The Beautiful American

by Jeanne Mackin

  She appeared to have slept for a couple of hours, and looked fresh and neat in tailored tweed trousers and a black sweater, her washed hair still damp and brushed smoothly back.

  “Lunch together,” she announced as soon as I opened the door. “Deux Magots. On me.”

  “Close that door!” Man shouted. “It’s affecting the light. Jamie, move that vase, it’s casting a shadow on his face. More to the right. I said more!”

  Man was the son of a tailor and sometimes this still showed in the precision of his movements. He wasted no gestures and it was easy to imagine those long, slender fingers of his making twenty stitches to the inch, as good tailors did, as his father must have done.

  He was a strange combination of practicality and dream—the foundation of his art, his surrealism. Take a real object and make it do something unreal. Make lips float in a sky, make a pear hold up a cloud, make a woman become a coat stand.

  The viewer was supposed to reappraise each object, learn it anew. But sometimes I stood in front of his photographs and paintings and wondered what was so lacking in reality that the world had to be disfigured and reconfigured. That, of course, was the response of a happy person who had not yet received a great and never-healed sorrow, who did not yet need to reconfigure reality.

  Fortunately for Jamie, Man also did a lot of portraiture. In fact, he paid the rent that way and so Jamie was given the task of setting up the studio on portrait days—preparing the camera, the backdrops, and then the chemical baths, waiting in the background as Man posed the subject, set up the stage, and took the photographs.

  That first day, a heavy scent of sandalwood and spices filled the air. Man’s sitter was a middle-aged man of exotic complexion, looking stiff and uncomfortable in formal evening dress, with white gloves placed casually over his black-trousered knees and a top hat tilted slightly on his head. His black-shadowed eyes were on Lee and never left her face.

  “The Maharaja of Indore,” Lee whispered to me. “Filthy rich. See that emerald on his left pinkie? It’s real. Man is to make his portrait, to send off to his fiancée. Then he’s going out to the stables to photograph his horses.”

  “Quiet,” Man growled. “Or leave.”

  When we were a foursome, Man was polite and mildly aloof, the generous man who orders more wine even when you insist you’re drunk enough, thank you. His hands, quite lovely, really, were always fluttering around Lee, smoothing her hair, picking off lint, touching, touching, till she grimaced with impatience.

  But in his studio when there was a sitter, he liked to play the bully. Jamie was already alert to the game. He moved the vase and winked at me.

  Lee shrugged her shoulders and went to a side room and shut the door. I found a stool in a corner, very out of the way, and watched the session.

  When Jamie took photographs, he moved constantly, checking the light meter, adjusting the focus, dancing left and right to find the best angle. Man seemed to barely move at all, so economical and concentrated were his movements. When he finally clicked the shutter, it was as if he were actually stopping time for the length of the photograph.

  As he worked, taking some dozen shots of the maharaja, I let my eyes wander around the studio. It was artfully disarranged with books piled on the floor, paisley shawls tossed casually over cane-seated sofas and chairs, and a whiskey bar with crystal glasses set up on an eighteenth-century writing desk. Chess pieces, wooden cubes and pyramids like children’s toys, bits of mannequins—a hand here, a headless torso there—created strange surrealist still lifes on the tabletops.

  Portraits hung on the walls, leaned against the furniture, lurked behind doors. Man still had hanging by a window his 1924 portrait of his mistress Kiki, Violon d’Ingres. Kiki with her short black hair wrapped in a turban, her naked back to the viewer and painted on that very famous back the f-holes of a violin, so that her body became an instrument.

  I wondered how Lee felt about that piece, seeing her predecessor in such prominent display, and then I wondered if that was why Man had left the photo there, as a reminder to Lee. See. Other women have loved me.

  A formal portrait of Erik Satie had been hung opposite Kiki, Mr. Satie looking more like a philosopher in some German academy than a musician of the avant-garde, and next to the whiskey bar was a portrait of James Joyce, his hands folded, his eyes opaque behind the thick lenses of his glasses.

