Noble Blood - The Crown Prince and His Lover Dead

Episode Date: June 9, 2020

The Archduke Rudolf, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, retreated to his hunting lodge in Mayerling with his teenage lover in 1889 to enact a gristly suicide pact in an event both stranger and more tragic than it appears at first blush. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Vodam. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot.

But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, The cat, just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Grimmin Mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion is advised. At 6.10 in the morning on January 30, 1889, crown prince Rudolph of the Austro-Hungarian Empire came out of his bedroom, closed the door behind him, and told his valet to prepare for the day of hunting ahead. The lodge where they were staying at Maryland in the Vienna woods was still dark in the early morning. Though Rudolph was already dressed in his hunting clothes, he said that he wanted to get a bit more sleep. Have breakfast ready at 8.30 and wake me at 7.30, he said. The valet named Loshchuk noticed that Rudolph was whistling as he went back to his room.

As Loshchuk was setting the table, he heard two gunshots in rapid succession, but thought nothing of it. At 7.30, he came to the Crown Prince's bedchamber to find it locked. Loshchak knocked loudly, and then again. Strange, but not too strange. Rudolph frequently used morphine and drank enough cognac and champagne to pass out cold. But Loshch had just seen him an hour ago. Losek tried running upstairs and down a back staircase to a second entrance to the crown prince's chamber, but he found that that door too was also locked from the inside.

His heart pounding in his chest, Loshchek went to find Count Hoyos, Rudolph's hunting buddy, who was also staying at the lodge. He's probably just tired, Hoyos called. Let him sleep. But Loshchek insisted that Huyus come. to the locked door and help. The Count rattled the doorknob. Is there a coal stove in there? he asked.

Could the crown prince have passed out from the fumes? Loshak shook his head. The rooms were heated by wood. And there's one more thing I should probably tell you, the valley said, looking at the floor. Rudolph wasn't alone in his chamber. He had snuck his 17-year-old mistress, Mary Vitzera, to the lodge with him.

Oh, Count Hoya said, Okay, well, let's think about this then. The Crown Prince's brother-in-law, Coburg, was set to arrive at the lodge that morning around 8.30 to join the hunting. What if they just waited for him? And so they waited. When Coburg finally arrived, the trio decided that the best course of action would be to break down the door with an axe.

Loshchek first tried axing the lock, but he couldn't break it. So he decided just to break it. break through a wooden panel which allowed him to reach a hand through the door and undo the lock from the inside. The three men stood outside the closed door. They decided that Loshak would go in alone to examine the scene, just in case the prince and his lover were in a compromising position. While the other two men hung back, the valet gingerly pressed the wooden door open. The bile froze in his throat and stammering, Loshick turned back to Coburg and Hoyos. The crown prince is dead, he managed to say.

The story of the Merling incident, as it's come to be known, has fascinated historians and lovers of the macabre for a century, but the event itself has become twisted to fit pat narratives of love or revenge. It wasn't a Romeo and Juliet story, or at least, it wasn't entirely a Romeo and Juliet story. The mistress, Mary Vitsera, was madly and wildly in love, and in her desperation, Prince Rudolf saw an opportunity. He would bring her down with him if it meant he didn't have to go alone. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. Rudolf, the crown prince of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was born in 1858, to a father who almost immediately despised him, and a mother who had no time or energy for him. The emperor, Franz Joseph, was an old-school

Habsburg conservative, a militaristic leader who valued discipline and formality above most other things. The empress, Elizabeth, commonly known as Sisi, was known for being beautiful, but her fixation on maintaining her youth and beauty and figure could accurately be described as obsession. Neither the emperor nor the empress had the time nor inclination for parenthood. Austria-Hungary wasn't like England, where Queen Victoria reveled in creating a picture of warm and happy domesticity. No, things were formal and rigid.

