Built in 1847 on Chalk Farm Road to the north of Camden Town in North London, the Roundhouse had been conceived as a railway engine shed containing a turntable for the London and Birmingham Railway. It was a circular structure, gloomy and cavernous, that smelled of creosote, with enormous wooden beams. Within a decade, trains had become too large for the building and the Roundhouse was used for various purposes. In the mid-sixties it had become the scene for love-ins, rock concerts, happenings, and the like. With the addition of a proscenium stage rigged for lighting and the construction of a few dressing rooms, it began its new life as a theater.
Nicol Williamson, a tall, laconic Scottish actor, played the part of Hamlet with a nasal twang and a partial lisp; this was not an affectation but Nicol’s natural speaking voice, and without doubt broke through some conceits as to how the Great Dane should be portrayed. Tony and Nicol rarely seemed to agree, and Tony munched nervously through a succession of green apples throughout the period of rehearsal. Anthony Hopkins was playing King Claudius and Judy Parfitt was Gertrude, and their chemistry was powerful. But after the show was up and running, Nicol would on occasion leave the stage without warning. This was always an interesting moment for the rest of the cast, who, without benefit of a curtain, would trail offstage after him into the wings in mute embarrassment. But Nicol was also an amazing actor and had a very strong presence; he was always entertaining to watch.
One night, the tip flew off his fencing foil in the graveyard scene and out into the audience. Nicol calmly stopped the action and asked if everyone was okay. Then crying, “On with the show!” he fell to the ground as Michael Pennington, playing Laertes, immediately stabbed him. Marianne Faithfull and I were both flirting with Nicol; we spent some time in his dressing room between shows. One evening at dinner after a performance, he introduced me to his friend Ian Holm, an idol of mine since I had seen his ground-breaking performance as Richard III at the National Theatre.
Marianne often would ease into the dressing room so close to curtain that I was already wearing her costume. I’d whip it off and start to lace her up in it as she’d pin the waist-length blond wig to her hair and then wander onstage in a cloud of Robert Piguet’s Fracas perfume, a heavy distillation of hypnotic tuberose.
• • •
One night Mum gave a party for the American artist Kenneth Nolan; he came with the art critic Clement Greenberg and a pretty brunette girlfriend called Stephanie Gordon, in a blue Pucci minidress. The next day, I heard Mum and Gina Medcalf talking about how the guests had been smoking grass. A girl called Jenny Harrington, with red hair and sweet green eyes, came one night. She was only nineteen, closer to my age than Mum’s, and another Sunday she in turn brought two of her friends, a black actor called Stefan Kalifa and his friend Brian Henderson, a handsome young musician from Trinidad. They took Mum and me to a club in Paddington, where there was a reggae group called the Heptones, who sang a song that I loved called “I Need a Fat Girl,” aka “Fatty Fatty.”
I’m in the mood, the mood
I need a fat, fat girl tonight
Soon Mum was seeing more of Brian.
CHAPTER 13
Anjelica and Ricki running along Maida Avenue, 1968
Mum was planning to drive to Venice to see her friend Manina, and while she’d spoken with me about it, she hadn’t told me that she was going with anyone. We hadn’t seen John Julius for some time, and I suspected that she was going with Brian. Allegra was to stay behind with Nurse. The night before she was to leave, she came into my room under the pretext of wanting to borrow one of my weekly women’s magazines. She sat on my bed. Eventually, she just got around to it and said, “You know, Anjel, we need to talk, because things are changing very fast. You’re becoming a woman, and you’re going to want to see boys and have lovers. We’ve been living in an atmosphere of secrecy lately. I feel it in you, and you feel it in me. But we’re together in the same house, and we’re mother and daughter. It’s difficult, but we’re going to have to incorporate it into our lives, because it’s a factor now. Unless you’re going to go and live somewhere else, which maybe you’d like to consider. This is an issue we’re going to have to face.”
I burst into tears. We sat on the Chinese bedspread, and we hugged and cried. It seemed possible that everything could become honest between us again. For a whole year I had come home from pretending to be at school and she’d be crying in her bed. I had become secretive and devious. Mum was obviously very upset about the failed relationship with John Julius and the wall of silence that had divided us. She stood up and went into her room. And I was flooded with love for her.
