All We Know: Three Lives

by Lisa Cohen

  Soon after she met Dody, Madge learned that she was the guardian of a teenage girl called Helen, her niece, the orphan child of her brother Eric, who had been killed in the April 1917 Arras offensive of the Great War. In fact, Helen was Dody’s own illegitimate daughter, born in Paris in 1905, when Dody was twenty-two. The child’s origins were hidden from almost everyone—even, and most disastrously, from Helen herself: Although she grew up with Dody, she always believed her to be her aunt. It is unclear how Dody explained her responsibility for Helen in the twelve years before her brother’s death. The secret of the girl’s parentage was sometimes implied but never discussed, even among Dody’s closest friends. “I never heard who her father was,” said Chloe Tyner; “I never heard who her mother was. We didn’t talk about such things.” For a long time, Madge could not understand why Dody took so much trouble with Helen, who lived with them when she was not away at school and then university. Nine years older, but still running away from her charmless childhood self, Madge resented not just the girl’s presence but the fact that when she was absent she was getting the education Madge had wanted for herself. To Helen, Madge was just another of “the innumerable young ladies”—Dody’s girlfriends—“who stayed with us.”

  In Paris in October 1905, Ruthella Todd and a man named Harry Lukach had registered Helen’s birth at the mairie of the Sixteenth Arrondissement, testifying that they had been witnesses to the birth of “Dorothy Thompson,” the child of an unnamed father and mother (“fille de père et mère non dénommés”). As a result of her place of birth and unspecified parentage, Helen was considered a French citizen. Six months later, she was baptized in London. On this document she was identified as Dorothy Helen Todd, and her mother as Dorothy Todd; Eric Todd stood as one of her godparents. Dody was able to procure her daughter an English passport and citizenship by claiming that she had been born in Toronto—another fiction Helen grew up believing. The other half of Helen’s parentage is unknown. In 1915 a public trust was set up for her and Dody; money from this fund materialized at odd intervals for years, almost until Dody’s death. Helen later believed that it had been provided by Lukach, an American businessman resident in London who was almost certainly Ruthella’s lover. The Todd and Lukach families had known each other well for years. They were neighbors in London and in Brighton, and Eric Todd and Lukach’s son were at Eton together. After Christopher Todd’s death, Ruthella left the Cromwell Road house and lived either at or adjacent to various addresses in Piccadilly at which Lukach also lived.

  As an adult, Helen’s interpretation of her origins was informed by her bitterness toward Dody, her experience of Dody’s interference in her life, and her belief that Dody made it a habit to disrupt couples; she had watched her mother’s lovers regularly move in with them and then return to their husbands as she was growing up. She believed that Dody had enticed Lukach away from Ruthella, and that he was her father. But Helen also left a record of Ruthella’s incapacity and dissipation that suggests another version of the story. As a child of nine, she had been left with Ruthella while Dody was in the United States, and she wrote that she became “accustomed to drunkenness from an early age.” She knew about her grandmother’s gambling habit and saw her lie in bed shaken by delirium tremens. (The gambling and the drinking continued until Ruthella’s death in January 1924, when she was hit by a car at the entrance to Hyde Park.) Helen’s son, the writer Olivier Todd, knowing this history, less resentful of Dody, and finding it impossible to imagine Dody inviting a man’s advances, believes that Lukach may have molested her. Certainly a woman as out of control as Ruthella Todd would have been incapable of protecting her daughter from Lukach or anyone else. She may have allowed Lukach to use her daughter, or tried to hold on to him by making him a gift of Dody. A distorted concern that Dody was a lesbian may have made it easier for her to sanction such a liaison. None of these possibilities particularly rules out the others.

