Femme Fatale No.3: Kiki de Montparnasse

Posted by dramaofexile in Femme Fatale and tagged with 1920's actress, 1920's art scene, 1920's painter, 1920's star, Alice Prin, bobbed hair, Chez kiki, Kiki de Montparnasse, Man Ray, vintage socialite November 4, 2012

I’ve been neglecting the Femme Fatale section of this blog for a while, I guess inadvertently because I haven’t been drawn to a muse in a while…until now. I’m currently obsessing over the fabulous Kiki de Montparnasse, French artist model, nightclub singer, actress, memoirist, and painter. She flourished in, and helped define, the liberated culture of Paris in the early 1920s.

Born Alice Prin in Burgundy, the illegitimate daughter of a peasant girl, she moved to Paris in 1913 and became the top French model of The Jazz Age. She was the lover of surrealist Man Ray, who took many famous photographs of her, and a list of the artists for whom she posed for reads like a Who’s Who of 20th century painting and sculpture. She had a solo exhibition of her paintings in 1927 and Jean Cocteau and director Sergei Eisenstein commissioned portraits from her. She also appeared in the avante-garde films “Ballet Mechanique” (1924), “Emak Bakia” (1926), and “Etoile de Mer” (1928), one of my personal favourites. Her music hall performances in black hose and garters included crowd-pleasing risqué songs, which were uninhibited, yet inoffensive. For a few years during the 1930s, she owned a Montparnasse cabaret, which she named Chez Kiki.

A symbol of bohemian and creative Paris, at age of twenty-eight she was declared the Queen of Montparnasse. Even during difficult times, she maintained her positive attitude, saying “all I need is an onion, a bit of bread, and a bottle of red [wine]; and I will always find somebody to offer me that.”

I’ve always been struck by Kiki’s unconventional beauty, her notoriety and incredible art. I’ve fallen pretty hard recently for her and it feels good to be inspired once more.

Femme Fatale #2, Barbara Hutton

Posted by dramaofexile in Femme Fatale and tagged with 1940's, barbara hutton, cary grant, Femme Fatale, heiress, socialite July 21, 2012

Barbara Woolworth Hutton (November 14, 1912 – May 11, 1979) was an American socialite, often dubbed ‘Poor Little Rich Girl’ because of her troubled life.

Heiress to the retail tycoon Frank W. Woolworth, she endured a disturbed childhood that made it hard for her to form relationships. Seven times married, she acquired several grand foreign titles, but was cynically exploited by many of her husbands. Although much envied for her possessions and her life of leisure, she remained deeply insecure, often taking refuge in drink, drugs and playboys.

The only child of Edna Woolworth – who was the daughter of Frank W. Woolworth, the founder of the Woolworth department store chain – and Franklyn Laws Hutton, Barbara Hutton’s early years were tragic. Her father was a notorious philanderer, while her mother committed suicide when Barbara was only six-years-old. As a result, she was shunted between various relatives and raised by a governess.

On her 21st birthday, she inherited close to $50 million from her mother’s estate. She was portrayed in the press as the ‘lucky’ young woman who had it all. However, the public had no idea of the psychological problems she lived with that led to a life of victimisation and abuse.

Her difficult childhood had set the tone for what became a troubled private life, which was punctuated by no fewer than seven failed marriages, including a brief partnership with Cary Grant. She had her only child, Lance, with Court Haugwitz-Reventlow.
In 1933, she married Alexis Mdivani, a self-styled Georgian prince, but the pair divorced in 1935.

Her second husband was Count Court Heinrich Eberhard Erdmann Georg von Haugwitz-Hardenberg-Reventlow, who used her great wealth to his advantage. They married in 1935 and he subjected Hutton to verbal and physical abuse that escalated so much that he hospitalised her. He was arrested. In 1937, he also persuaded Hutton to give up her American citizenship and take a Danish one – his native country – instead for tax reasons. They divorced in 1938, giving Hutton sole custody of their son Lance, who was raised by governesses.

By this stage, Hutton had descended into Seconal, a barbiturate-based tranquilliser, and anorexia. Both of these would affect her for her whole life.

Her most famous husband was her third Cary Grant. During the Second World War, Hutton gave money to assist the Free French Forces and used her high profile to sell war bonds. She met Grant in Hollywood and they wed in 1942. The press dubbed them ‘Cash and Cary’ but Grant received no money when they divorced in 1945, suggesting he genuinely cared for her.

In 1947, she married Prince Igor Troubetzkoy, who was a Russian royal of limited means. He drove the first Ferrari to compete in the Monaco Grand Prix in 1948. He filed for divorce in 1951. Following this, she attempted to commit suicide, which made headlines across the world.