The morning after our conversation, I was sitting at the piano downstairs in the living room, tapping the keys, as Mum was preparing to leave. She had asked me for some tapes to take on her trip, and I’d picked out some music for her—Miles Davis, Dylan, the Stones, Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. She seemed in a rush to go, which tipped me off that she would have company. She was wearing makeup and looked very pretty. We hugged and I told her to have a good time. The front door closed behind her and the house was silent. I went to rehearsals at the Roundhouse. A few days later, Nurse said, “I haven’t heard from Madam.” That was strange and it worried us, since Mum used to call every day to ask about Allegra, who was only four at the time.
I had a dream that night that my spine was being pulled out of me. I heard a voice saying, “Wake up, Anjelica. Wake up.” I opened my eyes. Leslie Waddington was sitting on my bed. I thought, What the hell is Leslie Waddington doing sitting on my bed? Then he said, “Your mother’s dead. She was killed in a car crash.” I felt my heart imploding while my mind tried to grasp what he had said.
When I walked downstairs, I saw that the house had changed overnight. I think Allegra was upstairs napping. The unthinkable had happened. Nurse was weeping. I couldn’t bear to look to her or Tony for confirmation. The light had gone out of everything. It was like being in a pile of ashes. Tony and I were silent. What could we say? We didn’t hug or touch.
Leslie said, “We should tell Allegra in Ricki’s room.” So we went upstairs to Mum’s room, and we sat on her bed. I sat on the right, and Tony sat on the left, with Allegra between us and Nurse opposite. Leslie told Allegra that her mummy had gone away and wouldn’t be coming back. Allegra opened her mouth and let out a scream like a banshee. A terrible, sad, high-pitched scream. An awful sound. Like something being torn out of your guts. Then Nurse took her to her room. Later that afternoon, she was reading aloud from her bird book.
I went into Mum’s closet. Her dresses didn’t even smell like her anymore. Flowers were coming. Lots of flowers; violets from Dick Avedon, violets from Diana Cooper. I was furious at the flowers. What the hell? Flowers can’t replace my mum.
I took a taxi to the Roundhouse and sat in the empty theater. In a way, I looked forward to the drama of telling Tony Richardson. When he walked in with Neil Hartley, I said it quick, “Mum’s dead,” and I watched the horror spread across their faces. That was really my proof that it had even happened—the effect of the news on other people. That evening Tony and I had to go to Victoria Station to meet Dad, who was coming in from Rome. He had been diagnosed with emphysema, and his lungs were so bad he couldn’t fly. When he got off the train, he looked terrible. Gaunt and white-faced. We must have gone to Claridge’s with him, always his hotel of choice. Other than the initial greeting on the station platform, I don’t recall a single embrace or any word of consolation. But then he might have known that I blamed him for abandoning her.
Later, at 31 Maida Avenue, Willy Fox came to the door in a tan raincoat, walked in, and came upstairs. He lay outside the covers and held me until I fell asleep. I’ll never forget him for that.
Mum’s funeral was on February 8, 1969. The house began to fill up with people, Mum’s friends, my friends. It was as if shock had made time stand still. Joan flew in from New York to take care of me; she remembers the iron four-poster bed at the end of the garden, covered with sno
w.
Manina wrote to me from Venice:
It is impossible—still—for me to conceive it. I just cannot imagine a world without Ricki. She is one of the lights of my life, and will remain so. I see her magnified and magic. When she appeared she changed everything; life became a feast. As if everything was suddenly possible. She was a container of life itself. Maybe so much that there remained nothing to live for anymore.
At Mum’s funeral, Jules Buck came up to Dad with his palm extended. He wanted to make peace, but Dad turned his back on him. He never spoke to Jules again. There was no casket in the crowded room at the Friends meetinghouse. My mother always said that the one religion she truly respected was Quakerism. I remember nothing of the service or what anyone said.
