Seductress (14 page)

The man was twenty-five-year-old Ivan Turgenev, and the woman who caused this epiphany, one of the plainest seductresses on record. Everyone who saw Pauline Viardot pronounced her “very ugly,” “strikingly ugly,” or “atrociously homely.” Dark and crude-featured, she had hooded eyelids, a receding chin, a wide mouth with a heavy underlip, and an H-shaped figure.

But after that night Turgenev, a gifted, aristocratic heartthrob, fell so irrevocably in love with Pauline that he abandoned Russia and followed her from pillar to post for the rest of his life. For forty years he lived with the Viardots in a ménage à trois and loved her “with an unswerving loyalty such as few women have had the fortune to inspire.”

As a siren Pauline was closer in spirit to the archaic archetype than Edith Piaf; hence her superior power and stature. She sang the original siren song—of knowledge and intelligence—and lived truer to her
ker
pedigree. Self-controlled and directed, she arrowed in on her goals without once losing sight of her best interests. A multitalented woman of extraordinary gifts, she achieved a life from the gods—or goddess: long life, happiness, self-actualization, domestic and professional success, and the abject adoration not just of Turgenev but of some of the most distinguished men of her age.

Pauline’s prospects as a girl, however, looked poor to nil. The ugly duckling of a glamorous opera family, the great Garcias, she grew up in the shadow of a gorgeous older sister, “La Malibran,” the “Enchantress of Nations.” Her father, the Pavarotti of his times, trained Pauline on the piano and made her his special pet. Nicknamed the Ant for her concentrated work habits, Pauline distinguished herself intellectually and artistically, mastering drawing, five languages, and musical composition.

But when she was fifteen, her career as a professional pianist derailed. Her sister died in a freak riding accident, and overnight she was assigned to take her place. The most concerted, expert training failed dismally. Pauline had a flawed, second-tier voice and subpar looks. In a period of fascistic looksism in the theater, “exceptionally plain” singers were given no quarter.

Her debut at eighteen, however, was the surprise of the season. She seemed to possess some transcendent star quality—exquisite technique, combined with passion torqued to breaking point. She also parlayed her plainness into striking originality. When she strode onstage for the first time with her “fine carriage,” jaded Parisians sat up; she wore a plain white dress, black chain necklace, and a solitaire diamond on her forehead.

Then she sang in a way that “made people forget her looks” altogether. It was a voice with a strange, hallucinatory spell, saturated with sensuality, emotion, and “consummate intelligence.” Critics compared it to “amber flowing over velvet,” “the taste of wild fruit,” and jungle scenes. Like Dante’s siren-ogre of
The Purgatorio,
she became “almost beautiful” as she sang.

Her aesthetic wizardry extended to eros. She enchanted men into seeing beyond her “unfortunate features” and falling in love with her. The Byron of Paris, romantic idol Alfred de Musset, preferred her over all the official beauties at his disposal. He praised her in reviews and love poems, proposed marriage, and adored her so fervently that he “could not exorcise her spirit from his mind” for many years.

Amid this adulation Pauline, with sirenic self-possession, chose a man designed to serve and further her best. Louis Viardot, a theater impresario twenty-one years her senior, offered her a climate-controlled conservatory for her “genius”: moral support, calm, security, and “a love which was profound, lasting, unselfish, and generous.” They married in 1840, but this did not stop the stream of infatuated men. One of the most ardent, painter Ary Scheffer, arrived thinking her “terribly ugly” but left “madly in love” and remained her lifelong acolyte. On the St. Petersburg tour Pauline attracted an entire claque of suitors, the “Four Paws” club, who assembled in her dressing room after performances and vied for the spot of “favorite” on the paws of a giant bearskin rug.

After a furious siege on her affections that fall of 1843, Turgenev won a coveted spot on her rug. For him, it was a “life-and-death” passion; for her, less so, though a passion. Young, hot-blooded, and ensconced in a tepid marriage of convenience, she could not have been indifferent to a man of Turgenev’s caliber. He was six feet one inch tall, vibrant, charming, with Paul Newman eyes and “almost hypnotic” powers over the opposite sex.

