Mata Hari: the True Story by Russell Warren Howe

Here is a youtube video called the Best of Chopin.  The first piece on it, Ballade no. 1 in G minor, was the very first work by Chopin that I learned.  What a wonderful introduction.

Mata Hari, The True Story by Russell Warren Howe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is another book that started out strong, but lost its momentum somewhere in the middle.

Howe gives us chapter after chapter of Mata Hari, whose real name was Margaretha Geertruida Zelle, rose from poverty, created a legend for herself, introduced the world to the strip tease act and ultimately was executed as a German spy during WWI.

Zelle was born and grew up in Holland with a father who ruined her mother by leaving her for a mistress and ruined his family financially by his extravagant tastes for luxury.

Margareth Geertruida turned out to be not so unlike her father and one has to respect her grit. In a certain way she reminds me of the character Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind. Despite adverse circumstances she fought her way through poverty to become a notorious stripper, but ultimately was made a WWI scapegoat.

When she was eighteen she married a British Lord, Rudolph John MacCleod, and moved to Indonesia with him. There they had two children, one whom mysteriously died while still a boy. It was suspected that their servant, in revenge for MacCleod sending away her lover (so he could have her for himself) poisoned the boy.

While in Indonesia, Zelle, now MacCleod, learned the art of exotic dancing as well as the language of the people. She used this back drop after she left MacCleod for his drunken rages and blatant infidelity, to create a saucy temptress that procured for her numerous lovers.

She accomplished this by leaving with her daughter to Paris because, according to her, "Where else could a divorced woman hope to make a living?" Later MacCleod retrieves their daughter and Maragetha never sees her again.

Mata Hari, as I shall now call her, became known for her so-called Indian (she now claimed to be the daughter of an Indian Princess and a European man) dance routines, which involved taking off her scarves until she was completely naked. Well, not completely. She never uncovered her breasts because they were so flat. I think that's kind of funny, but maybe that's just me.

Her life is one of traveling from man to man and living far beyond her or any of her lovers' means. Finally, at forty, she decided she needed a cool million to finally retire and settle down. Plus she had a twenty year old Russian lover, a soldier in the Russian army, who she wanted to spend the rest of her life with.

She offered her services as a spy to the French.

To read Howe's telling, she was a complete incompetent and accomplished nothing. The Germans didn't take her seriously and the French didn't know quite how to use her, so they hired her as a "free lance" spy.

Nevertheless, she was eventually arrested and convicted of spying for the Germans.

Half of the book is not very interesting. It mainly consists of Howe describing every hotel and restaurant Mata Hari checked into, who she met, who she spoke to, who she slept with. It reads as fascinating as a grocery list.

However, Howe is convinced that as bumbling as Mata Hari was as a spy, she was not guilty of working for the Germans. She was rather a convenient scapegoat for the French who, perhaps to commander incompetence, lost thousands of French soldiers.

Perhaps this is true, but I have another biography I hope to read and see if I can glean another viewpoint before I make my own conclusion.

In addition to Mata Hari's life, this is a good history of life before and during WWI in Europe.

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