Star-Crossed Lovers: Probably Not (Mayerling), Part II

            The truth behind the Mayerling incident remains murky. In the year since its publication, Greg King and Penny Wilson's investigation of it in Twilight of Empire, some of their conclusions is already under dispute. In an online review, Jason Colavita takes issue of several of its authors' conclusions), pointing out, that many of the less savory theories were known as early as 1914 in chapters XX - XXII of Francis Gribble's The Life of the Emperor Frans Joseph.

            Claude Anet's Mayerling,made into three films (1936, 1957 and 1968)--and a radio version on the Lux Radio Theaterin 1939--voiced by William Powell and Janet Gaynor, frames it as the iconic story of star-crossed lovers, but hardly true to history.  The murder-suicide of Archduke Rudolf of Hapsburg and Mary Vetsera had a far less romantic reality, and by 1936, many of its murky elements were already known

            Star-crossed lovers aside, there have been other works based on the Mayerling story that stand quite apart from Anet's novel. These include a stage play, another film, a ballet and two miniseries. the majority of them fictionalized.  How these works treat the incident differs, of course by the type of medium, the personal views of the authors, how much about the facts or theories on what may have happened became known over time, and the context and attitudes of the time in which each was made.

Henry Hull (Rudolf), Dudley Digges (Frans Josef and Pauline Frederick (Elizabeth)
in The Masque of Kings (1936)

            The earliest was a play by Maxwell Anderson, entitled The Masque of Kings, which had its first and only run in New York from February to April of 1936, the same year that the Boyer film was released.  This play, in blank verse, has been completely forgotten, as is the case of most of Anderson's historical dramas,.  If Frank N. Nugent, who reviewed the Anet/Boyer film in 1937 (he liked it much better) is to be believed, the drama, really a political commentary, was confusing and difficult to follow.  In fact, it is one of the most fascinating riffs on the Mayerling legend.  Anderson makes it all about the futility of the end of Empire.  Rudolf, consigned to an impotent, subsidiary role to his father, Frans Josef, is portrayed as an enlightened liberal, and is deeply disapproving of his father's rule. When circumstances conspire to allow him to become King not only of Hungary, but Emperor in place of Frans Josef, he realizes that the only way to perpetuate his hereditary role is to become an authoritarian and anti-liberal continuation of his father, and instead opts to end his life in suicide.  Mary Vetsera is presented as a young girl of easy virtue originally in the pay of Frans Josef, who redeems herself in her love for the Crown Prince.  She commits suicide herself in the hours before Rudolf ends his own life.  In the end, Frans Josef decides to cover up the reality of their deaths.  The result is the author's condemnation of the flaws and ultimate decadence of totalitarian rule and the ultimate futility in the modern sense of concept of empire (or more recently, dictatorship).

            Maxwell Anderson (1888-1959) was a pacifist, a journalist, playwright, adaptor, film-writer, and Pulitzer Prize winner, well known in the twentieth century, but now pretty much forgotten--his best-known works include High Tor, Lost in the Stars, Anne of a Thousand Days andThe Bad Seed.The Masque of Kings is perhaps the most forgotten of all his works; but a revival might actually be timely as political commentary.

Jean Marais and Dominique Blanchar, Le Secret de Mayerling

            One of the most far-fetched of conspiracy theories forms the basis for a 1949 film called Le Secret de Mayerling),starring Jean Marais and Dominique Blanchar.  It begins with the body of Mary Vetsera being removed in secret from Mayerling and the start of the Imperial coverup of the death circumstances of Rudolf.  It then flashes back to Rudolf's life as an Angry Young Man, involved with rebellion in Hungary.  The villainess in the affair with Mary is Marie Larisch.  We see Mary as a young schoolgirl, replete with braids, groomed as she matures by Larisch and presented to Rudolf as a new item.  After overcoming his compunction over her youth, they have their passionate affair--some of it taking place at Mayerling long before the fatal night.  In the end, Frans Josef realizes that Rudolf's complicity with the Hungarians and his request for an annulment, presumably to marry Mary, makes him a security risk to the Empire, has both Rudolf and Mary murdered, and then proceeds to conspire to hide the whole thing.  There have been other theories over the years that Mary and Rudolf were murdered at Mayerling in the course of a drunken brawl, but these have been long disproved. This film is the only dramatic work to propose a murder, but to have the Emperor himself as the perpetrator of this supposed double murder is unique.

