The Crown focuses on
Queen Elizabeth II as a 25-year-old newlywed faced with the daunting
prospect of leading the world's most famous monarchy while forging a
relationship with legendary Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill.
The British Empire is in decline, the political world is in disarray,
and a young woman takes the throne....a new era is dawning. Peter
Morgan's masterfully researched scripts reveal the Queen's private
journey behind the public facade with daring frankness. Prepare to be
welcomed into the coveted world of power and privilege and behind
locked doors in Westminster and Buckingham Palace....the leaders of
an empire await.
- Written by Netflix
Netflix’s
‘The Crown’ Tracks a Royal Marriage
The first
season of the new Netflix series ‘The Crown’ looks at Prince
Philip and Queen Elizabeth II during the early years of their
marriage
“He was swoon
handsome,”Peter Morgan says of the young Prince Philip, Duke of
Edinburgh. “He put the D into dashing, and the D into dangerous
because he was an outsider, disrespectful, uncontainable.”
Today the
95-year-old Philip is a fixture of the British royal family. But the
sumptuous Netflix series “The Crown,” created and written by Mr.
Morgan, shatters that image. Here Philip is a brash, forward-looking
young husband and father, in the rocky early years of marriage to the
woman who soon became Queen Elizabeth II. “She is our ‘A’
character, but their marriage is our ‘A’ story line,” Mr.
Morgan says.
All 10 episodes of
season 1 arrive on Nov. 4. The series could run for six seasons, each
covering a decade, but so far Netflix has ordered two.
Mr. Morgan had done
plenty of research on Elizabeth, now 90 years old, but says he knew
far less about her husband. He wrote the film “The Queen” (2006)
and the play “The Audience” (2013), both with Helen Mirren as the
monarch. England’s royal family has been the basis of a number of
films, including “The King’s Speech” (2010), with Colin Firth
as Elizabeth’s father, King George VI. “The Crown” deals with a
range of personal and political issues during Elizabeth’s reign.
The budget for the
series—$110 million for two seasons—is more than double the cost
of a typical drama, but not unheard-of. HBO’s “Game of Thrones”
and Netflix’s “The Get Down,” for instance, cost more. The
series is pricey partly because it was shot in grand English
locations standing in for places like Buckingham Palace and
Westminster Abbey, and because many scenes are filled with jewels and
horse-drawn carriages. Such rich period details—as well as story
lines exposing tensions within the aristocracy—have propelled
fictional series such as “Downton Abbey.”
Season 1 follows
Elizabeth (Claire Foy, who played Anne Boleyn in the series “Wolf
Hall”) from the day before her wedding in 1947, through her
accession to the throne five years later, and on to 1955, with
occasional flashbacks to childhood. Philip (Matt Smith) appears
early, renouncing his titles as prince of Greece and Denmark. (His
family had been exiled from Greece when he was a child, and he grew
up on the Continent and in England.)
Princess Elizabeth’s
marriage to this relatively poor foreigner isn’t a match anyone in
the royal family wants, except for the strong-willed bride. She is
conspicuously head over heels. “When the number one person is
completely intoxicated with love, and subservient to a dangerous
element, that makes managing the dangerous element very tricky,”
Mr. Morgan says. “Philip would snap and say what he thought. The
courtiers didn’t know how to manage him.”
Philip bristles
against changes that hit him like personal affronts. When Elizabeth
becomes monarch, he must give up his naval career. He resists the
idea that at her coronation ceremony he must kneel to his own wife.
Mr. Smith (best known for his recent run as “Dr. Who”) says,
“That’s the great conflict about Philip—the desire to be the
alpha, but to constantly be usurped and emasculated by his wife
because she is the queen of England.”
Mr. Morgan stays
true to historical facts, but invents intimate moments. He says of
the royals and their marriage, “Sometimes writing them as complex
adults that work through problems is more respectful than pretending
everything is hunky-dory. Given that we all know they end up
together, it gives you the license to imagine and color in.” When
Elizabeth offers her husband what seems like a make-work role as head
of the committee planning her coronation, Philip snarls, “There’s
no need to matronize me.”
But the series also
depicts Philip pushing for a more modern coronation. In reality, it
was due to his influence that the ceremony was televised, Mr. Morgan
says, “against the wishes of the old gray hairs,” but wisely
bringing Elizabeth closer to her subjects. This Philip can be a
bumbler. On a royal tour, he compliments an African wearing a tribal
crown: “Like the hat.” He stumbles home drunk after carousing
with friends. “They’re the things that make him utterly likable,”
Mr. Smith says of these missteps. “They humanize him and make him a
normal person in an abnormal world.”
In that
anything-but-normal world, Elizabeth faces an intensifying tug of war
between duty and emotions. She is fond of the aging Winston Churchill
(John Lithgow), whose party is trying to nudge him out of his second
go-round as prime minister. Princess Margaret wants to marry a
divorced man, Peter Townsend (Ben Miles). As head of the Church of
England, the queen cannot permit the love match.
The Duke of Windsor,
who as King Edward VIII abdicated the throne in 1936, is a figure of
both pathos and wit. Mr. Morgan’s lines include the snarky
nicknames the duke used behind his family’s back. The queen mum is
Cookie. The queen is Shirley Temple. Philip he calls the Foundling.
Before milliner
Herbert Johnson joined Swaine Adeney Brigg, it was situated at 13 Old
Burlington Street, London. In 1980, two American gentlemen came in to
the shop and introduced themselves as Mr. Harrison Ford and Mr.
Steven Spielberg with an interesting request.
Mr. Spielberg
announced that he was on the brink of making an adventure film with
Harrison Ford as the central figure: Raiders of the Lost Ark and
revealed that the main character Indiana Jones would be wearing a hat
which would be pivotal to the character and the plot. Herbert Johnson
was delighted at having been chosen to help design what was to become
the famous iconic Indy hat.
Our classic oldest
hat shape was the Herbert Johnson wide brim fur felt hat called 'The
Poet' with its tall crown and this was the style chosen. The 'Poet'
had been made by Herbert Johnson since the 1890's and has always been
deemed ageless. The hat was modified for the character Indiana Jones
in a number of ways. and the perfect shade of brown called sable was
chosen.
Indiana Jones' hat
The Indy hat is very
distinctive as we shaped the brim into an ovoid to give protection to
the eyes and neck - reducing the sides also helping with camera
angles. With the brim pulled down we created an explorer/safari look
and we altered the original ribbon from 50mm to 39mm, to make the
tall crown appear taller. The Indiana Jones hat is carefully cut by
hand, using the original patterns. Each size is ever so slightly
tailored to keep the hat in proportion to the wearer's hat size and
finally hand-rubbed to give it its unique shape.
The re-worked and
subtly modified Herbert Johnson Poet hat gave Mr Spielberg the look
he had envisioned for Harrison Ford's character Indiana Jones and
what has been known subsequently as the 'Indy' hat was born. The
tremendous success and popularity of the film Raiders of the Lost Ark
and its sequels along with the 'Indy' Hat which defines Harrison
Ford's character's 'look' has been incredible and continues to this
day.
Apart from the
original hat for 'Indiana Jones' (Harrison Ford) we made a further 45
'Indy' hats of assorted sizes, some for Mr. Ford and the remainder
for the film stunt actors on the set of Raiders of The Lost Ark.