Her next marriage to Dominican diplomat Porfirio Rubirosa lasted 53 days between December 1953 and February 1954 as the international playboy continued his affair with Zsa Zsa Gabor.

Hutton then married old friend and tennis star Baron Gottfried Cramm in 1955 but they divorced in 1959. In 1964, she married Prince Pierre Raymond Doan Vinh na Champassak but this proved to be short-lived, ending in 1966.

Over the years, apart from an important inheritance which included Old Master paintings and important sculptures,she also personally acquired a magnificent collection of her own which included the spectrum of arts, porcelain,valuable jewelry, including elaborate historic pieces that had once belonged to Marie Antoinette and Empress Eugénie of France, and important pieces by Fabergé and Cartier.

The death of her only son in an air crash in 1972 sent Hutton into a state of despair. By this time, her fortune had diminished, due to her extreme generosity (she had donated Winfield House to the United States government as a residence for their UK ambassador.^[26]) but also allegedly through questionable deals by her long-time lawyer, Graham Mattison. Eventually she began liquidating assets in order to raise funds to live, yet continued to spend money on strangers willing to pay a little attention to her. She spent her final years in Los Angeles, living at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where she died from a heart attack in May 1979, aged 66. It is said that at her death, $3,500 was all that remained of her fortune.

Femme Fatale No.1, Pola Negri

I’m going to be profiling prolific influential women from the past under this new umbrella, Femme Fatale. I’ll be primarily looking at women from the early 1900′s through to the late 1960′s. Most of them will be film stars,artists, authors, muses, socialites and designers. If anyone has any requests, let me know!

First Femme Fatale is Polish born actress, Pola Negri.

Pola Negri (1897 – 1987) was a Polish stage and film actress who achieved worldwide fame for her tragedienne and femme fatale roles from the 1910s through the 1940s during the Golden Era of Hollywood film. She was the first European film star to be invited to Hollywood, and became a great American star. She also started several important women’s fashion trends. She is known for being one of the most popular stars of the silent film era, and her varied career included work as an actress in silent and talking films, theater, and vaudeville; as a singer and recording artist; as an author; and as a ballerina.

Pola sings ‘Paradise’ in the 1932 film, A Woman Commands

Born Appolonia Chalupek, she was brought up by a single mother in a Warsaw slum. As a teenager, she trained at the Imperial Ballet School, debuted with the Imperial Ballet as a cygnet in Swan Lake, and danced in lead roles. She quit dancing after a bout with tuberculosis, then took up acting, which she studied at the Imperial Academy of Dramatic Arts in Warsaw. In 1913 she made her stage debut as an actress, and within a year she appeared in her first film. Soon she was a top screen star in Poland, prompting director Max Reinhardt to invite her to appear in his stage play Sumurun in Berlin; she remained there for five years, becoming internationally famous as the star of a number of major German films.

Bella Donna, 1923

Shadows of Paris, 1924

Flooded with contract offers from Hollywood, she moved to America in 1923 and signed with Paramount for $3000 a week; she thus became Hollywood’s first imported star. Her exotic, mysterious, passionate qualities caught on with American audiences, and she made numerous popular films; eventually her salary went up to $10,000 a week. She attracted a great deal of publicity for her offscreen romances and her long-term feud with rival Gloria Swanson. She divorced her husband, a Polish count, and made headlines with an engagement to Charlie Chaplin; she broke with Chaplin and took up with Rudolph Valentino, enhancing her sex-siren image.

Madame DuBarry, 1919

Valentino’s death in 1926 marked the beginning of her slip in popularity with the American public, which grew bored with her flamboyant exploits. With the advent of the sound era, she returned to Europe. From 1927-31 she was married to a Russian prince; she divorced him because he mismanaged her investments during the stock market crash. She became popular again in Germany after starring in several films there; she was ordered barred from films because she was thought to be part Jewish, but Adolf Hitler personally overruled this decision due to his fondness for the mother-love film Mazurka (1935), which he reportedly watched once a week for its tearjerking effects on him. It was rumoured that she and Hitler were romantically linked, but she successfully sued the French magazine that began the rumour.

Sappho, 1920

She settled on the French Riviera, then returned to the U.S. in 1941 after the Germans invaded France. In 1951 she became a U.S. citizen. After 1941 she appeared in only two additional films. She lived out the rest of her long life in well-off seclusion. She authored an autobiography, Pola Negri: Memoirs of a Star, before passing away in 1987.