Showing posts with label hashish. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hashish. Show all posts

Monday, May 12, 2014

Russian Hemp Honored in Statues and Stories (Yet, Still Repressed)




I've been informed that in between sheaves of wheat depicted on the Peoples Friendship Fountain in Moscow are sunflowers and cannabis leaves (shown). (Read more in Russian). The fountain was built between 1951 and '54 and features 16 golden women representing Republics of the Soviet Union, as well as the three plants chosen to represent Russia's agricultural bounty.

Nonetheless, when activists chose the fountain as a meeting place for a pro-pot rally in May 2008, they found the site barricaded and one peaceful protestor was beaten by police.

Russian hemp is historically important, according to Jack Herer's The Emperor Wears No Clothes, in which he theorizes that the War of 1812 was fought because Napoleon was trying to blockade the country's hemp crop before it reached Britian's navy.

Russian writer Leon Tolstoy mentions a "high-growing, fragrant hemp-patch" in Anna Karenina (1873), and Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883) writes of hemp fields, seeds and oils in his stories. Hashish makes a surprising appearance in a dinner party conversation in playwright Anton Chekhov's “A Woman's Kingdom” (1895).

Hemp is still being grown in Russia but a Siberian experiment to grow "drug free" hemp has failed. Meanwhile, Canadian hempseed food producer Naturally Splendid has just signed a distribution agreement with Sonray Sales to distribute their products in the US. Sonray also has customers in India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Russia and Switzerland.

And yes, in case you're wondering, there's a statute for Ukraine at the fountain. I'm guessing the Ukranians aren't exactly feeling the friendship right now. It's a shame we're always waging wars on people, and plants.

Thursday, May 8, 2014

Cole Porter, Bruce Villanch, Elsa Maxwell, Betty Grable and Marijuana

"Come and see my collection of Turkish hookahs."

So states a female character in Cole Porter's play "Du Barry Was a Lady," now on stage in San Francisco in a delightful adaptation starring Bruce Vilanch.

Packed with Porter's witty lyrics and beautiful melodies, the play was first produced on Broadway in 1939 starring Bert Lahr, Ethel Merman, and WWII pin-up girl Betty Grable as the character who uttered the hookah line. Lucille Ball starred with Red Skelton, Gene Kelly and Zero Mostel in the 1943 movie version.

Vilanch—who's written comedy bits for Bette MidlerWhoopi GoldbergRobin WilliamsBilly CrystalRoseanne Barr and Lily Tomlin, among many others—is something of a modern wit and bon vivant in the tradition of Porter and Coward. "He's given more great lines to celebrities than a Hollywood coke dealer," quipped Nathan Lane in Get Bruce, a 1999 documentary on Vilanch now playing on Netflix.

Graduating from Ohio State with degrees in theatre and journalism during the turbulent 60s, Vilanch was brought out to Hollywood by studio executives looking to shape the new direction of film during the Easy Rider daze. "Everyone was wearing beads and paisley shirts," Vilanch recalls in the documentary, adding, "We were all sitting in a room together smoking dope and talking about the movies and I thought, 'This is a business I really want to be in.'"

Cole Porter and Elsa Maxwell
Likewise, Porter and his set were no strangers to various delights. Starting in 1923, Cole and his wife Linda rented palazzos in Venice, including the Palazzo Rezzonico once inhabited by Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. 

Joining them there was the famed hostess Elsa Maxwell, who invented the scavenger hunt and other enticements that brought the rich and famous together. With Maxwell spreading the word, prominent figures like Tallulah Bankhead, Noel Coward and Fanny Brice came to Venice's Lido shoreline to enjoy its daytime amenities and nightly parties.

"Hard drinking was commonplace at these festivities, as was the use of drugs of all kinds, including opium, cocaine, and hashish," wrote Porter's biographer Charles Schwartz, who added, "A greater sensualist than most of his friends...Cole never hesitated trying drugs or practically anything else for kicks while socializing." Indeed, Porter's song, "I Get a Kick Out of You" has the lyric "I get no kick from cocaine" (sometimes sung as "champagne").

The Palazzo Rezzonico in Venice
The party was over in 1927 when police raided the Palazzo and found several local young men, including the son of the police chief, parading about in Linda Porter's dresses. Later, the principality of Monaco employed Maxwell's services to put it on the map as a tourist destination as she had done for the Lido. "Her imprimatur of social acceptability carried so much weight that the Waldorf Astoria gave her a suite rent-free when it opened in New York in 1931 at the height of the depression, hoping to attract rich clients because of her." (Schwartz)



While living in Los Angeles in 1944, Porter dated Bob Bray, a Marine from Montana who was friendly with Porter's longtime amour, choreographer Nelson Barclift. Porter's biographer William McBrien wrote that Bray and Barclift "were always high on marijuana" and that both came often to Porter's Brentwood home for lunch. According to McBrien, Porter's song "You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To" was written for Barclift.

In 1956, Porter contributed music and lyrics to "High Society," the musical version of "The Philadelphia Story" that opened with VIP Louis Armstrong and starred his pot-smoking buddy Bing Crosby.

Betty Grable in Three for the Show (1955)
As for Grable, her last musical was Three for the Show (1955) about a woman who must choose between two husbands, played by Jack Lemmon and Gower Champion. It featured a production number starting with Grable dressed in an Arabic costume smoking a hookah and dreaming of having a harem of husbands.  

