19th century nude scene that took San Francisco by storm
On Aug. 24, 1863, a thunderbolt hit San Francisco. The sensation appearing at Maguire’s Opera House was all anyone could talk about. In 16 nights, 30,000 people came to see her — more than half the population of the city.
The thunderbolt was named Adah Isaacs Menken. But to San Franciscans, she would always be simply, “The Menken.”
Adah Menken was one of the most remarkable women of the 19th century. Born to Jewish parents in 1835 in a small town near New Orleans, she took to the stage at age 19 in the Crescent City. Supremely confident, possessed of dazzling good looks and a formidable intellect, she quickly became a local star, and the travails of her personal life — the breakup of her first marriage, followed by marrying a boxer — led to scurrilous accusations that she was an “adventuress” and made her nationally notorious.
Her association with New York bohemian literary circles gave her gravitas. An accomplished poet herself, she was a friend and early champion of Walt Whitman.
But it was a theatrical vehicle that made Menken an international phenomenon — a play called “Mazeppa.”
As a play, “Mazeppa” was nothing special. But it featured one scene that shocked and titillated audiences like nothing ever seen before on the American stage. At the climactic moment, the heroine, played by Menken, was stripped naked, lashed to the back of a rearing horse, and sent on a death-defying run up a ramp to vanish backstage.
In fact, Menken did not strip completely naked. But by 19th
century standards, she might as well have. When she premiered “Mazeppa” in New York two years earlier, she wore skin-tight, flesh-colored tights. And in San Francisco, she went further still.
According to Allen Lesser in “Enchanting Rebel: The Secret of Adah Isaacs Menken,” before her performance, people placed bets that she would not dare strip — and lost. Discarding even the tights, the Menken wore only a scanty white blouse and shorts that came up well above her knees.
Adding to the excitement was the fact that the scene really was dangerous: Menken herself had narrowly escaped serious injury when she first rehearsed it, and an actress playing the role later was killed when her horse fell on her.
So when the almostnaked Menken rocketed fearlessly up the ramp, the packed house went wild.
“San Francisco gasped — and called it art,” Lesser writes. “The slim, powdered legs were breathtaking, the figure divine, and the head
more beautiful than Venus herself. The firstnight audience of miners, traders, gamblers, society, Bohemians (on passes) and critics applauded until their hands were sore. Never had San Francisco seen anything like the Menken.”
Actually, San Francisco had seen something like the Menken. As recounted in an earlier Portals, in 1853 an even more notorious woman, Lola Montez, had put the town in a tizzy with her “spider dance,” a kind of early strip-tease driven by the flimsy conceit that a nest of spiders had gotten under Montez’s skirts.
Though there were similarities between the two women — both shrouded their lives in mythology, and for both sex was a big part of their appeal — there were also key differences. Montez really was an adventuress, a bicontinental courtesan, while Menken was
first and foremost a performer and an artist. Although she was a much-married free spirit and proto-feminist who flouted America’s puritanical codes, her moral transgressions were greatly exaggerated by a censorious press.
And unlike Montez, Menken had a real impact on American theater. Her approach to acting was unprecedented.
“Her style was punctuated by a refreshing informality, a dash and abandon of manner which completely won over her audience,” Lesser writes. “It was something which can best be described as distinctly American, a warmth and friendliness combined with a frank display of sex which other actors, trained in the Continental school of dignity and severe formality, strictly avoided.”
Menken helped emancipate American theater from its European forebears, and her success pointed the way to new forms of theatrical entertainment, such as variety shows and musical theater.
San Francisco was made for performers like Montez and Menken. The brawling yet chivalrous frontier town always appreciated free-spirited women. Make it a freespirited woman who was also a brilliant writer, and had a spectacular body that she was not afraid to flaunt, and San Francisco was done for.
The reaction of the youthful writer Charles Warren Stoddard was typical. “She possessed the lithe sinuosity of body that fascinates us in the panther when in motion,” Stoddard panted. “She was a vision of celestial harmony made manifest in the flesh — a living and breathing poem that set the heart to music and throbbed rhythmically to a passion that was as splendid as it was pure.”
The Menken made more than $9,000 playing Mazeppa before going on to rousing successes in other plays in San Francisco theaters, including a “Protean farce” called “Three Fast Women,” an
embryonic musical comedy in which she brought down the house by playing numerous characters.
When not raking in the loot and the curtain calls, she consorted with the city’s literati, including Stoddard, Bret Harte and Joaquin Miller. When Menken took her act to Virginia City, Nev., where the miners greeted her with a passion that was splendid but decidedly not pure, she became friendly with a young reporter named Samuel Clemens, who had just begun writing under the name Mark Twain. Clemens confessed his attraction to his family, adding, “She is a literary cuss herself.”
The “literary cuss” with the refreshing stage style, the sparkling personality and the unforgettable body left California on April 23, 1864, determined to conquer the rest of the theatrical world. She had an enormous triumph in London and took Paris by storm, breaking all records and becoming synonymous with everything exciting and fresh in theater. She numbered Alexandre Dumas fils and the poet Swinburne among her intimates. The world lay at the Menken’s feet.
But she was unable to enjoy her triumphs. Menken’s love life continued to be star-crossed, and she suffered from dark moods that she expressed in her feverish poetry. She squandered the vast fortune she had made. Her health, which despite her athleticism and energy had been poor for years, declined rapidly.
Adah Isaacs Menken died in Paris on Aug. 10, 1868, at the age of 33. The world mourned her passing. At her funeral in the Jewish section of Pere Lachaise cemetery, Dumas said, “Poor girl. Why was she not her own friend?”
What Mark Twain half-jokingly called the “Extraordinary Meteoric Shower” of “the Great Menken” burned out quickly. But the people of San Francisco, and New York and London and Paris, would never forget the 20th century woman who had flamed across their 19th century sky.
Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling book “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco,” awarded the Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. Email: metro@ sfchronicle.com