the fully qualified tantric lama

Recently I was reading about Alexandra David-Neel (1868-1969), described as an anarchist, occultist, opera singing late bloomer. What a fabulous woman. Here, Janwillem Van De Wetering reviews a biography of her…..

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“Setting out on this review, I feel a slight tremor of fear. Alexandra David-Neel, a bourgeois Parisian, became a fully qualified tantric lama in Tibet when she was 52 years old. Tantric Buddhism has been known to follow the left-handed, or demonic, way.

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Do I dare to discuss a magic entity that is calmly gazing through the screen of my word processor, wearing a rosary necklace of 108 pieces of human skull, an apron of carved human bones, and holding a phurba, the higher-sphere crystal dagger that kills ghosts but may also seriously disturb or even switch off the regular flesh-and-blooded, by penetrating our astral bodies?

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Mme. David-Neel was a compulsive traveler, an explorer, a feminist, a prolific and internationally popular writer and an acknowledged authority on Buddhist ritual. Her stay at Kum Bum monastery in Amdo Province made her familiar with spells. She did cause a sudden thunderstorm out of the blue to frighten bandits off while traveling across the arid highlands of the ”roof of the world,” she did warm herself by tumo, or ”pit of the stomach,” meditation, making flames embrace her when she ran out of fuel and food in deep snow, and on a lower spiritual plane, she did carry a modern automatic seven-shot pistol that she fired at least once, aiming at a brigand who tried to steal her last tin spoon.

museum near the monastery found here

Fortunately, she didn’t kill him. Practicing Buddhists try to avoid taking life. David-Neel did eat meat products, though, including the soles of her boots, and in a drafty tent at 50 degrees below zero she slurped maggoty stew cooked by a substance-abusing butcher. David-Neel traveled in a time when Britain ruled not only waves but also mountains. The British secret service was wary of the mysterious Frenchwoman who hobnobbed with Oriental princes and high lamas in palaces and fortresses where political plans were hatched.

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She endlessly milked money out of Philip Neel, her hardworking husband. Showing a prudish image to her royalty-paying public, she hid an affair with a stagehand, a live-in relationship with a fellow artist in France and an invitation to be seduced on her future husband’s yacht in Tunisia. Perhaps, if we may follow her biographers’ hint, she participated in tantric sex, the free-for-all physical activity in which masters and disciples partake in order to raise their spirits toward detachment. She disapproved of this ”promiscuity of embarrassments,” but then, you see, she wasn’t really there, she was just hiding in a hayloft. (She peeked.) She had a violent temper that very few – indeed, only Aphur Yongden, her faithful associate, and, in her old age, her secretary, Marie-Madeleine Peyronnet -were able to handle.

homes for sale in Tunisia here

Calling herself a rational Buddhist, she tried to live well, taking a hot bath every day (a coolie carried the bathtub), eating gourmet meals (she never cooked herself), riding good horses and being carried by sturdy bearers. When Lhasa, the political and spiritual capital, couldn’t be reached that way, she walked, crawled, lived on boiled water and dirt, became seriously ill, begged, and pretended to be a servant to her servant (who later became her adopted son and companion, Lama Yongden, a source of much jealousy to her husband). She reached the forbidden holy city, the first foreign woman to ever do so.

Lama Yongden found here

In 1928 Alexandra legally separated from Philippe, but they continued to exchange letters and he kept supporting her till his death in 1941. Alexandra settled in Provence, and continued to study and write till her death at age nearly 101.

the pursuit of fish and fetish

Mary Kingsley (1862 – 1900) was an English writer and explorer. She was the daughter  of doctor, traveller and writer George Kingsley and the niece of novelists Charles Kingsley and Henry Kingsley.

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Dr. Kingsley died in February 1892 and Mrs. Kingsley followed a few months later. Freed from family responsibilities and with a small inheritance, Mary was able to travel as she had always dreamed, her reason for going being “the pursuit of fish and fetish“. 

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As Kingsley set off on her first trip to Africa she was referred to a new “French book of phrases in common use in Dahomey.” The opening sentence of the book was “Help, I am drowning.”, followed by “Get up, you lazy scamps!” This was shortly followed by the question “Why has not this man been buried?” and its expected answer “It is fetish that has killed him, and he must lie here exposed with nothing on him until only the bones remain.”

