 |
 People were out
 |
| Frolicking along Central Park West at 102nd Street. 3:00 PM. Photo: JH. |
Monday, October 25, 2010. Partly sunny, partly cloudy fair weather weekend in New York. People were out.
NYSD readers know that I am avid reader of obituaries. I remember as a kid making fun of my mother for reading them avidly and daily. The joke’s on me. Although not all obituaries are good or even interesting. The Americans tend to look at one’s life in terms of what they’d “done.” While this may be laudable, it often leaves out the life. The best I find are in the (London) Daily Telegraph. Their writers are excellent and the lives they chronicle are rich and telling.
Today’s includes that of Natasha, Lady Spender who died last Thursday at 91. Lady Spender was the widow of poet Sir Stephen Spender.
The story of her life is dramatic, romantic, poetic, and inspiring. She was a daughter, a wife, a mother, and a professional woman who had two careers, one of which resulted from an infirmity that came upon her. Every paragraph of her life seems to contribute to her initiative and self-reliance and the ability to adapt and make the most of what is given. The woman had a masterful approach to adversity. You could even conclude the angels had sent her for us and blessed her road.
From the Telegraph:
Lady Spender, who died on October 21 aged 91, survived illegitimacy and a difficult upbringing to become a concert pianist, socialite and wife of the poet Sir Stephen Spender.
Of these occupations, marriage to the poet – some 10 years her senior – might have seemed the most challenging, since Spender had been an active homosexual and, at the time he met the young Natasha Litvin, was recovering from a disastrous first marriage to the beautiful Inez Pearn, who had left him in 1939 for the poet Charles Madge. Moreover it did not augur well that Spender's most significant ex-boyfriend, Tony Hyndman, was one of the witnesses at his wedding to Natasha in 1941. |
 |
Spender continued to be ambivalent about his own sexuality. In his 1951 autobiography, World Within World, he wrote frankly and, for the time (16 years before the 1967 Sexual Offences Act), extremely bravely about his early homosexual experiences.
Yet at the same time he was notoriously sensitive about what he saw as intrusions into his privacy by others. In 1994 he sued the homosexual author David Leavitt for allegedly using his relationship with "Jimmy Younger" (the pseudonymous Tony Hyndman in Spender's autobiography) in his novel While England Sleeps. He also toned down homosexual allusions in later editions of his poetry.
Spender continued to have intense relationships with younger men throughout his life. Whether or not they were consummated was unclear even, apparently, to his wife. Of his close friendship with the young American zoologist Bryan Obst, who died of Aids in 1990, she surmised that "it was passion but nevertheless it was related to their shared talent". But she claimed that she never felt shut out by her husband's friendships as she regarded marriage as founded not on ownership but on mutual devotion, and of that she had not the slightest doubt.
Certainly the Spenders' marriage was an unusually happy one, with Natasha Spender providing her husband with the intellectual companionship he never had from his male partners and with a sunny and unflappable temperament which countered his occasional feelings of angst. The success of their relationship was undoubtedly due, in part, to Natasha Spender's indomitable optimism and the hard lessons about life, love and survival which she had learned as a child.
She was born Natasha Litvin on April 18 1919. Her mother, Rachel Litvin, was an actress of Baltic extraction, who became a rising star at the Old Vic during the First World War. Her father, of whom she knew nothing until the age of 12, was the music critic Edwin Evans, married to someone else.
 |
 |
| Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, Ted Hughes, T.S. Eliot, and Louis McNeice. |
|
As her mother had to work for her living, young Natasha was fostered out to a woman in Sussex, who cruelly neglected her charge. A friend of her mother's came to the rescue and, aged two and a half, Natasha was shunted off into the care of a Mrs Busby, a kindly working-class woman in Maidenhead, whom Natasha addressed as "Mother".
In later life Natasha Spender would attribute her stable temperament to Mrs Busby. As a child she also enjoyed holidays with the Booths, upper-class friends of her mother's who had a house near the Sussex Downs.
As a result of her dislocated upbringing, Natasha Litvin learned, chameleon-like, to fit in to any environment, adapting her behaviour and her accent as she crossed the class divide between Berkshire and Sussex. But when she was 11 her mother suddenly became stone deaf – the effect of a bout of typhoid – with the result that she could no longer continue her stage career, and for the first time in her life, Natasha had to live with her own kith and kin – in a one-room flat in Primrose Hill.
With no regular income, cash became a problem and it was now that Rachel Litvin finally revealed to her daughter the identity of her father – solely in order that she should go and ask him for money. It was not the best foundation for a relationship, but father and daughter got over it and established a friendship based on their shared love of music. Natasha had begun to learn the piano and Edwin Evans encouraged her, promising to get her lessons in composition.
In 1935, aged 16, she won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music and within a short while, her outstanding beauty, prodigious musical gifts and unquenchable zest for life soon attracted the attention of the bohemian London arts scene.
In 1940, she was invited to a literary lunch party at Horizon, the magazine which Spender had founded with Cyril Connolly. After lunch, Spender and Natasha did the washing-up, went for a walk, then out for dinner.
When Spender introduced her to his family, his maternal grandmother, Mrs Schuster, asked Natasha if she was Jewish. She admitted that indeed she was – "half" – before adding "but I am illegitimate". If the old lady was shocked, the Spender servants were charmed, one of the maids delightedly exclaiming: "She's illegitimate, and don't care who knows it." They married at the height of the Blitz in 1941.
