Confessions of an Art Addict (4 page)

In the summer of 1919, I came into my fortune. I was an heiress and I was independent. My mother was greatly upset. She could no longer control me. The first thing I did was to make an extensive trip all over the United States. I invited Benita's new husband's cousin to chaperon me. We went from Niagara Falls to Chicago and
from there to Yellowstone Park, all through California, down to the Mexican border and up the coast to the Canadian Rockies, and then back to Chicago, where I was met by my aviator fiancé, who had been demobilized. He introduced me to his family, who were all Chicagoans, but I did not make a hit. I complained too much about the provincialism of Chicago. As I was leaving on the ‘Twentieth Century', he told me it was all off. I was very unhappy because I thought I was in love with him and was patiently waiting for him to make a fortune in the loose-leaf paper business so that he could marry me.

In the winter of 1920, being very bored, I could think of nothing better to do than have an operation performed on my nose to change its shape. It was ugly, but after the operation it was undoubtedly worse. I went to Cincinnati where there was a surgeon who specialized in these beauty operations. He made you choose a plaster model of the nose you preferred. He never was able to give me what I wanted, a nose ‘tip-tilted like a flower', something I had read about in Tennyson. During the operation (performed under a local anaesthetic), when I was suffering the tortures of the damned, surrounded by five nurses in white masks, the doctor suddenly asked me to choose again. He could not do what he had planned. It was all so painful I told him to stop and leave things as they were. As a result of the operation my nose was painfully swollen for a long time and I didn't dare set foot in New York. I hid in the Middle West, waiting for the
swelling to go down. Every time it rained I knew it beforehand, because my nose became a sort of barometer and would swell up in bad weather. I went to French Lick, Indiana, with a friend and gambled away nearly another thousand dollars, the operation having cost as much.

If Lucile Kohn was responsible for my radical beliefs, my actual liberation came about quite differently from any manner she might have foreseen. One day when I was at my dentist's, I found him in a predicament. His nurse was ill and he was doing all his work alone. I offered to replace the nurse as best I could. He accepted my help, for which he paid me $2.35 a day. I opened the door and answered the telephone. I held instruments for him and boiled them. I also learned which of my acquaintances had false teeth.

Myself aged fourteen

John Holms

Laurence Vail

Yves Tanguy

Marcel Duchamp

Art of This Century

Presently I left this job and offered my services to my cousin, Harold Loeb. He had a little radical bookshop near Grand Central Station. I became a clerk and spent my afternoons on the balcony writing out checks and doing various boring jobs. I was only permitted downstairs at noon, when I had to replace the people who went to lunch, at which time I sold books. When I complained of my fate to Gilbert Cannan, who came often and sat for hours in the bookshop, he said to me, ‘Never mind, Lady Hamilton started out as a kitchen-maid.'

Though I was only a clerk, I swept into the bookshop daily, highly perfumed, and wearing little pearls and a magnificent taupe coat. My mother disapproved of my working and came often to see what I was up to and to bring me rubbers if it was raining. This was embarrassing. My rich aunts also came and literally bought books by the yard to fill their bookcases. We had to bring out a tape measure to be sure the measurements coincided with their bookshelves.

In the bookshop I met many celebrities and writers and painters, among them my future husband, Laurence Vail, and Leon Fleischman and his wife Helen, who later
married James Joyce's son. Laurence was about twenty-nine at this time, and to me he appeared like someone out of another world. He was the first man I knew who never wore a hat. His beautiful, streaky golden hair streamed all over as the wind caught it. I was shocked by his freedom, but fascinated at the same time. He had lived all his life in France and he had a French accent and rolled his r's. He was like a wild creature. He never seemed to care what people thought. I felt when I walked down the street with him that he might suddenly fly away—he had so little connection with ordinary behaviour.

The Fleischmans became my great friends. They practically adopted me. One day Leon took me to see Alfred Stieglitz, one of the earliest promoters of modern art in the United States. They put the first abstract painting I had ever seen into my hands. It was painted by Georgia O'Keefe. I turned it around four times before I decided which way to look at it. They were delighted.

Soon after, I went to Europe. I didn't realize at the time that I was going to remain there for twenty-one years, but that wouldn't have stopped me. In those days my desire for seeing everything was very much in contrast to my lack of feeling for anything. That was born, however, as a result of my curiosity. I soon knew where every painting in Europe could be found, and I managed to get there, even if I had to spend hours going to a little country town to see only one. I had as a great friend Armand Lowengard, the nephew of Sir Joseph (later Lord)
Duveen. He was a fanatic about Italian painting. Seeing what a good subject I was, he egged me on to study art. He told me that I would never be able to understand Berenson's criticism. This remark served its purpose. I immediately bought and digested seven volumes of that great critic. After that I was forever going around looking for Berenson's seven points. If I could find a painting with tactile value I was thrilled. Armand had been wounded in the war and was rather badly done in. My vitality nearly killed him and though he was fascinated by me, in the end he had to renounce me, as I was entirely too much for him.

I didn't see the Fleischmans again until I returned to America for a brief visit in the spring. I then persuaded the Fleischmans to come and live in Paris. As they had a child and little money, it was all very complicated. But they came. It changed their life as much as they had changed, and were still to change, mine.

Through the Fleischmans I again met Laurence Vail. A few days later he took me out for a walk. We went to the tomb of the Unknown Soldier and then we walked along the Seine. I was wearing an elegant costume trimmed with kolinsky fur, that I had designed for myself. He took me into a bistro and asked me what I wanted. I asked for a porto flip, thinking I was in the kind of bar I was used to. In those days I led only the most expensive sort of life and had never set foot in an ordinary café and had no idea what to order.

Laurence lived with his mother and his sister Clotilde in a very
bourgeois
apartment near the Bois. When his father was not in a sanatorium having a
crise de nerfs
, he was living at home upsetting his entire family. Laurence's mother was an aristocratic New England lady. His father was a painter of Breton ancestry, half French, half American. He had been neurasthenic for years and his family had no idea what to do about him. They had tried everything, but he was the world's great incurable neurotic.

Laurence wanted to get away from home. His mother gave him a small allowance of one hundred dollars a month and, considering her income was ten thousand dollars a year, she wasn't over-generous. But she preferred to spend it on her husband, whose capital had long since vanished paying doctor's bills. He had been in every sanatorium in Europe. Laurence might have taken a job, but he didn't like working. He was a writer of considerable talent, but as yet unknown.

He now told me he was about to take a little apartment, and as at this time I was worried about my virginity—I was twenty-three and I found it burdensome—I asked if I could pay half the rent and share it, hoping by this manæuvre to get somewhere. He said yes, but soon changed his mind. The next time I saw him he told me he had taken a hotel room in the rue de Verneuil on the left bank in the Latin Quarter. He came to see me at the Plaza-Athénée Hotel, where I was living, and started to make
love to me. When he pulled me towards him I acquiesced so quickly that he was surprised by my lack of resistance. However, I told him that we could not do anything there as my mother might return at any moment. He said we would go to his hotel room sometime. I immediately rushed to put on my hat and he took me to the rue de Verneuil. I am sure he had not meant to. That was how I lost my virginity. It was as simple as that.