At the door, Zoë lifted the little boy and told him to kiss his brother, Tony. Tony gave him a kiss. Then came my turn; I looked at him with unconcealed hatred, and at under two years old, my baby brother, Danny, lifted his little hand and made a bear paw with it as he growled right back at me.
• • •
When Tony and I got back to London from Rome, something in the air had changed. Mum was sad. In the afternoon, I’d come home from school and find her crying in her room. On her bedside table was a bottle of Perrier and a glass, the jade horse’s head, a notepad, a fountain pen, a stack of books—Memories, Dreams, Reflections by Carl Jung, and always something by Colette; she had given me Chéri to read when I turned thirteen. Mum had been advised by her therapist to write down all her dreams. I didn’t really want to know why she was crying, or dare to ask. I knew I would not like the answer.
The school year was coming to an end when Mum said, “Anjelica, can’t you make things easier on me? Can’t you see I’m almost seven months pregnant?” I remember walking down by the canal with Lizzie, asking, “How? How could Mum be pregnant?”
There is a story that when she was in her third month and already showing an expanding waistline, Mum took a plane to Shannon and arrived at St. Clerans in time for afternoon drinks with the local priest. “I haven’t seen my wife in a year,” said Dad as she entered the room, to which she responded by flinging off her cloak in front of the assorted guests. I heard later that she and Dad had a terrible fight.
Divorces weren’t nearly as acceptable then and were still practically unheard of in Ireland. Both my parents strayed during the marriage, and I think there was a sense, certainly on my father’s part, that he was simply doing what came naturally to him. Probably with my mother, there was a bit of You want to do that? I can do that, too. Hoping, in a way, to get his attention. When she was in her late twenties she had affairs with quite a few men. There was a rumor about a brother of Aly Kahn, as well as an adventurer and scholar of Greek history, Paddy Leigh Fermor, who at eighteen walked the length of Europe from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople; Paddy was, I think, an important love in her life. I heard about her intervening between Paddy and another man at a party that turned into a big Irish brawl, both men drunk and about ready to kill each other, and Mum, in a white Dior gown, covered in blood. Later, Paddy worked on the screenplay for The Roots of Heaven with Dad.
I couldn’t acknowledge the fact that my mother had lovers. Because to me, how could you even compare them with Dad? My father was a different cut. A swashbuckler, great-hearted and larger than life. He was intelligent and ironic, with a warm voice like whiskey and tobacco. I believe that without Dad to give shape to her existence, my mother didn’t really know what to do or who to be. She must have been trepidatious, fearful of the future. Her father was rigorous, his demands on her so exacting that I think Mum had cultivated an aversion to failure. It translated easily into her relationship with Dad, who was considerably older, dominant, proud, and egotistical.
One imagines that life won’t ever offer a decent alternative to the kind of high tension, expectations, and results of being with somebody like that. My father had a way of being dismissive that was quite devastating, of belittling people or ideas that he didn’t feel were really up to par. I’m sure Mum was seeking something to overcome a feeling of inadequacy.
John Julius was pleasant to me, but I felt that he was cold and intellectual, and I was upset by the idea that this was the new love of my mother’s life. I didn’t know that he already had a wife, Anne. I desperately wanted my parents to be together. Evidently, now, this would never happen. I had asked Mum, “How can you call other men ‘darling’ but never Dad?” And she told me that sometimes, when people grew up, they also grew apart. The details of our parents’ separation went largely unexplained, but Tony and I knew how loaded it was. It scared and worried me. Although Tony and I didn’t talk about it, I knew he missed the old Dad, the one who spoiled us as children.
When John Julius didn’t get a divorce and marry Mum, and it became obvious that she was going to have his baby by herself, I think her heart was broken. And as I understand it now, my mother wasn’t John Julius’s only port of call.
Mum told me that when she was pregnant with Allegra, John Julius’s mother, Lady Diana Cooper, had come by the house with a bunch of violets. Mum was ambivalent about the gesture, feeling there was something condescending about it, particularly in Diana’s choice of flowers, like a bouquet a grand person might present to a poor relation, she said.
