At the same time as Ellis was examining the hair covering Britain’s greatest brains, a Swedish painter was beginning to put into tangible form an image of blonde idealism which was to spread across northern Europe, captivating the hearts and minds of a generation of aspirant blondes. Carl Larsson, born in 1853, came from a poor background in Stockholm and rose, in the manner of fairytale heroes, to become in the early twentieth century one of Europe’s best-loved illustrators of an idyllic happy family life. Larsson painted bright watercolours of his wife, Karin, and their eight blonde children, romping, fishing and picnicking in sun-dappled bliss at the family’s country home outside Stockholm. His work seemed to crystallise the dreams of many millions of Swedes and, outside Sweden, particularly of Germans. Larsson’s publishers sold millions of reproductions of his paintings, which were pinned up in middle- and working-class homes, in nurseries, corridors and country cottages all over northern Europe. His books, too, sold by the hundreds of thousands. For their foreign sales, his publishers concentrated their efforts on Germany, where Nordic writers were enjoying great commercial success. His most famous book for the German market was the ingeniously titled Das Hans in der Sonne (The House in the Sun), which was filled with images of the blonde Larsson children larking about in the sun. This perfectly suited middle-class Germany’s current obsessions with family solidity, health, fresh air, and a ‘simple’ life in the country, as well as their as yet little-acknowledged racial outlook. The book, published in 1909, had an overwhelming reception. As one critic wrote, ‘You don’t discuss Larsson – you love him.’ Larsson won universally positive reviews and was presented, particularly in the provincial press, as the perfect ‘Teuton’, occasionally with racialist overtones. The painter himself matched the Aryan ideal, being tall, blue-eyed and blond.
Larsson began receiving enquiries almost weekly from Austrian and German art dealers wanting to offer reproductions of his watercolours for sale. He had already been feted in some twenty-five separate exhibitions of his work in German art galleries. Massive numbers of reproductions were sold to German buyers and his images appeared regularly in mass-market German magazines. Larsson had tapped a singular nerve in the German psyche with his pure, almost religious portrayal of the blonde ideal.
Larsson’s work, which equated blondeness with special beauty and value, triggered a wealth of subconscious references, among which was the view that the blonde Larssen children were little angels, as sacred and innocent as the pure winged creatures of medieval painting. It may have been a sign of the gloom of the times that angels of a sort began appearing in Britain, too, when the Larsson clan’s popularity was reaching its peak in the 1910s. A form of near-idolatory emerged in Britain focused on the blond hair of innocent and vulnerable young men trapped in the atrocities of war. Their attractions recalled the Victorian imagery of golden-haired boy-knights such as Tennyson’s Galahad, and the beautiful boys of Victorian poetry such as the one in Oscar Wilde’s ‘Wasted Days’: ‘A fair slim boy not made for this world’s pain, With hair of gold thick clustering round his ears . . .’
By 1914 these boys were both British and German, officers and men, and their blond hair shone like saintly haloes around their innocent faces. Wilfred Owen fondly recalled the beauty of a ‘navy boy’ met in a train compartment: ‘His head was golden like the oranges/ That catch their brightness from Las Palmas sun.’ Sassoon was struck by the attractions of a dead blond German.93 Finding a pile of German corpses, he was moved to lift and prop up the blond one against a bank. ‘He didn’t look to be more than eighteen . . . I thought what a gentle face he had . . . Perhaps I had some dim sense of the futility which had put an end to this good-looking youth.’94
The universal horror at the futility of wartime sacrifice contributed to the association of youthful blonde hair with a special kind of sacred beauty. Perhaps this helps to explain the enduring worship of Rupert Brooke, whose sensitive good looks and blond hair became part of the myth surrounding his poetry and later his memory. Brooke was the first of the war poets, a quintessential fair young son of England, whose death in April 1915 embodied the justice of the cause for which the nation fought. Brooke’s singular myth was immortalised in a poem written by Frances Cornford while he was still a Cambridge undergraduate:
A young Apollo, golden-haired,
Stands dreaming on the verge of strife,
Magnificently unprepared
For the long littleness of life.
