One on One
One on One
Craig Brown
101 chance meetings, juxtaposing the famous and the infamous, the artistic and the philistine, the pompous and the comical, the snobbish and the vulgar, each 1,001 words long, and with a time span stretching from the 19th century to the 21st.Life is made up of individuals meeting one another. They speak, or don’t speak. They get on, or don’t get on. They make agreements, which they either hold to or ignore. They laugh, they cry, they are excited, they are indifferent, they share secrets, they say ‘How do you do?’ Often it is the most fleeting of meetings that, in the fullness of time, turn out to be the most noteworthy.‘One on One’ examines the curious nature of different types of meeting, from the oddity of meetings with the Royal Family (who start giggling during a recital by TS Eliot) to those often perilous meetings between old and young (Gladstone terrifying the teenage Bertrand Russell) and between young and old (the 23 year old Sarah Miles having her leg squeezed by the nonagenarian Bertrand Russell), and our contemporary random encounters on television (George Galloway meeting Michael Barrymore on Celebrity Big Brother).Ingenious in its construction, witty in its narration, panoramic in its breadth, ‘One on One’ is a wholly original book.
Craig Brown
One on One
Dedication
For Frances
Epigraph
Tossed upon ocean waters,
Two wooden logs meet;
Soon a wave will part them,
And never again will they touch.
Just so are we; our meetings
Are momentary, my child.
Another force directs us,
So blame no fault of man.
Ga Di Madgulkar
We have as many personalities
as there are people who know us.
William James
The earth keeps turning round and gets nowhere.
The moment is the only thing that counts.
Jean Cocteau
When Arthur Miller shook my hand I could only think
that this was the hand that had once cupped
the breasts of Marilyn Monroe.
Barry Humphries
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
ONE ON ONE
ADOLF HITLER
JOHN SCOTT-ELLIS
RUDYARD KIPLING
MARK TWAIN
HELEN KELLER
MARTHA GRAHAM
MADONNA
MICHAEL JACKSON
NANCY REAGAN
ANDY WARHOL
JACKIE KENNEDY
HRH QUEEN ELIZABETH II
THE DUKE OF WINDSOR
ELIZABETH TAYLOR
JAMES DEAN
ALEC GUINNESS
EVELYN WAUGH
IGOR STRAVINSKY
WALT DISNEY
P.L. TRAVERS
GEORGE IVANOVICH GURDJIEFF
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT
MARILYN MONROE
NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV
GEORGE BROWN
ELI WALLACH
FRANK SINATRA
DOMINICK DUNNE
PHIL SPECTOR
LEONARD COHEN
JANIS JOPLIN
PATTI SMITH
ALLEN GINSBERG
FRANCIS BACON
HRH PRINCESS MARGARET
KENNETH TYNAN
TRUMAN CAPOTE
PEGGY LEE
PRESIDENT RICHARD M. NIXON
ELVIS PRESLEY
PAUL McCARTNEY
NOËL COWARD
PRINCE FELIX YOUSSOUPOFF
GRIGORI RASPUTIN
TSAR NICHOLAS II
HARRY HOUDINI
PRESIDENT THEODORE ROOSEVELT
H.G. WELLS
JOSEF STALIN
MAXIM GORKY
LEO TOLSTOY
PYOTR IL’ICH TCHAIKOVSKY
SERGEI RACHMANINOFF
HARPO MARX
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
BERTRAND RUSSELL
SARAH MILES
TERENCE STAMP
EDWARD HEATH
WALTER SICKERT
WINSTON CHURCHILL
LAURENCE OLIVIER
J.D. SALINGER
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
FORD MADOX FORD
OSCAR WILDE
MARCEL PROUST
JAMES JOYCE
HAROLD NICOLSON
CECIL BEATON
MICK JAGGER
TOM DRIBERG
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
GEORGE GALLOWAY
MICHAEL BARRYMORE
DIANA, PRINCESS OF WALES
PRINCESS GRACE
ALFRED HITCHCOCK
RAYMOND CHANDLER
HOWARD HAWKS
HOWARD HUGHES
CUBBY BROCCOLI
GEORGE LAZENBY
SIMON DEE
MICHAEL RAMSEY
GEOFFREY FISHER
ROALD DAHL
KINGSLEY AMIS
LORD SNOWDON
BARRY HUMPHRIES
SALVADOR DALÍ
SIGMUND FREUD
GUSTAV MAHLER
AUGUSTE RODIN
ISADORA DUNCAN
JEAN COCTEAU
CHARLIE CHAPLIN
GROUCHO MARX
T.S. ELIOT
QUEEN ELIZABETH THE QUEEN MOTHER
THE DUCHESS OF WINDSOR
Author’s Note
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Other Books by Craig Brown
Copyright
About the Publisher
ADOLF HITLER
IS KNOCKED DOWN BY
JOHN SCOTT-ELLIS
Briennerstrasse, Munich
August 22nd 1931
Earlier this year, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei – the second largest political party in Germany – moved into new offices at Briennerstrasse 45, near Königsplatz. As he approaches his forty-third birthday, its leader, Adolf Hitler, is enjoying success as a best-selling author: Mein Kampf has already sold 50,000 copies. He now has all the trappings of wealth and power: chauffeur, aides, bodyguards, a nine-room apartment at no. 16 Prinzregentenplatz.
His stature grows with each passing day. When strangers spot him in the street or in a café, they often accost him for an autograph.
His new-found sense of self-confidence has made him less sheepish around women. A pretty nineteen-year-old shop assistant named Eva Braun has caught his eye; she works in the shop owned by his personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann. He has even begun dating her. Walking along Ludwigstrasse on this bright, sunny day in Munich, what can possibly go wrong?
A few hundred yards away, young John Scott-Ellis is taking his new car for a spin. He failed to distinguish himself as a pupil at Eton College. ‘I had advantages in that I wasn’t stupid and was quite good at most games,’ he remembers, ‘yet I squandered all this because of an ingrained laziness or lack of will … I was a mess … I cheated and felt no remorse and when threatened with the sack – “You have come to the end of your tether,” is what Dr Alington once greeted me with – I always managed to put on a tearful act and wriggle out.’
He has emerged with few achievements to his name. A letter from his father to his mother, written in John’s second year at Eton, reads:
Dear Margot,
I enclose John’s reports. As you will see they are uniformly deplorable from beginning to end … I’m afraid he seems to have all his father’s failings and none of his very few virtues.
Of course we may have overrated him and he is really only a rather stupid and untidy boy but it may be he is upset by the beginning of the age of puberty. But I must say the lack of ambition and general wooliness of character is profoundly disappointing.
Try and shake the little brute up.
Yours
T.
After leaving Eton last year, John went to stay on one of his family’s farms in Kenya (they own many farms there, as well as a hundred acres of central London between Oxford Street and the Marylebone Road, 8,000-odd acres in Ayrshire, the island of Shona and a fair bit of North America too).
It was then decided that he should spend some time in Germany in order to learn a language. In 1931, aged eighteen, he has come to Munich to stay with a family called Pappenheim. He has been in the city for barely a week before he decides to buy himself a small car. He plumps for a red Fiat, which his friends (‘very rudely’) refer to as ‘the Commercial Traveller’. On his first day behind the wheel, he invites Haupt. Pappenheim, a genial sixty-year-old, to join him. Thus, he hopes to find his way around Munich, and to avoid any traffic misdemeanours.
They set off. John drives safely up the Luitpoldstrasse, past the Siegestor. The Fiat is handling well. The test run is a breeze. On this bright, sunny day in Munich, what can possibly go wrong?
While Adolf Hitler is striding along the pavement, John is driving his Fiat up Ludwigstrasse. He takes a right turn into Briennerstrasse. Crossing the road, Hitler fails to look left. There is a sudden crunch.
‘Although I was going very slowly, a man walked off the pavement, more or less straight into my car,’ recalls John. Many drivers, before and since, have used those very same words, often to magistrates.
The pedestrian – in his early forties, with a small square moustache – is down on one knee. John is alarmed, but the man heaves himself to his feet. ‘He was soon up and I knew that he wasn’t hurt. I opened the window and naturally, as I hadn’t a word of German, let Haupt Pappenheim do the talking. I was more anxious about whether a policeman, who was directing the traffic, had seen the incident.’
All is well. The policeman has not noticed, or if he has, he is unconcerned. The man with the little moustache brushes himself down, and shakes hands with John and Haupt. Pappenheim, who both wish him well.
‘I don’t suppose you know who that was?’ says Haupt. Pappenheim as they drive away.
‘Of course I don’t, who is he?’
‘Well, he is a politician with a party and he talks a lot. His name is Adolf Hitler.’
Three years later, in 1934, Adolf Hitler is sitting in a box at the small rococo Residenztheater
waiting for the opera to begin. By now he is the German Chancellor, the talk of the world. In the adjoining box is the twenty-one-year-old John Scott-Ellis, celebrating the first night of his honeymoon by taking his young German bride to the opera. John looks to his left. Isn’t that the very same fellow he knocked down three years ago?
The young man leans over. He seems to want to say something. Hitler’s bodyguards are taken aback. Who is he, and what the hell does he want?
John Scott-Ellis introduces himself. He seizes the moment and asks the Führer if he remembers being knocked over in the street three years ago. To his surprise, Hitler remembers it well. ‘He was quite charming to me for a few moments.’ Then the orchestra strikes up, and the overture begins. The two men never meet again.
Over the years,
John often tells this tale of his unexpected brush with Adolf Hitler. ‘For a few seconds, perhaps, I held the history of Europe in my rather clumsy hands. He was only shaken up, but had I killed him, it would have changed the history of the world,’ he concludes of his own peculiar one on one.
JOHN SCOTT-ELLIS
TALKS OF THE BOCHE WITH
RUDYARD KIPLING
Chirk Castle, Wrexham, North Wales
Summer 1923
In the summer of 1923, John Scott-Ellis is still only ten years old, yet he has already lunched with G.K. Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw.
John lives in a vast thirteenth-century castle. His father, the eighth Baron Howard de Walden, dabbles in the arts, writing operas, poetry and plays. At one time he owned the Haymarket Theatre, putting on a good many highbrow productions, including works by Henrik Ibsen. When these failed to make money, he was persuaded to stage a comedy called Bunty Pulls the Strings; it ran for three years.
The eighth Baron’s castle acts as a tremendous draw to artists and writers. Young John is now used to passing the time of day with Hilaire Belloc, Augustus John, George Moore or Max Beerbohm. Some of these grandees are more friendly than others. Belloc teaches him all sorts of tricks with paper, such as how to make a bird which flaps its wings when you pull its tail. By cutting out two triangles and placing them on a sheet of paper in a particular way, he also shows him an easy way to prove Pythagoras’ Theorem. ‘While I remember how to do this, I am sad to have forgotten his absolute proof of the Trinity, which he demonstrated in a somewhat similar fashion,’ John recalls in old age. He remembers, too, the Irish novelist George Moore (‘always rather preoccupied’) tackling his father with a problem he was finding impossible to solve.
‘I keep on writing down “she was in the habit of wearing a habit”, and it isn’t right and I can’t think how to alter it.’
‘What about, “she was used to wearing a habit”?’ suggested Lord Howard de Walden. Moore went away happy.
In the summer of 1923, Rudyard Kipling comes to stay at Chirk. The great author and the young boy go for a walk around the garden together. It was in such a setting that Hugh Walpole observed of the five-foot-three-inch Kipling, ‘When he walks about the garden, his eyebrows are all that are really visible of him.’
At the age of fifty-seven, Kipling encourages children to call him Uncle Ruddy. He finds it hard to make friends with adults, but speaks to children as equals, which is how he writes for them too. ‘I would sooner make a fair book of stories for children than a new religion or a completely revised framework for our social and political life,’ he explains.
Among children, he becomes a child. On a trip to South Africa, he lay himself flat on the deck to teach a little boy how to play with soldiers. But he can be short-tempered with those who lack his sense of adventure. He once handed his revolver to a youngster and urged him to fire it. Seeing him hesitate, Kipling snapped, ‘At your age I would have given anything to shoot a revolver!’
But Kipling and John operate on the same wavelength. Kipling has long been fascinated by the paranormal, so he is perhaps attracted by the boy’s unusual powers: John is able to throw a pack of cards face down on the floor and then pick out the four aces. ‘I claim absolutely no strange powers but probably I had, or even have, this ESP slightly higher than others,’ he recollects. One afternoon, a visiting Admiral with an interest in psychic matters asks him to throw two dice, and wish for high. ‘For about twenty throws or more I never threw less than four and frequently double sixes.’ The Admiral then tells him to wish for low. ‘I started with double ones and continued in much the same vein.’
On their walk around the garden, John chats with Rudyard Kipling about Germans. Kipling says he hates them. Their talk turns to aeroplanes. Kipling says they are always trying to knock down his chimneys.
John asks him if he would ever travel in an airship.
‘What!’ exclaims Kipling. ‘Locked in a silver coffin with lots of Boche?!’
Such a quote may seem almost too good to be true, but Kipling has a curious capacity to become his own caricature. Dining with Somerset Maugham at the Villa Mauresque, the conversation turned to a mutual friend. When Kipling declared, ‘He’s a white man,’ Maugham thought to himself, ‘This is characteristic. How I wish, in order to fulfil my preconceptions of him, he would say he was a pukka sahib.’
‘He’s a pukka sahib all right,’ continued Kipling.
After their walk, Kipling accepts John’s invitation to take a look at John’s collection of his complete works in their smart red-leather pocket edition. Kipling offers to sign them for him, but as if by magic, Kipling’s formidable wife Carrie suddenly swoops into the room and tells him not to. This, too, is characteristic. Carrie spends her time protecting her husband from his readers, and is often derided for it. To Lady Colefax she is ‘a super-bossy second-rate American woman, the sort of woman you could only speak to about servants’. A young boy called Henry Fielden was in the habit of dropping in at Kipling’s house, Bateman’s, to borrow books. Once when he arrived he saw Kipling standing at the window, so he waved, and Kipling waved back. But when Henry knocked on the front door, a maid told him that Mr Kipling was not at home. Henry insisted that they had just waved to each other, and the maid rushed away in confusion. A short while later, a furious Mrs Kipling appeared, saying through tight lips that her husband would be down in a minute.
The day after their interrupted book-signing, Kipling takes John to the sheepdog trials in Llangollen. John notes how comfortable Kipling is in the company of the shepherds, ‘getting them to talk and explain all about the trials and their lives’. On their way home, Kipling promises to write a story about these very shepherds. ‘But sadly,’ observes John, by now an old man, ‘he never got round to it.’
RUDYARD KIPLING
HERO-WORSHIPS
MARK TWAIN
Elmira, New York State
June 1889
In 1889, Rudyard Kipling is twenty-three years old, though he looks closer to forty. He arrives in San Francisco on May 28th, after a twenty-day voyage from Japan.
He is greedy for life. He witnesses a gunfight in Chinatown, lands a twelve-pound salmon in Oregon, meets cowboys in Montana, is appalled by Chicago, and falls in love with his future wife in Beaver, north Pennsylvania.
Before he leaves the United States, he is determined to meet his hero, Mark Twain. He goes on a wild-goose chase – to Buffalo, then Toronto, then Boston – before tracking him down to Elmira, where a policeman tells him he spotted Twain ‘or someone very like him’ driving a buggy through town the day before. ‘He lives out yonder at East Hill, three miles from here.’
At East Hill, he is informed that Twain is at his brother-in-law’s house downtown. He finds the house and rings the doorbell, but then has second thoughts. ‘It occurred to me for the first time Mark Twain might possibly have other engagements than the entertainment of escaped lunatics from India.’
He is led into a big, dark drawing room. There, in a huge chair, he finds the fifty-three-year-old author of Tom Sawyer with ‘a mane of grizzled hair, a brown mustache covering a mouth as delicate as a woman’s, a strong, square hand shaking mine and the slowest, calmest, levellest voice in all the world … I was shaking his hand. I was smoking his cigar, and I was hearing him talk – this man I had learned to love and admire 14,000 miles away.’
Kipling is transfixed. ‘That was a moment to be remembered; the landing of a twelve-pound salmon was nothing to it. I had hooked Mark Twain, and he was treating me as though under certain circumstances I might be an equal.’
The two men discuss the difficulties of copyright before moving on to Twain’s work. ‘Growing bold, and feeling that I had a few hundred thousand folk at my back, I demanded whether Tom Sawyer married Judge Thatcher’s daughter and whether we were ever going to hear of Tom Sawyer as a man.’
Twain gets up, fills his pipe, and paces the room in his bedroom slippers. ‘I haven’t decided. I have a notion of writing the sequel to Tom Sawyer in two ways. In one I would make him rise to great honor and go to Congress, and in the other I should hang him. Then the friends and enemies of the book could take their choice.’
Kipling raises a voice of protest: to him, Tom Sawyer is real.
‘Oh, he is real. He’s all the boys that I have known or recollect; but that would be a good way of ending the book, because, when you come to think of it, neither religion, training, nor education avails anything against the force of circumstances that drive a man. Suppose we took the next four and twenty years of Tom Sawyer’s life, and gave a little joggle to the circumstances that controlled him. He would, logically and according to the joggle, turn out a rip or an angel.’
‘Do you believe that, then?’
‘I think so; isn’t it what you call kismet?’
‘Yes; but don’t give him two joggles and show the result, because he isn’t your property any more. He belongs to us.’
Twain laughs. They move on to autobiography. ‘I believe it is impossible for a man to tell the truth about himself or to avoid impressing the reader with the truth about himself,’ Twain says. ‘I made an experiment once. I got a friend of mine – a man painfully given to speak the truth on all occasions – a man who wouldn’t dream of telling a lie – and I made him write his autobiography for his own amusement and mine … good, honest man that he was, in every single detail of his life that I knew about he turned out, on paper, a formidable liar. He could not help himself.’
As Twain walks up and down talking and puffing away, Kipling finds himself coveting his cob pipe. ‘I understood why certain savage tribes ardently desire the liver of brave men slain in combat. That pipe would have given me, perhaps, a hint of his keen insight into the souls of men. But he never laid it aside within stealing reach.’
Twain talks of the books he likes to read. ‘I never cared for fiction or story-books. What I like to read about are facts and statistics of any kind. If they are only facts about the raising of radishes, they interest me. Just now for instance, before you came in, I was reading an article about mathematics. Perfectly pure mathematics. My own knowledge of mathematics stops at “twelve times twelve” but I enjoyed that article immensely. I didn’t understand a word of it; but facts, or what a man believes to be facts, are always delightful.’
After two hours, the interview comes to an end. The great man, who never minds talking, assures his disciple that he has not interrupted him in the least.
Seventeen years on, Rudyard Kipling is world famous. Twain grows nostalgic for the time he spent in his company. ‘I believe that he knew more than any person I had met before, and he knew I knew less than any person he had met before … When he was gone, Mr Langdon wanted to know about my visitor. I said, “He is a stranger to me but is a most remarkable man – and I am the other one. Between us, we cover all knowledge; he knows all that can be known, and I know the rest.”’
Twain, now aged seventy, is addicted to Kipling’s works. He rereads Kim every year, ‘and in this way I go back to India without fatigue … I am not acquainted with my own books but I know Kipling’s books. They never grow pale to me; they keep their colour; they are always fresh.’
The worshipped has become the worshipper.
MARK TWAIN
BIDS FAREWELL TO
HELEN KELLER
Stormfield, Connecticut
February 1909
As Helen Keller’s carriage draws up between the huge granite pillars of Mark Twain’s house, the most venerable author in America is there to greet her, though she can neither see him nor hear him. Her companion Annie Sullivan – her eyes and ears – tells Helen that he is all in white, his beautiful white hair glistening in the afternoon sunshine ‘like the snow spray on gray stones’.
Twain and Keller first met fifteen years ago, when he was fifty-eight and she was just fourteen. Struck deaf and blind by meningitis at the age of eighteen months, Helen had, through sheer force of will, discovered a way to communicate: she finds out what people are saying by placing her fingers on their lips, throat and nose, or by having Annie transpose it onto the palm of her hand in letters of the alphabet.
Taken up as a prodigy by the great and the good,
she formed a special friendship with Twain. ‘The instant I clasped his hand in mine, I knew that he was my friend. He made me laugh and feel thoroughly happy by telling some good stories, which I read from his lips … He knew with keen and sure intuition many things about me and how it felt to be blind and not to keep up with the swift ones – things that others learned slowly or not at all. He never embarrassed me by saying how terrible it is not to see, or how dull life must be, lived always in the dark.’
Unlike other people, Twain has never patronised her. ‘He never made me feel that my opinions were worthless, as so many people do. He knew that we do not think with eyes and ears, and that our capacity for thought is not measured by five senses. He kept me always in mind while he talked, and he treated me like a competent human being. That is why I loved him …’
For his part, Twain is in awe. ‘She is fellow to Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon, Homer, Shakespeare and the rest of the immortals. She will be as famous a thousand years from now as she is today.’ Shortly after their first meeting, Twain formed a circle to fund her education at Radcliffe College, which led to her publishing an autobiography at the age of twenty-two, which in turn led her to become almost as celebrated as Twain himself.
But the intervening years have struck Twain some heavy blows. One of his daughters has died of meningitis,
another of an epileptic fit in a bathtub, and his wife Livy has died of heart disease. Throughout Helen’s stay he acts his familiar bluff, entertaining old self, but she senses the deep sadness within.
‘There was about him the air of one who had suffered greatly. Whenever I touched his face, his expression was sad, even when he was telling a funny story. He smiled, not with the mouth but with his mind – a gesture of the soul rather than of the face.’
But for the moment, he welcomes them into the house for tea and buttered toast by the fire. Then he shows them around. He takes Helen into his beloved billiard room. He will, he says, teach her how to play just like his friends Paine, Dunne and Rogers.
‘Oh, Mr Clemens, it takes sight to play billiards.’
‘Yes, but not the variety of billiards that Paine and Dunne and Rogers play. The blind couldn’t play worse,’ he jokes.
They go upstairs to see his bedroom. ‘Try to picture, Helen, what we are seeing out of these windows. We are high up on a snow-covered hill. Beyond, are dense spruce and firwoods, other snow-clad hills and stone walls intersecting the landscape everywhere, and, over all, the white wizardry of winter. It is a delight, this wild, free, fir-scented place.’
He shows the two women to their suite. On the mantelpiece there is a card telling burglars where to find everything of value. There has recently been a burglary, Twain explains, and this notice will ensure that any future intruders do not bother to disturb him.
Over dinner, Twain holds forth, ‘his talk fragrant with tobacco and flamboyant with profanity’. He explains that in his experience guests do not enjoy dinner if they are always worrying about what to say next: it is up to the host to take on that burden. ‘He talked delightfully, audaciously, brilliantly,’ says Helen. Dinner comes to an end, but his talk continues around the fire. ‘He seemed to have absorbed all America into himself. The great Mississippi River seemed forever flowing, flowing through his speech, through the shadowless white sands of thought. His voice seemed to say like the river, “Why hurry? Eternity is long; the ocean can wait.”’
Before Helen leaves Smithfield, Twain is more solemn. ‘I am very lonely, sometimes, when I sit by the fire after my friends have departed. My thoughts trail away into the past. I think of Livy and Susy and I seem to be fumbling in the dark folds of confused dreams …’
As she says goodbye, Helen wonders if they will ever meet again. Once more, her intuition proves right. Twain dies the following year. Some time later, Helen returns to where the old house once stood: it has burnt down, with only a charred chimney still standing. She turns her unseeing eyes to the view he once described to her, and at that moment feels someone coming towards her. ‘I reached out, and a red geranium blossom met my touch. The leaves of the plant were covered with ashes, and even the sturdy stalk had been partly broken off by a chip of falling plaster. But there was the bright flower smiling at me out of the ashes. I thought it said to me, “Please don’t grieve.”’
She plants the geranium in a sunny corner of her garden. ‘It always seems to say the same thing to me, “Please don’t grieve.” But I grieve, nevertheless.’
HELEN KELLER
AND …
MARTHA GRAHAM
66 Fifth Avenue, New York
December 1952
Before she taught Helen Keller each new word and phrase, Annie Sullivan used to say, ‘And …’
‘AND open the window!’
‘AND close the door!’
Everything life had to offer began with this little word.
The first word Helen ever learned was w-a-t-e-r. In Helen Keller’s dark, silent childhood, her teacher placed her hand beneath the spout of a well.
‘As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten – a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that “w-a-t-e-r” meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! … I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me.’
Now aged seventy-two, Helen Keller still dreams of being like other women: what must it be like, she wonders, to see and hear? However much she gains the upper hand over her disabilities, there are still many perfectly simple and basic things within easy reach of everybody else that she can never hope to master, or perhaps even to comprehend: dance, for instance.
She has gained the respect of some of the most distinguished people in the world, but sometimes she thinks she would swap it all for the chance to dance. ‘How quickly I should lock up all those mighty warriors, and hoary sages, and impossible heroes, who are now almost my only companions; and dance and sing and frolic like other girls!’ she confesses to a friend.
But she abhors self-pity; when she feels it looming, she forces herself to count her blessings. ‘… I must not waste my time wishing idle wishes; and, after all, my ancient friends are very wise and interesting, and I usually enjoy their society very much indeed. It is only once in a great while that I feel discontented, and allow myself to wish for things I cannot hope for in this life.’
Dance comes to symbolise the carefree land from which she is for ever exiled. ‘There are days when the close attention I must give to detail chafes my spirit, and the thought that I must spend hours reading a few chapters, while in the world without other girls are laughing and singing and dancing, makes me rebellious; but I soon recover my buoyancy and laugh the discontent out of my heart. For, after all, every one who wishes to gain true knowledge must climb the Hill Difficulty alone, and since there is no royal road to the summit, I must zigzag it in my own way … Every struggle is victory.’
Still fêted wherever she goes, Helen Keller is taken by a friend to meet the electrifying Grande Dame of modern dance, Martha Graham. Graham is immediately taken by what she calls Helen’s ‘gracious embrace of life’, and is impressed by what appears to be her photographic memory. They become friends. Before long, Helen starts paying regular visits to the dance studio. She seems to focus on the dancers’ feet, and can somehow tell the direction in which they are moving. Martha Graham is intrigued. ‘She could not see the dance but was able to allow its vibrations to leave the floor and enter her body.’
At first, Graham finds it hard to understand exactly what Helen is saying, but she soon grows accustomed to what she calls ‘that funny voice of hers’. On one of her visits, Helen says, ‘Martha, what is jumping? I don’t understand.’
Graham is touched by this simple question. She asks a member of her company, Merce Cunningham, to stand at the barre. She approaches him from behind, says, ‘Merce, be very careful, I’m putting Helen’s hands on your body,’ and places Helen Keller’s hands on his waist.
Cunningham cannot see Keller, but feels her two hands around his waist, ‘like bird wings, so soft’. Everyone in the studio stands quite still, focusing on what is happening. Cunningham jumps in the air while Keller’s hands rise up with his body.
‘Her hands rose and fell as Merce did,’ recalls Martha Graham, in extreme old age. ‘Her expression changed from curiosity to one of joy. You could see the enthusiasm rise in her face as she threw her arms in the air.’
Cunningham continues to perform small leaps, with very straight legs. He suddenly feels Keller’s fingers, still touching his waist, begin to move slightly, ‘as though fluttering’. For the first time in her life, she is experiencing dance. ‘Oh, how wonderful! How like thought! How like the mind it is!’ she exclaims when he stops.
Helen Keller and Martha Graham appear together in a documentary film, The Unconquered, in 1953. Still wearing her hat, Keller stands in the middle of a group of dancers ‘feeling’ the dance, while Graham and her dancers circle around her. She has a look of ecstasy upon her face.
