The Book of the Courtesans (18 page)

NINON DE LENCLOS

Seduction

(THE FOURTH EROTIC STATION)

A
S THE STORY
is told,
the young man could not fathom why everyone raved about Ninon de Lenclos. Her
fabled powers of seduction would have no effect on him, he boasted to a friend.

“What appeal can a woman of her age possibly have?” he asked.

So it was that his friend, who had been a lover of Ninon, proposed a wager,
betting that his friend would not be able to resist her charms.

Ninon, who was delighted to accept the challenge, agreed to a meeting. And of
course despite his confidence, once ushered into the courtesan’s presence,
the young man was disarmed. What was it that she did? Of course we can only
surmise what took place between them, but there is good reason to believe that
she began by taking an interest in him. Where were you raised? she probably
asked. What beautiful boots you are wearing! she might have said. Or, have you
seen the latest performance at the Comédie-Française; what did you
think of it? To all his responses, giving him the feeling that she is
fascinated.

But if we are to understand the secret of this process, we must take another
look. If the interest she focuses on him has an immediate effect, it is because
she is not feigning fascination. She is rather, from long habit, studying him
closely, with the same intense intelligence she has always turned toward life.
And though he has not fallen yet, it is easy to believe that this attention
makes him puff his feathers. Why not, perhaps he says to himself, tell his
friends one day that the famous Ninon found him very interesting, even though
she left him cold.

He begins then to regale her with his accomplishments, trying to reveal
everything he believes to be wonderful about himself. She does not stop him.
Though there may be a slightly indulgent smile on her face, she listens quietly
to everything he says, interrupting only to ask more questions, until finally
his bragging begins to slow down of its own accord. There must be something
profoundly unnerving to him in the serenity of her composure. In the wake of it
he starts, if only slightly, to experience a moment of self-awareness. Perhaps
he has gone on about himself a bit too much.

It is with this brief self-reflection, then, that the most subtle expression of
embarrassment passes quickly over his face. And though most people would never
have seen it, Ninon does. Her smile grows just a bit more indulgent, and seeing
that, he feels his embarrassment even more acutely, which in turn causes her to
emit a very discreet laugh. The process continues, as with Heisenberg’s
principle of uncertainty, perception affecting events, in this case
intensifying the young man’s feelings.

Even if he does not know it, he is already caught. She does not ridicule him.
Rather, her interest grows. She is intrigued by what she sees now—not
simply an arrogant young man but one in whom intelligence, arrogance, and
humility, even a tender vulnerability, are freely mixed. Her response is
neither unkind nor maternal. Instead, she allows herself to be touched as well
as intrigued. It must have been very early in her life that she realized the
way to charm a man is to find him charming. Yet it is not his braggadocio she
responds to, but the part of himself he has always tried to hide.

Now, since she makes no effort to conceal the fact that she finds him charming,
and since no one else has cared to see what he concealed, much less responded
so well, he begins to feel the full force of her fabled seductiveness.

The end of the story, repeated now for over three hundred years, is that the
young man lost his bet. Ninon was several years older when the young Abbe
Gedolyn began to pursue her with an unmistakable ardor. She put him off for a
while and when finally she agreed to be his lover she said he would have to
wait for one month and a day. He agreed eagerly, counting the hours until the
appointed time. When the day arrived, she was good for her word. Happy in her
arms at last, he asked her why she had made him wait for exactly a month and a
day.

“Because today is my birthday,” she answered, “and I wanted
to prove to myself that at the age of seventy, I am still capable of
entertaining a lover.”

MARION DAVIES

Chapter Five

Gaiety (or Joie de
Vivre)

Kiss the joy as it flies.
—WILLIAM
BLAKE

T
HE CAPACITY TO
take pleasure in life
is no less a virtue than any other. Joy is not as simple as it appears. There
are those who, whether out of fear or judgment, so habitually resist the
feeling that after a while they lose the knack of being pleased altogether.
Others, mistaking mastery for pleasure, prefer conquest to delight and never
really taste the spoils of their efforts. There is an art to enjoying life, to
feeling desire and receiving what comes, to savoring every detail, down to the
finest points, of each taste, sensation, or moment that happens by will or by
chance to appear. The experience requires a subtle courage. Delight, jubilance,
elation can throw you off balance, upsetting the established order of the day
(or, as is more often the case, the night). And because almost all forms of joy
are fleeting, pleasure must eventually lead to loss, no matter how small—
a loss that brings with it the certain knowledge that everything passes.

Abstinence and greed alike provide the means to avoid this knowledge. By
shunning pleasure, the loss of it can be avoided. Aesop’s fable of the Ant
and the Cricket is one of the more abiding stories regarding abstinence we have
been given. It is a cautionary tale that warns us against the fate of the
hungry cricket, who sang and danced all summer rather than gathering food as
the ant did. Yet, read closely, the story conceals another warning, too. The
abstemious ant lacks generosity. When the cricket asks for food from his
industrious neighbor, the ant sardonically suggests that he just keep dancing.
There is more than a little jealousy in this response, though in retrospect we
can feel some sympathy for him. All summer his attention has been on the winter.
But the sight of the cricket must have reminded the poor ant how little he
enjoyed the summer.