It already contained the elements of the legend that was to develop during his life and then to grow unchecked after his death. Soon the golden-haired Apollo was made real in the famous photograph taken by Sherril Schell in 1913. It shows Brooke with bare shoulders and flowing blond hair and became the frontispiece to his volume of poems. Although Brooke’s friends were appalled by the photograph, mockingly referring to it as ‘Your Favourite Actress’, few were impervious to Brooke’s ‘golden beauty’.
Rupert Brooke’s golden-haloed image as the symbol of romantic British sacrifice had far-reaching effects. In an article in the Eugenics Review, written in 1920, G. P. Mudge waxed lyrical upon the great blonde race that is the English and the need to preserve it by means of eugenics.
Among the signs that England is awakening to the significance of her racial worth and all that it has meant in the culture, chivalry, justice and sportsmanship of the world, we cannot fail to recall the recent poems of Rupert Brooke . . . there is still with us a great reservoir of that English character we want, in the women of that type. England still contains a large percentage of the tall, well-built, blond, blue- or grey-eyed type, who recall to us the men that fashioned England, who were among the first to go to France in 1914 and 1915, and who laid the traditions of our national life, of our statecraft, and of our fighting services . . . For this is the type that must at all costs not only preserve itself against extinction, but must multiply until all the needs of the Empire are met.
A wave of rampantly racialist writing was now entering the petit-bourgeois consciousness on both sides of the Atlantic. The arguments of these Aryan apologists showed little sophistication. Using mostly cliched phrases, they pounded the reading public with theories of Aryan or Nordic superiority, appealing to base mass instincts and often simply projecting educated middle-class values on to Nordic or Aryan man as if they were racial qualities. Blond hair – on men – was vaunted as the mark of the ultimate superior being.
Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, a highly idiosyncratic former Cistercian monk and zealous anti-Semite, was one whose obsessions reached a wide audience in Austria and Germany. In 1907, Lanz (he was born plain Adolf Lanz but changed his name to indicate his membership of the Aryan ruling class) founded a religious order, the Ordo Novi Templi. Only blonds with blue eyes and blessed with an ‘Ario-heroic’ figure could apply to join, and successful applicants became part of an association designed to support the threatened blonde Aiyan race in all countries of the world. They were expected to make racially appropriate marriages and to take part in a bizarre liturgy and calendar of mystical ceremonial. L.anz appointed himself prior and established the order in a romantically ruined medieval castle, Burg Werfenstem, perched on a sheer rock cliff above the River Danube near Vienna. He celebrated Christmas Day that year by hoisting a swastika flag on top of the castle tower.
Lanz’s extraordinary views were already well known in racialist circles in Vienna, and the behaviour of his sect, with its bizarre and highly visible festivals and its pagan rites, brought him publicity in the national press. In 1905 he had launched his racialist periodical, Ostara, named after the pagan goddess of spring. Lanz was driven by the concept of a Manichaean struggle between the noble and virtuous blond and the bestial dark man, bent upon subversion, corruption and the destruction of the Aryan race. The filthy promiscuity of the barbaric and vice-ridden Jewish race would eventually, he believed, drag the Aryans down the evolutionary ladder.
Lanz’s magazines were full of crazed notions of the dictatorship of what h
e called the blonde aristocracy. He published profiles of ideal Aryan blondes, paintings of blondes by approved ‘blonde’ Renaissance painters, and claims about the superior physical, intellectual and spiritual qualities of blondes. And he peppered his pages with slogans such as ‘Are you blonde? Are you a man? Read Ostara, the journal for blond fighters for men’s rights,’ Right-wing contributors produced a few of the essays in Ostara, but Lanz wrote most of the numbers himself. They were distributed from city tobacco kiosks and had a respectable circulation, particularly strong in the numerous right-wing student fencing associations. In 1907, Lanz claimed an enormous circulation of 100,000 copies.
In Ostara, Lanz was in essence laying out his ideas for overthrowing the evils of modern mankind and paving the way for the domination of the blonde race. His solution involved a racial struggle in which inferior races would be deported, enslaved, sterilised or incinerated. Socialism, democracy, feminism and other corrupting emancipatory influences would be crushed. Elements of Lanz’s bizarre fantasies are clearly reflected in the policies of the Third Reich. The extermination of inferior races, laws banning inter-racial marriages, the spread of pure-blooded Germans by way of polygamy, and the preferential care of Aryan mothers in the SS Lebensborn maternity homes were all anticipated in the pages of Ostara.
