by Philip Hoare
There he is tracked down by Bryce, now an old man. Only the alien remains the same; the rest have aged around him, although he has become human, like us. He has released, anonymously, a grey-sleeved album, The Visitor (when Bryce buys it in the supermarket, we see the colourful cover of Young Americans displayed behind him). As they talk, Newton toys with his drink – his thirst having become an addiction, binding him to earth – and he tells Bryce that his recording has a message for his wife which he hopes she will hear when it is played on the radio, broadcast like whale song, to be picked up back on his home planet. But as he looks up from the table to a helicopter whirring overhead, it is clear that the grounded angel will never be set free; that he will always be under surveillance, like the rest of us.
When interviewed about this time, the star said his work was about the sadness he felt in the world. Perhaps that was why, in some performances on his tour, he appeared with a thin gold veil over his face, denying the gaze of thousands of eyes. A veil to stifle as well as conceal. It was a strangely silent age, for all its noise. Sound had to be physically summoned through a needle or read from magnetic tape.
There was something about this breakpoint, three-quarters of the way through the century, the year in which I turned eighteen. There seemed to be a disturbance in history, the result of accelerating time; the threat of a disrupted country and an overturned world, the threat of violence and extinction, the last point at which the planet was still sustainable; the shift from the twentieth century towards the twenty-first that exposed things between the cracks.
When filming in New Mexico – like New England, a place cleansed of its first peoples – the production used locations which included a Mesoamerican graveyard, from which the actor – who was now living on milk, red peppers and cocaine – insisted on having his trailer moved. Meanwhile the crew reported malfunctioning cameras, an echo of Bryce’s attempt to covertly film his employer using a World Enterprises x-ray camera, only to find that the resulting image showed an empty body.
Throughout this period of flux the star felt haunted by the personae he had created. Beset by a metaphysical terror, himself an exile in America, he consorted with the supernatural, drawing pentacles in chalk and burning black candles, discerning the shape of the devil in his swimming pool and believing that bodies were falling past his window in Los Angeles – a city of lost angels – just as in the film’s most horrifying sequence, Newton’s gay lawyer, Oliver Farnsworth, is thrown through his own apartment window by secret agents. The men pick up Farnsworth by his arms and legs, swinging him at the plate glass, but his body bounces back and he apologises to his assassins, one of whom replies, ‘Oh, don’t worry about it.’
Now at college in an eighteenth-century gothic building, exiled in a London suburb – neither part of the city nor my home – I went to see the film over and over again, as if I were going to Mass rather than the movies. I did not know then that it had been made in studios only a few miles down the road. I walked to the local cinema along the river that followed me down Cross Deep, ignoring its wide green waters that ran under drooping willows. I had no interest in it, only in the nineteen-twenties building ahead, white-tiled like a temple. I took a cassette recorder from my shoulderbag and, stashing it between my feet, illicitly taped the soundtrack so that my underage sister could hear it. The tape did not come out blank, but I might as well have been recording ghosts.
That time is thick with memory. Back in my cell-like room, while my peers played on the football pitches outside, I stuck plastic cups stolen from the refectory in a grid on the wall above my bed to emulate his soundproofed capsule. I fetishised what he wore and tried to wear the same: the high-waisted quilted trousers that ended below his knees in scarlet turn-ups; the plastic sandals and seventies shirts patterned like his wallpaper; even the green visor, white shirt and belted shorts in which he plays table tennis in a room surreally decorated like a forest with autumn leaves scattered on fake-grass carpet. I dyed my hair red, using the same dye my mother used, secret silver sachets from the chemist, and wore a green woman’s jacket with padded shoulders from the nineteen-forties.
To me he represented all the weirdness of that decade which he created and which created him. I didn’t know what people were, physically; I thought then, and still think, that they were another species altogether; that it was they who were the aliens, not me. In the illusory intimacy of film, I thought I was seeing him as he was in everyday life, although what had been created was something stranger, a stranger in a strange land. His melancholy was mine. He told me so.
This is how I remember all of this; it is not necessarily how, or why, it happened, forty years ago, or forty years hence.
‘He’s just a man,’ friends tell me. He may be now, and he may have been before, but he wasn’t then.
When he was photographed for twelve hours in a Los Angeles studio, continually changing into different outfits, he might as well have turned up on Napoleon Sarony’s doorstep in Union Square with a suitcase full of costumes, as Wilde had done when he came to New York as an alien. A century later the starman would arrive on that same square, now home to Warhol’s Factory, wearing a floppy hat and long hair like an Apostle of the Newness, auditioning for another role. Or perhaps just reprising it, in the array of identities which led to that point (and then to another, and another). A few months before he had appeared on a record sleeve in a silvered ‘man dress’, reclining in a pose that referenced Wilde’s languid form draped on Sarony’s couch.
Night after night, as I came out of the cinema and into the sodium-lit street, I thought that the star – who spoke of his isolation and near madness – would walk past me, with his wide urgent stride, wearing his plastic sandals, as if he’d fallen to earth in the nearby river.
