Chapter Three
Some description is required both of the changes in Garnet’s physical appearance from the year of his birth to the year 1979 - the time when he became a modestly recognisable face, not just among the New York society scene, but on the TV screens of the world at large - and also of the apartment which was his sole dwelling place for those 48 years.
Pasty is an adjective rarely applied to a soft, malleable dough or a cement-like mixture of flour and water, something to which it would be most succinctly descriptive, but it was a common phrase when used in association with thoughts of the young Garnet’s complexion. Where his father would have been described as ruddy-faced, his cheeks pinpricked with red maculae from a lifetime’s exposure to the fierce, equatorial sun; the perpetual erubescence of his expression a physical manifestation of the hot blood and emotion that pumped so passionately in his veins, his son’s colouring was a reflection of the subdued walls of his private chambers and of the clouded New York winter sky and the sidewalks kept in eternal shadow by the towering office blocks and massive skyscrapers rising high above them. Garnet had fine, blonde hair - a throwback to the distant Germanic Aldbergs perhaps? - clear, pale blue eyes, and a narrow, long straight nose, the flawless geometry of which was undisturbed by a lack of any juvenile pugilism. Critics might have said that his eyes were a little bit too wide set, or that his lips were a fraction too narrow, for the ensemble of the whole countenance to be entirely aesthetically pleasing; certainly there was something about the Wendelson Jnr. visage which was not altogether a joy to behold, but it was difficult to dissemble whether this was as a result of a knowledge - and therefore more often than not dislike - of the man himself, or whether from a purely subjective analysis of his individual facial features. One wit, writing for a short-lived satirical magazine of the mid 1950s, described the experience of coming face-to-face with Garnet Wendelson as being similar to that of regarding a Picasso canvas: “...your eyes move rapidly across the surface, not knowing quite where to stop, or indeed, whether the whole isn’t improved by the constant unfocussed agitation.” His aunt Patricia would refer to him as being effete, back in the days when this would have been considered a compliment amongst a certain social group who considered physical frailty and a weak constitution a sign of someone unable - and more importantly, in no need of - earning a living from the skill of their hands and the sweat of their brow. In his youth, Garnet’s favourite book was A Rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans: an early French edition published in the 1890s a strangely out-of-place title in the family library, sitting alongside real-life accounts of lurid fin de siecle scandals and adventurous tales of big game hunters, reading more favoured by his father. This ‘breviary of Decadence’, though, he took greatly to heart, treating the flowery prose and the descriptions of the exotic lifestyle and appearance of Duc Jean Floressas des Esseintes as a style guide for his teenage years. It is easy to see the parallels that Garnet must have drawn between his own upbringing and circumstances and those of the young man who inherited the Chateau de Lourps: both were orphaned at an early age, both suffered from a propensity towards ill-health; even the physical attributes of the young Duc, Garnet could have believed to have been a description of the reflection he encountered staring back at him from his own mirror each morning: he even briefly experimented with a thin beard of the kind described as goatee, knowing that this facial adornment was the one preferred by des Esseintes, but the results were unsatisfactory, the hair on his face growing too fair and too patchy to adequately be shaped into the style he sought.
After his accident, Garnet, if anything, devoted even more time to the particulars of his physical appearance. He had always been a vain man, perhaps overly conscious of the way in which he was perceived by the world, and this possibly no fault of his own, since from an age when most other children were only too happy to vanish within the anonymity provided by zero responsibility and nondescript school uniforms, the media spotlight had been firmly focussed on the little boy who had inherited so much wealth. One journalist recalled to a colleague the occasion of the two hours that he had been forced to wait in the Wendelson lounge, while upstairs Garnet selected a suitable outfit to wear for the interview: as he remarked at the time, “it wasn’t even as though I had a cameraman with me”.
