In Paris as nowhere else, a bohemian, sexually diverse society flourished, and many went there in search of freedom, of the mind and of the body. Dolly Wilde spun at the heart of this world, but Joe Carstairs was on the periphery. ‘I was too nondescript,’ Joe said. ‘I was still in embryo.’ To the Parisian sophisticates she was simply a stocky, gauche American girl, steeped in new money and unschooled in art or literature. Though Joe may not have been allowed to enter their circle, its example influenced her profoundly. She and others who spent time in Paris during the war were to create their own version of the Parisian scene in 1920s London.
Dolly introduced Joe to the excitements of sex and of intellect. ‘I knew [her] excessively well,’ Joe said. ‘She taught me the elasticity of thought. She taught me to think.’
Dolly was known for her sparkling conversation. Yet Dolly’s words, unlike those of her uncle, were evanescent, careless, utterly resistant to repetition or transcription. At parties, wrote Bettina Bergery, ‘she scintillated with so many epigrams, all delivered at once – that no one had time to remember any . . . Her words flew out like soap bubbles.’ ‘It was wit that was impossible to quote,’ wrote Pamela ‘Honey’ Harris, ‘the quickest, lightest, most extravagant nonsense, with no bounds, no inhibitions, and often no sense of suitability.’
Dolly never worked, never exerted herself; she moved languorously and was always late. She was fabulously indolent. She had, wrote Lorna Lindsley, ‘a sort of elusiveness that made for laziness; she would not lift a finger, not even to beckon, but people came just the same . . . Dolly never “did” anything. She just was.’ People came, as often as not, to confide in Dolly. She had a huge appetite for gossip, preferably of an amorous nature, and became a kind of voracious agony aunt. She would plot, intrigue, entertain, advise, chastise her friends and – ultimately – betray their secrets. ‘Her discretion, it cannot be denied,’ wrote Victor Cunard, ‘was not as great as her capacity for amassing information.’ Another acquaintance, Antoine Gentien, was less delicate: ‘Friendship requires discipline, and Dolly had none.’ Dolly loved to tease and mock, to watch her victims squirm. ‘She was like a panther,’ said Rosamond Harcourt-Smith, ‘softness, grace, purrs and of course, claws.’
Once, when taken for tea in Paris by a rich American bachelor, Dolly had the waiter leave a silver salver of brioches on the table. She proceeded to cut off and swallow the little mounds capping each brioche, until eventually two dozen decapitated buns lay on the salver. Her host, having watched with mounting fury, paid the bill and reprimanded his guest. ‘But they are the best part of the brioches,’ Dolly protested, ‘I didn’t want the rest.’ A friend asked her afterwards what had motivated this display. ‘I don’t really know,’ said Dolly, ‘but I think it was to reproach him for his riches.’ Even she didn’t know whether her gestures had meanings: she could see herself as a subversive performance artist, transforming social niceties into witty symbolic dramas, or simply as a wilful child unable to resist temptation.
Dolly’s apparently beguiling inventiveness betrayed a profound boredom and disappointment: to be made interesting the world had to be transformed to fiction. Dolly Wilde was herself a literary allusion, a shimmering reference to Oscar. Her friends saw her always in relation to him, and subtitled their volume of tributes to her ‘Oscaria’. Dolly was enchanted and ensnared by the memory of her uncle; she felt Oscar’s spirit possessed her, compelled her. ‘I am more like Oscar than Oscar himself,’ Dolly would say. She went to masquerades dressed up as him. In a letter, she wrote: ‘I couldn’t resist the “bon-mot” which sprang to my lips (Oscar’s lips after all!).’ She adopted other guises too. Bettina Bergery described a typical Dolly Wilde performance, set in a small restaurant on the Quai de Voltaire:
