Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (61 page)

She was buried beside Scott in Rockville, Maryland, and after the funeral Scottie wrote to her grandmother that ‘it was reassuring to think of these two high-flying … spirits being at peace together at last’. All she wanted now was to erase the recent memory of her parents’ suffering and to ‘think of them only as they must have been when they were young’.
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That is how the world wants to remember them, too. Yet the bleak and blighted years of Zelda’s illness were in some ways more productive than the decade of her jazz age success. During the enforced separation from Scott, and from the trappings of their joint celebrity, she was able to channel her originality and energy into something other than column inches and material for Scott’s fiction. It is impossible now to guess what work she might have produced if she had made other choices when she was young, or if her mental condition had been better managed. As it is, the letters, novels and paintings produced during the last eighteen years of her life remain as a strangely lucid, hauntingly lit portrait of a woman engaged in a heroic struggle for self-knowledge.

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If Zelda and Scott had forged a Faustian pact with celebrity, so too had Tamara de Lempicka. Jean Cocteau always said of her that she ‘loved art and high society in equal measure’, and for a decade Tamara had seemed to serve both equally. Yet the forces of fashion and history that had swept her to eminence were changing course in the early 1930s, and while she was still much talked about in public, in private she felt that she had failed to catch the pulse of the new decade: ‘I hate my life which is useless, without scope,’ she wrote to Gino Puglisi in May 1935, confessing that she had spent the last few weeks immobilized by depression.
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She was finding it increasingly hard to paint, and the lavish foreign holidays she took with her new husband Baron Raoul Kuffner, only exacerbated her sense of being out of kilter with the world. The following year she again wrote to Gino, ‘I am an unhappy being, condemned, without a homeland, without a race always alone.’
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Inevitably the gathering political tensions in Europe fed her malaise. Visits to Austria and Berlin had revived memories of the Bolshevik terror still lodged in her imagination, and she was aware, too, that her and Raoul’s Jewish blood could make them vulnerable. By 1938 she had persuaded Raoul to relocate to America, and by the time they were settled in Hollywood in early 1940, she believed, optimistically, it might be a new beginning for her. The concentration of money and success in Hollywood reminded her of Paris in its heyday; Tamara loved the mix of American old money and new movie-star aristocracy and she devoted much of her energy and a great deal of Raoul’s money to hosting parties from their rented Beverly Hills mansion.

She was painting, too. And when, in 1941, the influential gallery owner Julian Levy offered her a one-woman show in New York, her confidence soared and she threw herself into the business of promoting the show. However, while her success at marketing herself in Hollywood society brought her a great deal of press attention, it was mostly the wrong kind. All that journalists wanted to write about were details of her Beverly Hills friends, her clothes, even her beauty regime. Disastrously, she became known as ‘the Baroness with the brush’, and her work was tagged ‘
tres
Hollywood’. The following year, when Peggy Guggenheim opened her new gallery, The Art of this Century, none of Tamara’s work hung on its walls.

She had miscalculated badly, but she was also a victim of changing trends. A new wave of artists, led by Jackson Pollock, was creating expressive form out of the heroic, messy physicality of paint; by comparison Tamara’s exquisitely invisible brush strokes looked old-fashioned and almost inert. After she and Raoul moved to Manhattan in 1942, she was forced to confront the gulf between her own art and that of the new generation. Although she tried hosting a weekly salon in her huge refurbished apartment, the Upper East Side was not Montparnasse in the 1920s; the creative centre of Manhattan was downtown, in Greenwich Village, and would remain there throughout the 1950s, among the beat poets and the post-war existentialists.

Tamara craved the society of interesting people; she needed the stimulus of youth. As she got older, friends observed her mounting frustrations, pent up with an energy that, despite her continuing productivity, she seemed unable to channel. Tamara was also haunted by a fear of death. Already she had lost two of the people who mattered most to her: Malvina had died in France in 1945 and Tadeusz had died of cancer in Poland in 1951. Then, in 1961, Raoul suffered a fatal, and very unexpected, heart attack.

