The Surprising Life of Constance Spry Page 17
Miss Gluck was dressed in navy blue and wore shoes and stockings; she had had her hair cut at Truefitt’s, she told me with a gay smile. I asked her to have a cigarette and she said ‘I don’t mind if I do’! She is evidently no tyro in the matter of interviews for I asked her to tell me the name of her dentifrice, having observed her beautiful teeth, and she archly handed me a sample tube saying ‘Won’t you give this a trial?’! We had a frank, not to say abandoned, chat about the weather and I then asked her what was her favourite holiday resort, and she dismissed my question with a gay little laugh and a sidelong glance which spoke volumes.
Of course you will have guessed that Miss Gluck is an artist. She has painted ever such a lot of pictures big and little and they’re in ever such nice frames all in white. ‘White for purity, you know,’ said Miss Gluck with a deep note of reverence in her voice, so I asked her if she was a church woman and whether she sang in the choir. She replied in the fine old biblical fashion by asking another question: ‘Have you come to see the pictures?’ – so quaint of her I thought. And that reminds me, there is one picture which everyone is rushing to see; it is called Hors de Combat, because she painted it lying down. Of course I was immediately interested in the artistic aspect of Miss Gluck and asked her to tell me more about her pictures. With an odd little gesture she referred me to her Mother saying, ‘My Mother knows more about my pictures than I do. Indeed if she were not so busy with her social work she would paint them for me to save my time.’
The exhibition was such a success that it was extended for a month and she was invited to prepare another. Eleven paintings were of Connie’s flower arrangements, with Chromatic as the centrepiece; it was bought by Connie’s great friend Ella Reeves. There were also curiously erotic paintings of fleshy lilies, luminous landscapes from Cornwall and quiet scenes of the Loire valley painted during summer holidays with Connie. Commissions poured in and Gluck’s specially designed frames became all the rage. Macy’s of New York were so keen that they wanted to take the whole exhibition to their store, but the Depression was beginning to bite and the market for art dwindled. The Gluck Room was dismantled and Mr Lawrence claimed the wood for salvage.
For four years, between 1932 and 1936, Connie and Gluck remained extremely close. Connie would stay a couple of nights a week in Hampstead and Gluck spent weekends with Connie at Colney Park. More and more of Gluck’s paintings went up on the Spry walls – one depicted a girl as the essence of spring that the painter had called Primavera but that the staff from the shop nicknamed ‘Interflora’. They toured the country in Gluck’s car and stayed in her studio in Cornwall. They visited gardens, meeting the owners, who gave them cuttings and seeds. In Cornwall they stayed with George Johnstone at Trewithen near Truro, and visited Caerhays Castle and the Trebah ravine garden where Connie saw giant gunnera and echium which she decided would be marvellous for dramatic flower displays.
Even on their travels, they both worked hard, Gluck sketching and preparing paintings for her next exhibition while Connie kept detailed garden and flower notes and wrote her book. Once, when they stopped in a tea room en route to Cornwall, a fellow guest, a vicar, made disparaging remarks about Gluck’s clothing. Connie leaped to defend her friend’s taste for ‘outré clobber’ and reprimanded the vicar for his prejudice. ‘And you a man of the cloth!’ she said severely.
Connie and Gluck were invited to spend a weekend at Broadlands, Molly Mount Temple’s Palladian mansion near Romsey in Hampshire, which as well as fabulous gardens boasted a polo practice-ground, a golf course, three tennis courts, eight hundred acres of shooting and room for over twenty guests. Gluck’s mother, the interfering Meteor, anxious to keep up appearances, lent her daughter her Rolls and chauffeur so she and Connie could arrive in style.
When it came to flowers, Molly Mount Temple insisted that Broadlands be decorated with the same sure eye for colour that she used in London: each room had to have its complement of matching vases and flowers to tone. The saloon was copper and orange, one drawing-room was in the colours of old English and Dresden china, another had a plum carpet and green walls and the flowers were in yellow, purple and puce. Connie later described the flowers at Broadlands as being ‘done with great imagination and skill . . . whatever flowers were used, or whatever scheme attempted, the results attained the highest degree of beauty and suitability.’ Both the colour combinations and the methods of arrangement were not unlike Connie’s own, and were certainly influenced by her. But on this occasion when her hostess demanded that Connie decorate the vast table for dinner she seems to have been uncharacteristically caught off guard.