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Mary landed in Sierra Leone on 17 August 1893 and pressed on into Angola . She lived with local people who taught her necessary skills for surviving in the African jungles, and often went into dangerous areas alone. She longed to study ‘cannibal’ peoples and their traditional religious practices, commonly referred to as fetishes during the Victorian Era. 

While in Gabon, Mary Kingsley travelled by canoe up the Ogooué River where she collected specimens of previously unknown fish, three of which were later named after her. After meeting the Fang people and travelling through uncharted Fang territory, she climbed 13,760 ft Mount Cameroon by a route not previously attempted by any other European. Her adventures also included a crocodile attacking her canoe and being caught in a tornado.

more tornado images here

Once when staying in a Fang hut, a violent smell alerted her to a bag suspended from the roof. Emptying the contents into her hat, she found a human hand, three big toes, four eyes, two ears and other portions of the human frame. She showed no squeamishness, saying “I learnt that the Fang will eat their fellow friendly tribesfolk, yet they like to keep a little something belonging to them as a memento.”

you can purchase this cannibal hat here

She travelled in West Africa wearing the same clothes that she habitually wore in England: long, black, trailing skirts, tight waists, high collars, and a small fur cap. These same clothes saved her life when she fell into a game pit, the many petticoats protecting her from being impaled on the stakes below. Later that same day, returning to her moored canoe, she found a hippopotamus standing over it and “scratched him behind the ear with my umbrella until we parted on good terms.”

mouth of a hippo found here

When she returned home in November 1895 Kingsley was greeted by journalists who were eager to interview her. Reports in the papers portrayed her as a “New Woman”, an image which she did not embrace. She distanced herself from any feminist movement claims, arguing that she had never worn trousers during her expedition.

Women in trousers found here

Mary Kingsley upset the Church of England when she criticised missionaries for attempting to change the people of Africa. She defended aspects of African life that had shocked many English people, including polygamy. For example explaining the “seething mass of infamy, degradation and destruction going on among the Coast native… as the natural consequence of the breaking down of an ordered polygamy into a disordered monogamy“.

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Here she describes the process of bartering with natives with a certain sense of humour. “All my trader stuff was by now exhausted, and I had to start selling my own belongings, and for the first time in my life I felt the want of a big outfit. My own clothes I certainly did insist on having more for, pointing out that they were rare and curious. A dozen white ladies’ blouses sold well. I cannot say they looked well when worn by a brawny warrior in conjunction with nothing else but red paint and a bunch of leopard tails, particularly when the warrior failed to tie the strings at the back. But I did not hint at this, and I quite realize that a pair of stockings can be made to go further than we make them by using one at a time and putting the top part over the head and letting the rest of the garment float on the breeze.”

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part angel, part demon

After reading Andrew Barrow’s heartfelt memoir about the short life of his younger brother I did a little googling to find out more about him. Among other things, he’s also the author of this obituary for the poet Philip O’Connor

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“As thin as a skeleton, his face already eroded, his smile never calm, he lived off doughnuts and Woodbines, ogled at women and spoke in cryptograms, spoonerisms and jingles, delivering sentences backwards and falling about in drunken exhilaration.

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Philip O’Connor’s life had been full of folly from the beginning. Born in Leighton Buzzard in 1916, delivered – he claimed – by the King’s physician, and encouraged by his mother, a fallen gentlewoman of mixed Asiatic, Dutch and Burmese blood, to consider himself descended through his father from the last King of Ireland, O’Connor had a disorderly childhood. Taken to France as a baby, he was abandoned at the age of four with Madame Tillieux, matronly proprietor of a patisserie in the seaside resort of Wimereux near Boulogne. Two years later, his mother returned to claim him and was met with violent protests. “Non!” screamed young Philip, scurrying to Madame’s black skirts. “Ce n’est past Maman, t’es Maman. ‘Suis Francais.”

Wimereux found here

Back in England a few years later, O’Connor was again adopted, this time by a one-legged bachelor civil servant who wore size 13 boots and owned a small wooden hut on Box Hill near Dorking. In circumstances unthinkable in today’s suspicious climate, here the dreamy little lad and his shy misogynist guardian set up house.