The original and the
first Indy hat still made today
Since the huge
success of the Indiana Jones films, we have continued to make exactly
the same hat still calling it 'The Poet' for fans of both the Indiana
Jones movies and the starring actor Harrison Ford. The adventurer
'Indy' hat is enormously popular and as soon as the hat is put on,
creates a handsome rugged look. The Poet hat like the Indiana Jones
movies remains a classic and unforgettable masterpiece.
Born in Cherryvale,
Kansas, Louise Brooks was the daughter of Leonard Porter Brooks, a
lawyer, who was usually too busy with his practice to discipline his
children, and Myra Rude, an artistic mother who determined that any
"squalling brats she produced could take care of themselves".
When she was 9 years
old, a neighborhood predator sexually abused Louise. This event had a
major influence on Brooks' life and career, causing her to say in
later years that she was incapable of real love, and that this man
"must have had a great deal to do with forming my attitude
toward sexual pleasure....For me, nice, soft, easy men were never
enough – there had to be an element of domination". When
Brooks at last told her mother of the incident, many years later, her
mother suggested that it must have been Louise's fault for "leading
him on".
Brooks began her
entertainment career as a dancer, joining the Denishawn modern dance
company in Los Angeles (whose members included founders Ruth St.
Denis, and Ted Shawn, as well as a young Martha Graham) in 1922. In
her second season with the company, Brooks had advanced to a starring
role in one work opposite Shawn. A long-simmering personal conflict
between Brooks and St. Denis boiled over one day, however, and St.
Denis abruptly fired Brooks from the troupe in 1924, telling her in
front of the other members that "I am dismissing you from the
company because you want life handed to you on a silver salver".
The words left a strong impression on Brooks; when she drew up an
outline for a planned autobiographical novel in 1949, "The
Silver Salver" was the title she gave to the tenth and final
chapter.
Thanks to her friend
Barbara Bennett (sister of Constance and Joan), Brooks almost
immediately found employment as a chorus girl in George White's
Scandals, followed by an appearance as a featured dancer in the 1925
edition of the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway. As a result of her work
in the Follies, she came to the attention of Paramount Pictures
producer Walter Wanger, who signed her to a five-year contract with
the studio in 1925. (She was also noticed by visiting movie star
Charlie Chaplin, who was in town for the premiere of his film The
Gold Rush. The two had an affair that summer).
Brooks made her
screen debut in the silent The Street of Forgotten Men, in an
uncredited role in 1925. Soon, however, she was playing the female
lead in a number of silent light comedies and flapper films over the
next few years, starring with Adolphe Menjou and W. C. Fields, among
others.
She was noticed in
Europe for her pivotal vamp role in the Howard Hawks directed silent
"buddy film", A Girl in Every Port in 1928.
In an early sound
film drama, Beggars of Life (1928), Brooks played an abused country
girl who kills her foster father in a moment of desperation. A hobo,
Richard Arlen, happens on the murder scene and convinces Brooks to
disguise herself as a young boy and escape the law by "riding
the rails" with him. In a hobo encampment, or "jungle,"
they meet another hobo, Wallace Beery. Brooks's disguise is soon
uncovered and she finds herself the only female in a world of brutal,
sex-hungry men. Much of this film was shot on location, and the boom
microphone was invented for this film by the director William
Wellman, who needed it for one of the first experimental talking
scenes in the movies.
By this time in her
life, she was mixing with the rich and famous, and was a regular
guest of William Randolph Hearst and his mistress, Marion Davies, at
San Simeon, being close friends with Davies' niece, Pepi Lederer. Her
distinctive bob haircut helped start a trend; many women styled their
hair in imitation of her and fellow film star Colleen Moore. Soon
after the film Beggars Of Life was made, Brooks, who loathed the
Hollywood "scene", refused to stay on at Paramount after
being denied a promised raise, and left for Europe to make films for
G. W. Pabst, the prominent Austrian Expressionist director.
Paramount attempted
to use the coming of sound films to pressure the actress, but she
called the studio's bluff. It was not until 30 years later that this
rebellious move would come to be seen as arguably the most savvy of
her career, securing her immortality as a silent film legend and
independent spirit. Unfortunately, while her initial snubbing of
Paramount alone would not have finished her in Hollywood altogether,
her refusal after returning from Germany to come back to Paramount
for sound retakes of The Canary Murder Case (1929) irrevocably placed
her on an unofficial blacklist. Actress Margaret Livingston was hired
to dub Brooks's voice for the film, as the studio claimed that
Brooks' voice was unsuitable for sound pictures.
Once in Germany, she
starred in the 1929 film Pandora's Box, directed by Georg Wilhelm
Pabst in his New Objectivity period. The film is based on two plays
by Frank Wedekind (Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora) and Brooks
plays the central figure, Lulu. This film is notable for its frank
treatment of modern sexual mores, including one of the first screen
portrayals of a lesbian. Brooks then starred in the controversial
social drama Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), based on the book by
Margarete Böhme and also directed by Pabst, and Miss Europe (1930)
by Italian director Augusto Genina, the latter being filmed in
France, and having a famous surprise ending. All these films were
heavily censored[where?], as they were very "adult" and
considered shocking in their time for their portrayals of sexuality,
as well as their social satire.
When she returned to
Hollywood in 1931, she was cast in two mainstream films: God's Gift
to Women (1931) and It Pays to Advertise (1931). Her performances in
these films, however, were largely ignored, and few other job offers
were forthcoming due to her informal "blacklisting".
Despite this,
William Wellman, her director on Beggars of Life, offered her the
female lead in his new picture, The Public Enemy starring James
Cagney. However, Brooks turned down the role in order to visit her
then-lover George Preston Marshall in New York City, and the part
instead went to Jean Harlow, who began her own rise to stardom
largely as a result. Brooks later explained herself to Wellman by
saying that she hated making pictures because she simply "hated
Hollywood", and according to film historian James Card, who came
to know Brooks intimately later in her life, "she just wasn't
interested .... She was more interested in Marshall". In the
opinion of Brooks's biographer Barry Paris, "turning down Public
Enemy marked the real end of Louise Brooks's film career". She
made one more film at that time, a comedy short, Windy Riley Goes
Hollywood (1931), directed by Hollywood outcast Roscoe "Fatty"
Arbuckle, working under the pseudonym "William Goodrich".
Brooks declared
bankruptcy in 1932 and began dancing in nightclubs to earn a living.
She attempted a comeback in 1936, and did a bit part in the Western
Empty Saddles, which led Columbia to offer her a screen test,
contingent on appearing in the 1937 musical When You're in Love,
uncredited, as a specialty ballerina in the chorus. She made two more
films after that, including the lead opposite John Wayne in Overland
Stage Raiders (1938), a "B" Western in which she played the
romantic lead with a long hairstyle that rendered her all but
unrecognizable from her Lulu days.
Brooks then briefly
returned to Wichita, where she was raised. "But that turned out
to be another kind of hell," she said. "The citizens of
Wichita either resented me having been a success or despised me for
being a failure. And I wasn't exactly enchanted with them. I must
confess to a lifelong curse: My own failure as a social creature." After an unsuccessful attempt at operating a dance studio, she
returned East and, after brief stints as a radio actor and a gossip
columnist, worked as a salesgirl in a Saks Fifth Avenue store
in New York City for a few years, then lived as a courtesan with a
few select wealthy men as clients.
