by Cecil Beaton
Next stop Buchlovice, until 1939 belonging to the Berchtold family. This is a triumph of ground planning, with crescents complementing crescents, ingenious vistas of steps and statue-decorated balustrades; and delightful wrought-iron work; every sort of tree flourished in the garden and park, and peacocks strutted round the ornamental pond. The whole effect was like a Bakst creation for a ballet of The Sleeping Beauty.
Prague
We visited the Jewish quarter and went into two synagogues; one was an early one, the other in memory of the Jews massacred in Czechoslovakia. At first I thought the walls were made of neatly textured stone, but on closer inspection I saw the names of the thousands and thousands who were exterminated. Nearby the Jewish cemetery remains intact, a wholesale mess of broken stones left by the Germans as a relic of an extinct race. It seems that the Germans never mention this; not even the children. ‘Be a sport. Come, forget it,’ is their attitude.
I felt sorry for the group as the rain-drenched bus, steam clouding its windows, turned the corner and was out of sight on its way to East Germany. I was not ashamed of having chickened out. In fact Liliane de Rothschild admitted I was intelligent. I smiled and waved with genuine gaiety.
But left alone I didn’t feel completely at ease; so many unexpected things can happen in this strange, mysterious town.
However, things did not turn out badly. I kept my appointment with Mr Liehm who was going to show me previews of two ‘important’ new Czech films. The first was about the beastliness of four school-children to another of their class, the message being don’t turn the other cheek, meet bad with worse. It was a cruel picture, beautifully produced in every way, an honest piece of art. The second, by Forman, was brilliantly funny, cruel and tragic, a satire on the government, who were seen as a bunch of bungling, incompetent, dishonest firemen. The Firemen’s League were to give a goodbye present to their former director, an eighty-three-year-old peasant dying of cancer. They organized a ball with tombola and beauty contest. The rustic ruggedness of the ball was hilariously shown, the beauties appalling and the tombola prizes ghastly. Suddenly the old man’s house catches fire and is destroyed. He is brought to the ball in his pyjamas. He shall be given all the tombola tickets, but who had taken the bottle of brandy? Who took that hunk of meat? Who took that box of chocolates? The entire tombola had been stolen. What can we say to the people? They will accuse us. This will ruin our reputation and reputation is more important than honesty. When the prize is presented to the aged director he opens his leather and velvet case — this prize too had been stolen.
Liehm considers Prague today one of the most progressive capitals in the world. Nobody has any belief in the government. In 1945 they put up a poor resistance to Russia compared with Poland.
Everybody defies the bumbling gangsters. Nobody obeys the rules, not even the police; but matters have reached a pitch where the future might be dangerous and a return to Stalinist censorship, prisons, and worse precipitated. The younger generation have no fear; they have zest and vitality, but their audacity might have to be curbed in case they go too far.
Liehm is a firebrand. A critic and a writer, he runs an uncensored weekly magazine. He took me around the Kafka sights.
One has only to be a few days in Prague before fully realizing the genius of Kafka. The air is impregnated with his spirit. Thirty years ago he wrote of everything that has happened here and is happening today. It is a town that is locked and has only the wrong keys, the keys that won’t fit the locks; things are not ruined and spoiled so much as baulked.
New York: November 18th
Noted the air so clear and bright. The sunset gaudy red. The illuminations well-polished diamonds. Everything has tremendous sharpness, a sequin glitter. Grand Central Station is the pinnacle ending Park Avenue’s long, light-spattered stretch. In only a year many new, even more modern, apartments appear in a city that looks cleaner than it is.
The younger generation think differently from their parents; the hippie mentality is here, even among those that are not actually hippies. Young American men have long hair. Girls go out with negroes; negroes go everywhere. The dances are absolute jungle rites; the dancers pay little attention to one another except perhaps to embrace when the ritual is over. Any sort of clothing goes.
