Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings (39 page)

There is a long pause.

‘Mother? How did you track me down here?’

‘Tony, darling, there is a lovely and talented man in your restaurant tonight who has been far from well. His name is Barry Humphries and he has been accidentally locked out in the street. Please buy him and his party a large bottle of champagne and get the management to apologise.’

Throughout this monologue, Humphries hears Snowdon’s voice going, ‘What, Mother? Who is this?
Who is this speaking?
’

Humphries waits hopefully in the street, but to his disappointment, the doors of Chez Moi remain closed.

Ten years later, Barry Humphries is starring as Dame Edna Everage in his West End show,
Housewife, Superstar!
The show is a triumphant success.
Vogue
magazine interviews Humphries, and arranges to send a photographer to the theatre.

Humphries arrives a little late. The photographer is already waiting by the stage door: it is Lord Snowdon. ‘I’d like to take up most of your day on this job, if you can spare the time,’ he says. ‘Perhaps we could break somewhere for lunch?’ Humphries suggests an Italian restaurant near the theatre.

‘Oh no, thank you,’ replies Snowdon. ‘I want you to be
my
guest. There’s an excellent French restaurant I know in Holland Park called Chez Moi. I wonder if you know it?’

‘He gave me a broad Royal Doulton smile, and I think he might have even winked,’ recalls Humphries. ‘Otherwise, no subsequent reference was ever made to that evening, so long ago, when for two minutes I had been his mother.’

TALKS ABORIGINAL TO

Gotham Book Mart, 41 West 47th Street, New York

November 1963

The twenty-nine-year-old Barry Humphries has spent the past year with his wife in New York, where the show in which he is appearing,
Oliver!
, is enjoying a successful run at the Imperial Theater on Broadway. He plays the relatively small role of the undertaker, though he is also understudying Fagin. They are living in a small apartment in Greenwich Village with no lift and no heating. Below it are Alex’s Borscht Bowl and Ruth’s Poodle Parlor. ‘The mingled aromas of stewed beetroot and canine shampoo filtered up through our bare floorboards,’ he recalls.

He loves New York. At the Village Vanguard, he sees Louis Armstrong and Sarah Vaughan; at Birdland, Count Basie. On Sunday nights he goes with Peter Cook, who is appearing in
Beyond the Fringe
, to watch the Supremes at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. In his favourite bar, the Ninth Circle, just a few doors away from his apartment, he chums up with a solitary drinker who always addresses him as ‘the English poet’. Humphries takes him for a minor academic, as he has recently been seeking Humphries’ advice on whether to accept an invitation to speak at Oxford University. After an all-night party in a furniture van, he at last catches the man’s name: Jack Kerouac.

Early one afternoon, Humphries is standing on top of one of the ladders in the rare book room at the Gotham Book Mart when Salvador Dalí enters, ready for a signing session of his latest book. With him is his avaricious sixty-nine-year-old wife Gala, who is always on the lookout for young men; before long, her eyes stray up the ladder.

The Dalís are staying in their usual suite on the seventeenth floor of the St Regis Hotel on Fifth Avenue. Dalí likes to winter at the St Regis, where the staff are perfectly used to him walking his pet ocelot on a leash through the hall. It is said he once kept a bear in the hotel, but the bear was asked
to leave after it surprised guests in the elevator and there were complaints. Dalí has been spotted taking live beetles to lunch with him in the hotel restaurant. He keeps them in a Perspex container and enjoys watching them climb up and down hills of sand. He says he finds them better lunch companions than humans.

While Dalí is in New York, he plans to attend the opening of his exhibition at the Knoedler Gallery of recent works, including the giant
¹⁷⁵
Galacidalacideoxyribononucleicacid
, which, he claims, is the longest one-word title in existence. The painting captures Gala looking out over a Spanish landscape, with the Prophet Isaiah behind her, and God the Father on a cloud presiding over the scene, with Christ and the Madonna just visible inside his head. It has already been bought by the New England Merchants Bank of Boston for $150,000. He is also promoting his new book,
The Diary of a Genius
, though he is said to be furious that, in the American edition, the appendix on farting has been suppressed. He blames it on the Protestants. A terrific farter himself, he points out that in Catholic countries you are allowed to fart to your heart’s content.

