Scandalous Women Celebrates Whitney Houston (1963-2012)

This weekend the world mourned the loss of singer Whitney Houston. I still have a hard time believing that she is gone, that her voice has been silenced. Just like I'll always remember where I was when I heard that John Lennon had been killed, I'll always remember where I was when I heard Whitney died. I was sitting at a bar hanging out with a friend, on Saturday night, when the bartender announced that Whitney Houston had died.

WTH?

How could that have happened? It didn't seem possible, I had just seen a clip on one of the infotainment shows that she had filmed a role in a remake of the 1970's classic SPARKLE, which she was also involved in producing. Although she'd been absent from the music business since her 2009 album wasn't as successful as her previous efforts, it seemed only a matter of time that she would be back in the studio again. After all, her ex Bobby Brown, had made a comeback of sorts on CMT of all places, and was now back touring with New Edition again. It seemed as if they had both put their tumultuous marriage and their problems with drugs in the past.

I came of age at the same time as Whitney Houston. She was born in 1963, a year before I was. We even shared a name, Elizabeth (her middle name, my first). I can remember so clearly when her first album came out. Her music was so infectious and her voice was so glorious, it didn't seem possible that such a powerful voice could come out of one person. How many of us tried though to sing like her, standing in front of the mirror with a hairbrush, or singing along in the shower? But there was only one Whitney Houston. She was also drop dead gorgeous which didn't hurt.  It seemed as if she was the complete package. And then THE BODYGUARD came out, and she added acting to a long list of accomplishments including 6 Grammy Awards, 22 American Music Awards, and 30 Billboard Awards. There would be no Mariah Carey, no Celine Dion, or Christina Aguilera if Whitney hadn't paved the way for the powerhouse vocalist that dominated the airwaves in the late 80's and early 90's. But she towered over them all. Who else but Whitney could take a Dolly Parton song and turn it into a powerhouse anthem? Dolly's own rendition sounded downright anemic compared to Whitney's version.  Not to mention what she did with the Star Spangled Banner, turning our national anthem into a hit pop record! I still have the cassette tape that I bought of her first album, and I've worn out the CD's of THE BODYGUARD, and her 1998 CD MY LOVE IS YOUR LOVE.

It seemed like Whitney was born to sing, her mother was gospel singer Cissy Houston, her cousin Dionne Warwick and her god-mother Aretha Franklin.  It was like the story of Sleeping Beauty, where the various fairies came and blessed her with many gifts, beauty, talent, poise. Unfortunately the evil fairy also showed up, blessing Whitney with the curse of so many performers, an addiction to alcohol and cocaine.  I remember the early years of Whitney's career, when she appeared to be the quintessential "good girl" of R&B. We all knew that she had grown up singing in the church in New Jersey, she dressed modestly for a pop-star, no plunging necklaces for Whitney! But there were rumors from the beginning that she was not the image that she was made out to be.

The tabloids constantly ran stories that Whitney and her best friend Robin were more than just friends.  Tere were stories that she was a diva, with a trashy mouth (anyone who watched BEING BOBBY BROWN knows that part is true). And then in 1992, she married the bad boy of R&B Bobby Brown.  Brown grew up in a rough neighborhood outside of Boston, had already fathered a string of kids, not to mention arrests for indecency. The tabloid press fell all over themselves chronically their life together, which seemed to consist of Bobby getting arrested and Whitney showing up loyally at his side in courtrooms. Along the way, she managed to continue acting and singing, recording 2 more hit albums. But it soon became clear that the couple had spiraled into drug addiction.  Later on, Whitney blamed Bobby partly for her drug use. The marriage continued to spiral out of control, culminating in a reality TV BEING BOBBY BROWN which chronicled a superstar that was struggling. Since their divorce in 2007, Houston went to rehab, and seemed to have gotten her act back together. 

At times like this, one can't help but wonder "what if?"  What if she had gotten help sooner? Those questions will always go unanswered.

Whitney's voice was the one that we listened to when we were sad, when we wanted to dance, when we got married.

R.I.P. Whitney

Scandalous Women Celebrates Black History Month

February is Black History Month and to celebrate, I thought I share links to all the posts here on Scandalous Women & around the blogosphere that have celebrated the achievements of Black Women over the centuries.

