by Cecil Beaton
When Gaby Deslys went to call on Sir James Barrie, who at that time lived in a top flat in Adelphi Terrace, she completely beguiled the author, then as she left, ran down the staircase, ringing the doorbells of all the other apartments. Sir James fell in love with her and wrote a starring vehicle with the rather literary title of Rosy Rapture. At the first day of rehearsal Gaby walked to the footlights and leaned towards her admirer sitting in the stalls. “I can’t dance,” she said, “I can’t act, I can’t sing, but I can do it.”
Even today, when thumbing through some old bound copy of The Tatler, a tremor of excitement runs down my spine if I come across a photography of Gaby Deslys. Perhaps it is a picture of Gaby in ruched tutu and paradise feathers, performing the Gaby Glide; or “at home” in a spidery lace tea gown, her elbow poised on a knee, chin resting on her extended fingers as she smiles tragically into the camera. Whatever else she may have been, she was always individual. To me, she remains mysterious.
Some may well say that Gaby Deslys was a freak, that she did not really represent style or fashion, but the nature of glamour is ill-understood, and women of doubtful reputation have often possessed this most elusive of all qualities. The individual representatives of any given period are always apt to be somewhat outré, in any case. What would not be considered vulgar on the African chieftain might have been judged adversely when worn by Gaby Deslys. Why? The answer is obvious. A condemnation of her taste is based on the limited conventions of ourselves and of our society. If we find that the African and his costume are really in the best of taste, it is because we are suspending our arbitrary notions of fashion to see him in his own light. Taste, after all, is variable; conventions are variable. Conventions in taste are much less interesting than the taste of the individual.
It was Francis Bacon who said that “there is no beauty which hath not some strangeness in its proportions”; Gaby Deslys certainly had more than her share of exoticism. In the last analysis, style is not created by the imitators, nor even by the couturiers, whoever they may be. You can lead a woman to a Dior dress, but how she will look in it is another matter. Only personality creates style. Indeed, personality not only can impose its bizarre aspects on a period, but even, to some extent, creates the period itself.
Like many good things, it was thought that Gaby Deslys was an import from Paris, though, as it later transpired, the French could not claim her for their own, and her exact nationality and origin remain to this day a matter of mystery. As had Webster’s Duchess of Malfi before her, “she died young,” leaving all of her money to the poor of Marseilles. Even the manner of her death was surrounded with a certain romanticism. It was said that she had an incurable throat ailment and that, when doctors advised surgery as the last possible means of saving her life, she chose death rather than scar her throat. Several lawsuits contesting her estate were carried on for some ten years afterwards, together with secret-service investigations, their purpose being to establish the identity of a woman who, enchanting as she was, showed more of an inclination to ambiguity than to mystery in her own lifetime. Some said she was Hungarian; some claimed to be illegitimate daughters, showing birthmarks to prove that this was so; and thieves, a decade after her death, made a hole in the wall of her mausoleum at Marseilles.
For me, Gaby Deslys is the individual embodiment of the pre-1914 war epoch, a symbol whose depth goes far beyond herself. No one may know or remember the names of the ten best-dressed women in the world at the end of good King Edward’s reign, if indeed such a list ever existed; but there are still a few, like myself, who remember Gaby Deslys with all the nostalgia of a popular song or a summer’s day picnic. Like fashion itself, she represents the triumph of the ephemeral.
CHAPTER IV
THE DEMI-MONDE
BOTH IN LIFE and in literature the demi-monde has always been identified with romance, tragedy, brief gaiety, and enlarged hearts. A candlelit world of its own, far from the decorum of respectable society, it exists now, alas, only in the brilliant evocations of Marcel Proust and Colette. The déclassé woomen, exotic blooms, who were nurtured in the hothouse of all that money can buy, thrived in an easy atmosphere that created a tacitly agreed place for them in the social scene. Houris of the rich, they enjoyed a half century and more of poignant splendour before the changes following the First World War forced the leisured classes into a less ostentatious pattern of social behaviour, and spelled the end, at least in its outward and dazzling social forms, of this perhaps somewhat touching way of life.
