Inside a Pearl Page 12

  Chapter 7

  Ned Rorem, the American composer, came to Paris. I had known Ned for ten years in New York and, like many gay men of my generation, had read his Paris Diary. After the war and well into the 1950s Ned had lived in Paris, kept by Marie-Laure, the Vicomtesse de Noailles. She’d died in 1970, long before I arrived in Paris, but among old gay Parisian men Marie-Laure was still famous for her wealth and taste and eccentricities. In fact, these same men constantly discussed “Marie-Laure” and “Marie-Hélène” (de Rothschild). Marie-Hélène de Rothschild was still alive then, but she’d moved to New York, whereas to her dying day Marie-Laure had lived off the Champs-Élysées in a huge modern house on the place des États-Unis. The house was known for its splendor, its cuisine, its Goyas, and its salons designed by Jean-Michel Frank, the walls lined with squares of white fawn leather and the little side tables covered with split straws under clear lacquer. Her husband, the vicomte, turned out to be gay. Marie-Laure was most certainly the most celebrated “fag hag” of high culture and seemed to have been enamored of the beautiful young Ned, whom she dubbed “Miss Sly.” Her lover was a sexy but heavy-drinking Spanish painter who did Picasso rip-offs. She had herself buried beside him, not her husband.

  Everyone in Paris now talked about Marie-Laure as if she were still alive—her amusingly cruel sallies at dinner, her patronage of truly great artists including Buñuel, Cocteau, Dalí. Marie-Laure had begged Ned not to tell in writing that they’d never slept together, but in the first of his diaries, The Paris Diary—a bit of a cad—he reported that very detail. Ned’s legendary beauty had been idolized by everyone, including the eminent composer Francis Poulenc; Ned had always claimed that he didn’t “get it”—since, as he wrote, “I’m not my own type.”

  Having left Paris for New York and Nantucket summers (both settings for his later diaries) a long time ago, Ned would return to Paris every ten years in order to declare once again that Paris was finished—the way an angler might say of a lake that it was fished out. In the same way, his old acquaintance James Lord (who’d returned to Paris after trying America, again, for a few years) would announce that Venice and Rome were finished. Maybe in Paris mythic figures such as Picasso, Corbusier, Matisse, Giacometti, Gide, Genet, and Poulenc had all passed on, but there were still world-renowned filmmakers around, like André Téchiné, Alain Resnais, and Éric Rohmer; the architects Jean Nouvel and Christian de Portzamparc; the brilliant writers Emmanuel Carrère, Jean Echenoz, and René de Ceccatty; and celebrated couturiers such as Azzedine Alaïa, Hubert de Givenchy, and Yves Saint Laurent. Because Paris was no longer a world capital—due to a loss of financial and military might—its artists were no longer universally esteemed. Surely it was no accident that the all-powerful Louis XIV had been able to consecrate “his” playwrights Molière and Racine—or his architect Mansard or his gardener Le Nôtre. Fame in the arts accompanies world domination: America at its postwar height had even been able to sell such an intrinsically unappealing school of painting as Abstract Expressionism and make it a worldwide movement.

  Yet even now Ned talked and wrote about Marie-Laure constantly (his memoir Lies, for which I wrote the introduction, has the best portrait of her in words). James Lord also wrote about her in less intimate, more acerbic terms in one of his many personal remembrances, Six Exceptional Women. There he told a story, one he recounted numerous times to friends as well, about how back in the fifties an American general had brought his wife from Kansas to Paris, where they had been invited to one of Marie-Laure’s dinners. The general had befriended Marie-Laure after the liberation in 1944. At the table, the wife apparently said they were on their way to Italy with stopovers in Rome, Florence, and Venice; everything had been arranged by American Express. “What!” Marie-Laure exclaimed, grabbing a silver serving spoon. “And not Bologna? You must go to Bologna, where they teach you how to give the best blow jobs. You must lick it all over like this,” and she proceeded to fellate the spoon. The couple grew darkly silent and took their leave early. Bernard Minoret, an extremely cultured Parisian who’d been James Lord’s lover in the forties, intended to write Marie-Laure’s biography, but somehow he was blocked as a writer. Bernard’s portrait, to my mind, would have been the best one, since Bernard was disabused but compassionate and had two great writerly gifts—curiosity and memory.

  At a party Bernard gave for Ned, Bernard introduced me to James Lord and many of the younger gay or bisexual writers and intellectuals who gathered around the older ones, and I instantly felt that this would be one of my circles of close friends in Paris.

  In his day Bernard had known everyone and was still the paragon of kindness, generosity, and continual mental brilliance. He took me to meet the actress Arletty, and on the way a Romanian beggar, his barefoot daughter on his shoulder, handed us a plea for help written in bad French (perhaps someone else wrote it for him). Bernard pulled out a hundred dollars and gave it to him (“There is a chance in a hundred he really is in need,” he explained). Arletty, who lived in public housing behind the Maison de la Radio, was entertaining three ancient actresses from the Comédie Française, and they were attended by an adoring fan, whom she called “Figaro.” She had been a movie star; her 1945 film Les Enfants du Paradis was recently voted best film ever by six hundred French film critics. But she’d had an affair with a German during the war and afterward been convicted of collaboration, though she famously defended herself: “My heart is France’s. My ass is my own.” When I met her she was blind; years before she’d grabbed the wrong eye drops. We guided her to a neighborhood restaurant, where there was a special table reserved for her, decorated with a copy of her memoirs and a rose in a vase.

  Because he was blocked as a writer, even at his great age Bernard was seeing a shrink, hoping to overcome his inhibition. His problem, he complained, was that he couldn’t bear a writer’s solitude. Still, he’d written a successful play about the salons of the past with a young collaborator, Claude Arnaud (who later became a formidable Cocteau biographer), two books of pastiche with Philippe Jullian, and screenplays with his friend Jacques Fieschi.

  Marie-Laure would have been a difficult subject for a biography, one that perhaps only Bernard could have breathed life into—because she fought no wars, signed no treaties, and left nothing of personal material interest behind. The most elusive biographies are of people who’ve done nothing but shape a whole era as patrons or tastemakers merely through the power of their personalities and sensibilities—people like Misia Sert, the great patron of the Ballets Russes. With his total recall and his vivid apprehension of the nuances of social reality, Bernard could have recreated, for instance, Marie-Laure’s style of dinner conversation in all its wickedness and erudition without making her sound like a complete monster.

  Physically, Bernard was tall and bald and had a comical rubber mask of a face. When he went out he was always beautifully, tastefully, and conservatively dressed.

  Bernard was the last of his line and an only child. He had inherited extensive forests that he’d since sold off and a considerable fortune he’d dissipated, or “dilapidated,” as the French put it. I used to say that every time you went to his apartment, he’d sold another Hubert Robert painting so that for another six months he could invite his likable band of layabouts out to dinner for another month. As a true old-fashioned Parisian, Bernard would never go Dutch. He was always the host.

  When Bernard died in 1983, his obituary by the writer Benôit Duteatre said, “He had made of his residence in the seventh arrondissement of Paris the last of those salons where several generations of artists met …” The article was titled “Bernard Minoret, writer and dandy.”

  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, gang
ly 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.