by Ned Rorem
But when Friday morning came around, and Boris and I showed up on her doorstep, Marie-Laure had already driven off, leaving no message with her concierge.
Anyone else would have crossed her off for good. But I was Rastignac. Since Nora and Georges were also planning to spend a month in Hyères, I asked Nora to ask Marie-Laure to ask me back. Meanwhile, two weeks were spent in sleeping mornings, working afternoons, and socializing nights with (let me check) Yves Vidal, Philippe Erlanger, Julius and Doda and Jean and José, Marie-Blanche, Boulanger, Boris Kochno, Elliott Stein (who was already busy on our libretto), Jacques Février, Lily Pastré, James Lord, the soprano Irene Joachim, Bernac, Fraigneau, Kanters, Seymour Barab who was passing through, and a host of other names I no longer recognize by either taste or smell. I would seem to be going in circles. Maybe we all were, maybe that’s youth. But just as heartbreak and physical pain can be remembered but not reexperienced, so the prospects offered by a chance meeting or a new work of art can be reexperienced (since we now know the outcome) but no longer savored. I did get a lot of music written in this fortnight, and on Saturday, 24 March, I took a real bath in one of the bains du quartier (you rent a copper tub for half an hour, buy a cake of savon de Marseille, and scrub yourself silly), after which Jean Leuvrais said my skin was more satiny; all events before and after were dated according to Ned’s Bath. We heard Prokofiev’s new version of War and Peace and concluded: Shostakovich at his best is better than Prokofiev at his best, but Prokofiev at his worst is more fun than Shostakovich at his worst.
Then a telegram came from Marie-Laure advising me to take the night train for Toulon on Saturday, the 31st, at the Gare de Lyon. “Get a first-class ticket, Claude the concierge, place des Etats-Unis, will take care of it.”
The hotel room, being paid up through April, I stored most of my stuff under the bed, locked the door, and left.
Ferdinand the benign sadist? He went back to his island in Norway. In the mid-1960s he phoned me in New York and came for tea. The gentle Charles Lovett? A year or two after Yes Is for a Very Young Man his life stopped oddly. At Hadrian’s Villa one day he was taking a picture. He lowered his head into the camera, stepped back a few paces, and fell into a twelve-foot hole. He was killed instantly.
32. Marie-Laure in Hyères
What can be said of this unique monster, the most influential “older woman” besides Mother of my life? It’s long ago. Neither the creature nor the land she dwelled in exist any longer. The aura, the verve, the smartness, the panache, have dimmed. The fact remains that if it weren’t for Marie-Laure I would have returned to America years earlier.
Recently James Lord, whose early life was also long enhanced by—though not dependent on, as mine became—Marie-Laure, asked if I thought she were intelligent. It had never occurred to me that she was anything less. Perhaps, thinking back, she was not intelligent but had a flair for miming those who were. And her taste was good. Intelligence, of course, bears little relation to talent, and none at all to moral goodness. James Lord is intelligent. I am less so (nor am I more morally good than necessary). But we all three have talent, and we keep our eyes open. Intelligence means seeing relationships, while talent means feeling relationships and being capable of economically solidifying this feeling communicably on canvas or page or staff.
She was hardly beautiful, was frankly plain, though in youth had been an anorexically svelte tomboy, aware of posture, dressed to kill. She was, as the French say, une belle laide, like Lillian Hellman or Barbra Streisand: one not blessed with movie-star traits but who, through wit and guile, convinces you she’s Lilith. By the time I knew her she had lost her figure and forsaken the high-fashion accoutrements of the rich. She lost her figure to a fibrous tumor in the belly which she refused to have excised and which made her look pregnant; she forsook high-fashion accoutrements of the rich during the Spanish Civil War when her right-thinking (that is, left-thinking) entourage considered her frivolous. With her thick stringy hair and spit curls she came to resemble Louis XIV in the same way Janet Flanner resembled George Washington—as a distaff incarnation of past political power, businesslike yet coy, no-nonsense yet ornate. In all the years with her I never saw Marie-Laure, while in the Midi, garbed in other than a voluminous peasant skirt, a peasant blouse on which she carelessly pinned a million-dollar brooch, and espadrilles which were the only seemly footwear for the grotesquely distorted toes which she loathed. In Paris, on high evening occasions, she did don a Rochas robe of royal blue, and by day wore real dresses and sheer stockings of bright red or green on her very good legs. Gone were the days of the shy spoiled brat in a new gown daily by Mainbocher. Yet she thought of herself as a femme fatale, batting her eyes, playing hard-to-get. (Henri Sauguet had once pointed me out from afar to Marie-Laure. “I don’t think he’s so good-looking,” said she. And he: “Oh no? But he looks just like you.”) Jean Cocteau had been an intimate of her childhood. Thirteen years his junior, she retained a crush on him from which she never quite revived. When in 1958 Cocteau suffered an attack and was expected to die, Marie-Laure told the press, “I was Jean’s Lolita,” which struck me then as drolly self-aggrandizing, as though the poet had simply devolved from her, but which now sounds plausible, if only because of the money that flowed between them.