NOT this one legged man (found here)

By the time he left school, O’Connor’s megalomania or messianism was already pronounced: “The word ‘fool’ had fastened itself sharply, hissingly on my tongue.” Autocratic bad temper, omniscience and almost epileptic exhibitionism had become his trademarks.

O’Connor’s extreme outsider status was reinforced in his late teens by a longish period tramping across England – an experience which formed the basis for his book Vagrancy published in 1963. His time on the road was followed by a six-month stay in the Maudsley Hospital, where he was diagnosed as the youngest schizophrenic in the ward. He then bounced, or fell, back into Fitzrovia and into a marriage with the daughter of a Scottish lawyer, whose inheritance he was to squander on pate de foie gras and percussion instruments.

Gene Krupa found here

The marriage ended after five years and O’Connor embarked upon a number of other relationships, fathering an unknown number of attractive and intelligent children, in whose upbringing he was to play little part.

Some of his wives and girlfriends attempted to tame him and at various times O’Connor earned a living by pushing an old man round Salisbury in a bath-chair, wielding the lights at the Bedford Music Hall in Camden Town, and as an operator on the continental telephone exchange. In this last role, he boasted that he had eavesdropped on a private conversation between the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

bath-chairs found here

Along the way he took up with a woman who earned her living taking baths with older men, then improved his lot by marrying a wealthy woman who financed a high-living fling that ended when her money and her sanity ran out. (After she tried to kill him, she was confined to a mental hospital and Philip O’Connor went on to other lovers.)

In material and emotional terms, O’Connor’s life was stabilised by his meeting at the age of 51 with the young, beautiful and beguiling American Panna Grady, whose self-effacing generosity to artists and writers in her New York apartment in the Dakota building had been on an epic scale. O’Connor began a love affair which was to last for the rest of his life.

Panna Grady and friends (including Andy Warhol) found here

O’Connor and Grady never married, but they created an atmosphere of strange fastidiousness around them in which O’Connor’s hisses and cackles were matched by a neurasthenic fear of the sounds and movements of others. This private world hedged in by Grady’s antique screens and Chinese tapestries was rarely penetrated or understood by others, though O’Connor could on occasions be an exhilarating host. Reluctant to shake hands – he was more likely to extend a dangling finger – he had considerable skills as a cook, dabbled interestingly with chickens but was just as likely to offer visitors a glass of boiling rum as a tumbler of the best champagne.

It could be argued that Philip O’Connor never grew up. Most of his life he avoided responsibility for others and himself. He was, said Stephen Spender, “part angel, part demon”.

In his own words, he “bathed in life and dried myself on the typewriter“.

Lego Vintage Typewriter found here

by hook or by crook

Theodore Hook was an English author who launched a Sunday paper in 1820

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He was a famous practical joker who perpetrated a jest that disturbed and amused all England. This was the famous Berners Street hoax. Berners Street in 1810 was a quiet street, inhabited by well-to-do families and people of social importance. On the morning of November 26, soon after breakfast, a wagon-load of coals drew up before the door of Mrs. Tottingham, a widow living at No. 54. A van-load of furniture followed, then a hearse with a coffin, and a train of mourning coaches.

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Two fashionable physicians, a dentist, and an accoucheur drove up as near as they could to the door, wondering why so many lumbering vehicles blocked the way. Six men brought a chamber-organ; a brewer sent several barrels of ale; a grocer sent a cart-load of potatoes. Coachmakers, clock-makers, carpet manufacturers, confectioners, wig-makers, mantua-makers, opticians, and curiosity-dealers followed with samples of their wares.

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From all quarters trooped in coachmen, footmen, cooks, housemaids, and nursery-maids, in quest of situations. To crown all, dignitaries came in their carriages,—the Commander-in-Chief, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chief Justice, a Cabinet minister, a governor of the Bank of England, and the Lord Mayor.

housemaid found here

The latter—one among many who speedily recognized that all had been the victims of some gigantic hoax—drove to Marlborough Street police office, and stated that he had received a letter from a lady in Berners Street, to the effect that she was at death’s door, that she wished to make a deposition upon oath, and that she would deem it a great favor if his lordship would call upon her. The other dignitaries had been appealed to in a similar way.

