Priscilla

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Vertès’s work was frequently mistaken for Lautrec’s. His talent was to remember a woman’s body, still or in movement. Sinuous, sensual, executed at speed, his drawings were erotic without being sordid. In 1948, Vertès had dinner in Paris with Lucian Freud and Christian Bérard at La Méditerranée and he drew ‘on some bits of paper tablecloth little girls sucking erected penises, very erotic and somehow not disgusting’. Gillian later tried to buy them, but was outbid.

  Vertès was born in Budapest. His older sister advised him when he was fourteen: ‘Be a painter and you can have a studio filled with big couches covered with furs and naked ladies.’ Aged seventeen, he worked for Fidibus, an erotic magazine, and for Le Courier de Budapest, drawing the faces of murderers and their victims. He went to the morgue to sketch their heads, and his friend Alexander Korda wrote the text. In 1919, in Vienna, he won a prize given by the Red Cross for his drawings of starving Austrian children, and met a Polish girl, Dora. In 1920, they left for Paris. They married in 1926; he was thirty-one, she twenty-four.

  In Paris, he earned his living from drawings, paintings, magazine covers, book illustrations. In 1928, he illustrated Joseph Kessel’s scandalous novel, Belle de Jour. Most of all, Vertès loved to draw Gillian, etching her outline on a piece of copper using an old-fashioned gramophone needle. There are numerous drawings of her in his letters. Gillian as naked centaur. Gillian sprawled across a hotel bed. Gillian sketching in an open book propped up by a man’s penis, presumably the artist’s. ‘Vertès’s letters acted on me as an aphrodisiac, not well written but erotic and full of sperm juice.’ The last time she saw him was at lunch at La Méditerranée in June 1961. After the meal, he wrote to her: ‘Gill, qui a été inspiratrice de presque la totalité des dessins . . . ton ami qui t’aime, Marcel.’

  Like SPB, Marcel Vertès was a loner who belonged to no movement – fragile, stubborn, moody, impatient. He had a springy walk, and when rattled one eyelid would twitch. If he loathed what he was looking at, he would say in an accented voice, ‘Interesting. Très intéressant.’ He had said this to Gillian at their first meeting five years earlier.

  In London at the time, Priscilla learned the details of Gillian’s romance only on her return to Paris. The relationship had begun inauspiciously. Gillian wrote of that wintry afternoon in 1933: ‘Strange that encounters which are going to shape one’s life don’t seem so very important at the time.’

  Oscar Kokoschka, the famous painter, had told Gillian to try her hand at fashion drawing; failing that, theatre decors or costumes – ‘but stop your ghastly nude drawings.’ A composer friend of her parents agreed to write a letter to Vertès who had designed costumes for his operettas. Armed with this letter, Gillian had turned up at 5 p.m. at Vertès’s studio in 78 Rue de la Faisanderie. She was sixteen. Vertès was thirty-eight and still married to Dora.

  Gillian found herself standing before a brusque man, large glasses on his nose, shaving cream around his ears and on his head a bizarre round hat. There was a table covered with China inks. The telephone was hidden by copies of Vogue.

  His green eyes examined her. They were pale, flecked with orange, and one eye was greener than the other. A small dog yapped at his feet.

  She admired his drawings, she blurted; she needed advice.

  ‘I heard the sound of footsteps. Mrs Vertès appeared. A handsome middle-aged thick-set woman, a bit on the heavy side. Vertès did not bother to introduce us – anyway he had forgotten my name.’

  Gillian sat stiffly staring at her shoes and the dog while a heated conversation took place in Hungarian. ‘We eyed each other for a few seconds, unaware that afternoon that the three of us were going to be involved in a long tug of war which only death would end. After a glance at the girl in the shabby clothes, Mrs Vertès walked out. Nothing to fear from that shy little figure.’

  After his wife had gone, Gillian showed Vertès her drawings. ‘I’m experimenting, trying to find my style.’

  He flicked through them. ‘Interesting.’ But her nudes were like firemen. Why had she picked on him to learn about fashion drawings? She had chosen the wrong man. In a gruff voice he said, ‘Come back when you have found your style,’ and returned to his work.

  She gathered up her portfolio, said goodbye and left. Kokoschka had been nicer.

