by Cecil Beaton
The unreality of the machine infernale was as fascinating as ever. In coops behind glass, inhuman sandwiches wrapped in transparent paper awaited inhuman eaters. For a nickel, a mince pie became one’s own. In the slot goes the nickel. Click, the aluminium plate glass window opens; sesame, the dish is yours.
A tableau of foods is available. Pineapple and grapefruit are cradled in a bed of cracked ice; boiling kidneys, Boston baked beans, lamb stew, primrose yellow salads, cool and crisp, are tempting to the eye. In other restaurants names conjure up dishes that when brought to you, are a disappointment. Here you see what you eat beforehand. And it is a distinct advantage to pay for the meal in advance. By the time one is ready to leave, there is no bill. One walks out with the odd feeling that the meal has been free.
Loelia and Myrtle were vastly entertained. They seemed blissfully unconscious of not fitting in with scurrying clerks and truck drivers, who were enjoying a fast feast for thirty cents.
The Revolution intruded, however, in the form of one sharp rebuff. The place was crowded, with hardly a free seat to be had. Spotting an empty table I pounced on it, hoping to establish squatter’s rights by spreading my tray and coat. Then I hurried to summon the others, laden with their full trays. By the time we returned, an old grey-haired tricoteuse was solemnly tucking into a tomato stew.
Myrtle Kellet, betraying the aristocracy with her most carefully enunciated English accent, said, ‘We’re awfully sorry, Madam, but we have taken this table. It’s reserved.’
The old revolutionary frowned, looked up for a withering moment and barked, ‘That’s just too bad.’
She went on masticating. The proletariat had triumphed. Relegated to an adjoining table, Myrtle remarked pointedly on how unbecoming toughness was to the elderly. Her observation went for nought.
PAUL DRAPER
Paul Draper’s dancing is a revelation. I remember him as a quietly uninteresting young man with a stutter. He performed at one of Osbert Sitwell’s small parties some ten years ago, embarrassing the guests by doing a clumsy Black Bottom. In the interim, his uniquely individual gift has found its own method of expression.
Draper is like no other dancer. He does not even look like a dancer; he wears no false smile, invokes no artificial means of appealing to his audience. This is a creature from the woods — a gamekeeper or lean young groom, fond of animals and looking rather foxy himself.
Most touching is his quality of purity and youthfulness. He explains (still with a stutter) that he likes to dance. The encores, he maintains, are a pleasure to him; he never tires of dancing. Now he will execute a minuet written by Mr Haydn in 1765, next he becomes a woodpecker tap-dancing a minuet with elaborate rhythms.
Paul Draper is like a fencing master or ski instructor, wedded to a fantasy born in the age of Fred Astaire. He gives nobility to a hackneyed golliwog dance of Debussy, the taut grace of his body expressing muscular beauty without so much as a trace of decadence. His dancing is surely a work of contemporary art.
LOUIS EILSHEMIUS
I went with Bibi Dudensing and Henry McBride to visit Louis Eilshemius, the infirm and controversial American painter. We lunched beforehand at the Dudensing’s Gallery, where they are now having another show by the Pittsburg miner, John Kane. Kane’s pictures are primitive and strong, in the genre of the best America has yet produced. On display, among the self-portraits was one which showed his wife, who disapproved of Kane spending Sundays painting, appropriately depicted in the background as a cross-patch, while her husband makes the parlour untidy with his paints.
Henry McBride arrived unexpectedly, bringing with him the Evening Sun. ‘I’ve written about your exhibition,’ he tapped me with the paper. ‘You are the Horace Walpole of your time!’ ‘I’m being showered with comparisons. This week’s Life refers to me as the Byron of the camera.’
Louis Eilshemius is partly paralysed and lives with his aged brother entirely isolated from the world outside their rooms. Wrapped in shawls, he sits in a chair beside his bed, gesticulating wildly with bird-claw hands that have dried and pointed nails two inches long. His hair streams on to his shoulders. He reminds me of an old dog, and his eyes are the intensely human eyes of my father.
Eilshemius is a great personality, no more gaga than he has been for years. In spite of his infirmity, his vitality is enormous. He shouts frighteningly and is like a child because he only speaks of what is on his mind. Hence manners do not exist and he is apt to offend people. ‘Who are you? Bibi Dudensing? You look different. McBride, thank you for writing about me in the paper. And you, Beaton, never heard of you!’
