The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me (15 page)

Cecil was delighted to be in Gerald’s inner circle, but thought him ‘a very odd character with very little heart’.162 Nevertheless, the two men shared many interests and appreciated one another’s talents. When Cecil moved into Ashcombe, the beautiful Georgian house in Wiltshire that he leased from 1930, Gerald joined the guests in decorating the bedroom walls in the ‘circus room’; his panel had a Columbine and performing dogs, with an ugly mastiff jumping through a paper hoop. And later Gerald would gamely dress up as the fictional King Boris to be photographed for Cecil’s spoof book, My Royal Past, where friends took the parts of various royals in absurd Edwardian tableaux. Cecil was becoming an increasingly significant element in fashionable society, photographing beauties, the famous and royalty so much that his particular, mannered style came to symbolise the decade before the war. Working his way up as a portraitist, he was invited to photograph the Queen and became the preferred royal photographer, contributing substantially to creating their public image. He was also thriving in the world of fashion and design, working for Vogue and making trips to America to photograph Hollywood celebrities and New York socialites and models.

PHOTOGRAPH OF ROBERT FROM CECIL BEATON’S PERSONAL ALBUM: ‘HORRID MADBOY’

Though Cecil seemed to triumph in every sphere he entered, the same was not true of his love life. The great passion of these years was Peter Watson, the immensely rich young man who would later be a connoisseur of the arts and co-founder (with Cyril Connolly) of the literary magazine Horizon. Slim and dark-haired, Peter had a black-and-orange Rolls-Royce, dressed in the finest suits and had the face of ‘the frog just as he is turning into a prince: a face lit by inner amusement and a kind of reluctant practicality’.163 Tragically for Cecil, Peter was never quite available. He was involved with the stage designer Oliver Messel, and drove Cecil into paroxysms of jealousy when he took up with Robert. Peter gave Robert a golden retriever named Pansy Lamb despite the dog being clearly male.* Far worse was when he bought the Mad Boy a car. Robert raced around in it, getting charged for speeding, driving without a licence and driving without due care and attention. ‘This young man will have to mend his ways if he is to continue to be in charge of a motor-car,’ said the Mayor of Evesham after Robert was convicted and fined in his court. ‘He seems to be a dangerous man on the road.’ Cecil was outraged. He insisted Peter buy a car for him too – which he did. Money was no object, even if love was. A cheque for £1,000 was handed over and Cecil was briefly soothed. Notwithstanding the present, Peter told Cecil, ‘I’d be delighted if you had an affair.’ Wracked with years of miserable anxiety, Cecil took his advice. But imagine everyone’s surprise when he chose a woman.

Doris Castlerosse was a remarkable person. Vivacious, sexy and boldly ambitious, she had begun life as Doris Delavigne from Beckenham, determined to do well for herself. As a ‘balcony girl’ at the Cafe de Paris, she acquired a series of lovers who kept her in the style she came to demand, until she achieved her aim of marrying a lord and became Viscountess Castlerosse. A frequent and popular guest at Faringdon, she would arrive in her Rolls with coroneted luggage and weighty jewel case, and provide much amusement with her unabashed talk, her extravagant elegance and her overt, very un-English physicality that some attributed to her Dutch heritage. According to a close friend, Daphne Fielding, ‘Hers were the prettiest legs that ever stepped into a punt or danced a foxtrot at Skindles. She had hair the colour of ripe corn and a flower-petal complexion. Deep-set blue eyes were fringed with enormously long dark lashes. Although her features were far from perfect, they were infinitely more intriguing than those of most classical beauties.’ Her two front teeth had a small gap between them, but she didn’t care. ‘“Wouldn’t have them changed for anything, darling, shows I’m lucky and sexy … and how,” she would say, with a hoot of raucous laughter.’164

Gerald was particularly fond of Doris. ‘“Let’s dish the dirt,” she would say as she curled up on a Faringdon sofa stroking her gazellelike ankles.’165 And Gerald, sitting at the piano, ‘would listen fascinated to her tales of rascality and violence, striking an occasional chord and making some Puckish suggestion for a happy solution to her marital dramas.’166 She would complain about her lack of money and such was Gerald’s affection for her that he even offered to help her out. According to Robert, ‘She came over and kissed him, which was very surprising, because he didn’t like being kissed, and said: “Dear Gerald, anything you could do wouldn’t last me two days!”’167 Doris was unrepentant about her approach to taking lovers and allowing them to fund her extravagant lifestyle – one that even Lord Castlerosse could not afford to support. She had stunning clothes from Worth and Reville and favoured shorts to reveal her finest features. Her collection of jewels was impressive and when making a promise she would mischievously touch her forehead, breast and two collar-bones, murmuring ‘Tiara, brooch, clip, clip’.168 Described as ‘the enchantress of the Thirties’, Doris was said to be the inspiration behind Amanda in Noel Coward’s Private Lives.’69 Certainly she was a performer, which suited Gerald. Doris was also a sexual performer, with a similar hard-nosed rumbustiousness to the Mad Boy. Robert described a night with Doris in Paris, where, for his birthday, she hired a young woman for him to ‘whip to death’. When he gave a couple of unenthusiastic taps, Doris lashed out herself, leaving an unpleasant welt on the prostitute’s skin, and saying, ‘I haven’t wasted my money just for this.’ This was too strong even for the Mad Boy’s daring taste. ‘Doris, any more of that and I’ll be sick.’170

