450. A Magnificent and Abominable Woman: Liar, Flirt, Animal, and Muse of Genius

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A Magnificent and Abominable Woman:
Liar, Flirt, Animal, and Muse of Genius

Yes, she has been called all those things, and more.

• The passionate muse of a string of geniuses.  (Undeniable.)
• Liar.  (True enough.)
• Feminist before her time.  (It has been argued.)

• Flirt. (Every chance she got.)

• Anti-Semite.  (Yes, alas, even though she had two Jewish husbands.)
• Romantic.  (Convincing.)
• Narcissist.  (Very self-involved, even while inspiring her geniuses.)
• "A big animal," according to her surviving daughter Anna. "And sometimes she was magnificent, and sometimes she was abominable.”

The she/her of this discussion is Alma Mahler, the wife or lover of (among others) Gustav Mahler, Oskar Kokoschka, Walter Gropius, and Franz Werfel.  Not all at once, of course, though her affairs did at times overlap. Which makes her the Muse of Modernism, having inspired undeniable masters of music, art, architecture, and literature.  Which, for one woman in one lifetime, isn’t bad. In fact, it’s flat-out astonishing. How did Alma Mahler do it?

Wait a minute, what’s the New York connection?  This post is supposed to be about New York. The connection: after a long life elsewhere, surprisingly she ends up here.  As many do. Think of Gloria Swanson, Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, and Montgomery Clift, after years in Hollywood. See my book Fascinating New Yorkers; they’re all in there. (The link is to my post BROWDERBOOKS; scroll down to Nonfiction.)

She was born Alma Schindler in fin-de-siècle Vienna in 1879. Her father was a struggling, debt-burdened landscape painter trying to make ends meet and support his family.  Watching him at work, young Alma came early to revere both art and the artist. And when he gained recognition and attracted paying students, Alma promptly lost her heart and her virginity to one of them, Carl Moll, and later, after her father’s death, married him.  Not a genius, this first one, but she was off to a good start. Moll and the painter Gustav Klimt were among the founders of the Viennese Secession, a movement of artists and architects, and Alma promptly fell in love with Klimt. Significantly, the main subject of Klimt’s art was the female body, and plenty of eroticism went into it.  When Klimt made physical advances and suggested “complete physical union,” young Alma held up a volume of Goethe’s Faust and quoted from it, “Do no favors without a ring on your finger.”  Alma at this point was a charming mix of innocence and savvy. But the innocence wouldn’t last long.

Alma in 1899.

Fin-de-siècle Vienna was feverish with art and music and genius and passion and sex.  Though no one knew it at the time, this was a glorious last stand of the soon-to-be-dismantled Austro-Hungarian empire and the Hapsburgs who had ruled it for centuries. As for feverish, Anna fitted right in.  When Moll got Klimt to stop trying to seduce Anna and Klimt departed, Anna was so devastated that she even stopped flirting … for a while. Feeling a deep urge to “fall at someone’s feet,” she soon flirted with an architect and then an opera tenor, and so it went.  There were plenty of feet to fall at, and if at first she realized that Klimt’s “physical union” was similar to what dogs do, and therefore disgusting, she at the same time was fascinated by the bulge in the trousers of men who were drawn to her. (How do we know all this?  Because of her candid tell-all diaries, often graphic, not always trustworthy, but revealing even so.)  

What was the secret of her charm?  Her daughter said that when Alma entered a room, you immediately felt an electric charge.  She could enchant people in a matter of seconds. Her intense belief in art and genius endeared her to men to the point that they didn’t think they could survive artistically without her.

Then, at a dinner party in 1901, Alma met the composer Gustav Mahler, ditched her other suitors, and within two months she and Mahler  were engaged. Mahler was older than her, 41 to her 22, and Jewish, but he answered her need for love, music, and genius; she had met her man at last.  But at a cost: herself a gifted and aspiring pianist, he demanded that she give up any artistic pretensions of her own to be his adoring, faithful, and compliant wife, which, not without keen regret, she did.  She saw herself as an artist who out of deep love was sacrificing herself to an artist, a genius for whom she had “the holiest feelings.” In 1902 they married.

