Best-Kept Boy in the World (4 page)

“MY DEAR DENHAM”

Evan Morgan was the only son of the third Lord
Tredegar -Courtenay Morgan—and of the Lady Katherine Agnes Blanche
Carnegie. The old Tredegar family fortune in coal funded a 121,000
acre estate in Monmouthshire in south Wales, as well as property
along entire city streets in London. Their sprawling seventeenth
century country house was one of the most magnificent in Great
Britain, with its paneled rooms, windows framed by heavy velvet
draperies, state rooms lit by hundreds of candles casting light and
shadows on coats of arms, massive gold-framed family portraits, and
elaborate molded ceilings inset with oval paintings. Tredegar House
was run by a staff of forty-five servants who lived and worked in
the mansion, with more in charge of the grounds, the brewery, the
bakery, the gardens. There were housemaids, groomsmen, an indoor
gardener, a hall boy, stickmen to provide wood for the many
fireplaces, housekeepers, coachmen, valets, footmen, a lodge
keeper, bricklayer, stone mason, scullery maid, deer keeper, kennel
keeper—a small army of servants, some of whom were the third and
fourth generations to live and work on the estate.

Evan’s father passed his time in the usual pursuits
of the landed gentry—hunting, shooting, fishing, and sailing his
steam yacht,
Liberty
, one of the largest private yachts
afloat. He was proficient at each pastime, but his real goal was in
getting away from Tredegar House as frequently as possible, for
Lady Katherine had severe mental problems and had come to believe
she was a bird and had built for herself a large nest in one of the
mansion’s sitting rooms, and there she sat, wearing a cloth
beak.

What chance would a boy have growing up in this
home? Evan quite predictably was quite an eccentric. “Evan’s
misfortune,” one friend said, “was to have been born with far too
much money ... and no practical sense at all.”
¹

Evan, who fancied himself a poet, mingled with the
authors and artists of the day, some of whom painted vivid word
portraits of their wealthy acquaintance. Poet and author Nancy
Cunard called Evan “a fantasy who could be most charming and most
bitchy.”
²
Aldous Huxley reported to a friend that “I
like him, I think, quite a lot, tho’ he is the most fearfully
spoilt child.”
³
Going for a walk during a visit at
Garsington in November of 1917, Virginia Woolf encountered a car
“full of speckled and not prepossessing young men ...The most
obvious was Evan Morgan, a little red absurdity, with a beak of a
nose, no chin, and a general likeness to a very callow but student
Bantam cock, who has run to legs & neck. However, he was
evidently most carefully prepared to be a poet & an
eccentricity, both by his conversation, which aimed at
irresponsible brilliance, & lack of reticence, & by his
clothes, which must have been copied from the usual Shelley
picture. But he was as innocent as a chicken & so foolish it
didn’t seem to matter.”
⁴
An acquaintance described him
as being “tall and very thin, with odd articulated movements, as if
preparing to spread wings in flight.”
⁵
His voice “had a
lilt to it, and his speech was often broken by a snort as he took
another pinch of snuff. He appeared utterly confident, utterly
relaxed ...but very evidently a man of vivid caprice . .
.”
⁶
Evan at the time served as the unpaid secretary to
the Parliamentary secretary of the Ministry of Labour.

It was in London at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel
on Percy Street off Tottenham Court Road, a restaurant popular both
with the aristocracy and the artistic set, that Evan met with this
coterie of poets, painters, authors, actors, and musicians—Duff
Cooper, Nancy Cunard, Wyndham Lewis, Michael Arlen, George Bernard
Shaw, Igor Stravinsky, Augustus John, Aldous Huxley, Dylan Thomas,
the Sitwells. Cheerleader and instigator of this group dubbed by
the press the “Bright Young People,” Evan, never one to tolerate
boredom, devised adventures such as a midnight treasure hunt in
London in which the participants had a list of objects to find and
bring to a two a.m. party, or dinners to which the guests came
dressed as young children and acted accordingly.
⁷
A
young man at one of Evan’s events remembered how it “began at the
Eiffel Tower [restaurant] and ended at somebody’s bedroom at
Prince’s Hotel in Jermyn Street” and how, at that point, he left
abruptly “clutching my remaining bits of virtue—bundled them into a
taxi and trundled home. I’ve never seen anything so stupendously
naughty, even in Oxford! Never again—as I value my
reputation.”
⁸