  Gillian was drawing in her room three days later when she heard ‘Dago on the phone!’ and ran downstairs, wondering who it could be. Vertès. He apologised for having been so unpleasant and invited her to dinner next evening.

  ‘But I haven’t found my style,’ she said, taken aback by his volte-face.

  ‘Vous le trouvez. Come without it at eight o’clock, chez moi,’ and rang off.

  He had given her a meal in his studio. Dora was not present, only his dog.

  After dinner he said: ‘You’re not a virgin, are you?’

  She looked at him, shocked. ‘No.’

  ‘Anyone at the moment?’

  She shrugged. ‘One makes do.’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Sixteen, nearly seventeen.’

  Another evening, he took her to a café, his vile dog Billy pulling at the leash.

  On the way home, they stopped before her building. To his surprise, she stayed rooted to the pavement, looking at him: ‘I would like . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I would like you to embrace me,’ she murmured.

  He hugged her to him, kissing her on the nose in an extraordinarily innocent way.

  She pressed the bell, ran upstairs.

  ‘What’s funny?’ he asked many months later.

  She laughed, throwing a pillow at him.

  ‘Well, I went to see you to be my maître and I ended up being your maîtresse.’

  Their affair was now in its sixth year.

  Vertès had a Buick, black with tan leather seats. Hood down in the summer, he drove Gillian to an auberge in Ville d’Avray. ‘I was called Madame instead of the inevitable Mademoiselle which made us laugh. I always looked like a schoolgirl, une jeune fille bien élevée, Koestler called me.’ Vertès said that Gillian was too young to smoke – her cigarettes had to be bought for her. But as Gillian crisply observed to Priscilla, she was not too young to bed.

  The majority of their rendezvous were in maisons de passe. Paris was full of discreet places of assignation for couples without suitcases, the addresses passed around by word of mouth. Nothing from the façade indicated that the building was anything other than a respectable hôtel particulier.

  Vertès’s favourite maison de passe was in Rue Cambacérès. Gillian described to Priscilla her first visit. Her outfit: a tartan skirt, but no petit culotte underneath, exactly as Vertès had instructed. Her perfume: ‘Shocking’, from a bust-shaped bottle that he had given her. A pretty blonde soubrette with white collar and cuffs ushered her into the lift. The small stylish room was furnished all in black. Headlights from passing cars lit up rose-coloured paper pompons, brushes filled with strands of hair, and two night tables, each with a napkin carrying the words: ‘Bless the love you owe your life’.

  Gillian also went with Vertès to the notorious One-Two-Two in Rue de Provence. When his finances were low, they ended up in less grand establishments, smelling of cheap powder, where the madam asked, ‘C’est pour un moment ou pour l’après-midi?’ There was a wash basin, a collapsible bidet hidden behind a ramshackle screen, thin walls. ‘We listened once to a couple next door making love. The woman said, “Fort, fort, trésor.”’

  The madam always banged on the door if they overstayed their ‘moment’. Vertès used these places to gather material for his lithographs. Gillian said: ‘I would suggest other quarters that I had heard about. So we explored crummy rooms frequented by whores.’

  One rainy night Gillian suggested the Panier Fleuri, the brothel where Robert had taken her and Priscilla. Both girls had longed to know what went on upstairs. Gillian was now able to report back. While she sketched Priscilla wearing a pair of Schiaparelli beach pantaloon
s, she revealed what she had seen.

  Vertès escorted Gillian through a metal door and paid the fee, 30 francs for men, 20 for women. They climbed to the first floor. Lined along the corridor were eight portable bidets filled with water. Two women stepped out of a door, in long white cotton shirts and wearing black velvet masks, and quickly washed, wiping themselves with a serviette, and left as fast as they came.

  ‘This looks promising,’ said Vertès, pushing Gillian after them.

  They entered a crowded room smelling of tobacco ‘and wet dog’. A heavy-jowled man in a leather jacket sprawled across a couch, two women in his arms. On Gillian’s right, a soldier, belt still on, made love standing up to a woman whose feet did not touch the ground. On the carpet, a man in a taxi driver’s cap was spread on his back, a woman’s mouth in his black pants. Gillian watched a blonde girl allow, ‘with an expression of tragic indifference’, a couple to mount her from behind. Was she drugged?

