Pauline Bonaparte, sister of French leader Napoleon and a princess by virtue of her marriage to Roman prince Camillo Borghese, enjoyed bathing in milk in order to “preserve her white skin.”
Real Stories from History — Without the Fairy-Tale Endings
by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie
So, when she dropped in on a lower-status relative and demanded a milk bath with a shower to follow, the poor man was ill-equipped.
“[There is] nothing so easy,” she said. “Just make a hole in the ceiling above my bath, and have your servants pour the milk through when I am ready.”
Princess, diva, pain in the ass — all terms that resonate throughout “Princesses Behaving Badly,” which tells of royal terrors who make modern gossip queens seem as demure as Snow White.
Here are a few outrageous women who would have dominated the Page Six of their time.
Pauline Bonaparte (1780-1825)
Bonaparte was “an undereducated, oversexed vixen” who was as dead set on conquering Europe’s social scenes as her brother was the rest of the continent.
When her first husband, Gen. Victor Emmanuel Leclerc, went to war, she “launched her own offensive on the menfolk of Europe.
“One story claims that she had simultaneous affairs with three generals, playing them off one another,” writes author McRobbie. “When they figured it out, they dropped her.”
While posing for a master sculptor named Antonio Canova, she “wanted to be depicted as Venus Victorious, the triumphant goddess of love,” which would involve her posing topless.
When the artist balked, concerned that “a nearly naked goddess of love might be a bit too sexy for polite society,” she scoffed, “Nobody would believe my chastity.”
How right she was.
Bonaparte was long known for scandalous behavior, including having male servants “carry her naked to her bath,” “wearing a sheer dress that showed off her nipples,” and having “a golden cup fashioned in the shape of her breast.”
Leclerc died in 1802 and she married Borghese soon after, ignoring warnings that his intellect matched her brother’s height. But as she discovered that he was “as dumb as mittens on a cat,” she quickly pursued “her favorite pastime: sex with lots of different men.”
Bonaparte spent so much time having sex that she was rumored to be “too weak to walk,” resulting in her “being carried everywhere and . . . so often confined to her bed.”
So promiscuous was the princess that her brother was rumored to be one of her lovers.
“Empress Josephine claimed that she’d caught the two siblings in the act,” McRobbie writes, “and another courtier asserted that Pauline admitted the incestuous transgression to him.”
Sadly, her capacity for making love failed to translate to genuine love or compassion for other human beings. Making relatives destroy their homes for her bath was only one of her sadistic domestic practices.
It was worse when she required a nap, as she used her servants as “furniture,” leaning her body weight against one sitting guard while the stomach of another, who was lying on the floor, became her footrest.
“One duchess recalled entering her boudoir to find a lady-in-waiting stretched flat on the floor, Pauline’s feet resting on her throat,” writes McRobbie. “The poor woman cheerfully declared, ‘I am well used to it.’ ”
The Princesse de Caraman-Chimay (1873-1916)
Clara Ward was the daughter of an American shipping and lumber tycoon who died when she was 18 months old, leaving the family a $6 million fortune, or around $130 million today. As she grew up, between her wealth and her voluptuous figure, she was the perfect glamour girl for Victorian times.
Ward married a Belgian prince named Joseph de Caraman-Chimay, and while she soon became a media darling, her popularity worked against her, as the obvious public affection of King Leopold II “made her a social pariah,” since he ignored other women in her presence, including his queen.
Escaping to party in Paris, she and her husband went to a fashionable nightclub one evening where she met a Hungarian gypsy fiddler named Rigo Janczy, a small man with a handlebar mustache whom the press later described as “pock-pitted” and “a monkey-faced brute.”
Nevertheless, “the first night she saw Rigo, she turned from her husband to smile at him and never looked back,” and the new couple ran away together 10 days later, eventually having each other’s faces tattooed on their biceps.
They partied across Europe and the U.S., with newspapers covering their every move. When her husband was granted a divorce, Ward’s own lawyer described her as a “fiery untamed steed” with a “wild, savage, eccentric nature.”
Her behavior from then on even managed to scandalize Paris.
Ward, who would smoke in public and “was featured frequently in articles in the foreign press lamenting the city’s moral decline,” began “earning money posing in skin-tight, flesh-colored costumes on the stages of the Moulin Rouge and Folies Bergere.”
Referring to her performance art as “poses plastiques,” she would stand as Rigo played, “dancing around her like an organ-grinder’s monkey.” Postcards of her in these poses were banned in Germany because “Kaiser Wilhelm II found her beauty so disturbing.”
Her partying eventually came to a halt, as over seven years time she spent the equivalent of $20 million today, partially by lavishing Rigo with gifts including “a menagerie of baby elephants, lions and tigers . . . as well as a new violin and a casket full of jewels.”
Ward and Rigo later fell out, and she had several more husbands before passing at age 43. One newspaper wrote of her that the “devil stood sponsor when Clara Ward was born,” and “she had always been more or less proud of her godfather.”
Caroline of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel (1768-1821)
Being a princess was not always glamorous. Sometimes it was downright disgusting.
