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

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The Magnetic Hypnotist: Dr. Franz’s Animal Magnetism

Maybe you’ve had arthritis or insomnia or blinding migraines, and you’ve bought yourself a magnetic mattress. You’ve read the claims about the changes in the earth’s magnetic field, and maybe you didn’t totally buy into them, but thought a noninvasive attempt to alleviate pain couldn’t hurt anybody.

Maybe you’ve found it works… like a charm. Have you ever wondered why?

Magnetic therapy has been around for longer than you think, and though it has largely been disproved, there are still academies of complementary medicine today that adhere to faith in its efficacy. The roots of the unusual theory came from alchemist, astrologer and discoverer of zinc, Dr. Philippus Theophrastus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim Paracelsus, in the 16th century. But it was his admirer Dr. Franz Friedrich Anton Mesmer who devoted his life and work to magnet theories, believing our bodies were filled with energy fluids and disruption of this field was the cause of all disease.

Today animal magnetism has a different connotation. But animal magnetism was the system of Franz’s late 1700s theory and literally meant magnetic.

“Good health, he concluded, results when this inner magnetic fluid is in balance with magnetic fluid that fills the universe. If the equilibrium got out of whack, order could be restored by pulling the fluids back into alignment with magnets,” wrote Dr. David Weeks in Eccentrics: a Study of Sanity and Strangeness.

Weeks says Mesmer was motivated entirely by belief and not by greed, the apparent hallmark of a true mad scientist or eccentric over a fraud or charlatan. To be fair, reports on Franz’s charlatanism may be unfair and unfounded. One patient reportedly said, “If I owe the health I enjoy to an illusion, permit me to make use of an agent that does not exist and yet heals me.”

Though his work’s power may have been largely placebo, who are we to argue with success? Patients flocked to Paris for his treatments, which involved sitting around in hot tubs with iron powder in the water and strange iron bars around the edges. Relaxing music played in the background. The groups of patients, relaxed, were encouraged to talk and get emotional and ‘release’ negative energies freely. Sound familiar? The good doctor’s work may have been the root of a wide variety of natural healing practices today.

Indeed, Franz also invented a kind of television set, complete with antennas and metallic tidbits. By touching the ‘bucket’ as it was called, patients would become hysterical, pee their pants, or laugh uncontrollably. Franz attributed these effects to the restoring of normal magnetic balance, by releasing insanity, otherwise known as magnetic fluid disruptions. There was some scandal surrounding this unusual therapy, not because the hopeful inventor was obviously nutters, but because some women were reportedly so healed that they were having orgasms. Franz insisted the effects were from electromagnetic physics, which later did form the basis of television.

The Austrian physician was originally headed for the priesthood and switched to law and then medicine. Not reassuringly, his dissertation in med school was on ‘planetary medicine’ or ‘medical astrology,’ which was fashionable at the time.

Eager to become a doctor’s wife, a wealthy widow married Franz Mesmer upon his graduation. The unusual couple was a major supporter of the fine arts and cultures of the era. The courts refused a new opera by a child prodigy, ruffling Franz’s feathers, who then announced that he would host the entire opera performance in his own backyard. Hence, twelve-year-old Mozart’s first opera, Bastien und Bastienne, was staged clandestino.

Though Dr. Mesmer’s belief in special fluids running through the body did not differ monumentally from the Chinese concept of Chi, or indeed from the absolute reality of the lymphatic system, perhaps his belief that his own body was healer and channel enough was rightly suspect. He eventually dropped most of the magnet use in his practice and flitted around the clinic in a silky lilac robe waving a magic iron wand. He could conduct the cosmic flow with his own charisma.

Though the magnetic baths were popular society get-togethers, being swaddled with magnetic devices and then ingesting lumps of iron was a little bit harder for the public to swallow.

King Louis the Sixteenth of France launched a scientific investigation into the Franz phenomenon. His conclusion? The imaginative powers of suggestion, not the magnets, were responsible for the powerful healings many received.

Was there a whole lot of faking going on? Mesmer said no. “I am accused of being a common cheat, and those who believe in me are taunted as being fools. Such is apt to the fate of new truths.”

Indeed, the power of suggestion and the law of attraction are all the rage once more today, and given our earliest manuscripts- from Sumer to the scripture, it is a frequently effective technique.

Encouraging people to relax and then to talk, share, get emotional, and release anxieties, along with absorbing their practitioner’s verbal directives toward health, was the root of Dr. Franz Mesmer’s success. This led indirectly but surely to later research into therapy and dynamic psychiatry, and it was also the origin of hypnotism.

Was the good doctor a crackpot quack? No. His patients were simply spellbound, enthralled…mesmerized.

