EPILOGUE

Picasso, Portrait of Jacqueline, ink wash, 1960; given to JR by the artist

For the next sixteen years I saw nothing of Douglas, but that did not stop him from campaigning against me. When the widow of the Canadian tycoon Sir James Dunn (soon to be the wife of another tycoon from New Brunswick, Lord Beaverbrook) put me in charge of the Dunn International Exhibition of Contemporary Art—a mini-biennial that opened at the Beaverbrook Museum in Fredericton and ended up at the Tate in London in 1962—Douglas wheedled his way onto the organizing committee and proceeded to harass me at every turn. As a cat’s-paw Douglas settled on an ambitious young porter who had prevailed upon a friend of ours at the Birmingham Art Gallery to recommend him for a job at Sotheby’s. Bruce Chatwin, he was called, and at Douglas’s behest he would appear in my office with a supercilious smirk on his pretty face and proceed to relay insultingly officious messages. A call to Peter Wilson, Sotheby’s chairman, who used Bruce to soften up special clients, put an end to this little game. When Bruce subsequently reinvented himself as a writer we became friends—sort of.

Ten years later, Douglas was still up to the same tricks. When he heard that Artemis, the international art fund, might appoint me managing director, he wrote to the chairman, Baron Léon Lambert, “You are not going to add luster to the shield of Artemis by employing him.” Léon promptly hired me. He also gave me the libelous letter. Friends advised me to sue Douglas, but given the beneficial effects of his intervention, I could hardly claim to have been damaged. Besides, a lawsuit would have given Douglas too much pleasure.

Back at Castille, Douglas was foolish enough to let Marie, the devoted housekeeper, leave. She had looked after the place ever since we moved in, and had grown accustomed to Douglas’s moods and manipulative ways. She knew when to mollify him and when to stand up to him. None of her successors could tolerate his meanness of spirit and purse for long. Resentful servants were thought to have organized the theft of many of the smaller paintings and drawings in the ground-floor rooms that took place in 1974. Douglas was convinced that this was an inside job, convinced that both he and the watchdog had been drugged and that the servants had let in the local Mafia. How else could he and the dog have slept through it? Nothing was ever proved, and Douglas was obliged to retain the servants in his employ. Since there were no burglar alarms and no proper bolts on the shutters, the theft would have been an easy job. To make matters worse, the collection had become so valuable that Douglas had long ceased to insure it. In due course he received a ransom note, supposedly for a million dollars, but refused to buy back his own property. He also received death threats. Since a million dollars was a fraction of the pictures’ true value, Douglas soon changed his mind and tried, repeatedly and unsuccessfully, to contact the robbers. Among the stolen Picassos was the wonderful nude drawing of Geneviève Laporte that the artist had given the two of us.

Picasso, The Young Bacchus, pen and ink, 1906; one of the many Picassos stolen from Castille in 1974

The burglary terrified Douglas—terrified him into leaving Castille. He had some difficulty finding a buyer; there was so little land, so little protection. The château was finally bought by a Greek couple from Marseille. They proceeded to decorate the château in a piss-elegant orientalist manner, to judge by photographs in Architectural Digest. “When the present owners acquired the property,” the magazine claimed, “they found little more than vacant rooms and a few pieces of furniture with lugubrious echoes of provincial France.” So much for the monumental Picasso wall that Douglas had hated to leave behind.

In the interest of security, Douglas moved into three small apartments in an ultra-safe, bunkerlike building in Monte Carlo, which had been erected on land reclaimed from the sea. The rooms were poky and low-ceilinged, so some of the more important paintings had to be sold. When I eventually saw what remained of the collection, and how diminished it looked in its elegant if cramped new quarters, I was saddened. The decor turned out to be the handiwork of Billy McCarty—an attractive decorator who had replaced the men’s haberdasher, Mr. Fish, in Douglas’s life. “I’ve adopted him,” Douglas told me with paternal pride when we met again in Monte Carlo in 1981. He explained that he did not want his “ghastly family” laying claim to his estate. “That’s why I had the adoption done in France and not England. Under the code Napoléon, everything I have goes to my son. There’s nothing, absolutely nothing, my family can do about it—besides, it’s fun having a son.”

