Arthur Jeffress: A Life in Art 9781838602819, 9781838602840, 9781838602833

Citation preview

Arthur Jeffress

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Supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

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Arthur Jeffress A Life in Art Gill Hedley

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BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Gill Hedley, 2020 Gill Hedley has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. xiii–xix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Terry Woodley Cover image © and reproduced courtesy of the Estate of Graham Sutherland All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

HB: 978-1-8386-0281-9 ePDF: 978-1-8386-0283-3 eBook: 978-1-8386-0282-6

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Contents List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgements xiii Foreword, Nicky Haslam xx

Introduction: Who was Arthur Jeffress? 1

Virginia and New York

2

Acton and tobacco

3

Harrow and the Far East

4

Cambridge

5

Man about town

6

Grand Tours and new companions

7

More rococo than anything

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‘The muff was particularly unfortunate’

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John Deakin

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3

13 19

29 41 51

61 67

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10 The Zamzam adventure

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11 ‘I shall still be hungry in the spring’

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12 ‘What a lovely war. What shall I do at the end of it?’ 13 ‘Tante cose’

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14 Modern art to frighten the horses in Hampshire

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Contents

15 Erica Brausen

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16 The Hanover Gallery

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17 ‘Arthur Jeffress for Painting’ 18 Gentle Friends

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19 Portrait of Arthur Jeffress 20 Dear Robert, Love Art 21 Private lives 22 Goose-girl

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24 Death in Paris

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25 At home in sunlight Notes 297 Sources and bibliography 329 Index 333

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23 Life in Venice

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Illustrations Colour plate section 1

Edward Burra (1905–76), Two Sisters (1929), oil on canvas. Private collection. Photo © Estate of the Artist c/o Lefevre Fine Art Ltd., London/Bridgeman Images.

2

Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978), The Painter’s Family (1926), oil on canvas. Image reproduced courtesy of Tate, © DACS 2019.

3

Tristram Hillier (1905–83), Chapel of the Misericordia, Viseu, 1947, oil on canvas. Southampton City Art Gallery, Jeffress Bequest/Bridgeman Images.

4

John Lavery (1856–1941), The Countess Rocksavage (1922), oil on canvas. Southampton City Art Gallery, Jeffress Bequest.

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Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), Seated Woman, (1938), oil on canvas. Private collection. © 2019. Photo Scala, Florence. © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2019.

6

Baron François Gérard (1770–1837), Napoleon Bonaparte (after 1804), oil on canvas. Southampton City Art Gallery, Jeffress Bequest.

7

Antony Denney (1913–90), photographer, interior of Arthur’s drawing room at 10 Pelham Crescent (1952).

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Antony Denney (1913–90), photographer, interior of Arthur’s drawing room at 99 Eaton Square. Anthony Denney / House & Garden © The Condé Nast Publications Ltd.

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André Bauchant (1873–1958), Les Funérailles d’Alexandre-leGrand (1940), oil on canvas. Image reproduced courtesy of Tate, Jeffress Bequest. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019. © Tate, London 2019.

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Henri de Toulouse Lautrec (1864–1901), Portrait of Émile Bernard (1885), oil on canvas. Image reproduced courtesy of Tate, Jeffress Bequest. © Tate, London 2019.

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11

Illustrations

Giuseppe Arcimboldo (c. 1527–93), Summer (date unknown), oil on canvas. Southampton City Art Gallery, Jeffress Bequest.

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Graham Sutherland (1903–80), study for portrait of Arthur Jeffress (1953), oil on canvas, Doncaster Museum and Art Gallery. Collection of DMBC Heritage Doncaster. © Courtesy of the Estate of Graham Sutherland.

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Graham Sutherland (1903–80), sketch for portrait of Arthur Jeffress (1953), oil on canvas. Southampton City Art Gallery, Jeffress Bequest. © Courtesy of the Estate of Graham Sutherland.

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Graham Sutherland (1903–80), Portrait of Arthur Jeffress (1954), oil on canvas, Southampton City Art Gallery, Jeffress Bequest. © Courtesy of the Estate of Graham Sutherland.

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Richard Chopping (1917–2008), Trompe l’Oeil for Arthur Jeffress (1956), watercolour on paper, author’s collection. © Richard Chopping.

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Walter Sickert (1860–1942), A Red Sky at Night (1896), oil on canvas. Southampton City Art Gallery, Jeffress Bequest.

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Kees van Dongen (1877–1968), Woman in Venice (c. 1921), oil on canvas. Southampton City Art Gallery, Jeffress Bequest. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019.

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Italian School, seventeenth century, Oriental scene with figures (date unknown). Southampton City Art Gallery, Jeffress Bequest.

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Joseph Heintz the Younger (c. 1600–78), Venetian Regatta at the Rialto Bridge (date unknown), oil on canvas. Southampton City Art Gallery, Jeffress Bequest.

Black and white figures 1.1 From left to right: Arthur’s mother Stella Rosenfeld at the time of her marriage, 1899; Arthur’s father, Albert Gustavus Jeffress, mid 1920s; Bertram Park (1888–1972) photographer, Arthur’s mother Stella, mid 1920s. Photographers unknown. Jeffress family papers. Reproduced courtesy of Helen Harris.

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Illustrations

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4.1 Cambridge, 1925. Arthur, aged twenty, wears ‘Oxford’ bags and reveals his new, androgynous style. Southampton City Art Gallery, Jeffress archive.

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4.2 Arthur as Isabella of Valois in an ADC production of Christopher Marlowe’s Richard II in 1926, Southampton City Art Gallery, Jeffress archive.

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4.3 Hills & Saunders, photographers. Arthur as the Empress Catherine, 1926; ‘Of course Shaw wrote Great Catherine, one of his worst plays in order to provide a part for A.T. Jeffress.’ © National Portrait Gallery, London.

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6.1 Arthur at Kenton Grange, summer 1927. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

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6.2 Arthur at Kenton Grange, summer 1927, with his friends, including Eliot Hodgkin on the left; Arthur is on the right with his first boyfriend, Budge Fraser, next to him. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

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6.3 70b Cadogan Place, Belgravia, where Arthur lived from 1928 and made his first attempt at interior decoration. Southampton City Art Gallery, Jeffress archive.

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7.1 Arthur, Monte Carlo Beach Hotel, Cannes, in 1930 with Hugh Wade and Elvira Barney, top right. Southampton City Art Gallery, Jeffress archive.

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8.1 Arthur ‘simply “adorable” in white silk, with a muff made of real narcissi and some diamond bangles’, at his infamous Red and White Party, 21 November 1931. Author’s collection.

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8.2 Brenda Dean Paul, who would later that night start ‘a fight wearing only a choker of pearls and a spotted handkerchief ’, at Arthur’s Red and White Party, 21 November 1931. © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans.

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8.3 30a Orchard Court. Arthur and Eliot Hodgkin admiring one of Hodgkin’s murals commissioned for the new flat, c. 1932. The subject is sailors in the South of France. Southampton City Art Gallery, Jeffress archive.

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Illustrations

8.4 30a Orchard Court, Portman Square, where Arthur Jeffress lived from 1932 and, from about 1934, with John Deakin. Over the fireplace is a lost portrait of Arthur by Eliot Hodgkin. Southampton City Art Gallery, Jeffress archive.

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9.1 Arthur and Tim Brooke on holiday, c. 1933. Southampton City Art Gallery, Jeffress archive.

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9.2 Arthur’s 1933 Rolls-Royce: a 20/25 drop-head Henley Style Coupé, a ‘beautiful, incredibly rare design’. Reproduced courtesy of Matt Porta.

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9.3 The grand entrance hall to Marwell House, designed by John Hill, with Baron Gérard’s portrait of Napoleon as centrepiece, before 1948. Southampton City Art Gallery, Jeffress archive.

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9.4 Arthur Jeffress at Marwell with one of his own embroidered footstools, 1939. Southampton City Art Gallery, Jeffress archive.

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9.5 Arthur Jeffress and manservant on the terrace at Marwell, 1939. Southampton City Art Gallery, Jeffress archive.

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9.6 From Rosemary McColl’s album, taken at Marwell House, Arthur Jeffress and John Deakin’s home, 1939. Reproduced courtesy of Robin Muir.

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9.7 John Deakin in a gondola in Venice, 1936. Reproduced courtesy of Robin Muir.

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9.8 Barbara Ker-Seymer (1905–1993), photographer. Arthur Jeffress outside the Gran Caffè Quadri in St. Mark’s Square, Venice, 1936. Southampton City Art Gallery, Jeffress archive. Reproduced courtesy of Max Ker-Seymer.

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10.1 Arthur Jeffress on the Zamzam en route to war as an ambulance driver, 1941. Southampton City Art Gallery, Jeffress archive.

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11.1 Arthur in the Middle East as part of the American Field Service ambulance corps, c. 1942. Southampton City Art Gallery, Jeffress archive.

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12.1 Probably taken to mark Arthur’s promotion to Captain in 1944. Southampton City Art Gallery, Jeffress archive.

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15.1 Erica Brausen as a young woman, c. 1929. Reproduced courtesy of Jean-Yves Mock.

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Illustrations

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18.1 E. Box’s paintings formed the opening exhibition, ‘Gentle Friends’, at Arthur Jeffress (Pictures), in Davies St., October 1954. Jeffress papers. 18.2 Manifesto of Arthur’s new gallery, 1954. Jeffress papers.

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19.1 Arthur’s bedroom in Venice showing the damask used by Graham Sutherland as a backdrop to his portrait of Arthur. Southampton City Art Gallery, Jeffress papers.

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19.2 Ida Kar (1908–1974), photographer. Arthur in front of the Sutherland portrait at home in Eaton Square, 1959. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

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19.3 Ida Kar (1908–1974), photographer. Arthur ill at ease in front of his painting of the sons of Fath-Ali Shah of Persia, Eaton Square, 1959. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

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20.1 Photographer unknown. Robert Melville, c. 1962: ‘Permanently young, always immaculately dressed.’ Permission granted by Roberta Korner.

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21.1 Diana Dors in Arthur’s gondola during the Venice film festival, May 1955. Photo by Horace Abrahams/Keystone/Getty Images.

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23.1 The garden of Arthur’s house in Venice with his aviary and small dog, La Dolce Vita. Southampton City Art Gallery, Jeffress archive.

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23.2 The downstairs bedroom in Arthur’s Venice house which opened on to the garden. Southampton City Art Gallery, Jeffress archive.

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23.3 The postcard provided by Arthur so guests could find his house in Ramo del Forno. They were given strict instructions about the times at which they might arrive or leave. Jeffress papers.

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23.4 Arthur’s gondola moored on the Grand Canal outside Martyn Coleman’s flat in Venice at the end of Calle del Dose da Ponte, c. 1960. Southampton City Art Gallery, Jeffress archive.

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23.5 Roloff Beny (1924–1984), photographer. Beny was commissioned by Arthur to take a series of portraits in the famous gondola. The gondolier in profile is Bruno Angelotti; Fausto Cadoni is in the background. Sent as Arthur’s final Christmas card in 1960, it became the image by which he is best remembered. Photographer Roloff Beny: Library and Archives Canada.

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Illustrations

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above list or other parts of the text, and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

Acknowledgements

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began my research into the life of Arthur Jeffress at Southampton Art Gallery

in 1985. His friend and colleague Robert Melville had written a very touching

tribute for the first exhibition catalogue of the Jeffress bequest in 1963, so I went to see him with a plan to write a brief biographical essay for the twenty-fifth anniversary. I was star-struck to meet Melville not least because he had been the father-in-law of Alexis Korner, the jazz musician. I asked simple questions and recorded his answers without probing. He told me that Arthur Jeffress always had a lot of photographs and I just made a note, never dreaming that he had carefully preserved all Arthur’s albums. I did notice a rather sardonic smile. Subsequently, and longer after I had left, Robert Melville’s daughter Bobbie Korner sent those albums and many letters, between her father and Arthur Jeffress, to Southampton. The photographs led me to so many other discoveries and I would like to thank Bobbie Korner and acknowledge the importance of her late father as a critic and writer: his 1939 book on Picasso deserves to be re-published. After I left Southampton in 1988, the work on Jeffress incomplete, two people independently took up the Jeffress baton. Helen Simpson, who worked in Southampton City Art Gallery a few years after me, undertook some properly thorough research on Jeffress, collecting official documents and interviewing a wide range of people who knew him, including the late Neil ‘Bunny’ Roger, John Hohnsbeen and Bobby Bishop, all of whom provided invaluable material. Following Helen came Cefyn (formerly Kevin) EmblingEvans who sought permission to double the word count of his BA dissertation to do justice to his own extensive and painstaking research into Jeffress, not least visiting his house in Venice and interviewing one of his gondoliers. Without Helen and Cefyn’s diligent and impassioned research, I would have had no ground to build upon and I thank them both warmly. xiii

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Acknowledgements

I decided to look again at the story of Arthur Jeffress in about 2009 and visited Southampton to see if there was sufficient new material for a short book and found two significant things. One was a postcard that I had written to Helen Simpson saying that maybe one day I would write a full biography. I have no recall of writing or even thinking this. Then, I was shown the photo albums that first Robert Melville and subsequently his daughter had preserved and sent to Southampton. Carefully annotated, they act like a diary of much of Arthur Jeffress’ life from 1910–45. Neither Helen nor Cefyn had been able to take advantage of this new information and I knew that I had to. I interviewed Derek Granger and the late Kenneth Partridge and remember with gratitude how entertaining and kind they both were. Cefyn pointed me in the direction of Michael Estorick, whose father Eric, owner of the Grosvenor Gallery, bought the Arthur Jeffress Gallery in 1962. Michael instantly handed over a huge suitcase full of letters largely between Melville and Jeffress and has been most generous in lending me such a rich source material for such a long time. I have enjoyed our conversations, too. The photo albums led me to Professor Nicholas Clifford, the son of one of Arthur Jeffress’ school friends, who then very generously lent me dozens of letters written by Jeffress to his mother Esther Rowland Clifford, during World War II. I have enjoyed our own correspondence very much and am very grateful that his mother, brother and he preserved these fascinating letters and that he so kindly and unhesitatingly put them all in the post to me from the United States. I should note that in these and other letters written by Arthur that appear in the book, most of the punctuation and spelling in the original correspondence has been left uncorrected. The letters and the internet helped me find Arthur Jeffress’ nearest relative, Jane Hill, in California. In spite of a rumour that there was no love lost within his immediate family, Jane’s first remark was that her parents adored Cousin Arthur. On my birthday, a parcel arrived from her containing a huge handwritten Jeffress family tree and we enjoyed a very entertaining exchange of emails. Sadly, Jane died in 2015 but since then, luckily spotting some Jeffress family photos on a genealogical website, I have also got to know Arthur Jeffress’ other cousin (once removed) Helen Harris who has, like Jane Hill, been extraordinarily generous and encouraging, not least as she is also an author.

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She and her husband have now visited London from their home in California to see some of the places that Arthur and his family lived. The late Brian Sewell gave me sound advice but warned I would never be a biographer unless I asked Edna Fleming if I could read an unopened letter she had kept from Arthur Jeffress. I chose not to pursue this and never believed she had kept a letter unopened. I told the art dealer Karsten Schubert that I was planning to write Arthur Jeffress’ biography. He replied that he just had seen that name in the latest edition of The Burlington Magazine. This led me to meet Peter Jones from Southampton Solent University, who had written a short paper about Jackson Pollock and Winchester and added substantially to the information I had about Jeffress. I only wish Karsten could have read my thanks for this typical example of his sharp memory and generous thought. His advice came at just the right moment, unlike his recent untimely death. Peter Jones has been a thoughtful correspondent, regularly asking ‘how’s Arthur?’ and allowing me to use and build on his research into the first Jackson Pollock to be shown in Britain. Arthur Jeffress would have been surprised at the range of images of him that are in public hands. The Sutherland portrait which he commissioned and the sketch for it were of course part of his bequest to Southampton but, thanks to Malcolm Sherard, photographs of Arthur Jeffress acting at Cambridge and with groups of friends in the late 1920s and mid 1940s are in the National Portrait Gallery, along with the excellent series of images by Ida Kar from the late 1950s. Coincidentally, Colonel Nairne, Chairman of the Winchester Art Society when Arthur Jeffress lent such remarkable works, including Pollock, to Winchester, is the grandfather of Sandy Nairne, previously Director of National Portrait Gallery, and I am grateful to the family, especially Major J.K. Nairne, for their help. One of Arthur Jeffress’ many performances was a walk-on part as a witness in a notorious society trial. I owe a particular debt to Maurice Bottomley, who created a wonderfully entertaining blog on the subject of the Elvira Barney court case and introduced his readers to so many marvellous characters crucial or delightfully tangential to the story; Cocktails with Elvira enabled me go back to the photo albums with a new focus. I learned much and was entertained even more by Maurice’s research and style and owe him a particular debt of gratitude.

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Two other researchers helped me very much and became intrigued by Arthur Jeffress. Jan Church investigated the garden at Marwell for the Hampshire Garden Trust and I have drawn heavily upon her work. We enjoyed an outing as far as the perimeter fence of Marwell, spying as much as we could. Thank you, Jane, and also to Bridget Phelps who tried her best to help us gain access to Jeffress’ previous home. Matt Porta in California became the owner of Arthur’s splendid 1936 car and not only bought the car but was sufficiently intrigued to write the Wikipedia page on Arthur Jeffress: I am grateful for all his careful work. Three people in Arthur Jeffress’ life led me to new research. First was Erica Brausen, with whom he worked at the Hanover Gallery. Jean-Yves Mock is her heir and the author of an elegant memoir, and it gives me great pleasure to thank him warmly for his immense generosity and for sharing his knowledge. He allowed me to translate his memoir from the French and to carry both versions on my website and has been a great support in his witty and incisive letters. Erica married Clem Haizelden, and I have had such delightful correspondence with his family who knew nothing of his life with Erica. I was able to put them in touch with the family of Raoh Schorr and with Schorr’s biographer and I want to thank Sue LaFleur, Patricia Mulholland, Renata and Silvia Sigrist and Hildegard Gantner-Schlee. More recently, I met Cherith Summers, who has written a dissertation on Erica Brausen and I look forward to her new research on this extraordinary woman. Robert Melville was the linchpin of the Arthur Jeffress Gallery and I am pleased that I was able to interview him, however inadequately, before his death. I have been through his extensive papers in Tate Archive and persuaded the Oxford University Press Dictionary of National Biography to publish an entry on this under-explored critic, writer and curator. John Deakin was a very unlikely lover for Arthur Jeffress but, because of his fame and notoriety, Deakin has enabled Arthur to crop up in many a memoir. Robin Muir, effortlessly encouraging and informative, was my first contact and he let me spend much time with his fascinating album of photographs put together by Rosemary Molloy McColl. Through Robin, I met Paul Rousseau, then in charge of the John Deakin Archive owned by James Moores, and Paul has become a dear friend. Together we organized a study day at Tate (through

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the British Art Network) on John Deakin and we would both like to thank all involved but especially Hilary Roberts at the Imperial War Museum for her insights into Deakin as an innovative war photographer. Paul and I travelled to Paris to meet Adrien and Luce Ostier to look at the archive of his uncle, André Ostier. We also nearly got thrown out of Tate Archive for our whoops of glee when we made an astonishing discovery there. I want to thank Paul for the gift of Valse des Fleurs and so much laughter and encouragement. I am grateful to James Moores and Hattie Buchanan at the James Moore Foundation for all their kindness and support. I would like to thank staff at Tate Archive but above all Adrian Glew for his interest which, clearly, he shows to all researchers equally and magnanimously, but has always made me feel encouraged. Everyone involved in making the London Library the most marvellous place for research (and for less focussed thinking, too) has earned my lasting gratitude. Colleagues at Southampton City Art Gallery, past and present, have helped and looked after me. I would like to single out Tim Craven, Rebecca Moisan (whose mother once worked at the Arthur Jeffress Gallery), Dan Matthews, Ambrose Scott-Moncrieff, Claire Mitchell, and, in the archives, Joanne Smith and Lucy Brocklesby. At Southampton Solent University, colleagues have been particularly gracious and effective. Professor Brandon Taylor organized a seminar in 2013 so that I could present a paper to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Jeffress Bequest and, with Peter Jones, has been a constant support ever since. Professor Edward Chaney, who supervised Cefyn Embling-Evans’ dissertation in 1993, heard my paper and later recommended me to his editor Joanna Godfrey at I.B. Tauris, and subsequently Bloomsbury. I cannot thank him enough for the suggestion and then acting upon it so effectively. Joanna Godfrey was the book’s first editor, improving the text with dexterity and great tact. She has been assisted, as have I, by Olivia Dellow who has made sure that the book is well-illustrated and sought all permissions, for which we are all very grateful. The next pair of safe hands and eagle eyes belong to Lisa Carden, whose copy-editing has been all to my benefit. Merv Honeywood at RefineCatch brought good humour and patience to the digital process. Nicky

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Haslam has written a foreword that is characteristically elegant, evocative and atmospheric. I am so grateful for his encouragement from the first moment I mentioned the book to him. He thought Arthur to be an unlikely subject then was amused and intrigued by my brief synopsis of his life: it encouraged me to try to write a book that would amuse him further and reveal so much more. The book has been supported by a Publications Grant from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and another from the Scouloudi Foundation in association with the Institute of Historical Research. The publishers and I are most grateful to both institutions. I would like to thank those in their various institutions who may not have realized how much help they gave me: Rita Boswell, previously Archivist, Harrow School Rab & Chris Barnard, Sidmouth Museum Shelagh Chambers, Orley Farm School Douglas & Lesley Dodd and Pam Russell from St. Luke’s Hospice, Kenton, the Jeffress family home Nicole Milano, American Field Service Alex Nyerges and Lee Bagby Viverette at Virginia Museum of Fine Arts – and to David Gordon for making the introduction Michael Phipps, the Henry Moore Foundation Philip Ryland and Grazina Subelyte, previously at the Peggy Guggenheim Foundation, Venice Miss J.S. Ringrose, archivist, Pembroke College, Cambridge I owe all these individuals a debt of gratitude: Eleanor Anderson, a survivor of the ZamZam, and her brother and sister Wilfred Danielson and Lois Carlson; the late Sir Jack Baer; Adam Barker-Mill for information about Erica Brausen and his mother Elsa Vaudrey; Eric Basire for information about Randolph Jeffress; Don Bassett, biographer of Felix Kelly; Sir Alan Bowness; Stephen Calloway; Adrian Clarke, Peter Watson’s biographer; Arrigo Cipriani at Harry’s Bar, Venice; Nicola Coleby, for matters Mexican; Elizabeth Conran for information about her late husband Loraine Conran; Robin Dalton for an invaluable anecdote; Allan Downend of the Benson Society; Adrian Eeles, Eliot Hodgkin’s biographer; the Esigares family

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in Seville for memories of Godfrey Jeffress; William Feaver, Lucian Freud’s biographer; René Gimpel; Charles Kaiser; James and Clare Kirkman; Michael Lake, for putting me in touch with Derek Granger and the late Kenneth Partridge; Diana Le Feu, for information about her family, the Levetts; Simon Martin, for putting me in touch with Cefyn Embling-Evans; Anne Massey, biographer of the ICA and of Dorothy Morland; Ian Massey; Kate McGarry; Esther Newton for information about Stephan Cole; Desmond Page; Michael Peppiatt; Matt Porta for caring for Arthur’s Rolls and Wikipedia page; Bill Rose, for information about ‘The Taffeta Twelve’ and Caleb Milne; Suzanne Ruta, for information about her husband Peter Ruta, Positano and Elsa & Michael Combe-Martin; Peyton Skipwith; Jane Stevenson; Barbara Del Vicario, at La Malcontenta; David Weinstein for putting me in touch with the late Jane Hill. I would like to express my gratitude to all those who gave permission to reproduce images and quotations. So many others, to whom I owe my lasting thanks, have provided information, listened to my ramblings, invited me to speak publicly, supported my change of career from curator to author, kept me going in myriad ways or simply had the kindness to remember to ask how the book was progressing. That mattered a lot. Thank you and my apologies to all whom I have bored stiff. To those who have gone further than the kindness of friends: Catherine Ferbos-Nakov, for the introduction to Jean-Yves Mock and so many other thoughtful gestures; Anne Goodchild, for empathy, checking in on my progress and making sure I got my Christopher Woods sorted out; James Hamilton and Katharine Eustace for expert guidance and all manner of generous words; James Rawlin, while at Sotheby’s and now at J & J Rawlin, for every bit of Modern British art advice I asked for and more; Jean Wainwright, for such a lot of fun, always, and substantial professional help, besides. My final, and more personal, thanks: To my parents, the late Alex Hedley and the remarkable Pat Hedley, for taking me to Venice for the first time in 1961, which was Arthur Jeffress’ last summer there. To my husband, Andrew Hughes: as you know only too well, I have worked on this book for over thirty-five years, off and on, and you have helped me, in every way, to finish it and survive.

Foreword Waking at dusk, I saw from our balcony the gondola of my London gallery-owning friend Arthur Jeffress with his handsome gondoliers in their time-honoured yellow-and-white livery, propelling their precious cargo, pashalike in the little black armchair, towards Harry’s Bar for his regular evening Bellini . . . These brief lines from my memoir, Redeeming Features, make me, even now, vividly recall the scene – the eighteenth century incarnate in the twentieth – from the Gritti just as I’d surfaced from a long day’s journey into siesta, one hot summer in Venice: and, as gondolas move gently, deliberately, the picture is somehow like a film-clip, each frame a haze of glassy water around the dark silhouette; it was also, sad to recall, now, the lasting image I would have of Arthur. We had met, a couple of years earlier, in London, introducd by mutual friends – Bunny Roger perhaps, or maybe Frederick Ashton. I’d just left school and had fallen happily into the artistic and largely gay set that these people had created in the decade following the war. There were parties and weekends in exotic houses galore, but it was quite a rarity for someone as young as I, a callous youth clearly the antithesis of older, rougher partners he desired, and still having scant knowledge of the fine-art scene in which he was so major a contributor, to be asked to Arthur’s. Other friends had taken me to his new gallery in Davies Street, I think to a show of ravishing miniature paintings by the great jeweller Fulco Vedura, but I was unaware of his previous involvement in such avant-garde galleristes as Erica Brausen at the Hanover. So I was, and still am, puzzled as to why he asked me to dine. I had also written: ‘Arthur was an American who hated the land of his birth and lived in splendour in Eaton Square, his walls hung with nineteenth-century portraits of aquiline bearded Persian wazirs, whom – had he not been cleanxx

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shaven, short and quite tubby – Arthur with his big liquid eyes, somewhat resembled.’ I should have added that in contrast to his precise, almost effete manners and what would later be called camp speech, he liked to give the impression that these pashas were actually his forebears, rather than plainer German-Jewish and Virginian stock as this book tantalisingly reveals; such a fantasy, perhaps fatal, is germaine to the duality of Arthur’s enigmatic personality. The lives of most of the people in this set were open books, and would be fascinatingly discussed – their childhood, their families, their loves, their work, and their wartime exploits. Arthur, almost sphinx-like, was the opposite. I was never aware that he had an entirely English upbringing, had been to Harrow, followed by Cambridge, where he excelled in playing female roles in the Amateur Dramatic Club (ADC). Indeed so excellently that a critic suggested that Shaw might have written the play especially for him. Nor did I ever hear of his once-infamous ‘Red’ party – at which he carried a muff fashioned from narcissi flown from Kenya – with red costumed guests, red decor, red food . . . and, as I read recently in Alan Pryce-Jones’s diaries, red lav paper, quite a coup in those Bronco-only days. He never spoke of past lovers, of the country house he bought to house his growing collection, let alone his extraordinary experience of being captured, in 1942, in the mid-Atlantic by the German navy. But like that last image of Arthur in his gondola, I can still see the opulence of his surroundings in Eaton Square. An elegantly comme il faut drawing room, a couple of superbly dressed, understanding, wives on silken sofas, lights above the pictures, shaded lamps. The dining room a shimmer of white napery, gilded candlesticks, the swarthy, bejewelled satraps’ dark eyes staring from their massive frames onto porcelain dishes of food equally rich and dark. Arthur’s surroundings were deeply important to him, and Gill Hedley describes his various houses in vivid detail, the friends and artists he loved to fill them with, particularly Graham Sutherland in that awning-shaded, gardensurrounded house in Venice. It is a pleasure to read of his eventual friendship with Peggy Guggenheim, his neighbour across the Grand Canal. One can imagine them, in Peggy’s low white palazzo . . . two Anglophile expatriate Americans, both with German-Jewish forebears, both rich enough, both sharp as tacks . . . dishing on their day, their adopted city, their staff, their passion for art; and perhaps, by now, their lovers?

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Foreword

It was rumoured that Arthur took his own life by poison from his ring, one last flamboyant and mysterious gesture. That the truth is more prosaic, while no less tragic, adds another paradoxic layer to Arthur’s inscrutable nature. So resolute a decision leads to the conclusion that he saw the secretive world he had created for himself disappearing, the style of art he admired being overtaken by a more brutal movement, the finesse of his chosen surroundings, even friends, becoming démodé. He would have found the following decades not to his taste; the noisy, the ill-kempt, the brazen were his bêtes noires. Yet, deep in this oblique man there remained a trait that attracted him to an uncouth element, a dangerous glamour. That it should be exposed was his nemesis. Judged by today’s culture and humour, the stories and ‘smart remarks’ about Arthur which were later to swirl around the circle in which I had first met him now seem cruel and flippant. Arthur’s enigmatically tragic life needed to be told with all its astonishing contradictions and variety. This book has achieved exactly that. NICKY HASLAM

Introduction: Who was Arthur Jeffress?

Arthur Jeffress’ reputation has survived as a caricature in footnotes – flamboyant American millionaire, eccentric and exotic collector, tragic homosexual, suicide – within the memoirs of those much more famous than Arthur himself. He evokes a note of glamour and pity. The art critic Brian Sewell told me that Arthur was neither a good Englishman nor a good American, not making a moral judgement but rather explaining that Arthur was out of step with the conventional version of each nationality, the country of his birth and that of his ancestors. Arthur’s education at Harrow and Cambridge gave him an entrée into Englishness but he spent much of his thirties in America and served the United States during World War II. He later turned against his parents’ country quite forcibly, yet asked for his ashes to be scattered in the Jeffress’ home state of Virginia. He was always contradictory about his links with America: he often spent holidays with his wealthy family in California and Virginia but was close to very few of his relations. Arthur came out as a homosexual to his friends in the comparatively safe environment of Cambridge University. For the rest of his life he took risks in paying for sex and lived only briefly with another man. He always holidayed in countries where homosexuality was tolerated while manoeuvring his way through the everyday double life that a queer man of his generation was forced to adopt. He was, as most people are, contradictory in very many ways. He was mean with money on a daily basis but often hugely generous to friends and guests. 1

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Arthur Jeffress

He was rich but deliberately ran his art gallery at a modest profit and wanted – but could not afford – to buy a larger house in Venice. Yet most people recall him as fabulously wealthy with a palazzo on the Grand Canal, and his final home in London is described invariably as exotic, hung with works of Middle Eastern art that implied Persian ancestry. He was a ‘cracking snob’ as he cheerfully admitted, but did not attempt to make a place for himself in aristocratic circles. His friends all worked, not dabbled, in the worlds of fashion, theatre, art, design and journalism. He has been described as a misogynist but while he certainly made very nasty remarks about women, mostly to ‘entertain’ other queers, he had many good women friends: his closest of either sex was the artist Edna Fleming. His employee the (heterosexual) art critic Robert Melville was also a very close confidant. Arthur always admired his intellectual superiors. Friends and family called him Arthur and those who knew him in Venice often addressed him as Arturo. Graham Sutherland’s wife used the nickname A. Pinkerton Nightingale in the context of Arthur’s failed trips to Japan in search of love, like Mme Butterfly’s false American sailor husband. More affectionately, to old Cambridge friends he was Ag after the role he played as a Pirandello heroine in amateur dramatics. Wartime friends from the United States sometimes called him Art, an abbreviation that is popular only in America (like Art Tatum). Arthur occasionally signed himself off in letters with a pun that knowingly echoed his nationality and his lasting passion: Love, Art.

1 Virginia and New York

Arthur Tilden Jeffress said he was born in Toilet Seat, Idaho, to avoid revealing that he had actually been born to American parents in the unremarkable London suburb of Acton.1 Although he grew up in London and lived in England for most of his life, he was always described by others as American. He had a very English accent and only ever spelled the word American without its capital letter, in the French style, though America shaped much of his life. His Californian cousin Henry Hill wrote to him in May 1960: ‘Have been up at the University of Oregon in Eugene for two weeks. What a fabulous state it is, completely unspoiled. Have never seen anything like the colour and grandeur! You would HATE it!’2 Jeffress often said he did hate America, especially New York, and Peggy Guggenheim sent him a postcard with an image of her Uncle Solomon’s museum on the front saying she quite agreed.3 His dislike of New York might have something to do with the awkwardness of relations with his mother’s family, although a violent mugging there probably with a sexual context has been given as an understandable explanation.4 His mother’s parents seem to have been comfortably off during her early childhood at least, but a note on the Jeffress family tree says that Arthur’s mother Stella Rosenfield met her husband Albert Jeffress ‘in a bar like My Fair Lady’5 emphasizing a social division between the two families. Arthur Jeffress was born in 1905 to Stella and Albert Gustavus Jeffress II, who had married in 1899 in New York. In November 1901, Albert, aged twenty-six, Stella, about twenty-one, and their first baby, Randolph, sailed to a new job in England; Charles Tilden Hill, their friend and Albert’s colleague, 3

4

Arthur Jeffress

Figure 1.1 From left to right, photographers unknown: Arthur’s mother Stella Rosenfeld at the time of her marriage, 1899; Arthur’s father, Albert Gustavus Jeffress, mid 1920s; Bertram Park (1888–1972) photographer, Arthur’s mother Stella, mid 1920s.

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travelled with them. Mr and Mrs Herbert Hoover, who would become President and First Lady of the United States from 1929 to 1933, were on the same voyage, all of them travelling first class from New York to Liverpool, on the SS Cambroman. Hoover was returning to the London branch of a metal mining company as a partner, while Albert and Charles were both taking up employment as accountants in England in the new British American Tobacco Company (BAT). Albert had joined the American Tobacco Company as a clerk aged twenty-one, became an assistant auditor and was being sent to Liverpool to take over Thomas Ogden’s tobacco company – a pivotal move in the American Tobacco Company’s attempts to dominate the English tobacco industry. Just before they left for England, Albert and Stella were living in New York at 337 West 23rd Street in Chelsea, ten blocks away from Stella’s mother and stepfather. Arthur’s brother Joseph Randolph, named after Stella’s late father but always known as Randolph by his family, was born there on 3 May 1900. Randolph and Arthur were never close and the brothers dealt with their Virginian heritage in their contrasting adopted English ways. Albert was thought of back home as a gay young blade and Stella is believed by his family to have tricked him into marriage by saying, although it might have been true, that she was pregnant and threatening suicide if he did not marry her.6 Nothing much is known about how the family as a whole assimilated Stella’s family background but Jeffress family tradition places her on the wrong side of the tracks, as a kind of Eliza Doolittle, implying her accent and upbringing were made to fade away.7 That same Jeffress tradition remembers that Albert ‘taught her to be a lady, bought her clothes and did everything for her. She depended on him utterly and he transformed her into a stunningly beautiful woman’ but clearly her beauty was there from the beginning.8 Stella was a very dark, strong-featured woman with thick hair and dramatic eyes, all inherited by their youngest son (see figure 1.1). Albert and Stella’s first marital home was located about a mile and half away from The American Tobacco Company’s headquarters on 5th Avenue. The novelist Edith Wharton was born on West 23rd Street herself and, in her novel The Age of Innocence, set in the 1870s, gave Countess Olenska a home ‘far down West Twenty Third Street’ in a ‘peeling stucco house with a giant wisteria throttling

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Arthur Jeffress

its feeble cast-iron balcony’.9 It was not a fashionable neighbourhood, and its inhabitants were ‘small dress-makers, bird-stuffers and “people who wrote”’.10 Later in the nineteenth century, that part of 23rd Street was a forerunner of Broadway with theatres and ‘continuous daily vaudeville’ across the street from what became the Chelsea Hotel. A pioneering film by Edwin S. Porter, What Happened on 23rd Street, made for Thomas Edison’s production company in 1901, records the place and time when Stella and Albert lived nearby. The film offered a glimpse of a woman’s skirt suddenly blown up by a draught from a hot air shaft, to her horror and the amusement of passers-by.11 In 1955 (the year Arthur Jeffress opened his Mayfair art gallery) Billy Wilder released The Seven Year Itch, the film in which Marilyn Monroe’s iconic scene echoed what had happened on 23rd Street back in 1901 but with lots of added sex appeal. The Jeffress family has a long history in Virginia in the southern United States, where their money was derived from farming, particularly tobacco, supported by slavery. Following Albert’s move to London to join BAT, he quickly rose to be on its board and finally became a Deputy Chairman in 1913. Descriptions of his son usually refer to Arthur’s family wealth and American nationality; Arthur is often described as ‘exotic’, too. Stella Rosenfield Jeffress’ family history is less clear than that of her husband, but unravelling the complexity reveals a significant aspect to Arthur’s life. His Jeffress ancestors had a proud history of WASP tradition; Stella’s family would have been considered inferior by many in both Virginia and London. She was born on 8 May 1880 in New York according to her passport applications. Her name is variously given on official documents as Adelhaid, Adelaide, Adèle and eventually she lived out her life as Stella Adelaide. Arthur inherited his mother’s dark good looks and certainly his friends in later life liked to weave a romantic tale, encouraged by Arthur and some of his decor, that he was Armenian (‘Jeffressian’) or Persian. His cousin Henry Hill wrote in 1964 to their mutual cousin Robert Jeffress: I am surprised at mention of Persian background. I would be much more sympathetic to Chinese, which I have always felt in the Jeffress eyelid. If there was a legend in London, I can well believe that Arthur would have been delighted and do nothing to discourage it.12

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Arthur’s brother Randolph ‘had no idea what the meaning was of the legend that Arthur had Persian ancestry’.13 His cousin Robert paid no heed to any of this and added: ‘We had been to his house and Art Gallery in London but never did see the “Palace” that Arthur owned in Venice. It just seemed to have slipped our minds.’14 Virginia put fancy Venice in its place. There was also an acceptance amongst his English acquaintances, in the 1920s at least, that Arthur was a Levantine Jew. It is clear that his mother came from a Jewish and German background and the Jeffress family were well aware of her heritage.15 In 1880, the US census shows that Arthur’s maternal grandparents Joseph and Rosalie Rosenfield and their family lived at 264 West 34th Street, in midtown Manhattan near 8th Avenue, between today’s Penn Station and Macy’s department store, the area known as Hell’s Kitchen. Joseph had no occupation but was sufficiently comfortable financially to be supporting a wife, three sons (aged five, four and three), a daughter (Adèle, aged two or so), his father-in-law Elias Lowenthal who had been born in Hamburg about 1816, a nineteen-year-old sister-in-law Henrietta Lowenthal and one Irish servant. Joseph was born in Prussia about 1825 but there are no certain traces of him, nor of the Lowenthals, arriving in the US. Stella’s mother Rosalie re-married sometime in the early 1880s. She had been born in Hamburg about 1855 and Joseph was thirty years older, so she was probably widowed early. Rosalie’s second husband, Hermann Schoenberg, arrived in the United States in 1880 and became a naturalized citizen six years later. By that point he had married Rosalie and was living in her previous marital home on West 34th Street, giving his occupation as an hotel proprietor, sharing the business to which she turned when widowed. By June 1900, her daughter (Stella) Adelhaid was married; their son Joseph Randolph was one month old and an Irish nurse looked after him. The couple had married in New York on 19 February 1899. But Adelhaid also appears in the same 1900 census described as single and still living at home with her mother and stepfather. Adelhaid Rosenfield’s date of birth is now given as 8 May 1879, rather than 1880, and she has three older brothers, Solomon, Jerome and Max. Another earlier census lists them as Sala, Romeo and Marx; names and dates in the census are notoriously inaccurate,

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Arthur Jeffress

subject to the hearing, spelling and subtraction skills of the recorder or the accent of the householder; this is the case with Stella’s birth date. In 1900 Rosalie’s second husband Hermann was a railroad conductor and they had a son Edgar Elias, born in 1889. Max (or Marx) was a book-keeper and the other sons employed as clerks, even eleven-year-old Edgar, an error that suggests the census-taker might have made a few other mistakes that day and failed to update information about Adelhaid from ten years previously. In 1915, Stella Jeffress had a problem locating her birth certificate. This serious contradiction of facts – Adelhaid recorded in two places, with this range of names, birth dates, married and single all at once – might suggest mistaken identity or very clumsy research on my part. However, by 1910, Herman and Rosalie Schoenberg, with Edgar, Max and Jerome, as well as Jerome’s own seven-year-old son Harold and a newspaper editor as a lodger, were living in a handsome brownstone elevator apartment block at 101 West 118th Street. This is the address that Mrs Stella Adelaide Jeffress gave when she sailed alone to New York from London in June 1914, linking them all inextricably, Harlem with Harrow. She probably travelled for her mother’s funeral. 101 West 118th Street is on the corner of Lenox Avenue (the section now called Malcolm X Boulevard) in the fashionable neighbourhood of West Harlem. Edward Burra painted here in the 1920s and Irving Berlin celebrated this district in the original version of Puttin’ on the Ritz in 1928, in which smart black Harlemites strutted their stuff. The Jeffress dynasty lived in an entirely different milieu, a proud Virginian family, indeed one of the First Families of Virginia. Arthur’s father, Albert Gustavus Jeffress II, was born on 1 April 1875 in Charlotte County, in the central southern part of Virginia. His father, also Albert Gustavus, married three times, first to Sarah Puryear with whom he had eight children. Her father was a wealthy farmer in Mecklenburg County. Sarah died aged forty-four in 1866, leaving five surviving children: Mary, John, Sarah, Lena and the influential Thomas Fox Jeffress. Albert Jeffress I married again in 1871 and his new wife would become Arthur Jeffress’ grandmother. Ella Elizabeth or Bessie, née Smith, was twentyseven when she married Albert and they had five more children themselves. She too died aged forty-four in 1888, when her children Alese, Albert

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Gustavus II, Henry and Anita were aged sixteen, thirteen, eleven and six respectively. A baby, Boswell, had died in 1882, the same year Anita was born. Bessie came from the Clarksville area of Virginia and her obituary referred to her, rather mysteriously, as ‘too spirited for her own good’.16 By the time of Bessie’s death from pancreatic cancer, her step-children, Mary, John, Sarah, Thomas Fox and Lena, were all independent adults. Her widower, now aged sixty-eight, then married for the third time. His financial interests were extensive and he outlived all his brothers and sisters by more than twenty years. Albert Jeffress I became a farmer himself and, by 1860, had eight slave houses and kept twenty-two black slaves. By 1830 Albert was sufficiently well established to build a large house called Red Oak Grove in Charlotte County, where he established a store, a post office and a licensed ‘ordinary’ (a type of inn) and was sheriff of Charlotte County. He became involved in selling and distributing tobacco; his second wife Bessie’s home town of Clarksville had the oldest tobacco market in the world. When Albert Jeffress I died in 1893, his obituary painted a sentimental picture of his slaves in mourning.17 The entrepreneur of the subsequent generation, Albert and Sarah’s son Thomas Fox Jeffress, started out as an accountant then became a highly successful tobacco, paper and cotton manufacturer and property developer. Thomas and his wife Kate Lee Miller lived in Meadowbrook Manor, Chesterfield County, which gave its name to a popular brand of American Tobacco Co. cigarettes. Thomas Jeffress’ business partner was Lewis Ginter, who became a partner in the Allen & Ginter tobacco company, which introduced innovations such as new technology for rolling cigarettes, collectable cards and the use of local Virginia tobacco. In 1890 Ginter’s company combined with that of James Buchanan Duke to form the American Tobacco Company. British American Tobacco was then formed in 1902, when the United Kingdom’s Imperial Tobacco Company and American Tobacco formed a joint venture. This resulted, ultimately, in the inheritance from his father that allowed Arthur Jeffress to become an English art collector and dealer. Thomas Jeffress also helped create the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden in Richmond, Virginia, and became head of the Jeffress family in that state after

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Arthur Jeffress

his father’s death. Meadowbrook and its gardens were later emulated by his English half-brother and sons. Through Thomas Jeffress, Albert Jeffress and his friend Charles Tilden Hill made their start and (in Albert’s case anyway) their fortune in British American Tobacco. Albert joined the company as an accountant in 1895, first in New York and then in New Jersey.18 Arthur’s aunt, Alese Randolph Jeffress, became a de facto mother to her younger siblings, Albert, Henry and Anita, from about the age of sixteen because they hated their new stepmother. Alese announced that she was going to raise Anita: ‘She made her clothes and mothered her so the bond between them was very great.’19 Alese married Thomas West Harris in 1899 from Meadowbrook and by 1900 they were living in Westchester County, New York; Anita (known as Neenee) lived with them. Later, the family moved to Berkeley, California, where Thomas Harris worked for the American Tobacco Company’s West Coast branch and later became president of The Tobacco Company of California. They had four children, the youngest of whom was Janie, exactly her cousin Arthur’s age, and she often features in holiday snaps with him. She also moved to England when she married and stayed in touch with her cousins Randolph and Arthur, exchanging letters with Arthur during the war and representing the rest of the family at his memorial service. Albert and Anita both later settled in England. Their brother Henry Fulton joined the American Tobacco Company before dying in the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918 and his wife Frances Summers Rogers, Arthur’s Aunt Fan, remained close to the Jeffress family until her death in 1958. She was born in Kentucky and, rather charmingly, cites her reasons for travel on her passport application aged thirty-five as ‘recreation and education’. Aunt Fan had lost her only son, Henry Fulton II, to meningitis when he was six and her husband died eight years later, so her attachment to her nephew Arthur, just a year younger than her little son, was important to her and she left him money in her will. Her great-niece Jane Hill remembered that she ‘stuck out the war’ with a couple of servants in the Plaza Hotel, New York.20 Jane’s father Henry recalled that: just even thinking of her makes me want to walk straighter. What a fabulous carriage she had; and I will never forget the terrible scolding she gave me for

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coming into the 59th Street entrance to the Plaza once when I was meeting her (I was down at the Barbizon Plaza) as she said that a Jeffress could never do other than come in the front door – even to the inconvenience of walking another two blocks.21 The family recalled her as the epitome of an exquisite and gracious lady – spent the rest of her life visiting, traveling all over the world, staying at the finest hotels everywhere. Wore widow’s weeds until her death. Loved by everyone. Bowed to by head waiters all over the world. Restless and unhappy – always exquisitely groomed. A sad woman.22 It is no wonder that she and Arthur were fond of each other. When the Jeffresses moved to London in 1902 they chose Acton as their first home, giving Arthur Jeffress the least likely address of his life.

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2 Acton and tobacco

About six miles west of central London, house-building in Acton increased greatly in the first few years of the twentieth century, while the electrification of trams caused property values nearby to rise sharply. The largest property locally, Acton Hill House and grounds, had been sold in 1877 to William Willett, a builder and property developer. Almost immediately Willett laid out Heathfield Road, Avenue Crescent and Avenue Gardens and began to build houses in these gently curved and linked roads to create Mill Hill Park, an early model of the garden suburb with good commuter potential. In 1879, Mill Hill Park underground station (now Acton Town on the Piccadilly line) opened. Mill Hill Park became an attractive private estate with gates at its Avenue Road entrance forming a cul-de-sac that acted as a barrier to working-class South Acton. By 1885, several large houses had been built, mainly at the Avenue Road end. William Willett, father and son, both earned a substantial reputation as builders of first-rate houses, not only in Mill Hill Park but also in more fashionable and central South Kensington and Chelsea, Hampstead and – beyond London – in Hove and Chislehurst. Their head office occupied the south side of Sloane Square in Chelsea. They employed their own architects and took pains to oversee much of the constructional and design detail themselves, and in particular, they created deliberate contrasts between individual houses which they built with good quality bricks, tiles and Portland stone. Their homes were in a style that echoed architect Richard Norman Shaw’s version of Arts and Crafts, serene and cosy, which was much sought after at the time and flourished in Bedford Park in west London. The Willets produced a more 13

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Arthur Jeffress

affordable version in a production-line manner and, to guarantee the best quality internal and external fixtures and fittings, set up a factory in 1900 for their own and other developments. A contemporary brochure for Willett’s Workshops advertises ‘marble floors, mantles, wall linings [. . .] internal and external stonework, stone mantel decorations [. . .] oak panelling and ceiling decoration [. . .] made from well-seasoned wood and with the best workmanship’.1 In particular, the Willetts believed ample window light to be an essential element in all their homes and Willett Senior was a vigorous campaigner for Daylight Saving Time. The Park had no pavements and the roads were gravelled across their entire width, giving a sense of space and elegance. Socially, Mill Hill Park had private lawn tennis and cricket clubs as well as events such as dinners, concerts and ‘Cinderellas’ (annual dances which ended at midnight). A ball at the Priory Constitutional Club in 1901, the year before Stella and Albert arrived, was described as ‘in every way satisfactory’ and that prim comment says much about the tone of the district. The local tennis club had members from all three roads and from further afield – in Holland Park, Hammersmith, Bedford Park, Ealing, even Fleet Street. In his obituary, Albert was described as an expert lawn tennis player and the Mill Hill Park club had four grass courts, a golf putting and croquet area. Like the cricket club, the tennis club held social events, among them an annual fête and café chantant. One was reported in the Acton Gazette: The grounds presented a most charming appearance, outlined with hundreds of fairy lights and Chinese lanterns. Chairs were arranged around little decorated tables, so guests could be seated or promenade. Entertainments included performances by the Blue Viennese Band, a cornet solo, such recitations as The Telegram by Miss Florence Watson, and a special mime act, the Living Marionettes.2 By 1895, twenty-two houses had been built on Heathfield Road. Arthur was born there in 1905 and by 1906 A.G. Jeffress is listed in the telephone book in a house named Briardene. Cosy and refined, Acton was still a strange choice to have been made by a young couple from Manhattan. The Willetts clearly placed their adverts cleverly or one of Albert’s colleagues knew the estate. A more obvious choice was made by their shipboard companions the Hoovers, exact

Acton and tobacco

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contemporaries but not yet with any children, who moved first to the London outskirts near Walton-on-Thames to a house called The White House, then to a more central flat in Hyde Park Gate, south of the Park. They finally lived in a large villa, The Red House near Holland Park, until their return to the United States in 1917.3 Although the Jeffresses, too, eventually acquired a similar stately mansion, they did not immediately follow the Hoovers’ more confident trajectory. Instead, the Jeffresses moved more slowly into a middle-class British background, first living in a newly built, comfortable house with space for a maid and a garden for their small son. Acton was an affordable and reasonably spacious London suburb with solid, modern houses, a lively social life and good transport links. Soon they also had family nearby; on 29 December 1903, Charles Tilden Hill married Albert’s youngest sister Anita Jeffress at St Mary’s, Acton, and settled in neighbouring Ealing. Anita Jeffress, only six years old when her mother died, had been living with her elder sister Alese; Charles Tilden Hill had lived with his parents in Richmond, Virginia, where his father was superintendent in a waterworks. The Jeffresses and the Hills had made a move across the Atlantic in strong contrast to their previous lives and neither couple emerged from the move with happy consequences. In February 1905, Albert Jeffress was the first American director to be elected to the new BAT London board.4 Exactly nine months later, on Tuesday 21 November 1905, Stella gave birth to their second child, Arthur Tilden Jeffress. Arthur’s mother chose to re-name herself Stella, possibly using a given middle name, and to anglicise Adelhaid to Adelaide. The name her English baby was given reflects the time and place of his birth rather than either family’s history. Arthur was an uncommon name in the US but popular in England because of the fame of Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, and the Victorian interest in Arthurian legend, especially Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. More currently, Margaret, daughter of Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught, married Gustav Adolf of Sweden in June 1905. This made a glamorous and romantic link between the names Arthur, Albert Gustavus and the British Royal Family as Prince Arthur was Victoria and Albert’s son. King Gustav VI

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Arthur Jeffress

Adolf, an art connoisseur, visited Arthur’s gallery in 1960 and the story made the papers. The Royal Family was a subject of even greater interest than usual in every newspaper just as the Jeffress family arrived in England. They came during the very first months of the Edwardian era, halfway between the death of Queen Victoria in January 1901 and the coronation of Edward VII in August 1902. It was also just the moment when public outcry obliged Arthur Conan Doyle, who became Sir Arthur in 1902, to bring back his beloved character Sherlock Holmes in a further adventure with The Hound of the Baskervilles. Arthur was a perfect choice of an English name for their second son and his middle name, Tilden, was in honour of his new uncle Charles. It can only be hoped that Arthur Tilden’s initials were not in acknowledgement of American Tobacco as he would surely never have forgiven his parents for that. In 1906, Charles Tilden Hill was also elected to the Board of British American Tobacco.5 He and Anita had two sons in the same pattern as their Jeffress cousins: the elder son, Bill, was born in New York in 1910, followed in London by Albert Henry Hill in 1913, named to return the compliment to his uncle and continue a family tradition, but always called Henry. The British American Tobacco Company was a joint venture created to end an intense trade war: the parent companies agreed not to trade in each other’s domestic territory. From 1905, when he was elected to the Board, Albert Jeffress was given special responsibility for relations between London and China. By 1912, BAT had three factories in Shanghai. In 1911, the US government had sued tobacco companies in a move to remove trade restraints. British American Tobacco and American Tobacco were among the defendants, although the outcome harmed neither company. American Tobacco sold all of its shares in BAT, mostly to British investors, and BAT was floated on the London Stock Exchange. Directors of BAT could buy its new shares for 30 shillings each; they were immediately worth £5. BAT was now back under the control of James Buchanan ‘Bucky’ Duke and he moved from New York to London, building new headquarters at Westminster House on Millbank (near the seat of government) in 1915. Duke rented an impressive home in Mayfair, while his magnificent James B. Duke House on 5th Avenue, New York, was completed in 1912.

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The Jeffress family, meanwhile, settled in England for life. Both parents maintained their American citizenship and tax status throughout their lives, but their sons eventually became naturalized Britons. By 1908, the Jeffress family had left Acton and was living in North London with two servants, sisters Edith and Mary Bentley, in a house they named Powhatan at 12 Lyon Road, Harrow. This has now been demolished but the road, not far from Harrow-on-the-Hill station, is leafy and, again, the house was a modern one. Its name was a homage to the Powhatan native Indian tribe of Virginia and in particular to Powhatan, the father of Pocahontas, who married the Englishman Captain John Smith. Like the Hills they visited America regularly, making their first return journey home from when Arthur was a year old. Charles and Anita Hill travelled extensively for the company as well as to and from the US on family visits. They moved house much more frequently and over a greater area than Albert and Stella, reflecting Anita’s uneasiness about settling in England. They were living at The Anchorage, Chislehurst, Kent, from round about 1908, probably in another of the Willetts’ housing developments. In 1909, as the Jeffresses left Acton, the Hills moved to a mansion flat at The Priors on East Heath Road, near Hampstead Heath in north London, and Emily, the middle of the three Bentley sisters who worked for both families, was their cook. About 1912, the Hills took over Powhatan when the Jeffresses moved again, and Henry Hill was born there in 1913. Randolph Jeffress was sent away to Seafield School, a preparatory school run by Mr and Mrs Henry Granville Coghlan in Bexhill-on-Sea, Sussex. Several of Randolph’s fellow pupils came from the Harrow area but his younger brother Arthur was not sent away to join him. Arthur instead attended Orley Farm Preparatory School in Harrow, close to home, from January 1914. Orley Farm School had been founded in 1850 and took its name from Anthony Trollope’s novel, a fictitious description of one of the school’s buildings previously owned by the Trollope family, and, by 1901, it transferred to new premises in Harrow and developed close links to the famous public school. By January 1914, Randolph was a pupil there and Albert Jeffress II already had a nearby English estate to emulate Red Oak Grove and Meadowbank Manor.

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3 Harrow and the Far East

In 1912, Arthur’s father Albert made plans to live in a setting appropriate to his role as Vice Chairman of BAT. He acquired Kenton Grange, a substantial house in Kenton, the northern part of Harrow, ‘only about 9 miles by road from the Marble Arch’.1 Much more of a village than Acton, Harrow nonetheless trebled in size between 1881 and 1911 but after World War I the population of Kenton itself still barely exceeded 250. Green fields would extend across to Stanmore for a further decade and the Jeffress’ estate was surrounded by five farms. Much of the development nearby was grand in scale, with large houses built on the slopes of Harrow Hill after the opening of the Metropolitan line tube station in 1880. Kenton’s railway station – a ten minute walk from Kenton Grange – opened in 1912 with overground trains to Euston, while the tube station on the Bakerloo line opened in 1917. Kenton achieved the ultimate suburban status briefly in 1948 when the first few episodes of the BBC Home Service’s soap opera Mrs Dale’s Diary were set there before the Dales moved on.2 The Thomas Fox Jeffresses visited their half-brother’s family in 1910 and again in 1921, by which time Albert and Stella had one son at leading public school, the other son in the tobacco business back home in Virginia and an impressive estate and house in which to offer hospitality. There is no record of Stella’s mother and stepfather ever coming to stay but a visit from her halfbrother and his wife, Arthur’s Uncle Edgar and Aunt Josie, is captured in a photograph in Arthur’s album. While Briardene and Powhatan had been very modern, with new houses continuing to be built nearby, Kenton Grange was over 100 years old and designed to look much older. Today it is completely central to a suburb but was 19

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Arthur Jeffress

then quite countrified, extensive and charming. John Betjeman, a contemporary of Arthur who lived half an hour away in Highgate, was always acute in his descriptions of class position and recalled his own family’s small villa and the neighbouring Burdett-Coutts (public housing) estate in the era just before 1914.3 Both were ‘lower’ than the sort of people who had carriages and servants taking care of everything behind garden walls.4 The Jeffresses became these ‘carriage folk’ and eventually entered English society behind garden walls via a strange route from Acton and Lyon Road, Harrow. The sale particulars for the Grange refer to its approach along winding carriage drives.5 These are distinctions of which Arthur grew to be very aware, happier to joke that he was born in Toilet Seat, Idaho, than admit to Acton as his birthplace. The house was originally a cottage orné known as Kenton Lodge built on the south side of Kenton Green in 1803–07 by John Lambert. It was later extended between 1865 and 1896 when the facade was altered by mock timbering to lend an ambience of comfortable stockbroker ‘Tudorbethan’ design. The estate agent’s advert of 1912 that caught Albert’s eye describes Kenton Grange as having 155 acres suitable for polo, golf and hunting. It was described as a charmingly old-fashioned country house.6 It had a hall, four reception rooms, billiard room, conservatory, thirteen bedrooms and dressing rooms and one bathroom. The morning room led to an aviary; there was a library, a Japanese room or boudoir and the hall was lined with Japanese leather paper. The very substantial grounds included stables, three tennis and croquet lawns, a small rookery, two paddocks, wilderness walks, a brook, a boat house and a lake island summerhouse. There was a rustic tea house and, more robustly, an engine and power house with a tower observatory. The kitchen gardens had separate glasshouses for vines, carnations, melons, tomatoes, cucumber and seakale; there was also a double peach house, a fernery and an ice house. The garden immediately around the house (now St Luke’s Hospice) is still very charming, while the rest of the grounds form two very large public parks. The owner whose death occasioned the sale to Arthur’s father was John Gwynne, scion of a distinguished engineering family. He and his Americanborn wife Agnes were childless and many of the alterations to Kenton Grange would have been made in their time. Gwynne was a sportsman and horseman but converted some of the stabling at Kenton Grange to workshops and created

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the pumps that undoubtedly intrigued Randolph. The family company produced pumps of all sizes, often powered by their own steam engines, and ‘Gwynne Hammersmith’ still appears on downpipes in the Grange’s stable block, which Randolph later used for his racing cars and for his model railway engines. Briefly, in the 1850s, The Grange was owned by the Sang family, and their large number of children. Frederick Sang Senior and Junior were both artists responsible for the decoration of the Conservative Club in St James’s. The estate had previously included a home farm, a stud farm and two picturesque lodges. Stella and Albert modernized their house to provide eleven bedrooms and four bathrooms, introduced a seventeenth-century fireplace, wooden panelling in the hall and a new quite modest staircase with a delightful set of tiny drawers built into its underside. A large carving of a cherub’s head on the balustrade, framed by wings and with a cheerful grin, is tucked beside the door to the garden room. It might have been modelled on Arthur. The front door is rather modest but opens directly into a large entrance hall which was used as the dining room. It is in two sections, which could be screened or curtained off, perfect for entertaining. The ceiling has elaborate plasterwork and oak panelling covers the walls. The hall leads to a drawing room also with good plasterwork, a frieze of vines and a fine ceiling roundel depicting the months of the year. The morning room and aviary to the right of the front door have left their traces in two stained glass windows with designs of blue morning glory flowers and small birds. The other windows of the house are generally mullioned and some of the leading is curved into Gothick arches: the architectural styles are certainly mixed. According to the Jeffress family, Stella was only allowed to choose the furnishings in their bathroom, which was cerise and purple; by implication, vulgar.7 A friend of Randolph from Harrow recalled that when he first knew him, there were twelve members of staff: butler, housekeeper, two housemaids, three gardeners, two carpenters, chauffeur, mechanic and nanny.8 Three of them were the Bentley sisters: Mary, Emily (no longer working for Charles and Anita Hill) and Edith, later remembered in the wills of both Albert and Arthur, who was probably Arthur’s nanny from his birth when she was twenty. In 1912, when they moved in, Arthur was six and Randolph was twelve. Kenton Grange appears to have been the perfect setting for an Edwardian

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childhood of comfort and pleasure for two years at least. Arthur’s photograph albums show plenty of evidence of games, guests, parties, Randolph playing his gramophone on the terrace, Stella in the greenhouses and pets including rabbits, Bill the smooth-haired fox terrier and later Arthur’s Great Dane, Baron. Baron arrived as a puppy in 1920 perhaps to bring some machismo into Arthur’s life. Randolph would only have been home for school holidays from about 1908 and then left home in 1918; their father was often absent and a huge guard dog was useful. Randolph went to Harrow in January 19149 and Arthur to school at Orley Farm;10 World War I broke out in August. Arthur’s extensive photograph albums contain no images that refer to the impact of war, except for a loyal record of General Pershing and his American troops in London in 1917, probably the first of the military parades Arthur adored throughout his life. The family spent most of 1914–18 in the Far East. In 1914, ‘Bucky’ Duke, who had moved from New York to London to assume control of BAT, returned promptly to the US at the outbreak of war, leaving the five Vice Chairmen, Jeffress included, in charge.11 Production of cigarettes for the Chinese market stopped in Britain and moved to the US so that BAT’s British factories could concentrate on War Office requisitions.12 In February of the following year, six months into the war, the Jeffress family sailed from Liverpool to New York on the Lusitania and then on to China. Arthur’s photograph album shows many images of his mother and himself in China, then Japan, Korea and Honolulu, shore visits on their trips to and fro. Travel for adventure and escape was to become central to his life. In 1917, Orley House records show that in many subjects he plunged from top of the class to bottom.13 Arthur is marked as absent in January 1918: he was in China and Japan again for most of that year but still sat the Harrow entrance exams. The name of his tutor is not recorded, but Arthur was successful. In December 1918, a month after the Armistice, Arthur and his parents sailed from Liverpool to New York and the family then returned east once more. In May 1919 they sailed back from Kobe to California, presumably visiting Alese and family, before returning home in time for Arthur to go to Harrow in September.

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Randolph left school at Easter 1917, just at the point the United States entered the war. In 1918 Randolph, his father and his cousin Robert Miller Jeffress all completed their US draft registration, giving Meadowbrook as their home address, but only Robert was called up. In 1918, Albert’s brother Henry died, followed by his brother John just a year later. In early January 1919, Albert made his will in New York, prompted by these early deaths. Back at Kenton Grange after the war, life and travel for Arthur and his parents became more conventional, as attested by photograph of holidays to all the favoured nearby resorts of the English middle classes: Wales in 1919; the Grosvenor Hotel in Swanage in 1920; Lynton – ‘Little Switzerland’ – in North Devon in 1921 (with a tiny photo of their new Rolls-Royce collaged on to the page); and Dinard, on the north coast of France, in 1922. Randolph was by now resident in Virginia, under the care of his Uncle Thomas, and entering an apprenticeship in the inevitable tobacco trade. His new American life is captured in photographs showing him playing the banjo and about to go up in a plane. These photographs, carefully organized and later annotated by Arthur, provide evidence of the exterior of Kenton Grange and holidays; we can never know, however, how the members of the family got on with each other or how they occupied themselves other than on long, hot summer days when the camera captured happy moments. There is every reason to believe that Arthur’s parents were a very devoted couple from the little that is known about them. Albert played lawn tennis and loved his garden.14 By 1922, when BAT had taken over the Garland Steamship Corporation, there was a freighter named after him.15 Albert travelled extensively for BAT, often with his wife. They entertained regularly and she had a household staff of twelve to manage. Stella also embroidered. (Arthur recalled in the 1950s how he watched firemen rescuing his mother’s embroidered cushions from his house fire in Pelham Crescent, leaving his paintings to burn.)16 Randolph remains shadowy until later in life but had a passion for engines and all matters technically modern and sophisticated – cars, trains and colour cameras – so the power house and observatory probably provided inspiration as well as sanctuary from his younger brother. Arthur’s father was described as scholarly, an ardent book-lover and devoted to the growing of specimen roses.17 In the 1920s, he found time to develop the

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eastern part of his estate (possibly where the original lodges had been) to build a group of cottages named Brookfield Close, a feeble echo of the picturesque style of the original manor house.18 He is also listed in the phone book with a flat in central London in a recently built mansion block at 82 Portland Place, just north of Regent Street. Arthur went to Harrow in September 1919,19 just before his fourteenth birthday and was confirmed into the Church of England, putting his mother’s Jewish heritage behind him – in theory at least. As with the rest of Stella’s background, this was assimilated into the Virginian, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant identity of the Jeffress family and Arthur describes his religion, on an application form in later life, as Episcopalian.20 His school career was not particularly distinguished, although academically satisfactory: he won a prize in the fifth form but he was certainly no sportsman. He remained a private in the compulsory Officer’s Training Corps, but in his last year gained a Certificate A in the spring OTC exams. He was placed third in the lists so was more than competent and practical, as his later war career also suggests. Arthur lived at first in Garlands, a kind of holding house for about five or ten younger boys before leaving this ‘Shell’ of his first year for one of the larger, more distinctive and competitive houses, following in Randolph’s steps to Druries.21 His housemaster was Norman Kenneth Stephen, who had been the Assistant Classics Master since 1888 and previously at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took a double first in Classics. He had also been a firstclass cricket player. ‘Clever, cool, witty and incisive; whose swift insight and capacity for freezing courtesy and shafted irony was equal to any occasion.’22 What a lot Arthur learned from him. Tediously, N.K. Stephen was known as Inky (a double pun on his initials and the Stephens’ brand of ink), but also described as ‘that prince of masters’ by Dornford Yates in one of his humorous Edwardian elegies As Berry and I Were Saying.23 Yates dedicated two of his stylish thrillers to him as well. Druries was the first of Harrow’s ‘large’ boarding houses, established in the 1790s by Henry and Ben Drury who, as father and son, ran the House from 1806–63 and re-built it in the neo-Gothic style, making it John Betjeman’s favourite of all Harrow’s buildings. Masters ran houses as their own businesses till the 1930s

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and amongst Druries’ earlier boarders were the Lords Byron and Palmerston.24 Boys ate all their meals in their House; fagging and beating remained accepted up to the 1970s and the school uniform has remained virtually the same from the nineteenth century.25 The Headmaster in Arthur’s time was Rev Dr Lionel Ford, who reorganized the timetable, placed a new emphasis on hard work and abandoned the traditional pupil-room system in which some teaching took place in a tutor’s own room. He introduced Spanish and Economics, and in 1917 abolished the distinction between Classical and Modern studies, introducing a number of specialist sixth forms.26 He was also: a man of massive self-confidence (and hubris) but devoted to Harrow and popular with the boys. His foremost interest was the education of his pupils [. . .] Ford was also a builder and the centre of the School was transformed in his time [. . .] One of his great delights was the piggery he kept at the bottom of the Head Master’s House garden. He was later Dean of York.27 Harrow began to change: the number of pupils increased from 450 to nearly 650, and between 1918 and 1922 many of the old guard of masters retired. Ford gave a gift of nine silent films to the school when he left and the boys gave his wife a fur coat.28 Arthur made friends at Harrow who would become important in his life in different ways over the next few years.29 These included Henry Clifford, who became a distinguished museum curator, and John ‘Budge’ Fraser, whose mother was the romantic opera singer Ruth Vincent and whose father was a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Royal Horse Guards: the perfect mix to impress Arthur. At Easter 1920 arrived Sidney ‘Wilf ’ Lovett, son of Major Berkeley Lovett, still a famous name in some quarters from his involvement in the notorious royal baccarat scandal. Clifford was someone whose approval Arthur longed for even forty years later; Fraser was his first boyfriend and Lovett’s whole family was of real importance to him in the mid-1920s until they all drifted apart. ‘Clifford and Fraser’ often appear in Arthur’s photographs from their time at Harrow, playing with the dogs at Kenton or dressing up, Clifford especially elegant as a Pre-Raphaelite damozel. The artist Eliot Hodgkin arrived at Harrow a term earlier than Arthur and remained a friend; the artists Edward Le Bas and Cecil Beaton were in the year

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above. Cecil recalled, rather inconsequentially, in his first volume of autobiography that he and ‘Boy’ Le Bas called the other pair Hodgepot and Jeffpot.30 Beaton and Jeffress always moved in circles that overlapped, not only at Harrow but at Cambridge, in the worlds of the Bright Young Things, Cairo in 1943, art, fashion, the Sitwells, Bébé Bérard, Pavel Tchelitchew, Pelham Crescent and Pelham Place, Venice and more, but they were never friends. It seems odd that Beaton bothers to remember such a small matter as a school nickname of someone who he otherwise never mentions. A recent history of Harrow states: Actually, neither Beaton nor many of his contemporaries was particularly ‘nice’. Extravagance of behaviour and dress, institutionalised bullying and casual sodomy were commonplace and only occasionally being brought to the notice of authorities. One reason for the apparent decadence of much of life at Harrow during the 1920s could be explained by the extreme overcrowding: houses became warrens, in many places delapidated [sic], crumbling, unsanitary, and unheated.31 The Harrow Song, Forty Years On, has an unforgettable chorus much parodied-not least because, with extraordinary inappropriateness, it has been adopted by many girls’ schools: Follow up! Follow up Till the field ring again and again, With the tramp of the twenty-two men Follow up! Follow up!32 Arthur must have delighted in that penultimate line, like so many schoolgirls after him (including the present author). In 1959, forty years on from his first term, Arthur attended the Royal Tournament as he did every year. He described it as The Royal Torture33 or Torment.34 Watching men in dress uniform on parade was an exquisite pain and (not always) an unconsummated pleasure. ‘Speech’ [Day] at Harrow is held in a semi-circular room designed by William Burges as a High Victorian version of the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, large enough to hold the entire school. Since World War II Harrow has had a distinguished history of staging Shakespearean plays in its own version of the ‘wooden O’, but not much is known about school or house plays during

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the 1920s. However, Arthur Jeffress took part in a dramatization of the Trial Scene from Dickens’ Pickwick Papers at Speech 1922 where he played Master Tommy Bardell, The Infant Phenomenon, son of Pickwick’s landlady, a nonspeaking part but one which required tears. His Mamma was played by the Hon. Somerset Maxwell, later Conservative MP for King’s Lynn who died at the Battle of El Alamein.35 At his final Speech in June 1923, Arthur shone. In a scene from Twelfth Night he played Maria, the archetypal cheeky, clever maid and his rendition of her ‘most excellent devil of wit’ was noted in The Harrovian magazine.36 Maria devises the plot to make a fool of Malvolio (Somerset Maxwell again) by tricking him into wearing yellow, cross-gartered stockings. The performance was reported in The Times but only because it was in front of the Old Harrovian Prime Minister and Mrs Baldwin.37 The stage, and performing in drag, became a very important part of Arthur’s future life and pleasure, while he was a student at Cambridge and for a while afterwards. 1923 is the point when Arthur Tilden Jeffress left the school and suburb of Harrow to create a role for himself on his own stage.

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4 Cambridge

Arthur left Harrow in June 1923 at the start of a heatwave summer and, a month before his eighteenth birthday, went up to Cambridge to begin a carefully designed new life. He read History at Pembroke College but Pembroke’s records show that he had previously been entered for the more glamorous Trinity.1 This had been N.K. Stephen’s college and an obvious trajectory from Harrow, and there is no known explanation for the switch. Pembroke, founded in 1347, has a series of beautiful courts and gardens, Christopher Wren’s lovely early chapel and Alfred Waterhouse’s High Victorian library. Apart from his developing passion for modern theatre, not a great deal is known of what else Arthur did while he was an undergraduate. The college is situated on Downing Street with Fitzbillies bakery to one side (Pembroke is the landlord) and the Fitzwilliam Museum a little further away. Fitzbillies was opened in 1922, just before Arthur went up, and was particularly notable for its Chelsea buns. After a brief closure in 2011, it remains so. During Arthur’s undergraduate years, the Fitzwilliam was under the directorship of Sir Sydney Cockerell and underwent major building work with support from the Courtauld family. The new Morley Galleries opened at the end of Arthur’s first year with paintings and sculpture displayed amongst furniture and decorative arts in the country house style, and with customary hyperbole and some accuracy, Cockerell later declared of the Fitz that he had turned it from a pigsty into a palace.2 Much of this taste – Venice and the grand country house approach to gallery decor (as well as hyperbole in advertising) – can be seen in Arthur Jeffress’ own later style.

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At Pembroke, the Master was William Sheldon Hadley, a classicist who had translated The Alcestes of Euripides but was primarily an historian.3 He bequeathed his library of books about Napoleonic history to Pembroke, and possibly to Arthur, a lifelong passion for Napoleon, the Bonaparte dynasty and its era throughout Europe.4 Arthur lived at 30 St Andrew’s Street, the site of today’s Grand Arcade shopping mall, a few moments’ walk from Pembroke, and near Robert Sayles’ department store, which was modern enough to introduce a gentleman’s clothing department the year before Arthur went up. What is clear from photographs throughout his life is that style – of clothes and mise en scène – was essential to Arthur’s idea of self. Within a very short time of arriving in Cambridge, he was wearing the very wide trousers known as Oxford bags, an aesthete’s fashion usually attributed to Harold Acton in Oxford from 1924. Robert Graves maintains that they were worn in Cambridge as early as 1922, and a photograph in Arthur’s album shows that he was certainly

Figure 4.1 Cambridge, 1925. Arthur, aged twenty, wears ‘Oxford’ bags and reveals his new, androgynous style.

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wearing wide white bags in 1925 with a very tight black polo-neck.5 He also wore kohl to emphasize his dark eyes, slicked back his hair and struck a pose. He looked sultry, highly androgynous. Whenever it was that his homosexuality was first acknowledged to himself or to others, he was clearly ‘out’ in Cambridge, where his persona was feminine and very knowing. At every stage of his life, within any group of photographs that includes Arthur, some of the pomposity or pretension will be counterbalanced by the cheery openness of his wide grin. That remained forever boyish and always made him look, apparently, delighted with life. He was about five feet eight inches in height, olive-skinned, darkhaired, with dark eyes and, as a young man at least, very slender. Apart from the theatre, his love of language was shown in the books he cherished. In particular amongst new books, he admired Proust (À la recherche du temps perdu in C.K. Scott Moncrieff ’s English translation was published for the first time from 1922) and he bought an early edition of Aldous Huxley’s Leda. It was, however, the work of Jane Austen and her comical follower E.F. Benson that he cherished throughout his life. Robert Melville, who helped to run Arthur’s gallery in the 1950s, recalled that Arthur created the E.F. Benson Society at Cambridge, but this was certainly not a formal group and is more likely to have been a group of undergraduate enthusiasts for Benson’s recent novels.6 Queen Lucia, the first of the Mapp and Lucia series, had been published in 1920 and Miss Mapp followed in 1922. Arthur would have to wait until 1927 for his next entrée into the world of ‘dear Riseholme and Tilling’ although Benson’s novels about social pretension, including the Dodo series and the pertinent Freaks of Mayfair, had appeared from 1893 onwards. It takes little imagination to imagine Arthur reading Queen Lucia in summer 1920 with glee on holiday at the Grosvenor Hotel in Swanage. The characters [. . .] are for the most part consistent and original (though one cannot fail to recognize the debt owed by Mrs. Weston to Miss Bates and by Lady Ambermere to Lady Catherine de Burgh). Indeed, it is the high quality and thoroughness of Mr. Benson’s latest work that suggests our only criticism. So very little restraint would have kept it within the limits of comedy and we do not feel that it gains in any way from the touches which incline to extravaganza.7

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The reviewer has made the obvious link between Miss Austen and Mr Benson. Perhaps a master at Harrow, with a sense of humour and insight, had introduced his pupils to Jane Austen’s most camp and exaggerated imitator and the idea of N.K. Stephens doing so is very convincing. Arthur’s wartime letters frequently recall Riseholme and compare army personnel to Miss Mapp, Lucia and Georgie Pillson and – never averse to the touches which incline to extravaganza himself – Arthur loved to quote what Robert Melville remembered, at least fifty years later, as the ‘convention of informality’ in a breakfast scene in which: only a couple of footmen were in waiting, and nobody said grace. Men stood about eating porridge, and then inspected the dishes on the sideboard. There were dishes of kedgeree, poached eggs and bacon, mushrooms from a forcing house, grilled chicken and cold ham and tongue. They then sat down to consume their selections: no fixed places.8 What Arthur relished here was the silly but reliable choreography of etiquette. He knew that fixed places underpinned English society. He also relished, in the Mapp and Lucia comedies, Benson’s wonderful ear for ridiculous codes of language. The inhabitants of Riseholme and Tilling invite each other to evenings of ‘Mozartino’, in order to hear a ‘po’ di mu’; as they leave they bid each other ‘au reservoir’ until even they get sick of such nonsense. For Arthur, like Benson a homosexual man, coded language was both a witty and intimate artifice and a means of protective cover. Arthur lived his whole life in coteries – public school, Cambridge, the theatre, the army ambulance service, the art world, emigrés in Venice – mainly male, often queer, each of which had its slang. The most distinctive version of English queer slang was Polari, which took elements of other languages and added personal invention so it could then be used to excluding effect in markets, theatres, fairgrounds, circuses and other closed, mainly male, groups. Much of it was borrowed from Romany and, with its own local emphasis, Polari (and other watered-down idiosyncratic versions) helped to disguise homosexual activity from hostile outsiders, especially plain clothes policemen. One version was used extensively in the Merchant Navy where many queer men worked on ships as sailors, stewards and entertainers, so this version would have been very familiar to Arthur. The letters he sent (those which are preserved at least)

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are mostly very discreetly and conventionally phrased, not often reflecting his spoken camp conversation. Nicky Haslam remembers that Arthur never merely offered his guests salad at dinner but always ‘salardyfoo’.9 Letters that Arthur received give much more of a flavour of the language that he and many of his friends used amongst themselves from the 1920s onwards: Dearest Ghirbozzone, It was Sir Arthur Bliss – no Lord Arthur Blissington to see you on Sat [. . .] It was heaven to see you – you’re a tonic, you are, and I haven’t laughed so much for ages [. . .] By ze By I wish you had come along with us after din. on Sat. – I really had a most engrossing time – but wearing. Perhaps you were wise to go to bed with Pheno Barbitone – or did you? With lots of Lovington Grange.10 Arthur was also still fluent thirty years later: ‘Of course he and Phyllis were (and, are) having a wild dottikins affair. How you could ever have wondered that passes my imaginaggers.’11 Back on stage in Cambridge was the first time Arthur had been able fully and legitimately to explore as an adult not only his love of words but also showing off, wearing and often designing, gorgeous women’s clothes and mimicking a wide range of female types. Observing the women who ran his home and cared for him as well as those who appeared in his favoured arch novels gave Arthur an awareness that he turned into a talent. Whether this play-transvestism was sexual is slightly beside the point as the university productions (not to mention the degrees) at Cambridge were open only to male students in his day. Arthur was physically and temperamentally suited to female roles but was only one amongst several people in each cast who had to cross-dress. When he later appeared on the professional stage he played male roles, albeit first in a chiton skirt then in sailor’s bell-bottoms. There is no doubt that he took his acting roles very seriously. He joined the Cambridge University Amateur Dramatic Club (ADC) straightaway on 21 October 1923 and, supported by Beaton and Le Bas, was elected on the same day as a new friend, Walter Meyjes.12 That year Arthur was in The Gyp’s Princess, a musical comedy, when Cecil Beaton was Princess Técla. ‘Boy’ Le Bas and Arthur performed various chorus roles, including a pair of very fetching

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vamps. Other characters included Mr Herbatious Border and Professor Basildon Bond: a gyp was a Cambridge name for a college servant, not a Gypsy. Arthur’s other early performances were for Nursery Productions, including Gerald Allen’s forgotten The Reincarnation, in which newly elected members of the ADC performed under the direction of second- and third-year tyros. By 1926, Arthur had a part in the rather more challenging Birds by Aristophanes and George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 Great Catherine (Whom Glory Still Adores). Arthur’s performance as the ‘sultry eyed heroine’ drew these reviews: ‘Mr. Jeffress took our breaths away as Catherine II. As a woman he is far more convincing than the clever caricatures of Mr. Beaton.’13 Of course Shaw wrote Great Catherine, one of his worst plays, in order to provide a part for A.T. Jeffress and in that respect he succeeded. Indeed Jeffress should never take other parts than queenly ones – both nature and art have fitted him for that purpose; and though it will be pleasant to see him in Edward II as Isabella, the ADC ought to produce Anthony and Cleopatra in the summer for him. In the present instance he was superb, as the applause testified [. . .] but Jeffress spoilt his dress by an ugly nosegay.14 There is a splendid photograph of Arthur as Great Catherine in the National Portrait Gallery, handsome, serious and looking a lot like his mother (see figure 4.3). Arthur designed the dresses for his role in this production. In March 1926, he did appear in Edward II for The Marlowe Society, which was supposed to transfer to London for a matinee charity performance, but this fell through. Influenza struck the cast, some of whom became ill only moments before the curtain went up, and the director Donald Beves (Dean of King’s) took over many parts at the very last minute (see figure 4.2). The Times noted that ‘the audience was frequently rocking with laughter on occasions which gave no textual justification for merriment’.15 Arthur was back at the ADC looking particularly flat-chested even for the style of the day in his own designs as Agata Renni, the pregnant heroine in Pirandello’s The Pleasure of Honesty, newly translated in 1923. The Times’ reviewer called him ‘restrained and extraordinarily natural’.16 Thirty-five years later, his friend Wilf Levett wrote to him still as Ag. As part of a Smoking Concert, in a spoof of Ibsen called The Sub-contractor, he appeared, pregnant

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Figure 4.2 Arthur as Isabella of Valois in an ADC production of Christopher Marlowe’s Richard II in 1926.

once more, as Vamp, the wife of Slump, a builder. This performance was well reviewed, too: ‘Why the ADC wants women, when it has such brilliant comediennes in its ranks, is beyond comprehension.’17 There had been two tense ADC meetings in Arthur’s time to resolve the problem of whether ladies from Newnham, Girton or members’ families should be invited to perform. When a motion was defeated in 1925 after heated discussion, it was resolved not to raise the topic again for another five years and women were not admitted till 1935. The same meeting also presented a silver bowl and ten guineas to Mrs Stubbings, who had been the ADC cleaner for fifty years, and decided to invite Miss Viola Tree and Miss Daphne du Maurier to tea.18 OUDS in Oxford employed professional actresses, forbidding female impersonation by students. During the summer, Arthur, Walter Meyjes and Joan Levett were performing in the West End in Robert Newton’s play Uneven Temperature at the Century Theatre on the Strand, in London.19 But the most remarkable performance

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Figure 4.3 Arthur as the Empress Catherine, 1926; ‘Of course Shaw wrote Great Catherine, one of his worst plays, in order to provide a part for A.T. Jeffress.’

