Uncommon Bawd

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.

Around the World on -L-5. Belle was a born courtesan, and she was proud of her profession. Her definition of the term owes less to Webster's dictionary ("a loose woman") than it does to Larousse's (a woman of "wit and elegance"), and she is historically correct in her estimate of the social importance of the courtesan in European society before World War I. It was the era of the marriage of convenience, and wives were apt to fit Lord Beresford's description of "county" women--their pearls were real, but their hair was a mess. The courtesan, on the other hand, was elegant, intelligent, well informed and equipped by temperament and training for the management of men and money.

Belle herself was less interested in money than she was in fun. She was delighted when Bert Swift "began to spend some of his pork fat on me," but she was always ready to go racing off to Arabia with only one maid and 85 hats to dynamite for turquoise in the desert, or to make a casual bet that she could go around the world on -L-5. She won that bet. On the trip she dined with Lord Kitchener in a dahabeah on the Nile, made an expedition by elephant through the Ceylonese jungle, married an Italian count in Japan, found herself pregnant, and back in England, got news that her husband was dead.

Was Belle downhearted? Not in the least. She had the baby, wrote a book, married a millionaire from Cleveland, later switched to the middle-aged son of a British banker and ran through his fortune in about a dozen years. "Belle." he said gently one day, "we have no more money." Gently, she left him. Before the year was out she was consorting with streetwalkers in London's slums and sleeping at night on the Thames Embankment.

Forbidden Fruit. In 1927, Belle landed in Manhattan--"fifty-two and fat." There was only $2 in her purse, but there was plenty of gin in the old girl yet. Within six months she opened the first of her three speakeasies, in a mansion on East 52nd Street--it was not a saloon, she insisted, but a salon. For entertainment Belle featured such "continental bizarrie as will be cayenne to the jaded mental tongue." For refreshment she offered the usual bootleg booze, champagne (at $30 a bottle) for the discriminating. One night she dared to charge Al Capone $1,000 for a round of soft drinks. But in 1931 the Feds closed down her "Country Club" on 58th Street, caught buxom Belle as she tried to skedaddle across the roofscape in red pajamas, and saw her sentenced to 30 days in a Harlem jail, where the warden thoughtfully put her in the prostitutes' ward "because he thought I would be more comfortable there."

That, as far as Belle was concerned, was the end of the glory road, but she lived on for another quarter-century--"still preferring forbidden fruit, still daring to pick it." and writing her memoirs with the help -of English Teacher Myra Chipman. Two years ago, in a "basement hovel" in Manhattan's East Fifties. Belle died at the age of 82, having designed her own tombstone with the inscription: "This is the only stone I have left unturned."

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