Saint Floradora (also known as "the Pompeiian Rose") was assumed to be a Christian daughter of a vacationing Roman senator forced to take cover during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius near Pompeii [St. Fidgeta & Other Parodies, 77-85].
Background
In 1880, lettered tiles were found in the ruins that arranged to form the name Floradora, justified by the later discovery of a female skeleton. Parts of her life are documented in a book by Father Tumpline. By 1940 "the Catholic World was dotted with convents, churches grade schools and nuns" named after Saint Floradora, including Sister M. Floradora, A.R.G.
Reaction to St. Floradora
In 1940, Professor T. Oates Frostauger challenged the lettered tiles found, opening a flood of theologians and scholars - among them Étienne Mougir, Oswald Preiselbeersaft, and Dr. Plitheroe - debating Floradora's importance in academic circles. The Secretariat on Saintliness investigated the matter "in secrecy for years," and an article in Time speculated what was being discussed, interviewing Father Wisney and Bishop Corvo, among others. Finally, in 1959 St. Floradora was removed from the Roll of Saints. Reaction across the world included:
- Irish Catholics razing the Shrine of St. Floradora in Ballyspitten
- In Chicago, twelve churches named for Floradora were renamed in honor of St. Nymphadota
- Members of the Little Order of Floradora of Baines, Oregon moved to Montmartre, France
- Sister Floradora changed her name to Sister Dido.
Bellairs, probably quite understandably, committed a rare spelling error with Floradora, notes Myers. "The correct name is Florodora with an o instead of an a. Florodora was a turn-of-the-century British musical that was a tremendous hit on both sides of the Atlantic, the story of a young woman seeking romance and the restoration of a stolen inheritance. In 1902, it broke the Broadway record for musicals with over 550 performances. It featured a sextet of chorus girls, all an identical 5 feet, 4 inches tall and 130 pounds and the hit song of the show was 'Tell Me, Pretty Maiden,' in which the chorus boys sang out, 'Prithee tell me pretty maiden, are there any more at home like you?' and the girls replied, 'There are a few, kind sir, but simple girls and proper too.'
"The show was so popular that it was revived in 1905 and again in 1920. The chorines, not too surprisingly, became known as The Florodora Girls, and being a Florodora girl acquired a kind of cachet. It turns out that the most celebrated of all Florodora girls was from the original Broadway 1902 production, Evelyn Nesbit. She was one of the great beauties of her age, and it was her fate to be involved in what is perhaps the most famous celebrity murder of the first half of the century. In the social status of the parties involved and the sumptuousness of setting, it easily surpasses our own sordid Simpson affair. The fact of the case, greatly oversimplified are, these: Nesbit, still a teenager, became the mistress of the famous society architect, Stanford White, one of whose most celebrated buildings was the recently-completed Madison Square Garden, in actuality the second building to bear that name. Nesbit was eventually discarded by White and wound up marrying the very unstable Pittsburgh millionaire, Harry K. Thaw. To make a long story short, one evening Thaw and Nesbit encountered White in the very elegant rooftop dining plaza of White's own Madison Square Garden, and there, in front of a nude statue of Diana for which Nesbit had served as the model, Thaw shot White in the head.
"And now the scene shifts to another exotic locale: South Bend, Indiana. In 1955 Hollywood released a movie about the Nesbit-Thaw-White affair called The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, very possibly the first movie Bellairs and I attended together off-campus. It stared Ray Milland as Stanford White, Farley Granger as Harry Thaw, and, as Evelyn Nesbit, none other than the very young, very dazzling Joan Collins - who even today, supported by botox, plastic surgery, skin grafts, plaster of Paris, wigs, paints and cantilever struts, still looks pretty good. Without the aid of any of that stuff she was a total dish and John and I both drooled over her then and even more so over another of her movies released later in the same year, that immortal masterpiece of William Faulkner's, Land of the Pharaohs, in which he wrote her a juicy role as an evil Egyptian Queen but forgot to provide her with much in the way of clothing. This then is the intellectual baggage that Bellairs had to draw on for his Saint Floradora; whether he actually used any of it, I of course do not know." Not surprisingly then, Bellairs once named Collins as his favorite actress [John Bellairs' Favorites, 1985].
A secretariat is a department administered by a governmental secretary, especially for an international organization.
