A Story Lately Told (22 page)

I went into Mum’s closet. Her dresses didn’t even smell like her anymore. Flowers were coming. Lots of flowers; violets from Dick Avedon, violets from Diana Cooper. I was furious at the flowers. What the hell? Flowers can’t replace my mum.

I took a taxi to the Roundhouse and sat in the empty theater. In a way, I looked forward to the drama of telling Tony Richardson. When he walked in with Neil Hartley, I said it quick, “Mum’s dead,” and I watched the horror spread across their faces. That was really my proof that it had even happened—the effect of the news on other people. That evening Tony and I
had to go to Victoria Station to meet Dad, who was coming in from Rome. He had been diagnosed with emphysema, and his lungs were so bad he couldn’t fly. When he got off the train, he looked terrible. Gaunt and white-faced. We must have gone to Claridge’s with him, always his hotel of choice. Other than the initial greeting on the station platform, I don’t recall a single embrace or any word of consolation. But then he might have known that I blamed him for abandoning her.

Later, at 31 Maida Avenue, Willy Fox came to the door in a tan raincoat, walked in, and came upstairs. He lay outside the covers and held me until I fell asleep. I’ll never forget him for that.

Mum’s funeral was on February 8, 1969. The house began to fill up with people, Mum’s friends, my friends. It was as if shock had made time stand still. Joan flew in from New York to take care of me; she remembers the iron four-poster bed at the end of the garden, covered with snow.

Manina wrote to me from Venice:

It is impossible—still—for me to conceive it. I just cannot imagine a world without Ricki. She is one of the lights of my life, and will remain so. I see her magnified and magic. When she appeared she changed everything; life became a feast. As if everything was suddenly possible. She was a container of life itself. Maybe so much that there remained nothing to live for anymore.

At Mum’s funeral, Jules Buck came up to Dad with his palm extended. He wanted to make peace, but Dad turned his back on him. He never spoke to Jules again. There was no casket in the crowded room at the Friends meetinghouse. My mother always said that the one religion she truly respected was Quakerism. I remember nothing of the service or what anyone said.

•  •  •

From Gladys Hill to Dorothy Jeakins:

23 Three Kings Yard

London W1, England

Feb. 11, 1969

Dorothy darling—

I received your dear letter and will ask Anjelica and Tony about a memento of Ricki’s for you.

She was on her way to Lago Maggiore with a young jazz musician named Brian Thomas Henderson. He was driving. We have not seen the police report yet but, near Dijon, near a small town called Gray, in Eastern France, they collided with a truck. It was Ricki’s car. She was killed instantly and Henderson was cut about the face, concussed. Henderson is still in hospital there. The truck driver was injured in the leg. But both men will recover nicely. The Memorial Service was held Saturday in the Westminster Meeting Hall, Society of Friends. The Quaker elders conducted the service and it was a half hour of silence with the elders speaking occasionally—words of comfort and simple faith! It was a miraculous service of rare beauty and dignity. I shall tell you about it when next we meet.

There was no will and I am trying to help with inventory and that kind of thing.

John and Tony go on to Ireland tonight. Anjelica is understudying Ophelia in Tony Richardson’s “Hamlet” that opens here Feb. 17th. Nurse and Allegra are at the house and Gina Medcalf, a young friend of Ricki’s, is sleeping there. Little by little, all will be straightened out. Anjelica and Tony are doing well—and so is John. Also Allegra and Nurse.

Leslie Waddington took over for all the hard things—what an exceptional young man he is!

Betty was here until yesterday. I shall be on my own here tomorrow.

I am sending this to Santa Barbara because you will have finished in Guaymas. And will write more later.

Much love from all of us,

Gladys xxxxxxs

That line, so stoic, so fiercely optimistic: “Both men will recover nicely”! I don’t know about the truck driver, but I believe my mother’s death haunted Brian Henderson throughout his life.

•  •  •

Marianne was kind to me. She took me along when she went to buy drugs at Boots Pharmacy in Piccadilly in her chauffeur-driven Bentley. Once we went to see a doctor friend of hers who chased us around his surgery, an action both disturbing and funny. But we got out of there in a hurry, and Marianne took me to her house on Cheyne Walk, opened a door upstairs, and showed me her infant son, sleeping in his crib. Mick Jagger came home later that evening. I thought he was amazing—rail thin, with sexy, insolent eyes and full lips. Having admired him as a schoolgirl, I found meeting him in person quite surreal.

Marianne gave me her long red fox coat and kissed me goodbye. She was off to Australia with Mick to do the film
Ned Kelly.
I had hoped again that Tony would allow me to play the part, but Francesca Annis took over the role of Ophelia before
Hamlet
went on tour to New York. Even though I had only a walk-on appearance in the play as a lady-in-waiting, I saw the trip to New York as an opportunity to escape the terrible emptiness of Maida Avenue. I didn’t know what Dad might have in store for me.

On March 1, a little over a month after Mum died, Gladys wrote from the Palace Hotel in Helsinki, telling me that before she put Mum’s good jewelry and lesser costume pieces into storage, she wanted to pass on a piece of polished stone, a medallion, to Dorothy Jeakins. She told me that my mother had rings and her pearl necklace from my father with her in Gray, and closed the letter by saying, “I have had no word on Mr. Henderson, but am sure that when he returns to England, he will want to talk to you, which is right. But see him only the once, for you and he could never be friends, and your good taste and natural dignity will tell you this.”

