by Cecil Beaton
Schiaparelli was an excellent editor of ideas, with many people working for her. Cocteau and Bérard gave her sketches for costumes; Jean Schlumberger applied his flair to the making of original buttons.
She was the first dressmaker to travel extensively and, wherever she went, brought back representative clothes of that country. On holiday in Switzerland, “Schiap” would make a mental note of the ski instructors; with her return, women would be given thick jerseys with padded square shoulders. A trip to the Tyrol launched Tyrolean fashions; an Indian voyage introduced saris and gauzes; North Africa gave rise to burnooses and cord embroideries, while visits to Peru, Mexico, or Russia widened the canvas of her effects. At one moment in the late thirties this capricious designer came under the surrealist influence. In her shop a shocking-pink sofa was designed like a pair of lips. Mauve lipstick was created for women, mutton chops were put on ladies’ hats, and particular headdress looked like a shoe. In the manner of her predecessor, Chanel, Schiaparelli, often put women in apparently unfeminine clothes, even going so far as to introduce bus conductors’ outfits. One suit, decorated with closed bureau drawers, was inspired by Dalí. By 1938 fashion had gone into such a state of decadence that it seemed surely a last warning before the Tower of Babel fell; which, with the Second World War, it did.
Though the twenties boasted a number of striking personalities among women of leisure, their number had dwindled, or they had withdrawn from the scene, in the period that followed the great depression of 1929. One of the few outstanding beauties of the thirties was Mrs. Harrison Williams, who represented the epitome of all that taste and luxury can bring to flower.
Her houses, her furniture, her jewellery, her way of life were little short of a tour de force. She herself was and is today a chef-d’œuvre, breathing a rarefied air of mystery, like some undine or goddess from another world who yet chooses to dress in the height of fashionable conventionality. Her clothes were always extremely feminine, soft, and graceful, and I would hazard a guess that many of them had been designed by Vionnet. Mrs. Harrison Williams restricted herself to pale colours that complemented her extraordinary colouring, setting off her aquamarine eyes, her short silver curling hair and very pink cheeks. Here is the kind of complexion that radiates the immaculate perfection of health, a perfection which was further emphasized by the brilliance of her eyes, the marble sheen of her skin, her strong and energetic hands, and the live muscular body that possesses the élan of a released spring.
More than any other woman, Mrs. Harrison Williams also possesses the American quality of freshness. No French or South American hostess could possibly have rivalled the almost unreal perfection of crispness and newness that she created in the surroundings of her Fifth Avenue house. Everything was kept in a state of polished and dazzling cleanliness. Nothing was ever tattered, and no Ispahan carpet ever became threadbare. Her Goyas, Bouchers, and Reynoldses has been tenderly relieved of years of grime and oxidization. Not speck of dust had the opportunity of gathering on the books in the air-conditioned library. English furniture and crystal candelabra were highly polished; parquet floors were waxed and shining. One even had the feeling that all the bonbons and the peppermint sweets on the dinner table were thrown out the moment the exquisite flower-strewn cloth was removed. It seemed a certainty that the jewelled gold boxes were sent off to be repolished, that the diamonds were washed along with the dog each day, and that the kitchen departments below must have boasted some great hospital sterilizer to make the glasses and porcelain shine.
Mrs. Harrison Williams’ flowers, especially, created an amazing impression of freshness and vigour, more so than any other person’s flowers that I have ever seen. Lilies almost shrieked in their newly filled vases as they burst with joy into flower on their bold stems; the white and the pink carnations, so stout and strong, looked as though they could never wilt; and the orchids had a metallic rigidity. Likewise, her porcelains and painted silk curtains, the pots of Fabergé flowers and her diamond-buckled satin shoes—all made their contribution to this pristine ambiance.
Both mistress and mansion seemed to have just stepped out of a bandbox. It was a feat that no Englishwoman could possibly have duplicated. In England there would have been a tattered cushion in a room, or a patina on the furniture. The fact that there was literally nothing, no object in any corner of Mrs. Harrison Williams’ house that was shabby, created a feeling of deft luxury and extravagance that was in itself quite startling.