Aesop himself was not immune to enjoyment. Centuries ago, he supported the
courtesan Rhodopsis. And La Fontaine, the man who, in the seventeenth century,
transformed Aesop’s tales into French poetry, was present more than once
when Ninon entertained her guests by playing the lute. He must have been
transfixed like everyone else. Despite the moral of the tale, his appreciation
of music is evident in the beautiful rhymes and rhythms of his telling.

Of course, the story is correct in one sense. The existence of greed alone
tells us that the indulgence of pleasure does not always lead to a pleasing end.
Yet, though greed seems to be going in the opposite direction to abstinence,
it springs from a similar motive. The accumulation of whatever is pleasurable
in far greater quantities than can actually be enjoyed creates the illusion
that one has escaped the transitory nature of pleasure. The rub is that, as
with a gluttony so exaggerated it causes illness, pleasure itself will be
sacrificed in the bargain. What is crucial is the intent.

When pleasure itself is the primary motive, excess has a far different effect.
In
My Apprenticeships
, Colette describes the experience of taking a
meal at Caroline Otero’s house on the rue Fortuny. “I have always
enjoyed food,” she wrote of her taste for hearty meals, “but what
was my appetite compared with Lina’s.” It makes a certain sense that
Otero would have a famous appetite. She had been close to starvation many times
in her childhood. There is perhaps a certain egalitarian justice in the fact
that the women most famous for enjoying pleasure often came from miserable
circumstances. Suffering can sharpen appreciation. Knowing that it was useless
to worry about how she might be able to eat in the future, even as a child
Otero learned to focus her undivided attention on the pleasures of each meal.

A robust dinner of sausages and beef and chicken was served, which both women
consumed with gusto. But that Otero was by far the better eater was made
abundantly clear. She emptied her plate four or five times. Still, Colette
tells us that Otero enjoyed every bite, emanating a mood of “gentle bliss,
an air of happy innocence,” as she ate, “her teeth, her eyes, her
glossy lips” shining “like a girl’s.” She had not
overeaten. After finishing with a strawberry ice, she immediately jumped up
from the table, and grasping a pair of castanets, began to dance with a full
and intense energy, another pleasure, one that, as Colette writes, “was
born of a true passion for rhythm and music.” It is fitting that such an
evening should end in dance. That pleasure requires an intimate self-knowledge
and a refined perception of desire, in turn necessitates that we be present to
each moment, bringing to it the full awareness that life is continually moving.

As Colette tells us, it was a joy to see Otero dance. Whenever great pleasure
is had, a secondary pleasure arises from being in the presence of the banquet.
Pleasure begets pleasure. Of its very nature, joy radiates outward, touching
everyone who happens to be in the vicinity where it is had. Accordingly, the
capacity to receive pleasure has a magnetic appeal. Wherever a particularly
joyous person goes, conviviality is born, excitement is generated, creativity
flourishes, and crowds assemble.

There was a reason why Païva was called “the Queen of Paris”
or why later Liane de Pougy was known in France as “our national
courtesan.” The great courtesans were like queen bees around whom
countless social worlds developed like so many intricate honeycombs. Whether
during the Renaissance or the period of the Enlightenment; the Second Empire,
the Regency, the Gay Nineties, the Belle Epoque, the Roaring Twenties; in Paris
or Rome, Venice, London, New York, or Hollywood; at balls and parties, salons
and cafés, the opera and the theatre, remarkable worlds were woven of
wealthy men and aristocrats, artists and writers, around the presence of a few
women, who provided an essential and catalytic ingredient to the mysterious
alchemy: their gaiety.

Sunset Boulevard

It was a big gay party, every bit of it.—Marion Davies,
The Times We Had

In the midst of the Roaring Twenties, among the most popular parties in
Hollywood were those thrown by Marion Davies at a house just above Sunset
Boulevard, at
1700
Lexington Road. The white stucco
mansion with a large and elegant swimming pool was bought for her by William
Randolph Hearst. Davies had been his mistress for several years. Hearst, who
was married at the time to another showgirl, met her when she was performing in
the
Ziegfeld Follies.

In the history of courtesans, the promotion from showgirl to kept woman was
a common event. Yet, as with Coco Chanel, Marion was not considered a courtesan.
By the Roaring Twenties—the age of the flapper—the institution was
fading. The liberties that courtesans had enjoyed exclusively were being
disseminated. Hence a tradition once built on the premise that proper women’
s lives were more restricted slowly came to an end. But the lineage of the
great courtesans had clearly passed on to the next generation. The art of
pleasure was continued with virtuosity by the good-time girl.

In her own telling, Marion was born with a great aptitude for frivolity, an
important quality in a good hostess. Though this talent is rarely encouraged in
children (at times it is even punished), it is as fruitful a calling as any
other, beneficial not only to those who have the ability but to the larger
society as well. We have only to imagine an atmosphere dominated by dutiful
work, dour expressions, or strict manners to see the necessity.

