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Born Helene Vasilardi in 1883, Odette Valery was an Italian dancer of Greek parentage who made her début at La Scala (the one in Milan, not the music hall in Paris), in 1898, at the age of fifteen. She was known far and wide as a great beauty, noted for her emerald eyes. She left a trail of broken hearts behind her.
Unlike many of the famous artistes of the period, Mlle Valery was well educated, was fluent in several languages, and competent at the piano.
She soon moved from Italy to Paris, danced at the Folies Bergère, and also at the Casino de Paris, as we can see from our card. Like her contemporaries, the notorious Mata Hari, and the famous Loie Fuller, Mlle. Valery was an interpretive soloist. She sought to recreate the dances of classical Greece (the homeland of her mother and father), in her bare feet, rather than dancing en pointe in a ballet troupe, which she felt had grown "old fashioned."
All three of those famous dancers might have been accused of sensationalism, but after all, they were stage performers who used their wits and talent to get noticed (half of success in show business, some say). Of course, Cleo de Merode was also primarily an interpretive soloist, and did very well performing her own versions of classical Cambodian dance in traditional costume, but perhaps because she never went anywhere without her mother, who jealously guarded her daughter's reputation, she was treated far less harshly by the press.
Odette Valery, on the other hand, was often smeared in the press, for her many lovers, her outspoken character, and later, when down on her luck, for her carelessness with money. She played Cleopatra with a living asp (defanged), and at the height of her fame, in 1910, was earning a thousand dollars a week (a great deal of money at that time).
Even her snakes had a personal groom, Robert, who traveled with them on international tours. They also had names. Hector was the asp, and the two giant cobras were named Sarah and Helene. She even traveled with a tiny green lizard, whom she called her mascot, and allowed to crawl, with apparent affection, all over her face during interviews with the press. It was the groom Robert's job, she said, to go out into the woods and find a particular variety of red ant this lizard liked to eat.
We find plenty of news articles about her, and her snakes, from around 1908-1910, but in 1912, she was found in a terribly impoverished state, very ill, and being watched over by her seven year old son, Gaeton, in a cheap London boarding house. A friend managed to get her back to Paris, but by 1914, at the beginning of the war, she was still destitute. At that point the trail all but disappears.
Millions of people in Europe were displaced in the war, and apparently she was one of them. We've not even found a record of her death, which is odd for so famous a dancer. Only an editorial, quite sympathetic, and poetically written, which appeared in La Renaissance Politique in May of 1914. "Pauvre Femme," or Poor Woman, it was called. The author wrote of her as a fine woman, a talented artist, and described her as having gone mad from the abuse of morphine and ether. The article claimed that she now wandered beneath the trees of Sainte Anne's, a notorious asylum for the insane on the outskirts of Paris. So very sad, and so terribly tragic for her child. Clearly fame and fortune were no more easily handled then, than now.
This lovely card lets us look upon her in happier days, when she was probably between 17 and 20 years old. It was still quite early in her career, and during the time she was performing at the Casino de Paris.
The portrait was taken by Monsieur Ogerau (sometimes Ogereau). We know little about him, but he was certainly willing to indulge in artistic licence, as we must assume it was he, presumably at Mlle. Valery's request, who painted out an inch or two of her waistline on the negative, making her appear particularly wasp-waisted.
Amazing costume! Note that for this photo, despite her reputed preference for bare feet, she is wearing dancing slippers :)
Many thanks to Wikipedia, as always, and to the New York Times, and La Renaissance Politique by way of lecti-ecriture.com.
Please examine our high res scans for detail.
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