Her face is exactly Aubrey Beardsley’s drawing of Oscar Wilde. The others are talking, she is looking dully at an empty glass as she strips the leaves from a sprig she had taken from the flowers on the table. A tall red-headed boy comes in and recognises Victor [Cunard], who begins introducing. Dolly’s eyes light up as she interrupts: ‘Darling, you do introduce so badly, you don’t know how to introduce at all: you just mention names he doesn’t know, and that makes conversation so general!’ Now she addresses the boy directly: ‘Victor, you don’t need to be told, is the White Knight from Alice in Wonderland, and this’ – pointing her twig at Yorke, a golden-headed German – ‘is Siegfried. It’s not red wine in his glass, he only drinks blood, dragon’s blood, that’s why he is smiling at the impertinent things the canaries in the cage over the caissière’s desk have been saying about us. He understands them perfectly. She’ – the twig now points at Ruth Yorke – ‘whose features are as taut as a red indian’s, who knows what rites she performs when the moon is full. As for me . . . you should have recognised me first and rushed to me – even without my turban, because I am Madame de Staël. If you’ve forgotten my face you should have remembered my branch’ – here she waves her twig – ‘and my beautiful hand and forearm. “My only perfection”, as you told me once. Well I knew you immediately, you haven’t changed a bit; you are Benjamin Constant.’ Forgetting that Benjamin Constant [author of the novel Adolphe] had been covered with eczema as well as red hair, the red-headed boy is terribly flattered. Also forgetting he is a shy stranger, he has seated himself at the table without being asked. Lost in Dolly’s eyes which grow more and more laughing and luminous, he is talking as he has never talked before. Luckily he has read Adolphe and is telling Dolly how strangely alike his own story is, only stopping to empty his glass again. Next morning he springs to his phone to call Dolly. But Dolly won’t be awake for a long time and when she is, her telephone is busy. He goes to the Ritz, where she promised to lunch, but Dolly has forgotten her promise.
In flattering and wooing Joe Carstairs as she wooed the red-headed boy, Dolly taught her that by recreating herself in the image of a fictional character her gaucherie could be transformed to charm. Joe learnt her lesson. She never underestimated the powers a theatrical self could afford. Joe did not mention how she and Dolly parted. Perhaps Dolly abandoned her as easily as she abandoned the red-headed boy, and taught Joe another lesson: not to trust.
To fuel her relentless gaiety and invention, Dolly Wilde was to turn to drink, to opium and to cocaine, bought from the ‘marchands de paradis’ on Parisian street corners. Like Joe Carstairs’ mother, she was soon ‘doping’, and her life ended pathetically.
‘Dolly Wilde, in life, was like a character out of a book,’ wrote Janet Flanner, ‘even if it was never written. On the street, walking, or at a Paris restaurant table, talking, or seen in the dim, sunset light of her rue de Vaugirard flat, remote in its inner court, she seemed like someone one had become familiar with by reading, rather than by knowing.’ Joe Carstairs, for all her physicality and vigour, acquired something of this quality. She was not a literary, intellectual type; but she nevertheless gave the impression of being a fictional creature, a product of her own imagination, a being who ‘just was’. Like the armoured goddess Athena, who emerged fully formed from Zeus’ head, both Dolly and Joe strove to give the impression of being invented rather than born.
Joe, at seventeen, was dazzled by Dolly; she found her ‘almost mystical’. Dolly was the first – or the second if we include Joe’s mother – of the clever, glamorous, flighty women to whom Joe was drawn, women with a streak of cruelty and a well of unhappiness. This early infatuation left its traces in other ways. Over the next seventy-five years Joe indulged in occasional bouts of literary and artistic pretension – writing poetry, making sculptures – which sat oddly with her customary no-nonsense bluntness. More strikingly, she devised her own theatrical games, elaborate practical jokes to startle and mock her friends. And, like Dolly, she came to define herself through a male alter ego, a spirit with which she enjoyed an ‘almost mystical’ relationship more powerful than any of her attachments to the living.
Chapter Three
The Action of Testicular Pulp
While Joe Carstairs was in Paris learning to live like a man, her mother, elsewhere in the city, was pursuing the secret of masculinity in a more concrete form.
In 1917 Evelyn Bostwick, aged forty-four, was appointed laboratory assistant to Serge Voronoff, a French surgeon of Russian extraction, at the Collège de France in Paris. By dint of this she became the first woman admitted to the college.
