NE day I had been working very hard all the morning up in my distant, quiet room, and it was nearly noon. I heard Tony's slow, tempered step on the stairs as he came up to look for me. He had that expression on his face that means he is about to manage me.

"There is a young man downstairs. He come to see you. He has come a long, long way, all the way from Hollywood."

"Oh, Lord!" I groaned. "What is he like?"

"He is nice. He come a long way . . ."

"Well, take him to wash up, and I'll see him after lunch. Una will look after him."

I had visions of a dusty young person who had been hitchhiking, catching lifts in cars, getting along anyhow. Una and the other Jeffers would cope, I knew. Then, after lunch on a tray upstairs, I would be kind and go down and hear all about his aspirations, how he wanted to write, how he had gone to night school, how he had read my books and wanted to do the same kind of thing.

When lunch was over, Una came up the stairs. I was rested and cool and ready now.

"He's a very nice young man, Mabel," she said. "He says his name is Adrian."

"I never heard of any Adrian except the Hollywood one who makes clothes for movie stars," I told her.

"Well, I think that's who it is, though he didn't say so. He is alert and gentle, and we all liked him."

So I went down to see him and laughed to myself when I saw his immaculate white clothes and his summer shoes, his dark blue tie and his blue and white handkerchief. My hiker was fresher than I was!

It was one of those instantaneous congenialities that occasionally happen. In one moment we were talking like old friends, for with this Adrian all the tiresome preliminaries could be discarded. One could be friends or one could not. We were, right from the start.

Perhaps we had a certain common basis for agreeing about things. I know that the people I like best agree with me in one particular—the importance of excellence and genuineness. It doesn't matter in what respect a person excels as long as he excels in something and is real and earnest.

That need to find the authentic reality in people, things, and places exists in Adrian as it does in Una, in Tony, as it did in Lorenzo, and as it did in a few others I have known.

I asked him what he had come for, what his plans were, and he told me that he liked Lorenzo in Taos so much that when he took his first holiday in thirteen years he got into his car at his house and drove out to call on me.

"Well—what did you plan to do first?" I queried, amused and sympathetic.

"I promised to go back to Santa Fé for two days and then I thought maybe I could come back and stay somewhere nearby and come to see you sometimes."

"Look," I told him. "We don't know each other but I think we'd get along. Come back and stay here with us for the weekend and see how it goes. If it goes well, you can stay on for your holiday; if it doesn't, you will be the first to realize it."

"I'd love to do that," he said, and that was the way it began—a friendship that I think we both feel is real and will last.

For we took a good look at each other and decided we would not have to weed each other out. We are both practiced weeders! If someone turns out to be not quite so authentic as he or she gave promise of being, that one is done up in a neat bundle and returned, marked "empty." For this the reproach of being ruthless, heartless, capricious, or changeable is laid at doors like ours, but it is never deserved.

As long as a person is first rate, excellent in some basic quality, Adrian would never go back on him. If that one were tiresome, cruel, unjust, or unfair, still Adrian would not pass him up if he knew that the fine essential excellence lay at the core of his nature. He would have infinite patience and forbearance, infinite understanding and again patience, patience.

The long years of coping with Hollywood characters have taught him that, and what a training it has been! *Gowns by Adrian!* Does any one of you realize what lies behind that small phrase? Designing clothes for the most beautiful women in the world, who must be made still more beautiful, then the fittings, the studious attention to points that must be concealed (*Continued on page 114*)

71

114

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The new Russian Eagle, which General Lodijensky has opened in the Sherry-Netherland, is as celebrated for its celebrities as it is for its blinis and its vodka cocktail. Sharing a snack of grushe in Imperialist surroundings are Mary Garden, or the Scottish nightingale, and Valentin Parera, husband of Grace Moore

GOWNS BY ADRIAN

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 71

or revealed, the caprices, the headaches, the arguments, and all the time to be as gentle as the dove but as firm as a lion!

For an artist cannot give in. If he has formed his conception of a project, whether it is a design to decorate the walls of the Supreme Court or the body of Greta Garbo as Christina, he cannot, he must not give it up. He will do his best to adapt himself but he will not give up his idea.

Adrian has never given up. He has sometimes seemed to; he has been adaptable, for he has infinite flexibility, but because he has been firm, one can always recognize his particular quality in the costumes he produces.

He was quite young when he started in Hollywood—he is not old now, perhaps thirty-two, but if he should pass into the anonymity that the very excellent creators sometimes reach, his clothes would still be recognized. Perhaps because he never drinks anything stronger than an occasional glass of wine, nor oversmokes, nor dissipates himself, the blood comes and goes in his lean cheeks, pulsating as quickly as in those of a child; but I lean to the theory of work as a determinant in his physical fitness.