‘Surely all this is not without meaning,’ says Ishmael, as he stands looking out over the water while Manhattan rises and falls behind him. ‘And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.’ ‘She had been a gloomy boy,’ Woolf wrote of her Orlando, ‘in love with death, as boys are.’ We all shudder at our earlier selves, and sigh with regret at what we did or did not put them through.
Not long ago, a museum curator led me down into the belly of the building, to the conservation studio housed in its basement. Staff were busy tending to various dummies dressed in glamorous outfits from the twentieth century, each being prepared to take its place in the galleries above. In one corner of the room a plywood capsule lay propped on trestles, like a bier. The curator lifted its curved lid and inside, under a cloud of tissue, lay a costume shaped from tarnished silver gauze; a frail, glittering suit of armour studded with sunflowers and leaves at the shoulders and hips for some Wildean parable. It had been worn in a film in which the starman played another alien, a pierrot picking his way over an irradiated beach lapped by a solarised sea. His long white stockings lay beside the outfit, rubbed with dirt.
Boxed up and ready to be launched out into the ocean, stiff on its legend and sewn over with sequins and pearls, the outfit all but trembled as I looked at it, as if an aquatic insect had emerged from its chrysalis and flown away. It might have been made of nothing. I could have reached down and touched it, this phosphorescent shroud shaped with his form, no more substantial than the glowing mantle on a gas lamp. But I couldn’t make that final connection, for fear my dreams would disappear. It was too late. The moment had passed, forty years before.
Recently I heard his voice, inadvertently, on the radio in my kitchen. It was an interview from 1976 and he was speaking as a civilian, as an ordinary person, making jokes. As I walked past, it sounded so strange and familiar, so confiding that for a moment I thought I was listening to myself.
On 10 December 1972 the starman, who declined to fly and t
ravelled instead by sea, left New York on RMS Ellinis. On his way across the Atlantic, sitting in an overstuffed armchair in his suite, he read Vile Bodies, which opens with a stormy passage on a ship. Inspired by the book’s sense of futility and its passionate bright young things caught between the wars, he wrote a song subtitled ‘1913–1938–197–?’ I remember not wanting to acknowledge the date. On 21 December he sailed up Southampton Water, from where I watch other liners pass like glamorous ghosts in the night. I ought to have been there to greet him when he arrived, to see his peacock plume coming down the gangway, although I was only fourteen and still at school. But forty years before, on that same quayside, I might have met one of those figures from Waugh’s novel, making the same journey in reverse.
The Honourable Stephen Tennant was born far from suburbia, into a life of privilege and landed estates with intimate connections to power and influence. A magazine cutting torn from his journal shows his family on an earlier visit to America, in 1919. They had sailed from Southampton to New York, and travelled by private Pullman train to Boston, where Stephen’s mother consulted the city’s mediums, trying to contact her eldest son, who had been killed three years before on the Western Front.
Stephen’s father, Lord Glenconner, wearing an extravagant bow tie, sits secure in industrial fortunes gathered in the previous century, and in the privilege of his position. In 1914 it had been Glenconner to whom the Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey turned and said, ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’ Next to Glenconner, in a picture hat and tea gown, is his wife Pamela, product of a more poetic breed, the Wyndhams; as a young woman she had known Wilde. David, Stephen’s brother, wears a dark suit, his raffish future as a playboy and nightclub owner presaged by his suede shoes.
But it is Stephen who draws the eye, for all that he too was only in his fourteenth year. It was impossible for any camera to take a casual picture of him. He predicts himself, demanding attention through his own discerning eyes. He stands under a palm tree in his white shirt and wide tie, his trousers cinched with the kind of snake-clasp belt I also wore as a boy. On the family’s tour of America he gave dancing demonstrations in hotel ballrooms and painted pictures in a Beardsley style; his mother believed her son was spiritualistically inspired by Blake. And from the beach he collected abalone shells, ‘the kind with bluegreen iridescence’. They would become an obsession for Stephen, as if their nacre held the sea just for him.
By his coming of age in 1927, a very different one from mine, Stephen had reached the peak of his perfection. That year he was photographed in his Silver Room in the family’s townhouse in Westminster, where a streetlight illuminated the foil-covered walls and ceiling within, and dull silver satin curtains fell like waterfalls. A polar bear skin was splayed across the floor, parrots perched in a silver cage, and alligators languished in a glass tank. This icy reflecting chamber resembled an aquarium installed in a Georgian square. It was a reservoir of Stephen’s dreams. He might as well have kept a porpoise there too, fished from the frozen Thames.
Against a silver backdrop, the colour of water lit by an electric moon, Stephen posed for Cecil’s camera. Clad in a pinstripe suit, striped shirt and silk tie, he wore a shiny mackintosh, enhancing his mercurial sheen. It was the most outrageous act of cross-dressing.Stephen had assumed the conventional attire of a City gentleman. Never had pinstripes seemed so unconfining, no tie so decadently tied. Their ordinariness was stranger than his made-up face and halo of lightened hair. He was an alien in Mayfair, a star of his own making, posing for an album cover in a room as fabricated as Warhol’s Factory. In public he appeared in pageants as a pearl-clad Romeo or as Shelley, ‘gold-dusty with tumbling amidst the stars’. But in more intimate entertainments, Stephen and his friends were filmed all the while by a tall young footman in dark glasses, rehearsing scenes yet to come.
