Seductress (27 page)

But, then, Violet was no ordinary lady. Plain as she was—with a small fist of a face, pinched lips, and dark circles under heavy-browed eyes—she knew how to get around men and get her way. At eighteen she chose the first of her backstage “wives,” the shy, patrician Gordon Woodhouse, who fell so in love with her that he acceded to her incredible terms: liberty to pursue her career, carte blanche banking privileges, and no sex.

In a futuristic role reversal, Violet acquired the kind of spouse traditionally favored by male musicians, a servant-to-genius. After they married in 1895, Gordon changed his last name for her benefit (giving her the double surname Gordon Woodhouse), quit his job, managed the household, and put his fortune in the service of her talent and pleasure. Sexual dysfunction or cryptohomosexuality might explain his compliance, but he, like everyone, was bespelled by her.

People called her simply “the bewitching one.” She had wit, vitality, sexual heat, a bowl-over style, and the charisma of genius. At her weekly musical salons she put the psychopomp of primal theater into her recitals. Costumed in lace-garlanded silk gowns, with her hair scrolled into butterfly chignons, she played with electrifying virtuosity and “gypsy rhythm in her wrists,” entangling listeners in the “golden web” of her music.

One guest became so entangled that he never left. Bill Barrington, a Leslie Howard look-alike and heir to the tenth Lord Barrington, arrived on an invitation from his friend Gordon and after three days told his host he adored his wife. Gordon referred the question to Violet, who refused to be impeded by the petty bugbears of convention. The trio took off on a five-day “honeymoon” in a horse-drawn caravan through the New Forest and cemented their “civilized understanding” with the joint purchase of two houses, Southover Grange and a new base in London. Far from maintaining a low profile, Violet and Bill flaunted their passion. She sat on his knee in public, called him her “Fairy Prince,” and semidiscreetly shared his bed.

At the horror of the thing, Gordon’s mother disinherited him, but Violet had just begun. Over the next two years she added two (perhaps three) more lovers to her ménage. First came Max Labouchère, a wolfishly handsome lawyer of intellectual tastes and whipcrack repartee, who tried and failed to live without her. “God, how [he] loved” his “Tookes,” he wrote, and soon moved to his own wing at Southover Grange.

At the same time, another resident, Adelina Ganz (daughter of a leading impresario), paid Violet court, perhaps successfully. Then Denis Tollemache, a young aristocratic cavalry officer, arrived on the scene, declared his passion, and took another room in the Woodhouse mansion. He’d heard her play as a teenager and never recovered.

Managing such an entourage demanded seductive skills of an advanced order. Violet reserved time alone with each devotee, distributed customized keepsakes, composed florid love notes, played off lovers, and feigned illnesses in emergencies.

At Southover she created an aesthetic Brigadoon that was difficult, if not impossible, to leave. No “humdrum constraints” existed in this charmed world of pastoral beauty and celestial music. Silent servants attended to every need, and inhabitants did as they pleased. In an atmosphere intensified by the collective desire for Violet, conversation attained a theatrical pitch that the hostess heightened with droll, ribald table talk. At night her men took turns reading aloud to their “little queen.”

Violet “did what she wanted, how she wanted, with whom she wanted.” Which included sex, possibly a great deal. With her “intensely warm-blooded nature,” Rabelaisian tongue, and maverick sensibilities, she undoubtedly availed herself of her adorers. Bill of course was a regular, and Denis and Max both wrote of her embraces—Max, of her “chain” upon his “hum, hum, hum.”

All this—the sex, adulation, private utopia, and freedom from domestica—provided the ideal ecosystem for her art. Her reputation as a pianist soared during the Southover years. The most exacting critics called her “one of the greatest living keyboard artists,” Pablo Casals wrote her fan letters, and Ralph Vaughn Williams, who hated the harpsichord, wrote a folk fantasia for Violet under the spell of her artistry.

In 1904 Violet decided to focus exclusively on early instruments, and four years later she moved her ménage to more commodious accommodations, a romantic estate near Stratford-upon-Avon with a guest house for Denis called the Abode of Love.

