The Rothschilds' Last Great Party

Since reopening the ancestral home of the Rothschilds in 1959 (the same year they were married), Marie-Hélène and Guy de Rothschild hosted many parties at Château de Ferrières and we are fortunate that two have been preserved in the public record.

Their first grand ball was to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Marcel Proust’s birth December 2, 1971.  Their second, my favorite, a year later on December 12, 1972, was an invitation for Dîner des Têtes Surréalistes and would soon become the famous Surrealist Ball.

The glory days of the Surrealist movement had passed, but the effect of its revolutionary ideas was still fresh, and it was the perfect opportunity to honor their friend Salvador Dalí and his legacy.

In his 1985 autobiography, The Whims of Fortune, Guy de Rothschild remembers that instead of a standard invitation, “in the winter of 1972, an invitation cut out of a sky painting by Magritte with strange hieroglyphics floating among the clouds must at first have mystified the people who received them. But when it occurred to them to read the text in a mirror, they learned that they were invited to a surrealistic dinner party at Ferrières on December 12.”

When the night of the party arrived, recalls one of the guests, Baron Alexis de Redé, in his memoirs, “the chateau was floodlit with moving orange lights to give the impression that it was on fire.”

As the guests ascended the main staircase, everything appeared calm, harmonious, grandiose, as usual . .. except that an army of lackeys, lackeys with cats heads, seemed to have fallen asleep on the steps, the banisters, the landings, in the most grotesque positions.

Then they began an interminable voyage, groping in the dark through a dim labyrinth, a forest of black ribbons that had to be separated like dense branches. Now and then some of the liveried cats would suddenly appear, bearing torches: weird phantom animals amid the giant cobwebs. Long-forgotten texts of Carco or Max Jacob came to mind. The way was so long that finally, shivering with delightful horror, the guests passed through the last portals of this surrealistic hell with a sigh of relief.

They entered the tapestry salon, impassive as ever in its gold, reds, and pinks where Marie-Hélene (with the head of a hind weeping diamond tears) and I (wearing a headdress representing a still-life arrangement on a huge platter) tried to suppress our cries of admiration, and appear to recognize the raving mad (disguised) arrivals. All the while, a concealed pianist was playing music by Satie [1].

In the salons, a fantastic assortment of masks inspired by Magritte, Max Ernst, de Chirico, Picabia, Delvaux, Tanguy and, needless to say, Dalí, congratulated each other on their ingenious ideas.

And suddenly there appeared the divine Dalí himself, who'd needed only to wax his mustache without having to change his head; he was sedately seated in a wheelchair pushed by two nurses, under an umbrella of dazzling flashbulbs; in his hand of genius, a laser beam!

His wife, Gala, wore her most gala evening dress.

Leonor Fini was a nightingale. The painter Stanislao Lepri had buried a host of little celluloid children in his long false pepper-and-salt beard.

One stumbled over all kinds of fallen fruit: apple-headed figures stretched their necks to vie with pear-headed ones; architectural monuments envied clockworks, original animals competed with imaginary creatures, beasts of Hell pursued fugitives from Paradise on Earth.

Then there was the unexpected: Audrey Hepburn wore a cage over her head; she had to open a little door in order to eat!

Michel Guy, the minister of culture, had stabbed his bald pate with a dagger, dripping rubies.

Denise Thyssen was the woman with two faces: Above her own, she wore a headdress that was an exact replica of it, the blond hair of both inextricably intermingled; one didn't know which one to talk to it was disconcerting to hear the reply come out of the wrong mouth!

Baron Alexis de Redé had is own special costume: “I wore a series of four masks, and only half my face was shown. Above it was a series of drawers containing photographs of Marie-Hélène as the Mona Lisa. For this mask, appropriately designed by Dalí, I won second prize. Later, I gave this mask to the Dalí Museum at Figueres.”

