Polly Adler

If I was to make my living as a madam, I could not be concerned either with the rightness or wrongness of prostitution, considered either from a moral or criminological standpoint.  I had to look at it simply as a part of life, which exists today as it existed yesterday…The operation of any business is contingent on the law of supply and demand, and if there were no customers, there certainly would be no whorehouses.  Prostitution exists because men are willing to pay for sexual gratification, and whatever men are willing to pay for, someone will provide.  -  Polly Adler

One thing that must strike anyone who has read extensively on the history of prostitution is the way that mainstream writers are so often tolerant, sympathetic or even enthusiastic about whores of the past (even into recent times), yet so judgmental of those who have worked in the last few decades.  In “Courtesan Denial” I stated that “I suspect that they are lawheads engaged in a process of doublethink designed to protect their minds from having to deal with the fact that the EXACT SAME profession which was legal and respected in many preindustrial cultures is illegal and demonized in ours.”  But in the past 19 months I’ve come to realize that theory is inadequate for the simple reason that even past whores whose work was illegal in their own day are often glamorized; the dividing line seems to be not the Industrial Revolution or the advent of large-scale prohibitionism about a century ago, but rather the appearance of second-wave feminism.  Harlots who lived before the advent of the feminist saviors are given a free pass (like Dante’s “virtuous pagans” of pre-Christian times), but their modern sisters should “know better” and are thus condemned as infidels for rejecting the anti-sex work Gospel.  Of course, that doesn’t explain why so many people celebrate the fun times of violating alcohol Prohibition while demonizing modern drug use, but a theory has to start somewhere.

Case in point, Pearl “Polly” Adler (April 16^th, 1900 – June 11^th, 1962), a Russian Jew who was sent to New York ahead of her parents (Morris and Gertrude Adler) and eight younger siblings in 1914.  When the First World War interrupted her family’s plans to join her, young Polly was forced to support herself by working in a sweatshop that made corsets; though she tried to attend school at the same time, it just didn’t work out that way.  At the age of 17 she was raped by a foreman she was dating, and after an abortion decided that since she was “ruined” anyhow she might as well profit by it.  She made good contacts in the Broadway theater crowd and soon moved in with an actress and part-time working girl; in 1920 that roommate introduced Polly to her first client, a bootlegger named Tony, who kept her in an apartment on Riverside Drive.  Before long she was providing space and management for other girls, and thanks to her wit, charm, intelligence and business acumen she was soon clearing $100/week ($1100 in 2012 money).

That modest initial success grew by leaps and bounds; by 1924 she was known as the “Queen of Tarts” and opened her best-remembered brothel, the Majestic, at 215 West 75^th Street.  The building featured hidden stairways and secret doors so clients could escape in case of a police raid, which was necessary because it was more than just a place where men went to have sex; it was a club where patrons of both sexes came to drink, play cards or games, and enjoy conversation, and Adler made as much money selling bootleg gin as she did collecting her cut from the girls.  The place was lavishly decorated and the walls were lined with books, many recommended by members of the Algonquin Round Table (including Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker), who became regulars soon after it opened.  Other regulars included actor John Garfield, boxer Jack Dempsey, mayor Jimmy Walker and gangster Lucky Luciano.  Her place was so well-known that she could not escape being shut down eventually, but she bribed her way out of trouble and simply moved the operation elsewhere…eleven times by the end of the decade.  It is very likely that bribes and kickbacks to cops and politicians constituted her largest operating expense.

After the stock market crashed in October of 1929, Adler’s fortunes began a slow decline.  In 1930 she was subpoenaed to testify before the Seabury Commission, a probe of a huge conspiracy by cops, prosecutors and judges to frame innocent people (often for prostitution) so they could be robbed of their life savings under threat of imprisonment.  Because she knew that testifying would probably not be a good idea for her she fled to Miami, where she remained until she grew homesick and tried to sneak back into town in May of 1931; informants sold her out immediately and she was hauled before the Commission the next day.  Not that it did the investigators any good; Adler claimed (perhaps conveniently) a poor memory, and provided almost no information of worth.  And though the Commission ended with the fall of many of her political connections, it actually made her business easier because she no longer had to pay out so much in graft – a godsend in the deepest part of the Great Depression.

Still, getting re-established wasn’t easy, and gangster Dutch Schultz became Adler’s business partner (bankrolling the venture in return for half the profit).  The two were friends, and Schultz often hid from his rivals or the police at her brothel.  This caused her considerable stress, because she was terrified that she or her girls (of whom she was extremely protective) would be killed by assassins trying to “hit” Schultz.  Still, the period proved fairly lucrative for her, and she once again attracted a celebrity clientele (including then-rising star Milton Berle).  She was only arrested twice in the next five years, but the second time – at 5 a.m. on March 5, 1935 – actually stuck.  The police had carried out an expensive, protracted, modern-style investigation as part of mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s campaign against “incorporated filth”, and she was charged with “maintaining an objectionable apartment” (at 30 East 55^th Street) and “possessing a motion picture machine with objectionable pictures”.  Public sympathy was with her; a New York Daily News editorial thundered, “It is this crusading against personal and private habits and instincts — the sex instinct, the deep rooted human fondness for gambling — which is futile and sickening, just as the prohibition of liquor was.”  But the evidence was steep and so, in an early example of plea-bargaining, she pled guilty to the bawdy house charge on May 6^th in exchange for dismissal of the more serious obscenity rap.  She paid a $500 fine and was sentenced to 30 days, of which she served 24; she spent the time scrubbing floors on the order of a warden who declared she must be taught the value of “honest work”.

Polly was back in business by the end of July, but things were never the same again; clients’ tastes were becoming more utilitarian, and upscale, full-service brothels like hers were declining in popularity.  She was arrested for the 17^th time on January 15^th, 1943; that was the last straw for her.  A year later she left New York (for only the second time in 30 years) and moved permanently to Los Angeles, where she fulfilled her lifelong dream of an education and obtained a university degree in 1949.  She then set to work on her memoirs, which were ghostwritten by the novelist Virginia Faulkner and published in 1953.  The book, A House Is Not a Home, became a bestseller and was made into a movie starring Shelley Winters which was released in 1964; unfortunately Polly did not live to see it, since she died of cancer in 1962.

But while the book is terribly honest and shows both good and bad aspects of “the Life” equally, the censors wouldn’t allow anything positive to be said about whores and so the finished film bears only a vague resemblance to it.  What remains is essentially a 98-minute morality play on the evils of harlotry, populated by fallen women who are victimized by men’s lust and so get addicted to drugs and/or commit suicide while “Polly” stands helplessly by; though it appeared over a decade before the advent of neofeminism, the anti-sex crowd couldn’t have written a better screed.  Oh, well, at least the people illegally drinking were depicted as enjoying themselves, even if the girls violating a still-current prohibitionist law were not.

