cesil\solinas\stella

............................................................... .stenio solinas

When Stella Tennant began her career as a model five years ago, she was on the Paris fashion runways wearing Vivienne Westwood's clothes, England's craziest and more cultivated fashion designer. She had a punk look, and the quantity of feathers and decorations on her clothes, that left nakedness and thinness be seen though, would have been enough to make anybody else look like something between a prostitute and a petty girl with middle-class ambitions. But she was perfect.

That was elegance, independent on what one is wearing. Today Stella is worth some billions, she embodies the Chanel griffe, and is expecting a baby. She had been an object of discussion in the past for her thinness that some people claimed was anorexia. It actually was a family mark.
The Tennants are still today a much talked-about institution as the Mitfords, the Sitwells and the Cunards were in the twenties and in the thirties: they make us think of weirdness, they conjure up richness, they continue to do trifles. Stella is the most photographed and famous right now, but every epoch has had its Tennant as a phenomenon.
Colin was at the centre of gossip in the late fifties: he had bought Mustique in the Caribbean Islands for 45 thousand pounds and turned it into the Swinging London's centre: from David Bowie to Mick Jagger, that was were pop music celebrated its triumphs and its excesses. When Princess Margaret married the photographer Tony Armstrong-Jones, Colin, who was Lord Glenconner after all, gave her a piece of the island for her wedding gift. There had been a “tender friendship”, as gossip newspapers usually call it, between him and Margaret. The princess once spent a holiday in Glen's castle in Scotland.
There weren't many servants in the house so that eleven-year-old Toby Tennant was given the task of answering the phone: “You must never say 'Your mother is on the phone'”, catechised uncle Colin, “but rather “Excuse me Madam, your majesty the Queen Elisabeth is one the telephone'”. Toby is Stella's father and Emma's youngest brother. Emma is the writer of the family: her last book has just been published and it is called “Strangers” (published by Jonathan Cape). It has been written as it were a novel and it tells of the twentieth century seen from the family album. It is hard to say whether there were more weird things or losses.
Colin's elder son, Charles, was disinherited because he was a heroin addict (he even tried tsell some of Margaret's private pictures to buy drug) and died in his late thirties. His second son Henry died of AIDS, his third Christopher became crippled after a motorbike accident. When Emma Tennant was interviewed by the Independent on Sunday, she strongly rejected any hypotheses of a family malediction although she believes in maledictions themselves: “Many old families had them and they lasted many generations: there always was a member of the family who saw, for example, three white foxes or heard a little owl's cry... As far as we are concerned, it's Press exaggeration built on private tragedies”.
The most striking feature in the women's genealogy of the Tennents is beauty, the less uplifting one open-mindedness. Pamela Tennant, the woman who embodied its style at the beginning of the century, was considered by her contemporaries as “a mixture between the whore of Babylon and the Madonna”, said Emma. She was wonderful, a noble Irish with French royal blood in her veins.

She married Edward, a Scottish landowner and first baron of Glenconner later. Their marriage was not a happy one although they had four children. Pamela was obsessively close to their first child Edward, nicknamed Bim: she thought he had inherited everything from her and nothing from the father, and that he was then fascinating, intelligent, sweet. He died when he was twenty in the battle of the Somme, one of slaughters of World War I where European aristocracy was decimated.
Pamela never got over it, began to organise séances and equipped a wing of the castle for that. In “Strangers” Emma Tennant gives one of Pamela's servants mediumistic powers and turns her into Bim's secret and hopeless lover. “Maybe it is all true. I mean, it's true that my grandmother took a servant with her for her séances. The rest is likely. Reality and fiction nourish each other”. The other “Babylonian” Tennant was Clare. She was already married at twenty and her husband was at the front like his son-in-law Bim. He loved her and wrote to her every day. She did not think about him and spent her nights at “Ciro”, near Piccadilly, to dance ragtime. His letters were left unopened to form a pile in the hall.
He found them intact when he returned from war four years later. They got divorced and she married another three times. In the twenties she was the most admired woman of the Gargoyle Club, the club that her younger brother David opened in Soho.
Matisse's paintings were hanged on the walls, the balcony overlooked London's theatres, Noel Coward, who played “Vortex” nearby used to go there after his shows, it was never daylight and every hour was good to drink something.
The Tennants held the bank in London in the roaring years trying to forget the horrors of the war. Writers, artists, aristocrats, all with the survivor's attitude, even those who never risked anything, used to go to the Gargoyle. That was the place where rules were made to be broken and passions to be fulfilled. Pamela's youngest son, Stephen, was the most popular figure of the period. He was a homosexual, had an affair with Sigfried Sassoon, the great pacifist poet, wore lamé and silver dresses, painted, organised one party after the other.
He built an aviary and a house for reptiles at Wilsford. Everything was painted white, the piano was white, the bear furs he used for carpets were white too. He wrote in his diary: “The lashes must rest for a month: no more mascara, no more eyeliner”.
Cecil Beaton remembered that he was so pampered that he asked his friends to go and see him to avoid the trouble of calling them on the phone.
And when the air battle was raging in England, while the guests of Savoy where he was staying hurried towards the shelters, Coward saw him walking down the hotel's central stairs, wearing a sumptuous robe and with a perfect hairstyle. “Let's hope this is going to be a funny night”, he told him.
Stella Tennant, in other words, has got it in her blood.
Having a past also means knowing how to walk in the present.

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