I found that the
only well-paying career open to me, as an unsuccessful actress of
thirty-six, was that of a call girl ... and (I) began to flirt with
the fancies related to little bottles filled with yellow sleeping
pills.
Brooks had been a
heavy drinker since the age of 14, but she remained relatively sober
to begin writing about film, which became her second career. During
this period she began her first major writing project, an
autobiographical novel called Naked on My Goat, a title taken from
Goethe's Faust. After working on the novel for a number of years, she
destroyed the manuscript by throwing it into an incinerator.
She was a notorious
spendthrift for most of her life, and was kind and generous to her
friends, almost to a fault.
"There is no
Garbo! There is no Dietrich! There is only Louise Brooks!"
Henri Langlois, 1953
French film
historians rediscovered her films in the early 1950s, proclaiming her
as an actress who surpassed even Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo as
a film icon, much to her amusement. It would lead to the still
ongoing Louise Brooks film revivals, and rehabilitated her reputation
in her home country.
James Card, the film
curator for the George Eastman House, discovered Brooks living as a
recluse in New York City about this time, and persuaded her to move
to Rochester, New York to be near the George Eastman House film
collection. With his help, she became a noted film writer in her own
right. A collection of her writings, Lulu in Hollywood, was published
in 1982. She was profiled by the film writer Kenneth Tynan in his
essay, "The Girl in The Black Helmet", the title of which
was an allusion to her bobbed hair, worn since childhood, a hairstyle
she helped popularize.
She rarely gave
interviews, but had special relationships with film historians John
Kobal and Kevin Brownlow. In the 1970s she was interviewed
extensively, on film, for the documentaries Memories of Berlin: The
Twilight of Weimar Culture (1976), produced and directed by Gary
Conklin, and for the documentary series Hollywood (1980) by Brownlow
and David Gill. Lulu in Berlin (1984) is another rare filmed
interview, produced by Richard Leacock and Susan Woll, released a
year before her death, but filmed a decade earlier. Author Tom Graves
was allowed into Brooks' apartment for an interview in 1982, and
later wrote about the at times awkward and tense conversation in his
article "My Afternoon With Louise Brooks" that is the lead
piece in his book Louise Brooks, Frank Zappa, & Other Charmers &
Dreamers.
In the summer of
1926, Brooks married Eddie Sutherland, the director of the film she
made with W. C. Fields, but by 1927 had fallen "terribly in
love" with George Preston Marshall, owner of a chain of
laundries and future owner of the Washington Redskins football team,
following a chance meeting with him that she later referred to as
"the most fateful encounter of my life". She divorced
Sutherland, mainly due to her budding relationship with Marshall, in
June 1928.
In 1933, she married
Chicago millionaire Deering Davis, a son of Nathan Smith Davis, Jr.,
but abruptly left him in March 1934 after only five months of
marriage, "without a good-bye... and leaving only a note of her
intentions" behind her. According to Card, Davis was just
"another elegant, well-heeled admirer", nothing more. The couple officially divorced in 1938.
Despite her two
marriages, she never had children, referring to herself as "Barren
Brooks". Her many lovers from years before had included a young
William S. Paley, the founder of CBS. According to Louise Brooks:
Looking For Lulu, Paley provided a small monthly stipend to Brooks
for the rest of her life, and according to the documentary this
stipend kept her from committing suicide at one point. She also had
an on-again, off-again relationship with George Preston Marshall
throughout the 1920s and 1930s (which she described as
"abusive"). He was the biggest reason she
was able to secure a contract with Pabst. Marshall
repeatedly asked her to marry him, but after finding that she had had
many affairs while they were together, married film actress Corinne
Griffith instead.
By her own
admission, Brooks was a sexually liberated woman, not afraid to
experiment, even posing fully nude for art photography, and her
liaisons with many film people were legendary, although much of it is
speculation.
Brooks enjoyed
fostering speculation about her sexuality, cultivating friendships
with lesbian and bisexual women including Pepi Lederer and Peggy
Fears, but eschewing relationships. She admitted to some lesbian
dalliances, including a one-night stand with Greta Garbo. She later
described Garbo as masculine but a "charming and tender lover".
Despite all this, she considered herself neither lesbian nor
bisexual:
I had a lot of fun
writing 'Marion Davies' Niece' [an article about Pepi Lederer],
leaving the lesbian theme in question marks. All my life it has been
fun for me. ... When I am dead, I believe that film writers will
fasten on the story that I am a lesbian... I have done lots to make
it believable [...] All my women friends have been lesbians. But that
is one point upon which I agree positively with [Christopher]
Isherwood: There is no such thing as bisexuality. Ordinary people,
although they may accommodate themselves, for reasons of whoring or
marriage, are one-sexed. Out of curiosity, I had two affairs with
girls – they did nothing for me.
On August 8, 1985,
Brooks was found dead of a heart attack after suffering from
arthritis and emphysema for many years. She was buried in Holy
Sepulchre Cemetery in Rochester, New York.
The energy source
for Laura Moriarty’s new novel, “The Chaperone,” is its
secondary character: Louise Brooks, at the age of 15. This book is
really about the older woman enlisted to accompany Louise to New York
from Wichita, Kan., during the summer of 1922. Louise was going to
study dance. The woman’s job was to keep Louise on the path of
virtue. As if.
By 1925 the real
Louise Brooks would be in movies. By the later ’20s she would be
the toast of Hollywood. By 1938 her career would be over. In 1940 she
went back to Wichita for a brief spell. “The Chaperone” treats
this visit pretty gently, considering what Brooks would later have to
say about it: “The citizens could not decide whether they despised
me for having once been a success away from home or for now being a
failure in their midst.” When she went back to New York, she found
that “the only well-paying career open to me, as an unsuccessful
actress of 36, was that of a call girl.”
Long story short:
“The Chaperone” leads straight to “Lulu in Hollywood,” the
collection of Brooks’s reminiscences about her movie career. It was
published in 1982, after she had had a lifetime to reflect on how
Hollywood works and how it treats actors. Much of what she says is
startlingly true today.
These eight essays
are selective, nostalgic, poison-tipped and fearlessly smart. They’re
sharp about Hollywood’s definitions of success and failure, about
how actors are manipulated by their employers and pigeonholed by the
press. Brooks saw stardom as a “pestiferous disease.” Late in her
life she could cherish her solitude.
“To a film star,
on the other hand,” she wrote, “to be let alone for an instant is
terrifying. It is the first signpost on the road to oblivion.”
Brooks still shimmers as a rare loner who traveled down that road,
her life in ruins — and then came back.
This book is as
idiosyncratic and magnetic as its author. It certainly isn’t a
memoir. She had so little intention of telling all that she actually
called one chapter “Why I Will Never Write My Memoirs.” The main
reason: She could not and would not describe the sexual experiences
that would explain who she was and what she had done. “I cannot
unbuckle the Bible Belt,” she said.
The real Louise
Brooks forgot more than many film stars ever know. And she was much
more trouble than the budding bad girl of “The Chaperone.” Reread
“Lulu in Hollywood” to remember why.
