The Glass of Fashion

by Cecil Beaton

  The personality who could rally such a social life about her must, of necessity, have possessed a remarkable charm and magnetism. So great was this gift that her mere presence converted men into her adoring slaves. When Puccini came to New York in 1910 for the première of his new work, The Girl of the Golden West, he abandoned several rich dowagers who had invited him to the opera, having caught a glimpse of Mrs. Lydig sitting in the diamond horseshoe. For the rest of the evening the composer stood like some forlorn and hypnotized bird at the back of Mrs. Lydig’s private loge.

  On her way to luncheon one day Mrs. Lydig’s eye was caught by a very beautiful rug in the window of a Fifty-seventh Street antiquaire. She entered the shop to scrutinize the work of art. After a moment she decided: “I’ll take that.”

  The salesman expostulated, “It’s a very expensive rug, madame. The best I can do for you is sixty thousand dollars!”

  “That will be all right,” said Mrs. Lydig. “Call the footman in my motor to take it out over his arm.”

  In 1910 she was living in a house on Fifty-second Street built for her by Stanford White. Its furnishing included antiques of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But with the beginning of the First World War, Mrs. Lydig dismantled the house, and the contents were sold at auction. During those war years she came to feel the inappropriateness of any display of luxury and devoted herself with enthusiasm to charity or welfare, masking the hard work that she accomplished by making light of it all.

  At the end of the war Rita Lydig divorced her husband and moved to a Georgian house in Washington Square. Here she created what was to be considered the most discriminating collection of objets de vertu, complete with the best English silver and crystal chandeliers. Her rooms, in which no piece of furniture was ever allowed to be placed catercorner, were somewhat sparsely furnished, for with the purification and deepening of her tastes the sifting process had dispensed with all but the most select and special art. One beautiful rug, her Flemish tapestries, her Titian and Zurbarán, were among the sole objects she chose to keep. She had always had a rare discrimination in all the arts and from the very beginning was a great patron. The curators of museums throughout Europe respected her knowledge and taste.

  Mrs. Lydig lived alone in the Washington Square house. Her servants (who, like everyone else she had ever employed, loved her so faithfully that they were loath ever to quit her service) slept over the garage. Yet she would never allow the front door to be locked, and the ground-floor windows were often left open. When her mother remonstrated that she might be burgled, the dauntless Rita replied, “I have an accident of wealth. If anyone who has an accident of poverty needs these things more than I, they can have them.”

  But Mrs. Lydig was never robbed. A radiating spirit, she had a generosity that gave out a feeling of generosity to others. She was the sort of woman whom no one could ever resent, natural in all things and, in spite of her stateliness and proud carriage, as simple as a child. All who saw her felt her feminine magnetism. Without any conscious effort she was able to get anyone to do for her anything she wished.

  Mrs. Lydig was never a public figure. Yet with her pale face dusted with lavender powder, her high collars worn tight up to the ears, her eighteenth-century tricorne hat and pointed shoes, the appearance was so spectacular that people who did not know her would follow her admiringly when she went to the Louvre or walked in the street. Her sister, Mercedes de Acosta, told me that on an occasion when they were getting out of her motorcar in the Place Vendôme, a complete stranger came up to Mrs. Lydig and said, “Que Dieu vous bénisse, madame!”

  Every artist whom she sat for considered it a rare privilege to work with so co-operative a subject. She inspired Rodin and Bourdelle to sculpt her; Sargent, László, Carolus Duran, Soralla, and Helleu painted her. It was Sargent who called Mrs. Lydig “Art in its living form.” Boldini was completely fascinated by her. Having painted fourteen portraits of her, he was always begging her to sit for another drawing inspired by some pose she had naturally assumed.

  Mrs. Lydig’s arresting appearance was partly due to her complexion, which was so pale that she was known as the alabaster lady. It was indeed in alabaster that Malvina Hoffman sculpted her. Her nose was long and flamboyantly uptilted, her lips thin and pursed. She wore her ebony, silken hair (so beautifully brushed that it shone like patent leather) in a huge pompadour and, in later years, en brosse. She ate seldom and sparsely, with the result that her long thin legs and arms gave her the effect of some wonderful spider. Possessed of a natural grandeur of bearing, Rita Lydig always held her head high and seemed to float across a room with unusually lithe movements. Isadora Duncan observed that Mrs. Lydig was one of the few people who understood one must dance as one walks. She never forgot that the whole personality had to be employed, and never permitted herself any liberties with or indifference to her own style. In public Rita Lydig seldom smiled or laughed. When she was amused, she lowered her head; her face could become screwed up and her shoulders would shake a little.

