Cleo Shows Her Ears

1922

Famous French Beauty Disproves A Suspicion

Friend of Edward VII of England and Leopold of Belgium Reveals Them to Reporters

PARIS, (By Mail) — "Kings may come, and kings may go, but I go on forever," sang Cleo de Merode the other day when, after an absence from the public eye of a quarter of a century, the erstwhile famous dancer jumped right back into the first pages of all the Paris newspapers by proving that she had ears.

Time was, in the days when Edward, prince of Wales, and Leopold, king of the Belgians were citizens of Paris by unanimous vote of the boulevards, when it pleased Cleo de Merode to twist her hair flat and low around her shapely head and launch the Merode curl. The style still persists, as did, until a few days ago, the legend that the dancer was imbued not so much with the desire to create a new fashion in coiffure, but to hide the fact that a jealous rival had slashed her ears, or, as some of the stories had it, that a discarded lover, had bitten them off.

It was the heyday of the "grandes vedettes" — of the demimonde — Liane de Pougy, Emilienne d'Alencon and a half dozen others whose gowns and horses and whims set the pace for the entire cosmopolitan crowd who brought their millions and their appetites for the new and startling to the city on the Seine. Kings and kinglets shared honors in their train with diamond kings from the Rand and from iron kings from Pittsburgh.

Was Veritable Queen

Cleo de Merode's beauty and her undoubted choreographic gifts, which had brought her from the music halls to the Paris Opera stage, combined with the unhidden interests which the Belgian sovereign displayed in her, made the dancer a veritable queen. It brought upon her also the bitter hate of less favored aspirants to royal honors. Hence the tale of the blemish under the flat curls.

Now comes this beauty of an age that has vanished to remind the world that she is still here and that her reputation is as much to her in the second decade of the twentieth century as was her fame in the closing years of the nineteenth. All because an American film producer thought fit to bestow the name Cleo on the heroine of a "life story" screen drama having to do with the loves and adventures of a Parisian dancer "the Great Parisian Dancer," to be accurate.

"Why, my name is Cleo and I am The Great Parisian Dancer," exclaimed Mlle. de Merode, and straightway she decided the public must be warned that the film didn't represent in the slightest particular the intimate life of the oldtime music-hall favorite. Certainly, most certainly, King Leopold and King Edward and King Whatshishame and Prince Fromthesouth were her friends and admirers, but what of that? She appealed to the courts to silence the wicked tongues that whispered tales of scandal about her friendships.

Proves Her Ears

While waiting for the court machinery to get into operation, Cleo de Merode allowed her present address to be known to the principal newspaper offices and selected the most stunning of her photographs of the days of triumph.

"It is horrible," she wailed to her visitors, "that I, the most modest, the most classical, the most dressed, of music-hall dancers, should be represented as an exponent of the lewd."

When one of the reporters suggested that perhaps after all there was some basis of truth in the film representation, Mlle. de Merode got furious.

"You remember," she exclaimed, "the story about my not having any ears, that I dressed my hair so as to cover up the deficiency. Well, look here."

And with a quick gesture, she threw back her hair and displayed to the gaze of the newspapermen the pink and pearlies that nature gave her and nobody had destroyed or deformed.

This victory over maleficent gossipers was quickly followed by another when the presiding judge of the court of referees granted her plea that the offending film be ordered withdrawn from the boulevard theater where it was being shown until a final decision is handed down.

—The Lincoln State Journal, Lincoln, NE, Nov. 15, 1922, p. 11.