I was gonna play in high school where it was like a murder mystery. UM. And the director of the play, in quotes, was was a character in the show, so like break the fourth wall, like speaks to the audience. It would come out, was like he was trying to put this show on, this murder mystery classic. It was. It was terrible. It was really bad. It was a
really bad play. Um. But we had someone get very very sick the night of the show, of opening night of the show, and um, so we had the director character step in and like be like and I'm going to have to play this part. So he was able to just have his script in front of him because that already worked for his character, and he like deliberately played it terribly, you know, like like a non actor, even though he was a very good actor. Actually, I liked how much weight was in that pause between it
was terrible. I was for a word that more accurately described what it was, and there's not. There's I couldn't think of a stronger word than just plain old terrible. And that was the only terrible play I've ever been. The only dinner theater type thing I ever did was our one manual tavern and forks, knives and other weapons. Right, we had the titties cut off and all that stuff, and I was the murderer. Once. You can't just say we had the titties cut off and all that stuff.
Like you've got to tell people about tell them. Cherry, who you heard in the show, played a character we got murdered and she came out of the kitchen. We were performed this in a restaurant and she came out of the kitchen with a platter with two like what
do we make like cake boobies jello? Yeah, and it's like, oh no, and then she had like blood all of her chest and then she collapsed onto the table with the cities and they were let us around it like presented, and it was like this killer cut off her boobs, put him on a platter, handed her that platter and then she stumbled out into the restaurant and died in front of everyone. How killed her? Also, I was like, it's being cut off murder. Well, definitely a pretty fucked
up thing, yeah, but still I worked. The funniest death was probably Julian's though, when he had the plunger on his mouth and it pulled out all his intestines. Yeah, that's just like plunger on the face, classic Looney Tune style. And he like pulled pull, pull, pull, and then he ripped it off. This like we used any hose stuff with cotton that was all packed into the plunger, and he put a piece of in his teeth, so when he pulled the plunger out, it looked like his intestines
of his mouth. People are eating by the way, wow, Like we made it the most bloody, gross, disgusting come up with and it was hilarious. Anyway, I'm in a show right now if you're in Atlanta at Village Theater. It's called Tipsy Tales robin Hood, and we, uh, we do a one hour show robin Hood, but one of the actors is drunk and we've got to work around that and try to get to the end of the play as best we can. I can't wait to do this. I'm very excited. It's been very funny. I mean, the
script itself for the robin Hood show is funny. It's like a nice little one hour comedy robin Hood play. And then it's going to be chaos because we we just have to basically go along with whatever the drunk does.
They've done this show before and like not robin Hood, but like they've done other shows, and you know the character, the actor will be drunk and they'll just like murder a character in the middle of the show, and now you just have to that character is dead now and you have to get through the rest of the play with that character. So at any point they might decide robin Hood is the villain and we have to like rework the show. Now robin Hood is pretty capitalist. Well
it should be chaos. So if you're around, come check us out the Village Theater. I can't wait to see it. I'm so excited. Speaking of theaters, yeah, we have kind of a theater person to talk. Performer, performer and true storyteller. So one of our listeners, Rachel it's Rachee Vaughan on Instagram, had reached out and said, hey, will you please do Collette because she is like a bisexual, like cool author,
feminist author from France. Um, it's like turn of the century France, so it's all crazy love affairs and stuff going on during that period, and yeah, that sounds right up our street. So we started looking into Collette, and we realized there's so much going on with her life.
There's just so she's like in the middle of this really interesting period of history, so many opportunities for historical tangents, and so much banter, and she had so many ridiculous romances throughout her life that we decided to kind of
split her up into several parts and do our first series. Um. So, yeah, we had flirted with like a few series ideas like Henry the Eighth or Casanova or Lord Byron um, but it kind of feels good to like start with, you know, a really complicated woman who had hot encounters with male and female alike and was just just can't be shoehorned very easily into any label or any box, you know. So, yeah, let's learn all about the early years of Collette. In
our first part. We're gonna talk about her first books, her first marriage, her first lesbian love affair, and so much more. Yeah, let's go. Hey their French comlution. Well, Eli and Diana got some stories to tell. There's no matchmaking, a romantic tips. It's just about ridiculous relationship. I love. It might be any type of version at all, and that's stra comes don't concrete, but if there's just the second glance. Ridiculous Rolets, a production of I Heart Radio.
