The Duchess Who Wouldn't Sit Down (4 page)

Back at the Berghof, by January 1945 - with certain defeat in sight and Germany's cities already in smoldering ruins - the
hospitality situation had deteriorated dramatically. As we have seen, at the height of his powers Hitler had a keen grasp
of just how useful the subtle indulgence could be to a host's reputation and his guests' morale. Now, however, with his grip
on reality fatally loosened, his hosting instincts were correspondingly dulled. He pared down the menu, serving spaghetti
with ketchup, mushrooms, and curds, and decreed the Sunday meal to be
Eintopfgericht
- leftovers served from a single pot.
Eintopf
was now represented by the state media as a "national meal of communitarian sacrifice and solidarity." Not surprisingly, guests
stopped accepting invitations to the Berghof and he took to eating alone, the last refuge of a desperate man and, as I have
indicated elsewhere, a clear indication of criminality.

There is some anecdotal evidence to support the claim that Hitler had intended to address the problem of German meat-eating
after his victory in the war. Goebbels explicitly refers to this plan in his diary entry of April 26, 1942: "Of course he
knows that during the war we cannot completely upset our food system. After the war, however, he intends to tackle this problem
also." He needn't have worried - by 1942, Germany was well on its way to becoming vegetarian by default. Although a German
soldier's meat ration was three times that of a civilian's, it is safe to say that Cassel spareribs and roast venison were
no longer on the menu.

Watching German diners stuff themselves on sole and duck at the Tour d'Argent in occupied Paris in 1942, Ernst Jiinger noted,
"In times like these, to eat well and to eat a lot gives a feeling of power." That may have been of some consolation to those
on the homefront - who had been told "they have to go without food so that the starving people of Europe may be fed" - but
I doubt it. By that time, they were drinking antifreeze or paying one hundred marks per pound for black-market tea. On April
22, 1942, the Nazi mouthpiece
Volkischer Beobachter
announced, "Less food will be offered, according to the simpler way of life introduced for the nation and a rationed cuisine
. . . There are two meatless days a week." In June, the
Westdeutscher Beobachter
editorialized, "Caterers must compensate for small meat portions with larger portions of potatoes, vegetables or salads."
Coupons for hotel meals were assessed down to the tiniest allotment of nutrition, "even as to how much fat is to be used for
a certain dish and how much flour for thickening the sauce."

The use of the word "ersatz" was forbidden; the patriotic euphemism "German" was endorsed for synthetic products, as in the
joke "Germans buy German Van Goghs." But by then the quality of even these supplements was so awful that on April 24 the
Deutsche Volkswirt
was forced to announce, "Expressions like 'German' pepper, 'German' caviare are forbidden from now on because they are apt
to injure the good reputation of German products in general." The ersatz "new flour" with which wartime bread was made was
so hazardous to the public's health that eating it fresh could make a person sick; it had to be allowed to mature for several
days before it was safe to eat. Heinz Pfennig, a German lieutenant at Stalingrad, lived on dried potato flakes. His rations
for Christmas Day 1942 were one tablespoon of peas, two tablespoons of potato soup, and two squares of chocolate. No soy.
This was a diet that even the fuhrer himself might have enjoyed.

Needless to say, things were even worse by the end of the war. In 1946, civilians in occupied Germany were on starvation rations
that could be as low as one thousand calories per day; by the next year, the official ration in the French sector was down
to four hundred and fifty calories per day, half that of the Belsen concentration camp. Meat, it is to be assumed, was not
a part of the ration.

Hitler had managed to turn Germany into a nation of vegetarians after all. The vegetarianism that he had been unwilling to
enforce in his role as the host of the Berghof was now the national practice. And, as Janet Barkas points out, it was roughly
compatible with kosher dietary restrictions.

CHAPTER II

TEDDY BEARS' PICNIC

But your passion is a lie
. . .
It isn't passion at all, it is your will. It's
your bullying will. You want to clutch things and have them in your
power. You want to have things in your power. And why? Because you
haven't got any real body, any dark sensual body of life. You have no
sensuality. You have only your will and your conceit of consciousness,
and your lust for power, to
know.

