All We Know: Three Lives (29 page)

“This affair has assumed in Bloomsbury the proportions of a political rupture,” Vita Sackville-West wrote to her husband, Harold Nicolson. “It is said,” Virginia Woolf wrote to Vanessa Bell, “that Condé Nast threatened to reveal Todds [
sic
] private sins, if she sued them, so she is taking £1000, and does not bring an action.” “So poor Todd is silenced,” wrote Sackville-West, “since her morals are of the classic rather than the conventional order.” Other
Vogue
staff resigned in protest; contributors threatened to stop writing for the magazine; and Chase got to work hiring a new editor, Alison Settle, and “immediately…transforming her into the correct image of a
Vogue
representative.” Chase recalled the firing and its after effects in inflated, sexual terms: “The lady [Dody] had a forceful personality and the sound of the wrench, when it came, reverberated from London to New York and back again. When the long, shuddering roar finally subsided we were weak, Toddless, but headed for the Nast formula.” Contemporaries, such as Sackville-West, who shared Dody’s “classic” proclivities understood Nast’s threat as referring to her lesbianism, which implicated Madge. Reviewing Carolyn Seebohm’s biography of Condé Nast in 1982, Madge wrote that “in the days when homosexuality was a criminal offence he was not above using the threat of disclosure to avoid paying up for a broken contract.” But describing this period to Hilary Spurling several years later, she said that Nast had been aware of Helen—perhaps guarding her own privacy by attributing Nast’s intimidation to a potential revelation about Dody’s illegitimate child. Homosexuality was never a criminal offense for women in England, but the threat—I will bring your private life into public view—was real. These are the vicious mechanics of discretion: the extent to which it is possible to be disgraced by the “exposure” of facts that are already evident.

Dody and Madge had not only orchestrated the publicity of people whose work they admired, but had also become public figures who provoked sexual gossip on Fleet Street, London’s grubby, male newspaper world. Their cachet as a powerful couple, the visibility of their ménage, and the contrast of their styles—one young, thin, and blond; the other older, heavier, and dark—impressed some and distressed others, but always incited comment. “A Garden is a lovesome thing, God wot [knows],” wrote the nineteenth-century poet Thomas Brown, and in the 1920s someone rang a change on the line: “A Garland is a lovesome thing, Todd wot.” Dody was referred to as “Das Tod das Maedchens” (The Death of the Maidens). And there was a “joke”: “‘What is a Sapphist?’ ‘A Doderast who practices Todomy.’” The question of what a Sapphist might be troubled the air in England between the 1918 libel suit the dancer Maud Allan brought against a newspaper that alleged she was a lesbian and the 1928 obscenity trial against Radclyffe Hall’s
The Well of Loneliness
. The question was part of a relatively new way of thinking about sex—the idea that a lesbian was a particular type of person—that was making certain women newly visible, or visible in new ways.

Madge and Dody’s own crowd mixed an exhilarating sexual openness with fear of exposure, excelled at innuendo, and took the kind of pleasure at in-jokes that can only be had when a simultaneous vigilance about and disdain for appearances is the rule. Cecil Beaton’s diaries capture the catty tone of their milieu and the extent to which the two were sources of fascination and revulsion. Sometimes Dody is “that filthy Editor of
Vogue
” who “has got an objectionable face…like a sea lion,” and Madge is “her bit” on the side. At others they are “Miss Todd the
Vogue
Queen with that nice little Madge Garland.” Frederick Ashton was so dazzled by Madge and Dody that he included two characters based on them in his first ballet, the 1926 
A Tragedy of Fashion
. Madge called this dance “a brilliant evocation of the period” that reflected “not only the physical appearance, but the whole tonality of my youth.” The pair in this dance—one figure outrageously butch, the other sinuously feminine: no more stylized than Madge and Dody themselves—was a bold answer to what a Sapphist was. But while the term clearly attached to Dody and her “mannish” style, it applied to Madge, whose self-presentation conformed to her gender, in more elusive ways. Her visibility was the unspoken part of what concerned Nast and Chase.

