Minute portraits of three unforgettable women

Many women have cut Samson's hair. They are usually smarter than the man accompanying them and more beautiful than their friend's wife. One of them was Hedy Lamarr . It is well known that she was the first actress to appear nude in a film, Ecstasy , and she simulated an orgasm by being shocked by someone hidden below her by piercing her buttocks with a needle. During the two years that her husband, an arms industry magnate, Fritz Mandl, held her captive, she studied engineering and invented the so-called spread spectrum , which made it possible to transmit signals without being interfered with. She fled her mansion in Vienna by jumping out of a window and didn't stop until she reached Hollywood. What happened to her? Missiles still travel through space with her invention. She was, without a doubt, the most beautiful woman in Hollywood, who seduced countless leading men and producers. She was married three or four times. One of her husbands, when drunk, would shoot her with a revolver at the diamond earrings he had given her. She turned down the lead role in the film Casablanca . She had all the millionaires around her at her mercy, but her kleptomania landed her in the police station several times. She had everything; however, she couldn't stop shoplifting a toothbrush.

Billie Holiday learned to sing without words, only with the sounds of her soul rising in her throat while listening to Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith on the jukebox in Alice Dean's brothel next door, where at age 10 she worked for five cents lifting and lowering levers, washing towels, and helping the girls with errands. Her name was Eleonora. Her mother gave birth to her when she was only 13, and her father was still a boy in shorts. It happened on April 7, 1915, in the poorest neighborhood of Baltimore, a city that at that time was famous for rats. While still a girl wearing socks, she was raped by her cousins, by successive guests of her house, and by the brothel's clients. There, while a forty-something man was satisfying himself, the mistress held her down and covered her mouth so she wouldn't scream or kick. The incident went to trial, and the girl was placed in a correctional facility. Upon leaving, her mother took her to a very luxurious house in Harlem, and the girl, who was not yet 15, immediately suspected that it was a brothel.

One day, she denied favors to the king of Harlem, a tough guy named Big Blue Rainier, a friend of the police. "So a black woman doesn't want to sleep with a black man?" The guy reported her for being a minor, and she ended up back in jail. One day, she was walking along 133rd Street, lined with music venues. Determined to get $50 so her mother wouldn't have her mattress thrown out the window, she walked into Pod's and Jerry's and asked to sing. The silence imposed by that voice made a pin drop if it hit the floor. It's infamous to think you have to go through such hardships to sing blues sorrow the way she sang about those hanged black men hanging like fruit on the trees. Although one of those cabaret sluts said she sang as if her shoes were pinching her, the truth is, she sang like a wounded cat, and no one has ever sung the blues like her.

The painter Suzanne Valadon was born in a village in Limousin as Marie-Clémentine, and at the age of 15 she ran away to Paris. She wandered around Montmartre and survived by stealing fruit and milk bottles from shops. She had a beautiful figure. An athlete suggested she work in the circus. She started out as a trapeze artist. Toulouse-Lautrec , Renoir, Degas , and Puvis de Chavannes, who were all around, drew her several times with her apple-shaped breasts spilling out of her corset. One day she fell from the trapeze and was left with a broken head.

She began posing as a model and learning to paint. Since she was posing for old people, Lautrec suggested she change her name. She would be called Suzanne, and she was baptized with absinthe at a party. There was a mysterious young man with a canvas under his arm named Van Gogh . Among the painters who surrounded her, one fathered her a son. It's unknown who it was, but it's certain that this son would be called Maurice Utrillo , to whom a Spanish journalist would give his surname. He was born on December 26, 1883. "A bad Christmas present I gave my mother that day," said the drunken painter 20 years later, a time when he traded a painting for a bottle of wine and was constantly in and out of detox centers. Suzanne Valadon was an extraordinary Impressionist painter, tossed around by those friends, Lautrec, Degas, Renoir. In the end, they would find her disheveled and with her shoes torn, and if they asked her if she remembered them, she would say: “They were all idiots.”