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with which Arthur was involved was in November 1926, when Terence Gray opened his Cambridge Festival Theatre. Terence Gray has been described by his biographer as an: Irish aristocrat born in Suffolk in England, scholar and writer, Egyptologist, historian, playwright, essayist, director, producer, theatrical supremo, wine grower, racehorse owner, wanderer and traveller, and Buddhist/Taoist philosopher.20 Born in 1895, Gray grew up in Magog House, Cambridge, and left the University after a brief period. In 1920 he published the snappily titled The Life of the King of the South and North Kamaria, Daughter of the Sun, Hatshepsut, A Pageant of Court Life in Old Egypt in the Early XVIIIth Dynasty, Reconstructed from the Monuments. A Chapter of Egyptian History in Dramatic Form by Terence Gray. Two years later, Howard Carter opened Tutankhamen’s tomb and Gray went on an expedition to Egypt in his footsteps, publishing And in a Tomb were Found . . . in 1923. Immediately afterwards, he swerved course and began to work in the theatre. Cambridge had a range of theatres. The ADC, founded in 1855, had owned its own building in Jesus Lane from 1862. It was still largely confined to students from Trinity so The Footlights started in 1883 to expand the range of university productions. The Marlowe Society was formed in 1907 to revive Shakespearean plays and improve the standards of verse-speaking, while commercial competition came from The New Theatre. Terence Gray took over an old theatre on the Newmarket Road, designed in 1814 by William Wilkins, to add an experimental element to drama in Cambridge. He transformed the Regency building with the help of the architect Edward Maufe and removed the proscenium arch, curtain, boxes and pilasters, adding a hand-operated wooden stage-revolve. The stage opened to give access underneath and fan-shaped steps led down from the stage, allowing the performers to approach it from any direction. The new powerful German Schwabe lighting gantry was better than any other in the country, giving direct and coloured lighting that created dramatic and emotional effects, noted in all the reviews. The lighting system also projected images on to the forty-feet high curved wall or ‘cyclorama’ at the back of the stage, giving an astonishing sense of distance. This was the first to be seen in Britain.

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Gray was an innovator but was closely following ideas introduced by Edward Henry Gordon Craig, son of Ellen Terry and husband to Isadora Duncan, who was central to British modernist theatre as a scenic designer as well as author of theoretical writings. The architectural style of Gordon Craig’s designs, neutral, non-representational often with abstracted Egyptian character, was available to view in exhibitions staged each year in London between 1919 and 1925, often at the Leicester Galleries or the Dorien Leigh Galleries at Millais House in South Kensington (later Francis Bacon’s studio). Before Gray created his own theatre, Gordon Craig’s plans had not previously been put into practice anywhere in Britain. Gray discarded realism and focussed on abstraction, with the director as supreme artist and his actors as puppets. Gray’s cousin, the ballet dancer Ninette de Valois, was his Choreography Director and turned down an invitation from Diaghilev to appear at La Scala, Milan, in favour of working at the 1926 opening of the Festival Theatre. Gray created an equivalent of the open-air Greek auditorium but installed very comfortable seats, gave out programmes that could be read in the dark and provided seats at the back for latecomers. Two bars provided good wine and caviar sandwiches and there was an excellent roof-garden restaurant. The grand opening was inevitably delayed and the Festival Theatre’s first three productions were held at the old ADC theatre in Jesus Lane. This enabled the first performance in the new Festival Theatre to be a radical and experimental version of Aeschylus’ Oresteia in a new translation by R.C. Trevelyan. The actors wore stylized costumes and Picasso-like masks against an equally abstracted set. Their movement and use of voice was also non-naturalistic. The atmosphere is splendidly evoked by Paul Cornwell: On the opening night, the smell of new paint and sawdust was still in the air but the theatre was nicely warmed and the audience was greeted with the enticing aroma of freshly-brewed coffee mingled with the spicy smell of Gray’s Theatre Cup already set up on the counter of the new foyer bar. Outside the modernist front of doors, there was the imposing figure of the uniformed doorman with his umbrella by his side, ready for the rainy day. As the Gownsman reported with great excitement, ‘you’ve got to see the boo’ful green commissionaire’. Inside the doors, girls in silver and green wigs managed, certainly on the opening night, to produce wide smiles to welcome

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the audience and to encourage the purchase of copies of the theatre’s first programme called the Festival Review [. . .] which contained a long article on the use of masks written by T.S.G., already in his partially-if-not-quite, invisible state. The walls inside had bright, colourful patterns and both the foyer and the auditorium were lit with coloured flood-lights. The contrast with the bleak ADC with its single fire could not have been greater.21 The Libation Bearers, the second play in the trilogy, had its first performance in the Festival Theatre on 22 November 1926, the day after Arthur’s twentyfirst birthday. Orestes was played by Maurice Evans making his professional debut. Later, after a very distinguished Shakespearean and Shavian career, he played Samantha’s father in the television comedy Bewitched. Remarkably, Arthur had a part in this new professional company as Pylades, who speaks only once to persuade Orestes not to hesitate in his decision to kill his mother, Clytemnestra. This minor part – albeit a speaking one and pivotal to the plot – is the sort that might be given to a financial backer. Arthur possibly bought himself the role, investing in a major piece of new theatre and feeling, at a momentous time in his life, that he was part of a company of like-minded, forward-looking people. A contemporary review said: To open with the Oresteia was a magnificent gesture – a kind of nailing of the colours to the mast. Artistically, there can be no two minds about its success, and the sustained applause which lasted for more than five minutes after the curtain had been drawn suggests that its success is not only artistic.22 Arthur stayed in the company to appear in The Man Who Ate The Popomack a week later.23 The novelist Malcolm Lowry called the play brilliant: it is about the power of art which is compared to the popomack, a kind of smelly durianlike fruit, the colour of lapis lazuli. Anyone who eats it turns blue and stinks: the solution is for everyone to do the same thing, either wear a diving suit (like Salvador Dalí ten years later at the opening of the International Surrealist exhibition) or simply shoot themselves. Arthur was cast as ‘Man about Town’ who appears in an art gallery off Regent Street to declaim: ‘I hate this modern fantastic stuff; it’s morbid.’24 In real life, Arthur left Cambridge to play that exact role for the rest of his life after a complete change in his fortunes.

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In late 1924, Stanley Baldwin, of Harrow, Cambridge and the Conservative Party, had become prime minister once more. He returned the United Kingdom to the Gold Standard but, by the end of 1925, the British coal industry had collapsed, which would lead within a few months to a six-month miners’ strike, the General Strike and long, drawn-out mass unemployment. In January 1925, following another stint in China, Arthur’s parents had both sailed after Washington State, to visit Alese and family; they were home again in London, via New York, in March. By Christmas of the same year, Arthur Jeffress was just twenty years old and had gained a 2:1 at the end of Part I of the Cambridge History tripos.1 In between, in September 1925, Randolph had suddenly married the rather mysterious Marie P. Geoghegan in Portobello, Edinburgh. The marriage was ‘irregular’ – in Church of England or American Episcopalian eyes at least – as they married in a Scottish manse rather than a church. Clearly unhappy at the prospect of a tobacco company career, Randolph seems to have turned into a different creature, now as little like a typical Jeffress as his brother. At the time of the marriage, Randolph called himself a musician (one snap of him playing the banjo is the only background to the profession he gives on the certificate) while Marie was a dancing instructress, short-lived careers for both due to an unexpected change of fortune. Marie had been born in Liverpool to an Irish Catholic family and her father was, at the time of Marie’s marriage, an electrical engineer. The Jeffress family recalled her as a dime-a-dance hostess in a dive where Randolph played the banjo and ‘when Marie discovered how rich he was it went to her head’.2 In Jeffress family terms, this seemed to be a reprise of Albert and Stella’s romance. 41

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Another Jeffress marriage had failed not long before when Anita and Charles Tilden Hill divorced in 1920. Charles had a very lucky escape back in 1915 when he survived the torpedo attack on the Lusitania in May which killed 128 other Americans. The Hill family had travelled out on the Lusitania in April: Anita and the boys stayed on with the Harrises in California as Alese was very ill. Charles Hill later made a deposition about the attack: On the afternoon of Friday, 7 May 1915, Hill was on his way to an appointment with the ship’s stenographer when he stopped to chat with Chief Steward Jones on the starboard promenade deck. Jones said to Hill, ‘Good God, Mr. Hill, here comes a torpedo.’ Hill saw the periscope of a German U Boat and the wake of the torpedo coming towards them. Both Hill and Jones were hoping that the torpedo would pass in front of the ship and saw the torpedo strike the starboard side with ‘a noise like that made by the slamming of a door’. The second ‘dull, heavy, muffled’ explosion then followed. Hill then rushed below decks and spent several minutes trying to find Mary Brown, Beatrice Witherbee, and her son Alfred Scott. Reaching D-deck, he found water flooding through the portholes. Not finding his friends, he then went back to his cabin to get his dispatch case and overcoat. He then ran into his steward Percy Penny who then assisted Hill into a lifejacket though Penny did not have one on himself. Going back up on deck, Hill saw that the lifeboats were not being launched properly. He was about to get into one when a woman inside told him that the boat was already too full. He then climbed into Lifeboat 14 with ship’s barber Lott Gadd. The boat was lowered too quickly and smacked into the water right-side up. The lifeboat started leaking immediately, and it wasn’t long before the waterlogged boat capsized. As Hill saw Gadd swim away from the boat, Hill remembered that he had yet to pay Gadd for that week’s shave.3 Charles Hill was one of the few people still in Lifeboat 14 when it was picked up by the Indian Empire and when they reached County Cork he stayed on at the Rob Roy Hotel in Queenstown (now Cobh once more), as injuries to the

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skin on his legs prevented him travelling back to England immediately. The Hills were still living together when she applied for a new passport in June 1916, but in 1919 Anita and the children travelled back to California and remained there permanently, without Charles, and they later divorced. Anita never lost her Southern Belle accent nor settled well in England, so far from most of her family, with young sons and a busy husband. Charles was also very extravagant and Anita the complete opposite. He made her furious by buying a complete outfit of golf clothes and clubs to play one game in Honolulu. The Jeffress family recalls that ‘he had a finer car than the queen’s in London’ and he often embarrassed her socially by simply choosing not to be at home when she was entertaining.4 On her divorce, her brother Albert gave her a house across the street from Alese and Tom Harris, where she lived until her death. She was notorious for her stinginess and infuriated Tom by asking his advice about investments, then doing the exact opposite. He said she called the butcher to say ‘Don’t send the liver I ordered. The cat has caught a mouse!’5 Sadly, her sister Alese died in September 1925, aged only fifty-three, and Tom Harris re-married shortly afterwards. His very young new wife was a college friend of his daughter Cack. On 9 October 1925, after a short time in Kenton when his sister Fan came on a visit, Albert Jeffress left England alone on the Mauretania via New York for another visit to Shanghai where there was upheaval. On 30 May 1925, Chinese students had clashed with foreign police in an anti-imperialist demonstration in Shanghai. The British captain in charge ordered police to fire on a group and about a dozen Chinese, including some students, were killed. The resulting protest set off a General Strike in Shanghai. An even more serious incident took place on 23 June when an exchange of fire between British and French marines and cadets in an anti-imperialist parade killed fifty-two Chinese people, many of them civilians, wounding at least 117. Another strike inevitably resulted and led to a boycott which lasted for well over a year, seriously affecting trade. Hostility toward foreigners and their special privileges increased, which in turn enhanced the image of the Soviet Union and won support for the Nationalist Party in China. Apart from business travel for BAT, little is known about the lives that Albert and Stella led after their sons left home. Albert was by now renting a

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London flat in Portland Place near Regent’s Park, but whether to avoid a latenight journey home to Kenton after long evenings at BAT events or for his own more personal reasons is not known. It is not especially convenient for the BAT headquarters on Millbank but no scandal seems to be attached to this move. Marie Jeffress was living in the same block in 1935–6, however, by which time some scandal was indeed involved. There is a pair of enlarged photographs in Arthur’s album, given an elegiac page and inscribed ‘1925, Mother and Father’. Stella is no longer such a great beauty but handsome, serious and matronly. The other photograph shows a distant glimpse of Albert athletically stretching out for a return shot on his lawn tennis court. Just before Christmas, the family received the shocking news that Albert Jeffress had died of heart failure on 21 December on board the President Pierce, off Honolulu. The ship had left Shanghai on 10 December and had been due to arrive in San Francisco on the day before New Year’s Eve via Honolulu, which it reached on Christmas Eve, now carrying Albert’s body.6 Everyone had believed him to be in good health, to which the tennis photograph seems to bear witness. It was noted in an obituary that he could still challenge either of his sons to a tough game. He was travelling extensively and the company was flourishing, expanding back into the United States. Sir Hugh Cunliffe-Owen took over as BAT chairman after Duke retired in 1923. Duke then died in 1925, aged sixty-nine, on the day after Albert set sail. He left the equivalent of $1 billion dollars to his twelve-year-old daughter, Doris, ‘the richest girl in the world’. A local historian in Harrow believed, many decades later, that Albert Jeffress had committed suicide. There is no evidence for this whatsoever and confusion with reports of Arthur Jeffress’ own death must have given rise to the rumour. Albert was reported to be in splendid health on the voyage and chatted to the captain before retiring for the night to his cabin, where he suddenly collapsed. Stella Jeffress never fully recovered her mental health following her bereavement, which gives eloquent testimony to the shock and unhappiness which arose from her husband’s death. While there might well have been tragedies and tensions in the family – Albert taking a flat in Portland Place, Stella’s depression, Randolph’s curious marriage and Arthur’s homosexuality,

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not to mention the divorce of Albert’s little sister, the death within months of his much-loved elder sister, his stepmother Elvira, and then his old boss – it is clear that the strains of the BAT role were simply too strong. He would have missed Christmas at home that year and few of his immediate family enjoyed longevity. Thomas Harris, Alese’s very recently widowed husband, made all the arrangements locally. Albert Jeffress’ body was brought across country from San Francisco, leaving on New Year’s Day 1926 for New York thence back to England on the Leviathan accompanied by one of the directors of BAT.7 They left at about 1pm on 9 January with Irving Berlin and his new wife Ellin in the Presidential Suite. The Berlins had boarded early to dodge the press as they were on their honeymoon. An eighteen-year-old stowaway was also on board. Three BAT representatives met the ship at Ocean Dock, Southampton, on the morning of Friday 15 January to receive the remains: Albert’s close friend and brother-in-law Charles Hill was there. A memorial service was held the same morning in heavy snow at St John’s, Smith Square, near the BAT offices in Westminster, followed by the funeral service the next morning at Kenton Grange itself.8 The strange order of a memorial before the funeral was organized by BAT to give their senior Deputy Chairman not only a distinguished farewell but to maintain his dignity in death. The order of events had already been announced in the New York Times while the ship was in transit and factored in the atrocious weather conditions as well as the state of Stella’s health. The winter weather did indeed delay the subsequent journey by road to London so Charles Hill was not able to be at the memorial; the cortège was still stuck in the snow trying to get back with the body from Southampton.9 Representatives from all the British branches of BAT attended the memorial, as did ‘all the Directors of the Company resident in England’, with a few unavoidable exceptions. The memorial began with Beethoven’s Funeral March and ended with Handel’s Death March in Saul; the Canon of Westminster officiated. The principal mourners were Randolph, his wife Marie and Arthur; Stella did not attend but staff from both Kenton and Portland Place did.10 Mr and Mrs Henry Brooke-Alder, who lived next door at Kenton Lodge, were friends and neighbours who supported Stella in her grief and shock; the delays

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greatly added to Stella’s distress and Christmas must have been especially tragic when the telegram arrived in Kenton from Honolulu. The sadness of that Christmas season remained with Arthur throughout his life and he rarely spent the holiday in England thereafter. There is no mention of Stella in any of Arthur’s surviving letters and no photos from the period after her husband’s early death and her own subsequent emotional collapse. A mentally unbalanced, probably German Jewish mother who had once been a barmaid (or even just occasionally visited a bar) would have been an awkward fit with the persona that Arthur cultivated from the 1930s onwards. Perhaps his mother’s story was simply too private and painful. The formal memorial was followed the next day by a brief, touching and private service conducted at Kenton Grange by the vicar of St Mary’s Parish Church, Harrow. The coffin was covered entirely by ‘a blanket of violets from the gardens of Kenton Grange’, in a poetic gesture, made extraordinary by the snowy weather, from an Eliza Doolittle to her husband.11 The cortège was driven from Kenton Grange to Waterloo station and then conveyed on a railway run by the London Necropolis Company to enable coffins and mourners to be conveyed directly and privately (in First or Third class) to Brookwood Cemetery near Woking, forty miles away, the largest cemetery in the world. Tributes paid to Albert Jeffress by his employers were fulsome and dignified, describing him as: a born worker, and gifted with remarkable business acumen [. . .] quiet and retiring by nature, his love for straight dealing and courtesy endeared him to all those with whom he came in to contact [. . .] he was an ardent book lover, but the main object of his life was the building up of the great business concern which we all know so well.12 Within the context of the BAT Bulletin one would, naturally, expect this emphasis on his responsibility towards the company, but there is great pathos in reading that work was the main object of his life just a few weeks after his death from heart failure at only fifty years of age. Newspaper reports noted that he had introduced free lunches for employees and came from a proud old Southern State family.13

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The new BAT Chairman, Sir Hugh Cunliffe-Owen, wrote a personal appreciation which gives a little more sense of the real Albert Jeffress. He writes of a: cheery good-tempered voice [. . .] unbounded application and energy, and a determination to succeed [. . .] His genial personality, his dry humour, his capacity and wonderful accuracy soon made him friends [. . .] he was always modest and quiet, with a ready smile and a quick wit.14 The obituaries in the BAT Bulletin go on to refer to him as a commanding figure and then, awkwardly, that ‘his was, in certain aspects, a peculiarly loveable and child-like character – child-like in that the simpler things of life made strong appeal to him, for he possessed an innate love of beauty and of Nature’.15 Albert was unlike his younger son in ‘disliking publicity and limelight’16 and, while Arthur did grow more circumspect with age and always loved beauty, he never became ‘innately modest and retiring’ like his father.17 Albert’s last passport application shows him to have been five foot eight and a half inches tall, light in complexion and with a scar on his forearm, brown eyes and hair and square chin. The photograph shows a man with a gentle face, a withdrawn and quizzical expression and tired eyes, looking much older than fifty. Their father’s death gave Arthur and his brother each a very substantial amount of money. Aged twenty and twenty-five respectively, they both seized the chance to enjoy their untimely fortune. Albert Jeffress left personal effects of £451,321 or $2,995,278 net. Stella received the bulk of his fortune, the equivalent today of about $12.3m. Randolph, who was over twenty-five by the time probate was granted, received (in today’s money) about $10.6m and Arthur, who was still under twenty-one, was given a staged bequest equivalent to $10.8m or about £8.4m, probably to cover his remaining education.18 The will had been drawn up in 1919 and a codicil, simply confirming a preceding one, was signed on 6 March 1925 on Albert’s last visit to New York. Bequests were made to his sister Anita, his siblings John (now deceased), Thomas and Lena, sister-in-law Fan, Alese’s children and those of his late sister Bertie Haskins – Minerva, Virginia and another Albert. He also gave a bequest

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to Albert Henry Hill, ‘nephew and namesake’ and to all his staff. Stella had the option to purchase Kenton Grange within the year from the estate at a value of $40,000; she was given a monthly allowance for the year while she decided. If she decided against, then the same offer was to be made to Randolph and then to Arthur, as long as he had reached his majority. Stella bought the house. Randolph and Marie’s son Albert Godfrey Jeffress was delivered at home in Kenton by Dr Wilson Smith on 22 July 1926. The baby was conceived shortly before his grandfather’s early death and Albert would not have even known about the pregnancy. There are cheerful photographs of Marie at Kenton Grange and of Arthur with his baby nephew and godson; others show Marie, her husband and brother-in-law as they all sail home in July 1927 after a holiday in the US. Randolph, on the occasions when he has been mentioned in local histories in Kenton, is remembered largely as someone who ran a charming miniature railway at Kenton Grange until 1950. He had in fact one of the largest collections of 7¼ inch locomotives in the country, built and maintained in a very comprehensive workshop in the old Kenton stables, working with expert help from Henry Greenly, one of the foremost miniature railway engineers of the twentieth century.19 Randolph was not as colourful and dramatic as his younger brother, but neither was he the character from an Ealing comedy that reference to a miniature railway might suggest. Almost immediately on his father’s death Randolph gave up his links with America, the tobacco trade and his new putative career as a musician. Now married with a child, living at Kenton, he took over a garage business, Redgrave Motors at 1a Highgate Road, in Kentish Town, north London. He was not planning to service other people’s cars (although the Jeffress family in the US described him as a ‘grease monkey’) but used it as a way to get close to engine oil and speed. He won gold and silver cups in 1929 in speed trials, driving a Hupmobile. He went on to race Bugattis, Alfa Romeos and MGs at Brooklands on five occasions from about 1930 to 1932 and sometimes helped out as a temporary mechanic. He raced with Dick Warde and Cyril Paul but was never a winner, and an accident at Brooklands may have put pay to this.20 Randolph then opened his railway in 1931 and kept it running every Saturday at 2.30pm, even during World War II. The number 183 bus was given

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a stop nearby just to make it easy for visitors. Later, when he wanted to sell the estate he tried to keep the railway, but permission was not granted. Finally, he sold his small-gauge Flying Scotsman and two other engines to a fairground in Cleethorpes in the 1950s. Jack Newbutt, who worked for the London North East Railway and part-time for Randolph while living in Clock Cottage on the estate, gave up his job at LNER so that he could move to Cleethorpes and stay near to the much-loved engines. These locomotives have been lovingly traced and many restored.21 George Wells was part of the motorcycle racing fraternity at Brooklands and when Randolph abandoned the world of speed for trains, he found through him an adviser for a new enthusiasm for photography.22 Wells’ son George Hendee Wells ran a camera business just down the road from Kenton Grange and they became close friends. Randolph was godfather to his son.23 Randolph bought a Klein Tricolour camera, one of only two examples built between 1936–7 by Bellingham and Stanley, which he purchased directly from the manufacturers. ‘Jeffress was an experienced and competent Trichrome Carbro worker and worked with George Hendee Wells FBIPP in experimenting with the process [. . .] Jeffress later acquired an American three-colour camera and subsequently designed his own.’24 Randolph’s enthusiasms were based on natural ability and application as well as having the money to back them, in which he resembled his brother. Arthur, unsurprisingly, did not return to Cambridge immediately. Aunt Fan came over again to visit in February, then Arthur and Stella went to New York together in March. Edith Bentley went with them as Stella’s maid on a First Class trip of a lifetime. Arthur finally went back to Cambridge in April, having already changed to read Economics at the end of the previous term. Had his father suggested this business-like move or was Arthur planning a new career? Or was he attracted to the glamour of the Cambridge economist John Maynard Keynes, whose marriage to the ballet dancer Lydia Lopova was in all the papers in 1925? Perhaps he was becoming politically aware. During the Easter term, Arthur was a Motor Transport volunteer working during the General Strike but did also sit his Part II A exams, achieving a second. He then left the University without taking his Part II B exams, therefore without a degree.

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Arthur did not leave Cambridge itself, though, and instead devoted himself immediately to the theatre now that his future finances were generously settled. His performance as Pylades in the Oresteia alongside professional actors was the high point, if not quite the end of Arthur’s theatrical career, and it was certainly worth staying on in Cambridge to be part of it. It was thrilling but not the career for him. He was now a very wealthy young man and, with his new boyfriend Budge Fraser, was able to spend lots of money just the way he wanted to and in ways which his parents would neither have encouraged nor likely permitted. Adventures, long and lavish trips abroad and new people beckoned to complete his education.

6 Grand Tours and new companions

In July 1926, just before probate on his father’s will was granted, Arthur bought a sporty Kissel car, a brand popular with Hollywood royalty like Fatty Arbuckle, Al Jolson and Mary Pickford. He spent the first part of that summer touring the Cotswolds with his friend Walter Meyjes and took snaps as usual. He and Meyjes had met at Cambridge through the ADC, where Meyjes was perfectly typecast as a vicar and acted as business manager to the company. Meyjes was at Trinity; he was Jewish by birth but went on to become an Anglican clergyman who converted to Roman Catholicism at the Beda College in Rome in 1934. He sang his first Mass at the Church of St Andrea delle Fratte where Alphonsus Ratisbonne was converted from Judaism; the ex-king of Spain presented Father Meyjes with a chalice.1 Meyjes combined his love of theatre with religious vocation and later co-wrote a play, Ecce Homo, which was one of the annual Westminster Cathedral Passion Plays filmed in 1951 as Behold the Man. He was the first in a series of tall, blond, serious young men involved in theatre with whom Arthur would always be deeply attracted as either a friend or occasional lover. Arthur next went to Cottington near Sidmouth in South Devon, staying with Joan Levett’s family, after their West End appearance together. Joan’s brother was his Harrow friend Wilf and their father was Major Berkeley Levett of the Scots Guards, who was notorious for his involvement in the royal baccarat or Tranby Croft Scandal.2 51

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On 8 September 1890, Berkeley Levett, a 27-year-old soldier said to be the best-dressed man in London, was staying as a family friend at Tranby Croft near Hull in East Yorkshire at a house party for the St Leger week at Doncaster Races. The hosts were Arthur Wilson and his wife; fellow guests included the Prince of Wales and Sir William Gordon-Cumming, a lieutenant colonel in the Scots Guards in which regiment Levett was a subaltern. The Prince of Wales had introduced the game of baccarat to England but it remained illegal, as a game of chance not skill; nonetheless the royal party played two games of baccarat in which Gordon-Cumming was expert. He was accused of cheating and his accusers made him sign an undertaking never to play cards again; in return, they would keep their silence. However, rumours began to spread (the Prince of Wales’ mistress, Daisy ‘Babbling’ Brooke, was suspected) and GordonCumming sued for slander. Although the defendants, including Levett, won the case, public mood was against them and recent expert analysis suggests Gordon-Cumming’s innocence. The reputation of the Prince of Wales had to be saved at any cost. Arthur will have adored being associated with the royal scandal even at such a remove. Ten years later in 1900, Levett married Sibell, heir to Hamar Alfred Bass, the wealthy brewer and Liberal politician, when she was nineteen. They had three children: Joan Angel May, born in 1903; Theophilus Francis Michael, known as Mic, born in 1905; and Sidney John Armine Douglas, born in 1906. The family had homes at Lancaster Gate, London, St-Jean-Cap-Ferrat and Cottington. Levett was a Gentleman Usher in the Royal Household from 1919 to 1931. Cottington was built about 1820. Originally known as Liberty Hall, it became a Convent of the Assumption until the Levetts moved there in the 1920s. Such a camp history must have delighted Arthur who, during his theatrical year of 1926, also took part in a film nearby at Ladram Bay, made by Equator Films. Arthur was the double for the actor Jameson Thomas in a film of H.G. Wells’ short story, Through a Window. It was renamed The Open Window for celluloid, according to Dan, a fisherman who played an extra for the day.3 The original plot involves an invalid watching the coming and goings on boats on the Thames right outside his window. For reasons that remain vague, a Malaysian man ends up being murdered in the protagonist’s bedroom but which part Thomas/Arthur played is not known. A photograph in Arthur’s

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album suggests that the action is seen through the car window and, as Jameson Thomas was so much taller than him, Arthur probably just doubled for the star while sitting in the car. No trace can be found of the film except in the influence it had on Hitchcock’s Rear Window. In March 1961, Wilf got in touch again.4 The memories are all of Devon and the letter is very touching: My dear Arthur (Ag), I hope you won’t have too much of a shock when you see who this is from. The name is Levett and I am still Wilf. What ages it must be since I saw you last. Must have been well before the War and what a lot has happened since then. Dear old Cottington is now a mass of high flats and bungalows – ghastly, but thank goodness daddy is not alive to see it. I have been meaning to write for ages and every time we see a photo of your handsome mug I say I will write . . . From all one reads and sees you must have made a great success of your venture and I am delighted. I am sure you must love it as you were always interested in the Arts [. . .] I still have that snapshot that Ruth Peppercorn took of you myself and poor old Mic on that trip to Dartmoor – it brings back happy memories which I am afraid have gone for good [. . .] Well I think that is all for the moment Ag. Best love and good luck. Wilf To which Arthur replied: My dear Wilf, Your letter of yesterday’s date was indeed a surprise to me, and I was awfully glad to hear from you after such a long time. But how sad it is to think you are the last of the family, except for poor Joan of whose serious illness I am dreadfully sorry to hear [. . .] I so often think of the happy days at Cottington, for they really were so very happy and it makes me sad that nearly all of us are gone. Above all, I can’t bear to think of that where the house stood is now flats and bungalows. As you say, thank heavens your father is not alive to see what has happened to his garden. I hardly dare contemplate what his fury would have been, and I was always so frightened by his temper anyway.5

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Sidney was the sensible member of the family and called Wilf because his father thought he looked like the rabbit in the Daily Mirror cartoon ‘Pip, Squeak and Wilfred’. Joan and Mic were, as Wilfred’s daughter Diana recalled, ‘high flyers’.6 Joan lived in London, just off Eaton Square, and knew Norman Hartnell, Arthur’s older Cambridge contemporary, who features in a family photograph at Cottington with Arthur. Mic died in Derbyshire in 1957 after being declared bankrupt as a poultry framer in 1938. Happier days were captured in a photograph of Mic in his Bentley, and others, taken on the beach, which show Arthur with the family and many beautiful girls, including Edwina Ashley. She is captioned as ‘Countess of Burma’, so Arthur added all these precise labels with each person’s correct title in place, many years later. In March 1927, with the first part of the bequest from his father in the bank and three plays and a bit-part in a film behind him, Arthur travelled to the United States. Photographs, as carefully annotated and detailed as a diary, recall that he went to Meadowbrook to stay with Uncle Tom, Aunt Kate and Cousin Robert with his wife Elizabeth; Marie and Randolph were there, too. After Virginia, Arthur went west and stayed with Aunt Anita before reaching Hollywood. While in Santa Monica, Arthur met the actor Barton Hepburn and costume designer Gilbert Clark, and was photographed on a beach with Catherine Dale Owen, a Broadway star who had just been acclaimed as one of the ten most beautiful women in the world. She appeared as Princess Orsolini in the silent film His Glorious Night and it was to her that John Gilbert spoke the immortal lines: ‘Oh beauteous maiden, my arms are waiting to enfold you. I love you. I love you. I love you.’ This specific scene, and the clumsiness of many other silent movie actors’ dialogue, was later wonderfully parodied in the 1952 film Singin’ In the Rain. The name Gerald keeps reccurring in the albums from now on. A photograph is captioned ‘Gerald’s first house in Laurel Canyon’ and another as ‘Gerald’s house in Crescent Heights’. ‘Gerald’ is photographed with Barton Hepburn’s car and Arthur’s Chrysler. Many years later, when Bunny Roger was recalling Arthur’s first boyfriends, he remembered a ‘real gent’ called Mitchell (after John Fraser but before John Deakin came on the scene, so Roger is recalling some point in the late 1920s) who always wore a black hat and city suit.7 This was Gerald Fraser Mitchell, son of a commander in the Royal Indian Marines, who travelled out to New York en route to Hollywood in December

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1926 from the smart Mayfair address of Clarges Street. Six feet one, fair with green eyes, handsome, rather serious like Meyjes and one year older than Arthur, Gerald was his companion on a grand tour of Britain in the summer of 1928 and lived with him in 1929, at least. He came from a marine family; his maternal Fraser grandfather and great-grandfather had been ships’ captains in Nova Scotia, and his grandmother lived in Devon till 1938. Gerald appears in Cottington photographs in the mid-1920s, a handsome blond actor with sea in his blood and social connections, an ideal type for Arthur. Gerald had grown up with quite elderly parents and his Hollywood phase was short-lived: he returned after only a year to their house in Bedford. Gerald then lived in London for many years, first in a flat in Great Ormond Street and then in South Kensington. By 1939, he was running the London Ice Club at the Westminster Skating Rink, near today’s Tate Britain, but it closed that year and he has left no war record. He disappeared on 6 December 1946 and his body was found two days later on Exmoor during a very fierce winter. He was only forty-two and left the equivalent of about £250,000. Arthur wrote to Richard Blake Brown to tell him that their friend had committed suicide: ‘so sad and so silly.’8 Arthur did not stay very close to boyfriends after they parted, but did always keep in touch. After the American trip, Arthur sailed back on 1 July with his brother and sisterin-law and spent part of the summer of 1927 on the north Norfolk coast, at Sea Palling, with John Fraser. ‘Budge’ Fraser had known the area since childhood as his mother, the romantic singing star Ruth Vincent, had been born at Great Yarmouth. After she married Lieutenant Colonel John Fraser, a Scot serving in the Royal Horse Guards, she retired from the stage to pursue her singing studies, but not long after her only son’s birth she returned to the stage and grand opera when her husband took up finance as a career. The combination of a famous mother on the stage and a father who had been in the Guards must have lent glamour to Budge in Arthur’s eyes, much as the Levett family shone for him, not only thanks to mutual affection but also by association with scandal, royalty and the Bass fortune. Arthur bitchily mentioned Budge in 1944: ‘who they tell me is quite unchanged thanks to Max Factor Pancake and great care, and is apparently completely untouched by the war, poor thing always said I was mean as muck.’9 Budge, Arthur’s first boyfriend, was not only at Harrow with him but also at Cambridge, where Arthur and Walter Meyjes supported his election to the

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Figure 6.1 Arthur at Kenton Grange, summer 1927.

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Figure 6.2 Arthur at Kenton Grange, summer 1927, with his friends, including Eliot Hodgkin on the left; Arthur is on the right with his first boyfriend, Budge Fraser, next to him.

ADC in 1924. There is a group of photographs of Arthur and Budge Fraser, in a group of eight friends, most taking a turn behind the camera (see figure 6.2). These were given to the National Portrait Gallery (along with the Hills & Saunders’ portrait of Arthur as Empress Catherine) by Michael Sherard, who later became Fraser’s partner in life as well as at work. Other friends in the photos are two young men from Harrow: Eliot Hodgkin and Guy Osborne (an antique dealer and pilot who died on active service in 1942). Another possible identification is Gordon le Strange, who married in 1948 but was bequeathed all Guy’s worldly goods, living with him in Norfolk in 1939. Guy was a little older than the rest (born 1903) and Gordon slightly younger, born in 1907. The snaps were taken at Kenton, according to a note on the back of one of them.10 The chums are in a cheerful, sunny mood. They more or less divide into two groups: some a little older, less frivolous, but Arthur, Budge and a couple of others are gleeful and giddy in a chorus line of high-kicks. He was the host for

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the day, Stella probably in the background with Randolph, Marie and the baby leaving the gay young things to themselves, and he looks especially pleased with himself. It was almost certainly the summer of 1927, before or after the jaunt to Norfolk where Gordon lived in Hunstanton. Arthur’s other life long chums, Tommy Upcher and Douglas Fitzpatrick, lived together in Sheringham. 1926 had been full of theatrical events and the birth of baby Godfrey; by 1928, Arthur was with Gerald not Budge. At this stage in his life Arthur was already travelling regularly, staying with friends or family and with no home of his own other than Kenton. The Portland Place flat would have been an obvious pied-à-terre, but that seems to have disappeared on his father’s death. The first substantial gesture towards Arthur’s own life and style was his move to 70b Cadogan Place, Belgravia, in 1928, possibly on Gerald Mitchell’s return from Hollywood. By that point, Arthur was driving a Bentley and had met Gerald’s mother. An early nineteenth-century building, between Pont Street and Eaton Place, the cottage at 70b is on an unusual corner site and finishes at a sharp angle, pointing away from the grandeur of the Cadogan estate. A small plaque identifies it as Jubilee House, named for George III’s Jubilee in 1809, so just to Arthur’s taste. The ground floor is a shop: a florist’s owned by the splendidly named Kate Ritz when Arthur first moved in, it was later taken over by an antique dealer. Arthur lived alone there during 1928 and 1930 but in 1929, his manservant Stanley Walker and Gerald Mitchell were there too. Charles Dickens’ description in Nicholas Nickleby was still apposite: Cadogan Place is the one slight bond that joins two great extremes; it is the connecting link between the aristocratic pavements of Belgrave Square, and the barbarism of Chelsea. It is in Sloane Street, but not of it. The people in Cadogan Place look down upon Sloane Street, and think Brompton low. They affect fashion too, and wonder where the New Road is. Not that they claim to be on precisely the same footing as the high folks of Belgrave Square and Grosvenor Place, but that they stand, with reference to them, rather in the light of those illegitimate children of the great who are content to boast of their connections, although their connections disavow them.

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Wearing as much as they can of the airs and semblances of loftiest rank, the people of Cadogan Place have the realities of middle station.11 Arthur was proud enough of his earliest attempts at interior design to record them in an album of photographs (see figure 6.3). The flat appears to have had a master bedroom, dressing room, dining room and drawing room. Where Stanley Walker’s quarters are, or if Gerald had his own room, is not shown. The effect is an unhappy mixture of the country cottage with very inauthentic beams, leaded windows and a suburban ‘masculinity’ in the heavy preponderance of ship motifs, including marine paintings and decoration on lampshades and a wastepaper basket. Some of the furnishings seem to have been brought from Kenton Grange – certainly the leather-bound books – and there are numerous paintings. The main bedroom is hung with wallpaper with panels featuring stags and swags; the bed is a splendid half-tester with barleysugar columns while one armchair is pure art deco, up to date. The dark dining room is grim with woodgrain painted on the panelling. It has a Jacobean-style

Figure 6.3 70b Cadogan Place, Belgravia, where Arthur lived from 1928 and made his first attempt at interior decoration.

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dining table and six Chippendale style chairs with Jacobethan upholstery, possibly embroidered by Stella, while the drawing room has comfortable chairs and sofas with velvet cushions. Arthur’s desk is nineteenth-century French and carries a lamp with a bulbous glass base painted with a seascape; its shade also depicts a ship. The desk chair is in complete contrast – French and handpainted. The hall is dominated by a fine Chinese painted cabinet, and on it is a moody and romantic photo of Gerald Mitchell with white tie and white rose boutonnière. Above hangs an early nineteenth-century French painting of two men, shoulder to shoulder. One end of the drawing room in contrast has a stamped leather armchair, a simple fireplace, an even simpler ship painting and two small ship models in cases. Beside them is a studio photo, almost certainly of Stella in evening dress, her hand at her throat; the resemblance to Arthur in costume as Empress Catherine is striking. The overall atmosphere is a good illustration of Paul Nash’s summary of English bad taste in 1932, quoted by Arthur’s friend Martin Battersby as: a gabled house with bogus beams and lattice windows, a sham inglenook and a gas log fire; Olde English chintz and Persian carpets . . . a teacosy of Jacobean design . . . an endless dance of ancient masks like a fearful fancy dress ball composed of nothing but travesties of the Jacobean and poor Queen Anne.12 This is the first of many occasions on which Arthur recorded his domestic setting and its style. The album may well exist because of Randolph’s interest in photography; the brothers were still on good terms at this point. Randolph’s wife Marie gave Arthur’s Cadogan Place address as that of her nearest relative in England when she and her husband travelled to New York in 1929. Cadogan Place was also the Assinghams’ home in Henry James’s novel The Golden Bowl and James describes a character just as someone might have written about Arthur Jeffress in later years: ‘He was funny [. . .] about his own people too, whom he described, with anecdotes of their habits, imitations of their manners and prophecies of their conduct, as more rococo than anything Cadogan Place would ever have known.’13 There would be a whole lot more rococo to follow.

7 More rococo than anything

Now Arthur really began to have fun, and in November 1927 he had another West End stage role. Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell had written ‘a satire on current silliness so near to the silly world that the silly world would feel at home with it’1 as their riposte to Noel Coward’s pointed lack of praise for their production of Façade, in which their sister Edith so memorably declaimed her own poetry through a loudhailer to William Walton’s music. Cecil Beaton’s set for the new play was probably his first public design for the theatre, and the very silly All at Sea or First Class Passengers Only: A Social Tragedy in Three Acts ran from 27 to 29 November 1927 in the semi-private Arts Theatre Club near Leicester Square, playing on some nights alongside Façade.2 Described in The Times as something between a review without music and a venomous charade, it takes place on SS Inania’s voyage between London and New York with a list of stock characters that attempt to characterize class with humour.3 The ‘hero’, Peter Leach, was played by the professional actor Esmé Percy with whom Arthur remained in touch into the 1950s. Percy’s subsequent interesting life as a serious actor and notable theatre director is delightfully (but oddly) commemorated by a small bronze terrier within a drinking fountain outside the gents’ lavatories at the end of the Flower Walk in Hyde Park. Oriel Ross played Lady Arabella Blundell-Bludyer, married to the Fifth Earl of Playstruck, and she drew a lively pen and ink Cocteauesque portrait of Arthur about this time. Arthur played Squib, one of the Crew and, while this was a trouser role, at least these were white bell-bottoms.4 By April 1928 Arthur was driving a French Ballot car and took it down to Brighton with friends; at Whit he was back at Cottington. In July, he spent 61

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some time in Suffolk with Hugh Wade, later to be a close friend, during a summer so hot that sunbathing became nationally popular for the first time, at least for those with time to indulge. In August he went on a British grand tour, motoring with Gerald Mitchell through Ludlow to the Lakes, Yorkshire, the Borders, Edinburgh, Northumberland, Durham and back home. Next Arthur and Gerald went to the other end of the country and visited Cornwall. With energy, time and money to spare and well-connected old friends to cultivate in his new persona, Arthur then visited Italy for the first time. Between 15 and 28 September he travelled to Pisa, Siena, San Gimignano and Florence and stayed nearby at the lovely Villa Capponi, newly acquired by his Harrow friend Henry Clifford. Clifford was never a really intimate friend after Harrow and always remained a figure of envy to Arthur, although they were close for a while again during the late 1930s, not least because Clifford worked at the Philadelphia Museum from 1930. He would later become its curator of paintings and a major collector in his own right, as well as an expert in Mexican art. Henry Clifford was sent from the US to school at Harrow at the point at which each of his parents re-married and his mother had a new baby. A sort of aunt (sister to his mother’s second husband) Marian, Lady Bateman stood in loco parentis to Clifford at Harrow and was very wealthy indeed. The Bateman home was Shobden Court in Herefordshire with its wonderful Strawberry Hill Gothick church. If this link was not enough to make Arthur green with envy, Clifford was also connected with the Ballets Russes from 1936 and was apparently heavily involved in the 1937 production of Lichine’s Paolo and Francesca, with sets and costumes by Oliver Messel.5 Clifford, aged twenty-four, had just married when Arthur visited for the first time. He was the couple’s guest again at Villa Capponi in May 1931, when Esther Clifford was pregnant with their son Nicholas and Arthur was photographed with the elder child (Henry) Pier. Esther Rowland Clifford was a wealthy and very well-connected young woman, as well as a medieval historian, who became a regular and important correspondent for Arthur during the war and the three friends travelled together in Europe on several occasions. Arthur was a frequent visitor to their home, Rock Rose, in Pennsylvania where he left his Picasso portrait of Dora Maar for the duration of World War II (see colour plate 5). When Henry Clifford came to London in

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1956 it caused a flurry amongst Arthur’s retinue, but Arthur wistfully noted that he knew Clifford would never buy a painting from his gallery. Arthur clearly felt the chasm between the Cliffords, distinguished museum curator and historian, and his own role as an art dealer. In early October 1928 Arthur was best man at the wedding, held at St Martin-in-the-Fields, of his school friend William Connell, from a Scottish shipbuilding family, and Isabel Raymont-Came, who lived with her family just off Portland Place. Arthur later became godfather to their daughter Diana, but remembered her in his will under her mother’s surname. In 1929, Arthur spent March at Cap Ferrat with the Berkeley Levetts, with whom he also stayed in Cottington later that year. In between, he visited Italy again; Florence once more, Ferrara and then Venice for the very first time. His albums contain a photograph taken on his first gondola trip down the Grand Canal in July 1929, captioned ‘Entering Venice’, taken just beside the Palazzo Gritti near the house he was to make his second home from the mid-1950s.6 By August 1929 he was back in England in a house party, ‘filming Rasputin’. Rasputin was the subject of a couple of professional films that year, too: one, Welcome Danger, was Harold Lloyd’s first talkie. The party was held at Higham House, Salehurst, Sussex, whose owner, John Robertson-Luxford, was the maternal grandfather of the artist Edward Burra. Burra and his sister Anne spent their childhood summers there, often with their cousins Lawrence and Sylvia Rich. Burra does not appear in any of Arthur’s photographs: he is always an instantly recognizable figure even if he had been heavily disguised as one of the many bearded characters. Burra’s beloved grandmother had died two years previously and – given that he loathed his grandfather – it was presumably Lawrence Rich who acted as host that day. Burra and his cousin Lawrence had played as children with a pair of small china dolls which they named The Dilly Sisters, after The Dolly Sisters, a wonderfully glamorous pair of Hungarian-American performers who charmed audiences with their films and musical act from the early years of the 1900s. The sisters also had a great many lovers, including Gordon Selfridge, some of whom they shared, and whose money they spent with abandon. Their stage name was probably inspired by Anthony Hope’s very popular novel The Dolly Dialogues, which tells arch tales of Mayfair, first published in the USA and

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England in 1894. The Dilly Sisters were also related of course to the Dilly boys who traded around Piccadilly Circus. Edward and Lawrence regularly played at being Gladys and Phyllis Dilly until Lawrence began to grow up. Edward remained enchanted, however, and in 1929, the summer of the Rasputin film, he painted – a rare oil – The Two Sisters (either Dilly or Dolly, alongside a manservant in drag), a work which Arthur later owned, buying it for £50 from the Lefevre Gallery with profits from the sale of his Hampshire house in May 1947.7 (see colour plate 1) Arthur’s friend Beverley Nichols recalled its setting in the lost years: ‘And how we used to troop off to that little restaurant with the striped parasols to join old Gordon Selfridge drinking with his chères amies the Dolly Sisters.’8 In October 1929, Wall Street crashed. In 1930, his US-based income seemingly unaffected by this, Arthur was in Cottington for Whitsun, just before the Levetts sold the house: they must have felt the impact of the stock market’s collapse. Then he was in Cannes in September spending time with

Figure 7.1 Arthur, centre and bottom left, Monte Carlo Beach Hotel, Cannes, in 1930 with Hugh Wade and Elvira Barney, top right.

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Hugh Wade and the soon-to-be notorious Elvira Barney, both of whom he had known for a few years. There are photos in his album of Hugh and Elvira in the Olympic-sized swimming pool of the new Monte Carlo Beach Hotel, where Elsa Maxwell, ‘The Queen of Pleasure’ and all its attendant parties, was in charge of external relations for the hotel, which included attracting the English and American jeunesse dorée as guests (see figure 7.1). Cannes enjoyed an influx of stars and their acolytes in the 1920s that added a new veneer to its well-established belle époque appeal. Bankers and industrialists were habitués and the Berkeley Levetts were long established on Cap Ferrat. When Somerset Maugham acquired the Villa Mauresque in 1926, amongst his neighbours were several wealthy American widows, including those close to Henry Clifford, such as his Aunt Marian and Emily Sherfesee. She was a survivor of the Titanic, who was quoted by Arthur in a letter during the war: ‘completely obfuscating, as Emily Sherfesee used to say.’9 Along the coast, over 100 miles of road and a social chasm apart, are Marseilles and Toulon where Burra, his friends Billy Chappell and Barbara Key-Seymer spent many summers at the end of the 1920s and beginning of the 1930s. Arthur turned up as part of the crowd, too, as Ker-Seymer’s photographs reveal.10 The attraction of Toulon was not glamorous hotels but rather the glorious low life of the brothels and bars with matelots in their tight, white and sexy uniforms. These French sailor suits and hats became a fashion cult and Gerald Reitlinger’s house in Glebe Place, Chelsea, was the venue for the infamous Sailor Party in 1927, which Chappell christened ‘Bugger Heaven’. Arthur owned not only Burra’s Dolly/Dilly painting but also his watercolour Three Sailors at the Bar (1930). This has a sensual approach to texture and reflection and a particular fetish about the folds and curves of the sailors’ uniform. A brass pole stands proud to divide the picture plane, and the equally phallic cylinder of the tea urn shines and rises behind the bar. The Two Sisters and Three Sailors at the Bar are exquisite records of moments and moods that Robert Melville remembered from Arthur’s collection years later. He described The Two Sisters and Rossi, which Arthur also owned: a painting of two brutal looking French sailors sitting in front of a bedstead [sic] on which several sailors’ hats were hanging and it conveyed the sense

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of a loud hum of conversation. It was beautifully drawn and over the years I became very fond of it. The two sailors looked as if they belonged to what is known as rough trade.11 Arthur felt safer and more at home in smart Cannes but also pined for less salubrious spots and everyone else knew it. Even in the late 1940s, Francis Bacon would send a message from Monaco to tease Arthur that he had not yet tracked down the Fleet.12 In November 1930, Arthur turned twenty-five and gained full control of the money that his father had left in trust for him. Travel became one of Arthur’s great pleasures, often to find sexual companionship. The destinations began to move further afield than Europe, partly as an escape from some of the scandals with which he became involved in the early 1930s.

8 ‘The muff was particularly unfortunate’

The late 1920s in London saw a lightening of the restrictions that World War I had imposed. Nightlife was lit up with new clubs, dance halls and restaurants filled with a generation that had survived many of its elder brothers and cousins: everyone young and rich enough was dizzy and ready to revel, including far more young women than had been allowed to appear in public before the war. The suffragettes might have fought for women’s political rights but a wider emancipation for fun and adventure had also been won in certain social classes: rebels without a corset. Arthur had been a child during the war and had spent most of it in either the US or the Far East so, when he turned twenty-five in the mid-1920s and was back home in London, independent and wealthy, it was the one time in his life when timing was just right for him. He lived an exciting life amongst the Bright Young Things, not at the epicentre but part of it all and part, too, of the aspect that Evelyn Waugh chronicled and called ‘vile’. For Arthur, who left his Cambridge studies incomplete, Mayfair was, as Robert Graves and Alan Hodges later wrote, ‘a new sort of informal university: with hostesses for heads of colleges and a constantly changing never-completed syllabus’.1 Sometimes such a life provided brutal penalties. In July 1930, Arthur visited his friends Gordon Russell and John Ludovic Ford in Kent. In August of the next year, Ford was acquitted at the Maidstone Quarter Sessions on a charge of driving a lorry while under the influence of drink, during which event Gordon 67

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Russell was killed. Elizabeth Pelly (née Ponsonby), who was also in the fatal car crash but survived, was one of the most notorious of the Bright Young People.2 Gordon Russell was driving a car which overturned at high speed on 5 July 1931. Elizabeth Ponsonby was thrown out of the car but not hurt too seriously. The car actually belonged to Ludy Ford but had been taken without his permission after a series of rows that night between the two men, apparently over Elizabeth. Ford was following them at high speed in, for whatever reason, a lorry. Ford and Russell (called ‘perverts’ by her father) had been with Elizabeth at Sandy Baird’s White Party that night and, whatever their relations with one another and each with Elizabeth, it was Russell and Elizabeth who fled together.3 Russell had a house in Chelsea, while Ford lived with his regular co-racing driver Maurice Baumer on the Cromwell Road. The White Party had been thrown by Sandy Baird, an Etonian who was later at Magdalen with John Betjeman, and with whom Brian Howard had been desperately in love. Baird’s mother lived in Town Place, Throwley, near Faversham, which had a beautiful and huge cruck barn, just the place for a party. First constructed in the fourteenth century, the barn was rebuilt about 1839 and, for the 1931 party, the artist John Banting decorated it all in white and hung it with white painted objects – branches of trees, a bicycle and so on – which must have looked profoundly inappropriate later the same night.4 What is even more distasteful is that Baird staged this party only months after his own father’s death in a car crash. Baird Senior had been a Gordon Highlander, which probably meant that father and son had little in common in life, at least apart perhaps from interest in soldiery. Gordon Russell was described in the press as a minor actor in the following court case while Ford was described merely as a garage owner, but the motor trade allowed Ford, like Randolph Jeffress, to be a glamorous Le Mans and Brooklands racing driver and also gave him access to a lorry when he needed one, useful to bring the drink down for the party. His family owned estates in Scotland and the West Indies and Ford moved to Haddington in the borders to run the estate there in 1934, maintaining his cars until the next war finally ended that way of life. A book called Circuit Dust describes Ford and Baumer’s 1933 racing season:

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They discussed these plans during the day before the final practice, while they were perfecting their pit arrangements, and nine o’clock that night found them at the Café de l’Hippodrome for dinner, accompanied by the big Mercedes, which they intended to use for a last survey of the circuit. While Baumer was eating hors d’oeuvres, Ford drove the Mercedes for two laps, then came in to commence his dinner, when Baumer took the car around. He returned and handed over in time to start on the soup, and when Ford returned Baumer went out again. Between courses they achieved the distinction of each covering eight laps, a total of nearly seventy miles of fast motoring between hors d’oeuvres and coffee.5 This illustrates in every way Agatha Runcible’s verdict on motor racing in Evelyn Waugh’s 1930 Vile Bodies: ‘too, too sick-making.’ Agatha was based in part on Elizabeth Ponsonby. Sandy Baird was later an habitué of the Colony Club and stayed friends with Arthur for years, taking photos of Arthur, Michael Shepherd, Budge Fraser and others just after World War II. It is safe to assume Arthur was at his friend’s White Party the night Gordon Russell died. Along with the rest of the crowd, Arthur had been to so very many of the notorious themed fancy dress parties of the 1920s and early 1930s where guests were invited, for instance, by Mrs Rosemary Sanders to come as a baby to her party in Rutland Gate and by Norman Hartnell to his 1928 circus party in Bruton Street. Then there was Elsa Maxwell’s Murder Party for Lady Ribblesdale, the Bath and Bottle Party, the Hermaphrodite Party, the Great Urban Dionysia and the Mozart Party – ‘un po’ di Mozartino’ – and so on, ad nauseam. London was hardly the only centre for such expensive japes but these parties still define the Bright Young Things’ era in London and Arthur’s own party defined its demise; ‘perhaps the last great entertainment of the Bright Young People Era.’6 With clunking timing, Arthur held his Red and White Party at 11pm on Saturday 21 November 1931 to mark his twenty-sixth birthday. The tragic events of four months previously, during which his friend Gordon Russell died, made Arthur’s party too close in theme and timing to be in anything but very poor taste. Undoubtedly, Elizabeth had recovered from the accident sufficiently

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to be on the guest list. On a wider level, the timing was also thoughtless and crass: there was real insensitivity in holding such a lavish celebration when hunger-marchers were gathering elsewhere. The Bright Young Things are still often associated with the 1930s but ‘the reign was over by the end of 1931; and we can give a day – 21 November 1931 – the day on which Arthur Jeffress, later a successful dealer in paintings, gave his famous Red and White Party’.7 It was in conscious emulation of Cole and Linda Porter’s legendary Red and White Ball at the Ca’ Rezzonico in Venice, 1926, which had red and white paper costumes supplied for each guest as well as a tightrope dancer for entertainment. The colour combination paid homage to Cole Porter but was also simple, striking and sexy. Martin Battersby describes 1932 as the peak for the all-white decorating craze and describes Jean Harlow as its personification, a confection of ‘snow, marble and marshmallow’8 but of course she was rarely without a slash of scarlet lipstick. Snow-white and rose-red have long had erotic connotations. Alec Waugh noted in his reminiscence of that year that, in spite of the economic crisis, a lot of money was being spent in London. He wondered if Londoners felt that they should cram as much as possible into this celebratory period immediately after an election in which the Labour party was soundly beaten by a new National Government.9 Waugh called November 1931 ‘a month of miracles that would not return’.10 Alec was Evelyn Waugh’s elder brother and went to the party with Elizabeth Montagu, but noticed little else as he was desperately in love with her. Arthur rented part of Maud Allan’s apartment in Holford House, overlooking Regent’s Park. Allan was a notorious star who was still remembered for her own dance version of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, with which she took London by storm in 1906 with her private (because no licence would be granted) dance of the seven veils. She had previously written a sex manual for women and Margot Asquith, the Prime Minister’s wife, became a very close friend indeed as well as her patron, paying the rent on a wing of Holford House. Built by Decimus Burton in 1832, it was the largest and most expensive of the villas that completed John Nash’s scheme for the Park. The west wing had a semi-circular bay, capped by a cupola and the house as a whole was in the Italianate style, of the period Arthur adored.

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The party is reported to have cost £500 at the time, about £30,000 today, and even Arthur’s corsage orchids were £2 each.11 Many people have reported on the party but, amongst them, only a few who were actually there, just like the 1960s. Alec Waugh, Elizabeth Montagu and Babe Plunket Greene were there, so it is more than likely that Elizabeth Ponsonby and Eddie Gathorne-Hardy turned up. Senior homosexual royalty attended including Eric Thesiger and Evan Morgan, who came as a medieval knight (but when he abandoned the armour was described as wearing a toga) accompanied by a young gentleman friend in a white ski suit and fur shako.12 Morgan’s wife Lois Sturt (Naps Alington’s sister) was there, too, with her lover ‘a hideous bald-headed man’ and she wore a fringed Hawaiian-style skirt. Leonie Fester wore a dress with a scarlet letter A for Adulterer on the front and a long fox fur wrapped around her shoulders.13 Bunny Roger, who became a life long friend of Arthur, said he met him there for the first time and had been taken at the last moment by Inge Bentheim, ‘a real riot of disorder’; Bunny later recalled that Arthur had looked like a Jewish hostess, his wide trousers like the skirt of a gown.14 Raymond Mortimer was definitely there, as were Sunday Wilshin and Arthur’s old friends Hugh Wade and Elvira Barney. Red food included caviar, lobster, salmon, ham, tomatoes, apples, pink blancmange and jelly. Reggie Hooper wrote under the headline ‘If Gossip We Must’ in The Bystander: Meanwhile, private parties continue particularly of the more bizarre sort. At one of these the host, a dark young man, looked, I am told by several people who were present, simply ‘adorable’ in white silk, with a muff made of real narcissi and some diamond bangles. This is the sort of thing which impels me to violent nausea or to join the labour party or both. As a champion, within reason, of liberty for everyone I do not object to people taking their fun in this way if they feel ‘so dispoged’; the better plan is, perhaps, to poohpooh it. But I cannot congratulate those who go in for this sort of imbecile extravagance or their efforts to bring nearer a revolution from which they would be the first to run with lisping squeals. This party, by the way, was labelled a red-and-white party. Even the invitation cards were red with

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white lettering. Ernest Thesiger looked marvellous, and there were plenty of young things from Oxford. If someone were to give a black-and-white party I would adore to go if only I could make my mind up what sort of flowers to get for my muff.15 Raymond Mortimer wrote to Eddy Sackville-West on 26 November that he had been to a party given by a ‘young Jew called Jeffress’ in ‘a vast dismantled house in Regent’s Park’ with ‘an excellent nigger band’ and that the ‘coup d’oeil was quite lovely’.16 Mortimer did not actually meet his host but confirms that he wore ‘white kid gloves to above the elbow, a ruby bracelet and a muff of fresh white narcissi’. Mortimer says he enjoyed himself, drank a lot and felt very ill afterwards. The letter shows, apart from its grimly casual, fashionable racism and anti-Semitism, the fact that Arthur was certainly not part of the Sackville-West set and that it was probably a commonplace at that stage in his life to accept him as Jewish. He and Raymond Mortimer later became friends. A newspaper photograph shows Arthur in full fig and the draped trousers do look exactly like a skirt (see figure 8.1). He holds a small clutch bag behind his back, his short-sleeved shirt top is cut fairly low and the contrasting red trimming is just visible at the waist. The red shoes look masculine and due to the muscularity of his forearms his long gloves are unable to reach his elbows, but they do have lots of tiny buttons and a bracelet is visible. His hair is slicked back and he is quite heavily made up. The huge orchid corsage is very odd and appears to combine leaves as well as red blooms so it looks more as if he is holding a potted plant but the narcissus muff is a delight. Twenty-five years after the event, the social historian John Montgomery wrote to Arthur to tell him that he was writing a book that would feature the infamous party. Montgomery states that 250 white on red invitations were sent out but several were filched from mantelpieces; 150 gatecrashers increased the crowd. He added two diamond clips to Arthur’s ensemble and commented that the upstairs rooms were roped off but this did not act as a barrier to many people who trooped down later, covered in dust. Moonlighting Metropolitan policemen checked all invitations but let anyone in regardless. Arthur stood at the door to greet his guests, who then walked along a red carpet through

‘The muff was particularly unfortunate’

Figure 8.1 Photographer unknown. Arthur ‘simply “adorable” in white silk, with a muff made of real narcissi and some diamond bangles’, at his infamous Red and White Party, 21 November 1931.

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three interconnecting rooms, the central one decorated with red and white bunting, then: What began as a reasonably formal, although distinctly eccentric, gathering soon developed into a noisy and hilarious free-for-all. Hired servants, dressed in scarlet double-breasted coats with large white buttons, struggled among the seething, jostling, swaying, shrieking mass of dancers and drinkers. The orchestra, overwhelmed by the noise, played louder and louder; the rooms became thick with smoke and the smell of scent. They danced to a Negro band and red and white nuns danced with men dressed as exotic birds with highly elaborate headdresses; men danced stripped to the waist; a man dressed as Queen Elizabeth in a red wig sat in the hall playing Abide With Me on an organ. A girl started a fight wearing only a choker of pearls and a spotted handkerchief.17 The girl was Brenda Dean Paul, who was photographed for the newspapers raising a glass, in her red-and-white spotted handkerchief dress (see figure 8.2). Elsewhere, Brenda Dean Paul, after having pulled Sunday Wilshire’s [sic] hair – for no reason apart from pure malice – was carted off by the police for being in unlawful possession of drugs. [. . .] Hugh Wade played Body and Soul on the organ in the empty hall, until Maud Allan in a rage, sent down word that she had let the house not the organ – and would they let her get some sleep? (At seven in the morning they still weren’t letting Miss Allan get some sleep).18 Arthur had previously written to Montgomery in a strained tone, apparently helpful but clearly peeved, in an attempt to lay the pernicious narcissus legend to rest: I am sorry that we cannot meet as I had hoped in conversation to persuade you to drop the idea of writing up the party in your book. It was so much less of an event than rumour has made out, and a number of other parties of that period, such as the Court Party and the Wild West Party, were much more elaborate, fantastic and extraordinary. I myself saw so little of what went on, as I stayed mostly by the ‘receiving’ door, hardly going into the bar

‘The muff was particularly unfortunate’

Figure 8.2 Photographer unknown. Brenda Dean Paul – who would later that night start ‘a fight wearing only a choker of pearls and a spotted handkerchief ’ – at Arthur’s Red and White Party, 21 November 1931.

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at all and practically not at all into the ‘sitting-out’ room, and it all happened so long ago, that I fear you will find my comments and amendations extremely dull and flat. I certainly never saw a trace of Maud Allan, and knew nothing of an arrest of any sort. Must you report my own costume in such detail? I fear that your publishers will be rung up and asked who gave the party, and if the information is given out, I can hardly bear the thought of the resultant publicity. At fifty one does not want to suffer for foolish escapades of one [sic] youth that one would much prefer forgotten altogether, as I am sure you will understand. The muff was particularly unfortunate. I knew nothing of it beforehand. A young female admirer (at least I think she must have been an admirer to take so much trouble) had spent most of the previous night making it up, and eagerly thrust it on to me on her arrival at the party.19 According to Bobby Bishop, who was not even born at the time and therefore dependent on Arthur’s re-telling of the tale decades later, the expensively unseasonable flowers had been bought at Rex & Company (opposite the Brompton Oratory) by Carmen Rosa de Ossa.20 She was the seventeen-year-old daughter of Leonie Fester and the idea of the party had been dreamed up one night over dinner with Carmen and her boyfriend.21 Arthur was adamant (and indignant) in one of his other recollections that the flowers he had been given were a clashing yellow and orange and called her a ‘girlfriend’.22 Carmen later recalled that he had nicked the muff from her.23 Arthur’s campaign to play down the whole affair continued: The resultant photographs were, to say the least, a mistake! I would be very much happier if you could leave out the description of the costume altogether even though it does take a lot of the ‘meat’ out of your story. Could you not say that I wore a modified sailor suit of white angel-skin with some red trimmings? Mention the muff, if you like, but only with the true story attached to it. I wish I could describe other costumes for you but time has greatly dimmed my memory of them. Nearly everyone kept to the red and white theme, and the result was highly effective. There were numerous white sailor suits trimmed with red instead of blue, and a large proportion of the men wore, naturally, white trousers with red shirts or scarves, and for

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women who felt unadventurous, a white evening dress and red shoes was all too easy. There were lots of red and white striped maillots, since that sort of thing was very fashionable at the time. I remember one very impressive Queen Elizabeth I in red and white brocade with string upon string of pearls; also a sprinkling of white garbed ‘nuns’ with ruby crucifixes. One man came as an exotic bird with a highly elaborate headdress and surcoat of red and white plumage and long white stockings. The number of pairs of long white kid gloves was legion.24 Arthur’s version refashions it as a comparatively cosy event that could have easily taken place at Kenton Grange and the description of himself as an attentive host not quite joining in the fun, being rather aloof and thus ignored, is completely convincing. But the idea that he was somehow not really part of the London party set is blown away by his involvement in a notorious murder trial the next summer. Three months after his party, he sailed to New York on the Berengeria and stayed at the luxurious and recently opened Hotel St Moritz with 1,000 rooms, a dancing salon and dining room on the thirty-first floor, and Rumplemeyer’s famous art deco café. In April, photos show him on board the Roma, with Henry and Esther Clifford; Henry and Arthur then extended the tour to visit Bari, the Amalfi coast, Sicily and Gibraltar. Maurice Yates, a Hollywood set designer, was with them in the ruins at Paestum. On 23 May 1932, Aunt Anita with cousins Henry, aged eighteen, and Bill, twenty-two, arrived in London so Henry could study for six months at University College: it seems likely that Stella was well enough to be at home to welcome them. Arthur loathed his cousin Bill but became very fond in later life of Henry, a distinguished modernist architect, his Scottish wife Heather and their two little girls, and the affection was mutual. In 2014, Jane Hill still remembered Cousin Arthur warmly from her childhood: ‘my mother and father adored Arthur.’25 Stella might have shrugged off the publicity for the Red and White Party or laughed about it with her sister-in-law but, only a week after the Hills arrived in England, the Elvira Barney murder trial in which Arthur also played his part was a very nasty – and hugely publicized – event.26

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Elvira Enid ‘Dolores’ Barney was the daughter of Lord and Lady Mullen. Her father was head of the Stock Exchange and Elvira was an actress. Her brother John had died tragically young in World War I and their sister Avril married three times, becoming Ernest Simpson’s fourth wife: Wallis Simpson was his second and yet another bride came before Avril, who would later die in a car crash in Mexico. In 1930, Elvira married John Sterling Barney – described at the time as an American ‘entertainer’ – at the London society church of St George’s, Hanover Square. Elvira, unlike Arthur, who spent most of his time on its edges, was right at the heart of the fashionable set whose most notable star was Brenda Dean Paul; her drug habit and ‘It’ girl status kept her almost daily in the newspapers. Arthur already knew Elvira and the musician Hugh Wade by the time they all spent time together in Monte Carlo just after the Barney marriage in September 1930. Hugh Wade had been with Arthur on a visit to Clarence Belisha earlier that summer, too. There is an unsubstantiated story that Hugh and Arthur were lovers but, as the same book asserts that Arthur was married, it cannot be relied upon. By the spring after Arthur’s party, Elvira was separated from Barney and living with Michael Stephen (described dismissively in various accounts as a drug-dealing dress designer) at 21 William Mews, near Lowndes Square. A salivating report later described the scene: Over the cocktail bar in the corner of the sitting room there was a wall painting which would have been a sensation in a brothel in Pompeii. The library was furnished with publications which could never have passed through His Majesty’s Customs. The place was equipped with the implements of fetishism and perversion. On Monday 30 May 1932, Elvira and Michael held a drinks party for about thirty people, from 6–10pm. Sylvia Coke recalled: ‘sherry, dry martinis and a grapefruit gin cocktail [and] sandwiches and biscuits [. . .] the gramophone was playing and we danced to it. It was a very gay party.’ A police officer was later quoted as describing ‘a clique [that] indulged in almost every sexual vice which it is possible to imagine’ which suggests much about the limits of his imagination.

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Other guests included Brian Howard, Anton Altmann, Eddie GathorneHardy, the Skeffington-Smyth brothers, Olivia Wyndham and Ruth Baldwin. Baldwin’s partner Betty ‘Joe’ Carstairs denied that she was there, though a party was held by Ruth and Olivia at Joe’s house at 5 Mulberry Walk later that night. Arthur Jeffress was the last to arrive chez Elvira, fashionably late about 7.45pm, and went on with the couple afterwards to supper at the Café de Paris. Elvira had sweetbreads and a Welsh rarebit; the two men had quails and ices, a very E.H. Benson combination. She drank fernet branca, the men had double whiskies and all three shared a bottle of champagne. Elvira paid the bill of £2.18/- which included a packet of Khedive cigarettes. They went on to the Blue Angel club at 52 Dean Street, Soho, where Arthur was a member, to hear their old friend Hugh Wade play. He, too, had been at the party earlier; they managed more whisky and kippers while they listened to the music. Arthur left to host his own party in his Portman Square flat till about 5am, apparently to play new records he had just brought back from America: After the Blue Angel closed Arthur Jeffress invited a number of people back to his residence in Orchard Court. Elvira and Michael were invited but Elvira said she was too tired. Those who did make it included Hugh Wade, Terence Skeffington Smyth, Leonie Fester, Irene MacBrayne, Lester Lucas, Lady Bowyer Smith, Arthur Streek and Barbara Waring. Elvira and Michael also returned home after 2am. Arthur said later that ‘they had appeared to be friendly’. It wasn’t long before the neighbours, not for the first time, started to hear screaming and yelling from the first floor and Elvira was reported to have shouted: ‘Get out, get out! I will shoot you! I will shoot you!’ Almost immediately the street heard the report of a pistol shot echoing into the night and almost immediately a neighbour heard Barney crying: ‘Chicken, chicken, come back to me. I will do anything you want me to.’ At about 4.50am, after a frantic call to his house just ten minutes earlier, Dr Thomas Durrant arrived at 21 Williams Mews and came across Barney continually repeating: ‘He wanted to see you to tell you it was only an accident. He wanted to see you to tell you it was only an accident.’

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On the stairs, shot in the chest at close range, lay a distinctly moribund Michael Stephen. ‘There was a terrible barney at no. 21,’ a neighbour later told the police, apparently unconscious of the pun. Elvira was sent for trial in July 1932 and, with Hugh Wade, Arthur was called as a witness. He was described in press reports, rather accusingly, as ‘fashionably dressed and very dark’. Elvira was later acquitted by the court, if not by public opinion. Much later, in 1974, Peter Cotes (who claimed to have danced with her on the night of her acquittal) wrote of: . . . Arthur Jeffress with whom my wife and I shared a day at the home of a mutual friend Beverley Nichols and then a dinner at our own home in Chelsea after we had driven him back to London from Surrey. During the day we heard a little about Elvira, and I guessed when we invited him for a drink that later, if he stayed to dine (which he invited himself to do), we should hear more. He was, as I remember him, both witty and wistful and as befitted the last person but one to see Michael Stephen alive, a mine of information about the fateful night at Williams Mews. It was a pity we never saw Arthur Jeffress again.27 It was even more of a pity that Arthur’s mine of information was neither fully dug nor more of the proffered nuggets recorded. Cotes does not really give much more detail about the evening than is known from press reports. Did Arthur really invite himself for dinner or simply offer to sing for his supper? That strikes an oddly ungracious, atypical note although ‘witty and wistful’ sounds just right for Arthur in the late 1950s. With sad irony, Elvira died on Christmas Day 1936 in a Paris hotel room, a quarter of a century before Arthur died in the same city, in another hotel. Arthur left England shortly after the trial to spend the summer at Cap Ferrat, where Barbara Ker-Seymer recorded their days on the beach with a group of friends. When he returned to London, he settled properly into his new flat at 30a Orchard Court, Portman Square. Built in late 1920s by Messrs Joseph in an art deco style, similar to their Shell Mex House in the Strand, it was the first and last contemporary building in which Arthur chose to live and

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he remembered it during the war as the epitome of luxury. He moved there alone except for his manservant and chauffeur, Stanley Walker, who had been with him in Cadogan Place. His decor is a great improvement on Cadogan Place and, again, has an album dedicated to it. For the photo shoots at least, there are masses of white lilies and roses. There are Toile de Jouy wallpaper and fabrics throughout, a perky little matelot figure and a small figurine of Napoleon on his desk. Arthur also ambitiously commissioned a few small trompe l’oeil murals – a sailor leans over a Mediterranean balcony in one, a cactus shares a windowsill with a classical bust, and the third is a fancifully quartered coat of arms with three Prince of Wales feathers. These are by his Harrow and Cambridge friend Eliot Hodgkin who began his career with fashion illustration and fashionable murals; they are photographed side by side on a sofa, admiring the work (see figure 8.3). In the dining room over the fireplace is a portrait of Arthur by Hodgkin in the same style as other portraits that Hodgkin painted at the time of Douglas Fitzpatrick and Elvira Barney (see figure 8.4). Each sitter has a collage of motifs associated with them as background. Arthur’s details are not legible but he wears a Cossack side-buttoned shirt: the Jeffressian legend begins. Portman Square had been laid out from 1764 onwards and the Turkish ambassador had a Persian tent in the middle of the gardens at the time, a good Jeffressian precedent. The Josephs had built Arthur’s block of flats as part of the slum clearance programme but some fine areas of the late eighteenth century still remained, including Robert Adam’s Home House on the north side. This great house, which had previously been the home of Samuel Courtauld and his art collection, opened as the Courtauld Institute of Art in October 1932, a few months after Arthur moved to the Square. Ironically, the Courtauld’s charismatic future director Anthony Blunt burst into tears in front of the novelist Rosamond Lehmann when he gave her a lift home in a taxi after one of Arthur’s parties in 1956. He kept saying ‘I am very, very sorry, Rosamond’, which she later realized was probably the verge of a confession of his role as a Soviet agent, which was not revealed to the public until the 1970s.28 This obliquely coincidental link to Arthur is given added spice because a flat in Orchard Court (‘Le Verger’ to the French and with a legendary black tiled bathroom) was used by the French or ‘F’ section of the

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Figure 8.3 30a Orchard Court. Arthur and Eliot Hodgkin admiring one of Hodgkin’s murals commissioned for the new flat, c. 1932. The subject is sailors in the South of France.

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Figure 8.4 30a Orchard Court, Portman Square, where Arthur Jeffress lived from 1932 and, from about 1934, with John Deakin. Over the fireplace is a lost portrait of Arthur by Eliot Hodgkin.

