Before Bruno, there was Sissi

Please forgive the comparison. But with the current hype over the outrageous Austrian gay fashionista, one has to bring forth the story of the true queen, or rather empress, of fashion and beauty who made headlines during the last decades of the Habsburg monarchy. Empress Elisabeth, fondly known as Sisi to her family, became a cult figure after she died in 1898 and even became the subject of Sissi, a movie trilogy starring Romy Schneider. The movie which portrays her as a fairy tale princess actually contributed to the legend of Sissi which persists to this day — with books, a musical, and countless tourist souvenirs adding to the merry mix. So much so that a Sisi Museum was created in the Hofburg, the residence, seat of government and administrative center of the Habsburg Empire in Vienna. The museum hopes to shed light on the mystery surrounding this fascinating woman who withdrew from court life early on and had been practically away from public view until the day of her tragic assassination.

With some very personal objects on display, the museum conveys a complex picture of this tragedienne. Born on Christmas Eve in 1837, Sisi seemed to have had a very carefree childhood in Munich and the Possenhofen Castle on Lake Starnberg. She was the daughter of Duke Maximilian and Duchess Ludovika of Bavaria. Maximilian was typical of his Wittelsbach clan: freedom-loving, eccentric and unreliable, albeit charming. He spent a lot of time traveling, always on the run from everything that looked remotely like official duties. Ludovika devoted herself actively to their seven children, although she started late in instilling discipline and introducing them to aristocratic life.

A BRIDE AT 15

In the summer of 1853, Sisi happens to accompany her mother and elder sister Helene to Bad Ischl, to celebrate the birthday of her maternal first cousin, Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria. Helene was to become Franz Joseph’s bride but the emperor ends up falling in love with the shy 15-year-old Elisabeth. The betrothal ceremony is arranged, thrusting Sisi into the public eye and overwhelming her with all the attention given to a future empress. This marks the beginning of her unease and apprehension of the Viennese court. She now enters the world stage with the inevitable relinquishing of her personal freedom.

Elisabeth reluctantly fulfills her official duties as empress, showing distaste for the pomp and ceremony as well as the rigid, hierarchical structures and intrigues of the Viennese court. She was permanently beleaguered by court ladies — ladies of the highest nobility, by whom she felt watched and spied on. She couldn’t stand official occasions where she felt she was being paraded “like a horse in harness.” In general, she was suffering from the loss of her freedom which she described in her diary:

“I have awakened in a dungeon with chains on my hands and with my longing ever stronger. And freedom, you turned away from me!”

A Cult Of Beauty

Reacting to the constraints of court, Elisabeth took refuge in the cult of her own beauty. Regarded as one of the most beautiful women of her time, she was very conscious of this status, thus adopting a very strict beauty regimen, which she adhered to religiously and which dominated not only her daily routine but a large part of her life. Bathing with olive oil was de rigueur. She had all kinds of skin crèmes, containing a range of ingredients from crushed frankincense to slug slime, some taking up to 12 hours of mixing to prepare, and even used veal meat as a facial. Proud of her thick, ankle-length hair, two to three hours of combing and dressing were required every day. Once a month, her hair was washed with a mixture of egg yolks and cognac, a procedure that took the better part of a day. She would in fact say, “I am a slave to my hair.” Her hairdresser, Franziska (Fanny) Feifalik, who was responsible for all the elaborate hairstyles, had to put on white gloves and was forbidden to wear rings when dressing her hair. After dressing, braiding and pinning up the hair for hours, the fallen out hairs had to be presented in a silver bowl, each lost hair bringing about a look of reproach from the Empress. Her niece would remark mockingly, that “the hairs upon Aunt Sisi’s head are numbered.”

Elisabeth was mad about dieting and had a mania for exercising as well as sports like horseback-riding and hiking. She was an accomplished equestrian, training as hard as a professional sportswoman for years to become one of the best. She weighed herself daily and was constantly dieting to preserve her youthful figure: raw steak with just milk or orange juice was standard. She was practically anorexic, trying to maintain a waistline of 20 inches which was reduced to 16, thanks to elaborate, punishing corsets which she had to be laced into. This infuriated her overbearing mother-in-law who wanted to see her son’s wife pregnant with the future heir and not ridiculously bound for the sake of vanity. To keep her body supple, she performed a daily program of gymnastic exercises with wall bars and rings hanging from the doorframe of her dressing room. For more intensive exercise, the empress had a gym at her disposal which housed a larger selection of equipment. To preserve her slimness, she would sleep with vinegar-soaked compresses on her body. So when it came to fashion, she was naturally very particular about the fit. Her riding habit, in fact, would require a tailor to sew the skirt on to the tight-fitting bodice each time she had to wear it so that there was not the slightest crease or wrinkle around her tiny waist. All these obsessive activities promptly scandalized court opinion and made her the favorite topic for gossip.

