‘Now, as Natalie entered her seventh decade, she seemed just as aggressive in her pursuit of new lovelies as when, at sixteen, she had insistently seduced the “wild rose.” For the most part, she was extremely discreet. In her memoirs, Berthe [Natalie's housekeeper] stated that she never once, in all her years at rue Jacob, caught sight of a woman in Natalie’s bed. Once in a while, though, she shocked people. Writer Joan Schenkar was told by Clarissa Lada-Grozicka of a 1937 Friday she attended as a young woman. Upon glimpsing sixty-one-year-old Barney “passionately kissing a beautiful, blonde, young American girl whom she called ‘Venus,’ . . . I telephoned to my mother & asked her to make some excuse & get me out of there.”’
— Suzanne Rodriguez, Wild Heart: A Life (2002)