Doris planned her seduction of Beaton with care – tuberose were strewn on Cecil’s bed – and she was confident of her well-tested love-making techniques. Curious, if not flabbergasted, guests at Faringdon crept to eavesdrop outside the new lovers’ bedroom, only to hear Cecil squeal, ‘Oh goody, goody.’ Cecil saw himself as a ‘terrible homosexualist’, but Doris claimed to believe that ‘There’s no such thing as an impotent man, just an incompetent woman.’171 Daphne Fielding quipped, ‘He wouldn’t have had to do a thing.’172 Many years later, Cecil described how Doris had helped him delay his orgasm by ordering him to ‘Think of your sister’s wedding!’ According to Robert, Doris was the proud possessor of the Cleopatra Grip, a natural vaginal feature that made sexual activity particularly pleasurable for the man. ‘If you come across one of those, you sign away your kingdom,’ Robert later told Hugo Vickers.173 This was also something that Mrs Simpson was rumoured to possess, possibly adding another factor to the King’s obsession with the married American.

GERALD; DORIS, LADY CASTLEROSSE; DAPHNE, VISCOUNTESS WEYMOUTH (LATER FIELDING); ROBERT

Lord Castlerosse, however, was not amused. Coming across his wife dining with Cecil in a restaurant, he said to his companion, ‘I never knew Doris was a lesbian.’174 Portly and charismatic, Valentine Castlerosse was no fool to be swept off his feet by a grasping courtesan. A dedicated bachelor until he married Doris, he was a man of the world. He dressed in velvet jackets and fur-lined coats, and kept a big cigar in the corner of his mouth in the Churchillian manner. His Daily Express column, ‘The Londoner’s Log’, was a portrait of interwar society, with photographs of beauties of the day and descriptions of his friends, travels and escapades within a ‘small glittering world – Mayfair, Monte Carlo, Deauville …’175 Lord Castlerosse was initially intrigued by Doris’s shameless ways, her earthy language and humour mixed with an appreciation of beauty and pleasure, and they were both extravagant and hot-tempered, with a tendency to jealousy. They also cared about one another, though they tried not to show it.176 Their infidelities were legion and as legendary as their fierce rows: once, after Lord Castlerosse hit Doris and was reprimanded for it by a friend, he pulled up his trousers to show bite marks on his leg: ‘She did it with her teeth!’177

And yet, as with so many hilarious stories that get passed on, the comedy is only the veneer; the emotions beneath were complex and often painful. Not only was Lord Castlerosse miserable, but Doris developed a perverse and unrequited passion for Cecil. In his diary, Cecil wrote: ‘Peter loves people that are not in love with him and I in my turn am now worshipped and adored by Doritzins for whom I hold no emotion whatsoever. It seems so terribly unfair that there cannot be a great straightening out and saving of waste.’ For a time, Cecil played along, if only to soothe the ache produced by years of rejection by Peter Watson. By the time Lord and Lady Castlerosse finally got divorced in 1938, it was Robert and not Cecil who was listed as the co-respondent. And Castlerosse was closer to the truth than he suspected when he had quipped about his wife being a lesbian. Doris took up with an immensely wealthy American, Mrs Eleonor Hoffman (or ‘Margot’, as she signed herself in at Faringdon), who bought her a palazzo in Venice. The unfinished Palazzo Venier dei Leoni passed through many extraordinary female hands in the twentieth century, having been formerly the Marchesa Casati’s (when its drawing room was lined with gold leaf) and later Peggy Guggenheim’s. Doris made the most of it, ferried about by liveried gondoliers and showered with hefty jewels by her girlfriend.178

ERALD WAS SO AMUSED by the youthful shenanigans unfolding before him that he wrote a book about them, a parody of a lesbian school story: The Girls of Radcliff Hall by ‘Adela Quebec’. This playful skit mocked Gerald’s young male friends, who were transmogrified into schoolgirls, but their characters and involvements were barely disguised. It also cocked a snook at the lesbian writer Radclyffe Hall, whose confessional book, The Well of Loneliness, had been banned in England following an obscenity trial in 1928. Gerald wrote the slim, wicked volume in Rome in 1934, and each morning he would read the latest chapter aloud to his guest, Diana Guinness (later Mosley), stopping frequently for fits of laughter.

