The Happy Years (1944-48)

by Cecil Beaton

  Greta leaves on Tuesday for Hollywood, and for three days on the train she will not move out of her compartment. ‘No, please don’t send me a telegram! I’d be terrified: I would have to open the door to the attendant. I don’t wish to go back to California, but I must get rid of that house — I don’t want it any more. Yet it’s rather frightening to think that that is all I possess in the world. I have no belongings — I have no trace of my existence: no papers, no love-letters, no relics involving any human beings.’

  As always, time went by too quickly as we talked, and she was late for dinner with her companion. Painting her lips, she said: ‘I despair having to put on this war-paint, and these horrible shoes which distort my toes. Oh, I resent going out to restaurants when I look so tired!’ ‘But you don’t look tired!’ ‘I can see — you can’t fool me. I know how I look!’ she said bitterly.

  February, 1948

  Monday was like Sunday on account of Washington’s birthday holiday. Greta leaves tomorrow. She abandoned her packing in order to arrive with a picnic lunch. She had boiled the usual four eggs of which I ate the whites of hers as well as my own share. My ice-box provided the ‘et ceteras’. She would not be precise about plans, but warned me against coming to California in case I am disappointed; but, secretly, I am glad she is leaving New York and the present stalemate. ‘The little man’ usurps much of her leisure and seems always to have priority, but perhaps his tentacles do not stretch as far as California?

  Our goodbye was not sad for it was more an au revoir. Nevertheless, we lingered a long time at the back of the door, then she waited several seconds for a long, final look at my hotel rooms before hurrying down the iron stairs marked ‘Exit’, her face white with wide, bright smile and mad, bright eyes.

  A moment after I returned from a cinema the telephone bell rang.

  ‘Have you put the light out?’ I asked.

  ‘No, not yet.’

  ‘Have you still got your mascara on?’

  ‘No, I am scrubbed: I am a clean boy,’ she said.

  I said how happy I had been this winter. My heart broke to hear her say: ‘It has been very sweet, hasn’t it?’

  ‘There’s so much we haven’t had time for — to go to that Chinese restaurant, to pay a call on Mr Molnar and ask him to tell risqué stories, to pay a visit to the registrar...’

  ‘Stop! Stop! If we go on talking like this, I will think too much about it and won’t be able to sleep.’

  Next morning typewriter, telephones, ‘busyness’. ‘Mr Thompson’ on the telephone:

  ‘I just called because I’ve been out somewhere and thought maybe you’d called. I just wanted to say good luck, and thank you.’

  ‘But is this the last time? Couldn’t I ring this afternoon? Couldn’t you ring me?’

  ‘Well, it would only be to say good luck again and then run.’

  ‘It’s terribly sad, but maybe it won’t be for long — maybe I’ll fly out to the coast to see you.’

  Laughing: ‘Oh, no!’

  ‘But if I come vaulting over the garden wall, won’t you receive me?’

  ‘Just once or twice maybe, but you had better not.’

  ‘Well, I really ought to see Mr Hitchcock. Well, thank you for everything. Be a good girl, and don’t bawl out your neighbours. Goodbye!’

  Part VIII: Californian Farewell, 1948

  GRETA AT HOME

  March 3rd: Beverly Hills

  To consolidate my winter’s conquest, and perhaps bring it nearer to permanence, I knew I should see her in her own home. I must be able to spend the days uninterruptedly with her, staying from morning until bedtime without her looking at her watch and saying: ‘Got to go now.’ It would be best not to ask her specifically if I should join her in California for she did not wish to make the decision, or to assume any responsibility. I sent her vague telegrams. I waited until the last moment to telephone to gauge whether she really wanted me to take an aeroplane; it was obvious that she did. Plans were made in a jiffy. With what relish I dismantled my expensive hotel rooms, and packed just one bag for my embarquement to Cythera!

  With a ticket in my pocket, the old fears at the prospect of taking flight asserted themselves — a legacy of the air crash in the war. Eugene, the waiter, did not make matters easier by saying: ‘I hate to see people fly — it’s so dangerous; there are many accidents at this time of the year.’ He looked out at the stormy skies.