D. H. Lawrence,
Women in Love

Once we have put our guests at their ease, another basic element essential to successful hospitality, at once apparently simple
and treacherously subtle, is the ability to make them feel special. Each and every invitee should be made to feel that he
or she has been included for reasons that are unique and particular and sought out for the singular contribution that he or
she is able to make to the gathering. This is true even if we have only invited our inner circle of intimate friends; their
egos, too, need petting and will not be satisfied to imagine that the requirement of their presence is based on pure sentiment,
since being liked for the wrong reasons can be as enervating as being disliked. Let them suffer the torments of hell when
they are alone with their insecurities and free-floating anxieties; at our house, they are members of a charmed circle, a
privileged fellowship of exalted individuals.

The problem is, few of us know enough exalted individuals to make up the guest list of even one dinner party, let alone an
entire season's worth. And even if we did, a roomful of exalted individuals can be tiresome, loud, and competitive, like an
orchestra made up exclusively of trumpets. Those who are more exalted, or consider themselves to be more exalted, may make
those who are less exalted, or fear themselves to be less exalted, feel inadequate; the less exalted will be quick - and rightly
so - to blame the host for their unfortunate condition. And a dinner attended by a hive of angry, more or less exalted individuals
is not likely to prove a success.

And so, as always, the host is called on to be manipulative, sly, and duplicitous - in other words, creative. After all, the
party does not put itself together. Everything, including and especially a guest's sense of his own worth, is the host's responsibility.
If two guests fail to see eye to eye, or a visitor's hypersensitive back goes into spasm after a night on the sofa bed, that,
too, is nobody's fault but the host's. The trick, as always, is to ensure that the balance of power remains firmly tilted
to the host's side. What every host would do well to keep in mind is that people are generally only too happy to find a dominant
force to surrender to. When a host is fully in control of every aspect of her hospitality, and when she exerts that control
with skill, tact, and sensitivity, she can be confident that her guests will deliver themselves willingly, gratefully, into
her serene authority.

My five-year-old daughter, Cora, displays an instinctive grasp of this challenge every time she holds a tea party for her
dolls and teddy bears. She has a great many dolls and teddy bears, but only a select few are invited to any given entertainment.
She compiles her list with such exquisite discrimination that the guests rarely quarrel or complain; when they do, she steps
in between them and knows just what to say to smooth their ruffled fur. She seats them just so and after great deliberation.
Only she is permitted to serve the tea and cakes. She speaks for each in turn and the conversation is always fluid and enlightened.
She also knows just when to call it a night so that everyone leaves with the unspoiled impression of having enjoyed a delightful
tea among a group of clever and amiable peers.

Regrettably, you cannot treat your guests as if they were teddy bears. They tend to be self-centered, obtuse, and vituperative
in ways that stuffed animals seldom are, and they will know it if we try openly to patronize them. But if, like most hosts,
we secretly hope to be lavished with compliments and extolled for our virtue and wisdom, there is a way to get our guests
to cooperate. It requires the resolve, patience, and determination to make them utterly dependent on our benevolence. Then
they will fall in line like so many teddy bears. If we are clear about our priorities, and if we approach them just right,
we can treat our guests just like our favorite toys, and they will reward us in ways that we - adults long since resigned
to complex relationships of scant emotional immediacy - can scarcely allow ourselves to hope for. They may not love us unconditionally,
admire us, praise us, pet us, hug and kiss us, or cling to us through the long, lonely night, as we might wish they would,
but they will assume all of our pains and fears as their own, and they will never betray us.

In the early twentieth century, there lived two women, born within a year of each other, who were internationally famous for
their hospitality during their own lifetimes. Each tried in her own way to make teddy bears of her guests, to line them up
into a chorus of mouthpieces, and each needed more from her guests than she was willing or able to ask for directly. One may
be said to have succeeded in all of her hopes and ambitions; the other, to have failed miserably. Their strangely parallel
lives demonstrate the risks and rewards of hosting a teddy bears' picnic.

