The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me (19 page)

James had been briefly married to the gorgeous cat-faced Viennese prima ballerina and actress Tilly Losch. Fascinated by the surrealist movement and its anarchic escapism, he had an impressive collection of art and was painted twice by Magritte, whom he had to stay in London. He was also a generous sponsor and host to Dalí, supporting him financially and inspiring some of his most iconic work. At West Dean, James’s Sussex home, the two men came up with the famous Lobster Telephone (also known as the Aphrodisiac Telephone – the speaker’s mouth is carefully aligned with the lobster’s genitalia) and the Mae West Lips Sofa. In happier days, James had ordered a stair carpet woven with the imprint of Tilly Losch’s footprints, to recall the marks she made with wet feet after a bath. Their very public divorce provoked a huge scandal: she accused him of being homosexual (her close friend Adele Astaire caused a stir with her evidence), and he accused her of adultery with Prince Sergei Obolensky. Following the separation, James got another carpet made with the paw-prints of his Irish wolfhound.

Somewhere in his house was a moth-eaten polar bear shot by some forebear in Greenland. James had it shipped to Dalí in Paris, where the artist dyed it mauve (did he already know about the Faringdon doves?) and had drawers put in the bear’s chest to keep his cutlery in.220 Some years later, James would create Las Pozas (The Pools), an astonishing surrealist Eden of waterfalls and sculptures high in the Mexican rainforest.

In July 1936, the International Surrealist Exhibition was held in London. The great names of surrealism attended, André Breton gave the opening speech and thousands came to see what all the fuss was about. At this point, Dalí was seen as ‘an incarnation of the Surrealist spirit’ who ‘made it shine with all its brilliance’.221 Several hundred people came to the New Burlington Galleries to hear him give a lecture in French, ‘Fantômes paranoïaques authentiques’ (‘Authentic Paranoiac Fantasies’). He was accompanied by two white Russian wolfhounds and was dressed in a lead-weighted deep-sea diver’s suit. It was Gerald who had obtained this equipment for his guest – to enable him to dive ‘to the depth of his subconscious’. Nobody had thought he might require some oxygen equipment on this plunge into his psyche; after the bulky helmet was bolted on by a mechanic and Dalí went on stage, he soon realised that he was running out of air. As he grappled, increasingly terrified, with the metal globe, his face visibly panic-stricken behind its thick glass window, Gerald banged at the bolts with a hammer. Witness accounts vary as to whether the hero of the hour was Gerald, Edward James with a billiard cue or a spanner-wielding workman. The audience assumed it was all part of the mad pantomime, which was a great success.

The fun did not end with the exhibition. Even if Edward James was right when he said ‘All the stories about orgies at Faringdon are untrue,’222 there were certainly games of other kinds. Dalí managed to get Gerald to put the grand piano in an ornamental pool on the lawn, and then placed chocolate eclairs on the black notes.223 This was the kind of surrealism that suited Gerald; his interest in the shocking, subversive qualities of the movement was purely from the sidelines. He dabbled in the same way that he might dress up in some peculiar clothes or appreciate some escapade, and he went along for the fun of the stunt. While Dalí wrestled with sexual images linked to masturbation or the now famously homoerotic figure of St Sebastian, pierced by phallic arrows, Gerald preferred to find absurd subjects with innuendo, where he could pierce pretension and provoke laughter. Rather than bloodied, penetrated saints, he went for large or engorged noses – for example, in his 1941 novel The Romance of a Nose, Cleopatra is transformed into a beauty after having a ‘nose job by a Theban physician’. His comic song ‘Red Roses and Red Noses’ is dedicated ‘To a Young Lady who wished Red Roses to be strewn on her tomb’. The cover of the manuscript has goofily picturesque red noses with cupids’ wings fluttering down the page.

Some people praise red roses:

But I beg leave to say

That I prefer red noses –

I think they are so gay.

A Kempis says we must not cling

To things that pass away:

Red Noses last a lifetime –

Red Roses but a day.

Red Roses blow but thrice a year –

In June, July or May:

But owners of Red Noses

Can blow them every day.

GERALD’S DESIGN FOR THE COVER OF HIS SONG ‘RED ROSES AND RED NOSES’

It was only weeks after the diving-suit fiasco that Dalí’s first great love, Federico García Lorca, was shot by a Fascist firing squad. The painter and the poet had been friends and lovers as art students in Madrid, at a time when it was risky and difficult to be gay and when both longed to push cultural boundaries. They had shared artistic ambition and a horror of intimacy with women; Lorca’s metaphor for sexual intercourse was the ‘jungle of blood’. And though they had not remained close, it must have been shocking, even for an egotist like Dalí, to learn of Lorca’s death. Still, it was not enough to stop him from showing support for Franco, and it was only a few years before the surrealists, under Breton, would expel Dalí from their movement as ‘the ex-apologist of Hitler, the Fascist, clerical and racist painter and the friend of Franco, who opened Spain as a drilling field for the worst barbarism ever known’.224 When Max Ernst refused to shake Dalí’s hand, saying, ‘I don’t shake the hand of a Fascist,’ Dalí replied, ‘I am not a Fascist, I am only an opportunist.’