Humphries is also a keen surrealist – his student works included
Pus in Boots
, consisting of two old shoes brimming with custard; a spoon containing the eye of a sheep, called
Eye and Spoon Race
; and a broken pram draped with raw meat, titled
Crèche Bang
¹⁷⁶
– so he shuttles down the ladder and ‘somewhat obsequiously’ introduces himself to the artist who has long been one of his idols.

The two men talk of Australia. Dalí tells Humphries of his great wish to visit the country and examine the cave paintings of the Aboriginals before breaking into what Humphries describes as ‘a kind of gibberish, which was his fanciful version of Aboriginal speech’. The manager of the bookshop tries to butt in – he is anxious to start the signing session – but Gala Dalí has other plans. ‘She began to stroke my none-too-lustrous hair and proposed that we all go back to the St Regis Hotel immediately so she could make certain tonsorial adjustments.’

Humphries is very excited by this unexpected encounter with the famous, ‘yet not a little apprehensive’, for Gala’s reputation as a sexual predator precedes her. ‘Only by having a constant succession of boys could she dispel her terror of growing old,’ writes Dalí’s biographer. ‘And no sooner did she begin to tire of one than she used her astonishing sex appeal, her charm, her power and her money to acquire another.’ Nevertheless, Humphries travels willingly with the Dalís to the St Regis Hotel. Throughout the entire journey, Dalí keeps up an unending stream of Aboriginal banter.

Gala shuts the door of the Dalís’ suite behind them. She then produces a large pair of scissors, clasps the back of Humphries’ head firmly in her left hand, and starts hacking away at his hair. ‘Snip! Snip! The “glittering forfex” did its work, and a few stooks of mousy fibre fell into my lap. Dalí himself merely watched proceedings from an armchair, his head on one side and his hands resting on an elaborate walking stick.’

Humphries suspects that Gala is cutting his hair in this random fashion so as to keep up with, and perhaps outshine, her husband’s descent into Aboriginal: by doing so, she hopes to establish her own credentials as an eccentric.
¹⁷⁷

Happily, he manages to wriggle out of her clutches without the loss of too much hair. Gala picks up a few of his shorn locks and inserts them into a copy of Dalí’s autobiography,
The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí
. The Dalís then both inscribe it for him.

An hour or so goes by before Salvador and Gala descend into a furious and intimate argument, Salvador gesticulating wildly and screaming curses at Gala, and Gala returning the abuse in French.

‘Feeling somewhat
de trop
’, Barry Humphries slips away unnoticed, back to the real world.
¹⁷⁸

SKETCHES

39 Elsworthy Road, London NW3

July 19th 1938

The thirty-four-year-old painter Salvador Dalí has, over the years, made three attempts to meet Sigmund Freud, but each to no avail. Every time he calls at his house in Vienna, he is informed that Freud is out of town for reasons of health. He then walks around the city, eating chocolate tarts. ‘In the evening, I held long and imaginary conversations with Freud; he came home with me once and stayed all night clinging to the curtains of my room in the Hotel Sacher.’

When
The Interpretation of Dreams
is first translated into Spanish in 1922, Dalí becomes a fanatical Freudian: ‘It presented itself to me as one of the capital discoveries in my life, and I was seized with a real vice of self-interpretation, not only of my dreams but of everything that happened to me, however accidental it might seem at first glance.’ From then on, his paintings become overtly and self-consciously Freudian, with intermingling sexual symbols set against strange dream landscapes.

In June 1938, Dalí is sitting in a restaurant in Paris, tucking into a dish of snails. By chance, he glances towards a fellow diner, and spots a photograph of Sigmund Freud on the cover of the newspaper in his hands: the world-renowned
¹⁷⁹
founder of psychoanalysis has just arrived in the city, en route for London, after a last-minute flight from Nazi-occupied Vienna, where he has lived for seventy-nine years.

Dalí looks from the newspaper back to his plate of snails and utters a loud cry. ‘I had just that instant discovered the morphological secret of Freud! Freud’s cranium is a snail! His brain is in the form of a spiral – to be extracted with a needle!’

