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IS NON MONOGAMY FOR YOU?

CELEBRATE

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FADE INTO YOU : MAZZY STAR

BAWDY

 

CAMERA GIRL : THE COMING OF AGE OF JACKIE BOUVIER KENNEDY by CARL SFERRAZZA ANTHONY : MISTRESS MANIFESTO BOOK REVIEW

 Camera Girl has a different perspective on the life of Jackie Bouvier Kennedy than most of the Jackie books I've read because it focuses on her life before her marriage to John F. Kennedy as a career woman.  The senator who would take the White House and end his presidency assassinated. was barely romantic and had not actually courted her much.  He was too busy and too much of a womanizer to think of it.  

Born Jacqueline Bouvier in 1929, the child of divorced parents who were always at war over her and her sister,  the future First Lady had a natural intelligence but wasn't especially academic. She was artistic and drew fun images revealing a sense of humor, considered being an actress, but being a writer was her most earnest desire.  Only an eighth French, more Irish, Jackie worked hard to learn French language and culture and adopt that ethnicity as her heritage. She was multi-lingual and a perfectionist.

Her step-father had greater wealth than her father, who was in a slow decline of fortunes and health. Pressure to marry and before the age of 21, she wanted to be a writer and journalist first. This book follows her efforts, against sexism, as she established herself as a roving photographer who wrote an article composted of  quotes of conversation. She came up with the interesting  questions and that asked people from all walks of life to answer. Her time as the Inquiring Photographer lasted about a year and a half and ended as she became officially engaged to the Senator. One of her articles focused on questions inspired by Marilyn Monroe.  

How could Jackie do more than be a housewife when most employers had the "you'll just get married anyway" attitude?  She, as an expensively educated young woman, tried to campaign to be assigned to hard news but the social status implied by that education actually went against her. (There were women employed as journalist at the time.)  Connections landed her a start, but even then she was told that an engagement would end her employment. 

It didn't help that her mother felt that men would not marry intelligent women and that her aspirations for her daughters was that they would marry way up.  Many a beau entered her life, most not serious, and she herself began to see marriage as the strongest opportunity she could have. She had a fiancee that she returned a ring to.

This book asserts that, though years younger than Kennedy, and certainly not as worldly, Jackie knew what she was doing when she decided she wanted to marry the womanizing man.  Warned by John's best friend Lem, she decided that a lot of opportunities, including being able to influence, came along with being the wife on a senator or First Lady. She advised her sister-in-law to evaluate those opportunities to stay in marriage. She used her research skills to help John F. Kennedy succeed.

Page 285:

Distinctly unromantic, Kennedy qualified his inability to easily express emotion by claiming it was a result of his mother being unemotional and rarely expressing affection to him.  By accepting this deficiency in him, Jackie realized she was just as unusual...."

***

Here at Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot, we have been interested in the saga of Jackie, Johm, Marilyn, and Big and Little Edie Bouvier.  Of interest to the Little Edie fans is that Jackie's father, nicknamed Black Jack, a sexual adventurer, may have had an affair with Little Edie, his niece.  You'll also learn more than in Grey Gardens about how it was that the Bouvier inheritance was depleted and possibly mismanaged by Black Jack, who was the brother of Big Edie. He may have used some of their money to finance Jackie's first trip to Europe in 1950, where she lived in Paris.

This book has much to reveal about Jackie and the relationship she had with those parents, who both wished to control her and have her to themselves; as a result she became careful with her words - both written and spoken.  She manipulated them by sometimes leaving out information or thinking three steps ahead.

page 91:

Reviewing her early writings during her train ride from New York to Kingston, Rhode Island, station, near Newport, would remind Jackie that she not only had a gift for adapting the events of her life into fictionalized stories but had always relied on doing so, particularly as a way of responding to the unpleasant incidents of her life, including her parent's divorce.  "It amuses me," she wrote at that time, to craft fairy tales.  When her balance was thrown off or her boundaries were crossed, Jackie would retreat into the role of imaginative chronicler, casting allies as heroes, violators as villains, artfully transfiguring reality.  She often illustrated her fanciful chronicles with caricatures of friends, family members, teachers - and herself, literally turning her real life into an absurdist cartoon world.

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If you're interested in more about Jackie, John F. Kennedy, Big and Little Edie Beale, Marilyn Monroe - you've come to the right place.  To pull up posts about these famous people, you can use the search feature and put in their names, or you can go into the archives.

2014 

August
LITTLE EDIE BOUVIER BEALE of Grey Gardens Fame. Her Affair With a Married Man May Have Done Her In.

