Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (16 page)

The situation of 20 rue Jacob was marvellously discreet, hidden from the street by high walls and gates. Yet behind those gates, Natalie’s sexuality was sumptuously evident, from the small columned folly in the grounds (her Temple of Love), to the profusion of gilt, tapestry, stained glass, velvet and damask within the house: ‘A cross between a chapel and a bordello,’ according to one much later visitor, Truman Capote.
¹³

Equally feminine in style were her Friday salons. Tiny, multicoloured iced cakes and exquisite cucumber sandwiches were served for tea to extraordinary women such as Isadora Duncan, Colette and Mercedes de Acosta. Men were regulars, too, among them Ezra Pound, André Gide, George Antheil, Jean Cocteau and Paul Poiret, yet as the young American poet William Carlos Williams realized, these male guests were incidental to the main action. The languorous glances and whispered asides of the women around him, the regular disappearance of two or three at a time, made Williams feel unsettled and self-conscious. ‘I went out, and stood up to take a good piss,’ he later recalled. It seemed the only way for a man to assert himself.
¹⁴

Some of the most important friendships Tamara developed at rue Jacob were with men: including the protean artist Jean Cocteau, whom she came to love as much for his snobbishness and treachery as for his wit. But it was the women who were most important to her, including the Marchesa Luisa Casati, who was now living in France, renovating her new home, the Palais Rose in Versailles. Casati never commissioned a portrait from Tamara. Perhaps she felt that her belladonna darkened eyes and gothic, hennaed hair required the surrealist eye of Man Ray or the misty flattery of Augustus John’s brush, rather than the brilliantly lit de Lempicka style. But Casati was a useful contact, giving Tamara introductions to several friends, including the influential photographer Baron de Meyer, and the Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, who had once been the Marchesa’s lover and mentor, and was still her close friend.

There were others among Natalie Barney’s circle who both modelled for Tamara and bought her work, including the Duchesse de la Salle, whose title might be fake but whose regal asperity and mannish dress inspired one of Tamara’s most compelling early portraits. Even Tamara was impressed by the speed with which Paris was opening up to her. Her friends now included prominent artists – Jean Pascin and the portrait painter Kees van Dongen – as well as a scattering of the rich and titled, among them Misia Sert, Polish wife of the painter José-Maria Sert and friend to Diaghilev, also the generous and knowledgeable Comtesse de Noailles.

Supported by such people, Tamara was growing confident of success. The three pictures she had shown in the 1922 Salon d’Automne had created a stir of critical interest with
Le Figaro
noting the ‘disquieting precision’ of their style’.
¹⁵
The following year, Tamara’s appearance in the Salon was sponsored by André Gide, and more group exhibitions followed in the Salon des Tuileries and the Salon des Femmes Peintres. Tamara was making her name not only in the art press; she was also being noticed by the columnists. The clothes she wore, the places she went to, the names of those invited to the parties and dinners she now hosted – all were becoming news.

Yet while Tamara basked in her success, her husband and daughter often felt themselves to be its victims. Tadeusz was not happy in Paris. He missed his family, who were now living in Poland, and although he had found a reasonably good job, he had only partially recovered his former spirit. Most nights he wanted to do nothing beyond slump in a chair with a glass of vodka and one of the detective novels to which he’d become addicted.

His depression hadn’t entirely extinguished the sexual attraction between him and Tamara, yet it was only just sufficient to hold the marriage together. Tamara’s obsessive interest in her work and her professional contacts left her little time for her husband, and her career increasingly represented a threat. Not only was she beginning to earn more money than him, she was starting to act like the man of the house.

