by Michael Foster and Barbara Foster, $24.95; Lyons Press; 347 pages
Stripped naked and bound to a fiery untamed steed, she is borne like the wind up the perilous slopes of a mountain until she and her charge reach the top, triumphant. This was the role that brought Adah Isaacs Menken—an American actress of immense ego, courage and flamboyance—to fame and fortune in the mid-1800s. The Menken, as she came to be known, thrilled and shocked audiences over and over on the stages of America and Europe in the role of Mazeppa. A melodrama based on the life of a Cossack chief in 17th-century Ukraine, the play made her the highest-paid actor in the world at that time.
With much bravado, equal in size to that of their subject, the authors of A Dangerous Woman, Michael and Barbara Foster, claim Marilyn Monroe might never have become a legend were it not for "America's original tragic star"—Adah Isaacs Menken. This claim is based in part on daringly posed photos that sold like hotcakes. The first of their kind, and forerunner to the popular pinup of more recent times, these poses flamed the public's insatiable appetite for details of Menken's private life, the more salacious the better.
What made Menken dangerous, as the title of the bio claims? She defied the moral code of her day, including gender roles. She gambled (dressed in male finery), and she boxed. She advocated for the Jewish people, an unpopular cause of her day. She had many lovers and five husbands, and (although never actually naked on stage) she wore a sheer body stocking that was scandalous for her time.
She took chances on stage that others would not have, riding a horse in the mountain-climbing scene in Mazeppa, whereas past productions used a dummy. Indeed, she and her trained steeds suffered many injuries.
Menken's ethnic/religious background is somewhat uncertain, in part due to her own changing accounts of her life and parentage. Some evidence suggests she was Jewish, some hints that she was born of a Creole mother and other accounts suggest an Irish heritage.
After accumulating great wealth, in 1868 Menken died penniless in Paris, most likely from tuberculosis, at the age of 33.
In the coda to the bio, the authors describe Menken as the "…first in a line that ends in mortal sacrifice." This line includes, in the Fosters' estimation, the likes of Harlow, Monroe, and even Princess Diana.
They point out that Menken had thought her poetry would be her ticket to fame. This is why she relished hanging out with literary figures such as George Sand, Joaquin Miller, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Walt Whitman, Alexandre Dumas, Charles Dickens and Sam Clemens. Early in his career as a reporter, Clemens described Menken in her role of Mazeppa as "a whole constellation … flaming out of the heavens like a vast spray of gas-jets."
While her poetry was published (including a posthumous collection entitled Infelicia), Menken achieved fame not through the written word but in her life on stage and in her love affairs.
Menken has been profiled in literature, in movies, and on TV (although with various fictional monikers such as "Irene Adler" in A Scandal in Bohemia in the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes series). Sophia Loren played a version of her in the 1960 campy Heller in Pink Tights. (See the trailer on YouTube.) Monroe was offered a movie role playing Menken, but turned it down.
The authors, who speculate freely about their subject to fill in the many blanks in recorded details of her life, are nonetheless successful in providing rich historical detail of the times in which Menken lived. They maintain a website dedicated to Menken ( www.thegreatbare.com ). The bio is complete with footnotes, bibliography and index.
It's a treasure for those who relish learning of long-forgotten, yet colorful, figures from U.S. history.