In retrospect 1927 seems a signal date, caught between what had happened and what was to happen, as if history could go either way. That same year Virginia Woolf created her Orlando, whose conflation of glamour and gender mirrored Stephen’s: ageless, aristocratic, fluid and vulnerable. The endless rooms of Orlando’s palace are awash with exquisite things from the past, ‘when the silver shone and lacquer glowed and wood kindled; when the carved chairs held their arms out and dolphins swam upon the walls with mermaids on their backs’; and to animate his domain, ‘he had imported wild fowl with gay plumage; and two Malay bears, the surliness of whose manners concealed, he was certain, trusty hearts’. (Vita was once given a Russian bear cub; it had to be put down.) One room is entirely silver, down to the counterpane, although Orlando considers this a little vulgar.
Nor was it by chance that in 1927 Rex Whistler portrayed Stephen as Prince Etienne in his Tate Gallery mural The Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats, ‘an Arcadian strip cartoon’, as his brother Laurence called it, with its anachronistic figures in eighteenth-century dress riding bicycles, their hair Eton-cropped. Stephen’s legend was being played out ahead of him. To further honour this dauphin’s adulthood, which would never really arrive, Stephen was sculpted by Jacob Epstein, who was not sure if he was a boy or a girl, but portrayed him half-naked, much as the starman had been photographed as a diamond dog. As Stephen watched himself taking shape in the artist’s hands, he declared, ‘this exquisite grey creature looking like a drugged, drowned Parsifal … when I am dead & forgotten its loveliness will live, gazing back into the past at me – where Ghost meets Ghost’.
Although they seemed not to have caught what Cocteau called ‘the illness of time’, all too soon the passionate bright young things burned themselves out. Stephen and his lover Siegfried Sassoon escaped to Sicily, a legendary island, where Stephen lay about in satin pyjamas while Siegfried, who had once fought the Germans in the mud of the Western Front, cleaned the shells they’d gathered from the beach. Stephen felt that they contained their love. But they became empty echoes when he had to send his lover away; Stephen could never bear too much reality. By 1935 he had retreated to his Wiltshire home, Wilsford Manor, where the river ran clear through his garden and the water meadows beyond. Restless, lovelorn, he wandered to Sussex, to visit Virginia Woolf at her riverside house and its flooded chalk valley. Woolf saw him often that summer and found his attentions amusing, although she looked upon him as a ‘fish in a tank’, so Stephen Spender told me.
What did she see in Stephen? Her letters and diaries of the time follow him and his like with a kind of amused disdain, filled with scenes of the half-life of high society and its shimmer. In one of her albums, along with all the photographs of her and Vita and their spaniels, and Lytton Strachey and Tom Eliot on English summer days, there is a caption in her hand – ‘Stephen Tennant’ – but like those nude photographs of her and Rupert Brooke, the picture is missing, edited out by history, and there is only a blank space where Stephen used to be.
Yet they were not so far apart, these two, attuned to their inner loneliness, fragile in the face of the modern age. Virginia was forced to stay in bed in order to control her mental illness; Stephen, having suffered from consumption as a young man, chose to stay there: for both, such instability seemed a reaction to the speed of the twentieth century. When she returned to Rodmell after lending her house to Stephen, Virginia wondered if she’d find the bathroom littered with his cosmetics; but he had moved down to the coast and the Bay Hotel, set on the cliffs at Seaford. He bought a new journal in the town, and on its cover painted a neo-romantic seascape overlooked by a classical bust and a sailor hailing from a placid quay.
The reality was somewhat different. Seaford was known for the huge waves that crashed over the sea wall in autumn and winter, smashing windows and damaging buildings. In the early hours of 17 September 1935 a terrific storm, the worst for many years, swept down the Channel. In the tempest, all fancies were forgotten. How could anyone sleep or even live through such a storm?
Stephen was woken by the sound of shattering glass. Rushing
out to the landing, his plush monkey in his hand, he looked down on the moonlit scene as the sea lashed the shore. ‘I sat in the upper landing window – & watched vast ghosts form & dissolve on the esplanade – waves, giant waves.’ The winds, roaring at one hundred miles an hour from Folkestone to Plymouth, tore boats from their moorings even in protected Southampton Water, and claimed several lives. The next day Virginia drove down to Seaford to see the waves exploding over the lighthouse; she was prevented by the police from driving along the flooded road. Meanwhile, along the coast at Brighton, the doors of the Victorian aquarium – a subterranean chamber where porpoises, a beluga whale and two manatees were kept in the nineteenth century and where, in the nineteen-seventies, I would watch dolphins perform in a space resembling an underground car park – were burst open by tons of seawater and shingle driven in from the beach, flooding its interior six feet deep and all but allowing its inmates – among them a twenty-seven-foot-long stuffed basking shark – to return to their rightful homes.