His hair had always been a source of irritation and rancour with him, and provided him with a constant reminder that not all things in life can be controlled by fiscal clout alone. Possibly this was not a sensation unique to Garnet: the battle between the direction that your hair wishes to lay and the direction that you would choose for yourself seem to be eternally waged by both sexes and on all continents; from such deep rooted - ho, ho - conflict does the source of most barber shop small talk stem. Garnet’s own routine as regards his weekly visit to Gino’s - one of the few remaining, genuinely old-fashioned, barber’s shops - at the corner of Broadway and 23rd Street was a ritual set in stone. Friday, 11 a.m., wash and trim, shave and manicure. Gino would be waiting at the door of his establishment, ready to greet “the young Mr. Wendelson”; he would take over the responsibility of wheeling his customer’s chair over the red and white checkerboard tile flooring, past the row of reclining leather seats and white porcelain wash basins to the cleared space at the very rear of the salon - not a noun that Gino himself would ever have used to describe his premises - and would park his client in front of a full length, ornate, gilt-edged mirror, from where the disabled man could watch every minute detail of the subsequent transformation of his appearance. Not that the change could ever be described as dramatic: Gino seemed to share - if not to actually feel more keenly - Garnet’s despair at the tenacity of his locks’ refusal to be shaped and styled in any lasting fashion; the fine, blonde hair a continual affront to his professional abilities. Garnet would generally sit in silence while Gino would tut and groan, observing his customer’s well known head from one side and then the other, occasionally lifting up some lifeless golden straws from the foppish fringe, before letting the hair drift slowly back again, the flyaway filaments almost defying gravity; the delicate strands quite happy to be seduced by the merest hint of static. Sometimes Gino would throw himself into a frenzy of activity, snipping and clipping, the small metal scissors in his hand snapping at the air like an angry crocodile; the big barber flitting around Garnet’s chair like a bumble bee in his striped apron, up on his tiptoes one moment, and then back and around, snipping, snipping, snipping. But, it was always to no avail: no amount of dextrous coiffure wizardry can replace hair where there is none, or transform gossamer threads into dense thatch. Of Garnet’s eyebrows there was scarcely a trace, such was the pallor of his hair: this peculiarity of his facial features alone had once been cited as evidence by a manager - subsequently sacked - at one of the Wendelson refineries, as to why he thought that his boss was untrustworthy. It also led to Garnet’s abrupt exit from a meeting of the recently founded Young Presidents’ Organisation in 1951, when he paranoiacly - and mistakenly - thought that his appearance was becoming the subject of gossip of the huddled groups of young C.E.O.s.
As he grew older, Garnet’s hair became even thinner. Gino once whispered the dreaded word ‘wig’ only to find his premises were boycotted by his noted customer for the next two weeks. The subject was never mentioned again.
At school, Garnet had been a conscientious pupil, particularly excelling at math. A place at a prestigious university had been a certainty - Yale had already offered him an unconditional place - before his accident curtailed any opportunities for purely academic improvement. Instead, Garnet diverted his mathematical talents to a more lucrative application, daily studying the financial pages of the reputable newspapers closely, and speculating - in most cases very successfully - in high risk, high interest, foreign investments, of which, at the time, there was no shortage. The Venezuelan cable stocks paid high dividends, as did his foresight to speculate on the discovery of oil reserves off the west coast of Africa.
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sp; Not that he had ever been short of money - far from it - but the embarrassment of riches provided by his new investments allowed Garnet to further indulge himself in a favourite pastime, that of establishing himself as, what is generally described, a patron of the arts. Not quite a Gertrude Stein for spotting new talent, Garnet instead made acquaintance with the then manager of the Chelsea Hotel - the city’s undisputed bedding place for the world’s literati - who endeavoured, in his turn, to keep Garnet updated concerning news of the rising and falling fortunes of his distinguished guests, and to attempt to keep one step ahead of the market - and the media - by predicting who was going to be ‘hot’ and who was ‘not’. The Chelsea had played home to Tennessee Williams, Thomas Wolfe and Mark Twain; its bar had been supported by Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan; William Burroughs had completed Naked Lunch while in residence, and Jack Kerouac had written the first draft of On The Road during his time as a guest. Andy Warhol made the film Chelsea Girls as a homage to the place; Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, and Larry Rivers made the Chelsea their home; and it was Jimi Hendrix’s bolt-hole whenever he was in town. To Garnet’s chagrin, though, none of these celebrities deigned to cross Seventh Avenue with the intention of stepping over the Wendelson threshold: instead, into Garnet’s aspiring social circle, fluttering like moths around the flame of promised sponsorship, hovered the Belgian mime artist Arnold Metz, the beat poet Saffron Davies, and the lavishly bespectacled painter Monotone, who claimed to be ‘something big’ on the fringes of the pop art movement, and there the ill-assorted trio stayed, like fish past their sell by date, for the better and worst part of the next two decades.
