All We Know: Three Lives (25 page)

She moved out of her parents’ home and rented a small attic room in a boardinghouse in Earl’s Court, a neighborhood whose down-market character was as far from the comfort in which she had been brought up as she could imagine. She saw her family off at Tilbury when they sailed for Australia in the summer of 1920. And then she was on her own. “I was free,” she said, “but I was terribly, terribly poor for a long time.” She had her minuscule salary. She pawned the few expensive possessions she had taken from home, including an elaborate silver brush set in a silk-lined, crocodile skin case that her father had given her. For a time, she still received a small allowance—“pin money”—from the clerk at Brooks, McGlashan, and McHarg. She believed that her father had been too embarrassed by his inability to control his daughter to tell his clerk to stop these funds. “He never really forgave me,” she said. “I didn’t appear in his will at all.” This was her sense of his shame. Her own—about being Australian, about being middle-class, about her body and its weaknesses—drove her from now on. “What I did,” she said, “was work—all hours.” She ate very little, often just a poached egg on toast and a meringue, which she had decided was the cheapest and most nutritious meal she could get, and she put all her energy into her job. She was the magazine’s receptionist; she made tea on the gas ring on the landing and took it to the editor and the pressroom; she ran down Chancery Lane to the delicatessen to get coffee and buns for the staff; she ran to the post office for stamps and to post the mail; she worked “as a messenger boy.” She was at the office Monday through Saturday and, as time went on, was often needed at night. Out late trying “to get proofs passed by some actress,” she might be kept waiting in a drafty corridor until eleven o’clock at night, but she was back in the office at nine the next morning. “I was very young and willing to do anything,” she said, “and
Vogue
was very small beer in those days in England.” She said, “I grew into it and grew up with it.”

Most of the “so-called English edition” of
Vogue
“was taken straight from the American pages,” she recalled, shipped from New York and reprinted in England. Production consisted “of inserting into the American magazine two photographs of ladies of title.” These were the intricacies of status: “The frontispiece had to be a lady of title above a baronet’s wife. The second photograph could be a baronet’s wife, but had to be titled.” Then there were “pages and pages of society snapshots.” There were reports on Paris fashion, but these were still filed by employees of American
Vogue
. The English fashion contribution consisted of a couple of pages of drawings from what were called court dressmakers, such as Reville, Lucille, and Dove, who made clothes for upper-class women who attended functions of the court. But these firms tended to copy French fashions and were not always attributed in the magazine.
Vogue
did not list prices, and some of the designs shown were fictions: As Madge wrote later, magazines at this time were in the habit of showing fashions that were sometimes “dreamt up by their own artists,” to be copied by the readers’ home dressmakers (this practice began to change in the mid-to-late twenties). There were no professional models, so when photographs were used (instead of drawings), the woman “who wore the dress in the shop posed or the fashion editor’s friends were persuaded to face the camera,” Madge wrote, “with deplorably amateur results.” As for the dresses themselves, “though the First World War did much to emancipate women and threw thousands into occupations hitherto reserved for men, it did not noticeably free their limbs. In 1921 the fashionable figure was still [almost as] encumbered…as her Edwardian predecessor.”

The editor of British
Vogue
, Elspeth Champcommunal, known as Champco, was a forceful, sophisticated woman—“handsome,” in the words of her friend Janet Flanner. The widow of a French painter killed in the First World War, she was also a friend of Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, Cedric Morris, and other English artists. She was close to Nicole Groult, the couturière sister of the celebrated designer Paul Poiret, married to the artist-decorator André Groult. Adding photographs of upper-class Englishwomen to an American publication did not interest Champcommunal for long, and she eventually left to open her own couture house in Paris. But her friendship and her influence on Madge were “immense and far-reaching,” as Madge wrote. “In fact, I should never have become Madge Garland without her.” Champcommunal does not appear in Edna Woolman Chase’s résumé of the early years of British
Vogue
(although a fiftieth-anniversary issue of the magazine, in the 1960s, credits her as the “first editor British
Vogue
, 1916–22”), but Madge always acknowledged her debt to Champcommunal, repeatedly paid public tribute to her work, and corrected the factual record about her career. In a lecture on the influence of fashion on furniture design in 1979, she referred to Champco as “the only Englishwoman…to have had a couture house in Paris.” Interviewed at this time, she credited Champco’s designs as part of her own history, talking about evenings she spent with Man Ray and Lee Miller in Paris and describing being photographed by Man Ray in “a beautiful dress by Elspeth Champcommunal. A plaid
chiffon
…typical of the twenties in Paris.”

