Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation

by Mackrell, Judith

  Professionally and socially Tamara was now working towards the peak of her success. British art critics were joining the European interest in her work, with the Sunday Times comparing her favourably to Wyndham Lewis, and the magazine Graphic publishing a flattering reproduction and review of La Belle Rafaela. In 1928 she was commissioned to paint a series of cover images for Die Dame, the German fashion magazine, which was one of the most significant commissions of her career. Not only did it bring her exposure to a mass market (and a lot of money), but one of the images she produced for the magazine, AutoPortrait or Tamara in the Green Bugatti, became her most widely reproduced painting. It showed a woman driver, gloved and helmeted for speed, her blonde hair and long, heavy-lidded eyes quite recognizable as Tamara.

  She had painted herself as an icon of the decade, and as her stock rose on the social register, Tamara’s life moved closer to the perfection she created on canvas. She had honed her appearance to a sleek, expensive look: her short blonde hair was styled in marcelled waves, and her scarlet lipstick and nail varnish were balanced by thick false eyelashes. She wore evening gowns by Poiret and the young Schiaparelli, whose artful folding and draping flattered her body’s curves. She also wore the designs of the newly launched Marcel Rochas, who loaned or gifted her several outfits. She had many lovers, both male and female, and as her estrangement from Tadeusz moved towards the formal severance of divorce, she developed an increasingly close relationship with one of her patrons.

  Baron Raoul Kuffner had begun collecting Tamara’s work sometime in the late 1920s, and in 1928 he commissioned her to paint a portrait of his mistress, the Spanish dancer Nana de Herrera. It’s not clear at what point Tamara began to consider Kuffner as a potential husband. At this point he was still married to his first wife, and with his thick-set body and thinning hair he wasn’t particularly attractive to her, but he was very rich, cultured and kind, and she seems to have wanted to manoeuvre herself into a possible future with him. The portrait she painted of de Herrera was strategically unflattering – her thin shoulders hunched and her smile so tense as to resemble a snarl – and certainly, when Kuffner’s wife died in 1934 Tamara moved swiftly to secure him and his fortune.

  Even though she claimed to have made over a million dollars by the end of the decade, Tamara never felt she was rich enough or enviable enough. She was still consumed by the need to shore up her life. In the late 1920s she was approached by the wealthy scientist Pierre Boucard, who had made his fortune patenting the indigestion remedy Lactéol. Boucard wanted her to paint portraits of himself, his wife and his daughter and, in addition, he wanted first rights of purchase over all her work. The terms that Tamara negotiated were such that she was finally able to create the home of which she had dreamed since coming to Paris – a public showcase for her achievements and a monument to herself.

  In 1929 she bought a three-floor apartment on rue Méchain, big enough to double as both living space and studio, and hired the celebrated architect Roger Mallet-Stevens and her own sister Adrienne to remodel its interior. She wanted its style to reflect her own vision of contemporary luxe, with the airy chrome and glass structures of the staircases and mezzanine landings, the streamlined windows and radiator grilles, all complemented by a more theatrical glamour. She had a pair of vases made to her own design, with electric lights in their base that showed her favourite calla lilies to stagey effect; her large sofa was upholstered in a plush grey fabric that had her initials woven into the pattern.

  The centrepiece, of course, was Tamara herself, and photographs of her painting at her easel, in jewels and an elaborately draped evening gown, appeared in the press. It was the apotheosis of the image to which she had always aspired: rich, famous and beautiful, in charge of her own created kingdom. And the following commission she received felt like the inevitable next step in her career, allowing her to extend her reach across the Atlantic.

  A young American millionaire, Rufus Bush, had invited her to paint his wife’s portrait in New York, for which he was offering a fee of forty thousand francs, plus lavish expenses. In early October, Tamara made her first voyage to the United States in high style, ensconced in a first-class cabin and dining at the captain’s table every night. She was met by Bush and his wife with not one, but two Rolls-Royces standing by to transport her and her luggage, and she was booked into the recently opened Savoy Hotel on 5th Avenue, an art deco temple to beauty and excess.

