by Cecil Beaton
At lunch she told us that for many a donkey’s lifetime now she has lived in a small house in West End Lane, Hampstead, tended by an old servant of seventy-six. Miss Compton Collier appears so strong and healthy that one knows it is true that when she goes to bed it is to sleep so soundly that nothing will disturb her — not even a bomb. In fact, in one raid when the roof was blown off the house and all her rooms but two were destroyed, Miss Compton Collier went on snoring.
‘Every day of my summer is taken up with work; from April to October I’m busy, so I leave everything else that has to be done to my winter months. I only do shopping in January: if a cup gets broken it has to wait till the first of the year. But I hate shopping in any case — it bores me. Now these clothes I’m wearing were bought fifteen years ago. I never read the papers: they’re so vulgar. I’ve never listened to the radio; I hear everything I want to hear. And I wouldn’t dream of doing the usual things like filling in a census or having a ration book — I just haven’t time. I hardly ever go to a play, but when I do I ring up and find out first if it’s got a nice happy ending because I hate all these squalid dramas that are so much the fashion. I loathe magazines and won’t contribute to them any more now that they’re full of Communist propaganda. I’ve never worked for the Press; if, in the old days, my pictures were used in The Tatler, it was I who chose the people to photograph: I never took people specially for the paper.’
‘How did you become a photographer?’ I asked.
‘I had a weak heart at school and wasn’t allowed to play games. Someone gave me a camera and I suppose that the artistic feelings, always in my family, came out in my generation in this different way. In another century I would have been a painter, I suppose. My great-grandfather sang at Queen Victoria’s wedding.’
Miss Compton Collier does most of her own photographic processing, and said she was up till three o’clock last night developing plates. All her paraphernalia is entirely obsolescent. She climbs under a dark red velvet cloth attached to her yellow wooden 1895 camera with its long rubber tube with ball-shutter release. Hanging from the wooden tripod is a large bag containing a menagerie of toy dogs, mice and other pets to attract the attention of her aristocratic children and animal sitters.
Miss Compton Collier has never visited a photographic exhibition, and shows complete ignorance of the work of other photographers. She had never heard of the work of Steichen, Bill Brandt or Cartier Bresson. Although she has no further ambitions, she is never bored with her work; each sitting is a thrill for her.
In the silvery prints that resulted from her visit to Broadchalke both my mother and I appeared calm and leisurely, our faces smoothed and our hair silken. We were not only amused, but delighted.
MY MOTHER
August
Being the only unmarried member of my family, I have lived in close proximity with my mother all my lifetime. Although I have spent much time abroad, she was always the one to write to, to send my news, to come back to. In many ways my mother’s tastes and mine are divergent. Sometimes I even feel we don’t talk the same language. Naturally there is the usual disparity — that of two different generations — that comes between us, but perhaps an added trouble comes from the fact that I have found my way into a world that is not hers.
Sometimes I feel she is jealous and embittered; then I marvel that, at such an age, she has not developed more of the faults that often come with age. On the whole it is a relationship that is very close and harmonious and loving. It is also one of great duration, which only makes the inevitable end, which I will have to face one day, all the more unbearable.
She, more than I realise, is the one that I rely upon. She has wisdom, has had a lifetime of experience and she knows instinctively a great deal in matters of taste. She has always managed to run the houses we’ve lived in with success.
I am foolish enough to be influenced by a well-meaning friend who spoke highly of a fortune-teller. ‘She is uncanny. Do go and see her.’ I did. The birdlike little creature, dressed in the colour of raspberry fool, predicted the imminent death of my aged mother.
It was, therefore, with a feeling of great sadness that I came down to Reddish for my last weekend of the summer. Late August is a melancholy time of the year in any case, but some superstition had given me the feeling that perhaps this would be — after the fifty years of our life together — the last weekend that I would spend with my mother. In the light of my secret fear, her enthusiasms, convictions, energy, her economies, and her broad outlook on life appeared more poignant than ever.
