I was almost intuitive about horses. I can remember standing on the corner of Seventy-ninth Street and Park Avenue. I’d suddenly say, “Horse, horse, horse!”—and a horse would come around the corner! Naturally, my fixation was practically over by then, but I could smell the oats and the hay coming around the corner. Because there’s quite a steep slope there on the corner, many horses slipped, broke their legs in the snow and ice, and had to be shot. And of course it killed me. Children, you know, are so tragically dramatic. The death of a horse to me was something so terrible—because I didn’t give a damn about anything else. Don’t forget, I still couldn’t speak any intelligible language.
I certainly didn’t give a damn about school. I was sent to the Brearley School. It’s one time in my life I’ve always regretted—fighting my way through the place…. And those goddamn gongs! Everyone knew where to go when the gong went off except me, but I didn’t know whom to ask. I didn’t know anybody, I didn’t know anything—I couldn’t speak. By this time, stuttering had started. You see, I wasn’t allowed to speak French. But you have to talk. You have to say, “I want some bread” or “I want some butter” or “I want to go to the…bathroom”—but I couldn’t say it!
I can remember a teacher named Mrs. McKiver who always used to say, “If you can’t say it, you don’t know it.” You can imagine what that did to me.
So this terrible stuttering began…several doctors were brought in. They said, “Mrs. Dalziel, either she speaks French or English, but right now she’s totally confused. There’s got to be a decision.” English was decided on, which is why I speak such terrible French to this day.
I can remember my mother coming to Mothers’ Day at the Brearley School—you can imagine how much that interested her—and I can recall exactly what she had on. She wore a bright-green tweed suit and a little gold-yellow Tyrolean fedora with a little black feather, gilt at the end, that was short but sharp—I’m talking sharp—and she was very made up. Well, of course, this went around school: “She’s got diphtheria,” or “She’s dying of cholera.” Naturally, I was mortified.
My father was so much easier and closer to us. He was the most wonderful, affectionate man—six foot six…well, by God, there was an Englishman! Six foot and a half. And when he’d meet us at the train station—in those days, of course, you’d travel by train—you’d see him easily in the crowds waiting at the gate, whether it was London, Paris, or New York. He had that thing about him, having to do with a sense of humor, which is the most cleansing thing in the world. He was a raring, tearing beauty, who lived to the age of ninety-three with all his brains and everything…but he really had nothing to do with the modern world at all.
My father had the English accounts for Post and Flagg stockbrokers. I never really knew what a stockbroker did; I’m not sure I do now. He was in business after World War I, so I mean…where was the money? He never had any money, never made any money, never thought about money; it killed my mother, who was American, though she was very European. She saw things rather square, which most women do. You know, women are squares. I mean, it’s very important. Women do care that their children have something to eat. Husbands aren’t so concerned. Supposing you were my husband: you might well say, “Oh, I’ll see you in a couple of weeks, I’m off. I don’t quite know where I’m going.”
Well, Brearley kept me for three months, and then they told my mother, “Mrs. Dalziel, she’s not…us!” And I certainly wasn’t. I was looking for something Brearley couldn’t offer.
I discovered dancing. I was taken out of Brearley and sent to dancing school, and I adored it. It was the only school they could keep me in. I was with the Russians—first Michel Fokine, the only Imperial ballet master to ever leave Russia, and later with Chalif.
I did Pavlova’s Gavotte at Carnegie Hall. In the Metropolitan Museum we have a delicious figurine by Malvina Hoffman showing Pavlova doing the Gavotte. I did it alone, on the great stage, but it certainly wasn’t any grand’chose. Don’t think the house got up and stormed the stage or anything—we were just the pupils of Chalif. But the Gavotte is so pretty. I remember coming forward in an aigre pois dress held out to here and a deep poke bonnet. I was alone doing this and I was terrified. I only wanted the joy of interpreting the dance—the Gavotte—but realizing that I was being seen, I suffered, as only the very young can suffer, the torture of being conspicuous.
