'Tears Before Bedtime' and 'Weep No More'

by Barbara Skelton

  January 14

  Today Cyril’s baby was born. He said if it had not been born prematurely it would have been an Aquarius. He rings up at six in the evening, talks in breathless tones. ‘How is the baby?’ I ask. ‘Fetching,’ he says. ‘Like some delicious animal in Harrods pet shop. It made a kind of squeak, has red hair and its eyes are closed.’ Said he had never seen a new born baby before, and he had been afraid he might be repelled. Asks how I like the scarf he had bought me from Turnbull and Asser. I said it was very pretty. ‘If you like it,’ he added, ‘I will get another of the same design, only a different colour, to have one like yours.’ Already, the sentimental words of a pending separation. Collect new passport photographs. Wash hair … feel frostbitten, wretched and alone.

  The week before my departure to the States, a locksmith came to repair the front door. I was vaccinated. I lunched with Mummy and the next day took a train to Brighton to have a final lunch with Cyril at the Mad Mascot. After lunch we drove along the coast past a daisy-chain of bungalows to Eastbourne and ordered tea in the Grand Hotel, while an orchestra played extracts from Gigi. The night before my departure, Cyril came round to the flat with Peter Quennell. When he learnt that I intended to spend four months in the States on $1,000, Peter exclaimed. ‘That’ll last you a couple of weeks.’ Cyril, who was used to me terminating letters, ‘From your thrifty wife’, merely smirked.

  ‘Perhaps a bit longer. You’re so careful.’

  ‘I hope your marriage will work out,’ I said.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Cyril was definite. ‘The baby will cement it.’

  The last person to telephone was the detective-inspector. Was I really leaving? He sounded offhand. Perhaps the boss was in the room. Then on March 12, Sutro took me to the airport. Once above the cloud fleeces, I felt almost carefree and euphoric.

  Chapter XII

  New York

  Gerda lived on 57th Street, in what she termed ‘her pad’ – an apartment crammed not only with her knick knacks, but those of the previous tenant, horse prints of hunters straddling a brushwood fence, china dogs and cats moulded in sentimental poses, ornamental bowls filled with peanuts and potato chips, black lacquer tables and frilly lampshades like large picture hats, all of which created the atmosphere of a cosy jumble sale. The drinks tray was on a black trolley and beside an array of glasses stood a passable bottle of brandy, Californian wine and gin in what looked like detergent bottles. With her large blue eyes, pale skin and long blonde hair, which she pinned back in a chignon, Gerda was still beautiful. The only giveaway was the loose, wrinkled flesh of her neck, accentuated by the tight pearls she wore with a plain black, décolleté dress. She had been in her thirties when she emigrated to the States, with practically no money, after paying to get a divorce from her stockbroker husband, Ronny Simmons. The pearls, she said, had been a present, not from her second husband, Roger Treat, a sportswriter who lived in their country house in Connecticut where Gerda spent weekends, but from someone she referred to as her ‘man’, who was loaded. He owned a house on the East Side and a beach house on Long Island. She had known him for a year, but he was not particularly generous. She loved her pearls. She had had to ask for them, though, Gerda said. Before that, all he had given her was some worthless gift like a Chibachi grill, picked up on one of his European trips. Apparently, he also had a wife and they were about to divorce.

  ‘I’m going to wait until she gets up off her arse and goes to Reno,’ Gerda said. She drew the curtain and the sudden draught caused little black particles of dust to scurry across the ledge, but as soon as the window was closed, one no longer heard the expiring gasps of the buses which halted at the lights opposite. Then she let down her hair, peeled off her dress and overshoes, and put on Chinese slippers and a Bloomingdale housecoat, one of the many hanging in the cramped bathroom. Nearly everything she possessed seemed to have been bought in duplicate. The icebox was crammed with cracker barrel cheese, natural caraway, Kraft ‘Natural Swiss’ and ‘Natural Colby’, cooked roast beef and gravy, Coney Island french fries, peach pies, apple pies and all-batter chocolate brownies.

  It was over ten years since we had seen each other and Gerda had become totally Americanised. The cupboard a ‘walk-in-closet’, women were ‘broads’, penises ‘dinkles’; anything she didn’t like was ‘for the birds’. Although she had to rise early to get to First and 58th, where she supervised the Revlon Beauty Salon, we hardly slept the first night. Talking of some celebrity, Gerda said, ‘I’ve made up her kisser many a time.’ I complimented her on her looks. She had to wear a girdle now, though.

