Good-looking and fit, Elie had panache. His clothes were hand-made; it was immediately clear that nothing but the best would do for him. You could also sense whether or not he was in the house, and you could further tell his mood by the shouting and swearing and the dirty talk, or alternatively a menacing drop in the voice. The impulse to be generous might suddenly break through. My parents had never thought to give me pocket money. Elie had in his pocket a gold clip containing a wad of French franc notes whose denomination had many zeroes at that inflationary time. Obviously having thought about it, he’d peel a few of them off for me on the understanding that I’d be going to the Place Pigalle and we would then discuss the women available there. Bought as investments, modern paintings were stored on racks in the attic of his Paris house. In the course of looking at this proto-museum one day, he suddenly pulled out a small but valuable abstract painting by Fautrier and gave it to Alan who passed it on to me.
Money was the source of Elie’s power, and he knew it. My father was very rich, he said to me one day, repeating that “very” half a dozen times with rising emphasis. The knowledge that he could pay for anything governed everyone’s responses to him. The whole carry-on was a function of his surname and his fortune. Writing from Royaumont on Christmas Eve 1951, Alan gave Mitzi a picture of things. Max was “in excellent form: he gets on very well with David, who answers him. The exact contrary is true with Elie, who is at his most insufferable when David is about, though well-meaning to David. But the noise, the curses, the horse-play, depress David beyond all expression, et alors la chose risque de se gâter [and then there’s a risk of things going wrong]. One has to be fully grown in order to take the Rothschild family in one’s stride.”
At the time when Elie was keeping the secret of Poppy’s cancer, he put himself out to be helpful. He had a Bentley, and drove me in it through Germany. He took the trouble to show me Ulm and Augsburg and finally Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest at Berchtesgaden. The chalet he had rented high above Scharnitz in the Tyrol had the rare quality of being simple and luxurious. In my turn, I acquired the Austrian fancy dress of lederhosen and a green felt hat adorned with a gamsbart. Out stalking, Albert Ragg, the head keeper’s eldest son, led the way up the mountains and I shot a chamois and a roebuck. Their horns were duly mounted as trophies.
Had Poppy been in good health I would surely not have been dispatched to sink or swim in this setting. I spent a couple of summers at Deauville with Elie’s elder sister Diane, her husband Anatol Mühlstein and their three daughters, Natalie, Anka and Tototte. In the afternoon we took our place in stands to applaud Elie playing matches of polo that he was almost sure to win thanks to the Argentine professionals on his team. (He was playing some years later when a ball hit his eye. The courage and humour with which he accepted the loss of sight was certainly a facet of his complicated character. On occasions he took out his glass eye for the effect that had on those watching.) Another summer I stayed in the south of France in a house near Saint-Raphaël belonging to Elie’s other sister Cécile. Victor Rothschild, head of the English branch of the family, was there with his wife Tess and his son Jacob, an Eton friend and contemporary, also destined to come up to Oxford on the same day as me. Victor, a Cambridge scientist then investigating the reproduction of sea urchins, suggested as though it was harmless that Jacob scrape some specimens off the rock from which we used to swim. He appeared unmoved when the luckless Jacob surfaced with so many prickles all over him that he finished in hospital. “We Rothschilds,” as one of Victor’s memorable generalisations has it, “are quick to give and take offense.”
One winter on my way to ski with other Eton friends, I stayed with my grandmother in her Paris flat. In her archive, a typical memorandum from Mr Hickman notes that in his pre-war style Alan was asking him to forward to me five hundred Swiss francs. Hearing that I had no anorak, Cécile had lent me hers. In due course I came back to the Paris flat and returned the anorak. That same evening, my grandmother’s butler Robert informed me that Elie had telephoned, and I was to be at his house in the Avenue Marigny at seven o’clock the following morning. The walk from door to door took perhaps ten minutes. Nobody was about in the winter dark. With ceremony, Monsieur Henri, the concierge, opened the main door and handed me to some other retainer, who with equal ceremony escorted me upstairs into a drawing room with an inlaid cabinet along one wall. The curtains were still closed. Elie came in with his dressing gown flapping around him. You borrowed my sister’s anorak, he said. Yes. And you returned it without having it dry-cleaned. Yes, there wasn’t time, I have to go back to Eton today. Whereupon he landed me a punch in the face so unexpected that it knocked me to the ground as he left the room with his dressing-gown still flapping.
