The Perfect Summer, page 13
However, reports of sinister goings-on in the dark, of uninhibited sex in the back row, no less than the contempt of the purist for a blatant amateurishness that some saw as a mockery of ‘genuine’ art forms deterred many. It was probably inevitable that pornography should nudge its way into the new medium, and rumours circulated that censorship was about to be introduced. The Mutoscope, more popularly known as the ‘What The Butler Saw’, had long been a fixture at seaside piers, its sequence of images pasted on card providing, for a penny a go and a swiftly turned handle, a pleasing if jerky view of a strip-tease. The celluloid film makers, D.W. Griffith among them, saw ready money in the perennial desire of men to see women with no clothes on, and a small underground trade in sexually explicit films grew up. Well-heeled gentleman would buy their own projectors and invite their male friends to private screenings of what was often very poor-quality porn. A tip-off might result in such a screening being raided by the police, and subsequent prosecution.
A sensuous and daring but perfectly legal form of entertainment, the new ‘Grecian frieze’ movement, starring Canadian-born Maud Allen, was currently on show at the Palace Theatre at the top of Shaftsbury Avenue. Maud had begun her career in the public eye as a lingerie model, adding to her income by selling her own graphic, eye-popping sketches to the publisher of a sex manual. For the London stage she had studied the drawings on old Greek and Assyrian tablets and manuscripts and devised a costume, ‘a wisp of chiffon and bare legs with pipes and cymbals’, that bordered on public indecency. Lady Diana Manners and her mother found her irresistible. For a while Diana became obsessed by everything Greek. She developed a habit of pulling on her second toe to make it longer than the others, in the classical custom of sandalled goddesses, and would hang from a trapeze she had hooked up in her bedroom to stretch herself to a better height. In Maud’s final dance, ‘A Vision of Salome’, she would appear on stage like a Raphael canvas come to life, carrying a model of St John the Baptist’s head on a silver plate while giving the waxen lips a lingering kiss. The audience stood to cheer. At the invitation of Margot Asquith Maud went to Downing Street to dance to the music of Mendelssohn’s Spring Song dressed as a nymph, in bare feet. It was said that her naked toes were able to express sorrow beautifully, and she was applauded enthusiastically.
Lady Ripon was not alone in her entrepreneurial plans for the Ballets Russes: between herself, Diaghilev, Eric Wollheim and the Beechams arrangements were finally made for the Russian Ballet to make its official debut at Covent Garden on Wednesday 21 June, the evening before the Coronation. The dancers would stay in London for a six-week run, sharing the summer programme with the Opera. The highlight of the six weeks would be a performance on Monday 26 June at a gala evening in front of the King and Queen, just four days after their Coronation.
Sergei Diaghilev was 39 years old, broad-chested and with a flattened nose like a boxer’s. The white streak in his thick, chinchilla- like hair was often hidden beneath the homburg hat tilted over his hooded eyes. He wore an oversize tie-pin, his fingers were heavily ringed, and he was known affectionately by one of his dancers, Lydia Lopokova, as ‘Big Serge’. He loved food, and the only three words Osbert Sitwell ever heard him say in English were ‘more chocolate pudding’. Eric Wollheim described the distinctive way Diaghilev moved: ‘You had to watch the great man in a hurry, because the more worried he was about time, the shorter and shorter steps he took, so that in the end he was at a standstill.’ Diaghilev had come to the ballet through the visual arts rather than music, and as a university student in St Petersburg his friends had been the painters Leon Bakst and Alexandre Benois. The use of set designs from the artists Bakst and Benois – rather than making do with the unimaginative offerings of tired set designers – was unheard-of. Employing the choreographer Michel Fokine was an act of total originality, and the music he commissioned from the 29-year-old composer Igor Stravinsky made an unforgettable impact. Son of a Russian opera singer and a student of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky had met Diaghilev in 1909 at a concert in Russia. Diaghilev was thrilled by Stravinsky’s unique combination of folk-song-inspired music undercut with its raw primitive beat, and the two men became immediate friends. Parisian audiences had reacted with delight and amazement to Stravinsky’s first two ballets, The Firebird and Petrushka. Since 1910 he had been working on a new composition, Le Sacre du Printemps. Diaghilev believed it would cause a sensation, but was uncertain how an English audience would respond to the unsettling drama of Stravinsky’s music. Diaghilev introduced the composer to Benois, and together they would plan their collaborations over dinners of ‘marinated fish, caviar, Black Sea oysters and the most delicious mushrooms in the world.’