Special Operations Executive (SOE), to be near their Baker Street head office. The SOE was created by Winston Churchill in 1940 to support resistance movements in enemy territory in Europe. In the words of one former spy: ‘The time the agents spent at Orchard Court was a brief period of luxury before their gruelling, dangerous stints in the field.’29 Arthur followed more or less the same pattern. Arthur chose the more prosaic but very pro-French American Field Service when he volunteered for war work a few years later, though his brother Randolph actually did work for the SOE.30 The details remained classified until 2014 but records in the National Archives reveal Randolph was recommended in February 1944 for a post in photographic records based at Station Xva, 56 Queen’s Gate, Kensington. This affected Randolph’s health and he missed the easy 9–5 hours, an hour for lunch, and the Saturday afternoons and Sundays off which his previous work in telegraphic censorship had

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afforded. He had been recommended for the new post after Edwin Smith (later a very distinguished photographer) turned it down due to a serious illness. Smith’s predecessor left after taking much time off for illness so it was clearly an unhealthy role; indeed Randolph contracted impetigo and described his sores in detail. He also worked at Station XVc, 2–3 Trevor Square, Knightsbridge, which housed the camouflage photographic and make-up sections. None of this would be of much consequence to anyone but Randolph were it not for the fact that he had been recommended for the post by Captain James E. Elder Wills. Wills was involved in the film business both before and after the war, but had also been cited in Randolph and Marie’s divorce in 1940. She was living in Pinewood with him in 1939 and, by 1944, she and Wills had married. Applying to the SOE that year, Randolph was asked to complete a form which required the maiden name of his wife, even if divorced, or (for a woman applicant) the ‘full name of husband’. Misunderstanding, or perhaps with a sweet sense of revenge, at first he wrote ‘ELDER WILLS’ which he then crossed out and added ‘Marie Geoghegan’.31

9 John Deakin

On 20 January 1933, Arthur set off on his travels again, sailing on the Bremen to New York and staying once more at the Hotel St Moritz until he left for Haiti. The island was under US occupation with marines stationed there until 1934 but the agreement for the troops’ departure was signed in August 1933, so Arthur arrived at a time when Haiti was in the news and was, in American terms at least, ‘safe’. Haiti, independent from France since 1804, had not repealed the French Penal Code of 1791, which meant that consensual same sex activity was legal. Whether Arthur was seeking the exoticism of the local culture or specifically on the hunt for marines and sex is not clear. He appears to have travelled to Haiti alone, although he seems to have been especially restless and began to flit around, flying from Nassau to Miami in February then returning to New York from Haiti on 1 May. But he set off again almost immediately, apparently via Whale Cay as a guest of Joe Carstairs, probably to see his old friend Tim Brooke (see figure 9.1). Certainly he sailed back on Joe’s yacht, the Sonia II , from Nassau to Haiti, arriving on 12 May 1933. On his return to New York, he stayed at The Lombardy Hotel on Park Avenue owned by William Randolph Hearst. Back home once more in Orchard Court, his expenditure did not let up. In November, Arthur (or rather Stanley Walker, his chauffeur) took delivery of a spectacular and brand new car: a 1933 Rolls-Royce 20/25 drop-head coupé with bodywork by the Carlton Carriage Company1. This Henley Style Coupé had elegant black and French grey paintwork and the seats were red leather in a ‘beautiful, incredibly rare design’. Arthur chose local coachbuilders, The Carlton Carriage Company of Willesden in north London, to build the body 85

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Figure 9.1 Photographer unknown. Arthur and Tim Brooke on holiday, c. 1933.

so that he could supervise its construction. It was still running in 2018 in California and is now unique for its ‘disappearing’ top (see figure  9.2). The current owner was sufficiently fascinated by his predecessor to write the very detailed Wikipedia page for Arthur. While it was not the fastest car he could have bought, it perfectly matched current high style with a strong element of tradition, the crucial point at which Arthur always felt most comfortable. The car had a Dickey seat, ‘suicide’ doors, highly polished metal art deco trim, P100 head lamps and a Lucas driving light, making it a very glamorous motor indeed and Arthur, with his modern West End apartment, exotic suitcase labels and reputation for louche and notorious friends, was now really rather glamorous himself. His next boyfriend, John Deakin, added a completely new dimension to his life. John Deakin was born on the Wirral, near Liverpool, in 1912 and said he came from near a leper colony which – give or take 600 years – was true. In 1283, in his home district of Bebington, the monks were given licence to use the land as a hospital for lepers. But he was not the pauper’s child he liked to suggest. His father had risen to a clerical job with Lever Brothers after years as

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Figure 9.2 Photographer unknown. Arthur’s 1933 Rolls-Royce: a 20/25 drop-head Henley Style Coupé, a ‘beautiful, incredibly rare design’.

a works’ foreman. John Henry Deakin retired aged forty-three in 1935, by which time his eldest son had turned his back on a respectable life on Merseyside. Deakin’s younger brother Ronald became an accountant.2 After spending some time in Ireland and possibly in Spain, Deakin, aged twenty-two, arrived in London in mid-September 1934. He was arrested, his case later dismissed, for aiding and abetting the main defendants in a court case in which they were accused of ‘maintaining a place at Endell-street for exhibiting to the view of any person willing to pay for admission lewd and scandalous performances’. This was The Caravan Club, a very new, short-lived but queer-friendly club. It advertised itself as ‘London’s Greatest Bohemian Rendezvous said to be the most unconventional spot in town’.3 Couples drifted away to an ante-room outside the lavatory where a question mark was painted on the door. Deakin cleverly defended himself as a young innocent: ‘How could I possibly know how people in London behaved?’4 One of Deakin’s fellow defendants was noted down as ‘A. Jeffries’ but, tempting as it is to believe that this was a rare occasion on which Arthur failed to correct the misspelling of his name, it is hardly likely as he is described as a waiter. Yet The Caravan

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Club, or a similar venue, seems the probable meeting place for the two men and Deakin’s close friend in the 1960s, the journalist Daniel Farson, states that a new benefactor paid his defence costs.5 This has to be Arthur. It is not certain exactly when Arthur first met John Deakin nor when they became lovers. From the 1930s till the 1950s they always lived near to each other alone or as a couple. Nothing in any correspondence actually confirms that they were lovers but it is assumed by Farson and by Bunny Roger, a close friend to Arthur, who knew them both well. They lived and travelled together for three years. Having spent time in Ireland and then Spain, by October 1935 Deakin was living just up from Orchard Court at 54 Baker Street; by 1936, he was living with Arthur and their servants, Mr and Mrs Jarrold, at Orchard Court. By 1937, Deakin’s address was 116b Crawford Street, a set of rooms above a shop in Marylebone less than ten minutes’ walk from the flat in Portman Square, at which point he was also living with Arthur in a grand Hampshire house and Orchard Court was no longer their London base. After the war, although the affair had ended, they still lived near each other in Egerton Gardens, Deakin at number 67 and Arthur at number 50. The art critic Douglas Cooper was living round the corner at that time at 18 Egerton Terrace, with the physician and collector Basil Mackenzie. By the 1950s, Deakin was a stalwart in Soho and a close friend of Francis Bacon, while Arthur was always based in Kensington or Belgravia and no friend to Bacon – nor any longer to Deakin. Deakin became a very distinguished photographer but in the early 1930s he saw himself as a painter, as he did again later in life after he was finally sacked from Vogue. The affair between Deakin and Jeffress was caught up with painting in many ways and it was Deakin’s ambition and vision as an artist and Arthur’s generosity with money that determined their time together. Deakin is often caricatured in books where he makes a sulphurous, almost pantomime, appearance. He was his own worst enemy and his friends never held back in describing his cruel wit and drunken meanness. But he was a very clever man, culturally ambitious and extremely funny. He and Arthur met when Deakin was in his early twenties, on his uppers as usual, and Arthur, still thrilled to be newly wealthy, was about thirty. Many of Deakin’s anecdotes seem like fantasy but turn out to be near the truth – he is a hobgoblin, hard to pin down.

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Not a handsome man by any means, Deakin was in every way a contrast to all the friends from Arthur’s usual social circles, a foil to his good-looking blond boyfriends and a real challenge as an intimate. Lucian Freud described him as being both Cinderella and the Ugly Sisters and Barbara Hutton – in a brilliant put-down (doubly insulting by implying he was an also-ran) – said he was the second nastiest little man she had met.6 Deakin had a mordant wit and provided Arthur with that thrill of difference and risk which encounters with sailors and guardsmen gave him. Each man had left their uncongenial backgrounds behind them. Arthur was interested in art from his schooldays and his first flat displayed a collection of paintings, including several portraits of Arthur himself. But a new taste for the modern, and for naïfs, may well have come from Deakin and was discovered alongside him while they were together in Paris. Deakin provided a partly informed and largely instinctive introduction to many new kinds of works of art. In 1934, Arthur added to his range of persona, becoming not only a traveller to exotic places and man-about-town but part of a couple and a country-house owner, too. Arthur bought a house on the Marwell Estate in Hampshire at auction in 1934, initially as a weekend retreat for the couple. Doubtless it tickled Deakin to be so grand. The centrepiece of the estate was Marwell Hall, a house with a medieval core but largely a Tudor revival building of 1816, which had once belonged to Jane Seymour’s family. The estate contained several other houses, one of which was called Marwell Lodge; built in about 1808, it became Arthur’s new home. The Lodge is an attractive two-storey red-brick building of eight bays with a plain parapet and hidden slate roof. Its main front faces northwest with an arched door casing and 12-pane sash windows.7 The original Georgian house was three bays wide with two more added to the left a few years later. Two lower service bays to the left were added in the nineteenth century and Arthur added one more bay to the eastern elevation in the summer of 1937 to give him a new drawing room and master bedroom above. Previously the house had six bedrooms with two bathrooms, one of which was connecting, and the extended version gave Arthur his own suite of bedroom, dressing room and private bathroom and a further five guest bedrooms. He wanted to entertain. His design provided an entrance hall which opened into another hall through

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a new archway and, hung with elaborate curtains, framed the vista of his portrait of Napoleon by Baron Gérard (colour plate 6 and figure 9.3). A library and study were converted from the morning room and there were two staircases and four servants’ bedrooms. In 1934, the brickwork was colourwashed in cream and the wide lawns were edged with walks and herbaceous borders. There was also a walled kitchen garden, tennis court and two cottages each with three bedrooms but only earth closets. Arthur bought the Lodge in 1934 at auction for as little as £2,750, or £188,000 in today’s money; he sold it for nearly ten times that price after the war.8 The property had comfortably-off sitting tenants, Maurice Gill, an underwriter, and his wife Olive, who had a ten-year lease at £180 per annum until September 1937. Arthur re-named his country house Marwell House, though the name Lodge persisted locally. It stands just outside the village of Owslebury, about five miles south of Winchester on the old Roman road to the sea. Bunny Roger was certain that Arthur picked up his sailors along the coast in Southampton, rather than Portsmouth, and shopped in Winchester.9 Marwell is about seventy-five miles from London and the transatlantic liner terminal in Southampton is only ten miles away, so Arthur had travelled the area regularly from childhood. Any form of ‘Sea Town’ was erotic, a separate world associated with young men, fleeting encounters and the promise of travel. In 1934, J.B. Priestley described Southampton’s ‘festive Jack’s-in-the-port life’.10 Arthur was clearly happy in either place: he later referred to his ‘esoteric visits to Pompey. Such fun I usually have’.11 Marwell House was the epitome of a small English country house, and has always been hidden from view until the visitor reaches half way up its 200-yard curving drive. The house stood in twenty-four acres of park and woodland and Jane Austen could easily have felt at home there. The stable building provided accommodation for the chauffeur and the Rolls-Royce. Arthur and Deakin used the house initially only at weekends and it was big enough to house the Gills (whose daughter left home to marry in 1936) and staff as well as Arthur and Deakin. Then the Gills died, within months of each other, over the winter of 1936–7. The coincidence of their early deaths (aged only fifty-three and fifty-six) was very fortunate for Arthur and could have been a fictional country house

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murder plot in the hands of Margery Allingham or Dorothy L. Sayers. The list of characters could include a young, ‘exotic’ and wealthy owner with a louche reputation and a flashy car as well as a boyfriend who was not only a bit of rough but also, very fashionably, a photographer; their chauffeur; an architect with an unfortunately apposite name; his local film-magnate client and a visiting designer of Italian romantic gardens. The backdrop would be the legend of the neighbouring Marwell Hall with its tragic ‘Legend of the Mistletoe Bough’, in which a young bride’s skeleton was found long after a Christmas game of hide-and-seek went awry. More prosaically, the untimely death of Mr and Mrs Gill enabled Arthur to make the changes he wanted to his house and he employed a local architect, A.E.T. Mort of Winchester, to effect the alterations. Mort worked extensively in the county and undertook several projects for film producer J. Arthur Rank at nearby Sutton Scotney. Arthur worked on the interior with the designer John Hill of Green & Abbott, with whom he had been at Cambridge. The dining room had Empire furniture with walls and curtains striped in ‘sombre shades of [. . .] tobacco and spinach green’.12 Here, Arthur hung works by de Chirico and Eugene Berman, bought with Deakin at his side. His friend the artist Martin Battersby provided ‘sanguine monotone’ murals in the rococo bedroom whose silvered eighteenth-century Venetian furniture had seats and backs carved like flat shells and with molluscencrusted legs.13 Bunny Roger remembered that the white ermine bedspread was the only item out of bounds for dressing up when they played charades.14 It seems that Arthur commissioned work from his acquaintance, the garden designer Cecil Pinsent, who had a distinguished reputation working in Tuscany for American expatriates, most notably Bernard Berenson at I Tatti. He also installed a swimming pool at the Villa Capponi for Henry and Esther Clifford in 1928, the year that Arthur first visited. Although Henry Clifford was not on good terms, at that time at least, with Bernard Berenson, Arthur would have known all about his house as well as La Foce, owned by Iris Origo, for which Pinsent also redesigned both house and garden. Arthur visited Berenson a couple of times in 1944 while he was stationed in Florence, and also bumped into Pinsent several times:

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Pinsent ran true to form in his manner of saying most unexpected things in a dry as dust voice. For instance he began one conversational sequence as follows, ‘I am not physically homosexual myself though most of my friends have always been so [. . .]’ quite out of the blue and apropos of nothing at all that I could see.15 Little visual evidence of any of Pinsent’s work remains at Marwell, although photographs from the 1930s and 1940s show Italianate box and yew hedging and some sculpture. Pinsent enclosed lawns and added a formal avenue towards the woodland.16 An elegant garden in which to set his Georgian house would have been a long-term plan for Arthur but Pinsent’s contribution was not substantial. Arthur had grown up in a house with glorious gardens where his father had grown specimen roses and today those gardens are two extensive public parks. Arthur often visited his uncle’s famous estate at Meadowbrook Manor and his uncle, Thomas Jeffress, went on to open a botanical garden in memory of his business partner. Arthur certainly had patterns to follow. Arthur abandoned London and Orchard Court to make Marwell his only home, and devoted as much money as he could to create this first perfect setting. He could not afford to have a luxurious town flat as well as a country home and needed cash to spare for travel. A photo album from the late 1930s to 1940s, owned by Rosemary McColl (née Molloy), shows several shots of Marwell with Arthur, Trudie the dog and guests and Arthur taking tea on the terrace served by a particularly formal butler (see figures 9.4, 9.5 and 9.6). The photographer of many of the images in the album has been identified as John Deakin. One portrait strongly resembles Arthur but in informal drag as a handsome, matronly woman – rather like Stella – but with painted nails, a striped T-shirt, chalk-striped jacket and a scarf hiding any Adam’s apple. It is dated 1940. The same person, in the John Deakin Archive, is photographed in a heavy coat but with cleavage exposed. This became the focus of much diligent and inspired research by the John Deakin Archive curator, Paul Rousseau, in which the sitter was assessed more clearly, through facial recognition techniques, as Francis Bacon.17 How they would have hated to have been confused this way. Astonishingly however, these drag photos turn out to be part of a series of women dressed as men dressed as women. Bacon/Jeffress is in fact a woman

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Figure 9.3 Photographer unknown. The grand entrance hall to Marwell House, designed by John Hill, with Baron Gérard’s portrait of Napoleon as centrepiece, before 1948.

called Celia Short, and other friends in drag include the designer Audrey Cruddas and Rosemary Molloy herself. Barbara Ker-Seymer was there, too, as her own albums in Tate Archive attest. Arthur designed a theatrical and opulent setting at Marwell, while Deakin and his friends provided marvellous commedia dell’arte (see figure 9.3). Daniel Farson tells a story set during their time together in Hampshire which he describes, rather unfairly, as ‘the charade when Arthur Jeffress enacted the role of a country gentleman with a stately home’. While visiting the neighbours for tea on the lawn, someone suddenly shouted ‘Deakin! Deakin!’ Arthur and Deakin exchanged a quick look and Arthur, on the alert, commented that it was an interesting name for a little dog. A wire-haired dachshund (very like their own Trudie at Marwell) appeared at the sound of his name and the lady explained that they had named their dog after a defendant – ‘one of those pansy ones’ – from early in her husband’s

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Figure 9.4 Photographer unknown, probably Rosemary McColl. Arthur Jeffress at Marwell with one of his own embroidered footstools, 1939.

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Figure 9.5 Photographer unknown, possibly Rosemary McColl. From her album, taken at Marwell House, Arthur Jeffress and John Deakin’s home, 1939. Arthur Jeffress and manservant on the terrace at Marwell, 1939.

career as a barrister.18 The couple were almost certainly Derek Curtis-Bennet QC and his first wife, Margaret; he had successfully appeared for the defence at The Caravan Club trial. Among those that Curtis-Bennett later defended were William Joyce (Lord Haw Haw), serial killer John Christie and atomic spy Klaus Fuchs. Beyond their Hampshire estate, Arthur and John Deakin began to devote themselves to serious adventures, extending their knowledge of art and having fun. Deakin brought with him laughter, jokes and risk, and they introduced each other to new worlds that they would explore together in luxury and at leisure. Deakin had a passion for silent films; Arthur bought him a new set of teeth.19

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Figure 9.6 Photographer unknown, probably Rosemary McColl. From her album, taken at Marwell House, Arthur Jeffress and John Deakin’s home, 1939. The house is shown below and their wire-haired dachshund, Trudie, above.

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In October 1935, Arthur sailed to Vera Cruz in Mexico with Deakin; by May 1936 they arrived in Los Angeles from Mazatlán, a Mexican resort just starting to be frequented by film stars. Nothing is known about the rest of their trip, which started on the east coast and ended on the west, and must have included Mexico City. Were they there for the Day of the Dead festivities? Did they seek out any of the Mexican muralists? None of Arthur’s photo albums from this holiday survive and it is not clear to what extent Deakin was taking photographs: on transit papers, Deakin describes himself as an ‘artist’. They also visited New York where Arthur began to buy works of art seriously, starting with De Chirico’s The Painter’s Family from the Pierre Matisse Gallery (see colour plate 2) and Eugene Berman’s The Jug on the Window Sill from the Julien Levy Gallery. Both are now in the Tate’s collection, the latter presented in 1960 by Arthur and the former purchased in 1961. Deakin checked in three pieces of luggage while Arthur had ten. They also spent time in Venice in 1936 where Deakin, eyes sleepily halfclosed and wearing a short-sleeved jumper and natty neckerchief, is photographed in a gondola (see figure 9.7).20

Figure 9.7 Photographer probably Arthur Jeffress. John Deakin in a gondola in Venice, 1936.

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It is also likely that Arthur had a flat for a while in Paris, having given up Orchard Court as of 1934, the year of the Marwell auction. His chauffeur later referred to a ‘chalet’ in Fontainebleau.21 Arthur’s long friendship with André Ostier was already established by that date. Ostier was the son of a distinguished banker who arranged for his son to catalogue a Rothschild library then bought for him a bookshop A.L.P. (À La Page) on Avenue Friedland from 1928–34, where he sold books and held exhibitions.22 In 1933 Arthur bought a Balthus painting, advised by Ostier. Their friendship lasted for all of Arthur’s life. Arthur later said that he had lived for six months in Paris and it was probably from summer to Christmas 1937 when the builders were in at home in Hampshire. All was complete in their new home by spring 1938, while Deakin prepared for his first one-man show. While they were in Paris, the show of the summer was L’Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne. Picasso’s Guernica was shown in the Spanish Pavilion. Hungarian Tokay cost sixpence a glass and fresh caviar sandwiches were available for the same price from a buffet near the Russian pavilion. Arthur and Deakin were witnesses to a series of very significant exhibitions which formed much of their subsequent taste in modern art, and celebrated figurative over abstract painting. Les maîtres populaires de la réalité at the Musée de Grenoble included work by Rousseau, Bombois, Vivin and Bauchant, all of whom were subsequently featured in Arthur’s collection and gallery. The show then toured to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The Maitres d’art indépendant 1895–1937 exhibition was held at the Petit Palais, a series of one-man shows with twenty-five works each by Matisse, Picasso, Bonnard, Vuillard and Léger and others. Finally, Origines et développement de l’art international indépendant, held at the Musée du Jeu de Paume, brought Chaim Soutine to prominence. Deakin specified that he introduced the work of Bombois and Soutine to Arthur, who bought a work by each.23 In turn Arthur introduced his friend André Ostier to Deakin, and their careers as photographers followed a similar trajectory. For both men, fashion photography was a career but portraying artists and cities was their real talent. Ostier took up photography full time in 1938, launching his career with a portrait of Émile Bernard. Arthur

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later acquired Toulouse-Lautrec’s portrait of the same sitter (see colour plate 10). 1937 was the perfect year in which to discover new French art, and Arthur and Deakin as two enthusiasts with money to spend were on the spot. Major shows of French painting and new museums opened in order, as Prime Minister Blum had stated, to create an encyclopedia of French art. Picasso was its newest star and ‘Douanier’ Rousseau the champion of the petits gens. There had been fascist riots in Paris during February 1934; six prime ministers were in power between that date and June 1937. Arthur was not overly political and was very risk averse, but Deakin may have overcome his worries and persuaded him that Paris was the place to be. Deakin, at least, probably provided some kind of empathy with the workers and it seems highly probable that the two of them had some feeling for the socialist slogan of 1936: ‘Tout est possible!’ (‘Everything is possible!’). They could live in a highly cultured capital – the very centre of the art world – where homosexuality was at least not illegal. Both Arthur and Deakin continued to spend substantial amounts of time in Paris throughout their lives and, in 1956, Deakin showed John Deakin’s Paris then John Deakin’s Rome at the gallery of his new lover, David Archer. Deakin and Arthur started the summer of 1937 at La Malcontenta, the glorious Villa Foscari near Venice. Photographs by Barbara Ker-Seymer show her with Arthur and Deakin at the villa and in Venice in June 1937 with Barbara’s husband-to-be Humphrey Pease, Jock Jardine and Rosemary Molloy (see figure 9.8).24 That same year, Bertie Landsberg, the millionaire Brazilian and then owner of this perfect Palladian villa, was short of money to maintain it so dreamt up a Friends of Malcontenta circle, and Arthur might have joined this early holiday property bond scheme too. Towards the end of World War II, Arthur told Esther Clifford that he had spent a scant half hour in Venice, then: On the way back, I dashed into the Malcontenta. The windows, window frames, door jams etc are all smashed by near-by bomb hits, but except for shocking neglect, it seems unhurt. Several families of sfollati [evacuees]

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Figure 9.8 Photographer Barbara Ker-Seymer. Arthur Jeffress outside the Gran Caffè Quadri in St. Mark’s Square, Venice, 1937.

now inhabit it [. . .] their bits of pitch pine furniture look too odd in those huge rooms: little cooking stoves in the vast fireplaces surmounted by marble bilection mould frames etc. The frescoes seemed in fairly good order, what I could see of them beneath their coating of dust. It looked sadder and more melancholy than ever, and was draughty as all get out. I wrote Bertie Landsberg and told him about it.25 In 1937, three days before Christmas, Arthur and Deakin checked how matters had progressed at Marwell, then sailed from Southampton to Nassau in the West Indies, having also found time just before they left Paris to buy a

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work by Monsú Desiderio from André Ostier. In January 1938, John Deakin arrived – very modern – by plane in Miami en route to from Whale Cay, Bahamas. He gave the name of his hostess in Whale Cay as Miss B. Carstairs and his last address as Winchester, Hampshire. Deakin states that he paid his own fare but Arthur was with him and footed the bill. Miss B. Carstairs was the splendid Queen of Whale Cay, Betty Carstairs, born Marion Barbara and more generally known as Joe. As noted above, Arthur probably knew her from the early 1930s when she lived in Mulberry Walk in Chelsea, where a party was held by her girlfriend on the night of Michael Stephens’ death. A flamboyant lesbian, Joe loved speed and machines and ran Great House on her island as a guest house for a chosen group of friends, often twenty at a time, including lovers, racing drivers, film stars and the otherwise entertaining. She had many tattoos (like Bertie Landsberg) and loved dressing up for parties as a heavily made-up woman in frumpy frocks in contrast to her normal shirt, tie and trousers. She rebuilt the island’s lighthouse, and constructed a power plant, radio station, school and museum. In the guest bedrooms she left a splendid set of anti-rules including ‘AVOID LOOKING AT PICTURES. IMMORAL!’ In November 1938, Deakin had an exhibition of his paintings at the important Mayor Gallery in Cork Street, London. A reviewer from the Evening Standard was spun a marvellous yarn about the trip that preceded the exhibition: Mr Deakin has been painting on the island of Tahiti. One day he ran short of paints and discovered that, despite Tahitic Gauguin tradition, the island was paintless. Leaving a half-painted canvas he took a ship for Fiji, six hundred miles away. But here, too, he drew a blank. A further week’s journey took him to the New Hebrides. In New Caledonia, some two thousand miles from his starting point, he was lucky. He struck paint in a Chinese chemist’s shop, returned to Tahiti after a month’s absence and went on with his picture.26 Arthur’s role in this adventure is omitted but the idea of him waiting patiently on Tahiti for a month, or even meekly funding and going along on such a hare-brained expedition, is impossible.

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Deakin had a rubber stamp made to impress the message ‘Deakin, Owslebury 39’ (the latter was their Marwell telephone number) on the reverse of his photographs and it appears on several photographs in the album kept by Rosemary Molloy, later McColl. 1939 was the year in which Deakin apparently turned from painting to photography, although 1937–8 while they lived in Paris seems much more likely: Deakin first picked up a camera in Paris in 1939 – it had been left behind in an apartment after a party – and exposed a few frames. ‘It was a cheap camera and he’d never taken a picture before’, wrote his friend, the poet Elizabeth Smart, but his tyrannical eyes took over.27 At that point fashion illustrator Christian Bérard introduced Deakin to Michel de Brunhoff, editor of French Vogue, where Bérard had worked since 1935. Bérard, with Eugene Berman and Pavel Tchelitchew, became the leading representative of Neo-Romanticism in French painting. Bébé Bérard’s career was devoted mostly to design, particularly for the theatre and cinema, but also the fashion world. He and his lover Boris Kochno, of the Ballets Russes, were one of the most prominent and openly homosexual couples in French theatre during the 1930s and 1940s: perhaps Henry Clifford introduced the two couples, but Ostier is much more likely to have been the link. Deakin became a fashion photographer at British Vogue and was then asked to concentrate on portraiture rather than the superficiality of lovely clothes. He excelled, like André Ostier, in capturing more than the mere image of artists and writers. But he was finally sacked in 1954 for yet another bout of drunkenness and returned for a while to painting, making collages and surreal objets d’art until he became the definitive photographer of Soho. A pair of paintings by Deakin of a Pearly King and Queen in a faux naïf style survives, as does the story that Arthur was the model for the portrait of the king. The paintings were planned to be included in a Deakin show at the St George’s Gallery which never took place. It was announced with a quarterpage illustration of the male portrait in Vogue which must have annoyed Arthur, but only if the story of Arthur as the model was current at the time. Deakin had already photographed the Whitechapel’s Black Eyes and Lemonade

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exhibition in 1951, an early exploration of vernacular culture which included some pearly costumes.28 Bizarrely, Dora Maar (Picasso’s partner and muse) photographed a Pearly King collecting money in London for Empire Day, 1935. Although Arthur owned one of Picasso’s portraits of Dora Maar there is no reason to think that he knew her but, as she was an established photographer in Paris in the mid-1930s, it is very possible. It might be why Henry Clifford dreamed up the camp French correspondence between owner and sitter during the war. The idea of associating Arthur with a cockney costermonger might be barbed but it is also a gentle portrait and record of their time together in the 1930s. It seems likely that Deakin and Arthur had parted by 1940, letting war bring to an end a relationship that had already deteriorated because of Deakin’s drinking. On 29 September 1939, the National Register gives a record of the household at Marwell. Rosemary Molloy McColl, their chum from the Malcontenta holiday, was living with Arthur and Deakin and, unpaid, undertaking ‘domestic duties’. Two years younger than Deakin, she seems to have been his friend first and they may well have met in Dublin where she had ‘led a lively life at Trinity College [. . .] known for her sophisticated circle of friends’.29 She was also a good friend of Bunny Roger.30 Rosemary had married Evan McColl earlier that last summer before the war; he volunteered early as a member of the Territorial Army and later won the Military Cross. She later married Barney Heron and then Alane Henderson. Her photo album shows Marwell in winter, Deakin’s first time in Venice, Trudie the wire-haired dachshund and images of lots of friends, including the very striking and butch Celia Short, who was in the Women’s Land Army in Buckinghamshire by September 1939. The photos range in date from Deakin and Arthur’s 1936 Venice trip to Marwell in 1939 and 1940 and some later shots of Rosemary’s two children, who were born in 1941 and 1945 respectively. A little sprig of leaves was pressed between the pages and wartime contact details for friends are scribbled on the flyleaf.31 It is not known what contact Deakin and Arthur had when the war ended but, by Hallowe’en 1947, Deakin managed to lose all his photographic equipment between Chelsea and Egerton Gardens, in which street they both had flats.32 Deakin returned to painting later in life and very much wanted to

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show his work at Arthur’s gallery. Robert Melville sent on a photo of one of the new works to Arthur in Venice in July 1955 and Arthur said he was: somewhat surprised at the Deakin. I must admit it looks quite a good one, but feel somewhat doubtful as to the advisability of showing such obviously faux-naives. He only paints like that with his tongue in his cheek, you know.33 It is deeply sad that this was the way that Arthur remembered him. Deakin’s extraordinary work, especially in Italy in the late 1950s and early 1960s as part of an influential group of artists and designers in Genoa, is too little known. His career as a highly innovative photographer began as soon as he joined The British Army Film and Photographic Unit.

10 The Zamzam adventure

By 1940 there was war in Europe and within the Jeffress family. Arthur’s brother Randolph divorced Marie for adultery. She had already been living at 82 Portland Place (though probably not in her late father-in-law’s flat) but, shockingly, was declared bankrupt while living in a private hotel on Piccadilly in May 1939. The man who had got her into this financial trouble was James Ernest Elder Wills, cited as correspondent in her divorce. He, too, was declared bankrupt due, he claimed, to entertaining rich potential clients. He had a long career in the British film business both as an art director and director. Probably Randolph was one of these potential clients and did not suspect that Marie would be attracted to Wills, who weighed nineteen stone and had lost not only a leg but also his hearing in World War I. Nonetheless, the couple married far away from London in Darlington, Co. Durham, late in 1940. Wills also ran the camouflage and special devices section of the SOE at The Thatched Barn in Barnet, a mock-Tudor hotel built in the 1930s, later bought by the holiday camp founder Billy Butlin only to be requisitioned for the SOE. Wills led a team there that created devices of the type made by Q in the James Bond series: These included concealed radio transmitters, booby traps hidden in animal dung (camel for the desert, horse for Europe, elephant for the Far East), exploding milk bottles, cigarettes, pens etc. These were used by agents of SOE [. . .] and left where they would be picked up (or stepped in) by the enemy.1 In the 1960s, it became a Playboy club; Elstree Film Studios later used it as a location for TV series including The Saint and The Prisoner. 105

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In late 1939, Wills and Marie lived together at Pinewood Film Studios, home to the headquarters and training unit of The British Army Film and Photographic Unit. Deakin might well have bumped into Arthur’s disgraced sister-in-law there. By the mid-1950s, Wills and Marie were living at separate addresses in Marylebone. She died in 1957 at Windsor aged only fifty-two. Wills died in 1970. Marie and Randolph’s son Godfrey went to school at Chester College, Sheepcote Road, Harrow. A school ‘friend’ bizarrely describes him as ‘regrettably mentally retarded’ and said that he was expelled after only a year or so at the school.2 Obviously the events leading to his parents’ divorce (he was fourteen when Marie remarried) affected him deeply and, together with an unstable grandmother and the war, circumstances caused him to be taken away from Kenton. By 1939, he was at a school run by Frederick Kingsmill Brownrigg in Cromer but bombs began to be dropped there, too, as Germans planes returned home over the Norfolk coast after raids. Later, he took a degree in economics at Trinity College, Dublin. Known as Jeff, he went to Peru during the 1950s to study horses and horsemanship, then moved to Seville where he joined a sporting and country club, the Real Club de Pineda. He kept one or two horses there and taught English locally. He started an equestrian school with father and son Antonio and Carlo Espigares, which still flourishes as Equitacion Espigares. Jeff lived at the Hotel Inglaterra, not far from the cathedral, where he slept, took his meals and had his laundry done; behind the hotel he had an apartment where he could concentrate on his hobbies: photography, like his father, stamp and book collecting.3 He died in Seville in 1993, aged sixty-seven, a Roman Catholic like his mother, and leaving more or less the same sum of money as his father did when he died at the same age. The Independent revealed that: Sir Albert Godfrey Jeffress, of Seville, Spain, left estate valued at £660,359 net. He left £5,000 to Brookwood Cemetery, Woking, for the upkeep of a grave, £300 to the Staff Christmas Fund at the National Liberal Club, London, his books on horses to the British National Equestrian Centre, Stoneleigh, and the residue equally between Trinity College, Dublin, and the

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Association of British Riding Schools, to provide scholarships for the training of riding instructors.4 This knighthood appears to be a British newspaper just taking the Spanish abbreviation for Señor a step too far. On 22 September 1937, Arthur had his status as a naturalized British subject confirmed, by virtue of his birth in England; Randolph, born in New York, did the same on 13 February 1940 and eventually carried a British passport. A German maid at Kenton Grange, Mary Annie Hense, was given re-admission to British nationality that year, too. The US Ambassador to Britain was Joseph Kennedy, a supporter of appeasement and strong advocate of America’s continuing neutrality. He advised Americans living in Britain to leave the country during the ‘Phony’ or ‘Bore War’. Meanwhile, Ed Murrow, an American journalist, broadcast truthful analysis of the European situation across the Atlantic via BBC, to which Arthur would have listened carefully. In April 1940, Hitler invaded Norway and Denmark, moving on to the Low Countries and into France. On 2 June 1940, Arthur left England, John Deakin and family troubles behind him to sail on the President Roosevelt to New York. While they were crossing the Atlantic, Operation Dynamo – the evacuation from Dunkirk – was drawing to a close; set in motion on 26 May 1940, 224,686 British and 121,445 French and Belgian troops had been evacuated by 3 June. On that same day, the Germans bombed Paris. Arthur arrived in New York six days later; the day after he arrived, Italy declared war on France and Great Britain. On 12 June 1940, Arthur applied in New York as a volunteer ambulance driver to the American Field Service for six months to serve in France, but two days later Paris was captured. The American Field Service had originally been created during World War I by American Francophiles and was revived during the next conflict: ‘Tous et tout pour la France!’ From the outbreak of war in Europe, several charitable organizations in the United States collected money and goods to help alleviate the hardships of the British. As that need grew, so did the number of AngloAmerican charities, and Arthur was allocated to the British–American Ambulance Corps which sent support to the British army.5

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The two Americans running the BAAC to which Arthur was assigned were Frank Vicovari, an architect, and William Ruxton, who was such an Anglophile that he tried to enlist in the British army. After Dunkirk, the funds to acquire and equip twenty-four ambulances rolled in within twenty-four hours. BAAC was besieged with applications to join but it was not until the winter of 1940 that a definite request for their services was received. Arthur described himself on the AFS application forms as white, 5ft 8ins, 163 pounds (just over 11 and a half stone), with brown eyes, black hair and a sallow complexion. As well as an obvious ability to drive, he offered a reasonable knowledge of France and that he was fairly fluent in French (‘have lived in Paris for six months’) with the ability to speak some Italian and German. His references were a representative of the family’s New York bank, The Guaranty Trust Co.; Forrest Hyde, his lawyer and a Virginian connection; Phelps Warren, later an authority on historic glass; and his friend since Harrow, Henry Clifford, who had joined the Philadelphia Museum of Art in October 1930.6 Arthur gave the address of his next of kin as his brother Randolph at Kenton Grange. He also gave his mother’s as Moorcroft, Hillingdon; this was a private mental home where she had been admitted, off and on, since her husband’s death. Arthur’s own address on the application form is the Hotel Ritz Tower, crossed out and replaced with the Hotel Lowell; both were elegant apartment hotels in upper Manhattan. He was not given an immediate role and returned to California, where he completed a US Young Men’s Draft Card in mid-October 1940, giving his aunt Kate Jeffress as next of kin. When he finally sailed the next spring, Arthur’s home address was given as 1354 Miller Place, Hollywood. This early 1930s house is quite small and overlooks Sunset Boulevard from the Hollywood Hills. He spent some of the autumn and winter there with his friend Hugh (known always as Tim) Brooke. Most of his fellow ambulance drivers were from the East Coast or New York. Arthur chose to leave England specifically to volunteer; he could easily have applied to do voluntary work in England, but perhaps he was following Joe Kennedy’s advice to Americans living in Britain. James Stewart from the AFS understood that Arthur had given up his home in England for the duration to be used in any way the British authorities saw fit.7

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Arthur did not rush off to a theatre of war at once. He had applied as a volunteer six months before his thirty-fifth birthday and eighteen months before the US entered World War II. During the summer of 1940, the Battle of Britain began. The air battle concentrated on the Channel during July and August, but then focussed on cities. The Hampshire ports and naval bases of Portsmouth and Southampton were particular targets during the Blitz that began on 7 September. On 6 November 1940, twelve bombs fell on the centre of Southampton. One of them, carrying 500 lbs of explosives, dropped directly on the Art School, part of the newly built Art Gallery inside the Civic Centre. Fifteen students and three staff were killed and the gallery did not re-open until 1946. A landmine also fell in Marwell village. A brief handwritten list of places in which Arthur had lived puts a bracket around Marwell with the note ‘Req. 1940’.8 On 15 August 1944 Arthur wrote: I have just had word from my lawyer that the Americans are after my house since they wish to use it as an Officers convalescent home. Knowing nurses as I do, I am convinced that Tornados, Kesselring and the Robot bombs will scarcely be able to do more to it than will the gentle sisterhood.9 Back from California to New York in 1941, Arthur joined other BAAC volunteers in the American Field Service and undertook a month’s intensive training in New York. They were to be sent to Africa, to drive ambulances for General de Gaulle’s Free French troops in their fight with the Allies against Italian forces. The drivers were all inoculated, encouraged to give blood and witnessed several hospital operations in an attempt to harden them up for what they would later see in the field. Each man was given responsibility for particular equipment and Arthur took charge of the stores and miscellaneous supplies ‘ranging from hundreds of cakes of soap on down the line to twenty four wristwatches, which were donated to the good cause’.10 Supplies, soap and clothes were to preoccupy Arthur for the rest of his war. Their uniforms were from Brooks Brothers. Dr James L. Clark, Head of the Department of Preparation, Arts and Installation at the American Museum of Natural History, gave the men a lecture on what they would need, might see and should expect on their trip to

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Africa.11 They also got to know each other socially: cocktail parties were organized for them and James Stewart’s diary mentions that on 21 February ‘Bing [Meuller] came over home with me. Dot came over then Arthur Jeffress dropped down’.12 Arthur finally left for his active service on the Zamzam after several false starts and many cancelled embarkation dates. The ambulance corps boarded on 19 March on its way to Eritrea, via Mombasa. They sailed from Hoboken, New Jersey, at 9.30pm on 20 March for a six-week voyage to Alexandria, Egypt, with planned stops at Baltimore, Trinidad, Recife, Cape Town, and finally Mombasa. The journey was far more remarkable than could have been imagined; within a few weeks, all the crew and passengers had been declared lost at sea. The Zamzam (named after the miraculous well revealed to Hagar – ‘Here! Here!’ – in the Bible as she searched for water for her son Ishmael) had been built in Belfast. By 1941 it was an Egyptian passenger ship carrying twentyfour British–American Ambulance Corps ambulance drivers (all American citizens and graduates, of which Arthur was one of the oldest) and missionary families representing several denominations to Africa. James Stewart, the same age as Arthur, described it as: a ship fit to give anyone the cold shivers. She was old, she was dirty, a sea going fire horse brought back from the pasture to which she had been pensioned. [. . .] This she vessel was an unwashed, infested, old peroxide blonde on whose face the uplifting operation had failed. (Poor old Zam Zam. What a way to talk about her. She died as nobly as any ship).13 The captain, William Gray Smith, was British and his ship was carrying 195 passengers, including fifty-five women, thirty-five children and a crew of 141. The cargo was ‘lubricating oil, tin plate, ambulances, trucks, steel bars, radios, typewriters, batteries, girdles, cosmetics and Coca Cola’.14 The BAAC had provided excellent equipment, including twenty-two ambulances, two trucks, a staff car, a field kitchen, spare parts and enough medical supplies for one year. The passengers were very diverse, and included missionaries, longshoremen, tobacco businessmen from North Carolina, two Greek nurses, a Belgian couple, several Canadians and an Italian prince. The captain:

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Figure 10.1 Photographer unknown. Arthur Jeffress on the Zamzam en route to war as an ambulance driver, 1941.

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had quite a few headaches as regards his passengers who [. . .] had been separated into three feuding groups – the American missionaries who wanted the bar shut; the American ambulance men who wanted it open; and the British who presumably wouldn’t have minded so long as it closed at 10.30 in the evening.15 The ambulance drivers had eight outside cabins between them, equipped with folding washstands and ancient electric fans on C Deck just above the water line. The first stop, after thirty-two hours, was Baltimore, where they took several hundred tons of fertilizer into the hold and, on a personal level for some passengers, a lot of good food from Baltimore’s restaurants. Most of the young ambulance drivers came from very privileged backgrounds indeed, enabling them to give their time as volunteers, and throughout the voyage the reported unfamiliar discomforts were inevitably poor food and hot, cramped sleeping quarters, three to a cabin. After ten more days, having passed through the Sargasso Sea and into tropical heat, they disembarked in Trinidad on 30 March. James Stewart recalled: We tried some of Trinidad’s Planter’s Punches; we hired some of Trinidad’s famous Calypso Men to sing for us; we bent the elbow with men from the Royal Navy [. . .] We had a delightful day but had to be back on board about sunset.16 The next stop was Recife in Brazil, where there were several Axis ships in the harbour and a noticeable amount of military activity. The drivers’ mood began to change. Most of their time was spent in the Grand Hotel and the men were less reluctant to return on board than they had been in Trinidad: they were sick of the journey and anxious now to get on with their task. Charles Murphy, the editor of Fortune magazine in New York, and David Scherman, a photographer for Life magazine, also joined the ship. They were roughly half-way to their destination. The captain had received orders in Trinidad from the British Admiralty to sail to a prearranged course. Although sailing under an Egyptian flag, the ship was carrying British cargo and therefore had to conform to British regulations. His request to sail with lights, showing his neutral status and because he had

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women and children aboard, was refused and he was told again to blackout the ship. Between Trinidad and Recife, the portholes were painted black. German naval authorities would later point to these actions as evidence that the ship, although neutral, was not acting in a neutral manner. The Germans would also claim that a large part of the ship’s cargo was contraband. Suddenly, the Zamzam was shelled by the German ship Atlantis. Under the command of Kapitän Bernhard Rogge, the Atlantis was disguised as a friendly British vessel, the Tamesis, the first of nine or ten merchant ships armed by the Third Reich for the purposes of seeking out and engaging enemy cargo vessels. The Zamzam, now Egyptian and therefore neutral but formerly British, was shelled in contravention to the rules of engagement: Thursday, April 17th, 1941 at 5:55 in the morning a peculiar and outlandish new noise was heard by those on board [. . .] A vicious howling hissing sound I shall never forget and yet seem never quite able to remember [. . .] With a horrible rending explosive crunch the first shells came aboard.17 The Atlantis fired fifty-five shells and, although only nine hit their target, they did fatal damage to the Zamzam and injured several passengers and crew. All the passengers, Arthur included, were captured and taken aboard the Atlantis. Except for three critically injured men the Zamzamers were then transferred again to a small German freighter on the morning of 18 April, the day after the sinking. The name of the freighter was Dresden, but for the Zamzamers it came to be known as the prison ship and they remained on it for thirty-three days and nights. The women and children were taken aboard first and with the exception of a few of the older children were sent below deck at once. The men were permitted to walk about in a small restricted portion of the ship, where we were soon called upon to line up to register our names and citizenship and the name of our nearest kin not on the ship, and to surrender our passports, money, flashlights, large knives, cameras, field glasses, compasses, matches, and revealing papers, if we had any. About mid-afternoon the women and children began to appear on the deck and the men were ordered below for breakfast and lunch combined in one meal of a thick stew of rice and vegetables, tea without sugar or milk, and buttered coarse dark brown bread.18

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It was at first announced that the Dresden would seek a neutral ship to which they could all be transferred or, failing that, sail to South America or to a neutral port in Europe. Finally, the Dresden changed course and began to travel east. The captain admitted he was going to attempt to take the Zamzamers to German-occupied France and in order to get there, he had to go through the British blockade, warning that enemy action and even death were possibilities. One of the drivers, Bud Redgate, painted the words ‘Zam Zam Wandering and Wondering Society, South Atlantic Chapter’ on the side of their quarters.19 They crossed the equator once more and believed a new rumour that they were set for the Canary Islands. Eventually, they sighted lights which turned out to be the coast of Spain at 7.20pm on the evening of 18 May. At dawn on 20 May, they anchored at Saint-Jean-de-Luz in Occupied France and promptly ran aground. By 4pm the ambulance drivers left their miserable fellow-travellers – who were considered ‘belligerent nationals’– on board and were taken by bus to Biarritz.Non-Americans were later to be taken on to Bordeaux and then to internment as prisoners of war, from which they were not released until 1944. The drivers, although they were all American citizens, were regarded as combatants of some type even though the United States had not yet entered the war. The gossip was that the drivers would also be taken on to Bordeaux with the Catholic priests and teaching brothers travelling on Canadian passports. 19 May 1941, the day the Dresden arrived in France, was also the day of the first public news about the Zamzam’s fate and it had been six weeks since there had been any contact. Radio broadcasts and newspaper headlines announced that the Zamzam was lost, presumed sunk, with very little hope of any survivors; telegrams were sent to their families. On 20 May, news again went out by radio and newspapers that the Americans, at least, from the Zamzam were in fact alive and well and in France. Most of the Americans (the tobacco men and missionaries) were detained in Biarritz for nearly two weeks while their passports and visas were re-issued. They stayed in hotels under consular care; some even attended cocktail parties while all were free to wander the lovely resort. Most of them were handed over on 31 May at the French–Spanish border and made their way to Lisbon, from where they would return to the US by plane or ship.

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This group did not include the ambulance drivers, however, although they too spent some time in Biarritz in three small hotels. They had reasonable and plentiful food, bed, baths and comparative freedom as well as the likelihood of an imminent transfer to Lisbon and then home to recover and await new orders. Clearly they could not embark on the same route again immediately. They were at first confined to their hotels while the US Consulate took detailed notes of their experiences and, until the Germans stopped them, they were also interviewed by US journalists. They were given freedom to wander the city on their third day. James Stewart notes that some of the International Set was still enjoying the pleasures of the resort and that those Zamzamers who had the right clothes joined them for cocktails and dinner; Arthur, no doubt amongst them, having shaved off the beard he grew on board. But Stewart pointed out these were the ‘dregs’, those who had stayed in Biarritz on good terms with the invading Germans. There were lingering tensions, too, between the tobacco men, the missionaries and the drivers and internally within the latter group, too. On 31 May their fellow Americans departed for the United States via Lisbon while the ambulance drivers were put on twenty-four-hour guard without explanation. They had therefore been held, technically, as prisoners of war whilst the Germans considered their status as military personnel or not. Their passports described the majority as students; they held Geneva Convention identity cards but these had been issued to them by the British. Probably they were held as a warning to other ambulance units: a German communiqué, reported widely in the US press, stated that the military authorities had to make sure that the ambulance drivers would be in no position to reveal military secrets to the British. On 1 June they were all subjected to individual debrief by their own officers for about half an hour, to advise them on their future conduct. They were allowed limited freedom once more – largely for shopping trips and the odd swim – and, on 7 June, James Stewart joined a group for dinner. Its members included Bing Mueller, an experienced traveller, Jim Crudgington, a young Princeton graduate who visited Europe each summer with his grandmother and whose grandfather was the Gamble of Procter & Gamble, and Arthur. Dinner was brought in from the hotel Beau Séjour and ‘was excellent. With the wine, also fine, its cost totalled 80 francs each, which is about $1.60. Worth it surely’.20

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Later Stewart added: ‘I don’t like the business of having food sent in. In the face of all those who eat at our regular table and say little about the food, it has the smack of high hat and snob, I think.’ This was certainly how Stewart felt about Arthur and he described the behaviour of some as snobbish and having ‘too much Arthur Jeffress attitude’. He makes another jibe at the ‘Southern Gentlemen’ into which category Arthur could easily have fallen, but as he sounded so frightfully English he probably just made things even worse. On 23 June Stewart washed his undershirt in Arthur’s room, which sounds friendly enough, but may just reveal that Arthur had cleverly and typically managed to snaffle the only room with its own wash-hand basin.21 On 28 June, the ambulance drivers were finally put into trucks about 5.30am and taken to the station, where they boarded a third-class local train to Bordeaux. About 10pm they were transferred to the Paris Express. One of the ambulance drivers, Thomas Olney Greenough, overheard that they were being taken via Mulhouse to the Black Forest to a concentration camp, so he and James Stewart immediately escaped from the train while it was stationary in Poitiers. The pair reached Lisbon safely and arrived in the US by 28 July. Meanwhile, back on the Paris Express, travelling north with the possibility of going east to the German–Swiss border must have seemed both logical and frightening. However, new orders were received and the remaining nineteen AFS men were taken to Lurs, a small village in the Hautes Alpes de Provence. This will have been a long and bewildering day with only the change of roofs from slate to tiles and the brilliance of the late June sun to reveal, at least to those like Arthur who knew Europe, that the journey was taking them south towards the Mediterranean rather than north east. In Lurs, a large private house was requisitioned as their ‘prison’, so their incarceration – during a Provençal summer spent in a pretty village with views over the Durance valley – was probably comparatively pleasant. In August 1952, Lurs was in the news because of the ‘Dominici affair’ in which three British tourists, the distinguished scientist and government adviser Sir Jack Drummond, his wife and their small daughter were murdered there. They had been on a camping holiday in their Hillman Minx. Much publicized at the time, the newspaper coverage will have been of particular interest to

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Arthur in Venice and he dined with Peggy Guggenheim that month, with his brother Randolph and second wife as fellow guests. The ‘Dominici affair’ (named after the man found guilty) gave Arthur the chance to recall his wartime adventures and provide entertainment with their retelling. Graham Sutherland, a regular guest in Venice, wrote later of Arthur’s bravery during the war. On 8 July 1941, three more AFS drivers escaped from Lurs to Marseilles (which was not occupied by the Germans till 1942) whence the police helped them reach Portugal. The remaining drivers later said that they had all been well treated and allowed out on supervised shopping trips but, after the escape, this privilege was rescinded and the drivers were told that the guards had received instructions to shoot anyone who tried the same thing. Three days later, their release was announced. After a train journey of about 900 miles, they finally entered Portugal at Vilar Formoso on the Spanish border on 24 July. At Fuentes de Onoro they were given food and greeted warmly by Portuguese people all the way to Lisbon. Portugal, while neutral under Prime Minister António de Oliveira Salazar, was friendly towards the Allies and provided a safe passage for Jews from many parts of Europe to travel to the US via the port of Lisbon. Lisbon’s neutrality and convenient geography made it a centre of spy networks and it is not surprising that Ian Fleming began to create his character James Bond – and the novel Casino Royale in particular – during a war-time visit to Estoril. The ambulance drivers were briefly transferred to Sintra from Lisbon before repatriation. The same year, that beautiful town also played host to the cabaret artiste Josephine Baker, but the ambulance boys missed this event by a few months; Arthur did manage to see her later in Egypt, though. Baker’s 1930 song J’ai Deux Amours: Mon Pays et Paris might have been written as the AFS anthem. Arthur later acquired a 1947 painting by Tristram Hillier of the Chapel of the Misericordia in Viseu, northern Portugal; Hillier had served in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve with the Free French (see colour plate 3). There was no official confirmation about the wanderers’ status until a press release on 11 July, which again appeared across the United States in newspapers: As a result of extended negotiations with the German Government, it has been arranged that the American ambulance drivers who were on the Zamzam when she was sunk on April 17, 1941, in the South Atlantic,

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subsequently landed in France and up to the present detained by the German authorities in occupied France, will now be released. The ambulance drivers will proceed to Lisbon, from which point they will be repatriated to the United States on the U.S.S. West Point.22 There were many other remarkable and tragic stories from the Zamzam. Ned Laughinghouse, one of a group of tobacco merchants who must have known some of the Jeffress clan, died on board of injuries sustained in the shelling. Frank Vicovari, in command of the ambulance drivers, was severely injured and had to remain on board the Dresden until America had entered the war, upon which he became an official prisoner of war. Most of the other passengers, including women and children, were confined in prison camps until 1944. The story of the Zamzam is surprisingly little known today, although astonishingly the Germans had allowed Life magazine photographer David Scherman to take pictures of the sinking of the ship and of life aboard the Dresden. When the Dresden reached France, Scherman’s photos were confiscated but, after the censor had reviewed them, almost all of them were sent back to Life, which printed some of them at the end of 1941. These were not the first pictures of the Zamzam incident published in Life, as Scherman had previously managed to smuggle home film hidden in rolls of medical gauze and tubes of toothpaste. The second series showed the attack on the Zamzam, the lifeboats on the water and the rescue by the Atlantis; other images in the same edition showed the Japanese Navy attack on Pearl Harbor. On 11 December, Germany declared war on the United States. Scherman was later transferred to Time-Life’s London office and became closely involved with Lee Miller after they met at a party, living with the photographer and her husband, the art collector and patron Roland Penrose. Miller was accredited into the US Army as a war correspondent for Condé Nast Publications from December 1942, and on 30 April 1945 – the day Hitler had committed suicide – she and Scherman arrived in Munich with the American troops who began liberating the city. The couple came across Hitler’s Munich apartment by chance and Scherman then took the iconic photographs of Lee Miller in Hitler’s bath.

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The sinking of the Lusitania, with its loss of 128 American lives, which Arthur’s uncle Charles had survived, had been a major contribution to the United States entering World War I. The Zamzam story remains largely unknown, certainly so in Britain: Arthur’s role in it is one of the most extraordinary parts he played during his life.

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Arthur arrived back in New York on SS West Point on 2 August 1941 and gave his address as The Ritz Tower, from which comfortable setting he had originally applied to the American Field Service. He waited a while until he rejoined the AFS and active service, finally, in early summer 1942. He spent about eight months sharing a brownstone townhouse overlooking Turtle Bay Gardens at 222 East 49th Street in New York with Tim Brooke. Part of their time was spent at what Arthur called a ‘Stella Dallas office’ job, working with ‘Salome and Mr Pickwick of the Secret Service’ in their offices at Rockefeller Plaza. When translated from Arthur’s camp reference to the 1937 movie Stella Dallas, this means working for Allen Dulles. His brother was John Foster Dulles, for whom the Washington DC airport is named. Allen Dulles established the New York office of what would become, just at the moment Arthur sailed with the AFS, the US government’s Office of Strategic Services. When it was first created, the OSS, based on Britain’s SOE and the forerunner of the CIA, was believed by many to include only ‘The Ivy Leaguers, the Martini-drinking best and brightest . . .’ and the initials were said to stand for ‘Oh So Social’ or ‘Oh Such Snobs.’1 Arthur and Tim were probably involved in one of its precursors, The Office of the Co-ordinator of Information, an intelligence and propaganda agency created in 1941. One of its founders was the six foot eight inches tall Robert Emmet Sherwood, a playwright and a scriptwriter for Roosevelt. Sherwood arrived in Hollywood as a screenwriter in 1926: the year Tim and Arthur made their first visit. Arthur commented later: 121

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No less than two of the men I used to deal with when working in that office with Tim in NY are now in the new Italian Cabinet. I am most impressed. Perhaps it wasn’t quite as pointless as I used to think, that work we were doing.2 Tim Brooke was three years older than Arthur, born in East Coker, Somerset. He was a Cambridge friend of Christopher Isherwood, knew the Cliffords and had also spent time in Cottington. In 1941, Arthur was moving back into a circle of friends he had made before he met John Deakin; Tim also knew Joe Carstairs very well. Ten years earlier Tim had been working as an actor, like his father John Brooke, in the Civic Repertory Company in Montreal founded by Lady Cholmondeley, née Sybil Sassoon. Her 1922 portrait by John Lavery, while she was briefly known as Countess Rocksavage, is coincidentally now in Southampton City Art Gallery as part of Arthur’s bequest (see colour plate 4). A revealing picture of the widespread importance of drama in the lives of the wealthy and leisured classes to which Arthur belonged is shown by the company that Sybil Sassoon put together, paying for most of them, including Tim, to sail to Canada.3 Several productions followed, beginning with Hamlet, as vehicle for the eighteen-year-old Viscount Duncannon, the son of the new Governor General of Canada who had issued the invitation to Sybil Sassoon. He was Vere Ponsonby, Lord Bessborough (to whom bright, young Elizabeth Ponsonby was inevitably, though distantly, related), and directed and designed several productions in Montreal and Ottowa in between diplomatic duties. Tim Brooke was also writing a novel – Man Made Angry – during 1932, a sympathetic story of a Jack the Ripper character. He wrote a few more novels, became a Hollywood scriptwriter and from 1935 onwards a film producer, moving west about the time his Broadway actor-director father broke into films, just when he and Arthur got to know each other better. Tim was the kind of languid, slim good-looking blond to whom Arthur was so often attracted, and he features with Arthur in many of Barbara Key-Seymer’s photos in the South of France. He had been born Hugh Felix Conrad von Bohr and can be identified now, amongst all his pseudonyms, as the person who introduced Lauren Bacall to a friend at Harper’s Bazaar, which launched her career in 1942.4 After 1942, when Arthur was overseas, Tim Brooke stayed on in California in a borrowed house on the coast working, as far as Arthur was concerned, on

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‘reports on the Ruritanian minority in South Dakota’. Arthur wrote to Brooke expressing his wish that he, too, could get a job in the same organization (the OSS) after his ‘boy scout’ time overseas and hoping that Tim could help.5 Meanwhile, Brooke was hoping to get some cash from Joe Carstairs (the ‘Führer of Whale Cay’) in return for doing some paintings for her. Arthur told Esther Clifford: ‘I feel I would almost keep him for life to prevent such an occurrence [. . .] only ‘almost’ though.’6 Arthur also spent some time travelling, visiting the Cliffords in Pennsylvania and basking in his new and unlikely role as a hero of the Zamzam adventure. He went on a trip to New Mexico with Henry, on which they met Marina Dasburg, wife of the painter Andrew Dasburg. [. . .] motoring back East with Henry [. . .] and we stopped at Taos. We went to her house [. . .] I suppose it was hers, everything was so dreadfully Bohemian both as to houses and lovers and paintings and books and food stains [. . .] and Henry said, ‘this is Arthur Jeffress. He’s just come back from that shocking experience on the ‘Zam-Zam’. There was, it is true, the usual hushed silence that had followed this gambit for the previous three weeks or so that he had been using it, but, said silence instead of being followed up by excited cries of, ‘Do tell us all about it’, or ‘What a brave boy: so young and striking-looking too’ or even just ‘How absolutely thrilling’; this time it was broken by La Dasburg herself, who, between hiccoughs, managed to enquire in a voice of maddeningly lordly superiority, ‘And what in the world is the Zam-Zam’!7 Nicholas Clifford, Henry and Esther Clifford’s younger son and today a distinguished historian, vividly remembers being told the Zamzam story by Arthur, basing a school essay on it and winning a star for his efforts. He has more than repaid the tip by preserving all the letters his mother received from Arthur. Arthur eventually returned to voluntary duty after his Zamzam adventure. This time, he sailed for the Middle East in June 1942 via Cape Town, arriving in Suez on 6 September. The night before his AFS unit sailed, Antonio Stewart from Pennsylvania, a friend to both Cliffords and to Arthur, threw a party for his fellow travellers. One guest was called Caleb Milne and he recalled that in

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Figure 11.1 Photographer unknown. Arthur in the Middle East as part of the American Field Service ambulance corps, c. 1942.

spite of the heat, they worked their way through the heaviest menu at the Plaza.8 No doubt Arthur remembered to call in on Aunt Fan and use the correct hotel entrance. Arthur wrote an undated letter to Esther Clifford, the first of hundreds they exchanged during the war, from SS Selandia, although he was not permitted to reveal that detail: The Squad Leaders are supposed to be consulted on all new legislation, I believe, but in point of fact our meetings resemble those of the Reichstag more than anything else. We just sit & listen to what has already been decided upon. There is a merry mass of petty politics to keep one constantly on the boil. The temperament & pretensions of our Sergeant (Sergeant indeed!) are a great asset in all this. Poor Lucia [E.F. Benson’s character] pales to a mild Melanie [Scarlett’s sister-in-law in Gone with the Wind] beside him! Oh, what I wouldn’t give to have some freshly laundered clothes. We do all our own washing, there is no iron on board & any soap flakes are long since exhausted.9 This intimately detailed, weary complaint, camp bolshiness and a real desire to impart a diary-like sense of what is happening to him, characterizes his

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many vivid letters to Esther Clifford. Most of the daily routine was dull and familiar to Arthur from the Zamzam, but partially enlivened by afternoons that more resembled life on a transatlantic liner: the men sunbathed, squinted for periscopes, swam in the pool, read, played gin rummy, wrote letters, talked. On the third day aboard ship the bar opened. Prices were favorably commented upon: Scotch – 17 cents; Beer – 15 cents; Martinis – 10 cents; cigarettes – 10 cents.10 Major Stuart Benson (a sculptor of some note in the classical style as well as a former art editor of Collier’s magazine) began to describe their new life to his men, mostly the much younger Arthur, who was now thirty-seven: Romantic as the thought may be, an ambulance driver does not take his car out as an individual, and roam the desert, looking for wounded and picking and choosing which wounded he will carry. He obeys orders. He goes where he is told and when he is told, and does as he is told. And it’s no picnic. He may come back from long hours of work and throw himself exhausted onto a stretcher. Then, even before he can fall into a well-earned sleep, he may be called upon again for more gruelling hours – driving without lights, dodging by a hairsbreadth the huge vague forms of other vehicles, blacker than the night, which loom suddenly out of the darkness. And he will go through the night, endlessly it will seem to him, his eyes dead with fatigue, striking his tin hat with his fist and slapping his face to keep from falling asleep over the steering wheel. Then when that piece of work is over, he will be too numb to feel anything except perhaps a little pride in that he has done his job well.11 Meanwhile, Arthur was involved in an endeavour more suited to his expertise and tastes: I am busy part-writing, directing and acting in a musical we hope to put on before we arrive in Shangri-La. Its all very dirty very topical & I am to play Mother Spanish Fly, the owner of a bad house. Toni Stewart (terrified, of course) is to be one of the inmates. We are racking our brains for what to use

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for costumes, jewellery, hats etc. Tomorrow I am to have tea with captain’s wife (a mysterious figure never seen by mortal eye – the only female aboard). Poor woman she little realises how much of her wardrobe & jewel box will be snatched from her as she stoops to pour the tea.12 The on-board artist Clifford Saber painted a picture in words – as well as watercolour – of the captain’s wife: She was rarely seen, however, and kept to herself in the captain’s quarters on a veranda behind the bridge. It was unusual for a captain’s wife to be aboard on such a trip, but she had signed on as secretary in order to meet war regulations. She was attractive, rather tall and slender, with brown hair and eyes, and the type of woman who could make a home wherever she found herself. On her veranda, which was shielded and surrounded by potted tropical plants and a palm tree, she had a dachshund and a bird cage with two canaries.13 The production was called Tuckerman Forbids; Edward Fenton and Arthur co-wrote ‘the book’ and the lyrics while the music was by ‘all the best Composers’. Slowly but surely, the still untitled musical revue scheduled for August 10 is being whipped into shape, Art Jeffress said today. The size of the undertaking plus the limited amount of time for rehearsals has hindered somewhat the necessary polish, but he expects A-1 entertainment.14 Tuckerman was Bayard Tuckerman, the commanding officer of Unit XVI, so he was clearly God, as in ‘God Forbid’. Co-author Edward Fenton, who had been a journalist and run a small bookshop, later worked in the print department of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. According to Clifford Saber, Fenton later walked away unscathed from vehicles which had been blown up under him on three separate occasions. One of ‘les Girls’ was named Zam Zam while the other soubrettes were Kous, Feenamint, Pi-Pi, Little Fatima and Veronica Shake. Pi-Pi was played by Toni Stewart. Caleb Milne was The Telephone Girl.

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Next, the ship called in to Port of Spain, which Arthur had previously visited on the Zamzam. After the excitement of Trinidad, the managers and cast of the yet untitled musical comedy are again down to serious business. Many purchases were made in port so that at least costumes, stage settings, and a bright curtain are at hand. The script and lyrics, by Art Jeffress and Ned Fenton, have been completed, as have arrangements and chorus’ songs which are under the direction of Messrs Le Boutillier and Jenkins. (After reviewing a few samples of the work of the four above, I should say that it is a good thing that there is not a Hay’s office branch on board ship.) Dick Edwards and Art Jeffress hold the outstanding female parts.15 Innuendo clearly defined the script. The action starts at 60 Beaver Street, the AFS HQ in New York, moves on to SS Pierce (a reference to the famous American grocery stores rather than the ship on which Arthur’s father died, one hopes, although it still seems in very poor taste) then to a street in Cairo and ends in Mother Spanish Fly’s Parlour. Arthur’s solo number as Mother Spanish Fly was Everything I’ve Got, based on the song from the Rodgers and Hart hit musical of that year, By Jupiter. The long-suffering wife of the captain appeared in the audience dressed as a sailor possibly because all her dresses had been requisitioned. There was a stopover in Cape Town, a change of ship and pace and then – after two months and a week en route – AFS Unit XVI finally arrived in Cairo on 6 September 1942. It was then driven to a camp at El Tahag, some sixty-six miles away, on the way to the Western Desert. Colonel Ralph Richmond had established a small AFS headquarters in December 1941 in Cairo but, as the Service expanded, larger quarters and staff were needed so departments for operations, public relations, finance, personnel, transport and mail as well as liaison were created. Arthur worked in several liaison offices and, on 3 August 1943, his commanding officer Major Henry Coster wrote from Tripoli to Major Hoeing at GHQ: Often in the AFS the good passes unnoticed and unmentioned. You know the quality of these days, for you have sent me by road convoy the hectic

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component parts which fill these hours. We face today the same group of men which haunted your HQ three weeks ago, only now these men have passed thirteen days and nights on the desert road between Cairo and here. But Arthur Jeffress has been here with me to face that ordeal. In each situation he has not only co-operated completely but shown imagination and great poise. In some ways he is far better at ‘liaisoning’ than I shall ever be. Of course minor emergencies or “special cases” are constantly arising when there must be one boss. In each circumstance Arthur has carried out my ideas with not only precision but enthusiasm. At one o’clock this morning he was helping me make air reservations at a distant airport. Again he was in action at 6.30 in the morning. And this good I do not wish to have passed unnoticed unmentioned [sic].16 Arthur’s references to Coster in letters to Esther are much less flattering. Inevitably, Arthur gives a highly personal sense of events, one in which he entertains, camps up his role, and, as Esther describes it, ‘wails for food’. The food is monotonous, not to use a stronger word, and I would dearly love to receive some sort of food parcel from the States. Especially I crave two strangely dissimilar things . . . very rich dark and indigestible fruit cake and [. . .] grey, big-egged caviare, lots of it! So now you know. I fully realise its an idiotic request [. . .] but thats why I want it, I suppose. I dont seem to have anything else to tell you or any more requests to make, except that I wish I’d insisted on your knitting me a fresh Balaclava. The nights are really astonishingly cold, and likely to get even more so. It, coupled with the heat of the day which enough to make your senses reel, should have us all in bed with pneumonia . . . but somehow it just doesnt. However dont get your knitting needles out now [. . .] it will be spring again before I could receive it. I am fully aware that that applies to the food as well [. . .] but I shall still be hungry in the Spring.17 A rare letter to Tim Brooke survives, thanks again to the Cliffords, which follows a similar pattern with lots of gossip, references to books and friends, complaints about the AFS, oddly poor spelling and requests for favours:

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I hope you picture me dashing about under fire and shell, tin-hatted and gas-masked, picking up wounded men at the greatest risk to myself and dragging them to safety. For nothing could be farther removed from the actual facts. All I do actually is drive long distances from our camp in the desert to various hospitals at base, usually with a load of sick men in the back [. . .] dysentery, jaundice, tonsilitis and the like. The only hasards being those that come from other convoys as they come careering over the top of the hills. Planes overhead there are in incredible numbers, it is true, but so far all of them friendly, for which the lord be thanked. Apart from as mentioned before, semi-permanent diarrhoea and one flat tire and almost constant rage at one thing or another (like Miss Mapp), all has gone pretty well with me. When I had the flat, there was fortunately a quaint North Country Tommy in the car with me on his way to a Rest Camp, who was so pleased that I had been to his home town once that he got out of the car, gastro-enteritis and all, and proceeded to lend me most valuable assistance. Just as well, for I’d still be struggling at it, if he hadnt. That was the day, slightly later on, when I passed a sign on the road (a new highway to me at that time) that asked, ‘Are you prepared in case of ambush on this road!’ I must say I found this completely obfuscating, as Emily Sherfesee used to say, and for quite ten miles more, set myself to wondering just what I was supposed to have with me in order to cope with ambush! An ambush would certainly have been most mortifying at that point.18 Early in 1942, a re-division of the Allied forces’ responsibility had given the Middle East–Indian Ocean command to Britain. In July, after the success of the First Battle of El Alamein in which the Axis forces were halted, General Alexander took over as Commander-in-Chief Middle East Command and LieutenantGeneral Montgomery took over the Eighth Army under him. After victory in the battle of Alam Halfa in early September, the Eighth Army went on the offensive in October and decisively defeated the Axis at the Second Battle of El Alamein. I will write you a line from Tobruk on my birthday, from Benghazi on Xmas day and from Tripoli on New Years! Or maybe, from Taormina or San Giovanni in Fiore!! Do you remember that delicious cake Henry produced from nowhere at that latter spot?

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In my last letter I seem to remember I indulged in a diatribe against the superior young British captain in charge of all the Tommy mechanics with us. This time I’ll tell you about the Corporal under him who actually supervises the monthly inspections of our cars and in whose hands our lives very largely rest. I mean, if he sends in a report that your car is in a frightful condition, it is then up to you to explain why this is so [. . .] and, of course, there just is no explanation. You cant very well simply say that you are allergic to the interiors of motor-cars! Anyway, the first time I caught sight of this Corp, my heart sank to zero. Such a very tough, and as it seemed to me, scowling egg he was. I felt I’d better rush off, tighten every bolt again and grease every point in the car once more, and plead a days grace before inspection owing to unusual pressure of work. However, while waiting for him to get around to me, I strolled into his inspection tent for a moment, and what do I find on his table but a much thumbed copy of one of Richard Jefferies’ nature books. This shook me a little, but I was finally and completely bouleverse by what happened next. A small bird found its way inside the tent and from the manner that it flapped and banged its way about was clearly in some sort of difficulty. So to my utmost astonishment, this supposed Gorgon, this apparent Bill Sykes cum Mr Murdstone dropped what he was doing, caught the bird in a hand that was eighty-five times larger than itself, and having very very gently wiped the sand out of the bird’s eye, took it outside and released it! Can you imagine? Since that time we have become firm friends and I really think he is one of the most charming people I’ve ever met. He comes from the Midlands and has a Gracie Fields accent, and used to be a truck-driver before the war. His love for England is simply terrific, and most refreshing. I learnt this morning that he had asked one of my friends if I was related to Richard Jefferies. I hope he wont be too bitterly disappointed when he finds I spell my name quite differently. I have been reading Jane Austen’s Emma. So marvellous in the midst of all this hurly-burly to read of people whose lives were so sheltered that the dropping of a tea cup would practically set them all by the ears. Miss Mapp’s life was positively cataclysmic compared with that of Emma Woodhouse.19

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Arthur’s letters maintain a level of reportage with a strong element of jollity designed as much, so it seems, to keep up his own morale as provide entertainment for Esther Clifford and her circle. He manages to bring four of his much loved and very English favourite authors into his description of the desert as well as reference to happier times spent with the Cliffords in Italy. Arthur’s love of England gleams throughout, although he had a strange notion about which part of the country Gracie Fields came from.

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12 ‘What a lovely war. What shall I do at the end of it?’

By 6 November 1942, in the middle of the Second Battle of El Alamein, Arthur was attached to the Combined Chiefs of Staff. He stayed for a month until he joined the 2nd New Zealand Division and two days before Christmas wrote to Esther: I am engaged on a new musical, more castigating if possible re the AFS than Tuckerman Forbid which we did on the boat. When I say I am engaged on it, it is a great exaggeration as I merely slap down on suggestions put forward by the other author who is a positive mine of inventiveness. A huge part is being written for me, but as it will never be produced, its not of much consequence.1 The Axis forces were pursued through Libya until Tripoli was captured by Eighth Army in January 1943. Sergeant (then Second Lieutenant) John Deakin was in Cairo from January 1942 with the British Army Film Unit. His biographer states that Deakin was still being paid an allowance by Arthur during the war2 although the affair had run its course. In 1942 Arthur included him on a long list of people to be recipients of Parcels for the Forces (‘no more than $6 each’) specifying that Deakin, ‘who is apparently determined to stay in Malta till the siege ends’, also got an extra treat of cigarettes as well as the basic foodstuffs.3 Maybe that was all the allowance amounted to but it makes plain that they were at least in contact during 1942–3. Deakin was in Malta from August 1942 to August 1943 and photographed the moment when the people of Malta received 133

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the George Cross from Lord Gort in 1942. Deakin became a Public Relations Officer there. He resigned his commission in autumn 1943 and in November sailed as a government official, working for the Ministry of Information, to West Africa. His work in Nigeria has subsequently surfaced in a California archive. In 1945 he was the only photographer at the 5th Pan-African Congress in Manchester for Picture Post.4 His wartime photographs reveal just how soon he developed a remarkable talent: sensitive, witty and original. The evidence is preserved in the archives of the Imperial War Museum and would have been completely unknown to Arthur. Arthur spent a couple of days in February 1943 with the 131st Field Ambulance, part of the famous Desert Rats. He had a slightly longer attachment from mid-February to mid-March 1943 to the 175th Highland Field Ambulance and wrote to Esther on 19 February 1943: We have to go there to help out the Americans who seem to be in a tight spot! Already we are out with our new assignment [. . .] just my section alone, with quite a different lot of troops to the New Zealanders who we got to know so well. I’d love to tell you all about these ones: they are very picturesque and have such fascinating accents. But they are military to a degree and hidebound with army tradition and customs. I feel isolated slightly and at times panicky, for fear of putting my feet in it with some frightful gaffe. So far they are very nice to us. So its off with the maori grass skirt and on with the eightsome reels. I expect we shall see heavy fighting as these people are famous for being in the thick of things, and distinguished themselves no end coming up from Alamein. Tante cose (note to censor that’s Italian for a great many things) and love from Arthur.5 Then the next day just as he set off to Tunis: I forgot to tell you in my letter yesterday that I had recently managed to wangle a trip to Leptis Magna [81 miles east of Tripoli]. After much jiggerypokery and finnagling, permission from umpteen bodies and officers and waiting around, we managed to set off one morning, eight of us in all, and be back lateish in the evening. It was simply superb . . . perhaps lack of sightseeing has reduced my standards, but It seemed to me thrilling,

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grandiose and beautiful. In fact awful in the sense used by the Victorian novelists. I had no idea that Leptis had been so important and monumental in its day [. . .] it makes Pompeii look like some small Atlantic City which is of course, is just what it was. Someone has sent Tony a lot of postcards of modern pictures. He has given me his cast-offs. Our tastes differ so strongly this has worked very well. He keeps Chirico horses while I get lovely nostalgic paysages by Sisley and Renoir. So now the walls of the ambulance are most gay.6 His ATS records then show him as CTBA (ceases to be attached) and he writes no letters to Esther until 22 April, when he was with the Royal Army Service Corps Mobilisation Centre. Then on 25 April he managed to send an enthusiastic postcard of Tutankhamen’s tomb in Thebes: ‘This is probably old stuff to you but it the first time I’ve seen it & I’m thrilled to the point of writing to tell you so.’7 Meanwhile, Henry Hill wrote crossly to their cousin Robert Jeffress: ‘Thank you for Arthur’s letter – don’t you know he is sick not to have stayed and been in the triumphs of the end. And to have missed it all when he didn’t really have to.’8 Robert appears, as usual, to be fiercely critical of Arthur suggesting, from the comfort of Virginia, that his cousin had simply chosen to leave the theatre of war at a crucial moment: Tunis had been captured by Montgomery on 7 May. Arthur left Alexandria for Tripoli, where he arrived four days later on 23 July 1943, posted to 567 AFS RASC for a month. He was now a second lieutenant, having been promoted from ‘volunteer’ on 14 July as a result of signing up for a further six months. The AFS records show that: In early April 1943 a Liaison Office had been opened in Tripoli as a sort of advance HQ at the point most nearly halfway between Cairo and the Tunisian battlefields. . . it took care of transients as well as convalescents, baggage, mail, spares, and the like. At the beginning it had been intended to do chiefly personnel work and was extremely busy. During the long summer wait, it handled a multitude of functions. A baggage room was added, and a villa at 73 Via San Francesco d’Assisi was loaned for the use of convalescents. Bowditch was repatriated, and Lt. A.T. Jeffress came into the office in

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mid-July. With the Company on its doorstep, new units and repatriation groups passing through in opposite directions, hospitalized personnel to keep track of and visit in the town’s dozen or so major medical establishments, convalescents in and out, as well as groups on leave to and from Cairo as well as Tripoli itself – it was frequently said that life in the office presented ‘not a little chaos.’9 Peter Coker, from the Association of AFS British Personnel, recalled in the 1950s: that fantastic party given by 567 in Tripoli. My own thoughts have been directed to it several times recently [. . .] A radio critique of a show at Arthur Jeffress’ new picture gallery in London reminded me that he was compere and ribbed me quite a bit about the workshop sketch team. I well remember the original briefing for that party when Art Howe declared that ‘nothing’ must stop it from being the best party of all time.10 Caleb Milne, veteran of Tuckerman Forbid, wrote enchanting letters home describing Tripoli: The town is very old, the name of course means three cities. There is a modern quarter of white plaster, plaza, hotels, colonnades of shops, fountains and Monte Carlo houses: the Jewish quarter, crowded with rabbis, dull robes, ear-locks, squatting shopkeepers and brass-makers, and the native quarter, all noise, donkeys, screams, red and raspberry fezzes, smells and bazaars.11 Caleb Milne IV was a handsome and wealthy young man who had been the centre of a scandal in 1935 when he faked his own kidnapping to gain notoriety and, by extension, fame in theatre or films. When the first ransom note was received, his textile millionaire grandfather took the news lightly. Caleb had recently had a few small theatre parts and his grandfather suspected this, too, might be play-acting. Edgar Hoover’s FBI G Men eventually found him and he confessed to the hoax. Later, aged thirty-two, he volunteered for the AFS, played his last theatrical role in Tuckerman Forbid, wrote many touching letters home and died of wounds sustained early in 1943 while he was rescuing a French legionnaire.

