The Other Heiress: The Marchesa Luisa di Casati

I was fourteen when I fell in love with a mysterious redhead I met at the Art Gallery of Ontario. I fancied myself a seasoned intellectual, a young lady of literary tastes and culture, despite my blue-collar country upbringing. And so I would take the Greyhound into Toronto, and dressed in something as obscure and outlandish as a girl could muster on a babysitter’s income, I would visit the gallery. My heart beat faster when I saw her. Her eyes were daunting, piercing through an alabaster visage, set afire with a mop of carrot curls.

We never spoke, because my redhead haunted me from a canvas painted by Augustus John. From her backdrop of sea-foam green, she never flinched, but held my gaze with her own, and an expression of both curiousity and haughty disdain. I was sure she was eccentric, that she must be a writer like me, a woman of outrageous tastes and interesting lovers. She was the woman I wanted to be when I grew up.

The famous painting is one of the Toronto gallery’s highlights to this day. “Luisa Casati should be shot, stuffed and displayed in a glass case,” is what the artist Augustus John said of the Marchesa.

John was not the only artist to paint this captivating femme fatale. Indeed, her whole celebrity was based on her lavish extravagance and eccentricity, which made her muse for the artists and literati of Europe in her time. Born in 1881, she reigned supreme over the imagination of anyone with a heartbeat for the first three decades of the 1900s. Her estate archives suggest she may be the most “artistically represented” woman after Cleopatra and the Virgin Mary. Sculptures, photographs, sketches and paintings preserve her spirit long beyond her death in 1957. She posed for Man Ray, Cecil Beaton, Kees Van Dongen, and Jacob Epstein. She captivated Erte, Jack Kerouac, Jean Cocteau, Tallulah Bankhead, Tennessee Williams, Ezra Pound, Colette and Coco Chanel. Her pets inspired the famous Cartier Panther design. Later, she was played by silver screen legends Vivien Leigh and Ingrid Bergman.

But who was she, and what was all the hoopla about? Was she beautiful? What talents did she possess?

Luisa, born in Milan in 1881, was the daughter of a wealthy Austrian cotton manufacturer who was made count by King Umberto the first for his contributions to the cotton industry. Luisa was born rich, but she was an unfortunate looking child, with bulging alien eyes on a harshly chiseled face. She was also very shy. But she was fiercely intelligent and curious about arts and culture, and her passions were encouraged with visits to museums and art galleries. Very early on, Luisa became enchanted with eccentric royalty or outrageous theatre figures, a fascination that was to continue through her lifetime.

Luisa’s mother died when she was just 13, and then the Count died two years later. Luisa and her only sister were the richest women in Italy at the time. The girls moved into the care of an uncle, but a few years later, Luisa married Camillo Casati Stampa di Soncino, Marchese di Roma. They had one child a year later, and Luisa soon found that wedded bliss was stifling her style, and the pair took up separate residences. Though she’d picked up a fascinating with the mystical arts and the macabre from her husband, she soon began an affair with the famous Italian lover, poet Gabriele D’Annunzio. The affair lasted decades, and the friendship a lifetime. It was at the time of this relationship that Luisa began to explore her deepest eccentricities and vanities, becoming a truly Gothic heroine and dandy. She artfully blended the macabre with the outlandish in her demeanor, surroundings, and fashion- the freakier, the better. She engaged in scandalous love affairs, with both men and women. Her decadence was supreme and captivating. Disregarding her childhood insecurities, she seized the tall, ghostly androgyny and accentuated it wildly, powdering her face whiter, circling her eyes with black kohl, smudging her lips in vermillion. It’s a look that reappears on fashion runways every few seasons even today.

“The face was that of a sinister Pierrot, utterly white, the thin mouth a slit that seemed to be of the same black as the rings encircling the eyes. The high cheekbones, the forward-thrusting chin, the long neck bespoke the apparition’s class,” said Philippe Jullian. “Was this the vampire Nosferatu in drag or the daughter of Dracula turned grandmother?”

The Marchesa had a penchant for outrageous luxury. She went to Paris, Rome, Capri, buying palaces! She loved to lavishly and bizarrely entertain guests of artistic or aristocratic temperament, hostessing grandiose masquerade balls. She painted her Nubian servants gold. She had wax mannequins made to populate her rooms- legend says they were modeled after her lovers. And like fellow eccentrics Lord Byron, Josephine Baker, and Michael Jackson, the Marchesa had her own menagerie of pets.