  For long periods during the trip I was afflicted with spasms of terror: I could not doze. The genteel stewardess came round smiling like an ogress: ‘Would you kindly fasten your seat-belts; we are expecting a little turbulence.’ The palms of my hands and my scalp were sweating on arrival in Los Angeles, but I had survived.

  After the shortage in London and Paris it was a happy event to find a taxi to drive me from the airport and, luckier still, a room available in a bungalow of the Beverly Hills that was reserved for transients of the MGM Company. It was too late to telephone Greta so I went immediately to bed. During my sleep I dreamt that perhaps she would not be as welcoming as I wanted, or that ‘the little man’ would hear of my departure from New York and come out in hot pursuit.

  I awoke early. The Venetian blinds were slatted with diamond brilliance. I let in the sun: the sky was brilliantly blue. To be here after the blizzards of New York was almost too great a contrast. I relished the rare treat of a large orange juice and egg and bacon breakfast. I telephoned. A very cheery voice replied: ‘I’ve been waiting for you — been up since early and, oh, so busy! I’ll fetch you in twenty minutes. I’ve got to start up the buggy and sometimes she doesn’t go. Meet me down by the road where the bus stops outside your hotel.’

  When, in the thirties, I first came to the capital of the movie world, my dream was to make the acquaintance of its greatest star: I left without as much as a glimpse. On my second visit I did manage — on that evening that will never pale — to meet her, but now, after all these years, I was about to enter her house as an intimate friend and I would see her in a new guise, leading another life to the one we knew together in New York.

  Wearing my light-weight flannel suit and feeling very spruce, I waited. I was scrutinizing a palm tree, and watching some small, dusty birds high up in its branches, when I realized a car had driven up and an intense, rather strained face was leaning forward and bidding me jump in. My heart gave one leap as I recognized the familiar features. Her hair was hanging in thick curls: she wore trousers and a jersey. We were on the way.

  She, a little nervous, said: ‘It’s “the Dragon’s” day out, but I don’t know if she’ll have gone yet, so let’s just drive about a bit before we go into the house. But when we do go in, you’re not to look! Promise to put on blinkers! I’m ashamed: it’s awful — so obnoxious, and not as it should be. Now I’m lost — I don’t know where we are.’

  ‘Well, it’s down that way. We turn off here, Benedict Canyon, and it’s there.’ I remembered ferreting out her house that night in her absence.

  ‘Imagine that I’ve been here six years, and that you have to direct the way!’

  The little buggy, champagne or dove-coloured, turned an abrupt corner. We drove trader a garage roof, and the white secret door was unlocked. Expecting little, I was delighted to find myself in a pretty white-walled garden filled with sun and geraniums, everything neat and orderly: a large sun divan, covered with a white sheet, a huge umbrella, white garden furniture.

  ‘Here, I don’t expect you’ve had orange juice — take this.’ I was as exultant as only I was when a boy on holiday. ‘Now, you’re not to look inside.’

  ‘Not even a peep? I spy a baroque angel hanging on a wall.’

  ‘Close your eyes. You see, in a way I’m a perfectionist, and this is far beneath what I would like it to be. But during the war you couldn’t get anything done, and now I may sell the place. Everything’s unsettled, so I feel — oh heck! let it go — what’s the use?’

  But I have discovered that always Greta is apt to decr
y anything merely because it is hers. I found later that she works in her garden a great deal, and not only does she tend the borders herself, but the Japanese gardener is permitted to work only on the front garden and is not given entrance to this, her hidden sanctum. In fact, she does the ‘nigger work’ — she had been mending the fence around her lawn. Often she works at it the whole day, quite naked, but she discovered that people could peer through the fence. She had bought some wood with which to fill the gaps, but it was the wrong kind and had done the job badly!

  ‘It’s hot in the sun: I’ll get you some bathing shorts.’

  Greta smoked an Old Gold as she lay back in a pair of tight white trunks and a brassière. We watched the humming birds in the trees and the blue jays, and I relished every detail that was part of this entourage. We lay back wallowing in sunny happiness. We were both in such a good mood for it was obvious that she was glad of my arrival.

