Warter Priory, near Pocklington, Yorkshire, postmarked 1935, at which time the property was in the possession of the Hon George Ellis Vestey, younger brother of the 2nd Baron Vestey, sold on his death to the 4th Marquess of Normanby in 1968.  In 1972 "the house was demolished, the splendid gardens bulldozed and the rubble used to fill in the nearby lake." [England's Lost Country Houses].

You go places and send postcards, or people used to.  In this case the sender writes to her dear friend in Bramley, Leeds, that "I have just got this postcard which we have in Pock[lington] so you will know I am home safe when I post in Beverley."

In other words you could tell from the view of the landmark on the postcard where your friend had been or gone back to.

You will be interested to know that the Bramley Baths, built in 1904, have recently been restored and are an excellent example, even perhaps the only remaining example, of Edwardian swimming baths left in Leeds today.

Now I'm off to the gym, to the store, to LACMA and many other adventures and destinations.  People to do, things to see, and so on. 

There was snow on the mountains at the beginning of the week when this was taken, you can see it in the distance; it's gone now. 

Francois Villon's poem "Ballade des dames du temps jadis"of course is really asking where the beautiful women have all gone.  The refrain about where the snows of yesteryear have gone is just a substitute, a stand-in, like Pete Seeger's where have all the flowers gone, long time passing, preferably as sung by Marlene Dietrich.

I've been corresponding lately with someone who reminded me about the snows of yesteryear in Ohio.  I have not been back in a very long time to see, but I do remember the winters there and yes, it could be pretty, for a while.  In this case, however, I suppose you could say that it is not just the snow from the old days that is gone, but how much else is gone with it.  You associate snow with a sense of loss because loss is a cold business.   I think about going back but I'm told The Unionville Tavern was sold and turned into a martini lounge and then closed and now it is falling into disrepair.  If you know what old white clapboard looks like in the snow in weak winter light against a gray sky, seen through the branches of old bare shade trees then you can appreciate why I hesitate at the same time I feel like I might want to see that again.  Few things are that bleak and still beautiful.  Black and white photography would not do it justice.  Neither would color. 

Lately everyone's been gone or off going to places, Greg to Palm Springs, Carlos to Atlanta, Eduardo to Cuba, my Montreal friends to Cuba too, Sophia to India, then Paris, Justin to Boston and back again to New York in time for lunch.  Philip's still in Russia.  I have not gone anywhere for a while now.  My choice.  Nowhere except Monday night when I went with Dave to the Valley, out past Woodland Hills, past Reseda, past Encino, look at the mountains in the picture, go out there and turn left and go off the screen for a million miles.  Another world.  Not Cuba or India, I admit, but definitely another world, trust me.  "Where are we exactly?" I ask a friend of Dave's when we finally get there.
 
"The Valley," the lady replies, as if to be more specific would be really complicated. 

Herman Schrijver's clients:
Ernest Simpson with his second wife Wallis and her friend the Prince of Wales
Venice, 1934.

"All draperies must be heavily trimmed and fringed.  If you cannot afford braids and fringes don't have draperies."

"Your pelmets or valances or draperies should always be at least two or three inches deeper than you think.  More rooms are ruined in England by pelmets and draperies which are too skimpy than in any other country."

"Long curtains to the floor lined and inter-lined give an air of luxury to the room and help to keep you warm in winter.  If you have lovely wooden or parquet floors let your curtains rest gently on the floor; even a few inches is not too much.  Again it gives an air of luxury. "

"Always have your curtains, pelmets or draperies made and fixed by a professional upholsterer.  If you must save money, choose a cheaper material."

- Herman Schrijver, (1904 - 1972), quoted in Herman & Nancy & Ivy, by Charles Burkhart, London: Victor Gollancz, Ltd, 1977

Fort Belvedere, interior as decorated for Edward VIII, (afterward the Duke of Windsor)
by Herman Schrijver (1904 - 1972)

While you were watching the Oscars, I was finishing Charles Burkhart's Herman & Nancy & Ivy (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1977) which I had eagerly awaited and which had just arrived in the weekend mail.   I was so looking forward to learning more about Herman Schrijver, Dutch-born bon vivant and decorator to so many interesting people including "Ernest Simpson, more than one of Ernest's wives (including Wallis), the King, assorted Guinnesses and Kesslers, Lord Stonehaven and Dame Marie Tempest." (p. 33).  

