The Parting Years (1963-74)

by Cecil Beaton

  Likewise, nothing seems to surprise him. A boy from a humble family in the Midlands, he arrived to learn to be a ‘paintah’ in London without any misgivings. ‘It was most extraordinary at the college. After a bit they wouldn’t give me any more cunvass, or paints, because I hadn’t got any munnay, so that’s how I got interested in engraving. They let you have the stoof free, but even so they said I was waaistin their copper plates because I did static isolated line drawings of figures they said I should use up all the copper by covering it with pattern. Before someone came and gave me a prize (for that picture you bought), they never thought anything of my work. Now I paint twenty pictures a year and Kas[5] sells the lot; and I teach. I luv America and I teach there quite a lot. They can’t paint a sphere, so I set the class to paint a door. They all got canvases the size of a door and painted as realistically as possible and we had an exhibition of all the doors down a corridor. It looked naice. But I couldn’t get oop in the momins. I was supposed to start at eight-thairtee, but I’d paaint at night and then go out to the poobs until they closed and that’d be two o’clock, and perhaps it was three or four before I got to baid, so I couldn’t get up at eight o’clock, so I’d go in at ten-thirty and stay till one, but no one seemed to caire.’

  It staggers me how this young man can be so at home in the world. When I first went to America, I was too scared to ask a policeman which was up or down town. Not David! He arrives in Los Angeles without knowing a soul. He gets arrested at three in the morning for jay-walking; he makes a lot of friends and goes off in a truck with one to try and get a driving licence. ‘Where’s your car?’ ‘I haven’t got one, but this is my friend’s trook.’ He drives it around with the instructor, who thinks him mad — quite understandably because David had never driven before — but who nevertheless gives him his licence. Hockney then buys a car and starts to drive it on the St Bernadino freeway. He can’t get off it, so has to drive on and on until he comes, four hours later, to Las Vegas. He stays there for an hour then comes all the way back. ‘It gives you confidence to be driving for ten hours on end.’

  PHOTOGRAPHING PICASSO

  April 28th, 1965

  It is strange that, at my age, I should work myself up into such a nervous condition at the idea of photographing Picasso. I was certainly extremely on edge, I remember, when I first photographed him in the Rue de la Boetie in the early thirties. At that time I could speak very little French. In the meantime every photographer in the world, and thousands of amateurs too, have had a field day with him; I remember Alexander Liberman saying it was tiresome that once one had photographed Picasso, he had never had enough and begged one to come back tomorrow.

  I sent a telegram as from le Petit Beaton from London to warn him of my arrival. I was in a state of anticipation by the time I arrived at the Grand Hotel, Cannes. Five minutes later I was on my way in a taxi to the Notre Dame de Vie at Mougins.

  I realized what a tremendous number of canvases must have been sold to pay for this long, winding drive that circled to the top of the mountain. Suddenly a closed gate, with a bell. The driver rang. No answer. I would not have been surprised if they had not answered. It could have been like the end of Washington Square. But, suddenly a voice asked who was there. ‘Mr Beaton? Mr Cecil Beaton?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Then wait.’ The door eventually opened and we were suddenly in a courtyard filled with brilliant mauve wisteria and being welcomed by Madame Picasso.

  Madame Picasso is squat and short-necked. She wore a blue silk coat and white trousers, hair immaculate. She was very polite. ‘Pablo says it is twenty years since he last saw you. Please come in.’

  A great welcome from Picasso. ‘Oh, I am pleased that you are here. We must embrace.’ I kissed him on two, soft, cleanly shaven cheeks.

  Also present were Monsieur and Madame Gomez (she specializes in the works of Balthus) and the room was a kaleidoscope of brilliant objects and colours against a sunny white background.