‘The Electric Circus’ a psychedelic playground with Gustave Doré flashing, changing colours, moving pictures, amplified sound in a grotto: totally experimental and unconventional; makes one feel old and square, and a sightseer of a different century.
A nice compliment from Marianne Moore, who said to me: ‘You’re a great example to us all. You’re so modest. You exact the most of yourself.’
Since her ‘inconvenient’ birthday (she was recently eighty) she has had a kaleidoscope of a life. After a while she says she hopes to be ‘thinned out’.
NEW YORK: MARGOT FONTEYN
November 1967
Eileen has a great deal more patience than I have. She has many uses for it, being victim, on the telephone, of the vagaries of the rich and spoilt people who speak more bluntly to her than to me. But even Eileen got exasperated with Margot Fonteyn.
Months ago Diana Vreeland, editor-in-chief of Vogue magazine, said she wanted a pictorial feature showing the greatness of the dancer ‘as a woman’. The article to accompany the pictures was to be written by Marguerite Duras. But Margot kept postponing the engagement with me. She is, admittedly, tremendously busy. She knows her days of retirement are not far off, and she is making as many appearances as she can possibly fit in in all parts of the world.
It is a bore to be photographed. But the prevarications were endless. Margot would be in Paris between the 3rd and the 19th, if I’d come over, but she couldn’t pose on the 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 11th, etc., etc. Then she was going to Sweden, then Texas, but she didn’t know when that would be.
Suddenly she was completely out of touch. Eventually we tried to reach her through her mother and through her chauffeur. I then sent a frenzied telegram to Diana in New York.
Vogue paid the fare for Margot to come from Dallas and sent a car to the airport to meet her, by which time I was in New York too. She rang to know if she could be photographed in the home of Trumble Barton where she was staying, but this was not allowed.
Margot arrived at my hotel quite punctually, very staccato and jolly. She said she was sorry I’d got the impression she didn’t particularly want to be photographed by me; more than anyone else she wanted me.
Margot, at over fifty, still possesses the line and movement of youth. Her legs are long and straight, and go into ballet positions which look odd when she wears a very ‘way out’ St Laurent evening dress. Her spirit shines through like a blade of young grass.
She is totally an artist. To those who have known her well all through the early stages, and have influenced her in one way or another, her blossoming into the ballerina assoluta and becoming a legend must be very gratifying.
Part V: Hither and Thither, 1968-70
January 5th, 1968
The building alterations at Reddish were considered to be of a minor character until the men started to hack down an inside wall. Then one thing led to another. It seems that if the alterations had not been done, i.e. the creation of a ‘landing’ library, and the addition of guest bathrooms, the landing floor would sooner or later have caved in anyway; the boards had become rotten and were resting on the water pipes. The cisterns in the attic were about to burst and had to be replaced. When the faulty ones were brought down they were found to be filled with the bones of rats, birds, cats, and other animals, and with horror we realized that for years we had been drinking the water in which these bodies had been decomposing.
Now, when the main work is nearing its end, we are told that the roof above the garage may fall in any day, that certain walls are being pushed out too far, and that a perilously leaning chimney-stack must be dismantled, brick by brick and put back again.
All of this is a very boring way of spending a
lot of money at a time when the country has been brought to economic chaos, and we are all fearful of what the new Labour Chancellor may introduce in the way of taxes, squeezes and restrictions.
I am advised about my finances by an old man who must surely be left over from the time of Dickens. He does not seem to me to have the sort of fighting qualities which I would have thought necessary in such a difficult taxation time. I am in the hopeless condition of knowing nothing about my own money affairs.