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Second Anniversary

Do you really have to be the ice queen intellectual or the slut whore?  Isn’t there some way to be both?   -  Susan Sarandon

Anniversaries are one of those times at which we’re inspired to look back at the past to see where we’ve been; it’s a bit like sitting on top of a mountain and surveying the route one took to get there.  And when I consider all that’s happened here since July 10^th, 2010 all I can say is “wow”.  Well, that’s not all I can say, or else the column would already be over, but I think you know what I mean.  And what makes it even more impressive is looking at the figures I recorded in last year’s anniversary column:  then I had written 365 columns, now it’s 731 (not counting the ones in queue you haven’t seen yet or the guest columns I’ve written for other blogs).  But while the sheer size of this site has just slightly more than doubled (counting the indexes and other supplemental materials), all the other figures are far more than double.  Last year there were about 8300 comments; now there are over 19,000.  Then I had just under 250,000 hits; I reached 750,000 late last night and (Athena willing) should hit a million by the end of the year.  87 subscribers have grown to over 300, and that’s not counting the 500+ people who follow me on Twitter.  My Google page rank is “5”, which I’m told is very good for a personal blog (Jezebel is only a 7), and that has almost certainly contributed to the number of researchers, reporters and other interested parties who approach me almost every week now with questions, interview requests and the like.  I still haven’t managed to make any money from this gig yet, but that’s not why I do this anyhow; the important thing to me is helping the general public to understand that most whores really aren’t weird, scary, criminal, stupid, unethical, emotionally disturbed, victimized by men (except by those employed by governments to persecute us, of course) or any of the other dumb stereotypes with which prohibitionists and other moralists constantly libel us.  And judging by the numbers, the fan mail and the reputation I’ve gained among activists, I think it’s safe to say that I’m achieving that to the extent that any one person can.

Last year at this time I started a new feature, “One Year Ago Today”, and though it’s been successful I also think it’s time to retire it as such.  I’m still going to call attention to old columns when the text calls for it, of course, but I really don’t want to have to do both “one year ago today” and “two years ago today” features, so I’m going to shift those recaps to two other places:  Every day I’ll do both of those on Twitter (non-users will be able to see them in the Twitter feed in the right-hand column), and “That Was the Week That Was” will have a “This Week in 2011” and “This Week in 2010” feature.  Another change to TW3 will be a reduction in the number of items I feature there:  it takes some doing to keep those columns at under 2000 words, so it will reduce my workload considerably if I extract a few bigger stories and feature them separately in another column (since I can nearly always manage to relate a few to each other).  Since the “one year ago” feature will be less rigid now, it’ll be easy for me to leave a gap in the schedule to fit that sort of thing into, and that, too will reduce my workload.  Don’t worry, I plan to keep doing a column every day for the foreseeable future; I’ve become more comfortable with shorter columns, which means I’ll be able to turn out daily essays without having to be concerned about padding them or finding more to say than the topic needs.

And that, as it turns out, is pretty much all I want to say on this topic, except for a big thank you to all my readers:  thank you for reading what I have to say day after day; thank you for linking me all over the internet; thank you for all the moral support and respect; thank you for many amazing compliments; thank you for the lovely presents; thank you for giving me the opportunity to marry my two beloved professions (harlotry and librarianship) together; and thank you for visiting often enough to amplify my voice so that maybe, just maybe, what I have to say will eventually start reaching the ears of those who need so desperately to hear it.

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Tangled Web

O what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive! -  Sir Walter Scott

As many of you already know, the prohibitionist mouthpiece who calls herself “Stella Marr” has been outed.  Last Tuesday evening I was emailed links to a posting she made which carelessly linked her legal name with “Stella Marr” and several other online personas; I quickly made a screen capture of the page, knowing full well that it wouldn’t be long before it was deleted (and it was, only a few hours later, though I also have a link to a cached copy).  Later that evening I was contacted by Norma Jean Almodovar, who had even more information than I had been given; due to the nature of some of it, we suspect the anonymous leaker (whose identity we do not know) is a real-life acquaintance who was fed up with Stella’s lies and wanted sex worker rights activists to know the truth.

And what a truth it is; it turns out that Amy (her real first name) is the daughter of a wealthy family who attended Barnard from autumn 1981 until spring 1985, then skipped a year and returned for the 1986-1987 school year; since she did not graduate until spring of 1994 I surmise that she was actually done by 1987 but for some unfinished requirement (a senior thesis perhaps?) that she finally completed in ’94.  I further assume that whatever dates she gives (and whatever the truth of the conditions therein), her “ten years in prostitution” ran from  early 1985 to late 1993.  I was not able to confirm her statement that she attended Julliard, and I assume her claims about Columbia extend from the fact that Barnard is an autonomous part of it despite their well-known rivalry.

Amy’s Google profile describes her as “a writer living in Houston, TX with her beloved husband and labrador [sic] retriever.  She is writing a memoir about her experiences as a prostitute in New York City.”  Interestingly, the “pimps and hos” nonsense she touts as “Stella” is in sharp contrast to her other claim that she transitioned out of hooking via being “kept” by a wealthy professor for two years; apparently, her “violent and controlling” pimp whom she supposedly saw murder women in front of her just meekly let her go without even demanding a cut.  But considering the poor job she did of covering her tracks (I even have records of real estate transactions she conducted), and the fact that she can’t make up her mind whether her benefactor taught at Oxford or Cambridge, I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that she left such a gaping logic hole in her invented life story.

How much of that story is real?  How much embellished?  How much distorted, wildly exaggerated and “reframed”?  How much made up out of whole cloth?  We simply don’t know and have no way of telling at this time, and I have to wonder if Amy herself even knows any more; given that prostitution is a recurring theme in her writing it seems likely that (as one of my sources stated) she started hooking after her family cut her off.  It may be that she then got in over her head, though she wasn’t nearly as traumatized as she pretends; after all, some of the things we found in other names seem to present whoring in a far less negative light.  She even owns a WordPress blog called “A Prostitute Reviews Movies”, which she seems to use for writing her screeds before posting them publicly to her own blog; this seems like a rather odd title for someone who also brands herself a “survivor” and blathers about “trigger warnings” and other concepts favored by the tissue-paper feelings crowd.  The tipster claimed that her “beloved” husband, a US government bureaucrat, considers her insane and that she started the “Stella Marr” character to get back at him; even if this isn’t true she obviously thrives on attention and craves success as a writer (of  fiction, clearly) at any cost.  However, I have no wish to cause problems for Amy’s husband, who may be as much her victim as the sex workers and activists she constantly defames and libels; though I have no control over what information others have released and may continue to release, I have redacted her last name from the information and pictures presented here so as not to be the agent of harm to a possibly-innocent man.