Almost half a century later, Martha Graham, now aged ninety-six, is busy dictating her autobiography. Her hands are crippled with arthritis. She looks back on Helen Keller, who died over twenty years ago, as ‘the most gallant woman I have ever known’. And then it suddenly strikes her why, way back in the 1950s, Helen had been quite so excited by her visits to the studio.
‘The word “and” is inseparable from the dance, and leads us into most of the exercises and movements. It led her into the life of vibration. And her life enriched our studio. And to close the circle, all of our dance classes begin with the teacher saying, “AND … one!”’
MARTHA GRAHAM
SILENCES
MADONNA
316 East 63rd Street, New York
Autumn 1978
By 1978, Martha Graham has a formidable reputation. Over the course of her career, she has danced at the White House for eight US presidents, and baffled almost as many.
Her work is adored and reviled in roughly equal measure. The Graham technique, taught at the school she founded half a century ago, is tense, percussive, sexually explicit. It is her belief that female dancers should ‘dance from the vagina’. One of her acolytes explains that ‘Martha’s premise was that an act of lovemaking was an act of murder.’
Aged eighty-four, she maintains a ferocious temper, storming in or out at the drop of a hat. She has been known to pull the cloth from a restaurant table, scattering everything to the floor before making her exit. Nowadays, she is spotted only rarely in her school, though rumour has it that she is always there, like a demanding ghost.
The nineteen-year-old Madonna Ciccone has just taken her first trip in an aeroplane. She arrives in New York City from Michigan, with $35 and a bag of dance tights, determined to make her name as a dancer. After she tells the cab driver to take her to the centre of everything, he drops her off in Times Square.
She auditions for a dance company, but fails. They tell her she has drive but no technique, and advise her to enrol in the Martha Graham Dance School. Within twenty-four hours she has signed up for beginners’ classes, paying her way by working in a fast-food restaurant.
‘I dug this place. The studios were Spartan, minimalist. Everyone whispered, so the only sounds you heard were the music and the instructors, and they spoke to you only when you were fucking up – which was pretty easy to do around there. It’s a difficult technique to learn. It’s physically brutal and there is no room for slouches … At one time in my life, I had fantasized about being a nun, and this was the closest I was ever going to get to convent life.’
The topic of Martha Graham provides the backdrop to every conversation. ‘I wanted to meet the mother superior, the woman responsible for all this.’ She hears that Graham visits the building often, and she even sits in on classes from time to time, either to check up on the teaching staff or to scout for talent. Madonna grows obsessed with meeting her, much as a visitor to Loch Ness might long to meet the monster. ‘She stayed pretty hidden. I had heard she was vain about growing old. Maybe she was really busy, or really shy, or both. But her presence was always felt, which only added to her mystique and to my longing to meet her … She had a serious Garbo vibe about her and seemed like she really wanted to be left alone.’
Madonna begins to daydream about running into her. ‘I was gonna be fearless and nonchalant. I would befriend her and get her to confess all the secrets of her soul.’
With this aim in mind, she signs on for extra classes, and lingers in the hallways in the hope of catching a glimpse. Sometimes, she invents excuses to enter the offices. And then, one day, quite by chance, it happens.
Madonna is in the middle of her 11 a.m. class. She has drunk too much coffee. Against the rules, she nips out ‘with my bladder at bursting point’. She heaves open the heavy door to the hallway and steps outside the classroom, only to find herself face to face with Martha Graham. ‘There she was, right in front of me, staring into my face. OK, not exactly in front of me, but my appearance must have taken her by surprise: no one ever left the tomb-like classrooms until classes were over.’
Graham stops dead in her tracks. Madonna is paralysed and, for the first time in her life, and possibly the last, struck dumb. ‘She was part Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. The rest of her was a cross between a Kabuki dancer and the nun I was obsessed with in the fifth grade, Sister Kathleen Thomas. In any case, I was overwhelmed, and all my plans to disarm her and win her over were swallowed up by my fear of a presence I’d never encountered before.’
Graham doesn’t say a word. ‘She just looked at me with what I thought was interest but was probably only disapproval. Her hair was pulled back severely, displaying a pale face made up like a porcelain doll. Her chin jutted out with arrogance and her eyes were like shiny brown immovable marbles. She was small and big at the same time.’
Madonna waits for words to spring from Martha Graham’s mouth, and daggers to fly out of her eyes. ‘I ignored the aching in my lower abdomen. I forgot that I had a big mouth and that I wasn’t afraid of anyone. This was my first true encounter with a goddess. A warrior. A survivor. Someone not to be fucked with.’
Martha Graham says nothing, but flicks her long skirts and disappears into a room, closing the door behind her. ‘Before I could clear my throat, she was gone. I was left shaking in my leotard, partly because I still had to go to the bathroom but most because I had encountered such an exquisite creature. I was truly dumbfounded … Much has happened in my life since then but nothing will diminish the memory of my first encounter with this woman – this life force.’
Ten years later, Madonna is by far the most famous female pop star in the world. Her performances incorporate elaborate dance routines: tense, percussive, sexually explicit. One day, someone from the Martha Graham Dance School contacts her office, saying that the school is facing bankruptcy. ‘Give it one day,’ comes the reply. The very next day, Madonna’s office rings back, offering $150,000. When Martha Graham, now aged ninety-four, is presented with the cheque, she bursts into tears.
MADONNA
INDUCES QUEASINESS IN
MICHAEL JACKSON
The Ivy restaurant, Beverly Hills, Los Angeles
March 15th 1991
Wondering who might be sufficiently glamorous to accompany her to the Academy Awards, where she is due to perform, Madonna has a brainwave. ‘How about Michael Jackson? Oh my God, what a great idea! Don’t you love it?’ she exclaims to her manager, Freddy DeMann, who used to manage him.
DeMann negotiates with Jackson, and reports back: he has managed to arrange a preliminary dinner. The two biggest-selling stars in the world are booked to meet at the Ivy in Beverly Hills, ten days before the ceremony.
In the past, Jackson has been puzzled by Madonna. Though he is an astute businessman, he can’t fathom her appeal. ‘She’s always in your face, isn’t she?’ he once complained to a friend. ‘I don’t get it. What is it about her? She’s not a great dancer or singer. But she does know how to market herself. That must be it.’
Two years ago, he was somewhat put out to discover that she was being advertised by Warner Brothers as the ‘Artist of the Decade’. It was only in a trade publication, but even so. ‘It makes me look bad,’ he explained. ‘I’m the artist of the decade, aren’t I? Did she outsell Thriller? No, she did not.’
At their table at the Ivy, Madonna wears a black jacket and hot-pants with lacy stockings. Around her neck hangs a crucifix. Jackson is wearing black jeans, a red shirt and matching jacket, topped off with a fedora. He keeps his dark glasses on.
‘I had my sunglasses on, and I’m sitting there, you know, trying to be nice. And the next thing I know, she reaches over and takes my glasses off. Nobody has ever taken my glasses off … And then she throws them across the room and breaks them. I was shocked. “I’m your date now,” she told me, “and I hate it when I can’t see a man’s eyes.” I didn’t much like that.’
As the dinner progresses, Madonna thinks she has spotted Michael Jackson taking a crafty peek at her breasts. Grinning, she snatches his hand and places it upon them. Jackson recoils. When all is said and done, this is not his style. But Madonna is not the kind of person to take no for an answer; later during their dinner, she saucily drops a piece of bread down her cleavage, then fishes it out and pops it into her mouth. The effect on Jackson is one of instant queasiness.
‘Oh my God, you should see the muscles on that woman! I mean, she’s got muscles in her arms way bigger than mine. They’re, like, rippling, you know? I wanted to know how she got muscles that big, but didn’t want to ask because I was afraid she’d make me show her my muscles.’
Their exploratory dinner at the Ivy cannot, therefore, be judged a great success, but at least it is not so disastrous as to derail their joint entrance at the Academy Awards ceremony at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles.
Both of them have made an effort. They cut a dash together, Jackson in a white-sequinned suit with a large diamond brooch, plus gloves and gold-tipped cowboy boots, Madonna preferring a Marilyn Monroe look, with a skin-tight low-cut gown, also white-sequinned, and $20 million-worth of jewels, on overnight loan from Harry Winston.
Afterwards, they go to Swifty Lazar’s annual Oscar night party at Spago. As she is making her entrance, Madonna is asked by a Hollywood reporter how she managed to convince the normally reclusive Michael Jackson to accompany her. ‘Oh, Michael’s coming out more,’ she replies. Cynics detect a sneaky joke.
Once inside Spago and away from the cameras, it is not long before Madonna drifts towards her former lover Warren Beatty, leaving Jackson all alone. He is rescued by his old friend Diana Ross. ‘Well, I just don’t understand it, Michael,’ Ross says loudly, so that everyone can hear. ‘I mean, she’s supposed to be with you, isn’t she? So, what is she doing with him?’
‘I don’t know,’ whispers Michael Jackson. ‘I guess she likes him better.’
‘Well, I think she’s an awful woman,’ says Diana Ross, reassuringly. ‘Tacky dress, too.’
It is the very last time that Michael Jackson and Madonna will go out on a date together. However, a month or two later, Jackson asks Madonna to appear in his new video. Madonna, very excited, thinks they should do something ‘utterly outrageous’. As the title of the song is ‘In the Closet’, she thinks it would be a good idea if she were to appear as a man, and Jackson as a woman. Jackson is not so sure; might it not just confuse everyone? After all, the song is intended to be solidly heterosexual: the title, ‘In the Closet’ refers only to the singer’s desire to keep a relationship between himself and his girlfriend under wraps. Jackson’s sister Janet has always been sceptical about Madonna (‘If I took off my clothes in the middle of a highway, people would look at me, too. But does that make me an artist?’), but she expresses enthusiasm for the project. ‘What a statement!’ she says.
In the end, Jackson decides against, and the model Naomi Campbell appears in the video instead. The very first lines of the song are spoken in a breathy whisper by, of all people, Princess Stephanie of Monaco. ‘There’s something I have to say to you, if you promise you’ll understand. I cannot contain myself: when in your presence I’m so humble. Touch me. Don’t hide our love … woman to man.’
Naomi Campbell writhes around in a desert, wearing very little. She smooths her breasts with her hands while the gyrating Michael Jackson, in a sleeveless white T-shirt and black jeans, performs energetic thrusts, cupping his hands hither and thither around his pelvis while singing:
Because there’s something
About you baby
That makes me want
To give it to you!
The two of them barely look at one another, let alone touch.
MICHAEL JACKSON
INTRIGUES
NANCY REAGAN
The White House, Washington DC
May 14th 1984
A month or so ago, Michael Jackson’s lawyer, John Branca, was contacted by the White House to ask whether Jackson might donate his song ‘Beat It’ for advertisements against drink-driving.
Jackson was reluctant: ‘That’s tacky. I can’t do that,’ he told Branca. But he then had second thoughts. ‘You know what? If I can get some kind of an award from the White House, then I can give them the song. How about that?’ He wants to be on a stage at the White House with President Reagan. ‘And I sure want to meet Nancy.’
Within days, they have a deal. The President has agreed to present Michael Jackson with a special humanitarian award, and the First Lady will be there too.
Fans gather at dawn to peer through the fence of the White House. At 11 a.m. the South Lawn is thronging with media, along with hundreds of White House staff, most of them clutching cameras.
The President arrives in a navy-blue suit. The First Lady wears a white Adolfo suit with gold buttons, trimmed with gold braid. Jackson wears an oversize military jacket with sequins, plus floppy gold epaulettes and a gold sash, a single white glove, checkered with rhinestones, and droopy dark glasses.
‘Well, isn’t this a thriller?’ chuckles the President, behind his dais. ‘I’m delighted to see you all here. Just think: you all came to see me. No, I know why you’re here, and with good reason – to see one of the most talented, most popular and one of the most exciting superstars in the world today – Michael Jackson. Michael – welcome to the White House.’
After dutifully peppering his speech with the titles of some of Jackson’s hits – ‘Off the Wall’, ‘I Want You Back’ – the jovial President gets down to business. ‘At this stage of his career, when it would seem he has achieved everything a musical performer can hope for, Michael Jackson is taking time to lead the fight against alcohol and drug abuse … Michael Jackson is proof of what a young person can accomplish free of drink or drug abuse.
People young and old respect that, and if Americans follow his example then we can face up to the problems of drinking and driving. And we can, in Michael’s words, Beat It.
‘Nancy spends a great deal of her time with young people talking about the problems of drink and drug abuse, so I speak for both of us when I say thank you, Michael, for the example that you’re giving to millions of young Americans … Your success is an American dream come true.’
Amidst applause, Jackson comes to the podium to receive his award. ‘I’m very, very honoured,’ he says in his high-pitched voice. ‘Thank you very much, Mr President.’ He then giggles to himself before adding, ‘And Mrs Reagan.’
The President and Mrs Reagan usher Jackson inside, leaving him and his entourage to tour the White House. Jackson shows an interest in a portrait of his namesake, the seventh President of the United States, Andrew Jackson, who is in a similar military uniform, though without the sequins.
Afterwards, Jackson is to have a private meeting with the Reagans, along with one or two children of staff members. But when he is ushered into the Diplomatic Reception Room, he is confronted by seventy-five adults.
He turns on his heels, running down the hall into the rest room off the Presidential Library. He locks the door, and refuses to come out. ‘They said there would be kids. But those aren’t kids!’ he protests to Frank Dileo, his manager.
Dileo has a word with a White House aide, who immediately rounds on an assistant. ‘If the First Lady gets a load of this, she’s going to be mad as hell. Now you go get some kids in here, damn it.’
Dileo shouts through the rest-room door, ‘It’s OK, Michael. We’re going to get some kids.’
‘You’ll have to clear all those adults out of there before I come out,’ demands Jackson.
An aide runs into the Reception Room. ‘OK, out! Everybody out!’ A member of Jackson’s entourage arrives in the rest room. ‘Everything is OK.’
‘Are you sure?’ asks Michael.
At this point, Frank Dileo grows edgy. ‘OK, Mike, outta there. I mean it.’
Michael Jackson returns to the freshly vacated Reception Room. A handful of children are waiting. While he signs a copy of Thriller for the Transport Secretary, the Reagans arrive. They usher Jackson into the Roosevelt Room to meet a few more aides and their children.
As Jackson talks to the children, Nancy Reagan whispers to one of his staff, ‘I’ve heard he wants to look like Diana Ross, but looking at him up close, he’s so much prettier than she is. Don’t you agree? I mean, I just don’t think she’s that attractive, but he certainly is.’
Jackson’s employees are forbidden from discussing their employer, so he does not reply.
‘I just wish he would take off those sunglasses,’ continues Mrs Reagan, adding, ‘Tell me, has he had any surgery on his eyes?’
There is still no reply. ‘Certainly his nose has been done,’ whispers Mrs Reagan, peering hard at Jackson, who is now talking to her husband. ‘More than once, I’d say. I wonder about his cheekbones. Is that make-up, or has he had them done too? It’s all so peculiar, really. A boy who looks just like a girl, who whispers when he speaks, wears a glove on one hand and sunglasses all the time. I just don’t know what to make of it.’ She lifts her eyes to the ceiling and shakes her head.
The Jackson aide begins to think it may be rude to say nothing at all to the First Lady. ‘Listen, you don’t know the half of it,’ he says, with a conspiratorial smile. But the First Lady reacts as though she disdains such idle gossip.
‘Well, he is talented. And I would think that’s all that you should be concerned about,’ she snaps.
NANCY REAGAN
DISAPPOINTS
ANDY WARHOL
The White House, Washington DC
October 15th 1981
‘The funny thing about movie people,’ says Andy Warhol to the First Lady over tea in the White House, ‘is that they talk behind your back before you even leave the room.’
Nancy Reagan’s eyes, already preternaturally wide, grow still wider. She looks at Warhol as though he were unbalanced.
‘I am a movie person, Andy,’ she replies.
The interview has been stiff throughout. Mrs Reagan never reacts well to criticism, and can spot it from a great distance. It is written in her stars. ‘Cancers tend to be intuitive, vulnerable, sensitive and fearful of ridicule – all of which, like it or not, I am,’ she explains in her autobiography. ‘The Cancer symbol is the crab shell: Cancers often present a hard exterior to the world, which hides their vulnerability. When they’re hurt, Cancers respond by withdrawing into themselves. That’s me all right.’
Warhol himself has been notably crab-like in his advance on the Reagans. Two months before the 1981 presidential election, he befriended the Reagans’ son Ronald Junior, then their daughter Patti. Both sides are happy: the younger Reagans mix with the most famous artist in America, and in turn Warhol mixes with America’s imminent first family. Warhol likes Ronald Junior. ‘He turned out to be a really nice kid. God, he was so sweet … and he’s very smart. Lispy and cute.’ At their first lunch together, Warhol is tongue-tied. ‘I didn’t know what to talk to him about. I was too shy and he was too shy.’ Warhol finds himself asking an awkward question about whether or not his father dyes his hair. Ronald Junior tries to change the subject. His mother, Nancy, is, he tells Warhol, ‘very sweet and very adorable’.
Warhol seizes the moment. ‘So then I got sneaky and brought Ordinary People up, and I told him how much I hated Mary Tyler Moore, that after I saw the movie if I saw her on the street I’d just kick her. And at that point he was almost going to say something about Nancy, but then somehow he got the drift of it and changed the subject. Because I think the mother in Ordinary People is just like Mrs Reagan. Really cold and shrewd.’
They discuss what to order. Warhol tells Ronald Junior that he has never eaten frogs’ legs, ‘and he was so sweet he ordered them just so I could try it. He’s really sweet, a beautiful body and beautiful eyes. But he just doesn’t have a pretty nose. It’s too long.’
Two weeks later, Patti Davis, Ronald Junior’s older sister, drops by the Interview office. ‘She looked sort of pretty to me, but then looking at her later on the video, how could these kids have missed their parents’ good looks? I mean, Dad was so gorgeous.’
Between Ronald Reagan’s election and his inauguration, Andy Warhol goes out with Ronald Reagan Junior and his wife Doria to see the movie Flash Gordon. By the end of the evening, he has given Doria a job on Interview magazine.
Warhol doesn’t encounter Nancy Reagan until March 1981, when, by chance, he spots her eating in the same restaurant. ‘We were leaving and didn’t want to go by the President’s table because it was too groupie-ish – everybody else was stopping at the table – so we went the other way, but then they called us over. Jerry Zipkin was yelling, and I met Mrs Reagan, and she said, “Oh you’re so good to my kids.”’
The possibility of an interview with Nancy Reagan is mooted in September 1981. By now Nancy has taken to ringing Warhol’s sidekick Bob Colacello at the office, fussing about Ron and Doria, ‘causing no end of envy to Andy’. Colacello negotiates with the White House for an interview with Mrs Reagan: they give their approval, thinking it might lighten her imperious image. But, perhaps sensing Colacello has overtaken him on this particular social ladder, Warhol affects to pooh-pooh the idea. ‘I think she is too old and it’s old-fashioned. We should have younger people. What is there to ask her? About her movie career? Oh, it’ll never happen anyway.’
But it does. A month later, Warhol and Colacello leave for Washington. Colacello warns Warhol not to ask her any ‘sex questions’. This upsets Warhol. ‘I just couldn’t believe him. I mean, I just couldn’t believe him. Did he think I was going to sit there and ask her how often do they do it?’
The two of them, plus Doria, arrive early at the White House and are placed in a reception room. There they remain: when the First Lady arrives, she fails to lead them to somewhere more grand or more intimate. Warhol, ever-alert to matters of status, is affronted; a waiter brings them each a glass of water, and Warhol is further affronted.
The interview never really gets going. ‘We talked about drug rehabilitation, and it was boring. I made a couple of mistakes but I didn’t care because I was still so mad at being told by Bob not to ask sex questions.’
Soon, it is all over. Before ushering them out, Nancy Reagan gives Doria a piece of Tupperware (‘not wrapped up or anything’) and socks for Ron Junior. Colacello tells Nancy what a good mother she is, and asks what they are doing for Christmas. Nancy says they will stay at the White House, ‘because nobody ever stays at the White House’.
Warhol leaves feeling he has been snubbed. A glass of water! When he gets home, his phone is ringing. ‘It was Brigid asking me what kind of tea Mrs Reagan served us, and then I started thinking and I got madder. I mean, she could have put on the dog – she could have done it in a good room, she could have used the good china! I mean, this was for her daughter-in-law, she could have done something really great for this interview but she didn’t. I got madder and madder thinking about it.’
ANDY WARHOL
BLANKS
JACKIE KENNEDY
1040 Fifth Avenue, New York
December 20th 1978
Somehow, Andy Warhol has no luck with Presidents or First Ladies. They never seem to hit it off. After a party for Newsweek in 1983, he observes, ‘It was a boring party. No stars. Just Nancy Reagan and President and Mrs Carter.’
But they have their uses. On November 22nd 1963, he was walking through Grand Central Station when the news came through that President Kennedy had been assassinated. Warhol paused to absorb this and then, in a matter-of-fact manner, said to his assistant, ‘Well, let’s get to work.’
Within months, he had produced any amount of pictures of Jackie Kennedy, some adapted from a photograph of her smiling just before her husband was shot, some from photographs of her at his funeral, others a combination of the two.
As the years roll by, the paths of America’s most famous widow and America’s most famous artist cross on a regular basis. He is mesmerised by her fame. Possibly as a result, she is often standoffish towards him.
This makes him touchy. In 1977, Warhol is invited to a fundraising dinner Jackie has organised. ‘The dinner was a horror. They put us at such a nothing nobody table,’ he records in his diary. ‘So here we were in this room where we didn’t even recognise anybody except each other and this girl comes over to me and says, “I know you have a camera, and you can take pictures of everyone here except Mrs Onassis.”’ A few minutes later, Warhol enters the main room and finds not only that ‘there was everybody we knew’, but ‘there were 4,000 photographers taking pictures of Jackie. And that horrible girl had come over to tell me I couldn’t!’
The following year, Warhol is irritated to be told that Diana Vreeland doesn’t think he is avant-garde any more, and Jackie doesn’t either. That November, he hears that Jackie has thrown a party without inviting him. ‘Robert Kennedy Jr told Fred that they had a big question about whether to invite us and decided not to. Jackie really is awful, I guess.’
A week later, things look up. He receives an invitation to Jackie’s Christmas party. Warhol invites his friend Bob Colacello. They arrive late. ‘Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton were there and Bob heard – overheard – Jackie saying that something Warren did in the hall was “disgusting”, but we were never able to find out what it was.’
Over dinner at Mortimer’s afterwards, someone says Beatty has had sex with Jackie. Bianca Jagger says Warren has probably just made it up, because he made up that he slept with her, and when she saw him in the Beverly Wilshire she embarrassed him by screaming, ‘Warren, I hear you say you’re fucking me. How can you say that when it’s not true?’
Then Bianca says that Warren has a big cock, and Steve asks how would she know, and she says that all her girlfriends have slept with him. Colacello is ‘in heaven’ because Jackie is so nice to him, even sharing her glass of Perrier with him when the butler forgot to bring his, and saying, ‘It’s ours.’
But the next day, Jackie has turned turtle. She calls Warhol three or four times at his office. ‘But I didn’t call back, because the messages were complicated – they were like, “Call me at this number after 5.30, or before 4.00 if it’s not raining.”’ Finally, she catches him at home. She is frosty. ‘She sounded so tough. She said, “Now Andy, when I invited you, I invited you – I didn’t invite Bob Colacello.”’ She complains that Colacello ‘writes things’. This leads Warhol to suspect that ‘something must have happened there that she doesn’t want written about. She was thinking about it all day, I guess.’ Could she be referring to the disgusting thing Warren Beatty did in her hall?
She punishes Warhol for his tardiness and his uninvited guest by asking her friends not to invite him to their parties. Warhol gets wind of his exclusion; their relationship deteriorates further. She never invites him to another Christmas party. It rankles. He records each fresh omission in his diary. ‘Shook hands with Jackie O.,’ he writes after attending a black-tie charity do at the Helmsley Palace. ‘She never invited me to her Christmas party again, so she’s a creep. And now I wouldn’t go if she did. I’d tell her to go mind her own business. I mean, I’m the same age, so I can tell her off. Although I do feel like she’s older than me. But then, I feel like everybody’s older than me.’
Warhol never quite gets over his exclusion from Jackie’s party list. In 1985, he is still fulminating. ‘I don’t understand why Jackie O. thinks she’s so grand that she doesn’t owe it to the public to have another great marriage to somebody big. You’d think she’d want to scheme and connive to get into history again.’
On Saturday, April 26th 1986, he attends the Cape Cod wedding of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver,
and notes, ‘Jackie never smiled at anyone, she was a sourpuss.’ At the reception, he blanks her. ‘I didn’t look at Jackie, I felt too funny.’ The two of them never see each other again. Less than a year later, Andy Warhol dies unexpectedly, following an operation to remove his gall bladder.
Twenty-two years after his death, archivists are sifting through 610 cardboard boxes, filing cabinets and a shipping container full of the belongings of Andy Warhol. They find, among much else, a piece of old wedding cake, various empty tins of chicken soup and $17,000 in cash. They also come across a photograph of Jackie Kennedy swimming naked. It is signed by her, ‘For Andy, with enduring affection, Jackie Montauk’ – a reference to Warhol’s estate on Long Island. No one knows how on earth it came to be there, or the story behind it; but it undoubtedly dates from a time before their falling-out in 1978.
JACKIE KENNEDY
IS ILL-AT-EASE WITH
HRH QUEEN ELIZABETH II
Buckingham Palace, London
June 5th 1961
It is barely four months since President Kennedy’s inauguration. Mrs Kennedy is still finding her feet.
Jackie is unsure of herself. In public, she smiles and waves. In private, she bites her nails and chain smokes. She is prone to self-pity. She is overheard saying, ‘Oh, Jack, I’m so sorry for you that I’m such a dud,’ to which Kennedy replies, ‘I love you as you are.’ Is each of them telling only half the truth?
Socially, she is an awkward mix of the gracious and the paranoid. ‘At one moment, she was misunderstood, frustrated and helpless. The next moment, without any warning, she was the royal, loyal First Lady to whom it was almost a duty to bow, to pay medieval obeisance,’ is the way her English friend Robin Douglas-Home puts it. ‘Then again, without any warning, she was deflating someone with devastating barbs for being such a spaniel as to treat her as the First Lady and deriding the pomp of politics, the snobbery of the social chamber.’
But now, on their whistle-stop tour of Europe, Jackie suddenly appears formidable. The French take to her as one of their own: born a Bouvier, she has French ancestry, and spent a year at the Sorbonne. She speaks fluent French and has arrived with a wardrobe of clothes specially designed for her by Givenchy. At a banquet at Versailles, President de Gaulle greets her by saying, ‘This evening, Madame, you are looking like a Watteau.’
The political editor of Time reports that, ‘Thanks in large part to Jackie Kennedy at her prettiest, Kennedy charmed the old soldier into unprecedented flattering toasts and warm gestures of friendship.’ At a press conference, President Kennedy says, ‘I do not think it altogether inappropriate to introduce myself … I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris, and I have enjoyed it.’
Over dinner in Vienna, Jackie Kennedy charms Mr Khrushchev. As the evening unwinds, the Soviet Chairman draws his chair closer and closer to her. He compliments her on her white evening gown, and their subsequent conversation encompasses everything from dogs in space to folk dances in Ukraine. At the end of it, Khrushchev promises to send her a puppy as a present.
But the next morning, Khrushchev is back to his grumpy old self. He has no interest in charming the President, still less in being charmed by him. Kennedy emerges from their meeting feeling humiliated. On the flight from Vienna to London, both Kennedys appear downhearted, their gloom increased by the President’s perennial back problems. Their doctor administers drugs to buck them both up: amphetamines and vitamins for the First Lady and novocaine for the President, who is also taking the powerful painkiller Demerol.