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During the North African campaign, the Germans and Italians suffered 620,000 casualties, while the British Commonwealth lost 220,000 men. American casualties in Tunisia alone reached more than 18,500. Arthur’s descriptions of Tripoli are more mondaine and mundane than Caleb’s: My first night back here I managed to get into the theatre to see the all-star concert party that included Beatrice Lillie, very funny singing a number new to me called Wind Round My Heart, Dorothy Dickson, Leslie Henson, Vivien Leigh, and my old friend Richard Haydn, who, you will recall, used to imitate a fish! It was good to see all these people again, with the possible exception of Leslie Henson. They must have had a terrible time trying to decide what to do with Miss Leigh, who seems to have practically no talent whatsoever. They gave her ‘You are old, Father William’ to recite in despair, I suppose. She also sang ‘I’m Scarlet [sic] O’Hara, the terror of Tara’, but it wasn’t so hot. Still, she looked absolutely ravishing, I’m forced to confess.12 This extraordinary production was directed by John Gielgud. On 18 July Arthur adds: Yesterday, as I sat in a bemused way brushing the flies from the top of my gin and water (there’s no lime, bitters or vermouth, or in fact anything to mix with said gin) I was somewhat electrified to see a tall and incredibly chic negress, all in white turban, frock and Hellsternish sandals [. . .] come up the steps and slink into the hotel in the most mondaine manner. That, said I, to myself, is uncommonly like Josephine Baker [. . .] and that was precisely who it turned out to. Well, well, you could have knocked me over with a Bren Gun.13 Arthur rarely writes about his fellow drivers and Caleb’s tragic death is not mentioned, but nor are any others. He remained focussed on the personal rather than the public, stylish in adversity and avoiding emotions. He was not alone in this and, naturally, neither was he the only queer man in the AFS. He did not mention, but luckily his friend Trumbell ‘Tug’ Barton did, that Arthur decorated the inside of his ambulance with rose-patterned wallpaper.14 It might just have been postcards, as Arthur says, but remembering the decor as roses is delightful. They were both part of a group known as the ‘Taffeta Twelve’,

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which included Burt Shevelove, who later wrote A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Another member was Patrick Dennis, the creator of Aunt Mame, who interviewed AFS members on the boat over about their eccentric female relatives; Aunt Fan Jeffress was a contributory element to Mame. Other flamboyants included Ward Chamberlin who founded the Public Broadcasting Service in the United States; Richard Edwards, a scholar of ancient Chinese art; Newell Jenkins, a musicologist and conductor; and Lem Billings, President Kennedy’s friend, who would eventually have his own room in The White House. Arthur’s pre-war friends who were also AFS ambulance drivers, Stephan Cole and Donald Neville-Willing, would have been likely team members, too. Arthur was sent next to Italy on 27 September 1943. His first port of call there was Taranto: I hear such awful reports (true I’ve not yet met anyone who has actually come from there) about the condition of the city [Naples] that Henry used to like so much in the south that I rather dread being sent there. Every hotel completely destroyed as part of a scorched earth policy, I believe. Oh God, will they do it in Rome, Florence, Venice, etc?15 The Allies’ campaign in Sicily had begun on the night of 9 July 1943 and ended with their victory on 17 August. They drove the Axis’ air, land and naval forces from the island, opened the Mediterranean’s sea lanes and Mussolini was toppled from power. This enabled the Allied invasion on 3 September; five days later, General Eisenhower announced the armistice with Italy. The port of Taranto in southern Italy ceased to be of importance and most shipping was re-routed up to the larger and better equipped port of Bari to which Lt. Jeffress (he had been promoted again on 2 October) moved his Liaison Office.16 Within three days after an initial landing Lt Arthur Jeffress had established an advanced AFS headquarters. After some difficulty, he obtained an apartment large enough to store extra baggage, accommodate the men and have room for his office. The greatest problem he encountered was that of obtaining water as the Germans had blown up the system of aqueducts before retreating.17

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He found a five-room flat at 50 Via Cognetti, near the sea, but was not well: I developed a horrid rash, and in addition, was feeling run down, ‘queer’ as the British say, and seedy (C.D. as Mrs Levett used to write me), and so decided that a few days relaxation was what was called for. [. . .] So far, I have kept myself rigidly under control and have managed to get along very well with the Colonels and Majors that I have to beg from. They are usually so tickled at the idea of an American having such an English accent [. . .] and, of course, when I manage to insinuate into the conversation that I was at Harrow, and then speak of Marwell as though it were at least only slightly smaller than Chatsworth, we nearly always get along like houses ablaze. Still the thought of starting all over again is deadening, to put it mildly.18 Bari had been a peacetime resort and provided those on leave from the Eighth Army – as well as those on convalescence – with a comparatively jolly atmosphere: There were old churches, bars, movie palaces (of which the largest was the Opera House, where both ENSA and USO also offered their entertainments), and service clubs. Lt. Jeffress was both energetic and ingenious in providing for unexpected numbers at odd hours, but even after an additional flat had been taken in January 1944 the demand sometimes exceeded the available resources.19 Arthur lets Esther have a fuller picture: I had really a devil of a time getting this place. The Town Major said he would requisition it for me, and then turned me over to the Italian authorities, who were nothing if not obstructionist. I spent the best part of two days haggling, arguing and finally screaming at Majors and Colonels. The old Colonel, to do him justice, screamed back at me in an even louder key, and I lost all idea of what he was saying before he had passed the first ‘Madonnnnna!’ There was a Captain there who far some strange reason was on my side. His name was Mozzarrella, and when I politely asked him if he was in carrozza [a deep fried cheese sandwich] he thought it so delightfully witty, he nearly died laughing.20

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As Bari was near to the front, during the winter of 1943/4 it suffered frequent alerts and air raids. The worst was the raid of 2 December in which seventeen ships sank in the harbour and caused over 1,000 casualties. Arthur wrote: Last night’s raid was really something. I had gone to Taranto [. . .] and only got back for the last fireworks – an ammunition ship blowing up with a bang to wake the dead in all five continents – to find this place under a sea of broken glass, the kitchen looking as though it had received a direct hit (had our slattern been in it, she would most certainly have been killed by the two large doors which crashed to the ground), and poor Newell with a distinctly wild look in his eye. The streets look quite remarkable today; and as for Sub-Area, not only has it lost all its windows, but most of its inner walls have gone too. It is housed in what was a very smart looking and obviously jerry-built Fascist mansion. [. . .] poor Colonel Beddows, ADMS, was last seen hurtling through a courtyard, borne along on a door by the blast!21 Arthur’s detailed AFS record sheet does not tell the full complicated story, but: To celebrate the start of battle [at Cassino] on 11 May [1944] one of the fanciest of all AFS administrative switches was performed. Captain Thomsen returned to the United States and was succeeded in the Algiers Liaison office by Captain A. T. Jeffress, who was succeeded in the Bari office by Lt. S. E. Cole, who was in turn succeeded as Adjutant of 485 Company by Lt. R. M. Mitchell.22 Arthur realized by late 1944 that the move to Algiers had been a mistake on his part; he had made a successful attempt to get promotion to rank of Captain but one that meant his ‘rival’ was having a much better time in Florence. The record sheet does not mention the recurring illness that Arthur recalled in 1961: I am distressed to hear about your horrid skin ailment [psoriasis] and am almost sure it is nerves. During the war when I was in the South of Italy I suffered from something of the same thing and was months getting over it.

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At one time I was put to sleep for four days merely, I think, to stop me scratching, but it didn’t have much other effect, and I was finally cured by the shock of being told I would have to go and face a board of psychiatrists in Naples, and that frightened me so much that I never itched from that moment.23 At the time, he wrote to Esther: This time I am in a New Zealand hospital – very well run with quite nice nurses with terrible accents. I am trussed up in bandages like the man in the film The Invisible Man & can hardly move. However, I think I’ll have to get my assistant, who pays me a daily visit, to bring out my typewriter, as I cannot live without it. This morning everyone was in a great ‘flap’ & the nurses kept running in like fussy hens, smoothing out the bedclothes & hiding ones books, papers & hairbrushes. Finally the cause of the fuss arrived – General Sir Bernard Freyburg, C-in-C the New Zealand Division. Having been a tough soldier of fortune all his life, I am still wondering where he picked up the gracious, regal manner. The Princess Royal at St Catherine’s Hospital for Women’s Complaints could have done no better. Hearing that I was in the AFS (we are the only non-Kiwis allowed in this hospital), he made a special trip over to my bed & talked to me about how wonderful we were & how fond the New Zealanders were of us & all we did for them. All I could do was purr & blush – cracking snob that I am. I felt I couldn’t have been prouder had I just presented the Führer with 6 strapping SS recruit babies, or celebrated my 107th birthday in Swansea. On his way out, I secured a special good-bye accompanied by such a smile & bow as you never saw, from the great man. I hope Patton doesn’t come over to this side. I don’t want my fat face slapped. Dear Esther, What a lovely war. What shall I do at the end of it – nothing to look forward to.24 His record sheet indicates that on 12 May 1944 Arthur arrived in Algiers and was promoted to captain, having already been awarded the Africa Star to which his service with the Eighth Army automatically entitled him. Later that month, he tells Esther that he had finally seen ‘the immortal Josephine Baker’:25

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Figure 12.1 Unknown studio photographer. Probably taken to mark Arthur’s promotion to captain in 1944.

On 23 July, he adds: Yesterday morning, out of a cloudless sky arrived your large package from Wanamakers and I unpacked it with woos of joy and squeals of delight from myself and bystanders, like Nanette in the first act of No, No! Well, the shirts

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are quite dreamlike. Nothing like them has ever been seen before except possibly on the august back of Ike Eisenhower and his ilk. At present, the Concierge is sewing AMERICAN FIELD SERVICE on to the left shoulder, and tonight, I intend to dazzle all and sundry with my new splendour. The trousers, too, are a joy, but will take a little time before they are ready for my shanks, as they have to be cut down. They were made for a tall circus performer and you would be astonished at the difficulty we encounter in trying to find a good tailor. Italy was so much better for that. Apart from the fact that, in the American manner, they have no pleats, thereby causing people with hips like mine to appear gargantuan, they could not be improved upon. I wonder if it is possible to obtain, through the military, some of that delicious material that they are made of, and so have some made to measure clothes run up by the little woman round the corner when I come back for my two year leave in August or September. I am rather touched by the pyjamas that you hated so much. They have a charming ingenue quality and are cool as all get out. I wore them last night [. . .] only one pair, be it said [. . .] and felt as cool as a cucumber and as merry as an apricot.26 He then asked Esther if she knew: an old Dainty Doodlebug, ex Florence, called Henry Coster? He used to be an AFS Major and has been back in the States for close on a year organising a new AFS Free French unit to replace one that we used to have that broke up in considerable confusion last summer. He wrote me recently asking if I would leave AFS British and work with him at his HQ here. No dice. He also said you had recently rung him up reference some Italian relief association.27 Arthur refused on the grounds that his ‘heart lie’d with the British’ and described him as ‘that really hopeless old woman, Henry Coster, who used to live I believe in Florence.’28 About the same time Coster wrote that delightful letter in praise of Arthur, who, in July 1944, signed up for a further six months.

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Arthur’s time in Algiers was short and annoying. Later, he managed some leave and large rations of nostalgia: I was a week in Rome [. . .] The Grand still functions, however, and is full of Generals and old Italian ladies, very rich and hawklike, in black lace, high necks, huge hats, with little dogs. I dined there once [. . .] high prices but wonderful food. I also ate at Ranieri’s (oh, the civilisation of that little red plush room with its gilt framed pictures) at the Orsa (now the grand chic) and at Alfredo’s where the food was not good and where I hate to admit that I made a scene. It was all rather costly but I had quite a good time, and managed to find a few friends from the past [. . .] English, though, not Italian.1 He was finally moved back to his beloved Italy, to Perugia and an office in the Palazzo Lilli with hens and geese on a large balcony. He promised Esther that he would visit her villa soon and finally arrived at the destination on which he had set his sights. A couple of days after the Florence office opened for business, Lt. Cole moved his office from Orvieto to the Palazzo Lilli in Perugia, for greater convenience in serving both companies. After he closed the Algiers office, Captain Jeffress succeeded Lt. Merrill in Florence.2 Florence was the AFS focal point in Italy during the second winter after liberation just as Naples had been during the first. The AFS had its HQ on the Viale Michelangelo and there was space for other office staff in a handsome flat on the Costa Scarpuccia belonging to the kindly Henry Coster. The AFS also 145

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had use of the Villa Gordon-Mann just outside the city centre, which was home to thirteen-year-old Danila Frassineti and her fifteen-year-old brother Giordano. Their mother Helen, an American citizen, and her second husband Edward Gordon-Mann, a British citizen born in Italy, had been sent to a concentration camp with their new baby and then released as part of a prisoner exchange and moved to the US just before the AFS arrived. Danila and Giordano were Italian citizens and had been left in the Villa under the care of servants and friends. Helen Gordon-Mann arranged that the AFS move into the upper level of the Villa, which was run as a convalescent home: Arthur ungratefully described it as ‘hideous’. From this point, Arthur’s letters to Esther focus on the fate of her beloved Villa Capponi (which had been captured by the Nazis, then requisitioned by the British) and tales of his social outings. He rarely shows the right amount of empathy with the Cliffords for their damaged home but is full of nostalgia for the time he spent as their guest. He also longs to be allowed to stay there at least right up until the moment when it became possible when he suddenly backs down. Just who is this high-ranking Mr Gower? I was told by all and sundry that he was your brother-in-law, but how can that be I ask myself? Anyway he has moved in on you and the place is used by his officers as a rest centre. Before I went there I had been given to understand that the destruction was fearful. But it isnt at all. China and glass all gone. . .wantonly destroyed on the last night by our dear friends. However that clever and really devoted butler managed to save all the silver and the two tapestries, also the books. Maud has the last named safely chez elle also a large trunk with the rest of the linen. All other linen and also the lovely drawing-room carpet gone. Much small furniture broken but not uncleverly repaired by the present tenants who have made an excellent job of clearing up and cleaning up. You need have no serious worries and I think you will be pleased on the whole. I lunched with Maud who is thinner but well and not too unhappy though there have been difficult times for her. Also saw Teresa who is older-looking but still ravishing. Her husband is not too well and his brother was shot by snipers. God, what time they have all had.3

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This strikes a rare note of reality and empathy. ‘Mr Gower’ was Brigadier Gore (although pronounced Gower) of The Greenjackets. He was the distinguished commander of the ‘Gore Force’, which checked Rommel’s advance in the battle of the Kasserine Pass in Tunisia, and his wife Enid was a cousin to Henry Clifford. One of Gore’s captains was Edward Voules, exactly Arthur’s age, a dedicated royal sycophant and inoffensive snob who, in 1987, wrote a privately published memoir entitled Free of All Malice in which he describes Arthur as a friend; they had known each other since the 1930s.4 In spite of Arthur’s rude remarks about him to Esther, and persistent misspelling of his name, they became close friends and neighbours in London after the war. Voules had apparently been sent on this posting to look after historic buildings as a result of a sexual escapade with fellow soldiers.5 Arthur dramatizes the news from Florence in October 1944, swinging between drama and high-handed casualness, with no feeling for the order in which Esther and Henry received the news: It was all so curious. The night before I was to go on leave, I drove an English officer friend out some miles to call on the Borgias (true) to whom he had a letter and messages. There was another English officer there, staying en famille during his convalescence. As we were sipping our hemlock, my friend, speaking of your town, said, ‘I hear of one unit, that their Brigadier’s aunt died leaving her villa to him and that he has moved in all his officers, bag and baggage. The other officer replied ‘Well, that isnt quite true. The Brig is in command of my unit, and it isnt his aunt that has died. It is simply that the villa belongs to his sister-in-law to whom he has written for permission to use the place. This having been granted we have installed ourselves and very nice it is too.’ Said I, ‘I am going up there tomorrow to which villa are you referring to?’ ‘It’s the villa C’, said he. When I came to, I pressed him with questions and learnt the most distressing details. To judge from his report, things could hardly have been worse, short of direct hits from mortars and an actual charge of dynamite. The next day I drove up and the following morning called, hot foot, to learn the true facts, which, thank God, were quite unlike the alarmist tales I

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had been told. By great good luck, the officer who runs the place is an old pre-war acquaintance of mine, one Teddy Vuoles [sic], who used to work in Gunthers and was ever so palsy-walsy with minor British royalty. He used always to be seen gracing the royal box at charity matiness, picking pug up for Princess Helena Victoria and putting pug down for Princess Marie Louise. He, fortunately, was in an expansive mood and showed me all over the place. I must say, that on somewhat cursory inspection, it was difficult to see that anything had happened at all. However, it seems, that when they first moved in, the place was a shambles [. . .] indescribable filth everywhere, a smell that reached to high heaven, and the beds a mass of lice. Being an influential sort of bloke, Vuoles was able to lay on a party of no less than twenty tommies who by dint of working hard for two weeks, have so cleaned matters up that, as I say, it now looks almost as good as new. The lawn, thanks to the presence of Volkswagens (these they used to park also in the hall, I believe) is a trifle chewed up, it is true, and they knocked the head off Venus in order to use her torso as a diving board. But both of these are fairly easily repairable. In fact, the lady’s head has been stuck on again, pro tem, and it is not easy to see the join. The two main bedrooms are practically untouched, frescoes, pretty furniture and all. Much of the smaller furniture throughout the house was smashed, and just about every chair had been disembowelled. These have been repaired, in a somewhat rustic fashion it is true, and a great deal of expense has been gone to recover them with such materials as are now obtainable. (Its as well its a rich and exclusive regiment!) Taken by and large, it might be so much worse, and I think you are fortunate.6 In November, he writes again in reply to the criticism one might expect from Esther Clifford under the circumstances: I am distressed that you found the letters over-brief and sketchy but can well understand it. I too felt that something much more detailed was called for, though I didnt see quite how I could supply it under the prevailing circumstances. Under the benign but terribly genteel eye of II Capitano Vuoles [sic], it was not very easy for me to examine every chair and cranny with a fine tooth comb.7

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Esther Clifford bluntly asked for solid facts and judgement, to which Arthur reacted with alarm: This business of estimating the percentage of damage to the villa is really frightening. It seems to me that there might be so much that I didnt know about that was stolen or damaged or destroyed [. . .] so much that I didnt see or couldnt think about. But, if it will truly be of assistance to you and if you promise not to give me awful knocks when you return and find that I have been too stupid for words, I would suggest 10%. After all, the villa itself is more or less intact, also the silver, the tapestries, the good chapel picture. It is extras that have suffered mostly [. . .] expensive extras, I grant you [. . .] but extras none the less, such as glass, china, chairs and the like. True the salone carpet is mafeesh, and for all I know that cost you all of Marie of Roumania’s ransom. I would say either 10 or 15%. If you want this worded officially in any shape or form, better let me know just what is required, pronto. I’m sorry I was so silly about the beds. Apart from your and Henry’s, which are oke, I really know nothing definite. I think the rest are gone. I know nothing about the Sestini family, if you had enquired before I would have found out with pleasure. Sorry.8 His requests for parcels kept him in a dependent state even though he insisted, scrupulously, on paying all costs each time, sent presents to Henry and the boys, bought Esther a handbag in Florence and paid their gardener ‘100 smackers’ which he would not permit Henry to repay. He had plenty of scope to describe his thoughts as a self-acknowledged ‘cracking snob’ as well as deep longings for good food, elegant clothes and books. He wrote lists of the books which he read and sent two copies to Esther, plaintively asking her more than once for confirmation that this had arrived. His worry was that a list might look rather like code and be seized by the authorities on his return to the US and he had plans to write a small book about his wartime reading matter. He kept himself well stocked with books and magazines and clearly sent gifts of books to friends whenever he could. Barbara Ker-Seymer wrote to Burra in 1945 that Arthur was keeping her supplied with a ‘wonderful literary feast’ of works by Scott Fitzgerald, recalling their own tales from the Jazz Age.9 Arthur never lost an opportunity to comment to Esther on the occasions when he could use his knowledge of Italian, and eventually made contact with

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their shared Italian teacher in Florence. He was now able to take up some threads of the kind of social rounds that he had been able to share as the Cliffords’ guest, largely in their Italian-American circle, especially with the American Teresa Rucellai. Count Rucellai’s mother was also American and a close friend of John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler and Henry James; the Villa Rucellai is about fifteen miles from Florence. Arthur’s privileged position enabled him to send and receive letters much more easily than civilians, so he acted as a source of information, keeping Esther up to date with the Rucellais and with Maud Wentworth Bosio, who had taken into safe keeping all the Clifford’s books and much of their linen and, like Teresa, made regular and conscientious visits to the Villa Capponi. Maud and her three daughters, one seriously ill, had been obliged to leave their villa. Arthur was often invited to eat with the family but was always conscious of the privation that his hosts were suffering and his inability to help to any great degree, so he often urged Esther to send supplies to their friends. Maud’s husband had been the modernist architect Gherardo Bosio, who restored part of La Pietra (Harold Acton’s villa) in 1927, but also did some work in Italian Africa and even Albania after Mussolini’s troops overran it in 1939. Modernism was a style which Fascism, unlike Nazism, actively encouraged and apparently Bosio also undertook some commissions for Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law. After Ciano fell out of favour (Mussolini had him shot in early 1944), Bosio was more or less forgotten. He died in Switzerland in 1941 of an inoperable brain tumour and his family turned Maud and their daughters out of the villa and into poor relations at the gate. Arthur also visited Bernard Berenson in April at I Tatti: I went out to tea at Berensons yesterday. The old man’s wife died a few weeks ago, but he seemed spry and witty and penetrating as can be. Was all agog to know about Leonor Fini, who is having quite a saison in Rome at this point. There was some american ballet dancer there (male [. . .] I think) who was a great friend of Fini’s and who regaled B.B. with tales of her life as we walked in the garden after tea. The old man would let out a loud ‘No!’ in the best Georgie manner and stop dead in his tracks at each new revelation. Quite fascinating. I had only a few words with him but he quite alarmed me by making me promise to return soon when there were fewer people there, for,

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said he, ‘I would be pleased to interview you’. I shant go near the place for months. One of my friends went and he fixed him with a gimlet eye and asked ‘What have you done with your life, young man?’ That is the kind of question I am not good at parrying.10 But he went again, bravely and greedily, in early June 1945: It was very pleasant and the food, particularly the blinis with a sauce of sour cream flavoured with anchovy, quite out of this world. I think I had forgotten what a really good cook could do. Apart from a slight false start all was happy and chatty. I opened up, foolish me, by saying, ‘Mr B, I believe that you are interested in modern as well as renaissance painters. Tell me, do you know a certain Savinio?’ To which he replied, with an Olympian smile, ‘I am interested in all painters, but they have to be artists’. And that, I said, disposes of Savinio [de Chirico’s brother]. However, he unbent after that and said that he knew S as a writer more, and agreed that his work was ‘amusing’. As I had not considered it anything more than that, myself, I was mollified. Niente di piu. Tante belle cose. Arthur11 His longings continue. Oh God, here’s another of those letters from Arthur. In Abercrombies, and nowhere else that I know of, they have a super travelling mirror in a leather case. There are two mirrors, actually, one ornery, the other, magnifying. (You know, Blackheads Delight) circular and facing each other inside the case. I dont know how much it costs. . . . fairly expensive, obviously, but its very nice and I want one very much. I did set out with one [. . .] it broke as I stepped on the ship at Brooklyn. Why I have not thought to ask for one again, I shall never know. One of our young gentlemen just returned from New York with one, and the sight of it set me aflame. Please have my name stamped on the front [. . .] you know, Sam Jaffe or Jafsie Condon [puns on possible misspellings of Jeffress], in block letters.12 He was able to present himself to Esther in the light of self-mockery and some honesty: he reveals himself as amusing, frightened, kind, cultured, snobbish, self-obsessed and completely anglophile:

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who in the world is the newspaper-man friend of Gretchen who says that I won the Italian war singlehanded. I simply detest understatement, except when it comes from the British. You must curse the day that ever my parents sent me to Harrow, so that thereby I met the arch balletomane and mexicanophile [Henry Clifford] and so set in motion the lengthy process by which it now happens that you are pestered with requests by every mail [. . .] Mens sana in corpore lusso has been my motto since I first set eyes on a mink coat.13 It is clear that Arthur also wrote many letters to his family, in the United States at least, and to other friends, but the hundreds to Esther are all that survive and they inevitably compare Britain, which Esther knew well, with America. After the war, Arthur might well have moved there, indulging comfortably in his anglophilia from across the Atlantic. When he set out in 1940 from Marwell, Arthur’s plans had been to support the British and the Free French through the American Field Services. When that was frustrated by the Zamzam affair, he spent eight further months in the US enjoying himself away from the war on the West Coast, in Philadelphia, New Mexico and New York, before joining the AFS again. By 1944, he did not even want to spend his leave in New York. He loved the idea of shopping there but had been furious to discover that Americans had so much more money than other troops – an American sergeant was paid the same as an English major, for example – and believed that most Americans that he met in the Middle East hated the British.14 He found these Americans to be arrogant and unfriendly, which reflects uncertainty about his own status. He felt rich and more valued in Britain than he would have been in the United States and Esther’s letters, now lost, may have increasingly made him aware of the contrasts between the Cliffords’ circle and his own life. His cousin Henry Hill had spent much of his war in Britain, based at Hughenden Manor in Buckinghamshire, a secret intelligence base for the analysis of aerial photography of Germany, used to create maps for bombing missions including the Dambusters’ raid. Arthur wrote to him from Perugia, mentioning that he had talked to a British major in case there was a job going within PWB, the Psychological Warfare Branch established by General

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Eisenhower in 1942. Arthur explained it was 50 per cent British, 50 per cent US and divided equally between military and civilian personnel. The major wanted an American assistant for the intelligence section (‘just my line, I, at least like to think’) and Arthur found the major ‘all that was most charming’ then heard nothing further. Arthur’s most pressing concern at the interview had been that he should be allowed to wear his beloved British battledress (‘snow white belt and gaiters and three pips’) rather than its American equivalent. Charmingly, the major who interviewed him replied that he could wear it whenever he liked, really, if it made him happy.15 Arthur finally signed up for a further six months in the AFS on New Year’s Eve, 1944, and continued to look after new recruits arriving in Italy. By May 1945, with one month left on his contract, he is writing to Esther to confirm his dislike of America: Your reports on Mary Barnwell and others being glad of Roosevelt’s death and sorry about Mussolini’s made me so mad that I have been able to think of little else ever since. Just another reason why I cant possibly face the USA. My blood is positively boiling and churning and bubbling in my veins.16 Four days after his thirty-ninth birthday he had written: ‘Did I tell you that I want to change my citizenship apres la guerre? What will I live on though, whisper Dame Reason, Mother Comfort and My Lady Complacent.’17 Arthur had become even more securely attached to the idea of England in his absence from it and was finally confirmed in his antipathy to the United States. He deeply hurt his American cousins by describing their country as ‘coca cola land’ with ‘fudge sundae shores’ in contrast to the privations of England.18 In the summer of 1945, between the war ending in Europe during May and the surrender of Japan in September and when the Liaison offices had all been closed, Arthur returned to help Americans with any problems they might have in transit on their way home.19 He told Esther ‘As a reward for being a good boy, I suppose, they are sending me home [ie to the USA] via England and I couldnt be more excited at the prospect’.20 Arthur was then ‘repatriated’ on 5 July 1945 and finally returned to the country he called home from New York on 9 March 1946 on the Queen Mary.

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That month, he wrote to Esther that it almost tore him in two to think of leaving HM Forces. While that was not exactly the case, it was clear he thought of his time in the services as having been attached to the British Army. What sort of war had it been for Arthur? He was thirty-five when he volunteered and forty when the conflict ended. Luke Kinsolving, who knew Arthur in Tripoli, sketched this composite portrait of the ‘average AFS man’ and it fits Arthur neatly: The average AFS man had about 2⅞ years of college. Chances are he joined the Field Service when it became apparent that his next period of exams would be the last. When the question of occupations comes up, the picture of the average AFS man becomes a hopeless kaleidoscope. They range from Reds to ex-monks. If there is any particularly noticeable common denominator – and here again it applies to only a minority – it is an interest in the theater, either amateur or professional, ranging from playwrites [sic] to vaudeville hams.21 In September 1949 Arthur’s cousin Janie wrote to their cousin Cack, ‘I feel he is a man now as he never was before’. In December 1949 she mentions that he had sold his country house for £20,000 (!!!! was added in the letter) and, after a Boxing Day lunch with Janie’s family, she says ‘I do think he likes the family and wants to be one of the family’. The family also made much of him at that lunch and Tinker (Leslie Ann, aged thirteen or so) was said to have disliked his yellow socks.22 A series of casual photographs taken just before the war show Arthur looking louche and indolent, wearing a very loudly checked jacket and a sardonic expression; doubtless the socks were startling, too. Esther Clifford had always considered Arthur just another of Henry’s callow public school friends but felt, too, that the war transformed him and she preserved all his letters and postcards, as have her two sons. Arthur had exercised and refined all his prejudices during his four years away and was settled into them, as most people are by the age of forty. He had lived in a kind of limbo: not American although wearing an American Field Service badge; yet not quite British in spite of his beloved British army battle dress.

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He now caught up with friends to whom he had written regularly, before and during the war: ‘How I enjoyed the tiny excerpt from my Munich crisis letter! I always enjoy my own writings so much more than anyone else’s.’23 Arthur was now clear about where he belonged, what would make his life unbearable and what made it pleasurable. He loved and had extended his knowledge of art and architecture through his time with both Henry Clifford and John Deakin; he certainly needed luxury in his life. He had contributed energetically to the war effort, learning new administrative and organizational skills, which became very useful when he chose to run an art gallery for the rest of his life.

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By 1945, Arthur had become an art collector in modest fashion under the varied guidance of John Deakin, André Ostier and Henry Clifford, acquiring some serious works. One of his earliest purchases had been on the advice of Ostier: Balthus’ La Caserne, a scene of marionette-like soldiers each wearing a fez and training horses in their barracks. It was painted in Morocco in 1933 and Arthur bought it immediately on Balthus’ return to Paris to a studio overlooking that of Delacroix, a hero to both Arthur and Balthus. In 1937, Arthur bought a fantastical work by Alessandro Magnasco from Ostier in Paris and kept it until his death. By 1940, Arthur had also bought de Chirico’s The Painter’s Family, now in the Tate (see colour plate 2). Oddly, he disparaged de Chirico’s work in one of his wartime letters, preferring to have postcard reproductions of Renoir and Sisley, artists in whom he never showed any other interest, and asked Esther: Please, since everything but charm is now in your country, buy me a nice Greuze and a Guido Reni or two to hang on my walls when the war is over [. . .] I pine for a sight of some pictures. Will you please buy me a few Picassos and Roualts [sic] and ship them right over. Only important ones, please. I was silly not to bring with me a small Tableau de Voyage [. . .] the little Berman that I have, of the monument funebre, would have been just the job. Talking of painters, I met Savinio, Chirico’s brother, while in Rome, and bought a little picture by him. It is fun [. . .] sort of Portrait of My Mother. 157

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An Edwardian Nanny type sitting in a red chair with hands folded in complacency. The only thing is that for a head, she has a long long bill. A duck billed platypus, perhaps. Anyway, I like it a lot and at last I have my tableau de voyage. I also bought two sort of Dufy-esque water colours, since I was in a mad mood. They are unimportant but I think they are rather charming, though its difficult to be sure. One loses one taste and discernment a little if one is away from things for a length of time, as I have been.1 During the war, he persuaded an innkeeper in Beirut (sometimes in the telling of the tale the scene shifted up country to Baalbek) to sell him his painted sign showing The Lion of Iran, and that painting became a talisman for him. In later years he had a wide collection of largely Persian paintings in his London flat, often associated with the reign of the second Qajar Shah (1772–1834). In 1942, in the lull before going to the Middle East and after the Zamzam affair, he made a major purchase from the Valentine gallery acquiring Picasso’s Femme Assise, a portrait of Dora Maar (see colour plate 5), as well as buying a clown head by Rouault.2 He left the Picasso in the safe-keeping of Henry and Esther Clifford and they (owner and sitter) even exchanged messages in French with the part of Dora Maar being written by Henry, his only wartime communication to Arthur.3 When he returned to England from the United States in 1946, Arthur had not yet decided to enter the art world professionally and seemed set for a country gentleman’s life, farming on a modest scale in Hampshire. This was not practical and has a comic touch of E.F. Benson, if not P.G. Wodehouse, about it. Arthur had a natural inclination towards the arts. If acting – at least, dressing up, designing, delight in words and stories, showing off – had been his first inclination, then fine art succeeded it as a more serious approach to a creative world, but one in which money talked in an accent he understood. First, he used art as decor, then, through Deakin, saw it as a very direct way – like sex, cars, houses and clothes – of expressing his identity and intellect, sharing something vital with a like-minded group. And along with fast cars and elegant houses, it cost a satisfyingly large amount to buy the kind of good art that impressed others who were important to him. Working in a museum, like Henry Clifford, was out of the question, as much as a professional stage career

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had been impossible. However, becoming a collector and a connoisseur involved taste, opinion, application and cash, all of which he had available. By 1946, Arthur was forty and had time to spend as well as a new-found need to be effective rather than merely getting by as a house guest and flâneur. He no longer had Deakin as a travelling companion, critic or expense. Marwell was clearly unable to function as a farming business and the weather of the notorious winter of 1946/7 had, on top of the privations of war, come as a particular shock to him. Arthur had tried to settle at Marwell again, acquiring a small poodle called George after a favourite guardsman, but found life dull. He concentrated on decorating and furnishing his house but could no longer make the setting work for him, so sold it in 1948. A year earlier, he had written Esther a letter that began to explain his doubts about life in the country and the usual complaint of his social class at the time about the ‘servant question’: Thank you so very much for your letter of March 20th, and also for a delightful and most welcome food parcel which arrived at the same time a time, I might add, when I was lying sick a’bed with flu and wondering who, if anyone at all was going to bring me food and sustenance, seeing that my staff is at this moment sorely depleted, and the bailiff ’s wife (who, lets face it, is a bitch) does nothing but sit around and ‘play the lady’ all day long instead of darning my socks, polishing, making delicious raisin bread and weeding the front lawn, as I think she should. However, I managed to put a curse on her as I lay in my room, and now she is ill herself with what is known as a Strep throat, and I am very pleased indeed. The doctor called today to see her and recommended lots of champagne. Champagne, indeed in these austerity days. I have a very good mind to order a bottle up from the cellar (I mean, clamber down for a bottle myself), open the cork outside her room and drink every drop of it myself this very evening. This winter has truly been torturous [. . .] snow, blizzards, floods, frosts, and rain, rain, rain. At present nothing is ploughed, sown or planted and if conditions do not improve soon I dont see what we shall do for vegetables and such later on. The bad news concerns the farm which has turned out pretty poorly, at least, the bailiff and his wretched wife have turned out as poor as poor. They

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are to leave in a month’s time, and then I shall carry on with the help of the cowman, who knows more of farming than they ever will, but will look about for somewhere smaller to live, and then sell Marwell. Its infuriating as I have just spent a lot on redecorating and on furniture [. . .] my new wallpapers and curtains are a dream of beauty and I do hope you will see them. However, though doubtless I could find someone else to come and run the place, I dont think I can stand the strain any more, and had best cut my losses and run. Where I shall live, Lord only knows. London is really too impossible. It is so drab and dull, and besides one person living alone practically starves there. I have toyed with the idea of the USA (quickly rejected) and with the South of France (not so quickly rejected) and with Italy (not really rejected at all), but will probably end up in a Mapp-like cottage in a small English town. I long for a small place where I can manage with one servant and a jobbing gardener to come in three or four times a week, and which I can easily let or close up, and go away. This place, much as I like it, is a millstone.4 This is the last existing letter from Arthur to Esther. During the summer of 1947, Mr Churchill, whose wife ran the local Post Office, acted as Arthur’s chauffeur on a three and half month trip to Venice via Paris, the Riviera and Rome.5 By the end of the year, Arthur took a London flat at 50 Egerton Gardens and Marwell was sold for £20,000 (equivalent today to about £500,000) and he also auctioned off some glass and furniture, finally leaving in early February 1948. But before he left, Arthur had made a significant link locally that would keep his name inextricably connected with the area. In the spring of 1946, the curator of Southampton Art Gallery had approached Arthur as a distinguished local collector. As a young man, George Loraine Conran had tried to study archaeology but, not able to afford it, became a journalist, reviewing design in London in the 1930s.6 He knew the ballet dancers Frederick Ashton and Anthony Tudor and lodged with the author Glorney Bolton in Chelsea so he might well have moved in Arthur’s circles, as Cefyn Embling-Evans has plausibly suggested, before taking up a museum appointment in Liverpool in 1937. Conran was a lifelong friend of Cedric Morris, who twice painted his portrait. Conran was appointed as

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Southampton’s first curator in 1939 then entered the Royal Navy, where he served as a gunnery officer and was at Dunkirk. By 1946, he was back at his civilian post, looking to relaunch the gallery. Southampton Art Gallery was created as a result of significant bequests. A bequest, from a local councillor and art patron Robert Chipperfield in 1911, challenged his fellow politicians to create a public art gallery and make no purchases based on committee decision or by councillors. Instead, until such time as a professional curator was appointed, the purchases were to be made by the Director of the National Gallery: at that point the task fell to Kenneth Clark, giving him larger funds to spend for Southampton than on the national collection. The challenge was accepted and the gallery became a central part of England’s first ever Civic Centre. Work began in 1930 and the gallery itself opened in 1939, only to be bombed tragically in November 1940. After the war, Conran needed to move fast to recreate the gallery in a new light and wisely approached local collectors for their support. In 1946, Arthur replied warmly to him that it was nice to hear from him after all this time. A lack of petrol kept Arthur tied to home but he invited Conran to Marwell to see his latest acquisitions. In a splendidly co-ordinated and speedy exercise of liaison, with skills learned in the AFS, within a month Arthur lent a sizeable number of his paintings to the gallery for a month-long exhibition from 19 August to 21 September 1946; it was a great success and welcomed over 14,000 visitors. The list included his Picasso, de Chirico and works by Soutine, Rouault, Derain, Modigliani, Balthus, Dufy, Vuillard and Vlaminck. He mentions that he has sold his Tchelitchew and that he also wants to sell his de Chirico: You remember it in the hall – huge rhomboid faceless heads & bodies filled with rectangular shapes? It is very cheap – £200 – would the gallery be dashing enough to buy it?7 The gallery was not so dashing; he sold it to Princess Anne-Marie Callimachi from whom it was purchased by the Tate in 1961, at exactly the same time as part of the Jeffress Bequest was being allocated there (see colour plate 2). A Southampton Art Gallery attendant had asked Arthur to explain the de Chirico work to him and he had countered that he was never able to explain

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modern paintings and whenever he felt the need for an explainable painting he bought a nice coloured postcard instead. He was sure that the man thought he was mad.8 What happened next was remarkable. While it is not clear who initiated the Circle for the Study of Art (CSA), in September 1947 and again in September 1948, this interesting group organized two exhibitions of modern art in, of all unlikely places, the wood-panelled Judges’ Lodgings in The Close of Winchester Cathedral. It is impossible that these exhibitions, or the very concept of the CSA, could have happened without Jeffress or certainly Conran’s active involvement. Conran had re-opened one wing of Southampton Art Gallery in 1946 and, while waiting seven more years to rebuild the rest, needed to cultivate collectors locally. He gave the opening speech for the 1947 CSA exhibition. The only mention of CSA, apart from adverts and leaflets, occurs in the minutes of the Winchester Art Club, which had been founded in 1888. They planned to invite John Piper and John Nash to lend to the club’s annual exhibition and Richard Eurich (who lived locally and later lent to CSA) to be guest artist-critic.9 The art club’s annual exhibitions had ceased during the war but in 1939 Winchester College had shown part of the distinguished Sir Edward Marsh collection (later distributed to regional museums through the Contemporary Art Society, in 1953). Marsh was a particular supporter of the work of Stanley Spencer. In June 1945, a Winchester Art Club committee member called Miss Robinson reported that Mr Behrend of Burghclere was ‘ready to lend several (probably about 20) works by Stanley Spencer. The committee considered these acceptable’.10 The following discussion resolved that about forty other works might be included by professional artists such as Philip Connard, Ronald Gray and his mentor, the late Philip Wilson Steer. The chairman of the committee, Brigadier E.M. Jack, was already approaching Bond Street galleries for potential loans. One of the art club committee members, Mr Ricardo, became a lender to CSA but no mention of the plan is made again until March 1946, when it was agreed that the Judges’ Lodgings will be hired out from 23 September to 31 October 1946 ‘to allow for CSA Exhibition’ and that details will be agreed with the Chairman of the CSA, whose name is not revealed.11 The opening date is two days after the show of Arthur’s loans closed in Southampton, but nothing actually happened until 1947.

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By 1947, the CSA was able to reveal a very interesting cache of local collections which the exhibition at Southampton of Arthur’s own collection might have flushed out.12 The choice of exhibition space within the Close of Winchester Cathedral suggests that key supporters of the CSA were Sir Walter Oakeshott, the new headmaster of Winchester College and Reverend James Mansel, later a Canon of Winchester, who was living in The College in 1947. Mansel, however, lent only in 1947 and Oakeshott and his wife Noel lent only in 1948. These loans were not in the avant-garde either, although the Oakeshotts did lend W.R. Nevinson’s Chicago. Oakeshott’s abiding interest was in medieval art and, in 1934, among the manuscripts in the Fellows’ Library at Winchester College he discovered the unique manuscript of Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. He became, ex officio, Vice President of the Winchester Art Club whose President was the Dean of Winchester Cathedral. Altogether there were nineteen lenders to the CSA exhibitions from Hampshire and around Petersfield/Midhurst on the Sussex border. By coincidence, at the height of the Blitz, in the winter of 1940–1, Eric Hall, Francis Bacon’s patron and lover, rented a cottage for Bacon and himself at Bedales Lodge, Steep, near Petersfield, until late in 1943. Peggy Guggenheim had lived with Douglas Garman at Yew Tree Cottage, near Petersfield, from 1934 just as Arthur and Deakin moved to Marwell, less than twenty miles away. Did they first meet then or earlier, in Paris? In the 1947 exhibition works lent by Arthur Jeffress dominate numerically and in quality. His Picasso and de Chirico are there as well as many of the other paintings lent earlier to Southampton, plus Burra’s Two Sisters (see colour plate 1) and, most astonishingly, Abstraction by Jackson Pollock, the first time Pollock’s work is recorded on display in Britain.13 To debut the work of Jackson Pollock in the deeply conservative setting of the Close of Winchester Cathedral in 1947 is a wonder. Arthur later lent Abstraction to Southampton Art Gallery from late November to early June 1948 and had it insured for only £15, so it is very likely that this Abstraction is an ink drawing but its appearance in Hampshire is no less remarkable. In the last year of his life he wrote, with honesty: ‘I do feel it is only fair to tell you that I never show abstract paintings in this gallery, partly because I don’t really like them and partly because I know absolutely nothing about them.’14 Arthur

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would not have purchased an abstract work (a movement he always loathed) by a young artist without the mediation of someone he respected. Peggy Guggenheim gave Pollock annual solo shows at her gallery Art of This Century in New York. When Arthur returned from his AFS service in July 1945, and before his return to Hampshire in March 1946 (the first mention of CSA in the Winchester Art Club minutes), he would have made his first visits to Art of This Century and seen Pollock’s work in the Autumn Salon, October 1945, as well as the Christmas Exhibition of Gouaches. Homosexuality was at least a preoccupation in the mind of Jackson Pollock at the time and he frequented a gay bar called George’s Tavern in Greenwich Village, where he met Tennessee Williams, also a friend of Arthur’s.15 It is beyond unlikely that Arthur Jeffress and Jackson Pollock ever slept together, but they may well have met socially at George’s, and that might just have tipped the balance in favour of this very unpredictable acquisition or acquisitions. The Pollock catalogue raisonné states that Banners of Spring, a painting from 1946, was bought by Arthur Jeffress from Betty Parson’s Gallery and never shown in the United States. Her gallery sticker is on the stretcher but there are no sales records. It was in the collection of E.J. Powers in London by 1957.16 Robert Melville’s essay on Arthur’s collection states that he was the first person in Britain to acquire a Pollock drip painting.17 Robert mentioned, in conversation with the author twenty years later, a very small work exchanged for Balthus’ Caserne in 1946, but Arthur bought that in 1933 and still had it in 1956.18 An undated paper in an unknown hand on a sheet from an Arthur Jeffress Gallery notepad indicates informally that Arthur sold Abstraction, a drawing by Pollock, to Gimpel Fils for £30 sometime after January 1954.19 The Pollock catalogue raisonné states that Banners was probably sold to Power through Gimpel’s and concludes that the drawing was apparently destroyed. Three photographs, also from Southampton’s files, confuse the issue further. One is of a work by Arshile Gorky. On the reverse is a note that reads ‘Exchanged for Jackson Pollock at Art of this Century, New York, 1946’.20 A note on the reverse of another photograph identified by Peter Jones as Roberto Matta’s Horbits of Patricia (1940), states that this was also exchanged at Art of This Century for a Jackson Pollock in 1946.21 Both claims might be true. Yet another

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annotated photograph – actually of an ink drawing by Pollock – recalls the swap with a Gorky but to Gimpel’s.22 In 1986, Robert said the drawing was sold for £50 when Pollock’s fame grew, but that Arthur made no profit.23 We can safely assume that the Pollock work shown in Winchester was a modest drawing, not to frighten any Hampshire horses, but no less extraordinary a loan for all that. Arthur seems also to have owned a painting by Pollock, however briefly, probably one from just before Pollock’s famous drip series began, and sold it on before he met Robert Melville. The other substantial collectors within CSA are some of the people with whom Arthur became acquainted or already knew. (John) Louis ‘Bow’ and Mary Behrend lived in Grey House, Burghclere, on the Hampshire/Berkshire border, from 1918 to 1954. They were lenders in 1948, making available three works by Stanley Spencer and two by Burra plus ten other works, including examples by Duncan Grant, Henry Lamb and Walter Sickert. Arthur and the Behrends frequented many of the same major London dealers. The Behrends were among Stanley Spencer’s principal supporters. After he showed them designs for a cycle of chapel decorations, which illustrated his experiences in World War I, the Behrends commissioned Spencer to realize his designs and, from 1927 to 1932, he painted them within the chapel the Behrends built at Burghclere. About twenty-three miles from Winchester, the chapel commemorated Mary Behrend’s brother, who had died while serving, like Spencer, in Macedonia. Notably, they did not lend their most impressive Spencers to the CSA. Another couple who lent interesting works in both years was ‘Paul’ Odo Cross and Angus Wilson. (Graham Griswell) Odo Cross was an ex-ballet dancer and painter born in London in 1898, son of a surgeon in the Life Guards and an American mother. His brother and sister died within two days of each other in 1927, which made him sole heir. Cross lived in Mayfair in the 1920s and 1930s and was a friend and occasional lover of the artist and teacher Cedric Morris, so Conran will have known them well. Angus Wilson was a year or so younger than Cross, born in New Zealand, and an orchid grower and plant photographer; not the novelist of the same name with whom he is easily confused (and both Wilsons knew Arthur). Cross and Wilson lived in Tidscombe, Wiltshire, just over the border near Andover

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and the Tate catalogue links Cross with a house in Fordingbridge on the edge of the New Forest. They also had a house in Jamaica where one of them is said often to have worn his mother’s pearls, especially when visiting Ian Fleming at his house Goldeneye. The pearls certainly belonged to Odo’s mother, Mrs Florence Griswold Cross from Newport, Rhode Island. Odo Cross was the author of a delightful book for children, The Snail that Climbed the Eiffel Tower and Other Stories, illustrated by John Minton and published by John Lehmann in 1947. Cross and Wilson later became clients of Arthur’s gallery. Mrs Ernest Milton lent a drawing by Jacob Epstein to the 1947 exhibition and a painting by Matthew Smith, who was her cousin. In her own right she was the author, art critic and literary editor Naomi Royde-Smith, who married the actor Ernest Gianello Milton, and she was, for a while, art critic of Queen.24 During the 1940s, she lived in Nell Gwyn’s house in Winchester while her (gay) husband was on tour. They do sound just like friends of Arthur, and Arthur must have lent his address book to whoever masterminded the two shows and played an organizing role himself behind the scenes. An anonymous lender lent works by the Mexican artists Rufino Tamayo and Jose Clementé Orozco, the latter much admired by Pollock. Intriguingly, this lender was apparently not the Sussex-based Mexican expert Edward James, even though Arthur had links to him through his friends, the designer John Hill and James’ secretary Donald Neville-Willing.25 Other potential local collectors included Maud and Gilbert Russell, who bought Mottisfont Abbey, near Romsey, in 1934 where she commissioned Rex Whistler to decorate a Gothic drawing room. Maud had been painted by several artists, including Henri Matisse who drew her in 1937, but she loathed the results. Although they were obvious people to approach, the Russells were not amongst the lenders to either CSA exhibition but Mottisfont Abbey was linked to Arthur. From 1900 to 1934 its owners had been the Vaudrey-Barker-Mill family but Captain Barker-Mill died on active service in 1916, when their son Peter was only eight. Peter Barker-Mill went to Harrow, grew up to be an artist and with his wife entered into a new gallery venture with Arthur Jeffress in 1947.

15 Erica Brausen

When Arthur came back from the war, the England about which he had fantasized for four years had changed for the worst. In 1947, Richard Blake Brown invited him for ‘luncheonette on Xmas Eve’ but Arthur said he would be: more in the luncheon market on Xmas Day or Boxing Day [as I] had thought that if no one came forward and asked me for the whole gay holiday of proceeding to Portsmouth myself on Xmas day and their [sic] burying my head in some stokers crutch [sic]. Arthur was about to move to 50 Egerton Gardens in Kensington, a small, temporary flat with only a communal phone and ‘on my own’.1 It had been twenty years since he had lived on his own but that would be the case for the rest of his life. Robert Melville scribbled a little list on the gallery notepad, probably just after Arthur’s death, which sketched out a very brief biography through nine or so places in which Arthur lived, including the very brief Zamzam period in France and Portugal. One of the places is Beaufort Gardens, although none of his other London addresses are mentioned. Beaufort Gardens (Mansions is crossed out) was another temporary home, which he possibly rented from Edna Fleming, just before moving into Egerton Gardens (with Edna as his landlady still, according to an electricity bill), five minutes’ walk away. Francis Bacon also lived at 14 Beaufort Gardens, then again at number 6, from 1952. At some point during 1946, Arthur had a chat with the formidable Erica Brausen at a party. His loans to Southampton would have impressed her. They 167

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were possibly building on an acquaintanceship made in Paris pre-war but each had connections through the Redfern Gallery; Erica had worked there and Arthur was very friendly with the Australian Richard Smart, one of the directors, and was especially close to his sister Sheila. They all knew the Australian artist Roy Le Maistre, who held regular salons in Chelsea and was a close friend of Francis Bacon. The Brausen–Jeffress circles frequently overlapped, not least with their future partners Peter and Elsa Barker-Mill. Emma Erika Brausen was born on 31 January 1908 into a bourgeois family in Dusseldorf. She had little in common with her duck-shooting businessman father and nor was she close to her mother.2 The family lived about fifteen minutes’ walk away from an important gallery opened by Johanna Ey, still known as ‘Mutter Ey’ from the days when she ran a café-bakery and helped young artists, at first swapping cakes for works of art.3 Ey became a passionate defender of modernism and later many of her artists were denounced by the Nazis as degenerate.4 She closed her gallery in 1934 but, as a girl, Erica Brausen had been much influenced by her. Between 1927 and 1929, Erica moved to Hanover and became part of a circle surrounding the dealer and collector Herbert Garve-Garvenburg.5 Brausen then moved to Paris aged twenty-one and, with the rise of Hitler in the 1930s, stayed on to live in a shared apartment in an art deco building on the Boulevard du Montparnasse, near La Closerie de Lilas, on a small allowance from her parents.6 She got to know a large number of artists and became a familiar figure at gallery openings, apparently working in a left-wing bookshop on Boulevard St. Michel, which specialized in illustrated books and photographs of the mentally disturbed.7 She organized exhibitions in its basement and Jacques Schiffrin’s Librairie-Galerie de la Pléiade is a likely venue. Founded in 1931, on the corner of Rue Royer-Collard and Boulevard St Michel, opposite the Luxembourg Gardens, its programme concentrated on photography and also showed L’Art schizophrénique.8 She and Ostier occupied different positions on the Right and Left Banks but the avant-garde gallery world was small and they must have come across each other, very possibly with Arthur. Erica’s friendship with the Catalan artist Joan Miró prompted her move to Mallorca in 1935. She ran a bar there which became popular with the many writers and artists who had settled locally and she made a good living exporting

Erica Brausen

Figure 15.1 Photographer unknown. Erica Brausen as a young woman, c. 1929.

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work by local artists: ‘ceramics and basketry sold like hotcakes throughout Europe and the United States.’9 She visited London from Palma in early December 1935, giving her permanent residence as Spain and her work as ‘HD’: home duties. Erica Brausen, with the code name ‘Mlle Beryl’, covertly helped Jewish and socialist friends escape the naval battle for Mallorca during the Civil War in the summer of 1936. Michel Leiris, later one of France’s most distinguished men of letters, credited her with saving his life and that of his wife Louise (as well as Raymond and Janine Queneau) by convincing a US navy submarine captain to get them off the island and safely to Marseilles.10 Erica went to London but returned to Mallorca in February 1936. She then moved back to Paris, where she became friends with the recently-arrived American painter Anita de Caro who worked at the British printmaker Stanley Hayter’s famous Atelier 17. De Caro became a follower of the remarkable Meher or Saïr Baba who had declared himself an avatar and communicated only through a wooden alphabet and gestures. Jean-Yves Mock says that Erica accompanied a group of Meher Baba’s followers who were sent by Baba to London at some point. When the followers returned to the master in Paris, Erica was told that she should keep quiet and stay put.11 Her own spiritual leanings began in Paris where she had become close to Jane Heap, co-editor of the literary journal The Little Review and one of the followers of the leading mystic teacher George Gurdjieff.12 Erica joined their women’s group, The Rope, and remained a lifelong friend to Heap and her partner Elspeth Champcommunal. In 1935, Jane moved to London, where she and Elspeth spent the rest of their lives. Jane’s move motivated Erica to make London her home, too, and it became the launch pad for her stellar art career. By 1939, Erica was sharing a flat with Elizabeth Lewry, who would marry Alan, later Baron, Sainsbury in 1944. His brother and sister-in-law, Robert and Lisa Sainsbury, were to be two of Francis Bacon and the Hanover Gallery’s most important patrons.13 Erica first got a job at the remarkable Storran Gallery, run by Eardley Knollys and his partner the artist Frank Coombes, in Albany Court Yard opposite Fortnum & Mason. As a German citizen, she presented herself as required to the authorities on 6 November 1939 and it was confirmed that she would not be interned; she was in Category C, low risk. She gave the alternative names Erika and Erica and

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her address as 8 Devonshire Mews, Marylebone, describing herself as being in the fashion business and a picture dealer; she gave Elspeth Champcommunal, then head of Worth, later Vogue’s first London editor, as her reference. After the Storran, Erica worked at the St George’s Gallery, Hanover Square, for Lea Bondi-Jaray, referred to by Arthur as ‘Mother Jaray’, a nod perhaps to ‘Mutter Ey’. Lea Bondi had run Galerie Würthle in Vienna, that city’s first modern gallery. Bondi was a close friend of the leading Expressionists and when she and her husband, the sculptor Sandor Jaray, fled from the Nazis to London in 1938, she set up the St George’s Gallery and brought the work of many German Expressionists to London for the first time. Lea Bondi also employed a fellow Viennese émigré, Harry Fischer, who, in the same year as Erica opened the Hanover, created the Marlborough Gallery with Frank Lloyd.14 They later seduced Francis Bacon to their gallery away from Erica Brausen, and broke her heart. Next, Erica Brausen worked at the Redfern Gallery, founded in 1923 as a small artists’ co-operative by the wealthy Arthur Knyvett-Lee and the landowner Anthony Maxtone Graham, whose wife would later write Mrs Miniver. The New Zealand-born Rex Nan Kivell joined the gallery in 1925 aged twenty-seven, and, in 1931, took control of the company. Nan Kivell first came to England to serve during World War I, worked as an archaeologist and then as ‘an archetypal outsider – illegitimate, homosexual, self-educated and antipodean’ became a distinguished dealer and collector.15 He brought in the eccentric Napier (Naps) Sturt, 3rd Baron Alington, as one of the Redfern’s backers. Naps’ sister and brother-in-law were at Arthur’s Red and White Party: maybe Naps was, too. The Redfern Gallery moved from Bond Street to its present Cork Street site in 1936 and kept its louche, un-Bloomsbury atmosphere for a long time. It still flourishes today. Providentially, Graham Sutherland, an important young painter then represented by the Redfern, suggested to Erica Brausen that she visit his friend Francis Bacon’s studio at 7 Cromwell Place. In January 1937 Sutherland and Bacon had been in a group show, Young British Painters at Agnew’s, which also included Victor Pasmore and Roy de Maistre, and they had remained friends. Brausen already knew Bacon but the artist was notoriously reluctant to receive studio visitors. She wrote to him several times, finally securing an

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invitation in early autumn when, promptly and presciently, she bought Bacon’s remarkable Painting (1946) for £200. Within a fortnight of its subsequent sale to the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1948, Bacon had used his share of the funds to move from London to the Côte d’Azur where he spent much of the next few years, gambling a lot in Monte Carlo and painting a little. The Brausen–Bacon partnership was not always an easy one but they established each other’s career and both built brilliantly on this early coup. Erica Brausen had already decided that she wanted to open her own gallery and her stockbook actually begins in early May 1945; she had already bought a work by Bacon’s friend, the much-admired painter and Vogue photographer, Peter Rose-Pulham.16 Sutherland knew she was on the lookout for artists on her own account and that she had ambitions and, with a friend’s help, just enough cash to make a start. Erica Brausen married in June 1946, just at the moment when she needed to establish herself formally in business with the solidity of British citizenship behind her and to protect another relationship. Her mariage blanc was to Clement Haizelden, known to his friends as ‘Clem’ and to his family as ‘Son’. He was born in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, on 17 August 1921 to parents who were drinkers and gamblers, who farmed their children out to relations at an early age and whose own proof of marriage at Gretna Green turned out to be inadequate when they sought pensions in their sixties so they married all over again.17 Clem was twenty-four when he and Erica married; she was thirty-eight. They were both homosexual and until recently little was known of his life before he married Erica: his family remember him as a soldier during World War II and were told that he had married a German woman he had met in Paris. The story continued that she did not like London so moved straight back across the Channel, but in fact he met Erica in London.18 Clem took his younger siblings to the theatre in the best seats and treated one of them to the rare gift of a banana during the war, but after he finally moved to the United States in 1951 there was virtually no further contact with his family.19 This is probably less to do with his homosexuality than strained relations with his mother in particular: he was the eldest of six children and one of his two brothers, a twin, was also gay, which certainly caused no problems within his family. His youngest sister Patricia Mulholland is an artist

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and was married to William Tucker, the distinguished British sculptor. As young artists, they regularly visited the Hanover Gallery with no idea of the link between her brother Clem and his wife Erica Brausen.20 Clem was part of the gay circle of the popular writer and journalist Beverley Nichols, Arthur’s old friend, and he also dealt in antiques. Clem had a rackety friend, Jack Romany, who owned a pub near Winchester and with whom he raced greyhounds; they dyed the dogs in new shades for different races. After some scam or other, Jack was given refuge from the police in Clem’s parents’ attic: Jack sounds rather more their type than Clem.21 However, the pivotal person in Clem’s life was the Swiss artist Raoh Friedel Schorr. Schorr studied art in Basel, Geneva and then Paris, where he had a studio for thirteen years and modelled many of his bronze animalier sculptures after creatures in the zoo. He settled in England in 1936, the same time as Erica, exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1937 onwards and was a very successful and wealthy designer of posters, fabrics, interior decoration, exhibitions and sculpture for film, theatre and shop windows displays.22 In the 1960s, Schorr began to model groups of animals for Worcester Royal Porcelain and Royal Doulton; a bronze Bengal Tiger is in the Tate, purchased by the director James Bolivar Manson, whose portrait Schorr painted. Manson was a fellow artist and fan of Schorr and, after leaving both his wife and the Tate, lived nearby in Carlyle Studios until his death in 1945. Another Schorr enthusiast was the profoundly eccentric Evan Morgan, 2nd Viscount Tredegar, Naps Alington’s brother-in-law, who, as a notable and senior member of gay circles, had been at Arthur’s Red and White Party. He went on to combine a role as a chamberlain to Popes Benedict XV and Pius XI with that of an accomplished occultist, and was called by Aleister Crowley the ‘Adept of Adepts’.23 Schorr’s artistic production was carried out at Bolton Studios where Erica Brausen lived for nearly twenty years. These twenty-seven hidden-away studios in the area known as ‘Little Chelsea in Kensington’ were built between 1885 and 1890 then re-modelled in 1934 when their communal sanitary arrangements were replaced by less bohemian facilities in each studio and resident staff provided cooking and cleaning. Many studios fell vacant during World War II or were destroyed but Erica was living in number 26 by 1947, possibly from as early as 1943. Schorr’s sister Clara worked with him and

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lived with her partner Elissa Huddleston at number 6, while he used numbers 3 and 5 as ateliers.24 Schorr and Erica had probably met in Paris and Schorr introduced his new London neighbour Erica to his young friend Clem. Schorr’s own home was in the elegant Chelsea street of Mulberry Walk, where Joe Carstairs and Ruth Baldwin had lived during the Elvira Barney trial. Clem lived there with Schorr in 1946/7, working alongside him at Bolton Studios after his wartime service. Clem was the love of Schorr’s life but in March 1947 Clem left England behind and travelled to Ontario then moved on to Baltimore, Maryland. In 1951, Clem travelled from New York back to London to say goodbye to one of his sisters before she emigrated to New Zealand. He never saw his family again. He stayed with Schorr on this short trip but was home in New York by Christmas, where his family believed him to be running an hotel.25 In 1951 he was living at 150 Willow Street, an early nineteenth-century ‘Federal Style’ building in Brooklyn Heights. Arthur Miller lived right next door at number 151 until he left to marry Marilyn Monroe in June 1956; Truman Capote lived at 70 Willow Street in the 1950s and 1960s during the time he knew Arthur. In May 1957, Clem applied for and was granted US naturalization. By now he had moved to 103 East 71st Street with a new partner, Yorke Kennedy, with whom he ran a very successful antiques and design company; their rich and glamorous clients included Jackie Kennedy and Barbara Hutton. Clem made an annual visit to London to celebrate Schorr’s birthday and returned with ceramics and watercolours from the Schorr studio to sell to American clients. Schorr occasionally travelled over to New York as late as the 1980s to help Clem and Kennedy when they had major commissions to deliver and the three of them took regular holidays together in the Caribbean. They also often holidayed together with Schorr’s sister and her family in Switzerland at their hotel on the shores of Lake Lucerne, and the Swiss nieces remained close to Clem and called him ‘Uncle’.26 Clem died on 8 September 1990 about seventy miles north east of New York in their last home on Benedict Road, South Salem, Westchester County, a pleasant white clapperboard house set in a two-acre garden. The Swiss nieces recall this home as a wonderful barn, not revealing from outside that it was

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filled with antiques and art. Clem’s death was the result of a fall while pruning an apple tree: he had supper with Kennedy after the accident, and did not wake up the next morning.27 Clem effaced himself entirely from the records of Erica Brausen’s life and from his own family. Erica continued to refer to herself officially as ‘Erica Haizelden’ until at least 1961 but from 1967, when she left Bolton Studios to live in Eaton Place in Belgravia, she is listed in the phone book as Erica Brausen. Travelling on the Queen Mary to New York in 1959, she is recorded as Mrs Erica Haizelden of 26 Bolton Studios, housewife, at a point when she was director of one of the most distinguished galleries in Europe. She was also living with the gloriously glamorous Java-born, Dutch-Indonesian model Catharina ‘Toto’ Koopman, whom she had met in Italy in 1945. Toto immediately came with her to London and they lived together for the rest of their lives with the respectability of a marriage, albeit to a third and male party, to protect them. When Erica’s will was published in 1993, it was under the name Erica Brausen-Haizelden. Erica left the Redfern in 1946 and somehow she and Arthur Jeffress came to an arrangement to work together, two sharp pieces of grit that enabled the pearl that was the Hanover Gallery to be created. It is unlikely that they ever thought they could be friends but the deal suited them both at the time and they had known many people in common over the years. He recognized her talent and she knew he had both money and restless energy to invest and an enthusiasm which she could try to harness. He was also efficient, wellconnected and worldly with experience in buying, if not selling, art. That was certainly Erica’s expertise. While she had been waiting to find a backer Erica had been active. Painting (1946), her crucially important painting by Bacon, was shown at the Redfern in the summer of 1946 and in the Exposition internationale d’arte moderne that winter at the Musée National d’Art Moderne, for which Bacon travelled to Paris. The sale of Painting (1946) to MoMA in New York was a magnificent transatlantic advert for her new gallery. She was a clever, formidable woman, elegant and with particularly beautiful hands; John Banting drew her that year, with one dramatic scarlet ‘sold’ dot collaged as an earring.

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16 The Hanover Gallery

Late in 1947, the Hanover Gallery was created at 32a St George Street, London, beside the society church of St George’s in Hanover Square and opposite the back door of Sotheby’s. It was the same place in which Erica Brausen had worked for Lea Bondi-Jaray. Erica changed the name – from St George’s to the equally local, but Germanic, Hanover – which also recalled her time in that city with Garve-Garvenburg’s circle in the late 1920s. Arthur was the main backer of the new venture and his fellow investors, Peter and Elsa Barker-Mill, were both artists. Peter was from a wealthy family whose home was Mottisfont Abbey in Hampshire, a member of the Artists International Association and later the philanthropist behind the Arnolfini in Bristol and many other projects to support fellow artists. Because of his Hampshire connections, part of the Arnolfini Collection was given to Southampton City Art Gallery, where it is now housed alongside the Jeffress Bequest. His wife Elsa (née Dun), who after their divorce exhibited her work as Elsa Vaudrey, was a friend of Erica and had showed at the Storran in 1935.1 She had independent means and had already provided backing for Erica to build up stock, any profit on which they shared, so it was Elsa Barker-Mill’s money that enabled Erica to purchase Bacon’s Painting (1946).2 The Barker-Mills could not support the gallery operation on their own and Arthur made the larger financial contribution. The fact that Arthur and Peter Barker-Mill were at Harrow at the same time may have begun the discussions or simply lent weight to them but the friendship was between the two women. Certainly, the Barker-Mills hoped 177

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that one or other of them might be able to exhibit at the Hanover, and Peter did show once but Elsa did not, and all the original key players probably had very different aspirations for the gallery. Arthur played a much more active role than simply as backer of the Hanover and drew an income, at least in the first year or so, but apparently of only a few pounds each week. He was described as an assistant on one tax statement. The genius of the operation was undoubtedly Erica, but much of the day to day management and intellectual weight of the gallery in the early years also belonged to Robert Melville, whose influence on the rest of Arthur’s professional life was to be considerable. Robert Melville was exactly the same age as Arthur, and a remarkable addition to Arthur’s own gallery as well as an emotional and intellectual support for Arthur for the rest of his life. The first Bacon exhibition at the Hanover was not held until November 1949 due to the fact that all (and there were not many) of the works Bacon produced between 1946 and 1948 were destroyed by the artist; much of his time and allowance that the Hanover provided had been spent in the casinos of Monte Carlo. Francis Bacon: Paintings was his first professional one-man show: a series of six paintings – Head I to Head VI – along with Study from the Human Body (1949) and Study for Portrait (1949) formed the core of the show while Robin Ironside’s watercolours were shown on the upper floor. The subsequent programme reflects an innovative and challenging mixture of the European avant-garde, younger British discoveries and a pragmatic plan to attract and to keep wealthy customers. Erica Brausen was one of the first dealers in Britain to realize that the work of living artists was about to become internationally fashionable.3 Erica had made a prestigious start with the sale of Painting (1946) to MoMA in 1948. She brought an excellent personal address book from the Storran, the Redfern and the St George’s galleries as well as from Paris. Arthur, of course, also brought his own wealthy contacts and a suave gallery manner. A recent, highly subjective, biography of Toto Koopman describes Arthur as one who seemed to have stepped from the pages of a novel by Baron Corvo or Ronald Firbank.4 He was said by the same author to be thought eccentric and that the old aristocracy gossiped about the level of luxury he enjoyed, considering him merely a flashy homosexual and nouveau riche as well. By implication, Erica

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and Toto thought this, too. One example of his ‘new money’ vulgarity was that he had painted ‘mannerist’ architectural motifs on his garden shed in Venice, which seems the least of it.5 Arthur certainly further developed a camp persona during the 1950s but, at the time that Erica Brausen thought of him as her financial saviour, Arthur could not be dismissed as a lightweight or eccentric. Even Dan Farson, no admirer of Arthur, acknowledges that they ran the Hanover together.6 In the late 1940s Arthur was as much involved in creating the successful atmosphere and reputation of the Hanover as was Erica. In 1947 and 1948 he had already forged a strong link with Southampton Art Gallery, owned at least one Jackson Pollock and had been a force behind the scenes of the Circle for the Study of Art exhibitions in Winchester. His serious approach and prominence were not unnoticed. In 1946, The Institute of Contemporary Arts had been founded, primarily, by Roland Penrose, Peter Watson, Herbert Read and Eric Gregory. E.L.T. Mesens and Robert Melville, amongst others less active, were on the committee. By March 1948, just before the Hanover finally opened to the public, the ICA was riven by problems and Penrose wrote in an internal memo: There is a lot of ‘dead wood’ in the committee. I would like to propose that we ask those members of the committee who have never attended a meeting to resign, and if they like, to suggest a substitute. I would also propose that we should approach Peggy Ashcroft for Theatre, John Arlott for Radio, Arthur Jeffress for Painting, [author’s italics] Louis MacNiece for Literature, Frederick Lawes for Press and Publicity, Margaret Gardiner for Education and possibly Arnold Haskell for Ballet.7 This was distinguished company indeed. Arthur was at a meeting six months later at the offices of Horizon magazine on 28 September as part of an ICA sub-committee which was planning an exhibition of Primitive Art. The others in the room were all ICA committee members: Herbert Read, Roland Penrose, Peter Watson, Melville and Mesens. Arthur was a substantial lender to what became 40,000 Years of Modern Art: A Comparison of Primitive and Modern, an exhibition which opened in December 1948. Arthur had also lent to the ICA’s 40 Years of Modern Art in 1947. The Hanover’s own Sunday Painters opened a fortnight after the Horizon meeting.

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It has been suggested that Lucian Freud, whose first show at the Hanover was in 1950, might have occasionally slanted some of his works towards homoeroticism to appeal to Jeffress’ own taste and the queer clientele he brought with him.8 One note from Jeffress to Richard Chopping may support this theory: he advises Chopping that he has secured him a commission with a client who is: really rather on the dotty side [. . .] Lucian Freud can tell you about him as he is MAD about Lucian’s pictures of youths [. . .] keeps making all sorts of strange offers. He hunts [. . .] what, I don’t know. Fabergé and Freud. He is altogether a rum one.9 The Hanover private views were colourful and the Pol Roger champagne flowed in a way that suited both Erica and Arthur, who was much more abstemious later at his own gallery events. The Hanover letterhead in 1949 was printed in brown on cream goatskin parchment. The gallery had a crimson carpet, some Biedermeyer furniture and an elegant Louis XV desk behind which Toto and Erica sat to welcome visitors.10 When Arthur withdrew his backing, he also took back some of the furniture he had lent to the gallery; later Erica replaced the carpet with marble floors and George Melly remembered her style as ‘fashionable on an international scale’.11 The first show at the Hanover Gallery – reflecting not only his importance but also Erica’s real gratitude for the professional entrée to Bacon – was of the work of Graham Sutherland. This opened on the evening of 9 June 1948, six weeks before the Games of the XIV Olympiad (the Austerity Games) opened in London. John Deakin was an interesting choice to take a press photograph of Sutherland in the gallery the next morning. Robert Melville recalled the impact of colour that first that caught a visitor’s eye: ‘(a) hot gong-like note, a luminous widening stain, of I suppose a kind of dark pink.’12 The Hanover Gallery itself struck a hot and gong-like note for many years. For the first twelve months the gallery showed a very varied programme from Peter Barker-Mill to Pablo Picasso. This latter show was due in large part to Robert Melville’s remarkable 1939 book, Picasso: Master of the Phantom, published by Oxford University Press. Clients were international, although predominantly British, and included people who stayed good friends with Arthur such as Tom Howard and Graham Eyres Monsell.

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The month after the Hanover opened, Arthur travelled north to meet members of the Ashington Group, painters who were miners in Northumberland and who had, through the Workers’ Educational Association, developed a skill in painting their everyday lives. They had a profound interest in learning more about the work and lives of other artists, and had written in 1945 to Graham Sutherland and to Henry Moore inviting them to Ashington to address the group, but neither artist had the time. Yet Arthur did make the trip in order to select works for the Hanover’s Sunday Painters exhibition in autumn 1948 and he took seven works away with him. However, he then wrote to say they did not conform to his idea of the properly primitive, as the colours reflected those found in the reality of a mining village in south Northumberland rather than the south of France or those dream landscapes that caught the imagination of many Sunday painters. He blamed his partners, and Arthur probably did conform to the Ashington Group’s idea of a typical art dealer. The Hanover’s list of exhibited artists combines several surrealists, significant artists of a much earlier Parisian avant-garde, German emigrés and British artists of Erica and Arthur’s generation; some of whose work is hardly known today. One significant but now overlooked artist who showed in 1951 was Isabel Lambert (neé Nicholas and later Rawsthorne), who had been a lover of Peter Pelham-Rose, muse to Giacometti and mother to Jacob Epstein’s son Jackie. She met Bacon at Erica’s and they became close friends. John Deakin later took a legendary series of photographs of her at Bacon’s request. Erica Brausen staged an annual exhibition of the work of Francis Bacon from 1949 to 1959 (with the exception of 1956), each one a vital contribution to the history of modern art. In 1949, the government lifted a previous ban on the importation of works of art for sale and she quickly took advantage of this, grasping the opportunity to sell work by a wide range of continental and American artists. Her reputation for showing the best in sculpture in particular, especially that of Giacometti, is assured. Arthur stuck firmly to two dimensions. Toto Koopmann gets quite a lot of credit in her recent biography for the role she played at the Hanover.13 Very well connected from her time in London and Paris before the war, she was apparently in charge of addressing all the invitation cards by hand and keeping a close eye on the correct etiquette for each recipient, checking the daily obituaries, personal columns and honours’

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lists in the press. She and Erica worked side by side, made studio visits together and visited art events worldwide. Bacon and Toto, the love of Erica’s life, detested each other on sight. Caterina ‘Toto’ Koopmann van Haemel was born in 1908, the same year as Erica, in Java to a Dutch father and a Javanese mother. She was educated in Holland then in Bournemouth, moving to Paris when she was twenty; she travelled regularly to Berlin in the 1930s, too, and attended the infamous 1936 Summer Olympics. She played an actress in Alexander Korda’s 1934 film The Private Life of Don Juan, made in London. As a supermodel avant la lettre, she worked for Chanel and for photographers that included Steichen, Horst and Beaton; she was the favourite model of the Vogue photographer George Hoyningen-Huené and is supposed to have first met Bacon at this point. In 1939, on the outbreak of war and the break-up of several romantic liaisons, Toto decided to move to Italy, where she is said to have fallen in love with a senior member of the Italian resistance and begun to spy not only for them, but also for the Allies, at the request of her ex-lover Max Aitken. Her breathless biographer describes Toto as a devastating cross between Modesty Blaise, the cartoon heroine, and the Madonna of the Sleeping Cars (a very popular spy novel of the 1920s) and the tales he tells illustrate this perfectly. Other rumours circulate, most notably and shockingly, that Reinhard Heydrich was one of her lovers, one with whom she was very much in love. One of the main architects of the Holocaust, apparently known as ‘The Hangman’, and by Hitler as ‘the man with the iron heart’, he was killed in 1942. He was a handsome, brutal womanizer and ranked second only to Himmler in the SS. He is not mentioned by Toto’s biographer at all, and nor does there seem to be a logical gap in the relentless story of her early life for such a grim liaison, but a rumour persists. Her known lovers in the mid-1930s in London include Tallulah Bankhead (who, as well as her affairs with Naps Alington and Toto, was also said with fictional hyperbole to have cut a swathe through the sixth form at Eton), Lord Beaverbrook, the newspaper magnate, and then his son Max Aitken. Max wanted to marry Toto and, not surprisingly, his father was opposed both as parent and jilted lover, but gave Max a sum of money and a penthouse at 15 Portman Square for the couple if they remained unmarried. They lived there

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from 1936 and were thus Arthur’s neighbours. Lord Beaverbrook was further betrayed by Toto’s subsequent affair with his friend, procurer and famous gossip columnist Viscount Castlerosse, ‘The London Log’ of the Daily Express. Toto was named as a correspondent in Castlerosse’s divorce from Doris Delevingne, who in turn had an affair with Cecil Beaton in his attempt to make the art patron Peter Watson jealous. Delevingne was later chatelaine of the Venice palazzo that Peggy Guggenheim made her own and which Arthur knew so well. Toto’s biographer tells how the Italian police arrested her in January 1941, ostensibly on the basis of her links to Lord Beaverbrook, but offered to release her if she agreed to act as a double agent, which she refused. She was sent to prison in Milan, where she danced the Charleston to keep warm. Two months later she was sent to several prison camps before escaping from Massa Martana when Mussolini was arrested; she then hid in the mountains for several months. Next she appeared in Venice, where a female friend hid her in the Danieli Hotel, but she was arrested in the street by the Germans a few days later and sent to the horrors of the concentration camp at Ravensbrück. She arrived there in October 1944 and allegedly pretended to be a nurse so as to be able to offer some covert help and triage to those who she believed would survive rather those whose fate was already confirmed. She also put on an imaginary catwalk show to enchant her fellow captives. Amongst other nightmares, as part of the vicious medical interventions which were usually performed on young Gypsy girls, her ovaries were apparently removed without anaesthetic. Ravensbrück was primarily for women and included many who worked for resistance movements, as well as spies, Gypsies, Jews and political dissidents. Six months later, on 17 April 1945, Toto was evacuated to Gothenburg, Sweden, and taken from there to Stockholm by Randolph Churchill. Next, she went to Switzerland to recuperate from her hellish time in Ravensbrück. She travelled to Ascona on the shores of Lake Maggiore, a place long associated with the avant-garde. Erica was there on holiday; they met and their love affair lasted for the rest of their lives. The mixture of personalities at the Hanover must have been like dynamite overlaid with heady perfume. Erica and Arthur were flanked by Toto as

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co-hostess and, her complete opposite, the steadfast and quietly intellectual Robert Melville. He is rarely mentioned in the publications that deal with Erica and Toto’s history but Robert Melville was both gallery manager and fulcrum of the Hanover up until 1954, as he would be at Arthur’s own gallery from 1955 onwards.

17 ‘Arthur Jeffress for Painting’

In 1950, Kenton Grange was sold. In July 1944 two bombs had fallen close by, all the ceilings had collapsed in one of their cottages as a result, and several windows were blown out. Randolph himself had a near-miss when a bomb fell near him in central London.1 Randolph could not mow his expanse of lawns because of petrol rationing so turned geese loose instead, also ‘raising a staggering amount of food’.2 It was impossible to run such a huge estate on his fixed income and, on top of the financial problems, Stella and her elder son had not been getting on well, to say the least. She was still spending periods of time in hospital to ease her mental problems and had a heart attack but, when she came home, inevitable tensions resulted. In 1939, she had been described in the register of her private mental asylum as ‘incapacitated’. On 16 November 1944, her nephew Robert recalled: ‘we saw her in 1936 and found her remarkably coherent though of course pathetic.’3 He suggested that Henry Hill should visit her and, a year or so before the war ended, Henry saw Randolph, Stella and Mrs Griffiths, the housekeeper, whom he described as ‘delightful’. Godfrey, then aged about eighteen, was home, too.4 By 1950, Randolph was fifty; he was divorced, his only child had been absent for most of his teens and was now grown up. Randolph must have felt that he should be the one to make decisions on behalf of his unstable mother and had previously written to James Wills, head of his section at the SOE (as well as the man who had cuckolded him), seeking assurance that he would not be called up after his SOE service and because of his impetigo.5 Post-war, Randolph 185

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found time to develop his model railway, to all outward appearances leading a very quiet life in Kenton. But Randolph had married Constance Griffith in March 1947 and it was her name that Randolph gave in 1944 to the SOE to be informed if he were ever a casualty of war. Probably born Constance Ada White in 1901, she had married Richard H. Griffith in South Manchester in 1937 and at some point had a son, John; it is not clear who his father was, nor when she became known as the housekeeper at Kenton nor indeed with whom the boy lived. In her 1968 will, she referred to her son John Gordon Griffith as living in Rhodesia or South Africa but said that she had not heard of him for many years.6 Her solicitors were obliged to advertise for him to come forward. As far back as February 1936, Randolph went to Mallorca (coincidentally on the same ship as Erica Brausen) travelling with Mrs Constance Griffith in First Class. They had made a trip to Gibraltar in February of the previous year, too, five years before his divorce from Marie and twelve years before he and Constance married. More significantly, that was also just before Constance White married Mr Griffith, although she travelled under his surname. Constance Griffith was living in Portman Mansions in Chiltern Street, Marylebone, at the time, an area with which the Jeffress family had long connections. The coincidence of Randolph, Constance and Erica Brausen all on the same boat journey is bizarre enough. However, the idea that Randolph and Constance were having an affair so long before she became his housekeeper and that another husband and child (possibly Randolph’s) were somehow lost along the way is rather astonishing, and makes Marie’s affair with James Wills more understandable. The American Jeffresses clearly had no inkling of the dramas in Kenton, but the relationship between Randolph and Constance must have caused some strains within his immediate family, especially with Stella. Constance was living at Kenton Grange, divorced and described as of private means, so not actually employed as the housekeeper, whatever the family was told, in 1939. Randolph was by this time describing himself as a ‘colour photographer’. Possibly the brothers disapproved equally of each other’s irregular way of life and how they each dealt with their mother. A frank letter from Randolph

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to Robert Jeffress after Stella’s death states that she was a manic-depressive, sometimes prone to violence (giving a swift kick up the backside to the bending hospital matron at least). As far as Randolph was concerned, she had been more dangerous when well and at home, which had lasted at one point for three years. He quoted a doctor who looked after her for over twenty years: ‘Mrs Jeffress’ speciality is the destruction of human relationships’ and Randolph added that she hated everything and everybody. He hints that the menopause was part of the explanation and that his father’s death accelerated an illness with which she had been born.7 No mention is ever made in his own letters of Arthur visiting his mother or indeed Kenton ever again, but in a letter dated 18 May 1953, Cack (Alese Jeffress-Harris’ daughter) wrote to her Hill cousins: ‘When we were in England a few days we saw Randolph, Connie, Godfrey and Arthur. Stella has been sent back temporarily to the nursing home as she had to be straightened up every now and then.’8 This sounds like electric shock treatment, which was the new, fashionable cure for mental and emotional disorders from the 1940s onwards. Cack stayed on that trip with her cousin Janie, who had moved to England in 1930 on her marriage to Billy Jones. Billy (John Leslie Jones) had been brought up on a Gloucestershire farm but joined the Indian Army following a stint at cadet college. By sad coincidence, he sailed to California in 1927 – to meet Janie’s family, possibly to propose – on the SS President Pierce, the ship on which Arthur’s father had died only eighteen months previously. After the family home and estate in Kenton were sold, Randolph and Constance moved without staff to a more manageable house in Rose Garden Crescent, Edgware, a couple of miles to the north. Godfrey kept this as his permanent address, too, up till about 1952. Stella moved to her own home in Northwick Circle, a pleasant roundel of mock-Tudor detached houses developed in 1923 by Edward Spencer-Churchill, who had inherited the entire estate of Kenton back in 1912. He planned to develop a garden city-type of estate at Northwick with a tennis and social club as the focal point, but in the end his development was less ambitious. Stella was still within Kenton and in an area not dissimilar to Acton, her first home in London. Bridget and Helen Peterkin, who had previously worked at Kenton Grange, took care of her and the house during her regular nursing-home visits.

