Let us be clear, she was not actually naked, but Adah Isaacs Menken was as close to naked as theater would allow in 1862. In the role of Mazeppa, based on a poem by Lord Byron, she was strapped to the back of a horse galloping across the stage of the National Theater on her way to superstardom.

Adah Isaacs Menken was one of a kind. She was Black. She was Jewish. She regularly shocked society by dressing in male clothing. She gained fame by playing a man on the stage. She was a poet, a painter, an essayist, a sculptor, the highest paid actress of the age. They called her “The Menken.” And, she was, for a time, a Cincinnatian.

She was not born here. Although her birth is still a matter of dispute, it is generally believed that The Menken was born Catholic in 1835, named Ada Bertha Théodore in Milneburg, Louisiana, just outside New Orleans. Her father is believed to be a free African American man named Auguste Théodore and her mother was his wife Magdaleine Jean Louis Janneaux, of Creole extraction.

From an early age, Ada showed a talent for performance, first as a dancer and then as an actor. Her journeys took her to Texas, where she met and married in 1856 an itinerant musician named Alexander Isaac Menken. Alexander was Jewish and his father was a prosperous merchant in Cincinnati. Ada converted to Judaism, changed her first name to the more Biblical Adah, and adopted her husband’s middle name - with the addition of an S.

She took her religious conversion seriously and began submitting essays to the American Israelite, published in Cincinnati by Rabbi Isaac Wise. Her poetry began reflecting Jewish themes. Adah wrote an essay promoting Walt Whitman, and an essay defending the election of Baron Lionel de Rothschild, a Jew, to England’s Parliament.

She made her Cincinnati debut in 1858 at the National Theater in “The Jewess, or, The Council of Constance” by W.T. Moncrieff. It was, the local newspapers noted, “neither a financial nor artistic success.” It was, however, at the theater in Cincinnati where Adah met her next husband, the champion boxer John C. Henan, known as the Benicia Boy, whom she followed to New York and another marriage.

Although she billed herself for a while as “Mrs. Heenan,” fame eluded her until, in Albany, New York, she took the stage as Mazeppa in H. M. Milner’s play. This “breeches” role (a woman playing a man’s part) was outstanding for two reasons. First, the climactic scene of the doomed Mazeppa, lashed to a galloping horse, usually involved a stunt double or dummy. Second, Mazeppa was stripped before being lashed to that horse. The Menken did her own stunts, and wore a “fleshing” or pink body suit, so she appeared, to audiences of that time, naked.

It worked. Adah Isaacs Menken became both famous and infamous. She became “The Menken.” On her return to Cincinnati in 1862, the National Theater sold out almost immediately. The critics raved:

“The brilliant and peerless Adah - the sensation of the modern stage - last night concluded her first week’s engagement at the National. Combining the poesy and daring of one of Byron’s loftiest conceptions, she dashes into the ‘Mazeppa,’ a a charachter which never would have entered into the imagination of any heroine of the stage to represent, but the heroine of heroines, Adah Isaacs Menken.”

“The bold, brilliant and undaunted Adah, in her own fair form, which Praxiteles himself might have modeled, is the one undivided embodiment of the hero.”

The New York World explained the reason for the hubbub:

“Of Miss Menken, it behooves us to report briefly. She looks well, is superbly formed, and knows how to defeat a valiant supernumerary in sanguine broadsword combat. Her spring fashions are simple and inexpensive - consisting of a suit of flesh-tinted tights, an infantile undergarment, many, many times too small for her majestic form, about twenty cents worth of fringe and - nothing else.”

The scandal of her (nearly) disrobed form ended her relationship with the American Israelite. (Although she was not really naked on stage, Adah posed for some topless cartes de visite which still survive.) As Alvin F. Harlow, years later, in his wonderful book, The Serene Cincinnatians, reported:

“But when she came through Cincinnati, playing the lead in Mazeppa, in which she, as the Cossack hero, was bound, supposedly naked, but really in fleshings, on the back of a wild horse and sent into the steppes, her contributions to The Israelite ceased, e'en though her fame burgeoned and she crossed the ocean to hobnob with the great literati of England and the Continent.”

From Cincinnati, The Menken took her Mazeppa sensation on the road to San Francisco, New York City, London, then Paris. Along the way, she entranced Charles Dickens, had affairs with Alexandre Dumas (pere) and Algernon Charles Swinburne, married another two men and died in Paris of tuberculosis or peritonitis, or both, in 1868. She was 33 years old.

In her final illness, she is reported to have said:

“I am lost to art and life. Yet, when all is said and done, have I not at my age tasted more of life than most women who live to be a hundred? It is fair, then, that I should go where old people go.”

Adah Isaacs Menken is buried in Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris. Her tombstone reads, only, “Thou Knowest.”