For parents at the beginning of the twentieth century, Marion’s mother and
father seemed exceptionally lenient. They were not especially punitive when, on
Halloween, she was arrested for throwing a sack of vegetables at the butler who
answered the door of a posh mansion. Her mother and father must have felt
partly culpable for her actions. While they were out of town they had left her
in the care of a maid who, too busy to look after a child, sent Marion by
herself to the locked park in the neighborhood below. Very quickly she decided
that, as she describes them in her autobiography, “the raggedy
looking” children outside the gate were having a better time than those
inside. Soon she found herself joining them in a plot to steal vegetables from
a grocer on Lexington Avenue in order to throw them at the first person who
answered the door of a fancy house in the neighborhood.

Even as a child, the worlds that existed outside the comfortable one in which
she was raised seemed more attractive to her. Her father was a moderately
successful lawyer in Brooklyn. Yet, in the tape-recorded interviews that
document her autobiography, though her grammar is correct, her speech is full
of the slang and cadences of a rougher life. On film, Davies seems to be at one
moment delicate, and at the next tough and charmingly streetwise. The notion
that street life was supposed to be adventurous and romantic was characteristic
of a generation that had begun to find the protocols of privilege suffocating.
Once, when she was the guest of the socialite Jim Deering, at his villa on
Biscayne Bay, after complaining to her mother, “I’m very bored here,
what a lot of grumpy people,” she escaped over the estate walls and ran
off to Palm Beach. Yet again like many in her generation, she was also drawn in
the direction of glamour and glitter. If years later she learned that the
mansion she and her friends had attacked on Halloween belonged to the man whose
mistress she eventually became, the choice was metaphorical as well as
accidental. The place she occupied in society would always be equivocal. Lover
of a powerful man but not his wife, enjoying a luxury that was not always her
own, respected and yet the center of a scandal that lasted for years, Marion
Davies eluded definition.

To be free of strict demarcation, uncircumscribed by ordinary expectations,
indeterminate and yet determined in another way, loose, spirited, seeking only
the definitions of each moment was what she chose. She had little tolerance for
anything she found tedious. Since she would not submit herself to the rigors of
boredom in school, she was often consigned to the corner. Seldom is the
significance of such resistance properly credited. If the wrong path is not
refused, the right one may never appear. Though Marion wanted to dance, even
ballet school seemed too dull. What she really wanted was to become a showgirl.
This tested her parents’ patience. But finally, despite her mother’s
horrified objections, they sent her to Kosloff’s, the best among New
York’s schools that prepared girls to go on the stage. At the age of
thirteen she joined the pony ballet, and not much later she became a Ziegfeld
girl—a role in which she was able to use her extraordinary gift, a vivid
and compelling love for the fleeting joys of life.

Hearst, who sat in the front row of the
Ziegfeld Follies
night after
night as she performed, found her irresistibly charming. He pursued her for a
period of a year, sending her small offerings, candy, silver, boxes, or gloves.
More than thirty years older than Davies, he was not a conventionally
attractive man. Pear-shaped and balding, in photographs of the couple he
appears like a bloated ghost smiling beside her. But she fell in love with him
nonetheless. No doubt the fact that he was so wealthy or that he could help her
career with pages of free publicity in his newspapers added to his appeal. But
these were incidental details within what was a far more complex attraction.
They were both large figures—physically tall, vital, intense, intelligent,
forceful in different ways. Like her, though again in different ways, he could
be unorthodox. When they did not serve his purposes, he could push conventions
aside with ease. Some of the differences between them would have attracted her,
too. He was more worldly and better educated than she. That he was focused on
future profit as well as present pleasures meant she could be free to dwell in
the present without worry. And since he could match her move for move, where he
was conventional, he provided her with a measure of safety, a seawall against
her own outrageous impulses.

A story she tells from their early courtship evokes the many shades of meaning
in the word once used for a courtesan’s paying lover, her “protector.
” One night when Marion was about to go to a party being given by General
Vanderbilt for the Prince of Wales, Hearst ducked quickly into Cartier’s,
bought a diamond and pearl bracelet and ring, and used these to bribe her to
stay home. He was afraid he might lose her to the prince, who shared Hearst’
s enthusiasm for showgirls. Though after she accepted his deal, she planned to
climb out her window and go to the party anyway, she found that he had hired
detectives to wait outside her house.

But if Hearst could be an almost parental figure, he was also frequently absent.
Remembering the parties at
1700
Lexington Road, Charlie
Chaplin recalled that the best of them took place when Hearst was elsewhere.
Several times a week a group that included Chaplin, Rudolph Valentino, John
Barrymore, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, Alma Rubens, Harry Crocker, and
Tom Ince would gather to swim or play charades, join in masquerades or dance in
the incongruously grand ballroom Hearst had added on to the house. There were
small dinner parties and larger soirées to which at times over a hundred
people were invited, not only actors and actresses but also polo players and
senators, chorus boys and foreign heads of state, anyone who interested Marion.