Rudolph's contact with his parents was akin to a, modern-day relationship with a polite co-worker. When Rudolph was five, he came down with a case of typhoid. His mother refused to cut short her vacation to Bavaria to return home to him. She was the type of mother who did eventually respond to his letters, but usually after waiting a few days. At age six, Rudolph's education began under a major general, who was informed that his job was to toughen up the nervous young prince. To that end, the Major General forced the Crown Prince to do military drills outside at 6 in the morning, every morning, rain or snow. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, the Major General would creep into the little boy's bedroom and fire a gun several times,

you know, to toughen him up. Once, the Crown Prince was brought to the zoo where he was locked in a cage. While the boy screamed and cried in terror, the Major General shouted at him through the bars that a wild boar was coming to eat him. Unsurprisingly, the tax did not help toughen Rudolph up. He became prone to bedwetting and night terrors that culminated in a nervous breakdown at seven years old. The official story from the palace was that Rudolph had diphtheria. As his education progressed, Rudolph was presented with a series of 50 tutors for a seemingly infinite number of subjects, a dozen languages, military history, diplomacy, economics. From 8 in the morning until 9 at night, the crown prince was drilled in the things that his father decided a prince should know.

Emperor Franz Joseph wrote, the prince, quote, must not become a free thinker, but he should thoroughly become a quainter. with the conditions and requirements of modern times. Still, Rudolph's teenage rebellion led to private, furtive writings about atheism, and Rudolph further rebelled against his father privately by writing about his liberal ideas for the future of Europe. But his patchwork education had real consequences. Though he knew a little about a lot of subjects, Rudolph was never able to gain the critical thinking abilities to digest contradicting. information. He wanted a liberal Europe, but he never for a second questioned his own divine right

to be ruler. His education was shallow and wrote, with no time for Rudolph to learn how to think methodically or to tease out the contradictions in his philosophies. And so by the time his formal education ended, a few weeks shy of his 19th birthday, Rudolph was a deeply unpleasant man. Moody and prideful, prone to making rash judgments and dramatic proclamations, but without the patience or humility to try to understand things deeply. Rudolph's father made him a colonel, but Rudolph approached his military duties with a complete lack of interest. His fellow officers would see him staring out into the distance, either looking bored or tired or both. One afternoon, during a regiment report, Rudolph stared at the ground for ten minutes straight while another officer was discussing important logistical matters.

Finally, at one point, Rudolph interrupted him. Every other officer stared at the crown prince, eager with anticipation. He almost never spoke in meetings. There's dirt on my shoe, he said finally. You there, groom, come wipe it off. The nearby servant quickly came over and knelt with a rag. When Rudolph's shoe was clean, the meeting continued, and Rudolph returned to staring blankly into space. His political career as a young man was marred with frequent social faux pa and a sarcastic attitude that bordered on cruel, especially with his mother and younger sister.

Here he was, the only son and crown prince of the most powerful royal family in the world, but until his father died, he had no purpose in life. His only sense of purpose or meaning came from his position as a crown prince. And so Rudolph enforced rigid protocol around his position, which only served to isolate him from his family further. Rudolph began spending his time getting drunk at seedy taverns, having affairs with women and becoming a regular customer at Vienna's best brothels. He kept a book of his conquests, color-coded by whether or not they had been virgins.

When Rudolph's reputation became something murmured and politely coughed about in the emperor's presence, Franz Joseph insisted that his son get married. Reluctantly, Rudolph agreed. He rejected two women right away for not being attractive enough, but finally he agreed on marrying Princess Stephanie of Belgium. He went on a trip to Brussels to dutifully propose to his bride to be, but the entire arrangement was almost torn up when his future mother-in-law walked in to see Rudolph infligante

with an actress in his bedroom. He had brought a girlfriend along to Brussels to keep him company for the trip where he was supposed to propose. But these diplomatic matches were more important than fidelity, at least on the part of the groom. 23-year-old Rudolph became engaged to 15-year-old. year old Princess Stephanie, although the wedding had to be postponed for a year when it was discovered that Stephanie hadn't yet begun to menstruate. The optimistic young princess

learned very quickly that her relationship with her new husband would be cordial at best. They managed to produce a daughter, but Rudolph spent most of his time out at those seedy taverns, you know, the type of place where men played cards and women danced on tables. He didn't even bother trying to keep his affairs a secret. Everyone knew he was out at brothels that he spent most of his time with his favorite prostitute, a young woman named Mitzi Casper. Even so, the marriage didn't entirely collapse until Crown Prince Rudolph infected both himself and his wife with gonorrhea.