Since they destroyed their letters, no one will ever know the precise details of their affair. But in 1845 Turgenev left Russia to be with Pauline and installed himself in the Viardot household. Except for periodic breaks and journeys home, he never strayed from her side. He treated her four children as his own (as indeed several might have been) and loved her “like an eighteen year old” until he died.

Her voice was a drug for him; he wept at her concerts and installed a pipe to his study so that he could hear her practicing. Pauline, though, possessed a wealth of other fascinations. She had a personality, said friends, that “conquered her physical ugliness.” Brilliant, scintillant, well read, and artistic, she wrote Turgenev enravishing letters that made him think of avenues of green trees, alive with birdsong. At the same time, she critiqued his work and helped him become one of Russia’s premier writers.

In his novels he portrayed her over and over again as a seductress who bewitches men with her conversational charm. She talked “like a princess”—with eloquence and sparkle. She told her St. Petersburg audience that despite “thirty degrees of frost,” she found in them “thirty-five degrees of warmth” and repeatedly schmoozed enemies into abeyance. One huffy Russian remembered how she turned him into a “docile lamb” as soon as she spoke; “instead of being cold with her,” he said, “I would, on the contrary, be most amiable.”

Like many raconteurs, Pauline brought out the best in others and deftly baited Turgenev so that he shone at gatherings. She also encouraged him to let down his hair; her parties were cut-loose affairs with impromptu comic concerts, games, feasts, and amateur theatricals (admission: one potato) in the attic. Her up-tempo buoyant spirits drove out his Slavic gloom. “Laugh,” he beseeched her, “laugh heartily . . . [and] show all your teeth.”

How heartily she dispatched herself in bed can only be guessed. She was secretive and delivered a mixed message: On the one hand, she spoke of her volcanic sexuality; on the other, of ascetic self-denial. “Ah,” she said, “I too had my gypsy instincts to combat.”

Unlike Piaf, Pauline kept a strong hand on her emotional tiller. Husbanding her resources and guarding her ego integrity, she refused to let her passions run away with her. In the interests of self-preservation, she once banished Turgenev for three years and hedged her erotic bets with a throng of other beaux. These included some of the leading lights of the artistic world: Maurice Sand (son of the author) and composers Charles Gounod and Hector Berlioz. The latter endured “agonizing physical and mental sufferings” on her behalf and said she’d made him lose his bearings “like the needle of a compass in a typhoon.”

Throughout all this Turgenev was steadfast in his affections. He dreamed of her every night and “quite simply could not live without her.” So complete was her hold on him that he believed she trafficked in black magic. “There have always been witches,” he once said. “They have some sort of inner power over people, no matter what one says, and there’s nothing to be done about it.”

With her husband supplying domestic support, and Turgenev valentines, Pauline soared creatively. “One of the greatest artists in the history of opera,” she set the standard for numerous parts (such as
Orphee
which she performed 150 times), and won an idolatrous following. “She is perfect,” said a critic, “as far as it is possible to attain perfection, both as a singer and an actress.” After her voice deteriorated prematurely at forty, she taught, performed privately, and brought her other considerable talents into play: piano, composition (she published three music collections), and drawing. She died in 1910 at eighty-nine with a “contented smile” on her face, surrounded by a loving family and eulogized by the music world.

Among her many excellent sketches is a self-portrait in which she looks like a long-lashed beauty, every irregularity softened and modified. Objectively she resembled a “bizarre mélange” of Spanish bus-boy and Olive Oyl. But Pauline Viardot, a master illusionist, made people see her as she saw herself, a beautiful, svelte stunner. That was her specialty. When Turgenev drew her fictional likeness in
Spring Torrents,
he made her a blond, gray-eyed bombshell, and just before he died, he surveyed his pictures of her in the room and exclaimed, “What marvelous features.”

 

“Transformation,” say folklorists, “is a power of privileged beings.” To look at this clutch of homely women, few would guess they were babe shapeshifters or privileged beings. Biologically, they should have been the most underprivileged of society: the despised, shunned, and undated, the outcasts at the high school geek table.

