The Surprising Life of Constance Spry Page 10

  Connie’s teaching colleagues were appalled by her resignation and considered her departure a serious loss to the profession and a sad waste of talent. But Homerton School was in trouble; its champion, Sir Robert Blair, had retired in 1924 and the local authorities decided that these schools were totally uneconomic and should be closed. Homerton was the last surviving day-continuation school and Connie’s resignation spelled its end. To her parents her behaviour was incomprehensible. Her father had been immensely proud of her achievements at the school. Along with the shame of divorce she was now recklessly giving up a fine career in education for a ridiculous little job doing flowers for shops and showmen.

  Connie realized that she was abandoning all that her father and Lady Aberdeen had trained her to do. She was leaving behind the slums with their poverty and disease, and perhaps she did feel some regret. But perhaps, too, she could argue, filling shops and cinemas with flowers was no less useful in showing people the healing power of natural beauty. No doubt she was seduced, as anyone might be, by the prospect of finally being able to crystallize those creative visions she had nurtured for so long. But she never abandoned her belief that beauty was not a privilege for the rich but, like good health, something everyone could and should enjoy.

  FIVE

  Ensnared with Flowers*

  1928–1930

  Connie visited Norman Wilkinson at his riverside home Strawberry House, by Chiswick Mall, and was delighted to find ducks and swans standing by the door. Before she even entered the house she noted the pots of daisies on the stone terrace, formal hyacinths in Bristol Blue glasses on the window sills where the sunlight made ‘a deep rich note of blue’; shallow, straight-edged dishes tightly packed with narcissi – the flowers and the receptacles perfectly complementing each other. ‘The effect of these solid masses of flowers was quite beautiful,’ Connie recalled.

  Wilkinson grew delicate camellias in his tiny greenhouse and old roses, stocks and laced pinks – simple flowers that would then have been spurned by florists’ shops but which Connie saw had decorative potential. The house seemed equally lovely. Wilkinson was a passionate collector of antiques and filled his home with ‘a delightful clutter’ of Art Nouveau, ‘Gothic’ and Tudor furniture and furnishings. In every room flowers were arranged with originality and a keen colour sense; in particular, Connie observed, set in alcoves in the dining-room, two large shallow marble bowls generously filled with close-packed flowers – scarlet geraniums, red camellias and dark-red roses lay in a pool of light from spotlights hidden in the ceiling. Wilkinson was an artist who understood not only colour, form and lighting, but also the vital integrity of flowers in the scheme of a room. This, Connie told him, was precisely what she too believed in: flowers used as materials, like paint on a canvas, ‘for something truly creative, truly artistic’. To her immense relief Wilkinson did not laugh at her, but understood what she was struggling to express.

  As she explored and admired the house, Connie came across something that suddenly jogged her memory: hanging in the sitting-room was a copy of Richard II Holding the Red Rose of Lancaster, the painting that she had seen as a child in The Studio magazine. She explained how she had been so excited by it, the lavish richness combined with austere formality: ‘I remember to this day’, she wrote, ‘the parterre of delicate, exquisite even strange flowers: flaked and ticked pinks, curious foxgloves, panachée roses . . . the minute and elaborate detail of the smallest flower.’ She told Wilkinson that this painting had inspired in her a creative interest in all kinds of flowers, whether wild, exotic, rare or commonplace. The artist was pleased when he heard that she had liked it so much because, he told her, it was he who had painted it when he was very young. He quoted some lines of Milton from ‘Lycidas’ which had inspired him:

  Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,

  The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine,

  The white pink, and the pansy freaked with jet,

  The glowing violet,

  The musk rose, and the well-attired woodbine,

  With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head,

  And every flower that sad embroidery wears.