Country Life, the
quintessential English magazine, is undoubtedly one of the biggest
and instantly recognisable brands in the UK today. The magazine
comments in depth on a wide variety of subjects, such as
architecture, property, the arts, gardens and gardening, the
countryside, schools and wildlife. This eclectic editorial mix,
combined with stunning photography and high-end property advertising
ensures that week after week, Country Life is read by people who live
the real country house lifestyle. Countrylife.co.uk brings over 100
years of editorial and commercial excellence to the web and is one of
the best and most enjoyable places to browse for luxury property for
sale online. The site also showcases the best of the editorial from
Country Life magazine as well as carrying its own exclusive online
content covering rural news, seasonal recipes and countryside events.
Country Life was
launched in 1897, incorporating Racing Illustrated. At this time it
was owned by Edward Hudson, the owner of Lindisfarne Castle and
various Lutyens-designed houses including The Deanery in Sonning.
At that time golf
and racing served as its main content, as well as the property
coverage, initially of manorial estates, which is still such a large
part of the magazine. Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the late Queen Mother,
used to appear frequently on its front cover. Now the magazine covers
a range of subjects in depth, from gardens and gardening to country
house architecture, fine art and books, and property to rural issues,
luxury products and interiors.
The frontispiece of
each issue usually features a portrait photograph of a young woman of
society, or, on occasion, a man of society: Princes William and Harry
have both been frontispieces in recent years.
In 2016, in its
119th year, Country Life was the subject of a three-part documentary
series made by Spun Gold and which aired on BBC Two on consecutive
Friday nights in March. The magazine has also celebrated its
best-ever selling issue - the double issue from Christmas 2015 - and
a 6th ABC increase in a row, which is an achievement no other weekly
magazine publishing original content can claim.
In 1997, the
centenary of the magazine was celebrated by a special issue, the
publishing of a book by Sir Roy Strong, the airing of a BBC2 TV
programme on a year in the life of the magazine, and staging a Gold
Medal winning garden at the Chelsea Flower Show. In 1999, the
magazine launched a new website.
In 2007, the
magazine celebrated its 110th anniversary with a special souvenir
issue on 4 January.[4] Starting on Wednesday 7 May 2008 the magazine
is issued each Wednesday, having been on sale each Thursday for the
past 111 years, with the earlier day being achieved using electronic
publishing technology.
The first several
dozen pages of each issue are devoted to colour advertisements for
upmarket residential property, which are one of the best known
attractions of the magazine, and popular with everyone from the super
rich looking for a country house or estate to those who can only
aspire to own such a property.
The magazine covers
the pleasures and joys of rural life. It is primarily concerned with
rural communities and their environments as well as the concerns of
country dwellers and landowners and has a diverse readership which,
although mainly UK based is also international. Much of its success
has historically been built on its coverage of country house
architecture and gardening at a time when the architectural press
largely ignored this building type. An extensive photographic archive
has resulted, now of great importance to architectural historians.
The other rural
pursuits and interests covered include hunting, shooting, farming,
equestrian news and gardening and there are regular news and opinion
pieces as well as a firm engagement with rural politics. There are
reviews of books, food and wine, art and architecture (also many
offers) and antiques and crafts. Illustrative material includes the
Tottering-by-Gently cartoon by Annie Tempest. The property section
claims to have more prime agents than anywhere else. In addition.
monthly luxury and interiors sections offer readers some informed
ideas about the latest in jewellery, style and travel, and interiors.
Recent feature
articles have included Charles, Prince of Wales guest-editing an
issue of Country Life in 2013, an historic revelation which revealed
the true face of Shakespeare for the first time in 2015, and in 2016
an exclusive on where the Great Fire of London really began in 1666.
Upcoming are a special commemorative issue in June 2016 on the
occasion of the Queen's 90th birthday, and a Best of Britain
celebrating the very best of what the United Kingdom has to offer,
from craftsmen to landscapes.
Around the world,
dandies embrace style while respecting their local cultural
traditions. Dandyism transcends fashion —it is a committed way of
life. An international survey of the global dandy community from the
creators of I am Dandy.
Editors:
Gestalten
Available Soon
Release Date:
November 2016
Credits:
Photographs by Rose
Callahan, Texts by Nathaniel Adams
Format:
22.5 × 29 cm
Features:
Full color,
hardcover, 304 pages
Language:
English
ISBN:
978-3-89955-667-4
Shop Price: €39.90
Catalog Price:
€39.90 / $60.00 /
£35.00
Not Available
About This Book
From America to
Africa to Asia, dandyism is a way of life. It is fashion in the best
sense, self-esteem through style. And, in every country, it takes a
unique form as dandies draw on the local context and fashion culture
to shape their looks. We are Dandy throws open the doors of the
wardrobe and explores the dandy as a global phenomenon. With texts as
witty as the subjects are stylish, the book pokes between the folds
to let us know these exceptional individuals. For them, their dandy
fashion is more than a trend or a phase—it is who they are, the
outer expression of their inner selves. Photographs and profiles
paired with clever histories reveal what it takes to look your best
around the world. We are Dandy unfolds with a foreword by the
illustrious Dita Von Teese that conveys the authenticity of these
aesthetes, their passions, and their bravely curated philosophies.
Nathaniel „Natty“
Adams has been involved with the historical and contemporary Dandy
phenomenon for many years —it even informs his own wardrobe. A
research grant aided the studied journalist in traveling around the
world and into the eclectic homes of various Dandies.
New York is more
than the current home of filmmaker and photographer, Rose Callahan;
the city is also the site and start of her involvement with the
Dandy. In 2008, she created the blog The Dandy Portraits, where she
documents the many facets of the modern gentleman. Shortly
afterwards, she met Natty Adams and the idea for I am Dandy was born
Coco Chanel had
wanted to develop a distinctly modern fragrance for some time by
early 1920. At this time, Chanel's lover was Grand Duke Dmitri
Pavlovich Romanov of Russia, the murderer of Rasputin. The duke
introduced her to Ernest Beaux on the French Riviera. Beaux was the
master perfumer at A. Rallet and Company, where he had been employed
since 1898. The company was the official perfumer to the Russian
royal family, and "the imperial palace at St. Petersburg was a
famously perfumed court."The favorite scent of the Czarina
Alexandra, composed specifically for her by Rallet in Moscow, had
been an eau de cologne opulent with rose and jasmine named Rallet
O-DE-KOLON No.1 Vesovoi.
In 1912, Beaux
created a men's eau de cologne, Le Bouquet de Napoleon, to
commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Borodino, a
decisive battle in the Napoleonic Wars. The success of this men's
fragrance inspired Beaux to create a feminine counterpart, whose
jumping off point was the chemical composition of aldehydic
multiflores in Houbigant's immensely popular Quelques Fleurs (1912).
His experiments with
the aldehydes in Quelques Fleurs, resulted in a fragrance that he
called Le Bouquet de Catherine. He intended to use the scent to
inaugurate another celebration in 1913, the 300th anniversary of the
Romanoff dynasty. The debut of this new perfume proved ill-timed
commercially. World War I was approaching, and the czarina and the
perfume's namesake, the Empress Catherine, had both been German-born.