I was also taught The Dying Swan, which is the most extraordinary thing because of the tremor that goes through this creature. In the most extreme positions one leg goes out, out, out, and then the head comes down, down, down, and the body is moving, quivering, in a death spasm…oh, it’s too beautiful! It’s beauty that’s leaving the world…. Of course, it was the most wonderful education for a young girl, because I had to interpret it for myself.
Someone once told me that Pavlova learned The Dying Swan from watching a swan die in Southampton. I’ve since learned that Pavlova came to the United States after the choreography of The Dying Swan. But it’s a nice story, and I could very well believe it. I spent so many years of my life on that Southampton beach in the marvelous summer air. Every rainy day, when I couldn’t be on the beach, I’d walk around the lake, where I used to watch the swans by the hour. The beauty of those swans! Of course, they’re angry beasts, like peacocks; but where peacocks are common, there’s nothing common about swans. The silence of their swimming…you don’t hear it, but you feel it. All I’d hear would be the sound of the rain, but I’d feel that wonderful salt and brine that’s as strong just inland as it is on the beach.
One day in 1917 my sister and I were playing on the beach, as usual, and then we were put to bed. During the night, there was an outbreak of infantile paralysis in Southampton. There was going to be an epidemic on the beach! So that same night we were awakened and dressed and with my mother’s French maid—don’t ask me why it wasn’t an English-speaking nanny—motored for eight hours to Pennsylvania Station, where we were put on a train to Cody, Wyoming. Don’t ask me why Cody was chosen. I suppose my mother had heard of it and it sounded remote and romantic. We didn’t make it to Cody. In Butte, Montana, with a background of roaring copper mines, there was a railroad strike, so we were stuck.
Believe me, the West was still the West then. We were put to bed that night—the French maid, of course, was in hysterics in the next room, not knowing where she was or quite what had happened to her—and we sat at the window, my sister up on a pillow, and looked out onto the street. Everyone was drunk. The men would say “Dance, dance, dance!” and they’d shoot bullets into the ground and dance around them and then they’d say “Dance, dance, dance!” The great thing was to jump. Then they’d shoot bullets through their hats…and sometimes they’d miss. Men were falling over—dead.
Don’t think we were frightened. It was all so totally bizarre. It was a world of which we knew nothing, so it didn’t affect us that much. To this day, anything physical or strange…I can usually pass it off by saying it was a very healthy experience.
Eventually we got to Cody, where my mother joined us. We were there in the wilds with the moose and the bears and the elks and…my word! It was so lonely. I remember lonely men, lonely spaces…I couldn’t stand the loneliness of those cowboys. They weren’t romantic to me. They were just lonely, ordinary guys who used to sing these sad songs around the fire…this may not be sensitive, but it’s as sensitive as I care to get. It wasn’t big-time stuff.
But we did meet Buffalo Bill—he was a bit of all right. Cody was named after him, and if you lived in Cody you knew Colonel Cody—Buffalo Bill. He was essentially an entertainer. But what chic old Bill had! With his beard he looked like Edward VII, and he wore the fringed leather clothes that the hippies all wore in the sixties. By the time we met him, he’d already been received by European royalty and was covered in glory, fringes, gauntlets, and sombreros. To us, he was just an Edwardian gentleman who happened to be in Wyoming, just as we happened to be there.
We stayed wit
h him long after the school year had started. He rode beautifully, and he was so sweet to us, giving us these little Indian ponies which we adored.
My mother’s horse, our two ponies…that was all I had out West…and old Bill. The last time I saw him was when he came to see us off on the train that was to take us back to New York. I can remember standing with my sister at the back of the train with tears pouring down our faces, waving….
I was so lonely in Wyoming. But I think when you’re young you should be a lot with yourself and your sufferings. Then one day you get out where the sun shines and the rain rains and the snow snows, and it all comes together.