Belles laides
weren’t accorded any magical immunities or advantages at birth. They belie the psychological wisdom that beauty can be loved into ugly children by the devoted parental gaze. Only Isabella Stewart Gardner and Pauline Viardot were fathers’ favorites; the rest grew up the dysfunctional way, acquainted with familial strife and neglect and the gall of homeliness. Plastic surgeons weren’t on hand to make it all better; with few career options beyond male patronage, it was beauty or bust. They scaled the heights through go-getter spine and chutzpah, creating their dazzle and transformative hoodoo from scratch.

Of the seductresses,
belles laides
were the overachievers. Without the passe-partout of a pretty face, they tried harder. They turned themselves into erotic fighting machines. They developed their characters, mined the Seductive Way for the strongest munitions, and intuitively exploited their primordial charms. Erotic guerrillas, they tunneled beneath the beauty checkpoint and took the enemy off guard. They knew—who better?—that amour is an illusionist game, “of imagination all compact.” For that reason, they played up the necromancy of the senses, especially the ancient beauty substitutes of fashion, cosmetics, and image. Whatever other physical appeals they could muster, they did—with a vengeance: dance, gesture, music, voice,
volupté
settings, and hot and heavy sex.

Not surprisingly they stressed mind spells. Accentuating their archaic attractions, they laid on ego strokes and maternal beguilements and blazed with goddess brio. When they talked, they took eloquence one better and traded in comedy, laser-guided weaponry that strikes at the “animal unconscious,” the involuntary matrix of desire. The sex goddess is “laughter loving”; she hits below the belt—smack at the id. They also aimed for the biggest bangs in love. With their elemental, no prisoners’ personalities, they designed their love labyrinths on the thrill park model, for maximum intensity. They delivered the
mysterium tremendum
of the first cave rite in all its heartstopping awe, terror, surprise, and rapture. This was strong medicine, not the pap of pretty girls. Symmetry, as George Santayana points out, elicits “domestic peace” and “delights without stimulating.” It expresses no “vitality.”

Disproportion and irregularity, on the other hand, exert the opposite effect, something closer to the punch-to-the-solar-plexus of passion.
Belles laides
knew their style: the “beauty of the Medusa,” which disorients, electrifies, whiplashes us with ambivalence, and transports us to an “estranged,” irrational world. That world is the world of myth; the word “grotesque” comes from
grotta
(cave).

Plain women, then, are less accursed than they think. Not only do their defective faces and figures contain an unsuspected mythic charge, they can transfigure themselves into seductive supremas with a little love savvy. They can redefine beauty as radically as Bosch or Picasso.

There are two ways, according to George Sand, of handling ugliness: You can either submit to public consensus or ignore it and get on with the business of personal greatness and enchantment. In the latter case, the erotic impact doubles. A
belle laide
“wins the heart” and deliciously “shocks the senses.” Shock and ecstasy are what men seek in love, not the stasis, regularity, and calm of clueless lovelies.

In fact men may not be as excited by pretty girls as they’d have us believe. Many seasoned connoisseurs have brushed them off. “Prettiness suggests nothing,” carped George Moore; “Whoever looks at it twice when it has been in the house three days?” growled George Bernard Shaw. In Bertrand Blier’s film
Too Beautiful for You,
Gérard Depardieu ditches his cover girl wife for a plus-size secretary, and in Thomas Mann’s
The Magic Mountain,
the plain, flat-chested Clavdia Chauchat enamors all the men on the mountain while comely guests madly circulate the book
The Art of Seduction.
A whole subgenre of literature and film celebrates homely seductresses.

In Marcel Proust’s view, “pretty women ought to be left to men without imagination.” He might have added “boys.” Psychiatrists and sexologists point out that perfect tens appeal primarily to adolescents and insecure men. Living dolls are fetishes, defenses against performance anxieties and the frightening swamps of female sexuality. If you’re not careful, a woman can hurtle you headlong into precivilized madness, into the maw of nature, where sexually she can’t be beaten or contained.

So when we swallow looksist propaganda and sink all our resources into beautification, we’re accommodating nervous half men who want to divert us from sexual empowerment. A gorgeous face and figure, to be sure, cause a momentary power surge, but it’s momentary, exactly as chauvinists want it. A cupcake can’t sink her claws in your heart; an armpiece stays on your arm, not in your head.