All We Know: Three Lives

by Lisa Cohen

  If Vogue succeeded in the United States by targeting an elite demographic and pioneered using marketing that limited appeal rather than trying to reach everyone, it nevertheless, as Nast knew, could work only by a double standard. On the one hand, he wrote, “the publisher, the editor, the advertising manager and circulation man must conspire not only to get all their readers from the one particular class to which the magazine is dedicated, but rigorously to exclude all others.” On the other, the magazine must “attract readers who did not yet belong to the class which he had chosen, but who aspired to it.” He and Chase thought that British Vogue had neglected the service elements of the magazine (“Seen in the Shops, Smart Fashions for Limited Incomes, and the Hostess and Beauty articles”), which were attempts to attract this second group of readers. Dody and Madge, however, interpreted the “apparent taste of the British public” as what they should like and what they did not yet know they wanted (as Vreeland did in the 1960s at American Vogue). Still, the idea that made Vogue a success in the United States (we shall cater to those with money while presenting the high life for the aspirations of the middle class) may not have been viable yet in England, with its more rigid understanding of social class.

  Nast and Chase also accused Dody of failing to turn a profit. But the magazine had lost money for years before her tenure, and Nast had often been on the verge of abandoning the whole venture. Most recently, British Vogue had struggled through the crisis of the General Strike of 1926, when production and transportation were shut down all over England. Still, if Dody was a brilliant editor she was probably not a good manager. Edna Chase had appeared in London more than once during her tenure, trying to whip the staff into shape. Harry Yoxall, who found Dody stimulating if difficult, was startled by her swings of temper in the office and described her borrowing money from him in order to invite someone else to lunch. Madge suggested at the end of her life that Dody had mishandled Nast’s money. But she also said, “The world was changing and he [Nast] wanted much more space given to commerce. In those days, I’d never been inside a store. It was quite another world. We went only to court dressmakers.”

  In September 1926, Yoxall fired Dody, on instructions from Nast, who was himself invariably “difficult to find” when “situations became too fraught,” as Madge later observed. Several days later, Yoxall dismissed Madge; he referred to her in his diary as “Miss McHarg (Mrs. Garland), the maîtresse en titre” (favorite or official mistress). Yoxall had written to Nast, annoyed at Todd’s “prolonged absence at a crucial time, with all her fashion staff too” (a reference to Madge), and he had long been troubled by the difficult “play of personalities” in the office, but he had never expected “such drastic consequences” to follow his complaint. Yet he also said he believed that both firings “should have been done long ago, and would have been but for Nast’s fatal procrastination when any unpleasant doing or thinking is required.” Musing on Dody’s personality, he predicted that she would “end on the Embankment [i.e., in the gutter] one of these days, or in some similar situation.” Dody consulted a lawyer, who advised her to threaten a suit to obtain a settlement for breach of contract. Nast and Yoxall responded by threatening to publicly attack her “morals.” Trying to protect herself, her daughter, and Madge, she backed off. “For details of the Todd developments see files of my private correspondence with Nast,” Yoxall noted in his diary in November 1926—but we cannot see; these files have not survived.

  “This affair has assumed in Bloomsbury the proportions of a political rupture,” Vita Sackville-West wrote to her husband, Harold Nicolson. “It is said,” Virginia Woolf wrote to Vanessa Bell, “that Condé Nast threatened to reveal Todds [sic] private sins, if she sued them, so she is taking £1000, and does not bring an action.” “So poor Todd is silenced,” wrote Sackville-West, “since her morals are of the classic rather than the conventional order.” Other Vogue staff resigned in protest; contributors threatened to stop writing for the magazine; and Chase got to work hiring a new editor, Alison Settle, and “immediately…transforming her into the correct image of a Vogue representative.” Chase recalled the firing and its after effects in inflated, sexual terms: “The lady [Dody] had a forceful personality and the sound of the wrench, when it came, reverberated from London to New York and back again. When the long, shuddering roar finally subsided we were weak, Toddless, but headed for the Nast formula.” Contemporaries, such as Sackville-West, who shared Dody’s “classic” proclivities understood Nast’s threat as referring to her lesbianism, which implicated Madge. Reviewing Carolyn Seebohm’s biography of Condé Nast in 1982, Madge wrote that “in the days when homosexuality was a criminal offence he was not above using the threat of disclosure to avoid paying up for a broken contract.” But describing this period to Hilary Spurling several years later, she said that Nast had been aware of Helen—perhaps guarding her own privacy by attributing Nast’s intimidation to a potential revelation about Dody’s illegitimate child. Homosexuality was never a criminal offense for women in England, but the threat—I will bring your private life into public view—was real. These are the vicious mechanics of discretion: the extent to which it is possible to be disgraced by the “exposure” of facts that are already evident.

