All We Know: Three Lives (31 page)

Madge had become romantically involved with Frances (Fay) Blacket Gill, one of the first woman solicitors in England, and she was not hiding it. Blacket Gill specialized in representing designers (Victor Stiebel, Norman Hartnell, Hardy Amies, and the milliner Aage Thaarup were among her clients), actors (the Redgraves), artists, and writers. Her clients were also her friends and were mostly “people who happened to be homosexual.” When Madge and Fay entertained at their home near Grosvenor Square, Harry Yoxall was often a guest. (Drinks one evening featured “Claire [
sic
] Luce and a German film star.”) Yoxall also visited them several times at Madge’s country house on the Kent-Sussex border, once to see the house and garden “and have cocktails with her and ‘girl’ friend,” on another occasion to bring Chase and her husband to the cottage for sightseeing, lunch, and dinner. “Good food and talk,” wrote Yoxall, and Fay “acted as host.”

From an upper-middle-class family in Newcastle (her father was a solicitor who had encouraged her to study law), Fay was about nine years younger than Madge and had something in common with Dody—and with Andrew McHarg—with her butch style, small stature, and domineering personality. She dressed in beautifully cut suits—“straight skirt, nice jacket, roomy pockets, shirts with double cuffs, and a huge pair of cameo-style cufflinks”—wore her hair short but well coiffed, always had three chunky gold chain bracelets on one arm, three strings of pearls round her neck, pearl studs in her ears, a huge cameo brooch with diamonds, and a large diamond ring on her right little finger, “hideous, but spectacular.” She loved cars and never let anyone else drive her Jaguar.

Madge and she were a combustible pair. Fay was a divorce lawyer who was good at “sorting out everyone’s problems but her own,” said her last girlfriend, the actress Patricia Laffan. “She had no sense of irony,” recalled Patrick Woodcock, a London physician whose patients were actors, designers, and artists—the same crowd as Fay’s clients. She was “a very complex and not very kind person,” said Sybille Bedford, “Philistine and difficult”—but she also recalled that Madge always “quarreled…bitterly” with her lovers. (Sybille knew Blacket Gill well, because Allanah Harper later lived with her.) “In a match between her and Madge, I don’t know who I’d bet on winning,” said the novelist Francis King, a friend of both. At the end of the affair, Madge is said to have thrown Fay’s belongings out the window. Decades later, at a fashion show, Fay turned to Patricia Laffan and muttered, “Here comes that bitch Madge Garland.” There are no photographs of Fay in Madge’s albums. One has a number of missing pages, ripped out—black stubs sticking out of the binding—that may mark her presence in and expulsion from Madge’s life.

When the Munich Pact was signed in November 1938, British
Vogue
, like other businesses, began preparing for war: provisioning itself with fire extinguishers, first aid kits, and gas masks; determining the chain of command in the event that staff members were killed; carrying out air raid drills. There was the threat of bombing, and for a time it was unclear whether it would be possible to conduct nonessential businesses such as
Vogue
if England were under attack. Facing confusion at home and the New York office’s failure to understand their situation, the editorial board in London decided to continue publishing provisionally, at least “until we see some daylight in the fog of war.” Of the Paris collections in August 1939, Madge wrote later: “The clothes were the most fantastically beautiful ever seen. The influence of Surrealism, which had been dominant in art…and had inspired Schiaparelli’s most original models, was now visible in picturesque clothes suitable only for a fancy-dress existence remote from reality, and which showed all too clearly that no one cared to consider the present or dared look into the future.”

In the months of the “phony war”—from the German invasion of Poland and England’s declaration of war on September 3, 1939, until Germany attacked France, Belgium, Holland, and Britain the following spring—food rationing and price restrictions were instituted, paper rationing was imminent, London was under blackout, and friends and colleagues on the
Vogue
staff were killed in the accidents resulting from the completely dark nights. Harry Yoxall tried to communicate all of this to Condé Nast: “The cost of living is beginning to rise substantially. Employés are experiencing difficulty and discomfort in getting to and from their work. At any moment they may have to face grave danger of life and limb in doing so.” Tax increases were also making salaries inadequate, and distribution problems were considerable, since the railways were moving troops and munitions, and road transport was impossible because of petrol rationing. At night, most members of the staff did some kind of volunteer duty: as fire wardens, as ambulance drivers, and at air raid centers. In October 1939 the magazine began publishing one issue a month instead of two.

Madge was a pacifist; she supported the Peace Movement—later called the Peace Pledge Union—organized by Dick Sheppard, the minister who had married her and Ewart Garland. He was a man “reckless in the expenditure of himself, orator, organizer, legend in his own life-time,” Sybille Bedford wrote, someone “who could make contact with every human being he met.” Madge had venerated him since the early 1920s and she signed the group’s pledge: “We renounce war and never again, directly or indirectly, will we support or sanction another.” Aldous Huxley had thrown himself into lecturing and working for the cause before he left England, and other early members included Bertrand Russell, the writer Siegfried Sassoon, and the journalist and peace activist Vera Brittain. Madge’s beliefs did not mean that she was less affected by the run-up to war, but it complicated her position on the magazine. She first refused to attend air raid drills with the rest of the British
Vogue
staff, and in October 1939, Yoxall wrote to Nast that in the event of Betty Penrose’s death he had placed Madge “low in the table of succession for the acting editorship,” because Penrose believed “that in the circumstances contemplated—i.e. presumably serious and continuous bombing—Garland would not operate well.” He added: “In any event she is a bad organizer of editorial assignments, and is too much of an individualist to make a successful director of a team in times of stress.” He was a conflicted observer: He respected and liked Madge, wanted Nast to acknowledge the extra work she had assumed when Penrose was ill for an extended period in 1936, and eventually felt that she “turned up trumps,” able to “make things brighter,” during the “phoney war,” despite his earlier misgivings.

