GERALD PAINTING MOTI, HELD BY PENELOPE BETJEMAN
It is fitting that Gerald’s ‘English period’ should produce more writing and painting than music. While some of his music is unconventional, harmonically modern and must have been challenging to many of his more conservative contemporaries, his books are light and funny and his paintings mostly peaceful landscapes, with the occasional portrait of a friend.144 He had started young, with his watercolour outings with his mother and producing sketchbooks full of competent and charming impressions of his early travels. In one of his many notebooks, Gerald described his youthful passion for watercolour painting that incorporated his great admiration for Turner:
PENELOPE BETJEMAN FEEDING TEA TO MOTI, WATCHED BY ROBERT, GERALD AND A FRIEND
I produced a sunset that outdid Turner’s most lurid efforts in almost every respect. I was very proud of my sunsets but my father, when I showed him one of them, rather dampened my pride by saying that, although he was sure it was very nicely painted, he was not sufficiently fond of either poached eggs or tomato soup for the picture to have any very strong appeal for him. This chilling appreciation of my work rather put me off sunsets and I turned my attention to other less flamboyant aspects of nature.
Gerald then describes how a ‘particular hue of green stirred my fancy in a strange and violent manner’. Finding out the name of the colour led to a very liberal use of oxide of chromium for a while, and Gerald playfully quotes Havelock Ellis’s theory ‘that a partiality for green is one of the things that denote unnatural tendencies so perhaps this is a dangerous admission; however this mania for green on my part was only a passing phase . . .’
In adulthood, Gerald took the lead from Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, the painter he most admired, and created gentle, mild-coloured oils that are pleasing but hardly unexpected or strange. According to Gerald himself, he liked ‘the directness and simplicity’ of Corot’s early paintings and found his style ‘the perfect method of dealing with landscape’. He was an avid collector of the nineteenth-century French artist, picking up many early pictures at bargain prices and later trying them out at home before buying them from London’s Reid & Lefevre Gallery. He eventually amassed the largest collection outside the Louvre, as well as acquiring paintings by Matisse, Sisley and Degas.145
Gerald’s friend Harold Acton saw his conventional approach to the visual arts as ‘the residue of his very conventional ancestry – the aunts and people who went sketching. A sort of compulsive thing.’146 It is interesting that Gerald didn’t feel the need to live up to his reputation as full of surprises, and was willing to study and follow in the well-trodden footsteps of the masters. It has been suggested that Gerald wasted his efforts by spreading his creativity so widely and not concentrating on music, where his real talent lay. Nevertheless, his paintings were good enough to be exhibited, and they sold. The mealier-mouthed cited his social standing as a contributing factor – ‘It just goes to show the advantages of being a Baron,’ sneered Evelyn Waugh – but the pictures continue to be admired and to sell today. Gerald had his first exhibition in 1931 at Reid & Lefevre. It included many Roman scenes, some Venetian views and some lush English landscapes. When Gerald had his second exhibition at the Lefevre, he received a positive review in The Times: ‘He appears to see instinctively and naturally with Corot’s eyes . . . And he can also see without the help of Corot, so that nearly all his landscapes are sedate and satisfactory in their organization and observed with quiet and unpretentious precision.’
FARINGDON HOUSE PAINTED BY GERALD
Although his landscapes are well executed and charming, it is often Gerald’s portraits that are the most memorable. He managed to get Robert to sit still long enough to paint several pictures of him – though he did work from photographs as well. Gerald also encouraged the Mad Boy to develop his own strengths and was delighted when Robert rode his horse, Passing Fancy, in the Grand National, sporting the Berners colours of red and green with a black cap. Deborah Mitford wrote to her sister Jessica: ‘Lord Berners had a horse in for the first time in his life and the Mad Boy said to us before the race “If it falls at the first fence Gerald will be broken hearted.” And it did! Wasn’t it awful. But luckily he is very short-sighted and he thinks it was the second fence so all is ok.’147
There is no evidence of any fall-out from this disappointment, but both Gerald and Robert were superstitious. According to Robert, if Gerald saw a white horse he would stamp, even if he was in the car. Then he might add, ‘You can’t talk now. When I’ve stamped 100 white horses I get my wish.’148 Gerald later admitted that this was useful for when there were bores in the car. However, he also considered it bad luck if you neglected to pick up a fallen white feather and ‘plant’ it upright in the ground.