• • •
From Gladys Hill to Dorothy Jeakins:
23 Three Kings Yard
London W1, England
Feb. 11, 1969
Dorothy darling—
I received your dear letter and will ask Anjelica and Tony about a memento of Ricki’s for you.
She was on her way to Lago Maggiore with a young jazz musician named Brian Thomas Henderson. He was driving. We have not seen the police report yet but, near Dijon, near a small town called Gray, in Eastern France, they collided with a truck. It was Ricki’s car. She was killed instantly and Henderson was cut about the face, concussed. Henderson is still in hospital there. The truck driver was injured in the leg. But both men will recover nicely. The Memorial Service was held Saturday in the Westminster Meeting Hall, Society of Friends. The Quaker elders conducted the service and it was a half hour of silence with the elders speaking occasionally—words of comfort and simple faith! It was a miraculous service of rare beauty and dignity. I shall tell you about it when next we meet.
There was no will and I am trying to help with inventory and that kind of thing.
John and Tony go on to Ireland tonight. Anjelica is understudying Ophelia in Tony Richardson’s “Hamlet” that opens here Feb. 17th. Nurse and Allegra are at the house and Gina Medcalf, a young friend of Ricki’s, is sleeping there. Little by little, all will be straightened out. Anjelica and Tony are doing well—and so is John. Also Allegra and Nurse.
Leslie Waddington took over for all the hard things—what an exceptional young man he is!
Betty was here until yesterday. I shall be on my own here tomorrow.
I am sending this to Santa Barbara because you will have finished in Guaymas. And will write more later.
Much love from all of us,
Gladys xxxxxxs
That line, so stoic, so fiercely optimistic: “Both men will recover nicely”! I don’t know about the truck driver, but I believe my mother’s death haunted Brian Henderson throughout his life.
• • •
Marianne was kind to me. She took me along when she went to buy drugs at Boots Pharmacy in Piccadilly in her chauffeur-driven Bentley. Once we went to see a doctor friend of hers who chased us around his surgery, an action both disturbing and funny. But we got out of there in a hurry, and Marianne took me to her house on Cheyne Walk, opened a door upstairs, and showed me her infant son, sleeping in his crib. Mick Jagger came home later that evening. I thought he was amazing—rail thin, with sexy, insolent eyes and full lips. Having admired him as a schoolgirl, I found meeting him in person quite surreal.
Marianne gave me her long red fox coat and kissed me goodbye. She was off to Australia with Mick to do the film Ned Kelly. I had hoped again that Tony would allow me to play the part, but Francesca Annis took over the role of Ophelia before Hamlet went on tour to New York. Even though I had only a walk-on appearance in the play as a lady-in-waiting, I saw the trip to New York as an opportunity to escape the terrible emptiness of Maida Avenue. I didn’t know what Dad might have in store for me.
On March 1, a little over a month after Mum died, Gladys wrote from the Palace Hotel in Helsinki, telling me that before she put Mum’s good jewelry and lesser costume pieces into storage, she wanted to pass on a piece of polished stone, a medallion, to Dorothy Jeakins. She told me that my mother had rings and her pearl necklace from my father with her in Gray, and closed the letter by saying, “I have had no word on Mr. Henderson, but am sure that when he returns to England, he will want to talk to you, which is right. But see him only the once, for you and he could never be friends, and your good taste and natural dignity will tell you this.”
I received a call from Brian, who told me he had some things he wanted to give to me. When I went to his flat, he presented me with a dream that Mum had written down the night before the accident and some things she had with her when she died. He returned the Cartier watch that I’d given to her for her birthday; the oval glass had shattered over the Roman numerals. And he gave me the box of music I’d sent her off with on her journey. He obviously hadn’t looked inside. I took the box home and went into my bathroom and locked the door. When I opened it, the tapes fell out covered in dark, sticky blood. In shock, I dropped them in the bathtub, turned on the tap, and watched the water run red on the porcelain and down the drain. Later that night, I read the dream.
JAN 28–29
ST. QUENTIN GRAND HOTEL
I am in a room with B. Perhaps in bed.
There is a stillness. There will be an earthquake.
The hotel crumbles. There is wreckage everywhere.
