S*x, Bed, and Beauty - Why Stephen Tennant Rotted Away | Society Mysteries #21

In the autumn of 1987, a few months after the last of the bright young things finally died in his bed at Wilsford Manor, Sbees threw open the doors of his country house and invited the world to pick through the debris of a life lived almost entirely for beauty. 939 lots, four days. Rooms draped in rotting pink satin, racoo fountains choked with moss, polar bear rugs matted with dust, boxes of ceilen photographs, first editions, ivory furniture, and a bedroom that one observer described as a shrine to shells. The sale raised 1.6 million, and the cataloges themselves are now collector's items. The man whose possessions they dispersed had spent the better part of six decades constructing an exquisite fantasy world inside the Wiltshire house and had produced in terms of finished work almost nothing at all. His name was Steven Tenant. He was by common agreement the most dazzling socialite of interwar England and the most spectacular failure of nerve in 20th century British letters. He wanted to be famous. He wanted to be loved. He wanted above all never to be truly known. Steven Tenant was the brightest thing that never burned. This is a story of beauty, ruin, and the art of magnificent waste. Welcome to Society Mysteries. Steven James Napia Tenant arrived on the 21st of April 1906 at Wilsford Manor near Salsbury. The youngest of five children born to Edward Tenant, first Baron Glenn Connor and the former Pamela Windham. The money was Victorian and industrial. They made their fortune in bleach. Specifically, Charles Tenant had patented powdered bleach in 1799, and the family St. Rolex's chemical works near Glasgow became the largest in Europe, an empire of chlorine and linen that bankrolled generations of gentile living. But Pamela Windham brought something else entirely. She was one of the three celebrated Windham sisters painted by John Singer Sergeant in that famous group portrait now hanging in the Metropolitan Museum. A woman steeped in the refined intellectual circle known as the souls and a cousin of Lord Alfred Douglas also known as Boosezie Oscar Wild's lover and ruination. Art, beauty, sexual ambiguity and money that never ran out. These were the coordinates of Steven Tennant's birth. The family had four boys and a daughter. Steven was the baby and he knew it. His father was a decent conventional kind of person. His mother was not. Pamela doted on Steven with an intensity that unsettled the household. She pulled him from school when he grew upset and he burned through 20 private tutors in a single year and she personally supervised his artistic education. She dressed him in elaborate smok and took him to Tableau vivance at the Royal Albert Hall when he was 8. She treated him as the girl she had always wanted. At age four, Steven reportedly told his father that when he grew up, he wished to be quote, "a great beauty." Around the same time, he stared at a pansy in the garden and whispered, "Something's looking." Even his childhood was a performance. Then the war came and it took his eldest brother. Edward, known to everyone as Bim, was killed at the Battle of the Som in 1916. Steven was 10. The loss shattered the family in ways that would never fully heal. Pamela, devastated, turned to spiritualism, conducting seances in the hope of reaching her dead son. The household at Wilsford took on a quality of gilded grief. Steven's own health was fragile from the start. Tuberculosis struck in his teens and would recur throughout his life, a companion illness that shaped his self-image as someone delicate, precious, always in need of tending. In 1920, when Steven was 14, his father died. Pamela married the statesman Viccount Gray of Faladon, a fellow bird lover whose mild temperament offered no counterweight to her indulgent maternal instincts. By 15, she had arranged Steven's first London art exhibition, which drew favorable press attention. The boy was on his way, though toward what exactly nobody could say. His brother David, the elder surviving son, had his own trajectory. He would go on to found the Gargoyle Club in Soho, that loose and glittering crucible of London's Bohemian night life. The tenant brothers shared a taste for the avant guard, but Steven would take it to places David never imagined. In 1922, Steven entered the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London, and the effect was like opening a window in a hot house. He met Rex Whistler, the brilliant young artist who would become his closest friend. Whistler later described Tenant as