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The Purple Heart of Gladys: Gladys Towles Root and the Technicoloured Dream Court

Other defense attorneys ask you why you did it, or where you were the night you didn’t. Gladys, “The Purple Lady,” asked you for your favourite colour. And then she wore it around her client to put him at ease. If you didn’t have a preference, she usually wore purple.

Thanks to Cy Rice for his fascinating bio.

Gladys Towles Root began practicing law when it was not popular for a lady to grace the courtroom. To say she made a splash is an understatement. Her work began in 1930, and to this day she has won more sex crime cases than any other lawyer in history.

Despite being a trailblazer of the California legal system, her work did not make her popular with the later feminist movement, as her views about rape tended to favour man’s insistent biology. Furthermore, “Only one out of a hundred of these cases is founded on fact,” Gladys stated. “The woman usually gave willing consent, fabricated the story, or encouraged the act.”

That said, her sympathies to sex offenders stemmed from her belief that no one wanted to be a pervert and that the sick needed care and understanding. She also had a much different idea of what constituted ‘perversion’ than most of her colleagues in decades like the ‘30s and ‘40s. (Her career lasted for 52 years, from 19030-1982).

While her work sometimes veered shockingly close to “blaming the victim,” she was adamant that a lawyer do her job to the best of her ability, whether or not each job was pleasant. The right to a fair trial was sacred, and too bad for the prosecution that the best of Gladys’s ability was better than anyone else’s ability. Her shrewd intelligence, showmanship, and deep knowledge of the law won nearly every time.

Sometimes it was quite shocking to watch a woman’s vehement defense of a child molester. Though Ms. Root acknowledged that sex crimes against children were reprehensible, she also expressed that children possessed “an imagination rivaling Alfred Hitchcock’s, and often just as macabre.”

About that unpopular figure, the pedophile, she said, he “can be either married with a family, or single. In a way, he is to be pitied. He has strong guilt feelings and he lives in a private hell with himself. He utters the torments of the damned and carries a heavy burden of shame. Not all molesters are furtive and scheming and feel triumphant when not apprehended by the law. Some have a strong compulsion to be caught…they subconsciously want to pay for their deviate thoughts and actions.”

But Gladys way ahead of her time in her deep conviction that the government had no business in the bedroom of consenting adults. She didn’t believe justice should be wasting people’s time, money and lives for the consenting kinks of married (or even unmarried!) grownups. At a time when every creative act of sensuality was against the law, Gladys urged the law to reconsider its prudishness. She worked in a time when cross-dressing or homosexuality were illegal, and saved many ‘sex offenders’ from a life in prison. She felt strongly that whether we like it or not, prostitution can never be outlawed and that access to abortion is an absolute right. “Prostitution is going to be with us forever and a day,” she said. “The highest officials in the world have tried in vain to eliminate the oldest profession. It couldn’t be done.” As for abortion, “it comes under the heading of progress,” she said. “Many a young woman could be saved whose life may now be ruined by a few minutes of reckless passion.”

Once while defending a man arrested 30 times for the same crime, she turned to the judge and asked, “”Your Honour, can you tell me what’s wrong with a man wearing women’s clothes if he so chooses?” He could not.

Of course, not every deviant she defended was so harmless. She believed in a fair trial for professed rapists and murderers, too, and she often worked pro bono for those who couldn’t afford her services. “I don’t speculate on the guilt of a client,” she says. “When he comes to me he is innocent, and I’ll do my damnedest to see that he walks from the courtroom a free soul and becomes, I hope, a good future citizen.”

Ms. Root herself was herself charged with a few criminal acts throughout her career, including charges of conspiracy, suborning perjury, and obstruction of justice. She was defending a man charged with the kidnapping of Frank Sinatra’s son, and accused of making up a baseless story in order to defend her client. She maintained her innocence and the charges were dropped. Later, there was some tax evasion drama.

Gladys took on as many as 1600 cases a year, often joking that she spent so much time working that, “I’m going to die in the courthouse.” She won the majority of her cases, and for better or for worse, she saved many from the chair, and many whores and homos from prison.

Despite her eyebrow-raising insights into human desire, violence, and her impossible energy, nothing’s as shocking as Gladys Towles Root’s personal style. When asked about what drove her to dress in costumes that not even Cruella or Liz Taylor in her heyday topped, Gladys cavalierly called herself a nutcase and a screwball. This mad hatter wore four-foot hats into court, frequently in purple, her very favourite of favourite colours, lavishly decorated with massive flowers and feathers.

Not only were her outfits skintight so that she could barely wiggle around the courtroom, but they were also vivid rainbows and resplendent with yards of swishing taffetas or trailing skirts. One LA Times reporter described her dress as “a Cinemascope production.” Many of her wardrobe essentials, such as the yard-wide egg-shaped blue hat with a bouquet of poppies, were her own designs.