In London the next day, the President informs the avuncular British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, of the battering he has received. ‘The President was completely overwhelmed by the ruthlessness and barbarity of the Russian Chairman,’ records Macmillan. ‘It reminded me in a way of Lord Halifax or Neville Chamberlain trying to hold a conversation with Herr Hitler. For the first time in his life Kennedy met a man who was impervious to his charm.’
In the morning, they attend the christening of Jackie’s niece Christina Radziwill. From there, they go to an informal lunch with the Prime Minister and a number of friends and relations, including the Ormsby-Gores and the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. The Duchess, an old friend of the President,
has mixed feelings about Jackie. ‘She is a queer fish. Her face is one of the oddest I ever saw. It is put together in a very wild way,’ she observes to her old friend Patrick Leigh Fermor.
That evening, the Kennedys attend a dinner at Buckingham Palace. It proves a minefield. The guest list has been the subject of negotiation: traditionally, divorcees are not invited, so the Queen has been reluctant to welcome Jackie’s sister Princess Lee Radziwill, who is on her second marriage, or her husband Prince Stanislaw Radziwill, who is on his third. Under pressure, she relents, but, by way of retaliation, singularly fails to invite Princess Margaret or Princess Marina, both of whose names Jackie has put forward. Jackie’s old paranoia returns: she sees it as a plot to do her down. ‘The Queen had her revenge,’ she confides to Gore Vidal.
‘No Margaret, no Marina, no one except every Commonwealth minister of agriculture they could find.’ Jackie also tells Vidal that she found the Queen ‘pretty heavy-going’. (When Vidal repeats this to Princess Margaret some years later, the Princess loyally explains, ‘But that’s what she’s there for.’)
Over dinner, Jackie continues to feel awkward, even persecuted. ‘I think the Queen resented me. Philip was nice, but nervous. One felt absolutely no relationship between them.’
The Queen asks Jackie about her visit to Canada. Jackie tells her how exhausting she found being on public view for hours on end. ‘The Queen looked rather conspiratorial and said, “One gets crafty after a while and learns how to save oneself.”’
According to Vidal (who is prone to impose his own thoughts on others), Jackie considers this the only time the Queen seems remotely human.
After dinner, the Queen asks if she likes paintings. Yes, says Jackie, she certainly does. The Queen takes her for a stroll down a long gallery in the palace. They stop in front of a Van Dyck. The Queen says, ‘That’s a good horse.’ Yes, agrees Jackie, that is a good horse. From Jackie’s account, this is the extent of their contact with one another, but others differ. Dinner at Buckingham Palace, writes Harold Macmillan in his diary that night, is ‘very pleasant’.
Nine months later, Jackie pays another visit to the Queen at Buckingham Palace, this time by herself. She is more in the swing of things now. ‘I don’t think I should say anything about it except how grateful I am and how charming she was,’ she tells the television cameras as she makes her escape.
HRH QUEEN ELIZABETH II
ATTENDS
THE DUKE OF WINDSOR
4, route du Champ d’Entraînement, Bois de Boulogne, Paris
May 18th 1972
The Queen is to pay a state visit to Paris to ‘improve the atmosphere’ before Britain’s entry into the Common Market. But before the visit takes place, word arrives at Buckingham Palace that her uncle David, once King Edward VIII, now the Duke of Windsor, has throat cancer, and is days from death.
The Queen’s Private Secretary, Sir Martin Charteris, contacts the British Ambassador in Paris, Sir Christopher Soames, who in turn arranges a meeting with Jean Thin, the Duke of Windsor’s doctor. The Ambassador comes straight to the point. Dr Thin recalls: ‘He told me bluntly that it was all right for the Duke to die before or after the visit, but that it would be politically disastrous if he were to expire in the course of it. Was there anything I could do to reassure him about the timing of the Duke’s end?’
Unversed in royal protocol, Thin is taken aback. He can offer no such reassurance. The Duke may die before, during or after his niece’s state visit to France, but he is not in the business of making predictions. The Palace is put out. Will the Duke prove as much of a nuisance in death as in life? As it turns out, the prospect of the Queen’s visit gives the Duke a new lease of life: more than ever, he seems determined to cling on.
And so he does. He is still alive when the royal party lands at Orly Airport on May 15th. Each evening, Sir Christopher telephones Dr Thin to see how his patient is coming along. Dr Thin reports that His Royal Highness is unable to swallow and on a glucose drip, but still intent on welcoming his monarch.
At 4.45 p.m. on May 18th, the royal entourage arrives after a day at the Longchamp races. The Duchess of Windsor greets the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales with a succession of shaky curtseys, ushering them into the orchid-laden drawing room for tea. For the next fifteen minutes, no one mentions the Duke of Windsor’s health. ‘It was as if they were pretending that David was perfectly well,’ the Duchess says later. She complains that the Queen was ‘not at all warm’, though she may simply be irritated by the Windsors’ jumpy pugs.
The only member of the royal visitors to have been here before is the Prince of Wales, who called by last October, hoping to patch things up between his black-sheep uncle and the rest of the family. The very next month, Uncle David was diagnosed with cancer, so the Prince’s account in his diary of his visit provides a glimpse, albeit a sniffy glimpse, into the Windsors’ life as it was lived, not long ago: ‘Upon entering the house I found footmen and pages wearing identical scarlet and black uniforms to the ones ours wear at home. It was rather pathetic seeing that. The eye then wandered to a table in the hall on which lay a red box with “The King” on it … The whole house reeks of some particularly strong joss sticks and from out of the walls came the muffled sound of scratchy piped music. The Duchess appeared from a host of the most dreadful American guests I have ever seen. The look of incredulity on their faces was a study and most of them were thoroughly tight. One man shook hands with me twice, muttered something incomprehensible in French with a strong American accent and promptly collapsed into the arms of a strategically placed black footman.’
The Duchess (dismissed by Charles after their meeting as ‘a hard woman – totally unsympathetic and somewhat superficial’) leads the Queen up the stairs, where the Duke is sitting in a wheelchair, crisply dressed for the occasion in a blue poloneck and blazer. These garments conceal a drip tube, which emerges from the back of the collar and then swoops down to flasks concealed behind a curtain. He has shrivelled to ninety pounds. As the Queen enters, he struggles to his feet and, with some effort, manages to lower his neck in a bow. Dr Thin worries that this may cause the drip to pop out, but all is well, and it stays put.
The Queen greets her uncle with a kiss, and asks how he is. ‘Not so bad,’ he replies. From this moment on, the opinions of two of the witnesses to their meeting divide. The Duchess, who is by nature unforgiving, portrays the Queen as unsympathetic and coldly dutiful. ‘The Queen’s face showed no compassion, no appreciation for his effort, his respect. Her manner as much as stated that she had not intended to honour him with a visit, but that she was simply covering appearances by coming here because he was dying and it was known that she was in Paris.’ However, the Duke’s Irish nurse, Oonagh Shanley, remembers the Queen chatting perfectly amiably to her uncle, whose voice, reduced to a whispery rasp, is barely audible.
Some say their meeting comes to an end when the Duke is overcome by a coughing fit, and is wheeled away. It is certainly a very short time before the Queen leaves the room, to rejoin the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales downstairs.
Rightly or wrongly, the Duchess of Windsor senses that they wish to be off. She escorts them to the front door of the villa, where the four of them pose together for photographers. Inevitably, the Duke of Edinburgh attempts a few jokes. Equally inevitably, the Duchess considers them inappropriate. The royal party leaves. The entire visit has taken less than half an hour.
Ten days later, the Duke of Windsor dies. Nearly 60,000 people come to Windsor to pay their respects. There is a question as to whether or not Trooping the Colour, scheduled for two days before his funeral, should be cancelled, as a mark of respect. But the Queen insists that it should go ahead, so it does.
THE DUKE OF WINDSOR
LOOKS ON AGHAST WITH
ELIZABETH TAYLOR
4, route du Champ d’Entraînement, Bois de Boulogne, Paris
November 12th 1968
Both now in their seventies, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor potter along as stately relics of their former glamour. They occupy their time either entertaining or being entertained by what has come to be known as the jet set. After jetting into Paris, and before jetting out, their ever-changing friends – foreign aristocrats, shipping millionaires, misplaced royalty, international playboys, amusing bachelors, the higher echelons of show-business – are delighted to receive the call from the Windsors.
Thirty years ago, they were the most glamorous couple in the world: that title, only ever temporary, is now held by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, who are, by chance, both making movies in Paris. The balance of fame, perhaps also of wealth,
dictates that it is the Windsors who make eyes at the Burtons, though the latter are far from displeased, as the Windsors reinforce their sense of having arrived, their craving for being centre-stage, particularly when off-stage.
The Windsors visit the Burtons on their separate sets, and the two couples dine together regularly. In honour of Burton’s Welsh roots, the Duchess makes a point of wearing her Prince of Wales brooch – the fleur de lys in white and yellow diamonds. Elizabeth Taylor looks at it covetously: she is celebrated for her jewellery collection.
Dining with the Windsors and the Rothschilds before the European premiere of The Taming of the Shrew, she wears roughly $1,500,000-worth – so much that the couple have to be protected by eight bodyguards on their short journey to the Paris Opera House. Earlier the same day, Burton spends $960,000 buying her the jet plane on which they flew into Paris. ‘Elizabeth was not displeased,’ he confides to his diary.
Elizabeth remains enchanted by the fairy-tale glamour of the Windsors, but Burton, less convinced that the world he has created is the world he wants, his unease fuelled and allayed by three bottles of vodka a day, is beginning to find them a little wearing. Unlike the Duchess, the Duke lacks zip: another of their acquaintances finds himself mesmerised by the way that he ‘always had something of … riveting stupidity to say on any subject’.
On November 12th, the Burtons grace a dinner for twenty-two at the Windsors’ home. As they enter the room, Burton recognises only two people, the Count and Countess of Bismarck, and then only by name. ‘He, the Count, looks as much like one’s mental picture of the iron chancellor as spaghetti. Soft and round and irresolute. He couldn’t carve modern Germany out of cardboard.’
The Duke and Duchess seem, through his jaded eyes, much diminished. ‘It is extraordinary how small the Duke and Duchess are. Two tiny figures like Toto and Nanette that you keep on the mantelpiece. Chipped around the edges. Something you keep in the front room for Sundays only. Marred royalty. The awful majesty that doth hedge around a king is notably lacking in awfulness. Charming and feckless.’
Elizabeth notes that she and Richard are the only two people without titles in the entire room. She is offended that she has not been placed next to the Duke, and Richard is furious that he has not been placed next to the Duchess. Instead, he is between another Duchess and a Countess, both ‘hard-faced and youngish’.
One of them tells him that she saw him in Hamlet, and asks how he could possibly remember all those lines. Burton says that he doesn’t bother, that he improvises, that Shakespeare is lousy, that Hamlet’s character is so revolting that one could only say some of his lines when drunk. ‘I mean, the frantic self-pity of “How all occasions do inform against me, and spur my dull revenge”. You have to be sloshed to get around that. At least I have to be.’
He thinks he may have shocked her. Another lady, ‘not a day under seventy, whose face had been lifted so often that it was on top of her head’, asks him if it is true that all actors are queer. Yes, he replies, and that’s why he married Elizabeth, because she was queer too, but they have an arrangement.
‘What do you do?’
‘Well, she lives in one suite, and I in another, and we make love by telephone.’
After dinner, Taylor looks on in horror as Burton approaches the Duchess of Windsor and says, ‘You are without any question, the most vulgar woman I’ve ever met.’ Before long, he has picked up the seventy-two-year-old Duchess and is swinging her around ‘like a dancing singing dervish’. The room falls silent. Watching the event with the Duke, Taylor is terrified that Burton will drop her or fall down and kill her. Meanwhile, Burton, who has long suspected that his lifestyle is a betrayal of his origins, is overcome with self-pity and starts pining for the Welsh valleys. ‘Christ! I will arise and go now and go home to Welsh miners who understand drink and the idiocies that it arouses … I shall die of drink and make-up.’
Arriving back at the Plaza Athénée, Taylor is furious, and locks Burton in the spare bedroom. He tries to kick the door down, ‘and nearly succeeded which meant that I spent some time on my hands and knees this morning picking up the battered plaster in the hope that the waiters wouldn’t notice that the hotel had nearly lost a door in the middle of the night’.
In the morning, Taylor berates him for his misbehaviour, complaining that they’ll never be invited again. ‘Thank God,’ he replies, adding, ‘Rarely have I been so stupendously bored.’
That weekend, he reluctantly agrees to accompany Taylor to a grand fancy-dress party at the Rothschilds’ château in the country. Also at the party is Cecil Beaton, who spots them across the room. ‘I have always loathed the Burtons for their vulgarity, commonness and crass bad taste,’ he writes in his diary the next day. ‘She combining the worst of US and English taste, he as butch and coarse as only a Welshman can be.’
ELIZABETH TAYLOR
UNNERVES
JAMES DEAN
Marfa, Texas
June 6th 1955
She is the former child star, now Queen of Hollywood. He is the up-and-coming method actor, surly and unpredictable. Though Elizabeth Taylor is a year younger than James Dean, she belongs to an earlier generation of old-fashioned, glamorous, self-confident, untouchable stars, whereas he heralds a new generation: scruffy, grunting, brooding, callow. They are to act together in Giant, Elizabeth Taylor as the wife of a Texas cattle baron, James Dean as the troublesome ranch-hand who strikes oil.
They are introduced a few days before filming begins. To everyone’s surprise, he charms her, and takes her for a ride in his brand-new Porsche. Taylor ends the day convinced that he is a perfect gentleman, and that others have tarred him with the wrong brush.
The following day, Taylor, expecting a warm welcome after their pleasant introduction, goes up to Dean and says hello. He glares at her over the rims of his glasses, mutters something incomprehensible to himself and strides off as though he hasn’t seen her. It dawns on her that, after all, his reputation for moodiness may be justified.
Their first four weeks are to be spent on location in the small, sleepy town of Marfa, Texas, where the temperatures frequently rise to 120 degrees in the shade. On their first day of filming, his friend Dennis Hopper has never seen James Dean so nervous on a set.
Their first scene involves Dean firing a shot at a water tower, Taylor stopping her car, and Dean asking her in for tea. But Dean is so nervous that he can barely get the words out. ‘At that time there wasn’t anybody who didn’t think she was queen of the movies, and Jimmy was really fuckin’ nervous. They did take after take, and it just wasn’t going right. He was really getting fucked up. Really nervous,’ recalls Hopper. ‘Well, there were around four thousand people watching the scene from a hundred yards away, local people and visitors. And all of a sudden Jimmy turned and walked off towards them. He wasn’t relating to them or anything. He got half-way, unzipped his pants, took out his cock, and took a piss. Then he dripped off, put his cock back, zipped up his pants, and walked back to the set and said, “OK, shoot.”’
This is not the sort of behaviour to which Elizabeth Taylor is accustomed. On the way back from the location, Hopper says to Dean, ‘Jimmy, I’ve seen you do some way-out things before, but what was that?’
‘I was nervous,’ explains Dean. ‘I’m a method actor. I work through my senses. If you’re nervous, your senses can’t reach your subconscious and that’s that – you just can’t work. So I figured if I could piss in front of these two thousand people, man, and I could be cool, I figured if I could do that, I could get in front of that camera and do just anything, anything at all.’
As the filming continues, Dean irritates the cast and crew with his habit of coming to a halt in the middle of a take and shouting, ‘Cut – I fucked up!’ He attributes it to the perfectionism required of a method actor. His co-star Rock Hudson, one of the old school, is less forgiving of the solipsistic neurosis that powers Dean’s acting. The director, George Stevens, also grows irritated by Dean’s random behaviour, regarding it as unprofessional. ‘I’d get so mad at him, and he’d stand there, blinking behind his glasses after having been guilty of some bit of preposterous behaviour, and revealing by his very cast of defiance that he felt some sense of unworthiness.’ Stevens is equally annoyed by Taylor’s obsession with her looks. ‘Until you tone down your veneer, you’ll never be an actress,’ he tells her.
Their shared sense of directorial persecution may help forge a bond between Taylor and Dean: in time, the two stars grow to like each other. ‘We were like brother and sister really; kidding all the time, whatever it was we were talking about. One felt he was a boy one had to take care of, but even that was probably his joke. I don’t think he needed anybody or anything – except his acting.’
Both Dean and Taylor are reliant on drugs of one sort or another: he smokes marijuana, while Taylor takes medications for her plentiful ailments, which Stevens regards as psychosomatic. ‘When Jimmy was eleven and his mother passed away, he began to be molested by his minister. I think that haunted him the rest of his life. In fact, I know it did. We talked about it a lot. During Giant we’d stay up nights and talk and talk and that was one of the things he confessed to me,’ Taylor says forty-two years later.
‘He would tell me about his past life, some of the grief and unhappiness he had experienced, and some of his loves and tragedies. Then, the next day on set, I would say, “Hi, Jimmy,” and he would give me a cursory nod of his head. It was almost as if he didn’t want to recognise me, as if he was ashamed of having revealed so much of himself the night before. It would take maybe a day or two for him to become my friend again.’
One day in September, with only a few scenes left to shoot, the director, crew members and actors assemble in the screening room to view the day’s rushes. In the middle of the screening, Stevens takes a call, then orders the lights up. James Dean, he announces, has been killed in a car crash.
The following day, Taylor is summoned to film reaction shots for a scene in which she acted with Dean a few days ago. She realises with a start that she is being asked to react to a young man whose corpse is now lying on a slab in a funeral home at Paso Robles, but she goes ahead with it just the same.
JAMES DEAN
IS FOREWARNED BY
ALEC GUINNESS
The Villa Capri, Hollywood
September 23rd 1955
A week before he is due to die, James Dean is sitting at a table in his favourite little restaurant in Hollywood, the Villa Capri. He is very chummy with Nikkos, its maître d’, from whom he has started renting a log house in Sherman Oaks.
Looking towards the entrance, he spots a familiar figure attempting to get a table, then being turned away. He recognises him as the English actor Alec Guinness, the star of so many of his favourite Ealing comedies, like Kind Hearts and Coronets.
Guinness has always been more than a touch superstitious, and in a few minutes he will be applying his sixth sense to James Dean. He regularly visits fortune tellers, and has even indulged in a little table-turning. At one time in his life he became obsessed with tarot cards, until all of a sudden one evening, ‘I got the horrors about them and impetuously threw cards and books on a blazing log fire.’
Guinness delights in recounting his psychic powers. On the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, 1943, he had been resting in the cabin of the naval ship of which he was a lieutenant, when he had apparently heard a sinister voice saying, ‘Tomorrow.’ He was convinced that this was a premonition of death.
That night, sailing from Sicily to the Yugoslav island of Vis, his ship hit a hurricane. An electrical discharge caused ribbons of blue fluorescent light, ‘until the whole ship was lit up like some dizzying fairground sideshow’. Convinced that he was going to die, Guinness found the spectacle ‘beautiful and strangely comforting’.
The ship was dashed against the rocks as it entered the small Italian port of Termoli, and he gave the order to abandon ship. He had, it seems, outwitted the sinister voice – or had it been delivering less of a judgement than a warning?
In March this year, he and his wife were on holiday in the Trossachs in Scotland when their car had a bad puncture. ‘Couldn’t get the wheel off,’ he recalls in his diary. ‘After nearly an hour’s effort said a little prayer to St Anthony and the nuts came loose the very next time I tried – and with only a small effort.’
Six months later he arrives in Hollywood, exhausted after a sixteen-hour flight from Copenhagen, in order to begin filming The Swan with Grace Kelly and Louis Jourdan.
The screenwriter of Father Brown, Thelma Moss, has invited him out to dinner, but they are having difficulty finding a table because Thelma is wearing slacks. They finally settle for a small Italian restaurant, the Villa Capri, which has a more casual dress-code, but when they get there they are told by the genial maître d’ that it is full, and so they begin to walk away.
‘I don’t care where we eat or what. Just something, somewhere,’ grumbles Guinness irritably, adding, ‘I don’t mind just a hamburger.’
At that moment, he becomes aware of the sound of feet running down the street behind him. He turns to see a young man in sneakers, a sweatshirt and blue jeans. ‘You want a table?’ he asks. ‘Join me. My name’s James Dean.’
‘Yes, very kind of you,’ replies Guinness with relief, and eagerly follows him back to the Villa Capri.
Before they go into the restaurant, James Dean says, ‘I’d like to show you something,’ and takes them into the courtyard of the restaurant. There, he proudly shows them his new racing car, one of only ninety Porsche 550 Spyders ever produced. He has had it customised: it now has tartan seating and two red stripes at the rear of its wheelwell, all designed by George Barris, the man who will go on to design the Batmobile. ‘It’s just been delivered,’ Dean says, proudly. On the lower rear of the engine cover are the words ‘Little Bastard’. The car is so brand new that it is still wrapped in cellophane, with a bunch of roses tied to its bonnet.
Alec Guinness is seized by one of his premonitions.
‘How fast can you go in that?’
‘I can do 150 in it.’
‘Have you driven it?’
‘I’ve never been in it at all.’
And then – ‘exhausted, hungry, feeling a little ill-tempered in spite of Dean’s kindness’ – Guinness hears himself saying, in a voice he can hardly recognise as his own, ‘Look, I won’t join your table unless you want me to, but I must say something. Please do not get into that car.’ He looks at his watch. ‘I said, “It’s now 10 o’clock, Friday the 23rd of September 1955. If you get in that car you will be found dead in it by this time next week.”’
Despite this grim prognosis, Dean laughs. ‘Oh, shucks!’ he says. ‘Don’t be so mean!’
Guinness apologises, blaming his outburst on a lack of sleep and food. The three of them then have dinner together – ‘a charming dinner’ – before going their separate ways. Guinness makes no further reference to the car, ‘but in my heart I was uneasy’.
Though Dean himself has an interest in morbid premonitions – passages about death and degradation are heavily underlined in his copy of Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon – he ignores Guinness’s warning. A week later, on September 30th, he is driving his new Spyder across the junction of Route 46 and Route 41 near Cholame, California, when he collides head-on with a Ford Custom Tudor coupé driven by a student with the inappropriately comical name of Donald Turnupseed.
James Dean is taken by ambulance to Paso Robles War Memorial Hospital, where he is pronounced dead on arrival at 5.59 p.m. His last words, uttered just before impact, are, ‘The guy’s gotta stop … he’ll see us.’
Fifty years after his death, this section of the road is renamed the James Dean Memorial Junction.
‘It was a very odd, spooky experience,’ recalls Alec Guinness of their strange meeting. ‘I liked him very much. I would have liked to have known him more.’
ALEC GUINNESS
CRAWLS WITH
EVELYN WAUGH
The Church of the Immaculate Conception, Farm Street, London W1
August 4th 1955
On Tuesday, July 19th 1955, the postman delivers a parcel and a letter to Evelyn Waugh. The parcel contains his weekly box of cigars. He is put out when the postman tries to charge him almost £8 duty on it. The letter is from his sixty-seven-year-old goddaughter, Edith Sitwell. She says she is to be received into the Roman Catholic Church in just over a fortnight. The news makes Waugh uneasy. He is aware of her tendency to show off. ‘She might be making an occasion of it,’ he confides to his diary, adding that he has written to her confessor, Father Caraman, ‘urging the example of St Helena’. This particular saint is noted for her piety.
August 4th is a bright, sunny day. Waugh wakes up in the Grand Hotel, Folkestone. The staff are civil and obliging, the food dull and lukewarm. ‘If only the cook and the patrons were better it would be admirable,’ he thinks. He keeps sending notes to the chef (‘Don’t put cornflour in the sauce’), who reacts badly. ‘He comes up and glowers at me in his white hat from behind a screen in the dining room.’
Waugh catches the 9 a.m. train to Charing Cross. One of his fellow passengers is ‘a ginger-whiskered giant who looked like a farmer and read the Financial Times’. Waugh’s journey is enlivened by a cinder blowing in from the engine, landing on the giant’s tweed coat and burning a hole in it.
From Charing Cross, Waugh walks to White’s Club, stopping to buy a carnation on the way. At White’s, he refreshes himself with a mug filled with stout, gin and ginger beer, before arriving at Farm Street at 11.45 a.m. He is wearing a loud black-and-white houndstooth tweed suit, a red tie and a boater from which stream red and blue ribbons. Waugh enters the Ignatius Chapel, which he finds empty save for ‘a bald shy man’ who introduces himself as Alec Guinness.
Getting dressed this morning, Alec Guinness found it hard to know what to wear. Eventually, he picked a navy-blue hopsack suit as ‘suitably formal’. He felt a black or grey tie would be ‘too severe’, preferring a bright blue tie as ‘more in keeping for what I assumed was a joyous event’. He has not yet become a Catholic himself.
They are joined, in Waugh’s words, by ‘an old deaf woman with dyed red hair whose name I never learned’. Guinness, too, fails to catch her name, ‘even when she barked at us’. She walks unsteadily with the aid of two sticks, and her bare arms are encased in metal bangles which give him the impression that she is some ancient warrior.
Guinness watches as she attempts to sit down on a complicated seat she has brought with her – ‘half prie-dieu and half collapsible deckchair’. Somehow, she manages to entangle herself in the mechanism, with disastrous results: ‘The sticks slid from under her, the chair heaped itself on the floor and all the bangles rolled down her arms and sticks and propelled themselves in every direction around the room.’
‘My jewels!’ she cries. ‘Please to bring back my jewels!’
Waugh and Guinness dutifully get down on all fours and wriggle their way under the pews and around the candle sconces, trying to retrieve ‘everything round and glittering’.
‘How many jewels were you wearing?’ Waugh asks the old deaf woman.
‘Seventy,’ she replies.
Under the pews, Waugh whispers to Guinness, ‘What nationality?’
‘Russian, at a guess,’ says Guinness, sliding on his stomach beneath a pew and dirtying his smart suit.
‘Or Rumanian,’ says Waugh. ‘She crossed herself backwards. She may be a Maronite Christian, in which case beware.’
The two men start laughing, and soon, according to Guinness, get ‘barely controllable hysterics’. They pick up all the bangles they can find. Guinness counts them into her hands, but the old deaf woman looks suspiciously at the pair of them, as if they might have pocketed a few.
‘Is that all?’ she asks.
‘Sixty-eight,’ says Guinness.
‘You are still wearing two,’ observes Waugh.
At that moment, the organ strikes a deep note, and the other three witnesses enter. Waugh turns his unforgiving owlish stare upon ‘Father D’Arcy … a little swarthy man who looked like a Jew but claimed to be Portuguese, and a blond youth who looked American but claimed to be English’. Guinness notes that the Portuguese man, a poet, looks ‘a little peevishly atheistic’.
Then, up the aisle, ‘swathed in black like a sixteenth-century infanta’, glides Edith Sitwell, to be received into the Church by Father Caraman.
The service concluded, they are driven in a Daimler from Farm Street to the Sesame Club, just two streets away. Waugh has heard bad things about it, but is pleasantly surprised by the ‘gargantuan feast’ that has been laid on: cold consommé, lobster Newberg, steak, strawberry flan and ‘great quantities of wine’. All in all, he considers it ‘a rich blow-out’.
Guinness notes, ‘Edith presiding like a bride in black and Fr Caraman frequently casting his eyes heavenwards as if in ecstasy.’
An awkward moment comes when the old deaf woman suddenly says, ‘Did I hear the word “whisky”?’
‘Do you want one?’ asks Waugh.
‘More than anything in the world.’
‘I’ll get you some.’
But at this point the Portuguese poet steps in. He nudges Waugh and says, ‘It would be disastrous.’ So Waugh persuades her to stick with the white wine. Repeating the words of the Portuguese poet, he explains to Guinness that ‘We couldn’t face another disaster from that quarter.’
Over lunch, Guinness tipsily shares his few remaining theological anxieties with the blond English youth and the Portuguese poet. ‘Would we have to drink the Pope’s health? If Edith died on the spot would she go straight to heaven? And would that be a case for ecclesiastical rejoicing or worldly and artistic distress?’ A great deal is drunk; the following morning, try as he may, Guinness cannot recollect any of them leaving the table.
