Why I Started Chasing Bad Girls, #9 (Catherine the Great)

Catherine the Great had a taste for handsome young men. She called her boyfriends “favorites,” and she had quite a few of them. The sweetest one of all was a twenty-one-year-old soldier in the royal guard, Alexander Lanskoi, who fell desperately in love with the fifty-year-old empress. She was in love with him, too, though she didn’t take him seriously at first because he was so young.


As for me, I’m forty-one and the boy I met on the dance floor, Dave, is twenty-five. “I’m not so sure I should see him again,” I tell Denise. “I just want to live in the moment, and last night was a moment that has passed.”

“Oh, that’s not right, Joyce,” she says. “That’s not in the spirit of the free-party movement. You have to call Dave because you felt a connection with him.”

So. I call Dave, and we arrange to meet again in Leicester, where he lives. During the journey there I wonder what I’m doing. A few days later, on the third anniversary of my marriage to Jack, I’m still with Dave, lying under a thin duvet on a lumpy, sheet-free mattress.

Kent is concerned. The Bad Girls Project was his idea, but my interest in Dave is a sign that I’ve gone overboard. I’m so immersed in the bad girls that they’re always with me now, like brushing my teeth or thinking about what I’m going to have for lunch.
“I’m worried about you, Joycie,” he says. “Who is this Dancefloor Dave character, anyway?”

“He’s my guy, that’s who. He likes football, music and people.”

“Isn’t he a bit too young for you?”

My answer is that Catherine the Great liked younger man—and I want to spend as much time as possible with Dave. He’s fun. It’s uncomplicated. And Dave feels so familiar, like I’ve known him forever. There’s no explaining it, and Dave isn’t a big talker. When he does talk, his blunt honesty makes me laugh.

“I’ve never met another kisser who matches me so well,” I gush.

“Oh, is it a long list?”

Sadly, my time in London is coming to a close because Kent won’t fund my bad-girls research anymore. Is he jealous of Dave? Wonderfully, I don’t particularly care; I can well take care of myself.

One night, as Dave and I are lying around in Kent’s bed on Elgin Crescent, we get an unexpected phone call. Kent has just returned from a trip, is driving home from the airport, and wants us to be out of the flat. We throw our bags together, spend a few weeks at a trashy hotel in Bayswater, and then we say goodbye. Dave’s heading off for a year of travel in Southeast Asia and New Zealand.

He asks me to come with him, but I can’t because I’m broke. And very sad. I go back to Chicago to look for a job, and Dave promises to come see me there in nine months’ time. I don’t believe him.

I throw myself back into my research, focusing on Catherine the Great. Her first marriage was not for love, but for the good of the empire, which was fine for Russia, but not for Catherine. Yes, she was a power-hungry monarch with a brilliant political career, but I’m more interested in her love for a much younger man who simply made her happy.

Catherine couldn’t quite believe that Alexander Lanskoi was seriously in love with her, and because she thought she was in control of the situation, she went off on a dating binge in search of a new favorite. When Alexander got wind of it, he freaked out and showed up at her chambers, sobbing. She let him in reluctantly, and he told her he couldn't believe she could just walk away from a love that made them both so happy. How could she do that to him, to them? Stunned and amazed, Catherine took her baby back into her arms, loving him for the rest of his short life.

I go off on a dating binge of my own in Chicago, trying to forget Dave by going out with guys who remind me of him: a British man, a few younger men and a dancer who’s having a fight with his girlfriend. Time passes, one of the younger blokes becomes my boyfriend, I email Dave to tell him the news, and I get a phone call from Australia.

“I can't believe that you could love somebody else the way you love me,” Dave sobs.

“You can’t just walk away from our love. When I’m with you, I feel normal.”

“But you disappeared on me for nine months,” I sob back. “What was I supposed to think? I had to get on with my life.”

“I can get on a plane tonight, and I’ll see you in Chicago in two days.”

“Oh, god.”

“I’m going to book the ticket today.”

“Oh, god.”