  Wilkinson, like Connie, had spent much of his childhood in the Midlands, but in a cultured and wealthy family of textile manufacturers who owned ‘a sort of Selfridges’. He grew into a precocious young man with evident musical and artistic leanings – though he was quick to point out he was not the distinguished marine painter of the same name, and liked to be known as ‘Norman Wilkinson of Four Oaks’ to emphasize the difference. He persuaded his parents to commission the architect William Lethaby to design a magnificent new house in the William Morris style and laid out the gardens himself. Later he studied art in Paris. He shared a studio in the Latin Quarter with his friends the artist Keith Henderson and the theatre designer Lovat Fraser. Henderson recalled how every day Norman bought huge bunches of flowers from the flower women in the ‘Boul’ Mich’ and filled the studio with their scent. ‘I can see him in the studio, touching the flowers gently, as though they were human . . . It was a perfect setting for his slender Roman elegance.’

  Wilkinson went on to make his name designing costumes and sets, mostly for Shakespeare productions. His memorable design for A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London in 1914 featured an iridescent forest and ‘gold-faced fairies, their eyebrows picked out in crimson’. Increasingly his designs put him in the vanguard of the rebellion against nineteenth-century stage realism and won for him an international reputation as a stage designer. He went on to work with Granville Barker, the theatre actor and director, and later became a governor of the Stratford Memorial Theatre.

  Connie always claimed that Wilkinson was her most important teacher and source of inspiration. He was shy and self-conscious but had a generous spirit and taught Connie all he knew about design. She made several trips to his home, where they discussed art, poetry and flower arranging, and studied drawings and plans for Atkinsons’ Perfumery. Sometimes he visited Connie at Abinger, where they searched for suitable plants and ideas in her garden. With a comfortable private income and plenty of work designing for the theatre, Wilkinson claimed that he took on the Atkinsons’ commission only because it amused him. The notion of doing a scent shop took his fancy, and he wanted to get away from the traditional ‘fake Pompadour or dolled-up chemist’.

  His concept for the decor was a fairytale setting: the walls would be covered with specially made mirror glass with a grey antique finish that gave a soft reflection of subdued and tremulous light, ‘creating an almost insubstantial air’. Cascading crystal chains, representing fountains of perfume, would be subtly illuminated from above by spotlights similar to those he had in his home. For the windows, Wilkinson told Connie, he had in mind dramatic flower displays that stood as if on the stage of a theatre, full of character and romance. He wanted flowers that were reminiscent of the old herbals – scented if possible – and absolutely no common ‘shop’ flowers such as carnations, ferns and gypsophila. He suggested old-fashioned roses, striped pinks, single marigolds, mignonette, sweet william, honeysuckle, auriculas, wild flowers and ‘country bunches’, with occasional bursts into the richness of camellias of the kind he grew in his greenhouse. Connie was charmed and flattered. Wilkinson was offering her a tantalizing window of opportunity, but could she live up to his exacting standards?

  On Monday 15 November 1929, Atkinsons’ opened its doors and the twenty-two carillon bells in the gilded tower that soared above the new and elaborately decorated Art Deco building rang out a ‘delightful and delicate medley of tunes’. For Connie, doing the flowers at Atkinsons’ for the first time was a day of mingled excitement and panic: ‘Yawning emptily were several very capacious urns to be filled by nine-thirty on that Monday morning.’ The vases had been provided by Wilkinson out of his junk-shop finds, so Connie felt at home. They were exactly the type of container she herself loved to use, soapstone and metal urns, marble tazzas, carved wooden ang
els holding aloft cornucopias and some ‘particularly fine majolica’. But it had almost ended in disaster when she realized that Covent Garden in November could offer only ‘chrysanthemums, chrysanthemums all the way, with not even a snippet of myrtle, which would have fitted the picture so well’. The only ‘drieds’ were the ubiquitous Chinese lanterns, helichrysums and dyed statice. If she worked with this sort of shop-worn material she would produce the very effect of déjà vu against which Wilkinson had inveighed.

  What was she to do? Her heart sank, and she felt herself entering a dangerous world about which, she suddenly realized, she knew nothing at all. She was saved from disaster by a friend returning from a country walk with arms filled with a bundle of old-man’s-beard covered in silvery seed-heads, various coppercoloured leaves and great trails of hops turned to strawy gold. ‘The bunch lived and glowed,’ she wrote,

  and the thought of it in the gentle soapstone was exciting. I had a niggling fear that the authorities at Atkinsons might feel that to furnish them with weeds was not part of the contract, so when I saw in the market a few stems of a rather clumsy heavy green orchid, I bought them, because they looked as though they might fit in with the strange assortment lying in the van, and also perhaps soften any disapproval waiting round the corner.

