Gaby Deslys (1881-1920)
Gaby Deslys (1881-1920)
(The Hawera and Normanby and Star [NZ] - November 12th, 1910)
THE REAL GABY DESLYS
BOHEMIAN WITH RESERVATIONS
The following account of Mdlle. Gaby Deslys, the "gay Parisienne," whom King Manuel loved not wisely but too well, and who was allegedly responsible for that indiscreet young monarch's downfall, is taken from the Sydney Sun.-
"I first saw Mdlle. Gaby Deslys in 1905, on the stage of 'Parisiana,' one of the leading Parisian music-halls, situated in the Boulevarde Poissoniere. She appeared to me a dainty, pretty, shapely little woman; young, for she could not have been more than 19 or 20; clever,for her dancing was not only memorable from its grace and agility, but for the fact that every movement had a meaning. It was psychological dancing in the highest form."
FIRST CONNECTION WITH ROYALTY
"At that time Mlle. Deslys attracted much attention. It would be a great exaggeration to say that she was the rage of Europe, or even of Paris. There were many actresses, dancers and beauties much more prominent in the public eye. But her beauty and her cleverness led to much being said and written about her, and it was not long before she attained the dizzy eminence of being able to command a royalty on the sales of her picture postcards. Socially, she was unknown. In the clubs and on the boulevards she was much discussed, but no name was ever heard coupled with hers."
"GABY IS MA BABY."
"A few weeks later, I was seated one evening in the Cafe to the Harcourt, the largest place of the sort on the Boulevard St. Michel, in the Latin Quarter. There was a fellow Australian and three American students with me at the table. At the others immediately surrounding us were a score of other Yankees, students and correspondents of the American papers. Suddenly there was a howl. 'Rah, rah, rah!' yelled the Yankees, and as I wondered whether they had suddenly gone mad or an anarchist outbreak was imminent, order evolved out of chaos in the chorus:-
'Gaby
She's ma baby;
She's ma honey and ma candy
and ma dove.
And it may be,
Little Gaby,
That you'll learn to return
ma love.'
Sung to the tune of a song popular in two continents, it made the glasses shake, and following the glances of the others I saw a girl enter - a bright, smiling, jolly-looking girl, well but not overdressed. I did not recognise her, and she looked so obviously American or English that I was quite surprised when she walked up to the tables, and said in slightly broken English, "Well, boys, how was you gettin' along?"
I was introduced, and found the lady to be not the American student I first thought her to be, nor the excessively prosperous artist's model that was the subject of my second guess, but the dancer whose turn I had enjoyed at Parisiana."
FOND OF ENGLISHMEN AND AMERICANS
"During the rest of my stay in Paris I saw much of Mlle. Deslys and nothing that didn't increase my admiration and respect for the girl. She was particularly friendly with the English and Americans in Paris, and as I was thrown constantly among this little community. I had opportunities of judging the girl's character considerably better than those who base their views on the chatter of the boulevardier and the ten-centime newspaper.
Unlike most of her profession, she was not fascinated by expensive pleasures. Earning a good salary, she always dressed well, but she showed herself to be just as pleased to sit with three or four of us at a 1.25 supper in a popular cafe as to go through all the glories of Maxim's or the Hotel St. Petersburg.
On one occasion a dozen of us took Mlle. Deslys and some other girl friends of the crowd - girls who had to work for their living, typists and shop girls - for a boating picnic to St. Cloud. The modest nature of the outing may be reckoned from the fact that it cost us fellows only 15 francs apiece. Yet I never saw a girl give greater evidence of thoroughly enjoying herself. Of her origin, I know nothing, but I fancy her parents were people in a humble position, living a few miles out of Paris.
On the other hand, Mlle. Deslys is a well-educated girl, and a girl of intelligence much above the average. She can speak English well, and German tolerably, and converse on any subject you put before her."
"ALL OF US LOVE GABY."
"Off the stage, Mlle. Deslys was physically more attractive than behind tne footlights. But added to these attractions was a charm of manner that was irresistible. Distinctly Parisian in many respects, Mdlle. Deslys differed from most of her fellow-countrymen in never being sex-conscious. There was nothing of the coquette about her.
She was a 'pally' girl, who made you forget that she was a girl. According to the Yankees' definition, she was a "good fellow," although, as one of them remarked, without anybody venturing to contradict, "I guess all of us love Gaby." It is very easy for respectable middle-aged persons 16,000 miles away to wonder why Manuel could have been such a fool, but I know some respectable middle-aged persons in Paris whom the Yankee newspaper man might have included in his sweeping assertion."
NO LOVER WITHOUT LOVE.
"As for Gaby herself, it was obvious, at any rate in those days, that she didn't love anybody. Unlike other dancers, whose beauty was a matter of much advertisement, Mlle. Deslys boasted no public and profitable amours as an additional bait to the sensation loving public. There was nothing puritanical about her. 'I have no lover,' she explained one evening with a smile and a shrug of her shoulders, 'because I do not love - as yet. Voila!'
