May 16: Marie Antoinette’s Wedding, Hollywood’s First Night Out, and a Woman on Top of the World

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On the evening of May 16, 1770, a fourteen-year-old Austrian archduchess named Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna was married to the fifteen-year-old French Dauphin Louis-Auguste in the Palace of Versailles, and the ceremony was so spectacular — thirty-thousand spectators, fireworks over the fountains, a supper for the royal family watched by crowds of ordinary people who had been admitted to the palace on a kind of aristocratic open-door policy — that twelve people were killed in a stampede in Paris later that night when the public celebrations overflowed the available space. The marriage that would define both their lives, and end both their lives, began with a crowd crush at the party.

She had not been called Marie Antoinette before she crossed the border. At a formal ceremony on a small island in the Rhine, on a bridge between France and Austria that was technically neither country, she had been stripped of all her Austrian possessions, including her dog and her German-speaking servants, and handed over to a French household. The procedure was called the “handover of the bride.” The island ceremony was designed to emphasize the completeness of the transfer: she arrived as an Austrian; she left as a French Dauphine. She was fourteen years old, had never been to France, and did not speak fluent French. The island in the Rhine is the last place she was purely herself before history got hold of her.

The Dauphine and the Dauphin and the Problem of Succession

The marriage was a diplomatic transaction of the first importance. The Seven Years’ War had ended in 1763 with France’s humiliation and the near-collapse of the old alliance system. Austria and France, traditionally enemies, had attempted a “diplomatic revolution” in the 1750s — they became allies — and the marriage of the Dauphin to an Austrian archduchess was designed to cement this new arrangement at the highest possible level. The Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa had sixteen children; she deployed them in marriages across Europe like pieces in a very high-stakes game. Marie Antoinette was her youngest daughter, and France was the prize posting.

Louis-Auguste was shy, awkward, passionate about hunting and locksmithing — he was genuinely skilled at locks, made them as a hobby, kept a forge in his apartments — and apparently incapable, for seven years after their marriage, of consummating it. The reasons are disputed: some historians have argued he needed a minor surgical procedure, others that he was simply inexperienced and anxious, and others that the couple’s emotional relationship had not developed sufficiently. The lack of children became a political crisis. The queen was blamed, as queens always are. “Madame Deficit” was one of the kinder names the pamphlets used.

Marie Antoinette’s reputation has swung wildly in the two and a half centuries since her execution on October 16, 1793. For most of the nineteenth century she was either a tragic martyr (royalist version) or a symbol of aristocratic excess (republican version). In the twentieth century she became something else: a study in the impossibility of her position. She was sent to France as a child to be a political instrument, given no education in the political role she was supposed to play, surrounded by a court where every relationship was a potential calculation, and then blamed for the structural contradictions of an ancien régime that had been unstable for generations before she arrived. She probably did not say “let them eat cake.” The line appears in Rousseau’s Confessions, attributed to “a great princess,” years before Marie Antoinette arrived in France. It attached to her anyway, because the story needed someone to say it.

Hollywood Gives Itself a Prize (And Gets the Date Wrong)

On May 16, 1929, in the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences held its first awards ceremony. Two hundred and seventy people attended. The dinner cost five dollars a plate. The ceremony lasted fifteen minutes. The winners had been announced three months earlier, in February, to give newspapers time to prepare their stories; there was no suspense and no envelope, just Emil Jannings collecting his Best Actor award early because he was sailing back to Germany and could not stay for the actual ceremony. The statue had not yet acquired its nickname “Oscar” — that came later, probably in 1931, probably from Academy librarian Margaret Herrick, who said it reminded her of her uncle Oscar. The Academy disputes this origin story. Most good nicknames have disputed origins.

The first Best Picture winner was Wings, a silent film about World War I aerial combat. The second-most celebrated film of that first ceremony was Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, directed by F.W. Murnau, which won an award for “Unique and Artistic Picture” — a category that existed only that year, for that film, and was then abolished. The Academy decided that distinguishing between artistic and commercial achievement was too complicated and collapsed everything into a single Best Picture. The film that won Best Picture was not the most artistically significant film. This has remained more or less true ever since.

The other award that year worth noting: Emil Jannings, the first person to win the Best Actor award, went back to Germany, made films for the Nazi regime, and became one of the most enthusiastic collaborators in German cinema. His Oscar sits in the context of all of that now. The Academy does not take back awards. Emil Jannings is in the record books. The award is for the performance, not the person. This is a comfortable position that the Academy has had to revisit, without fully revising, many times in the century since.

The Roosevelt Hotel, where that first ceremony was held, is on the National Register of Historic Places. The pool where Marilyn Monroe used to swim is still there. These threads keep crossing.

Junko Tabei, and the Altitude at Which the Rules Change

On May 16, 1975, a thirty-five-year-old Japanese mountaineer named Junko Tabei became the first woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest, and the thirty-sixth person overall to do so since Hillary and Norgay in 1953. She was the leader of a fifteen-woman Japanese expedition, the first all-female Everest expedition, financed in part through piano lessons Tabei gave at home because corporate sponsors were initially reluctant to fund a women’s team. Twelve days before she reached the summit, an avalanche buried her camp at night; she was unconscious for six minutes before her Sherpa, Ang Tsering, dug her out. She continued climbing.