But in late December 1939, he fired her, largely at Penrose’s insistence. “It was a beastly job,” Yoxall wrote in his diary, adding that “Madge took it well.” Penrose set down her desire “to get rid of Madge” in a scathing, thirteen-page, single-spaced document detailing Madge’s flaws, among them her “fundamentally artificial approach to life”; her poor “capacity for executive work”; her “lack of clarity of thought” and of a “journalistic instinct”; her “uneven…taste with its distinct leaning toward the chi chi” and its absence of “what one might call for lack of a better word ‘breeding’—it has no sympathy with the traditions of elegance and conservatism.” (One example of Madge’s poor taste included her championing of a Picasso painting to accompany a feature; Penrose suggested a Renoir). Nast himself seemed to value Madge more for her “contact with the artistic, literary, theatrical crowd in London” than for “any flair for clothes.” It was a “difficult situation,” wrote Yoxall. “I think Betty is fundamentally right, but…” His gratitude at how well Madge took it inspired him to send her to Paris one last time: “There are to be Spring collections & it’s necessary to keep the Brogue flag flying—and give her a bit of a holiday first. So that’s a nice outcome of a messy business which has caused me much mental anguish.” He called the trip her “swansong” and described her report:

“Then once again I was out of a job,” Madge wrote, “but so were most of my friends.” She was forty-four years old, grateful that she had not been called up to do war work, but aware that her professional future looked bleak. Recalling this time in interviews, she did not admit to having been fired. Instead, she said that the German occupation, the fall of Paris, and the closure of so many couture houses meant that a fashion editor was no longer required. She left the magazine in February 1940, however, and Paris fell in June. The industry was eviscerated but not shut down during the occupation; it kept itself going through a mixture of collaboration, resourcefulness, resistance, and infusions of foreign capital.

When one of her contacts in the wholesale dress business recommended her to Stafford Bourne, of Bourne and Hollingsworth, a middle-class department store on Oxford Street, she began to remake herself again, shifting her focus, if not her preferences, to mass-produced clothing and new textiles, and becoming involved with the politics of fashion as the industry was recruited in the service of the nation. She was in no position to be choosy, but at first she refused the job Bourne offered, as merchandise manager, telling him that she knew nothing about his stock. It was both an honest assessment and a way to distance herself from his world of “children’s socks, or grandma’s underclothes, and that sort of thing.” Telling the story later, it was a way to say that her success at Bourne and Hollingsworth had not been inevitable but was the result of hard work. The salary was small, but she was grateful to be employed, and the job gave her power over every section of the store. She ended up staying until the end of the war and became committed to creating and marketing good ready-to-wear clothing at affordable prices.

She found the place in chaos and deeply old-fashioned. Most of the buyers were men, and many of them had been called up for military service; those who remained were either much older than she or completely inexperienced. She began by asking the board of directors for a number of changes to make the staff more comfortable, allowing them to smoke during their lunch break and buying a gramophone so that they could listen to music. The board was annoyed that she would emphasize “such trivial matters at such a serious moment,” she said, but her championing of the employees, her enthusiasm, and her attention to the minutiae of sales technique gained her the support of the staff and allowed her to make more substantial changes. She reorganized the links between wholesale and retail and reconfigured the store’s displays. Her most important reform was a new way of sizing the stock. Britain was far behind the United States in manufacturing quality ready-to-wear clothing and in adopting a consistent numbering system; the two were related. Different manufacturers used different scales, which were based not on body measurement but clothing measurement. The most common designations were, in Madge’s words, “a series of unintelligible and mysterious letters (w x, etc.),” unrelated to human dimensions. Taboos against coming in unseemly contact with the body, which made it impossible to take accurate body measurements, accounted for part of this confusion. Many size charts were also made by tailors, who each had their own methods; even the parts of the body they measured differed, depending on their theories of cutting. Remembering the well-made ready-to-wear copies of French designs she had bought with Olguita in St. Louis and Chicago, and how easy it had been to find “the right type of dress in the right size,” Madge instituted a rational sizing system for Bourne and Hollingsworth’s clothing. She “began to dabble in design” herself and had these pieces made up in the store’s factory.

For much of the war, she was without a home of her own: bombed out, always moving around, camping in empty flats or staying with friends in London and in the country. She could not get to her house in Sussex, because it was in a restricted area and fuel rationing made regular travel there impossible. In May 1940, the phony war ended; the London Blitz began in earnest that September. Four hundred Londoners died on the night of September 7, 1940, and the docks were set on fire. The Germans bombed London steadily for the next three months—they began dropping incendiary bombs in late December—and these raids continued until May  1941. Many people and businesses left town; thousands of homes were destroyed; thousands were killed; fires burned everywhere. One walked “through shattered streets ankle-deep in glass,” wrote Vera Brittain, and when bombs damaged the water mains, through streets running with water. The whole physical pattern of the city changed. Everyone was living in a combination of fear, defiance, and dailyness—getting up in the morning, going to work, returning home, changing clothes, and going into shelters. Madge stayed with friends at their country house near Windsor, then rented a small house of her own nearby, taking the train to work as often as possible. On the worst night of the Blitz, May 10, 1941, German planes dropped hundreds of tons of bombs on London, destroying the House of Commons and tens of thousands of homes, killing thousands. Three weeks later, from her friends’ home, Madge wrote to her brother Gerald, who was now running Brooks, McGlashan and McHarg in Melbourne: