Outrageous Olga de Meyer
Olga de Meyer was one of the greatest beauties of the Edwardian era, and her good looks were only matched by the unending dramas of her life. Born into nobility and dying in disgrace, scandalous rumors constantly swirled around her, which was just how she liked it. Unfortunately, some of the darkest whispers were true.
1. She Had An Aristocratic Family
Though born in London, England in the summer of 1871, Olga de Meyer had serious Italian credentials. Her (reported) father was the nobleman Gennaro Caracciolo, and her full name was Maria Beatrice Olga Alberta Caracciolo. But if her father gave her these aristocratic roots, it was her mother who cemented her in scandal.
2. She Came From A Long Line Of Scandal-Makers
Olga inherited centuries of scandal. Her mother, Marie Blanche Sampayo, was the daughter of a French diplomat and his American wife, Virginia Timberlake—who was a captivating socialite with a taste for drama, often of the made-up variety. One commenter described her as "a brilliant woman in mind, appearance, and accomplishments...in spite of her want of veracity” and added that she “craves notoriety”.
Olga wouldn’t be much different, but these family tendencies went deeper than that.
3. Her Great-Grandmother Was An Original
Olga’s maternal great-grandmother Margaret O’Neill Eaton was one of the original American scandal-makers. Under Andrew Jackson’s presidency, Margaret hastily married Secretary of War John Eaton in a wedding so scandalous, the other Cabinet wives utterly snubbed the newlyweds and kicked off the “Petticoat Affair” from 1829 to 1831.
It was a difficult legacy to live up to, but Olga certainly managed it.
4. Her Parents Had A Shocking Wedding
Olga’s dramatic life began just before she was in the womb. Her mother Marie had only married Duke Caracciolo under extreme duress from her parents, who insisted their girl be respectable. Yet no sooner had the ceremony finished than Marie rode off into the sunset with her lady’s maid, not to be heard from for many months.
When she returned, she was carrying outrageous gossip.
5. She Was An Unpleasant Surprise
Both the Duke and the new Duchess’s families were horrified at what might be happening to Marie Blanche, but when she finally returned, it became all too clear: In tow was a little girl, Olga. Since her parents had been separated “at the church door,” as one commenter put it, it seemed clear the Duke wasn’t the father. But who might have been was a bigger question.
6. People Whispered About Her Parentage
Tongues wagged everywhere Olga de Meyer and her mother went, especially as her mother continued to perform gauche rebellious acts, including going out “shooting in a kilt and smoking cigarettes”. Some believed Olga’s father was Marie’s friend Stanislaus Augustus, 3rd Prince Poniatowski, which, funnily enough, would still make Olga descended from nobility. But the other possibility was even more esteemed than that.
7. She May Have Been The Daughter Of A King
One of the bigger whispers was that Olga was the illegitimate daughter of King Edward VII, then the Prince of Wales, a known playboy with a constant string of mistresses. And there were salacious signs. For one thing, Olga’s middle name was “Alberta,” and Edward’s first name was actually Albert. Other clues followed.
8. He Showered Her With Gifts
Whether or not King Edward was Olga’s father, he certainly seemed to think he was, and helped support her as she grew up. He gave Olga’s mother an expensive villa to live in at Dieppe that faced the English Channel, and would see Olga on and off during the coming years.
Yet this didn’t mean Olga had a charmed life. Far from it.
9. Her Neighbors Shunned Her
After all this scandal, Olga’s mother simply couldn’t bounce back into the height of society. At Dieppe, they called her à-côté, or on the fringes of respectability, and she was rarely invited out into polite society to do anything. Meanwhile, Olga suffered too, as parents in the know refused to even let the children play with the little girl of mysterious parentage.
In fact, everything about Olga’s place in society was precarious.
