The Story of a Passionate Love Between a Dashingly Hand Some Heartbreaker and a Prima Donna Is Described by Susan Smit in a Compelling Fashion.’ – De Telegraaf
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SUSANTHE FIRST WOMAN SMIT ‘The story of a passionate love between a dashingly handsome heartbreaker and a prima donna is described by Susan Smit in a compelling fashion’ De Telegraaf The First Woman She was the diva of all international opera houses that had sworn never to get married. He was the fighter, thegambler, and the heartbreaker with the angelic face who excelled on stage. Together Geraldine Farrar and Lou Tellegen starred in silent movies and were one of the most legendary Hollywood couples of their time. In The First Woman Susan Smit depicts, with a razor-sharp pen, their boundless ambition, their doubts, fears and passionate love that is doomed to fail. But at the same time the novel is the story of an exciting era, in which Europe loses its innocence after a gruesome war; the women’s movement slowly gains power and a mass medium is born that will change the world for good: cinema. With this dazzling novel, based on histo- ric facts and which takes us from the backstreets of Paris and the courts of the German Empire, to New York and Hollywood, Smit will again touch the heart of her readers. Lebowski Agency / Oscar van Gelderen E: [email protected] T: +31 6 46096823 Quotes ‘Smit describes the magnetic relationship between the two stars in a sensitive manner and endows the reader with so- mething from the zeitgeist, the First World War about to break out and the rise of the movie as a mass medium.’ – Trouw ‘The story of a passionate love between a dashingly hand- some heartbreaker and a prima donna is described by Susan Smit in a compelling fashion.’ – De Telegraaf Susan Smit has chosen her subject well, a star couple from the beginning of the twentieth century, and has written it up carefully in a novel that is somewhere between a docu- mentary (with an eye for the First World War and the rise of the moving pictures) and a psychological novel.’ – de Volkskrant It’s clever how Smit’s novel involves you totally in the mar- riage of those two ambitious reckless and faithless people. You also get to experience the state of affairs in the world just after the First World War.’ – Veronica Magazine ‘With The First Woman an unknown, beautiful love affair is being thrust into the spotlights again.’ – Hebban ***** Susan Smit The First Woman Lebowski Agency, 2017 © Susan Smit, 2017 © Dutch translation: Anne Roetman, Arjaan van Nimwegen & Thijs van Nimwegen, 2017 © Lebowski Publishers, Amsterdam 2017 Cover design: Peter de Lange Photograph of the author: © Danique van Kesteren Typesetting: Crius Group, Hulshout www.lebowskipublishers.nl www.overamstel.com [Colofon_Overamstel.eps] Lebowski Publishers is an imprint of Overamstel Publishers bv All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Table of Contents The First Woman 9 Interview by Het Parool ‘This is the tragedy of successful women’ 351 Biography 355 5 For ‘the indecent, the greedy, the imperious, the unruly, the apostate, the flammable and the tumultuous’. (after Toon Tellegen, whose great-great-grandfather was Lou’s brother) 7 Geraldine Hollywood, 1935 Shortly after midnight the telephone rings. My father is in bad health and I dash into the living. As I take up the phone a man asks me if it’s me talking. Breathless I confirm. His matter–of-fact tone reassures me. This is not the voice of someone bringing bad news. ‘I’m with the press and I thought you’d probably appre- ciate to know Lou Tellegen deceased.’ Hearing your name increases my heartbeat. You being dead does not pervade immediately. I loved you the way a person probably can love only once in a lifetime. I worshipped you, but the image of you as well. Oh, the fantasies in which we garb our lust. I was young, not yet aware that our gaze upon our beloved says more about our own heart than about the other one’s. In time, reality drove off the dream, but that is no more than a rule – one best accepted without bitterness. I was attracted by your darkness, not by your light. It was a fatal, irrevocable beckoning, like the sucking power of a pitch-black void. Your obscurity was hanging hea- 9 vily around me. At the same time some playfulness shone through your masculine earnest, cool like a street kid’s. There was a frivolity which seemed to keep you