  ‘When you’ve reached my time of life, you can’t have an arse floating about like a jelly,’ she said.

  Next day it snowed and when I went out, snowflakes had settled on the awnings. In spite of the smell of centrally-heated fry and the look of the men with their brutish, Neanderthal heads, I immediately fell in love with Third Avenue. The smuggler, Toot, whom I had last seen on the Côte d’ Azur, was also in New York, training for an American flying licence. After being imprisoned in Shanghai for smuggling gold, he had decided to go straight. Old Bill was there working for Shell. He was so disparaging when he spoke of the New Yorkers that he was labelled ‘the good-will Ambassador’. I would meet them in Roger’s on Lexington. It did not take long to discover that even in the scruffiest bar, one of the main pleasures of New York was the drinks, whether it were gallons of 100% pure, unsweetened King Sun fruit juice (which caused one’s breasts to swell), Rob Roys (a Martini made with scotch), Red Snappers (bloody mary made with gin) – named after a Florida fish – or whisky sours drunk in the bar of the St Regis. But after hearing many a joyous waiter’s peel of ‘another dago red here’, I became wary of ordering wine. Gerda always knew when I had been into Roger’s. Sniffing me, she would say, ‘You’ve been in that terrible dump again. Go clean yourself up, kid.’

  One soon got used to seeing large groups of women being escorted to the most prominent table in a restaurant, all of them wearing identical little black dresses and six-tiered ropes of pearls. Old B. took me to a fish restaurant on Third and kept sending the waiter off to get something or remove the iceberg lettuce that accompanied each dish.

  ‘You think we’re fussy, don’t you?’ he said. The waiter was not at all perturbed.

  ‘Oh no,’ he replied, ‘I think you’re interesting. I don’t have the same experience as you do. But I’d like to.’

  Once I had made contact with the introductions I had brought from England, there was never a dull evening. Describing her as being ‘a wild-living honey round forty, (divorced)’, as though announcing a trade, Tynan had provided Dorothy Biddle’s telephone number. She was looking for someone to share her apartment on Fifth Avenue and invited me for drinks. All her friends wore superb fur coats and one of them was even dressed in panther skins, but it soon became clear to Dotty that I would be a wash-out as a tenant.

  Sutro had given me an introduction to Anita Loos, author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, who invited me to tea. As Sutro was in the movie business, she assumed me to an actress. The following day, a man rang to offer me a part in a forthcoming musical. Sutro’s aunt invited me to dinner and a concert in Carnegie Hall. I also had a little black Mattli dress on which I had pinned the Farouk clip. Aghast when she saw it, she begged me not to be seen wearing such an ostentatious jewel in the street.

  Stephen’s introductions were the most rewarding. Unlike the Baron de La Grange, Chuck Turner, also a musician, became a close friend, as well as the bright, witty and ambitious Earl Macgrath, then secretary to the composer, Gian Carlo Menotti, and both of them put me up in their apartments. Chuck’s attic apartment had a view on one side of the 59th Street bridge, with cars racing over it and, on the other, a consolidated laundry. Chuck loved concocting odd dishes and suffered from intermittent bulimia. One evening, he was preparing a dinner for some friends, amongst them the composer Samuel Barber, with whom for many years Chuck had lived. The gigot being cuit, Chuck opened the ove
n and a swarm of cockroaches ran out. These little monsters thrive all over the States.

  The only hopeless introductions had been provided by Peggy Guggenheim – a few choice words written on the thinnest of rice paper to gallery owners, none of whom responded. The Tynans, however, were in New York. Elaine arranged a luncheon in Le Bistro on Third and 49th, one of those small, intimate, pseudo-French restaurants that abound in New York. We were a party of six, including the two most sought-after about-town bachelors of that period: Bob Silvers, then editor on Harper’s, and the New Yorker cartoonist Charles Addams. It was clever of Elaine, for Don Juan Silvers and Charlie Casanova became regular escorts. As we left Le Bistro, the latter invited me to lunch the next day in the Rainbow Room, at the top of the Waldorf. Then he took me to Long Island. We drove there in his Bentley. Charlie had a passion for vintage cars. There was also an old Bugatti in the garage, where he would spend hours tinkering and cranking to get her to start, a moment I dreaded, for we would then go for a bump full speed round Westhampton. Charlie’s little clapboard house, situated on an inlet of the sea, was a veritable folly. His Chriscraft was moored at the end of a jetty. In the summer, when we sat on the terrace drinking, yachts sailed by. Many yacht owners knew Charlie. There would suddenly be a shout of ‘Hoi, there!’ and an exchange of greetings.

