'Tears Before Bedtime' and 'Weep No More'

by Barbara Skelton

  The baby has begun to laugh and takes more interest in things. I do hope she is an intelligent, cheerful, positive character and not an elfin waif. She seems robust so far. At the moment D. has whisked her off to Lewes after announcing that our marriage is finished as I obviously prefer you … she saw that I was carrying your letter about in my wallet which I do because I can never remember your address. A Freudian lapse. I have heard very little news as am too broke to see anyone. My Pavillons are finished and the bank manager and income-tax man are waiting with their tongues hanging out for the cheque. I hope there will soon be something for you, i.e., some magazine rights or something. Have also done a piece for the ST on the beginnings of modern poetry (Eliot, Yeats and Pound). I feel I have not a moment to waste and must be working all the time or I shall leave chaos behind. Saw Michael Wishart and Nicky at Janetta’s. They look a completely happy queer couple or at any rate self-sufficient and were going off on a skiing holiday in Switzerland. The John Russells are getting Clive Bell, who is ill, to go and live with them. Isn’t it extraordinary after Logan Pearsall-Smith, Matthew Smith etc?* They only take terminal cases! My heart bleeds for you and I will help you as soon as I can.

  You were lucky to be away for the royal wedding. There has never been so much pointless mobbing and hysteria and endless yak yak yak ‘pour l’accouplement de deux nains’.

  In case I stop this letter now, this is just to say that I long for your letters, that I want to hear about everyone, that I love you and miss you desperately, but want you to enjoy yourself. I think you should plan to get back to the Mediterranean now rather than summer in the US …

  I then received a letter from the lawyers to say: ‘We have filed a divorce petition against you on the part of your husband and enclose the following documents …’ One headed ‘In The High Court of Justice Probate Divorce’ said:

  TAKE NOTICE that a Petition has been presented by Arthur George Weidenfeld. If you do not intend to answer the charges, nor to be heard on the other claims in the Petition you need not do anything more than send the Form of Acknowledgement of Service. The Court may then, without further notice from you, proceed to hear the Petition and pronounce judgment, notwithstanding your absence …

  Clause 5 of the Petition read, ‘The Respondent has frequently committed adultery with the said Cyril Connolly …’ and Clause 6, ‘The Petitioner has not in any way condoned or connived or been accessory to the said adultery and therefore the Petitioner prays the said marriage may be dissolved, and that the Co-Respondent be condemned in the costs of this suit …’

  The Petitioner’s prayers were answered and I wrote to Cyril, ‘The W. Petition arrived yesterday. Without reading it all, I just signed whatever it was and posted the form into the nearest box, stampless, what’s more. I won’t have enough money to go west and don’t really care. I don’t like travelling alone here. The evenings are so sad.’

  In July, I flew back to London. The telephone was ringing as I entered the flat. It was Cyril. Soon after, I ran into Lee Miller, then married to Roland Penrose, who intoned, ‘Whatever are you going to do now, Barbara?’ When I saw Jocelyn she had an American model girl staying with her and whenever I went round to dinner, Jane Sprague would be laying the table, dressed in a T-shirt and black tights, which gave the impression she was out to vamp John Osborne. Jane was exceedingly tall with superb legs, blue-grey eyes and bobbed white hair, and had been briefly married to a French count. In order to obtain a British work permit she then married an Armenian, Steve, and soon got tired of him, whereupon Steve fell in love with her and became so violently jealous that she sought refuge with Jocelyn.

