A Complicated Marriage (25 page)

I offer an example of a day during our trip to Europe in 1959, this from June 12. We are in Paris:

I always thought that because we hadn't gotten divorced after our trip to Europe in 1959, we never would. That I was along on the European journey at all was a fluke. Two years earlier Clem had come home early from
Commentary
one day and announced, “I've been fired.” No
surprise, the situation between Elliot Cohen, the editor, and Clem had been oil and water for some time. Clem was jubilant; at last he was free to do whatever he pleased or nothing at all, and he skipped off to the liquor store. My heart shrank as the last picture-book image of married life—where the “little woman” kisses her “hubby” good-bye as he whistles off to work—turned to ashes. Clem returned with the usual bottle of Tanqueray. When I murmured, “Shouldn't we be switching to Seagram?” I learned yet another valuable Clem lesson. “If you expect less, you'll get less. You never pull back, the money will be there.”

Of course, the notion that I might get a job never, or hardly ever, crossed my mind. The iconic “breadwinner husband” still hovered over the ashes. And Clem was right. Though we were stretched thin over the next two years, and though my mother's diamond bracelet made several trips to the Century Pawn shop—that Bergdorf Goodman of pawnshops on Eighth Avenue—we scraped through.

Then, in 1959, Clem was hired by the venerable gallery French & Company as an advisor for its new venture into contemporary art. He had already lined up local talent that included Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, David Smith, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Friedel Dzubas for the 1959–60 opening season. The directors were interested in adding a few Europeans to the mix. The gallery would of course be paying Clem's expenses. However, even though his $100-a-week fee had restored us to solvency, it would never cover a trip for two.

That's when the fluke came our way: The
Saturday Evening Post
asked Clem to write a piece about abstract expressionism for the heart-stopping fee of $1,500, an unheard-of amount for an art writer at that time. It was an amount that would allow me to tag along, as well as allow Clem to extend the trip and see as many treasures from the past as he could possibly see. But the price he paid was high. I watched him struggle with that piece, which would be his first and last for a mainstream magazine. It was also the first time he had to consider the needs of his audience, not explaining too much or too little, all the while staying true to himself. He finally hammered out a middle ground he could live with, but I always thought he would just as soon have seen that article disappear.

We made plans. We would travel by ship, Cunard's
Mauritania
, to our
first stop, England. May 15 was the big send-off. An astonishing number of people jammed the stateroom, spilling into the corridor, everyone from Clem's family to artists to the far-fetched. Perhaps ocean crossings were passé enough to be new again. Maybe they just felt like champagne at noon.

And then we were at sea. A romantic dream. A week of deck chairs, Ping-Pong, “elevenses,” teas, dancing, being cosseted. When he wasn't reading or writing, Clem was staring for what seemed hours at the sea, searching the horizon for any storm that would slake his thirst for adventure.

Too soon, we were in South Hampton in our rental car, map in hand, heading west, we hoped, to Cornwall. Clem, clutching the wheel, assuring me that driving on the left could be mastered easily. While I, after a few close calls with bicyclists, leaned half out of the window, yelling, “Watch out! Americans!” Miraculously in one piece, we arrived at Patrick and Delia Heron's house, Eagles Nest, a rambling old pile on a rise commanding views of fields and sea, in Zennor. Patrick had spent his boyhood there and now his daughters ran on that hill, their English blond hair streaming behind them.

The Herons were the nucleus of an enclave of young contemporary artists living in Cornwall, among them Terry Frost, Roger Hilton, John Wells, Peter Lanyon, Adrian Heath, and, perhaps most memorable to me, Bryan Wynter. Memorable because he lived atop Zennor Cairn, a steep hill accessible only by foot, in a house he had built himself, with a generator fueled by the wind, heat supplied by the sun, and, of course, his own well and garden for nourishment. Bryan also happened to be handsome and dashing and, like Lanyon, a glider pilot. Irresistible. The evening we went there for dinner, we stayed until three. It was like that in Zennor. Four days of parties, dancing, sightseeing in Penzance, Lands End, St. Ives, always with long afternoons in studios. And very long nights.

