Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

Next morning they go to Asprey’s, where Norman makes Bruce spend all his money on a glittering chromium unicorn.

  “Why a unicorn, Norman?”

  “Why a unicorn?” he repeated with feeling. “Because it reminds me of you . . . fantastic beast.”

  In “Rotting Fruit” Bruce’s obsessions, ambivalence and inexperience come tumbling out: his taste for Matisse and Noel Coward; the austerity that comes from not being able to afford the art he wants; above all, his panic over challenges to what Norman deprecatingly calls “your iron-clad chastity”. Although Bruce keeps detached, there are moments when Norman is anxious to close the distance.

  The pursuit of the elusive Matisse ends in a hotel in Estoril where Norman sends him for the weekend to meet a “very dear friend” whom he warns is “sick like me, very sick. You’d like him. He’s very artistic.”

  Bruce arrives at the hotel where the story and the writing degenerate into a stock camp fantasy. The cowboy photographer, Seymour Ross, offers Bruce $200 if he will pose for him. “Salute me. Salute me,” orders Ross. “Nazi salute. Nazi salute . . . Click your heels.”

  Finally, Ross collapses on the bed, the camera between his legs. He lies panting for a full minute, then snarls at Bruce to get out.

  As he escapes to the seafront, the narrator reflects: “I was unable to decide whether I had been sexually outraged or not. NO. NO. I danced. I jumped in the air, vaulted over the railings and on to the beach kicking the sand. I howled with laughter. It was far too funny. That wasn’t outrage.” But it is not clear whether Bruce is happy to have preserved his “iron-clad chastity”, or if he is experiencing the first exhilaration of the voyeur.

  Wilson filled such a presence in Bruce’s life that he is distributed over all three characters in “Rotting Fruit”: the narrator Peter, the art collector and the deviant photographer. He had opened the door to Bruce’s sensuous delight in objects, but how much further their own relationship went is harder to know. Bruce’s mannerisms undoubtedly grew more camp as he aped Wilson and it was no secret within Sotheby’s that the chairman was attracted to Bruce, and felt possessive of his young blood. In Mrs Ford’s tearoom there was a joke:

  Q: Where do you look for PCW when you can’t find him in his office?

  A: Behind the tallboy.

  “The tallboy,” says Brian Sewell, “was Bruce.”

  Opinions divide as to whether the joke had substance. Hodgkin believes “they definitely had an affair.” Lucie-Smith disagrees. “Bruce was clever at keeping old men on heat without ever delivering the goods. His sense of the ridiculous would have prevented him. The whole relationship bears the mark of unrequited love, but Bruce manipulated him for what he could get out of it.”

  Sewell probably gets closest to the truth. “I’m convinced he was not PCW’s lover. Wilson wanted Bruce body and soul and it made it easier for him if Bruce pretended, so it didn’t look a footling, idiotic pursuit. It was a very kindly act on Bruce’s part.”

  Even if not physical, their relationship carried the emotional charge of an affair. To at least one person Bruce intimated that the flirtation may have gone too far. He told Ivry that Wilson wanted him to come and live with him in a mews house. “He’s very, very possessive and it’s very, very awkward. I don’t know how long I can take it.”

  The Somerset Maugham sale had marked a watershed in Bruce’s relationship with Wilson. He began to rebel against “the Beast’s” exploitation.

  Bruce, like his own description of the Russian Bohemian poet Sergei Esenin, married to Isadora Duncan, was “a blonde innocent who awoke the tenderest emotions in both sexes”. It was impossible to be indifferent to him, even if he was indifferent to so many others. Peter Adam, an arts documentary-maker for the BBC, described him as “that dangerously charismatic man who had seduced us all”. He says: “Many people genuinely loved Bruce or fell in love with him. It was not difficult to do so.” Bruce, who shied away from intimacy, was less able to reciprocate. Gregor von Rezzori said, “He was not loving at all, he couldn’t care less. But who loves a loving person?”

  After Ivry Guild became engaged and Spink left the flat, Bruce embarked on a string of short-lived relationships with both sexes. Most were furtive, schoolboy affairs, as with Teddy Millington-Drake. “It didn’t last very long and then we became great friends,” said Millington-Drake. “We were all very juvenile in those days. We didn’t take our love affairs seriously.” Bruce realised the affair was over when he arrived at Este and found Millington-Drake and the designer John Stefanidis in identical bathrobes.