Not everyone was taken in by Lanz’s absurd rhetoric, nor that of others writing in the same vein. In July 1930, Professor H. J. Fleure published an article called ‘The Nordic Myth’ in the Eugenics Review, pulling apart the supposedly scientific basis on which white superiority was based and exposing the ‘sinister’ political propaganda of those who peddled such theories. He denounced Wagner and his ‘widespread expansion of egoism into racialism under the guise of a glorification of the fair-haired, blue-eyed white man’. He condemned Wagner’s son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain. He damned a good deal of modern writing as unscientific dogma; and he concluded that ‘the idea of a tall, fair, Nordic type existing in purity in the far past as the indigenous stock of the region is as yet quite unproven. Nor is it by any means certain that the type which combines these characters is normally a highly superior one . . .’
Professor Fleure was fighting a losing battle. All across northern Europe and America the worship of the fair-haired blue-eyed white man had become a powerful force. In Germany you have only to look at the paintings of an early-nineteenth-century artist by the name of Fidus to get an idea of the blonde mania with which the Germans were already deliriously obsessed. Fidus himself was a dark, brooding, lupine figure. But his work, a kitschy cross between William Blake and modern-day Japanese comics, was dominated by the theme of the tall, solitary, molten-eyed blond hero. This superman tended to stand, inexplicably naked, on windy mountain peaks, his arms victoriously raised as he gazed up at the sun or out over a vast distant landscape, looking with the swirling fronds and tendrils of his yolk-yellow hair somehow like a capital letter in a richly illuminated manuscript. Fidus’s men were invariably blond with lurid matching pubic hair. And his favourite portrayal styled them as Norse gods or warriors, with their requisite quota of suggestively undulating blonde maidens and who knows what strange thoughts of Aryan domination.
Germanic interest in the Nordic race had encouraged a general Romantic fascination with Scandinavia. The Germans had begun visiting the region as early as the 1820s despite poor transportation and accommodation. But tourists began to visit in greater numbers after Kaiser Wilhelm 11 began sailing every year from 1889 onwards to Norwegian fjords in his yacht, accompanied by a company of men who raved about their great Nordic past and pranced about on deck fancying themselves as the new Vikings. Scandinavian habits of outdoor exercise and gymnastics were brought back and enthusiastically embraced in Germany. After the stolid, overloaded style of nineteenth-century bourgeois living, people were drawn to the idea of a reformed life. They focused on new diets (including vegetarianism), outdoor exercise, gymnastics, natural healing and fresh air. Nudism, too, became a popular way of linking the body more closely to nature. In Germany the term Nacktkultur was coined in 1903 in a book by Heinrich Scham which established an enduring if questionable link between nudism, vegetarianism, social reform and ‘racial hygiene’, in particular anti-Semitism. Nudism had been used in the past by the German medical profession to combat diseases such as tuberculosis. But soon healthy Germans, many of them urban, took up the habit. The movement produced a lot of slightly repellent body-beautiful journals and by the late 1920s the streams of books on the subject, often enticingly illustrated with blonde beauties, had become hugely popular.
One particular book, Der Mensche und die Sonne (Man and Sunlight), written in 1924 by Hans Suren, was so popular it ran to sixty-eight editions in its first year of publication. No doubt the numerous photographs of attractive young nudes pursuing outdoor sports – running, gymnastics, volleyball, even skiing – accounted for part of the book’s enormous success. There they were on page after page, lavishly bronzed and mostly blonde athletes (though predominantly men), cavorting in Arcadian flowered meadows, on idyllic beaches, in peaceful marshes and racing in goose-pimpled agony down icy Alpine slopes, in every case burnished by an omnipresent sunshine. But its text, an impassioned espousal of male health, strength and beauty justifying a new Utopian culture, also appealed to a recently urbanised German population hungry for change.