ELSA SCHIAPARELLI ON TOP OF THE FOLLY WITH GERALD

In England, Dalí’s encounters were of the more light-hearted sort, though they often boosted his career. With Edward James and Gerald, he got to know many influential people of the day, including Cecil Beaton. He also collaborated with the famous Italian couturier Elsa Schiaparelli, who became friends with Gerald and stayed at Faringdon. Some years younger than Gerald, she had been a philosophy student in Rome when he was a diplomat, during the giddy days of futurism. ‘Schiap’, as she liked to call herself, was just as keen to shock with her clothes as Dalí was with his paintings. Working with great names like Jean Cocteau and Man Ray, she made sweaters with patterns of skeleton ribs or tattoo-like pierced hearts, suits with pockets like a chest of drawers, and introduced zips (specially coloured), wedge-heeled shoes, culottes and simple ‘smalls’ to replace elaborate silk underwear. Influenced by Dalí, she made hats that looked like upside-down shoes, and dressed Wallis Simpson in a lobster-print dress for a photograph by Beaton just before her marriage to the Duke of Windsor.

Although based in Paris, Schiap was an Anglophile. She had a place in London and adored roaming around the countryside picking up bargains in antique shops. John Betjeman recalled how Gerald once took her to a jumble sale in the vicarage garden at the little village of Baulking, where she was pressed into buying something at the secondhand clothes stall. ‘People came to stay at Faringdon not as the famous men and women they often were, but to be themselves.’225

Schiap was just the sort of person that Gerald liked to throw into the mix at his extraordinarily eclectic weekends, and she was there in June 1938 at a glamorous house party that included H. G. Wells, Baroness Budberg (Wells’s dashing Russian mistress who had famously been involved with Gorky and was suspected of being a double agent) and Tom Driberg. In the visitors’ book, Schiap enters her profession as ‘Hopeless job’ and ‘Cosmopolitan’, while H. G. Wells writes ‘Lighting and Hot Water Expert’.

ON THE TERRACE STEPS AT FARINGDON: ELSA SCHIAPARELLI, GERALD, BARONESS BUDBERG, H. G. WELLS, ROBERT, TOM DRIBERG

One of Gerald and Robert’s closest friends, who lived close to Faringdon, was Daisy Fellowes, a woman famous for being spectacularly well-dressed, even ‘the best dressed woman in the world’, favouring outsize jewels and exotic creations by Schiaparelli. Daisy was the glamorous niece of Winnie de Polignac, who had brought her up after Daisy’s mother had killed herself. Like her aunt Winnie, she had first married a French prince who seemed to prefer the company of men. Her second husband was Reginald Fellowes, a cousin of Winston Churchill, and they set up home at beautiful Compton Beauchamp House. Some years younger than Gerald, The Hon. Mrs Reginald Fellowes was the first person to wear the Schiaparelli-Dalí Shoe Hat, with its inverted velvet heel, and was said to have ‘the elegance of the damned’. Described by Francis Rose as ‘the beautiful Madame de Pompadour of the period, dangerous as an albatross’,226 Daisy had a villa at Cap Martin and a fabulous yacht, took lovers with impunity and, predictably enough, was photographed in glamorous poses by Cecil Beaton. Some have remarked that in Gerald’s novel The Romance of a Nose, the well-dressed, independent heroine has much in common with Daisy. Diana Mosley wrote that Gerald loved Daisy’s elegance and ‘her malicious remarks made in silky tones’, while Evelyn Waugh gossiped that Daisy had ‘taught Gerald B to take cocaine’. Like him, she loved practical jokes – you never knew what she might do next.227 Placing a statue of St Joseph in front of her house, Daisy claimed she was honouring the patron saint of cuckolds. She represented a worldly, fashionable side of Gerald’s life that he admitted enjoying despite its obvious limitations.228 And if Daisy was old enough to be Robert’s mother, she was playful and charming enough to appeal to him too.