Rarely seen without a hat, and a walking-stick with which to point instructions on the stage, Diaghilev was much valued by the Russian government in his role of impresario, exporting and promoting Russian culture. There was an energy in his eyes, the monocle in one adding to the glint, and he spoke French with wit and ease. Lady Ripon found his tendency to roar with laughter one moment and dissolve in tears the next wholly charismatic. Standing in the empty Opera House discussing final arrangements for the Coronation Gala, Diaghilev and his patron made an elegant couple. But Gladys and all those close to him knew that Diaghilev’s most intimate emotions were reserved for his lover, his lead dancer, Nijinsky.
On Monday 19 June the Corps of the Imperial Ballet arrived in London with barely a word of English between them. Some of the company, including Serge Grigoriev, the régisseur who was in charge of all administrative matters, took lodgings near the British Museum. Grigoriev confessed to being taken aback by the peculiarities of English customs. The Russian visitors were perplexed to find London’s beautiful squares in all their full June lusciousness locked up, the green lawns behind the railings only accessible with little keys belonging to those who lived round the square. They were disappointed by the ‘excessive’ plainness of English architecture. Grigoriev was further amazed to discover that the most famous opera house in the world stood ‘in the midst of a vegetable market and was closely hemmed in by greengrocers’ warehouses and vast mountains of cabbages, potatoes, carrots and all manner of fruit’, making it impossible to see its façade. And Michel Fokine was disconcerted by the flatness of the stage, being accustomed to one raked towards the audience.
The leading dancers were staying at the Waldorf because their preferred hotel, the Savoy, was full to the brim with important foreign visitors already in town for the Coronation. From his room at the back of the three-year-old Waldorf at the top of Aldwych, Nijinsky overlooked the roofs of the Opera House. For the Ukrainian son of a nomadic family who had spent the first few years of his life travelling from the Crimea to St Petersburg in the train of a troupe of gipsies, jugglers and puppeteers, it was a curious and awe-inspiring sight.
On Tuesday 20 June two full-dress rehearsals were taking place in London. On the stage of the Royal Opera House, Diaghilev’s company was assembling, a group of foreigners suspected by some of being mere uncivilised, untamed Cossacks indulging in wild circus acts. No more than a mile away, on the other side of Whitehall, the Duke of Norfolk, in his hereditary role of Earl Marshal, organiser of all Royal ceremonial events since 1386, in particular funerals and coronations, was struggling with one of the oldest and grandest ceremonies in the land. A book of instructions 212 pages long had been produced, but this was no guarantee that things would go smoothly. The Duke was feeling anxious despite having delegated to Lord Kitchener the supervision of 60,000 troops, many of them already billeted in Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, with the overspill out at Wormwood Scrubs at East Acton. On the Monday another rehearsal involving Their Majesties had gone without a hitch, except that the King had been unable to conceal his irritation at the confused seating arrangements. The Prime Minister had complained to him directly that he had been placed among the visiting colonial guests, and asked for a seat more appropriate to his office. The King consequently found himself involved in juggling a complicated seating plan just when he was most anxious to concentrate on his spiritual preparations – but he had not forgotten the chaos at the time of Edward VII’s funeral, when the instruction book was discovered to be littered with spelling mistakes and errors in protocol, and four secretaries had been forced to work through the night correcting it. The Earl Marshal had been given a year’s notice to get ready for the Coronation, but George V had little confidence in him. ‘I love the Duke,’ he acknowledged. ‘He is a charming, honourable, straight forward little gentleman, no better in the world but,’ he added with a sigh of regal exasperation, ‘as a man of business he is absolutely impossible.’
