Our Modern Waywardness
Having discussed The Shining at length, we will turn to the real world for some actual historical grounding.
Below is the original version of the photograph which has become iconic as the image that closes Kubrick’s film. He intended to stage the photo himself but his researchers found this one and it was exactly what he needed. He said:
I originally planned to use extras, but it proved impossible to make them look as good as the people in the photograph… I think the result looked perfect. Every face around Jack is an archetype of the period.
One can see exactly what he meant:
A mystery for 45 years, the photo’s provenance was finally identified in 2025. It was taken at a Valentine’s Day ball in London in 1921. So it does not show American high society of the Great Gatsby mould, even though it looks like it. This demonstrates the lingering similarity (as well as the sheer interplay) at that time between Britain and America. On either side of the Atlantic, the upper-class phenotypes had not yet diverged (first in America with its infusions of Germans, Jews and Italians then in Britain with the Third World) so the two groups were still indistinguishable.
Of that bright young crowd in 1921, the vast majority would be British. Some of them have been confirmed. Some elite Americans have been identified by Rob Ager, but I think he is unlikely to be correct.
Among this very WASP crowd was one single anomaly. The man at front-centre (later pasted over with Jack Nicholson) was an eccentric Russian Jew, Santos Casani (Joseph Zisling), who had moved to London around five years before. A former soldier turned ballroom dancer, Casani had been disfigured in a crash two years earlier so was actually wearing a prosthetic nose in the photo. He remained in London for the rest of his life, teaching dance, and died in 1983.
The ball took place at the Royal Palace Hotel in Kensington. Designed in 1892 by Basil Champneys, this was a lovely Victorian building in the Queen Anne style, with stunning interior décor. The exact location was the ballroom of the Empress Rooms, an opulent extension added to the hotel in 1897 and designed by Herbert Legg.
The Empress Rooms was extraordinarily well-fitted with no expense spared in technology or aesthetics:
The ball-room, which is by far the largest in London, will be made to serve also the purpose of a hall for concerts and public dinners, and will be used on Sunday evenings during the London Season for dinners à la carte, at which the Royal Blue Hungarian Band will play. The rooms will be available for wedding breakfasts, balls, banquets, receptions, concerts, &c., being very handsomely furnished. Great attention has been paid to the floor of the ball-room, which is set on springs. This room has panels covered with cerise tinted silk, and the wainscoting is of polished birch and sycamore, the ceiling being in white and gold. The electroliers are a great feature, being of exquisite design and finish; and, in addition to this centre lighting there are thirty five-light brackets round the walls, and these as well as the centre electroliers are fitted with cut-glass globes, the result being that the room is lighted to perfection without the slightest glare.
Immediately, the Empress Rooms became a focal point for high society. Newspaper coverage from the late 1890s and early 1900s notes a staggering succession of parties, balls, dances, concerts and exhibitions held there.
In an alarming example of life imitating art, in 1902 there was a masked ball in the very room where the photograph would be taken, and…
1904 saw a “leap year ball”, at which ladies were invited to approach gentlemen:
The earliest photo I could find is this, from 1905, which I believe was taken from the same balcony as the 1921 photo but looking at the other end of the ballroom:
In 1920 the Empress Rooms reopened after renovation to bring its aesthetics “up to date”, and this Art Deco style is what we see in the famous photo.
That 1921 ball was organised by renowned dance teacher Belle Harding who had been associated with the Empress Rooms for many years. She had written in the Daily Mirror in 1919:
The charm of life lies in variety.
The charm of modern ballroom dancing lies in its variations, and is eloquent of the mood of the moment.
I am constantly being asked whether, in these days of peace, we may look for a return of the old-fashioned waltz - demure, reserved, but very tiring - and I reply, in its old form, never.
In this restless age, when one dances both day and night away, the restricted evolutions of the old waltz has no appeal. We do waltz, but it is a modern version.
A walk, a chassez, a canter, and other variations are introduced to relieve the monotony, and pander to our modern waywardness.