She could be seen in her skintight long velvet gowns walking her greyhounds- or her pet cheetahs. She wore live, gilded snakes as necklaces. Isidora Duncan recounts her experience as Luisa’s visitor. A parrot greeted her with a tirade of vulgarities. A while bulldog snarled. A cobra hissed from a cage. The walls and floors were covered in white bear skins and tiger skins. “There was a gorilla, showing its teeth.” The Marchesa drove in a carriage fronted by twin leopards. She carried a monkey in a cage. Others complained of the stench, but she gave him a sprig of lilacs, which he flung about, scattering the petals. “Now do you see why I have a monkey? Don’t you think that’s beautiful?” Luisa asked her detractors. “Isn’t it like something in a Chinese painting?”

Her biographers Scot D. Ryersson, Michael Orlando Yaccarino, Quentin Crisp, in Infinite Variety, tell the above anecdote. They also recount how her palace gardens were filled with a veritable zoo, and that she sometimes sailed the canals with her selection of primates, tigers, and exotic birds. There were white peacocks, ocelots, boa constrictors, and albino blackbirds.

“She was the most flamboyant and dramatic character to flit through the early 20th century European beau monde,” writes Michael Mattis at www.dandyism.net.  “They simply don’t make her kind anymore: richer than God, gloriously semi-sane, with outrageous taste in friends, art, décor, clothes, houses, pets and lovers. Guests of Casati’s boudoir were a veritable who’s who of the aristos, aesthetes, artists, bons vivants, poets, dancers and dandies that made the early 20th century’s art scene what it was: totally, utterly, and delightfully mad.”

A Polish sculptor named Catherine Barjanksky once said, “She was so different from other women that ordinary clothes were impossible for her.” The artist described Luisa’s ensemble of one occasion as something out of Thousand and One Nights. “Long Persian trousers of heavy gold brocade, fastened tightly…. held by diamond bangles…feet encased in gold sandals with high diamond heels…she smoked cigarettes out of a long black mouthpiece studded with diamonds.”

The Marchesa has been criticized for the bottomless well of her vanity. Would she have been so outrageous if she attracted no attention? Furthermore, she had hundreds of portraits made of herself in ink and oil and photograph. Her motivation, hardly original, yet clear as a bell, was simply this famous statement: “I want to be a living work of art.” Luisa wished to make herself immortal, and so she made herself memorable, with portraits that would bring her to life centuries after her passing.

Luisa was also criticized for being a showy, flamboyant personality despite contributing no art or literature to society. Her talents were mere shock value and superficial veneer.

But this is hardly a fair critique when one considers not only the inspirational value of the muse, but the monetary injections her estate provided for endless artists, sculptors, photographers, costumiers, designers, dancers, actors, musicians, writers, theatres, even puppeteers. Her high profile cemented their stature in some cases, and others had a chance at a career because of her. Her lavish splurging boosted the productivity and importance of the arts in Europe after the turn of last century.

Just as important as her money was the attention she brought to the arts and literary affairs. People flocked in droves to events just to see the living work of art, and thus the arts themselves gained considerably in both finance and audience. The importance of this role cannot be understated. This was a vivid time in Europe for arts and culture, with other eccentrics like Ballet Russes superstar Nijinsky and opera/theatre artist Erte and a whole host of others mingling around salons and galleries. But the roots of these geniuses and most of their company were humble. Luisa’s grandiosity fuelled the development of greatness.

Today we depend on the fickle and disinterested government arts grants and listen to other taxpayers complain that they could care less about opera or oil painting. Or we watch artists and writers live their passion very nearly in the gutter. The Marchesa was a patroness extraordinaire who valued the arts above all else, even, I believe, above her own image. I am certain that the meaning of her vanity was rooted in her absolute devotion to the creativity of the human imagination. It takes tremendous vanity to fuel the salons and cafes and theatres of Europe, and this was the Marchesa’s fate.

But alas, even for a filthy rich heiress, the bottomless well of gold runs out after one too many monkeys. By the early 1930s, the Marchesa had spent more than everything, overdrawn by some 25 million dollars.

Even her penitence was the height of elegant soap operatics. She appeared before the Parisian archbishop to seek his forgiveness, dressed from head to toe in white, carried by four valets, holding white flowers and an albino parrot on her lap.

