Certain commentators claimed there was no comparing the two grandes dames. While Lady Cunard’s witty intelligence sparked off truly interesting conversations, her rival, Lady Colefax (the ‘Coal Box’), was merely fixated with collecting famous names and didn’t know what to do with them when she got them.198 Harold Nicolson wrote of her formidable energy: ‘While London still slept round her, she would have written and addressed some sixty postcards and the telephone would start shrilling before the postman dared . . .’199
About ten years older than Gerald, Emerald Cunard had started off life in America as Maud Burke. After marrying into the Cunard shipping family, she changed her name to the more sparkling Emerald, and managed through intelligence, charm and ambition to create an immensely successful salon at her home in Grosvenor Square. Her great talent was to mix writers, musicians and painters with politicians, soldiers and members of the British and European aristocracy. Small-built, with birdy eyes and a small mouth, she had many lovers, including the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham and the writer George Moore, both of whose work she promoted and inspired. Harold Nicolson caustically described her in later years as ‘looking like a third-dynasty mummy painted pink by amateurs’, and many said she neglected her skinny, kohl-eyed daughter Nancy, who made a name for herself as a provocative anti-racist and civil-rights activist, taking up with a Harlem-based jazz musician.
Though the Ladies Cunard and Colefax were always pleased to catch the biggest social fish, the Coal Box was an easier target for teasing. Sibyl Colefax was an interior decorator, founding Colefax and Fowler and adopting the traditional Georgian country house as her style. ‘Dark, sharp-featured, beady-eyed’,200 she was an inveterate snob: ‘Like a bunch of glossy red cherries on a hard straw hat,’ said Virginia Woolf.201 She had less money and panache than her American rival, and she was a notorious social climber, who would go to great lengths to ‘acquire’ the famous and the rich. But as Beverley Nichols admitted, ‘a woman who is neither nobly born, nor very rich, nor very beautiful, does not create a brilliant salon unless she has herself some brilliant qualities.’202
Gerald quipped that when Sybil Colefax visited him in Rome and was given the room next to him, he got no sleep as ‘she never stopped climbing all night’.203 In a thank-you letter following a 1945 weekend at Faringdon, the playwright Terence Rattigan continued the theme, imagining Sibyl’s social activities continuing beyond death, something, he joked, he himself could soon be responsible for if her hand turned gangrenous from a cut she had sustained when he helped her through a barbed-wire fence on a walk.* ‘By the way,’ he asked Gerald, ‘who do you think will be at her first dinner party in Paradise? Would she begin with Shakespeare, Disraeli, Mrs Sidders and a member of The Divine Family, or start lower down and work her way up?’ Easy to caricature, the Coal Box provided inspiration for various writers of fiction, including Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley and Osbert Sitwell.204
Gerald is said to have once sent Sibyl a postcard asking her to a lunch to meet the P. of W., knowing only too well that the Coal Box would assume he meant the Prince of Wales. The entire country was gripped by the future king’s dalliance with the married Wallis Simpson. Imagine Sibyl Colefax’s disappointment when the guest turned out to be the Provost of Worcester (College, Oxford). It might have been apocryphal, but Lady Colefax trumped Gerald by inviting him to an evening at her King’s Road address where the newly crowned King Edward VIII turned up with Wallis Simpson. The fashionable couple’s preference for glitzy clubs was well known, so it was a triumph for the ambitious Coal Box. However, the evening nearly ended in disaster when the after-dinner entertainment was provided by Arthur Rubinstein, the world-famous Polish-American pianist, who performed several pieces by Chopin. The King became increasingly restive and got up, plainly intending to leave. In desperation, Sibyl begged Gerald to play something instead. Gerald refused, claiming that he had only come as a guest, at which the Coal Box threatened, ‘I’ll never ask you here again!’ Gerald’s teasingly nonchalant response was, ‘I rather think you will.’205 The impending calamity was narrowly averted when Noël Coward, who had just arrived, charmed the King with ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’ and ‘(Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage,) Mrs Worthington’. Rubinstein had meanwhile left with the Princesse de Polignac, both no doubt appalled by the musical taste of the English upper classes.