Elizabeth Keckly - Mary Todd Lincoln's dressmaker

Lucy Parsons: An American Revolutionary

Sally Hemings - Dusky Sally: The Controversy over Thomas Jefferson & Sally Hemings

Marie Laveau: Voodoo Queen of New Orleans

Josephine Baker

Mary Ellen Pleasant

Ida Wells-Barnett: Crusader for Justice

Bessie Smith: Empress of the Blues

Queen Ranavalona - The Mad Monarch of Madagascar

The Glamorous Garman Sisters

The Garman family

"No other contemporary women had much poetry, good, bad and indifferent, written about them, or had so many portraits or busts made of them." - Roy Campbell

It seems like the Garman sisters have been on the edge of my periphery for ages now. Just recently I read about them in article on Lucien Freud in the February issue of Vanity Fair.  Douglas Garman had a long affair with Peggy Guggenheim, who was the subject of an earlier blog post here at Scandalous Women. Pick up any biography of the Bloomsbury Group and you will see their names. Like the better-known Mitfords, the Garman sisters took center stage in Bohemian London during the first half of the twentieth century. Unconventionally beautiful, flamboyant, and headstrong, they broke away from middle-class conventions, seducing and inspiring a generation of artists. While all of the Garmans were artistic in their own right, it seems that their greatest gift to the world was to inspire other artists. These siblings seemed to possess an uncanny ability to turn heads, break hearts, and spark creative genius.

Like the theme song from The Mary Tyler Moore show, these three women “could turn on the world on with her smile, who can take a nothing place and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile…” As their biographer Cressida Connolly put it in her biography, “People fell in love with them. They were lovely to be in love with, passionate, generous, and beautiful. They sent secret notes at midnight and left their pillows smelling of scent. They gave presents: books of poetry, music, wildflowers. They made dramatic entrances and exits, their arms full of lilies, haunting railway stations throughout Europe, intoxicating their lovers with sudden meetings and long goodbyes.” Seriously who wouldn’t want to know someone like that?

There were 9 children in all, 7 sisters and 2 brothers, in the Garman family but this post will only focus on the three who had the most impact on the world. The eldest sister Mary (1898-1989) married the maverick poet Roy Campbell. Kathleen (1901-1989), an enigmatic artist's model and aspiring pianist, was the lover and, later, the wife of controversial American-born sculptor Jacob Epstein. And the youngest and considered the most beautiful of the sisters, Lorna (1911-2000), was the lover of both the painter Lucian Freud and the poet Laurie Lee.

The children grew up at Oakeswell Hall in what is known as “The Black Country” near Birmingham in England. Their father was a prosperous doctor, a proper Victorian father, twenty years older than their mother. Although the family was not rich, there was enough money for the usual servants that you find in a big house, including a governess. The children lived an idyllic late Victorian/early Edwardian childhood of picnics interspersed with lessons and piano practice. From the beginning, however, Mary and Kathleen showed signs of rebellion against the stultifying conventions of their middle class upbringing. They stole knickknacks from the drawing room, using their younger siblings to fence the goods for cash. With the proceeds, they bought cigarettes and French novels. When their father, Walter, caught them reading Flaubert’s racy Madame Bovary, he snatched it out of their hands and consigned it to the fire. His actions only made them rebel more; there were forays into town to buy drinks at the pub, and excursions to the cinema.



Mary Garman

Kathleen Garman during the early years of her affair with Jacob Epstein

After the war, the two sisters ran off to London. Mary took a job driving a delivery van for Lyon’s Corner Houses while Kathleen took a job working with the horses that pulled the carriages for Harrods.  When their father found out, he was appalled at their behavior, but when he realized that they were serious, he gave them an allowance which allowed them to quit their jobs. Instead they both enrolled in art school. One night in 1921, Kathleen and Mary were having dinner out when they became aware that a strange man kept staring at them. The waiter brought over a note, asking them to join him to dine. Although they were amused and flattered, they declined. The man turned out to be the American-born sculptor Jacob Epstein. When Kathleen went back to the restaurant a few days later, Epstein was there again. This time Kathleen agreed to sit with him. Kathleen was twenty, and Jacob was twenty years older. A few days later, she had agreed to sit for him. Before long, she was not only his model but his mistress, beginning a more than thirty-year relationship, marred only by his wife’s shooting her with a pearl-handled revolver in 1923. It seems that while Mrs. Epstein tolerated her husband’s infidelities, she instinctively knew that Kathleen was different from the other women her husband had been involved with, and she was not happy. When shooting Kathleen didn’t scare her off, she took the tactic of encouraging her husband to pursue other lovers, hoping that his love for Kathleen would fade away. No such luck! The incident left Kathleen with a permanent scar, and unable to wear sleeveless dresses but it didn’t end the affair.  Kathleen was so devoted to Epstein, that she didn’t press charges because he asked her not too. She even went so far as to agree to ride around Hyde Park in an open cab with his wife so that newspaper reporters could see that there was no enmity between them. Kathleen further scandalized society by giving birth to three children by Epstein, Theo, Kitty and Esther (a fourth child died of SIDS while Kathleen was playing piano in the same room). All three children bore their mother’s last name. It wasn’t until after Margaret’s death, and his knighthood in 1954, that Epstein and Kathleen were married, making her Lady Epstein.