December

Special Edition
AN EYE TO JACKIE KENNEDY ONASSIS

2016 

May

MARILYN MONROE (Norma Jeane Baker)

Mistress of Super Agent Johnny Hyde Early in Her Career

N ANGEL WING : HOLIDAY GIVING and CHARITIES 

2017

March

KATHLEEN “KICK” KENNEDY ; Sister of J.F.K., Widow of Billy Hartington, Mistress of Peter Wentworth Fitzwilliam When They Died in A Plane Crash

2020

July

JUDITH KATHERINE IMMOOR  AKA CAMPBELL EXNER : MISTRESS OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY : COURIER BETWEEN KENNEDY AND MOBSTER SAM GIANCANA

August

MIMI ALFORD : BEFORE MONICA LEWINSKY THERE WAS A J.F.K. INTERN IN THE WHITE HOUSE

September

MARY PINCHOT MEYER : WAS SHE THE PRESIDENT'S TRUE SOUL MATE?  WAS SHE ASSASSINATED BY THE C.I.A?

CATHERINE WALTERS INTO OLD AGE : WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT and THE PRINCE OF WALES FIGURE INTO HER SURVIVAL

Perhaps the most surprising thing about courtesan Catherine Walter's story is that ex-lover, poet, and confidant Wilfrid Scawen Blunt figured in it to the end.

After her brief time in Paris, Catherine returned to England.  In the 1880's she featured in the goings on in Mayfair - London, as she had twenty hears earlier when her beauty and horsemanship made her career. She set herself up in a house in 1882 and began writing with Blunt once more, despite the ending of their romance which had been horrible for him. It turns out that she and Wilfrid wrote letters back and forth to each other for forty years.  Perhaps her instincts had been right that he would make for a loyal friend all along.  

At her house in Mayfair, Catherine became the hostess of a salon, which was the more fashionable way to be 'at home' to receive friends on a certain day and hour, as had been the custom. It was because of this salon that she began to be included again in society at least a little bit, as the class structure and notions of womenhood began to change slowly. She held teas on Sunday afternoons, when she knew that men would be able to come and women would generally not be able to. Both Blunt and the Prince of Wales came to visit as did the Prime Minister Gladstone. The women who showed up tended to be artists, writers, and actresses. 

It's not known who all were her 'protectors' were in her years as a courtesan in England, but what is known through Blunt is that in his last visit to her, when he and she were both debilitated with age, she showed him a drawer full of letters which proved that she also had been writing back and forth with the Prince of Wales, who seemed interested also in her welfare. Implied is that possibly the Prince had been one of the men who had once had a relationship with her and provided for her.

Catherine Walters had the gift of making old lovers into friends. (This reminds me of the woman who may be considered the most famous courtesan of the 21st century, Pamela Digby Churchill Harriman who also remained friends with the various men who kept her.)

She kept a friendship with Marquis of Hartington - Spencer Compton Cavendish, now in politics, who had been a man she once wanted to marry, and whose family had provided a liveable, life-long annuity.

However, as she aged she had increasing trouble with her lungs and at one point it was HRH, the Prince of Wales who sent a doctor to attend to her.  In 1889 the cure was the South of France, and months away from cold, rainy London.  Both Hartington and the Prince of Wales came to visit her as she lived in the South of France.  In her mid sixties her health had declined to the point where was in pain and took daily medications. She grew thin and was half deaf and half blind by 1918. She still wrote, using pencil instead of pen, her handwriting difficult to read. In 1920 she had a fatal stroke and died.

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BIGHEARTED

 

VICTORIAN ERA ENGLAND AND IMPROVEMENTS FOR WOMEN'S RIGHTS

 Page 309 :

".... All the great courtesans of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries treasured their autonomy and guarded it jealousy, an impropriety which marked them off, more than most anything else, from their 'respectable' sisters. This was so even though the position of women - particularly married women - in the mid-nineteenth century was better than it had ever been.  It is hard to imagine, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the profoundly radical changes to the position of women about the Divorce Act of 1857, and the Married Women's Property Act of 1882. Before the latter a married woman could own no property (although among the very rich, pre-nupital settlements often circumnavigated this), nor even control any earnings she might have (this was changed by legislation in 1878), and she had the legal status of a minor, on par with children, criminals and the insane. Although prior to 1857 she could be divorced by her husband, she herself was debarred from filing a divorce suit - or any other kind of legal action - against him. Most critical of all was the fact that the husband had complete control over the children, who like his wife, were his legal property. A woman had no redress. In the case of her adultery, for instance, a husband could - and invariably did - simply take her children away from her for good.