Laurence Naismith as Frans Josef: Requeum For a Crown Prince

            Several decades later, in 1974, the deaths at Mayerling were included as the fourth episode called Requiem for a Crown Princein a British miniseries dealing with the twilight of Imperial Europe entitled Fall of Eagles.This one is framed far more seriously as a docudrama. The episode is narrated by Count Eduard Taaffe, Frans Josef's Prime Minister, and deals with the consequences of the deaths, principally concerning the reactions of the Empress Elizabeth, the Vetsera family and Princess Stephanie, and as scrupulously as possible, the developing conspiracy of the coverup.  In many of the Mayerling stories, Taaffe is characterized as the villainous enforcer of Frans Josef's reactionary policies.  Here, he provides the dispassionate voice of political reason from the point of view of the grieving Emperor.  There's not a hint of Deathless Love. 

Edward Watson (Rudolf) and Natalia Osipova (Mary) in Mayerling

            The sober account of Rudolf and Mary's double suicide (or murder-suicide) of Fall of Eagles finds its expressionistic antithesis in Kenneth MacMillan's ballet, Mayerling of 1978.  If the Lux Radio Theater conveys its Anet-based story merely by voices, McMillan's decidedly un-Anet-like dance version does it entirely by physical gesture. Like the 1936 film, it uses Liszt's music as the basis of its score, but how differently does music function as a dramatic reinforcement there.  In this three-act dance-drama, Rudolf is seen as a passionate, tortured young man, and the tragedy of his life is played out primarily in a series of pas de deuxwith some of the various women in his life: Marie Larisch, envisioned as an old mistress, the fiasco of his wedding-night with the innocent and inexperienced Princess Stephanie, his dysfunctional relationship with his mother, the Empress Elizabeth, the courtesan Mitzi Kaspar, and finally with Mary Vetsera, characterized as a fiery young sex kitten, whose death with Rudolf seems to be an almost logical dénouement when passion, guns and drugs aren't  enough. But a surprising amount of detail is also portrayed in larger ensemble scenes, and there are interludes of very intense episodes with three conspiring Hungarians, who fan his conflicting emotions. 

            Rudolf's fascination with guns and his use of morphine are shown, and his volatile personality is certainly expressed..  There are Hamlet-like echoes too--the Crown Prince's fascination with a skull that he keeps in his apartment (which he seems really to have done) and in his intense interview with his mother, but Rudolf is certainly no Prince of Denmark, bent on revenging his father.  Perhaps the most poetic, if over-the-top version of the Rudolf-Mary affair, the ballet is to this date the most timeless version of the Mayerling story.  It has had its latest revival in September, 2017, by the Houston Ballet.  Though it debuted with mixed reviews--perhaps a reaction to its innovative shock value and violence, it is now considered to be Kenneth MacMillan's masterpiece. And maybe it's fitting that MacMillan died backstage at a performance in 1992.

            It would be thought that by 2006, with increasing evidence coming to light, that a 3- hour television miniseries, filmed in Austria, with the title Kronprinz Rudolf, would reveal a lot of the conflicting details of the Mayerling story. It was directed by Robert Dornheim, and starred Max von Thun and Vittoria Puccini as the doomed lovers, and even had Omar Sharif, now in the role of a fictional artist and confidant of the Crown Prince.  Many of the subtler details of what is known about the story are here: Rudolf's liberal thinking and his frustration in this direction by his father, his venereal disease and its transmission to his wife (though here, it's syphilis), his last night with Mitzi Kaspar before his suicide--and his attempt earlier to entice the latter into a suicide pact, his friendship with the liberal journalist Maurice Szeps, and his flirtation with Hungarian conspiracies.  