For years he and Tamara had enjoyed the most civilized of marriages. They took lovers, dined at different times and even lived in separate buildings. When Tamara painted ten hours a day, Raoul didn’t complain of being neglected as Tadeusz had done. Yet still they had remained deeply wedded, and while Raoul’s death left Tamara a very wealthy widow, it also left her lonely and exposed. By 1963 she was unable to manage on her own and moved to Houston to be near Kizette, her husband Harold Foxhall – a Texan geologist – and their two daughters, Victoria Ann (nicknamed Putti by Tamara) and Christie (nick-named Chacha).

It was not a move Kizette welcomed, however, since her relationship with Tamara had remained tense and conflicted. Even though Tamara had been distraught with worry while her daughter remained in Paris during the war, and had pulled every string she could to secure her safe passage to America, she had done little to welcome Kizette to her new American life. Busy promoting a youthful image among her Beverly Hills circle, she had rarely acknowledged Kizette’s existence; and in truth she was disappointed in her daughter. Kizette had graduated from Oxford, she was good-looking and clever, but as far as Tamara was concerned, she lacked any distinguishing talent, and had apparently settled with Harold into the kind of bourgeois domesticity that she, herself, had always despised.
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Now, even when it suited her to move closer to Kizette, Tamara could not but criticize and interfere. If it was too late to save Kizette from mediocrity, she believed she could at least make something of her two granddaughters. She indulged Putti and Chacha with imperious extravagance, buying them beautiful clothes and even whisking them to Paris to see the newly famous Beatles. With equal imperiousness she also tried to take over the girls’ upbringing, scrutinizing their performance in school, passing judgement on their looks and even their boyfriends. (In one 1963 photograph Tamara is tilting her granddaughter’s face upwards with one finger: it could be a gesture of affection, but looks much more as though she’s subjecting the girl’s face to a severe and challenging scrutiny.)

Women like Tamara, who had achieved remarkable success and lived through remarkable times, might be excused some impatience with the mundane. Diana Cooper set exacting standards for her son John Julius, and Josephine could be unreasonably demanding of her Rainbow Tribe. But Tamara’s need for control was considered by her family to be pathological. When Putti got engaged, Tamara flew into a tantrum because the young man had sought permission from Harold, not from her – she claimed that the money she poured into the household gave her the right to be considered its head.

Nor was it just the her family who saw her behaviour as extreme. Much of Houston took the same view. Tamara’s European hauteur and dated glamour – she was now approaching seventy – looked bizarrely anachronistic in this very American city. The pungent obscenity of her language and the nicotine stains on her teeth were considered unsavoury and the judgements of the Houston society were confirmed when she was invited to a party at the French consulate and was rebuffed, very publicly, by a group of visiting Parisians. These women, all around Tamara’s age, were clearly discomfited by her presence, muttering, ‘What are you doing here, Tamara?’ before pointedly moving away. Later Tamara admitted to her hostess, one of her few friends in the city, that these Parisians had apparently not forgiven her for the ‘obscene practices’ that had made her notorious back in the 1920s.
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Despite regular trips back to Europe, Tamara felt that her social and her professional life had become stranded in ‘this uncivilized location’, as she contemptuously referred to Houston. But at the beginning of the 1970s the art world finally began to court her again. There was a revival of interest in the art and style of the deco era, and when the French historian and collector Alain Blondel stumbled across some of Tamara’s early work, he regarded it as an extraordinary find. In 1972, he mounted an exhibition of her work – forty-eight paintings dating from 1925 to 1935 – in his Galerie du Luxembourg. And even though reviews were mixed, those which were positive exclaimed over the quality of her work and over its inexplicable neglect.

The interest snowballed and Tamara featured prominently in the major art exhibition that was part of the events marking 1975 as International Women’s Year. Two years later a lavish new book appeared about her life and work, edited by Franco Ricci. Tamara was outraged to discover that Ricci had included letters exchanged by her and the poet D’Annunzio during their odd non-affair in the mid-1920s, along with sections of the lurid diary kept by D’Annunzio’s housekeeper Aélis. Yet gossipy as the press coverage was, it could not undermine the fact that Tamara’s paintings were now seriously back in style.