During the age of romantic ballet, the cocotte had already began to wage her victorious campaigns from the vantage point of a theatre loge. Here, through opera glasses, she was the cynosure of the young bachelors and married men whose chequebooks were often as large as their hearts. Perhaps one of the highest peaks in the history of the demi-mondaine coincided, paradoxically enough, with the outwardly respectable eighties. But these often brilliant and cultivated creatures continued to sit at private tables at Maxim’s and privately screened theatre boxes until the First World War, inspiring their dressmakers and the creators of luxury to the most dazzling flights of fancy. One of their dressmakers described these elegant women strolling up and down the lawns at Longchamp or Deauville as looking like “fillies paraded before their backers prior to the trial gallop, adorned with furs and hypertrophic plumes; the strut of a bird, the gestures of a queen, a magnificent carriage of the head. When one draped them in a chinchilla cape, it showed its ten thousand louis’ worth. One knew what one had for one’s money. They were women born for luxury. Competition made them achieve the impossible, since all the Parisian dressmakers outdid each other in invention and daring to assure the triumph of their latest creations. Sometimes on the very morning of the opening of a race meeting, dressmakers’ assistants would be still sticking pins into a gown that was to be displayed that same day.”
THEY WERE WOMEN BORN FOR LUXURY
But 1914 was to bring their world, among so many others, to an end. After the war, Harry Melville complained that the cocottes had become so “golf-linksy”; and today, the poule de luxe is almost nonexistent, an anachronism or, in her newly vulgarized guise, a forever-altered entity who can scarcely lay claim to the genius of her feathered predecessors.
The goddesses of that vanished half-world were tarts of the highest calibre. Without being restrained in their styles, they were also obliged never to offend by their vulgarity the men of taste who financed them. Thus they deserved their riches, their servants, their stocks and bonds. The greatest of these ladies of immodest means lived in large houses or apartments of their own. They knew how to command servants, how to order good food and wines and entertain their men friends in a faultless style, but with a levity, and atmosphere of improvidence that the gentlemen could scarcely find in their own homes. No duchess could have excelled in dignity the bearing with which some tart with éclat alighted from her carriage to air her Afghan hounds in the Bois. Nor were these women any less gracious as they entered their dress shop, to be received, perhaps, by the ambassadorial-looking Monsieur Doucet himself, with his Vandyke beard and carnation buttonhole. In fact, the duchess and the grande cocotte never came face-to-face, for not for another twenty years were their worlds to coincide, and when they did, the cocotte had become something quite different. (Balenciaga has wittily observed that yesterdays’s cocotte is today’s grand lady).
AIRING AFGHAN HOUNDS IN THE BOIS
In their great days the tarts showed no desire to become respectable or move into the legitimate world by marrying the men who kept them. Sometimes, as in Chéri, they fell in love with young men of their own class, but their profession was sacrosanct. If a gentleman was seen at a restaurant by a lady of his world in the company of a grande cocotte, there was never any question of “cutting” him or of acknowledging his companion’s presence: while dining with this enigmatic woman, resplendent in her pearls, lace, and picture hat, the gentleman was as invisible to his respectable friends as if he wore a magi
c cloak. He did not exist.
Some of the spectacular and well-publicized ladies had vague connections with the stage, and in photographs, attired in frothy negligées or reclining in their ornate drawing rooms, they would be called “the well-known actress.” Most of them blossomed in the luxury of Paris, though a few thrived in London.
Perhaps the last of the great demi-mondaines was Forzane, an incandescent blonde of Swedish extraction, who appeared a short time before the First World War and had disappeared by the end of it. With her exquisite grace and original line of body, her luminous pallor, her small chubby nose and fully-fashioned, divided rosebud lips, she was a clarion call to sex. Her elongated eyes, set in a pale face, had the same hot, somewhat queasy look that her rival, the actress Lantelme, possessed. But Forzane was more subtle, more restrained and ambiguous than her sultry blonde rival. Forzane’s appeal was never vulgar. She seemed to breathe in the rarefied atmosphere of Parma violets and gave the illusion of the unattainable.
