A Complicated Marriage (26 page)

 

The plush Victorian candy box of the boat train to Folkestone, the channel ferry, the gulls that never left us nor cared whether they were English or French, the exchange of the white cliffs of Dover for the cliffs and customs of Calais. Cliffs aside, what really told me I was in France was Clem's appalling transformation to Mr. Hyde in the dining car to Paris. Was it the martini that wasn't right, or the soup he didn't want, or the disdain of the waiter that set him off? I don't know. Whatever it was, a heretofore never seen churl of a Clem erupted. He scowled and barked,
treated the man as if he had committed a heinous crime and was too stupid to live. The waiter, being French, turned on his heel, nose in the air, as dismissive as ever. Clem, smiling like the Cheshire cat, was delighted, with himself and with the waiter. He said it was an involuntary reaction to weeks of living under the thumb of the too-civil, too-buttoned-up British ways—the “ways” that I had found so charming. Now he was free. His venting over, he returned to his easygoing self and the churl disappeared forever.

By 10:00 PM, we were at the Quai Voltaire, at the time a borderline-seedy hotel on the Seine, our headquarters for two weeks. And we were off to a quick start. The Gottliebs and Paul Jenkins had left a message to meet them at a bar on the corner. Openings, studios, parties, the usual drill followed, except that here we spent most of our time in restaurants and cafés. With a few notable exceptions.

Tea at Brion Gysin's. A brief glimpse into the “romantic” Paris. A shabby building on a curlicue street in the Latin Quarter, the tiny garret with shutters open to rooftops of every shade of gray. We were at what was known as the Beat Hotel. Brion, a close friend and collaborator of William Burroughs, had reinvented the dada technique of cut-ups, wherein prose, poetry, and music were cut up and randomly rearranged or recorded. He, in effect, altered reality.

I grasped little of all that, but what I saw and heard that day certainly altered
my
reality. Brion wore a flowing orange silk caftan as he wafted amid immense pillows of glittering stripes and tassels, and walls swathed with exotic fabrics. He had re-created Tangiers, where he had lived for a while. He played tapes on a large machine—I had never seen a tape recorder before—that had the whine of the Casbah, and others that were compositions of cut-ups of everyday sounds and poems. We sipped Moroccan tea and sucked on a hookah of hashish laced with opium. That afternoon would be my closest brush with the expatriate Beats. Brion was a sweet, gentle man, evidently living on a thread of material subsistence, but awash in the creative riches of his mind and senses.

The next evening, we infiltrated a different world. We were invited to tea at Elena Yurievitch's. A small elegantly appointed apartment, a small elegant gathering of guests. The last to arrive, we stood for a moment,
until two more chairs were found and we were squeezed into the already seated circle. As in England, there were no introductions; it was assumed you were either known or not worth knowing. On our spindly needlepoint chairs, we balanced cups of tea, lace napkins, and here and there a glass of sherry, while the delectable melody of French conversation played on, not a word of which—despite my high-school French—did I understand. For all the world, I might have been at a meeting of a secret society, or a séance, or a wake. Whatever, there was a set of arcane rules known only to the initiates. And while Clem and I were tolerated, we were not folded in.

Lord Norwich, whom we had met in London, kindly whispered a few names, all Lord or Lady or Princess this or that, intimating that they were known as much for the circles they traveled in as for their achievements. He himself was a viscount, in the diplomatic service, and son of Lady Diana Cooper, who sat across from me and had already caught my eye. So that was my predecessor at Cleve Lodge, she of the discarded tissue paper, she who had lain her fair head on the same pillow, or did she travel with her own?

I stared shamelessly, like a peasant, at the vision in soft green, the supreme beauty of her day. A pale, blond English garden. Silk dress draped just so, shoes to match, and a wide-brimmed hat draped in green tulle that half shaded her powdered porcelain white face. Oh, that hat, the way the green of it reflected on her skin. A green that would have made anyone else look terminal but made her incandescent. She never acknowledged our presence. And she never moved more than a hair's breadth. Before we left, Lord Norwich led us to the window. There below was the garden of the Rodin Museum, the sculpture sprawled so comfortably amid the benches in the courtyard. I wondered what
The Thinker
and his confreres would have thought of our stiff circle.

