Authors: Michael Holroyd
He had crossed into this aristocratic world at the Paris Peace Conference. It was here that his friendship began with T. E. Lawrence who, singling him out as the perfect image-maker, returned again and again (concealing his ‘hideous’ motorbike behind the bushes) for ‘fancy-dress’
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portraits of himself as Café Royal Arab or pale aircraftman. But it was the Marchesa Casati, of the archaic smile and macabre beauty, who beckoned him into international high society. As Luisa Ammon, daughter of a Milanese industrialist, she had been, it was said, a mousy little girl. But, inspired by the example of Sarah Bernhardt, she decided to turn herself into a theatrical work of art and her world into a stage. As the young wife of Camillo Casati Stampa di Soncino, noblest of Roman huntsmen, she pounced like a panther on to life: and somewhat overshot it. The mousy hair burst into henna’d flames; the grey-green eyes, now ringed with black kohl and treated with toxic belladonna, expanded enormously, fringed with amazing false eyelashes like peacock’s feathers. Her lips were vermilion, her feet empurpled, her sphinx-like face, transformed by some black-and-white alchemy, became a painted mask. By taking thought she added a cubit to her stature, raising her legs on altitudinous heels, and crowning her head with top hats of tiger skin and black satin, huge gold waste-paper baskets turned upside down, or the odd inverted flowerpot from which gesticulated a salmon-pink feather. It was for her that Léon Bakst, soaring to his most extravagant fantasies, designed
incroyable
Persian trousers of the most savage cut; for her Mariano Fortuny invented long scarves of oriental gauze, soaked in the mysterious pigments of his vats and ‘tinted with strange dreams’.
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She lived, this decadent queen of Venice, in the roofless ‘Palazzo Non Finito’,
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on the Grand Canal where Bakst choreographed her
bals masqu
é
s.
She would appear with a macaw on her shoulder, an ape at one arm, or a few cobras. As a backdrop she redesigned her ballroom with caged monkeys which gibbered among the branches of lilac as she floated past,
pursued by a restive ocelot held on its leash by a black keeper, his hand dripping with paint. But there were failures. The ‘slaves’, painted with gold, collapsed; her costume – an affair of armour pierced with a hundred electric arrows – short-circuited. By the spring of 1919 she had left Venice and her husband, achieved poetic status as mistress of the symbolist ‘Prince of Decadence’ Gabriele d’Annunzio and, having exhausted one huge fortune, was preparing to demolish a second.
Casati’s witch-like aspect often provoked terror. But John, unlike most of her admirers, was a romantic only by instalments. Visually she stimulated him, but in other ways she made him ‘laugh immoderately’.
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Where T. E. Lawrence beheld a ‘vampire’, John saw only ‘a spoilt child of a woman’ ringed about with the credulity and suspiciousness of a savage. Yet, as the vigour of his two portraits shows, he found her dramatically exciting.
She had been painted by innumerable artists as Joan of Arc, Pulcinella, Salome, the naked Eve. To Marinetti and the Futurists, she was their Gioconda; to Boldini, who portrayed her smothered in peacock feathers and arched over cushions like a pretend-panther, she was Scheherazade; to Alberto Martini, she became an art-nouveau Medusa. But to John, who painted her twice in April 1919
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in the Duchess of Gramont’s apartment on the quai Malaquais, she was something else again: a pyjama’d figure, with dramatic mascara, poised with a provocative elbow before a veiled view of Vesuvius where, as the unbidden guest of Axel Munthe, she overstayed her welcome by some fifteen years. Romanticism and irony were perfectly blended to produce what Lord Duveen was to call ‘an outstanding masterpiece of our time’.
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‘He painted like a lion,’ sighed Casati. ‘Le taxi vous attend,’ he writes to her from Paris. ‘Venez!’ They flung themselves towards each other. Sex was not the real attraction between them. Casati took other people’s admiration for granted, like a perpetual chorus singing invisibly while she stood on stage alone. For she was intensely narcissistic. John responded to her exhibitionism. It was her sheer extraordinariness he loved – she was more tempestuous and terrifying than Ottoline had ever been. Though Marinetti dedicated his Futurist
Dance Manifesto
to her in 1917, she lived always for the present, converting everything she touched into make-believe, using all her camp artillery to keep reality in retreat. John relished her gypsy-like fervor and, under the brazen theatricality, what he judged to be her ‘perfect naturalness of manner’.