The staff of British
Vogue
in the January 1, 1923, edition of
Vogue
. “Miss McHarg” is standing second from left, William Wood at center. Aldous Huxley is seated at left, Dorothy Wilde beside him. Ruth Anderson, interim editor, seated center (Courtesy Condé Nast Archive)

When Champco quit the magazine, Ruth Anderson became the interim editor; she, too, became a mentor and longtime friend. Aldous Huxley was on the staff in the early 1920s, writing book and theater reviews; Madge’s long friendship with him and Maria Huxley began at this time. Dorothy Wilde, Oscar’s niece, was also working on British
Vogue
. Constantly trying to improve herself, Madge pestered colleagues to train her, took secretarial classes at night (she enrolled in a school in South London, not the West End, to save money), and gradually worked her way up. She became a typist, then a secretary, then assistant to the editor. She also learned that how she looked gave her entrée. Even though her material circumstances were precarious, her clothes were still better than what “a tea girl” was expected to wear, and her shoes were pretty because vanity had made her stop wearing “the hideous laced-up surgical…boots” prescribed by the doctors. Delivering the proofs of a portrait to Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, whose engagement to Prince Albert was announced in 1923 and duly noted in
Vogue
, Madge was let in the front door, instead of at the tradesmen’s entrance. To work in fashion in this way, it seemed, was not to be “in trade.” One day Huxley passed her on the stairs and asked, “Are you dressed like that because you’re on
Vogue
, or are you on
Vogue
because you’re dressed like that?” It was a conundrum about clothing, work, and identity that she liked to cite to suggest the indissolubility of these two options—and to describe her suitability, at once natural and hard-won, for the job.

But after two years of “walking about and working all day, and dancing most of the night, and eating very little,” she collapsed, diagnosed with jaundice and other ailments. Her parents, with whom she had had little communication, happened to be in London, and appeared at her bedside to chastise her. They had often discouraged her ambitions by reminding her of her bad health. “‘Oh you won’t be able to do this, that, and the other because you are so often ill,’” she said, mimicking them years later. Standing over her now, they told her this collapse was her reward for defying their wishes. Living on her own, too sick to work, with no income when she did not, she was frightened in a way that she had not been by relative penury and hunger. Ewart had remained in London after being demobilized and continued to be “on the outskirts” of her life during those years. He was perhaps in love with her, he certainly admired her, and he was inclined to be gallant. The family connection also created a sense of obligation. She cared for him, was not in love, was terrified of leaving the world to which she wanted to belong, and trusted that he would not thwart her. From her sickbed, she asked a nurse to send him a telegram. It read “
COME AT ONCE AND MARRY ME
.”

She was married in London on April 12, 1922, at the church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, dressed not “in anything as conventional as white satin but in a very pretty dress and flower-laden hat.” Her parents and just one other witness were present. It was not the ceremony Andrew and Hettie McHarg had hoped for, and as that telegram suggests, the negotiations that preceded it were intense and peremptory. Madge later said she would have preferred to live together unmarried, but that Ewart, with his “impeccable good manners, refused with horror such a suggestion.” She told him that she would not wear a wedding band and chose a diamond eternity ring—a symbol of love, not bondage—from the jeweler Chaumet instead. She said that she would not be married in a church, but relented when a friend, probably Elspeth Champcommunal, arranged for her to be married by the pacifist minister Dick Sheppard, a hero of hers and the vicar of St. Martin. She told Ewart that she would not change her name to his, that she would continue to work, that she would not run the household, and that it would be “instant divorce” if she ever got pregnant. As she noted dryly years later, “Such a union, undertaken in such a spirit, would hardly become a great success, and within two years we had parted.” Again, the story was more complicated than even this recital suggests.

One weekend in Paris in 1923 or ’24, Madge sat in a movie theater watching the film and holding Ewart’s hand. On her other side sat Dorothy (Dody) Todd, the new editor of British
Vogue
. Todd was strictly tailored and coiffed, shrewd, sophisticated, intimidating. Back in London after a stint in New York, where she had been trained by Condé Nast and editor Edna Woolman Chase, she was at ease in Paris, had an American disregard for convention, and had apparently flawless English social credentials. Madge also held her hand.

Soon afterward, Madge left Ewart for Dody—moved with her to a small house in Chelsea that had been the home of Elspeth Champcommunal, who was now in France. “Madge has gone off with this woman,” Ewart told his brother in despair. “Don’t worry,” his brother replied, “women are very peculiar. She’ll come back. She’ll come to her senses. Women usually do.” Madge never did, and although Ewart’s sympathy with her never diminished, his pride was injured to the end of his life, not by the considerable scandal of adultery, but by the more unthinkable conundrum of having been left for a woman. Still, Madge and he did not divorce until 1930, when Ewart, given the lack of no-fault divorce, did what was called “the honorable thing,” allowing himself to be construed as the guilty party. The divorce may have been delayed because he was hoping that Madge would return, or he could have been protecting himself, or her. They had a number of mutual friends over the years, including the poet John Betjeman, the choreographer Frederick Ashton, and the dancer Billy Chappell, but they never met again.

