Kirsten Dunst: Teen Queen

Marie Antoinette—played by Kirsten Dunst in Sofia Coppola's stunning new film—used her distinctive personal style to defy the rigid etiquette and scheming courtiers of Versailles. Kennedy Fraser looks at the high-spirited life and tragic fate of the young royal.

Sofia Coppola's film Marie Antoinette, covering the nineteen years that fabulous and tragic woman spent at Versailles, created a sensation when it opened earlier this year in France. It was filmed largely on location in the palace, with unswerving support from the directors of the museum. For the two leading actors—Kirsten Dunst as the young queen and Coppola's cousin Jason Schwartzman as King Louis XVI—it was a transformative experience to walk in rustling silk and tapping heels through halls filled with ghosts. For Dunst, exquisitely but unstuffily costumed by Milena Canonero (who deserves an Oscar for this work), it was a very sensual role. “You breathe differently in those dresses; you move in a special way,” Dunst says. To prepare herself, on the night a scaled-down crew was filming her in the emotionally charged balcony scene, she walked alone through the palace in the dark. “I could look in those mirrors,” she says. “Be still in myself. Feel my place in that house.”

It is Coppola's third full-length film, after The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation. With a $40 million budget, it is by far her most ambitious project. She was aware that her subject is controversial—that people, especially in France, either see the queen as a saint and martyr or really, really hate her. But Coppola forgot about all that and brought her own Marie Antoinette to life. In her film, history is seen from a very feminine young woman's point of view. In the director's mind it forms a trilogy with the previous two films, exploring the theme of young women discovering who they are. The queen's love of fashion particularly interested her. “You're considered superficial and silly if you're interested in fashion,” Coppola says. “But I think you can be substantial and still be interested in frivolity. The girl in Lost in Translation is just about to figure out a way of finding herself, but she hasn't yet. In this film she makes the next step. I feel that Marie Antoinette is a very creative person.”

In 1770, the fourteen-year-old Archduchess Marie Antoinette left her home in Austria and traveled to meet her fifteen-year-old fiancé, the dauphin, heir to the throne of France. She was an attractive little thing, with blonde hair, blue eyes, a fine pale skin, and the pouting Hapsburg-family lower lip. She was the fifteenth child of a formidable mother, the Empress Maria Theresa, who led her huge empire so efficiently that she went on reading state papers while she was giving birth. At the last minute it had been discovered that the future bride (who liked dancing and playing with children and dolls) could barely read and write. Her mother arranged for a crash education and a makeover, including cosmetic dentistry, a less provincial hairdo, and a complete new wardrobe of French-style clothes. Then the girl rolled through the forest in a special gilded coach with gold roses (symbol of the Hapsburgs) and lilies (symbol of the Bourbons) nodding in a topknot on the roof. Behind the huge glass windows she was like a jewel in a padded case. From now on, her mother had warned her, all eyes would be upon her, and she should do what she was told. Maria Theresa had anxious premonitions; her girl was lively and affectionate in nature but had the attention span of a flea.

The journey went like clockwork; the Austrian court followed her in 56 other vehicles. To pull the carriages in relays, 20,000 horses were posted along the route. In a temporary pavilion on an island in the middle of the Rhine, the Austrian princess said goodbye to her mother's courtiers. In another room, highborn ladies from the French court of Versailles stripped her of every stitch of clothing and dressed her in clothes that would make her a dauphine. Her new trousseau was distributed as perks among her well-born attendants. They even took her little lapdog, Mops, out of her arms. (Some kindly soul arranged for them to be reunited after she was settled in her new home.) At a prearranged place in the French woods she met the bridegroom and his grandfather King Louis XV, a lazy, indecisive man, proud of his prowess at hunting, bedding young women, and cutting the top off a boiled egg. The king was very flirtatious with her, but the future Louis XVI was painfully shy and gauche. He kissed her on the cheek but could think of nothing to say. All his life he kept a journal in a firm copperplate hand. Mostly he recorded the number of stag and boar he had killed while hunting—a pastime (like messing about with locks and mechanical things) he enjoyed. “Met the dauphine,” he wrote now.