Norma Jean Almodovar sent “Stella” an open letter, which you can read here; she also posted the following on several Facebook groups:

Many of us sex worker rights activists have been well aware of the vicious lies told about us by an abolitionist calling herself “Stella Marr.”  She has bullied us and lied about us in numerous articles, forums and on her blogs.  There was nothing we could do about it because we did not know her real identity.  She felt free to spread her falsehoods anywhere and everywhere, knowing that there was nothing we could do as long as her cloak of anonymity protected her.

Now we know who she really is.  Someone who knows her well and obviously dislikes her enough to “out” her, has provided us with her true name and other very personal information.  When I sent a message to Stella’s Facebook page, letting her know that we know who she really is, she confirmed that it was her by responding with a very nasty message threatening action against me if I posted her real name.

It seems her whole story is a fraud, that she is not who she claims to be (in addition to her fake name), and that she was never the victim of pimps who trafficked her into prostitution.  Her real story is much more interesting, but I will not share what I learned if she agrees to publicly apologize to all of us who were defamed by her.  A number of you already know who she really is, because the person who outed her originally has shared that info with many other people.

I’d like to propose to our community that we give her the opportunity to make that public apology, and then hopefully she will retire the fictitious character “Stella Marr” whom she created in response to her own personal problems which had nothing to do with a past she never lived.  (Think William Hillar, fraudster extraordinaire whose alleged true life story became the basis for “Taken”.)

Should she not take the opportunity to publicly retract her false statements and apologize to all of us who have been psychologically battered by her lies and bullying, perhaps we can consider filing a joint lawsuit against her  for doing to us what she claims “pimps” and prostitution do to women.

You can read the email I sent to her as well as my refutation of her recent blog article which claims all of us sex worker rights activists are pimps (and therefore have no right to speak at colleges and universities or to fight for the rights of prostitutes) here.

Feel free to post this message anywhere and everywhere that victims of Stella Marr’s lies might read.

Personally, I hope Amy accepts the offer, admits the lies and retires “Stella” (I for one care nothing for her apology, which would be as insincere as everything else she writes); it would accomplish a great deal more good than fully “outing” her ever could, and would demonstrate the lengths to which prohibitionists will go to spread their propaganda.

One Year Ago Today

The conclusion to an interview in which my husband answers questions submitted by readers.

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The Golden Afternoon

“Once upon a time there were three little sisters,” the Dormouse began in a great hurry; “and their names were Elsie, Lacie and Tillie, and they lived at the bottom of a well–”  -  Lewis Carroll

Long-time readers have probably noticed that as time goes on, my subject matter slowly broadens; when I first started writing two years ago every single column was about prostitution, then I branched off into tangentially-related topics, and now often wander quite far afield.  There are a number of reasons for this, of which the four most important are 1)  I am not a monomaniac, though I know it sometimes must appear so; 2) I don’t really want my readers to think I’m a monomaniac; 3) It’s easier to write something interesting every day if I allow myself some latitude; and 4) It helps to illustrate my most important theme, which is that whores are normal people with the same range and variety of interests as anyone else.  Even so, I’ve been very careful to maintain an organic topical growth and to eschew jarring changes of focus; take today’s column, for instance.  It has absolutely nothing to do with harlotry (though there is a tenuous connection via another sexual topic I’ve previously discussed), but it is the fruit of an outer limb connected to the main trunk by successively-smaller branches as follows:

On August 1^st, 2010 I published “Lammas”, which opened up the topic of holidays by discussing the fact that many whores are pagans of one kind or another.  Then on “Halloween” I mentioned my “otherness” and referred in passing to my love of horror movies, a topic on which I expanded in “Maman” (May 8^th, 2011).  “Frightful Films” (October 28^th, 2011) listed and described my favorite horror movies, then “My Favorite Things (Part One)” (December 1^st, 2011) did the same for my favorite non-horror movies; in the comments, a reader asked me to do a column on “My Favorite Books”, which included Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; its sequel “My Favorite Authors” included Lewis Carroll.  And though my column for tomorrow will be a philippic about the sorry state of American independence (see last year’s column for an example), I couldn’t let an anniversary of great importance for friends of Alice pass by without comment:  tomorrow is the 150^th anniversary of Wonderland Day.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was a brilliant but shy mathematician and Anglican deacon who taught at Oxford and became a close friend of the family of Christ Church Dean Henry Liddell.  Dodgson grew especially close to Mrs. Liddell and the couple’s three daughters Lorina, Alice and Edith; he often took the girls rowing on the Thames, and though the Victorians were less evil-minded than modern people on the subject of adult men and young girls, they were always accompanied on these expeditions by at least one other adult.  One such excursion occurred on Friday, July 4^th, 1862; Dodgson (then 30 years old) and the girls (13, 10 and 8 respectively) were accompanied by the Reverend Robinson Duckworth, and as was their custom they stopped for tea upon reaching Godstow.  Typically, the three Liddell sisters would demand that Dodgson tell them a story of his own devising; years later he wrote, “none of these many tales got written down:  they lived and died, like summer midges, each in its own golden afternoon until there came a day when, as it chanced, one of my little listeners petitioned that the tale might be written out for her.”  The “little listener” was of course Alice Liddell, whose given name was attached to tale’s heroine (though she also had traits borrowed from Lorina, Edith, other girls they knew and even Dodgson himself); and though as he later told Duckworth he “sat up nearly the whole night” writing out what he could remember of the story, he was a perfectionist and so fussed over it, rewrote it and revised it for over two years before presenting the handwritten, self-illustrated Alice’s Adventures Underground to her in November of 1864.  A year earlier he had allowed the children of his friend George MacDonald to read the then-unfinished manuscript and they urged him to take it to a publisher; the first edition, with the now-familiar illustrations by Punch cartoonist Sir John Tenniel, was released by Macmillan in 1865 under the pen name “Lewis Carroll”, which Dodgson used to separate his works of fancy from his serious mathematical treatises.

Incidentally, the blonde Alice who appears in those illustrations (and whose image has become inextricably attached to the character) was not based on Alice Liddell, who appears dressed as a beggar child above in an 1858 photo by Dodgson.  As you can see she was a beautiful child and grew into a beautiful woman; the photo in the paragraph below (taken in 1872 by Julia Margaret Cameron) depicts King Lear and his three daughters, with Cordelia (far right) portrayed by the 20-year old Alice (the other two are Edith [center] and another sister, Marina).  Dodgson was not the only person who was extremely fond of her; a number of contemporary letters and diaries speak highly of her charm and intelligence.  But he loved her very deeply, so much so that Mrs. Liddell eventually became uncomfortable with his attentions and took steps to discourage them after some mysterious incident in October of 1862 which is referred to in his diary only by the cryptic phrase “Lord Newry’s business”.