An Unhappy Marriage

As if being the laughing stock of Viennese aristocracy wasn’t enough, her mother-in-law Sophie took over the control of her life. Her three children were taken from her and Sisi was barely allowed to see them, putting her in deep depression and illness. It was only after two years of cure and lodging in Madeira, Corfu and Bavaria from 1860-1861 that Sisi was able to return with new confidence to Vienna. She decided to take control of political issues, taking interest in Hungary, the very troubled neighbor of Austria. In many ways, she liked Hungary more than Austria, and perhaps the fact that her mother-in-law hated Hungarians reinforced her fondness for it more, even surrounding herself with Hungarian ladies-in-waiting and insisting that her attendants speak Hungarian which she spoke fluently. In 1867, she was crowned Queen of Hungary. Her very liberal ideas, her call for a republic structure and her efforts for the poor and troublesome made her very popular. But despite her commitment to Hungary, politics was really not her calling so by 1870 she decided to withdraw from public life and tried to live the life of a private person.

As she grew older, Sisi grew increasingly bitter and withdrew into her own world. Her marriage was a source of unhappiness. Franz Joseph was a very busy man, struggling to fight revolutionary and separatist tendencies in the empire. Although the emperor would show affection, this was not done without being overly critical about her ways. He was also a very simple man, quite boring actually, happy with spartan furnishings and even basic comfort food, thereby cramping her style and her predilection for the opulent and luxurious. Eventually, he started womanizing and this gave her more reason to be seldom seen in Vienna, traveling restlessly around Europe as often as she could and visiting countries no other Northern royal went to at that time like Morocco, Algeria, Turkey, and Egypt. Traveling became her purpose in life. “If I arrived at a place and knew that I could never leave it again, the whole stay would become hell despite being paradise,” she once confided to her Greek teacher.

She also engaged herself in writing poetry, inspired by her favorite German poet, Heinrich Heine. She would write about her journeys, classical Greek and romantic themes (She had intensive studies of both ancient and modern Greek, immersing herself in Homer’s Illiad and Odyssey), as well as the ironic mockery of the Habsburg dynasty. Shaping her own fantasy world, she referred to herself as Titania, Shakespeare’s Fairy Queen:

Titania shall not go where people walk

This world, where no one understands her,

Where hundred thousand gazers her beleaguer,

Whispering and prying, “Look, the fool, look there!”

Where jealousy and envy sneak her out,

To distort her every action,

She returns homebound to those regions,

Where allied, kinder souls abide.

Death In Geneva

In the end, Sisi could never escape the strokes of fate that accompanied her life. In 1857, her first daughter Sophie died at only two years old. Ten years later, her brother-in-law Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico was shot by anti-monarchy insurgents. His wife, Charlotte, went insane and spent the last 50 years of her life in uninhabited royal houses and psychiatric clinics. One of Sisi’s closest friends, Ludwig II of Bavaria, also became mentally ill, was locked away, and drowned under mysterious circumstances in Lake Starnberg.

When her only son Rudolf committed suicide with his loved one, Baroness Mary Vetsera in 1889, she never recovered from the blow. Antisocial and unapproachable, she took to wearing black with mourning jewelry in jet, onyx or black wooden and glass beads. Fans, veils, and parasols became indispensable accessories to further shield herself from the world. Increasingly growing lonely, she experienced the death of her sister Sophie, who died during a fire at a charity bazaar in Paris in 1897.

On top of all the deaths in her family through the years, Sisi had her own thoughts of suicide, which she expressed in her poems. So her trip to Geneva on that fateful day in 1898 was almost a death wish. The assassin, Italian anarchist Luigi Lucheni, encountered a sad, broken woman at the end of her life. Destiny had finally caught up with Sisi when he thrust that knife to her heart as she was about to board the steamship at the pier. Lucheni was actually after a prince from the House of Orléans but failed to find him so turned to Elisabeth instead because, as he confessed later, “I wanted to kill a royal. It did not matter which one.” Ironically, the royal he killed didn’t care much for her status and even spent most of her life trying to escape it.

The circumstances of Sisi’s death made it doubly tragic, and happening at this point in her life made her immortal, turning her into a legend: All the criticisms at court and among the aristocracy were forgotten. Having retreated from public life for so long, what remains in the memory are her early years as a sweet, loving wife, a devoted mother, a benevolent empress. Although she died at age 60, there is even the impression that she died young, since virtually nothing was known about her later life. Ernst Marischka’s 1955-1957 film trilogy Sissi helped perpetuate this myth. The star who played her, Romy Schneider, in fact, hated her role saying, “It stuck to me like porridge!” Luckily, she was able to redeem herself when she played the role again in Luchino Visconti’s 1972 film Ludwig II. This time, she was portrayed as a distant, capricious Elisabeth. Definitely a more convincing picture of the beautiful, unapproachable empress who seemed to be always yearning for death or eternally searching for some unattainable solace.

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Aside from the Sisi Museum in the Hofburg, related museums in Vienna include the Imperial Apartments at the Hofburg and the Schönbrunn Palace, both residences of the Empress; and the Hofmobiliendepot, a storage space for Habsburg furniture not seen in the other residences, including those used for the Sissi movie trilogy. Other residences are the imperial villa in Ischl, Austria; the Achilleon in Corfu, Greece which Sisi built in 1890; and her summer residence in Gödöllo, Hungary.