Gerald himself developed friendly relations with Wallis Simpson – another person whose well-known Fascist tendencies were not an impediment to adulation from vast numbers of people, though this was probably more a reflection of the gilded allure of ‘Majesty Divine’, as Lady Cunard called the King. (The diminutive hostess had snapped up her fellow American and was a great supporter of the woman she hoped would be the next queen.) Letters remain from Mrs Simpson to Gerald, written in a flowing, rather elegant hand. Though they are mostly apologising for cancelling engagements, they give a small taste of their intersecting lives:
Dear Lord Berners
I am so very sorry about last night – but I suddenly developed a pain around my heart. I’m afraid I’m very tired – the doctor has put me to bed for a week – no telephone calls. No visitors. It was disappointing to have my first party postponed. However I shall try again and hope to be fortunate enough to find you free to come. I did so enjoy my lunch with you both conversationally and gastronomically.
Yours Sincerely
Wallis Simpson
Gerald liked the pleasures of fashion and high society, but he was not seduced by their superficial glitziness. Sometimes he bridged the gap between his higher aspirations and his partiality to the social whirl by teasing, which took everything down a peg or two. Once, he was dining in the Ritz when a woman friend came in. She was well known to have had many lovers, who were getting younger and younger. On the day in question, she arrived with her eleven-year-old son, and Gerald said: ‘This time you’re going too far!’206
Sometimes, Gerald himself went too far. One prank involved placing an advertisement in a national newspaper: ‘Lord Berners wishes to dispose of two elephants and one small rhinoceros (latter housetrained). Would make delightful Christmas present. Apply R. Heber-Percy, Faringdon House, Berkshire.’ When a ‘special correspondent’ from the Daily Mirror rang up to enquire, R. Heber-Percy reported that ‘Harold Nicolson and Lady Colefax had snapped up the elephants.’ Several newspapers followed up the joke with articles, and both of Gerald’s old friends were mortified. Nicolson responded to the press with little of his usual jeu d’esprit: ‘It is just Lord Berners adding to the Christmas merriment. I have known him for twenty-five years but I do not feel friendly towards him today. I do not want an elephant, have never wanted one, and I have not bought one.’207 The endless teasing of ‘Harold Nickers’ (as one friend called him) and his wife, ‘Rye Vita’ (Vita Sackville-West), had worn rather thin.
No doubt Gerald revelled in the po-faced responses to his mischief. Although he was often gloomy and certainly valued time alone, he tried to make himself entertaining, if sometimes startling, to those around him. According to one friend, Gerald worked out a trick for keeping his train compartment to himself: wearing dark glasses, he would beckon to fellow passengers from within, with a sinister expression on his face, while holding a newspaper upside down.208 The story became legendary, and while it is unknown whether this approach was taken more than once, it became assumed by some that this was what Lord Berners always did if he was travelling by train.
Far worse than these more puerile japes, in fact positively sadistic, was the trick that Gerald played on some house guests to whom he had been speaking about suicide, well aware that they knew about his depression. Once his friends had gone to bed, he blew up a paper bag and popped it, making a bang that sounded disconcertingly like a gun. People rushed from their bedrooms to find Gerald sitting disingenuously downstairs, greeting their sudden appearance with an enquiring expression. Although Gerald was mocking his own vulnerability, it was a pitiless way to laugh at people who cared for
him. Cecil Beaton’s assessment that Gerald had ‘very little heart’ sometimes seemed to be true. His jokes could be a form of self-defence, but they could also cross over into calculated aggression.
Flashes of psychological brutality had been a feature since the young Gerald worked out how to make a plank swing up under the outside lavatory to spank his governess’s bottom. But it was sometimes more chilling than practical jokes. It was as though the empathy that made him such a loyal friend could occasionally evaporate. When he was a boy, Gerald claimed to have thrown his mother’s fat spaniel out of the window. This was not, he wrote, from ‘innate cruelty’, hatred for dogs or because this particular one resembled Elizabeth Barrett Browning with its ringlets. It was merely because he had wondered whether the dog would fly, just as it swam when thrown into water.209 In Gerald’s story Mr Pidger, an angry husband throws his wife’s beloved, if infuriating, little lapdog out of the train window after it unwittingly destroys a large inheritance. There is drama and humour in the scene – rather as there was when Gerald popped the paper bag – but the overwhelming atmosphere that remains is one of isolation (the couple divorces) and sadness.