It all came together for me when I got back to New York. I went back to dancing school and I didn’t give a damn about anything else. All I’ve ever cared about since is movement, rhythm, being in touch—and discipline. What Fokine taught.
He was a brute. He’d put you at the barre, he’d place his cane under your leg…and if you couldn’t raise your leg high enough, then—whack! One day he tore my leg to ribbons—all the ligaments. It just went. I was laid up with my foot up and my leg up for eight weeks. That was nothing in his life. But he taught me total discipline. And it’s stood me in good stead all my life—it’s forever!
I’m talking about strict rules, bash on, up and away!…still, my dream in life is to come home and think of absolutely nothing. After all, you can’t think all the time. If you think all the time every day of your life, you might as well kill yourself today and be happier tomorrow. I learned this when I was very young. When I discovered dancing, I learned to dream.
CHAPTER FOUR
Japan! When I got to Kyoto, the eighth-century capital of Japan, it was truly a dream come true. Under the pine trees there I felt an element of the centuries as I’d never felt anywhere before in my life. Everything old there is so beautifully maintained. But there’s nothing slow about Kyoto—everyone’s on motorbikes wearing Saint Laurent shirts. What’s extraordinary is the way everything modern fits in with everything old. It’s all a matter of combining. There’s no beginning or end there—only continuity.
God was fair to the Japanese. He gave them no oil, no coal, no diamonds, no gold, no natural resources—nothing! Nothing comes from the island that you can sustain a civilization on. What God gave the Japanese was a sense of style—maintained through the centuries through hard work and the disciplines of ambition.
When I saw the meikis carrying these beautiful umbrellas, walking over these acres of moss in the shadows of a rainy night under these beautiful willow trees with their knees just slightly bent…do you know what meikis are? They’re the girls who are training to be geishas. You’d think that a geisha was made up like a meiki until you knew the difference. A geisha is very tenderly made up, and everything about her hair and her clothing and everything else is very exquisitely done. But everything about a meiki is a great exaggeration—her obi is this wide, her skirt is padded at the bottom with a row this wide, her back panel is out to here; she has very white makeup, very red makeup….
The idea must be that you learn from the exaggeration.
This is a very serious subject with me. I’ve given this a lot of thought. I adore dressing and I adore making up. I adore the procedure—it’s terribly invigorating, both during my getting up in the morning and during my getting ready to go out in the evening. It gives me such pleasure.
I adore artifice. I always have. I remember when I was thirteen or fourteen buying red lacquer in Chinatown for my fingernails.
“What is that?” my mother said. “Where did you get it? Why did you get it?”
“Because,” I said, “I want to be a Chinese princess.”
So I went around with these red red fingernails—you can imagine how big that would have gone over at the Brearley School.
Then…when I’d started going out a few years later, I discovered calcimine. If I was going out—and I went out almost every night—two and a half hours before my escort arrived I’d start with this huge bottle of calcimine (I forget the brand, but it was theatrical stuff)—a sponge…and I’d be totally calcimined from the waist up, out along the arms, the back, the neck, the throat, et cetera, et cetera. I had to do this alone, because my family didn’t take much interest in what I was doing. Then, when my escort and I would get up to dance, he, in his black dinner jacket, would be totally white. I would come off on him. But he’d have to put up with it. It meant nothing to me—I looked like a lily!
On the night of my coming-out party in 1923…was I calcimined that night! I was whiter than white. My dress was white, naturally. And then the reds were something. I had velvet slippers that were lacquer red. I carried red camellias. In those days everyone sent flowers, and I’d received something like fifty bouquets. One huge bouquet of red camellias was from a big-time show person: J. Ringling North. “Circus people…where did you ever meet them?” my mother wanted to know. I told her that for some reason J. Ringling North had taken a fancy to me and sent the red camellias.
My mother disapproved. “You should know,” she said, “that red camellias are what the demimondaines of the nineteenth century carried when they had their periods and thus weren’t available for their man. I don’t think they’re quite…suitable.”
