The Wandering Years (1922-39)

by Cecil Beaton

  BROUSSA

  Broussa (‘the green’) lived up to its name for fertility and lush vegetation. The only flowers we saw in Turkey grew here: the fountains were oases of refreshing coolness. The olive groves, dotted with cypress spikes, stretched in a pale carpet for miles below us. Olympian, we commanded a huge world; and, to make it even more airy, we climbed a minaret to become part of the sky.

  We bought gaudy silks in the bazaars, wandering about the open air markets overhung with vines, choosing shoes and belts. We visited (as sightseers) the whores’ quarters where the reception rooms were furnished with brass beds and yellow lace curtains.

  We motored down from the heights through fields of olives and green peppers. Daylight faded. A few Biblical figures, shrouded, moved away on donkeys. The road-menders ate their evening meal, preparatory to sleeping in small Boy Scout tents. And soon it was dark.

  LESBOS AND LEMNOS

  A frustration known to all who own yachts is to plan a visit to certain places only to discover that owing to a caprice of nature they are unable to land. So it was with us. Here we were in the midst of so many historical wonders, and missing so much. Some of us had hoped to arrive on the morrow at Santorin, but the captain informed us the winds are wrong. So we anchor at some other, and completely uninteresting island. An ill wind took us to Lesbos. What is there to see here? Nothing; but Daisy, waving her fingertips in the air, says, ‘I thought it would be amusing to send postcards from Lesbos.’

  After a few days of this island-hopping, everyone’s nerves were frayed. The setting was for pleasure, but I am certain no one fully enjoyed his day on Lemnos. Why hadn’t we gone to an island where the sponge divers are; where, because of their hazardous profession, none live long and it has become an island of the young? Or we might have landed at Mykonos, an oriental island, with the houses all domed and white-washed, with dovecotes on the roofs. Or what about an island where they still wear Greek national costumes, with gold necklaces and full skirts? No, we had to come to a rather barren little bay of oily waters, with a few modern houses dotted on the undulating slopes.

  In the harsh sunlight, Lemnos proved to be a bleak island. The evening walk inland provided our only pleasure.

  There is no more transcending moment than twilight. This evening it melted our hard hearts, beautifying even these surroundings. Venice is at its best when the light fades; Nimes and Arles show their souls in the gloaming. But it seemed a positive miracle that the dusk could transform ugly-duckling Lemnos into this crepuscular swan.

  The village children clustered around in growing numbers, making Pied Pipers of those of us with cameras. They beckoned us to further alleyways to show the childs’ brick church, their parents’ home, to point out the pump, the goat or the geese. The women hurried out of hovels, their latest born held high. Each snapshot was taken amid clapping, cheers and hilarious laughter.

  The sky, now pink and yellow, showed a horizon of purple mountains. A short distance from the mainland, a small green island bore an entirely different look. It was like a chip of another world, with spinach-green trees and fresh, juicy grass.

  So persuasive was the sunset from our seats under the trees of the little café, that we decided to have here a picnic dinner to be sent from the boat.

  As we eat, under trees hung wnth lanterns a few villagers and soldiers watched, like children at a Punch and Judy Show.

  ATHENS

  A five-hour run and we arrived at the port of Piraeus.

  While cruising in Greece last year, the Sister Anne was shot at for being in forbidden waters. The ensuing fracas was appalling. It seemed rather unnecessary that, again this year, we should run into trouble. But owing to the captain not having the latest charts or instructions, he had cruised home on the wrong side of some fortified island. Police arrived the moment we docked, to take the captain off to jail.

  Daisy had a face of steel. Eric looked harrassed. But for David and me the cruise was now over. Armand said, ‘Your high spirits are rudely obvious.’

  We rushed off to get our tickets to Venice, at the Hotel Grande Bretagne. After such long confinement on the yacht, we found that a large hotel had the same effect on us as an Arab finding himself in an oasis. We drank our ouzos heartily, shouting as more and more French and English acquaintances appeared.