Despite Gerald’s declared dedication to frivolity and social life, there was a lurking doubt that made him mock, tease and sometimes hurt the people he cared for. Evelyn Waugh viewed Gerald’s milieu as fundamentally flawed, marked by a sort of original sin. ‘The friends of Berners were so agreeable, so loyal, so charming, but they were aboriginally corrupt. Their tiny relative advantages of intelligence, taste, good looks, and good manners . . . were quite insignificant.’210 Gerald himself did not articulate this, but his pitiless satires on the sorts of people he surrounded himself with reflect a layer of doubt. Even the companionship of the Mad Boy, with his inspiringly bad behaviour and refusal to toe the line, could not get rid of the darkness that lay at Gerald’s core.
* The same age as Robert, and gay, Rattigan wrote Flare Path, based on his experiences as a rear-gunner in the RAF, and would become celebrated for The Winslow Boy and The Browning Version.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Follies and Fur-lined Wombs
OBERT CLAIMED THAT THE TOWER on the hill overlooking Faringdon was built for him by Gerald as a twenty-first birthday present. Although his flippant follow-up was usually ‘I’d have preferred a horse,’ there was a gleeful pride in showing off the gargantuan gift. And perhaps there was an idea of constructing a 100-foot folly as a phallic tribute to the Mad Boy around the time of Robert’s formal coming-of-age. It would have been not long after the two men met in 1932 – maybe some kind of ludicrous honeymoon fantasy? Various people are unconvinced. Some suggest that Lord Berners wanted to provide employment for local builders who were having a hard time during the Depression, or that it was celebrating George V’s jubilee. Others have seen it, more convincingly, as a flight of fancy – the last great folly to be built in England. By its very nature it should have no purpose, though celebrating forbidden love is hardly functional.
Predictably, the authorities were unhappy with the idea of this pointless eyesore that would poke up above the treetops on what was already known as Folly Hill, its name possibly deriving from the French ‘feuilles’, ‘leaves’. The place was a ‘well-known landmark of historical interest’ and the site of an old fort. There was a running argument with curmudgeonly neighbours, and the Rural District Council rejected Lord Berners’s plans in 1934: ‘High Words over Lord Berners’s Tower’, reported the Oxford Mail. This was followed by a Ministry of Health inquiry, and ultimately compromise, with an agreement to stop the tower going too high above the trees.
Gerald had chosen as architect Lord Gerald ‘Gerry’ Wellesley, the future 7th Duke of Wellington. He had been a colleague at the British Embassy in Rome during the First World War and the two men remained friends; in the 1920s, Gerry had returned to stay with Gerald in Rome along with their mutual friend Harold Nicolson, and the two men’s wives, Dorothy ‘Dottie’ Wellesley and Vita Sackville-West, had had an affair. It is unknown to what degree Vita played a part in the break-up of the Wellesleys’ marriage, but while her romantic interest quickly moved on, Dottie (a poet) remained devoted to Vita, waiting to collect her from the station in her Rolls after a trip abroad and feeding her champagne. It was Dottie Wellesley who first discovered the ruined Sissinghurst Castle that became the Nicolsons’ celebrated home.211 In the 1920s, Vita and Dottie had gone together to stay at Faringdon, something Harold Nicolson approved of at the time as it kept his wife away from Violet Trefusis, her great and scandalous love (who had previously been engaged to Gerry). All of this kept the gossips busy, what with the titles and the imposing, literary Englishwomen behaving more like the French.