This does not mean that Dodgson was a pedophile, as he is so often portrayed nowadays; much has been made of the fact that he enjoyed photographing little girls nude, but this was actually a very common practice in Victorian England:  it was part of the “child cult”, meant to express innocence and purity, and was so mainstream that nude children even appeared on Christmas cards of the period.  And though it is true that he enjoyed the company of young girls, he also befriended many adult women, especially married ones.  In fact, a number of Carroll scholars (including Martin Gardner and Karoline Leach) have argued that he was in fact the exact opposite of a pedophile:  not a man who was sexually attracted to children, but rather one so deeply uncomfortable with his own sexuality that he preferred the company of little girls precisely because he was not attracted to them.  His well-documented friendships with married women and the oft-repeated prayer in his diaries to be delivered from the “sin of David” point to an entirely different kink:  King David coveted the beautiful Bathsheba and sent her husband, Uriah the Hittite, to die on the front lines of battle so he could possess her.  It therefore seems likely that the desire which troubled him so was a fetish for other men’s wives, possibly consummated about 1853, which drove him to avoid temptation by socializing with girls too young to be objects of carnal desire.  We can even guess the type of woman to whom he was sexually attracted, yet found emotionally repellent:  both Alice books and a number of his other writings feature strong, castrating, dominatrix figures (such as the Queen of Hearts and the Red Queen) with weak, ineffectual husbands.  Alice’s mother may have been one of these:  a bit of student doggerel from the 1860s goes, “I am the Dean and this is Mrs. Liddell/She plays the first, and I the second fiddle.”

Alas, the time which gave Alice’s adventures to the world was as mortal as a bread-and-butter-fly; only three months later Mrs. Liddell began to cool toward Dodgson, and on June 27^th of the following year she told him about gossip linking him with either their governess or Lorina (who was 14 and therefore marriageable).  The rumors caused a break in their close relationship, and though they remained cordial the rowing trips became a thing of the past.  He befriended many other girls in the next four decades, but none of them ever truly replaced Alice in his affections:  in a letter he sent her soon after her marriage in 1880 he wrote, “I have had scores of child-friends since your time, but they have been quite a different thing.”  She was also his muse for 1871’s Through the Looking-Glass, and no subsequent work dedicated to another girl can match the two Alice books in genius or wit; they are the enduring legacy of that “golden afternoon”, now a century and a half gone, so it is only proper that the occasion be commemorated by those who love them.

One Year Ago Today

In “July Updates (Part Two)”, Georgia learns about the Law of Unintended Consequences, Google reveals its prohibitionism, the European Women’s Lobby demonstrates that it knows less than nothing about male psychology and Seattle police display their abject cowardice.

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My Favorite TV Comedies

…and now for something completely different.  -  John Cleese

Yesterday I shared my favorite TV dramas with you, and today I’d like to do the same with my favorite TV comedies; at the end there’s a bonus list of my two favorite documentary series, which obviously wasn’t long enough for a column of its own.  Just as I did yesterday I’ve embedded videos of each show, with one exception (as you’ll see below).  Like yesterday’s, this list is arranged alphabetically.

1)  The Addams Family  Charles Addams had been doing his macabre cartoons for The New Yorker for over twenty years when a television producer decided they would make a clever television show.  Unlike the characters in the rival show The Munsters, the Addams family (named for the cartoonist) were not comical takeoffs on Universal movie monsters, but rather oddballs who were just plain weird rather than monstrous; that weirdness allowed them to get away with a great deal that other contemporary shows could not.  For example, Mr. and Mrs. Addams were the very first TV couple who were not only sexually interested in one another on-camera, but passionately interested.  It’s been one of my favorites since I first encountered it in afternoon reruns in the mid-1970s.

2)  The Adventures of Pete and Pete  Like the Addams family, the Wrigleys are just a little bent, but unlike the Addams most of their neighbors (many played by unexpected celebrities like Iggy Pop or Patty Hearst) are equally strange.  The show was originally a series of one-minute shorts which aired between shows on children’s cable network Nickelodeon in 1989 (here are the first two, “What Would You Do for a Dollar?” and “Freeze Tag”); they proved so popular the creators were asked to create a series of 30-minute specials and later a whole series.  The stories, especially in the first two regular seasons, achieve a rare mixture of hilarity and poignant sweetness that isn’t quite like anything else.

3)  Bewitched  There were quite a few fantasy situation comedies in the 1960s, but this was the best and most enduring of them; I was five years old when it finally went off the air, and it’s been in nigh-constant syndication ever since.  The lovely Elizabeth Montgomery played a witch married to a mortal, and the friction between the two worlds (most often in the person of her interfering mother) created an endless number of comical situations which rarely fail to amuse and are often hilarious.  One of the show’s greatest strengths was its masterful use of character actors appearing as witches and other magical beings, animals or monsters in human form, or even historical personages summoned into the present by errant spells.

4)  The Bullwinkle Show  This show was originally named Rocky and His Friends, but after Rocky’s sidekick Bullwinkle became the more popular character, the title was changed for the fourth season and used for all the seasons in syndication.  The show aired in the evenings, and like the classic Warner Brothers theatrical cartoons was intended for adults.  But for some reason I’ve never quite understood Americans collectively decided in the mid-1960s that cartoons were “kid stuff”, and that attitude persisted until the advent of The Simpsons in 1989.  Bullwinkle’s producer, Jay Ward, was among the first to prove that by use of crude, limited animation held up by funny scripts and talented voice actors, a quality cartoon could be produced at a very reasonable cost; though it’s doubtful that any television show has ever been animated more crudely, it’s equally doubtful that any has ever been as funny, clever and sly.

5)  Fawlty Towers  John Cleese stars as Basil Fawlty, a rude, incompetent and self-important innkeeper whose schemes to improve his business, keep the riff-raff out and stay out of trouble with his shrewish wife lead to twelve of the funniest half-hours ever committed to videotape.  There aren’t many shows that can make me laugh so hard I literally cry, but this is one.

6)  The Good Life  This British sitcom premiered the same year (1975) as Fawlty Towers, but they’re not very much alike; though this series (which was broadcast in the US as The Good Neighbors) is very funny, its humor is cuter and more gentle than the manic hilarity of Fawlty.  The story follows an engineer who decides to get out of the rat race by quitting his job and taking up farming…in the upscale London suburb of Surbiton, much to the consternation of his good-natured but snobbish neighbors.

7)  Green Acres  No, I’m not obsessed with shows about successful men who quit the rat race to become farmers; honestly I’m not.  Besides, the hero of this show is a lawyer, and instead of farming in the suburbs he moves to a very weird rural town whose inhabitants make the eccentric population of Pete & Pete’s Wellsville look like models of sanity in comparison.  Even the laws of nature here seem to work in a more surreal fashion, and on more than one occasion characters are able to read credits, hear incidental music and otherwise break the fourth wall.

