Natasha’s love of life lasted a lifetime
By Philip Jones
A remarkable woman died in Adelaide recently. She was known as "Madame" to thousands of girls and boys - now adults- who attended the Rex Reid[1]/Katharine Gorham School of Ballet[2] in Melbourne in the 1950s and 1960s. Madame was the administrator, but few knew of the extraordinary life. Madame was the Princess Natasha Kirsta, born Nadejda Watchinadze, in Georgia [Ekaterinoslav per her passport], in 1894. She came to Australia in 1957, where she lived mostly in Melbourne.
She married a fellow Georgian, George Kirsta[3], before the revolution. Mr Kirsta edited an avant-garde literary magazine in Moscow. The Kirstas fled the revolution and lived successfully in Vienna, Berlin and Paris.
Mrs Kirsta's vitality, charm and intelligence led her into intimate friendship with many important European writers, artists and thinkers. Her friends included Sigmund and Anna Freud, the novelists Robert Musil and Hermann Broch, the Princess Marie Bonaparte[4] the psychoanalyst, as well as Picasso, Bonnard, Matisse, Ravel, Nijinsky and his sister Bronislava, Cocteau[5], Proust, James Joyce, Bertrand Russell[6], Colette, Chanel, Marlene Dietrich and Stravinsky. (Natasha was Vera Stravinsky's[7] cousin.)
The Kirstas were poor for most of their lives after leaving Russia; the income from the jewels smuggled out did not last long. After they separated in Paris about 1930 Mrs Kirsta formed her own ballet company with her friend, the emigre Russian dancer Victor Gsovsky[8], as artistic director. Her business acumen and the high artistic quality of her company helped them survive the German occupation. Indeed, Mrs Kirsta took her ballets to Germany.
After the war she met the Australian dancer and choreographer Rex Reid. They formed a new company and toured most of Europe and South America. The company was performing in Cairo in 1956 at the outbreak of the Suez crisis. Reid was arrested; Mrs Kirsta remained free because she travelled on a Nansen passport (a special identification passport for refugees) and had known Egypt's President Nasser as a friend for some years.
Australia had withdrawn its embassy from Egypt, but Mrs Kirsta, with the assistance of the Canadian Embassy and with some help from President Nasser, secured Mr Reid's release; he flew to Rome and then to Melbourne, Natasha and the dancers sailed as deck passengers to Piraeus in Greece and then went on to Paris. She waited a year for a visa so she could join Mr Reid in Australia.
Soon after arriving in Melbourne, she met the writer Barrett Reid, who introduced her to Mirka and Georges Mora, Sunday and John Reed, and to me. This group, with Rex Reid, remained her closest friends.
At a welcoming party in South Yarra she described her desolate feelings when the ship docked at Port Melbourne. "Streets a mile wide, little, low buildings, and nobody at all to be seen. Desolation," she said. But she soon cheered up.
"Is there an avant-garde in Australia?" There was then an avant-garde in painting, if not in literature. We showed her Hesters, Nolans, Tuckers and Blackmans. Her response was swift and positive. Criticism came later, but in the cliche of the theatre of the time, it was “constructive". Twenty years later she made a most daring pronouncement on the art of Mirka Mora: "It has genius without talent."
She was astonished to find that Barrett Reid had read Hermann Broch's 'The Death of Virgil', then almost unknown in Europe. Mrs Kirsta had not heard of it in Paris. It had only received one review in Nouvelle Revue Francaise', which she had missed, but Cocteau had told her that this was a great novel and she must read it. “You are a little rat because you will not smoke opium," Cocteau said, “but you will read this great man’s book”. We were one up on her with James Baldwin as we had been lucky enough to secure an American edition of 'Notes of a Native Son'. "You mean the ugly little monkey writes books?" she asked. Baldwin had taken his sisters to Paris and to a ballet school. Mrs Kirsta was never a dancer, but she exercised daily. She knew the advantage of strong leg muscles, particularly to a frail and ageing woman.
She startled Michael Craig, a physiotherapist and writer, by saying: "Feel my stomach. Flat, absolutely flat. Feel my thigh. Only the skin and then muscle. Not like.... (a great woman in the ballet), with her great folds of flesh draping down from her bones."
