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Marriage to a well-to-do lawyer gave Suzanne her first taste of luxury. When the marriage broke up, she took as her lover (and later husband) the painter André Utter. 21 years her junior and the drinking companion of her tosspot son, and moved in her aging mother. In her Family Portrait (see cut), painted in a flat style she learned from Gauguin's oils, she left a record of one of the most scandalizing and yet financially successful households in French art history.
Mad Decade. Utter turned business manager and made Utrillo's work, done between drinking bouts and trips to the sanitarium, what Utter rightly called "The greatest commercial operation of the century." With the francs rolling in, the "Trinité Maudite" (Damned Trinity) set off on a decade's mad spending spree. Suzanne fed filet mignon to her dogs, canned sardines to her cats, hired a taxi to wait outside the house by the day, finally bought her own limousine and hired a white-uniformed chauffeur. When her new astrakhan coat seemed too heavy, she threw it on the floor for the dogs.
Such wild extravagance came to an end with the Depression '30s. By the time Utrillo married in 1935, Suzanne had become a hunched figure of an old woman. But on her 70th birthday, three years before she died in 1938, Suzanne still had her old spirit. Her toast at her own party was a rousing "vive l'amour!"
* Whose probable father was an insurance clerk and alcoholic Montmartre habitué named Boissy. Maurice did not acquire his surname Utrillo, given him by a friendly Spanish journalist, Miguel Utrillo, until he was eight.