I wandered round the garden in dejection. The flowers were lovely, but I could think of nothing that I felt would be a possible contribution to a house so filled with beauty. Fortunately for me there was another guest in the house [Gluck] who was interested, an artist whose appreciation of flowers makes her paint them superbly, but who disowns any knowledge of the practical side of flower arrangement. She thus brought to the matter a technically unbiased mind, and her eye was arrested only by what she regarded as intrinsically beautiful, without any regard to the earthly limitations imposed by vases, or the necessity of fixing stems in water. So I got a lesson not only in flower decoration, but in the emphatic necessity of keeping a mind clear of prejudice or fixed ideas.
So Connie and Gluck happily spent the whole day walking around the grounds collecting material for what were to be Connie’s unusually lavish table decorations, which she described in detail:
Red cabbage leaves followed by curly kale leaves, but only those which had turned slightly towards a yellowy green. These were arranged in two frills round a large shallow copper pan. Then velvety begonia leaves, again arranged formally, and a ring of white scabious. After that came a mound of every lovely colour: verbenas, Phlox decussata, salvia, bougainvillea, zinnias, pale flame geraniums, gloxinias, purple carnations, and dahlias, mauve, yellow and peach coloured. In the centre were yellow and orange African marigolds and arranged at intervals were the heads of the amethyst thistle . . . It was really exciting, a thrill of colour, satisfying and lovely to a degree. It took a long time to do, because it involved lengthy and pleasant discussion [with Gluck] about the shape and colour of every flower, but it was a great lesson.
In Scotland, Connie and Gluck went to stay with Winnifreda Portarlington, who always summered at the Castle of Stornaway on the Isle of Lewis overlooking the most northerly beach in Scotland. The castle was imposing, its rooms papered with Chinese landscapes and furnished with English antiques, and its entire staff brought up from London. Lady Portarlington, a woman ‘with magnificent ideas and inherent good taste’, anxious that her enormous dining-table should beat all records, asked Connie’s advice about decorating it; she was determined to create a sensation for her guests. All morning they discussed the matter, visited the greenhouses, planned, argued and debated, until at length the hostess went off to ‘hold conclave with her butler’. She returned later saying that the whole matter was settled, she had had a grand idea which was to be kept a secret, and Connie was not to give so much as a look at the table until dinner-time when she should have a ‘real surprise’.
When the moment arrived, Connie found the gargantuan table, which stretched the length of the great dining-hall, heaped down its centre with moss and heather on which lay dozens of slain partridges arranged with ‘a sort of artistic sentimentality’. ‘What could be more suitable?’ Connie wrote, her tongue firmly in her cheek. ‘The guests had shot partridge all day, we were eating partridge, and the table was decorated with partridge. Uniformity of purpose, what more could be said. Unconsciously she had even gone to the length of conforming to the canons of a well-known authority on flower decoration by arranging her partridge en zigzag.’
It was here that Connie met the Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli, a friend of, and collaborator with, the Surrealists, who was then living in Paris. Her unique and wildly original knitwear was popular and chic; he
r creations included a dress with a Salvador Dali design of a large lobster printed on it and a hat that looked like a giant shoe. She designed the aviator Amy Johnson’s clothes for her solo flight to Cape Town in 1936 and outraged the lawn tennis establishment with her culottes for the tennis champion Lili d’Alvarez. Schiaparelli was madder and more original than most of her contemporaries and Connie admired her individuality and artistry. Like Connie, she relied on inspiration rather than craftsmanship or business acumen.