Herman was also great friends, oddly enough, with Nancy Cunard and Ivy Compton-Burnett, and the point of the book Herman & Nancy & Ivy I think is to elaborate on just exactly how one person can have such different sorts of friends.  Nancy, as you know, is famous today for the Beaton portrait of her wearing lots of ivory bracelets; she was also tireless in her work on behalf of various causes and was sexually insatiable.  Understandably, Nancy was not especially fond of the novelist Ivy who was sexually almost certainly the very opposite of Nancy and seemingly uninterested in any causes.  One would be hard-pressed I think, to find two more different women, but both were friends of Herman.  

"If you have a personality," Herman wrote, "this must be expressed and recognized in all your rooms, in every corner of your house.  If you don't have a personality steal or borrow one from the people you like or admire most."  In an interview with Herman In a Cape Town newpaper in August 1936 he tells us that "King Edward likes clean, bright colours and colour contrasts, and he is fond of red and yellows.  The walls of most of his apartments at the Fort are painted white."  The question of course is whether the King really preferred this decorating scheme or borrowed it, perhaps from Wallis SImpson.   We may never know.  

Clearly, however, Herman was drawn to people with personalities, sometimes even people with fairly difficult ones.  Nancy was forever showing up chain-smoking and drunk, and Ivy always scraped the butter off the toast at tea.  Nancy almost never ate, and Ivy liked very simple, very plain English food.  Ivy, in fact, disliked people speaking anything but English in her presence and would demand a translation when someone spoke French.  Nancy, as Harold Acton told Duncan Fallowell (in To Noto, Bloomsbury 1989) "was an extraordinary woman.  She always had to have enormous black men plunging into her morning, noon and night."  As for Ivy, it is unclear whether her long-term relationship with the English furniture expert Margaret Jourdain with whom she lived for many years was ever physical.  Opinion is evenly divided.

Which I think proves the point that Herman preferred personality in rooms as well as friends. 

To be continued.

Madresfield Court, Malvern, Worcestershire
Scanned from the author's extensive collection of postcard views of stately homes

In the next issue of Vanity Fair, the one after the Oscar issue with the young starlets on the cover, the one with Michael Douglas on the cover instead, there will be yet another story on the relationship of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead to the history of Madresfield and the Lygon family. 

As you know, of course, I have already written extensively on Madresfield and Brideshead, but apparently there is still more to be said.  And not surprisingly, since as you will recall, William Lygon, 7th Earl Beauchamp, had "a persistent weakness for footmen" [Source] which was inevitably bound to be noticed by his brother-in-law the fabulously wealthy and profoundly intolerant Duke of Westminster who did say something, rather unpleasant, and scandal ensued.  Since Waugh had taken up with the doomed second son, the young and delicate Hugh Lygon, the banished Earl became the inspiration for Lord Marchmain, the Lygons for the Flytes, Hugh for Sebastian, and so on and so on. 

The intersection of fiction and fact is an endlessly fascinating place to pin down, to map, to go and seek out and stand at the corner of and look about in every direction for yet more clues.  They say we are in a time when the memoir and reality are especially important, but I think we've all just gotten terribly skeptical.  No one believes what passes for truth so everyone wants to reveal their own personal version, hence all these blogs, confessional and othewise, these tell-all tales, all fodder for Oprah's book club.  The problem is that one can never tell the truth without embellishing (at any rate, I can't).  How far one goes in one direction or the other, for the sake of truth or for the sake of a good story, depends on so many factors, not least being the desire to keep your audience entertained.  I happen to think since man first started grunting, he was shaping true reporting into enhanced and compelling narrative ("The wooly mammoth was how big?  Really?  Show us the little dance you did when you taunted him.  Right before you killed him all by yourself with that little stick. Go on. Tell us again."). 

It's in our nature.  I don't know about you, but I can hardly get through the day without at some point re-imagining the scene around me, the various players, the setting, the dialogue re-composed into a new and improved reality.  A funnier one, at least.  And no, as a matter of fact my 'fictionalized' take is not always the one in which I come off looking good.  Sometimes quite the opposite.  You, on the other hand, invariably receive a flattering portrayal.  I promise.

In Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead (London: Harper Press, 2009) the author Paula Byrne writes, "all Waugh’s fictional people and places are subtle transformations, not direct portrayals, of ‘reality’.”  I should hope so.  I should like to think fiction is more than the truth with the names changed.  I should even like to believe that fiction does something the truth can't do.  Something perhaps even better.  I happen to believe there's a point to taking the raw material of this world and shaping it into something else, that there's even a useful purpose for not entirely telling the truth.  But I'm old-fashioned.  I love fiction.  Fiction is, after all, not entirely true.  Non-fiction is, by definition, non-not-true.  Yes I adore finding out what supposedly really happened, what was really going on.  But I think sometimes fiction gets to the truth behind the truth, the way non-fiction can get to the story behind the story.  And yes, I know it sounds mad, trying to make the distinction.  I know it is difficult, trying to tell the difference.  

Alain Delon, Le Samourai, 1967
Detail, television screen grab by the author

Jef Costello (Delon) is a man of few words.  He says more just by looking at the bird he keeps in a cage in his apartment.  His hands tell you more than most people say out loud.  His eyes do the acting, the way he studies that bird to know if someone's been there when he was out.

Not saying things, what can't be said, is interesting.  I had a lovely chat on Sunday with my dear friend Felix about just that, all the things one can't say in polite company or in print.  I mean the people we've known we can't name, the things we've done we can't tell you, the jobs we've had we don't talk about, and not just because of those confidentiality agreements or the terms of that court settlement.  Some of us, you see, are gentlemen.  Some of us have learned that if you can't say something nice, it's better to have a little private chat about it later with your best friend when you can process the pain of holding in how you really feel by saying what you were rehearsing in your head all weekend to say but can't, shouldn't, won't, because you value your dignity, your pride, career, relationship, reputation, mental health and/or physical well-being.

Yes, some of us know when to keep quiet and not spill the beans, when to smile and nod and not argue.  It's intuitive, I think, what we figure out can be said and not said, but it's also learned.  Some of us studied with professionals.  My mother could speak volumes without saying a word.  She could make grass stop growing with a look.  My father, on the other hand, simply didn't talk, which was also effective.  Not saying anything can inspire fear.  It can also be good for you.

Or bad for you.  Which is why you run it by a friend, to figure out the distinction.  The urge to say something and the effectiveness of saying it are two often quite different matters.  You can have fairly base motives in life for saying things (ego, par example).  There are also equally unattractive reasons for not speaking up (like, for instance, fear).   

Now as you might imagine, I'm not telling you everything.  The truth is it's not all that interesting.  Trust me, you don't want to know.  And if you really really do want to know, I promise I'll tell you later.

Carden Hall, Clutton, Cheshire, burned 1912
Image: Lost Heritage - Demolished Country Houses of England

As you know, many a resume and curriculum vitae these days is an unlovely thing, a history of previous employers now renamed, merged, bought, dissolved, bankrupt, closed and in some cases simply ceasing to exist.  Rather the fate you might have wished for former lovers, but awkward when on the job search and being asked for references.     

So before moving on from the memoirs of Frederick-John Gorst, Royal Footman (see previous entries below), I thought it might be useful if not also comforting to point out that, with the notable exception of Welbeck Abbey, everywhere Mr Gorst was employed is, in a word, gone:

St. Aiden's Theological Seminary, Birkenhead. Founded in 1847, closed in 1969.  Gorst's first job in service, as a young boy in the 1890s, is here as a page boy carrying coal to the students' rooms, polishing shoes, running errands, working in the kitchen, and carrying pitchers of warm milk to the Rev. Beibetz in the evening.

Carden Hall, Cheshire.  Burned 1912.  The teenager Gorst, having outgrown his page boy uniform, learns to be a footman.

S.S. Germanic of the White Star Line.  After suffering exhaustion by age 19, a physician advises Gorst that sea air might improve his health and the young man is hired by the White Star Line, serving on the S.S. Germanic from Liverpool to New York.  Sold in 1904 to the White Star's sister company the American Line, subsequently rosold and renamed several times, the S.S. Germanic sees service in two world wars before it is cut up for scrap in 1950.

Court Hey.  Disenchanted with life at sea as a saloon class steward, Gorst returns to shore and enters the service of  the Gladstone brothers, nephews of the illustrious Prime Minister William Gladstone, at their stately Georgian home Court Hey on the outskirts of Liverpool.  Demolished, 1956.  Source

19 Rutland Gate, London.  Gorst is hired as travelilng footman to Lady Howard.  The house is sold at the death of Lord Howard, and eventually demolished in 1932 to make way for a block of flats.

