There was no doubt that Maugham relished his celebrity, partly because it brought him a great deal of money, and also because it went a long way toward soothing his sense of grievance over what he considered a lack of critical acclaim. Since his television appearances he could go nowhere without being recognized, pursued by journalists and photographers, by fans and students of literature, by would-be writers asking for advice, and by literary ladies, “soulful damsels,”47 as Maugham described them, who expected him to be “terribly sinister & cynical.” When he went to the States in 1950 for the showing on CBS of Trio, dinners were given in his honor by the Society of Arts and Letters, which elected him an honorary member, by the Pierpont Morgan Library, and by the Library of Congress in Washington. And in 1956, at the wedding of Prince Rainier and Grace Kelly in Monte Carlo, it was Somerset Maugham whose presence among the prominent guests was among the most widely reported, his photograph one of the biggest in Life magazine’s coverage of the event. Such recognition brought with it practical advantages, too: special rates at hotels, a swift passage through Customs at Calais, Dover, and New York, and always the best table and most unctuously mannered maîtres d’hôtel at restaurants everywhere.
Not all the appurtenances of fame were agreeable, of course, and Maugham grew increasingly resentful of the numbers of people who on the merest acquaintance made tiresome demands on his time. “People I haven’t seen48 in thirty years write letters saying ‘darling Willie we must meet,’” he complained. “They don’t care a fuck about me … [they] simply want to show me off.” He hated being used, and he exploded once when he found a couple of young men, who claimed to know one of the family, hanging about outside the Mauresque expecting an invitation to stay. “I am not a monkey in the zoo49 for people to come & stare at & I very much resent being treated as such,” Maugham wrote furiously to his niece Kate Bruce.
I do not know your son in law & I think he took a most impertinent liberty in telling his friends to “look me up.” I shall be obliged that you see that he does not repeat a proceeding which is highly offensive to me.
Such a demanding way of life would have exhausted many a younger man, but Maugham remained exceptionally limber, lusty, and fit. “When he emerges [from the pool]50 and lies down to sun himself,” wrote the film director Garson Kanin, “I see an old body but a firm one, wrinkled but unblemished.” Always abstemious, Maugham continued to restrict himself to no more than two courses at lunch and dinner, with, at the most, a couple of cocktails beforehand. The results of such self-discipline were rewarding. Robert Bruce Lockhart at a dinner in London described the seventy-four-year-old Maugham’s appearance with admiration:
Willie arrived punctually at eight51 looking very dapper in a double-breasted coat of light navy-blue, black silk socks and a monocle. The figure is wonderful. He has no spare flesh, but quite a good calf for a man of his age. He sat on the sofa with his legs tucked up.
There was to be more to it than self-discipline, however. In 1954, shortly after his eightieth birthday, Maugham spent ten days at a clinic in Switzerland run by a Dr. Paul Niehans. Overlooking Lake Geneva just outside Vevey, La Prairie offered an expensive and apparently revolutionary method of rejuvenation known as “fresh-cell therapy,” in which the patient was injected with a solution made from cells taken from the fetus of a freshly killed sheep. Dr. Niehans had always declined to publish details of his research and thus was deeply distrusted by the scientific community, which was highly critical of “the whole air of hanky-panky, instant cookery, and big money” that surrounded him. But to his patients the charismatic Niehans was a genius, a savior, consulted by large numbers of famous people who had complete faith in his treatment as well as in his absolute discretion. Among the many clients who booked into La Prairie in search of a lost youth were Noël Coward, Gloria Swanson, Marlene Dietrich, Konrad Adenauer, Thomas Mann, the Aga Khan, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Christian Dior, and Charlie Chaplin. By far the most important of Niehans’s patients was Pope Pius XII, who was treated under conditions of great secrecy in the Vatican, Niehans flying to Rome for the first consultation, it was said, accompanied by two heavily pregnant ewes. When Maugham arrived in Switzerland with Alan, who was also to undergo the treatment, he received the red-carpet reception from Niehans, who invited the two men to dine at his house and gave them a tour of the clinic, the abattoir, and the laboratories. He explained the procedure in detail, that in the space of an hour the sheep was slaughtered, the fetus removed, and the tissue sliced, minced, mixed with saline solution, and injected by means of a large horse syringe into the patient’s buttocks. A three-week stay was the norm, but after only ten days Maugham announced he had had enough and returned to France, with strict instructions not to smoke or drink for the following three months. “I feel strange,”52 he reported after returning to the Mauresque. “Not ill, nor especially well, simply—strange.”* Alan, on the other hand, was delighted to notice an immense surge in his own virility, an effect to which he drew attention on every possible occasion. “We had Willie Maugham and his catamite53 Searle to lunch,” Diana Cooper told Evelyn Waugh. “They both had the ‘cell’ treatment in Switzerland [and] Searle has become a garrulous Tom Cat … I heard him say … in a cockney-pansy voice, ‘My dear you can’t imagine what it’s like—I wake up to find myself under a tent’—here an obscene gesture was made, denoting a fabulous erection.”