For Nymph Errant, a 1933 musical about a young English lady intent upon losing her virginity that received its US premiere in 1982, Porter penned "Experiment," sung by Man We Love Kevin Kline as Porter in De-Lovely:

Before you leave these portals 
To meet less fortunate mortals 
There's just one final message 
I would give to you 
You all have learned reliance 
On the sacred teachings of science 
So I hope, through life you never will decline 
In spite of philistine Defiance 
To do what all good scientists do 

Experiment 
Make it your motto day and night 
Experiment 
And it will lead you to the light 
The apple on the top of the tree 
Is never too high to achieve 
So take an example from Eve 
Experiment 

Be curious 
Though interfering friends may frown, 
Get furious 
At each attempt to hold you down 
If this advice you'll only employ 
The future can offer you infinite joy 
And merriment 
Experiment 
And you'll see

Saturday, April 5, 2014

Gertrude Rings Her Bell

UPDATE 10/15: Bell is included in the new book Tokin' Women: A 4000-Year Herstory.




UPDATE 4/19 - Letters from Baghdad, a terrific documentary on Bell that was executive produced by Tilda Swinton, who gives voice to Bell in the film, is now on Amazon Prime. 


UPDATE 7/15 - The trailer for the Werner Herzog-directed film Queen of the Desert starring Nicole Kidman as Gertrude Bell with James Franco and Robert Pattinson looks fairly true to life. The film will be out this winter, and Kidman is on the cover of Vogue this month with a photo shoot inside inspired by her role. 


A spirited and brilliant child whose grandfather was a railroad magnate, Gertrude Bell earned a college degree in history with honors in only two years and became a serious student of Arabic. She fell in love with a young officer who read her Hafiz, the Sufi poet, but her parents refused to allow them to marry.

She never married, but she did publish a translation of Hafiz. Coached by an uncle who was the British Minister in Tehran, Bell took many adventurous quests through Arabia, meeting sheiks who treated her like a visiting queen.

Pictured here with Winston Churchill on her right and T.E. Lawrence (a.k.a. "Lawrence of Arabia") on her left, Bell was a mountaineer and a self-styled diplomat, later a spy, who was instrumental in drawing the current borders of Iraq and establishing the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. The 1997 film The English Patient makes a reference to a Bell map (incorrectly identifying her as a man).

Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations by Georgina Howell says of Bell, "Her Arabic had become good enough for her to discuss desert politics with notables she met long the way. She began to take her turn with the narghileh that was passed around as they talked, the bubble-pipe in which tobacco, marijuana, or opium was smoked. She did not enjoy it at first, as she was at pains to tell her parents, but gradually acquired the habit."

Muhammad al Dhailam smoking his narghileh
in tent at his encampment (Saudi Arabia)
Photo by Gertrude Bell, February 1914.
Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University
In February 1914, Bell wrote a letter recounting this legend she heard during her travels in Arab lands: "There were three men, one drank arak [a distilled alcoholic drink], the other wine, and the third hashish. And when they rose to go out of the house they looked at the door. And the Father of arak said, 'It is great as the door of a khan, we can never open it.' The Father of wine said, 'It is open and the flood of a river is flowing through, we cannot pass.' But the Father of hashish said, 'Then we must climb the wall.' And he climbed the wall and dropped into the street." It's possible the men who told her this story are in this picture Bell took at the same time.

Bell was not the only Englishwoman to travel in the Orient at the time, or to taste the hashish. Mary Eliza Rogers, who traveled with her diplomat brother in Palestine and Syria, wrote  in Domestic Life in Palestine of taking a meal at a harem, after which chibouques and narghiles were brought out: "After Helweh had smoked for a few minutes, she inclined her head gracefully, placed one hand on her bosom, touched her forehead with the pliant tube, and then handed it to the lady sitting next to her, who happened to be the second wife of her own husband, Saleh Bek. Thus it was transferred from one smoker to another, even to the handmaidens, with the words, 'May it give you pleasure.' This politeness and ceremony is strictly observed among the Moslems even between the nearest relations. The prescribed forms of greeting in habitual use, appear to me to have the effect of keeping comparative peace and harmony in the harims."

Bell on horseback.
In Women's Orients: English Women and the Middle East, Billie Melman writes, "In Victorian fiction only really dissolute women smoke. Yet in harem literature smoking is domesticated and feminised. Indeed quite a few travellers took to smoking..." including Rogers, Elisabeth Finn, Lady Lucy Stanhope and Isabel Burton (wife of VIP Richard Francis Burton). Isabella Bird-Bishop and Harriet Martineau, "those two paragons of propriety, became quite addicted to the chibouque." Martineau, a director ancestor of Princess Kate Middleton, writes of of Arab women "shotgunning" Jewesses on their sabbath, so that they might also enjoy themselves.

Later in life, Bell wrote, "Some day I hope the East will be strong again and develop its own civilization, not imitate ours, and then perhaps it will teach us a few things we once learnt from it and have now forgotten, to our great loss." Facing old age with little income, and possibly cancer, Bell died of an overdose of diallylbarbituric acid (aka allobarbital or Dial) two days before her fifty-eighth birthday.

In 2013, it was announced that Angelia Jolie was slated to portray Bell in a biopic directed by Ridley Scott (but Nicole Kidman directed by Werner Herzog will do just fine).

Saturday, March 22, 2014

Maud Gonne: Mystic, Revolutionary, Hashish Taker

UPDATE 10/15: Gonne is included in the new book Tokin' Women: A 4000-Year Herstory.