  Picasso, sad to relate, had aged and it had taken the form of shrivelling him. There was something melancholy about his eyes, which had lost some of their brilliance; before they were black, but now they seemed a light brown. His skin was pale cigar-leaf and his hands and pointed fingers, rather heavy, were a darker shade; the teeth like old ivory and the whites of the eyes parchment. In fact, in his several sweaters and velvet trousers, he was altogether a symphony of brown, beige and mushroom. There was a gash of green paint on one arm and a sleeve was worn to tatters, a hole also in the black stockings; neat white leather shoes.

  Lots of fun about the passage of the years. Yes, he remembered my photographing him like Whistler’s mother and featuring the toys on his mantelpiece. No regrets about the dead or the past. We must go on even if it was madness. The numbers of paintings he did! Sometimes eight in one day. We must see everything there is to see. ‘Come!’

  We left his sitting-room for another white, simple drawing-room with such a mass of letters, pottery, drawings and stacks of canvas that it was impossible to take in more than an occasional detail. Past the dark dining-room with the long table covered with parcels, pictures, books, sculpture, and pictures stacked against the wall, to the hall, full of packing cases and canvases. Down to the basement (formerly the hall in the Guinness’ time), now just a cemetery of modern statuary, some lifelike, others abstract constructions of wire, steel, painted tin. Picasso wandered about turning on extra lights for the photographs; he enjoyed being taken, was amused and flattered; he had a semi-queasy expression on his face. He gazed at the camera with wildly staring eyes, and I took a lot of pictures as we continued our tour of the house.

  The amount of work by Picasso was utterly staggering. But there was more. ‘Come you must see everything. This is nothing.’ Madame Picasso was self-effacing and managed to be out of the camera line all the time, and when I did try to take her, she seemed genuinely unhappy and shy. We then climbed a white circular staircase to one huge painting-room after another. Each was filled with pictures, some not finished and still wet, everywhere large daubs of the shapes we have become accustomed to; but to me the latest work seemed to have lost exactitude. The line was not good; the brush stroke coarse and rubbed. A lot of curious painting with every sort of trick employed; sometimes he dipped a cork into the paint and pressed that on to the canvas; a smell of Ripolin and everywhere stacks of tins of paint. Even on a huge glassed-in terrace, with a superb view of distant purple mountains, there were masses of blue canvases, mostly of monstrous women, all somewhat indecent according to Victorian standards.

  The sun poured through the shutters which, because of the high wind, slashed backwards and forwards. I clicked and clicked, hoping for the best in my excitement; I moved a piece of sculpture that I thought was made of card and found it was of iron; points dug into my thumb and the blood poured. Nothing to do but suck and forget. Some of the time the sun came through onto the floor and enabled me to take good patterned compositions, but much of the ‘work’ was pretty humdrum stuff and God knows if I got the exposures right.

  Back in the first sitting-room we sat around the circular table and talked happily. In the centre of the table there was a bowl of deep-pink roses from the garden, and around the room in odd pots delightful little posies of daisies, tulips and small, bright, wild flowers. I went on taking pictures.

  When I felt I had taken enough I got out my sketch book; but I found that after the intensity of taking photographs my energies were too dissipated for drawing. I kept turning the pages. Picasso rushed from his chair. ‘You do what Degas did and have pages that are transparent, so that you can turn over and trace the good bits and ignore the bad.’ He was tremendously enthusiastic about this idea and his eyes popped. It was another facet of his extraordinary display of vitality.

  At one point he demonstrated to M. Gomez the advantages of the modern (Knoll) swivel chair he sat in. He almost twirled himself into space. All his actions were quick ones; his arms raised in a jerk; his body too nervous and tense to be graceful. Generall
y when he turned his head, his body turned too. He jumped from place to place like a boy skipping. He talked of his working at night. Then it was quiet, with no one to disturb him. Sometimes it was three o’clock before he stopped, so he got up late in the morning. He didn’t need much sleep but liked to rest and read. When someone complained that they hadn’t been able to sleep, Picasso said: ‘So much the better for you. Sleep is a waste.’ He is strong; he is accustomed to moving sculpture. He did an imitation of his mother in her working chair. Her feet could never touch the ground. He asked Madame Gomez why she was here. ‘Specially to see you.’ That reminded me that Alice Toklas arrived one day and said she had come especially to see him. ‘Now you’ve seen me, you can go.’ Alice was not amused. But Picasso is fond of Alice and is still helping her through the financial difficulties she was in after the death of her friend Stein. Picasso sometimes stared very intently at me and his regard still has the power to intimidate. He laughed at me holding four sharpened pencils in my hand and said: ‘Aren’t you going to paint me?’ He said he thought I was a painter. I had the eyes of a painter, like Chardin or Fragonard, but not of a photographer. Most photographers had eyes like lenses. Photographs were too mechanical. Drawings were more alive, and colour photographs added nothing to black and white.