Across town, behind the fruit and vegetable stalls, Diaghilev was not getting on much better. He had brought seven ballets with him that summer, including Scheherazade, Le Pavillon d’Armide and the new Le Spectre de La Rose that the corps intended to dance five times over the season. But the immigration officer at Folkestone had become suspicious when he opened the enor- mous trunks containing the brilliantly coloured and unfamiliar costumes. The security officials had not forgotten the Congress of Social Democrats held in London five years earlier, attended by Lenin, and this particular summer they were taking no chances: the huge Russian cases were impounded lest their contents incite Russian revolutionary activity. So the ‘dress’ rehearsal took place in plain clothes. And there were other problems. The painter Benois and choreographer Fokine quarrelled over the choice of certain backdrops; dancers tripped over scenery; and everyone disagreed about the tempo of the music. Diaghilev could only hope the audience reaction would not mirror the greyness of the rehearsal clothes.
Thomas Beecham, 32, creative and business manager of Covent Garden since 1910, famous womaniser and indiscreet cuckolder of Sir Bache Cunard, remained confident that he had a future success on his hands, and offered to conduct the music for some of the ballets himself. His father Sir Joseph was the highly successful owner of the world-famous pharmaceutical company – currently using a uniformed suffragette to advertise their most celebrated product under the tag-line ‘Since taking Beecham’s Pills I have been a new woman.’ The pills, most effective for bowel problems, were also said to cure bilious and nervous disorders, headaches, giddiness, drowsiness, cold chills, loss of appetite and shortness of breath. The Beecham family, as it happened, also owned the Covent Garden Estates on which the opera house stood.
Thomas was a conductor of exquisite phrasing, combining power with delicacy, and any orchestra responded to his baton with intense pleasure. He was known to demand the very highest standards. He once noticed that his lead cellist was not reaching the required perfection. Sweeping his flattened hands away and outwards through the air to indicate a halt mid-bar, he addressed the white-faced young woman. ‘Now, Madam,’he observed, ‘you have between your legs an instrument capable of bringing pleasure to thousands . . . and’, he continued in a tone of incredulity, ‘all you can do is scratch it.’
As the Russian dancers tried to rest before their opening night in a country Grigoriev summed up as ‘quite different to what we were accustomed elsewhere’, the indigenous social whirl spun ever faster. In the past few days parties had been given by the Duchess of Sutherland, Lady Londesborough and Lady Derby, and on 20 June six hundred members of the upper classes danced from eleven at night until half past five the following morning at Jennie Cornwallis-West’s magnificent Shakespeare Ball. Guests could choose their own Shakespearian character on which to base their costume. Jennie was launching an appeal to raise money to build a National Theatre, and hoped the ball would net more than £10,000 for the cause. Dressed as Olivia from Twelfth Night, she strolled through the Elizabethan–Italian garden into which Edwin Lutyens had transformed the Albert Hall, surveying the magnificent sight. The blue sky that completely covered the dark redbrick Victorian roof made the guests feel light-hearted as soon as they entered the hall. The lower tiers of boxes had become clipped yew hedges crested with topiary birds over which grape-laden vines tumbled. Cypress trees stood at intervals around the hall, and the boxes at the top of the auditorium had been turned into marble terraces. The pageant of the Court of Queen Elizabeth largely comprised real-life direct descendants of Shakespeare’s historical characters; of the fictional characters, F.E. Smith stood out among the seventeen others dressed for the part as the most excellent Romeo of them all. In the souvenir brochure Mr H. Hamilton Fyfe concluded that ‘this age has shot its bolt. Whatever the future may conceal of splendour and beauty, it will certainly not outdo this.’ Some would have disagreed, anticipating the magnificence of the Coronation in two days’ time. The attention and excitement of others was concentrated on the stage at Covent Garden.
British reaction to the Russian ballet was tested on Wednesday 21 June, the night before the Coronation. It was not the first time Nijinsky had danced the lead role in Le Pavillon d’Armide and Carnaval, but it was his first appearance on a London stage and things did not seem to be going well. During the interval Diaghilev watched in horror as ‘at least a hundred old ladies, covered with diamonds as if they were icons,’ passed him ‘with a look of disgust on their faces,’ prompting the business manager to come rushing over. ‘You’ve spoilt your magnificent opening by the barbarian horror,’he panicked. ‘It isn’t dancing. It’s just savages prancing about.’ Diaghilev feared he had a disaster on his hands.