Robert had been unhurt in the Grand National fall, but his equally daredevil older brother Alan was less fortunate. In 1934, he rode in a National Hunt steeplechase at Cheltenham, where he was thrown to the ground and killed after his horse hit a fence.* It was particularly hard for the Heber-Percy parents, as Gladys had recently forbidden him from returning to Hodnet Hall after a scandal involving a married woman. Robert was devastated. He never forgot that before the race he had driven under a railway bridge while a train was crossing – something he considered bad luck – and he connected it with witnessing his brother’s death. He retained a lifelong superstition and would stop the car rather than pass below a bridge if a train was coming.
* Alan’s neck was broken. The coroner’s verdict was accidental death.
CHAPTER SIX
Boys and Girls
T WAS NATURAL that a more youthful group of friends should accumulate after Gerald and Robert started living together, but this was not just because of Robert. Many entered the Faringdon orbit as friends of Gerald; their reactions to Robert varied from delight to antipathy. Among the most frequent visitors to Faringdon in the early 1930s were the dazzling Lady Mary Lygon (‘Maimie’) and her sister Lady Dorothy, known as ‘Coote’. Two years younger than the Mad Boy, Coote was the youngest daughter of Earl Beauchamp. She was plumper and plainer than her three beautiful sisters, her pudding face hidden behind thick glasses, but they were all known as ‘the Beauchamp Belles’. Coote was intelligent, kind and discreet and quickly became a close and lifelong friend to Robert and Gerald. Nobody would have been more surprised than the participants if destiny had been revealed – that many decades later, the elderly Coote and the Mad Boy would do something that might have been the young woman’s wildest dream. But we are jumping ahead of the story.
Coote and her six siblings had been brought up at Madresfield Court in Worcestershire, which had been home to Lygons for almost a thousand years. Gerald and Robert became familiar with the remarkable house that boasted a moat, twelfth-century oak doors and a Tudor great hall combined with Georgian fireplaces and Arts and Crafts murals. The Lygons also had a house in Belgrave Square and a castle in Kent to which they travelled by private train. The Lygon children’s existence had been one of extreme luxury combined with an extraordinary set of problems. Their father, known as ‘Boom’ for his voice, took snobbery and etiquette to their limits: guests would go into the dining room for meals in order of precedence (royals, then dukes, then earls and so on); he referred to his children by their titles (‘Lady Lettice’ or ‘Lady Dorothy’); champagne was decanted into jugs so as not to be ‘middle class’; and the numerous servants were dressed in gleaming livery of black tailcoats with silver buttons.149 Nevertheless, Lord Beauchamp was a member of the Liberal Party and was informal enough to invite his children to visit him during his bath time for chats (and sometimes a cocktail), and to take them swimming in the freezing Kentish seas. His wife was less popular. Her children found her strict, cold and mean – she dressed her daughters in embarrassingly shabby clothes – and she was ultimately behind the disaster that befell the family.
COOTE (LADY DOROTHY LYGON), ROBERT, PENELOPE BETJEMAN AND GERALD, READY TO RIDE
Though the L
ygon family was actively Catholic, with household prayers held twice a day in the family chapel, the morals at ‘Mad’, as the house was known, were notorious. Robert must have been amused if he was ever among the young male guests that Coote and her sisters advised to lock their bedroom doors at night in case their father had taken a fancy to them. And while Gerald was never known to act inappropriately with his employees, he probably enjoyed the evident fact that Lord Beauchamp took on his male servants according to their looks – footmen were dressed in the Beauchamp colours of maroon and cream and were observed to sport an impressive array of rings and bracelets.150 Harold Nicolson was once at dinner at Madresfield when a fellow guest asked him, ‘Did I hear Beauchamp whisper to the butler, “Je t’adore”? ‘Nonsense,’ replied Nicolson. ‘He said, “Shut the door.”’ Nicolson (the bisexual husband of the bisexual Vita Sackville-West) knew that the other guest had heard quite well and observed that the butler was most handsome.151 It was hardly a secret that Lord Beauchamp took his footmen and grooms as lovers, but when he went on a tour of Australia in 1930 and lived openly with his nineteen-year-old valet as his ‘joy-boy’, it became something of a scandal. Lady Beauchamp’s brother, the Duke of Westminster, hired private detectives to collect evidence, reported it to the King, and organised an attack.
