There was nothing so close to the feeling of flying as being on a good Irish hunter when the hounds picked up a scent. All the senses engaged in perfect synchronicity and rhythm—your heart and your horse’s heart beating as one. Trusting your combined power to fly is an intimate connection.
PART TWO
LONDON
Ricki, Anjelica, Allegra, and Tony, 31 Maida Avenue, London, 1968
CHAPTER 9
John and Anjelica at the premiere of Freud, Berlin International Film Festival, 1963
I can’t remember being formally told that we would be leaving Ireland to go to school in England, but it was a time of few explanations. I didn’t ask questions, because I was afraid of the answers. Suddenly, in 1961, Mum, Nurse, Tony, and I were living in a white semi-detached house that my mother was renting on Addison Road in Kensington, walking distance to the French Lycée. My Irish tutors and the Sisters of Mercy had not prepared me for the expectations of my new school. I was miserable there. I found the curriculum impossible at the Lycée. All the classes were in French, with the exception of English literature and language. I was backward, the stupidest girl in class. I understood maybe a third of what was being said. Math in French brought on panic attacks. I sat in the back row next to Pierre, an unpopular dark-haired boy with restless eyes and a short attention span, who liked to tease me and pull my hair. None of the students spoke to me. On the playground, there was a concrete yard surrounded by chain-link fence and a nurse’s station—a little hut with a gas heater, where we were occasionally admitted to warm ourselves in the winter. Tony was going to a crammers for private tutoring to prepare for entrance exams to Westminster School.
Tony and I were familiar with London; we had traveled there over the years. We went to a dentist on Harley Street called Dr. Smith, who wanted me to stop sucking my thumb and told me that if I didn’t, my teeth would stick out like a witch’s. I had just celebrated my tenth birthday at Claridge’s; Gladys gave me a crate of mangoes, my favorite fruit.
At the end of my first year, my report card read “assez faible.” There’s no perfect translation. “Rather weak” doesn’t quite convey the French disdain. My teacher, Mme. Ferguson, recommended that I repeat 7ème. I would spend two dismally friendless years at the Lycée, save for the tolerance of Parviz, an Indian girl in my class whose father owned a modest hotel on the Cromwell Road. There were occasional visits from Joan Buck, three years ahead of me in the same school, who dropped in on the junior playground to check out how I was doing. Her interest was the only credibility I earned with the other children.
At Whitsun, the seventh Sunday after Easter, Tony and I returned to Ireland. I picked some white flowers that looked like bluebells and carefully folded them in damp cotton and newspaper for the flight home. All the way from St. Clerans to the Lycée to present to my new 7ème teacher, a pregnant, sour-faced woman who unwrapped the flowers, smelled them with distaste, declared, “Ça scent des onions!” and dumped them in the waste-basket. I remember feeling sorry for her unborn baby.
From that moment I contrived to come down with every childhood disease in the book. I was pushed over in the playground and hurt myself. The nurse refused to allow me to go home early. The following morning, when I complained that I was still in pain, Mum took me to see Dr. Apfel, a German doctor with a clubfoot, who said I had fractured several small vertebrae in my neck and put me in plaster from the collarbone to the ears, which was far from comfortable. But I couldn’t believe my luck. It kept me out of the Lycée.
• • •
Dad was making Freud in Munich. He wanted me to join him and Tony, who had traveled to Germany several weeks before. When I arrived, I was met by Gladys and Dad’s driver, and taken to a hotel, the Vier Jahreszeiten. When Dad opened the door, I could see a man seated behind him in the murky light. Dad said, “Anjelica, this is Monty Clift.” The man was weeping. As I approached, he held his arms wide and said, “Come here, darling, give me a hug.”
I was enveloped in a shuddering embrace. He smelled of alcohol. “Go to your room,” Dad said to me. “It’s late.” He indicated a door at the end of the suite. As I lay in bed, I felt compassion and concern for the beautiful bearded stranger.
