Portraits and Observations (47 page)

Now it was four o’clock and I hastened to present myself, for I’d been told not to be late, and not to stay long, as my hostess was an elderly partial invalid who seldom left her bed.

She received me in her bedroom. I was astonished. Because she looked precisely as Colette ought to have looked. And that was astonishing indeed. Reddish, frizzly, rather African-looking hair; slanting, alley-cat eyes rimmed with kohl; a finely made face flexible as water … rouged cheeks … lips thin and tense as wire but painted a really brazen hussy scarlet.

And the room reflected the cloistered luxury of her worldlier work—say,
Chéri
and
La fin de Chéri
. Velvet curtains were drawn against the June light. One was aware of silken walls. Of warm, rosy light filtering out of lamps draped with pale, rosy scarves. A perfume—some combination of roses and oranges and limes and musk—hovered in the air like a mist, a haze.

So there she lay, propped up by layers of lace-edged pillows, her eyes liquid with life, with kindness, with malice. A cat of peculiar gray was stretched across her legs, rather like an additional comforter.

But the most stunning display in the room was neither the cat nor its mistress. Shyness, nerves, I don’t know what it was, but after the first quick study I couldn’t really look at Colette, and was somewhat tongue-tied to boot. Instead, I concentrated on what seemed to me a magical exhibition, some fragment of a dream. It was a collection of antique crystal paperweights.

There were perhaps a hundred of them covering two tables situated on either side of the bed: crystal spheres imprisoning green lizards, salamanders,
millefiori
bouquets, dragonflies, a basket of pears, butterflies alighted on a frond of fern, swirls of pink and white and blue and white, shimmering like fireworks, cobras coiled to strike, pretty little arrangements of pansies, magnificent poinsettias.

At last Madame Colette said, “Ah, I see my snowflakes interest you?”

Yes, I knew what she meant: these objects were rather like permanent snowflakes, dazzling patterns frozen forever. “Yes,” I said. “Beautiful. Beautiful. But what are they?”

She explained that they were the utmost refinement of the crystal-maker’s art: glass jewels contrived by the premier craftsmen of the greatest French crystal factories—Baccarat and St. Louis and Clichy. Selecting at random one of the weights, a big beauty exploding with thousand-flower colors, she showed where the date of creation, 1842, was concealed inside one of the tiny buds. “All the finest weights,” she told me, “were made between 1840 and 1880. After that the whole art disintegrated. I started collecting them about forty years ago. They were out of fashion then and one could find great prizes in the flea market and pay very little for them. Now, of course, a first-class weight costs the earth. There are hundreds of collectors, and all in all only perhaps three or four thousand weights in existence worth a glance. This one, for instance.” She handed me a piece of crystal about the size of a baseball. “It’s a Baccarat weight. It’s called the White Rose.”

It was a faceted weight of marvelous, bubble-free purity with a single decoration: a simple white rose with green leaves sunk dead-center.

“What does it remind you of? What thoughts run through your mind?” Madame Colette asked me.

“I don’t know. I like the way it feels. Cool and peaceful.”

“Peaceful. Yes, that’s very true. I’ve often thought I would like to carry them with me in my coffin, like a pharaoh. But what
images
occur to you?”

I turned the weight this way and that in the dim, rosy light. “Young girls in their communion dresses.”

She smiled. “Very charming. Very apt. Now I can see what Jean told me is true. He said. ‘Don’t be fooled, my dear. He looks like a ten-year-old angel. But he’s ageless, and has a very wicked mind.’ ”

But not as wicked as my hostess, who tapped the weight in my hand and said, “Now I want you to keep that. As a souvenir.”

By so doing she arranged for a financially ruinous destiny, for from that moment I became a “collector,” and over the years have done arduous duty searching out fine French weights everywhere, from the opulent salesrooms at Sotheby’s to obscure antiquaries in Copenhagen and Hong Kong. It is an expensive pastime (currently the cost of these
objets
, depending on quality and rarity, runs between $600 and $15,000), and in all the while that I have pursued it I have found only two bargains, but these both were staggering coups and more than compensated for many cruel disappointments.