A marketing misfortune that invoked unpopular associations, combined
with the fact that Le Bouquet de Catherine was enormously expensive,
made it a commercial failure. An attempt to re-brand the perfume, as
Rallet No. 1 was unsuccessful, and the outbreak of World War I in
1914 effectively prevented public acceptance of the brand.
Beaux, who had
affiliated himself with the Allies and the White Russian army, had
spent 1917–19 as a lieutenant stationed far north, in the last
arctic outpost of the continent, Arkangelsk, at Mudyug Island Prison
where he interrogated Bolshevik prisoners. The polar ice, frigid
seascape, and whiteness of the snowy terrain sparked his desire to
capture the crisp fragrance of this landscape into a new perfume
compound.
Beaux perfected what
was to become Chanel No. 5 over several months in the late summer and
autumn of 1920. He worked from the rose and jasmine base of Rallet
No. 1. altering it to make it cleaner, more daring, reminiscent of
the pristine polar freshness he had inhabited during his war years.
He experimented with modern synthetics, adding his own invention
"Rose E. B" and notes derived from a new jasmine source, a
commercial ingredient called Jasophore. The revamped, complex formula
also ramped up the quantities of orris-iris-root and natural musks.
The revolutionary
key was Beaux's use of aldehydes. Aldehydes are organic compounds of
carbon, oxygen and hydrogen. They are manipulated in the laboratory
at crucial stages of chemical reaction whereby the process arrests
and isolates the scent. When used creatively, aldehydes act as
"seasonings", an aroma booster. Beaux's student, Constantin
Weriguine, said the aldehyde Beaux used had the clean note of the
arctic, "a melting winter note". Legend has it that this
wondrous concoction was the inadvertent result of a laboratory
mishap. A laboratory assistant, mistaking a full strength mixture for
a ten percent dilution, had jolted the compound with a dose of
aldehyde in quantity never before used. Beaux prepared ten glass
vials for Chanel's inspection. Numbered 1–5 then 20–24, the gap
presented the core May rose, jasmine and aldehydes in two
complementary series, each group a variation of the compound. "Number
five. Yes," Chanel said later, "that is what I was waiting
for. A perfume like nothing else. A woman's perfume, with the scent
of a woman."
According to Chanel,
the formula used to produce No. 5 has changed little since its
creation, except for the necessary exclusion of natural civet and
certain nitro-musks.
Chanel envisioned a
design that would be an antidote for the over-elaborate, precious
fussiness of the crystal fragrance bottles then in fashion
popularized by Lalique and Baccarat. Her bottle would be "pure
transparency ...an invisible bottle." It is generally considered
that the bottle design was inspired by the rectangular beveled lines
of the Charvet toiletry bottles, which, outfitted in a leather
traveling case, were favored by her lover, Arthur "Boy"
Capel.[6] Some say it was the whiskey decanter he used that she
admired and wished to reproduce in "exquisite, expensive,
delicate glass."
The first bottle
produced in 1919, differed from the Chanel No. 5 bottle known today.
The original container had small, delicate, rounded shoulders and was
sold only in Chanel boutiques to select clients. In 1924, when
"Parfums Chanel" incorporated, the glass proved too thin to
sustain shipping and distribution. This is the point in time when the
only significant design change took place. The bottle was modified
with square, faceted corners.
In a marketing
brochure issued in 1924, "Parfums Chanel" described the
vessel, which contained the fragrance: "the perfection of the
product forbids dressing it in the customary artifices. Why rely on
the art of the glassmaker ...Mademoiselle is proud to present simple
bottles adorned only by ...precious teardrops of perfume of
incomparable quality, unique in composition, revealing the artistic
personality of their creator."
Unlike the bottle,
which has remained the same since redesigned in 1924, the stopper has
gone through numerous modifications. The original stopper was a small
glass plug. The octagonal stopper, which became a brand signature,
was instituted in 1924, when the bottle shape was changed. The 1950s
gave the stopper a bevel cut and a larger, thicker silhouette. In the
1970s the stopper became even more prominent but, in 1986, it was
re-proportioned so its size was more harmonious with the scale of the
bottle.
The "pocket
flacon" devised to be carried in the purse was introduced in
1934. The price point and container size were developed to appeal to
a broader customer base. It represented an aspirational purchase, to
appease the desire for a taste of exclusivity in those who found the
cost of the larger bottle prohibitive.
The bottle, over
decades, has itself become an identifiable cultural artifact, so much
so that Andy Warhol chose to commemorate its iconic status in the
mid-1980s with his pop art, silk-screen, Ads: Chanel.
Ernest Beaux was
born in Moscow, Russia, the brother of Edouard Beaux, who worked for
Alphonse Rallet & Co. of Moscow, then the foremost Russian
perfume house and purveyor to the Imperial courts. In 1898, A. Rallet
and Company, with approximately 1500 employees and 675 products, was
sold to the French perfume house, Chiris of La Bocca.
Ernest completed his
primary education that same year, and from 1898–1900 apprenticed as
laboratory technician in the soap works of Rallet. After his
obligatory two years of military service in France, he returned to
Moscow in 1902, where he started his perfumery training at Rallet
under the guidance of their technical director, A. Lemercier. He
finished his perfumery education in 1907, earned a promotion to
senior perfumer, and was elected to the board of directors.
In 1912 Russia
celebrated the centennial of the Battle of Borodino, the turning
point in Napoleon's Russian ambitions. For this celebration Ernest
Beaux created the fragrance "Bouquet de Napoleon," a floral
Eau de Cologne, for Rallet. It proved to be a major commercial
success.[10]
The following year,
1913, marked the tercentenary of the founding of the Romanov dynasty.
To follow up on his "Bouquet de Napoleon" success, Ernest
Beaux created a now lost fragrance, the "Bouquet de Catherine",
honoring Catherine the Great. This fragrance is not to be confused
with a fragrance from Brocard, Rallet's chief competitor in Russia
called "The Empress's Favorite Bouquet", which later
evolved into the Soviet version, "Red Moscow."
Bouquet de Catherine
was not a marketing success, perhaps due to Catherine the Great's
German heritage at a time of rising tensions between Russia and
Germany which would lead, in 1914, to World War I. While born and
raised in Russia, Ernest Beaux's French heritage brought him into the
French army. While it was generally expected that this war would last
no more than a few months, he was not released from military service
until 1919, having by this time seen service in the infantry fighting
against Germany and then as an intelligence officer and interrogator
at an Allied prison camp at the Kola Peninsula at the Murmansk Oblast
during the Russian Civil War.
While serving in the
French military, Ernest Beaux's perfumer colleagues at Rallet fled
during Russia's October Revolution to La Bocca, France, to continue
working with Chiris.In 1919 Ernest Beaux, released now from the army,
settled in Paris but continued to have a relationship with the former
Rallet employees at La Boca.
Chanel No. 5
In 1912, Ernest
Beaux married Iraïde de Schoenaich (1881-1961), who gave birth
to their son, Edouard[ (1913-1993), the following year. During the
Russian Civil War, Iraïde escaped from Russia through Finland with
her infant son. They reached France by sea following a dangerous
two-month-long voyage, during which time Iraïde fell deeply in love
with another man. Ernest divorced her and took custody of their son,
while Iraïde moved to Nice to work with her lover. Ernest later
married Yvonne Girodon (1893-1980), with whom he had a daughter,
Madeleine.