  Charlie made excellent Martinis. On my first visit, I drank so many that I became very aggressive and accused him of being ‘mean’, ‘a rotten lecher’, ‘vain’ and ‘selfish’. The following day, we drove at full speed back to New York, where I was dropped off on the kerb with a serpenty kiss and the words, ‘Call you next week’. I spent that Sunday alone with a drainpipe for company.

  *

  On the next visit, I called him an ‘American Blimp’ and a ‘tin hoarder’. When we returned to New York, it was no longer ‘I’ll call you’ but ‘Call me’. Even so, he rang soon after and took me to a farewell party the Tynans were giving. When he introduced me to James Thurber, then totally blind, Thurber groped for my hand and murmured, ‘Hallo darling’. Afterwards, we went to the 21 Club. It was a stiflingly hot evening. Even so, most women were swathed in tippets. At the next table, amongst a group of six, was a fleshy brunette who sat with her elbows resting on coasters and her head buried in her hands. Suddenly, she jerked her face to one side and threw up over her shoulder. Her companions seemed not to notice, but within seconds, a little bellhop appeared with a sick pail and broom.

  Charlie was, on the whole, a passive man, with immense charm and a most appealing way of moving, in a kind of swinging gait. As well as vintage cars, he collected medieval bows and arrows that were attached to the walls like paintings. In the sitting room, there were also a medieval coat of armour and a canary bird that flew out of its cage at drinks time. Charlie was not at all loquacious, but his remarks could be as humorous as his cartoons. Once, driving back from Long Island, as we were passing the crammed cemetery, he remarked, ‘They must be standing up in there.’ Another time, when I went to his apartment for dinner, he was praising some book and, as though addressing a total philistine, I said, ‘But, I’ve never seen you reading.’ Topping up my drink, he said, ‘Do you expect me to sit here and read in front of you?’

  *

  I always loved being taken to Gerda’s white clapboard bungalow on the edge of a lake surrounded by a forest of dogwood trees in Connecticut. Sometimes, we swam in the lake and the neighbour’s freshly fished trout tasted simply delicious. It was only when I became totally infatuated with the elusive Charlie that the lake symbolised death.

  Gerda’s husband, Roger, was a reformed alcoholic. In his late forties, he remained strangely infantile.

  ‘Where’s my cud?’ he would say – short for cuddly – a blanket. He took me to AA meetings that were far from dull, when the ‘alkies’, as he called them, got up and confessed to the degrading acts they had committed in order to obtain more booze. In general, though, New Yorkers are reticent about drinking. If someone has a bad hangover, he never says so, but, ‘I woke up feeling rather tired today.’

  Roger had just written a novel that his publishers had given a boost in Time. Most of the women characters were depicted as whores; they were all in for it and, on practically every page, ‘Her breath quickened’ or ‘He kissed her on the mouth hard’ or ‘Peter, that’s lovely. It makes me all – you know. Is there more?’ Sometimes when Gerda went back to New York, I would stay on in Newtown and return by rail. The trains were very slow and dirty. Once I was sitting next to a girl in the dining car who exclaimed, ‘Just look at that waiter’s jacket! One doesn’t come in here to be nauseated, after all.’

  Americans are always ready to converse and ask personal questions. Once, I returned on the bus and the driver managed to keep up a conversation all the way into New York, his eye on my reflection in the mirror above his head, while dogwood trees, streams, lakes and waterfalls flashed past.

  ‘You really were dreaming when I drove up,’ he started off by saying.

  ‘I was told your bus would be late.’

  ‘But it wasn’t, was it?’ Pointing to the scenery, he said, ‘The more you see of the world, the more you want to run into the woods!’ After listing all the Asian countries he had been to, he said he wanted very much to visit England, especially Ireland. ‘People think I am Irish, but I don’t look it. At least, I don’t think I do.’ He was very interested in religion and was planning to spend his vacation with the Shakers, a sect similar to the Quakers. They believed in complete segregation of the sexes. Was I ‘Protestant? Episcopal? Congregational? Methodist?’ Being ignorant of the distinctions, I said ‘Episcopal.’ Did he go to church regularly?

  ‘I haven’t been for months. I feel ashamed. But, you know’, he said, ‘it may sound silly, but when I’ve been to church I always have better luck.’ Talking of New York, ‘I wouldn’t give you a nickel for it. Dog eatin’ dog.’ The Puerto Ricans were more desperate than the Negroes. ‘And when they intermarry they’re not liked by either side. They have illegitimate children, live on relief, have TV, drink beer and don’t work. They’re filthy – their minds too.’ And so it went on until the skyscrapers loomed on the horizon.

