All We Know: Three Lives (27 page)

To up-and-coming young gay men such as Cecil Beaton, George “Dadie” Rylands, and Steven Runciman, how Madge looked and what she thought mattered. She was more experienced and sophisticated than they, despite her lack of a university education. They were cowed by Dody, who was, in Raymond Mortimer’s words, “a very forcible lady,” but Madge encouraged them and was in a position to help with access to a world that was now hers. She brought Runciman, later a leading historian of Byzantium, to parties. When Rylands, then knocking about Bloomsbury, needed money, she got him a job as a model; for a time this future Cambridge don was visible on the sides of buses in a cigarette advertisement. To Beaton, who never tired of pronouncing on women’s beauty, Madge invariably “looked charming—extremely chic. She’s so thin and wears her dresses wonderfully well.” As an undergraduate at Cambridge, Beaton and other aspiring sophisticates had waited eagerly for each new issue of
Vogue
, which “was received as an event of importance.” Back in London, desperate to extricate himself from his middle-class family and increasingly savvy about how to use publicity and his nascent photographic skills to do so, he was highly attuned to the doings of what he called “the
Vogue
gang” and always hoping to find a way to impress Madge and Dody so they would publish his photographs. To foster his anxious social advance, “he concentrated,” notes his biographer Hugo Vickers, “on Allanah Harper…and Madge Garland.” It was a coup when Madge and Dody attended his parties and lunches, when he was invited to theirs, when he danced with Madge, and when she suggested that she might be able to use his sisters as models. It was a thrill when Madge told him “one or two rather indecent stories, typical of Bloomsbury.” A young Anne Scott-James, who joined
Vogue
in the 1930s after an Oxford education and went on to a long career in journalism, first saw Madge at a party in the 1920s: “She absolutely knocked me out. I’d never seen someone so extraordinary…I kept saying, ‘Who is that? Who is that?’ She was a star.”

Madge, one of Cecil Beaton’s first subjects, in 1926 (Courtesy of the Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s)

Treating the magazine as a kind of salon over which they presided, Madge and Dody courted contributors and entertained friends at home and at their favorite restaurant. It was the beginning of Madge’s lifelong practice of connecting people she admired with one another—a habit she pursued to the point that she was “almost like an agency” for bringing people together. She introduced the interior decorator J. Duncan Miller to the photographer, painter, and interior designer Curtis Moffat; the latter had worked with Man Ray in Paris, and in 1925 opened a photography studio with Olivia Wyndham. She introduced the designers Eyre de Lanux and Eve Wyld to Moffat when he opened a gallery in 1929. For a lunch to present a young Sylvia Townsend Warner to Virginia Woolf, both of whom were known to be shy, they asked the restaurateur Marcel Boulestin to prepare the food but serve it at their home on the Royal Hospital Road. Townsend Warner had just published her first novel,
Lolly Willowes
, whose protagonist is a witch. When Woolf asked how she knew so much about witches, Townsend Warner startled her by answering, “Because I am one.”

Boulestin had first run an adventurous interior decoration business in London, selling Paul Poiret’s textiles and wallpapers. His restaurants helped to popularize authentic French food and they made the same point that British
Vogue
was trying to make: They were vehicles for modern design, combining English and French sensibilities. The architect of the first, the Restaurant Français, was Clough Williams-Ellis, John Strachey’s brother-in-law; its decorator was Allan Walton. The murals at the second, the Restaurant Boulestin, were painted by Marie Laurencin and Jean-Emile Laboureur; the curtains were from a fabric designed by Raoul Dufy; André Groult, who ordinarily concentrated on making austere but sensuous objects in opulent materials (furniture covered in shagreen, lacquered screens), supervised the work. Dody commissioned Boulestin to write about food for
Vogue
, and his restaurants became their clubhouse; “You’d never go there and not know somebody,” said Madge.

Their own flat, which Madge called “a beautiful house for parties,” was furnished sparely, but was “charming & very cleverly thought out,” said Beaton. There, at “impromptu wild parties,” were writers, actors, designers, photographers, painters, dancers, and composers. When the revue
Blackbirds of 1926
 played in London after its run in Harlem, Madge invited its star, Florence Mills, and felt that “it was like having somebody from the Royal family” in her home. “Several ultra smart young women came in,” wrote Beaton of another occasion, “wearing lovely clothes & lots of false pearls.” There was Olivia Wyndham, from an old aristocratic family, wild, but something more than a party girl; the socialite and drug addict Brenda Dean Paul; Allanah Harper; Dorothy Wilde. And there was Madge, “the thinnest person I’d ever seen,” recalled Anne Scott-James, “wearing these incredibly graceful twenties clothes with a very long waist.”

Nicole Groult, seated, at home, with Marie Laurencin (Courtesy Colombe Pringle)

Madge was one of “the people one always saw at these mad bacchanals” around London in the 1920s, wrote the composer Vernon Duke, author of “April in Paris.” But she was not one of the Bright Young People, upper-middle- and upper-class youths such as Wyndham, Harper, and Dean Paul, who had money and time to burn. Out all night in London or Paris, or up late at home at her own parties, she still had to go to work the next morning. Attending the couture collections in Paris, she understood the spectacle to be as challenging, in its own way, as studying paintings in galleries and museums—perhaps even more so, since the work was constantly in motion and journalists were not allowed to sketch or take photographs during a showing (they could, discreetly, take notes) and embargoes enforced by the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture, the industry’s governing body, meant that members of the press had to wait for six weeks to publish what they had seen. These demands created lifelong habits for Madge. Decades later, Hilary Spurling commented on the intensity and speed with which she moved through art exhibits; Madge replied that it was an effect of having learned how to look quickly and deeply at the collections.