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With a newly extended income from his 22.5 per cent portion of the Kenton sale, Arthur bought his first London house and, by June 1950, another in Venice which he enjoyed for the rest of his life. He moved from Egerton Gardens to the charming cream stucco of Pelham Crescent, designed by George Basevi in the late 1830s. Cecil Beaton and Oliver Messel lived just behind the Crescent in the rather grander Pelham Place, at numbers 8 and 17 respectively. When Arthur acquired 10 Pelham Crescent, he first made extensive repairs required by its war-damaged state and then began to create his first complete and exquisite interior. This featured in an article in House & Garden with colour photos by Anthony Denney (see colour plate 7).9 Denney himself was, amongst other things, a very interested collector of modern and contemporary art who worked for Vogue as Decorations Editor, advised G-Plan (the pioneering British furniture company) and was later related by marriage to Ernest Milton’s wife Naomi Royde-Smith, who was a lender to the CSA in 1947.10 The article contains rather prosaic Anglo-Saxon detail compared to a later text in a French magazine, and reveals that Arthur’s grand painting of Napoleon was used as a bookcase door, that the bathroom was wallpapered and had lace curtains and that the painting Arthur acquired from an innkeeper in Baalbek hung over the bath. The drawing room wallpaper is described as olive green. The curtains are in peacock blue serge, deeply swagged and braided, while Lucian Freud’s Quince on a Blue Table hangs in one corner. Throughout the house, just as in Eaton Square later, lighting came from gorgeous chandeliers, often Venetian. His Venetian house relied more on candlelight. The colour photos of Pelham Crescent reveal that the Puginesque bedroom wallpaper had red roses and yellow lilies while the carpet was dark green. The bathroom had red and gold paper on the walls and around the sides of the boxed-in bath, while a white marble bust of a woman with her hair coiffed in the fashion of the 1840s gazed down on the bather. The drawing room carpet – dating to roughly 1840–50 – was worked in cross stitch, sewn together in panels with a decorative design of medallions, roses, grapes, foliage and Gothick tracery, and is now in the collection of the museum in Hull which marks the birthplace of the British anti-slavery campaigner, William Wilberforce.11 The money that enabled Arthur to acquire it had, of course, come ultimately from slave labour in Virginia.

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Two more publications celebrated the Pelham Crescent interior. Noel Carrington in 1954 described the wallpaper in the drawing-room as ‘khaki green with a self-stripe, alternating shiny and dull’. The doors were a greyish green with off-white mouldings, while the staircase had pink and warm ivory paintwork and a mustard carpet.12 Next, an article appeared in Connaissance des arts (a monthly magazine published in Paris) in January 1956.13 The interior paid tribute to the era in which the house was built – William IV, just pre-Victorian – and to French design of the same period. Naturally, Arthur added a wider range of keynotes and flourishes which the French magazine noted (they commented on the narrowness of the English fireplaces and the unfamiliar use of individual picture lights) while stating that he had created one of the most beautiful collections of furniture and Napoleonic objects in England. The dining room was dominated by Baron Gérard’s portrait of Napoleon in his coronation robes, over two metres high, a much-copied painting (see colour plate 6). Arthur’s version had originally hung in the Hôtel de Salm, home of the Légion d’honneur, whose order Napoleon created and wears in the portrait. It faced another image of Napoleon, a plaster bust attributed to Joseph Chinard, a favourite sculptor of the Bonaparte family, showing the emperor as a younger man during the Italian campaign of 1796/7. Nearby was a small bronze equestrian portrait based on the image created by Jacques-Louis David of Napoleon on his rearing horse Marengo, about to cross the Alps. The article’s author (H.H.) reported that, since childhood, Mr Jeffress had had a passionate admiration for Napoleon but three works of art seems quite restrained for a passion, certainly by Arthur’s standards. The dining room with its curved doorway is shown with a small dining table set for three and a candelabrum in the form of a classical urn. The wallpaper pattern was scattered with little gold stars designed specially by Arthur from some original fragments of a French painted paper of about 1800. There were two cameo panels of Painting and of Architecture and a partial painted frieze ‘inspired by Pompeii’ in green, yellow, orange and black. The curtains were heavy gold silk, the furniture light maple and the Aubusson Empire carpet with flowers and foliage on a background of café au lait completed ‘the decoration of this room dedicated to the glory of the Emperor’. The L-shaped ‘salon-bureau’ is described

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as a ‘collector’s gallery’. The wallpaper in a wide yellow and white stripe is challenged by a collection of bright blue opaline glass of the type made popular during the reign of Napoleon. The paintings chosen for this most public of his rooms included Arthur’s Monet hung opposite Bauchant’s Funeral Procession of Alexander, emphasising the importance Arthur always attributed to this work (see colour plate 9). Nearby were works by de Chirico, Henri ‘Douanier’ Rousseau and a painting then attributed to Delacroix. The finest work of all was Henri ToulouseLautrec’s portrait of Émile Bernard, today along with Arthur’s Bauchant, in the Tate (see colour plate 10). Arthur had bought the Toulouse-Lautrec portrait and Monet’s richly-coloured Water Irises, 1900, from Lefevre in 1951/2 (see colour plate 8). These were replacements, funded by an insurance claim, after a devastating fire at Pelham Crescent which had destroyed some of his French paintings. In April 1951, Arthur was able to inform Duveen & Walker, his insurance brokers, that he had spent £10,000 on fourteen new paintings.14 Most of these had been bought on a shopping trip to Paris with Erica Brausen; he describes her as ‘his partner’ and cites her as someone who can vouch for the prices paid. New works included ‘Douanier’ Rousseau’s La Republique Francaise and Vuillard’s Theatre as well as works by Luce, de Chirico, Degas, Bonnard and Soutine. It remains unclear what was destined for Pelham Crescent and what was to be Hanover Gallery stock. Certainly, his beloved Bauchant of Alexander’s funeral was bought from Lucien Lefebvre-Foinet for 800,000 francs and was immediately insured for £1,100, the Rousseau for £1,200. Little is known about the fire from which many other works in his collection survived, so it must be assumed that it was confined to one principal room, quite soon after he moved in. Arthur recalled to Bunny Roger that he watched in horror from a phone box as the firemen saved his mother’s embroidered cushions at the expense of his paintings.15 A sketch that showed the scene to comic effect was sold after Arthur’s death at Sotheby’s in 1962, described as by ‘A Sicilian Peasant’, and entitled The House of Arthur Jeffress in Flames and inscribed Miracolasamente scarpito delle fiamme (‘miraculous escape from the flames’) as Arthur rushes around with his hands flung up in despair.16 It might possibly have been a cartoon by Mario Marini although it is supposed to have

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been by ‘a peasant’. A small horse and rider by Marini is also shown in the drawing room, a rare example of modern sculpture in Arthur’s collection. In 1946, he already had works by Derain, Dufy, Vuillard and Modigliani, which he lent with others to Southampton Art Gallery. Which of these were destroyed or later sold is not clear. In the same year as the 1956 article, Arthur wrote to Robert Melville from Venice: The Delacroix’s [sic] are beautiful. They are shown at the Sala Napoleonica in the Piazza and not at the Biennale, which is a boon and a blessing to all. One of them, called the Natchez tribe or some such title, I have seen at the Lefevre. It is so wonderful I find myself haunted by it [it is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art] and I wish I could buy it from them, only that they want £20,000! Already my mind goes round in circles with plots to exchange my Monet, my Douanier, and perhaps, even my small Delacroix. But it takes a lot to make a sum like £20,000!17 In contrast to his Napoleonic dining room and the grand gallery/drawing room, Arthur’s bedroom was very English indeed, baffling H.H. from Connaissance. His bed was a very pretty and quite narrow bois clair piece with bowed ends carved with lotus leaves, ‘d’inspiration française’, while the remarkable wallpaper reproduced in a new colour scheme Pugin’s rose and lily design for the Houses of Parliament. H.H. remarked, in a tone of chilly Gallic surprise, that this did not prevent M. Jeffress from hanging pictures. Luckily, the fireplace and the door were painted white. The paintings chosen for this private room were his collection of naïfs (including E. Box, Louis Vivin, Gertrude O’Brady and ‘Douanier’ Rousseau) which echo the bold simplicity of the floral pattern and the room was at once a riot of textures and patterns but with a pleasing if rather arch quality. There was a sort of whatnot in maple drawn up beside the bed for use as a book and telephone table. The period that Arthur loved best, both in English and French design, was about 1800–30 and his version of the period was warmer than Georgian, avoided the excesses of the Regency and held back from the stuffiness of Victoriana. In Arthur’s hands, it also rejected the cosiness of German Biedermeyer and he introduced strong colour and contrasts through his opaline glass, Napoleonic

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works, paintings by Freud, Burra, Monet and Arcimboldo’s sixteenth-century Mannerist vegetal fantasies. Arthur disliked the surrealist movement but enjoyed the frisson of ‘accidental’ pairing associated with surrealism. In 1949, Arthur acquired a house in Venice at San Maurizio 2678, Ramo del Forno. Over the years, this house has been described by others as a palazzo and on the Grand Canal, neither of which is true. It is in a tiny lane off the Campo San Maurizio on the way by foot from St Mark’s Square to the Accademia Bridge with one proper palazzo (Ca’ Corner) between it and the Grand Canal. There is a straight line – but no viewpoint – from Arthur’s house to Peggy Guggenheim’s Palazzo Venier. They moved in the same year. He had the great luxury of a walled garden with access to the end of the Calle del Dose da Ponte and a landing stage for his gondola. By March of 1950, his transport back home in London was a rather sedate Armstrong Siddeley and his urbane and cosseted life was gradually established. In September 1951, neither he nor Peggy Guggenheim were on the guest list for the legendary Beistegui Ball at the Palazzo Labia in Venice, although his friend André Ostier took the formal photographs. Arthur was simply following the pattern which he established for the rest of his life. He left London in June to base himself in Venice and from there made various trips to other parts of Italy, usually the Amalfi Coast, Sicily or Greece during the hottest weeks, returning to London, often via Paris, each late September. He was rarely without houseguests, whom he both relished and complained about at length. He gave many parties at home: in 1951, Peggy Guggenheim met Raoul Gregorich at one of Arthur’s parties and this led to the last serious love affair of her life.18 Gregorich ran a car workshop on Mestre, the industrial suburb on the coast near Venice. He and Peggy epitomize the range of Arthur’s guests: did he fix Arthur’s car and is that how they met? Gregorich tragically died in a car crash three years later.19 In 1952, Arthur’s surprise visitors were his brother Randolph and sisterin-law Constance and he took them to dinner at Peggy Guggenheim’s. The brothers were on polite, if not warm, terms and there was probably some nosiness on the part of Constance to take a good look at some of Arthur’s splendour. Peggy’s visitors’ book shows his running gag about her decor and uncomfortable chairs in a north Italian sixteenth-century style – ‘Still that dining room furniture!’; ‘Ancora Arturo Jeffress’ – and one of his filthy limericks, ‘There were

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two young men from Lahore . . .’20 He also once told Robert ‘for some odd reason the food was simply delicious’.21 Sadly, his own Venice visitors’ book has not survived. It included a drawing by Richard Chopping, to whom Arthur gave a pair of gondolier’s slippers in return.22 While he was travelling or in London, Arthur often lent the Venice house to friends such as Graham and Kathleen Sutherland and Robert and Lilian Melville, or rented it out to others. From 1950 onwards, the Sutherlands often spent part of May and June there: usually they spent four weeks on their own and two weeks with Arthur.23 In return, Arthur was given two small paintings or drawings each year but very much in theory, and this was always a cause for complaint from Arthur and Robert. By 1959, Arthur had struck a deal in Venice with the Marlborough Gallery by which he should in general handle Sutherland’s works on paper, and Marlborough the oils.24 Sutherland painted each morning, swam at the Lido each afternoon (Arthur complained about paint in the bottom of the gondola) and entertained each evening. Sometimes the Sutherlands were lent a grand apartment at the Gritti. Sutherland’s biographer notes that Arthur had a weakness for aristocracy but did not add that this was clearly true for the equally aspirational Sutherlands.25 Douglas Cooper was often their guest in what he referred to as ‘A.J’s necrofil bandbox’ and ‘Arthur’s Persian tent’.26 Arthur described Cooper’s own house, Château de Castille, near Avignon, as one of the most beautiful he ever hoped to see and said that: ‘Douglas was on the whole very charming except that he would air his hatred of England ad nauseam and I always find that distasteful, feeling so much the reverse myself.’27

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18 Gentle Friends

In late 1952, the artist Donald Friend was invited to meet Arthur, who had come for dinner with Dr Patrick Woodcock, Arthur’s doctor and Friend’s landlord in Pimlico. The other guests were Arthur’s old Cambridge friend and fellow ADC actor, ‘Auntie’ Francis Wormald, the art historian, and his wife. Friend’s description of Arthur was full of acute observation and exaggeration: a strange man, and quite a power in the art world, fabulously rich and fashionable, possessor of a fine collection of modern masters, a palace in Venice and a lovely house in London - the sort of place that is photographed in Vogue, very ornamented and sumptuous. Mr Jeffries [sic] I should say was either an Armenian or a Jew, witty, intelligent and unhappy. He owns the Hanover Gallery. I liked him, I enjoyed his peculiar sumptuosity, a sort of mink-teddy-bear quality.1 By 1953, Arthur’s newly established life of ‘mink-teddy-bear’ elegance and comfort in Pelham Crescent and Venice was spoiled by conflict with Erica Brausen. The details of their final row are not known, and it is surprising that they had managed to rub along at all for seven years. Some versions suggest that everything erupted overnight but it was clear this volcano had been rumbling for a while. Peter Barker-Mill had written to the gallery’s solicitor as early as May 1949 to question Brausen’s status: ‘It appears that Miss Brausen is in fact a director, having been so appointed and awarded 100 shares. I don’t understand how this could have happened without my wife’s knowledge or agreement.’2 Peter and Elsa divorced later that year and he remarried in 1952. Their involvement in the Hanover was part of Elsa’s divorce settlement. 195

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In December 1953, Arthur reminded Elsa that he wished to close the gallery. One version of the rupture is that Arthur sold a painting by Bacon to Galerie Louise Leiris and asked for commission. Arthur may have failed to suggest the level of discount that Erica would have undoubtedly offered or might simply have been flexing his muscle as the undisputed co-owner, not her backroom boy, of the Hanover. Perhaps the fact that Arthur even had dealings with her old friend was enough to aggravate Erica. At ‘my gallery’ he certainly did not need to take any private commission and his integrity as a dealer is made clear in all his letters to a fussy, even irritating, degree. His distinguished contemporary the dealer Sir Jack Baer confirmed that Arthur’s reputation for honest dealing was undoubted.3 But Arthur and Erica clearly did not do business in the same way and he needed to be his own boss; so did she. He was exasperated that she closed the gallery for her holidays and blamed her absence in August 1953 for Bacon’s first temporary defection to an exhibition at the Beaux Arts Gallery later that year. When Bacon finally left Erica for Marlborough Fine Art in 1958, she was devastated. Much of Erica’s energy and vision was focussed on developing sales and exhibitions for Bacon so much of the gallery profit, and therefore the Barker-Mills’ and Arthur’s money, was spent in pursuit of this and on Bacon’s pleasures. In hindsight this investment seems exceptionally prescient: in November 2013 a Bacon triptych of Freud sold for the world-record auction price of nearly £90 million, and he is considered the most important British painter of the twentieth century. Arthur and Bacon’s mutual antipathy was something they could both use to annoy Erica. Arthur disliked both the man and his work while Robert Sainsbury said that Arthur was simply too fussy, too effeminate – ‘he fluttered too far’ – for Bacon’s taste.4 In 1965 the critic John Russell described a pioneering dealer, like Erica, performing tasks for artists in the role of ‘estate agent, employment agency, psychoanalyst, sea lawyer, chauffeur, maquereau [pimp], social secretary, handyman, investment counsellor, impresario and scribe’.5 Arthur also liked having these tasks done for him and did not see artists as prima donnas for him to support: he had had enough of that with Deakin. Arthur was happy to be impresario in his own gallery and have others at his beck and call.

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The Hanover represented artists in the manner of today’s highly successful galleries, but Arthur simply wanted to sell the art he admired – and not necessarily at huge profit. He set out to see if his own tastes and preferences could be sold to others while Erica wanted to run a really significant international gallery. They both succeeded and Robert Melville left the Hanover to work for Arthur in his new gallery. In January 1954, Arthur wrote to Peter Rose-Pulham as if it were common knowledge in their circle that things were going badly at the Hanover. He tells Rose-Pulham that he hopes ‘before long it will either close its doors or that I shall have ceased in any way to be connected with it. I want very much to open a new, and smaller, gallery, later on’.6 In March, he told his solicitor that he had not been to the gallery since Christmas and that (not surprisingly) exhibitions had been arranged without his knowledge. He became seriously ill and had an operation but remained discreet about the details, as does Robert Melville. Their plans for the new gallery were put on hold until Arthur left hospital, and then a nursing home near the Wallace Collection. The Hanover Gallery’s salvation came in the form of Michael Behrens, a banker who simply walked in one day and bought the gallery at the eleventh hour when Erica mentioned despondently – but only in passing – that she was closing the next day.7 Behrens bought the whole gallery with Erica in sole charge for £4,254, with another £612 for some of the furniture Arthur had provided.8 Behrens owned the Ionian Bank, the restaurant La Réserve and was a leading player in the oil business, living with his wife Felicity at Culham Court, near Henley, for which they collected fine English furniture and contemporary art. Arthur noted with glee that Behrens also loathed Bacon. He made a very low offer for the Hanover Gallery and did not want to take on Bacon and his complications. Clearly, Erica Brausen sorted that out and later, when Bacon left, Marlborough paid his debt to the Hanover. In July 1957, Behrens was already nagging her about profit, noting that nothing had been sold after Christmas but signing himself ‘ever your devoted financial slave’ adding ‘and please don’t sell lovely paintings to horrible clients until I have seen them – otherwise I ask myself why I am doing all this?’9

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Arthur and the Barker-Mills regularly sold work from their own collections through the Hanover as well as buying from it. Arthur’s account at the Hanover was Number One and was closed promptly in 1954. Account Number Two was that of Erica Brausen and Catherine Koopmann and some of the works by Francis Bacon on sale were their own. Perhaps this is the area in which the final rupture occurred. Arthur wrote about Erica: ‘We are still daggers drawn, of course, and likely to remain so, silly twat that she is.’10 On 5 March 1954, Arthur wrote to Robert, from the nursing home: Here it is 7.30am, God help us, & me wide, wide, wide awake. So I send you this tiniest of scribbled notes to tell you how much I have appreciated all that you have done for me since I have been in here. No friend could have been kinder – and everything, believe me, is deeply appreciated.11 In particular, Robert was trying to find premises for their new gallery: a building in Grosvenor Street seemed perfect but fell through. One in St George’s Street was mentioned, but that was far too close to the Hanover. Arthur hoped that Erica dirtied her nose when she pressed it against the pane at Davies Street, where Robert had found them the just right place while Arthur was en route to recuperate on Ischia and Capri in April.12 By early June, Arthur’s plans were quite fully developed and he wrote to Gaspero del Corso at the Galeria del Obelisco in Rome: I have sold my interest in the Hanover Gallery. With which I no longer have any connection whatsoever. I am however, opening a completely new gallery in London in October. It is to be at 28 Davies St, just a few doors from Claridges Hotel and it will be called Arthur Jeffress (Pictures). Mainly, I intend to show modern primitives, trompe l’oeils and ‘magic realists’, though the policy will not be completely rigid, naturally.13 Everything about the new gallery made Arthur’s plans clear. It carried his name and would specialise in paintings. It was in Mayfair and conveniently – for international visitors, lunch engagements and use of the hotel concierge – very near Claridge’s. 28 Davies Street (still a gallery today) is beneath Claridge House, a seven-storey neo-Georgian red-brick apartment block built in 1924 with a row of ground floor shops where Arthur’s old friend Clarence Belisha

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Figure 18.1 Photographer unknown. E. Box’s paintings formed the opening exhibition, ‘Gentle Friends’, at Arthur Jeffress (Pictures), in Davies Street, October 1954.

had lived; Edward Voules (late of Villa Capponi) lived opposite. The noise from drilling drew the ire of an upstairs neighbour, Lady Docker, but as she had been banned from Monaco (and then the whole of the South of France) in the early 1950s, clearly she had previous form as a complainer. The gallery cost £3,000. Strip-lighting was installed to improve on that of the Hanover and to cast light directly on the walls where paintings hung from rails. The interior was by his university friend, the distinguished designer John Hill of Green & Hill, who also worked on Marwell, Pelham Place and Eaton Square and at Monkton for Edward James. The display window was lit automatically each night until midnight. The carpet was a ‘heavenly green’, there was also parquet, Arthur’s desk was in the main gallery and there was a small office for Robert on the main floor, too. Even the picture racks were lined with light green material.14 Robert Melville wrote to him in Venice: ‘The first coat of dark grey is now on all the walls and I think our pictures are going to glow like jewellery against this

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background.’ Robert later recalled blue opaline glass and Charles X furniture making the gallery like a drawing room and much like Arthur’s own.15 Arthur announced his gallery with an elegantly printed single-page manifesto, probably prompted by Robert to echo the London Gallery’s rather defensive leaflet Activities of the London Gallery (see figure 18.2). It would be overweening to describe Arthur’s manifesto as radical in any way but he was making a firm case for a particular European taste in painting that was popular in France, even more so in Italy, but not in England. In 1954 he wrote from Venice to the dealer Edwin Livengood in Paris: ‘I believe that the policy of my new Gallery of specialisation will intensify the London market for this kind of painting.’16 ‘Magic realism’ was a term first applied to a post-expressionist style of painting in Germany in 1925. Two of its best known exponents, however, were Giorgio de Chirico and his brother Albert Savinio, examples of whose work Arthur owned. Arthur’s The Artist and his Family by de Chirico currently illustrates the term on the Tate’s website.17 In Arthur’s view, magic realism was a distant and gentle cousin to surrealism, making links between Old Masters (the little masters, at least) and sympathetic contemporary artists. Most importantly, the work was story-telling and decorative rather than coolly cerebral and could be explained (and therefore easily and repeatedly sold) to many buyers from his social circles of design, film, theatre, fashion and journalism. It was nostalgic, unpretentious and spoke of charming and often witty things rather than nihilism, and was certainly not anything like Francis Bacon. The handling of paint was usually detailed and smooth, elegant yet unsettling and in this way had its link with his other focus, trompe l’oeil. The nostalgic, well-crafted and everyday aspect to magic realism also made links, in Arthur’s way of thinking at least, with what he called ‘Sunday Painters’. He avoided the French term ‘naïf’, which was one he had already used for an exhibition title at the Hanover, and its equivalent art brut. Maybe, and it seems right, he felt two French terms would be too much in his London manifesto. A parallel exhibition to the Paris/Grenoble/New York Popular Masters show (seen by Deakin and Arthur in Paris) appeared at Tooth’s in London in 1938 where it was called French Sunday Painters and Robert Melville used the term ‘Sunday Painters’ for the title of his 1954 show at the ICA. The press

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ARTHUR JEFFRESS (PICTURES ) is a Gallery with a unique policy : its exhibitions will be devoted to SUNDAY PAINTING, TROMPE L’OEIL and MAGIC REALISM. These terms cover a wide field of creative endeavour, and signify traditional but inexhaustible modes of beholding. The artists approach reality in a spirit of approval, and in rich and unpredictable imagery they mirror a world we all recognize. SUNDAY PAINTING designates the art of people who have had little or no instruction in drawing and painting, but are impelled by the sense of wonder to challenge the laws of gravity and perspective and make unorthodox yet enchantingly communicative records of their response to history and geography and the events of the day. The illusionistic art known as TROMPE L’OEIL employs high finish, extreme precision of detail, and effects of stereoscopy and optical surprise to create an immaculate world of stillness and deep silence. It is the art of transforming the object without altering its appearance. MAGIC REALISM is an art in which actuality and fantasy are inextricably intertwined. It is realism enriched by dream and nostalgia, and steeped in the mystery of the human condition. A long series of exhibitions has already been planned. Many fascinating and unusual aspects of these arts of poetic representation will be explored, and it is hoped that Arthur Jeffress (Pictures) will make a distinctive and pleasing addition to the picture galleries of London. 28 DAVIES STREET LONDON W1

MAYFAIR 7836

Figure 18.2 Manifesto of Arthur’s new gallery, 1954.

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release to the New York iteration of the earlier show stated: ‘The painters who concern us in this exhibition [. . .] never lived like artists; they rarely thought or spoke in terms of art [. . .] They show us how the act of painting can be as simple as breathing [. . .]’18 The Tate website also uses Arthur’s beloved painting by André Bauchant, Les Funerailles d’Alexandre, to exemplify naïve painting. Arthur would have relished these approbations of his collection.19 Giuseppe Arcimboldo, the late sixteenth-century Italian painter, was a key figure for Arthur: an Old Master, rediscovered by the surrealists, whose work both tricks and amuses the eye. Arcimboldo’s work was much copied, during his life and later, and the ambiguity appealed to Arthur as did the link to the artist’s fabulous patron, Rudolf II (see colour plate 11). Arthur’s gallery was aimed at those with a taste for decor rather than debate and it was furnished accordingly; his homes in London and Venice were dressed with works of art that were mostly for sale. Arthur’s personal taste in painting lay at a point somewhere between Sunday Painters and Modern French Masters, European not English, with a filigree edging of work from the 19th century and a large element of exoticism and the fantastical such as Magnasco, Monsú Desiderio and Arcimboldo. His friend Martin Battersby chose Marwell House as one of his epitomes of taste in his book The Decorative Thirties: [. . .] discriminating collectors with a taste for the bizarre [. . .] like Arthur Jeffress putting them in place of honour in rooms furnished with silver lacquered Venetian and Charles X furniture and canvases by Giu Arcimboldo [. . .] which had originally graced the cabinets of curiosity by sixteenth century Hapsburgs now re-emerged from obscurity.20 Furniture was at least as important to him as paintings and his approach to sculpture was negligible, but Henry Moore was an exception. Arthur considered him an important (and highly saleable) artist, liked the man and regularly sold his sculptures to clients. He owned one small maquette by Moore himself and a small Marini of a horse and rider which he bought at the same time as a painting of the same subject. He also bought F. E. McWilliam’s Study for Father and Daughter (II) and one of Giacomo Manzù’s many Seated Cardinals in 1954 but seems to have treated sculpture rather as bibelots than works of art, in his

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own collection. He did not act directly for artists, unlike the innovative Hanover or Gimpel Fils. His gallery had a regular stock of works that he and Robert purchased from other dealers or at auction but which did not always end up in their exhibitions. The stock and exhibitions reflected Arthur’s own taste and judgment but he never attempted to sell or show works by Picasso or Monet although he owned fine examples; he owned, but never hung on his walls, work by Jackson Pollock. He had a deep and mutual friendship with Graham Sutherland, whose work he exhibited, sold and commissioned, but he still had reservations about its abstract qualities. It would be wrong to conclude, as others have, that Arthur’s taste was simply camp and decorative while all the intelligent exhibitions were held elsewhere, such as the Hanover and the ICA. Their achievements are legendary and assured in the history of art but the Arthur Jeffress Gallery is no mere oddity or period piece. The Hanover and the ICA had both shown exhibitions of Sunday Painters; Magnasco and Arcimboldo were also in vogue in sophisticated circles: the Magnasco Society had been founded by the Sitwell brothers to promote seventeenth-century art as long ago as 1924.21 Arthur was also in the vanguard of the revival of interest in Tissot and Atkinson Grimshaw. To purists, he committed a crime of variety and popular appeal, but the gallery programme was generally well respected even by young modernists like Alan Bowness, later the director of the Tate, who visited most of the gallery’s shows. It is also clear that, even at the Hanover, Arthur made studio visits to artists as far as Yorkshire and the Northern coal fields, rare enough for London dealers even today, and he was certainly no sleeping partner. In 1822 William Hazlitt described small galleries as ‘Oh! Art, lovely Art! [. . .] a point to aim at in a morning’s walk – a relief and satisfaction in the motley confusion, the littleness, the vulgarity of common life’.22 The Hanover aimed for much more than this; Arthur Jeffress (Pictures) settled happily and successfully for just this late Georgian ideal. While negotiations over his departure from the Hanover dragged on, Arthur noted that April 1954 began with April Ghoul’s Day. André Ostier came over from Paris to celebrate the moment on Monday 18 October 1954, when Arthur Jeffress opened his gallery with an exhibition devoted to E. Box, who was probably his dearest friend.

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E. Box was the nom de plume of Edna Fleming (née Edna Florence Vandyke), born just a few months earlier than Arthur in 1905. Her parents Emmie and Solomon Vandyke, German-Jewish like Arthur’s mother, ran the Vandyke Hotel, Cromwell Road, opposite the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. Edna married stockbroker Ralph Layton when she was nineteen and he was thirty-six. She studied art at Regent Street Polytechnic probably in the 1920s (rather than the late 1930s, as she claimed) but there is no record of her studies there. Edna said that her time as student was when she first got to know Arthur Jeffress as part of the bright young party set and Arthur referred to her as ‘Party Clara’. The Laytons had a daughter in 1930 and lived in Sussex at West Wittering then later at Greatham House, Sidlesham, as well as their London house in Kensington. Few other details are known about Edna’s life until 1947, when she moved in with Marston Fleming in Chelsea. He was born in Canada in 1913 and had trained as a metallurgist, joined the Royal Canadian Air Force first as a navigator and then, in 1943, as a flight lieutenant. He was stationed in Britain during World War II and never left, becoming a distinguished academic metallurgist, Professor and Pro Rector of Imperial College, London. In 1948, Edna was living in Sloane Avenue, now calling herself Edna Fleming, and she appears in the Hanover Gallery sales ledgers as a buyer at this address. Soon she and Marston Fleming were living together in Yeoman’s Row off the Brompton Road. This was the time at which she began to give alternative dates for her year of birth – no longer 1905 but sometimes 1909 or even 1919. The couple travelled widely because of his career and their marriage is finally recorded in 1982, very shortly before Professor Fleming’s death. They lived in the very beautiful Zoffany House at Strand-on-the-Green, Chiswick, from 1966. There are at least two versions of how she became an artist. In one, Edna displayed a painting of hers when Arthur came to dinner and she told him it had been painted by a local shopkeeper. He took it away for the current show at the Hanover where it sold, then she could not keep up with the demand that followed.23 More convincingly, in 1948 Edna complained to Arthur that she loved but could not afford any of the works in the Hanover Gallery exhibition of Sunday Painters; he snapped at her to go home and paint one herself. Not long afterwards, she brought a work into the gallery claiming it to be an

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example of naïf work by an unknown artist called E. Box that she had found while on a trip to Lincolnshire. Arthur was sufficiently impressed to ask for the artist’s address so he could make a studio visit, at which point Marston persuaded Edna to confess that she had followed Arthur’s advice and bought herself paints. She used a cigar-box lid as the support so grabbed Box as the name for the artist she had confabulated; it was also Marston’s nickname for her. Eden was more or less an anagram of Edna so she used that name, too, with all its innocent, idyllic associations.24 Norman E. Box was a famous national haulage company in the 1920s and 1930s, so the name E. Box would have been nearly as familiar on the roads as Eddie Stobart is today. The Hanover gave her a solo exhibition straightaway in 1949. Sir Roy Strong wrote a profile of Eden Box for Vogue in 1978 and described her later as ‘an incredibly difficult woman’ who easily took offence.25 She created a very beautiful interior at Zoffany House with large paintings from the Qajar period of Persian art, just like Arthur, and provincial still-life painting. Her own painting style is a mixture of Indian or Persian miniatures, English rural primitives, the knowing naivety of ‘Douanier’ Rousseau and the tweeness of the Victoriana revival plus images of her chocolate Labrador, Fred. She always painted her tiny paintings on the floor. Her work was very popular and served Arthur well: he collected her work extensively himself, was much influenced by her taste according to Robert and they remained very close friends. Rumour has it that he once asked her to marry him (although she first married in 1925), and certainly Robert Melville, André Ostier and Edna were the last people he contacted just before his death. In his will Arthur offered her the pick of his art collection and she chose his much-loved late Monet which, at first, she hung on a green trellis over a sky blue wall, in a conservatory annexe so that it might not stand out: they could not afford to insure it.26 Generously, advised by Brian Sewell, she later lent it to Southampton Art Gallery to hang with the rest of Arthur’s bequest until her own death in 1988, when it contributed to her estate of £6 million and her daughter sold the work at auction to a Japanese private collector. Edna’s own works were bequeathed by Arthur to a close friend, who expected a much more valuable gift but received something that meant a great deal to Arthur. Sir Roy says of Edna that ‘there was a cryptic quality to her which is hardly surprising as she was a complete self-invention’.27

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Arthur Jeffress (Pictures) had a deep picture window onto Davies Street, which for the inaugural exhibition was draped with heavy velvet curtains, swagged theatrically at each side to reveal one E. Box painting, Gentle Friends, on an easel. To the left-hand side of the entrance was a shelved display cabinet where passers-by could see that domestic-scale works were always for sale. The name of the gallery was in white lettering on a shiny black fascia above the entire frontage so it looked like a rather lovely jewellery case (see figure 18.1). Later Arthur commissioned a series of ash or card trays from Fornasetti (who also designed a chair cushion for him) which seem to have been gifts for artists – Tristram Hillier certainly received one after his solo exhibition – but they were often stolen. In 1956, Robert had written (surely to Arthur’s dictation) in a hurt tone to Michael Middleton at House & Garden about their disappointment not to have been included in his article ‘Art on a Shoestring’: We specialize in low-priced, well-framed pictures which have either decorative appeal or unusual imagery, and we should like it to be known that our air of ‘luxe’ hides a very reasonably priced stock.28 Arthur felt very secure with the way in which he and Robert Melville ran the gallery. He travelled a great deal, spending every summer in Venice and the Mediterranean, seeking sunshine each winter. Whenever he was away for a substantial period – for work, on a cruise or at a health farm, Venice, Rome, Paris, Greece or Sicily – he and Robert exchanged detailed letters about the gallery, Arthur’s homes and guests as well as art-world gossip. These letters provide an intriguing view of how the gallery was run: Robert seeks approval for a number of minor things but buys regularly at auction; Arthur is wistful about not being around to hang the major summer show each year or to greet the occasional summer customers. Arthur translates letters that are written in French. He frets and Robert reassures; they defer to each other in their different spheres of expertise and write with great affection. They were not the only ones involved on a day to day basis: amongst others, Muriel Perfect and Bobby Bishop worked in the gallery in a variety of roles. Robert preserved all the business letters that Arthur wrote to him and copies of letters to others while he was away, and a clear picture of

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life in Davies Street and Venice emerges. In the summer of 1957, Robert bid for but failed to buy a Monet at Sotheby’s and Arthur responded ‘sad and hateful to think that it went to the Marlborough [. . .] Was the sale very exciting?’29 In October 1954, Arthur writes to his old school-friend Eliot Hodgkin: ‘The first exhibition is a great success; every picture sold! One could hardly ask more than that, I feel.’30 The opening show sold out within the first week and Robert later said that was always what Arthur aimed for and he kept prices low so that could be achieved.31 The second show, always a crucial decision and even more as it was their first Christmas exhibition, was of the Italian artist Aldo Pagliacci. Arthur explained the gallery’s policy to an artist: ‘Gallery commission is 33⅓%. The cost of framing and transport would be borne by yourself, but the Gallery undertakes all other expenses, such as the printing and mailing of Invitation Cards and the usual advertising’.32 Babe Martindale, a rave from the Bright Young grave, wrote to him in June 1955 from the Isle of Man to promote an artist friend; she reminds him that they knew each other ‘in the days of the “parties”, Red & White etc, I met you several times with Elizabeth Ponsonby. I was then Babe Plunket Greene.’33 Arthur replied: Dear Babe Martindale, I really opened this gallery and left the Hanover Gallery in order to get away from Abstract painting as much as anything else. One of my aims here, indeed, has been not ever to have an abstract painting in the place! I admit that one or two of Graham Sutherland’s works do come rather perilously close to abstraction for my own personal taste, but that has been unavoidable, and the ones that I am showing are in the main far from abstract . . . Have you thought of trying the gallery of Gimpel Fils in South Molton St? It might be just the thing for them.34 While Arthur and Robert agreed on much of the gallery’s programme, Peyton Skipwith has remarked that the gallery ‘illustrated the particular taste of its owner Jeffress, rather than Robert Melville. The taste was not cutting edge but specifically appealed to the more esoteric connoisseur . . . exquisite for exquisites.’35

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19 Portrait of Arthur Jeffress

In the summer of 1953 Arthur was forty-eight and just beginning plans for his own gallery. Britain was celebrating the coronation of a very young queen and the beginning of a new Elizabethan age with hopes for a renaissance of arts, science and the economy. In the previous summer, Arthur’s friend Graham Sutherland had represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in the rather obliquely entitled Sutherland, Wadsworth, New Aspects of British Sculpture in which Sutherland had a solo display of sixty-seven paintings. The American Pavilion marked their dominant place in the art world by presenting Jackson Pollock’s action painting. Arthur must have felt rather smug. In the British Pavilion, Sutherland’s new portrait of the newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook and his remarkable 1949 mandarin image of Somerset Maugham helped to bring portraiture back into prominence. Sutherland wrote about his sitters: I think it is true that only those totally without physical vanity, educated in painting, or with exceptionally good manners, can disguise their feelings of shock or even revulsion when they are confronted for the first time with a reasonably truthful painted image of themselves: there is a quilted atmosphere of silence as when it snows.1 Arthur decided to commission his friend to paint his portrait and sittings began out of doors in July 1953 in Venice. The first study (given as a gift by Sutherland to Robert Melville and now in Doncaster Art Gallery) shows Arthur, head and neck only, in a white shirt and no jacket (see colour plate 12). He is not smiling and has an awkward formality that shows clearly that this 209

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study is based on a photograph taken just for that purpose. In July 1954 the sittings resumed and a small painting (part of the Jeffress Bequest to Southampton) shows more progress (see colour plate 13). This is just of the head again, still not smiling but more relaxed and reflective than the study and more obviously – as the artist himself inscribed it – a sketch. Robert later wrote to tell him that Alfred Hecht (their mutual friend and society picture framer) had reframed the sketch with a greater area of red above the head, making the composition more exciting.2 On 13 July 1954, Arthur wrote to Robert that the Sutherlands and Hecht had arrived the evening before, ‘dead on time as announced’, always a matter of huge importance to Arthur; he always found the Sutherlands particularly unreliable. It was pouring with rain from the moment they arrived but Sutherland talked of starting the portrait the next day ‘which will keep us all busy and drive all thoughts of the Lido away’. Arthur hoped it would be square in shape and that the red damask of his bedhead and bedspread would form the background (see figure 19.1).3 Sutherland made daily drawings (two in Indian ink and pencil survive) and complained – rightly – that he could get no likeness but assured Arthur that this was not unusual. Arthur was not allowed to see the preparatory versions and had little idea of what progress was being made.4 Sittings were restricted to two sequential summers because of the artist’s growing success: after Venice in 1952 he had another large exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris. In spring 1953 he had shown at the Curt Valentin Gallery, for which Arthur travelled to New York, then at the Tate and at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. During 1954, he was showing in Chicago, Boston, New York and again at the Venice Biennale in a group show at the British Pavilion when the portrait sittings resumed. Arthur, too, was exceptionally preoccupied by his efforts to disentangle from the Hanover and create his own gallery. No wonder Arthur Jeffress, the portrait, meant so much to him. In 1975, Sutherland summed it up in a letter to Southampton Art Gallery: It is the definitive portrait of three which I did of my friend and dealer. The chair in which he is sitting was one of those garden chairs which he used and the pose which he habitually assumed. The tapestry background refers to a tapestry which was in his bedroom and added, as I thought at the time, an air of sumptuousness which was very characteristic of him.5

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Figure 19.1 Photographer unknown. Arthur’s bedroom in Venice showing the damask used by Graham Sutherland as a backdrop to his portrait of Arthur.

An undated letter from Kathy Sutherland to Robert Melville says: ‘We had a blissful time with him – He is such a wonderful host & I don’t think we have ever enjoyed ourselves more in every way. G has made studies & is working now on the head while he remembers him.’6 The sittings took place in Arthur’s small walled garden where he sat astride a curlicue garden chair in a pose that today recalls that icon of sexiness when Christine Keeler was photographed two years later, albeit naked, by Lewis Morley on a copy of an Arne Jacobsen chair. Bobby Bishop later firmly denied that he had ever seen Arthur sitting like this. There is a sexual undertone to the pose with its focus on the crotch but whether Arthur appears as an alpha or beta male is open, as is the pose and chair, to interpretation. Arthur’s gaze is slightly to his left, a little bit dreamy, smiling with his lips nearly parted as if in conversation, or at least listening and amused. There is a real sense conveyed by Sutherland of his sitter’s sophistication and his reputation as a convivial

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host; laughter seems to hang in the warm air. The use of a garden chair makes the scene informal and momentary. The red and pink damask blends into the background warmth and suggests the colour and style of the Venetian High Renaissance while some of the pomposity, and what the artist defined as sumptuousness, are offset by Arthur’s very up to date and sharp Italian-tailored blue suit and bright, white shirt. His right hand rests on the back of the chair in

Figure 19.2 Ida Kar (1908–74), photographer. Arthur in front of the Sutherland portrait at home in Eaton Square, 1959.

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an elegant pose to display the ring with purple stone that so many people believed, doubtless told so by Arthur, to contain cyanide and to be his secret suicide insurance (see colour plate 14). Agatha Christie first used the cyanide-in-a-ring plot in a 1922 novel which Arthur may well have read as a teenager, and the idea of Arthur wearing such a fatal ornament seems to have a fictional air to it.7 It seems unlikely that Arthur would ever have been quite so cavalier as to keep lethal poison close, to hand so to speak, except to create a romantic yarn. For it to be resolutely effective, he would have had to keep it well preserved, like the pea-sized ‘killpill’ in a rubber shell issued to troops during World War II. Arthur enjoyed every moment of the portrait project. He told Robert on 24 July 1954: I have caught a glimpse of the oil sketch of my head that Graham has done. It looks superb to me, I must say, and quite alarmingly alike! The idea is to use the red damask as background but without the gold, I think. I do so hope that he will be able to make a start on it when he gets back to Trottiscliffe. [. . .] As he is due to start on the ‘Naval Person’ (have you read your papers?) two weeks later. I fear I shall take a very second place once that starts.8 Robert charmingly replied: ‘If it’s a good likeness it’s bound to be a deeply attractive picture. Have you decided where you are going to hang it?’9 Of course he had. And Arthur’s instant pleasure in the painting must, in part, be (in Sutherland’s own terms) because he was educated in painting and had exceptionally good manners. Sutherland later caught Arthur’s appearance, as Robert Melville noted, more effectively in words than in paint: Romantic, even exotic, the physical character of his countenance – with its black and humorous eyes and (especially after the long summer sun) its warm brown colouring – reminded one strongly of the faces of certain figures in the paintings of Eugene Delacroix, whose works he admired so much.10 Arthur was relaxed in Sutherland’s company, possibly sexually attracted to him too, and they shared a great many complex characteristics: charm, sharp humour, living and eating well as well as snobbery, hypochondria and fondness for flattery. With cruel and rather apposite judgement, Bacon dismissed

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Sutherland’s portraits in general as ‘coloured snaps’.11 With the same accurate venom, Douglas Cooper (no friend to Arthur but still devoted to Sutherland at this point) cleverly noted that in Arthur’s portrait ‘sadness vies with pertness, and exoticism with mundanity’.12 Arthur has an air of eagerness which dominates his attempted insouciance. Somehow the portrait fails entirely to convince and the head is not quite securely grafted onto the body – or rather looks as if the two parts have only just been reunited. This weakness was probably the result of interrupted sittings but perhaps also of Sutherland’s deep fondness of Arthur and reluctance to reveal too many of his faults. The emphasis on the ring serves to hint at both Arthur’s melancholy and his affectation. Arthur’s is not one of Sutherland’s greatest portraits but it is an immediate and successful study of warm friendship. It was completed by early summer 1955 and Arthur was utterly delighted, making it the centre piece of an exhibition entitled Graham Sutherland: A New Portrait and Some Paintings. Arthur wrote to Dr Richard Gainsborough of Art News & Reviews: It was very kind of you to write to me to congratulate me upon the portrait and I greatly appreciate it. I agree with you that it is perhaps the best of Sutherland’s portraits to date and must confess that I feel quite over-awed by it at times . . . sort of looking posterity in the face.13 Michael Middleton reviewed it in The Spectator, calling it: the most satisfactory picture since the Maugham. Constructed once again about a firm central upright, it shows the subject sitting across a chair, legs tucked underneath, arms on the curling back; in the background a strip of damask or wallpaper. The flesh is the colour of brass, the background red, the clothes a blue-grey. The legs dwindle again to a Baconian fog, but at least they are there, applied in their entirety, and the painting is the better for that.14 The strong orange-red background might also have been described as Baconian. A couple of days later, Deakin called into the gallery, ostensibly to see some of their primitives as he had decided to start painting again, but really to see the portrait and probably report back to Francis Bacon on the ‘coloured snap’. Later Robert reported: ‘Deakin tells me that he is doing nothing but painting, and working night and day. He wants to give you a new picture when

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he returns, and seems to hope you will give him a show.’15 Arthur told him to pay no attention as the ‘poor dear’ would drink any projects out of his mind.16 Deakin clearly is no stranger to the new gallery but the relationship with Arthur was over. The portrait always hung above Arthur’s London desk except when it was borrowed, as it was on several occasions, for international exhibitions. He often lent works from his private collection but in 1957 he wrote from Venice to Walter Goetz, the cartoonist turned dealer, in France: Where is my Rousseau and where is my Vivin? Thanks to you and the Tate Gallery and the Rhodes National Museum my drawing room, once the scene of animated culture and seclusion now resembles Cagnes-sur-Mer after a lesbians’ drunken party. The walls are bare and scarred. As you must remember, I did not want those two paintings to go away in the first instance and only allowed them to do so on your special pleading and on your assurance that they would be here before my return. In the words of a former naval person, ‘Action Please.’ Sincerely but querulously.17 Goetz had created the wartime cartoon character Major Thomson and Arthur sounds once more like Lieutenant Jeffress, the effective Liaison Officer of 1944. The reference to Cagnes’ lesbians is a dig, via Suzy Solidor who lived there and ran a club, at her friend and one-time lover Erica Brausen. The loss of his paintings, even to reasonably prestigious exhibitions organised by the Tate Gallery and British Council, seems quite disproportionately to have distressed him and he even considered moving to an hotel until these backdrops and props in his life were in place. He clearly missed them just like family. Arthur rarely seems to have lost his temper, resorting instead to pique and sarcasm, although his chauffeur Mr Churchill later recalled that an altercation with customs officials over the import of some pictures resulted in Arthur throwing the whole lot in the Channel.18 In 1954, Sutherland was commissioned by an all-party group of parliamentarians to paint a state portrait of Winston Churchill (‘the naval person’) as an eightieth birthday present. Alfred Hecht, their mutual friend who made all Sutherland’s frames, gave a small dinner party to celebrate its completion, inviting Peter Wilson, Chairman of Sotheby’s, Kay Walsh the

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actress and her husband Elliott Jacques as well as Arthur. They were all ‘knocked sideways’ by the portrait according to Kathy Sutherland, but the result appalled both Winston and Clementine Churchill and the portrait was, notoriously, later destroyed.19 G.S. Whittet, the editor of Studio, also had a preview of the portrait at the Churchill home in Hyde Park Gate. Shortly afterwards he visited Arthur, who confided that Sutherland had actually re-used a canvas with the beginnings of Arthur’s own portrait on it for the great man’s painting. Arthur asked him not to mention it so Whittet held back until after Arthur’s death in a small piece published under the pseudonym Paul Mahl in Studio.20 Many years later in a letter to The Times he pointed out, ‘it would have been another reason for the Old Man to have disliked the portrait’.21 The Sutherland is the only surviving portrait that Arthur commissioned but there are some painted homages to him. One is a posthumous painting by a Basque artist, Coqué Martinez, who was evacuated to Britain as a child during the Spanish Civil War and had a solo exhibition at Arthur’s gallery in 1956. By chance, five of his works were later donated to Southampton. The Desert Idyll (Homage to Arthur Jeffress) is very knowing. Adam and Eve lie naked, in a postcoital snooze, with the serpent crawling over them both in a desert with lots of phallic cacti and cuddly wild beasts nearby. It recalls a page from William Beckford’s Vathek, whose eponymous hero Derek Hill once compared to Arthur: The ground was strewed with violets, hare-bells, and pansies, in the midst of which sprang forth tufts of jonquils, hyacinths, and carnations, with every other perfume that impregnates the air. Four fountains, not less clear than deep, and so abundant as to slake the thirst of ten armies, seemed profusely placed here to make the scene more resemble the garden of Eden, which was watered by the four sacred rivers.22 A closer friend created another telling ‘portrait’. Richard Chopping was a trompe l’oeil specialist who, in the late 1930s, attended the London Theatre Studio and studied stage design under Michel Saint-Denis before establishing himself as an author and illustrator of natural history and children’s books. At Christmas 1952, Chopping showed at the Hanover with two other artists including Bacon and his works were reviewed as ‘some blonde and delicate

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examples of infinite precision’.23 His watercolours were hung in a little gallery at the back, ‘like a kind of long lavatory’, while Bacon’s work was downstairs in the main gallery.24 Chopping and his partner Denis Wirth Miller were very good friends of Bacon and he took Anne Fleming, wife of Ian Fleming, to the exhibition to introduce Chopping’s work. She then successfully recommended to her husband that Chopping should design the jacket covers of the James Bond novels. When Arthur left the Hanover, Chopping moved with him. In 1956, Chopping was at Arthur’s gallery, in a three-man show with Robin Ironside and Kenneth Rowell, and created a Trompe L’oeil for Arthur Jeffress (see colour plate 15). It contains many of the distinctive elements that appear on his Bond covers – a blonde and delicate plain background of plywood, a signature butterfly and a pair of phallic couplings of an apple and a courgette. It was really quite unusual to see this Mediterranean vegetable in England at that time, except on the pages of fashionable Elizabeth David’s cookery books. The symmetry is repeated by sheets from passports, one set clearly from an old US passport of Arthur’s and signed by a US Consul of the 1940s. The other passport is left unidentified. The fruit and vegetables are placed on top of the passports alongside envelopes addressed to Arthur at Pelham Crescent, a postcard of a kilted drummer from a Highland Regiment (probably the Royal Scots or ‘Dandy Ninth’) and a used third-class day return railway ticket from Waterloo to Portsmouth. It is explicitly personal but the details of the story remain untold. Was it the Scottish soldier who travelled down to Portsmouth from London for the day? Arthur himself would never ever have travelled second class, never mind third. The teasing tone recalls the early letters that Bacon wrote to the Hanover from the South of France letting Arthur know whether the Fleet was in town or reports from Southern Rhodesia that: ‘the Rhodesian Police are completely him too sexy for words starched shorts and highly polished leggings.’25 Arthur was clever at promoting his own image, so photographs and written descriptions are plentiful. In 1959 an article appeared in the Tatler and Bystander written by David Wolfers, a journalist who later fulfilled his dream of opening his own gallery, the New Grafton. The article is really a vehicle for Ida Kar’s splendid portraits of leading art dealers and the only full page image is of Arthur.26 Kar took a great number of images of him in front of works of

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art at home particularly his dramatic Middle Eastern collection of paintings mostly associated with Fath-Ali Shah of Persia who reigned from 1797 to 1834, Arthur’s favourite era. The Sutherland portrait was the backdrop finally chosen and the rest of the Kar photographs are in the National Portrait Gallery (see figures  19.2 and 19.3). The text confirms that his gallery was run for his personal satisfaction, that financial surplus was not a factor but that he hoped to break even. He kept prices low to encourage private collectors and ‘would like to regard this gallery as an oasis of sanity in a world of Tachiste and Action painting’. He confirmed that he liked being a dealer so he could enlarge his own private collection: ‘Arthur Jeffress is that unusual figure, man who has gone into dealing through collecting.’ He looked handsome, more so than in the Sutherland portrait, and channelled his inner Byron through a brooding expression and snowy-white open-necked, wing-collared shirt. Other images show him in an ordinary suit but Kar clearly stage-managed the shoot to create a moody, monochrome and undoubtedly melancholy series of portraits.27 Arthur’s photo albums ceased after 1945 or have not been preserved. Instead, images of Arthur, cruel or loving, appear in strange places. A note to the dealer James Kirkman from Honor Frost accompanies a sketch she made on a 1957 Alitalia boarding card: ‘While looking for drunken-portrait-drawings that I did of friends in pubs I came across this of Arthur Jeffress I think on the Lido’.28 Frost was a fascinating woman, a friend of Erica’s, and inherited Wilfred Evill’s extensive art collection, some of which was bought from Arthur’s gallery. Arthur appears as the quintessential gallery owner in a 1958 novel by Rosalie Packard, Love in the Mist. Packard’s American heroine is married to a British man, living in a mews house in Kensington and contemplating her enforced move north for her husband’s job. She compares cultural life in London to suburban life back home in Chicago and her idea of what life will be like in Farmiloe, her invented northern city. She cannot imagine life with ‘No Tate? No taxis? No trams? No Battersea Power Station? No Harrods?’29 and knows she will long for the ‘mink-Mitsouko-espresso-Molyneux Cinqexpensive-furniture-polish smell of the Brompton Road.’30 Finally, they do move to Farmiloe and ‘I got so sick of the inside of 43, Larches Road that I could have had hysterics. I longed for the Festival Hall and Arthur Jeffress (Pictures) and my nice, gossipy chums.’31

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Figure 19.3 Ida Kar, photographer. Arthur ill at ease in front of his painting of the sons of Fath-Ali Shah of Persia, Eaton Square, 1959.

Less flatteringly, Francis King – who worked for the British Council in Florence, Salonika and Athens – wrote a roman-à-clef called The Firewalkers, which he was obliged by his employers to publish in 1956 under the pseudonym Frank Cauldwell because of its homosexual content. The book was re-issued in 1985 and in a new introduction King wrote: Cecil [Provender] was based on Arthur Jefferies [sic], a rich, cosmopolitan American, who owned a London gallery devoted to the work of primitive artists . . . I now see that my fictional portrait [. . .] brings out the self-disgust and self-destruction then latent in him like the virus of fatal illness.32 Arthur and King had many friends and acquaintances in common, including David Carritt, Lady Norton, founder of the London Gallery, Naomi RoydeSmith and Ernest Milton. Born in 1923, King first visited Venice in the late 1940s where he was seduced by a gondolier. He goes on to describe Cecil/

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Arthur as ‘a person of the liveliest curiosity, even though he liked to give the impression that little in life either pleased or interested him’.33 Cecil Provender is clearly based upon Arthur rather than being a precise portrait; the character does not capture his appearance, but there is some real accuracy in King’s descriptions. He noted that Cecil/Arthur was sensitive about looking his age, would always be guaranteed to secure the best place on any occasion and would unerringly find a seat on a crowded train. He also mentions Cecil/ Arthur’s vast range of tips about places to which he travelled and how they were nearly always reliable. His other pen portraits ring true: It would be hard to find a single adjective to describe Cecil Provender. ‘Spinsterly’ would, in many ways, be suitable but in one, perhaps most important, respect, he differed from the majority of spinsters. On the other hand, he was far too vinegary, for all his generosity and protectiveness, to deserve to be called ‘motherly’.34 To his delight, Arthur was the subject of a profile in the Sunday Dispatch by the columnist Bromley Abbott, probably from the winter of 1960, with the headline: ‘As snug as a bug in a hamster: dandies take the fur line for winter.’35 He observes that Lord Sherwood, who had been wartime Under Secretary of State for Air, Winston Churchill and Godfrey Winn – ‘some of our smartest men about town’ – had been seen wearing fur-lined overcoats. But I unhesitatingly award the prize of honour to art connoisseur Arthur Jeffress who now sports not one but two fur-lined overcoats. One is lined with mink. The other is lined – wait for it – with the pelt of 45 wild hamsters. The piece goes on to describe the moment at which the new coat was delivered to the gallery in the presence of the journalist (what a happy coincidence!) and the brown and white furry lining took up all of Arthur’s attention in spite of the fact that King Gustav VI of Sweden was also expected at any moment. When asked why he had bought the coat, Arthur cheerfully replied that it was cheap and: reasonably exclusive as apparently hamster linings were worn only by young ladies on the Continent earlier this century. It is warm. And it is not heavy.

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Why, I picked up Lord Sherwood’s sable coat the other night – it was so heavy I nearly collapsed. What a thorough, masterly and camp piece of PR: fashion, history, furry pets, dining with Lord Sherwood, foreign royalty visiting the gallery and Winston Churchill again. Brian Sewell, the art critic, and friend of David Carritt who became very close to Arthur, knew Arthur only slightly himself but knew Edna Fleming better. He described Arthur as both cerebral, ‘he knew and understood’ and emotional, ‘kind and sympathetic’. Sewell, not known for his flattery, concluded that Arthur really had no side or grandeur.36 Arthur’s old friend Tom Howard recalled to Robert Melville after Arthur’s death that, while he was introvert and unhappy most of the time, Arthur showed that he was fond of Tom: ‘from certain remarks like “Would you like to spend the Coronation with me as it is cheaper if you have an American visitor?” ’, and ‘ “How long do you plan to stay at the flat? I thought two weeks would be enough for both of us.” ’37 Howard understood that Arthur’s directness is rude and practical all at once and so always sounded amusing and more or less affectionate, at least to the right listener. ‘He had such perfect taste and a wonderful sense of humour – not always kind – but that was part of the charm.’38

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After he left the Hanover to join Arthur, Robert Melville was succeeded at Erica’s side in 1956 by Jean-Yves Mock, a young Frenchman who became, in his own words, the person who wielded the feather duster and locked the door on the day the Hanover finally closed down. He was a mainstay to Erica Brausen and to the Hanover Gallery, and later had a distinguished career at the Pompidou Centre, remaining the guardian of Erica’s bright flame and her biographer.1 Robert Melville was crucial to Arthur’s gallery. He was Arthur’s intellectual superior and did not hide this, had a loving family life and a professional career parallel and complementary to, while independent of, the gallery. This allowed their relationship to be close rather than intimate and for Arthur, mean in some ways and so generous in others, to pay Robert much less than he deserved or needed. Robert wrote extensively at night, which supplemented his income and artists often repaid him with gifts. Graham Sutherland in particular was generous and he clearly expected Robert to sell his gifts from time to time. Alan Reynolds gave him several works, too: Permanently young, always immaculately dressed in the finest of youthful fashion [. . .] a kind and noble man, slight of build and full of an ancient charm, his intelligence and his cynicism is alien to the brute primitives that make up the Bond St. hucksters [. . .] Robert Melville is their man but only on his shy, silent terms for he moves among them, a Greek among Romans.2 Robert was Arthur’s opposite and complement. He had been employed by E.L.T. Mesens at the London Gallery from 1947 when Robert, his wife and small daughter first moved to London from Birmingham. The gallery had been 223

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founded by Peter, later Lady, Norton in 1936 then sold two years later to Roland Penrose. Robert recalled that Mesens took him out to a bar in South Molton Street most nights from 6–10pm to drink neat gin, which was more than he could cope with as a family man.3 When Arthur came into the gallery one day, Robert asked him for a job at the Hanover and was offered a post for three days a week. Within one week, he became a full-time employee. Robert had already had twenty-five years’ experience in clerical work and in his fragmentary autobiography (or ‘autopsy’, as he called it) he wrote: I went into an office when I left school & was a clerk for many years – enough years to finally be called a Sales Manager. I hated the entire office world & was bored every minute of the day. At night I was free and I wrote. When I, at last, managed to get into the art world I was still bored during the day (except when I was allowed at one gallery to buy for it and hang the exhibitions but it only lasted 4 or 5 years).4 It was entirely to Arthur’s advantage to have his Secretary (the chief administrator of the company not the typist) freelancing as a highly regarded critic. In 1949, Melville wrote a perceptive and prescient article on Bacon in Horizon, a magazine edited by Cyril Connolly and backed by Peter Watson the co-founder of the ICA, which was to have lasting influence on Bacon’s critical reputation, placing him firmly in the European tradition. It appeared in the December 1949–January 1950 issue, carefully sited between a short story by James Lord, The Boy Who Wrote No, which contains a description of the vicious beating of a child, and an essay by Maurice Blanchot on the Marquis de Sade. Bacon always promised to give Robert a painting but never did. Instead Robert tried to buy Study from the Human Body, 1949, on instalment, but his wages were derisory and the gallery was not prepared to wait.5 Robert Melville became the highly regarded art critic of the New Statesman from 1954 to 1976 and wrote monthly pieces for Architectural Review between 1950 and 1977. These were the reviews of which he was most proud and he covered topics from Turner to Bridget Riley via Giles’ cartoons. He wrote extensive catalogue essays in Britain and America and his book Erotic Art of the West was published in 1973. When he retired from the Architectural Review, Melville was described by Hugh Casson as ‘unchallenged as the most serious

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Figure 20.1 Photographer unknown. Robert Melville, c. 1962: ‘Permanently young, always immaculately dressed.’

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(and I don’t mean solemn) and illuminating art critic in the country’.6 In his draft ‘autopsy’ Robert said that, had he ever run his own gallery, it would have been a cross between the vanguard of Robert Fraser’s (‘Cool Bob’) and the intimacy of Arthur Jeffress’.7 The many letters that they exchanged were, by 1957, always addressed to ‘Dearest Arthur’ and ‘Dearest Robert’. For Christmas 1954, Arthur bought Robert and his wife Lilian a painting by Tristram Hillier. He had remembered that it was the one they both liked at the Tooth’s private view. For Christmas 1957, they bought him a book on Asia and some flowers. Arthur told them: I don’t think you can really imagine the pleasure your gift of Freesias gives me. I took them up to my bedroom on Xmas eve, so that they were just about the first thing of which I was conscious on Xmas day. They really are a joy, and I am very grateful to you both for the sweet thought that prompts the gift.8 With his new gallery safe in Robert’s care, Arthur spent Christmas 1954 in Rome, setting off on Christmas Day, before moving on to Tunisia where he had first been in 1943. He sent a telegram from Cyprus to Richard Chopping at home in Wivenhoe that he had secured him a commission.9 In Tunisia, it is very likely that Arthur stayed with Jean and Violet Henson in their glorious Villa Hammamet where they entertained several mutual friends like Christian Bérard and Roy Alderson, who produced an album of thirty-four watercolours of their garden. Arthur, in a feathered mask, attended the Chelsea Arts Ball on New Year’s Eve, 1954 with Bunny Roger, Richard Chopping and his partner Denis Wirth-Miller.10 By February, Arthur was following his doctor’s advice and taking a cure to lose weight at a health farm, Tempford Hall, near Sandy, in Bedfordshire: I have eaten only oranges and drunk only water since my arrival, but curiously do not feel very hungry except if I get a whiff of cooking. Yesterday, the staff was obviously enjoying a great joint of roast beef, and, smelling it as I am out on to the landing all but sent me up the wall. I have lost six pounds so far. The doctor gave me such a thorough examination from top to toe, not to mention specimens of just about everything imaginable, that I was quite impressed. He thinks to cure my semi-permanent lassitude and general malaise, but so far cannot find the seat of the trouble that causes my head pains, which he says, are not caused by Sinus.11

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Dicky Chopping became a frequent member of Arthur’s circle and his biographer reports his comments on Arthur’s health problems and increasing weight. He would catalogue the problems ‘Dame Time and Witch Gin’ caused him but he ignored medical advice and was unwilling to change his lifestyle. He continued to overeat, chain-smoke cheroots and drink champagne and cocktails to excess.12 In January 1956, the article about his Napoleonic flat appeared in Connaissance des Arts while Arthur was on a trip to Egypt, the first time he had returned since the war. As usual at this period, he travelled with his trompe l’oeil artist friend Roy Alderson: ‘Cairo is fascinating, as ever. We sight-see a lot & I have also run into an astonishing number of friends so that we lunch and dine in amusing (or otherwise) company. Monday we leave on the Nile steamer.’13 Two of those friends included Somerset Maugham and his partner Alan Searle, both also recovering from ill health and en route to Aswan as guests of the Agha Khan. From Cairo, Arthur and Roy took a cruise down the Nile then went on via Tripoli, where he visited his Venetian friend Anna Maria Cicogna whose father Count Volpi had been Governor, then to Taormina in Sicily (where he gave his address, as usual, as care of Giovanni Panarello, the antiques dealer), to Malta (cold and wet) and then Rome. His final stop was Paris. His health was poor throughout the holiday as he caught a cold on the first night and was ‘always doped with Aspirin, Veganin, Veranon, Codeine etc’.14 Anthony Groves-Raine, a close friend and illustrator, wrote: ‘How was Roma Doma? I must say you are a dashing One. Rome one minute, Bootle the next.’15 In the summer of 1956, Arthur was, as usual, in Venice and writing painstakingly to Robert to make arrangements to accommodate his old friend Henry Clifford of the Philadelphia Museum. Clifford had telephoned Arthur in Venice from the Ritz in Madrid and was to be offered Arthur’s own bedroom at Pelham Crescent; ‘breakfast only, of course’. Arthur asked Robert to make sure that Arthur Giles, his butler, stayed on until Clifford arrived to be able to offer him drinks; ‘Mr Clifford, for all that will never buy a painting from AJ (P),

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must be treated “en prince”.’ Clifford had already booked a room at Brown’s Hotel but ‘he has never seen my house. He is pretty generous with his tips, so the nicer Giles is to him, the better off everyone should be’. Arthur maintains that he did not have the Giles’ Fulham home address with him in Venice but this appears to be a ruse so that Robert will supervise the princely details.16 Mrs Giles, the splendidly named Elisa Victorina, had written a letter to Arthur from the West Indies earlier that year, so if she was still away Arthur would feel that extra care was needed. In the end, Clifford arrived a day early and did not even visit the gallery. Next summer, there was a surprise lunch: Three days ago, you will be interested to know, Miss Erica Brausen (Picture Dealer) and the baroness Toto Koopman (Archaeologist) had lunch with me at my capanna [sic] on the Lido. All went off pretty well and there were no sparks, except that Toto kept starting conversations with remarks like ‘now let me see, was that before or after we had that Slight Break in our relations . . .’17 Toto had studied archaeology at London University and she later worked on one of the digs run by Max Mallowan (the second Mr Agatha Christie) in Iraq. Back in 1954, Erica had told Alfred Hecht that she would arrive in Venice that August and that while she would speak to Arthur on first meeting, there would be no further communication. Clearly there was then a slight thaw. Arthur’s cousins Henry and Heather Hill visited him that summer, too, and later recalled: ‘[what a] place it was – what with his sending for us in a private gondola with two gondoliers in gleaming white, and golden velvet waistbands, arm bands with A.J. initials embroidered on the arm bands.’18 Hill embroidered the description further for their disapproving cousin Robert Jeffress: We roared with laughter over your remarks on Arthur’s Gondola – but you said nothing about the two Gondoliers. Did we tell you they were in the most gorgeous white linen suits – yellow-gold cummerbund sashes, and enormous silver arm epaulets about the size of saucers – marked with ATJ. I am quite sure people fell into the canal and off the bridges in the crush that gathered to watch as we sailed by in state! But you know, quite literally, it is no different than you having a Cadillac and driver for Aunt Fan in New York.19

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As Henry’s daughter Jane recalled in 2012, Robert and Elizabeth Jeffress had about eighteen servants to look after just the two of them.20 No doubt they were not showy. Arthur seemed happy be teased in a series of letters with Goddard Lieberson of Columbia Records, who wrote: I trust that, your luggage stuffed with velvet slippers, straw hats, and striped shirts, you are now safely back in London, perhaps even at this moment, pacing up and down Davies St. This sentence courtesy of Henry James, Esq.21 He and Arthur have a delightful exchange about musicals and records and Arthur was: quite overwhelmed that you should follow West Side Story with Oh Kay, and look forward tremendously to the latter. It was one of my most most favourite musicals back in the late twenties, or was it early thirties?22 Anyway, I shall never forget Gertie Lawrence and how superb she was in it. But how immensely kind of you to send me the record [. . .] I am contemplating a move to a flat in Eaton Square.23 Lieberson added to a later letter: p.s. What does the ‘(USA)’ mean after Arthur T. Jeffress on the stationery? United States of America? Unfit for Selling Art? Useable Saturday Afternoons? Useless Sundays in the Autumn? Unstable Susceptible Attribute? Utterly Spurious Arcimboldis?24 In early 1958 Arthur was at another health farm, this time near Godalming, which Ian Fleming later mentioned in Thunderball. Arthur asks Robert for the forthcoming exhibition schedule so he can fix next year’s ‘starvation dates’ and adds: This my fourth day, and only about 7lbs have fallen from me, which is rather discouraging, I think. The torture of starvation does not seem quite so bad this year, somehow, though I am quite unable of [sic] any sustained concentration. There are quite a few people here to talk to this year such as Hugh Cruddas, an old friend of mine, Mrs Dunne who bought a

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commissioned Martinez once from us, and Gore Vidal, the American writer of homosexual novels and successful plays.25 Hugh Cruddas was a lover of Robert Heber-Percy, ‘The Mad Boy’, and heir to Lord Berners, with whom Cruddas lived at Faringdon House in Oxfordshire while Martinez was to paint the posthumous Homage to Arthur Jeffress. The lost conversations with Vidal are much more intriguing. Gore Vidal, bisexual, was at that point a screenwriter for MGM and had also written three thrillers under the pseudonym Edgar Box between 1952 and 1954. It is tempting to speculate whether either E. Box knew of the other, but though Edna’s pseudonym appeared first she did not show in New York until 1954 at Betty Parsons Gallery, so it remains simply a surreal coincidence. In spring 1958, Arthur moved house. He had previously planned to buy another house in Venice, next to Peggy Guggenheim’s, largely because otherwise there was no direct canal access from his home. But his bank advised against it.26 Instead he moved to his final and grandest London address at 98 Eaton Square, Belgravia, and wrote excitedly to Henry Hill: The new flat is really going to be lovely when it is finally finished, I hope, though whether you will think so is a moot point. Anything contemporary, such as radio and Television, is securely hidden behind a cunning façade of false books, and there is nothing remotely modern to be seen beyond some sculptures and paintings and in even the last-named, there is not a smell of an Abstract, not the merest act of an Action painting, and not a trace of a ’tache of Tachiste.27 After World War II, many of the other grand London squares – Belgrave Square, Grosvenor Square, St James’s Square as well as Park Lane – had been made over to business or institutional use, yet Eaton Square, a long canyon of elegant cream stucco, remained almost wholly residential and so rose to the forefront of fashion. Terence Rattigan, Rosamund Lehmann, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh were neighbours. Vivien Leigh came for dinner with Arthur who lived on the grander south-facing side of the square, closer to Belgravia, which made him particularly proud, as did his ability to such attract wellknown guests.