  When not staying with Gerda, I went from pillar to post, sleeping on a let-down couch next to hissing hot pipes, an open suitcase by my side, to be awoken by a voice saying, ‘What about a little symphonette for breakfast?’ And on would go Gigi, for it was all the rage, at the time.

  The first party I went to was given by Dwight Macdonald, founder and editor of Politics Literary Review. He was an anarchist, a life-long friend of Mary McCarthy and could be very pedantic when drunk. When I entered, Mary’s ex-husband, Bowden Broadwater, said, ‘Come and meet the VIPs’ and steered me across the room to talk to John Russell’s first wife, Vera, who turned her back. John Rushole (Russell) was sitting on the edge of his chair and whispered, ‘Where are you staying?’ Bowden was very adept at making snide remarks which, alas, one couldn’t always catch, as they were hissed out of the corner of his mouth. Caroline was there, with her husband, Israel Citkovitz.

  ‘I don’t care much for Macdonald,’ I said. ‘He’s like an overgrown boy scout. Or his wife, for that matter.’

  ‘Just wait until you meet Mrs Trilling’, she replied. Her husband, Lionel Trilling, was a writer who taught English literature at Columbia University and they were both very intellectual. William Phillips, co-founder with Philip Rahv of the Partisan Review, asked me what class I belonged to.

  ‘None really,’ I said. ‘If anything, middle.’

  ‘How you must wish to be upper,’ was his response.

  When I said I was going to Boston for the weekend, to see Edmund Wilson, Phillips instantly had to let me know that he too was going away, not only this weekend, but the following one too. He came straight out of the status book. Phillips was planning to go to England. He would ring me up practically every day in a great fret about his reception there. I wrote to Cyril saying what a dismal little snob he was:
<
br />   He showed me a sucking-up letter he had written to you and I advised him to cut it down, for the ingratiation went on for pages. Although he appears to be thoroughly nice, he has a reputation for being a creep and is not at all popular. He was about the only person not invited to the Tynan farewell. Both Caroline and I think him dismally stupid; he only rings up if he wants something and has not asked me to a single thing, so I don’t think you need feel obliged to entertain him too lavishly. I have just been to see the Edmund Wilsons. I like her very much, but found it a bit sticky. I think he was quite astounded by my ignorance. The Mrs took me to Salem. It was sunny. There are some ravishingly pretty clapboard houses with Palladian windows painted dark grey and the magnolias were in full bloom. Otherwise, I sat on the banks of the Charles River with a book most of the time.

  Cyril replied:

  Just got your sweet letter and very pleased with it. I have just had lunch with PQ and given him your address. He is coming to NY in a week I think and is very anxious to see you. He has promised to ask his publishers, the Viking Press, if they can give you some reading – it seems to me the easiest job for you is to read MSS in your own time and comment on them and make suggestions. Anyhow, you can at least talk it over with him and he is very well disposed and liked you very much the last time he saw you. No real news for you as I have been buried in work. I retire into it now like Kupy into the bottom of your bed and find the inside of a book the only place where I feel safe, or I sit through the marvellous afternoons of early summer in the gloomy junk room of the cottage fiddling with old bank statements, telegrams, corrected proofs and worthless articles: what a punishment. I see from your old letters that the bad thing about our marriage was that you had so much contempt for me. By the time we got married most of the love had gone and I was a husband. A figure of fun, know all, humbug, bald patch, quota peg, circumference and so on. There seemed to be something in you which hated a husband and took everything good about one for granted, concentrating on the faults. I see that the alternative of remaining married to you and waiting for W. to blow over would never really have worked because your contempt for me would be increased and so you would have always been looking for someone else – this does not mean that I do not feel terribly sad about the whole thing, particularly about what has happened since, but I don’t believe we could have come together without a divorce. We were pretty washed up when we went to Greece together. I found on looking through all this muck that I really have only loved you and Jean – everybody else seems to have been part of an hallucination – as Siegfried loved Gutruna after swallowing the philtre. We should have got going at Bedford Square when we were both less suspicious. It has been wonderful, the last few days, the colour of sea and downs, the new leaves, the sunshine. It is a great happiness to go out in the little bus, open again, making its merry song or ‘bark’, as the sportscar enthusiasts call it.