Spotted in Downton Abbey Season 3, episode 4: Lady Sybil and her Irish revolutionary boyfriend get into trouble, over which her father pulls strings to get them off the lam. "They're afraid with Sybil they'll have another Maud Gonne on their hands," he says.

 



"I had never thought to see in a living woman so great beauty. It belonged to famous pictures, to some legendary past," is how William Butler Yeats described the young Maud Gonne (1866-1953). Yeats proposed marriage several times to Gonne, and the two remained lifelong friends and compatriates in the Irish nationalist cause despite her refusals.

A young sophisticate who attracted the attention of the Prince of Wales at her coming-out party (pictured) and traveled throughout Europe. Shortly afterwards Gonne had her political awakening, and schooled herself in Irish history and Gaelic when she "witnessed with her own eyes, the brutal evictions, the unjust imprisonment of some of her friends" in Ireland under English rule. After her father died when she was 20, the statuesque (six-foot-tall) beauty tried her hand as an actress to earn a living until she discovered she was a wealthy heiress.

She traveled to Constantinople where she wished to experience the "real life of the East," but found it closed to her as a woman. In France, "she developed an oratorical style remarkable even in a country famous for its rhetoric," wrote Nancy Cardozo in Lucky Eyes and a High Heart, The Life of Maud Gonne. "She wrung tears from cynical politicians and sous from the pockets of students who adopted the eloquent young beauty and carried her off to speak to Republican and Catholic societies in the provinces...A thousand people gave her a standing ovation in Bordeaux." Over 2000 articles were published about her speeches in 1892 in France alone.

"What a singular scene," Yeats wrote that year. "This young girl of twenty-five addressing that audience of politicians, and moving them more than all their famous speakers although she spoke in a language not her own." Yeats compared her to Oscar Wilde's prodigious mother, known as Speranza.

Yeats took Gonne to a meeting of the Theosophical Society and introduced her to Madame Blavatsky, near the end of her life. Together Gonne and Yeats took hashish in Paris in 1894 in "an attempt to make themselves telepathic"; later they experimented with mescal given to Yeats by Havelock Ellis.

"I have to thank you for the dream drug which I have not tried as yet being very busy & having need of all my energy & activity for the moment but I mean to try it soon," Gonne wrote Yeats in April or May 1987. She was probably referring to hashish, or mescal.

Gonne's image was used in an ad for Vin Mariani, the coca-laced wine that had many famous enthusiasts. She said of it, "Your coca-wine by fortifying my voice will allow me make my beloved country better known." She used chloroform for insomnia, and the story goes that, substituting cannabis for her insomnia instead, had awoken one night to find herself apparently translated to the bedside of her sister Kathleen.

At one point, Gonne had a vision of she and Yeats in a past life "when they were brother and sister, sold into slavery in the Arabian desert and traveling together across endless sands." Having lost a child, Maud hoped her son might be reincarnated and asked Yeat's friend, the painter known as AE, how soon after its death a child might be reborn. Using cabalistic rituals Yeats had learned in the Golden Dawn, Maud "had a vivid encounter. She had been a priestess in ancient Egypt and had given false oracles for money under the influence of a priest who was her lover...AE received a similar vision of her in Egypt....Maud did not question her own clairvoyance."

Gonne raised two children and her "concern for her children and pleasure in sharing her love of children with her women friends is very evident in all her correspondence," wrote her biographer Margaret Ward.

On Easter 1900, Gonne founded the Daughters of Ireland, a revolutionary women's society for Irish nationalist women who, like herself, were considered unwelcome in male-dominated societies. In 1918, after the Irish Free State was established and Yeats named a Senator and a Nobel laureate, Gonne was arrested in Dublin and imprisoned in England for six months. "The day before her arrest she wrote to say that if I did not denounce the Government she renounced my society for ever," wrote Yeats. Gonne participated in a hunger strike while incarcerated, and used her experiences to further publicize the scandalous prison conditions.

Monday, February 3, 2014

Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas and Jenny Reefer




Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas
Born on February 3, 1874 was the hostess with the mostest, art collector extraordinaire, avant-garde writer and wit Gertrude Stein.

Much has been made of Stein's longtime companion Alice B. Toklas and her hashish fudge, a recipe for which appears in The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, published in 1954When Toklas's American publisher objected to the "illegal" recipe, she reportedly feared many would assume Stein's writing happened while under the influence (which certainly seems possible, if you read it).

Toklas disavowed knowledge of the recipe, writing in a letter to Donald Gallup* composed on 12-19-21 October 1954, "I hope you were as shocked as I was by the notice in Time of the hashish fudge. I was also furious until I discovered it really was in the cook book! Contributed by one of Carl's most enchanting friends—Brion Gysin—so that the laugh was on me. Thornton [Wilder] said that no one would believe in my innocence as I had pulled the publicity stunt of the year—that Harper had telegraphed from London to the Attorney General to see if there would be any trouble in printing it." Hear Toklas reading the recipe and commenting about it in a 1963 interview.   

It's possible that Stein and Toklas were more conduits for a younger generation of partakers, like Gysin and his friend VIP Paul Bowles, who lived with Stein and Toklas for a time. The Lost Generation was, after all, mostly lost in liquor. However, among Stein's art purchases was the first painting ever sold by Marie Laurencin, which appears to be a painting of a hashish party held in 1908.