The palaces where Marie Antoinette grew up had thousands of rooms, and she had experienced plenty of grand court ceremony, but there were times of intimate and almost bourgeois family life with her mother and father (the easygoing, pleasure-loving Francis of Lorraine) and her siblings. However, nothing could prepare an outsider for living with the rigid etiquette of Versailles. In a strictly hierarchical system of absolute monarchy, all power derived from the king, who was next in line to God. Everything at the palace was designed to awe. The facade with its huge balconied windows was a quarter-mile long, and its famous mirrored gallery was more like a stage or a street for deities than an ordinary room. An emasculated nobility had to hang out, cap in hand, in hopes of catching the king's attention (or that of his official mistress) and begging for favors and pensions. Power was reflected in the smallest ritual and gesture. The presence at the humblest human activities of the monarch—dressing, undressing for bed, eating a meal, using a candle or the chamber pot—was an honor for the courtiers and a chance for them to be rewarded for their subservience. Young Marie Antoinette found herself shivering in the cold while princesses of the blood fought over the right to pass her the royal undergarments. Like box hedges on the move, the ladies squeezed into her apartments in panniered skirts to watch circles of quite unnecessary rouge applied to her pink-and-white cheeks.

As her mother had foreseen, the debutante first lady of Versailles was watched by a thousand eyes for the first signs of a faux pas. Gossip, humiliating mockery, and intrigue were the principal court occupations. A lady in court dress in the halls of Versailles was prey to many hazards: catching her skirt in some other lady's heel, or falling foul of dog poo or food scraps. “Remember,” one nobleman told his daughters who were about to be presented at court, “in this place vice has no consequence. But ridicule kills.” No one could fault Marie Antoinette on her grace of movement; she sailed down the halls and up the stairs as if she were weightless. Almost immediately the teenager made a fashion statement that was a serious violation of etiquette: She tried to jettison the particularly uncomfortable corset, the grand corps, worn by the most important ladies. Under maternal pressure she gave in; the look the corset gave (and a style of court dress unchanged in seven decades) was an integral part of a ceremonial curtsy.

Before she arrived, Marie Antoinette had enemies ready-made: the factions opposed to a recent Franco-Austrian alliance arranged by her mother and favored by Louis XV's politically powerful mistress the Marquise de Pompadour. (She had subsequently died and been replaced by a glamorous former prostitute, Mme du Barry.) “L'Autrichienne, they called Marie Antoinette, first in whispers and then as years went by in louder and more sinister hisses. The xenophobia was silly, really, for all royal houses were intermarried. (If her father was French, her bridegroom's mother had been German, his grandmother Polish.) There was a constant hostage-like trade in barely pubescent princesses across the borders of Europe; they were the slender human seals on international treaties.

She had one job ahead of her, really: to secure the power of the French state (and the alliance with her native land) by giving birth to a future dauphin. But here there was a problem more fatal to her life story than any other: For seven years, her marriage to Louis was unconsummated and she remained a virgin. On their wedding night, the teenagers were dressed in their nightclothes and then climbed into the great state bed in the presence of the king, the archbishop, assorted foreign dignitaries, and every courtier who could wangle entry, before they were finally left alone behind the curtains. But there were no secrets at Versailles, and the whole court soon knew that nothing had happened. “Rien,” the young prince wrote in his journal. “Nothing.”

After his grandfather died and he became king in 1774, this impotence and lack of an heir became a real danger for the couple. His younger brother the Comte de Provence, who was hungry for the throne, embarked on a lifetime of intrigue against them. As with many aspects of the tale, historians have conflicting opinions about Louis XVI's sexual difficulties. Some say there was a technical fault with the royal foreskin that was finally corrected by an operation. Others believe the problem was psychological; he had never expected to be king and was traumatized as a boy by the deaths of his seven-year-old brother and both his parents. He was left in the care of a tutor who had filled his head with the evils of Austria. Louis XVI was an intelligent, widely read man, thought not to be opposed to reform of the worst abuses of the system. (The greatest burden of taxes fell on the poorest people.) “In my heart, I think he was interested in progressive ideas,” says Schwartzman. “But if you're also a king, you'd be conflicted. He's so interested in gears and motors and well-built machinery. But his own gears weren't working. He's unpickable. He's not a well-built machine.” The king and queen were two lonely young people thrown together by fate. “I think they ached for each other,” the actor says.