from really losing your grip, whatever the circumstances. You were a bum with a gentleman’s distinction, muscles steeled, face aristocratic. Side view sharp and powerful, the way they would print them on countless movie posters in the years to come, most of the time looking down on a woman in your arms, either willing or recalcitrant. When we first met, you were an enigma to me, but your keynote reached me already. It was a deep, humming note, as breathtaking as it was uncanny, which, given the chance, would drown everything else out. I let you into my life, fully aware I did put it all in jeopar- dy doing so – all I had achieved, all I had acquired. I did it in the blink of an eye, though I made it seem you still had to conquer me. ‘How do you feel hearing this, and what can you say about it?’ The man’s voice on the other end of the line has an ex- cited quiver now. I expected my desires to have worn away over the years, to have been perished together with my rancor and resent- ment. But time did not do its healing job. And your death does not bring mercy. There should be a song about you and me. I would sing it in a thin voice alternately resounding with disarray, flaring 10 hope and resistance. I would make my voice whine, rise, fall, shiver and exult. I would sing it once. And never again. I reach for the table’s edge, then for the sofa’s back, stooped down. It feels like someone kicked a ball into my stomach. ‘Why would his death interest me anyhow?’ I ask calmly and I hang up. 11 Part 1 13 1 Lou August 1901, Paris A screaming sound awakens him. Someone wiggles up a window, pulls it up and beats a rug. Lou pulls himself up, sitting on the wooden street bench. Now he can hear the voices of day laborers, maids and clerks walking to their jobs. Their laughing echoes from the facades. People sud- denly disappear underground, on a stair to a stop on the new subway line. The line is said to cross underneath the whole city, from east to west. So he did fall asleep, partly sprawled across his suit cases. Getting up from the bench he feels his rigid muscles and stretches his stiffened limbs. Pain is pounding in his head and whining in his pelvis. He lifts his two suitcases, again surprised by their weight. Yesterday an uninvited call boy took up one of the valises on the platform in the Gare du Nord. The boy lifted it slightly, dropped it cursing and disappeared into the crowd. The suitcases are filled with books, clothes, shoes, everything he owns. In the shrill morning light the baroque of facades, win- dows, porches and balconies shows its filth and damages. It’s the very patina on the stately blocks of houses and the wide 15 boulevard, that he missed in yesterday’s gloaming, bringing out the city’s grandeur, like the crackled skin of a grand lady. He likes this city’s mug: arrogant, gracious, demanding. As if the city is meant for him, a feeling he never had before in the cities he lived in. Yesterday night he had stopped in front of a sign saying chambres meublés à louer, and had walked into the alley. The concierge showed him a stuffy room with only a bed in it, but as he drew back the curtains he saw an elegant balcony looking out on strollers on the Avenue de Clichy. The room was half a franc a night, payment in advance. Not much later he woke up by a vague sensation of disquiet and itch. In the light of the candle he lit he saw the origin: the bed was crawling with beetles and lice. The walls as well were covered with insects. Panicking and disgusted he dressed and took his things. He did not bother to walk down the stairs but dropped his suitcases from the balcony and jum- ped down after them. In a public bathhouse, open around the clock, he took a private bathroom and washed. Another half a franc. Now he’s got two of them left in his pocket. This morning he’s not concerned with his money pro- blems. The sun had gained power and the August foliage in the trees is casting a vibrating mosaic of summer light and shadow across the pavement. The light seems to have taken an advance on his golden future. Paris will do him good. Something in the air is giving him the feeling he could live here forever, like a god. In his coat pocket there’s a letter. This introduction is his 16 entrance to Paris’ artist world, eventually bound to guide him to the theatre world. It had been written by Constantin Meunier, a Belgian sculptor he modelled for, and it is ad- dressed to Auguste Rodin.