by Ned Rorem
On the 7th, dined with Gordon Sager. It was Gordon who complained: “The odds are against me: I’m Jewish, homosexual, alcoholic, and a Communist.” To which Jane Bowles, extending her game leg, retorted: “I’m Jewish, homosexual, alcoholic, a Communist—and I’m a cripple!”
On the 8th, lunch with Chuck Turner. Tea with Julien Green. At seven o’clock, again with José, went to Marie-Louise Bousquet’s “Thursday.” Marie-Laure was there too, in royal blue wool, and sitting (everyone else was standing) on a sofa chain-smoking Gauloises. This was perhaps our third meeting, the only one at which we even slightly clicked. She appeared interested that I was at work on her scenario. That was that.
On the 9th, lunch with one Henri-Georges Tibaudin, 48 rue Lamarck, whom I had met a few evenings earlier at the Boeuf sur le Toit, an appealing roughneck, and the first mortal I had sex with (on his floor, after a cherry tart and coffee) since the hemorrhoidectomy.… Tea with Alfonso Ossorio at 4 rue Camille-Tahan, where he had now moved from MacDougal Alley. Dined at Michel Girard’s.
On the 10th, lunch with José. At two o’clock, visit from Jean-Michel Damase, a composer who in succeeding years has been called my French counterpart, not least because we were both writing unapologetically delicious scores in defiance of Boulez’s increasingly virulent Fascist takeover of France. At 4, pick up Cocteau drawing at framers. At 9:30, party chez H.-L. de la Grange.
On the 11th, a Sunday, Doda gave me a pair of shoes—heavy brown leather army stock—which I sorely needed. We then dined, rue Barbet-de-Jouy, at Marie-Blanche de Polignac’s, with nine other guests. I thus within four days frequented Marie-Louise, Marie-Laure, and Marie-Blanche, known to upper-crust Paris as Les trois Maries. Always, after these sorties and minor infidelities, I would meet Jean Leuvrais around midnight at the Royale Saint-Germain, and recount my day, or as much as he needed to know. (During all those years in France the milieu I frequented, other than amours, was a generation older than I. Which is why today Paris represents not a college reunion but a graveyard.)
On the 12th, interview with Match.
On the 13th, lunch with Peter Watson, founder in London of Horizon magazine. In the evening, at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Julius played the French premiere of my sonata, after which Nadia Boulanger reportedly said: “Quelle drôle de chose,” and left. Paris-Match printed my picture, looking like a petulant brat, flanked by Green and Saint-Jean.
Following week, same pattern: visits to Nora for the portrait, visits to Michel Girard for work on the ballet, midday meals with Peter Watson, or Julius, or Doda, or José, and once a dinner at Nadia Boulanger’s, another at the Azevedos’. The names of still other friends and vague lovers pepper the agenda, as does the frequent noun “cuite.” For liquor seemed always an aim, a target, a climax, a dessert, a veritable meaning; its promise, its perspective, facilitated conversation, gave body to the soul of camaraderie, lent dimension to situations which, without it, would have seemed boring, if not intolerable, even gatherings in the homes of the justly celebrated … There are visits to Henri et Isabelle Gouin, wealthy bourgeois melomanes who had wellplanned soirées (Jacques Abram played there often, as did Leon Fleisher), and several dates with, simply, “the German,” or sometimes “le boche” whom I seemed to have met at the Montana.
On the 20th Gide died. Julien gave me the news late in the afternoon, although thousands of mourners had already passed through the master’s house in the rue Vaneau where he lay in state. Among these mourners, according to Julien as well as to next morning’s paper, were Marie-Laure and Boris Kochno who, in an excess of zeal, wailed loudly while flinging bouquets on the body, then danced a sarabande accompanied by their own lamentations. Again I was unpleasantly impressed by this exhibition of a supposedly remarkable woman.
The following day at 1:30 I lunched at the Aurics who were careful in their criticism, Marie-Laure being one of their original sponsors as well as, in the summer months, their sort-of landlady (in the 1930s she had gifted them with a large cottage and garden on her property in Hyères, fifty yards downhill from the main house). That evening Nora took me to Phèdre, the latest collaboration of her husband with Jean Cocteau, as choreographed by Serge Lifar for the Ballets de l’Opéra.
