Overview

Set against the background of turn-of-the-century Paris and the collapse of the Belle Epoque in World War I, this book offers a complete portrait of the famous courtesan Mata Hari who launched strip tease dancing, and attempts to answer the riddles surrounding her life story. Given access to Mata Hari's sealed dossier, Howe argues convincingly that Mata Hari was, in fact, a victim of collusion between Germany and France and her prosecution and death sentence was a cover-up for corruption and high-level espionage.

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9780349105963

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Reviews

Still another life of Mata Hari, this time partially disclosing documents sealed for 100 years following the 1917 trial. Howe managed to get most of them opened, though two dossiers - including the chief prosecutor's - still remain sealed. It's clear at last - as was intuited by Sam Waagenaar's earlier biography of the spy - that she was framed. Born Margaretha Geertruida Zelle in 1882 in a small Dutch hamlet, M'greet grew up adoring fine clothes but was five feet nine inches, had big hips and shoulders and almost no breasts. Although she became the mother of the striptease, while masquerading as a Hindu temple dancer, and was the first naked dancer ever accepted and exhibited in the raw in European high society, she actually wore breastcups stuffed with cotton while performing her orgasmic sex dances to Siva and kept her chest covered throughout her entire career as a courtesan - even while in bed (she'd tell her lovers that her jealous husband had bitten off her nipples). At 17, M'greet married a dissolute army officer, Captain Rudolf MacLeod, well over twice her age, and followed him to Java. She deserted the monster and later, when she'd become Mata Haft, he divorced her. Now Marguerite, or Lady MacLeod, Mata Hari ever depended upon the kindness of older men to pay her very steep hotel and clothing bills. Even so, during WW I, she fell in a love with a 21-year-old Russian officer half her age and remained his mistress/mother for the rest of her life. He'd been blinded in one eye and appeared ready to go entirely blind, but he wanted to marry her and she planned to care for him forever. For that reason, needing money, she accepted a proposal from French intelligence that she use her arts to penetrate German intelligence. The Germans weren't fooled and gave her useless information, meanwhile hiring (or pretending to hire) her as their own agent. This led eventually to her bizarre arrest by the French, a trumped-up trial to cover their own embarrassment, and her execution by firing squad. Despite lively subject matter, this is a dull book stuffed with wads of padding passed off as important facts - much like the heroine's breastcups. (Kirkus Reviews)

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