Books: Uncommon Bawd

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BELLE OUT OF ORDER (341 pp.)—Belle Livingstone—Holt ($4).

The Prince of Wales held the glass of champagne as high as his pudgy arm could reach, but his pretty playmate had unusually long and shapely legs. With a flick of her skirts and a flash of her thighs, she kicked the glittering goblet right out of his hand. His Royal Highness beamed approval. "You have the real American spirit, Miss Livingstone." he announced, and all the gay young lords and their ladies of the evening cheered.

Whatever she had, it was so violently admired by the plutocratic playboys of the Edwardian era that Kansas-born Belle Livingstone was celebrated in the continental press as "The Most Dangerous Woman in Europe." What is more, brags Belle, when her day as a gold digger was done, she did not dispiritedly rest on her shovel, but hurried home and dug herself a sizable niche in U.S. social history as one of the leading figures of the Prohibition era, the Texas Guinan of the champagne trade.

Belle tells all—or. anyway, enough to leave the rest readily imagined—in this ribaldly readable autobiography of an uncommon bawd, which is at the same time a perceptive reminiscence of the gaslight culture in its last wild glare.

The Ideal Woman. "Like Moses,'' Belle begins, "I wasn't born. I was found." She was found one day in 1875, "squalling and squirming" beneath a big sunflower on the outskirts of Emporia, Kans., and carried home by John Ramsay Graham, editor of the Emporia News, who named her Isabel and raised her—except for a brief period when she was kidnaped by some passing Indians—as his daughter. At 17, Isabel saw a performance of Robin Hood, decided then and there that she wanted to be an actress, ran away from home and got a job in the road company of Wang, under the name of Belle Livingstone. When father ordered her home. Belle simply stuck out her well-developed chest in defiance, walked up to the first man she saw—he happened to be a traveling salesman—and murmured: "Will you have an orange?" He allowed as how he would, and within hours they were married. Father went home, and Belle stayed with the show.

She was not much of an actress, and her face was obviously not going to be her fortune, but she had a magnificent body, and within two years of her debut the fact was proclaimed in the Manhattan press, which pronounced her the "ideal woman." Overnight, Belle became The Body of her generation. Reporters wrote paeans to her "poetic legs." Barnum offered her $1,000 a week to star in one of his sideshows. Diamond Jim Brady squired her about. Teddy Roosevelt came to her flat with friends and enjoyed himself so thoroughly that he sent Belle a full set of Haviland china in appreciation.

Suddenly Belle's husband, whom she had divorced for a poor sucker, turned out to be a rich sucker—he died and left her $150,000. Like a shot, Belle was off to Europe, and soon her madcap manners and her saucy wit had won her a place in the social whirl around the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII.