• CHIEF OF STAFF

    Suzanne Stroh is on the team at vChief.

  • AFFILIATIONS

    Founder and CEO, Legion Group Arts, an international arts and entertainment group. The Legion family of companies is based in Washington, DC. with offices in London and Athens. The Legion Foundation, based in Zurich, meets the needs of Greek children and unaccompanied minor refugees living in Greece.

  • COORDINATES

    Suzanne hails from Michigan, where her family brewed Stroh’s beer for five generations. She lives with her family in the Virginia countryside.

  • Interview with Dan Savage

    Author, activist and “Savage Love” advice columnist chats with Suzanne in the January 2016 issue of Gay & Lesbian Review

    Read Interview

  • Interview with Christina Schlesinger

    Code name Romaine Brooks, Guerrilla Girl artist Christina Schlesinger has never exhibited her Peter Paintings. Until now.

    Learn More

  • More Laurels!

    In May SCOTCH VERDICT picked up its eighth international award in the south of France.
    SCOTCH VERDICT Wins St. Tropez 2015

    Learn More

  • New Laurels!

    SCOTCH VERDICT won the Jury Prize for best screenplay at the NOVA Film Festival in April, 2015.
    NOVA: Jury Award Winner | SCOTCH VERDICT

    Learn More

Brave Hearts and Coronets

Sep 5
"Fashionable Contrasts" by political cartoonist James Gillray

“Fashionable Contrasts” by political cartoonist James Gillray

brave hearts and coronets

I’m putting the finishing touches on a new story, “Patrimony.” Set in London and Chicago, it’s inspired by the efforts of Mary Macleod MP, Lord Lucas, Liza Campbell and others working for inheritance equality in Great Britain.

KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS: greatest movie ever made?

KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS: greatest movie ever made?

They’ve set up shop here on Facebook to circulate a petition signed by 319 Britons as of July 31. It’s nice to see the names of a few friends on the list.

And the campaign has inspired people like author Kathryn Heyman to write to Entrenched Male Bastions That Matter in Publishing, like The London Review of Books, demanding gender equality. You can read her letter, and the dispiriting response, here. Apparently, finding women who can write is “complicated” at the LRB.

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Leading journals have also been covering the issue, including this article in the Independent by Jane Merrick and Matthew Bell that gives a good overview.

 

Alec Guinness playing Ascoyne d'Ascoyne's uppity forebear in KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS. Bears a striking resemblance to Lily de Gramont, don't you think? Hat not quite du bon ton. But we certainly catch the whiff of Legroux on the winds of change.

Alec Guinness playing Gascoyne d’Ascoyne’s uppity forebear in KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS.
Bears a striking resemblance to Lily de Gramont, don’t you think? Hat not quite du bon ton. But we certainly catch the whiff of Legroux on the winds of change.

 

The vote on whether to end gender discrimination that has been entangled with primogeniture for centuries will affect about a thousand women and their “family firms” in Great Britain. More will potentially be affected in Spain. In Pakistan, Madeeha Maqbool’s op/ed piece ran July 23 in the independent weekly’s Friday Times Blog.

 

If you’re wondering why anyone else would care about Equality for Women in the Peerage… well, you’ll see. “Blood flows in women’s veins too,” says Liza Campbell. “Patrimony” will be ready for publication October 15.

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SCREENWRITER’S NOTEBOOK

Aug 6

My screenplay’s in the news. Or rather, its main theme is.

One of my favorite journalists, Sarah Lyall of The New York Times, published an interesting piece today on primogeniture in Britain. Here’s the link to her article,“Son and Heir? In Britain, Daughters Cry No Fair.”

She leads in with DOWNTON ABBEY, but she could just as well have led in with Tabou. If only my novel cycle were a hit TV series!

Primogeniture is the fusty old legal rule of sole male inheritance of titles, property and chattel in the paternal bloodline. Primogeniture is the reason Vita Sackville-West never inherited Knole. It’s the reason Lily de Gramont wasn’t a prince like her grandfather–or at least a duke, like all the other men in her family. And it’s the reason why I’d never be a controlling owner of my own family business in the UK, because I’m adopted.

Primogeniture: proof that consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

–AFTER AN EPIGRAM FROM OSCAR WILDE

Well, It’s alive and well in England, but in Scotland, at least a portion of the estate must be left to all legitimate children born in wedlock.

Screen Shot 2013-06-23 at 8.56.59 PMAnd why care? Because the rot of primogeniture is at the core of my ghost story, SCOTCH VERDICT, nominated for best unproduced screenplay next month at the Madrid International Film Festival. It’s a very sexy Napoleonic mystery set in Bombay 1796 and Edinburgh 1811, based on a true trial story. With a shocking twist that will knock your socks off. If and when it’s produced, that is.

The award winner will be announced July 6th. Come join me and my fellow screenwriters for a great evening of film and laurels and libations in Madrid.

Meanwhile, check out the poster by the talented British-born, Hollywood-based production designer,Robert de Vico, who’s creating the visual treatment. Talk about a thriving imagination! So lucky to have him on my team…

Ever wondered if Tabou might be the next DOWNTON ABBEY? If SCOTCH VERDICT is the next CRYING GAME?

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Let’s find out. Next stop: Madrid.

 

Defying Gravity News

Jul 28
Cover art for Defying Gravity

Cover art for Defying Gravity

I just signed off on the printer’s proofs for “Quiet Enjoyment,” my short story about haute couture and courtroom fireworks on Antigua.

It will be published by Paycock Press in November in Defying Gravity, the sixth collection in the Grace & Gravity series of fiction by women writers living in the Washington, DC area and edited by poet Richard Peabody.

Peabody founded Paycock Press in 1976 to publish the international literary magazine, Gargoyle.

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Bending Minds 1976-2013

“Quiet Enjoyment’ is a comedy taken from Aurore, Book Four of Tabou, to be published in 2014. Books One, Two and Three are available for all eReaders from Publish Green.