Sidney Gabrielle Collette was born in eighteen seventy three and she lived in sin Xeiville on Puis Say in Burgundy, France, like rural, you know, rural France. And her father, Captain Collette, was a war hero. He lost his leg in the Crimean War, so he was given a tax collector position in this village, which left the family well off initially. And Collette attended public school from six to twelve, and all the boys in the public school only called each
other by their last names. You know, they'd be like, hey, Banks, get over here, right. So Collette was like, okay, well then call me Collette just like one of the guys. You know, you shouldn't call me Sidney gabriel He should call me collect just like everybody else. That's kind of how she started going by her It's like menonymously monom Okay, that's how she's It starts to say, I'm a monomononomon that's exactly anyway. That's when she started being known menonymously
as Collecte collect like Madonna Share or Frank. Frank, Yeah, he has no Frank. At some point in her childhood, her father was seeking election as a deputee in the French National Assembly, and Collette accompanied him to his campaigning events and she would get tipsy on mold wine with the voters, which such an idea of, like I don't know, like an eleven year old kid being like, give me some of that juice, like good juice. Yeah. Her mom put a stop to that. Eventually she stepped in was like, okay,
that's enough. How many voters have you won over? Okay, that'll be enough, thank you. But by the time that Collette was twelve years old, everything changed. Her father had made some poor investments and this forced him to sell
off some of his wife's property. And then, in addition to that, Collette's half sister married a doctor, but her family didn't have the money to pay off the dowry that they'd agreed upon, so the house and all the furniture had to be sold to cover it, leaving the rest of the family basically in poverty, which kind of sucks for the sister to be like, sorry, this is what I'm worth. I know the family is going to
go broke. Paying for me to marry this guy. But but also have to be like, it's not like you could be confused about the terms of the marriage contract, Like why would you agree to pay a price you can't you don't have I wonder if it was agreed when they still had money and then they lost it all over the course of the engagement, right, right, how are we going to pay this debt? And you can't go and like negotiate, like, hey, what if can we lower the You got it? That's why you always set
your dowry. Less for you, everybody, when you're setting your dowries, make it a percentage of your net worth, not a hard number. That way, if you lose everything, you know, well sorry, here you get of my money. That's two bucks and turns out my daughter's worth less than USA. Yeah. Sorry, don't carry that energy into your marriage. So everything had been sold off, the families left with nothing, and Collette wrote in her memoirs quote except for my parents ruin,
the money gone, the furniture sold by public auction. It had been roses all the way. But what would I have done with everlasting roses? Well that's an optimistic outlook, It's true. I think she was pretty depressed throughout her life, but she seemed to try at least. Who wants to be happy all the time? Sounds miserable? What would I
write about? Yeah? Her father frequently corresponded with a friend that he had served in the Crimean War with, and when Collette was nineteen, this friends son came to visit them. His name was Henri Guthier Villars, known to most people by his pen name Willie just Willie, another anonymous. So Willie is in we say Willie is in puiss And if I were twelve, I'd have a joke there, But I'm just gonna let it go because I'm a mature adult now. Willie was thirteen years older than Colette. He
was a critic and writer in Paris. He was already famous with his quips and ways, his way with words, and also as being one of the most notorious libertines in Paris. And he wasn't handsome. Joel van Valeen writes in his article The Endearing Colette that Willie had quote a beak of a nose and a paunch of the stomach, but he was cultured and urbane, and most importantly he made her laugh I'm telling you, it's like Roger Rabbit. You can get a hot lady if you've got a
good sense. It's true. It's plus he was Collette's ticket out of the provinces and rural obscurity, which probably really added to his attraction. Like she saw him like she was like, this is my train out of here now. Willie seemed equally taken with this. You know, this striking French beauty, this gorgeous woman, and she had this this flowing golden hair and these big magnetic eyes. Her hair went all the way down to her ankles. Yes, in fact,
like just a natural dress. She always wear it. There's actually some writer said that she would wear him in two braids that would sit coiled like a python in the chair next to think. That was one of her biographers talked about that. I'm like the heaviness of the hair and her neck anyway, I had really long hair down to my waist and it was I'm just saying, she's got a wheelbarrow. She's always pushing around with her
hair braids in. I would assume if I saw someone with hair coiled up around them that they could control it, like it could count to life. And stranglement. If it got that long, there's some magic to it. If there's some magic to it, there's no limit, there's all magic exactly. Fire breathing hair, I would smell like actually fired hair.
Let's not put this. Van Valen, the journalist, says that in a French gossip newspaper, there was an item printed warning quote an exquisite blonde whose marvelous hair has made her famous to follow Mephistophily's advice and not give away on the kisses until she has a ring on her finger. La And this article made Willie so mad that he fought a duel with the editor and wounded him this day like the hell you say now, pink you in the arms. But not long after that, in eight three,
Willie and Colette were married. They moved to live in Paris full time, but married life was not all it was cracked up to be. Collette said the city of Paris filled her with dread, which kind of makes sense when you grow up in the country Hansria overload, just a lot going on. She called marital sex quote an ugly dream, which I don't know what that says about Willie and bed or just how how traumatic, your first sexual experience can be Um. I don't know exactly what
she's referring to with that. Also, Willie was a neglectful husbands the guy. He worked hard fish and he played harder. His whole life was about like the social rounds, so he would always be out at the theater and running around trying to meet journalistic deadlines and stuff. So he just left Colette home alone most of the time, and usually she was hiding from people that they owed money to.
We would come around, you know, knocking on the door, and she would just have to like hide behind a bureau and pretend not to be home, which is so creepy. No one's here, and oh we're absent. Nobody homes, just those chickens clock clock. What's a French chicken noise? You know, different countries are different now they do, It's true. What do the French say for chicken clucks? You know, we're like gruise montepul got the translations chicken, chicken, very sophisticated.
Gru that's a French chicken. Well, I can't find chicken, but my quick Google search here found me a French rooster, which rears us in America and in English, it says cockadoodle do. Of course we all know what a rooster says. In French, they say cock rico cock rick, which sounds more like a salsa dance to It's about to say that sounds like a really cool cabana spot. But I can go to leave me down of Coca Rico denies some dancing. There's a big breast band plan. It's led
by a chicken. I would pay good money led by a chicken called Coca Rico. Somebody get it together for me. I am ready to watch for Diana's birthday. We're gonna have to find that. I want to cocoa eat piece band led by a giant chicken. It's my one wish, all right. So Willie's leaving her home alone. He owes money everywhere. It's just like a chaotic situation, right, He's always going down to the Coca Rico cash like I'll go to the Cocoa Rico. He says, no, no, no,
it's too dangerous. Sorry, the chickens Rooster's own. Well, it's only for cox. But also Willie cheated, like we said, he's one of the most notorious libertines in Paris. So' not really a surprise to hear this. He had a string of mistresses, actresses, waitresses, studio models. He was forever. Some of them he had him for years. Some of them it would just be a short, little one night
stand or whatever. And about a year into their marriage, Colette received an anonymous letter telling her, hey, you'll be very interested. Don't know what is going on in this particular Parisian at part a month? How is my how is my accent? And Colette took herself to the address provided and she found her husband with his mistress, Charlotte Kinsellor, who he had actually been with for like several years
at this point. And again, this is far from his only affair, but this is the first one that Colette knew about, and somebody wanted her to know, you know that. I don't know if it was meant to be a kind thing, like your husband's running around on you, or if it was like, hey, you're being you know, like kind of a shitty thing. Was it like I feel badly cut out magazine letters? Oh, speculation station. It's one of his other mistresses who found out about this girl.
