Word: otero
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...BELLE OTERO by Arthur H. Lewis. 257 pages. Trident...
Name Sleeper. The most notorious demimondaine of the era was a statuesque Spanish gypsy who is reputed to have amassed $15 million during an active career that spanned five decades. Her name was Augustina Otero, and her origins were humble to the point of bleakness. She was born in 1868, the second of seven bastards of a village prostitute. At the age of eleven, she was raped and rendered infertile for life. At twelve, she left home and wandered through Spain and Southern France, sharing bed for board before becoming a cabaret dancer. It was not long before she discovered...
Over the next quarter century, La Belle Otero's distinguished clientele came to include the crowned heads of England, Spain. Belgium, Russia, Germany, Persia, Monaco and Montenegro, as well as assorted dukes and princes, not to mention such uncommon commoners as Italy's D'Annunzio, an American Vanderbilt, and French Premier Aristide Briand. But she wasn't merely a name sleeper; she democratically slept with all who could afford her huge fees. "Don't forget," she once told her friend Colette, "that there is always a moment in a man's life, even...
Curious Twins. In her dealings with men, Otero lost her professional cool but twice. Once she sought out Eugene Sandow, "the Strongest Man in the World." But he rebuffed her advances, preferring the male company of his Danish pianist roommate instead. The other object of her attentions was one half of an act named the Marco Twins -James, 6 ft. 3 in. and Dietrich, 3 ft. 6 in. It was the lower half of the team that attracted her ("Frankly, I was curious"), and one night she succeeded in satisfying her inquisitiveness. But later she discovered that the twins were...
...smelled something burning. Opening the door to a small room with yellowing photographs tacked to the walls, she saw an unmade bed and an overdone rabbit stew smoldering on a gas cooking ring. Slumped in a chair and dead of a heart attack lay 97-year-old La Belle Otero, her jet hair now grey, her teeth false, her wrinkled skin still highly rouged. A neighbor who had come in each afternoon to tidy up gave Caroline Otero's epitaph: "She was constantly talking about her past, and I was not listening any more. It was always the same...