The first was in a huge and dusty junkshop in Brooklyn. I was looking at a bunch of odds and bits in a dark glass cabinet when I saw a St. Louis flower weight with a tomato-colored porcelain overlay. When I sought out the proprietor and asked him about it, it was obvious he had no idea of what it was or what it was worth, which was about $4,000. He sold it to me for $20, and I did feel slightly crooked, but what the hell, it was the first and last time I ever got the best of a dealer.

My second great coup was at an auction in East Hampton on Long Island. I just happened to wander into it, not expecting much, and indeed it was mostly bad paintings and indifferent furniture culled from an old Long Island sea house. But suddenly, just sitting there amid a lot of pottery and boring plates was an electrifying spectacle: an absolutely spectacular
millefiori
weight made in the form of an inkwell. I knew it was the real thing, and by searching carefully I found the date, 1840, and signature of the maker, J.C., deep inside the lower bouquet. It was about eleven o’clock in the morning when I made this discovery, and the inkwell did not appear on the auctioneer’s podium until three that afternoon. While waiting, I walked around in a daze of anxiety, wondering if the auctioneer or any of his customers had any notion of the inkwell’s rarity and value, which was enough to finance a pair of Siamese
twins through college. If all this sounds rather unattractive, and I suppose it does, I can only say that that’s what collecting does to you.

Anyway, the auctioneer opened the bidding on the inkwell-weight at $25, so I knew right away
he
didn’t know what he was selling; the question was, did anyone in the audience? There were perhaps three hundred people there, a great many of them with very sophisticated eyes. As it turned out, there
was
one who had an inkling: a young dealer from New York who had come to bid on furniture and knew very little about paperweights, but was shrewd enough to realize this was something special. When we reached $300 the others in the auditorium began to whisper and stare; they couldn’t fathom what it was that made this hunk of glass worth that kind of money. When we arrived at $600 the auctioneer was fairly excited himself, and my rival was sweating; he was having second thoughts, he wasn’t really sure. In a faltering voice he bid $650 and I said $700, and that finished him. Afterward he came over and asked if I thought it worth $700, and I said, “No, seven thousand.”

Some people, when traveling, carry with them photographs of friends and family, of loves; I do, too. But I also take along a small black bag that will hold six weights, each wrapped in flannel, for the weights, despite their seeming solidity, are quite fragile, and also, like a crowd of quarrelsome siblings, inimical; one of the easiest ways to chip or shatter a weight is to have it collide with another. So why do I cart them around on, say, a two-day trip to Chicago or Los Angeles? Because, when spread about, they can for me make the most sinisterly anonymous hotel room seem warm and personal and secure. And because, when it’s a quarter to two and sleep hasn’t come, a restfulness arises from contemplating a quiet white rose until the rose expands into the whiteness of sleep.

Occasionally I have given a weight as a gift to some very particular friend, and always it is from among those I treasure most, for as Colette said that long-ago afternoon, when I protested that I couldn’t accept as a present something she so clearly adored, “My dear, really there is no point in giving a gift unless one also treasures it oneself.”

Q:
If you had to live in just one place—without ever leaving—where would it be?

A:
Oh, dear. What a devastating notion. To be grounded in just one place. After all, for thirty years I’ve lived everywhere and had houses all over the world. But curiously, no matter where I lived, Spain or Italy or Switzerland, Hong Kong or California, Kansas or London, I
always
kept an apartment in New York. That must signify something. So, if really forced to choose, I’d say New York.

Q:
But
why?
It’s dirty. Dangerous. In every way difficult.

A:
Hmmm. Yes. But though I can live for long stretches in mountainous or seaside solitude, primarily I am a city fellow. I like
pavement
. The sound of my shoes on pavement; stuffed windows; all-night restaurants; sirens in the night—sinister but alive; book and record shops that, on impulse, you can visit at midnight.

And in that sense, New York is the world’s only city
city
. Rome is noisy and provincial. Paris is sullen, insular, and, odd to say, extraordinarily puritanical. London? All my American friends who
have gone to live there bore one so by saying, “But it’s so civilized.” I don’t know. To be totally dead, utterly dull—is that civilized? And to top it all, London is also highly provincial. The same people see the same people. Everybody knows your business. At most, it is only possible to lead
two
separate lives there.

And that is the great advantage of New York, why it is
the
city. One can be a multiple person there: ten different people with ten different sets of friends, none overlapping.