It wasn’t that she ignored her duties as a wife and mother. Tamara carefully allotted time to tuck Kizette up at night and to take breakfast with her in the morning. Occasionally she dedicated hours to the preparation of extravagant Polish dinners, and she always demanded the highest standards. A badly cooked meal or an ugly piece of crockery placed on the table by her unwitting housekeeper could rouse Tamara to a fury. More than one wine glass or vase was smashed because she judged it to be vulgar or bourgeois. This angry perfectionism was partly a reaction to those few, frightening years when her life had veered out of control, but it cast a net of irritable, nervous tension over the household. Kizette alternated between extravagant attempts to please her ‘Cherie’, as Tamara liked to be called, and resentment at her scenes. Little Nancy Cunard, averting her face from Maud’s chocolates, could have sympathized with Kizette the night that she stubbornly refused to add the ritual ‘God bless Mama’ to her prayers.
¹⁶

Tadeusz, however, preferred Tamara’s volatile domestic presence to her increasingly regular absences. Most evenings, after tucking Kizette up in bed, Tamara would disappear from the apartment. Her excuses were always innocuous – she was going with friends to a new cabaret, the opera or a restaurant – but often she wouldn’t return home until dawn. Tamara was discovering the full decadent potential of Parisian nightlife. If she was out for the evening with the Duchesse de la Salle she might go to the lesbian club, La Rose; if she was with one of her male homosexual friends she might end up in one of the gay bars on rue de Lappe, where men dressed up as women and the cabaret was exceptionally obscene.

At such places there was not only a range of drink and jazz on offer but also drugs, which Tamara discovered she enjoyed almost as much as she liked sex. Her taste was not for the anaesthetic calm of morphine, but for substances that made her feel dangerous and alive: hashish that came in tiny pellets and was swallowed with sloe gin fizzes, or cocaine sniffed from a miniature silver teaspoon. The latter was Tamara’s special addiction: it was cheap and easily available, and she coveted the electric clarity it induced in her senses and the lift it gave to her physical desire.

Tamara was a greedily tactile woman: even during ordinary, daylight encounters she liked to reach forward and stroke the cheek of the person she was talking to, or cup their face in her hand. But on the dance floor, holding her partner close in a foxtrot, or circling around them in a Charleston, Tamara’s caresses became demanding. Men and women who were partnered by her would feel her lips on theirs, her fingers trailing across their chest or crotch. One night at La Rose, Tamara began to undress the woman with whom she was dancing, announcing to the amused crowd that she was auditioning her as a potential model. As she caressingly assessed her victim’s breasts in her hands she pronounced them to be ‘round enough’; inserting her hand between the woman’s legs, she judged with mock regret that she would not do, she was ‘too wet to concentrate’.

These exhibitionist displays became Tamara’s party trick, but they were often just foreplay to more lawless sexual encounters. It wasn’t only the buzz of cocaine that fuelled Tamara’s desires, but the craving for adventure. On certain nights she would excuse herself from the company of her friends and head off to an area on the Left Bank of the Seine that was notorious for its seedy, jerry-built clubs and bars. This shanty town of pleasure had flourished during the war and continued to service the appetites of the 1920s. It was an environment perfectly suited to Tamara’s needs. Among sailors, students and other anonymous pleasure-seekers, she could vary and refine her sexual high: according to one unnamed acquaintance, threesomes were her favourite, allowing her to savour simultaneously the softness of a woman’s skin and the muscular heft of a man.

Tamara’s mantra that ‘it is an artist’s duty to try everything’ was a cliché of Left Bank life, yet for her it had a visceral reality. The more squalid or precarious her sexual encounters, the more liberating she found them. They gave her a release from the rigid structure of her daytime life and the ambitions she’d set herself. Yet even in the random intoxication of these late-night encounters, Tamara’s painterly vision was still at work. She retained a powerful sense memory of the strangers with whom she had sex: the hard or ripe texture of their flesh, the shape of their bodies. They were all potential material and when she returned home she would sometimes stay up painting until the last of her sexual and chemical adrenalin was expended, converting the sensations of the night into brush strokes and colour. Sometimes she would snatch only a couple of hours’ sleep before it was time to wake Kizette for breakfast. Decades later Tamara would recall that she had ‘started from nothing’ with a determination to achieve ‘the best of everything’.
¹⁷
By 1924, she believed she was getting close to her aim.