10. She Was In Danger
As the official daughter of an Italian duke and the rumored illegitimate child of the Prince of Wales, Olga de Meyer was stuck between nobility and the demi-monde right from the beginning. The adults around her knew it, too. Reportedly, King Edward VII once asked a friend to “take pains because of Olga’s delicate position in society,” noting that “[s]he has been brought up without friends”.
This wasn’t the only reason she was vulnerable.
11. She Had A Striking Beauty
For better or worse, Olga matured into a stunning young girl. Tall and slim, she had “Venetian red hair” that tumbled down the length of her body, and an oval face that held all the markers of beauty for the day. More than that, she had an “elusive combination of childlike innocence and soigné charm” even as a teenager. It began to attract a new kind of attention.
12. She Captivated A Painter
Just as Olga was hitting adolescence, the famed painter James McNeill Whistler came to Dieppe and was struck by Olga’s cat-like beauty. He painted several portraits of the 16-year-old, including Study of a Young Girl’s Head and Shoulders.
His notice of the girl naturally attracted other painters to the burgeoning muse. Yet few of these attentions were innocent.
13. They Dragged Her Into The Adult World
As more and more painters congregated around Olga de Meyer, they also bribed and pleaded with her to sit for them, using adult techniques to convince her. One man, Giovanni Boldini, was so desperate to get the teen to sit still so that he could capture her, he said, “I’ll give you a cigarette and not tell your mother”.
Olga would usually just laugh at this, but other interactions turned much more serious.
14. She May Have Found A Lover
As Olga rose as a muse, there are suggestions she began at least a halfway romance with the painter Charles Conder, a strapping blond man who called the social agitants Oscar Wilde and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec friends. Evidently, Olga liked to rebel, and she kept that streak going.
15. She Had A Violent Talent
When Olga de Meyer turned 20, she decided to buck convention even more and take up fencing, becoming one of the best female fencers in Europe. She would go on to grace magazines dressed up in her fencing gear, and was a crack shot on top of all that. Apparently, Olga didn’t care what people thought, but people were thinking.
16. She Had Nay-Sayers
Olga captivated most people, but not everyone. The novelist George Moore was particularly scathing about Olga’s so-called beauty. When he met an artist friend infatuated with Olga, he sighed, “By Jove, you’re all after the girl…She’s paintable, I admit, but as to one’s daily use…too slender for me”.
Others, though, had more than Olga’s looks to complain about.
17. She Wasn’t Naive
Some would have called Olga de Meyer a demi vierge at this time—a young woman who enjoys escapades but still tries to give the appearance of propriety. This perfectly fits with Olga’s upbringing, and more than a few people were concerned. Henry James’s novel What Maisie Knew, tracing the maturation of a young girl, was reportedly inspired by his meetings with Olga; James once admitted “The enchanting Olga learnt more at Dieppe than my Maisie knew”.
But her true end of innocence was yet to come.
18. She Had A Much Older Fiancé
Olga’s mother was laissez-faire at best with her daughter, at least according to the strictures of the day, but eventually even she decided it was time for the girl to go a more conventional route and marry. One of the most “promising” suitors was the Italian Prince Marino de Brancaccio who, although 20 years older than Olga, would at least give her a title.
Before the wedding could happen, though, tragedy struck.
19. She Lost Her Mother Young
Life always seemed to hit Olga de Meyer senselessly hard and fast, and the first strike was no different. According to some sources, just before sealing the deal with Prince de Brancaccio, her mother perished. Olga, whose parents had never exactly been pillars to her, now had almost no one to rely on.
So, perhaps looking for a stability she’d never find, she forged ahead.
20. She Ran To The Altar
Right after her mother’s passing, Olga jumped into matrimony, marrying the Prince just a month after saying goodbye to her mother. But whatever Olga was hoping for, Brancaccio wasn’t it. A family friend, the artist Jacques-Émile Blanche, called it a “dramatic union”—in fact, he called it “a short and most dramatic union,” and he was right to.