Connie loved to dress Gluck, and got her friends to help. Victor Stiebel made her an austere long black velvet dress with a white tie and Elsa Schiaparelli designed for her a deeply pleated culotte in black chiffon – androgyny turned into high fashion. On a visit to Paris Madame Karinska, costume designer for the New York City Ballet, made Gluck a black crêpe evening suit appliquéd in gold. Connie, who had always loved good clothes and fine fabrics, seems to have lost interest in her own appearance and now preferred simple tailored suits with a string of pearls, plus her ubiquitous overall for work. Stiebel once made her an evening dress in black velvet with a small train to give her height. She went upstairs to try it on and came down kicking a flap of velvet in front of her saying, ‘There’s something wrong with this dress of Victor’s.’ Stiebel was hugely amused: she had put it on back to front.
Sometime in 1932, possibly while on a trip to Paris with Stiebel to attend Schiaparelli’s show collection, Connie met Jean and Violet Henson. Jean Henson was a tall, handsome, rather louche American southerner who had gone to Paris and immersed himself in the heady world of the Dadaists, posing for Man Ray and befriending Jean Cocteau, Christian Bérard and Serge Lifar. Violet, similarly tall and striking, was a brigadier’s daughter who had rebelled against her wealthy English upbringing, travelled extensively and developed a passion for art and literature. Both were bohemian, independent, and flouted social convention. When Connie met them, the Hensons had built a beautiful house in Hammamet on the Tunisian coast with an enormous garden overlooking the Mediterranean, which they filled with rare and exotic plants. The terraces and courtyards were crammed with fountains, sculptures and Roman, Greek and Islamic antiquities collected on their extensive travels around archaeological sites.
Connie’s passion for all kinds of pots, vases and bric-a-brac and her wide knowledge of horticulture appealed to the Hensons, who insisted she visit them for a holiday. For Connie, who had never been further than southern Ireland and France, Tunisia was a fabulous new experience, a floral paradise. The boxes of exotic cut flowers bought on cold early-morning trips to Covent Garden were here growing naturally and in abundance. She found giant olive jars in which date palms and ancient gnarled olive trees grew, ilex, fig and pepper trees, wild cork oaks and juniper bushes interspersed with the bright colours of arums, flaming strelitzia, giant datura, bougainvillea and potted azaleas. Wild flowers growing by the roadside pungently scented the air.
The rooms in the house, with their cool high ceilings, were furnished with treasures from the Hensons’ travels alongside the work of friends: drawings by Cocteau, and photographs, heavily influenced by the Surrealists, by Cecil Beaton, Horst and his lover George Hoyningen-Huene, chief photographer for Vogue. In an alcove in the drawing-room a Roman torso stood near a Bérard painting and on a Spanish table nearby was a lamp by Giacometti, its light falling upon carved African bowls heaped with the golden tangerines that Violet grew in her garden.
Hammamet became a playground for the smart international set who joined the avant-garde artists and built their summer homes there. The Hensons loved to entertain and a steady stream of artists and writers relaxed on the terraces, in the lush gardens and the nearby beach, among them Beaton, the Sitwells, André Gide, Paul Klee, Paul Bowles and Frank Lloyd-Wright. Beaton and Hoyningen-Huene made a trip through Tunisia, taking hundreds of photographs with their new lightweight Rolleiflex cameras, and Beaton later recalled the many English gardens at Hammamet: ‘The Moroccan year passes in seasons of flowers. All the English spring blossoms are here as well as the summer ones; roses of unfamiliar species tumble over balconies in pillowy profusion.’
Gluck too was ecstatic about Violet’s gardens, which seemed to her like ‘Eden, with cats, dogs, birds and fishes all living together free and with no danger to one another’. Early every morning they were woken by peacocks screaming, before breakfasting on one of the terraces looking down over a marble courtyard, with a fountain playing, a lotus pool and a dovecote, while macaws, parrots and Siamese cats roamed freely around. Gluck recalled the ‘languor and hysteria’ of Tunisia, the stream of visitors to the Villa Hammamet who drank iced tea on the terraces and played halma, the starlit evenings, the sirocco that blew all day, the picnics in the hills.
It is savage, lovely, bare country. Lunch – cold chicken, eggs, white wine, figs and grapes and coffee in the shade of a carouba tree, spreading with silver-grey low-growing branches and a grey-green leaf . . . Flocks of black goats and marvellous-looking shepherds passing every now and then, the shepherds shy and accepting with pleasure and eagerness empty Vittel bottles as if they were some rare gift. I rode back – and so home and an immediate plunge into a delicious sea to wash off the dust and sweat. My God I felt good after it. Then iced tea and then people to dinner.