  Dody’s rapport with Helen was fraught at best, an impossible mixture of repudiation and commitment. For a woman in her social position—from a family once monied and respectable, now tenuously so because of Ruthella’s excesses—the stigma of bearing an illegitimate child and the difficulty of raising her alone was immense, even in the more open milieu in which she moved in the 1920s. Rebecca West, who lived openly with H. G. Wells and had Wells’s child; who did not hide the circumstances of her son’s birth (some ten years after Helen’s); and who, like Dody, refused to compromise with convention in all sorts of ways, nevertheless suffered acutely: “People disapproved of H.G. so much less than they did of me,” she said; “they were very horrible to me, and it was very hard.” The resolutely bohemian Vanessa Bell, still married to Clive Bell, but living with the mostly homosexual Duncan Grant, was incapable of honesty with the daughter she had with Grant, not telling her that he was her father until she was forced to. Dody never went out of her way to lie when it came to her desire for women—she never married to make herself more acceptable socially, unlike many contemporaries who preferred their own sex—but she found it almost impossible to acknowledge that she had a child and she treated her daughter in private as the liability she was in her public life. She cared about Helen, never gave her up, always provided for her, but faulted everything about her, holding on to a place at the center of Helen’s life while keeping her at a distance. Helen’s illegitimacy would always have meant that she was a vexed part of Dody’s life, but Dody’s charged ambivalence—love, disgust, neglect, frantic overinvolvement—make it plausible that her daughter was conceived in a violence and betrayal that were unresolved and irresolvable.

  Helen was predictably angry and insecure, wanted a “normal” family life, and couldn’t understand why “Dodo,” as she called her, “who didn’t particularly like children, [would] have adopted a niece.” As a student at Somerville College, Oxford, in the late 1920s, she fled Dody, her education, and England for Paris, where she promptly had her own child out of wedlock. In 1929 or ’30, Madge and Janet Flanner, sitting at the café Les Deux Magots, saw Helen walk by with her infant son. “I see Dody’s niece has had a niece,” Flanner quipped. It was not until the 1930s or ’40s that Dody told Helen that she was her mother, saying roughly that she “should have felt” it all along. It was not until 1946 that Dody officially acknowledged her, registering her as her legitimate offspring at the French consulate in London, thus making it possible for the document that had recorded Helen’s birth in Paris to be amended. But this legal recognition changed little privately; the two women were bound in mutual incomprehension and dependence their whole lives. Dody was proud of her grandson, Olivier, in a way that she never could be of her daughter, but she still introduced him to friends as her grand-nephew.

  It was with this complex person that Madge fell in love, with this household that she allied herself when she left Ewart Garland. But for a long time, preoccupied with her own progress, she saw only Dody’s allure, not her instability. As far as Madge was concerned, she had finally found her place. Of the troubled end of their affair, she said, “Other people will say she ruined my life, she ruined my marriage, she gave me a terrible time. To hell. I have no regrets at all. She fostered me and helped me. She opened many doors. I repaid that debt in full, because I supported her in later life. But I owed her more than I could ever repay.”

  Edna Woolman Chase, the keeper of the Vogue flame, later insisted that Dody’s tenure as editor was marked by too little care about the place of fashion in the magazine. But Dorothy Todd, working with Madge, was the first person in England to combine high fashion, high art, and journalism. “It was entirely Dody Todd who put Vogue on the map in London,” Madge said, making it “for about four years the mouthpiece of literary and artistic London.” Madge herself was a key ingredient—inspiration, labor, support, collaborator, incarnation of the idea. There had been other young women in Dody’s life, but Madge was her equal. Together they made a fashion magazine that invested in, explained, and created the English and French av
ant-garde as a fashionable world, representing haute couture, painting, photography, literature, theater, modern design, and good food as part of the same excitement, and treating all as elements of celebrity. As a recipe for a magazine, these ingredients are now commonplace. At the time, it was unprecedented. In the early 1970s, Rebecca West called Madge and Dody “two very remarkable women” who “changed Vogue from just another fashion paper to being the best of fashion papers and a guide to the modern movement in the arts.” Transforming British Vogue, they were arbiters of a new kind of taste, mixing the outré with the respectable, bohemia and “Society.” Their rendering of the magazine also made it clear that both high fashion and the high art with which they were surrounding it depended on the idea of novelty.

