If you don’t know A Visit to Don Otavio, Sybille Bedford’s delightful book about Mexico, all told with love of foible and with sly humor, I am here to prod you into filling this local-color lacunae, as did praise from the most prestigious publications, which fell over themselves at its 1953 publication. Born in Germany in 1911 as Sybilla von Schoenbeck, daughter of Maximilian von Schoenbeck – a feckless Francophile, who died when she was 14 – and Lisa Bernhardt – Jewish heiress and drug-addicted social bird-of-paradise – Sybille was raised in Germany, Italy, England, and France—on the Riviera, where she came of age between the wars. Her mother had an affair with Clive Bell, Virginia Woolf’s brother–in-law, and brought the Bloomsbury set into their lives. Sybille was taken up, practically adopted, by Aldous Huxley and his wife Maria, with whom she had a long-running romance, one of nearly countless liaisons with women. She is once described as “a young German girl, blond and red-cheeked, wearing a dinner jacket and a monocle…” Her biographer, Selina Hastings (Sybille Bedford: A Life), name-drops through her years: Maurice Chevalier, Thomas Mann, André Gide, Albert Einstein, Berthold Brecht, Jean Cocteau, Peggy Guggenheim, Mary McCarthy, Diana Trilling…
After Hitler came to power, Germany expropriated her inheritance. She got a protective English passport after friends paid a British homosexual to marry her (thus Bedford) and skipped out on one of the last ships to New York before U-boats shut down Atlantic passenger travel. Her companion and lover was Esther Murphy, sister of Gerald Murphy who, with his wife Sara, was a great friend of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda.
When the war was over, thousands wanted to return to Europe; bookings were next to impossible to get, so Sybille and E., as Esther is known in the book, decided to while away some inexpensive time in Mexico. They hit all the high points: Coyoacan, Cuernavaca, Patzcuaro, Oaxaca, Puebla, and so forth, Sybille finding the driest of humorous observations to make as she went, as well as offering up gems of description such as finding herself under “a ceiling vaulted by an Indian, taught by a Spaniard taught by a Moor.” But their sojourn at Lake Chapala was the highest point of their travels. They had obtained an introduction to Don Guillermo Gonzáles Hermosillo Brizula, dueño of Villa Montecarlo and descendant of an ex-governor of Jalisco. He is referred to in her book as the Don Otavio of the title – Don Otavio de X y X y X – referred to as the son of an ex-governor of Jalisco.
“The eighteenth century hacienda, washed apricot, with wings enclosing quadrangles on each side, stretched a long southwestern front facing Lake Chapala.” The gardens were English, the statuary was Italian, there were seventeen attentive servants, waiting hand and foot and sweeping up geranium petals. Don Otavio tells Sybille that the house is a replica of “a villa at Monte Carlo my mother used to stay in when she was a girl.” In Sybille’s book it is called Hacienda San Pedro. Don Otavio makes his casa their casa and introduces them to expats whose docks await up and down the lake, and who fall alike to Sybille’s wit.
A Mrs. Rawlston gets the brunt of it. In the Otavio book she comes from “a family that was ruined in the war about the Negroes.” Who could this be but Neill James, who is said to have been born in 1895 on a cotton plantation in Mississippi. In 1946, when Sybille visited, she was very much in residence in our latter-day LCS garden. In the biography, we hear that James got into a row with Sybille and Esther – intimates of Huxley mind you – over his mysticism. She throws a plate at them and drives them out of the house. In A Visit to Don Otavio, they go to Mrs. Rawlston’s house for a seemingly endless afternoon and evening of bridge during which she cheats brazenly, miscounting tricks and misremembering her bid as suits the likelihood of winning, all the while offering a master class in imperiousness. And she deplores a so-called Mr. Middleton (whose true identity I have not sussed and who loves his English garden above all) for entertaining two dark-skinned Hindu botanists, calling him a lover of the sort of three-fifths people who might have labored on her father’s plantation. None of this color, and there is plenty more, seems to have made any impression around these parts where today, nearly 32 years after her death, James is Philanthropist, Godmother, all around Lady Bountiful. It may be that James is not remembered so harshly because the Mrs. Rawlston character is not pure James but is a mash up of her with her plantation history and the “strong-willed, opinionated, and sometimes obstinate” Elizabeth Hunton in nearby Villa Virginia. She was so notorious a character that she starred in her own book, the 1939 Mrs. Morton of Mexico by Arthur Davidson Fricke.