Miss Carfax, the headmistress – like her creator – was melancholic. ‘In spite of a superficial gaiety of spirit she often felt unhappy and tormented.’ Robert’s wildly shambolic, unreliable yet adorable character, Millie Roberts, ‘was growing into a very pretty girl’, with ‘a decided talent for “chic”’, though she ‘was at heart a simple, country girl, who liked games and country pursuits’. Miss Carfax asks Millie to go and live with her in the country on her chicken farm, but only on condition that Millie should have nothing more to do with Lizzie Johnson, who keeps giving her presents, including a car. It was obvious to anyone who knew all the characters that Lizzie was Peter Watson. Predictably beside herself with jealousy is young Cecily Seymour – Cecil Beaton. Poor Cecily; Lizzie ‘has never even thought of giving her a bicycle’.

‘“Supper!”’ cries Cecily. ‘“Bags I sitting next to the Head!”’ And all the girls scamper into the dining room. The headmistress is impressed by Cecily, who was ‘so temperamental, her wit so exuberant, and she was, above all things, so versatile. Miss Carfax felt that there was nothing that Cecily could not do if she set her mind to it. She was certain that one day Cecily would make a name for herself in some branch of art.’ Other characters include Miss MacRogers, the teacher who introduces Millie to Miss Carfax and who is surely Michael Duff. There is also the exotic Madame Yoshiwara, a ‘Japanese lady artist’ who is a feminised version of the Russian surrealist painter and theatre designer Pavel Tchelitchew. He was a friend of Peter Watson and, through Gertrude Stein, became a part of the Sitwell circle. Gerald acquired an exuberant watercolour sketch by the Russian of a leggy dame sporting a vast hat and transparent skirt, riding in a carriage. Underneath, someone has written: ‘A design by Tchelitchew for Cecil Beaton to wear at King George and Queen Mary’s Jubilee.’ So Gerald wasn’t the only one to have fun at Cecil’s expense in 1935.

‘Next term there was a great deal of excitement over the arrival of the mysterious new dancing master, Mr Vivian Dorrick’ – quite evidently Doris Castlerosse. ‘He was blond, slim, debonair and delightful, and it was not surprising that many of the girls’ hearts were fluttered by the appearance in their midst of such an Adonis.’ Mr Dorrick was ‘extremely soigne; he was always beautifully turned out’, but he didn’t seem to want to get closer to his pupils. ‘“I expect he only does it for money,” remarked one of his disappointed admirers.’ But then Mr Dorrick is spotted by Olive Mason (the stage designer Oliver Messel) ‘trying to kiss Cecily behind a screen’, and Cecily cries out, ‘“No, no, Mr Dorrick, my heart belongs to another.”’ But Cecily soon changes her mind, and, smiling coyly, admits, ‘“Strange as it may seem, I really do believe that I’ve fallen for him … just a little.”’

Poor Cecil was mortified when he went to stay with Gerald in Rome in 1935. He had had no idea about the novel, which had already been privately published and passed around the ranks to much hilarity. Cecil now observed that Gerald couldn’t resist ‘joking about one’s softest spot and prodding one’s Achilles heel’. And none of the ‘girls’ can have been too pleased. ‘I absolutely adored Les Girls,’ wrote Noel Coward to Gerald. ‘Oh dear! What a beastly little book.’179 According to Hugo Vickers, Cecil attempted to destroy as many copies as possible of The Girls of Radcliff Hall. John Byrne, who reissued the extremely rare satire in 2000, wonders whether it was actually more likely to have been Robert. After all, he is treated almost as harshly and he was certainly well placed to ‘diminish the stock’ and then spread rumours about Cecil. After decades of searching, Byrne only ever located four copies of the very plain, inconspicuous little book – once in a US bookseller’s catalogue under ‘Lesbian Literature’, with the author taken at face value as Adela Quebec.180 Gerald would have been most gleeful.

A PAGE OF THE FARINGDON HOUSE VISITORS’ BOOK FROM DECEMBER 1934 TO JANUARY 1935. NAMES INCLUDE: DAISY FELLOWES (‘AMATEUR SANS DISTINCTION’); REX WHISTLER (‘PEINTRE DE LUXE’); COOTE AND LATER HER TWO SISTERS, LADY SIBELL AND MAIMIE, BOTH OVER FROM MADRESFIELD; GERALD WELLESLEY, LATER THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON, AND THE ARCHITECT OF THE FOLLY, CLAIMS TO BE A ‘WORKER’, AND IS STAYING WITH HIS SON VALERIAN, A STUDENT AT OXFORD; CECIL BEATON PUTS HIS BUSINESS ADDRESS AS ‘HAMAM BATHS’ AND HIS PROFESSION AS ‘MASSEUR’; DORIS, LADY CASTLEROSSE, IS A ‘PROCUREUSE DE LUXE’; LADY JULIET DUFF IS THE MOTHER OF SIR MICHAEL DUFF, WHO INTRODUCED GERALD AND ROBERT TO ONE ANOTHER