Trying to Unveil Mysteries of Mata Hari
LEEUWARDEN, the Netherlands — In December 1915, Margaretha Zelle, the woman known to all the world as the exotic dancer Mata Hari, was traveling by ship from one of her lovers in Paris to another in The Hague. The sex symbol was known for provocative routines in a nude body stocking with a bejeweled bra and golden headdress. Sometimes, she would tell people she was a Javanese princess or the daughter of an Indian temple dancer, but only rarely would she reveal that she was Dutch.
It was World War I and her route took her through British waters, where the authorities stopped the boat to question those on board. No evidence of anything had been found on Zelle, but the officials noted she was a “bold sort of woman who is not above suspicion.”
A copy of the report was sent to the French secret service. A military intelligence officer, George Ladoux, saw the report and recruited her to work for French intelligence, sure that she was a double agent for the Germans.
In early 1917, Ladoux arrested and interrogated Zelle, and garnered what he took as a confession: She admitted to taking money from the Germans, though she denied having ever provided them with useful espionage. On October 14, Mata Hari was executed by firing squad. Newspaper reports described her as refusing to wear a blindfold and blowing kisses to the riflemen.
Now, 100 years later, the French archives of her interrogation and trial have been opened to the public, and her life is being reassessed and commemorated in the Nether- lands, the country that she tried to leave behind at age 19. The Museum of Friesland in Leeuwarden is staging an exhibition about her life, the Dutch National Ballet in Amsterdam is reprising a contemporary ballet, “Mata Hari,” and a theater piece on her life is on tour.
Zelle often presented herself as someone else from somewhere else, and her compatriots have had an uneasy relationship with her persona.
“Almost everyone here knew that she got famous through exotic dancing, and people here didn’t like that,” said Klaas Zandberg, the coordinator of the Leeuwarden Historical Center, an archive in the city where Zelle was born in 1876 and lived until she was 18. He said many locals “still think that she’s some kind of whore who still gets too much attention.”
Although her childhood was spent in a prosperous household, her father, a hat merchant and speculator, lost all his money when she was 14. Her parents divorced, her mother died, and her father left her with relatives. At 18, she married a 39-yearold captain in the Dutch colonial army.
Zelle’s husband, Rudolph MacLeod, took her with him to the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), where she learned some Javanese dance and had two children. Her son died at age 3, possibly from mercury poisoning by a nanny. The couple divorced; when her husband refused to pay alimony, she left her daughter with him and found ways to support herself.
In 1903, she moved to Paris, where Mata Hari’s sensational premiere took place before wealthy socialites at the Musée Guime. “She was at least a millionaire at one point,” said Hans Groeneweg, the curator of the museum exhibition.
Today, Mr. Groeneweg said, there is a “bigger, broader picture” of the woman known as Mata Hari — femme fatale, fallen woman, brazen double agent. But the documents from the French archives have not filled in all of the gaps, he said.
“In some way, perhaps we have to be glad not knowing the complete story,” Mr. Groeneweg added. “Something of the myth has to be preserved.”