Master of the Game

Chapter 18

BOOK FOUR

Tony

1946-1950

Chapter 18

Tony had been to Paris before, but this time the circumstances were different. The City of Light had been dimmed by the German occupation, but had been saved from destruction when it was declared an open city. The people had suffered a great deal, and though the Nazis had looted the Louvre, Tony found Paris relatively untouched. Besides, this time he was going to live there, to be a part of the city, rather than be a tourist. He could have stayed at Kate's penthouse on Avenue du Marechal Foch, which had not been damaged during the occupation. Instead, he rented an unfurnished flat in an old converted house behind Grand Montparnasse. The apartment consisted of a living room with a fireplace, a small bedroom and a tiny kitchen that had no refrigerator. Between the bedroom and the kitchen crouched a bathroom with a claw-footed tub and small stained bidet and a temperamental toilet with a broken seat.

When the landlady started to make apologies, Tony stopped her. "It's perfect."

He spent all day Saturday at the flea market. Monday and Tuesday he toured the secondhand shops along the Left Bank, and by Wednesday he had the basic furniture he needed. A sofa bed, a scarred table, two overstuffed chairs, an old, ornately carved wardrobe, lamps and a rickety kitchen table and two straight chairs. Mother would be horrified, Tony thought. He could have had his apartment crammed with priceless antiques, but that would have been playing the part of a young American artist in Paris. He intended to live it.

The next step was getting into a good art school. The most prestigious art school in all of France was the ecole des Beaux-Arts of Paris. Its standards were high, and few Americans were admitted. Tony applied for a place there. They'll never accept me, he thought. But if they do! Somehow, he had to show his mother he had made the right decision. He submitted three of his paintings and waited four weeks to hear whether he had been accepted. At the end of the fourth week, his concierge handed him a letter from the school. He was to report the following Monday.

The ecole des Beaux-Arts was a large stone building, two stories high, with a dozen classrooms filled with students. Tony reported to the head of the school, Maitre Gessand, a towering, bitter-looking man with no neck and the thinnest lips Tony had ever seen.

"Your paintings are amateurish," he told Tony. "But they show promise. Our committee selected you more for what was not in the paintings than for what was in them. Do you understand?"

"Not exactly, maitre."

"You will, in time. I am assigning you to Maitre Cantal. He will be your teacher for the next five years - if you last that long."

I'll last that long, Tony promised himself.

Maitre Cantal was a very short man, with a totally bald head which he covered with a purple beret. He had dark-brown eyes, a large, bulbous nose and lips like sausages. He greeted Tony with, "Americans are dilettantes, barbarians. Why are you here?"

"To learn, maitre."

Maitre Cantal grunted.

There were twenty-five pupils in the class, most of them French. Easels had been set up around the room, and Tony selected one near the window that overlooked a workingman's bistro. Scattered around the room were plaster casts of various parts of the human anatomy taken from Greek statues. Tony looked around for the model. He could see no one.

"You will begin," Maitre Cantal told the class.

"Excuse me," Tony said. "I - I didn't bring my paints with me."

"You will not need paints. You will spend the first year learning to draw properly."

The maitre pointed to the Greek statuary. "You will draw those. If it seems too simple for you, let me warn you: Before the year is over, more than half of you will be eliminated." He warmed to his speech. "You will spend the first year learning anatomy. The second year - for those of you who pass the course - you will draw from live models, working with oils. The third year - and I assure you there will be fewer of you - you will paint with me, in my style, greatly improving on it, naturally. In the fourth and fifth years, you will find your own style, your own voice. Now let us get to work."

The class went to work.

The maitre went around the room, stopping at each easel to make criticisms or comments. When he came to the drawing Tony was working on, he said curtly, "No! That will not do. What I see is the outside of an arm. I want to see the inside. Muscles, bones, ligaments. I want to know there is blood flowing underneath. Do you know how to do that?"

"Yes, maitre. You think it, see it, feel it, and then you draw it."

When Tony was not in class, he was usually in his apartment sketching. He could have painted from dawn to dawn. Painting gave him a sense of freedom he had never known before. The simple act of sitting in front of an easel with a paintbrush in his hand made him feel godlike. He could create whole worlds with one hand. He could make a tree, a flower, a human, a universe. It was a heady experience. He had been born for this. When he was not painting, he was out on the streets of Paris exploring the fabulous city. Now it was his city, the place where his art was being born. There were two Parises, divided by the Seine into the Left Bank and the Right Bank, and they were worlds apart. The Right Bank was for the wealthy, the established. The Left Bank belonged to the students, the artists, the struggling. It was Montparnasse and the Boulevard Raspail and Saint-Germain-des-Pres. It was the Cafe Flore and Henry Miller and Elliot Paul. For Tony, it was home. He would sit for hours at the Boule Blanche or La Coupole with fellow students, discussing their arcane world.

"I understand the art director of the Guggenheim Museum is in Paris, buying up everything in sight."

"Tell him to wait for me!"

