king's cross to chelsea to manhattan
Many loved him as a refined and clever and interesting man, and were horrified and disappointed when they had come upon the wolf in him. And they had to because Harry wished, as every sentient being does, to be loved as a whole and therefore it was just with those whose love he most valued that he could least of all conceal and belie the wolf.
When I first met Maxwell Davies, he was living in a delightful, small flat in Bloomsbury but he used the proceeds from doing the score for another Ken Russell film to buy a larger place near King's Cross Station. I had never lived in that area and had a lot of fun exploring it, developed a major crush on a German bartender in the station's pub, and rarely ventured further than walking distance from the apartment. I hadn't told anyone I knew in London that I was there so spent several months mostly on my own. I made a lot of drawings but discarded most of them and probably only a set I did inspired by Max's Miss Haversham piece survives.
When I did finally venture out, I met a charming young Englishman named Robert. He had been living for some years with an Irish fellow so we had a classic clandestine romance, making sure never to go places where we might run into the jealous spouse. Occasionally Robert invented an overnight business trip and would instead stay with me. Neither of us could forget the morning after the first such night when Robert was dozily walking out of the bedroom, noticed he had stepped on some papers, looked to see what they were and was horrified to notice he had just walked on the manuscript for Max's Third Symphony.
When Max wrote that he was returning to London for a time, I moved to a bedsit in Chelsea, just off the King's Road and around the corner from where Graham Robertson and Whistler had lived. It was a real dump of a place where the tiny rooms were shared by two people and you never knew from one day to the next who might be occupying the next bed. For several weeks, my roommate was a delightful young Irish fellow, a construction worker who would get paid on Fridays, get roaringly drunk and spend all his money in one night of pub-crawling, and spend the rest of the evenings sleeping until the next paycheck. My favorite memory of him is from a Saturday morning when he groaned his way out of bed, stuck his head under the faucet and forgot the shelf which was too low over the basin. He bumped his head and said "Jesus, Joseph and Mary!" in his wonderful, thick accent which I often had a very difficult time understanding. He disappeared one Saturday and I assume he must have spent the rent money during his Friday night binge.
I signed on with an office temp agency and my first assignment was at a Dalgety subsidiary in an elegant building near Berkeley Square. Dalgety is a large Australian conglomerate and most of my co-workers were Australian, involved primarily in establishing agricultural projects in Africa. My main task was to collect the field data from several sources and compile it into weekly summary reports for the home office in Sydney. It was a pleasant job and I liked the people, so I accepted an offer to join the staff permanently, left the shared-bedsit place for a place of my own in the same Chelsea street, and settled into an enjoyable time with the affair with Robert as its centerpiece.
I often saw Max and went to any concert featuring his music, especially enjoying ones with his own ensemble, The Fires of London, and most especially his wonderful "Eight Songs for a Mad King" which they did so well. When he agreed to do new orchestration and arrangements for Sandy Wilson's "The Boy Friend" and to conduct the orchestra, I was invited to the recording sessions. All of the musical numbers were recorded before Ken Russell actually started filming. It was Twiggy's first venture in singing and she was terribly nervous about it, would sit down after each take and say "ohhhh, was I too awful?" and we all assured her she was not. Twiggy, Tommy Tune, Glenda Jackson and the ever-delightful Murray Melvin were all wonderful and it was a real privilege to watch them working together on that charming musical, made even more special with the Maxwell Davies touch. I had seen Julie Andrews in the New York production of the musical, and initially felt regret that she was not doing the film; in the end, I thought Ken Russell was right and I thoroughly enjoyed the film at its premiere, even if I did have to lean to one side throughout it to see around Princess Anne's beehive hairdo.
Robert decided he wanted to end his long relationship with the Irishman, thought the best way to do it was to move to America for a time, and asked me to go with him. I'm not sure that was one of my better decisions, but I agreed. We flew to Washington and stayed with Frances, the first time I had visited her since the crazed time when she asked me to leave. It was a very pleasant visit, she got on very well with Robert, and we enjoyed playing tourist and showing him around the city. Then Robert and I went on to New York, stayed for awhile with Felix and then, crazily enough, ended up living with the black lawyer. Robert started doing beautiful little drawings using a mosaic technique and we did a large work together, a grid of plexiglas box frames with his drawings in the top row, collage in the middle one, and drawings of mine in the bottom row. That was followed up with several more similar works, including a wall-sized tribute to Elizabeth II for her Silver Jubilee which was the major work in an exhibition we had together in the East Village.
The lawyer was still having his lengthy conversations with unseen spirits, often very noisily throughout the night, but managed somehow to keep his job with the law firm so Robert and I had the place to ourselves during the day and spent much of that bitterly cold winter happily working on drawings, smoking good grass and occasionally indulging in something stronger. One afternoon my old friend Michael gave me some large white pills and cautioned me not to take more than one. I took two. That was a trip quite unlike any I had ever had before, the only time I totally lost contact with first level reality, my first and only contact with angel dust. After a hectic frenzied time listening to music and making a mess of the front room, I left the house completely naked, smashed through the plate glass door of the building, walked to Central Park West and got on the hood of a car thinking it was a flying carpet to Tibet. I regained contact with ordinary reality in St. Vincent's Hospital after a valium shot which was so pleasant, the first thing I asked for was another shot.
Although I suffered no legal consequences for the adventure, the lawyer was asked to vacate the premises and moved to the East Village. Robert decided he was going back to the safer, saner life he had led in London, and I moved into the Vanderbilt YMCA on East 47th Street, around the corner from the United Nations.
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