Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (52 page)

Nevertheless, Tamara still couldn’t acknowledge the degree to which she had brought Tadeusz’s desertion on herself. At Lake Como she not only blamed him for the failure of their reconciliation, but even heaped abuse on Kizette for failing to give her proper support. Compromise and sympathy had never really counted in the family narrative constructed by Tamara; Tadeusz and Kizette had been given their allotted roles, and when they didn’t play them as expected she was furious.

Tamara could be selfish, narcissistic and cruel, but she continued to justify her behaviour on the grounds that her life was essentially in the service of her work. It was her duty, she believed, to bend the world to her creative will. And she was far from alone in that notion. In this decade of rapid social change, the borderline between freedom and selfishness, ego and egotism was hotly contended ethical ground.

For male artists and writers, the supremacy of the individual over society was one of the clarion themes of the Twenties. The question of what constituted the moral self had taken on a new urgency after the war. Scott Fitzgerald argued that ‘character was the only thing that did not wear out’ in the face of collapsing ideologies and broken dreams; for D.H. Lawrence the self was a mystical flame, set against a disintegrating modern world.

Most women, however, were experiencing the dichotomy between individual liberty and society in far more practical, problematic and domestic ways. In theory they were living in an era of emancipation – many had the vote, many were attaining financial independence and every flapper image that featured in the movies or magazines seemed a celebration of their freedom of choice. Yet women were presented with few narratives of what to do with those choices. Most of the feckless flapper heroines of the 1920s, from Betty Lou in
It Girl,
to Monique in
La Garçonne,
ended up being rewarded by – or corralled into – marriage. And at that point their stories typically came to an end. If ever a liberated girl failed to get her man, the alternatives were nearly always tragic, like Iris March driving herself into an ancient elm tree in a last, lonely gesture of integrity.

The practicalities of how grown-up, married flappers might balance independence and family life were much less documented. Zelda might be commissioned to write an article or two on modern marriage and in Britain an assortment of writers from D.H. Lawrence to Violet Bonham Carter penned newspaper columns on the same subject. But these barely touched on how hard and confusing a project it was for women to combine the ambitions of their single selves with the compromises required by husbands and children. Diana and Zelda knew they didn’t want to be like their mothers, but they had no other blueprint on which to model themselves. As for Tamara, she had lost Tadeusz because she had conceded to so few of his needs. And however self-righteously she had tried to justify her behaviour, she still felt diminished and exposed by his departure. She had been bred to believe that any woman abandoned by her husband was a failure.

The only thing she could do to counter that sense of failure was to make herself a better painter. During this period Kizette recalled Tamara veering between listless depression and ‘frantic’ work;
¹⁶
she was already exhibiting symptoms of the bipolar behaviour that would worsen in middle age, although, unlike Zelda, she could still turn her ‘manic’ phase to professional advantage. Significantly, one of the best portraits she produced during this period was of Tadeusz himself. It was both a homage and a critique, for while Tamara made her husband look dangerously handsome, capturing the dark, charismatic beauty with which she’d first fallen in love, the left hand, on which he would have worn his wedding ring, was left deliberately unfinished. The title she gave the canvas –
Portrait d’homme inachevé
– implied all her dissatisfactions with Tadeusz as a weak man and an inadequate husband.

In late 1927 or early 1928 they began divorce proceedings. And with Tadeusz definitely out of her life, Tamara focused more attention on her daughter – at least on canvas. She was now painting Kizette more frequently, and for her part Kizette was an apparently compliant model, grateful to spend more time with her mother, anxious to please as she attempted to pose motionless during each forty-five minute session. They are uncomfortable paintings, though – one in particular, which shows Kizette sitting on the balcony of their apartment, suggests an unacknowledged but powerful resistance in her relationship with Tamara. While Kizette’s hand is placed quietly in her lap, her blue gaze is staring half sullenly, half challengingly at the unseen woman painting her. The art world judged it to be a powerful painting, winning Tamara first place at the 1927 Exposition Internationale des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux, but it was not a happy one.