ARGE PORTIONS OF LIFE at Faringdon were given over to the delights of entertaining, and though Gerald was more confident and contented, his music was no longer given such single-minded priority. Some have contended that he squandered his greatest talent by dispersing his energies across other arts for which he had less flair. Later Robert and others would say that Gerald was too keen on having a pleasant life to be really ambitious about his musical career. Nevertheless, Gerald’s most successful and lasting piece was composed during this glittering and sociable time. A Wedding Bouquet is a satirical, merry yet also melancholy ballet with orchestra and, unusually, chorus. The subject is a French provincial wedding, based on the initial part of Gertrude Stein’s 1931 play, They Must. Be Wedded. To Their Wife. The plot has the sort of messy emotional tangles that visitors to Faringdon were only too familiar with: amusing on the surface and deeply painful underneath. There is a wistful bride, a disreputable groom (who dances with his mistresses), and a Mexican terrier called Pépé (like Stein’s own), who fends off her mistress’s suitors and is played by a child ballerina.

A Wedding Bouquet was first performed at Sadler’s Wells in 1937, and the production brought together some of the most significant names of the time. Gerald himself designed the sets and costumes; there are backdrops with scenes from Faringdon and from his travels abroad. The young Frederick Ashton was the choreographer, and the cast included Margot Fonteyn, Ninette de Valois and Robert Helpmann. Constant Lambert had just become musical director of Sadler’s Wells and conducted the piece that he had encouraged. Like Gerald, he was a composer who loved bringing the freedom and fun of more popular musical forms to serious music and who detested pomposity and the insularity of some English music. Constant and Gerald were the only two English composers whom Diaghilev commissioned to write for the Ballets Russes. Both men were influenced by Stravinsky and appreciated popular music – Constant was a fan of The Blackbirds, the famous black jazz musicians who were such a success in London during the 1920s. He also championed Gerald’s music; in America, he had to explain that far from being another stage name like Duke Ellington or Count Basie, Lord Berners was actually an English lord.229 In A Wedding Bouquet, the brassy fanfares of jazz and the song tunes of the music hall merge with the more classical lyricism of orchestral ballet. Underneath, the darkness is lurking; like Gerald’s depression, it was one aspect of the whole. The inherent satire and parody do not exclude true emotions. Gertrude Stein said of the ballet (as she might have said of its composer), ‘They all say it is very sad and everybody has to laugh and that is very nice.’230

Many have remarked on how Gerald was at his most genuine and exposed in his music. Hearing him play in the 1920s, Beverley Nichols wrote:

As soon as he is at the piano, the mask drops, and the revelation through music begins. It is curiously personal music, distinguished by a Rabelaisian humour. I shall never forget his playing to me a passage for horns which occurs in his ballet. There had been a theme which galloped and sparkled; up and down, in and out, like a scamper of wild horses over the plains. And then suddenly, in an unexpected key, there came a regular cackle of fifths – loud and broken, staggering and absurd. It was as good an example of a musical guffaw as I can imagine.231

Frederick Ashton, too, admired Gerald for his professional approach to collaborating on the production. ‘He was very good at constructing a ballet. He could do a very good pas de deux in rather a Tchaikovsky/ Delibes way. And he understood about lengths … If I said, “That’s too long,” he would cut it. With Benjamin Britten, every note was sacred … Gerald was much more realistic.’232 With his lifelong dread of boredom, Gerald strongly believed that small, or at least short, was beautiful in music: ‘The symphonies of Schumann and Schubert, beautiful as they are, contain passages one feels might conveniently have been shorter, while in Bruckner and Mahler there are moments that even an audience of tortoises might find tedious.’233

Although extremely different in character, Gerald and Lambert became close, and remained friends until they died within a year of one another. They shared a playfulness, though Constant was a far more chaotic personality, with a tendency to drink too much and lose control. Like Gerald, Constant had worked with Christopher Wood, who painted a memorable portrait of the young composer. Despite his youth (Constant was in his thirties), he was plagued by worsening health and was already running to fat, but he had immense charm and his charisma worked on both men and women. Lambert had his own wounds stemming from his family (his father, a portrait painter from Australia, was hardly doting), but his fresh, unabashed hedonism combined with originality and talent was appreciated by his older friends. With his Chelsea pub crawls, scruffy appearance and casual flings with girls who were much too young, he lived a version of the Swinging Sixties three decades earlier than the baby boomers. Constant had originally been picked up as a friend by the Sitwell siblings when he was still a teenager in the early 1920s, and he frequented Edith Sitwell’s literary gatherings and tea parties at her Bayswater flat. His talents were manifest. Osbert Sitwell described the seventeen-year-old as ‘a prodigy of intelligence and learning, and gifted with that particularly individual outlook and sense of humour which, surely, were born in him and are impossible to acquire’.234