Books |
Elsie de Wolfe’s Paris: Frivolity Before the Storm
Charlie Scheips
By
Published: Oct 15, 2014
Category:
Non Fiction
Once, for a week, I filled in as the co-host of a television talk show. Charlie Scheips was one of the guests, there to chat about Andy Warhol and the movies. A minute into our conversation, Charlie’s phone rang. We said, at exactly the same time, “It’s Andy!” And I laughed, because you have to be very fast indeed to keep up with Charlie.
So it won’t do to describe Charlie Scheips, as his site does, as a “curator, art adviser, writer and cultural historian.” He’s all that, but in Manhattan, this description is close to generic. What distinguishes Charlie Scheips from the art mob is his range. He knows everyone –– instead of a photograph, his book jacket image is his portrait, painted by David Hockney — and instead of serving up a smart spin on the latest trend, he scores actual scoops.
Like, for instance, a treasure trove of close to 200 unpublished photographs of Elsie de Wolfe’s 1939 “Circus Ball.” He’s used these as the centerpiece of a book like no other, “Elsie de Wolfe’s Paris: Frivolity Before the Storm.” On the surface, it’s a voyeur’s dream, a behind-the-scenes look at the high water mark of a kind of entertaining that went extinct two months later, when Hitler invaded Poland. But more, it’s a deep dive, an X-ray of an elite Society that took dinner parties and balls as seriously as we take our work — because it was their work.
As Scheips writes: “This book is my search to bring back a lost moment in time, when men in white tie and women in elaborate evening dresses saw the occasion of a grand ball as an expression of sophistication and a means to confirm the existence of a civilized life — and have fun.”
Ephemeral? Beyond. As a biographer of Proust has noted, “Even the greatest hostess is forgotten when the last of her guests dies.” But to Elsie and her crowd, an invitation to a great party was the equivalent of immortality. Now, in a book, they actually have it. [To buy “Elsie de Wolfe’s Paris: Frivolity Before the Storm” from Amazon, click here.]
When she hosted the last Circus Ball, Elsie was 81. She’d done it all: She’d been an actress, America’s first interior decorator, longtime companion of the very rich Bessie Marbury, and bestselling author.
In 1903, touring the Palace of Versailles, de Wolfe and Marbury found an abandoned Louis XV pavilion. They bought the Villa Trianon and, with Marbury’s fortune, restored it. In 1926, de Wolfe married Sir Charles Mendl; as Lady Mendl, she did less decorating and more entertaining. She became a pillar of Society, famous for being famous and ripe for inclusion in a Cole Porter song, because “everybody” knew she did headstands as part of her morning exercises:
When you hear that Lady Mendl standing up
Now turns a handspring landing up
On her toes,
Anything goes.
The Circus Ball of 1939 — the second of an annual event given on the final evening of the social season — featured bejeweled white Lipizzaner horses and even more bejeweled guests. The beauty part: Scheips also takes us backstage, to the preparation of a circus ring, the feeding of the ponies, the icing of the champagne, the three weeks of preparation, the planeloads of roses.
And then the war came, and the Mendls fled to America.
Imagine the Titanic, iceberg approaching, as the glittering passengers danced.
