THE BRIDE OF THE WIND The Life and Times of Alma Mahler-Werfel. By Susanne Keegan. Illustrated. 346 pp. New York: Viking. $25.
ALMA MAHLER-WERFEL was the Marilyn Monroe of her day. What Marilyn was to the world of cinema, Alma was to the cultural milieu of Vienna in the first half of this century. Her effect on an entire generation of Viennese artists, writers and composers was nothing short of electric.
Her list of amorous conquests reads like an artists' Who's Who of the period. She was married three times, to the composer Gustav Mahler, the Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius and the poet and writer Franz Werfel; in between she managed to have a prolonged affair with the painter Oskar Kokoschka and dalliances with a number of other, lesser cultural lights.
What was it about Alma Mahler-Werfel that caused your average Viennese intellectual or artist to go weak at the knees and start dedicating everything and anything he produced to her? After her death in New York in 1964, the satirist and songwriter Tom Lehrer pondered: Alma, tell us All modern women are jealous Which of your magical wands Got you Gustav and Walter and Franz?
Susanne Keegan's "Bride of the Wind" (the name given to one of Kokoschka's portraits of her) comes closer than any previous attempt (including Alma's own tendentious autobiography) to answering that question, while leaving her mystique intact.
Born into the Hapsburg Empire in 1879, Alma Schindler, the daughter of the painter Emil Schindler, was habituated from birth to a high-octane world of writers and artists. She was not only, as The New York Times wrote in her obituary, "the most beautiful girl in Vienna"; she was also one of the most talented and certainly the most ambitious. Ms. Keegan, whose previous books include "Lost Berlin," makes much of Alma's thwarted musical aspirations (as part of their premarital agreement, Gustav Mahler persuaded her to renounce her music). But early in life Alma seems to have realized that in the male-dominated atmosphere of Vienna her role was to be a motivator and stimulant of brilliant men, in bed and out.
The lot of most ambitious women of the time was to search for greatness in men, rather than to find it in themselves, and like many others she followed Nie tzsche's dictum that "man is made for war, woman for recreation of the warrior." It was her good fortune (and a function of her good taste) to find some spectacular cultural warriors. She was not particularly promiscuous, just lucky, and discerning.
Her opinions -- in particular her virulent anti-Semitism, which she tried to justify by saying she had married two Jews (Mahler and Werfel) -- were often obnoxious, and her escape to the United States from Nazi Germany with her third husband, Werfel, did little to dim her racist inclinations (a trait that her Jewish friends inexplicably tolerated).
Ms. Keegan interweaves Alma's amorous progress through some of the most elevated artistic figures in Europe with a portrayal of Viennese social life at its most culturally refined, when it combined steaminess, stuffiness and artistic aspiration in a uniquely creative cocktail. The descriptions of Gustav Mahler's marriage to a young and, toward the end, unfaithful wife are moving.
Alma was, unsurprisingly, less popular with people of her own sex than she was with men. After the playwright Gerhart Hauptmann told her, "In another life we two must be lovers. I make my reservation now," his wife muttered, "I'm sure Alma will be booked up there, too."
Even in old age, when the benedictine (a bottle a day) and the deaths not only of the men she had loved but also of three of her four children had taken their toll, Alma Mahler could still turn heads. On her last voyage from Rome, Thornton Wilder, whom she described as "a tall, Apollonian figure of a man," made a point of introducing himself. "Great men somehow continued to cross my path," she wrote with the septuagenarian satisfaction of a muse in her twilight.
Yet for all its detail, this biography never quite reveals the secret of Alma Mahler-Werfel's mysterious allure -- perhaps because that special quality she had defies description in words, and is better represented in the music of Gustav Mahler. Even Thomas Mann could not explain what it was about her that made her irresistible despite her manifest faults. When asked, he was said to have thought seriously for a few moments, then to have smiled and remarked, "She gives me partridges to eat, and I like them." It was, as her biographer says, as good an answer as any.
Photo: Alma Mahler-Werfel, 1899. (From "The Bride of the Wind")