Letter from Fort Worth

I take it all back about Texas (Letter from New Haven). Everyone is ‘y’all,’ and although Fort Worth is as flat as a pancake, it has an Edward Hopper-ish quality. From the direction of the cattle yards the sound of railway engines shunting back and forth drifts across the city. Real cowboys descend from pick-up trucks, and go shopping for colourful boots. The social column in this morning’s Star Telegram, which is all about a genteel sit-down literary afternoon tea at the Public Library, mentions somebody with a ‘Dresden complexion.’ Presumably this means milk-white and creamy like the porcelain, not bombed to smithereens and rebuilt years later. Anyway, the cowboys are here for the Texas rodeo, and I am attending a conference at the Kimbell Art Museum about George Stubbs.

After the last session, a delegate takes me home to River Crest, Fort Worth’s single hill. Her house is a château with mod cons, set among walnuts and magnolias, overlooking the west fork of the Trinity River. Curiously, neighbours let themselves in through the front door one by one, and join us for drinks. Mine comes in what can only be described as a sterling silver bucket, wet and freezing. House guests materialize from distant regions, including Mrs. G., an experienced dressage rider and trainer visiting from London who exercises horses for the Queen. We talk side-saddle.

I have been intrigued by one of the portraits in the Kimbell’s Stubbs show: Letitia, Lady Lade (Royal Collection). She too is slightly ‘Dresden,’ and wears a large hat. Her mount is rearing. You can tell by the outstretched front legs; skilled riders in equestrian portraits by Velázquez or statues by Bernini are doing something entirely different. They are performing a levade, one of the most difficult, controlled movements in high-style dressage. It is for the horse a balancing act, much more like a crouch than a rear, the weight thrown back on the hind legs, the front legs tucked in close to the breast. But whereas Philip of Spain or Louis XIV conjured this movement by cueing with their thighs and buttocks, I wonder what you can do about a rearing horse when riding side-saddle. Who better to ask than Mrs. G.?

‘How much do you know about horses?’ she asks, drily.

I sense I have gained full marks for interest, but failed on general knowledge. Mrs. G. turns back to the illustration in the catalogue.

‘It’s impossible.’ She raises her eyebrows. ‘You couldn’t stay on like that. You know, not unless you forced your left foot right down in the stirrup.’

Her hands gather up invisible reins.

‘Troublesome mare, too.’
‘Really?’ I have no idea what she is talking about.
‘Absolutely,’ she continues, shaking her head. ‘Ears turned back. Sure sign of mischief, or anger. No, it’s a nonsense – unless Stubbs wanted to make the lady look as if she hadn’t the foggiest notion of what she was doing.’

According to Malcolm Warner’s catalogue essay, Letitia Darby (alias ‘Mrs Smith’) emerged from obscurity, an adventuress, and was by the mid-1780s firmly established as mistress to the Prince of Wales. Slightly later she married his crony, the racing enthusiast and card-carrying rake Sir John Lade. Lady Lade was famous for using bad language, and was held partly responsible for the Prince’s unpopularity. Stubbs painted her portrait in 1793. So maybe the picture was a horsy person’s joke at the expense of the enterprising Lady Lade, whom Stubbs shows floundering, side-saddle, on an angry rearing horse.

But she doesn’t look as if she’s floundering.

Back in New Haven, I am tickled to discover in the glorious new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography an article about the unattractive ‘racehorse owner and miser,’ Michael Lade, who, despite years of failure, eventually did well at Newmarket. In 1797, he won the Oatland Stakes with his bay colt ‘by Dungannon out of Letitia.’ Letitia. How many unrelated men with the surname of Lade could be associated in the 1790s with famous Letitias, human or equine? Though the ODNB does not say so, Michael Lade must have been related to Lady Lade’s husband Sir John.

Now, Stubbs certainly painted Dungannon, who was owned by the bouncy Irish racing identity Dennis O’Kelly. That great picture, which belongs to the Earl of Halifax, is also in Fort Worth just now. And Dungannon was the son of Eclipse, whom many consider the greatest racehorse of all time, a great-great grandson of the Darley Arabian, one of the three miracle-working stallions who came to England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and, with the vital cooperation of local mares, brought about the thoroughbred revolution.

But what about that dam Letitia?

If Lady Lade had been really lousy on horseback, and Stubbs’s portrait were a kind of joke, would anyone who rejoiced in the name of Lade and loved breeding thoroughbreds bother to name his mare after her? I doubt it. Instead, I have a feeling Lady Lade was a pretty good whip, and that Stubbs did not worry too much about the disposition of ladies’ feet when riding side-saddle.

I shall definitely come back to Texas.