Born Marie-Laure Bischoffsheim on Halloween in 1902, our mutual October birthdates, though twenty-one years apart, first endeared me to her, with her horoscopic obsession that Scorpios hurt everyone but each other—though I am a Scorpio only in France; Indiana with its four-thousand-mile eight-hour separation claims me on the cusp as Libra. Her father, a Jewish banker, died when she was an infant. Her mother, Marie-Thérèse, paternally descended from Lafayette, was the prim and proper offspring of the blazing Comtesse de Chevigné, one of the two models (the other was Madame Emile Straus, Bizet’s widow, who survived the composer by half a century) for Proust’s Oriane de Guermantes, and herself the last descendant of the Marquis de Sade, a fact of which Marie-Laure was boastful. Marie-Laure doted on the grandmother’s memory, quoted her often, emulated the sparkle which had skipped a generation, wanted to be her. Marie-Laure, who adored what we today call “celebrities” and was in a position to meet anyone—or almost anyone—she wished, had in fact known Proust a bit, found him a vieux raseur, but by the time she was old enough to realize what she’d missed, the great man had died. She never, as a result, could allow that Proust had any interest whatsoever.
Marie-Thérèse remarried. Her new husband, Francis de Croisset, author and lyricist for, among others, Reynaldo Hahn, Proust’s onetime lover, with whom he produced the delicious Ciboulette, was also, according to Marie-Laure, a child abuser. He had, she claimed, seduced her in her adolescence, a trauma which caused her later to pen a novella, La chambre des écureuils, privately printed and publicly distributed during the war years. When in 1954 Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour tristesse came out (its title filched from a poem by Marie-Laure’s dear friend Paul Eluard: “… adieu bonheur, bonjour tristesse”), better written but too close for comfort in incestuous shock value to La chambre des écureuils, Marie-Laure wanted to—but did not—sue. Croisset sired a son ten years younger than Marie-Laure, Philippe, who espoused an American heiress, Ethel Woodward. Widowed (Philippe died young in a car crash), Ethel thrives today in the rue Weber from where she, as a well-off music lover, promotes the well-being of Pierre Boulez, among others. (If facts are skewed, check with James Lord. Better yet, with Bernard Minoret. As a professional French historian of snobbery Bernard has a finer grasp on lineage than I as a befuddled Yankee.)
In 1922 Marie-Laure wedded by prearrangement the Vicomte Charles de Noailles, uniting the fortunes which contained, in real estate alone, half of Wall Street, and similar financial districts in Montreal and Geneva. The young couple dutifully produced two daughters, Laure and Natalie, after which they maybe never again slept together. Laure married Gaston de la Haye-Jousselin, an effete neutered type from a “good family,” and she too, with her upper-crust
accent, always seemed effete and neutral, taking after her tame grandmother as Marie-Laure had taken after her own wild grandmother. Their son, Egmont, about four or five in 1951, would, with his English nanny, inhabit an elaborate nursery directly above my room when I came to live in the place des Etats-Unis. Laure inherited her mother’s three large Goyas which are still presumably lodged in the Haye-Jousselin chateau in Normandy. She herself perished in the mid-1980s from swallowing a chicken bone. Natalie married Sandro Perrone, director of the Roman daily Il Messagiero, and they had two sons—one of them, Mario, gravely autistic—before their divorce. Natalie, the only surviving Noailles now, lives in seclusion at Fontainebleau’s Palais de Pompadour, bequeathed by her father. An accomplished equestrian, she fell violently from a thoroughbred at the time of her sister’s death, and has not been the same since. Both daughters, though hardly pals, were of my generation, and staunch acquaintances.