  There were other people I couldn’t identify: bejeweled older women dressed in fancy ball costumes, intense young men who glared out challengingly, here and there friendly faces—the elite of Paris, of the world really, since Paris was the center of the world.

  Not bad for a girl from Poughkeepsie, I thought, sitting in Man Ray’s studio in Paris and wondering if that portrait of James Joyce was hanging a little crookedly.

  Man used his balcony as a darkroom, with heavy shutters he could draw to shut out the light, and porcelain basins for the developing fixing baths. During the sittings, the shutters were opened to admit as much light as possible.

  On a gray day, as that day was, the natural light was inadequate, so Man had set up lights in big aluminum reflectors. But as soon as he turned them on, there was a brief popping explosion and the studio went dark again. The old Paris buildings had been too quickly, too inefficiently fitted with electric, so the fuses blew constantly.

  “Fuse,” Man growled, and Jamie was out the door, new fuse in hand.

  “I said, ‘Are you living near, miss?’” The Maharaja of Indore was speaking to me. He had shifted his position so he could look at me and I could tell by the set of Man’s shoulders that he was not pleased about this.

  I moved closer to the window and the maharaja’s eyes followed me, restoring him to the position Man preferred.

  Man actually smiled at me. “Perfect,” he said. “Stay there till we’re finished.”

  “I do live near here,” I answered the maharaja.

  “It is a pleasant neighborhood?”

  His voice was higher than I had expected, and ended on an up note, like an upbeat jazz tune, something Josephine Baker might sing.

  “Very.” I already knew where this conversation was heading. He would ask to visit. And if the visit was amusing enough, he might offer to move me to a better neighborhood, rent free, or at least paid by him. I had already had two such offers from businessmen. Women were to them a commodity like jewels, like fine wines and racehorses.

  “May I see your rooms?” the maharaja asked.

  “Only when my husband is there,” I said. And in came Jamie, as if cued by Noël Coward.

  “Ready,” he told Man.

  The maharaja wagged his finger at me and smiled. “Such a very young husband,” he said. “This will not do. Young men must be planting wild oats. He will leave you, miss.”

  Man took the shot just then, as the maharaja was leering at me, finger still pointed in the air. I saw it a few days later and Lee joked that Man should “accidentally” send this one to the fiancée, not the more formal portrait. Man didn’t think it was funny. He was still photographing the maharaja’s horses and stables and didn’t want to lose the money. Fame got you credit, but at the end of the month it didn’t pay the tab.

  • • •

  And so began the dance that was the foursome of Man and Lee, Nora and Jamie. Our lazy days were behind us and with great earnestness we became expats rather than mere tourists. Jamie worked nine and ten hours a day, assisting Man and developing prints. He came back to me exhausted and exhilarated, convinced that this was his way to the fame he desired for himself.

  “But if you don’t have time to take photographs for yourself, what will you have to show when there is a chance for an exhibit?” I asked.

  “Wet blanket. There’s always Sunday. I’ll get up earlier, take some photographs before I go to the studio.”

  “And when will I see you?”

  “
Nora, the vacation is over. Remember, Berenice Abbott worked for Man for three years and learned enough to open her own studio. And she didn’t know anything about photography when she started! To be an assistant to Man Ray . . . that’s the beginning of a real career.”

  Lee, too, was working, modeling for Paris Vogue, gowns by Patou, day costumes by Chanel. As the discovery and protégée of Condé Nast himself, Lee could get modeling work whenever she wanted. But it wasn’t all about connections, not with Lee. There was her beauty to recommend her, that startling cap of blond hair, the slender legginess that would make even a hopsack dress look elegant. And she had personality; it showed even in photographs.

  One particularly stunning photo I remember from that time shows Lee in a floor-length sleeveless black dress with a neckline cut almost to the waist and a big flower pinned on it. She leans against a wall, staring at something the viewer can’t see, and her expression is one of impatience and discontent. Because of the angle of the shot, her shadow on the wall behind her shows a seemingly different posture, straighter, more formal. It was as if Lee and her own shadow lived two different lives. Duality. There was the Lee you saw, and the secret Lee you could not see. The Lee you knew, and the Lee no one would ever really know.

