Seductress (11 page)

She profaned the first law of ladyhood: “Never
ever
behave with pride, self-confidence, and self-conceit.” She wore the crown of the Snake Goddess with lofty hubris and complete indifference to female hostility. She traced her ancestry to Mary, Queen of Scots, identified herself with the two great Isabellas of history, and orchestrated a royal funeral for herself with her coffin carried “high—as for a queen.”

Bernard Berenson called Belle “a miracle.” With her “proclivity for the primitive and archaic,” she might have glimpsed her primordial appeal. She played the moon goddess in an amateur theatrical and treasured a poem her last lover wrote to her comparing her to the moon, the emblem of the dynamic, self-renewing she-serpent. She placed a mosaic of the Medusa’s head at the center of the courtyard of her museum. This misunderstood “ugly deity” actually was a Snake Goddess whose “lovely terrible face slew [men] by the eye; it fascinated.” Belle Gardner may not have lived up to her full seductive potential. She probably got less sex than she wanted and failed many character tests. She was a snob, a robber baroness, an autocrat, a histrionic, and an insufferable bully. But she fascinated. As a local paper put it, “the spell of Mrs. Jack’s enthrallment cannot be broken.” Beauty was beside the point.

 

The second most common images of the primordial goddess after snakes were birds, grotesque beaked idols with popped eyes, anthill breasts, and wings or winglike epaulets on their shoulders. Sometimes they had elongated bodies with vast, ovoid buttocks, designating the deity’s role as creatrix, layer of the cosmic egg. In her avian guise, the goddess again embodied the life force and libidinal energy of creation; bird-masked figures in one cave painting dance around a man with an erection. As the divinity evolved, distinct species—owls, hawks, and waterbirds—assumed different aspects of her being.

Waterbirds, for example, represented her healing and life-giving properties, with special emphasis on material goods and happiness. In this category, swans led the flock, incarnating desire (with their phallic necks), poetry, and the power of transformation. One group of swan figurines from prehistoric Greece compresses these meanings and suggests another—the spirit of comedy, that most primal of aphrodisiacs. The bell divinities were the holy clowns of the prehistoric pantheon; their goofball heads with jug ears and bug eyes tower up on necks attached to domed bodies with pea-size breasts.

Catherine Sedley, wag and wench extraordinaire, might have taken these antic idols for her mascot. In a charitable light, Catherine looked merely humorous. A flat-chested string bean, she was the antitype of the Stuart England beauty ideal—plump butter blondes with snub noses, rosebud mouths, and full
poitrines.
She had dark hair, a long nose, an unfashionably big mouth, and a walleye that made her squint. “The weapons at her disposal,” writes her biographer, “included neither beauty nor any other attraction to the outward eye.” To a man, everyone found her “very ugly.” But with her artillery—the id-seeking missiles of laughter—she needed little else. Through her comedic charms, she conquered any lord she wanted, including James II, whose passion for her bordered on lunacy.

Catherine was born in 1657 into a household that would have knocked the stuffing out of a lesser being. The only daughter of Restoration hellrake and poet Sir Charles Sedley, she grew up both “notoriously plain” and party to an incessant donnybrook of brawls, bacchanalias, and violent parental squabbles. While her father roistered around England, her mother spiraled into insanity until she entered a madhouse in Catherine’s early teens. At this low point in her life Sir Charles consoled his daughter by introducing a common-law wife into the family and ejecting Catherine from the house.

She landed a job with a beautiful Italian princess her age, Mary of Modena, who’d just married James, duke of York, heir to the British throne. Before long the scampish Catherine had made a name for herself at court. Having inherited her father’s poetic and hedonistic proclivities, she became known as the “shocking creature”—“none the most virtuous but a witt.” Her glaring defects of face and figure did not affect her popularity with men; she received more than her share of marriage proposals, including one from a prosperous, well-heeled widower.

But the brazen jade, unenchanted by the seventeenth-century marital bargain in which women surrendered their legal identities, money, and autonomy to husbands, rejected them all. She even backsassed suitors with impunity. When a dumpee, Lord Dorset, avenged her with satiric verses, accusing her of hurting men’s eyes with her ugly face and nasty squint, she fired back with a stinging pasquinade of her own. One of his slurs, however, hit the mark: Catherine’s “cupid” was no angelic cherub but a “Black-guard boy,” an uncouth, foul-tongued, insurrectionary street urchin.