  One evening, the fashion photographer, Alec Murray, came to dinner. Though he only lived round the corner, he arrived in a Citroën, bringing two dachshunds. Suddenly, the downstairs doorbell rang. We looked out of the window and there was Steve. Knowing Alec to be a close friend of Jane and seeing his car outside, Steve had assumed that Jane was with us. I had never met the Armenian gentleman and saw no reason to answer the insistent peel of the bell. Dinner over, we looked out again and there was Steve, as Alec said, ‘pissed as a newt’, busily puncturing Alec’s tyres. The following day, I received a bouquet and a note of apology. Soon after, Jane moved into Lyall Street and slept on the divan in the sitting room. Appearances mattered a great deal to her. If, like her, you were not impeccably dressed, she was embarrassed to be seen in your company and, when in the street, would walk a few paces ahead, disowning one, so to speak. I reacted badly to this quirkiness as, at that time, I seemed to be deliberately looking my worst; in Jane’s company the hem of a skirt would become mysteriously unstitched and I even found myself entering a cinema wearing carpet slippers. Even so, we maintained an amicable relationship. Then one day Jane, disillusioned with marriage, and I, disillusioned with life in general, booked a double cabin on the Liberté. This time I planned to remain in New York. The flat was rented to the American poet, Theodore Roethke, and his wife, Beatrice, then the two ageing femmes fatales were seen off early one November morning at Victoria Station by Jocelyn, Cyril and John Osborne. We had a very rough voyage, almost the last for the Liberté; soon after she was scrapped. Another passenger in the second class was a folk-singing pupil of Woody Guthrie, who haunted the decks dressed as a cowboy, nursing a guitar. He made Jane rock with laughter by saying I resembled Churchill. When we docked in New York, Cowboy helped with the luggage and we taxied to Gerda, who instantly took a dislike to Cowboy’s hat and kept saying, ‘Why don’t you have a haircut?’

  The following day, I moved into the Pickwick Arms Hotel on 51st. After signing in, I moved towards the lift followed by Cowboy, who was helping me carry the luggage, when the lady at the desk shouted, ‘Now then, none of that! No gentlemen allowed upstairs.’ The hotel was cheap and clean. I remained cooped in the space of a cupboard until, with Charlie’s help, I found an apartment on 54th Street.

  Darling Cyril,

  I have now moved into a nauseous apartment costing $160 a month, which includes everything but the telephone. Nothing in it yet but the tea-chests, a camp bed and two throwouts (a painted desk and black-lacquered table of Mr A). For any less here, rooms are really squalid; also people seem to take a ridiculously probing interest in location. It means that after the Roethke rent I have to find $30. I sobbed as I unpacked all the glass you had given me as it seemed so pretty here and then I sobbed as I read the inscriptions in your books! There are still lots of people to see, though, which keeps me from morose brooding. The first snowy night I spent with Caroline in her cosy Greenwich Village house with the Bacon paintings and baby taking an active part in a babychair next to the fire. I like both her and her husband, Israel Citkovitz. He is very sympathetic with a wry sense of humour. But one feels simply dreadful, headachy from the heating, with a carbohydrate rash. Hamburgers have begun to pall, they’re just for the dogs, really. I have been chasing round interviewing people for jobs. Jason E. was amiable and ineffective. Tomorrow I am being interviewed by the editor of the New Yorker, Mr Shawn. I am sure I can work it for you to write something, even an article on cartoonists, with all these Christmas potboilers just out. Am going to Gerda’s for Christmas. Write to me at her address, I might do a bunk from this apartment. Heaps of love and let’s keep up our peckers … B.

  Finally, Doubleday’s on Fifth Avenue took me on as a temporary saleslady to cope with the Christmas rush. First one had to attend a course of instruction on how to use a cash register, develop a sales technique, ‘never assume a customer’s potential is exhausted by one sale … avoid extremes of dress …’ The customer had to be greeted pleasantly with the time of day and after a purchase asked if he would care for it to be gift-wrapped. The telephone had to be answered with ‘Merry Christmas from Doubleday’. The salary was $45 a week, with a bonus of $10 a week on completion of the six-week sentence. They certainly knew what they were doing! But for a ten-minute break morning and afternoon, and the lunch hour, it meant standing seven hours a day. Each
time the head of the department caught one leaning against a pile of books, he’d bark, ‘Come along now, none of that.’ Women would come in and peruse a cookbook for an hour.

  ‘Can I help you, madam?’

  ‘Just browsing,’ was the stock reply.