Mrs Kirsta opened the ballet school in Little Lonsdale Street at 6.30 every morning. She came by tram from the flat she shared with Rex Reid in Dandenong Road.
She never felt fatigue in these years. If she and Rex were giving a dinner party, she would scurry home to prepare a beef Stroganoff, usually served with latkes. Sometimes she would consider that the young people were best left alone, and she would eat at a modest Hungarian or Chinese restaurant in Exhibition Street before going to a concert in the Town Hall.
She ate like someone who had known real hunger and the absence of wine in those days meant nothing to her. She drank a thimbleful of champagne on special occasions – always Australian, which she claimed was better than the French. She developed a fierce love for Australia and passionately defended it.
She revisited Paris once, where she met a young Australian who said he had left Australia because it was so dull. “So pompous Un rien du tout[9]. I said to him, what do you know of Australia? You know nothing! How dare you talk like that about Australia. My Australia.”
She allowed herself one or two criticisms, rather differently expressed: “Well, Australians tend to be a little lazy and are hopeless with languages, alas but the talent is spectacular.”
When people talk about Natasha Kirsta or when journalists have written about her the voice is usually made guttural or the type italic, and darling is always spelt darlink. But it was not easy to turn her into a character.
She gravitated naturally to talented or sensitive people, although she was not a snob and would respond energetically to anyone of any age who showed some spirit of life, with charm or humanity. She possessed a quality so much admired by E. M. Forster, she was able to "connect".
To some extent, Natasha moved in *Society”. She was overjoyed to meet the Queen "and her beautiful children". And she numbered among her friends Lady Casey and Lady Johnson (the wife of a British High Commissioner), Harold and Dame Zara Holt remained her friends.
She thoroughly enjoyed Government House receptions. Even the most informal party was a "reception", and she gave her own for old friends from Europe and America. These friends included the Stravinskys (who saw almost no one else), Fonteyn, Nureyev, Vivien Leigh[10] and Lily Kedrova. At one of these receptions, she beckoned imperiously to Nureyev and formally presented him to her friend, a poet. Later, the friend protested. "No." Natasha said. *You are a distinguished writer and a civilized man. He is an interpreter and, anyway, a peasant still completing his education.”
Although Natasha retained the prejudices of her class, her reactions to people were always from the heart. Politically she was a cranky reactionary: but she loved Don Dunstan[11]. She had great respect for property but loved the thief Albie Baker. Her loyalty was rock solid.
She lived in the present. It was what was happening now in Australia, that interested her. Her rather grander life in Europe was something to be discussed only within a meaningful context — for example, one had been reading Tolstoi or had recently been in Europe.
In August 1980 she returned to Melbourne after several years in Perth and Adelaide. Rex Reid went to work overseas so she came back to live in a modest but comfortable room in the Tolarno Hotel in St Kilda. She was almost blind and walked with a three-pronged stick she called "my factotum". Life outside a nursing home was possible only because of the constant attention of the hotel proprietor, Mrs Rika Wall. Mrs Wall's devotion was a remarkable tribute to both women.
I saw her almost daily at this time. She needed constant medical attention; I thought at times she could not live another day. She would heave and cough and struggle for breath but would continue to smoke her Gauloises or Camels. Her lungs seemed to be less effective than her eyes. Then she would go to hospital for treatment and be back in a few days looking 10 years younger. She had clung to life, repeating these cycles, for several years. "Any life is better than none. She had two pleasures which seemed to sustain her: food and conversation. However sick, she could always eat. She ate fast and talked at the same time. Despite her failing eyes, she could see and spear the pommes frites on the plate. She drank lemonade.
I cooked lunch for her or took her to a restaurant two or three times a week.
One day we went to the Cafe de Paris in La Trobe Street. We sat in a semi-private room slightly above and overlooking the main restaurant. We were to go to a new eye specialist after lunch, but Natasha said that it was waste of time. “I accept my blindness. I am composed. ””
She was in a mood for reviewing her life and told me a series of stories I has heard before. She said that many people thought of her as a worldly and sophisticated woman, as a woman who had had many lovers. This was not true. Apart from her husband Georges she had only ever had one lover and this she regrated profoundly.