I carried the camellias anyway. They were so beautiful. I had to assume that no one else at the party knew what my mother knew.
I doubt that my mother thought my dress was particularly suitable, either, but there was nothing she could do about it. It was copied from Poiret—white satin with a fringed skirt to give it un peu de mouvement and a pearl-and-diamond stomacher to hold the fringe back before it sprang. It looked like the South Sea Islands—like a hula skirt.
How I miss fringe! Where is fringe today? The fringe was there in the twenties—as it was there in the sixties—because of the dancing, the dancing…the music! I’ve known two great decades in my life, the twenties and the sixties, and I’m always comparing them because of the music. Music is everything, and in those two decades you got something so sharp, so new….
The tango! The tango’s basically the waltz—you’re making a square on the floor all the time—but it’s much more stylized. It’s a certain way of holding your body, holding your head…don’t forget the strength it takes to step out. You had to have a marvelous partner. It’s a fascinating, totally South American dance. One day, when South America comes through, we’ll realize the curious effect it’s had on our culture.
A snob might say, “The tango, for God’s sake—is that culture?”
By the time I was seventeen, I knew what a snob was. I also knew that young snobs didn’t quite get my number. I was much better with Mexican and Argentine gigolos (they weren’t really gigolos—they were just odd ducks around town who liked to dance as much as I did). They were people who knew that I loved clothes, a certain nightlife, and that I loved to do the tango.
This naturally was rather un-understood in New York.
I was considered a bit fast. The story got out. The Colony Club’s right across the street from here. One afternoon a few years ago I was walking with Andy Warhol. I said, “Look over there, Andy. That’s a very select woman’s club.”
Andy said, “Woman’s club? What do they do?”
I said, “Well, I’m not sure. My mother and my grandmother wanted me to join, but I was blackballed, which means you don’t get in.”
“Why?”
“Well, I was considered fast.”
“Fast! Gee. They won’t let you in if you’re fast? What do they do in there?” It was the first time I had ever really heard Andy excited.
I said, “They have their hair done, they dictate letters, they have lunch with each other. It’s lovely…but I’m not a member.”
It never mattered to me. At the time my mother was upset. My grandmother had been one of the original founders. But I was much more interested in going to the nightclubs way downtown—to avoid running into my mother and father—and doing what I loved to do best�
�dancing.
In those days my mother was rather un-understood too. Her flamboyance was rather resented. Whispers would go around: “Look, she’s painted.” She was very made up for those days. But men were infatuated with her. There were many scandals, because she was often involved with somebody. She traveled with a very good-looking Turk named Sadi-Bey who wore a red fez with his suit or his dinner jacket. He was absolutely charming. We usually saw him only at night, and he’d arrive in his dinner jacket with the tassel hanging from the fez down over it. We thought he was the height of chic. Though we weren’t exactly what you’d call a tidy little group, my parents were devoted to each other. Theirs was a very old-fashioned marriage. A little sort of episode like Sadi-Bey and others—that was nothing.
I remember this: my mother wouldn’t have a chauffeur or a footman unless he was infatuated with her—he had to show enormous dazzle for her. Everyone had to or she wasn’t interested. I can remember at one time saying something extraordinary to her like: “You expect every coachman on the block to be in love with you! What’s the matter with you? Don’t you ever cool down?”
But she had to be on stage, often making a show of herself. She’d even flirt with my boyfriends, and occasionally one would fall flat for her. She was quite young and beautiful and amusing and mondaine and splashy, all of which I’m glad I had in my background—now. But I’ve had to live a long time to come to that conclusion.
In my memory, she seems vivid and affectionate and lonely. I think she was someone who was possessed by a great fear. She was even afraid of servants—she was afraid of anything that would disturb anything. Yet she lived only for excitement. When she died, at fifty-two, I think it was because she could find nothing to interest her.
D.V. Page 3