The Restless Years (1955-63)

by Cecil Beaton

  Elsie, fired with ambition for the stage, had realised that she had meagre talent as an actress and had invented the profession of interior decorator. Her fame spread throughout the Ladies’ Clubs of America; Paul Cravath invested her earnings in General Electric and she became as affluent as if she owned a gold-mine. Yes, in her own way, Elsie had been quite a phenomenon. Later scrapbooks showed her in the twenties. She travelled. When first she saw the Parthenon, she exclaimed: ‘It’s my colour-beige!’ It came as a surprise to see a very juvenile version of myself with Elsie at a supper party near Cannes.

  Elsie had been good to me: she gave me, a shy and completely unknown stranger, my first exhibition in New York. I had arrived in Manhattan at the height of the winter season in the boom of 1931, with a crateful of very English watercolours and caricatures of the London scene, and a portfolio of photographs. I expected that any of the great New York galleries would promptly give me an exhibition. It shows how wrong and naif I was. Elsie, who was still in business as the most highly paid of all interior decorators, came to my rescue. She suggested that I should exhibit my wares together with her furniture in her showrooms on Fifth Avenue. Thus began a friendship from which I have benefited much.

  Elsie, in spite of her great age, always managed to collect newcomers to her circle who kept her young in spirit. For several summers she took a house in the South of France to which Oliver Messel and I, and a number of our friends, were constant guests. We found much to laugh at in Elsie’s company. Situations were always surprising — often fantastic. Oliver’s imitation of Elsie’s Boston accent, which is much like Brooklyn-Jewish, complete with masterful gesture and frown as she related some latest drama, was one of the funniest in his brilliant repertory. Although, like a vain child, Elsie bridled when she was applauded, she did not mind making people laugh at her. With her constant companion, a middle-aged American named Johnnie McMullin, she performed a sort of perpetual turn: it was an act of complete frivolity and artificiality. Their dialogue on returning from a visit to various maharajahs in India made us roll about with helpless laughter.

  From Elsie’s house in the Midi her guests would invariably go over to Maxine Elliot’s huge Villa de l’Horizon for lunch and a swim. The statuesque Edwardian actress now lived in respectable and luxurious retirement, entertaining a great number of people who, somehow, all had handles to their names. Maxine dearly loved a duke, but she adored even more her large black and white monkey named Kiki. Others did not — for Kiki did not welcome guests, however aristocratic, and had been known to bite them. One morning Elsie and her party arrived, with the usual fanfare, for a swim and Maxine’s special pink cocktail and Chinese biscuits. Elsie was laughing her grey laugh and everyone admired the achievement of her appearance: blue curls in a Syrian fringe under a shepherdess hat, muslin-tucked and ruched blouse, pleated skirt, her choker of pearls, her diamonds, her well-shod feet. Delighted with her success, she flailed her arms and legs about.

  Suddenly the air was rent by a terrible ear-splitting scream. A violent death? A murder? No — Kiki had hold of Elsie’s ankle. The scream was followed by a great plop and a splash. Elsie was nowhere to be seen. For a moment everyone was too horrified to move. Then, seeing Elsie’s shepherdess hat floating on the surface, it was realised that Elsie could not swim and had sunk like a stone to the bottom of the pool. Then followed more splashes, and a little later several divers brought to the surface an utterly transformed creature: hair in rats’ tails streaming over a purple face — her fakir-thin body now revealed in clinging rags. Maxine, a victim of high blood pressure and a weak heart, was also now purple in the face. We feared that she might forthwith have a stroke. Maxine was a woman with little humour, but in spite of her abject apologies she could not keep a smile out of her large, topaz eyes as Elsie, propped up by two stalwart men, stood while Johnnie McMullin held his handkerchief to her nose shouting: ‘Blow, Elsie! Blow!’

  Elsie was never a snob but, having a lesbian background she saw the advantages of an arranged marriage with charming but impecunious Charles Mendl, an attaché at the British Embassy in Paris. Elsie enjoyed comparative respectability, and helped the stature of her husband by becoming an impeccable hostess on a grand scale.