Gerry Wellesley’s plans for the tower were somewhat plainer than the folly Nancy Mitford describes in The Pursuit of Love – a confection of marble and semi-precious stones with a gold angel on the summit that blew a trumpet every evening at the hour of Lord Merlin’s birth. In reality, it was built of red brick and was proceeding squarely upwards when apparently Gerald returned from a trip abroad and was appalled to find that the style was austere Classical rather than the Gothic he had desired. Known by some as ‘the Iron Duchess’,212 John Betjeman joked that Wellesley was the only modern architect with a style named after him – the ‘Gerry-built style’. Everyone’s honour was saved when Gerry conceded the final section to something fancier, adding a pinnacled, crown-like viewing platform at the 140-foot summit and, below that, an airy belvedere room with arched windows. Gerald hoped to have a grand piano up there, but presumably the narrow wooden staircase that snaked up the interior walls prevented that. A notice was put up stating: ‘MEMBERS OF THE PUBLIC COMMITTING SUICIDE FROM THIS TOWER DO SO AT THEIR OWN RISK.’ Both building and creator shared the characteristics of charm and gaiety tempered by undertones of gloom. Solidly impressive yet light and witty, traditional yet rebellious, generous-spirited yet private, Lord Berners and his Folly had much in common.
A POSTCARD DOCTORED BY GERALD
The Folly had its grand opening on Robert’s twenty-fourth birthday, 5 November 1935. Gerald was the maestro, laying on a marvellous party, with fireworks shooting like comets and exploding above the looming dark outline of the tower. The Express reported that Lord Berners’s guests were invited to ‘bring effigies of their enemies for the bonfire. No guest may bring more than six effigies.’ Gerald claimed to have always been more interested in settings rather than their inhabitants, but he liked to bring people to admire his creations, whether they were musical, artistic or architectural. A natural host and master of ceremonies, he himself opined that ‘humanity may be roughly divided into hosts and guests. A psychologist has explained the types as representing two kinds of will, the will to power and the will to subjection.’213 And although he was not obviously dominating, it was through giving and exhibiting that he established his influence. Yet Gerald could also identify with the vulnerable. His 1930 ballet, Luna Park, is set in a fairground, where the showman displays a one-legged ballerina, a man with six arms and a three-legged juggler. The performers all turn out to be fakes, and eventually escape their master as normal people.
It is possible that some sort of rift occurred between Gerald and Robert that November. On the last day of the month, the Mad Boy signed himself into the visitors’ book, giving his address as Hodnet Hall and writing in the ‘Profession’ column ‘unwanted’. And yet, only one week before this, Gerald had contacted his London solicitor to confirm that he wished to leave his entire estate to Robert in his will. According to a letter from Winter & Co., Gerald had already made Robert the heir to his freehold and leasehold properties. This would now be extended to cover absolutely everything apart from a few annuities and legacies to faithful servants. Gerald also added another new clause: ‘I desire that I shall be buried at the base of the Tower which I have lately caused to be erected on the site known as Faringdon Folly.’ The two men had only been together a few, tumultuous years, but Gerald was making it clear
to Robert that he was no plaything to be discarded, but the love of his life who would inherit as though he were his son or his spouse.
GERALD’S PAINTING OF THE FOLLY FOR THE SHELL GUIDE POSTER, COMMISSIONED BY JOHN BETJEMAN
The Folly became immensely popular; it was opened to the public on certain days and became a local landmark. When John Betjeman published his influential Shell Guides to the English countryside, he also commissioned some of Britain’s best artists and designers to produce posters. They included Rex Whistler, Eric Ravilious, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and Paul Nash. Lord Berners’s contribution was a rolling Berkshire idyll, with his Folly protruding proudly from the circular tree canopy on Folly Hill.
Salvador Dalí must have been thrilled by the Folly when he came to stay with his wife Gala in the summer of 1936. Gerald had met them in Paris with Winnie de Polignac and was intrigued enough by the rising surrealist star to invite him to Faringdon. Though Gerald might have sensed that, like him, Dalí was sexually anxious and even timid, he probably did not know about the increasingly famous artist’s obsession with towers. Intense insecurity about the size of his penis and in particular a terror of the ‘lion’s jaws’ of female genitalia, had led Dalí to take a compulsive refuge in masturbation – a recurring theme in his paintings. According to Dalí’s biographer, his onanistic fantasies were usually connected to towers, with a preference for church belfries that reminded him of his adolescent frenzies. It was often by fantasising the exact position of the three belfries of Sant Pere, his baptismal church, that he could achieve an orgasm.214 One can only imagine the effect on Dalí as he climbed to the top of Lord Berners’s impressive brick erection and, gazing out over four or five verdant English counties, pictured the extraordinary ejaculation of fireworks that had taken place there only months earlier.
The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me Page 14
