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Of all the colorful figures on the twentieth-century European cultural scene, hardly anyone has provoked more-polarized reactions than Alma Schindler Mahler Gropius Werfel (1879-1964) . Mistress to a long succession of brilliant men, she married three of the best known: the composer Gustav Mahler, the architect Walter Gropius, and the writer Franz Werfel. Her admirers regarded Alma as a self-sacrificing figure of inspiration to great artists, many of whom indeed exhibited a remarkable devotion to her. Her detractors saw her as a self-aggrandizing social climber, a boozy, bigoted, vengeful harlot - or as one contemporary put it, "She was a grande dame and at the same time a cesspool."So who was she really? The historian Oliver Hilmes sets the record straight.