Her estates were sold to pay off her debts, and the lady Luisa spent 25 years in England in humbling circumstance. But she lost none of her pluck, apparently- legend holds that the Marchesa could be seen strolling the alleyways, dumpster diving for feathers and other accoutrements with which to decorate her bonnets.

Luisa’s long-term lover, the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio wondered, “By what fire did she transmute the substance of her life into the beauties of such moving power? She demonstrated how true it is that all enchantment is a madness induced with art.”

Today I stood at the renovated and spectacular new Art Gallery of Ontario. More than two decades have gone by since I was first astonished and seduced by the portrait. Now I know that Augustus John was her lover, too, and that the effect she had on me was precisely the one she wanted to have on anyone who laid eyes on her. Amazingly, this picture was purchased for a mere 1500 pounds in 1934. It is said to be the best loved work in the gallery. Clearly, her ability to make an instant audience wherever she goes has prevailed long after she died. She was indeed the living work of art she wanted to be. Immortal.

Every portrait of the Marchesa shows another side, another layer, and John’s is disarming for its near-softness. He avoided the Gothic, macabre, darker incarnations and focused on the shock of her orange hair, flaming against a grey-green backdrop. She is pale, almost vulnerable, turning guardedly to her observer, yet unflinching. She shows that her intensity is still present even when undressed of her carriages and strange pets and vampiric gowns, never having been dependent on those things after all. Here, as ever, she does not flinch. She makes no apology for the fact that she is everyone’s lover, and not just mine. There is enough of her to go around, and always will be.

“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.”
- Shakespeare, on Marchesa’s tomb, 1957

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

Back to the Future: Ray Bradbury’s Pulp Fiction

Ray Bradbury has been old for as long as I can remember. Nearly 89, the wheelchair is new to his octogenarian years, but he’s had the mad scientist’s white shock mop and those bottle glasses for decades. He’s been writing for 77 years.

“Live forever!” a strange carnival wizard once told Bradbury the boy, knighting him with his magic sword.  Did Mr. Electrico give Ray eternal life?

I hope Bradbury needs no introduction. The writer is an institution of America, a sort of literary Abe Lincoln. His boyhood was built on Tarzan comics and penny candy, on pulp short stories and freak shows. With nothing but an American dream, and no education but his imagination, Ray began filling the pulp mags, morphing into a prophet of techno- doom as his first novels came out in the early ‘50s. I’ll assume all who are literate have read the stunning quintuplet of early Ray: The Martian Chronicles, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Fahrenheit 451, The Illustrated Man, and Dandelion Wine. A half century later an asteroid has been named for him, as has a park and a crater on the moon. He has dozens of prestigious awards. Add a Science Fiction Writer’s Association Grand Master designation, and an induction into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Then there’s the special Pulitzer citation for a “deeply influential” career in science fiction/fantasy.

For all that, Bradbury doesn’t like being known as a science fiction writer. “I don’t try to describe the future. I try to prevent it,” he has famously said.  His stories feature space, creatures, dinosaurs, and time machines, but Bradbury’s conjure is genre-less. He writes novels, plays, poems, and short stories, but in a way, they’re all short stories. His novels gather related stories tied with poetic threads, or bloom from a story. His prose sings with gorgeous detail. He has hundreds, maybe thousands, of stories.

Ray spent his early childhood in the Waukegan, Illinois Library. Escaping with the Wizard of Oz or Tarzan, or with Jules Verne and H.G. Wells stoked his imagination. He thought about being a writer, or a magician.

Labor Day of 1932, fate intervened. Dealt an early blow by death, Ray’s beloved Uncle Lester was shot through the liver by a thief. Ray saw a carnival tent by Lake Michigan and sought to forget his sorrows in the magic tricks of Mr. Electrico. The magician introduced Ray to the oddities of the carnie circus- The Illustrated Man, the fat lady, the human skeleton, and other sideshow freaks we all get to revisit in Dark Carnival and Something Wicked This Way Comes.

“Live forever!” the magician said. Ray “felt something strange and wonderful had happened.” He DID want to live forever, and a few days later, he began to write each and every day, a habit still today, nearly 80 years later. Of that weekend, Ray says, “I was running away from death, running toward life.”

That may be, but teen life for a sci-fi geek proved unpopular. High school was hell. Ray was homely, with pimples and boils. He spent his spare time with a typewriter instead of girls. The other boys played sports and drove cars.  But Ray was furiously penning at least one short story a week, ambitiously sending them to top markets. He graduated, unpublished, in the same suit his uncle had been shot in.