8)  Making Fiends  This is a web cartoon created by the astonishingly talented Amy Winfrey; it’s absolutely one of the funniest  things I’ve ever seen while still being 100% “clean” and incredibly charming.  She did six half-hour shows for Nickelodeon in 2008, but the originals are still online and pack more laughs into a few minutes than most sitcoms can generate in several episodes.

9)  Monty Python’s Flying Circus  As with Star Trek and Twilight Zone yesterday, I honestly don’t think I can say anything useful about this landmark series in the space I have to work with.  The influence of this bizarre, zany, irreverent, erudite and wholly original sketch comedy show on everything that has come after it is incalculable; even our use of the word “spam” to mean junk email derives from a Python sketch depicting a diner in which Spam (the meat) is served with every single dish whether one wants it or not.

10)  Red Dwarf   Imagine a science fiction show that totally succeeds as a comedy, or a hilarious comedy which is better science fiction than the majority of shows in that genre, and you’ve got Red Dwarf.  A perennial loser is placed in stasis for violating ship’s rules and emerges 3,000,000 years later to find the entire crew was killed in a radiation accident soon after he was frozen; his only companions are the ship’s computer, a hologram simulation of the dead bunkmate he couldn’t stand, and a humanoid creature who evolved from the ship’s cat.  Hijinks ensue.

My Favorite TV Documentaries

1)  Connections  Veteran journalist James Burke examines the interdependence of technology by demonstrating how each new discovery leads to wholly unpredictable effects that trigger change in apparently-unrelated areas; in each episode he takes one ancient or medieval development (such as the stirrup or the water wheel) and demonstrates how it set off a series of interlinked events leading to the development of a major technological device of the modern world (such as computers or nuclear weapons).  Sound interesting?  You can watch the first episode, “The Trigger Effect”, in its entirety right here.

2)  Cosmos  Three decades of cable TV networks wholly dedicated to documentaries still haven’t produced a science show as interesting or entertaining as Carl Sagan’s 1980 magnum opus, which is why it’s still highly regarded today despite the fact that a little (though not much) of its science is now dated.  In a way this show and Connections were inspirations for this blog, because both of them showed me it was possible to be informative and entertaining at the same time.  I also have Cosmos to thank for introducing me to the music of Vangelis, one of my favorite musicians.

Today’s puzzle:  One of today’s series and three of yesterday’s feature main characters who appear in every episode (or nearly so), despite the fact that they’re already dead by the end of the first episode.  How many more can you think of?

One Year Ago Today

In “A Decent Boldness” we make the acquaintance of Aella, an Amazon of the mythic past who finds herself stranded on the far side of the world, broke and unable to speak the language, and has to figure out how she’s going to survive.

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My Favorite TV Dramas

You’re traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination.  -  Rod Serling

Since this feature has proven much more popular than I expected, this month I’d like to share my favorite TV shows with you; today we’ll look at my favorite dramas, and tomorrow my favorite comedies.  And when I say “look at” I mean that literally; instead of using still pictures I’ve embedded a YouTube video of the introduction to each show.  Since it’s not unusual for shows to change the graphics or even the theme music in successive seasons, I’ve selected my favorite ones (when available).  Since the entertainment industry has become obsessed with recycling of late, most of these series have been remade or turned into movies, but in each case the one I like is the original.  The list is arranged alphabetically, and one thing that may strike you is that there’s a lot of British TV here (4 of 10 in each list) and a preponderance of 1960s shows (half of each list).  The reason for that is, I was already becoming annoyed with the stupidity of American network television by the time I was 11 or 12, and stopped watching it entirely in 1980.  After that it was nothing but public TV and cable through the entire ‘80s, which meant I saw a lot of British shows; I first saw the two post-1980 American shows on this list in the late ‘90s on cable.

1)  The Avengers  Though this series premiered in the UK years before the mid-‘60s spy craze, it was syndicated to American television from its fourth season on because of it; the video I’ve showcased here was a short introduction for American viewers which came just before the opening credits in that first syndicated season, so it may be new to my UK and Commonwealth readers.  In its first three seasons (never seen in the US until the ‘90s) the show was a straight drama, but later seasons incorporated the unique style and comedic elements for which the show became known.  I first discovered it in early ‘70s reruns, and Diana Rigg was the first woman I can remember being attracted to.

2)  Batman (The Animated Series)  Not the Adam West TV show, y’all; this was the first production from the revived Warner Brothers animation department in the early ‘90s, and it is widely considered the finest animated TV show ever made.  The stories were scripted with adults in mind; they were complex, emotionally realistic and beautifully animated, and each episode was separately scored with a full orchestra.  Perhaps best of all, the voices were provided by regular actors, not “cartoon voices”, and it shows.

3)  Dr. Who  This classic British science fantasy serial had been around for almost two decades before debuting on American public television in 1981, starting from the first story with the Fourth Doctor, Tom Baker.  By the second week I was hooked, and by the third I no longer cared about the community-theater special effects because the stories, acting and everything else were so good.  Our local PBS station eventually aired all the ‘60s episodes and new episodes as well until its cancellation in 1989, and if the BBC ever gets off its collective arse and packages the serials properly by season, I intend to buy all the first five Doctors.  Since fans will want to know:  my Doctor order of preference is 4, 3, 5, 2, 1, 7, 6.

4)  Kolchak:  The Night Stalker  Because my mother never allowed me to watch “scary shows” I first heard of this from other kids, and saw it in syndication in the early ‘80s.  Carl Kolchak is a hard-boiled reporter who investigates all sorts of supernatural occurrences, though much to his chagrin the stories are usually discarded by his long-suffering editor.  The series has a strong current of black humor and has been named as an inspiration for a number of other shows, including The X Files.

5)  Kung Fu  Since we only had one television set and my parents weren’t interested, I had to wait until this acclaimed and groundbreaking series was syndicated in the mid-1980s to see it.  It is impossible to overstate the influence of this “Eastern Western”, not only because it spurred a martial arts craze and awakened American interest in Asian philosophy, but more generally in pioneering techniques such as extensive use of flashback and presenting combat in slow motion.

6)  The Outer Limits  Though I had read about this series and even owned an episode guide, I never actually saw it until an independent TV station picked it up in 1984; even then I only saw a few until cable network TNT broadcast them as part of its Monstervision series in the early ‘90s.  While not as consistently outstanding as The Twilight Zone, this series is still a lot of fun and there were a number of excellent and thought-provoking episodes.

7)  The Prisoner  By the end of his extremely popular Danger Man series  (syndicated to the US as Secret Agent), Patrick McGoohan was the most highly-paid television actor in the world, and one of the most respected; he then used his clout to get this 17-episode series produced.  It’s doubtful anyone else could’ve; the series is a strange, enigmatic and compelling dramatization of the right of the individual to be individual in the face of a totalitarian surveillance state.  If you’ve never seen it, the three-minute introduction below will give you a good idea of the premise.