21. She Made A Big Mistake
Olga and her prince officially split at the end of the 1890s, but it was over long before that. The couple lived in Rome and tried to make it work for around two years, then somewhere around there they called it quits, and there was nothing left but paperwork.
In fact, before 1896, Olga had decamped to Monte Carlo—and started yet another scandal.
22. She Took Her Mother’s Lover
Olga was used to the finer things in life, but she had no real dowry to back that lifestyle up. For a girl of her position, this often meant taking a wealthy and generous lover, which is exactly what she did when she absconded to Monte Carlo. Only, few expected her to choose the man she did: While there, she was reportedly a “kept” woman for one of her mother’s old lovers.
In fact, wherever she went, she learned to find patrons.
23. She Found Scandalous Work
In these hinter years, Olga tried her best to scrape together a good image of herself while still getting the funds for the life to which she was accustomed. She briefly worked for the Paris paper La Galoise as a society columnist, in part getting the job because of her innate sense of style…and in part because the owner had also been a friend of her mother’s.
Yet Olga was about to meet her real destiny.
24. She Had Wealthy Friends
In her hard-won upward trajectory through society, Olga became close to the Sassoon banking family, and it was at one of their houses one day in 1897 that Olga met the photographer Adolph de Meyer. Although she may have technically still been married to Prince Marino Brancaccio, she didn’t appear to be thinking about him much.
25. She Walked Down The Aisle Again
Olga evidently began some kind of relationship with Adolph de Meyer, and, at least according to some timelines, a month after her divorce she married him in a Protestant ceremony, just before her 28th birthday. At this point, Olga may have thought she was at the height of her powers, but she hadn’t seen anything yet.
26. Her New Husband Had Talent
De Meyer wasn’t just a mere photographer; Cecil Beaton called him the “Debussy of photography”. As his fame rose throughout the next few years, he would go on to take the portraits of many marquee names of the 20th century, including Mary Pickford, John Barrymore, and even King George V and Mary of Teck. In the end, however, it was Olga who made him.
27. She Made Him What He Was
According to some, Olga was the one who raised her husband’s talents to the level of genius, and without her, Adolph “would have remained merely a fashionable decorator, or a snob who took photographs”. Instead, Olga urged him to learn from the painters who had once taken her as their muse, and helped him make contacts throughout Europe that would rocket him to fame. It worked out well for her.
28. The Camera Loved Her
Eventually, Adolph even became the very first official fashion photographer for Vogue, but he never forgot about his wife. Over the course of their long marriage, Adolph took nearly endless photographs of Olga, and it’s thanks to him that her captivating looks were brought into the new century. But her reputation just kept on rising.
29. Her “Father” Finally Became King
Olga’s rumored father Edward VII was, somewhat unfortunately for him, the son of the very long-lived Queen Victoria. As such, he had to wait until 1901, when he was nearing his 60s, to become King of England, and until 1902 to have his official coronation at Westminster Abbey. When it finally did happen, he didn’t forget about Olga.
30. She Received A Huge Favor
Edward VII wanted to invite Olga and her husband to his coronation, but all the seats were reserved either for officials or peers and their families, which meant Edward had to get creative. He promptly asked his cousin to give Adolph the title of Baron de Meyer, turning Olga into a Baroness, so that the couple could be present that day.
Olga must have been delighted with the noble title, but this idea didn’t turn out as stately as Edward might have hoped.
31. She Had A Prime Seat To The Coronation
Although Adolph took his place in the diplomats’ wing at the coronation, Olga attended in the “King’s Box,” in full view of the crowd. Even though she sat in the second row, behind the heat scores of Alice Keppel, Edward’s long-time mistress, and the famous actress Sarah Bernhardt, people still called her presence “conspicuous”. They also got quite the wrong idea.