Graduation was one rite of passage, but for most teen boys, hardly the most important one. Shy about his acne, Ray didn’t have a girlfriend, so he and a friend enjoyed a traditional deflowering at 16. Ray’s lady of the evening was a chubby redhead. According to biographer Sam Weller, the long-awaited transition into manhood was over in three minutes.

Bradbury did not pursue college. He sold newspapers- and stories. By 1947, the stories about sideshow freaks became woven into his first book, Dark Carnival.

This year was also significant because he married. Ray met Marguerite in a bookstore. He invited her for coffee. Later, their first kiss “broke my eardrums.” They did it like rabbits on the floor until one day her dad caught them. “We made love underneath every pier along the coast,” Ray said in a biography by Sam Weller. They were married for an astonishing 57 years, with four girls. Death did them part in 2003.

As a writer, and a huge fan of Bradbury’s work, I can’t help but notice that there’s much lauding, mythmaking and hero adulation going on. Yet few have been bold enough to say some truths out loud. Here goes: Ray Bradbury is an uneducated, inflexible, pretentious, cowardly old crab who has been set in his ways since 1937. And he’s afraid to use a computer.

I await the shots to ring out, but if I once went on record with the audacity to say that Henry Miller was an overrated bore who knew nothing about women, I can stand my ground on this one. Ray shuns the science fiction establishment while soaking up all of its highest accoladesy. “I don’t write science fiction. I’ve only done one science fiction book and that’s Fahrenheit 451,” he told Devin O’Leary, a statement so ludicrous that the South Park satirists should have gobbled it up. Ray prefers “fantasy” writer, because, he says, his stories are as enduring and rich as Greek mythology or Old Testament stories. “It’s my ability as a teller of tales and a writer of metaphors. I think that’s why I’m in the schools,” he told writer Joshua Klein.  No one can argue the fact that Ray’s books have changed the world. But the ones that did were all written over 40 years ago, the same ones still read in schools.

Nor does Ray read what’s being written today in the sci-fi fantasy genre. He’s too busy listening to “mainly the Russian composers: Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky.” He slams the cyberpunk genre: “This kind of crud” looks boring to him, though he doesn’t “have time to read these books.” Nor does Bradbury learn about craft from reading his contemporaries’ work, as that is “incestuous.” This from the man who famously said, “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

I have to wonder which will endure: Quicker than the Eye, or Snow Crash? From the Dust Returned or The Fionavar Tapestry? Hmm.

But I admit it was this was what got to me most, said to Joshua Klein: “There’s a lot of junk around… they sell in the millions… There have always been soap operas and summer-reading books. That goes back 100 years. Look at Gone With The Wind. That was a big bestseller 60 years ago. But, you know, it’s very shallow. It’s a woman’s book.”

Clearly, Ray’s never read Margaret Mitchell’s classic, a work so far from the shallow end that readers need a life preserver. The great Biblical and Shakespearian themes of love, war, deception, truth, slavery, identity, roots, race, gender, class, social mores and values, grief, loss, faith, materialism, and spirituality weave seamlessly together in this detailed and riveting depiction of survival during the social upheaval of the Civil War, a book whose threads of characterization are never lost or left untied, even after 900 pages. Frankly, it’s not a book that our short story master could pull together. Ray must have seen the romantic movie, but he couldn’t have read this tome before commenting. If he had, he’d know why these people who never existed- Rhett Butler, Melanie Wilkes, Belle Watling- are as real as anyone born of flesh and blood. Now what was that kid’s name in Dandelion Wine?

Perhaps if he had read the book, he would have known more about women- and men- and never have committed adultery. That Maggie had expressed discontent in their marriage in 1968 meant “I couldn’t trust her anymore” and so Ray went on to tryst with a woman decades younger who of course hunted him until he was weak from refusal. Five years of lusty romance went by, until another woman called to wish Ray a happy 54th birthday. He invited her up to his office and began another four-year infidelity. He loved his wife, and believes Maggie never knew. I sincerely hope she had secrets of her own.

It’s not just his wife who played the fool. All of Ray’s contemporaries in fiction, in filmmaking, are idiots. Though he’s never been to university,  “All the people at all the studios are stupid.  They’re so goddamned dumb…They’ve all gone to college, and they think they know how to write…” When asked by the Smithsonian to pep up a planetarium presentation, they critiqued his factual errors. Ray didn’t feel those were important, as long as the audience felt the excitement of the solar system.  Seems not even scientists know better.