Louis XVI was so socially inept that people thought him rude. He had a huge appetite for food and drink and soon became enormously overweight. He liked going to bed and getting up at an early hour. He was clumsy and ungainly: They said he walked like an old peasant waddling along behind his plow. His wife, a sprite who picked at her food, loved to dance and stay up late, was his opposite in every way. But they grew fonder of each other with each passing year. He discouraged her from taking an interest in politics but indulged her in every other pastime. When Marie Antoinette and his libertine, handsome younger brother the Comte d'Artois ran late-night gambling parties, the king paid off their debts. In 1775 Louis made her a gift of the Petit Trianon, a jewel of a neoclassical château with intimate, perfect proportions, set in the park of Versailles, a fifteen-minute walk from the palace. The interior was light, bright, and comfortable, with boiseries of wildflowers, ears of corn, and roses. “You who love flowers, I give you this bouquet,” he said. His grandfather had commissioned it for la Pompadour, but she died before it was completed, and it was used by du Barry, her successor as royal favorite. That Louis XVI, a king who never had a mistress, gave the royal love nest to his own wife was to work against her in the public mind. Who could believe her secluded gatherings there were innocent?

In compensation for the failures of the marriage bed the queen had developed a taste for worldly, amusing people and fashionable things. Like Princess Diana in another age, she found an increasingly confident personal style to use as a weapon against her enemies at court. In alliance with creative people—her architects, landscape designers, and most notably the couturier Rose Bertin and the hairdresser Léonard—she made the Trianon and her own person as exquisite as could be. “She had a great passion,” said the memoirist the Comtesse de Boigne, “and that was for fashion. She dressed to be in fashion, she got into debt for fashion, she was witty and a flirt—all to be in fashion.” She liked to dazzle with the very best outfit at her own costume balls; she enjoyed the buzz about her tall hairdo when she appeared at her box in the theater in Paris. She and her friend the Princesse de Lamballe were the talk of the town when they appeared in the Bois de Boulogne for a winter sleigh ride—two blondes, all in white, with diamonds and furs. She learned to ride astride a horse (after early experiences with a donkey, which she kept falling off) and had her portrait painted as an equestrienne in the fashionable English redingote and cutaway vest, accessorized by lace cravat and tricorne. It was the rage for aping the country-house life of the English aristocracy as well as the chic new sensibility of Jean-Jacques Rousseau that led her to create a miniature arcadia around the Trianon, complete with rolling meadows, a little lake, an artificially meandering stream, a romantic grotto, and a classical temple of love on a tiny island. She invited chosen friends to join her for pleasure parties straight out of Watteau or Fragonard: picnics, boating, blindman's buff, or gathering the hens' eggs at her miniature farm. She built a private theater and played (in spectacular costumes) the parts of milkmaids and shepherdesses.

The queen's coterie, called the Private Society, caused much bitterness among the courtiers who were excluded. Her First Girlfriend, the Comtesse Jules de Polignac, was always there with Diane de Polignac, her sister-in-law, accompanied by her lover the Comte de Vaudreuil and her sister, the mistress of Artois, the king's playboy brother. The strikingly handsome Swedish count Axel von Fersen, a great success with the ladies, was often at the queen's little soirees. They had met at a masked ball on one of her daring outings into Paris café society. He was by all accounts the love of her life, though no one can know whether they were actually lovers. “At Trianon,” she said, “I can be myself.” The king was amused by it all, and by having to wait for an invitation to join the Private Society at luncheon.