  Gillian felt ashamed, but also disturbingly excited. She leaned against Vertès, who put his arm on her shoulder. He slipped his hand under her bodice and cupped her breast with his palm. A warm flush burned through her. Soft, moist, every nerve taut, there on the couch right away, she could . . . But he removed his hand. Unappeased, humiliated, she turned on her heels. She tried to leave, but Vertès held her, whispering reassurances, and she stayed.

  ‘Let’s go next door.’

  There the crowd was less dense. A fat middle-aged woman reclined on a couch, smoking and chatting to two men. Suddenly, the door opened, letting in one of the masked girls, who ran over to the couch and seized the woman’s hand, kissing it. ‘You’re not still angry?’ The woman deliberately paid no attention, until the girl stopped her kisses and lifted the woman’s skirt.

  Gillian saw that she had nothing on underneath. Light from a garnet cloth shade fell on a very white belly and a dark triangle. The girl spread the woman’s legs, long and fleshy, with rolls of fat above the knees, and buried her face between them. The woman crushed out her cigarette, lay back.

  Vertès and Gillian joined the silent circle that formed around the couch. Ten minutes at least passed before the woman, writhing under the girl’s kisses, abruptly raised her arms, fists beating against the wooden sides of the couch, back arching, head shaking in every direction, and collapsed, panting, folded in half, still squeezing the girl’s masked face between her thighs.

  Some images from that night remained so vivid and shameful, that for months afterwards Gillian blushed when she thought of them; and yet she could not stop thinking about them.

  It pained Priscilla to have to listen to what a sensational sex life her best friend was enjoying. It was not just that her married life lacked this erotic dimension. Robert and Guy had few friends. ‘They were all forty or over and I found them very old and dull.’ Untouched by Robert’s fastidious hands at night, posing by day in Schiaparelli’s latest outfits, which showed off a figure crying out to be caressed, she feasted on Gillian’s stories. The question is, did it stop there?

  On 12 July 1977, Priscilla wrote to Gillian in Monaco: ‘It is my birthday today and I’m thinking of you and of our friendship which has lasted 50 odd years of undiluted pleasure and happiness for me and as far as I can recall only one serious disagreement which was my fault anyway!’ Was the disagreement over Vertès?

  Once Gillian had brought Vertès out of the shadows to meet Priscilla, the artist was in touch with my aunt until his death. But the door is shut on their relationship. Something did happen between Vertès and Priscilla, although it is hard to say exactly what this was.

  Priscilla ran down Vertès in her novel. The Priscilla-character Crystal ‘hated him’. She and the character based on Gillian, Chantal, ‘hardly ever discussed him for that reason’.

  Was this hatred the source of her later conflict with Gillian? Or could there have been another reason?

  The answer lies locked in the portrait that Vertès painted of Priscilla in 1939. While Priscilla was modelling for Gillian, she had also been posing for Gillian’s lover.

  Their friend Zoë Temblaire was the origin of the story behind the portrait. Gillian heard about it first only after the war. Zoë confessed: ‘At the time, we thought you would be too upset had we told you.’

  One year older than Priscilla, curly dark-haired and plainer, Zoë was the third member of their trio, the daughter of Gillian’s elephant-faced landlord when the Hammonds lived in Boulevard Berthier. Zoë’s mother was a strange, furtive creature; Priscilla would see her hurrying along, hat down to her eyebrows, cheeks rouged, on her way to watch a film.

  The three girls had known each other since 1930, but because of a mutual dislike between Zoë and Robert, Zoë had not been invited to Priscilla’s wedding. Zoë told Gillian during a telephone conversation fifty-three years later: ‘I have rarely detested a man so much,’ and thought it odd that with her beauty Priscilla should have married him. Gillian explained that Priscilla, recovering from her abortion and penniless, had little choice. ‘She was in very bad shape. Aged twenty-two, marriage to Robert seemed the best solution.’ But Zoë’s omission from Priscilla’s wedding list sparked a grievance that found a destructive outlet.

  Gillian wrote: ‘What I most disliked in her after the war was her desire to wound, to hurt one.’ The story that Zoë told Gillian about Priscilla and Vertès was an example of Zoë’s deviousness.

