On the night of December 12, Monsieur Bébé, as Radiguet was still sometimes known, died alone. To some, Misia described his face in death as a mask of terror; to others, a mask of serenity51 Cocteau later claimed to have been at his lover’s deathbed. He was not. Shocked to find that the dying Radiguet had no one at his side, Chanel told Cocteau to “spend the night with him,” but he was too terrified of typhoid to do so, let alone view the body or attend the funeral.52 He fled. Henceforth, some of Cocteau’s closest friends, headed by Valentine Hugo, would keep their distance. To the bitchy boys at the Boeuf, Cocteau would now be known as Le Veuf sur le toit (the widower on the roof).
For Picasso, Radiguet’s demise reopened the scars of Apollinaire’s premature death five years earlier. Although he usually avoided funerals, Picasso and Olga joined the mourners at the funeral at Saint-Honoré d’Eylau. The ceremony was the more affecting for being a service en blanc: white altar cloths, white flowers, a white coffin, and two great white horses to pull the hearse through the wet foggy streets. Those who complained that white was reserved for children’s funerals were told that anyone under the age of twenty-one was a child in the eyes of God. Chanel and Misia, who had known Radiguet through Max Jacob, since he was fourteen, had paid the medical bills and the costs of the elaborate funeral; Gouy and Greeley took care of the dead man’s hotel debts; and Moysès his vast bar bills at the Boeuf sur le Toit. The funeral was very well attended: Radiguet’s distraught mother and father and six sobbing siblings and an army of the dead poet’s sorrowing fans and friends from le tout Paris, most of whom braved the freezing rain and followed the white horses and Vance Lowry’s black band from the Boeuf to Père Lachaise.
Isuffered a great loss, and I ran away,”53 is how Cocteau explained his flight from the deathbed. He ran away to join Poulenc and Auric in Monte Carlo, where the ballets—which they had written music for—Les Biches and Les Fdcheux, were in rehearsal. Satie, who was also there doing arrangements for Diaghilev, was anything but welcoming. He was horrified to find that Cocteau had struck up a friendship with his archenemy, Louis Laloy, a powerful music critic who had hitherto despised Les Six. In his paper, Comoedia, Leloy had inveighed against Satie for Parade, against Cocteau for Le Coq et I’arlequin, and against Poulenc and Auric for their lack of gravitas. The latter were so fearful of what Laloy might write about their ballet music that they had gone ahead and made peace with him. After a blazing row with them for their faint-heartedness and treachery, Satie returned to Paris and denounced them in an article entitled “Souvenirs de Voyage.”54 He inveighed against the sugariness of Poulenc’s and Auric’s “lemonade” or “lollipop” music—“a mixture of the sexual, the unsexual, and the emetic”—and then went on to lambast “the loathsome Laloy”: “So they [Cocteau, Auric, and Poulenc] won him over, did they?” Satie asked rhetorically, “What was the price?”55 No less than the dissolution of Les Six. Cocteau proved all too ready to abandon the musical power base that his group had represented. He no longer needed them. Thanks to Laloy, he had found a whole new world of the senses to explore—opium. Satie would not speak to any of Les Six ever again. He would avenge himself on them when he and Picasso collaborated on their ballet Mercure.
Besides being an eloquent critic and a leading supporter of Debussy, Laloy was secretary general of the Paris Opéra, as well as a man of considerable charm and intellectual curiosity. He was also a celebrated opiomane, thanks to his best-selling Le Livre de la fumée, which promoted opium as a mood enhancer for a new generation in search of paradis artificiels. The pipe of peace that Laloy handed Cocteau, Auric, and Poulenc was laced with opium. Cocteau had already smoked the stuff— with the flamboyantly decadent actor, de Max, as well as with Radiguet—so seemingly had Auric. But it was above all Laloy who, despite preaching moderation, set them on the road to addiction: a road that Picasso had renounced fifteen years earlier and Cocteau and Auric would follow for the rest of their lives.