  Madge and Dody (MGP)

  Chase and Nast had brought Dody to New York to groom her, but when they sent her back to London to take charge of the magazine, it was “not only [to] London, as it turned out,” Chase sniffed, “but a very specialized district thereof. Naturally of a literary and artistic bent she soon became at home in the coterie of English intellectuals and artists known as the Bloomsbury Group.” In fact, Dody had been influenced by Frank Crowninshield’s Vanity Fair in New York as well, but Bloomsbury, broadly speaking, was a key to and a beneficiary of her editorship. Clive Bell now wrote art criticism for British Vogue; the poet Richard Aldington and the young critic Raymond Mortimer reviewed books (replacing Aldous Huxley); Woolf published several essays, as did Vita Sackville-West and Mary Hutchinson (writing as “Polly Flinders”); Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant’s interior decorations were on display, as was the work of the painter and graphic artist Edward McKnight Kauffer and of his companion, the artist and textile designer Marion Dorn. The magazine published Edith Sitwell’s poems. The focus was also newly international. Fashion had always looked to Paris, but British Vogue now showed Man Ray’s “rayographs” and “helped Roger Fry in firmly planting the Post-Impressionists in English soil,” as Rebecca West wrote. Madge and Dody “brought us all the good news about Picasso and Matisse and Derain and Bonnard and Proust and…Raymond Radiguet and Louis Jouvet and Arletty and the gorgeous young Jean Marais.” They were the first in England to publish Cocteau’s painting, Gertrude Stein’s writing, and photographs of Le Corbusier’s architecture, as even Chase acknowledged. The feature “We Nominate for the Hall of Fame” (borrowed from Vanity Fair) was a way to applaud people as diverse as Sigmund Freud, Marianne Moore, and Bertrand Russell, conferring celebrity status on high art and intellectual work.

  This inclusiveness and productive juxtaposition—presenting a range of work in the magazine and making connections among people—opened and improved the insular, segmented worlds of English art and fashion. What Dody did for Madge—instructing her and lifting her into public view—the two of them and Vogue did for others, established and fledgling. For already recognized artists, it was a new kind of fame. “Vogue,” Woolf wrote in her diary, “is going to take up Mrs Woolf, to boom her.” Gertrude Stein credited Dody with arranging her 1925 introduction to Edith Sitwell, who had written an “enthusiastic” article about Stein’s Geography and Plays for the magazine. Sitwell then became the emissary who persuaded Stein to lecture at Cambridge and Oxford in the summer of 1926. After Stein delivered her talk, “Composition as Explanation,” Leonard and Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press published it. Vogue also gave many young English writers and artists their initial exposure. Cecil Beaton credited Dody with first encouraging him. Madge was his entrée and one of his earliest photographic subjects.

  Her thinness was now de rigueur (MGP)

  Where Madge had been faulted she was now accepted, and she acquired a poised and even thrilling presence. Her thinness, previously a mark of ill health, was de rigueur by the mid-1920s. She attended the Paris collections and was able to buy couture clothing because she had access to the more affordable designers’ samples, which fit her. “She…could have been a model,” said Rebecca West, “had she not” been “a connoisseur of the first water.” British Vogue did not yet have its own photography studio and most often used the team of Maurice Beck and Helen Macgregor. Watching them work in their mews studio, Madge learned how to hold herself and how to face a camera. She began directing the shoots of models and clothing, and of the actors, writers, and artists now being featured in the magazine. Visiting other artists’ studios, she became friends with the people she met—in London with Ted McKnight Kauffer and Marion Dorn, and with the young painter, decorator, and textile designer Allan Walton; in Paris, with Man Ray and Lee Miller, with Nicole and André Groult, and with their friend Marie Laurencin, whose book illustrations, theater costumes, and textile, carpet, and wallpaper designs were as admired as her paintings.

  She was studying. In Paris, she sat and watched Brancusi at work; on breaks, he made them omelets on his studio stove. In London, at tea parties at Edith Sitwell’s “perfectly repellent Bayswater flat…very unlike the elegancies of the brothers’ [Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell’s] house in Carlyle Square,” she made the tea and passed the cakes and bread and butter (so did a young John Rothenstein, later head of the Tate Gallery), taking in the conversation while her elders spoke. Her eye for art impressed the directors of the Leicester Galleries and Agnew’s, who introduced her to the work they owned and represented, gave her lists of paintings to look at in London and abroad, and quizzed her on what she had seen when she returned. When Miss McHarg went to see Gertrude Stein, the writer in her “downright forthright manner” told Madge that her surname was unappealing and asked if she had another. There was her husband’s, Madge replied, but they were separated and she had never used it. Do, Stein counseled. From then on, she was Madge Garland.