The disease was incredibly painful and would flare up at random intervals. But it was even worse for Princess Stephanie. It had shriveled her fallopian tubes. Her husband had made her infertile and rendered her incapable of doing the single task required of her to make a male heir. From that point on, the relationship between husband and wife

was formal and distant, a contract between countries. Rudolph was less a husband to her and more of a jailer someone who kept her in a cruel and distant country and constantly humiliated her again and again with his infidelity. As for Rudolph, the gonorrhea led to prescriptions of morphine and opium and cocaine, which he added to his regular habits of cognac and champagne. The depressive crown prince, now all but ignored for political tasks, entirely retreated into a world of instant gratification. and pleasure. He surrounded himself with people who flattered him and made him feel important.

After all, he was the crown prince of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was supposed to always feel important. Mary Vetsera had very little in the way of formal education. Her mother, Helene, sent her to an institute for daughters of the nobility, where Mary would learn the skills to become a good society wife one day, the dancing and the table manners and the like. In truth, Mary was just the daughter of a minor baron and her upward mobility in terms of social hierarchy was already limited by the less than spotless reputation of her mother. Helene had been the type of woman that established matriarchs of Viennese society refused to make eye contact with. Back when Helene was 32, she seduced the 20-year-old Crown Prince Rudolph himself.

And since Mary had begun appearing in the society scene at age 15, she had started building a similar reputation for herself. There was no denying that she was pretty, with dark hair and dark flashing eyes. Women muttered that her large bosom made her figure unbalanced, but men tended to stare at it. People rarely described Mary Vat-Sara as an indenting. intellectual. There are other adjectives that crop up. Vivacious, attention-loving, captivating,

a flirt. She seemed to have very little interest in art or music. Her primary loves were gossiping about her exploits in a way that even her friends found indecorous. And second, the scandalous French romance novels that she had her maid sneak to her. Tragedy had come to the Vetsara family early. When Mary was 10 years old, her brother, Ladislav, died in an explosion at the Viennese Ring Theater. Ladislov was 16, and he was one of five cadets at the Military Academy who were given complimentary tickets to an opera for outstanding performance. That night, a malfunction with the stage lights caused a gas explosion that engulfed the entire theater in flames. Crowds trampled each other trying to reach the emergency.

exit doors which only swung in, trapping the occupants inside. Ladislav's body was only identified because his mother, Helene, recognized the cufflinks that he had been wearing. But the event didn't seem to affect young Mary too deeply. Far from becoming morbid, if anything, as she grew into a young woman, she became impatient, for glamour, for excitement, for scandal, for love. If life was fleeting, Why waste it waiting through the insufferably restrictive formalities of Austrian high society when it was so much more fun to make interesting things happen? Preserving her virtue had very little appeal for Mary,

when there were so many men that she saw staring at her. Mary didn't concern herself with their age or whether or not they were married. Her flirtations became games of conquest, and Mary, intellectual or not, was very good at games. But fate came for Mary Vitzera when she saw the crown prince Rudolph in the royal box at a horse race. He was so close that she could watch him,

studying him in profile as the sun lit him from behind. His light mustache, the curl and his brown hair, the black cape he wore, embroidered with golden squares. He was magnificent, like the hero of one of her French romance novels. When the two were introduced at a ball, she practically spun home, informing her maid that she had finally seen the crown prince and that he was beautiful. The teenage infatuation came easily for Mary. Like almost every girl her age, she had souvenir postcards that featured the

young crown prince, much in the same way a young Kate Middleton had a poster of Prince William. For Mary's mother, Helene, she was content to indulge in the the infatuation. After all, she had had her own brief affair with the prince. Helene was perfectly happy to wink and close the door on Mary in one of her many suitors. And so she found very little to condemn when Mary began taking her carriage out to the praetor every day, hoping to accidentally see Rudolph. But those meetings soon became less accidental. Rudolph had a cousin named Countess Marie Larish, the type of of woman who delighted to indulge in any shred of gossip if it made things more entertaining for her.

