From the Archives: Rival Queens
Nancy Goldstone has made a career of telling the often forgotten and always dramatic stories of powerful women in medieval Europe.* In The Rival Queens: Catherine de’ Medici, Her Daughter Marguerite de Valois, and the Betrayal That Ignited a Kingdom, Goldstone turns her attention to Renaissance France and its role in the growing struggle between Catholics and Protestants across Europe.
The betrayal to which the title refers is the infamous St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, in which thousands of French Huguenots were killed when they gathered in Paris to attend the unwilling Marguerite’s wedding to her Protestant cousin, Henry of Navarre. In fact, the massacre is only the most extreme of the betrayals–personal and political alike–which Goldstone describes.
Goldstone overturns the ruling historical evaluation of Catherine as an able, if Machiavellian, ruler and Marguerite as a sensual dilettante. Instead, she shows Catherine manipulating her children in order to maintain her power in France. Marguerite stands in counterpoint to her, growing into a woman of courage and integrity. Goldstone makes a compelling case for both portrayals, using first-hand accounts from the period, including Marguerite’s memoir.
Firmly rooted in history, The Rival Queens combines the pageantry and passion of a Philippa Gregory novel with the Byzantine plot and violence of A Game of Thrones. It is a story of intra-family rivalry taken to the level of “scheming and conspiracy, treason and treachery”. Religion is its battlefield; sex, tale bearing and the withholding of maternal love its primary weapons.
*Including The Maid and the Queen, yet another contemporary retelling of Joan of Arc’s story.
Ellen Church: “Sky Girl”
Ellen Church was born in 1904, a year after the Wright Brothers took their first flight at Kitty Hawk. As a young girl, she saw airplanes perform at the country fair near her hometown of Cesco, Iowa. She decided that she wanted to learn to fly.
After graduating from high school, she moved to the Twin Cities, where she earned a degree in nursing. From there, she moved to San Francisco, where she worked as a hospital nurse and finally earned her pilot’s license.*
In 1930, she decided to try to turn her love of flying into a career. She applied for a job at Boeing Air Transport,** which had the contract to fly the mail between San Francisco and Chicago. They turned her down—like other airlines B.A.T. only hired male pilots. During her “interview,”the manager at the San Francisco office, Steve Simpson, told her that the airline planned to hire male stewards—a new idea that some European airlines were testing.
Airlines in the United States had begun offering passenger service only a few years earlier, in 1926. The planes carried a pilot, a co-pilot and twelve passengers. The co-pilot had the job of handing out box lunches and taking care of passengers who were frightened or airsick—both common conditions at the time because plane rides were bumpy. The addition of a steward as a third crew member meant that the co-pilot could concentrate on his primary job and passengers could received more attention.
Church argued that women with nursing degrees would make passengers more comfortable than a male steward. Simpson agreed to give her a three month trial, and the authority to hire seven other nurses to work on the planes. B.A.T. called them “Sky Girls.”
The trial was a great success and other airlines began to hire young nurses to work as stewardesses, or air hostesses. By 1933, 100 women worked as stewardesses.
In addition to being nurses,*** stewardesses had to be single. They could weigh no more than 115 pounds and be no taller than 5’ 4” tall. The upper age limit was 25. In addition to caring for sick or frightened passengers, their duties included taking tickets, handling luggage, passing out lunches, cleaning the inside of the plane, and tightening the bolts that held the seats to the floor.
Church’s career as a Sky Girl only lasted eighteen months, due to an automobile accident. But she entered a second stage in her aviation career in World War II. When the United States entered the war, she joined the Army Nurse Corps. She helped evacuate wounded soldiers from Africa and Italy by air and trained other evacuation nurses in preparation for the D-Day invasion of Normandy. Captain Ellen Church received the Air Medal,in recognition of her “meritorious achievement in aerial flight,” the European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal with seven bronze service stars, the American Theater Campaign Medal, and the Victory Medal.
*A generation after the first American women pilots got their licenses.
**A predecessor of United Air Lines
***The requirement that stewardesses have a nursing degree ended with the beginning of World War II, when the military’s need for nurses was more important than the airlines desire to hire nurses as stewardesses.In fact, the military’s need for nurses was so great that Congress debated whether or not to draft nurses in 1945.
“The Blond Hans”
One of the ideas that appears over and over again in the statements made by her contemporaries about Sigrid Schultz is that she “knew everyone.” Working through her letters and draft memoirs, it certainly seemed to be true. I found correspondence from people like novelist Paul Gallico and dancer and choreographer Ted Shawn that made my fan girl heart flutter.
I quickly learned to track down names I didn’t recognize, especially those of German performers and artists. Most of them were famous at the time. And even if they didn’t make it into the final version of the book,* learning about them gave me a richer picture of the world Sigrid moved in.
I had a hard time reducing German actor Hans Albers (1891-1960) down to a single walk-on line.
Albers was a cabaret comic and singer, whose 1928 revue Zieh Dich Aus (Undress Yourself) was one of the hottest shows in Berlin, both in terms of popularity and what Schultz called “spiciness.” He was famous for his clever improvising as well as his charismatic stage presence.
Albers went on to become one of the most popular German movie star between 1930 and his death in 1960. After parts in more than 100 silent films, he starred in the first German talking picture, The Night Belongs to Us (1929)—a romance with a race car theme. Later that year, he had an important role in The Blue Angel, the film which made Marlene Dietrich an international star. Albers found his own breakout role in The Copper (1930), a German-British crime film in which he played Scotland Yard Sergeant Harry Cross.** He became known for roles as a dashing hero in adventure movies and occasional westerns.***
When the Nazis came to power, “the blond Hans,” as he was known, was so popular that the Nazi regime overlooked his long-standing relationship with Jewish actress Hansi Burg for several years.**** Despite the fact that he frequently opposed the Nazis, his acting career flourished under the Third Reich. Instead of playing overtly Nazi heroes, Albers took roles as heroic Germans of the past and romantic leads. After the war, he moved successfully into roles as wise, fatherly figures.
*So many stories got cut in the final big revision before I turned my manuscript in last May. This happens when you need to reduce your word count by 40,000.
**The film was remade in 1958, with Albers once again the the leading role.
*** Thanks to novelist Karl May, pulp-styleWestern adventure were very popular in Germany in the years between the two world wars.
****When it became too dangerous for her to stay in Germany, Burg fled Germany with some help from Sigrid, who arranged for her to marry a Norwegian, Erich Blydt, thereby making her eligible for a visa to Norway. Burg returned to Germany, and Albers, after the war, again with help from Sigrid, who undertook what she described as “a kind of Cupid act.”
****
And speaking of Sigrid Schultz, The Dragon From Chicago is available for pre-order wherever you buy your books. You can get a signed copy for yourself or your favorite tough cookie from my neighborhood bookstore, the Seminary Coop: https://www.semcoop.com/dragon-chicago-untold-story-american-reporter-nazi-germany . Use the special instructions box to tell me how you want it signed.