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Preface
The Baroness Kizette de Lempicka Foxhall and I thought it wise to say something about how this book was put together—why a story purportedly told by one to the other comes to be written in the third person, and why our account of her mother's life should take the form of narrative biography.
As anyone who knew both Kizette and her mother, Tamara de Lempicka, will tell you (and as the following pages amply confirm), the two of them spent off and on a difficult half-century together. Tamara was an artist and a mother in that order, and her daughter's life—like her own—was ruled by the major dictum of what we call below the artist's hunger: "Work before all." Always a commanding presence, Tamara dominated the lives of those close to her, and Kizette was no exception. That she cared for Kizette is not in question; that she treated her harshly is beyond question. The very intensity of the bond between the two tended to make Tamara's mothering tyrannical rather than benign.
The intense bond lasted beyond Tamara's death in 1980. Not despite but because of her stormy relationship with Tamara, Kizette felt immensely empty without her mother. Kizette had spent her first twenty years making way for Tamara the celebrity and famous artist and the last twenty catering to the whims of a proud but publicly ignored grande dame. Most of what Kizette had done in her life, she felt, had been done with reference to this great personality, whose paintings and papers and stories were Kizette's unique inheritance. She was in a very true sense of the word "haunted," dominated now by her mother's ghost just as surely as she once had been by her presence. She became obsessedwith telling her mother's story, with laying to rest Tamara's always restless spirit.
Kizette began to gather together Tamara's papers, letters, notes, and written vignettes, and to make notes of her own. Tamara had been an accomplished storyteller, and she told her stories over and over, always the same way—almost word for word—each time. Kizette imagined she could hear Tamara speaking as she wrote down old stories, made chronologies, and put together lists of her mother's paintings, exhibitions, and prizes. Almost automatically Kizette's account took the form of a tale, of a narrative, like something out of a novel or a film.
When, through the auspices of Abbeville Press, I first met Kizette in Houston in the spring of 1986, she was in the throes of her own hunger, the hunger to get down the story she had both in hand and in her head. And while the act of putting words on paper might banish the ghost, Kizette's obsession had developed into something more than the need to rid herself of her own past. Tamara de Lempicka was a great painter who had fallen out of fashion and into obscurity, and her daughter wanted to restore her to her proper place in art history. She wanted a book worthy of a de Lempicka, a book Tamara herself would have admired. Above all, she wanted to avoid the type of "true confession" from embittered children that has of late become fashionable.
For these reasons we agreed to tell Tamara's story in the third person, in a narrative that used all the techniques of traditional historical research, including recourse to primary and secondary sources, as well as those of oral history. The story would be the one Kizette had to tell, but I would shape it, fill it out with additional research, and seek out others who knew Tamara well and had their own feelings and prejudices about her. We hoped to produce a book that had not only the immediacy of personal experience, but that also put Tamara de Lempicka in the context of her historical and aesthetic times.
The reader will judge how well we succeeded, but I must say the Baroness Kizette de Lempicka Foxhall remained faithful to this conception of the work throughout. She ever bowed to fact when it competed with memory and—with an eye artistically as cold as Tamara's—allowed the voice of the narrative rather than her own to rule.
And because she did, we have several to acknowledge and to thank. The majority of the biographical information about Tamara comes from Kizette—from a series of extensive interviews conducted with her in March 1986, supplemented by Kizette's written outlines, chronologies, and summaries of events, as well as her mother's personal papers, letters, and autobiographical writings, which Kizette had collected and meticulously arranged.
In addition I interviewed a number of others in Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, and Cuernavaca, Mexico, who knew Tamara. Principal among these was Victor Manuel Contreras, Tamara's close companion in her last years, who graciously extended his hospitality in May 1986 by allowing me not only to grill him to exhaustion about the artist but also by inviting me to stay in Tres Bambus, Tamara's impressive home in Cuernavaca. There, too, I talked to Tamara's young friends, Felipe and Gabriele Ortiz-Monasterio, who did so much to illuminate the artist's final years. In March 1986, I interviewed Houston cultural affairs reporter Anne Holmes and Ms. Jane Owen, both of whom helped immensely to fill out the picture of Tamara's relations with Kizette and her family. In Hollywood, in May of 1986, Franzi Hohenlohe—who had known Tamara as long as anyone other than Kizette—recaptured for me something of the Europe in which Tamara had first made her mark, and George Schoenbrun discussed Tamara's Hollywood years. In New York, in June 1986, actor Toni Selwart helped to provide a picture of Tamara and her second husband's social circle, and Wade and Gene Barnes talked about Tamara's many trips back to New York after she moved to Houston. In addition, Wade Barnes provided me with a written reminiscence that was quite useful as a "take" on Tamara's personality and how she struck others. In July 1986, screenwriter Bert Phillips and art collector Happy Hayes took time from their busy schedule in Paris to interview for me Alain Blondel, who owned the gallery that first brought Tamara back into the limelight in the early 1970s.
For additional—mostly written—sources, the reader may refer to the brief Note on Sources at the end of our text.
A more intangible, but no less crucial, aid in writing this book came from Kyle Young and L. Edward Purcell, who along with Bert Phillips and Happy Hayes took time to read and criticize the manuscript in draft, ever improving it with their insight and suggestions. James Summerville provided me with access to the Vanderbilt University Library, for which I am grateful. I especially wish to thank Patricia Hogan for her careful readings, her keen criticisms, and her moral support throughout.
