The Woman who said No to Matisse
In 1952, Frances Lasker Brody, an heiress to the fortune of advertising genius Albert Lasker, commissioned a massive ceramic-tile wall mural from Henri Matisse to fill the inner courtyard of her and her husband’s modernist mansion in Holmby Hills (arguably architect A. Quincey Jones’ masterpiece). When the Brodys visited Matisse in France to see the first cut-out design, Frances was bitterly disappointed, and persuaded him to produce an alternative. He generously created a second version, and you can now see it displayed in its own room at LACMA, where it went after Francie’s death. His rejected version hangs at the National Gallery in Washington DC.
Who would have had the gall to question a genius like Matisse? Frances Brody, that’s who.
Sidney and Frances Brody, my aunt and uncle on my father’s side, were a constant, if distant, part of my upbringing. Most holidays of my youth were celebrated at their sprawling home, where a pool and a tennis court were set amidst mature trees and gardens. Sid was a strapping, 6’ 6” “man’s man” with a booming voice and great joie-de-vivre who had been a decorated Army Air Corp officer in WWII. But he made a deal with the devil when he married Frances Lasker, my spoiled father Edward's even more spoiled, imperious younger sister. She brought a family fortune to a man who came from humble origins, and Sid was able to finance his life and career as a developer and become a pillar of elite society. The parties at their house were filled with Hollywood royalty and politicians, mostly Democrats (Ronald Reagan was still welcome after changing into a Republican).
The deal Sid made with my aunt eventually took a great toll, and he ended up miserably unhappy and having secret affairs. Francie was so imperious she would have made the queen of England uncomfortable, so imagine the effect she had on her poor husband. He ended up having chronic headaches in the 1960s that were similar to migraines; he went to a specialist, who sent him to a clinic in Kansas City, of all places, where this specific kind of headache was treated. When Frances announced that she would rent a house near the hospital, the doctor forbade it: Sid would stay for the several weeks of psychotherapy and treatment, by himself, or not come at all. Frances went along with it, though not happily.
My mom told us years later of the first dinner she and my dad had with them upon Sid’s return. Sid was uncharacteristically honest as he told my parents of arriving at the clinic and seeing, with dawning realization, the other patients: they were all middle-aged men like him, and he soon discovered that they were all married to wealthy women. At the end of his stay, he realized he would only get over the headaches if he left Frances. A grim silence descended on the dinner table. Finally my mom asked, “Sid, what are you going to do?”
Smiling wanly, he answered. “I came to the realization while I was there that I’m a whore, Jane. So I’m going to stay with Francie.” His cobra of a wife never even blinked.
Some background is necessary to attempt to explain how my father and his sister turned out as entitled as they did. They grew up in a 52-room estate with a staff of fifty in Lake Forest, Illinois, and never had to make a bed or put away a dish. Two months after their mother, Flora Warner, married my grandfather Albert Davis Lasker, she contracted typhoid fever, which evolved into phlebitis, a painful inflammation of the veins for which there was no cure, and she became a semi-invalid for the rest of her life. She was said to claim that she only had enough love to give her husband, with whatever was left over parsed meagerly among her children. A hundred years ago, this was not an uncommon sentiment in the Upper Class.
Albert suffered from crippling bi-polar disorder. He would have manic episodes followed by prolongued depressions so severe that he would cry for weeks, literally, and have to be taken on trips to Europe or Mexico with a staff and a doctor until he recovered. Both of these afflictions obviously had a major effect on their children, and though Albert may have spent copious amounts of money on their upbringing, money is no substitute for affection.
Coming Next: The Aunt From Hell