* * *

Lady Ottoline Violet Anne Cavendish Bentinck (1873-1938) was a sad and lonely child. Half-sister to the sixth duke of Portland
and youngest sibling to four considerably older brothers who had little interest in her, she was raised at the family seat
of Welbeck, Nottinghamshire, following the death of her beloved father when she was four. The fifth duke had been a notorious
eccentric who had excavated miles of tunnels and ballrooms under the castle and decorated most of the rooms in pink and gold,
with no furniture but an open commode in the corner of each. One chamber, eerily, was stockpiled floor-to-ceiling with brown
wigs in green boxes. The kitchen was located in an outbuilding and meals were sent to the house on heated trucks via underground
rail. Her mother was sickly and protective; her only adult friend, the duke's librarian, was sent away for smoking in the
dining room. Ottoline spent a great deal of time alone in her room, which she divided in two with a curtain. She slept on
one side of the curtain; on the other, she staged dramatic performances with her dolls, to which no one came.

She grew into an awkward and pious teenager, horse-faced, six feet tall, and with hair the color of marmalade. She was already
suffering the headaches that were to plague her for the rest of her life. Her favorite reading was Thomas a Kempis's
The Imitation of
Christ.
She held Bible classes for the farmhands in her spare time. Her first mentor and heroine was the reclusive Mother Julian.
Dancing lessons in London proved a dismal failure, for she was too shy to dance. She was sixteen when her brother the duke
- to whom she referred exclusively as "Portland" - married, and she and her ailing mother retired to a family house in Chertsey,
Surrey. Ottoline spent the next three years nursing the dying woman, the drear monotony broken only by a disastrous coming-out.
A short trip to Italy was followed by her mother's death, upon which she was shipped off to her brother's house in Langwell,
Scotland, where she was assiduously shunned by his hunting companions.

Ottoline couldn't help but know that she was different from others of her class. Throughout her twenties, she vainly sought
a means of escape, with the sole aim of avoiding being forced into marriage with one of her brother's friends. She tried studying,
at Edinburgh and Oxford, but found herself unsuited to academics. She tried travel; her second voyage to Italy, accompanied
by a dour governess, was enlivened by a brief passion for the charismatic psychologist Axel Munthe, a man twice her age. His
offer of a guest cottage on his estate in Anacapri was made at a price she was unwilling to pay, however, and he dismissed
her by noting that he already had enough neurotics in his practice and did not need one at home. Until she met the Oxford
lawyer Philip Morrell, it seemed as if the life she aspired to - vaporously envisioned as one "lived on the same plane as
poetry and as music" - was going to be beyond her grasp.

They were married in 1902, the same year in which Philip alienated both his and her families by running as a Liberal for a
seat in Parliament; he alienated them even further by winning. Lady Ottoline Morrell was now a politician's wife, a step up
from her former abjectness but not quite what she was looking for. In 1905, Philip opened a practice in London. They took
a house at 44 Bedford Square, in the Bloomsbury neighborhood just then rising to respectability as an enclave of fashionable
intellectualism. In 1906, Ottoline gave birth to the twins Hugh and Julian (a girl); Hugh died of a brain hemorrhage three
days later, and a subsequent operation left Ottoline unable to bear more children. Strangely, of all her life's watersheds,
it was this tragedy that galvanized her to remake herself in the image that had by then taken hold of her imagination. Declaring
in 1907 that "I am not suited to good works," she decided "to launch recklessly on the sea of London." The makeover was comprehensive,
to say the least.

At first, her guest list drew heavily on Philip's liberal and political connections and on her Bloomsbury neighbors. Henry
James, Bertrand Russell, and Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith were among the early regulars. Lady Ottoline soon found
that she had the instincts of a born hostess. "I was intensely interested in these people - most of whom were remarkable in
some way and I who found them so exciting, so thrilling, was anxious that they should know each other. If I liked a personality
my instinct was that I wanted that one to meet others in whom I was interested."