Elsa Schiaparelli, who also stayed with the Hensons, drew inspiration from the Bedouin robes in the souks of nearby Nabul. She encouraged Gluck to wear baggy white Arab trousers (which Jean Henson described as Gluck’s ‘excrementals’) tied with a scarlet Neapolitan sash, yellow shirt and green jacket, finished with a geranium behind the ear and a Hammamet cap. Gluck wrote in her diary, ‘Jean said I looked the most vicious Arab he had ever seen.’ She loved wandering round the souk dressed as an Arab and was excited by the beauty and subtlety of the Arabs’ appearance, painting a portrait of a ‘delicious’ Arab boy which Violet Henson remarked would ‘make a fortune if any old queers saw it’.
Connie, who had already begun designing and making her own vases, derived inspiration from antique pots she found in Tunisia. She searched through the museums in Tunis, asking Gluck to sketch the Roman, Greek and Phoenician pieces for her. Connie described their characteristic ‘purity of outline and perfections of balance’. But she rejected the tourist pots turned out by ‘native potters who, while often keeping the old classic shapes were apt to adorn their handiwork with too much ornament and embellishment’. All the same, she could never resist taking home quantities of earthenware pots, bric-a-brac from the souks and shells found along the beach. She recalled one occasion when an Arab fisherman gave her a curious piece of coral which he had ‘dragged up from the deep’. It looked like a graceful miniature birch tree growing from a little mound of bleached grey rock. She packed it with great care and carried it carefully across the sea and on to Paris, but like so many souvenirs it had lost its charm long before she got it safely home. ‘The journey was fraught with mysterious discomfort and haunting worry. I appeared to travel with an impalpable aura, something which stole on the air like a pale blue sensation developing during the scorching journey into, I regret to say, an ancient and fishlike smell.’ In Paris she discovered the reason: ‘Entrenched in the convolutions of the grey rocklike base was a dead and disintegrating mollusc.’
Connie and Gluck travelled home by boat to Marseilles and then on the train via Paris, their luggage bursting with Connie’s Moroccan pots and plant cuttings and cut flowers that she could not resist and hoped would last the journey but rarely did, along with Gluck’s rolls of canvas and paints and half-finished pictures. Her paintings of Tunisia were snapped up by English clients who loved the exotic colours and her renditions of the brilliant Mediterranean light.
Their happiness came at a price. Relations at home were becoming increasingly strained. Connie was not spending enough time at the shop or dealing personally with her clients. She spent long periods away from her home and beloved garden. It is likely also that she felt under pressure from Shav, and from Val who was always very jealous o
f Connie despite their apparently close working relationship. In January 1934 Shav wrote a letter to Val complaining about Gluck’s regular visits to their home. He found her irritating and neurotic:
She can’t settle down to any sort of normal and peaceful life and I doubt if she ever will . . . Everything with her is a complication and very restless. I am quite fond of Gluck but I do not like being with her for too long. There is something about the atmosphere of Bolton House that is disturbing to me – as she herself disturbs me. There are always problems and mysteries and tribulations and nothing seems to run smoothly for more than a short time. She is abnormal herself – a queer mixture of childishness and astuteness. The truth is I think she has no real inner peace – nothing to hold on to.
It is almost possible to imagine from this letter that he was ignorant of the true nature of his wife’s relationship with Gluck. But given that he describes Gluck as ‘abnormal herself’, perhaps he was well aware of the situation.
Gluck was fortunate to have found a place in a smart society that made few moral judgements and was on the whole sexually tolerant. Despite this she was insecure, as her biographer Diana Souhami wrote:
It was as if she had no point of balance, no safe hold on what was hers, no way of reconciling the contradictions in her life. She wanted to be independent, yet was tied to her family for her material needs. She extolled the virtues of the simple life, yet lived rather grandly. She thrived on excitement yet longed for peace. The smallest everyday transactions raised questions of integrity, yet she showed no moral qualms about infidelity or affairs with other men’s wives.