Monty was having an ongoing struggle with drinking. He was showing up on set with a thermos of grapefruit juice and vodka, and by noon he would be staggering. Dad was angry and frustrated. Although he too liked to imbibe, he particularly disliked displays of sloppy behavior and would not tolerate it on set. To compound the issue, the leading lady, Susannah York, sympathized with Monty in thinking Dad a brute. I had heard from Betty that when Monty came to St. Clerans a few months before, he was discovered in the wee hours attacking the Limerick ham. He and Nan Sunderland had struck up a great friendship and were exchanging loving handwritten letters, which must have contributed to Dad’s exasperation.
I never much liked going on Dad’s films—his first assistant director, Tommy Shaw, was always shouting at Tony and me to be quiet, and there was nothing going on beyond the set. On Freud, the locations were doctors’ offices, consultation rooms, and medical institutions, shot mostly in the studio. Dad had engaged the services of several authorities to advise on authenticity and, in some cases, to practice real hypnosis. The English heart surgeon David Stafford Clark was a presence. He and Dad became good friends. Dad’s driver, Mike, befriended Tony and took him to the Bierfest, where hundreds of people seemed to stay thunderously drunk for days, wearing national costume (lederhosen and dirndls), drinking from ceramic jugs, eating footlong sausages and kraut, and singing boisterously together. I recognized the blond from the topless pictures in the box in Dad’s bathroom when she made an appearance on set as a mental patient.
• • •
There was a brief tenure in a flat belonging to Leslie Waddington, at Rosary Gardens, a grim row of Victorian redbrick in Kensington, where one day Tony threw Mindy’s beef marrowbone across the room at me, resulting in a black eye. I could see that the direct hit surprised him, but he showed no remorse. I was sad and longed to return to Ireland.
Soon Mum, Tony, Nurse, and I moved to Cheval Place, a mews house on a cobbled street in Knightsbridge, around the corner from the Bucks, on Montpelier Walk. A woman modeled ceramic pigs in a garage a few doors down from our house. Joan and I called her “The Piggy Lady.” She allowed us to hang out with her and play with clay.
I loved the Bucks and I was delighted to be living in such proximity to Joan. She and I would walk Mindy and Vladimir, her new black standard poodle, in Hyde Park. He was a big rambunctious puppy, and everyone agreed he was spawn straight from the devil. Joan also had a fast-multiplying family of white mice that she kept in the close quarters of her bedroom. Jules and Joyce invited me to go with them and Joan to see the premiere of Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence of Arabia; this was my first grand outing since The Boy and the Bridge, a command performance for Princess Margaret, which I’d gone to with my father some years before in London. Joan was upset that I was allowed to carry an evening bag, and barely tolerated my presence under the hot lights of the movie theater in Leicester Square. We were to go home early, because her parents were attending the opening-night gala afterward and said we were too young to go along.
When we opened the door at Montpelier Walk, the place was in shambles. Vladimir had committed total mayhem, and there we were—white mice, dog shit, and torn curtains, and us in our party frocks having to clean it all up.
• • •
I remember Mum saying that she thought I would like Lizzie Spender, the daughter of the poet Stephen Spender and his wife, Natasha Litvin. A year older than I, strong and tall, Lizzie had skin like peaches and cream, thick corn-yellow hair, blue eyes, and Slavic cheekbones, and she shared my love for horses and dogs. Like me, she had a poodle; hers was called Topsy.
We met one weekend when her parents took Mum and me to Bruern Abbey, the beautiful Oxfordshire estate of Michael Astor. Lizzie and I were in the pantry giving Mindy a clip, and it
was taking forever to trim her fur. Upstairs the adults were having a dinner party. Mum and Natasha came to tell us it was time for bed, but we resisted. Lizzie said, “How would you feel going to bed wearing half a mustache?” That was the night Mum met John Julius Norwich.
The next day, Lizzie and I went riding, and I broke my wrist, falling off a young stallion when he tried to climb a barbed-wire fence to get to a mare.
• • •
When I was eleven, Mum, Nurse, Tony, and I moved in to Lizzie Spender’s house on Loudoun Road in Swiss Cottage for almost a year. Lizzie’s parents had gone on an American tour. Tony occupied her brother Matthew’s old room, and Nurse was downstairs. Lizzie and I shared her bedroom on the top floor, and Mum was next door. Mum had finally found a house she liked on Maida Avenue in nearby Maida Vale and was in the process of buying it and reconfiguring the interior.