Robert Indiana's costume for Jenny Reefer.
An interesting character by the name of Jenny Reefer appears in "The Mother of Us All," a 1947 opera about the life and career of suffragette Susan B. Anthony for which Stein wrote the libretto. Reefer is described as "a mezzo-soprano; a comical feminist, outspoken and opinionated." Sounds like a pothead to me.

Stein and Toklas's greatest significance was in bringing expatriate writers and artists together at their Parisian salon. That tradition was carried on by 1970s superagent and pot lover Sue Mengers, of whom CBS President Leslie Moonves said,  “She was the modern-day Gertrude Stein. People would gather and exchange ideas and talk about things that were not talked about anywhere else in town.” Tokin' Woman Mama Cass Eliot was also compared to Stein. 

Kathy Bates played Stein in Midnight in ParisPat Carroll played her in the one-woman show Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted in 1989 to rename a block of Myrtle Street between Polk Street and Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco as Alice B. Toklas Place, since Toklas was born one block away on O'Farrell Street.

Agnes Moorehead as Endora in TV's Bewitched
In the 1968 film I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, Leigh Taylor-Young turns Peter Sellers onto pot brownies, causing him to transform.

An episode called "Tabitha's Weekend" that aired on TV's Bewitched on March 6, 1969 has this interesting exchange: Endora (the grandmother witch) is offered cookies by Darrin's (straight) mother. "They're not by chance from an Alice B. Toklas recipe?" Endora asks. When told they were not, "Then I think I'll pass," is her answer. Tabitha, the junior witch, then turns herself into a cookie. (Mrs. Stevens suffers from headaches and gulps the more prosaic sherry.)

Perhaps this is why Rob Thomas, the singer/songwriter of the highly successful band Matchbox Twenty, called his first band "Tabitha's Secret." (Thomas tells CelebStoner he's a "huge" pothead and advocate for legalization.)

*Donald Gallup was a well-known scholar of American Literature, who served as the curator of the Yale Collection of American Literature for over thirty years. In 1940-41 he and Robert B. Haas prepared for the Yale University Library A Catalogue of the Published and Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein, and he and began collecting Stein and Toklas's materials after meeting them while he was stationed in Paris during World War II. In 1958 he succeeded Carl Van Vechten as the literary executor of the Stein estate. 

Apparently Gallup and Van Vechten (presumably, the Carl of mention) had a hand in producing Alice's cookbook. Toklas wrote, "It's not necessary to tell you that the pieces selected and their arrangement move me deeply. Gertrude always used to say—Let's put them first into groups and then break them up by contrasts—which is just what you have done. You and Carl have done such marvels because of the purity of your purpose which permits inspiration to flow unimpeded. Thank you—dear Donald." 

Gertrude and Alice met the younger painter and writer Brion Gysin in the 1930s when he lived in Paris. Toklas wrote Gysin in Tangiers on 26 February 1952, giving motherly advise about finances, and calling Jane Bowles [the wife of VIP Paul Bowles, a friend of Gysin's]  "strange as an American but not as an Oriental." She signed off, "Affectionate good wishes to you—dear Brion always." Bowles had lived with Stein and Toklas. On 24 February 1954 she wrote to Gysin offering help with a UNESCO investigation being conducted on him. On 11 June 1957 she wrote congratulating him on a New York showing, signing it, "So many good wishes to you and fond love." On 27 November 1958, in a letter to Ned Rorem, she wrote that Gysin "is here [in Paris, or maybe staying with her] and painting beautifully—working hard." 

On 14 March 1953, Toklas wrote to her friend Louise Taylor, letting her know that in order to receive an advance on the cookbook, she needed to come up with 12,000 more words, and so was opening up a chapter to contributions from friends. She asked Taylor if she could include Taylor's Circassian Chicken recipe, and said she would be including contributions from the Van Vechtens, Marie Laurencin, Isabel Wilder, and "undoubtedly" Brion Gysin. She complained in the letter of exhaustion from jaundice; Toklas was in ill health and so depended on contributions from friends. The book has a section titled, "Recipes from Friends," in which the Hashish Fudge recipe appears, attributed to Gysin and misspelling cannabis as "cannibus." 

On 24 April 1953, Toklas wrote to Carl (who she called "Sweetest and only Papa Woojums") about the "difficulty in getting the miserable cook book finished" which had been a "tormenting and very unsatisfactory effort." (In this letter she recounts the last words of Baby (Stein). "About Baby's last words. She said upon waking from a sleep—What is the question. And I didnt answer thinking she was not completely awakened. Then she said again—What is the question and before I could speak she went on—If there is no question then there is no answer."

Source: Letters of Alice B. Toklas: Staying on Alone. Edited by Edward Burns. Vintage Books Edition, January 1975. 

Saturday, December 7, 2013

Iris Tree: Poet Adventuress





Iris Tree photographed by Man Ray

You preach to me of laws, you tie my limbs
With rights and wrongs and arguments of good,
You choke my songs and fill my mouth with hymns,
You stop my heart and turn it into wood.

...Age creeps upon your timid little faces
Beneath each black umbrella sly and slow,
Proud in the unimportance of your places
You sit in twilight prophesying woe

So dim and false and grey, take my compassion
I from my pageant golden as the day
Pity your littleness from all my passion
Leave you my sins to weep and whine away!

Thus begins Iris Tree's first book of poems, published in 1919.

