Adah Isaacs Menken

American actor and poet

• Born: June 15, 1835
• Birthplace: Either Memphis, Tennessee or Chartrain (now Milneburg), near New Orleans, Louisiana
• Died: August 10, 1868
• Place of death: Paris, France

Menken won notoriety throughout the United States and Europe for her scandalous performances in Mazeppa, in which she appeared on stage apparently nude, strapped to the back of a wild horse—an image that shocked nineteenth century audiences and contributed to the creation of burlesque theater and the liberation of nineteenth century women.

Early Life

Little is known about the early life of Adah Isaacs Menken, largely because she later deliberately created misleading legends about herself. Not even her birthplace is known for certain, and there is some suggestion that her father may have been a prosperous freed slave who worked in New Orleans. Her early years certainly introduced her to a varied background, for she spoke German, French, Spanish, Hebrew, and Latin. It is also known that during her early years she danced with the New Orleans French Opera and appeared in circus equestrian acts. Menken herself also claimed to have attended college in Nacogdoches, Texas.

In 1856, Adah married Alexander Isaac Menken, a well-known Jewish theatrical musician. She later claimed to have published during that same year a book of poems titled Memories, under the pseudonym Indigina. In 1857, she made her stage debut in Shreveport, Louisiana, as Pauline in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s play The Lady of Lyons (1838). Over the next two years, she earned her living as a dancer and circus performer in Shreveport, Nashville, and New Orleans. A woman who was always ready to defy convention, she took to smoking cigarettes in public. When she refused to stop, her husband left her.

Life’s Work

The crucial year in Menken’s career was 1859, when she moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where she embraced Judaism. She also published a series of poems in The Cincinnati Israelite and in The New York Sunday Mercury. Before the year was out, she moved to New York, where she made her stage debut in The Soldier’s Daughter in March. To maintain herself she worked frequently in variety shows as a black-faced minstrel and even once impersonated the distinguished actorEdwin Booth in a satire on his production of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (pr. c. 1600-1601).

During that period, Menken met and fell in love with the famous Irish prize fighter John Carmel Heenan. To marry Heenan, she secured a rabbinical diploma dissolving her marriage to Alexander Menken but retained Menken as her stage name throughout the rest of her life. However, her marriage to Heenan actually constituted bigamy because she failed to obtain a legal divorce through New York State courts. To make matters worse, Heenan took to beating her at night and eventually left her with a son who died in infancy. Their divorce was ultimately made legal in 1862. During Menken’s brief marriage to Heenan, she apparently learned to box from her husband, and in later years she claimed that she had boxed professionally.

In 1861, Menken came to the stage role that would make her fame and fortune throughout the remainder of her life: the title role in Mazeppa: Or, The Wild Horse of Tartary , a melodrama about the tribulations of a young boy adapted in 1830 by Henry M. Milner from Lord Byron’s 1819 poem “Mazeppa.” What made Menken’s performance noteworthy and, indeed, notorious, was not only her playing the role of a young boy but also her appearance in the play’s climatic scene, in which she was strapped to the back of a wild horse that leapt and bucked across the stage. That sensational image alone would have been spectacular; however, Mazeppa was also supposed to be nude. That scene had originally employed a dummy strapped to the horse. However, Menken insisted on playing the scene herself and created a realistic impression of nudity by wearing a skin-tight outfit that matched her coloring, with only a small skirt around her waist. In an age in which women were clothed from neck to toe and when the mere sight of a woman’s bare ankle was considered provocative, Menken’s choice of costume was audacious and scandalous. However, the daring costume also brought her fame and fortune, and soon she became the highest-paid female actor in the United States. A photograph of Menken on horseback in her famous role was widely distributed during her lifetime and is still reproduced in many books on the history of theater.