Then there was the skirmish with Michael Moore, who “stole” Ray’s title by naming his film Fahrenheit 9/11. The Oxford English Dictionary dares to use the word, too, but Bradbury railed against Moore’s robbery of his intellectual property. I’m assuming a man with a Pulitzer citation and honorary doctorates knows titles aren’t copyrightable, and that Moore could have called his movie Gone With the Wind if he’d wanted to. I’m also assuming that Ray knew he was making literary allusions when he used titles like The Golden Apples of the Sun and I Sing the Body Electric. But that didn’t stop the old codger from calling Mike Moore a “screwed asshole” in the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter.

The writer is also so busy listening to Russian classical and reading Shaw that he’s had no time to learn computers. He’s not a Luddite, though- it’s just that “I don’t do Windows.” Everyone on the computer writes nefarious junk. “We are multitudinous lemmings driven by wireless voices to hurl ourselves into the Internet seas where tides of mediocrity surge, pretending at wit and will but signifying nothing,” he writes in Bradbury Speaks. I would protest that just like the magazine and book industries, there’s plenty of pulp fiction along with the real deal. John Kumpunen, an online commenter, said it better. “About writing: Reality is that 99.9% of writing is terribly bad. Uninspiring, dead, clumsy, and just stylistically awful word vomiting like Bradbury’s … ‘multitudinous lemmings driven by wireless voices to hurl ourselves into the Internet seas where tides of mediocrity surge…’ Now, THAT is bad. Salieri waving his baton to drown out Mozart.”

But aside from that, computers “make mistakes,” Ray told journalist David Boyne. “I don’t make mistakes.”  I see.

“Ray Bradbury has been dusted with so much glory lately that it’s high time his reputation got a good sullying,” wrote Bryan Curtis for Slate in 2005. He laments his lost “pulp god.”  “So now that Bradbury has officially been accepted into the halls of Literature, can we lesser life forms please have him back?” he asks. For him, “It’s the pulpy, childlike terrors that stick.” Bryan believes in Ray the fabulist, in the stories of dinosaurs and giant reptiles, of time machines and aliens and magic elixirs and things that go bump in the night.

You can read all the dang Dickinson and Edith Wharton you want to, but you can’t take the Tarzan out of the boy.

Maybe, just maybe, the remarkable achievements, the prolific works, the recognition, the magic- maybe none of these have ever obliterated the earnest, pimply boy who couldn’t get a girl or be a writer, the boy who sold papers on the corner and penny stories to pulp magazines. If that’s the case, then the very human Bradbury is much like the very fiction Adrian Mole. Sue Townsend’s brilliant, zitty creation fancied himself a writer and an intellectual, but his poetry, Lo! The Flat Hills of My Homeland! never got accepted by the literati. If this is indeed the case, then all of Ray Bradbury’s blustery self-importance and maniacally driven productivity is just a young boy’s bravado after all.

Notes from Inside Waylon Smithers Closet

Who’s the President of the Malibu Stacey Fan Club and has the largest collection of Stacey dolls in the world? Well, good guess, but it’s not Lisa Simpson, who is most likely to burn her Barbies along with her bra as soon as she begins junior high. It’s Waylon Smithers, who also staged “Malibu Stacey, The Musical.” Poor Waylon Smithers is also the proud owner of just about every other stereotype of queer middle age.

Montgomery Burns may seem oblivious to the hints of undying love from his good and faithful servant, but The Simpsons‘ audience has known all along. In 2004, when a clever marketing gimmick announced that the show would be ‘outing’ a character, bets all around were on the obvious closet queen. But it was Marge’s sister who came out. Waylon Smithers never did come out of the closet- it’s just not in his character…

read the rest of this issue’s Fascinating Queers at Out Impact

http://www.outimpact.com/features/news-features/spotlights-news-features-features/fascinating-queers/notes-waylon-smithers-closet-2028

The Accidental Artist: the Story of Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo spent most of her 47 years sick and confined to her bed, but that didn’t stop her from having torrid erotic affairs with both men and women. She was an intense, passionate, fiercely intelligent woman with a formidable unibrow. She wanted to be a doctor but fate intervened, and she became an artist, literally by accident.

read Frida’s story at Fascinating Queers at Out Impact

http://www.outimpact.com/features/news-features/spotlights-news-features-features/fascinating-queers/accidental-artist-story-frida-kahlo-2157