"The Princess and the Rocking Horse"
Photograph by Antony Armstrong-Jones
from Once Upon a Time, The Story of Antony Armstrong-Jones
by Robert Glenton and Stella King
London, Anthony Blond Ltd, 1960

Everything is connected.

The 3rd Lord Glenconnor, Colin Tennant (1926 - 2010) died last week.  If you haven't seen The Man Who Bought Mustique (2000) you should add it to your Neflix queue.  Colin Tennant turned the barren little Mustique into a glamorous island Studio 54.  He gave Les Jolies Eaux, a house designed by Oliver Messel, to Princess Margaret for her wedding present in 1960.  It became the one place in the world, she said, where she could relax.

Lord Glenconnor is predeceased by his eldest son Charlie, a one-time heroin addict who died of hepatitis in 1996 and  his second son Henry, who died of AIDS in 1990. The third and youngest son, Christopher, was disabled following a motorcycle accident in 1987.  The title passes to Cody Charles Edward Tennant, born in 1994, Charlie's son and Colin Tennant's grandson.

In the documentary of his life on Mustique, Lord Glenconnor is filmed preparing a luncheon for HRH Princess Margaret, an elaborate affair which involves the construction of a tented pavilion on a secluded patch of beach.  At the end, he tells the crew to turn off their cameras.  "What a lot of fuss about --" he says to himself, but doesn't finish.

Once Upon a Time, The Story of Antony Armstrong Jones
by Robert Glenton and Stella King
London, Anthony Blond, Ltd, first edition April 1960
Collection of the Author

From the jacket flap:

The story of the commoner who married the most talked about Princess in the world has a 'once upon a time' flavour, for Tony is not one of the gilded brigade with a title, lots of money and a 'correct' sort of job but nobody who has met him through the pages of this book can be blind to his charm and vitality or doubt that their tale will have a happy ending.


Caption: "Arranging pictures for his exhibition"

    A telephone rings in a royal home.  There is a glimpse of well-cut sleeve, an impeccable edge of white cuff, as a hand picks up the receiver.  
    Urbanely a voice murmurs: 'The Taj Mahal will be arriving in six minutes.'
    Tony Armstrong-Jones, the newest resident of Buckingham Palace, is on his way.  After his engagement that was how he was referred to by friends and those dealing with his affairs.  It is an apt title when you consider his initials - T.A.J. - and a happy choice when you think of that fabulously beautiful monument to an Inidan ruler's love of a woman.

Postcard view, Tredegar House, Newport, Monmouthshire, [Wales].
Collection of the Author

Now owned by Newport City Council, Tredegar House was the seat of the Morgan (as in Captain Morgan fame) family and the Lords Tredegar for five hundred years. Godfrey Morgan, the first Viscount Tredegar rode into the valley of death in the Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War and was succeeded by a cousin Courtney who "enjoyed less arduous pursuits." Courtney's son, Evan Morgan (1893 - 1949), 4th Baron, 2nd Viscount Tredegar, was the last of the family to live at Tredegar and entertained a diverse circle of friends at weekend parties here, including Aldous Huxley, Augustus John, Aleister Crowley, and the great American beauty Denham Fouts (1914 - 1948), sometimes called the "best kept boy in the world" who stayed with Morgan for a while before running off with Prince Paul of Greece.  

According to the Duke of Bedford, the Morgans were "the oddest family I have ever met"; Evan wrote poetry, dabbled in the occult and kept a menagerie at Tredegar House which included a kangaroo, a baboon and a macaw; [go Here for a rare photo of Evan with his parrot Blue Boy]; his mother used to build birds nests in the trees in the park big enough to sit in; his sister, Gwyneth Erica Morgan was found dead in the Thames in 1924, said to have been the victim of illegal drug use, and his father owned one of the largest yachts in the world.

His relationships with men notwithstanding, Evan was married twice, first in 1928 to Hon. Lois Sturt (1900-1937), an actress and daughter of the 2nd Baron Alington; and in 1939 in Singapore, to Princess Olga Sergievna Dolgorouky (born 1915 - unknown), the marriage annulled in 1943.  He died without issue in 1949.

