Lord Mullion's Secret or One Thing Led to Another

I cannot remember exactly what in James Lees-Milne's wartime diaries sent me to the library searching for Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust, which I found but have yet to discover why I wanted to read the book in the first place and, without going back through the years 1944 and 1945 in Lees-Milne's diaries, I'm not likely to. However, walking between the stacks, call-number scribbled on a sticky trying to find the Waugh book, I did make a discovery or, rather, a rediscovery - a name I'd not thought of in years, Michael Innes.

What caught my eye was the title, Lord Mullion's Secret, silver on the black spine of a small shabby book. The author's name was covered by the library catalogue label but, always willing to be sidetracked, I opened the book and began to read one of the best books I've read in a long, long time.

When I was a graduate student, one of my professors advised us that the best way to tell if a book is worth reading – and I think she was probably referring to serious art criticism or post-modern philosophy, rather than detective stories – is to read the first chapter and the last. If neither grab one, as it were, then don't waste time with what's in between. But, rarely falling to the temptation of reading the denouement before opening sentences, the book went home with me, and so gripping is it I took it to read in the hotel in Asheville after we'd seen The Mikado, the Celt's all-time favorite Gilbert and Sullivan operetta and tunes from which are likely to be sung in the shower, while baking, pottering about, or any other time deemed appropriate for a bit of happy song and dance (Tit Willow is a particular favorite).

"The Mullions were still quite comfortably off, although they no longer managed to pay their way in the entirely unobtrusive fashion they would have wished. Twice a week, and through the greater part of the year, they were obliged to turn Mullion Castle into a Stately Home. The disturbance was heralded shortly after breakfast, when Lord Mullion ascended to the leads and himself hoisted his personal standard above the battlements. He didn't greatly care for thus announcing to the world that he was 'in residence', since it seemed to him that whether he was at Mullion or not was a private matter with which the world had nothing to do. This particular small ostentation, indeed, was perfectly orthodox among his peers, a clear majority of whom probably maintained the habit. But Lord Mullion was a retiring man, who had to be kept up to the mark in the matter by his wife. "

Probably somewhere at that point I knew this book had to go home with me, so I grabbed Evelyn Waugh and moved on - as indeed I must here.

It was Wright Ludington's green cedar plank walled living room that caught my eye over twenty-five years ago. I marked the pages then, not realizing how I would again come to search for them – and not necessarily for aesthetic reasons, though these are undoubtedly beautiful rooms.

Though none are visible in these photographs, Wright Ludington collected work by some of my favorite artists - names which are now perhaps more evocative than true favorites, for Graham Sutherland was one of my favorite painters and one who is not well-known nowadays. A friend of both Mr Ludington and Roderick Cameron, and designer of the Christ in Glory tapestry in Coventry Cathedral, that was so impressive to me as a young teenager raised without any religious loyalties. Paul Nash, another English artist, who died the year after I was born, friend of Barbara Hepworth, herself a friend of Bernard Leach whom I once knew - six degrees of separation right there or, I suppose, just one thing leading to another.

Another, perhaps, is an inventory of art and artifacts inhabiting this most personal of Kunstkammers. The most pleasurable to me, not the painting by Edouard Vuillard, Interior with Baby, nor the Modigliani portrait, Rousseau's Castle by Moonlight, nor even the pair of Rouault paintings flanking the fireplace, but that small collection of objects, I suspect one of many such, made magical by distance and time - a four-thousand-year-old head of a Sumerian king and of a priest, two-thousand-year-old Tanagra figures and an Roman ivory fragment, a torso, Roman glass vials. It is the classical fragments, the busts, the heads, the torsos, the capitals, and the statues: bits, shards and splinters of civilization loved for themselves and what they represented.

The statue of Hermes, the Messenger of the Gods, in the covered loggia, above and here, formerly stood in the Sculpture Gallery at Lansdowne House - part of what John Cornforth described as "the most important collection in a London house." The statue reputedly was found near Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli whence it entered the Lansdowne collection.

The room above, I think, is the bedroom Billy Baldwin slept in on his first visit to Wright Ludington's Montecito house. 

"He opened the door not to a guest room, but to an art gallery. We entered at one corner and looked down what seemed like an endlessly long room - at least sixty feet. The white walls were filled with a fantastic collection of paintings of every period and nation. I stopped at every picture. Suddenly, it occurred to me that there weren't any windows - yet the room was filled with light. I looked up to see an ingenious skylight that extended the room's entire length. No one has ever wakened to such glorious sunlight.

"At each end of the room was a four-poster bed with blue-and-white curtains. Each bed had its own table, chest of drawers, books and a good light for reading. The beds were so remote from each other, and the curtains pulled so cozily around them, that even if you had to share the room, it would be like having the place to yourself."

Photographs by Charles White to accompany text by Robert Henning, from House and Garden, March 1983.
Photograph by John F Waggaman, of Billy Baldwin's bedroom from The Collector in America, compiled by the Editors of Art in America, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971.
Introduction to Lord Mullion taken from Lord Mullion's Secret, A Red Badge Novel of Suspense, by John Innes, Dodd, Mead & Company, 1981. 

Hicks, Hermes and a book review

More than thirty years after this photograph taken in Wright Ludington's salon, David Hicks was interviewed (a post for another day) by Charles Gandee for House and Garden - a source for some of the content of my recent posts - probably the best interior design magazine that ever was, its demise after the glory years under the editorship of Louis Oliver Gropp, much regretted. In the 1980s the magazine was renamed and reformatted as HG, the first of its, in my experience, two changes in pursuit of the chimera of hip. The last and most frenetic of the three formats was followed after the final closure by the limp and, by me, unlamented Domino.

