Einstein was also with Marie when they attended a conference in Brussels focused on “The Theory of Radiation and Quanta.” At forty-three years of age, she was the only woman among twenty-three men when informed she had won a second Nobel Prize, making her the only person to have achieved such an accomplishment. The news should have been a glorious moment, but it came when her personal and professional life was in shambles. She had recently been denied a seat in the French Academy of Sciences, as much for being born a Pole as for being a woman. Einstein stood in her corner and called her detractors reptiles.
In addition to the sexist slight, she had another hydra head to slay—apparently Madame liked sex as well as science. Einstein erred when he called Marie “cold as a herring.” Marie fell for a married scientist, Paul Langevin, and they rendezvoused in their apartment near the Sorbonne. The obvious drawback was his wife, the mother of his four young children. She was incensed when she discovered their love letters, ones in which Marie demanded he marry her—and the Mrs. Scorned dished the dirt to the press. While an eminent man with a mistress may have been given a pass, society branded Marie with the letter A and labelled her a home-wrecking Polish adulteress. Langevin felt honor-bound to fight a duel against the journalist of the exposé; neither was hurt. France was scandalized by the affair, and Sweden was likewise not impressed. From Stockholm arrived the polite suggestion that Madame Curie not receive the Nobel Prize in person as they did not want an adulteress to shake hands with King Gustaf V. She responded in a letter, “I believe that there is no connection between my scientific work and my private life.” Madame Curie attended the ceremony and shook hands with King Gustaf; shortly afterward, she suffered a nervous breakdown.
Redemption arrived with the outbreak of World War I when Marie closed the Institut Curie to establish the first military field radiological centers utilizing mobile units to x-ray soldiers to locate bullets and shrapnel. She worked alongside her seventeen-year-old daughter Irene, who contributed to another of Madame Curie’s firsts. In 1934, Irene became the second woman to win a Nobel Prize, along with her husband, Frederic Joliot-Curie, for their discovery of artificial radioactivity. The award made Marie and Irene the first parent and child to win the gold standard of prizes. A quip Eve gave an interviewer showed she possessed the humor her mother and sister lacked, “You are not mixing me up with my sister by any chance? You see, I am the only one of my family not to have won a Nobel Prize.”
Marie was proud of her two accomplished daughters, but it was her third child, radium—which she kept by her bed to watch its glow—that had contaminated her body for more than thirty years. At age sixty-six, her fingers were blackened and cracked, she was nearly blind, and lesions covered her body. The martyr to science died from the substance that had conferred upon her immortality, a price Madame willingly paid as she felt science took ascendancy over all else. Although her life was one filled with high honors, the self-effacing genius summed up her biography in twenty-one words, “I was born in Poland. I married Pierre Curie, and I have two daughters. I have done my work in France.”
In 1995, Marie achieved another first when President Francois Mitterrand ordered the ashes of the Curies to be transferred from a small-town cemetery to the Pantheon. The memorial is dedicated to the “great men of France” and serves as the final resting place of historical figures such as Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, and Voltaire. The interment made the celebrity scientist the first woman enshrined in the august mausoleum based on her own achievements. In attendance at the ceremony was President Lech Walesa of Poland.
Part of understanding the secret of the soul of Marie Curie lies in her own words, “Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”
The décor of the nineteenth century can be described as more is more: windows covered with heavy damask draperies, velvet ensconced furniture, gilt frames, obscured walls. Then came a woman who brought in the light and vanquished Victorian gloom. Elsie de Wolfe left her impeccable mark as America’s first female interior decorator.
The girl who was to be a pioneer of the non-rugged variety was born as Ella Anderson de Wolfe in 1865 to a physician father and Scottish mother in a New York City brownstone, now the site of Macy’s department store. She was the only daughter of attractive parents who bemoaned her homely shoe-button eyes, long narrow face, and frizzy hair. Elsie, as she preferred to be called, described herself as “an ugly child,” an especially horrible assessment for someone forever enamored with aestheticism. In her 1935 biography, After All, she recounted how she once arrived home to discover the new drawing room wallpaper struck her as so repulsive she felt physically assaulted, like “something terrible that cut like a knife.” She fell on the floor in a tantrum, kicking and screaming.
A love affair with Europe began when Elsie was sixteen and left for Edinburgh “for finishing” in the household of her mother’s cousin, a distinguished clergyman, who arranged for her presentation to Queen Victoria. She later described the monarch as “a little fat queen in a black dress and a load of jewels.” Half a century later, Elsie would teach a wishful queen, Lady Wallis Windsor, “how to make a home fit for a king.” In the interval between her introduction to royalty and her friendship with the great queen’s great-granddaughter-in-law, de Wolfe led many lives, even including one that entailed flying with Wilbur Wright.
Her father’s death left little other than debt, and Elsie returned to New York to become an actress, thereby challenging the opinion of high society that the stage was a disreputable profession for a respectable lady. As it transpired, it was her onstage style and wardrobe-couture ensembles from Paris that garnered attention more than her acting ability.
Fortunately, Elsie had better luck on the romantic front when she met Elisabeth (Bessy) Marbury, with whom she entered into a “Boston Marriage” (a term for two single women living together, attributed to Henry James’ The Bostonians); they were romantically linked for the next forty years. Bessy was a scion of old Manhattan money and was the first woman literary agent; her clientele included Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, and Somerset Maugham. Elsie decorated their stately home in Irving Place with brightly flowered curtains and championed chintz (and so became known as “the chintz lady”). Her preferred color was made manifest when she first viewed the Parthenon in Athens and exclaimed, “It’s beige—just my color!” The couple threw parties that made them the hostesses with the mostest; their guest list included Sarah Bernhardt, Mrs. J. P. Morgan, and Mrs. Astor. The designing lady launched her fabulous career when Bessie suggested her new stage should be the dressing of interiors.
With all the drama of the theater she had left behind, de Wolfe swept into the male-dominated upholstery and furniture business and transformed it into an exciting profession; in the process, she made it a domain for women. Soon Elsie was proudly handing out business cards embellished with her trademark wolf-with nosegay-crest in its mouth. The quintessential woman-about-town was readily recognized as the tiny lady with the short white gloves, triple strand pearl necklace, and little dog in her arms.
De Wolfe and Marbury refused to let their era’s prejudice against their lesbian lifestyle dampen their professional and social ambitions. Bessie, at age sixty-two, was an active member of the Democratic Party who campaigned for Franklin Delano Roosevelt; she also served as his personal advisor. Elsie was never apologetic about her unorthodox choices, and her motto “never complain never explain” appeared in embroidery on one of her signature pillows.
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