Bruce took no special notice of her to begin with. After he had an operation on his varicose veins, Elizabeth visited Bruce in Fitzroy Square Nursing Home. He lay eating from a pot of caviar, a gift of Simon Sainsbury. “He never offered me any. Then he asked me to buy him a Hermés diary. When I found out how much it cost, I said, ‘No’.” He invited her to dinner at Grosvenor Crescent Mews, but cancelled at the last moment because there would be too many women. “He had awful manners in lots of ways.”
He paid Elizabeth more attention following his first visit to America in the winter of 1961, from which he returned wearing a bright red and yellow lumberjacket and a red hat with a baseball brim and ear flaps. He was, Elizabeth observed, thrilled with it. “You can’t wear that!” she shrieked. “It’s a farmer’s outfit.”
His fascination with America woke him up to Elizabeth, the only American at Sotheby’s. On subsequent visits to New York, he learned how her Catholic East Coast pedigree, from a small, aware, élite coterie of old money, was so exclusive as to be almost impenetrable. “As recherché as your rare bit of porcelain,” says Kasmin. “When it’s related to an amusing, well-read, clever, alert girl who’s working for your boss, it can seem rather attractive.”
On hearing Elizabeth tell a story about a housefly in a New York apartment, Bruce felt: “This was a woman I could marry.”
Elizabeth was born into two of America’s most prominent clans.
Daisy Terry, her father’s mother, had been a friend of Henry James, who praised her as “the only truly cultured woman in America”. Daisy was an immensely strong character who kept a diary in German, rode to hounds and played piano to concert standard. Aged 85 and living in a Boston hotel, Daisy was described by Harper’s Bazaar as “a challenging presence in a world where such quality is rare”. Elizabeth knew her as “a very old lady, blind in the one eye with a black patch – and tunnel vision in the other”.
Elizabeth was shaped by Daisy’s world – eccentric women interested in art and travel – rather than by her immediate family, who were “desperately conventional”. Her mother, Gertrude Laughlin, was descended from worthy and solid Protestants who pretended to be Scottish, but came from the Irish west coast and got rich quickly. They owned the country’s largest steel mill, in Pittsburgh, where they founded banks and built ships. They stood at the opposite end of the trade to the Turnells of Sheffield.
Her father was Rear-Admiral Hubert Chanler, a slight, trim Catholic who collected Tiffany clocks, large cars and terrifying French poodles that he named after favourite wines and deployed like battleships. Known as “Bobby” because she could not say Poppy, her father was, says Elizabeth, “a Victorian figure without any leavening sense of the ridiculous”. In Paris, he had once met, completely unwillingly, Léger, and could not understand why his friends the Murphys “had this gear box from a Ford car on their mantelpiece”. Bobby would become one of Bruce’s stock characters. No one imitated him better: “My career in the Navy’s been rather strange. People start talking about me as a tea-time admiral!”
Years later, Bruce wrote to Cary Welch about Elizabeth’s father. He had observed “the Admiral” glowering at the guests to a party he and Elizabeth were throwing for Millington-Drake in the Chanlers’ New York apartment. “‘I am Admiral Chanler; I don’t know who you are; but then I don’t know anyone here and this is my house.’ By this time he had had far too much to drink having started at 4 p.m., and started to make such observations as, ‘There are many people here who, under normal circumstances, I would regard as of questionable honesty,’ singling out in particular a friend of mine called Tristram Powell, ex-Eton, son of the novelist Anthony Powell, as a ‘very suspicious man with a beaky nose’.” The Admiral encouraged his wife to grill Bruce at dinner about the marital status of everyone present. Bruce wrote, “I would love to have invented so bizarre a sex life for each of the characters in turn that they would have a whole-dark-Geneseo-winter-full of conversation and speculation. THEY NEED IT.”
At the end of his life, Bruce started to write a novel based, in part, on the Chanlers. Late on, he saw an attractive subject in Elizabeth’s family – their eccentricities (sometimes teetering on insanity), their reckless Bohemianism and the Jamesian wealth which they had used to furnish houses in Washington and New York. “My dear, the loot!” Bruce told his American editor, Elisabeth Sifton.