Welbeck Abbey, where Gorst is employed in the early years of the last century as a Royal footman to the 6th Duke of Portland.  Still standing. 

The world changes.  In Hollywood if you're lucky your resume is a list of hit shows that are still in syndication; the sets, the offices, the props and the people who ran those shows long gone, of course, the crew dispersed, but the product lives on.  In other lines of work the remaining evidence is less tangible.  The name of the company you started with may even have changed a couple times while you were still there, before they asked you to clean out your desk.  But a friend of mine experienced in these matters says no one ever survives more than three take-overs.  Apparently more than that is simply too much for a normal human being to bear. 

If you're like the young footman Gorst, however, you learn to keep moving.  You change with the world.  You are one step ahead of the fires, the scrap yard, and the demolition crews.  You stay ahead of the game.  And as my wise friend advises, you always want to be nice to the little people on the way up.  Because you will surely meet them on the way back down.

Magnolia budding, Rustic Canyon, Sunday afternoon 21 February 2010

Hobbled by the limits of what a camera can do (and what I seem able to make it do, as you can see), I throw all my faith into words.  And then I worry, possibly far too much.  I admit it.  What you think matters.

So to begin with, of course, let us remember that words are slippery and difficult and tend to repeat themselves.  And people with cameras and words are fallible.  And then there is so much to choose from, I mean in terms of the world itself and everything in it, so many elements to juggle and keep in the air at one time.  What you can count on to carry the story and balance the composition, what details to keep and which ones to leave out.  How it will all sound later when it changes, and it will certainly change because you will change; your perspective will.  I don't know about you, but I go into a kind of trance in the process.  The trance is the place you go where time doesn't go, and you are there, doing this juggling, this thinking, this composing, half enchanted, half dissatisfied, not quite dreaming but not where you will be later, afterward.

Later what happens is you start to doubt, or I do at any rate.  Judging kicks in.  The whole process is exhausting and I suppose is not even good for you, except not being good for you never stops anyone.  The difficult part is everything you don't say.  The part about the magnolia tree in Ohio that you can't even see but I was thinking of, the one that won't be budding for ages yet, the one that bloomed like something a young boy would find exotic and full of meaning, pink and white and faintly sexual right out there in the open after the snow was gone, not in sunny California but in the middle of Ohio, a very long time ago. 

You were somewhere else, of course.  You were thinking of another past entirely.  Indians on horseback, not cowboys.  Barefoot Indians. 

You can't tell from this photograph how anxious I was to get to the next one, and how already disappointed I was with the the way the light was changing.  And at the very same time, you can't see how happy I was to be with my friend, to be where I was, right there, right then.

You can't imagine how interesting it all was in that moment and place and then afterward, in the bliss of the trance.  And how much I looked forward to telling you so, as soon as I got back.

"I'm coming to get you," Bianca called to announce on Sunday.  "Lily's coming too."

Possibly as a ruse to get me out and away from my research on the servant problem (see previous posts), or because we had both seen A Single Man, my dear friend and co-conspirator Bianca had decided we needed a trip to Santa Monica Canyon where she felt sure she would be able to find the house where Christopher Isherwood used to live.  Along the way, she took the opportunity to show me many other points of interest, since this part of Los Angeles was where she had spent her formative years. 

"Hello, you've got the arrow," she reprimanded the car in front of us as we took a very hard right off San Vicente and plunged down the steep winding descent of Entrada Drive.  "There's my school," she said, waving at a blur as we careened downhill.  "That used to be a gas station where we'd go buy candy," she added as a small building swept by whose vaguely Art Deco lines hinted at a former existence.  A scent of jasmine and ocean whipped our faces as I clutched Lily in my arms in case she might attempt to leap out the open window .

"She's had half a Benadryl," Bianca explained of the tiny creature who I then realized was placidly enjoying the ride with a slightly glazed look in her eyes.  "There's the Uplifter Club," Bianca said after several more turns. "We would go there and order butterscotch sundaes.  Butterscotch."  She sighed.  "Johnny Weismuller used to live over there," she added.  A few more curves and bends and ups and downs and we came to a stop in a wooded glade.

We got out and Lily stumbled off to inspect some low-lying foliage.  The afternoon light was flashing brilliant gold against the trees at the top of the canyon far above us.  "It was always colder down here than anywhere else," my tour-guide and friend observed.

"A microclimate," I suggested.  "The redwoods..."

