Reflections

A month ago a correspondent sent me this link to an article about the eighty-seven-year-old Patricia Cavendish O'Neill's latest memoir A Chimp in the Wine Cellar. Her brother, of course, is not mentioned in the video embedded in the article but what I found interesting was her accent – of an age long gone and of a class that, however notorious its behaviour might be to outsiders, saw privacy as its right. This video has set me off down another path in my personal search for this man, Roderick Cameron, who proved to be so influential in twentieth-century decorating – all without being a decorator himself.

If a compilation of eulogies is not a mirror, giving glimpses of subjects and authors as it does, I'm not sure what is. One such, Anne Cox Chambers' Remembering Rory, has proved to be a source of much pleasure – odd word, I know, pleasure, when used in relation to eulogies, but what else can said when each page is a source of connection, learning and reading? Also, when reading them, how can one not be conscious that all reputations will be subject to revision by a following generation.

Remembering Rory sits slipcased in all its green leather, gold tooling and marbled paper glory next to Patricia Cavendish O'Neill's memoir A Lion in the Bedroom, Roderick Cameron's own The Golden Riviera and now, Some of My Lives by Rosamond Bernier – the author of one of Cameron's tributes. I'd hoped to find traces of Roderick Cameron in Bernier's book but so far, at a cursory glance, have not. Not that it matters, for Rosamond Bernier's book is proving to be a good accompaniment for those hours after midnight, when the soft ticking of a clock that has done so since before Napoleon became emperor, the rustle of sheets from the bedroom I have just left, the occasional siren of an ambulance racing along the continental divide outside the window, and the scent of hyacinths, all suggest that if heaven were here on earth, this is how it would be.

In her eulogy of Roderick Cameron, Rosamond Berniers speaks, as do many in the book, of his aesthetic, quoting other people as she does so:

"Rory Cameron in his own houses worked for a quality of repose. Bustle and confusion and untidiness were not for him. Having shopped with him in former years, I know that his eye for size, shape, and predestined location were unerring. Planning for his house in Ireland he selected piece after piece almost without bothering to measure them, only to find on arrival in Donegal that every one of them fitted snugly into the space that he had in mind for them.

"Mark Hampton remembers, amongst much else, the range of color that Rory allowed himself – 'coarse linen the color of Caen stone, yellow in warm shades running from heavy cream to deep maize, celadon greens, and every possible shade of white.' He liked large, calm, yet grand pieces of furniture – perhaps they echoed his own large, calm presence – but he never allowed them to dominate. Other, smaller pieces of miscellaneous provenance were encouraged to come forward and sing their songs, and sometimes he dressed the room down where everyone else would have dressed it up.

"Unlike scholars who 'know everything' but cannot conjugate their knowledge with the business of living, Rory Cameron had an infallible sense of what to do with a house. To mix and mate one object with another was both this genius and his greatest pleasure. Better than almost anyone around, he knew how to release the conviviality of objects. People never forgot their first introduction to one of his houses. Thirty years after the fact, Kenneth Jay Lane remembers the moment in Paris when luncheon was wheeled in on a lacquer table by Jansen. The silver was English, eighteenth-century, there were black lacquer bowls from Japan, and very grand but rustic French dishes come on heavy silver plates, with glasses hand-blown and full of bubbles from Biot, in the south of France. There was a set of grass mats woven by the Queen of Tonga and given to Rory."

A lacquer table by Jansen, English eighteenth-century silver, Japanese black lacquer bowls, hand-blown bebubbled glasses from the south of France, grand but rustic dishes on heavy silver plates."

So, the other path I mentioned in the first paragraph is one I'm not yet walking and wonder if  I should. There is not much more that, however many eulogies I might quote, can be written about of Roderick Cameron's aesthetic and the influence he had. Since I began writing about him, I've not been too exercised about this much-loved man's private life but, inevitably, there have been glimpses of that in a lot of what I've written and quoted. What has always interested me the most are connections. so when I read, for example, of his acquaintance with Unity and Diana Mitford, the Moseleys, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (actually friends of Cameron's mother), Greta Garbo, Grahame Sutherland, David Hicks, Peter Quennell, Freya Stark, Somerset Maugham, Alvide Lees-Milne, Elizabeth de Chavchavadze, Louise de Vilmorin... the actual list is much longer... I wonder about his politics.

