The Glass of Fashion

by Cecil Beaton

  CHAPTER III

  FOOTLIGHTS AND POWDER

  WE MAKE a mistake if we think that the important influences on our tastes are necessarily the genuinely æsthetic ones. Often they are of questionable artistic value. Bad poetry and bad fiction have been known to inspire even the great writers. Mozart and Bizet drew inspiration from the popular songs of their day, while Henry James could find the subject of some of his work in the gossip of old ladies. So far as I am concerned, I am well aware that the men responsible for decorating the first stage productions I ever saw were possibly not artists of any high distinction. Yet I realize now that their work definitely inspired me.

  Early in this century the stages of the serious theatre were bathed in an amber glow that gave a rich effect to scenery and costumes but drained them almost entirely of colour nuances. On the light-opera stage, pale candy colours were, almost without exception, all that were ever seen. The anteroom at the Marsovian Embassy would be decorated with marble columns, tapestries, Aubusson carpets, and hydrangeas, all confined to sweet-pea colours. Likewise, the ladies were attired in pastel shades. In its own limited way, this was extraordinarily pretty and created a magic of its own. Among the items listed on the theatre programme, together with the usual credits of “Cigarettes by Abdulla,” “Scenery painted by the Harkers,” and “Shoes by Baynes,” there was the inevitable line, “Colour schemes by Comelli.” I never discovered who Signor Comelli was, but as the invisible wizard behind the scenes, he correlated in wonderful harmony the opalescent mauves, blues, and pinks that dominated his strange world.

  The leading lady’s gowns were inevitably made by Lucille and were masterpieces of intricate workmanship. It was the fashion for women to wear high-waisted Directoire dresses, falling straight to the floor, where the wearers’ feet would be encumbered by bead-fringes and possibly clinging trains. Lucile worked with soft materials, delicately sprinkling them with bead or sequin embroidery, with filigree lace insertions, true lovers’ knots, and garlands of minute roses. Her colour sense was so subtle that the delicacy of detail could scarcely been seen at a distance, though the effect she created was of an indefinable shimmer. Sometimes, however, she introduced rainbow effects into a sash and would incorporate quite vivid mauves and greens, perhaps even a touch of shrimp-pink or orange. Occasionally, if she wanted to be deliberately outrageous, she introduced a bit of black chiffon or black velvet and, just to give the coup de grâce, outlined it with diamonds.

  In private life Lucile was Lady Duff-Gordon and a sister of the romantic novelettist, Elinor Glyn. She had suddenly developed her own utterly personal métier. Nowadays her work is sometimes disparagingly referred to as “boudoir lampshade stuff.” All fashionable dresses become costumes in time, however, and in her heyday Lucile’s artistry was unique, her influence enormous. She was the first Englishwoman to create a name equally well-known in London, Paris, Chicago, and New York. Until Lucile’s advent the Paris dressmakers had displayed their clothes on mannequins of no particular looks. These models wore black satin “maillots,” with high necks and long sleeves, over which went the evening dresses of Doucet or Worth. It was considered shocking to see a lady’s skin in daylight. Lucile discarded the black undergarment and employed beautiful young women as mannequins for her clothes. The fame she brought to the outstanding Hebe and Dolores is legendary. Drian, the painter, has described these tall women mincing about in their turbans and trailing trains as looking like impertinent lobsters.

  LILY ELSIE DRESSED BY LUCILE, 1910

  Apart from these innovations, Lucile was responsible for the training of a number of good designers, including Edward Molyneux, who started his career by making drawings for her on a landing at the turn of the great staircase in her Hanover Square establishment.

  Just as ladies’ costumes were limited to sweet-pea colourings, so their make-up was of a more restricted palette: lips were touched with coral instead of carmine, complexions were peaches and cream. Hair was pale nut-brown, and I remember that the yellow or peroxide hair which we now call blond was, at that time, considered unfortunate. Perhaps, in comparison with today, the art of physical embellishment was somewhat naïve; yet there was a dancer in The Merry Widow and The Dollar Princess who knew a thousand tricks of make-up.