Voronoff was an unusually tall man, about 6 foot 5 inches, with dark hooded eyes, a thick moustache and a commanding, haughty presence. He was fifty-two in 1918, when he and Evelyn presented to the French Academy of Science a paper describing their experimental treatment of wounds, a project prompted by the casualties of the war. The paper, entitled Intensive Acceleration of the Healing of Granulating Wounds by the Application of Testicular Pulp, explained how the pair had ‘inflicted 74 wounds on dogs, ewes and goats’ and applied to them the living pulp of a variety of glands: the thyroid and adrenal glands, the pancreas, spleen and testicles. Their aim was to test the capacity of these glands to speed up the healing process.
In the published paper Evelyn was pictured holding a goat, its back covered with a sheet from which eight holes had been cut, four on either side of the spine. The caption explained that wounds were made through the holes and each then filled with the pulp of a different gland. Voronoff and Evelyn claimed, impossibly, that their experiments had proved the remarkable healing properties of testicular pulp: ‘the action of testicular pulp becomes manifest from its very first application, and surpasses all the other glands we have experimented with.’ It is not clear whether Evelyn and Voronoff were fraudulent, technically incompetent, or in the grip of a powerful delusion.
These experiments marked the beginning of the couple’s obsession with testicles. Serge Voronoff himself had become interested in the subject in 1898, when he saw some eunuchs on a visit to Cairo and pondered on the connection between their castration and their physical debility. These eunuchs, he noted, were often obese, with smooth hairless faces, enlarged breasts and pelves, pendulous cheeks, high-pitched voices and pale skin and gums; what was more, they aged prematurely, were feeble-minded and lacked courage or enterprise. The eunuchs Voronoff described were grotesque parodies of old women. The twin horrors they represented were the collapse into age and into womanliness. The testicles, he surmised, warded off both evils.
Voronoff did not have the means to pursue his insight until he met Evelyn in 1917. She proved a great supporter of his work, not only as a financial investor but also as a keen participant in his experiments. A recent biographer of Voronoff, David Hamilton, suggests that she may have been too keen: ‘It should be noted that Evelyn Bostwick, his assistant, was an ambitious person without laboratory training, and as such she might well have been over-anxious to produce the desired result.’ Spurred on by their supposed success in treating wounds with testicle pulp, the couple grafted portions of young ram testicles into the scrotums of old rams. They claimed that these transplants transformed timid, spiritless creatures into bellicose, vital animals with strong sexual drives, thick wool coats and sprightly gaits.
When Voronoff published his results in 1919, he suggested that men too might benefit from testicular grafting. His findings were greeted with great popular curiosity: the possibility of sexual rejuvenation had acquired an added relevance in the wake of the war, when many women had to look to the older generation for husbands. The scientific establishment was more sceptical – Voronoff provided only anecdotal evidence and some inconclusive photographs – but thanks to Evelyn’s money the experiments could proceed without official endorsement. In 1920 Voronoff married Evelyn and performed his first monkey-to-man transplant. (A friend later asked Joe if she thought any of her mother’s husbands had married her for her money. ‘I think all of them did,’ Joe replied.)
A man and an ape were laid on separate tables in an operating theatre, with a surgeon assigned to each. The ape was anaesthetised and shaved, while a local anaesthetic was applied to the man’s genitals. One of the ape’s testicles was then cut open and sliced into six pieces, and one of the man’s opened and scarified with small scalpel cuts. One by one the slices of monkey testicle were carried over to the other table, and stitched separately into the man’s scrotum with catgut; the whole was sewn up with silk.
The first two grafts, performed in June 1920, were disastrous. The testicles of both patients had already been destroyed by tuberculosis, and the transplant operations awakened the dormant infections. The grafts had to be rapidly removed. The Voronoffs managed to hush up these failed experiments for a few months. They travelled to America in July, on the death of Nellie Bostwick, and Evelyn skilfully deflected journalists’ enquiries about the progress of Voronoff’s research. ‘I am his mouthpiece,’ she told them, ‘and anything I say about his work can be taken as coming from him.’
A reporter from the New York Times interviewed Evelyn. ‘She is rather small and pretty,’ he wrote, ‘and looked to be in her early thirties, although I learned that she was considerably older. She has reddish-brown hair, worn in simple fashion, and large, intelligent, bluish-gray eyes . . . She was amazingly at home in her subject, and my wonder grew as I noticed her facility of expression and lucidity.’ That year, Evelyn’s translation into English of Voronoff’s Life: a means of restoring vital energy and prolonging life was published in New York.