This improbable revelation causes Dalí to reinvigorate his campaign to meet his hero. Through the surrealist patron Edward James he contacts the author Stefan Zweig, who he knows to be both an admirer of his own work and a close friend of Freud. Zweig writes three letters to Freud on Dalí’s behalf, suggesting that Dalí quickly draws a portrait of him. He explains that Dalí is ‘the only painter of genius in our epoch’, and that ‘he is the most faithful and most grateful disciple of your ideas among the artists’.

In his third and final letter, written a day before their meeting, Zweig writes: ‘For years it has been the desire of this real genius to meet you. He says that he owes to you more in his art than to anybody else ... He is only here for two days from Paris (he is a Catalan) and he will not disturb our conversation ... Salvador Dalí would have liked, of course, to show you his pictures in an exhibition. We know, however, that you only reluctantly go out, if ever, and therefore will bring his last, and, as it seems to me, his most beautiful picture to your home.’

The meeting takes place at Freud’s first London home, near Primrose Hill, on July 19th. By chance, as Dalí approaches the house with Stefan Zweig and Edward James, he spots something extraordinarily significant, as he so often does: ‘I saw a bicycle leaning against the wall, and on the saddle, attached by a string, was a red rubber hot-water bottle which looked full of water, and on the back of the hot-water bottle walked a snail!’

Sigmund Freud is eighty-two years old, and dying from the cancer of the jaw that has plagued him for the past sixteen years. He recently suffered an attack of deafness, so says very little to Dalí, who is at any rate unable to speak either German or English. But Dalí is unabashed by Freud’s silence. ‘We devoured each other with our eyes,’ he says.

As agreed, Dalí shows Freud his recent painting
Metamorphosis of Narcissus
. It shows Narcissus naked in a barren landscape, staring at his own reflection in a pool, with, next to him, and echoing his contours, a stone hand holding an egg, from out of which a narcissus is hatching. There are various nude figures in the background, and a crab in the foreground. Freud studies it with his customary intensity. ‘Until now,’ he comments to Zweig the next day, ‘I was inclined to regard the Surrealists – who seem to have adopted me as their patron saint – as 100 per cent
fools (or let’s rather say, as with alcohol, 95 per cent). This young Spaniard, with his ingenuous fanatical eyes, and his undoubtedly technically perfect mastership, has suggested to me a different estimate. In fact, it would be very interesting to explore analytically the growth of a picture like this ...’

While Zweig and James talk to Freud, Dalí draws a portrait of his head in a sketch book, making it resemble at one and the same time both Freud and a snail. Worried that Freud might be shocked at how odd it makes him look, Zweig manages to prevent him from setting eyes on it.

Dalí is to recall his meeting with Freud as one of the most important experiences of his life. Whenever he can, he boasts that he forced the founder of psychoanalysis to reconsider his whole view of surrealism. In a letter to his fellow surrealist André Breton, he writes: ‘He remarked (I showed him one of my pictures) that “in the paintings of the Old Masters one immediately tends to look for the unconscious, whereas when one looks at a Surrealist painting, one immediately has the urge to look for the conscious”.’ Dalí adds that he thinks this proclamation is ‘a death sentence on Surrealism as a doctrine, as a sect, as an “ism,” while at the same time confirming the movement’s validity as a “state of spirit.”’
¹⁸⁰

And what does Freud think of Salvador Dalí? As Dalí sketches the great psychoanalyst, his eyes blazing with excitement, Freud leans over to Edward James and whispers in German, ‘That boy looks like a fanatic. Small wonder that they have civil war in Spain if they look like that.’
¹⁸¹

ANALYSES

Leiden, Holland

August 1910

Three times Gustav Mahler has made an appointment to see Sigmund Freud, and three times he has decided to cancel it. Freud makes it clear that if he cancels again, he will not be given another chance.

It is Mahler’s wife, Alma, who is pushing him into a meeting. Their marriage, always wobbly, is in crisis. At fifty, Gustav is nearly twenty years older than Alma. When they were married eight years ago, few of their friends thought it would last. ‘She is a celebrated beauty, used to a glamorous social life, while he is so unworldly and fond of being alone,’ observed Mahler’s friend, the conductor Bruno Walter.