  Dody and Madge had not only orchestrated the publicity of people whose work they admired, but had also become public figures who provoked sexual gossip on Fleet Street, London’s grubby, male newspaper world. Their cachet as a powerful couple, the visibility of their ménage, and the contrast of their styles—one young, thin, and blond; the other older, heavier, and dark—impressed some and distressed others, but always incited comment. “A Garden is a lovesome thing, God wot [knows],” wrote the nineteenth-century poet Thomas Brown, and in the 1920s someone rang a change on the line: “A Garland is a lovesome thing, Todd wot.” Dody was referred to as “Das Tod das Maedchens” (The Death of the Maidens). And there was a “joke”: “‘What is a Sapphist?’ ‘A Doderast who practices Todomy.’” The question of what a Sapphist might be troubled the air in England between the 1918 libel suit the dancer Maud Allan brought against a newspaper that alleged she was a lesbian and the 1928 obscenity trial against Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. The question was part of a relatively new way of thinking about sex—the idea that a lesbian was a particular type of person—that was making certain women newly visible, or visible in new ways.

  Madge and Dody’s own crowd mixed an exhilarating sexual openness with fear of exposure, excelled at innuendo, and took the kind of pleasure at in-jokes that can only be had when a simultaneous vigilance about and disdain for appearances is the rule. Cecil Beaton’s diaries capture the catty tone of their milieu and the extent to which the two were sources of fascination and revulsion. Sometimes Dody is “that filthy Editor of Vogue” who “has got an objectionable face…like a sea lion,” and Madge is “her bit” on the side. At others they are “Miss Todd the Vogue Queen with that nice little Madge Garland.” Frederick Ashton was so dazzled by Madge and Dody that he included two characters based on them in his first ballet, the 1926 A Tragedy of Fashion. Madge called this dance “a brilliant evocation of the period” that reflected “not only the physical appearance, but the whole tonality of my youth.” The pair in this dance—one figure outrageously butch, the other sinuously feminine: no more stylized than Madge and Dody themselves—was a bold answer to what a Sapphist was. But while the term clearly attached to Dody and her “mannish” style, it applied to Madge, whose self-presentation conformed to her gender, in more elusive ways. Her visibility was the unspoken part of what concerned Nast and Chase.

  The firing devastated both women. They had occupied positions of cultural power; now they were unemployed, tainted by scandal, and so virtually unemployable. Bloomsbury did not shun them, but they were ostentatiously avoided by many other former colleagues and friends, some of whom were afraid of having their own homosexuality exposed. When Madge walked down the street, people crossed away from her. But she did not retreat.
She and Dody held on to the flat on the Royal Hospital Road, and Yoxall was stunned to see them out at the ballet a month or two after the firing, “both looking very full of life, and both very gaily dressed.” They made plans to start a magazine of their own. “Fashion Miss Todd all but eschewed,” Chase had argued, as if Vogue were simply the vehicle for Dody’s “real” interests in art and literature. Yet the plan for the new magazine—it was “to be Vogue, only quarterly,” with Dody as editor and Madge second in command—suggests that fashion was important to both of them, and not only for advertising revenue. Beaton was upset about the turn British Vogue had taken under Alison Settle (and Chase’s firm hand). They were “trying hard to make the magazine like a woman’s pictorial,” and he did his best to be affiliated with Madge and Dody’s new venture, to which Raymond Mortimer and others had already been recruited. He had them to lunch several times, along with Edith Sitwell (who wore “a black toque from which fell masses of black lace, and a tweed dress”) and several of the other queer young men who supported them: Dadie Rylands, Steven Runciman, the poet Brian Howard. “I wanted to impress her [Madge] with some of my photos,” Beaton wrote, but “she talked hard—hard without ceasing—about Brancusi and Vogue—& how badly they’d been treated…She, of course, was smarting with the injustice…She says she was given the sack by Condé Nast for making Vogue too highbrow too Bloomsbury. They published pictures of obscure actors and actresses.” Madge’s talk was “all very smart & intellectual & terrifically Vogue.” After lunch, he photographed her in her “coat & claret-coloured skirt & hat & flower.”

