EVERY age produces its own handful of remarkably beautiful women but for the majority of them, the attention they have effortlessly attracted steadily fades with age. It is a bitter disappointment for them to realise that their authority has been superseded by a younger generation and that the central defining characteristic of their existence is lost.
Toward the end of her life, Hazel Lavery became preoccupied with the transitory nature of her own allure. "I used to feel miserable about my mother," later wrote her daughter Alice, "when she used to gaze into the mirror ... and I could see her thoughts in the reflection, it is going, it has almost gone, the thing I cherished all my life, that meant such joy to me and those who loved me ... beauty has faded away'." Hazel Lavery is a rare exception, however, for unlike most of her kind, she has remained in the public eye long after her death more than 60 years ago. During her lifetime, she had many admirers among leading politicians, not least Kevin O'Higgins with whom, a new biography of the beauty has just revealed, she conducted a secret and passionate affair. That alone is enough to secure her permanent fame of some sort.
But in addition, she was married to probably the leading portraitist of the period, John Lavery, who even before their wedding had begun to paint his wife on a regular basis. Thanks to his work, her beauty was extensively recorded for posterity and so too was her very unique style.
In the current flurry of attention being paid to Hazel Lavery's extra-marital relationships, it is inevitable that her position as one of the most elegant and imaginatively dressed women during the first decades of this century will be largely overlooked. Yet her flair and understanding of fashion were what caught the public attention during her lifetime and they ought not to be ignored now. In addition to her husband, she was also captured by many other artists including Ambrose McEvoy, Oswald Birley and John Singer Sargent. And she was endlessly photographed for the fashion and social pages of publications at the time. "Another beautiful study of a beautiful and artistic member of society," runs the caption above a photograph in The Tatler from 1916, while others describe her as "A famous beauty," and "she beautiful wife of a great artist." Not all beautiful women possess a great sense of fashion; what distinguished Hazel Lavery from the start was her understanding of clothes and how to use them to her best advantage. In part, this sprang from financial necessity. The Laverys, despite his success, were never particularly rich and she had to use her imagination to greater effect than other, wealthier women. In 1931, for example, she agreed to promote Pond's Cold Cream, appearing in advertisements as "The Greatest Beauty since Lady Hamilton".
She seems instinctively to have known how to create an effect with modest means. In the 1920s, a decade earlier, a social columnist remarked that Lady Lavery, as she had then become thanks to her husband's knighthood often wore no jewellery, only a flower tucked into her simple dress. The costume balls which were in vogue earlier this century offered her plenty of opportunity to employ creative skills and these then spilled over into her everyday clothing.
Although as a young woman she had been dressed by couture houses in Paris, gradually - she preferred to wear her own designs, made up by a seamstress in Pimlico. Lady Audrey Morris, a contemporary, recalled: "Her clothes were generally concocted by herself and her maid. She would appear in public faultlessly wearing organdie frills and a picture hat she had pinned together. The result was in the best picturesque style." Her favourite colours were pink, purple and red and it is most often in these shades that she was painted by her husband. The door of the Laverys' London home at Cromwell Place was painted a vivid scarlet while the red heels she wore in another portrait, Hazel in Black and Gold, dating from 1916, gave rise to a fashion for shoes in this style. Because she was an innovator, Hazel Lavery was more likely to lead than follow in matters of style. One newspaper report on her appearance in the early years of her marriage noted that "Mrs John Lavery, who started some pretty fashions ... now affects a sort of nun headdress, under a wide brimmed hat. She has also been seen with floating lapels of clear fine lawn under a country hat, and amazingly becoming they were." LIMITED funds probably meant that she could not afford to follow current fashion too closely, even had she wished to do so.
She claimed that about every to years she would be in fashion and on one occasion remarked that, as she was "triste financially", she would just have to wear a sackcloth for her spring attire.
As she grew older, her dependency on clothes and make-up appears to have increased; after being photographed by Cecil Beaton for Vogue in 1933, she wrote to him that due to "advancing years" she felt the new season's hats "should have veils like the Khu (sic) Klux Klan, the face entirely hidden". She always lied about her age; by the 1920s, she usually marked herself down by about seven years. And her make-up grew so thick that one young admirer remembered that when she cried his presence, he saw the tear making a tunnel down her check".
Although only 55 when she died, Hazel Lavery already considered her moment as long passed. A few years before her death, she spoke to a journalist about the curse of famous beauties: "They're so talked about that in the end people just say `I can't see why they say she's beautiful: Anyway she won't last long!' It's frightening the way the world waits to see a beautiful woman fade away."