London police women found here

Police-officers were despatched to maintain order in Berners Street. They found it choked up with vehicles, jammed and interlocked with one another. The drivers were infuriated and disappointed tradesmen were clamoring for vengeance. Some of the vans and goods were overturned and broken; a few barrels of ale had fallen prey to the large crowd that was maliciously enjoying the fun.

overturned car found here

All day and far into the night this state of things continued, meanwhile, the old lady and the inmates of adjoining houses were in abject terror. Every one soon saw that a hoax had been perpetrated, but Hook’s connection with it was not discovered till long afterwards. He had noticed the quietness of the neighborhood, and had laid a wager with a brother-wag, a certain Henry Higginson, who afterwards became a clergyman, that he would make Berners Street the talk of all London.

Charlotte Bronte’s dolls house found here

A door-plate had furnished him with Mrs. Tottingham’s name, and he had spent three days in writing the letters which brought the crowd to her door. At the appointed time he and Mr. Higginson had posted themselves in a lodging just opposite, which he had rented for the purpose of enjoying the scene. He deemed it expedient, however, to go off quickly into the country and there remain incognito for a time. Had he been publicly known as the author of the outrageous hoax, he might have fared badly.

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sealing wax and other things

Writer Leo Tolstoy came from a rather eccentric family, with Fyodor Ivanovich Tolstoy (1782 – 1846) being perhaps the most unruly of all his relatives.

His comrades at that time described Fyodor Tolstoy as an excellent shooter and a brave fighter. His wild character, along with his taste for women and card games, gave him frequent cause for arguments with his comrades and higher officers that often ended in a violation of discipline.

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In 1803 Fyodor went on a circumnavigation of the world as a member of the sloop Nadezhda. His behavior on board, where he was unencumbered by official duties, was very unpredictable. He often provoked quarrels with the crew, including the captain himself and played jokes on those that he did not like: for example, once he intoxicated a priest and when the latter lay dead drunk on the floor, Tolstoy stuck his beard to the deck boards with sealing wax. When the priest came to, he was obliged to cut off his beard to free himself.

poppy seed beard found here

On another occasion, when the Captain was out, Tolstoy sneaked into his cabin with an orangutan that he had bought while the ship was moored on an island in the Pacific Ocean. He took out the logbook and showed the ape how to cover the paper with ink. Then he left the orangutan alone in the cabin, drawing on the notebook. When the Captain returned, all his records had been destroyed.

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Similar behavior more than once caused Tolstoy to be put under arrest. Finally, the Captain lost patience and abandoned his passenger during a stop at Kamchatka. From Kamchatka Tolstoy managed to get to Sitka island, where he spent several months among Alaskan natives.

Russian Church in Sitka found here

During his sojourn on Sitka, he acquired multiple tattoos, which he later displayed with pride to curious acquaintances. The afore-mentioned orangutan, which was left on land with Tolstoy and whose later fate is unknown, gave rise to a great deal of gossip in aristocratic circles. According to one of the rumors, during his stay in Kamchatka, Tolstoy lived together with the ape; according to others, he ate it.

Alaskan tattoos found here

Tolstoy returned to European Russia via the Far East in August 1805. He developed a love of gambling and became famous for it during his years in Moscow. He did not hide the fact that he sometimes cheated. According to the memoirs of his contemporaries, he did not like to rely on luck during a game, preferring, by way of cardsharping, to “play for certain”, as he liked to say.

image by Georges de La Tour

Even more famous was Tolstoy’s participation in a number of duels, the reasons for which were often found in card games. It is unknown how many duels he fought, but some accounts state that he killed eleven men altogether. In his early years in Moscow, Tolstoy’s love affairs provided copious material for rumor and gossip in society. He married the gypsy dancer Avdotya Tugayeva on January 10, 1821, but only after having lived with her for several years.

19th century gypsy found here

Tolstoy suffered greatly from the death of his children, especially when his eldest daughter, Sarra, died at the age of seventeen. At the end of his life he  grew devout and considered the death of his eleven children to be God’s punishment for his killing of eleven men in duels.

He carefully noted the names of those he had killed in his diary. He had twelve children, who all died in youth, except for two daughters. As each child died, he would cross out the name of one person he had killed and wrote the word “quit” (repaid). When he lost his eleventh child, he crossed out the last of the names and said, “Well, thank God, at least my curly-haired gipsy girl will live.”