The 1920s were being exhumed as a golden age of glamour and high living: the clothes, interior design and music were all exhibiting a nostalgic return to the jazz age, and Tamara’s work was emerging as a prime reference point. In 1976, when the Victoria and Albert museum staged an exhibition of early twentieth-century fashion, her paintings were centrally displayed. Two years later a reissued paperback of Huxley’s
Point Counter Point
would use
Autoportrait
as its cover illustration. (This was the novel featuring Lucy Tantamount, one of several characters based on Nancy Cunard.) For years Tamara’s reputation had suffered from her close identification with the Twenties, but now it climbed higher and higher, as her work became acknowledged as one of the decade’s treasures.

Tamara was initially surprised that her ‘old stuff’ should receive so much attention: but she rapidly came around to capitalizing on it, even claiming that it was she who had launched the entire deco movement. She revelled in the attention, and to the many journalists who sought her out she was a funny, charming fund of stories. At home, however, her behaviour was far less accommodating. She was possibly suffering early symptoms of the arteriosclerosis that would kill her, and her moods were turning more violently unpredictable; she was exceptionally abusive to Kizette and her memory wandered.

Fortunately for her family she had now discovered a refuge away from Houston in the ritzy, cosmopolitan city of Cuernavaca in Mexico, a resort for the rich, the colourful and the dangerous since the days of Al Capone. Tamara was delighted by the number of artists and nomadic aristocrats who had settled there, and among whom she established her own court. One of her most attentive new friends was Robert Brady, the same playboy artist to whom Josephine had been briefly and ‘platonically married’. Brady evidently had a taste for famous elderly women: he loved to call Tamara ‘Baroness’, fawning over her talent and begging stories from her. But Tamara took far more pleasure from Victor Contreras, the young Mexican sculptor. She was painting nearly every day, even as she turned eighty, and Contreras appeared to have an instinctive understanding and appreciation of what she was doing. With him she felt rejuvenated as a woman and as an artist, and after she had purchased her own house in Cuernavaca in 1978, she saw him constantly.

Cuernavaca might have bought a tranquil conclusion to Tamara’s life, except for her health. Her lungs and arteries were wrecked; she developed emphysema and she was terrified by her prolonged lapses into confusion and forgetfulness. By the end of 1979 she was dependent on an oxygen tank and could barely shuffle from one room to the next. She lived on almost nothing but the cocktails she still stubbornly insisted on serving her few select visitors. She still insisted, too, on wearing her jewels, her hats and her brilliantly coloured dresses. Even so, by the time she died, in the early morning of 16 March 1980, she had wasted away to a tiny, brittle version of her former self.

Robert Brady delivered the eulogy at her funeral, proclaiming his delight that Tamara had lived long enough to see ‘the incredible renaissance of interest in her art’.
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His style of delivery may have been ingratiating, but no one believed more firmly than Tamara in the truth of her own resurrection. Her request to Contreras that her ashes be scattered over the summit of Mount Popocatépetl, the volcano that towered over the landscape of Cuernavaca, wasn’t just because of her sentimental attachment to the place; she was already imagining herself as a phoenix rising from the fires of Il Popo.

And in fact, her reputation continued to soar. In 1981 the Canadian director Richard Rose staged an experimental play based on the story of her relationship with D’Annunzio. When
Tamara
transferred to Los Angeles in 1984, Anjelica Huston played the title role and the play acquired a cult status that sustained it through a further three-year run in New York. Simultaneously, the prices for Tamara’s paintings climbed even higher. Celebrity collectors like Jack Nicholson and Madonna drove them through the $2 million mark, and Madonna staked her own claim to the eroticized glamour of Tamara’s portraits by including several in her music videos. The art establishment might remain ambivalent, with
Time
magazine headlining its coverage of a 1994 exhibition, ‘Who is right, the movie stars or the critics?’
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Yet even if Tamara’s work was not accepted into the canon, her deco paintings remain one of the most visible and charismatic reference points of the 1920s. Even as the debate continues over her artistic ranking, there are few painters who have left behind a more compelling register of period style, and of the women who embodied it.