  His involvement with Michael Ricketts, the 23-year-old brother of Howard, Bruce’s colleague at Sotheby’s, was more serious. An unpublished poet, Michael worked for Oxford University Press and was a friend of Harold Nicolson and Edith Sitwell. Howard Ricketts sometimes joined them for dinner at the Fiddler’s Tower in Beauchamp Place. He says, “It was a closet period, pre-Wolfenden. There was a lot of blackmail going on. Bruce knew that I knew, but he kept it as quiet as possible.” Observing them together, Howard Ricketts thought: “My brother hasn’t totally cracked this relationship.” He felt that Bruce’s sex life was something perceived by him as being quite separate. “He viewed himself as apart from himself.”

  This detachment is a recurring trait. Few came close. At the point where his lovers might want to talk personally, Bruce would be incapable.

  After Michael Ricketts, Bruce was involved for 18 months with a rich young art dealer whom he had met through Hewett. Bruce, he says, was “a cold fish” with a limited emotional attention span. “You had only a part of him.” With the detachment came confusion about his sexuality. “He wasn’t 100 per cent gay. I’d put him 70/30. I don’t think he was ever happy about being gay. He was not a fulfilled gay man.”

  Jane Abdy says, “When he gave in to his homosexuality he was disgusted with himself, which explained the rest of his life, which was a flight from reality – going to Edinburgh, going to Patagonia, always to be fleeing. He became like Orestes after the murder of Aegisthus, I thought, pursued by furies. This disgust was never there when I first knew him.”

  Twenty-five years later, Bruce reported to his doctor at the Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford that he had been “bisexual since youth”. It was a measure of his privacy that, six months before his death, not even his parents or his brother knew.

  He was a sexual kaleidoscope, even to himself: at each arbitrary formation a plausible identity. To some he was homosexual, to some heterosexual, to some he was bisexual, to others he was asexual. (“I couldn’t imagine anything worse than going to bed with him,” says one woman. “Nothing.”) To all, he was secretive. “There was something about him which made sure you wouldn’t ask,” says Robert Erskine. One might have expected him to share confidences to friends like Lucie-Smith or Sewell, both undergoing the same anxieties, but he did not. “There was never a crack,” says Sewell. “Not a word.” Lucie-Smith says: “We all construct our personalities and sometimes we construct them at different rates. I was going through the difficulties and the demons, but because Bruce made the jump so quickly he was never at ease with himself as he might have been. Like the Just So rhino, he had crumbs inside his skin; he never settled.”

  James Lees-Milne, himself bisexual, wrote in his diary: “I think of Bruce with fascination and a certain repulsion. He was one of the most physically attractive mortals. I used to tell him he looked like a fallen angel . . . I recall one evening when B and I were alone for dinner at Alderley. He and I sat before the fire, drinking and talking far into the night. I wondered, should I ask him to stay the night, and decided not. Just as well perhaps. He was very beguiling stretched along the rug in a cock-teasing attitude. He was, with all his intense vanity, discreet. Yet on this occasion admitted that he could never decline to sleep with male or female, if pressed, but once only. Nonce with me.”

  Something old-fashioned in his behaviour recalls the example of an older generation, like E. M. Forster’s, who always thought his homosexualit
y was something distasteful for the world to know. “Bruce is demonised as an arch closet queen,” says Francis Wyndham. “He wasn’t, but he was reserved and he didn’t glory in his homosexuality. I think he looked upon it not as a handicap, rather as something he wished otherwise. He wanted to be heterosexual, which is unfashionable now when one should be happy to be gay.”

  Homosexuality was illegal until 1967, despite the publication of Sir John Wolfenden’s report ten years before arguing that homosexual activity in private should no longer be a criminal offence. “Nobody took any notice of the law,” says William Davis, who met Bruce at this time. “You just didn’t stand in the middle of the park.” If Bruce stood in the park, he did not talk about it – unless the experience took place at a safe remove from Mother England. But he frequented bars like The Rockingham in Soho, The Calabash in the King’s Road, The Establishment Club – “always with groups of rather rich young queens, Americans in Paris,” says the actor Peter Eyre. “I was almost embarrassed by him. He was inadvertently tapette. He used to wear these smart suits and had a sweet, piping upper-class voice which he dropped later. He had the complete identity of the young queen.”

