Bruce Chatwin (25 page)
Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs
Intensely private people can still be intimate, but Bruce’s privacy was generally not about protecting the intimacy he shared. Many of those who had loved Bruce speak of his frigidity, his emotional unwillingness, his lack of connection. He told Howard Hodgkin how he had got into bed at last with someone he craved. “But,” he said, “it was just like making love to a beautiful machine.”
“Just
think,
” said Hodgkin, “how many people have felt the same way about you.”
think,
” said Hodgkin, “how many people have felt the same way about you.”
Susan Sontag met Bruce in New York in 1979 and observed the strange sexual avidity in which he engaged at that time. “He slept with everyone, once: it goes with being a great beauty. His sexuality was like his possessions, a means of engaging and also of not engaging with the world. He was profoundly solitary and therefore conducted his sexual activity as a way of connecting with people. At such an industrial rate it meant not an exclusive or intensifying connection: it meant he
had
a connection. ‘I know this person because I’ve slept with him/her.’ It gave him the right to call someone next time he was in town. There were no rules about it.”
had
a connection. ‘I know this person because I’ve slept with him/her.’ It gave him the right to call someone next time he was in town. There were no rules about it.”
He felt a stronger urge towards his own sex, but was also powerfully attracted to women. Francis Wyndham noticed how “he convincingly expressed a desire for young rather sexy girls. I know that wasn’t a fake.” He would have infatuations with them – especially if they had a touch of the exotic, like Samira Kirollos, a Copt whom he took to a ball in Cowes. Another young woman to whom he responded was Ursula Digby-Jones.
No one could have embodied more satisfyingly Bruce’s childhood history for himself. In 1956, Kenelm’s tall, blonde wife had escaped her native Hungary and been shot as she crossed the border into Austria. A German officer brought her to the British Embassy in Vienna where a First Secretary looked at this dishevelled woman in a fur coat and asked if she had a passport.
“No, I have this.” She gave him a slim volume of
The Waste Land
and, said Kenelm, “never looked back.”
The Waste Land
and, said Kenelm, “never looked back.”
Bruce tried to seduce Ursula after the opening of the nightclub at which he had worn Jimmy Douglas’s python. He followed her back to her hotel room, squeezed a foot in the door. “She threw me out.”
Someone who did not reject his advances was Gloria Taylor, a former Chanel model with a fringe and high cheekbones who ran the Dior boutique in Conduit Street. Gloria was the sister of the actor Malcolm MacDowell. Known as “the naughtiest girl at school”, she was right out of the world of Margharita’s magazines. She had met George Ortiz in Paris and Ortiz had introduced her to Hewett and Hewett, in the winter of 1962, introduced her to Bruce. She says, “One night after dinner at Robert Erskine’s we went out and had an affair. I thought I was a bit of a baby snatcher. John Hewett looked at me askance.”
Bruce called her “Glor” and liked the fact she worked for Dior. She found him painfully shy, despite his bluster. “He always had to make statements and justify himself. He couldn’t relax and be calm. Something was goading him. Somehow, he was always on the go.”
One weekend, Bruce took her sailing and he changed completely. “I’ve never seen a change like that. His real courage came to the fore. From being butterfly twittery, he became calm, bold, even-tempered, the master of himself and of the boat. You felt safe.” Their affair continued through 1963. “It was like being with someone who wasn’t always there. There wasn’t a cosy niceness afterwards. He never said he was in love with me.” Then Bruce told Gloria he had met an American woman who owned a car and would take them to Wales.
XII
Elizabeth
I think he was fascinated by my voice.
—Elizabeth Chatwin
ELIZABETH CHANLER WORKED AS WILSON’S SECRETARY. SHE WAS
two years older than Bruce, small, alert and bubbly, with a deep stripe of shyness. “The one truly delightful thing about you,” a friend wrote to her at this time, “beside your occasional spontaneous overflow of healthy animal spirits is your lack of that talent known as ego-inflating.”
two years older than Bruce, small, alert and bubbly, with a deep stripe of shyness. “The one truly delightful thing about you,” a friend wrote to her at this time, “beside your occasional spontaneous overflow of healthy animal spirits is your lack of that talent known as ego-inflating.”
She lived in a cold flat in Chelsea with two friends from Radcliffe, where she had been at college, and Wilson’s grey parrot. She was engaged to be married to an American living in Boston.
Bruce told a friend that he first met Elizabeth on a dig in Persia. By the end of the day they had fallen into the sack “like two warm rabbits”. They met, in fact, at Sotheby’s. From her desk Elizabeth watched him talking with a client. “I could see him from behind, in a double-breasted charcoal grey suit with a high, stiff detachable collar, standing there, looking at something, his blonde hair sticking up.” She had read
The Lord of the Rings
at Radcliffe: Bruce was like Strider.
The Lord of the Rings
at Radcliffe: Bruce was like Strider.