Luckily it has been a quiet and pleasant weekend with summer sun continuing uninterrupted. The fields are yellow with barley and gold with corn, the hedges pale with spikes of long grasses, fronds of clover in full flower, and the trees are that dark, dark olive green that is almost black. My mother and I enjoyed the quiet. The stress of work was over, and now I had only to bother about tidying, packing the essentials, and, ineffectively rather, talking to the gardener about future plans. My mother, I was glad to hear, made many plans for next summer. ‘We must have at least a dozen new roses — and I must order seeds — clarkia and more ranunculus. They’ve done well this year, and I didn’t know we could grow them.’ But her gardening knowledge is by no means confined to the ordering of plants. She knows exactly what has to be done to the earth, with the result that only a few of our things have failed this year. ‘Gulliver should have thrown a bucket of water over those strawberry tubs in early May.’
Surreptitiously I tried to watch my mother, rather than, as is my custom, almost taking her presence for granted. I noted the intensity of surprise in her face as she appeared at the door of her bedroom to hear me ask at what height the carpenter should hang the baskets in the winter garden. I studied her look of amusement, or assumed terror, when confronted by the onrush of the army of Alys Essex’s pugdogs. Most delightful was to see her from the top of the garden talking to Stacey, the jobbing gardener, as she walked along the lawns at such a brisk pace towards us. Accompanied by her own pug, she walked gracefully, sturdily, energetically as a colt. She is still wonderfully lithe and energetic, and she emanates an aura of well-being. White-haired, with remnants of great beauty, she is remarkable.
The ‘winter garden’ has mercifully been completed. I think much of the time spared to my mother will be spent in it at work on her tapestry. ‘I’ll never finish this needlework rug in my lifetime,’ she says. ‘Nonsense!’ I reply half-heartedly. I tried to sketch my mother as she sat in the winter garden, surrounded by lilies in pots. But I was tired — worn out by the summer and by emotion. In any case, one sketch more or less — what is that in the face of life? I was sad, though, not to have some little picture that would be the perfect souvenir.
She was somewhat nervous in the car. She shied even at a signal marking a main road ahead; but we motored happily through the Chalke valley: Ebbesbourne Wake, Alvediston, Berwick, etc., down to the valley of Coombe — to visit the Freuds in their new greystone house. She remembered the Freud house in the days of its former owner, as she did the names of the gardener and the gardener’s boy opposite at Swan Lake Cottage. As we drove along the Shaftesbury-Salisbury road, she remembered so much more than I did about the people who had lived around us at Ashcombe: ‘That man Samson that kept the garage was a perfect brute. Mrs Mullin, such a nice woman, at the butcher’s, always gave me lilies of the valley.’ The summer day was almost painfully beautiful; the hills in a strange mist of heat. I got out of the car to pick a bunch of clover for my mother to give to Lucian. She said: ‘You’ve got good eyes to see the clover so far away.’
VISIT TO THE MOROSINI
Venice: September 1955
When Venice was comparatively new to me, twenty or thirty summers ago, the Italian aristocracy continued to congregate, as they had done since the days of Canaletto, in St Mark’s Piazza after the heat of the day was over. With eighteenth-century flourish they continued to greet one another with exaggerated nods and smiles.
At this time it was difficult to believe that the Morosini had once possessed such beauty that she had become famous, but it was easy to surmise that she had been a great personality. I was intrigued to hear stories about her, many of them surely false, but all helping to create a legend.
The Morosini was said to have been more admired than any woman in Italy, and to have had many important lovers, amongst whom was the German Kaiser who, at the time she was living at the Cap d’Oro, had addressed one of his letters to her simply:
‘To The Most Beautiful Woman
In The Most Beautiful House
In The Most Beautiful City
In The World.’
The letter is said to have reached its destination.