Cocteau would attribute his opium addiction to the death of Radiguet, “whom I thought of as a son. My nervous suffering became so unbearable, so overwhelming, that Louis Laloy … suggested that I relieve it this way.”5657 As well as smoking every day, Cocteau would join Laloy most Sundays for opium parties at his house. Opium turned out to be a perfect palliative for Cocteau’s grief, also for his dysfunctional nervous system, which would never recover from his father’s suicide and his mother’s tyrannical love.58 Despite opium’s side effects—hot flushes, chills, nonstop yawning, nausea, constipation, and diminished libido, not to mention the countless useless cures—Cocteau’s astonishing ability to function as a poet, playwright, movie director, and social superstar depended on its tranquilizing balm.
The drug was also an advantage in that it enhanced the image of glamorous decadence that Cocteau cultivated. As Princess Soutzo observed, “From 1914 onwards, Cocteau, society’s darling, had always wanted to appear as a poète maudit,” to which Paul Morand, soon to be her husband, added, “hence the air of insincerity emitted by his work.”59 Stravinsky thought that opium facilitated Cocteau’s writing; enemies claimed that his addiction was a “drama queen’s” affectation. Successive efforts to cure himself of the habit never lasted for long, except during World War II, when the drug was difficult and dangerous to procure. His protective movie-star lover, Jean Marais, helped Cocteau through a painful rehabilitation, but once the war was over, he resumed the habit.
Invited to lunch with the Picassos at the rue la Boétie in July 1924, Cocteau would have an epiphany. Going up in the antiquated hand-operated elevator, Cocteau lapsed into a narcoleptic state: “I imagined that I was growing larger alongside something terrible—I don’t know what. … A voice was calling to me: ‘My name is on the [door] plate!’ A jolt woke me, and I read … Ascenseur Heurtebise. During lunch the conversation touched on miracles with Picasso characteristically remarking that ‘everything is a miracle: it’s a miracle not to melt in the bathtub like a piece of sugar.’ ” Cocteau’s miracle would take the exhilarating form of demonic possession: an evil angel—“d’une violence acceptée et même souhaitee”—who would take up residence within Cocteau and torment him until he managed to expel it from his body as if he were giving birth. Cocteau spelled this out in a masochistic cri de coeur of a poem—“as important for my work as the Demoiselles d’Avignon is for Picasso’s”—entitled “L’Ange Heurtebise.” The angel was of course a fantasy version of Radiguet. In the poem, he proceeds to torture and rape Cocteau with his “sceptre male,” as if he were Rimbaud beating up on that most maudit of poètes mau-dits, Paul Verlaine.
L’Ange Heurtebise, d’une brutalité
Incroyable saute sur moi. De grâce
Ne saute pas si fort
Garçon bestial, fleur de haute,
Stature.
(Angel Heurtebise with incredible
Brutality jumps on me. Have mercy,
Don’t jump so hard
Beastly boy, flower of great stature.)
In claiming that his masterpiece had come to him “against his will, automatically” in an opium-induced vision, Cocteau may have hoped to curry favor with the surrealists, for whom automatic writing was a key to the subconscious. Actually “L’Ange Heurtebise” was anything but automatic. Cocteau had devoted some nine months to the poem, which was not finished until March 1925—a few days before he went back into a clinic for a cure. The poem is not at all spontaneous: it is full of other poets’ music—echoes of Rimbaud, Anna de Noailles, Rilke, and Mallarmé. And yet, for all its straining for effect, “L’Ange Heurtebise” is probably Cocteau’s finest poem. Besides commemorating the loss of Radiguet, it resonates with the fear of being dropped by Picasso. This on top of being blackballed by the avant-garde must have been unbearably humiliating for Cocteau. Hence the vision in the elevator. It is surely no coincidence that Heurtebise, manifested as Cocteau, was on the way up to visit Picasso, the god who was failing him and who would fail him again and again and derive a certain sadistic satisfactio
n from doing so. Cocteau later discovered there was no such thing as a Heurtebise elevator. Picasso’s was an Otis.
In his quest for a new god, Cocteau asked Auric to take him to Meudon to see Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, eloquent Catholic proselytizers who were celebrated as much for their understanding of philosophy, the arts, and literature as for their contagious piety. Max Jacob, who had also turned to God for solace after being rejected by Picasso, had been urging Cocteau, a lapsed Catholic, to return to the sacraments, “the way one goes to a doctor.” “You mean swallow the host like an aspirin?” Cocteau said aghast. “The host should be taken like an aspirin,” Jacob replied.606162636465
On the road to redemption, Cocteau was joined by two of his gosses, as he called the fawning homosexuals in his fan club. The nice one, Jean Bourgoint—the model with his sister for Cocteau’s Enfants terribles—would eventually abandon the Boeuf sur le Toit and Jean Hugo’s hospitable roof for a Trappist monastery; the nasty one, Maurice Sachs, would start off as a chic seminarian and end as a spy for the Gestapo, trading allegations about his fellow Jews for drugs and other privileges before being killed on a death march from Hamburg to Kiel in 1944.