  After a childhood in which disapproval was always waiting round the corner, this was something Connie was particularly anxious to avoid.

  Those first unconventional displays of leaves and berries, seed-heads, trails of wild clematis and the gloriously heavy cascade of golden hops with the central cluster of strange, exotic green orchids were an immediate success, ‘and I was not cast out with ignominy’. It was, she wrote, her first lesson in the use of plant material that was usually discarded, ‘gone with the wheelbarrow’, and her first success with what was to become one of her most famous principles: that wild and cultivated flowers displayed together could be both beautiful and dramatic.

  It was not the most auspicious time to open a grand perfumery. The Wall Street crash that October was the harbinger of a decade of financial stress, and even the very rich had to cut back on houses, horses and servants. But there was still a steady supply of wealthy customers willing to treat themselves to small luxuries, and Atkinsons’ were so delighted with Connie’s arrangements and the resulting publicity for their products that she was given a permanent contract. Other fashionable stores followed suit, and Connie was soon asked to do the windows for Drage’s furniture store in Oxford Street, Elizabeth Arden’s showrooms and Hatchet’s Restaurant.

  But it was the world of the theatre that swept Connie up on a wave of glamour and success and where she would make some of her greatest friendships and triumphs. Norman Wilkinson was part of the predominantly homosexual set of young theatre talent and it was through him that Connie was introduced to the most gifted designers, writers and actors, several of whom had their careers launched by Charles B. ‘Cocky’ Cochran, the leading showman in the Twenties and Thirties. Cochran’s skills were described as a combination of Diaghilev and Ziegfeld, ‘with a touch of Barnum’. The best talents were attracted to work for him, among them Ivor Novello, Cole Porter, Roger Quilter, Norman Hartnell, Paul Nash, Lovat Fraser, Leonid Massine, Frederick Ashton, George Balanchine and the Diaghilev ballet company. Cochran liked a ‘dash of the Continent’ in his shows, with ‘rows of chorus girls with gorgeous legs, tits and tinsel’. His revues, staged at the London Pavilion Theatre, which advertised itself as ‘the Centre of the World’, were a medley of sketches, colourful ‘turns’ and musical numbers; the best had wit, charm and pace, plus style and elegance. If the revues lacked the earthiness and gusto of the music hall they appealed to the wealthy middle-class audiences, who adored the glamour and lavishness.

  Connie, who loved the theatre, often accompanied Wilkinson to see new Cochran productions. They would go backstage where she met several people who would become her closest friends and collaborators, such as the costume and set designers Oliver Messel and Rex Whistler, the writer Beverley Nichols, the photographer Cecil Beaton and the actors John Gielgud and Charles Laughton. After his huge success in Richard of Bordeaux Gielgud spent lavishly on flowers for his dressing room, and Connie would continue to provide them for many years. Wilkinson was busy spreading the word about his wonderful new discovery – ‘Connie Spry and her marvellous flowers’ – among his coterie of theatre friends. Word of a new talent or fashion quickly spread, and Connie was soon in great demand.