  Eyre says: “There was no question of Bruce pretending not to be homosexual with his friends who were,” but he noticed Bruce’s very English resistance to talking about himself. Once, speaking of someone they both knew, Eyre said: “He can’t come to terms with his sexuality.”

  “Oh, my dear,” said Bruce. “Sexuality.”

  If Bruce spoke openly to anyone, it was to Werner Muensterberger, a psychoanalyst whose patients had included James Dean. Muensterberger knew Bruce from the early 1960s. He says, “I have never seen anyone in all my life who kept his sexuality so private.” It surprised Muensterberger when, one evening in the 1970s, Bruce sat with him till 3 a.m. “What excited him personally was to observe two people in action.” Bruce told Muensterberger how when staying with a couple in South America, he had burst in on them while they were making love. Instead of leaving the room, Bruce urged them: “Please go on.” He described the scene to Muensterberger “in technicolor”.

  “He was a looker, an observer, much more than a participant,” says Muensterberger, who analysed Bruce’s homosexuality as a way of avoiding involvement or commitment. “For him, homosexuality was mainly a curiosity. It had the element of being adventurous. His travelling was another form of voyeurism.”

  To Colin Thubron, Bruce’s sexuality went a long way to explaining his fascination with crazed people out of their context, for the ambiguous, the odd, the peculiar. “Homosexuals have an instinct for dealing with the world as abnormal. The assumption that we’re all a bit abnormal is less likely to occur to people who feel integrated in the norm of things. Bruce assumed, and was drawn to the assumption, that the extraordinary was everywhere. A lot of his celebration of the world was for its sheer peculiarities: ‘Life is peculiar. Everything is really mad. Not just me’.”

  Just as he was too garrulous to be a great dealer – “You have to leave a silent space in which they take the hook,” says Lucie-Smith – so his loud voice got in the way of romance. There must be moments of silence in a relationship. “Bruce was like a well-shaken bottle of champagne,” says a friend. “He wasn’t one of my best lovers,” says Christina Camerara, who had an affair with him in the early 1970s. “He talked too much.”

  After “Rotting Fruit”, Bruce rarely spoke and never wrote directly on the subject of his sexuality. What prevail are the theories and observations of those men and women who were either his lovers or close enough to witness his liaisons. Lucie-Smith says that Bruce was “active with partners at or near his own level of class and education, passive with what might be described as rough trade”. Bruce once described to Lucie-Smith a partner’s picture of himself in the sexual act – “brows knitted and eyes bulging like a Japanese god”. Lucie-Smith was impressed by an aspect of Bruce’s description. “He’s floating above himself, seeing himself from the outside – or else seeing himself through his partner’s eyes. Which of us is so self-conscious that we would take a snapshot of ourselves in that moment?”

  The Japanese god was how Bruce wanted to appear, a self-image he approved of. “Aesthetically, all his references are not to the human world but to the art world. He told me he once went to bed with a famous ice-skater: it was as if he had succeeded in animating a Greek statue and taken it to bed.”

  There was often denial over what had taken place. “When Bruce was crazy about someone, he was crazy about them,” says Lucie-Smith. “Once it was all over, he sometimes blotted the whole thing from his mind.” One of his lovers was, for a brief period in the late 1970s, Peter Adam. “He liked the idea of sex better than sex itself,” says Adam. “He liked many ideas better than their reality.” Adam was of German extraction, cultured, confident of his attraction. One night in 1978 he invited Bruce to a dinner party. “Bruce came in wearing a white T-shirt, a pair of jeans. I was properly dressed in a suit. He didn’t pay the slightest attention to me and I got flirtatious. I thought: ‘What can I do so he takes notice?’ I’ve rarely been so determined and so furious. So I go and do the cheapest thing I can think of. I went into the kitchen, where I was making pasta, and poured the hot spaghetti water over me. I went into my bedroom and changed into jeans and a T-shirt, exactly what he was wearing – and suddenly he paid attention.” Bruce stayed the night, but afterwards asked Adam not to tell anyone. Adam says, “I’ve hardly known anyone say that. It’s schoolboy behaviour. He had a very bad relationship with himself.”

