Cléopâtre-Diane de Mérode (27 September 1875 – 17 October 1966) was a French dancer of the Belle Époque.Jaffe, Aaron, and Goldman, Jonathan (2010). Modernist Star Maps: Celebrity, Modernity, Culture. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. p. 137. . She has been referred to as the "first real celebrity icon" and the "first modern celebrity". She was also the first woman whose photographic image, due in particular to photographers Nadar and Léopold-Émile Reutlinger, was distributed worldwide.
Biography
Cléo de Mérode was born in Paris, France on 27 September 1875 at 7:00 P.M.Paris Archives. 1875, Naissances, 05 V4E 3017. #2179. http://archives.paris.fr She was the illegitimateEdward Ross Dickinson (2017). Dancing in the Blood: Modern Dance and European Culture on the Eve of the First World War. Cambridge University Press. p. 112. daughter of Viennese Baroness Vincentia Maria Cäcilia Catharina de Mérode (1850–1899). Vincentia was estranged from Cléo's father, who was the Austrian judge, lawyer, and pioneer of tourism Theodor Christomannos. Through Christomannos' marriage to Aloysia Wellzensohn, she had three half-siblings.Conyers, Claude (2003). Courtesans in Dance History.Taylor & Francis, Ltd. p. 229. Cléo met her father as a young adult at a train station in Merano, and upon seeing him jokingly exclaimed, "I really hope that you are wealthy, because I am used to luxury and the good life." Upon Christomannos' death in 1911, de Mérode left an inscription on his grave in German which reads, "The man who wanted everything for others and nothing for himself". She was raised Catholic but only as her early life, not as a serious religion. and affectionately called "Lulu" by her family. But after her mother's death, she lived as an Atheist. At the age of eight, she was sent to study dance with the Sisters of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, and she made her professional debut at the Paris Opéra at age eleven. According to a 1964 interview with Cecil Beaton, she became a dancer because she was fond of music.
De Mérode became renowned for her glamour even more than for her dancing skills, and her image began appearing on such things as postcards and playing cards. At 16, she debuted her signature hairstyle, a chignon, which became the talk of Parisian women and was quickly adopted as a popular style for all. In Sweden, the hairstyle nearly instigated a strike against female workers when they were ordered to cease wearing the chignon to work. The hairstyle persisted in popularity for decades; as late as 1941, American newspapers called it the "Cléo de Mérode hairdo". At the same time, the hairstyle, which covered her ears, caused rumours to circulate that de Mérode was missing one of or both of her ears. She responded to the rumours by going out in public the following day with her ears exposed. de Mérode later said of the trendsetting hairstyle, "It wasn't thought out at all; it just happened. As a child I wore a square fringe. This would fall in my eyes when I was a coryphée at the Opéra ballet, and I kept pushing it back from the center; gradually the hair grew and, in order to keep it from falling forward, I knotted it in a bun. When big hats came in it was difficult to fix them on without padding, but I invented a little hidden crown." In 1895, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec did her portrait, as would Charles Puyo, Alfredo Müller, Edgar Degas, Manuel Benedito, Georges Clairin, Friedrich August von Kaulbach (who painted her twice), József Rippl-Rónai, François Flameng, Carlos Vázquez Úbeda, Einar Nerman, Paul-Eugène Mesplès, Henri Gervex, and Giovanni Boldini. She was sculpted by the likes of Alexandre Falguière (who sculpted her twice), Mariano Benlliure, Alphonse Mucha, Ernst Seger, and Eugène-Denis Arrondelle. A sculpture of her done by an anonymous artist can be found at the Galerie Tourbillon, and a wax mask of her by Georges Despret is preserved at the Musée Fin-de-Siècle Museum in Brussels. Georges Goursat also drew several caricatures of de Mérode during the 1900s. Her picture was taken by some of the most illustrious photographers of the day, including Nadar and his son and successor Paul Nadar, Léopold-Émile Reutlinger and his son Jean Reutlinger, Charles Ogerau, Henri Manuel, and Otto Sarony.