Certainly as far as Kizette was concerned, Cherie was reverting hurtfully to her old patterns. ‘She stayed out late and came home with so much energy she would paint for twelve hours non-stop. Then she’d take her favourite medicine, valerian, so she could get some sleep.’
¹⁷
Tamara was painting to exorcise Tadeusz, but she was also galvanized by the discovery of a new model. Sometime in 1927 she had been walking in the Bois de Boulogne when she had noticed a curious activity in the crowd ahead of her. People were pausing or breaking stride, turning their heads, and the reason was a young woman heading in her direction. It was one of those moments, she later recalled, when her perceptions were heightened and she felt the pulse of her vocation quicken.

The woman was astoundingly beautiful and when Tamara peremptorily begged to paint her, she was more than happy to comply. Rafaela turned out to be a professional, working as a model and part-time prostitute, but while that made her a very familiar type, she had a physical ripeness, a glossiness of colouring, that Tamara had never seen. She would have taken Rafaela to bed if she hadn’t wanted to use her as a model so badly, and the quality of the three portraits she went on to paint may well have been charged with the intensity of deflected desire. In
La Belle Rafaela,
the softly lit curves of the young woman’s body, foreshortened and exaggerated, have a perfumed heaviness, a bruised and satiated quality. In
The Dream,
or
Rafaela with Green Background,
a rare moment of intimacy is caught on canvas: Tamara has used unusually soft skin tones, making Rafaela’s flesh look vulnerable, and captured an equally vulnerable expression in the model’s eyes, an expression of darkness clearing, as if she has just awoken.

Professionally and socially Tamara was now working towards the peak of her success. British art critics were joining the European interest in her work, with the
Sunday Times
comparing her favourably to Wyndham Lewis, and the magazine
Graphic
publishing a flattering reproduction and review of
La Belle Rafaela.
In 1928 she was commissioned to paint a series of cover images for
Die Dame,
the German fashion magazine, which was one of the most significant commissions of her career. Not only did it bring her exposure to a mass market (and a lot of money), but one of the images she produced for the magazine,
AutoPortrait
or
Tamara in the Green Bugatti,
became her most widely reproduced painting. It showed a woman driver, gloved and helmeted for speed, her blonde hair and long, heavy-lidded eyes quite recognizable as Tamara.

She had painted herself as an icon of the decade, and as her stock rose on the social register, Tamara’s life moved closer to the perfection she created on canvas. She had honed her appearance to a sleek, expensive look: her short blonde hair was styled in marcelled waves, and her scarlet lipstick and nail varnish were balanced by thick false eyelashes. She wore evening gowns by Poiret and the young Schiaparelli, whose artful folding and draping flattered her body’s curves. She also wore the designs of the newly launched Marcel Rochas, who loaned or gifted her several outfits. She had many lovers, both male and female, and as her estrangement from Tadeusz moved towards the formal severance of divorce, she developed an increasingly close relationship with one of her patrons.

Baron Raoul Kuffner had begun collecting Tamara’s work sometime in the late 1920s, and in 1928 he commissioned her to paint a portrait of his mistress, the Spanish dancer Nana de Herrera. It’s not clear at what point Tamara began to consider Kuffner as a potential husband. At this point he was still married to his first wife, and with his thick-set body and thinning hair he wasn’t particularly attractive to her, but he was very rich, cultured and kind, and she seems to have wanted to manoeuvre herself into a possible future with him. The portrait she painted of de Herrera was strategically unflattering – her thin shoulders hunched and her smile so tense as to resemble a snarl – and certainly, when Kuffner’s wife died in 1934 Tamara moved swiftly to secure him and his fortune.

Even though she claimed to have made over a million dollars by the end of the decade, Tamara never felt she was rich enough or enviable enough. She was still consumed by the need to shore up her life. In the late 1920s she was approached by the wealthy scientist Pierre Boucard, who had made his fortune patenting the indigestion remedy Lactéol. Boucard wanted her to paint portraits of himself, his wife and his daughter and, in addition, he wanted first rights of purchase over all her work. The terms that Tamara negotiated were such that she was finally able to create the home of which she had dreamed since coming to Paris – a public showcase for her achievements and a monument to herself.