She was also the type of woman who knew exactly how to exploit an opportunity for profit. Rudolph had been seeing women, mistresses, mistresses, prostitutes, prostitutes who became mistresses since the beginning of his unhappy marriage to Princess Stephanie. And his cousin, the countess, was usually good at procuring those women for him, for a price. As the affair between the very married 30-year-old Rudolph and the 16-year-old Mary that Sarah began, Countess Larish began taking little fees, both from Mary and Rudolph, to act as a go-between for their meetings. And by little fees, the equivalent today of a few hundred thousand dollars. The countess would tell Mary that she needed to pay up if she ever wanted to see the crown prince again.

To Rudolph, the countess would tell Mary that she needed to pay up if she ever wanted to see the crown prince again. would not so indiscreetly let him know that he would pay if you wanted certain matters to remain private. And so for a good part of the year, young Mary would be swept away from her home by the countess, who delivered her to Rudolph whenever he requested, before she was then safely deposited back to her mother. Helene and the countess were close. The married countess herself had had two illegitimate children by one of Helene's brothers, But what was just meant to be a trifling little fling soon became so much more for young Mary.

One afternoon, as the countess escorted Mary up the back stairs and through the kitchens to Rudolph's chambers at Hofberg Palace, Mary gingerly stepped ahead. Oh, don't worry, I know the way, she smiled. Mary had been sidestepping her escort and had already visited the palace without the countess realizing. Mary's affair had taken on a life of its own. Once, without telling anyone except her maid, Mary snuck to the Hofberg Palace in the middle of the night, wearing only a lingerie nightgown and a fur coat. He's going to annul his marriage to that awful Princess Stephanie and marry me,

Mary would tell her sister Hannah. Hannah just rolled her eyes and called her sister a stupid child. I can't believe she's so in love. love with the crown prince. You can't imagine anything so silly, and she has no idea how ridiculous it is, Hannah said. Their mother, Helene, found it better just to dismiss it all together. Your sister isn't very well, she said simply. Mary didn't look well. Her eyes had begun to take on an evil glint, especially when she spoke of Princess Stephanie, and she began to revel in her newfound power to torment to Princess Stephanie and to captivate the scornful attention of society.

One afternoon, when Rudolph and the princess were at the theater to see a Sarah Bernhardt performance, Mary caused a scandal when she arrived wearing an extremely low-cut dress, and then spent the entire performance openly staring at the royal box instead of the stage. Her visits to Rudolph were always on his terms, but that just made them so much more electric, charged in their urgency. I cannot live without having seen or spoken to him, Mary said once to her piano tutor. I know this love is a happy dream from which I shall have to wake.

But Mary didn't want to wake. She had caught the object of her affection, the ultimate prize, and she refused to let him go, or rather to let go of her fantasies of how they might be. He seemed to really like her when they were together, and from that she was able to convince herself that he loved her too. He even gave her a ring, which she secretly called her wedding ring. It was a silly thing made of cheap iron, but it was engraved.

The crown prince had engraved it with the letters I-L-V-B-I-D-T. They stood for a German phrase. Please pardon my pronunciation. In Liebe Verand bin indisturte, we are united by love until death. The year Crown Prince Rudolf turned 30, his inner circle began to notice a change in him. Though he had always been moody, his moods began to get violent. On a hunt with his father, Rudolph fired his weapon so off kilter that he almost killed the emperor. Franz Joseph and the rest of the family proud.

privately believed that maybe Rudolph had been trying to kill him on purpose, so that he could be the emperor himself. From that point on, Franz Joseph avoided being alone with his son. The same was true for his wife, Princess Stephanie. She noticed her husband's strange moods, the dark circles beneath his eyes, the way he would casually toy with the trigger of a pistol as he spoke to her. She was afraid of him. Princess Stephanie went to her father-in-law. and begged Emperor Franz Joseph to send Rudolph on a trip to do something, anything, to pull him out of his strange malaise.