She also tended to match her hair colour to her dresses. On one occasion, she dyed her hair hot pink, to match two pink lambs on leashes as she walked along the boulevards.

Her jewelry was also larger than life. Rings like golf balls, brooches that rivaled her hats. And all that glitters is indeed gold. Everything was real.

Gladys’s second husband and soul mate Jay Geiger gave both Gladys and Boy George a bit of competition. He liked to dress head to toe in hot pink and satiny fabrics and carry an English walking cane. Once, as a present to Gladys, he fixed angel wings to a live elephant that he brought to her yard as a surprise. Both Root and Geiger adorned themselves with mink trim and matching lilac outfits on occasion. There were rumours about a skunk dressed in a jeweled cape at an evening bash.

Outlandish clothing and pets to match are not Mrs. Root’s only vices. She eschewed alcohol, though occasionally she would sip cocktails or mocktails because they looked fabulous with her vibrant outfits. However, she adored chocolates, and she would indulge in these finest pleasures if, and only if, she won her day’s case.

Her home and office were just as lavishly outrageous as her costumes. Her office, a block from skid row, was gold and purple. At home, she had sequined doorknobs, gold-painted ceilings, and nighties that flowed with twenty yards of chiffon behind her while she lounged by her pool and fed peaches to her peacocks. (Once a parrot accompanied Ms. Root and her husband for dinner, and bit a judge who was dining there at the same time.) Every morning, very early, she lay on her gold chaise while her maid paraded in with costume options for the day.

How she found the hours for these luxuries is one of the many mysteries of Gladys Towles Root, who seemed to have more hours in her day than mere mortals, and significantly more energy with which to fill them.

For on top of her average of 75 or so court appearances monthly (including during her pregnancies), she met with her clients in prisons for consultation or visited them on holidays when they might be lonely, clients as far as 500 miles away. Her compassion for the sick and twisted and lonely and poor was unwavering. Yet she also hobnobbed at various society events with her profession’s glitterati, and spent time with her husbands and children. She seldom slept, but when she did, it was in white satin with taffeta drapes drawn around the bed. The headboard was velvet and the carpet in the boudoir was red.

Her last breath was in a Los Angeles courtroom, just before Christmas, in 1982. She told the judge she needed a moment, as she was having trouble breathing. Then, Gladys Towles Root, decked out head to toe in gold, had a heart attack and died.

She was buried in gold and sequins, and there was an assortment of family, clients, ex-cons and other degenerates, prosecutors, and judges in attendance. Over 4000 came to say goodbye to their “purple lady.”

If you like art, literature, madness and interesting people, you’ll love Lorette C. Luzajic’s books. Her first book is “The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos.” Her second is “Weird Monologues for a Rainy Life (Irreverent Ramblings from the End of the World.)” Her poetry and her collected blogs, musings, reviews, memoirs, notes, eulogies, requiems, interviews, profiles and more are both devastating and hilarious romps through one woman’s wild mood swings. Lorette proves that there’s life after death, even for manic-depressives. “Think Courtney Love meets Margaret Atwood,” says Donnarama, Toronto’s premiere performance artist.

Visit the author’s link at Amazon to order your copies today!

Erte- a century of fashion design, opera sets, art deco, magazine drawing, stage construction, decorative arts, and sculptures

Few can boast a 100-year career. Erte, as Romain de Tirtoff was known, lived from 1892-1990, and worked as an artist since early childhood. This eccentric fellow veered from his heritage of Russian military aristocracy to saturate the world with flamboyance, plumage, and endless other fabulousnesses, for nearly a century. The sheer energy of Erte’s phenomenal reign is insane. He made thousands upon thousands of drawings: he was the designer of just about every theatre set, costume, opera, textile, and stage show in the last century. Close your eyes and picture ‘art deco’ and you are likely summoning up Erte. But the 20s came and went, and they were very early in his life’s work. I fell in love with Erte’s dozens of bronze sculptures at a New Orleans gallery. These ornate masterpieces showed a vivid world where the female form reigned supreme. There was little I’d ever experienced that so beautiful as these bejeweled, stylistic mermaids and mythic heroines.

Not even Madonna rivals this effeminate, utterly elegant little character; in career longevity and creative output…she’s only going on silver! His autobiography showed him to be a fierce, fearless, live-and-let-live type, a man who loved nothing more than his work, cats and solitude. He loved intensely, polishing off a ‘til –death-do-us-part that lasted 20 years and still left him ‘widowed’ in his mid-30s. He told the world about his life, art, love, theatre, opera, and Hollywood: his autobiography, Things I Remember, astonishes with dry, spare humour and deep warmth. Erte was a man of great refinement and absolute manners, hobnobbing with fashion designers and actresses, opera divas and prominent personalities- yet there’s no indication anywhere that he was ever a snob. There’s a peculiar warmth that underlies the memoirs of this graphic maverick. Even when he is scathing, as high camp personalities are wont to be, he is polite and elegant. “I firmly believe, too, that every human being has a duty to make himself as attractive as possible,” he writes in his epilogue.

