Suddenly, in 1889, all these high hopes and promises came to earth. After some rumblings and rumorings at Schoenbrunn, it was announced that Johann Salvator had petitioned the emperor for permission to resign all rank and title, sever his official connection with the royal house, and even give up his knighthood in the Order of the Golden Fleece. The petitioner also asked for the right to call himself Johann Orth, after the estate and castle on the Gmündensee, which was the favorite abode of the prince and of his aged mother. All these requests were officially granted and confirmed by the emperor, and so the man John Orth came into being.
The first of the two Orth mysteries lies concealed behind the official records of this strange resignation from rank and honor. Even to-day, after Orth has been missing for a whole generation, after all those who might have been concerned in keeping secret the motives and measures of those times have been gathered to the dust, and after the empire itself has been dissolved into its defeated components, the facts in the matter cannot be stated with any confidence. There are two principal versions of the affair, and both will have to be given so that the reader may make his own choice. The popular or romantic account deserves to be considered first.
In the eighties the stage of Vienna was graced by several handsome young women of the name Stübel. One of them, Lori, achieved considerable operatic distinction. Another sailed to New York with her brother and appeared in operetta and in musical comedy at the old Casino. The youngest of these sisters was Ludmilla Stübel, commonly called Millie, and on that account sometimes, erroneously, Emilie.
This daring and charming girl began her career in a Viennese operetta chorus and rose to the rank of principal. She was not, so far as I can gather from the contemporary newspapers, remarkable for voice or dramatic ability, but her “surpassingly voluptuous beauty and piquant manners” won her almost limitless attention and gave her a popularity that reached across the Atlantic. In the middle eighties Fräulein Stübel appeared at the Thalia Theater in the Bowery, New York, then the shrine of German comic opera in the United States, creating the rôles of Bettina in “The Mascot” and Violette in “The Merry War.”
The New York Herald, reviewing her American career a few years later, said: “In New York she became somewhat notorious for her risqué costumes. On one occasion Fräulein Stübel attended the Arion Ball in male costume, and created a scene when ejected. This conduct seems to have ended her career in the United States.”
This beautiful and spirited plebeian swam into the ken of Johann Salvator, of Austria, in the fall of 1888, when that impetuous prince had already been dismissed from the army and his other affairs were gathering to the storm that broke some months afterward. Catastrophic events followed rapidly.
~~ MILLIE STÜBEL ~~
In January, 1889, Prince Rudolf was found dead in the hunting lodge at Mayerling, with the Baroness Marie Vetsera, to whom the heir of a hundred kings is said to have been passionately devoted, and with whom he may have died in a suicide pact, though it has been said the crown prince and his sweetheart were murdered by persons whose identity has been sedulously concealed. This mysterious fatality robbed the dispirited Johann Salvator of his closest and most powerful friend. It may have had a good deal to do with what followed.
A few months later Johann Salvator married morganatically his stage beauty. It was now, after the lapse of a few months, that he resigned all rank, title, and privileges, left Austria with his wife, and married her civilly in London.