It's the weekend, and thoughts turn to balls...

Oh, those fabulous balls we used to hold!

Well, we can only dream of being invited to one of the notorious bals masqué held by one of the early 20th century's most extravagant society hosts Count Étienne de Beaumont.







His guest list alone was a glittering tableau of previous "exhibits" here at the Dolores Delargo Towers Museum of Camp - the Marchioness Casati, Jean Cocteau and Jean Marais, The Comte's niece Comtesse Jacqueline de Ribes, Serge Lifar, Christian Dior, Alexis von Rosenberg Baron de Redé, Nancy Cunard - as well as luminaries such as Romanov Princess Natalia Pavlovna (Natalie) Paley, the Viscount and Vicomtesse de Noailles, Marcel Proust, Pablo Picasso, Oliver Messel, Erik Satie, Duc Fulco di Verdura, Tristan Tzara, billionaire Gerald Murphy and his wife Sara and Leonide Massine. Man Ray was his "house photographer"...





The Comte was bitterly satirised in Raymond Radiguet’s Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel, yet he was not merely a spoilt aristocratic party-giver. He was also one of Paris's foremost patrons of the arts - notably the more avant garde ones that were the penchant of some of his guests - and his money ensured that some of the 20th century's most influential works were brought to the public's attention.



Regardless of his influence, it's his balls we love!



Le Comte Étienne Bonnin de la Bonninière de Beaumont (9th March 1883 - 4th February 1956)

A significant Nancy

And Beauty walked alone there
Unpraised, unhindered
Defiant, of single mind
And took no rest and has no epitaph.
- Nancy Cunard, Parralax


Nancy Cunard by Man Ray



In the words of Carla Kaplan:

If you were looking for a paragon of the flapper, Nancy Cunard would seem to be an ideal candidate. The daughter of British aristocrats, Cunard was a stylish, rail-thin beauty, alternately celebrated as an icon of rebellion and reviled as a sexual adventuress. Harold Acton claimed she inspired (and probably slept with) "half the poets and novelists of the 'twenties.'" As much as anyone, she embodied the sexual freedom of the 1920s; indeed, her slick-haired, smoking, dark-eyed image became synonymous with that decade. (Cunard herself could not have cared less: "Why the smarming over 'The Twenties'?" she would later sneer. "To hell with those days! They weren't so super-magnificent!") Yet she also fought tirelessly for other kinds of freedom ("equality of races... of sexes... of classes" - the "three things that mattered"), taking up the cause of workers, black Americans, anarchists, Spanish Republicans, anticolonialist revolutionaries and avant-garde artists.

The New Yorker's exacting Paris correspondent, Janet Flanner (aka Genêt), judged her to have "the best mind of any Anglo-Saxon woman in Europe." You wouldn't know any of this from Cunard's reputation: She is mainly remembered, if she's remembered at all, as a rich white girl who crossed the Atlantic to sleep with black men. Not that Cunard would have been surprised. As she once remarked, "Reputations are simply hell and there's nothing - or little enough - to be done about changing them."

Nancy Cunard biography