Lalla Rookh

Lalla Rookh, has one of the more layered histories in the circus. Her real name has variously been reported as "Louise Montague," "Laura Keene Stuart," and "Polly Stewart." Before entering the circus ring, she was variously a stage actress and vaudeville performer in New York, managed by R.B. Caverly. Around 1876, M.B. Leavitt, a theater entrepreneur and manager credited with being the first to build a touring burlesque troupe met with Caverly regarding a beautiful young talent whom Caverly was sure Leavitt would want in his theater troupe. According to Leavitt he "was told to pick out the prettiest one I saw coming out of the theater. I did so, and it was the one the agent referred to." Despite his troupe already being filled, Leavitt hired the woman whom he met as Polly Stewart and renamed "Louise Montague" and she appeared in his shows for the next three years, during which she would marry her first husband, comedian Paul Allen.

After departing Leavitt's show, Montague signed on with Henry Minder's New Theater in New York's Bowery district, appearing as Josephine in HMS Pinnafore in 1879. Two years later, she found herself thrust into a different kind of limelight when she "won" circus owner Adam Forepaugh's $10,000 beauty contest" and was named "the most beautiful woman in the world." In reality, of course, the contest was more or less fixed. Rather than receive the advertised prize money, Montague had agreed to a salary of around $75 - $100 a week. Forepaugh renamed his star "Lalla Rookh" after a character in Thomas Moore's poem of the same name.

In Forepaugh's employ, Lalla Rookh became the main attraction of the circus's parade, one spectator even falling out of a second story window attempting to get a glimpse of the "ten thousand dollar beauty." During another reported incident, a crowd broke through the window of a Chicago Western Union office struggling to get a look at her. During her two year tenure with Forepaugh, the show averaged a quarter of a million dollars each season, enough to make her employer a rich man, a fact that did not go unnoticed by the performer herself. In 1882 she filed two suits against Forepaugh over the matter of her salary, one for 32 weeks backpay at $75 a week for which she was awarded $150 and the other for the advertised $10,000 in prize money. The prize money case was dismissed due to the failure of a material witness to appear but Stewart would return to sue Forepaugh (all while still in his employ) three more times, once for further owed back pay and again for damages ensuing from a fall from an elephant for which she would receive another $50. Her final breach of contract suit against Forepaugh stemmed from her refusal to tour with the circus as she had been promised a private state room and found upon arrival that this was not the case. That same year she left the circus and returned to the New York stage.

Montague had a successful stage career, touring the eastern U.S., notably performing in several Gilbert and Sullivan operettas including starting as Yum-Yum in The Mikado. Louise Montague died in 1910 at the age of 51 leaving behind a son, Henry Montague and little else, as she was, like many circus performers, nearly destitute in the end, which M.B. Leavitt who remained a close friend up until her death attributes to her "charitable inclinations." Her only death notice was written by her own hand, only days before her passing after a period of illness. "Louise M. Montague, died at her residence, Manhattan Ave." While her final years were spent in obscurity and near poverty, for two seasons, Lalla Rookh was one of the most famous women in the country.