The Wandering Years (1922-39)

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The Wandering Years (1922-39) Page 23

by Cecil Beaton


  Auntie Mae considered for a moment. ‘Oh well, I became interested in Universal Peace by reading the old Persian philosophers. This stupid picture-making isn’t everything, you know.’ She cooed and screwed up her face, leaning a little blonde head on Prince Mdivani’s shoulder. She then stood stiff as a ramrod, head back so far and chins in so tight that I was tempted to poke her and see if she toppled backwards like a ninepin. Yet, for all the mannerisms, Auntie Mae seemed the most naturally affected person I had ever watched.

  The bride’s mother joined the Universal Peace group for a moment, tapping Anita on the shoulder. ‘You know,’ she said confidentially, ‘the groom is just as lovely as he looks!’

  AT W. R. HEARST’S

  January 2nd 1931

  Anita, John and I were invited to stay at W. R. Hearst’s ranch for New Year’s Eve. We were to take Hearst’s special train, leaving Los Angeles at eight o’clock in the evening. The train would arrive at its destination around two in the morning; but we could sleep as long as we wanted to, and, when everyone was awake there’d be a communal drive out to the ranch.

  The party assembled at the station. Everyone was in high spirits. Tough blondes, hams and nonentities mingled with directors and magnates. Eileen Percy, the gay spark of the crowd, wisecracked, laughed hilariously, swished round on one heel and boxed anyone within reach.

  W. R. had taken a train from New York. His car was now slowly linked to the private train that would transport our raucous mob. An official hurried along, carrying a huge bouquet. Flashlight photographers sought out Marion Davies. They love her because she is unlike any other star. Not a bit stagey, she doesn’t clasp a bouquet and smile with shut eyes and raised brows for the cameras. She is genuinely surprised by the bouquet: ‘Oh, but how nice.’

  The party surged on to the train. Time to be off, but Anita and Alice Head were being flashlit and the train must wait. ‘Once more, please. A close-up this time.’

  We were all ravenously hungry and made a dash for the dining car. Hearst, Marion and Ambassador Moore were edging their way along the corridors. Marion dined quietly with Hearst, and only occasionally dashed across to whisper to her girl friends about how she had lost a bracelet or had her hair dyed a different colour.

  I ate in the company of two blondes: Eileen Percy, gayer now than ever, and Julianne Johnston, a nice film actress with no particular personality. With us was Colleen Moore. I had seen pictures of Colleen looking pretty and cute. Now she was here in the flesh. I marvelled. It is one of the tricks of fate that Colleen Moore photographs so well. She looks utterly different in the flesh and I couldn’t keep my eyes off her.

  Colleen Moore said not a word during dinner. Afterwards we joined Anita and John. I had a spurt of vitality and was in good form while describing a brawl at Zoe Akins’ party, when someone knocked a goldfish bowl on to Gloria Swanson’s chinchilla coat. The blondes and even Colleen Moore screamed hilariously, spurring me on to fresh sallies.

  Later in the evening, John took a redhead in tow and brought her to Anita’s compartment for laughs. I have never heard such laughs. Miss Stork (we found out her name) was quick and witty, and so dirty that we yelled in an agony of laughter.

  At last Anita and John, their ribs aching, decided to go to bed. I was to share a compartment with a natty little counter-skipper named Eddie Kane. The compartment reeked with fumes of alcohol. Eddie and an old-girl actress were rather tight, talking over-emphatically to one another. At last she tottered off. The beds were made up, and in the space of a few square inches we undressed. We spun a coin; I won, and slept on the lower bed. ‘Good night, old man,’ Eddie said. I replied, with as much energy and spirit as I could muster, ‘Good night, old man.’

  A tap on the door. The porter’s voice saying, ‘It’s after nine o’clock and Mr Hearst is up,’ was a command for us all to get ready. The king had arisen; now his minions must rise.

  The awful Eddie Kane made early morning noises. He dressed and departed, looking both pathetic and smart.

  I joined Anita and John. After a slight delay, we started off in a motor for the ranch. There were about ten cars in all; and the party dribbled up to the ranch in twos and threes.

  The air was sharp and crisp, with a tang in it. We admired glorious scenery, we gaped at enormous green hillsides that made remembered mountains seem like mole hills.

  At length the car shot through a gate, and we were on the grounds of the estate. A sign warned: ‘Danger! This road dangerous to pedestrians on account of wild animals.’ Soon we passed herds of buffalo, striped zebra, deer and antelope, exotic birds that looked like white ostriches.

  Abruptly, in the distance, at the top of a tree-spotted mountain, we caught sight of a vast, sparkling white castle in Spain. It was right out of a fairy story. ‘Gosh,’ I said. The car moved closer and closer to the vision. Through the cypress trees we could distinguish statues. And then we had arrived.

  The sun poured down with theatrical brilliance on tons of white marble and white stone. There seemed to be a thousand marble statues, pedestals, urns. The flowers were unreal in their ordered profusion. Hearst stood smiling at the top of one of the many flights of garden steps.

  As we stepped out of the motor the housekeeper, a whitehaired, dark-eyed woman, came forward and shook hands. Then we were shown to our quarters, with footmen conducting us.

  My room seemed gigantic. There was a carved gilt ceiling; great, hewn Jacobean beds with gold brocade covers; old, tinselled velvets hanging on the walls. The view from the window revealed a panorama of pale green mountains, blue, misty hills and a silver sea in the distance.

  I walked outdoors. The castle consisted of a main building and five outbuildings. The main portion loomed like Wells Cathedral, with an assembly room and a dining-room both the size of a great church. The outbuildings were almost as impressive.

  John and Anita’s accommodation were even better than mine. Brocade lined the walls of their sitting-room from floor to ceiling. It would have bankrupted you to buy one square foot of the material for a cushion. The Italian furniture was of museum quality. The ceiling, like the one in my room, had been carved with full-sized gilt angels. And the bed, an affair of oak tooled to resemble drapery, had the most elaborately embroidered coverlet upon it.

  We went outdoors and toured the formal terraces, then wandered in the vast garden. Some of the statues, I noted with surprise, were not up to scratch, even cheapjack. Perhaps it was by intent; we’d been so overpowered by Donatellos and Della Robbias that it made the place come alive to see a nypmh with bobbed hair eating an apple, or three very obviously Victorian graces playing together.

  Inside the cathedral-like assembly-room the party now gathered, all bemoaning the non-arrival of their bags. Some stood in awe at the grandeur of their surroundings. Those who didn’t, the tough blondes and nonentities, had been here before. Blasé, they made efforts to explain what certain pieces were, where they came from and their date. This aesthetic assessment ended in shrieks of ribaldry. In fact, Eileen Percy was already making whoopee, rushing about with a sword she had picked up for an impromptu bacchanale.

  The lunch table looked like a scene in some epic film about the lives of the Caesars. A never-ending length of table was literally covered with food — bottles of pickled fruits of all descriptions, chutneys, olives, onions, squares of every kind of cheese, bowls of fresh fruit. Purple glass goblets, vivid hanging banners and urns of poinsettias completed a Lucullan sight. The food turned out to be as good as it looked. I gobbled away, while the blondes became increasingly hilarious as they planned a cockeyed New Year’s Eve.

  Trunks arrived. I retired to shave and put on entirely new clothes. In doing so, I lingered too long. Feeling spick and span, I came down from my Jacobean magnificence to join the party but could find no one. Every guest had disappeared.

  I wandered about, rather unadventurously trying to explore. Occasionally, a secretary hurried through the marble garden.

  I got out my ca
mera and spent an hour or so trying unsuccessfully to photograph myself with a timing gadget. It kept going off prematurely, clicking the shutter before I could even get into position. Still no one. I wrote a long Hollywood letter home, skimmed through newspapers, ate chocolates and nuts, smoked cigarettes.

  At last I found some of the party drinking in the kitchen. The blondes were in riding breeches and bright-coloured sweaters. They had had a glorious ride. Secretly, I wished I’d been with them, though years had elapsed since I last rode a horse. It also turned out that I’d missed joining the throng when they went to watch the animals being fed in W.R.’s private zoo.

  The sun now set; the lights in the garden were put on, illuminating the swimming pool. I went indoors and found Marion Davies arranging the placement for dinner. She was wearing Wedgewood blue, which accented her white, freckled skin, her drooping aquamarine eyes and shining, pearly teeth.

  Marion Davies is pretty as a Greuze, and what a character! She is kind, humble, shrewd, blindly generous and madly inconsequential. When I photographed her a few weeks ago in New York, we wanted a bare shoulder which the small neck to her dress would not allow. In spite of its being a new dress, worn for the first time, she seized a pair of scissors and ripped it down.

  Marion is never alone, always surrounded by a gang of twenty or thirty hangers-on. In New York, her party kept arriving at the theatre so late they once trooped in ten minutes before the final curtain. When she went to Europe last year, she took a retinue of twenty-six people who could buy anything they liked and charge it up to her. The scent bills alone came to thousands of dollars. But then, Marion must spend more money than anyone else in the world...

  ‘Marion is most attentive to all sorts of people,’ Anita later remarked. ‘I’ve often gone into a shop where she knows the salesgirl, and the salesgirl says, “I had a post card from Miss Davies this morning”.’

  Marion’s nephew, Charlie Lederer, was in grand form at dinner, celebrating his eighteenth birthday. His codfish face made him look older than his years. He behaved like a roué, with a silly goat laugh and a very dry tongue. Brought up in an atmosphere of sophistication, he knew all and seemed unshockable. During the meal, Charlie sat mixing a concoction of cheeses, sauces, butter, onions and paprika, all the while displaying his astonishing gift for making jokes. In reply to a toast, he got up and made an outrageously funny birthday speech, about how inadequate he was to live up to these surroundings, how annoyed Hearst was with him each time he put his foot through a Goya. It was great impertinence, as everyone sat scared stiff of Hearst.

  A very ordered party went out onto the terrace to see Marion’s latest picture. The cold air sobered us up. Or perhaps it was the dull film. I wondered why Marion should spend her time making such bad movies. The production of this one seemed particularly poor. I went to sleep once or twice, but a blonde Miss Lloyd nudged me incessantly.

  Indoors, the mob crowded the assembly-room and waited for midnight. We drank champagne, tried to be hilarious, exchanged kisses all round. But the party was so large that many of the guests remained strangers one to the other. Bells ringing, sirens going off and a whining moan in the distance announced that the New Year was in. Eileen Percy put a cushion on her head, then turned somersaults in front of the colossal chimney grate. Colleen Moore drank silently. Marion had sudden spurts of energy, did a Charleston, shook her hands frenziedly, then hurried out of the room to consult with Hearst. Gradually, all hopes of an orgy disappeared. We dwindled to bed.

  I had no sooner put out the light than Charlie Lederer came in. He had opened his bedroom window and a wasp’s nest dropped in. If he couldn’t find an unoccupied bedroom, could he come here and sleep in the other bed? But there were corridors of empty rooms and he did not return.

  New Year’s Day. The sun poured through the windows. The mountains sparkled. I was early for breakfast. Colleen felt like death, but wandered out with me to look at the zoo. We found every kind of animal in wired cages — lions, tigers, giraffes, bears and a gorilla. We sent telegrams from the telegraph office in the garden.

  Snapshots had to be taken of everyone. I clicked Eileen Percy in riding clothes astride a white marble unicorn.

  By lunch time, Charlie Lederer had dressed himself as a film cowboy. He made me laugh so much that I almost choked of hiccups. Again he concocted his mess of cheeses.

  In the early afternoon there was a lull of half-hearted wisecracking. With Eileen Percy laid low by a headache, the party lost its spirit. Then Anita and I decided we would ride. It was a brave moment, as I hadn’t been in the saddle since St Cyprian’s School. Riding clothes were soon lent me; I fancied myself enormously. With cold feet and an uncertain sinking in my stomach, I went towards the mounting block. The cowboy told me about the reins, and once on I felt all right.

  We jogged over even ground. Clop-clop over stones; crack; twigs and dry branches snapped. We descended through woods, down the mountain for miles. Jog-jog; my innards were being well shaken up. But I felt jubilant and decided to ride a lot in future. I liked the smell, the click of the hoofs, the crunch and the creaking of the leather saddle, the balmy air.

  Miss Lloyd, a film rider in scarlet, rode first, Anita and I and the cowboy followed. My legs were beginning to quiver with the strain. At last we came out onto an open space and cantered, then galloped. Though pretty shaken and wobbly, I did quite well for myself.

  The sun set. The sky became blue-violet, the white palace at the top of the mountain seemed literally a castle in Spain. Deer and antelope bounded past with incredible grace. The scarlet blonde shouted ‘Whoopee!’ It was what I felt, only I wouldn’t have described it that way.

  Then came the accident. To keep wild animals away from the main grounds, fences have been erected on W.R.’s property. This entails the opening and shutting of many gates when horseback riders go afield. One kind of gate we opened by tugging at a long rope which, attached to a lever, pulled the whole gate to one side. But we had to pull hard. My horse clearly didn’t enjoy going too near the gate, and became nervous. I got the gate open; but in order to shut it, the rope had to be pulled again. The animal had no inclination to turn back to the rope: he was all for galloping off home. Still, the gate must be shut. Anita and the cowboy had already disappeared. The scarlet blonde cantered off, leaving me to perform this task. I managed to get the horse near enough to the gate. But no sooner had I pulled the rope than the creature bolted. I clung to the saddle with one hand. Stupidly, I also held on to the rope with an ungloved hand, and not quite strongly enough. My bare hand streaked down, the length of the rope in a painful second. The skin on my fingers was seared almost to the bone!

  Agony ensued. My hand smarted and throbbed until I howled with torment. I galloped on and caught up with Miss Lloyd. She said euphemistically, ‘Oh, that’s too bad.’ We had two miles to go, with my hand in hell all the way. Then the horse had to be tied up. I could hardly walk when I got on to the ground and staggered for first aid.

  To make matters worse, the housekeeper observed to the man who dressed my hand, ‘Oh God, it’s a wonder he doesn’t faint!’ I trembled with pain while the hand was being dressed. I screwed up my face and stamped and drank enough whisky to make me tight, but the pain was still unendurable.

  I tried for sympathy everywhere, but got little. I then drank more and more. My packing was done by a servant to whom I gave pie-eyed instructions. After that, I had a hot shower in a stupor.

  Anita was solicitous when she heard about the accident. I moaned with gratitude. Cocktails came and went. Lederer was funnier than ever at dinner.

  Afterwards, people seemed in excellent spirits. Even I did a wild and weird dance with Marion, which promptly petered out when Hearst appeared upon the scene. He left, and the fun began again. I executed a tremendous tango with Eileen Percy. We rolled together on the floor amidst screams of joy. My hand was squashed and throbbed like a tom-tom. That awful Eddie Kane, not to be outdone, took my place. I subsided, panting with pai
n and exhaustion.

  Eddie and Eileen now danced a frenzied apache together, making a beeline for a gold, carved chest so priceless that Hearst would not allow a telephone to be on it, nor anyone but the head housekeeper to dust it. The dancers dashed at the forbidden object, opened the lid and jumped inside. On the bottom was a bowl of water to preserve the wood from warping. Splash went Eddie Kane; splash followed Eileen Percy. Marion closed the lid on them, then jumped on it to keep the prisoners inside. The bottom of the chest caved in. Water poured from underneath.

  And at that very moment, Hearst most typically came back into the room. He watched the tableau with a deathly white expression.

  There was a distinct coolness after that. A chastened group moved on to the terrace to see something of the new Clara Bow film. Then we hurriedly departed to catch our train.

  A BRAWL

  We dined at the Spanish restaurant El Cholo — Anita, Wilson Mizner, Irving Berlin and myself. Wilson and Irving were having a reconciliation. They’ve been friends for twenty-five years, but lately each thought the other was trying to high-hat him. Anita played the peacemaker; Irving brought along a bottle of Napoleon brandy as a loving cup. The two prodigals were in high spirits: ‘Well, you old son of a bitch. Ha, ha! Haw, haw! Oh, you old bastard, you son of a bitch! Haw, haw! Bang! Ha, ha!’ The four of us sat down to dinner in the back parlour of the restaurant and proceeded to devour excellent Mexican foods: soup and beans, tamales, rices and dishes with unknown names. I concentrated on the food, feeling rather out of the conversation. Irving kept leaning across Anita to say, ‘Well Willy, you old son of a bitch, do you remember...?’

  ‘Ooough! Jesus Christ, you old bastard! You son of a bitch. But I’ve always liked you, haven’t I, you old son of a bitch?’ Anita, very gay, screamed with laughter. The bottle of Napoleon brandy quickly became empty, the profanity more raucous. Wilson broke out in a running sweat, mopped his head and chin with a quivering hand, drew in his breath with a whistle and guffawed more asthmatically than ever.

 

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