An event! The adventure of French dance still lay in revamping of Greek classics even though Jerome Robbins had, in America, already irreversibly altered the aroma of ballet with The Cage. (True, Martha Graham had yet to proffer her version of Phaedra, not to mention Judith and Clytemnestra and other female monsters from the Graeco-Judaic past, but she did so on flat feet.) But if dance was blooming in New York as it faded in Paris—with the triteness of Petit and the pretension of Béjart—for the moment, like the storm before the calm, the slightly rotten apogee of the French agony lay in a work like Phèdre.
Cocteau had hoped for Greta Garbo to mime the main role. Garbo changed her mind. The happy substitute was Tamara Toumanova, that “baby ballerina” from the Ballets Russes of yore. Now thirty-three, she projected from the stage the same tragic eroticism that Garbo projected from the screen, just by being there, doing nothing.
From the blackness of the Salle Garnier a sudden spotlight blazes onto Cocteau’s eighty-foot portrait of the barbarian queen, while a crunch from Auric’s orchestra splits the opera house’s brass, splaying the audience with audibly yellow splinters. The curtain rises. There stands Phaedra, arms extending fifteen feet in either direction by means of wands attached to her blood-red wings. Toumanova, solely by staring her public down with those haunted eyes, and by, every few minutes, shrugging imperceptibly so that the red wings shiver, evokes a horrible antiquity. Lifar, aptly effeminate and old enough to be at least her father, portrays her son Hippolytus, object of lewd cravings. Neither of them dances, they just move … that’s all I recollect, but the recollection is indelible, as Nora swells with pride beside me.
It was the last important theater piece Georges Auric would compose. Within a year his professional image altered, as did his material status. Moulin Rouge, the hundredth movie for which Auric wrote the score, featured a little waltz sung by Zsa Zsa Gabor (as dubbed by Muriel Smith), known simply as “Song from Moulin Rouge.” The waltz quickly became number one on the charts; within months, as refashioned by Percy Faith into a foxtrot, it resounded from every jukebox across the world. Auric, who had sold the score outright to the film studio, sued for and won the rights to have the song extracted and represented as a discrete entity. He made millions in royalties, bought a mink for Nora, a Jaguar for Monsieur de Lesseps, and a house in Nogent where on Sundays they “received.”
As when unsolved murders are committed, innocent eccentrics emerge from the woodwork and confess to the crime, so when successful pop tunes are penned, many a nobody rises up to affirm he penned it first. Each such affirmation must be legally heeded. Thus Auric first sailed to America, to answer a charge of plagiarism. (A like charge never occurs where “serious” music is concerned, only with money-making tunes.) And thus the definition of what constitutes musical plagiarism was defined by the lawyer—was it Nizer?—retained by ASCAP: If the first seven notes of two songs are not only tonally but rhythmically identical, the songs are the same, and the second one was filched from the first, except when the melodic outline stems from the basic overtone series—as in the horn-call opening of Beethoven’s Eroica, or indeed, Auric’s Moulin Rouge—when, the procedure being so ubiquitous, the first twelve notes must be identical in both, or in all, cases. (I’m of course paraphrasing a memory of this precedent, a paraphrase which now leaves me wondering about the unchallenged resemblance between the first seven notes of, say, Ellington’s “In a Sentimental Mood” to Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me.”) In any case, Auric, having set a legal precedent, returned to France unconvicted and even richer.
But he grew crankier. He did not want money so much as praise for what he deemed his “true” work, like the work of colleagues who were poorer but whose fame was less flip. Auric’s true music now turned gnar
led, constipated, “meaningful,” lest we forget he had not only outgrown the security of the movies but the charms of Poulenc, and was right up there with Pierre Boulez whose approval, though Boulez was twenty-five years younger, Auric craved. He composed, for example, a partita for Fizdale & Gold which they claimed was so illegibly crabbed and minuscule they never could learn it.
If, during the approaching long seasons in Hyères, Georges became a continually refreshing neighbor, more relaxed than in Paris, coming up most afternoons at six, sometimes with Nora, when they had finished work, funny and exquisite, for them both, the exquisite fun was edged in rue. Georges, without admitting it, hated being loved for what he was, a creator of flawlessly synchronized and necessary film music, rather than for what he wasn’t, a composer of unsettlingly profound noncollaborative masterpieces. Nora wanted to be admired for being a lady, whatever her notion of that could be, but in fact was an arriviste with a decorative gift, and no worse company than most.