  Gabrielle Ray was not a talented actress, not even a good dancer, but her parakeet features were not without possibilities. By sheer cleverness she was able to fascinate an audience and make it susceptible to her self-created prettiness. She metamorphosed herself into a sort of Maude Goodman nursery-picture-book unreality, with masses of soft, silky curls falling about her raised head and a straw hat hanging over her shoulder from a ribbon. The effect was as though butter would never melt in her mouth, yet there was an intriguing perversity about such excessive prettiness. Gabrielle Ray was the precursor of the Marie Laurencin school of pink-and-white femininity. Lily Elsie, the star of the operettas in which Miss Ray appeared, was to tell me many years later of some of her colleague’s experiments in make-up. A past mistress of pointillisme, Gabrielle Ray would, for her stage appearance, put mauve and green dots at the edges of her eyes, with little red and mauve dots at the corners of her nostrils. As meticulously as Seurat working over one of his canvases, she shaded her eyelids and temples in different colours of the mushroom, while her cheeks were tinted with varying pinks from coral to bois de rose. The chin was touched with a hare’s-foot brush dipped in terra-cotta powder, and the lobes of the ears and the tip of the nose would be flicked with salmon colour. Thus painted, Gabrielle Ray appeared before the audience enamelled like a china doll.

  GABRIELLE RAY

  Perhaps better than any other actress, this dancer knew how to pose for a photographer. Doubtless she was one of those forerunners of photographic facial surgery, for she would have a piece of silk thread held under her nose by assistants who stood at either side of her, uptilting the nose just the amount that she wished. With little talent but much imagination Gabrielle Ray, during her brief career, turned herself into a small work of art.

  The reputation of actors or dancers may or may not live after them, depending upon their artistry or their importance to a given age or epoch: ballerinas like Taglioni or Carlotta Grisi still live on in legend and in nineteenth-century engravings, perpetuating the spirit of romantic ballet; actors such as Coquelin or Sarah Bernhardt have their names in theatre history. There are any number of personalities, however, who, like the Ephemerae, those May flies that are born, live, and die in a single day, vanish completely and leave scarcely a trace behind them. It seems unlikely that anyone born after 1920 may ever have heard of Gaby Deslys, who was also something of an actress and something of a dancer, but whose ambitions, indeed, lay more in the achievement of luxury than the fulfilment of talent. When I was five or six years old she was already in her heyday; by the time I was sixteen she had died.

  Aunt Jessie may have given me my first glimpse of the grown-up world of fashion, and Lily Elsie, the star of The Merry Widow, may have personified romance; but Gaby Deslys was the first creature of artificial glamour I ever knew about, one of that species of rara erotica calculated to bring forth all the emotions that might be dreamed of by a boy who has not yet reached the age of puberty. I was never allowed to see Gaby Deslys on the stage, but, though my mother felt that my enthusiasm for such a soubrette should scarcely be encouraged, I followed her career with the greatest interest. No doubt my family must have read or heard of the gossip that this actress wisely allowed to gild her name. She made no secret of her private life nor of her belief in free love, and said to American reporters, with disarming candour: “Money is woman’s only bulwark against the world. I give nothing back.” Her bejewelled value had even been calculated in terms of her weight. It was estimated that, with all the diamonds and pearls and emeralds in place, Gaby Deslys was worth something over three thousand dollars a pound.

  Apart from photographs which appeared in magazines and which I pounced upon with the enthusiasm of a botanist di
scovering a new plant, my only human contact with Gaby Deslys was through the medium of Aunt Jessie. My aunt would tell me of a matinee she had attended, describing how the star had shed an enormous cloak of feathers, or the manner in which she had removed her hat, a pyramid of precious ospreys, that was then thrown across the stage landing on a chaise longue while the audience gasped with delight. That same audience knew, just as Aunt Jessie suspected or as I guess from photographs, that the pearls she was wearing were priceless, that her emeralds were far from being paste, and that ladies had to invent more than the Gaby Glide to acquire such things.

  Gaby Deslys was something of a key transitional figure—the successor to the grand Parisian cocottes of the nineties on the one hand, and, since she was a theatrical figure, the precursor of a whole school of glamour that was to be exemplified twenty years later by the Marlene Dietrich of the cinema screen. Her critics were in agreement that her voice was like a canary’s and that she was not even a particularly good dancer, but what did it matter if her aura of glamour was artificial? The world loves nothing so much as artifice, and I was not alone in my worship of Gaby Deslys: her success was phenomenal.

  Plump as a partridge she was, but though her features were far from classic, one did not feel that they could be improved upon on any detail. Her nose was rather fleshy, pear-like and thick-ended, yet somehow in perfect harmony with the cherry lips. Indeed, something about Gaby Deslys’ whole esculent appearance called to mind a basket of fruit, real or imitation. Her breasts were round, with unpointed nipples. Even the colour and texture of her complexion cried aloud to extend the metaphor, for it was like fruit and cream. Her silky hair was dyed a greenish marzipan gold, possibly like Dorian Gray’s, but more like that of a child in a perambulator. Set in the cherubic face, two eyes as warm and sad as those of a Saint Bernard dog painted by Landseer looked at you with liquid compassion from beneath their heavy lids and luxuriously sad brows. The cherry lips were parted in a smile that showed seed-pearl teeth, a smile that revealed the sensuality, the gaiety, and the good nature behind it, as well as reflecting a distant strain of something tragic, an awareness that the days of the waltz could not last forever.

  Upon this physical foundation Gaby Deslys walked the tightrope of a near-barbarous taste with a rare audacity, scarcely regarding the sheer drop to utter vulgarity below her. The spirit behind her self-adornment was not unlike that of some African chieftain strutting his panoply and plumage before the tribe. Her taste ran amok in a jungle of feathers and ospreys, diamonds and chiffon and furs, creating the pattern for the Folies Bergère costumes to be worn by Mistinguette and other vedettes who came after her. Most of those who copied, however, did so without taste, an observation which is intended to be neither ironic nor paradoxical, since Gaby’s personality alone was fully capable of sustaining those outfits for which the word “bizarre” must take on new overtones.

  Yet, though fantastic, her clothes had their own grace. They were an adaptation of the fashions of the time. With a high Directoire waistline, she might wear a harem skirt and a huge bonnet towering with bows and feathers. She wore, indeed, virtually anything: jewels, lace, furs, beaded fringes of the lampshade school, and, always, feathers galore: swansdown, paradise, osprey, egret, even cock and chicken feathers. When she entertained the soldiers during the First World War, she dressed as they would have liked her to dress—swathed in black satin lind with cerise velvet and trimmed with chinchilla, cascades of pear-shaped pearls hanging from her neck, and on one side of her head, a tea cosy trimmed with paradise feathers.

  Contrary to the fashions of her time, which favoured high décolletages, Gaby Deslys showed as much of her bosom as propriety permitted. She made a point of revealing her legs, too, well-rounded legs encased in lace stockings. Her small feet were shod with stub-toed shoes whose buckles glittered, whose incredibly high heels were studded with flashing rhinestones.

  The climax of any costume display, however, was her hat, resembling airplane propellers or a Brancusi bird, these huge constructions of gauze were rampant with the ubiquitous feathers of tropical birds, parrots, or flamingos. She was, in short, a human aviary. On occasion she might employ a slightly pyrotechnical theme by wearing a jewelled cap which, like the last of some fireworks display, sent up the inevitable great sprays of egret and ostrich plumes.

  In the theatre Gaby Deslys must have lived up to the off-stage legend she had created, and no doubt went through a performance that was sure to delight an audience. Her success was made to be enjoyed by others. Like a Midas, everything she touched turned to gold. The signature was luxury, scrawled on her motorcars, clothes, jewels, and feathers; and the more luxurious and scandalous her life, the more people loved her. She created a morality of her own immorality, with a vitality that obviated any unpleasant undertones of “kept woman” or worse.

