Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (13 page)

As they walked hand in hand through the galleries of Venice, Florence and Rome, Tamara absorbed her grandmother’s delight in the Renaissance masters, their use of chiaroscuro, perspective, colour and line. She found she was as susceptible to beauty as she was to good food and pretty dresses, and by the time they reached their final stop, a village near Monte Carlo, she was already planning her future as an artist.

Her amused grandmother offered to hire a tutor for the short time they were there, partly so that she would be free to indulge her mild gambling habit in the nearby casinos. The tutor was a young painter called Henri, and it was possibly his romantic good looks that clinched Tamara’s new sense of vocation. The closeness of Henri’s body, the occasional touch of his hand as he instructed her in the sketching of mimosa blossom and the painting of sea views, were even more exciting to Tamara than the pictures she produced.

Tamara was not a pretty girl: her heavy blue eyes, broad nose and solid curves were too adult for a child’s face. But in the mirror she saw herself as lovely and, convinced that Henri must reciprocate her adoration, she vowed to make herself an artist worthy of him. Back home in Moscow, around the time of her thirteenth birthday she had her portrait painted by a society painter. It was done in pastels and in a style of sentimental mistiness that was considered appropriate for a young girl. Tamara, however, dismissed it as inept: ‘The lines they were not
fournies,
not clean. It was not
like
me.’ Certain of her own superior skills she forced Adrienne to sit for her, working with furious determination to prove her point: ‘I painted and painted and painted,’ she later recalled, ‘until at last I had a result.’
⁴

That dogged application would serve Tamara well in Paris in 1920. But as a spoiled adolescent she was far from ready to turn her fantasy of artistic perfection into hard-working reality. There were too many other distractions in her life, especially once she was old enough to accompany her mother to St Petersburg, to stay with her aunt and uncle, the Stifters, for the winter season.

The Russian capital was magical to Tamara – a Venice of the north with its frozen canals and gilded, pastel palaces, its busy traffic of troikas and sledges on snow-etched streets. St Petersburg also offered Tamara her first glimpse of Imperial society. Moscow was a busy, commercial city, but it did not shine as St Petersburg did in the full, reflective dazzle of the Tsar’s court. Attending her first grown-up parties, her first opera and ballet performances at the Mariinsky Theatre, Tamara felt she had arrived in her true element: the fantasies of her childhood realized in the crystal chandeliers, the gowns of the beautiful women and the red and gold court livery of the men.

Now aged fifteen, Tamara was also impatient for adult love. One night she was invited with her aunt to a costume ball, at which she planned to create a stir by dressing herself up as a peasant girl and making her entrance with a pair of live geese walking at her heels. As a social strategy, this proved to be a mortifying miscalculation. Alarmed by the crowds and by the highly polished floor of the ballroom, the two geese started flapping and squawking in noisy distress, and for a few stricken seconds Tamara felt the whole ballroom laughing at her.

Yet even in the middle of this humiliation she had sufficient clarity to register the presence of an extraordinarily handsome man in the room. He was tall and slim-hipped, his chiselled Slavic features given an almost insolent glamour by dark, slicked-back hair. Tamara observed the number of women hovering around him, and it was competitiveness as well as lust that made her decide that one day she would have him: ‘Right away I fell in love with him because he was so good looking. And because he was alone with ten women around him.’
⁵

Within the small upper-class community of St Petersburg it was easy for Tamara to discover the identity of her future husband. He was Tadeusz Julian Junosza Lempicki, a twenty-two-year-old lawyer and son of a wealthy Polish family. He was also rumoured to be a womanizer, and while his worldliness and beauty ought to have overwhelmed a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, Tamara was already wedded to the idea of him, and willing to wait.

The next time she was in St Petersburg, she tracked Tadeusz down at the Mariinsky, and approached him with an invitation to tea at her Aunt Stefa’s – she was, she reminded him boldly, the girl with ‘two geese as my friends’.
⁶
It was simply a marker, but the following year she was able to lay siege to him in earnest when her aunt and uncle invited her to come and live with them full time.