Harvey Keitel in Ridley Scott’s The Duellists

Tolstoy died in 1846, after a short illness, in the presence of his wife and only surviving daughter Praskovya. Before his death he summoned a priest and confessed to him for several hours. He was buried in the Vagankavo Cemetery. His widow Avdotya outlived him by fifteen years but died a violent death: she was stabbed by her own cook in 1861.

Algie

Algernon Swinburne (1837-1909) was a talented writer, remembered best perhaps for his poetry. According to Colin Wilson’s The Misfits, he was also a sexual pervert, although of a fairly harmless variety.

Swinburne by Rossetti

“Ever since he was a child he had an obsession with being flogged. Most biographers assume that this began at Eton, which was notorious for its ‘swishings’ – one headmaster was said to be more familiar with his pupil’s behinds than their faces – but it was almost certainly an inborn tendency.

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At the age of twelve, Swinburne was sent to Eton where he lived with his tutor, James Joynes, and his wife. Joynes would prepare the flogging room with burnt scent or make Swinburne put Eau de Cologne on his face before being beaten, which Swinburne found greatly increased his pleasure.

In later life he expressed nostalgia for the ‘glorious Eton beatings’ and said he would ‘give anything for a photo taken at the right moment on the flogging block – say the tenth cut or so.’

Eton flogging block found here

In 1866, with the publication of Poems and Ballads, Victorian England realised with horror that their neo-classical poet was an advocate of vice and profligacy, and a disciple of that unspeakable Frenchman, Baudelaire. Swinburne’s response to this was to become more defiant and to increase his intake of brandy. At the Arts Club in Hanover Square, he drank himself unconscious with dreary frequency, usually passing through a stage in which he talked in a loud voice about lesbianism, sodomy and sadism, or shrieked obscenities while he performed an impromptu dance like a demented puppet.

Baudelaire

In 1867, American actress Adah Mencken knocked at his door. She had been asked by Swinburne’s friends to seduce the poet, one rumour asserting that Rossetti had paid her £10.00 to do so. She spent that night, and many subsequent nights, in Swinburne’s rooms but is said to have returned the fee to Rossetti, admitting that she could not ‘get the poet up to scratch’ or convince him that biting was no real substitute for intercourse.

Adah

Below: an extract from Swinburne’s Atlanta in Calydon (1865)

For winter’s rains and ruins are over,

And all the season of snows and sins;

The days dividing lover and lover,

The light that loses, the night that wins;

And time remembered is grief forgotten,

And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,

And in green underwood and cover

Blossom by blossom the spring begins.

trapped by a fetishist

It appears to me that more people in the arts have polygamous relationships than us ordinary folk. Or maybe no one writes about the ordinary folk who are having them

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“Wonder Woman was created by Harvard-trained psychologist Dr. William Moulton Marston, who wrote the stories under the pseudonym Charles Moulton. Marston is also known as the inventor, or at least the most enthusiastic advocate, of the polygraph lie detector. Marston led a colorful and unconventional life. In his first of several popular psychology books, Emotions of Normal People, he discussed emotional states in terms of “elementary behaviour units” in the activities of dominance, compliance, submission and inducement.

One study in Marston’s book involves the “baby party,” a strange sorority ritual held at Jackson College. Freshman initiates were required to dress like babies, bound, prodded with sticks, and wrestled when they resisted. One of Marston’s theories was that America would become a matriarchy, and in many of his writings he espoused the view that women could and would use sexual enslavement to achieve dominance over men.  His ideas landed him the post of consulting psychologist for the women’s magazine Family Circle.

order your adult baby dresses here

His research assistant on that study, Olive Byrne, was also the woman who, as Olive Richard, conducted the seminal interview published in Family Circle. In fact, Olive moved in with Marston and his wife Elizabeth. William Marston fathered two children each by each woman, and the extended family lived together harmoniously.

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Artist Sir Stanley Spencer also had an unconventional love life.

“He viewed sexual union as a sacrament. ‘A man raises a woman’s dress with the same passionate admiration and love as the priest raises the Host on the altar,’ he wrote.

Bardot

Stanley met his first wife, Hilda Carline in 1923 and they eventually married in 1925. Their first daughter, Shirin, was born the same year and their second, Unity, in 1930.