On August 26, Allegra was born. And on the third day home from the hospital, when I looked at this perfect infant with her rosebud mouth, asleep in her crib in Mum’s room, I leaned down and kissed her and instantly fell in love. Allegra as a baby had a round head, wispy pale blond hair, big slate-blue eyes, and a grave, slightly imperious countenance that reminded us of an infant Queen Victoria. She called me “Kika.” Mum used to love to dress her in antique linens and lace, and after her bath time Nurse would bring her downstairs in full regalia, smelling of shampoo and baby powder, before putting her to bed.
• • •
Dad stood alone. He was a lonesome pine. I think there were places that my father wouldn’t go with anyone. He had demons. He could be charming and captivating, seductive and charismatic, but if he had it in for you, watch out. His eyes were brown and inquisitive, like monkeys’ eyes, with a keen intelligence. But when he got angry, they would turn red. He was disgusted by ignorance, prejudice, and stupidity, but sometimes I think that Dad was just plain angry, and vodka fueled that rage.
The only book my father read to Tony and me was Old Yeller, a heartbreaker that I doubt I ever recovered from. One of his favorite conversational gambits was to question our knowledge of rarefied information over dinner, such as “Where does lightning come from? Below or above?” I always felt put on the spot, Dad’s eyebrow raised for an extended moment, in which I made the mistake of groping for the answer. Or he would lay out playful—if controversial—theories, such as that everyone in the world should be allowed to kill three others over a lifetime.
Dad was apt to declare preordained decisions about what would be best for our futures. That Tony should enter the minefield of Irish politics, even though he had hitherto shown no particular interest in that arena, rather preferring the more solitary and aesthetic pursuits of falconry and music. Or that, now, at the age of fourteen, I was to have my life in Ireland and London supplanted by art studies at L’Ecole du Louvre, in Paris. It had not occurred to him that this idea was no less than horrifying to me in light of the miseries I had suffered at the Lycée.
When he summoned me to his room for that particular discussion, I reacted so badly to his proposal that he questioned my sanity. Whenever Dad put me on the spot, I became at first quiet and then defensive, and then, more often than not, I left his room in tears. Lately, the only way to please Dad, I felt, would be to sacrifice my own choices in life to make him happy. Dad criticized the way I dressed, my use of makeup, the fact that I now smoked.
On the night before Christmas Eve 1965, a few of us were dancing in the drawing room. The actor Patrick O’Neal, who was preparing to do The Kremlin Letter with Dad, was visiting with his wife, Cynthia. I guess he said something to Dad about my moving provocatively, because in the morning I got an ominous phone call from Betty, saying, “Come up to the Big House. Your father wants to see you in his room.”
I could not imagine what I had done, but I was anxious. I walked up the driveway with dread in my heart. When I entered his room, Dad told me to sit down. “I have it on good authority that you were doing the bumps last night,” he said.
I had never before heard the expression. “What are the bumps?” I asked.
“You know damn well what the bumps are,” he said, turning aside.
I asked again, “What are the bumps, Dad?” By now it was starting to dawn on me that moving my hips in a certain way—that was the bumps. I began to protest. He
told me to be quiet. I started to cry. “You don’t love me,” I said defiantly. Suddenly, his arm swung back and his hand hit me hard in the face, backward and forward; the force of it was like walking into a wall.
As soon as my vision cleared, I ran out of his room as fast as I could, charged downstairs and across the gravel yard, and flew down the driveway to the Little House, choking on my tears. I was crying so hard I couldn’t breathe. I was hysterical. Tony found me and wet some towels with cold water and put them on my head and neck to try to calm me down. Tony could be a bully, but if anyone else attempted to hurt or take advantage of me, he always came to my rescue and valiantly tried to comfort me.
The “bumps” problem was an anomaly. Generally, Dad loved that I was athletic and that I could stand on my head or that I could bend my spine and rock my entire body like a boat. He thought that was just wonderful, though obviously not to the point of my being seductive.
After that episode, I avoided Dad assiduously. On Christmas Day we were all clustered around the tree. We had not spoken. I’d bought him a beautiful present, a Claddagh chieftain’s brooch from a trip to Dublin, an old one that I’d found at Louis Wine’s antique shop. I think he was ashamed. He said “Thank you” sheepishly, and bent to kiss me. I didn’t want to be near him, I didn’t want to be around him. He scared me.
Tony was kind when Dad got tough with me. And Dad was certainly no easier on Tony. Tony got sent from the dining table with alarming regularity, for small infringements that became magnified by defensiveness on his part. The more guarded and stoic Tony became, the more punishing Dad could be. I was targeted at lunch for declaring that I did not like the artist Van Gogh. Dad said, “Name me five Van Gogh paintings and you can stay; otherwise, leave the room.”
Dad had given Tony some Native American deerskin jackets, which Tony had adopted as his falconry uniform. All day long, throughout the holidays, he was carrying his hawks around, his chest covered in blood, scat, feathers, and guts. When he appeared in this condition for lunch in Dad’s absence, no one at the Big House had much to say. Tony did as he pleased. But when he made the mistake of doing so in front of Dad, he was severely humiliated in front of everyone. There was a pattern developing around these infractions. The offenses were repeated and they occurred with greater frequency. The accompanying words of admonishment from Dad rose in volume according to his frustration, and before you knew it, it felt like war was being waged between them in the dining room.
• • •
In the summer of 1965, I went to Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat with Joan and her parents for three weeks. There was a mistral and it rained most of the time, which in France, we had heard, meant that if you committed a crime you could get off with a light sentence. The actor Jack Hawkins was living next door to the Bucks, and I had a crush on his youngest son, Andy. We listened to popular French songs like “Quand un bateau passe,” by Claude François, and “Tous les garçons,” by Françoise Hardy. In the mornings, we’d dive off the end of the dock into deep blue water. The Mediterranean was not so polluted in those days; all the seafood came from there and not from Chile.
I longed to fall in love and I was just starting to understand my power. When Joan gave a party, I spent most of the evening speaking in French to a poetic-looking blond boy much older than I. He invited me to a dinner at his villa later that week, but he wasn’t around when Joan and I arrived, and we didn’t know anyone there, so we left.
When I returned to England, Emily told me that she had been going out with Mayo Elstob, Joshua’s friend from Town and Country. I thought this would make for a good opportunity to meet up with Joshua again, as we had lost contact. Emily came over on a Saturday night with both of them, and we went upstairs to my room. I turned off the lights and lit the candles in the candelabra.
It was very beautiful in the dusk, so we decided to go up to Hampstead Heath and smoke banana peel instead; someone said it might get you high. It didn’t work, and we spent the evening wandering back down from the heath to Emily’s parents’ house on the Bayswater Road.
I called Mum and asked if I could stay over at Emily’s. She said yes. That night, Joshua came into my bed, but I was suddenly turned off by his reciprocity. He was urgent and confessional and told me that he had cared for me even while I was pining for him at Town and Country.
In the early-morning hours, we got up and went for a sad walk in Hyde Park. Joshua told me he had stomach cramps. We said goodbye. I never saw him again.
• • •
Mum had taken me to Venice for the first time in 1961 to see an exhibition of the fifteenth-century painter Vittore Carpaccio at the Doge’s Palace. I fell in love with the city as soon as I laid eyes on it—a soft, shimmering view across the Grand Canal to the Piazza San Marco, with its two columns topped by gold-winged lions, rising like a miracle out of the sea. The pictures were fantastic; I loved a portrait of Saint Ursula, asleep, with her cheek cupped in the palm of her hand. Mum loved the delicate little flowers and shrubs that grew in the crevices of the parterre in the paintings. I could feel her gearing up to re-create this visual in the garden at Maida Avenue.
The next time we went to Venice, she invited Emily to come with us. Our rooms were on the Grand Canal, at the Gritti Palace, and when we drew the curtains and flung open the shutters, which had been closed for the night, the early sun streamed in and the reflection of the water below danced on the ceiling of our bright red room. The gondoliers sang songs like Grandpa used to sing, and the prows of their boats, slicing through the silvery stillness of the lagoon, looked like seabirds arching their necks.
Mum had met a woman in Venice on a previous trip, someone she found very fascinating, an artist whose name was Manina. On our way to her apartment, we walked across several bridges and waterfront pavements to a chorus of wolf whistles. The Italian men loved Emily and were always trying to pinch her bottom. She was very sanguine about this—in those days one didn’t think of it as sexual harassment but rather as just something that happened to you, especially if you were young or pretty or voluptuous. On the contrary, one was just a little flattered.
Turning the corner of a busy pedestrian thoroughfare onto a relatively quiet street, Mum paused for a moment and said, “Look! There she is! She always knows when I’m coming, even when I haven’t called first—that’s why she’s waiting downstairs!”