In a moment of clarity, Evan’s mother, worried about
her son, offered to pay all expenses for Aldous Huxley, then
teaching at Eton, to chaperone him on a trip abroad, hoping, as
Huxley put it, “that my respectable middle-aged temperament would
act as a slight brake to Evan’s whirligig habits.” The inability to
get a wartime passport prevented their travels, but Huxley
witnessed an example of these “whirligig habits” the very next day
while at the studio of an artist “spasmodically trying to paint a
nude study from a very lovely little model with red hair ... Evan
and the model became increasingly affectionate.”
⁹

One of the Bright Young People, the popular novelist
Ronald Firbank, had set his sights on Evan, who had filled out a
little since Virginia Woolf had viewed him as a “student Bantam
cock,” doe-eyed Evan with his wavy light brown hair and sensuous
lips. Evan at first was fascinated by his conversations with the
older Firbank, conversations, as he characterized them, “of a most
speculative and dubious character,”
¹⁰
conversations that
made Evan feel that his admirer was “under the influence of Bacchus
... at least you could never tell because his conversation was
equally wild either way.”
¹¹
One friend noted Ronald
“Firbank spoke only in strangled and disjointed gasps of rapture,
hilarity and dismay.”
¹²
He wore, Evan observed, shirts
of a color “never seen off the stage” and his ties were “very
bohemian.”
¹³
But it was his hands that most troubled
Evan, those well groomed nails with a deep carmine polish, those
hands, one could never tell where they might “find
themselves.”
¹⁴

Evan was amused by Firbank and viewed him “as one
might some rare bird to be cherished for its exquisite exotic
qualities rather than as a human being,”
¹⁵
but his
amusement began to turn to concern when he realized that Firbank
was cherishing him in a very different way (Firbank’s nickname for
Evan was “Heaven Organ”),
¹⁶
and those troublesome hands
kept finding themselves in the wrong places.

Twenty-seven-year-old Evan dutifully told his father
that his relationship with Firbank was becoming of “deep concern”
to him, and noted how Firbank had a habit of “running his fingers
through his hair, ‘just like a woman, my dear’” leading to some
“sinister suspicions concerning him.”
¹⁷
Firbank proudly
had told Evan of his plan to dedicate to him his latest novel,
The Princess Zouburoff
, with a dedication that would read:
“To the Hon. Evan Morgan in Souvenir Amicale of a ‘Previous
Incarnation.’”
¹⁸
(When Firbank first met Evan, he told
him that his profile was identical to that of the mummy of Ramses,
and that he must be a reincarnation of the ancient Egyptian
pharaoh.) This was a little much, especially since Evan was finding
himself attracted not to Firbank but to another member of his
coterie, the composer Philip Heseltine, a friend from his Eton and
Oxford days. Aghast at Firbank’s proposed dedication, Evan had his
father instruct the family solicitors to intercede and communicate
to Firbank that should his new book ever be published with that
dedication, Evan Morgan would “take such steps as he may be advised
to protect his interest and to make his views on the subject
perfectly clear to the public and his friends.”
¹⁹
The
publisher had the dedication page physically cut from each book
before it was released.

Other fathers were warning their sons about Evan,
just as Lord Tredegar cautioned Evan about Firbank. While a student
at Eton, Alan Pryce-Jones’ father had taken him aside in his
library and said, “You are old enough to know that there exists a
man named Evan Morgan. He is a first cousin of your friend Pinhead.
And I tell you here and now that should you ever find yourself in
the same room, you are to leave immediately.”
²⁰
“Why?”
Alan innocently asked his father, who responded that “he would tell
me one day ... one day when I was older.” Ominous words, to be
sure, and words that Alan’s father never elaborated upon; and of
course Alan’s response was to pester Pinhead immediately to
introduce him to Evan Morgan. Pinhead did—”we took to one another
at once”—and they became friends. “I had no reason to be other than
grateful to him for as much affection as his leprechaun character
would bestow on a friend.”
²¹
Another young man worried
about a
Vogue
portrait that showed him standing next to Evan
Morgan: “The ravishing beauty of my face and my figure rendered my
proximity to this old starfish most suspicious to the
ignorant.”
²²

It had not been so many years before that Oscar
Wilde had been sentenced to two years of hard labor in Reading Gaol
for the attraction he felt toward Bosie, Lord Alfred Douglas. Evan,
a good friend of Lord Alfred, whom he considered “the greatest
sonneteer since Shakespeare,”
²³
was very much aware of
this when he contemplated Ronald Firbank’s feelings toward him, and
his own toward Philip Heseltine.

