Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation

by Mackrell, Judith

  Nevertheless, it was not a beautiful woman whom she stalked most obsessively at this time, but a man in his early sixties. Gabriele D’Annunzio, the celebrated Italian poet, had none of the athletic lustre Tamara admired. He was short, barely five foot four, with a bald head, pale skin, pointed waxed moustache and insinuating lizard eyes that, according to one fascinated but repulsed mistress, ‘were like caca’.9 But ‘Il Comandante’, as he liked to be known, was a legend: Italy’s unofficial national poet and national hero,* and also the Don Juan of the age.

  During the last four decades D’Annunzio was said to have had every woman of beauty, rank or genius: the actors Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse, the dancer Isadora Duncan and the astonishing Luisa Casati were all his trophies. When he’d met Tamara in Milan in late 1925 he had seemed very interested in adding her to the list, and she was sufficiently impressed by his reputation to play along with his overtures. What the sixty-three-year-old poet lacked in beauty he made up for in power, and Tamara itched for the opportunity to capture his peculiar hypnotic presence on canvas. It would be a most interesting artistic challenge, and it would bring her a great deal of kudos.

  D’Annunzio’s initial suggestion that she paint his portrait had been offered more as a flirtatious advance, but in the summer of 1926, when Tamara was again in Italy, working on a portrait of Picenardi, she received an invitation to lunch at the poet’s palatial villa on Lake Garda. Right up until the moment she arrived at Il Viattoriale, she assumed she would be able to brush aside the poet’s amorous game-playing and pin him down to a serious commission. Once there, however, she realized the kind of person she was dealing with. Here was a man who made her own ego and willpower seem almost modest.

  Tamara saw that everything about the villa was contrived to aggrandize its owner. Within the grounds was the hangar that housed his famous biplane (during the war D’Annunzio had flown over enemy troops, dropping pamphlets to exhort their surrender). Inside were rooms devoted to the most stagily monumental of art collections: statues of Buddha and the Virgin Mary, plaster casts of Michelangelo sculptures and of the Parthenon friezes. One blood-red room contained the trophies of his love affairs, pairs of gloves belonging to all his former mistresses. There was a music room that could be hung with either scarlet or black drapes, depending on the mood of the evening, and the ultimate coup de théâtre was the chamber, containing D’Annunzio’s own coffin, in which he claimed to sleep in order to prepare himself for death.

  Such gothic memento mori were favoured by other celebrities of D’Annunzio’s generation – Sarah Bernhardt also famously kept a coffin in her rooms. While the flappers of Tamara’s generation considered it shocking to host cocktail parties from their baths, sleeping in coffins was a leftover from true fin-de-siècle decadence. Even Tamara was thrown. And she felt further wrong-footed over lunch, as D’Annunzio plied her with charming questions about her life and work, yet flickered evasively whenever she attempted to broach specific details of the portrait. By the end of the day she was forced to leave the villa with nothing other than the poet’s compliments and his vague promise that they would meet again.

  Tamara was nevertheless determined to coax something more definite out of him, and later that autumn, when she was once again in Italy, she wrote to suggest that she call in to see D’Annunzio on her return journey. Believing she now had the measure of her prey, she laced her note with flattering innuendo, suggesting that her interests in him were as much sexual as they were professional: ‘Would you like me to pass your way, too? (In the good sense of the word?) I’d like to – how about you? I send you, my brother, all my thoughts, the good ones, and the bad ones, the mischievous ones and those that make me suffer.’

  When D’Annunzio agreed to the visit, Tamara wrote again, absurdly exaggerating the flutter of her own girlish excitement: ‘I’m so glad – and afraid. What are you like? Who are you? And me, will you like me looking like a little student without my Paris gowns, my make up, etc. Etc.?’10 But if she thought she was close to getting the poet to sit for her, what actually followed was a comedy of crossed purposes, two forceful wily egos, each trying to get what they wanted, and failing.

  Tamara had no intention of letting D’Annunzio make love to her. Even with models to whom she was genuinely attracted, she now kept sex and work distinct. ‘The man who sits for the portrait is, for me, like a statue,’ she once explained. ‘The flirt can be in the evening with somebody else. But never with the person that is sitting.’11 D’Annunzio, however, had no intention of being Tamara’s statue. And when she went to stay with him in December 1926 she appreciated just how formidable and peculiar an opponent she had taken on.