It was during this time that Garnet first met Marcel Chin, at a dinner party at the house of a mutual acquaintance. It was 1973, and as the tide of popular opinion in New York was becoming increasingly critical of the government’s continued involvement in the Vietnam War, Chin’s Laotian nationality singled him out as being something of a guest ‘outrageaux’ among the social tables of the dissenting bourgeoisie. Chin had arrived in New York six years earlier, penniless and unknown, but, with the resourceful guile of the refugee, had quickly managed to secure for himself work as a runner for the respected practice of architects, Wills & Bowery. It was a placement that was to determine the future course of his life. Ambitious and artistic, Chin was not content to remain the mere messenger for very long, at the same time, though, he recognised that success was not casually dished out on a plate for nothing in his newly adopted land of opportunity, but was nevertheless an achievable goal at the end of a long tunnel of hard work: this promise in itself was a better prospect than he could have hoped to have had back in his homeland, hard work there being purely an accepted daily norm, not a means to a better end. Chin was still a very young man at this time - not yet out of his teenage years - and his small frame and high voice, made him appear even younger than he actually was: William Wills was approaching retirement age, and the drive and ideas which had been the mainstay of his company during the duration of his successful career were beginning to falter, increasingly he found his thoughts meandering over time’s past, rather than focussing on future projects; sentimentality was irrevocably replacing originality. In Chin, though, Wills appeared to see one final project which was worthy of encouragement. Realistically, he could not have imagined the oriental youth would ever be the future of his company, there was no question of grooming a successor - indeed, at the time Chin had only the most rudimentary knowledge of the English language, let alone any other skills requisite to running a large organisation - but he must had seen in the young immigrant a determination and ambition which reminded him of his own youth: it is an old, familiar story, but nevertheless the enduring appeal and predictable cycle of fables are not there without good reason. Wills was impressed with Chin’s determination and vitality: both old and young man would remain at the company offices long into the evening, the one methodically explaining every aspect of his craft, imparting all that he knew, the other soaking up the information like a sponge. Together they poured over drawing boards, reviewed past assignments, even, occasionally, roamed the Manhattan streets by night, so that the one could show the other the finished product of past labours. At the end of eighteen months Chin knew more about the running of an architectural practice than any student, fresh out of college, with a solid six year degree course behind them. His language skills had improved too, during this time, as had his living arrangements. When he had first arrived in the country he had been obliged to share a room with three others, in an overcrowded tenement block just south of Canal Street: by the end of his apprenticeship with William Wills he had moved out of Chinatown altogether and was renting an apartment for himself above an Italian deli close to Time Square - it could not be called ‘having arrived’ exactly, but for the young native of Laos it was ‘a promising start’.
When William Wills died, Chin was both surprised and delighted to discover that the old man, in his will, had left him a small bursary for the purpose of continuing his education, and had also stipulated that a position be made available in the company when he qualified as an architect. It was a faith in his abilities that Chin was to repay - in part. Bored by the seemingly pedestrian speed that his formal schooling now took, previously having been spoilt enjoying the lavish attentions of a one-to-one tutor, Chin was to drop out of his course after just one month, but, such was the force of his personality, the charismatic youth was taken on by Wills & Bowery as a design consultant. The position was offered with the intention of being something of a dead-end in terms of Chin’s career: a way of respecting old Mr. Wills’ dying wishes whilst being an exercise in damage limitation at the same time, by not allowing the inexperienced oriental too much opportunity for hands-on practice when it came to actual buildings. In all eventuality, it was a job made in heaven for the imaginative Marcel. He was given an office to himself and allowed free reign to come up with increasingly outlandish architectural designs, totally uninhibited by any restrictions such as client’s briefs, health and safety requirements, or economics of any kind. Bizarrely, under such circumstances, Chin’s reputation grew. His design for a revamp of the New York metro system won him a commendation in a highly respected national competition, and this despite the fact that he had taken no account of ventilation in any of his plans, instead offering the proposal of a high speed train which would reduce journey times to such a degree that there would be no need for more than one lungful of breath between stops. Needless to say, the scheme was never acted upon, but Chin quickly discovered that an architect need not be judged purely by the quantity of the buildings he can point to at any one time and claim to be his own.
In the space of less than five years since he had arrived in the city, Chin had achieved for himself the reputation of being New York’s brightest architect never actually to have built anything.
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