Laversine is to the French Rothschilds what Waddesdon is to the English Rothschilds, a proclamation in the form of architecture. In the days of his parents Elie had lived there, but after the war the house became a police college. Laversine is a short drive from Royaumont, and Elie took me there to join three or four other guns to shoot rabbits of which there were a great many. I made a clean kill in front of me with no beater anywhere near. Standing to one side, Elie was not in a position to see my shot but began to shout that one of the beaters had been in the line of fire. I protested. He ordered me to go and sit in the car. In front of everyone he came for me, but this time I ducked and he caught my neck. He had an American station wagon, with a section at the back for his labrador. We drove away in silence. On the way home, as luck would have it, the dog was sick. Elie stopped the car and said, “Clean it up.” There wasn’t a cloth, I had to use my hands.
Poppy’s coffin was removed from the Jewish section of Père Lachaise and reburied in the Catholic cemetery at Viarmes. At the best of times, that cemetery’s carefully sanded paths, inscriptions and commemorative photographs set in granite or marble, have a lugubrious piety. A religious ceremony was out of the question. While we were standing around the grave, Elie behind me suddenly barked, “Stop snivelling!” and gave me a push. I slipped. It had been raining, and now wet sand was streaky on the overcoat I had to wear at school.
What was up with him? It is possible that he saw himself in the role of the father I ought to have but didn’t. He perceived Alan as an intellectual, mostly contemptible, sexually suspect, spending money but incapable of earning it, and I had to be stopped from developing along that track. Psychotherapist that she is, Elly has a theory that he was hitting me to repress homosexual feelings to which he could never admit and may even not have known about. Baby Winston Churchill (as he was known to distinguish him from his grandfather) had the simpler view that Elie was a bully for whom the humiliation of the young was natural. His mother Pamela, by then the wife of Averell Harriman, was a grande horizontale of her day, and sometime mistress of Elie. Baby Winston could not forget Elie’s various devices for getting him out of the way so that he could be alone with Pamela. Particularly patronising was the gift one day of a very expensive camera that he was supposed to go out of doors with and photograph the streets.
After Laversine it was a comedown for Elie to be living in the Faisanderie at Royaumont, even though it had been done up as if it were a luxurious country house rather than a cottage. Inside the entrance is a small space, too small to be a lobby let alone a hall, and on the wall there is a rack with an array of riding crops and whips. In a recurrent dream I used to see myself grabbing one of these whips and slashing at Elie, consciously turning his possessions against him. Over time, contradictions piled up so you never could guess quite where you stood with him. In the course of having a summer job in Paris, Candida rang up and Elie happened to answer, saying, “What do you want? Money, a car?” No, she said, just to talk to my aunt. (Yet he was generous to servants, and they and sometimes their children were employed year in, year out, with almost tribal fidelity. Doucet, the butler, had been with him since the war, first in the Avenue Marigny, and afterwards in the almost equally grandiose house Elie bought in the rue Masseran, not
far from the Invalides. In the 1968 upheavals, Doucet made an entry into the drawing room with the words, “Monsieur le Baron aura besoin de son revolver,” and there the requisite weapon lay shiny on a silver tray.)
Violence, verbal or physical, was certainly close to the surface. He genuinely liked animals and handled them expertly, but one day at the Faisanderie a dog of his, a huge and fierce Bouvier de Flandres, jumped up towards Elly. The dog was on a chain and couldn’t do harm. She has never forgotten how he thrashed it to within an inch of its life. When she was sixteen or so, she tells me, he said to her, “Je sais que tu sais que je suis fou,” I know that you know I am mad. Had he not been who he was, she thinks, he would never have gotten away with his behaviour.
Elie held his drink pretty well but vodka before the meal was liable to fire up his loud, coarse and insulting language. At a lunch in the Faisanderie, he jeered at Max as a homosexual. As though he wasn’t hearing, Max went on chewing his food in his usual methodical manner. By then, Max had made his share of Royaumont over to Natty, and given Elie power of attorney over his accounts, presumably hoping that this abdication of independence would bring him a quiet life. At the table were Philip, Elly and I, and it was evidence of Elie’s projection of power that we too said nothing, allowing ourselves to be humiliated.