Though Erte stated famously that he couldn’t ever retire because his work is his life, he did write Things I Remember to make a sweeping summary of his career. He was 80 at the time, so how long he had was anybody’s guess. I was mildly upset that he didn’t write at all about his sculptures. I just assumed that for a man who produced thousands of elaborate projects, mentioning the bronze sculptures just didn’t come up. Then I found out Erte hadn’t even STARTED making his best art yet…the sculptures were all made in his 80s!

Erte worked fearlessly, and he was blessed with strength and confidence and intuition. While the theatre world was long a haven for the queer, the early 1900s weren’t exactly an ideal era to burst out of the closet in. Will and Grace had not yet brought camp into everybody’s normal social circle. Madonna had not yet rolled out the red carpet. Furthermore, Erte was the only son of a Russian Imperial Fleet admiral. Still, his gayness must have been obvious even to those who had never known or heard of such a thing. Even as a child, Erte looked effeminate. He wanted to be a ballerina! He hated war passionately, unlike all the men in his bloodline who lived for their military duties. Erte had beauty, not violence, in his heart. “When I was five years old, I designed an evening dress for my mother,” he writes. Indeed, his mother had the gown made up, and wore it to a ball. “Around her décolletage was a garland or real roses. I was absolutely enchanted.”
Surely the redder necked among us will point to such examples to say, see; it IS the mother’s fault! But most of us see that sublime moment for what it was – as Erte felt, the pivotal moment where his fate was realized. Every last piece of his work was a celebration of women’s exquisite beauty.

Romain de Tirtoff, his real name, enjoyed variety in his work, his social life, his world travels, and his love life. He was adventurous, though he mentioned that he was so spacey that he often forgot who or where he was. For this reason, his daring never led to opium, cocaine, or other drugs that may have been in vogue in his many circles. While he enjoyed meeting new lovers on trains and at parties, he did not care for a Hollywood orgy he attended, sensing that the pleasures felt forced, awkward, and pretentious. But despite the conservative, military bloodline he was born to, Erte never wasted a moment on foolish regrets. His first ‘rendezvous’ was at age 13. “I wasted very little emotional energy in trying to fight my own nature, even less in punishing myself with feelings of guilt. Rather, I looked forward to many more delightful adventures. I was not disappointed. Sex has always played an important role in my life, and still does,” Erte wrote in his geriatric years. “But my greatest love has been my art. Other desires and relationships have always taken second place to this ruling passion.”

Indeed, he attributes indulgence and its moderation as the force behind his longevity- including the two, and only two, cigarettes per day that he enjoyed for most of his life. He also enjoyed dressing up- back in the early days, he referred to ‘drag’ as ‘in costume.’ A petite, elegant harlequin of a man, no one knew. Sometimes it wasn’t drag, per se, but such over-the-top outlandishness that his presence was unforgettable. Erte liked to intrigue his dinner companions by modeling various Asian robes, wearing a different one for every course served! But even when he dressed fashionably male, he was often mistaken for a woman.

Regardless of his unorthodox adventures, Erte was still a deeply religious person, though he preferred to pray in private. “Throughout my adult life, (prayer) has been a source of great comfort and strength. But, since I feel that religion is a private matter, I am likely to do my praying in empty cathedrals,” he wrote. He also dabbled in some salon spiritualism in the days that ghost-raising séances were the fashion. But he felt too intensely a portal, and didn’t care to experience the spirits beyond that.

Though Erte loved festive soirees, operas, and gala celebrations with the rich, famous, and royal, hobnobbing with everyone from the deeply eccentric Marchesa de Casati to Barbra Streisand, he loved his cats most of all. “Being alone is vitally important for me and my work. I am a solitary person…The cat is a solitary animal, very independent, very quiet by nature. Like cats who hide themselves away when they are ill, I cannot stand people visiting me when I am indisposed. I want to be left alone.”

Lorette C. Luzajic is the girl at thegirlcanwrite.net. Writer, artist, editor- her various art creations are everywhere. Visit her site for biography, client testimonials, links, or to hire her for your next writing project. Please order her amazing poetry collection, The Astronaut’s Wife.

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/Astronauts-Wife-Poems-Eros-Thanatos-Lorette-C-Luzajic/9781847287335-item.html