  Zoë’s first version was as mixed up as her character, which preferred to live at second-hand through her girlfriends’ adventures. This is how Gillian initially came to understand what had happened: ‘Through me, Vertès had met Pris and had asked her to model a hat for the cover of Vogue. (The gouache was not used and he gave it to Pris as a present.) I knew that Pris was sitting for him, but she did not tell me that he asked to meet her at the café on the corner of the Rue Cambacérès, the idea being to end up in our usual haunt.’

  Priscilla, according to Zoë, met Vertès at the café, but had second thoughts about accompanying him to the maison de passe. Zoë said waspishly, ‘I wasn’t astonished at Vertès’s behaviour, but what did surprise me was Pris not going to the Cambacérès.’ Then: ‘She’s such a weak character. She floats along like a leaf.’

  Gillian had previously understood that an editor from Vogue was present at the sittings. She also knew, by now, Zoë’s habit of stirring up trouble between Gillian and Priscilla, ‘always running down one to the other and vice versa, a proper Iago’. Gillian admitted to Zoë, ‘I’d rather have known at the time’ – but repeated: ‘Pris and I have never cheated on each other.’ She held fast to this conviction for most of her life.

  Only the portrait can say what really went on. I look at my aunt’s face, inscrutably beautiful, to find a key. Something in the smile that is half formed, as she fastens the straps of her hat, reminds me of Kessel’s Séverine. One day a man whom Séverine finds odious makes a pass at her. She rejects him, but feels an indefinable voluptuousness which she does not know how to slake.

  For the moment, neither Gillian nor Robert had grounds for suspicion. Priscilla was the outwardly passive young wife of a scion of the French upper classes. Anyone meeting her on the ‘Boule Miche’ arm-in-arm with Gillian would have taken them for two well-brought up women bent on having an innocent time, while this was still possible.

  Gillian associated certain phrases with Priscilla at this time.

  ‘Message reçu,’ in her laconic voice.

  ‘Not fit for human consumption.’

  ‘Chum’ – a word that Gillian never used.

  Right hand on hip: ‘I must push off.’

  When not modelling for Gillian, Priscilla still attended cordon bleu classes. With Zoë, she accompanied Gillian on rounds of magazine offices to give moral support. On chilly afternoons the three women sat in a cinema with their coats buttoned to the neck. In sunny weather, they sunbathed naked on Gillian’s fifth-floor balcony in Rue de Clichy. Or went shopping in Rue Bonaparte for slips to wear under their frocks. G
illian passed on to Priscilla her taste for uncluttered couturier clothes.

  One afternoon, late spring, they were walking in the Carousel Gardens when Gillian bumped into her deflowerer. The Baron wore his bowler hat and a small, plump, round-faced young woman hung on his arm. ‘My wife Suzanne,’ he said with pride.

  ‘I bet there’s been blood with Suzanne,’ Gillian remarked after the couple strolled off. Meanwhile, she wrote to her mother that a young man had proposed. ‘I suppose it is flattering, but when I marry, he has got to be the cat’s whiskers.’ She mentioned Vertès only as someone who could further her career. ‘I see a lot of Vertès, we have large teas at the Dôme. He’s most cheerful and goes on drawing as if nothing was happening, or ever going to happen.’

  Still wanting to be a film star, and feeling depressed about her drawing, Gillian decided to join an acting class. ‘Vertès thinks it an excellent idea. He says that after I’ve had some training he can surely help me as he knows so many cinema people.’

  Priscilla was present when Gillian had her studio photograph taken, and for Gillian’s debut performance as Agnès in Molière’s School For Wives. Gillian’s elation was contagious. ‘I felt like I was throwing myself into space . . . I realised that mastering my fear, my painful shyness, gave me a kick. That’s when I understood what made me tick.’ Priscilla had felt this exhilaration on the ballet floor.

  Dressed in her customary black, Gillian chose the part of Sonia in Crime and Punishment for a performance to be attended by important agents. Priscilla and Zoë agreed that she looked like a crow among all the gaudily dressed girls. ‘Crow or not, I was the only drama student top impresario André Trives picked out.’

  Trives told Gillian to come and see him. She had the physique everyone was looking for, a cross between Michèle Morgan and Simone Simon. ‘At last!’