I had gone to Monte Carlo to write an article about the place and on the very first night had come face-to-face with my nemesis in the bar of the Hôtel de Paris. In the course of the next week we kept each other company. Douglas had lost much of his menace, which enabled us to be affable with each other; otherwise he had not aged well. While his body, not to speak of his self-esteem, had ballooned, his intellect—as happens in Monte Carlo—had done the reverse. Occasionally a flash of wit or méchanceté would shine through the querulousness, but there was little trace of the passionate mentor who had opened up the world of modern art to me and so many others—little trace, either, of the mercurial manipulator who had been the source of so much laughter and so much mischief. The narcissistic cement that had once held the components of Douglas’s character had crumbled.

Douglas’s dégringolade stemmed partly from drink, partly from ill health (his feet had given out), and partly from a terminal row he had had with Picasso shortly before the latter’s death. Jacqueline told me what had happened. One evening, circa 1970, Douglas appeared unannounced at Notre-Dame-de-Vie and insisted on being allowed into the studio where Picasso was working. Let him in, the artist said, on one condition: he must not talk. But Douglas did talk. He told Picasso it was time he recognized his illegitimate children—a subject the artist adamantly refused to face, because it presupposed the eventuality of his death. At first Picasso, who was a bit deaf, could not understand what Douglas was driving at. When he did, he exploded in rage and threw his old friend out of the studio. Jacqueline described how Douglas had gone down on his knees to her and tearfully begged her to intercede with Picasso—to no avail. Thereafter Douglas, who had served with such honor as Picasso’s Falstaff, turned fiercely against his former hero. A few months after the artist’s death in 1973, he published a letter in Connaissance des Arts criticizing the magazine’s praise of Picasso’s late paintings. As an admirer of the artist’s work, Douglas felt entitled to condemn the paintings in question as “incoherent doodles done by a frenetic dotard in the anteroom of death.” Jacqueline never forgave Douglas’s treachery, and never acknowledged him if ever their paths crossed. As I took leave of him, Douglas said defiantly, “I gather you still see Jacqueline. Don’t on any account remember me to her.” It was his way of sending love.

Douglas may have started his career as a rebel in the cause of cubism, but he ended up as a rebel without any cause at all except a loathing for all forms of progressive art and the American pundits—“the flying rabbis,” he called them, “heads on upside down, like a Chagall”—who promoted them. In line with his fogeyism, he adopted an apoplectic manner and took to dressing like his horsy forebears, in ever bigger and brighter checks. Like Evelyn Waugh in old age, he played the role of curmudgeon to the hilt and cherished the belief that everyone but him was out of step. If he no longer inveighed against the British, it was because the French were now the targets of his wrath. However, he went on savaging anyone who dared write about “his” artists, but his tirades were all bark and no bite and no longer to be found in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement or the Burlington Magazine.

A year or so before he died, a combination of hormonal and glandular problems obliged Douglas once again to become a patient in Nîmes hospital. He sent for his son Billy, as well as an intelligent and attractive young man whom I will call Robin, to rally round what was likely to prove his deathbed. Douglas’s condition was so worrying that Robin decided to call his stepfather, a leading endocrinologist, for help. Over the telephone, the endocrinologist dictated a course of treatment that would keep Douglas alive for another year. He was often in considerable pain, but his childish sense of fun and fiendishness continued to percolate. Douglas’s end was in character. “I propose to die on April Fool’s Day,” he announced in 1984 as he went into hospital for the last time. And after three days in a coma, that is exactly what this hugely gifted, hugely flawed old buffo did.

