The Muse Extraordinaire of the 20s: Nancy Cunard

The mere mention of Cunard Cruise Ships conjures up images of floating palaces where the affluent dance the night away in awe-inspiring splendor. However, disaster lurks in their past: the Lusitania, one of Cunard's luxury liners, was sunk by a German U-boat, prompting America's entry into World War I. Another figure plaguing the line is the great-granddaughter of the line's founder, Samuel Cunard.

Nancy Clara Cunard was the only child of Sir Bache Cunard and Maud, his American heiress wife, who took the name Emerald. The Baronet was mostly keen on foxhunting, fishing, and horseback riding, while his lady was more concerned with climbing the social ladder. Emerald supported Wallis Simpson in the hopes of becoming a lady-in-waiting when her fellow American became queen, in order to bolster her prestige.

Nancy Cunard in 1925, photographed by Man Ray

Nancy in Harlem, New York, with two male companions,
circa 1925

Emerald's dowry of two million dollars (about five hundred million dollars nowadays) was primarily used to purchase the title of lady, but the pair split in 1911 despite the high-end housing market. Emerald, despite her pride in her beautiful daughter, whom an admirer later described as "lovely enough to seduce a saint," sent Nancy to prestigious boarding schools in Britain, France, and Germany. Nancy gained fluency in French, Spanish, Italian, and German as a result of her education.

The non - conventional heiress chose the traditional path of escape: marriage to Sydney Fairbairn, a soldier on leave from the battlefield back injury. Sydney held the dual qualifications of physical attractiveness (which pleased Nancy) and a lack of a title (which displeased Lady Cunard). The media took a hiatus from covering the World War in November 1916 to cover the wedding of the heiress of two incredibly wealthy parents. The union did not last, and Nancy referred to it as "a horrible phase" during its brief existence. Nancy fell in love with yet another soldier, Peter Broughton-Adderley, after Sydney returned to the front, and she was heartbroken when he died in the war.

Nancy, lost, looked for a new identity, and she became a bohemian flapper, trimming her long blonde hair into a haircut with pasted kiss curls on her cheeks, wearing shorter skirts, and sporting a long cigarette holder. Nancy, unlike many other Jazz Age heroines, despised her wealthy background. She joined her Lost Generation comrades in France the next year. Her well-known name, beauty, and heiress position gave her access to the avant-garde Dadaist and Surrealist groups. Nonetheless, she grew dissatisfied with the fleeting fame of becoming the decade's "It Girl." To subdue her demons, Nancy resorted to her old standbys: sex and booze.

Nancy at the Hours Press, her publishing house at 15 Rue Guénégaud, in Paris, 1930

Nancy Cunard was looking for a way to express herself via style. Her signature accessories were vintage ivory and onyx bangles that snaked up both of her delicate arms from wrist to elbow, and she donned turbans with veil over her eyes. Man Ray immortalized her in a photograph, while Brancusi sculpted her figure.

Cunard's life changed forever when she met Henry Crowder, a black jazz musician from Washington, at a Venice hotel. She dispatched a gondola to bring him to her palazzo later that night. Despite the fact that he was from another world and the son of a poor Georgia family, he talked to her soul and was entranced.

They returned to Paris, where they were inseparable because they were uncomfortable with the looks they received from the Fascists. Unlike his predecessors, Henry's ability to withstand her emotional and physical outbursts contributed to his long-term viability. When the New York writer Janet Flanner ran into Henry and asked about his bruises, he replied, "Just bracelet work."

The media, on the other hand, bared its fangs and portrayed Nancy as a depraved English aristocrat with a penchant for black men, prompting a flood of hate mail, including one from the Ku Klux Klan. Their disparate backgrounds, public condemnation, and Nancy's past eventually drove them apart, and she returned to Paris alone.

Nancy aboard the Spanish liner Marques de Comillas in New
York, United States on 25th July 1941

Nancy and Henry Crowder in the Hours Press, Paris, 1930

Nancy wore progressive issues on her bangle-adorned sleeve in the 1930s, the most prominent of which was a campaign against fascism. She published articles denouncing Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia as well as Franco's coup. She traveled to Barcelona to gain firsthand knowledge of Spain's civil war. The heiress raised awareness of the issue of immigrants fleeing to France by opening a shelter. Her heroic efforts on behalf of the impoverished had taken their toll by the late 1930s, and she had become dangerously thin rather than gracefully thin. Cunard asked for donations for "the bombed-out inhabitants of Barcelona" on the Parisian streets where she had previously walked in splendor.

After a long booze-fueled binge in London in 1960, the British authorities committed her to a mental institution. Cunard spent the next five years of her life on the streets, surviving primarily on liquor and cigarettes while shouting against racism. An acquaintance said she "looked thinner than a Buchenwald corpse" in Paris in 1965, shortly after her sixty-ninth birthday; she weighed sixty-five pounds.

“All that remains is a burning sense of indignation,” read her epitaph, which could have been taken from one of her own newspaper articles. Her death was described as "the sad, lonely farewell to a toast to the Twenties" by the Evening Standard.

Nancy photographed by Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1956