  D’Annunzio was in the habit of consuming large, daily quantities of cocaine, and as a result he slept and ate at very unpredictable times. Everyone else in his household was expected to do likewise, and Tamara, who depended on routine, even when she was playing to excess, began to feel seriously unwell. Both her digestion and her sleep patterns were being sent haywire, yet the more she pleaded discomfort the more energetically D’Annunzio pressed his attentions. She could never find a quiet moment to rest and consider her situation without the poet appearing by her side, attempting caresses and murmuring insinuating suggestions. Any time she proposed a suitable opportunity for their first sitting he brushed the idea of the portrait aside. After several fraught days and exhausted nights Tamara was defeated. She packed her bag and slipped out of the house, without daring to say goodbye.

  The game was far from over, though. D’Annunzio pursued her with a flurry of telegrams and letters, their tone sufficiently ardent for Tamara to agree to return. Perhaps she believed that she could successfully wear him down this time, tolerating his advances without actually letting him into her bed. Certainly she managed to sustain her second campaign for a full ten days. She listened with pretended fascination to D’Annunzio’s rambling discourses on sex and the soul, and while she allowed him to kiss her she concocted a dozen different reasons why he could go no further – from fidelity to her husband, to her fear of contracting venereal disease (D’Annunzio was deeply insulted). She even put up with the ignominy of having to listen to the poet enjoying noisy sex with his housekeeper, Aélis, in the corridor right outside her bedroom door.

  It was ugly, however, and at times frightening. D’Annunzio harangued and insulted Tamara, complaining that she had his entire household ‘hanging by a hair of her cunt’;12 he offered her quantities of cocaine to unsteady her resolve and came very close to raping her when she had taken to her bed with a slight fever. But it became clear to them both that they were engaged in an unwinnable and unprofitable battle of wills. If D’Annunzio couldn’t have Tamara in his bed, he had no intention of letting her have him on canvas; equally, Tamara would not accept D’Annunzio on any terms but her own.

  She left Il Vittoriale worn out and disgusted, but underneath their mutual rancour she and D’Annunzio acknowledged one another as worthy opponents. And even if Tamara didn’t get her portrait, she did receive the gift of a large topaz ring, which she wore in tribute to the poet until she died. She also found no difficulty in erasing the memory of his creepily staged advances. Before returning to Paris, she spent a delightful few days in the arms of one of her ‘innamorati’ – possibly Picenardi or his Venetian friend, Count Marcello Vettor.

  When she arrived home she was wearing an expression of sleek and, to Tadeusz, infuriatingly obvious satisfaction. For several months he’d been aware of Tamara’s games with D’Annunzio, having read most of the florid love letters she’d received from the poet and never bothered to conceal. Assuming that she had just come from the latter’s bed, he raged bitterly at her, refusing to accept her protestations that the entire visit had been chaste and that she had only stayed in the villa for the sake of her art and, ultimately, for the family’s good.

  Tamara didn’t much care what Tadeusz believed. She was used to his jealous eruptions and often rather enjoyed them, believing they kept the se
xual charge of their marriage alive. It never occurred to her that one day her husband might find his situation intolerable. Yet this time, when she arrived back from Italy, the recriminations with which Tadeusz greeted her did not end as they usually did, either in bed or with her stalking out of the flat to meet her friends. Instead he turned on her with the triumphant announcement that he was leaving her for another woman. During a recent business trip to Poland he had met a wealthy divorcee called Irene Spiess, who had fallen in love with him and wanted him to come and live with her in Warsaw.

  For Tamara the news was so unexpected and the shock so great that it knocked all the natural fight from her. She watched Tadeusz pack up his things and move out of the apartment, and in the days that followed she barely had strength to dress herself, let alone paint. Kizette, who was used to being ignored for hours at a time, was alarmed by the intensity with which her mother now clung to her. Tamara was so fearful of the emptiness in the flat, without Tadeusz, that for a while she wouldn’t even let Kizette go to school.