Bruce took no special notice of her to begin with. After he had an operation on his varicose veins, Elizabeth visited Bruce in Fitzroy Square Nursing Home. He lay eating from a pot of caviar, a gift of Simon Sainsbury. “He never offered me any. Then he asked me to buy him a Hermés diary. When I found out how much it cost, I said, ‘No’.” He invited her to dinner at Grosvenor Crescent Mews, but cancelled at the last moment because there would be too many women. “He had awful manners in lots of ways.”
He paid Elizabeth more attention following his first visit to America in the winter of 1961, from which he returned wearing a bright red and yellow lumberjacket and a red hat with a baseball brim and ear flaps. He was, Elizabeth observed, thrilled with it. “You can’t wear that!” she shrieked. “It’s a farmer’s outfit.”
His fascination with America woke him up to Elizabeth, the only American at Sotheby’s. On subsequent visits to New York, he learned how her Catholic East Coast pedigree, from a small, aware, élite coterie of old money, was so exclusive as to be almost impenetrable. “As recherché as your rare bit of porcelain,” says Kasmin. “When it’s related to an amusing, well-read, clever, alert girl who’s working for your boss, it can seem rather attractive.”
On hearing Elizabeth tell a story about a housefly in a New York apartment, Bruce felt: “This was a woman I could marry.”
Elizabeth was born into two of America’s most prominent clans.
Daisy Terry, her father’s mother, had been a friend of Henry James, who praised her as “the only truly cultured woman in America”. Daisy was an immensely strong character who kept a diary in German, rode to hounds and played piano to concert standard. Aged 85 and living in a Boston hotel, Daisy was described by
Harper’s Bazaar
as “a challenging presence in a world where such quality is rare”. Elizabeth knew her as “a very old lady, blind in the one eye with a black patch – and tunnel vision in the other”.
Harper’s Bazaar
as “a challenging presence in a world where such quality is rare”. Elizabeth knew her as “a very old lady, blind in the one eye with a black patch – and tunnel vision in the other”.
Elizabeth was shaped by Daisy’s world – eccentric women interested in art and travel – rather than by her immediate family, who were “desperately conventional”. Her mother, Gertrude Laughlin, was descended from worthy and solid Protestants who pretended to be Scottish, but came from the Irish west coast and got rich quickly. They owned the country’s largest steel mill, in Pittsburgh, where they founded banks and built ships. They stood at the opposite end of the trade to the Turnells of Sheffield.
Her father was Rear-Admiral Hubert Chanler, a slight, trim Catholic who collected Tiffany clocks, large cars and terrifying French poodles that he named after favourite wines and deployed like battleships. Known as “Bobby” because she could not say Poppy, her father was, says Elizabeth, “a Victorian figure without any leavening sense of the ridiculous”. In Paris, he had once met, completely unwillingly, Léger, and could not understand why his friends the Murphys “had this gear box from a Ford car on their mantelpiece”. Bobby would become one of Bruce’s stock characters. No one imitated him better: “My career in the Navy’s been rather strange. People start talking about me as a tea-time admiral!”
Years later, Bruce wrote to Cary Welch about Elizabeth’s father. He had observed “the Admiral” glowering at the guests to a party he and Elizabeth were throwing for Millington-Drake in the Chanlers’ New York apartment. “‘I am Admiral Chanler; I don’t know who you are; but then I don’t know anyone here and this is my house.’ By this time he had had far too much to drink having started at 4 p.m., and started to make such observations as, ‘There are many people here who, under normal circumstances, I would regard as of questionable honesty,’ singling out in particular a friend of mine called Tristram Powell, ex-Eton, son of the novelist Anthony Powell, as a ‘very suspicious man with a beaky nose’.” The Admiral encouraged his wife to grill Bruce at dinner about the marital status of everyone present. Bruce wrote, “I would love to have invented so bizarre a sex life for each of the characters in turn that they would have a whole-dark-Geneseo-winter-full of conversation and speculation. THEY NEED IT.”
At the end of his life, Bruce started to write a novel based, in part, on the Chanlers. Late on, he saw an attractive subject in Elizabeth’s family – their eccentricities (sometimes teetering on insanity), their reckless Bohemianism and the Jamesian wealth which they had used to furnish houses in Washington and New York. “My dear, the loot!” Bruce told his American editor, Elisabeth Sifton.
The family historian, Lately Thomas, wrote that the Chanler mix of genes was “a volatile mixture about as unstable as nitroglycerine”. The first-known Chanlers, like the Chatwins, were Normans who had settled in England. They were self-assured, cosmopolitan, excitable, with a weakness for adventure. The American branch began with the Rev. Isaac Chanler, who left Bristol in 1710 for Charleston, Carolina. Isaac’s son was the author of
Hysteria: its causes and aspects
, a study of some relevance to subsequent generations. These included: William Backhouse Astor, a furious hoarder, and Sam Ward, an unrestrainable spender of three fortunes. Elizabeth’s father could trace himself to Peter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch governor of New York, and a rebel who liked to plough his land in a court suit to show his contempt for King George III. The two chief distinguishing Chanler traits were an exceptional self-sufficiency and a distinctive, attention-compelling “Chanler voice”, both of which Elizabeth inherited.
