The influential touch of a vanished hand
Nicholas Haslam
NANCY LANCASTER: HER LIFE, HER WORLD, HER ART by Robert Becker Random House, £25, pp.426 One evening in the 1930s Nancy Lancaster dined with Lady Colefax. Among the guests was the future Duchess of Windsor. 'Could you be the same Wallis Warfield I saw walking down Franklin Street in Richmond, Virginia, wearing a monocle and spats?' She was, and now there is a photograph, taken in 1914, of Wallis wearing this bizarre tenue in Michael Bloch's newest book on the Duchess. Mrs Lancaster's total recall not only of this arresting vision but the place, time, and conversation surrounding it is typical of her gimlet eye and vivid memory which form the nuggets in this book's rich seam.
These two women shared nearly identical backgrounds. Southern aristocrats, both with a passion for decoration and stylish living. Both married English grandees, both lived ever after in a kind exile; the Duchess's was from force majeure, but Mrs Lancaster's was self-imposed, and whatever the triumphs of her art, the sadnesses and successes of her life in an adopted country and a world which adopted her with open arms, it was for the rural post-Bellum Virginia of her birth and her innate Ameri- can roots she, unlike the Duchess, yearned. For Mirador, the estate where she was born and which she eventually owned and heartbreakingly, had to sell — or for Misfit, prophetic name, the marching prop- erty, the first house she ever bought. If the Duchess had a totally modern outlook, Mrs Lancaster was au fond nostalgic, a senti- ment she vehemently denies possessing, but nevertheless its implication in Robert Becker's masterly chronicle of her volatile character and near-intangible life is inescapable and ultimately deeply moving. Mrs Lancaster's influence on 20th- century decoration, decorative architecture and indeed garden design is now widespread — if relatively unsung — and this book puts that influence in its true perspective. The bands of raggle-taggle gypsies probably don't realise that without her remembered and recreated paint recipes, walls would be a blanket of Dulux Magnolia, Cheltenham lady decorators unaware that had she not brought chintz downstairs, curtains would still be dinge- colour velvet four inches off the floor. But its more than that, of course. Her taste, if not Mrs Lancaster herself, is a direct link with the 18th century, a culture that fortu- itously hibernated in the industrial revolu- tionless Southern United States of her youth, and her evocation of that time is in many ways the most fascinating part of this book.
Though rustic, Virginia was no back- water. Scions of English families constantly shot its blue-hilled valleys; beautiful Nancy's legendarily beautiful aunts and sis- ters married those scions. These unions, particularly the Astor one, gave Nancy instant entree to the highest society upon her own with Ronald Tree. That world, hating change then as much as now, warily clung to draughty, powerless corridors and comfortless rooms and lives, war-death saddened, servant-problem ridden, blown apart by debt . . . or Detmar Blow. There had been a few sidelong glances at the gilvered glamour of Sassoon-style chic, at the white lacquer and looking-glass of Mrs Maugham and Lady Mendl (for whom a Mirador was a quite different thing), but Nancy's knack of reinterpreting conven- tion, of reapplying the 18th century's tech- nique with a totally fresh eye, of breathtaking comfort and light-enhancing colour provided a new yet traditional for- mula that calmed patrician nerves. Her own magnificent houses and those she dec- orated for friends — (`Decorators, if they are any good, get very intimate with their clients') — were her showcases and it was not until the dazzling partnership with John Fowler that she actually became a business, decorating for a wide swathe of clients, among them the by-now-monocle- less Duchess, and establishing a style that became, and still is, even in its watered- down and plagiarised form, the most popu- lar decorative trend of the 20th century.
Robert Becker — perhaps willy-nilly lets Nancy Lancaster speak her life. Little use is made of diaries or letters in his text, which consists of her recollections and theories, her own idiosyncratic voice pre- sented in great chunks of bold type. It is a satisfying device, for it allows the reader to `hear' her character, humorous and wistful, dictatorial yet receptive, feel her boundless stamina. Above all, while grateful for her English life, she remained deeply proud of her Virginian stock, of a South before it became soap-opera hackneyed — a Con- federate flag always flew above her houses, but when, in an interview, I described her library as Buttah-Yellah she was on the tele- phone in a flash to remonstrate, 'We don't talk in that common Southern accent.' But although she says here, 'I can only just read and write', what poetry there is in her spoken word, especially of the colours she loved:
Hardly Pink . . . White like the white beneath a shadow . . . dirty dandelion; not brown or black or the usual grey, but the colour of a dead mouse; the Soul of Blue and candlelight, it filled up the room like a mist.
Her art, her intrinsic tie to past beauty and excellence, is vivid on every page; her world, and the way her world lived, equally so: granted her longest marriage proved that Trees really do grow on money, but few people can have sent several horses, carriages, tack, grooms, maids, cooks, chauffeurs, valets and children across the Atlantic several times a year. The creation of Ditchley must have cost an incalculable fortune, with gilding and gardens, furniture and objects, paintings and parties and plea- sure. That it was not labelled nouveau riche (Tree's was a Chicago department store inheritance) is due to the 'off-hand perfec- tion' Cecil Beaton noted. As Nancy mod- estly puts it, 'I can mix things, it's the one quality I have.'
And yet, and yet, there is the underlying sadness. Almost no reference is made, but the Tree marriage fails CI wish to God that you were my brother') and the next, to Lancaster, barely recorded. 'I'm no good at husbands, but I can find butlers.' Her children are hardly mentioned, and while her relationship with her aunt, Nancy Astor, is lovingly described, one realises, as she did, that it is the houses and the furni- ture and the servants that are her real friends.
Others have written that this book is the history of a life as the subject would like to have it believed. Maybe so. Nonetheless it is a riveting document, and anyway, we all know history is bunk. In Nancy Lancaster's case, the bunk would be an elephant's breath-coloured four-poster, trimmed in azalea-bordered silk on a verandah over- looking a datura-scented garden. At Mirador.
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