Inside a Pearl (16 page)

Of course, Bernard knew many of the older rich women of his generation. One of them, learning that he was being booted out of the impressive duplex where he'd been living for years, gave him a six-room apartment in a building she owned. Another lady, a Rothschild, famous for her vast knowledge, “invited” him, in the French sense (all expenses paid), to accompany her and other titled ladies to Saint Petersburg. Typical of him, Bernard read thirty books on the city and
convinced a curator he knew at the Musée d'Orsay to arrange a private, guided visit of the Hermitage. They stayed at the best hotel. We were never introduced to these women, though the possibility was sometimes dangled before us. Bernard liked to “compartmentalize,” as Americans say—but why? Was he afraid these ladies would be scared off by the overwhelming proof that he wasn't just an eternal bachelor, a perennially unattached escort? Although they were too discreet to mention anything as tacky as homosexuality, one of them, the American-born Ethel de Croisset, broke her silence long enough to phone me for advice when her butler was diagnosed with AIDS. Ethel was such a fascinating woman—she never said anything you could predict. She was a serious archeologist and went on digs. She bought Matisses and Giacomettis right out of the artists' studios. She was always driving herself about Paris in search of culture in her little car and with her badly fitting contacts. She had been born a Woodward; it was her brother who was murdered by his wife. The wife pretended she had thought he was a thief and shot him in self-defense. The dead man's parents backed up her story because they didn't want their grandchildren to have a convicted murderer as a mother. Truman Capote related it all in a chapter of
Answered Prayers
; the day after that chapter came out in
Esquire
Mrs. Woodward committed suicide.

Or did Bernard fear that one of us would replace him as
cavalier servant
? Bernard never regarded women as a bore, the way his friend James Lord did. Usually when I tried to bring James and MC together for dinner, he'd say, “Oh, let's not have a complicated, formal evening. Let's just be
en famille
!”—which to him meant no women. MC was relaxed and homey; she didn't know how to sparkle in society. And though she and Bernard would have been able to talk books, he would never spend a whole evening with her. Which was particularly galling, because Bernard was a close friend of MC's longtime friend, my French editor Ivan Nabokoff's wife Claude.

I did once have a long lunch on James's upper deck on new white-canvas-covered chairs under a fresh white awning before a view of Paris with two women, Lauren Bacall and the fashion goddess Hélène Rochas (“She is
une idole
,” as Bernard carefully explained to me). I
preferred the silence of Rochas and her good-guy companionability over the strident charms of Bacall. Bacall was, however, the star of one of my favorite films,
Key Largo
(and no Parisian would ever permit himself to be thought ignorant of such a silver-screen masterpiece). When the film first came out, my chemical-equipment-broker father had parked me the entire day in a theater in Charleston, West Virginia, while he went around on his business appointments. My father's business day was long, and I sat through the movie four times before he came to retrieve me. Now, I kept trying to recover Bacall's iconic slender body and huge eyes beneath the loud, opinionated harridan in front of me.

I suspected that James thought MC was too dowdy and unimportant to occupy such a large part of my affections, which naturally I resented.

Bernard took me to meet Amyn Aga Khan, who seemed like a nice, regular, tall Harvard grad and businessman. He lived in a lavish
hotel particulier
behind the Musée d'Orsay. Amyn owned a real estate development along the Costa Smeralda, in Sardinia, but he appeared humble and cozily collegial until the servant took our drinks order and said, “And Your Majesty?” Then I remembered that Amyn's older brother was worshipped by millions of Ismaili Muslims. He was Rita Hayworth's stepson.

I had met the king and queen of Sweden when I interviewed them at the Drottningholm Palace. I didn't have to bow, but I did have to present my questions in advance. Everything was regulated by a female protocol officer—even the hotel I had to stay in. The king looked out at the dying trees in the park and said he couldn't replace them because he was the poorest monarch in Europe. He said he was a feminist and had decided that his firstborn child would inherit the throne regardless of gender. The firstborn was a girl and is the princess royal, though he has a younger son. (Later I discovered it was parliament, not the king, that had ultimately determined the succession.)