From New York, Menken took the production of Mazeppa to San Francisco where it opened to a sold-out audience at Maguire’s Opera House, with Junius Brutus Booth, Edwin’s Booth’s brother, as Menken’s costar. Menken became the toast of San Francisco and was even made an honorary member of that city’s Hook and Ladder Fire Company. Soon, she was traveling throughout the United States presenting Mazeppa to large and shocked, but obviously appreciative, audiences. The question of scandal aside, Menken was apparently very good in her role. She had spent several years acquiring her skills as an actor, and the many years she had spent performing equestrian acts in circuses aided her in handling the climatic moment in the play.

In addition to Mazeppa, she starred in several other plays, including Dick Turpin, The French Spy, Three Fast Women, and The Child of the Sun, in each of which she received good reviews. However, Mazeppa was always her main vehicle. When she performed in the play in San Francisco, Mark Twain wrote a review and later sought her out as a friend when she appeared in Virginia City, Nevada. Other notable literary figures, including Bret Harte, were also her friends, and they encouraged her to write more poetry, especially in the new free verse form. Menken married and divorced one of these literary acquaintances, the Civil War satirist Robert Newell, better known as Orpheus C. Kerr (“office seeker”). She also married and divorced James Barkley, a southerner about whom little is known. Through the turmoil of her private life she continued to star in Mazeppa and crossed the Atlantic Ocean in 1864 to take the production to Europe, where it was a great success.

In London, where Menken appeared at Sadler’s Wells Theater, Menken attracted the friendship of such important literary figures as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Algernon Swinburne, and Dante Gabriel Rosetti. In France she met and carried on a romantic relationship with the famous French novelist Alexandre Dumas, père. Meanwhile, in addition to making frequent stage performances, she continued to write poetry and dedicated a new volume of poems to her friends Charles Dickens and George Sand. After Menken gave birth to her second son in November, 1866, Sand honored her by serving as the short-lived boy’s godmother.

In August, 1868, Menken was rehearsing for a show in Paris when she suddenly collapsed on stage. Over the following week, her condition did not markedly improve, but she returned to rehearsals, only to collapse again. On August 10, she died, at the age of only thirty-three years. Physicians were unable to agree on a diagnosis; some attributed her condition to tuberculosis, others thought she had cancer, and still others thought she might have had a ruptured appendix. There was no post-mortem examination. Menken’s final book of poetry, Infelicia , appeared one week after her death.

Significance

In an age when respectable women were expected to be quiet and genteel in their public life and to demur to their husbands and other men in all matters, Adah Isaacs Menken was a startling phenomenon. Her first husband abandoned her because she refused to stop smoking cigarettes in public. That did not stop her from marrying and divorcing three other husbands during an age when divorce was not common.

However, Menken’s artistic adventures were more significant than her complex private life. Known as an accomplished actor, she flew in the face of convention by appearing on stage seemingly in the nude, both shocking and delighting polite society. Her innovation in the theater of the times would be the first step toward the creation of American burlesque. Not only was she an actor of accomplishment and some infamy, but she was also a poet and the friend, and even lover, of some of the most significant literary figures of the day. She may well be considered one of the first of modern public celebrities. She accomplished all this in a lifetime that spanned only thirty-three years.

Bibliography

Banham, Martin, ed. The Cambridge Guide to the Theatre. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1995. A good general guide to the theater with an informative entry on Menken.

Eiselein, Gregory, ed.“Infelicia” and Other Writings by Adah Isaacs Menken. Alberta, Canada: Broadview Press, 2002. An edition of her book of poetry and of other works by Adah Isaacs Menken.

Gascoigne, Bamber. World Theatre: An Illustrated History. Boston: Little, Brown, 1968. The emphasis in this book is on the visual theater, and it contains an excellent description of how the “wild horse” scene in Mazeppa was staged.

Mankowitz, Wolf. Mazeppa: The Lives, Loves, and Legends of Adah Isaacs Menken. New York: Stein & Day, 1982. Fascinating and thorough biography of Menken, with many illustrations.

Sentilles, Renee. Performing Menken: Adah Isaacs Menken and the Birth of American Celebrity. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2003. A study of how Menken was the first woman of the theater to create herself as a celebrity and how that phenomenon has continued in American history.