The Books: The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West 1911-17; “Much Worse than Gaby Deslys: A Plea for Decency”

On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)

NEXT BOOK: The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West, 1911-17

This essay was really fun to research. As I’ve mentioned before, the one problem with this excellent volume is that there are no footnotes and no explanatory paragraphs. Since Rebecca West was writing multiple columns a week, responding to various tempests-in-teapots as well as larger political issues, some of the references are totally obscured in the mists of time. This is the editor’s issue. I thank her for digging up these long-lost columns but I think a bit more editorial “voice” was needed, in order to provide context. In each column, Rebecca West is responding to something very specific: someone else’s column, a protest, a controversial law being passed. If you want to understand what’s going on, you have to do your own research. But I’ve been doing my own research since I first saw East of Eden at age 12 and decided I needed to know everything about James Dean and Elia Kazan. I went to WORK.

This 1913 column was a response to a controversy that had erupted following a musical production starring Gaby Deslys. Many people weighed in, expressing predictable (then and now) moral outrage over the scantily clad dancers onstage, and the damn-near “indecency” of the lead, Gaby Deslys. I hadn’t heard of Gaby Deslys. MY BAD. Researching her was so fun.

Born in Marseilles, Marie-Elise-Gabrielle Caire eventually changed her name to Gaby Deslys. She moved to Paris and started to get jobs. She started out in the chorus line, and gradually got bit parts here and there. She was motivated to be good. Off-hours, she worked on her dancing. She had true grit. A great work ethic.

She knew who she was. She understood what her gifts were, perhaps the most important thing for any performer. She said:

“I knew well enough that I would never be a tragedienne or comedienne. My style was a kind of mixed salad that was out of place in classic theater. I therefore considered the options and common sense told me to get out of theatre and turn to the music hall.”

Smart move.

Getting out of the chorus line is one of the most difficult things for any dancer to do. An entire musical was created about that very challenge! But she did, until eventually she was a headliner in some of the biggest theaters of the day.

Like Madonna, she was a master of her own publicity. If you Google her, a wealth of photos fill the computer screen. That was her doing. Get those photos out onto the market, keep her name in the press, keep everyone talking. It worked.

She was an enormous star of the stage and the music halls of London. 1911 was her peak year. She made $4,000 a week for her performances. She moved on to larger venues, performing at the Winter Garden as well as on Broadway, dancing with a young Al Jolson. She was such a big star that after a performance at Yale in 1911 the undergraduate audience rioted, tearing up the theatre, and rushing the stage, a la Elvis. They were furious at the $2 ticket price. They all wanted to see her. Incredible. She was a phenom.

A dance was named after her: “The Gaby Glide.”

A cocktail was named after her too. Here is the recipe. It sounds lethal.

1 jigger (1/ 1/2 oz) gin
1/2 pony (1/2 oz) orgeat
1 scant tsp absinthe

She was controversial. Some of her dances were banned in certain cities, as controversial as “twerking.” Her sexuality was out there for all to see. Her clothes were extremely revealing for the time, featuring expanses of neck and shoulder, bare legs, short sleeves. Short sleeves. People were outraged.

She had many admirers, including the King of Portugal (who was eventually deposed, and went into exile.) She met him while she was performing in Lisbon and the King took a liking to her. He gave her a bracelet worth $70,000. Tabloid interest in her personal life was intense. Revolution was in the air in Lisbon. The fact that the King was consorting with what people considered a mere chorus girl didn’t help matters. She and the King would meet up whenever she was in London, he gave her jewels worth almost $100,000. She did what she wanted to do, but, peppered with questions about her love life from press who came from all over the world to follow her exploits, Deslys refused to kiss and tell.

Look at how beautiful and charming she was.

She moved to America in 1911, leaving her royal admirer behind (although they stayed in touch and would still “hook up” when she had engagements in England – he had moved there for his exile).

There was a lot of controversy surrounding her birth origins: rumors spread that she was not French at all. Private detectives were put on the case. That’s how big a deal she was. Creating a new identity and inventing a past was par for the course with stage actors then, especially considering that it was not seen as a valid or respectable profession. Even after her death (in 1920: she was one of the millions and millions of casualties from the Spanish influenza pandemic), rumors continued to fly about who she was, where she hailed from, who her parents were, etc.

Gaby Deslys, though a young woman, had created a will (she probably sensed the end was coming), and she left all of her wealth (she was worth millions) to the poor of Marseilles. Unlike the millions of others who came down with that deadly flu, her end was not quick. She developed a throat infection and she was operated on multiple times, one time without anesthesia. We humans are made of strong strong stuff. She had ordered that the doctor not leave a scar on her famous throat, and she was also worried that the operation would affect her singing ability. I found a clip of her singing two songs in 1910:

She was buried in Marseilles with an enormous monument/headstone, a clear indicator of her importance and fame.