I was like, fine, I'm gonna tell your wife on you. I like that you're cheating on me with somebody else, that you're cheating on your wife with You're supposed to be cheating on your wife with me. Well, I'm gonna go tell Collette about this. That's definitely what happens anyway. One of his other mistresses tipped off the lead about his other mistresses. That's definitely what happens there. Anyway, history made. Now, don't let your lard imagination get away with you, because
I didn't. I thought they were like in the middle of some crazy sex actors when she when Colette walks in, Like so Colette walks in and it's like, mon dieu, what are you doing? And we assumed that, um, but
it wasn't. They actually were just going through Charlotte's household accounts and honestly, listen, like this might have been more galling and walking in on some sex stuff, because again, Collette has spent a year hiding from creditors and then she has to walk in and watch this guy financially support another woman. Goodness, so she might have been like, I'd rather caught you with your dick insider than this
right now? Check what's this? Wow? Maybe another speculation station? Uh, maybe he wasn't helping her with her finances, maybe he was trying to scam some money, where he's like, oh, yes, some you should probably I've got an account that that could keep some of this in that does a better interest rates, So why don't you just give it to me.
It reminds me of my when my cousin came to look at all my Magic the Gathering cards in middle school because I my mom bought me a yard sale box like five magic Gathering cards and I never played before. My cousin definitely had, so I was like, hey, you know, are these worth anything? And he comes through. He literally sits down my deck and he starts going through it, and I was just too naive at the time to
know what he was doing. As he sets cards aside, and it's like, you don't want this, you don't want this, This one's no good, this one's no good. Here, you should keep these. Maybe you can sell that one, and he walks away with a stack of his own, And in hindsight, I'm like, he definitely probably took all the valuable. You should have been like, well, if I don't want him, why do you want him? Yeah? Well, well, I actually play. So these are good for my deck, but they're not
worth anything, you know kind of thing? Sure, sure, well, whatever he was doing with Charlotte, whether he's trying to scam her money or give her money. According to Victoria Best, a former lecturer on French literature at Cambridge University, she writes a blog called lit Love, and she goes real into Collet. It's really interesting. Definitely check her out. Can I pause for Victoria Best? Here? For second? Her blocks called love? Why isn't it called best lit our best Love?
You got the last name like best, you better be using its? True? I don't think about not a lot of us are gifted with the last name like best. Use it, use it for them for those of us who can't. That's true. We should write her a letter like love. Your blog just cited it in our podcast episode. And also want to ask, what then is Robert here? No? Victoria? You do you? Okay girl? She does great work? Please
continue well. She wrote that when Collette walks in on Charlotte and Willie, Charlotte was like ready to fire, she grabbed a pair of scissors would defend herself, which tells me something about maybe Charlotte's life. In the past couple of years, people keep sending anonymous letters about Willie being in my apartment. I gotta be ready. She's always got a pair of scissors with hands reach. She was gonna stab Collette. She's like, there's always man, my boyfriend's wives
are always showing up here China start some ship. But Collette played it really cool. And this is like a common thing for Collette. She seems to be very like interested in maintaining in maintaining her cool in the face of public humiliation. So when all her family's stuff went up for auction, even as a kid, she was acting like, Oh, that ain't no thing. Everything's fine. I don't care well what I want with all these roses? Exactly what would I do with everlasting roses? Um? So in this situation,
she also just played it cool. She said, I'm here to get you, Willie. Let's go um here to get dear Willie out of that and let's go. So, yeah, she just played it cool. She got Willie, she left, and actually she and Charlotte became friends eventually, like once she had kind of I guess decided there's and Willie is incorrigible. There's nothing to be done. She sort of was like, fine, why am I mad at Charlotte? She's making her way in this world. I'm at at Willie
and so you and I are cool. But the pain of discovery didn't slow Willie down, not for a second. There's another time. While Colette was sitting down to have her portrait painted with the artist Jacques amure Blanche, she watched Willie get dropped off at their place by a woman, and as he stepped away, they exchanged like a loving goodbye, you know, kiss kiss, So glad we could spend some time together, little booty grab, I'll see you later, sugar
sugar cakes, cake, hey, the French sugar cake. But since he wasn't inside the room to see Colette see him, she actually let her emotions get the best of her. As we said, she usually keeps it cool, but this time she really broke down. The painter would later write quote, she had real convulsions, hysterical crying fits. One had to lay her on a sofa and bathe her temples with cologne because she believed herself abandoned forever. That's such an
old school like rub cologne on my temples. I'm having a fit, you know, don't work anymore. Can you imagine like you're having a panic attack and I just come up and spray acts in your eyes Like this is the worst, so much worse. Um. But yeah, I think this is important to note because Colette's is so well known for having like an open marriage and just being kind of out and about in the world. But early on that was not really her her jam and she really took it to heart that she was being she
used being run around on. And not long after this, Colette got pretty sick. She chalked it up to this nervous breakdown, but one of her biographers, Judith Thurman, argues in her book Secrets of the Flesh, A Life of Colette, that Collett's symptoms indicate not only about serious depression, but that her husband Willie had likely given her a severe k of gonarrhea. Willie, look, if you're going to be running around, first of all, have a conversation about it,
you know, come to an agreement with your partner. You can at least talk about it. And secondly, actually probably primarily played safe friends. I know, it's nineteenth century France. I was about, well, just try It's nine or something. And Willie's like a wife, gotta do, gotta take what she gets, So that means I get to cheat on whoever I want and I get to bring home a STD and give it to you. That's the risk you run when you marry a guy. You take what you get,
and what you get is gonarrhea s t DS. So Willie sucks like Willie Boo anti Willie podcast, ridiculous romance. But in a minute, he is going to do the best thing ever for Collette, and that is make her a writer. And let's find out how right after this break, Okay, welcome back, my petite co co Rico's so collect you know, got sick with gnoia. She was sick for a little while. Her mother came to live with them to like nurse
her back to health. And then Willie was feeling bad, probably for giving her goneria, so he took her on a little trip to Brittany, France, and that seemed to kind of repair their relationship, at least for a minute. You know, they had better communication skills after that. Now, as we said before, Willie well known music critic and writer in Paris, but actually he was more of a con man than he was a writer what Willie Willie guy, And he was real proud of it too. He loved
telling people how he never did a day's work. He just paid other people to do some work. Some sources to say he never wrote a word himself. Some sources to say he did some writing, but mostly not a real um. John Grisham totally right, hate, I don't speculations station. John Grisham doesn't write is on stuff? Does he? I don't. It's a lot of books. How could he? How could he? And like Tom Clancy, like any of those grocery store novels where they come out with a new book every month,
I feel like you've got to have some ghostwriter. They probably wrote some at first, and then somebody came and I was like, all right, you guys can all copy this style. I hear movie composers do this a lot um, the big ones, especially uh. In fact, I read recently that not Michael Giaquino, who's amazing, but some of the bigger ones will farm out there compositions to other composers and then not necessarily maybe give them the credit they deserve. So yeah, just a thing just popped into my head.
