One Hundred Summers

by Vanessa Branson

  The reception was a huge success. Janie Davis, our wicked old neighbour from Easteds, gave a speech on my behalf, while Hamish, as Robert’s best man, told suitably debaucherous tales from their Cambridge days. Then Richard congratulated Robert by throwing him in the pool, rendering our marriage certificate a soggy, illegible mess. Anna who was now married to Hamish, made adorable sailor suits for our page boys and bridesmaids. My gown, which was gloriously disintegrated with age, had been worn by brides in my mother’s family for the previous 150 years. After the traditional reception, the marquee was given a circus theme for the evening party. We were married!

  But then something terrible happened. We left the party in a hail of whoops for the Crown Inn in Chiddingfold, where we’d booked the honeymoon suite. When we arrived in the oak-beamed room, I swept my gown from the floor, expecting to kiss my groom, but he just stared at me and sat down on a chair in the corner of the room.

  ‘Did I notice you having a cigarette during the reception?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, I may have had a puff,’ I laughed. He didn’t find it funny.

  ‘You promised me that you would give up smoking when we got married,’ he said. ‘You know how much I hate it. Honestly, Vanessa, I’m disgusted by you.’

  ‘Come on, Rob,’ I replied. ‘It’s a not big deal. I’ve just pushed it back by a day.’

  I stopped smiling, realising that he was deadly serious. He really was going to make a big scene about this, on tonight of all nights.

  ‘How can I trust you if you behave like this?’ he yelled. I was becoming frightened and could feel my throat catching as I started to make excuses about the pressures of the day, how I’d drunk champagne to give me courage and then lost my self-control…

  ‘You’re a weak-willed idiot,’ he said. ‘If you smoke again,’ he continued, ‘if you smoke one more time, I’ll divorce you.’ I lay curled up on the bed as he towered over me, snorting with derision. ‘Oh God, now you’re resorting to tears.’

  I wrapped myself up in my dress, silent tears hidden behind my hands, winded by his aggression. The culture of our marriage had been set.

  The Hutley family had loaned us their holiday house on the Maltese island of Gozo as a wedding gift. Our honeymoon address was Number One, Prison Street. An ominous beginning.

  PART THREE

  1983–1999

  1

  PORTOBELLO

  And yet the man I married was dazzling. The characteristics that made Robert challenging to live with also made him compelling company. His powerful, competitive spirit extended far beyond the tennis court, and he was as happy engaging in debates about the ethics of blood sports as he was playing a game of chess. He would argue for the sheer jousting joy of it, his facility with language and confidence of manner more than occasionally compensating for the slightly dodgy facts he built his cases on. I revelled in his energetic company and wallowed in his sweet smell, the texture of his skin, his elegant hands and his open smile. He was generous with his time and his money, supporting the local community and lending his expertise to good causes further afield. He was culturally inquisitive, a great reader – insomnia supported his prodigious thirst for books – and let’s be straight here, he was pretty damned sexy. This man completed me: his strength complemented my femininity and his intellect my practicality. I loved him deeply.

  We baby boomers were the in-betweener generation. Germaine Greer had published The Female Eunuch in 1970 and Margaret Thatcher was now prime minister. Women were told that everything was possible, but the odds were still stacked against us. The times were a-changin’ – but oh so slowly.

  Having questioned Lindy about her willingness to ‘love and obey’ in her wedding vows, I thought nothing of changing my surname from Branson to Devereux, unaware of the impact that it might have on my sense of identity. Robert and I then fell into the trap of playing out the roles that husbands and wives subconsciously play, without ever discussing the effects that getting married would have on our relationship.

  This uncomfortable role-playing, combined with the possibility of waking the honeymoon monster, squeezed much of the fun from our relationship. From the first day of our married life, I failed to acknowledge that I was hurting. Distant memories of being bullied as a ten-year-old bubbled up. I hadn’t known how to confront my tormentors then, and I didn’t know how to confront my husband now. I’m sure Robert was unaware of the effect his dictatorial style was having on me and I kept on smiling as if it was water off a duck’s back, which must have infuriated him even more.