In 1933 a fellow artist, Patricia Preece, began to model for him, first in a conventional way – there is a portrait of her in striped jersey in front of his gramophone – and later wearing increasingly few clothes.

Patricia Preece – Self Portrait

Stanley quickly became infatuated. Hilda wrote to a friend: ‘She vamped him to a degree unbelievable except in cinemas. If he went to her house, she always received him half or a quarter dressed. He showered her with presents, from the lacy lingerie in which he painted her, to gifts of cash.

Carline divorced Spencer in 1937. A week later he married Patricia, knowing she, however, was a lesbian. She continued to live with her partner, and though she frequently posed nude for her husband, refused to consummate the marriage.

Patricia found herself trapped by a fetishist. As she said years later, he bought her ‘innumerable pairs of bright, beastly shoes with enormously high heels, in which he stared at my legs and feet with fascination‘. When Spencer’s bizarre relationship with Patricia finally fell apart (though she would never grant a divorce), he returned to visiting Hilda.

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Then there’s Australian actor Jack Thompson who spent 15 years in a ménage à trois with two sisters, Leona and Bunkie.

“Know how difficult it is living with the woman you love?” Thompson is fond of saying. “Try doubling it”. Though the living arrangement came to an end, Thompson has no regrets, “I wouldn’t have missed it for quids.”

Glenda Jackson & Jack Thompson 1975

Perhaps most famous of all were the complicated goings on of the Bloomsbury Set.

Duncan Grant had always been actively homosexual but a relationship blossomed with Vanessa Bell who was in a relationship with his friend, artist Roger Fry. Grant eventually moved in with Vanessa and her two sons by her husband Clive Bell. Then Grant’s new lover, David Garnett arrived.

Vanessa Bell aged 2

Relationships with Clive Bell remained amicable, and he too stayed with them for long periods fairly often – sometimes accompanied by his own mistress, Mary Hutchinson. Vanessa very much wanted a child by Duncan, and became pregnant in the spring of 1918. Although it is generally assumed that Duncan’s sexual relations with Vanessa ended in the months before Angelica was born, they continued to live together for more than 40 years.

Bloomsbury

lucky lord dexter

“Lord” Timothy Dexter (1748-1806)  was an eccentric colonial merchant who had little in the way of formal schooling.

Not this eccentric Tim

“Because he was basically uneducated, his business sense was peculiar but extremely lucky. Somebody inspired him to send warming pans for sale to West Indies, a tropical area. His captain sold them as ladles for local molasses industry and made a good profit. Next Dexter sent wool mittens to the same place. Asian merchants bought them for export to Siberia.

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His next venture was selling coal to Newcastle, which should have been a sure failure. His ships happened to arrive in the time of a coalminer’s strike and potential customers were actually desperate.

He exported bibles to East Indies and stray cats to Caribbean islands and again made a profit. He also hoarded whalebone by mistake, but ended up selling them profitably as a support material for corsets.

Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter

Members of the New England high society could hardly contain their dislike for this ignorant but newly-rich upstart, and refused to socialize with him. His relationships with his “nagging” wife, daughter, and son were not particularly good, either. This became evident when he started telling visitors that his wife had died (despite the fact that she was still very much alive) and that the “drunken nagging woman” who frequented the building was simply her ghost.

Punishment for nagging wives

He bought a new house in Newburyport and decorated it with minarets, a golden eagle on the top of the cupola, a mausoleum for himself and a garden of 40 wooden statues of famous men, including George Washington, William Pitt, Napoleon Bonaparte, Thomas Jefferson and of course, himself. People flocked to gawk at this collection.

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Dexter also had his own way with household staff. He had a protective black housekeeper named Lucy, whom he claimed to be a daughter of an African prince. Other servants included a large idiot, a fortune teller and his  own poet laureate.

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At the age of 50 he decided to write a book – A Pickle for the Knowing Ones or Plain Truth in a Homespun Dress. He wrote about himself and complained about politicians, clergy and his wife. The book contained 8,847 words and 33,864 letters, but absolutely no punctuation, and capital letters were sprinkled about at random.

One day he began to wonder what people would say about him after he died. He proceeded to announce his death and to prepare for a burial. About 3,000 people appeared for the wake. However, Dexter’s wife refused to cry for his passing, for which he later caned her, and so he decided not to appear to his guests at all. Timothy Dexter actually died in 1806.