This seems to have been just the sort of ruffian imp designed to mug her employer. The forty-four-year-old duke of York was handsomer, braver, kinder, and a more avid womanizer than his brother Charles II, himself a world-class Casanova. James stood six feet two inches and had a long roster of conquests, some famous beauties. But Catherine threw him for a loop. She supplied a tonic he could not live without, the liberation of laughter. Casting the curative spell of the archaic bell divinities, she released him from the royal straitjacket.

She serenaded him with her father’s lewd drinking songs on the virginal, mocked his Roman Catholic pieties, bombarded him with coarse zingers, and roasted him to his face. “We [James’s mistresses] are none of us handsome,” she wisecracked, “and if we had wit, he has not enough to discover it.”

While the beautiful Mary of Modena pined away in jealous melancholia and his priests and advisers stormed, James could not be parted from Catherine or her bed. Whatever she did there, she clearly had her patron deity’s appetite. In James’s absences, she disported with the keeper of the privy purse, a young beefcake named Colonel James Grahame. She gave birth to at least two children during these coterminous affairs, one (who died) by James and another, a girl, by the colonel. Characteristically, she needled her daughter. “You need not be so proud,” she gibed, “for you are not the king’s but old Grahame’s.”

Once installed in office, James II faced a massive campaign to oust Catherine. The combined forces of church and state descended on him with horrendous threats and admonitions. To no avail. He settled a huge pension on her and gave her a mansion on St. James’s Square, which she fitted out with carte blanche splendor, hiring the best artists and craftsmen in England. When he made her countess of Dorchester and Baroness Darlington, though, he went too far, and a goon squad bundled her off to Ireland. After six months she sneaked back to the king who continued to see her in secret.

His abdication in the 1688 Glorious Revolution should have sent her to the Tower. But the doughty Catherine sweet-talked his enemies and demanded her pension and property back. Because of the “favor” (perhaps amorous) she found “in the eyes of King William” and her persuasive powers in Parliament, she succeeded in both.

By now, in her late thirties, Catherine’s looks were a shipwreck. Rail thin, her “wither’d” features caked with white paste and cochineal, she prowled the social scene festooned in yards of “embroidery, fringe, and lace.” Diamonds spangled on her, jested a courtier, like rancid spots on rotten veal. Except for her comic spark, she had few ostensible feminine charms, not even a fortune. Again, though, her “wit and humor” carried the day. She promptly captured the star bachelor in the kingdom, Sir David Colyear, a kind, charming Scottish baronet with “a great deal of wit” himself.

Their marriage ushered in a new phase in Catherine’s off-color, irreverent career. Appropriating the swan divinity’s transformational privilege, she morphed into a loving wife and mother, the archetypic creatrix, “giver of life, nourishment, warmth, and protection.” Wealthy and adored, she gave vent to her innate tenderheartedness, championing the poor and doting on her two sons. Neither her sex appeal nor her humor deserted her. When she dispatched her boys to boarding school, she quipped, “If anybody calls either of you the son of a whore you must bear it for you are so: but if they call you bastards, fight till you die; for you are an honest man’s sons.”

With the mythic waterbird’s command of material goods, she astutely managed the family business, attracting more than professional admiration from the master of the mint. On one of her husband’s brief absences, a Mr. Conduitt wrote honeyed verses to console her. Rigged out in “great splendor,” she tottered around Bath until 1717 and survived to skewer the archbishop of Canterbury at George I’s coronation. When he asked the consent of the people, she barked, “Does the old Fool think Anybody here will say no to his Question when there are so many drawn swords?”

Stuart England was no playground for women. Derided as the “softer sex” and “weaker vessel,” they were at the legal mercy of their husbands and condemned to silence, passivity, niceness, and mindless household pursuits. With every strike against her, including a gothic childhood, the walleyed, nonpretty Catherine Sedley pulled a stunning gender break and brought down the prize men.

She mesmerized James II into the strongest passion of his life and won a dream husband, all the while making a mockery of female norms, the double standard, and male oppression. A caustic loud-mouth and pushy virago, she saw herself with perfect clarity. She swanned around, sure of her superiority and the “extraordinary part she played in English history.”