I read recently well, much like that, Willie had himself a stable of ghost writers collect called it his factory. So he had composers writing music criticism, and then he had authors writing articles and novels, whatever, sonnets, sometimes whatever they felt like writing, or whatever he thought they should write, whatever you thought would sell. He's like, right this recipes, recipes, Yeah, I think pieces. He's like, get me some discourse right away.
And sometimes like he would conceive the plot and like hand over an outline and they would actually write the book. Um. Most of the time, though, it seems like he just edited whatever they came up with and then slapped his name on it and sold it. And because that, you know, Willie was like a marketing genius. He was an incessant self promoter. He had a huge network in the literary world, so he could really make a book sell. That is the truth about him. He could market the ship out
of something. So a lot of even acclaimed authors would take a turn in the factory if they were hard up for cash, because they knew they would get paid well because the book would sell. Um. So Stephen King comes by is like things are tight, mhm, what you got for me? I mean basically, and Meanwhile, that meant Willie, of course, could publish as many as fifty books a month, which is a rate that no single author could keep up with on their own. So he's kid raaking royalties
except Stephen King, except for Seing. So Collette even did some work in the factory herself, although she saw herself as more of like an actress and a singer than a writer. But one day Willie was a little hard up for money and he didn't have any ghostwriters around that he'd lean on, so he turned to his wife for a new book. He suggested that she writes something about her school days. But hey, you know what, Colette, why don't you throw a little lesbian action in there?
Might help me sell the book, Oh Willie, it's like sex sells. So Collette put pen to paper, and indeed she wrote a six hundred page manuscript in the form of a diary, and it was called Claudine in School, and it was about a fifteen year old protagonist who's a bit of a hoyden. Uh. This is a Diana word where let's take a literary lesson for today. I'm sorry I did not know this word hoyden. Hoyden. I mean, I don't know the actual definition, but I think it means like a girl who's a bit of a tomboy.
You know, she'll she'll run around in the dirt. She's very opinionated and kind of bold and brassy, and she'll talk back. The definition I'm seeing is a boisterous girl. And the example sentence they give just to clarify for you is I've warned you before you young Hoyden. That is not helpful. Helpful, That is not a helpful sentence. Thanks Oxford Languages. Anyway, Claudine is a bit of a Hoyden.
She's got a quick wit, she's curious, she's bold, she's got this independent spirit, and she has a love affair with her female teacher. And I'll say she was only fifteen, so there's no se x and it's not a graphic. It was like kissing and cuddling. Thank you. Was a little worried about that either way. Inappropes, but but it sells. I guess Willie barely even flipped through this six page manuscript before he just threw it into a drawer in disappointment,
slammed it shut. No way am I have publishing? This will not see the light of day piece of mered. But a little while later he dug it back up, reread it, and according to Collette, he called himself a stupid ass. Oh Willie, what was I thinking? This is brilliant? So stupid? So he put his hat on. He ran out to the publishers with all the notebooks in hand, said, quick, have the next. Um, I don't know ulysses and like, I hope not. We like something people can read, sait,
I have the next? I have the next Da Vinci Code. Everyone is going to be talking about this one like I was the next Tom Clancy. No, will get it in here, and he gives the publishers. They put it together in the year nineteen hundred, under Willie's name, of course, and this became an instant bestseller, selling forty copies in just two months. Was the next da Vinci Code? It really was? It really was, and soon to be made into a movie with Tom Hanks, Yes, Tom Hanks, Claudine.