Charles de Noailles, ten years his wife’s senior, handsome, dapper, manly, a Gentleman to the bone, had manners whose perfection can only be called art, art which even then was all but past. He and Marie-Laure lived separately since the mid-thirties—since, that is, having provided the world with appropriate progeny and, as the most-envied young couple in their special society, provided their country with unique works of cinematic bravura via commissions and imposed tastes. It was when these works began provoking scandals with both church and state that the Noailles initiated their life of chambres à part, wherein Charles would pursue an existence of gentleman-gardener with his nominal mistresses in his own domains, and Marie-Laure, who thrived on scandal, would pursue as a rich bohemian her affairs of head and heart in the world of the arts, free to act promiscuously provided she did not besmirch the family name. The initiation was also surely impelled by Charles’s discreet pederasty, he having been upset when rumors of an affair with his gymnast were bruited in the milieu. In all the years I knew her, Marie-Laure, who was otherwise outlandish, even slanderous in gossip and given to words like “enculer” and “godemichet” as the servants impassively passed the potatoes, never once, with me or with anyone I know, discussed the sexual proclivities or hints of indignity relating to her sacred mate.
She loved him, worshiped him, was a little in awe of him if only because, like all French husbands from every class, he legally controlled the purse strings. Her sole moments of intimidation came every three months when she was called to account for her expenditures. Though her allowance was unlimited, it was an allowance. Marie-Laure kept up a voluminous correspondence, including a daily letter to Charles when, as was usually the case, he was at his properties of Grasse or Fontainebleau or en voyage, or even in Paris when she too was there. The hôtel in Paris belonged to her by inheritance, but contained separate apartments for both daughters, and for Charles. Yes, even in Paris she would leave a letter under his door each night, which he each morning answered.
If Charles was more than a little queer, Marie-Laure was definitely straight. She never said “tu” to women except her daughters, never said “vous” to men except her husband. Once I asked the very American question: “Since you vouvoyer your husband, what do you say in bed?” (The question is American not just because we have no intimate form of address—can you even conjugate in English the second-person singular of any verb?—but because we have no sense of correct discourse among the well-brought-up.) Her answer: “We never talked in bed.”
That answer, of course, betrayed an innocence beneath the bluff. Like many a notorious sophisticate, when you get down to brass tacks, Marie-Laure was sexually naïve. Had she really, beyond her husband, had more than, say, ten or twelve lovers in her life? To be fair, most of my straight women friends have not had more than around twenty lovers, including one-night stands, in their active premenopausal lives, as distinct from the hundreds, even thousands of partners enjoyed or abhorred by most gay males, myself included. (I classify my own libidinous encounters—steady lovers, passing affairs, one-night stands—as I do the authors I’ve set to music. Some, like Whitman and Goodman and Auden, I return to often; others, like Bishop and Ashbery and Roethke, remain recurring memories; still others, like Plath and Mew and Noailles herself, were one-shot deals.)
The first and most important of these extramarital and very public amourettes was Igor Markevich in the 1930s. Only twenty-one at the time, Markevich was an already famous enfant terrible as composer and protégé of both Boulanger’s and Diaghilev’s. Skinny, Slavic, charismatic rather than handsome, he would eventually marry Kyra Nijinsky, the dancer’s daughter, then Topazia Caetani (offspring of one of Charles de Noailles’s “mistresses,” Cora Caetani, who traced her name back to the court of Nero) and evolve into a conductor of international stature. For now he was the caring and instructive partner of Marie-Laure who hitherto seemed to have been a poor little rich girl, educated to the teeth in every art except the art of love.
Three disruptive episodes transpired during their otherwise tranquil and lengthy liaison. In 1934, finding herself pregnant, it was decided, after “civilized” consultation with Igor and Charles, that, more or less against her desires, Marie-Laure would get an abortion in Switzerland. The procedure was botched, and told on her mind and body for the rest of her life. A year later, in the Alfa-Romeo she had impulsively bestowed upon Igor, the pair went over a cliff where the auto was caught by a protruding tree and hung in the balance. Igor, despite cracked ribs, emerged from the wreckage, but Marie-Laure remained trapped inside for hours before the car, by means of a derrick, was hoisted to safety. In what condition would Marie-Laure be found? She was quietly reading the poems of Hölderlin and appeared unhurt except for a broken cheekbone—broken in the very spot where Dali, in his 1929 portrait, had painted a perfect pink rose. A year later, while Igor was collaborating with Jean Cocteau on a sizable cantata, Marie-Laure accused them loudly, on no foundation except her jealousy, of a love that dare not speak its name. The accusation changed the weather: at a vernissage, Cocteau assailed her with a slap heard round the world, while Igor, fed up with unpredictable tantrums, imposed a decades-long estrangement. (By the time I knew Markevich he was married to the cheerful Topazia, and both were on the warmest terms with Marie-Laure.)