The family historian, Lately Thomas, wrote that the Chanler mix of genes was “a volatile mixture about as unstable as nitroglycerine”. The first-known Chanlers, like the Chatwins, were Normans who had settled in England. They were self-assured, cosmopolitan, excitable, with a weakness for adventure. The American branch began with the Rev. Isaac Chanler, who left Bristol in 1710 for Charleston, Carolina. Isaac’s son was the author of Hysteria: its causes and aspects, a study of some relevance to subsequent generations. These included: William Backhouse Astor, a furious hoarder, and Sam Ward, an unrestrainable spender of three fortunes. Elizabeth’s father could trace himself to Peter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch governor of New York, and a rebel who liked to plough his land in a court suit to show his contempt for King George III. The two chief distinguishing Chanler traits were an exceptional self-sufficiency and a distinctive, attention-compelling “Chanler voice”, both of which Elizabeth inherited.
Bobby brought her up to believe the Chanlers were “an unofficial royalty”. But a series of scandals dented recent Chanler history and Bobby, like Charles Chatwin, went a long way to conceal these. It fell to Elizabeth’s first cousin, a lawyer for Alger Hiss, to fill in the gaps at family reunions and weddings – before Bobby came steaming over. She says, “He hated us finding out about family skeletons. We found everything out sideways, under the table.” She passed the details on to Bruce.
Bobby’s immediate Chanler relations were both eccentric and profligate. His father, Winthrop or “Wintie” Chanler, had been a grandchild of John Jacob Astor. Orphaned young, he inherited an income of $80,000 per annum. He did little but travel and hunt. One of his daughters, when asked his profession, replied: “He practised fox-hunting.” He hunted everything else too. Moufflon in Sardinia, lions in Morocco, chamois in the Alps.
“Grandpa had a fantastically good time,” says Elizabeth. “He once agreed to meet Grandma in London. She got there, having come on a boat with her family, to find a note: ‘I’ve gone big-game hunting in the Rockies’.”
Wintie’s three brothers also did what they wanted. The middle one, Willie, a friend of Theodore Roosevelt, pursued life as an adventurer until losing a leg. He smuggled arms to Cuban rebels; fraternised with Butch Cassidy in New York; and instigated, with 200 cowpunchers, an unsuccessful revolt against a Venezuelan dictator. In the course of an expedition to British East Africa, he gave his name to a species of antelope, Cervicapra chanlerii, and to a waterfall. Chanler Falls has since dried up. “Like all Chanler enterprises it has come to nothing,” says Elizabeth.
The older brother Armstrong, a lawyer married to a highly-strung novelist, suffered from progressive paranoia until he was committed to Bloomingdale asylum after re-enacting Napoleon’s death scene. On the eve of Thanksgiving, 1900, he escaped the asylum, leaving behind this note to his doctor: “My dear Doctor, You have always said that I am insane. You have always said that I believe I am the reincarnation of Napoleon Bonaparte. As a learned and sincere man, you, therefore, will not be surprised that I take French leave. Yours, with regret that we must part. J. A. Chanler”
Bob Chanler, his youngest brother, was an artist who married the Italian prima donna Lina Cavalieri. She deserted him for a Russian nobleman after persuading her infatuated husband to transfer to her all he possessed in exchange for $20 a week pocket money.
This prompted Armstrong to wire Bob: WHO’S LOONEY NOW?
Bruce was not alone in mistaking blue money for big money. Because of the Astor connection it was assumed that the Chanlers enjoyed access to considerable wealth. Bruce’s friend the journalist James Fox says, “At the beginning, Bruc
e used to infer that Elizabeth owned three quarters of New York – which, as it turned out, she didn’t.” In fact, the money came from Gertrude’s family. All Bobby inherited from the Astors was Sweet Briar, a 200-acre estate in fox-hunting country near Geneseo in New York State. “When I die,” he told his eight children, “all you’ll get from me is cigarette money.”
Required to earn his living, Bobby tried his damnedest not to be eccentric in the manner of his father and uncles. He could mend anything beautifully and wanted to be a sculptor, but Daisy forced him into the Navy. He served in China, on a Yangtse gunboat, and in Constantinople. Aged 23, he met the nine-year-old Gertrude Laughlin at a diplomatic party thrown by her father in Athens. Fourteen years later, while working as an aide-de-camp at the White House, he married her in a ceremony hailed by the Evening Star as “one of the most important of the season”. Shortly afterwards Bobby was transferred and the couple moved to San Diego, California, where on 16 November 1938 Elizabeth was born.