  Madame Gomez went into the next room to talk business with Picasso, and Madame Picasso told me that she still found Pablo someone that she could never take for granted. She had been married for eleven years and each day was more impressed by his honesty and naturalness. He was so great that she felt it was a privilege to be with him and take care of him. It is clear how much she loves him. Her eyes linger on him. She dashes forward in distress if, the wind blowing one canvas on to another, they have smudged. She wraps his jumper across his chest when he comes out into the open. She brings him a large glass of milk.

  Jacqueline Picasso admitted she would like to go to Paris; that they seldom went out here, not even to the bull fights any more. Pablo only liked to work; his world was here on the mountain top. He had already made three new studios and he wants to fill a fourth. This at eighty-four is not bad! She is obviously perfectly happy to look after this man and has no ulterior motives.

  Time to go. ‘I have to paint,’ said the master. It is marvellous that he has such gaiety at his time of life.

  I had been somewhat suffocated by too many neo-classical heads and tortured buttocks and graffiti-esque twats; and there were too many photographs of Picasso around. But he had been kindness itself to me.

  ‘So good to see you looking so well,’ I said and he ran to touch wood. He does not like the process of getting old. ‘Come back again in twenty years, but come back sooner as well.’ Eyes melting with amusement and friendliness, he waved as we circled down the mountainside.

  July 1965

  For many, many years Juliet Duff has been a great figure in my life, and has had a certain influence on me. Her taste, inherited from her mother,[6] has always impressed me, and she has an elegance and a sense of eccentricity that is appealing. But I have never really liked her, nor she me.

  At first she was very undecided as to whether she would ‘take me up’ or not. At the time of my ‘first appearance’ in London she was an intimate friend of Diaghilev, sitting in his box at the first night of the new ballet season. It was to a large supper-party in her Belgrave Square house that she first invited me. The fifty guests were already seated at a long table in the dining-room; marble swans looked on. Everyone was drinking pink champagne, a drink always served by her mother. Most of the men guests were in dinner jackets. I, arriving late, had to walk the length of the room to greet my hostess. I was in a tail coat, having come on from some other beano that warranted such apparel. Emerald Cunard on seeing me created a little rumpus of displeasure, for only a few days before she had thrown on to the fire and put a poker through my recently published Book of Beauty declaring that I was a ‘low fellow’. Juliet was now in a quandary. As hostess she must be polite to her invité, but although she never liked Emerald she did not necessarily want to incur her wrath. With one gracious smile I was bidden to sit out of earshot and sight of Emerald, and from that day on Juliet has been a constant friend.

  As the years pass, Juliet’s once enormous income has diminished; she has had to retrench, and her innate meanness has taken a severe hold. The slate mines have been doing badly in Wales, so she must sell a Fabergé ornament or a Boilly painting.

  Sunday

  Today, however, Juliet was at her best; she sat back and listened to the talk, which was racy. Occasionally she made a contribution about someone she considered eccentric and interesting. Simon, rather tipsy, was in his most delightful vein and at the end of the evening he ran his hand down Juliet’s arm and said: ‘You’ve looked so pretty in your rose-coloured dress.’