A bust of Kathleen by Jacob Epstein

Not to be outdone by her younger sister, Mary soon met and married the South African poet Roy Campbell, despite the fact that he hung her out of a fourth floor window so that she would gain some respect for him. Cressida Connolly has pointed out: "Within three days he had moved into the girls' studio room. Tall and thin, with startlingly blue eyes, he was already writing poetry, living on beer and forgetting to eat - or eating only radishes, their leaves and all, bought from a market stall. The girls decided to fatten him up, and the three of them would lie, arm in arm, in front of the fire while he read them fragments from the poems which would become his first book."


She wore black with a gold veil to the wedding. It was a tempestuous marriage from the beginning. The couple lived on the edge of poverty for years, poetry not being incredibly lucrative. They had two daughters Tess and Annie, but Mary soon fell under the spell, like many before her, of Vita Sackville-West. In Vita, Mary had found the perfect combination of mother figure and lover. But Vita was an all-together cooler customer. While she had many lovers, her marriage to Harold Nicolson provided the perfect escape route when things got too sticky. Campbell’s verse attack on the Bloomsbury group following the affair was the literary scandal of the epoch. Sackville-West’s other lover, Virginia Woolf, was moved to write Orlando in response to the affair. There were threats and tears, until the family finally decamped to the South of France.

Lorna Garman

Lorna, the youngest, was perhaps the wildest of all. “She was amoral really,” her daughter Yasmin later said. “But everyone forgave her because she was such a life-giver.” She wore exotic clothing, rode her horse at night, and swam naked in the lake. At the tender age of 14, she seduced her brother’s college friend Ernest Wishart who was 9 years her senior, and should have known better. When she turned 16, they were married. Of the three sisters, while Kathleen bagged the great artist, Lorna bagged herself a member of the landed gentry. She would be the only one of the three sisters who was financially well-off (during the Spanish Civil War, she sent Laurie Lee pound notes soaked in Chanel No. 5). By the time she was 21, Lorna had given birth to two sons, Michael and Luke. Because she was so young when they married, her husband turned a blind eye to her affairs, even raising her daughter Yasmin by Laurie Lee as his, until she asked if one of her lovers could move into a cottage on their estate. Even that was too much for her forgiving husband. Her relationship with the much younger Freud (she gave him the Zebra head that appears in several of his paintings) ended when she discovered that he was also involved with a younger actress. She told him, “I thought I was giving you up for Lent but I’m giving you up for good.” Both of her former lovers married her nieces, Lucien to Kitty Garman (Kathleen’s daughter) and Laurie Lee to her sister Helen’s daughter Kathy Pologe.

There is a tragic side to the Garman’s story. Mary’s husband Roy died in a car accident in Spain in 1957. Although they inspired great love and affection from their lovers, they were not the best mothers. Mary pretty much expected her daughters to raise themselves. “We were never told how to sit and a table….or how important it was to change our knickers every so often,” Anna later said. Her neglect led Tessa to suffer for years from anorexia. Kathleen spent most of her time at Epstein's beck and call, which left little time to be a mother. She sent her two daughters to live in the country to be raised by their grandmother while she kept her son Theo with her. A promising painter, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia while in his twenties. He died unexpectedly at the age of 29. Her daughter Esther, distraught over her brother’s death and the suicide of a young man whose marriage proposal she had rejected, committed suicide less than a year later. Lorna and her children basically grew up together.