The worst mistake of his life, he’d repeat when the spirit moved him, had been to come to Royaumont and be mixed up with the precious Fould-Springers. Rude to Liliane sometimes to her face, sometimes behind her back, he could be scornful of her taste, her friends, her appearance and her family. Elie’s attitude to boiseries, pictures and furniture that any museum would have been glad to acquire, was at times proudly possessive and at other times careless and even contemptuous as though Liliane was obliging him to show off. Where she was the butt, Liliane’s tactic was to remain passive. Where others were under attack, she found some way to associate with him. In a core conspiracy they override their disunity by uniting against others. Stories nevertheless came back about how she had stood into the small hours feverish with jealousy outside the house of Pamela Harriman or some other woman whom Elie had taken up. Her sorrows were wrapped in secrecy but she did once let drop to Elly, “You have never been humiliated in public by your husband.” A maxim of hers was, “Money doesn’t bring happiness, but it allows you to cry more comfortably.” Wondering why she put up with it rather than setting up on her own, people easily felt affection for her, and then pity.
A forceful, lawless and very rich man was on the loose.
SEVENTEEN
Radio Toscane
AT THE BEGINNING of November 1952 Grandpa Harry, Mister Colonel, had pneumonia and died as dutifully as he had lived. Mitzi came to his funeral. A few days later, on November 13, Vere replied to condolences from Liliane: “Of course we are all one family. We could not possibly have loved you all more. We adore you all, and your precious mother was quite wonderful last Sunday, and I thank God with my whole soul that Beloved Little Poppy is really better from her gland troubles. She has been so tremendously gallant, and Alan is so lucky to have such an adorable wife. Unluckily I am frozen, and can neither see, hear, read a letter, write, sleep or rest. And I am so slow and inadequate. I have had about 500 letters and telegrams, but although I write the whole of every day not even stopping for a cup of tea, I have only answered about 30.” She and Harry, she wrote, had had “47 years of Perfect Happiness. I don’t think we ever had a disagreement.” A fortnight later she was writing to Poppy, “How blessed it is that at last your Gland Trouble is better, and that you will probably be coming home to your own lovely house.” She talked at this emotional pitch, as if underlining and capitalizing her speech. But she had been misled. Poppy had only a few weeks of life left.
Vere’s will to live weakened fast. At intervals, she would stay in Cavendish Close where Doris could look after her. Adrian was often at Windsor Castle while Alan pleaded that he had the Times Literary Supplement to bring out every week. What was to be done about me in the holidays gave Alan a good deal of trouble. His pursuit of a social life consigned me to a series of suppers alone with Doris. A secondary social life was organised for me. On one occasion, Ivy Compton-Burnett invited me to a meal, and quizzed me for material to put into a novel. Lord Radcliffe, the lawyer who had drawn the partition line between India and Pakistan, also invited me. Lord Birkenhead took me to listen to William Plomer reading his poems.
As soon as he could after the deaths of his father and Poppy, Alan embarked with me on a series of restless trips abroad. First came Mitzi. By a process of eliminating Austria, France and England on political or fiscal grounds, she had settled on Florence. In 1947, in the lobby of the Excelsior Hotel she overheard conversation about a house for sale at Arcetri, a little cluster of unspoilt buildings including Galileo’s villa on the hills overlooking the city from the south. On impulse, she bought this house. Communists then painted a hammer and sickle on the main door. They’re taking over the country and they’ll come to cut your throat, Poppy and Lily both told her, to which she is supposed to have replied, I’d like to see them try.
At this point Alan owned a Bentley, which gave him as much satisfaction as the pre-war Tatra, and as much trouble and expense. Historic monuments could always be visited, he said, but on the way to Mitzi we could tour human monuments who’d soon be disappearing. Douglas Cooper qualified as an art critic and collector rather than a human monument. He was then living in a château difficult to find on little roads halfway down France. His exaggerated manner and mincing voice made him seem to be acting in a pantomime. Reviews in the TLS were then unsigned, and under cover of anonymity he pursued vendettas against colleagues and rivals, leaving Alan to smooth things over. John Richardson, his boyfriend, was conventionally dressed except that he was wearing red shoes with high heels.