Like Bruce, Elizabeth knew what it was to be the eldest child of a father at sea. Until she was seven, she thought of him as a photograph. “Where’s Bobby?” Gertrude once asked. Elizabeth replied: “He’s on the bureau.” In Hawaii, scene of her earliest memories, her father became known, because of the blackout, as “The Man Who Comes and Goes in the Dark”.
In 1941, Bobby was posted to Hawaii on the heavy cruiser Minneapolis. On 4 December, Gertrude arrived on the island with Elizabeth and her new-born brother, John. Three days later Elizabeth was playing on the beach when the boy from next door said: “They’ve bombed Pearl Harbor.” Elizabeth ran to tell Gertrude. Then aeroplanes roared overhead. She looked up and saw red circles under the wings. Taking both children, Gertrude left Hawaii and went to stay with her parents in Washington. Bruce would later cite the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor “to illustrate our murderous propensity”.
Gertrude’s father, Irwin Laughlin, was a compulsive collector who had retired from the diplomatic service to Meridian House, an airy French-style home which he built and decorated with drawings by Boucher and Fragonard, eighteenth-century French furniture, and Oriental screens from his bachelor years in Japan – where, unbeknown to his family, he had left behind an illegitimate daughter. It was the lure of Irwin Laughlin’s collection for Peter Wilson which led Elizabeth, eventually, to a job at Sotheby’s.
Laughlin was important in Elizabeth’s early life. From her grandfather she gained an attachment to antique mirrors, chandeliers and embroidery. Meridian House, with its large staff and walls painted to resemble grey silk, was one of several substantial homes in which she grew up.
Bobby remained at sea. The Minneapolis had been absent from Pearl Harbor at the time of the Japanese attack. But a year later, news reached Washington that she had been engaged in action in the Solomon Islands. On i December 1942, a torpedo sliced off her bow and the cruiser, 15 feet down in water, was engulfed in flaming gasoline. Bobby, as Damage Control Officer, was subsequently awarded the Silver Star for his part in directing the repairs.
Elizabeth’s childhood was more peripatetic than Bruce’s. She had crossed the Pacific twice by the age of three. After the war she came to live in a palace in Rome where, in 1946, Bobby had been appointed Naval Attaché. At the Assumption convent school, Elizabeth learned Italian and calligraphy. She had terrible handwriting. Bobby, replying to a letter, wanted to know: “Why didn’t you write it a little more carefully . . . I have very little time to spend on trying to decipher bad handwriting. Your Bobby.”
He had more time than he cared to admit. His naval career did not end splendidly. After three years in Rome, he requested sea duty and was turned down. There were too many captains and technology had changed. Bobby’s last command was the repair ship Hector on the American west coast, anchored within the breakwater. From Hector he transferred to working two days a week on the veterans’ disability board. In April 1952, he was given the rank of rear admiral on retirement and he clung to it tenaciously.
Bobby retired to Sweet Briar. The farm had been left him by his mother. Daisy walked out of the house with what she was wearing, leaving everything behind, including the painting which she had at different times promised to each member of the family.
He came home intending to set the world on fire as a farmer and horsebreeder. But shortly after taking up residence, his horse “Mainstay” stepped in a woodchuck hole and Bobby broke his collarbone. A year later he still came down to dinner with a wide elastic bandage wrapped under his dress shirt.
In retirement, he became an irascible disciplinarian. His eldest son, John, says, “He had preconceived notions, some of which were based on his naval training, on how children should be brought up.”
He raised them as Catholics. Every week in summer a priest visited the private chapel to say mass and afterwards came to breakfast. When a new priest addressed Bobby as “Mr Chanler”, he said gruffly: “I’d really rather be called Admiral.” His main source of information was the Tablet which he read cover to cover.
He was constantly laying down laws. There was a correct procedure for cutting cheese. No parking on the lawn. No trousers for women. At home, the eight children changed for lunch and supper.