Hysteria: its causes and aspects
, a study of some relevance to subsequent generations. These included: William Backhouse Astor, a furious hoarder, and Sam Ward, an unrestrainable spender of three fortunes. Elizabeth’s father could trace himself to Peter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch governor of New York, and a rebel who liked to plough his land in a court suit to show his contempt for King George III. The two chief distinguishing Chanler traits were an exceptional self-sufficiency and a distinctive, attention-compelling “Chanler voice”, both of which Elizabeth inherited.
Bobby brought her up to believe the Chanlers were “an unofficial royalty”. But a series of scandals dented recent Chanler history and Bobby, like Charles Chatwin, went a long way to conceal these. It fell to Elizabeth’s first cousin, a lawyer for Alger Hiss, to fill in the gaps at family reunions and weddings – before Bobby came steaming over. She says, “He hated us finding out about family skeletons. We found everything out sideways, under the table.” She passed the details on to Bruce.
Bobby’s immediate Chanler relations were both eccentric and profligate. His father, Winthrop or “Wintie” Chanler, had been a grandchild of John Jacob Astor. Orphaned young, he inherited an income of $80,000 per annum. He did little but travel and hunt. One of his daughters, when asked his profession, replied: “He practised fox-hunting.” He hunted everything else too. Moufflon in Sardinia, lions in Morocco, chamois in the Alps.
“Grandpa had a fantastically good time,” says Elizabeth. “He once agreed to meet Grandma in London. She got there, having come on a boat with her family, to find a note: ‘I’ve gone big-game hunting in the Rockies’.”
Wintie’s three brothers also did what they wanted. The middle one, Willie, a friend of Theodore Roosevelt, pursued life as an adventurer until losing a leg. He smuggled arms to Cuban rebels; fraternised with Butch Cassidy in New York; and instigated, with 200 cowpunchers, an unsuccessful revolt against a Venezuelan dictator. In the course of an expedition to British East Africa, he gave his name to a species of antelope,
Cervicapra chanlerii,
and to a waterfall. Chanler Falls has since dried up. “Like all Chanler enterprises it has come to nothing,” says Elizabeth.
Cervicapra chanlerii,
and to a waterfall. Chanler Falls has since dried up. “Like all Chanler enterprises it has come to nothing,” says Elizabeth.
The older brother Armstrong, a lawyer married to a highly-strung novelist, suffered from progressive paranoia until he was committed to Bloomingdale asylum after re-enacting Napoleon’s death scene. On the eve of Thanksgiving, 1900, he escaped the asylum, leaving behind this note to his doctor: “My dear Doctor, You have always said that I am insane. You have always said that I believe I am the reincarnation of Napoleon Bonaparte. As a learned and sincere man, you, therefore, will not be surprised that I take French leave. Yours, with regret that we must part. J. A. Chanler”
Bob Chanler, his youngest brother, was an artist who married the Italian prima donna Lina Cavalieri. She deserted him for a Russian nobleman after persuading her infatuated husband to transfer to her all he possessed in exchange for $20 a week pocket money.
This prompted Armstrong to wire Bob:
WHO’S LOONEY NOW
?
WHO’S LOONEY NOW
?
Bruce was not alone in mistaking blue money for big money. Because of the Astor connection it was assumed that the Chanlers enjoyed access to considerable wealth. Bruce’s friend the journalist James Fox says, “At the beginning, Bruce used to infer that Elizabeth owned three quarters of New York – which, as it turned out, she didn’t.” In fact, the money came from Gertrude’s family. All Bobby inherited from the Astors was Sweet Briar, a 200-acre estate in fox-hunting country near Geneseo in New York State. “When I die,” he told his eight children, “all you’ll get from me is cigarette money.”
Required to earn his living, Bobby tried his damnedest not to be eccentric in the manner of his father and uncles. He could mend anything beautifully and wanted to be a sculptor, but Daisy forced him into the Navy. He served in China, on a Yangtse gunboat, and in Constantinople. Aged 23, he met the nine-year-old Gertrude Laughlin at a diplomatic party thrown by her father in Athens. Fourteen years later, while working as an aide-de-camp at the White House, he married her in a ceremony hailed by the
Evening Star
as “one of the most important of the season”. Shortly afterwards Bobby was transferred and the couple moved to San Diego, California, where on 16 November 1938 Elizabeth was born.
Evening Star
as “one of the most important of the season”. Shortly afterwards Bobby was transferred and the couple moved to San Diego, California, where on 16 November 1938 Elizabeth was born.
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