The Morosini’s beauty centred on her brilliant turquoise-emerald eyes, her thinness of limb — an unusual attribute at this time — and her flowing red hair. By degrees, the brilliance of the eyes faded, the incandescence of the complexion was replaced by heavy applications of ‘enamel’, and the auburn tresses were dipped into a strong rejuvenating dye. A cruel rhyme was circulated about her:
Je suis la ruine en flammes
Et voilà mon épigramme;
Mais approchez sans crainte
Parce que, si la ruine est vraie,
La flamme est peinte.
The Morosini was of bourgeois origin, the daughter of a well-to-do Genoese banker. She had married a somewhat effete aristocrat whom, two years later, she dismissed. In an effort to maintain respectability at a time when women were not supposed to live alone, she brought her father to chaperone her. In spite of the beautiful daughter’s desire for social success and for choosing her lovers less with her heart than her brain, and although surrounded by men of the greatest power, she remained suspect. Her love affairs became as notorious as her entertainments, but respectability still avoided her. It was only when her hair turned white, and she became lady-in-waiting to Queen Eleanor, that she achieved security. She had never been considered particularly witty but, with the passage of time, she became vivacious and full of fun. All through her life, and however lavish her parties, she showed an inability to be generous. Meanness dogged her throughout; in fact, it robbed her of her final epitaph: in order to economise on the fees she would pay for her portraits, she would employ second-rate painters. Instead of being immortalised in her epoch by Boldini, she decided on vast imitations by Salvatico (wearing a tailleur of the 1914 epoch, Parma violets and, inevitably, a large hat). Instead of Helleu, she sat to the Florentine, Corcus, who made a pale art nouveau nonsense of her in veils and mists and 1920 bandeau.
Brando Brandolini intimated one morning recently that nothing would be easier than for him to take me to meet the Morosini, and that it would amuse him to see my reactions to her. Since the former beauty now never emerges from her palazzo, having had the misfortune to break a femur, and must remain in an invalid’s chair, she has become to the outside world even more of a legend.
At the end of a great hall on the piano nobile of a palazzo overlooking the Grand Canal, with shining, polished stone floors and high, echoing walls, there came an extraordinary series of parrot-like screams. As the volume of sound increased at our approach, a white-haired, painted woman with cherries and cream complexion, in black taffeta, was seen in the distance, waving and gesticulating wildly from her perch.
‘Who are you?’ she screamed in English. ‘Who is this? Six of you — what a lot! ... Brando and Charlie Bestigui? ... And who are you? ... Oh, Ode de Mun and Freddie Cabrol and Daisy ... And who are you? ... Oh! — are you the English photographer who took the Coronation? Oh, you’re very chic, very elegant!’ Gales of convulsed laughter.
The aged beauty, eighty-nine years of age, wielded a stick and fluttered her large, black fan like a great actress who knows that the curtain is up and that the Goldoni comedy is under way. She relayed the tattle of Venice. Gossip is her passion and keeps her going: from early morning until two o’clock each day she is busy screaming into the telephone. She knows who is leaving, who is arriving, and not only who is sleeping, but who is dining with whom; it is a life of eighteenth-century intrigue and plot.
Footmen poured glasses of raspberry or redcurrant juice, or tipped cream into coffee. An incessant stream of visitors arrived. The old lady gave the impression of merry sweetness and loving kindness. But at no time had she been particularly endowed with either of these qualities; always she had shown a healthy respect for important people and an inflexible indifference to others. She could always laugh at herself and was the first to relate how, in a desperate attempt to improve the service in her house, as soon as she heard of the death of one of her best friends she telephoned to the butler, before the cadaver was even laid out, to know if he and his first footman would come into her household. It was after her fifth call that the butler ordered the telephone to be taken off the hook.
The Morosini continues to flash her fan above the splashing waters of the Canal. Perhaps only now has she reached her apotheosis. She has everything she needs; happiness exudes from her. She has acquired an audacity of speech and a frankness that comes with either extreme youth or partial senility.
TASTE CHANGES
Frosca Munster, who has come over from Paris, asked: ‘Have you read The Arabian Nights?’