Her long fair hair was worn straight and swathed close to her head, in a modification of the Greek classical style: she foreshadowed the neat boyish head of the twenties. At a time when it was fashionable to lean somewhat forward, in the manner of a swan triumphantly carving through the surface of a lake, Forzane adopted a contradictory stance, leaning backward with her pelvis brought forward, one foot trailing behind the other. A tightly rolled umbrella would be tucked under one arm, while the other arm was almost pulled from its socket by not one, but two borzoi dogs on a leash.
FORZANE, 1911
Her clothes, in comparison to others of the day, were sparsely trimmed, relying for their effect on a fluid line of drapery. Forzane’s special allure could be seen to its best advantage when she wore white and grey chiffons falling in fluted columns from high Directoire waists. Another striking appearance was achieved by severe tailleurs of broadcloth, complemented by spats and tight-fitting toque trimmed with uncurled heron feathers. An impressionable friend of mine described the delighted shock of seeing her descend from her electric brougham to go into a shop, a vision in pigeon-throated grey, with a draped hobble skirt slit to the knee, chinchilla at neck and wrists, and a turban sprouting a vast aigrette.
THEY HAD AN ARTIST’S EYE FOR EFFECT
Both Forzane and other demi-mondaines knew how to sustain interest, not only in their men but in their public. Perhaps it was easier to create a sensation in those days than it is today. When Forzane entered the restaurant of the Savoy Hotel in London, people stood on their chairs to get a better view. Her very original form of allure must have been even more startling in its day than it would appear now. Like other women of real chic, Forzane triumphed over the ephemeral fashions of her day. In the legacy of photographs that have been left to us, the quality that elevates her above others is vividly apparent.
LANTELME, 1910
It is difficult for our age to estimate the novelty of many of these women’s appearances. So many copies have since been foisted upon us that we have become inured to the shock of the original. Before the actress Eve Lavallière appeared, for instance, no fashionable woman would have dreamed of accentuating a slightly Mongolian face by tying neat dark hair in a bow, just as the wearing of natty suits was an innovation with her.
An undoubted sensation was caused by the spectacle of Lantelme entering a box at the theatre accompanied by the South American millionaire, Edwardes. Cocteau has given a graphic picture of them: Edwardes wearing a soft shirt instead of the usual boiled front and tail coat; while his lady friend, with the huge mouth of a carp, her hair a mass of frizz, possibly with a tight dog collar of diamonds around her neck, declined to sit upright in the customary manner, but slouched so low over the rim of the box that her pearls fell in cascades to the light brackets below.
Many of these women were inventive and strange in their public appearances. They had an artist’s eye for effect. Some were accompanied by curious pets or exotic servants. One lady brought back a middle-aged, weather-beaten-looking midget from Australia to be her perpetual bodyguard. Polaire, the actress with the tiniest waist and the boast that she was the ugliest woman in the world, capitalized on the appearance of her huge mouth, evil slanting eyes, and wild hair cut in a fringe by returning from a visit to America with a servant around whose neck she had hung a plaque that read, “I belong to Polaire. Please send me back to her.” In The Tatler dated December 13, 1911, “Priscilla in Paris” wrote:
GINA PALERME
“The Dress Rehearsal of the Folies Revue is one of the important functions of the winter season, and Polaire created quite a sensation by arriving in her box with a youth who looked about sixteen. Such a baby boy! Uncle dear! A little pink and white face, violet blue eyes, and smooth flaxen poll. I’m sure he was wearing his first dress suit, and he looked so conscious of his ‘prettiness.’ He seemed to be the celebrated actress’ latest toy. She takes him everywhere with her. The other night she was invited to sup at the Café de Paris by a delightful English woman who is a great admirer of the little Algerian actress’ talent. Well, Polaire accepted the invitation, but she brought the baby. I think she carts him round because she has an artistic eye for contrasts, and certainly you cannot imagine anything more piquant than the extreme blondness of the youth next to Popo’s very swarthy little self.”