having the figure of a more delicate Shelly. The two of them would sit in the college quad, Steven reciting poetry while Rex sketched illustrations to match. It was at the Slade that Tenant began to understand his own power, not as a maker of things, but as a presence. He was tall, slender, goldenhaired, and possessed of a theatrical charm that stopped people mid-sentence. By the mid 1920s, Steven Tenant had become the undisputed prince of the bright young things, that rockous aristocratic set whose costume parties, nightclub crawls, and tabloid scandals defined a decade. The term was a press invention, but Tenant embodied it so completely that he was singled out as the brightest of them all. A 1927 Daily Express profile gushed that his appearance alone was enough to make you catch your breath. The gossip columnist William Hickeyi reported him arriving at one event in an electric broom, wearing a football jersey and earrings. He threw lavish parties at Wilsford redecorated now with racoo chandeliers, satin wallpaper, and rooms full of gilded cherubs. There was a private aviary. There was a reptile house. The original arts and craft paneling his parents had commissioned from the architect Detmar Blow was stripped out and replaced with something altogether more theatrical. French guilt, Chinese lacquer, cascades of artificial flowers. At one fancy dress dinner, guests grew steadily hungrier as they waited for the host, who finally appeared in a white Russian suit with a silver train and a bando around his head. The meal was followed by a game of hideand seek. At another gathering, he descended a staircase scattering rose petals. He wore makeup from the age of 18. Gold dust in his hair, bright red lipstick, velvet suits, jewelry, and ribbons, and Charles James satin leopard print pajamas that probably cost more than most people's annual rent. On one trip to New York, he disembarked the ship in full makeup, clutching a bunch of orchids. A customs officer jered. "Pin them on," tenant replied without missing a beat. Oh, have you got a pin? What a wonderful welcome, you kind, kind creature. His friend Edith Olivier wrote that he was the most sparkling talker who ever comes to my house. A man who handled words as if they were paint on a brush. John Waters many years later put it more bluntly. Aubry Beardsley, Ronald Furbank, Denton Welch, believe me, Steven Tenant made them all seem butch. He was the first patron of the young Cecile Beaton who photographed him in a series of now famous images heavy litted rouge draped in silk. Beaton visited Wilsford and came away thunderruck. The whole weekend he wrote in his diary was like being at the most perfect play. Steven's circle included the sitwell siblings, Lady Diana Manners, the Mittford sisters and Evelyn W. Nancy Mitford would later base the character of Cedric Hampton in Love in a Cold Climate directly on Tenant, the flamboyant, cheerful homosexual who charms his way into polite society. When American critics objected to Cedric's unrepentant gayity, Mitford fired back. In America, she observed, you could have pedests in books so long as they were gloomy and killed themselves, but a cheerful one horrified everyone. War II borrowed from Tenant for Lord Sebastian Flight in Brideshead Revisited and the Honorable Miles Malpractice in Vile Bodies. Steven Tenant was becoming fiction even while he was still alive. In 1929, he published Leaves from a Missionary's Notebook, a slim illustrated volume privately printed. It was witty and strange and hinted at a genuine literary gift, but it would be the only book he ever finished. His attentions were then turned to the most passionate love affair of his life. But before Sigfrieded Cassoon, there was a curious episode. Steven had proposed marriage to a friend, Elizabeth Landers, and reportedly frightened her off by discussing plans to bring his nanny along on the honeymoon. That doomed attempt at heterosexual convention behind him. Tenant met Cissoon in the summer of 1927. He was 21. Cissoon was 41, a decorated war hero and one of England's most admired poets, a man who had stared down the Western Front and written some of its bitterest dispatches. The contrast was almost perverse, the soldier poet and the painted boy, and they fell for each other immediately. Tenant wrote Cissoon ardent letters addressing him as my heart's best beloved. Cissoon composed sonets in return. The older man became nurse, protector, and devote, keeping vigil during Steven<unk>'s bouts of illness. "I asked for nothing," Cissoon wrote in April 1929, as tenant recovered from a lung