The search for beauty, health and racial unity was all part of the appeal of nudism, and by 1930 there were more than three million members of nudist clubs in Germany, as well as 60,000 members of nudist schools who attended classes naked. In Britain, things had not got quite so far, but nudism had nevertheless produced a popular set of values supposed to banish inhibitions and to promote healthy open-air lifestyles.h
The British movement also pandered to political and racial as well as aesthetic prejudices. ‘In this society,’ wrote one keen British nudist, ‘the notion is prevalent that the nordic blond type is much better adapted for gymnosophy [nudism] than the Mediterranean brunette type . . . these race bigots [the society’s leaders] are bitterly antisemitic and would under no circumstances admit a Jew.’95
While blonde nudists were proclaiming their vigorous superiority, other new aesthetic exclusivities were spreading their influence. One of them, linked to the powerful image of the burnished blond superman, was suntans. In the nineteenth century only outdoor labourers were tanned, and it was thought that long exposure to the sun roughened the sensibilities as well as the complexion. But by the early twentieth century, many low-status jobs involved working long hours indoors with little holiday, and so suntans became a way of displaying wealth and leisure for those who could afford to lie in the sun. The fashion for the suntan is said to have been invented by Coco Chanel in 1923 when she descended the gangplank of the Duke of Westminster’s yacht on the French Riviera, burnished with an apparently all-over tan. Fashionable tourists from the Scott Fitzgerald Beautiful People set, clustered in their particular colonies along the gleaming coast, quickly derobed and stretched themselves out in the baking sun to acquire matching tans. Within a few years no romantic hero was without one.
The Riviera set provided, as Harold Acton noted, a sporadic peep-show of changing society. Its new leaders were style-setters and self-made celebrities like Coco Chanel. As a hat-maker in fashionable Deauville in the early 1900s, Chanel had found that ladies would stop and chat to her during the day and then ignore her at society events after dark. But by 1920 she was being received everywhere and was photographed in cahoots with society ladies and on the arms and knees of titled men. Fashions were changing, too. On women, suntans, cropped hair, short dresses, beach pyjamas and sparse jewellery were in. White-powdered faces, constraining clothing, hats and jewels (except pearls) were out.
Hair colour was also changing. On men, the racial ideal in Europe and America had long demanded its heroes to be blond, tall and athletic, just like Hobey Baker, perhaps the most brilliant athlete ever to attend Princeton University. Baker’s tall blond figure
as captain of the football team in 1913 indelibly impressed Scott Fitzgerald in his freshman year, and became the model for Allenby, the football captain in This Side of Paradisei
Baker may also have been the model for the noble, romantic and pointedly Anglo-Saxon statue of The Christian Student which stood until 1930 with its back to the library at Princeton, representing the official ideal of an American undergraduate.
If American men aspired to being blond, fashionable ladies in the 1920s most certainly did not. Dark, lustrous curls or smooth, glossy expanses of straight raven hair had been the ultimate expression of feminine beauty for something like ten generations. Despite the racial rhetoric of the time, the Victorian association of blonde hair with grasping duplicitous eroticism and with low-class promiscuity had kept it that way. The appearance of the first nude blonde calendar girl in 1913 had not helped the image of the blonde in the eyes of high society. The calendar pin-up was based on an oil painting by Paul Chabas of a blonde girl in a lake, which might have gone unnoticed if Anthony Comstock of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice had not seen it in a gallery and demanded it be removed. A lively dispute ensued, the nude blonde gained notoriety and her image was immediately pirated by calendar companies and distributed by the hundreds of thousands. Reproductions eventually appeared on posters, cigar wrappers, sweet boxes, postcards and even on braces.
Within a few years, in the trend-setting microcosm of the French Riviera, divisions were breaking down and perceptions were being reshaped. Hydrogen peroxide dyes were being marketed for the first time and women were in a mood to experiment. The Americans had already successfully introduced the glamorous values of the jazz age, fast cocktails and an infectious indifference to tradition, and a number of amusing American women had begun making bold sexually liberated statements with their cropped bleached-blonde hair. Florence Lacaze, who came over to Europe from San Francisco with her fabulously wealthy husband Frank Jay Gould, was a startling blonde force of nature who entertained lavishly, introduced waterskiing, collected art and held literary lunches in her vast Cannes villa, employing secretaries to do her reading for her. Her chic sun-bleached hair was met with approval by the Riviera luminaries of arts and letters, and with the waves of dukes and duchesses, kings, queens, princesses and counts and their assorted hangers-on who dropped in every summer.
On Blondes Page 15