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Truly Wilde: The Unsettling Story of Dolly Wilde
Joan Schenkar
By
Published: Jan 01, 2005
Category:
Biography
Dorothy "Dolly" Wilde was five years old when her uncle Oscar died in 1900 at the age of 46. But if anyone in the Wilde clan inherited his wit — and his penchant for personal drama, sexual intrigue and an early death — it was Dolly. She too died at the age of 46. In her case, though, a syringe and drugs were at her side.
Until Joan Schenkar wrote "Truly Wilde," this fascinating woman was at best a footnote in books about chic lesbians. For Dolly never really did anything — she drifted through salons and bedrooms, dispensing quips and sexual pleasure to the most celebrated lesbians in Paris and London. She was, says her first biographer, "an artist of the spoken word" — and in 369 engagingly written, provocative pages, Schenkar proves it’s possible to make us care about a woman who basically wasted her life.
Despite the fame — okay, notoriety — of her family, Dolly’s early years were not promising. When she was very young, her father drank himself to death; her mother handed her over to an aunt and then a convent. That set her on a lifelong path in search of a stable home. What she found instead was Natalie Clifford Barney, a rich, wickedly witty American who seemed to welcome every artist of note into her Paris salon and every lesbian of note into her bed.
Barney’s home — and the London and Paris living rooms that Dolly loved — was a stage set where Dolly shone. Someone asked: What will you do today? Her response: "Probably nothing but hesitate." A cousin wondered: What’s made you so thin? "Requited love," she replied.
As a writer, Dolly’s skills never really took her beyond letters. But what letters! Luckily for Dolly, Schenkar discovered 200 of her missives in an obscure library in Paris. In the absence of more sustained writing or accounts of Dolly’s life by friends and lovers, these letters serve as an outline of her autobiography.
There was nothing ordinary about the life Dolly describes; she seems never to have done a single chore. Nor, for that matter, did she ever buy stationery — she preferred the writing paper from the hotels and private homes she visited. "Darling, wait for me with open arms and let me fall breathless into them," she’d write. And you don’t need much imagination to guess the reaction of her recipient.
Letter-writing was the closest she came to a discipline. In every other way, she was hot-wired to the moment and the pleasure it might bring. She lined her eyes with kohl and so impressed F. Scott Fitzgerald that he put her in a scene — later, he cut it out — from "Tender Is The Night." She was a character: She ate the little knots off the top of a brioche. Was she constant about anything? Not really. Even when she was committed to a relationship, she never forgot that sex with others could be rationalized as "the logical conclusion to admiration."
A personality built on eccentricity, seduction and quips needs constant replenishment. Dolly took drugs to spark her conversation in the salon. And heroin to ease her loneliness after. The inconstancies of her lovers also took a toll. Dolly sometimes had affairs to get even with Natalie Barney (including one with Alla Nazimova, the brilliant Russian actress who would become the godmother of Nancy Davis, future wife of Ronald Reagan). And sometimes revenge was turned inward. When Barney "eloped" with an actress, Dolly slashed a vein in her arm. There would be three more suicide attempts before breast cancer and what may have been an accidental overdose of heroin ended her restlessness for good.
In the end, Schenkar writes, Dolly repeated Oscar’s history. "I am more Oscar-like than he was himself," she said. Their uncanny physical resemblance was only the first similarity; more important was their shared penchant for excess, collapse and ruin. The key difference between Oscar and Dolly is that he cared about a career and she cherished the ephemeral moment that went unrecorded. "She seemed always to be in rehearsal for a final work whose contract she could not bring herself to sign," Schenkar concludes.
All of us, gay or straight, know people who are smarter and wittier than we are but who get nowhere in life. In an occasional flash of generosity and curiosity, we think that someone should pay more attention to them, that they could put their intelligence to some worldly purpose. They probably can’t. Dolly Wilde was lucky in just one way — her compelling, tragic life attracted a writer who is talented and dedicated enough to make her story matter.
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