I wonder too about prurience (not Cameron's, ours) –  though why I would in a society where every celebrity's doings are fair game for the press – when I read this about one of the heroines of many a style blogger's fantasies.

"Mummy had known Windsor for many years and, although I do not think he had been one of her lovers, she liked him very much. It was not long after this that they came to Fiorentina with Jimmy [Jimmy Donahue]. After lunch, everyone was sitting on the terrace talking when the duchess said, 'I just want to take Jimmy and show him the marvellous view from your point.' The duke sat around reminiscing, saying, 'When I was monarch ...' while everyone knew the duchess was having it off with Jimmy in one of the upstairs guest rooms. Mummy told me that the duchess was famous for her expertise in fellatio: rumour had it that she had had lessons in China on this particular art. She was a very masculine woman; there was nothing soft or feminine about her, and I personally did not think she was at all good-looking. She had a presence. I suppose that was the best one could say about her."

If I were to write a biography of Roderick Cameron, I would have to overcome my distaste of knowing too much about someone's sexual habits. Perhaps I'm a prude.

Beyond all that, what is clear at this point is that Roderick Cameron, his circle of friends and those whose aesthetic he influenced, is that they sit at an ever-increasing distance (Cameron died twenty-eight years ago, Billy Baldwin forty years ago, David Hicks fifteen years ago, Van Day Truex thirty-three years ago), hidden in the pages of books, and the focus has blurred and in some cases been obliterated. Their work, when compared to what is published today, has a quality of being edited, of having things taken out rather than added to. Those rooms were photographed on their best behavior, reserved but not standoffish, awaiting patiently for the music of voices, for the clink of ice, the scents of flowers and warm pulse points, and time's passing.


Quotations from Remembering Rory, Anne Cox Chambers, and A Lion in the Bedroom by Patricia Cavendish O'Neill. Photographs from A Lion in the Bedroom.

Soignée

"I often think designers should keep their thoughts to themselves, and just let the results show their point of view. But in this particular case, I am anxious to talk about my work, because I think that what is most eloquent in this house is what doesn't meet the eye. I'm referring to absence - or abstinence, if you will. The most important thing about the house is what didn't go into it."

So said David Whitcomb over thirty years ago during a conversation about a 1950s modernist glass box he'd decorated in the Appalachian hills of Tennessee. What he said about absence in an interior struck a chord with me, for I like a certain simplicity, emptiness and a lack of visual clutter - qualities common to many of the interiors I've written about. All my favorite decorators of the last forty years share the same eye for proportion, simplicity, and appropriateness - an analogy with tailoring (bespoke is implicit) comes to mind - how a garment is constructed of fine stuff by hand after years of training of both hand and eye. In interior design there has to be training and knowledge, not just of historical styles (in which I include early and mid-century modernism) but of how the forms of furniture, the drape of textiles and the texture of color inhabit both a volume and the lives of the clients.

I'm not sure if it's a phenomenon of aging but I have come to feel the oppressive weight of possessions. I've never been a collector per se, and I don't think that nine framed drawings, two etchings, one large abstract painting, two watercolors, three photographs, a framed Hermes scarf, a small bronze, a tiny terracotta Grand Tour souvenir, 125 square feet of books, and twenty-eight-years-worth of The World of Interiors actually count as a collection - more, perhaps, the evidence of a life well-loved and a hell of a lot of dusting required.

I was reminded recently - it happens every time I see a piece of majolica - of a house early in the 1980s that in my memory was awash in chintz and majolica. No surface nor shelf was free of the stuff. The lady of the house had been persuaded by her decorator to collect majolica, as if by building this collection she was in some way validating her existence - I collect, therefore I am, as it were.