The Acts of 1857 and 1882 changed all this.  As well as divorce and other law reforms, the nineteenth century saw many other campaigns by women to improve their circumstances - the campaigns for the vote, for the expansion of job opportunities, and for better educational rights all belong to this period..."

ARE YOU A FEMINIST?

Britannica defines FEMINISM

  

HOW COURTESANS TOOK ON MALE PRIVILEDGE FOR THEMSELVES

One of the fascinating aspects of Katie Hickman's book about courtesans, which focuses on the women of England who came into this lifestyle, is her reportage on other aspects of a courtesan's lifestyle. She reports on finances, on contraception, and on the character and personalities and values of the successful courtesan.

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt moved on from his fraught relationship with Catherine Walters in Paris.  When it seemed that his association with Catherine would cause scandal, his boss removed him to another diplomatic post.  He was considered an eligible bachelor and even became the unsaid fiancee of a young woman whose parents approved of the match but, reminded of his love for Catherine and seeing how it compared for his feelings for this other woman, he was unable to make the proposal.

These excerpts from pages 308 and 309 have much to say:

"In many ways Blunt's behavior was not at all unusual for a man of his class and times.  The ability to separate what he himself would call "practical romance" from either idealized romance or sexual conquests was a perfectly acceptable way for a man to conduct his affairs, so long as he was discreet: and Blunt who later quite consciously made the decision to marry for money, saw no shame in it. ..."

***

He was aware of the double standard - one for men - another for women.

***

Page 309:  "It goes without saying that when women tried to emulate this masculine behavior it became an "immorality" for which society could not forgive them.  The only women who were in some measure outside these constraints were courtesans.  The penalties melted out by society could not touch the demi-monde (although some would say that being part of this shadowland , was the penalty) and as a social group they were thus almost uniquely free.

It was not just sexual chastity that was the issue here, but also, by extension, a woman's whole autonomy. Blunt, who in his way, was in many ways a forward thinker about women, never really blamed Catherine for her promiscuity, or even for the fact that she accepted money for it (although he did not like it).  His blame was for something altogether more subtle, something that he himself could barely articulate: the fact that she could accept him as a lover, but still desire to keep her independence from him. This was the really tormenting fact for him about their liaison. And it was this which, in his eyes, made her 'unvirtuous.'

Ask your self this question (and maybe you'll want to leave me a comment) :  Do you compartmentalize one relationship from another and why?

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BEMUSED

 

CATHERINE WALTERS and DIPLOMAT WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT : HIS FIRST EROTIC OBSESSION ENDS IN HEARTBREAK AND A LIFETIME OF FIGURING OUT WHAT HAPPENED TO HIM

He was twenty-three and unconventional for a diplomat attached to the British Embassy in Madrid, Spain. She was twenty-four. Her relationship with Marquis of Hartington - Spencer Compton Cavendish was over and, if she didn't overspend, she had decent financial support for life from his family. The beginning of their relationship was played out in the luxury society resort of Biarritz

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt fell immediately in love with Catherine, who he called Esther in some of his poems, as if to keep some privacy for the two of them. Not inexperienced sexually, he was also erotically obsessed with Catherine. When they first met, he was honored that she showed off that she was with him. He was sure she loved him back and never imagined that their relationship would end.  She had seduced him and she shut out all others to concentrate on him - at first.

He was young but had been posted in three capitols and he had even kept a mistress himself in Madrid for a while.  How innocent could he be?  He believed himself to be special because she had chosen him.  Doubt and jealousy began to plague the man, however, and what made it all worse was that he insisted in going back to Paris with her and there could be no doubt that she was not his at all. They broke up and he was devastated. Catherine Walters was not about to give up her life as a courtesan because she aspired to the rich life. So when he got posted to Paris in 1864 he didn't seek her out right away.

When he did meet up with Catherine again, it was she who summoned him and suggested they find a place to live together. She was in charge. Wilfrid saw that she was living in lesser circumstances than she had lived in before and Catherine claimed that she no longer wanted luxury. They found a suitable four room apartment and he moved in. But first, before she went to live with him, she had to take care of some business in London. That business was obviously a contract to be kept by yet another man of wealth, an old friend she said, an Englishman.