  Robert didn’t mean to stop being my friend, but he did so at a stroke on our wedding night. We were falling into the same pattern of behaviour as his mother and father, and I found myself occasionally catching someone’s eye and winking if Robert’s manner became particularly arrogant. Given the opportunity, his mother and I would sneak off for a smoke and do the Guardian crossword together. Smoking was my self-destructive self-preservation, my pathetic ‘fuck you – I’m not going to be controlled by you’ self-defence.

  When you’re newly married, you can’t admit that you’re unhappy to anyone – not even yourself. I was convinced that these were just teething troubles and that once we got into a rhythm we would find a way of communicating as equals, the oppression would lift and we would fly once more. However, the reality was that our patterns of behaviour became entrenched as we dug ourselves deeper into the mud.

  Everything I did became an unconscious attempt to please Robert. He hated illness, dismissing it as a sign of weakness, so I became defiantly stoic. And he introduced the term ‘MUT’ or ‘maximum usage of time’, which to this day occasionally pops into my mind. Reader, you must be shrieking, ‘Why did you allow this man to dominate you so?’ The answer is that, back then, Robert was 90 per cent wonderful. My parents had always taught us to look on the positive side; holding one’s own was never in their parenting manual. On the contrary, girls of my generation were taught that we were there to boost men’s confidence, to make them feel and look good. Robert had commented that he thought the Branson family were dysfunctional because we never yelled at each other. Whatever your point of view, it seemed that we were programmed for different styles of married life and were ill-equipped to reconcile them.

  Details, details, details. Despite all this, our lives were about to enter a fantastical period. Although the time was defined by work, the line between work and play was so faint that it sometimes felt impossible to tell them apart.

  The draw of west London was strong, and soon after getting married we moved into a garden flat at 98 Oxford Gardens in Ladbroke Grove. The forty-foot-long sitting room was bookended with floor-to-ceiling windows and the ceiling was decorated with elaborate cornicing, beautifully set off by a marble fireplace. Off to the back was a narrow galley kitchen and downstairs, testament to the fact that the idea of children had not yet crossed our minds, there was one spacious bedroom and a bathroom.

  It was the summer of 1984. Live Aid, Bob Geldof’s visionary endeavour to raise funds for relief of the Ethiopian famine, harnessed all that was good in the music industry, ending with the thrilling performance of Freddie Mercury. ‘We are the champions,’ he sang, and indeed, everyone under thirty felt at that moment as if they were the champions of the world.

  Word of a mysterious fatal disease that had affected mostly gay men from the East and West Coasts was filtering through from New York. My neighbour Tony Moore, a gentle artist, rang the doorbell to ask if I wanted to buy some of his prints.

  ‘My God, you look ill – are you OK?’ I asked without thinking, horrified at the sight of my statuesque friend, now reduced to skeletal proportions.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ he sighed, giving me a resigned smile. I found out a few days later that when he became gravely ill, the ambulance crew had refused to pick him up.

  The extent of the prejudice surrounding AIDS became apparent over the following years. Thankfully, most of this ignorance has now been eradicated. In the London I
inhabited in the 1980s, we brushed up against the disease rather than being overwhelmed by it. However, I remember answering the door to a man canvassing for support to prevent an AIDS hospice called The Lighthouse from opening in our area. He tried to convince me that having such a building nearby would affect house prices, but how wrong he was.

  One weekend Richard came down to Tanyards, looking very pleased with himself.

  ‘Ok everyone, guess what new venture I’ve just started?’ he gleefully asked at dinner. ‘Let’s do twenty questions.’ He smiled, confident that we wouldn’t come up with the right answer.

  ‘Animal, mineral or vegetable?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, I suppose it’s mineral,’ he said.

  We started guessing. ‘T-shirts? Taxis? Hotels? Schools?’

  ‘No, no, no, no,’ he replied. He loved this game.

  ‘Ok, you win,’ we said, when the twenty questions were up.