One summer day in 1931, as Lord Beauchamp sat doing his embroidery in the Moat Garden, several cars drew up and a number of severe and important-looking men, including the Liberal Chief Whip Lord Stanmore, got out. They had been sent by ‘the highest authority in the land’ and announced that there was evidence of ‘criminal acts of indecency’ between Beauchamp and a number of men. He was told he must leave the country and never return, or expect to be arrested. Coote was only nineteen, at home with her twenty-three-year-old sister, Sibell, and a friend. Their mother had already moved out and their other siblings were either married, living in London or at school. Boom’s first reaction was that his only option was suicide, but after his rapid departure to a German spa, his children took it in turns to stay with him and make sure that he didn’t manage this.152 Only the oldest son and heir, William, Viscount Elmley, took his mother’s side; all the other children stayed loyal to their father, travelling with him and helping him bear the humiliation and isolation.
With their father ‘gone to have mud baths’ (as the euphemism had been for Wilde and others in their exile), the young Lygons had the run of Madresfield, inviting their own friends for weekends, and continuing to hunt and serve champagne in jugs. They now had to cope with the fact that they were simultaneously highly attractive, privileged people, and almost like orphans. To some extent, they became social outcasts because of their father – unwelcome in certain circles and tainted as prospective wives, even if Sibell had persuaded her lover, Lord Beaverbrook, not to let the story get into the press. Nevertheless, there were enough open-minded people and the Lygons’ Madresfield friends overlapped to a large extent with the Faringdon set. Gerald and Robert went to stay there, as did Michael Duff, the Mitfords, Cecil Beaton and many more. The Lygons were always welcome at Faringdon. Coote remembered this phase as being rather fun: ‘We were young and foolish and just enjoyed ourselves very much.’153
Gerald was loyal to the entire Lygon family, inviting the nomadic, exiled Lord Beauchamp to stay with him and Robert on his travels. Beauchamp tended to move between cities that were more tolerant to homosexuals – Sydney, San Francisco, Paris and Venice – often accompanied by one or more of his children. Supporting friends in trouble was a high priority for Gerald, who was fearless of public opinion. Evelyn Waugh joined them in the Holy City and Boom organised intensive sightseeing, including visits to St Peter’s, while Tito, Gerald’s factotum, cooked and kept house.
Evelyn Waugh had become a fixture at Madresfield after his first stay in 1932. Recently separated from his first wife, he had been at Oxford with Coote’s brother Hugh, who would later become the model for Lord Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited: handsome, boyish, drunken and homosexual. It is believed that Waugh had a fling with him during their student days. Though Coote loyally denied that the book had been modelled on her family, there were enough parallels for most people to draw a different conclusion. Coote certainly had overlapping qualities with Cordelia, the youngest daughter of Lord Marchmain (not to mention King Lear), and the dazzling Maimie, whom Waugh adored, was not unlike the unavailable and compelling Julia Flyte, with whom she shared a wild, uncontrolled streak and a tendency to depression. The Lygons represented all the romance of youth, grandeur and indulgence that Waugh had not experienced at home.
