The Lady in Gold by Anne-Marie O'Connor Read Free Book Online Page B

Ernst had had the good fortune to marry into. They were the only real family Klimt had ever had.
    Mizzi took Klimt’s advice. She told her family. Her stepfather threw her out, enraged she would jeopardize her sisters’ slim marriage prospects. Mizzi moved into a small hotel and begged Klimt for financial support. Marriage was not just a convention for most women in those days; it wasthe arbitrator of their destiny. It could determine comfort or poverty, companionship or abject loneliness. For a girl like Mizzi, an affair with Klimt was a high-stakes endeavor.
    Mizzi was ruined.

An Innocent Abroad
    Like the Bauers, many members of the Jewish elite considered themselves quintessentially Viennese.Freud donned lederhosen to stroll in the Vienna Woods with his daughter Anna. The Bauers celebrated Christmas and Easter as they did the balls of the opera season. In the eyes of Vienna witAlfred Polgar, even the classic Viennese
feuilleton,
or short funny sketch, blended “the melancholy of the synagogue and the alcoholic mood of Grinzing,” the medieval winery district in the Vienna Woods.The Viennese
Fiakerlied,
or “Coachman’s Song,” a favorite of the crown prince, was composed by a Hungarian Jewish immigrant. Jewish bon vivants like Budapest-bornFelix Salten seemed
über wiener,
more Viennese than the Viennese.
    Yet a wall of social prejudice stubbornly defined them as Jews. One of the more unusual Vienna residents to point out the virulence of this tenaciousanti-Semitism was Samuel Clemens, the American writer known by his pen name,Mark Twain.
    Twain moved his family to Vienna in September 1897. He was depressed. The previous year, his family had lost their beloved daughter Susy to spinal meningitis, at twenty-four. Twain desperately needed a change of scene. He was suffering from paralyzing writer’s block when he checked in to the Hotel Metropol, on the Morzinplatz overlooking the Danube Canal. He brought his God-fearing wife, Olivia, and his daughter Clara, the belle of the family.
    Twain was already something of a philo-Semite. “The difference between the brain of the average Christian and that of the average Jew—certainly in Europe—is about the difference between a tadpole’s and the Archbishop’s,” Twain wrote a few weeks after arriving in Vienna, to the ReverendJoseph Twichell, an old friend. “It’s a marvelous race—by long odds the most marvelous the world has ever produced, I suppose.”

    Mark Twain, sitting for a sculpture by Theresa Federowna Ries in Vienna. Twain had so many Jewish friends in Adele’s milieu that he was called “the JewMark Twain” in the anti-Semitic press of 1897. ( Illustration Credit 8.1 )
    The Vienna literati invited Twain to address theConcordia club in October. He found himself face-to-face with the crème de la crème of Jewish society. Nearly half the Concordia’s 348 members were Jews. The audience included nearly every prominent member of Adele Bauer’s Jewish milieu, fromGustav Mahler, Alma’s future husband, to the handsome and picaresqueFelix Salten, a journalist who was writing a sexually explicit fictional memoir of a teenage Vienna prostitute, but would someday be better known as the author of
Bambi,
the children’s classic.Viktor Leon was the librettist of
The Merry Widow.
The great Vienna newspaper editorMoritz Szeps found a seat at the august all-male club; and his daughter, the pioneer female journalistBerta Zuckerkandl, likely watched from a special balcony for women. Vienna journalistJulius Bauer, a close friend of Adele’s family who penned a libretto for Johann Strauss the Younger, wrote a picaresque song about Twain’s exploits that was sung, opera-style, byAlexander Girardi, the star of the wildly popular Strauss opera
Die
Fledermaus.
    Then Twain stood up before these Vienna wits and confided that he had always wanted to deliver a speech in German, but