I think it was Katherine Mansfield who, hearing the gardener raking up leaves, wrote in her notebook that “somewhere somebody is secretly putting things in order.” In age-old war with chaos, with the dirt and the dust that always and forever push in upon us, hoping to invade us—in that war, Mrs. Harrison Williams is surely a general, and I am not being facetious in admiring a quality as evanescent, yet as important, as cleanliness. Among the few indelible impressions that the years preceding the last war have left on my mind’s eye, Mrs. Harrison Williams and her dazzling surroundings remain one of the most felicitous.
Altogether a different personality from Mrs. Harrison WIlliams was Millicent Rogers. Among the poor little rich girls whose comet-like careers left streams of newspaper headlines in their wake during the twenties and the thirties, there may have been heiresses to tobacco, banks, biscuits, tinned meats, sewing machines, or five-and-ten cent stores who were richer and more pathetic in their own right than Millicent Rogers. But none could have been more extravagant nor more extravagantly beautiful than this daughter of a Standard Oil pioneer, with her face like a lotus flower and her figure like a Chinese statuette.
The Millicent Rogers who in the forties chose to spend her last years in New Mexico had long since retired from the field of both life and fashion, leaving others to wave their banners with less flair and certainly with less originality. She had slipped unobtrusively out of a social life whose beginning would hardly have presaged the calm harbour of its later years.
For in her anarchic youth, a youth which coincided with the heyday of the twenties, Millicent Rogers had been very much involved in the social whirl. When the then Prince of Wales paid his history-making visit to America, the quixotic heiress—at the height of her strange youthfulness, with a marble complexion, pouting lips, long fingernails, and Oriental jewels setting off a short black velvet dress—was on hand to dance with him. She saw to it that anyone who observed her should never forget the occasion.
But whatever the time or place, Millicent Rogers always left her imprint upon it. One admirer has observed that he would never forget her coming along a corridor in a blue linen beach suit, passing through a shaft of sunlight that caught the red handkerchief she was holding. On another occasion he watched her make an entrance through a doorway in a magenta sequin sheath the colour of her hair. Mrs. Vreeland relates the events of a coming-out ball at the Ritz Hotel in New York, where Millicent Rogers was staying. That evening the heiress had decided to play musical chairs with the prevailing fashions and kept changing her dress. Initially she wore a Patou black silk dress with bustle and train; but on the pretext of having sat on some ice cream she abandoned it for a robe of looped taffetas. The ice cream excuse gave way to spilled coffee, thus providing a further alteration, and so it went throughout the evening.
But if Millicent Rogers’ exhibitionism was not easily appeased, she at any rate showed her good taste in all things. Throughout the succeeding years she could always be relied upon to make unusual surprise appearances, dressed either as Anna Karenina in sable, as a fragrant Chinese courtesan in mandarin robes, or as Gretel in Tyrolean peasant clothes made by Schiaparelli. Her originality was manifest even in the way she wore a bow or a scarf; jewellery embarked upon a whole new trend when she picked up a leaf, stuck a pin through it, and gave it to Boivin to copy in gold and diamonds.
Later she was to develop a reputation for designing jewellery herself and even in retirement continued her hobby of collecting silver jewellery peculiar to the Southwest.
But Millicent Rogers was not content to remain a mere clotheshorse. With the passing of the years her calm, domesticated nature, her great love of her children and of relaxation and peace began to assert itself. Young or middle-aged, she remained a woman of remarkable originality, always pursuing hobbies that allowed her to express her artistic abilities. If she had not suffered from ill health, she might have laid the ghost of her money, becoming a serious artist in one field instead of a dilettante who dissipated in a delightful way her talents, by illustrating books for her children, making acres of needlework carpets, designing jewellery, and exercising her superb taste in decorating house after house, which were usually quixotically abandoned before their completion.