Can't you please do something? she said. Your son isn't well. She was surprised by the emotion in her voice. She so rarely ever spoke with her husband's family. Franz Joseph told her that she was overreacting. You're giving way to fancies, my dear, he said. There's nothing wrong with Rudolph. After Stephanie left the emperor's chamber, a page caught up to her to inform her that from now on she should follow protocol and only speak to the emperor after requesting a formal audience through his secretaries.

Meanwhile, Rudolph had become fascinated with stories about death and suicide. Suicide, especially theatrical suicides, were practically entertainment in Vienna at the turn of the 19th century. Newspaper readers delighted themselves with stories of chilling and romantic deaths. There was the young couple who ate a formal lunch of chicken and champagne and then went into a cemetery hand in hand to shoot themselves. The woman who put on a wedding dress and jumped off a train. The woman who was singing the national anthem as she left from her apartment window. A tight-rope walker who hangs himself out of his own window visible to the street below

and left a note that said, The rope was my life and the rope is my death. But Rudolf was particularly fascinated by the story of the famous Hungarian sportsman Isch van Kiegel, who shot himself and used a small handheld mirror to aim correctly. When Rudolph read that, he couldn't talk about anything else for weeks. Would you kill yourself with me if I asked? Rudolph asked his private secretary.

The secretary response. that, although he would consider it a great honor, no, he wasn't willing to kill himself. Rudolph asked another officer on his staff, who also politely declined. Both men quietly asked for reassignments. Mitzie Casper, the longtime lover of the Crown Prince, was used to his waxing poetical about suicide. He would often show up, drink a bottle of champagne, and talk about killing himself. At this point, she was used to it. But one evening, he showed up talking about suicide with such a grim and haunted look in his eyes that Mitzi couldn't get it out of her head. The next afternoon, she went to the police station to report the conversation to the chief of

police. If you repeat anything that the crown prince said to you, to anyone else, the police chief threatened, you will be prosecuted. Chastised, Mitzie returned. turned to her apartments, waiting for the next time Rudolph would come. His final interaction with Mitzi would happen a few weeks later. Rudolph showed up, drunk, and spent two hours drinking more and telling Mitzie that suicide was the only heroic answer, the only way to make the vague statement that he needed to make. He was rambling, verging on scary. But after the police chief's threats, Mitsy didn't tell anyone. Before Rudolph left that night, he did something he had never done before.

Rudolph, a devout atheist, made the sign of the cross on Mitzie's forehead. Rudolph spent Christmas with his family, where his mother pulled him aside to beg him to be a little kinder to his younger sister, who had been the object of so much of his sarcasm and cruelty. I do love you, you know Rudolph, said the cold and beautiful Empress Elizabeth. To her surprise, Rudolph began to sob. Though he was a man of thirty, he fell to his knees and hugged his mother's skirt, crying like a child. You haven't said those words to me in a long time, he gasped. The emperor and empress just stood there, motionless and embarrassed by their son's humiliating display.

Maybe they didn't realize, or maybe they weren't capable of. realizing that he was begging for help one final time. A few weeks later, Rudolph told the Countess Marie to pick up Mary Vett Sarah and bring her to the palace immediately. She obliged. The countess told Mary's mother that they were going to go shopping, but instead they went directly to the Hofberg Palace. Here, Rudolph said, take this money and bribe your driver to say that you lost Mary while you were out shopping. The Countess obliged, and when hours later she returned to Mary's house without Mary, that was the story, she told Helene, in a dramatic performance worthy of being on the stage.