When Kirsta left her in Paris about 1930 she met the Duc de Brissac[12]. The Duc had been separated from his wife for 12 years. A divorce was not possible for religious reasons and so the Duc and Natasha “lived in sin”. De Brissac was on leave from his post as Governor-General in ”the Indo-Chine””. ( Mrs Kirsta accompanied him unofficially for a period).
They dined at Maxims and afterwards walked to the Duc’s car in the Place Vendome. As the chauffeur was opening the door a shot was fired, hitting Mrs Kirsta in the back. “The Duchess. She shotted me”, she declaimed. “Do you remember? I showed you the bullet wound.” When De Brissac visited her in the American hospital she told him that the relationship was over. It was too ”sordid”. She never saw him again.
She thought most people put too much emphasis on sexual relationships. Sexual passion had not brought happiness for her and rarely for many of her friends. She talked of Misia Sert and her lovers and of Cacteau and his lovers, of how Collette had once made a pass at her. “Horrible. I could not bear to touch the flesh of another woman.”
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Natasha’s gems paid Dad’s army
From the upstairs ballet studios of Kathleen Gorham comes the rhythmic “One!” (thump) "Two!" *thump) “Three!” *thump) of students’ feet.
They all know her simply as Madame Natasha.
She favors sensible woollen dresses with possibly a bulky-knit cardigan to keep out the chill of these Melbourne winter mornings.
Madame removes her heavy horn-rimmed glasses and announces: “I have had an interesting but tragic life, darlink”.
It sounds melodramatic but as she unfolds her story in a richly-accented monologue, you realise it is an understatement.
Before beginning, Madame inserts a Gauloises cigarette in a holder. It is one of the uncompromising sans-filtre type and the small room soon smells like a Quartier Latin …..
….until she was three and spoke French, Italian, German and Spanish before she could speak Russian and Georgian.
Madame Natasha is reluctant to talk about the Russian Revolution of October 1917 (“the Bolsheviks are here …everywhere”). Her father and two brothers were killed, her mother and sister vanished, and the family estates and property were stolen or destroyed.
She says she escaped to Poland with 300 carats of diamonds. “I had a little waist as a child. The diamonds were padded around here with cotton wool.”
Buit there they were taken by the father of George Kirsta, her childhood sweetheart. Father needed the money to feed his private army of 4000 men which campaigned (unsuccessfully) against the Bolshevik forces.
Then came happier days in Paris. Madame’s hands swim in the air as she describes her education at the Sorbonne, her marriage to George Kirsta and her discovery by Misia Sert[13].
“Misia was the patroness of art in Paris for 50 years. She has the salon at five o’clock in the afternoon and everyone was there..” In the following torrent of names it is possible to pick out Ravel, Derain, Matisse, Stravinsky , Bonard, Diaghileff.
*Misia was like a mother to me…She was painted 20 times by Renoir and she given him once a cheque en blanc. He wrote 10,000 francs and she says: You are a fool. I'm a millionairess!” and she put a zero at the end. Ah, a most sensational woman.
George Kirsta became a successful painter but dies of a heart attack at the age of 54.
Madame started her own ballet company and survived the Second World War in Paris. She smiles at the irony: “I had a formidable company – because the dances couldn’t leave.”
Then in 1952 she went to the Coronation and met Australian ballet director-choreographer Rex Reid. They joined forces, playing throughout Europe and the Middle East.
“We worked six weeks in Egypt and then suddenly…bomps…the attack on the Canal, 1956. ”
With the help of Canadian diplomats Madame got Rex out on a dawn plane seven weeks later with 5 pounds in his pocket. “I was not arrested and waited until the first boat. It took 16 days to get from Alexandria to Marseilles (usually three days) but I saved everything of the company ”, down to the last
……
“I love and admire Kati…I am very happy here with a lot of wonderful friends.”
Would Madame-Princess Natasha like to see Russia once again?
“Never in my life. Russia does not exist. I don’t even think about it….I mustn’t. What do you want to find there? Graves or somethings?” Madame is silent in moment.
“But there are not even graves. They don’t exist.”
……………………………
[3] https://tramvaiiskusstv.ru/zhivopis/spisok-khudozhnikov/item/7186-kirsta-georgij-konstantinovich-1902-1955.html
[9] rien du tout= nothing at all