MY CURIOUS YEARS WITH CHARLES HENRI FORD
The Autobiography of Indra B. Tamang
by Indra B. Tamang & Romy Ashby
Turtle Point Press. 264 pages, $24.
INDRA B. TAMANG’S autobiography proves that the Cinderella fable is alive and well and thriving in the exurbs of Kathmandu, Nepal. That’s where Tamang was born, in a hut with no electricity and no running water. By his teenage years, his ambition and curiosity had led him to the capital to become a waiter far from home in a hotel restaurant. There he waited for months on a silver-haired, soft-spoken American gentleman who eventually asked if he’d like to become a houseman or general factotum in his newly acquired house, an unused wing of a prince’s palace.
For most young Nepalese men, that would have been the end of the story. But Indra’s new employer was an artist, the last of the surrealists, a world traveler, an author, and a bon vivant named Charles Henri Ford. When Ford picked up stakes and went to New York or Paris for months at a time, he brought Indra with him. When he moved into another house in Chania, Crete, he brought Indra, who again took over as houseman and companion—though never as lover. This was in the mid-1970s, and both Paris and Manhattan were enjoying what may have been the last artistic flowering of bohemia. Ford knew or got to know all of the major players, from Andy Warhol to art curator Henry Geldzahler—and so did Indra.
All of this is detailed in Tamang’s very readable autobiography, My Curious Years with Charles Henri Ford, which always rides a fine balance between starry-eyed bedazzlement and controlled nonchalance—not an easy thing to achieve when you’re ensconced at the Dakota with
actress Ruth Ford, John Lennon, and Yoko Ono as neighbors. Tamang not only helped Charles with his work but also made his own art, including photos, posters, and collages. After Ford’s death in 2002 at age 94, Tamang remained friendly with many of the artists he’d met. He smoothly glided over to the same caretaking position for Charles’ sister, Ruth Ford, when she began to fail, living in her even larger apartment downstairs at the Dakota. Eventually, he inherited both places, which were worth millions of dollars, giving rise to a storm of news stories both pro and con.
When Tamang writes of his village past in Nepal, you can almost smell and taste this world. He never lost that past and in later years returned often to Nepal. He is less descriptive and tactile about other places. True, the ancient house in Chania, Crete, gets a nod, but the Parisian flat and the wonderful double apartment at the top of the Dakota, originally servants’ quarters, are all but ignored.
People in the book fare similarly. While the author might suddenly stop the narrative flow and go into detail about this odd neighbor or that strange visitor—all very minor characters—we never get anything like a full portrait of those he was closest to: Charles Henri and Ruth Ford. She was a model and later a minor actress in theater and film. But Charles was a one-of-a-kind human being, a strong-willed person who created himself out of almost nothing, with an odd and “artistic” mother, Southern upbringing, and a more-or-less absent father.
By the time this writer came to know Ford in the late 1980s, he possessed a persona as smoothly polished as a porcelain statue. If there was a point of entry to his character, it wasn’t obvious. He had a mot for virtually every situation that might arise. What was he like beneath that exterior, this lover of poet Djuna Barnes (who never had another lover after that) and of the surrealist painter Pavel Tchelitchew? Tamang was with Ford for thirty years and presumably in a position to tell us, but he does not.
Ford and Tamang seem to have met pretty much everyone in the art world for several decades and in multiple cities, such that a list of names and brief descriptions is needed, and one is provided, as a sort of appendix. Tamang emerges as a nice guy who was spirited away and allowed himself to be spirited away, again and again. But he seems unable or unwilling to discuss what that actually means. For some readers, it might mean something quite dark: he was colonized so utterly that he never thought to question or complain. For other, more lighthearted readers, it could mean: why bother to analyze your luck when it has been so fabulous?
Felice Picano, who passed away shortly after turning in his final review to this magazine, was the author of many novels and memoirs.