It was just at this point in his life that Evan took
up the notion of becoming a priest, and became the first Tredegar
in five centuries to join the Roman Catholic Church. After he had
one of the family’s Rolls Royces fitted with an altar, his
chauffeur drove him to Rome where he entered the Vatican seminary.
Perhaps it was because he sent his valet to attend all his classes
and take notes that he never did become a priest, but certainly all
was not lost. In 1923, at the age of thirty, he was made the Privy
Chamberlain of the Sword and Cape by Pope Benedict XV (and
continued in the same office under Pope Pius XI), an office that
entitled him to flamboyant robes, which he wore for his formal
portrait that hung at Tredegar House, and that, in fact, he wore
whenever possible. His friend Nancy Cunard remembered seeing Evan
in Rome dressed as “some sort of papal chamberlain,” wearing
something that to her resembled “a British admiral’s uniform—the
hat particularly.”
²⁴
Another friend described him as “an
18
^th
century figure come to life again.”
²⁵
And later Gore Vidal recalled seeing him carrying “a big attaché
case with the Tredegar coat of arms, more elaborate than the Queen
of England’s.”
²⁶
Evan’s religious convictions were
erratic at best. He once owned a relic of the true Cross, but
mislaid it in an all male Turkish bath.

Evan was ordered by his father to marry and produce
an heir after Evan’s sister, Gwyneth, had drowned in the Thames—a
drug related suicide, it was rumored. Ideas of the priesthood
abandoned, Evan, in 1928, married Lois Sturt (a “most unwilling
bride” one friend observed),
²⁷
the strikingly beautiful
daughter of the 2
^nd
Baron Alington and Lady Feodorowna
Yorke. As Gore Vidal further noted, this “glamorous Mountbatten
world” was “boldly bisexual. Bloomsbury with coronets. And
everybody got married.”
²⁸
Lois had been a film star in
the early 1920s and had been the lover of the 15
^th
Earl
of Pembroke and of Prince George, the duke of Kent, soon to become
King George VI of England. Prince George had wanted to marry her,
but the royal family opposed the union due to her “fast”
reputation.

It was on the world travels of this couple—who were
often, as a friend commented in “remote
communication”
²⁹
—that Evan happened to spot Denham Fouts
in the lobby of the Quisisana Hotel on Capri.

Was Evan’s wife concerned when her husband so
suddenly made a new friend who was now part of their entourage as
they continued the Grand Tour, or did she consider this just
another manifestation of Evan’s charming eccentricities, another
addition to his unusual collection of acquaintances? In China, they
visited the opium dens where Denny sampled the wares and developed
an addiction.

When Evan’s father died, Evan became Lord Tredegar,
a viscount and baron, lord of 500-year-old Tredegar House. And then
the fun began.

The glitterati, along with the beautiful and the
handsome unknowns, made their way to his infamous weekend garden
parties at Tredegar Park: H.G. Wells, Marchesa Casati, Aleister
Crowley, Lord Alfred Douglas, Lady Nancy Cunard, the painter
Augustus John, George Bernard Shaw, William Butler Yeats, G.K.
Chesterton, Aldous Huxley. Denny was right at home in this
glamorous party world and became a part of it: from Jacksonville,
Florida, to one of the grandest manors of the English-speaking
world.

In addition to the menagerie of guests, Evan had
assembled at his estate a menagerie of animals. There was Somerset,
the boxing kangaroo with which Evan invariably boxed a few rounds
at each party, Alice the honey bear, Blue Boy, a rather frightening
macaw that perched on Evan’s shoulder spitting out obscenities and
that seemed to have a particular dislike for H.G. Wells, attacking
the famed author with hammer-like blows. There were also baboons
that stalked and terrified the hapless gardeners, as well as
anteaters, pigeons, birds of prey, falcons and owls that Evan
trained to swoop over the guests. He would call “Rosa, Rosa” and
Rosa, a duck, would fly straight to him from the other side of the
lake in the park; as a friend noted, “Birds came crowding round him
like spinsters round a popular preacher.”
³⁰
To the
delight of his guests, he had trained Blue Boy to climb up his leg
inside his trousers and push its beak out through his
fly.
³¹