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.