The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me

by Sofka Zinovieff

  As soon as he is at the piano, the mask drops, and the revelation through music begins. It is curiously personal music, distinguished by a Rabelaisian humour. I shall never forget his playing to me a passage for horns which occurs in his ballet. There had been a theme which galloped and sparkled; up and down, in and out, like a scamper of wild horses over the plains. And then suddenly, in an unexpected key, there came a regular cackle of fifths – loud and broken, staggering and absurd. It was as good an example of a musical guffaw as I can imagine.231

  Frederick Ashton, too, admired Gerald for his professional approach to collaborating on the production. ‘He was very good at constructing a ballet. He could do a very good pas de deux in rather a Tchaikovsky/ Delibes way. And he understood about lengths . . . If I said, “That’s too long,” he would cut it. With Benjamin Britten, every note was sacred . . . Gerald was much more realistic.’232 With his lifelong dread of boredom, Gerald strongly believed that small, or at least short, was beautiful in music: ‘The symphonies of Schumann and Schubert, beautiful as they are, contain passages one feels might conveniently have been shorter, while in Bruckner and Mahler there are moments that even an audience of tortoises might find tedious.’233

  Although extremely different in character, Gerald and Lambert became close, and remained friends until they died within a year of one another. They shared a playfulness, though Constant was a far more chaotic personality, with a tendency to drink too much and lose control. Like Gerald, Constant had worked with Christopher Wood, who painted a memorable portrait of the young composer. Despite his youth (Constant was in his thirties), he was plagued by worsening health and was already running to fat, but he had immense charm and his charisma worked on both men and women. Lambert had his own wounds stemming from his family (his father, a portrait painter from Australia, was hardly doting), but his fresh, unabashed hedonism combined with originality and talent was appreciated by his older friends. With his Chelsea pub crawls, scruffy appearance and casual flings with girls who were much too young, he lived a version of the Swinging Sixties three decades earlier than the baby boomers. Constant had originally been picked up as a friend by the Sitwell siblings when he was still a teenager in the early 1920s, and he frequented Edith Sitwell’s literary gatherings and tea parties at her Bayswater flat. His talents were manifest. Osbert Sitwell described the seventeen-year-old as ‘a prodigy of intelligence and learning, and gifted with that particularly individual outlook and sense of humour which, surely, were born in him and are impossible to acquire’.234

  It was also Lambert’s lack of respect for boundaries that appealed to this older generation of eccentric artists who had been brought up in the confining Victorian era, and who had broken the chains through creativity and through their personalities. If Gerald had felt oppressed by the narrow horizons of his childhood, Edith Sitwell’s had wounded her far more deeply. Born only a few years after Gerald, she shared the isolating, emotionally desiccated environment of a wealthy, upper-class family and the misfortune of lacking good looks. She had grown to six foot by the time she reached puberty and was extremely thin with a crooked nose. Having been forced by her parents to wear vile and hated ‘Bastille of steel’ contraptions to correct the problems with her spine and legs, she ended up accentuating her own peculiarities.235 Later, she used unusual clothes and unconventional jewellery to create her own peculiar beauty. But like Gerald, with his masks, costumes and mockery, these external coverings provided a sort of emotional armour for someone already injured.

  Having become a Sitwell protégé, Lambert became a legendary speaker at performances of Façade, in which Edith Sitwell’s bizarre poems were recited to what was initially considered very daring music by William Walton – another enfant terrible. Walton was both friend and rival to Constant, and the two young composers shared Gerald’s appreciation of continental composition as well as his rejection of the patriotically English music of compatriots like Elgar. In Façade, Sitwell’s experimental, nonsensical words were declaimed through a megaphone from behind a screen. Constant proved to be ‘the perfect instrument of this performance, a speaker sans pareil of the verse, clear, rapid, incisive, tireless, and commanding vocally an extraordinary range of inflection, from menace and the threat of doom to the most debonair and jaunty inconsequence’.236

  By the time Constant became a frequent visitor to Faringdon, he was already at crisis point in his marriage. He had married the seventeen-year-old Florence Kaye (‘Mouse’) in 1931, following several years of admiring her extraordinarily lovely oriental features and her feline, adolescent figure. Mouse’s father had been a sailor from Java or Malaya, nobody was quite sure, and she was brought up in an orphanage.237 After their marriage, a son, Christopher (called ‘Kit’, after Christopher Wood), was born, but Constant proved as neglectful a parent as his own father. (Robert would later describe himself as Kit’s godfather and the ageing Mad Boy would become close to this younger mad boy as he went through his own creative yet self-destructive adventures.) Mouse worked as a model and tried to bridge the gap between herself and her husband by improving herself culturally. Constant merely retreated, taking to serious boozing and philandering, and absenting himself from domestic life.