EVELYN WAUGH
WRONG-FOOTS
IGOR STRAVINSKY
The Ambassador Hotel, Park Avenue, New York
February 4th 1949
Evelyn Waugh claims to dislike all music, with the possible exception of plainchant. This does not bode well for Igor Stravinsky as he prepares to meet him in New York. He has already been warned by Aldous Huxley that Waugh can be ‘prickly, pompous, and downright unpleasant’. But he is an admirer of Waugh’s writing, particularly his talent for dialogue and the naming of characters (Dr Kakaphilos; Father Rothschild, S.J.), and is pleased when a friend arranges a meeting.
Stravinsky spent last night in the more congenial company of Vladimir Nabokov, W.H. Auden and George Balanchine, playing them his draft score of Act 1 of The Rake’s Progress. As usual, he found himself a little irritated by Auden’s tendency to talk during any performance, but this is small fry compared to what lies ahead: Waugh is, after all, notoriously prickly.
‘Why does everybody except me find it so easy to be nice?’ asks the distracted Gilbert Pinfold in Waugh’s most autobiographical novel.
Tom Driberg identifies this as ‘a true outcry’ from Pinfold’s creator. At the age of only forty-five, Waugh has somehow boxed himself into the character of a grumpy old curmudgeon: Penelope Fitzgerald sums up the social message he wishes to convey as: I am bored, you are frightened.
His rudeness has no age limit. When Ann Fleming brings her uninvited three-year-old son to tea at the Grand Hotel, Folkestone, Waugh is so annoyed that he puts ‘his face close to the child’s, dragging down the corners of eyes and mouth with forefingers and thumbs, producing an effect of such unbelievable malignity that the child shrieked with terror and fell to the floor’. Fleming retaliates by giving Waugh’s face a hard slap and overturning a plate of éclairs.
Observing him at Pratt’s Club, Malcolm Muggeridge thinks Waugh presents a ‘quite ludicrous figure in dinner jacket, silk shirt; extraordinarily like a loquacious woman, with dinner jacket cut like a maternity gown to hide his bulging stomach. He was very genial, probably pretty plastered – all the time playing this part of a crotchety old character rather deaf, cupping his ear – “Feller’s a bit of a Socialist, I suspect.” Amusing for about a quarter of an hour. Tony [Powell] and I agreed that an essential difference between Graham [Greene] and Waugh is that, whereas Graham tends to impose an agonized silence, Waugh demands agonized attention.’
Some of his rudest remarks are delivered in such a way that few, perhaps including himself, can tell whether they are intended. ‘I spent two nights at Cap Ferrat with Mr Maugham (who has lost his fine cook) and made a great gaffe,’ he writes to Harold Acton in April 1952. ‘The first evening he asked me what someone was like and I said “A pansy with a stammer.” All the Picassos on the walls blanched.’
He delights in wrong-footing one and all. When Feliks Topolski and Hugh Burnett arrive for lunch at Combe Florey to prepare for Waugh’s appearance on Face to Face, he is at pains to point out that his house has no television set and a radio only in the servants’ quarters. He then serves them a large tureen of green-tufted strawberries. ‘Too late I saw the problem,’ recalls Burnett. ‘Put the strawberries on the plate, add the cream, take the spoon – and you were trapped with the strawberry tufts. My attempt to spear one shot it under the sideboard. That was the BBC disgraced. Topolski, seeing what had happened, did the socially unthinkable – dipped a strawberry into the cream with his fingers. “Ah, Mr Topolski,” Waugh observed helpfully, “You need a spoon.”’ When the day for the recording comes, Burnett introduces him to his interviewer, John Freeman. ‘How do you do, Mr Waugh,’ said Freeman.
‘The name is Waugh – not Wuff!’ he replied.
‘But I called you Mr Waugh.’
‘No, no, I distinctly heard you say “Wuff”.’
During the interview, Waugh confesses that his worst fault is irritability. What with? asks Freeman. ‘Absolutely everything. Inanimate objects and people, animals, anything.’
The Stravinskys and the Waughs meet up at the Ambassador Hotel on Park Avenue. Waugh is never at his best in America: he finds the natives unappealing, and upsets them with observations such as, ‘Of course the Americans are cowards. They are almost all the descendants of wretches who deserted their legitimate monarch for fear of military service.’
Stravinsky soon finds that the cutting edge in Waugh’s work is even sharper in his person. ‘Not an immediately endearing character,’ he thinks. After they have introduced themselves, Stravinsky asks Waugh whether he would care for a whisky. ‘I do not drink whisky before wine,’ he replies, his tone suggesting faint horror at Stravinsky’s ignorance.
Waugh seems to rejoice in causing all Stravinsky’s remarks, polite, lively or anodyne, to bounce back in his face. At first, Stravinsky speaks to Waugh in French, but Waugh replies that he does not speak the language. Mrs Waugh contradicts him pleasantly, but is swiftly rebuked.
The conversation stutters on. Stravinsky says he admires the Constitution of the United States. Waugh replies that he deplores ‘everything American, beginning with the Constitution’. They pause to study their menus. Stravinsky recommends the chicken; Waugh points out that it is a Friday.
‘Whether Mr Waugh was disagreeable, or only preposterously arch, I cannot say,’ Stravinsky recalls.
‘Horace Walpole remarks somewhere that the next worst thing to disagreeableness is too-agreeableness. I would reverse the order of preference myself while conceding that on short acquaintance disagreeableness is the greater strain.’ Desperately trying to find common ground, Stravinsky attempts to relate his own recent sung Mass to the theme of Waugh’s current lecture tour. ‘All music is positively painful to me,’ replies Waugh.
The only subject on which the two of them achieve a measure of agreement concerns the burial customs of the United States. Stravinsky is impressed by Waugh’s knowledge. Waugh claims that he himself has ‘arranged to be buried at sea’, though this, it turns out, is just another of his little teases.
IGOR STRAVINSKY
IS APPALLED BY
WALT DISNEY
Burbank Studios, Los Angeles
December 1939
Igor Stravinsky is himself not the easiest of folk, but Walt Disney is not to know this when the composer drops round to his studio.
Disney is at the height of his success. Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck are the most durable and biddable stars Hollywood will ever know, and his recent Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs will gross $8 million. He has just built himself a palatial studio in Burbank, the size of a modest town, complete with its own streets, electric system and telephone exchange.
Meeting Leopold Stokowski, the conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, at a dinner party, Disney mentions an idea he has had for a two-reel version of Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, starring Mickey Mouse. Stokowski grows tremendously excited at the idea of animating great works of music. He suggests other pieces Disney might transform into colour: Bach’s Organ Toccata in D-minor, for instance. Disney sees it as orange. ‘Oh, no, I see it as purple,’ counters Stokowski.
Disney’s modest idea balloons into a full-length film, with classical music galore. Both men become over-excited: no idea seems too preposterous. Stokowski suggests a Debussy prelude, ‘Les Sons et les parfums tournent l’air du soir’, explaining that he has always craved perfume in theatres. Disney goes overboard for it. ‘You’ve got something!’ he says. ‘You could get them to name a special perfume for this – create a perfume – you could get write-ups in the papers! It’s a hot idea!’
Disney wants a sequence showing the creation of the world, full of volcanoes and dinosaurs. But what music to use? His researchers can only come up with Haydn’s Creation, but Disney thinks it doesn’t carry quite enough oomph. At this point, Stokowski alerts him to Le Sacre du printemps by Igor Stravinsky.
Disney listens to it, and is immediately gripped. He offers Stravinsky $5,000 for the rights, though Stravinsky will remember it as $10,000. According to Stravinsky, Disney hints that if permission is withheld he will use the music anyway: pre-Revolutionary Russian copyrights are no longer valid.
Stravinsky accepts; Disney steams ahead. Before long the human inhabitants of the Burbank studio find themselves working alongside animals in cages, including iguanas and baby alligators, with skilled animators studying their movements close-up. ‘It should look as though the studio has sent an expedition back to the earth six million years ago,’ enthuses Disney. He is so excited that he starts free-associating to the music: ‘Something like that last WHAHUMMPH I feel is a volcano – yet it’s on land. I get that UGHHWAHUMMPH! on land, but we can look out on the water before this and see water spouts.’ As he listens to the music, he gets so worked up that he suddenly blurts, ‘Stravinsky will say: “Jesus, I didn’t know I wrote that music!”’
Which, as it turns out, is roughly what Stravinsky does say. In December 1939, he drops into the Burbank studio for a private screening of Fantasia. The experience leaves him with the most awful memories. ‘I remember someone offering me a score, and when I said I had my own, that someone saying, “But it is all changed.” It was indeed. The instrumentation had been improved by such stunts as having the horns play their glissandi an octave higher in the Danse de la terre. The order of pieces had been shuffled, too, and the most difficult of them eliminated, though this did not save the musical performance, which was execrable.’
As Stravinsky remembers it, Disney tries to reassure him by saying, ‘Think of the number of people who will now be able to hear your music.’ To which Stravinsky replies, ‘The numbers of people who consume music … is of no interest to me. The mass adds nothing to art.’
But Disney’s memories of the meeting are quite different. Stravinsky, he maintains, made an earlier visit to the studio, saw the original sketches for the Fantasia version of Le Sacre and declared how excited he was. Later, having seen the finished product, Stravinsky emerged from the projection room ‘visibly moved’. Disney remembers the composer saying that prehistoric life was what he always had in mind when he wrote it. But Stravinsky disagrees. ‘That I could have expressed approbation over the treatment of my own music seems to me highly improbable – though, of course, I should hope I was polite.’
Either way, he is much less polite twenty years later, when he and Disney clash in the pages of the New York Times. He dislikes what was done to his music, he writes, and furthermore, ‘I will say nothing about the visual complement as I do not wish to criticise unresisting imbecility.’
Whose memory are we to trust? There may be a temptation to favour the highbrow over the lowbrow, the intellectual over the populist; but self-delusion rains on all, high and low. Many artists who took money from Hollywood felt able to absolve themselves by seeking a divorce from the finished product. For them, the prevailing myth of the philistine Hollywood producer offered a welcome escape hatch.
By and large, the evidence favours Disney. Less than a year after their supposed contretemps, Stravinsky cheerfully sells Disney two more options – one on the musical folk tale Renard, the other on The Firebird.
And his artistic halo always has a certain rubbery quality about it: he composes some hunting music for Orson Welles’s Jane Eyre, and after contractual negotiations break down, uses the very same piece for a commission from the Boston Symphony Orchestra, transforming it into an ode to the memory of the wife of Serge Koussevitzky. On another occasion, he lifts the incidental music he has been commissioned to write for a film about the Nazi occupation of Norway, Commandos Strike at Dawn, straight from a collection of Norwegian folk tunes his wife has stumbled upon in a second-hand bookstore in Los Angeles. When this deal falls through, he further rejigs it into a piece for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, solemnly retitling it ‘Four Norwegian Moods’.
WALT DISNEY
RESISTS
P.L. TRAVERS
Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, Los Angeles
August 27th 1964
It is all smiles as Walt Disney and his most recent collaborator, P.L. Travers, pose with Julie Andrews at the world premiere of Mary Poppins. This, he tells reporters, is the movie he has been dreaming of making ever since 1944, when he first heard his wife and children laughing at a book and asked them what it was. At his side, Travers, aged sixty-five, appears equally thrilled. ‘It’s a splendid film and very well cast!’ she enthuses.
The premiere is a lavish affair. A miniature train rolls down Hollywood Boulevard with Mickey Mouse, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Peter Pan, Peter Rabbit, the Three Little Pigs, the Big Bad Wolf, Pluto, a skunk and four dancing penguins on board. At the cinema, the Disneyland staff are dressed as English bobbies; at the party afterwards, grinning chimney-sweeps frolic to music from a band of Pearly Kings and Queens.
The next day, Travers is over the moon, wiring her congratulations to ‘Dear Walt’. The film is, she says, ‘a splendid spectacle … true to the spirit of Mary Poppins’. Disney’s response is a little more guarded. He is happy to have her reactions, he says, and appreciates her taking the time, but what a pity that ‘the hectic activities before, during and after the premiere’ prevented them from seeing more of each other.
Travers writes back, thanking Disney for thanking her for thanking him. The film is, she says, ‘splendid, gay, generous and wonderfully pretty’ – even if, for her, the real Mary Poppins remains within the covers of her books. On her copy, she adds a note saying that it is a letter ‘with much between the lines’. The same month, she complains to her London publisher that the film is ‘simply sad’.
Those smiles at the premiere are, in fact, the first and the last they will ever exchange. Pamela Travers is a long-time devotee of Gurdjieff, Krishnamurti, Yeats and Blake. For her, the Mary Poppins books were never just children’s stories, but intensely personal reflections of her Alphabetti Spaghetti blend of philosophy, mysticism, theosophy, Zen Buddhism, duality, and the oneness of everything. In the last year of her life, she will reveal to an interviewer that Mary Poppins is related to the mother of God. Disney’s own conception of the finger-clicking nanny is rather more straightforward.
Nothing about the film of Mary Poppins has been easy. The contract alone took sixteen years to negotiate: Travers finally accepts 5 per cent of gross profits, with a guarantee of $100,000. But this is to prove inadequate compensation: she soon begins to complain that Disney is ‘without subtlety and emasculates any character he touches, replacing truth with false sentimentality’.
Walt Disney’s attitude to Travers is one of damage limitation. He wants to keep her on board, but positioned as far as possible from the driver’s seat. This does not stop Travers making frequent lunges for the steering wheel, generally with a view to forcing the vehicle into reverse. She complains about everybody and everything, even stretching to the type of measuring tape Mary Poppins would use.
She objects to all the Americanisms that seem to be creeping in – ‘outing’, ‘freshen up’, ‘on schedule’, ‘Let’s go fly a kite’ – and considers the servants much too common and vulgar. Furthermore, the Banks home is much too grand, and any suggestion of a romance between Mary Poppins and the cockney chimneysweep Bert is utterly distasteful. Finally, she objects to Mrs Banks being portrayed as a suffragette, and considers the Christian name they impose on her – Cynthia – ‘unlucky, cold and sexless’, her own preference being Winifred.
Travers even believes her responsibilities extend to the casting.
The day after Julie Andrews gives birth, she phones her in hospital. ‘P.L. Travers here. Speak to me. I want to hear your voice.’ When they finally meet, her first remark to the actress is, ‘Well, you’ve got the nose for it.’
Mary Poppins is a worldwide success. Costing $5.2 million to make, it grosses $50 million. But the more the money rolls in, the more Travers’ attitude to the film and its creator sours. She tells Ladies’ Home Journal that she hated parts of the film, like the animated horse and pig, and disapproved of Mary Poppins kicking up her gown and showing her underwear, and disliked the billboards saying ‘Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins’ when they should have said ‘P.L. Travers’ Mary Poppins’.
She writes to a friend that Disney wishes her dead, and is furious with her for not obliging. ‘After all, until now, all his authors have been dead and out of copyright.’ But there is always the promise of a sequel, and yet more money. It is only when Disney dies in December 1966
that her objections become more concentrated and vocal. In 1967, she says that the film was ‘an emotional shock, which left me deeply disturbed’, and in 1968 that she ‘couldn’t bear’ it – ‘all that smiling’. In 1972, she declares in a lecture that ‘When I was doing the film with George Disney – that is his name, isn’t it – George? – he kept insisting on a love affair between Mary Poppins and Bert. I had a terrible time with him.’
Her invitation to the world premiere is, it later emerges, not achieved without a struggle. Failing to receive an invitation, she instructs her lawyer, agent and publisher to demand one on her behalf. When it is still not forthcoming, she sends a telegram to Disney himself, informing him she is in the States, and plans on attending the premiere: she is sure somebody will find a seat for her, and will he let her know the details? Her attendance is, she adds, essential ‘for the dignity of the books’.
Disney writes back saying that he has always been counting on her presence at the London premiere, but is now delighted to know she will also be able to come to the premiere in Los Angeles. And yes, they will happily hold a seat for her.
P.L. TRAVERS
WATCHES OVER
GEORGE IVANOVICH GURDJIEFF
The American Hospital of Paris, Neuilly-sur-Seine
October 30th 1949
Any meeting between the living and the dead is inevitably one-sided. Do they know something we don’t know?
On October 30th 1949, P.L. Travers sits all night in a private room on the first floor of the American Hospital of Paris, gazing lovingly at the corpse of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff.
Pamela first encountered Gurdjieff thirteen years ago, in 1936, at his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, near Fontainebleau. After spending much of her life pursuing poets and mystics, she found in Gurdjieff what she had long been looking for, and was particularly drawn to his unusual emphasis on finding truth through dance. Back in London, she was to teach these Gurdjieffian dances before progressing to teaching the teachers; she spread his beliefs for the rest of her life.
Gurdjieff was a guru with an opaque past. Half Armenian, half Greek, he cultivated obscurity about many things, not least his age.
He tried his hand at many trades, dealing, in different places and at different times, in a range of products including carpets, antiques, oil, fish, caviar, false eyelashes, sparrows and corsets.
But around 1912, he found his calling as a guru, his core belief being that ‘modern man lives in sleep, in sleep he is born and in sleep he dies’. Only by subscribing to Gurdjieff’s special training could modern man snap out of it, rise to a higher level of consciousness, and find God, or, as Gurdjieff preferred to call Him, ‘Our Almighty Omni-Loving Common Father Uni-Being Creator Endless’.
Among his many other beliefs was that the moon lives off the energy of dead human beings, known as Askokin, and controls all man’s actions. To guard against rebellion, the higher powers have implanted an organ at the base of man’s spine called the Kundabuffer, which stops him becoming too intelligent.
Only those who follow Gurdjieff’s path can break away from their fate as food for the moon, and thus attain immortality.
P.L. Travers’ most famous creation, the flying nanny Mary Poppins, might be seen as Gurdjieff in a long dress, shorn of his handlebar moustache and propelled by an umbrella: in some of the stories, Poppins guides her charges to the secrets of the universe, with the planets all indulging in a great cosmic dance. In the chapter ‘The New One’ in Mary Poppins Comes Back, Mr and Mrs Banks give birth to a new baby, Annabel, who, it emerges, is formed from the sea, sky, stars and sun. Mary Poppins is, to all intents and purposes, one of the enlightened, aware of worlds beyond.
As Pamela Travers sits beside the corpse of Gurdjieff, she believes that the real Gurdjieff is somewhere else, somewhere on another plain, reunited with the being he used to call the Most Most [sic] Holy Sun Absolute. Alive, he was the most earthy of men, enjoying huge three-course meals, washed down with Armagnac, while his followers made do with bowls of thin soup. Some non-believers found his personal habits unseemly. In his palatial flat at his institute in Paris, he often didn’t bother to visit the lavatory, preferring to defecate willy-nilly. ‘There were times when I would have to use a ladder to clean the walls,’ recalls one of the residents. He demanded unquestioning obedience from his wealthy followers, and enjoyed humiliating them; it was almost as though he relished the sight of grown men in tears. He was a stranger to celibacy, and loved to boast of all the babies he had fathered, peppering his pidgin English with the word ‘fuck’. But for his devotees this only added to his air of other-worldliness: surely a guru so un-gurulike could not possibly be a fraud?
The Second World War separated the guru from his protégée. Stuck in Paris, Gurdjieff refused to let the Nazi occupation hinder his lifestyle, feasting on delicacies from local suppliers attained with promises – bogus, as it turned out – of massive wealth owed to him from a Texan oilfield.
The moment the war was over, Pamela travelled to Paris on one of the first trains. She sat with Gurdjieff’s other disciples and imbibed his latest thoughts and aphorisms such as ‘Mathematic is useless. You cannot learn laws of world creation and world existence by mathematic,’ and ‘Useless study Freud or Jung. This only masturbation.’ He advised Pamela and his other followers to have an enema every day, then donned a tasselled magenta fez to play his accordion in a minor key. ‘This is temple music,’ he assured them. ‘Very ancient.’
Pamela saw Gurdjieff in Paris for one last time a little under a month before he died. She brought her adopted son, Camillus, who told Gurdjieff that he had no father. ‘I will be your father,’ said Gurdjieff. On October 25th 1949, Gurdjieff was taken to the American Hospital, carried into the ambulance in his bright pyjamas, smoking a Gauloise Bleue and exclaiming merrily, ‘Au revoir, tout le monde!’
He died four days later. The next day, Pamela travels from Victoria Station to Paris with a group of his followers. She pays homage to his corpse first in his bedroom, and for the remainder of the week in the chapel. On November 2nd she sets eyes on him for the very last time. While she is there, the undertakers come to collect him, but the coffin is too small, and a fresh one has to be ordered.
She attends his funeral at the Alexandre Nevski Cathedral. Afterwards, she files up and kisses the coffin. He is buried at Avon near Fontainebleau; with the other mourners, she throws a handful of earth on his grave.
Travers dies aged ninety-five, in 1996, leaving £2,044,078 in her will, including a generous bequest to the Gurdjieff Society. At her funeral in Chelsea, her lawyers and accountants sit on one side of the aisle, her fellow Gurdjieffians on the other. As her coffin is carried away from Christ Church, these two sides of the congregation join together in a rendition of ‘Lord of the Dance’.
GEORGE IVANOVICH GURDJIEFF
COOKS SAUERKRAUT FOR
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT
Taliesin, Spring Green, Wisconsin
June 1934
Gurdjieff is no easy traveller. He arrives at Grand Central Station with seven suitcases, furious at the train driver for refusing to delay the departure of the midnight express until he is in a mood to board.
Cursing loudly, he bangs his way through thirteen Pullman cars, disturbing the sleeping passengers. Throughout the night, he moans and groans at theatrical volume. At breakfast, he refuses everything on the menu, informing the steward, at exhaustive length, about his complicated digestive processes and special dietary needs. For the rest of the journey he infuriates his fellow passengers with his chain smoking, drinks furiously and produces all sorts of smelly food, including an over-ripe Camembert. From Chicago, he travels to the Wrights’ 1,000-acre architectural fellowship, Taliesin. ‘Now must change, we are going to special place,’ he informs his long-suffering assistant.
Gurdjieff and Frank Lloyd Wright have never met before. Both men are, by nature, leaders, not disciples: a clash of egos seems on the cards. Furthermore, there is a question of jealousy: Wright’s wife Olgivanna was, for many years, one of Gurdjieff’s sacred dancers. ‘I wish for immortality,’ she tells him on their first meeting, and Gurdjieff had agreed to organise it for her. Added to this, the Wrights’ six-year marriage – his third, her second – is going through a stormy patch. Wright has taken to blaming Olgivanna for all his worst moods. One moment he will take an outlandish view, bulldozing her into agreeing with him, then he will change his mind and chastise her for letting him think like that. A few days ago, he dreamed that Olgivanna was in bed with a black man. When he woke up, he placed the blame on her. ‘There must be something in you that led me to the conclusion of such a dream!’ he said. Before the arrival of Gurdjieff, Olgivanna has been thinking of leaving Wright. ‘I cannot bear this abuse any longer,’ she tells her daughter.
Gurdjieff is no shrinking violet. The moment he sets foot in Taliesin he takes charge of the cooking, producing many little bags of hot spices and peppers from his various pockets. He takes control of the entertainment, too. After dinner, he supervises the playing of twenty-five or thirty of his own compositions on the piano: he is the self-proclaimed pioneer of a revolutionary new school of ‘objective’ music, the first ever to produce exactly the same reaction in all its listeners.
Without fuss, Wright becomes a willing disciple. Just twenty-four hours in the company of Gurdjieff have served to convince him of his genius. He compares him to ‘some oriental buddha’ who has ‘come alive in our midst’; like Gandhi, though ‘more robust, aggressive and venturesome … Notwithstanding a superabundance of personal idiosyncrasy, George Gurdjieff seems to have the stuff in him of which genuine prophets have been made.’ Wright sees him as ageless, like God. He is, he says, ‘a man of perhaps eighty-five looking fifty-five’. In fact, though nobody knows for sure, most people reckon his year of birth to be 1866, which would in fact make him more like sixty-eight.
Gurdjieff loves to be in command, and is never happier than when a lot of people are doing exactly what he says. Before his stay is over, he has made everyone cook great quantities of sauerkraut from his own recipe, involving whole apples, including their skins, their stems and their cores. Even his most devoted disciples find it hard to swallow. On his departure from Taliesin, he leaves behind two fifty-gallon barrels of the stuff. In the first flush of discipleship, Frank Lloyd Wright will not hear a word against the sauerkraut. He insists the barrels must be transported to his Fellowship’s desert camp in Arizona, watching attentively as they are loaded onto a truck.
The sauerkraut truck gets as far as Iowa before the crew decides to call it a day. ‘We loosened the tailgate ropes,’ one of them confesses years later, ‘and dumped the barrels into a ditch.’
Even after such a brief meeting, Wright never loses his faith in Gurdjieff. Mysteriously, his rows with Olgivanna come to an end. ‘I am sure Gurdjieff told Olgivanna to be devious, because it all changed,’ notes a friend. Or was it something in the sauerkraut?
As time goes by, Taliesin comes increasingly to resemble Gurdjieff’s Institute of Harmonious Development, particularly in its strictly pyramidical approach to harmony. ‘Never have so many people spent so much time making a very few people comfortable,’ remarks one disaffected disciple. By the late 1940s, the Wrights have taken to sitting on a dais, eating different meals to their followers, who are given fried eggs.
The two men meet again from time to time. Whenever they clash, it is Wright who gives way: there is never any question as to which is the guru and which the disciple. When Gurdjieff returns to Taliesin in 1939, Wright suggests he sends some of his own pupils to Gurdjieff in Paris, ‘Then they can come back to me and I’ll finish them off.’
‘YOU finish! You are IDIOT!’ snaps Gurdjieff. ‘YOU finish? No. YOU begin. I finish!’
In November 1948, Wright visits Gurdjieff in the Wellington Hotel, New York, where he is staying with his varied entourage. Gurdjieff places Wright beneath an enneagram constructed of large leaves, and listens attentively as Wright talks him through his problems with his gall bladder. ‘I seven times doctor,’ announces Gurdjieff, prescribing him a meal of mutton, avocado and peppered Armagnac. Oddly enough, it seems to do the trick. Gurdjieff then brings out his harmonium. ‘The music I play you now came from monastery where Jesus Christ spent from eighteenth to thirtieth year,’ he explains.
One of Gurdjieff’s most striking pronouncements is, ‘I am Gurdjieff. I will NOT die!’ But die he does, just under a year later.
‘The greatest man in the world has recently died,’ Wright announces to the audience as he is being presented with a medal in New York. ‘His name was Gurdjieff.’
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT
DESIGNS A HOUSE FOR
MARILYN MONROE
The Plaza Hotel, Fifth Avenue, New York
Autumn 1957
One afternoon in the autumn of 1957, the most venerated architect in America, Frank Lloyd Wright, now aged ninety, is working in his suite in the Plaza Hotel, New York, when the doorbell rings. It is Marilyn Monroe, come to ask him to design a house.
Since their marriage in June 1956, Arthur Miller and his bride Marilyn Monroe have been based at Miller’s modest two-storey country house near Roxbury, Connecticut. Dating from 1783, it has 325 acres of land planted with fruit trees. A verandah at the back looks out across endless hills. A short walk from the house is a swimming pond, with clear spring water.
It is just right for Miller, who likes to live in the countryside, away from the flash world of celebrity, and is known to be careful with money. But Marilyn has other plans. She loves to spend, and has firm ideas about what is glamorous and what is not. Her self-esteem is bound up with her ability to splash out: she craves nothing but the best.
Like so many men, Frank Lloyd Wright is immediately taken with Marilyn.
