“When he met her, he’d met his match,” says John Stefanidis. “She knew as much, if not more, than he did. It was checkmate.” The marriage was not universally understood, yet it made good and lasting sense. It would be unorthodox – but that worried neither. Elizabeth came from a line of eccentric women accustomed to letting their husbands roam.
To “Glor” at a dinner in Cambridge Place in 1979, Bruce remarked: “I was attracted to Elizabeth because she had a touch of the tar brush.” He pursued this line with the photographer, Eve Arnold. Elizabeth, he said, was an octoroon from New Orleans. The story was not entirely a Chatwin invention and had its origins in the eighteenth century and a black girl impregnated by a Chanler on their Carolina estate. The Chanlers, generally, were sandy-coloured, but thanks to this infusion a swarthy complexion popped up in each generation. Bobby’s cousin Chanler Chapman had been dark, and so was Elizabeth.
She was not a threateningly feminine woman, yet Bruce described her to Gregor von Rezzori wearing a Balenciaga coat in such a way that the writer imagined a blonde, long-legged beauty. “I remember that piercing and original vision he had of her. He transformed her.”
His transforming vision was not always active. There would be painful passages and periods of separation. Bruce had “smart” friends who were slower to see Elizabeth for what she was; sometimes, to his discredit, he appeared to go along with them. Frequently, he went off with other people. He behaved like a little boy with Elizabeth, says Julia Hodgkin. “Always running away from home, setting off with his belongings tied in a kerchief to a stick, knowing that, come nightfall, mummy would come down the road looking for him.”
Throughout their marriage Elizabeth remained steadfast. Mindful of Reverdy Wadsworth, she had the ability not to be emotionally clinging. There was a matter-of-factness in her acceptance of whatever he did. She had made her decision about him and her love was constant. Bruce was the person who could most share the way she saw and lived in the world, and it was plain to Gillian Walker that Bruce felt the same way about her. “His life as it was constructed resembled a circus tent. Everything else can go on, but it has to have a pole to keep it in place. That centering is vital for someone who has a passion for the variety of experiences that the world can offer. Elizabeth was pivotal. Without her whatever chaos there was in his life would have pulled Bruce away from himself.”
He needed someone both to run away from and to come back to and he found in Elizabeth that person. “He was dreadful to her,” says Gloria, “but he stayed.” Ivry Freyberg had no doubt about his motives. “There was no question but that he was in love with Elizabeth. She was a completely new animal, so unlike an English girl. He told me: ‘I’ve found this most fantastic American and I’m mad about her’.”
Bruce soon missed his fiancée. Communication was not easy. Telephone calls were expensive and complicated to book. He wrote tenderly, often. “Letters are all very well, but by the time they reach they are old hat. Can you imagine what it must have been like in the 18th century, with the husband disappearing for years to India, and with a postal service of three months? I now have all the right papers signed by Church, notaries and State. I assume that it is all right to bring them over with me? My Uncle Anthony just came in with an unbelievably hideous and special metronomic clock which was exhibited in the Great Exhibition. There is also a postcard signed Alfred . . . it shows a long Italian tunnel with apparently no ending. How right is he? I can’t lay my hands on it just now, but will send it on. The sight of you at the docks will be worth all this trial. Love, love, love, Bruce.”
Bruce was pleased with his priest: “Father Murray is a real treasure.” He occupied his spare moments with house-hunting and sorting through wedding presents. “Why don’t you say for wedding presents credit at John Hewett, 173 New Bond St Wi?” He looked forward to every conversation. “Am much cheered this morning by your telephone call, the Host and the weather. No houses on the market. Chairs, blinds, etc., all arriving soon, must shampoo carpet. A million hugs!” He signed one letter “All is love.”
Elizabeth’s list of wedding presents to Gertrude included a do-it-yourself-sauna, a holder to store maps in a car “as one day we will go to Afghanistan etc. by land”, subscriptions to American Vogue and the New Yorker, and a blini iron. “Bruce is frightfully fussy about cooking things, as he likes to make elaborate dishes from time to time.” One choice of present prompted a panicked letter from Bruce. “My Dear Liz, After our telephone conversation I had a sleepless night. The real reason for my insomnia was . . . the recollection of a conversation we had before you left, a conversation of which I only just [realise] the horrendous implications. You said that you were going to learn how to work a deep freeze!!