During one period in the thirties Millicent Rogers chose Charles James, the American dressmaker, to make all her clothes for her. Charles James is a superb tailor in satin and has affinities with the French in his master craftsmanship and attention to detail. He was naturally delighted that her orders should be so extensive, for it kept his business thriving. But after having put so much time and effort into the making of four dozen blouses which he felt were designated for the Manhattan Storage, he rebelled. When Mrs. Rogers’ maid telephoned for a further order, Charles James complained, “Why Mrs. Rogers is nothing but a hoarder!” The maid replied, “Not a hoarder, Mr. James, a collector!” True to the maid’s words, in 1949 Millicent Rogers presented to the Brooklyn Museum a collection of clothes created for her by Charles James.
Dresses were not, however, the limit of this heiress’s passion. Her acquisitions comprised a number of carpets, quilts, Chinese porcelains, furs by the tons, paintings, and bric-a-brac.
When Millicent Rogers retired to New Mexico, the courtyards of her small adobe house were painted in varying colours, while the sunlit rooms were filled with the choicest of her various possessions. Here, with her Gaugins on the wall, she sat in bed and made gold ornaments, beads and jewellery of abstract design, her tools being pumice stone and nail files. During the infrequent hours that she left this room she wore the long skirt and blouse of the Indians and went barefoot.
Throughout her life Millicent Rogers had always looked the perfect expression of her highly civilized tastes, which lent an æsthetic motive to all that she did. Within her limits she was an artist; the circumstances of her birth had allowed her free rein to create an exciting and imaginative existence for herself. Many millionaires are inevitably unpredictable, fractious, or spoiled. But if it is a handicap to be born poor, it is often a greater handicap to be born with a silver spoon in one’s mouth. There is nothing like wealth to create psychological problems for those who, but a freak contingency of destiny, inherit money without having done anything to achieve it. It is a tribute to Millicent Rogers’ earnest nature that, after the anarchic years of her youth, she devoted herself to valuable charity work, and then, voluntarily as well as through the exigencies of health, quit the fashionable world for a last contemplation of life’s quieter and richer side.
In the thirties the fashion photographers came into their own. As one of them, I must confess to having indulged myself in the generally prevailing recklessness of style. My pictures became more and more rococo and surrealist. Society women as well as mannequins were photographed in the most flamboyant Greek-tragedy poses, in ecstatic or highly mystical states, sometimes with the melodramatic air of a Lady Macbeth caught up in a cocoon of tulle. Like the souls in torment seen in Hieronymus Bosch’s hell, ladies of the upper crust were to be seen in published photographs fighting their way out of a hat box or breaking through a huge sheet of white paper or torn screen, as though emerging from a nightmare. Princesses were posed trying frantically to be seen through a plate-glass window that had been daubed with whitewash. In fact, white was one regular keynote to these proceedings. White-on-white paper was often used as a background, with a woman in white holding a sheaf of whitened branches in front of it. Perfectly normal ladies were pictures in extremes of terror, with one arm covering the face or thrust forward in exaggerated perspective straight towards the camera.
Backgrounds were equally exaggerated and often tasteless. Badly carved cupids from junk shops on Third Avenue would be wrapped in argentine cloth or cellophane. Driftwood was supposed to bring an air of neo-romanticism to a matter-of-fact subject. Christmas paper chains were garlanded around the model’s shoulders, and wooden doves, enormous paper flowers from Mexico, Chinese lanterns, doilies or cutlet frills, fly whisks, sporrans, egg beaters, or stars of all shapes found their way into our hysterical and highly ridiculous pictures.
Some of this meretricious work was inspired by a literary approach. Mannequins “dressed to kill” would be photographed as murderesses with smoking guns, and smart witnesses appeared in the “witness box.” I remember that George David would take the models, wearing clothes from Bergdorf Goodman’s, to be photographed among the sawdust and backstage trappings of the circus ring; or, wearing black satin and monkey fur, with the huge hats of a villainess of melodrama, they would be photographed against the scabrous, peeling walls of Brooklyn. Man Ray, Munkacsi, and other photographers played tricks with elongation of the figure and with “solarization” of the negative, all of which played havoc with the ladies’ hair. No demonstration of madness was considered too exaggerated.