THE VISIT TO NIEHANS’S clinic was repeated in 1958, when Maugham was eighty-four, but in all other respects the pattern of Maugham’s life remained much the same as before the war: winter and spring at the Mauresque, a few weeks of foreign travel (Austria, Italy, Spain) with a stay at a spa (Vichy, Abano, Vevey), an intensely social summer on the Riviera, followed by the autumn in London in his regular suite at the Dorchester Hotel. On the Riviera Maugham was a generous host—“It may interest you to know,”54 he wrote to Frere in 1950, “that in three months, exclusive of breakfasts, we served 1060 meals”—and he enjoyed having people to stay, particularly if they were prepared to entertain themselves and not disturb his highly structured daily routine. Over the years he had encountered in his guests every type of delinquency, and now in old age he was fiercely intolerant of the slightest infringement of house rules. Like an experienced hotelier, he listed the offenses that annoyed him the most, the worst offenders treating his house “as though they were gauleiters55 in a conquered province.” These marauders left lights on, made cigarette burns in the sheets, borrowed books and never returned them, borrowed money that was never paid back, and sometimes arrived with three weeks’ dirty laundry expecting it all to be washed and ironed before they went home.
From the guests’ perspective, Maugham could be a daunting host. “One could never be quite certain56 of the reception one was going to get,” his daughter recalled. “He might be kindness itself or he could on occasion be very crushing.” Unpunctuality was the greatest sin, and he refused to wait a single second for anyone who was late arriving for a meal. Liza, for example, suffered agonies of nerves when staying with the children in case Camilla or Nic should delay proceedings and incur her father’s displeasure; and the writer Peter Quennell, whose experience was typical of many, was not the only one to describe Maugham as a martinet. “He imposed a régime57 and demanded a standard of behaviour that his guests neglected at their peril; and a single ill-judged remark or minor misstep might plunge them into permanent disgrace.” Such a misstep was taken by the producer Peter Daubeny, who as a young man recently engaged to be married was invited to spend a week at the Mauresque. On the first afternoon, Maugham took him for a walk along the Corniche, and as they rounded a corner a car roared by, loaded with small children, a pram strapped to the roof.
“That’s what you’ll be doing58 a year from now,” commented Maugham, chuckling and slipping his hand into mine…. There was something faintly suggestive in his tone of voice, and in a reflex I pulled my hand away. I immediately sensed that I had done something foolish and gave him an uneasy smile. It was me
t by a face of freezing scorn and hostility. The walk continued in ominous silence…. From then on the week was pure disaster. At dinner, and every subsequent meal, Maugham made desultory conversation, but with an icy, withering malice, bitingly disparaging of anything I had done in the theatre.
