First Lady Elizabeth Monroe

Who Was The First Lady Gaga?

Southampton - Marilyn Monroe , Elizabeth Taylor , Angelina Jolie , Lindsay Lohan , just about every glamorous and scandalous movie star who has ever made a career by making headlines owes a debt to a woman whose "bad girl" behavior would have left all of them in the dust.

This woman appeared as the nude star of stage shows, dated powerful men, blazed through five husbands, including the world bareknuckle, heavyweight boxing champ and another who was a leading intellectual. She set fashion trends, inspired famous writers to create fictional characters based on her real life, was rumored to be bisexual and shocked the popular culture into following her every move. What's more, she lived more than 100 years ago.

Adah Isaacs Menken was the first media celebrity, who was known around the world as "The Naked Lady" because her stage show featured her nude (in a sheer body stocking). Her star power inspired poets like Walt Whitman and writers like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle , who used Menken as the basis for the classic Sherlock Holmes supporting character of Irene Adler. Her popularity was fueled by a new advent of the period, mass circulation newspapers. Their reporters couldn't wait to write about her latest adventure, according to biographers Michael and Barbara Foster , who call her the originator of the modern celebrity femme fatale.

"Menken was an original who pioneered in several areas we now take for granted," said the Fosters, authors of the newly published "A Dangerous Woman: The Life, Loves and Scandals of Adah Isaacs Menken," 1835-1868. "Adah invented 'stardom' in the modern, media-driven sense, making use of the newly invented newspaper, the telegraph, photography, railroads and steamships to become the first global superstar - number one on Broadway, the rage of gold rush San Francisco, the toast of Victorian London and Paris. Onstage, Adah risked her life every evening in the Civil War sensation "Mazeppa," in which apparently stripped naked she rode up a four-story stage mountain tied to a stallion. The mix of sexuality and danger made her the Civil War siren, the highest paid actress in the world, and caused her death at 33.

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Elizabeth Kortright was born in New York City in 1768 and married James Monroe at age 17.  The family made their home in Virginia, but spent several years overseas while James Madison served as U.S. Foreign Minister to Great Britain, France, and Spain.  She became a popular figure in France, where she was affectionately called la belle Americane Her time spent in European diplomatic circles influenced her sense of proper protocol for the White House, to which she brought a European stateliness and formality.  Their youngest daughter, Maria, was the first presidential child to be married in the White House, in a small, private ceremony.  When Elizabeth and James Monroe left the White House, they returned to Oak Hill, the family estate in Virginia, where she lived for the remainder of her life. On January 1, 1818, Elizabeth and James Monroe held a grand New Year’s Day reception marking the reopening of the White House, which was rebuilt after its burning at the hands of the British in 1814.  The couple supplied some of their own furniture to the government because the White House was almost empty when they moved in.  This French Empire style furniture imparted the feeling of formality that they considered appropriate for the Executive Mansion.  Nine pieces remain in the White House today.