  Throughout her life Tamara had been prone to extremes of elation and self-pitying collapse, and the loss of her husband triggered one of the most extreme depressions of her life. It’s possible that it also triggered an emotional recall of her past sufferings, for the nightmare of the Cheka in St Petersburg, and the misery of her first months in Paris still haunted Tamara. The diamond bracelets she ritually purchased with her earnings weren’t simply for show, they were insurance against loss, portable capital that she could take with her if ever her world imploded for a second time. During these last few years she’d felt such triumph and relief in making herself financially secure, that she’d never imagined the possibility of her marriage being taken from her.

  For a few weeks Tamara was enveloped by fear and loss, but she had fought to have Tadeusz when she was a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, and as she emerged from the fog of depression she was prepared to fight for him again. She travelled to Poland to see him, convinced that she could seduce, argue or simply will him to return. And while he resisted her on the first visit and continued to resist her on the second, the third time she played her trump card and took Kizette with her.

  Tadeusz was a genuinely fond father and, as Tamara had hoped, the sight of a wan-faced Kizette pleading with him to come home, had an effect. He agreed to take a holiday with them both at Lake Como, and to attempt a possible reconciliation. Yet he and Tamara were too angry for it to work. On 21 May 1927, the day that Charles Lindbergh landed at Le Bourget airfield after completing his Atlantic flight, Paris was full of cheering crowds. The Lempicki, however, were in Lake Como, locked in an argument so loud and abusive that the hotel management were threatening to evict them.

  In Kizette’s recollection, Tadeusz had justified his affair with Irene by listing every betrayal and insult he’d received from Tamara over the last five years; Tamara, unable to accept any responsibility, had flipped back into her old, angry contempt: ‘Who do you think you’re talking to. I’m an artist. You’re a nobody who’s too dumb even to have an affair with a pretty girl instead of the first mouse who runs across your path.’13

  Not surprisingly, Tadeusz walked out, assuring Tamara that nothing she could say or do now would prevent him seeking a divorce and marrying Irene. Again, Tamara was crushed, and again poor, bemused Kizette had to look after her mother as she huddled on the floor of her hotel room, moaning over and over again, ‘Oh God, how I love him.’

  It wasn’t just the loss of Tadeusz that assaulted Tamara, it was the wound to her pride and her carefully constructed public image. She had expended a formidable amount of energy on presenting herself as a woman who could accomplish everything, in her work and in the home. An article published in the February issue of Vanity Fair had delighted her by praising both the ‘momentous event’ of her debut show in Milan and the ‘exquisitely novel’ style in which she had decorated the family’s current apartment in rue Guy de Montparnasse.14 In 1979 Tamara would acknowledge how proud and competitive she had always been. Not only had she wanted to be the best artist, she had wanted ‘to have the best husband, the nicest house, the best dresses’,15 and it was intolerable to her that people might now regard her as a deserted wife, an object of pity, rather than envy and adulation.

  Nevertheless, Tamara still couldn’t acknowledge the degree to which she had brought Tadeusz’s desertion on herself. At Lake Como she not only blamed him for the failure of their reconciliation, but even heaped abuse on Kizette for failing to give her proper support. Compromise and sympathy had never really counted in the family narrative constructed by Tamara; Tadeusz and Kizette had been given their allotted roles, and when they didn’t play them as expected she was furious.

  Tamara could be selfish, narcissistic and cruel, but she continued to justify her behaviour on the grounds that her life was essentially in the service of her work. It was her duty, she believed, to bend the world to her creative will. And she was far from alone in that notion. In this decade of rapid social change, the borderline between freedom and selfishness, ego and egotism was hotly contended ethical ground.

  For male artists and writers, the supremacy of the individual over society was one of the clarion themes of the Twenties. The question of what constituted the moral self had taken on a new urgency after the war. Scott Fitzgerald argued that ‘character was the only thing that did not wear out’ in the face of collapsing ideologies and broken dreams; for D.H. Lawrence the self was a mystical flame, set against a disintegrating modern world.