Despite the risks involved and the many traps for the unwary, invitations were much sought after, with the Mauresque one of the prized landmarks of the Riviera. Inevitably stories of bad behavior and frightful gaffes were much prized and widely circulated, increasingly embellished as they did the rounds. There was the story of the “well-known peer” caught attempting to leave with a suitcase full of Maugham first editions, his bag conveniently “bursting open” at the bottom of the stairs as he was about to scuttle to safety through the front door. Then there was the story of Cyril Connolly famously caught filching three avocados from the orchard, an anecdote much relished and endlessly repeated, to Connolly’s considerable annoyance, “[when] all I had done,”59 as he plaintively explained, “was to bring him [Maugham] in an unripe windfall from the garden.” Most famous of all was the story of Patrick Leigh Fermor and the stammer, which became one of the great set pieces, sure to be retold in certain circles whenever Maugham’s name was mentioned. In the original version, the travel writer “Paddy” Leigh Fermor was taken to stay for a few days at the Mauresque by Ann Fleming, a great favorite of Maugham’s. Lunch on the first day “went like a marriage bell,” but at dinner an exuberantly tipsy Leigh Fermor found himself telling a funny story about a man with a stammer. Afterward “[when] we were enjoying a nightcap,60 Mr. Maugham got up, shuffled across the Aubusson, and with a limp handshake said … ‘Well, I will say goodnight now and perhaps I should say goodbye too, as I expect that I will be in bed tomorrow when you leave,’ and then ambled off.” Leigh Fermor was instantly mortified, convinced he had been humiliatingly dismissed as a direct consequence of his lack of tact. Over the years he worked up this brief incident into an ornate melodrama in which Maugham is transformed into a gothic monster—“his face is the wickedest tangle61 of cruel wrinkles … alligator’s eyes peer from folds of pleated hide and below them an agonizing snarl is beset with discoloured and truncated fangs”—who, mortally offended, brutally banishes the defenseless hero from his house. The fact that Maugham, by then more than a little deaf, may not even have heard the stammer story, nor cared very much if he had, seems never to have occurred to Leigh Fermor; nor the fact that with so many people brought to the Villa, Maugham probably had only the vaguest idea who he was or how long he intended to stay and genuinely believed him to be leaving the next morning.
Ann Fleming, who had married the writer Ian Fleming in 1952, provided exactly the kind of feminine company Maugham most enjoyed: like Barbara Back, she was chic and amusing and wrote witty, gossipy letters full of scabrous comment about their mutual friends; like Barbara, she was not in the least daunted by Maugham. Her husband, Ian, on the other hand, adopted a slightly deferential manner when in the presence of the older man, whom he much admired. When Fleming wrote his first novel, Casino Royale, he sent it to Maugham and was delighted to receive an enthusiastic letter in return: Maugham had been so absorbed by James Bond’s adventures he had read into the early hours, he said; “It goes with a swing62 from the first page to the last & is really thrilling all through.” Eager to make the most of such a valuable opinion, Fleming asked if he might use a quote from the letter to promote the book. “No,” came the answer. “[It’s] not that I didn’t mean63 what I said, but that I am asked all the time to write something that can be used in such a way … & have always refused … I would not do it even for the author of the Book of Genesis.” Soon after their wedding the Flemings came to stay at the Mauresque, and Maugham was touched to see how deeply the couple were in love. He was puzzled, however, by the large number of towels they used, upward of nine a day left in a damp pile on the bathroom floor. It later transpired that Fleming during sessions of highly inventive sex liked to whip his wife with a wet towel, then use another to wrap her in and soothe the smart.
With Fleming tied to his job at The Sunday Times, Annie often came to the Mauresque on her own, joining that group of old friends in whose company Maugham was happiest, friends such as Desmond MacCarthy, the Freres, Juliet Duff, Raymond Mortimer, and the charming and irascible Gerald Kelly. In 1948 Kelly had been elected president of the Royal Academy, and when Elizabeth II paid an official visit to the Academy, Kelly arranged for Maugham to be seated on her right at dinner. “I had wanted the Queen64 to be amused,” Kelly explained to Bert Alanson, “and I asked her whether I could put Willie to sit next to her, and she said she would be too frightened, and I had to reassure her that he could, if he chooses, be the nicest company, and she agreed to take the risk.”
One of the less congenial figures to be found sitting on the terrace at the Mauresque was that of F.H. Unlike his son and daughters, F.H. was a rare visitor to Cap Ferrat, but although very frail he was there on the occasion of his brother’s seventy-sixth birthday in 1950. Throughout his stay he irritated Maugham by addressing him as “my boy,” and true to form gave little sign of enjoying the celebrations. “Your father,” Maugham reported to Robin, “bore with grim disapproval65 the various festivities which my friends & neighbours had arranged.” The antagonism between the pair was real, and when in 1954 F.H. published an autobiography, At the End of the Day, he made in six hundred pages only three brief references to his younger brother, the longest comprising the book’s last sentence: “I need not describe the works of my brother William Somerset Maugham.”
