Best-Kept Boy in the World (12 page)

To celebrate the end of the War and gas rationing,
Christopher in September of 1945 bought a second-hand Lincoln
Zephyr convertible, and would roar down the narrow roads of the
Hollywood Hills with Denny and Bill in the back seat shrieking,
Denny pretending “they were all a bunch of pleasure-mad teenagers
of the 1920’s, drunk on bathtub gin,” and yelling “Let ’er rip!”
and “Flaming youth!”
¹¹⁰

At the end of September, Denny flew to New York
City, having had crated and shipped ahead his Picasso; it was time
to raise some money and he hoped to interest a dealer in Manhattan
in buying the painting. Traveling “by air” was a glamorous but
still new adventure, and Denny covered his bases. In his clean
script, he wrote on a plain piece of paper:

To whom it may concern:

The picture “Girl Reading” by Picasso which is my
property, having been given to me by Peter Watson, is to be the
property of Christopher Isherwood in the event of my dying or
disappearing before it is sold in consideration of debts I owe to
him and because he is my [and here Denny inserted a carrot and
added the word “best”] best friend.

He signed it L. Denham Fouts, and dated it September
20, 1945, with the address 137 Entrada Dr. Santa Monica beneath the
date, and at the bottom of the page a line which read:

Witness: and signed by William E.
Caskey
¹¹¹

In New York, Denny sold the Picasso to a man he met
at a cocktail party who offered more for the painting, $9,500, than
any of the dealers he had approached. (That buyer in turn sold it
to Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Marx of Chicago. It was Mrs. Marx—Florence
May Schoenborg—heiress to the May Department Store chain fortune,
who was an avid collector of modern art, and who, at her death in
1995, willed this painting, and a collection of others, to the
Metropolitan Museum of Art where it hangs today as part of the
permanent exhibit, a single painting from the collection Peter
Watson had assembled, worth today well over fifty million
dollars.)

When Denny returned from New York to California in
the spring of 1946, Christopher and Bill were living in his
apartment. Denny stayed with them, but it wasn’t long before Denny
and Bill were quarrelling. Christopher believed Denny was jealous
when he realized that his best friend and Bill were truly in love,
that he had lost Christopher. Denny told Christopher that Bill was
“just another boy, another pawn in the sexual chess
game.”
¹¹²
Christopher in his diary analyzed what
happened:

And now Denny, that sly old chess player, had made a
crude amateur mistake; he had challenged Caskey from a position of
weakness. Caskey saw his advantage and pushed their quarrel to the
point at which Christopher had to choose between them. Thus it was
that Christopher’s friendship with Denny ended. Christopher was
sorry, of course. Denny may have been sorry, too—yes, I’m sure he
was. But he accepted the situation with his usual arrogant show of
indifference. He was in one of his self-destructive moods, ready to
break with anyone who wouldn’t submit to his will. Christopher, who
was also capable of such moods, understood this perfectly. Though
he had sided with Caskey, his sympathies remained with Denny.
Looking back on the two relationships, it seems to me that
Christopher and Denny came closer to each other than Christopher
and Caskey ever did.
¹¹³

Denny left the apartment, subletting it, went back
East with Trotsky and from there to Europe.

Over three decades later, thinking about Denny,
Christopher would reflect: “I
liked
Denny. He was witty, he
could make me laugh, and he could instruct me how to live in this
country ... And for all his reservations and sneerings about
religion, he did take Vedanta seriously. He resisted it, he
attacked it, he hated it: but he knew it wasn’t merely silly, a
freaky game. He was a curiously serious person, despite his air of
frivolity.”
¹¹⁴

In
Down There on a Visit
, Isherwood expressed
best his feelings about his friend: “I never in my life met anyone
who was so much fun to be with ... He had a genius for enjoying
himself.”
¹¹⁵

“A MARVELOUS SOUTHERN WHORE NAMED DENHAM FOUTS”

The Europe that Denny found when he had returned in
the spring of 1946 was very different from the world he left in
June of 1940 when Peter sent him to the United States for the
duration.

What had become of his European friends during those
horrific years?