Letter from New Haven

During the summer, Fire Island Pines, a narrow, scrubby Atlantic-facing dunescape off the southern shore of Long Island, is entirely colonized by gay men from Manhattan. Little dogs, swelling pectorals, postcards of Prince William, and other clichés abound. The only way to get there is by ferry. There are no roads, just paths, jetties, and boardwalks. This alone makes it worth the trip. Yet Fire Island has a distinctly ‘science fiction’ aspect – as if populated by curious aliens, time-travellers, off-duty astronauts, and support staff. Here, glamorous youth and leathery, wobbling-tummied capital are exquisitely interdependent. From about four o’clock in the afternoon to six or seven, at the quayside tea dance, hundreds of shirtless men writhe to ‘Let The Sun Shine In,’ and other camp classics. All shapes and sizes. You can’t help thinking of those nature documentaries where colorful water birds peck grubs and insects from behind the ear of some lumbering hippopotamus. I am not sure where I fit into this eco system. It does not seem particularly fragile.

By coincidence, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, they still fire a midday cannon from the citadel. It, too, feels like an outpost. The sound is richly gun-powderish and colonial: Boom! I nearly jumped out of my chair. There is something more than vaguely gothic about Halifax. I came here to shoot part of a documentary about human teeth. Halifax was where they brought for burial several hundred frozen bodies left behind by the R.M.S. Titanic. Coffins were for first class passengers only. Five years later, towards the end of World War I, the Mont Blanc, a French ship laden with T.N.T., bumped into a Belgian relief vessel in Halifax Harbour, blew up, and flattened half the town. A half-ton anchor landed more than two miles away. A 1,200-pound cannon crashed to the ground in Dartmouth, three miles in the opposite direction. More than 1,600 people were killed instantly. Within a few hours a good proportion of what was left standing burned down. Most recently, on September 11, 2001, more than 40 international flights were diverted to Halifax. 7,000 bewildered passengers were stranded for days and days, most of them billeted with kind strangers. At breakfast I noticed advertisements in the local paper for Katie’s organic handmade dog biscuits, Arabian belly-dancing, and psychic readings by Keith. In the personals, Potato says he loves Hopper, who has just turned forty. I like Canada.

But I have fallen in love with Los Angeles. The meanest strip-mall neighborhoods sprout quirky cactuses, swathes of wisteria, hedges of pittosporum, and avenues of tall, slender palms. There are little exclamation marks of flaming bougainvillea, or else great umbrellas of it. You cease to notice the drive-thru burger joints, spooky places of worship, decrepit truck depots and oilrigs that bob up and down on the stony hills in between. The desert climate is wonderful, and southern California can be cheap, provided you use your head. Latin taste and gentle good manners are never far away. The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, Calif., must be among the most physically spectacular of all museum establishments. But every object is anchored, cushioned, or visibly threaded with nylon cords, an eerie portent of the next inevitable earthquake. There is something perversely arrogant about putting on display so many fragile Sèvres garnitures in the middle of a seismic hot zone. While the unthinkable forces that not so long ago threw up the San Gabriel Mountains lie dormant, you do occasionally think Pompeian thoughts.

In London I went on Richard and Judy, the afternoon chat show on Channel 4. This was to talk sunnily about my book. Earlier in the day we found out that Rebecca Loos, the other woman in the Posh and Becks sex scandal, was going to be in the same program. The producer laughed immoderately when I asked if we were going on different segments. They sent a car, and when we reached the studio, a crowd of paparazzi clicked and flashed through the passenger window. Although I held up a copy of my book, strangely there was nothing in the next day’s papers.

Accompanied by Max Clifford, the ambulance-chasing celebrity publicist, Rebecca Loos arrived an hour later. The Noor of Jordan hairstyle, orange suntan, tasteful pashmina, dark glasses, plenteous cleavage: a pleasant smile, the coy wave. Watching in the green room, we agreed that these sent out decidedly mixed signals. Rebecca reckons David Beckham made her feel like a million dollars. Which is, I suppose, just about what she has earned in fees. Judy obviously didn’t like Rebecca, and asked if she was a Lesbian. She made a defiant little head toss. ‘Yes, I have had relationships with women,’ she said, shoulders back. Richard, Judy’s much younger husband, was tickled pink.

I took my mother to northern Vermont to inspect the Brown Swiss calves at Shelburne Farms, a great Vanderbilt establishment overlooking Lake Champlain and the glorious Adirondack Mountains. Frederick Law Olmsted, who years earlier created Central Park in Manhattan, laid out this magnificent estate in the 1890s. Stands of trees cleverly diminish the Brobdingnagian scale of the rusticated stone barns, where they make cheese. The horse barn, meanwhile, is longer and wider, though fortunately not taller than Grand Central Station. The children’s farm is wasted on children: a retired Columbia University professor was in ecstasies after learning how to milk a cow. I made friends with some splendid Rhode Island reds. Why are hens so charismatic?

Our taxi driver informed us that Vermont and Texas are the only states that declared independence before joining the union. He is right: Vermont broke with the crown in 1777, but did not become the fourteenth member of the United States until 1791. Texas declared herself independent of Mexico in 1836 – ‘Remember the Alamo!’ – and only became the twenty-eighth state ten years later. While Vermont is needed for milk, butter, cheese and skiing in winter, I wonder if Texas is absolutely necessary.