I rely upon Eileen to be level-headed enough to say when I am in a really serious jam. As it is, it is a battle to make money enough to pay the income tax. This year has been a poor one financially. The result is that I now feel extremely wary of spending even the ordinary cash for everyday expenses. In comparison to some, I suppose I am well off. But by the standards of most solvent people, my existence is pretty precarious. With God on my side, I may continue to make enough to keep going to the end. But it takes a jolt like a transatlantic journey to make one realize that one can lose sense of everything except one’s immediate surroundings. Other people’s currency seems remote, and values are merely relative to one’s immediate needs. Thus a peseta is a windfall to a starving Spaniard, while a hundred thousand bucks is chicken feed to a Hollywood agent.
A few hours after my arrival in New York I was in the middle of the sort of activity that doesn’t come my way at home: a decorator needs materials; a man wants designs for carpets; someone is interested in the idea of my doing a club restaurant. Here, suddenly, I’m in touch with business. In London I’m guarded against the outside world, but here I realize I must step out of my little orbit and see what is happening.
An evening with David Bailey was a revelation. At thirty he has made a fortune as a photographer and owns eight different companies in Switzerland and Lichtenstein. He is on the ball in a way that it is intelligent for an artist to be, and, of course, he has a very good accountant. I would like to be able to learn a few of his tricks. It would not mean that I become less of an artist, but more sensible about important practical matters and less worried when Mr Blick, the builder, says that it will cost £250 to renovate the garage roof.
If I stay long in New York, the activities gang up on me with such speed that I forget the importance of taking time off to attend to the understanding of my money. As soon as I sense I am in a rut, either of illness, stagnation, or overwork, it is good for me to pull stumps and move on to get a different perspective.
Bora-Bora, Pacific Ocean: January, 1968
When I saw the Tahitian bungalow of bamboo and palm fronds in which I was to stay alone for three or four days, I felt utterly lost. Why had I come all this way to be trapped? Like many people I have a certain fear of being alone, although sometimes I like time off from people in my own house. However, the time passed quickly and agreeably, thanks partly to the calming atmosphere of this tiny, humid, tropical island in the middle of the Pacific, but mainly thanks to Jane Austen. Each time I returned from an expedition in or on the translucent sea, or returned from a meal of fruit, I became absorbed in the Bennett family. Their problems and their characteristics are so real that I am amused and fascinated, and not a little moved from time to time.
The villages are the same as those in almost every tropical part of the world, and the hotel is planned like others, large dining-room and office and thirty-three bungalows dotted among the coconut palms. All the lush, plummy vegetation makes the island look exactly like the eighteenth-century engravings done at the time of Captain Cook’s voyages. The mountains are of basalt and have now acquired, after millions of years, very peculiar sawn-off, rather hideous, shapes. The grey summits may be in cloud, but the mountain-sides are sunny velvety green, covered with flowering trees, palms, bananas and mangoes, and bushy with coffee and vanilla.
The white coral reef seems miles away; inside the lagoon the waters are quite still and one can see the wonderful rainbow colours of the forests of coral and seaweed below.
My first morning glimpse was of an idyllic shore with white sands, a tangerine, lilac and rose sea, the blue sky filled with circling, shrieking, white birds — the terns, so named by Cook’s botanist, Sir Joseph Banks. The water was almost rippleless, in fact it engulfed one like a caress. I ventured on a plastic floating mattress with a peephole to the deep through which I watched white and yellow fish darting in and out of the coral. By snorkelling extraordinary magical mysteries below the surface were revealed to me. The coral forests were of every variety of tree, some like firs, some windswept conifers, others yellow spiked, some dappled with purple, some like nuggets of gold. The pale grey and blue were like white icicles. At one’s approach a complete cloud of brilliant blue fish with black spotted backs panicked and hurried for safety. A whole family of small white fish hovered near the white sandbed. A long, red-snouted fish looked as if he was out for trouble, and all the other fish rushed out of his way to take cover in a cranny or hole. Like every animal and insect, the lizards, birds and sea flies keep up a life-long battle for self-preservation.