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He hung four large Seasons by Arcimboldo in the dining room and the same artist’s Sense of Smell in his library. In 1959, with photographs again by Anthony Denney, the new flat was celebrated by House & Garden (see colour plate 8).28 Each room had a different colour scheme but the same patterned wallpaper, specially printed by Cole & Sons and the effect was ‘beautiful, curious, jewelled’. The text makes much of the needlework chair-covers and fire-screen all embroidered by Arthur himself in a failed attempt to soothe his nerves. He claimed that complex designs kept him awake at night. The article is headed ‘Arthur Jeffress owns and actively directs one of Europe’s most unusual art galleries’, getting his point across from the outset. Venice still preoccupied his summers and in 1959 his friend Viva King, Ruth Sheradski, the fashion writer and illustrator, and Robert Irving, the music arranger, were house guests; Coral Browne, the actress, and others joined them for a dinner on a barge in the lagoon to watch the Redentore fireworks but Bobby Bishop from the gallery was petulant and ill. He decided that he was being poisoned by what Arthur called ‘the lovely, cosy, healthy local wine’.29 Another dinner party saw the New York dress designer Valentina crossing herself and screaming in Arthur’s bedroom at each clap of thunder during a storm.30 Arthur stayed in Venice till early September then set off for Naples, Rome, nostalgically visiting the Cliffords in Florence and artist Rory Cameron’s house in Cap Ferrat. Aunt Fan finally died after a protracted illness, rare in his family, and left him a small bequest so he began to plan next year’s spring trip, thinking further afield to Ceylon and Persia. He also sailed round some of the Greek islands, a recreation that had recently become internationally fashionable when Elsa Maxwell organized a cultural cruise round the islands from Venice for a group of carefully selected jet-setters. During the late 1950s, Arthur worked hard at establishing a grand persona, unaware of course that his own fifties would be his final years. He was, however, making preparations for something lasting. First, he embarked on an even more whirligig set of travels. In July 1958 he sent a de Chirico postcard to Robert: ‘Very depressed at the thought of a third world war in my life.’31 He avoided Christmas 1958 in London as was his custom, and arrived in San Francisco on the Polar route to stay with the Hill family in Berkeley, California, from 10 to 12 December en route to ‘Angor-Vat,

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Tokyo and Bagdad and I don’t know where all . . . but what an accomplishment to get him here and what fun it will be to see him again. Jane and Vicki are furious he won’t be bringing his gondola.’32 They failed to persuade him to stay on for Christmas itself but he had cancelled his direct Paris to Tokyo flight to stay with them for thirty-six hours. Henry Hill wrote to Robert on 29 December that he was ‘very chipper and in good form after such a grueling trip! But a wonderful, though too short, visit’.33 Arthur was seeking in his travels some arrangement that might bring him affection as well as sex. Raymond Mortimer (who had been at the Red and White Party all those years ago) sent him a postcard with an image of a sculpture from the rococo Church of Wies in Steingaden, which he compares to Proust’s character M. Charlus, and hoped that Arthur ‘fell in love with or in Bangkok’.34 In spring 1960, Arthur finally made his trip to Persia, Lebanon, Baalbek, and back to Tripoli (where he was the guest again of Anna Maria Cicogna) and Petra, revisiting in the grandest style places he had last seen in a truck in 1943. He was a dinner guest of John Julius Norwich and his wife and was surprised to meet a young woman who asked how Robert Melville was. She turned out to be what Arthur called a ‘Brausen Babe’.35 In the summer he was of course in Venice, as well as Rome and Ischia, and motored down on his own stopping off in Perugia, again for old times’ sake, and did part of the Piero della Francesco trail. He was on Corfu in September and was ill once more in the autumn, possibly with liver trouble, and went back to Enton Hall health farm. Beverley Nichols was there too and after he left, Arthur said he missed him more than he could say.36 By Christmas 1960, he recovered sufficiently to make a two-week trip with a friend to Egypt, but then on 4 April 1961 Arthur made his will. Days later he went to Paris, where he arranged to see André Ostier as usual and to catch the last day of a ‘Douanier’ Rousseau show. He stayed for one week with John Hohnsbeen and wrote that: ‘I spent last week chez Hohnsbeen and had a lovely time though I think he was baffled that I refused to go to bars and night-clubs, and insisted on falling exhausted and alone into bed about 11pm.’37 Hohnsbeen had been lent an apartment at 1 Rue Git le Coeur where Meher Baba, the guru whose friends brought Erica to London, lived briefly in 1935. The Beat Generation’s legendary fleapit hotel was well established nearby at

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number 9. One of the hotel’s habitués, Brion Gysin (who was a long-term collaborator with William Burroughs and provided the notorious marijuana brownies recipe for the Alice B. Toklas Cookbook), had already shown at Arthur’s gallery in 1958, thanks to Robert. Gysin’s neo-Dada work was a really new development for Arthur, who wrote to an artist (granted, in a bid to turn down their work) in 1960 that ‘The Gallery’s policy has been undergoing quite radical changes during the last few months’.38 Shortly after his death, the gallery was showing the work of Pauline Boty, Richard Hamilton and David Hockney – the hippest work in town – all of which had been agreed by Arthur before his unpredicted death. He said he could not refuse Hockney when he saw that he carried a gold bag.39 But he had loathed Jean-Jacques Lebel’s Burial of Tinguely’s The Thing, at the 1960 Venice Biennale, credited with being the first European ‘happening’: ‘It took me back thirty years and made me feel very silly.’40 Arthur’s own taste did not change much over the thirty-five years or so during which he collected and dealt in works of art. In 1955, Marita Ross wrote about him in Everybody’s Magazine: ‘In Beirut I saw an intriguing inn sign called The Lion of Iran, painted by an elderly restaurant owner. I liked it so much I paid him £4 for it, despite the shrill protests of his family.’ Later, in Tripoli, Jeffress bought another scene, The Battle of Adowa, also by an unknown artist. He refused to sell either painting, and when peace came he concentrated on finding artists who were not content merely working to a formula and imitating more successful contemporaries. Instead, he preferred people with a genuine gift for selfexpression, even though the untrained painter might challenge the laws of gravity and perspective in highly unorthodox fashion. There is a vast difference, however, between the amateur and a true Sunday Painter, Jeffress insists. The former tries merely to copy the work of established professionals; the latter paints from an inner compulsion which often results in something deeply moving. Six years ago, Jeffress held the first exhibition of his finds – mostly works of self-taught artists. Among these painters were an ex-bargee and circus strong man, a retired French postal clerk, an Italian enginedriver, a London pavement artist, and an elderly French charwoman who produced paintings of extraordinary beauty and mysticism.41

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Marita Ross thoroughly researched her article and interviewed the marvellously named Fred Buckett, who exhibited at the gallery and had been one of the workmen who helped build the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1900. Buckett was employed later as a handyman at the Royal College of Art, where he decided to buy his first set of paints. Apparently film stars Cary Grant and Leslie Caron (a regular Jeffress client) had visited Mr Buckett at home in Battersea where he had painted a large mural in his backyard, captured on British Pathé News. As part of the gallery’s continuous marketing, Arthur responded to a request by The Tatler & Bystander to contribute what he considered to be The Six Best Post War Paintings.42 He settled, with Robert Melville’s help, on: Portrait of Edward Sackville-West by Graham Sutherland Las Meninas by Pablo Picasso The Gentle Friends by E. Box The Escaped Convict by Sidney Nolan Les Toîts by Nicolas de Stael Pope Innocent X by Francis Bacon Arthur was put under real pressure to include the final painting as it was assumed this artist would indeed be one of his personal favourites. Arthur’s interest in Sunday Painters was a fashionable one, with critical credentials, too. In 1957, he was in substantial correspondence with Herbert Read about the work of James Lloyd, a Yorkshire farm labourer and painter, who both Read and John Berger admired. Arthur gave him a show that year. Like magic realism, Sunday Painting has European roots (the former Italian, the latter French) and both are modern styles of figure painting that have links with surrealism, a movement about which Arthur was ambivalent. Robert Melville stated that Arthur owned Salvador Dali’s Morphological Echo of 1934 at one point in the early 1950s.43 He made shrewd early purchases of works by Edward Burra, an artist from his own circle, more or less, and sharp observer of a world Arthur knew well, whether it was the Dolly Sisters or French sailors. All Burra’s detail was sensuously and often cruelly depicted, and although Burra showed with the Surrealists he was not a surrealist himself. Arthur held on to his Burra works until the 1950s but sold them at little profit. Three Sailors

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at the Bar was sold to Kenneth Partridge after much nagging on the buyer’s part.44 In 1936, Barbara Ker-Seymer wrote to Burra to say Arthur was delighted with his new acquisition of a Burra and he had seen the artist’s work reproduced in Minotaure so ‘feels he has not bought a pig in a poke’.45 Arthur also owned Christopher Wood’s French Sailors bought from Lefevre in 1936, and Lucian Freud’s painting of a Zebra and Quince on a Blue Table, 1943–4. He did buy Yves Tanguy’s Les Oiseaux Repentis from the International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936, which he kept for about a decade, and owned at least two works by de Chirico but had no lasting affection for them. He much preferred the Belgian painter Delvaux, who took dream settings reminiscent of those of de Chirico and rendered them poetic and decorative. His incongruous moonlit mermaids or nudes are more like illustrations to fairy tales for adults than the disturbing stage sets of de Chirico. Almost every work that Arthur loved told some kind of story or created a theatrical moment of surprise – the portrait of Napoleon has this in common with the fantastical concoctions of Arcimboldo – but there is an element of both melancholy and play-acting in all of these creations (see colour plates 6 and 11). In 1960, Arthur cancelled an artist’s show commenting, quite gently, on the man’s ‘American melancholy’, which is a strange phrase but one that clearly meant something to Arthur.46

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After his relationship with John Deakin ended during the war, Arthur never lived with anyone else. He became instead a constant host and a travel companion but never again a permanent lover nor very intimate friend, and while he had always depended on casual pick-ups, he no longer found this as easy or satisfying. Arthur thought he was ageing fast, and he was becoming more nervous and fastidious. From 1950 onwards, an increase in the national wage began to create a substantial reduction in the kind of trade upon which he had often depended for sex. This became a matter of some distress so he travelled to Japan to find whether it was true that young Japanese men particularly valued and respected the sexual attentions of older (and, as Bunny Roger pointed out, heavier) gentlemen. There was no law in Japan against private sexual relations between consenting adults of either gender but in Britain the law was not repealed until six years after Arthur’s death, and his friends speculated that he might stay in Japan if he found it congenial. Francis King, who had described him so waspishly in The Firewalkers, had been the British Council’s representative in Kyoto since 1959 and lived with a Japanese man. While homosexuality remained illegal in Britain, this was not the case in France or Italy, which is in part why Arthur chose to travel to these places most frequently. Greece was added to his list of places of ease after homosexuality was decriminalized there in 1951. His visits to Japan were only holidays in the end, his usual turn of the year adventure. In the winter of 1958/9, Kenneth Partridge had hoped to travel with him, but there was a misunderstanding because the young designer thought that Arthur’s agreement amounted to an invitation to be his guest.1 Kenneth could not possibly have afforded such a trip and even getting 237

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time off work was a problem, but Arthur was looking for new sexual adventures and did not need a younger male companion. The lady who did become his travelling companion has been identified firmly as Elizabeth Taylor, described in the anecdote as ‘not that Elizabeth Taylor, but the novelist’.2 But it was neither the film star, nor her namesake the novelist (although she and Arthur did indeed have many friends in common). The most likely candidate is Elisabeth Taylor, a client from the Hanover Gallery since the early 1950s and later at Arthur’s own gallery, who had her paintings framed by Alfred Hecht. She lived in the same Kent village as Noel Coward, was a friend of his designer Gladys Calthorp, and acted as a go-between when Coward was considering an exhibition at Arthur Jeffress (Pictures) which sadly never took place. Miss Taylor told friends that she paid her share for everything and Arthur even expected her to share taxi fares.3 Somehow, this sounds as if she replied on her return to very pointed questioning such as: ‘Did he really make you pay for everything?’, but the stories still exist that he was particularly ungenerous to her, insisting on a 50/50 share of all expenses, on the dot. But as she has not been accurately identified before, nor mentioned by Arthur in his letters, this cannot be certain. Arthur received a letter on his return in early 1959 addressed to the ‘Gentleman in the London Fog’ from a Japanese boy who was referring to his sensible warm overcoat rather than the hazy climatic conditions of Sherlock Holmes’ London. Arthur wrote poetically – romantically? – that he hated leaving Tokyo and really felt quite emotional as the plane took off in a snow storm (‘hurrah for Mrs Hamster’, a reference to his fur-lined coat) and all he could see was ‘a tiny figure on the ramp waving to me . . . at 6.30 am.’4 Someone making such an early start just for him would have touched Arthur immensely. No respectful romances resulted but he did bring back a black silk fan to use in his gondola.5 His trip to Kyoto and Nara was spent partly in the company of the writer Quentin Crewe and his wife Martha Sharp, introduced to him by Sutherland, as well as Hugh Dunphy who was then living in a Kyoto temple. Arthur loved the Zen gardens: the sensation of euphoria and doziness that his hay fever tablets produced only added to the charm.6 He spent time with the American gallery owner Edwin Hewitt, who gave up his life in the United States to live with a young Japanese boxer. Arthur asked Robert if he didn’t think that idea

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was too extraordinary for words, which does not suggest that it was part of his own planning. Hewitt took him out to a park in the freezing cold and rushed up and down pointing out what Arthur calls a few down and outs, asking which one Arthur wanted then shouting ‘What’s the matter with you for God’s sake? Don’t you want anything?’, while Arthur shrivelled with cold and embarrassment. Arthur also mentions a Teddy Boy saga that did not live up to his expectations. His guide was supposed to be the ‘Freddie Ashton of Japan who would be a wonderful and understanding cicerone [but was] more of a superannuated Bobby Helpmann’. Instead of a bar full of young men, they went to one full of gentlemen of their own mature years who kept buying Arthur beers and telling ‘Madame Butterfly-Helpmann-san . . . how sophisticated I appeared to be (a great compliment, it seems)’.7 Next, Arthur moved on to Hong Kong and stayed with Derek Adkins, who had been Cecil Beaton’s commanding officer in the RAF in Cairo. Arthur asked Myrtle in the gallery to obtain a print of Southampton Art Gallery’s pair of paintings by Abraham Solomon for Derek, which show a young sailor on his way to his first sea voyage and then returning ‘happy and gay’.8 Sadly his trip was cut short, abandoning plans for Singapore, Colombo and Karachi, because of his close friend Martyn Coleman’s sudden illness: Arthur rushed unhesitatingly from Bangkok to Venice to be with him. Not all of Arthur’s men friends were queer but it seems that few straight male friends could resist the opportunity to tease and flirt with him like schoolboys about his own sexual preferences. Robert Melville seems to have been a discreet exception. Quentin Crewe, a Belgravia neighbour in about 1960, sent Arthur a note to say ‘we long for you’ with a cutting from a magazine drawing his attention to a ‘penetratingly useful’ tool for gum massage: ‘Send today for your personal, hygienic VIBRA-FINGER .’ Oddly, this has been preserved in Arthur’s papers alongside a separate cutting for a similar phallic substitute which turns out to be a blood glucose meter.9 Arthur had a large number of very good women friends but he has, quite reasonably, been accused and found guilty of misogyny. He was very close to ‘Bumble’ Dawson, the theatre costume designer who was part of the Burra and Ker-Seymer circle, and who later married Gerald Corcoran, of the Lefevre Gallery. Arthur’s closest friend of all, man or woman, was Edna Fleming and

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she and her husband Marston were regular guests in Venice. Esther Clifford was a very important friend during the war but while she was a thoughtful historian with time to write (and go shopping for Arthur), the correspondence does not reveal any real intimacy and their friendship lessened post-war. Sheila Smart was a regular theatre companion. Their mutual friend Robin Dalton, the Australian writer and film producer, recalls an anecdote which she left out of her memoir. She took her second husband to meet Arthur at Pelham Crescent and, as soon as he saw him on the door step, Arthur exclaimed: ‘Ooh, he goes straight to my womb.’10 The published anecdote is that Arthur wanted to dress her handsome new husband up in a sailor suit and teach him a Cockney accent.11 A story survives in which Arthur generously offered to look after a woman friend’s daughter during the war and place her in the US under his protection.12 This is probably his god-daughter, Diana Connell, whose father took her instead to the South of France. Viva King was also a good friend. Her autobiography The Weeping and the Laughter is a breathless and amusing commentary on friends in a spectacular range from Aubrey Beardsley’s mother via Augustus John to Long John Baldry. Viva was married to Willie King, a scholar and curator of ceramics at the British Museum who drove a Rolls-Royce, and she preferred the company of homosexual men. Arthur and she had a wide range of close mutual friends from Elvira Barney (who bequeathed Viva her portrait by Eliot Hodgkin) to Roy Alderson. Herman Schrijver, the interior decorator, ‘my old Dutch’, was another mutual friend, close to Viva, Francis King and to Roy, whose work he often recommended to clients. Schrijver was part of a wonderful and odd triumvirate of other friends – Nancy Cunard and Ivy Compton-Burnett – and unlike Arthur, was bored by ‘fine’ furniture. He only gave intimate dinner parties for which he shared the cooking with his Italian housekeeper. He and Arthur shared a taste for luxury, however, and Schrijver’s clients on both sides of the Atlantic were very grand, including the Duke of Windsor. He dispensed practical advice on topics like Christmas presents and etiquette on Woman’s Hour. Viva was especially fond of Arthur’s friend Esmé Percy, the actor-director who had acted with Arthur (or rather vice versa) in the Oresteia in 1926. Percy was very close to his mother, which Viva phrases as being ‘a mad mum-lover’

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and adds that he was also a dog-lover, which explains in part the very curious memorial drinking fountain for dogs to him by the gentlemen’s lavatories in Hyde Park, made hideously ironic by the fact that his pet Alsatian had accidentally bitten out one of his eyes and he always acted with a glass eye from then on.13 Percy had studied with Bernhardt, seen both Irving and La Duse on stage and had known John Gielgud from the 1920s, when they had first acted together in a charity nativity play.14 After the war, Percy effectively became Gielgud’s assistant director and he was also a fine actor in Shakespeare and Shaw. Very good looking in his youth, he was once found tête-à-tête at home in Putney with Herbert Beerbohm Tree by Lady Tree, who reminded them that the port was on the sideboard but would her husband please ‘remember it is still adultery’.15 Viva wrote of her visits to stay in Venice several years running in Arthur’s ‘little house’ and of his strange character – albeit ‘affectionate and generous’ – which she thought she understood. ‘He never asked me two years running for fear I might take his invitation for granted, so I stayed in rooms near the Arsenale on alternative years.’16 But of course his guest list during the Biennale, which took place in the even years of the 1950s, would always be focused on art contacts and business. She emphasized how grandly Arthur entertained in London and Venice, expecting guests always to wear their best clothes and: there was something very attractive about this; it made one feel rich. There was so much gold about his home and our Christmas presents were wrapped in gold paper. Arthur, in his way, had the Midas touch.17 The Midas touch is not a blessing, though. Arthur himself acknowledged that he had ‘always been a push-over for bright, glittering gold’ and specified how much he disliked silver frames for paintings.18 Arthur’s will is a clear guide to the hierarchy in which he placed his friends and Edna was given the pick of his collection, able to choose one painting before anyone else. The other women mentioned in his will are his old nurse, who is given priority above all the other cash bequests, and two god-daughters. But Kenneth Partridge, the designer, and Derek Granger, a film and television producer, young men when they first knew Arthur in the late 1950s, reveal his misogyny.

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Both recall a day trip that Arthur made to Brighton to see them. His white hair by this time, in his mid-fifties, was rinsed a delicate blue; he tried on a hat and fox fur from a second-hand stall on the seafront, primped his coiffure then minced along the prom to amuse the boys. Less amusingly, he complained about a bus load of ladies who were crowding the steps of the Old Ship Hotel: ‘Oh God, all these slits around me.’19 Granger and Partridge both recalled his penchant for phoning grand lady friends while in the middle of sex: chatting inconsequentially to one of his beloved ‘ladies in Balenciaga’ while otherwise preoccupied with a sailor.20 This strange and somewhat feeble form of exhibitionism probably directly affected no-one involved and was just childish. His occasional viciousness towards unknown women is clearly remembered by other men and later, fatally so. The day trip to Brighton also left another cameo. The men all went to an antique shop where Kenneth Partridge knew the owner and, at the sound of the doorbell, a naked leg was seen to emerge from a bed at the back of shop. The shaky and embarrassed owner of both the leg and the shop then appeared and leant into the window display to bring out a small picture in which Arthur had professed interest, thinking it might be a little Christopher Wood painting. The whole display of glass, china and pictures collapsed. Arthur coolly said ‘That’s of no interest,’ and walked out.21 Granger, Partridge and later Nicky Haslam were all young men for whom invitations to Arthur’s regular parties, whether in Eaton Square or in Venice, were prized. Invitations to stay in Venice were confined to a very few close friends and people of influence, but there were always lots of more general invitations to lunch in his bathing tent on the lido or to dinner in the garden. Women house guests were obliged, if not rather relieved, to entertain themselves elsewhere for two evenings a week and warned not to come back too early while Arthur held his ‘boys’ nights’, cruising for sex. Bunny Roger repeats a phrase of Arthur’s – ‘no cunts before breakfast’ – and several people relate tales of assignations with sailors in port and payment with fake watches.22 Arthur’s London dinner parties had a mixture of the grand, the young, glamorous or impressionable, and a few sailors who were in town. In London, Jean-Yves Mock was amazed by the fact that Arthur had dainty lace tablecloths on his small round dining tables while John Mortimer believed he was eating

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off a solid gold dinner service in Eaton Square.23 This was the time when Arthur’s reputation as exotic and eccentric was established and the exoticism lay in some of the aspects of his decor in London. In Venice, the finishing touches were Venetian and the house had lots of images of the city in the lagoon as well as a dreamy, moonlit female nude by Delvaux. In London, many of his paintings were primitive works by Abyssinian or Persian artists and the effect was sumptuous and grand. Arthur retained his love for theatre throughout his life and backed a play called The Bird of Time at the Savoy in 1961 written by the travel writer Peter Mayne, starring Gladys Cooper. Two of his interests collided when Stephen Mitchell, a theatre producer much associated with Terence Rattigan, put on the play Grab Me a Gondola. Bobby Bishop had helped rewrite the story of a starlet hitching a ride on the Grand Canal during the Venice Film Festival, which Diana Dors had done as a publicity stunt in 1955. Rank Films borrowed Arthur’s own gondola and gondoliers for shots for a proposed film in 1958, perhaps at Bobby’s suggestion (see figure 21.1). The gondola apparently also had a cameo part in David Lean’s film Summertime, but Arthur did not have much time for its star Katharine Hepburn. However, she bought a Berkeley Sutcliffe cat picture from him and her assistant sneaked an example of one of her own paintings into the gallery for Arthur and Robert to see. Being so near Claridge’s worked well. Cary Grant was a regular enough visitor for Robert to complain that he never made up his mind. Throughout his life Arthur had a few close friends within the art world like Graham Sutherland, Alfred Hecht, Roy Alderson, Richard Chopping, John Hohnsbeen and David Carritt. Fellow collectors of his own age and comparable taste and wealth like Peter Watson and Wilfred Evill were only acquaintances or clients. Mostly, though, his friends were, as they always had been, from the queer cadres of theatre, fashion, journalism and interior design including Budge Fraser and Michael Shepherd, Martyn Coleman, Bunny Roger, Beverley Nichols and David Webster (chief executive of the Royal Opera House, who was also George Melly’s godfather). Another old chum was Major Donald Neville-Willing, who merited an obituary in The Daily Telegraph just because of his eccentricity: ‘Maj Donald Neville-Willing found his dentures a liability in romance. “I’m unlikely to be successful if the moon is bright.” ’24

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Figure 21.1 Horace Abrahams, photographer. Diana Dors in Arthur’s gondola during the Venice film festival, May 1955.

Donald Neville-Willing was born in 1901, the son of a Manchester cotton manufacturer who, ‘Never-willing’ liked to recall, never recovered from a prepschool report which said of young Donald, ‘Good at everything, but excels at sewing.’25 He appeared in a Cochrane review and then On with the Dance in 1925. During World War II (which he described as the best thing ever to happen to English homosexuals) he was sent, like Arthur, from New York to Cairo with the Ambulance Field Service. When he left he wrote to the AFS: My sudden departure for the British army prevented me from saying goodbye to my many friends in the AFS. I must say the joy of being commissioned was dimmed by the fact that I was leaving the AFS. I have been so extremely happy the last ten months and already miss everyone tremendously. Do, if you have space in your ‘amazing’ Bulletin, say goodbye to everyone for me – and tell everybody I expect them to look me up in New York. I am

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in the book – by that I mean the telephone book – and not under the name of ‘Nails’ or ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy,’ just plain as ever, Donald Donald Neville-Willing Lieutenant (Possibly the oldest in the World; Bronson Rumsey excepted) MERRA GHQ. MEF 26 He already knew Arthur well by then and later claimed that ‘we had a very amusing boyhood together just after the war’.27 Beverley Nichols once said of him that he elevated the tricky profession of publicity into genius and Arthur learned from him. At one point secretary to Edward James, the Major enjoyed a triumphant spell as entertainments manager of the Café de Paris from 1952: Noel Coward and Marlene Dietrich were among his star performers but financial problems closed the club down, in that incarnation at least, in 1957. His clients at one time or another included Tommy Steele, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Norman Hartnell and Christopher Stamp, manager of The Who. When Benjamin Britten was planning to visit America in June 1939, W.H. Auden recommended the George Washington Hotel on the corner of 23rd Street and Lexington Avenue, told him that he was expected and warned Britten not to forget the hyphen in the manager, Neville-Willing’s, name. Both those streets had been important places in Stella Jeffress’ early life. The Major was the only person, after Arthur’s death, to ask if he should write to his mother.28

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By the late 1950s, when Arthur makes posthumous guest appearances in many memoirs, his homosexuality was freely acknowledged and his manner – bitchiness, flamboyance, biting wit, frivolity and theatricality – was described as ‘eccentric’ when probably the more accurate adjective is ‘camp’. He did not have the true and original eccentricity attributed to the much better known of his circle such as Brian Howard, Evan Morgan, Lord Berners or Terence Gray. Instead, Arthur’s love of theatricality and ambivalence towards women was a queer manner where a kind of femininity was adopted and parodied as a commonplace, calling himself ‘Auntie’ and other men as ‘girls’. His unkind camp traits included being pernickety about manners and language and paying constant attention to others’ discomfort, but this was largely done for attention rather than for cruelty. His camp was a tease, switched on and off, and others in his circle used the same technique both with and against him. The very correct and distinguished Arthur Tilden Jeffress of Arthur Jeffress (Pictures) wrote formal business letters, often witty and extended but rarely gossipy unless to Robert. No letters to lovers, just a few notes to intimate friends, survive although Robert preserved a few written to Arthur. He certainly took risks when he was in Venice by having sex under bridges, walking hand in hand with two sailors while wearing an opera cloak and picking up sailors while taking coffee with contessas in the Piazza San Marco, according to Bunny Roger who was often left to entertain the ladies.1 However, Arthur made one brave, political gesture when, in 1954, Peter Wildeblood, Lord Montagu and Michael Pitt-Rivers were successfully prosecuted at Winchester Crown Court for ‘conspiracy to incite certain male 247

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persons to commit serious offences with male persons’. Arthur contributed to funds for the defence at this trailblazing trial, gave a dinner party at which Somerset Maugham was his guest and begged him (theatrically, the anecdote adds) to make a public statement or write to The Times in support of the defendants. Montagu had been Arthur’s guest in Venice. Maugham angrily refused, threw his brandy glass into the fireplace and walked out.2 There are a few odd exchanges in letters which imply that at some point Arthur might have been threatened by blackmail himself, but he calmly involved Robert Melville in the correspondence about which Robert had been suspicious. Arthur was clear that the man was unknown to him and arranged, as requested, for paints to be sent to this inmate in Bedford prison. ‘It would be flouting Christian charity to ignore the letter’ but he did think the allusions to Oscar Wilde, Michelangelo and Eros were pretentious and in poor taste. Clearly these were also overtly homosexual allusions and Arthur knew Robert was fully aware of the implication and of Arthur’s own sexuality. But he feels no need to explain himself beyond that reference to poor taste, and his coolness makes it plain that there is no blackmail here.3 One of the last letters sent to Arthur was from Roy Alderson, back from Corfu, and that does hint at an awkward situation, possibly blackmail or other nastiness: ‘Dearest Zit [. . .] Just to warn you – be careful of answering press Button A on the telephone. Its [sic] Mick again. So far I’ve dodged it.’4 It is not plain exactly who, if any, were Arthur’s long-term lovers apart from Budge Fraser, Gerald Mitchell and John Deakin. Malcolm (surname unknown), who joined HMS Mercury at Portsmouth in July 1954, but meanwhile had a part-time job in Lyon’s, sent a message via Robert, who had just come back from Venice, saying he wished he had been with them all and sending love.5 Richard Blake Brown was a good friend from Cambridge, part of the Cottington circle with Gerald and Norman Hartnell, but only a friend. Blake Brown was at one point chaplain on HMS Renown, later a prison chaplain, and a novelist in the 1930s and 1950s. Arthur wrote to him as ‘Dear Cantharides’ (Spanish Fly, again) and signed himself Dirndl. Tim Brooke and Arthur certainly appear intimate if photographs are anything to go by, but John Hohnsbeen insisted that Arthur never had sex with friends. Hohnsbeen and Bobby Bishop were certainly his close confidants.

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Hohnsbeen also maintained that Arthur frequently picked up four or five sailors a night in Venice, often buying them fake watches and enjoying the services of gondoliers on land or under bridges.6 Phrases from the character that Arthur inspired in The Firewalkers sound like direct quotes: ‘But you’re so indiscriminate – your range is as wide as an Aga.’7 The narrator is forever relied upon to tell unwelcome soldiers or sailors who Cecil/Arthur has picked up previously that they have got the wrong address, ‘always making dates with what he would call “monsters” whom he would then have to avoid’.8 Nonetheless Cecil claims: ‘Wet or fine, rain or shine, goose-girl makes it a principle never to put anyone off. I haven’t many principles but that is one of them.’9 Goose-girl, fairy tales aside, is rhyming slang derived from ‘goose and duck’. Bunny Roger recalled that Arthur had been involved in a scandal with the Black Watch when a colour sergeant revealed that he had given him £100 in return for sex; others in the regiment were also involved. Bunny recalled rather expansively and creatively that the whole regiment was then sent to Hong Kong as a direct result. Arthur was successfully extricated by a barrister and then, according to Bunny, left London and acquired his first house in Venice. This sets the tale in the late 1930s, when Arthur was still with Deakin, but Bunny is vague about dates. John Hohnsbeen, who only knew Arthur in the 1950s, was aware of the story.10 This story may lie behind the Chopping portrait. Whichever regiment it was (certainly not the Black Watch; maybe the Royal Scots who did set off for Hong Kong about then) there must be some truth in it and there is no doubt that guardsmen – and then later in life, sailors – were Arthur’s great predilection. He told Robin Dalton that sailors had given him more pleasure in life than anything or anyone else, and his will was to reflect this in a lasting and very significant fashion.11 Bunny Roger was shocked to observe Arthur approach a guardsman and whisper in his ear while he was taking part in Trooping the Colour, but knew full well that Arthur propositioned and paid for sex with soldiers and sailors throughout most of his life.12 One of the pre-war routines for picking up guardsmen was to leave a message in a cake shop near Beauchamp Place in South Kensington and Arthur’s butler was well aware of what to do. The usual cost was £5 although Arthur was remembered as someone who tried to get away with paying £4, opening himself up to comments of ‘Running short, are

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we?’ and ‘I’ve heard you can get it for half a crown in the park’, and he always coyly tucked the notes into the young man’s pocket rather than handing over the payment directly.13 He was once approached by someone in a pub who asked if they had met before, then went through a range of other wellestablished pickup lines. Arthur, uncertain what to do in this passive role, bought the man about eight pints of beer before he was bluntly asked to make up his mind about what he really wanted and did he not remember that they ‘once had had a fuck in Hampshire’.14 He also told Loraine Conran, while trying to persuade him to buy a painting for Southampton, that the words ‘what’s it worth, chum?’ were ominous words that he often heard in another context.15 The risks of this kind of encounter were great. To seek sexual partners in the street or in a park, or simply to have sex with another man at home could lead to arrest and prosecution followed by a prison term of up to ten years as a result of the Criminal Law Amendment Act (1885), in which any act of ‘gross indecency’ between men in public or private was an offence. There was an intense increase in the policing of homosexual activity and, from 1944, arrests tripled under a devoutly Roman Catholic Director of Public Prosecutions. While his friends can never quite decide whether Arthur only liked the muscular lower ranks or had a parallel interest that, so to speak, embraced guardsmen, Arthur was attracted to men who bore no resemblance to him physically, socially or temperamentally and he admired, as well as fancied, the British Tommy and Jack Tar as well as willowy, athletic blonds. Even John Deakin fitted into this desire that arose from envy, admiration and a profound wish to belong elsewhere. Some of the Jeffress family identified the marriages of his parents and brother in much the same way, in which both Albert and Randolph, from apparently very conventional families, chose wives who were of a different social standing and with – in Jeffress terms – shady pasts. Arthur reveals nothing about his sexual life in his wartime letters to Esther, which is hardly surprising. The ‘Taffeta Twelve’ might have included sexual partners, but he is more likely to have sought closeness within Other Ranks. When he returned from the war, Arthur revised his life. No longer with Deakin, he gave up his country house, turning first Pelham Crescent and then Eaton Square and Venice into homes rather than pieds-à-terre. His homes offered no concession to anyone else’s taste and became showrooms that

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extended his work as a dealer and stages with the perfect props for lavish hospitality. In Venice, the pattern was repeated but house guests on the small, serene islands in the lagoon were more carefully chosen. In The Firewalkers, there are several references to Cecil Provender/Arthur’s capricious nature as host: There were some young lieutenants from the Camp devouring plates of roast lamb that was probably roast goat, they all gazed at us with a kind of solemn astonishment as Cecil unpacked one delicacy after another: brique and foie gras sandwiches, Scotch eggs, cold chicken and ham, russian salad, chocolate mousse, and Alpine strawberries and cream. ‘You’d think they’d never seen any food in their lives,’ Cecil grunted. ‘What manners!’ But then, in one of his unaccountable fits of generosity, he passed over to them a whole carton of sandwiches with nothing but a shrug and his small, bitter smile. In return we were sent a carafe of Naoussa wine, excellent in its raw astringency, which Cecil sipped and then proclaimed to be: ‘Vinegar, my dear – just vinegar.’16 Cecil/Arthur is later described in much more forensic detail, although the character may not have liked this particular guest any more than the guest had liked his host: It was rarely that one felt one was in complete contact with Cecil for more than five minutes at a stretch; he had the restlessness of a person waiting for a train that never comes, and his restlessness used to transmit itself to others so that when one stayed with him in his luxurious villa in Florence one found oneself switching the radiogram off and on, picking up and putting down a number of books which one never finished reading, and standing for long, vacant intervals on the balcony overlooking the Fiesole road as if in expectation of a guest more amusing than those already gathered around one.17 Robin Dalton describes exactly what it was like to be his guest, having stayed with him twice in Venice. She still remembers with wonder that a maid (Arthur’s housekeeper Alieta, in fact) always stood by the bath waiting to wrap the female guest in the towel she held over her arm. Toothpaste was squeezed out ready on

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to the toothbrush and a little decanter of whisky was placed by each bed. Arthur is usually remembered as a wonderful, but very bossy, host. One night at dinner he insisted that every guest kiss or make a fuss of his latest dog, which was brought round on a cushion to each reluctant guest in turn.18 This was the little mongrel named La Dolce Vita (by Alieta), after Fellini’s 1960 film. A regular guest in Venice at that period was Bobby Bishop who, in the early 1950s, was living in 34a Shepherd Market (an address wonderfully mistranscribed on a website as 34a Ducki Doris) and by 1955 was sharing a flat in Chester Row with actors Coral Browne and her gay husband Philip Pearman. Bobby was blond, slim and athletic just like Tim Brooke or Anton Dolin, the type which Bunny Roger recalled that Arthur liked best but usually admired from a distance. He was born in 1927 in Cambridge and had been an actor, first in rep at Oxford, later appearing in a late night review called First Edition at the New Watergate Theatre club off the Strand with Beryl Reid and Nicholas Parsons in March 1954.19 He sang a song called The Valet and the Governess, a satirical reference to Britten’s Turn of the Screw which opened later that year at La Fenice in Venice.20 Bobby started his career at the Cambridge Arts Theatre about 1945 alongside Roger Moore in Androcles and the Lion, in which the hero was played by Hedley Briggs, with whom Arthur had appeared in the Oresteia in the same city before Bobby was born.21 Bobby worked at the gallery where his good looks attracted some dealers and probably many clients, but he was more active than merely decorative. He often went on holiday with Arthur between 1954 and 1961, driving with him from Rome to Venice in 1954, then staying for three weeks in the summer of 1956 in Venice, Capri and Positano (‘Bobby will tell you of the stay here, which has, on the whole, been rather fun, tho’ I am not sure he really enjoyed it as he missed Venice so much’).22 They had mutual chums in Beverly Nichols and Godfrey Winn and Bobby had first visited the house in Venice with Hermione Gingold, pretending he already knew Arthur.23 While it is not clear exactly what he did at the gallery or in Arthur’s life, there was a very deep affection between them. Arthur bequeathed Bobby his entire group of works by E. Box which looks like a very intimate gesture, but Bobby had hoped (as did John Deakin) to inherit a much larger and more valuable proportion of the art collection. Bobby later denied, with amusement,

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any suggestion that they had ever been lovers although he accepted that most people thought they were.24 Arthur, however, complained, rather explicitly, that while Bobby might have sex with him mid-week he was doing the same with a woman at the weekends.25 The woman in question was the actress Beryl Reid. One of Arthur’s obsessions as a host was that his guests should adhere very strictly to the household’s timetable so that neither the staff, fellow guests nor, much more importantly, Arthur were put out in any way. In July 1956 he wrote to Robert Melville: Tell Bobby that Theodora Benson arrived yesterday by bus from Milan. She looked up the air time-table and realised at once that the time of arrival was quite out of the question for any host! I do not envy him his 4 hour wait before I open the door to him here! [. . .] Richard Chopping flies away tomorrow night. He too will walk the streets for several hours, poor dear, as his plane leaves at 2.30am.26 The obligation to wait four hours until Arthur was prepared to open the door to him seems particularly harsh, as Bobby had recently been very ill. Arthur, who often refers formally to him by his whole name to avoid confusion with Robert’s daughter Bobbie, had been worried earlier in the early summer of 1956 because: I have not heard from Bobby Bishop since I came away, although I sent a cable on arrival and wrote off a few days later. Perhaps he is not allowed to write from his new place which I am told is rather strict in its regime.27 Bobby had been in the King Edward VII Hospital in Midhurst recovering from TB and Beryl Reid was very tickled that Malcolm Allison, the handsome footballer, was there at the same time.28 The Queen Mother had also visited, which would have been the culmination of several fantasies at once for Arthur, who adored her. In 1954, just back from New York, Arthur described: a lovely week. I stood in the Mall on Monday to see the Queen Mum ride by, and did she look a treat. I cried of course, I always do. And then yesterday [. . .] she drove past the gallery on her way to Clarence House [. . .] and so we all waved and cried again. Bless her.29

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In 1958, Bobby was with Arthur in Venice once more but very unwell. Arthur dined at Peggy Guggenheim’s with Jean Cocteau, who then came to Arthur’s for tea, but the only report back to Robert that summer was that: Hugh Chisholm [Arthur and he had been in the same AFS Unit] and new millionaire wife Rosemary Vanderbilt have rented a vast apartment on the Grand Canal. I went there for dinner last night. Never have I seen so many footmen or so much gold plate, but, oh, the weariness of it all. I was the first to leave, dropping with ennui, so suppose that will be the last invitation I’ll get in that direction. Ruth and Zachary arrive tomorrow and I am giving a birthday dinner for the former in the evening, but I’ve asked Nancy Mitford and have suddenly realised, with a cold shudder down the spine, that practically everyone present will be american [sic] and she can barely bring herself to be polite to them. Bobby will have to work overtime, I’m thinking.30 Bobby Bishop left the gallery to write songs and then created an ITV series called The Most Likely Girl on ITV in 1957 for Beryl Reid. He wrote a resignation letter to Arthur in December 1956 which ends: ‘Will you please save one evening next week for a Christlemearse blow-out? . . . . IloveyouitstrueyesIdo, Boosh’.31 They remained close friends and still travelled together until Bobby moved to New York as a writer, later reminiscing expansively and very warmly about Arthur. In turn, Arthur clearly adored him. Bobby wrote frankly about his disappointment that Arthur did not remember him more generously in his will and described a seance in which Arthur appeared to apologise for not providing for him for life as he had intended due to jealousy of Beryl Reid (although the spirit remembered her incorrectly as Hermione Baddeley).32 Arthur’s other close male friends and travelling companions included Roy Alderson, Martyn Coleman and Ronald Gurney. Roy spent the last summer of Arthur’s life with him; Martyn inherited his Venice house and Ronald, possibly his last young companion, was given a bibelot in his will along with gifts to Arthur’s other close friends. In May 1961, the final trip, Ronald Gurney drove him to Venice in his own small car. Earlier Arthur had written rather plaintively to him that he was sure he had selected the wrong ties as a gift (for Valentine’s Day?) from Beale & Inman and urged to go in himself to choose.33 Gurney was the son of a diplomat, sixteen years younger than Arthur; he would later become

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involved in The Monument Historic Buildings Trust. Most important of all, he had been a second lieutenant in the Black Watch, aged nineteen. Arthur also extracted him from some financial problem and a month before the trip to Venice took him to visit his friends John and Myfanwy Piper. John Piper first made drawings in Venice during spring 1959 on a commission from Arthur and continued to paint and draw in the city over the years. In 1973 he designed the sets for Benjamin Britten’s opera Death in Venice, for which Myfanwy Piper wrote the libretto which had many echoes of Arthur’s last days. Roy Alderson, nicknamed ‘Rowena’ by Edna Fleming, was one of Arthur’s frequent travel companions and spent part of the summer of 1961 with him on Corfu, the last holiday of Arthur’s life. It is not clear when or how they met but it was a long-term friendship, and they probably met during the mid 1930s as part of the Bunny Roger circle. Arthur and Roy were not lovers, but rather chums on adventures in search of sex. Roy was born in 1915, and his father killed in action just one year later. His mother ran a fashionable antiques shop in Chelsea with Roy, who later became a highly successful trompe l’oeil mural painter. He also painted in a fey watercolour style, including Toto’s terrace on the island of Pannerea, Italy, with Stromboli in the background (1971). He too was friends with Ronald Gurney, and took him to a ball with Viva King while Arthur was making his fateful journey from Venice to Paris in September 1961. Roy Alderson died in Trinidad, in 1991. Martyn Coleman received the most unexpectedly generous personal bequest under the term of Arthur’s will. They had been friends since the 1930s, and often travelled together, but were not lovers. However, Coleman lived in Venice for many years, latterly in a flat that overlooked the exact spot on the Grand Canal where Arthur’s gondoliers would await him, and acted as a kind of caretaker when Arthur was absent from Venice. Martin Coleman Whiteman was born five years after Arthur, the son of a successful ironmonger in Worcester who had previously worked in a pawnbroker’s. One of his relations left him a substantial amount of money on condition Martin took his middle name as surname; he adjusted his given name, too. Coleman became a naturalized US citizen after settling in New York in 1947 at the Woodward Hotel on Broadway (now The Dream Hotel), where he was manager.

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In 1939, he had been living in Eaton Terrace with Richard Kitchin, with whom he moved to America, arriving in California on Christmas Eve, 1940. When Arthur saw him there, he thought little of his Californian friends who included Rogers Brackett, later lover and mentor of James Dean. Coleman began to write plays, including How Now Hecate, premiered at the Dallas Theatre in 1947, a very feeble derivative of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit which had appeared as a film in 1945. Coward took the title of his play from Keats; Coleman took his (and the title is the best bit of the play by far) from Shakespeare, unwisely quoting the Scottish play. Martyn enjoyed more success with Genie in a Bottle in 1948 and, in 1951, wrote Cranford, adapted from Mrs Gaskell’s novel, with the Victorian authoress appearing as a character to introduce each act. It is still frequently performed today by amateur groups but theatre cannot have provided Coleman with an adequate income, so that first bequest in his life must have been substantial too. Before 1939, Coleman had been proprietor of, ironically, the Broadway Hotel in the Cotswolds with Michael Yates. The village of Broadway had attracted artists and writers – often Americans, like Whistler and Henry James – for decades and was at the heart of the Arts and Crafts revival, but by the 1930s it was ‘loud with bright young people who had just arrived from town and the Tatler in gamboge and vermillion sports cars’.34 Arthur and Coleman probably met then; Bunny Roger certainly knew him from these Cotswold days. There was a kind of salon there around the senior American stage actress Mary Anderson, who had performed at the Lyceum during Henry Irving’s era. She settled in England after marriage to Antonio Fernando de Navarro, an American sportsman and barrister of Basque extraction, who was, moreover, a Papal Privy Chamberlain of the Sword and Cape. A commonplace book describes one of the sights of London: ‘the church in Leicester Square where Mme Navarro, between the matinee and evening performances, used to pray to be delivered from the attentions of King Edward VII.’35 With that kind of pedigree, it is hardly surprising that she is believed to be one of the models for characters in the Lucia novels of E.F. Benson, either the operatic Olga Bracely or even Lucia herself. That alone would have tempted Arthur down to Broadway. The Navarros settled at Court Farm in Broadway until her death in 1940, the year Coleman left one village called Broadway for another.

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Martyn Coleman was painted in 1936 by Glyn Philpot, the year before the artist’s death, in a commission by his friend Michael Yates. It was later owned by Elton John and used by Penguin for a cover of Somerset Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge.36 Coleman’s boyish face with its soft expression showed vulnerability and much petulance and, years later, he is instantly recognizable from the same expression in a photograph taken with his good friend Peggy Guggenheim. He and Arthur regularly dined with her as Venetian neighbours and Arthur and Peggy often mention Coleman in their exchange of letters. She said he always gave her the best advice in matters of taste and advised her to create the canal-side loggia to her palazzo.37 Coleman was also an amateur artist and one of his works hung in Arthur’s Venice house. Peggy Guggenheim gave a Thanksgiving party in November 1955 and her guests included Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, who were on their first visit to Italy. They renewed their friendship with Martyn Coleman, who they found to be anti-American; he had let his British citizenship lapse and wanted to live nowhere but Italy.38 Oddly, Arthur tells Peggy Guggenheim that he has not heard from Coleman for a long time just days after he had confirmed the will in which he had made him such a major beneficiary: ‘How is Martyn? I never hear from him at all these days.’39 Clearly, he and Arthur were extremely close friends, as revealed by the way in which Arthur rushed to his aid when he was taken ill. While Arthur was on his Far East tour in January 1959 he received a letter from Marinko Kolic, the Yugoslavian with whom Coleman was then living in Venice, which told him that his friend had had a stroke, following TB. Arthur immediately cancelled his trip, and: quickly decided that the best thing was for me to go straight to him and see if I can help in any way at all such as, perhaps, getting him into a better room, or something. Poor thing, even if there isn’t anything that I can do, it will surely be a comfort for him to see a friendly face.40 Coleman lived in several Venice apartments until he settled into his flat at 2724 San Marco in 1955. He and Peggy Guggenheim fell out by the late 1960s, bitching about each other.41 By 1961, he was short of money and always in poor health; Arthur’s gesture to his old friend was exceedingly generous. If Coleman

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knew that he was a beneficiary, then how he behaved between his own illness and Arthur’s death is an interesting question. John Hohnsbeen who, like Bunny Roger, never liked Coleman, recalled that the two friends had fallen out before Arthur’s sudden death.42 Rumour has it that Coleman spread unpleasant stories about Arthur afterwards, but the truth was sad and unpleasant enough.

23 Life in Venice

When Arthur appears in memoirs, as he so often does, it is plain that, the younger the writer and therefore the later in Arthur’s life that they knew each other, the more highly polished his or her tale seems to be. The story does not always maintain accuracy but John Mortimer’s pen portrait in Clinging to the Wreckage does, like Cecil in The Firewalkers, ring true and gives a flavour of some of Arthur’s Italian dolce vita. Mortimer became a friend and gallery client and, with his novelist wife Penelope Mortimer, moved to Positano in 1956 to a house owned by the American painter Peter Ruta, who introduced them to Arthur. Ruta and Arthur had certainly known each other since at least 1949, dining at Peggy Guggenheim’s. Arthur gave his postal address to Robert as care of Ruta but he and Bobby Bishop also stayed at the artist Bruno Marquhardt’s house for at least part of that visit; Bobby was pining for Venice. Mortimer describes Arthur at length and recalls a humiliation which Arthur orchestrated. Mortimer had accidentally left a pair of old swimming trunks on the roof of Arthur’s cabana on the Lido. The Mortimers were invited to dinner the following winter with a couple of dozen ‘murmuringly sophisticated people’ in Eaton Square. Arthur rang a bell which summoned a footman with a serving dish under a heavy gold cover. Bowing to Mortimer, the footman lifted the cover and presented the moth-eaten Jantzens.1 Mortimer tells two further tales, but how much of a joke either was at the time remains unclear. On one occasion, the housekeeper made them a dish of ‘Il Hotpot Lancastero’, which Mortimer surmised was because of their socialist – therefore obviously Northern – politics. Next, Arthur cheerfully announced 259

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that a honeymoon couple was coming to stay: ‘ “Then you’ll have someone to discuss baby food with, won’t you, dears?” ’2 It is impossible to tell exactly who was in the know when the new husband dramatically appeared after dinner dressed in one of his new wife’s evening gowns and fully made-up. The subsequent evenings are not described. Another day ‘of all people the Oswald Mosleys came to luncheon’.3 The report to Robert suggests that Arthur had never met them before. Arthur says that ‘the poor Mortimers: they looked as though they had swallowed very unripe apples all through the meal’.4 It seems strange that anybody, but least of all the notorious leader of the British Union of Fascists, would just turn up as a surprise to their host, but perhaps Nancy Mitford just brought her sister and brother-in-law, unannounced. The press certainly knew. Arthur brightly informs Robert (who did not respond): I’m forced to confess that he was so charming and amusing and informative that I was able to close my mind altogether to the thought of the gaschamber to which he would have inevitably sent me had things gone differently.5 Noblesse obliged. This show of ‘good’ manners was trumped in 1961 by Arthur’s fatal rudeness. Arthur, his house and guests were looked after by the housekeeper and cook Alieta Zampieron. She took care of the dog La Dolce Vita (whose name she had chosen) and the aviary, as well as guests or any lodgers when Arthur was absent. The house had a walled garden with a large stone table, several smaller metal tables and chairs for al fresco dinner parties. There was a summerhouse, painted in a trompe l’oeil style and fitted out with a bed and other furniture, an aviary and stone figures of the four seasons, a stone snail and tortoise. Inside, there was a large entrance hall, kitchen, a ground floor bathroom full of paintings like every other room, and a dining room panelled with Venetian glass and ten chairs upholstered in red velvet. Arthur’s bedroom was also on the ground floor, opening out into the garden, and functioning as his private drawing-room. Delvaux’s cool, blue Siren in Full Moonlight hung there opposite one of Pagliacci’s hot, red Churches in Flames.

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Figure 23.1 Photographer unknown. The garden of Arthur’s house in Venice with his aviary and small dog, La Dolce Vita.

On the first floor was a reception room in the Luigi Filipi style, Arthur’s favourite 1830s period, furnished in yellow. On the same floor was the principal guest room, also with yellow walls and a queen-sized gondola-shaped bed. Here hung several paintings, including two attributed to the late Baroque painter Magnasco. Next was a guest bathroom and smaller bedroom furnished in silvered pinewood in the Venetian grotto style and an old, single-barrelled carbine to use as a coat hanger. There was a rather poorly furnished bedroom in the attic, possibly for Alieta. On the day of the inventory, at least, thirty-six pink glass bowls for strawberries were stored there. Two couples could be entertained in style while others stayed in the single bedroom or in the summer house. In 1956, Roy Alderson arrived unexpectedly, en route to the Near East which, knowing Arthur’s punctiliousness, shows the closeness of their friendship. Arthur told Robert that the garage on the mainland at first refused Roy’s trompe l’oeil taxi until he convinced them that it was not a child’s hearse.6 Arthur’s house guests at the time were Anne

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Figure 23.2 Photographer unknown. The downstairs bedroom in Arthur’s Venice house which opened onto the garden.

Scott-James, Gavin Henderson, Kenneth Harris and Richard Chopping. Arrangements must have been complex and Alieta probably had a refuge nearby to which she could escape at night. Arthur’s own bedroom had a lavishly carved and gilded bedhead with red and gold damask coverings, as captured by Sutherland in his portrait. This was another room grand enough for parties and there is a lovely photo of Peggy Guggenheim sitting on the bed chatting with Herbert Read and others during one of Arthur’s Biennale soirées. For many of his acquaintances, Arthur was as much a Venetian resident as an English one. He wrote to The Daily Telegraph to complain about tourists in Venice as so many expats have done since. In 1957 he had air-conditioning installed upstairs but his greatest luxury, and

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probably the thing for which he is best remembered, was his gondola with the traditional complement of two gondoliers, now an indulgence. Arthur’s gondola did not have a cabin but was decorated with carved dolphins. As was so often the case, Arthur persisted in a fashion that was fast becoming very out of date but gave him style and notoriety. Peggy Guggenheim might have had a real palazzo and wealth, a Grand Canal view and a fabulous art collection but she eventually had only one gondolier; by choice, of course, and she already had a motorboat. Her gondola, commissioned in 1956 and, like Arthur’s, originally equipped with a staff of two, was later donated to the Museo Storico Navale: her gondolier dressed in the conventional white trousers and striped T-shirt. So did Arthur’s gondoliers, sometimes as photographs attest, but visitors always reported that his freelance gondoliers, Fausto Cadoni and Bruno Angelotti, wore yellow and white uniforms during the day (apparently traditional wedding outfits) which clearly only came out for these special, memorable occasions and created a legend. These same colours were used for his cabana, a glamorous beach-hut with suncanopy on the Lido, rented from the Grand Hotel. Arthur used Fausto’s brother Luciano Cadoni, who was porter there, as his homme d’affaires, to book train tickets and the like, to the end of his life. Fausto also often sorted out practical matters, even lending Arthur a suit on one occasion.7 Each morning without fail in good weather the gondola would meet Arthur and guests on the Grand Canal at the end of the Corte del Santissimo, and take them to the Danieli to catch a less romantic public vaporetto over to the Lido to swim, sunbathe and be seen.8 The Lido, with its formal ranks of cabanas lavishly furnished and decorated with flowers, reeked of Ambre Solaire and formality. Arthur’s gondoliers would later bring a hot lunch provided by Alieta, serve it on Fornasetti china, and share the meal and the siesta in their swimsuits. The great Venetian hostess Anna Maria Cicogna also went daily to the Lido and served a hot lunch to her guests (or rather her footmen did) but she always travelled in her own motorboat, the Cleopatra. Yet sometimes she asked Arthur to send his famous gondola to Santa Lucia station to collect her guests. Life in Venice in the season involved a great deal of partying, which in London Arthur affected to hate but in Venice he could always glide to soirées in his gondola, leave in style and never stay late, transported by his gondoliers wearing their

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Figure 23.3 The postcard provided by Arthur so guests could find his house in Ramo del Forno. They were given strict instructions about the times at which they might arrive or leave.

black and silver evening uniform, decorated with a silver armband and badge. Arthur designed this pure silver closed hand, viewed from the back, with his initials, ATJ, embossed.9 The heat and crowds of Venice became oppressive in July and August, so Arthur often went to the coast near Naples or in Sicily. In summer 1956, he went to Rome and the ‘Etruscan country’ with Coleman after his soggiorno in Naples and Positano with Bobby. His visit to Positano, when the Mortimers and Tennessee Williams were also there, was recalled in a letter to Christopher Kininmonth (who had produced a book called Rome Alive with John Deakin in 1951): Why all the fa-al-de-foo about meeting Bob Ullman . . . Anyway, now that you have met him, I hope you’ll go often to Tre Ville. It’s the only really civilised ‘grand’ house I know of on that coast, the bathing is bliss, and the food usually superb. So what more can one ask?10 Robert Ullman’s house Tre Ville was named after the (in fact) four separate villas that he, an early theatrical PR agent, turned into one glorious villa which

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later became the home of his friend Franco Zeffirelli. Arthur also added that he had made ‘one tripette to Verona for the open-air opera’ (seeing Nabucco, which he described to Robert Melville rather strangely as ‘fun’) and that he had spent an evening in Positano with Arnolf and Wilhelmine Keyserling. He was a philosopher and a follower of Gurdjieff. I do indeed know the Keyserlings, and last year went to a rather devastating ‘musicale’ where a jejeune Paganini-type threw himself about in such gyrations that I feared he might go over the precipice at any minute and everyone squirmed and sweated in the heat which was incredible, though I had taken the precaution of placing myself close to the large tub of ice in which were floating a fiasco or two of wine-type wine. It was handy for me as I simply removed my sandals and soaked my burning feet therein. The wine was reputed to be particularly fruity and vinous that evening.11 It was probably that summer when he called in to see John Deakin, just outside Rome, showing that they remained well aware of each other’s whereabouts. Bobby recalled Arthur’s greeting was: ‘Oh! Whatever happened to all those pretty teeth I gave you?!’ Sadly, Deakin’s retort is not recorded.12 Arthur used Peter Ruta’s address as his poste restante in Positano but the Mortimers believed – wanted to or were led to believe – that he was staying, with his guest Tennessee Williams, at the legendary Villa Cimbrone. This had been restored thoroughly at the beginning of the twentieth century by its English owner Ernest Beckett with mock-Gothic, Moorish and Venetian architectural elements; Vita Sackville-West (allegedly Beckett’s daughter) is said to have advised on alterations to the glorious garden. A stream of visitors, especially the Bloomsbury Group, came to the villa during the Beckett family’s ownership, while Greta Garbo and her then-lover, the conductor Leopold Stokowski, stayed at the villa in the late 1930s. It has a ‘Belvedere of Infinity’ and Gore Vidal, who lived from the 1970s in La Rondinaria (built even more precipitously below Villa Cimbrone for one of Beckett’s other daughters) described the view as the most beautiful in the world and it is easy to see why. In parallel to this Italian Bloomsbury, there was always a crowd of the more louche, artistic and less wealthy in the area, which is why Ruta, who continued to exhibit until 2015, chose Positano. His father, Walther Franke-Ruta, had been among the founders

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of the Dada Cabaret in Leipzig in the 1920s and Ruta emigrated to New York, where he studied painting. Following the avant-garde’s Grand Tour itinerary, he studied in Mexico and in Venice where he met the Guggenheim circle. Positano was also home to a number of exiles from Nazi Germany and, from the early 1950s, it was an art colony and always a homosexual haven. John Hohnsbeen, Peggy Guggenheim’s curatorial assistant, later rented a house there and Arthur certainly found at least one lover amongst the young artists.13 Ruta recalls that Arthur was not really the Positano type: ‘he preferred rarified London society, Lord Runciman, Lord Kinross, Head of the Irish Library in Dublin [actually National Gallery] and the like . . .’14 Peter Ruta’s widow recalls that Arthur persuaded Ruta to send his daughter to school at Dartington.15 Arthur often went to Rome on gallery business, as he championed so many Italian artists. His other favoured destination was Sicily, where he chased warmth in the early months of the year. After his New Year 1956 trip to Egypt, he went to Taormina again in February and used his friend Giovanni Panarello as his poste restante. Panarello was a dealer in art and antiques whose shop on Corso Umberto was a rich mix of ancient, baroque and modern sculpture. Arthur regularly bought from him, including a group of six birdcages all in one go: two mosques, a pagoda, a casino, a house, and hardest to resist, a gondola. He planned to use these to house even more of the exotic birds he kept in his Venice aviary but it never happened. Arthur sometimes spent Christmas in Taormina and was back again late in 1956 at the Grand Hotel Timeo with Martyn Coleman. Erica Brausen and Toto Koopman increasingly spent a great deal of their time in Sicily, too, building from 1959 onwards an idyllic estate out of six smaller white cottages on the northern island of Panarea, christening their creation Le Case dei Sette Mulini. Each building was painted white with blue woodwork, and an intertwining series of descending terraces, paths and beds of bougainvillea, rosemary, jasmine and plumbago provided glorious views over to Stromboli. Naturally, Arthur was never one of their guests. He wrote regularly to the artist Anna Mayerson (who had had an exhibition at the Hanover with Peter Barker-Mill and lived in Taormina in the 1950s) care of Panarello and she replied warmly. Truman Capote was often in Taormina in the 1950s and knew both Anna Mayerson and Panarello: everyone did.

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Panarello was also a friend of the mysterious Miss Harriet Brown, who visited Taormina for nearly thirty years from 1950, often in the company of diet guru Gayelord Hauser. Miss Brown was Greta Garbo incognita. An article notes that only on one occasion did she appear publicly at one of Gayelord Hauser’s parties and that was ‘to meet an English art-dealer from London, a close friend of Garbo’.16 It was obviously not Arthur, although he did know Gayelord, but it is very likely to have been Erica as she and Garbo’s lover Mercedes d’Acosta had both been connected to Meher Baba. Truman Capote and Arthur were certainly not close, but Capote spent time in Venice with Gielgud and Beaton and thus had plenty of opportunities to observe Arthur in his element. Gielgud describes his own 1959 visit, based at the Cipriani and giving a recital at La Fenice. He also described: ‘the beach that likes to be visited’ [. . .] extraordinary cruising grounds with ‘nests’ in long grass and occasional gun emplacements (now empty and forlorn) which give excellent vantage points for voyeurism. People walk up and down in their bathing slips (mostly with enormous bulging erections) smiling and beckoning and disappearing at intervals in to the undergrowth [. . .] in the full glare of the afternoon sun.17 Truman Capote simply said ‘Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go’,18 and shared Arthur’s affection for Harry’s Bar. Arthur’s gondoliers took him there on most Venetian evenings for a couple of Bellinis before dinner, and he is still remembered there over fifty years after his death. Arthur’s Venetian house was burgled in July 1959. He was asleep but the heat woke him up at 4.20 am and he found the garden door wide open. His bathroom/dressing room had been ransacked and less valuable things left behind while the thieves had taken a very large sum of cash (over £300, enough for the rest of the summer), $3,700 in travellers’ cheques, his passport, driving licence and other crucial documents and ‘all my lovely cufflinks. And here’s a nice piece of Freud for you [. . .] a paper-cutter, a shoe horn six belts and five pairs of specs!’19 No art was taken but he lost amongst other items his fabulous amethyst and star ruby cufflinks. It was believed by some after his death that Arthur had only just broken through the closed ranks of Venetian society, but in fact he was well established

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in some quarters, taking part in the endless sarabande of dinner parties, picnics and return invitations throughout the 1950s. Nellie van Doesburg ‘passed out at Arthur Jeffress’s [and] Peggy poured cognac on her private parts to wake her up’.20 Venetian grandees were Arthur’s hosts and guests by turn, entertaining a range of visitors from Nancy Mitford and Pelham Place neighbour Oliver Messel with his young nephew Antony Armstrong-Jones to the less predictable, like Arthur’s brother and new sister-in-law. Another good friend was the artist and surrealist muse Manina Tischler who lived, amongst other places, in Casa Frollo on Giudecca. Arthur was the first person to respond to a cry for help from Victor Cunard’s household when he died, having just had dinner with Keith Vaughan amongst others, and Arthur subsequently helped out with the funeral flowers. Robert remarked that Arthur always seemed to deal with all the problems when anything happened to friends in Venice. Whether he frequented the beach ‘that likes to be visited’ or not, Arthur entertained sailors regularly at his boys’ evenings and, unlike most of his London-based queer friends, had a house in Venice rather than hotel suite to which to invite them. He also held more soigné dinner parties which frequently included potential gallery clients like Stanley (Neiman) Marcus, who was known to like modern primitives; Arthur’s cousin Henry Hill and wife Heather who were keen collectors of Henry Moore’s work; people of influence in the art world including John Rothenstein, the Tate’s director, Lawrence Alloway the critic, Herbert Read or Henry Clifford. Peggy Guggenheim gave Arthur social access to others of distinction including James Thrall Soby, the critic and collector. Robert smartly took Soby to Pelham Crescent to see the Balthus (he was writing a monograph for MoMA) on his European summer visit in 1956 but Arthur only wanted to know what Soby thought of his house. Arthur met the Alloways, Lawrence and his painter wife Sylvia Sleigh, when they were staying with Peggy Guggenheim’s daughter Pegeen and this exposure to the younger generation revealed peevishness on Arthur’s part. Alloway was the new Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and first used the term Pop Art as a clever, hip way of describing a certain kind of artistic response to popular culture, particularly associated in Britain at that point with the ICA. Arthur wrote to Robert in the summer of 1957:

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The Lawrence Alloways were here, staying with Pegeen Guggenheim and her most unusual looking lover who is writing an anti-Venice book and who is, I believe, a friend of yours. Name of Ralph Rumney, I think. I learned that you had shaken avant-garde London to its very foundations by your adverse comments on Lynn Chadwick.21 Robert and his status as an up-to-date critic kept Arthur’s gallery reputation sharp by association, but it is clear that Arthur would have rather learned new ideas first-hand from Robert rather than by report. Rumney was to become a founding member of Situationist International in Italy the next summer but was expelled a year or so later when he allegedly failed to hand in a psychogeography report about Venice by the deadline. Other Venice guests at Arthur’s house, apart from the regulars like the Sutherlands, the Melvilles and the Flemings, included old friends Roy Alderson, Bunny Roger, Beverley Nichols, Robin Dalton, Hardy Amies, the British special effects expert Tom Howard and Viva King. Others included writers Paul Bowles, Nancy Mitford, Woodrow Wyatt, Anne Scott James; dancers Alicia Markova, Anton Dolin and Anthony Gilpin; the ex-Ziegfeld Girl Kathryn Cohen and John Gielgud. Elsa and Michael Combe-Martin from the British Council in Italy were also particularly close to Arthur: he had worked in Portugal during the war and her niece Suzanne later married Peter Ruta. His letters to them, signed ‘Arturo’, are always gossipy, funny and arch: ‘And so life’s rich tapestried pattern weaves on, and I must go and change my suit. I have two lovely new ones.’22 Anton Dolin recalled gliding in Arthur’s gondola ‘with Nelson Eddy and Jeanette McDonald as they sang to the stars. All of us irresponsible, loving every hour, day and night.’23 Bunny Roger remembered that she sang Dream Lover and Beverley Nichols was there, too, and his version adds to the tale an aria from La Bohème.24 It must have been her party piece Yes, they call me Mimi but what a shame it was not Tosca’s I have lived for art. Nichols swerves back to sensible journalism as he records the gondola’s vital statistics (twenty varieties of wood, 280 sections) and says that Arthur paid £900 for it in 1960. He also described Arthur’s habit of changing the colour of

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Figure 23.4 Photographer unknown. Arthur’s gondola moored on the Grand Canal outside Martyn Coleman’s flat in Venice at the end of Calle del Dose da Ponte, c. 1960.

the gondola carpet from black to yellow, mauve or pink.25 Fausto Cadoni, one of Arthur’s two gondoliers, added that the shade was chosen to complement the cocktails served, Bellini peach or Campari orange. One stellar guest, Margot Fonteyn, less glamorously slipped and hurt her neck. Zachary Scott and his wife Ruth Ford were Arthur’s guests in 1957 on an outing to Torcello and for a birthday dinner the next summer. Scott, now acting on the stage and TV rather in films as in his youth (he was the sleazy playboy lover in Joan Crawford’s film Mildred Pierce), married the actress and model Ruth Ford in 1952. She was famous for her New York salon where she entertained many in Arthur’s outer circle including Cecil Beaton, Fleur Cowles,

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Arthur Laurents, Edward James and Tennessee Williams. Arthur met her through her brother Charles Henri Ford who was the lover of the painter Pavel Tchelitchew, commissioned to paint Ruth’s portrait by a lovesick Edward James in 1937. Edith Sitwell, in her turn, adored Tchelitchew unrequitedly. Charles Henri Ford and Tchelitchew moved to New York from Paris in 1934 and Arthur owned more than one work of the painter, sold many more and bequeathed a large pastel, Blue Clown (1932) to Southampton Art Gallery. Tchelitchew died on 31 July 1957 and the Scotts learned of his death while with Arthur in Venice. One of Arthur’s closest Venice friends was John Hohnsbeen, who was a long-time friend of Peggy Guggenheim’s too, and ‘received no pay and had no help, but every pre-Easter week I installed [ . . . her] collection and every November I dismantled it. I handled the considerable correspondence that the administration of the place entailed’.26 He had worked for Curt Valentin in his Bucholz gallery in New York for six years until the architect Philip Johnson and the art collector Blanchette Rockefeller dropped into the gallery one Saturday morning in 1950. She bought a Marini bronze and Johnson acquired Hohnsbeen as, to use his words, the third Mrs Johnson. Each finished relationships with others, Hohnsbeen’s with Christopher Isherwood, and moved in together to Johnson’s newly completed Glass House in Connecticut while Douglas Cooper took over Hohnsbeen’s apartment. Johnson’s biographer describes Hohnsbeen as ‘blue eyed, fair and well put together with the bearing and the manner of a colt’ and he had once been a dancer in the Martha Graham Company.27 He was also promiscuous, very much the type that attracted Arthur, and they shared a taste for luxury and glamorous company. After Valentin fired Hohnsbeen, he became a partner in the Peridot Gallery which opened in 1948. Johnson helped with finances but Hohnsbeen admitted to having been a bit half-hearted about this venture, too, as he loved chatting people up more than selling. His ‘fluency, manifest in a caustic wit born of a disabused attitude toward the world’ explains why he and Arthur stayed friends.28 In 1955, Hohnsbeen and Johnson moved to an allwhite apartment on East 55th Street – where the only note of colour was Hohnsbeen’s ice blue robe – only for him to be diagnosed, like Bobby Bishop the year before, with TB. Johnson looked after him until Johnson fell for

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someone else in 1956. Hohnsbeen moved to Paris for a year, then to Venice from each Easter to autumn as assistant and curator to Peggy Guggenheim. Back in London, Robert Melville was always kept up to date with Venice gossip and Arthur’s plaints: There is a great va-et-vient of guests in this house and I find myself scurrying about like a cross hen coping with their arrivals and departures [. . .] Anne Scott-James due this evening to take Roy’s place, and Gavin Henderson, Kenneth Harris and Richard Chopping already here.29 Nor was Arthur always aware of exactly whom he had entertained: ‘Peggy brought Mary McCarthy to dinner the other evening, and I spent the whole time under the impression she was Carson McCullers. Very tall [with] a delightful gap toothed grin.’30 McCarthy had just published her remarkable book Venice Observed, so that was a wasted opportunity. Arthur always described Peggy as an ‘eternal twenties girl’ and she signed a copy of her autobiography for him: ‘A Twenties Girl.’31 He appears, sitting casually in the background observing the scene, in a film that captures one of her parties.32 One image of Arthur Jeffress in Venice is frequently reproduced. Taken right at the end of his life, it became his last ever personal Christmas card in 1960 (see figure  23.5). Roloff Beny was a Canadian painter, championed by Herbert Read and Peggy Guggenheim, who spent most of his life in Rome and achieved fame as a photographer. He took a series of photographs for Arthur but the one that Arthur preferred shows him smiling, comfortably settled in his gondola with one of his very handsome gondoliers (not in full regalia) viewed in profile, slightly out of focus and gazing downwards. Tom Howard was not so sure: ‘Dear Art, Can’t decide whether I like us in the gondolas or Youth Revisited best.’33 In spite of a resemblance to Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice – an older man and a handsome, indifferent, younger one – the shot shows Arthur as a very contented pasha. For many people, this black-andwhite photograph was the last image of him that they held in mind and the link it makes with his gondola and gondoliers has been abiding. Bobby Bishop kept it by his bedside.34 Arthur owned a Venetian scene painted by Kees van Dongen which depicts a lady elegantly stepping out of a gondola. She is almost certainly Luisa Casati,

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Figure 23.5 Roloff Beny (1924–1984), photographer. Beny was commissioned by Arthur to take a series of portraits in the famous gondola. The gondolier in profile is Bruno Angelotti; Fausto Cadoni is in the background. Sent as Arthur’s final Christmas card in 1960, it became the image by which he is best remembered. Photographer Roloff Beny: Library and Archives Canada.

muse and lover of the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, who was notorious throughout Europe for her parties during the belle époque (see colour plate 17). She also owned the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni before Doris Delevingne or Peggy Guggenheim. Arthur wrote to Robert in July 1961 that he thought the new image which he had chosen for that Christmas looked very nice, but he had already chosen the Van Dongen for 1962 so was now in a hurry to get there.35

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In June 1961, Arthur set off to Venice as usual on what he called his hejira – an escape towards pleasure. He booked a convoluted route, flying on British United Airways from Southend to Ostend, then on by first-class sleeper train from Ostend to Munich and onward to Venice. The summer exhibition masterminded by Robert back in the gallery was an ambitious and lively group show called By the Seaside and Arthur clearly wished he could be there to fiddle with every detail. It featured on the nightly television magazine programme Tonight and Arthur kept making suggestions for improvements like adding ‘a little group of seaside mementoes’ to the eye-catching window display: I do wish we knew where to find one of those nice old-fashioned bucket and wooden spades, and perhaps some of those pretty metal shapes for ‘castles’ to put in the window. If you can think of any such, preferably used, I think, do do so, pray.1 He added the obvious point that catalogues should be sent to all lenders and ‘all those who have assisted such as Geoffrey Bennison, Viva King et  al – especially Al. Love Art’.2 Luckily, Robert loved the window dressing idea. Arthur sent a dull, Edwardian sepia postcard of Corfu, like a landscape by a dreary Academician, and joked with Robert: ‘A jolly scene on the Front at Corfu. Frame it at once in crimson velvet and molten gold & put it in the window.’3 He stayed longer, fatally longer, than usual in Venice and in early August wrote to Robert: 275

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It was 90 degrees on the Lido at noon today and we gasped for breath. The atmosphere is not in any way cleared for me by the thought that tonight my entire house party, consisting of myself, Bobby, Roy Alderson, Hardy Amies, has been invited to dine to meet the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. My chief reaction to this unheard-of treat is one of dread because I understand that one isnt [sic] allowed to leave the party until he does, and he never goes to bed before the small hours of the morning and I go regularly at 11pm, it is going to be an ordeal.’4 The hostess was Countess Volpi and the first course at dinner was ortolan. The duchess wore a dark strawberry-pink satin evening gown by Balenciaga with three horizontal pleats on the back. When Amies asked, professionally, how these were kept unflattened she replied that her maid went ‘woosh! woosh! woosh! with something’ and, when asked to explain exactly what she meant, added vaguely that she thought the thing was called an iron. Arthur was also struggling to make small talk with the duke and asked about his golf. When the duke replied that gout was slowing him down, Arthur cheerily replied ‘Just like me!’ and was raked head to toe by the cold royal gaze.5 Earlier that summer Michael Merritt was a house guest. He was a new young friend whose visit, Arthur told Robert, would present problems, but he was looking forward to it and had paid Merritt’s fare. Patrick Woodcock, doctor to theatrical royalty in London and Arthur’s own doctor, was his guest that July, too, and when Arthur confided to him his concerns about Michael, the doctor advised him to ‘play the situations by ear, whatever that may mean’.6 He is probably the ‘Mick’ about whom Roy sent a warning in mid-September, never received, and this might account for the reference to potential problems. During that sultry summer, Arthur and Alieta completed an inventory of the house contents together. By mid-August Bobby had gone back to London and Arthur sailed to Corfu for three weeks, part of which he spent with Roy. Beverley Nichols wrote to him in September 1961 (a letter never received) saying that his own finances probably would not permit him to buy property on Corfu but alluding to Arthur having a similar plan there, although ‘I hope I did not put you to a lot of trouble over this land business. But one must be allowed to dream. Have you quite given up the idea of getting anything for yourself?’7

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Corfu was just poised to become a tourist centre and its airport opened the following year. As Arthur wrote to his cousin Henry, ‘I think is almost the most lovely island I have ever seen. I should like to go back every year, at least until it gets completely spoilt and Capri-ized which will soon happen, alas.’8 He confirmed that he had already booked his flight to California to spend Christmas 1961 with the Hills. Arthur wrote to Robert: I have very little personal news. This is the thirteenth day that Roy and I have spent on this little island of intense beauty and in this little house of intense banality. Roy leaves for London the day after tomorrow as he has to return to prepare himself for his great jaunt to Jamaica where, for a period of at least six months, he will be painting ‘muriels’ for a new hotel. If you want news of me (there isn’t any) ring up his house after Sept 2nd. I think, by the time I have spent a further eight days quite on my own here that I shall have entirely got Corfu out of my system. The house, which is brand new, thank God and therefore clean, has the great Corfiote advantage of having a bath (doll’s size) and more or less constant hot water. That is considered a great great luxury in these parts. Having said that, I think I have said all. There is nothing that is above Woolworth value in any of the rooms, which makes for sore and unpleased eyes, aesthetically speaking.9 Arthur’s original plan had been to stay once more at the Hotel Xenia (owned by the son of Spiros, the charming taxi driver and Mr Fixit in Gerald Durrell’s autobiographical stories My Family and Other Animals) but there were no rooms that August. He moans about the ‘dolt of a maid’ in the rented cottage but they managed to provide themselves with eggs, bacon and tea for breakfast. Still the bathing is superb and I usually manage to get slightly drunk each evening on ouzo and retsina. It is better so for in that way one is more or less unconscious of the food. The owner of the one good restaurant dropped dead the day after we had dined there three days ago [. . .] I cant say that I am surprised. Only rather cross. Oh that dinner party for the Windsors. They left on the stroke of 11.30pm which was splendid. What was not so splendid was that the Duchess, having espied my gondola many times from her hotel

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window, expressed the desire to go home in it. And, of course, no gondoliers! One of them was having a nice tipple at a nearby café; the other one was just putting the finishing touches to a quick fuck with his fiancée (the prima ballerina of the Fenice, no less!) at the other end of town. They both arrived, hot, one of them slightly pissed, the other slightly tired, ten minutes later, to find a very irate me awaiting them. It was on that night that I finally came to [the] firm decision to sell the gondola. Love and kisses to all, from Arthur.10 The tale of the Windsor dinner party and the aftermath with the errant gondoliers has been the basis of many guesses about the subsequent tragedy of Arthur’s death. Some people believed that a row with the gondoliers drove them to denounce Arthur; Bobby Bishop recalled, oddly, that the request by the Duchess for a ride home in the gondola went off smoothly.11 But the true story unfolds more slowly. On 8 September Arthur sailed to Athens, stayed at the Athenée Palace Hotel and then toured the Peloponnese. He told Robert, as usual, of all his plans: It is rather pleasant being back in sort of civilisation. This air-conditioned room and bathroom seem like the ne plus ultra of refinement and luxury, though in fact the hotel is only just first class. I am seeing an old friend or two, and tomorrow go off for a three day tour of the Peloponnesus to see Mistra and Bassae and Olympia in a car that I have rented. My passage back to Venice, leaving here on the 16th, is confirmed. I only hope there will be a sleeper for me on the Simplon–Orient Express when I get back to Venice, for the 23rd/24th. Much love and do pay the garage bill.12 That was the last business and gossip letter that Arthur wrote to Robert. On 16 September, Arthur sailed back from Piraeus on the Enotria to Venice as he had previously outlined: where I expect to be from 18th until 23rd [. . .] providing porter at the Grand Hotel has got me a sleeper on the latter day. I forgot to do anything about it while I was in Venice and have had to write to him about it from here. A nuisance as the trains may well be all full up at that time.13 That particular nuisance was never felt.

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Arthur was prevented by Italian state police from setting foot in Venice or indeed in any other part of Italy ever again. He first found out about the ban when he went to collect his passport from the purser on the morning of 18 September. He was, of course, shocked and bewildered and had great difficulty in collecting his thoughts when, at his request, an officer from the American consulate visited him on board as the ship docked in Venice about lunchtime. He was not allowed to go home to collect his things and was kept on board until the evening, when he was taken to the Santa Lucia train station and then under police escort to the Swiss border.14 The vice consul later reported that a few of Arthur’s minor requests were carried out and calls were made to Anna Maria Cicogna and possibly to Peggy Guggenheim, but these influential women were not able to intercede, although one report suggests that the Contessa did manage to extract some concessions or even came to speak to him.15 A bag was fetched from his house by his gondolier Fausto Cadoni, who had been there to meet him. The American consul in Venice had been informed while the Enotria was en route that an American citizen had been barred entry by order of the Ministry of the Interior in Rome on the grounds of being an undesirable person.16 Off the record, the police told a member of the consulate staff that it was because Arthur had been having sex with minors but something may have been gained in translation: in some Latin languages, there is a blurring of terms used to describe pederasty and homosexuality. There is no evidence that Arthur ever had sexual relations with anyone other than consenting, often paid, adult men. Aaron F. Jacobs, the vice consul in Venice, was the official who spoke to Arthur directly and probably the last person to have a friendly conversation with him. Arthur claimed that he must have been denounced by an enemy, but who it was or for what reason he did not know. Jacobs confirmed that Arthur had no attorney in Venice so the police order was not challenged. Arthur’s first request was that he should be escorted immediately to a train or plane so that he could return directly to London, but this was refused; the subsequent delay meant that Arthur caught a train only as far as Paris. He took a room at his usual hotel, La Hotel France et Choiseul on Rue St Honoré, which at the time had much of the atmosphere, charm and drawbacks of many an English country house: ‘bad service and draught.

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Besides, the vast chimneys were still equipped with grills and coke, of which the English are madly nostalgic.’17 It had long been popular with Americans because the future President and Mrs Franklin Delano Roosevelt had honeymooned there the year Arthur was born. Other visitors recalled its simple facade and discreet entrance between boutiques, its warm atmosphere, bedrooms with flowery Victorian wallpaper and a resident tortoise which wandered around the interior garden room and ate lettuce. Even today it retains some of that old-fashioned Englishness with small cosy seating areas on the ground floor, flagged floors and classical detail. With its mixture of Anglo-American charm and eccentricity, it is clear why Arthur always stayed there and sought sanctuary late on Monday 18 September. He wrote some letters, including to Peggy Guggenheim, asking what he should do. He called his friends in London the next day and was urged by Robert and Edna to come straight home. He tried to contact André Ostier, his closest friend in Paris, but tragically he was in Rome. Sometime during the night of 20 September, Arthur took an overdose of barbiturates and suffocated. He was pronounced dead on Thursday 21 September 1961, aged fifty-five. What made him decide to commit suicide? In France, suicide had been legal since 1789, as was homosexuality. Suicide had ceased to be a crime in Britain just one month earlier, the last European country to change the law, so it may well have been on his mind. Arthur had always said that he carried poison in his signet ring but clearly he had enough barbiturate tablets with him to make up a fatal dose. A Home Office pathologist stated the same year that in the houses of people who committed suicide ‘fantastic quantities’ were found; ‘it is nothing to have 1,000 gr of rapid-acting barbiturate in one household’ and he was in no doubt ‘that promiscuous prescribing was an incentive to take overdoses’.18 Theories explaining his final despair have included a serious illness, possibly cancer. Elaborate efforts were made at first to avoid mentioning publicly his homosexuality and persecution. Randolph made one press statement that Arthur had never recovered fully from the effects of dysentery contracted during the war in the Middle East; in another newspaper he suggested fear of war.19 No records survive of anything other than two bouts of psoriasis during the war and none of Arthur’s self-obsessed reports to Esther Clifford mention

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anything further, although he might have been too fastidious to describe the symptoms of dysentery. He was indeed very ill in London in the mid-1950s and underwent an operation that Randolph later said was because of dysentery; Nicky Haslam recalls that Arthur suffered from what would now be called irritable bowel syndrome.20 Bobby visited him in St George’s Hospital in the unlikely setting of a public ward.21 Bunny was told by Arthur that his ‘liver belonged to an old lady who’d been dead a long time’.22 As yet another explanation, Randolph also told the press that Arthur was regularly depressed but as they did not meet very often this cannot be relied upon. Certainly Arthur did have anxieties about getting old, being out of step with modern life and not having a happy sex life.23 Events in Venice would have been enough to cast most people into profound despair but his closest friends did not believe he would kill himself. His chauffeur recalled in the 1980s that Arthur had a particular fear of nuclear war but that was neither uncommon nor fanciful at the time.24 In April of that last year of Arthur’s life a paramilitary group of Cuban exiles, backed by the US government under its new President John F. Kennedy, mounted an unsuccessful invasion of Cuba and its revolutionary leftist government led by Fidel Castro. The disaster became known as the Bay of Pigs and by the May after Arthur’s death Nikita Khrushchev sited Soviet nuclear missiles on Cuba. During 1961, China and France undertook nuclear tests and the USA began underground testing. The USSR was especially active and two of their nuclear tests took place on 17 and 18 September 1961 just as Arthur was arriving, distraught, in Paris. On 18 September, a letter was written to Arthur which he never received. It was from an ‘affectionate old friend’ in Corfu, Lela Typaldo Forestis, wife of the Greek consul to Venice. She writes from the home of her sister, Maria DesyllaKapodistria (the first woman elected mayor of a city in modern Greece). Lela gives Arthur all the Venetian society gossip and concludes sadly that she supposes the fate of the world will soon be decided and hopes that atomic war will not break out.25 This reads as the continuation of a familiar conversation. Peggy Guggenheim’s theory of Arthur being denounced by his gondoliers has been repeated over the last half century. In a letter to their friend Michael Combe-Martin, Peggy Guggenheim wrote:

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I got a letter from him asking if he should kill himself but I didn’t believe he would do it. He must have been denounced by his gondolier whom he dismissed as he was buying a motor boat and giving up the gondola.26 This version was strenuously denied by one of the gondoliers, Fausto Cadoni, when interviewed by Cefyn Embling-Evans in the 1990s. No doubt, if asked by the authorities whether Arthur was homosexual, his staff would have spoken the truth and provided evidence if required. But the gondola was still in commission and the gondoliers both still employed when he left for Corfu. Fausto married his ballerina shortly after Arthur’s banishment and the tragedy of his death was kept from the couple until they returned from honeymoon.27 Nonetheless, the previous summer Arthur had found it odd and disconcerting that some post to London had been mysteriously delayed and suspected ‘some skulduggery here in the house no doubt’.28 In June 1961 he mentions that as ever there are ‘domestic problems rumbling boiling and simmering’ and that the two gondoliers, between whom there was a ‘bitter enmity’, had got wind of his thoughts about getting a motorboat and that there was tension in the air. He also chose that summer to complete an inventory of his house. Meanwhile, everyone I meet, from the Consul up or down, screams at me that it will be a crime and a shame to take a motor boat and to abandon such a glittering equipage. It is all a bit disturbing.29 The US vice consul reported in a memo to the State Department on 19 September: For several years Mr Jeffress has maintained a home in Venice where he is well-known in Venetian ‘society’ [. . .] When in Venice he seemed to be quiet and well-behaved. However he has had the reputation of being a homosexual.30 Homosexuality was not against the law in Italy by virtue of having being left out of the fascist regime’s Rocco Code, which left matters of repression and moral approbation to the Catholic Church. However, the state did dole out custodial sentences or public admonition. Some of the American expatriate gay community became an embarrassment to the Serenissima and, starting with Arthur, others in the Guggenheim circle were expelled on a variety of

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charges including Alan Ansen, the beat poet who lived in San Samuele and left for Athens, Charles Briggs who owned the Ca’ Dario and the art collector Robert Brady who moved on to Mexico from his palazzo on Dorsoduro. Brian Howard had been banned from both Italy and France as an ‘undesirable person’ back in the 1950s, not explicitly because of his homosexuality but because he had insulted some English people in the street in Menton.31 In the same way, Arthur was not being punished for breaking any law against homosexuality but for the sin of bad manners. The explanation for Arthur’s suicide seems finally to be brutta figura, which can be translated in the words of Arthur’s youth as a very bad show or simply not behaving like a gentleman. It is more pertinently interpreted here as loss of face, the dark side of Italy’s prized bella figura. That summer, there was an uneasy atmosphere in Arthur’s life. He had been burgled and lost personal possessions as well as cash but no works of art; he made an inventory of his house. He had a row with his gondoliers, who were also on bad terms with each other and worried about their employment prospects. Arthur and many of his friends were gloomy about politics and the threat of another war. But life went on in its usual sunny way in Venice. Arthur took friends regularly to the Lido to swim and have an elaborate picnic lunch: his handsome young gondoliers threw off their uniforms and joined them on the beach in their swimming trunks, all noisy and highly noticeable as a group. Kenneth Partridge, who was a lunch guest along with Zachary and Ruth Scott, recalls the roped-off area of sand and shore in front of the cabana where Arthur had recently been promoted to ‘primo fila’. Arthur clearly believed this magically transformed a very public place into his own protected domain.32 Previously he had told Hardy Amies that he would always avoid such a ‘posh’ position.33 Ironically, Contessa Volpi’s daughter Marina Cicogna later recalled: We always had a sit-down lunch in front of the cabin. Mostly the cabins next to ours were Americans, who would have liked to have a quiet snooze after lunch. They were very annoyed with our howling laughter.34 One overheated day in that summer of 1961, a woman swimming off the next-door strip of beach caught Arthur’s attention again. She was a relation of

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a high-ranking official who has been variously described as the mayor of Venice or the chief of police. It is most likely to have been the new mayor appointed the year before, Giovanni Favaretto Fisca, a Christian Democrat who had been on the Board of the Art Biennale. Gondoliers went on strike when he prevented them from taking a shortcut and he banned the wearing of bikinis on the Lido. That June, he had become a Knight Grand Cross and awarded the order of Cavaliere di Gran Croce Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana, weeks after he welcomed Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh to Venice. He was a busy man with a phone in his cabana and he used it loudly. Whatever her own identity or status, the woman in question has been variously described as Jewish, overweight, and – which particularly offended Arthur’s prissiness – not having shaved under her arms. This apparently minor matter of female body hair had long been a cultural divide between Europe and in the English-speaking worlds, where some women began shaving under their arms as a commonplace from about 1915 (when Gillette produced their first razor for women): therefore for most of Arthur’s life. Not shaving was variously seen as exotic, erotic or unhygienic when encountered by British and American tourists in Europe. Arthur was very fond of the paintings of Paul Delvaux, who often painted his naked women with very visible body hair. There were two works by Delvaux in Arthur’s collection, including a painting of a mermaid in the Venice house, but both his mermaid and Virgin Mary (the only female nudes in Arthur’s entire collection) are smoothly marmoreal. This trivial cultural difference was yet another opportunity for Arthur to display his misogyny. He commented loudly and offensively that day at the Lido on the woman’s appearance, possibly and even less forgivably, on her Jewishness. Arthur was of course overweight and, through his mother, Jewish and he would have done well to have considered his hypocrisy. Only a year before he had asked Robert in a postcard whether he was fêted at dinner parties in Persia because they all thought he was Liberace.35 Instead of making fun of himself this time, Arthur let his desire to entertain through vicious humour override his natural elegant manners. Kenneth Partridge has also pointed out that much of what was indulged in and said within Arthur’s walled garden in San Maurizio could be overheard or overseen by staff in the mayor’s prefectural headquarters right next door in the Ca’

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Corner.36 The sound of office typing could easily be heard chez Jeffress so he and his guests were probably already under informal, unavoidable surveillance because they were indiscreet, noisy, queer, and not local aristocrats. Beautifully dressed, highly cultured and a generous host, Arthur apparently exuded bella figura. However, this profoundly Italian concept is just as much about gracious behaviour to friends and strangers as it is about appearance. He allowed rudeness to tip over into vulgarity and nastiness and the public exposure of this brutta figura was fatal. He was humiliated (an eye for an eye) by officialdom in Venice, could never return there nor to Sicily, Rome or Positano and would have to endure loss of face elsewhere, both personally and professionally. He could not offer a sexual escapade as an anecdotal excuse: he had simply insulted a woman, an important stranger, for no reason and had been ostracized. This inflammatory moment was perhaps just what the mayor had been waiting for. Arthur’s homosexuality was a justification to get rid of him but the flashpoint seems to have been his boorishness on the Lido, which did not affect Venetian polite society but the mayor’s own family. Whether Arthur was fully aware that what he said had finally provoked the mayor is neither here nor there. He knew that his homosexuality made him vulnerable. Arthur had neither intimate friendship for comfort nor had his search for a last warm and loving sexual relationship succeeded in Japan. There were tensions starting in his lovely life in Venice and London. Fausto was getting married and Bobby had already moved to America. The status quo had changed. Truman Capote asked viciously, but perhaps with hideous accuracy, in a letter to Cecil Beaton in November 1961 whether the explanation for his suicide was that Arthur had looked in the mirror.37 That is, tragically, what he probably did in that room with its familiar Victorian wallpaper, reminiscent of his bedroom at home. Unlike Oscar Wilde, in another Paris hotel, he had no final quarrel with the decor but only with himself. He looked at his reflection and did not like the foolish figure that he felt he now cut, like The Old Fop in Britten’s Death in Venice.38 No one could pretend that his adopted country of Italy would ever welcome him again and his homosexuality now made him widely vulnerable. Even in liberal France, the National Assembly had just passed the Mirguet Amendment

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which declared homosexuality, along with alcoholism and prostitution, a social scourge and urged the government to take action. Homosexuality was still a very serious crime indeed in Britain and although Illinois became the first American state to decriminalize it in 1961, that would have been scant comfort to Arthur. None of his friends could really help in the necessary way. Robert and Edna, safe within their families, urged him by telegram and by phone to come home immediately, but to no effect. It does not seem that either of these close and loving friends really believed he would kill himself or they would have crossed the Channel immediately to dissuade him in person. Rumour has it that Edna received a letter from Arthur but did not open it. This seems impossible to believe. She called Bobby but he was in America.39 Arthur punctiliously wrote a note to the hotel manager to apologize for the inconvenience, left a note of Robert’s telephone number prominently on the table, lay down and took his final leave. Arthur Jeffress’ body was cremated at the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris without ceremony and, in accordance with his unexpected will made just six months previously, his ashes were flown to Richmond, Virginia, on the night of 12 December 1961 and scattered (more or less) in accordance with his will on the Capitol ‘to which I hope one day to return’.40 This return to his ancestral land was perhaps his νόστος – or, longing for the past – but seemed to all his friends an extraordinary gesture. It was likely planned for the end of a very long life, not an escape in sudden shame which would have horrified his Jeffress family, all ‘decent, stern men’ like von Aschenbach’s forebears in Death in Venice.41 The final decision about his ashes was announced casually to his legal executor by Arthur’s Virginian cousin Robert Jeffress. ‘The deceased’s relatives would in fact like them scattered in the James river which we presume runs not too far from the Capitol.’42 Decent, stern Robert Jeffress wrote to tell his cousin Randolph that the ceremony for his brother had taken place on 20 December, one day short of the anniversary of their father’s death.43 Robert later wrote to Henry Hill, with chilly amazement, that a notice about Arthur appeared in the Financial Times in London on 28 January 1964: ‘Anyway, it certainly was unfortunate that he killed himself, but apparently he made quite a name in England.’44

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The area chosen by the family in Virginia is eleven miles away from the Capitol and near the Bellona Arsenal built by the army in 1816 during the period that Arthur loved so much. By 1961, it had become a private estate with formal gardens designed by Charles Gillette, who had also created the gardens at Thomas Jeffress’ Meadowbrook, fifteen miles downstream on the other side of Richmond. Arthur’s ashes were scattered in the middle of the James River, which uniquely stays within one state, finally flowing out into the Atlantic at Chesapeake Bay. It was the first river in America to be given an English name, after the king, but its Native American name is Powhaten, like the first Jeffress home in Harrow.