As frequently happens, when in search of something else, my eye was caught by something I was not looking for - this time, a mildly repellent passage in Patricia Cavendish O'Neill's autobiography and, suddenly, there it was - the word I didn't know I'd been looking for, which sums up my thoughts about much of today's interior decorating.

Soignée is a word not much used nowadays, and it's surprising, really, given that its meaning is quite simple. It just means well-groomed, carefully and elegantly put together. Before I develop my thought, let me quote the passage in which O'Neill refers to a famous, now dead (thus arguably fabulous) personage:

".... He had another hang-up, which was horrid. He liked all his women to smell au naturel and remain unshaven. I used to watch in horror all those beauties becoming unsoignée, going without makeup and gradually losing all their glamour. Having reduced them to the mundane, he would move onto the next one and repeat the process."

Unsoignée is precisely the quality that has become so much a part of modern interior design in America. It's not just the plethora of mise en scene props and accessories that overlay most horizontal and vertical surfaces, but also the unconsidered, and some might say benighted, groupings of mismatched pictures in small frames, and in the (to my mind) uneducated juxtaposition of furniture from various periods and styles. I'm not going to argue that the juxtaposition of, say, an Eames plywood chair with French a canapé or Verner Panton plastic with a farmhouse table is wrong, per se, but what I am going to say is that if brand, logo, name or provenance is the deciding factor, that leaves no room for proportion, scale or suitability. One imagines the intent is to be "eclectic," perhaps even worldly - but the result is all too often mere randomness, evoking an upscale flea market.

There was a time, starting in the 1960s, I think, when young designers began to take a piece of what nowadays is called important furniture and display it in isolation, spotlit, against a white wall and with lots of space around it. White wall apart, the point is, placement in relation to immediate surroundings and effect on the viewer, were considered. The unsoignée character of and the apparent lack of consideration in much of modern decorating is a clear example of how innovation - the mix of styles - becomes established practice and eventually descends into retrograde performance art.

How, you might ask, did we go from well-groomed and considered elegance to the accessory- and collection-riddled interiors of today? The answer to that lies, I believe, in the nineteenth century and is for another post. 

Photographs by Daniel Eifert to accompany text, from which the quotation comes, written by Peter Carlsen for Architectural Digest, March 1979. The quotation of Patricia Cavendish O'Neill is from A Lion in the Bedroom, Park Street Press, 2004.

Full circle

Van Day Truex is a man I've never written about. I've quoted him, referred to him, quoted other people about him but I've not written about this essential link in my circles within circles. I intend to, I keep telling myself, knowing as I do that he was more than a decorator, artist and teacher - designing for Tiffany, Hinson, Minton and Wedgwood as he did - but Van Day Truex's history* has already been written.

It seems to me that as the world turns and time passes, the more individual his later rooms become and the harder they are for modern clients, decorators, and, in my case, students, to understand. The interiors of his that I admire the most, and I think many would agree, are not those of 1940s New York, but those in his last house at Ménerbes - simple, unpretentious, symmetrically arranged distillation of stone-floored and plaster-walled spaces furnished with rattan and wood, softened with linen, cotton and African art.

I have shown these later rooms in lectures to students as part of a history of interior design and the reaction almost without exception has been one of wonderment that I find significance in them - that they are set apart from the work of his colleagues. They are so beguiled by fad and fashion, it makes me wonder if I am wrong in how I try to portray the man and his work. As I see it, the younger generation is increasingly swayed by the deepening relationship of celebrity and marketing, where few standards beyond cute and famous are relevant. With the dissolution in modern design of many precepts Truex might have recognized, I should perhaps not be surprised to find myself and what I value increasingly off-topic.

Truex's influence is undoubted, as his place in the history of interior design, but it seems he is too far removed from this present generation for them to care - he died over thirty years ago - and there are many newer names jostling for position. Unlike David Hicks, Angelo Donghia, Geoffrey Bennison and Michael Taylor, there is little that exists to carry his name - unless Tiffany reissues his designs.

