Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (12 page)

She was also recovering some pleasure in her appearance. Fashionable clothes were returning to the shops, and Nancy was one of the first women in London to get her hair shingled and to wear the new shortened skirts. She looked elegant, slightly dangerous, and wrote with appreciation in her diary of having ‘a very good figure’ and being ‘much seen’.
²⁹

But every pleasure was precarious, as was Nancy’s equilibrium. Scattered through her diary are anxious reminders to herself to dress or flirt or laugh in a certain way, to make sure she was still desirable to men. She was quick to feel her loneliness and lack of confidence, and frequently disguised it with alcohol: ‘[It] smoothes down the bitter silences and comforts the nerves, dissipates my shyness.’
³⁰
She wished she had an occupation and even toyed briefly with the fantasy of becoming some kind of avant-garde dancer: ‘masked, beautifully dressed, very original’.
³¹

But she wished even more for a man with whom her ‘happiness [could] be ratified and enduring.’
³²
Nancy hated herself for the hopes she invested in each new lover, and for the speed with which she found them wanting: ‘How odd I am in the way I pick up with people, and get to know them terribly well, seemingly … and then jump every time the mechanism works of itself and the doll speaks.’
³³
But that seemed to be her pattern. ‘I find life quite impossible as I cannot enjoy a thing without carrying it to all the extremes and then nearly dying of the reaction.’
³⁴

For five months she walked a tightrope of nervous tension, with nights of ‘incessant drink’ followed by days of collapse. She feared she might go mad from her ‘gnawing and probing and exaggerating and lacerating state of mind. I seem to want too much, hence a mountain of unhappiness.’
³⁵
And in this state of jittery self-absorption, Nancy found it impossible to deal with Sydney, who insisted on seeing her to discuss the arrangements for their separation, and punished her with what she regarded as insufferably self-pitying rants.

Maud she found equally intolerable. Now that Nancy was effectively single again, she had not only returned to live with her mother, but also reverted to her former state of financial dependency. That was bitter to her. ‘Her Ladyship gave me [only] voluntarily what she might have settled on me; I felt I could not count on it and … that she could and would have cut if off had she so wished.’
³⁶
Renting a house in the countryside and writing some poetry that satisfied her brought an interlude of serenity, but it was temporary. As soon as she was back in London, she was again overwhelmed by the ‘long mood of depression’.
³⁷

She tried to outrun it by spending three frenetic weeks shopping and partying in Paris, but in October she suffered a severe collapse. Her mind and body were both shot and even Nancy acknowledged she needed help. She admitted herself to a nursing home outside London, where for a month she submitted to a strict regime of bed rest and sobriety. It was painfully dull, but it gave Nancy the time and space to reflect soberly on the necessity for change.

‘My capacity for happiness is starved,’ she wrote, and she was determined to revive it.
³⁸
On her return to London she arrived at a compromise with Maud over money and living arrangements, moving into a small rented room above the Eiffel Tower. The complicated whirl of lovers and parties gathered around her once again, and the poet Robert Nichols put a pistol to his head, luridly threatening to blow out his brains if she failed to return his love. But Nancy reported triumphantly to her diary that, for the first time in years, she had managed to survive these and other traumas, ‘WITHOUT ANY DRINK’.
³⁹

By the end of 1919, she made a vow that she would begin the new decade in a new place and with a new spirit of independence. She would establish a home for herself in Paris, where Pound, Lewis and others had convinced her that a cultural renaissance was stirring. She would not waste her time with shops and parties, but would find the courage to dedicate herself to writing. Later, Nancy would identify this vow as the most solemn decision of her life: ‘I had determined to leave England and leave I did,’ she wrote. ‘On 7 Jan 1920 I went to France, alone for ever.’
⁴⁰

Chapter Three

TAMARA

In 1920 Paris was reclaiming its pre-war status as the City of Light: resurrecting itself to the rhythms of jazz, the flare of new ideas, the confident bustle of cafés and bars. But it was a very different Paris from the one in which Tamara de Lempicka had arrived two years earlier. In the summer of 1918, the city’s shops and cafés were still shuttered against German shelling, food was rationed and much of the city’s population was frightened and tired.