At this time, also, much unrestrained activity was afoot in the fields of decoration. Night clubs were done up as bird cages; baroque excesses in plasterwork were allied to the plush luxuries of late Victorianism. Sugary magentas and pinks, together with bright yellows, were favourite colours.
Yet, in spite of much that was depressing, life in the thirties had its highlights. Art, especially under the influence of such painters as Dalí, Picasso, and Bérard, was impinging very closely on fashion.
Even an esoteric painter such as Tchelitchew had an overt influence. Whereas Bérard’s whole idiom lent itself easily to fashion, Tchelitchew’s idiom was anti-fashion. Hence it is all the more remarkable that his decor and costumes for Giraudoux’s Ondine created a vogue for fish nets, stalactites, coral branches, and driftwood. But those elements of mystery in the theatre often became meaningless when brought into reality, and the fish nets draped over an oak staircase in a Wiltshire mansion seemed oddly incongruous. The influence continued nonetheless, and photographs were taken by Hoyningen-Huene, George Platt Lynes, Horst, Durst, and myself of lost wanderers in a Tchelitchew world of shadows. We apotheosized poverty, dragging in poor children in beggars’ rags, just as Tchelitchew had romanticized real beggars, or as Bérard had popularized Le Nain peasants.
In the theatre the thirties did not reap a rich harvest, though the Old Vic in London’s Waterloo Road, it is true, was doing excellent pioneer work at that time; while John Gielgud made people appreciative of the classics, introducing Chekhov, reviving Webster, revitalizing Shakespeare, and, with his extraordinary personality and voice of great range and ability, making an ever-increasing public enjoy plays of a high quality. His Richard of Bordeaux was a dignified success in the commerical theatre. Yet even Gielgud lent his noble services to embellishing a play by Dodie Smith that appealed to the masses of matinee goers, if not to more discriminating audiences. London seemed satisfied with an endless succession of drawing-room comedies and family plays based on old patterns, lacking in wit and freshness. From a visual point of view, the theatre was equally uninspiring. Only in the ballet could one find first-rate designers at work.
The New York stage had Porgy and Bess, Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour, the early Clifford Odets, and the Group Theatre, which has latterly come under so much criticism for having been Communistic in its ideas. Musical comedy was being brought to a high degree of perfection in the thirties, and popular songs began to be more and more influenced by the growing musical sophistication in this branch of the theatre arts. But then popular music and one of the latter-day geniuses who helped to make it what it is today, Cole Porter, are well worth analysis in the light that they shed not only upon the thirtie
s but also the succeeding eras.
One of the epigrams that people were quoting back in the early thirties is a line from Noel Coward’s play Private Lives, where the hero observes, “Strange how potent cheap music is.” Popular songs, like styles in clothing, are ephemeral manifestations of the times. But it would be wrong to classify any temporal artistic expression as “cheap.” Nobody denigrates the dresses of Poiret or Worth or Doucet: they have simply taken their place as costumes, historical pieces that reflect their time but are no longer valid, in a living sense, for our own age. So it is with popular songs. Like the ironic epitaph on Keats’s grave, popular songs or styles in dress are “written on water.”
Perhaps it is precisely because of their fleeting qualities that they seem to incorporate, in their expression, a peculiarly poignant and almost tragic awareness of the unique moment in time that will never come again. There is something uncanny in the way that popular songs, especially, can quickly conjure up for us the whole emotional feeling of a decade. Like sponges, they seem to have an extraordinary capacity for absorption and can retain an ocean of memories.
Among those composers whose talents have given so much to our latter-day popular culture, perhaps no one in the first half of the twentieth century has surpassed the brilliance of achievement that Cole Porter has sustained over some twenty-five years of activity. From his songs of the twenties up to the present moment he has consistently maintained a high level of both music and lyrics. Cole Porter’s advent brought a sophistication and smartness that were quite new to the realm of popular songs. With his plaintive, often minor-key airs, his dry, hard-as-dog-biscuit harmonies and staccato rhythms, he created a shock of a special and cultivated order. Like a scholar “cutting up” or an attractive philosopher being bad, Cole Porter appeared as an enfant terrible, saying with charm and wit just those things that everyone secretly feared and hoped might be said.