Though I am no longer one for ferreting out elective affinities, Freudian or otherwise, between past and present, cause and effect, it seemed immediately clear that her abortion was the decisive shock of the Vicomtesse’s young life. As parent to Laure and Natalie, she went through the motions—which were more than mere motions—of irreproachable devotion. But she would have preferred a son, and was convinced that the embryo, flushed down the drain of the Swiss quack, would have emerged as the ideal boy. Sonless, she became, like many strong women (weak ones too, and some with sons), partial to homosexual men; indeed, nearly all of her lovers—though not Markevich—were, at the very least, what was then termed bisexual. Like many strong women (weak ones too) she imagined herself the unique being to convert these lovers into Ladies’ Men, if only by transforming them into surrogate sons. The situation is ubiquitous in every class, more plaintive and hopeless for the women than for the men.
I have always despised the central quatrain of Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes”:
The world’s gone mad today, and good’s bad today,
And black’s white today, and day’s night today,
When those guys today that women prize today
Are just silly gigolos.
Today? It’s been true since the Greeks. Silly? The “gigolos” are no sillier than the women who prize them. In Proust and Balzac, as in real life, how many of the males—females too—turn out to be AC-DC! So too with Marie-Laure’s milieu, which Cole Porter skirted.
There is no solution. Though a woman speaks with the tongues of men and of angels, and has no penis, she is become as a tinkling cymbal in this Aristotelian comedy wherein two creatures love and need each other, but will never—by definition of their sex—unite.
More than once I have seen a woma
n in middle age wash her hands of the beautiful boys and set her cap for a homely heterosexual of her own age. That’s what Libby Holman settled for, when I came to know her, with the husky abstract expressionist Louis Schanker, after a lifetime of impossible unions. Marie-Laure settled for it too, as we shall see, with the Spanish painter Oscar Dominguez, the ugliest man alive, and straight as a die in his crooked way.
Meanwhile, I would play on Marie-Laure’s susceptibilities, as she would play on mine.
Fernand Bacchat, the chauffeur, greeted the Toulon train at 7:45 a.m. on Sunday, April Fool’s Day, and together we drove the seventeen kilometers west to Hyères. Bacchat, not tall, very French, married, late thirties, great-looking with salty gray temples and a dashing smile, was rather dumb, overworked, and given to gossip. Of him I knew only this: he had an affair with Theodora Keogh contingent with Marie-Laure’s affair with Theodora’s husband, Tom. Theodora had instigated this upstairs-downstairs intrigue out of spite—she loathed Marie-Laure and the whole of the Tout Paris which fawned over Tom. (Not that Bacchat was anything to sneeze at, or that Tom’s carnal rapports were very weighty—he was only heterosexual when sober, which was rare.) At this point I had never seen either of the Keoghs, although two weeks earlier, when Tom had attempted suicide with a razor in his room above the Montana bar and was rushed to emergency, Marie-Laure took me to the room to pick up his things, and we found it spattered in blood—the sheets, the windows, the ceiling. The Keoghs were an American couple living professionally in Paris. (Marie-Laure, I learned, knew few Americans, and those few she invoked, like Bernard Berenson or Glenway Wescott, never quite jibed with her clichéd notion of Americans—including the Keoghs and myself—as rustic cowboys.) Tom was an adroit craftsman to whom Christian Bérard, on his deathbed, bequeathed the mantle of Europe’s sole Great Designer. He had designed sets and costumes for the movie Kismet, featuring the gilded body of Marlene Dietrich, whom he rather resembled with his pronounced cheekbones, lazy eyes, and cider-colored hair, and was now employed by the ballet companies of both Roland Petit and the marquis de Cuevas. Theodora, named for her grandfather Roosevelt, was a nimble novelist of prefeminist perceptions who had just published Meg, the tale of a young woman’s sad self-discoveries, and was about to publish The Double Door, an acid portrait of the Cuevas milieu. (Why did she stop writing? Only last year I had a letter from her in a Virginia village dreaming of the old days.) Tom, after their divorce, returned to the States where he finally died. I covet the three watercolors he made for me: of a sleeping male nude, a green apple with two huge leaves, and a handsome clown in orange and black.