He ushers her into a separate room, away from his wife and his staff, and listens intently as she describes the sort of home she has in mind. It is spectacularly lavish. Once she has left, Wright dips into his archives and digs out an abandoned plan for a building he drew up eight years earlier: a luxury manor house for a wealthy Texan couple.
The parsimonious Miller is taken aback when he hears of Marilyn’s grandiose vision for their new home. ‘That we could not really afford all of her ideas I did my best not to dramatize, but it was inevitable that some of my concern showed.’ When she tells him the name of the architect, Miller’s heart sinks. But he bites his lip, hoping good sense will prevail. ‘It had to seem like ingratitude to question whether we could ever begin to finance any Wright design, since much like her, he had little interest in costs. I could only give him his day and let her judge whether it was beyond our means or not.’
One grey autumn morning, the Millers drive Frank Lloyd Wright to Roxbury. Wright is wearing a wide-brimmed cowboy hat. He curls up in the back seat and sleeps throughout the two-hour journey.
The three of them enter the old house together. Wright looks around the living room, and, in what Miller describes as ‘a tone reminiscent of W.C. Fields’s nasal drawl’, says disparagingly, ‘Ah, yes, the old house. Don’t put a nickel in it.’ They sit down to a lunch of smoked salmon. Wright refuses any pepper. ‘Never eat pepper,’ he says. ‘The stuff will kill you before your time. Avoid it.’
After lunch, Marilyn remains in the house while the two men trudge half a mile up the steep hill to the crest on which the new house is to be built. Wright never stops to catch his breath: Miller is impressed. At the crest, Wright turns towards the magnificent view, unbuttons his fly and urinates, sighing, ‘Yes. Yes indeed.’ He glances about for a few seconds, then leads the way back down the hill. Before they go back into the house, Miller steals a quick private word with Wright. ‘I thought the time had come to tell him something he had never bothered to ask, that we expected to live fairly simply and were not looking for some elaborate house with which to impress the world.’
The message is plural, but it should have been singular. An elaborate house with which to impress the world is, in a nutshell, just what Marilyn is after, which is why she hired Frank Lloyd Wright in the first place. But Wright affects not to hear. ‘I saw that this news had not the slightest interest for him,’ says Miller.
A few days later, Miller visits the Plaza Hotel alone. Wright shows him a watercolour of his extravagant plan: a circular living room with a dropped centre surrounded by five-foot-thick ovoid columns made of sandstone with a domed ceiling sixty feet in diameter, rounded off with a seventy-foot-long swimming pool with fieldstone sides jutting out from the incline of the hill. Miller looks at it in horror, mentally totting up the cost. He notes with indignation that Wright has added a final flourish to his painting – a huge limousine in the curved driveway, complete with a uniformed chauffeur.
Miller asks the cost. Wright mentions $250,000, but Miller doesn’t believe him: it might cover the cost of the swimming pool, ‘if that’. He also notes that Wright’s ‘pleasure dream of Marilyn allowed him to include in this monster of a structure only a single bedroom and a small guestroom, but he did provide a large “conference room” complete with a long board-room-type table flanked by a dozen high-backed chairs, the highest at the head, where he imagined she would sit like the reigning queen of a small country, Denmark, say’.
The marriage goes from bad to worse. Miller and Monroe have nothing to say to each other. ‘He makes me think I’m stupid. I’m afraid to bring things up, because maybe I am stupid.’ Marilyn adds that ‘I’m in a fucking prison and my jailer is named Arthur Miller … Every morning he goes into that goddamn study of his, and I don’t see him for hours and hours. I mean, what the fuck is he doing in there? And there I am, just sitting around; I haven’t a goddamn thing to do.’
Miller fails to give the go-ahead to Wright, who dies in April 1959. Miller and Monroe divorce in 1961; Monroe dies in August 1962.
Thirty years later, the plans are dusted off and enlarged. Marilyn’s dream home finally emerges as a $35-million golf clubhouse in Hawaii, complete wtih banqueting rooms, a men’s locker room and a Japanese furo bath with a soaking pool, not to mention seated showers.
MARILYN MONROE
WEARS HER TIGHTEST, SEXIEST DRESS FOR
NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV
The Café de Paris, Hollywood
September 19th 1959
In her bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Marilyn Monroe is preparing to meet the Soviet Premier, Nikita Khrushchev. When she was first invited, his name hadn’t rung a bell, and she wasn’t keen to go. It was only when her studio told her that in Russia, America meant two things, Coca-Cola and Marilyn Monroe, that she changed her mind. ‘She loved hearing that,’ recalls Lena Pepitone, her maid. Marilyn tells Lena that the studio wants her to wear her tightest, sexiest dress. ‘I guess there’s not much sex in Russia,’ she concludes.
Her preparations are lengthy and elaborate, involving a masseuse, a hairdresser and a make-up artist. When they are halfway through, the president of Twentieth Century-Fox, Spyros Skouras, arrives, just to make sure that, for once in her life, Marilyn will be on time. As agreed, she squeezes into a low-cut, skin-tight black lace dress. Her chauffeur drops her at the studio before noon. The parking lot is empty. ‘We must be late! It must be over!’ gasps Marilyn. In fact, they are far too early.
Nikita Khrushchev’s American tour has had more than its share of ups and downs. He is a temperamental character, apt to flair up at the slightest provocation. Perhaps because of this, the American media cannot get enough of him. ‘It’s Khrush, Khrushy, Khrushchev!’ writes a columnist for the New York Daily News. ‘The fellow’s all over the dials these days … The pudgy Soviet dictator is smiling, laughing, scowling, shaking his forefinger or clenching his iron fist.’ Others have been less generous. A rival columnist in the New York Mirror describes him as ‘a rural dolt unwittingly proving a case against himself and his system’. The three main television networks show live coverage of his visit, repeating it every night in special thirty-minute bulletins. He is followed everywhere by 342 reporters and photographers, the largest travelling media group the world has ever known.
On the fifth day of his tour, Khrushchev arrives in Los Angeles, in time for lunch for four hundred people at Twentieth Century-Fox. There has been such demand for places that spouses have been banned unless they also happen to be stars. There are one or two couples – Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh – but they are few and far between.
Khrushchev enters a packed room. Everyone who is anyone is here: Edward G. Robinson, Judy Garland, Ginger Rogers, Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis, Dean Martin, Debbie Reynolds, Nat ‘King’ Cole, Frank Sinatra, Maurice Chevalier, Zsa Zsa Gabor. Mrs Khrushchev is seated between Bob Hope and Gary Cooper. Conversation proves stilted.
‘Why don’t you move out here? You’ll like the climate,’ suggests Cooper.
‘No,’ replies Mrs Khrushchev. ‘Moscow is all right for me.’
Khrushchev is on the top table, next to Skouras. Lunch has its awkward moments. When Khrushchev is told that his spur-of-the-moment request to visit Disneyland has been turned down, owing to security worries, he sends the American Ambassador to the UN a furious note. ‘I understand you have cancelled the trip to Disneyland. I am most displeased.’
The after-lunch speeches are awkward. Khrushchev heckles Skouras during his speech of welcome, and further heckles Henry Cabot Lodge as he speaks of America’s affection for Russian culture. ‘Have you seen They Fought for Their Homeland?’ he yells. ‘It is based on a novel by Mikhail Sholokhov.’
‘No.’
‘Well, buy it. You should see it.’
In his own speech, Khrushchev grows very bullish. ‘I have a question for you. Which country has the best ballet? Yours?! You do not even have a permanent opera and ballet theatre! Your theatres thrive on what is given to them by rich people! In our country, it is the state that gives the money! And the best ballet is in the Soviet Union! It is our pride!’
After going on like this for forty-five minutes, he suddenly seems to remember something. ‘Just now, I was told that I could not go to Disneyland. I asked, “Why not? What is it? Do you have rocket-launching pads there?” Just listen to what I was told: “We” – which means the American authorities – “cannot guarantee your security there.” What is it? Is there an epidemic of cholera there? Have gangsters taken hold of the place?’ He punches the air, and starts to look angry. ‘That’s the situation I find myself in. For me, such a situation is inconceivable. I cannot find words to explain this to my people!’
At last he sits down. The Hollywood audience applauds. As he is being shown to the sound stage to watch the movie Can-Can being filmed,
he recognises Marilyn Monroe and darts over to shake her hand. All wide-eyed, Marilyn delivers a line that Natalie Wood, a fluent Russian speaker, has coached her to say. For once, she gets it right first time: ‘We the workers of Twentieth Century-Fox rejoice that you have come to visit our studio and country.’
Khrushchev seems to appreciate her effort. ‘He looked at me the way a man looks on a woman,’ she recalls.
‘You’re a very lovely young lady,’ he says, squeezing her hand.
‘My husband, Arthur Miller, sends you his greeting. There should be more of this kind of thing. It would help both our countries understand each other.’
Afterwards, Marilyn Monroe enthuses, ‘This is about the biggest day in the history of the movie business.’ But when she gets back home, she has changed her tune. ‘He was fat and ugly and had warts on his face and he growled,’ she tells Lena. ‘Who would want to be a Communist with a President like that?’
But she is pretty sure that the Premier enjoyed their meeting. ‘I could tell Khrushchev liked me. He smiled more when he was introduced to me than for anybody else at the whole banquet. And everybody else was there. He squeezed my hand so long and so hard that I thought he would break it. I guess it was better than having to kiss him.’
NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV
LAMBASTS
GEORGE BROWN
Harcourt Room, Palace of Westminster, London
April 23rd 1956
A formal dinner is being held by the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party to honour Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union, and Marshal Nikolai Bulganin, his Premier, both of whom are in Britain at the invitation of the Conservative government.
Khrushchev is never the easiest of guests.
Mrs Anthony Eden thinks his idea of dinner-table repartee is to declare that Soviet missiles ‘could easily reach your island and quite a bit farther’.
Fortunately, dinner with the Queen earlier in the week passes without incident: she is not one to pick an argument. In fact, Khrushchev finds her ‘completely unpretentious, completely without haughtiness … the sort of young woman you’d be likely to meet walking along Gorky Street on a balmy Sunday afternoon’.
During the Labour Party dinner, the Shadow Minister of Supply, George Brown, puffs away on his pipe, dutifully listening to a welcoming speech by the Chairman of the Labour Party, then to a speech by Bulganin. Before long, a few of his more left-wing colleagues, keen to demonstrate their friendliness towards the Soviet Union, start thumping the table and chanting, ‘We – want – Khrush-chev,’ over and over again.
Never short of things to say, Khrushchev leaps up with a great beam on his face to deliver an impromptu speech. The way Brown remembers it, Khrushchev ‘just went on and on. He delivered a great denunciation of Germany, put in a lot of stuff about the beginning of the war, and followed this with a particularly offensive passage about Britain’s role in the war – how we had thrown the blood-thirsty Germans at the throat of the nice Russians, and so on.’
For Brown, enough is enough. He remembers muttering, ‘May God forgive you,’ but to his fellow guests the mutter emerges as more of a bark. Khrushchev stops speaking. He turns to Brown and asks him to repeat what he has just said. Brown does not reply, and those around him urge him to stay silent. But Khrushchev is spoiling for a fight, and announces to the room that Brown is clearly too afraid to repeat his remark.
Brown isn’t going to take this lying down. ‘I will gladly repeat my remark!’ he announces. ‘I said, “May God forgive you!” … What I meant was that it was you who signed the treaty with Ribbentrop, not us, and that if you hadn’t signed your treaty with Ribbentrop, we wouldn’t have been at war for a whole year before you even got started, that a lot of my comrades wouldn’t now be dead, and that a lot of brave Poles wouldn’t now be dead!’
At this, pandemonium breaks out, with Khrushchev launching a tirade against democratic socialists, against Britain, and, in Brown’s words, against ‘pretty well everybody’. Neither man is prepared to back down. Whenever Khrushchev pauses for breath, Brown puts his oar in, voicing his support for the Eastern European political prisoners whom the Labour Party has solemnly agreed, in a pre-dinner arrangement, not to mention. For good measure, he adds that Khrushchev’s son Sergei, who is there at the meal, dares not disagree with his father. Khrushchev replies with a lengthy speech, delivered, thinks the mild-mannered Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, ‘with vehemence, even brutality’, and ends by telling his hosts they should make an alliance with the Russians, because if not, they will be swatted ‘off the face of the earth like a dirty old black beetle’.
At this point, the Welsh firebrand Aneurin Bevan leaps to Brown’s aid, wagging his finger and repeating, ‘But this is ridiculous, Mr Khrushchev, but this is ridiculous.’ Gaitskell attempts a conciliatory speech, ending with a toast ‘to our next meeting’.
‘Not for me!’ shouts Brown.
In Brown’s memoir, he insists that ‘I don’t want to leave an impression that the events of this Khrushchev dinner were all either ludicrous, or bad-tempered, or bitchy … It was not just a boorish evening with the hosts being discourteous to the guests.’ He then rather ruins the impression of composure by adding a coda that might best be summarised as ‘He started it’: ‘Khrushchev asked for what he got by the way he spoke to us – and it is just as important that a guest should not be rude to a host as that the host should be courteous to a guest.’
The next day, the Speaker throws a lunch for the Soviet visitors at the House of Commons. Brown is once again invited. He decides to adopt a low profile, ‘so when the drinks were being handed round before lunch I stayed in a corner with one or two of my own cronies and didn’t go anywhere near where the Russians were being made much of by people who seemed to me a bit over-anxious to mollify their feelings’.
All goes fine until after they have finished eating. They are sipping coffee, ‘when who should approach me but Bulganin. He looked closely at me with those lovely blue eyes and said something in Russian which clearly meant something like, “So you are the naughty fellow from last night!” … and I said, “Oh yes.”’
Bulganin invites Brown to come and see Russia for himself. Brown says he would be delighted. At this point, Khrushchev strides over to the two of them, and asks the interpreter what is going on. Brown doesn’t want to get involved. ‘I wished him a pleasant journey and said that I looked forward to seeing him in Moscow when I was able to take up Bulganin’s invitation.’
Brown holds out his hand. Khrushchev refuses to shake it – ‘Nyet, nyet!’ – and moves away. Brown leaves for his constituency. The Conservative politician and diarist Harold Nicolson is told all about it by a Labour contact. ‘My friend told me that in a long experience of unsuccessful banquets, that will live in his memory as the most acid failure that he has ever witnessed.’
Khrushchev subsequently remarks that if he were British he would vote Conservative.
Brown’s invitation to Moscow fails to arrive.
GEORGE BROWN
BERATES
ELI WALLACH
Rediffusion TV Studios, Kingsway, London WC2
November 22nd 1963
Neither his temper nor his love of alcohol prevent George Brown from becoming deputy leader of the Labour Party.
This evening, he has been enjoying one or two drinks – a few at the Lebanese Embassy, followed by a few more at a mayoral reception at Shoreditch Town Hall – when he is called to the phone. It is Milton Shulman, from Rediffusion Television, with the news that President Kennedy has been shot. Will Brown come and appear on a special Kennedy Assassination edition of the current-affairs programme This Week? Realising he is already the worse for wear, Brown’s wife attempts to dissuade him.
‘George, you mustn’t.’
‘I must!’ he replies.
Minutes later, Brown is driven from Shoreditch to the TV studios in Kingsway. He is a little early, so he helps himself to a couple more drinks in the green room. Before long, he is joined by two of the other guests – the historian Professor Sir Denis Brogan and John Crosby of the New York Times. Over another glass or two, he begins to hold forth about his close friendship with the late President and the future of the United States of America.
A third guest now puts his head round the door. It is the actor Eli Wallach, still clearly upset by the news of the assassination. Wallach is introduced to Brown, who tells him how much he admires his work. Wallach accepts Brown’s compliments gracefully, but he is an unassuming man, so tries to steer the conversation away from himself.
Brown misinterprets his modesty. ‘Why are American actors so conceited?’ he asks loudly, adding, ‘Someone like you always carries a newspaper sticking out of his pocket with his name in the headlines!’ Wallach attempts to defend himself, saying that, on the contrary, he is always bumping into people who can’t put a name to his face.
‘Have you ever been in a play by Ted Willis?’ asks Brown, randomly.
‘No,’ replies Wallach. ‘Who’s Ted Willis?’
‘You’ve never heard of Ted Willis?!’ exclaims Brown, as though this is further proof of Wallach’s vanity.
Wallach moves away, and finds himself a place on a sofa, but Brown follows him, sits down nearby, and continues to make noisy remarks about the conceit of American actors. Suddenly, Wallach loses his temper, rises from the sofa, points at the deputy leader of the Labour Party, and yells, ‘I didn’t come here to be insulted! Is this bastard interviewing me on the programme? If so, I’m leaving now!’
Brown is in no mood to be conciliatory. He repeats his remark about the conceit of American actors. Wallach then takes off his jacket and says, ‘Come outside! Come outside and I’ll knock you off your can!’
Brown tells Wallach to shut up and sit down. Wallach rushes forward and is about to strike when Milton Shulman leaps between the two men, pushing Wallach back on the sofa. At this point, in comes Carl Foreman, the director of The Guns of Navarone, who imagines the dispute is between Wallach and Shulman, and attempts to intervene. Meanwhile, Shulman is trying to placate Wallach. ‘He’s not going to interview you! He’s one of the guests!’
‘I don’t care who he is,’ says Wallach. ‘I’ll still knock the shit out of him!’ By now, Brown has been reduced to silence. The time has come to go downstairs to the studio, always a sobering moment. Brown goes over to Wallach. ‘Brother, brother,’ he says, ‘I don’t think we should go into the studio this way … Let’s shake hands.’ They shake hands awkwardly. Wallach goes through the door first. As he advances along the corridor, Brown shouts after him, ‘And now you’ll know who Ted Willis is!’
The live broadcast begins. The urbane interviewer, Kenneth Harris, turns first to Brown. ‘I know you met President Kennedy once or twice,’ he says. ‘Did you get to know him as a man?’
A look of intense irritation flashes across Brown’s face. ‘Now, you’re talking about a man who was a very great friend of mine!’ he barks. Tears welling in his eyes, he embarks on a slurred and rambling monologue, ‘a compound’, in his biographer’s view, ‘of maudlin sentimentality, name-dropping and aggression’ about ‘Jack’ (‘who I was very near to’), ‘Jackie’ and their children. Brown’s colleague Richard Crossman is watching the programme at home. ‘At the first moment I saw that he was pissed and he was pretty awful. He jumped up and down and claimed a very intimate relationship with Kennedy.’
In fact, the records show that Brown’s acquaintance with Kennedy extended to three brief official meetings: on July 9th 1962, from 5.15 p.m. to 6.08 p.m.; on June 14th 1963, from 11 a.m. to 11.55 a.m.; and between 5.30 p.m. and 5.40 p.m. on October 24th 1963. Nevertheless, in his autobiography he feels able to boast: ‘Jack Kennedy was one of the two Presidents of the United States whom it has been my privilege to know well. I came to love and admire him …’ Who knows what the President thought of Brown? His initial briefing note on him from the American Embassy in London advises that ‘certain character defects such as irascibility, impulsiveness and heavy drinking have left his future position in the Party in doubt’.
Brown’s television appearance, and a subsequent, widely disseminated, report in the New York Times of his set-to with Eli Wallach, prompt many complaints from the general public, to all of which Brown dispatches the same printed reply: ‘Thank you very much for your letter, and may I say how sorry I am that you felt that you had to write in those terms.’
Two months after the assassination, on January 23rd 1964, Brown finally gets down to writing a letter of condolence to Jackie Kennedy. ‘You may remember vaguely that we caught sight of each other when your husband was showing my daughter around the garden as late as last October,’ he begins, ‘and we exchanged greetings across the garden when you were in the room upstairs.’
ELI WALLACH
IS WELCOMED BY
FRANK SINATRA
Caesars Palace, Las Vegas
February 1974
The most belligerent people are sometimes unexpectedly warm-hearted. Even Frank Sinatra can disappoint onlookers who have been spoiling for a fight. Or is this just another example of his cruelty?
Ten years after his unfortunate contretemps with George Brown, Eli Wallach flies into Las Vegas. As he comes down the steps of the plane, he sees a huge billboard featuring two blue eyes. The caption states simply, ‘HE’S HERE’.
Ol’ Blue Eyes is back in Las Vegas, even though he promised four years ago never to return following a very public fight with the casino manager of Caesars Palace.
At that time, Sinatra had been under surveillance by the IRS. Their agents had noticed that he was cashing in his winnings at blackjack without paying for the chips – an easy way to pocket money tax-free. Leaned on by the IRS, the casino manager, Sanford Waterman, had confronted Sinatra, telling him, ‘You don’t get chips until I see your cash.’
Sinatra had called Waterman a kike; in turn, Waterman had called Sinatra a bitch guinea. Things had gone from bad to worse: Sinatra grabbed Waterman by the throat; Waterman pulled out a pistol and placed it between Sinatra’s eyeballs; Sinatra laughed, called Waterman a crazy hebe and exited, declaring that he would never work at Caesars again. In the end, Waterman had been arrested for pulling a gun.
The next day, Waterman told the District Attorney he had heard Sinatra say, ‘The mob will take care of you.’ This caused the Sheriff to say, ‘I’m tired of Sinatra intimidating waiters, waitresses, and starting fires and throwing pies. He gets away with too much. He’s through picking on little people in this town. Why the owners of the hotels put up with this is what I plan to find out.’
The District Attorney’s report indicated Waterman still had the finger-marks on his throat where Sinatra had grabbed him. ‘There seems to be reasonable grounds for making the assumption that Sinatra was the aggressor all the way.’ The charges against Waterman were dropped: he was judged to have acted in self-defence. It was at this point that Sinatra, denying he ever laid a finger on Waterman, vowed never to set foot in Nevada again. ‘I’ve suffered enough indignities,’ he said.
But four years later, things have changed. The casino manager has been arrested for racketeering, the District Attorney has been voted out, and the new management of Caesars Palace has tempted Sinatra back with the promise of $400,000 a week, plus full-time bodyguards ‘to avoid any unpleasant incidents’.
The new Sheriff is delighted to welcome Sinatra back to Las Vegas. To celebrate his return, Caesars Palace is proud to present each member of the audience with a medallion inscribed, ‘Hail Sinatra. The Noblest Roman Has Returned’.
But what of Eli Wallach? Ever since the publication of The Godfather in 1969, and its film adaptation in 1972, Wallach and Sinatra have been linked in the public mind as bitter rivals. The scene in which a studio boss wakes up to find the severed head of his favourite racehorse lying next to him in his bed has been the inspiration of an urban myth. In the film, it is the mafia’s revenge for the studio boss’s refusal to award a starring role to one of their own singers, Johnny Fontane. The horse’s head helps him change his mind: he immediately drops the actor who has already been cast and replaces him with Fontane. Over time, word has got around that Johnny Fontane is really Frank Sinatra, and the dropped actor is really Eli Wallach. After all, twenty years ago, hadn’t Harry Cohn offered Wallach a leading role in From Here to Eternity – and hadn’t it unaccountably gone to the inexperienced Italian Frank Sinatra? Small wonder, then, that when Eli Wallach walks into the Frank Sinatra show at Caesars Palace, a frisson runs around the audience.
Halfway through his act, Sinatra stops singing, looks over to his wife in the audience and says, ‘Barbara, did Eli get here?’
‘He’s sitting right beside me!’ she replies.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ says Sinatra, ‘I’d like to introduce a friend. Our paths have often crossed, and he played a big part in my career …’
The audience stirs. They all know what he is talking about. They sense a drama about to unfurl, perhaps even a fight. Sinatra pauses, looks over towards Wallach and says, ‘… Ah, the hell with that! It’s an old story! I don’t feel like telling it!’
Perhaps the audience is disappointed by this anti-climax, but Eli Wallach finds it hilarious. ‘I fell out of my seat laughing. Every time Frank saw me after that, he’d say, “Hello, you crazy actor.” And every time he came to New York, he’d send a limo for Anne and me. We’d sit in a box at the theater. He’d look up, smile at us, and afterward we’d have a late supper at 21.’
On the other hand, it may be worth adding that the author of The Godfather, Mario Puzo, does not get off so lightly. By chance, one night in 1970, after the book has become a bestseller, but before the film has been shot, he enters Chasen’s restaurant in Beverly Hills and sees Sinatra dining there. ‘I’m going to ask Frank for his autograph,’ he tells his companion, the film’s producer Al Ruddy.
‘Forget it, Mario. He’s suing to stop the movie,’ replies Ruddy. But Puzo persists, and goes up to Sinatra’s table. Sinatra loses his temper. ‘I ought to break your legs,’ he grunts. ‘Did the FBI help you with your book?’
‘Frank is freaking out, screaming at Mario,’ Ruddy recalls thirty years later. As Puzo remembers it, Sinatra calls him ‘a pimp’, and threatens to ‘beat the hell out of me’.
‘I know what Frank was up to,’ explains Al Martino, who eventually plays the part of Johnny Fontane.
‘You know how much Johnny Fontane was in the book? He was trying to minimise the role.’
FRANK SINATRA
DEALS WITH
DOMINICK DUNNE
The Daisy, Rodeo Drive, Los Angeles
September 1966
On a normal day, Frank Sinatra is not slow to take umbrage, nor to accompany it with the promise of revenge, a promise he enjoys keeping. ‘Make yourself comfortable, Frank! Hit somebody!’ the fearless comedian Don Rickles once greeted Sinatra as he strode into his cabaret lounge.
The TV producer Dominick Dunne has never been able to fathom why Sinatra has taken against him. ‘I wish I knew, but he took a major dislike to my wife and me.’ One moment, he was part of Sinatra’s wider circle, the next the object of abuse. ‘You’re a no-talent hack,’ Sinatra says to Dunne as he passes him at a party; whenever Sinatra sees Dunne’s wife Lenny, he tells her she married a loser. Why this change of heart? Dunne can only imagine that Sinatra bears him some sort of grudge for a TV show on which they worked together some years ago.
Sinatra’s ire appears to increase with their every encounter. Last year, Dunne was having dinner at the Bistro in Los Angeles when Sinatra, clearly drunk, abused him loudly from a neighbouring table. Sinatra then turned his venom on Lenny, before continuing around the table, going for Lauren Bacall, Maureen O’Sullivan and Swifty Lazar, in rapid succession. Finally, he grabbed the tablecloth and pulled it from beneath all their plates and glasses, threw a plate of food over Lazar, and stomped out.
This year, Sinatra has been involved in any number of fights. In June, for instance, a businessman called Frank Weissman asked him and his party in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel if they wouldn’t mind piping down: Weissman ended the night in a coma at the emergency hospital.
Tonight, Dominick Dunne is out for dinner at the Daisy with his wife and a small group of friends after attending a wedding. He often eats here, and knows the staff. By chance, Frank Sinatra is sitting at the next table, along with his two daughters, Nancy and Tina, and his new wife, Mia Farrow, who at twenty-one years old is younger than each of them. Over the past months, Sinatra has come in for a good deal of ribbing about his child bride, which perhaps explains his bad mood. ‘Frank soaks his dentures and Mia brushes her braces …’ one of his most vocal tormentors, the comedian Jackie Mason, joked in his stage act a few months ago, ‘then she takes off her roller skates and puts them next to his cane … he peels off his toupee and she braids her hair …’
It probably wasn’t a wise move. The next day, Mason received an anonymous call telling him that if he valued his life, he should consider changing his material. When he failed to follow this advice, three shots were fired through the glass door of his Las Vegas hotel room. But the police saw no reason to pursue an investigation. ‘I knew that Sinatra owned Las Vegas when the detectives there made me the prime suspect and asked that I take a lie detector test,’ said Mason, adding, ‘I have no idea who it was who tried to shoot me. After the shots were fired, all I heard was someone singing, “Doobie, doobie, doo”.’ Over the following year, Mason will have his nose and cheekbones broken, again by a complete stranger.