  Independent of time, Mrs. Lydig dressed in her own fashion. Yet for all her strangeness and fragile appearance, she created many new styles. She was the first woman to wear an evening dress cut to the waist in the back. Appearing thus for the first time, sitting in her box at the opera with a great black fan in her hand and surrounded by men, Rita Lydig created a sensation. In those days such trifles seemed to mean much. The newspapers were scandalized. Then after a week all the women who had taken exception to the new fashion copied it.

  Mrs. Lydig financed the Callot sisters in their dressmaking business, for her clothes always came from that distinguished firm. Yet throughout the years she never went to their shop for a fitting, considering it the height of vulgarity to go to a dress shop. Even the jeweller came to her rather than she to him; likewise, the furrier brought his furs. Dress fittings at Mrs. Lydig’s house were frequent events.

  Mercedes, her youngest sister, has described how the fitters would arrive with their vast boxes, thimbles, silk paper, and scissors. Some would be kneeling with their mouths full of pins, while others, hovering, gave their opinion and exclaimed, “Que c’est ravissant, madame!” After the fittings all were given port and cakes. Everyone who ever worked for Mrs. Lydig inevitably received a lavish appreciation. Sometimes she put her hand in her pocket and distributed loose emeralds. Her sister admitted, “Everyone who fitted Rita got emeralds!”

  Such an individualist would naturally despise uniformity of dress. Mrs. Lydig’s clothes were never modern or à la mode, belonging to no period. They were the expression of a unique personality that loved ancient brocades and velvets, was a fanatic of rare laces, and developed a style of dress to which she remained faithful despite all fashion changes. She never ordered one thing of a kind, but duplicated each item by the dozens, with only slight variations in material, lace, or design. It was not unusual for twenty-five copies of one coat to be made. Mrs. Lydig’s adoration of clothes was not for purposes of display, but because they gave her the satisfaction of a work of art. In her own bedroom she would wear, as a dressing gown for her own pleasure, a circular skirt made from one piece of seamless eleventh century lace. The price she paid for this garment was nine thousand dollars.

  Her wardrobe included black velvet dresses for day; low-cut, bare-backed evening dresses; jackets and coats made of rich and rare materials and worn with velvet skirts by day or satin culottes for evening; nightdresses and underclothes trimmed with medallions incorporating classical figures in lace as delicate as the skeleton of an autumn leaf; black lace mantillas as light as gossamer; heavy lace tunics that appear like armour; blouses of embroidered batiste, needlework, or bobbin lace with the exaggeratedly high collars; cobweb-thin stockings with rare lace insertions; rose-point petticoats, small sable hats, fezzes of unborn lamb, and an umbrella stick of platinum with the name “Rita” set in diamonds on top.

  Although she walked very short distances, Mrs. Lydig possessed at least three hundred pairs of sh
oes, shoes that have never been seen before or since. They were made by Yanturni, the East Indian curator of the Cluny Museum, a strange individual with an extraordinary gift for making incredibly light footgear that was moulded like the most sensitive sculpture. The conditions under which he would supply a few favoured customers were somewhat unusual. Yanturni demanded a deposit of one thousand dollars, from which he would subtract the price of each shoe or boot supplied, though delivery often took two or three years. Once he had agreed to work for a customer, he made a plaster model of both feet, on which he would then work and mould his materials until they were as flexible as the finest silk. Mrs. Lydig’s shoes were fashioned from eleventh- and twelfth-century velvets, with variations in long pointed toes or square-ended toes and correspondingly square heels. Her evening and boudoir slippers utilized brocades or gold- and silver-metal tissue. Some were covered with lace appliqué and leather spats that fitted like a silk sock. Mrs. Lydig collected violins expressly so that Mr. Yanturni could use their thin, light wood for his shoe trees. With its tree inside, each shoe weighed no more than an ostrich feather. She preserved these shoes in trunks of Russian leather made in St. Petersburg, with heavy locks and a rich cream velvet lining.