  While Madge scrambled for freelance journalism, Dody worked on a survey of modernist design in England, Europe, and the United States, The New Interior Decoration, which she eventually asked Raymond Mortimer to write with her. They still entertained. At a crowded cocktail party at the Royal Hospital Road flat in the autumn of 1926, Beaton noted that “Todd was a little nervous & shaky at first but later became normal.” But by early 1928 they still did not have funding for the new magazine, and the strain was starting to show. Friends saw them bicker, having “rows in front of everybody and Dody really behaving like a sort of Victorian father—you know, ‘Do this, do that,’ ‘I won’t do this, I won’t do that,’—and poor Madge…dissolving into tears and crying for hours.” Elspeth Champcommunal, who showed her collections with Nicole Groult in London in the late 1920s, became a refuge. Madge arrived at a party at Champco’s country house in Provence one afternoon “in a state of devastation” about Dody, “dressed in a scarlet dress with pearl buttons all the way down the front, and an Eton collar, bright gold hair, and very tearful.”

  Woolf was hyperbolically critical at this time, describing Todd as grotesque: “like some primeval animal emerging from the swamp, muddy, hirsute.” After Dody and Madge had Woolf to lunch to introduce her to Rebecca West in the spring of 1928, she wrote, “The Todd ménage is incredibly louche: Todd in sponge bag trousers; Garland in pearls and silk; both rather raddled and on their beam ends.” This description is for Vanessa Bell’s entertainment. In her diary, Woolf wrote, “Todd’s room; rather to her credit, work-manlike; Garland pear[l] hung & silken; Todd as buxom as a badger. Rebecca a hardened old reprobate I daresay, but no fool; & the whole atmosphere professional; no charm, except the rather excessive charm of Garland.” Rebecca West, however, remembered the lunch lasting till nearly five o’clock.

  If Madge had been unprepared for the firing, she was completely unmoored by what happened next. Increasingly, she came home to find Dody passed out with an empty whiskey bottle beside her. Then the bills started coming in from businesses all over London—florists, dressmakers, galleries, restaurants—and she was confronted with Dody’s catastrophic handling of money. “She had been running up bills” for years “on a scale that was almost lunatic,” Madge said. “She begged and borrowed from her friends.” A painting by Vuillard that she had given Madge for her birthday was reclaimed by the gallery, as was a Duncan Grant portrait. Madge learned that Dody had used her name at a number of establishments, including when buying clothes for Helen, so that some of this debt was literally hers. The deception was terrible; the fact that Dody had committed it at “stores”—middle-class establishments—that Madge had never even entered made it even more baffling and humiliating. In this way, Ruthella Todd’s destructive legacy became real to Madge, and she began to think of Dody’s character as an inheritance from her “gambling mother.” She said, “Condé Nast didn’t realize it in time—he saw the brilliance—he didn’t see the instability. It was awful.” She did not say that she herself had not seen it in time.