At that very moment, Mary and the Crown Prince were riding to Merling, a hunting lodge in the woods, a few hours carriage ride outside of the city, where Rudolph had quickly arranged a hunting trek with a few of his friends. As soon as the two arrived, they were treated to the Crown Prince's room, where Mary remained hidden, taking her meals there, even as Rudolph left to eat dinner with his guests. The lovers were embarking on what Mary believed to be her romantic destiny. Side by side, they wrote letters together, letters to their friends and families to be read after their deaths. That night, before they went to bed, Rudolph went to his valley, Lashik, and made a simple and clear declaration. You are not to let anyone into these rooms, not even the emperor. Loshak said he

understood. Mary, 17 years old, was wearing the olive green ice skating outfit that she had traveled in, that she had been wearing when she told her mother that she was going out shopping. She smiled and gave Loshchak a gold watch and crusted with diamonds. The valet watched as they closed the door behind them. The next morning, Mary and Rudolph were found, both covered in blood. Mary was on the right side of the bed, closer to the door, her body in full rigor mortis. Her eyes still open, her hair down, a handkerchief still clutched in her hand. The bullet had entered her left temple and blew off the right of her skull.

In official reports, Count Hoyas and Loshchak both scrambled when they described what she was wearing. She was fully dressed, Loshick said, in a black dress, Poyas wrote. But Mary hadn't brought a black dress. She had only brought the olive green clothes that were found folded neatly on a nearby chair. The men, awkward and formal, were trying to cover up the fact that she was found naked. Rudolph was seated on the other side of the bed, his head hanging low and blood congealing at his nose and mouth. His body was only in the beginning stages of rigor mortis. Doctors estimated that Rudolph had shot Mary six hours before he finally decided to shoot himself.

After the shock of the gore, of the sight of blood splatter on the headboard and the visible brain, the details of the room began to come into focus one by one. The crystal tumbler on the bedside table still filled with brandy, two shattered champagne glasses on the floor, a broken coffee cup, and next to Rudolph, a small, handheld mirror like Ishton Kigel had used to perfect his deadly aim. The three men who found the bodies, the valet, Lozhak, Count Hoyos, and Coburg, sent a telegraph immediately to the court physician. Coburg was too distraught to move, so Hoyas was sent to rush back to Vienna to tell the

emperor that his son was dead. Remember, Coburg said, not a word of this can get out until the emperor knows, so tell no one. Of course, Hoyas responded, not a soul. He rushed to the train station and demanded to board the next train bound for Vienna

that passed through the station. The station master said that the next train was an express and it wasn't stopping there. For God's sake, man, Haya shouted. The crown prince has shot himself. The train stopped. and Hoyos made it to Vienna. Meanwhile, the station master had telephoned his brother-in-law,

who telephoned the German embassy, who informed the British embassy. The only government that didn't seem to know that Prince Rudolph was lying in a pile of his own blood was his own. Hoyos was so unnerved by the scene, so embarrassed by the prince's actions, by the violence, the blood, the nudity, the mistress, that he tried to soften the story when he got to the palace. I didn't even see the bodies, he lied. The valet told me they poisoned themselves. None of the officers wanted to be the one to tell the emperor.

It was decided that the only person who could tell Franz Joseph was his wife, the empress. A minister interrupted her Greek lesson, hat in hand. He informed the empress that Mary Vetsara had poisoned Prince Rudolph, and then, in her guilt, she had taken her own life. Rudolph's younger sister came in to see their mother weeping. He's killed himself, hasn't he? Valerie said. Elizabeth gasped and physically stepped away from her daughter. Why would you think that? she said.

No, it's probably, no, certain, that the girl poisoned him. By the time they got around to telling Rudolph's wife, Stephanie, the official story was determined. There would be no sorted details of murder or suicide or an affair. they would say that Rudolph had a heart attack. It was just like when he was seven years old, having a nervous breakdown when they said it was diphtheria. Better to cover up, to obfuscate. The most important thing is preserving royal decorum.

Meanwhile, Mary's mother, Helene, had spent the past two days desperately trying to get the chief of police to take her missing daughter seriously. The moment he'd found out that Mary had been having an affair with the prince, the chief of police refused to get involved. The royal family's personal life is none of our business, he said. When finally Helene made it to the palace to ask if anyone knew the whereabouts of Rudolph or Mary, the servants tried to usher her away.