Whether coaxing out or damping down my inner Hemingway, I’ve been working slowly but surely on a collection of short fiction, Daughter of Michigan and Other Stories. “Quiet Enjoyment” is not the only piece featuring characters from my novel cycle. “Turban Boy” traces the dark origins of Tiffin d’Aileron’s mysterious and complicated relationship with her grandmother, Valerie Drummond, the fictional Anglo-Irish Countess of Tiffin and Ross.

Many thanks to Richard, a longtime champion of women’s fiction and the DC literary scene, for encouraging me along the way.

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Poet Richard Peabody edits Gargoyle and the Grace & Gravity fiction series.

Screenwriter’s Notebook

Jun 24

Screen Shot 2013-06-23 at 8.59.16 PMMy screenplay’s in the news. Or rather, its main theme is.

One of my favorite journalists, Sarah Lyall of The New York Times, published an interesting piece today on primogeniture in Britain. Here’s the link to her article, “Son and Heir? In Britain, Daughters Cry No Fair.”

She leads in with DOWNTON ABBEY, but she could just as well have led in with Tabou. If only my novel cycle were a hit TV series!

Primogeniture is the fusty old legal rule of sole male inheritance of titles, property and chattel in the paternal bloodline. Primogeniture is the reason Vita Sackville-West never inherited Knole. It’s the reason Lily de Gramont wasn’t a prince like her grandfather–or at least a duke, like all the other men in her family. And it’s the reason why I’d never be a controlling owner of my own family business in the UK, because I’m adopted.

Primogeniture: proof that consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

–After an epigram from Oscar Wilde

 

Well, It’s alive and well in England, but in Scotland, at least a portion of the estate must be left to all legitimate children born in wedlock.

Screen Shot 2013-06-23 at 8.56.59 PMAnd why care? Because the rot of primogeniture is at the core of my ghost story, SCOTCH VERDICT, nominated for best unproduced screenplay next month at the Madrid International Film Festival. It’s a very sexy Napoleonic mystery set in Bombay 1796 and Edinburgh 1811, based on a true trial story. With a shocking twist that will knock your socks off. If and when it’s produced, that is.

The award winner will be announced July 6th. Come join me and my fellow screenwriters for a great evening of film and laurels and libations in Madrid.

Meanwhile, check out the poster by the talented British-born, Hollywood-based production designer, Robert de Vico, who’s creating the visual treatment. Talk about a thriving imagination! So lucky to have him on my team…

Ever wondered if Tabou might be the next DOWNTON ABBEY? If SCOTCH VERDICT is the next CRYING GAME?

images-12

Let’s find out. Next stop: Madrid.

 

My Painterly Sister Weatherly

May 4
New work by Weatherly Stroh

New work by Weatherly Stroh

Spring’s half sprung! And it’s full of artistry. Never a drab moment spending it with family members as talented as this.

 

In Middleburg

The artist Weatherly Stroh was back in Middleburg this week, exhibiting her new work at Middleburg Common Grounds and visiting Uncle Gari Melchers’s studio at Belmont. I feel very lucky to have put a red dot on this painting of a hound just picking up the scent.

The equine sculptor Susanne Stroh, my stepmother, showed equally beautiful work.

my sister the painter Weatherly Melchers Stroh

my sister the painter Weatherly Melchers Stroh

Come visit us in the Virginia countryside and check out Susie’s bronzes and Weatherly’s latest series of animal portraits and hunt country landscapes, with settings in Metamora and Ocala.

 

 

 

 

Near Fredericksburg

It’s also the best time of the year to spend time sketching in the garden, strolling through the gallery or writing in the gazebo above the Rappahannock at Belmont.

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Belmont, house and studio of Gari Melchers near Fredericksburg, Virginia

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Self portrait by Uncle Gari

Self portrait by Uncle Gari

Fredericksburg is always closer than you think.

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Virginia in springtime by the American Impressionist, Gari Melchers (1860-1932)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Munnings in Middleburg

And then there’s the Alfred Munnings exhibition happening at the National Sporting Library Museum. Dozens of really gorgeous paintings by my favorite equestrian painter of all time. Many of them are masterpieces from from private collections. Honestly: it’s worth the trip.

Sir Alfred Munnings (1878-1959)

Sir Alfred Munnings (1878-1959)

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To my eye, Munnings’ old fashioned, elegant, painterly style embodies the best of two ways of seeing horses in the landscape: impressionistic and anatomical

114 Years Ago Today in Paris

Apr 30
Plover's eggs by a Dutch Master...Lily's favorite Epicurean delight

Plover’s eggs by a Dutch Master…Lily’s favorite Epicurean delight

114 years ago today in paris

the red duchess and the pope of lesbos dine alone

Plover’s eggs. It’s illegal to gather them today, but in 1909 the food writer at the International Herald Tribune had hunted them down at the Café Anglais. And had this to report:

PARIS April 24
Have you ever eaten an omelette of plover’s eggs? Two men bent on a new experience did so one morning recently…Twelve eggs, by the way, were needed for its making. Questioned on the subject last evening, the “maître d’hôtel” at the Café Anglais, second to none the wide world o’er for its cuisine, and happily keeping to the old traditions, replied that omelets of the sort were asked for so rarely as to amount practically to never. “If desired we serve them of course, but if my opinion were asked I should be inclined to express disapproval. The plover’s egg is too ‘serré.’” That settles the matter.
Six days later…
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“Bottle of Chateau Yquem Fetches $117,000 at Auction.” That was 2011. What did it cost in 1909, and how easy would it have been for Natalie to get her hands on a bottle from the “comet year”? Was it this wine that launched their lifetime together?

Across town on the Left Bank at No. 20, rue Jacob, Miss Barney was cooling a pricey Sauternes. And making sure her cook had gathered the plover’s eggs for a memorable May Day repast. ‘Serré…’ I can almost hear Natalie Barney thinking. She’d no doubt read the piece in the Herald. Well if plover’s eggs were good enough for Oscar Wilde, they’re good enough for a daughter of France….

April 30, 1909: A daughter of France was indeed coming over. The marquise de Clermont-Tonnerre. Élisabeth de Gramont.