Within a year, her Thursday evening "at homes" for artists, writers, politicians, and intellectuals had become the preeminent
salon of London and 44 Bedford Square "the most civilised few hundred square feet in the world." Virginia Stephen (later Woolf)
wrote: "We have just got to know a wonderful Lady Ottoline Morrell, who has the head of a Medusa; but she is very simple &
innocent in spite of it, & worships the arts." Quentin Bell found her "extremely simple and not very clever," but conceded
that "she brought petticoats, frivolity and champagne to the buns, the buggery and high thinking of Fitzroy Square."

Now considered to be striking rather than awkward, she welcomed her guests from the balcony of the second-floor landing, done
up in Grecian, Cossack, or Oriental dress. In one of the more generous descriptions of her newfound flamboyance, Virginia
Stephen likened her to a Spanish galleon, "hung with golden coins, & lovely silken sails." A typical costume was one described
by Vanessa Bell: "It might have been designed by Bakst for a Russian ballet on a Circassian folktale theme. Russian boots
of red morocco were revealed under a full, light-blue silk tunic, over which she wore a white kaftan with em broidered cartridge
pouches on the chest, on which fell the ropes of Portland pearls. On her head was a tall Astrakhan fez."

The Bloomsbury crowd - notably the Stephen sisters, Virginia and Vanessa, Lytton Strachey, and Roger Fry - ensured the bohemian
bona fides of "Our Lady of Bedford Square." Hungry artists could always be certain of a decent spread and a handout. The painter
Augustus John assured her that she did not need to prove her generosity to him, but that was after she had already slept with
him. Artists Jacob Epstein and Henry Lamb were not so proud and accepted her financial assistance and adulation as their due.
Henry James, who despised these "irreverent young peo­ple," stood with her one evening on the landing looking down at the
boisterous crowd below. "Look at them," he warned her. "Look at them, dear lady, over the banisters. But don't go down amongst
them." It was a warning she chose to ignore and would later have good cause to recall.

Although her salon was flourishing, Ottoline was not yet satisfied, and her status as London's paramount hostess had failed
to sate a gnawing emotional hunger. Her torrid affair with Bertrand Russell, begun in 1911, seemed to hold great promise,
but Russell, who exploited their relationship to disentangle himself from a loveless marriage, would never regard her as an
equal. "He told me that I could never accomplish anything important in life by
my reading
while I could help by being with him," she wrote in
her Memoirs.
"The great thing seems to me in dealing with people is to find the
centre
of a human being, their core, to get into touch with that, and from that to radiate out in understanding." This foolhardy
quest was never going to be realized in a busy, transient, fashion-conscious London salon. Through the glory years of Edwardian
indulgence, she gradually came to the conviction that what she really wanted was to "collect people . . . and make a more
complete compact society of in tellectuals." Only in such a setting could she indulge her "one touch of genius . . . the power
of loving people."

In 1915, she got her chance. Ostensibly out of concern for Julian's delicate health, the Morrells left London for the Jacobean
manor of Garsington, in Oxfordshire. In her memoirs, Ottoline limned her aspirations: "I should like to make this place into
a harbour, a refuge in the storm, where those who haven't been swept away could come and renew themselves and go forth strengthened."
With hindsight, she added. "But people are very difficult to manage.'' It was to be a retreat and an egalitarian Utopia, with
Ottoline in the role of angel presiding over a community of brilliant, liberated, and grateful artists and writers. She painted
one drawing room Venetian red to match her hair, the entrance hall dove gray, and the sitting room peacock green, with gold
moldings. She filled the house with oriental boxes, cabinets, china, and hangings. The scent of incense, potpourri, and clove-studded
oranges permeated the manor. She converted an old fish pond into a swimming pool with an ornamental island at the center.
As Virginia Woolf said of the place, "I think even the sky is done up in pale yellow silk, and certainly the cabbages are
scented."