  Lovely women were a dime a dozen, but Lee knew how to hold back, to make the viewer want and need more of her. It was this very quality that drove Man, possessive and insecure, mad. Lee could not be contained, controlled, or even embraced for very long, and the more she evaded you, the more you tried to pin her down.

  Lee was already tired of modeling, though, of being the object of fantasy for men who desired her, and for women who wanted her face, her figure. But the Depression was cutting into Man’s portrait work and they needed the money Lee earned.

  She took me to one of her modeling sessions at Paris Vogue (she called it P’rogue, of course, just as Poughkeepsie was P’oke, as if all situations could be reduced to a single syllable). The photographer was Huene, a wild-haired Estonian with an accent so thick you could spread it on bread. He obviously adored Lee. He barked orders at everyone else, but with Lee he was polite, even obsequious. “Lean back a little more, darling. No, the smile is too big. Mystery, mystery. Lift up the elbow a little, dearest, turn—sideways.”

  When his back was turned, Lee would make faces at him, then return to her stonelike stance in a split second. The Estonian could never figure out what I was laughing at. He probably thought I was simpleminded.

  “Take a photo of my friend,” she said, near the end of the session.

  “Too short. No legs,” the Estonian said.

  “Spoilsport. She’s smallish but well proportioned,” Lee argued. “I’ll fix the hem, you’ll see, she’ll look fine.”

  Without asking my opinion or permission, Lee selected a gown from the rack, a red silk jersey with a plunging neckline. “Put it on,” she said. “Quick, quick.” She found a pair of high heels that added four inches of height, and then took three books from the bookcase. (They had been shooting at-home loungewear, and so had created a kind of library in the studio.) “Stand on these,” she said. “I’ll drape the gown over them.”

  This is what it feels like to have a camera pointed at you, to know that others will see that picture and judge everything about you, to the smallest detail: miserable. I couldn’t smile properly. “Too many teeth!” the Estonian groaned. I couldn’t pose naturally. “She looks like she has a backache,” he complained to Lee.

  “How do you do this?” I asked, giving up and pulling the fake pearl earrings off my ears.

  “I pretend I’m elsewhere,” she said. “For a few minutes someone has power over me, and in my thoughts I just leave. I learned the trick early in life.” A metallic quality crept into her voice, and I knew what she was remembering.

  Huene, ignoring us, became angry in earnest as he rummaged through the trunk his assistant had set up for that day’s shoot. Red satin shoes, rhinestone tiaras, an old-fashioned corset, all went flying.

  “Numskull,” he yelled at his assistant, a nameless and easily cowed young man with slightly crossed eyes. “Where is the Chanel bag? It must be shown with the next ensemble!”

  “They didn’t send it over,” he said.

  “Then go get it!” Huene’s hair was standing on end. “Do you think I have all day? No, wait. I need you here. You.” He turned and pointed at me. “You go get it. This isn’t a playground. Here, we work. Twenty-nine, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. You can find it? Go. Run. Tell the housekeeper Huene has sent you for the new red bag and she is to give it to you.”

  Lee, grinning, handed me my coat and hat. “Don’t worry,” she said. “He will tip you for the errand. Well. I’ll see to it.”

  I ran all the way to the Champs-Élysées, not stopping till I came to the corner of rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, where I paused for a second to catch my breath and smooth down my hair. I knocked at number twenty-nine, and a little maid opened the door and showed me into a hallway painted beige and white, no hint of color or pastel.

  “Yes?” A young woman, but very beautiful, very stylishly dressed in a jacket and trousers and a string of pearls wound many times around her throat, came into the hall. “Coco is not here. What do you want, please?”

  “Monsieur Huene sent me, from Vogue. He says the red bag was not sent with the clothes for the shoot.”