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you look like a fabulous chicken

In 1962, writer Liz Smith had dreams of being discovered as a newer sexier version of Estelle Parsons. Hanging out with her friends Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton gave her plenty to write about…..

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“While we wait for Elizabeth to have Alexandre do her hair, I overhear a secretary ordering lingerie from Henri Bendel. Someone is always ordering lingerie around the Burtons. You visualize a world of hotel suites with lovely once-worn panties, bras, slips and body stockings left behind and delighted maids exclaiming over the windfall. Richard, on the other hand, claims to have only six sets of drawers to his name. He declares either he or his wife washes out a pair nightly.

lingerie made from discarded cans

Elizabeth is wearing a coffee-colored suede coat trimmed with a dramatic flounce of fox at the bottom and a matching explosion at the top. Richard is very Southern Californian in a white cardigan and wraparound sunglasses. Alexandre has on something by Cardin, and there’s a bodyguard who is neither introduced, nor distinguished by tailoring. We pile into a robin’s-egg-blue Rolls to go two blocks. All in all, we are as likely to escape notice as an orange tie on St. Patrick’s Day.

nurse’s uniforms by Pierre Cardin

Grand entrance into David Webb’s jewelry emporium on 57th Street. ”I am omniscient and triprescient,” Richard murmurs, as the place dissolves into elegant pandemonium. People are springing to attention as if we were wearing stocking masks.

Elizabeth says to the salesman: ”Well, look, Andrew, what will these three pieces be with my spectacular discount?” She indicates leopard, zebra and serpent rings. ”Never mind — send them to the hotel, and these, too.” She points to a $2,500 lighter and a $29,000 shell purse…..

Zebra Handbag $4995.00

Weeks later she accompanies them to a party in Paris.

The Burtons enter in a crush. Elizabeth is wearing glittering emeralds and white egret feathers worked into her hair with diamonds. As she wedges her way past, I whisper, ”You look like a fabulous chicken.”

She blows a feather out of her face: ”You mean I look like a chicken’s behind.”

Elizabeth

She wiggles her fingers and says, ”Bye, bye,” as she goes down the hall like a delicious snowdrift on legs……

Want to eat like the Burton’s did? Here’s their recipe for Chipped Beef a la Krupp Diamond:

Chipped beef

Flour

Butter

Milk

Curry powder

Hard-boiled eggs.

Shred the chipped beef, dredge in flour. Saute in melted butter in a hot skillet. In a saucepan, make a white cream sauce using three tablespoons of flour and a little milk. Add several pinches of curry powder to this. Serve over the beef. Add a few hard-boiled eggs to dip in sauce, or slice them and place on top. (Elizabeth’s verdict: ”We eat this at high noon; 11 a.m. if it’s ready!”

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pawpaw for the passionate

Born in Liverpool England in 1852, Edmund James Banfield came to Australia as a boy with his journalist father. The young E.J. also grew up to be a journalist but suffered a breakdown in 1897 and was given 6 months to live.

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It was then that he and his wife Bertha obtained a lease on Dunk Island off the coast of Queensland. Originally named Coonanglebah by the Aborigines, it had been renamed Dunk by Captain Cook in honour of Montagu Dunk, the Earl of Sandwich.

(image caricatured Lord Sandwich slipping money into the pocket of an attractive carrot-seller, said to be one of his usual amusements)

Bertha and E.J arrived with very little apart from camping and gardening equipment and a small boat. But their new home had plenty of coconuts, avocados, oysters and fish and it didn’t take long for them to create an enviable paradise. In 1908, E.J. published “Confessions of a Beachcomber” which prompted hundreds of people to write asking him how to find their own tropical island.

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The profits from this book enabled the Banfields to invite a former servant, Essie, to move in with them as a companion for Bertha. In subsequent books he theorised that the human race could thrive on a diet composed entirely of bananas. He was also devoted to the pawpaw and assured readers that it made a woman more beautiful and a man more virile.

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Dunk Island was the location used in filming “Age of Consent” starring James Mason and a 22 year old Helen Mirren. It was on this film set that Mason met his second wife, Clarissa Kaye who played his ex girlfriend. Their bedroom scene was cut by the censors who deemed it too hot. Nothing to do with the 103 degree temperature she was suffering at the time

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