A PERLE BEYOND PRICE

RENEE PERLE AND JACQUES-HENRI LARTIGUE

           There was understandable international interest in the news that I was changing my screen saver, abandoning that image of Marlene Dietrich from Shanghai Express.

           Now the furore can end, since her replacement has been chosen. For the foreseeable future, it will be this woman, Renée Perle, who will greet me at the start of each working day.         

    The photograph, from about 1931, is by her lover, Jacques-Henri Lartigue. Born in Romania, she had just come to Paris and was starting to find work both as artist's model and in the world of haute couture.

           Jacques-Henri was born into wealth. He got his first camera when he was seven and used it to record the doings of his family and their friends. People who would have shunned the average amateur were happy to pose for this polite little boy, so obviously "one of us". For the rest of his life, Lartigue occupied himself with photography and painting but nothing one could really call "work". His images remained undiscovered until the early nineteen sixties, when his wife dragged him into the Museum of Modern Art in New York and showed them his dozens of albums, a hoard of images, most unseen since they were taken.

           Lartigue also kept a diary, documenting his romantic adventures in the Paris of the années folles - including a fetish about women's hands; he loved to apply polish to their nails.  It describes his first meeting with Renée.

"Along the sidewalk of the Rue de la Pompe, I see two women standing in the shadow of a street lamp. Are they waiting for someone or... something? One of the women is tall and slender, the other is tiny: an umbrella next to a pot of flowers. Later, in the Bois, the 'umbrella' is in my car between the 'flowers' and me. I look at her profile. A long neck; a very straight, very small nose. A shiny, stray hair lock caresses her mouth. She has gloves on... I wish I could see her hands. Hands are so important!" 

Wondering aloud if she might have been Mexican, he received the reply, "Romanian - my name is Renee Perle. I used to be a model at Doeillet." They make a date for the thé dansant at a fashionable café, where Lartigue breathlessly awaits her.

"Half past five at the Embassy. I wait for my 'umbrella' from last night. I need a whisky. I’m very shy deep down, and ready to be furious if she doesn’t show up. It’s my curiosity that would be most disappointed.

Five thirty-five. There she is! Can it really be her? Ravishing, tall, slim, with a small mouth and full lips, and dark porcelain eyes. She casts aside her fur coat in a gust of warm perfume. We’re going to dance. Mexican? Cuban? Her very small head sits on a very long neck. She is tall; her mouth is at the level of my chin. When we dance, my mouth is not far from her mouth. Her hair brushes against both.

She takes off her gloves. Long, little girl’s hands. Something in my mind starts dancing at the thought that one day perhaps she would agree to paint the nails of those hands…"     

     Renee and those nails……

The relationship lasted about two years, and ended, of course, in tears. "She is always making scenes," Lartigue wrote. "Is it jealousy, or is it madness? Maybe it is the need to be assaulted, to be made unhappy and to cry - all for the sake of a reconciliation? I am far too down-to-earth, too much of a spectator and too bad an actor to fall into the trap of playing the kind of game Renée wishes me to play."

           In quieter moments, he photographed her, repeatedly, seldom smiling, often pouting, sometimes at the wheel of a sporty car, often lounging in some Riviera villa or garden, and almost always in the fashionable clothing of the time. His images remind us of how differently silk stockings shine, compared to nylon, and what adventures are possible when certain skins encounter the cosmetics of that time. And then there are her nails….

Do women like her still exist? If only…..