  At last I dragged David away to go to the Acropolis. A world on top of a world, a great bone-white city high about its counterpart of tramways and concrete below, the ruins seems part of a lunar landscape. Everywhere broken columns and pediments and decorated remains which, as Cocteau put it, give the effect of the aftermath of a picnic by the gods.

  My predeliction for ruins makes me wonder whether this temple is not more dramatic now than when it was new and complete. But on closer examination of the sublimity of proportion of the Parthenon and Erectheum with the vase-shaped spaces between the tapering columns, one mourned for such desecration, and inveighed against Doge Morosini, wishing he might burn in perpetual torment. Like all great things on earth, these temples are without nationality. Like trees, stars or the sky, they are part of the universe and cannot be considered as belonging to any country or date. They have nothing to do with the ‘Classical Period’, represented in the theatre by women holding pots and walking sideways in a room empty but for a few slender pieces of uncomfortable furniture.

  Later we returned to see the Acropolis at sunset. Unfortunately a great many other people had the same notion. We arrived simultaneously with hundreds of English visitors off cruise boats, puffing, staggering, mopping themselves; they then would sit down plomp to put up their feet sensibly shod in golf shoes. They wore sun hats, garden hats, veils.

  Freckled young men in khaki shorts offered sweets from a crumpled paper bag to over-ripe girl friends. After weeks cooped on board they swarmed energetically over the broken columns. They sweated, wiped their necks and under-arms, and formed a resolute cloud of locusts as they swept into the small museum where perhaps the most dynamic of all archaic figures are housed.

  Even this mob could not damage the dignity of the greatest eruption of grandeur the world has ever known. As the sky slowly turned to apricot the marble assumed an incandescence.

  We went back to say goodbye to Daisy. She was sad to see us go. She offered Rosamund a pound note if the child could induce us to stay.

  ‘We couldn’t, Daisy. Think of poor Juliet waiting in that rented palazzo.’

  Daisy turned dewy, love-in-the-mist eyes upon us and smiled. ‘No matter! you’ve done very well to last as long as this. Most of my friends send themselves urgent telegrams after ten days of a cruise!’

  JOURNEY TO TAMARIS

  Arrived in Venice to a cloudburst. The deluge continued for a week, and my longing for the sun drove me towards the South of France. So on to Genoa, only to be hailed by more storms. William Odom[74] had sent his Dusenberg from Cannes, and I motored six hours through heavy rain to join him there.

  Cannes is bad enough at the beginning of summer; now, at the end of the season, it seemed even more odious in the ubiquitous rain.

  The decadent cronies of the Carlton Hotel made the downpour an occasion for an extra little drinkie, sitting around more foolishly than ever and stewed to the gills. With money to burn, they insist upon doing just that.

  One of the species, a fat slut encased in tight blue trousers, wore gladioli in her dyed blonde hair. She was telling the hotel manager and clerks at the reception desk how she had been so badly fitted under the arms for her new suit that she had refused to pay.

  I had earlier telegraphed Bébé at Tamaris to find out whether he was in a painting mood; if so, I would like to come and sit for the long promised portrait. No reply. Now, in Cannes, I was able to telephone him. I found Bébé awaiting me — his answering telegram had gone astray.

  Odom was just as glad to leave Cannes, and suggested driving me to Tamaris. Our release from the hotel, however, entailed considerable to-do. The storm still raged, the baggage seemed too big for
the car. At last we were under way, but Odom had to stop at an antiquaire. For sixty pounds he bought a pair of opaline vases in turquoise and gold. Then, after an hour of forging through the mountains in a torrent of rain, it was discovered that he had left his attaché case in the shop. Since the case contained all the cheque books, money and papers necessary to his holiday, we turned about, winding our way again through the gorges while Noah’s cascades continued with renewed energy.

  Throughout the journey to Tamaris, the deluge never once stopped. Several times we took the wrong road. When we neared our destination, the car stuck in the mud. We got out to push; the mud came over our ankles. The car lurched forward, cracking, bumping, roaring and swerving over mud and stones. Night fell; we took a few more wrong turns, at last arriving in a tempest. Groping our way through the dark, we stumbled into the hotel bar and were greeted by the welcoming voices of Denise Bourdet[75] and Charles de Noailles.