Tabei had been climbing since she was ten years old, when a teacher took her class up Mount Nasu in Japan. She founded a women’s climbing club in 1969 because the men’s clubs she tried to join didn’t want female members. She is not the figure who comes to mind when people think of Everest heroism — that figure is almost always male, almost always Western — but her ascent required everything the male ascents required plus twelve years of institutional resistance and an avalanche. She described the summit in characteristically understated terms: she was too tired to take in the view properly. She wanted to go down.

After Everest, Tabei went on to complete the Seven Summits — the highest peak on each continent — and devoted the latter part of her life to environmental advocacy, particularly around the growing problem of waste on Everest’s slopes. She died in 2016 of peritoneal cancer. The International Astronomical Union named a minor planet after her: 6897 Tabei. It orbits between Mars and Jupiter, which seems appropriate for someone who spent her life going higher than she was supposed to.

Henry Fonda, Liberace, and the Register of May Births

Two performers born on May 16 in different years illuminate the opposite poles of American entertainment in the twentieth century. Henry Fonda, born May 16, 1905, in Grand Island, Nebraska, built a career on restraint — on the tight jaw and the controlled voice and the sense of a man holding something back. His Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath (1940), his Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine (1946), his Juror #8 in 12 Angry Men (1957), his Frank in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968, cast against type as a cold-blooded killer) — these are performances built on economy and stillness. He won his first and only competitive Academy Award, for On Golden Pond, at age seventy-six, four months before he died. His daughter Jane accepted it for him; he was too ill to attend.

Liberace, born Wladziu Valentino Liberace on May 16, 1919, in West Allis, Wisconsin, built his career on the opposite principle: more of everything, always. More candelabras, more rhinestones, more fur, more rings, more teeth in the smile. He was a technically accomplished classical pianist who understood that his audiences wanted spectacle alongside the music, and he gave them spectacle on a scale that has not been equaled by a solo performer before or since. His Las Vegas shows featured him descending to the stage by wire, in costumes that weighed over two hundred pounds. He drove a car covered in mirrors. He owned eighty-seven cars. He sued the British tabloid columnist Cassandra (William Connor) for implying he was homosexual in 1956 and won — and then, decades later, sued a former live-in companion to conceal the same information. He died of AIDS-related complications in 1987, and his doctor initially refused to list AIDS as the cause of death. The Liberace Museum in Las Vegas, which housed his costumes and pianos and cars, closed in 2010 due to insufficient visitors. The building is now a storage facility.

Also on This Day

• 1868: The United States Senate acquits President Andrew Johnson by a single vote on articles of impeachment arising from his violation of the Tenure of Office Act. Johnson had fired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton without congressional approval. The acquittal preserves the presidency from what might have become a legislature-dominated system of government, but Johnson’s administration is effectively over; he is not renominated. The precedent set — that removing a president requires not just a majority but a supermajority, and that policy disagreements alone are insufficient grounds — shapes every subsequent impeachment debate.
• 1960: Theodore Maiman demonstrates the first working laser at Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, California. The laser uses a synthetic ruby crystal and a photographic flash lamp. Maiman’s paper announcing the discovery is rejected by Physical Review Letters on the grounds that there have been too many papers about masers (the laser’s microwave predecessor) recently. He publishes in Nature instead. The laser goes on to enable CD players, eye surgery, fiber optic communications, barcode scanners, and weapons targeting systems — a range of applications that Maiman did not predict and the rejecting editor could not have imagined.
• 1966: China’s Cultural Revolution officially begins with the publication of the “May 16 Circular,” a directive from Mao Zedong purging moderates from the Communist Party leadership and calling for the elimination of “representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the Party.” The Cultural Revolution will last, in various phases, until 1976, resulting in the persecution of an estimated 1.5 million people and the deaths of hundreds of thousands. Libraries are burned, universities are closed, intellectuals are sent to labor camps or killed. The May 16 Circular is the document that starts it.
• 1988: Surgeon General C. Everett Koop releases a report concluding that nicotine is as addictive as heroin and cocaine. The tobacco industry spends the next several decades arguing otherwise in court. Koop, a conservative evangelical Christian appointed by Ronald Reagan, turned out to be one of the most independent and consequential Surgeons General in American history — Reagan expected a culture warrior; he got a scientist who followed the evidence wherever it led, including to the AIDS crisis, which Koop addressed with a directness that horrified his original supporters.

May 16 keeps returning to the theme of display and its costs: the wedding that began a revolution, the ceremony that began an industry of ceremonies, the climber who had to prove the obvious. Marie Antoinette performed the role she was given and was destroyed by it. Liberace performed the role he invented and was destroyed for it, and then was erased from it. Junko Tabei climbed the mountain and went home and gave piano lessons. The summit was not the point. The point was being allowed to try.

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