Chapter Four

TALLULAH

John Hollis Bankhead had always expected his granddaughter to put the family name in lights. With reluctant admiration, the Confederate veteran and US Senator had judged that ‘Tallulah had a
force
in her from her very childhood, and it was clear that force had to go somewhere.’
¹
A pugnacious, plump little girl, she was apparently without fear, hurling herself out of a hay loft, her hair ‘on fire’ with the excitement of pretending to be a parachute jumper.
²
She had temper tantrums so violent that her grandmother had to douse her with buckets of cold water, and her behaviour at school was so delinquent she rarely stayed at any establishment for longer than a year.

Perhaps it was inevitable that as soon as she was old enough, Tallulah would propel herself away from her conservative Southern family and towards the glitz and glare of an acting career. Given the emotional hullabaloo she created around herself, the stage was her natural element. But as she was growing up, Tallulah’s attention seeking had been more than simple exhibitionism: it had been the only strategy she knew for claiming the attention of her emotionally volatile father and compensating for the death of her mother.

Adelaide Bankhead had developed fatal peritonitis just three weeks after giving birth to Tallulah, on 31 January 1902. Later Tallulah would deal briskly with the tragedy, asserting that she couldn’t brood over a woman she ‘did not remember’.
³
Yet as a child she’d felt a haunting association between her birth and Ada’s death. How could she not? Her father Will had her baptized in a ceremony that took place right next to her mother’s coffin. He then lapsed into a state of histrionic mourning that continued intermittently for many years, veering between hectic high spirits and alcohol-fuelled melancholia. One of Tallulah’s earliest memories was of seeing Will weaving inconsolably around the house, waving a gun and vowing to join his wife. However carefully the other adults in her life tried to shield her, she could sense from the talk about her father that some guilty train of logic connected his behaviour back to her.

Will had adored his wife. She was beautiful, spoiled and very romantic: if the mood took her she would wander down the dirt track of her grandfather’s plantation dressed in her latest Paris gown. And when the mood took her to fall for the handsome young lawyer Will Bankhead, she happily threw over the man to whom she was already engaged.

For two years Will and his bride led a charmed life. They set up home in a large apartment in Huntsville, Alabama, and shortly afterwards Will got himself elected to the Alabama State Legislature, paving his way to becoming a congressman. The following year their first daughter Eugenia was born. And if the household budget was a little tight, subsidies from Will’s father always ensured that there were servants, books, good food and drink.

After a cruelly short time, however, all this was taken from Will. It was evident to the family that his grief left him helpless to cope with his two tiny daughters, and so the pattern of Tallulah’s childhood was set. For part of the year she and Eugenia were sent to live with their grandparents in Jasper, a day’s ride from Huntsville; for another part they were with Will’s sister Marie in more distant Montgomery. In practical ways it was a good solution but the girls grew up feeling that nowhere, exactly, was home. Each place had its own rules. When they were alone with their father in Huntsville, he let them stay up late and bribed good behaviour out of them with candy. When they were living in Jasper, their grandmother imposed early bedtime and any breaking of rules was met with the punishment, or the threat of it, from their grandfather.

The Bankheads were, in fact, a lively, affectionate clan. Yet without a mother or a real family, Tallulah spent most of her childhood feeling that every scrap of affection had to be fought for. Eugenia, by contrast, seemed to be fussed over by everybody. She was a delicate child, suffering acute attacks of measles and whooping cough when she was very small; she was also pretty and had a far more winning disposition than her turbulent younger sister. It seemed to Tallulah that Eugenia always had more than her fair share of their father’s love, and for the whole of her life she would begrudge the fact that Eugenia had once been taken on a picnic by him, while she’d been left behind.

A photograph taken when the two girls were about eight and seven showed exactly how things stood between them. Eugenia, a neat docile girl, is seated in a chair with her hands and ankles demurely crossed, her hair tied with a large white ribbon. Tallulah, standing next to her, looks double her sister’s size, her plump arms and waist unnaturally confined in her Sunday best frock and a calculating grin on her face. The hand snaking behind Eugenia’s back looks ready to deal a pinch or a slap.