She had been married and divorced three times. I knew this because Ravi and I had fetched out every item of personal history we could from the internet, and photos of the Dame as a young woman, looking fierce and intelligent, even at the risk of eclipsing her beauty. Years ago, she’d made a documentary about a group of women—artists, cooks, socialites, pigeon-feeders—whom she filmed in their bedrooms and studios and on the street. I loved this film, its humor and stubbornness. The way it didn’t smooth out the women’s madness. There were scenes of the object cluttering their homes, slow shots of their thickened hands, their creased faces like lines of a poem. On-screen, the women were restored to a state of dignity that might have been refused them in their lives. I had always thought that the film was a kind of self-portrait, a collage of what the Dame valued in herself and how she wanted to be seen.
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