Manina was small and delicately made, with huge dark eyes lined in kohl and a direct gaze. She took us upstairs to her dim apartment and gave us lemonade. Her drawings of great glowering birds adorned with colored glass hung on the walls. She was creating amulets by melting lead into liquid in a saucepan and decorating the molten metal with glass beads from Murano. Then Manina introduced us all to the I Ching, and Mum, Emily, and I threw our coins.
Across the canal, in another deserted palazzo, lived a Cuban friend of Mum’s, an artist called Domingo de la Cueva. He showed us some of his work, mostly jewelry—breastplates, armbands, and circlets. The most impressive piece was a girdle of fire opals, rough rubies, diamonds, shells, and semiprecious stones, all set in rose gold. He told us he was incapable of leaving Venice, even for a holiday. “I feel I will die without her,” he said. “Every time I try to leave, I get sick. I feel as if I am never going to see my city again.”
We went for Bellinis at Harry’s Bar and had lunch on the nearby island of Torcello. We went across the bay to Murano to see glass being blown; on the beach outside the factory, the sand was strewn with colored pebbles. I collected some for future amulets of my own.
A few days later, we went to visit Grandpa, who was vacationing at his birthplace on Lago Maggiore. As we drove across the Veneto to the lakes, Mum taught Emily and me the “Sorrow” song. Emily and I loved to harmonize together, although she had a much better voice than I.
O she was a lass from the low country,
And he was a Lord of high degree,
And she loved his Lordship so tenderly.
O Sorrow!
Sing So
rrow!
Now she sleeps in the valley, where the wildflowers nod,
And no one knew she loved him,
But herself and God.
In the tiny town of Ispra, near Varese on Lago Maggiore, we visited Mum’s family, living very traditionally in a simple but handsome house. They served us lunch; we must have been thirty people—teenagers, aunts, uncles, grandmas, babies. And most precious of all, dressed in black from head to toe, my grandpa’s eldest sister, my great-aunt Agnèsé, a woman as tiny and wrinkled and old and beautiful as we had ever seen.
CHAPTER 11
John and Anjelica on the set of Sinful Davey, 1968
Emily and I went to some great concerts—the Four Tops, Steve Winwood and Jim Capaldi in Traffic, Cream, the Yardbirds, the Kinks, Jeff Beck, John Mayall, Eric Burdon and the Animals, singing “House of the Rising Sun.” We favored the Rolling Stones, especially Mick and Keith. There were live clubs all over London, and you could go out to Chalk Farm or Eel Pie Island to hear new groups. And in the coffeehouses, Bert Jansch or Nina Simone would be playing.
At the Royal Albert Hall in summertime, they would hold the proms, and as a student you could get in to watch beautiful concerts for free, up near the dome, “in the Gods.” These new tape recorders had just come out in America that you could sling over your shoulder and have sounds wherever you went. All of a sudden, music was everywhere. A sound track for your life.
We would go to Powis Terrace and listen to Pink Floyd rehearse in the church hall, and to Earls Court to see Jimi Hendrix make love to his guitar onstage, plucking the strings with his teeth as she wailed for him. I wore a pink satin dress with printed flowers and a straw hat with a big brim and a long blue satin ribbon. I rode a carousel next to the stage, dizzily, for hours.
• • •
These were the days of Room at the Top, Darling, Antonioni’s Blow-Up, Georgy Girl, The Servant, Girl with the Green Eyes, Privilege, and the Nouvelle Vague filmmakers—Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Louis Malle, Claude Chabrol. Jules et Jim, Alphaville, Les enfants du paradis, La belle et la bête—I went to all these movies with my mother. The sound track of A Man and a Woman was always on the record player. I loved Anouk Aimée, because she wore her hair parted on the side over one eye in the movie and looked a lot like Mum. I remember being very upset after seeing La peau douce, a Truffaut film, with the actress Françoise Dorléac. I think it was because I found her so devastatingly beautiful, or because the leading man, Jean Desailly, was ugly with pockmarked skin, and the movie was strange and dark and sexual. Ready, Steady, Go and Top of the Pops were our favorite TV music shows, and I loved the American series—The Fugitive, Dr. Kildare, and the cowboys in Bonanza.
A Story Lately Told: Coming of Age in Ireland, London, and New York Page 13