32. Tongues Wagged About Her
While Olga’s parentage was still hotly debated, so too was her exact relationship with King Edward VII. Since she sat in the King’s Box alongside Edward’s mistress, some of those less informed in the crowd began to wonder if Olga, too, was some kind of courtesan for the monarch.
Olga could only hold her head high and keep going forward. Yet the more her profile was raised, the harder this got.
33. People Were Still Suspicious Of Her
Despite or maybe because of her upbringing, the new Baroness de Meyer now had a reputation for being extremely tactful and discreet, at least around the right society. But society didn’t often pay her back for this courtesy: Because of the scandal that hung around her like a fine mist, she and the Baron were rarely the “first guests” at a party, and usually entered with the crowd.
When Olga did get into inner circles, moreover, it inevitably went wrong.
34. She Got A Cruel Insult
At one point, Olga and her husband were invited to the Duchess of Rutland’s weekend party, a high honor for the time and an event that would include millionaires and painters alike. But when the elderly Duchess of Devonshire recognized who Olga was during their introduction, she snubbed her by only holding out two fingers to her.
And if it wasn’t Olga they were whispering about, it was her marriage.
35. Her Marriage Was A Sham
Olga and her husband Adolph de Meyer’s continued marriage must have been a shock to those who had seen her tumultuous union with her first husband. But the pair were also holding onto an enormous secret: Their union was completely unconsummated. If the reasons behind this got out to the wider public, it would have destroyed everything they were striving for.
36. Her Husband Was Gay
According to those who knew them best, the de Meyers had a “lavender” union, as Adolph was gay. Before they married, Adolph had reportedly made it clear to Olga what their relationship would look like, advocating for “the real meaning of love shorn of any kind of sensuality” and extolling the virtues of “companionship” over “unrestrained passion”.
As it happened, Olga likely wasn’t disappointed at all.
37. She Liked Women
Olga herself was bisexual, possibly even lesbian, and her track record during her marriage to Adolph certainly indicates a preference: The writer Violet Trefusis, who infamously had another tumultuous affair with Vita Sackville-West, was one of her lovers, as were a series of society women. Some of these lovers were even as scandalous as Olga herself.
38. She Was Attracted To Scandal
Not long after her marriage to Adolph de Meyer, Olga began an affair with Winnaretta Singer, the heiress of the Singer sewing fortune. Like Olga, Winnaretta was currently in a lavender marriage, but she’d also gone through a disastrous first union. In Winnaretta’s case, her first wedding night ended with her climbing up an armoire and threatening to kill the groom if he ever touched her.
In fact, Winnaretta may have even introduced friction into the de Meyer marriage, companionable as it was.
39. Her Husband And Her Lover Didn’t Get Along
Winnaretta and Olga soon spent many of their waking hours together, with the Baroness reportedly even teaching her new lover how to fence. They got so familiar that Adolph even once informally addressed Winnaretta as “Tante Winnie,” or “Auunt Winne,” a liberty that displeased her so much she hissed, “Tante vous-même” or “Aunt yourself!”
Unfortunately, everything was about to go topsy-turvy for Olga.
40. She Lost Her Protector
In the end, Edward VII had the throne for precious little time. In 1910, less than a decade in, he passed, forcing Olga to search for a new protector in high society. Always adaptable, the de Meyers now moved on to ballet circles and championed geniuses like Vaslav Nijinsky to get their dose of importance.
All the same, time was running out.
41. She Fled To America
In 1913, the murmurings of WWI began to rise, and Adolph and Olga left their fashionable European surroundings and went to America. They barely landed on their feet: They hated New York as a city, and after their assets were frozen in England they were all but penniless and very nearly friendless. It was here that it began to turn sideways, and then fall off completely.
42. She Got Lost In Mysticism
While in America, Olga and her husband began to lose a sense of themselves, which they tried to rediscover through the occult. They became interested in the mysticism running rampant through American society at the time, and one astrologer in particular gained an immense amount of sway over the two socialites. So much so that she changed a fundamental part of them.
