Sunday 6^th February 2011

I can’t keep on about Paris for ever. It’s two weeks now since I was there. Besides, after the January lull (which wasn’t really a lull at all, as we have said) London Poor Little Rich Gays are blossoming with restaurants, dinners, creations, operas, private views, police incidents and miraculous bargains.

But what about Bruno-France Bruno, seen in Paris in that magnificent Hôtel Partic?  He may well turn out to be one of the greatest Poor Little Rich Gays of all. What a masterpiece! There’s inevitability but constant surprise. It was inevitable that, whatever hotel we took in Paris, he would be nearby.  We were invited for drinks. He supplied the code which would open his street door.  Once in the courtyard, we were to call him and he would come down to fetch us: but he didn’t, he came in from behind, through the street door also. Years ago, Bruno-France summoned about thirty people to Glyndebourne: he had special free access to a dress rehearsal of Fidelio. Once there, in the foyer, doubt swept through the party as to the existence of the tickets, from what source, not known. Possibly Bruno-France was glimpsed struggling, or appearing to struggle, at the Box Office. Harry Rollo, the world-famous impresario and performance artist, who has just triumphed in New York, yet again, was writhing on the floor with the tension. But of course there was soon a tremendous clattering and whirring of printing machinery and we were in.

At Glyndebourne Bruno-France always snacks from the house fridge. That’s not the opera house, the actual house.

Last seen residing in a high, high apartment above Drury Lane (white cats, glass walls lightly pinned with honed steel discs), the same apartment in fact that Trenton from the Multis’ gallery went to last winter and sat on a sofa where a porn film had been made the day before – Bruno-France is now recreated in this splendid Hôtel Partic. Bruce MacBain went sweeping round, saying ‘That’s a this,’ and ‘This is a that.’ None of it meant anything to me. It is the apartment of an old lady, now deceased, who endured a long decline and had holes in her clothes. The drawing room was like a meeting room with black leather chairs, no doubt important, round a circular coffee table dense with primitive figures – nowhere to put your knitting. Throughout there was little sign of occupation – no lippie, no stockings, no clucks flung off (I think all that had been modernised into cupboards), streaming wood floors, quite a bit of steel, complete refurb, very modern, of the old building. There was a treadmill, an experimental vertical garden and, according to Prince Dmitri Hersov who knows about these things, absolutely ultra audio equipment.

Bruno-France himself lives mainly elsewhere, at St Germain-en-Laye or if here, in a secret room he showed us, behind a concealed door, with its own bathroom and kitchen.

Experimental Vertical Garden