When I first read A Visit to Don Otavio some years ago, I was delighted to see a fairly careful description of the location of the hacienda. Someday I would take my book, visit the lake, and seek it out; perhaps from land, perhaps from a boat close to the lakeshore, seek at least a likely site where it might have been. Here are the directions Sybille offers: From Guadalajara, she and E. reach the end of the road and the lake. When the promised launch fails to arrive, they commandeer a ride in a mule cart and head west. They pass stucco villas—among them the house of Porfirio Díaz’s daughter—followed by open country. The road deteriorates to “not always parallel ruts.” They occasionally have to get out to push the cart and move boulders. Next a village: “San Antonio Something.” Another hour brings them to a church and a collection of mud houses – Ajijic. So far so good. More wild country and at last, Don Otavio’s villa in a place called San Pedro Tlayacán.
But when I finally move here, I do not encounter San Pedro Tlayacán. Maps don’t include it, neither does Google. I begin to suspect Sybille doesn’t want me arriving at the hacienda without a proper introduction and has sent me on a wild goose chase. Ah, but she slips up with another detail – a votive chapel can be found on a steep hill just outside the hacienda’s gate.
Across the road from the hill in Chapala that leads up to the Capilla de Nuestra Señora de Lourdes, and extending to the lake, is an enormous property with two large blocks of hotel rooms, a meeting center, and a spacious patio for outdoor dining. The grounds are hectareas in size; there is a tree older than God. It is called Hotel Villa Montecarlo, the very name of the hacienda of Don Guillermo, the real-life Don Otavio! My husband and I pay a visit and inquire into the property’s history. The waiter who has worked there the longest is summoned.
Yes! He confirms that this is the place. The hacienda is long gone. It had been an earlier hotel for a time, indeed in Sybille’s book Don Otavio is ordering ceramic numbers for the bedroom doors and organizing place settings, since in fact he is nearly destitute and desperate for income. The waiter says that for a time the state acquired the house and it served as an asylum for orphans or pensioners or something, also that there are pictures of the old hacienda somewhere. We keep two appointments to see them but they cannot be found – or perhaps even looked for. His priority is urging us to visit the room where Maria Felix once stayed. It clearly must have been a high point of his life, seeing “the most beautiful woman in the world.”
Never underestimate Tony Burton’s knowledge of our area. In If These Walls Could Talk, he points out additional ways Sybille has led me astray. He is the one who says that Sybille’s Mrs. Rawlston was based on Hunton, not James, though Hunton was not born on a plantation in Mississippi as James was. Sybille’s biographer sure thought Mrs. Rawlston was James. The property on which Hotel Villa Montecarlo stands was settled by Septimus Crowe, who was “living at the lake well before 1893,” and Villa Montecarlo was the name he gave the original house. It was sold several times before being acquired by Aurelio Gonzáles Hermosillo, father of Guillermo who inherited in the 30s. Father and son were involved in building La Capilla de Lourdes. The house Sybille encountered was a 1918 remodel of a 1906 replacement of the Septimus Crowe home, not an eighteenth century hacienda. As seen in the picture, it does not resemble her description, though it is lovely and grand. I stand corrected too on the age of the magnificent Ficus shading the patio. Burton tells me it is not in fact older than God, but was planted in 1918. Sybille’s invention, “San Pedro Tlayacán,” may come from the name of a Villa Tlalocan, Villa Montecarlo’s close neighbor. Aguas Termales Tlalocan, below the Racquet Club hill in San Juan Cosalá, is in the approximate location where Sybille sent me to find Hacienda San Pedro with its aura of the idyll that was life as Don Otavio’s guest. Did she obfuscate, misremember, give a fig? One finally surrenders. Go on, Sybille, tell me your delightful story. Fact checking her is a fool’s errand – but how entertaining to be both her reader and that fool.
- Fraud - March 30, 2025
- Crossing the River - January 30, 2025
- A Visit to Don Otavio - December 26, 2024
Thanks for the kind words in this very interesting article, which has given me some pause for thought. If you are interested in discussing more about Bedford, James, et al, then feel free to get in touch. Tony.