When she returned to Paris, Blunt realized that once again Catherine had allowed him to live in fantasy. He stayed in the four room apartment while she again lived in luxury. Just as Sophia Baddelely had her Mrs. Steele who lived with her and played many roles in her life including intermediary, Catherine had her Julie who was to explain the change to Blunt.  Catherine now had her young sister living with her, she said.  As if her teenage sister, sixteen and her age when she first became a kept woman, needed to be kept from the truth?

One day Blunt walked in and there he was - her English patron - comporting himself as Catherine's owner. One does wonder if Catherine allowed this to happen.  Maybe Blunt took some time to get used to the idea of sharing her with this man.  What was worse was seeing that she was also entertaining other men.

Blunt was willing to have Catherine however it effected him emotionally. While she received from her rich English patron, who Blunt thought of as a man who needed to spend to show off his wealth, Blunt benefited by her generosity to him. If she had not said so, somehow he had not realized the obvious, and yet it is clear that she did value him as a confidant for some time and then he spent his life trying to understand her and what had happened to him.  She trusted Wilfrid enough to talk about her life with him and he would preserve much of what we know about Catherine Walters.

One of her personal policies was to not have any women friends.

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CATHERINE WALTERS and the MARQUIS OF HARTINGTON : HE COULD NOT MARRY HER BUT SHE GOT A LIFELONG SETTLEMENT

His full name was Spencer Compton Cavendish, Marquis of Hartington and he was the heir of the Duke of Devonshire.  Catherine Walters had met him when she was nineteen years old, and he became her second known patron who came from the aristocracy.

It was thought that his relationship with Catherine Walters had been brief but as it turned out Blunt, the poet who was inspired by Catherine and had her ear, had in his possessions a couple hundred letters between Catherine and Spencer which proves that they had contact for four years, writing to each other every week.  Spencer and Catherine were affectionate with each other. The two of them rode to the hunt, sporting together. Maybe it was even true love.

Like last month's Courtesan, Sophia Baddeley, who was an earlier, Georgian England Courtesan, and who managed to keep a bit of good reputation and a status because of her stage presence as an actor and singer, Catherine was able to use her skill as a horsewoman to be accepted by some of those who would otherwise ostracise her.

Page 281 : "Catherine's horsemanship, for which she was passionately admired by her contemporaries, meant that she found an acceptance on the hunting field that was denied to her in every other social situation,  Stories about her daring, both on the field and off, abound.  SHe once cleared the eighteen- foot water jump at the National Hunt Steeplechase at Market Harborough for a 100 pound bet with ease, after three other riders had tried and failed.

***

By 1850, letters prove, Catherine Walters was already the Marquis of Hartington's mistress and living in London.  He was beginning to get involved in politics and so he was busy and could not always come by but she made useful her time by being tutored, improving her writing.  

She also believed he would marry her if his father approved, despite her not being accepted by society. 

Page 283 : "As a protector, however, he was generous to a fault. For all his great expectations, by the standards of the day Hartington was not personally very rich, and he was obliged to survive o an allowance from his father.  Despite this he paid Catherine a generous allowance of her own, and in his letters there are references to additional gifts of 100 pounds, 150 pounds, and even 250 pounds.

***

Not one to sit around and wait for him, Catherine rode on horseback in Hyde park, both for exercise and to show herself off as other courtesans also did.  Though she might have not exactly have started out wanting the fame she got, it was part of the life and she became a star, like Sophia Baddeley had. The notoriety went against her dearest wish to have Spencer as a husband. In 1861 he wrote to her hinting that it might be best if she forgot all about him.  The man was not going to make a marriage with her and he knew it. By 1862 he admitted that their relationship had to end.

Catherine knew what she wanted and was not one to let Spencer go without a fight. She followed him to New York where he later claimed he was reluctant to have more to do with her.  The relationship was off and on for another year. Finally when she knew he would not take her back and marry her, she sold her London house, her horses and carriages, and moved to Paris.  It was not impossible for a man to marry a courtesan but it was rare and usually scandalized his family and society.  Perhaps her heritage background, her Irish and Catholic beginnings, as well as her common status would have made marriage with someone as elevated as the Marquis of Hartington impossible even if she had not been a courtesan?

Though he could not and would not marry her, the Devonshire family didn't abandon Catherine Walters financially. She received 500 pounds a year from them which continued to her death in 1920, even after Spencer's death.  The 500 pounds a year gave her a financial freedom and once again, still a very young woman, Catherine could have taken that money and ended her life as a courtesan.  I find it honorable that the Devonshire family kept to that agreement and that people of their status and means understood what being put aside may have meant to a young woman who had to seek her own living as a teenager.

