The Notorious Lola Montez

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Entertaining Women: Actresses, Dancers, and Singers in the Old West

More than a hundred-sixty years ago citizens in New York were discussing with avid interest the approaching theatrical engagement in the city of a woman with a romantic Spanish name – and a titled one, no less – who had caused one monarch to lose his throne and had left a trail of affairs in her wake after a hectic zig-zag career of adventure and amour which had taken her pretty much all over the map of Europe.

This woman, who had been described as the most beautiful woman in Europe, whose comeliness, flashing, black eyes, crimson lips, intelligence and ready wit, few men had been known to resist, was now in the United States and was slated to appear in New York before traveling to California.  Small wonder, then, that honest housewives shook their heads when their husbands and sons displayed too much interest in “that adventuress” and suggested that they had better stay at home that evening.

Nevertheless, a well-filled house greeted the celebrity from overseas. Enough New Yorkers passed their cash into the box office till to make her engagement well worthwhile.

Lola Montez was the attraction. The Countess of Landsfeld, as Lola was also known, may not have been the best dancer in the world in fact, one New York newspaperman reported that, in his opinion she was quite the worst, but the former uncrowned queen of Bavaria could hardly have been accused of being dull.

The audience had come to taste optically an exotic dish and Lola added a liberal dash of paprika.  She included in her Iberian repertoire the “spider dance” a creation of her own, based on the most exotic of foreign sources, but watered down a bit for American consumption.

The “spider dance” was simple and titillating. Lola started the dance routine from the wings of the stage. She would twirl her way in front of the audience dressed in a pair of multicolored tights and a skirt cut just above her knee. After another few twirls she would end up under a canopy of corks hanging from the ceiling that had been painted black. The corks represented spiders falling from the sky. As the music reached fever pitch, she would spin around and around until she was tangled in the corks. Lola would spend the remainder of the dance twirling around trying to free herself from the corks.

To learn more about Lola Montez and other performers like her read

Entertaining Women: Actresses, Dancers, and Singers in the Old West