“Now all week I have been instructed about the evils of paganism and heresy. I have learned the implications of life everlasting, the light of Heaven, the darkness of Hell, and the mist of Purgatory. But I now find myself faced with the greatest HERESY known to man, the DEEP FREEZE.
“Imagine if you were put in a deep freeze. Your outward form might remain, but where would your soul be? Flitting about the Fields of Asphodels or knocking at the Golden Gate. But vegetables have no souls; they die. It is a major article of my faith never to eat dead vegetables. A doctor friend of mine nearly dropped down dead in Harley Street as a result of eating dead vegetables. It is a complaint known as scarlatina. So give up all this nonsense of a deep freeze, do not deprive me of the pleasure of eating fresh food in its due season and learn to make a proper apple pie and the best chowder.”
Bruce arrived in America in the middle of August. Worried about his son’s eyes, Charles insisted that Bruce sail with them on the Dutch ship Statendam. “I reckoned it a good idea for Bruce not to fly over, to relax.” As they sailed into Manhattan harbour Charles won the ship’s sweepstake. The box of Havana cigars augured well.
Bruce had not seen Elizabeth for seven weeks. They stayed in David Nash’s New York apartment and visited the Dunbarton Oaks collection in Washington, meeting old Mrs Bliss. When conversation turned to the smuggling of artefacts from Turkey, Bruce began: “Ignorance is –” “Happiness,” interjected Mrs Bliss.
At Dunbarton Oaks, they were enraptured by a Peruvian wall hanging of parrot feathers from a species of papagayo now extinct. The Incas had prized these feathers over gold. “I want one of those,” Bruce told Elizabeth. “Fat chance,” she said.
The chance came a day or two later in New York. Immediately before leaving for Geneseo to get married, they visited John Wise, a pre-Columbian dealer, who in his room at the Westbury Hotel unravelled to their astonishment a pristine checkerboard of blue and yellow parrot feathers. Wise’s rectangular hanging, possibly intended for an Inca temple, formed part of a cache discovered in a big earthenware drum near the River Ocoña. Max Ernst owned one. And Nelson Rockefeller. This was the last.
John Wise was a friend, wrote Bruce, “a man of enormous presence and a finely developed sense of the ridiculous”. He asked how much money they had on them. Bruce had nothing. Elizabeth looked into her purse. “I happened to have our wedding money on me.” The total was $150, given to both Bruce and Elizabeth to buy presents.
“Well, it’s a wedding present,” said Wise.
“It was the nicest thing he could have done,” says Elizabeth.
The ancient feathers celebrate many Chatwin elements: rarity, patchwork, simplicity, flight. Bruce, who was prepared to sell anything, twice teetered on the brink of letting them go. He pulled back on both occasions. The Peruvian hanging became one of the very few objects he could never bear to part with. “To Bruce, it was the sun and the sky – a sacred object,” says Elizabeth.
On 21 August 1965, Bruce and Elizabeth were married by Abbot Boltwood in the chapel at Sweet Briar Farm. The guests had lunch on the lawn and the Admiral, spruce in his full naval whites, served Californian champagne.
The Chatwin contingent was Charles and Margharita; Hugh; the photographer Derry Moore and David Nash. Br
uce had asked Nash to be his best man on condition he did not give a speech.
This prohibition did not prevent Elizabeth’s younger brother Ollie from rising to his feet after lunch. The sight of Elizabeth kneeling at the altar and wiggling her feet playfully had moved him to deliver an oration. When they heard that their sister was to marry an Englishman, he said, the family had naturally been curious to know what he was like. On a single day, they had put him through his paces, making him participate in tennis, horse-riding and a water-skiing session on Lake Conesus. The conclusion was: “He’s a lot like us.”
Bruce had succeeded in charming even those Chanler women who found him on first impression “alarmingly handsome”. Determined not to have him as an enemy, Bruce had paid conspicuous attention to Elizabeth’s father, so much so that Ollie was amazed to observe them disappear into the library and Bobby close the door. So far as he knew, this favour had only ever been bestowed two or three times.
A single cloud cast a shadow on the ceremony. Two days before the wedding, the parish priest in Geneseo, Father Carron, had handed Elizabeth a pamphlet spelling out 32 reasons why she should not marry a non-Catholic.
