Notorious Lola Montez kept the men in S.F. panting

Lola Montez already had a racy global reputation when she landed in S.F. Lola Montez already had a racy global reputation when she landed in S.F. Photo: Southworth & Hawes, Collection Of The Metropolitan M Photo: Southworth & Hawes, Collection Of The Metropolitan M Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Notorious Lola Montez kept the men in S.F. panting 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

On May 21, 1853, the most notorious woman in the world arrived in San Francisco by paddle-wheel steamer from Panama. Her name was Lola Montez.

She had come unannounced, so no one was there when she stepped off the ship at Long Wharf and made her way into the city. But her erotic exploits, political intrigues, violent temper and extraordinary beauty had made headlines throughout the world.

Who was the tempestuous lass, born Eliza Gilbert in County Sligo, Ireland, who had run off with and married a British lieutenant at age 16? Lola! Who had left her husband in India and begun sleeping with another lieutenant on the ship taking her back to England, scandalizing everyone aboard? Lola!

Who reinvented herself as a "Spanish dancer" on the London stage, only to be exposed as a married Irish fraud? Lola! Who lied her way out of the mess, decamped for the continent and within three months was dancing before the emperor of Russia, the king of Prussia and the nobility of Central Europe? Lola!

Who became the lover of the famous virtuoso pianist Franz Liszt? Lola! Who moved on to Paris, taking the City of Light by storm and taking a swashbuckling French journalist into her bed? Lola!

Who became the mistress of King Ludwig of Bavaria? Lola! Whose outrageous behavior provoked such popular outrage that mobs stormed her house and forced her to flee for her life? Lola! Who wrapped the hapless monarch so far around her imperious finger that he ended up abdicating his throne? Lola!

Who took her erotically writhing Spider Dance to New York, where predictable tumult and scandal ensued? Lola! And who ended up coming to Gold Rush San Francisco, the only place in the world as raucous and self-invented as she was - Lola!

The countess

Lola no sooner landed in San Francisco than she arranged to appear at the American Theater as Lady Teazle in Sheridan's aptly named "School for Scandal." As Bruce Seymour notes in his fascinating biography, "Lola Montez: A Life," public interest in the woman Ludwig had made the Countess of Landsfeld was so great that the theater was able to charge $5 for the best seats, 10 times the price of some of her East Coast engagements.

Lola's acting was reasonably well received, but what everyone really wanted to see was the Spider Dance. On the second night, she obliged them.

The Spider Dance was a version of the tarantella, a southern Italian dance. Wearing flesh-colored tights and layers of multicolored petticoats, Lola played a country maid who discovered that spiders had gotten into her clothes.

Her contortions exposed her shapely legs, to the delight of the mostly male audience but the moral outrage of other observers. One young girl who wanted to go see the show noted that "some thought she was obliged to look rather higher (for the spiders) than was proper in so public a place."

Horse-whippings

The public and press generally treated this female time bomb that had rolled into their midst respectfully, their good manners possibly encouraged by the fact that Lola had a predilection for slapping and even horse-whipping those who crossed her.

As James Varney writes in "Lola Montez: The California Adventures of Europe's Notorious Courtesan," she reveled "in the attentions lavished on her by San Francisco's panting men."

She was not exactly embraced by San Francisco's respectable classes. Her marriage at Mission Dolores to Patrick Hull, a San Francisco newspaperman she had met on the boat from Panama, was treated as a slightly disreputable affair.

Satire target

And Lola was not to get out of town without some pointed ridicule. The company at the American's rival theater, the San Francisco, realized that they could profit by deflating Lola's balloon and put on a satire titled "Who's Got the Countess?"

Written by San Francisco's resident satirist, theater impresario "Doc" Robinson, it featured a talented brother and sister team of actors, Caroline and "Uncle Billy" Chapman. Caroline played "Mula, Countess of Bohemia," while her brother stole the show with his ludicrously exaggerated "Spy-Dear" dance.

The burlesque, one of the first original plays staged in San Francisco, played to packed houses for two weeks. A few San Franciscans thought it went too far. A correspondent to the Herald called the piece "an exceeding coarse and vulgar attack upon one who, whatever her faults and foibles may have been, has proved herself a noble-hearted and generous woman."

Poison-pill duel?

Lola soon moved on to Grass Valley and appeared onstage in Sacramento. When someone laughed during the Spider Dance, Lola harangued the audience and stormed offstage, and then feuded with an editor who wrote that she had papered the house with her supporters.

A letter soon surfaced, purportedly from Lola, challenging the editor to a duel: "You may choose between my dueling pistols or take your choice of a pill out of a pill box. One shall be poison and one shall be not."

It was probably bogus, but whoever wrote it had Lola down cold.

Sharp decline

Lola left California in 1855 for Australia. She returned briefly, but the shipboard death of her last husband (she had already dumped the hapless Hull, who died soon afterward), and the ravages of the syphilis from which she had long suffered, had saddened and sobered her.

She moved to New York, embraced spiritualism and began writing and giving lectures. She died alone and in poverty at age 39 in 1861.

Lola's sojourn in San Francisco was an oasis of comparative calm in her turbulent life. Perhaps, Varney wrote, this was because San Franciscans regarded her as a kindred spirit.

"Such spirited flamboyance and panache as she possessed held great attraction for men who had had the grit to uproot themselves and make the long and hazardous journey to California," Varney wrote. "Lola, like these enterprising adventurers, had long since made a choice to forge her own destiny, rather than submit to it."

In any case, it is pleasant to think of Lola Montez, standing onstage at the American Theater at the end of a performance, and near the end of one of the most extraordinary lives of the 19th century, telling the cheering audience that San Francisco was the greatest city in the world.

Editor's note Every corner in San Francisco has an astonishing story to tell. Every Saturday, Gary Kamiya's Portals of the Past will tell one of those lost stories, using a specific location to illuminate San Francisco's extraordinary history - from the days when giant mammoths wandered through what is now North Beach, to the Gold Rush delirium, the dot-com madness and beyond.