Lily. Here.

I can imagine both women standing in front of their wardrobes, agonizing over what to wear on their first date.

Biographer Francesco Rapazzini picks up the story from here:

The exact date of their first encounter is unknown, but one thing’s for sure: the two women were attracted from the start. Lily was in search of lesbian adventure; Natalie knew how to take her there. Renée Vivien, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Colette: hadn’t they also given their gay virginities to Natalie?

 

There was an invitation following that evening with the Mardruses. Soon the marquise found herself at Miss Barney’s. What happened next has been described by Natalie’s biographer Jean Chalon, paraphrasing Saint-Simon: “They came together, mind and soul, in the sublime intermingling of two rare spirits.”

 

Natalie and Lily wasted no time acting on their desires: everything had been clear from the beginning. Lily was looking for a true companion, not just another friend. All the long hours spent with Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, talking and listening and analyzing her own sex drive, served Élisabeth up to Natalie on a silver platter.

 

A blue room the way Picasso saw it

A blue room the way Picasso saw it

Their first night together, spent between 30 April and 1 May 1909, was one of love shared in Natalie’s bedroom at No. 20, rue Jacob. Natalie’s room was painted all in blue, from the bedstead down to the floorboards, covered with a white bearskin rug that had been the gift of Liane de Pougy. One of the two windows looked out on the garden with its Greek temple “of Friendship.” Legend has it that the temple, along with the house, was built for Adrienne Lecouvreur[1] by maréchal Saxe[2]. Every year for the rest of their lives–except when the second world war kept them apart–they would try to spend at least a few hours together on the first of May celebrating their anniversary.

 

The first night was followed by a second, and on the second day they still couldn’t bear to separate. Philibert was away and the girls, Béatrix and Diane, were in good hands with the staff at home. For the first time, Lily felt free.

 

But on the third day, 3 May, Lily tore herself from Natalie’s embrace and returned home to the rue Lauriston. It was six o’clock at night when she shut the door behind her, took off her hat and gloves, looked in on her daughters and rushed over to her writing desk. “I am sad to death over leaving you,” she wrote feverishly. “Why, since I’m going to see you tomorrow? It feels like I’ve broken a spell–that I will return to you a stranger, only for a few brief hours there with you where I have nothing of my own–”with” you there in your atmosphere–your attendant in your life of flowers made for distilling perfumes, incense, intoxication; living only on flames and sunbeams. This calm solitude where I am now, it pleases me more than ever–because in this solitude, where I only have myself to please, nothing can intrude on the perfect world except you and me. […]  But so many things demand my attention–interruptions–the ransom I must pay for all the happiness you give me! […] I kiss your hands, hands avowed to women alone, your caressing hands I’ve allowed everywhere, fluid as the water we love! Till tomorrow my love.”

 

This first letter from Élisabeth to Natalie reveals Lily’s impulsive, passionate nature. But it also shows her need for personal space, for solitude, to gather herself and reflect on the new woman in her life as much as on the physical passion that had taken her by storm. She had never before felt such intense physical pleasure. Not with her husband, not with Albert Flament, nor with any of her other male suitors. Natalie helped Élisabeth to reconcile herself, at last, with her body. With the American, she finally came to know her own body as something other than a source of suffering and an object of torture. It could experience pleasure.

 

How much time had passed between their first encounter and their first night together? The American hadn’t needed to employ her usual seduction tactics.  Lily was ready–ripe, even–for Sapphic love. Natalie hadn’t had to force her hand. Lily had been waiting for the right woman. The woman who would make her want to say “yes.”

 

And how did Lily take her first steps down the path of lesbian sexuality? It’s one thing to fantasize, another to have the courage to live out one’s desires. Paris at the turn of the century was known throughout the world as the pleasure capitol, a safe haven of tolerance. There were no laws against homosexuality–masculine or feminine–and the enjoyment of this privilege was the exclusive domain of high society and the chattering classes. The lower classes were loath to accept those they considered perverse. But male and female homosexuals were welcomed in nearly every salon and even in most households, as long as they skirted scandal. It just wasn’t discussed. Take the Gramont family, for example. The subject of Lily’s sex life was simply never raised. In public, neither her brothers, her sister, her stepbrother, her stepsisters nor her nephews ever made a single allusion to their “lesbian aunt” or sister. “It was something nobody talked about,” remembers Élisabeth’s nephew, Comte René de Gramont. “Everybody knew that my aunt loved women, but it didn’t concern any of us. She was discreet. And so were we.”

 

And Philibert? In the beginning, he had no clue about what was going on. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Except that his wife seemed a bit happier. And was always being sent flowers. In time he would discover Lily’s liaison and redouble his violent outbursts.

 

For now, Élisabeth didn’t ask herself too many questions about this Sapphic love. Hadn’t she decided, the day after returning from North Africa, that from now on she would live as she wished? If that meant living with a woman, so be it. It’s worth remembering that Élisabeth was, after all, a product of the upper crust. And the upper crust reserved its prerogative: pay no attention to petty critics.

Élisabeth de Gramont (c) 2004 by Francesco Rapazzini
Translation (c) 2013 by Suzanne Stroh

 

Seven years later, and then for the next four decades, celebrating their May first anniversary would get a little more complicated when Natalie would take up with an American painter born on that day, Romaine Brooks. I can almost hear Lily stifling a laugh  when Francesco Rapazzini comments, “Too bad for Romaine.” May Day remained sacrosanct for the staunchly faithful yet non-manogamous couple, because for Lily, a woman whose mother had died in giving her life, she had never felt much like celebrating her birthday on 23 April. Besides, Rapazzini explains, Lily’s rigorous, analytical mind never stopped reminding her that she had never actually chosen to be born. For someone so independent, dedicated to perpetual becoming and self-determination, what was the use in celebrating that? “The first of May was Élisabeth’s true birthday: the birth of love, of the pleasures of the flesh, of sexuality. And so it had to be celebrated at all costs. Which Natalie never failed to do.”