  Meanwhile, she had another commitment to honour – her contract with Sidney Bernstein to provide plants and flowers for his Granada cinemas, which were nearing completion. The Bernstein family, along with the Ostrers, the Woolfs, Oscar Deutsch (and later the Grades), were the children of Jewish immigrants who came to prominence in the entertainment industry and were the British equivalents of the great Hollywood moguls. Sidney Bernstein’s father moved to London from Latvia in the 1890s and had a somewhat chequered business career. On his death in 1922 he possessed a collection of properties which included a small but important chain of about twenty film theatres which Sidney, with his brother Cecil, was now enlarging. Bernstein had planned their opening at a particularly propitious time: in September 1928 the film The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson opened at the Piccadilly Theatre – the ‘talkies’ had arrived. Theatre entrepreneurs scoffed and tried to make light of it. Cochran claimed the talkies were a passing phase, a novelty of which the public would soon tire, but the public flocked to the cinemas. ‘The theatre is dead . . . quite dead,’ the theatre critic Hannen Swaffer wrote. It wasn’t, but it started to change. Cochran fought back with Bitter Sweet by Noël Coward and Wake Up and Dream with music and lyrics by Cole Porter, starring Jessie Mathews, Sonnie Hale, Tilly Losch and Anna Neagle; and soon everyone was singing ‘Let’s Do It’ and ‘What Is This Thing Called Love?’. Indeed, new theatres were still being built at a great rate during this tug-of-war to win the public. Had the theatre managers had any idea of the grim times ahead, they might have thought again.

  In 1928 three million cinema tickets were being sold every week in London alone, and it was growing clear to Sidney Bernstein that, despite his own personal passion for the theatre, the future lay with the movies. Early that year he announced in the trade press that he planned to build a new cinema opposite Sadler’s Wells, to rebuild the Empires at Edmonton, Willesden and West Ham and the Rialto in Enfield, as well as taking over the lease of the Lewisham Hippodrome. These cinemas would reappear as elegant places of entertainment, completely redesigned and fully equipped for sound. Several would also have dance halls, tea rooms or cafés. The age of the supercinema was about to be ushered in.

  Bernstein knew exactly how he wanted his picture palaces to look – they had to be perfect, the best. Each would be totally individual and full of original ideas. They would be palaces of the imagination where people who led lives of drabness could find escape and fantasy, glamour and drama. They would be called Granada Cinemas, after a happy walking tour he had had in southern Spain.

  Bernstein invited his friend Theodore Komisarjevsky to become the art director of all his theatres and cinemas. Komisarjevsky was a brilliant architect, theatre director and designer; a slight, balding man with protruding eyes and immense charm, he was renowned for being unreliable, sometimes plaintive and, unusually in the mostly gay world of theatre design, a womanizer (his theatre friends who found his name difficult to pronounce nicknamed him ‘Come and seduce me’). He had trained as an architect in Moscow before the Revolution, risen under Lenin to be managing director of the Moscow Grand State Theatre of Opera and Ballet, then founded his own acting school. He also made a number of films which were praised for their originality and beauty. In 1919 he left Russia and settled in Paris where he started the Arc-en-Ciel Theatre. It was here that Bernstein met ‘Komis’ and they became close friends, sharing a passion for both theatre and films. Bernstein persuaded him to come and work in England, where they joined forces with the writer Arnold Bennett to stage a nu
mber of new plays. Both showman and businessman, Bernstein was in every way Komisarjevsky’s opposite, but it proved a hugely successful and creative partnership. Influenced by the marble and gilt American dream palaces of the 1920s, they set about creating a chain of cinemas the like of which had not been seen before in England.

  Komis was immediately charmed by Connie and offered to take her on a tour of the London Granadas, which were receiving their finishing touches before opening. The Granada at Walthamstow looked like a Moorish court, with wrought-iron columns and a fine metal canopy over the entrance. Inside were heavily patterned walls, three thousand seats upholstered in alternate deep-claret and dark-orange corded velvet, and stage curtains of a delicate pale-green silk with a ‘deep embellishment of orange, black, green and white’. In each cinema, expensively re-equipped for the new talkies, a Mighty Wurlitzer rose silently out of the depths and burst into sound, filling the vast auditorium, while in the foyer someone played popular songs on a grand piano, so that patrons could listen to music as they stood waiting for their seats. Connie was to supply sweet-smelling pot-plants such as orange blossom and myrtle to line the walls, Komis told her. Then they visited the Granada at Woolwich, which was quite different: a delicate, almost medieval confection of colours based on early church manuscripts with lines of gold, grey and red. Connie decided that the plants here would have to be quite different: dainty ferns, handsome, red-plush-coloured coleus and heavy, polished leaves of anthurium.