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25 At home in sunlight

Arthur Jeffress’ death affected only a small group of intimates but the stories of his demise and the retelling of parts of his life has given him a certain posthumous reputation. The poignancy of his suicide, the perceived mystery or betrayal behind it, its sexual element and glamorous setting ensured Arthur’s place in many memoirs. There can have been no thought in Arthur’s troubled mind when he killed himself that his suicide would be the way in which posterity would define him, often with amusement and prurience. The ridicule that he was trying to avoid by taking his own life has coloured the way in which he is often recalled, but he had carefully planned a more distinguished and generous memorial through bequests to the Tate and to Southampton. He had no idea exactly what shape his ever-changing art collection would have at the end of his life but key works – the Sutherland portrait, works by Bauchant, Monet, Toulouse-Lautrec, E. Box, the Gérard portrait of Napoleon – would always have been kept by him. He made his will in London less than six months before his death on 4 April 1961, just before he went to Paris to spend Easter with John Hohnsbeen. His father’s will had also been written just months before his own early death. Arthur’s will dealt first with small private bequests of money to his four godchildren but he asked to expedite, before all others, the gift of £1,000 to Edith Bentley, now Mrs Challis.1 Edith was his childhood nurse who had married Stanley Challis in 1931 when she was about forty-five. Challis had first married her younger sister Mary in Harrow in April 1918 (Edith had been a witness) but when Mary died in 1930, her eight-year-old daughter and another newborn became their aunt’s stepdaughters. Arthur always kept in touch, 289

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writing in 1960 that it was a pity no one except his Nanny ever read Woman’s Own, for which his chum Beverly Nichols wrote a piece about Arthur’s gilded life in Venice. Arthur’s godson and nephew Godfrey Jeffress, now thirty-five, was also left £1,000. Each of the other three godchildren was left £500. There were two goddaughters, Diana Raymont Came and Jennifer Sutcliffe, and while Diana’s family was part of his life in the 1920s, it seems from Jennifer’s address in a Manchester suburb that whatever relationship Arthur had with her parents it lacked his usual social gloss. The same can be said of his other godson, Robert Henry Arthur Browne, whose father was Sergeant R.S. Browne of the Royal Leicesters, then serving in Germany and now identified as Ralph ‘Sailor’ Brown [sic].2 Whether he met the two fathers while at war or at leisure, in bed or as their employer, their gesture of making Arthur a godfather was warm and fond, showing he was not always seen as a snob. Art came next. The Tate was left his exquisite Toulouse-Lautrec Portrait of Émile Bernard and Bauchant’s Les Funerailles d’Alexandre. Bobby Bishop was left ‘any or all’ of the E. Box paintings, plus £500. David Carritt, a brilliant young art expert who had recently discovered a lost painting by Caravaggio, was left his much-loved Delacroix oil painting, Portrait of Palikare. Carritt wrote ‘for my part there is almost no-one in the world I shall miss so much’.3 Robert was given £5,000 (several years’ salary) and an Odilon Redon flower painting, his favourite from Arthur’s collection, and one that André Ostier particularly admired. Edna Fleming was given £500 and her choice from the remaining of paintings; she chose his late Monet, by far the most financially valuable work that Arthur owned. His generosity to Southampton Art Gallery was expressed in the form of a bequest of any of the rest of his pictures that they wished to choose. They later successfully argued the case to include works from gallery stock as well as the collection. In the end, with the advice of the Tate, they chose ninety-nine works from this ‘small but subversive collection’ as a reviewer called a selection in January 1961, when he singled out Bonnard’s Two Poodles and a view of Upper Sydenham by H.A. Binckes.4 Next in order was a series of smaller bequests. Two (intriguingly) unspecified paintings on indefinite loan were given to Stephan Cole who had followed Arthur on that merry dance through the liaison offices of the AFS, a simple

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thing compared to his civvy street role as manager to Tallulah Bankhead and best man at her wedding. Next was Edward Voules, who was given first pick of Arthur’s cufflinks or any other piece of jewellery; Ronald Gurney, a younger and more recent friend, was able to make the same choice, but second in line after Edward. Hierarchies of age and longevity of friendship were carefully preserved. Many of Arthur’s friends bought works from his collection at the subsequent auction and Gurney was able to acquire the large portrait of the Shah’s sons which Bunny Roger and his brother also tried to acquire; Tooth’s bought the Baalbek inn sign.5 The Jane Austen Museum in Chawton, Hampshire, about sixteen miles from Marwell, was left a small square maple wood occasional table with a green leather centre that once belonged to the writer he so admired. Bunny Roger was bequeathed his choice of a piece of furniture from Eaton Square and, after him, so was Graham Sutherland. Then, others in Arthur’s employ were remembered with gifts. Arthur Giles and his wife were left £5,000 and £500 respectively. His staff in Venice (gondoliers or domestics) who had been with him for over three years were each left £750 although his housekeeper Alieta Zampieron received, like Arthur Giles and Robert Melville, £5,000, the equivalent today of over £100,000. The gondola was described in the inventory as in poor condition, which seems odd, and Cefyn Embling-Evans suggests that some sleight of hand had taken place.6 Fausto Cadoni went on to work for Peggy Guggenheim, whom he considered a much less satisfactory employer. The largest bequests came last. Martyn Coleman was left the house in Venice as well as its entire contents, including jewellery and clothes, and any paintings not selected by Southampton, the Tate or Edna. He was also left the gondola and/or motorboat; Arthur clearly had been planning a change of transport for some time but events overtook him. Coleman received any lire in the Italian bank account. He had been responsible for handling Arthur’s money matters in Venice when Arthur was away but can hardly have expected such largesse: Coleman’s illness and vulnerability in 1959 might have prompted the gesture. And who else was on hand to keep the house as Arthur had created it? But Coleman sold it in 1965 for about £50,000 (over £1 million today) after begging Southampton to hurry their selection of paintings so that probate could be granted.

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Arthur Jeffress

Nothing was left to Roy Alderson, nor to other friends, which is very surprising, nor to other relatives, which is less so. Finally and grandiloquently, Arthur Jeffress left the residue of his estate, including the flat in Eaton Square, the gallery business and all his American investments, probably about £9 million today, to two charities. One half was to be converted after funeral expenses into a cash bequest to The King George’s Fund for Sailors. ‘IT IS MY EARNEST REQUEST that this legacy shall be applied solely for the benefit of male Royal Naval Ratings and Merchant Seamen.’ The Sailors’ Fund accounts for 2016 show that there is still an endowment of £2.9 million pounds in the Arthur T. Jeffress Bequest.7 The other half was to be given to the Institute of Cancer Research, now The Royal Marsden Hospital. This lent weight to the theory that Arthur had cancer, but the link between cancer and tobacco was revealed to the general public in Britain only four years previously. Tobacco was the basis of all Arthur’s inherited wealth. This bequest was often overlooked by his acquaintances and friends in favour of sniggers or admiration for his gift to sailors – very specifically for men only – who had always given him so much pleasure. John Deakin wrote a shocked and formal note, undated but within weeks of Arthur’s death, from the home of Principessa Obolensky in Genoa, to Robert asking where Arthur had been buried, as he had only just read about his death in a newspaper.8 He told Dan Farson that ‘I really loved that bastard . . .’9 Robert and Edna organized the memorial service at noon on 28 November 1961, one week after Arthur’s fifty-sixth birthday, at St Bartholomew’s Church, near Smithfield, easily the most beautiful ancient church in London. Graham Sutherland delivered an elegant tribute and then sent a succinct but even more affecting version to The Times.10 Southampton Art Gallery put the Arthur Jeffress Bequest on display in late 1963 and accompanied the exhibition with a small catalogue, for which Robert Melville wrote a marvellous essay on his good friend and employer.11 He started with the fact that it amused Arthur to have ‘art dealer’ inscribed in his passport, as he did not like the breed and maintained that he could always tell them by their cold eyes. He was on warm terms with several, however, and, in an exchange of business letters with Gerald Corcoran of the Lefevre, wrote ‘I

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too am fond of our formal exchange of correspondence and wonder what our biographers will make of it all!’12 Robert’s essay perceptively pointed out that Arthur did not really think of himself as a collector either, believing it to be de-humanizing to obsess about quality: ‘He would never allow his sense of aesthetic values to deny him the pleasure of acquiring a picture which interested him for other reasons.’ Arthur is evoked in two thoughtful, intimate analogies: ‘He bought paintings in much the same way he bought flowers: sometimes they were orchids, sometime cabbage roses, and he didn’t expect any of them to be everlasting.’ Then, to explain that the 1961 version of the collection was only one snapshot of Arthur’s taste in art, Robert compared the way in which the collection ebbed and flowed to Arthur’s love of processions. Robert believed that in the fourteen years he knew him, Arthur never missed a single royal procession in London nor any Royal Tournament (see colour plates 19 and 20). He once asked Arthur what he would most like to see if he could have travelled through time and one can just imagine long afternoons in the gallery, uninterrupted by clients, when they chatted like this. Arthur said he would make straight for St Petersburg to see one of the military reviews described by Sacheverell Sitwell in Valse des Fleurs: All round, in every direction, there are domes and spires. The gilded crosses on the churches rise from crescents. There are domes like melons, pumpkins, pineapples, like pears or strawberries, painted in all colours, ornamented with disks and stars, and hung with veils of gilded chains. The procession is more than a mile in length, and does not come forward in a straight line but curves and zigzags in perfect order and as though to be the better seen.13 Arthur mentioned the fabulous tributes paid to Tsar Nicholas I by Persia – jewels, fabric, precious metals and exotic animals – adding ‘but I would have been weeping for Persia’. This, along with the huge fragment of a painting of Shah Fatih Ali’s sons which dominated his library in Eaton Square, led Robert, like other friends late in life, to subscribe to the legend of Persian ancestry. That painting and the ‘glossy and curiously feminine’ portrait of Napoleon in his coronation robes were so close to Arthur’s sense of self that Robert was always drawn to them as if they held ‘the secret of his baffling, complex and fascinating personality’.14

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Arthur Jeffress

Napoleon’s link with Venice may be the key to Arthur’s continuing passion for him or that he gave his name to the legal system that kept homosexuality within the law in France and much of mainland Europe. Perhaps Arthur just believed he resembled the small, charismatic Corsican as Michael Sherard and Sandy Baird speculated after a visit to Marwell in 1947. There are notes to each other on the reverse of a photo about how Arthur had put on weight and looked rather like ‘his adored Napoleon’.15 The Bauchant painting of Alexander’s funeral procession should be added to this set of passkeys. Derek Hill, son of his interior designer and university friend John Hill as well as a distinguished artist and critic, described Arthur as a character out of Vathek, holding the glorious East in fee. He was of course a man out of his time and would have been happier in St Petersburg in the early eighteenth century or in Beirut with James Elroy Flecker.16 On the same kind of slow afternoon in the gallery Robert and Arthur often discussed favourite painters, which books they most often re-read and the happiest moments of their lives. Neither man answered the last question in a satisfactory way, we are told. Carpaccio was always on Arthur’s list of favourite painters and the debt that some magic realists like E. Box owed to that lovely Venetian master is clear. Proust and Austen were constants on his list of writers but Benson was the one whose work he knew best and Robert recalled in the 1980s how Arthur quoted the ‘breakfast scene’ in detail. What Arthur loved in English country house formality and military display was the balance and tension between stringent, arcane rules and elegant glamour. He had learned to play this English game very effectively from his Edwardian childhood onwards but his own hospitality had, according to Robert: more than a hint of Byzantium [. . .] he knew the palaces, temples and luxury hotels of most of the cities of Europe and the East, but he knew and loved London best of all even though in spite of his English ways he could never be mistaken for a typical Englishman.17 Robert went on to describe two paintings of quality that Arthur lost in the fire at Pelham Crescent. One was by Arthur’s friend Christian Bérard, a family group seated on a deserted beach, consisting of a middle-aged woman, a girl

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and a boy, each painted as a self-portrait. Robert uses his elegant prose to describe Bérard’s late designs for theatre and textiles ‘which lend an ineffable exoticism to fleeting occasion’ but who, in the triple self-portrait, dealt with ‘the melancholy problem of identity in a triumph of taste’, perfectly evoking Arthur, too. Finally, Robert also recalls a now lost, large painting by Pierre Bonnard in which – ‘with sensual indelicacy’ – golden sunlight seemed to pour over a woman and a nearby table laden with sumptuous fruit. He concluded: ‘Arthur Jeffress came finally to the point of wondering whether the world wanted him or not, yet no man ever looked more at home in sunlight.’18

296

Notes All references to websites show the date when each was last accessed.

Abbreviations: ATJ = Arthur Tilden Jeffress RM = Robert Melville SCAG = Southampton City Art Gallery

Chapter 1, pp. 3–12. 1

Nicky Haslam in conversation with author, October 2018.

2

Letter, Henry Hill to Arthur Tilden Jeffress, 18 May 1960, Hill family papers.

3

Postcard, Peggy Guggenheim to ATJ, 14 February 1961, Jeffress papers.

4

Robert Melville in conversation with author, March 1985.

5

Jeffress family tree, Hill family papers.

6

Email, Helen Harris to author, 3 January 2016, quoting from notes written by ATJ’s cousin Janie Averett Harris Jones (1905–78) to her daughter Leslie Ann (Tinker) Jones.

7

Ibid.

8

Ibid.

9

Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (D. Appleton & Company, New York, 1920), Book One, Chapter IX, p. 65.

10 Ibid. 11 Ken Jacobs, What Happened on 23rd St. in 1901. Available at www.eai.org/titles/ what-happened-on-23rd-street-in-1901 (accessed 3 December 2018). 297

298

Notes

12 Letter, Henry Hill to Robert Jeffress, 28 April 1964, Jeffress family papers. 13 Letter, Robert Jeffress to Henry Hill, 7 April 1964, ibid. 14 Email, Helen Harris to author, 3 January 2016, quoting Janie Jones. 15 Jeffress family tree, Hill family papers. 16 Unidentified newspaper cutting, Jeffress family papers. 17 Unidentified newspaper cutting, ibid. 18 B.A.T Bulletin, Volume XVI (London: British American Tobacco, January 1926), pp. 249–54, Jeffress family papers. 19 Email, Helen Harris to author, 3 January 2016, quoting Janie Jones. 20 Email, Jane Hill to author, 28 March 2012. 21 Letter, Henry Hill to Robert and Elizabeth Jeffress, 10 November 1958, Jeffress family papers. 22 Email, Helen Harris to author, 3 January 2016, quoting Janie Jones.

Chapter 2, pp. 13–18. 1

Nigel Middlemiss and Jerome Farrell, The History of Mill Hill Park. Available at millhillparkacton.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/History-Mill-Hill-Park (accessed 3 December 2018).

2

The Phillimore estate, Survey of London: Volume 37, Northern Kensington, pp. 58–76, originally published by London County Council, London, 1973. Available at https:// www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vol37/pp58-76#h3-0015 (accessed 9 January 2019).

3

Howard Cox, The Global Cigarette: Origins and Evolution of British American Tobacco (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 99.

4

Ibid., p. 100.

5

Orley Farm School website. Available at www.orleyfarm.harrow.sch.uk/about/history/ (accessed 3 December 2018).

Chapter 3, pp. 19–28. 1

Particulars of Sale Plan and Views of Kenton Grange (London: Messrs Walton & Lee, 1912), Jeffress papers.

Notes

299

2

David Kynanston, Austerity Britain 1945–1951 (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010), p. 263.

3

John Betjeman, ‘Poems of Childhood’, taken from ‘Summoned By Bells’, A Ring of Bells (London: John Murray, 1962), p. 9.

4

Ibid.

5

Particulars of Sale Plan.

6

Ibid.

7

Email, Helen Harris to author, 3 January 2016, quoting from Janie Jones.

8

Wembley History Society Journal, Vol VI, No. 6, Spring 1988, p. 134, Jeffress archive, SCAG.

9

Email, Rita M. Boswell, Archivist, Harrow School, to author, 20 October 2011.

10 Email, Shelagh Chambers, Orley Farm School, to author, 21 March 2011. 11 John K. Winkler, Tobacco Tycoon, The Story of James Buchanan Duke (New York: Random House, 1942), pp. 254–5. 12 B.A.T Bulletin, Volume XVI (London: British American Tobacco, January 1926), pp. 249–54, Jeffress family papers. 13 Email, Shelagh Chambers, Orley Farm School, to author, 21 March 2011. 14 B.A.T Bulletin. 15 Morning Oregonian (Portland, Or., December 30 1922), p. 14. 16 Bunny Roger interviewed by Helen Simpson, quoted in Kevin Embling-Evans, Arthur Tilden Jeffress: His Life and Work, unpublished dissertation, p. 111, Jeffress archive, SCAG. 17 B.A.T. Bulletin. 18 London Parks & Gardens Trust, London Gardens Online. Available at www. londongardensonline.org.uk/gardens-online-record.php?ID=BRE042 (accessed 3 December 2018) 19 Email, Rita M. Boswell. 20 Letter, ATJ to The Bursar, Harrow School, 15 January 1960 [in order to get a visa for his Middle Eastern travels], Jeffress papers. 21 Email, Rita M. Boswell. 22 J. Smithers, Dornford Yates (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1982), p. 24. 23 Dornford Yates, As Berry and I Were Saying (London: Ward, Lock, 1952), Introduction. 24 Christopher Tyerman, A History of Harrow School, 1324N1991 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 140.

300

Notes

25 Ibid. 26 ‘Schools: Harrow School’, British History on Line. Available at www.british-history. ac.uk/vch/middx/vol1/pp. 299-302 (accessed 3 December 2018). 27 E.D. Laborde, Harrow School: Yesterday and Today (London: Winchester Publications, 1948), pp. 63–4. 28 Ibid., p. 195. 29 Email, Rita M. Boswell. 30 Hugo Vickers, Cecil Beaton: The Authorised Biography (London: George Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1985), p. 22 and fn. 31 Tyerman, p. 501. 32 The song was written by Edward Ernest Bowen and John Farmer in 1872. 33 Daniel Farson, Never a Normal Man: An Autobiography (London: HarperCollins, 1997), p. 111. 34 Daniel Farson, The Gilded Gutter Life Of Francis Bacon: The Authorized Biography (London: Century, 1993), p. 88. 35 The Harrovian, 29 July 1922, p. 1. 36 Ibid., 28 July 1923, p. 61. 37 ‘School Speech Days’, The Times, 28 June 1923.

Chapter 4, pp. 29–40. 1

Email, Miss J.S. Ringrose, Honorary Archivist, Pembroke College, Oxford, to author, 20 September 2011.

2

Lucilla Burn, The Fitzwilliam Museum: A History (London: Philip Wilson Publishing for Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 2016), p. 144 and fn. 56.

3

Email, Miss J.S. Ringrose.

4

John Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses: A Biographical List of All Known Students, Graduates and Holders of Office at the University of Cambridge, from the Earliest Times to 1900, Volume 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947), p. 186.

5

Robert Graves and Alan Hodges, The Long Week-end: A Social History of Great Britain, 1918–1939 (London: Four Square, 1961), pp. 122–3.

6

Robert Melville in conversation with author, March 1985.

7

Miss A.M. Champneys, ‘New Novels’, The Times Literary Supplement, 5 August 1920, p. 502.

Notes 8

E.F. Benson, As We Are (London: Longmans, 1932), p. 15–16.

9

Nicky Haslam in conversation with author, October 2018.

301

10 Letter, Anthony Groves-Raines to ATJ, 27 April 1956, Jeffress papers. 11 Letter, ATJ to Elsa and Michael Combe-Martin, 26 November 1954, copy kindly supplied by Suzanne Ruta. 12 MS Add.7675, ADC Archives, Department of Manuscripts & University Archives, University of Cambridge. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 ‘Marlowe Dramatic Society’, The Times, 8 March 1926, p. 12. 16 ‘Pirandello Play At Cambridge’ The Times, 18 June 1926, p. 12. 17 MS Add.7675, ADC Archives, Department of Manuscripts & University Archives, University of Cambridge. 18 Ibid. 19 ‘Uneven temperature’, The Observer, 25 July 1926, p. 11. 20 Paul Cornwell, Only by Failure: The Many Faces of the Impossible Life of Terence Gray, (Cromer, Norfolk: Salt Publishing, 2004) p. xxiv. 21 Ibid., pp. 111–12. 22 J.E. Sewell, quoted in Paul Cornwell, ‘Sensational with the Greeks and Daring with Shakespeare but Not So Sure about Shaw: Performance of George Bernard Shaw at Terence Gray’s Festival Theatre, Cambridge, England, 1926–1935’, Theatre History Studies, vol. 29, (Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 2009) p. 171. 23 W.J. Turner, The Man Who Ate The Popomack (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1922). 24 The Australian Live Performance Database. Available at www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/ event/98024 (accessed 3 December 2018).

Chapter 5, pp. 41–50. 1

Email, Miss J.S. Ringrose, Pembroke College, 20 September 2011.

2

Email, Helen Harris, 3 January 2016, to author, quoting Janie Jones.

3

The Lusitania Resource. Available at www.rmslusitania.info/people/saloon/charles-hill/ (accessed 3 December 2018).

4

Email, Helen Harris, 3 January 2016.

302

Notes

5

Ibid.

6

B.A.T Bulletin, Volume XVI (London: British American Tobacco, January 1926). pp. 249–54, Jeffress family papers.

7

Ibid.

8

Ibid.

9

Ibid.

10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Newspaper cutting, unidentified, ibid. 14 B.A.T Bulletin, ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Albert Godfrey Jeffress will, copy in Jeffress archive, SCAG. 19 Eric L. Basire, History of the Kenton Miniature Railway (London: privately published 2015), p. 1. 20 Ibid., p. 51. 21 Paul D’Orléans, 100 Years After the Indian Summer. Available at thevintagent. com/2017/07/27/100-years-after-the-indian-summer-part-1-billy-wells/ (accessed 3 December 2018). 22 Randolph Joseph Jeffress will, copy in Jeffress archive, SCAG. 23 Cutting from unidentified sale catalogue, ibid. 24 Email, Miss J.S. Ringrose.

Chapter 6, pp. 51–60. 1

‘Ordinations at the Beda’, The Catholic Herald, 25 March 1938. Available at www. archive.catholicherald.co.uk/article/25th-march-1938/12/ordinations-at-the-beda-exking-of-spain-gives (accessed 3 December 2018).

2

For a full account, see: The Rt Hon Michael Havers, Edward Grayson and Peter Shankland, The Royal Baccarat Scandal (London: Souvenir Press, 1977).

Notes

303

3

Diana Du Feu, telephone conversation with author, May 2011.

4

Letter, Sidney Levett to ATJ, 8 March 1961, Jeffress papers.

5

Letter ATJ to WL, 9 March 1961, ibid.

6

Diana du Feu, telephone conversation with author, May 2011.

7

Bunny Roger interviewed by Helen Simpson, SCAG, quoted in Kevin Embling-Evans, Arthur Tilden Jeffress: His Life and Work, unpublished dissertation, p. 111.

8

Letter, ATJ to Richard Blake Brown, 23 December 1946, copy kindly supplied by Ian Massey.

9

Letter, ATJ to Esther Clifford 22 June 1944, Clifford papers.

10 National Portrait Gallery, catalogue references x47331-5. 11 Charles Dickens, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (London: Chapman and Hall, 1865), p. 159. 12 Martin Battersby, The Decorative Thirties (New York: Walker, 1971) p. 18, quoting Paul Nash, Room and Book (London: Soncino Press), 1932. 13 Henry James, The Golden Bowl (London: Methuen, 1905), p. 27.

Chapter 7, pp. 61–66. 1

John Pearson, Facades: Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell Sitwell (London: Macmillan, 1978), p. 242.

2

J.P. Wearing, The London Stage 1920–1929: A Calendar of Productions, Performers, and Personnel (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), p. 551.

3

‘Arts Theatre Club’, The Times, 28 November 1927, p. 12.

4

Sarah H. Bradford, Honor Clerk, Jonathan Fryer, Robin Gibson, John Pearson, The Sitwells and the Arts of the 1920s and 1930s (London: National Portrait Gallery Publications, 1996), p. 117.

5

Information supplied to author by Professor Nicholas Clifford, 2012.

6

The Mercury, Hobart, Tasmania, 5 April 1940, p. 5.

7

Invoice, Jeffress papers.

8

Beverley Nichols, The Unforgiving Minute: Some Confessions from Childhood to the Outbreak of the Second World War (London: W.H Allen, 1978), p. 304.

9

Letter from ATJ to Tim Brooke, 14 October 1942, Clifford papers.

10 Barbara Ker-Seymer Papers, TGA 974/5/1, Tate Archive.

304

Notes

11 Robert Melville, ‘A Gallery Of Portraits’, Encounter, May 1983, p. 65. 12 Hanover Gallery Records, TGA 863, Tate Archive.

Chapter 8, pp. 67–84. 1

Robert Graves and Alan Hodges, The Long Week-end: A Social History of Great Britain, 1918–1939 (London: Four Square, 1961), p. 125.

2

D. J. Taylor, Bright Young People: The Lost Generation of London’s Jazz Age (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), p. 254.

3

Maurice Bottomley, Cocktails With Elvira: Elvira Barney and her Circle. Available at www.elvirabarneywordpress.com (accessed 3 December 2018).

4

Marie-Jaqueline Lancaster, Brian Howard: Portrait of a Failure (London: Timewell Press, 2005), p. 283.

5

Barre Lyndon, Circuit Dust (London: John Miles Ltd. 1934) quoted in The Search for MG C-Type Montlhery Midget C0291 and Beyond. Available at www.gt40mk1.plus. com/MG_C0291.htm (accessed 3 December 2018).

6

D.J. Taylor, Bright Young People, p. 225.

7

Martin Battersby, The Decorative Thirties (New York: Walker, 1971), p. 78.

8

Michael Harrison, Rosa (London: Corgi reprint, 1973), pp. 258–9.

9

Alec Waugh, A Year to Remember: A Reminiscence of 1931 (London: Bloomsbury Reader, 1975), pp. 176–7.

10 Ibid., pp. 172–3. 11 John Montgomery, The Twenties (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1957), p. 199. 12 Ibid., p. 201. 13 Ibid., p 200. 14 Bunny Roger interviewed by Helen Simpson, quoted in Kevin Embling-Evans, Arthur Tilden Jeffress: His Life and Work, unpublished dissertation, p. 107. 15 R.S. Hooper, ‘If Gossip We Must’, The Bystander, 2 December 1931, Volume CXII, pp. 433–4. 16 Letter, Raymond Mortimer to Edward Sackville West, quoted in Michael De-La-Noy, Eddie: The Life of Edward Sackville West (London: Arcadia Books, 1999), p. 40. 17 John Montgomery, p. 200. 18 Michael Harrison, p. 259. 19 Letter, ATJ to John Montgomery, 7 April 1956, Jeffress archive SCAG.

Notes

305

20 Bobby Bishop notes, Jeffress archive, ibid. 21 Notes, telephone conversation, Helen Simpson and Bunny Roger, October 1996, Jeffress archive, ibid. 22 Letter, ATJ to John Montgomery, 24 January 1957, Jeffress archive, ibid. 23 Notes, telephone conversation, Helen Simpson and Carmen de Ossa, November 1996, Jeffress archive, ibid. 24 Letter, ATJ to John Montgomery, 7 April 1956, ibid. 25 Email, Jane Hill to author, 24 November 2010. 26 The story of the Elvira Barney trial is extensively described by Maurice Bottomley and all quotations are taken from https://elvirabarney.wordpress.com/tag/elvira-barney/ (accessed 19 February 2019). 27 Peter Cotes quoted in Jonathan Goodman, Masterpieces of Murder (London: Constable and Robinson, 2005), pp. 374–5. 28 Miranda Carter, Anthony Blunt: His Lives (London: Macmillan, 2001), p. 398. 29 Melanie Backe-Hansen, Espionage and Spies in Portman Square. Available at www. thehousehistorian.wordpress.com/2015/05/11/espionage-and-spies-in-portmansquare/ (accessed 3 December 2018). 30 Special Operations Executive HS9/791/5, National Archives. 31 Ibid.

Chapter 9, pp. 85–104. 1

Matt Porta, 1933 Rolls-Royce 20/25 Drophead Coupé. Available at www.fantasyjunction. com/cars/1517-Rolls-Royce-20/25 (accessed 3 December 2018).

2

Robin Muir, Under The Influence: John Deakin, Photography and the Lure of Soho (London: Art Books, 2014) p. 19.

3

Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–1957 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) p. 71.

4

Daniel Farson, Never a Normal Man: An Autobiography (London: HarperCollins, 1997), p. 111.

5

Ibid.

6

Muir, Under The Influence, p. 108.

7

British Listed Buildings, Marwell House: A Grade II Listed Building in Owslebury, Hampshire. Available at www.britishlistedbuildings.co.uk/101157043-marwell-houseowslebury#.XAUy6vZ2uM8 (accessed 3 December 2018).

306

Notes

8

Sale Particulars, Marwell Hall estate, 1934, HRO 64M80/10, Hampshire Record Office.

9

Bunny Roger interviewed by Helen Simpson, SCAG, quoted in Kevin Embling-Evans, Arthur Tilden Jeffress: His Life and Work, unpublished dissertation, p. 109.

10 J.B. Priestley, English Journey (London: William Heinemann, 1934), p. 18. 11 Letter, ATJ to Richard Blake Brown, 23 December 1946, copy kindly supplied by Ian Massey. 12 Battersby, The Decorative Thirties (New York: Walker, 1971), p. 199. 13 Ibid. 14 Bunny Roger interviewed by Helen Simpson, quoted in Kevin Embling-Evans, p. 111. 15 Letter, ATJ to Esther Clifford, 11 Jan 1945, Clifford papers. 16 Jan Church, Hampshire Gardens Trust, Marwell House. Available at www.research.hgt. org.uk/item/marwell-house2-marwell-lodge (accessed 4 December 2018). 17 Paul Rousseau and Sean Cole, ‘ “Or is it Bacon in drag?”: How to find an unknown sitter’s identity’, Fashion, Style & Popular Culture, Vol. 3, No. 2, 1 March 2016, pp. 209–24. 18 Farson, p. 112. 19 Letter, Bobby Bishop to Helen Simpson, 17 November 1991, Jeffress archive, SCAG. 20 ATJ photo album, Jeffress archive, ibid. 21 Mr Churchill, telephone conversation with author, 1986. 22 I am indebted to Adrien Ostier for his help regarding his uncle, André Ostier. 23 Robin Muir, A Maverick Eye: The Street Photography of John Deakin (London: Thames & Hudson), 2002, p. 21. 24 Barbara Ker-Seymer papers, TGA 974/5/1, Tate Archive. 25 Letter, from ATJ to Esther Clifford, 10 May 1945, Clifford papers. 26 Robin Muir, p. 20, quoting Evening Standard, 26 October 1938. 27 Muir, p. 21. 28 Ibid., p. 155. 29 Email, Fiona Nugent Condon to author, 17 July 2018. 30 Letter, Bunny Roger to Helen Simpson, 14 February 1997, Jeffress archive, SCAG. 31 Rosemary Molloy McColl album, courtesy of Robin Muir. 32 Muir, p. 45. 33 Letter, ATJ to RM, 1 August 1955, Jeffress papers.

Notes

307

Chapter 10, pp. 105–120. 1

‘James Ernest Elder Wills’. Available at https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0932625/bio (accessed 11 January 2019).

2

Wembley History Society Journal, Vol VI, No. 6, Spring 1988, p. 137, Jeffress archive, SCAG.

3

Information kindly supplied by the Espigares family by telephone to author, 13 January 2019.

4

The Independent, 11 December 1993. Available at www.independent.co.uk/news/ people/wills-1466833.html (accessed 4 December 2018).

5

The full story of the AFS is available at www.ourstory.info/ (accessed 4 December 2018).

6

ATJ application, RG2/001, copy supplied by The Archives of the American Field Service, New York.

7

James W. Stewart, Sinking of the Zam Zam: Diary of James W. Stewart with the British American Ambulance Corps., January–September 1941 (Bloomington: iUniverse, Inc, 2012), p. 20.

8

Manuscript note, Jeffress papers.

9

Letter, ATJ to Esther Clifford, 15 August 1944, Clifford papers.

10 James W. Stewart, p. 20. 11 Ibid., p. 24. 12 Ibid., p. 221. 13 Ibid., p. 27. 14 ?TEXT REQUIRED? 15 Ulrich Mohr and Arthur V. Sellwood, Ship 16: The True Story of a German Surface Raider Atlantis (Stroud: Amberley Publishing, 2008), p. 186. 16 James Stewart, p. 38. 17 Ibid., p. 54. 18 Swan Hjalmar Swanson, Zamzam: The Story of a Strange Missionary Odyssey (1941). Available at https://archive.org/stream/ZamzamTheStory/ZamzamTheStory_djvu.txt (accessed 11 January 2019) 19 Stewart, p. 96. 20 Stewart, p. 138. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., p. 151.

308

Notes

Chapter 11, pp. 121–132. 1

Noel Riley Fitch, Julia Child: The OSS Year. Available at www.wsj.com/articles/ SB121933814525060743 (accessed 4 December 2018).

2

Letter, ATJ to EC, 29 June 1944, Clifford papers.

3

The full story appears in Philip Booth, The Montreal Repertory Theatre: 1930–1961, 1989. Available at www.digitool.library.mcgill.ca/webclient/StreamGate?folder_ id=0&dvs=1543942985449~670 (accessed 4 December 2018).

4

Lauren Bacall, By Myself and Then Some (London: Headline Book Publishing, 2006), p. 71.

5

Letter, ATJ to Tim Brooke, 14 October 1942, Clifford papers.

6

Letter, ATJ to EC, 22 June 1944, ibid.

7

Ibid., 12 August 1943.

8

Caleb Milne, I Dream Of The Day: Letters From Caleb Milne, Africa, 1942–1943 (New York, Van Rees Press, 1944), p. 6. Available at https://archive.org/stream/ IDreamOfTheDay-nsia/IDreamOfTheDay_djvu.txt (accessed 11 January 2019).

9

Letter, ATJ to EC, undated, Clifford papers.

10 Available at http://ourstory.info/library/4-ww2/AFSletters/AFSNB3.html (accessed 11 January 2019). 11 Available at http://ourstory.info/library/4-ww2/AFSletters/07.html (accessed 11 January 2019). 12 Letter, ATJ to EC, undated, Clifford papers. 13 Available at http://www.ourstory.info/library/4-ww2/Saber/desertTC.html (accessed 11 January 2019). 14 Available at http://ourstory.info/library/4-ww2/AFSletters/07.html (accessed 4 December 2018). 15 Available at http://ourstory.info/library/4-ww2/AFSletters/ttimes.html (accessed 4 December 2018). 16 Letter, Major Coster to Major Hoenig, RG2/001, copy kindly supplied by Archives of the American Field Service, New York. 17 Letter, ATJ to EC, 5 October 1942, Clifford papers. 18 Letter, ATJ to Tim Brooke, 14 October 1942, ibid. 19 Letter, ATJ to EC, 22 October 1942, ibid.

Notes

309

Chapter 12, pp. 133–144. 1

Letter, ATJ to EC, 23 December 1942, Clifford papers.

2

Robin Muir, Under The Influence: John Deakin, Photography and the Lure of Soho (London: Art Books, 2014), p. 23.

3

Letter, ATJ to EC, 14 October 1942, Clifford papers.

4

I am indebted to Hilary Roberts of the Imperial War Museum and Paul Rousseau for this information.

5

Letter, ATJ to EC, 19 February 1943, Clifford papers.

6

Ibid., 20 February 1943.

7

Postcard, ibid., 25 April 1943.

8

Letter, Henry Hill to Robert Jeffress, 12 May 1943, Hill family papers.

9

Available at http://ourstory.info/library/4-ww2/AFSletters/AFSB3.html (accessed 4 December 2018).

10 Available at http://www.ourstory.info/library/5-AFSIS/Our/NL55.html (accessed 4 December 2018). 11 Caleb Milne, I Dream Of The Day: Letters From Caleb Milne, Africa, 1942–1943 (New York, Van Rees Press, 1944). Available at archive.org/details/IDreamOfTheDay/page/ n7 (accessed 4 December 2018). 12 Letter, ATJ to EC, June 27 1943, Clifford papers. 13 Letter, ATJ to EC, 18 July 1943, ibid. 14 Charles Kaiser, The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America (New York: Grove Atlantic, 2007), p. 35. 15 Letter, ATJ to EC, 10 October 1943, Clifford papers. 16 Available at http://ourstory.info/library/4-ww2/AFSletters/AFSB4.html (4 December 2018). 17 Available at http://ourstory.info/library/4-ww2/AFSletters/18.html (accessed 4 December 2018). 18 Letter, ATJ to EC, Nov 12 1943, Clifford papers. 19 Available at http://www.ourstory.info/library/Rock/R10.html (accessed 4 December 2018). 20 Letter, ATJ to EC, 26 November 1943. 21 A rare ATJ letter was printed in the AFS newsletter, presumably submitted by Robert Jeffress. Available at http://www.ourstory.info/library/Rock/R10.html (accessed 4 December 2018).

310

Notes

22 Available at http://www.ourstory.info/library/Rock/R12.html (accessed 4 December 2018). 23 Letter, ATJ to Tom Howard, 18 January 1961, Jeffress papers. 24 Letter, ATJ to EC, 14 January 1944, Clifford papers. 25 Letter, ATJ to EC, 27 February 1944, ibid. 26 Letter, ATJ to EC, 29 May 1944. ibid. 27 Letter, ATJ to EC, 23 July 1944, ibid. 28 Ibid.

Chapter 13, pp. 145–156. 1

Letter, ATJ to EC, 23 September 1944, Clifford papers.

2

Available at http://www.ourstory.info/library/Rock/R14.html (accessed 4 December 2018).

3

Letter, ATJ to EC 18 October 1944, Clifford papers.

4

Edward Voules, Free Of All Malice (Suffolk: The Lavenham Press, 1987), p. 116.

5

Bunny Roger interviewed by Helen Simpson, SCAG, quoted Kevin Embling-Evans, Arthur Tilden Jeffress: His Life and Work, unpublished dissertation, p. 32.

6

Ibid., p. 114.

7

Letter, ATJ to EC, 23 October 1944, Clifford papers.

8

Ibid., 24 Nov 1944.

9

Letter, Barbara Ker-Seymer to Edward Burra, undated but 1945, Barbara Ker-Seymer papers, TGA974/2/11-130, Tate Archive.

10 Letter, ATJ to EC, 18 April 1945, Clifford papers. 11 Ibid., 3 June 1945. 12 Ibid., 13 Dec 1944. 13 Ibid., 29 May 1945. 14 Ibid., 18 July 18 1943. 15 Letter, ATJ to Henry Hill, 26 November 1944, Hill family papers. 16 Ibid., 12 May 1945. 17 Ibid., 25 Nov 1944.

Notes

311

18 Letter, Robert Jeffress to Henry Hill, 21 August 1944, Hill family papers. 19 Available at http://ourstory.info/library/4-ww2/AFSletters/AFSNL19.html (accessed 4 December 2018). 20 Letter, ATJ to EC, 27 June 1945, Clifford papers. 21 L.L. Kinsolving, Composite Portrait of the Average AFS Man. Available at http:// ourstory.info/library/4-ww2/AFSletters/13.html (accessed 4 December 2018). 22 Email, Jane Hill to author, 10 April 2012. 23 Letter, ATJ to Richard Blake Brown, 11 November 1947, copy kindly supplied by Ian Massey.

Chapter 14, pp. 157–166. 1

Letter, ATJ to EC, 25 November 1944, Clifford papers.

2

Email, Julia May Boddewyn to author, 14 May 2016.

3

Letter, ATJ to EC, 7 November 1944, Clifford papers.

4

Ibid., 3 April 1947.

5

Telephone conversation, Mr Churchill and author, 1986.

6

Email, Elizabeth Conran to author, 4 March 2013.

7

Letter, ATJ to Loraine Conran, 10 July 1946, Jeffress archive, SCAG.

8

Ibid., 30 August 1946.

9

Winchester Art Club Minute Books, 151M88W/2, Hampshire County Archives.

10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 CSA catalogues, Jeffress archive, SCAG. 13 Peter Jones, ‘Britain’s first Jackson Pollock’, The Burlington Magazine, Volume CLI, No. 1270, January 2009, pp. 31–2. 14 Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1990), p. 480. 15 Letter, ATJ to David Lloyd-Lowles, 17 January 1961, Jeffress papers. 16 Francis Valentine O’Connor and Eugene Victor Thaw, edited by, Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Drawings, and Other Works (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 150 [Banners of Spring, 1946, oil on canvas 34 × 43 in., catalogue number 157 (private collection)].

312

Notes

17 Robert Melville, introduction to The Arthur Jeffress Bequest: Southampton Art Gallery (Southampton: Southampton Art Gallery, 1963). 18 Robert Melville in conversation with author, March 1985. 19 Jeffress archive, SCAG. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. I am indebted to Peter Jones for this information. 22 Jeffress archive, SCAG. 23 Robert Melville, in conversation with author, March 1985. 24 Nicola Beauman, ‘Smith, Naomi Gwladys Royde (1875–1964), literary editor and writer’, Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 25 Sharon Kusunoki, curator of the Edward James archive at West Dean, Sussex, quoted in email from Nicola Coleby to author, 7 June 2012.

Chapter 15, pp. 167–176. 1

Letter, ATJ to Richard Blake Brown, 11 November 1946, copy kindly supplied by Ian Massey.

2

Jean-Yves Mock, Erica Brausen; Premier Marchand de Francis Bacon (Paris: L’Echoppe, 1996). Available in English translation on http://www.gillhedley.co.uk/pdf/EricaBrausen-translation-French.pdf, http://www.gillhedley.co.uk/), p. 5.

3

Cherith Summers, Erica Brausen & The Hanover Gallery (1948–1973) (University of St. Andrew’s, unpublished dissertation, 2018), pp. 5–6.

4

Michael Hausmann, Johanna Ey: A Critical Reappraisal (Birmingham: University of Birmingham, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, 2010), p. 9.

5

Aloys Greither, ‘Erica Brausen’, Kunsthandler und ihre Kollektionen, 11 (Germany: Leverkusen, Bayer, 1972), no pagination.

6

Jean-Noël Liaut, The Many Lives of Miss K.: Toto Koopman – Model, Muse, Spy (New York: Rizzoli Ex Libris, 2013), p. 120.

7

Summers, p. 7.

8

Günther Stern, ‘Peinture des fous’, Tumultes, Vols 28–9, No. 1 (Paris: Centre de Sociologie des Pratiques et des Représentations Politiques de l’université Paris, 2007), pp. 299–313.

9

Liaut, p. 121.

10 Letter, Jean-Yves Mock to author, 10 July 2013.

Notes

313

11 Jean-Yves Mock in conversation with author, Paris, December 2011. 12 Liaut, p. 150. 13 Summers, p. 9. 14 For a fuller picture, see Gill Hedley, ‘Three Female Gallerists who Changed the Course of British Art’, RA Magazine, Autumn 2016, (London: Royal Academy Publications). Available at https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/article/movers-and-shakers-femalegallerists-british-art (accessed 14 January 2019). 15 John R. Thompson, Sir Rex Nan Kivell. Available at www.adb.online.anu.edu.au (accessed 3 December 2018). 16 Hanover Gallery records, TGA 863/1/1, Tate Archive. 17 Email, Sue LaFleur to author, 9 August 2012. 18 Telephone conversation, Patricia Mulholland and author, August 2012. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Sue LaFleur, email to author, 9 August 2012. 22 Hildegard Gantner-Schlee, Raoh Schorr, 1901–1991 – Muttenz, Paris, London: ein Künstlerleben (Basel: Verlag des Kantons Basel-Landschaft, 1995), pp. 103–04. 23 Available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evan_Morgan,_2nd_Viscount_Tredegar (4 February 2019). 24 Email, Susan L. Milne to author, 14 August 2012. 25 Email, Sue LaFleur to author, 9 August 2012. 26 Email, Renata and Silvia Sigrist, Switzerland to author, 28 August 2012. 27 Ibid.

Chapter 16, pp. 177–184. 1

For a full biography of Elsa Vaudrey (1905–90), see Mel Gooding and Lucy Inglis, Elsa Vaudrey (London: Sansom & Company, 2019).

2

Cherith Summers, Erica Brausen & The Hanover Gallery (1948–73) (University of St Andrew’s, unpublished dissertation, 2018), pp. 10–11.

3

The Hanover Gallery’s status is discussed in Bryan Robertson, John Russell and Lord Snowdon, Private View: The Lively World of British Art (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1965), pp. 26–7.

314

Notes

4

Jean-Noël Liaut, The Many Lives of Miss K.: Toto Koopman – Model, Muse, Spy (New York: Rizzoli Ex Libris, 2013), p. 131.

5

Ibid.

6

Daniel Farson, The Gilded Gutter Life Of Francis Bacon: The Authorized Biography (London: Century, 1993), p. 86.

7

The Outsider: the Michel Saint-Denis Archive (Sheffield: University of Sheffield, and the British Library, 2006). Available at www.thefreelibrary.com/ The+outsider%3a+the+Michel+Saint-Denis+Archive%3a+a+Theatre+Archive . . . -a0147389514 (accessed 3 December 2018).

8

Email, William Feaver to author, 4 February 2011.

9

Jon Lys Turner, The Visitors’ Book: In Francis Bacon’s Shadow: The Lives of Richard Chopping and Denis Wirth-Miller (London: Constable, 2016), p. 169.

10 Liaut, p. 132. 11 George Melly, Don’t Tell Sybil: An Intimate Memoir of E. L. T. Mesens (London: Heinemann, 1997), p. 108. 12 Robert Melville collection, notes on Graham Sutherland, not yet catalogued, http://archive.tate.org.uk/TateArchiveUncatCollList.pdf, Tate Archive. 13 For a full version of her life, see Jean-Noël Liaut, The Many Lives of Miss K.: Toto Koopman – Model, Muse, Spy (New York: Rizzoli Ex Libris, 2013).

Chapter 17, pp. 185–194. 1

Letter, Randolph Jeffress to Henry Hill, 21 August 1944, Hill family papers.

2

Ibid.

3

Letter, Robert Jeffress to Henry Hill, 14 November 1944, ibid.

4

Letter, Henry Hill to Robert Jeffress, 3 April 1944, ibid.

5

Special Operations Executive: Personnel Files, HS9/791/5, National Archives.

6

Constance Jeffress will, copy in Jeffress archive, SCAG.

7

Letter, Randolph Jeffress to Robert and Elizabeth Jeffress, 14 June 1964, Hill family papers.

8

Email, Jane Hill to author, quoting Jane Harris, 8 May 2012.

9

‘Private View’, House and Garden, December 1952, pp. 56–9.

10 The life and work of Anthony Denney is celebrated at Rainham Hall. Available at https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/rainham-hall/features/anthony-denney--a-newexhibition-programme (accessed 18 February 2019).

Notes

315

11 Needlework carpet granted-aided by The Art Fund. Available at www.artfund.org/ supporting-museums/art-weve-helped-buy/artwork/3605/needlework-carpet (accessed 3 December 2018). 12 Noel Carrington, Colour and Pattern in the Home (London: Batsford, 1954), p. iv. 13 ‘L’appartement londinien de Mr Jefress [sic] un amateur de tableaux naïfs, de meubles Empire et Charles X’, Connaissance des arts, January 1956, Vol. 47, Part 1, Vol. 52, Part 1 (Paris: Société Française de Promotion Artistique, 1956), pp. 47–50. 14 Letter, ATJ to Duveen & Walker, 26 April 1951, Jeffress papers. 15 Bunny Roger, interviewed by Helen Simpson, quoted in Kevin Embling-Evans, Arthur Tilden Jeffress: His Life and Work, unpublished dissertation, p. 111. 16 The Property of the Late Arthur Jeffress, Catalogue of A Collection of Paintings, Drawings and Works of Art (London: Sotheby & Company, 1962). 17 Letter, ATJ to Robert Melville, 11 July 1956, Jeffress papers. 18 Anton Gill, Art Lover: A Biography of Peggy Guggenheim (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), p. 386. 19 Ibid., p. 385. 20 Information kindly supplied by email, Grazina Subelyte, Curatorial Assistant, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, to author, 11 July 2012. 21 Letter, ATJ to RM, 29 July 1959, Jeffress papers. 22 Jon Lys Turner, The Visitors’ Book: In Francis Bacon’s Shadow: The Lives of Richard Chopping and Denis Wirth-Miller (London: Constable, 2016), p. 170. 23 Roger Berthoud, Graham Sutherland: A Biography (London: Faber & Faber, 1982), p. 242. 24 Typescript on Arthur Jeffress Gallery paper, ‘For Insertion in the Agreement with Graham Sutherland’, 1959, Jeffress papers. 25 Berthoud, ibid. 26 Letters, Douglas Cooper to Graham Sutherland, 5 May 1960 and 27 July 1961, Sutherland correspondence, TAM 67, Tate Archive. 27 Letter, ATJ to RM, 3 July 1955, Jeffress papers.

Chapter 18, pp. 195–208. 1

Paul Hetherington, edited, The Diaries of Donald Friend, Volume 3 (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2003), pp. 172–3.

316

Notes

2

Cherith Summers, Erica Brausen & The Hanover Gallery (1948–1973) (University of St. Andrew’s, unpublished dissertation, 2018), p. 18.

3

Telephone conversation, Sir Jack Baer and author, 8 May 2012.

4

Daniel Farson, The Gilded Gutter Life Of Francis Bacon: The Authorized Biography (London: Century, 1993), p. 86.

5

Bryan Robertson, John Russell & Lord Snowdon, Private View: The Lively World of British Art (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons), 1965, pp. 25–6.

6

Letter, ATJ to Peter Rose-Pulham, 16 January 1954, Jeffress papers.

7

Jean-Yves Mock, Erica Brausen; Premier Marchand de Francis Bacon, p. 1.

8

Letter, Abbott, Ford & Ellis, solicitors, to Michael Behrens, 25 May 1954, Jeffress archive, SCAG.

9

Letter, Michael Behrens to Erica Brausen, Hanover Gallery Records, TGA 863/6/3, Tate Archive.

10 Letter, ATJ to Elsa and Michael Combe-Martin, 26 November 1954, kindly supplied by Suzanne Ruta. 11 Letter, ATJ to RM, 3 April 1954, Jeffress archive, SCAG. 12 Letter, ATJ to RM, 11 April 1954, ibid. 13 Letter, ATJ to Gaspero del Corso, 2 June 1954, Jeffress papers. 14 Letter, RM to ATJ, 19 August 1954, Jeffress archive, SCAG. 15 Robert Melville, introduction to The Arthur Jeffress Bequest: Southampton Art Gallery (Southampton: Southampton Art Gallery, 1963). 16 Letter, ATJ to E. Livengood, 13 July 1954, Jeffress papers. 17 www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/m/magic-realism (accessed 5 December 2018). 18 The Museum of Modern Art, New York, press release. Available at www.moma.org/ momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/press_archives/446/releases/MOMA_1938_0026_193804-22_38422-18.pdf (accessed 5 December 2018). 19 Available at www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/n/naive-art (accessed 5 December 2018). 20 Martin Battersby, The Decorative Thirties (London: Herbert Press, 1988), p. 183. 21 Sarah Bradford, Sacheverell Sitwell, Splendours and Miseries (London: SinclairStevenson, 1993), p. 135. 22 William Hazlitt, ‘Mr Angerstein’s Collection of Pictures’, London Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 36, December 1822, p. 489 (quoted in Bryan Robertson, Private View, p. 14). 23 Mary Gilliatt, Fabulous Food and Friends (Barnsley: Pen & Sword Books, 2008), p. 68. 24 Robin Dalton, telephone conversation with author, 26 March 2011.

Notes

317

25 Letter, Sir Roy Strong to author, 2 July 2012. 26 Mary Gilliatt, ibid. 27 Letter, Sir Roy Strong to author, 2 July 2012. 28 Letter, RM to Michael Middleton, 5 April 1956, Jeffress papers. 29 Letter, ATJ to RM, 10 July 1957, ibid. 30 Robert Melville, in conversation with the author, March 1985. 31 Letter, ATJ to Eliot Hodgkin, 30 October 1954, Jeffress papers. 32 Letter, ATJ to M. Mati, 26 September 1957, ibid. 33 Letter, Babe Martindale to ATJ, 18 June 1955, ibid. 34 Letter, ATJ to Babe Martindale, 20 June 1955, ibid. 35 Kevin Embling-Evans, Arthur Tilden Jeffress: His Life and Work, unpublished dissertation, p. 32.

Chapter 19, pp. 209–222. 1

John Hayes, Portraits by Graham Sutherland (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1977), p. 128.

2

Letter, RM to ATJ, 9 August 1955, Jeffress archive, SCAG.

3

Letter, ATJ to RM, 13 July 1954, ibid.

4

Letters, ATJ to RM, 16 and 19 July 1954, ibid.

5

Letter, Graham Sutherland to Elizabeth Ogborne, 16 October 1975, ibid.

6

Robert Melville collection, not yet catalogued, http://archive.tate.org.uk/ TateArchiveUncatCollList.pdf., Tate Archives.

7

Agatha Christie, The Secret Adversary (London: The Bodley Head, 1922).

8

Letter, ATJ to RM, 24 July 1954, Jeffress archive, SCAG.

9

Letter, RM to ATJ, 4 August 1954, ibid.

10 Robert Melville, introduction to The Arthur Jeffress Bequest: Southampton Art Gallery, (Southampton: Southampton Art Gallery, 1963). 11 Rick Gekoski, Lost, Stolen or Shredded: Stories of Missing Works of Art and Literature (London: Profile Books), 2013, p. 43. 12 Douglas Cooper, The Work of Graham Sutherland (London: Lund Humphries, 1961), p. 59.

318

Notes

13 Letter, ATJ to Richard Gainsborough, 8 June 1955, Jeffress papers. 14 M.H. Middleton, The Spectator, 24 June 1955, p. 801. 15 Letter, RM to ATJ, 29 June 1955, Jeffress papers. 16 Letter, ATJ to RM, 3 July 1955 ibid. 17 Letter, ATJ to Walter Goetz, 26 September 1957, ibid. 18 Telephone conversation, Mr Churchill with author, 1986. 19 Roger Berthoud, Graham Sutherland: A Biography (London: Faber & Faber, 1982), p. 195. 20 Paul Mahl, Studio, 1962, Vol. 163, p. 39. 21 G.S. Whittet, The Times, 17 January 1978; p. 15. 22 William Beckford, Vathek: The English Translation by Samuel Henley (1786), facsimile (London: Sampson Low, Marston and Company, 1892), pp. 13–14. 23 M.H. Middleton, The Spectator, 19 December 1952, p. 715. 24 Jon Lys Turner, The Visitors’ Book: In Francis Bacon’s Shadow: The Lives of Richard Chopping and Denis Wirth-Miller (London: Constable, 2016), p. 155. 25 Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2009), p. 144. 26 ‘A Gallery of Names That Mean Galleries’, The Tatler & Bystander, 20 May 1959, pp. 428–31. 27 National Portrait Gallery, NPG x1125507-10. Available at https://www.npg.org.uk/ collections/search/person/mp62147/arthur-jeffress (accessed 17 January 2019). 28 Sketch by Honor Frost, 1957, donated by James Kirkman, Jeffress archive, SCAG. 29 Rosalie Packard, Love in The Mist (London: Constable, 1958), p. 20. 30 Ibid., p. 135. 31 Ibid., p. 134. 32 Francis King, The Firewalkers (London: Gay Modern Classics Publishing, 1985), introduction p. 2. 33 Ibid., p. 11. 34 Ibid., p. 8. 35 Bromley Abbott, ‘Snug as a Bug’, Sunday Dispatch, undated cutting, Jeffress papers. 36 Telephone conversation, Brian Sewell with author, 1986. 37 Letter, Tom Howard to Robert Melville, 5 October 1962, Robert Melville collection, not yet catalogued, http://archive.tate.org.uk/TateArchiveUncatCollList.pdf., Tate Archive. 38 Ibid.

Notes

319

Chapter 20, pp. 223–236. 1

Jean-Yves Mock, Erica Brausen; Premier Marchand de Francis Bacon (Paris: L’Echoppe, 1996). Available in English translation on http://www.gillhedley.co.uk/pdf/EricaBrausen-translation-French.pdf, http://www.gillhedley.co.uk/.

2

Arthur Moyes, ‘Critic’s Choice’, Anarchy, 1971, cutting in, Robert Melville collection, C-G, not yet catalogued, http://archive.tate.org.uk/TateArchiveUncatCollList.pdf, Tate Archive.

3

Handwritten notes by Robert Melville, 5 October 1961, Robert Melville collection, R-H, ibid.

4

Ibid.

5

Ibid.

6

Tessa Sidey, Surrealism in Birmingham 1935–1954 (Birmingham: Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, 2000), pp. 62–3.

7

Handwritten notes by Robert Melville, 5 October 1961, Robert Melville collection, R-H, not yet catalogued. http://archive.tate.org.uk/TateArchiveUncatCollList.pdf, Tate Archive.

8

Letter, ATJ to Lilian and Robert Melville, 27 December 1957, Jeffress archive, SCAG.

9

Jon Lys Turner, The Visitors’ Book: In Francis Bacon’s Shadow: The Lives of Richard Chopping and Denis Wirth-Miller (London: Constable, 2016), p. 169.

10 Ibid., p. 171. 11 Letter, ATJ to RM, 28 Feb 1955, Jeffress papers. 12 Jon Lys Turner, The Visitors Book, p. 198. 13 Letter, ATJ to RM, 25 January 1956, Jeffress papers. 14 Letter, ATJ to RM, 13 February 1956, ibid. 15 Letter, Anthony Groves-Raines to ATJ, 4 May 1956, ibid. 16 Letter, ATJ to RM, 21 July 1956, ibid. 17 Letter, ATJ to RM, 27 July 1957, ibid. 18 Letter, Henry Hill to Robert Jeffress, 28 April 1964, Hill family papers. 19 Henry Hill to Robert Jeffress, 26 November 1957, ibid. 20 Email, Jane Hill to author, 28 March 2012. 21 Letter, Godard Lieberson to ATJ, 24 October 1957, Jeffress papers. 22 Oh Kay! Music by George Gershwin, lyrics by Ira Gershwin, book by Guy Bolton and P.G. Wodehouse, performed London 1927.

320

Notes

23 Letter, ATJ to Godard Lieberson, 16 December 1957, Jeffress papers. 24 Letter, Godard Lieberson to ATJ, 29 December 1959, ibid. 25 Letter, ATJ to RM, 20 February 1958, ibid. 26 Postcards, ATJ to RM, 13 and 20 February 1958, ibid. 27 Letter, ATJ to Henry Hill, 25 June 1958, ibid. 28 ‘Maple-wood, needlework and exquisite colours in a fabulous flat’, House & Garden, March 1959, pp. 76–9. 29 Letter, ATJ to RM, 22 July 1958, Jeffress papers. 30 Letter, ATJ to RM, 12 July 1958, ibid. 31 Postcard, ATJ to RM, 18 July 1958, ibid. 32 Letter, Henry Hill to Robert Jeffress, 10 November 1958, Hill family papers. 33 Letter, Henry Hill to Robert Jeffress, 9 December 1958, ibid. 34 Postcard, Raymond Mortimer to ATJ, 2 February 1959, Jeffress papers. 35 Letter, ATJ to RM, 14 April 1960, ibid. 36 Letter, ATJ to RM, 18 October 1960, ibid. 37 Letter, ATJ to Robert Isaacson, 21 April 1961, ibid. 38 Letter, ATJ to Alan Price, 29 September 1960, ibid. 39 Robert Melville, in conversation with author, March 1985. 40 Letter, ATJ to RM, 15 July 1960, Jeffress papers. 41 Marita Ross, ‘Sunday Painters’, Everybody’s Magazine, London, 12 February 1955, pp. 21–2. 42 Letter, ATJ to H. A. Fieldhouse, 27 September 1960, Jeffress papers. 43 Robert Melville, in conversation with author, March 1985. 44 Kenneth Partridge, in conversation with author, 2011. 45 Letter, Barbara Ker-Seymer to Edward Burra, 27 July 1936, Barbara Ker-Seymer papers, TGA974/2/11-130, Tate Archive. 46 Letter, ATJ to Alan Price, 29 September 1960, Jeffress papers.

Chapter 21, pp. 237–246. 1

Kenneth Partridge in conversation with author, 2011.

2

Ibid.

Notes 3

Ibid.

4

Letter, ATJ to RM, 5 January 1959, Jeffress papers.

5

Given by Fausto Cadoni to Kevin Embling-Evans, by whom donated to Jeffress archive, SCAG.

6

Letter, ATJ to RM, 29 December 1958, Jeffress papers.

7

Ibid.

8

Letter, ATJ to Myrtle Perfect, 8 January 1959, ibid.

9

Cutting, Jeffress papers.

321

10 Robin Dalton, telephone conversation with author, 26 March 2011. 11 Robin Dalton, An Incidental Memoir (London: Viking, 1998), p. 104. 12 Helen Simpson, quoted in Kevin Embling-Evans, Arthur Tilden Jeffress: His Life and Work, unpublished dissertation, p. 122. 13 Viva King, The Weeping and the Laughter (London: Macdonald and Jane’s, 1976), p. 199. 14 John Gielgud, Gielgud on Gielgud (London: Sceptre, 2001), p. 419. 15 Neville Phillips, Smack a Trifle!: Odd Quirks in Prose and Rhyme (London: Troubador Publishing Ltd, 2009), p. 14. 16 King, p. 223. 17 Ibid., p. 224. 18 Letter, ATJ to Arthur Laurents, 7 June 1960, Jeffress papers. 19 Kenneth Partridge, interview with author, March 2011. 20 Derek Granger, interview with author, May 2011. 21 Kenneth Partridge, interview with author, March 2011. 22 Notes from a conversation, Bunny Roger with Helen Simpson, 14 January 1997, Jeffress archive, SCAG. 23 John Mortimer, Clinging to the Wreckage, A Part of Life (London: Penguin Books, 1982), p. 160. 24 Quoted in obituary of Hugh Montgomery Massingberd. Available at www.irishtimes. com/news/gifted-journalist-transformed-obituary-pages-1.926166 (10 December 2018). 25 Byron Rogers, The Last Human Cannonball: And Other Small Journeys in Search of Great Men. 26 Available on http://ourstory.info/library/4-ww2/AFSletters/AFSB3.html (17 January 2019).

322

Notes

27 Letter, Donald Neville Willing to Robert Melville, October 1961, Jeffress archive, SCAG. 28 Ibid.

Chapter 22, pp. 247–258. 1

Bunny Roger, interviewed by Helen Simpson quoted in Kevin Embling-Evans, Arthur Tilden Jeffress: His Life and Work, unpublished dissertation, p. 115.

2

Beverley Nichols, A Case of Human Bondage, The Tragic Marriage of Somerset Maugham (London: Secker & Warburg, 1966), p. 13.

3

Letter, ATJ to RM, 6 July 1955, Jeffress papers.

4

Postcard, Roy Alderson to ATJ, 19 September 1961, ibid.

5

Letter, RM to ATJ, undated but from July 1954, Jeffress archive.

6

John Hohnsbeen, interviewed by Helen Simpson, quoted in Kevin Embling-Evans, p. 100.

7

Francis King, Francis King, The Firewalkers (London: Gay Modern Classics Publishing, 1985), p. 48.

8

Ibid., p. 103.

9

Ibid., p. 195.

10 Bunny Roger, interviewed by Helen Simpson, quoted in Kevin Embling-Evans, p. 108. 11 Robin Dalton, telephone conversation with author, 26 March 2011. 12 Bunny Roger, interviewed by Helen Simpson, quoted in Kevin Embling-Evans, p. 121. 13 Kenneth Partridge, interviewed by Helen Simpson, quoted in Kevin Embling-Evans, p. 91. 14 Ibid. 15 Letter, ATJ to Loraine Conran, 6 July 1948, Jeffress archive. 16 Letter, ATJ to Richard Blake Brown, 11 November 1947, copy kindly supplied by Ian Massey. 17 King, The Firewalkers, p. 17. 18 Ibid., p. 37. 19 Robin Dalton, telephone conversation with author, 26 March 2011. 20 Available at: www.overthefootlights.co.uk/London%20Revues%201950-1954.pdf, p. 31 (accessed 3 December 2018). 21 Sir Roger Moore fan site. Available at http://obr.lh.pl/sirrogermoore/theatre.htm (accessed 3 December 2018).

Notes

323

22 Letter, ATJ to RM, 11 July 1956, Jeffress papers. 23 Letter, Bobby Bishop to Helen Simpson, 17 November 1997, Jeffress archive. 24 Typescript, Bobby Bishop notes for Helen Simpson, p. 37, ibid. 25 Kenneth Partridge, interviewed by Helen Simpson, quoted in Kevin Embling-Evans, p. 92. 26 Letter, ATJ to RM, 17 August 1956, Jeffress papers. 27 Letter, ATJ to RM, 14 July 1957, ibid. 28 Beryl Reid, So Much Love, An Autobiography (London: Hutchinson, 1984), p. 89. 29 Letter, ATJ to Elsa and Michael Combe-Martin, 26 November 1954, copy kindly supplied by Suzanne Ruta. 30 Letter, ATJ to RM, 6 July 1958, Jeffress papers. 31 Letter, Bobby Bishop to ATJ, 10 December 1956, ibid. 32 Letter, Bobby Bishop to Helen Simpson, 20 September 1997, Jeffress archive. 33 Letter, ATJ to Ronald Gurney, 20 February 1961, Jeffress papers. 34 J.B. Priestley, An English Journey (London: Victor Gollancz, 1934), p. 58. 35 J.A. Gere and John Sparrow, Geoffrey Madan’s Notebooks: A Selection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981) p. 46. 36 W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge (London: Penguin edition, 1984), cover. 37 Peggy Guggenheim, Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1979), p. 355. 38 Christopher Isherwood, edited by Katherine Bucknell, Christopher Isherwood Diaries (New York: HarperCollins 2011), p. 553. 39 Letter, ATJ to Peggy Guggenheim, 7 April 1961, Jeffress papers. 40 Letter, ATJ to RM, 16 January 1961, ibid. 41 Anton Gill, Art Lover: A Biography of Peggy Guggenheim (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), p. 431. 42 John Hohnsbeen, transcript of notes from interview with Helen Simpson quoted in Kevin Embling-Evans, p. 103.

Chapter 23, pp. 259–274. 1

John Mortimer, Clinging to the Wreckage, A Part of Life (London: Penguin Books, 1982), p. 160.

324

Notes

2

Ibid., p. 161.

3

Ibid.

4

Letter, ATJ to RM, 15 August 1958, Jeffress papers.

5

Ibid.

6

Letter, ATJ to RM, 6 July 1956, ibid.

7

Letter, Fausto Cadoni to Helen Simpson, 11 October 1997, Jeffress archive.

8

Helen Simpson transcript of notes from John Hohnsbeen, quoted in Kevin EmblingEvans, Arthur Tilden Jeffress: His Life and Work, unpublished dissertation, p. 97.

9

Fausto Cadoni, interviewed by Kevin Embling-Evans, p. 127.

10 Letter, ATJ to Christopher Kininmonth, 7 June 1957, Jeffress papers. 11 Ibid. 12 Letter, Bobby Bishop to Helen Simpson, 17 November 1996, Jeffress archive, SCAG. 13 Email, Suzanna Ruta to author, 1 February 2013. 14 Ibid. 15 Email, Suzanna Ruta to author, ‘Arthur Jeffress’, 4 May 2017. 16 ‘Garbo Forever’. Available at www.garboforever.com/Garbo_Stories-16.htm, 3 December 2018. 17 Sir John Gielgud, Life in Letters (London: Arcade Publishing, 2005), p. 232. 18 ‘Quotes of the Week’, The Observer, 26 November 1961 [published coincidentally on ATJ’s birthday, two months after his death]. 19 Letter, ATJ to RM, 19 July 1959, Jeffress papers. 20 Jacqueline Bograd Weld, Peggy: The Wayward Guggenheim (New York: Dutton Books, 1986), p. 391. 21 Letter, ATJ to RM, 25 August 1957, Jeffress papers. 22 Letter, ATJ to Elsa and Michael Combe-Martin, 26 November 1954, kindly supplied by Suzanne Ruta. 23 Anton Dolin, Autobiography (London: Oldbourne, 1960), p. 231. 24 Beverley Nichols, Woman’s Own, 3 September 1960, p. 31. 25 Ibid. 26 John Hohnsbeen, ‘No Joke’, letter to The New York Times, 17 December 1992. 27 Franz Schulze, Philip Johnson: Life and Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 217. 28 Ibid.

Notes

325

29 Letter, ATJ to RM, 6 July 1956, Jeffress papers. 30 Letter, ATJ to RM, 21 July 1956, ibid. 31 Jacqueline Bograd Weld, p. 46. 32 Lisa Immordino Vreeland, Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict, film, 2015. 33 Letter, Tom Howard to ATJ, undated from Vermont, Jeffress archive. 34 Letter, Bobby Bishop to Helen Simpson, 5 July 1997, ibid. 35 Letter, ATJ to RM, 25 July 1961, Jeffress papers.

Chapter 24, pp. 275–288. 1

Letter, ATJ to RM, 29 August, 1961, Jeffress papers.

2

Postcard, ATJ to RM, undated summer 1961, Jeffress archive, SCAG.

3

Postcard, ATJ to RM, 5 September 1961, Jeffress papers.

4

Letter, ATJ to RM, 9 August 1961, Jeffress archive.

5

Typescript, Bobby Bishop notes for Helen Simpson, pp. 52–3, Jeffress archive, SCAG.

6

Letter, ATJ to RM, 7 July 1961, Jeffress papers.

7

Letter, Beverley Nichols to ATJ, 11 September 1961, Jeffress papers.

8

Letter, ATJ to Henry Hill, 27 September 1960, Hill family papers.

9

Letter, ATJ to RM, 29 August, 1961, Jeffress papers.

10 Ibid. 11 Typescript, Bobby Bishop notes for Helen Simpson, p. 53, Jeffress archive, SCAG. 12 Letter, ATJ to RM, 11 September, 1961, Jeffress papers. 13 Letter, ATJ to RM, 29 August, 1961, ibid. 14 General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59: Publication A1 205; Box Number: 391; Box Description: 1960–1963, I – S, National Archives at College Park, College Park, Maryland, U.S.A. 15 Anton Gill, Art Lover: A Biography of Peggy Guggenheim (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), p. 430. 16 General Records of the Department of State; Record Group 59. 17 Denise Tual, A Letter From France. Available at www.vivandlarry.com/guest-post/a-letter-from-france/ (accessed 3 December 2018).

326

Notes

18 M.M. Glatt, The Abuse of Barbiturates in the United Kingdom, 1962. Available at www. unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/bulletin/bulletin_1962-01-01_2_page004.html (accessed 3 December 2018). 19 Cuttings, from Evening Standard and Daily Mail, in Felix Jones file, Jeffress archive, SCAG. 20 Nicky Haslam, in conversation with the author, 15 February 2019. 21 Letter, Bobby Bishop to Helen Simpson, 20 September 1997, Jeffress archive, SCAG. 22 Bunny Roger, interviewed by Helen Simpson quoted in Kevin Embling-Evans, Arthur Tilden Jeffress: His Life and Work, unpublished dissertation, p. 114. 23 Cuttings, Jeffress archive, SCAG. 24 Telephone conversation, Mr Churchill and author, 1986. 25 Letter, Lela Typaldo Forestis to ATJ, 18 September 1961, Jeffress papers. 26 Anton Gill, p. 430. 27 Fausto Cadoni, interviewed by Kevin Embling-Evans, p. 128. 28 Letter, ATJ to RM, 15 July 1960, Jeffress papers. 29 Letter, ATJ to RM, 18 June 1961, ibid. 30 General Records of the Department of State; Record Group 59. 31 Marie-Jaqueline Lancaster, Brian Howard: Portrait of a Failure (London: Timewell Press, 2005), p. 502. 32 Kenneth Partridge, in conversation with author, 2011. 33 Letter, ATJ to Hardy Amies, 11 May 1960, Jeffress archive, SCAG. 34 ‘Affairs and Graces: the snapshots of Marina Cicogna’, The Independent, 12 October 2009. Available at www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/ affairs-and-graces-marina-cicognas-snapshots-1801202.html (accessed 10 December 2018). 35 Postcard, ATJ to RM, 1 April 1960, Jeffress papers. 36 Kenneth Partridge in conversation with author, 2011. 37 Gerald Clarke, edited, Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote (New York: Random House, 2004), p. 330. 38 Myfanwy Piper, libretto, for Benjamin Britten’s opera Death in Venice, 1973. 39 Letter, Bobby Bishop to Helen Simpson, 5 July 1997, Jeffress archive, SCAG. 40 L. T. Christian Funeral Home Records, 1912-1986, accession number 34483 (Box 21, folder 13), Library of Virginia. 41 Myfanwy Piper, libretto.

Notes

327

42 L. T. Christian Funeral Home Records. 43 Letter, Robert Jeffress to Henry Hill, 7 April 1964, Hill family papers. 44 Ibid.

Chapter 25, pp. 289–296. 1

Arthur Tilden Jeffress will and the inventory, copy in Jeffress archive, SCAG.

2

Email, ‘Editor Tigers in the News’, to author, 25 January 2019.

3

Letter, David Carritt to Robert Melville, undated, 1961, Jeffress archive, SCAG.

4

The Times, 11 January 1961, p. 15.

5

The Arthur Tilden Jeffress collection was sold through Sotheby’s, London, in four auctions: 13 April, 8 May, 20 June and 19 December 1962.

6

Email, Cefyn Embling-Evans to author, 26 October 2010.

7

Available at www.seafarers.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Seafarers-UK-AnnualReport-2016.pdf (accessed 10 December 2018).

8

Letter, John Deakin to Robert Melville, undated [reply from RM 9 October 1961], Jeffress archive, SCAG.

9

Dan Farson, ‘Insult in the Kasbah’, Sacred Monsters (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1988), p. 59.

10 Letter, Graham Sutherland to The Times, 29 September 1961, Jeffress archive, SCAG. 11 Robert Melville, introduction to The Arthur Jeffress Bequest: Southampton Art Gallery (Southampton: Southampton Art Gallery, 1963). 12 Letter, ATJ to Gerald Corcoran, 21 September 1954, Jeffress papers. 13 Sacheverell Sitwell, Valse des Fleurs, A Day in St. Petersburg and a Ball at the Winter Palace in 1868 (London: Faber and Faber, 1941), p. 69. 14 Robert Melville, introduction. 15 Handwritten notes on reverse of photograph in National Portrait Gallery (NPG x47330). 16 Derek Hill, ‘Acquisitions of Works of Art by Museums and Galleries: Supplement’, The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 107, No. 742 (Jan., 1965), pp. 47–54. 17 Robert Melville, introduction. 18 Ibid.