As I rediscover lost lesbian history working on this translation, I’m uncovering other intrigues along the way. Like how the most fascinating things about secret histories are the little things you’ll never know.

Like about that bottle of Château Yquem they drank. Was it from the comet year? That was back in 1811…. If you wanted to launch a thousand ecstasies, that’d be your wine…. I seem to recall a 200-year-old bottle selling for something like $117,000 a few years ago.

Discounting feverishly, I can see it would have been well within Natalie’s price range. It would have been rare and prized even in 1909, certainly. Something she might have considered splurging on, even though she herself never drank more than “two thimblefuls” of alcohol at one sitting.

But on April 30, 1909, Natalie didn’t yet know how much the Epicurean Lily disliked that wine (Sauternes in general and Yquem in particular).

And on April 30, 2013, not being a dessert wine drinker myself, I’ll never know if Lily’s aversion was a matter of taste, of personal preference, or because it triggered her migraines (the way it triggers mine)… or if it was really because her Gramont forebear had been fighting for the British during that particular war! (“Awkward,” as my 11-year-old would say.)

Comet year or not, the moon is full overhead, the night is lit up like a ballet outside my window, and it’s looking like the perfect time to compose and send that billet, wrangle those fresh eggs and put that pricey wine on ice.

Happy May Day from Virginia.

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Plover’s eggs, comet years and gay marriage aside, Virginia’s still for lovers. And that’s good enough for me.images-5


[1] Adrienne Lecouvreur (1692-1730), the popular actress allegedly poisoned by her rival, then memorialized by her friend, Voltaire. [2] Maurice de Saxe (1696-1750), Marshal General of France, one of the eight illegitimate children acknowledged by the king of Poland, although more than 300 are believed to have been born.

Élisabeth de Gramont (1875-1954)

Apr 23
Short hair oui; Roman Emperor look, non.

Short hair, oui; Roman Emperor look, non.

April 23

Élisabeth de gramont (1875-1954)

Today is the birthday of the Modernist author, sculptor and music patron Élisabeth de Gramont, also known by her married title, Duchess of Clermont-Tonnerre. Although she never liked her violent husband; scandalized high society by leaving him for a woman in 1912; and then divorced him eight years later, the alliterative duchy suited her clear intellect. It also suited her thunderous, high-minded pursuit of truth, social justice and personal pleasure…not always in that order. She was known socially as “Madame de Clermont-Tonnerre” most of her life but took back her maiden name for publication, performance and exhibition.

The letters

There are more than 500 letters written between Élisabeth and her “eternal mate,” Natalie Barney, chronicling their shared life of forty-five years. Hardly anybody outside Élisabeth’s very private family knew about Natalie’s letters to her. Lily’s biographer Francesco Rapazzini has read them all, and he tells me that they differ significantly in tone from those Barney wrote to the other woman in her life, painter Romaine Brooks, whom Barney met six years after falling in love with Lily. Comparing the two sets of correspondence makes it clear that Barney and Gramont treated their relationship as lifelong and primary. They both relegated the Barney-Brooks relationship to a lower order of importance.

Great Reading Rooms: Quiet in the Bibliothèque Jacques Doucet!!!

Great Reading Rooms: Quiet in the Bibliothèque Jacques Doucet!!!

The letters belonging to Natalie Barney have been kept at the Bibliothèque Jacques Doucet since Barney’s death in 1972. It would be an understatement to say “kept under lock and key.” They have also been kept under very watchful eyes by curators mindful of burnishing Barney’s literary reputation, and researchers tell stories about items mysteriously “disappearing” from files. Lily’s letters were not to be published until 2004, fifty years after Lily’s death. Whether this embargo was contractual or merely stated verbally, Barney’s executors definitely knew about the Lily letters, and they misled biographers and scholars for decades. What this means for readers of belles-lettres is that at least five books have been written about Natalie Barney and her circle based on incomplete facts and wrong conclusions. As cottage industries go, the Lily letters are a big deal.

And wait till you read some of them for yourself. 2018 will mark the 100th anniversary of Lily and Natalie’s secret marriage contract, made during the stress of wartime at a flashpoint after seven years together. They tended to write sparingly in English, and even then only for logistics, saving passion for French. I’m lucky to be translating some of them into English. Many of these letters are lesbian literary classics; others are simply the sexiest things I’ve ever read.

Natalie Barney had already conquered the world’s most desirable woman, courtesan Liane de Pougy, when she met Éiisabeth de Gramont. Taking Lily to bed was, by Natalie’s way of reckoning, something like conquering the world’s second most desirable.

Lily, of course, would have laughed. As the song goes, she was The Top from day one.

Childhood: la petite prince

Childbirth in 1874 was traumatic for Élisabeth and deadly for her mother, Princesse Isabelle de Beauvau-Craon. The baby girl, now a motherless child, shared a birthday with William Shakespeare. And so April 23 was as auspicious a day as it was tragic for Élisabeth. She had been born with the soul of a writer into one of the most storied families in France, with a proud heritage dating to medieval times and blood ties to the princely house of Grimaldi in Monaco. All the men in her family were dukes. Élisabeth would only match that storied rank through marriage. She would then race to outstrip it in love, fame and accomplishment.

Isabelle’s widower was a young Army officer stationed across the country. Her father, Prince Marc de Beauvau-Craon, was a merry widower himself. So baby Lily was sent to Paris to be raised in central heating by her doting paternal grandmother. They called her “the little queen.”

Lily was imperious by nature. By the age of three, she was already directing her English nanny to run the cold bath her Gran demanded for “instilling character,” while bribing the French nanny to run a hot tub on the side. The cold bath was, of course, only for show. French children were rarely even to be seen after five o’clock in the Gilded Age, let alone heard splashing around in the bath.

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Lily in full-anime boyhood as “Guiche de Gramont.” Her legend appears to have inspired a manga artist.