To steer Cocteau back to the sacraments, the Maritains recruited a charismatic missionary, a tall, tanned priest, fresh from the Sahara, called Father Charles Hen-rion. Father Henrion was given to wearing a white burnous emblazoned with a crimson cross above a blood-red heart. He “gave me the same shock as Stravinsky and Picasso,” Cocteau said. On Friday, June 19, 1925, the feast of the Sacred Heart, the born-again poet took communion from Father Henrion in the Maritains’ private chapel. The sacraments provided balm for his ongoing grief at Radiguet’s death and Picasso’s defection. For Cocteau, the opium of the people would all too soon prove no match for the real thing.
Bacchanal scene, Mercure, with sets by Picasso, 1924. Musée Picasso, Paris.
20
Mercure (1924)
The success of the divertissement La Statue retrouvée, which Cocteau had thought up and Picasso designed for the Beaumonts’ ball in June 1923, had inspired Beaumont to become an impresario like Diaghilev. He went ahead and rented a large Montmartre music hall (currently a pornographic cinema) called the Théâtre de la Cigale, and set about organizing a season of mostly balletic entertainments.1 He named his venture Les Soirées de Paris, after Apollinaire’s pre-1914 magazine of art and literature. For the occasion, Beaumont persuaded Moysès of the Boeuf sur le Toit to transform one of the theater’s galleries into a Boeuf-like bar, where patrons could drink, eat, and dance, but it lost money and had to be closed. He also installed Massine, whose marriage and attempt to form his own company had both failed, in an apartment in the courtyard of his hôtel particulier. He appointed him consultant and choreographer. As always, Cocteau was eager to collaborate. He just happened to have a short adaptation of Romeo and Juliet up his sleeve and was ready to direct it and play the role of Mercutio. To his subsequent regret, Beaumont agreed to take on this project: Cocteau’s text was thin and he kept throwing tantrums. Nevertheless, Jean Hugo’s stylish décor and costumes ensured that the production was well received. Beaumont would soon come to regret the expense of being an impresario. Having drawn on an unexpected windfall to launch his venture, he blamed an unexpected loss in the stock market to terminate it.
By far the most original and significant of the Soirées de Paris productions was the short (thirteen scenes in less than ten minutes) ballet Mercure, which Beaumont commissioned from Picasso, Satie, and Massine. The lighting for this and his other productions was entrusted to the American dancer Loie Fuller, whose performances in swirling veils and beams of colored light had made her an expert in the field. Everyone involved was very secretive about this project. On February 20, Beaumont wrote asking Satie to compose the music for a ballet to be called Les Aventures de Mercure for a fee of eight thousand francs.2 The next day he wrote Picasso in greater detail, outlining his plan for a new form of balletic entertainment—part ballet, part mime, part poses plastiques, part sculpture, part drawing:
My point of departure for our mythic dance has been your drawings. I don’t want to drag literature into it, nor do I want the composer or the choreographer to do so. What I want from you are TABLEAUX VIVANTS. I have drawn on mythology to the extent that it is a universal alphabet and not by virtue of any ties to a specific period or place…. This old alphabet is the only means we have of explaining the totality of human nature in simple terms that everyone can understand. Let us therefore make use of the assets we have at hand … [and] take Mercury rather than Jupiter or Saturn; nevertheless do whatever you want and do not regard the little story we already have as anything more than a collection of letters that a child has at its disposal for word making.