"Cold," Bianca summarized.  "Over there's a creek, where those houses are now."  She regarded the structures with faint disapproval.  "We used to ride our horses here and pretend to be cowboys."  I looked around appreciatively, trying to imagine a teenaged girl in this shady woodsy place but with less houses.  Living very far away from the places I grew up, I am especially curious about how it must feel to be an older self in the place where a young self used to live and play, and ride horses.  And go to school barefoot, she tells me.

"How does it feel?" I ask.  "To be here now?"

"Where's our house?" she asks instead of answering.  She looks around to get her bearings, searching out landmarks.  We walk a little further and she stops.  "That," she says, indicating a clapboard edifice behind some shrubbery and a wall, "used to be the garage.  And that," she adds, "was the guest house."  We continue on our way and she directs my attention up the steep hillside.  "There," she tells me.  "That was the studio.  That was my room."

A small shingled cottage sits above us, nestled in a thicket of trees against the slope.  You can almost not see it.  The main house is hidden behind the newer structure closer to the road where we are standing. 

"Like a treehouse," I say.  "And an artist's garret at the same time."

"It's where I did so many things, you know, for the first time," she observes, looking up at the little house perched in the trees.  She does not elaborate.

"Beautiful," I say.

"And cold," she replies.  "Come on, I'll show you where the bridge over the creek was, the one that washed out.  A boy I went to school with lived over there.  He was nice.  Then one night his mother came home and tried to kill him.  He was very quiet after that."

We find Lily and go back to the car and turn around and after a while we remember to look for Christopher's, but we disagree on exactly where it should be and wind up down at the beach instead, in time for the sunset.

Welbeck Abbey, principal residence of the Dukes of Portland

King Edward VII conferred the title of Master of the Horse on the 6th Duke of Portland which honor allowed the Duke to use the state carriages and have four matched Royal footmen in his household.  Frederick John Gorst, author of Of Carriages and Kings, was one of those four in 1904.

Once upon a time I worked in that madcap business called television, in a position ambiguously referred to as "development," which meant periodically being engaged in something referred to as "staffing."   Staffing meant you were at that stage in the development of a television series when you were looking for writers to write a new show that had been picked up for the coming season or else looking for fresh recruits for a show coming back for another season, and depending upon the nature of the show and the temperment of the creator and executive producers and the amount of interference from the network and studio, staffing could be an interesting process of reading scripts and meeting writers and having lunches with their agents.  Or it could be a crap shoot.  Or an empty ritual in a court society filled with intrigue, duplicity, and nepotism.  I was lucky, though.  I worked for a very nice man who was the talented creator of a great show.  "Ever work on a really awful show?" someone asked me once, as if I would have had a very different attitude toward television and the industry euphemistically called entertainment if I had.  But I had not.  Plus, I didn't stick around long enough to get disillusioned and bitter.  Like I said, I was lucky. 

So was young Frederick Gorst, royal footman to the 6th Duke of Portland, according to his delightful memoirs which I have just finished.  The Duke and Duchess of Portland certainly sound like very good and interesting people to have worked for.  But talk about staffing -- consider just a portion of the numbers it took to run a place like Welbeck Abbey, at the turn of the last century:

Steward
Wine butler
Under butler
Groom of the chambers
Four Royal footmen
Two steward's room footmen
Master of the Servants' Hall
Two page boys
Head chef, Second chef
Head baker, Second baker
Head kitchen maid, Two under kitchen maids
Vegetable maid
Three scullery maids
Head still room maid, Three still room maids
Hall porter, Two hall boys, Kitchen porter and six odd (handy) men
Head housekeeper
Duke's valet
Duchess's personal maid
Lady Victoria's personal maid
Head nursery governess, Tutor, French governess, Schoolroom footman, Nursery footman, fourteen housemaids

And that was just the kitchen and household staff, which doesn't include those who worked in the stables and garages, estate management, gardens, home farm, laundry cottage (12 full-time laundresses), fire station, gymnasium, golf course, library, chapel, mechanical help (telegrapher, night watchmen, engineers, telephone clerk) and the window cleaners.

It takes a small army, of course, to make a television show.  More than a few writers, obviously.  But it's all fairly temporary, relatively speaking.  Transient.  100 episodes, five or six seasons, it doesn't last forever.  Plus you go on hiatus every once in a while too. 

Running a stately home would be, on the other hand, a very serious business.