Having no daughters of her own, Stefa had taken a fancy to Tamara. It amused her to have a seventeen-year-old girl in the house to dress up and spoil, and in anticipation of this new arrangement she had already taken Tamara to Paris to buy a wardrobe for the new season. Aunt Stefa proved to be a liberal as well as generous guardian during that visit, and Tamara was permitted to explore much of the city on her own. As she’d walked the cobbled streets of Montmartre, hearing snatches of the blaring music they called ragtime, and sat in a café on Saint-Germain, awkwardly smoking her first cigarettes, Tamara felt she was becoming a woman at last. She was ready to make good her claim on Tadeusz.

Back in St Petersburg, as she accompanied Stefa on her social rounds, Tamara studied the way other women looked and behaved. She was intrigued by the ballerina Mathilde Kschessinska who lived in one of the city’s finest private mansions, and possessed an astonishingly showy collection of jewellery that, as Stefa intimated, had come to her through her many ‘protectors’, among them two grand dukes and the young Nicholas Romanov, before he married and became Tsar.

Just as Diana’s imagination had been jolted by the spectacle of Luisa Casarti, Tamara saw in Kschessinska some blueprint for her own half-formed fantasies of a life that could be bigger and more splendid than a conventional marriage. As yet she had no idea how that life might be attained; she was determined only that it would be magnificent and that it would involve having Tadeusz by her side.

Inserting herself into her beloved’s world was easier than she had dared hope. Aristocratic Poles formed a small, elite group within St Petersburg society, and several of Tadeusz’s circle were known to the Stifters. Tamara conspired ways of seeing him several times a week, taking afternoon coffee with him and his friends in one of the fashionable cafés along the Nevsky Prospect, or drinking in the Stray Dog Café, where writers gathered, and where Tadeusz liked to amuse himself by listening to firebrand ideologues as they debated socialism and art. In the evenings there were concerts, parties and balls, and always Tamara stayed as close as she could to Tadeusz’s side, waiting for the moment when he would ask her to dance.

So obsessive was her pursuit that when war was declared in the summer of 1914, the news barely registered. Whilst her brother Stanzi was preparing to leave Moscow for the Front, Tadeusz, the only man she cared about, was debarred from military service (or so he claimed) by a slight defect in his foot. Not only was her beloved free from danger, but he was at last beginning to pay her special attention, visiting her at home, singling her out at parties, even intimating marriage. Money had recently become a pressing issue for Tadeusz, as his formerly sober father had begun squandering the Lempicki capital on women and drink. He had little desire to put his legal qualifications to more than dilatory use, and as he cast around for other options, Tamara seemed to be one of the best. It was hard not to suppose that her banker uncle had deep and generous pockets, and she herself had definite potential. The adoring schoolgirl he’d first met was fast maturing into an attractive woman; she was lively and intelligent, she dressed well, and her enthusiasm for life carried a definite promise of sensuality.

But if Tamara quivered with hope over Tadeusz’s new attentiveness, her uncle and aunt viewed him less favourably. They knew about his father’s slide into dissipation and were concerned it might be a family trait. Even more worrying to them was Tadeusz’s failure to settle down to responsible employment. His only serious interests appeared to revolve around a group of rich young men in the city who were setting themselves up as defenders of the Imperial order, ranging themselves against the growing threat of revolution.

The Romanovs’ corrupt and antiquated rule had long been unpopular, and during the last decade St Petersburg
*
had been gripped by intensifying spasms of political unrest. After the mass casualties of Bloody Sunday, in 1905, when the army had shot indiscriminately at a peacefully demonstrating crowd, the city had witnessed more violent outbreaks of militancy. The war had done little to unify the people: in fact as Russia suffered a series of grave setbacks, including the loss of Poland and part of Lithuania to the Germans, the Tsar’s regime grew significantly weaker. 1915 was a year of strikes and protests and Tadeusz hinted, boastfully and probably untruthfully, that he’d been enlisted by the Tsar’s secret police as a counter-revolutionary spy. Tamara was riveted by his claims, but they made Tadeusz even less desirable in the eyes of the Stifters. Gently they began to urge their niece to see less of him, while in private they began to discuss whether the city was not in fact too dangerous and whether they should take her away from Petrograd altogether.