  When in 1935 he came across the fifteen-year-old Margot Fonteyn at Sadler’s Wells he must have seemed to her old and disreputable – he was already becoming burnt-out, limping around with a stick, and he had many physical problems (including diabetes) that remained undiagnosed until his premature death. But Constant fell in love, and eventually Fonteyn in turn fell for this magnetic and fascinating man. The details of their relationship remain hazy; neither ever talked about their involvement, though it lasted for many years. They often stayed at Faringdon, where irregular couples were more the norm than the exception, and nobody was going to make a fuss.

  Robert Helpmann, one of the star dancers in A Wedding Bouquet, described a visit to Faringdon when another of the more unusual and interesting couples to visit was there: Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Helpmann recalled entering the drawing room at teatime and having to wait while a horse was fed buttered scones before being introduced to his fellow guests. Stein was dressed in tweeds and a deerstalker hat, while Toklas ‘was equipped with a growth between her eyebrows that suggested the unicorn but did her best to conceal the fact so that she resembled an old English sheepdog instead.’238 The two women had been living together for decades in Paris, where Stein had discovered and supported artists including Picasso, Matisse and Cézanne. Her art collection was astonishing and the couple hosted a Saturday evening salon at rue de Fleurus – with Toklas’s petits fours and drinks – for painters and writers such as Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and where Picasso might drop by. Cecil Beaton described the beauty and solidity of their apartment: ‘The Misses Stein and Toklas live like Biblical royalty: simply, yet in complete luxury.’239 Stein’s admiring protégé Francis Rose wrote that such was her ‘majestic presence that everyone rose at her entrance as though to greet a princely Cardinal instead of America’s great spinster writer’.240

  Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas had recently brought her the fame and commercial success both she and Toklas believed she deserved as ‘a genius’. Gerald was not necessarily convinced that Stein’s experimental writing was as good as she and Toklas made out; Diana Mosley claimed he thought her writings were ‘real rubbish’. But he was intrigued. ‘A Rose is a Rose is a Rose’ was playful and provocative in a way he could relate to, though Gerald might have chuckled at Hemingway’s addition to his copy (in a magic circle similar to that on the cover): ‘A Bitch is a Bitch is a Bitch’.241 Gerald was impressed by Stein’s art collection and evidently liked her playful freedom with words – enough at least to want to use her play for his ballet. Doubtless it helped that she was highly fashionable among the avant-garde. And at a personal level, Stein and Toklas were extremely intriguing: two Jewish-American lesbians who had lived together openly since before the First World War and who were a ma
gnetic force for the best emerging art in Europe. While there was gossip about the pair once they’d left, they were honoured guests at Faringdon.

  Gerald went to stay with the couple at their house in Bilignin, near Lyons, and liked it so much he returned several times. Toklas picked wild strawberries at dawn for breakfast and Basket, the large poodle, ran wild in the fields.242 Stein got up late and in the afternoons would take Gerald out for wild drives in the Ford along the dusty country roads. Unlike other women in Gerald’s circle, Stein cropped her hair like a man and experimented with gender issues in a way that was far ahead of her time – something that probably intrigued him. She was also warm, gregarious and very good company, and his letters to her are full of genuine affection and the signs of mutual friendship: ‘Thank you so much for sending the corn seeds. My first lot is coming up well. Also the hibiscus . . . Give my love to Alice and lots for yourself.’ Gerald even honoured the American with a parody of her writing in his poem ‘Portrait of a Society Hostess’, probably based on Lady Colefax.

  Give a canary champagne and it spins. Chandelier drops glitter and drops glitter and are conversation. Bohemian glass is cracked in Mayfair. Mayfair-weather friends come and go come and go come and go. The house is always full full full full.

