Narcissism

Two notable women in Manhattan's Success Set are Mrs. Florence Nightingale Graham Lewis and Mrs. Clara Fargo Thomas. Mrs. Lewis, daughter of a Canadian truckman, now makes nearly a million dollars a year as Elizabeth Arden, cosmetics. Mrs. Thomas, socialite scion of the "Pony Express" Fargos, took up painting after her marriage to a Manhattan realtor. The two women are friends. Last week, between them, they had produced one of the oddest combinations of Culture, Art and Advertising ever seen.

On view in Dorland Hall in London was a 14-panel mural, painted on wood, entitled A Pageant of Beauty. Mrs. Lewis had paid for it to advertise her cosmetics. Mrs. Thomas, with four assistants to do the cultural research and most of the painting, had designed and executed it. Impressed, Soviet Russia's Ambassador to Great Britain, Ivan Michaelovich Maisky, had asked Mrs. Lewis to exhibit it in Russia where Communist maidens are beginning to take a livelier interest in prettying up. Since Mrs. Lewis has no intention of starting a Moscow Elizabeth Arden Salon, she refused his request. Next September she plans to take A Pageant of Beauty on a U. S. tour.

To go with the panel, she has supplied a handbook of footnotes and acknowledgments to the museums from which Mrs. Thomas purports to have obtained cultural research. Thus, beginning at the extreme left in ancient Egypt, Queen Nefertiti (adapted from a bust in Berlin's Staatliche Museum) is to be seen putting on lipstick while her subjects do calisthenics. In ancient China, a 4th Century procuress braids a student courtesan's hair. Ladies of antique Greece are taking a shower bath while below them a pair of frizzled jades gossip in ancient Minoan. Next in this progress of lady Narcissists is Greece's Helen of Troy sizzling her hair on a curling stick and smirking at the Greek fleet coming to retrieve her. Further on, Rome's Julius Caesar (British Museum bust) looks sourly at a rolled rug from whose far end stick the feet of wily Cleopatra. Nearby a Roman lady takes a hot tub bath. Another walks on her hands, sticking out her stomach at beauteous Mumtaz Mahal for whom the Taj Mahal was built.

Beyond Mumtaz, France's medieval Eleanor of Aquitaine presides at a Court of Love as King Louis VII rides angrily home from the Crusades. At her feet, in the East Indies, slaves give a Malay lady a pedicure.

To show how the unwashed ladies of the Renaissance looked at their best, Mrs. Thomas has sketchily copied France's Diane de Poitiers, a German artist's Venus, naked except for picture hat and necklace, and a Botticelli model. Facing them, smart, stingy Queen Elizabeth of England, decked out to the ears, primps in a mirror, turns her back on the Spanish Armada.

For the 18th Century, Pompadour, Lady Hamilton and Josephine wage their own private wars against the ravages of time while a woman hangs by her chin from a hook to reduce her "goozle" and two men at a windlass lace up the corset of the mural's only fat woman.

Omitting the 19th Century, the mural leaps headlong into Elizabeth Arden's magnificent 20th. A carved lacquer box spills out a few samples of available cosmetics while everywhere lithe young lady Narcissists skate, ski, sail, dive, fly, play tennis, pose with bubbles or just leap for joy. At the extreme right is a modernistic chair from which to emphasize the advantages of beauty through the centuries, a string of pearls have fallen and on which rest a gentleman's silk hat & gloves.

Artist Clara Thomas became interested in art by looking into some of her husband's books on falconry. She has since painted office walls for Vincent Astor, Percy Rockefeller, Robert Rutherford McCormick, William Ziegler, the royal suite in London's Grosvenor House. Mother of two children, 17 and 12, a fair, blue-eyed little woman with an even smile, she looks scarcely 30 at 40. She likes stag parties at which she is the only woman, rides well, works hard, hunts the fox.

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