The queen showed me the charming opera theater she said had been “benignly” forgotten for a century. They still had the original lighting—candles were stacked on cylinders that could be turned to raise or dim the illumination—and original sets by the Bibiena brothers. That
night they were doing Salieri's
Don Giovanni
, as opposed to Mozart's more famous version.

When we left the private quarters for the public museum, Queen Silvia (who'd originally come from Heidelberg and worked variously as an Olympic educational hostess, flight attendant, and language interpreter—she spoke six different languages, including sign language), said, “Here we go, it's show-business time!” I thought no royal born and bred would have said something so playful.

Bernard, who never had the catalog of aristocratic European lineages (the
Almanach de Gotha
) far from his reach, liked women. But his women were kept, as I suggested before, in a separate compartment—just as his sex life was. Once I dropped by in the afternoon to deliver a book I'd promised him and discovered a handsome Moroccan ironing Bernard's shorts. If I got it right, the young man was the same sort of youth who, in Parisian lore, made love to monsieur and at the same time was a trusted family retainer who prepared little at-home meals—
un homme à tout faire.

Bernard devoured books the way other people ate croissants—one or two daily. There were stacks of books on every surface. Did he read in the afternoon, or late at night, after everyone had gone home? He read everything about the Mitfords—in fact, one of the women I met at his house was Charlotte Mosley, who was married to the son of the English fascist Diana Mosley, herself a Mitford sister; Charlotte was the editor of a collection of letters between Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh.

He knew everything about the seventeenth-century salons and gave expert advice to Benedetta Craveri, the granddaughter of the philosopher Benedetto Croce and the wife of the French ambassador to Prague—and the author of a good study of conversation. Bernard is acknowledged in her book as well as in many others, including my biography of Genet. Bernard was also an expert about Napoleon and he'd read all the memoirs relating to that period, but then again what did he not know? Whenever a subject came up—Japanese prints, Robert Wilson's plays, or the poetry of “Edgar Poe,” as the French called Edgar Allan Poe—Bernard had the last word on all due to his sixty-one years of uninterrupted reading. He was always prepared to
deliver a dictum. He said, for instance, that Poe was no good except as translated by Baudelaire. Japanese prints had been good until spoiled by aniline dyes. Robert Wilson was a great opera director, but his own plays were tedious.

Bernard twisted coquettishly in his chair and wondered aloud how I might portray him. Like many, he ascribed superhuman powers of observation to novelists, not to mention a vicious misanthropy. He assumed that I was always taking notes, but in fact I was far too lazy to start scribbling when I got home at midnight. Bernard was the one who was observant and generous. When you said something mildly clever, he held a hand up and called out, “Did you hear the witty thing that Edmund just said?” Then he'd repeat it—as Madame du Deffand might have repeated something Horace Walpole had said. Bernard was a bit like Charlus in Proust, a complex, bristly, adorable character.

Who were the members of Bernard's salon? One was Jacques Fieschi, a successful writer of film scenarios who was also an amateur boxer (he had the smashed-in nose to prove it). Jacques had been Bernard's lover for many years, then fell for Claude Arnaud. Rather than losing Jacques in a fit of jealousy, Bernard decided to “take the couple” and so he moved Claude in. In that way he was like Cocteau, who, learning that his longtime lover—the much younger movie star Jean Marais—had fallen for a lifeguard, Paul Morihen, set his rival up in business as the proprietor of a bookstore downstairs from his apartment in the Palais-Royal, thereby extending his family by one member rather than diminishing it to zero.

Claude was a lean, gangly young man who sprawled like an American rather than sitting up, all limbs neatly tucked in, like a Frenchman. The American way of sprawling (which is caricatured in the first woodblocks of Commodore Perry's sailors in mid-nineteenth-century Japan) is, I suppose, more suited to America's wide-open plains than Europe's crowded, pinched salons. I remember asking two French friends what had most struck them most after their first hours in New York and they said, “How floppy everyone is in this city. The careless, reckless way they careen down the sidewalk—they'd be considered crazy in France, or arrested. They're not
contained
.”