DC at the Tate Gallery in 1983 with Juan Gris’s Portrait of Josette (1916), which he gave to the Prado

The pride of Douglas’s last years had been his appointment to the Patronato of that great museum, the Prado in Madrid. He was the first foreigner to be thus honored. In gratitude, he gave the Prado his finest Juan Gris, the 1916 portrait of the artist’s wife, Josette, because this Spanish master was virtually unrepresented in his own country. He also left the museum Picasso’s cubist Still Life with Pigeons, an ingenious replay of a subject that he had painted at the age of thirteen at his father’s behest and done so skillfully that he had supposedly been rewarded with the parental palette and brushes. Although Douglas had had a reconciliation with the Tate (he had organized an impressive cubist exhibition for the gallery and let it have two of his greatest paintings on extended loan), he left the institution nothing at all. “The English will have Rothenstein to thank for that, my dear.” Apart from the Prado, the Kunstmuseum in Basel would be the only other institutional legatee.

Years earlier, Douglas had told me in a moment of pique that he hoped to end like Sardanapalus, the legendary last king of Assyria, whose death inspired one of Delacroix’s greatest paintings. Douglas envisioned a funeral pyre in the courtyard of Castille, piled with “all my worldly goods, not to speak of some of my lovers, my dear,” and topped off with his corpse. “My pictures and I shall go up in smoke,” he decreed. “There’ll be nothing left for any of you.” As things turned out, there would be a great deal left for his adopted son. The last time we met, Douglas told me that he had asked his son and heir to compensate me for the things I had been unable to recoup from Castille. Billy behaved impeccably. He returned the Prud’hon, the Braque Firebird, a Picasso drawing, and one or two other items of personal significance; he also gave me a sum of money, in exchange for a promise that I would make no claim on the estate. The sum was generous, but it did not approximate the value of the property I was obliged to relinquish. I am grateful to Billy, but it was distressing to watch family silver and drawings inscribed to me coming up for sale at Christie’s.

Billy proceeded to live in far greater style than Douglas ever did. He bought a beautifully situated house in the Birdland section of Los Angeles—what his neighbor, the actress Coral Browne, used to call the “Swish Alps”—which was home to such stars as Dolly Parton and Madonna. The house’s two wings were connected by a long, narrow swimming pool with steps at either end so that when Billy awoke he could swim from his bedroom at one end to the kitchen at the other. There was also a second pool for guests, an orchid house, and a dramatic view through a screen of ancient olive trees and dove-colored smog down to the vast spread of Los Angeles way below.

Billy liked to refer to Douglas as “El Benefactor,” and before long, he too saw himself as a collector and employed a curator, David Crownover, to procure important examples of tribal art. He employed another curator, Dorothy Kosinski, to organize exhibitions of the rapidly dwindling Cooper collection in London, Basel, and Dallas. To celebrate the openings of these shows, Billy would lay on elaborate parties. In honor of the Basel opening he put a number of us up in Basel’s best hotel and treated us to three days of lavish festivities. For his London gala Billy re-created the colonnades of Castille on the parade ground of the Chelsea Barracks. As the evening was cool, he provided cashmere shawls for women guests. The party was said to have cost a vast sum. Douglas’s old friends felt that these extravaganzas did not commemorate his collection so much as highlight its dispersal, for Billy turned out to have sold the cream of El Benefactor’s crop to the cosmetics heir Leonard Lauder. True, he also embarked on a plan to chronicle Douglas’s life and catalogue what had once been the world’s finest private collection of cubist art, but he died before anything came of these efforts.

When Billy invited me to visit his spectacular new house in March 1989, I was appalled to discover that he had contracted AIDS. The courage and humor with which he faced up to his illness impressed those who knew him. When a melanoma developed in his brain, Billy did not hesitate to undergo a horrendously painful and intricate operation. He flaunted his scarred forehead like the badge of bravery it was by tying his head in piratical bandannas and behaving as if nothing were the matter. (A dislike of passing unperceived was yet another legacy from his adoptive father.) Trust Billy to plan a dazzling send-off for himself: a funeral fit for a head of state, with a live performance of Mozart’s Requiem in a large Los Angeles church, followed by a Hollywood-style reception beside the pool. After Billy’s death the masterpieces remaining from Douglas’s collection and the tribal artifacts and deco furniture that Billy had bought for himself came up in a series of sales at Christie’s early in 1992. They fetched around $30 million. During his lifetime Billy had been a very generous donor to AIDS-related charities, to which he also left a large part of his estate. He told me he intended this bequest to be his memorial.