328

Sources and bibliography The books, websites and blogs that have been my reference sources are noted in full in the endnotes. The following have been essential background and foreground reading, with authors in alphabetical order in each section:

The life of Arthur Jeffress Embling-Evans, Kevin. Arthur Tilden Jeffress: His Life and Work. Unpublished dissertation for Southampton Institute, 2003. Haslam, Nicky. Redeeming Features: A Memoir (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009). King, Francis. The Firewalkers (London: Gay Modern Classics Publishing, 1985). King, Viva. The Weeping and the Laughter (London: Macdonald and Jane’s, 1976). Melville, Robert. Introduction to The Arthur Jeffress Bequest: Southampton Art Gallery (Southampton: Southampton Art Gallery, 1963).

Theatre in Cambridge Cornwell, Paul. Only by Failure: The Many Faces of the Impossible Life of Terence Gray (Cromer, Norfolk: Salt Publishing, 2004).

Bright Young People Bottomley, Maurice. Cocktails With Elvira: Elvira Barney and her Circle available at www. elvirabarney.wordpress.com. Taylor, D.J. Bright Young People: The Lost Generation of London’s Jazz Age (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).

329

330

Sources and bibliography

André Ostier André Ostier, Photographies, (Paris: Fondation Pierre Bergé Yves St-Laurent, 2006)

Joe Carstairs Summerscale, Kate. The Queen of Whale Cay (London: Penguin, 1997).

John Deakin Farson, Daniel. Never a Normal Man: An Autobiography (London: HarperCollins, 1997). Muir, Robin. Under The Influence: John Deakin, Photography and the Lure of Soho (London: Art Books, 2014).

The Zamzam affair Anderson, Eleanor. Miracle at Sea: The Sinking of the Zamzam and Our Family’s Rescue (Bolivar, MO : Quiet Waters Publications, 2001). Stewart, James W. Sinking of the Zam Zam: Diary of James W. Stewart with the British American Ambulance Corps., January–September 1941 (Bloomington, IN : iUniverse, Inc. 2012).

The American Field Service www.ourstory.info

Erica Brausen and The Hanover Gallery Gooding, Mel, Lucy Inglis and Elsa Vaudrey (London: Sansom & Company, 2019). Liaut, Jean-Noël. The Many Lives of Miss K.: Toto Koopman – Model, Muse, Spy (New York: Rizzoli Ex Libris, 2013). Mock, Jean-Yves. Erica Brausen; Premier Marchand de Francis Bacon (Paris: L’Echoppe, 1996).

Sources and bibliography

331

Summers, Cherith. Erica Brausen & The Hanover Gallery (1948–1973). Unpublished dissertation for University of St Andrew’s, 2018.

Peggy Guggenheim Bograd Weld, Jacqueline. Peggy: The Wayward Guggenheim (New York: Dutton Books, 1986). Gill, Anton. Art Lover: A Biography of Peggy Guggenheim (New York: HarperCollins, 2002). Guggenheim, Peggy. Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1979).

Graham Sutherland Berthoud, Roger. Graham Sutherland: A Biography (London: Faber & Faber, 1982). For genealogical material – births, marriages, deaths, divorces, census records, phone books, immigration, passports, military service and wills – I have depended on access to records available through the subscription website www.ancestry.co.uk. All the oil paintings in the Jeffress Bequest to Southampton City Art Gallery can be seen on the website www.artuk.org.

Arthur Jeffress More images, especially from the Jeffress family, can be found on my own website www. gillhedley.co.uk. Jean-Yves Mock’s memoir of Erica Brausen can be found here, too. Arthur Jeffress’ photographs, letters and papers are in three main sections. The Jeffress Archive is in Southampton City Art Gallery and copies of some of these documents are also in Tate Archive (TGA 971/11). The Jeffress papers, the Hill family papers and the Clifford papers are still in private hands and new permanent homes are being sought. Please see www.gillhedley.co.uk for news.

332

Index ATJ = Arthur Tilden Jeffress. Entries followed by f indicate pages that include a figure. À la recherché du temps perdu (Proust, Marcel) 31 A Sicilian Peasant House of Arthur Jeffress in Flames 190 Abbott, Bromley (columnist) 220 Abstraction (Pollock, Jackson) 163–4 Acton 13–15 Acton, Harold (writer) 30 ADC (Cambridge University Amateur Dramatic Club) 33–4, 37 Gyp’s Princess, The 33–4 Pleasure of Honesty, The 34 Sub-contractor, The 34–5 women 35 Adkins, Derek (RAF) 239 Aeschylus Libation Bearers, The 39 Oresteia 38–9, 50, 240, 252 AFS (American Field Service) 107–19, 121, 127–30, 135–43, 145–6, 154, 244–5 Age of Innocence, The (Wharton, Edith) 5–6 Aitken, Max (1st Baron Beaverbrook) 182–3, 209 Aitken, Max (2nd Baron Beaverbrook) 182–3 Alderson, Roy (artist) 226, 240, 243, 254, 255 bequest (lack of) 292 blackmail (possible) 248

Egypt 277 Jamaica 277 Toto’s terrace on the island of Pannerea, Italy, with Stromboli in the background 255 Venice 261, 269, 276 Alice B. Toklas Cookbook (Toklas, Alice B.) 233 Alington, Naps (3rd Baron) 71, 171, 173, 182 Allan, Maud (dancer) 70, 74 Allen, Gerald Reincarnation, The 34 Allen & Ginter tobacco company 9 Allison, Malcolm (footballer) 253 Alloway, Lawrence (director, ICA) 268–9 Altmann, Anton (boyfriend of Brian Howard) 79 American Field Service (AFS) 107–19, 121, 127–30, 135–43, 145–6, 154, 244–5 American Tobacco Company 5, 9, 16 Amies, Hardy 269, 276, 283 And in a Tomb were Found (Gray, Terence) 37 Anderson, Mary (actress) 256 Androcles and the Lion (Shaw, George Bernard) 252 Angelotti, Bruno (gondolier) 263, 273f, 278, 281–2, 291 Ansen, Alan (poet) 283 Archer, David (lover of John Deakin) 99 Arcimboldo, Giuseppe 202, 203 Seasons 231 Sense of Smell 231 333

334

Index

Aristophanes Birds 34 Arlott, John (author; commentator) 179 Armstrong-Jones, Antony 268 Arnolfini Collection 177 art dealers 196 art galleries 203 Art of this Century gallery 164 ‘Art on a Shoestring’ (Middleton, Michael) 206 Arthur Jeffress (Sutherland, Graham) 209–15 Arthur Jeffress Bequest (Southampton Art Gallery) 161, 292 Arthur Jeffress (Pictures) gallery 197, 198–203, 206–7, 218, 233 By the Seaside (exhibition) 275 Chopping, Richard 217 Graham Sutherland: A New Portrait and Some Paintings (exhibition) 213 Melville, Robert 197, 198, 199–200, 206–7, 223 Arthur T. Jeffress Bequest (King George’s Fund for Sailors) 292 As Berry and I Were Saying (Yates, Dornford) 24 Ashcroft, Peggy 179 Ashington Group 181 Ashley, Edwina (wife of Louis Mountbatten) 54 Ashton, Frederick, (ballet dancer) 160 Asquith, Margot (socialite) 70 Atlantis (ship) 113 Auden, W.H. 245 Aunt Mame (Dennis, Patrick) 138 Austen, Jane 31, 294 Emma 130 Autumn Salon (exhibition) 164 BAAC (British-American Ambulance Corps) 107–8, 109–19 Baba, Meher (guru) 170, 233, 267 Bacall, Lauren 122 Bachardy, Don (artist) 257 Bacon, Francis 66, 88, 92, 163, 167, 182

Beaux Art Gallery 196 Brausen, Erica 171–2, 181, 196 Exposition international d’arte modern (exhibition) 175 Francis Bacon: Paintings (exhibition) 178 Hanover Gallery 178, 181, 216–17 Head I to Head VI 178 Marlborough Fine Art 196, 197 Melville, Robert 224 Painting 172, 175, 177, 178 Pope Innocent X 234 reputation 196 Study for Portrait 178 Study from the Human Body 178, 224 Sutherland, Graham 213–14 Young British Painters (exhibition) 171 Baer, Jack (art dealer) 196 Bahamas, The 85, 101 Baird, Sandy (friend of ATJ) 68, 69, 294 Baker, Josephine 117, 137, 141 J’ai Deux Amours: Mon Pays et Paris 117 Baldwin, Ruth (socialite) 79 Baldwin, Stanley (Prime Minister) 41 Ballets Russes 62, 102 Balthus 157 Caserne, La 157 Bankhead, Tallulah 182, 291 Banners of Spring (Pollock, Jackson) 164 Banting, John (artist) 68, 175 Bari 138–40 Barker-Mill, Elsa (artist) 168, 177–8, 195, 198 Barker-Mill, Peter (artist) 166, 168, 177–8, 180, 195, 198, 266 Barker-Mill, William (Captain) 166 Barney, Elvira Enid ‘Dolores’ (actress) 64f, 65, 71, 78–80, 240 Barney, John Sterling (husband of Elvira Barney) 78 Barton, Trumbell ‘Tug’ (friend of ATJ) 137 Bass, Hamar Alfred (brewer; politician) 52 Bass, Sibell (wife of Berkeley Levett) 52 BAT (British American Tobacco Company) 5, 9–10, 15, 16

Index Bateman, Marian (step-aunt of Henry Clifford) 62, 65 Battersby, Martin (artist; friend of ATJ) 70, 91 Decorative Thirties, The 202 Battle of Adowa, The (unknown artist) 233 Bauchant, André Funerailles d’Alexandre, Les 190, 202, 290, 294 Baumer, Maurice (racing driver) 69–9 Bay of Pigs invasion 281 Beaton, Cecil 25–6, 33, 61, 183, 188, 267, 270, 285 Beaufort Gardens (residence of ATJ 167 Beckett, Ernest (owner of Villa Cimbrone) 265 Beckford, William Vathek 216 Behold the Man (Rilla, Walter) 51 Behrend, John Louis ‘Bow’ (art patron) 162, 165 Behrend, Mary (art patron) 165 Behrens, Michael (banker) 197 Belisha Clarence (friend of ATJ) 78, 198 Bengal Tiger (Schorr, Raoh Friedel) 173 Benson, E.F. 31–2, 256, 294 Dodo series 31 Freaks of Mayfair 31 Miss Mapp 31 Queen Lucia 31–2 Benson, Stuart (Major, AFS) 125 Benson, Theodora (friend of ATJ) 253 Bentley, Edith (childhood nurse to ATJ) 17, 21, 49, 289–90 Bentley, Emily (cook to Jeffress family) 17, 21 Bentley, Mary (servant to Jeffress family) 17, 21, 289 Beny, Roloff (artist; photographer) 272 Bérard, Christian (fashion illustrator) 102, 226, 294–5 Berenson, Bernard (art historian) 91, 150–1 Berlin, Ellin (wife of Irving Berlin) 45 Berlin, Irving 45 Puttin’ on the Ritz 8

335

Berman, Eugene 102 Jug on the Window Sill, The 97 Berners, Gerald (composer; writer) 230, 247 Betjeman, John 20 Beves, Donald (Dean of King’s College) 34 Billings, Lem (AFS volunteer; friend of John F. Kennedy) 138 Binckes, H. A. (artist) 290 Bird of Time, The (Mayne, Peter) 243 Birds (Aristophanes) 34 Bishop, Bobby (gallery worker; writer) 211, 231, 248, 252–4, 259, 281, 285 Arthur Jeffress (Pictures) gallery 206 bequest to 290 Grab Me a Gondola 243 Most Likely Girl on ITV, The 254 Naples 264 Red and White Party 76 Venice 231, 252–4, 259, 278 Black Eyes and Lemonade (Deakin, John) 102–3 Blake Brown, Richard (chaplain; novelist) 248 Blithe Spirit (Coward, Noel) 256 Blue Clown (Tchelitchew, Pavel) 271 Blum, André Léon (Prime Minister) 99 Blunt, Anthony (art historian; spy) 81 Bohème, La (Puccini, Giacomo) 269 Bohr, Hugh Felix Conrad von. See Brooke, Hugh ‘Tim’ Bolton, Glorney (author) 160 Bolton Studios 173–4 Bonaparte, Napoleon 189, 294 Bondi Jaray, Lea (art dealer) 171 Bonnard, Pierre 295 Two Poodles 290 Bosio, Gherardo (architect) 150 Bosio, Maud Wentworth (American expat in Florence) 150 Boty, Pauline (artist) 233 Bowles, Paul (writer) 269 Bowness, Alan (director, Tate) 203 Bowyer Smith, Lady (friend of ATJ) 79 Boy Who Wrote No, The (Lord, James) 224

336

Index

Box, Eden ‘E.’ (Fleming, Edna) 203–5, 230, 239–40, 280, 286, 292 bequest to 241, 290 Gentle Friends 206, 234 as landlady 167 Venice 269 Box, Edgar. See Vidal, Gore Brady, Robert (art collector) 283 Brausen, Erica (art dealer) 167–74, 181, 186, 215, 228 Bacon, Francis 171–2, 181, 196 Hanover Gallery 175, 177, 178, 180, 183–4, 195–8 Sicily 266, 267 Briardene (residence of Jeffress family) 14, 19 Briggs, Charles (millionaire) 283 Briggs, Hedley (actor) 252 Bright Young Things 67–70 British-American Ambulance Corps (BAAC) 107–8, 109–19 British American Tobacco Company (BAT) 5, 9–10, 15, 16 Britten, Benjamin 245 Death in Venice 255, 285 Turn of the Screw 252 Broadway, Worcestershire 256 Brooke, Daisy ‘Babbling’ (mistress of Prince of Wales) 52 Brooke, Hugh ‘Tim’ (writer) 85, 86f, 108, 121–3, 248 Man Made Angry 122 Brooke, John (father of ‘Tim’ Brooke) 122 Brooke-Alder, Henry (neighbour of Stella Jeffress) 45 Brooke-Alder, Mrs (neighbour of Stella Jeffress) 45 Brown, Harriet (Greta Garbo) 267 Brown, Richard Blake (priest; novelist) 167 Browne, Coral (actress) 231, 252 Browne, Valentine (Viscount Castlerosse) 183 Browne, Ralph (Sergeant) 290 Browne, Robert Henry Arthur (god-son of ATJ) 290

Brunhoff, Michel de (editor; Vogue) 102 Buckett, Fred (artist) 234 Burial of Tinguely’s The Thing (Lebel, Jean-Jacques) 233 Burra, Anne (sister of Edward Burra) 63 Burra, Edward 8, 63, 64, 233–4 Rossi 65–6 Three Sailors at the Bar 65, 233–4 Two Sisters, The 64, 163 Burton, Richard 245 Butlin, Billy (holiday camp founder) 105 By the Seaside (exhibition) 275 Cadogan Place (residence of ATJ) 58–60 Cadoni, Fausto (gondolier) 263, 270, 273f, 278, 279, 281–2, 285, 291 Cadoni, Luciano (porter) 263 Callimachi, Anne-Marie (Princess) 161 Calthorpe, Gladys (designer) 238 Cambridge 29 theatres 37–9 Cambridge Festival Theatre 37–9 Cambridge University Amateur Dramatic Club (ADC). See ADC Cannes 64f–5, 66 Capote, Truman 174, 266, 267, 285 Caravan Club, The 87–8 Caro, Anita de (painter) 170 Caron, Leslie 234 Carpaccio, Vittore (artist) 294 Carrington, Noel (founder, Puffin Books) 189 Carritt, David (art expert) 219, 243, 290 Carstairs, Betty ‘Joe’ (friend of ATJ) 79, 85, 101, 123 Carter, Howard (archaeologist) 37 Casati, Luisa (muse of Gabriele D’Annunzio) 272–3 Caserne, La (Balthus) 157 Casino Royale (Fleming, Ian) 117 Castlerosse, Viscount (Valentine Browne) 183 Castro, Fidel (President) 281 Cauldwell, Frank Firewalkers, The 219–20, 249, 251

Index Challis, Stanley (husband of Edith Bentley) 289 Chamberlin, Ward (AFS volunteer; founder, PBS) 138 Champcommunal, Elspeth (editor, Vogue) 170 Chapel of the Misericordia (Hillier, Tristram) 117 Chappell, Billy (friend of Edward Burra) 65 Chicago (Nevinson, W.R.) 163 China 43 Chinard, Joseph (sculptor) 189 Chipperfield, Robert (art patron) 161 Chirico, Giorgio de 235 magic realism 200 Painter’s Family, The 97, 157, 161–2, 200 Chisholm, Hugh (AFS volunteer) 254 Cholmondeley, Marchioness of (Sibyl Sassoon) 122 Chopping, Richard 180, 216–17, 226, 243 Trompe L’oeil for Arthur Jeffress 217 Venice 193, 253, 262, 272 Christie, Agatha 213 Christmas Exhibition of Gouaches (exhibition) 164 Churches in Flames (Pagliacci, Aldo) 260 Churchill, Clementine (wife of Winston Churchill) 216 Churchill, Winston (Prime Minister) 215–16, 220 Ciano, Galeazzo (son-in-law of Benito Mussolini) 150 Cicogna, Anna Maria (Countess Volpi) 227, 232, 263, 276, 279 Cicogna, Marina (daughter of Anna Maria Cicogna) 283 Circle for the Study of Art (CSA) 162–3, 165–6 Circuit Dust (Lyndon, Barre) 68–9 Claridge House 198–9 Clark, Gilbert (costume designer) 54 Clark, James L. (department head, Museum of Natural History) 109–10

337

Clark, Kenneth (director, National Gallery) 161 Clifford, Esther Rowland (wife of Henry Clifford) 25, 62, 77, 123–4, 154, 158, 240 (see also Villa Capponi) Clifford, Henry (museum curator; friend of ATJ) 25, 62–3, 77, 103, 108, 123, 152, 157, 158, 227–8, 268 (see also Villa Capponi) Clifford, Nicholas (historian; son of Henry Clifford) 62, 123 Clinging to the Wreckage (Mortimer, John) 259–60 Cockerell, Sydney (director, Fitzwilliam Museum) 29 Cocteau, Jean 254 Cohen, Kathryn (Ziegfeld Girl) 269 Coke, Sylvia (actress) 78 Coker, Peter (Association of AFS British Personnel) 135 Cole, Stephan (AFS volunteer) 138, 290–1 Coleman, Martyn (playwright) 239, 243, 254, 255–8, 264, 266 bequest to 291 Cranford 256 Genie in a Bottle 256 How Now Hecate 256 Venice 270f Combe-Martin, Elsa (British Council) 269 Combe-Martin, Michael (British Council) 269 Connaught, Arthur, Duke of 15 Connell, Diana (goddaughter of ATJ) 63, 240 Connell, William (school friend of ATJ) 63 Connolly, Cyril (editor, Horizon) 224 Conran, George Loraine (curator, Southampton Art Gallery) 160–1, 162, 250 Coombes, Frank (artist) 170 Cooper, Douglas (art critic) 88, 193, 214, 271 Cooper, Gladys (actress) 243 Corcoran, Gerald (Chairman, Lefevre Gallery) 238, 292–3

338

Index

Corfu 277 Coster, Henry (Major, AFS) 127–8, 143, 145 Cotes, Peter (biographer of Elvira Barney) 80 Cottington (home of the Levetts) 52, 53 Countess of Rocksavage, The (Lavery, John) 122 Courtauld Institute of Art 81 Coward, Noel 238, 245 Blithe Spirit 256 Cowles, Fleur (writer) 270 Craig, Edward Henry Gordon (theatre designer) 38 Cranford (Coleman, Martyn) 256 Crawford, Joan 270 Crewe, Quentin (writer) 238, 239 Cross, Florence Griswold (mother of Odo Cross) 166 Cross, (Graham Griswell) ‘Paul’ Odo (ballet dancer; painter) 165–6 Snail that Climbed the Eiffel Tower and Other Stories, The 166 Cruddas, Audrey (designer) 93 Cruddas, Hugh (friend of ATJ) 229, 230 Crudgington, Jim (BAAC volunteer) 115 CSA (Circle for the Study of Art) 162–3, 165–6 Cuba 281 Cunard, Victor (correspondent, Times) 268 Cunliffe-Owen, Hugh (chairman, BAT) 44, 47 Curtis-Bennet, Derek (barrister) 95 Curtis-Bennet, Margaret (wife of Derek Curtis-Bennet) 95 cyanide 213 d’Acosta, Mercedes (writer) 267 Dalí, Salvador 39 Morphological Echo 234 Dalton, Robin (writer) 240, 251, 269 D’Annunzio, Gabriele (poet) 273 Dasburg, Marina (poet) 123 Dawson, Beatrice ‘Bumble’ (friend of ATJ) 239

David, Elizabeth 217 David, Jacques-Louis (artist) 189 de Chirico, Giorgio 235 magic realism 200 Painter’s Family, The 97, 157, 161–2, 200 de Ossa, Carmen Rosa (daughter of Leonie Fester) 76 de Valois, Ninette (ballet dancer) 38 Deakin, John (photographer; lover of ATJ) 86–104, 181, 265, 292 Black Eyes and Lemonade 102–3 Hanover Gallery 180, 214–15 image 97f John Deakin’s Paris 99 John Deakin’s Rome 99 Mayor Gallery exhibition 101 photography career 99, 101, 102–4 Rome Alive 264 World War II 133–4 Deakin, John Henry (father of John Deakin) 86–7 Deakin, Ronald (brother of John Deakin) 87 Death in Venice (Britten, Benjamin) 255, 285 Decorative Thirties, The (Battersby, Martin) 202 Delacroix, Eugène 191 Portrait of Palikare 290 Delevingne, Doris (wife of Viscount Castlerosse) 183 Delvaux, Paul 235, 284 Siren in Full Moonlight 260 Denney, Anthony (photographer; editor, Vogue) 188 Dennis, Patrick (AFS volunteer) Aunt Mame 138 Desert Idyll (Homage to Arthur Jeffress), The (Martinez, Coqué) 216, 230 Desylla-Kapodistria, Maria (mayor of Corfu) 281 Dickens, Charles Pickwick Papers 27 Dietrich, Marlene 245

Index Docker, Nora (socialite) 199 Dodo series (Benson, E.F.) 31 Doesburg, Nellie van (musician; artist) 268 Dolin, Anton (dancer) 269 Dolly Dialogues, The (Hope, Anthony) 63–4 Dolly Sisters 63–4 ‘Dominici’ affair, the 116–17 Dongen, Kees van (artist) 272, 273 Dors, Diana 243, 244f Doyle, Arthur Conan Hound of the Baskervilles, The 16 drama 122 Dream Lover (Schertzinger/Grey, Clifford) 269 Dresden (ship) 113–14, 118 Drummond, Jack (scientist) 116 Drury, Ben (master, Harrow) 24–5 Drury, Henry (master, Harrow) 24–5 Duke, James Buchanan ‘Bucky’ (chairman, BAT) 9, 16, 22, 44 Dulles, Allen (director, OSS) 121 Dulles, John Foster (Secretary of State) 121 Duncannon, Viscount (Frederick Ponsonby) 122 Dunphy, Hugh (follower of Zen) 238 Durrell, Gerald My Family and Other Animals 277 Eaton Square (residence of ATJ) 230–1 Eddy, Nelson 269 Edinburgh, Philip, Duke of 284 Edward II (Marlowe, Christopher) 34, 35f Edward VII (King) 52, 256 Edwards, Richard (AFS volunteer; scholar) 138 Egerton Gardens (residence of ATJ) 160, 167 Elizabeth (Queen Mother) 253 Elizabeth I (Queen) 284 Emile Bernard (Toulouse-Lautres, Henri de) 99, 290 Emma (Austen, Jane) 130 Epstein, Jacob 181

339

Erotic Art of the West (Melville, Robert) 224 Escaped Convict, The (Nolan, Sidney) 234 Espigares, Antonio (equestrian school owner) 106 Espigares, Carlo (equestrian school owner) 106 Eurich, Richard (artist) 162 Evans, Maurice (actor) 39 Evill, Wilfred (art collector) 243 Exposition international d’arte modern (exhibition) 175 L’Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (exhibition) 98 Ey, Johanna (gallery owner) 168 Eyres Monsell, Graham (friend of ATJ) 180 Farson, Daniel (journalist; writer) 88, 93, 179 Fath-Ali (Shah) 218 painting of sons of 219f, 291, 293 Femme Assise (Picasso, Pablo) 158 Fenton, Edward (journalist) 126 Fenton, Edward & Jeffress, Arthur Tilden Tuckerman Forbids 125–7 Fester, Leonie (friend of Barney, Elvira) 71, 79 Fields, Gracie 130, 131 50 Egerton Gardens 160, 167 Fini, Leonor (artist) 150 Firewalkers, The (King, Francis [Cauldwell, Frank]) 219–20 First Edition (review) 252 Fisca, Giovanni Favaretto (mayor, Venice) 284 Fischer, Harry (art dealer) 171 Fitzpatrick, Douglas (friend of ATJ) 58 Fitzwilliam Museum 29 Fleming, Anne (wife of Ian Fleming) 217 Fleming, Edna (née Vandyke) (aka E. Box) (artist) 203–5, 230, 239–40, 280, 286, 292 bequest to 241, 290 Gentle Friends 206, 234

340

Index

as landlady 167 Venice 269 Fleming, Ian 117, 217 Casino Royale 117 Fleming, Marston (metallurgist; husband of Edna Fleming) 204, 205, 240, 269 Florence 145–50 Fonteyn, Margot 270 Footlights 37 Ford, Charles Henri (poet; artist) 271 Ford, John Ludovic (friend of ATJ) 67–9 Ford, Lionel (headmaster, Harrow) 25 Ford, Ruth (actress) 270–1, 283 Forestis, Lela Typaldo (friend of ATJ) 281 40 Years of Modern Art (exhibition) 179 40,000 Years of Modern Art: A Comparison of Primitive and Modern (exhibition) 179 France 64f–6, 80, 114–16 homosexuality 65–6, 237, 285–6, 294 La Hotel France et Choiseul 279–80 Lurs 116 Toulon 65 Paris 98–9, 232–3 Francis Bacon: Paintings (exhibition) 178 Franke-Ruta, Walther (co-founder, Dada Cabaret) 265–6 Fraser, John (Lt Col) 55 Fraser, John ‘Budge’ (lover of ATJ) 25, 50, 55, 57f, 243, 248 Frassineti, Danile (daughter of Helen Gordon-Mann) 146 Frassineti, Giordano (son of Helen Gordon-Mann) 146 Freaks of Mayfair (Benson, E.F.) 31 Free of All Malice (Voules, Edward) 147 French Sailors (Wood, Christopher) 235 French Sunday Painters (exhibition) 200, 202 Freud, Lucian 89, 180 Quince on a Blue Table 188, 235 Freyburg, Bernard (General, C-in-C, New Zealand Division) 141 Friend, Donald (artist) 196 Frost, Honor (friend of Brausen, Erica) 218

Funerailles d’Alexandre, Les (Bauchant, André) 190, 202, 290, 294 Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, A (Shevelove, Burt) 138 Gainsborough, Richard (founder, Art News & Reviews) 214 Garbo, Greta 265, 267 Gardiner, Margaret (artist) 179 Garman, Douglas (writer; lover of Peggy Guggenheim) 163 Gathorne-Hardy, Eddie (socialite) 71, 79 Genie in a Bottle (Coleman, Martyn) 256 Gentle Friends (Box, E.) 206, 234 Geoghegan, Marie P. (wife of Randolph Jeffress) 41, 44, 48, 84, 105–6, 186 Gérard, Baron Portrait of Napoleon in Coronation Robes 90, 93f, 188, 189, 293 Giacometti, Alberto 181 Gielgud, John 137, 241, 267, 269 Gilbert, James/More, Julian Grab Me a Gondola 243 Gilbert, John (actor) 54 Giles, Arthur (butler to ATJ) 227, 291 Giles, Eliza Victorina (wife of Arthur Giles) 228, 291 Gill, Maurice (tenant of ATJ) 90–1 Gill, Olive (tenant of ATJ) 90–1 Gillette, Charles (garden designer) 287 Gilpin, Anthony (dancer) 269 Gingold, Hermione (actress) 252 Ginter, Lewis (business partner of Thomas Fox Jeffress) 9 Goetz, Walter (art dealer) 215 Golden Bowl, The (James, Henry) 60 gondolas 228, 243, 263–4, 269–70f, 272–3f, 277–8, 284 Gordon-Cumming, William (Lt Col) 52 Gordon-Mann, Edward (owner of Villa Gordon-Mann) 146 Gordon-Mann, Helen (owner of Villa Gordon-Mann) 146 Gore, Adrian (Brigadier) 146–7 Gorky, Arshile 164, 165

Index Grab Me a Gondola (Gilbert, James/More, Julian) 243 Graham Sutherland: A New Portrait and Some Paintings (exhibition) 213 Granger, Derek (producer) 241–2 Grant, Cary 234, 243 Graves, Robert 30 Gray, Terence (theatre producer) 37, 247 And in a Tomb were Found 37 Life of the King of the South and North Kamaria, Daughter of the Sun, Hatshepsut, A Pageant of Court Life in Old Egypt in the Early XVIIIth Dynasty, Reconstructed from the Monuments, The. A Chapter of Egyptian History in Dramatic Form by Terence Gray 37 Great Catherine (Whom Glory Still Adores) (Shaw, George Bernard) 34, 36f Greece 231, 237, 277 Greenly, Henry (miniature railway engineer) 48 Greenough, Thomas Olney (BAAC volunteer) 116 Gregorich, Raoul (lover of Peggy Guggenheim) 192 Gregory, Eric (co-founder, ICA) 179 Griffith, Constance (née White, wife of Randolph Jeffress) 185, 186, 187, 192 Griffith, John (son of Constance Griffith) 186 Griffith, Richard H. (husband of Constance Griffith) 186 Groves-Raine, Anthony (illustrator) 227 Guernica (Picasso, Pablo) 98 Guggenheim, Pegeen (daughter of Peggy Guggenheim) 268–9 Guggenheim, Peggy (art collector) 163, 279, 281–2 Coleman, Martyn 271, 272 gondolas/gondoliers 263, 281–2, 291 Pollock, Jackson 164 USA 3 Venice 117, 192–3, 257, 262, 263, 268

341

Gurney, Ronald (2Lt, Black Watch) 254–5, 291 Gustav Adolf (King of Sweden) 15–16 Gwynne, John (previous owner of Kenton Grange) 20–1 Gyp’s Princess, The (ADC production) 33–4 Gyson, Brion (artist; writer) 233 Hadley, William Sheldon (master, Pembroke College) 30 Haiti 85 Haizelden, Clement ‘Clem’ (antique dealer) 172–5 Haizelden, Erica. See Brausen, Erica Hall, Eric (art patron) 163 Hamilton, Richard 233 Hanover Gallery 170, 175, 177–82, 183–4, 195–8, 203 Bacon, Francis 178, 181, 216–17 Brausen, Erica 171, 175, 177, 178, 180, 183–4, 195–8 Chopping, Richard 216–17 Deakin, John 180, 214–15 Fleming, Edna (Eden Box) 204, 205 Francis Bacon: Paintings (exhibition) 178 Melville, Robert 178, 180, 184, 224 Mock, Jean-Yves 223 Sunday Painters (1948 exhibition) 179, 181 Harlow, Jean 70 Harris, Cack (cousin of ATJ) 43, 154, 187 Harris, Janie (cousin of ATJ) 10, 187 Harris, Kenneth (friend of ATJ) 262, 272 Harris, Thomas West (husband of Alese Randolph Jeffress) 10, 43, 44 Harrow 17, 19 Harrow School 24–7 Hartnell, Norman 54, 69 245 Haskell, Arnold (dance critic) 179 Haslam, Nicky (interior designer) 32, 242, 281 Hauser, Gayelord (diet guru) 267 Hazlitt, William (writer) 203

342

Index

Head I to Head VI (Bacon, Francis) 178 Heap, Jane (co-editor, The Little Review) 170 Heber-Percy, Robert ‘The Mad Boy’ (lover of Hugh Cruddas) 230 Hecht, Alfred (society picture framer) 210, 215, 243 Henderson, Gavin (friend of ATJ) 262, 272 Hense, Mary Annie (maid to Jeffress family) 107 Henson, Jean (owner of Villa Hammamet) 226 Henson, Leslie (actor) 137 Henson, Violet (owner of Villa Hammamet) 226 Hepburn, Barton (actor) 54 Hepburn, Katharine 243 Hewitt, Edwin (gallery owner) 238–9 Heydrich, Reinhard (German SS official) 182 Hill, Bill (cousin of ATJ) 16, 77 Hill, Charles Tilden (husband of Anita Jeffress) 3, 10, 15, 16, 42, 45 England 17 extravagance 43 Lusitania attack 42–3 Hill, Derek (son of John Hill) 294 Hill, Heather (wife of Henry Hill) 77, 228, 268 Hill, (Albert) Henry (architect; cousin of ATJ) 6, 10–11, 77, 135, 185, 232 birth 17 USA 3 Venice 228, 268 World War II 152 Hill, Jane (first cousin once removed of ATJ) 10, 77, 154, 229, 232 Hill, John (designer) 91, 199 Hillier, Tristram 117, 206 Chapel of the Misericordia 117 His Glorious Night (Barrymore, Lionel) 54 Hitchcock, Alfred Rear Window 53 Hockney, David 233 Hodgkin, Eliot (artist; school friend of ATJ) 25, 26, 57f, 81, 82f

Hohnsbeen, John (curatorial assistant) 232, 243, 248–9, 258, 266, 271–2, 289 Holford House 70 homosexuality 102, 250 Britain 237, 247–8, 250, 286 coded language 32–3 France 237, 285–6, 294 Freud, Lucian 180 Greece 237 Haiti 85 Italy 237, 279, 282–3, 285 Japan 237, 238–9 Jeffress, Arthur Tilden 1, 31, 32–3, 66, 89, 90, 180, 217, 237–9, 242, 247–50, 268, 279, 280, 282, 285 legality 85, 237, 247–8, 250, 280, 285–6, 294 Montague Trial, the 247–8 Pollock, Jackson 164 USA 286 Hope, Anthony Dolly Dialogues, The 63–4 Hooper, Reggie (editor, The Bystander) 71–2 Hoover, Herbert (President) 5, 14–15 Hoover, Lou Henry (First Lady) 5, 14–15 Horbits of Patricia (Matta, Roberto) 164 Horizon (magazine) 224 Hound of the Baskervilles, The (Doyle, Arthur Conan) 16 House of Arthur Jeffress in Flames (A Sicilian Peasant) 190 How Now Hecate (Coleman, Martyn) 256 Howard, Brian (poet; friend of ATJ) 68, 79, 247, 283 Howard, Tom (special effects expert) 180, 221, 269 Hoyningen-Huené, George (photographer) 182 Hutton, Barbara (socialite) 89, 174 Huxley, Aldous Leda 31 Hyde, Forrest (lawyer) 108 ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts) 179, 203, 268

Index 40 Years of Modern Art (exhibition) 179 40,000 Years of Modern Art: A Comparison of Primitive and Modern (exhibition) 179 Idylls of the King (Tennyson, Alfred) 15 Institute of Cancer Research 292 Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA). See ICA Ironside, Robin (artist) 178 Irving, Robert (music arranger) 231 Isherwood, Christopher 257, 271 Italy 62, 63, 76, 138–40, 145–50, 192 (see also Venice) Florence 145–50 homosexuality 237, 279, 282–3, 285 Positano 265–6 Sicily 138, 266 Tre Ville 264–5 Villa Capponi 62, 91, 146–9, 150 Villa Cimbrone 265 Jack, E.M. (Brigadier; chairman, Winchester Art Club) 162 Jacobs, Aaron F. (vice consul, Venice) 279 Jacques, Elliott (husband of Kay Walsh) 216 J’ai Deux Amours: Mon Pays et Paris (Baker, Josephine) 117 James, Edward (Mexican art expert) 166, 271 James, Henry Golden Bowl, The 60 James River 286–7 Jane Austen Museum 291 Japan 237, 238–9 Jaray, Lea Bondi. See Bondi Jaray, Lea Jaray, Sandor (sculptor) 171 Jefferies, Richard (writer) 130 Jeffress, Albert Godfrey ‘Jeff ’ (nephew of ATJ ) 48, 106–7, 185, 187, 290 Jeffress, Albert Gustavus I (grandfather of ATJ) 8, 9 Jeffress, Albert Gustavus, II (father of ATJ) 3, 4f, 5

343

British American Tobacco Company 10, 15, 16 character 23, 46–7 death 44–7 description 47 draft, the 23 family history 6, 8–11 hobbies 23–4 marriage 3, 5, 250 residences 14–15, 17, 19–22, 43–4 tennis 14, 23, 44 travel 22, 41, 43 tributes 46–7 will 47–8 Jeffress, Alese Randolph (aunt of ATJ) 8, 10, 43 Jeffress, Anita (aunt of ATJ) 9, 10, 15, 42, 43 England 17, 77 Jeffress, Arthur Tilden ancestry 6–11, 293 art 89, 98–9, 158 Arthur Jeffress (Pictures) gallery. See Arthur Jeffress (Pictures) gallery as American Field Service volunteer 107–19, 123–31, 134–43, 145, 153 as art collector 97, 98–9, 157–64, 189–91, 205, 218, 233, 289, 292–3 Bacon, Francis 196 birth 3, 13, 15, 20 blackmail (possible) 248 as book lover 31–2, 149, 294 British-American Ambulance Corps 107–19 burglary 267 character 1, 128, 151, 154, 213, 215, 217, 219–21, 247, 251–2, 253, 259–60, 284–5, 292–4 clothing 30f–1, 56f–7f, 71–4, 76, 143, 220–1 cross-dressing 33 CSA exhibitions 163, 165, 166 death 205, 280–7, 289 description 108, 178–9, 195, 209–10, 211–14, 218, 220–1

344

Index

education 17, 22, 24–7, 29–39, 41, 49 film career 52–3 fire 23, 190, 294–5 friends 237–43 gondolas 263–4, 269–70f, 272–3f, 277–8, 281–2, 291 Hanover Gallery 175, 177–81, 183–4, 190, 196–8, 203, 204 health 139, 140–1, 197, 198, 226–7, 229, 232, 280–1 homages to 216–20, 230 homosexuality 1, 31, 32–3, 66, 89, 90, 180, 217, 237–9, 242, 247–50, 268, 279, 280, 282, 285 ICA 179 images 30f, 35f, 36f, 56f, 57f 64f, 73f, 82f, 86f, 94f, 95f, 100f, 111f, 124f, 142f, 212f, 217–19f, 272–3f inheritance 47, 66 interior design 59f–60, 91, 137, 188–90, 202, 211f, 231, 241, 243, 260 lending art 215 military service 49, 107–19, 123–31, 133–43, 145–53 misogyny 2, 239, 241–2, 284, 285 as Motor Transport volunteer 49 music 229 name 15–16 naturalization 107 nicknames 2 Office of the Co-ordinator of Information 121–2 pets 96f, 159, 252, 260, 261f portraits 83f, 209–16, 217–18 processions 26, 293 queer slang 32–3 Red and White Party 69–77 relationship with mother 187 religion 24, 72 reputation 1 residences: 250–1; Acton 14–15; Beaufort Gardens 167; Cadogan Place 58–60; Eaton Square 230–1; Egerton Gardens 160, 167; Harrow 17, 19–22; Kenton Grange 19–22,

56f–7f; Marwell House/Lodge 89–95, 96f, 103, 109, 159–60, 202; Orchard Court 80–3; Paris 98; Pelham Crescent 23, 188–92, 294–5; USA 108, 121; Venice 192, 211f, 227–8, 231, 241, 242, 243, 251, 260–4f, 267–9, 272, 283, 291 Rolls Royce 86–7f Royal Tournament 26, 293 sailors 65, 89, 90, 242, 247, 249, 268, 292 school friends 25–6 Selandia voyage 124–7 servants 21, 159 social class 2, 15, 20, 32, 116, 122, 217, 290 soldiers 89, 217, 249–50 Southampton Art Gallery 161 stage performances 27, 33–7, 39, 50, 6 style 30f–1, 143 suicide 280–6, 289 ‘Taffeta Twelve’ 137–8 theatre 243 travel: Bahamas, The 85, 100–1; ban 279; correspondence 206; Egypt 227; Far East 22, 237–9; France 64–6, 80, 98–9, 232, 279–80; Greece 231, 237, 276–8; Haiti 85; Italy 62, 63, 76, 77, 97, 99–100f, 145, 160, 191, 192, 227–8, 231, 232, 242, 247, 252, 259, 264, 266, 275–6, 278–9; Japan 237–9; Libya 134–5, Mexico 97; Middle East 232; sexual companionship 66, 85, 232, 237–9, 242, 247, 249, 285; Tunisia 134–5, 226; UK 23, 51, 55, 61–2; USA 54–5, 77, 107, 123, 145, 231–2: World War II 123–31, 133–43, 145–53; Zamzam voyage 110–19 Tuckerman Forbids 125–7 USA 1, 3, 152–3 wealth 2,47, 50, 71, 190, 292 will and bequests 161, 241, 252, 254, 255, 257, 286, 289–92 women friends 2, 239–41 World War I 49

Index World War II 83, 107–19, 123–31, 133, 134–43, 145–55 Zamzam voyage, sinking and imprisonment 110–19, 123 Jeffress, Boswell (uncle of ATJ) 9 Jeffress, Ella Elizabeth (Bessie) (grandmother of ATJ) 8–9 Jeffress, Elizabeth (wife of Robert Miller Jeffress) 229 Jeffress, Henry Fulton (uncle of ATJ) 8, 10, 23 Jeffress, Henry Fulton, II (cousin of ATJ) 10 Jeffress, John (half-uncle of ATJ) 8, 9, 23 Jeffress, (Joseph) Randolph (brother of ATJ) 3, 5, 7, 192, 280–1, 286 career 23, 41 divorce 84, 105 draft, the 23 Edgware 187 education 17, 22, 23 hobbies 21, 23 , 48–9 inheritance 47 Kenton Grange 185 marriages and family 41, 48, 186, 250 miniature railway 21, 48–9, 185–6 motor racing 21, 48 naturalization 107 photography 49, 60 relationship with mother 186–7 World War II 83–4 Jeffress, Lena (half-aunt of ATJ) 8, 9 Jeffress, Mary (half-aunt of ATJ) 8, 9 Jeffress, Robert Miller (cousin of ATJ) 7, 23, 135, 185, 228–9, 286 Jeffress, Sarah (half-aunt to ATJ) 8, 9 Jeffress, Stella (Adelhaid) Rosenfield (mother of ATJ) 3, 4f, 5, 187, 245 bereavement 44–6 description 44 family history 6, 7–8 health 108, 185, 187 hobbies 23 inheritance 47, 48 interior design 21

345

name 15 travel 41 Jeffress, Thomas Fox (half-uncle of ATJ) 8, 9–10, 19, 92 Jenkins, Newell (AFS volunteer; musicologist) 138 John, Elton 257 John Deakin’s Paris (Deakin, John) 99 John Deakin’s Rome (Deakin, John) 99 Johnson, Philip (architect) 271–2 Jones, John Leslie ‘Billy’ (husband of Janie Harris) 187 Jug on the Window Sill, The (Berman, Eugene) 97 Kar, Ida (photographer) 212f, 217–18, 219f Keeler, Christine (model) 211 Kennedy, Jackie (First Lady) 174 Kennedy, John F. (President) 281 Kennedy, Joseph (US Ambassador) 107 Kennedy, Yorke (antique dealer) 174 Kenton Grange (residence of Jeffress family) 19–22, 56f–7f, 185 Key-Seymer, Barbara (photographer; friend of ATJ) 65, 80, 93, 99, 149 Keynes, John Maynard 49 Keyserling, Arnolf (philosopher) 265 Keyserling, Wilhelmine (wife of Arnolf Keyserling) 265 Khrushchev, Nikita (First Secretary, Soviet Union) 281 King, Francis 219, 237, 240 Firewalkers, The 219–20, 249, 251 King, Viva (friend of ATJ) 231, 240–1, 269 Weeping and the Laughter, The 240 King, Wally (curator) 240 King George’s Fund for Sailors 292 Kininmonth, Christopher 264 Rome Alive 264 Kinsolving, Luke (AFS volunteer) 154 Knollys, Eardley (art dealer) 170 Knyvett-Lee, Arthur (co-founder, Redfern Gallery) 171 Kochno, Boris (dancer) 102

346

Index

Koopman, Catharina ‘Toto’ (model; archaeologist) 175, 180, 181–4, 198, 228, 266 Korda, Alexander Private Life of Don Juan, The 182 La Hotel France et Choiseul 279–80 La Malcontenta 99–100 Lambert, Isabel (née Nicholas, later Rawsthorne) (artist) 181 Landsberg, Bertie (millionaire) 99, 100 Laughinghouse, Ned (tobacco merchant) 118 Laurents, Arthur (friend of ATJ) 271 Lavery, John Countess of Rocksavage, The 122 Lawes, Frederick (journalist) 179 Layton, Ralph (husband of Edna Fleming) 204 Le Bas, Edward (artist; school acquaintance of ATJ) 25–6, 33 le Strange, Gordon (partner of Guy Osborne) 57 Lean, David Summertime 243 Lebel, Jean-Jacques Burial of Tinguely’s The Thing 233 Leda (Huxley, Aldous) 31 Lehmann, Rosamond (novelist) 81, 230 Leigh, Vivien 137, 230 Leiris, Michel (writer) 170 Leptis Magna 134–5 Levett, Berkeley (Major) 25, 51–2, 64, 65 Levett, Joan Angel May (friend of ATJ) 35, 51, 52, 53, 54 Levett, Sidney John Armine Douglas ‘Wilf ’ (school friend of ATJ) 25, 34, 51, 52, 53–4 Levett, Theophilus Francis Michael ‘Mic’ 52, 53, 54 Lewry, Elizabeth (wife of Alan, Baron Sainsbury) 170 Libation Bearers, The (Aeschylus) 39 Librairie-Galerie de la Pléiade 168 Libya 134–7

Lichine, David Paolo and Francesca 62 Lieberson, Goddard (friend of ATJ) 229 Life 118 Life of the King of the South and North Kamaria, Daughter of the Sun, Hatshepsut, A Pageant of Court Life in Old Egypt in the Early XVIIIth Dynasty, Reconstructed from the Monuments, The. A Chapter of Egyptian History in Dramatic Form by Terence Gray (Gray, Terence) 37 Lion of Iran, The (inn sign) 158, 188, 233, 291 Lloyd, James (labourer; painter) 234 London 67, 70, 230 Acton 13–15 Beaufort Gardens 167 Cadogan Place 58–60 Claridge House 198–9 Eaton Square 230–1 Egerton Gardens 160, 167 Harrow 17, 19 Orchard Court 80–3 Pelham Crescent 23, 188–92, 294–5 London Gallery 223–4 Lopova, Lydia (ballet dancer) 49 Lord, James Boy Who Wrote No, The 224 Love in a Mist (Packard, Rosalie) 218 Lowenthal, Elias (great-grandfather of ATJ) 7 Lowenthal, Henrietta (great-aunt of ATJ) 7 Lowenthal, Rosalie. See Rosenfield, Rosalie Lowry, Malcolm (novelist) 39 Lucas, Lester (friend of ATJ) 79 Lurs 116 Lusitania, RMS (ship) 42, 119 Maar, Dora (partner and muse of Pablo Picasso) 103, 158 MacBrayne, Irene (actress) 79 McCarthy, Mary 272 Venice Observed 272

Index McColl, Evan (husband of Rosemary Molloy) 103 McColl, Rosemary (née Molloy). See Molloy, Rosemary McDonald, Jeanette 269 Mackenzie, Basil (physician) 88 MacNiece, Louis (poet) 179 McWilliam, F.E. Study for a Father and Daughter (II) 202 magic realism 200, 201f, 234 Magnasco, Alessandro 157, 203, 261 Magnasco Society 203 Maistre, Roy de (artist) 168, 171 Maitres d’art indépendant 1895–1937 (exhibition) 98 maîtres populaires de la réalité, Les (exhibition) 98 Malcolm (possible lover of ATJ) 248 Mallowan, Max (archaeologist) 228 Malory, Thomas Morte d’Arthur 163 Man Made Angry (Brooke, Hugh ‘Tim’) 122 Man Who Ate The Popomack, The (Turner, W.J.) 39 Mansel, James (Reverend) 163 Manson, James Bolivar (director, Tate) 173 Manzù, Giacomo Seated Cardinal 202 Marcus, Stanley (Chairman, Neiman Marcus) 268 Margaret (Princess of Sweden) 15 Marini, Mario (artist) 190–1 Markova, Alicia (dancer) 269 Marlowe, Christopher Edward II 34, 35f Marlowe Society, The 34, 37 Marquhardt, Bruno (artist) 259 Marsh, Edward (polymath) 162 Martindale, Babe (socialite). See Plunket Greene, Babe Martinez, Coqué 216 Desert Idyll (Homage to Arthur Jeffress), The 216, 230

347

Marwell Hall 89 Marwell House/Lodge (residence of ATJ) 89–95, 96f, 103, 109, 159–60, 202 Matisse, Henri (artist) 166 Matta, Roberto Horbits of Patricia 164 Maugham, Somerset 65, 209, 227, 248 Razor’s Edge, The 257 Maxtone Graham, Anthony (co-founder, Redfern Gallery) 171 Maxwell, Elsa (professional hostess) 69 Maxwell, Somerset (school acquaintance of ATJ) 27 Mayerson, Anna (artist) 266 Mayne, Peter Bird of Time, The 243 Meadowbrook Manor (residence of Thomas Fox Jeffress) 9, 10, 92, 287 Melly, George 180 Melville, Lilian (wife of Robert Melville) 193, 226, 269 Melville, Robert (art critic; co-founder ICA; secretary, Hanover Gallery) 31, 32, 65–6, 164, 167, 225f, 269, 280, 286, 292 as art critic 224–5 Arthur Jeffress (Pictures) gallery 197, 198, 199–200, 206–7, 223 bequest to 290, 291 career 223–5 description 223 discretion 239 Erotic Art of the West 224 Hanover Gallery 178, 180, 184, 224 ICA 179, 200 Jeffress, Arthur, relationship with 198, 205, 226, 248 Picasso: Master of the Phantom 180 ‘Sunday Painters’ (1954 exhibition) 200 tribute to ATJ 292–3, 295 Venice 193 Meninas, Las (Picasso, Pablo) 234 Merritt, Michael (friend of ATJ) 276 Mesens, E.L.T. (co-founder, ICA; director, London Gallery) 179, 223, 224

348

Index

Messel, Oliver (stage designer) 62, 188, 268 Meyjes, Walter (university friend of ATJ) 33, 35, 51 Ecco Homo 51 Middleton, Michael 214 ‘Art on a Shoestring’ 206 Mildred, Pierce (Curtiz, Michael) 270 Miller, Arthur 174 Miller, Kate Lee (wife of Thomas Fox Jeffress) 9, 19 Miller, Lee (war correspondent) 118 Milne, Caleb (AFS volunteer) 123–4, 126, 136 Milton, Ernest Gianello (actor) 166, 188, 219 Milton, Mrs Ernest. See Royde-Smith, Naomi Minton, John (illustrator) 166 Miró, Joan 168 Miss Mapp (Benson, E.F.) 31 Mitchell, Gerald Fraser (lover of ATJ) 54–5, 58, 62, 248 Mitchell, Stephen (producer) 243 Mitford, Nancy 254, 260, 268, 269 Mock, Jean-Yves (curator) 223, 242 Molloy, Rosemary (friend of John Deakin and ATJ) 92, 93, 99, 103 Monet, Claude 203, 290 Water Irises 190, 205 Monroe, Marilyn 6, 174 Montagu, Edward (Lord of Beaulieu) 247–8 Montagu, Elizabeth (actress) 70, 71 Montagu Trial, the 247–8 Montgomery, John (social historian) 72, 74, 76 Moore, Henry 181, 202, 268 Moore, Roger 252 Morgan, Evan (2nd Viscount Tredegar; chamberlain; poet) 71, 173, 247 Morphological Echo (Dalí, Salvador) 234 Morris, Cedric (artist) 160, 165 Mort, A.E.T. (architect) 91 Morte d’Arthur (Malory, Thomas) 163 Mortimer, John 242–3, 259–60, 264, 265 Clinging to the Wreckage 259–60

Mortimer, Penelope (novelist) 259–60, 264, 265 Mortimer, Raymond (writer) 71, 72, 232 Mosley, Oswald 260 Most Likely Girl on ITV, The (Bishop, Bobby) 254 Mottisfont Abbey 166 Mrs Dale’s Diary (BBC Light Programme) 19 Mrs Miniver (Struther, Jan) 171 Mueller, Bing (BAAC volunteer) 110, 115 Mulholland, Patricia (artist) 172–3 Mullen, Avril (sister of Elvira Barney) 78 Mullen, John (brother of Elvira Barney) 78 Mullen, John Ashley (father of Elvira Barney) 78 Murphy, Charles (editor, Fortune) 112 Murrow, Ed (journalist) 107 My Family and Other Animals (Durrell, Gerald) 277 naïve painting 202 Nan Kivell, Rex (director, Redfern Gallery) 171 Nash, Paul 60 Navarro, Antonio Fernando de (sportsman; barrister) 256 Neo-Romanticism 102 Neville-Willing, Donald (AFS volunteer) 138, 243–5 Nevinson, W.R. Chicago 163 New York Museum of Modern Art 98 West Harlem 8 West 23rd Street 5–6 Newbutt, Jack (railway worker) 49 Newton, Robert Uneven Temperature 35 Nicholas, Isabel (artist) 181 Nicholas I (Tsar) 293 Nichols, Beverley (author; friend of ATJ) 80, 173, 243, 245, 252, 290 Corfu 276 Dolly Sisters 64

Index health 232 Venice 269–70 98 Eaton Square (residence of ATJ) 230–1 Nolan, Sidney Escaped Convict, The 234 Norfolk 55, 58, 106 Norton, Nöel ‘Peter’ (founder, London Gallery) 219, 224 Northwick Circle (residence of Stella Jeffress) 187 Norwich, John Julius 232 nuclear war 281 Oakeshott, Noel (wife of Walter Oakeshott) 163 Oakeshott, Walter (headmaster, Winchester College) 163 Office of Strategic Services (OSS) 121 Office of the Co-ordinator of Information 121–2 Oiseaux Repentis, Les (Tanguy, Yves) 235 Olivier, Laurence 230 On with the Dance (Coward, Noel/ Braham, Philip) 244 Open Window, The (film) 52–3 Operation Dynamo 107 Orchard Court (residence of ATJ) 80–3 Oresteia (Aeschylus) 38–9, 50, 240, 252 Origines et développement de l’art international indépendent (exhibition) 98 Origo, Iris (writer) 91 Orley Farm School 17 Orozco, Jose Clementé (artist) 166 Osborne, Guy (antique dealer; pilot) 57 OSS (Office of Strategic Services) 121 Ossa, Carmen Rosa de (daughter of Leonie Fester) 76 Ostier, André (photographer; friend of ATJ) 98, 157, 192, 203, 205, 280, 290 Owen, Catherine Dale (actress) 54 Oxford bags 30f–1 Packard, Rosalie Love in a Mist 218

349

Pagliacci, Aldo 207 Churches in Flames 260 Painter’s Family, The (de Chirico, Giorgio) 97, 157, 161–2, 200 Painting (Bacon, Francis) 172, 175, 177, 178 Panarello, Giovanni (art dealer) 266–7 Paolo and Francesca (Lichine, David) 62 Paris 98–9, 232–3 La Hotel France et Choiseul 279–80 parties 65, 68, 69–77, 242–3 Parsons, Nicholas 252 Partridge, Kenneth (designer) 237–8, 241–2, 283, 284 Pasmore, Victor (artist) 171 Paul, Brenda Dean (actress) 74, 75f, 78 Pearman, Philip (actor) 252 Pease, Humphrey (husband of Barbara Key-Seymer) 99 Pelham Crescent (residence of ATJ) 23, 188–92, 294–5 Pelham-Rose, Peter (artist) 181 Pembroke College, Cambridge 29 Penrose, Roland (art collector; husband of Lee Miller) 118, 179 Percy, Esmé (actor) 61, 240–1 Perfect, Muriel (of Arthur Jeffress [Pictures] gallery) 206 Persia 6–7, 158, 293 Peterkin, Bridget (housekeeper to Stella Jeffress) 187 Peterkin, Helen (housekeeper to Stella Jeffress) 187 Philpot, Glyn (artist) 257 Picasso, Pablo 62, 99, 180, 203 Femme Assise 158 Guernica 98 Meninas, Las 234 Picasso: Master of the Phantom (Melville, Robert) 180 Pickwick Papers (Dickens, Charles) 27 Pinewood Film Studios 106 Pinsent, Cecil (garden designer) 91–2 Piper, John 255 Piper, Myfanwy (art critic; librettist) 255

350

Index

Pirandello, Luigi Pleasure of Honesty, The 34 Pitt-Rivers, Michael (defendant in Montagu Trial) 247–8 Pleasure of Honesty, The (Pirandello, Luigi) 34 Plunket Greene, Babe (socialite) 71, 207 Polari 32 Pollock, Jackson 164–5, 203, 209 Abstraction 163–4 Banners of Spring 164 Ponsonby, Elizabeth (socialite) 68, 69–70, 71 Ponsonby, Frederick (Viscount Duncannon) 122 Ponsonby, Vere (Governor General of Canada) 122 Pop Art 268 Pope Innocent X (Bacon, Francis) 234 Porter, Cole 70 Porter, Edwin S. What Happened on 23rd Street 6 Porter, Linda (wife of Cole Porter 70 Portrait of Edward Sackville-West (Sutherland, Graham) 234 Portrait of Napoleon in Coronation Robes (Gérard, Baron) 90, 93f, 188, 189, 293 Portrait of Palikare (Delacroix, Eugène) 290 Portsmouth 90 Portugal 117 Positano 265–6 Powhatan (father of Pocahontas) 17 Powhatan (residence of Jeffress family) 17, 19, 287 Private Life of Don Juan, The (Korda, Alexander) 182 Proust, Marcel 294 À la recherché du temps perdu 31 Puryear, Sarah (wife of Albert Gustavus Jeffress I) 8 Puttin’ on the Ritz (Berlin, Irving) 8 Queen Lucia (Benson, E.F.) 31–2 queer slang 32–3 Quince on a Blue Table (Freud, Lucian) 188, 235

RASC (Royal Army Service Corps) 135–6 Rattigan, Terence 230 Ravensbrück concentration camp 183 Rawsthorne, Isabel (née Lambert) (artist) 181 Raymont-Came, Diana (goddaughter of ATJ) 63, 290 Raymont-Came, Isabel (wife of William Connell) 63 Razor’s Edge, The (Maugham, Somerset) 257 Read, Herbert (co-founder, ICA) 179, 234, 262, 268 Rear Window (Hitchcock, Alfred) 53 Red and White Ball 70 Red and White Party 69–77 Redfern Gallery 168, 171 Redgate, Bud (BAAC volunteer) 114 Redon, Odilon 290 Reid, Beryl 252, 253, 254 Reincarnation, The (Allen, Gerald) 34 Reitlinger, Gerald (art historian) 65 Republique Francaise, La (Rousseau, Henri ‘Douanier’) 190 Reynolds, Alan 223 Ribblesdale, Lady 69 Rich, Laurence (cousin of Edward Burra) 63, 64 Rich, Sylvia (cousin of Edward Burra) 63 Richmond, Ralph (Colonel, AFS) 127 Ritz, Kate (florist) 58 Robertson-Luxford, John (owner of Higham House) 63 Rockefeller, Blanchette (art collector) 271 Roger, Bunny (friend of ATJ) 54, 88, 90, 190, 242, 243, 249, 256, 281 bequest to 291 Chelsea Arts Ball 226 Coleman, Martyn 258 Marwell House/Lodge 91 Red and White Party 71 Venice 242, 247, 269 Rogers, Frances Summers (Aunt Fan) (wife of Henry Fulton Jeffress) 10–11, 231

Index Rogge, Bernhard (captain of the Atlantis) 113 Romany, Jack (pub owner) 173 Rome 145 Rome Alive (Kininmonth, Christopher) 264 Roosevelt, Eleanor (First Lady) 280 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (President) 280 Rose-Pulham, Peter (artist) 172 Rosenfield, Jerome (Romeo) (uncle of ATJ) 7, 8 Rosenfield, Joseph (grandfather of ATJ) 7 Rosenfield, Max (Marx) (uncle of ATJ) 7, 8 Rosenfield, Rosalie (grandmother of ATJ) 7–8 Rosenfield, Solomon (Sala) (uncle of ATJ) 7 Rosenfield, Stella (Adelhaid) (mother of ATJ). See Jeffress, (Adelhaid) Rosenfield Ross, Marita (writer) 233–4 Ross, Oriel (actress) 61 Rossi (Burra, Edward) 65–6 Rothenstein, John (director, Tate) 268 Rousseau, Henri ‘Douanier’ 99 Republique Francaise, La 190 Rousseau, Paul (curator) 92 Royal Army Service Corps (RASC) 135–6 Royal Family 15–16, 52, 253, 256, 276, 277–8, 284 Royal Marsden Hospital 292 Royde-Smith, Naomi (author) 166, 188, 219 Rucellai, Teresa (owner of Villa Rucellai) 150 Rumney, Ralph (co-founder Situationist International) 269269 Russell, Gilbert (art collector) 166 Russell, Gordon (friend of ATJ) 67–8 Russell, John (critic) 196 Russell, Maud (art collector) 166 Ruta, Peter (artist) 259, 265–6, 269 Ruxton, William (co-leader, BAAC) 108 Saber, Clifford (artist) 126 Sackville-West, Vita 265 Sailor Party 65

351

Sainsbury, Baron Alan (businessman) 170 Sainsbury, Lisa (art patron) 170 Sainsbury, Robert (art patron) 170, 196 Salazar, António de Oliveira (Prime Minister) 117 Sanders, Rosemary (party host) 69 Sandham Memorial Chapel 165 Sang, Frederick (previous owner of Kenton Grange) 21 Sassoon, Sibyl (Marchioness of Cholmondeley) 122 Savinio, Albert (artist) 151, 157–8, 200 Scherman, David (photographer) 112, 118 Schiffrin, Jacques (gallery owner) 168 Schoenberg, Edgar Elias (half-great-uncle of ATJ) 8, 17 Schoenberg, Hermann (step-grandfather of ATJ) 7, 8 Schorr, Clara (sister of Raoh Schorr) 173–4 Schorr, Raoh Friedel (artist) 173–4 Bengal Tiger 173 Schrijver, Herman (interior decorator) 240 Scott, Ruth. See Ford, Ruth Scott, Zachary (actor) 270, 283 Scott-James, Anne 261–2, 269, 272 Searle, Alan (partner of Somerset Maugham) 227 Seasons (Arcimboldo, Giuseppe) 231 Seated Cardinal (Manzù, Giacomo) 202 Seely, Hugh (1st Baron Sherwood) 220–1 Selandia, SS (ship) 124–7 Selfridge, Gordon (retail magnate) 63, 64 Sense of Smell (Arcimboldo, Giuseppe) 231 Seven Year Itch, The (Wilder, Billy) 6 70b Cadogan Place (residence of ATJ) 58–60 Sewell, Brian (art critic) 1, 221 Shakespeare, William Twelfth Night 27 Shanghai 43 Sharp, Martha (wife of Quentin Crewe) 238 Shaw, George Bernard Great Catherine (Whom Glory Still Adores) 34, 36f Shepherd, Michael (friend of ATJ) 69, 243

352

Index

Sheradski, Ruth (fashion writer; illustrator) 231 Sherard, Michael (boyfriend of ATJ) 57, 294 Sherfesee, Emily (Titanic survivor) 65 Sherwood, Lord (Hugh Seely) 220–1 Sherwood, Robert Emmet (screenwriter; co-founder Office of the Co-ordinator of Information) 121 Shevelove, Burt (AFS volunteer) Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, A 138 Shobden Court 62 Short, Celia (friend of ATJ) 93, 103 Sicily 138, 266 Singin’ in the Rain (Kelly, Gene/Donen, Stanley) 54 Siren in Full Moonlight (Delvaux, Paul) 260 Sitwell, Edith 61, 271 Sitwell, Osbert & Sacheverell Sitwell All at Sea or First Class Passengers Only: A Social Tragedy in Three Acts 61 Façade 61 Sitwell, Sacheverell Valse des Fleurs 293 Six Best Post War Paintings, The (Tatler & Bystander article) 231 Skeffington-Smyth, Denys (friend of Elvira Barney) 79 Skeffington-Smyth, Terence (friend of Elvira Barney) 79 slavery 9, 188 Sleigh, Sylvia (artist) 268 Smart, Elizabeth (friend of John Deakin) 102 Smart, Richard (director, Redfern Gallery) 167 Smart, Sheila (friend of ATJ) 240 Smith, Edwin (photographer) 84 Smith, Ella Elizabeth (Bessie). See Jeffress, Ella Elizabeth (Bessie) Smith, William Gray (captain of the Zamzam) 110 Snail that Climbed the Eiffel Tower and Other Stories, The (Cross, Odo) 166

Soby, James Thrall (critic) 268 social class 20 SOE (Special Operations Executive) 83–4, 105 Solidor, Suzy (singer) 215 Solomon, Abraham (artist) 239 Somerset Maugham (Sutherland, Graham) 209 Southampton 90, 109 Southampton Art Gallery 160–1, 162, 177, 205, 290, 292 Special Operations Executive (SOE) 83–4, 105 Spencer, Stanley 162, 165 Spencer-Churchill, Edward (developer, Northwick Circle) 187 Spiros (Corfu taxi-driver for the Durrell family) 277 St George’s Gallery 171 St Petersburg 293 Stael, Nicolas de Toîts, Les 234 Stamp, Christopher (manager, The Who) 245 Steele, Tommy 245 Stephen, Michael (dress designer) 78, 79, 80 Stephen, Norman Kenneth (housemaster) 24, 29, 32 Stewart, Antonio (friend of ATJ) 123, 125, 126 Stewart, James (AFS volunteer) 108, 110, 111, 115, 116 Stokowski, Leopold 265 Strange, Gordon le (partner of Guy Osborne) 57 Street, Arthur (friend of Elvira Barney) 79 Study for a Father and Daughter (II) (McWilliam, F.E.) 202 Study for Portrait (Bacon, Francis) 178 Study from the Human Body (Bacon, Francis) 178, 224 Sturt, Lois (wife of Evan Morgan) 71 Sturt, Napier (Naps’) (3rd Baron Alington) 71, 171, 173, 182 Sub-contractor, The (ADC production) 34–5

Index suicide 280 Summertime (Lean, David) 243 Sunday Painters (1948 exhibition) 179, 181 ‘Sunday Painters’ (1954 exhibition) 200 Sunday painting 201f, 233, 234 Surrealism 233 Sutcliffe, Berkeley (artist) 243 Sutcliffe, Jennifer (god-daughter of ATJ) 290 Sutherland, Graham 117, 171, 181, 193, 203, 207, 243 Arthur Jeffress 209–15, 262 Bacon, Francis 213–14 bequest to 291 character 213 Graham Sutherland: A New Portrait and Some Paintings (exhibition) 213 Hanover Gallery 180 Melville, Robert 223 Portrait of Edward Sackville-West 234 Somerset Maugham 209 success 210 Sutherland, Wadsworth, New Aspects of British Sculpture (exhibition) 209 tribute to ATJ 292 Venice 117, 193, 210, 269 William Maxwell Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook 209 Winston Churchill 215–16 Young British Painters (exhibition) 171 Sutherland, Kathleen (wife of Graham Sutherland) 193, 211, 269 Sutherland, Wadsworth, New Aspects of British Sculpture (exhibition) 209 ‘Taffeta Twelve’ 137–8, 250 Tahiti 101 Tanguy, Yves Oiseaux Repentis, Les 235 Tate Gallery 200, 202, 290 Taylor, Elisabeth (friend/travelling companion of ATJ) 238 Taylor, Elizabeth (actress) 245 Tchelitchew, Pavel 102, 271 Blue Clown 271

353

10 Pelham Crescent (residence of ATJ) 188–92 Tennyson, Alfred Idylls of the King 15 The Caravan Club 87–8 The Thatched Barn 105 Theatre (Vuillard, Édouard) 190 theatres 37–9 Thesiger, Eric (Page of Honour) 71 Thesiger, Ernest (actor) 72 30a Orchard Court (residence of ATJ) 80–3 Thomas, Jameson (actor) 52 Three Sailors at the Bar (Burra, Edward) 65, 233–4 Through a Window (Wells, H.G.) 52 Tischler, Manina (artist) 268 tobacco 5, 6, 9–10, 16, 292 Toîts, Les (Stael, Nicolas de) 234 Tosca (Puccini, Giacomo) 269 Toto’s terrace on the island of Pannerea, Italy, with Stromboli in the background (Alderson, Roy) 255 Toulon 65 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de Émile Bernard 99, 190, 290 Tre Ville 264–5 Tree, Helen (actress; wife of Herbert Beerbohm Tree) 241 Tree, Herbert Beerbohm (actor) 241 Tripoli 135–7 Trollope, Anthony 17 trompe l’oeil 81, 198, 200, 201f Trompe L’oeil for Arthur Jeffress (Chopping, Richard) 217 Tucker, William (sculptor) 173 Tuckerman, Bayard (CO of Unit XVI, AFS) 126 Tuckerman Forbids (Jeffress, Arthur Tilden/Edward Fenton) 125–7 Tudor, Anthony (ballet dancer) 160 Tunisia 134–5, 226 Turn of the Screw (Britten, Benjamin) 252 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare, William) 27 Two Poodles (Bonnard, Pierre) 290 Two Sisters, The (Burra, Edward) 64, 163

354

Index

Ullman, Robert (theatre PR agent) 264–5 Uneven Temperature (Newton, Robert) 35 Upcher, Tommy (friend of ATJ) 58 USA 54–5, 77, 152, 286 (see also New York) Valentin, Curt (art dealer) 271 Valentina (dress designer) 231 Valet and the Governess, The (song) 252 Valois, Ninette de (ballet dancer) 38 Valse des Fleurs (Sitwell, Sacheverell) 293 Vanderbilt, Rosemary (wife of Hugh Chisholm) 254 Vandyke, Emmie (mother of Edna Fleming) 204 Vandyke, Solomon (father of Edna Fleming) 204 Vathek (Beckford, William) 216 Vaudry, Elsa. See Barker-Mill, Elsa Vaughan, Keith (artist) 268 Venice 63, 97f, 191, 192, 193, 231, 241, 254, 263–4, 267, 282–4 Ban 279, 285 Capote, Truman 267 Coleman, Martyn 255, 257 Deakin, John 97f gondolas/gondoliers 228, 243, 244f, 263–4, 269–70f, 272–3f, 277–8, 281–2, 284, 291 homosexuality 247, 249, 267, 268, 282 Piper, John 255 Ramo del Forno house (residence of ATJ) 192, 210–11f, 243, 251–2, 259–63, 268, 291 Red and White Ball 70 St. Mark’s Square 100f Villa Foscari 99–100 Venice Biennale 209 Venice Observed (McCarthy, Mary) 272 Vicovari, Frank (co-leader, BAAC) 108, 118 Vidal, Gore 230, 265 Vile Bodies (Waugh, Evelyn) 69 Villa Capponi 62, 91, 146–9, 150 Villa Cimbrone 265 Villa Foscari 99–100 Vincent, Ruth (singer) 55

Virginia 6 Vogue 102 Volpi, Countess. See Cicogna, Anna Maria Voules, Edward (Captain; friend of ATJ) 148, 29 Free of All Malice 147 Vuillard, Édouard (artist) Theatre 190 Wade, Hugh (musician; friend of ATJ) 62, 74 Barney, Elvira 64f, 65, 71, 78, 79, 80 Walker, Stanley (manservant of ATJ) 58, 81 Wall Street crash 64 Walsh, Kay (actress) 215–16 Waring, Barbara (actress) 79 Warren, Phelps (friend of ATJ) 108 Water Irises (Monet, Claude) 190, 205 Watson, Peter (co-founder, ICA; backer, Horizon) 179, 183, 224, 243 Waugh, Alec (novelist) 70, 71 Waugh, Evelyn 67 Vile Bodies 69 Webster, David (chief executive, ROH) 243 Weeping and the Laughter, The (King, Viva) 240 Welcome Danger (Bruckman, Clyde/St Clair, Malcolm) 63 Wellesley, Arthur (Duke of Wellington) 15 Wells, George (motorcyclist) 49 Wells, George Hendee (photographer) 49 Wells, H.G. Through a Window 52 Whale Cay 85, 101 Wharton, Edith Age of Innocence, The 5–6 What Happened on 23rd Street (Porter, Edwin S.) 6 Whistler, Rex 166 White Party 68, 69 Whittet, G.S. (editor, Studio) 216 Wilberforce, William (anti-slavery campaigner) 188 Wilde, Oscar 285

Index Wildeblood, Peter (defendant in Montagu Trial) 247–8 Wilder, Billy Seven Year Itch, The 6 Willett, William (property developer) 13–14 William Maxwell Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook (Sutherland, Graham) 209 Williams, Tennessee 164, 264, 265, 271 Willing, Ava Lowle (Lady Ribblesdale) 69 Wills, James Ernest Elder (second husband of Marie Geoghegan) 84, 105–6, 185, 186 Wilshin, Sunday (actress) 71 Wilson, Angus (plant photographer) 165–6 Wilson, Peter (Chairman, Sotheby’s) 215 Winchester Art Club 162–3 Windsor, Edward, Duke of 276, 277–8 Windsor, Wallis, Duchess of 276, 277–8 Winn, Godfrey (columnist) 220, 252 Winston Churchill (Sutherland, Graham) 215–16 Wirth Miller, Denis (partner of Richard Chopping) 217, 226 Wolfers, David (journalist) 217

355

women acting 35 body hair 284 Women’s Own (magazine) 290 Wood, Christopher French Sailors 235 Woodcock, Patrick (doctor of ATJ) 195, 276 World War I 22–3 World War II 107–19, 127–30, 133–43, 145–53, 183 Wormald, Francis ‘Auntie’ (art historian) 195 Wyatt, Woodrow 269 Wyndham, Olivia (photographer) 79 Yates, Dornford As Berry and I Were Saying 24 Yates, Maurice (set designer) 77 Yates, Michael (friend of Martyn Coleman) 256, 257 Young British painters (exhibition) 171 Zampieron, Alieta (housekeeper to ATJ) 260, 262, 263, 276, 291 Zamzam (ship) 110–19, 123 Zeffirelli, Franco 265 Zoffany House (residence of Edith Fleming [Eden ‘E.’ Box]) 204, 205

356

357

358

359

360

361

362

Plate 1 Edward Burra (1905–76), Two Sisters (1929), oil on canvas. Private collection. Photo © Estate of the Artist c/o Lefevre Fine Art Ltd., London/Bridgeman Images. An early acquisition, lent by Arthur to the exhibition of the Circle for the Study of Art in Winchester in 1947 alongside Abstraction by Jackson Pollock. Arthur’s paintings were described later as ‘a subversive little collection’.

Plate 2 Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978), The Painter’s Family (1926), oil on canvas. Image reproduced courtesy of Tate, © DACS 2019. Arthur was always rather ambivalent about this work. He lent it to Southampton Art Gallery where he was asked to explain it. He replied that he was never able to explain modern paintings and whenever he felt the need of an explainable painting he bought a nice coloured postcard instead.

Plate 3 Tristram Hillier (1905–83), Chapel of the Misericordia, Viseu, 1947, oil on canvas. Southampton City Art Gallery, Jeffress Bequest/Bridgeman Images. When Arthur was finally released from captivity by the Germans, his train journey through Portugal started just east of Viseu. Hillier had served in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve with the Free French and painted this work in 1947.

Plate 4 John Lavery (1856–1941), The Countess Rocksavage (1922), oil on canvas. Southampton City Art Gallery, Jeffress Bequest. The Countess was born Sybil Sassoon and organized a theatre troupe to travel to Canada in 1931, inviting Arthur’s friend Tim Brooke.

Plate 5 Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), Seated Woman, (1938), oil on canvas. Private collection. © 2019. Photo Scala, Florence. © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2019. Arthur purchased this portrait of Dora Maar in New York, 1942, between his return from the Zamzam voyage and embarkation with the American Field Service.

Plate 6 Baron François Gérard (1770–1837), Napoleon Bonaparte (after 1804), oil on canvas. Southampton City Art Gallery, Jeffress Bequest. One of the key works in Arthur’s collection and which formed the centrepiece of his mise-en-scène at Marwell House.

Plate 7 Antony Denney (1913–90), photographer, interior of Arthur’s drawing room at 10 Pelham Crescent (1952). This was probably taken at the same time as the House & Garden photo shoot in 1952 and selected by Arthur to be used as his Christmas card.

Plate 8 Antony Denney (1913–90), photographer, interior of Arthur’s drawing room at 99 Eaton Square. Anthony Denney / House & Garden © The Condé Nast Publications Ltd. Arthur’s paintings by Bauchant and Toulouse-Lautrec can just be seen to the left and centre while his Monet is over the fireplace.

Plate 9 André Bauchant (1873–1958), Les Funérailles d’Alexandre-leGrand (1940), oil on canvas. Image reproduced courtesy of Tate, Jeffress Bequest. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019. © Tate, London 2019. This painting always took pride of place in Arthur’s London home. It combines his love of French naïf painting and the Middle East (Alexander was buried in Babylon), with his lifelong passion for royal and military processions. With the ToulouseLautrec, it was singled out from his bequest to be given to the Tate Gallery.

Plate 10 Henri de Toulouse Lautrec (1864–1901), Portrait of Émile Bernard (1885), oil on canvas. Image reproduced courtesy of Tate, Jeffress Bequest. © Tate, London 2019. An exquisite portrait of a fellow artist painted when Bernard was about eighteen. Bernard sat twenty times for this portrait, looking more bourgeois than the radical he became. Students often sat for each other and Bernard himself drew a sketch of Lautrec. The painting is, at time of writing, in the National Gallery.

Plate 11 Giuseppe Arcimboldo (c. 1527–93), Summer (date unknown), oil on canvas. Southampton City Art Gallery, Jeffress Bequest. . This painting was hung in the dining room in Eaton Square.

Plate 12 Graham Sutherland (1903–80), study for portrait of Arthur Jeffress (1953), oil on canvas, Doncaster Museum and Art Gallery. Collection of DMBC Heritage Doncaster. © Courtesy of the Estate of Graham Sutherland. Given as a present to Robert Melville by the artist.

Plate 13 Graham Sutherland (1903–80), sketch for portrait of Arthur Jeffress (1953), oil on canvas. Southampton City Art Gallery, Jeffress Bequest. © Courtesy of the Estate of Graham Sutherland.

Plate 14 Graham Sutherland (1903–80), Portrait of Arthur Jeffress (1954), oil on canvas, Southampton City Art Gallery, Jeffress Bequest. © Courtesy of the Estate of Graham Sutherland. ‘No man ever looked more at home in sunlight.’

Plate 15 Richard Chopping (1917–2008), Trompe l’Oeil for Arthur Jeffress (1956), watercolour on paper, author’s collection. © Richard Chopping. A gift from the artist to Arthur on the occasion of Chopping’s 1955 exhibition at Arthur’s gallery. It is full of private, queer jokes from one friend to another.

Plate 16 Walter Sickert (1860–1942), A Red Sky at Night (1896), oil on canvas. Southampton City Art Gallery, Jeffress Bequest. A rare modern British painting in Arthur’s Venetian collection, but one which he particularly admired.

Plate 17 Kees van Dongen (1877–1968), Woman in Venice (c. 1921), oil on canvas. Southampton City Art Gallery, Jeffress Bequest. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019. The woman is probably Marchesa Luisa Casati, who once owned the Venetian palazzo that Arthur visited so frequently when Peggy Guggenheim became its chatelaine.

Plate 18 Italian School, seventeenth century, Oriental scene with figures (date unknown). Southampton City Art Gallery, Jeffress Bequest. One of the images that added to the legend that Arthur was ‘exotic’, possibly Persian.

Plate 19 Joseph Heintz the Younger (c. 1600–78), Venetian Regatta at the Rialto Bridge (date unknown), oil on canvas. Southampton City Art Gallery, Jeffress Bequest. Arthur formed a substantial collection of Venetian scenes and was also an early champion, with the Sitwells, of the revival of interest in seventeenth-century Italian painting.