In November Voronoff embarked on a string of gland-grafting operations. He reported spectacular results: his patients, he said, regained their potency and vigour, their mental powers and – in some cases – their hair. He boasted particularly of the astonishing rejuvenation of Edward Liardet, a seventy-four-year-old Englishman who claimed himself transformed by the operation: he had taken up running and weightlifting, and sent Voronoff pictures to prove it. Liardet was an alcoholic, who went on to die of delirium tremens in 1923; it is possible that his apparent transformation was the result of the temporary abstention from tobacco and alcohol that Voronoff required of his patients. Certainly it is scientifically impossible that monkey glands could be accepted by the human body, let alone work the miracles that Voronoff claimed.
Serge Voronoff’s experiments were driven by a conviction that the male genitalia held the secret of rejuvenation, and Evelyn readily subscribed to this doctrine. Joe Carstairs too – despite her loathing for Voronoff – seemed to believe that masculinity and youth were powerfully linked, that by casting off her femininity she might also cast off her mortality. She would try to restore the spent manhood of the Great War in her own person.
Joe Carstairs never discussed her mother’s gland-grafting work. She told only two stories about her parents. They were first and final scenes, and both took place in 1918.
Evelyn got wind of her daughter’s homosexual affairs, and summoned her to her rooms in Paris. ‘She said, “Come and see me,” in her lofty way,’ recalled Joe, ‘and I did. In the Majestic Hotel, if I remember rightly. She wasn’t too bad with dope.’
‘I know,’ said Evelyn. ‘I know about you.’
‘Really?’ asked Joe.
‘Yes, you are a lesbian. I’ve heard all about it. All over Paris.’ Joe must buckle down and get married, Evelyn warned, or she would be disinherited.
‘Well, I’ll tell you,’ said Joe. ‘I don’t like the husband you’re married to’ – Voronoff – ‘and I think the whole thing’s a horror. I think he’s a murderer. If you want to cut me off, go ahead, I don’t give a goddamn about money. Speak your words.’
‘If you don’t do what I want you to,’ replied Evelyn, ‘just walk out that door.’
‘Thank you, mother,’ said Joe, and walked out.
Joe Carstairs added an odd postscript to this tale. She explained that while she lived in France she drove a grey, open Buick, a gift from her mother, and that after their quarrel the car was withdrawn. ‘I loved this Buick,’ Joe said. ‘Of course when I fell short with my mother the Buick left, and I left, and that was it.’ In this phrasing, Joe replaces her mother with the Buick:
it is the Buick that Joe loves and leaves, the Buick that leaves her. Inanimate objects were wonderful shields against pain.
Since Voronoff and Evelyn did not marry until 1920, Joe’s claim that she argued with her mother about her fourth husband in 1918 does not hold up. There are other anomalies in her account of the showdown with Evelyn. The punchline of Joe’s story is that she defied her mother, but she seems in the event to have complied – at least nominally – with Evelyn’s demands. In 1918, to secure her inheritance, Joe married her childhood friend Count Jacques de Pret.
Joe must have relived the moment of her breakup with her mother often enough to let several quarrels meld. And, characteristically, she told a story in which she walked out on her mother before her mother – in dying – had a chance to leave her.
(Evelyn died aged forty-eight, on 3 March 1921, the day after Voronoff’s eleventh monkey-gland operation. She left gambling debts and, said Joe, ‘a tremendous debt of cigarettes’. Though Evelyn had probably succumbed to the effects of drugs or drink, her death was ascribed to natural causes. Joe Carstairs believed that Voronoff had killed her mother. ‘He was like a vulture,’ Joe said. ‘A dreadful man. He did murder her, dammit. Got his doctor friends to sign the death certificate. He gave her an overdose. He stood to inherit – it was too easy.’ There is no evidence to support this allegation but Evelyn’s legacy provided Voronoff with a huge income for the rest of his life. Ten years after her death Voronoff married Gerti Schwartz, a ‘cousin’ of the mistress of King Carol of Romania; she was believed in fact to be the mistress’s daughter by the King. In 1951 Voronoff died, his monkey-gland surgery utterly discredited.)
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