Dave comes to Chicago, we remember why we love each other, we decide that being together could never work, we break up, Dave leaves, we miss each other, he returns, we break up, we spend a holiday in France, we go to England, we break up. In between, we call each other and have phone sex and cry. For a year we go on like this.

How Catherine the Great Got That Way

A bad girl isn’t born, she’s made. We’ve seen it over the course of Western history: a bright and pretty yet relatively unremarkable young woman finds herself stuck in an awful situation—she may come from a crazy family or crushing poverty, or perhaps she’s locked in a disastrous marriage—and she reaches a crisis point that drives her to find an exit. As she journeys alone into the world, she discovers that the things good girls are taught to shun, meaning illicit sex, dirty money and self-serving power, are the same things that will save her.

This discovery marks the moment of her becoming a bad girl.

Catherine the Great, Empress of All the Russias, is a classic example. Until the age of fifteen, she was a sweet-natured princess from a tiny German state who spent her time going to church, learning French and entertaining youthful fantasies of love and marriage. But all that changed when Her Majesty the Empress of Russia decided that the girl was the perfect match for her first cousin, the future czar.

Married to a Mental Defective
As a result, the princess found herself lost in a far-off land and married to a mentally defective degenerate who refused to consummate their union. On their wedding night in August of 1745, the Empress Elizabeth herself led the virgin bride to the couple’s bedchamber, a pink velvet fantasyland, where servants dressed her in satin and lace and tucked her into bed. The girl waited for her new husband, and she waited, and then she waited some more.

“My dear husband did not attend to me at all,” Catherine recalled later in her memoirs. “I yawned, I suffered from boredom, having nobody with whom I could exchange a word.”

In the wee hours of the morning, Peter stumbled into the room, drunk, and collapsed on the bed with his boots on. There was no sex that night, not a tender word or a kiss, and that’s the way things went for years—Catherine would wait for Peter, and Peter would come home drunk and either collapse or train his dog in the bedroom while tormenting Catherine with talk of sexual exploits with his mistresses. After years of fruitlessly waiting for her husband to impregnate her and thus ensure an heir to the throne, Catherine took matters into her own hands and went out and found herself a lover to provide what her husband wouldn’t.

Catherine’s mother-in-law got her heir, never mind who the child’s father might be, and with this item of business finally tended to, the super-fertile Catherine enjoyed many pregnancies by many lovers. It became her custom to deposit her babies in the nursery so she could quickly return to court and keep up with the political intrigue going on at the palace in Saint Petersburg. “Heaven alone knows how it is that my wife becomes pregnant,” Peter complained to his friends after one such pregnancy. “I have no idea whether this child is mine and whether I ought to recognize it as such.”

A Good Time for Murder
Eventually, Catherine grew tired of Peter—as did Russia’s citizenry and armed forces—and she decided along with Gregory Orlov, her lover of the moment, that it would be best if she dethroned her husband, which explains why Czar Peter III was murdered in 1762. Certainly, Peter’s murder freed the Empress to live out her passions. Once he was gone, she lost any sense of shame and stretched into her true self. She discovered her talents, developed a powerful presence among her courtiers and surrounded herself with admirers.

In short, Catherine the Great was a bad girl:
• She had encountered an obstacle that forever changed the direction of her life.
• She took action to ensure that she would never feel trapped again.
• She rebelled against the established order.
• She enjoyed sex and love immensely and used men to get what she wanted.
• She found an outlet for her creative energy, which in her case involved the assumption of wealth and power.
• She defied her critics and became a star.

Catherine led a very complicated life, but she never saw it that way. By her thinking, she was merely a simple girl who needed love. “If in my youth I had found a husband whom I could have loved,” she wrote in her memoirs, “I should have remained faithful to him all my life. It is my misfortune that my heart cannot rest content even for an hour without love.”

Note: No, Catherine the Great and her horse did not engage in...erm, how you say...sexual congress. That's just a myth invented by people who like to mock powerful women--the same people who accuse Hillary Clinton of being a lesbian or Britney Spears of being crazy. True, Catherine the Great liked to ride, and she loved cavalrymen (the younger the better). So there was no equine sex, although it must be said that the Empress did enjoy dressing like a man and riding a horse astride her thighs.