Is it not strange that this fellow could come to Taos and join a quite new group of people and fit into the days as though he had always been one of us? That is what he did and he seemed to love it, and if he seemed to, then surely he did, for had he not, he would have gone away at once and distinguished to pretend he was enjoying himself, although he has an actor's gift for dissimulation when he cares to use it, which is usually only where his work is concerned.

What background has fitted him to be at home with all kinds of people, from our Abraham Lincolnic local judge and his wife to deep, quiet Robinson Jeffers with his profound sophistication, and all the oddities and adventures of a Southwestern ranch in the summertime?

Let his own words sketch it briefly. "My name is Gilbert Adrian. I started drawing at three, and at seventeen left my home town, Naugatuck, Connecticut, to study at Frank Alvah Parsons' New York School of Fine and Applied Art. Then came Paris, and a Grand Prix Ball to cap the racing season. The great couturiers plan their costumes months ahead, but an American friend, Honor Leeming, asked me to take her in one of my own. We both felt very

self-conscious about it, particularly when a dark little man followed us around with his eyes glued on Honor. Suddenly she got a good look at him and whispered, 'I think it must be Irving Berlin.'

"The composer was said to be scouring Paris for his Music Box Revue, so I decided to speak to him. Probably feeling that he had offended me with his stares, he was terribly confused and barely managed to stammer something about admiring the costume.

"I told him I had hundreds more, and arranged to bring them to his hotel in the morning. The result was a contract for the Music Box. When Natacha Rambova saw the designs, she asked me to come to California and do some for her husband, Rudolph Valentino. I've been here ever since.

"You ask which movies I liked best—

"Garbo in Romance was really fun doing. So was Shearer in The Barretts. And The Great Ziegfeld.

"I loved doing The Guardsman with the Lunts—whom I adore as people about as much as possible, considering the fact that I only can see them on fleeting visits to New York.

"I adore Helen Hayes—who has made my life a hell by giving me a black poodle which I cannot enjoy because he plays with Guard, a Dane dog who howls to high heaven when I take him away—and so I am without a dog—while owning two—the great Dane gives me hay fever—so I can't bring him in the house—and the poodle makes the Dane lonely if I bring him in—so—it's a problem—unsolved."

Adrian meets each person he encounters with poise and without alarm. He is real, sincere, and ready, whether it is for a long horseback ride in the hills or a tumultuous motor drive through a cloudburst. Have not these years he has passed in the studio at Hollywood prepared him for any horse and any cloudburst?

We had a lovely fortnight during his holiday. He was never in the way, yet always prepared for anything. People tried him sometimes. Once in particular he was heckled and really sorely put upon, but at the end it was he who made a nice thing of an unpleasant hour, desiring to leave with everyone feeling kindly. It was over his drawings. He is perhaps more vulnerable on this point than anywhere else, for he leaves a last

(Continued on page 116)

116

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Mrs. H. Allison Laurence roams the Forbidden City in Pekin, having of late shot tigers with the Maharaja of Mysore. On N.Y.K.'s Chichibu Maru, she is on her way around the world

## GOWNS BY ADRIAN

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 114

fern-like sensibility uncovered where they are concerned.

They are unique drawings done in pencil—and never from life. A superficial critic would call them Beardsleyesque, a discriminating eye finds a strange and fantastic originality in them, that in a fatalistic manner portrays a likeness of the day we live in. One strange feature of them is that nearly every figure has the feet of a tree-climber. I desisted from inquiring of him about this and still wonder if he realizes it. An emotional moment of jealousy brought an attack upon these sheets of cardboard one night; Achilles' heel quivered for an hour and then recovered its naked endurance.

Can the secret of a nature like Adrian's be traced to his mother? When I first talked to him, I said to myself he must have had a lovely woman for a mother. I went to stay with him later on in that same year she was away, and the next time I went she was dead, and I had her room. It was not so long before my visit that it had happened, and all her little things were so long there. Her pens and paper, her perfumes, her photographs of Adrian in their silver frames, all those personal small things were in the blue-green room where an open fire burned in the fireplace. I don't know why it seemed so poignant to me when I went to bed to find a little silver hairpin near the edge of the rug.

He had not changed this time, and yet there was a faint wounded look at the bottom of his eyes. He was as gay and adequate as ever, his color as fresh, perhaps fresher than before, and I thought how it is that sometimes a shock of loss and a pain can also freshen up the nature which can take it and face it and go on stronger than before.

The house Adrian lives in is out in the country in north Hollywood, and mediocre places line his street, yet inside his driveway that eighteenth century taste of his shows at once. It is like a French manor house in the deep French country, all white with tall trees about it. At the back, two wings form

a wide embrass, and inside this enclosed place an enormous pepper tree droops feathery branches over the long line of the house and the two tall wings.