  In the evenings, the buses were crammed with exhausted shoppers slumped over packages. I would join the surge along Fifth Avenue lined with Bowery bums, each one rigged out as Father Christmas, braving the icy wind as he stood swinging a censer to attract shoppers into the big stores. On Madison Avenue, no matter the time of day or the weather, a gaping crowd would be gathered outside one of the big banks, where a bevy of pretty girls with bare arms and bunting-trimmed skirts, each one clasping the next one’s shoulder, would be spinning round the main hall on rollerskates. A $60 bonus was not for the likes of me.

  Darling Cyril,

  Have been suffering from terrible insomnia for ages; I am not unhappy anymore, just worried, mainly about money. Anyway, here is your piece, and I am afraid it’s not typed too well … ‘Count On Me’ has gone into the New Yorker, but I doubt if they will take it. A friend on their staff, a writer, thought the story was very original and, after helping me correct it, said it had a good chance. I also have a new admirer, Sacha Schneider, a musician, and he conducts – Jewish, of course. So I am not at a loss for company. I see Caroline regularly, and Earl, Old B. and Gerda, and lots of new people, so you see it is better than London; it’s just a question of how to earn money in the least obnoxious way. I am sorry you are having a bad time with D. I thought it would get better when I left, but Cressida looks a dream. Otherwise, cannot think of any news; spent New Year in Chinatown at a marvellous Chinese restaurant. Little pigeons and delicious tender lobster and snow peas. Would like to write a more amusing letter but feel too wreckish. I didn’t get any cable at Christmas and was rather hurt, but then realised I hadn’t sent you one, after all. I miss you very much at times and get fretful if there is a long gap. Another dull letter. Heaps and heaps of love …

  February 6 1961

  22 W 56th Street

  There is a blizzard again; it is supposed to be the worst winter ever. The temperature gets below zero at times. Thick snow, with doormen shovelling and people picking their way along car ruts. I have now moved into a good room. Big, with a usable open fire where one burns some stuff called ‘Canel’ that blazes up like petroleum; and there is quite a stretch of sky – ‘That little patch of blue that prisoners call the sky’. Charlie arranged it for me; it belongs, to Maeve Brenan, a friend of his. I sent your piece to Brendan Gill, who is a writer for the New Yorker. He is an admirer of yours; if it comes back I will try Partisan. The change of title a great improvement, it made me laugh a lot, the Believing. Dwight Macdonald had a piece refused by the Sat Eve Post and had to resort to Partisan. ‘Count on Me’ was returned. The man who read it said the homosexual theme would keep it out of everything. But when one sees the competent boredom that goes into the New Yorker, one really despairs.

  I have no job, at the moment, although am supposed to be working part time for this research company. They don’t give me enough work, but they want to keep me on because of the English voice. What one’s sunk to. Everybody raves about Kennedy. Have not done anything amusing, been busy getting settled in.

  The cold is atrocious. Sacha Schneider has gone off on a tour of the States for two months. Another egomaniac, middle-aged baby.

  Married three times, the last wife being the actress Geraldine Page, Sacha was known as a ‘violinist-conductor-impresario-straordinario’.

  ‘Homogeneity is the vorst thing in music,’ he would say. ‘It is not so good in marriage, either. The first five bars sound vonderful, but aftervards you are bored because everything sounds the same.’

  He prided himself on being a great womaniser and lived downtown in a large duplex loft, dominated by a Steinway. Small and energetic, with a leonine head, he would rush round in a dressing gown, a tassel swinging in his wake, preparing delicious meals. He loved food. He had achieved fame as a member of the Budapest String Quartet, the best-known ensemble in the States since 1938 when he arrived with his cellist brother, both of them refugees from Europe. They became a household name; there had even been a cartoon showing four men with masks coming out of a bank holding violin cases and the caption read, ‘Let them go, fellas, they’re the Budapest Quartet.’ But after so many years ensemble they became slipshod and often played out of tune. In 1961, the Quartet was disbanded. Sacha was a generous man. Once, before flying off with his violin to San Francisco, he handed me some dollars that I promptly left behind in a taxi. He entrusted me with the keys to his duplex so that I could come and go as I pleased. Each summer he spent in the Vaucluse where he had a house on the edge of the village of Roussillon.