Next stop was the Villa Mauresque, where Somerset Maugham and his secretary Alan Searle lived together in style. With his wrinkled features and speech impediment that broke up communication, Maugham seemed to be an antediluvian species. After dinner, he could hardly wait to play cards. I was in bed when he came into the room as Bobby Pratt-Barlow had done, to present me with a book, not Krafft-Ebing but Don Fernando, about his travels in Spain. Maugham made it clear that his admiration of Max Beerbohm, our next human monument, was mixed with envy because the Incomparable Max had far lower sales but a more selective reputation. Beerbohm lived modestly in Rapallo, in a back street out of the way. His companion, Elisabeth Jungmann, had prepared something to eat, all of which, Beerbohm said gravely, was home-grown. Still the Edwardian dandy, he was beautifully turned out in an old-fashioned suit. He led me across a small terrace to his workroom, opened a cupboard and showed me what he called the false title pages he had drawn in a number of books to make fun of them or their authors. Take one, he said. Such was the care that had gone into these cartoons and the amusement he derived from them that I felt I couldn’t take advantage of him. I see you don’t like them, he said. (I regretted my inhibition all the more when these books were sold off at auction after his death.) Then we drove on to Lerici to call on Percy Lubbock, retracing Alan and Poppy’s visit there before the war. Blind, Lubbock had to employ someone to read to him, and at the time this was Quentin Crewe, himself already suffering from the degenerative condition that cost him his life.
Over the Futa pass as it zigzags from Bologna to Florence, Alan almost crashed the unsuitable Bentley a number of times. Mitzi had done little to San Martino, a villa in brick and stone whose jumble testifies to a past that goes back centuries. Roofs are at several different levels. A fortified wall encloses a courtyard where the lemon trees blossom in terracotta pots. Externally, huge buttresses against the wall support a squat tower. Indoors, the staircase, lintels and a fireplace are in pietra serena. All that is left of a former farm is a garden and a dozen olive trees. Two gnarled contadini turned up one day to say that as boys they’d driven the cows from here down to the Arno to water.
The last of our
human monuments was Bernard Berenson, then the world authority on the high art of Italy. He and Mitzi had a similar psychological evolution. Both wanted to believe they had adopted a new identity so that other people no longer thought of them as Jews but they couldn’t be completely sure of success. At Settignano on the far side of Florence, I Tatti housed his library and his pictures. Admirers, acolytes, scholars swarmed around him. With a cashmere shawl around his shoulders and a hat to keep off the sun, Berenson was in a wheelchair in the garden, a great man and conscious of it. At lunch, he sat me next to him, and asked humdrum questions about school. I told him that the Eton Essay Society met in the rooms of the headmaster Robert Birley, and my turn had come to write and read an essay to the members. And what about? The Dreyfus Affair. Berenson raised his voice. Conversation stopped. As a Jew, he said, he had lived and suffered the scandal, and it wasn’t a subject for schoolboys. What did I know about it? All I had read was a pot-boiler by some unknown author. Further down the table, someone who could have been Hugh Trevor-Roper sidetracked Berenson with an interjection. Nevertheless the date April 11 1953 is under Berenson’s signature on the flyleaf of the copy of The Italian Painters of the Renaissance which he presented to me. Alan recommended that instead of the Dreyfus Affair I write up an account of the human monuments. Birley had an immense range of knowledge and enjoyed imparting it, however abstruse. I could see that this first attempt of mine at the higher journalism seemed to him light-weight, snobbish.
At San Martino, Mitzi and Frank had rooms at opposite ends of a corridor. What Alan and I did not know was that they were getting on badly. As from about October 1952 Mitzi’s diaries become more and more critical of him. This is unprecedented. Frank, she writes while still in her Paris flat, “made me sit on his knees and pressed me to his heart, [saying] ‘you must come and rest with me at San Martino. All will be peace there now as I have finished with that awful drinking.’ Frank went ahead there by himself. The day after his return, “He was drunk and fell in the garden. Then quite sober for three days, later going at it hard.” Mitzi comes to conclusions: “I suppose now I have finished being a fool. I don’t go back to live at San Martino alone with him…. If he drinks again now his liver is in this state I suppose it will be the end. An end would be better than the sort of life he is going to have…. When I think of the misery he knows I have, to go and add to it by drinking simply disgusts me.” Rejoining Frank in San Martino, she repeats that she would rather return on her own to Paris than stay with him. “This time Frank Wooster has I believe properly finished me off. Il m’a sûrement coupé bras et jambes. [He’s surely cut off my arms and legs.] … I will not return before he begs my pardon, before I see a small hope that life with him will not kill me.” Day after day the tone rises: “So angry at Frank I could not face the thought to see him again … he’ll have all he needs but not me to be unkind to…. I must keep myself fit for more important work.” Years were to pass before I heard Harold Acton’s story of meeting Frank in the Via Tornabuoni at this point. He was so down in the mouth that I bought him a cocktail at Doney’s, Harold said, and he gave me the advice, “Never get married.”
Faul Lines Page 23