That was her frank philosophy. Love was the necessity for the lover, not money, and from what I saw of Mlle. Deslys during those two months in Paris, I am convinced that she would have just as willingly thrown in her lot with Manuel had he been a penniless student. Her cabled statement, from Vienna, that 'There is no disgrace in being the King's mistress,' is, I am convinced, misunderstood. What Mlle. Deslys meant to convey was that, in accordance with ordinary Parisian morality, there was no disgrace in being the mistress of Manuel, the man she loved; not that there was no disgrace in being the mistress of any king.
It may be, of course, that the girl deceived me, that she is nothing but a mercenary adventuress; but it will take a lot to make me believe that, and there are twenty or thirty tolerably well-hardened and not impressionable Americans and Englishmen who will take their stand by my side when I say that Mlle. Deslys was five years ago one of the best-hearted, straight-forward, decent girls I have ever had the honor to know.
Now that he is free from the shackles of Royalty, it is up to Manuel to make the lady Mrs Braganza. I trust that he will be man enough to do it, and if they come to Sydney for their honeymoon, I'll be one of the first to congratulate him, and congratulate him honestly, too."
(Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette [USA] - April 06, 1920)
WANTED TO BE A JULIET AND DIED OF A BROKEN HEART
How the Sudden Death of Gaby Deslys Has Revealed Her Consuming Desire to Be Known as a Great Tragedienne Instead of Merely a Music Hall Favorite.
Every girl who ever thought of the stage has wanted to be a Juliet - just as every stage-struck young man has wanted to be a Romeo.
Love! The real thing, set in the most romantic way! Love that dies tragically! There you have it. Something to make them all adore you and cry about you. Well, no stage person, no actor or actress, secure in some other line of expression ever loses the wish to climb to the supreme level. And even the adorable Gaby Deslys was no exception. She was just naturally something else - a sprite, maybe', a flickering fairy of the stage.
But she wanted to be a Juliet. It was the dream of her life. The more they laughed and applauded her as something else, the more she longed to be that ecstatic Shakespearean heroine - to play "opposite" a real honest-to-goodness Romeo, to express in a passionate simplicity of stage art the classic instance of young, innocent first love.
She brooded over the ambition more than any knew, except her intimates. It is these intimates who declare that she really died broken hearted. For she never did get to be a Juliet.
"Life Was Her Greatest-Love"
One day she came to New York with a hundred hats, and heaven knows how many gowns. Yet wearing, them all was not her central thought. Her central thought was that America might make her a Juliet. But it didn't. After all her triumphs she went back to Paris very, very unhappy.
"To me," she said to her friends, "Juliet typifies the perfect exaltation of the noblest of passions! To die for love, what a wonderful privilege!"
But this romantic role was denied her in death, as had been the one she longed to portray in life. For Gaby knew no great consuming love, save her love of life. It was her chief charm. She radiated and bubbled and effervesced with it from finger tips and toe tips, it curled her bowed lips in winsome smiles, it haunted her witching ways and naughty pranks, and gave sinuous grace to her amazing gowns and nodding plumes.
To have seen Gaby, bounding with feline leaps on the stage, or stepping with half-repressed ferocity through the amorous paces of the murderous Apache dance! To remember her voice purling through some lilting French Chanson! To have seen her beautiful hair, tumbling over her rosy little ears, and into her limpid eyes, alight with the inspiration of her audience, and then to say that disappointment at being unable to play a role so different, so opposite, was oven partially responsible for the death of this beautiful, joyous girl, seems ridiculous.
And had there been nothing more in life for her than mere song and dance, such, an idea would appear as foolish as it sounds. Versions as to Gaby's birthplace and early station in life, are as various as they are. numerous. Some accounts even state that she hailed from Hungary with a distinctly Hungarian name. But she always said she came from Marseilles, of good parentage; and she ought to know.
Basking in Royalty's Smiles
How she ever endured her bounding vitality to remain bottled up in a convent until the age of 16, is a mystery, but she eventually ran away, and against her father's wishes, went-upon the variety stage, at the munificent salary of $10 a week. And so began a career that rivalled in the realm of the theatre, of love, and the adulation of the public, the glittering life's history of the beauties who reigned over the imagination of poets and artists and rulers in the golden age of Greece and Rome.
And in those early days of her triumph, there was no hint of the tragedy of the great shadow that was so prematurely to overtake her youth. Nor did she have the least yearning then, to impersonate tragedy on the stage. It was the joy of success that held her in its grip, and intoxicated her. And the joy of her spirit held her long line of suitors enthralled and enmeshed.
And what a romance unfolds itself in the personalities and personnel of those extravagant admirers! Not since the days when Thais and Phryne held sway in Alexandria and Athens, have gifts of such imperial value and beauty been showered upon any stage favorite. Heads crowned with kingly diadems, with the white hair of age, and with youth's romantic fervor, the flippant and serious alike, all fell under the spell of her flashing wit and beauty and radiant good nature.