She made one silent film in the United States called Her Triumph (unfortunately it’s lost).

An interesting coda: After she died, her enormous gilded bed in the shape of a swan was auctioned off, and Universal Studios bought it. It was used in a couple of different pictures, and I know it well! Here it is in the 1925 film Phantom of the Opera.

Here it is again, as Carole Lombard’s bed in the hilarious Twentieth Century:

And finally, and most famously, it was Norma Desmond’s bed in Sunset Boulevard.

So that’s the background of this extraordinarily bright and brief-ish career. In 1913 she played in a production in London (I’m not sure what it was) and caused an uproar because of her revealing costumes. No sleeves, legs on display, bosom swelling underneath her corset. Many who saw her (like J.M. Barrie, who was so smitten he asked to meet her, he wanted to write a play for her) were captivated, but mostly she caused tut-tutting outrage about how she was responsible for the decline of morals in the whatever whatever blah blah blah same shit going on today phone call for Miley Cyrus.

Rebecca West, looking on, saw all kinds of things to write about in response. As she points out, bitingly, in her first paragraph, many of those who expressed outrage, bishops and snooty ladies as well as leading suffragette Christabel Pankhurst (who was already moving into her anti-sex phase, something West thought was stupid and detrimental to the movement she was a part of) hadn’t even SEEN the show. (Again, blah blah same shit going on now “I don’t NEED to see Zero Dark Thirty, I already KNOW it’s offensive” etc. etc. you bore me blah blah blah.) So West starts out strong, because she actually HAD seen the performance.

Her column is not only a defense of Gaby Deslys but an appreciation – not just of her beauty and charm – but of what beauty and charm ADDS to our society, what looking at beautiful things provides a population. Doesn’t it make life better to see a pretty woman dancing? Isn’t it a wonderful reminder that life can, often, be beautiful – just as much as it is ugly? Isn’t it important to be reminded that Beauty still exists? And who better to show us that than a lovely little show-girl?

West would be run out of town on a rail by the Tumblr-feminists today for going against the grain and breaking ranks. For being pro-objectification. Bah! We all “objectify” each other every day! To even say you NOTICE that a woman is sexy or has a beautiful body is seen in some circles as akin to sexual harassment. That’s INSANE. There is a huge difference between sexual assault and some dude saying, essentially, “Wow, she has a great ass and I enjoy looking at it.” I objectify the hell out of Channing Tatum. And Angelina Jolie. And Jensen Ackles. And Rita Hayworth. And Matthias Schoenaerts (my latest crush). I love looking at these people, their beauty, sexiness, bodies, frames, movements. Appreciation Objectification, what’s the dif. The fact that some feminists have to clarify that they are “pro-sex” is so depressing, but it has needed to be done. I get that some people don’t like sex, or see it all as some power play of patriarchy, or they see all sex as a form of rape, that’s fine, that’s their choice, sex is personal. I don’t agree with dictating the sexuality of other people. Don’t be a Bossypants about other peoples’ personal lives. But to expect that anti-sex rhetoric will be a widespread point of view is dumb. It’s like positioning yourself as being against … sneezing. Or sleeping. If it’s not for you, that’s fine, but sex has millennia behind it. For practical reasons and pleasure reasons. This was the issue West had with the “choose celibacy – abstain” strain of feminist thought at the time. It would alienate married people, working-class women, etc. West wanted the movement to be inclusive of all, and not a humorless judgey anti-pleasure anti-fun movement. She was afraid of that. Why blame Gaby Deslys for being pretty and sexy and showing her arms and her back? Who DOESN’T like to look at such a thing? What is wrong with THEM?

West decimated Deslys’ critics with the sideswipe that they were those “who make ugliness out of beauty because their minds are unclean.”

Marilyn Monroe said a similar thing: “People had a habit of looking at me as if I were some kind of mirror instead of a person. They didn’t see me, they saw their own lewd thoughts, then they white-masked themselves by calling me the lewd one.”

One final thought: West was PISSED that in a world which had REAL problems such as worker’s unrest, poverty, squalor, illness, an abyss between the haves and have-nots, social unrest, feminists imprisoned and treated so harshly that in some cases they DIED, the fact that women STILL didn’t have the vote – you know, REAL issues – that in that world of desperate seriousness, these idiots were focusing their scorn on a pretty chorus girl. And not only that, watch how West brings in the social/political aspect: Women who were grey before their time, wrinkled before their time, were evidence of a FAILURE of society. West thought women were awesome and powerful. They should not be ground down into powder, through too many childbirths, too much back-breaking work, too much starvation. Society was BROKEN. It wasn’t just a feminist issue, it was an economic issue and West saw that they were all related. (Many of the leading feminists had already retreated into the merely-personal.)

