by Craig Brown
GEORGE IVANOVICH GURDJIEFF
COOKS SAUERKRAUT FOR
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT
Taliesin, Spring Green, Wisconsin
June 1934
Gurdjieff is no easy traveller. He arrives at Grand Central Terminal with seven suitcases, furious at the train driver for refusing to delay the departure of the midnight express until he is in a mood to board.
Cursing loudly, he bangs his way through thirteen Pullman cars, disturbing the sleeping passengers. Throughout the night, he moans and groans at theatrical volume. At breakfast, he refuses everything on the menu, informing the steward, at exhaustive length, about his complicated digestive processes and special dietary needs. For the rest of the journey he infuriates his fellow passengers with his chain smoking, drinks furiously and produces all sorts of smelly food, including an over-ripe Camembert. From Chicago, he travels to the Wrights’ 1,000-acre architectural fellowship, Taliesin. ‘Now must change, we are going to special place,’ he informs his long-suffering assistant.
Gurdjieff and Frank Lloyd Wright have never met before. Both men are, by nature, leaders, not disciples; a clash of egos seems on the cards. Furthermore, there is a question of jealousy: Wright’s wife Olgivanna was, for many years, one of Gurdjieff’s sacred dancers. ‘I wish for immortality,’ she tells him on their first meeting, and Gurdjieff had agreed to organise it for her. Added to this, the Wrights’ six-year marriage – his third, her second – is going through a stormy patch. Wright has taken to blaming Olgivanna for all his worst moods. One moment he will take an outlandish view, bulldozing her into agreeing with him, then he will change his mind and chastise her for letting him think like that. A few days ago, he dreamed that Olgivanna was in bed with a black man. When he woke up, he placed the blame on her. ‘There must be something in you that led me to the conclusion of such a dream!’ he said. Before the arrival of Gurdjieff, Olgivanna has been thinking of leaving Wright. ‘I cannot bear this abuse any longer,’ she tells her daughter.
Gurdjieff is no shrinking violet. The moment he sets foot in Taliesin he takes charge of the cooking, producing many little bags of hot spices and peppers from his various pockets. He takes control of the entertainment, too. After dinner, he supervises the playing of twenty-five or thirty of his own compositions on the piano: he is the self-proclaimed pioneer of a revolutionary new school of ‘objective’ music, the first ever to produce exactly the same reaction in all its listeners.
Without fuss, Wright becomes a willing disciple. Just twenty-four hours in the company of Gurdjieff have served to convince him of his genius. He compares him to ‘some oriental buddha’ who has ‘come alive in our midst’; like Gandhi, though ‘more robust, aggressive and venturesome ... Notwithstanding a superabundance of personal idiosyncrasy, George Gurdjieff seems to have the stuff in him of which genuine prophets have been made.’ Wright sees him as ageless, like God. He is, he says, ‘a man of perhaps eighty-five looking fifty-five’. In fact, though nobody knows for sure, most people reckon his year of birth to be 1866, which would in fact make him more like sixty-eight.
Gurdjieff loves to be in command, and is never happier than when a lot of people are doing exactly what he says. Before his stay is over, he has made everyone cook great quantities of sauerkraut from his own recipe, involving whole apples, including their skins, their stems and their cores. Even his most devoted disciples find it hard to swallow. On his departure from Taliesin, he leaves behind two fifty-gallon barrels of the stuff. In the first flush of discipleship, Frank Lloyd Wright will not hear a word against the sauerkraut. He insists the barrels must be transported to his Fellowship’s desert camp in Arizona, watching attentively as they are loaded onto a truck.
The sauerkraut truck gets as far as Iowa before the crew decides to call it a day. ‘We loosened the tailgate ropes,’ one of them confesses years later, ‘and dumped the barrels into a ditch.’
Even after such a brief meeting, Wright never loses his faith in Gurdjieff. Mysteriously, his rows with Olgivanna come to an end. ‘I am sure Gurdjieff told Olgivanna to be devious, because it all changed,’ notes a friend. Or was it something in the sauerkraut?