            

Omar Sharif as artist Hans Canon and Max von Thun as Rudolf
 in Kronprinz Rudolf

            But this miniseries has lots of inventions too. To begin with, there's Rudolf's doomed early affair with a Jewish girl in Prague, perhaps inserted to explain his liberal-mindedness and also his later cynicism with regards to women(?).  Then there is Sharif's artist character Hans Canon as a liberal confidant, and perhaps the only person capable of telling truths. Canon really existed, but died in 1885. In this version, Rudolf has a cynical affair early on with Helene Vetsera, and it is Helena who encourages Mary, (here an innocent blonde girl--not dissimilar in type to Catherine Deneuve) with what is at first a schoolgirl crush on the Crown Prince, to pursue an affair with him as she matures.  Once again, legend and apocryphal inventions tend to smooth over all of the rough edges that seem to have existed in the Mayerling saga.  It's a star-crossed lover (Mary) and Rudolf's last stand as a liberal visionary at the end, and very much in the soap-opera tradition that so often creep into the miniseries genre.

            Does anybody know what really happened at Mayerling?  It will probably always be both sordid and at least a little romantic--that never seems to disappear entirely.  Which leaves me to wonder: what would the makers of Babylon Berlin ever do if they made their own series on this material?

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 Francis Gribble, The Life of the Emperor Frans Joseph, London, Evereigh Nash, 1914

            online at https://archive.org/details/lifeofemperorfra00gribiala

Jason Colavito's rebuttal article to King and Wilson's book: http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/review-of-twilight-of-empire-the-tragedy-at-mayerling-and-the-end-of-the-habsburgs-by-greg-king-and-penny-wilson

The Lux Radio Theater Episode of Mayerling is at:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08HJMxTU67Q

The Marais and Blanchar Le Secret de Mayerling can be viewed at:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBx8ncE2c-o

Kenneth MacMillan's Royal Ballet production is available only on clips on YouTube, but a full-length Russian production of his ballet can be seen at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTNRFY4rztY

Star Crossed Lovers? Probably Not (Mayerling) - Part I

Deneuve and Sharif: Star-crossed Lovers: 1968

           In my twenties, I caught a showing of the movie Mayerling, with Omar Sharif and Cathrine Deneuve (1968).  I don't often cry in movies, but I blubbered at the end of this one, as Crown Prince Rudolf and his girlfriend Marie Vetsera, his One True Love, made a suicide pact, which they carried out when everything fell to pieces in Rudolf's frustrated life.  Heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, he had been denied any training in his duties as future Emperor by his inflexible and conservative father, Franz Josef, was not close to his fey mother Elizabeth,  and in an unhappy marriage with Princess Stephanie of Belgium.

            This story fell right into the tradition of "faithful unto death, and doomed for reasons of rank and power," that had been around for at least a millennium, when Kings and nobles ruled, and marriages were arranged for economic and political reasons to ensure that dynasty at whatever level were perpetuated, and love something else entirely.  Operas, ballads and novels were full of them.

            This particular tearjerker version of history had been already filmed twice, and all were based on a French novel by Claude Anet (the pen name of Jules Schopfer), entitled Mayerling: 

Claude Anet

The Life and Tragedy of a Crown Prince (1930).  The first film was in 1935, starring Charles Boyer and Danielle Darrieux, and directed by Anatole Litvak.  The second was a made-for-television version in 1957, with Audrey Hepburn and Mel Ferrer.

Boyer and Darrieux

            All three followed the novel's plot, with the misunderstood and sensitive married Rudolf falling in love with Baroness Marie, who was very young and innocent.  In fact, she's a beautiful cardboard heroine.  We don't really know much of her character except that her pure devotion to Rudolf makes her avoid  a marriage proposal from a Portuguese noble, Miguel de Bragança.  Rudolf sees this pristine maiden as his salvation--even tries to get an annulment from his Princess wife so he can marry her.  When things don't work out in that department, and incidentally a chance to become king of Hungary in a breakaway plot falls through, death is preferable.  Suicide occurs at the hunting lodge at Mayerling, Rudolf shooting Marie first and then himself, grasping her hand in his as he dies.