Gina Palerme, a delightful actress who became an adornment to the musical comedies at the Palace Theatre, brought the glamour of the French cocotte to London. Her off-stage appearances were as sensational as her stage escapades. She would appear in a chinchilla cape that touched the ground, embellishing the effect with a saluki dog. Sometimes she wore a velvet tam-o’-shanter and men’s riding breeches while relaxing in the richly ornate gilt of her Maida Vale drawing room.
One day, perhaps, a historian will write a book about these unique women whose breed has vanished from contemporary society. In respectable social terms they served little or no purpose. But then, the world in which they lived was not a world that has any need of justification. It was neither threatened from within nor from without. Our concept of “usefulness” has, alas, been narrowed to a rather prosaic definition in modern times. Baudelaire, in the middle of the nineteenth century, could write that nothing was more horrible to him than a “useful person.” He was making, beneath the shock of the statement, a profound judgment on the hypocrisy of moral values. We do not ask of nature that it be useful: flowers are the most useless of things; yet we pursue, cultivate, nurture, and foster them, spending hundreds on our greenhouses and gardens. If people do not come under the same category as flowers, then perhaps Baudelaire would have said that they should. Many of these demi-mondaines graced their epoch with a true expression of luxurious personalities flowering in a free environment. Admittedly they were social orchids, and the conditions of their cultivation are no longer possible. They have died out. But their extinction has scarcely been our gain, nor has the passing of their world been superseded by any substitute which possesses those qualities of the bizarre and the picturesque.
CHAPTER V
CHANGING WORLDS
THE BLACK ASCOT
WHEREAS Queen Victoria’s reign lasted for more than sixty solid years, the Edwardian age of opulence proved to be a short-lived wedding party, confined to one brief decade. Someone has said that each age is an age that is dying, or one that is coming to birth; but the nostalgic eye always seems to choose to regard change as a form of dying. Meanwhile, thought it would have been difficult to foresee the war that was to come four years later, King Edward’s prestige was such that his death in 1910 brought a first suggestion of the profound organic breakup which many of the component parts of Western European society and culture were to undergo in the next three or four decades.
The most significant aspect of England’s mourning period for King Edward was the social event that came to be known as “The Black Ascot.” At the first Ascot racing season after the popular monarch’s death, society appeared dressed from head to foot in black. The m
en wore black silk top hats with morning or frock coats, black trousers, black waistcoats, black ties, while in their black-gloved hands they carried tightly rolled black umbrellas. Their funereal ladies must have seemed like strange giant crows or morbid birds of paradise strutting at some Gothic entertainment. As far as the eye could see there were black dresses trimmed with long back fringes, black lace parasols and huge black hats, wider than they had ever been before. Fashions tend to extremes before being dropped, and the elaborate headgear had now become like the last spurt of a Catherine wheel. These vast picture hats, perhaps set on one side of the head and piled high with black ostrich feathers mixed with osprey or black paradise feathers combined with black tulle, were worn not only in mourning for a king but for a glory that had gone forever.
THE BLACK ASCOT
THE BLACK ASCOT
The glory had not entirely gone, if one is to be accurate. Certain personalities in society and on the stage or in opera came into their own during these transitional years between King Edward’s cigars and cigarette smoking. Not the least of them was the unforgettable Lina Cavalieri.
Lina Cavalieri was said to be the most beautiful woman in the whole world. Though time made her a contemporary of Gaby Deslys, the two could not have been less alike: Cavalieri was not a music-hall entertainer, but an opera singer; and if there were demi-mondaine aspects to her career, she was unquestionably a woman of innate distinction. Music critics were in agreement that her voice was not of the calibre of a Tetrazzini or a Geraldine Farrar. Physically, she was hardly a woman of heroic proportions, being of medium height and slender build. But Cavalieri was undeniably a great beauty in the classic mould. Her features were of a blunt, Roman cast, a magnolia complexion that complemented the black, wavy hair, which was parted in the middle like that of a Spanish dancer and gathered in a bun at the nape of the long neck.