Born in 1865, Harding had grown up in the late Victorian era. Though she seems acceptant of post-war frivolity, she seems also to understand that something is wrong. I don’t think I am reading too much into her words. Can “waywardness” really be meant as a good thing? “Restless” perhaps, but I don’t see how any thoughtful person could think it good for society to be “wayward”. Harding would go on to enjoy her heyday in the 1920s so, while she observed this “mood of the moment”, she benefited from it so perhaps didn’t think it terribly concerning. In retrospect, we know that it was.
Even at the time, it was obvious to many of a certain age that the Great War had uprooted Britain. People, especially young people, were happy to be at peace, but they didn’t know what to do with it. What did the future hold, and what should it hold? An uneasy situation for a country whose empire had already lost its confidence. And, due to the Great War, so many young faces had been lost from high society. Then there was the threat of America - for how long would it bow to the Old World? Troubling questions. Well, at least there were pleasant diversions to occupy the mind.
The actress, aristocrat and socialite Muriel Barnby had a women’s gossip column in the Sunday Pictorial under the pseudonym “Kiki” (previously “A Town Mouse”). She wrote to her fans in the run-up to Harding’s Valentine’s Day ball:
Oh, yes, I’d almost forgotten to tell you a very exciting bit of news. I’m to be one of the judges of the foxtrot competition at the Empress Rooms on St. Valentine’s Night at the “hearty ball”. You’re given a heart to wear on your sleeve when you arrive - in case you haven’t got one - and somewhere there’s another to match it.
Afterwards, she reported:
Miss Bedells and I were judging the dancing competition at the Empress Rooms that night, and Heather Thatcher was another of the judges. She wore an Early Victorian gown with lace frills, demure rosebuds holding her “bertha” on her shoulders. And with it she wore a tortoiseshell monocle.
Lord Leigh, who was born in the [eighteen]‘fifties, was at Miss Harding’s supper-party, but wouldn’t judge, being “a mere amateur”, he said. Nevertheless, he was the gayest of us, and couldn’t understand why people needed coffee or spirits to keep themselves going.
The ball was also reported in Kensington’s local newspaper:
A special dance was held under the direction of Miss Harding at the Empress Rooms, Royal Palace Hotel, on St. Valentine’s Day (last Monday). Ballot dances, Continental attractions, and a fox-trot competition with novel prizes were performed. The judges were well-known members of Society, the Stage, and the Press. Murray Pilcer’s Band played some good music.
It all sounds so harmless and good-natured. But what of all the young elite who could not attend, because they had died in the Great War? Vigorous, capable, brave and honourable, the best of our gene-pool, ready to take their country into the future, but instead they were just dead meat dissolving into soil - a lamentable waste which, it seems to me, doomed their country in the long term.
Still now, there was the lingering wealth and prestige from Victorian times. See how the Empress Rooms were advertised:
The following year, the Evening Standard gave an account of what must have been an astonishing experience at the venue:
Sunlight is the last thing usually associated with an all-night dance, but it was a feature of the ball held last night at the Empress Rooms. A wonderful lighting scheme had been devised, and at nine o’clock at night the effect was that of a strong afternoon sunlight.
As the night wore on the sun went down, sunset gave place to dusk, and at midnight the great ballroom was apparently illuminated by the soft light of a full moon, which in turn sank to rest, and the half-light of dawn was followed by morning sunshine. At 2:30am the dancers were disappointed to find that they had to go home in the dark, after all!
The expertise, ingenuity and wealth to achieve this in 1922 can hardly be exaggerated. It was late-imperial decadence, certainly, but still the venue was being advertised with a note of Victorian rectitude, as in this pictorial which explained the brilliant engineering of its now-legendary dance-floor:
In surveying what followed, we should consider the ambition (and nascent foreignness) of Britain’s child America. When the merry 1921 ball took place, the Federal Reserve had already existed for eight years, Wall Street was ploughing towards the Great Crash of 1929, and in the decade after that Franklin D Roosevelt would engineer Britain’s castration with World War II. That cataclysm would divorce Britain from its imperial and Victorian past. It would also (as shown in Jack Torrance) divorce Americans from their civilisational heritage. But it would do the same to Europeans. Indeed, one can see foreshadowings of this in aesthetic changes before the war, as classical elegance gave way to modernist whimsy:
But foreshadowings are one thing, a world war is another. Britain would never be the same again.
