One day, while visiting my friend, Serge, I sat carefully on a small chair, maybe too fragile to support my weight. I asked him if it was an old child’s chair. He replied that it had belonged to Tallulah Bankhead. He said the reason the chair and matching chaise were so small was due to Tallulah’s diminutive stature. They were custom made by Syrie Maugham, the ex-wife of the late William Somerset Maugham. This really piqued my interest. After all, she was quite a star in her day. I loved her in the Alfred Hitchcock movie, Lifeboat (“Cartier dahling”). They were a gift from Tallulah to Vivian Vance Dodds, of “I Love Lucy” fame, and her husband John. It was said that when John and Vivian visited her one day, Tallulah had a few drinks too many and gave the chairs to Vivian when she complimented her on them. I asked Serge how he had come to own it, and so my story begins.
I met Serge through my cousin, Billy, former owner of Billy Blue men’s wear in Union Square. For many years Serge had an antique store on Union Street, in San Francisco’s Cow Hollow district. He primarily dealt in 18th century French antiques, and sold to many local luminaries. He closed up shop about 3 years ago, but still dabbles a bit in the business via his website, www.sergematt.com, and via the online antiques collective Go Antiques (http://www.goantiques.com/).
One evening Serge attended the San Francisco Opera with his business partner, Lola. Lola aspired to mingle with the local ‘glitterati’. She might have been described in the day as “piss elegant”, driving her white VW convertible Beetle swathed in expensive fur. She was half Jewish and grew up in Germany during WWII. She managed to elude the Nazis until someone turned her in. Lola’s non-Jewish mother had a friend who had joined the Nazi party early on and eventually became a member of the SS. He protected Lola and her sister, and sometimes found them busy work, such as sweeping in a railroad station in Munich. During the evening’s intermission they ran into Marcella Gump and her husband Len Curley. Also at their table was John Dodds, the husband of the late Vivian Vance (married from 1961 until her death in 1979) and a successful New York publisher. Introductions were made, champagne was ordered, and a friendship soon developed between Serge and Doddsy, as he was affectionately known to his friends.
They shared a love of the opera, antiques, fine dining, art, and all things cultural. Their friendship lasted until John’s death in 1986 and was close enough for John to leave Serge the Vance/Dodds estate.
While going through Vivian and John’s estate, Serge discovered an unpublished manuscript. It was Vivian Vance’s autobiography. She had sought to have it published shortly before her death. Apparently it sat in a dusty closet for 10 years. Except for excerpts printed by The NATIONAL ENQUIRER, it has never been seen by the public. Serge has been trying to find a publisher for it so perhaps we will all have an opportunity to read it in the future. This particular passage caused quite a stir amid rumors that Vivian and Lucille Ball were lesbian lovers. She wrote about the angst that this caused her.
Many of the other items that he inherited have been sold but there are many pieces with great stories still in his collection. He has a great photo of Lyndon B. Johnson and the first family sitting in a Model-T, inscribed to John and Vivian. There’s also a great photo of Maurice Chevalier autographed for Vivian. I remember an episode when he appeared on the show. He was quite the lady’s man of the day. The Vivian Vance/John Dodd inheritance also includes a carved, early American eagle, a pair of bronze mice titled The City Mouse and The Country Mouse, a pair of Venetian mirrors, a water color of their Santa Fe, NM house, an early American pair of Staffordshire dogs, and some miscellaneous artworks.
Also amongst the treasures was a painting by Olga Carlisle. I had never heard of her and did some online research to find that she had a rather extraordinary history before settling in San Francisco as a painter and writer. According to a piece published in the Chronicle in 2004 she is the “granddaughter of one of Russia’s most admired writers, and daughter of socialists imprisoned during the Bolshevik Revolution.” She also managed to smuggle the first copies of Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The First Circle” and “The Gulag Archipelago” out of the Soviet Union. The story has many twists and turns so make sure to read the article to fully appreciate it. Sometime after Vivian’s death, Ms. Carlisle asked Serge to return the painting to her. Being fond of the painting, he chose to keep it. If you look at a detail from the painting here (create link), it shows Vivian working in her garden in their house in Connecticut.
There was a painting on wood, of their cat Spartacus, by Barnaby Conrad (http://www.barnabyconrad.com/about_Barnaby_Conrad.html), who had quite a life, which included, in addition to artist, bullfighting, boxing, and writing.
Also included amongst the items that Serge inherited was a scrapbook that belonged to Vivian. Serge had mentioned the scrapbook to me some months prior. I was anxious to see it. One day, when I was visiting, I asked if he had located it. He hadn’t and went into another room to search for it. I sat in the living room, perusing Vivian’s manuscript and could hear Serge rifling through stuff in the other room. After a while, I went to see how he was doing. I could see that he had rummaged through lots of books and papers with no success. I scanned the room and something caught my eye. I asked Serge what it was. He said, “Only what I’ve been looking for.” We both had a good laugh over that.
I started to turn some of the pages in the scrapbook. It had become friable and yellowed with age, but held several clips of newspaper and magazine articles about various events in Vivian’s public and private life. There were clips about life in Connecticut, living in Santa Fe, the local theater in her childhood home of Albuquerque, NM, Hollywood, and the Bay Area. There were several great photos in the scrapbook, including stock photos as well as vernacular or candid shots never seen by the public. In one of the photos, where Vivian has her back to the camera, she’s meeting President Eisenhower. You can see William Frawley (Fred Mertz) in that photo, too.
The photos spanned the ages from the time of her infancy to the pinnacle of her career when she appeared on “The I Love Lucy Show”, and the “Jack Paar Show”. There was something very ordinary about the scrapbook itself, nothing glamorous like you’d imagine a star to have. It looked like she might have started it before she achieved stardom, maybe even pre-dating her showbiz career.
I brought the scrapbook home. Later that evening I sat down on my bed with it, and started to look more closely at the contents. I could imagine Vivian also sitting on her bed with the scrapbook, searching for clippings in current magazines and newspapers. It was a privilege to be able to thumb through the aging pages which represented important events in an American icon’s life. Ultimately this is why I love collecting. I get to be close to items that carry history around with them. With a little digging you can always find a story, some elaborate with incredible associations like this one but most are more mundane and open a doorway on the past.