  Forced to settle the bills in her own name, Madge also cleared Dody’s debts over the next four years, feeling that she owed it to her. In the meantime, nearly everything they owned, and those things they had merely appeared to own, was seized by bailiffs. In a draft of her memoir, not identifying Dody, Madge wrote, “I had never thought of keeping a record of the things I had paid for myself and so in the bankruptcy of my friend the entire contents of the house, which was in her name, vanished.” A kind daily servant hid some of Madge’s books, keeping them safe for the next several years. Her dresses were all that was left: “So now once again I was homeless, penniless,” she wrote; “only a few lovely and rather inappropriate clothes remained.”

  To Remake My Career

  Long after her separation from Dody and even decades after Dody’s death, Madge was haunted by her. Yet it was her ability to distance herself from Dody that made it possible to get by. “Dody went downhill, you might say,” recalled Chloe Tyner. “And Madge, she soared uphill. She had to fight very, very hard. But she was able to do it because her manners were better and she managed to always look charming.” For the rest of her life, there were people who would not acknowledge Madge, because the two had been lovers and because of Dody’s disgrace. As the student outstripped the teacher, there were also those who thought ill of Madge because they believed she had used Dody to get ahead. As she retreated from London, reemerged, and continually refashioned herself, her ability to wear clothes well and her understanding of what she and others wore were signs of her debt to Dody and of her own distinctiveness.

  Escaping the end of their life together, Madge went with Ted Mc Knight Kauffer and Marion Dorn to stay at Vanessa Bell’s house in Cassis; she treasured a painting Kauffer made of the place during that stay, which he gave her. Soon afterward, she moved to France, where “it was much cheaper and easier to be poor than in London.” She occasionally found work reporting for provincial English papers about the collections at the couture houses where she still had contacts. She lived “almost anywhere,” subsisted on yogurt and vegetables, and often shared these “miserable meals” with the painter and theater designer Sophie Fedorovitch, who had done the set and costumes for A Tragedy of Fashion. A “remarkable small woman with short fair hair and very keen blue eyes,” Fedorovitch was the daughter of Polish gentry, had studied painting in Russia, survived the Revolution, then escaped to London after almost starving to death. Madge and she shared an instinct for textiles and clothes; they may have shared a bed. (“One night we slept on the floor in somebody’s flat,” Madge recalled.) Despite Fedorovitch’s own “sober habit,” wrote a friend, “she loved…beautiful clothes on other women” and she had a real “feeling for ethereal fabrics on the stage.” When Fedorovitch moved back to London, she continued to work closely with Ashton over several decades; he called her “my greatest artistic collaborator and adviser.” In Paris she sometimes worked as a taxi driver—which many Russian émigrés did, but not many women did—and she memorialized this pinched time with Madge in a still life of a carafe and a glass of water—a joke, since they could seldom afford to drink wine. Madge and she often spent evenings in some basement boîte, “drinking tea and singing Russian songs till all hours.” Madge would meet Janet Flanner at Les Deux Magots and sometimes accompanied Flanner when she filed her copy for The New Yorker, putting it on the last, late-night train to
the coast to meet a boat to New York. Virgil Thomson brought her to meet Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas; she heard him play “the early beginnings” of Four Saints in Three Acts at another friend’s house.

  Summer in Cannes (MGP)

  She spent a summer in Cannes, where her flat, in the rue d’Antibes, was devoid of furniture other than a bed. She had no money to furnish the place, so she asked the artist John Banting to paint images of tables and chairs on the walls. It was still a relative novelty to spend the summer in the South of France, and the Cap d’Antibes, as she said, offered a new “way of life and dress.” She wore sailor pants, a striped top, and espadrilles. She wore these trousers with a white singlet, tennis shoes, and a sailor cap at a jaunty angle. Or she was in a Chanel dress, and well shod. That new way of life had to do with being part of a critical mass of independent women, the first generation that was moneyed and had left home without marrying. In one series of snapshots taken in her flat, Madge and a group of friends lounge theatrically on her bed. What is pictured, the feeling arrested there: the ease with which they are tumbled together, the looks among them and at the camera, the sense of shared leisure and pleasure.