  Are you there? Are you there? There! Are you not all there? Many are not quite all there but royalty are there and lots and lots and lots. Glitter is more than kind hearts and coronets are more than comfort. She praises and embarrasses she praises and embarrasses she confuses cabinet ministers. Some will not go.

  What with one thing and another. What with another and one thing. What with what with what what wit and what not.

  Squashed bosh is her favourite meringue.

  There are various photographs documenting the stay of Stein and Toklas at Faringdon, but none so revealing as the one picturing them with their hosts and several other guests posing on the front porch one cold February day. Gerald and Stein sit perched opposite one another on the curved, low walls that flank the steps: solid and confident in their hats and coats, each has the small hint of a smile. They are the oldest in the company (Stein was almost a decade older than Gerald), and they emanate the power of two creative forces, politically conservative but radical in their art; people who know what they are searching for. Stein brings to mind the comments that Toklas made when they met in 1907: her ‘beautifully modelled and unique head’ like a Roman emperor’s, and her voice, ‘deep, full, velvety like a great contralto’s’.243 Toklas claimed to have heard bells in her head at this meeting; a sure sign that she was in the presence of genius. Toklas herself is sitting tiny and hunched on the steps at Stein’s feet. She is frowning, clutching her dark coat around her as if she is not happy to be there. But surely, as the woman who was not only lover but ambitious manager for her partner, she must have been pleased that Stein’s name was now associated with Lord Berners, Sadler’s Wells, and some of the most exciting, up-and-coming names in English dance? Stein described meeting Frederick Ashton, the choreographer for A Wedding Bouquet, who was also friends with Gerald. ‘I am always asking Alice Toklas do you think he is a genius, she does have something happen when he is a genius so I always ask her is he a genius, being one it is natural that I should think a great deal about that thing in any other one. He and I talked a great deal on meeting, and I think he is one . . .’244

  Toklas took care of all the practical aspects of Stein’s, or ‘Lovey’s’ life, organising where she should go and whom she should meet. Toklas looks mousey, with her pale, pointy face and her dark moustache, though Stein called her ‘Pussy’. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to think that Pussy was dominated by Lovey; if anything, Toklas knew how to wield the upper hand. Hemingway described a visit to rue de Fleurus shortly before his friendship with Stein evaporated. He was told to wait by the maidservant, and overheard someone speaking to Miss Stein ‘as I had never heard one person speak to another; never, anywhere, ever. Then Miss Stein’s voice came pleading and begging, saying, “Don’t, pussy. Don’t. Don’t, please don’t. I’ll do anything, pussy, but please don’t do it. Please don’t. Please don’t, pussy.”’245

  Sitting next to Toklas on the steps is the Mad Boy, who doesn’t look very mad at all. Nattily clad in jodhpurs, riding jacket and tie, with hair as brilliantined as Valentino’s, he has a shotgun across his knee and a dead rabbit at his feet. He has evidently been up since dawn, while some of the other guests clutch a glass that is presumably the first cocktail of the morning. Robert was increasingly in charge of estate matters, and he looks the part. Gerald was busy with his creative concerns and uninterested in this aspect of Faringdon, which Robert approached with mixed success. It was at around this time that he came up with a disastrous scheme to save money by sacking all the garden and woods staff and then rehiring them at a reduced wage. At a time when the rural working class were often extremely badly paid, this was deeply distressing, and several of the men didn’t want to return. One long-standing estate employee remarked, ‘Robert was a queer man. One minute he was as good as gold, and he’d give you anything. And then he’d bury you in the earth.’246

  GERALD AND GERTRUDE STEIN SIT OPPOSITE ONE ANOTHER, WHILE ROBERT SITS NEXT TO ALICE B. TOKLAS ON THE STEPS. OTHER GUESTS INCLUDE LADY DIANE ABDY (FRONT WITH GLASS) AND HER HUSBAND, SIR ROBERT ABDY, BEHIND HER.