It is too universally reported to be entirely discounted that the former King Manuel of Portugal lost his head and his crown, and the price of fabulous pearls, to the winsome Gaby. Nor was the more phlegmatic Anglo-Saxon temperament proof against her wiles, that is, the male temperament. For Queen Mary, with the instance of her royal Portuguese relative still very fresh in mind, had a heart-to-heart talk with her royal son, the Prince of Wales, "the morning after" he had been noticed to applaud the fair Gaby in her Music Hall performance with a far from royal reserve.
And the throne immediately thereafter called upon the bishops of the church to deliver a ukase {Imperial decree - Ed.} against "immorality in the Music Halls." British literature then rushed into the breach, with George Bernard Shaw and Sir James Barrie chief spokesmen for the much discussed Gaby, and they seem to have carried off the honors.
This pampered darling of the gods was even shielded from the occasional frowns of the sun. Mirrors and stained glass windows were so skilfully arranged over the wonderful gold bed in the exquisite bedroom of Gaby's London house, that no matter how dismal the rain or fog, there was a constant play of delicate light throwing a curious iridescence about the room, something like the rainbow after a summer storm.
One Wish That Came True
But though gentle and winsome to all, she felt no particular call for any special one of her many admirers. And the more they clamored at her door, the greater became her longing to do something really worth while, to make her name live in the annals of the stage.
"I am tired of being known as 'the beautiful Gaby' who wears pretty gowns. I want to be a real actress in a real play. I want my public to know me as I really am, the Gaby with a soul. I want to play Juliet!"
Then came her opportunity in 'Infatuation,' the motion picture play, that created a furore, and from that moment her every ambition in life was subordinated to her resolve to give the world her version of Juliet, that heroine of matchless love, triumphing in the very absence of its consummation.
One other emotion also consumed and wellnigh obsessed the beautiful Gaby. She had a horror of growing old, and perhaps ugly and even penniless. It was her consuming desire to go out in a flame of glory, at the pinnacle of her youth and beauty and fame, and strangely enough she had her wish.
And now she lies in her last rest, much as lay the Juliet she so passionately loved, clad in a simple white gown of tulle and chiffon, on a bed of white roses, with the medal of the blessed Virgin she never went without, the sole ornament on her breast.
And of her as of the lovely Juliet, it may be said "The air that had drunk in her words and her last long looks, still hung about the corners, as the air where a rose has bloomed holds a little while the memory of its breath."
(The Daily Mail [London, UK] - 12th February, 1920)
MLLE. GABY DESLYS
DEATH IN PARIS LAST NIGHT
HER BRILLIANT STAGE TRIUMPHS
FROM OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT
Paris, Wednesday.
Mlle, Gaby Deslys, the actress died to-night.
Shortly after returning from the United States, Mlle. Gaby Deslys developed an abscess in her throat, and during the two months she was in hospital underwent about a dozen operations.
GREAT-HEARTED ACTRESS - HER LONDON TRIUMPHS
Gaby Deslys was richly endowed with that very precious gift - personal charm. Not strikingly beautiful, not brilliantly educated, she had a wonderful way with her. I always thought she was more likeable of the stage than on it, writes a Daily Mail correspondent who knew her well. She was quiet. She was gracious. She had a splendid heart, filled with a giant love for her old mother in France.
Gaby - everyone called her that - was 36, and she was very little known till she came to this country. She always spoke very broken English. Perhaps she did not want to speak it too well; next to her amazing hats and the originality of her performances, her quaint speech was one of her great assets.
In the years before the war Gaby Deslys was one of the greatest attractions on the London stage. Even people who professed to be shocked by her could not resist going to see her. She drew an enormous salary. She recently returned her fortune for income tax purposes at £280,000, and she had a remarkable house in Kensington Gore.
Part of this house was furnished in luxurious Oriental fashion, and her prie-dieu - for she was a devout Catholic - was beautifully arranged.
GABY AND SIR J. M. BARRIE
Gaby Deslys was the only person for whom Sir James Barrie has ever written a revue. It was called "Rosy Kapture, the Pride of the Beauty Chorus" and was produced at the Duke of York's Theatre.
"He is a strange author," she said to a Daily Mail interviewer on the eve of the production. "He not like me to know what he means. When he look glad, then I know I doing it all wrong. But if he look triste then I know I doing it right."
At various times she got into troubles over her performances. At one time the Lord Chamberlain had complaints about a sketch she performed called "A la Carte," On another occasion the "Gaby Glide" came in for sharp criticism. On a third occasion she and her dancing partner, Harry Pilcer, severed forces suddenly.
It was her success in London that "made" her for both Paris and New York, but latterly, partly owing to the throat trouble from which she suffered, she began to tire of the stage. Just before her last illness, in fact, she announced her intention of retiring. "I have quite enough of acting, except, perhaps now and then for charity," she said.
"I could not bear to feel my audiences growing cold towards me. Besides, I think it is time I got married. I have found the man, and am very fond of him."