  After such a dramatic arrival, the evening meal was calm. It did not even ruin my composure when Odom felt ill, rushed out into the night to be sick and came back looking gangrenous.

  Bébé wore a scarlet sweater that contrasted sharply with his chestnut beard. Holding a once-white and now filthy little dog under his arm, he presided at the huge table of twenty-odd diners.

  Tamaris is a small encampment on the water’s edge — something less than a village, with a hotel and no more than a dozen Louis Phillippe houses built on bright-green slopes that stretch down to a halcyon bay. The houses have been developed by Michel Pascha, whose Turkish tastes are much in evidence.

  For many years now, a collection of original individuals and characters — painters, poets, writers, authors and ladies of the monde — have come to this spot. In a medieval tower on the water’s edge live Maria (Gramont) and Francis Hugo. Denise Bourdet cossets her friends in her white and blue house, which is perched high on a green rock with a view on three sides, including the twinkling lights of distant Toulon by night. Nearby, too, is Antoinette d’Harcourt, considered by Eluard to be the greatest French woman poet alive. Also on top is Georges Auric, the composer, and his painter wife, Tony Gandarillas and his daughter and Frosca Munster.[76]

  Our hotel swells the strange populace. Bébé would be intrinsically exotic anywhere. But his friend Boris, ordinarily a great eccentric, here seems almost conventional. Then there is Felix,[77] teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown and growing more fantastic each day with his real or invented maladies. Most people, if they ever got into anything resembling his recent scrape, would hide away in shame. Not Felix: delighted, he spends the entire night telling even strangers of his idiosyncrasies, in such a loud voice that he keeps half the hotel awake. Francis Rose, whom Felix has only known a few days, was up for three nights running, and once received an invitation to inspect a certain portion of Felix’s anatomy with a magnifying glass! Felix had the notion that a romantic disease was about to punish him.

  Sir Francis himself is someone not to be found every day. Though barely twenty-seven, he gathers laurels from several eminent art connoisseurs who consider him a great painter. Since childhood, he has been friends with people like Cocteau and Bébé, was Kit Wood’s[78] bosom companion. Though English, he has never lived in England, spending his time in China and the South of France. Once Francis was rich. Then he became involved with an American crook, who not only relieved him of two million pounds but managed to have all Francis’s possessions — furniture, objets d’art and even the pet Chihuahua — made over in his name. As a result, Francis found himself stranded in New York earlier this year. Now he will live on a small sum of money forthcoming from the sale of his house in Cannes — enough perhaps to last him another year.

  Looking like an otter already, Francis increases the resemblance by cutting his hair en brosse and a bristly moustache which accentuates a rush of teeth.

  His exaggerated manners are of Horace Walpole’s epoch, his speech that of a nineteenth-century squire. He has extremely refined tastes and a broad diversity of knowledge. If his life is a waste, it is all the more tragic for being a waste of so much excellent material.

  Bébé tells stories of Francis’s youth. When his mother was alive and the fortune intact, she dressed her otter-like prodigy in roses and lace. A man at the Hotel Negresco in Nice supposedly saw an apparition wearing Chinese silks, jewels and a rose in his buttonhole. The spectator was roused to such fury that he threw an apple tart the length of the hall. Since the man was a first rate sportsman and shot, his missile found its mark, spattering full on Francis’s face.

  Undated, Tamaris

  It continued to rain for thirty-six hours after our arrival in Tamaris. The first evening we ignored the storm, gathering at the little casino where sailors and fishermen came to gamble and dance. Down poured the skies; lightning flashed through the shutters, thunder cracked overhead. Next day the storm persisted, flooding roads and gardens, making us resign ourselves to life indoors.

  When at last the third day brought sunshine, we all felt as if we could embrace the world with gratitude. Everything was recreated in the brilliant light; the nebulous landscape of yesterday now revealed an almost uncanny succulence. Variations of liget and shade impose never-ending changes on the salad greens and blues of the landscape at hand, as well as on the distant panorama. Though the coast further along towards Cannes is ugly and impossible to paint, here everything seems congenial to the eye.

