All We Know: Three Lives (38 page)
And her charm, both genuine and mannered, never did away with her need for love. In one draft of her memoir, describing the end of her marriage to Ewart Garland, Madge wrote, “within two years we had parted; I to live as what is now called a loner for most of my life.” Dody Todd is not the only person elided in this summary. Madge’s life was filled with extreme and ragged behavior as well as smooth surfaces, and there were always more women on whom her happiness and her unhappiness depended. “Everybody was one of Madge’s old flames,” said Sybille Bedford, referring to Eve Wyld and others. Olivia Wyndham’s 1939 photograph of a plaster cast of Madge’s hand, part of Madge’s papers, is a reminder that Wyndham’s American girlfriend was so jealous that when they returned to London for visits, Wyndham had to scheme elaborately to see Madge. The collector Gabrielle Enthoven told Madge that if only she, Enthoven, were a little younger she would pursue her. Mercedes de Acosta, Madge said, was “one of the women I have loved most in my life.” The women she loved and who loved her were friends, colleagues, and lovers, and it is not always possible, or necessarily useful, to define them as one or the other. The point was that she cared in her way for those whom, one by one, she tried to care for.
Madge, back to camera, with Margaret Rawlings, in “The Bystander,” September 1933 (MGP)
Writing in her eighties about her nanny, May, and recalling her distress when she learned that May “was leaving me and going to marry a man,” Madge noted that this memory had been precipitated by a more recent betrayal. Hurtling through her long life after May’s departure in just a few sentences, she wrote:
The years passed, lovers came and went with the usual amount of drama and pain. Hard work, increased financial security and a passionate interest in the world and its artifacts helped me to present a reasonably confidant appearance—a thin veneer with many cracks, many papered over by pretty clothes, but one which was adequate for all but the most percipient of friends. Then, as I was approaching my eightieth year, almost simultaneously, two disasters broke the façade,
the death of a
a great sorrow and an agonising physical illness. I put out my hand to clasp that of a much-loved and (I thought) utterly trustworthy friend—but there was nothing there. Only the dust of a trivial fascination. I was utterly alone.
betrayed and abandoned
. It was then, 75 years later, that I thought of May.
Olguita Queeny, the first real love of Madge’s life, committed a series of betrayals and remained a charged subject. In old age, Madge spoke openly about her unhappiness when she learned that Olguita had married: “I cried and I cried and I cried, for days on end,” she told Peter Ward-Jackson; “I couldn’t stop crying.” She said that she had locked herself in her room in the Queenys’ home in St. Louis and stopped weeping only when she was taken to see the Grand Canyon. It is a moving confession, but a confusing one, since Olguita did not marry until 1928, a decade after Madge’s visits to St. Louis, and Madge joined her for at least part of the honeymoon: There are snapshots in both women’s photo albums of the three of them, Madge, Olguita, and her new husband, lounging in matching bathing suits on the beach at Le Touquet in northern France. Olguita’s London homes appeared in
Britannia and Eve
twice in the 1930s—undoubtedly Madge’s doing. But for both women, the meaning of their bond outlasted the friendship. Olguita married an Englishman and spent the rest of her life in London and Malvern, so Madge and she were never far away from each other, but they drifted apart and then there was a rupture, from which Madge never recovered.
In 1945, as the war was ending and Madge was about to leave for the United States, including a stay in St. Louis, she sat in the dining room at the Dorchester Hotel waiting for Olguita, who never arrived. The next day, she received Olguita’s letter explaining why she had not kept their date and telling Madge that she would not see her again. Her reasons are obscure now, because Madge ripped up the first few pages of the letter when she received it. More than forty years later, sorting through her papers in preparation for a move, Madge found the remaining pages. Olguita’s words now begin in mid-sentence on page four and go on:
I somehow wish our lives fitted better, but my domestic schedule and your electrified one seem so far apart. We’d probably both find lots still in common, but the odd hour for lunch seems an unsympathetic and stilted allotment. One can hardly find pieces of treasure—in a hurry. I feel our friendship was too important to treat lightly, and I like keeping it the way I remember it…I’m rambling. I just wanted to say—I’m sorry—for bungling the chance of seeing you. You sounded remote and busy and I feel it was difficult to say on the telephone how tired and unavailable I was.