Her father’s remarriage posed logistical challenges to Lily’s imperial way of life. Lucky she adored her new stepmother, Marguerite de Rothschild. Papa and Maman Marguerite insisted on setting up house near Papa’s barracks so they could look after the petite prince themselves. No more run of the house in Paris with gardens sloping down to the Seine! Soon there was a new baby. Then two more.

Marguerite’s father had disowned her for marrying against his wishes, but when he died, Marguerite’s mother and sisters reinstated her inheritance. Lily now had one of the world’s richest stepmothers. Once again, her life changed overnight.

If that wasn’t enough to cramp Lily’s style, there were problems backstairs. In a real-life Cinderella story, Lily was treated by the staff as a penniless Beauvau-Craon; her three siblings were treated like Rothschilds. By the age of eight, she had tired of sitting at the corner table. Francesco Rapazzini tells the funny story of Lily’s bold offensive to regain control of her territory. One evening at teatime, she attacked a serving plate of spinach with her bare hands, hurling green muck at every aproned target. Bull’s eye. Bull’s eye. Bull’s eye.

Maman Marguerite intervened with loving discipline that the petite prince accepted with her characteristic stoic detachment. The battle had been lost but somehow the war had been won. From that point on, the staff lived in terror and the four Gramont children did as they pleased. Lily starred as chief ruffian. There were never any clean knees on inspection and only one rule in the sandbox: no kicks to the stomach. Christian piety did not survive Lily’s First Holy Communion. When miracles didn’t happen, Lily went back to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. For the rest of her life she would only enter a church under duress, and when making her will in 1922 she expressly forbade any religious services, leaving her burial to “my daughters and Miss Barney.”

Lily had inherited a lovely, small castle from her grandfather, Prince Marc. Nobody could lord over her there. For a month or two every summer, Lily and her siblings ran wild on the farm while their parents gallivanted around Europe, soaking in fashionable spas. Lily wandered her fields and streams, evading her dull tutors; she visited her royal aunt, married to her Choiseul uncle, whose liberal politics fascinated her just as much as the gruesome tale of his mother’s murder by his own father. Lily played the flute. She stole forbidden books from the locked bookcase and read them beneath the shade trees. Whatever her voracious eyes feasted on became what her greedy mind devoured. Much later, somebody who knew her well commented, “When she peers at you through her lorgnette, she is trying to see if you are edible.” Soon she was translating Keats.

The seaside held equal pride of place in her heart, ever since that visit to Nice where she developed her first crush on an eponymous girl, a wild teenager a few years older. From the older Lily, Élisabeth learned the power and attraction of sex appeal–female sex appeal in particular–and disdain for convention. Her passion for the sea itself was evident from an early age. When she would emerge from the waves at Deauville, smiling like the sun, gawkers ogled. Naturally her parents occupied themselves at the casino. Élisabeth hardly ever went there as as an adult, even though she spent as much time as she could in rented cottages near Hornfleur, the gay hotspot of her era.

From reluctant débutante to chronicles of the Belle Époque

She was a reluctant débutante, to put it mildly. Her sense of duty alone explains her compliance. I can only image how she lasted through balls like the one her father gave in 1894, when Consuelo Vanderbilt was presented to European society and, soon thereafter, sold off to the Duke of Marlborough. Lily’s feminist sensibilities already rankled at the notion that marriage conferred any sort of status upgrade to the chattel that was traded. As far as she could see, marriage was nothing but imprisonment. She was prescient. At eighteen, however, she tolerated the scene because her insatiable curiosity got the better of her: she couldn’t wait to see what her outrageous friend, Robert de Montesquiou, would get up to next. Montesquiou famously became the model for Proust’s depraved Baron de Charlus. Lily befriended Marcel Proust in 1903, invited him to her exclusive parties, footed his champagne bill at the Ritz on many memorable occasions, and thus became one of the two unwitting models for his Duchesse de Guermantes. After his death she wrote about him.

Whether writing about Proust or food or music or golf, all Lily’s books bore the stamp of a first class intellect. She loved to laugh. In private she agreed with Natalie Barney that Proust hadn’t known the first thing about lesbians. But in defending Proust throughout her lifetime, for instance, she deftly accomplished opposing aims at the same time: always broadcasting and dignifying her belle époque sensibilities, while at the same time validating (even having fun with) the collapse of the ancien régime. She delighted readers with four volumes of memoirs that let you imagine what it was like to have been born in the age of the horse-drawn carriage; to have come of age by motorcar under electric lights, seeing Cubism and hearing Stravinsky for the first time; to have received deposed kings and queens at home one day, and then amputees at a railway station the next during World War I; only to have awakened from those horrors to the Jazz Age. And then the Crash.

The red duchess

Inspired by Marxism from a young age, scarred by World War I and repulsed by the rise of Hitler, her communist activities had earned Élisabeth the nickname “red duchess” by 1932. Her visit to the Soviet Union in 1931 had been so carefully scripted that she’d returned with no inkling of plans for forced famine in the Ukraine.

But when she went back to Moscow at 60 in 1935, horrified to find that all her contacts had disappeared without a trace, she acknowledged the deception, cut her trip short and rushed home to Paris to decry the criminality of Soviet communism.  This is only one of many such examples of a woman with such intellectual integrity that she had no trouble–no trouble whatsoever–changing her views (or even the fabric of her life) to suit emerging facts. To translate Élisabeth de Gramont: avant-gardiste is to reproduce many of these profiles in courage so deftly painted by her biographer, Francesco Rapazzini.

The Front Populaire won seats in the 1936 election on an anti-fascist platform, but in the end Lily was denied a Senate seat.

The Front Populaire won seats in the 1936 election on an anti-fascist platform, but in the end Lily was denied a Cabinet post.

She returned from Moscow changed but unbowed. By no means did Élisabeth de Gramont ever abandon her left-wing convictions. In fact, she would soon go on to support the marxist Front Populaire in the successful 1936 election. She tried not to look or sound disappointed after her friends withdrew their offer of a cabinet position. (France is ready for a woman in office, yes surely, fair enough: but a lesbian? That is taking femininity too far!)