Silks and velvets for court dresses, muslin and lawn for the new informal gowns that went so well (with Gainsborough hats) with the English garden. Fans, laces, silk flowers. The wheel of fashion, spun by the queen and Mlle Bertin, her “minister of fashion,” was whirling faster and faster. The modern fashion world was born in this era. Bertin (whose story resembles that of Coco Chanel in her business acumen and her rise in society) was the first couturier; Léonard was the first of the superstar hairdressers. Of Gascon peasant stock, he rode to his ladies in a lordly carriage and (like Bertin) was given to making snobbish pronouncements. (“The great Léonard does not dirty his hands with the heads of the middle classes.”) Other women, seeing the newfangled fashion magazines and with no choice but to follow the queen's example, were in danger of bankrupting their husbands. The coffers of France herself were empty after she had fought against the British in the American War of Independence. It is by now definitively proved that Marie Antoinette never said of the starving peasantry, “Let them eat cake!” but she may just as well have done, and people had begun to call her “Madame Deficit.”

In 1777, Marie Antoinette finally was able to write to let her mother know that the marriage had been consummated, that she had experienced “the most essential happiness of her entire life.” Her brother Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor, had been dispatched on a mission from their mother to find out what was happening. He asked the most detailed anatomical questions (it must have been embarrassing to a sister who had enough modesty to take her bath in a muslin gown or colored water) and wrote home to say he wished he could whip his brother-in-law into ejaculating, like an angry donkey. Joseph's instructions seemed to work. In 1778 the queen gave birth to a daughter, and in 1781 to the requisite dauphin. In 1785 she produced a second son (who was her favorite child because he was pretty) and in 1786 a second daughter, who died as an infant. She survived the experience of giving birth surrounded by courtiers jammed so close into her bedroom that she nearly suffocated.

She was a tenderhearted mother, closely involved with the welfare of her babies. But her new status as a mother came too late to save her reputation. Rumors started by her in-laws and other enemies at court and fueled by an ever-increasing tide of pornographic and political pamphlets, more vicious even than today's tabloids, fed a fevered public imagination. There were orgies at the Trianon; she was having lesbian affairs with Lamballe and Polignac; it was really Artois who was the father of the dauphin.

When the Bastille fell, on July 14, 1789, the queen was strolling in her idyllic garden and Louis was out hunting. “Rien,” he wrote in that day's journal. The king, like many, thought that change to the system was due, but he was not anticipating revolution. The previous month, at a turbulent moment with the Estates General and negotiations over a constitution, the seven-year-old dauphin had died a lingering death of tuberculosis of the bones. The king and queen, by now devoted to each other, as well as to their children, had gone into seclusion. “Are there no fathers among the deputies?” asked the king in anguish. The venom of the pamphlets against the queen increased once freedom of the press was declared in 1789. When a mob arrived from Paris and stormed the palace, its members almost succeeded in murdering her. They reached the door of her bedroom, baying that they would tear out her heart and fry her liver. She escaped half-dressed, with her stockings in her hand, and ran down the secret passage to her husband's apartments. The rioters, frustrated, smashed up her mirrors and slashed the luxurious bed with their weapons. For her remaining time on earth she lived in constant terror of assassination. That last night at Versailles was one of many occasions when military might failed to protect the royal family. The corrupt system of handing out commissions as political treats had left an army with timid and incompetent officers, so unfamiliar with their soldiers that they had no idea whether they would obey an order. Napoleon would later say that had he been in charge, Louis XVI would still be sitting on his throne.

The royal family was forced to go to Paris. The queen's hair turned white on the journey. Their carriage was surrounded by a screaming, jostling mob, and the head of a dead bodyguard bobbed outside the window. They were installed in the disused palace of the Tuileries and soon resumed some semblance of the old court ritual. For all the fright she had endured, the erstwhile airhead found extraordinary reserves of will and character. Her husband had kept her out of state business, but now, when he seemed incapable of deciding what to do (once, he didn't utter a word for ten whole days), she found herself acting for him. She became, they said, the best man he had. She consulted with their ministers, spent hour after hour writing letters to people who might help them. She turned out to be her mother's daughter and quite good at political intrigue. She used her charm to turn several revolutionary leaders, including Comte de Mirabeau, into the king's secret agents.