Coco Chanel and the
N°5
At that time, Joseph
Robert was the chief perfumer at Chiris. With little prospect of
being promoted under him, Ernest Beaux tried to use his contacts to
the emigrated Russian nobility to get new projects. In 1920, with the
help of the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich of Russia (1891–1941), a
companion of Coco Chanel (1883–1971), he arranged a meeting in
Cannes late in the summer of 1920, where he presented his current and
former works to Mlle. Chanel. Chanel chose the "No. 5" as a
Christmas present for her best clients. When Ernest Beaux asked her
how she wanted to name that scent, she replied: "I always launch
my collection on the 5th day of the 5th months, so the number 5 seems
to bring me luck – therefore, I will name it 'Nº 5'".
Initially only 100
flacons of Chanel Nº 5 were produced, which she gave away on
Christmas 1921 for free to her best clients. However, soon the demand
was such that she decided to launch the perfume officially for sale
in her shops in 1922. That year she also launched a second fragrance
from the two numbered series of bottles that Beaux had presented her,
which were numbered one through five, and twenty through twenty-four:
Chanel Nº 22, the bottle no. 22 from the second series. However,
since this didn't do as well as Nº 5, it was withdrawn and only
relaunched in 1926.
Ernest Beaux left
Chiris in 1922 to head a sales agency for his friend Eugene Charabot
in Paris. However, Chanel Nº 5 did so well that Bader and
Wertheimer, owners of Galeries Lafayette, bought the rights to it
from Coco Chanel on April 4, 1924, and founded Parfums Chanel, for
which they hired Ernest Beaux as chief perfumer. In his new function
Ernest Beaux created many famous perfumes until he retired in 1954;
his successor as chief perfumer of Perfumes Chanel was Henri Robert.
Margherita Sarfatti
was born in Venice on April 8, 1880, into the wealthy and cultured
Jewish Grassini family. Her father Amedeo was a fiscal attorney for
the Venetian government and an intimate friend of the anti-socialist
Giuseppe Cardinal Sarto (1835–1914), later Pope Pius X (1903–1914).
Like his father, Marco Grassini, he became a Knight of the Crown of
Italy. Margherita’s mother was Emma Levi and one of her cousins,
Giuseppe Levi (the father of Natalia Ginzburg), eventually became a
major proponent of the anti-fascist movement in Turin. Margherita was
the fourth and last child in the family. Her sister Colomba (Lina)
committed suicide in 1907 after being widowed and her other sister,
Nella, perished together with her husband on the way to Auschwitz in
1944. The family lived in an impressive fifteenth-century palazzo on
the edge of Venice’s Old Ghetto until 1894, when they moved to the
imposing Palazzo Bembo on the Grand Canal.
Sarfatti was
educated by private tutors, among them Antonio Fradeletto
(1858–1930), the founding director of the Venice Biennale. During
her childhood, she began to be interested in art and poetry,
influenced by Fradeletto, who introduced her to the theories of John
Ruskin. One of her admirers persuaded her to read the works of Karl
Marx and other socialist theoreticians, which caused a scandal in her
family. In 1898, despite her father’s objections, she married
Cesare Sarfatti (1867–1924), a Jewish lawyer from Padua, who was
thirteen years her senior and whom she persuaded to join the
Socialist Party. During their honeymoon in Paris she made her first
purchase of Post-Impressionist art when she bought a set of
lithographs and posters by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. On October 15,
1902, the couple moved to Milan, where they lived in an apartment
situated on Via Brera. At this stage her major interests were the
history of art and politics. Later Margherita Sarfatti began to write
on feminism and on the most prominent artists of the time. In Milan
she was introduced to Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938), an old
friend of her husband, met Filippo Turati (1857–1932) and Anna
Kulischoff and became an intimate friend of Luigi Majino and his wife
Ersilia, the president of the Feminist League of Milan. She gave
birth to two sons, Roberto (1900–1918) and Amedeo (b. 1902). With
the death of her father in 1908, Sarfatti came into a large
inheritance, which enabled the family to move to a large apartment on
Corso Venezia in Milan and to purchase a country home near Lake Como.
In 1909 she began her Wednesday-evening salon, where she entertained
the major Italian intellectuals and artists. When the Futurist
Movement first appeared, Sarfatti’s salon began to be a regular
setting for encounters between Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944,
the founder of the Futurist movement), Carlo Carrà (1881–1966),
Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) and Luigi Russolo (1885–1947). The
Sarfattis spent their holidays at their Como home, Il Soldo (The
Penny), where they opened their salon to well-known people such as
the poet Ada Negri (1870–1945) as well as to their Milan
acquaintances. In 1909 Sarfatti became art critic of the daily
newspaper Avanti! and in the same year gave birth to her daughter
Fiammetta. In 1912, when Anna Kulischoff started La difesa delle
lavoratrici (Women Workers’ Defense), Margherita Sarfatti wrote
articles in support of the publication and provided financial
support. On December 1, 1912, Mussolini became the manager of
Avanti!. A deep friendship between the two soon developed into a love
relationship, which was apparently tolerated by Cesare Sarfatti, but
not by Rachele Mussolini.
In October and
November 1914, Mussolini adopted an interventionist position. He
resigned as editor of Avanti!, joined with pro-war leftists outside
the Socialist Party and launched a new socialist newspaper, Il Popolo
d’Italia (People of Italy). The Socialist Party leadership viewed
these acts as a betrayal and expelled him from the party. With the
outbreak of World War I Roberto, Sarfatti’s older son, ran off to
join the army, although he was under age. Though he was at first sent
home, he enlisted legally at the age of seventeen, joining the elite
Alpini mountain troops and was sent to the front in July 1917. On
January 28, 1918, he was killed in battle while leading an attack on
the Austrian front lines and was posthumously awarded Italy’s
highest military honor. In 1921 Sarfatti published I vivi e l’ombra,
a compilation of elegiac poetry commemorating her son.
At the end of the
war, Sarfatti too was expelled from the Socialist Party because of
her interventionism. Thereupon she began to work for and collaborate
with Popolo d’Italia, the official newspaper of the fascist regime,
but also wrote articles for the Turin newspaper La Stampa and for
Gerarchia, a revue of political theory edited by Eloisa Foà. After
1922 she became the manager of this revue. Meanwhile she strengthened
her liaison with Mussolini. At a public meeting on March 25 in the
Piazza San Sepolcro in Rome, Margherita was at Mussolini’s side.
Although formally their relationship remained secret, since both were
married, Sarfatti began to collaborate in Mussolini’s writing and
even prepared the plan of the march on Rome in late October 1922.
Indeed, she was so close to Mussolini that she can be described as
one of the planners of Fascism.