Elizabeth heard Helene at the door. You're telling me the poor woman knows nothing, the Empress mother to her lady in waiting? Let her in. Without so much as a moment's introduction, the Empress gout. gathered her height and told Helene to collect her courage. Your daughter is dead, she said simply. So is my son. Helene wept and was escorted out while Elizabeth called after her. Remember, the crown prince died of heart failure.

Back at Maryland, the crown prince's head was bandaged and his body was covered with a white sheet. When word finally reached the palace that it had actually been a suicide, the emperor requested special dispensation from the Vatican to permit a royal burial anyway, which he was granted because, as the emperor said, the prince didn't know what he was doing. He hadn't been in his right mind. Mary's body was brought to a storeroom

and covered haphazardly with her clothes. She was given a quiet, secret burial nearby. Her family wasn't permitted to attend. The only connection they had left to their daughter were the letters that she had written to them on Maryland Stationary. Dear mother, Mary wrote, forgive me for what I have done. I could not resist love. I am happier in death than in life. To her sister Hannah, Mary wrote, think of me now and again, and marry only for love. I could not do so, and as I could not resist love, I am going with him. do not cry for me. I am going to the other side in peace. It is beautiful here. Rudolph was tortured and lost. He felt useless and he was going mad from disease and the drugs

and the alcohol and the emptiness of a life in which he had been given everything. But for Mary, her death was merely a gift for her lover, a way to immortalize that larger-than-life obsessive love that can only happen. when you're 17 years old. She would be forever part of his story. After all, maybe in the back of her mind she knew that he would never leave his wife for her, that he would never marry her.

This was the only version of their story where they would end up together. Rudolph had wanted someone devoted enough that he wouldn't have to die alone. He saw the love in Mary that Sarah's eyes, and he knew what to do with it. That's the tragic story of the Maryland incident, but stick around after a brief sponsor break to hear about how Rudolph's death reshaped Europe. I'm Ago Wodom.

My next guest, you know from Stepbrothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network. It's Will Ferrell. My dad gave me the best advice ever. I went and had lunch with them one day, and I was like, and Dad, I think I want to really give this a shot. what that means, but I just know the groundlings. I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place that come, look for up-and-coming talent. He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet. He goes, but there's so much luck involved. And he's like, just give it a shot. He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head

against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, It would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks Dad on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

I'm Iris Palmer and my new podcast is called Against All Od, and that's exactly what the show is about doing whatever it takes to be thoughts. Get ready to hear from some of your favorite entrepreneurs. and entertainers as they share stories about defying expectations, overcoming barriers, and breaking generational patterns. I'm talking to people like award-winning actress, producer, and director, Eva Langoria. I think I had like $200 in my savings account, and my mom goes, what are you going to do? And I was like, I'll figure it out. We got a one-bedroom apartment for like $400 a month, and we all could not afford.

Like, I was like, how am I going to make $100 a month? I'm opening up like I've never before. For those of you who think you know me from what you've seen on social media, get ready to see a whole new side of me. Listen to Against All Odds with Iris Palmer as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Crown Prince Rudolph's death meant that his father, Franz Joseph, no longer had an heir. The next male Habsburg in line was Franz Joseph's brother who died, which meant that the next in line was his son, Rudolph's cousin, an Archduke named Franz Ferdinand. Archduke Franz Ferdinand didn't live long enough to take the throne as emperor of the

Austro-Hungarian Empire either. He and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo by Bosnian Serb, which ignited all of Europe to fall into the First World War. One last, final, and very important note, if you were a loved one is having superfluous, suicidal thoughts, please know that help is available. Call the suicide hotline now at 1-800-273-8255. Noble Blood is a production of IHeart Radio and Grimmin-Mild from Aaron Manky. The show is written and hosted by Dana Schwartz and produced by Aaron Manky, Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn.

more about the show over at noblebloodtales.com. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. And I'm Egovod. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot.

But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right. It wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Yeah. Listen to Thanks Dad on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.