Edward Frederic Benson (1867 - 1940) wrote over a hundred books, was mayor of Rye, was awarded the OBE and made an Honorary Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, but he is best remembered for his Lucia books, hugely popular when they first appeared in print in the 1920s and periodically in vogue ever since.  "We will pay anything for Lucia books" proclaim Noel Coward, Gertrude Lawrence, Nancy Mitford and W.H. Auden according to the cover of this Penguin omnibus, and I don't believe you could find a stronger endorsement than that, although one can't help wondering when and where the four of them got together to make this collective announcement.  Perhaps at the Ritz, I suppose, after a performance of Private Lives, or possibly over drinks in Auden's rooms at Oxford, or maybe during a luncheon al fresco with Nancy in Versailles.  Whatever the case, wouldn't you love to have been there?  Personally, I would have loved to ask them what else they'd pay anything for.  It must have been a very informative gathering.

I was first introduced to Lucia (Emmeline Lucas of Riseholme) by my friend Luis Lopez-Cepero during a resurgence of interest in the series in the 1970s but I suspect her adventures have been reissued in every decade before and since, and that she has attracted followers of every generation.  Don't you think?  I will admit I was not immediately fond of Lucia's friend Georgie PIllson with his diminutive name and elaborate comb-over, but I did identify with Lucia's neighbor Daisy Quantock, who was a devout Christian Scientist until she found her Guru who felt the call to come and live with her and her husband and caused such a stir in the village.

I am re-reading the books now and finding all sorts of new reasons to admire Benson's work.  What about you?  When did you first meet Lucia? 

JOHN SINGER SARGENT (1856 - 1925)
Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, 1882
Oil on canvas
221.9 x 222.6 cm (87 3/8 x 87 5/8 in.)
Collection: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Gift of Mary Louisa Boit, Julia Overing Boit, Jane Hubbard Boit, and Florence D. Boit in memory of their father, Edward Darley Boit, 1919.

Ruth Bernard Yeazell reviews Sargent’s Daughters: The Biography of a Painting by Erica Hirshler (MFA) in the August 5th issue of the London Review of Books.  It is the kind of book I would want to write if I were a museum curator: the story of a painting which is not just the history of the work but is about the artist and his critics and his friends as well as about the sitters in the painting and their lives before and after, their world, their time and place.  

In this case, the subjects were not especially famous.  None of the four girls married, although spinsterhood wasn't all that unusual for women of their era and class, according to Hirshler.  A 1910 social register lists more than a dozen houses on Boston's Chestnut Street having one or more "Miss" in residence.  Florence, the oldest, leaning with her back to the vase, ended up in a "Boston marriage" with a cousin who taught science at a local woman's college.  Of course, being a wife and mother weren't the only options for a girl in those days, just the expected ones.  I'm thinking of Sargent's portrait of the three Wyndham sisters who made such important and interesting matches. 

It might be worth mentioning here, however, in these times when marriage rights are so much in the news, that traditional marriage involved no "equal" rights and in fact conveyed no financial or legal protections to the woman partner, beyond the dubious right to give up her name and her dowry.  With their mother dead, it is small wonder the painting's title references the girls' father only; they were after all his responsibility and to some degree his property, belonging to him the way the monumental pair of Japanese vases did.  At least in a Boston marriage, two women could retain some elements of their own identity, not sacrificed at the altar, although still subject to the approval of father, or uncle or brother.  The Misses Boit had no male siblings, however, having lost one brother as an infant, with another committed to an institution for the feeble-minded.  In any event, ERA or not, we have come a long way from the days when marriage was about the conveyance of a piece of chattel in the form of a daughter or sister by the males of her family to another male.  But I digress.   

Funny how much you think you can tell about people from pictures of them.  The question is, once you know where their lives are headed, does the painting look different?  I think so.  I think you begin to imagine that somehow the painter could tell where their lives were headed. The slightly jarring composition with its unsettling barren darkness, its lack of traditional unity -- by contrast think of that white frothy petalled cloud of the Wyndham girls -- Sargent seems to be saying something about these young girls he couldn't possibly have known, which is what was going to happen to them, and where life would take them, afterward.

Darling, 1904 is hard at work polishing a draft of the next full-length Sam, Pam and Didier adventure, one of half a dozen currently in various stages of development.  Those who are familiar with the material have described the series as a Tales of the City for the City of Angels, a modern Make Way in West Hollywood for Lucia, and the sort of novels those nice young bachelors in novels by Eveylyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford and Barbara Pym would have written, if they hadn't already been busy being characters in novels instead.