But the following morning’s reviews in The Times and the Daily Mail were enough to reassure him, and to give Nijinsky the confidence to exchange his decorous carnival trousers for an infinitely more suggestive pair of harlequined tights. ‘Every jump is a separate ecstasy,’ exclaimed the Times’s critic George Calderon, while the Daily Mail reporter thought the performances ‘little less than a revelation’, continuing: ‘the amazing Nijinsky, bounding into air with the light joy of a Mercury with winged heels, created the moments of the most alluring novelty.’ The excellence of technique combined with the originality of the production startled the critics. Thomas Beecham was elated. Diaghilev’s production had ‘sounded the death knell of the existing system of organised incapacity’, he declared. Ballet would never be the same again.
The solemn day of the Coronation opened clammy and grey. Queen Mary woke in a state of apprehension, noting in her diary that the weather was ‘damp but fine’. Her husband enhanced her description with his own observation: ‘Overcast and cloudy’, he wrote. Compared with the preceding days of June sunshine the weather was disappointing, and since there was a chance of seeing the proceedings later on film in the picture palaces it was thought that the cold and the threatened drizzle were sure to deter many onlookers. The organisers need not have worried. At 7.50 a.m. the crimson stands along the parade route, packed with thousands of resilient British royalists, suddenly turned black as thousands of umbrellas were simultaneously unfurled against the fine rain. Mary feared that her propensity to sea-sickness might be triggered by the unsprung sway of the coach thatwas to take her and George to and from the Abbey. She wondered if her husband’s knock knees would spoil the elegance of his procession up the aisle.
Lady Huntingdon had been up since six that morning to be sure of being ready and in her seat in good time. Falling asleep on the journey toWestminster Abbey, she was jostled so violently in her own wildly-swinging carriage that her companion, the Countess of Fingall, found herself acting as impromptu lady’s maid on arrival, re-settling the tiara on Lady Huntingdon’s lacquered head. Some carriages paused for the horses to drink from the stone water troughs set deep into the pavements and generally used by the cab horses. Twelve thousand policemen lined the route. Around the Abbey itself the customary frantic mechanised buzz of the streets, the usual jostle for road space between horse-cabs, motor-cars, trams, bicycles and horse buses was missing. All of New Georgian London had come out on foot to watch the show.
The distinguished writer and Nobel prize-winner Rudyard Kipling, with an earning capacity of £10,000 a year the richest author in the English-speaking world, was annoyed that the dark green Rolls-Royce he had ordered, expecting it to be delivered in March, would not be ready for the Coronation: Barkers, the royal coach-builders to whom Rolls-Royce subcontracted their work, were committed to an urgent commission for the King and were behind with their orders. As a result the Kiplings had an early start in their old and slower Rolls, leaving Bateman’s, their house in Sussex, at quarter to six that morning. They had been invited to have breakfast in the House of Commons, conveniently close to the Abbey, but to his annoyance Kipling became trapped in conversation over the toast and marmalade by George Buckle, editor of The Times, asking for the umpteenth time whether he would write a piece about the Coronation for the paper.
For Brian Calkin, the 13-year-old chorister from St Paul’s Cathedral Choir School, who had sung at the unveiling of Queen Victoria’s memorial the month before, this was the most exciting day of his life. His ambition was to become a professional singer when he grew up, and he had a solo part. He wore the medal that all the choirboys had been given that morning by the Keeper of the Privy Purse, accompanied by a card stating that it was a gift from the King himself ‘in remembrance of their Majesties’ Coronation’. In Brian’s pocket was his personal ticket of entry to the Orchestra Gallery in the Abbey, signed by the Earl Marshal. To Brian’s mild irritation, his name had been entered incorrectly as ‘Bernard’, but he knew the Earl Marshal had a lot on his mind and there was bound to be the occasional slip. Once inside the Abbey, the ceremony unfolded for Brian like the final scene from Alice in Wonderland, with the Heralds in their tabards resembling huge playing-cards, crimson against the grey Abbey. The choristers had been rehearsing for months. Brian’s brother John was one of the scholars at Westminster School, and he envied them their exclusive and age-old privilege of shouting ‘Vivat Rex Georgius! Vivat! Vivat! Vivat!’ as the King arrived in the Cathedral.