As time goes by, Taliesin comes increasingly to resemble Gurdjieff’s Institute of Harmonious Development, particularly in its strictly pyramidical approach to harmony. ‘Never have so many people spent so much time making a very few people comfortable,’ remarks one disaffected disciple. By the late 1940s, the Wrights have taken to sitting on a dais, eating different meals to their followers, who are given fried eggs.33
The two men meet again from time to time. Whenever they clash, it is Wright who gives way: there is never any question as to which is the guru and which the disciple. When Gurdjieff returns to Taliesin in 1939, Wright suggests he sends some of his own pupils to Gurdjieff in Paris, ‘Then they can come back to me and I’ll finish them off.’
‘YOU finish! You are IDIOT!’ snaps Gurdjieff. ‘YOU finish? No. YOU begin. I finish!’
In November 1948, Wright visits Gurdjieff in the Wellington Hotel, New York, where he is staying with his varied entourage. Gurdjieff places Wright beneath an enneagram constructed of large leaves, and listens attentively as Wright talks him through his problems with his gall bladder. ‘I seven times doctor,’ announces Gurdjieff, prescribing him a meal of mutton, avocado and peppered Armagnac. Oddly enough, it seems to do the trick. Gurdjieff then brings out his harmonium. ‘The music I play you now came from monastery where Jesus Christ spent from eighteenth to thirtieth year,’ he explains.
One of Gurdjieff’s most striking pronouncements is, ‘I am Gurdjieff. I will NOT die!’ But die he does, just under a year later.34 ‘The greatest man in the world has recently died,’ Wright announces to the audience as he is being presented with a medal in New York. ‘His name was Gurdjieff.’
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT
DESIGNS A HOUSE FOR
MARILYN MONROE
The Plaza Hotel, Fifth Avenue, New York
Autumn 1957
One afternoon in the autumn of 1957, the most venerated architect in America, Frank Lloyd Wright, now aged ninety, is working in his suite in the Plaza Hotel, New York, when the doorbell rings. It is Marilyn Monroe, come to ask him to design a house.
Since their marriage in June 1956, Arthur Miller and his bride Marilyn Monroe have been based at Miller’s modest two-storey country house near Roxbury, Connecticut. Dating from 1783, it has 325 acres of land planted with fruit trees. A verandah at the back looks out across endless hills. A short walk from the house is a swimming pond, with clear spring water.
It is just right for Miller, who likes to live in the countryside, away from the flash world of celebrity, and is known to be careful with money. But Marilyn has other plans. She loves to spend, and has firm ideas about what is glamorous and what is not. Her self-esteem is bound up with her ability to splash out; she craves nothing but the best.
Like so many men, Frank Lloyd Wright is immediately taken with Marilyn.35 He ushers her into a separate room, away from his wife and his staff, and listens intently as she describes the sort of home she has in mind. It is spectacularly lavish. Once she has left, Wright dips into his archives and digs out an abandoned plan for a building he drew up eight years earlier: a luxury manor house for a wealthy Texan couple.
The parsimonious Miller is taken aback when he hears of Marilyn’s grandiose vision for their new home. ‘That we could not really afford all of her ideas I did my best not to dramatize, but it was inevitable that some of my concern showed.’ When she tells him the name of the architect, Miller’s heart sinks. But he bites his lip, hoping good sense will prevail. ‘It had to seem like ingratitude to question whether we could ever begin to finance any Wright design, since much like her, he had little interest in costs. I could only give him his day and let her judge whether it was beyond our means or not.’
One grey autumn morning, the Millers drive Frank Lloyd Wright to Roxbury. Wright is wearing a wide-brimmed cowboy hat. He curls up in the
back seat and sleeps throughout the two-hour journey.
The three of them enter the old house together. Wright looks around the living room, and, in what Miller describes as ‘a tone reminiscent of W.C. Fields’s nasal drawl’, says disparagingly, ‘Ah, yes, the old house. Don’t put a nickel in it.’ They sit down to a lunch of smoked salmon. Wright refuses any pepper. ‘Never eat pepper,’ he says. ‘The stuff will kill you before your time. Avoid it.’