  Most women, however, were experiencing the dichotomy between individual liberty and society in far more practical, problematic and domestic ways. In theory they were living in an era of emancipation – many had the vote, many were attaining financial independence and every flapper image that featured in the movies or magazines seemed a celebration of their freedom of choice. Yet women were presented with few narratives of what to do with those choices. Most of the feckless flapper heroines of the 1920s, from Betty Lou in It Girl, to Monique in La Garçonne, ended up being rewarded by – or corralled into – marriage. And at that point their stories typically came to an end. If ever a liberated girl failed to get her man, the alternatives were nearly always tragic, like Iris March driving herself into an ancient elm tree in a last, lonely gesture of integrity.

  The practicalities of how grown-up, married flappers might balance independence and family life were much less documented. Zelda might be commissioned to write an article or two on modern marriage and in Britain an assortment of writers from D.H. Lawrence to Violet Bonham Carter penned newspaper columns on the same subject. But these barely touched on how hard and confusing a project it was for women to combine the ambitions of their single selves with the compromises required by husbands and children. Diana and Zelda knew they didn’t want to be like their mothers, but they had no other blueprint on which to model themselves. As for Tamara, she had lost Tadeusz because she had conceded to so few of his needs. And however self-righteously she had tried to justify her behaviour, she still felt diminished and exposed by his departure. She had been bred to believe that any woman abandoned by her husband was a failure.

  The only thing she could do to counter that sense of failure was to make herself a better painter. During this period Kizette recalled Tamara veering between listless depression and ‘frantic’ work;16 she was already exhibiting symptoms of the bipolar behaviour that would worsen in middle age, although, unlike Zelda, she could still turn her ‘manic’ phase to professional advantage. Significantly, one of the best portraits she produced during this period was of Tadeusz himself. It was both a homage and a critique, for while Tamara made her husband look dangerously handsome, capturing the dark, charismatic beauty with which she’d first fallen in love, the left hand, on which he would have worn his wedding ring, was left deliberately unfinished. The title she gave the canvas – Portrait d’homme inachevé – implied all her dissatisfactions with Tadeusz as a weak man and an inadequate husband.

 
In late 1927 or early 1928 they began divorce proceedings. And with Tadeusz definitely out of her life, Tamara focused more attention on her daughter – at least on canvas. She was now painting Kizette more frequently, and for her part Kizette was an apparently compliant model, grateful to spend more time with her mother, anxious to please as she attempted to pose motionless during each forty-five minute session. They are uncomfortable paintings, though – one in particular, which shows Kizette sitting on the balcony of their apartment, suggests an unacknowledged but powerful resistance in her relationship with Tamara. While Kizette’s hand is placed quietly in her lap, her blue gaze is staring half sullenly, half challengingly at the unseen woman painting her. The art world judged it to be a powerful painting, winning Tamara first place at the 1927 Exposition Internationale des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux, but it was not a happy one.

  Certainly as far as Kizette was concerned, Cherie was reverting hurtfully to her old patterns. ‘She stayed out late and came home with so much energy she would paint for twelve hours non-stop. Then she’d take her favourite medicine, valerian, so she could get some sleep.’17 Tamara was painting to exorcise Tadeusz, but she was also galvanized by the discovery of a new model. Sometime in 1927 she had been walking in the Bois de Boulogne when she had noticed a curious activity in the crowd ahead of her. People were pausing or breaking stride, turning their heads, and the reason was a young woman heading in her direction. It was one of those moments, she later recalled, when her perceptions were heightened and she felt the pulse of her vocation quicken.

  The woman was astoundingly beautiful and when Tamara peremptorily begged to paint her, she was more than happy to comply. Rafaela turned out to be a professional, working as a model and part-time prostitute, but while that made her a very familiar type, she had a physical ripeness, a glossiness of colouring, that Tamara had never seen. She would have taken Rafaela to bed if she hadn’t wanted to use her as a model so badly, and the quality of the three portraits she went on to paint may well have been charged with the intensity of deflected desire. In La Belle Rafaela, the softly lit curves of the young woman’s body, foreshortened and exaggerated, have a perfumed heaviness, a bruised and satiated quality. In The Dream, or Rafaela with Green Background, a rare moment of intimacy is caught on canvas: Tamara has used unusually soft skin tones, making Rafaela’s flesh look vulnerable, and captured an equally vulnerable expression in the model’s eyes, an expression of darkness clearing, as if she has just awoken.