CLEO de MERODE was born on this date in Paris, France. She was the illegitimate 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. 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.”
de Merode was sui generis, but might be characterized as a turn of the century of Lady Gaga-Madonna-Kardashian, a creature and brand of her own transgressive creation, challenging norms and boundaries at every piqué en arabesque and jete.
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”.
de Mérode became an international star, performing across Europe and in the United States. In Germany, she danced at Hamburg’s Hansa-Theater and Berlin’s Wintergarten, and in France she appeared in the plays Les Deux Pigeons, La Korrigane, and Étoile, and Gustave Charpentier engaged her for the role of La Beauté in Le Couronnement de la Muse.
In 1897, she arrived in New York City, where she appeared for a month at Koster and Bial’s in the play Faust. During her stay in New York, she was besieged by reporters and followed down the street by girls begging for her autograph. de Mérode’s performance was heavily anticipated, but was disappointing, and though the press praised her beauty, they said she could not dance; Munsey’s Magazine said of her, “Cléo de Mérode can go back to her inconspicuous position among the ballet dancers at the Paris Opéra, crowned with the distinction of having made the most successful failure of the season. Critics and public joined in a chorus of disappointment after her first appearance at Koster & Bial’s, and yet she has set a new fashion in personal adornment, crowds mark her progress on the street, and large audiences assemble to see her.” de Mérode responded to the criticism by saying, “The papers stated that I was a failure, but they lied. I pleased the Americans vastly. The papers pretended that I danced badly, as if Americans could tell. They know nothing about dancing and don’t like ballets.” In a separate interview she stated, “I dance the ancient dances, the Louis XIII, the Louis XV, the gavot, the pavan, the minuet, and I led at Royan Louis Ganne’s ballet of Phryne. I am gowned by a real dressmaker. I know music very well and play the piano as little as possible. I know how to arrange a basket of fruit, place flowers in a jardiniere, and touch a book without spoiling it. I have read the poets and the historians, and I do not write. I wear stockings that are as fine as a woven mist. What other accomplishments shall I speak of?” Although she criticized American culture, she celebrated American women, noting, “It would be outrageous not to admire the women of America. They are not like us. It is too bad for them that they are not French, but that cannot be helped. They know much more than we do and have ambitions in many directions that we in our country never feel. I think as a whole they are prettier than we are. I do not wonder that the men from Europe fall in love with the American girls. They are so chic and charming, you know. I have heard so many stories of them that at first, I did not know what to think, and when I walked about on the great steamer that brought me here, I looked at your countrywomen very curiously. The more I looked the better I liked them.
In 1898, de Mérode was awarded first prize at an exhibit of the New York Camera Club as being the most beautiful woman in Paris. In 1900, she caused a sensation at the Exposition Universelle when she performed traditional Javanese and Khmer dances. She also appeared in two films, one of which was hand-tinted in color; both showed her dancing. In 1901, Édouard Marchand organized for her to dance at the Folies Bergère in a three-act pantomime titled Lorenza, taking the risk to do something other elites of the ballet had never done before. Her performance gained her a new following, and her popularity further increased.
In the fall of 1895, a rumor 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 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 1950, de Mérode sued Simone de Beauvoir for libel, claiming five million francs in damages. de Beauvoir had “wrongly described her as a prostitute who came from peasant stock and had taken an aristocratic sounding stage name as self promotion” in her book The Second Sex. de Mérode won the lawsuit, and the passage was taken out of the book. However, de Mérode only received one franc in damages because “the judge found that Cléo had permitted the rumors during the course of her career for their publicity value”.
In 1955, she published her autobiography, Le Ballet de ma vie (The Dance of My Life). In 1964, de Mérode was photographed by Cecil Beaton and featured in the February 1964 issue of Vogue.
de Mérode never married or had children, which has led some biographers to categorize her as a lesbian. Paul Klee, who personally knew de Mérode, called her “probably the most beautiful woman alive” and said she “seemed asexual” in a 1902 diary entry, a common conclusion when anyone wasn’t conforming to the social norm.