She wanted for nothing until the 1930s when the last penny of the last fortune had been squandered and the curtain came down on her performance. She fled from her Palais Rose at Neuilly to England. In England there was charity, a pale but persistent kindness, first from Lord Alington,
then, for the last dozen years of her life, from a Wodehousian platoon of old fellows – the Duke of Westminster, Baron Paget-Fredericks, Lord Tredegar and, most constantly, John himself with whom she stayed for a time in Chelsea. ‘Je serai ravi de vous revoir, carissima,’ he gallantly welcomed her, enclosing ‘un petit cadeau’. He warned her that ‘Londres n’est pas gai en ce moment’, but she knew there was nowhere else she could shelter. She lived in a small dirty flat within, however, a house that had once been Byron’s. The layers of powder grew thicker; the stories of Italy longer; her clothes more faded and frayed; her leopard-skin gloves spotted with holes; her thin figure, subsisting on opium and cocaine, turned into an assemblage of bones. But she had never valued comfort and did not miss it now. Despite the squalor, she played, to the last notes, this ghostly echo of the d’Annunzian heroine. ‘Bring in the drinks!’ she would call, and a bent Italian servant would shuffle forward with a half-empty bottle of beer. What money came in she tended to spend at once, shopping in Knightsbridge and Mayfair for Spider, her Pekinese. Her one asset was absolute helplessness, which threw responsibility for her survival on to everyone else. Her friends paid an allowance each week into her bank from where she would collect it by taxi. The bank statements show that, for over a decade, John was her most persistent source of income. She did not need very often to beg from him: he gave spontaneously, regularly, small sums with a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God generosity. ‘Ayez courage, carissima, et croyez à mon amitié sincère.’ It did not occur to her to do otherwise. ‘Je suis bien triste que vous êtes toujours dans les difficultés,’ he wrote again, with more apprehension. But when, during the early 1940s, she asked for more money to remove these difficulties, he fell back into explanations: ‘Le gouvernement prend tout mon argent pour ce guerre et j’ai des grandes dépenses comme vous savez.’ The aphrodisiac notes now gave way before a crisp commercial correspondence – ‘Voici le chèque’. But she did not embarrass him with gratitude and they remained friends until her death in 1957. His last portrait, painted in 1942, shows her wearing a half-veil, the elaborate golden fichu gathered at her chest matching the eyes of the staring black cat on her lap. She is seated in an upright chair against a theatrically stormy sky – a sad, sinister, witch-like figure still held together with some vestiges of dignity.
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Casati occupied a unique place in the latter part of John’s life. She should, he once suggested to Cecil Beaton, have been shot and, like Spider, stuffed – she would have looked so well in a glass case. The other women in his life were for more active employment and, from the 1920s onwards, began to arrange themselves into a pattern. There were the occasional models; there was the chief mistress who looked after him in town and abroad when Dorelia was absent; and there was the Grand Lady,
to be defined neither as model nor mistress, who conducted his life in society.
John’s principal mistress during these years was Eileen Hawthorne, ‘an uncommon and interesting type’, he suggested to Maurice Elvey, ‘ – at any rate she would like to do some work in films.’ Pictures of her constantly appeared in the press – a new portrait by Lewis Baumer or Russell Flint; an eager advertisement for bath cubes, lingerie, eau-de-cologne; or simply as ‘Miss 1933’. The most extraordinary feature of these pictures was that, though she appeared forever young and glamorous, none of them looked the same. As queen of the magic world of cosmetics she could change her looks from day to day. This was her ‘mystery’. She was known by the newspapers as the girl of a thousand faces. Each morning she re-created herself, and again each evening. Superficially, it was impossible to tire of her.
But she was not a good model for John. Hardly had he begun to apply his brushes than her features would start to re-form themselves. She was always painting herself more fluently, it was said, than he was.
There were other problems too. He suspected that she did not possess a flair for discretion. The man who, twenty years before, advised Sampson to ‘sin openly and scandalize the world’ had grown timid of scandal himself. Experience, like a great wall, shut off his return to innocence. His letters to Eileen Hawthorne exhibit more anxiety than enjoyment. He asks her, because of Dorelia, not to telephone him in the country; he begs her to avoid journalists – especially on those occasions when she happens to be missing a tooth or is unable to conceal a black eye. He wishes he could trust more wholeheartedly her ability to hide things: for example, pregnancies. Though he shared her favours with the composer E. J. Moeran, it was John who, after some grumbling, paid for the abortions. He had no choice. Otherwise her mother would get to hear of them, and then the world would know.