He'll play the teacher. He'll play the teacher and do a ridiculous French accent, and they'll get obviously probably l Fanning to play Claudine and see it. She could play fifteen, maybe a little old for it, but she could playft like sexy stuff. You'd want someone older. She's she's been back five or six years in the Yeah, and I'm saying she could play a high schooler just as easily as Tom Hanks could play a female high school teacher. Very true. This movie is very interesting. Directed by the
Duffer brothers. What is going to happen to? Cladie can't wait? Well? This kicked off like a new era for Collette. She had found her voice, she loved writing, and her literary career was launched. Because even though it was only Willie's name on the manuscript, it didn't really take that long for too Pi to figure out who the real author was. I spread, surely, I imagine Collette dropped them. She might have whisper whisper Actually I wrote that, and then boom,
gossip spreads in Paris like like revolutions. That just goes so fast. But I mean, he's well known for having ghostwriters, so they probably were always trying to be like who actually yeah, um so yeah. At this point they're frequenting like literary salons. Kind of a glamorous couple going around, not rich, but you know, people wanted them on their guest list and stuff, and she is like hanging out
with as yet unknown legends like Marcel Proust. What you know, Paris was just enchanted with her country manners and her childlike spontaneity. During a blizzard, for example, she once made sorbet out of jam and the snow that had collected on the windows. And so Paris was probably like, oh, she took his strawberry jam and snow and she made ice cream all so cottage cool shut. It's kind of making me think of the snoopy um right where you would literally what we did, We put snow in them.
I guess that's not the thing people did ices, weren't they like snow cone That's what I'm gonnes. Yeah, we just made them with actual snow. Well, the one time we had snow in Georgia enough snow to do that. Yes, I know, I'm thinking about snow in Georgia, and I'm just like, you can't scoop up snow in Georgia without other stuff coming with it, because it's not deep enough. You don't get that clean middle layer. No, And well, as a kid, I think it was like during the
ninety three blizzard or something. So snow to actually do something like that, but I feel like, yeah, most of the time, snow in Georgia is not you don't want to. We moved to Georgia and people were still constantly talking about the Blizzard of ninety three. It was like it, you know, because I had moved from upstate New York in a valley where we regularly got like eighteen inches of snow, and people were like, oh, well, we had the Blizzard of it was six inches deep and I
was like, oh my god, I lost a scarf that day. However, did you say, well, the next year there was no snow, so I didn't need it. I had bought it and lost it for that blizzard. Collette also around this time, cut off her famous floor length golden tresses, and she kicked off the fashion for short hairstyles for women that would stay trendy into the nineteen twenties. So who amongst us has kicked off a fashion trend that lasted almost twenty years. It's been it's been a while since I've
done it. I can't wait for you to do it again. Yeah. I was actually responsible for the midriff and rings. Yeah, that was me, what about belly chains? Remember those? Oh yeah, yeah, Well I started with it with with just a ring, but then I like clipped my wallet chain to it because I also started wallet chains, and people just kind of cut out the moment chains as like, nobody's going to take my wallet if it's chained to my belly button.
I mean, it's a fair point, or they'll rip out your Come on, I wasn't going to say it, think I was going to leave it there. I blame myself,
your fault. If you started it, that's your fault. And Willie wanted more Claudine because of course it's selling so well, and he's like, let's get more of this rambunctious lady, and so she got to writing it, and she has famously claimed that Willie would lock her in her room for hours at a time until she had pushed sufficient amount of pages under the door jam each day, and then had to let her out rump still skin like you got you better spin this straw into go by,
which I mean, take this blank paper and make it porn and then I'll che not too much point because that limits the market. Um. But actually her the biographer that we cited earlier Judith Therm and she's kind of is like, you know, Collette liked a good story, and so that means she was not always a hundred percent honest about everything that she's talking about. And there is some evidence that when they were in the country together,
Collette just had a lot of trouble concentrating. So she would walk their dog and sometimes also her cat in the morning and then ask him lock me in my room for four hours so I can get to work, like as a focus technique, I guess, So we don't. I don't know for sure if he actually was like this cruel dude who would lock her in a room, or if she was like, I just need to concentrate. Um, you know, I'm in the country where I like to run around, and so I need you to make me
sit and work for four straight hours. So that's a good idea. I might start asking you to lock me up so I can finish my work and then and then I will definitely tell everyone she locks me in my room until I'm finished working. She's problematic. I mean, I think it's a good point that sometimes Mary, because you do ask me, they'll be like, do not let me have this I don't want one of these cookies. Don't let me eat this after this hour or make
me get up at this time. And you know, that's that is a thing that you lean on your partner sometimes and you're not great at it. No, I'm bad.
I'm bad at it. But but I think that Collette had maybe like picked up a little bit of marketing genius from Willie, and she was sort of like, this is this is going to make people want to, you know, you know, more about me, and they're going to care more about what I'm doing if they think there's this crazy brute locking me in my room every day and forcing me to write with bread and water or something. So I think, you know, it was almost like a branding thing, like, oh, it's just a way to get
interest up about about the book. I don't want people to know what a hid and I am. I want them to think I'm just an innocent princess locked in a tower. She certainly thought it would get people gossiping about Claudine, the second installment of Claudine, and it did. She ended up writing him a book a year. There was Claudine at School, of course, and then Claudine on Berry and then Claudine married and Claudine and Annie, and then there was also two other books about like a
spinoff character, and this is all by five. Willie comes in. He's like, I got one word for you, merchandizing. We want action figures, lunch boxes. It's just like early Disney McDonald's. How else can I make money off this property? Yes, you'll get the free toy with every happy meal. What is it? Whatever French joke insert here, you get it? So but but no, really, he started making Claudine postcards,
Claudine cigarettes, Claudine perfumes, lotions, ice cream. There's like a like a Ben and Jerry's flavor Claude Claudine praline or Claudine and Annie's pretzels. Would that be a good one? I would like a little sweet and salty. That's good. I'm to that um. And then he would also make Claudine candy and even dulls, so action figures was not
far off. They have the first novel adapted for the stage, with an actress named Polaire cast as the titular role, and Willie would go out and about with both women, both Colette and Polaire, on his arms and he would hint that there was a lesbian relationship behind closed doors