Claude wasn't crazy, but his legs were too long and his clothes too tight. And he didn't mind slumping down in his chair, even when he was holding up a finger in objection. His body language suggested he was sure of himself. Though he wasn't conventionally handsome, he was lean and sexy, and because he was such a human pretzel his body was always in the forefront of our minds. Which reminds me of the pronouncement Bernard made about my lover Michael in his presence:
“Tu n'es pas beau, mais très sexe.”
Needless to say, it didn't flatter Michael being told that he was sexy but not handsome. That sort of “objectification” of someone in front of you was something Americans instinctively avoided, though it was an impertinence privileged Europeans indulged in. I remember a celebrated woman painter and her movie star husband once discussing in front of me whether I was intelligent or not (they couldn't make up their minds about that conundrum).

Another regular in Bernard's salon was Arnaud Deschamps, an elegant young aristocrat who was always impeccably dressed, seldom spoke, and whenever addressed smiled shyly. He made a meager living dealing in antiques while anticipating a giant settlement in his favor, one that was delayed year after year. He'd had an aunt in the south of France who'd willed him her Murillo, a Spanish masterpiece. But she'd taken as a lover a very tough younger woman and she changed her will in her favor. Once the aunt had died, the younger woman sold the Murillo to the Louvre in a reputedly prearranged deal, and Arnaud had little chance of winning.

In France the institutions always won out. Decades before, a woman had been accused of murdering her first husband, an art dealer, Paul Guillaume, then later her second husband, Jean Walter, an architect. It was Jean Walter's son, frightened for his own life, who lodged the accusations, but Madame went to André Malraux, the minister of culture, and ironed out a deal. If all charges were dropped, she would leave her entire collection of paintings to the state, upwards of a billion dollars' worth of canvases: ten Cézannes, twenty-three Renoirs, twelve Picassos, ten Matisses, twenty-two Soutines, twenty-seven Derains. She drove a hard bargain and was allowed to retain ownership of the paintings until her own death in 1977, at the age of seventy-nine. By then the
Soutines and Derains had fallen out of fashion, but that still left a number of undeniably great works, and her collection now hangs in the Orangerie.

Our typical evenings chez Bernard started with my arrival at eight thirty; being American I was always on time, and for nearly an hour I would enjoy an entertaining, exclusive audience with Bernard. The others, being French, would drift in at nine or even nine thirty. Coming to one of my evenings, MC obeyed French time, which made me furious if I was cooking. I usually planned on a half hour for drinks before going to the table. She eventually reformed, or at least was always sure to have a good excuse. (No wonder so many French hosts warm up meals, often picked up from the downstairs caterers, at the last moment in their microwave ovens.) More and more she was putting in long hours up in her studio assembling her boxes. “I was working!” she would say importantly. Then, wide-eyed, she would assure everyone who'd been waiting on her that they had no idea how exhausted she was.

When we were all at Bernard's and the others were well watered with champagne, we'd go out to a neighborhood restaurant for green salad followed by a duck confit, a single perfect vegetable, and a chocolate marquise, the whole thing accompanied by generous pours of red wine at Bernard's expense.

The French seldom drank after the wine was cleared away with the meal—wine is a food, not a conversation enabler to be poured hours after the dinner. Since I didn't drink at all, I found American-style drunks like James Lord annoying, with their precarious walk and their repetitious remarks, a terrible bore, to use the word he himself hurled at his own pet peeves as the evening wore on and he became more and more inebriated.

After dinner and lively conversation, often about Bernard's reading or something Claude or Jacques was writing, we'd saunter back to Bernard's salon, which was decorated with family antiques and 1830 portraits of two brothers, his ancestors. Claude had already begun his biography of Cocteau, whom Bernard and James had known personally. Bernard retained a strong sense of the period and alliances back then and could indicate the exact emphasis Claude should give to
Cocteau's so-called “collaboration” with the Nazis or his long, troubled friendship with Picasso. I was very surprised and touched when Claude dedicated his Cocteau biography to me. I took the dedication seriously and longed to “protect” the book. I arranged for Yale University Press to publish it in English and coedited an anthology of Cocteau's English-language writing to come out at the same time. In a similar way, Bernard helped me with the nuances of Parisian gay life in the 1940s for my biography of Genet, which I was working on from 1986 to 1992.