  In her last years Elsie has almost become a beauty. The hard, dog-biscuity face of the early photographs has mellowed; the eyes have become kinder and more compassionate, and the skin, now stretched over her delicate cheekbones, has created an effect of carved ivory.

  I came in from the garden and my forest walk. The other dinner guest, the American Howard Sturgess, had by now appeared. We awaited the imminent arrival of Elsie. Various white-gloved servants came in to alter the placing of a chair or squirt the flower-scented air with more oriental perfumes. In the distance a parrot squawking, a great rattle over parquet floors, and Elsie, at very high speed, was wheeled in sitting like an idol in her chair.

  Elsie is magnificent — and knows it. She squeaks with pleasure at our compliments about her coiffure, her sparkling jacket, her new necklace. We drink dry Martinis immediately served on small silver trays with the same biscuits that Maxine Elliott patented in the South of France. Elsie’s food is always imaginative and unusual. She makes rules — never any soup: ‘Don’t start your dinner on a lake!’ An exquisite meal is served at a small circular table decorated with, paradoxically among the silver gilt and crystal, some rustic bunches of nasturtiums.

  Later Elsie confessed: ‘I’ve outlived my time. I realise it: I’m too old now. I ought to have died before the war; I’ve just been hanging on since then, and for someone who’s led such an active life as I have, it’s terrible to retire and take things easy, and try to preserve a little vitality.’

  Elsie showed us tonight, in many little ways, something of the experience she has gained in a long life of hard work. Yet, up to the last, she has brought amusement and activity with her.

  When the evening had come to an end for her — it was to be the last time that I was ever to see her — she bid us remain and drink another glass of wine as the night was young — except for an old lady. She was then lifted up to bed by the chauffeur, Tony. The sincerity of the demonstration of love on the part of the servants was a tribute to her qualities. The servants were not merely in attendance on a rich old woman whom they knew would soon die and, maybe, leave them a fat present; they were grateful that such a remarkable character had treated them with the greatest fairness and consideration over a long period.

  The other guest, that delightful, charming Howard Sturgess (he too, like Elsie, to die so soon), in his foghorn voice said: ‘Elsie was wonderful tonight. I shall always remember her in that little jewelled jacket, with the butterflies in her hair, sitting against the green of the garden in the twilight.’

  Tony, the gloomy chauffeur, driving me to the station to return to Paris, said: ‘She may have been wonderful tonight. That’s because you were there and gave her an incentive, and she hopped herself up, but in the morning she won’t feel so good. She’ll ’ave a ’orrible ’angover!’

  GRETA (FROM AMERICA)

  Greta wrote lovingly of England where there is fresh air. She sent her love to ‘little Mr Burton’,[2] and country neighbours Juliet Duff, Simon Fleet, and Clarissa Churchill. I was surprised to hear that she had received a charming letter from my mother, and Greta asked that I should give her a hug without her knowing it was from her. She also enjoined me to give her best to Daisy Fellowes if I should see her. If I should see Queen Mary I was to say nothing.

  REDDISH HOUSE, BROADCHALKE

  Summer

  The one English summer to remember for its sun: ceaselessly fine day after day, the heat almost tropical. After luncheon I lay out on the terrace, broiling on a mattress. I sweated so much that after an hour reading David Cecil on Dorothy Osborne I came up to finish the essay in the cool calm of my bedroom. The exquisite, alert prose inspired me but after a while I started to doze.

  I woke to find the household’s latest addition — a whit
e and grey kitten — in a pose of abandon on the brown and white percale of a sofa. A more charming picture could not be imagined. A breeze came through the open window and rustled some of the flimsy pages of my play on which I had been working earlier. The kitten stretched itself in the most luxurious manner. I shared its enjoyment of the moment. High summer: slight breeze blowing, a cock crowing in the distance and hens emitting the sounds of sleep.

  I made a mental inventory of my room. Typewritten pages had now been blown onto the floor; Truman Capote’s book of short stories was open on a stool with other books (Denton Welch’s Brave and Cruel, Osbert Sitwell’s Laughter, and Colette’s Gigi); by the telephone, which at that moment began to ring, the snapshots of Greta in the triple red leather frame which she had given me. The only disappointment of the summer is that she is not here to enjoy it.