After lunch, Marilyn remains in the house while the two men trudge half a mile up the steep hill to the crest on which the new house is to be built. Wright never stops to catch his breath: Miller is impressed. At the crest, Wright turns towards the magnificent view, unbuttons his fly and urinates, sighing, ‘Yes. Yes indeed.’ He glances about for a few seconds, then leads the way back down the hill. Before they go back into the house, Miller steals a quick private word with Wright. ‘I thought the time had come to tell him something he had never bothered to ask, that we expected to live fairly simply and were not looking for some elaborate house with which to impress the world.’
The message is plural, but it should have been singular. An elaborate house with which to impress the world is, in a nutshell, just what Marilyn is after, which is why she hired Frank Lloyd Wright in the first place. But Wright affects not to hear. ‘I saw that this news had not the slightest interest for him,’ says Miller.
A few days later, Miller visits the Plaza Hotel alone. Wright shows him a watercolour of his extravagant plan: a circular living room with a dropped centre surrounded by five-foot-thick ovoid columns made of sandstone with a domed ceiling sixty feet in diameter, rounded off with a seventy-foot-long swimming pool with fieldstone sides jutting out from the incline of the hill. Miller looks at it in horror, mentally totting up the cost. He notes with indignation that Wright has added a final flourish to his painting – a huge limousine in the curved driveway, complete with a uniformed chauffeur.
Miller asks the cost. Wright mentions $250,000, but Miller doesn’t believe him: it might cover the cost of the swimming pool, ‘if that’. He also notes that Wright’s ‘pleasure dream of Marilyn allowed him to include in this monster of a structure only a single bedroom and a small guestroom, but he did provide a large “conference room” complete with a long board-room-type table flanked by a dozen high-backed chairs, the highest at the head, where he imagined she would sit like the reigning queen of a small country, Denmark, say’.36
The marriage goes from bad to worse. Miller and Monroe have nothing to say to each other. ‘He makes me think I’m stupid. I’m afraid to bring things up, because maybe I am stupid.’ Marilyn adds that ‘I’m in a fucking prison and my jailer is named Arthur Miller ... Every morning he goes into that goddamn study of his, and I don’t see him for hours and hours. I mean, what the fuck is he doing in there? And there I am, just sitting around; I haven’t a goddamn thing to do.’
Miller fails to give the go-ahead to Wright, who dies in April 1959. Miller and Monroe divorce in 1961; Monroe dies in August 1962.
Thirty years later, the plans are dusted off and enlarged. Marilyn’s dream home finally emerges as a $35-million golf clubhouse in Hawaii, complete wtih banqueting rooms, a men’s locker room and a Japanese furo bath with a soaking pool, not to mention seated showers.
MARILYN MONROE
WEARS HER TIGHTEST, SEXIEST DRESS FOR
NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV
The Café de Paris, Hollywood
September 19th 1959
In her bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Marilyn Monroe is preparing to meet the Soviet Premier, Nikita Khrushchev. When she was first invited, his name hadn’t rung a bell, and she wasn’t keen to go. It was only when her studio told her that in Russia, America meant two things, Coca-Cola and Marilyn Monroe, that she changed her mind. ‘She loved hearing that,’ recalls Lena Pepitone, her maid. Marilyn tells Lena that the studio wants her to wear her tightest, sexiest dress. ‘I guess there’s not much sex in Russia,’ she concludes.
Her preparations are lengthy and elaborate, involving a masseuse, a hairdresser and a make-up artist. When they are halfway through, the president of Twentieth Century-Fox, Spyros Skouras, arrives, just to make sure that, for once in her life, Marilyn will be on time. As agreed, she squeezes into a low-cut, skin-tight black lace dress. Her chauffeur drops her at the studio before noon. The parking lot is empty. ‘We must be late! It must be over!’ gasps Marilyn. In fact, they are far too early.37
Nikita Khrushchev’s American tour has had more than its share of ups and downs. He is a temperamental character, apt to flair up at the slightest provocation. Perhaps because of this, the American media cannot get enough of him. ‘It’s Khrush, Khrushy, Khrushchev!’ writes a columnist for the New York Daily News. ‘The fellow’s all over the dials these days ... The pudgy Soviet dictator is smiling, laughing, scowling, shaking his forefinger or clenching his iron fist.’ Others have been less generous. A rival columnist in the New York Mirror describes him as ‘a rural dolt unwittingly proving a case against himself and his system’. The three main television networks show live coverage of his visit, repeating it every night in special thirty-minute bulletins. He is followed everywhere by 342 reporters and photographers, the largest travelling media group the world has ever known.