Tamara was stubborn, though, her relatives’ opposition only steeling her determination to possess her beloved, and because he was still hesitating on the brink of a marriage proposal she elected to force the issue. It’s not clear exactly when she and Tadeusz became lovers, but in the spring of 1916, when Tamara proceeded triumphantly up the aisle, she was already pregnant.

It was a fairy-tale wedding. Tamara glided through a chapel packed with titled nobility and foreign dignitaries; the train of her dress, or so she claimed, stretched all the way from the altar to the door, and at first the fairy tale extended to her married life. Tadeusz acquiesced gracefully to his capture: Tamara’s dowry allowed them to take an apartment on Zhukovsky Street, one of the city’s most fashionable addresses, and even the birth of Marie Christine, nicknamed Kizette, in September 1916 failed to interfere with their married life.

As soon as was decent and practical, Tamara packed their baby daughter off to live with Malvina in Moscow, while she remained happily occupied with Tadeusz. Life was still good in Petrograd, despite the war and the worsening political situation. The theatres were full; the champagne flowed; women wore their Parisian dresses and diamonds; and the city buzzed. The latest gathering point for the smart young set to which the Lempicki belonged was the Comedians Hall, a vast pleasure palace, whose several dining rooms were designed in the style of a Montmartre bistro or Venetian palazzo and whose nightly programmes of entertainment featured satirical comedians, Futurist-designed stage tableaux and bands playing the latest American songs.

All these pleasures were far more absorbing to Tamara than bad news from the battle front or the plummeting value of the rouble. She didn’t pay much attention to the food and fuel shortages that affected most of Russia as the country’s archaic distribution systems collapsed, nor did she register that barely a mile from her pampered world, hungry children were scavenging in the streets. However, by the spring of 1917 even she was forced to take notice. A succession of strikes and mass defections from the army had finally forced the Tsar’s abdication, with power now uneasily divided between the new Provisional Government and the left-wing Petrograd Soviet. As panic flared among Tamara’s friends and neighbours, many began packing up to leave. Not only was their city teetering on the brink of anarchy, but everyone feared the power of the revolutionary Bolshevik party, led by the exiled Vladimir Lenin and waiting in the wings of Russian politics.

By now Maurice Stifter had transferred as much money as he could to foreign holdings and he and Stefa were preparing to travel to Denmark, where Malvina, Kizette and Adrienne were already heading. Urgently they begged Tamara to join them, but even though she could see the dangers around her, she preferred to listen to the confident pronouncements made by her husband and his friends, who insisted that after a short sharp struggle, the counter-revolutionaries – the Whites – would restore the Tsar to his throne. Tadeusz’s posturing heroics promised Tamara the drama she’d always craved: in her eyes she was already standing by his side as he fought for the Imperial cause. By the time she was forced to accept the true peril of her situation, there was hardly anyone left in the city to help her.

All through the summer the balance of power wavered: and by October, Lenin and his Bolshevik party were able to take control of the city, quelling opposition with their secret police force, the All Russian Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle Against Sabotage and Counter Revolution. The Cheka, as they became known to a terrified city, targeted anyone in the city with right-wing connections, Tsarist sympathies or visible wealth, and not surprisingly, Tadeusz was on their hit list. When they came for him, however, he seems to have been unprepared. According to Tamara, the two of them were making love when the door of their apartment was kicked open and she had to grab a sheet to cover herself as men in black leather overcoats swarmed into their bedroom.

Immediately they began ransacking the place for incriminating papers, and even though none were found, Tadeusz was ordered to dress, and marched out of the building at gunpoint to a waiting car. Tamara ran out, too, begging piteously for her husband’s release, but a blow from one of the men sent her sprawling, half unconscious, onto a bank of hard snow. By the time she recovered her senses Tadeusz was already being driven away; and to her panic and disgust she realized that she had narrowly missed being pitched onto the remains of a dead horse. Animal carcasses were a common sight in the city: dogs and horses that could no longer be fed by their impoverished owners were routinely abandoned on the street, where their emaciated bodies were butchered for remaining scraps of flesh. Tamara had always averted her eyes from them, but now the ravaged mess beside her on the snow seemed to symbolize her own pitiful situation.