It was the work of a party, the dance of work. It was the way the clothes worked and how they danced. “The ’twenties in Paris,” said Madge, “was a moment when you went out every night…and one’s clothes were very light, because one danced all the time.” The truth of the cliché of that decade as a time hell-bent on fun is that the exhilaration of that dancing, the mobility, was meaningful to people who had lived with physical restraint and diminishment. She was out dancing at hotels and nightclubs; out at a dance hall in Notting Hill Gate, where she met Frederick Ashton, then an aspiring dancer; out dancing with Olivia Wyndham, then back in the middle of the night to the impressive Wyndham family home to make scrambled eggs and try not to wake up Wyndham’s elderly and daunting father. If she stayed in, she would push back the furniture, roll up the rugs, wind up the Victrola, and dance. “And if one wasn’t dancing one watched people dancing,” Madge said. Out at the ballet with the actress Viola Tree, daughter of the actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree, and afterward to the Eiffel Tower restaurant, where they were joined by Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf for coffee. Out with Dody at the London premiere in 1924 of Bronislava Nijinska’s
Les Biches
, for which Marie Laurencin did the décor and costumes, Madge was struck by “the vein of poetry” that ran alongside the austerity of much modern design. Out by herself one morning, having breakfast at an ABC restaurant, she was still wearing evening clothes from the night before, returning from an assignation, possibly with Wyndham.

Wearing those incredibly graceful twenties clothes, including Chanel’s simple chemise dress, which appeared in 1924, Madge was participating in a fashion that “eventually swept every other type of dress off the fashion map,” she wrote later, “and put women as nearly into uniform as anything short of a Government department has ever done.” Yet it was in these clothes that she established a distinctive personality. Her clothes were also a way to be adorned in a whole series of relationships: the exchange between high fashion and interior decoration in the 1920s, the artistic and commercial traffic between London and Paris, the sexual fluidity of the time. Cecil Beaton saw these connections when he looked at Madge in early 1926 “look[ing] perfect in a most lovely costume by Nicole Groult. Very influenced by Marie Laurencin—in pale blue and pink.” The outfit Beaton referred to was a “patterned jumper [sweater] and skirt, and a long silk coat of a plain color, lined with the pattern, and beautifully bordered,” as Madge described it, with “a hat to match, and so forth.” Teddy Wolfe, a protégé of Roger Fry and a member of the London Group of artists, loved Madge in this ensemble so much that he painted her in it, in 1927. But he left one eye in the portrait unfinished, Madge said, because toward the end of the sitting they “put the gramophone on and danced.”

Nicole Groult was charismatic and driven, the creative and financial force in her household. Laurencin was her intimate friend, and Maria Huxley and Sara Murphy were among her clients. Nicole and André Groult’s circle of friends also included Dorothy Parker, the photographer Henri Lartigue, the illustrator Georges Lepape, the sculptor Ossip Zadkine, and the designer Eileen Gray. The Groults profoundly shaped Madge’s taste and they introduced her to that “whole school of Paris
artistes-decorateurs
.” Laurencin and the illustrator Charles Martin painted the murals on the walls and ceiling of the Groults’ apartment. Madge described Laurencin, to whom Groult introduced her in 1924, as “both Bohemian and
bourgeoise
,” at once “the independent New Woman [and]…the most enclosed, most feminine” person. Laurencin was associated with Cubism and Dada, but her paintings are curvilinear and whimsical, the forms willowy, the palette pale. Her “costumes for ‘Les Biches’ were momentarily as influential on fashion as any of Chanel’s designs,” notes the historian of art and design Charlotte Gere. Laurencin frequented Natalie Barney’s salon and, Madge recalled, disliked painting men, rarely did, and asked a higher fee to do so. Although many of her figures have a kind of typological sameness, she created vivid portraits of Nicole Groult and of Madge. After she asked Madge to sit for her in 1937, she gave her the painting, telling her it had been a labor of love. Wherever Madge lived, this work was the centerpiece of her rooms. A Laurencin still life was another of her prized possessions; it, too, was a kind of portrait of Madge, a friend of hers noted, because it was “both modern and exquisite.” In a profile of the painter published in 1963 (several years after Laurencin’s death), Madge wrote about a long summer holiday in the Basque country that she took with Laurencin, Marcel Boulestin, and his boyfriend Robin Adair in the 1930s, and recalled Laurencin’s physicality, the pleasure she took in walking in the woods, biking, swimming, and dancing “in her espadrilles to the
piano-méchanique
in the local bistro.”

For Madge, being dressed well by Groult and others meant the sensual pleasure of living and moving in strong designs, made to measure, in lush fabrics. It meant the experience, fleeting yet profound, of being shaped, included, and transformed. It meant feeling the division between how she saw herself and how others saw her, and feeling that difference disappear. It meant all of these combined with her technical understanding of the garment. That mixture of emotion and expertise, and of the simultaneous fluidity and painfulness of borders, is the complex experience that Virginia Woolf, in the orbit of Madge and Dody and thinking about fashion and narration in the mid-1920s, called “frock consciousness.” Woolf understood that it was impossible to separate having clothes on one’s mind and on one’s body. Her writing, from adolescence on, documents her fascination with the relationship between clothing and consciousness, and records her frequent despair at having to get dressed to appear in the world. Her diaries, letters, and stories of the mid-to-late 1920s record the effects Madge and Dody and
Vogue
had on her and her circle of friends.