So it’s a series of drawings that I am asking you to do. Just as you transformed the horrible nudes of the Folies Bergère into admirable drawings, you will certainly find a way to adapt the admirable nudes in your incomparable drawings to music-hall requirements.3
The instructions that Picasso and Satie took most to heart were “do whatever you want” and “respect the music hall requirements.” The two of them decided to avenge the would-be with-it tricks that Cocteau had tried to impose on Parade by making him their butt. Since Cocteau liked to don a Mercury outfit—winged helmet, winged shoes, silver tights—whenever fancy dress was called for and flit about at high speed among the assembled guests, who better? Work on the ballet proceeded in tightest secrecy. Picasso did drawings for thirteen successive tableaux—most of them less than a minute long—as Beaumont had suggested; Satie then “furnished” them with musique d}ammeublement. Satie insisted on a similar arrangement with Massine. Like a composer of a film score, he fitted his music to the choreography instead of the other way around. This was the only way he could protect himself from being misinterpreted.4 The sole function of the music, Satie told Pierre de Massot, was to provide a sonic backdrop to Picasso’s plastic poses.5 Actually, this was not quite true. As the composer’s biographer, Steven Whiting, has described, Satie used his music mischievously to define and ridicule the character of Cocteau/Mercure (danced by Massine). For instance, the pratfall music at the end of the first tableau:
Portrait by Picasso of Erik Satie in Ballets Russes program (Théâtre de la Gaité-Lyrique, May 1921). Musée Picasso, Paris.
a slapstick final cadence that might have accompanied a clown tripping on his way offstage. In this configuration of glib melodic surface and devious accompaniment, one may already hear a musical characterization of Mercury, hence of Cocteau. This association is corroborated at the end of the first tableau, the god enters to the syncopated tune, now reharmonized … that emphasizes the jerky rhythms. Given Cocteau’s taste for jazz, the deliberate Americanism of the music assumes its own sarcastic point.6
In the night scene after the overture, dancers bearing placards printed with ETOILE in block letters jolted audiences into a fresh awareness by confronting them with the unexpected word in place of the expected image. A set of zodiac signs that Polunin, who painted the scenery, had in his studio inspired Picasso to introduce constellations into the décor.7
Mercure’s most memorable tableau was the sixth one: a bathing scene in which the Three Graces, played by men in drag and long black wigs—supposedly Auric, Poulenc, and Laloy—poke their bewigged heads and bright red cardboard breasts through a large hole in the backcloth representing a bathtub.8 In the following scenes, Mercure bursts in and steals the “girls’” pearls—a swipe at Satie’s bête noire, Wagner, and his Rhine maidens—and is then chased away by a cutout of the dog Cerberus. Meanwhile, the Graces have turned into basketwork constructions, manipulated like puppets by wires. The final tableau opens with a party given by Bacchus, in which Picasso and Satie get in digs at Poiret, Diaghilev, and Beaumont. The polka—based on Vincent Youmans’s Tea for Two—was intended to “capture the mood of forced gaiety at a high-society get-together.”9 As if to bring his so-called classical period to a
suitably farcical conclusion, Picasso ends the ballet on a note of what else but Chaos, portrayed by male dancers in multicolored tights—pink, blue, yellow, green10— surrealists!
Dance of the Three Graces with Cerberus scene, Mercure, with sets by Picasso, 1924. Musée Picasso, Paris.
These in-jokes were lost on most of Mercure’s audience. People tended to be baffled or offended, and the ballet was an instant flop. Cocteau was angry and hurt; Diaghilev worried, with good reason, that in losing Picasso, Satie, and Massine to Beaumont he had forfeited his avant-garde credentials. Misia was upset because Diaghilev was upset. As for Breton’s newly conscripted surrealists, they used the first night of Mercure as a pretext for yet another divisive demonstration. Under pressure from Satie’s disloyal former pupil, Auric, Breton—who took little interest in music—disrupted the performance by instructing his gang, including Aragon, to yell “Bravo Picasso, down with Satie” at the box where the Picassos and General Mangin presided.11 When the police intervened, Aragon broke away, jumped onto the stage and went on inveighing against Satie. Breton wanted to settle a score with Tzara by attacking his ally; Auric was out to bite the hand that had fostered him. Undeterred by the fracas, Beaumont went ahead with the ball he had arranged to follow the ballet. For once, there was no specific theme. By contrast with the shambles of the performance, the composure of the guests at the ball seemed stately. Picasso and Eugenia Errázuriz went à Vespagnole, and Olga more traditionally in couture, as we know from Man Ray’s famously stylish photograph of the Picassos at the height of their époque des duchesses, together with Eugenia, who had unwittingly made it all possible.
A Life of Picasso Page 33