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The
term "horse opera" usually refers to the era of the Singing Cowboy
and the movie serials of the 1930s. Silent film star William S. Hart
coined the term because certain musical interludes in those early
films featured the cowboy serenading his horse. In some snooty quarters,
the term is used to lump together any entertainment with a Western
setting.
The first true horse opera in Texas was a stage production of Lord
Byron's romantic poem "Mazeppa" in Houston
in May of 1839. The April 3, 1839 edition of The Morning Star
newspaper noted that Mr. Lewellen's "well known and high celebrated
horse Timour will appear." Any production where the horse gets all
the advance publicity is a true horse opera, but the woman who played
Mazeppa became the true star of the show and emerged as America's
first entertainment celebrity and sex symbol.
Byron's poem tells of a young page, Mazeppa, whose dalliance with
the wife of a proud and much older count is discovered. The count
sentences Mazeppa to be bound "in nature's nakedness" on a wild horse.
The horse is then turned loose in the wilderness, pursued by a pack
of wolves. Poor Mazeppa. |
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Adah Isaacs Menken
at age19
Wikimedia Commons |
A Texas woman,
Adah Isaacs Menken, often referred to as La Menken or the Great Menken,
took the drama on a world tour in her role as Mazeppa and made it
the most famous horse opera of all time and Menken the most famous
woman of her day. Newspapers referred to her as "the most photographed
woman in the world" and ran pictures to prove it.
La Menken's early life is a tangle of fictions of her own devising.
In one version of her childhood she was the daughter of a French nobleman.
In another she was captured by Indians in Texas, ala Cynthia
Ann Parker, but was rescued (after anywhere from three weeks to
three months) by the Texas Rangers. Another version has her growing
up as the adopted daughter of Sam
Houston. She might have been born Nacogdoches,
or possibly in Memphis, or maybe it was New Orleans, with the name
Adelaide Bertha Theodore. Some accounts refer to her as "the naked
lady of Nacogdoches."
Some sources list her as a student at Nacogdoches University but there
is no evidence she ever cracked a book at that institution. However,
Thomas Peck Ochiltree, a Texas Ranger, Confederate officer, and Congressman,
reportedly knew her well in Nacogdoches
and had a teenage crush on her until she stole his boots one Christmas
Eve and he lost interest in her.
Adah also shows up in Liberty
in the 1850s where she befriended local journalists and staged readings
of Shakespeare and published poems and essays in the "Liberty Gazette."
A Liberty resident recalled seeing her and her sister Josephine perform
in Galveston.
Adah performed her role wearing pink tights. The title character in
the old movie "Heller in Pink Tights" is said to be inspired by her.
Adah probably met her first husband, Alexander Isaac Menken, in Galveston
when they were members of Neitsch's Theater company. They eloped to
Livingston and
married in that city on April 3, 1856. They soon divorced and she
remarried several times, though not always with the benefit of a legal
divorce from the previous husband. She maintained her first husband's
name for the rest of her stage career.
Adah made her first appearance as Mazeppa at the Green Street Theater
in Albany, New York before the largest audience in the history of
that theater. She wore a body suit that, under the stage lights, looked
like a birthday suit. She performed the role in San Francisco, England
and in New York City at Wood's Broadway Theater where one review noted
that the theater was "jammed to suffocation." La Menken's performance
in Paris in 1866 was hailed as the greatest triumph ever accorded
an American actress.
Adah Isaacs Menken fell ill after a performance in Paris and died
at the tender age of 33, penniless by some accounts. As she lay dying
she wrote these words: "I am lost to art and life, yet when all is
said and done have I not at my age tasted more of life than most women
who live to be a hundred?" |
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