Cricket and the Occult iii
An investigation in three parts
Part Three
Wormsley
In the final part of our story, John Paul Getty Jr, billionaire philanthropist and creator of the private cricket ground at Wormsley, is dead, and so are Kenneth Anger’s plans for a film about it. Would Arrangement In White And Green ever really have come to fruition? And would it have been too mad to watch if it had?
For years I never thought I’d see Wormsley, Getty’s self-described ‘Arcadian vision’ come alive. It existed as a kind of rumour, a completely private ground host only to the matches that Getty arranged for his own pleasure. Brian Lara and Graham Gooch were among the players to make hundreds during these semi-secret games of wonder, in a place of ultimate cricketing privilege.
When I was a young teen, I used to go to Alf Gover’s cricket school in Wandsworth every Saturday during winter. To get there, me and my dad had to drive along the A3, which ran past the gates of Sutton Place, foreboding country estate of the OG oilman himself and Getty’s father, J Paul Getty Sr, and so for a long time in my mind’s eye, that’s where this secret ground was located. It was decades later, long after John Paul Getty Jr’s death, that I joined a team that booked to play at Wormsley. To be entirely honest, it had lost a little of its mythic quality by then as the estate operated as a semi-commercial going concern, hosting cricket and opera and visits to the library, but it was still possible to feel the magic of the place beneath your feet, all of the great cricketers that had come here when it was a rich man’s dream.
Perhaps Getty Jr knew this was how it would go. I’m guessing he did; maybe there was even something in his will about it, I don’t know. His heir is apparently not as interested in the game, so it thrives in a different way now and anyone can get to see it, which is both necessary and wonderful. The ground needs to be played on, the vision of its creator demands it.
So there is one last mystery, now that both Getty and Kenneth Anger are dead. Why a film, and why Kenneth Anger?
The first part is easier, I think. Getty had a vision and he’d made it real. It was a vision that had helped to save his life and it was probably going to die with him, too, this Arcadian version of it at least, because everything about Wormsley at that point was bound up in who he was. A film would commemorate the ground’s pure first era. People could look at it in two hundred years’ time and understand the essence of his dream.
With his money and clout Getty could have commissioned any number of film makers, but chose Kenneth Anger, who, it’s fair to say, did not know a lot about cricket. But Anger’s life had been dedicated to an independent view of the world, he had lived on his own terms, and he was, as he came towards the end of it all, finally being recognised as an original force in film making. If anyone understood what it meant to have a singular vision and to try to make it real, it was Kenneth Anger.
This film producer Paul Gallagher wrote a terrific piece for the website Flashbak about Anger’s plans for the film, which he was going to call Arrangement in White On Green, an echo of the subtitle to Invocation of My Demon Brother, which was Arrangement in Black and Gold, and a title we have half-inched for this Substack, as it is so lovely and evocative.
Gallagher’s piece is where the quote that opened part one of this trip down the rabbit hole comes from. Contained within it, it seems, is Kenneth Anger’s view of cricket:
‘You know that cricket is actually filled with occult symbols? I mean, It’s a purification ritual, that’s why they dress in white. And the wickets, well, they’re really a wicker gate. And the three stumps, that’s an occult number. Three nails and that… Even the lines on the pitch, is that what you call it? Field. The cricket field. Well, the lines are taken from pagan symbols.’
Maybe the wicket is a gateway of a kind – the gateway between being alive in the game and being excluded from it, as a batter at least. A breaking of the wicket signifies a moment of change, it is both deed and symbol. And more than most sports, cricket is ritualistic, both overtly and in its many arcane events and laws. It’s a game that surrounds its players with superstition and repetition, and it offers access – if you’re lucky – to a higher state, a fleeting feeling that anything is possible, that by your actions alone you can make an otherwise hostile world do your bidding.
Getty, like Anger, was an outsider, an American exile isolated from much of normal life by extreme wealth. Wormsley is an indication that he came to see cricket in a certain way; that for him it was representative of something bigger, a vision of how to survive and live.
I know that Getty commissioned the English artist David Inshaw to paint the ground, and Inshaw’s work is imbued with very deep mystery and allegory. Getty was a fan of what I regard as the greatest cricket painting of all, Inshaw’s The Cricket Game, which he made of another magical country house ground, Little Bredy in Dorset.
Yet commissioning Inshaw didn’t work out. By David’s own admission, his painting of Wormsley wasn’t his best – in fact you can’t really tell it’s Wormsley at all. It was a clash of sensibilities, and maybe Kenneth Anger’s sensibility would have clashed with the place too. He made a lot of films, but most of them are just four or five minutes long. Lucifer Rising only lasts for half an hour, so who can really say what would have happened if he had come to Wormsley with a quarter of a million quid burning a hole in his pocket. Maybe he would have run away with the money and buried it in the desert. Maybe he would have created an insane masterpiece that opened a portal into the game’s deeper mysteries.
Maybe.
We can only look at Wormsley and dream of what those mysteries might really be.