We have slipped gently to a place somewhere
atop it. I can see colored shreds and strips
of building refuse that is neither wood nor steel
but something like both. There is no feeling of
danger but of something like relief—that
sort of calm after a storm.
Lucio wrote to tell me he had photographs “of many of her expressions, whether épanouic or with melancholy—she was like that—extremist.” He said she improved many things within him, and that she had helped him at a certain moment of his life.
Tony and I separated Mum’s collection of photographs from her diaries and letters. I kept the former, and Tony stored her papers in a trunk. Later, when Allegra retrieved the trunk, she read what was there. One discovery was that Mum had terminated a pregnancy in 1959, the year she broke up with Lucio García del Solar.
Philippe Halsman, who had taken my mother’s photograph so long before for the cover of Life, wrote that he felt he had been instrumental in changing the course of her life from an ordinary to an extraordinary one, and was asking himself whether it had been for her ultimate good.
Joan wrote that she was delighted I was coming to New York that spring, and sent me a beautiful letter:
Please don’t cry; we shall laugh as much as your mother and I did when she came to this heathen land, for you and she have the same mind and the same humor, the same way of looking at the world and knowing that it’s a bit off. I saw Arnaud who was white through his tan at the news and says he really loves you: the town is sad and grey but it will be sort of beige by the time you get here.
I used to say, “Oh, will you leave me that in your will?” when I liked jewels or dresses or something of Mum’s. It was a joke, of course. It never occurred to me that my mother would die young. My father, it was one thing, he could’ve gone at any minute, and all anyone did was talk about my father’s health. But my mother—it was different; she was only thirty-nine.
I think of my mother all the time. Diana Pickersgill’s mother, Dorothy, died in a car crash, too. Diana described such a loss as an abduction, and so it is.
PART THREE
NEW YORK
Avedon for Vogue, 1972
CHAPTER 14
Anjelica in Connemara, the west of Ireland, for Vogue, 1969
On April 28, 1969, I went to live with Joan on Forty-seventh Street at the Buchanan, in an apartment belonging to her uncle Don. It was around the corner from the Shelton Hotel on Lexington Avenue, home away from the skies for a stream of uniformed pilots and female flight attendants who seemed to be having a good time of it. Downstairs, Smiler
’s deli made fat tuna-salad sandwiches on rye, and Schrafft’s across the street mixed a great chocolate ice cream soda. Joan took me to Serendipity and made me buy an elegant black jumpsuit. We were happy as roommates; she allowed me to paint my room a lurid magenta, which was a mistake. I went on to decorate her living room in an Indonesian jungle theme with a bamboo overhang entwined with green rubber snakes and inflatable lizards.
Joan was running with a crowd of photographers, designers, illustrators, editors, and models; she seemed to prefer the company of French people. Soon she would be making plans to go to Paris to work as a stylist for the photographer Guy Bourdin, whose brilliant and surreal work at French Vogue was causing a sensation. She introduced me to his assistant, a doll-faced Vietnamese called Duc, with whom I began a rather tranquil liaison. He spoke little French and barely a word of English.
Joan spent many of her nights encased in a see-through plastic hazmat suit in order to make her ankles thin. She was now an assistant fashion editor at Glamour and was writing book reviews for the magazine. She was finally exercising her talent and her interests. She was working with the top photographers and spoke knowledgeably about Richard Avedon, Hiro, Bert Stern, Irving Penn, and an emerging group of more radical photographers whose pictures were having a major impact on fashion—names like Helmut Newton, Jimmy Moore, and Bob Richardson.
She showed me a copy of French Vogue. Among the photographs on the fashion pages, Bob Richardson’s work was singular. The model, Donna Mitchell, was intense. In several of the pictures, she looked beautiful but distraught. In others, she was wearing Moroccan harem pants, talismans, and Hindi tattoos, stranded on a Greek beach with a naked lover washing up against the rocks of a tide pool. Looking at this layout was like watching a beautiful, dangerous foreign movie. It was not about fashion. Joan said to me, “If you want to be a model, you should really work with Richardson.”
A Story Lately Told: Coming of Age in Ireland, London, and New York Page 16