But, in the meantime, we must return to Dunne and his party as they sit there enjoying their dinner. All of a sudden, Dunne feels a tap on his shoulder. He looks up. The maître d’ of the Daisy is looking down at him, ‘very nice guy called George, Italian, we all knew him, gave him Christmas presents, wonderful man’.
George says, ‘Oh, Mr Dunne, I’m so sorry about this, but Mr Sinatra made me do it.’ So saying, he leans back, clenches his fist, and hits Dunne smack in the face. ‘It wasn’t a hit to knock me out, but it was embarrassing,’ recalls Dunne. The crowded restaurant falls silent.
Dunne looks across at Sinatra, who is looking back at him with a smile on his face. Dunne and his wife leave the restaurant. As they wait for their car to be brought around by the concierge, George runs out. He is sobbing, and afraid.
‘I’m sorry, so sorry. Mr Sinatra made me do it,’ he says. He tells the Dunnes that Sinatra tipped him $50. ‘It was the social talk of the town,’ Dunne recalls. ‘I was the amusement for Sinatra. My humiliation was his fun.’
Sinatra’s reputation for violence follows him not only to his own grave, but to the graves of others. On two occasions, he sets his men onto the same newspaper columnist, Lee Mortimer, because Mortimer has written unflattering remarks about him. After Mortimer’s death, Sinatra is travelling with his friend Brad Dexter when he insists they drive to his grave. As he stands on the grave, Sinatra unzips his trousers and urinates on it. When Dexter asks him why, he replies, ‘This cocksucker made my life miserable. He talked against me, wrote articles, caused me a lot of grief. I got back at him.’
‘Frank always had to settle the score,’ explains Dexter.
But Jackie Mason refuses to be silenced. ‘I love Frank Sinatra. You love Frank Sinatra. We all love Frank Sinatra,’ he says in his stage act for many years to come. ‘And why do we love Frank Sinatra? Because he’d kill us if we didn’t.’
Like Mason, Dominick Dunne outlives Sinatra, enjoying a highly successful second career as a newspaper columnist and author with a particular interest in seeing that the guilty are brought to book. He never forgives Sinatra for his behaviour that night. ‘It showed the kind of power Sinatra had, to make a decent man do an indecent act. And you know, I am aware totally that his voice is one of the great voices of his era, if not the greatest. And to this day, I can’t stand the sound of it.’
DOMINICK DUNNE
URINATES WITH
PHIL SPECTOR
The Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center, Los Angeles
April 2007
Forty-one years later, Vanity Fair magazine’s star columnist Dominick Dunne is covering the trial of Phil Spector, who is charged with the murder of the actress Lana Clarkson.
Short of acting jobs, Clarkson had been working as a hostess in the VIP room of the House of Blues, a nightclub on Sunset Boulevard. She hadn’t recognised Spector when he entered, even addressing him as ‘Miss’, perhaps misled by his size – he is only five feet five inches – and by his voluminous candy-floss wig, only marginally smaller. ‘Mister,’ he had corrected her.
This man, a fellow waitress had told her, was the famous 1960s record producer, ‘the tycoon of teen’, as Tom Wolfe once called him. He was known, she added, for his generous tips.
After a drink (he left $450 for a $13.50 bar bill), Spector persuaded the reluctant Lana back to his Castle. ‘Just for one drink,’ she insisted. Travelling back in his chauffeur-driven Mercedes, they watched a James Cagney movie called Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye.
They had only been in the Castle a short time before Spector’s chauffeur, waiting outside in the car, heard a gunshot. After some delay, Spector came out and said, ‘I think I killed somebody.’ The chauffeur called the police, who discovered Clarkson’s corpse on a white French bergère chair.
‘The gun went off accidentally! She works at the House of Blues! It was a mistake! I don’t understand what the fuck is wrong with you people! I don’t know how it happened. It scared the shit out of me!’ Spector screamed, as a policeman held him down. Later, he claimed Clarkson had picked up one of his guns and shot herself in the face.
Ever since the man who murdered his daughter Dominique was given what he describes as ‘a slap on the wrist’, Dunne has had an abiding interest in reporting the murder trials of the rich and famous, among them O.J. Simpson, Claus von Bulow and the Menendez brothers. He is fuelled by outrage at the idea that money may buy an acquittal.
He is already convinced of Spector’s guilt,
and listens impatiently as Spector’s defence attorney complains, ‘The police had murder on their minds!’ He is unimpressed. ‘I should hope to God that the police had murder on their minds, with a woman less than an hour dead, shot in the face, bleeding from the mouth, her teeth all over the floor, life over, in a French bergère chair in the foyer of a castle, and an arrogant man in a house full of guns who had to be Tasered by police. I think that’s cause for having murder on your mind.’
The trial has been going for just a few days when the court takes a break, and Dunne heads for the men’s room. It is empty but for a single man standing at the central urinal, which is lower than the other two, as though designed for little boys.
Spector is wearing the Edwardian frock-coat in which he arrived at the court this morning. He has opened it wide to urinate, so that it billows out and blocks the remaining two urinals, one on either side. Dunne doesn’t quite know what to do, but decides to remain where he is. ‘I didn’t have the nerve to ask him to move his coat and free up a urinal, and I also didn’t really want to pee next to him, considering that he was on trial for murder just down the hall, and I was there to write about him. So I waited my turn in silence in the back by the sinks.’
After he has finished peeing, Spector, who is today sporting a blond pageboy toupee, goes over to the basins, carefully rolls up his sleeves and elaborately soaps and scrubs his hands in hot water. Dunne is reminded of the way germophobes wash obsessively after shaking hands.
As he dries his hands with a paper towel, Spector turns and notices Dunne. ‘Hi, Dominick,’ he says.
‘Hi, Phil,’ says Dunne. The last time the two men met was after Spector asked their mutual friend Ahmet Ertegun to arrange a get-together so he could pick Dunne’s brains about the O.J. Simpson murder trial, by which, like so many people, he was riveted.
Dunne is not sure what to say next, particularly as Spector must know that he is not on his side: he is, in his own words, ‘a longtime victims’ advocate’. Yet Dunne still feels there is something likeable about Spector. Finally, it occurs to him what to say.
‘I went to Ahmet’s memorial service in New York at Lincoln Center last week.’
‘You went? Oh my God, this is the first I’ve heard about it from someone who went. I owe everything to Ahmet. He started me in the business!’
Spector wants to know everything about it. Dunne runs through the famous names present: Eric Clapton, Bette Midler, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Oscar de la Renta, Henry Kissinger. ‘Mick Jagger mentioned you in his eulogy.’
‘Mick mentioned me?’
‘Nothing about this. It was about you and Ahmet and your friendship.’
The two men return to the courtroom, Dunne to the public gallery, Spector to the accused’s chair. From their different vantage points, they watch as a woman testifies about how Spector held her at gunpoint; she is the first of four such witnesses.
The two men never speak again, but a few days later, Dunne is handed a note thanking him for the programme from Ertegun’s memorial service. ‘Dear Dominick … I did so enjoy reading the words about our dear friend; and the pictures were a treasure. Thanks for thinking of me. Love, Phillip.’
The trial comes to an end five months later, with the jury unable to agree on a verdict.
At the retrial, Spector is found guilty and sentenced to a minimum of nineteen years in prison. He is sixty-nine years old. Three months later, Dominick Dunne dies of cancer, at home in Manhattan, at the age of eighty-three.
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Craig Brown
101 chance meetings, juxtaposing the famous and the infamous, the artistic and the philistine, the pompous and the comical, the snobbish and the vulgar, each 1,001 words long, and with a time span stretching from the 19th century to the 21st.Life is made up of individuals meeting one another. They speak, or don’t speak. They get on, or don’t get on. They make agreements, which they either hold to or ignore. They laugh, they cry, they are excited, they are indifferent, they share secrets, they say ‘How do you do?’ Often it is the most fleeting of meetings that, in the fullness of time, turn out to be the most noteworthy.‘One on One’ examines the curious nature of different types of meeting, from the oddity of meetings with the Royal Family (who start giggling during a recital by TS Eliot) to those often perilous meetings between old and young (Gladstone terrifying the teenage Bertrand Russell) and between young and old (the 23 year old Sarah Miles having her leg squeezed by the nonagenarian Bertrand Russell), and our contemporary random encounters on television (George Galloway meeting Michael Barrymore on Celebrity Big Brother).Ingenious in its construction, witty in its narration, panoramic in its breadth, ‘One on One’ is a wholly original book.
Craig Brown
One on One
Dedication
For Frances
Epigraph
Tossed upon ocean waters,
Two wooden logs meet;
Soon a wave will part them,
And never again will they touch.
Just so are we; our meetings
Are momentary, my child.
Another force directs us,
So blame no fault of man.
Ga Di Madgulkar
We have as many personalities
as there are people who know us.
William James
The earth keeps turning round and gets nowhere.
The moment is the only thing that counts.
Jean Cocteau
When Arthur Miller shook my hand I could only think
that this was the hand that had once cupped
the breasts of Marilyn Monroe.
Barry Humphries
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
ONE ON ONE
ADOLF HITLER
JOHN SCOTT-ELLIS
RUDYARD KIPLING
MARK TWAIN
HELEN KELLER
MARTHA GRAHAM
MADONNA
MICHAEL JACKSON
NANCY REAGAN
ANDY WARHOL
JACKIE KENNEDY
HRH QUEEN ELIZABETH II
THE DUKE OF WINDSOR
ELIZABETH TAYLOR
JAMES DEAN
ALEC GUINNESS
EVELYN WAUGH
IGOR STRAVINSKY
WALT DISNEY
P.L. TRAVERS
GEORGE IVANOVICH GURDJIEFF
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT
MARILYN MONROE
NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV
GEORGE BROWN
ELI WALLACH
FRANK SINATRA
DOMINICK DUNNE
PHIL SPECTOR
LEONARD COHEN
JANIS JOPLIN
PATTI SMITH
ALLEN GINSBERG
FRANCIS BACON
HRH PRINCESS MARGARET
KENNETH TYNAN
TRUMAN CAPOTE
PEGGY LEE
PRESIDENT RICHARD M. NIXON
ELVIS PRESLEY
PAUL McCARTNEY
NOËL COWARD
PRINCE FELIX YOUSSOUPOFF
GRIGORI RASPUTIN
TSAR NICHOLAS II
HARRY HOUDINI
PRESIDENT THEODORE ROOSEVELT
H.G. WELLS
JOSEF STALIN
MAXIM GORKY
LEO TOLSTOY
PYOTR IL’ICH TCHAIKOVSKY
SERGEI RACHMANINOFF
HARPO MARX
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
BERTRAND RUSSELL
SARAH MILES
TERENCE STAMP
EDWARD HEATH
WALTER SICKERT
WINSTON CHURCHILL
LAURENCE OLIVIER
J.D. SALINGER
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
FORD MADOX FORD
OSCAR WILDE
MARCEL PROUST
JAMES JOYCE
HAROLD NICOLSON
CECIL BEATON
MICK JAGGER
TOM DRIBERG
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
GEORGE GALLOWAY
MICHAEL BARRYMORE
DIANA, PRINCESS OF WALES
PRINCESS GRACE
ALFRED HITCHCOCK
RAYMOND CHANDLER
HOWARD HAWKS
HOWARD HUGHES
CUBBY BROCCOLI
GEORGE LAZENBY
SIMON DEE
MICHAEL RAMSEY
GEOFFREY FISHER
ROALD DAHL
KINGSLEY AMIS
LORD SNOWDON
BARRY HUMPHRIES
SALVADOR DALÍ
SIGMUND FREUD
GUSTAV MAHLER
AUGUSTE RODIN
ISADORA DUNCAN
JEAN COCTEAU
CHARLIE CHAPLIN
GROUCHO MARX
T.S. ELIOT
QUEEN ELIZABETH THE QUEEN MOTHER
THE DUCHESS OF WINDSOR
Author’s Note
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Other Books by Craig Brown
Copyright
About the Publisher
ADOLF HITLER
IS KNOCKED DOWN BY
JOHN SCOTT-ELLIS
Briennerstrasse, Munich
August 22nd 1931
Earlier this year, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei – the second largest political party in Germany – moved into new offices at Briennerstrasse 45, near Königsplatz. As he approaches his forty-third birthday, its leader, Adolf Hitler, is enjoying success as a best-selling author: Mein Kampf has already sold 50,000 copies. He now has all the trappings of wealth and power: chauffeur, aides, bodyguards, a nine-room apartment at no. 16 Prinzregentenplatz.
His stature grows with each passing day. When strangers spot him in the street or in a café, they often accost him for an autograph.
His new-found sense of self-confidence has made him less sheepish around women. A pretty nineteen-year-old shop assistant named Eva Braun has caught his eye; she works in the shop owned by his personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann. He has even begun dating her. Walking along Ludwigstrasse on this bright, sunny day in Munich, what can possibly go wrong?
A few hundred yards away, young John Scott-Ellis is taking his new car for a spin. He failed to distinguish himself as a pupil at Eton College. ‘I had advantages in that I wasn’t stupid and was quite good at most games,’ he remembers, ‘yet I squandered all this because of an ingrained laziness or lack of will … I was a mess … I cheated and felt no remorse and when threatened with the sack – “You have come to the end of your tether,” is what Dr Alington once greeted me with – I always managed to put on a tearful act and wriggle out.’
He has emerged with few achievements to his name. A letter from his father to his mother, written in John’s second year at Eton, reads:
Dear Margot,
I enclose John’s reports. As you will see they are uniformly deplorable from beginning to end … I’m afraid he seems to have all his father’s failings and none of his very few virtues.
Of course we may have overrated him and he is really only a rather stupid and untidy boy but it may be he is upset by the beginning of the age of puberty. But I must say the lack of ambition and general wooliness of character is profoundly disappointing.
Try and shake the little brute up.
Yours
T.
After leaving Eton last year, John went to stay on one of his family’s farms in Kenya (they own many farms there, as well as a hundred acres of central London between Oxford Street and the Marylebone Road, 8,000-odd acres in Ayrshire, the island of Shona and a fair bit of North America too).
It was then decided that he should spend some time in Germany in order to learn a language. In 1931, aged eighteen, he has come to Munich to stay with a family called Pappenheim. He has been in the city for barely a week before he decides to buy himself a small car. He plumps for a red Fiat, which his friends (‘very rudely’) refer to as ‘the Commercial Traveller’. On his first day behind the wheel, he invites Haupt. Pappenheim, a genial sixty-year-old, to join him. Thus, he hopes to find his way around Munich, and to avoid any traffic misdemeanours.
They set off. John drives safely up the Luitpoldstrasse, past the Siegestor. The Fiat is handling well. The test run is a breeze. On this bright, sunny day in Munich, what can possibly go wrong?
While Adolf Hitler is striding along the pavement, John is driving his Fiat up Ludwigstrasse. He takes a right turn into Briennerstrasse. Crossing the road, Hitler fails to look left. There is a sudden crunch.
‘Although I was going very slowly, a man walked off the pavement, more or less straight into my car,’ recalls John. Many drivers, before and since, have used those very same words, often to magistrates.
The pedestrian – in his early forties, with a small square moustache – is down on one knee. John is alarmed, but the man heaves himself to his feet. ‘He was soon up and I knew that he wasn’t hurt. I opened the window and naturally, as I hadn’t a word of German, let Haupt Pappenheim do the talking. I was more anxious about whether a policeman, who was directing the traffic, had seen the incident.’
All is well. The policeman has not noticed, or if he has, he is unconcerned. The man with the little moustache brushes himself down, and shakes hands with John and Haupt. Pappenheim, who both wish him well.
‘I don’t suppose you know who that was?’ says Haupt. Pappenheim as they drive away.
‘Of course I don’t, who is he?’
‘Well, he is a politician with a party and he talks a lot. His name is Adolf Hitler.’
Three years later, in 1934, Adolf Hitler is sitting in a box at the small rococo Residenztheater
waiting for the opera to begin. By now he is the German Chancellor, the talk of the world. In the adjoining box is the twenty-one-year-old John Scott-Ellis, celebrating the first night of his honeymoon by taking his young German bride to the opera. John looks to his left. Isn’t that the very same fellow he knocked down three years ago?
The young man leans over. He seems to want to say something. Hitler’s bodyguards are taken aback. Who is he, and what the hell does he want?
John Scott-Ellis introduces himself. He seizes the moment and asks the Führer if he remembers being knocked over in the street three years ago. To his surprise, Hitler remembers it well. ‘He was quite charming to me for a few moments.’ Then the orchestra strikes up, and the overture begins. The two men never meet again.
Over the years,
John often tells this tale of his unexpected brush with Adolf Hitler. ‘For a few seconds, perhaps, I held the history of Europe in my rather clumsy hands. He was only shaken up, but had I killed him, it would have changed the history of the world,’ he concludes of his own peculiar one on one.
JOHN SCOTT-ELLIS
TALKS OF THE BOCHE WITH
RUDYARD KIPLING
Chirk Castle, Wrexham, North Wales
Summer 1923
In the summer of 1923, John Scott-Ellis is still only ten years old, yet he has already lunched with G.K. Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw.
John lives in a vast thirteenth-century castle. His father, the eighth Baron Howard de Walden, dabbles in the arts, writing operas, poetry and plays. At one time he owned the Haymarket Theatre, putting on a good many highbrow productions, including works by Henrik Ibsen. When these failed to make money, he was persuaded to stage a comedy called Bunty Pulls the Strings; it ran for three years.
The eighth Baron’s castle acts as a tremendous draw to artists and writers. Young John is now used to passing the time of day with Hilaire Belloc, Augustus John, George Moore or Max Beerbohm. Some of these grandees are more friendly than others. Belloc teaches him all sorts of tricks with paper, such as how to make a bird which flaps its wings when you pull its tail. By cutting out two triangles and placing them on a sheet of paper in a particular way, he also shows him an easy way to prove Pythagoras’ Theorem. ‘While I remember how to do this, I am sad to have forgotten his absolute proof of the Trinity, which he demonstrated in a somewhat similar fashion,’ John recalls in old age. He remembers, too, the Irish novelist George Moore (‘always rather preoccupied’) tackling his father with a problem he was finding impossible to solve.
‘I keep on writing down “she was in the habit of wearing a habit”, and it isn’t right and I can’t think how to alter it.’
‘What about, “she was used to wearing a habit”?’ suggested Lord Howard de Walden. Moore went away happy.
In the summer of 1923, Rudyard Kipling comes to stay at Chirk. The great author and the young boy go for a walk around the garden together. It was in such a setting that Hugh Walpole observed of the five-foot-three-inch Kipling, ‘When he walks about the garden, his eyebrows are all that are really visible of him.’
At the age of fifty-seven, Kipling encourages children to call him Uncle Ruddy. He finds it hard to make friends with adults, but speaks to children as equals, which is how he writes for them too. ‘I would sooner make a fair book of stories for children than a new religion or a completely revised framework for our social and political life,’ he explains.
Among children, he becomes a child. On a trip to South Africa, he lay himself flat on the deck to teach a little boy how to play with soldiers. But he can be short-tempered with those who lack his sense of adventure. He once handed his revolver to a youngster and urged him to fire it. Seeing him hesitate, Kipling snapped, ‘At your age I would have given anything to shoot a revolver!’
But Kipling and John operate on the same wavelength. Kipling has long been fascinated by the paranormal, so he is perhaps attracted by the boy’s unusual powers: John is able to throw a pack of cards face down on the floor and then pick out the four aces. ‘I claim absolutely no strange powers but probably I had, or even have, this ESP slightly higher than others,’ he recollects. One afternoon, a visiting Admiral with an interest in psychic matters asks him to throw two dice, and wish for high. ‘For about twenty throws or more I never threw less than four and frequently double sixes.’ The Admiral then tells him to wish for low. ‘I started with double ones and continued in much the same vein.’
On their walk around the garden, John chats with Rudyard Kipling about Germans. Kipling says he hates them. Their talk turns to aeroplanes. Kipling says they are always trying to knock down his chimneys.
John asks him if he would ever travel in an airship.
‘What!’ exclaims Kipling. ‘Locked in a silver coffin with lots of Boche?!’
Such a quote may seem almost too good to be true, but Kipling has a curious capacity to become his own caricature. Dining with Somerset Maugham at the Villa Mauresque, the conversation turned to a mutual friend. When Kipling declared, ‘He’s a white man,’ Maugham thought to himself, ‘This is characteristic. How I wish, in order to fulfil my preconceptions of him, he would say he was a pukka sahib.’
‘He’s a pukka sahib all right,’ continued Kipling.
After their walk, Kipling accepts John’s invitation to take a look at John’s collection of his complete works in their smart red-leather pocket edition. Kipling offers to sign them for him, but as if by magic, Kipling’s formidable wife Carrie suddenly swoops into the room and tells him not to. This, too, is characteristic. Carrie spends her time protecting her husband from his readers, and is often derided for it. To Lady Colefax she is ‘a super-bossy second-rate American woman, the sort of woman you could only speak to about servants’. A young boy called Henry Fielden was in the habit of dropping in at Kipling’s house, Bateman’s, to borrow books. Once when he arrived he saw Kipling standing at the window, so he waved, and Kipling waved back. But when Henry knocked on the front door, a maid told him that Mr Kipling was not at home. Henry insisted that they had just waved to each other, and the maid rushed away in confusion. A short while later, a furious Mrs Kipling appeared, saying through tight lips that her husband would be down in a minute.
The day after their interrupted book-signing, Kipling takes John to the sheepdog trials in Llangollen. John notes how comfortable Kipling is in the company of the shepherds, ‘getting them to talk and explain all about the trials and their lives’. On their way home, Kipling promises to write a story about these very shepherds. ‘But sadly,’ observes John, by now an old man, ‘he never got round to it.’
RUDYARD KIPLING
HERO-WORSHIPS
MARK TWAIN
Elmira, New York State
June 1889
In 1889, Rudyard Kipling is twenty-three years old, though he looks closer to forty. He arrives in San Francisco on May 28th, after a twenty-day voyage from Japan.
He is greedy for life. He witnesses a gunfight in Chinatown, lands a twelve-pound salmon in Oregon, meets cowboys in Montana, is appalled by Chicago, and falls in love with his future wife in Beaver, north Pennsylvania.
Before he leaves the United States, he is determined to meet his hero, Mark Twain. He goes on a wild-goose chase – to Buffalo, then Toronto, then Boston – before tracking him down to Elmira, where a policeman tells him he spotted Twain ‘or someone very like him’ driving a buggy through town the day before. ‘He lives out yonder at East Hill, three miles from here.’
At East Hill, he is informed that Twain is at his brother-in-law’s house downtown. He finds the house and rings the doorbell, but then has second thoughts. ‘It occurred to me for the first time Mark Twain might possibly have other engagements than the entertainment of escaped lunatics from India.’
He is led into a big, dark drawing room. There, in a huge chair, he finds the fifty-three-year-old author of Tom Sawyer with ‘a mane of grizzled hair, a brown mustache covering a mouth as delicate as a woman’s, a strong, square hand shaking mine and the slowest, calmest, levellest voice in all the world … I was shaking his hand. I was smoking his cigar, and I was hearing him talk – this man I had learned to love and admire 14,000 miles away.’
Kipling is transfixed. ‘That was a moment to be remembered; the landing of a twelve-pound salmon was nothing to it. I had hooked Mark Twain, and he was treating me as though under certain circumstances I might be an equal.’
The two men discuss the difficulties of copyright before moving on to Twain’s work. ‘Growing bold, and feeling that I had a few hundred thousand folk at my back, I demanded whether Tom Sawyer married Judge Thatcher’s daughter and whether we were ever going to hear of Tom Sawyer as a man.’
Twain gets up, fills his pipe, and paces the room in his bedroom slippers. ‘I haven’t decided. I have a notion of writing the sequel to Tom Sawyer in two ways. In one I would make him rise to great honor and go to Congress, and in the other I should hang him. Then the friends and enemies of the book could take their choice.’
Kipling raises a voice of protest: to him, Tom Sawyer is real.
‘Oh, he is real. He’s all the boys that I have known or recollect; but that would be a good way of ending the book, because, when you come to think of it, neither religion, training, nor education avails anything against the force of circumstances that drive a man. Suppose we took the next four and twenty years of Tom Sawyer’s life, and gave a little joggle to the circumstances that controlled him. He would, logically and according to the joggle, turn out a rip or an angel.’
‘Do you believe that, then?’
‘I think so; isn’t it what you call kismet?’
‘Yes; but don’t give him two joggles and show the result, because he isn’t your property any more. He belongs to us.’
Twain laughs. They move on to autobiography. ‘I believe it is impossible for a man to tell the truth about himself or to avoid impressing the reader with the truth about himself,’ Twain says. ‘I made an experiment once. I got a friend of mine – a man painfully given to speak the truth on all occasions – a man who wouldn’t dream of telling a lie – and I made him write his autobiography for his own amusement and mine … good, honest man that he was, in every single detail of his life that I knew about he turned out, on paper, a formidable liar. He could not help himself.’
As Twain walks up and down talking and puffing away, Kipling finds himself coveting his cob pipe. ‘I understood why certain savage tribes ardently desire the liver of brave men slain in combat. That pipe would have given me, perhaps, a hint of his keen insight into the souls of men. But he never laid it aside within stealing reach.’
Twain talks of the books he likes to read. ‘I never cared for fiction or story-books. What I like to read about are facts and statistics of any kind. If they are only facts about the raising of radishes, they interest me. Just now for instance, before you came in, I was reading an article about mathematics. Perfectly pure mathematics. My own knowledge of mathematics stops at “twelve times twelve” but I enjoyed that article immensely. I didn’t understand a word of it; but facts, or what a man believes to be facts, are always delightful.’
After two hours, the interview comes to an end. The great man, who never minds talking, assures his disciple that he has not interrupted him in the least.
Seventeen years on, Rudyard Kipling is world famous. Twain grows nostalgic for the time he spent in his company. ‘I believe that he knew more than any person I had met before, and he knew I knew less than any person he had met before … When he was gone, Mr Langdon wanted to know about my visitor. I said, “He is a stranger to me but is a most remarkable man – and I am the other one. Between us, we cover all knowledge; he knows all that can be known, and I know the rest.”’
Twain, now aged seventy, is addicted to Kipling’s works. He rereads Kim every year, ‘and in this way I go back to India without fatigue … I am not acquainted with my own books but I know Kipling’s books. They never grow pale to me; they keep their colour; they are always fresh.’
The worshipped has become the worshipper.
MARK TWAIN
BIDS FAREWELL TO
HELEN KELLER
Stormfield, Connecticut
February 1909
As Helen Keller’s carriage draws up between the huge granite pillars of Mark Twain’s house, the most venerable author in America is there to greet her, though she can neither see him nor hear him. Her companion Annie Sullivan – her eyes and ears – tells Helen that he is all in white, his beautiful white hair glistening in the afternoon sunshine ‘like the snow spray on gray stones’.
Twain and Keller first met fifteen years ago, when he was fifty-eight and she was just fourteen. Struck deaf and blind by meningitis at the age of eighteen months, Helen had, through sheer force of will, discovered a way to communicate: she finds out what people are saying by placing her fingers on their lips, throat and nose, or by having Annie transpose it onto the palm of her hand in letters of the alphabet.
Taken up as a prodigy by the great and the good,
she formed a special friendship with Twain. ‘The instant I clasped his hand in mine, I knew that he was my friend. He made me laugh and feel thoroughly happy by telling some good stories, which I read from his lips … He knew with keen and sure intuition many things about me and how it felt to be blind and not to keep up with the swift ones – things that others learned slowly or not at all. He never embarrassed me by saying how terrible it is not to see, or how dull life must be, lived always in the dark.’