  ‘So you came all this way to see your girlfriend — or did you come to see Mr Hitchcock?’

  ‘Nothing in the world would ever induce me to go and see that old show-off.’

  She looked shocked and delighted. ‘I was determined not to ask you to come,’ she said, ‘but when you telephoned I was on the point of sending you a telegram. Suddenly I get so restless.’ In the brilliant light her beauty was more fine and delicate than one could have imagined: the skin of a polished flawlessness, the eyelashes like a peacock’s tail. She looked furtively to the servants’ quarters. ‘I wonder if “the Dragon” has gone yet?’ She went to a door and listened with an expression of fear on her face. It is obvious that she does not know how to handle servants and that ‘the Dragon’ holds her in terror.

  ‘When may I meet “the Dragon”? So often I’ve heard her sad voice on the telephone.’

  ‘Not today — tomorrow, maybe, she’ll give us dinner.’

  By degrees, I was allowed to see the house. In the sitting-room — a large comfortable place with huge sofas and a lot of colour — there were Impressionist paintings, two Renoirs, a Modigliani, a Rouault and, best of all, a most touching, tender, appealing ‘still life’ by Bonnard of a jug of poppies and meadowsweet. Again Greta deprecated the pictures. ‘I bought them as investments before I knew anything much about painting. They’re rather boring ones, I think.’ She said she wished the Impressionists had not been so bourgeois: the objects they painted were poor in taste and their flowers coarse. Here were her bookshelves, the cupboards with the tennis racquets and the old mackintoshes, the pad with the telephone numbers written in her square, capital lettering. So this was where the ‘Divina’ lived.

  We walked down a long stone corridor, named by her ‘the Pullman’, to the kitchen. This consisted of two immaculate rooms in which trays were laid out. I was not allowed to take any active part in her preparations for an early lunch of salad, Matza biscuits and milk. Each brought a tray out into the sun. Blue jays came down from the trees and ate out of Greta’s hand. It was enchanting.

  Greta enumerated the joys of California. ‘Living here I have everything. It’s an easy life. You’d go mad in California, I know — you’d mind the lack of entertainment — but I like it well enough.’ A friend of hers considers it unhealthy, for, she says, the bugs and insects never die. They just lie underground in winter, and go on multiplying, so that soon the whole place will be overrun by them. ‘See how I’ve been stung when working among the oleanders!’ Her hands were blistered. I told her that, from experience, I knew it was easy to catch a bad cold at sundown, or become stricken with acute laryngitis. ‘But where today, except in Tahiti, could you lead such a healthy life? And for your work — you’re quite undisturbed, and when the day’s over in the studio, you can go for long walks in the mountains and by the ocean. There’s so much sun — everything grows, and you can be out of doors all the time — I’m never inside.’

  Here we were absolutely remote from the world with nothing to disturb us. I basked in drowsy sensuousness, and soon was asleep.

  We must go down to the sea. The preparations against the sudden chill of a Californian late afternoon were hilarious as we shared the intimacy of the dressing-room and bathroom. I was rigged out in borrowed corduroy pants, several sweaters, and, on top, a brown windbreaker: Greta was almost similarly dressed. We set off for Santa Monica.

  Again I was driving along these familiar landmarks of avenues fringed with palm trees, of suburban mansions with sprinklers whirling over the coarse, too-green grass, past fruit and flower stalls, and whimsical ice-cream parlours, past poor little shacks and enormous advertisement displays. Again I remembered how, on earlier visits, the imperviousness of this woman in the car beside me had managed to transcend this vulgar, venal place. Now that she has retired from the screen and her face is no longer magnified a thousand-fold on the hoardings, I felt an extraordinary pride in the fact that this private person, sitting at the wheel, had been the empress of the whole motion-picture industry. She had given the films a lustre just as now, by her vivid presence, she radiated our journey with a touch of the sublime.