  Intensely private people can still be intimate, but Bruce’s privacy was generally not about protecting the intimacy he shared. Many of those who had loved Bruce speak of his frigidity, his emotional unwillingness, his lack of connection. He told Howard Hodgkin how he had got into bed at last with someone he craved. “But,” he said, “it was just like making love to a beautiful machine.”

  “Just think,” said Hodgkin, “how many people have felt the same way about you.”

  Susan Sontag met Bruce in New York in 1979 and observed the strange sexual avidity in which he engaged at that time. “He slept with everyone, once: it goes with being a great beauty. His sexuality was like his possessions, a means of engaging and also of not engaging with the world. He was profoundly solitary and therefore conducted his sexual activity as a way of connecting with people. At such an industrial rate it meant not an exclusive or intensifying connection: it meant he had a connection. ‘I know this person because I’ve slept with him/her.’ It gave him the right to call someone next time he was in town. There were no rules about it.”

  He felt a stronger urge towards his own sex, but was also powerfully attracted to women. Francis Wyndham noticed how “he convincingly expressed a desire for young rather sexy girls. I know that wasn’t a fake.” He would have infatuations with them – especially if they had a touch of the exotic, like Samira Kirollos, a Copt whom he took to a ball in Cowes. Another young woman to whom he responded was Ursula Digby-Jones.

  No one could have embodied more satisfyingly Bruce’s childhood history for himself. In 1956, Kenelm’s tall, blonde wife had escaped her native Hungary and been shot as she crossed the border into Austria. A German officer brought her to the British Embassy in Vienna where a First Secretary looked at this dishevelled woman in a fur coat and asked if she had a passport.

  “No, I have this.” She gave him a slim volume of The Waste Land and, said Kenelm, “never looked back.”

  Bruce tried to seduce Ursula after the opening of the nightclub at which he had worn Jimmy Douglas’s python. He followed her back to her hotel room, squeezed a foot in the door. “She threw me out.”

  Someone who did not reject his advances was Gloria Taylor, a former Chanel model with a fringe and high cheekbones who ran the Dior boutique in Conduit Street. Gloria was the sister of the actor Malcolm MacDowell. Known as “the naughtiest girl at school”, she was right out of the world of Margharita’s magazines. She had met George
Ortiz in Paris and Ortiz had introduced her to Hewett and Hewett, in the winter of 1962, introduced her to Bruce. She says, “One night after dinner at Robert Erskine’s we went out and had an affair. I thought I was a bit of a baby snatcher. John Hewett looked at me askance.”

  Bruce called her “Glor” and liked the fact she worked for Dior. She found him painfully shy, despite his bluster. “He always had to make statements and justify himself. He couldn’t relax and be calm. Something was goading him. Somehow, he was always on the go.”

  One weekend, Bruce took her sailing and he changed completely. “I’ve never seen a change like that. His real courage came to the fore. From being butterfly twittery, he became calm, bold, even-tempered, the master of himself and of the boat. You felt safe.” Their affair continued through 1963. “It was like being with someone who wasn’t always there. There wasn’t a cosy niceness afterwards. He never said he was in love with me.” Then Bruce told Gloria he had met an American woman who owned a car and would take them to Wales.

  XII

  Elizabeth

  I think he was fascinated by my voice.

  —Elizabeth Chatwin

  ELIZABETH CHANLER WORKED AS WILSON’S SECRETARY. SHE WAS two years older than Bruce, small, alert and bubbly, with a deep stripe of shyness. “The one truly delightful thing about you,” a friend wrote to her at this time, “beside your occasional spontaneous overflow of healthy animal spirits is your lack of that talent known as ego-inflating.”

  She lived in a cold flat in Chelsea with two friends from Radcliffe, where she had been at college, and Wilson’s grey parrot. She was engaged to be married to an American living in Boston.

  Bruce told a friend that he first met Elizabeth on a dig in Persia. By the end of the day they had fallen into the sack “like two warm rabbits”. They met, in fact, at Sotheby’s. From her desk Elizabeth watched him talking with a client. “I could see him from behind, in a double-breasted charcoal grey suit with a high, stiff detachable collar, standing there, looking at something, his blonde hair sticking up.” She had read The Lord of the Rings at Radcliffe: Bruce was like Strider.