The daughter of famed English actor and impressario Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Iris was a free thinker and sybarite from an early age. In 1912, at the age of 15, she went to Milan where her sister Viola was studying singing. From there, she wrote to a friend: "I am rather a success here; my hair is admired...I am trying to keep as pure as possible but it's rather difficult. I am in love with a beautiful Italian called Ludovici who gives me lessons in the language on a crimson sofa."  A few weeks later she wrote, "I am having a glorious time, living a somewhat bohemian life and eating bohemian spaghetti....I want to do so many things and of course I shall end by doing nothing. Women never do anything except spoil the lives of men - that is their only consolation."

Back in England at the Slade school the following year, she and her friend Nancy Cunard secretly rented a studio where they "gave clandestine feasts and talked through the night by the light of guttering candles, reading poetry aloud and smoking cigarettes." (The Rainbow Picnic, Daphne Fielding, 1974) "Forbidden playgrounds were investigated..They drank beer in public houses and wine at the Cafe Royal."

Tree by Augustus John
Iris wrote:

I was born in 1897
I have a fringe -
I have whiskers - 
I have a studio in 
Fritzroy Street...
I have had 28 
lovers, some more 
some less...
I drink absinthe.
I borrow money.
I have loved men
I have loved women...
I am a soul.
I am an artist.
I am wanton.
I am a hypocrite.

At 17 she met her lifelong friend, Welsh poet and "King of the Bohemians" Augustus John at one of Lady Ottoline Morell's Thursday gatherings.  In an unpublished essay, In Praise of Augustus John, she wrote, "At Ottoline's there were all kinds of dress-ups. Her rooms were scented with pomanders, pot-pourri and packed with genii in full cry....John's basso profundo muttering rare but penetrating sentences...At first meeting I experienced an immediate intimacy as if I was part of his landscape which has remained in my vision ever since. "

Tree traveled with her father to Hollywood in 1915 (as revealed by Oscar Levant in his book The Uninportance of Being Oscar). Levant called her "a charming and witty woman." When she met her first husband Curtis Moffat in New York in 1916, he "looked like a prentice wizard of magus out of a fairy story, especially in the black cloak he habitually wore at night when he took her out to explore the more raffish quarters of the city: the Bowery, Harlem, Greenwich Village and the dockside." (Fielding)

In his memoir Chiaroscuro (1952), John writes of taking hashish jam supplied by Princess Violette Murat at a dinner party at the Moffats' home in Hampstead:

Having helped myself to the first dose I had almost forgotten it when, catching the eye of Iris Tree across the dinner table, we were both simultaneously seized with uncontrollable laughter about nothing at all. This curious effect repeated itself from time to time throughout the evening.

Iris may have written of the event, or a similar one, in her poem:

Suddenly 
Shutting our lips upon a jest 
As we are sipping thoughts from little glasses, 
A gun bursts thunder and the echoing streets 
Quiver with startled terrors...

Much of Tree's poetry of the time deals with the horrors of WWI, juxtaposed against the wild and free bohemian life she was living, still railing against the bourgeoisie: 

You have never known
Delight of dying slowly,
Poisoned with raptures...
Nor felt your souls go blowing like balloons
Tossed by impulsive hands...
You have not felt the abandon
Of light love
Dragged by the hair across a slippery floor...

Contrary to her youthful assessment of women's worthlessness, Tree accomplished much in her life, as well as writing remarkable poetry and acting as muse and model to other artists.  She came to America to act in Max Reinhardt's play The Miracle in 1925, and there met her second husband, Friedrich Ledebur. The two roamed around California, gypsy style, with their son, then moved back to Europe where they were involved in the Chekhov Theatre Studio.

Around 1940 Tree relocated to California and rented a house in the Ojai Valley, the Shangri La where the movie Lost Horizon was filmed.  There she attended lectures by Krishnamurti, and along with him, Aldous Huxley and others, founded The Besant Hill School near Ojai.

Tree also established the Ojai theatre festival, where she played Lady Macbeth and "gave a magnificent performance, even though her stage fright was immeasurably increased by the presence in the audience of her friends Lillian Gish, Charlie Chaplin and Greta Garbo." She and other members of the Chekhov studio performed her play Second Wind.

French author Simone de Beauvoir wrote of meeting Tree in California in 1947 when her theatre company was preparing to perform Macbeth. "She was extremely beautiful, as I can see in a photograph taken by Man Ray. She traveled widely and always moved in artistic and literary circles," she wrote in America Day by Day. According to Beauvoir's biographer Deidre Bair,  Tree "enjoyed teasing that ‘the Mauvais Tempts [Bad Times] had arrived" with Beauvoir, who thought Tree was "fascinating, beautiful and intelligent, but she was not amused by her jest."

Tree's cameo appearance in La Dolce Vita
Tree owned an apricot ranch for a time, acquired a barn by the sea on an estate once owned by Robert Louis Stevenson, and once took up residence in an apartment built over the merry-go-round on the Santa Monica pier.  She appeared in the 1956 film version of Moby Dick in which Ledeber played Quequeg. She also appears in a cameo, reading poetry as herself, in Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960).

The early 1960s found Tree living in Geneva with her son, where she hosted the Huxleys and followed Krisnamurti. Like Huxley, she lost many of her personal papers in California. "Another link between Iris and Aldous Huxley was that she too had taken mescalin," wrote Richard Morphet of the Tate Gallery. Her biographer Daphne Fielding describes encountering Tree in France where she tried a hallucinogenic mushroom said to produce "beatific visions in glorious Technicolor." Fielding claims Tree didn't really how to ingest them, but the chapter ends with someone suggesting she'd gone to the Pyrenees because, "Maybe it's good mushroom country."