Q:
Do you prefer animals to people?

A:
I like them about equally. Still, I’ve usually found there is something secretively cruel about people who really feel more warmly toward dogs and cats and horses than people.

Q:
Are
you
cruel?

A:
Occasionally. In conversation. Let’s put it this way: I’d rather be a friend of mine than an enemy.

Q:
Do you have many friends?

A:
About seven or so whom I can entirely rely upon. And about twenty more I more or less trust.

Q:
What qualities do you look for in friends?

A:
Firstly, they mustn’t be stupid. I’ve once or twice been in love with persons who were stupid, indeed very much so; but that is another matter—one can be in love with someone without feeling the least in communication with that person. God, that’s how most people get married and why most marriages are unhappy.

Usually, I can tell quite early on whether it is possible for someone and myself to be friends. Because one doesn’t have to finish sentences. I mean, you start to say something, then realize, midway, that he or she has already understood. It is a form of mental-emotional conversational shorthand.

Intelligence apart, attention is important: I pay attention to my friends, am concerned about them, and expect the same in return.

Q:
Are you often disappointed by a friend?

A:
Not really. I’ve sometimes formed dubious attachments (don’t we all?); I’ve always done it with my eyes open. The only hurt that hurts is one that takes you by surprise. I am seldom surprised. Though I have a few times been outraged.

Q:
Are you a truthful person?

A:
As a writer—yes, I think so. Privately—well, that is a matter of opinion; some of my friends think that when relating an event or piece of news, I am inclined to alter and overelaborate. Myself, I just call it making something “come alive.” In other words, a form of art. Art and truth are not necessarily compatible bedfellows.

Q:
How do you like best to occupy your spare time?

A:
Not sexually, though I have had my enthusiastic periods. But, as more than a casual pastime, it is too heart-scalding and costly, however you interpret the latter adjective.

Really, I like to read. Always have. There are not many contemporary writers I like too well. Though I have admired, among our own Americans, the late Flannery O’Connor, and Norman Mailer, William Styron, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, the early Salinger. And oh, really, a number of others. I’ve never liked Gore Vidal’s fiction, but I think his nonfiction is first-class. James Baldwin, ditto. But for the last decade or so I prefer to read writers I’ve already read. Proven wine. Proust. Flaubert. Jane Austen. Raymond Chandler (one of the
great
American artists). Dickens (I had read all of Dickens before I was sixteen, and have just now completed the full cycle again).

I am partial to films, too—though I leave in the middle quite a lot. But I only like to go to films alone, and only in the daytime when the theater is mostly empty. That way I can concentrate on what I’m seeing, and depart when I feel like it without having to discuss the merits of the project with someone else: with me, such discussions always lead to argument and irritation.

I prefer to work in the mornings, usually for about four or five hours, and then, if I’m alone in a city, any city, I meet a friend for lunch at some favorite restaurant (in New York: Lafayette, La Côte Basque, Orsini’s, the Oak Room at The Plaza, and, until its unhappy demise, the Colony). Many people say they hate to lunch; it fattens them, fatigues them, altogether spoils their day. It makes mine. There are some men I enjoy lunching with, but by and large I prefer beautiful, or at least extremely attractive, alert, and
au courant
women. I count in this category several very young ladies (Lally Weymouth, Amanda Burden, Penelope Tree, Louise Melhado—the latter, alas, married to a very square stockbroker). But I don’t consider that any woman deserves full marks until she attains and maintains qualities of style and appearance and amusing good sense beyond the point of easy youthful beguilement: this, a partial list, and a prejudicial one, would have to include Barbara Paley, Gloria Guinness, Lee Radziwill, Oona Chaplin, Gloria Cooper, Slim Keith, Phyllis Cerf, Kay Meehan, Viola Loewy, D. D. Ryan, Evelyn Avedon, Pamela Harriman, Kay Graham—well, one could go on for quite a while, though certainly the names would not top fifty. Notice, the persons I mention are private citizens, not public; after all, for certain public characters—Garbo (an ultimately selfish and tiresome woman) or Elizabeth Taylor (a sensitive, self-educated lady with a tough but essentially innocent attitude—if you sleep with a guy, gosh, that means you have to marry him!)—
allure
is their trade.