Happy birthday music hall star Gaby Deslys, with her famous swan bed and controversial cleavage

Born in Marseilles, Marie-Elise-Gabrielle Caire eventually changed her name to Gaby Deslys. She moved to Paris, determined to be an actress or a dancer. 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 and a great work ethic.

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.”

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 Gaby Deslys did it. The dream came true: she was a headliner in some of the biggest theaters of the day.

Like Madonna of a later era, she was a master of her own publicity. If you Google her, a wealth of photos fill the computer screen. That was her doing, we still feel the results of her PR-savvy today, over 100 years later!! Deslys understood the key to fame and popularity: 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. Just like the girls used to do after Elvis shows! The rioting undergraduates were furious at the $2 ticket price. They all wanted to see her. Gaby Deslys was a phenom.

She was so well-known 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

Gaby Deslys was controversial. Some of her dances were banned in certain cities, as controversial as “twerking” was, once Miley Cyrus brought it to the mainstream. Deslys’ sexuality was out there for all to see. She wore extremely revealing clothes featuring expanses of neck and shoulder, bare legs, short sleeves. Short sleeves. People were outraged.

She had many admirers, including the King of Portugal (the one who was eventually deposed, and forced to go into exile.) Deslys met him while she was performing in Lisbon and the King took a liking to her, just as everyone except the prudes took a liking to her. He gave her a bracelet worth $70,000. Tabloid interest – although “tabloid” probably wasn’t the word back then – in her personal life was frenzied. Revolution was in the air in Lisbon during her time there, and the fact that the King was consorting with what people considered a trashy chorus girl didn’t help. Along with that bracelet, other jewels followed, the collection worth almost $100,000. Deslys did whatever she wanted to do, but, when 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 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 theatre 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 her, where she came from, who her parents were.

Deslys, though a young woman, made up a will (she probably sensed the end was coming), leaving all of her wealth (she was worth millions) to the poor of Marseilles. Unlike the millions of others who came down with the deadly flu, her end was not quick. She developed a throat infection and was operated on multiple times, one time without anesthesia. We humans are made of strong stuff. She ordered that the doctor not leave a scar on her famous throat (reminiscent of the anecdote from Marilyn Monroe’s life: when Monroe was in the hospital to have her appendix removed, the doctor lifted up her gown in the operating room and saw that Monroe had taped a note to her stomach asking him to try to make her scar as little as possible please and thank you). Along with the worries about a scar, Deslys also worried that the operation would affect her singing ability.

I found a clip of her singing two songs in 1910:

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

Mandatory Credit: Photo by Victor Console/Daily Mail/Shutterstock (1842229a)
The Tomb Of Actress Gaby Deslys In The Saint Pierre Cemetery In Marseilles France.
The Tomb Of Actress Gaby Deslys In The Saint Pierre Cemetery In Marseilles France.

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. The bed 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.

Onto a specific anecdote, and this is where 21-year-old journalist Rebecca West – one of my favorite writers of all time – strolls into the picture:

In 1913 Deslys was in a production in London and caused an uproar because of her revealing costumes. No sleeves, legs on display, bosom swelling underneath her corset. Many who saw her were captivated (like J.M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan, who was so smitten he asked to meet her, he wanted to write a play for her). But mostly she caused a wave of 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 and all the sex-negative sexuality-police on Twitter, who consider themselves progressive and yet sound like outraged Victorian-era matriarchs screaming “COVER YOUR BODY YOU HUSSY.”

Rebecca West, looking on at all of this, 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, like 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 women’s liberation movement) hadn’t even seen the show. (The refrain: blah blah same shit going on now “I don’t NEED to see Zero Dark Thirty/Last Temptation of Christ/Cuties, whatever, I already KNOW it’s offensive” etc. etc. I refuse to listen to a word you say if you flip out without having seen/read the thing. You’re not a serious person.) So West, in her piece lambasting the outraged hordes, starts out confidently, because she actually HAD seen the performance.

Her column is not only a defense of Gaby Deslys but an appreciation – not just of Deslys’ beauty and charm – but of what beauty and charm ADDS to our society, what looking at beautiful things and people 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 show-girl? Why deny yourself pleasure? Gaby Deslys was not a victim of objectification. She was in total control of the image she put out. She knew she was pretty, she loved being a star, she dressed to please – herself and her audience. Talk about same shit different day … these arguments still erupt on Twitter, the assumption being that women can’t possibly enjoy their sexuality or display it without somehow being coerced. Well, come on now, that’s silly. Besides, I objectify the hell out of the male actors I love. I also objectify the actresses I love, the ones I love to look at, whose faces I find beautiful and intriguing. I don’t objectify them to REDUCE them. I wouldn’t even call it objectification, I’m just using it to make a point. I call what I do ART APPRECIATION.

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 have no desire to have it or see it as a power play of the patriarchy, or have been wounded and can’t deal with it in any way/shape/form. And that is a TOTALLY valid outlook. I wouldn’t dream of telling people they were wrong about something so personal. I don’t agree with dictating the sexuality of other people. And I just wish that attitude went both ways. Don’t be a Bossypants about other peoples’ personal lives. To expect that anti-sex rhetoric will ever 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 is generally a popular activity, for practical reasons and pleasure reasons. Incidentally, this was the issue West had with the “choose celibacy – abstain” strain of feminist thought at the time. This attitude would alienate married women, working-class women, etc., whom West felt were essential to the suffragist movement.

And so why blame Gaby Deslys for being pretty and sexy and showing her arms and her back? Why judge the people who enjoyed it? Why judge FUN? Who DOESN’T like to look at pretty shoulders and a friendly smile? 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 angry that in a world with REAL problems such as worker’s unrest, poverty, squalor, illness, an abyss between the haves and have-nots, feminists being 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 serious world, these idiots were focusing 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 to West of society’s failure. West thought women were awesome and powerful. She did not want them to be ground down, burdened with too many childbirths, too much back-breaking work. This is why she considered herself a Socialist too, as most activists were back then. Society was BROKEN. It wasn’t just a feminist issue, it was an economic issue and West saw they were all related.

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, only SHE was shocked at the squalid conditions most working-class men and women lived in in 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 it couldn’t figure out how to avoid destitution for so many of its citizens. 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 an actress? Shame, shame, shame.

I’ll let West take it from here.

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.

Before I go, here’s one more picture of Gaby Deslys for us to enjoy. She created these photographs for her fans to enjoy. And we have them now. I imagine her up in heaven being so pleased that people still find her image captivating, that there is such a thing as the internet where all her photos – carefully curated and produced by her – live on. All her hard work paid off.