Few were prepared to offer aid to the quarter of a million Polish and Russian refugees who, along with Tamara, were streaming into Paris, in flight from war and revolution at home. Tamara had managed to smuggle out a few precious items of jewellery when she left Russia. But the market was already flooded with the gems and heirlooms of other exiles, and the money they raised was rapidly exhausted by the exorbitant prices being charged for food, lodgings and fuel.

Just eighteen months earlier Tamara’s life had felt limitless. She had danced all night and drunk champagne as carelessly as though it were water. Now, with her husband Tadeusz and daughter Kizette, she was cooped up in a small hotel room, with just a bed, a cot and a basin between them. That basin came to haunt Tamara: ‘The poor baby, our food, everything [was] washed in that one bowl.’
¹
It symbolized everything she had lost, her old St Petersburg apartment and all the lovely things it housed: the hangings, the silverware, the pictures and Turkish carpets.

It made Tamara wretched to picture her apartment now, its rooms almost certainly pressed into lodgings for factory workers, its treasures looted by soldiers, its elegance tainted by coarse voices and dirty boots. Yet her immediate problem was her husband, who seemed barely able to stir from their hotel room, a vodka bottle on the floor close by, his beautiful features slack with defeat.

When she had first met him, Tadeusz had been a careless, confident playboy. Now he was weak and querulous, shrugging off her pleas that he find a job, telling her to go and beg some cash from her relatives – her uncle and aunt, or her mother Malvina, who had also resettled in Paris.

Tadeusz remained paralysed by his former sense of entitlement. Paris was growing familiar with his type. According to Coco Chanel these once privileged exiles ‘were all the same; they looked marvelous [sic] but there was nothing behind … they drank so as not to be afraid’.
²
They certainly did not care to work. Tamara’s uncle, Maurice Stifter, director of the Russian branch of Credit Lyonnaise in St Petersburg, had willingly taken a more lowly post in the Paris office and had offered Tadeusz a position in the same bank. As the son of landowning gentry, however, Tadeusz could not, or would not, bring himself to become a clerk.

By the end of 1919, Tamara’s jewellery had all been sold, and while her relatives would never let her and Kizette starve, her life felt intolerably drab. She looked with envy at other young women in Paris, swinging arm in arm along the street, smoking cigarettes, their futures still before them. Her own days yawned with a weary predictability: looking after Kizette, cooking the family’s meals, having nothing to dress up for beyond the occasional party at her uncle and aunt’s. And always the fights with Tadeusz. The more she nagged her husband, the uglier his resistance became. He hit her frequently, and when Tamara saw her family she often had to conceal bruises on her arms and neck with powder or a necklace or jacket. It was humiliating to admit the miserable state of her marriage, but one night her pride gave way and she confessed everything to her younger sister Adrienne.

‘We have no money … and he beats me,’ Tamara wept.
³
Yet the sympathy she expected was not forthcoming. The flight to Paris had been liberating for Adrienne, opening her eyes to a world where clever, spirited women might make careers for themselves. As soon as the war was over she’d secured a place at the École Spéciale d’Architecture to train as an architect. And now, as Tamara poured out the litany of her misfortunes—her useless husband, the loss of her former, lovely life—Adrienne briskly reminded her sister that she too had options. Tamara had shown considerable artistic flair as a girl, having studied painting in both Russia and abroad: even if Tadeusz was useless as a breadwinner, that shouldn’t stop her from helping herself.

In the decades that followed, Tamara would point to this conversation as the single, blinding moment in which she decided to become a professional artist. In all the interviews she gave, in all the tales she recounted to her daughter Kizette, she would claim that having bared her soul to Adrienne she had immediately gone out to buy the thick white paper and sable brushes with which she worked on her first picture. She would claim that with nothing to help her but her own God-given talent, she had raised herself out of adversity.