McBride sat blinking like an owl. Bibi’s eyes popped from her head with intensity.
Later Eilshemius said, ‘Well, you look good, McBride. How old are you, seventy-one? You don’t look more than sixty-nine.’ To our embarrassment, McBride refused to recognise that he was being addressed. Pretending Eilshemius was talking to me, Henry added, ‘Yes, it is known that Englishmen age very quickly.’
The dark house has no electricity. Today its gloom seemed all pervading, intensified by a grey and snowy atmosphere outside. Photography proved impossible, though I tried to take a few exposures — of necessity against the light, as Eilshemius’s chair could not be moved and his back was to the window.
Louis went on to complain that no one wrote to him; he never received so much as a single letter. His friends had written successful books but made no mention of him, in spite of the fact that no one could paint oceans as well as he, that his trees and forests were as good as Courbet’s. Critics and public alike were dumbbells not to accept his greatness.
In the dark, overcrowded room, hundreds of his pictures (painted on canvas, cardboard and letter-writing block) had been stacked in hysterical profusion. It is many years since Louis Eilshemius stopped painting, but his output was enormous. All about us, bevies of pompadoured nudes splashed in mountain streams and waterfalls, backed by chutney-coloured arbours. More than one detractor had complained that he made his nudes wooden. ‘To HELL with the critics!’ Louis shouted. On and on he raved. He had no use for the present day; he was great, and his pictures should be acclaimed. Not only was he a great painter, but a poet and composer too. He compared himself to Beethoven. ‘You know Beethoven, don’t you? Well, I’m that great.’ Oddly, these paeans of self-praise could not have been dismissed as mere paranoia. His mind was too alert for that. And in spite of the squalor of the scene itself, there was a certain grandeur about this old man’s fanatic arrogance.
On our way out, we met Louis’s elder brother, aged eight-five. He looks younger than the painter, but is hard of hearing. As we peeped into the drawing-room, which stands intact and doubtless unchanged from what it was fifty years ago, we could hear the two old cronies upstairs shouting at one another. ‘Dudensing, Dudensing? McBride, McBride? Beaton, Beaton?’
The German domestic, looking like one of Eilshemius’s painted figures, winked sympathetically and hoped we would return.
Outside, the familiar pavement looked strange for a moment. I thought of what we had just left — the stuffed birds, framed photographs, stacks of strange pictures, and the invalid barking and thumping in his bedside chair. Our visit had seemed like some incident from a book. Certainly, Eilshemius’s world had none of the reality of the present day — which, I realised with a start, was the last day of the year 1937.
MRS PATRICK CAMPBELL
New York, 1938
Mrs Pat is a great woman, triumphing over the sordid difficulties of poverty and age by a resolute sense of beauty and poetry. For today’s sitting she wore black velvet and artificial pearls. She brought with her the white Pekinese dog to which she is so inordinately devoted that she will not return to England (dogs must remain in quarantine for a year before entering the British Isles).
In appearance, Mrs Pat seems a prototype of a stage duchess. But after the hot lights had played on her for a while, she began to disintegrate. There was something ghastly about her dirty white gl
oves, her fallen chins and the tragic impedimenta of age. She bellowed like a sick cow, throwing her hands to the skies, ‘Oh, why must I look like a burst paper bag? Why must I have all these dewlaps? Why can’t I be a beauty?’
I took Mrs Pat to lunch at Voisin’s. She was in good form castigating Orson Welles’ production of Julius Caesar: ‘They have no reverence, those boys. They speak the lines as if they had written them themselves. You can’t recite the Song of David spontaneously. You must recite it as David. Mr Welles’s Brutus is like an obstretrician who very seriously visits a lady in order to placate her nerves.’
As only an artist can be, she is canny and clear in her observations about people: ‘Lilian Gish may be a charming person, but she’s not Ophelia. She comes on stage as if she’d been sent for to sew rings on the new curtains.’
Kirsten Flagstad ‘walks meaninglessly around the stage, like a wardrobe at a seance.’
About Violet, Duchess of Rutland (whose recent death robbed us of a landmark) Mrs Pat said, ‘She was the most beautiful thing I ever saw. In my day, beauties were poetic looking. They wore long, pre-Raphaelite tea gowns. They moved and spoke very slowly, giving the impression that they had just been possessed.’ At this point, our lunch was momentarily interrupted when Mrs Pat sailed over to join Noel Coward and another man at a wallside table. I watched her pantomime, and noticed that Noel seemed ill at ease. When Mrs Pat floated back she said, ‘He wants to put me in his new play. I refused. I could never talk like a typewriter. I couldn’t tap out, “Do you love me? Don’t you love me? I don’t love you”.’
I laughed, but wondered how she could turn down a part on Broadway when she has not had an opportunity for years. I remembered someone saying about Mrs Pat and her present plight: ‘She is like a sinking battleship firing on her rescuers.’ She quoted a line from Swift to Vanessa, ‘You have taught me to distinguish and you leave me desolate.’ This was on the street as we said goodbye. I turned for a last glimpse of her standing in the snow, a monument in black velvet.
In the corridor outside my room I could hear a booming voice coming nearer. ‘2645, 2645, 2645… Ah! Here we are. Can I come in? Are you expecting me?’
Mrs Pat arrived, swathed in furs, wearing a feathered hat and the usual black velvet dress with train. She brought with her the proofs of the pictures I had taken; also, for my inspection, a selection of old photographs of herself as she used to be. These documents attested such beauty that it was almost frightening to compare them with what they have turned into. ‘Look,’ she moaned, ‘at the beauty of that neck, at that line of cheek. And look at me now, all wind and water.’
The early pictures depicted a magnolia beauty with dark hair and prune eyes, communicating an acute sensitiveness and delicacy. Mrs Pat inveighed: ‘Oh God, how can you be so unkind as to do this to me? Why must we all become ugly? I don’t know how some women stand it. Why don’t they commit suicide?’ She was apparently comforted by my photographs. I didn’t dare protest what I thought — that they were really quite ordinary. To Mrs Pat, they seemed the distillation of magic. ‘Oh, that shadow under the jaw! You’re a genius to put in that shadow. And no one has taken such a photograph of gloved hands. Those gloves are alive. Look at the depth between the thumb and first finger. That’s what everyone wants to have!’
She was likewise delighted with the photogenic qualities of Moonbeam, who, according to my spy, David Herbert, had been the cause of trouble a day or two ago. David, having taken Mrs Pat out to dinner brought her back to her hotel in a taxi. When the driver discovered that Moonbeam had wetted the floor of the vehicle he remonstrated vehemently with Mrs Pat. To placate him, she held Moonbeam high and wagged a finger at the culprit, cooing, ‘Who would have thought the old dog to have so much pee in him?’
Abruptly, Mrs Pat broached the irrelevant subject of money. ‘Now I’ve brought you forty dollars for these pictures.’
I remonstrated with her. I had no intention of her buying any photographs. They were meant as a tribute.
Mrs Pat insisted on paying. She said, ‘It’s rather affected of you to go on like this, you know. I shall give you thirty dollars, then. I can afford it. I have a rich pupil now.’
Everything she does or says is touched with Shakespearean grandeur. When she named the price I must accept for the photographs, the word dollar became something as beautiful as a gold coin. She took away from it the stigma of commercialism and invested it with dignity.
‘Now tell me about your life at the moment,’ I asked.
‘I am poor but I’m not afraid of being poor. I could easily have been rich if I’d been just a bit vulgar or broken a little dog’s heart. You can understand my giving up a career for Moonbeam, can’t you? I couldn’t go back to England and let that little dog die! Anyway, I live in an old-fashioned hotel, a red brick building full of old people who adore me. They look after me so kindly; they adore Moonbeam. I have two rooms with French windows and a high ceiling. And I don’t have to hear other people’s bath water!’
It was in her present hotel that John Gielgud visited her. He felt so sorry for her poverty that he offered to lend her money, then sent fruit and all sorts of food she couldn’t eat. He wept for her, which she thought silly. She had no wish to be pitied. She said, ‘Get along with you. Pull yourself together. You’re too hysterical on and off the stage.’ Wiping his eyes, Gielgud replied, ‘Those are Terry tears.’
