The Unfinished Palazzo by Judith Mackrell

Author:Judith Mackrell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
Published: 2017-05-23T16:00:00+00:00

Doris on the waterfront terrace with an unidentified male acquaintance and Angela, her sister-in-law and close friend.

One name that was absent from the press, however, was Margot’s – for even though she’d paid for the palazzo and been consulted in its rebuilding plans, she didn’t much care for Venice and was only willing to stay in the city for short periods. She and Doris were still seen together a great deal. Late in 1936 they’d travelled from New York to an all-female house party on a Nevada ranch and Valentine, who’d tracked them down while touring America with Beaverbrook, had been scathing about the Sapphic community he found there: ‘a regular mare’s nest….Female horses and female humans’.36 He regarded Doris’s latest transgression as an offence against masculine propriety, and it was the following year that he punitively attempted to get her barred from the Royal Enclosure at Ascot. Undeterred, however, Doris and Margot remained publicly on view on both sides of the Atlantic: they were in London in May 1937 to see the new king being crowned; in October they were in Florida, drinking at the El Morocco night club with George Cukor. They spent Christmas at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu, and the following year they were at a house party in Palm Springs, where Doris was painted a second time by Lavery.

Yet Margot did not particularly like cities and crowds; she seems to have required large landscapes and the company of animals to keep her happy. While she was still devoted to Doris – so devoted that she didn’t notice Doris’s growing impatience with her – Venice in high season was too crowded, too artificial for her to put up with for long. And she didn’t, apparently, make an exception for the end-of-season ball that Doris had planned as the climax of this first Venetian summer.

It was a lavish, all-night event, with cocktails on the front terrace and a polished dance floor laid out over the garden at the back. A jazz band played throughout, and fairy lights reflected the night’s stars. Cecil came, despite his disapproving eye, and with him the artist Rex Whistler and the writer Raimund von Hofmannsthal. There was an array of European titles, including the young Prince Philip of Greece, and as Doris watched her guests dancing under the night sky; as the music from her band floated across the canal; as the lights of San Marco glimmered in the near distance, she may have believed that she had finally put Valentine and their wretched marriage behind her. She may also have believed that she had guaranteed her place in Venetian society.

But the night of Doris’s party was to be memorable for reasons that had little to do with the beauty of its setting or the luxury of its entertainment. Doris couldn’t know it yet, but this event was to be one of the last of its kind in Venice before the outbreak of war. Mussolini was drawing closer to Hitler, and

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.