Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation by Judith Mackrell Read Free Book Online

allotted time to tuck Kizette up at night and to take breakfast with her in the morning. Occasionally she dedicated hours to the preparation of extravagant Polish dinners, and she always demanded the highest standards. A badly cooked meal or an ugly piece of crockery placed on the table by her unwitting housekeeper could rouse Tamara to a fury. More than one wine glass or vase was smashed because she judged it to be vulgar or bourgeois. This angry perfectionism was partly a reaction to those few, frightening years when her life had veered out of control, but it cast a net of irritable, nervous tension over the household. Kizette alternated between extravagant attempts to please her ‘Cherie’, as Tamara liked to be called, and resentment at her scenes. Little Nancy Cunard, averting her face from Maud’s chocolates, could have sympathized with Kizette the night that she stubbornly refused to add the ritual ‘God bless Mama’ to her prayers. 16
    Tadeusz, however, preferred Tamara’s volatile domestic presence to her increasingly regular absences. Most evenings, after tucking Kizette up in bed, Tamara would disappear from the apartment. Her excuses were always innocuous – she was going with friends to a new cabaret, the opera or a restaurant – but often she wouldn’t return home until dawn. Tamara was discovering the full decadent potential of Parisian nightlife. If she was out for the evening with the Duchesse de la Salle she might go to the lesbian club, La Rose; if she was with one of her male homosexual friends she might end up in one of the gay bars on rue de Lappe, where men dressed up as women and the cabaret was exceptionally obscene.
    At such places there was not only a range of drink and jazz on offer but also drugs, which Tamara discovered she enjoyed almost as much as she liked sex. Her taste was not for the anaesthetic calm of morphine, but for substances that made her feel dangerous and alive: hashish that came in tiny pellets and was swallowed with sloe gin fizzes, or cocaine sniffed from a miniature silver teaspoon. The latter was Tamara’s special addiction: it was cheap and easily available, and she coveted the electric clarity it induced in her senses and the lift it gave to her physical desire.
    Tamara was a greedily tactile woman: even during ordinary, daylight encounters she liked to reach forward and stroke the cheek of the person she was talking to, or cup their face in her hand. But on the dance floor, holding her partner close in a foxtrot, or circling around them in a Charleston, Tamara’s caresses became demanding. Men and women who were partnered by her would feel her lips on theirs, her fingers trailing across their chest or crotch. One night at La Rose, Tamara began to undress the woman with whom she was dancing, announcing to the amused crowd that she was auditioning her as a potential model. As she caressingly assessed her victim’s breasts in her hands she pronounced them to be ‘round enough’; inserting her hand between the woman’s legs, she judged with mock regret that she would not do, she was ‘too wet to concentrate’.
    These exhibitionist displays became Tamara’s party trick, but they were often just foreplay to more lawless sexual encounters. It wasn’t only the buzz of cocaine that fuelled Tamara’s desires, but the craving for adventure. On certain nights she would excuse herself from the company of her friends and head off to an area on the Left Bank of the Seine that was notorious for its seedy, jerry-built clubs and bars. This shanty town of pleasure had flourished during the war and continued to service the appetites of the 1920s. It was an environment perfectly suited to Tamara’s needs. Among sailors, students and other anonymous pleasure-seekers, she could vary and refine her sexual high: according to one unnamed acquaintance, threesomes were her favourite, allowing her to savour simultaneously the softness of a woman’s skin and the muscular heft of a