  Every sort of artistic activity is going on at the moment. John Sutro, who suddenly appeared with Marc Allegret to confer with Bébé about doing a film, dubs Tamaris ‘the artist’s Locarno’. Certainly, the number of conferences that take place here is remarkable. Someone came from the Comedie Française to discuss Cyrano de Bergerac; and each day is so full that appointments have to be made in advance for these high-powered talks. Bébé paints me all afternoon. When John and I, having seen one another only at a distance for two days, decided we must plan a playwriting project together, we were obliged to make a date for lunch two days ahead, as if we had been in London, New York or Paris. Living as we do en masse, it is practically impossible to discuss anything à deux.

  Tonight Hitler makes his decisive speech at Nuremberg. Meanwhile, everyone waits breathlessly to hear if this civilisation is at an end.

  I keep feeling, quite absurdly perhaps, that the chances of war might be diminished if we stopped having a good time. Yet inevitably, we find ourselves fiddling while homes and families may tomorrow burn.

  As a result of this grim possibility, however, every unimportant detail of existence looms with sudden significance. I live each day as if it were part of future annals, as if this very diary in which I write were already being read by some idle post-war stranger. Thus this morning’s petit dejeuner became a historical event. I noticed with new eyes the croissants and the paper napkin beneath them, sprigged with modernistic roses. My coffee cup seemed a curious object, decorated with brown and yellow futurist designs. Perhaps that stranger, reading through these pages, will say, ‘My God! Why didn’t those artists at Tamaris do something instead of being such irresponsible idiots?’

  I have written this with sea water, as the ink has almost given out.

  The night after Hitler’s speech found our whole community sunk in gloom. News came through from journalist friends at Paris Soir, that an ultimatum had been presented to the Czechs: either they must accept a plebiscite or the country would be invaded within six hours. This sudden threat allowed no time for any political readjustments by the French, in the event of an unavoidable war.

  Conversation centred solely about the pros and cons of whether there would be a war. With nerves strained, it proved difficult to condone stupid remarks which, at any other time, might have gone unnoticed. Francis Rose gabbled on about his friends and about China. Denise’s silent gloom seemed preferable. Francis’s American friend became suddenly unbearable. And we all could have scragged Lesseps for being so coy, indulging in a ridiculous pantomime while he helped himself t
o sweets from a box.

  CHRISTIAN BÉRARD

  Bébé has an elementary quality. It is one of his many virtues. No one could be more highly civilised and, to use a word I hate, sophisticated; yet his instincts, reactions and gestures are those of someone utterly primitive. When he is in his room and thirsty, it is unnatural for him to pour mineral water from the Vittel bottle into a tumbler — he drinks straight from the bottle. Instead of spreading butter on bread with a knife, he will dip his bread into the butter dish.

  For his work, Bébé is without paraphernalia. Here in the hotel, the bed has been taken from the room he uses as a studio. On the bedside table lies his paint palette; on the mantelpiece his canvas perches, somewhat rickety. But Bébé finds this emptiness full, making me aware of how an unfurnished room can stir the imagination.

  Bébé’s preparations are animal. He smears the paints with his hands, never bothering to screw the tops back on paint tubes. Colours are squeezed directly on to ever thickening mountains of paint. He recognizes and justifies a sloppiness that, in others would be inexcusable: ‘If I am careless and dirty and drop everything, it is all right. I can spatter filth about the floor, and it will not be repulsive. But when Francis Rose leaves a pair of bedroom slippers lying about, it seems as unprepossessing as a dirty comb.’ This paradox is true enough. Bébé seldom washes; he never sleeps in, but on, his bed. His clothes are filthy. Yet he is never revolting, never unpleasant. His personality and temperament outweigh all disadvantages.

  When he works on my portrait, I notice that Bébé’s every stroke of the brush, every daub, is the result of intense concentration. After each bout of work, lasting perhaps fifteen minutes, he sinks exhausted on his bed. There must then be an intermission, time to smoke an opium pipe.