At home with the Searles

Royal Institute of British Architects

During the early 50s Searle and his first wife Kaye Webb moved into a modernist home designed by architect Denys Lasdun.  In a style influenced by the early 'domino principle' villas of Le Corbusier, Lasdun built the house on his own in his mid twenties.

Jamie Barras' Flickr gallery

 

It was an ostentatious home befitting the profile of a young, successful and increasingly well known couple.  Searle's top floor studio had plenty of light and Kaye frequently threw parties for London's cultural community.  For example, as in the last post, this would've been where S.J. Perelman first met Ronald.
At their previous address on Moscow Road Searle had been walking every day to his studio space at 77 Bedford Gardens but here the family could all be under one roof.

Completed in 1938 the house at 32 Newton Road, just off Westbourne Grove was 'one of the first houses carried out in an absolutely uncompromising contemporary manner'.

'Built for a pair of bachelor artists, it was topped by a splendid studio favoured by north light, as the estate agents say, and a fine terrace overlooking half of Paddington.  As Searle remarked to his friend David Arkell, 'If one had to overlook half of Paddington, this was the way to do it.'
(Russell Davies)

Searle portrayed Lasdun for his 1953 book  'Looking At London'
The book also features a view from the back terrace of 32 Newton Rd with the hands of the Searles visible in the foreground; author and artist of the publication.

'Newton Road was not turning out to be a complete success.  Filled with gorgeously multifarious objets and the light admitted by vast horizontal windows, and even a wall of glass bricks in the hall, the house was ideal as a photographic backdrop for visiting cameramen.  

The Searles had many friends in journalism and underwent the 'ideal couple' treatment more often than most.  Their New Year Party came to be quite a celebrated event in the social calendar of London's artists, writers and performers during the 50s.  There are those who, with hindsight, remember these gatherings as 'entirely Kaye's thing', with Ronald a rather withdrawn and even embarassed presence.  

Others recall him as a perfectly willing accomplice.   The truth is that he was probably just tired.  Invitations and decorations were all his responsibility, and he could not bear to fall short of personalizing all the items so that everyone had something to take away.

But it was in the normal working day that the inadequacies of the house really showed themselves.  Sound travelled unobstructed-a switch turned on in the cellar could be heard at the top of the house-and the twins' playroom was directly beneath Ronald's studio.  Ronald would be trying to work, it seemed to Paul Hogarth, 'while the twins were fighting with T-squares'.  

Ronald's own preference was for a radio turned on very low, and meticulous tidiness, an aim in which none of the rest of the household was able to match him.

The house itself was famous-architectural-school pilgrims came in busloads to see it- and so was Ronald; the visiting graphics world seemed to expect him him to act as its host.  Nobody, not even the artist friends to whom he mentioned the problem, realized how seriously he wished to insist on his privacy.'   (Russell Davies)

'Ronald's routine was to walk to his studio each morning, returning for an early supper at Burnham Court, before leaving to meet Punch's critic Eric Keown for their work at the theatre.  But the winter of 1951 had been 'harder and more miserable than any I have known,' Kaye told her father.  The time had come to consolidate family life and studio in one place, so a search began.
'We were on our knees with pounding around Paddington and Bayswater for weeks' Ronald recalled.  The trek brought to a unique house in Bayswater, 32 newton Road, built in an uncompromisingly contemporary steel-and-concrete style.  'As soon as we went through the front gate we fell in love with with the house- as odd as it seemed in a street of early Victorian villas,'  Ronald says.  It had been designed in 1938 for two bachelor artists, 'unknown artistically, but extremely wealthy' (the sculptor Robert Conway and his friend), by the young architect Denys Lasdun.  There was a vast studio on top, where Ronald could work, with a north light and fine terrace. 

The wall by the front door was of glass bricks; upstairs was a thirty-foot stretch of plate-glass window.  The cellar was full of stuff left by the previous owners (including several Lucian Freuds, which they returned).
'The only problem was we had no money,' Ronald recalled. 'Well, just about enough to put down the deposit.  The price was unbelievably expensive for a couple of freelancers at that time' (it was £7,000), 'and the banks felt that it was an unsaleable modern horror-pity that it had no Elizabethan timber on the façade, or something.'  Eventually they got a £5,000 mortgage from Lloyds Bank, Notting Hill Gate, at 4.5 percent. . . 'and we did manage to pay it off, by agreeing to perpetrate untold rubbish over the years,' Ronald told me. 'It turned out to be perfect for all our working space and living needs.'