A more disconcerting reality was the Algerian war for independence that was spilling over into the streets of Paris. De Gaulle had been brought out of retirement, and now, after five years of fighting, the French were having a hard time letting go of their colony. The conflict would go on another three years. In the meantime, there were armed soldiers everywhere, and we might turn a corner and the street would be blocked off,
sirens and megaphones at full blast. Most frightening was the sound of explosions, random and at any time. People didn't talk about it much, and if they did, it was dismissed as “political unrest” and life went on as usual. But for me it was the unacknowledged elephant that made it all the more unnerving.

There was another battleground that struck closer to home. After the war, many young American artists had chosen to live on the cheap and work in Paris, for centuries the center of the art world. New York was the Lower East Side and those “upstarts” at the Cedar Bar. Paris was ateliers and the Deux Magots and Le Dome, where the past mingled with the new. The only problem: The new art suffered in comparison with what was coming out of New York. Paris was now imitating rather than innovating. Slowly but surely, by the mid-fifties the center of the art world was shifting to America, the least likely place imaginable. As if to hammer the point home, the Museum of Modern Art had put together a show called “The New American Painting” that was now traveling around Europe. French artists seemed to shrug it off; where there was great art, there would always be Paris. But for the expats, this was a bitter pill. They were in the wrong city at the wrong time.

After an opening of Josef Sima at Facchetti's, a large group adjourned to a café. It was crowded, everyone standing around drinking, when a young man came up to Clem and without a word punched him in the face. No great harm was done, and the man was quickly restrained. But the shock. Clem, as usual, shrugged it off as just one of those things. Seems his assailant was one of the American expats. Although he didn't know Clem personally, he knew about him and saw him as the standard bearer for the touted greatness of the new American art. That, and probably too much booze, had been enough to ignite his bitterness.

We spent a particularly long day at Pierre Soulages's studio, where, in a shed out back, I had my first run-in with a hole-in-the-ground latrine with two only boards to stand on. Pierre was a lively, passionate artist, and the afternoon extended to dinner, joined by his wife, Colette, and eventually on to Les Halles, where we ate shellfish until 3:00 AM. On another occasion, the sculptor Robert Jacobsen invited us to his house in Montfermeil for a Sunday with his family. Near Paris, but in another
world, we arrived at an old isolated farmhouse. Lunch under a grape arbor, everyone round-faced and apple-cheeked, filled with warmth. We were welcomed with an abundance of food, wine, and high spirits. Later we played
boules
on the lawn. I had stepped out of time into a France I had only imagined.

One night, the painter Georges Mathieu invited us to dinner. The imposing interior of his historic mansion had been painted a stark white. The effect was startling, more so because, outside of the barest necessities, there was no furniture. Here and there were obscene sculptures of a scale designed to offend. His own art was on the walls. Dinner was formal, served by a butler, again in an otherwise bare room. Mathieu, though elegant and aristocratic in demeanor, loved to shock and had gained notoriety for his method of painting. He preferred to create his works in public, painting his huge canvases on a street, in a park, wherever. All in an hour or two, usually in costume. Many ridiculed, but everyone knew of him. Of course, in a few years such events, or “happenings,” would become commonplace, but at the time, Mathieu held the stage. His suave darkness, flashing eyes, and sculpted mustache reminded me of Dalí. But as a person, he was a mild-mannered intellectual who enjoyed a good debate. He and Clem got along well, and he would look us up when he came to New York. Clem chided him for his theatrics, saying his work was too good for that and that in the long run he was getting in his own way.

We also met Jim Fitzsimmons, who lived in Switzerland and was publisher of the new magazine
Art International
. He would become a close friend. And we had dinner with an old colleague of Clem's, George L. K. Morris, from his
Partisan Review
days. On another night, we got together with Marjorie Ferguson, who Clem told me was the only woman he ever considered marrying besides me. I liked her; she was straight-talking, down to earth. Sort of like me, I thought.