between the two of them. Our old friend Victoria Best writes on Litlove quote, Willie knew that personality mattered, and that selling the people behind the stories appealed to a voyeuristic desire in the audience to see the real versions of the characters they read about. There was, after all, plenty of truth in this. Colette was ransacking her life with Willie for the plot, transposing their marriage into print
almost as fast as she lived it. So's it's like, how you know, we want to see all the Avengers actors hanging out as if they really are going to say of the world when we need them to. Yeah, that quote really made me think, like, what would Willie have done with social media? Can you imagine the fake ship that he would be having celebrities put on their social media accounts. It would just be he would have
just done well as all in his hand. He would probably be a huge piece of ship, just like he was then, but like he would have done well, very successful and in terms of Collette writing her married life into the novels, most notably at least for this podcast, Collette wrote about Claudine living in a threesome, and we're going to find out more about that right after this
and welcome back to the show. So yeah, Claudine's fictional threesome was actually extremely true to life, and it will bring us to this episode side piece, What could happen? Collette met the Parisian born American socialite Georgie Raoul Duval, the wife of a wealthy French mining engineer, at a friend's house in March nineteen o one, and seems like
it was lust at first sight. Georgie was hot. Georgie was lying, hey girl, and she was like, hey girl, look a wealthy French mining engineer is you know he's going to marry a ten He's going to marry ten right? And also he's busy exact feeling lonely. Yeah, Georgie's board, Georgie's flying solo. She wants some anonymous and read all these Claudine bucks and it's like, true, this girl knows what's up. This girl knows how to push buttons specifically,
but one button we all know what matters. Now. This is Collette's first known homosexual affair. Um, but it isn't just Collette's side piece, because unbeknownst to Collette, Georgie also began having an affair with Willie oh Man, and Willie also had no idea that Georgie was sleeping with Collette. Playing the field, Georgie was like, I wonder head long, I can keep this up for real? Well, it wasn't that long before husband and wife figured out that they
were sleeping with the same person. And I just want to know how how like did they meet each other coming and going or did one of them let it slip in bed one night? Like they were like, oh, Georgie and he was like, wait a minute, how do you know, Georgie, How do you know I've been sleeping with her? How do you know, Georgie, I've been sleeping I wonder if Georgie would like play them against each other and be like, so, Collette, tell me what does
your husband like in bed? You know what, what really turns him on? I'm just curious, you know, and vice versa. And of course Willie is like, I don't know what turns Colette on in bed, but why would pay attention to that? You have to turn a woman on in bed? I mean maybe Willie was like dynamite in the sack as it's possible he got he got around enough that
he should have. If practice makes perfect, you would think, I tell you, you hear about some of these guys and they're like having hundreds of affairs with actresses and singers and models and stuff. And I'm like, I guess you just have to. I guess you. Really, it's just confidently put yourself out there because it sounds exhausting to me.
It really does. I don't know Collette. Apparently as a journalist later on in her life, she would write articles, including about fake orgasms, and I wonder she was like, let me talk to some of these women, who are you really enjoying yourself? Or maybe because she had lesbian love affairs, she would be with women, married women who would be like, wow, I didn't know it could be like that. What are you doing in bed with your man? I thought, I just thought you were supposed to scream.
I wasn't compelled to. It just seemed like the right thing to do. I love that parton Emily where she's listening for orgasms in Paris and they're all different. Do you remember that moaning? And one one of the ladies is just like it's like the most quiet. So however, they figured it out. They figured it out one day that they were both sleeping with the same woman, and in true Parisian fashion, especially for that time, they decided to share her. Um. There's a police report from May
first one that really spells it out. It says, quote, we learned that the novelist Gautier Villars has chosen the afternoon of twenty nine April a small apartment on the fourth floor of a discreet house in Pasquier Street, with the aim of meeting to lesbians, his legitimate wife and a lady aged about thirty. The meeting of the novelist and the two ladies in question took place from three
to six o'clock in the evening. Arriving first, the two ladies were left alone for an hour, but Mr Gautier Villars had come to join them, so they continued with him the game. First, okay, a couple of questions. First, love this afternoon delight? Second? First, what police report? Why were you there? We had nothing else to do today, so we decided the snoop on a local threesome. My question was like it sounds were like a gossip column, and the police report, So who were they being really
loud and the neighbors called the police. Are just like they just did a lot of gossip columns back then, or maybe because homosexuality was legalized in France after the French Revolution, but you know, people would still call the cops sometimes. So I wonder if the two ladies showing up, people are like, oh, these two bitches are dooming something, and then the police showed up and they're like, oh, no, there was a man there. He showed up late, but
he was there. That's all good. Two women together talking, having a conversation without a man present, and even discussing a man zip. I'll have no Beckadel tests passing in my town. I also love they continued with him the game, the game of doing it in a game, job playing. I don't know, but I want to play. It depends for me. It depends only well. Of course. Collette frequently
acknowledged that she suffered from jealousy. She called it quote the only suffering we endure without ever becoming used to it. I would say that that's true of like hitting your funny bone. You know, you never get used to that. I could hit my funny bone thirty times a day, and I would hate it just as much tomorrow. That's so true. It does hurt in a very special way.
So checkmate, Collette, check poetry. But anyway, she managed to put her jealousy aside for a while, at least to carry on this Manashati was Georgie and Willie, and this went all through the spring. But in the summer of nineteen o one, Willie and Collette realized that Georgie made something of a habit of summoning each one of them an hour apart from each other, and they didn't take
kindly to that. They're like, wait a second, we had something worked out here, and you're all deliberately separating us. Plus I would also wonder whose seconds getting sloppy seconds? Maybe it's switched sometimes depending on her mood. See that
would be more fair. Well. Also, it's like, listen, if you're in a polyamorous relationship, there's certain rules, and if the couple's like, hey, we only meet together, it's not cool for you to then meet with one of them outside of outside of your threesome, right, although it's also not cool of the couple they both met with her individually. If that was the rule, so everybody was breaking it. So I'm not entirely sure what was bothering them here.