In 1924, when her
husband died, Sarfatti moved to Rome, where she held her salon on
Friday afternoons. In 1925 she published a personal memoir and
biography of Il Duce, The Life of Benito Mussolini, in an English
edition. Mondadori published the biography in Italian in 1926 under
the title Dux. The book was translated into seventeen languages. In
1925 she was engaged as a vice-president of the Exposition des arts
decoratifs in Paris, a task which won her the Legion of Honor. In
1926 she was a theoretician and a leading force of the first
exhibition of the Italian Novecento, the opening of which was
attended by the Duce himself. In 1927, in Rome, she organized an
exhibit of the Dieci artisti del Novecento italiano, in the framework
of the Esposizione degli Amatori e Cultori. Towards the end of the
1920s she espoused the evolution of Fascism, with its heroic rhetoric
and strict discipline. In the 1930s she openly combined the Novecento
movement with the aggressive passion and renewal from which the
Fascist Redemptive Action (Opera redentrice del Fascismo) eventually
emerged. In 1931 she was often attacked by the revue Regime Fascista
but tenaciously sustained the role played by the Novecento group in
the diffusion of Italian art abroad. Margherita Sarfatti was one of
the protagonists of Italian political and intellectual debate in the
age of Giovanni Giolitti (1842–1928).
Towards the end of
1926 Sarfatti moved to Via Rasella in Rome and when Mussolini moved
to Villa Torlona in 1928 Margherita Sarfatti, together with her
daughter Fiammetta, moved to live in close proximity to the Duce’s
residence. That same year she converted to Catholicism. Despite her
lover’s anti-Zionist and antisemitic unsigned writings in
newspapers and journals she claimed that there was no “Jewish
question” in Italy and declared that Mussolini would never follow
Hitler’s antisemitic policies. On July 14, 1938, “The Manifesto
of the Race” appeared in the Roman daily Il giornale d’Italia.
Composed primarily by Mussolini himself, this document condemned the
corruption of the Italian Aryan race through intermarriage with Jews.
Sarfatti sensed
that, despite her conversion to Catholicism, she was not immune to
the antisemitic laws passed in 1938. After her son Amedeo left Italy
for Argentina in 1938, Sarfatti followed him, first traveling to
Switzerland to deposit Mussolini’s letters in a safe place. In
Argentina she continued to be involved in art criticism but did not
meet with the same success as she had enjoyed in Italy.
Returning to Italy
at the end of 1947, she continued to write, publishing an
unapologetic memoir, Acqua Passata, in 1955. She died at her Il Soldo
residence on October 30, 1961.
Mussolini’s
Jewish Lover Who Crafted Italian Fascism Margherita
Sarfatti wasn’t just the dictator's most erudite paramour; she was
his secret adviser and ideologue. The English version of her memoirs
is finally out.
My Fault: Mussolini
As I Knew Him, by Margherita Grassini Sarfatti, Enigma Books, 323
pages, $26
On November 14,
1938, shortly after the Italian Racial Laws were passed, Margherita
Sarfatti slipped out of her home near Lake Como, got into her car and
asked her chauffeur to drive her to the nearby Swiss border.
Among
the few belongings the Jewish socialite and art critic had stuck in
her two suitcases were 1,272 letters she had received from Benito
Mussolini over their 20-year romantic and ideological relationship —
a sort of insurance policy. Sarfatti, 58 at the time, would return to
Italy only in 1947 after living in exile in France, Argentina and
Uruguay.
In addition to art essays she wrote for local
newspapers during her exile, Sarfatti published in 1945, shortly
after Mussolini’s death, a series of articles in the Argentine
paper Crítica in which she revealed details about her relationship
with Il Duce. Scholars believe she waited until he no longer had the
chance to harm the family members she had left behind in Rome.
Today,
70 years later, these articles have been published in the
English-language book “My Fault: Mussolini As I Knew Him.” Dubbed
by Enigma as “the unpublished memoir of Mussolini’s longtime
lover,” the book’s 18 chapters come edited and annotated by
historian Brian R. Sullivan, whose commentary is informed by three
decades of research in Italy, France, Switzerland, Britain and the
United States.
Just as the story of the long, intimate
relationship between Sarfatti and Mussolini lay forgotten in archives
for years until Philip V. Cannistraro and Sullivan published their
1993 work “Il Duce’s Other Woman,” Sarfatti’s memoirs
remained abandoned in the shadows of history for decades.
Indeed,
Sarfatti wasn’t just one of Mussolini’s hundreds of lovers. The
aristocratic, intellectual and ambitious wife of wealthy Zionist
lawyer Cesare Sarfatti, and mother of their three children, did not
only share her bed with Il Duce. She also helped him forge and
implement the fascist idea; she contributed advice — and Sullivan
says, money — to help organize the 1922 March on Rome in which
Mussolini seized power.
During those 20 years she was his
eminence grise and unofficial ambassador, glorifying him in her 1925
biography that was translated into 18 languages.
Il Duce's many
frailties
It was Clara Petacci who has gone down in history as
Mussolini’s most famous lover. In April 1945, Italian partisans
shot her and Il Duce and hung their bodies upside down in Milan’s
Piazzale Loreto. But after their intense 20-year personal and
political relationship, Sarfatti was apparently the one who knew him
best — maybe even better than his lawful wife, Rachele Guidi.
From
the cover of Margherita Sarfatti's book
“Mussolini and
Sarfatti had shown each other their souls,” Sullivan writes in the
book’s long introduction. “She had listened to his secrets …
she knew most everything about Mussolini’s hidden weaknesses, his
human frailties, his crude behavior, his superstitions, his ignorant
misunderstandings about so many scientific and medical matters, and
about his syphilis.”
But according to Sullivan, as much as
Mussolini feared that Sarfatti would expose details on their sex
life, he feared even more that she would reveal other shortcomings —
and destroy the demigod image he had worked so hard to
create.
Although Sarfatti’s 1955 Italian-language
autobiography “Acqua Passata” (“Water Under the Bridge”) does
not mention her relationship with Il Duce, her memoirs make up for
it. She recounts a raft of personal and political anecdotes, provides
quotes from Mussolini and talks about his sex addiction and cocaine
use. But she never slides into bedroom gossip.
From her
descriptions Mussolini comes across as a brilliant, charismatic
statesman — but also an egocentric one ridden by inferiority
complexes, fears and superstitions. He was also an unbridled
womanizer, not to mention a manipulator who didn’t hesitate in his
youth to threaten suicide in a letter to his mother “if she failed
to send him some money for food.”
Sarfatti, meanwhile, comes
across as a haughty, self-confident woman who often boasts of her
good judgment, intuition and wisdom in both political and personal
affairs.
Despite the book’s title “My Fault,” chosen by
Sarfatti decades ago for the memoirs, she expresses no regret over
her relationship with Mussolini, who was responsible for the deaths
of her sister and brother-in-law on their way to Auschwitz, the
destruction of Italian democracy and the establishment of a
dictatorship. On the contrary, Sarfatti evades responsibility,
putting all the blame on Mussolini.
Pesky Pact of Steel
Sarfatti
maintains that fascism began as a positive idea that was distorted
over the years. She claims that even Mussolini underwent a complete
change. “After less than a decade in power, Mussolini seemed to me
to have become someone else,” she writes. “He began to deny even
the right to interior freedom and to subject the very souls of his
people to the power of the state.”
As Sarfatti puts it,
Mussolini’s alliance with Nazi Germany, which she opposed, was the
main cause of his downfall. “But the Duce did not form the
Rome–Berlin Axis or the Pact of Steel with the Führer by accident.
Mussolini harbored within him a number of defects that attracted him
to the Germans of his time. Thus he succumbed to the illness of
power, to the madness of the Caesars.”