Both smoked opium, a habit still not unusual at that late date in well-off artistic circles of their generation. They never discussed it, but their mood swings depended on the daily pipe. So far as I know they never, unlike Cocteau, underwent disintoxication, and Auric when in England was given special dispensation (i.e., was granted his regular dosage) by no less a person than King George VI. Apparently opium reliance does not increase with usage, once a norm is set.
Magnanimity was not among the many virtues of Nora and Georges. But once, when Auric had become the chief of the French Performing Rights Society, SACEM—the equivalent of our ASCAP—he did a favor for the son of Marie-Laure’s gardener. This boy, Maxim, was a dwarf, grotesquely twisted, with giant hands and bulging eyes; worse, he had a younger brother who was handsome as an angel. Maxim fancied himself a composer, and showed some of his pitiful work to Georges and me. Georges spoke on Maxim’s behalf to the board of examiners at SACEM, and the boy was duly accepted as a member. When the gardener and his family learned this great news they came en masse to kiss Auric’s feet. Where, we all wondered, does Maxim go from here?
From here Georges himself went on to become head of the Paris Opéra, where his first gesture was to hire Boulez as guest conductor and grant him carte blanche for a production of Wozzeck. Nora gave up painting. In her role as “Madame Opéra” (Marie-Laure’s caustic term) she grew ever more imperious, a great backstage hostess.
The Aurics remained affectionate during my various returns to France, until The Paris Diary appeared, when Nora—and by extension Georges—refused to acknowledge me. I stress “by extension,” for Georges was growing vague. It was perhaps his strong intelligence that sapped him, or his long life of success at everything except what most counted. They both outlived Marie-Laure by many years (she died in 1970). But Nora, they say, behaved oddly. Like going to the bank at 4 a.m. in her nightgown. Guy de Lesseps died first. Then Nora. After which Georges married the housekeeper, a young girl from the Midi, to whom the family fortune fell when Georges himself passed on soon after.…
Oh well, it’s only money. When Ravel, the most-played composer of the twentieth century, died, his estate went not to a museum of his artifacts but to his brother’s chauffeur’s wife’s daughter by a second marriage.
That’s enough about the Aurics.
People were reading Beckett. The novel Molloy appeared that spring, and a year hence En attendant Godot would be mounted (its sole décor a metal tree by Giacometti), taking the world by storm. I couldn’t buy it: what did such language offer that wasn’t equaled by the “experimental” dramas from Chicago’s WPA theater in the 1930s, beginning with the sophomoric symbolism in the name Godot? Beckett was just another tiresome Irish wit. If life isn’t worth living, or even worth dying, then how summon the energy or interest to write that life isn’t worth dying, or even worth living? Silence is more eloquent than sound. But Beckett made of hopelessness something chic. And he surely wrote for posterity.
So the winter unrolled like a musky carpet or a dying cobra around the fetid fringes of the Tout Paris. One person led to another. The Neapolitan pianist Aldo Ciccolini was a constant presence at Michel Girard’s. Aldo was the only virtuoso ever to specialize in slow music. At a party full of pianists upstaging each other with their Liszt and Chopin knucklebusters, he could coolly take over the keyboard with Ravel’s Pavane or a Satie Gymnopédie, while gradually the rivals seemed to grow vain and empty in their non-Italianate overstatement.
Regular frequentation of the Comtesse Pastré, a papal countess (her late husband had bought the title in Rome), hence the lack of la particule nobilaire. Known to all as Lily, she was six-foot-two, homely, unkempt in her sheaths of baby-blue, sixty years old, and touchingly if indiscriminatingly devoted to the “better music.” Her fortune came from the apéritif Noilly Prat. Regulars of her salon were Louise de Vilmorin (Poulenc’s poet, money from grain, elegant with a congenital limp, nonstop talker, platonic mistress of Charles de Noailles), Boris Kochno (last régisseur of the original Ballets Russes, lover of Diaghilev at whose Venetian funeral in 1929 he wrestled with Serge Lifar, hard drinker, still electrically attractive with his crew-cut, Slavic accent, and arrogant Tolstoyan affectations), Samson François (Cortot’s prize student, another hard drinker, Debussy specialist, dead by 1970 at forty-six), and Pierre Guérin (hanger-on, ungifted, useful, embarrassing). Lily served a rich buffet, sang without talent accompanied by the wine-filled greats, and owned a rambling mansion at Montredon near Marseilles, where fourteen years later I would complete most of Miss Julie’s Act II. Meanwhile, it was here in her Paris garden that we all were photographed on the occasion of my not winning first prize in the Biarritz competition. And it was here that I met an American poet, David Posner, with whom I immediately went to bed at the Hôtel du Bon La Fontaine. David was a paragon of dusky beauty, muscular as young King David, just my type. But the bed experience was not repeated because: (1) he anathematically perfumed his anatomy, and (2) his conversation, like the perfume, was a turn-off—he tried too hard, and was socially masochistic. David, a gerontophile among other things, had been beneficial to the aging Somerset Maugham, reading to him, bathing him, and, when the occasion demanded, lying nude upon the master and ejaculating by means of frottage. In 1959 David was instrumental in my becoming composer-in-residence at Buffalo University where he had become curator of the Lockwood Memorial Library (in the John of which he would sometimes make passes at his best friends, not realizing, because of his nearsightedness, that they were his best friends), and where he received a doctorate for his thesis on Julien Green. David eventually married. He died of AIDS at the very start of the plague.