Maybe it was just the hour apart they're like, we could use a little more time than that. I don't know, but they got mad at her. I think got real mad about it. Whatever bothered. Then they did not take kindly to it, and they broke it off with Georgie, and then they took revenge in literary form. It's also pretty pretty messed up to be like, we're gonna go
make what do they call it. It's like revenge porn or something kind where it's like, oh, this girl broke up with me, so now I'm gonna publish all the all the sexty stuff we used to do pretty twisted. But Collett wrote the book Claudine Married, and in that book, the character that Claudine has her lesbian affair with is so obviously a caricature of Georgie that Georgie tried to keep the book from being published. She feared there was
going to be this scandal. But Willie, he's savvy, he got it published anyway, and Georgie cut all ties with both of them, sus it I'm done. I'm done. With both of you. How dare you now, I I question, I don't uh if took revenge is like a scholarly viewpoints rather than their own viewpoint, because she was already
right writing about her own life. So a lot of characters and all the books are very thinly veiled caricatures of people in their life, and this was kind of a common thing I think in a lot of literature. We talked about a little bit during the Oscar Wild episode that sometimes they would be writing books about each other, and it was, you know, you change the name, but everyone knew that Lord is actually that guy in the circle,
at least well in the circle. Yeah, and now we don't know necessarily who they're talking about it, but but at the time they certainly knew, and they would often be real mad about how they got portrayed by one another, because for all I know, Stephen King is out there like, man, I'm gonna make Dean Coots the villain and nobody's gonna know, but I'm gonna know. Dean's gonna know. Dean's reading it like that best. Well, I'll show him in my next one.
I'm scared of him, though he can summon clowns um, well, yes, it might not be that cruel. But but in either case, you know, Georgie went to them and was like, hey, this is really obviously me. Can you change that or stop this book from going out? And they were like no, we're mad at you. So there was some there was
some animosity to it. I think so if if she actually tried before it was done to get it changed or something, then yeah, I think that there might have been a little bit like, sorry, that's what we do. So I should have should have known it before you fucked. A famous literary couple definitely talked thought about that. It's like dating Taylor Swift and then being like, what she wrote a song about me? Come here? How could I have known? So? Writing wise, things are going great. Everyone
loves Claudine, they're in literary salons. Life is good. But marriage wise, everything sucked. Victoria Best rights that as Willie got older, quote, his libido flagged and he needed ever more perverse scenarios to revive it. The steady stream of schoolgirl Claudina likes that were drawn to him by his celebrity proved useful for this particular task. Very gross, and Collette wrote about it saying, quote, hanging on him, cooing to him. They write, darling, you'll marry me when she dies. Yes,
you'd better believe it. He's marrying them already, one after another. He could cull, but he prefers to collect. Damn. Collette is a cutting ass bitch when she wants to be issued like these dumb bitches. But as Best says, she did not write about quote how Willie required her to warm them up socially and sometimes sexually before he received them. WHOA.
So this is a really interesting point here because Collette, like we said, she starts her married life seeming to be pretty monogamous, like she doesn't want him running around on her um. But then she kind of gets maybe swept up into the Parisian life, or she sort of becomes resigned to this is how it is, and gets into the open marriage thing. And of course she she must have had some same sex desire already or else
she wouldn't have been interested. Um. But I wonder how much Willie was like, go ahead and try it, you know, kind of coerced her a little bit into some things that she didn't really want to do or yeah, or or introduced her I mean, a lot of people are very feel very monogamous until they are presented with someone says like, well, you know what about this lifestyle and they maybe even tepidly check it out, and then they're like, oh shit, this is awesome. You know. So, I mean,
it's true you have to try it before you know. Um. So, yeah. I wonder how willing she was to sexually warm up someone for him, or if that was like, Okay, great, that sounds great. I love that. Right. However she felt about the whole situation, you know, of their marriage. She was definitely getting sick to death of Willie himself. She loved their bohemian life, we think. I mean, she said she had all these illustrious friends, She had scandalous friends.
One time collect jumped naked out of a cake at a party. I gotta wonder if that's the first time someone did that. Life goal, life goal, life goal. You think she was the first one to do. No, it must have happened before. It might have. It's just such a trope. Yeah that. I don't know if she was like, I'm doing that because that's what like crazy ladies do, or she's like, you know what, I'm gonna do something real crazy and it became like a thing popularized it.
But yeah, that's I'm like, she's such a trends that. I just think of Adam's family values. Lurch was that was she in the cake when you baked it? That's poor girl, poor girl, raw, Julia as come as Adams is one of the finest performances of our age, I agree, absolutely, he will always be my Gomez. I'm totally fine to see new gomezes in the lifetime, but he will always be my Gomez. And then it didn't hurt that Angelic at Houston, also one of the great performances, will also
always be my Morticia. So good anyway, cakes just jumping out of a cake. Collette also loved writing, but she was bored. In an article for The Guardian, Aida at Amerium writes, quote, Collette always knew that the shock of marriage contained something greater than her own experience of a specific man. It ended any sense of independent sovereignty. That's apparently was like a theme in some of her books was this sense. And it wasn't just women that had it.