Gustav Mahler, 1909.

(A personal note: It was through my deceased partner Bob that I discovered the late German Romantics and developed a taste for their haunting, brooding music.  I especially love Mahler’s Das Lied von Der Erde [The Song of the Earth], which, given a choice, I would like to hear on my deathbed.  Likewise Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs.  And for a joyous tribute to life, I especially esteem Strauss’s opera Ariadne auf Naxos, juxtaposing as it does the poignant lament of Ariadne, abandoned by Theseus on the island of Naxos, with the Commedia dell’arte flirt Zerbinetta, a deft charmer who teases a trio of admirers, only to run off with another.  As for the teary Ariadne, all changes when Bacchus arrives, singing triumphantly and claiming her rapturously for himself. Those late German Romantics, whether death-haunted or celebrating life, knew a lot.)

Here now are the highlights of the busy and often turbulent career of Alma Mahler and her geniuses.

• Passionately in love with Alma but fearing insanity, Mahler consulted Freud, thus making the cast of fin-de-siècle Vienna complete.  On a walk together Freud wondered why Mahler hadn’t married a woman named Marie, since that was his mother’s name. Mahler replied that Marie was Alma’s middle name, thus gratifying the Oedipus-obsessed Freud.
• When Mahler, who wrote Alma love poems and smothered her slippers with kisses, learned that she was having an affair with the young architect Walter Gropius, later the founder of the Bauhaus, Mahler sprawled on the floor, weeping, then invited Gropius to his summer home in the mountains and left him and Alma alone, so the lovers could decide what to do.  (Only after Mahler’s death in 1911 did Alma and Gropius finally, in 1915, marry, the four-year interval being filled with other lovers.)
• During her three-year affair with Oskar Kokoschka, during which she had an abortion, the jealous artist painted the bloody, murdered children of his supposed rivals; did a sketch of Alma spnning with his intestine; and once whispered into her ear so weird a text that she screamed, wept, and swallowed a toxic dose of bromide.  Fortunately, Kokoschka summoned a doctor.
  

  

  Oskar Kokoschka, 1919.

Alma Mahler, by Oskar Kokoschka, 1912.

• Wanting to rid herself of Kokoschka, when the First World War came, she taunted him into joining the cavalry, then broke off the relationship while he was at the front, where he was badly wounded and erroneously reported in the Viennese papers as dead.

• Alma married Gropius while he was on leave from the Austrian army in 1915.  But while Gropius, rescued after being buried under a building’s rubble after a grenade killed every other soldier present, was in a field hospital, Alma attended a performance of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, where she met the writer Franz Werfel.  She described him as a “stocky, bow-legged, somewhat fat Jew with sensuous, bulging lips and slit, watery eyes! But he wins you over.” They exchanged glances, left at the intermission, and you can fill in the rest.
• In 1916, after a night of rough sex with Werfel, Alma, who was pregnant, gave birth to a boy two months prematurely.  Was the father Gropius or Werfel? She didn’t know. The child, who resembled Werfel, soon died. This was too much for Gropius; they divorced in 1920.
  
  
  

  

  Alma and Gropius with their daughter Manon, 1918.

• Meanwhile, obsessed with Alma, Kokoschka in 1918 commissioned a life-size doll of Alma that he could touch and make love to.  The result was a weird, furry creation bearing little resemblance to Alma, but he made drawings and paintings of it, as well as photographs.  Now cured of his infatuation, he threw a raucous farewell party for it where the doll was exhibited, and he and his friends got drunk. Then he beheaded it in his garden and broke a bottle of red wine over it.

What did Alma of the prewar years look like?  A circa 1908 photo in my source (see below) shows a well-bosomed woman of about thirty in a fancy dress falling to the floor, her dark hair topped by a broad-brimmed, high-crowned black hat three times the size of her head.  Under that monstrosity her expression is serious, her gaze at the camera direct. But no camera can convey the well-attested magic of her presence, her ability to charm and enchant.