Later in life, both Lorna and Mary became devout Catholics. Kathleen, after Epstein’s death, became the keeper of his flame, donating many of his works to museums in Israel as well as becoming a collector in her own right. Her collection forms part of the Garman/Ryan Collection at the Walsall Library.

Sources:

Cressida Connolly - The Rare and The Beautiful: The Lives of the Garmans

Happy Birthday Nell Gwyn!

Today is Nell Gwn's birthday, born February 2nd, 1650 which would make her 362 years old this year if she were a vampire. Nell has always been my favorite of Charles II's mistresses, probably because apart from his Queen, Catherine of Braganza and his sister Minette, I've always felt that Nell was the only one of his mistresses who truly loved him as Charles the man, not Charles the King. She seems to have been relatively undemanding compared to Barbara Palmer, and she wasn't a spy for the French like Louise de Keroualle. With her, the King could pretty much be himself.

Called "pretty, witty Nell" by the diarist Samuel Pepys,  Nell has long been seen as a living embodiment of the spirit of Restoration England. She's become something of a folk heroine over the years, her story echoing the rags-to-royalty tale of Cinderella. Elizabeth Howe, in The First English Actresses, calls she was "the most famous Restoration actress of all time, possessed of an extraordinary comic talent." Despite her great success on the stage, she gave it all up to be the King's mistress.

The details of her early life are a bit sketchy.  Some historians believe that she was born in London, some in Oxford, and some point to Hereford, near Wales, since Gwyn is a Welsh name. Most historians do agree that her father, Thomas Gwyn, was probably a Captain in the Royalist army during the English Civil War.  What happened to her father is unknown, whether he died, or deserted the family.  What is clear is that he was soon out of the picture, and Nell, her older sister Rose, and her mother had to fend for themselves.  There are stories that Nell's mother ran or worked in a bawdy house, and that Nell, herself might have been a child prostitute. By the time she was 12, she had a protector named Duncan who kept her for about 2 years. After the relationship was over, Nell became an orange girl at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. By the time she was 16, she was appearing on the stage instead of selling oranges to the audience in front of it.

Because she was illiterate, she learned her lines by rote. She was taught her craft of performing at a school for young actors developed by Thomas Killigrew and one of the finest male actors of the era, Charles Hart,
who became her lover. She was famous for her roles in breeches parts, where she could dance, sing and show off her legs, which were apparently quite good. It was the Duke of Buckingham who allegedly introduced the King to Nell, looking for a way to supplant his cousin, Barbara Palmer, as the King's mistress. Apparently Nell asked for 500 pounds initially which was considered too much, so Buckingham went to plan B, which was the actress Moll Davis. Whatever the story, by 1688, Nell was the King's mistress. Since she'd been the mistress of both Charles Hart and Charles Sackville, she jokingly titled the King "her Charles the Third".

Unlike his other long-term mistresses Barbara Palmer and Louise Keroualle, Nell never received a title of her own, although her oldest son Charles was made first Earl of Burford and then Duke of St. Alban's with an allowance of 1,000 pounds a year. Her younger son James died while in school in Paris in 1681. In 1671, she had a house of her own at 79 Pall Mall, however the house was the property of the crown.  It wasn't until 1676, that the freehold of the house and land were given to Nell.  The King also gave her Burford House in Windsor, where she lived whenever the King was at Windsor Castle. She also had a summer residence near the area that was known as Bagnigge Wells Spa. In 1685, King Charles died. His dying wish was that, "Let not poor Nelly starve." The new King, James II, paid Nell's debts off and gave her a pension of 1,500 pounds a year. Nell only lived two more years. She had a stroke in 1687, at the rather young age of 37, which left her paralyzed on one side. She soon suffered another stroke, and finally passed away on November 14, 1687.

Nell has long been a popular subject for novelists because of her rags to riches story. In honor of her birthday, I thought I would highlight a few of the most recent novels and biographies.

This biography was written by Charles Beauclerk, the Earl of Burford, who is a direct descendant of Nell. I haven't read it, but it's supposed to be very good.

This novel by Priya Parmar really focuses on Nell's early years and her career as an actress. Filled with juicy backstage gossip, I highly recommend it.

The Darling Strumpet, by Gillian Bagwell. I had the privilege of getting to hear Gillian read one of the naughtier scenes from this book last year at the Historical Novel Society conference.

