The Knowing Virgin

THAT WAS YVETTE by Bettina Knapp and Myra Chipman. 380 pages. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. $5.95.

Her decolletage was as breathcatching as the Grande Corniche, her hair was hennaed, her makeup stark white; her expressive arms were encased in black gloves to the knobby elbow, and from her thin, lacquered lips slipped a repertory of chansons more Rabelaisian, Evangelist Dwight Moody once grieved, than any "Sodom ever produced." That was French Disease Yvette Guilbert, the ex-seamstress whose reputation became as luminous and lurid as the Divine Sarah or Eleonora Duse.

As Toulouse-Lautrec's favorite model, she is still today the symbol of the gaudy decadence of the fin de siecle.

Now, in an earnest if somewhat amateurish biography, Yvette is finally portrayed in truer colors. She was nearer vestal than scarlet. As a critic noted at the time, the onstage illusion Yvette so shatteringly evoked was of knowing virginity; as stage-door admirers soon discovered, it was no illusion.

Wilde Talk. "You have the virtue of courage, my dear," explained the Hippodrome impresario who discovered her, "but in the theater one virtue has never been as handy as a couple of vices." And virtue was not her only handicap. In the day of the hourglass figure, Yvette was as bony as the Eiffel Tower, and, over all, decided Oscar Wilde, the ugliest woman in the world.

Her voice was not very shapely either, but through intermittent recitative, consummate stagecraft, and the selection of the ablest contemporary poets as her lyricists, she convinced even a contemporary London music critic, George Bernard Shaw, that she was "technically, highly accomplished." Among other aficionados: Spain's King Alphonso XIII, though he laughed at all the wrong parts, and Britain's roistering King Edward VII, who saw her each summer at Marienbad at the luncheons that he reserved for the untouchables.

Her inaccessibility would not have surprised a fan-mail-writing friend who never missed her Vienna appearances--Sigmund Freud. Yvette's wastrel father deserted the family when she was 13, and she vowed to marry only a man who would "cater to my every caprice," and that's the sort of self-effacing servitor she finally wed at 32.

Yet no one seemed to satisfy Yvette. Her career was one long catfight with the critics, one tirade after another against the promoters and public. A special target was the "crude, greedy" U.S. audience, though she said herself she would never have come to the States except for the money, and the money was considerable: $16,000 a month.

Moliere, Too. What gnawed most at her ego was a reviewer's remark that her stage manner would make an angel swoon, but her words would make a monkey blush. Devoting most of her last four decades to getting on the side of the angels, she scoured libraries and chateaux to add Crusaders' lays and a centuries-old Vie du Christ cycle to her repertory, which she performed on academic platforms ranging from the University of Vienna to Bryn Mawr.

Before she died, she had built one of France's finest and largest (80,000) collections of old songs. She had also compiled debts so disastrous that she was forced back to the coarse ditties of the cabaret, appearing on the same bills with cowboys and acrobats. Writing later of the lack of discernment of the Paris public, she concluded bitterly: "I've been deceived, deceived!" Her hair was white, and she no longer bothered to henna it. But when she died in 1944 at 79, Yvette was still singing and still convinced that the blushing monkey was on her back.

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