Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  Leonor Fini, Argentinean raised in Italy, painted with a brush whose accuracy shamed Dali’s, and used as her sole subject matter her own intimidatingly feline features portraying Death. Her technique, if not her imagination, surpassed Marie-Laure’s, and she thrived in a world which may have found the Vicomtesse amateurish. Leonor, with that guttural stagy speech, those black muslin cloaks and turbans of green fur, and the intelligent self-assurance, scared me. Nor could one, everybody said, be friends with both her and Marie-Laure. She was not to be trifled with. Her lover, the willowy Stanislav Lépri, was the object of unrequited adoration by a certain duke. This duke asked Leonor to plead in his favor with Lépri. A week later the duke asked Leonor: “What did he say?” Leonor: “That you are garbage.”

  Alberto Giacometti’s presence—un beau laid, he too—was so familiar around the Saint-Germain quarter, with his sad face and careless déshabille, that his appearance at Marie-Laure’s table seemed incongruous. As for his work, I prefer his gray-and-pink portraits to the bottom-heavy elongated sculptures that brought him fame. He played on one note all his life, and that note is more fetching and dimensional in James Lord’s reporting than in the work itself. I would never have predicted his posthumous glory any more than I’d have predicted Balthus’s international canonization.

  Balthus, single-named like Colette or Fernandel, was a count because he said he was. Born in Poland, romantic to the teeth, emaciatedly attractive, a self-pitying scold, and far more widely versed—including in music—than most painters who never read and so hang out in cafés all winter when night falls early (especially in northerly Paris) and it’s too dark to paint, Balthus had a little-boy whine that counterbalanced his pedophilic paintings and an opportunistic way of denigrating Marie-Laure that got results (what’s money for if not to nourish genius, etcetera). He longed to legitimize his bogus nobility by buying a castle. This he did, with a ramshackle fifty-room ruin somewhere above Nevers. We stopped there and took pictures en route to the Midi in 1952, and found only one habitable room. Below this room, weirdly, was the replica of—or was it the model for?—the cistern in which Alain Cuny is held prisoner in L’île des chèvres. As with Nancy Mitford, or for that matter with Giacometti, I was at first miffed at the fuss around Balthus’s big-scale paintings, so overshadowed was their style by their content. The content, like that of Alvin Ross who must have already known Balthus’s work years before, was pubescent females, overweight with braids, being ogled by witches. The style was that of children’s books. Marie-Laure, in fact, had on display in her octagonal parlor the original series of black-and-white illustrations for Wuthering Heights which seemed unexceptional. When Balthus noodled, the way they all did, with his black pencil on the white paper tablecloth of the Catalan, depicting what he called his Ancestors, Marie-Laure carefully clipped it and gave it to me saying: “Frame this.” Only with the conditioning of time, and with the lecturing of those wiser than I, have I learned that Balthus is, yes, important.

  Dora Maar: she of the limpid laughter, the long cigarette holder, the Mata Hari hair-bob, the acutely animated brain paradoxically wedded to a pathological lack of humor. Her position as Picasso’s mistress and model for scores of his greatest portraits during the decade surrounding World War II stamped every aspect of her personality and conversation. But Dora was herself a portraitist of consequence: look at the rendition of her neighbor, Alice Toklas, in gray and black and brown, to realize how a spirit can be transferred to canvas and preserved indefinitely. Among my most chilling souvenirs is this: In 1956 she invited me to sit for her. During our séances de pose in her studio, rue de Savoie, I came to see another side to this nervous cool woman who at Marie-Laure’s was on more formal behavior. She was … not unhappy but somehow unrealized. How could she not be, having been abandoned by the pagan God in the shape of Don Pablo? After an analysis with the madman Lacan, she turned to the Christian God and would have liked me to turn there too. My portrait in oils (which I recall as orange, mostly), plus a little pointilliste pencil drawing, she gave to me. I in turn entrusted these to Claude Lebon to have photographed. Claude left them in a taxi. No amount of searching at a dozen lost-and-founds ever led to their retrieval. I never told Dora, and hope you won’t tell her now.