operation, but to be near him always. They traveled together to Bavaria, to the south of France, and for a while the affair had the quality of a pastoral idol, the kind of love that exists in the amber light of someone else's diary. But Tenant's need for solitude grew. His body failed him repeatedly. His moods darkened. He spent weeks in bed, then months. So soon, desperate, took to renting a house near Wilsford and haunting the grounds like some heartbroken ghost in tweeds, then going home to drink and weep. Steven shut him out, then let him back in, then shut him out again. A cycle of intimacy and withdrawal that must have been agonizing for a man who had survived the trenches, only to be undone by a beautiful boy in silk pajamas. Cissoon's hopes would briefly revive when he was allowed in to see Tenant during one of his recoveries only to be crushed again. Steven was admitted to a psychiatric hospital diagnosed with neurosthenia. So soon visited him even there. But in May 1933, the end came with surgical coldness. A letter from tenants's doctor, a doctor ta Ross arrived at Cissoon's door. He says you upset me and make him feel ill. it read and that he cannot see you again. 6 years of love terminated by proxy's hand. Cissoon was destroyed. By the end of that year, he had proposed to Hester Gati, a woman 20 years his junior, who was people noticed Tenant's age and said to resemble him. Tenant, for his part, spent the rest of his life romanticizing what he had thrown away. It is quite paradoxical. His biographer, Philip Poor, observed that having so sumearily dismissed Sigfrieded, Steven should seemingly spend the rest of his life regretting the action. No subsequent lover would fill the space. The affair became, in Tenants's private mythology, an idyllic lost past, a thing more beautiful for having been destroyed. Pamela died in 1928, and Steven inherited Wilsford. The house became a stage set with no play to perform. Throughout the 1930s, Tenant began work on a novel called Lascar, a story you must forget, set among expatriots in Marseilles. He worked on it obsessively, producing stacks of handwritten pages, drawings, and notes. Virginia Wolf, EM Forster, Elizabeth Bowen, and Will Caffa all encouraged him. Sirill Connley, the editor of Horizon, published one of Tenant's paintings on his magazine's cover in 1941 and privately noted that Tenant was an interesting and pathetic phenomenon, a great writer who can't write. The novel was never completed. Tenant rewrote it endlessly, terrified of the judgment that publication would bring. He was, he once confessed, one of those sad people who wanted to be loved without being known. to be a wonderful memory, a legend, a glory. The Second World War effectively ended the Bright Young Things era. The world that had sustained their gilded nonsense, the country houses, the endless weekends, the assumption that nothing truly terrible could happen to people like them was swept away. Wilsford was partly requisitioned as a hospital for wounded soldiers, and Tenant found himself sharing his fantasy palace with men in far worse shape than he had ever been. After the war, Tenant did not re-enter society. The parties were over. The friends had scattered into marriage careers or the grave. Rex Whistler had been killed in Normandy in 1944, just weeks after D-Day, a loss that cut Steven deeply. He retreated into Wilsford with increasing finality, his world shrinking to the dimensions of his bedroom and the overgrown gardens beyond its windows. He had a joint exhibition at the Sagittarius Gallery in Rome in 1956 and another with Cecile Collins in 1976, earning modest praise. One reviewer noted the paintings mystery and romance. He kept up a vast correspondence. Will Caffer remained a treasured friend. In 1949, he wrote the forward to her essay collection, his most significant published work apart from the missionary notebook. He drew, painted, collected shells with an obsessive passion and filled the house with a rising tide of objects, books, photographs, bless jewels that he could not bear to discard. The myth of his reclusiveness calcified into legend. It was popularly believed that he spent the last 17 years of his life in bed, and the image proved irresistible, the faded estate, intombed in satin, producing sheav of handwritten pages for a novel that would never see print. The truth was somewhat more mobile. He made trips to the United States and to Italy, entertained visitors with surprising regularity, and maintained friendships well into old age. He struck up connections with Daphne Dare, Steven Spender, Vita