On the fifth day of his tour, Khrushchev arrives in Los Angeles, in time for lunch for four hundred people at Twentieth Century-Fox. There has been such demand for places that spouses have been banned unless they also happen to be stars. There are one or two couples – Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh – but they are few and far between.
Khrushchev enters a packed room. Everyone who is anyone is here: Edward G. Robinson, Judy Garland, Ginger Rogers, Kirk Douglas, Shelley Winters, Dean Martin, Debbie Reynolds, Nat ‘King’ Cole, Frank Sinatra, Maurice Chevalier, Zsa Zsa Gabor. Mrs Khrushchev is seated between Bob Hope and Gary Cooper. Conversation proves stilted.
‘Why don’t you move out here? You’ll like the climate,’ suggests Cooper.
‘No,’ replies Mrs Khrushchev. ‘Moscow is all right for me.’
Khrushchev is on the top table, next to Skouras. Lunch has its awkward moments. When Khrushchev is told that his spur-of-the-moment request to visit Disneyland has been turned down, owing to security worries, he sends the American Ambassador to the UN a furious note. ‘I understand you have cancelled the trip to Disneyland. I am most displeased.’
The after-lunch speeches are awkward. Khrushchev heckles Skouras during his speech of welcome, and further heckles Henry Cabot Lodge as he speaks of America’s affection for Russian culture. ‘Have you seen They Fought for Their Homeland?’ he yells. ‘It is based on a novel by Mikhail Sholokhov.’
‘No.’
‘Well, buy it. You should see it.’
In his own speech, Khrushchev grows very bullish. ‘I have a question for you. Which country has the best ballet? Yours?! You do not even have a permanent opera and ballet theatre! Your theatres thrive on what is given to them by rich people! In our country, it is the state that gives the money! And the best ballet is in the Soviet Union! It is our pride!’
After going on like this for forty-five minutes, he suddenly seems to remember something. ‘Just now, I was told that I could not go to Disneyland. I asked, “Why not? What is it? Do you have rocket-launching pads there?” Just listen to what I was told: “We” – which means the American authorities – “cannot guarantee your security there.” What is it? Is there an epidemic of cholera there? Have gangsters taken hold of the place?’ He punches the air, and starts to look angry. ‘That’s the situation I find myself in. For me, such a situation is inconceivable. I cannot find words to explain this to my people!’
At last he sits down. The Hollywood audience applauds. As he is being shown to the sound stage to watch the movie Can-Can being filmed,38 he recognises Marilyn Monroe and darts over to shake her hand. All wide-eyed, Marilyn delivers a line that Natalie Wood, a fluent Russian speaker, has coached her to say
. For once, she gets it right first time: ‘We the workers of Twentieth Century-Fox rejoice that you have come to visit our studio and country.’
Khrushchev seems to appreciate her effort. ‘He looked at me the way a man looks on a woman,’ she recalls.
‘You’re a very lovely young lady,’ he says, squeezing her hand.
‘My husband, Arthur Miller, sends you his greeting. There should be more of this kind of thing. It would help both our countries understand each other.’
Afterwards, Marilyn Monroe enthuses, ‘This is about the biggest day in the history of the movie business.’ But when she gets back home, she has changed her tune. ‘He was fat and ugly and had warts on his face and he growled,’ she tells Lena. ‘Who would want to be a Communist with a President like that?’39
But she is pretty sure that the Premier enjoyed their meeting. ‘I could tell Khrushchev liked me. He smiled more when he was introduced to me than for anybody else at the whole banquet. And everybody else was there. He squeezed my hand so long and so hard that I thought he would break it. I guess it was better than having to kiss him.’
NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV
LAMBASTS
GEORGE BROWN
Harcourt Room, Palace of Westminster, London
April 23rd 1956
A formal dinner is being held by the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party to honour Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union, and Marshal Nikolai Bulganin, his Premier, both of whom are in Britain at the invitation of the Conservative government.