Carmel Snow, educated creature, not young and with a withered right hand—an example of how style does not rely on beauty—was my hostess on two occasions, she being the manager of Harper’s Bazaar, and hence the nominal boss of Madame Bousquet.… Dozens of other names of humans sprinkle the calendar, as well as of theaters and museums and parties and operas and movies and bars which may have been mere reminders then, but which impress me now with their inexhaustibility: all the regulars, plus Dean Witter (music student), Noël Lee (the most significant American pianist since Paul Jacobs, and the most unjustly unsung song composer of our generation), Hélène jourdan-Morhange, Themistocles, Ghislaine de Peyroux, Marya Freund, Kathleen Ferrier, people from the embassy, etcetera.… But I wanted to know Marie-Laure. Everyone else knew her.
Well, yes, a few weeks earlier as a concession to José, Marie-Laure allowed him to bring me to her house postprandially, but this didn’t count. At ten we were ushered into the exquisite octagonal ground-floor music room—one of the rooms where in future years I would work and play and live and love each day. We sat demurely, José and I, listening to the wine-edged laughter of the dinner guests in the small blue marble dining room across the teakwood hall. The laughter grew louder, and I more uneasy, as the dinner guests, eleven of them, and their hostess now entered our music room for coffee and brandy. All wore evening cloth
es. Among them tottered Sacheverell Sitwell, and also the Aurics. Nora, whom I was used to seeing in painter’s togs, looked breathtaking in a deep red satin gown, a dark red lace stole, and pale red camellias in her short white hair. (Next morning, at our séance de pose, she said: “I was disappointed to see you there last night. That woman has no sense of your quality, she’ll drag you down as she does everyone.”) Marie-Laure flirted with me in her very English English—the kind rich Europeans learn at their nounou’s knee—rather disdainfully, said I looked like Ginger Rogers dolled up in my new tan suit, introduced me to Mr. Sitwell (whom I asked to intercede on behalf of his distinguished sister about the rights to her poem, which he agreed to, but was surely too drunk to remember or care), then glided away and we said nothing more except good-bye.
A British acquaintance—or was he American?—called the gentle Charles Lovett, had a Norwegian boyfriend, Ferdinand Finn, who lived alone on his own island in the Oslofjorden, but was now vacationing in Paris. His robust aspect and reputation as a benign sadist were alluring. In the early evening of 8 March I found myself in Ferdinand’s bed on the top floor of the Hôtel du Quai Voltaire overlooking—as all the beds there overlooked—the Seine. As we lay in postcoital ease, I asked:
“So what’s the gentle Charles up to tonight?”
“He’s out with that awful Noailles woman. They’re going to see a play at the American Center.”
I got up, dressed, waved farewell, rushed to the American Center, boulevard Raspail, and bought a ticket to Gertrude Stein’s Yes Is for a Very Young Man. I liked Marie-Laure for being at such a play, she liked me for being at such a play. The gentle Charles Lovett invited us back to his place, rue Schoelcher. On Saturday afternoon Marie-Laure in turn invited me to a dress rehearsal of La petite Lili, a dreary vehicle starring Edith Piaf and her current beau, Eddie Constantine. She also suggested I go to the Midi with her the next Friday, along with Boris Kochno. Meanwhile, she began my portrait, for which I daily sat while talking of Satie’s Socrate. I packed my little suitcase, and the briefcase full of manuscript paper (hoping to finish the copy and scoring of Mélos at Hyères), then socialized frenetically to say proud good-byes.