In 1929 she bought a three-floor apartment on rue Méchain, big enough to double as both living space and studio, and hired the celebrated architect Roger Mallet-Stevens and her own sister Adrienne to remodel its interior. She wanted its style to reflect her own vision of contemporary luxe, with the airy chrome and glass structures of the staircases and mezzanine landings, the streamlined windows and radiator grilles, all complemented by a more theatrical glamour. She had a pair of vases made to her own design, with electric lights in their base that showed her favourite calla lilies to stagey effect; her large sofa was upholstered in a plush grey fabric that had her initials woven into the pattern.

The centrepiece, of course, was Tamara herself, and photographs of her painting at her easel, in jewels and an elaborately draped evening gown, appeared in the press. It was the apotheosis of the image to which she had always aspired: rich, famous and beautiful, in charge of her own created kingdom. And the following commission she received felt like the inevitable next step in her career, allowing her to extend her reach across the Atlantic.

A young American millionaire, Rufus Bush, had invited her to paint his wife’s portrait in New York, for which he was offering a fee of forty thousand francs, plus lavish expenses. In early October, Tamara made her first voyage to the United States in high style, ensconced in a first-class cabin and dining at the captain’s table every night. She was met by Bush and his wife with not one, but two Rolls-Royces standing by to transport her and her luggage, and she was booked into the recently opened Savoy Hotel on 5th Avenue, an art deco temple to beauty and excess.

From her first day in Manhattan she felt as if she had come home. The city was living the American dream to the hilt, with the ever-rising stock market promising a season of even more extravagant parties and consumption. Tamara was enchanted by this vision of a city at play, of ‘women who … flirted and laughed as their men heaped fortune upon fortune and gave away mink coats and diamond bracelets and thousand-dollar bills as party favours’.
¹⁸

But then, nine days after Tamara arrived, the market began to crash.

All that summer Wall Street had witnessed exceptional speculative activity. An interview with the financier John Jakob Raskob had been published in August under the title ‘Everyone Ought to be Rich’. Its promise that a market investment of just $15 a month could accumulate $80,000 (close to a million dollars by today’s values) in the space of two decades was taken as holy writ by many ordinary Americans, and by early September the Dow Jones share index was driven to a record high of 381 points as Americans avidly exchanged market tips.

On 24 October, however, concerns about rising personal debt and lax market regulation contributed to a rash of nervous selling. The market lost 11 per cent of its value at the opening bell, and over the days that followed terrified investors were suckered into the panic as the Dow slid faster and deeper. Attempts were made to steady it, with a few of the very wealthy buying up huge quantities of stocks, but by 13 November the market had plunged to just under the 200-point mark.

Tamara, who had only modest fluency in English and little sense of formal economics, could not follow the details, but couldn’t fail to see the panic. Those who stood to lose most were those who’d borrowed heavily to buy stocks. Yet business also suffered – from the loss of capital, from the contraction of credit and from the massive decrease in outside investment. Over the following months a hundred thousand American companies would close, and five thousand banks would fail, ushering in a decade of economic depression.
*

The mood in Manhattan was febrile, almost like a war zone, with people alternately retreating into despair or partying with fatalistic excess. As far as Tamara was concerned, it was vexing but not calamitous – she lost a sizable chunk of her American earnings by depositing them in a bank that subsequently failed. But there were still people in America whose fortunes were sufficiently large or well managed to consider the market crash a temporary hazard. Tamara received several lucrative commissions during this time and even managed to organize an exhibition of her work in Pittsburgh.

As far as she was concerned the party hadn’t really ended. She continued to write letters home extolling the wonders of Manhattan: the 5th Avenue department stores, the perfect deco skyline and the nightclubs of Harlem, which, she informed Kizette, were the ‘best … in the world’.
¹⁹
In mid-December she met a handsome ranch owner, who gave her a train ticket for New Mexico and an invitation to visit him. She had promised Kizette and Malvina that she would be back for Christmas, but the adventure was just too tempting, and it was late January before she finally returned to Paris.