Otherwise, it was a midsummer day with cicadas singing everywhere. Pattie Sullivan considered it one of the nicest weddings she had known. A friend of Elizabeth, Jane Lyons, wrote to the bride: “I hate to be trite, but I have never seen two people so well matched – that makes it sound like figures or vases. He is just as impressive as you are.”
No one was more pleased than Bruce’s mother: “I think of Bruce’s and Elizabeth’s as THE WEDDING,” Margharita wrote to Gertrude.
The Chatwins honeymooned off the Maine coast. Elizabeth’s father had heard Bruce liked sailing. Without consulting either of them, Bobby had chartered a 42-foot yawl.
Nor, as it turned out, were they sailing away on the beautiful pea-green boat by themselves. Cary and Edith Welch would join them on another yawl owned by Billy and Mea Wood.
They drove together to Cold Harbor, Maine. On the way they stopped at a roadside café where there were name-badges for sale. Cary became “Earl”, Edith “Darlene”, Elizabeth “Maxine” and Bruce was “Max”. From then on, “Max” and “Maxine” were their pet names for each other.
The Chatwins’ yawl had been badly rigged, but Bruce knew how to handle her. They sailed east for a week. The shoreline was a rocky, flat-forested wilderness with tiny villages. Beyond P’tit Manan, the wind dropped. Bruce, in the faster vessel, steered for the lobster harbour of Cape Split. As he passed through the breakwater, their boat struck a rock not marked in the charts. “We put it in subsequently,” says Elizabeth. Luckily, the hull was not broached.
There, in the dead calm, Cary and Edith Welch joined them with Billy and Mea Wood. That night a thick fog descended and in the morning they could not see their hands before their faces. For three days they lay marooned in the small harbour. In the Wood kitchen, the three couples gorged on lobsters caught by a brawny preacher-woman. Bruce re-read his childhood copy of Slocum. Elizabeth wrote thank-you letters. They could not do much but eat and walk. They took long walks in a forest infested with old cars “like wounded sculptures”, which the locals used for target practice. “It felt as if we were trespassing on the set of Bonnie & Clyde,” says Welch.
On the last day a storm blew away the fog. It was dark by the time the wind dropped. The Woods having left by road, the Welches joined the Chatwins on their boat. They decided to risk sailing by night. Elizabeth lay on the bow, looking for rocks. Edith read the charts. Bruce set his course by the flashes of the lighthouse.
“It was a curious honeymoon,” says Elizabeth, who had never before spent so much time with Bruce. “But then I hadn’t been on any other.” As for Bruce, he was proud of his safe helmsmanship in the fog. He felt he had proved himself, demonstrated nerve and sinew. Everything was going to be all right.
XV
Out of His Depth
My career was the reverse of most people’s in that I started as a rather unpleasant little capitalist in a big business in which I was extremely successful and smarmy, and suddenly I realised at the age of 25 or so that I was hating every moment of it. I had to change.
—BC to Michael Ignatieff
AT THE END OF SEPTEMBER, AFTER A HOT AND DUSTY MONTH IN New York, the Chatwins sailed to London for the new auction season. “In as much as I foresaw the future, it was Sotheby’s,” says Elizabeth. “I just assumed it would go on.”
The flat at 119a Mount Street proved unsuitable in every way. Bruce had removed the books from the shelves to give his wife room, but the kindness was too little. The flat was tiny and decorated with oriental austerity rather like Charles’s galley on the Sunquest: the kitchen was in the cupboard and the sink came from a chandler’s shop. Everything precious not on display was wrapped in tissue paper and concealed in wooden boxes inside a cupboard.
Bruce was chiefly pleased with the yellow bathroom. On the wall he had hung a gouache of blue and red toothbrushes taken from a French provincial salesman’s album, a painting which confirmed to Hodgkin the deep-seated conventionality of his taste. It was the mischievous Hodgkin who was responsible for the bright yellow. He had caught Bruce snooping in his studio – “I’m looking for a colour for my bathroom,” Bruce explained with a grin. Annoyed, Hodgkin brought along on his next visit a tube of artist’s quality cadmium yellow. “This is the only colour for your bathroom wall,” he said. “It must be shiny and it must be dense.”
“Really?” said Bruce. “That sounds very expensive.”