I received a call from Brian, who told me he had some things he wanted to give to me. When I went to his flat, he presented me with a dream that Mum had written down the night before the accident and some things she had with her when she died. He returned the Cartier watch that I’d given to her for her birthday; the oval glass had shattered over the Roman numerals. And he gave me the box of music I’d sent her off with on her journey. He obviously hadn’t looked inside. I took the box home and went into my bathroom and locked the door. When I opened it, the tapes fell out covered in dark, sticky blood. In shock, I dropped them in the bathtub, turned on the tap, and watched the water run red on the porcelain and down the drain. Later that night, I read the dream.

JAN 28–29

ST. QUENTIN GRAND HOTEL

I am in a room with B. Perhaps in bed.

There is a stillness. There will be an earthquake.

The hotel crumbles. There is wreckage everywhere.

We have slipped gently to a place somewhere

atop it. I can see colored shreds and strips

of building refuse that is neither wood nor steel

but something like both. There is no feeling of

danger but of something like relief—that

sort of calm after a storm.

Lucio wrote to tell me he had photographs “of many of her expressions, whether épanouic or with melancholy—she was like that—extremist.” He said she improved many things within him, and that she had helped him at a certain moment of his life.

Tony and I separated Mum’s collection of photographs from her diaries and letters. I kept the former, and Tony stored her papers in a trunk. Later, when Allegra retrieved the trunk, she read what was there. One discovery was that Mum had terminated a pregnancy in 1959, the year she broke up with Lucio García del Solar.

Philippe Halsman, who had taken my mother’s photograph so long before for the cover of
Life,
wrote that he felt he had been instrumental in changing the course of her life from an ordinary to an extraordinary one, and was asking himself whether it had been for her ultimate good.

Joan wrote that she was delighted I was coming to New York that spring, and sent me a beautiful letter:

Please don’t cry; we shall laugh as much as your mother and I did when she came to this heathen land, for you and she have the same mind and the same humor, the same way of looking at the world and knowing that it’s a bit off. I saw Arnaud who was white through his tan at the news and says he really loves you: the
town is sad and grey but it will be sort of beige by the time you get here.

I used to say, “Oh, will you leave me that in your will?” when I liked jewels or dresses or something of Mum’s. It was a joke, of course. It never occurred to me that my mother would die young. My father, it was one thing, he could’ve gone at any minute, and all anyone did was talk about my father’s health. But my mother—it was different; she was only thirty-nine.

I think of my mother all the time. Diana Pickersgill’s mother, Dorothy, died in a car crash, too. Diana described such a loss as an abduction, and so it is.

O
n April 28, 1969, I went to live with Joan on Forty-seventh Street at the Buchanan, in an apartment belonging to her uncle Don. It was around the corner from the Shelton Hotel on Lexington Avenue, home away from the skies for a stream
of uniformed pilots and female flight attendants who seemed to be having a good time of it. Downstairs, Smiler’s deli made fat tuna-salad sandwiches on rye, and Schrafft’s across the street mixed a great chocolate ice cream soda. Joan took me to Serendipity and made me buy an elegant black jumpsuit. We were happy as roommates; she allowed me to paint my room a lurid magenta, which was a mistake. I went on to decorate her living room in an Indonesian jungle theme with a bamboo overhang entwined with green rubber snakes and inflatable lizards.

Joan was running with a crowd of photographers, designers, illustrators, editors, and models; she seemed to prefer the company of French people. Soon she would be making plans to go to Paris to work as a stylist for the photographer Guy Bourdin, whose brilliant and surreal work at French
Vogue
was causing a sensation. She introduced me to his assistant, a doll-faced Vietnamese called Duc, with whom I began a rather tranquil liaison. He spoke little French and barely a word of English.

Joan spent many of her nights encased in a see-through plastic hazmat suit in order to make her ankles thin. She was now an assistant fashion editor at
Glamour
and was writing book reviews for the magazine. She was finally exercising her talent and her interests. She was working with the top photographers and spoke knowledgeably about Richard Avedon, Hiro, Bert Stern, Irving Penn, and an emerging group of more radical photographers whose pictures were having a major impact on fashion—names like Helmut Newton, Jimmy Moore, and Bob Richardson.

She showed me a copy of French
Vogue.
Among the photographs on the fashion pages, Bob Richardson’s work was singular. The model, Donna Mitchell, was intense. In several of the pictures, she looked beautiful but distraught. In others, she
was wearing Moroccan harem pants, talismans, and Hindi tattoos, stranded on a Greek beach with a naked lover washing up against the rocks of a tide pool. Looking at this layout was like watching a beautiful, dangerous foreign movie. It was not about fashion. Joan said to me, “If you want to be a model, you should really work with Richardson.”

In those first weeks in New York, I would walk back to the apartment after the curtain at the Lunt-Fontanne, where we were doing
Hamlet.
Now that Francesca Annis had taken over for Marianne, I never got to go on as understudy. I zigzagged through the neon-stained streets at night with the tall glass buildings towering around me and steam percolating from the manholes, passing the cheap radio-and-discount-camera stores on Broadway, the bodegas, the joke-and-souvenir shops with latex masks of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew next to small replicas of Marilyn Monroe and the Statue of Liberty. I had a love-hate relationship with the city from the start. New York ran all the extremes. She was the beast that didn’t sleep, where you could find whatever you were looking for in twenty minutes. As often as not, along Sixth Avenue, I would pass the solitary blind Viking, “Moondog,” in his red tunic under a helmet of giant Valkyrie horns, and he would recite a poem. A magical, iconic denizen of the city, he was like something ancient from outer space.