            There are slight differences and tweaks in the three versions, more due to when they were filmed than anything else.  The 1935 version has the music of Liszt as its soundtrack, while the 1968 film uses the over-the-top love duet from the ballet Spartacus by Khachaturian.  The black and white
1935 film has wonderful stylized visual touches typical of cinema of that decade, while the 1968 production is all colorful uniforms, gorgeous costumes and extravagant longish hair and moustaches

Hepburn and Ferrer

found in historical epics of that time.  The Hepburn-Ferrer television is simplified and scaled down to an hour, as befits early television dramas, and, typical of the 1950's, lacks any implications of physical passion whatsoever.  Perhaps this is partly driven by the fact that Ferrer and Hepburn were getting ready to divorce.

            Anet's novel was an out-and-out romance, streamlining historical characters into a smarmy fiction.  But the reality was utterly different.  It appears that almost everyone concerned with the Mayerling affair was terribly flawed in one way and another, the murder-suicide scene gruesome, and  Franz Josef, his advisors and members of his court had made great efforts to cover up the underlying motives and circumstances in Rudolf's death.  A fascinating and thorough study authored by Penny Wilson and Greg King entitled Twilight of Empire: The Tragedy of Mayerling and the End of the Hapsburgs, published in 2017 reexamined all of the existing evidence and applied modern research techniques and forensics, revealing just how tragic and sordid the real story was.  The Hapsburg court and most of the other European colonial dynasties were nearly exhausted by the end of the 19th century, and World War I would virtually put an end to most of them.  Royal houses were hopelessly inbred among themselves, with resulting physical and mental anomalies rampant.  If the Hapsburgs managed to avoid the hemophilia that afflicted the ruling families of England, Spain and Russia, they had their own pitfalls.  Franz Joseph seemed to have escaped inherited eccentricities, but his increasing political and intellectual rigidity made his empire lag behind 19th-century modernization.  His gorgeous wife, Elizabeth came from a notoriously eccentric family, with insanity winding in and out of it.  She herself was constantly trying to run away from her Imperial responsibilities, and as she got older, she became anorexic and totally self-absorbed in maintaining the illusion of youth and beauty.  She neglected all but her youngest daughter, including her one boy, Rudolf.

The Real Crown Prince Rudolf

            The odds of normality for Rudolf were against him. He was highly intelligent and sensitive, but held distant from both parents, his education was haphazard, sometimes brutal and never systematically carried out.  Even worse, as he reached his maturity, his father declined to allow him to participate in learning the craft of kingship. As a young man, he was politically liberal, and truly wished to bring reform into his future realm, but the Emperor pointedly denigrated or ignored his efforts, never allowing him to learn the discipline of making a well-thought-out political plan. As a consequence, he degenerated into what would now be called a "trust fund baby."  By his mid-twenties, he had had more lovers than he could count, some of them prostitutes, many more members of the court or wives of his friends, and had contracted Gonorrhea from one of them, which he then transmitted to his wife, the Princess Stephanie.  She had borne him a daughter early in their marriage, but her venereal disease then made her sterile.  Apparently the only woman he could trust and who really befriended him was Mitzi Kasper, a courtesan, and thus outside court circles.  He had become an alcoholic before he was out of his teens, and would also become addicted to morphine, first prescribed by his doctors for physical ailments.  

The Real Mary Vetsera

            Marie Vetsera, or Mary, as she preferred to be called, was no innocent flower either.  She came from minor nobility, but as a mere Baroness she was not admitted into inner Imperial  circles. Her father, Albin von Vetsera, was a career diplomat, awarded the title by Frans Josef for his services.  Her mother, Helene Baltozzi Vetsera came from an extremely wealthy cosmopolitan family whose fortunes were made in the Levant. Albin spend most of his career away from his family on various official missions.  Helene, twenty-two years younger, took advantage of his numerous absences to conduct extra-marital affairs, including, possibly Rudolf when he was in his early twenties.  The family had ennobled relatives in England, moving in the fast set of the Prince of Wales there, and Mary was raised to be fluent in several languages.  By the time she was in her mid-teens, Mary had blossomed into a very voluptuous and flirtatious femme fatale.  Her mother raised her and groomed her to marry well in the highest circles of nobility, hopefully to gain access to the courtly inner sanctum.  She evidently did not worry about her daughter's virginity in the process.  Helene engineered Mary into Rudolf's presence whenever possible, and Mary duly became infatuated, and by the time she was sixteen, was embroiled in what started out to be a passionate love affair with the Crown Prince, including visiting him once in his palace apartment clad only in a nightie with a fur coat on top.