43. She Changed Her Name
While under the influence of the astrologer, and just as WWI began in earnest, Olga and Adolph changed their names to ones that were supposed to be more beneficial to their horoscopes. Adolph now went under the name “Gayne,” while Olga became “Mharhra”. It was no passing fancy, either; they would be known by these names from now on.
Not that Olga had much time left.
44. She Was “Terrifyingly Young”
As soon as the conflict was over, Olga and Adolph went right back to their beloved Europe, settling in Paris after the Armistice was signed. They were happy and relieved, but nothing is ever as simple as going home. Despite the fact that the de Meyers “remained young—terrifyingly young” at heart to the very end, age was beginning to tell on Olga.
As she tried to settle back into her French socialite life, this became all too clear.
45. She Was Still Beautiful
To be fair, Olga was still almost as beautiful and chic as ever, and she knew what to do with her aging looks. She first cut her hair and rinsed it blue (she was one of the first women in society to do this), then let natural gray locks frame her pert face. If anything, it was Adolph whose years showed up front, and the now-portly man liked dressing in a somewhat old fashioned fur-lined overcoat and monocle. It wouldn’t make a difference in the end.
46. She Took Up A Trendy Vice
Post-war Paris was a heady place to be, with people letting loose after the lean, brutal years as the Roaring Twenties revved up. Opium use was particularly fashionable, and there were many well-decorated dens all over the city where the rich, young, or those who aspired to be both could partake. Olga, never one to shun a fad, jumped in with both feet, spending much of her time in these smoky rooms with members of Sergei Diaghilev’s ballet troupe. Yet these habits made her very few friends.
47. She Could Be “Vicious”
Olga, for all her high-society tact, had never been the gentlest or kindest of creatures. Although everyone seems to have been attracted to her in one way or another, few appeared to truly like her. Even her one-time lover Violet Trefusis noted “she had such a vicious tongue”. In short, Olga was more often an object of desire than of affection, and was more often used than cared for.
Unfortunately, she found out the importance of real friends too late.
48. She Became An Addict
Within a handful of years, the de Meyers’ social substance use turned into full blown addiction, and it hit Olga particularly hard. As she sunk deeper in, she became less concerned with who her acquaintances were, until she devolved into someone “[n]ervous, drugged, [and] surrounded by ambiguous friends” while her husband watched on, seemingly unable to do anything. Olga wasn’t doing herself any favors, either.
49. She Turned “Spiteful”
Olga’s addiction was a tragic thing, but it appears to have turned her “vicious” tongue into a full-blown weapon. Reportedly, Olga, now well into her 50s, began “scandal-mongering” and became “frankly spiteful”. Eventually, she appeared to drive away what few loyal friends she had left, and she and Adolph fell in instead with a bohemian group that included the opium-addicted artist Jean Cocteau.
By then, though, Olga simply couldn’t keep up.
50. It Was Too Late For Her
When Olga was 59, she seems to have recognized that something needed to change, and reportedly checked into an Austrian hospital for a detoxification cure. To her, recovery may have been the promise of yet another fountain of youth, fun, and health, but she got none of those things. While she was receiving treatment in 1931, her heart gave out.
There was only one person to mourn her.
51. Her Husband Mourned Her
Adolph was heartbroken at his companion’s passing. Striving to pay Olga her last respects in the style she was accustomed to, he had her remains cremated and put in an alabaster urn from Egypt. Not that he could quite let her go: in mystic fashion, he also tried to communicate with her spirit, and would often rise early from dinner by saying “Mhahra is waiting for me”.
52. She Was The End Of An Era
A child of the demi-monde, Olga de Meyer was also a ghost from another age even before her early death. The Edwardian era passed her by in a haze of partying, and the post-war Roaring Twenties ran her into the ground. But her brief years were also bursting with glamour, excess, and glittering ambition few could dream of. Indeed, there were very few like her.
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