  From her first day in Manhattan she felt as if she had come home. The city was living the American dream to the hilt, with the ever-rising stock market promising a season of even more extravagant parties and consumption. Tamara was enchanted by this vision of a city at play, of ‘women who … flirted and laughed as their men heaped fortune upon fortune and gave away mink coats and diamond bracelets and thousand-dollar bills as party favours’.18

  But then, nine days after Tamara arrived, the market began to crash.

  All that summer Wall Street had witnessed exceptional speculative activity. An interview with the financier John Jakob Raskob had been published in August under the title ‘Everyone Ought to be Rich’. Its promise that a market investment of just $15 a month could accumulate $80,000 (close to a million dollars by today’s values) in the space of two decades was taken as holy writ by many ordinary Americans, and by early September the Dow Jones share index was driven to a record high of 381 points as Americans avidly exchanged market tips.

  On 24 October, however, concerns about rising personal debt and lax market regulation contributed to a rash of nervous selling. The market lost 11 per cent of its value at the opening bell, and over the days that followed terrified investors were suckered into the panic as the Dow slid faster and deeper. Attempts were made to steady it, with a few of the very wealthy buying up huge quantities of stocks, but by 13 November the market had plunged to just under the 200-point mark.

  Tamara, who had only modest fluency in English and little sense of formal economics, could not follow the details, but couldn’t fail to see the panic. Those who stood to lose most were those who’d borrowed heavily to buy stocks. Yet business also suffered – from the loss of capital, from the contraction of credit and from the massive decrease in outside investment. Over the following months a hundred thousand American companies would close, and five thousand banks would fail, ushering in a decade of economic depression.*

  The mood in Manhattan was febrile, almost like a war zone, with people alternately retreating into despair or partying with fatalistic excess. As far as Tamara was concerned, it was vexing but not calamitous – she lost a sizable chunk of her American earnings by depositing them in a bank that subsequently failed. But there were still people in America whose fortunes were sufficiently large or well managed to consider the market crash a temporary hazard. Tamara received several lucrative commissions during this time and even managed to organize an exhibition of her work in Pittsburgh.

  As far as she was concerned the party hadn’t really ended. She continued to write letters home extolling the wonders of Manhattan: the 5th Avenue department stores, the perfect deco skyline and the nightclubs of Harlem, which, she informed Kizette, were the ‘best … in the world’.19 In mid-December she met a handsome ranch owner, who gave her a train ticket for New Mexico and an invitation to visit him. She had promised Kizette and Malvina that she would be back for Christmas, but the adventure was just too tempting, and it was late January before she finally returned to Paris.

  Kizette, who was now boarding at a Catholic girls school, had been yearning for a festive holiday with her grandmother and Cherie. When Malvina saw Kizette struggling to overcome her disappointment, she was enraged by her daughter’s callousness. There was a cupboard in the new apartment in which Tamara kept her by now enormous collection of hats – a collection that ranged from the large theatrical models she had favoured in the early 1920s to the close-fitting cloches she now preferred, dozens of them in different colours and styles. Malvina emptied the cupboard and took all the hats do
wnstairs where, one by one, she tore them to pieces and threw them onto the fire.

  There’s no record of how Tamara reacted to the destruction of her hats when she returned home. It was a busy time for her. Paris was already suffering from the fallout of the market crash, especially in the steady exodus of its American population. As Janet Flanner reported in the New Yorker, orders for expensive jewellery were being summarily cancelled, art collectors had stopped buying and in the bars of expensive hotels, the ‘pretty ladies’ were suddenly having ‘to pay for their cocktails themselves’.20 Yet Tamara’s client list continued to expand. In Paris, as in New York, those who still had money seemed determined to continue spending. Among the numerous social events she attended that year was the ‘silver’ party given by Jean Patou, held in a roofed garden where every surface, including the trees, was covered with foil. Giant stuffed parrots hung in silver cages and three lion cubs were led on leashes through the crowd of conspicuously fashionable guests.