  A perfect summer’s day in my garden. This is the day I think about when I receive a sudden summons to America. Is it worth signing a contract that will necessitate my having to spend months staying in impersonal, expensive hotels when I could be writing my diary on the lawns as now?

  This is the day that compensates for weeks of winter cold and rain. The sky is unfettered azure. The trees are still salad-green, and the lawns and fields like Ireland (as well they should be after the months of rain we have had); the birds twittering, piping, chirping, chirruping and hiding. The hoots of the owl, which generally augur more rain, cast no jarring note, for the barometer shows that it will remain fine — if not forever, at least for tomorrow. On the terrace butterflies hover over the heliotrope, nepeta, and tobacco flowers. Flapping back and forth their wings, they are relishing the pollen with greed and unction. They congregate particularly on the flat plates of the sedum or ice plant-red admirals, cabbage whites and chartreuse yellows. They take their fill and then fly off, possibly through the muslin curtains of my bathroom where they flutter frantically from window to window, beating against the panes until my huge hand clutches at their powdery, panicky wings and imprisons them. Then, too terrified to move in the dark palm of my closed fist, they suddenly find themselves unbelievably fantastically free to fly to the top of the walnut tree or, even further, to the row of elms beyond.

  It is a poignant, nostalgic time of the year with the knowledge that it cannot last forever. As a flame flickers brightest before it finally goes out, summer is putting on its finest spurt. But it cannot be long before the frost will gradually scythe everything before it, and the garden will go into hibernation for all those long partridge-coloured months. Already the early morning produces a thick, silver-skeined carpet of cobwebs — for the dew is heavy; even at midday it has only been partially consumed by the sun.

  I hate to admit that my little house at Broadchalke is used only for weekends, even at the least rushed times of the year. Yet I am seldom able to be here longer than from Friday lunchtime until Tuesday. My London visits are so filled with work and appointments that I pity myself when there is no time to go to picture exhibitions, films or plays. But any tempting offer to remain for Friday evening in London is refused and nothing will induce me to return ‘of a Monday’, for I know how necessary it is for me to be in the country.

  Here the pressure is relaxed; even if my windows are shut, the clear country air seeps into my soul. I am able to read, write and think, and it is here that I give my subconscious an opportunity to assert itself. Without these periods of gestation I would no doubt dry up completely. It is reprehensible and silly that seldom do I go out for walks by myself, or manage even to get beyond my precincts, but no one who lives in the City would ever realise how crowded is the day-to-day existence of country people. Apart from my own creative work, there is always something that must be done, or that would be nice to do. The man comes about repairing the thatch. (It’s too expensive just now to do the entire roof.) The electrician wants to know where to put the plug points. Could we spare two hurdles from the wattle hedge? Sequestrene to be ordered, and a ham, and we’re running short of tumblers for the bathrooms, and the sweet peas will want new bamboo this year.

  ON DRESSING

  Some of my American friends are appalled at the lack of care with which I present myself, collar awry and socks coming down. They say: ‘A typical Englishman with two days’ grime on his shirt-cuffs.’ But I am rather pleased with this inevitable insouciance, and that for most of the time I get away with it. I know I look cleaner than I am; it helps to have a cold-beef-and-bread-sauce skin. Only when dog-tired do I have a second bath during the day. I consider a second bath a waste — unless, of course, I’ve been doing something strenuous, or have played tennis and got into a good sweat. In fact, I am so Scottish that I find myself saving not only bath water, clean clothes, and my beard, but also my energies. If alone in the country, and not likely to be seen by anyone, I take satisfaction in not scraping my chin for a couple of days. I often wear a dirty shirt and a twenty-year-old suit.

  When I relayed a little of the above to my country neighbour, Eddie Sackville-West, he was quite appalled. ‘My dear, I dress just as carefully if I’m going to see no one. I dress for my own satisfaction, not for the somewhat doubtful pleasure of others!’