As the time for dinner arrived, the guests were given cards to indicate their tables: the table of the Sleeping Cat; the table of the Dethroned Queens; the table of the Shoes Fit to be Tied . .. but this gave them no indication of where to go. So the guests wandered about in disorder, mischievously guided by butlers wearing top hats, carnations in their buttonholes, whose mission was to solve these puzzles and finally lead them to their places.

On each table, covered by a tablecloth representing the sky, there was a centerpiece inspired by some surrealist painter or poet, designed to be at the same time crazy, incongruous, and poetic. For example, on the table entitled "Eggs à la Florentine" was a mound of cooked spinach, pierced by the carcass of a giant bird, garnished with women's breasts.

At each place setting there was a fur-covered plate and a place card: a square of sky held between the ruby-red lips of Mae West; a pale blue dinner roll--the famous pain peint (the two words are pronounced the same in French, their literal translation being "painted bread"; a wine glass with the label vin vain (another play on words, since these two are also pronounced alike, and the meaning or rather, lack of meaning is "vain wine"); there was also a bubble-blower and a menu.

The menu, inscribed on a background of sky and clouds, was all the more hallucinating because none of the sixty guests read the same words. And such delirious words! Double meanings, outrageous puns. Marie-Hélène and her friends must have had a lot of fun finding these ideas, or rather, trying to confuse the ideas! French-speaking readers may appreciate the cheese course: Les choses dégoulinantes (the dripping things) for some were beaucoup de Brie pour rien (a lot of brie for nothing) for others.

Since the dishes were described so wildly, nobody had the slightest idea of what was going to be served next.

Finally came the Dessert des Tartares (dessert of the Tartars - the barbarians) - or, as on another menu, "At last!”. The warmly applauded climax was a huge platter carried by eight men, with a nude woman reclining on a bed of roses, all made of edible spun sugar, to be hacked to pieces.

After dinner, the festivities moved to the salons, to dancing in a Turkish nightclub, to another salon, where a photographer took pictures of the guests seated on a Dalí sofa in the form of a pair of lips, underneath a picture of Mae West [2]. The whirl went on till dawn. Everyone was enchanted with himself, everyone was enchanted to be there . . . in short, everyone was enchanted.

The next morning, our everyday heads seemed very strange indeed!

The Surrealist Ball was one of the last grand parties.  As a valediction, Baron Alexis de Redé shared:

“All these parties were in the tradition of the great balls that have been held in France for centuries. You can trace them back to the days of Henri Ill and the masquerades and carrousels that so appealed to Louis IV. In the last century, there were the Beaumonts and the Noailles, there was Bestegui and Cuevas. And coming in at the latter end of the century, the Rothschilds and I made an impressive attempt to round the century off with some magnificent and memorable evenings.

It is not possible to repeat such things now for so many reasons. But it is fascinating to look back and to remember these occasions, which dominated our thoughts and plans to such an extent for so many months. I am happy that I took part in so many, and happy that I gave some myself.”

Footnotes

[1] Erik Satie, who wrote the score for the ballet Parade, causing Guillaume Apollinaire to coin the term surrealism. 

[2] The Mae West Lips Sofa (1937) is a surrealist sofa by Salvador Dalí, and is a real world incarnation of the sofa Dalí painted in his "Face of Mae West which may be Used as an Apartment” (1935) probably based on the painting.

The wood-and-satin sofa was shaped after the lips of actress Mae West, whom Dalí apparently found fascinating. It measures 86.5 x 183 x 81.5 cm. Edward James, a rich British patron of the Surrealists in the 1930’s, commissioned this piece from Dalí.

The UK arts minister, John Glen said in 2017, This iconic piece is considered to be the single most important example of surrealist furniture ever made in Britain.

The sofa was introduced commercially in 1973 by Bocaccio Design, known also as BD Barcelona Design.

In the Dalí Theatre museum in Figueres, there is a ‘Mae West‘ room  It is a three- dimensional living room scene installation, with custom built furniture that takes shape as the ‘ face’  of Mae West, when viewed from a certain angle.