  Toklas claimed that frequently, when Stein met with various geniuses of the art world, she would end up in a room with the wives. She considered writing Wives of Geniuses I Have Sat With. Though Stein and Gerald clearly look like the husbands and geniuses in the group photograph, it is hard to imagine Robert as the ‘wife’ having cosy chats with Toklas. But perhaps he talked with this notoriously grumpy, if highly intelligent woman about food; the hunter and the cook bonding over game. The legendary Alice B. Toklas Cook Book (published in 1954) has recipes for jugged hare, and her ‘Rabbit with Dumpling’ has a touch of Stein’s spirited prose style: ‘Cut your Belgian hare!! In pieces. Roll in flour and brown in an iron pot in which you have slightly cooked 4 or 5 slices of bacon . . .’ The reader is warned that ‘when cooked the meat should have the consistency of chicken, and not slimy restaurant rabbit.’ There is also a recipe attributed to ‘The Late Lord Berners’s for ‘Roast chicken in cream’ – using plenty of Gerald’s favourite ingredient plus sherry and lemon juice – and ‘Filet de Sole à la Ritz’, poached sole served cold, in a sauce of whipped cream and grated horseradish – an exquisite summer dish that was passed on through the decades at Faringdon.247

  IGOR STRAVINSKY WITH GERALD AT FARINGDON

  In 1937, the visitors’ book at Faringdon shows a remarkably busy year: in addition to everyone connected to A Wedding Bouquet, Gerald and Robert welcomed Igor Stravinsky and his mistress Vera Sudeikina, Malcolm Sargent, Osbert Sitwell, Emerald Cunard, Winnie de Polignac and Robert’s mother, Gladys. Among the younger guests were Lygon sisters, Mitford sisters, Kathleen Meyrick – Robert’s old flame – and Cyril Connolly. And there are two visits recorded by someone who has not been seen before – a twenty-one-year-old woman with dark hair, captivating eyes and marvellous clothes. Her signature is tidy and plain, though an angled dash underscores the surname. She doesn’t fill in her profession or nationality with jokes like many others. On her second visit in November, she puts her address as Sloane House, Church St, SW3 – a Georgian mansion in Chelsea. Her name is Jennifer Fry.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Orphan on the Top Floor

  HEN JENNIFER FRY first visited Faringdon, it was as a friend of Robert’s. He was five years older than her, but their sets overlapped and their backgrounds were not dissimilar. The Mad Boy was an ideal playmate – ‘fast’, good-looking, roguish. They were both without any fixed employment or education and like most of their friends spent an inordinate amount of time and effort on enjoying themselves. Jennifer would surely have got on with Gerald too. Like him, she could be shy – an insecure only child from a wealthy family, she too had been both over-protected and disregarde
d. She might have appeared a giddy nightclub butterfly, but she was also a thoughtful, widely read person who loved the arts; she would have been interested in Lord Berners the composer, writer and painter. And he would have liked her spirit.

  Jennifer was born in the middle of the First World War, in 1916, exactly nine months after her parents’ wedding. Her mother, Alathea Gardner, had been a lovely bride with the preferred looks of the age: only twenty-one, she was ethereally pale, with long, elegant hands, auburn hair and dauntingly large, melancholy blue eyes. Both of Alathea’s parents had unusual genealogies. Her father, Herbert Gardner, was the illegitimate son of Lord Gardner and the actress Julia Fortescue. He was thus far from being a conventional product of the English upper classes, despite his parents ultimately marrying. He became a Liberal MP and was later made a baron in his own right, as Lord Burghclere. Alathea’s mother was Lady Winifred Herbert, daughter of the 4th Earl of Carnarvon. It was Lady Winifred’s brother, the 5th Earl, who funded many of Howard Carter’s Egyptian expeditions, and who was there to unearth the astonishing tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922. Jennifer was six when she learned about the world-famous discovery by her great-uncle; it must have been tremendously exciting for a child. Sadly, it was only a year later that Lord Carnarvon died – from the ‘Curse of Tutankhamun’ (as the popular press declared) or an infected mosquito bite, as his nieces, including Alathea, believed.

  Alathea and her three sisters were brought up to be cultured, literary women, learning languages and reading politics and history as well as all the regular lessons. Yet they were only too aware of the disaster of their gender – the family’s wealth was tied up with the Burghclere title and the lack of a son meant that both the barony and the money would disappear. (When an uncle famed for magic tricks came to visit, the young Gardner girls would beg him to turn them into boys.) Given these family tensions, it was a relief to Alathea’s parents when their second daughter agreed to marry twenty-seven-year-old Geoffrey Fry.