Sackville West, and Elizabeth Bowen. But the image was true enough in spirit. He lived largely supine in designer pajamas or bright pink shorts surrounded by his treasures. His bed a raft a drift in an ocean of accumulated objects. Truman Capot visited. David Hawkchney visited. Kenneth Anger visited. Christopher Isherwood visited. Derek Jarman came to pay homage. He urged Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia to admire his legs. He refused Russell Hart's attempts at a television interview. Harty had sent flowers to coax him, but tenant, unfamiliar with the presenter, found a gesture baffling and hid the roses in an unused room. He grew heavier. He avoided mirrors. He wondered aloud with naked jealousy why Ceil Beaton should receive so much attention and not him. The question was answerable, and he knew it. Beaton had worked. Tenant had merely existed, though he had done so with an intensity that bordered on art. In 1974, Tenant made one of his few public statements on sexual politics. No condemnation of physical joy can be admirable. It was the quiet declaration of a man who had lived through an era when such joy could destroy you, and who had come out the other side unrepentant. He underwent several rounds of electrocomvulsive therapy over the years, suggesting that the carefully curated whimsy of his life concealed dark occurrence of depression. As Cecil beaten had reflected so many of Steven's eccentricities and poses were part of his illness. The beauty was real. The suffering was real. The line between them was never clear. In 1986, his great nephew Simon Blow made a BBC film about him. tenant 80 years old and confined to his pillows told Blow with a satisfied air, "I think we have to say that I am famous." It was both touching and absurd, the declaration of a man who had spent decades fleeing public notice, only to discover that the flight itself had made him unforgettable. Steven Tenant died at Wilsford on the 28th of February, 1987, aged 80. He had outlived almost all of his contemporaries. He had never married. He had no children. He left no will, a final perfect expression of a life that refused to reckon with endings or the coarse mechanics of succession. The estate fell into legal confusion and Soverees was called in to liquidate. The auction held over two days in mid-occtober 1987 was a cultural spectacle. Bidders wandered through rooms that newspapers described as the lair of a fantasist, half asleep among his bibos, jewels, and polar bear skins. The dust lay thick on everything. His housekeeper, Sylvia Blandford, who had cared for him through the long final years, said he would have turned in his grave at the sight of strangers pouring over his things, pricing his dreams by the lot. What remains of Steven Tenant is scattered and strange, like the contents of a magpie's nest distributed across the world's institutions. His letters and scrapbooks sit in the Bayki Library at Yale. His personal effects are displayed at the Victor Win Museum of Curiosities in Hackne, that cabinet of the weird and the wonderful. VS Nipool, who rented tenants property in Wiltshire, fictionalized him as the enigmatic landlord in the enigma of arrival, a spectral figure glimpsed at an upper window already half myth. Terrence Davis depicted him, played by Callum Lynch, in the 2021 film Benediction, which told Cissoon's story and forced viewers to reckon with the damage beautiful people inflict on those who love them. He produced almost no finished work, and yet he haunts the culture in a way that more diligent artists do not. Four fictional characters in major English novels were based on him. His face, photographed by beaten in a hundred poses of studied decadence, circulates still through fashion magazines and art exhibitions and the internet's endless appetite for beautiful ruins. Perhaps that is because what he created was himself, a living artwork of gold, dust and satin and evasion, assembled over eight decades in a crumbling house on the Wiltshire Plains. He wanted to be a wonderful memory. He wanted to be a glory. The terrible beautiful joke is that he got exactly what he wished for and that wishing was the only thing he ever fully committed to doing. All right, a much requested video on one of England's most curious estates. He was such a huge influence on so many whether David Bowie or Derek Jan and he managed all that without ever really doing anything at all. Quite amazing. Thanks for listening. I've been Johnny and I'm off for a cup of Dargiling or perhaps a champagne and creme de vlet. I'll see you next time. Cheers.