hyde park gate
[While no doubt true of all the Tales, in this one especially, all the players existed in a different reality, as many realities as there were players, and all would tell this Tale in such different ways, the reader might think the players never knew each other and that none of it ever happened.]
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I returned to London in early 1972 after some weeks in Washington, New York and Los Angeles. The Baron Francois de Louville had recently purchased a house in Notting Hill Gate and was slowly remaking the interior. Only his bedroom and bath on the third floor had been completed at the time he offered me a small room with the idea that I would undertake its decoration. I had known Francois for years and had often been a guest in his former residence, a palatial apartment in Hyde Park Gate, overlooking Kensington Gardens. I had some reservations about our ability to live in the same house, no matter how large and spacious, but had no other immediate plans or options, so accepted his offer and set about creating a Proustian room, completely lined in thick industrial cork, lit with elegant fixtures and equipped with a fine sound system which, because of the cork, could be enjoyed without disturbing the rest of the house.
Despite his own luxuriously fitted rooms and my cloistered cell, we spent most of our time in the huge, unfinished attic where there was little but sound gear which surpassed anything most London clubs had to offer, a few chairs and sofas and many cushions. Francois and I were both recovering from ruined marriages, so to speak, and were in a party mood. The little dance club, Yours or Mine, in Kensington High Street, hangout of barons, earls and Davids Hockney and Bowie, was our home away from home and we probably spent as many waking hours there as we did in the Notting Hill Gate house, often returning with newly found friends who would stay a night or a week or longer in the house, which soon turned into a truly open house for so many people it was not unusual to wake in the morning amid a crowd of strangers.
Among the frequent visitors to the house was Patricia Potier, a formidable lady who had recently divorced her aristocratic Spanish husband and had bought the Hyde Park Gate establishment from Francois with the proceeds. She lived there with a wonderfully mysterious young man named Martin, with whom she had no romantic connection, and her delightful young son, Rupert, and maintained a salon in the classic sense where everyone who was anyone in the London underground of music, art and theatre (and even more exotic disciplines) was apt to be encountered. She was a collector of exotic objects, especially of Asian origin, and one of my most memorable birthdays was spent in that Notting Hill attic amid an Aladdin's Cave of beautiful carpets, prayer wheels, books and tankhas, loaned for the occasion by Patricia and other collectors.
At some point, and just how it came about I cannot recall, Patricia asked me to move into the Hyde Park Gate complex. The ceilings there were perhaps as high as thirty feet and over the main entrance was a glass-paned door which had once allowed deliverymen to deposit coal for the fireplaces in a storage space which from the inside front hall was accessed via a fold-down stepladder into a trapdoor in the ceiling. It was that storage space which I turned into a special nest, cork-lined again, the floor carpeted with thick foam rubber covered with beautiful fabrics and Oriental carpets. Once secluded in there, the stepladder could be pulled up, the trapdoor closed, and no sound could be heard from outside.
Not long after moving there, a fellow arrived from America carrying a bottle of clear Oswald-type liquid which is mentioned in another Tale. Just before that bottle was acquired, Patricia arranged, as a birthday gift, a trip to London for Egbert Switters, a strikingly handsome Dutch artist, philosopher, magus and bad boy. I had never fallen in love that hard before and have only once since then, instantly and completely. Egbert climbed the ladder to my nest and remained there until one stormy evening when I threw his possessions out the trapdoor and pulled up the ladder. The things remained on the floor of the hallway for several days, no one willing to interfere in our dance.
The months between his first appearance and that final evening together in the coal-bin nest were magical, the time I would without hesitation select if offered the chance to re-live a segment of my life. There was no shortage of other mind-altering substances in addition to my special bottle and the three of us spent many hours together exploring our inner landscapes, going to concerts, traveling to special places. There was an especially memorable afternoon spent in Cambridge where we were so enthralled by the glass in King's College Chapel that we got into the car and rode around and around the circular drive near it as if performing some sacred dance of thanksgiving; three unforgettable evenings with the Grateful Dead at the Lyceum Ballroom, joining the backstage party after Jerry Garcia had been brought to tea at Hyde Park Gate; an all-night trip with nothing but the Greaseband's only solo album on repeat for hours (until a poor neighbor knocked on the door and said he didn't mind the sound, but could we please change the record); sitting up in the coal-bin nest thinking of something I wanted to ask Egbert and hearing him answer from below, followed by his best wizardly chuckle. He carried one book with him, Ezra Pound's translation of the Confucian Analects, and we pondered those together while sitting in the beautiful Kensington Gardens. He followed a practice of "every day a line", whether a drawing or a journal entry, and I took up the same habit, beginning once again to make drawings and eventually producing several canvases, the first in some years.
I was asked by a friend if I would consider a one-man exhibition as a benefit for the Notting Hill Housing Trust. I agreed, and my first London exhibition was thus staged in the Kensington Town Hall. It included portraits of Francois, Patricia and Egbert, along with a number of drawings and the first of a series of works done on blank business cards, framed in a grid.
The "bad boy" aspect of Egbert took us into territory I had never explored before, including performing before an elderly man willing to pay us handsomely for the show. Egbert took pleasure in gently shocking people and succeeded triumphantly when I took him to the premiere of Maxwell Davies' "Taverner" at Covent Garden and his version of black tie attire was black leather from head to foot. He was also a kind and generous man and indulged me in many of my own fantasies, as well as putting up with my insane jealous fits and possessiveness. No one else in my life had as great an effect on me and his influence has continued even though it has now been almost twenty years since I last saw or heard from him.
Evicting him from the coal-bin nest marked the end of the Hyde Park Gate era. It was a stupid, Steppenwolf-ish act which got us all thrown out of the Magick Theatre we had played in with such joy. Three days after the eviction, I went to an estate agent, rented an apartment in Shepherd's Bush, and returned to solo living.
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