  At last, beyond the hot dog stands and the bathing shacks, the stretch of shore became deserted, and the ‘buggy’ was parked by a certain white wooden hut where it had been parked many hundreds of times before. We set out along the sand where she had walked many hundreds of times, in all weathers — including the driving downpours of the ‘rainy season’. We set off with incredible zest, health and vitality, climbing over breakwaters and rocks, and running after the seagulls and pelicans, then wrestling with one another, and suddenly going into amorous clinches. We walked for many miles unseen by any eyes and when, at last, we felt the need of a drink we came across a Coca-Cola booth where we quenched our thirst. Refreshed, we returned to the shore, and again started wrestling — to find that a group of delighted roughnecks were watching from the booth.

  Greta was very acrobatic and, finding a certain iron framework from a deserted swing, did a number of spectacular exercises. She is in Olympic trim, and every day goes through an elaborate ritual of training. Her body is that of a seventeen-year-old girl — lithe, strong and supple. It is, no doubt, the Scandinavian in her that makes her so mindful of health.

  Farther along the shore there were gatherings of sea-birds. As we approached they would take to the air in a dark, hovering cloud. But occasionally one bird would be left behind and, terrified, would run from us with a broken wing trailing. Greta was deeply upset by the sight. ‘Oh, the misery! It knows it is going to die — the others will peck it to death. That is the law of nature — the sick are outcast and doomed — and there is nothing that we can do.’ We watched a small, dishevelled, black-headed gull on which the cruel birds had started, and it was wretched to see it awaiting its inevitable end. Further along we watched another tragedy of impending death: a bird caught by a wave could not defend itself and was knocked about helplessly. Greta said: ‘I’ve seen it so often. We can only try not to frighten it: that is all we could ask if we were in that predicament — but I wish I could give it a fish.’

  Occasionally on our long walk we would see lovers clasped in each other’s arms in their parked cars or lying on the rocks. We noticed one young and respectable couple having a picnic tea. On the return journey we saw a negro nearby busily building a sand-castle by a breakwater. ‘What a strange occupation for a grown-up person!’ As we watched him he patted his castle with tremendous intensity of purpose. We climbed the breakwater. On the other side we saw the young picnicking couple now flushed and asleep under a rug, and Greta realized in a flash (not I!) that the Negro had been spying on the couple as they made love. Greta told me of a man she knew whose one pleasure was to stalk lovers. It amazed me that anyone as essentially innocent as she is never surprised by human perversion.

  Nearing the motor she sang boisterously, and invented some dialogue as if she were a tough guy making me a proposition. It was done with such realism, and her ear so exact, that I felt maybe she could have been a dramatist. I was also surprised to d
iscover how many aspects of life she knows about. One would have thought perhaps she was a little remote in her ivory tower, but she is ready to appreciate all types, and this tough guy was utterly realistic and rather frightening.

  She sat on some wooden steps scraping the tar, washed up by the sea, off the soles of my shoes. ‘If it gets on the carpets it’s obnoxious.’ Then suddenly, as if about to make some profound definition about life, she said: ‘I can’t think quite what to do for dinner — whether to take you out to a little Italian place and look into your eyes, or whether to give you something at home.’ The latter alternative was happily decided upon.

  I watched as if she were performing an act of legerdemain, spellbound, as Greta prepared lamb chops and vegetables in a steam dish. Outside it was suddenly dark and soon extremely cold: the house became a frigidaire. ‘We must have some heating, however much you dislike it,’ she said. The installation had not previously been turned on this year, so the rooms were filled with a stale smell of burnt metal that was the same as when the old magic-lantern let off its fumes in the nursery. The dinner, however, was good and hot, and was enjoyed sitting on a cedar-coloured sofa under the Bonnard.

  A noise of dry leaves scraping together was heard from outside in the alley. Like a frightened animal Greta was on the alert, then in a flash was peering through the slats of the blinds. This was a most pathetic sight, for she spends hours at the windows trying to see if anyone is about. Ever since her house was burgled, her nerve has gone, and she is in a bad state of restlessness. We went through the empty rooms to see that no one was hiding. Now I was allowed to see the series of rooms that are unfurnished, the store-room, dining-room, drawing-room, the suites of vacant rooms. Yes, the house is much too large for her. Having peered in all nooks and crannies I convinced her that all was well.