Princess Caroline, the bride of the Prince of Wales, “didn’t wash, or at least not enough; her undergarments, too, went overly long between launderings,” which might have accounted for the prince, George, “recoiling” from her during their first meeting.
The daughter of a German duke, Caroline was “untidy, graceless, and chubby. She was also loud, vulgar and devoid of tact or discretion.”
The horribly ill-matched couple managed to have a child together before separating after one year. But the convention and politics of the time prohibited divorce, meaning that he was freed — expected, even — to have affairs, while she was stuck. As a technically married woman, then, her behavior sent gossipy European tongues wagging.
“She was a big fan of the plunging neckline — as in, nipples out — and appeared to apply her makeup with a trowel.” She would often disappear with men at parties and bragged that “she took a ‘bedfellow‘ whenever she wanted and ‘the prince paid for it all.’ ”
Caroline managed to keep her social standing until she precipitated an unnecessary falling out with a powerful couple. When the aggrieved, Lady Douglas, finally tired of the treatment and threatened to expose secrets about the princess, “Caroline reacted in a spectacularly ill-conceived fashion. She sent her former friend obscene and harassing . . . letters featuring poorly drawn pictures of Lady D performing a sex act.”(When the couple went to the prince with their complaints, Lady Douglas also accused the princess of “trying to touch and kiss her inappropriately.”)
She became a pariah to high society, not just for her scandalous behavior, but worse, because “she’d become a bore.” Even her servants tired of hearing of her hatred for the royal family, and “the various creative ways she’d like to see them die. (Sometimes after dinner, Caroline would spend the evening sticking pins into a wax doll made to look like the prince, before melting it over the fire.)”
Caroline, by then “a blowsy woman of 46,” became a national embarrassment, attending society balls naked from the waist up and pioneering the wearing of cut-off shirts.
She traveled around Europe for years, spending her time and her bed with those of increasingly lower social standing, so shunned by the royal court that when her daughter died in childbirth, she had to learn about it in the newspaper. Disgraced and abandoned by all around her, she died alone at 53.
Gloria von Thurn und Taxis (1960- )
The days-long 60th birthday party German Prince Johannes von Thurn und Taxis threw for himself in 1986 rivaled the greatest fetes of all time. Held at his 500-room castle, Schloss St. Emmeram, his guests included the likes of Mick Jagger, Jerry Hall and Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, and the guests indulged in “mountains of lobster, fountains of champagne and a cake decorated with 60 marzipan penises serving as candles.”
But the epic finale was possibly the grandest moment of all — the entrance of Princess Gloria, 34 years her husband’s junior, “dressed, of course, as Marie Antoinette, wearing a powder-pink, $10,000 bespoke gown and a two-foot-tall powdered wig topped with the French queen’s own pearl tiara. Later that night, she sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to her beloved husband from atop a gilded cloud while accompanied by the Munich Opera.”
And to think that just six years earlier, she had been a lowly barmaid.
Gloria’s husband was “the wealthiest noble and biggest landowner in Germany.” Worth a reported $3 billion, he was a bisexual who “enjoyed pulling pranks on unsuspecting friends, such as lacing banquet dinners with laxatives and dropping herrings down women’s dresses.”
Together, the insanely wealthy couple traveled the world without a care, buying art, partying with stars and living the life of dreams as the media swooned.
This attention was surely focused on the younger, prettier, though no less eccentric of the two, as Gloria became a media sensation. She “barked like a dog on ‘Late Night with David Letterman’ and got busted for possession of hashish at the Munich airport. She wore sweaters made out of teddy bears and received Holy Communion wearing a witch’s hat. She dyed her hair every hue of the rainbow, wore it in a Mohawk, or teased it up like the plumes of a peacock, earning her the sobriquet ‘Punk Princess.’” Vanity Fair had even dubbed her “Princess TNT, the dynamite socialite.”
But when her husband died in December 1990, Gloria’s partying days ended with the discovery that his estate was $576 million in debt.
And just like that, the Punk Princess became the prudent princess instead.
“As she told London’s Daily Telegraph, ‘My fairy story is over. You can’t be a fairy and meet a payroll.’”
Sobered up for good, Gloria took an exacting eye to the estate, and began to cut. She sold off treasures, cars, properties, art, even banks that her husband had owned. One auction that included 75,000 bottles of wine earned $19 million. When all this wasn’t enough, she turned the castle into a tourist attraction and rented parts of it out as office space.
“She spent the decade teaching herself corporate law and economics; [her] chainmail minidress was replaced with Chanel suits.”
By 2002, the estate was not only out of debt, but “was enjoying a 10 percent return.”
Gloria the punk princess wound up so entrenched in respectability that “when Pope John Paul II died in April 2005, she was one of the first laypeople to be received by the new pope.”
In later interviews, despite the decade she spent in a financial hell pit, Gloria expressed no regrets for her wild years.
“I think it’s the privilege of youth to be curious, fun-loving, even wild,” she told W Magazine. “I also think that every age has its own behavior. You don’t want to behave like you’re 70 when you’re in your 20s. And vice versa.”