  Some of Madge’s work at this time—organizing, coordinating, advising, and making connections among people—integral then, is difficult to pinpoint now. The fact that she was professionally subordinate to Dody means that a number of contemporary references to Dody refer to her as well. (Again, the lack of a masthead on the magazine is part of this problem of attribution.) But at some point in the mid-1920s she was made the fashion editor of British Vogue. She became known for dressing others—the anonymous women who read the magazine pages she produced, but also her friends in haute bohemia: the writer Violet Powell, wife of novelist Anthony Powell; Clive Bell’s mistress Benita Jaeger, who did her hair and dressed according to Madge’s prescription, “her curly hair cut short…and wearing a Lanvin evening dress which plunged daringly low at the back”; and Virginia Woolf.

  To up-and-coming young gay men such as Cecil Beaton, George “Dadie” Rylands, and Steven Runciman, how Madge looked and what she thought mattered. She was more experienced and sophisticated than they, despite her lack of a university education. They were cowed by Dody, who was, in Raymond Mortimer’s words, “a very forcible lady,” but Madge encouraged them and was in a position to help with access to a world that was now hers. She brought Runciman, later a leading historian of Byzantium, to parties. When Rylands, then knocking about Bloomsbury, needed money, she got him a job as a model; for a time this future Cambridge don was visible on the sides of buses in a cigarette advertisement. To Beaton, who never tired of pronouncing on women’s beauty, Madge invariably “looked charming—extremely chic. She’s so thin and wears her dresses wonderfully well.” As an undergraduate at Cambridge, Beaton and other aspiring sophisticates had waited eagerly for each new issue of Vogue, which “was received as an event of importance.” Back in London, desperate to extricate himself from his middle-class family and increasingly savvy about how to use publicity and his nascent photographic skills to do so, he was highly attuned to the doings of what he called “the Vogue gang” and always hoping to find a way to impress Madge and Dody so they would publish his photographs. To foster his anxious social advance, “he concentrated,” notes his biographer Hugo Vickers, “on Allanah Harper…and Madge Garland.” It was a coup when Madge and Dody attended his parties and lunches, when he was invited to theirs, when h
e danced with Madge, and when she suggested that she might be able to use his sisters as models. It was a thrill when Madge told him “one or two rather indecent stories, typical of Bloomsbury.” A young Anne Scott-James, who joined Vogue in the 1930s after an Oxford education and went on to a long career in journalism, first saw Madge at a party in the 1920s: “She absolutely knocked me out. I’d never seen someone so extraordinary…I kept saying, ‘Who is that? Who is that?’ She was a star.”

  Madge, one of Cecil Beaton’s first subjects, in 1926 (Courtesy of the Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s)

  Treating the magazine as a kind of salon over which they presided, Madge and Dody courted contributors and entertained friends at home and at their favorite restaurant. It was the beginning of Madge’s lifelong practice of connecting people she admired with one another—a habit she pursued to the point that she was “almost like an agency” for bringing people together. She introduced the interior decorator J. Duncan Miller to the photographer, painter, and interior designer Curtis Moffat; the latter had worked with Man Ray in Paris, and in 1925 opened a photography studio with Olivia Wyndham. She introduced the designers Eyre de Lanux and Eve Wyld to Moffat when he opened a gallery in 1929. For a lunch to present a young Sylvia Townsend Warner to Virginia Woolf, both of whom were known to be shy, they asked the restaurateur Marcel Boulestin to prepare the food but serve it at their home on the Royal Hospital Road. Townsend Warner had just published her first novel, Lolly Willowes, whose protagonist is a witch. When Woolf asked how she knew so much about witches, Townsend Warner startled her by answering, “Because I am one.”