I thought I might also add my memoir of meeting the Grand Duke Dimitri's son Paul. It was originally written as a thank you to Bob M. for his lovely tribute to Paul who passed on recently. I always wanted to add that Paul had the most wonderful combination of dignity and a natural quality of nobility and at the same time he excuded such an healthy, athletic vigor and boyish joy for life. He reminded me so much of the wealthy but wholesome and fair minded men in my mother' family.
Well anyway here is the thing I wrote and I am sure some of you have already read it.
Dear Rob, I read your touching account of Paul’s passing and just wanted to thank you for the respect and gracious remarks you made. I only met Paul once. It must have been sometime after 1973 or around 1974. I had just received my Master of Fine Arts degree from UCLA and had returned to NYC to continue my career as a sculptor. The head of the UCLA Sculpture Dept. who was also the head of my Master’s committee, Oliver Andrews, had been commissioned by the Warrington’s, in Cincinnati, to make create a titanium water walls sculpture for their garden. Mrs. Warrington wanted a section of her garden dedicated to St. Francis. Oliver wrote me in NYC and asked me if I would make the St. Francis out of copper mesh. I agreed and flew out to stay with Oliver at his agent’s house, A. B. Closson, on Indian Hill.
After meeting the Warrington’s and a few other things I started immediately to work on sketches. Mr. Closson was very nice, but I was certainly not a peer and spent most of my time working out ideas. Oliver occasionally went out but it was very quiet overall. That is, until Mr. Closson asked me if I wanted to meet the Grand Duke, which is what Paul was called by his friends in Indian Hill. Oliver had told Closson that I was something of a Russophile and had been reading Russian memoirs since I was 12 years old, so he thought that I would enjoy meeting the son of the Grand Duke Dimitri.
So the following Sunday we all walked down the street to Paul’s home, a lovely Tudor style house. When we all walked in the entrance, Paul came down the stairs and said, “Which one of you is interested in Czarist Russia?” Well everyone said at the same time, “I am.” However I did not hear them as I saw, across the living room, a miniature painting of the Grand Duchess Ella sitting on the veranda of IIlynskoe. I had never seen a painting of Ella, only photographs, and without being able to stop; I walked, as if in a trance, across the living room to the painting and said out loud, “But this is Ella sitting on the porch of Illynskoe.”
Paul was startled and walked over to me and said, “How on earth did you know that.” I said that I had been reading Russian Memoirs, including his Aunty’s two books, since I was twelve. I said that somehow when you read, you see things and feel things and I had a sense of what Illynskoe looked like from his Aunt Marie’s books. I also told Paul that there was a Russian Princess in our family but that it was very distant and it was all my marriage not by blood. I told him that my Aunt’s Grandfather’s first wife had married, as her forth husband, a Russian Prince and had lived in the Passy at Rue 20 Venuse, in Paris between the two World Wars as a Russian Princess.
Paul asked me who she had married and I said, “One of the Golitizins, but that I did not know which one or which branch.” I said the my Uncle was in Paris at the same time as a young art student at the Sorbonne and that he had become the Princess’ protégé and that he had said that the Prince was a scoundrel from the naughty line of the Golitizins. That made Paul laugh.
(By the way my Uncle was mistaken about the line of Galitizine's. The American heirest married Prince Mstislave whose great uncle, Nikolai was killed on the battlefield of Borodino in the famous victory over Napoleon and his other great uncle, Alexander, and his grandfather, Valerian, who were both exiled to Siberia for being part of the revolutionary group, the Decembrists.
The line also includes dear old Prince Nikolai Galitizine, the last Romanoff Prime Minister who was executed in 1925 in St. Petersburg. The Galitizines in exile married a great many English and Americans which creates a great many leads for me to follow up on to try and expand my understanding of the world of exiled nobility in Paris during the time the Princess and my Uncle were there.)
Paul immediately started taking me on a tour of the house and showed me the Czarina’s black enamel and silver make-up holder that was placed in her car, a curly coral and golden bell baby rattle that had belonged to Czarevitch, lots of Russian Birch Empire furniture that had belonged to his father and that the Grand Duke had removed from Serge Palace when he was banished to Tehran.
Then he started to show me his American Grandfather’s roll top desk and he looked at me and said, “I see you are only interested in Russia.” I apologized but agreed that this was so. Then he stopped and looked at me for awhile, because I had asked him if he had any photographs of his mother and father that I could look at. Without answering my question, he walked me over to a set of bound volumes and said, “This is a set of magazines that my father brought out of Russia, it was the “Town and Country” of Czarist Russia.” You can look through them first.” As I started to touch one of the books he said something to me in Russian, but I did not understand him.
Then he stopped me and said, “Don’t you know Russian?” When I said that I did not, he said, “You can come back and look at these books only when you have learned Russian.” It was an odd moment, but I had been raised to be polite and I simply felt that his honor was involved. So I said that I would immediately start learning Russian, which I did try to do as soon as I returned to NYC. I did not work and I never got to see the magazines. (I can still hear my teacher, Madame Michalovna saying to me again and again, "Open-a your mouth! Open-a your mouth! Finally my voice went away altogether and I ran out of the classroom)
But anyway we spent an absolutely wonder afternoon. I briefly met his wife and then returned to the Closson’s house. For the rest of our stay on Indian Hill we started to be invited everywhere, luncheons, dinners, pool parties, etc. Every time I came to one of these events the entire room would be hushed. Finally at the last dinner party, I asked the hostess, “Am I hallucinating or did every one stop talking when I came in the room?” The society lady said to me, “Yes it is true. You see the Grand Duke told us you were a member of the Russian Nobility.” I said, “Oh heavens, that’s not true.” She smiled and said, “The Grand Duke said you would deny it.”
I have always carried that time with Paul and my visit to Indian Hill as one of the happiest memories of my life.