Truex's name is still well-known, more so than that of his friend Roderick Cameron, but I wonder to whom. Is it a generational phenomenon - the Olympians of one generation fade into legend and new kids on the block with their own idols take their place?

A while back I bought The Gardens of Provence and the French Riviera because it contained an essay with photographs of Roderick Cameron's last house, Les Quatres Sources, in Provence. The book was produced in the middle 1980s and has all the choppy, scattered arrangement of a page characterized by small images, floods of negative space and muddy photographic reproduction - a style of design that has not stood the test of time. However, the quality of 1980s book design is not what this post is about.

 

"I was luckily on my own when I first visited this garden. I discovered the garden of Les Quatre Sources shrouded in the morning mist, my steps accompanied by the light-hearted rhythm of the overture of Don Giovanni, faultlessly whistled by the music-loving gardener. From the underwood covered with dew to the terraces soaked in the morning sun, along paved paths, and up hidden stairways, I had the feeling of I was discovering a new universe, where each planet sent out its own perfume, its own message or myth; wild mind, lavender, rushleaved broom, and dead leaves combined their fragrances. One should know the language of scents to understand this garden."

So wrote the author of his visit to Les Quatre Sources, and whilst there is much more that could be quoted about how Roderick Cameron and his lover Gilbert Ocelli created their garden - a garden so personal as to hold a memorial to Cameron's mother that read Enid, his beloved mother, Countess of Kenmare, one of the beauties of her time - and, as the following paragraph tells, the ashes of Van Day Truex.

"Higher up on the last terrace, an obelisk flanked by two urns, interrupts the perspective. Under the obelisk lie the ashes of of the friend who showed this place to Roderick Cameron. Roderick Cameron wanted his garden to be inhabited by all those most dear to him. Unfortunately, this master landscaper has since died. 'I wanted to create a romantic garden,' he had confided to me."

Roderick Cameron's ashes were scattered in the garden he created around Truex's obelisk. Where Gilbert Ocelli's ashes lie I have no idea.

So there, scattered in a garden in Provence, the ashes of the two lynchpins of my circle within circle theme, lie close by a memorial to the woman of whom her daughter writes: "Mummy and Rory both had the same quality of innocence. The dark spots of life were discarded and not allowed to intrude on their existence. They saw the world through a golden haze and if you were lucky enough to be part of their magic circle they took you through into that fairyland where life was always fun and always filled with beauty. The reverse simply wasn't tolerated, or perhaps noticed." 

Quotation and photograph from The Gardens of Provence and the French Riviera by Michel Racine, Ernest J-P Boursier-Mougenot and Françoise Binet. The MIT Press, 1987.

Photograph of Roderick Cameron and Van Day Truex in Ireland from *Van Day Truex, Adam Lewis, Viking Studio, 2001.

Quotation about Roderick Cameron and his mother from A Lion in the Bedroom by Patricia Cavendish O'Neill, Park Street Press, Sydney 2004.

Red pants, white cups and blue dragons

New purchases, for me, like new ideas, are not embraced immediately: they sit prominently displayed where I – crab-wise and apparently typically of my zodiac sign – walk by, look askance at, consider, reject for a while, even play with... until I finally trust them. So it was with the red pants I bought three weeks ago: only yesterday were they taken out of their packaging and moved on to the next part of the journey to what will be part of a splendid outfit. So it will be with the white, mark-embossed Meissen demitasses I bought on Saturday - they sit in their box by me on the dining table, yet to reach the china cupboard - and so it is with my writing about Roderick Cameron and his circle.

In many ways I walked backwards into Cameron and now shortly will begin an amble through his circle of friends - people who, in the main, held him in deep affection and appreciated his talents. His sister, particularly, loved him deeply and judging by her autobiography, was also in awe of him. As well she might have been, for in her book the man who hitherto I saw only in glimpses now has shading and depth. In a profession where we tend to exalt those with talent, and it must be said, those without a shred of it, I found it refreshing to read about man of quirks, pretensions, standards, erudition, talent, taste and, very definitely, clay feet. Affectionate, though, this portrait of one sibling by another is, it's no canonization.