One such night at the Herons', around their long, crowded table, art talk fast and furious, Roger Hilton, the bad-boy cutup of the group, started to bait Clem about this and that. Clem, as usual, took it in stride, not responding in kind. Roger, not getting the reaction he had hoped for, switched targets to the personal, saying something about Clem's having
lost his punch, gone soft, since he had married Jenny. Such a feeble jab, but the tears welled, people made a to-do, and I felt like an idiot child. I thought my skin had finally toughened up, but once again I was taken by surprise, the words quick as a viper's tongue. It shouldn't have been a surprise, but I had been lulled by the days of kindness and inclusiveness, forgetting that where there were artists, studio visits, liquor, and Clem, all too often there was combustion.

Two days later, on our way to London, we crossed the Salisbury Plain on the lookout for Stonehenge. There, between one unremarkable town and another, sitting off the road on a slight rise, was an eruption of stones. No warning, not even a sign, we swerved onto a side road and there we were. No cars, no one but us, the circle of stones, and the setting sun. The brutish power of them, like a vise dragging me back three thousand years. I touched their rough coldness, walked their shadows, wove my steps between them, breathing them in, shaking with awe. I bowed before the mysteries that shrouded the astonishing site. Then, the sun gone, a new moon above, it was time to find a pub and a bed for the night. Evermore I would love stone and rock and the secrets they kept.

The next day we drove into Hyde Park Gate. Quite a different circle, this one of mansions where Virginia Woolf had spent her girlhood, where the sculptor Jacob Epstein now lived, where across the garden I could glimpse the mansard eaves that housed Winston Churchill. At the head of the circle was the grandest of all, Cleve Lodge, the house of Teddy and Nika Hulton—Sir and Lady, of course, in keeping with the neighborhood. This would be our house, too, for the next two weeks. Meyers, white gloved and august, my first butler in the flesh, would be our guide into the quirky Neverland of the superrich.

Upstairs, no grand four-poster awaited; Clem was billeted in eight-year-old Cosmo's bed flanked by toy soldiers, with me adjacent on a lumpy cot in the former nanny's cell. Out of nowhere, a personal maid appeared in the makeshift room to unpack my things and reline my bureau drawers with tissue paper. Lady Diana Cooper had vacated the cell that morning, she explained. Well, who was I to be picky? For the duration of my stay, my clothes would discreetly disappear and reappear, cleaned, ironed, a button tightened, a hem repaired. Another part
of our household regime was Cosmo, darting in and out of our rooms, too early, with schoolboy chatter and curiosity. Clem was grumpy but charmed. The Hultons were abroad the first few days, but Cosmo would remind us that the house was not as empty as it seemed. He introduced us to his ancient tortoise, which roamed the gardens, and he showed us the tennis court, tucked modestly behind some shrubbery. All in the heart of London.

The drawing room awaited, at once cozy and sumptuous in the English way, the sort of room Americans aspire to and never pull off. There we would have drinks and entertain our visitors. Behind closed doors, off the entrance hall, was the formal sitting room, furnished in Louis XV, its gilded delicacy defying human touch, the pale silk walls dotted with Nika's renowned collection of Paul Klee. A room we rarely entered except to behold.

The house came to life with the Hultons' return. Teddy, a small tidy man with quiet, unassuming ways, may have been the ruler of his publishing empire, but Nika was the whirling, radiant center at Cleve Lodge. An erstwhile Russian princess, she was tall and strikingly beautiful, with a cloud of dark hair, magnificent creamy shoulders and breasts displayed in dresses made à la mode for her, all in the same style: off the shoulder, décolletage just so, tight at the waist, shoes to match, open-toed, of course. She knew what worked—why play around? She was also a businesswoman, author, jet-setter, art collector, and society figure whose photo I would trip over in the morning paper. She gave us a party and arrived late. Someone said she sometimes didn't show up at all.

