Baby boomers who act like they invented being young at sixty are
forgetting about Elsie de Wolfe who at sixty-one in 1926 attended a
costume ball in Paris dressed as a Moulin Rouge dancer and made her
entrance doing handsprings. When she turned seventy, the world's most
famous interior designer wrote her autobiography and noted that her
daily exercise regimen still included yoga, headstands, and walking on
her hands. Her design style was nearly as dramatic, banishing the dark,
heavy Victorian look for new openness, airiness, and light. Starting at
forty, she received her first major commission for Stanford White's
Colony Club, after which she designed the interiors for the premiere
families of her day, the Fricks, Morgans, Vanderbilts, and Windsors.
Ten years into her success, in her early fifties, she stopped to become
a nurse in World War I in France and earned the Croix de Guerre and the
Legion of Honor. From her late twenties onward she lived with Elisabeth
Marbury, one of the first women to work as a theatrical agent,
representing among others Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. They
spent thirty-three years together as a classic butch-femme couple,
mentoring a whole generation of younger lesbians including Mercedes de
Acosta who would become Greta Garbo's lover. Then de Wolfe up and
married Sir Charles Mendl because she wanted a title. Now Lady Mendl,
she expected nothing to change with Marbury, given that her marriage
was completely platonic, and the women remained lovers for seven more
years, until 1933, when Marbury died.
The next time you discuss outing and public figures and privacy, you might bear in mind that in 1926, the New York Times
ran a front page story calling de Wolfe's wedding "a great surprise"
because "she makes her home with Elisabeth Marbury at 13 Sutton Place."
Not that everything can be explained by early experiences, but the
woman who spent her life making things beautiful grew up listening to
her mother tell her she was ugly. When she was seventy, Parisian
fashionistas named her the best dressed woman in the world. She is
immortalized in song lyrics by Irving Berlin and by Cole Porter:
When you hear that Lady Mendl, standing up,
Now turns a handspring, landing up-on her toes
Anything Goes!
Flashback to 1949: South Pacific opened on Broadway, James Gould Cozzens won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, All the King's Men
won the Oscar for Best Picture, and in France, Jean Genet received his
tenth criminal conviction, which meant he would be sent to prison for
life. In the preceding five years he had published his five
groundbreaking novels, as well as three plays and dozens of poems, all
of which were greatly esteemed by his European contemporaries despite
his focus on petty thieves and his inclusion of gay sex. As news of his
dire situation spread, rather than ostracizing Genet, the leading
intellectuals rallied to his defense, and with a public push from
Cocteau, Sartre, and Picasso, among others, Genet was pardoned by the
French president. It is safe to say Harry Truman would not have done
the same because at that point Genet's fiction was still banned in the
United States. Genet never returned to prison after that, nor did he
ever publish another novel, although he continued to write plays,
poems, and a memoir, Un Captif Amoureux, published in 1986, the year after he died of throat cancer. For the full story, treat yourself to Edmund White's definitive Genet: A Biography
.
Although the controversy over his 1934 WPA painting The Fleet's In!
was sparked by homophobia and led Henry Latrobe Roosevelt to remove it
from the Corcoran show, Paul Cadmus was always aware that the outcry
helped establish him. For the rest of his life, he said he was grateful
for it. By 1937 his paintings at the Midtown Galleries in New York
attracted more than 7,000 visitors. He had grown up in Manhattan and
was fascinated by sailors, frequently hanging out at the Soldiers' and
Sailors' Monument in Riverside Park, where he was often propositioned
by navy men on leave but was too shy to go with them, preferring
instead to sit on the benches with them and talk. By his twenties, he
was over his shyness and traveled through Europe for three years with
his lover Jared French, who urged him to quit advertising and paint
fulltime. Back in New York, they formed a circle of prominent gay
artists including George Platt Lynes, who used Cadmus as a model, and
Lincoln Kirstein, who married his sister, Fidelma Cadmus, and fifty
years later wrote the catalog as Cadmus was being rediscovered. He
enjoyed more than a decade of increasing interest in his work before he
died, eleven days after 300 friends had gathered to celebrate his 95th
birthday. He was survived by Jon Anderson, his partner of more than
thirty-five years.