  Behold the dramatis personae of Marie-Laure’s innings and outings. Put them all regularly at one table and hear them talk. Not one was born in France (Paris for a century was merely a crossroads), and all were heterosexual. Painters then as a rule were straight, while composers as a rule were gay—at least those crossing Marie-Laure’s path like Poulenc and Sauguet and vaguely Auric and certainly me. Marie-Laure was, in a sense, akin to Frank O’Hara. Frank was a poet who had been a musician, but his social milieu, when he could choose, was that of painters, straight painters. He preferred, so to speak, the nationality of painters. At four in the morning, his magnetism and gin and patience paid off when he got to bed with them, straight though they were. Marie-Laure too, through patience and gin and charm and conversation, managed to get at least Oscar to bed.

  Oscar in this social collection was ever more of a problem as the years rolled on. His peers found him a boring baby. Dora alone showed patience, curious always for any word of Picasso that Oscar might trade with her after one of his unwanted visits. But Marie-Laure thrived on his misbehavior; indeed, with the sadism typical of all masochists, she tacitly encouraged it. How many times at Hyères, late at night after some ghastly faux pas of Oscar’s when she would chide him before guests and swear never to let him drink in her house again, would she, after the guests had left, sneak up to his room with a bottle! “You aren’t nice to me,” he would say, “always scolding.” And to me, next day, the avowal that he could only screw Marie-Laure when he was drunk.

  But they adored each other too, sported like adolescents, called each other Poochie when things were going well. “Dis-moi, Poochie,” he would say, and she would answer, “Oui, Poochie,” in a sort of circular craziness that echoed for me years later when observing roommates Bill Flanagan and Edward Albee, who called each other Mommy. (If Edward were not yet home when Bill and I decided, say, to go out to a bar, Bill would leave a note: “Dear Mommy, Ned & I are at the Old Colony, meet us there at midnight, Love Mommy.”)

  If Marie-Laure took him to a party in “her world” of the Tout Paris, Oscar, like as not, would disrobe completely and dance on the table, a spectacle unwelcome even in a young sexy man. A Parisian hostess’s quandary lay in whether to invite Marie-Laure and risk getting the dreaded Oscar too, or not to invite Marie-Laure and risk having her party lack luster. (A like problem for party givers then was Jean Genet. Genet, a known thief, made a point, when accepting an invitation into the grand monde, of stealing bric-a-brac. It became chic for one hostess to tell another: “When he came to my house Genet stole a silver tray. What did he steal from you?”) Oscar and Marie-Laure were both my confidants: she asking advice, but never following it, about his drinking; he confiding that his pride, not to mention his talent, was being devoured by the woman. I was the parent of these grotesques, twenty years older than me. Once when I appeared at a function with them, a newspaper reported: “Et puis, il y avait Marie-Laure de Noailles avec, comme d’habitude, la Belle et la Bête.”

  It had been exactly two years since I sailed from the USA. My countrymen again were everywhere, quickly spotted by their naïve demeanor and irrelevant paraphernalia. I felt removed, wishing maybe to play American for the French, but also to play French for Americans. Priorities are where you find them. (Tableau: Stravinsky and Picasso stand chatting in the Champs-du-Mars. Tourist with camera comes up and says: “Would you mind stepping aside while I get a shot of the Eiffel Tower.”) The sun set ever later. May nights turned lubricious.

  I would remain in Paris two months this time, seeing Marie-Laure every day, but leading my own life too, with my own drinking problems, or rather, compulsions, not discussable with her, not comparable to Oscar’s. The vicious cycle was my own too, growing ever tighter
around unhealthy booze followed by revivifying sex followed by unhealthy booze followed… Contrary to accepted patterns I never drank alone but did have sex alone, that is, namelessly. Recovering from a hangover, trapped in a shredded body, I memorized the topography of Paris by wandering from pissotière to pissotière, from Buttes-Chaumont to place Breteuil, brushing against strangers, sometimes going to their dingy mansardes, sometimes bringing them to the hotel. Or sitting on a bench interminably, in perhaps the Parc Monceau, beyond responsibility, beyond even time and space, heavy eyes fixed on a reeking urinal into which centipedes, strong ones and weak ones, enter and remain too long, while two yards away toddlers in pinafores were dandled on their nannies’ knees. Occasionally there were the public baths, an ideal hell I would grow dependent on in the Manhattan of the sixties. A small one on rue Dauphine, another on rue de Penthièvre, were without private cubicles, but a fourth-dimensional fog afforded privacy. If alcohol, at least at the start, seems witty, gay baths are humorless by definition. A man can’t sustain an erection while laughing.

  When I first arrived in France I was still full of Freudianisms—“He’s anal, she’s oral,” etcetera—until everybody yawned, contending that Freud had passed that way in the 1930s and was old-hat to the logical French. In fact, he had merely grazed the surface before invading the United States, and was now returning to Paris in the guise of Jacques Lacan, an expensive psychoanalyst who had sprung from an intellectualized surrealist milieu, and, from my vantage, seemed mad as Peter Sellers in What’s New, Pussycat? He had treated Philippe Bemberg who later killed himself, and Dora Maar, and Raffaello de Banfield. (Raffaello had wanted to break with Lacan, but the doctor waited beneath Raffaello’s stairway and threatened him with damnation.) Marie-Laure knew Lacan socially, so was an authority on psychiatry.

  My extracurricular social life, during this hiatus in Paris, other than the cuites which were noted every third day in the calendar, revolved around a parade of old friends, just passing through: Gary and Naomi Graffman, composer Homer Keller, and Nell Tangeman, the latter whom I took to sing Penny Arcade at Marie-Blanche’s where the two fell in love. (Nell fell in love too with Eleanor Steber, another landsman just passing through. They had never met, but broke the ice with room-service daiquiris, and remained holed up in Eleanor’s hotel for three days. Of such is the kingdom of divas.) Fixed Parisian friends, always with Jean Leuvrais as official lover, until Guy visited for a week in early June: Souzay, Lily Pastré, Kochno, Julius, Julien, the Aurics, Madame Claude Alphand of the sauterne-hued locks and lavender voice for whom I wrote three folklike ditties on words of Marot, Doda, Jacques Bourgeois, Jennie Tourel very often, Barbara Hutton, and others documented in The Paris Diary. There was an enormous party given by Alexei de Rédé in his Palais Lambert on the Île Saint-Louis (the hôtel, formerly Chopin’s, was Arturo’s gift), to celebrate the ballet Mélos. Since I had won only second prize, the honor seemed dim. Boulanger accompanied the incomparable Denise Duval in Préger’s—not my—setting of Marie-Laure’s words (during which, in deference to me, Marie-Laure left the hall), followed by Poulenc joyfully accompanying Duval in “Envolez-vous, oiseau de ma détresse,” followed by Javanese dancers miming some ponderous fairy tale during which Elsa Maxwell, sitting with her back to them, declared: “Aren’t they lovely.” Movies: Sunset Boulevard, All About Eve. Books: Mauriac’s suffocatingly beautiful Le sagouin, and Sartre’s Saint Genet. (I never met, or even saw, Sartre, but did once see Genet. I was sitting on the terrace of Le Rouquet, rue Saint-Guillaume, when Genet strolled by on the arm of Jean de Noël to whom he audibly said: “I can’t even pick my nose in public anymore without someone saying ‘That’s from The Book, page 547.’” Beyond this gossip report came two events affecting my professional future:

  The Consul, Gian Carlo Menotti’s first full-length opera which the previous year had such success in New York, now took Paris by storm. Alternately in English, with Patricia Neway as Magda Sorel, and in French, with Ethel Semser, it was playing to SRO at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. If you remember, at the end the curtain falls on Magda as she puts her head in the oven. On opening night the chief stagehand went out for a drink. Pat Neway assumed her pose, the music stopped. But the curtain stayed up for five long minutes of breathless quiet before the stagehand could be found. In the bustle backstage Cocteau pronounced: “Quel coup de théâtre, cette fin! Quel silence vertigineux!” Neway became a star, a darling, a guest in demand. A dessert was named for her at Maxim’s. Menotti likewise. During his fifteen minutes in the fickle French sun he could do no wrong, his image and interviews on every street corner. Likewise too, the very young conductor Thomas Schippers, Menotti’s protégé, said by everyone to be more beautiful than the sky. One evening at the Montana bar I chanced upon Gian Carlo. He sat with Schippers, the latter all of twenty-one and sure of himself, was indeed beautiful, but too perfect, too slick. I was nonplussed. We chatted, I invited them for lunch at Marie-Laure’s, they accepted, that was that. Tommy grew. Within a few years, emancipated but still faithful musically to Gian Carlo, Tommy had bloomed into a conductor of stature. Like all homosexual conductors of the period (except Mitropoulos), he married. His wife, heiress Elaine Phipps, provided the good life, and he worked hard. Tommy and I remained always wary of each other, even caustic; in an interview he once called me backward-looking, though he never, except for Menotti and Barber, conducted “forward-looking” pieces. His wife died of stomach cancer in Cincinnati where Tommy had been named head of the orchestra. His position in America, where only Europeans are permanent conductors of major orchestras, was singular, though his repertory stayed safe. I was thus astounded when in 1973 he commissioned me to write a large work for his symphony. The result was Air Music, a thirty-five-minute suite in ten movements, which won the Pulitzer Prize for 1976. A year later Schippers died, of cancer like his wife. Shortly after, the orchestra asked me to compose a double concerto, for cello and piano, in his memory. Named Remembering Tommy, the eighth of its ten movements, a nostalgic blues, is titled “One Minute in the Montana Bar.”

  On the afternoon of the Fourth of July Nell Tangeman sang the world premiere of Six Irish Poems in a live broadcast with the Orchèstre de la Radiodiffusion Française conducted by Tony Aubin. This was the first of my symphonic music to be heard in France. Nell had never sounded more right. Each note, each series of notes, each molding of each series, and each contrasting movement containing the moldings, had been conceived for Nell’s huskily silken and sensible mezzo-soprano, and she brought it off in a style which to French ears, geared to timbres at once tighter and more “Roman Catholic,” showed a new dimension of Anglo-Saxon melancholy. That evening Marie-Laure threw a party, ostensibly in my honor, though most of the guests hadn’t bothered to listen to the broadcast except the valiant Valentine Hugo who extraordinarily whistled much of the score to me, after one hearing.

  The party finished badly. In street clothes and tieless, I was the only informal guest among the Tout Paris, and felt smug in my talent, my youth, and my champagne. Toward midnight, for no fathomable reason except exhibitionism and the knowledge that Cocteau had done the same seventeen years before, I slapped my hostess violently across the face and she fell to the floor. Picture the aghast faces of the servants who restrained me, and the abstracted smile of Marie-Laure as she was helped into a chair! This sort of misbehavior, I calculated, was what she adored. Guy and Nell rapidly escorted me back to Saint-Germain; but once we’d deposited Nell, I refused to go home, staying up all night at the Pergola, to the consternation of Guy who had never seen me thus.

  The day before this demonstration Koussevitzky died, a fact which went unnoticed in the Parisian press but which would be reflected, in the ultimate ebb and flow of contemporary American music, as a kind of weaning from precocious adolescence into uncertain maturity. That same day, 3 July, Marie-Laure introduced me to Picasso, during a preview of Buñuel’s Los Olvidados. Shortly thereafter she tried to introduce me again, this time at a verniss
age of Masson, but I demurred.

  “He won’t remember,” I mewled, scared stiff.

  “Of course he’ll remember, how could he not, lui, Picasso? He never forgets, you or anyone. With those photographic eyes—those black bullets—you’re burned forever into his cerebellum.”

  Was it for this I hit her next day? To show that I too was someone, had black eyes, made my own rules?

  The morning of 7 July, Marie-Laure and I motored to Hyères where I would remain until August.

  Can the galloping horse cast a mere side glance as he speeds through the next twenty days? Come to think of it, the horse image is an obsession since childhood, the horse being the one creature to which I’m violently allergic. Because of an affection for this winged piano-shaped beast, and a proscription of contact, I depicted in The Paris Diary a boy—myself—who destroys a horse by piercing it with wooden spears. (I was bemused to learn that an English dramatist later wrote a play around the same obsession.)

  Between 7 July and 1 August, 1951, Marie-Laure and I thought up a ballet scenario structured line for line on the three stanzas of Robert Browning’s “Love in a Life.” All that remains of this project is a vocal setting of the troubling poem wherein the poet, whenever he enters a room—”Room after room,/I hunt the house through/We inhabit together”—finds that “you” have just left…

  I composed, too, a suite of seven connected unaccompanied choruses, From an Unknown Past, so-called because the authors of the profane texts are mostly anonymous. The cycle, lasting less than ten minutes, I have never done better than.

  And I finished the orchestration of the piano concerto, scribbling avidly like Penelope weaving her shroud, making the instrumentation maybe more ornate than required, since Marie-Laure in the evening stalked me from behind, moving ever closer, talking, talking, in her dark blue dressing-gown, yet not wanting to touch me for fear of smearing the ink. I dreaded our regular good-night kiss, wondering if my tact was dishonest, fearing her tongue, feeling I was using her while giving nothing in return.