Dolly Wilde

Interview, Nov, 2000 by Joan Schenkar

SHE WAS THE LAST OF THE WILDES, AND BOY WAS SHE EVER!

"I am a darting trout," the improbable boast begins, "shifting, glancing, and flashing my iridescent tail in a hundred pleasant pools!" and before the sentence has glittered to its end, we wonder who on earth could have had the nerve to say it. It sounds like one of Oscar Wilde's self-possessed characters, those preposterous darlings of his imagination that took the 1890s by storm in plays like An Ideal Husband and that little-theater perennial, The Importance of Being Earnest. As the following passage, an excerpt from Joan Schenkar's just released Truly Wilde: The Unsettling Story of Dolly Wilde, Oscar's Unusual Niece (Basic Books) reveals, the boaster was a Wilde, but one Oscar never set loose upon the stage. She postured and charmed without a curtain and lights to protect her, because she carried on her act in real life--it was Wilde's own niece, Dolly. PATRICK GILES

She looked, said everyone who knew them both, remarkably like her uncle Oscar. She had the same artfully posed, soft, white hands, the same elongated face, and the same air of indolent melancholy, which Aristotle insisted was always the natural accompaniment of wit. She spoke remarkably like her uncle too, or, rather, like a brilliantly female version of Oscar--for there was nothing parodically male about Dolly Wilde. And although she would occasionally dress up as her uncle in borrowed, too-tight pants, a great flowing tie and a famously ratty fur coat (perhaps it was Oscar's favorite coat after all, the one Dolly's father Willie was supposed to have pawned when Oscar was imprisoned), she looked most like Oscar Wilde when she was dressed up as herself: a beautiful, dreamy-eyed, paradoxical woman--wonderfully stylish and intermittently unkempt, spiritually illuminated and clearly mondaine. She stares out at us from her few significant photographs with a distinctly contemporary gaze; conscious of the camera, c asual about her audience.

For sixty years she was a delicious rumor: Oscar Wilde's enchanting niece Dorothy, born in 1895, a scant three months after her uncle's notorious trials and shameful imprisonment. In titled, artistic, and carefully closeted circles in Paris and London and Hollywood, stories of the outrageous things Dorothy lerne Wilde said and did were passed around like canapes at a book launch. Photographed by Cecil Beaton and the Baron de Meyer, adored by the Sitwells, the Cunards, and French Academicians like Edmond Jaloux, attracting people of taste and talent wherever she went, Dolly Wilde was almost--as her friend Janet Flanner wrote--"like a character out of a book ... like someone one had become familiar with by reading, rather than by knowing"--too literary, in short, to be believed.

Although she could only have been produced by the follies and grandeurs of the 1920s and the 1930s, Dolly Wilde seems sensationally contemporary. Her tastes for cutting edge conversation and "emergency seductions" (as she called the sexual adventures which she applied like unguent to her emotional wounds), for fast cars and foreign films, for experimental literature and alcoholic actresses, are still right-up-to-the minute, and it is too easy to forget that she has been dead--and deader still for being unnoticed--these sixty years.

Much of Dolly's adulthood was spent in the unsuccessful search for a "home life" with Natalie Clifford Barney (1876-1972), the compellingly attractive and irresistibly unfaithful American femme de lettres, multi-millionaire, and founder of Paris' most important Modernist salon, and Dolly failed to find a final form for her brilliant talents. She was fashionably, then horribly, entangled with heroin; she came to use alcohol and every other available drug urgently and often. She never ever had enough money or what Virginia Woolf meant by a room of one's own. She died, chillingly, at the same age as her father and her famous uncle--and of the same addictions. And she died alone....

In her romantic pavillon at the end of a cobbled courtyard at 20 rue Jacob on the Left Bank, Natalie Clifford Barney hosted and enchanted all the great Modernist male writers, Joyce, Proust, Eliot, Valery, Pound, Eluard, Ford and Gide. But she also recruited, attracted, and showcased all the brilliant female subverters of the Modernist style: Renee Vivien, Colette, the duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre, Romaine Brooks, Isadora Duncan, Ida Rubenstein, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Lucie Delarue Mardrus, Mercedes de Acosta (who brought her lover Greta Garbo), Allanah Harper, Janet Scudder, Sybille Bedford, Esther Murphy, Radclyffe Hall, Una, Lady Troubridge, Djuna Barnes, Marie Laurencin, Mina Loy, Marguerite Yourcenar, Janet Flanner, Eyre de Lanux, and Dorothy lerne Wilde. In its heyday--which coincided with Dolly's own years of shine and sparkle--the Barney salon was the longest and most successful enterprise of its kind in Europe: it mingled genders, tastes, talents, ages, sexualities; and cultures for sixty years and more; always on Fridays, always in the same place.