In the autumn of 1895, a rumour began that de Mérode was King Leopold II's latest mistress, and the two were dubbed "Cléopold" by the media. Because the King had had two children with a woman reputed to be a prostitute, de Mérode's reputation suffered, and she was labeled a "courtesan" or "demimondaine", both of which she is still referred to as today. In an attempt to settle the rumours, de Mérode's mother wrote a letter to the editor of Le Figaro, which was published and then subsequently mocked due to poor spelling. Two years later her mother said in an interview, "It is false, absolutely false. His majesty has no idea of doing such a ridiculous thing. When Lulu was dancing at the Grand Opera - where, you know, she must report every night, because she is not a premiere at all, and has no favors granted her which other members of the corps do not also receive - it happened that one night His Majesty the King of the Belgians and his suite were at the opera. The royal party sat very near the stage in one of the avant scenes. His Majesty the King sent to my daughter a flattering message, telling how much pleasure she had given him, and asked if he might beg the favor of meeting her. My daughter met the King, but never in her life except in my presence." In the same interview, de Mérode added, "It is horrible that they should so pursue me with such monstrous lies! The King of the Belgians is no more to me than any other great man who has admired me on the stage, whom I have seen for a few moments off the stage very rarely, and always in the presence of many other persons. His Majesty sent me gifts. I have no hesitation in saying that I accepted them, but that is permissible for an artist in France. I have never accepted any attentions from the King of Belgium, and he has never received a favor from me which I could not accord to any gentleman under the circumstances. I have never been alone with him." However, the French agent Xavier Paoli recorded in his 1911 book Their Majesties as I Knew Them that the King claimed that he had never met nor seen de Mérode perform and was unsure of how the rumours began. When he finally met de Mérode after the rumours were already rife, he apologised to her: "Allow me to express my regrets," he told her, "if the good fortune people attribute to me has offended you at all. Alas, we no longer live in an age when a king's favor was not looked upon as compromising! Besides, I am only a little king." de Mérode wrote in her autobiography of the rumor, "I was completely bewildered by the dimensions that this story took on. The tale of my liaison with Léopold sped along, across France, throughout Europe, and around the world. Caricatures, gossip columns, songs, skits, showed the king and me, snuggling, sharing a restaurant table, cracking open champagne at Maxim's, on a cruise, in a Pullman, and so on....I did not know what to make of such inordinate publicity; it stunned me." According to Georg Stefan Troller, who interviewed her, Leopold II had promised her the Belgian Congo if she married him. Michael Garval, de Mérode's biographer, claims that the rumours began after the King accosted de Mérode in the Foyer de la Danse at the Paris Opéra, and that the King may have staged the affair to conceal his actual relations with Émilienne d'Alençon. Garval has also said that although de Mérode posed as a courtesan to increase her fame, she never worked as one.
In the spring of 1896, a second scandal erupted due to the exhibition of the sculpture La Danseuse by Alexandre Falguière at the Salon des Artistes Française. The sculpture was a life-size nude in white marble that was carved from a plaster cast of de Mérode's body. Despite the grain of skin visible on the plaster, proving a live cast, de Mérode accused Falguière of having fabricated a scandalous work by molding the body of the statue on another female model, whereas she posed only for the head. The scandal followed her throughout her career; almost a decade later, in 1904, The Sketch wrote, "Cléo de Mérode is, of course, well known because of her beauty and the Falguière statue, and not on account of her quality as dancer, which is not remarkable." Although de Mérode vehemently denied posing for the sculpture, she later incorporated the work into a stage production in which she starred. The sculpture can be seen at the Musée d'Orsay.
In the summer of 1896, de Mérode appeared in a simulated nude scene in the title role of Phryné, a three act ballet-pantomime staged at the Casino Municipal in the seaside resort of Royan. She later recalled, "I appeared before the jury enveloped in a dark grey-blue drapery. I danced in this costume and my gestures made the long folds of fabric undulate in a pretty manner. Underneath I wore a pale rose maillot, covered with a light rose gauze tunic, which hugged my form. When the moment came to seduce the judges, a follower, with one gesture, raised the immense cape and spread it behind me to its full extent. Against this rather dark ground, I was a pink silhouette, and from a distance, with a certain suspension of disbelief on the part of the audience, the flesh-coloured feminine form gave the illusion of a nude body." That year she was also elected “Beauty Queen” by 3,000 out of 7,000 votes by readers of L'Illustration. She garnered almost 1,000 votes more than other celebrated names, including Sarah Bernhardt and Gabrielle Réjane.