8)  Sherlock Holmes  England’s Granada television produced what I and many other Sherlockians consider the finest of all Holmes series.  The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes ran for two seasons and was later followed by The Return of Sherlock Holmes, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, though they are here considered all one series.  Jeremy Brett was to me the perfect Holmes, and the series’ production values were impeccable; only a few of the adaptations strayed very far from the spirit and substance of Doyle’s stories.

9)  Star Trek  I’m sure everyone knew this would be here; is it really necessary for me to introduce this series?  Anything I might say is probably already familiar to 95% of my readers.  So let me just tell you that I was a really, really major Trekkie, and had every book and model (though I must confess I wasn’t all that good at putting them together and had to ask Jeff for help).  Of the sequels I like the animated series best, followed by Enterprise; Next Generation and Deep Space Nine are good but not in my opinion up to the same level as the original, and Voyager was to me completely unwatchable.  Of the movies, I only consider The Wrath of Khan and The Undiscovered Country truly worthy of the legacy; the former is in the second tier of my favorite movies.

10)  The Twilight Zone  Another obvious choice; I have loved this show since first seeing it in reruns as a child, and can remember excitedly repeating the plots to friends in second grade.  When the local PBS station started rerunning them on Sunday nights in the early ‘80s, I actually wired up a kill switch on the ancient Motorola I had inherited from my great-grandmother so I could watch them from bed and instantly kill the picture if my mother came in.  As with Star Trek, I doubt this show needs an introduction even to most international readers, so I’ll just say that I decided to showcase the first-season opening with the haunting Bernard Herrmann theme rather than the more familiar Marius Constant one.

Two Honorable Mentions

I decided to list these two separately due to issues of scale; the first is an incomplete series which was not renewed and therefore ends in a cliffhanger, while the second was a soap opera with 1225 episodes.

1)  American Gothic  This horror series was stylish, sexy and very daring, but upset and confused TV executives so much they did their best to kill it and eventually succeeded.  It was moved around the schedule without warning and episodes were aired out of sequence or skipped entirely, making the intricate storyline literally impossible to follow.  Fortunately I didn’t see it until it was broadcast on the Sci-Fi Channel, complete and in order, in the late ‘90s.  The show didn’t really have a traditional intro, but that’s OK because this trailer will give you an idea of the premise and plot.

2)  Dark Shadows  This soap opera premiered in 1966 as a gothic, but began to introduce supernatural elements about six months later and eventually featured witchcraft, werewolves, time travel, astral projection, Dorian Grey portraits and many other such ideas, often drawn from famous horror novels (including a confusing and not-very-good Lovecraft sequence).  The tortured, all-too-human vampire Barnabas Collins eventually became the star of the show and paved the way for every humanized vampire that came after him, thus making this series the ancestor of everything from Anne Rice to Twilight, though IMHO better than any of them and deserving of a true homage instead of the mess Tim Burton recently served up.

I’ll close with a little game for y’all; though I find a number of the male stars of these shows attractive, there’s only one I will consistently name if asked to give examples of celebrities I find attractive.  Let’s see how well y’all know me; I’ll give you the answer Friday.

One Year Ago Today

“Delicious Poison” reports on the abuse of a cattle steroid named Oradexon in the brothels of Bangladesh, and the predictable Western response to it.

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Ad Astra

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales.  -  Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Locksley Hall”

Ray Bradbury’s passing on the 6^th set off a chain of thoughts and reminiscences about my lifelong love of astronomy and space travel.  Ever since I was a small child, I dreamed of visiting other worlds, and eagerly devoured books and shows which allowed me to do so in my imagination.  It didn’t much matter to me whether the stories were realistic or fantastic, hard science fiction or pure fantasy, illustrated or not; I was just as happy with Adam Strange’s travels by zeta-beam to the planet Rann as I was with John Carter’s astral projection to Mars or the voyages of the starship Enterprise, and every bit as fascinated by the real moon landings as I was by Dr. Dolittle’s lunar excursion on the back of an immense moth.

As so often happens, the fiction inspired me to explore the fact, and I read every book on astronomy and/or space travel I could get my hands on.  I must’ve read We Came in Peace (a pictorial history of the space program published a few months after the landing of Apollo 11) dozens of times, and about 6 or 7 years ago was overjoyed to discover a copy in a used-book store in New Orleans while I was killing time between calls.  By the time I reached high school I was determined to be an astronomer, but after I saw Cosmos I modified that to “astronomy popularizer” instead; I wanted to be a female Carl Sagan, writing books explaining science in general and astronomy in particular to lay people.  I figured I might even get my own show one day, using my sex appeal to bring the viewers in.  That dream never quite went away, either; when Denise won a scholarship in chemistry and her friend Jane (to whom I was also very close) excelled in pursuing a physics degree, we conceived of the notion of trying to sell one of the cable networks a show called The Astronomy Babes after the two of them had earned their PhDs.  I would also go back for my doctorate in library science, and the three of us would host the show together, talking about astronomy and space science dressed in sexy outfits.  I think it would’ve been a winner; we were all beautiful, intelligent and unusually busty, and each had her area of specialization (Jane would explain physics aspects, Denise chemistry, and I would handle the cultural and historical segments).  Alas, real life intervened for all three of us, but it’s fun to fantasize about an alternate world where our show is entering its third season and I’m raking in royalties from Astronomy Babes DVDs, T-shirts, web promotions, etc.

Realistically, a show like that takes some serious putting together and we probably would’ve all had to relocate to Los Angeles.  But I had one other astronomy-related fantasy which was much more achievable, and had I not fallen in love I would probably be living it right now.  What I envisioned was that after building my house I’d semi-retire around the age of 40, then go on tour to all the parts of the country where interesting astronomy projects were going on while Grace ran the agency at home.  I planned to take only one or two calls a day (mostly just enough to pay for hotels, food and gas), leaving plenty of time to do sightseeing, visit observatories, etc.  Like my heroine Phryne, I would have established a sliding scale: high prices for most clients, typical ones for highly-paid science types and nothing at all for astronomers and other scientists who took the time to give me tours and answer my questions.  I know I have a number of scientists as readers, and at least one astronomer, so I’m very sorry, guys; life always seems to take me in a different direction than I imagine it will.  Had I gone down that path I probably wouldn’t be doing this blog, which I humbly believe will prove more important in the long run.

Though I still love astronomy, it’s grown increasingly difficult for me to follow the newest developments.  Just a few weeks ago, for example, I read an article on the neutrino observatory in Antarctica which discussed neutrinos of different masses; now, although I was familiar with the idea that neutrinos might indeed have an infinitesimal mass, the last I heard (from an astrophysicist client back in 2000) was that the concept had been disproven…and here this new article is treating neutrino mass as an established fact!  And now they’re saying the Higgs boson could be detected any day now; I despair of keeping up.