Unlike other people, Twain has never patronised her. ‘He never made me feel that my opinions were worthless, as so many people do. He knew that we do not think with eyes and ears, and that our capacity for thought is not measured by five senses. He kept me always in mind while he talked, and he treated me like a competent human being. That is why I loved him …’
For his part, Twain is in awe. ‘She is fellow to Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon, Homer, Shakespeare and the rest of the immortals. She will be as famous a thousand years from now as she is today.’ Shortly after their first meeting, Twain formed a circle to fund her education at Radcliffe College, which led to her publishing an autobiography at the age of twenty-two, which in turn led her to become almost as celebrated as Twain himself.
But the intervening years have struck Twain some heavy blows. One of his daughters has died of meningitis,
another of an epileptic fit in a bathtub, and his wife Livy has died of heart disease. Throughout Helen’s stay he acts his familiar bluff, entertaining old self, but she senses the deep sadness within.
‘There was about him the air of one who had suffered greatly. Whenever I touched his face, his expression was sad, even when he was telling a funny story. He smiled, not with the mouth but with his mind – a gesture of the soul rather than of the face.’
But for the moment, he welcomes them into the house for tea and buttered toast by the fire. Then he shows them around. He takes Helen into his beloved billiard room. He will, he says, teach her how to play just like his friends Paine, Dunne and Rogers.
‘Oh, Mr Clemens, it takes sight to play billiards.’
‘Yes, but not the variety of billiards that Paine and Dunne and Rogers play. The blind couldn’t play worse,’ he jokes.
They go upstairs to see his bedroom. ‘Try to picture, Helen, what we are seeing out of these windows. We are high up on a snow-covered hill. Beyond, are dense spruce and firwoods, other snow-clad hills and stone walls intersecting the landscape everywhere, and, over all, the white wizardry of winter. It is a delight, this wild, free, fir-scented place.’
He shows the two women to their suite. On the mantelpiece there is a card telling burglars where to find everything of value. There has recently been a burglary, Twain explains, and this notice will ensure that any future intruders do not bother to disturb him.
Over dinner, Twain holds forth, ‘his talk fragrant with tobacco and flamboyant with profanity’. He explains that in his experience guests do not enjoy dinner if they are always worrying about what to say next: it is up to the host to take on that burden. ‘He talked delightfully, audaciously, brilliantly,’ says Helen. Dinner comes to an end, but his talk continues around the fire. ‘He seemed to have absorbed all America into himself. The great Mississippi River seemed forever flowing, flowing through his speech, through the shadowless white sands of thought. His voice seemed to say like the river, “Why hurry? Eternity is long; the ocean can wait.”’
Before Helen leaves Smithfield, Twain is more solemn. ‘I am very lonely, sometimes, when I sit by the fire after my friends have departed. My thoughts trail away into the past. I think of Livy and Susy and I seem to be fumbling in the dark folds of confused dreams …’
As she says goodbye, Helen wonders if they will ever meet again. Once more, her intuition proves right. Twain dies the following year. Some time later, Helen returns to where the old house once stood: it has burnt down, with only a charred chimney still standing. She turns her unseeing eyes to the view he once described to her, and at that moment feels someone coming towards her. ‘I reached out, and a red geranium blossom met my touch. The leaves of the plant were covered with ashes, and even the sturdy stalk had been partly broken off by a chip of falling plaster. But there was the bright flower smiling at me out of the ashes. I thought it said to me, “Please don’t grieve.”’
She plants the geranium in a sunny corner of her garden. ‘It always seems to say the same thing to me, “Please don’t grieve.” But I grieve, nevertheless.’
HELEN KELLER
AND …
MARTHA GRAHAM
66 Fifth Avenue, New York
December 1952
Before she taught Helen Keller each new word and phrase, Annie Sullivan used to say, ‘And …’
‘AND open the window!’
‘AND close the door!’
Everything life had to offer began with this little word.
The first word Helen ever learned was w-a-t-e-r. In Helen Keller’s dark, silent childhood, her teacher placed her hand beneath the spout of a well.
‘As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten – a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that “w-a-t-e-r” meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! … I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me.’
Now aged seventy-two, Helen Keller still dreams of being like other women: what must it be like, she wonders, to see and hear? However much she gains the upper hand over her disabilities, there are still many perfectly simple and basic things within easy reach of everybody else that she can never hope to master, or perhaps even to comprehend: dance, for instance.
She has gained the respect of some of the most distinguished people in the world, but sometimes she thinks she would swap it all for the chance to dance. ‘How quickly I should lock up all those mighty warriors, and hoary sages, and impossible heroes, who are now almost my only companions; and dance and sing and frolic like other girls!’ she confesses to a friend.
But she abhors self-pity; when she feels it looming, she forces herself to count her blessings. ‘… I must not waste my time wishing idle wishes; and, after all, my ancient friends are very wise and interesting, and I usually enjoy their society very much indeed. It is only once in a great while that I feel discontented, and allow myself to wish for things I cannot hope for in this life.’
Dance comes to symbolise the carefree land from which she is for ever exiled. ‘There are days when the close attention I must give to detail chafes my spirit, and the thought that I must spend hours reading a few chapters, while in the world without other girls are laughing and singing and dancing, makes me rebellious; but I soon recover my buoyancy and laugh the discontent out of my heart. For, after all, every one who wishes to gain true knowledge must climb the Hill Difficulty alone, and since there is no royal road to the summit, I must zigzag it in my own way … Every struggle is victory.’
Still fêted wherever she goes, Helen Keller is taken by a friend to meet the electrifying Grande Dame of modern dance, Martha Graham. Graham is immediately taken by what she calls Helen’s ‘gracious embrace of life’, and is impressed by what appears to be her photographic memory. They become friends. Before long, Helen starts paying regular visits to the dance studio. She seems to focus on the dancers’ feet, and can somehow tell the direction in which they are moving. Martha Graham is intrigued. ‘She could not see the dance but was able to allow its vibrations to leave the floor and enter her body.’
At first, Graham finds it hard to understand exactly what Helen is saying, but she soon grows accustomed to what she calls ‘that funny voice of hers’. On one of her visits, Helen says, ‘Martha, what is jumping? I don’t understand.’
Graham is touched by this simple question. She asks a member of her company, Merce Cunningham, to stand at the barre. She approaches him from behind, says, ‘Merce, be very careful, I’m putting Helen’s hands on your body,’ and places Helen Keller’s hands on his waist.
Cunningham cannot see Keller, but feels her two hands around his waist, ‘like bird wings, so soft’. Everyone in the studio stands quite still, focusing on what is happening. Cunningham jumps in the air while Keller’s hands rise up with his body.
‘Her hands rose and fell as Merce did,’ recalls Martha Graham, in extreme old age. ‘Her expression changed from curiosity to one of joy. You could see the enthusiasm rise in her face as she threw her arms in the air.’
Cunningham continues to perform small leaps, with very straight legs. He suddenly feels Keller’s fingers, still touching his waist, begin to move slightly, ‘as though fluttering’. For the first time in her life, she is experiencing dance. ‘Oh, how wonderful! How like thought! How like the mind it is!’ she exclaims when he stops.
Helen Keller and Martha Graham appear together in a documentary film, The Unconquered, in 1953. Still wearing her hat, Keller stands in the middle of a group of dancers ‘feeling’ the dance, while Graham and her dancers circle around her. She has a look of ecstasy upon her face.
Almost half a century later, Martha Graham, now aged ninety-six, is busy dictating her autobiography. Her hands are crippled with arthritis. She looks back on Helen Keller, who died over twenty years ago, as ‘the most gallant woman I have ever known’. And then it suddenly strikes her why, way back in the 1950s, Helen had been quite so excited by her visits to the studio.
‘The word “and” is inseparable from the dance, and leads us into most of the exercises and movements. It led her into the life of vibration. And her life enriched our studio. And to close the circle, all of our dance classes begin with the teacher saying, “AND … one!”’
MARTHA GRAHAM
SILENCES
MADONNA
316 East 63rd Street, New York
Autumn 1978
By 1978, Martha Graham has a formidable reputation. Over the course of her career, she has danced at the White House for eight US presidents, and baffled almost as many.
Her work is adored and reviled in roughly equal measure. The Graham technique, taught at the school she founded half a century ago, is tense, percussive, sexually explicit. It is her belief that female dancers should ‘dance from the vagina’. One of her acolytes explains that ‘Martha’s premise was that an act of lovemaking was an act of murder.’
Aged eighty-four, she maintains a ferocious temper, storming in or out at the drop of a hat. She has been known to pull the cloth from a restaurant table, scattering everything to the floor before making her exit. Nowadays, she is spotted only rarely in her school, though rumour has it that she is always there, like a demanding ghost.
The nineteen-year-old Madonna Ciccone has just taken her first trip in an aeroplane. She arrives in New York City from Michigan, with $35 and a bag of dance tights, determined to make her name as a dancer. After she tells the cab driver to take her to the centre of everything, he drops her off in Times Square.
She auditions for a dance company, but fails. They tell her she has drive but no technique, and advise her to enrol in the Martha Graham Dance School. Within twenty-four hours she has signed up for beginners’ classes, paying her way by working in a fast-food restaurant.
‘I dug this place. The studios were Spartan, minimalist. Everyone whispered, so the only sounds you heard were the music and the instructors, and they spoke to you only when you were fucking up – which was pretty easy to do around there. It’s a difficult technique to learn. It’s physically brutal and there is no room for slouches … At one time in my life, I had fantasized about being a nun, and this was the closest I was ever going to get to convent life.’
The topic of Martha Graham provides the backdrop to every conversation. ‘I wanted to meet the mother superior, the woman responsible for all this.’ She hears that Graham visits the building often, and she even sits in on classes from time to time, either to check up on the teaching staff or to scout for talent. Madonna grows obsessed with meeting her, much as a visitor to Loch Ness might long to meet the monster. ‘She stayed pretty hidden. I had heard she was vain about growing old. Maybe she was really busy, or really shy, or both. But her presence was always felt, which only added to her mystique and to my longing to meet her … She had a serious Garbo vibe about her and seemed like she really wanted to be left alone.’
Madonna begins to daydream about running into her. ‘I was gonna be fearless and nonchalant. I would befriend her and get her to confess all the secrets of her soul.’
With this aim in mind, she signs on for extra classes, and lingers in the hallways in the hope of catching a glimpse. Sometimes, she invents excuses to enter the offices. And then, one day, quite by chance, it happens.
Madonna is in the middle of her 11 a.m. class. She has drunk too much coffee. Against the rules, she nips out ‘with my bladder at bursting point’. She heaves open the heavy door to the hallway and steps outside the classroom, only to find herself face to face with Martha Graham. ‘There she was, right in front of me, staring into my face. OK, not exactly in front of me, but my appearance must have taken her by surprise: no one ever left the tomb-like classrooms until classes were over.’
Graham stops dead in her tracks. Madonna is paralysed and, for the first time in her life, and possibly the last, struck dumb. ‘She was part Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. The rest of her was a cross between a Kabuki dancer and the nun I was obsessed with in the fifth grade, Sister Kathleen Thomas. In any case, I was overwhelmed, and all my plans to disarm her and win her over were swallowed up by my fear of a presence I’d never encountered before.’
Graham doesn’t say a word. ‘She just looked at me with what I thought was interest but was probably only disapproval. Her hair was pulled back severely, displaying a pale face made up like a porcelain doll. Her chin jutted out with arrogance and her eyes were like shiny brown immovable marbles. She was small and big at the same time.’
Madonna waits for words to spring from Martha Graham’s mouth, and daggers to fly out of her eyes. ‘I ignored the aching in my lower abdomen. I forgot that I had a big mouth and that I wasn’t afraid of anyone. This was my first true encounter with a goddess. A warrior. A survivor. Someone not to be fucked with.’
Martha Graham says nothing, but flicks her long skirts and disappears into a room, closing the door behind her. ‘Before I could clear my throat, she was gone. I was left shaking in my leotard, partly because I still had to go to the bathroom but most because I had encountered such an exquisite creature. I was truly dumbfounded … Much has happened in my life since then but nothing will diminish the memory of my first encounter with this woman – this life force.’
Ten years later, Madonna is by far the most famous female pop star in the world. Her performances incorporate elaborate dance routines: tense, percussive, sexually explicit. One day, someone from the Martha Graham Dance School contacts her office, saying that the school is facing bankruptcy. ‘Give it one day,’ comes the reply. The very next day, Madonna’s office rings back, offering $150,000. When Martha Graham, now aged ninety-four, is presented with the cheque, she bursts into tears.
MADONNA
INDUCES QUEASINESS IN
MICHAEL JACKSON
The Ivy restaurant, Beverly Hills, Los Angeles
March 15th 1991
Wondering who might be sufficiently glamorous to accompany her to the Academy Awards, where she is due to perform, Madonna has a brainwave. ‘How about Michael Jackson? Oh my God, what a great idea! Don’t you love it?’ she exclaims to her manager, Freddy DeMann, who used to manage him.
DeMann negotiates with Jackson, and reports back: he has managed to arrange a preliminary dinner. The two biggest-selling stars in the world are booked to meet at the Ivy in Beverly Hills, ten days before the ceremony.
In the past, Jackson has been puzzled by Madonna. Though he is an astute businessman, he can’t fathom her appeal. ‘She’s always in your face, isn’t she?’ he once complained to a friend. ‘I don’t get it. What is it about her? She’s not a great dancer or singer. But she does know how to market herself. That must be it.’
Two years ago, he was somewhat put out to discover that she was being advertised by Warner Brothers as the ‘Artist of the Decade’. It was only in a trade publication, but even so. ‘It makes me look bad,’ he explained. ‘I’m the artist of the decade, aren’t I? Did she outsell Thriller? No, she did not.’
At their table at the Ivy, Madonna wears a black jacket and hot-pants with lacy stockings. Around her neck hangs a crucifix. Jackson is wearing black jeans, a red shirt and matching jacket, topped off with a fedora. He keeps his dark glasses on.
‘I had my sunglasses on, and I’m sitting there, you know, trying to be nice. And the next thing I know, she reaches over and takes my glasses off. Nobody has ever taken my glasses off … And then she throws them across the room and breaks them. I was shocked. “I’m your date now,” she told me, “and I hate it when I can’t see a man’s eyes.” I didn’t much like that.’
As the dinner progresses, Madonna thinks she has spotted Michael Jackson taking a crafty peek at her breasts. Grinning, she snatches his hand and places it upon them. Jackson recoils. When all is said and done, this is not his style. But Madonna is not the kind of person to take no for an answer; later during their dinner, she saucily drops a piece of bread down her cleavage, then fishes it out and pops it into her mouth. The effect on Jackson is one of instant queasiness.
‘Oh my God, you should see the muscles on that woman! I mean, she’s got muscles in her arms way bigger than mine. They’re, like, rippling, you know? I wanted to know how she got muscles that big, but didn’t want to ask because I was afraid she’d make me show her my muscles.’
Their exploratory dinner at the Ivy cannot, therefore, be judged a great success, but at least it is not so disastrous as to derail their joint entrance at the Academy Awards ceremony at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles.
Both of them have made an effort. They cut a dash together, Jackson in a white-sequinned suit with a large diamond brooch, plus gloves and gold-tipped cowboy boots, Madonna preferring a Marilyn Monroe look, with a skin-tight low-cut gown, also white-sequinned, and $20 million-worth of jewels, on overnight loan from Harry Winston.
Afterwards, they go to Swifty Lazar’s annual Oscar night party at Spago. As she is making her entrance, Madonna is asked by a Hollywood reporter how she managed to convince the normally reclusive Michael Jackson to accompany her. ‘Oh, Michael’s coming out more,’ she replies. Cynics detect a sneaky joke.
Once inside Spago and away from the cameras, it is not long before Madonna drifts towards her former lover Warren Beatty, leaving Jackson all alone. He is rescued by his old friend Diana Ross. ‘Well, I just don’t understand it, Michael,’ Ross says loudly, so that everyone can hear. ‘I mean, she’s supposed to be with you, isn’t she? So, what is she doing with him?’
‘I don’t know,’ whispers Michael Jackson. ‘I guess she likes him better.’
‘Well, I think she’s an awful woman,’ says Diana Ross, reassuringly. ‘Tacky dress, too.’
It is the very last time that Michael Jackson and Madonna will go out on a date together. However, a month or two later, Jackson asks Madonna to appear in his new video. Madonna, very excited, thinks they should do something ‘utterly outrageous’. As the title of the song is ‘In the Closet’, she thinks it would be a good idea if she were to appear as a man, and Jackson as a woman. Jackson is not so sure; might it not just confuse everyone? After all, the song is intended to be solidly heterosexual: the title, ‘In the Closet’ refers only to the singer’s desire to keep a relationship between himself and his girlfriend under wraps. Jackson’s sister Janet has always been sceptical about Madonna (‘If I took off my clothes in the middle of a highway, people would look at me, too. But does that make me an artist?’), but she expresses enthusiasm for the project. ‘What a statement!’ she says.
In the end, Jackson decides against, and the model Naomi Campbell appears in the video instead. The very first lines of the song are spoken in a breathy whisper by, of all people, Princess Stephanie of Monaco. ‘There’s something I have to say to you, if you promise you’ll understand. I cannot contain myself: when in your presence I’m so humble. Touch me. Don’t hide our love … woman to man.’
Naomi Campbell writhes around in a desert, wearing very little. She smooths her breasts with her hands while the gyrating Michael Jackson, in a sleeveless white T-shirt and black jeans, performs energetic thrusts, cupping his hands hither and thither around his pelvis while singing:
Because there’s something
About you baby
That makes me want
To give it to you!
The two of them barely look at one another, let alone touch.
MICHAEL JACKSON
INTRIGUES
NANCY REAGAN
The White House, Washington DC
May 14th 1984
A month or so ago, Michael Jackson’s lawyer, John Branca, was contacted by the White House to ask whether Jackson might donate his song ‘Beat It’ for advertisements against drink-driving.
Jackson was reluctant: ‘That’s tacky. I can’t do that,’ he told Branca. But he then had second thoughts. ‘You know what? If I can get some kind of an award from the White House, then I can give them the song. How about that?’ He wants to be on a stage at the White House with President Reagan. ‘And I sure want to meet Nancy.’
Within days, they have a deal. The President has agreed to present Michael Jackson with a special humanitarian award, and the First Lady will be there too.
Fans gather at dawn to peer through the fence of the White House. At 11 a.m. the South Lawn is thronging with media, along with hundreds of White House staff, most of them clutching cameras.
The President arrives in a navy-blue suit. The First Lady wears a white Adolfo suit with gold buttons, trimmed with gold braid. Jackson wears an oversize military jacket with sequins, plus floppy gold epaulettes and a gold sash, a single white glove, checkered with rhinestones, and droopy dark glasses.
‘Well, isn’t this a thriller?’ chuckles the President, behind his dais. ‘I’m delighted to see you all here. Just think: you all came to see me. No, I know why you’re here, and with good reason – to see one of the most talented, most popular and one of the most exciting superstars in the world today – Michael Jackson. Michael – welcome to the White House.’
After dutifully peppering his speech with the titles of some of Jackson’s hits – ‘Off the Wall’, ‘I Want You Back’ – the jovial President gets down to business. ‘At this stage of his career, when it would seem he has achieved everything a musical performer can hope for, Michael Jackson is taking time to lead the fight against alcohol and drug abuse … Michael Jackson is proof of what a young person can accomplish free of drink or drug abuse.
People young and old respect that, and if Americans follow his example then we can face up to the problems of drinking and driving. And we can, in Michael’s words, Beat It.
‘Nancy spends a great deal of her time with young people talking about the problems of drink and drug abuse, so I speak for both of us when I say thank you, Michael, for the example that you’re giving to millions of young Americans … Your success is an American dream come true.’
Amidst applause, Jackson comes to the podium to receive his award. ‘I’m very, very honoured,’ he says in his high-pitched voice. ‘Thank you very much, Mr President.’ He then giggles to himself before adding, ‘And Mrs Reagan.’
The President and Mrs Reagan usher Jackson inside, leaving him and his entourage to tour the White House. Jackson shows an interest in a portrait of his namesake, the seventh President of the United States, Andrew Jackson, who is in a similar military uniform, though without the sequins.
Afterwards, Jackson is to have a private meeting with the Reagans, along with one or two children of staff members. But when he is ushered into the Diplomatic Reception Room, he is confronted by seventy-five adults.
He turns on his heels, running down the hall into the rest room off the Presidential Library. He locks the door, and refuses to come out. ‘They said there would be kids. But those aren’t kids!’ he protests to Frank Dileo, his manager.
Dileo has a word with a White House aide, who immediately rounds on an assistant. ‘If the First Lady gets a load of this, she’s going to be mad as hell. Now you go get some kids in here, damn it.’
Dileo shouts through the rest-room door, ‘It’s OK, Michael. We’re going to get some kids.’
‘You’ll have to clear all those adults out of there before I come out,’ demands Jackson.
An aide runs into the Reception Room. ‘OK, out! Everybody out!’ A member of Jackson’s entourage arrives in the rest room. ‘Everything is OK.’
‘Are you sure?’ asks Michael.
At this point, Frank Dileo grows edgy. ‘OK, Mike, outta there. I mean it.’
Michael Jackson returns to the freshly vacated Reception Room. A handful of children are waiting. While he signs a copy of Thriller for the Transport Secretary, the Reagans arrive. They usher Jackson into the Roosevelt Room to meet a few more aides and their children.
As Jackson talks to the children, Nancy Reagan whispers to one of his staff, ‘I’ve heard he wants to look like Diana Ross, but looking at him up close, he’s so much prettier than she is. Don’t you agree? I mean, I just don’t think she’s that attractive, but he certainly is.’
Jackson’s employees are forbidden from discussing their employer, so he does not reply.
‘I just wish he would take off those sunglasses,’ continues Mrs Reagan, adding, ‘Tell me, has he had any surgery on his eyes?’
There is still no reply. ‘Certainly his nose has been done,’ whispers Mrs Reagan, peering hard at Jackson, who is now talking to her husband. ‘More than once, I’d say. I wonder about his cheekbones. Is that make-up, or has he had them done too? It’s all so peculiar, really. A boy who looks just like a girl, who whispers when he speaks, wears a glove on one hand and sunglasses all the time. I just don’t know what to make of it.’ She lifts her eyes to the ceiling and shakes her head.
The Jackson aide begins to think it may be rude to say nothing at all to the First Lady. ‘Listen, you don’t know the half of it,’ he says, with a conspiratorial smile. But the First Lady reacts as though she disdains such idle gossip.
‘Well, he is talented. And I would think that’s all that you should be concerned about,’ she snaps.
NANCY REAGAN
DISAPPOINTS
ANDY WARHOL
The White House, Washington DC
October 15th 1981
‘The funny thing about movie people,’ says Andy Warhol to the First Lady over tea in the White House, ‘is that they talk behind your back before you even leave the room.’
Nancy Reagan’s eyes, already preternaturally wide, grow still wider. She looks at Warhol as though he were unbalanced.
‘I am a movie person, Andy,’ she replies.
The interview has been stiff throughout. Mrs Reagan never reacts well to criticism, and can spot it from a great distance. It is written in her stars. ‘Cancers tend to be intuitive, vulnerable, sensitive and fearful of ridicule – all of which, like it or not, I am,’ she explains in her autobiography. ‘The Cancer symbol is the crab shell: Cancers often present a hard exterior to the world, which hides their vulnerability. When they’re hurt, Cancers respond by withdrawing into themselves. That’s me all right.’
Warhol himself has been notably crab-like in his advance on the Reagans. Two months before the 1981 presidential election, he befriended the Reagans’ son Ronald Junior, then their daughter Patti. Both sides are happy: the younger Reagans mix with the most famous artist in America, and in turn Warhol mixes with America’s imminent first family. Warhol likes Ronald Junior. ‘He turned out to be a really nice kid. God, he was so sweet … and he’s very smart. Lispy and cute.’ At their first lunch together, Warhol is tongue-tied. ‘I didn’t know what to talk to him about. I was too shy and he was too shy.’ Warhol finds himself asking an awkward question about whether or not his father dyes his hair. Ronald Junior tries to change the subject. His mother, Nancy, is, he tells Warhol, ‘very sweet and very adorable’.
Warhol seizes the moment. ‘So then I got sneaky and brought Ordinary People up, and I told him how much I hated Mary Tyler Moore, that after I saw the movie if I saw her on the street I’d just kick her. And at that point he was almost going to say something about Nancy, but then somehow he got the drift of it and changed the subject. Because I think the mother in Ordinary People is just like Mrs Reagan. Really cold and shrewd.’
They discuss what to order. Warhol tells Ronald Junior that he has never eaten frogs’ legs, ‘and he was so sweet he ordered them just so I could try it. He’s really sweet, a beautiful body and beautiful eyes. But he just doesn’t have a pretty nose. It’s too long.’
Two weeks later, Patti Davis, Ronald Junior’s older sister, drops by the Interview office. ‘She looked sort of pretty to me, but then looking at her later on the video, how could these kids have missed their parents’ good looks? I mean, Dad was so gorgeous.’
Between Ronald Reagan’s election and his inauguration, Andy Warhol goes out with Ronald Reagan Junior and his wife Doria to see the movie Flash Gordon. By the end of the evening, he has given Doria a job on Interview magazine.
Warhol doesn’t encounter Nancy Reagan until March 1981, when, by chance, he spots her eating in the same restaurant. ‘We were leaving and didn’t want to go by the President’s table because it was too groupie-ish – everybody else was stopping at the table – so we went the other way, but then they called us over. Jerry Zipkin was yelling, and I met Mrs Reagan, and she said, “Oh you’re so good to my kids.”’
The possibility of an interview with Nancy Reagan is mooted in September 1981. By now Nancy has taken to ringing Warhol’s sidekick Bob Colacello at the office, fussing about Ron and Doria, ‘causing no end of envy to Andy’. Colacello negotiates with the White House for an interview with Mrs Reagan: they give their approval, thinking it might lighten her imperious image. But, perhaps sensing Colacello has overtaken him on this particular social ladder, Warhol affects to pooh-pooh the idea. ‘I think she is too old and it’s old-fashioned. We should have younger people. What is there to ask her? About her movie career? Oh, it’ll never happen anyway.’
But it does. A month later, Warhol and Colacello leave for Washington. Colacello warns Warhol not to ask her any ‘sex questions’. This upsets Warhol. ‘I just couldn’t believe him. I mean, I just couldn’t believe him. Did he think I was going to sit there and ask her how often do they do it?’
The two of them, plus Doria, arrive early at the White House and are placed in a reception room. There they remain: when the First Lady arrives, she fails to lead them to somewhere more grand or more intimate. Warhol, ever-alert to matters of status, is affronted; a waiter brings them each a glass of water, and Warhol is further affronted.
The interview never really gets going. ‘We talked about drug rehabilitation, and it was boring. I made a couple of mistakes but I didn’t care because I was still so mad at being told by Bob not to ask sex questions.’
Soon, it is all over. Before ushering them out, Nancy Reagan gives Doria a piece of Tupperware (‘not wrapped up or anything’) and socks for Ron Junior. Colacello tells Nancy what a good mother she is, and asks what they are doing for Christmas. Nancy says they will stay at the White House, ‘because nobody ever stays at the White House’.
Warhol leaves feeling he has been snubbed. A glass of water! When he gets home, his phone is ringing. ‘It was Brigid asking me what kind of tea Mrs Reagan served us, and then I started thinking and I got madder. I mean, she could have put on the dog – she could have done it in a good room, she could have used the good china! I mean, this was for her daughter-in-law, she could have done something really great for this interview but she didn’t. I got madder and madder thinking about it.’
ANDY WARHOL
BLANKS
JACKIE KENNEDY
1040 Fifth Avenue, New York
December 20th 1978
Somehow, Andy Warhol has no luck with Presidents or First Ladies. They never seem to hit it off. After a party for Newsweek in 1983, he observes, ‘It was a boring party. No stars. Just Nancy Reagan and President and Mrs Carter.’