  Some very young person said the other day how much he longed to have money so that he could go off and buy himself a lot of suits, silk shirts and cuff-links. This struck me as being surprising yet I suddenly remembered what a thrill it once had been to order a new suit of clothes. My first brown suit at Harrow was a milestone!

  Young ‘teddy boys’, with their bright blue or scarlet corduroy pants, seem to show spirit, but generally men still go about in dirty old mackintoshes, shiny, striped City trousers, and greasy bowlers.

  The English have not recovered from the war, and it shows itself in the torpor of their vestments.

  MISS COMPTON COLLIER

  July

  Many of my adolescent glimpses of the grand world came through the photographs in The Tatler which bore the credit line ‘Miss Compton Collier’. Other photographs that appeared in The Tatler were attributed to ‘Rita Martin’ and ‘Lallie Charles’, so why, I wondered, should it be ‘Miss Compton Collier’. Who was this lady? I was intrigued to discover her whereabouts but I knew of no one who had ever met her, and her name was not listed in the telephone book. Her photographs invariably showed us leisurely ladies caught in a silvery light, enjoying the herbaceous borders, clipped yews, stone garden seats and sundials of their country houses. Poring over these reproductions week after week I came to know Miss Compton Collier’s taste extremely well.

  When possible, she chose to photograph her subject standing on flagged paths, terraced steps, rustic bridges or by balustrades. Occasionally Miss Compton Collier would sprinkle a successful actress or two among her aristocratic sitters; but these, too, would be photographed as far as possible from the atmosphere of the theatre and would be found on holiday or holding a sheaf of corn, leaning against a rustic gate surrounded by cow parsley. My earliest family snapshots were mostly made in emulation of Miss Compton Collier.

  It was many years after Miss Compton Collier’s photographs had ceased to appear that I heard that she had continued her career with unimpaired zest, and each spring would send to people of high rank an itinerary of her summer tour stating that she would be in the neighbourhood during a certain week in case she were needed for an ‘at home’ sitting. I was intrigued to know that this mysterious lady still existed, so I wrote to ask if she would deign to include me professionally in her schedule and take some pictures of my mother and myself in the garden at Broadchalke.

  Miss Compton Collier proved to be an extremely agile spinster of over seventy with a pale brown face of minor distinctiveness with the flesh solid and shiny. She was dressed in old-fashioned clothes, somewhat like a land girl of the 1914 war, with large felt hat and flowing skirts. She projected a personality that brooked no nonsense, and no interruption; her main objective was to seek out the nearest flagged path and the most lichen-mottled stone garden ornaments. A sl
ightly forced giggle was part of her stock-in-trade. This softened any of her criticisms and enabled her to make all sorts of observations that, without it, might have caused offence; it was certainly not a giggle from the heart. I felt that Miss Compton Collier did not approve of the decoration of my house; she was only interested, and that for utilitarian reasons, in the bathroom, and the quicker outside the better.

  Miss Compton Collier is extremely knowledgeable about gardens: ‘After all, I have photographed eleven thousand of them!’ She knows her England well: ‘Dorset has the best little manor houses. Oxford is where the nouveaux riches live in gardens planned by Sutton’s. That thatched wall is typical of Wiltshire; we must take it quickly — but, oh dear — the horrid sun is coming out! I hate the hard light it gives. Such a bad week last month — sun every day! I loved the summer before — rain all the time! People can’t believe it when I photograph them in a downpour. But I say: “I’ll give you your money back if you don’t like it!”’ Recently in Scotland she had placed a whole tribal family in the garden under umbrellas, and at a given moment ordered the gillies to rush up to take away the umbrellas while the exposure was made.

  Miss Compton Collier took pictures of my mother and myself obediently sitting on an old stone seat with the dog at our feet. Behind the camera her performance was dynamic — even acrobatic. In order to stimulate the interest of her subjects she would jump up and down, wave an arm, squeak a rubber dog, and hum in a high musical voice. Suddenly, with a heavy click, the shutters of the lens would open and close. ‘Got it!’ shouted Miss Compton Collier in triumph. Her face was now a matter-of-fact, rather sullen mask. The switch from such inspired enthusiasm to the merely businesslike was somewhat of a shock.