The firing devastated both women. They had occupied positions of cultural power; now they were unemployed, tainted by scandal, and so virtually unemployable. Bloomsbury did not shun them, but they were ostentatiously avoided by many other former colleagues and friends, some of whom were afraid of having their own homosexuality exposed. When Madge walked down the street, people crossed away from her. But she did not retreat. She and Dody held on to the flat on the Royal Hospital Road, and Yoxall was stunned to see them out at the ballet a month or two after the firing, “both looking very full of life, and both very gaily dressed.” They made plans to start a magazine of their own. “Fashion Miss Todd all but eschewed,” Chase had argued, as if
Vogue
were simply the vehicle for Dody’s “real” interests in art and literature. Yet the plan for the new magazine—it was “to be
Vogue
, only quarterly,” with Dody as editor and Madge second in command—suggests that fashion was important to both of them, and not only for advertising revenue. Beaton was upset about the turn British
Vogue
had taken under Alison Settle (and Chase’s firm hand). They were “trying hard to make the magazine like a woman’s pictorial,” and he did his best to be affiliated with Madge and Dody’s new venture, to which Raymond Mortimer and others had already been recruited. He had them to lunch several times, along with Edith Sitwell (who wore “a black toque from which fell masses of black lace, and a tweed dress”) and several of the other queer young men who supported them: Dadie Rylands, Steven Runciman, the poet Brian Howard. “I wanted to impress her [Madge] with some of my photos,” Beaton wrote, but “she talked hard—hard without ceasing—about Brancusi and
Vogue
—& how badly they’d been treated…She, of course, was smarting with the injustice…She says she was given the sack by Condé Nast for making
Vogue
too highbrow too Bloomsbury. They published pictures of obscure actors and actresses.” Madge’s talk was “all very smart & intellectual & terrifically
Vogue
.” After lunch, he photographed her in her “coat & claret-coloured skirt & hat & flower.”

While Madge scrambled for freelance journalism, Dody worked on a survey of modernist design in England, Europe, and the United States,
The New Interior Decoration
, which she eventually asked Raymond Mortimer to write with her. They still entertained. At a crowded cocktail party at the Royal Hospital Road flat in the autumn of 1926, Beaton noted that “Todd was a little nervous & shaky at first but later became normal.” But by early 1928 they still did not have funding for the new magazine, and the strain was starting to show. Friends saw them bicker, having “rows in front of everybody and Dody really behaving like a sort of Victorian father—you know, ‘Do this, do that,’ ‘I won’t do this, I won’t do that,’—and poor Madge…dissolving into tears and crying for hours.” Elspeth Champcommunal, who showed her collections with Nicole Groult in London in the late 1920s, became a refuge. Madge arrived at a party at Champco’s country house in Provence one afternoon “in a state of devastation” about Dody, “dressed in a scarlet dress with pearl buttons all the way down the front, and an Eton collar, bright gold hair, and very tearful.”

Woolf was hyperbolically critical at this time, describing Todd as grotesque: “like some primeval animal emerging from the swamp, muddy, hirsute.” After Dody and Madge had Woolf to lunch to introduce her to Rebecca West in the spring of 1928, she wrote, “The Todd ménage is incredibly louche: Todd in sponge bag trousers; Garland in pearls and silk; both rather raddled and on their beam ends.” This description is for Vanessa Bell’s entertainment. In her diary, Woolf wrote, “Todd’s room; rather to her credit, work-manlike; Garland pear[l] hung & silken; Todd as buxom as a badger. Rebecca a hardened old reprobate I daresay, but no fool; & the whole atmosphere professional; no charm, except the rather excessive charm of Garland.” Rebecca West, however, remembered the lunch lasting till nearly five o’clock.

If Madge had been unprepared for the firing, she was completely unmoored by what happened next. Increasingly, she came home to find Dody passed out with an empty whiskey bottle beside her. Then the bills started coming in from businesses all over London—florists, dressmakers, galleries, restaurants—and she was confronted with Dody’s catastrophic handling of money. “She had been running up bills” for years “on a scale that was almost lunatic,” Madge said. “She begged and borrowed from her friends.” A painting by Vuillard that she had given Madge for her birthday was reclaimed by the gallery, as was a Duncan Grant portrait. Madge learned that Dody had used her name at a number of establishments, including when buying clothes for Helen, so that some of this debt was literally hers. The deception was terrible; the fact that Dody had committed it at “stores”—middle-class establishments—that Madge had never even entered made it even more baffling and humiliating. In this way, Ruthella Todd’s destructive legacy became real to Madge, and she began to think of Dody’s character as an inheritance from her “gambling mother.” She said, “Condé Nast didn’t realize it in time—he saw the brilliance—he didn’t see the instability. It was awful.” She did not say that she herself had not seen it in time.

Forced to settle the bills in her own name, Madge also cleared Dody’s debts over the next four years, feeling that she owed it to her. In the meantime, nearly everything they owned, and those things they had merely appeared to own, was seized by bailiffs. In a draft of her memoir, not identifying Dody, Madge wrote, “I had never thought of keeping a record of the things I had paid for myself and so in the bankruptcy of my friend the entire contents of the house, which was in her name, vanished.” A kind daily servant hid some of Madge’s books, keeping them safe for the next several years. Her dresses were all that was left: “So now once again I was homeless, penniless,” she wrote; “only a few lovely and rather inappropriate clothes remained.”

Long after her separation from Dody and even decades after Dody’s death, Madge was haunted by her. Yet it was her ability to distance herself from Dody that made it possible to get by. “Dody went downhill, you might say,” recalled Chloe Tyner. “And Madge, she soared uphill. She had to fight very, very hard. But she was able to do it because her manners were better and she managed to always look charming.” For the rest of her life, there were people who would not acknowledge Madge, because the two had been lovers and because of Dody’s disgrace. As the student outstripped the teacher, there were also those who thought ill of Madge because they believed she had used Dody to get ahead. As she retreated from London, reemerged, and continually refashioned herself, her ability to wear clothes well and her understanding of what she and others wore were signs of her debt to Dody and of her own distinctiveness.

Escaping the end of their life together, Madge went with Ted Mc Knight Kauffer and Marion Dorn to stay at Vanessa Bell’s house in Cassis; she treasured a painting Kauffer made of the place during that stay, which he gave her. Soon afterward, she moved to France, where “it was much cheaper and easier to be poor than in London.” She occasionally found work reporting for provincial English papers about the collections at the couture houses where she still had contacts. She lived “almost anywhere,” subsisted on yogurt and vegetables, and often shared these “miserable meals” with the painter and theater designer Sophie Fedorovitch, who had done the set and costumes for
A Tragedy of Fashion
. A “remarkable small woman with short fair hair and very keen blue eyes,” Fedorovitch was the daughter of Polish gentry, had studied painting in Russia, survived the Revolution, then escaped to London after almost starving to death. Madge and she shared an instinct for textiles and clothes; they may have shared a bed. (“One night we slept on the floor in somebody’s flat,” Madge recalled.) Despite Fedorovitch’s own “sober habit,” wrote a friend, “she loved…beautiful clothes on other women” and she had a real “feeling for ethereal fabrics on the stage.” When Fedorovitch moved back to London, she continued to work closely with Ashton over several decades; he called her “my greatest artistic collaborator and adviser.” In Paris she sometimes worked as a taxi driver—which many Russian émigrés did, but not many women did—and she memorialized this pinched time with Madge in a still life of a carafe and a glass of water—a joke, since they could seldom afford to drink wine. Madge and she often spent evenings in some basement boîte, “drinking tea and singing Russian songs till all hours.” Madge would meet Janet Flanner at Les Deux Magots and sometimes accompanied Flanner when she filed her copy for
The New Yorker
, putting it on the last, late-night train to the coast to meet a boat to New York. Virgil Thomson brought her to meet Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas; she heard him play “the early beginnings” of
Four Saints in Three Acts
at another friend’s house.

Summer in Cannes (MGP)

She spent a summer in Cannes, where her flat, in the rue d’Antibes, was devoid of furniture other than a bed. She had no money to furnish the place, so she asked the artist John Banting to paint images of tables and chairs on the walls. It was still a relative novelty to spend the summer in the South of France, and the Cap d’Antibes, as she said, offered a new “way of life and dress.” She wore sailor pants, a striped top, and espadrilles. She wore these trousers with a white singlet, tennis shoes, and a sailor cap at a jaunty angle. Or she was in a Chanel dress, and well shod. That new way of life had to do with being part of a critical mass of independent women, the first generation that was moneyed and had left home without marrying. In one series of snapshots taken in her flat, Madge and a group of friends lounge theatrically on her bed. What is pictured, the feeling arrested there: the ease with which they are tumbled together, the looks among them and at the camera, the sense of shared leisure and pleasure.

Madge never found steady work—unlike these friends, she did not have family money—again became ill, and eventually returned to London. But once there, she was approached by the Illustrated Newspapers Group and offered a job editing the women’s section of their two recently amalgamated magazines,
Britannia
and
Eve
. It was a coup, given the dire state of the economy and the disgrace she had lived through. It was another thing to reconcile it with the kind of work she had been used to. Rebecca West told her she could not possibly be associated with such a lowbrow publication, especially one with a name as absurd as
Britannia and Eve
. (They had kept the titles of both papers.) “I can and I will,” Madge said, citing the salary. West continued to tease her, referring to the magazine as “Madge’s two old girls” and calling the night she closed her section “putting [her] two old girls to bed.”

Hired as the “Woman Editor,” Madge told the editor in chief that she was qualified to produce the fashion pages but had no knowledge of “what are called women’s interests”: “knitting, and babies, and cooking.” She had Elspeth Champcommunal’s old nanny check the knitting patterns, managed the pages on child rearing with the help of friends and their nurses and governesses, and paid the cook of wealthy friends (Lord and Lady Sainsbury) to test recipes. She published an early article on flower arrangement by horticulture and household design guru Constance Spry, which began a friendship that lasted until Spry’s death. The editor congratulated her on her knowledge of knitting (“I said nothing”) and cooking (“In those days I don’t think I’d seen a saucepan”), then asked her to edit the fashion pages of another of the company’s magazines,
The Bystander
. She began producing five pages a week for
The Bystander
along with twenty pages a month for
Britannia and Eve
. She had a minuscule staff, but loved that the work was “such a challenge”—and that in the worst years of the Depression she had two salaries and two expense accounts. She lived in Mayfair—her mother’s dream, achieved in her own way—surrounded by the luxury goods about which she was writing. In one flat, on Bruton Street, she was flanked by the couturiers Norman Hartnell and Victor Stiebel. She had a favorite table at the Ritz, bought a country house in Sussex, and resumed her life in Paris, in style. The Illustrated Newspapers’ offices were close enough to Victoria Station that she could catch a 4:30 train to Paris on a Friday afternoon, arrive by midnight—the fashionable hour for art openings—spend the weekend in Paris, and return home in time to be at work on Monday. She made longer visits for the collections at least twice a year.

Sailor style in the South of France (MGP)

It was not just the money. The November 1929 issue of
Britannia and Eve
, her first, carried the headline “Fashions Feminine and Otherwise by Madge Garland” along with her photograph—one of the portraits Beaton had taken several years before. “What I Saw in Paris, by Madge Garland” was another early headline. Beginning in January 1932, her name was also splashed across the pages of
The Bystander
every week: “Madge Garland writes a Forecast of Fashion”; “A Portfolio of Spring Fashions Compiled by Madge Garland”; “Madge Garland Brings Back News from Paris.” The 1930s, she recalled, was when “I lived the fullest life.” Her medium was her self-presentation. She began appearing on television, talking about women’s clothes for the BBC. Able to buy couture clothing again, she wore Lanvin and Schiaparelli—the wit and conceptual flair of the latter especially pleasurable to her. She was “always very elegant, slightly affected, willowy, soignée.” She was “always in a hat.” She was in a black wool coat with sleeves of leopard skin, designed by Victor Stiebel.

Her medium was also the mixture of technical vocabulary, rapturous hyperbole, and didacticism that was the language of fashion. She was working at a time when fashion was a set of demanding but always changing rules handed down from above. As she said later, “I thought I should inform people, be absolutely clear and exact—whether they like[d] it or not!” As in: “Dark brown is excellent when accompanied by brilliant sapphire blue.” “Pink and brown is good, provided that both colours approximate to mushroom shades.” The logic is sometimes elusive: “Sports clothes favour colour contrasts, but skirts are often divided.” At times, the more she rendered the clothing, piling detail on detail, the more the object seemed at once to escape and reward her—and the reader: “For evening wraps nothing is so satisfying to the eye, nor so practical to wear since it does not easily crease, as a good lamé, particularly when it is shot with multi-colored flower colours which permit it being worn with several different coloured satin or velvet gowns.”

Emphatic and effusive, this rhetoric also careened toward the telegraphic. Madge’s report from the spring 1930 collections, described in
Britannia and Eve
as a “copy of a telegram received from our Woman Editor in Paris,” reproduced not just the syntax but the look of an urgent, condensed communiqué: “
SHINY STRAW HATS FEATURED FOR SUMMER STOP BIZARRE JEWELS CRYSTAL ENAMEL ETC WORN WITH SIMPLE EVENING GOWNS WOOD AND METAL NECKLACES FOR SPORTS WEAR STOP
.” And: “
LATEST SHOES FROM BUNTING MADE OF FISH-SKIN RESEMBLING SHAGREEN BUT FINER AND SOFT STOP
.” Then there is the question that is not a question: “Don’t you think a spotted handkerchief knotted closely around the throat is a practical and becoming fashion?” she wrote in late 1931, as if searching for another way to be didactic. “Does your new winter hat reveal one side of your waved hair and dip abruptly over the other side?” “Are you one of the enthusiasts who are delighted at the so-called return of the bustle?” And: “Which Would You Choose—Pink Velvet or Black Tulle?”

Writing on fashion, the physical, and the electricity of the present in the section of
Tender Buttons
called “A long dress,” Gertrude Stein uses a version of this form:

These, too, are questions that preempt themselves, doing what they ask. Writing about the space of waists and of necessity, the relationships among colors, and the crackle of technology, Stein is concerned with the way lines of text and the lines of a dress—“long lines,” “the serene length”—intersect. “Practice measurement, practice the sign that means that really means a necessary betrayal, in showing that there is wearing,” she writes, in the section of
Tender Buttons
titled “A chair.” And: “Actually not aching, actually not aching, a stubborn bloom is so artificial and even more than that, it is a spectacle, it is a binding accident, it is animosity and accentuation.”

With friends in the South of France, late 1920s; Madge is second from right (MGP)