So if you or your friend that handsome and charming literary agent, or some other acquaintance with connections to the rich and powerful, the wife of a major publisher perhaps, or even some movie mogul's assistant looking for the next franchise to acquire the rights to... in short, if you know anyone with any kind of influence and an interest in thinly disguised autobiography masquerading as fiction, a taste for the salaciously funny and faintly libelous, let me know.  I can arrange to slip you a few preliminary pages in advance.  I've changed your name, of course, whenever it pops up in the narrative, I promise. 

As you know I will consider all offers and am very creative when it comes to working out a deal, even the kind involving special outfits and accessories, as long as your friend isn't really a cop and we all agree on the safe word.   
 
You can also take a peak Here for excerpts. 

THOMAS EAKINS (1844 - 1916)
Salutat, 1898
Oil on Canvas
49 3/4 x 39 3/4"
Collection: Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts
currently on loan to LACMA

"Manly Pursuits: The Sporting Images of Thomas Eakins" at LACMA, July 25 - October 17, 2010, is an informative show about the pursuit of the masculine in America, particularly when viewed in conjunction with the adjoining exhibition of Catherine Opie's photographs of high school football players and their games.  At first glance, Eakins' frank admiration of his young athletes feels healthy and natural.  His skillfull intelligent compositions of  naked men leaping, jumping, diving, swimming, wrestling, are dignified and bracing and tough.  The exhibition rooms contribute to the sober male mood, vast and spare and done in dark manly shades of raw and burnt umber, rugged sienna.  No sissies here.  "Salutat" recalls the amphitheatre of ancient times: the crowd may be boistrous, filled with specific, recognizable, familiar faces (ours), but the athlete is faceless, his attendants anonymous.  He is the pure light in the frame.  He is the noble Everyman.

But In the bright white of the adjacent rooms scenes from the arena continue, and the resulting dissonance comes not just, I think, from adjusting your eyes to the light. These modern-day gladiators are heavily armored and padded and yet disconcertingly vulnerable.  Their portraits are oversized and imposing, but they stare back at the camera dumbly and uncertainly or else with cocky yet clumsy, unconvincing bravado.  They don't look ready to be heroes or any kind of Everyman.  We are anonymous now and they are the specific, not men and more than boys, but barely, even with all the brightly colored gear. 

If you interrupt the narrative flow and trespass between the two shows (and you can), if you retrace your steps and return, or alternate between the light and the dark, you become aware of an uneasiness and you begin to look for the source of it.  Is it you, or is it in the works themselves?  What are we looking at, and why does it make us uncomfortable?  Is it the simple depiction of males, nude or partly nude or self-consciously posed, that bothers us?  Whether it's a sweaty teenager's bare midriff or a group of Eakins' students naked in a swimming hole, what's going on that we find compelling and yet vaguely unacceptable?  Of course there's none of the mindless rush and high of ESPN / Fox Sports to reassure us, to make the eroticism safe and commercial, but neither is the message entirely unconscious either.  There's uneasy desire going on here, but in a more subtle and interesting way than you might suspect.  Others have written about it all better than I can, however.  [Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Fire, for one, on the history of the best American painting in the museum's collection].

Rumor has it there will be a catalogue later on, of the Eakins show.  I hope so.  This is a smart show and the juxtaposition with Opie is provocative.  I think both artists have important things to say to us about what it means to be a man and manly in America.  But go see for yourself.

See Also: American Stories and Manly Pursuits

Oliver Messel's sister Anne, Countess of Rosse (1902 - 1992), with Michael, 6th Earl of Rosse and Mr Cecil Nice, Head Gardener at Nymans, the Messel family country house, Sussex.
Photo credit: John Hardy, from the National Trust Guide to Nymans, 1983

The gardens of Nymans were left to the National Trust by Oliver and Anne's father, Colonel Messel, upon his death in the Coronation Year (1953).  "Nymans was an exceptionally hideous house," according to Oliver, "Its only redeeming feature was the garden."  Moving to Nymans after the death of Oliver's grandfather in 1915, Oliver's parents commenced extensive alterations after the FIrst World War which transformed the structure into an idealized Gothic mansion.

