Word: lola
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...splendour of her breasts," wrote an early biographer, "made madmen everywhere." He might also have mentioned her energy, ambition, courage, cunning, charm, wit and wardrobe. It took all those things, and plenty of gall besides, to turn Eliza Gilbert into Lola Montez, famous dancer, mistress of Franz Liszt and Alexandre Dumas père, intimate of kings and prime ministers, de facto ruler of Bavaria during Ludwig I's declining years, and belle of the California gold rush...
...Lola? Rumor had it (probably from Lola's own lips) that she was the daughter of Lord Byron ... or maybe of a matador. In fact, as this perfectly sober biography with a plot like a chambermaid's dream shows, Lola was born in Limerick, Ireland, in 1818, the daughter of an 18-year-old lieutenant and a 13-year-old chorine. When she was seven, Eliza's father died of cholera in India. Shipped home to Scotland, the child appalled her stepfather's Presbyterian parents by running naked through the streets. Hustled off to school...
...Lola was what the Victorians called "a superb piece." She had skin like a Dresden shepherdess, hair like a black velvet shawl, eyes that flashed and flickered like sapphires in firelight. When a man got her Irish up, she cut him across the face with a riding whip. She once fired a pistol at a disappointing lover. What Lola wanted, Lola...
...Petersburg, Lola got a "private audience" with the Czar, who gave her 1,000 rubles for services rendered. In Dresden, she got Liszt, the great lover of the age, and so wore him out that one night he locked her in a hotel room and fled, leaving a substantial sum to pay for the furniture he knew she would break. In Paris, she got culture and a taste for liberal politics in the company of Balzac, Lamartine, George Sand, Victor Hugo, and especially Dumas père. She found the great love of her life, however, with a talented radical...
Chicagoan Carl Haas, manager of a Lola team. "It's a social event, just like Le Mans. It's a bit of a mecca. It's got its own sort of flavor." In fact it sometimes seems that the race is a secondary event, little more than a 100-decibel background for the real thing: drinking, talking and gawking, or in the long stretches of the night, cooking steaks over flickering grills and cracking yet another sixpack...