  Darling Cyril,

  Thank you very much for your letter. Everything is alright again now, touch wood. Have got a job with Caroline’s dentist. He’s a capper. I stand in a nurse’s uniform getting spattered with blood, holding the patients’ hands while their teeth get filed down to vicious little spikes. It’s known as ‘rehabilitation’. Then the whole lot get gleaming caps. He’s threatened to have a look at my mouth, which I’m dreading. I’m going through the whole works … swabbing out mouths, aiming the water squirt on the needle as he manipulates the drill, sterilising the burrs, dabbing the patients’ chins and administering shots of Bourbon to everyone at the end of the day.

  Chuck has lent me his apartment for the whole of the summer. It’s got a TV and a record player, friendly cockroaches and a fridge stuffed with frankfurters and pineapple juice. I adore Chuck. He’s less treacherous than Earl, has more sentimentality and a gentler disposition. Chuck, Caroline, Israel and the dentist are my favourite people, at the moment. Yesterday, it was sweltering. One had to shed every particle of clothing and even lying motionless on the bed, one sweated. Have gone off the boil for letter writing … I’m going to stand on my own feet from now on, providing they don’t drop off …

  The next job was modelling in the Junior Miss department of Bergdorf Goodman’s. There were twenty salesladies in the department, their ages ranging from forty to sixty; all had varicose veins and were determined to be friendly. Each time I caught the eye of one of them she’d smile. It became quite a strain. A rictus smile on my face, I’d lean furtively against the glass counter of the Better Hats – little skullcaps dotted with velvet ribbons and bows – and wait for the hostess to take a coffee break, then I’d volunteer for her chair. The hostess sat in the centre of the department answering questions like, ‘Do you have anything in toast or pumpkin for my wife?’ I would call over one of the smiling hostesses. It gave me something to do, memorising their names. Sometimes, nodding towards a woman wearing drainpipe trousers and an old raincoat, one of them would point out a celebrity.

  There’s Katharine Hepburn! Isn’t she just darling?’

  One never got a smile out of Miss Eric, the head of the department.

  ‘Now watch your step,’ she would say, every time she passed and saw my legs comfortably screwed corkscrew fashion under the hostess chair. ‘Watch how Doris does it. She’s more refined.’ Or, ‘Look at your hair. I’ve never seen anything like it. Go to the beauty saloon and get it teased. How often do I have to remind you to put on pancake?’ I’d wait for Miss Eric to go to luncheon and then sneak into the airless, cramped model room. But immediately a head would appear round the door and say, ‘Have you coasted yet today, dear?’ Dressed in one of the latest models, a hat dangling with price labels, I’d get into the lift and tour the other floors, lingering in the antique department, as it never had any customers. The last straw was when Caroline came in pretending to look for a bargain on one of the rails and I was ordered to twirl.

  I went from job to job. When out of work I lived on Social Security and a weekly cheque would arrive in the post. Sometimes, I lined up with the rest of the jobless in an Employment Exchange and filled in a resumé which had to be clear, bri
ef and factual:

  Be objective. But don’t hesitate to present yourself in the best possible light. Give name, height and education. This presented a problem, for I couldn’t really claim to have had any.

  The only job I really enjoyed was secretary to Joseph Dever, the ginger-haired society editor of the New York World Telegram (a daily that soon after became defunct). In order to be close to their office, I moved downtown and took a room overlooking Puerto Ricans in the Chelsea Hotel. I was the only woman in a roomful of about sixty men, 90 of them Jewish. I did not have to clock in to work before ten o’clock. I was in my element. Occasionally, Jo took me to a charity dinner or dance, or I would be included in a group of senators and their wives at a reserved table in the Peppermint Lounge, where café society adults now ‘dug Juves New Beat’ and everyone was ‘Doin’ the Twist’ to Joey Dee and his Starliters. Cholly Knickerbocker† claimed to have discovered the Peppermint Lounge and, writing under ‘American Smart Set’, put: