The Lady in Gold (17 page)

Little Maria at her family's Alpine vacation chalet at Ischl, ca.
1924
. Maria loved animals, and cried when she read the children's classic Bambi. (
Illustration Credit 22.1
)

This was her favorite.

“There once was a mother goat who had seven little kids,” Emma told Maria. “One day, as the mother goat went into the forest to find food, she told the little goats, ‘You must not open the door, because the Big Bad Wolf is out there, and he will devour you.' Soon the little goats heard a gruff voice, saying, ‘Children, open the door and I will feed you.' They could tell it was the wolf. So the wolf ate chalk to soften his voice, but the little goats saw his black feet under the door. The wolf asked the miller to spread flour on his feet. The miller knew what the wolf was up to, and refused. But the wolf threatened to eat the miller, so he did as he was told,” Fräulein Emma told Maria.

“Deceived, the little goats opened the door, and it was the wolf. The little goats ran and hid, but the wolf found them and ate them up. When
the mother came home, she called for her children. Finally, the youngest kid jumped out from the clock case and led the mother to the wolf.

Maria and Luise Bloch-Bauer summer at the Czech castle of their uncle, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, who was still mourning his late wife, Adele, ca. 1925. (
Illustration Credit 22.2
)

“The mother goat found the wolf sleeping. She cut open the wolf's belly, and her kids jumped out, unhurt. The goats found some river stones, stuffed them in the wolf's belly, and sewed him up. The wolf woke up, leaned over the well for a drink, and fell in and drowned.” Maria would drift off to sleep, imagining herself as the little goat who rescues her family.

Years later,
Bruno Bettelheim, then a Vienna student, would write his classic book,
The Uses of Enchantment,
about how fairy tales help children cope with their fears.
Freud believed fairy tales were a window into the unconscious.
He thought that “The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids” had inspired a patient's dream in which the wolf represented the patient's anxiety over his father.

But when Maria blithely repeated this story, Therese raised her eyebrows at Fräulein Emma. Did Maria really need to hear these
Greuelmärchen,
gory fairy tales? Couldn't Fräulein Emma read her the new children's book by
Felix Salten,
Bambi
?

“
Finally, he's written something we can
all
read,” Therese added archly,
in a disapproving allusion to the scandalously explicit best seller Salten had reportedly authored anonymously in 1906, with the indelicate title
Josephine Mutzenbacher: A Viennese Whore's Life Story, as Told by Herself.

In the eyes of her indulgent father, Maria could do no wrong. When she began school, she confessed she had been reprimanded for giggling or whispering in class. “
The old swine do you injustice again!” Gustav would thunder, with mock outrage. One day Maria came home and innocently repeated a new word some older schoolboys taught her. It was the name of a popular condom brand. Her father burst out laughing.

Therese was horrified.
She enrolled Maria at the Schwarzwaldschule, or Black Forest School, founded by Adele's socialist friends, a private girls' school so highbrow that Schoenberg and Kokoschka had taught there.

If Ferdinand and Adele had raised girls, they might have encouraged them to take up a career.

Adele's best friends were career women in an age when women did not take up professions.
Berta Zuckerkandl was now a prominent journalist and cultural critic. Dr.
Gertrud Bien was a respected physician.

Therese, however, brought up her girls in a sheltered manner, designed to lead to marriage within their cultured circle. Their aunt Adele had spent her life trying to be remarkable. Maria and Luise were encouraged to be ordinary, unusual only within their carefully circumscribed conventions.

Maria was a child of eight when her glamorous older sister turned sixteen. Luise was an unusually poised teenager, with a willowy figure and a biting wit. An insomniac, Luise stayed up into the wee hours and woke Maria to tell her thrilling details of the love affairs of actors and aristocrats. Maria was in awe of stylish Luise, whose first evening gowns were made by the fashion house of Klimt's old companion,
Emilie Flöge. Luise was mature enough to disarm guests with her bons mots at the salons of her aunt Adele and uncle Ferdinand.

Maria was too shy to do much more than stand by the curtains watching Adele hold forth in a long gown, her cigarette holder draped from her long, elegant fingers.

At Ferdinand's Brezany Castle, outside of Prague, Maria was the youngest guest. She would wander through the drafty rooms filled with Baroque antiques of dark woods, heavily carved with swans and lions, and the formal and uncomfortable furniture of the Biedermeier period.
Meals were served at precise hours, and servants helped everyone dress for dinner. Luise and her brothers went off to hunt with Ferdinand. Maria loved
Bambi,
and she had cried when she read the passage where the fawn's mother was shot by hunters. When she saw the group return jubilantly one day with a dead stag, targeted for his magnificent rack of antlers, Maria burst into tears.

Ferdinand's gardens were a well-tended park, with statues and topiaries. The girls begged Ferdinand to dig a pool at Brezany, but it was futile. It didn't appeal to his classical tastes, and Ferdinand had no interest in donning a swimming costume.

Though the girls were discouraged from any real vocation, they were expected to be conversant in the world of culture. Luise read widely, devouring Goethe and Schiller. She had a genius for languages, and dreamed of writing plays. She was studying to be a teacher, but Therese viewed finding a good husband to be Luise's primary vocation.

This posed little challenge. By eighteen, Luise was a scene stealer. She spun around the dance floor at Vienna balls, dressed with style and ease, and was a skillful flirt. By day, she flitted around the house, singing her favorite opera,
Die
Fledermaus:
“Happy he who forgets what cannot be changed.” By night, Luise accompanied lonely “Uncle Ferry” to the theater or opera, and the socially prominent widower loved to make an entrance with his stunning niece on his arm.

Therese was the anchor of Bloch-Bauer gatherings, invitations to which were coveted in Vienna. Unlike Adele's, these gatherings were designed less for the exchange of ideas than for the family's social advancement.

Guests ate at a long, deeply carved formal dining table. A Dutch tapestry covered one wall, and guests dined under the gaze of the tapestry harlequin, who watched with vicarious pleasure as a busty maiden tried to squirm out of the embrace of a rogue nobleman. Some of Adele's old friends still came to dine, like Alma Mahler and
Amalie Zuckerkandl, whose father,
Sigmund Schlesinger, had written an unfinished play with
Mark Twain. At one Bloch-Bauer lunch, Luise caught the eye of a
handsome blond aristocrat and moved her seating card next to his. Therese had other plans. She seated the blond next to Luise's best friend,
Renee Rein, a socially connected young woman who was a confidante of the aging
Katharina Schratt. Therese put Luise's card back in its place, next to that of one of Vienna's most eligible bachelors: Baron
Viktor Gutmann, heir to a vast timber operation in Yugoslavia. The Gutmann barons were philanthropic: one had paid for the studies of the Hungarian carpenter's son who fathered Vienna playwright
Arthur Schnitzler.

Maria Bloch-Bauer, “the Duckling,” carries the wedding train of her sister, Luise, nineteen, a celebrated belle of prewar Vienna. The witty and intelligent Luise married Viktor Gutmann in 1927. (
Illustration Credit 23.1
)

Maria, still a schoolgirl, with her widowed uncle, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, at his Czech castle, ca. 1933. (
Illustration Credit 23.2
)

Christl, left, and Maria, right, ca.
1934
, best friends from childhood until they left Austria. (
Illustration Credit 23.3
)

Maria is presented to Vienna society at her debutante ball, ca.
1934
, attended by Alma Mahler and Manon, Alma's daughter with the Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius. (
Illustration Credit 23.4
)

Viktor Gutmann was a dashing young man who had returned from the eastern front of
World War I in a braid-trimmed officer's uniform festooned with medals. It was Viktor whom Therese had in mind when she began to plan the brilliant illusion that would be Luise's debutante ball, an affair she plotted like a general deploying an army. Therese decided on a “flower cotillion.”

On the morning of the ball, Maria opened the door at the Stubenbastei, and florists marched in with armloads of orchids, lilies, hyacinths, and tiny white lilies of the valley. They wove the flowers into wicker archways, transforming them into bloom-laden arbors. Wreaths of blossoms hung over the doorways.