'. . . Domestic life in the 1950s was simple.  Entertaining was rarely lavish, decor was unexciting.  So the Searles' distinctive home was much written about.  ('Their marriage is a model of domestic happiness enriched by professional collaboration,' wrote the Sunday Times's Atticus.)  Unusual objets trouvés were displayed everywhere - a Webb toy theatre, a model of an old steam engine, a rocking-horse, a row of marionettes, a ladder painted with stars and diamonds, an American wall clock  with an enormous winking eye painted by Ronald on its pendulum.  

The curved fireplace wall was hung with Japanese masks, costumed dolls, prints and drawings, and plastered with invitation cards.  There was imaginative use of colour, even on radiators.  Their bedroom was lime-green and maroon.  The back door was candy-striped in pale blue and white, with sunbursts of of yellow and black.  The bathroom had curtains of striped towelling. . . Ronald had even painted the light-switches: one was disguised as an eye with heavily fringed lashes and an arched eyebrow; another had a cow's head with switches in eye and nostril; another had a bird perched on it.  Any corner was embellished with a mural-a simpering mermaid brandishing a frying pan and a fork; a tricorn-hatted military figure with twirling moustache, on a bicycle.  

Photo by Madame Yevonde

Ronald's sprawling studio on the top floor had a sky-blue ceiling, its white walls covered in drawings and posters, shelves of art books, with concealed lighting, and a Berber rug on the parquet floor.  The crimson and white striped curtains were of deckchair canvas.  The playroom had one wall coated in blackboard paint, and a glass-topped table displayed the children's paintings.

(from 'So Much To Tell' Valerie Grove's biography of Kaye Webb published in 2010 by Viking)

If you look at the house on Google Street View you can observe just what a modern design it was for that street.

© Yevonde Portrait

Explore this building here 

S. J. Perelman

American humourist and author Sidney Joseph Perlman had a well known creative partnership with cartoonist Al Hirschfeld.  Their Westward Ha! (1948) was an early example of an illustrated travelogue, matching a satirical writer with an illustrator of a similar sensibility.  Their globe-trotting trip was paid for by Holiday magazine and initially published as a series in the magazine.





Less known is Perelman's collaboration with Ronald Searle. Like Perelman and Hirschfeld Searle had found success illustrating the satirical travelogues of Alex Atkinson published in Punch then later Holiday.
Punch editor Malcom Muggeridge introduced them in London in the early fifties and it seems they instantly clicked, remaining friends for the rest of their lives. 'Perelman had his irascible side. . . but he had a genuine affection for Ronald, triggered at an early meeting when the Enlishman asked his way to 'the cloakroom', a term which delighted Sid by transporting him instantly to his favourite literary territory, amid the rapiers and intrigues of Baroness Orczy.' (-Russell Davies)

'. . . we all went off to a party at Ronald Searle's. . . oddly enough this was practically a counterpart of an evening at the Hirschfelds', made even more uncanny by Searle's having a beard.  They live in a four-floor modernische house in Bayswater, top floor of which is his studio, like Al's.  It was one of those progressive parties, where waves of people had been piling up since five o'clock and it was now ten-thirty . . . a real bedlam.  Finally, though, Searle and I got a few minutes alone in his studio, inscribed books to each other, and had a short interval of sense.  He's an extremely talented man, as you know, and among other things I learned that he first learned to draw when he was a prisoner on the Burma-Siam frontier in a Japanese camp, being the only man in his company who ever got out alive . . . '
(Letter from Perelman to his wife Laura Dec 23rd 1953)

Peter Harrington Books is selling a 1st Edition copy of Westward Ha! inscribed to Searle by both Perelman and Hirschfeld in 1953. It's likely this is the book signed by Perelman for Searle in his loft studio in 1953. It's nice to see the esteem held by Hirschfeld for his fellow caroonist in this dedication.
Also, a copy of Perelman's 'The Beauty Part' (1963) 'Inscribed by the author to his friend and collaborator Ronald Searle on the front free endpaper, "For Monica and Ronald, this obstreporous [sic] vaudeville with love from its author, Sid. 14 February, 1968". Includes, loosely inserted, an envelope dated Feb 12 1986 to Searle from Perelman containing an autograph letter giving directions to the appropriate bus stop to reach him in his country residence in Frenchtown, New Jersey, and a bus schedule. A charming artefact of a close friendship.'





