Read The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People for Free Online Page B

that she strangled the poisoner—with her bare hands, of course.
    The MacLeods returned to Holland and separated, and by 1904 Margareta was in Paris, without husband or child. “I thought that all women who ran away from their husbands went to Paris,” she said.
    At her debut as a dancer, she met Émile Étienne Guimet, the owner of an Oriental art museum, where she soon gave an electrifying performance of Oriental dances, dressed in jeweled bra and see-through draperies in a setting of palms, bronze statues, and garlanded columns. Theater critic Édouard Lepage described her appearance in the hyperbole typical of the times: “supple like the unrolled serpent which is hypnotized by the snake charmer’s flute.
    Her flexible body at times becomes one with the undulating flames, to stiffen suddenly in the middle of her contortions … with a brutal gesture, Mata Hari rips off her jewels … throws away the ornaments that cover her breasts. And, naked, her body seems to lengthen way up into the shadows! … she beats the air with her shattered arms, whips the imperturbable night with her long heavy hair.” (Some sources say that she never danced completely nude, but always concealed her breasts, which had been bitten and thus permanently disfigured by MacLeod.) By then, she had become Mata Hari (Malay for “eye of the day,” the sun), complete with story—that she was the child of a 14-year-old Indian temple dancer who had died giving birth; raised by temple priests who taught her dances sacred to the Hindu god Siva; danced nude for the first time at the age of 13 before the altar of a Hindu temple. She looked the part—tall, dark, strong-featured, with velvety eyes. Her career skyrocketed and she became a sensation in most of the major capitals of Europe. And she was a scandal; the directress of one of her performances went so far as to force her to wear a piece of red flannel, diaper-fashion, at her crotch.
    The spy plot, true or not, began on the day WWI was declared and she rode through the streets of Berlin with a police official. It was all high drama: the bottles of invisible ink given her by the Germans (she threw them into a canal, she said); her German code number, H 21; her seduction of high German officials (for money, love, or secrets?); her agreement to spy for the French for the million francs she needed to impress the father of the love of her life, Vadime de Massloff, a Russian captain; her grandiose plans for manipulating noblemen through jealousy, greed, and lust; the French spies tailing her in Madrid, one disguised as an old man on a bicycle, and so on.
    She was arrested by the French in February, 1917. Some say she greeted the arresting officers naked on a couch in her hotel room. This is no more true than the rumor that she took milk baths while Parisian children starved or that she danced nude in her cell at Saint-Lazare Prison.
    The file on her was 6 in. thick, but the evidence was inconclusive. A tube of “secret ink” in her possession turned out to be oxycyanide of mercury, which she injected into herself after making love as a birth-control method.
    Her aged lover Maître Clunet defended her at her trial, and another lover, Jules Cambon of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, testified in her behalf. A third lover, old and amiable General Messimy, sent a letter written by his wife which asked that the general be excused from testifying since he didn’t know the defendant. At that, Mata Hari laughed, “Ah! He never knew me! Oh, well.
    He has a nerve!” The jury laughed with her, but humor did not save her from her awful sentence—death by a firing squad.
    The nun who came to fetch her on the day of her execution chastised her for showing too much leg while putting on her stockings in front of the prison doctor. She was dressed to the teeth. On the way out of prison, she was asked whether she was pregnant (according to French law, a pregnant woman could not be executed). This question arose,