Mrs Pat turned now to discussing her pupils. ‘Oh, how they read! I have one woman who teaches at a school and has forty pupils a day. But no matter, she reads Milton so badly! She can’t keep her voice up, just crashes right on without hearing the sound of the music. She is incapable of understanding a half beat. She never pauses before a He with a capital H, says He as if God were the butcher boy! Fancy not being able to give the reverence of a half-pause before talking of our Maker. She gabbles on as if it were our Dressmaker!’
Mrs Pat, a mountainous stage duchess, sat draped in her fur coat with a history. ‘Isn’t it a beauty! It was left me by my greatest woman friend, Brigit Guinness. She wore it for six years and I have worn it for six. Yet it’s just as luxurious as ever! You see, Brigit left three coats. Tanis took the mink, Meraud[71] got the sable. They gave this to me because they thought it was rabbit. But I knew it was flying squirrel: if you blow on it the fur is soft and blue-grey all the way down. It hasn’t been dyed. It wears so well, whereas the girls haven’t got an inch of their coats left. I wrap myself in it and I am as comfortable as in a house.’
Mrs Pat on love: ‘Oh, I was loved once. But it didn’t work. The French have a proverb, “Become like honey and the flies eat you”.’
Mrs Pat said she was having an anxious time trying to find someone who could write the necessary explanation about herself and Shaw, for the publication after their deaths of Shaw’s letters to her. Gaps in the correspondence must be filled in; it must be understood that this was not just the gaga drivellings of a writer to any actress. The editing had to be done with understanding, reverence and taste. ‘It’s difficult to find someone who will not throw these letters to the ground so that you have to stoop to see them. We want them on a pedestal just at eye level! I believe we have got hold of an Irishman; and, you know, Irishmen are never vulgar!’
She talked about her difficulties in the theatre. Only today she had had such a bad snub. Someone had asked her to take the part of a drivelling old woman of a hundred and two. ‘It is very difficult to be a hundred and two convincingly. Even at my age I can hardly move. But to be a hundred and two and drool at the mouth is too horrifying. It is surely better that I remain a legend!’
The legend went on to talk of her big opportunity, when she played Mrs Tanqueray. ‘I never got my chance until I had two children. Then, straightaway, I went right to the top. It’s a question of taste and not experience. Alexander[72] knew I had had no training, but he always listened to me. He told me to lose my temper in one scene and brush all the photographs from the piano on to the floor. But I r
eplied that I could never lose my temper or do ugly things with my hands. In the play, I was supposed to be a musician: no musician would put frames on the piano! And again, at rehearsal, he told me to strum the piano. I said, ‘I never strum. My mother locked the keyboard and only let us open it if we were going to play.’ Alexander then said to me, ‘Well, play then.’ But it so happened that my teacher had discovered the third finger of my right hand was weak. I must rest it a while. In the interim, he’d been teaching me an arrangement by Bach, for left hand only. Thus, in front of Alexander, I held a book high in my right hand, adopted an expression of complete disdain, and played the piano with my left hand until the poor man was eventually able to gasp, “That’s enough, Mrs Campbell!”’
By now, Mrs Pat was in a reminiscing mood. She began to tell many stories of sorrow and heartbreak on the stage. Magic names of dead actors and actresses were evoked once more — Cyril Maude, Herbert Tree, and Maude Millet, whose eyes shone as though she had just seen a little piece of heaven.
Ivan Moffatt suggested that conversations at Ashcombe, Rhinebeck and Kammer should be recorded on a hidden dictaphone, then collected in a book to be called A Years Conversation.
No sooner had the suggestion been made than we left for Rhinebeck to find Raimund with a new toy — a recording machine. Rather self-conscious conversation was recorded. A few people did special stunts for the occasion, such as imitations and anecdotes. Certain voices sounded better than others. My own seemed nauseating and smug. I minded the nasal twang less than the overtones of meticulous self-assurance.
Something must be done about it. I telephoned to Ruth Ford. Did she think, as a result of her recent studies, that it was possible to alter the register of one’s voice? ‘Oh dearre, no. Don’t alter your voice. It’s a bee-utiful voice.’
Unconvinced, I telephoned to Mrs Pat for advice. She was correctively enthusiastic, ‘Yes, yes, come along to me. You must be taught not to place your voice up there. We can easily get it down. Oh, do try. Do come along.’