I was rather surprised at her question. ‘I suppose I read it when I was growing up, but I’ve forgotten about it.’
‘Well, you must re-read it now. You will thank me for sending you into the most delicious world. You will be so happy all the time you’re reading. It’s like a holiday. Incidentally, all of Picasso is based on these stories — the Cyclops, the magic caves. They’re enchanting.’
Frosca and I then discussed the question of ‘timing’, and Peter Watson said that certain books he had lately re-read had given him such a completely new impression that they might have been entirely different from those he had read before. So much depended on one’s attitude and susceptibilities of the moment. Certain books one loathed in the past became one’s favourites later on; the disappointment at others is sad; and so with many aspects of taste.
It is interesting how, when one discovers a certain author, one invariably finds that one’s friends have also picked upon the same writer at the same time. I do not know why I have never before read the Goncourt journals; but, since they have now made a great effect on me, I find that others suddenly share the same passion. Likewise, if by chance I come across Max Beerbohm’s remark about never having met anyone who had boasted of dining last night with the Borgias, so next day in conversation someone will quote this same witticism.
The dark colours and sombre restraint of my mother’s taste revolted me when I was a child. A certain cretonne in rather bold colours, which she chose to cover a French chair, appalled me; I now think of it as of an extraordinary and strange beauty. I consider it was a miracle that she should have found it. So it is even with plants and the flowers in one’s garden. Thirty years ago when Lovat Fraser designed Polly Peachum’s costume for The Beggar’s Opera, I thought there was nothing more beautiful than candy pink roses. Now I am sick of them and prefer the pale flesh-coloured opalescent ones.
It is not just a surfeit that creates this desire for something different. It is less gratuitous than one imagines. There must be some dynamism, some inner urge, which creates a need and makes itself felt in many different directions all at the same time.
FRYERN: THE JOHNS
Autumn 1955
I have been working concentratedly for too long — result: I am like a fenced-in animal, seldom migrating beyond the confines o
f my terrace. Realising my staleness, I telephoned the Johns near Fordingbridge and proposed that I should come over forthwith and see them. At Fryern, the delightfully ramshackle, well-proportioned house in which the John family live, you always come across the unstereotyped or unexpected. In flat-toned, unenthusiastic growl Dorelia, or Dodo (Mrs John), answered my call and said it would be all right for me to appear any time — not a very warm welcome; but then this beautiful and remarkable woman is the very antithesis of a ‘gusher’. She is particularly unforthcoming on the telephone.
I got into the car knowing I was about to enjoy myself. The sun was slanting over the hills before going in after a splendid day of late autumn. Mounting high over the downs one single magpie flew across my path.
I spat superstitiously and recited: ‘Curse you — where is your mate?’ But my spirits rose higher as I motored through the pretty villages of Martin, where Gainsborough lived for a time in a low timbered cottage, and Damerham, where the Japanese anemones were still flourishing outside the grey-stone and thatched houses. (One forgets that with the Michaelmas daisies, petunias, dahlias and chrysanthemums there is more colour in autumn cottage gardens than at any other time of the year.)
Past the common near Fordingbridge I took a wrong turning — I always do — but eventually the scene became familiar and I drove past the hideous ‘modern’ block that is Augustus’ ‘second’ studio, and arrived at the late eighteenth-century house. I went through the open front door, past the Modigliani sculpture and the inconsequential clutter in the hall, and, looking into the large sitting room, found nobody. The walls were covered with paintings, a cat slept on a sofa. It was in the dining room that I found Dodo and Augustus sitting at the long refectory table littered with the remains of a large tea and lots of tobacco ash and cigarette stubs. It is a marvellous room: typically ‘Dodo’ in taste with its vast dresser, stretching the length of one wall, filled with every sort of china, pots of preserves, and assorted objects. On the walls a mass of various paintings by Gwen John and Augustus and Matthew Smith. A great white head of magnolia grandiflora, cut from the tree that pressed against the tall window-panes, was in a big pot waiting to be painted by Augustus.