At the end of her life Tree was forbidden to indulge in cigarettes, coffee and wine for medical reasons. "I feel a traitor," she said "abandoning Baccus the Mind-Shaker and Ganymede the Cup-Bearer." She died in England in 1968, her last words being, "It's here, it's here... Shining...Love...Love....Love."

Tuesday, November 5, 2013

A High-Living Princess: Violette Murat

UPDATE 10/15: Murat is included in the new book Tokin' Women: A 4000-Year Herstory.


Princess Violette Murat, c. 1928-30
Photograph by Berenice Abbott 
In his memoir Chiaroscuro (1952), Welch painter and "King of the Bohemians" Augustus John described a 1920s dinner party at the home of photographer Curtis Moffatt, "a bit of a sybarite" who married poet Iris Tree:

When he lived in Hampstead, Curtis used to give small parties at which sardines and wine were consumed -- and sometimes hashish. I had already tried smoking this celebrated drug without the slightest result. It was Princess Murat who converted me. She contributed several pots of the substance in the form of a compôte or jam. A teaspoonful was taken at intervals. Having helped myself to the first dose I had almost forgotten it when, catching the eye of Iris Tree across the dinner table, we were both simultaneously seized with uncontrollable laughter about nothing at all. 

 ...The crises of laughter continued with some of us till dawn, with further repercussions as I made my way home with Violette Murat, who had only been slightly amused by the night's proceedings. 

Violette Murat, who turned John onto hashish, was a Bonaparte princess who may have been a lover of Marie Laurencin. The book Cote D'Azur - Inventing The French Riviera includes the following insight into the lifestyles of the rich and famous in the 1920s: “Princess Violette Murat, friends say, not only bought her opium in Toulon, but also rented a submarine in order to smoke it in peace."

Murat is described at another famous dinner party in 1922, where VIP Marcel Proust met James Joyce and Stravinsky: "Princesse Violette Murat flounced out of the party, looking daggers at [Proust] as he arrived. Gossip about her meanness was rife, and she was mortally offended by rumours that one of Proust’s particularly parsimonious characters was based on her. With her strange lack of physical proportions, he once said of her 'She looks more like a truffle than a violet.'"

The Napoleonic family is large and convoluted; everyone has five names, with repetitious family names like Eugene. I've uncovered conflicting information about Murat but I think she is Violette (aka Cecile) Ney D'Elchingen, born September 9, 1878. Granddaughter of Napoleon's marshall Michael Ney, she was the wife of (Eugene) Joachim Murat (1875-1906), a descendant of the Joachim Murat (1767-1815) who married Caroline Bonaparte, Napoleon's sister. Violette died in Paris on July 19, 1936.

Along with VIP Tallulah Bankhead, Murat was part of the Harlem renaissance in the 1920s. Berenice Abbott, who photographed (Eugene?) Murat (shown), wrote of her, “A very high liver. Oh, all kinds of wonderful tales are told about her….She…knew how to make an art out of living and that’s something stupendous. Anything she did became a vibrant, extraordinary event. I can remember seeing her go into a ten-cent store and buy the place out and have a fling doing it.”

NOTES: The 100th anniversary of the publication of Swann's Way, Proust's first volume in A la recherche du temps perdu (aka "In Search of Lost Time") November 14, 2013, will be celebrated the world over.

Born on November 13, 1913 in Paris, Princess Laure Louise Napoléone Eugénie Caroline Murat was a cousin of Violette Murat. In 1939, she married Fernand Auberjonois, a journalist who worked as a foreign correspondent for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Toledo Blade as well as NBC and Voice of America. The couple's son, actor Rene Auberjonois, is best known as Father Mulcahy in the movie M*A*S*H.

UPDATE 3/15 - Just discovered: Tucked in the corner of La Grand Odalisque by Ingres (1814)—a painting commissioned by Violette's grandmother and Napoleon's sister Caroline Bonaparte Murat—is what looks like a hash or opium pipe, along with what looks like an incense burner (complete with smoke). The fan the girl holds looks rather like a hookah mouthpiece.

The painting was “widely criticized” when it appeared, supposedly for the elongation of the girl’s figure (which almost looks like a grand pipe itself, with a big-ass bowl).  



Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Through Resa's Eyes: Nietzsche, Wagner and Hashish

Resa von Schirnhofer, fifth from left, the only female in her class. 

“I would only believe in a god who could dance. And when I saw my devil I found him serious, thorough, profound, and solemn: it was the spirit of gravity—through him all things fall. Not by wrath does one kill but by laughter. Come, let us kill the spirit of gravity!”

 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

A Facebook friend reminds me that this week is the birthday of Friedrich Nietzsche. Of all the writers in the book Conversations with Nietzsche: A Life in the Words of His Contemporaries it was a younger woman named Resa von Schirnhofer who had something to say on the subject of Nietzsche and hashish.

"If one wants to rid oneself of an unbearable pressure, one needs hashish. Well then, I needed Wagner," Neitzsche wrote. This quote, truncated to remove the Wagner reference, is everywhere Googlable. But it took Resa to make the connection, and put it in the context of the time.