Madge came to regret having hurt him, but at the time, all she knew was that Dody Todd was the key to the intellectual, aesthetic, and sentimental education she craved. Dody’s seductiveness, her taste, her generosity, her sheer force—and her catastrophic problems—changed Madge’s life. She desired Madge, took seriously her longing for art and books, dressed her in haute couture, convinced her of her value, and gave her entrée to a world of writers, performers, artists, designers, and gallery owners. She also gave her more responsibility at the magazine. She was “the absolute making of Madge,” said Chloe Tyner, Elspeth Champcommunal’s daughter, “and Madge lapped it up and absolutely fell in love.” Madge once described this period as “the only two happy years of my life.” Even right before her death, when she still found anything to do with Dorothy Todd “inexpressibly painful,” she acknowledged her debt. “I owe her everything,” she told her friend, the biographer Hilary Spurling. “
Everything
. She had this gift for finding and sponsoring young people. I was one.” It was not easy: “You can imagine how tongues wagged. You can imagine what was said.” And when the affair ended, Madge was ruined, “financially and socially. A lot of people never would—and never have—known me, because I was associated with her. But I would have left my husband in any case.”

Madge, early 1920s (MGP)

Dorothy Todd in Haute Savoie, mid-1920s, photographed by Madge (MGP)

Early in
A Novel of Thank You
, written in 1926, Gertrude Stein names Dorothy Todd and reflects on the act of naming her:

In this perverse introduction, the etiquette- and celebrity-conscious Stein also ostentatiously introduces, though does not name, “us”: herself and Alice Toklas. Stein loved proper names and knew how to drop them; her love of making meaning from repetition had something to do with her understanding of fame and advertising and the excessive reference they involve. Like everyone who was anyone in the arts in the first few decades of the twentieth century, in England, Europe, and the United States, Dorothy Todd “came to see, us,” that couple set apart by genius, love, sex, artistic dependency, and idiosyncratic punctuation.

In the mid-1920s, in several of the circles in which modernism is said to have been formed, everyone also came to see Dody Todd. Her name was repeatedly, admiringly, jealously, and scathingly bruited about—linked to everything fashionably avant-garde, commercial, and sexual in London and Paris. She was someone to reckon with or to please: a source of interest, irritation, and income to Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant, and other Bloomsbury figures; fearsome and encouraging to an admiring younger generation of writers and artists; respected by and troubling to colleagues at
Vogue
. By the end of the 1920s her name was seldom mentioned (although Stein did so, in 1933, in
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
), nor was it particularly desirable to see or be seen by her. In debt, drinking heavily, shunned socially, unable to find work, she fled to New York. It was the moment of the prosecution of Radclyffe Hall’s
The Well of Loneliness
for obscenity, and at a Manhattan party Mercedes de Acosta made a splash by calling Dody “the bucket in the well of loneliness.”

But in her prime, Dody radiated ambition and a tough self-assurance. She had a “tremendous mind,” remembered Chloe Tyner, and was “very quick…very amusing.” Virginia Woolf described her as having “a shimmer of dash & ‘chic’ even. She stands on her two feet, as she expresses it.” She was small and heavy and had dark hair, which she kept short and slicked back in an Eton crop. She wore a uniform of a suit—the jacket with a velvet collar, the skirt a fashionable length—with a fresh flower in her buttonhole every day. She moved in an aura of expensive perfume and had a commanding, pleasing voice and a plummy accent.

Her family history, however, was “a wasp’s nest of the most unpleasant character,” as Madge put it—a story of debility and lies that reverberated through generations. Her father, Christopher Todd, trained as a carpenter, then followed his father (who had originally made his living as a bricklayer) in the profitable business of constructing and managing property in an expanding mid-Victorian London. By the 1880s, Christopher Todd was a wealthy developer who owned real estate all over London, much of it utilitarian, cheaply built housing in Chelsea. Her mother, Ruthella Hetherington, the daughter of a Carlisle butcher, twenty-five years younger than her husband, was his second wife. Dody was born in London on May 1, 1883. On the birth certificate of her brother, Alfred Guy Eric Todd, born two years later, her father listed his occupation as “Gentleman.” The family lived in one of his grander properties, a large house on the newly developed Cromwell Road (which was not yet the main route west from Knightsbridge), where Ruthella enjoyed the life of a pampered Edwardian lady. According to one source, they spent six months of every year on a yacht in the South of France. In her impoverished old age, Dody would gesture at the area around the Cromwell Road and say, “All that belonged to us, once upon a time.” She would say that “Ruthella had known Winston Churchill’s mother very well.”