The shock of coming across this fragment in the 1980s was so great that Madge was moved to document her distress and try to explain their friendship. Writing in an almost illegible scrawl, when her eyesight but not her acumen was failing, writing when her sense of what she could say was still conflicted, veering between longing and disavowal, she produced two pages. She did not name Olguita.
It is 43 years since I sat in the Dorchester waiting for my luncheon guest. She never arrived. Next morning a letter arrived in the familiar spidery writing. Today I had the courage to ask my secretary to read it to me. Yes, I said, I know the first three pp. are missing (they had been torn up when the letter first arrived—too full of anguish, too acute to be born—[illegible] were [two words illegible] destroyed—p. 4 continued to explain, to attempt to describe a relationship so precious, so unique that it could not be related [
sic
] to a brief luncheon at the Dorchester…Our total innocence would be impossible today but we were [blank space] of illicit relationships and certainly had no such desires on either side. We loved each other, had perfect trust in each other and tho we were both so different.
Madge wrote that after this broken date they met again only twice, both times by accident. Once they ran into each other “in a quiet street not far from Sloane Sq. stopped under a lam[p]post and began to talk—we talked and talked as if our lives depended on our conversation—it began to rain and we went on talking. It grew dark and we parted, our eyes clinging to each others in an agony of betrayal.” Denying “illicit” feelings, this writing—private yet seemingly composed with an audience in mind; fragmented, oblique, and direct; romantic and repudiating romance—was an attempt to come to terms with emotion that still had the power to derail her. The scrawled pages, her need to account for the conclusion of a friendship that had been of the utmost importance to her, the story she told about crying for three
Madge, “chez Rebecca [West] taken by her,” at Ibstone House, in the 1960s (MGP)
days when she learned of Olguita’s marriage—all are of an intensity that makes the distinction between
innocent
and
illicit
irrelevant. Olguita died in 1983. It is possible that “
the death of a
a great sorrow” that Madge wrote about in the essay about May was Olguita’s death.
“Of course I am a feminist!” Madge exclaimed to a young reporter in the mid-1980s. She often paid tribute to the inspiration of Rebecca West’s early feminist writing and brave life. When West married in 1930, Madge felt bereft and expressed her shock to others. “It is not a question of comparative affection,” says Josephine Napier, in
More Women Than Men
, after the marriage of two teachers in her school. “That may be why we feel a faint resentment over people’s marriages. Because I think there is no doubt that we do.” Madge and West remained close, and late in their lives West was her only intimate who had also known and cared about Dody. “You are not one of the old friends who are merely a custom,” West wrote; “you fascinate me just as much as you did when I first met you.”
More women: When Madge talked about having known “most of the great beauties of my time,” she meant the models, of course, but she was also thinking about the artists Marion Dorn and Lee Miller. The first time Madge visited Man Ray’s studio, Miller opened the door: There was “this wonderful-looking creature: pale, pale blond hair; pale blue eyes; pale, pale peach skin; pale grey sweater; and pale grey velvet pants.” Miller’s beauty was exceptional; her clothes were unusual: Women still did not wear pants in Paris, only on the Riviera. “She was so beautiful—she was
so
beautiful,” Madge said, expressively and redundantly, “that it was just a pleasure to be with her.” Miller would reply to such appreciation by saying that she wanted “to break the beauty.” She had moved to France from New York in 1929 to apprentice herself to Man Ray, and became his lover and model; she was also photographed, filmed, and painted by Edward Steichen, Picasso, Cocteau, and others. A superb photographer in her own right, she later produced some of the most crucial images of wartime and postwar London and Europe, including Dachau and Buchenwald. But in the years that followed, she did break herself: drinking heavily, no longer taking photographs, never speaking of her work, retreating to the farm in Sussex where she lived with her husband, the art historian Roland Penrose, where Madge would visit her. At her death, she was known more as a model for famous male artists than as a photographer, and this relative obscurity persisted until her son stumbled on boxes of her work—an archive of some forty thousand negatives and hundreds of prints—and set about rescuing them and her reputation. Madge loved her, and although Miller rarely had women friends (“She was much more for the boys,” said Madge), the feeling was mutual. “How are you honey? love + kisses—Lee,” reads an undated note she wrote to Madge on the back of a snapshot.