  “Ah. I will see if I can find it.” She smiled at me and left. I took a few steps forward and looked into the room on my immediate right. It was painted in beige and chocolate, and the sofas and chairs were upholstered in white. The windows at the end of the room looked over a manicured garden that stretched all the way to the next street. Because it was February, the garden was all brown and white, like the apartment. I wished I could see it in the summer, see what roses bloomed there. In the corner of the room stood a dressmaker’s dummy in an incomplete Harlequin costume. Chanel was also, at that time, helping to design ballet costumes for Diaghilev.

  “Do you like it?” The pretty young woman in the man’s suit had returned. “Nijinsky himself will wear it.” She handed me a small wrapped parcel.

  “It’s swell,” I said. “But he may trip on that bit of lace at the back.”

  She laughed loudly, throwing her head back. “You are right and brave to say so. I told her the very same thing. It will be adjusted. Do you like perfume? Wait one more moment. Huene will still be there when you return.” She left again, and this time came back carrying a small square flacon of Chanel No. 5. “For you. Wear it in joy and health.” She kissed me on both cheeks, and then pushed me back out onto the street.

  “Misia,” said Lee knowingly when I was back in the studio. “Chanel’s special friend. Isn’t she gorgeous? And you’ve done well for yourself today.”

  I had done very well. A bottle of Chanel perfume and a large tip from Huene, large enough to pay our rent for the week, and Huene had asked me to come to other shoots in case he needed me to run errands.

  “You are so young and so helpless looking, perhaps even a little not bright looking, if you don’t mind my saying,” he explained. “They will give you anything you ask for.” I wasn’t flattered by this explanation, but at least I would be earning a bit all those days when Jamie was working so hard for Man.

  After Lee was finished, we went out for coffee and a brandy. Her gay mood had passed and she was subdued, tired.

  “Modeling got me out of P’oke,” she said finally. “And it still pays the rent,” she said in answer to a question I hadn’t asked. “So, what do you do, my friend, when we are all so earnestly earning a living? Are you dancing the tango in some café, praying at Notre-Dame?” She learned forward and smiled mischievously at me. “Tell me, what is your favorite place in Paris?”

  “If you have time, I’ll show you.” I had been startlingly moved by that photo shoot. I had assumed that Lee was taking me there to show off. Just the oppo
site. She had wanted me to see her powerless, objectified, not Lee the woman but just a woman with no identity of her own. I wanted to give her something back.

  “I’m all yours for the rest of the afternoon,” she said. “I’ll just tell Man the shoot took longer than I had thought.” We finished our brandy and headed to the Left Bank to the Jardin des Plantes, which was both a garden—rather, a series of gardens of all types—and a zoo. During the French Revolution, just about the time my ancestor the perfumer Thouars was packing his bags for the New World, some softhearted revolutionary took pity on all the animals being abandoned by the aristocratic houses, many of whom had private menageries of tigers, elephants, and monkeys. And so the zoo had been created to rescue and house the animals.

  “Clever,” Lee said when she saw our destination. “The zoo. Free, and open all year.”

  I took her on a roundabout tour of the places I had discovered, the alpine garden filled with small hills and gravel paths where tiny-leaved plants clung close to the wintry ground, waiting for spring, when they burst into brilliant carpets of red and yellow; the neoclassical elephant house; the ornate aviary for pheasants.

  When we arrived at the long line of cages holding the big cats, I led Lee right up to the panther’s cage. Our shoes crunched over the frosted gravel and we could hear children shouting from a merry-go-round, yet in front of these cages it seemed still, silent, as if all the wildness of the world had been captured and rendered mute in those cages.

  He was there, long and sleek and black as a midnight shadow, lying on his belly, paws stretched out, amber eyes staring out of that perfectly black, shining face. His eyes caught mine and I felt the pull of his majesty.

  The panther, my father had told me, was the only animal that was said to have a sweet scent of its own. It killed and ate, and then slept for three days, like Christ in the tomb, and when it wakened, it yawned and its breath gave off such a sweet odor that any fawn or antelope nearby followed that scented trail to its source. Then the panther killed and ate, and the cycle began all over again.