After dinner, for which he wore a maroon smoking jacket, he staggered into the library and closed the door. He forbade books to leave the house. If there was a gap in his shelves it enraged him. “Did you take a book out of Bobby’s room,” wrote an anguished Gertrude to Elizabeth, “La Princess des Ursins?” He had read the complete works of Henry James twice and Seven Pillars of Wisdom three times, once aloud to his mother. But apart from the Tablet he was not a serious reader. One of the few contemporary books on his shelves was The Bridge Over the River Kwai. Suspicious of most writers, he blamed Scott Fitzgerald for his Uncle Teddy’s drinking problems.
Elizabeth was not allowed out with young men before her eighteenth birthday. Until then, an II p.m. curfew was enforced. Bobby did not like her watching television and only grudgingly permitted visits to the Riviera cinema in Geneseo.
Drink increased his rigidity. He was not supposed to drink because he had pancreatitis. But he laced his consommé with sherry and drank two and a half bottles of smoky red wine a night. And before going to bed, he took a bottle upstairs on a silver tray.
With Gertrude he enjoyed a powerful attraction, but she had a difficult time of it. He conducted their serious arguments in French, which he spoke fluently, shifting to Italian once his children learned French. A lot of their arguments had to do with Elizabeth.
Elizabeth grew up the most independent of eight children. She learned to cope with the heckling of a large family. Bobby doted on her, but she bore the brunt of his discipline. “She was difficult, precocious, with a good mind,” says Gertrude. “And very determined if she wanted something.”
As a baby she screamed incessantly. “I hate being told what to do. I remember going on a steam train and when we got into the compartment I was furious. I wanted to get into the engine with all the excitement and noise.”
Only one person could control her, Fuddy, the children’s governess. Miss Kathleen Fogarty was an emaciated, common-sensical Irish Catholic from New Brunswick. Over her white uniform she wore a full-length raccoon coat so that, from the rear, herding everyone down the aisle in church, she looked like a raccoon. Elizabeth may have been the first granddaughter of millionaire grandparents, but Fuddy made her finish everything on her plate. “Anybody caught looking at themselves in the nude, she’d go after them. ‘Never look at yourself in the mirror!’ she’d say. So I hardly ever do.”
Elizabeth, like Bruce, was a sickly child. She suffered from asthma. If she ate raw wheat during harvesting, half an hour later she would not be able to breathe. She also had a condition that came to be known as “Lib’s Tongue”, aubergines, tomatoes and walnuts in particular making her blow up. Most debilitating, she had rickets, probably from Vitamin D deficiency. She grew up with the stoicism of a child who has a physical handicap. �
�Lib is someone who lives in the present very much,” said her best friend Gillian Walker. “‘That’s who I am and I’m going to make the best of it.’ There is no self-pity.”
Her condition did not prevent her from riding. Her grandfather had been Master of the Genesee Hunt, in the saddle at the time of his stroke. From the age of twelve Elizabeth was riding three times a week to hounds.
Animals were her passion. At Fox Hollow School in Massachusetts she decided she wanted to be a vet. “I was always rescuing game-cocks and chickens and when we did biology I liked to cut up animals. We started out with earthworms and progressed to pregnant cats.”
At 17, she applied to Scripps College in California to study biology and was accepted. Months afterwards she received a letter at school. Rear-Admiral Chanler had withdrawn the application. He regarded vets as second-class doctors. And he did not want her in California for the same reason Charles Chatwin had not wanted Bruce to be in London. Bobby thought California was “a bad place”.
She was 17 when she reached breaking point with Bobby. It was a small incident, one that occurs in households everywhere. She had invited a friend to stay, Didi Drysdale, who persuaded her to put on lipstick. “I forgot I even had the lipstick on.” Elizabeth came downstairs to where the family was sitting. “She looked so pretty and alive,” remembered her brother Ollie. Then Bobby saw her face and screamed: “GO UPSTAIRS AND WASH THAT OFF IMMEDIATELY.”
“That did it,” says Elizabeth. “For years and years and years I didn’t carry on a conversation with him. He never apologised. I don’t think he knew what he’d done. Once I went to Radcliffe, I was gone.”
Bruce wrote the incident into his second novel On the Black Hill: “She would steal off to Rhulen and come back with cigarette smoke on her breath and rouge rubbed off around her lips . . . He called her a ‘harlot’.”
Bruce Chatwin Page 19