Christine (Kitty) Salmond Pringle Mocatta was a paragon of elegant butch femininity, and her house in the Thames Valley was one of Madge’s refuges during the war. From an artistic family (her brother was the cellist Felix Salmond; her sister was a partner in the Redfern Gallery), she left a miserable first marriage and supported herself and her young son as a music hall dancer until one of her stage door admirers, Edgar Mocatta, the heir to the Mocatta gold-dealing fortune, proposed marriage in 1940. Slim and tall, with striking violet eyes, Kitty was generous and she loved opulence. She had her suits made at Hawes and Curtis, clothier to the Prince of Wales: gray or navy blue, with double-breasted jackets and velour collars. She wore handmade shirts with French cuffs. She smoked her own blend of Egyptian (oval) cigarettes from a Bond Street tobacconist, wore Mitsouko or Jicky by Guerlain, carried crocodile handbags, and wore crocodile pumps. The only color in her ensembles came from her lacquered red nails, her substantial jewelry (sapphires by day, rubies and diamonds for the evening), and her handkerchiefs. Those
foulards
—in blue or pink, from a shop on the rue de Castiglione that sold nothing else—were a vehicle for the language of love, since Kitty and her intimates embroidered messages on everything. When she traveled, she carried these scarves in a pouch of silk satin, a gift from Madge. On its front, embroidered in petit point: “
TO DARLING KITTY
”; on the inside: “
TO KITTY DARLING
”; on the back: “
YOURS, MADGE
”; on one of the scarves: “
FOR MY BELOVED, FROM KITTY TO MADGE
.” A
suivez-moi, jeune homme
(literally, a “follow me, young man”) refers to a number of accessories meant to attract a man’s attention—hat ribbons that flutter seductively at the nape of the neck, the handkerchief that a woman drops intentionally. “So these were what you might call
suivez-moi, jeune fille
” (“follow me, young woman”), said Colombe Pringle, Kitty’s granddaughter and Madge’s goddaughter, who was the editor of French
Vogue
from 1987 to 1994. They were “
des billet doux, mais en tissu
”—love letters inscribed on fabric.
And then there was Dody, whose traces are few after the 1920s, but whose end must be mentioned.
The New Interior Decoration
, by Dorothy Todd and Raymond Mortimer, was published in 1929. It is dedicated to Madge Garland. Dody ran a gallery for a short time in the 1930s, and she published an essay about Marion Dorn’s work in
The Architectural Review
. During the war, she held a government job as a social worker. She made several attempts to reestablish herself in publishing, appealing to magazine editors for work. She published a translation of Le Corbusier’s
Sur les Quatre Routes
in 1947 and a translation of a biography of Metternich in 1953. She might have published a memoir, through Virginia Woolf’s intervention—the editorial roles briefly reversed—for the Hogarth Press. In June 1926, at a party at Edith Sitwell’s Bayswater flat in honor of Gertrude Stein, Woolf had “proposed, wildly, fantastically, a book—which she [Todd] accepts!” Woolf was “in my new dress” (from a dressmaker Dody had recommended); Stein was “in blue-sprinkled brocade, rather formidable”; Madge, E. M. Forster, and Siegfried Sassoon were also at this party. In the course of the evening, Woolf’s unease overwhelmed her. “Jews swarmed,” she wrote to her sister; “Leonard, being a Jew himself, got on very well with her [Stein]. But it was an anxious exacerbating affair:…I was so morose that I flew to the bosom of Todd, and there reposed. I have asked her to write her life, but I gather that there are passages of an inconceivable squalor.”