For example, the Bishop of Kensington said that he was “shocked” at how nude Gaby Deswys was onstage. West replied that she was “shocked”, too, about the horrible squalid conditions of most men and women in the working-class areas of England, she was “shocked” that women had to choose to give up their children because they couldn’t take care of them, she was “shocked” that society was so broken that it couldn’t figure out how to avoid such destitution. And you, Bishop, supposedly a man of the cloth who should care about the poor spends your time focusing on the creamy bare arms of a stage star? Shame, shame, shame.

I’ll let West take it from here, but before I go, here’s one more picture of Gaby Deslys. I have so enjoyed getting to know her.

Excerpt from The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West, 1911-17: “Much Worse than Gaby Deslys: A Plea for Decency”, by Rebecca West

I grant that the play in which she appeared was so incredibly witless that it can only have been written by a National Conference of Village Idiots. But in its real purpose of exhibiting a great many beautiful ladies it was very successful. The ladies were beautiful. The ignorant greatly overestimate the beautiful effects of theatrical make-up. If a girl looks pretty on the stage she is almost certainly pretty off the stage; so we were looking at some really wonderful and praiseworthy achievements of humanity. And I fail to see why, when industrialism has made most of us so extremely plain, we should not have the opportunity of looking at the women who have managed to be beautiful. Of course, I might go to the National Gallery and look at St Helena, or to the British Museum and look at Clytie, but I take a great delight in the movement of living things, and I will have my magnificent straight-backed chorus girl. There was one indeed who seemed to me to hold up hope for womanhood. A fairly intimate knowledge of theatrical history enabled me to calculate that she must be forty-five: yet her hair rose from her smooth brow in the strong waves that show vitality, the line of her chin and jaw delicate and uncoarsened by age, her body was straight as a pine tree, and she moved proudly. Maturity had merely ripened her: it should. The tired drudges who are grey-haired and bent-backed at forty-five have been mutilated by society. The woman was the pattern of what nature meant a middle-aged woman to be; and though I know quite well that the musical-comedy and music-hall stages are in certain respects remarkably like the Pit, I am grateful to them because their women set up a high ideal of physical excellence.

But Mlle Gaby was much more than that. I do not mean that I would trust her with the management of the women’s movement during Mrs. Pankhurst’s absence. I can’t imagine anything with which one would trust her. The fact is that she is not quite human. When she frolics on to the stage and purrs impudently to the audience, it is as though one’s Persian kitten should suddenly stand upright on the hearthrug and, flourishing its dainty paws, should sing ‘We Won’t Go Home till Morning.’ One could be no more scandalized by her brevity of dress than one could be distressed at the Zoo by the gazelle’s refusal to wear anything but its horns. Her occasional vulgarity is no more disquieting than would be a saucy gleam in the eye of the giraffe. She is a happy child who dances because she is tingling with life. When she crossed the Palace stage she turned the audience’s thoughts to May mornings and ices, and money enough to go where you like. Now if most of us crossed the Palace stage, we would turn the audience’s thoughts to November evenings, and cold cocoa and thirty shillings a week in the Post Office with the prospect of a three-pence a month extra under the Holt Report. We feel the difference with shame and hate the dingy world of work that has made us what we are. We ardently desire brightness and health, and rebel against the dispensation of gloom and sickliness which is the work of poverty. This is the state of mind that will save the world. Therefore Mlle Gaby’s performance is neither immoral nor non-moral, but definitely moral.

I do not believe that any performance which depends on the physical exercises, such as dancing, of a beautiful and healthy person can have any immoral effect on a normal clean-minded audience. The Bishop of Kensington referred in the course of his letter on Mlle Deslys to a “positive morality,” which her performance was violating. There can be no such thing as positive morality any more than there could be one course of treatment for all the patients in a hospital. The social system has put us into so many holes that it has no right to ask us to obey the same rules. It’s as right for a starving man to steal as it would be wrong for Lord Abinger to try to recover his taxes in this way; it is as right for a suffragette desiring to stop the forcible feeding of Rachel Peace to punish the quiescent property-owner as it would be wrong for me to break Mrs. Humphry Ward’s windows; it is as right for a Dublin docker to let his children to go hungry as it would be wrong for any other man to shirk his duty. Morality must not be a solid unyielding thing like the old-fashioned seawalls that so often fell in ruins, but must be ready to give to pressure where it is stronger, yet yield no inch further than it must, like the seemingly carelessly scattered lumps of gravity that keep back the sea so much more strongly. All we know of morality is that it must be the kind of conduct that is instinctive to a healthy body: for if it conflicted a virtuous people would be doomed to extinction, which is absurd. That was the mistake of the medieval Christians who, fearing the flesh, drove the best men and women into the monastic life and left Europe to the seed of the unspiritual. A healthy body means a strong, sensitive nervous system that will perceive and understand the emotions of others, thereby ensuring an unpriggish altruism which is the secret of virtue. Therefore I believe that the sight of beautiful persons is a moral tonic.