CAUTION!
Any person or persons who attempt to recognize their own sordid idiosyncracies in any character in this book are warned that anything they say will be used in evidence against them.
This disclaimer may be the best thing in this book. On the other hand, my knowledge of the who’s who (or who slept with who) of the glitterati of the 1920s (and 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s) may be too inadequate to have recognized — let alone understood — most of the inside jokes that are probably peppered throughout.
Daisy Fellowes was a portmanteau of connections. In her day, she may have been the best-connected person on the planet. If there are six degrees of separation between me and Kevin Bacon, there were probably no more than four between Daisy Fellowes and my grandfather. Just read the string of labels that opens her Wikipedia biography: “prominent French socialite, acclaimed beauty, minor novelist and poet, Paris Editor of American Harper’s Bazaar, fashion icon, and an heiress to the Singer sewing machine fortune.” Every one of those subordinate clauses by itself is more that most of us can claim. She packed six of them into her life. But then she did have plenty of hooks to hang them from, carrying around a name that would have taken up a sheet of paper by itself: Marguerite Severine Philippine de Broglie Ducasez Fellowes, Duchess de Gluecksbierg.
She was the kind of character who provides an irresistible rabbit-hole for even a well-intentioned writer. Thus, Ladislas Farago, when ostensibly writing about her daughter Jacqueline in his history of World War Two espionage, The Game of Foxes, veers off course for a quick swing around the isle of Daisy:
The Prince was killed in 1918, the year Jacqueline was born. His young widow, a ravishing and poignant figure in the deep mourning that was fashionable at that time, then married the Hon. Reginald Fellowes, a tall, dark, dashing British banker, younger son of the second Lord de Ramsey. From then on, she commuted between her palace in Neuilly-sur-Seine, her spacious Villa Zoriade on the Riviera, and Donnington Hall in Berkshire, once the residence of Beau Brummel, now decorated with Daisy’s magnificent collection of eighteenth-century furniture. She lived so sumptuously that even the walls of her boathouse on the Cote d’Azur were lined with drawings by Giovanni Tiepolo, the great painter of Venetian baroque whose frescoes adorn the Doge’s Palace. With apartments also in Belgravia and Tangier, she was always on the move, allegedly to dodge taxes on the vast Singer fortune.
Daisy Fellowes de Broglie Ducasez, acclaimed as the world’s best-dressed woman, was the outstanding hostess of her age, more devastatingly smart and witty than beautiful. She entertained prodigiously at her many homes and aboard her 250-foot yacht, the Sister Anne. Her circle of friends included not only such blue-blooded fixtures of high society as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the Lady Castlerosse, Lady Diana Cooper, Sir Oswald and Lady Cynthia Mosley, and the Aga Khan, but also Somerset Maugham, the great ballet master Serge Lifar, Coco Chanel, Cecil Beaton, Yvonne Printemps, and Sacha Guitry.
Her name pops up in letters, memoirs, and biographies of everyone from Gertrude Stein and Colette to Erté and Chanel to the Duchess of Windsor and Pamela Digby Churchill Harriman (to name another portmanteau of the famous and rich). And there is always some juicy tidbit about her to be shared:
- Daring Dos, Marie Trasko:
- • “According to her hairdresser, she had her hair done as much as ten times in one day.”
- The Power of Style, Annette Tapert and Diana Edkins:
- • “Seeing a group of girls playing in a park, she asked the nurse watching them, ‘Whose lovely little children are those?’ To which the nurse replied, ‘Yours, Madame.’
- Too brief a treat: the letters of Truman Capote, edited by Gerald Clarke:
- • “Daisy Fellowes (her face lifted for the fourth time — the Doctors say no more).”
- October Blood, Francine du Plessix Gray (novel):
- • “Daisy Fellowes, who always wore identical bracelets of diamones and rubies on each wrist (she ordered two of each because she loathed asymmetry).”
- Second Son: An Autobiography, David Herbert:
- • [Daisy on her daughters]: “The eldest, Emmeline, is like my first husband only a great deal more masculine; the second, Isabelle, is like me without guts; [and] the third, Jacqueline, was the result of a horrible man called Lischmann ….”
I confess that I bought Cats in the Isle of Man for its title alone, hoping for something quirky and unjustly forgotten. Instead, I found the book quippy and probably not worth what a used copy will cost you. It starts as the story of Claudia and John, twin children of an American Singer-like heiress and a handsome but feckless Polish prince. John is dropped off early in the journey, however, only to reappear briefly in the midst of World War One and then be killed in combat. Instead, the story becomes focused on Claudia and her consistently poor taste in men.
Claudia see her father and handsome and resolute, “a terribly just and severe judge.” Instead, he is feckless, a man who “dreaded being alone and would do anything to keep his friends about him, from the time he awoke in the morning to his last minute of consciousness.” Her first crush is on the debonair Felix, who quickly proves to be just another impoverished nobleman in search of an American fortune. She marries Count Robert for his “knack, which came from long practice, of asking questions about the futile things that women are interested in, and appearing to appreciate their answers, while all the time his gentle mind was wandering in other spheres.”
The Count takes her off to his castle in the countryside and makes her a near-prisoner in its bleak rooms, unchanged in their decor for the last eleven generations. Later on, with Robert conveniently dead and the fog of war putting her world in a comforting soft focus, Claudia meets and falls in love again with Felix. They pledge to spend the rest of their lives together. But once a shit, always a shit, Claudia learns in the end, and Daisy Fellowes draws the final curtain on her story.
I got the strong impression Cats in the Isle of Man that Daisy Fellowes would have been terrific fun as a conversationalist. There are some amusing asides and observations tossed off in the course of the book. Count Robert worries that Claudia, “being half American, could not be entirely civilised.” The most sought-after prostitute in Paris is sought after by men not for her beauty or sexual prowess but simply because she “had a trick of looking at him with her brown eyes all the time he was speaking, and she never interrupted.” Sadly, these are bits of tinsel hung off an otherwise unremarkable frame. Claudia is a cipher and her story not worth telling. But the book did allow her to add “minor novelist” to her CV, so I guess it served its primary purpose.
File this “Justly Neglected” and run: You got a hair-dresser to get to!
It probably takes some lightness of character to float along with the currents of fashion.
Cecil Beaton goes on about her fashion sense for two whole pages in The Glass of Fashion. After a bit one begins to tire of the “Bright Young Things.” They may have been bright, but do seem to have been rather shallow, deep down. A fascinating time.