Christopher Todd died suddenly of a heart attack when Dody was nine, and in the years that followed, Ruthella squandered the vast sum he left—over £33,000, plus stocks, property, and other assets—which by the terms of his will she was to hold in trust for his children from both marriages. She had become, or perhaps had always been, an alcoholic and a gambler, and she periodically found herself broke and stranded at casinos around Europe, requiring rescue “by friends or the family solicitor, who would travel out to Monte Carlo to pay her debts and bring her back.” Eric was sent to Eton, but appears to have been pulled out after only a year or two. Unlike Madge, Dody was well educated by the standards of the day for a girl. She said that she had run away from home as a child and returned only on the condition that she be allowed a tutor in Latin and Greek, and she learned at least enough of the classics to be able to quote some of these texts in later life. But she also spent much of her childhood accompanying her mother to those exclusive gaming places. In the process, she learned to speak French and to love the South of France. She also learned to gamble—to take huge risks, Madge said, “not only at the baize table, but in life.”

A “Dorothy Todd, artist” appears in the New York City directory at a Greenwich Village address from 1917 to 1919. She may have been living in London in 1920 and 1921, when the telephone at the Cromwell Road house was listed in her name. She and Ruthella were both in New York in June of 1922, at which time Ruthella transferred the title of the house to her. By then Dody was working in the New York office of
Vogue
. Edna Woolman Chase called Dody one of the first editors of British
Vogue
, but does not say when or how she came to her, or Nast’s, or William Wood’s attention—or what sort of work, if any, Dody did before being hired by
Vogue
. Some of the details of her life in her twenties and thirties are hard to know because of the absence of a masthead on the magazine during its early years, and because of the way Condé Nast managed his employees, sending them back and forth across the Atlantic on what often felt to them like a whim. Her progress is hard to track, too, because the British
Vogue
offices were bombed during the Blitz, which destroyed whatever records might have been saved until then. The contentious end of Todd’s employment at
Vogue
plays a part in these gaps. But much of what is unknown about her early adulthood has to do with her attempts to cover a family secret, the exposure of which would have ruined her and everyone around her.

Soon after she met Dody, Madge learned that she was the guardian of a teenage girl called Helen, her niece, the orphan child of her brother Eric, who had been killed in the April 1917  Arras offensive of the Great War. In fact, Helen was Dody’s own illegitimate daughter, born in Paris in 1905, when Dody was twenty-two. The child’s origins were hidden from almost everyone—even, and most disastrously, from Helen herself: Although she grew up with Dody, she always believed her to be her aunt. It is unclear how Dody explained her responsibility for Helen in the twelve years before her brother’s death. The secret of the girl’s parentage was sometimes implied but never discussed, even among Dody’s closest friends. “I never heard who her father was,” said Chloe Tyner; “I never heard who her
mother
was. We didn’t talk about such things.” For a long time, Madge could not understand why Dody took so much trouble with Helen, who lived with them when she was not away at school and then university. Nine years older, but still running away from her charmless childhood self, Madge resented not just the girl’s presence but the fact that when she was absent she was getting the education Madge had wanted for herself. To Helen, Madge was just another of “the innumerable young ladies”—Dody’s girlfriends—“who stayed with us.”

In Paris in October  1905, Ruthella Todd and a man named Harry Lukach had registered Helen’s birth at the
mairie
of the Sixteenth Arrondissement, testifying that they had been witnesses to the birth of “Dorothy Thompson,” the child of an unnamed father and mother (
“fille de père et mère non dénommés”
). As a result of her place of birth and unspecified parentage, Helen was considered a French citizen. Six months later, she was baptized in London. On this document she was identified as Dorothy Helen Todd, and her mother as Dorothy Todd; Eric Todd stood as one of her godparents. Dody was able to procure her daughter an English passport and citizenship by claiming that she had been born in Toronto—another fiction Helen grew up believing. The other half of Helen’s parentage is unknown. In 1915 a public trust was set up for her and Dody; money from this fund materialized at odd intervals for years, almost until Dody’s death. Helen later believed that it had been provided by Lukach, an American businessman resident in London who was almost certainly Ruthella’s lover. The Todd and Lukach families had known each other well for years. They were neighbors in London and in Brighton, and Eric Todd and Lukach’s son were at Eton together. After Christopher Todd’s death, Ruthella left the Cromwell Road house and lived either at or adjacent to various addresses in Piccadilly at which Lukach also lived.