At length in 1791 it was resolved that the family should try to escape—not into exile like most of their friends and relations but to a fortified palace not far from the border. The queen remained enough of a fashion plate to send for Rose Bertin and order trunkloads of new dresses for the journey. With the queen disguised as a maid and the king as a sort of valet, they sneaked past the guard to join their two children and the royal governess, who were waiting in a hackney cab driven by Axel von Fersen. He saw them safely transferred to a roomy coach loaded down with luggage, including a silver dinner service; her traveling case for her beauty supplies and porcelain teacups; several chamber pots; and a smart red uniform the king planned to wear to review the still-loyal troops he hoped to find at the end of the journey. It was, said one wag, a miniature Versailles, lacking only a chapel and an orchestra. They rumbled at a snail's pace through the leafy countryside. The king, ever the geographer, followed the route on a map. He had been to the sea once, and she had come from Vienna, but otherwise it was for both the farthest they had ever traveled. Even Léonard had been given a part to play—to carry the queen's jewel box and meet up with the young duc in charge of the cavalry escort. But it was in every way a star-crossed expedition, managed by impractical people. Léonard got separated from the jewels and scampered into exile to join his ladies after being given away by the look of his silk stockings. (“Oh, Léonard!” Coppola says. “I love that character. He could have his own TV series!”) They were later than anticipated; the fresh post horses were not where they should have been; the cavalry had given up, gone on ahead, and starting drinking. At Varennes, tantalizingly close to freedom, the king was recognized, and once again the despairing, exhausted family was returned to Paris.

They were imprisoned in modest but comfortable apartments in the thick-walled Tower of the medieval Temple. For the first time in their lives they were an ordinary family. The queen and her sister-in-law Elisabeth sat sewing; the king gave Latin lessons to his son and read (in the space of a few months) a couple of hundred books. He was eating as much as ever. They all played backgammon and billiards. One day they could tell from the sounds outside that the city was in an uproar. Mobs broke into the prisons and massacred all the inmates, including the unlucky Princesse de Lamballe. They mutilated her fair-skinned body and dragged its trunk through the streets before waving the blonde head on a pike in front of the window of the queen, who promptly fainted. (Many years later, in Sweden, the “angelically” handsome and ultraconservative Fersen met a similarly violent death when he was beaten with walking sticks and umbrellas by an irate revolutionary mob in Stockholm.)

The king, who had already been stripped of his powers, was now stripped of his name and title. He went to his trial and his execution as “Citizen Louis Capet.” The guards separated Marie Antoinette and her little boy (whom she called Louis XVII). For days she heard him sobbing from the floor below her apartment, then singing revolutionary songs he had been taught by his drunken jailer. (He died at the age of ten, still in prison, of the same disease as his brother.) In her childbearing years the queen had grown quite plump, but now she was a skeletal, white-haired old crone of 37, suffering each month from uncontrollable hemorrhages. The authorities moved her in the dead of night to a tiny, dank cell in the Conciergerie prison. She was forced to dress, undress, and change her sanitary linens in front of guards who also took bribes from people curious to see her. Mlle Bertin sent some new mourning clothes and a supply of chemises, stockings, and bonnets. But the Widow Capet was forbidden to wear black as she was paraded on a cart, through packed streets, to the guillotine. She had dressed herself all in white, as carefully as could be in her circumstances. She faced death with absolute self-control and dignity, and stepped gracefully, even with tied hands, to the scaffold.

Her remains were tossed near her husband's in what had become a crowded mass grave for victims of the “national razor.” Today that place, once the cemetery of the Church of the Madeleine, is a secluded garden, with symbolic white roses bowing and nodding their heads in the chirp of birdsong. At the restoration of the monarchy in 1815, the perfidious Provence, now Louis XVIII, built a fancy expiatory chapel over the spot where they exhumed the remains of his brother and the unhappy queen. All of Marie Antoinette that was found was a skull, a handful of bones, and a pair of garters.

“Kirsten Dunst: Teen Queen” was first published in the September 2006 issue of Vogue_._