While the hospitality at Cleve Lodge may have been extravagant and on the house, I paid nonetheless. A rare bracelet of large cat's-eyes linked together and set in heavy gold, which my grandfather had had made in Africa for my mother, was stolen off the bureau. I had left it there, and then it was gone. It must have been tantalizing. But still, who would have thought?

Particularly nice was renewing our New York friendship over dinner with the art dealer Victor Waddington and meeting his wife and son, Leslie, who had recently begun to pursue his father's profession. Leslie and John Kasmin would become the two leading dealers of the new
American art. Later that night, Clem and I walked home through Hyde Park. Gentle London. We spent time with art writer Lawrence Alloway and E. J. Powers, who was passionately amassing his enormous collection of contemporary art. We visited the studios of Bill Turnbull and the sculptors Eduardo Paolozzi and Anthony Caro, who, with his wife, Sheila, would become our lifelong friends. We saw Richard Wollheim, the philosopher and art writer, poet W. S. Graham, curator Roland Penrose, and David Gibbs, who became a guide and friend. At the U.S. embassy, we met an exceptionally engaging new friend, Stephan Munsing, who, for decades, would continue to introduce American artists and their work into the capital cities of Europe.

We spent hours over drinks at the Dorchester with Isaiah Berlin, philosopher, critic, political pundit, and an old friend of Clem's. My first highbrow who also knew how to have a good time—besides Clem, that is. And before we left, the gang from Cornwall came up for a few days, and we partied and danced into the morning hours while I pursued my flirtation with Bryan Wynter.

The biggest treat for me was our lunch with author Sybille Bedford. Clem had a soft spot for Sybille because of her connection to Jeanne Connolly, his glamour-girl lover during the war years, when so many Brits lived in New York. He also warned me that Sybille was pretentious, could be a bore, and guzzled white wine, which she pronounced “white
ween
.” We met at the Hyde Park Hotel. Small and round, she was at first barely discernable from the other matrons out on the town for lunch. However, once conversation began, Sybille was anything but matronly. She and Clem quickly settled into fast and furious gossip about their raft of mutual friends, kicking off with tales of the outrageous and hapless Jeanne, who, having succumbed to too much booze and fast living, had died in 1950 at thirty-nine.

I happily sailed through the meal on tales of Auden, Isherwood, Spender, Huxley, Mary McCarthy, Kingsley Amis . . . I fantasized that Sybille, a lesbian, would fall madly in love with me. She didn't. In fact, we exchanged only a few words. But I did grab a moment to gush about how much I had enjoyed her much-acclaimed
Legacy
. Published three years before, when she was forty-five, it was her first novel. Yes, Sybille
was pretentious in that she lived on a shoestring but loved to parade her highborn, snobbish ways. And yes, she did guzzle “white ween,” but boring, no. And by 1959 I was an expert on what was boring.

One day, strolling the city, we passed Aquascutum, where Clem spotted a suit in the window that he thought would look nice on me. It was a nauseous green that Clem insisted was an “interesting color,” but that made Nika, my new arbiter of taste, blanch. Needless to say, we bought it. Besides making me look like the rear end of a truck, the suit was made of such sturdy wool that I couldn't kill it with a stick. Even the moths took a pass. I am sure that if I hadn't eventually recycled it to a thrift shop, it would have outlived me.

One day we took an excursion up the Thames to Greenwich for a visit with John Bratby. His paintings had been used in the recent movie
The Horse's Mouth
, and he had become something of a celebrity. He lived in a crumbling estate on the edge of nowhere. Cold and damp inside and out, for a while we shivered by a derelict swimming pool, empty except for a few feet of sludge. The house had almost no furniture, and in the distance I now and then glimpsed a large woman with a child on her hip; neither was introduced. Consistent with the ambience, the studio, at one time perhaps a ballroom, was jammed with Bratby's large, dark signature pictures that mirrored all of our nightmares.

On the train back to London, my thoughts ran amok from Brontë to gothic horror movies, with a dash of
Sunset Boulevard
. Arriving late, we went directly from the station to a party at the Alloways', after which I begged off and went home to replay and put to rest the day. I heard the indefatigable Clem come in around three.