  None looked more fashionable than Tamara. To be in possession of her beautiful apartment, her extensive wardrobe and her lovely social life was all balm to her. To see herself not only survive but triumph during the economic crisis, while others failed, was proof of her talent and spirit. In 1934, when she married Kuffner and his enormous fortune, she could safely consider herself immune from danger for the rest of her life. And yet for Tamara, too, something significant had ended with the turn of the decade.

  From 1930 onwards she started to suffer prolonged bouts of anxiety and depression. Her robust health faltered and she developed severe stomach pains. She missed Kizette, whom she had sent to boarding school in England, believing it offered a better education and better care than her convent in France. She missed Ira Perrot, with whom she had quarrelled irrevocably, and she was distraught over the death of Jules Pascin in June 1930, which seemed to be a grim exemplar of the passing decade: drunk and unhappy he had slit his wrists and hanged himself in his Montmartre studio.

  But it wasn’t just her personal life that seemed to be slipping out of control. When Tamara visited friends in Berlin in 1934 she was seriously alarmed by her first vision of Hitler’s Germany. She claimed she could smell the fear on the streets, and when Nazi uniformed officials had demanded to see her travel papers she felt a shuddering reminder of her past encounters with the St Petersburg Cheka. It seemed that the world was heading towards another catastrophe, and as it did so Tamara was far less confident now that her talent would allow her to transcend it. She was feeling her age, and also her vulnerability to changing trends.

  The 1920s had created Tamara; they had provided her with her style, her subject matter and her marketplace. Even if her painting had never, objectively, attained the greatness she had hoped for, it had been exceptional as a register of its time. It had captured the tempo and colours of jazz, deco, of Coco Chanel and la garçonne; it had evoked the café culture of the Left Bank and the monied luxury of the Right. But in a rapidly changing world she began to sense that she was adrift. Over the decades that followed she tried to experiment with different techniques and subject matter, yet again and again the results turned out to be kitsch, sentimental or coarse. With the passing of the 1920s, it was as though she had lost some instinctive accord with her material, and when she and Kuffner moved to Hollywood, Tamara became known merely as the eccentric baroness who did ‘these amusing paintings’.21 While she lived long enough to see her early work making a return to fashion in the 1970s, it was also long enough to know that as a painter her golden age had been disappointingly brief, ending shortly after the decade that had formed her.

  Chapter Twelve

  JOSEPHINE

  When Josephine Baker arrived in Paris on 22 September 1925, the city was still inventing itself as the capital of the années folles, and all the elements that had limited her career were about to be repackaged as something Dionysiac and new. She was to be presented as a Harlem jazz babe, a black modern flapper, but also as the most primitive of sexual fantasies, an African goddess. As the Paris historian Jean Prasteau would write, the timing was perfect: ‘She arrived exactly at the moment we needed her. With her short hair, her free body, her coloured skin and her American accent, she untied the tendencies, tastes and aspirations of that epoch.’1

  Josephine herself was alight with expectation when, along with the rest of the troupe, she stepped off the train at the Gare Sainte-Lazare. Her terror of the Atlantic crossing had been distracted by an on-board romance with the band leader Claude Hopkins, and by Caroline Dudley’s promises of what awaited her. Even though the city was misted in a grey autumnal drizzle as the troupe were taken by bus to their lodgings, Josephine stood on the observation platform to catch every passing view: the jaunty taxis honking through the streets, the pavement cafés under bright awnings, the massive stone boulevards as grand as Manhattan museums. Approaching Montmartre and its steep, cobbled streets, she witnessed her first astonishing sight of white people and people of colour talking easily on the pavements and drinking together in bars. Paris looked like a kind of paradise, and when she fell asleep that night her mind was filled ‘with the idea of conquering [it]’.2

  Conquest was not, however, what an unhappy Rolf de Maré predicted when he watched the troupe’s first rehearsal. The assortment of jazz, tap and Charleston numbers that had been assembled for La Revue Nègre seemed to offer little that would excite his sophisticated home audience. The troupe didn’t even look very ‘nègre’ with their hair straightened, their cheeks powdered and rouged and their performance style honed to suit white American audiences. De Maré looked in vain for the blue-black skin, the tight African curls, the exotic ‘dynamite’ he had imagined selling to Paris.