During World War I this bell jar paradise temporarily shattered. Denis, Bill, and Max left for the front, and although Gordon stayed on and an infatuated female fan joined the fold, the spell broke. Gordon lost most of his assets, Max died in battle, Bill and Denis returned shell-shocked, and Violet had to go to work. If she’d remained on the concert circuit, she would be a household name today. She gained international fame and signed a three-year contract with Gramophone for the first-ever recordings of the harpsichord.

But in 1926 she inherited a fortune through an Agatha Christie- style twist of fate. The day before Gordon’s aunts planned to cut him from the will, they were mysteriously murdered by the butler. Ignoring the scandal, Violet seized the spoils and retired from professional life.

She bought a London mansion and a Gloucestershire estate that her men transformed into a “perfect setting” for their “live princess,” with a connecting bedroom to Bill’s and special wing for her Pekinese dogs. Gordon became a glorified male Martha Stewart, Bill attended to the gardens and grounds, and Denis squired her to London for the private concerts she continued to give.

Despite her retreat from the public arena, Violet’s musical artistry grew in later years. She unearthed and mastered the difficult last works of Scarlatti, played for celebrities like the queen, and drew an even more impassioned following. As exotically caparisoned as ever—in Bo-Peep silk skirts, stacks of jangling bracelets, and violet-dyed hair—she worked the same erotic hoodoo. Part “czarina,” part Tinker Bell, she mesmerized everyone she met with her quicksilver charm. Her music, though, continued to be her power draw.

An infatuated clavichord maker heard her play and said that “such a spell was cast on” him it was “as if one of the immortals had come to earth.” Two women developed crushes and treated her “like a goddess.” In her sixties Violet embarked on a love affair with a poet twenty years her junior. Sachie Sitwell not only loved and idolized her but appointed himself her muse. “You are the ONLY living master,” he exhorted, and encouraged her to tackle and master the intricate Scarlatti oeuvre.

Violet spent her final years “surrounded by adulation.” After Denis died, Bill and Gordon continued their ministrations to their “bewitching one” and perfumed her days with praise and presents. When she died, they made a shrine of her room, with her hairbrushes and bibelots laid out in perpetuity. Even in death they vied for first place in her favor, with Bill scheming (and losing) to have his name inscribed above Gordon’s on Violet’s tombstone.

The obituaries called her “one of the greatest musicians of our time.” The
Times
wrote: “No one who ever heard her can ever forget her playing . . . legends have grown up about her.” But she was forgotten, and the legends soured. If at all, she was remembered as that “witch,” that “Dreadful Woman” with her “Women’s Paradise” of harem boys. She trampled the taboos, lived outside the female artistic preserve, and bruised and bloodied patriarchal sensibilities.

She got her “paradise,” though. The Sitwells put Violet’s personal motto in the newspaper each year on the anniversary of her death: “Time will run back and fetch the age of gold.” This was the mythic, prehistoric Grecian golden age, ruled by the great goddess and her suppliant male subjects. Violet simply had the “will to fetch.” She switched on her inner seductress and harnessed the primordial sorcery of music to realize the most preposterous of feminist/artistic fantasies and live as she deserved, an “English Goddess of plenty.”

 

When the earliest musicians raised their invocations to the almighty, celebrants stomped themselves into divine ecstasy in orgiastic circle dances. To lure the goddess in their midst and capture her regenerative magic, they staged elaborate fertility rites, miming coital motions and beaming up cosmic lust.

On one cave fresco a ring of nine women in caps and skirts dance around a naked man. Another depicts dancers in animal masks—creatures sacred to the goddess—enacting sexual intercourse a tergo, complete with erect penis and parted haunches. It was dirty dancing with a higher purpose. Sexual rapture promoted life and growth and transformed the dancer into a demigod imbued with holy eros.

The sex goddesses of antiquity, like Inanna, were “shining bright and dancing.” Minoan priestesses whirled in delirious jeté turns (sometimes nude) and traced out serpentine figures to worship the goddess’s divine sexual energy. Patriarchy later demonized these dancers as emblems of ungovernable lust, as bloodthirsty Salomes and diabolic Lamias. But as the original Lamia illustrates, they could do nothing to stop kinesthetic sorcery, with its power to send men into testosterone storm and three-sheets-to-the wind erotic transports.