Lord Tredegar’s wife had died in 1937. Evan did have
a knack for marrying well. In Singapore on March 13, 1939,
forty-six-year-old Evan married twenty-four-year-old Princess Olga
Sergeievna Dolgorousky from a family of Russian nobility that,
before the Revolution, had been close to the Imperial family. The
couple divorced four years later; it appeared to have been a rather
unhappy marriage that included an incident in which Evan tried to
set fire to his wife.
¹

Through his family’s standing, Evan found himself at
the outset of the War just where he didn’t belong: in MI5,
Britain’s esteemed counter-intelligence agency. Thinking well
outside the box, his first scheme was to have peregrine falcons,
like the ones he had trained at Tredegar Park to entertain the
guests at his garden parties, attack German carrier pigeons and
thereby disrupt the flow of classified information to pre-invasion
agents. It was never clear just how the falcons would distinguish
enemy pigeons from neutral pigeons or develop a taste for Nazi
pigeons more than other avian delicacies flying the skies at the
same time. This scheme morphed into a plan to slow the German push
into France and Belgium by letting loose a massive flock of pigeons
that would mingle with the Nazi carrier pigeons and confuse the
Germans as to which pigeons were theirs. The RAF gave it a try with
a squadron of planes taking off with cargo holds full of thousands
of pigeons. Over the southern coast of England, the pigeons dropped
from the planes were instantly killed by the intake of the engines.
Evan refined his plan. The next time the pigeons were taken aloft,
they were in individual brown paper bags, the bags were let loose
over the coast, and by the time the pigeons burst from the bags
they at least were free of the planes; but rather than traveling to
mingle with their fascist counterparts, they made their way
immediately back home to their familiar roosts.

Despite these setbacks, Evan was quite proud of his
work as commander of the Falcon Interceptor Unit of MI5, and one
day, as he lunched with Lady Baden-Powell, broke all edicts of the
counter-intelligence agency by showing her around his office and
describing in detail the war efforts in which he was involved. This
was a blatant violation of the oath of secrecy he had taken, and
Evan at once was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London. In
due course, he was freed, and, fuming, made his way back to
Tredegar Park.

Evan was not about to let the matter pass. He knew
just who to contact to plan suitable revenge against those who
summarily had imprisoned him: the infamous sixty-eight-year-old
Aleister Crowley, a character the British tabloids had dubbed the
“Beast of the Apocalypse,” the “King of Depravity,” the “Wickedest
Man on Earth.”

Crowley, who fancied himself, with Shakespeare, one
of the two greatest poets of the English language, held himself out
as a prophet of a new era that would supplant Christianity, an era
when men would become gods. The central credo of his ministry was
“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,” a credo that
focused on individual freedom while flirting with license and
anarchy. A mystic, a spiritual philosopher who fiddled with the
concept of reality, Crowley considered magick (as he spelled it to
distinguish it from pedestrian tricks of magic) “the science and
art of causing change in conformity with will.”
²
His
rituals and sacraments, in which genital secretions served the same
role as the wine and wafer, included the use of hashish, mescaline,
heroin, and opium, sexual magick with both male and female
partners, and the consumption of the blood of cats.

Crowley was a student of occultism, and his devotion
to magick and mysticism paralleled Evan’s, who before the War had
been a member of the “Black Hand,” a private occult society in
London, and who recently had been constructing, at great cost, an
elaborate magick temple on his estate. Surely here was just the
person to help perform a little black magick to bring about the
revenge against his arresting officer that Evan craved. The two
conspirators were kindred spirits. Crowley had been a guest at many
of Evan’s notorious weekend parties and had inscribed one of his
books,
The Book of Thoth
, to Evan as follows: “To my old and
very dear Friend and Colleague, Adept of Adepts in the Secret
Tradition, Eifon Morgan, heir of the Mysteries of the Round Table,
entitled to bear Excalibur, Lord of the Secret Marches about
Camelot do I, being the pupil and heir of Merlin, entrust this
Book, Aleister Crowley.”
³

So Evan was well aware of just what havoc Crowley
could wreak when on May 18, 1943, he wrote to the Great Beast,
inviting him to come stay at Tredegar Park. Crowley arrived on June
17, and was housed in the Oak Room, the grandest in the mansion, a
forty-two-foot long bedroom that once had been the main state
dining room of Tredegar House, with its massive fireplace and
seventeenth century oak paneling carved with busts of the Roman
emperors, scrolls of acanthus leaves, and grotesque heads. On
Sunday, June 20, 1943, Crowley wrote in his diary: “Saw T’s Magick
room—far greater than I thought.”
⁴
That was saying
something.