  ‘Well, we’ve done lots of studies about the condom business,’ he said, enjoying our incredulous looks, ‘ and Durex has such a stuffy image. People are embarrassed to even say the name, let alone buy them – plus, they have a virtual monopoly and charge too much.’ We caught each other’s eyes, enjoying his enthusiasm. ‘AIDS will be a thing of the past if everyone is happy to use condoms, so we’ve started Mates, a new condom company to undercut Durex and make condoms seem more, well, sexy.’

  We all laughed as the simple brilliance of his plan sank in, and then Mum stepped in, cutting her son down a peg or two. ‘Oh, Richard,’ she sighed, ‘When are you going to do something worthwhile with your life?’

  The smile dropped from his face and he pleaded quietly, ‘I’m trying, Mummy. I’m trying.’

  Robert had started a film arm of Virgin called Virgin Vision. Their ambitious team included Stephen Navin, who was to so enrich my life. Their first project was Electric Dreams, a modern-day version of Cyrano de Bergerac, in which the love triangle was between a girl, a boy and a computer. Steve Barron was directing his feature debut and Giorgio Moroder produced its pulsating soundtrack; the theme song by the Human League has since become a classic.

  Flying to join Robert, who’d been working on the film in LA, I experienced my first taste of film industry lunacy. MGM, the studio which had picked up the film, sent a stretch limo to collect me up from the airport and put us up in a suite at the Sunset Marquis hotel. The two days before the premiere were insane; we couldn’t open the door to our room because of all the job offers and invitations that were jammed under it. ‘We could get used to this lifestyle,’ Robert and I thought as we lay in the March sun, sharing a chilled bottle of Californian sauvignon blanc and observing the shenanigans of an ageing rock star and his groupies by the pool.

  MGM had enormous hopes for Electric Dreams, with the film set to open in over 1,200 cinemas nationwide. Robert and I met Ileen Maisel, the executive in charge of the film, for lunch in The Ivy to raise a glass to the film’s success during its premiere on the East Coast. We waited for the time when the viewing figures from the early screenings were collated. Eileen went to call her New York office from the restaurant phone, before all too quickly returning to our table, her eyes averted.

  ‘I’m afraid the film has to be pulled,’ she said. ‘Not enough people went to the screenings to gather decent word-of-mouth. I’m so sorry.’ And with that she walked out of the restaurant, leaving us to pick up the bill.

  I swear the receptionist at the Sunset Marquis was reluctant to look us in the eye when we returned to the hotel. There were no notes pushed under our door and not one message on the answerphone. We had gone from gods of the universe to untouchables in one afternoon. Feeling rejected by Los Angeles itself, we hired a car and drove to Santa Barbara for the weekend, where to add insult to injury, it rained.

  The film industry is as compelling as it is ruthless, and Virgin and Robert were seduced by its allure twice more. The first time was to finance a screen version of Orwell’s 1984; the director Michael Radford and producer Simon Perry, who in their eagerness to complete the film quickly, exceeded their budget with such abandon that Robert lost much of his hair. He attempted to persuade them to commission Eurythmics to write the soundtrack, knowing that they would do a stunning job while hoping to recoup some of the film’s overspend through a record deal.

  Talking to Annie Lennox about the project recently, I realise how appalled and let down they were by the experience. She and Dave Stewart were given three weeks to complete the soundtrack and worked around the clock to produce an extraordinary album; they delivered it at the eleventh hour, only to hear nothing back. Unbeknownst to them, the project had been hit by drama and they found themselves caught up in a battle between the vision of the director and the needs of the producers. When the film won the award for Best Film at the Evening Standard British Film Awards later that year, Mike Radford shattered us all by angrily denouncing Eurythmics and Virgin Vision in his acceptance speech. Knowing how much Robert had put into the film and lost in the process, it was devastating to hear Radford tearing into Virgin Vision in front of the entire British film industry. Trying to hide my distress, I turned to Rupert Everett, who was sitting to my right. In an attempt to console me he could only say, ‘Well, darling, at least you won!’ I suppose he had a point.

  Virgin’s last foray into film was financing Absolute Beginners, directed by Julien Temple and produced by Stephen Woolley and Nik Powell, our old neighbour and Richard’s erstwhile partner. It was a decision that sadly sealed the fate of Virgin’s involvement in the film business forever.

  ***

  At that time I could just about justify going to New York for the odd ‘business trip’ by selling a few vintage posters. After my month tramping the city’s streets as a teenager, I still thought of it as my town and felt at home in the crime-ridden, chaotic city. In 1984, I found myself on the only Virgin Atlantic Boeing 747 on the way to Newark with Yu-Chee Chong, an art dealer who specialised in historic images of Singapore and had a knockout sense of style and a devilish sense of humour. Night had fallen and the captain invited us into the cockpit, where we looked down at the network of red and orange glowing ribbons, as commuters returned to the suburbs from Manhattan, energy surging along every highway.

  Then the captain radioed the control tower. ‘Virgin 001, Virgin 001, are you receiving me? Over.’

  The airline was still new enough for the air traffic controller to quip, ‘Virgin? How can you prove it? Over.’ The captain rolled his eyes as he banked the mighty plane to line up with the runway.

  Once we were through customs, we wove our way through traffic into the centre of town to the Upper East Side, where we were staying in a grand apartment that belonged to a colleague of Yu-Chee’s. We had all of Manhattan before us, but what to do? Yu-Chee suggested we visited her friend, Evelyn Samuels, who was studying history of art at the Warburg Institute. The daughter of John S. Samuels III, a coal magnate from Galveston in Texas, Evelyn had just married a Brit named Nick Welch, and adventure was in the air.

  We headed downtown to the Samuels’ loft on Prince Street in SoHo, took the elevator to the top floor and entered a cavernous room with exposed brick walls and a Harley Davidson artfully positioned as a centrepiece. John S. Samuels III was entertaining a few elegantly dressed friends. We quaffed a glass or two of champagne, pretending that we did this every day of our lives, before Evelyn suggested that we leave the oldies and walk around the corner to the newly opened Palladium club, the successor to Studio 54.

  Our plan had one fatal flaw: the Amazonian bouncer, a Grace Jones-lookalike in a spray-on latex catsuit, took one look at Evelyn in her Laura Ashley floral print dress, Yu-Chee in her Chanel suit and me in my baggy Annie Hall trousers, and sent us to the back of the queue. A crowd was gathering, and Big Grace was clearly relishing her power. But then something remarkable happened: a white limo swept up, the crowd parted like the Red Sea and Andy Warhol got out, dressed in a white suit. To our embarrassment, Evelyn started shouting. ‘Andy, An
dy – over here!’

  Andy looked over in our direction and beckoned to us. ‘Over here, girls,’ he drawled, and we cocked our heads and smiled at the open-mouthed bouncer as we followed Warhol into his inner sanctum at the back of the club. It transpired that he had not only been a guest at Evelyn’s wedding but had given her a screenprint of a dollar sign as a present. A postscript to this story is that Evelyn went on to become Professor Evelyn Welch, a renowned expert on the Italian Renaissance and mother of Florence Welch, lead singer in the band Florence and the Machine.

  The following night I met up with Fiona Whitney, who had come from LA to join us. We ventured back to SoHo, this time to a loft on Spring Street that belonged to the Jaffe family. Lee Jaffe took us to an unconverted industrial floor to meet his flatmate Shenge Ka Pharaoh and a strange evening followed. Fiona and Lee connected over quantities of cocaine, while Shenge and I chatted and danced around. He never sat still and clutched a paintbrush that he’d continually dip into pots of paint before painting on every surface he could find, leaving wild heads with spiky Afro hair on hubcaps and strange toy cars and big cat-like faces on discarded objects in the abandoned loft. I bent down and snorted a line or two of coke; the evening confirmed my prejudice against coke, the ensuing conversations being frustratingly disconnected. However, hanging out with Shenge – who many say was the energy and brains behind Jean-Michel Basquiat – was a real privilege.

  Back in London I began to curate – not that I would have used the term back then – exhibitions, first with Kate Flannery and then with Louise Hallett. We hit on the simple formula of showing an overview of artists from the twentieth century, decade by decade, and then focusing on six contemporary artists.