Tamara was, however, a habitual self-dramatizer. Ever since childhood she had tailored events into crises, triumphs or revelations, and the reality in Paris was not the fairy tale she liked to suggest. Several things delayed her from embarking on her new vocation, including the grim duty of help182ing her mother confirm the death of her soldier brother Stanzi, somewhere on the Eastern Front. Despite her later airy claim that she achieved success single-handedly, it was the teaching and support she gained from her early tutors, as well as the financial and domestic support of her family, that aided her through the early years of her new career.

Nevertheless, her progress was remarkable. Within half a decade of completing her training Tamara was established in Paris, charging up to fifty thousand francs for a commissioned portrait, which she would generally expect to complete in three weeks. This was good money – Josephine Baker was paid roughly five thousand francs when she was brought to Paris to star in
La Revue Nègre,
while the Harlem poet, Langston Hughes, working as a doorman in a Montmartre nightclub, earned just five francs a night, plus food and tips. But socially Tamara was also on the rise, written about in gossip columns and photographed in magazines. In the most well-known of her pictures,
Autoportrait,
she would paint herself as an archetype of late 1920s glamour – seated at the wheel of a bright green Bugatti, her lips gleaming a metallic red; her platinum-blonde curls just visible beneath a leather motoring helmet. She would make herself look as hard, fast and luxe as the car she was driving – an icon of the decade. The depression that had fogged her first eighteen months in Paris had long passed by then, and Tamara’s charmed self-belief, fostered since childhood, was fully restored.

*   *   *

Girls had always been cherished in her family. Her mother, Malvina Dekler, was the spoiled and lively daughter of a wealthy Polish banker, and along with her three sisters she had enjoyed all the advantages of a luxurious family home in Moscow, holidays on the family estates in Poland, finishing school in Switzerland and parties throughout the St Petersburg winter season. When Malvina’s brief marriage to Boris Gorski, a Russian merchant, had ended in scandal – he had disappeared, or possibly even killed himself – she had put the trauma aside and simply moved with her three small children, Stanczyk, Tamara and Adrienne, back into the comfort of her parents’ home.

A more exact chronology of the family history is hard to establish, for Tamara developed a habit of reinventing or excising crucial details when journalists and biographers started to take an interest in her life. She didn’t care to make public the scandal of her absent father, and she was fashionably vague about the exact date of her birth, alternating between 1895, 1898 and (impossibly) 1902. She also distanced herself from too close an association with Russia which, after the revolution, she came to detest, claiming her birthplace was not Moscow but Warsaw.

Yet in all the stories, real and false, that Tamara told about herself, she was always consistent about the idyllic nature of her childhood. Her grandfather Bertrand Dekler was rich, and he allowed his wife Clementine and daughter Malvina to indulge the entire household. There were lavish dinners and parties, clothes from Paris, the best tutors. And if all three children thrived it was Tamara, a bossy, imaginative and greedy little girl, who thrived most vigorously.

She was always the ringleader, directing the other two children on raids to the kitchen, where they stole tiny jam-filled cakes and cream moulds that had been prepared for one of Malvina’s many parties. She was also the centre of attention. At the age of eight, burning from a small joke made at her expense by one of the servants, she ran away from home, and was discovered in the street outside, selling paper flowers to support herself in her new orphaned life.

As Tamara grew older the fantasy of herself as an orphan flower girl gave way to dreams of stardom. Her grandmother was an accomplished pianist, filling the house with the sound of Chopin waltzes and mazurkas. Inspired by Clementine’s example Tamara spent hours at the piano, working on her scales, yet in her imagination already a concert pianist, exquisite in black velvet and pearls, and with a vast crowd in thrall to her brilliance.

The conviction of her musical genius was eventually replaced by a vision of herself as a painter. When Tamara was twelve, she persuaded Clementine to include her on a six-month tour of Italian art treasures. Initially, she had merely been trying to escape from school, faking a cough that was sufficiently bronchial to alarm her family into agreeing that the approaching Moscow winter would be dangerous to her health. But once in Italy, she was intrigued by what Clementine showed her.