  But it was not merely in fashions that Mrs. Lydig was unpredictable and provocative. Pleasure-loving and capricious, she was a Medici; her soul was Latin. In her behaviour to her female friends she was apt to be somewhat offhanded and continually created difficulties for herself. In her fight for perfection she would send some object back to a shop as many as fifty times, until it was as she desired. So, too, her friends had to attain her ideals. Any deviation from her standard of good taste was an outrage to her. She never allowed them to use slang expressions in her company, and suffered beyond control if their rooms were ugly. Seeking beauty, she was a deeply religious creature of super-sensitivity who gave herself wholeheartedly to all adventures of the spirit. Rita Lydig never knew what it was to be bored. She had the mind of a lawyer and would dash off indignant letters, her irony and sarcasm phrased in scholarly language. It was her contention that any opponent could be defeated by humour. In politics her views were radical; she became a leader of the Equal Franchise Society, advocating women’s suffrage. Long before the subjects were mentioned in polite society, she fought for birth control and was a rabid antagonist of the drug traffic, though ironically enough she herself later became a victim of morphine. One day while riding in her carriage Mrs. Lydig became injured in an accident with a runaway horse. She never recovered from the effects. Yet in the face of misfortune she showed gallantry, courage, and charm.

  With little notion of practical things or business, Rita Lydig slowly accumulated so many debts that, finding herself incapable of meeting the bills, she sought a sister’s help to cut down expenses. Mercedes de Acosta ran through the items in the monthly books. “A thousand dollars for flowers! But you must do without the white cyclamen, the lilies, the gardenias, and the lilies of the valley!”

  “I knew you’d say that!” Rita cried. “But why should you take away that one beautiful thing from me? I can go without food. You must cut out the butcher for me, but I will not be without my white flowers.”

  Eventually the house and all it contained were sold. Duveen paid forty-one thousand dollars for a Flemish tapestry, but still Mrs. Lydig could not pay her creditors. She had run through her fortune and, appalled that she owed anybody anything, was obliged with the greatest humiliation to declare herself bankrupt. The incident was the first of a number of vicious blows that fortune was to deal her. Overnight Rita Lydig found herself dropped by the conventional and fickle world of society that was incapable of feeling any real understanding or sympathy for her, yet had pursued her at the summit of her power.

  She fell in love with the Reverend Percy Stickney Grant, the rector of the Church of the Ascension on Fifth Avenue and Eleventh Street. But the Episcopalian bishops decided that no clergyman could marry a divorced woman. Bishop Manning refused to sanction the marriage and, rather than leave the Church, Grant broke off the engagement. Mrs. Lydig felt she had been betrayed, suffering deep disillusionment.

  When I met her in New York in 1928, less than a year before her death, her skin was still as smooth as that of a gardenia. I was surprised to see that even during the daytime she wore the bodice of her black velvet dress cut audaciously low, revealing a considerable portion of her pearly, globose bosom. The effect was particularly startling at a time when fashion dictated that women should be flat-chested. I remember that her movements were sharp and brittle, that she had the rare quality to shine, reminding me of a large china cat.

  I did not realize she was suffering at that time from a mortal illness that caused her great physical pain. During an operation an electric pad on which she was lying had short-circuited, burning her so badly that the wound never healed. She was unable to lie on her back. Yet even in the bouts of unspeakable suffering she never accused or complained, saying “Accidents can happen to anyone. Suffering can be overcome by all, and it only makes us stronger.” The victim of careless and unscrupulous doctors, Mrs. Lydig had become dependent on morphine.

  The final years of suffering ended in October of 1919, when she died at the Gotham Hotel in New York City, with her sister Mercedes near her. Towards the end Rita Lydig had become reconciled with the Catholic Church, possibly as much for the sake of her Spanish forbears as for spiritual reasons. Spain, indeed, must have been much on her mind. As she lay dying, Mercedes lifted her fan to her. Lethargically Mrs. Lydig asked, “What are you doing?”