The ardent suitor

At 34, the mother of two children, Lily went out to dinner and came home changed forever. She had fallen in love at first sight with the rich American lesbian heiress so notorious that she was called L’Amazone. Or maybe it wasn’t first sight. Maybe the two women had noticed one another at the ballet, the opera, the theater….but hadn’t been properly introduced. In any event, tonight it was spontaneous combustion with Natalie Barney, who had just moved into 20, rue Jacob, where she would preside over the most famous literary salon in Paris between the wars. As for Lily, although she’d never even kissed a girl before, she had the courage not to deny the life-changing aspects of that first encounter, which happened on or around her 34th birthday, at a supper party given by her girlhood friend, the poet Lucie Delarue-Mardrus.

Love with “Natly” compared favorably to the opium Lily had learned to smoke on her trip to the far east. Love with Natly was a new planet. It happened on the riverbanks in plain view and paired well with chicken sandwiches. It happened in railway cars when you had a fever of a hundred and three. It happened when you could make up a plausible lie and sneak off to a nearby hotel in the south of France.

Love aboard

Love aboard

It happened for nights on end aboard a barge floating the Seine. It happened by sneaking her into your castle at night. And it even happened at her place in Paris, on the floor in the doorway with your hat and diamonds on before you had to dash to meet the girls at the theater. Lesbian love awakened Lily’s dormant senses. All of them.

After divorcing Philibert, duc de Clermont-Tonnère, in 1920, Élisabeth wrote under her maiden name of Gramont

After divorcing Philibert, duc de Clermont-Tonnèrre, in 1920, Élisabeth wrote under her maiden name of Gramont

As for her contributions…. In 1912, Lily gave us the true adventure story of escaping household lockdown imposed by her husband, fleeing the castle with two young daughters in tow, like something out of a swashbuckler by Dumas père. At 45 in 1920 Lily gave us a culinary classic: the best-selling Almanach des Bonnes Choses de France. Shortly thereafter we have the duchess divorcing the duke for cruelty. Unheard of. (Divorce left her virtually penniless and, thereafter, chronically short of money.) By 1924, she’d gathered the world’s cutting-edge musicians together on Thursdays at home and given us short haircuts for women, prompting Gertrude Stein to order Alice Toklas to get out the shears. Lily never took credit for the Roman Emperor look, but she was by now a proven tastemaker. And that was just for starters.

Always on the edge of the new, she remained a timeless classic, a grande dame of the old, old school. As Dolly Wilde learned the hard way, you were toast if you even tried to tutoie this woman who vouvoied her own husband and children. (“They will get the wrong idea about you and me,” Lily scolded Dolly. Of course they would; and they did; and they were right.)

EdG avec face à main 1940

Old school. Thanks to Francesco Rapazzini for this photo used in the Italian translation of his book.

Where did you really stand with the duchess? It could be hard to know. She was impulsive, changeable, mercurial, unpredictable. But she was loyal–even to the point of developing an enduring relationship with her one-time rival, Romaine Brooks. It inspired the same degree of loyalty in others. Long after divorce stripped her of her courtesy title, most people still called her Madame de Clermont-Tonnerre, refusing to acknowledge any slippage in high rank. Although Madame de Clermont-Tonnerre came across as deeply human, intensely curious, without prejudice and conversant with every foible and frailty, her eyesight was so poor that she peered at the world through a lorgnette. It enhanced the hauteur that was such a part of her charm, along with her laugh, of the kind described by the French as a “string of pearls.” Natalie Barney often commented that Élisabeth’s myopia only sharpened the acuity of all her other senses, including her “sixth sense,” the perception of truth in and through the the body. Natalie thought of it as the sense of pleasure.

The turning point

Lily met Natalie, the love of her life, in 1909, not in 1910 as all of Natalie’s biographers believed. It was probably from Lily’s arms that Natalie emerged one morning that November to walk home past the florist. Lily’s husband was away all that month; the Amazon had the (then) marquise to herself, and they could even have spent furtive nights together, the other side of midnight, at the rue Lauriston. Natalie always took pains to leave her lovers before dawn; I can imagine her sending an order of flowers to Lily’s and then deciding, at the last minute, to take along an an extra armful for her unrequited longtime love, Pauline Tarn.

Pauline, another famous poet who had dumped Natalie in 1901 and wrote under the pen name Renée Vivien, had for years been allowing her life to ebb away in a haze of alcoholism, addiction to chloral hydrate, sexual obsessions and anorexia. She had already tried at least once to kill herself, and she’d been seriously ill since springtime. These days she was bedridden.

Failed suicide aside, things with “petit Paul” were a little tense. Sure, Natalie had been chronically unfaithful during their five years together. But Pauline had left Natalie for a woman Natalie detested–Lily’s cousin, Hélène de Rothschild, Baronne van Zuylen van Nyveldt (whom Natalie called “La Brioche” for her heft), and all three women were now keeping a very uneasy truce trying to provide hospice care for the poet on a death slide. Lily, whose cardinal sin was pride not jealousy, would have taken a managerial, if detached, role. (In Years of Plenty, she writes that she never met Renée Vivien.) Lily would have encouraged kindness in Natalie, who was never strong on compassion. Natalie (always a jealous lover with a conquering hero modus operandus) would have known she was pleasing Lily in being extra thoughtful that morning.

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Natalie stole away at dawn. Walking home, she stopped by the florist and decided to take a nosegay of violets over to Renée Vivien, who was bedridden.

“Take her flowers,” Natalie might have heard Lily murmuring from her early morning slumber. And so she would have gathered a nosegay of violets before she left the shop. Still, I can imagine Natalie’s heart in her throat as she approached Pauline’s door. Loving kindness and tending the sick was one thing; running into that bitch La Brioche who stole your girlfriend was another. Francesco Rapazzini picks up the true story from here:

          The morning of 18 November 1909, the American bought violets, their special flowers, to give to her former lover. As soon as she rang the doorbell at [Pauline Tarn’s/Renée Vivien’s place on] the avenue du Bois, today the avenue Foch, it was opened by a new butler, one she didn’t know.