Addy,¹ lady's maid to Oliver's mother Maud, described life in the country with the Messel family:  

"At Nymans we always had three housemaids and a housekeeper, three kitchen maids and four in the pantry; the butler, two footmen and an old man, and me, I never had to do any cooking.  There were about fourteen gardeners in those days.  There was a chauffeur, and there was Beech with the horses and there was a groom... At weekends I used to go down to Nymans in the car with Mrs Messel, but the staff went by train.  A big brake would meet them because we used to take the silver chests down for the weekend."

The gardens at Nymans are open to the public all year; the house from March to the end of October.  Petworth, one of my great favorites, is nearby.

"Anybody can be good in the country."  Oscar Wilde

¹ cited p. 21 Oliver Messel A Biography by Charles Castle, Thames and Hudson, 1986

LESLEY BLANCH (1904 - 2007) at home in Menton, France, May 2007
Photo credit: Eamonn McCabe
From The Guardian Profile by Joe Boyd, 2007.
Also reproduced in Caroline Moorehead's review of Anne Boston's Lesley Blanch (2010)
Times Literary Supplement, March 26, 2010

If you go to Lesley Blanch's official website you will learn that Anne Boston's new biography of the acclaimed writer and world traveler was unauthorized and is considered an "unfounded attack" on Blanch's reputation.

In similar fashion, Selina Hastings' new biography (NYT Review) of the writer William Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965) would almost certainly have displeased its subject.  To protect his reputation Maugham once paid his nephew Robin $50,000 not to write the unflattering biography Maugham knew his nephew would certainly be capable of producing.  Hastings' biography gives us a sense of just how unflattering, including as Hastings does the story of Louis Legrand, or Loulou, the “ravishing 16-year-old male whore” who was hired by the great author and subsequently enjoyed by his friends as well as his nephew.   

How to control the telling of a life is no easy matter.  What you want to be remembered for, what you want remembered or forgotten is not always up to you.  What is preserved and revealed for posterity may end up being out of your control.  Blanch certainly knew the challenges the biographer faces.   In The Wilder Shores of Love, (first published in 1954 and recently reissued), she writes about four women who "escaped from the constraints of nineteenth-century Europe and fled to the Middle East where they found love."  Her account of these women's lives makes for sensational reading -- I can't put the book down -- but I wonder if her subjects would have been any more or less pleased about Blanch's telling of their stories than Blanch was by Boston's account of her own.  Possibly.  Possibly not.  What exactly constitutes a true story anyway?  The lurid details?  Or the deftly applied series of broad strokes that, one after another, give shape to a portrait in words?   

So much, after all, is a matter of opinion.  In the end there's only so much you can do about the stories people will tell about you afterward. 

"What we must try to guard against," as my dear friend Sophia has observed, "should we live as long as Blanch did, is that we are never photographed wearing scarves." 

OLIVER MESSEL (1904 - 1978)
Self Portrait at the age of 19
Reproduced on the jacket cover of
Oliver Messel, A Biography by Charles Castle
Thames & Hudson, 1986

From an early start of a career in the 1920s that lasted for five decades, Oliver Messel became one of the world's most sought-after and highly-paid scenery and costume designers for theater, ballet, opera and film.  From the West End to Broadway, Covent Garden and Glyndebourne to Hollywood, he charmed and enchanted audiences with creations which were "the epitome of good taste, delicate fantasy and magical illusion."  He designed the Royal Ballet's first post-war production of The Sleeping Beauty for the re-opening of The Royal Opera House, as well as the sets and costumes for the films Romeo and Juliet with Norma Shearer and Leslie Howard, and Suddenly Last Summer starring Elizabeth Taylor and Katharine Hepburn.   He also designed and decorated a number of interiors including the Oliver Messel penthouse suite at the Dorchester Hotel in London, and houses in Barbados and Mustique, including that of HRH Princess Margaret, who married Oliver's nephew, Tony Armstrong-Jones, afterward the Earl of Snowdon.    

"I had admired his creative genius as long as I can remember going to the theatre.  For genius he was, along with a number of other things - magic-maker, mimic, raconteur, entertainer, designer and painter."  Princess Margaret, at the opening of the Victoria and Albert exhibition of Oliver Messel's work in 1983.

"I attempted to use every device to make as much magic as possible."  Oliver Messel