  “I am only fanning you,” her sister replied.

  “Is it a Spanish fan?” she asked. They were her last words.

  After her death her sister gave a wonderful collection of Mrs. Lydig’s personal belongings to the New York Metropolitan and Brooklyn museums. There all the details of her extraordinarily personal wardrobe are tended with the care they deserve. Although her clothes belonged to a period now somewhat piquant in our eyes, of matinee hats and cloaks, of the New York and Paris of the First World War years, they have a timeless character that is essentially Spanish, austere and uncompromising, a character which, in fact, has much in common with that of the Spaniard Balenciaga, the great dressmaker of today.

  Like all great personalities, Mrs. Lydig was the target of much gossip and censure. Yet there is no one who denies her the quality of distinction. The painter Sargent said that she had the grace and beauty of the Old World and the courage and spirit of the New. Frank Crowninshield was to write of her: “With her beauty, her allure, her personal extravaganzas, and the long succession of tragedies that befell her, she was not, in her essence, a true embodiment of the time. She belonged rather to the days (and the novels) of Balzac, to the pages of Turgenev, the stores of Maupassant. There was even, in her battle with destiny, a haunting suggestion of the tortured and heartbroken Emma Bovary.” Crowninshield also compared her to Balzac’s Duchesse de Langeais; and, with her wealth, her romantic flair, and her religious fervor, the comparison is apt.

  Frederick MacMonnies, the sculptor, added his own eulogy: “Few of us ignore the majesty of seeming realities and the powers that seem to be … she lived her own life in her own beneficent way, heedless of criterion … she became a perfected personality, radiant, individual, of consummate style and judgment, a delicious comrade for any emergency, in fact, a masterpiece of civilization.”

  CHAPTER VIII

  THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE DAMNED

  THERE HAS been no period in my lifetime more abused, more ridiculed, more hailed as damned, ugly, and wild than the twenties. Perhaps I am rare among my contemporaries in finding that the period was, on the whole, remarkable and vital. If we try to re-examine it, we find it was in some ways like the one we are now passing through—a post-war period marked by restlessness and diversion-seeking. In literature the first “lost generation” was in command. Many people were building their lives on false, shifting, materialistic, childishly romantic, or epicurean values
. Women were cutting their hair short, as they do today, and if skirts were up to the knees, whereas today they are down to the calf, it may be merely due to the fact that the Second World War created a hiatus in fashion such as did not occur in the year from 1914 to 1918.

  There were beauties in the world too. I am of the opinion that styles are at no period really unbecoming. If a woman adheres to the proportions and the formula of a given epoch, she will acquire an allure, a feeling of rightness that makes her sense she is attuned to and in equilibrium with the times. By embracing a particular fashion and using it with an instinctive feeling for its organic relationship to the moment, she can make it her destiny.

  To me the fashions of the twenties are infinitely alluring. Looking through a fashion magazine of 1926 or 1927, one is above all struck by the simplicity of line with which the fashion illustrators sketched those longer-than-life ladies who, with their short, tubular dresses, cigarettes in long holders, cloche hats, bobbed hair, plucked eyebrows, bands of diamond bracelets from wrist to elbow, and earrings hanging like fuchsias, symbolized the visual aspect of the period.

  For all of the deleterious values that are generally associated with the decade of the Green Hat and Our Dancing Daughters, bathtub gin, speed, the precipice-bound excitement of youth, gangsters, and immorality, some people seem to forget that it was also a period of immense creativeness. Since then we can point to few writers, actors, artists, or cinema stars whose personal contributions have been so great. Literature produced Huxley, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Thornton Wilder; the films created stars—Garbo, Gloria Swanson, Charlie Chaplin—of a magnitude never since equalled. Art yielded Dadaism, the post-cubist period of Picasso, Klee, the German expressionists, and Brancusi; sport was represented by Suzanne Lenglen, playing incredible tennis and looking hideously chic in a knee-length shift, her head bound up in a sunset-coloured turban. In the theatre, Noel Coward, Gertrude Lawrence, Helen Hayes, Pirandello, and Eugene O’Neill were exercising their literary or dramatic talents.