          “Mademoiselle has just died,” the man informed her in his liveried monotone, as if he had just said, “Mademoiselle has just gone out.”

          Stunned, Natalie tried to step inside. To give one last kiss to the woman she had loved. But La Brioche, who had only just appeared in the doorway, prevented her from going in. Natalie was reeling. She made Hélène promise she would place the flowers beside Renée Vivien’s body. She took a few steps down the street and fainted on a park bench. As soon as she recovered her senses, she had only one thought: to see Lily.

On her way, she had the presence of mind to stop by the florist again. She'd already had one door slammed in her face by a Rothschild. What was it like to stand on Lily's doorstep for the first time?

On her way, she had the presence of mind to stop by the florist again. She’d already had one door slammed in her face by a Rothschild. What was it like to stand on Lily’s doorstep for the first time?

          Élisabeth didn’t live far away; only the place de l’Étoile separated the two streets. It was the first time Natalie knocked at the front door of Lily’s house on the rue Lauriston. There she stood on the doorstep. She was pale and looking deathly ill, gripping a floral bouquet and weeping. This time there was no Brioche shutting the door in her face. Élisabeth reached out and took her in her arms.

          The next day, Lily [who could be a superficial and aloof correspondent] wrote a letter that had nothing mundane or operatic about it. “Little blond, so adored and not a whit too much, your pansies haven’t left me since the moment I held you so close in the red light of my Orient room, when I tasted your lips a thousand times sweeter than honey–and this morning come more lilies–white lilies–red lilies–I’ve put them in the big red Chinese vase–and the memory of you floats all around me, it’s there all the time–it’s there, in scent, where you really came from, which is how I can believe so much in your real presence–but I would like to have you and never let you go, to have you here, coming and going and coming back again–I should like your arms around me–I should like your light to enter the room like rays of light coming through the windows–

          “One can live any old way, but this is how one loves!”

          Think no more of needing the pardon of “petit Paul”–I’m the one who will bear this burden for you, at least for now. Let me be the one. And in time, there will be relief. [….] My love, I love you, I love you, I want to live with you, have you all to myself, exhaust myself tirelessly in every joy of love with you until I’m senseless after you. You’re worth it, Blond Sorcerer.”

          Natalie had confided in Élisabeth: she had finally admitted her sense of guilt over Renée Viven, her “petit Paul.” Vivien had loved Natalie, she explained, but had needed an exclusive kind of love that Natalie had not known how to give. Natalie, like every self-respecting Epicurean, now felt remorse and was asking for forgiveness.

From Élisabeth de Gramont (c) 2004 by Francesco Rapazzini
Translation (c) 2013 by Suzanne Stroh

 

It was a turning point. The major turning point in the life of a woman in love, with two small children and social obligations that routinely required bejewelled attire, a houseful of servants who loved to talk in a city that loved to talk, a husband who would soon return home to a hothouse and who would just as soon start putting two and two together… What now?

The first time they had made love, it had been Lily running away to regain equilibrium. All summer, it had been Lily keeping the distance between them. Lily with such cool detachment that Natalie, dumbstruck, the Don Juan of her time, had begun a novel that only thinly disguised their relationship, wondering if she could, in truth, call herself Lily’s lover. “She’s never given herself to me….Perhaps she is too limitlesss to be possessed,” Natalie wrote. “Sometimes I fear it to be true, and sometimes I hope that it is.”

And now here was Natly knocking at the door to put the greatest distance of all between two people. Here was Natly in Lily’s arms, in her house, in the red room with lips like honey, filling her senses, crowding out every other memory. The genie was out of the bottle. Here was Natly on her knees, about to wreck Lily’s life, begging forgiveness for sins yet to be committed. She was incapable of sexual fidelity, she was trying to explain to the marquise. Whatever her problem was, Natalie didn’t understand it. But she knew it was a fatal affliction.

She’d fallen at the right woman’s feet for once.

Beyond the fleeting comforts of absolution that fateful morning of 18 November 1909, Lily gave Natalie a lifetime gift. She listened. She heard Natalie out. It never occurred to her to judge. All she had to offer in the face of such raw truth was acceptance. Deep human understanding. So with the courage it takes to love without imposing conditions, she extended the hand of compassion. Lily felt no need to change the woman she loved, and so there was no temptation to change her. Only the urge to bring Natalie back to life by loving her senseless–a gift, for her part, that Lily was now more eager than ever to bestow. And for Lily, all those gifts bestowed on an Amazon brought to her knees included bestowing one to herself: the courage to keep following her own heart, wherever it would lead.

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“more lilies–white lilies–red lilies–I’ve put them in the big red Chinese vase–“

The following spring on Shakespeare’s birthday, April 23, 1910, Élisabeth de Gramont turned thirty-five years old. She wasn’t easy to live with, she changed like the weather and flitted about constantly between houses, she was hopeless without a box at the opera or a lorgnette (which would never change with the times), and she could be caustic and fatally direct, suffering no fools. But for the first time in her life, love was aflame. She felt free as fire. The great adventure was only just beginning.

Was it really a hundred years ago?

 

 

 

 

 

My Goodreads

Apr 22

UnknownWhat are you reading this spring? I’ve always got a few books going at any given time, including this one. Poetry by Garrison Keillor, one of America’s more underrated literary talents.

Check out my currents, my flames and my favorites on Goodreads.

And as my friend Piers taught me, never leave home without a book.

Til tomorrow,
Suzanne

May Ball, 1894

Apr 12

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May ball, 1894

Business and pleasure rarely mix, except in the company of Élisabeth de Gramont.

Or so I discovered today, when my translation crossed paths with the research on the rise and fall of wealth I’m doing for Professor John Davis of the Harvard Business School and the Cambridge Institute, where I work.

Unknown

“Keep your mouth shut and don’t look her in the eyes.”