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CATHERINE WALTERS : IRISH-ENGLISH HORSEWOMAN WHO EVEN IMPRESSED THE FRENCH and RETIRED WELL

Continuing with author and historian Katie Hickman's book, we now focus on another English Courtesan she profiles, Catherine Walters, who was called The Courtesan's Courtesan and rose to fame in Victorian England and, of course, Paris.

CATHERINE WALTERS

"Skittles"

1839-1920

Though the Parisians and the French in particular were skeptical of the English Courtesans, and Paris therefore would seem an unlikely place for an English Courtesan to rise, this is where Catherine Walters did indeed become famous, though she wasn't there for long.  

The astonishingly beautiful Catherine was first kept at the age of sixteen. Then in London, in 1863, she began a relationship with a young man who was inspired to write poetry by her, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, who, it was said, was so obsessed with her that he could never really love another woman again after Catherine. Some of the information we have about Catherine's life comes from Blunt who played a supportive role in her life but also seems to have been tremendously swayed by idealism, unable to fully face the reality of Catherine's lifestyle.

Catherine was reportedly a blond with deep blue eyes, though photographs show her to be brunette and her hair was also called auburn. (Perhaps she had dyed her hair?)

Her body was so exquisite that she was considered to be perfectly formed. She most impressed others - in particular the French. with her style as a horsewoman for when she was riding sidesaddle, she wore a garment so well cut to show her body that it was rumored she was naked beneath the cloth.  People were in awe to see her as she joined the parade of other courtesans who rode to show off their fine clothing, jewelry, horses and carriages.

Page 279 : ... "And how smart, how elegant, what a horse woman, what an air of originality and honesty in the presentation of her carriages!' wrote Zed in his portrait of her. 'When she appeared on the avenue de L'Imperatrice driving herself with two beautiful sparkling pure-blooded horses, followed by two grooms on horseback in splendid and elegant uniform... every head turned, and all eyes were on her.'...

She gave off aristocratic bearing but she was born in Liverpool to a sea captain and his Irish wife and was raised as a Catholic.  Blunt, who claimed to be her confidant, said her mother died when she was four and that as a girl Catherine was sent off to be raised in a convent school. After running away from the school she worked for a horse stable and rode the horses to display them to customers, earning a percentage. Her nickname 'Skittles' came from that time.

At sixteen she was already a mistress of a man named George Lord Fitzwilliam, the master of the Fitzwilliam Hounds.  When she separated from him after a year, he gave her a settlement if 300 pounds a year plus a lump sum of 2000 pounds.

Her story reminds us a bit of that of CoCo Chanel, who was also motherless at a young age and raised in a convent school, and who left there in need of earning her own keep, becoming a a young kept woman in the process.

Walters' career as a courtesan did not end in her teenage years with a first lover, who, it could be argued, provided her enough money to settle into a different, more modest lifestyle. Like many a courtesan, she desired to experience more, to own more,  to take it as far as it would go, and her beauty plus her horsemanship attracted many potential suitors.  

Though we know the names if some of them, money she was given in her teens and early twenties may have allowed her to leave fame behind and settle into a house in Mayfair where she continued to maintain old friendships with some of the noteworthy men she'd had relationships with and possibly attract more such suitors.  She was able to retire well, with the attention of some of those she had met years earlier seeming to care about her welfare and continuing to provide in some way.  

Catherine Walter's will described her as a 'spinster.'  She had never married and had no children. Unlike Sophia Baddeley she had not spent herself into poverty, though she surely had some times in her life when she had to budget carefully.

Something we always wonder is how or if or when a courtesan is in love or loves the man who has set her up in luxury.  If not, how does she separate that relationship, in which she must show special devotion and often be on call for him from other relationships? Is she an expert at compartmentalization? Or is it that she separates love from sex? Or is it that she can love more than one person at a time? In the case of Blunt, author Katie Hickman gives us the impression that Catherine knew to keep him around because she needed him and his devotion to her, prioritizing the men who could provide for her as he, a mere diplomat, could not.  As I see it, to do so took some diplomacy, keeping some air of mystery, some ability to not tell the whole truth perhaps, or to allow a man to think what he might while she took care of herself. Is that manipulative or is it simply that we cannot be fully responsible for what someone else is thinking or feeling?

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The image on the book cover of Courtesans by Katie Hickman is not Catherine Walters but is a portrait of actress Sarah Bernhardt..

Wikipedia is the source for the photo of Catherine Walters used above.

BASHFUL

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