About one matter,
though, she does accept the blame. “I cannot hide behind my work as
an art critic. I must accept my responsibilities. I believed in
Fascism and fought for it in the beginnings,” she writes.
“Worse,
I wrote a book read by many that interpreted the goals of Fascism in
a favorable light and proclaimed to the entire world that Mussolini
was a hero of historic proportions. That was my fault .... It is my
duty to declare that Mussolini fell because of his complete moral
bankruptcy.”
Lamenting the failure of her “final, desperate
attempt to guide Mussolini,” she adds: “Meanwhile, we discovered
that behind the mask of Fascism lay an abyss of corruption, nepotism,
favoritism and arbitrary lawlessness.”
Like most Italians,
Sarfatti saw Mussolini as the embodiment of the “good tyrant,”
adding that she had hoped he would turn out wiser, more level-headed
and more just than the leaders produced by the ballot box.
Sullivan
lambastes Sarfatti’s attempt to put all the blame on Il Duce. He
writes that since it was Sarfatti, more than Mussolini, who crafted
the ideological and philosophical basis of fascism between 1913 and
1919, she can’t evade responsibility for what others did based on
her views. He adds that the original manuscript contains inaccuracies
and spelling mistakes.
In his copious comments and remarks —
often more comprehensive than the original text — Sullivan contends
that after Sarfatti fled Italy, she agreed with Mussolini not to
reveal details about their relationship. In exchange, no harm would
befall her family still in Rome, among them her daughter Fiametta,
her son-in-law and their three children.
But history lost out,
Sullivan concludes, in that the book was not published in the late
1940s. Sarfatti possessed priceless photographs, letters and
documents in Mussolini’s own hand.
“At least some of that
historically precious material might have become available to
scholars over sixty years ago,” Sullivan writes. “Instead, it
passed into the possession of Sarfatti’s heirs after her death.
They have refused permission to anyone to study those valuable
records. Indeed, they have consistently denied their very existence.
One can only hope they will have a change of mind.”
Il
Duce and His Women by Roberto Olla – review
Sex was at the
centre of the Italian dictator's image
In 1919 Benito
Mussolini, an obscure political agitator, assembled a ragbag of
black-shirted followers in Milan, and launched the political movement
that was to become, two years later, the National Fascist party. The
party took its name from the classical Roman symbol of authority –
an axe bound in rods, or fasces. Part idealist, part buffoon,
Mussolini dreamed of a second Roman empire for Italy, and dominion
over the Mediterranean. Occasionally he liked to wear a richly
tasselled fez and would pose for the cameras, thrusting out his chin
pugnaciously. He introduced the stiff-armed Roman salute,
disapproving of the handshake as fey and unhygienic. As Mussolini's
regime strengthened, the high priests of fascism began to hail their
leader as "divine Caesar", and adopted the passo romano,
the Latin goosestep, in parades. Behind the bombast, however, Italian
fascism relied on bludgeons, intimidation and, according to Roberto
Olla, Mussolini's vainglorious sexual antics and boastfulness.
Olla, an Italian
writer and TV journalist, provides an absorbing account of
Mussolini's self-proclaimed manful potency and "animal allure".
In the course of his life, he had relations with hundreds of women,
perhaps "as many as 400". The women were brusquely mauled
by him under his desk or on mattress-like cushions installed for the
purpose. Towards the end of his 23-year-dicatorship, facing defeat,
he became addicted to a German-manufactured aphrodisiac pill
trade-marked Hormovin. Taking this prototype Viagra was a "political
act", says Olla, as it served to prolong the myth of the Duce as
one who never flagged. Undeniably, sex was at the centre of the myth
of Mussolini and his image as a man of power. Yet Mussolini's
sexuality has been "ignored" by historians as being
unworthy of study. In Il Duce and His Women, Olla remedies the
deficiency, and gives us a portrait of Mussolini in all his priapic
foolery – and occasional daring.
Mussolini's most
notorious mistress, Claretta Petacci, saw a "god-like potency"
and "bull-like" magnetism in her idol. A doctor's daughter,
she began to court Mussolini in 1932 and before long, bouts of
"savage, ardent sex" routinely occurred in his headquarters
at Palazzo Venezia in Rome. Mussolini was by then married with five
children, yet the more women he had, the more he felt puffed out with
a sense of his own rank and self-importance. Petacci's diaries, first
published in Italy in 2009 as Mussolini segreto ("Secret
Mussolini"), are amply quoted by Olla. In spite of her adoring
pillow talk ("Anchor yourself in me, my great and glorious
ship"), Petacci has much to say about Mussolini's inner life,
personality and politics. He forbade his daughter from marrying a
Jew, yet one of his mistresses, Margherita Sarfatti, was Jewish.
Sarfatti, a rather "overlooked character", according to
Olla, exerted a stronger influence on the dictator than is generally
realised.
She first met
Mussolini in 1912, and was one of the masterminds behind fascism's
pompous celebration of ancient Rome. The eagle motifs and suckling
she-wolves visible today on fascist architecture in Italy are partly
Sarfatti's legacy. Her bestselling 1926 biography of Mussolini, Dux,
exalted the leader as a sacred manifestation of romanità
("Romanness") and the noble Italian race. Yet her name was
dirt once Mussolini had committed Italy to Nazi Germany's antisemitic
cause. A racial dogma that glorified blond northerners of course
conflicted somewhat with the Mediterranean cult of romanità. Yet a
latent tension had always existed between fascism and Italian Jews.
Zionists, in particular, were seen by Mussolini as a self-regarding,
supranational sect inimical to the sturdy Blackshirt. "They
should mind their own business," Mussolini told Petacci while
sunbathing with her one day in Rome. "They are carogne
[carrion], cowards." While Sarfatti managed to escape
Nazi-occupied Italy, her sister Nella and her husband died on a
transport bound for Auschwitz.
To Petacci, Hitler
was unappealingly furtive and rat-like beside her grandly uniformed
Dux, whose smouldering, lantern-jawed features were said to radiate a
sense of physical daring – ardimento – and the very masculine
fascist soul. Other women were no less impressed. Ida Dalser went so
far as to sell her beauty salon in order to raise funds for
Mussolini. In time, she became the mother of Mussolini's first-born
son and, it seems, married the dictator. Years later, after Mussolini
had cynically discarded her, Dalser accused him of cowardice and
dereliction of duty. Enraged, Mussolini confined Dalser to a mental
home, where, shortly before Christmas 1937, she died.
Olla's biography
ends that momentous year of 1937, when Mussolini paid his disastrous
official visit to Nazi Germany. Having invaded Abyssinia (now
Ethiopia) two years earlier, the dictator decided to hitch his
carnival chariot to Hitler's funeral hearse, and a last chance for
peace in Europe was lost. Olla has read widely into the cult of
ducismo, and writes illuminatingly of his subject. Ultimately, his
psycho-sexual study asserts the dangers of blind adherence to
ideology. In April 1945, with Italy's defeat now certain, Mussolini
was executed by anti-fascists and his body strung up alongside that
of the starry-eyed Claretta Petacci in Milan, not far from the site
where, 26 years earlier, the fascist movement had been launched.
• Ian Thomson's
Primo Levi: A Biography is published by Vintage.