Lord Dorset, her ex-suitor, lashed her with scurrilous verses for decades. “What strange mysterious spell,” he snarled, could she have possibly cast on “sacred James”? It was a spell more ancient than he could have imagined and more sacred than kingship: the charm of the harlequinesque bird goddess with her divine life, loin, and health-reviving laughter.

 

Besides swans and waterfowl, owls haunted the primitive religious imagination. With their eerie shrieks, soundless flights through the night sky, and deadeye vision, they personified the goddess as death wielder. In the archaic cyclic scheme of things, of course, this included the miraculous power of rebirth. The prehistoric idol, the Owl-Headed Madonna of Cyprus, cradles newborn life in her arms, a tadpole creature that gapes at her in helpless adoration. She stares straight ahead with artillery-target eyes, decked in high-fashion regalia. She wears three stylish chokers, a geometrically patterned bikini (to mark her overly endowed libido), and four hoop earrings in double-pierced Minnie Mouse ears.

This obscure Bronze Age figurine, better than all the psychospeculations, contains the clue to the outlandish sexual power of Wallis Warfield Simpson. She was just as bizarre and ungainly looking as the Cypriot Madonna—“flat and angular,” with “large startled eyes” and an à la mode wardrobe. She had a strong sex drive, drew a stern bead on her goals, and clutched to her breast the same babe, the duke of Windsor, who abdicated the throne for her sake. Maternal owl deity charms, however, didn’t account for Wallis’s entire allure; she deployed seductive arts of an advanced order. For a
belle laide
of such admitted limitations—superficiality, intellectual arrest, to name a few—her hit list of inamorati strains credulity. Wallis, almost literally, could peg any man she wanted.

Since she invented social X-ray chic, she seems less plain now than she did seventy-five years ago, when curvy, whipped cream Kewpie dolls were the rage. Nicknamed Minnehaha, she had an Aztec nose, hatchet jaw, bushy eyebrows, and a “masculine figure.”

Homeliness wasn’t her only problem. Born out of wedlock in 1895 to a Baltimore couple who married seventeen months later, Wallis lost her father to tuberculosis at two and spent the rest of her childhood on the move with an impecunious mother. Dependent on the charity of in-laws, her mother sewed for the Women’s Exchange and took in boarders in a modest apartment house.

Thanks to a generous uncle, Wallis attended fashionable schools, but she grew up with the sting of financial insecurity and a poor relative complex. A scrappy tomboy, she was a preemptive striker with a will to climb. Instead of “Mama,” her first words were “me-me” and her dolls, named Mrs. Astor and Mrs. Vanderbilt. Under her mother’s tutelage, she learned the guerrilla arts of southern charm—flattery, flirtation, small talk, and rococo self-presentation. Vivacious and quick-witted with an intriguing bad-girl edge, she “oozed sex appeal like an old-fashioned burner stove radiates heat.”

Beginning in grade school, she attracted boys “the way molasses attracts flies.” At fifteen she made her first conquest. Although the “least pretty” of her friends, she enamored the designated dreamboat of the group, a patrician high school senior. When she “came out”—courtesy of a blackmail threat to her uncle—she collected “more beaux than any other girl in town.” Harsh-featured and plain as she was, she managed to decorate the front of her stylish gowns with fraternity pins and snag Baltimore’s premier bachelor, Carter Osborne, who loved her “wildly” and considered himself engaged to her for three years.

Yet for all her lovecraft and primordial dazzle, Wallis lacked the owl goddess’s clear vision. In a heated moment she picked Mr. Wrong. Soon after her 1916 marriage to air ace Earl Winfield Spencer, she found she’d acquired an alcoholic, a bounder, and a sadistic wife beater. As their union unraveled over the next eight years, Wallis man-shopped, seducing a succession of Washington diplomats—an Italian ambassador, an Argentinean playboy, a naval attaché, and a future foreign minister—and living in China in a ménage à trois with Herman Rogers, who thought her “the great love of his life.”

A divorce and several conquests later, she married a second time. Ernest Simpson, a starchy shipping magnate with a pseudo-English accent, left his ailing wife for Wallis and moved with her to England. In London, flush at last, Wallis upclassed herself into a Lady who Lunched, hobnobbing with nobility and throwing chichi parties. At her celebrated dinners she provided jaded British aristocrats with piquant cuisine—southern soul food—and an unbuttoned ambiance that made them feel like “boy[s] let out of school.”