Another excellent novel about Nell by Susan Holloway Scott, a frequent guest here on the blog.

Book of the Month - Sister Queens by Julia Fox

Title: Sister Queens: The Noble, Tragic Lives of Katherine of Aragon and Juana, Queen of Castile
Author: Julia Fox
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Publication date: 1/31/2012
Pages: 480

From the back cover:

The history books have cast Katherine of Aragon, the first queen of King Henry VIII of England, as the ultimate symbol of the Betrayed Woman, cruelly tossed aside in favor of her husband’s seductive mistress, Anne Boleyn. Katherine’s sister, Juana of Castile, wife of Philip of Burgundy and mother of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, is portrayed as “Juana the Mad,” whose erratic behavior included keeping her beloved late husband’s coffin beside her for years. But historian Julia Fox, whose previous work painted an unprecedented portrait of Jane Boleyn, Anne’s sister, offers deeper insight in this first dual biography of Katherine and Juana, the daughters of Spain’s Ferdinand and Isabella, whose family ties remained strong despite their separation. Looking through the lens of their Spanish origins, Fox reveals these queens as flesh-and-blood women—equipped with character, intelligence, and conviction—who are worthy historical figures in their own right.



When they were young, Juana’s and Katherine’s futures appeared promising. They had secured politically advantageous marriages, but their dreams of love and power quickly dissolved, and the unions for which they’d spent their whole lives preparing were fraught with duplicity and betrayal. Juana, the elder sister, unexpectedly became Spain’s sovereign, but her authority was continually usurped, first by her husband and later by her son. Katherine, a young widow after the death of Prince Arthur of Wales, soon remarried his doting brother Henry and later became a key figure in a drama that altered England’s religious landscape.


Ousted from the positions of power and influence they had been groomed for and separated from their children, Katherine and Juana each turned to their rich and abiding faith and deep personal belief in their family’s dynastic legacy to cope with their enduring hardships. Sister Queens is a gripping tale of love, duty, and sacrifice—a remarkable reflection on the conflict between ambition and loyalty during an age when the greatest sin, it seems, was to have been born a woman.


This is the first historical non-fiction book that I have downloaded to my Nook, and I just started reading it. I reviewed Fox's earlier book on Jane Boleyn, I didn't accept her theory that poor Jane Boleyn was misunderstood and was totally innocent of helping to send her husband, George, and Anne Boleyn to the block. Nor that she was completely blameless in her part in helping Katherine Howard secretly meet Thomas Culpeper later in Henry VIII"s reign. However, when I heard that she had written a dual biography of Juana of Castile and Katherine of Aragon, I was intrigued enough to download it yesterday while browsing through Barnes & Noble. I've been wanting to learn more about Juana ever since I saw the film Juana La Loca and then read C.W. Gortner's wonderful novel, The Last Queen. On a side note: one of the great things about the Nook is how easy it is to buy books, which is also the downside of the Nook.

Having read the first 60 pages of the book, I'm sold. It's evident that Fox has really done her research.  There's none of the speculation which ruined both her first book, and Alison Weir's book on Mary Boleyn for me. Fox grounds her book with an overview of Juana and Katherine's mother Isabella of Castile (check out the portrait of Isabella on Julia Fox's web-site!).  I don't think it's possible to understand either of these two women without really getting to know Isabella, who is fascinating.  Queen of Castile in her own right, she sidestepped her older brother, to choose her own husband, picking Ferdinand of Aragon who was King of Sicily at time, when she was only 18 and he was 17. It was a dynastic marriage that turned into a love match, but frankly, Isabella must have been a pain to live with. Her determination to rid Spain of the Moors and unite the country is admirable but her religious intolerance against Moors and the Jews, kind of sticks in my craw. Expelling the Jews who refused to convert and and then inviting the Inquisition to set up shop before she even got rid of the Moors! You have to wonder if Ferdinand ever felt a bit emasculated. The kingdoms of Aragon and Castile were never officially united, and Castile was the larger, more prosperous country.

The book is filled with wonderful little details like a letter from Henry VII, where he asks that Katherine's attendents be beautiful, or at least not ugly! I can't wait to dig in to continue reading the book.  This was definitely worth the price of the download!

Mary at The Burton Review has a more in-depth review here.

You can find out more information about the author, Julia Fox, here. I must say that I prefer the cover for the US edition over the more staid UK cover.