An abundance of desires and tastes overwhelms me upon entering this house. On the first floor, Warhol’s portrait of Prince Charles appears to greet if not oversee the visitor. When Warhol painted him, the prince was young, unblemished; but recent history has cast its shadow, and the image is now marked by trouble. Turquoise-green, the portrait’s background, is the color Hughes selected for the adjoining room’s walls—“the arsenic room,” he calls it — where the Tudors dominate. A naive portrait of Queen Elizabeth I claims center stage, while a Duncan Phyfe card table, with ornate legs—“dolphin supports”— stands decorously in one of the corners. In the other room on this floor, where Hughes now rests and sleeps on a high-tech hospital bed, a Warhol “blue Jackie Kennedy” in a gilt frame hangs above a Tudor portrait and, separated by a great, elaborate mirror, the pair repeats on the other side. The American and English royals keep Hughes company, their coupling a visual pun that might amuse him.
Objects — Russian, English, Mexican, Native American, or hailing from New Orleans — fraternize in the house, sharing space across time and culture. Near the staircase, a twentieth-century American naive or outsider painting of a snake charmer stops me: She’s a black woman, in a green leaf-skirt, with a green snake clenched ferociously in her teeth and another wrapped around her arm. But my eyes dart everywhere, and everywhere there’s something unusual. I’m drawn to some pieces more than others, or perhaps must simply focus my eyes someplace.
In Hughes’s former bedroom on the second floor, a Northwest Indian spoon and a mask from a Jemez Indian tribe arrest me, then a cabinet — bursting with too many Mickey Mouses, a Pee Wee Herman — almost screams with plaintive joy. Arranged or deranged, crammed together behind glass, the toys are poignant. They seem like effigies — George Washington on a horse, Mortimer Snerd. The cabinet holds a menagerie of memories and gives a sense of how, when recalling resonant childhood, associations overflow uncontrollably.
Moving away from the colorful old toys, I spy a silver bowl containing antique magnifying glasses. I love magnifying glasses and wonder why Hughes does. A man who treasures detail might cherish an object that can make the finer things in life bigger. Yet the glass also exaggerates flaws. Hughes is a person, I’ve read, who sought and demanded perfection; the magnifying glass suggests the scrutiny necessary to achieve it.
Everything has a place here, a reason to be where it is, selected for its color, shape, design, history, visual pleasure and, like a writer spinning a story, Hughes knows that each object in its place makes, like every sentence and word, a world unto itself, but juxtaposed with others, cobbles together new worlds. Looking at the three pieces of statuary near the bed — a Chinese or Japanese Genji, made of wood; and two female figures, nineteenth-century English, cast from Canova originals — I think: Maybe he didn’t become a novelist because he loves excess. Nothing succeeds like excess. But a writer throws away so much; one excludes, pares down, crosses out. Omissions are as significant as what’s on the page. Hughes wanted everything around him, all his ideas and possibilities, and he bought and exhibited as much as he could. About his wishes and hopes, he was voracious.
From Hughes’s room on the first floor, the voice of his registered nurse travels in and out of earshot. He’s reading to Hughes from a biography of Napoleon. Of all his senses, Hughes’s hearing functions best now, and the nurse reads to him daily. Hughes likes biographies especially. From them, perhaps, he can get a person’s measure, learn how others’ beginnings and ends may have been radically different, hear how they failed or thrived, and lose himself in details of lives he might have written — collected — for himself.
On the top floor, in the study, is a magnificent Wooton secretary, a desk from 1876, with many compartments and divisions, a warren for secrets. Near it hangs Warhol’s Portrait of an American Male, an unknown and typical Midwestern-looking American man. Hughes calls him “Mr. Nobody.” Perhaps it’s on the wall in deference to Warhol, whose fascination with the rich, famous and powerful was matched by an equally strong interest in anonymity and powerlessness. For a time, the Automat was Warhol’s favorite restaurant; and according to Bob Colacello, former editor of Interview magazine, he wanted his early work to be called “Common Art,” not Pop Art. But “Mr. Nobody” might also be hanging in Hughes’s study as a reminder: A fictive fellow knows how fragile identity is, how difficult to maintain, and that the possibility of failure hangs over any self-creation.
Few of us, I think as I leave his house and look back, live out our fantasies as fully as Hughes has lived his. Now housebound, unable to move, often unable to speak, he’s visible in what he’s collected. These things are who he is now. Hughes resides in his portrait of the Duke of Buckingham by Daniel Mytens, Indian masks, carved human skull, Stieff Mickey Mouses, Lichtenstein painting of George Washington, stuffed reindeer head, Cecil Beaton self-portrait, dressing table by Quervelle, Zuni Pueblo masks, early-nineteenth-century American silhouettes, wreaths of dried flowers, nineteenth-century Russian sofa (purportedly once owned by Tsar Alexander I), photograph of art dealer and friend Thomas Amman, nineteenth-century mahogany sideboard, twenty-seven pairs of shoes neatly arranged in his dressing room, silver collection, Wedgwood vases, Audubon prints, eighteenth-century costumes (which he once wore), black painted wooden screen, nineteenth-century petit point Aubusson pillows, photograph of his father as a young man, twentieth-century African funerary marker, Venetian glass. If things could only speak, I think.
C is for Cool
White Cool
Chet Baker could break your heart with his romantic trumpet sound and melancholy way of phrasing a ballad. With his Rebel Without a Cause looks, Baker’s sound and image could hook you “in about 20 seconds,” an ex-girlfriend tells Bruce Weber in Let’s Get Lost. Photographer/filmmaker Weber, who was 16 when he became a Chet Baker fan, calls his movie “a loving record of the time” he and his crew spent with Baker. A compelling and disturbing homage to a jazz great who got hooked, in his twenties, on heroin, Let’s Get Lost also celebrates the American jazz scene of the 50s and 60s.
Weber’s eye fixes on beauty and style in the movie as it does in his art photography and his commercial work for Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren. In those ads, young men very much like young Chet Bakers flirt with young women — images that evoke time passing and the heartbreak of romance. A sense of the fleeting moment and the vulnerability to heartbreak pervade Let’s Get Lost. With Baker as its enigmatic star, the movie follows beauty and brilliance turning tormented, distorted and sad. Baker is the cool, romantic guy who stepped from day into night to live in semi-darkness. Shot in black and white, sometimes with a hand-held camera and always with startling immediacy by cinematographer Jeff Preiss, the movie lingers with Baker in film noir shadows. Preiss recalls, “When Chet didn’t want to be filmed, he’d just walk into a spot that wasn’t lit.”
To Weber the film is “about that thin line between love and fascination. We take into our own lives what the people we admire give us and we fantasize about it. Sometimes the fantasy is so far out of reach that when we meet that person he can’t live up to it.” Bruce Weber realized a fantasy. He filmed Baker in recording sessions, interviewed his ex-wives, children, lovers, the musicians he played with. He collected footage and thousands of stills of Baker, created scenes with actors and actresses for Baker to star in. Says Weber, “We spent a lot of time with Chet. And when we first met we were taken in by the romance of his music and the way he looked, and a little bit of his lifestyle when he was young. Then we realized we took it on ourselves because we kind of fell for him and we wanted to change him. But Chet never disappointed me, personally or musically.”