Space travel, on the other hand, has become exactly the opposite for me now:  I still know what’s going on and have no problem understanding it; I simply don’t give a damn about it.  The endless delays of the shuttle program (chasing the ridiculous goal of eliminating all risk in an inherently dangerous pursuit), the bureaucratic obstacles which blocked all efforts at commercialization of the field so that we’ve only recently reached a point which should have been achieved about 30 years ago, the psychotic waste of trillions on warmongering, oppression and political games when a hundredth part of that could’ve opened up the solar system to us by now…all of these have contributed to my present attitude on the subject, which might be best described as, “wake me up when you actually do something.”  My attitude toward most recent science fiction cinema is similar; I see it as a lot of noise and flash with no real substance.

I no longer believe human beings will walk on Mars in my lifetime, nor that we will strike out for the stars anytime in the next several centuries unless we’re forced to by some unforeseen circumstance or easily enabled to by some unforeseen discovery; human society has turned in on itself again, as it has so many times before, and the hands that hold the purse-strings are more interested in their own petty power-games than exploring new worlds.  A new Enlightenment will come, as it always does, but I won’t see it in this incarnation; so of late I’ve turned away from what passes for space travel in the real world, and devoted my attention instead to explorations of the mind.  Though I will never set physical foot on another world myself I have walked a thousand of them in my imagination, and there is nothing to keep me from going outside on a clear summer night and turning my eyes upward to the stars.

One Year Ago Today

“Dirty Whores” analyzes the reasons for the persistent myth of the diseased whore, and contrasts it with the truth of the subject.

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Litha

And what is so rare as a day in June?
Then, if ever, come perfect days;
Then Heaven tries earth if it be in tune,
And over it softly her warm ear lays:
Whether we look, or whether we listen,
We hear life murmur, or see it glisten.  -  James Russell Lowell, “The Vision of Sir Launfal”

The apparent path of the sun crossed the celestial equator at 23:09 Universal Time last night, making today the first day of astronomical summer in the northern hemisphere, the longest day of the year (and of course the shortest for those of you reading this in the southern hemisphere).  In European tradition today was Midsummer, the holiday called Litha (from an Anglo-Saxon word for “summer”) by neopagans and St. John’s Day by Christians.  It was the most important day of the year for many ancient peoples, and even today is extremely popular in Scandinavia and the Baltic countries, where there is scarcely any night at this time of year.

In my column of one year ago today my friend JustStarshine explained the spiritual significance of the day, and I shared my own feelings about summer:  As a child I loved it because I was out of school, but once I grew up and could no longer take a three-month holiday the oppressive heat of New Orleans summers made them my least favorite season.  But where I live now, the real summer heat does not arrive until July, and so I can once again enjoy the loveliness of June as I did in childhood.  One of the chief pleasures of the season for me is the availability of fresh blackberries, picked by my own soft white hands from the vines on my own land; I gladly suffer the many thorn-scratches and insect bites to win buckets of the delicious fruit, and we enjoy blackberry pie, blackberry muffins and waffles, blackberry ice cream and other such treats, then blackberry jam after the fresh fruit is gone.

May all my readers, no matter what your personal beliefs, find joy and abundance in your lives, and may your fortunes increase through the summer and autumn as the fruits ripen for harvest.  Blessed Be!

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Father’s Day

Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave
My heart into my mouth: I love your majesty
According to my bond; no more nor less.  -  William Shakespeare, King Lear (I,i)

Perceptive long-time readers have probably noticed that while I mention my mother and sisters from time to time and my grandmother and favorite cousin quite frequently, I’ve barely mentioned my father at all.  Some of you may have concluded that he was largely absent from my life for one reason or another, but that would not be the case; it’s just that I honestly don’t have a lot to say about him.  But since today is Father’s Day in the United States and many other countries, I thought I would take the opportunity to provide you with a brief sketch.  Though I’ll speak of him in the past tense because it’s been 15 years since I’ve seen him, he and my mother are both still alive and still reside in the same house where I grew up.

If I were less objective, I would say my father was hard and standoffish, but that would not really be true; while he was traditionally paternal and often trapped in very rigid thought patterns, that was no more true of him than it was of other men of his generation and background.  He was in fact much warmer than his younger brother and several of his contemporary cousins, and though I never met his father (who died in 1960), Maman told me that he was very cold toward his sons; he was an intellectual who married late, and other people I’ve talked to about him (such as my aunt) have said that they believe the only reason he got married in the first place was because that was what an established man was expected to do in the 1930s.  Given this upbringing, I’d say my father was actually a bit on the demonstrative side, though he sometimes had trouble showing it.

My father was always very devoted to my mother; I honestly feel that he’s always been very much in love with her, and since he was not a very verbal person he expressed it the same way he expressed affection to us or Maman:  by doing things.  He would cheerfully embark on major landscaping or construction projects, and never made me feel I was imposing if I asked him to help me with something; the only drawback was that he is the one from whom I inherited my hardheadedness, and if he was to be involved in a project it would be done his way or not at all.  I think these characteristics were what caused him to be less affectionate to me than to my first and third sisters; his rigidity prevented him from understanding my strangeness, his tendency to be non-verbal made it difficult for us to relate, and his devotion to my mother caused him to absorb a lot of her attitude toward me.

So though I never felt rejected by my father exactly, I never really felt accepted by him either; like my mother, he never quite seemed to know what to do with me.  The two preferred sisters were both tomboys who were much like my mother in personality, so that gave him a point of contact with them; my brother and other sister had an amiable if not especially close relationship with him.  When I was young we often watched shows together:  we both enjoyed The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau and other nature documentaries, and he was a big Star Trek fan (I never heard him laugh so hard as he did at a rerun of “A Piece of the Action” in the late ‘70s).  Indeed, Star Trek was the subject of the first of only two intellectual discussions I can ever recall having with him, a 1988 conversation in which he stated that he felt the characters in The Next Generation lacked the appeal and chemistry of those in the original series.  He and I were in agreement on that, but six years later argued about the imprisonment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War after I referred to the facilities in which they were held as “concentration camps”.

But for the most part our interaction was limited to discipline, his telling me I wasn’t doing my chores quickly enough for his liking, my asking him for permission to do this or that (because he was more permissive than my mother), or his chastising me for upsetting my mother (which happened quite frequently in high school).  Other than that, he seemed more distant with every passing year, and I remember how very strange it felt to walk down the aisle with him at my wedding; we had been growing apart for so long that I didn’t really feel that I was his to give away any more (even in the modern social sense, much less the traditional patriarchal sense).  So it’s not remotely surprising he upheld my mother’s decision not to speak with me any more, though I sometimes wonder if he actually knows the reason or just went along with it without question.