"He touched upon his favorite theme, this time grieving deeply, with tears in his eyes, lamenting the irreplaceable loss of his former friendship with Wagner," Resa wrote. Nietzsche wrote of Wagner, "He has supplied the precious varnish wherewith to hide the dull ugliness of our civilisation. He has given to souls despairing over the materialism of this world, to souls despairing of themselves, and longing to be rid of themselves, the indispensable hashish and morphia wherewith to deaden their inner discords." This use of the word hashish is similar to that of George Eliot (aka Mary Ann Evans) in The Lifted Veil (1859):  "She intoxicated me with the sense that I was necessary to her… A half-repressed word, a moment's unexpected silence, even an easy fit of petulance on our account, will serve us as hashish for a long while.”

Friedrich Nietzsche
Resa spent a holiday with Nietzsche in Sils-Maria at the time he wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra [aka Zoroaster]. Here the author "told me about his bouts of raging headaches and the various medications he had tried against them. In Rapallo and in other places of the Riviera di Levante, where he had spent his times of worst health, he had written for himself all kinds of prescriptions signed Dr. Nietzsche, which had been prepared and filled without question or hesitation. Unfortunately I took no notes and the only one I remember is chloral hydrate. But since Nietzsche, as he expressly told me, had been surprised never to be asked whether he was a medical doctor authorized to prescribe this kind of medication, I conclude that some dubious medicines must have been among them. At any rate, he claimed to know his own sickness better than any doctor and to understand better which medications were to be used.

"Nietzsche never spoke of having used hashish, nor can I remember ever hearing the word hashish from his lips, but no doubt in his intensive reading of contemporary French authors—among them Baudelaire—he was already familiar with hashish in the summer of 1884 as a new drug that had recently appeared in Europe. Hashish smoking is mentioned as early as 1882 in The Joyful Science, though only as an Oriental habit of self-intoxication.

"When I came to Paris at the end of October 1884 all kinds of things were told to me about hashish use; I read an article about the physiological and psychological differences between opium intoxication and hashish intoxication and I heard celebrities from the ranks of high society mentioned as having tried to dream the hashish dream, etc. In my notebook from that time can be read: 'Hashish, or dawamesk is a distillate of cannabis indica, mixed with a fatty substance, with honey and pistachios to give it the consistency of a paste or jelly.' [Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal.] I was also told there were very tasty hashish candies. I felt a desire to try its effect myself—just once, out of psychological curiosity—but I resisted the attraction of this sweet poison."

Once during an illness, Nietzsche "described to me how, when he closed his eyes, he saw an abundance of fantastic flowers, winding and intertwining, constantly growing and changing forms in exotic luxuriance, sprouting one out of the other." He asked if she thought it was "a symptom of incipient madness." According to Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography by Julian Young: "Not until later did it occur to her that the hallucinations could be the result of chloral hydrate and other drugs, possibly including hashish, that he had obtained in Rapallo, mostly by the simple expedient of signing the prescription 'Dr. Nietzsche', his credentials never once having been questioned. He also mentioned that he had been drinking English (Irish?) stout and pale ale." On one occasion, Nietzsche poured Resa some Vermouth di Torino, leading to "a sparkling mood and full of humorous inspirations." (Young)

Resa von Schirnhofer
Resa von Schirnhofer (1855-1948) was born in Austria and came to Zurich in 1882 as a pioneering female doctoral student. When Nietzsche asked Resa why she intended to get a doctorate, "I explained that I set little importance on the title for myself, but in the interest of women’s rights I did not want to leave the university without having gotten the degree.” In letters to Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth she writes that "she never married because she would have imposed two requirements: great love from her partner and the provision of affluent circumstances....as it is usually impossible to have both of these in bourgeois marriage, she soon resigned herself to not marrying at all.”

Originally of affluent circumstances, she lost most of her resources by investing in government bonds during the first world war, forcing her to earn a living by giving piano and language lessons. Her recollections of her time with Nietzsche were discovered in her papers after her death.

Here is her description of Nietzsche: “A soft voice full of gentleness and melody and his very calm way of speaking caused a pause in the first moment….When a smile lit up his face, bronzed by so many sojourns outdoors in the south, it took on a touchingly childlike expression that called for sympathy. His look generally seemed to be turned inward, like the one we see on statues of Greek gods, or seeking out of the depths something he had almost ceased to hope for; but his eyes were always those of a man who has suffered much and, although he has remained a victor, stands sadly over the abysses of life. Unforgettable eyes, shining with the freedom of the victor, accusing and grieving because the meaning and beauty of the earth had turned into nonsense and ugliness.”

Describing an interaction, "I told him how, when I was a five-year-old child in the country, my mother and I, pursued by an enraged bull, had barely escaped to the first house of the village. An interesting conversation followed about the wave-effect, often through an entire life, of a nervous shock received in childhood."  She reports that Nietzsche was visibly moved as he bade her farewell, saying “with tears in his eyes: I hoped you would stay longer. When will I hear you refreshing laughter again?” The fool may have rejected her for lack of comeliness, telling someone at the time his ideal woman would be beautiful and stupid.

Monday, October 7, 2013

Marie Laurençin: Pot Party Painter

UPDATE 10/15: Laurençin is included in the new book Tokin' Women: A 4000-Year Herstory.
 
