In the late summer of 1926, when Rosamond Bernier was not quite 10 years old, her father put her on a ship and sent her off to her English boarding school, all by herself. Every evening she changed into a (party) dress, ate cold smoked tongue and then retired to the smoking room for gambling. “I had spectacular luck,” Bernier writes in her bonbon of a book, “Some of My Lives: A Scrapbook Memoir.”
Indeed she did. Throughout her long life she is now 95, Bernier has had a knack for being in the right place at the right time. Though little known outside the world of art and fashion, she was a fixture within it, as a writer, an editor and a lecturer. This book, as its title suggests, is a random collection of her (memories), snapshots of some of the greatest artists, writers and composers of her day.
Some of these relationships were serendipitous. When Bernier went to visit the conductor Carlos Chávez — whom she knew through her father, the head of the board of directors of the Philadelphia Orchestra — at a (rehearsal) in Mexico while she was in college, Aaron Copland happened to be playing the piano. Two others were present: Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Bernier befriended them all. She and Copland grew so close that he walked her down the aisle at her wedding to the art critic John Russell in 1975. On her first engagement, she recounts that he wrote: “ ‘My girl has gotten herself (engaged) — the only girl I could have married.’ Then he added I can almost hear the giggle, ‘This will confuse the biographers.’ ” That (drunk) in the bar in Acapulco, the one she and her first husband tried to nurse back to health? Malcolm Lowry.