This climate of secrecy did not suit John, but it was necessary. He divided his life into compartments as irretrievably lonely people do. It is unlikely, for instance, that Eileen Hawthorne ever met the redoubtable Mrs Fleming. She was the widow of Valentine Fleming, a millionaire Yeomanry officer and Member of Parliament for Henley: ‘one of those rare, slightly baffling Edwardian figures of whom nothing but good is ever spoken’,
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who had been killed after winning the DSO in the Great War. She was rich; she was handsome – dark, with a small head, large eyes and autocratic features. The three portraits he painted of her in her forties show ‘a Goyaesque beauty, hard, strong-featured, the self-absorbed face of an acknowledged prima donna used to getting her own way’.
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Upon her four ‘shiny boys’ (as John called them) – Peter the author and explorer,
Ian the creator of James Bond, Richard a prosperous banker, and Michael who died of wounds as a prisoner of war after Dunkirk – she had laid an obligation to succeed. She believed in success, and herself led a successful life in society. In 1923 she moved to Turner’s house at 118 Cheyne Walk, a few minutes’ walk from Mallord Street. It was a luxurious place, superb for entertaining, with a large studio at the back, all drastically improved since J. M. W. Turner had lodged there in old age. Sitting at the bar of the Aquatic Stores next door ‘fortifying the inner man’ against his entry into Mrs Fleming’s luncheon parties, John sometimes thought of Turner – how he would have preferred the grosser amenities of Wapping. Often John needed drink to confront these social occasions, but the money, the aura of success, the opportunities – these could not be denied. Eve Fleming passionately admired him, he could not help feeling some admiration for her, and many people who came to Cheyne Walk admired them both. In such company it was possible to forget a bad day’s work.
In his biography of Ian Fleming, John Pearson describes Mrs Fleming as ‘a bird of paradise’, extravagant, demanding, a law to herself. She was, he wrote, ‘a rich, beautiful widow – and, thanks to the provision of her husband’s Will, likely to remain one.’ In order to ensure that his millions remained within the family, Val Fleming had left her almost all his wealth on condition that she remained a widow. If she remarried, most of the money would pass to her sons. Nevertheless, such was her attachment to John that, despite everything, she dreamed of taking him away from Dorelia and having a child by him. She would turn up at Alderney, drive him off in her Rolls-Royce, and tell him that she would give up her fortune if he would give up Dorelia. Poppet remembered that her mother ‘hated’ Eve Fleming ‘and suffered quite a lot’.
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For Eve was a most insistent woman. She could not endure coming second to anyone. After one of her Rolls-Royce tutorials, John suggested that he might briefly marry Eve, have a child by her, then obtain a quick divorce and return to Alderney, all for the sake of a quiet life – in which case, Dorelia replied, she would no longer be there. She might have left with Henry Lamb.
What appeared to be a solution to their problem had already been brought to the door of Mallord Street one afternoon in the late spring of 1921 by John Hope-Johnstone. He arrived with a girl of sixteen – a little old for his own taste since he was one of those people for whom time passes too rapidly. He had seen her at the Armenian café in Archer Street, introduced himself, then taken her in a cab to meet Compton Mackenzie. They’d had a grand time. Now, since she was an avid admirer of John, they’d come to see him too. Her name was Chiquita. John grunted and let them in.
She was an engaging creature, very tiny, with a dark fringe and a low
rippling laugh, and she specialized in ‘cheekiness’. While the men growled away in conversation, she flitted round the enormous studio, aware of John’s eyes, like searchlights, travelling all over her as she moved. Soon she began to chatter, telling stories about herself – how her mother had run away to New Orleans with a Cuban leaving her to be brought up by a funny old man with whiskers; how she had been a tomboy, climbing trees, stealing apples, getting spanked and, at the age of fifteen, ran away from school to join a travelling theatre company.
‘When can I paint you?’ John interrupted. ‘Come to-morrow at four.’
‘I’ll come at five,’ Chiquita retorted.