Waugh took on the role of naughty, flirtatious older brother to the sisters. He defaced young Coote’s diary of humdrum routines and spiced them up with orgies and incest. And he liked to play the game of ‘marrying off Coote’, so that every man they encountered would be inspected to see if he was suitable: ‘Would he do?’154 His letters to Coote (‘Pollen’ or ‘Poll’) and Maimie (‘Blondy’) are intimately bawdy, insulting Coote jokily as a ‘Filthy Bitch’, and using the fashionable expressions of the day to express how much his stays at Madresfield meant to him: ‘It would just be too lovely for any words to join in your Christmas cheer. Deevy [divine], in fact hot stuff. Oh, but you can’t really mean it . . .’155 He dedicated Black Mischief to Coote and Maimie in 1932. Waugh was also intrigued by ‘the wicked Lord Berners’s and later, when house-hunting, he wrote, ‘I wouldn’t mind the Berners Betjeman country.’
Faringdon became an ever more significant refuge for Coote and Maimie as disaster continued to dog their family. After the death of Lady Beauchamp, Hugh, who had become increasingly dissolute, went on a driving trip to Bavaria, fell on a pavement and fractured his skull. He died in 1936, aged thirty-one. Within two years, Boom would also die, attended in New York by Coote – now more of an orphan than ever. At the age of twenty-five, there were increasing indications that she might remain a lifelong spinster; Waugh’s old teasing about prospective grooms must have worn very thin. To make matters worse, she and Maimie felt unwelcome at their beloved Madresfield, now dominated by the new Earl, their formal older brother, and his frosty Danish wife. They didn’t return for fifty years.
MAIMIE AND ROBERT IN ITALY
The old album at Faringdon shows photographs of Maimie and the Mad Boy sprawled in skimpy bathing costumes on the beach at Ostia. They look like something out of an unsuitable Hollywood movie; in one, someone has taken a lipstick and written SHIT in large letters across Robert’s muscular back. It would be hard to believe that they were not physically involved, even if it was under Gerald’s watchful eye. Like his friend Derek Jackson, Robert liked to ‘ride under both rules’.156
Though it was Maimie whose sex appeal was tangible, it was Coote who stayed more often at Faringdon. Maimie was a beauty, but she drank too much, suffered from melancholy and insomnia and had a succession of Pekingese (including Grainger, whom Evelyn Waugh called ‘the lascivious beast’) that piddled on the Aubusson rugs, rather as Gerald’s fictional dog, Mr Pidger, would do in the eponymous story. No doubt Maimie and Gerald discussed diets and sleeping pills and fashionable cures. Coote, on the other hand, rode an elegant side-saddle out with Robert, was interested and informed about books and travel, and her independent mind made her a valued friend. She was there at the party given for the opening of the Faringdon Cinema, where Gerald made what might have been the only public speech in his life – and even that was only three sentences long.157 There was also an element of the ‘Jagger’ about her – an expression that Waugh and the Lygons used to describe a helpful, dependable, good-hearted friend who doesn’t make too many demands.158 Certainly Coote was tactful and steadfast; even her nickname emerged from her secretive ways that reminded her siblings of the hymn ‘God Moves in a Mysterious Way’, which they thought was by a Mrs Coote but in fact turned out to be by William Cowper. It was nothing to do with the feathered variety, and she could never have been said to be ‘queer as a coot’. However, as a daughter who had doted o
n her disgraced father, she was always unobtrusively sympathetic to the ways of men who preferred men.
MAIMIE WITH HER PEKINGESE GRAINGER AND ROBERT AT FARINGDON
HEN CECIL BEATON had first met Gerald in the mid-1920s, he didn’t take to him. ‘A ridiculous-looking man – like a silly tailor’s dummy’, he wrote.159 But he soon longed to be part of Gerald’s inner coterie. A contemporary and enemy since school days of Evelyn Waugh, he shared the novelist’s intelligence, ambition and sense of being an outsider. Both men began as middle-class boys who longed to be part of the smart set and Waugh later claimed Cecil’s diaries revealed him as a man ‘unashamedly on the make’.160 The latter never denied this – in fact he admitted to being a ‘scheming snob’ – and there were others who levelled remarkably similar accusations at Waugh. Cecil was close to Michael Duff and even without the manifest talents that endeared him to Gerald, the willowy, mannered young man was soon a member of the privileged set of creative types and party-goers who surrounded Gerald and Robert.
The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me Page 11
