Real Life or Fake News? Glimpses into Maud Allan's Tabloid-like Life

For this round, I decided to do some research on Maud Allan’s life.  I was most interested in learning more about the queer aspects of her life, both personally and in the context of the infamous “Cult of the Clitoris” case.  My partial trip down this research rabbit hole was, well, pretty trippy.

Reading about Maud Allan’s life was like reading the tabloids, but from the early 1900s.  Super sensationalistic.  Most of what I’m going to summarize below is based on Philip Hoare’s book, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century, as well as Lucy Bland’s book chapter, “Trial by Sexology: Maud Allan, Salome and the ‘Cult of the Clitoris’” case in the book, Sexology in Culture.  I apologize that I’m not as thorough with citations as I’d like to be – please don’t quote anything in this blog post.

Maud Allan was born Beulah Maude Durrant.  Many folks believe that part of the reason that she changed her last name was because her brother Theo was involved in a high profile murder case.  He was convicted of killing two white women, Minnie Williams (23 yrs) and Blanche Lamont (21 yrs) who were discovered naked in the Baptist church that the Durrant family attended on April 13, 1895.  One was hacked to death, and the other was laid out as if for a medical exam (Theo had attended medical school, but later had an illness that the press termed “brain fever”  (Hoare 66).  Theo was sentenced to death by hanging, and according to the press, his mother, Isabella, kissed her son’s lips in public right after his death (Hoare 69).  There were rumors of mother-son incest that circulated.

A common interpretation is that this traumatic event served as an inspiration for Allan’s later work, The Vision of Salome, whereby Salome kisses the lips of John the Baptist after he has been beheaded – this aligns with Oscar Wilde’s interpretation of Salome as in love with John the Baptist in his play, Salome, based on the biblical story.  According to Hoare, Isabella, wrote her daughter Maud: “You have an opportunity that you must not overlook, for in it lies your whole future success.  Your sorrow with your personality ought to give your playing a charm that cannot be taught.  Now doen’t lose the opportunity to allow the public to judge what you can do” (69).  Hoare interprets these words as Isabella advising her daughter to take advantage of family trauma in order to inspire her performance career (69).

Both the changing of Maud Durrant’s last name to Allan and her moving to Europe to establish her career seem related to an attempt to escape the sensational nature of her brother’s murder.  My impression is that Allan was quite conscious of shaping her own public image and willing to reshape the truth (i.e., lie) to suit her needs.  For example, in her autobiography, My Life and Dancing, she says that her parents were educated doctors, which was not the case.

She originally moved to Berlin to train as a concert pianist (some reviewers compared her to Isadora Duncan, but with greater musicality) and eventually ended up in England.  Her early prolific performances of The Vision of Salome later led to being invited to perform the title role of Wilde’s play, Salome, in 1918.  This would lead to the controversial “Cult of the Clitoris” trial that contributed to the downfall of her career.

To back up for a moment and provide some context, England was in the depths of WWI at the time, and as a result, there was strong anti-German sentiment in the air.  Politicians suspected of being pro-German, such as Allan’s friends and patrons, the Asquiths (the former prime minister and his wife), were vilified by other politicians.  Moreover, foreignness – and specifically Germanness – were associated with homosexuality and elite decadence, in part due to the early work of German sexologists as well as the cabaret scene.  Allan’s sensual Orientalist performances, with her almost nude body covered in little more than pearl beads, fit into this world.  She was also suspected of being a lover of Margot Asquith, who funded her palatial living quarters for twenty years.  It seems well documented that Allan had romantic and sexual relationships with people of varied genders, including her assistant and secretary, Verna Aldrich.

To return to the “Cult of the Clitoris” trial, an MP named Noel Pemberton Billing (a former actor who invented “flying boats” and who ran on a platform of airpower for England, so that its air-force would be as strong as its navy had been historically) published an article, “The 47,000” that was essentially a conspiracy theory in his newspaper, The Imperialist (formerly The Vigilante).  Based on information given by Capt. Harold Spencer, an American who had been discharged from the military due to mental illness, this article claimed that there was a black book with 47,000 names of powerful highly connected British subjects, ranging from politicians to other kinds of elite, who were vulnerable to blackmail by the Germans because they were homosexual.  (It was suggested at the trial that Margot Asquith was in this book.)  A good dose of anti-Semitism infects the anti-German, homophobic stew, since evidently a powerful Jewish cabal working behind the scenes is responsible for much of this.  I haven’t been able to locate the full original article, but here’s a taste: "There exists in the cabinet noire of a certain German prince a book compiled by the Secret Service from the reports of German agents who have infested this country for the past 20 years, agents so vile and spreading debauchery of such a lasciviousness as only German minds could conceive and German bodies execute."  Shortly thereafter, Billing published a short enigmatic paragraph related to the performance of Wilde’s Salome (which was to be performed privately, in part because biblical stories couldn’t be performed publicly): 

"The Cult of the Clitoris

To be a member of Maud Allan's private performances in Oscar Wilde's Salome one has to apply to a Miss Valetta, of 9 Duke Street, Adelphi, W.C. If Scotland Yard were to seize the list of those members I have no doubt they would secure the names of several of the first 47,000."

In response, Maud Allan sued Billing for libel – basically, because his article accused her of being a lesbian, since only lesbians or medical doctors would know what a clitoris was.  The trial was something of a circus, highly attended and covered in the press.  Similarly to Wilde’s libel trial a couple decades earlier, Allan ended up being trial for her queerness, even though she was the one who brought the suit.  Billing basically argued that his article wasn’t libel because it was true.  The earlier trial of her brother was brought as “evidence” that sexual perversion ran in the family.  A key witness, Eileen Villiers-Stuart, who was also Billing’s mistress, perjured herself by claiming to have seen the Black Book firsthand when she had not (there was never any evidence that the Black Book was real); she went on to claim that the names of both Margot Asquith and the judge presiding over the case were in the book.  Billing was found not guilty, and Allan’s career never fully recovered from the negative press.

There’s more interesting stuff to excavate from Allan’s life – notably that she toured India and more on her own same-sex relationships – but that’s what I’ve got to share for now.  One major takeaway I had was the importance of press and publicity: both the rampant fake news of the era and the importance of shaping one's self image in a way that feels resonant with today's social media saturated world.  It strikes me that the way we use the camera and media could be informed by this.