Through Stephen and Natasha, who was a concert pianist, I met the poet W. H. Auden, who took tea in his carpet slippers in their kitchen, and with them visited Henry Moore, whose garden in the countryside was populated with immense abstract bronze nudes. Another friend of theirs was the opera composer Gian Carlo Menotti, from Spoleto, who told me a story about Mum when she was first a starlet in Hollywood. They had met at a party, and because she seemed lonely, he befriended this beautiful girl from out of town, taking her frequently to lunches and dinners. One evening, while driving her home, he made a derogatory remark about Laurence Olivier. Mum asked him to stop the car. When he did, she insisted on getting out and walking the rest of the way to her apartment. She could not bear for her idol to be insulted.
It finally became evident to my mother that the Lycée and I were not a perfect match. I had the measles, and the faculty was threatening to hold me back for a third year in 7ème, when she got the picture. I began attending Town and Country, a school for “artistic” teenagers nestled on a leafy residential street in Swiss Cottage. It had a laid-back atmosphere compared with the Lycée, and was a much smaller school, with the added luxury of having classes conducted in English.
Lizzie, Tony, and I all got the chicken pox. Lizzie taught me the score of West Side Story, and together we fell in love with the Beatles. There was one to suit your every mood—John if you wanted smart, Paul for romance, George for spirituality, and Ringo for fun. Sometimes we’d go to Crufts dog show, and the Horse of the Year Show at Wembley Arena, where I would cheer for Ireland’s own Tommy Wade on his little piebald horse, Dundrum.
• • •
Beginning in 1963, when I was twelve, Joan and Lizzie came to St. Clerans three times a year, every year, over the school holidays. Joan visited for several months in the summer as well. Lizzie remembers being there one summer with no grown-ups around. Betts’s father was unwell and she’d gone to Kilcullen. I guess the Creaghs were on hiatus. For a couple of months, a shrewish woman called Sheila served us an unrelenting diet of white soda bread, raspberry jam, and macaroni and cheese. We heard rumors that Dad had gambled away the house. We put on a dog show that attracted the locals for miles around. We made our own ribbons for contests like “Best Fancy Dress” and “Most Intelligent Dog” and served cornflakes in melted chocolate at a concession stand.
The Pony Club met several times over the course of the summer, a motley group of some ten to fifteen children of ages varying between seven and thirteen. We learned the points of the horse, riding etiquette, and games on horseback—such as a version of “bobbing for apples,” where you had to grab one in your teeth from a trough of water without the use of your hands, remount your pony, and race to the finish line. We also played musical chairs on horseback. When the music stopped, you had to dismount and run to claim a seat. Tony distinguished himself once by knocking me out of the only remaining chair even though everyone had seen me get there first.
In the summers, Paddy Lynch drove us—Tony, Lizzie, Patsy, Mary, and me—in the horsebox to gymkhanas in towns within a forty-or-so-mile radius of St. Clerans, places with names like Gort, Ballinrobe, Claremorris. Sometimes the Pony Club came together for three-day events. Generally speaking, the ponies that liked to hunt were rarely happy in the formal-show jumping ring, but others enjoyed the attention, and the cross-country eventing was always fun. I loved winning rosettes on Victoria, and Lizzie would be beaming astride Angela Hemphill’s horse, the dun Patsy Fagan. Tarka and Leonie King boxed their ponies over from Oranmore, the Lynch children always attended, as well as the Scully boys, and from down the road in Craughwell, Diana Pickersgill, daughter of the master of foxhounds, on a sizable hunter. When not riding, Diana wore a fox’s brush pinned to her kilt at all times.
On the road, Paddy would sing at the wheel—Elvis and Jim Reeves songs. “Put your sweet lips a little closer to the phone,” which I always thought was “put your sweet lips a little closer to the foam,” with a vision in my mind of a lonely mouth lapping at an imaginary shoreline. Our favorite song was “Oh Wasn’t She Charming for Nineteen Years Old,” a song about a deceived husband who discovers that the young woman of his dreams is in fact a wretched crone of ninety:
She pulled off her left leg and I thought I would faint,
And down from her cheeks there rolled powder and paint.
She pulled out her eyeballs, on the carpet they rolled.
Ah, shur wasn’t she charming for nineteen years old!