With Kimber Smith, another expat painter whom we had known in New York, we went to L'Orangerie, the shrine to Monet's water lilies. I was enveloped and carried away. They were the most ecstatic paintings I had ever beheld; I longed to live beside their serene waters. Later, we went back to Kimber's for dinner. His beautiful wife, Gaby—she had
the smallest waist since Scarlett O'Hara—worked, of course, for Paris
Vogue.
She was also a sublime cook and had prepared a cassoulet that I would never forget. That night, Gaby was uncharacteristically on edge and argumentative during dinner. Later, in the studio, while Clem talked about Kimber's work, Gaby managed, only with some effort, to keep silent.

However, over brandy, when conversation turned to the Paris art scene and to Kimber's plans for showing in the future, she began to rail against galleries, saying that her husband's art was too good to be tossed into a corrupt marketplace, that she would never allow certain pictures out of the studio. Nothing new, I had grown accustomed to outbursts from wifely protectors of their geniuses. But Gaby stretched the parameters of possessiveness, as if she, her husband, and his art had been fused into one and their survival hung in the balance. Why? Like the old saw, was she afraid that a successful husband would leave her? Did she prefer to support the family, thereby keeping control? Kimber, a passive man, chugged brandy and never said a word.

I like to think that Clem let this moment alone, but I have a hunch he said, as I had heard him say in similar situations, “Stop acting like a wife.” In any event, the drama was all for naught. After we left, Clem said he hadn't seen anything that would have prompted him to recommend Kimber to French & Company. A disappointment, because Clem liked them both. For me, the whole thing was a mess—well, except for the water lilies and the cassoulet.

One morning early in our stay, Bill Rubin knocked on our door at the Quai Voltaire. He then stayed on and ate and talked through breakfast, lunch, and a long afternoon at the Louvre. In his early thirties, Bill lived in New York, taught art history at Sarah Lawrence, and was an art collector. A Francophile, he spent a good deal of time in Paris, where his brother, Larry, had opened a gallery. He was passionate, obsessive really, about art—the surrealists and now the abstract expressionists. His passions defined him. He ate Clem whole. I was used to people who bit off chunks of him, but with Bill, the pattern was set the moment he stormed our hotel and would continue throughout the years of their friendship.

Bill ate people and food the same way. We would have dinner with him
in New York every few weeks, often at L'Aiglon, a favorite of his and, for me, resonant with memories of long, formal meals with my grandmother. With the face and physique of a chubby boy, Bill had his own method of dieting. He wolfed down enormous quantities of food, all the while rationalizing that he ate only one meal a day. Course after course, he guzzled his way to the post-dessert finale, a large salver of individually wrapped macaroons, L'Aiglon's trademark. Still talking nonstop, he popped them into his mouth like peanuts, the wrappers piling high in front of him, while my tongue was still trying to dislodge the first sticky morsel from my molars.

Yes, I was jealous of Bill's bond with Clem, even that first day in Paris. They never seemed to run out of things to talk and argue about. Until I guess they did, but by then Bill had discovered power: He became curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in 1969, but by then I had stopped sitting around restaurant tables where art was the only dish on the menu. However grand his titles and position became, when I think of Bill, I will always think of a greedy, self-centered boy eating whatever he needed to fill himself up.

Paris and I didn't get along. Whether it was my language problem or the nonstop art talk, I needed an escape. Hoping to make friends with the city, I would set off alone, map in hand, searching its streets and monuments, any destination that had nothing to do with art. My first stop, the Bastille, which wasn't as much fun as I had hoped, but was no doubt a telling choice. I took a boat ride on the Seine and spent untold hours in cafés, staring at the passing parade. But never did I fall under the spell of the city's renowned charms.

I wondered if my reaction would have been different if I had been visiting as the wife of a shirt manufacturer. I hated being attached to Clem in a place where he was the object of so much ass kissing one minute and animosity the next. It spilled out onto him and, therefore, over me. Feelings never being simple, I also loved being there with him and knowing that I was seeing a part of Paris that shirt manufacturers never saw. Whatever the case, when it was time to go, I was glad to wave good-bye.