The couple were ideally suited and set about pursuing their separate artistic careers, she as a concert pianist and he, invalided out of the fire service with varicose veins, as a writer and co-editor of Horizon. At the end of the war their son Matthew was born, and a few years later their daughter, Lizzie.
In the postwar years the Spenders established their home in St John's Wood as a centre of metropolitan literary society. Sylvia Plath described her first meeting in 1960, at a dinner party at the (TS) Eliots: "The Spenders arrived: he handsome and white-haired – she lean, vibrant, talkative, lovely."
 |
|
| Valerie (Mrs. T.S.) Eliot and Lady Spender. |
|
But four years later, Natasha contracted breast cancer which affected her arm muscles, bringing her career as a pianist to an end. She overcame the illness with typical indomitability and (now in her forties) passed her A-levels in a year, took a degree in psychology, did postgraduate work and went on to a second career as a college lecturer specialising in the psychology of music. She also contributed to the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
The Spenders had established the pattern of living six months of the year in England and six months abroad, and in 1964 they acquired the ruins of a farmhouse in the French Alpilles in Provence. After years of hard work they restored the house (which they named Mas St Jerome after Spender's favourite saint), playing host to many visiting writers and artists – the house became the setting for Iris Murdoch's novel Nuns and Soldiers.
Natasha Spender created a unique and beautiful garden and later commemorated both the garden and her life there in an eloquent and sumptuously illustrated book, An English Garden in Provence, published in 1999.
This was four years after her husband's death in 1995, an event she likened to "losing the music". Afterwards, she immersed herself in preserving her husband's legacy as his literary executor, collaborating wholeheartedly on his official biography, written by Professor John Sutherland and published in 2004.
Natasha Spender's courage was never more severely tested than when, two months after her own book came out, Mas St Jerome was completely destroyed in a forest fire. Luckily the Sutherlands were staying with her at the time and woke up in time to rescue her and raise the alarm, or she would almost certainly have been killed.
The fire not only destroyed the house and the garden but also Spender's library, a loss his widow felt particularly keenly. But she remained philosophical and typically down-to earth. "I lived through the Blitz and this is remarkably similar," she told an interviewer. "I must buy some secateurs non-slips and start work cutting back in the garden."
Within two years, Natasha Spender, by now in her 80s, had completely rebuilt the house and replanted the garden, a victory over adversity that seemed somehow to symbolise her entire life.
Lady Spender is survived by her son, Matthew, a successful painter, and her daughter, Lizzie, an actress and writer, married to Barry Humphries. |
Twenty-seven years ago, shortly after the legendary movie star Rita Hayworth had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, her daughter Princess Yasmin Khan started The Rita Hayworth Gala to bring awareness and funding to eradicate it. Since then, the gala has raised $54 million. It’s remarkable to see what the power of one daughter’s love for her mother, but even more remarkable is that all those years ago, this was a disease that was embarrassing to mention, and only talked about in whispers. Princess Yasmin, “Yasi” (Yazzy) to all who know and love her, has made this a cause for which everybody works tirelessly.
This past Friday, the committee members of the Rita Hayworth Gala were invited to ring the closing bell of the New York Stock Exchange in honor of the upcoming Gala to be held tomorrow at the Waldorf-Astoria. Also present were 2010 Gala Honorees Naeem and Ranjana Khan and philanthropist Marlyne Sexton (mother of committee member Nicole Sexton). ABC News Nightline anchor Terry Moran also participated.
There is no small amount of pomp, circumstance and history in ringing the bell. The Exchange has an aura of power about it. Today few outsiders allowed into the Exchange, because of 9/11. There is massive amount of security to even get in. Once inside, however, it seems like any other older building as staff leads the visitors through a series of hallways to an elevator. Several floors up, however is the entrance to the boardroom, a vast and elaborate space built in the latter part of the 19th century. |
 |
The committee gathered in the room for photos and were given medals commemorating the day before being led, shortly before 4:00 pm, to the floor of the exchange.
I've been on the floor of the exchange many times for television interviews. I’ve learned over the years not to make eye contact with the traders as I walk across the floor. It’s somewhat akin to walking across the boy’s side of the gym in grade school! However, as Chairman Duncan Niederauer led Chairs Michele Herbert and Chele Upton Chiavacci, and the group across the floor, I can honestly say I felt pride — and no small amount of awe and wonder coming from the traders still inputting their final orders for the day.
Only a small number of people can fit on the balcony, but we all managed to get onto the platform -- while being applauded from below. Thirty seconds before the close, the group was instructed to start clapping and look at the cameras that are placed across the way.
The excitement was palpable. When the moment finally comes and the bell goes off it is startling! Michele Herbert, Chele, Naeem and Ranjana pushed the button, while Marlyne whacked a large gavel on the balcony to signify the actual end of the trading day.
Afterwards we all went back down to the trading floor and spent a few moments taking in the the moment we had just participated in.
For Princess Yasi and all those daughters, sons, husbands, wives and other caregivers of those Alzheimer’s, and for those today, it was a great expression of how far their efforts have come. To paraphrase the infamous quote by Saul Steinberg many years ago; “If Alzheimer’s Disease were a stock — I’d short it!”
Tickets are still available to this year’s gala and can be purchased here.
— Alexandra Lebenthal for NYSD |
|
|
Enter your email address below to subscribe to NYSD's newsletter. It's free!
|
| |
Comments? Contact DPC here. |
|
|
|
|