Ominously, the Empress Rooms retained prominence in London society until exactly that point. After a final dance in May 1940, the times precluded frivolity. The venue is absent from newspapers until 1944 when a darts competition was held there. During those years of disuse its opulence would have decayed somewhat. In 1945 a diorama exhibition took place… and then nothing.
Just before the end of the war, Belle Harding died, aged eighty. It seems to symbolise the end of the era she represented. This is made more stark by the fact that she was in good health, still dancing and teaching, and only died because of a horrible accident at home.
The Empress Rooms went unmentioned in newspapers until 1949, at which point it was used as an issuing centre for ration tokens (a grim demonstration, in a place that formerly epitomised Britain’s wealth, of its post-war penury). In the 1950s its grand larger rooms were used as offices by the Civil Defence Corps, no doubt being stripped of their beauty in the process. Meantime, Kensington Council used the building’s upper storeys for social housing.
In 1955 Santos Casani was interviewed on “the Torrid Twenties” and “the Terrifying Thirties”. He reminisced:
Ah, that was the time when people had money and liked to spend it whatever time of the day it was. And it was the time when people loved dancing. They would dance at tea-time, dinner-time, and supper-time.
Casani had disdained the arrival of primitive dances such as “the Black Bottom”. No doubt he was alluding to that when he lamented the inversion of hierarchy that had occurred as culture became “democratised”:
In those days a new dance used to be started by society and dribble down to the palais. Now it’s the other way round. It starts in the jungle and ends in the nightclub.
But perhaps that is what happens when the elite occupy themselves with trivia; if they won’t take their position seriously, why shouldn’t people consult the jungle? But, at the same time, we need to bear in mind America’s influence, and its emerging new elite who exalted Black culture, especially in dance. Casani’s casual racism was picking up on that. He was nostalgic for a WASP culture that, though itself degraded by the 1920s, had visibly been supplanted by the 1950s. Nowadays we complain about rap, drill, twerking, “wiggerism” and MLE, but they are not the first uses of Black culture to assault White civilisation.
The same interviewer also spoke with Casani’s colleague Josephine Bradley, who recalled:
The most popular place for tea dances was the Empress Rooms at Kensington. I wonder what’s happened to them.
These two jewels of Victorian London, the Royal Palace Hotel and the adjoining Empress Rooms, survived for forty years after the 1921 photo was taken. In 1958 they were bought by Jewish hotelier Maxwell Joseph. Soon after, he secured investment from financier Israel Instone Bloomfield and a building grant from the Labour government. In 1960 the Empress Rooms were demolished without ceremony, without acknowledgement of their former grandeur and importance. The hotel was demolished the following year. On the site of both was built a new hotel, a Brutalist monstrosity designed by Jewish architect Richard Seifert.
And so we see the historical dynamic that Kubrick reflected in The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut: property, wealth and power transferred from one elite to its successor; the first corrupted by success, the second calmly destroying what it had bought.
Fascinating piece. Got me thinking, TS Eliot would have been writing The Waste Land in 1921, a poem about disintegration, both personal and societal. It gives you this eerie sense of being in a photograph of a place that was destroyed long ago.
This is my favorite piece you have written, Colin. You have always been a top-flight writer but this is absolute art filled with great insight. Excuse the effusive praise but the piece really hit me both initially and with the second read. This, particularly:
"The Empress Rooms went unmentioned in newspapers until 1949, at which point it was used as an issuing centre for ration tokens (a grim demonstration, in a place that formerly epitomised Britain’s wealth, of its post-war penury)."
You should be quite proud of that. You would have been encouraged to "frame it" at the time of The Royal Hotel's height through to the time digital technology vulgarized how we memorialize our triumphs.
The early Twenties were Peak WASP and good on you for pointing out that it was the last time the Upper Classes in Britain and America were physically identical in almost instance. War and economic collapse divorced the two both politically and aesthetically after almost four centuries; it is not without irony that the physical resemblance continues only among the white working classes in the North of England and Appalachia/the Upper South, people who would have been barred from the Empress Room or the pre-war Plaza Hotel dance hall.