La Menken and the First Horse Opera

The term “horse opera” usually refers to the Singing Cowboys and the movie serials of the 1930s. Silent film star William S. Hart coined the term because musical interludes in these films sometimes featured the singing cowboy serenading his horse. In some snooty quarters, the term is used to lump together any entertainment with a Western setting. 

The first real horse opera in Texas was a stage production of Lord Byron’s romantic poem “Mazeppa” in Houston in May of 1839. The April 3, 1839 edition of The Morning Star newspaper noted that a Mr. Lewellen’s “well known and high celebrated horse Timour will appear.” Any production where the horse gets all the advance publicity is a true horse opera. 

Byron’s poem tells of a page who, as punishment for his dalliance with the wife of a proud but much older count, is sentenced to be bound “in nature’s nakedness,” back-to-back, on a wild horse that is then turned loose in the wilderness, pursued by a pack of wolves.

 Poor Mazeppa. 

A Texas woman, Adah Isaacs Menken, often referred to as La Menken or the Great Menken, took the drama on a world tour that made it the most famous horse opera of all time and Menken the most famous woman of her day. At one time she was said to be the most photographed woman in the world and newspapers ran hundreds of photographs to prove it. She was America’s first entertainment celebrity. 

That Menken grew up in Texas is pretty well accepted by historians but beyond that is a tangle of fictions of her own devising. In one version of her childhood she was the daughter of a French nobleman. In another version she was captured by Indians in Texas, aka Cynthia Ann Parker, and taught to ride by a Chief Eagle Eye, but she was rescued (after anywhere from three weeks to three months) by the Texas Rangers. Another version has her growing up as the adopted daughter of Sam Houston. 

She most likely was born in either Memphis or New Orleans with the name Adelaide Bertha Theodore. Though she is often referred to as a student at Nacogdoches University there is no evidence she ever cracked a book at the school. Thomas Peck Ochiltree, a Texas Ranger, soldier, and Congressman, reportedly knew her well in Nacogdoches and had a teenage crush on her until she stole his boots one Christmas Eve. 

She also shows up in Liberty in the 1850s where she befriended local journalists and staged readings of Shakespeare and published poems and essays in the “Liberty Gazette.” A Liberty resident recalled seeing her and her sister Josephine perform in Galveston. Adah’s performance was memorable because she performed her role wearing pink tights. The title character in the movie Heller in Pink Tights is said to be inspired by her. 

Adah probably met her first husband, Alexander Isaac Menken, in Galveston where they were members of Neitsch’s Theater company. They eloped to Livingston and were married in that city on April 3, 1856. The two soon divorced and she remarried several times, though not always with the benefit of a legal divorce from the previous husband. She used her first husband’s name throughout her stage career as Adah Isaacs Menken. 

With him she toured the South and West but with little success until she was cast in the lead role of “Mazeppa.” She made her first appearance as Mazeppa at the Green Street Theater in Albany, New York before the largest audience in the history of that theater. She performed the role in San Francisco, England and in New York City where she played to a packed house at Wood’s Broadway Theater that was “jammed to suffocation.”  Menken’s performance in Paris in 1866 has been described as the greatest triumph ever accorded an American actress.

Adah Isaacs Menken fell ill after a performance in Paris and died at the tender age of 33, penniless by some accounts. As she lay dying she wrote these words: “I am lost to art and life, yet when all is said and done have I not at my age tasted more of life than lost women who live to be a hundred.”