Les Invités (The Guests) 1908
"Everybody called Gertrude Stein Gertrude, everybody called Picasso Pablo and Fernande Fernande and everybody called Guillame Apollinaire Guillame and Max Jacob Max, but everybody called Marie Laurençin Marie Laurençin," wrote Gertrude Stein.

Stein purchased Laurençin's Les Invités, the painter's first sale. The painting is a record of an infamous 1908 dinner party where hashish pills were taken at Azon's restaurant in Paris. Laurençin's self portrait is upper left, with knowing eyes, flanked by Picasso and Apollinaire. Fernande Oliver, Picasso's mistress, is bottom right.

The following year, Laurençin painted Un Réunion a la Campagne (A Reunion in the Country), where she is depicted reclining as a hostess would, along with the three from Les Invités and others. Thus Laurençin is possibly the first person to paint a pot party (or two). In the first portrait she is the most fully realized image, and is bringing a flower: was she the instigator for the hashish taking? She may have been a lover of Princess Violette Murat, who could have supplied her.

Marie Laurencin, Diana a la Chasse (Diana of the Hunt) 1908
An illegitimate child, Marie Laurençin was born in Paris in 1883 to a Creole mother who worked as a seamstress. She began her career as a porcelain painter at the Sèvres factory, studied with the flower painter Madeleine Lemaire, and attended the Académie Humbert where she met George Braque. Through Braque, she soon became part of the avant garde artist set in Paris. Source.

The paintings reproduced in Elizabeth Louise Kahn's excellent 2003 biography of Laurençin demonstrate amply her unique and prodigious talent.  In 1907 Laurençin exhibited her paintings at the Salon des Indépendants and was introduced to Apollinaire. The two artists began an affair that lasted until 1913, and she has also been linked with Picasso and with other women. Rodin said called her "a woman who is neither futurist nor cubist. She knows what gracefulness is; it is serpentine." Picasso purchased her painting La Songeuse (1911) and had it all his life.

Max Ernst painted her portrait, as did Cocteau and Rousseau. She kept company with Mary Cassatt and Susanne Valadon. In 1912, Laurençin and two other women (Charlotte Mare and Gaby Villon) fought off angry viewers of the controversial Cubist House with their umbrellas.

Les Chansons de Bilitis 1904 (print)
In Stella Gibbons's wonderful 1932 book Cold Comfort Farm, the heroine advises a protegée not to share her poetry with society people. "Nor must you talk about Marie Laurençin to people who hunt. They will merely think she is your new mare."

Laurençin was named chevalier of the Légion d'honneur in 1937 and in 1983, the Marie Laurençin Museum in Nagano-Ken, Japan was inaugurated to celebrate the centenary of her birth. A Japanese influence can be seen in this print (left). Marie Laurençin's 130th birthday is October 31st of this year.

Perhaps Laurençin was also familiar with Alice B. Toklas-style brownies: she was a regular at Gertrude Stein's salon on rue de Fleurus, and remained in contact with Toklas for the rest of her life. "I see Marie Laurençin quite often," Toklas wrote in a 1949 letter. "She wants me to translate for her some of the poems of Emily Dickinson so that she may do some illustrations—most certainly her dish of tea." Sadly, Toklas never did the translations.

In a letter Toklas wrote in 1950 discussing the Cone collection, which had just opened at the Baltimore Museum of Art, she suggests her correspondent look for "a very early Marie Laurençin" and describes Les Invités. Apparently the painting had been sold to the Cone sisters; Claribel Cone met Stein when the two attended Johns Hopkins medical school and the Steins introduced the Cones to the Parisian art scene. 

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Happy Birthday Isak Dinesen, a Modern Scheherazade

Meryl Streep played her on film; Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley, Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe courted her; she flew in planes and hunted lions with Denys Finch Hatton in 1930s Africa, and was a bestselling author.

Born on April 17, 1885, Isak Dinesen (aka Baroness Karen von Blixen) was the Danish author of "Out of Africa" and many, many stories, some of which have been made into film (e.g. "Babette's Feast").

According to Isak Dinesen, The Life of a Storyteller by Judith Thurman, Dinesen and Finch Hatton were great fans of Baudelaire, and "Friends remember that Denys and Tania liked to experiment with the sensations hashish, opium, or miraa could give them. Denys arranged the cushions on the floor before the fire and reclined there, playing his guitar. Tania sat 'cross-legged like Scheherazade herself' and told him stories." (Miraa is kava, an indigenous African herb that has a mild hallucinogenic effect. Dinesen refers to it in her story "The Dreamers" by its other name, murungu.) In another of her tales, "The Monkey," an old abbess drugs her dinner guests with a love potion, leading to an evening of "exalted lewdness" (Thurman). 

Streep as Dinesen in the film "Out of Africa"
with Robert Redford as Finch Hatton.
Dinesen wrote to her mother from Africa in 1924, "The greater part of humanity needs excitement, some slight intoxication, pleasure, and danger too. I think that if it were in my power to do anything at all for humanity, I myself would like to amuse them. I think it is wonderful that such delightful peacable people as you exist; but there is need for more than this, and I shall allow myself to make use of Shakespeare's words: 'Dost thou think, because thou are virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale? Yes, by St. Anne, and ginger shall be hot I' the mouth too."

Dinesen died in 1962, but her stories live on. Orson Wells, a fan of Dinesen's who planned to make a series of films from her stories, directed a 1968 film starring Jeanne Moreau based on Dinesen's "The Immortal Story." "Babette's Feast," a film based on another of her short stories, won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1987.