Ronny told me how Adrian's mother loved the birds and of a strange happening the morning she was buried. He said that while they were sitting inside, suddenly this huge pepper tree was filled with thousands of birds. They seemed to come from everywhere at once and they all sang like mad so that one heard them all over the house. Ronny said it was like a farewell to her.

OUT in the shade of the old tree there are chairs and a long table and benches, and here nearly every day in the year one may breakfast and lunch while odd industrious pigeons strut upon the lawn at the end, and the quail call upon the wall. Dogs, birds, monkeys, all kinds of little animals are at home nearby. The gray parrot that likes to lie on her back in the palm of his hand calls to Adrian from the kitchen. Besides these, he raises chickens seriously: silver-laced Wyandottes, Buff Orpingtons, and Andalusian Blues. It is gay, homely, beautiful, and very excellent, this environment of his.

There is one at hand named Jenny, one of those pearls so hard to find, a pearl in blue cambric, with blue eyes and a white apron. It is she who orders the excellent meals and cooks the perfect roasts and makes a lemon meringue pie that is really unforgettable! And one named Erland is another indispensable blue-eyed treasure. He never forgets who likes a sherry before dinner and who prefers an old fashioned. In the high-ceilinged drawing-room he draws the long, gray-green taffeta curtains at just the right moment of twilight, and he lights the logs in the deep fireplace when one needs them without realizing it. Erland has an almost military alertness without anything mechanical in it.

It is hard to make a sketch of anything without shadows somewhere, accidents and dark spots, else it is apt to seem insipid and saccharine. But in

*(Continued on page 119)*

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May, 1936

119

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GOWNS BY ADRIAN

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 116

making a little sketch of Adrian, one is really hard put to find the acid to etch with or the malice to touch it up, and I hunt in my remembrance in vain for peculiar or questionable characteristics to flavor these lines. I suppose that genuine quality he has redeems his experienced career. It runs through every part of his life. When he designs clothes they must be carried out in real materials and finished as perfectly as though they would be subjected to an examination under a microscope. If he uses lace it must be real lace, if fur it must be the finest: sable, ermine, or chin-chilla. The sewing has to be of the best.

It is the same with everything in his house. There are no fakes, no false effects. All these beautiful old carvings and crystals and all the sound chairs and tables and paintings, the worn French furniture in the patio, they are genuine. He does not have much of the modern type of furniture about him, and everything has a slightly softened and faded tone that gives a rooted and enduring aspect to his background. Only out in one corner of the patio there is a smart little set of chromium chairs and a table, and they seem very up-to-date standing on the old flagstones.

Adrian's success is perhaps as much due to the fact that he takes no short cuts nor resorts to subterfuges as to his hard work. Take his newest adventure. A face cream. I predict that in a short time everyone who can possibly afford it will be after it, and the reason for that is because it is genuine.

Ronny's mother was visiting there and she showed Adrian her recipe, one she had inherited from her grandmother. Every ingredient in it was good. There were no mineral oils nor tallow nor any of the inferior materials that compose the best creams we know. It was just a good, honest, old-fashioned, efficacious Victorian face cream useful for every purpose, and it took Adrian's fancy. He formed a small corporation with Ronny and Ronny's mother and himself, and he has had it manufactured. There is no artifice about it and no swank. It is put up in plain white alabaster-like jars with platinum lids, and it has the magical name "Adrian" scrawled across the white in silver letters in his abominable writing. It has no subtle cherché perfume to attract and hold one, no panache at all beyond the fact of its simple unusual excellence.

Adrian says he had some jars of it put up and he gave them to twenty women he knew to try it out. If they did not come and demand more of it before the first jar was finished, he knew it wasn't good enough. Needless to say, they clamor for it and it will have one of those indubitable successes that are the result of honest production.

Adrian's principal quality is his honesty. One day I was saying to him that it is so hard to find all one wants in one person.

"Yes, but not impossible," Adrian agreed with a flicker of amusement in his eye, and I realized suddenly that in him one can, as a matter of fact, enjoy this kind of whole human being.

"I don't know why I rest so well in Adrian's house," Tony said the first morning after he slept there, but I did.

"Perhaps because there are no bells ringing, no telephones, or doorbells," I answered, though I knew better, as well as he did.

"No. The frogs outside sing all night and the house very nice and a good feeling here," he went on. That was the way it was. There is a good feeling to Adrian and to his house as well.

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We were enchanted with its possibilities for sports clothes. Just as much of it as we can put through about a hundred washings in time, we are making into country clothes. And we're using the Indian pewter buttons on them, too. If you think this is a decadent over-sophistication, dismiss the thought. You have never seen sports clothes better suited to their purpose.

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