  Then, too, at that time nobody felt guilty for adoring luxury. Even the stagehands were impressed and pleased to see some enormous limousine waiting at the stage door for her, with a chauffeur and a footman in attendance, their livery splendid in its colour and chic. The Renault, Daimler, or Rolls-Royce might have a canework body, or it might be painted white or elephant’s breath, a sort of off-mustard yellow that was popular at that period. As she drove off, people would see her sitting framed in the window, creating an effect comparable to the passing of the Queen of Sheba. I myself first caught a glimpse of her in this fashion near the Ritz Hotel in London. The effect was like seeing someone from another world: through the window of the motorcar her complexion had an extraordinary luminosity; and, as the Rolls-Royce purred past, it left a scented trail of unbelievable luxury and allure, spiced with a breath of naughtiness that escaped, at least by a narrow margin, being trashy.

  Her news value, for obvious reasons, was inevitable. On holiday in Monte Carlo, or “roaming the Riviera,” each picture of her added a new note to the ever-green reputation. It was not just a case of Gaby Deslys being photographed walking along an esplanade; rather, each costume she appeared in was the apotheosis of something new, something exaggerated, perhaps, but nevertheless an inspiration. If Gaby wore an ecru-coloured tussore suit with a coal scuttle of full-blown roses on her head, or a dress of velvet and diamanté trellis, I might well feel I had discovered a new continent. Her fantasy spread to embrace even the little Chihuahuas she kept as pets, Mexican creatures so spindly and shivery that one felt certain they could not survive a winter in subtropical Nice unless they were wrapped in dark Russian sables. And they were.

  THE CLIMAX OF ANY COSTUME DISPLAY WAS HER HAT

  The day came when I was to see Gaby Deslys at close quarters. It was at an open-air entertainment, one of those theatrical garden parties where I had been taken as a schoolboy. The event was for charity, and actresses appeared as saleswomen, selling ice cream or their own photographs, shouting through megaphones and shouting without megaphones. Gaby Deslys appeared in a magenta dress of very fine lace. On her head she wore an enormous cockeyed propeller of magenta osprey. Magenta orchids trembled at her breast; magenta were her lace stockings, and her shoes were of magenta satin with magenta ribbons crisscrossed up her legs. Pale magenta cheeks and lips had been painted on a face the colour of marshmallow. Vulgar? Perhaps, but by whose standards? The gesture seemed to transcend vulgarity and create its own allure.

  Gaby Deslys had appeared in London as early as 1903, as a dancer and soubrette in musical comedy, but it was not until she established herself as a vaudeville turn, singing slightly naughty French songs, doing somewhat acrobatic dances, and wearing fantastic clothes, that she came into her own. Gradually the flames of her reputation spread. There was never a greater fire in the forest. Gaby soon gained international attention as the mistress of the young King Manuel of Portugal, who had, indeed, spent a king’s ransom on her and had given her a rope of pearls as long as herself. Newspaper stories of the day would have it that the Portugese people revolted against the extravagances of their young monarch, whose bills for Gaby Deslys mu
st have appalled his Treasurer. More than likely it was only the straw that broke the Portugese camel’s back. Be that as it may, the actress severed her liaison with King Manuel after the loss of his crown and, taking her pearls, went triumphantly off to make her American debut. Contracts were signed with both Ziegfeld and the Shuberts, and her salary, from the very beginning, reached $18,000 a month, an astronomical figure in those days.

  Reporters enumerated the $320,000 worth of jewels that “Gabrielle of the Lilies” had brought with her to America, or told how she forbade her press agents to use King Manuel’s name in connection with her own, as she wished to shine on personal merits. Since she had come to epitomize the most fantastic in European glamour, New York was quick to recognize her genius. A number of shocked suffragettes only just failed to prevent her from appearing on the stage of the Winter Garden. Yale and Harvard students adored her and made her their Zuleika Dobson.

  Though she appeared in New York in the winter and bought her clothes in Paris, Gaby Deslys lived in London, in Knightsbridge, where she had a house with leaded windows and rows of scarlet geraniums in window boxes. The interior was decorated in sumptuously bad taste. Typical of a good-natured vedette, she allowed the newspapers to take photographs on the bed in which she slept, an elaborately carved and gilded ecclesiastical four-poster in an alcove reached by three steps. Sometimes other photographs showed her having lunch with her sister, seated against the oak wainscoting beneath a deep beamed ceiling. In front of her was an ostentatiously decorated table with, as centrepiece, a huge silver tureen filled with orchids. I can even remember the heavy cut glass on the long refectory table.