They all read the same magazines and shared them because they were expensive: Studio and Cahiers d'Art, Formes et Cou-leurs and Gazette des Beaux-Arts.

Tony had learned French at Le Rosey, and he found it easy to make friends with the other students in his class, for they all shared a common passion. They had no idea who Tony's family was, and they accepted him as one of them. Poor and struggling artists gathered at Cafe Flore and Les Deux Magots on Boulevard Saint-Germain, and ate at Le Pot d'Etian on the Rue des Canettes or at the Rue de l'Universite. None of the others had ever seen the inside of Lasserre or Maxim's.

In 1946, giants were practicing their art in Paris. From time to time, Tony caught glimpses of Pablo Picasso, and one day Tony and a friend saw Marc Chagall, a large, flamboyant man in his fifties, with a wild mop of hair just beginning to turn gray. Chagall was seated at a table across the cafe, in earnest conversation with a group of people.

"We're lucky to see him," Tony's friend whispered. "He comes to Paris very seldom. His home is at Vence, near the Mediterranean coast."

There was Max Ernst sipping an aperitif at a sidewalk cafe, and the great Alberto Giacometti walking down the Rue de Ri-voli, looking like one of his own sculptures, tall and thin and gnarled. Tony was surprised to note he was clubfooted. Tony met Hans Belmer, who was making a name for himself with erotic paintings of young girls turning into dismembered dolls. But perhaps Tony's most exciting moment came when he was introduced to Braque. The artist was cordial, but Tony was tongue-tied.

The future geniuses haunted the new art galleries, studying their competition. The Drouant-David Gallery was exhibiting an unknown young artist named Bernard Buffet, who had studied at the ecole des Beaux-Arts, and Soutine, Utrillo and Dufy. The students congregated at the Salon d'Automne and the Charpentier Gallery and Mlle. Roussa's Gallery on the Rue de Seine, and spent their spare time gossiping about their successful rivals.

The first time Kate saw Tony's apartment, she was stunned. She wisely made no comment, but she thought, Bloody hell! How can a son of mine live in this dreary closet? Aloud she said, "It has great charm, Tony. I don't see a refrigerator. Where do you keep your food?"

"Out on the w-windowsill."

Kate walked over to the window, opened it and selected an apple from the sill outside. "I'm not eating one of your subjects, am I?"

Tony laughed. "N-no, Mother."

Kate took a bite. "Now," she demanded, "tell me about your painting."

"There's n-not much to t-tell yet," Tony confessed. "We're just doing d-drawings this year."

"Do you like this Maitre Cantal?"

"He's m-marvelous. The important question is whether he l-likes me. Only about one-third of the class is going to m-make it to next year."

Not once did Kate mention Tony's joining the company.

Maitre Cantal was not a man to lavish praise. The biggest compliment Tony would get would be a grudging, "I suppose I've seen worse," or, "I'm almost beginning to see underneath."

At the end of the school term, Tony was among the eight advanced to the second-year class. To celebrate, Tony and the other relieved students went to a nightclub in Montmartre, got drunk and spent the night with some young English women who were on a tour of France.

When school started again, Tony began to work with oils and live models. It was like being released from kindergarten. After one year of sketching parts of anatomy, Tony felt he knew every muscle, nerve and gland in the human body. That wasn't drawing - it was copying. Now, with a paintbrush in his hand and a live model in front of him, Tony began to create. Even Maitre Cantal was impressed.

"You have the feel," he said grudgingly. "Now we must work on the technique."

There were about a dozen models who sat for classes at the school. The ones Maitre Cantal used most frequently were Carlos, a young man working his way through medical school; Annette, a short, buxom brunette with a clump of red pubic hair and an acne-scarred back; and Dominique Masson, a beautiful, young, willowy blonde with delicate cheekbones and deep-green eyes. Dominique also posed for several well-known painters. She was everyone's favorite. Every day after class the male students would gather around her, trying to make a date.

"I never mix pleasure with business," she told them. "Anyway," she teased, "it would not be fair. You have all seen what I have to offer. How do I know what you have to offer?"

And the ribald conversation would go on. But Dominique never went out with anyone at the school.

Late one afternoon when all the other students had left and Tony was finishing a painting of Dominique, she came up behind him unexpectedly. "My nose is too long."

Tony was flustered. "Oh. I'm sorry, I'll change it."

"No, no. The nose in the painting is fine. It is my nose that is too long."

Tony smiled. "I'm afraid I can't do much about that."

"A Frenchman would have said, 'Your nose is perfect, cherie.'"

"I like your nose, and I'm not French."

"Obviously. You have never asked me out. I wonder why."

Tony was taken aback. "I - I don't know. I guess it's because everyone else has, and you never go out with anybody."

Dominique smiled. "Everybody goes out with somebody. Good night."

And she was gone.

Tony noticed that whenever he stayed late, Dominique dressed and then returned to stand behind him and watched him paint.

"You are very good," she announced one afternoon. "You are going to be an important painter."

"Thank you, Dominique. I hope you're right."

"Painting is very serious to you, oui?"