Crowley stayed at Tredegar Park for two weeks to
carry out his work. Exactly what sort of black magick the two
concocted, what spells cast, what séances conducted, is not known,
though the conspirators were suitably smug when, soon after the
Great Beast’s visit, they learned that the officer who had had Evan
thrown into the Tower of London was beset with a painful illness
that brought him satisfyingly close to death.

And what during the War had become of Prince Paul of
Greece with whom Denny had sailed the Aegean, and who shared with
Denny an identical tattoo over his heart?

Crown Princess Federica, who had wed Prince Paul in
January of 1938, dutifully gave birth to their first child, a
daughter, in November of that year, and a son two years later. That
was to be just about the only happiness the couple shared for the
next six years. The Third Reich tried to convince Paul’s brother,
King George II of Greece, to abdicate in favor of Prince Paul, who
had married a German princess and who, therefore, the Reich
assumed, would be more sympathetic to Germany than the King; a
promise of protection from Mussolini’s Italy came with this
overture. The King and Crown Prince would have nothing of it, and
Italy invaded Greece on October 28, 1940, followed by the German
army attacking across the Bulgarian border. The Greek government
retreated to the island of Crete and then, when Crete was bombed,
took refuge in Cairo, where the Crown Prince stayed, and London,
where the King set up government in Claridge’s hotel. After three
years of exile, the Monarchy with the British army invaded Greece
to take it back. The country was freed by November of 1944 and the
King and Prince Paul returned to Athens. With the death of King
George, Prince Paul would ascend to the throne on April 1,
1947.

And Peter Watson? During the War, he lived by
himself in a modest flat in Palace Gate in London, and volunteered
as a clerk for the Red Cross, driving a Red Cross van. Accustomed
to traveling the world, he was confined to England, never his
favorite country, and after a while began to go stir crazy. He
wrote to a friend on January 11, 1943 that “the whole thing [the
War] has been going on much too long I feel, and ... it is very
depressing for me to have lost all sense of contact with Denham ...
After four years the sense of tension is unbearable.”
⁵
Taxes were rising in England during the War years, and the income
Peter received from the trusts his father had established was
falling. He was still supporting young artists and authors, but his
days of Bentleys and Vuitton luggage were in the past. Even worse,
some of his investments, and all of his art collection, were in
German-occupied France. He had lost contact with Sherban Sidery,
the Rumanian caretaker he had left in charge of his apartment, and
worried about whether the caretaker had been able to protect the
paintings or whether the Nazis had found and confiscated the
collection. Peter was fatalistic about the dangers of the day:
“There is even a great jagged hole in the Ritz,” he wrote to Cecil
Beaton, “but so far this block has escaped. I never go to a
shelter—I would rather die in my sleep.”
⁶

As the War dragged on, Peter had become
philosophical, too, about his art collection far away in his
apartment in Paris. “I had an International Red Cross message from
the Rumanian Sidery who has stayed in my flat,” he wrote to Cecil
Beaton; “A good thing really I feel to have someone in the flat.
The pictures I am afraid have gone—a pity really because I had
attempted to get the most interesting work of any painter I ever
bought and it was all most deliberately chosen. But I don’t care as
it seems to be fatal to one’s character to attach oneself too much
to things.”
⁷

Peter was therefore to some extent, mentally
prepared for what he found when he and Cyril Connolly at last got
back to his apartment in Paris and found the rooms in shambles, the
entire art collection gone, and, scattered around the apartment,
tell-tale pawn tickets: his caretaker, the man he had left in
charge, was responsible for the loss of the paintings, the gold
knives and forks, everything of value. All of this Peter could
accept. The apartment could be cleaned and renovated for Denny’s
homecoming. What Peter did not expect, and could not accept, was
how Denny so quickly “lapsed into a sort of pre-war cocktail haute
pederast life.”
⁸