We thought this was the best song ever and begged Paddy to sing it over and over. He would pull the car to the side of the road to buy fruit and ice cream, and we would choose from the three flavors in the block—chocolate, vanilla, or strawberry—and they would cut off a slice and put it between two wafers, like a sandwich.
Tony’s summer visitors included Tony Veiller’s son, Bidie, who first came when his father was writing the screenplay with Dad for The List of Adrian Messenger, and Tim, the son of Dad’s production designer, Stephen Grimes. We all liked Tim; he was wry and funny, and he provided a nice counterbalance to all that Joan, Lizzie, and I had going on in the way of cattiness toward Tony. Tony and I had found ourselves some allies, and he didn’t seem to need to bully me as much anymore. Bidie pinched Joan’s bottom under the Sarsfield Bridge. They were forever telling jokes to which I was not privy, so I invented a word, “Witchturla,” with which to torture Joan, and told her it had a really filthy meaning.
Often, as the long summer days turned to evening, we would think of amusing things to do to divert the adults, such as dressing up in white sheets and cantering our ponies up and down the field in front of the Big House as they were eating supper in the dining room. One night, Peter O’Toole jumped out of the ha-ha in his Lawrence of Arabia costume to surprise us.
I think it was Bidie who brought the 45 of Chubby Checker’s “Let’s Twist Again” into our possession. We played it every night on the gramophone in the Lynches’ kitchen, and Bidie taught us the Twist; we’d heard it was all the rage in America.
Lizzie and I went along with Mary and Patsy to see Paddy win the silver cup for the Championship Stone Wall event at Mountbellew, on Mum’s horse, Errigal. As the judges raised the height of the jump to well over six feet, we yelled with pride when Errigal cleared it with a foot to spare, beat the competition, and won the prize. Paddy said later the jump was twice the size of himself.
Later in London, when I told Mum about this triumph, she said, “If they aren’t careful, they’ll break that horse’s heart!” At once, all the pleasure in his performance dimmed. I had never considered that too much was being demanded of Errigal, and I felt ashamed. When I regaled Mum with stories and anecdotes about Betts and Zoë or Suzanne, she grew stiff at the mention of their names. I recognized the sharp glance, the clenching of the jaw that hardened her features as she went back to being the stubborn victim of Dad’s rejection. Ireland and London, like my parents, were pulling away, dividing loyalties, leaving one in a position of constant betrayal of the other side.
• • •
There was a measure of challenge to Dad’s morning inquisitions: How hig
h had we jumped our ponies? How was our French coming along? How many fish had Tony caught?
“The worst thing,” he opined one morning behind a curl of smoke from a brown cigarillo, “is to be a dilettante.”
“What’s a dilettante, Dad?” I asked in some trepidation. I was unfamiliar with the word. It sounded French.
“It means a dabbler, an amateur, someone who simply skims the surface of life without commitment,” he replied.
I hadn’t considered the dangers of the condition. From his lips, it sounded like a sin, worse than lying or stealing or cowardice.
Now and again, I sensed intrigue and mystery among the grown-ups, with their raised eyebrows and whispering in the halls of St. Clerans. Magouche Phillips, who had in a previous decade been married to the painter Arshile Gorky, caught kissing Dad’s co-producer behind the stone pillars on the front porch. Or Rin Kaga, a samurai warrior whom Dad had encountered on the making of The Barbarian and the Geisha, descending from the Napoleon Room in full kimono, with tabis on his feet. He spoke not a word of English but had shed a few joyous tears at breakfast when he was reunited with Dad. Dad explained that a samurai was allowed to cry only a few times in his entire life. For me, who until recently had cried an average of three to four times a day, this was an extraordinary idea to ponder.
Tony and I would climb the mahogany ladder in the study and take down art books from Dad’s extensive collection. Volumes ranging from the mysteries of the Greek, Egyptian, and Mayan cultures to his great loves, Rembrandt and Picasso. Dad knew a great deal about sculpture and painting and expected our tastes to reflect his own. The names of the painters he admired reverberated with import—El Greco, Rubens, Velázquez, Caravaggio, Vermeer.
A Story Lately Told: Coming of Age in Ireland, London, and New York Page 10