Join me 119 years ago in the Paris ballroom of the Duke and Duchess de Gramont, Agénor and his second wife, born Marguerite de Rothschild.  It’s just this side of midnight on a warm spring night like tonight’s: May above the Seine, with silvery gardens stretching down to the river. I’m dressed as a man. Dressed as Francesco Rapazzini, in fact, the handsome young Italian who loaned me this tailcoat. And who apparently has better things to do with his evening than go to another boring bal blanc.

Don’t worry, he said to me when tying my cravat. She will nod from across the room, and that means, ‘Now you may write about me.’

What about Proust? I’ll never hold up, I said, itching under my collar. With Proust (I coached myself once again), reply with an allusion that refers to an irony over a double entendre.

Francesco ran his finger under the collar, saying only, We haven’t met him yet. This is 1894.

I have no Italian, I whined.

So much the better, he murmured, flicking lint and turning me, pleased with his work. Men don’t need language anyway. Keep your mouth shut. He stood back. You’ll do. Prettiest girl at the ball. All the boys will think so.

Don’t you think we’re messing a bit with history here? What if the sight of me sets her down her merry way too soon? It’s fifteen years yet before she meets the lusty gaze of Natalie Barney.

Just don’t look her in the eye, then.  He handed me a pair of sunglasses with my gloves and pushed me into the moving carriage.

And now here she is.

images-3Dressed in the loveliest pink ball gown money can buy, eighteen year-old Élisabeth is not very keen on finding a husband. She’d much rather be having a left-leaning political discussion with her war-hero-turned-pacifist uncle Horace de Choiseul-Praslin. She regards the ubiquitous, bachelor museum specimens swirling around her with disdain. She just overheard two of them complaining that the room smells like armpits. Why do they get to decamp to the Ritz without me? And where is that arty biographer type person I just waltzed with? Granted: a mute. Even soquite good at dancing for a blind person in dark glasses… Better than me with only one bad eye… Sort of supple… And rather…  There’s something about him. She’s intrigued. But it is not permitted to dance twice with the same man. How does anybody find out anything at a May Ball?

Were she the sulking type, Lily would sulk. And I would catch her at it from across the room and make her laugh. We’d slip outside and go for a walk. That’s if I wasn’t “Francesco.” And if her stepmother Marguerite, guarding Lily like a prize, wasn’t trying so hard to “make tonight a success.” Lily does her duty, remains seated, inclines her head and forces a docile expression.  When she finds me lurking against the wall, she nods slightly.

Now you may write about me.

Consuelo Vanderbilt...

Consuelo Vanderbilt…

There; across the room; so expensively decked out and dressed in a brand new creation by Worth. Who’s that stealing all the light? 

Lily removes her lorgnette; she compensates for myopia with superb intuition and even better hearing. She tunes in on the girl’s bizarre accent. Is she American?

Can she be anything but? I tease silently.

They’re an invading force.

Never look the gift force in the mouth.

Lily looks down just in time to avoid bursting into laughter, since she does not blush. Well, let her have her four marriage proposals. Who is that awful woman? The girl’s mother?

...and her mother, Alva, lording over $65 million

…and her mother, Alva, lording over $65 million

“Mrs. Willie Vanderbilt,” whispers Marguerite. “And that’s Consuelo.”

Stop staring! Élizabeth shoots a glance at me.

You stare.

She’s not as pretty as the dressmaker made her out to be.

And I wasn’t staring. I was gawking. Her grandfather died the richest man in the world.

Well please never go to those lengths to please me, Monsieur.

Certainly not.

She fights a smile. I’ve put a point up on the scoreboard. Touchée. Though she’ll never admit it.

Back to gossip. Here I have the advantage: I can remember the future. So I say, nodding toward the competition, Her mother will piss away sixty-five million before she’s finished.

Sixty-five million! That’s more than my richest cousin is worth. Or so they tell me, anyway. Lily shoots a glance, first at her stepmother, and then at the American heiress. And it’s at that moment that she gets a new idea about how to please Mama Marguerite. I press for details, but she dismisses me. Later, Monsieur, she says, trying to hide the ironic twinkle in her eyes. I am very bored of writing now.

I wonder. What does Élisabeth really think of the tall, gawky American her age whose mother, Alva Vanderbilt, will bill this as Consuelo’s “social début”? That’s before marrying her off and being the first one in their set to divorce a Vanderbilt. The pioneer strain, indeed.

The other side of midnight, I made my report. And as Francesco would write, a hundred years later:

Many years afterwards, looking back on these parties, Élisabeth de Gramont would describe them in acidic tones. The rooms became “foul-smelling furnaces,” the men pinned to the scene like ornithological specimens, the girls being “herded like sheep.”

Élisabeth never really trusted girls her own age with nothing on their minds but landing a husband. She was already beginning to wonder, at eighteen, whether a husband could be anything but a jailer. More or less cruel, perhaps, but a jailer nonetheless. It was unthinkable that the happiness of one being could depend solely on the actions of somebody else. The knowledge that these lovely girls would spend their whole lives brooding, staying up nights waiting for their unfaithful husbands to return home, seemed like a blot on the whole female sex. 

© 2004 by Francesco Rapazzini, Élisabeth de Gramont
Trans. © 2013 by Suzanne Stroh

 

Later that June, as I learned from Fortune’s Children: The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt  by Arthur T. Vanderbilt II, “Alva informed her daughter that five men had asked her for Consuelo’s hand, all of whom Alva had refused ‘since she considered none of them sufficiently exalted.’”

“Thank God,” Élisabeth wrote to me. “I was bracing myself but I was prepared to do my duty, even if it meant a lesbian marriage.”

“Oh, you needn’t go to those lengths to please me, Mademoiselle,” was my reply.

What becomes a château most?

What becomes a run-down château most?

 

 

In Season

Apr 5

The trees are budding here in Virginia. It’s poetry season for me. Here’s an old one.

In Season

Unknown

Redbud and cherry blossom.
I feel my sap rising.
In a trance, I’m aware you want me.
In a trice, you put me at arm’s length.
Both are the real you:
flesh and blood,
made of iron.
Enfold me now, for
every blossom fades and falls.

–Suzanne Stroh from Unpublished Poems