Lamia belonged to a species of hetaerae in ancient Greece known as the
auletrides,
virtuoso exotic dancers. Born a slave, Lamia possessed the brass knuckle will-to-thrive common to
sorcières.
While in bondage, she learned the Middle Eastern
aulos
(flute) and veil dances and persuaded her master to let her entertain at symposia parties. These performances were considered so sexually inflammatory that Plato banned the
aulos
from his ideal republic. In the heat of the show, men tore off their rings, threw them at dancers, and bid fortunes for their favors afterward.

Lamia wore a G-string and “coan vest” (a lacy cobweb over bare breasts) and piped and triple-stepped while pumping her pelvis “as if she were in the act.” At the finale she auctioned herself to the highest bidder for the night.

As luck would have it, an Egyptian procurer caught her act, bailed her out of slavery, and delivered her to the bed of Ptolemy. For twenty years she held the position of official favorite. When she was enslaved a second time in a sea battle in 306 B.C., she made her captor, Demetrius of Macedon, a “slave to Lamia.” Though ten years his senior, she bewitched him with her “remarkable talents,” as both an
auletride
and accomplished conversationalist and bedmate.

“I do not fear your being satiated,” she boasted in one of her letters. Nor was he; until she died, she ruled beside him as unofficial queen. Greek misogynists consequently branded her a she-demon and a bloodsucking man destroyer. The Athenian public, however, knew better. They deified her as Venus “Lamia” and raised a temple in her honor which she haunted, they said, for generations with her maddening flute music and undulating form divine.

Two millennia later another hot-bodied dancer plugged into the primal magic of the earliest rites and boogied her way out of bondage. Josephine Baker started life trapped in a racist St. Louis ghetto and ended up enthroned as an international queen of song, dance, and seduction. One night on the Paris stage was all it took.

In 1925 the curtain rose on an all-black revue at the Théâtre de Champs-Élysées to a standard darkies on the bayou tableau. Then Josephine hurtled onstage, rump gyrating, legs flying in a rip-the-roof Charleston. At the end she reappeared and unleashed “the frenzy of African Eros.” Naked except for a hot pink feather between her thighs, she dry-humped and slithered around her male partner and collapsed in a torrential orgasmic spasm. She brought down the house.

In one fell swoop, she catapulted Europe out of postwar rigor mortis into the Jazz Age and awoke a superstar. She was the “Ebony Venus,” the “Creole goddess” who gave “all Paris a hard-on.” Her cult lasted a lifetime and included the prerogative of every divine avatar: multiple men as muses, managers, adorers, fans, and transient lays.

Josephine never saw herself except as a creature of myth. Given the circumstances, it was pure megalomania. She was born out of wedlock into the dead-end squalor and poverty of a segregated East St. Louis slum. She wore newspapers for shoes, scavenged coal in railroad yards, hustled food, and suffered racist, sexual, and domestic abuse.

Yet when she went to live with a loving grandmother and heard fairy tales for the first time, she identified herself with a grandiose mélange of mythic characters: Santa Claus, Cinderella, “Prince Charming,
and
the Fairy Godmother.” Had she known of Ishtar, who raised the dead with her seven-veil
danse lascive,
she’d have come nearer her supernatural counterpart.

Like all
sorcières’,
Josephine’s drive to make it was ruthless and single-minded. Neither seduction nor art is for choirgirls. She had no truck with “normal” socialization, raised hell in school, and stubbornly followed her lights. A demon for dance, she did a mean Messaround and Tack Annie and performed for pennies in her basement on orange crates lit by candles in tin cans. At thirteen she split for Chestnut Valley, a twelve-block ragtime and red-light district, and supported herself waitressing and dancing on street corners with the Jones Family Band.

Jazz used to be spelled “jass,” which meant “screwing.” For Josephine, the original mack mama, the two went together from the start. Like the barrelhouse blues singers she idolized, she reclaimed the primal female role as an independent operator and sampler of men. By fifteen she’d already been married and divorced twice and had muscled her way onto the TOBA (tough on black asses) vaudeville circuit.

Nicknamed the Monkey, she was too skinny and dark for the prevailing high yeller beauty ideal. “I have no pretension to being pretty,” Josephine once said. “I have pointed knees and the breasts of a seventeen-year-old boy . . . my face is ugly and my teeth stick out.” The chorus girls taunted her: “God don’t love ugly.”