  With little more than a week to go before opening night, he tried to imagine a more original way of restyling the show. His producer, André Daven, had been impressed by the troupe’s gregariousness when he’d first met them at the Gare Sainte-Lazare, spilling off the train in a ‘rocking, boisterous, multi-coloured [crowd] all talking loudly, some roaring with laughter. Red, green, yellow shirts, strawberry denims, dresses in polka dots and checks. Incredible hats – derbies – cream coloured orange and poppy.’3 This Harlem energy was new to Paris, and with the help of Jacques Charles, a famously canny veteran of the music hall, de Maré decided to make it key to the revue. New costumes were ordered in an exaggerated, motley design – Louis XIV hats were combined with overalls and straw hats paired with furs; scenic backdrops of New York and Mississippi steamboats were to be lit with carnival-bright colours. Charles also trawled Paris for darker-skinned performers to augment the cast, including the Antillean dancer Joe Alex. Finally, Charles identified the crucial missing ingredient. Erotic images of black women were widely peddled in France, ranging from the tropical fantasies of Gauguin’s paintings to the postcards of half-naked Algerian women on sale in the street. Charles was clear: ‘We need tits. These French people, with their fantasies of black girls, we must give them des nichons.’4

  Naked breasts were already key to the marketing of the famous, and white, Folies Bergère, as well as productions that were less obviously burlesque. Parisians were accustomed to discreet views of flesh: ever since a 1908 court ruling had drawn a legal distinction between the ‘aesthetic’ and the ‘obscene’ nude, audiences had become used to the flash of a naked breast or buttock slipping from artful drapery. But Charles was right to assume that de Maré’s audience would hope for more from this black American troupe. He planned strategic moments at which the chorus line would appear topless, and suggested a duet for Josephine and Joe Alex to be titled La Danse Sauvage, in which she would be virtually naked, except for a decorative belt of feathers and minuscule briefs.*

  If Charles hoped that these improvements would create the necessary oomph of sexual bravura, the dancers were tearfully resistant. Onstage nudity was a rarity in legitimate American theatre, and for them to show their breasts in Paris, in what they had assumed was an upmarket show, seemed like a professional
insult. Josephine, too, was angry and confused. She had come to Paris in the expectation of a sophisticated new platform for her career – Caroline Dudley had half promised her the chance of developing her singing – and to perform a ‘savage’ dance in nothing but a few feathers sounded like a step backwards into the theatrical ghetto.

  But Charles was good at his job. In the face of Josephine’s reluctance, he promised her that the duet with Joe Alex would be purely artistic, that it would be the climax and talking point of the entire show. And in truth, Josephine had little choice but to comply. She was in a strange city whose language she couldn’t speak, and she had no money with which to buy a ticket home.

  As the remaining days blurred into a frenetic schedule of rehearsals and costume fittings, she continued to feel very unsettled though. André Daven’s publicity had made an attempt to trumpet the revue’s novelty: ‘You will see these twenty-five Negros, in typical scenes and in their crude state. We haven’t changed or altered anything. It might not appeal to everybody, but all the same, Negro art is really something. The greatest artists in the world have praised its … force.’5 But despite this fanfare negative rumours were circulating: people were already suggesting that the dancing girls were not up to Parisian standards, and that the music was too wild for Parisian ears. The singer Mistinguett insisted that her own adoring public would never accept these American mongrels.