  But lately we have become alarmed, for Juliet’s health is very poor. She has fallen several times and although Dr Gottfried has reduced her blood pressure from the danger point, she does not look as if she will be long in this world. Then one day she keeled over getting out of bed. The doctor was called and she was ordered to rest. The next day she had a brain haemorrhage, lost consciousness, and died.

  Although in many ways Juliet and I did not get on, I know I shall miss her.

  Kin’s exit was as if to an execution. In my pyjamas I watched him go. He had two heavy bags to carry. He gripped his lips tightly and looked very serious. I like to think that it was as bad a moment for him as it was for me. The taxi came. His outstretched hand was stiff and taut. I went back to bed, not to sleep, but to moan at my loss and to feel desperately sad.

  GRETA IN GREECE

  July 1965

  I arrived at Vouliagmeni, the appointed bay where the yachts were harboured. Greta was the first person I saw; sitting with her back to the quay she had tied her hair back with a rubber band into a small pigtail. The effect was pleasing, neat and Chinese, but the hair has become grey. The surprised profile turned to reveal a big smile.

  She was up to her old tricks. ‘My, my, my! Can it be Beattie, my Beat!’ Still feeling Kin’s presence, I took the opportunity to tell her of his leaving this morning after one year. ‘One whole year! My, my!’ was all she had to say on the subject. There are so many things that we could have shared. At first I was riled and irritated by the ‘Is that so’s’ and ‘never mind’s’, ‘Don’t ask questions’, ‘Not going to tell you’, etc. I couldn’t imagine that there was not to be one moment of truth; but, no, she behaved like a mad child most of the time and that is all she wanted. So I soon learnt to talk gibberish like a monkey and she seemed perfectly content.

  Greta’s sense of humour is very alive. She remembers things that have amused her years before, including silly stories; bald man going into drug store: ‘Are you sure this hair restorer will be a success? Yes? Then give me two bottles and a comb and brush.’ The pansy who was told by the director to walk down the stairs in a more manly fashion: ‘You don’t expect me to play a character part for £7 a day?’

  In the apricot-coloured light of evening she still looks absolutely marvellous; she could be cleverly photographed to appear as beautiful as ever in films, but it is not just her beauty that is dazzling; it is the mysteriousness and other intangible qualities that make her appealing, particularly when talking with sympathy and wonder to children, or reacting herself to some situation with all the innocence and surprise of childhood itself.

  Tricheni

  Yesterday was a halcyon day in all respects. We arrived at a sandy, olive-planted island called Tricheni that appeared to be deserted; the captain warned us of the danger of sharks. Some bathed close to the shore in pellucid waters. It was difficult to imagine anything as violent as sharks in these calm waters, but Frederick Ledebur, having demonstrated at breakfast how to baffle a wasp (by twirling one’s thumb in quick circles), gave us the drill if we met a shark — splash the surface of the water and make a loud noise causing bubbles to rise. If the shark is not then terrified
, dive at it; in no event turn your back on it and swim away.

  While we bathed, Greta went for a walk among the olive trees; and was seen moving at a great speed in her tall straw hat, having abandoned the top to her bathing suit. A while later she returned radiant, her eyes blazing, teeth showing in a great grin. ‘You have no idea how beautiful it is! It’s Holy!’ For the rest of the day her spirits soared. She was reborn.

  By degrees we made friends with villagers, and old women bowed from their cloistered arches with the dignity of Proustian duchesses. We discovered that part of the cloisters had been converted into a pension, the bedrooms simple yet all that the soul requires, the dining-room appetizing. The light became more beautiful, our mood more idyllic, and we lingered, determined to come back to this place. A village girl came up to know if Greta was who she was; Greta hid her smiling face. Then as we moved on, she went back and told the girl that indeed she was who she was. The girl was delighted. Greta showed in many ways that she can be kind and good and adorable.

  She talked about the Kabuki actors and said that at first she found the noises they made offensive; but on a second visit she was fascinated; and she was able to reproduce the sounds exactly. She described a female impersonator in the troupe whom she said had the most ‘sexy’ look of any woman she had ever seen.