            Mary was aided and abetted by a rather shady court parasite, Countess Marie Larisch.  Countess Larisch was a niece of Empress Elizabeth, who basically made her way through court life via pandering and blackmail. Using her courtly connections, she encouraged the liaison between Mary and Rudolf.  The prince's reputation as far as women were concerned was certainly well-known, but Mary flaunted her relationship with him in a very brazen way, most notably refusing to curtsy to Princess Stephanie at a diplomatic reception.  If she wasn't so blatant she might have aspired to become his official mistress, just as Katherina Schratt was with Frans Josef. Though there are stories that Rudolf tried and failed to secure an annulment from his marriage to Princess Stephanie, it certainly wasn't in order to marry Mary, and there is now evidence to suggest that the time of his suicide, he was pursuing other women as well as keeping his friendship with Mitzi Kaspar.

            Mary's distinction, then, was so tangled up in infatuation, bad advice and fantasy that she became a consensual partner in Rudolf's double suicide plan (he had previously asked various male friends and Mitzi Kasper to join him in this pact, but they refused).

            What finally set Rudolf to take his own life was the failure of the latest Hungarian conspiracy to break away from Austria, in this case offering him the crown of an independent Hungary. Perhaps he saw this as his last chance to make a contribution to his imperial heritage.  At any rate, he shot Mary, and then sat with her body for six hours before he shot himself.

            To avoid an imperial scandal, the government of Frans Josef enacted a coverup, burying Mary in secret in the monastery of Heiligenkreutz and giving Rudolf a state funeral, concealing his suicide with various prevarications so that he could have a Catholic state burial.  In consequence, much of the evidence and documentation was hidden or destroyed.

            Over the years, details of this scandalous story were either leaked, or rediscovered, and Wilson and King's study does a great deal to clarify what could be pieced together.  It seems that, as with other contemporary royal dynasties, the period of their glories lay far behind, and almost all of them would perish with World War I.

            In spite of all the murkiness, Maurice Anet's tale of star-crossed lovers and its movies endured during the 20th century for over 30 years.  But the story also inspired other interpretations in film, dance, plays and a miniseries of the Mayerling legend right into the 21st. century, though with tweaks as new evidence surfaced.  These will be explored in part II of this blogpost.

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For this latest analysis of the Mayerling Story, see
Greg King and Penny Wilson, Twilight of Empire: The Tragedy at Mayerling and the End of the Hapsburgs, New York, St. Martin's Press, 2017.

A good, popular account of the end of the Hapsburg Dynasty (though a little out of date) can be found in
Edmond Taylor, The Fall of the Dynasties.  The Collapse of the Order, Garden City, 1963.  It is now available in a reprint edition at Amazon.

The Hepburn-Ferrer version of Mayerling can be screened for free if you are an Amazon Prime member.

Only clips of the 1935 and 1968 versions of Mayerling are available on Youtube, but DVDs of both are available for sale.

            

         

AMERICA AMERICA: DREAMERS WONDER WHERE YOU'VE GONE

            

            America America, Elia Kazan's account of how his Uncle Isaac came to America.  It's a long movie--3 hours--and filmed in black and white, but the on-location filming in Greece, Turkey, its unknown actors, and its filming in black and white, often with the camera hand-held, make it seem as contemporary as any indie film of 2018.

