And another one. I see from Wikipedia that Heywood Isham died in 2009 and has officially become a footnote in history, just as he would have wanted, I’m sure. Sheila has a website.
Sheila and Heywood Isham were staying at the Angleterre Hotel, which is next to the Astoria in St Isaac’s Square. “We find the Astoria so stuck up,” complained Sheila, her nut brown face scowling. Her skin was tanned to the condition of leather after years in hot climates – Haiti, the United States. Her husband, whom she called “Hey!” was a retired US ambassador. She was an artist. For fifty years the couple had travelled the globe, meeting the rich and famous, and now they were back in Russia, “our favourite place of all,” to promote a retrospective exhibition of her work at the Mikhailovsky Castle. I had come early, dressed pretty tidily, because I was aware I was mixing with high-flyers.
I was sneaked up on in the foyer by a venerable old man, mostly bald, but smartly dressed, this was Hey!, who led me to their table, where they were just finishing up their breakfast. They boxed me in and started asking me questions. My first impression was quite positive. Sheila Isham had strong blue eyes and brown highlights in her hair. I took her for around her mid-fifties (she was seventy-six, I learned later.) They told me how pleased they were to be back in Russia and I politely asked questions about their interesting lives. Almost as if I had pressed a button, Hey launched into an anecdote about his early career. He had obviously told it so many times, that he couldn’t remember what the point of it was. Sitting alongside Hey, I had a better chance to examine him. He was definitely getting old. He had the trembling jaw of the third age, and heavily liver spotted, like a piece of corned beef. The story neither gathered pace nor stimulated interest, and I wasn’t sure it was supposed to. Looking at Hey’s misted-over expression, I realised I had been transformed into dinner party guest, strategically placed beside him at the table and listening to the old Russia hand unlock his file-index of dusty anecdotes. It was a dull tale, which I listened to with increasing incredulity – not because I didn’t believe it happened, but because I couldn’t believe that someone could consider it worth repeating. Hey was saying, “ 'and he said, ‘Do you speak any German?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I do,’ and he said, ‘You’re hired.’ ” Hey began laughing gently, and I realised, with sudden horror, that that had been the punchline, and that I had missed it. I belatedly joined in, but felt I lacked conviction.
It was Sheila who did most of the talking after that. She told me how they had come to Russia for the first time in the mid-fifties. She had studied International Relations but had changed to Art when she met Heyward. He would cover the international relations from there on, as a young diplomat. When he was in Germany (where his anecdote had deposited him, young, smart, and groomed for a great career), she was studying at a famous school there ( I knew it was famous, because of the significance with which she pronounced the name I had never heard of.) “Boy, did they work us hard there. But I learned a lot. I learned an awful lot.” If he was in anecdote mode, she was very definitely in interview mode: no incident was isolated, but was as if neatly labelled for magazine consumption, “influences”, “education”...
“That was where I learned my craft. I had to work hard, but I had talent,” she was saying. (“I’ll be the judge of that”, I thought.) But perhaps this was the first inkling I had that, for those that fame has taken under her wing, or even for those, like Sheila Isham, who are merely clinging to its tail feathers, approbation is already a given, and individual approval can only gloss what is already there, which is a cast iron self-assurance of one’s own ability. Sheila explained how, when they first came to Moscow, they were followed around. “I got into a lot of trouble from drawing bridges. You weren’t allowed to draw anything in those days, and there were a lot of amateur policemen who would inform the authorities if they thought you looked suspicious.”
She was harmlessly patronising: “...but you know that already,” she would add, after telling me something that I knew already. You had the impression that she thought you were flattered when she said this. “I know I know that already”, I kept feeling like saying.
Hey! had been silent for quite a while, but the mention of Khruschev in connection with painting seemed to activate transistor relays in his analogue brain, and he briefly flickered to life, like a fairground fortune teller’s head when you put a coin in the slot, with an anecdote about a telephone call in which dropping the name of a high up member of the KGB to an intransigent lackey had obtained a desired result. We chuckled appreciatively at his savoir faire. His Russian was partially intact: at least he could say 'so l'dom' (with ice) perfectly.
“We were persona non grata here for a while,” said Sheila. “That means we weren’t welcome,” she added helpfully, “...but you know that already”.
They were a remarkable old couple. He was the worldly half of their relationship, discussing international politics at the very highest level, from the horse’s mouth. She, by contrast, took care of the rest of existence: its metaphysical manifestations, in art and the world of the imagination. She spoke of her art, her “work” as if it were something she had no control over, but merely tended, as if it were a garden she were the curator of, or a strange creature such as a dragon, that she was the guardian of. “A couple of years after Haiti, my work became really mythic” she told me.
I would have been happy to leave it at this, but unfortunately, I had been ‘hired’ as some kind of tour guide, translator and gopher before the exhibition. Sheila was beside herself with the lack of preparation by the Russian organisers of the event. It was on the way to the gallery that I found out how old she was, by letting her fall in the snow. If anyone over sixty falls over and you are near them, it’s your responsibility, by the way, for not throwing yourself underneath their collapsing body like an airbag. At the gallery, an hour or two later, Sheila revealed herself to be a true primadonna, with whistles and bells, not to mention a typical American abroad. If she had left the practical side of existence to Hey!, how completely she had accomplished it! Now she was incapable of the slightest improvisation in the material realm. She made the simplest task, that of allocating some thirty or so paintings to five rooms according to some instructions, nearly impossible.
”Which room is this?” she would ask, not revealing to her interlocutors, except through a slow and painful process of trial and error, that she in fact had an invisible soundproof bubble around her head and could not hear a word you said. Paintings would be brought in, “That one goes there. That one goes there. No. Sorry. This is the wrong sheet. Let me get the right sheet. This is the right sheet. That one goes there. That one goes there. Oh. No, this is the wrong room. YOU’VE GOT THE WRONG ROOM!” Three hours later, the job was half done. Hey! had arrived, and when he thought he was unobserved, discreetly loosened his clothing. The public hanging went on. It should have taken twenty minutes. I was in awe of this ancient, brown, wrinkled powerhouse of creativity and incompetence. She was fantastic at pushing people around, and she made people feel it was it was an honour to be pushed around by her. Her steely blue eyes, hardened, no doubt by years of living, and getting things done in difficult-to-live-and-get-things-done places, brooked no dissent. I understood the awesome charismatic power of the catastrophic generals of history. The Somme suddenly made sense.
But what about her paintings? The different ‘phases’ and ‘periods’ of the artist are supposed to denote the restlessness of the imagination, the constant drive to experiment. Sheila Isham’s pictures were the kind that would provoke a Sunday supplement panegyrist to call them a ‘series of departures.’ They were departures, all right, but in the sense of a British railway timetable: none of them actually arrived anywhere. Unlike most artists, who tend to begin with the figurative, and gradually unshackle themselves from the slavish adherence to established forms, Isham had developed in the opposite direction, beginning with abstract expressionist circles and wavy lines, moving through a sort of primitivism to end up at a kind of simple expressionism, or, to put it crudely, pictures of animals in dynamic brush strokes. There might have been three or four different artists on display, so it was difficult not to suspect a touch of wilfulness in all this. Still, whereof on cannot speak, one should remain silent. I was just the hired help (although I never got paid.)