I fully realize that in publishing this I am opening the door for prohibitionists to proclaim that I became a whore due to “daddy issues”, thus proving that all whores are mentally unbalanced, blah blah blah.  I’m not worried about it; people like that will twist whatever they have to fit their model, and if they don’t have anything to twist they’ll just make stuff up.  Did my teenage promiscuity result from a lack of attention from my father?  Possibly, but what difference does it make?  We all have childhood troubles, traumas and tragedies, and we are all shaped by them; if we as a society are going to deny agency and free choice to individuals on that basis, absolutely nobody will have free choice.  Ultimately, the hidden currents and tendencies which pushed me toward harlotry are no more germane than those which push others into politics, medicine, science, music, teaching or being a professional busybody, and any given individual’s choices are nobody’s business but his or her own.

One Year Ago Today

“Speaking in Prostitute” examines the misunderstandings which arise when whores and amateurs attempt to have a dialog.

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Rhodopis

The Egyptians relations affirm that Rhodopis was a most beautiful Curtizan; and that on a time as she was bathing her self, Fortune, who loveth to doe extravagant and unexpected things, gave her a reward…  -  Aelian, Various Histories (XIII, xxxiii) (tr. Thomas Stanley)

As I pointed out in my biography of La Belle Otero,

…the details of [the] lives [of courtesans] tend to be vague and often contradictory…[because] when one is in the business of selling an illusion, the details of one’s life may become as fluid and embellished as advertising copy, and one’s biographers are forced to choose between conflicting reports from letters, rumors, the rose-tinted memories of favored clients, the gossip of rivals and the propaganda of moralists.

But though many fanciful tales are told of courtesans from Acca Larentia to Mata Hari, none are as romantic and enduring as the story of Rhodopis, which eventually became one of the world’s most beloved fairy tales.

She was a Thracian enslaved in Samos sometime in the first half of the 6^th century BCE; her birth name may have been Doricha, but since the source of this information is Strabo (who lived 500 years later), we cannot be certain.  She was the slave of Iadmon, who also owned Aesop, the great fabulist; by this we may infer that Iadmon was an enlightened man who educated his slaves well and allowed them considerable freedom.  Sometime in her teens she was sold to Aesop’s original owner Xanthes, a merchant who traded extensively with Egypt (one of the traditions of Aesop’s life is that he was Ethiopian, which would make sense in the context of Xanthes’ business).  It is unclear whether she started working as a hetaera for Iadmon or if it was her second master who first employed her thus, but the fact that she was educated (as other Greek women were not) indicates that this was the career for which she was intended from the start.  Her stage name, like those of many hetaerae, was based on a physical feature:  “Rhodopis” means “rosy cheeks”.

Xanthes took her to Naucratis, the first permanent Greek colony in Egypt, where she quickly became very popular.  She had not been working a very long time when she was hired by the merchant Charaxus, elder brother of the poetess Sappho; he soon fell in love with her and purchased her freedom for a very dear price, for which he was scolded by his sister in verse.  It is from this now-lost poem that Strabo derived the name Doricha; some sources say the lyric also chided Rhodopis for taking advantage of her brother’s good nature by stealing his property (i.e. accepting her freedom rather than becoming his slave).  This helps us to pin down the time somewhat; Herodotus tells us that the reigning pharaoh was Amasis II, whose reign began in 570 BCE, and Sappho is believed to have died not long after that.  Rhodopis remained in Naucratis and became very successful; she was religiously devout and tithed to the temple at Delphi, which had to be rebuilt after being destroyed in a fire (the Pharaoh also donated 1000 talents of gold as a gesture of friendship toward the Greeks).  Large contributors were commemorated by iron spits engraved with their names; Herodotus (who lived a century later) said that he counted ten inscribed with hers, which gives you some idea of her wealth.

This is all that can be considered historical about Rhodopis; the rest belongs to the realm of legend and fantasy.  The first of these stories, which began shortly after her death, claimed that she had built the third of the Great Pyramids.  This is of course ridiculous; it was actually built by Menkaure in the 4^th Dynasty, about 2500 BCE.  The story may have arisen through confusion of Rhodopis with the legendary 6^th dynasty Queen Nitocris, possibly due to the name of her city (Naucratis); Nitocris was herself confused with Menkaure because her throne name was said to have been Menkaura.  Herodotus thoroughly debunked the idea that Rhodopis had anything to do with pyramid-building, but did repeat the legend of Nitocris…who may not have existed at all.  Historians believe that she appeared in the historical record due to a mistake in a catalog of pharaohs compiled during the reign of Ramses II, and that previously independent legends were then attached to her.  Incidentally, Herodotus’ account of Nitocris’ life inspired the young Tennessee Williams’ first published story, “The Vengeance of Nitocris”, which appeared in the August 1928 issue of Weird Tales; this story in turn inspired H.P. Lovecraft to mention her in two of his tales, thus bringing her into the Lovecraftian tradition drawn on by many writers since.  And Ramses II, who inadvertently created her legend, himself inspired Shelley’s “Ozymandias”.  It’s almost like I planned all this to fit together, isn’t it?

The confusion of Rhodopis and Nitocris (a lady of very different background and temperament) was no doubt facilitated by the legend that the former also became the Queen of Egypt.  Strabo repeats the story, already old in his time, that after Rhodopis had become successful and wealthy she bought a fine house with a pool in the garden.  And while she was bathing there one day, an eagle swooped down and stole one of her sandals, carried it to nearby Sais, and dropped it in Pharaoh’s lap.  The monarch was of course fascinated by this strange omen and by the richness and beauty of the sandal, and so sent men throughout the capital and other nearby cities to discover who the owner of the dainty lost shoe might be.  Rhodopis’ maids had of course gossiped about the singular occurrence at their mistress’ bath, and by this word came to Pharaoh, who summoned the hetaera to the palace.  When he beheld her beauty he interpreted the omen as a sign he should marry her, and she therefore became Queen of Egypt and they lived happily ever after.

Though there is no clear historical record of the latter part of Rhodopis’ life, we do know the names of Amasis II’s consorts and she is not among them.  It’s certainly possible that she became one of his concubines; she would be neither the first nor the last courtesan to become a royal mistress, and an earlier folk tale may have become attached to her name because of it.  But in the end, it doesn’t matter because the magical romance of a king and a commoner enabled by a lost slipper proved greater than either of the living people who inspired it, and Rhodopis – or as we have called her since 1697, Cinderella – is undoubtedly the only whore ever to inspire a Walt Disney movie.

One Year Ago Today

“Full of Themselves” reveals the incredible pomposity of certain women who would be considered sex workers but for the existence of an arbitrary legal line.

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