'Dear Ronnie, I must tell you at once how pleased I was to receive the books you sent us, Take One Toad and The Square Egg.  Take One Toad is a strikingly original job, I was much impressed with the way you handled the period costumes and the whole conception of the book.  This is not to downgradeThe Square Egg in any sense; you have some marvelous drawings in that, it goes without saying.  The first one, naturally, has a unity that the other as a collection doesn't.  At any rate, here's hoping that The Square Egg has more than the modest sale you foresaw in your note to me. . . 
(Letter from Perelman to Ronald Searle December 10th, 1968)

Searle's caricature of Perelman looks like an evolution of Mr. Lemon Hart in turn inspired by lanky Punch theatre columnist Eric Keown.

'My Life In Scotland Yard' Holiday Magazine April 1968

"It was piquant to learn that I resembled Dr. Crippen, the classic poisoner."

"The subject was murdered by renowned ghouls and I rather wanted to lie down"

"The Black Museum piece was tip-top, you caught every sinister possible facet"

(Letter from Perelman to Ronald & Monica Searle April 8th, 1968)

"The law was guilty of an anatomical booboo"

'Room and Bored' in haunted Irish manor Poltrooney

Holiday Magazine September

Following the decline of Holiday magazine Searle and Perelman sustained their collaboration in the pages of Travel & Leisure magazine, probably commissioned by Holiday's ex-Art Director Frank Zachary who had jumped to the new title. Searle provided lavish illustrations to compliment Perlman's equally exotic travel series 'Nostasia in Asia'.  I have the first in the series but if anyone has the rest please contact me at the email address in my Blogger profile.

'Dear Ronnie. . . thank you very much indeed for your drawing of myself being inducted into the Chinese tailor shop in Hong Kong that illustrated the fourth piece in that Travel & Leisure series.  As soon as it's framed, it goes up on the wall. . . it'll make a peachy companion pice to one of Andre (Francois)'s covers for The New Yorker, a cafe scene he did a couple years ago; and it will also be cheek by jowl with that marvelous photograph of Toulouse-Lautrec you once gave me.'
(Letter from Perelman to Ronald Searle November 4th, 1974)

A tropical encounter with W. Somerset Maugham

2. The Egg and Ainu 

3. Paradise-once over lightly

Perelman wrote the introduction to a Searle illustrated  'The Adventures of Baron Munchausen', published in 1969.  The adventures of the mustachioed  weaver of tall tales seems to perfectly portray Perelman himself!

I remember the Searles telling me over lunch of a spooky incident involving Perelman's death-in his biography of Searle, Russell Davies quotes Ronald:

'Suddenly an old friend appeared before, looking like a gently spotlit figure on a stage. . . Only one finger moved, to tap ash from an ashless cigarette. (She always tapped more than she smoked.)  The apparition was Laura West Perelman. . . she had died in 1970.

But here she was, nearly ten years later, very much alive and looking me straight in the eye.  With her usual laconic American drawl, she spoke, coming directly to the point as usual:

'RAHnald, Sid's dead,' she said. Then she was no longer there.

In the morning, before I had even got to my coffee, the telephone rang. My sister-in-law was calling from London.

'Sad news, I'm afraid.  I've just heard on the radio that Sid Perelman has been found dead in his hotel room in New York . . . '

Sid had died at the Gramercy Park Hotel during the night of the 16-17 October.  Searle describes this as 'a very small ghost story: but it certainly impressed me at the time'.  He still awaits Sid's explanation.'

'I Dreamt that I dwelt in Marble Halls'

Holiday Magazine September 1968

An amusing letter between the cartoonist and his friend the humourist Sid Perelman. Searle THANKS Perelman for sending him his newly published Omnibus, "what a marvellous surprise for the Searles who send their warmest thanks not only for the modest inscription but also for momentarily assuaging their ever greedt appetite for SJP".  

Searle adds a PS on the back of THE PAGE discussing a hat that Perelman had in a glass case. "I've been worried for a long time about that hat in the glass case" [small drawing of hat]. Searle goes on to explain that it reminded him of a hat in the Hans Andersen museum beside which was a length of rope which Andersen "carried everywhere in case of fire. How anticipatory can you get? Perhaps yours needs a small extinguisher."

(Letter for sale -Sotherans)

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Sources:

Russell Davies' biography of Ronald Searle  

Dorothy Hermann's biography of S. J. Perelman

'Don't Tread On Me' Selected Letters of S. J. Perelman

Holiday Magazine1968

Travel & Leisure Magazine 1973
(Thanks to Josh Lieberman for contributing scans)