AUSTRALIA
Sydney: January 1968
‘Mr Beaton? Will you come this way please?’ Embarrassing to be picked out for such unexpected and sudden attention, particularly as I was only on holiday; but I loved it! ‘This way.’ From the back of the economy class I was whisked through to an army of white-shirted, black-trousered customs officers. A Group Captain sent by Lord Casey to meet me. ‘The Queen’s photographer’s luggage.’
I got into the waiting Rolls; conversation with an apple-cheeked ADC with a strong accent.
Pretty ironwork balconies on ramshackle early houses. The bridge, the new Opera House, boats bobbing up and down at the water’s edge, the white, low-lying Admiralty House.
Another ADC at attention and there to greet me, the Caseys;[8] all the old English pomp — bow, bow, exchange of politeness, smiles, jokes, the grandchildren. A Monet scene through the windows; bright, ugly flowers, boats, modern skyscrapers forming a backcloth: an English countryhouse atmosphere.
The life at Admiralty House is so formal, so comfortable and conventional that one cannot break through to today. Competent secretaries enquire what help they can offer. They mean to carry through and they do. We meet punctually at mealtimes, ADCS prompt us, tell us where to sit: ‘Your back will not be facing the window.’ We make spasmodic conversation but it is never consecutive and often interrupted. No subject is therefore fully discussed. This makes for great frustration.
Having slept for ten hours at night I am asked: ‘Would you care to rest this afternoon?’ No, a plot has been brewing among the newly arrived guests. We would like to venture forth on our own to see the city, the suburbs, even go to a bathing beach. A limousine is ordered; a secretary directs the chauffeur, fills us in with information. This is the Library, the Wall Street area, King’s Cross, the Soho part. This is the Chelsea or British part of the town, Kensington.
It is impossible to get to grips with reality. The town is there in its physical sense but it seems there is no life. It is Australia Day, holiday weekend, and everyone has gone away. Hard to tell what sort of people live in the little houses, the new villas, the apartment houses, or the sleazy hotels; every part is abandoned as if there were a plague. It is only when we get to Bondi Beach that the real life is amusing to watch: so much activity; surfing, aquatic competitions of all kinds, life-savers rushing out to sea to protect people from currents, sharks and being battered on the rocks. Every colour of costume; a ‘pop-art’ kaleidoscope of young people, quite good-looking in an anonymous way, but no beauties, as you would see in Italy; everyone well disposed to each other; surprisingly, a lot of negroes and Chinese.
The limousine continues its tour. This is the Golf Club stretching for miles. Here the Park with the crowds listening to the soap-box preachers. We get down and mingle and listen, but time is short.
Over there is the Zoo; the new circular skyscraper; there the boats for the regatta, the tankers, the boat that brought soldiers ba
ck from Vietnam. We are due back to meet the grandchildren at five o’clock.
Later we got another car to take us to a park where koalas, wombats, and kangaroos are in a more or less natural setting. After twenty miles of suburbs, a side road brought us to mountainous, heavily wooded ‘bush’. The animals were a bit squalid without sunlight. The glimpse was the nearest we have yet come to seeing something typically Australian.
The Art Gallery of New South Wales was very impressive and a selection of Chinese sculpture beautifully shown; women polo-riders and dancing girls, and a whole row of female musicians, now more beautiful than they must have been in their original crude colouring. Time has taken all but the most delicate traces of shrimp or lobster and fawn from the surface of these pale grey and pearly clays. There were good examples of the work of many modern painters. Most interesting, too, were the paintings by native aborigines.
At the back of this museum we saw the van which for four months will travel throughout Australia showing the people in many villages and outbacks their first original paintings. It was one of the signs of the determination of these people to make Australia into a great country of the future.
The Sydney Opera House makes all other opera houses look like coffers or kiosks, situated on this commanding promontory, dominating the city.
Canberra
The journey here to the seat of government was a revelation; no worry about whether we would miss the aeroplane, or be detained at customs: no lining up and waiting. The entire staff moves with Their Excellencies; some, including the chef, going on in advance.