It was inevitable, I suppose, that the more I learned, the more connections made, that my scope should widen and a greater picture would emerge, however faded and overlaid with the chicanery of memory, of a band of men who, to a great degree, were outlaws in their own time. Socially acceptable only because they were obliged to hide their inner lives, their sexuality and their partners. It is a dichotomy that continues today in the lives of many and leads in increasingly more instances to unspeakable tragedy - except where anonymity can be bought. 

I have mentioned before, how fortunate I've been in receiving positive comments, suggestions for further research, anecdotes from people who worked for him and on occasion scans of images from magazines not available to me. One correspondent scanned the photograph of Cameron's Paris living room - yet to be used in a post but no less welcome for that. If it were possible to tell you who these people are I would, but they generally speaking wish to remain anonymous. Another such kind soul, the blogger le style et la matière sent me the photograph above of Cameron's Anglo-Indian room, his study at Le Clos where he wrote his books - The Golden Riviera, the book I've just finished being one of them.

"By the time Rory had finished Le Clos itself, the top two floors consisted of six bedrooms and ensuite bathrooms and the ground floor was the dining room, a library and a large sitting room. The walls were painted the palest of pale olive green. I watched him pick an olive leaf and, turning the back of the leaf over, he got the painters to match the color. The sofas were large and opulent, covered in off-white, thick textured cotton with matching cushions. The chairs were large and Louis XV. Stripped to a pale olive grey, they were also covered in heavy cotton but in the lightest of lemon yellows.

Rory was, I believe, the first person to conceive the idea of the modern-day tablescapes. Large tables were covered in thick layers of material that flowed to the floor and on them he would place his flower arrangements and his precious collected pieces. He would go to the Nice market and buy tuberoses, carnations, lilies, and roses, all in the palest of pinks, whites, creams and yellows. He would cut off the stems and arrange large bowls of massed flowers. The rooms all had french windows open to the sunlight, which used to filter through the leaves of the olive trees and dance on the Aubusson carpets. The scent of the flowers would drift through a house bathed in the glow of warm Mediterranean sunshine. One of the sitting room walls had Louis XV panelling to frame Rory's collection of beautiful leather-bound books, many of which were first editions of the Belgian botanical artist Pierre Redouté and the 16th-century Italian architect Andrea Palladio. There was a secret panel in the carving and on pressing one of the rosettes, a door would swing open, leading into a library where other first editions lay opened and displayed on easels, their pages changed each day. Not nearly as large as the sitting room, the library walls were also panelled and housed the rest of his famous collection of books."

Soon I shall move away from Roderick Cameron - not entirely, for I'm not yet done with him - to his circle and beyond. Some are well-known, others less so. Not all are known for their decorating skills but all were in their times famous or even notorious for how they lived their lives.

Interesting, isn't it, that Cameron's sister credits him with the invention of tablescapes - that pleasurable if not always beautiful arrangement of favored objects so indelibly associated with David Hicks - a great friend of both Cameron and his sister. Those early arrangements of objets de vertu arguably are the parents of many a tabletop agglomeration of ... well, just stuff, and which of us is not tempted by such a display, especially when persuaded that we too can live the life portrayed by magazine proppers and stylists? But that is a discussion for another day.

Blue Dragons? Roderick Cameron in The Golden Riviera begins a lovely account of an early morning on the Pointe de Saint-Hospice with "How one becomes attached to routine, always the same china: Royal Worcester's 'Blue Dragon', a stylised pattern dating from the last century and one that is to be found in countless English houses." I will continue with this story in a later post but for now here is Royal Worcester's 'Blue Dragon'.

Quotation from A Lion In The Bedroom by Pat Cavendish O'Neill, Park Street Press, Sydney, 2004.

Photo of Roderick Cameron at his desk in the Anglo-Indian room and of the library at Le Clos from the book mentioned above but for which there is no attribution given.