Last night I finally got to see a movie my parents had talked about 55 years ago when it first came out:

            Starting in Anatolia, Turkey in the 1890's, it chronicles the long, often blackly funny, and very torturous journey of young Stavros Topoglouzou to his arrival as an immigrant in the United States.  The Christian Greeks and Armenians lived a precarious life as minorities in Ottoman Turkey, and when the Armenians in his village are slaughters by the Turks, his middle class (by Anatolian standards) family decides to send him to Istanbul-was-Constantinople with all of their accumulated worldly valuables to establish a family business with a rug-dealing cousin there, and once established, to send for the rest of them.

Stavros on the road

            But Stavros has other ideas: he doesn't want to stop in the Turkish capital, but once there, to emigrate to America.  And eventually, he does.  Meanwhile, though, he undergoes some black-  When he gets to the big city, he finds that his cousin's carpet business is failing, and that the latter was hoping that the Topogoulou's family valuables would help him start over.  In Constantanople, one scheme after another to earn enough money to emigrate falls awry.  The rug store is unsalvageable, Stavros's backbreaking efforts to earn funds for a steamship ticket topples in one night to a prostitute, to whom he loses his virginity and his cash stash.  His cousin introduces him to a very rich friend with four ugly daughters.  If he marries one of them (not so ugly after all), he will eventually inherit a fortune.  But for all of his picaresque under-the-table past, he can't go through with it, having developed a genuine affection for the girl, but feeling totally smothered by her way of life and what he would have to buy into--and abandoning the American dream.

comedic tribulations, losing all the family goods on the road to a Turkish con-man and a bunch of Gypsies.

            Finally, he begins an affair with an American middle-aged woman married to a successful Armenian American but very repulsive businessman, who are making a visit back to the old country.  When they return to the United States, she gets him a steerage ticket on the same ship so that they can continue their liaison.  Discovered by her husband just before they dock in the promised land, he is thrown into the brig for certain return to Turkey.

            But there's a subplot.  Back in Anatolia he had met a panhandling young Armenian named Hohannes Gardashian on his way to emigrate to America on foot.  Stavros gave him his shoes.  Later, they find each other again in Constantanople.  While Stavros is playing the gigolo for a boat ticket,  Hohannes is dying of Tuberculosis, and, in the end, rather than being rejected at Ellis Island and shipped back himself, gives Stavros his place and jumps overboard.  And so, Stavros gets to America under an assumed name that is Americanized anyway, and later gets all of his brothers and sisters over too.

Stavros and Johannes (R) glimpse America

Hohannes has secured passage on the same ship as part of a crew of indentured shoeshine boys being ushered into America by an impresario: if they work for several years for tips only, they will then be free to pursue other things. But

            There are so many twists and turns in the plot that I can only suggest that you rent the movie from Amazon and see it for yourself.  As the grandchild of immigrants with a similar, but far less action-packed story, I found myself enthralled.  My ancestors too had been brought over one by one, but in a much more orderly way.  My dad, in fact, would have probably been called a "dreamer," as he was born in Europe and brought here when he was one year old.

            The amazing timeless feeling to this movie is all the more poignant given our Commander-in-Chief's "Build the Wall" attitude and the plight of the dreamers as I write this.  All of us who are not of Native American stock are immigrants, and the majority of us (except for the more tragic forced "immigration" of African Americans) came here because they were fleeing intolerable conditions elsewhere.  Really, when you think about it, most migrations are triggered from similar situations, and all over the world (think of the Rohinga).  There were always a few bad apples in the batch, and even in the halcyon days of American immigration, undesirables were screened and not let in, but almost all of us made it here without resorting to a Life of Crime.  If you think about it, consider Australia, where immigration was initially made up of dumped undesirables.

Elia Kazan on the set

            Elia Kazan had a controversial career.  He directed so many classics: On the Waterfront, East of Eden, and A Streetcar Named Desire, to name just three, and received countless awards for them.  He also had a tarnished reputation for his naming names during the infamous McCarthy hearings.  Like Roman Polanski, though, as much as there are personal character disasters, when these semi-autographical memoir film were made, for this writer, at least, the work of art can stand on its own merits and messages.

            I wish that "America America" could be re-released on the big screen now because of its timeless timeliness.  It's so relevant to our American world!

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You can rent America America on Amazon Prime. $2.99.  It's worth it.