Some of her male characters would get it too, where once they're married, they're like happy to be married, but then they also realized like, oh, I'm not in charge of my own life anymore. I have the other person who had to consult with all the time, and how constraining that can feel and eating Um, I guess, especially depending on who you're married to and how much they
can strain your life. But um, but I thought that was an interesting thing where she's like really realizing that marriage as a partnership isn't just like we're together, working together and making life together. It's like, you're also kind
of limiting my personal freedom. And then her nineteen ten novel The Vagabond collect wrote that marriage, even to someone kind and true, is quote a long drawn out, voluptuous nous, suspended, fanned, renewed, the winged fall, the swooning, in which one's strength is renewed by its own death. Damn, that's exactly what I was going to write in your anniversary card this year. But have to find another way to say that you can strain my personal freedom. Look, you say it every
day with your eyes. I'm so glad that to just getting well, it's just the magic is still alive. Well, so Collet started thinking about other things and other ways to be creative, And we mentioned earlier she had always thought of herself as an actress, so she decided to take lessons in mime from the celebrity pantomime George Wogg. And let's remember this is nineteen hundreds, so mime is
like a really big acting technique. And Willie was super supportive of this career path, so supportive in fact, that he urged her to go on tour with Wogg's company, which is something that would kind of take her out of his company a long time. Oh, have all these school girls trying to sleep with me? Yes, why don't you go out of town for a few months and
take your long drawn out voluptuousness with you. So yeah, she realized that he wanted out to She wrote, quote, while I was dreaming of escape, someone side me had been dreaming of conveniently showing me the door. It's like with just if one of us had just said something
sooner earlier. It's like my first girlfriend and I went to see a movie and I won't say which one because it's controversial that I hate it um and we both were sitting there, apparently both hating it, but we both thought the other person was loving it, and I after a certain scene went audibly during the movie and after the movie, I was like, you couldn't tell that I was miserable, and she was like, no, I thought that you saw that scene and went wow. I was like, no,
it was the opposite. Now is that not a good lesson on how you things can be communicated and received very differently as But what movie was it? Now? You have to tell me which one it is? Okay, fair enough. I would like to see it again. Um, I haven't seen it since then. I was like sixteen, and I was very bored, and I wanted to love it, and I love everyone in it, and I love that style
of movie. I would watch it again. I can't sit here and say it was a bad movie because everybody loves it so and I canna be like I'm right and everyone else is wrong. But it's um me personally, I was bothered by it. I would watch it again. So anyway, in nineteen o six, Colette and Willie separated officially, and Colette left to pursue her life on the stage with George Wogg's company, and a lot happens during her
basically her single life. So we will find out more about that, including her affair with Napoleon the Third's gender bending knees in part two of our Colette series. This will bring us to the end of this part. Wait, you dropped Napoleon the Third in there, and I am ready? Can we just keep going? I'm so ready? That's crazy. Only the third of course, the bastard who sent Max and Carlotta to Mexico's. He's a popular character in Ridiculous Romance.
It's turning out. Yeah, I can't wait, especially when she's single. That's when she has a lot of her really ridiculous romances. Um, it's so fun. I cannot wait because we're gonna talk about like gay subculture in Paris and all these codes and stuff. Anyway, I'm very excited about this series. Also, I think it's wacky that, um, she went from like a like a ghostwriting novelist and libertine to a mime, like a touring mime. Like what a shift. This is
awesome that that wouldn't happen today. I mean, it wouldn't be like Suzanne Collins being like, well, I finished the Hunger Games books. Now I'll be a touring mime. Can you imagine? And changing it up. I would go see it. I mean, I don't know what she looks like, but she has a really expressive face. She could do it. Yeah, you just need some makeup and a striped shirt, reality, physicality and knows a lot of minds that don't wear striped shirts and berets, but they all George Wog was
one of them. He was not into that kyle of mining. He felt that actually mime gave you more opportunities to show emotion and expression words do, which is often true. We talked about that in the Oscar Kokoshka episode. He wrote that play that was largely wordless and about how you know, there was a theme in the in Austria at the time that you know, language wasn't enough and it was actually limiting. So yeah, I could see that. I could see that. That That makes sense to me. I mean,
especially if you're going around internationally. Great, now you don't have to worry about not language or they don't do your language so they're missing nuance. You're like, there is no language, so it's all good. You might say, a smile is the same in every language. Wow, thank you McDonald's coke or whoever did that. Yeah, that sounds like coked, but we will. Yeah, we'll get into mime in all that culture. I'm sure in the next part she's going to expose her she's gonna have the first nip slip.
She's gonna have, well not the first nip slip, but she's gonna have a big nip first. She's she's just gonna have a scandaloust Janet Jackson style nip slip, among other things. Yeah, and we're going to be bringing you collect episodes from the next couple of Wednesdays. That's how we're going to do this. We'll we'll break it up in between with other episodes on Friday's, so just make sure you can find the next part of this next Wednesday. We're very excited about this series, like so into it.
So thanks again to Rachel for this rabbit hole because it was awesome and of course it's turn of the century Paris, which is an amazing place to be research purposes. Um, so appreciate that. Absolutely probably be shouting you out a couple of times during the two So thanks a lot. Oh Man, I was going to research a French couple for this Friday's episode, so I guess we'll get out of France. We'll break it up, get out of France for a little while. But yeah, I hope you'll enjoy this.
I hope you're looking forward to the part too as much as I am. Now. Uh, and we'll we'll bring that to you next week. Yeah, we'll write in and tell us what you think about Collette. So far, you've read Claudine, I'd love to know if it's worth checking out because I'm kind of interested. I haven't read any Collette myself. Yeah, Um, I've heard of her, but this is the most I've ever learned about her myself, So I'm really into it and I would love to find
out if there were still worth reading. I guess yeah, so many years definitely, Um, but yeah, reach out on email. We're ridic Romance at gmail dot com, or find us on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at Oh great, it's Eli, I'm at Dianamite Boom, and you can find the show at ridic Romance. About those platforms, don't forget to drop us a review in Apple Podcasts and Spotify. We love those. They really help us out as well. Help keep the show going. And we will catch you all with another
episode later this week. So long, friends, it is time to go. Thanks for listening to our show. Tell your friends neighbor's uncle Sandance to listen to a show. Ridiculous from Dance