“Think of the colour of skin against this yellow,” said Hodgkin.
It cost £125 to cover all four walls. Bruce explained to a visitor: “I’ve always wanted to live inside an egg.” To Lucie-Smith, the Mount Street flat – which had no view – was more “like a very posh crackle-glazed prison cell”.
Into this confined space Bruce and Elizabeth arrived from America with 15 pieces of luggage. When Elizabeth on the spur of the moment accepted the gift of a female ginger kitten havoc ensued. The cat immediately fouled Bruce’s perfect yellow bathroom, initiating a lifelong exasperation with her pets. “I didn’t know Bruce hated cats,” says Elizabeth. “It drove him up the wall. At least it wasn’t a dog.”
Elizabeth had accepted the cat in anticipation of a country house overrun with mice. The finding of this house was now a matter of urgency. As Margharita confided to Gertrude, it was even more important for Elizabeth than for Bruce “as she will be much more tied as soon as she has family responsibilities.”
Bruce had hoped to keep two establishments: the London flat and a country house in North Oxfordshire, where they had seen an eighteenth-century vicarage. But during October he became aware for the first time just how limited his wife’s finances were. If they pooled their incomes, they could just afford one home.
Elizabeth’s share of the Astor estate was “31 cents annually”, while her mother’s fortune was strictly entailed. In 1958, Gertrude had endowed each of her children a capital sum of $250,000, kept in trust at the Mellon bank in Pittsburgh. The capital provided $8,000 dollars in a good year and could not be touched.
“Our situation is not at all good,” Elizabeth wrote to Gertrude. “Bruce is now getting £3,000 a year & I get about £1,600. The total of £4,500 will after US & English taxes be reduced to something like £3,500 or less . . . And as Bruce earns more, the tax on my income goes up so that it pays him to work less, if you see what I mean.”
Sympathetic, Gertrude wrote on 18 October with welcome news. “I have arranged that there will be plenty of money available for the house when you find one.” While Bruce worked, Elizabeth house-hunted: one week in London, one week in the country. By November the hunt had widened to Dorset with Hugh and Charles joining in. A promising old priory came to nothing when Hugh – who had completed his training as a surveyor – prodded the plaster and found dry rot. Bruce kept Gertrude up to date. “No luck with houses so far. The market is apparently depressed at
the moment and we may have to wait till spring because that’s the time people put them on the market.”
* * *
It should have been a glorious homecoming: the young and talented honeymooner returning to assume his new directorship.
He had been appointed a director in the summer and at the age of 25 his name was now on the masthead. The directorship was the fulfilment of a promise by Wilson. “Wilson told him that if he stayed, he would be one of a small group of new directors – about three – who would eventually control the whole firm,” wrote Kenneth Rose in his diary, after a conversation with Bruce in 1968. But the Beast groomed many of his favourites for positions they would never fill. The promotion was not the advancement it appeared to be. Bruce kept from Elizabeth the extent of his disappointment until after their wedding.
In March 1965, the board of Sotheby’s comprised nine directors. Bruce imagined he would be the tenth, with a vote and a share. He was not alone in his expectations. When the announcement was made, soon after Elizabeth flew to America to prepare for their marriage, Bruce discovered that eight others had been given identical encouragement, two of them – Marcus Linell and Howard Ricketts – younger than himself.
Among the new appointments was Richard Day, in charge of prints and drawings. Summoned to the office of the financial director, Day found Bruce already sitting down. “Bruce was the first in, the catalyst for all of us. I was the second. He was amazed to see me. He realised if I was a director, there would be others. Slowly, the others turned up. Howard, Marcus, Michel . . . He wasn’t best pleased.”
Those who filed into the room were not invited to join the ruling élite. They were to be subsidiary directors without voting rights. “They were called directors,” says Pollen, “but they weren’t the executive committee.”
Because of a new tax law, there was a waiting period of several months before the partnership came into effect. Meanwhile, Bruce was expected to attend board meetings. On 23 October, he wrote to his mother-in-law, who had agreed to loan him the £6,500 he needed to buy his shares: “I’ve been going to board meetings for the first time and more often than not they’re long and tedious, but sometimes they are very funny especially when all my own contemporaries stand on their dignity and get pompous and silly.”
Bruce Chatwin Page 24