More cheerful company was provided by some of the regular visitors from America, George Cukor, for instance, Garson Kanin and his actress wife Ruth Gordon, the playwright Sam Behrman, and a rich, amusing man about town, Jerry Zipkin. Zipkin, who divided his time between escorting prominent ladies to fashionable soirées and pursuing a hedonistic homosexual career undercover, had met Maugham at the bridge table in New York. Like Maugham, he was addicted to the game, and when on the Riviera played regularly with Maugham and his coterie of wealthy widows, his bunch of “old baguettes,” as Zipkin unchivalrously called them. Chief among them was the brightly painted, heavily bejeweled Marion Bateman, who had her maid brush her white hair with cornstarch every night to make it shine. Lady Bateman liked to add tone to her table with blue blood, the aura of anciens régimes, and she was proud of her biggest catch, the exiled queen of Spain, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Maugham often entertained Queen Ena, inviting her to lunch to meet Charlie Chaplin and arranging bridge parties for her. Ena loved to play, although she was no good at the game and drove Maugham and other serious players frantic by her habit of looking at her cards and giving away what was in her hand by absentmindedly muttering to herself “Only two hearts,”66 or “Quite a nice lot of spades.”
Since the war, the Sporting Club in Monte Carlo had more than regained its international luster, and with Princess Grace as patron there was every summer a program packed with world-famous performers. In June 1958 Maugham attended a gala dinner at the Sporting Club at which Frank Sinatra was to sing, with Noël Coward as compère. Both Coward and Garson Kanin were staying at the Mauresque for the occasion, and both left descriptions of the event. On the night, Maugham and his party sat at a table with the New York columnist Leonard Lyons and his wife. According to Kanin, Sinatra stopped by on his way from the stage, and Noël introduced him to Maugham. “Frank says, ‘Hiya, baby!’67 Maugham replies, ‘Very well, indeed, but hardly a b-b-baby.’ I have never seen Maugham in circumstances as strange as these,” Kanin continued.
There are too many people, too much noise…. But he takes it all in good part and sees to it that he has a good time. He has a positive gift for enjoying himself. He stays as long as he wants to, then takes his leave, making certain to stop at the main table in the middle of the room on his way out to pay his respects to the Prince and Princess.
The more observant Coward gives a slightly different version, unlike Kanin
alert to Maugham’s impatience underneath the bonhomous veneer. The evening was chaotic, he noted in his diary:
Far too many people68 and suffocating…. Willie was getting more and more fractious as the evening wore on…. Finally I went on and introduced Frankie in French and English, then he hopped up on to the stage and sang for an hour, enchantingly. Willie was off home like a shot the moment Frankie’s last note had died away. I don’t think he enjoyed it much….
Naturally such society was anathema to the more cultural among Maugham’s friends, among them the historian and diarist James Lees-Milne, whose wife, Alvilde, had a house at Roquebrune; Christopher Isherwood, who with his very young lover, Don Bachardy, had an open invitation to stay at Cap Ferrat; and that exquisite bird of paradise, Jean Cocteau, who with his fabulously good-looking boyfriend, “Doudou,” stayed often at the Villa Saint-Sospir, only a short distance down the road from the Mauresque. An artist as well as a writer, a close friend of Picasso, a celebrity in literary and theatrical circles in Paris, Cocteau should have had a great deal to offer Maugham; and yet although they continued to meet from time to time it was clear from the first that the friendship would never prosper. Cocteau had little regard for “Somerset,” as he always addressed him, regarding his work as facile and populist, while Maugham was highly resistant to the flamboyant Frenchman’s dazzling conversational flights of fancy, irritated by what he dismissively described as his “long-winded insincerity” and by his determination always to hold center stage. Maugham had recently bought two fine Picassos, La Mort d’Harlequin and La Grecque, and Cocteau as he was leaving one day stopped to admire them. He asked Maugham if he knew Picasso, and when Maugham said he did not, offered to arrange a meeting. “D-d-does he play b-b-bridge?” came the quizzical response.
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham Page 57