Today's post did not begin as a review of the state of interior design publishing, but whilst I'm on the subject I might as well say how disappointed I am by the quality of the design of the long-awaited biography of Billy Baldwin. I'm not going to complain about the fact that I learned little that is new for that perhaps says as much about me as the author, or about the fact that I've seen a great deal of the photographs in other books about and by Billy Baldwin. I do not question the author's scholarship or his writing style, for it is a learned, well-written and easily-read book, but what I will say that is that when it was announced it was to be published I asked myself what else there was to say about Mr Baldwin and now I have the answer.

My concern is this: at this point in twenty-first century book production it should not so be so that photographs, however old the original, can look so sad on the printed page. The major problem, I think, is with the old print films - four-color halftones that were made before the refinements of the 1980s, and which, when enlarged beyond their capacity, begin to look fuzzy and dull on the page. Not all the images suffer in this way, but there is many a photograph that is fuzzy and dull. None of this can be laid at the door of the author - he after all is at the mercy, if mercy is the right word, of his designer and publisher. In this case, the publisher should have exercised more editorial control over the graphic designers.  Did anyone think of doing a print check?

When buying a book online, and I increasingly do because they are cheaper, I cannot leaf through as I could in a bookstore. There's a lesson here, of course, for had I been patient and waited until this book appeared on the shelves I would very likely not have bought it. Of all the books that were slated for publication last month, two were of interest to me - Billy Baldwin: The Great American Decorator being one of them. I'm so disappointed I think I'm going to return it. The other I've yet to check out - in the bookstore!


Photograph of David Hicks from David Hicks, A Life of Design, by Ashley Hicks, Rizzoli, 2009. The second photograph of Wright Ludington's salon by John F Waggaman from The Collector in America, compiled by Jean Lipman and the Editors of Art in America, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971.

A friend of a friend

That there are six degrees of separation between me and anyone else on the planet is a concept that both troubles me and makes me skeptical. Nonetheless, I was reminded of it one weekend recently at a party in another state where I knew none of other people present - I had one of those well, that explains a lot moments, when I learned something about an acquaintance here from a friend of a friend of a friend - a man whose other plans at the last moment fell through and he attended the gathering at which we were also last-minute guests.

What I learned, and I use that word advisedly, is of no consequence and neither should it be, but what is important is that the world if one moves in certain circles really is growing smaller and tighter. I cannot imagine there are six degrees of separation between me and the Queen but if I moved in her circles I might well find it to be so. And so another connection was made when I received an email - an instance of a correspondent helping me with my thoughts about Roderick Cameron - in which he writes "As I recall there was another part of that circle, a gentleman named Ludington who lived in Santa Barbara and had a strong impact on Mr. Baldwin. Just a data point for you."

"I had known Wright Ludington all my life, and his house in Santa Barbara remained the one thing in America I wanted to see and had not. So I was doubly delighted when he called to ask me to come out for a visit.

"Even if I had not known Wright's special magic, I would have felt it in that house. As we walked through the rooms, I could feel the powerful force he exerts on his environment - in the architecture, the decoration, and especially in the pictures and sculpture that fill his world.

"'Come,'  he said. 'I'll show you to your room.'

"He opened the door not to a guest room, but to an art gallery. We entered at one corner and looked down what seemed like an endlessly long room - at least sixty feet. The white walls were filled with a fantastic collection of paintings of every period and nation. I stopped at every picture. Suddenly, it occurred to me that there weren't any windows - yet the room was filled with light. I looked up to see an ingenious skylight that extended the room's entire length. No one has ever awakened to such glorious sunlight.

"At each end of the room was a four-poster bed with blue-and-white curtains. Each bed had its own table, chest of drawers, books and a good light for reading. The beds were so remote from one another, and the curtains pulled so cozily around them, that even if you had to share the room, it would be like having the place all to yourself.

"Beside my bed was the bath and dressing room, painted brilliant yellow, with an enormous window directly over the tub. From that window I could look down the tawny-grassed valley to the blue Pacific far below."

Billy Baldwin does not give a date to his visit and clearly he is describing a room other than this. The point is, I think, not that Ludington - the donor of 175 works of art to the Santa Barbara Museum and erstwhile owner of Val Verde, an estate described as "a retreat for the nation's gay cultural elite" - knew Roderick Cameron, but that he was a life-long acquaintance of Billy Baldwin who employed Arthur Smith a good friend of Andrew Crispo, who very possibly walked along the same street as William Pahlmann, called "the best known decorator of his day," by Mark Hampton, who worked for David Hicks, who was influenced by Van Day Truex, who in turn was a friend of Roderick Cameron, who may well have danced with a man who'd danced with a girl who'd danced with the Prince of Wales.

However small the degree of separation it is membership of a circle that matters. It is perhaps facile to think of circles, cultural elites, and in a way too horizontal, siloing being more to the point. Siloing is a name for a form of vertical segregation of society where depending on your belief, sexuality, race, income etc., you belong to your silo and have little or no connection with the members of other silos. As a phenomenon it is pretty obvious in modern-day American society - there are the broader categories: straight, gay, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, black, white, Democrat, Republican and within those are smaller categories such as ideology, denomination, sect, club, team, university,redneck, yankees, red-haired stepchildren, young, old, male, female, immigrant, illegal, left, right, center, etc., etc, etc.

Friend of a friend, indeed, you might say.

Photograph by Ezra Stoller (I think) from The World In Vogue from the Viking Press, 1963.
Quotation from Billy Baldwin Remembers, Billy Baldwin, Harcourt Brace Jonanovich, 1974