The postwar years brought drastic changes.  Vienna was now the capital, not of a vast empire, but of a small republic. The waltz gave way to the Charleston, and long dresses were supplanted by Coco Chanel’s petite robe noire, a knee-length or slightly longer cocktail dress still wearable today.  The skull-hugging cloche hat supplanted the towering prewar monstrosities, and bosoms were out, a boyish look most definitely in.

Did Alma adjust?  I have no photos of her from the 1920s, but she did get around to marrying Franz Werfel in 1929, and this marriage stuck.  Not that Alma, now in her forties, was faithful. Artists and high society flocked to her salon, providing more feet for her to fall at.  And she gave lavish parties, flirted, and had a fervent affair with a well-connected Catholic priest. What her husband was doing all this time I don’t profess to know.  Perhaps writing poetry. Perhaps, once Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, lamenting the fact that rampaging Nazis were burning his works, condemned because the author was Jewish.

Franz Werfel, circa 1930.

Yes, Hitler came to power, and the 1930s were a somber decade indeed.When he seized Austria in 1938, Alma and Werfel decamped for France, and they left there only in 1940, after France collapsed and much of it was occupied -- no place for a Jewish author or his wife.  They escaped with Heinrich Mann, his wife, and a nephew, traipsIng across the Pyrenees to Spain, with Alma, now 61, encouraging her younger husband, while lugging a suitcase stuffed with jewels and the original score of Bruckner’s Third Symphony.  From Spain they made it to the U.S. and ended up in, of all places, Hollywood.

(Another personal aside:  Werfel has told how, while crossing the Pyrenees even as German troops closed the border, they took refuge in Lourdes.  There he vowed that, if their escape to America was successful, he would write a book about Bernadette Soubirous, whose visions of the Virgin in 1858 led to her later sainthood and transformed Lourdes into a site of miracle healings.  They did get to America, and the result was Werfel’s Das Lied von Bernadette (1941), which was translated as The Song of Bernadette.  It became a bestseller, and when my mother, meaning to return it to the library, put it on a table by the door, I grabbed it and, seeing that it wasn’t due yet, read it.  And when, in 1943, Hollywood made a movie of it starring Jennifer Jones, I saw that, too. So I encountered Werfel’s name early, but only years later would I hear of Alma Mahler/Werfel.)

In Hollywood Alma entertained the émigré artistic elite, feuding and flirting and drinking heavily, and enraging Werfel with her anti-Semitic comments, calling the Allies “weaklings and degenerate,” and Hitler and the Germans “supermen.”  And when reports of concentration camp horrors reached her, she declared them fabrications by refugees.  

Los Angeles was not the Vienna of her youth, and she was not now the Alma of those fin-de-siècle days, being described by one ungentlemanly observer as “a bag of potatoes veiled in flowing robes,” though still “imposing, regal, radiating authority.”  The much-abused Werfel escaped her by dying there in 1945, whereupon she went back to the name Alma Mahler. In 1951 she moved to New York -- a curious choice for a rabid anti-Semite. What she did here and where she lived, I don't know. Given her age, her few years here cannot have been brilliant. And here she died in 1964, age 85. I was in the city then, teaching French at St. John’s University in Queens; I doubt if I even noticed. 

What can one finally say of such a woman and such a career? Her life makes the most turbulent doings of grand opera look tame. She and her lovers are a dazzling spectacle of Romanticism run wild. She fascinates me, but I wouldn't want her in my life, though maybe, if I had enemies, in theirs. Muse of Genius, r.i.p. But not here; she was shipped back to Vienna in 1965, and is buried near her first husband, Gustav Mahler.

Source note: Many of the details in this post are from "It Had to Be Her," Cathleen Schine's review of Passionate Spirit: The Life of Alma Mahler," by Cate Haste, in The New York Review of Books, January 16, 2020.

Coming soon:  Deutsche Bank: it helped build Auschwitz and make Trump president.

©   2020  Clifford Browder