But they have their uses. On November 22nd 1963, he was walking through Grand Central Station when the news came through that President Kennedy had been assassinated. Warhol paused to absorb this and then, in a matter-of-fact manner, said to his assistant, ‘Well, let’s get to work.’
Within months, he had produced any amount of pictures of Jackie Kennedy, some adapted from a photograph of her smiling just before her husband was shot, some from photographs of her at his funeral, others a combination of the two.
As the years roll by, the paths of America’s most famous widow and America’s most famous artist cross on a regular basis. He is mesmerised by her fame. Possibly as a result, she is often standoffish towards him.
This makes him touchy. In 1977, Warhol is invited to a fundraising dinner Jackie has organised. ‘The dinner was a horror. They put us at such a nothing nobody table,’ he records in his diary. ‘So here we were in this room where we didn’t even recognise anybody except each other and this girl comes over to me and says, “I know you have a camera, and you can take pictures of everyone here except Mrs Onassis.”’ A few minutes later, Warhol enters the main room and finds not only that ‘there was everybody we knew’, but ‘there were 4,000 photographers taking pictures of Jackie. And that horrible girl had come over to tell me I couldn’t!’
The following year, Warhol is irritated to be told that Diana Vreeland doesn’t think he is avant-garde any more, and Jackie doesn’t either. That November, he hears that Jackie has thrown a party without inviting him. ‘Robert Kennedy Jr told Fred that they had a big question about whether to invite us and decided not to. Jackie really is awful, I guess.’
A week later, things look up. He receives an invitation to Jackie’s Christmas party. Warhol invites his friend Bob Colacello. They arrive late. ‘Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton were there and Bob heard – overheard – Jackie saying that something Warren did in the hall was “disgusting”, but we were never able to find out what it was.’
Over dinner at Mortimer’s afterwards, someone says Beatty has had sex with Jackie. Bianca Jagger says Warren has probably just made it up, because he made up that he slept with her, and when she saw him in the Beverly Wilshire she embarrassed him by screaming, ‘Warren, I hear you say you’re fucking me. How can you say that when it’s not true?’
Then Bianca says that Warren has a big cock, and Steve asks how would she know, and she says that all her girlfriends have slept with him. Colacello is ‘in heaven’ because Jackie is so nice to him, even sharing her glass of Perrier with him when the butler forgot to bring his, and saying, ‘It’s ours.’
But the next day, Jackie has turned turtle. She calls Warhol three or four times at his office. ‘But I didn’t call back, because the messages were complicated – they were like, “Call me at this number after 5.30, or before 4.00 if it’s not raining.”’ Finally, she catches him at home. She is frosty. ‘She sounded so tough. She said, “Now Andy, when I invited you, I invited you – I didn’t invite Bob Colacello.”’ She complains that Colacello ‘writes things’. This leads Warhol to suspect that ‘something must have happened there that she doesn’t want written about. She was thinking about it all day, I guess.’ Could she be referring to the disgusting thing Warren Beatty did in her hall?
She punishes Warhol for his tardiness and his uninvited guest by asking her friends not to invite him to their parties. Warhol gets wind of his exclusion; their relationship deteriorates further. She never invites him to another Christmas party. It rankles. He records each fresh omission in his diary. ‘Shook hands with Jackie O.,’ he writes after attending a black-tie charity do at the Helmsley Palace. ‘She never invited me to her Christmas party again, so she’s a creep. And now I wouldn’t go if she did. I’d tell her to go mind her own business. I mean, I’m the same age, so I can tell her off. Although I do feel like she’s older than me. But then, I feel like everybody’s older than me.’
Warhol never quite gets over his exclusion from Jackie’s party list. In 1985, he is still fulminating. ‘I don’t understand why Jackie O. thinks she’s so grand that she doesn’t owe it to the public to have another great marriage to somebody big. You’d think she’d want to scheme and connive to get into history again.’
On Saturday, April 26th 1986, he attends the Cape Cod wedding of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver,
and notes, ‘Jackie never smiled at anyone, she was a sourpuss.’ At the reception, he blanks her. ‘I didn’t look at Jackie, I felt too funny.’ The two of them never see each other again. Less than a year later, Andy Warhol dies unexpectedly, following an operation to remove his gall bladder.
Twenty-two years after his death, archivists are sifting through 610 cardboard boxes, filing cabinets and a shipping container full of the belongings of Andy Warhol. They find, among much else, a piece of old wedding cake, various empty tins of chicken soup and $17,000 in cash. They also come across a photograph of Jackie Kennedy swimming naked. It is signed by her, ‘For Andy, with enduring affection, Jackie Montauk’ – a reference to Warhol’s estate on Long Island. No one knows how on earth it came to be there, or the story behind it; but it undoubtedly dates from a time before their falling-out in 1978.
JACKIE KENNEDY
IS ILL-AT-EASE WITH
HRH QUEEN ELIZABETH II
Buckingham Palace, London
June 5th 1961
It is barely four months since President Kennedy’s inauguration. Mrs Kennedy is still finding her feet.
Jackie is unsure of herself. In public, she smiles and waves. In private, she bites her nails and chain smokes. She is prone to self-pity. She is overheard saying, ‘Oh, Jack, I’m so sorry for you that I’m such a dud,’ to which Kennedy replies, ‘I love you as you are.’ Is each of them telling only half the truth?
Socially, she is an awkward mix of the gracious and the paranoid. ‘At one moment, she was misunderstood, frustrated and helpless. The next moment, without any warning, she was the royal, loyal First Lady to whom it was almost a duty to bow, to pay medieval obeisance,’ is the way her English friend Robin Douglas-Home puts it. ‘Then again, without any warning, she was deflating someone with devastating barbs for being such a spaniel as to treat her as the First Lady and deriding the pomp of politics, the snobbery of the social chamber.’
But now, on their whistle-stop tour of Europe, Jackie suddenly appears formidable. The French take to her as one of their own: born a Bouvier, she has French ancestry, and spent a year at the Sorbonne. She speaks fluent French and has arrived with a wardrobe of clothes specially designed for her by Givenchy. At a banquet at Versailles, President de Gaulle greets her by saying, ‘This evening, Madame, you are looking like a Watteau.’
The political editor of Time reports that, ‘Thanks in large part to Jackie Kennedy at her prettiest, Kennedy charmed the old soldier into unprecedented flattering toasts and warm gestures of friendship.’ At a press conference, President Kennedy says, ‘I do not think it altogether inappropriate to introduce myself … I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris, and I have enjoyed it.’
Over dinner in Vienna, Jackie Kennedy charms Mr Khrushchev. As the evening unwinds, the Soviet Chairman draws his chair closer and closer to her. He compliments her on her white evening gown, and their subsequent conversation encompasses everything from dogs in space to folk dances in Ukraine. At the end of it, Khrushchev promises to send her a puppy as a present.
But the next morning, Khrushchev is back to his grumpy old self. He has no interest in charming the President, still less in being charmed by him. Kennedy emerges from their meeting feeling humiliated. On the flight from Vienna to London, both Kennedys appear downhearted, their gloom increased by the President’s perennial back problems. Their doctor administers drugs to buck them both up: amphetamines and vitamins for the First Lady and novocaine for the President, who is also taking the powerful painkiller Demerol.
In London the next day, the President informs the avuncular British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, of the battering he has received. ‘The President was completely overwhelmed by the ruthlessness and barbarity of the Russian Chairman,’ records Macmillan. ‘It reminded me in a way of Lord Halifax or Neville Chamberlain trying to hold a conversation with Herr Hitler. For the first time in his life Kennedy met a man who was impervious to his charm.’
In the morning, they attend the christening of Jackie’s niece Christina Radziwill. From there, they go to an informal lunch with the Prime Minister and a number of friends and relations, including the Ormsby-Gores and the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. The Duchess, an old friend of the President,
has mixed feelings about Jackie. ‘She is a queer fish. Her face is one of the oddest I ever saw. It is put together in a very wild way,’ she observes to her old friend Patrick Leigh Fermor.
That evening, the Kennedys attend a dinner at Buckingham Palace. It proves a minefield. The guest list has been the subject of negotiation: traditionally, divorcees are not invited, so the Queen has been reluctant to welcome Jackie’s sister Princess Lee Radziwill, who is on her second marriage, or her husband Prince Stanislaw Radziwill, who is on his third. Under pressure, she relents, but, by way of retaliation, singularly fails to invite Princess Margaret or Princess Marina, both of whose names Jackie has put forward. Jackie’s old paranoia returns: she sees it as a plot to do her down. ‘The Queen had her revenge,’ she confides to Gore Vidal.
‘No Margaret, no Marina, no one except every Commonwealth minister of agriculture they could find.’ Jackie also tells Vidal that she found the Queen ‘pretty heavy-going’. (When Vidal repeats this to Princess Margaret some years later, the Princess loyally explains, ‘But that’s what she’s there for.’)
Over dinner, Jackie continues to feel awkward, even persecuted. ‘I think the Queen resented me. Philip was nice, but nervous. One felt absolutely no relationship between them.’
The Queen asks Jackie about her visit to Canada. Jackie tells her how exhausting she found being on public view for hours on end. ‘The Queen looked rather conspiratorial and said, “One gets crafty after a while and learns how to save oneself.”’
According to Vidal (who is prone to impose his own thoughts on others), Jackie considers this the only time the Queen seems remotely human.
After dinner, the Queen asks if she likes paintings. Yes, says Jackie, she certainly does. The Queen takes her for a stroll down a long gallery in the palace. They stop in front of a Van Dyck. The Queen says, ‘That’s a good horse.’ Yes, agrees Jackie, that is a good horse. From Jackie’s account, this is the extent of their contact with one another, but others differ. Dinner at Buckingham Palace, writes Harold Macmillan in his diary that night, is ‘very pleasant’.
Nine months later, Jackie pays another visit to the Queen at Buckingham Palace, this time by herself. She is more in the swing of things now. ‘I don’t think I should say anything about it except how grateful I am and how charming she was,’ she tells the television cameras as she makes her escape.
HRH QUEEN ELIZABETH II
ATTENDS
THE DUKE OF WINDSOR
4, route du Champ d’Entraînement, Bois de Boulogne, Paris
May 18th 1972
The Queen is to pay a state visit to Paris to ‘improve the atmosphere’ before Britain’s entry into the Common Market. But before the visit takes place, word arrives at Buckingham Palace that her uncle David, once King Edward VIII, now the Duke of Windsor, has throat cancer, and is days from death.
The Queen’s Private Secretary, Sir Martin Charteris, contacts the British Ambassador in Paris, Sir Christopher Soames, who in turn arranges a meeting with Jean Thin, the Duke of Windsor’s doctor. The Ambassador comes straight to the point. Dr Thin recalls: ‘He told me bluntly that it was all right for the Duke to die before or after the visit, but that it would be politically disastrous if he were to expire in the course of it. Was there anything I could do to reassure him about the timing of the Duke’s end?’
Unversed in royal protocol, Thin is taken aback. He can offer no such reassurance. The Duke may die before, during or after his niece’s state visit to France, but he is not in the business of making predictions. The Palace is put out. Will the Duke prove as much of a nuisance in death as in life? As it turns out, the prospect of the Queen’s visit gives the Duke a new lease of life: more than ever, he seems determined to cling on.
And so he does. He is still alive when the royal party lands at Orly Airport on May 15th. Each evening, Sir Christopher telephones Dr Thin to see how his patient is coming along. Dr Thin reports that His Royal Highness is unable to swallow and on a glucose drip, but still intent on welcoming his monarch.
At 4.45 p.m. on May 18th, the royal entourage arrives after a day at the Longchamp races. The Duchess of Windsor greets the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales with a succession of shaky curtseys, ushering them into the orchid-laden drawing room for tea. For the next fifteen minutes, no one mentions the Duke of Windsor’s health. ‘It was as if they were pretending that David was perfectly well,’ the Duchess says later. She complains that the Queen was ‘not at all warm’, though she may simply be irritated by the Windsors’ jumpy pugs.
The only member of the royal visitors to have been here before is the Prince of Wales, who called by last October, hoping to patch things up between his black-sheep uncle and the rest of the family. The very next month, Uncle David was diagnosed with cancer, so the Prince’s account in his diary of his visit provides a glimpse, albeit a sniffy glimpse, into the Windsors’ life as it was lived, not long ago: ‘Upon entering the house I found footmen and pages wearing identical scarlet and black uniforms to the ones ours wear at home. It was rather pathetic seeing that. The eye then wandered to a table in the hall on which lay a red box with “The King” on it … The whole house reeks of some particularly strong joss sticks and from out of the walls came the muffled sound of scratchy piped music. The Duchess appeared from a host of the most dreadful American guests I have ever seen. The look of incredulity on their faces was a study and most of them were thoroughly tight. One man shook hands with me twice, muttered something incomprehensible in French with a strong American accent and promptly collapsed into the arms of a strategically placed black footman.’
The Duchess (dismissed by Charles after their meeting as ‘a hard woman – totally unsympathetic and somewhat superficial’) leads the Queen up the stairs, where the Duke is sitting in a wheelchair, crisply dressed for the occasion in a blue poloneck and blazer. These garments conceal a drip tube, which emerges from the back of the collar and then swoops down to flasks concealed behind a curtain. He has shrivelled to ninety pounds. As the Queen enters, he struggles to his feet and, with some effort, manages to lower his neck in a bow. Dr Thin worries that this may cause the drip to pop out, but all is well, and it stays put.
The Queen greets her uncle with a kiss, and asks how he is. ‘Not so bad,’ he replies. From this moment on, the opinions of two of the witnesses to their meeting divide. The Duchess, who is by nature unforgiving, portrays the Queen as unsympathetic and coldly dutiful. ‘The Queen’s face showed no compassion, no appreciation for his effort, his respect. Her manner as much as stated that she had not intended to honour him with a visit, but that she was simply covering appearances by coming here because he was dying and it was known that she was in Paris.’ However, the Duke’s Irish nurse, Oonagh Shanley, remembers the Queen chatting perfectly amiably to her uncle, whose voice, reduced to a whispery rasp, is barely audible.
Some say their meeting comes to an end when the Duke is overcome by a coughing fit, and is wheeled away. It is certainly a very short time before the Queen leaves the room, to rejoin the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales downstairs.
Rightly or wrongly, the Duchess of Windsor senses that they wish to be off. She escorts them to the front door of the villa, where the four of them pose together for photographers. Inevitably, the Duke of Edinburgh attempts a few jokes. Equally inevitably, the Duchess considers them inappropriate. The royal party leaves. The entire visit has taken less than half an hour.
Ten days later, the Duke of Windsor dies. Nearly 60,000 people come to Windsor to pay their respects. There is a question as to whether or not Trooping the Colour, scheduled for two days before his funeral, should be cancelled, as a mark of respect. But the Queen insists that it should go ahead, so it does.
THE DUKE OF WINDSOR
LOOKS ON AGHAST WITH
ELIZABETH TAYLOR
4, route du Champ d’Entraînement, Bois de Boulogne, Paris
November 12th 1968
Both now in their seventies, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor potter along as stately relics of their former glamour. They occupy their time either entertaining or being entertained by what has come to be known as the jet set. After jetting into Paris, and before jetting out, their ever-changing friends – foreign aristocrats, shipping millionaires, misplaced royalty, international playboys, amusing bachelors, the higher echelons of show-business – are delighted to receive the call from the Windsors.
Thirty years ago, they were the most glamorous couple in the world: that title, only ever temporary, is now held by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, who are, by chance, both making movies in Paris. The balance of fame, perhaps also of wealth,
dictates that it is the Windsors who make eyes at the Burtons, though the latter are far from displeased, as the Windsors reinforce their sense of having arrived, their craving for being centre-stage, particularly when off-stage.
The Windsors visit the Burtons on their separate sets, and the two couples dine together regularly. In honour of Burton’s Welsh roots, the Duchess makes a point of wearing her Prince of Wales brooch – the fleur de lys in white and yellow diamonds. Elizabeth Taylor looks at it covetously: she is celebrated for her jewellery collection.
Dining with the Windsors and the Rothschilds before the European premiere of The Taming of the Shrew, she wears roughly $1,500,000-worth – so much that the couple have to be protected by eight bodyguards on their short journey to the Paris Opera House. Earlier the same day, Burton spends $960,000 buying her the jet plane on which they flew into Paris. ‘Elizabeth was not displeased,’ he confides to his diary.
Elizabeth remains enchanted by the fairy-tale glamour of the Windsors, but Burton, less convinced that the world he has created is the world he wants, his unease fuelled and allayed by three bottles of vodka a day, is beginning to find them a little wearing. Unlike the Duchess, the Duke lacks zip: another of their acquaintances finds himself mesmerised by the way that he ‘always had something of … riveting stupidity to say on any subject’.
On November 12th, the Burtons grace a dinner for twenty-two at the Windsors’ home. As they enter the room, Burton recognises only two people, the Count and Countess of Bismarck, and then only by name. ‘He, the Count, looks as much like one’s mental picture of the iron chancellor as spaghetti. Soft and round and irresolute. He couldn’t carve modern Germany out of cardboard.’
The Duke and Duchess seem, through his jaded eyes, much diminished. ‘It is extraordinary how small the Duke and Duchess are. Two tiny figures like Toto and Nanette that you keep on the mantelpiece. Chipped around the edges. Something you keep in the front room for Sundays only. Marred royalty. The awful majesty that doth hedge around a king is notably lacking in awfulness. Charming and feckless.’
Elizabeth notes that she and Richard are the only two people without titles in the entire room. She is offended that she has not been placed next to the Duke, and Richard is furious that he has not been placed next to the Duchess. Instead, he is between another Duchess and a Countess, both ‘hard-faced and youngish’.
One of them tells him that she saw him in Hamlet, and asks how he could possibly remember all those lines. Burton says that he doesn’t bother, that he improvises, that Shakespeare is lousy, that Hamlet’s character is so revolting that one could only say some of his lines when drunk. ‘I mean, the frantic self-pity of “How all occasions do inform against me, and spur my dull revenge”. You have to be sloshed to get around that. At least I have to be.’
He thinks he may have shocked her. Another lady, ‘not a day under seventy, whose face had been lifted so often that it was on top of her head’, asks him if it is true that all actors are queer. Yes, he replies, and that’s why he married Elizabeth, because she was queer too, but they have an arrangement.
‘What do you do?’
‘Well, she lives in one suite, and I in another, and we make love by telephone.’
After dinner, Taylor looks on in horror as Burton approaches the Duchess of Windsor and says, ‘You are without any question, the most vulgar woman I’ve ever met.’ Before long, he has picked up the seventy-two-year-old Duchess and is swinging her around ‘like a dancing singing dervish’. The room falls silent. Watching the event with the Duke, Taylor is terrified that Burton will drop her or fall down and kill her. Meanwhile, Burton, who has long suspected that his lifestyle is a betrayal of his origins, is overcome with self-pity and starts pining for the Welsh valleys. ‘Christ! I will arise and go now and go home to Welsh miners who understand drink and the idiocies that it arouses … I shall die of drink and make-up.’
Arriving back at the Plaza Athénée, Taylor is furious, and locks Burton in the spare bedroom. He tries to kick the door down, ‘and nearly succeeded which meant that I spent some time on my hands and knees this morning picking up the battered plaster in the hope that the waiters wouldn’t notice that the hotel had nearly lost a door in the middle of the night’.
In the morning, Taylor berates him for his misbehaviour, complaining that they’ll never be invited again. ‘Thank God,’ he replies, adding, ‘Rarely have I been so stupendously bored.’
That weekend, he reluctantly agrees to accompany Taylor to a grand fancy-dress party at the Rothschilds’ château in the country. Also at the party is Cecil Beaton, who spots them across the room. ‘I have always loathed the Burtons for their vulgarity, commonness and crass bad taste,’ he writes in his diary the next day. ‘She combining the worst of US and English taste, he as butch and coarse as only a Welshman can be.’
ELIZABETH TAYLOR
UNNERVES
JAMES DEAN
Marfa, Texas
June 6th 1955
She is the former child star, now Queen of Hollywood. He is the up-and-coming method actor, surly and unpredictable. Though Elizabeth Taylor is a year younger than James Dean, she belongs to an earlier generation of old-fashioned, glamorous, self-confident, untouchable stars, whereas he heralds a new generation: scruffy, grunting, brooding, callow. They are to act together in Giant, Elizabeth Taylor as the wife of a Texas cattle baron, James Dean as the troublesome ranch-hand who strikes oil.
They are introduced a few days before filming begins. To everyone’s surprise, he charms her, and takes her for a ride in his brand-new Porsche. Taylor ends the day convinced that he is a perfect gentleman, and that others have tarred him with the wrong brush.
The following day, Taylor, expecting a warm welcome after their pleasant introduction, goes up to Dean and says hello. He glares at her over the rims of his glasses, mutters something incomprehensible to himself and strides off as though he hasn’t seen her. It dawns on her that, after all, his reputation for moodiness may be justified.
Their first four weeks are to be spent on location in the small, sleepy town of Marfa, Texas, where the temperatures frequently rise to 120 degrees in the shade. On their first day of filming, his friend Dennis Hopper has never seen James Dean so nervous on a set.
Their first scene involves Dean firing a shot at a water tower, Taylor stopping her car, and Dean asking her in for tea. But Dean is so nervous that he can barely get the words out. ‘At that time there wasn’t anybody who didn’t think she was queen of the movies, and Jimmy was really fuckin’ nervous. They did take after take, and it just wasn’t going right. He was really getting fucked up. Really nervous,’ recalls Hopper. ‘Well, there were around four thousand people watching the scene from a hundred yards away, local people and visitors. And all of a sudden Jimmy turned and walked off towards them. He wasn’t relating to them or anything. He got half-way, unzipped his pants, took out his cock, and took a piss. Then he dripped off, put his cock back, zipped up his pants, and walked back to the set and said, “OK, shoot.”’
This is not the sort of behaviour to which Elizabeth Taylor is accustomed. On the way back from the location, Hopper says to Dean, ‘Jimmy, I’ve seen you do some way-out things before, but what was that?’
‘I was nervous,’ explains Dean. ‘I’m a method actor. I work through my senses. If you’re nervous, your senses can’t reach your subconscious and that’s that – you just can’t work. So I figured if I could piss in front of these two thousand people, man, and I could be cool, I figured if I could do that, I could get in front of that camera and do just anything, anything at all.’
As the filming continues, Dean irritates the cast and crew with his habit of coming to a halt in the middle of a take and shouting, ‘Cut – I fucked up!’ He attributes it to the perfectionism required of a method actor. His co-star Rock Hudson, one of the old school, is less forgiving of the solipsistic neurosis that powers Dean’s acting. The director, George Stevens, also grows irritated by Dean’s random behaviour, regarding it as unprofessional. ‘I’d get so mad at him, and he’d stand there, blinking behind his glasses after having been guilty of some bit of preposterous behaviour, and revealing by his very cast of defiance that he felt some sense of unworthiness.’ Stevens is equally annoyed by Taylor’s obsession with her looks. ‘Until you tone down your veneer, you’ll never be an actress,’ he tells her.
Their shared sense of directorial persecution may help forge a bond between Taylor and Dean: in time, the two stars grow to like each other. ‘We were like brother and sister really; kidding all the time, whatever it was we were talking about. One felt he was a boy one had to take care of, but even that was probably his joke. I don’t think he needed anybody or anything – except his acting.’
Both Dean and Taylor are reliant on drugs of one sort or another: he smokes marijuana, while Taylor takes medications for her plentiful ailments, which Stevens regards as psychosomatic. ‘When Jimmy was eleven and his mother passed away, he began to be molested by his minister. I think that haunted him the rest of his life. In fact, I know it did. We talked about it a lot. During Giant we’d stay up nights and talk and talk and that was one of the things he confessed to me,’ Taylor says forty-two years later.
‘He would tell me about his past life, some of the grief and unhappiness he had experienced, and some of his loves and tragedies. Then, the next day on set, I would say, “Hi, Jimmy,” and he would give me a cursory nod of his head. It was almost as if he didn’t want to recognise me, as if he was ashamed of having revealed so much of himself the night before. It would take maybe a day or two for him to become my friend again.’
One day in September, with only a few scenes left to shoot, the director, crew members and actors assemble in the screening room to view the day’s rushes. In the middle of the screening, Stevens takes a call, then orders the lights up. James Dean, he announces, has been killed in a car crash.
The following day, Taylor is summoned to film reaction shots for a scene in which she acted with Dean a few days ago. She realises with a start that she is being asked to react to a young man whose corpse is now lying on a slab in a funeral home at Paso Robles, but she goes ahead with it just the same.
JAMES DEAN
IS FOREWARNED BY
ALEC GUINNESS
The Villa Capri, Hollywood
September 23rd 1955
A week before he is due to die, James Dean is sitting at a table in his favourite little restaurant in Hollywood, the Villa Capri. He is very chummy with Nikkos, its maître d’, from whom he has started renting a log house in Sherman Oaks.
Looking towards the entrance, he spots a familiar figure attempting to get a table, then being turned away. He recognises him as the English actor Alec Guinness, the star of so many of his favourite Ealing comedies, like Kind Hearts and Coronets.
Guinness has always been more than a touch superstitious, and in a few minutes he will be applying his sixth sense to James Dean. He regularly visits fortune tellers, and has even indulged in a little table-turning. At one time in his life he became obsessed with tarot cards, until all of a sudden one evening, ‘I got the horrors about them and impetuously threw cards and books on a blazing log fire.’
Guinness delights in recounting his psychic powers. On the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, 1943, he had been resting in the cabin of the naval ship of which he was a lieutenant, when he had apparently heard a sinister voice saying, ‘Tomorrow.’ He was convinced that this was a premonition of death.
That night, sailing from Sicily to the Yugoslav island of Vis, his ship hit a hurricane. An electrical discharge caused ribbons of blue fluorescent light, ‘until the whole ship was lit up like some dizzying fairground sideshow’. Convinced that he was going to die, Guinness found the spectacle ‘beautiful and strangely comforting’.
The ship was dashed against the rocks as it entered the small Italian port of Termoli, and he gave the order to abandon ship. He had, it seems, outwitted the sinister voice – or had it been delivering less of a judgement than a warning?
In March this year, he and his wife were on holiday in the Trossachs in Scotland when their car had a bad puncture. ‘Couldn’t get the wheel off,’ he recalls in his diary. ‘After nearly an hour’s effort said a little prayer to St Anthony and the nuts came loose the very next time I tried – and with only a small effort.’
Six months later he arrives in Hollywood, exhausted after a sixteen-hour flight from Copenhagen, in order to begin filming The Swan with Grace Kelly and Louis Jourdan.
The screenwriter of Father Brown, Thelma Moss, has invited him out to dinner, but they are having difficulty finding a table because Thelma is wearing slacks. They finally settle for a small Italian restaurant, the Villa Capri, which has a more casual dress-code, but when they get there they are told by the genial maître d’ that it is full, and so they begin to walk away.
‘I don’t care where we eat or what. Just something, somewhere,’ grumbles Guinness irritably, adding, ‘I don’t mind just a hamburger.’
At that moment, he becomes aware of the sound of feet running down the street behind him. He turns to see a young man in sneakers, a sweatshirt and blue jeans. ‘You want a table?’ he asks. ‘Join me. My name’s James Dean.’
‘Yes, very kind of you,’ replies Guinness with relief, and eagerly follows him back to the Villa Capri.
Before they go into the restaurant, James Dean says, ‘I’d like to show you something,’ and takes them into the courtyard of the restaurant. There, he proudly shows them his new racing car, one of only ninety Porsche 550 Spyders ever produced. He has had it customised: it now has tartan seating and two red stripes at the rear of its wheelwell, all designed by George Barris, the man who will go on to design the Batmobile. ‘It’s just been delivered,’ Dean says, proudly. On the lower rear of the engine cover are the words ‘Little Bastard’. The car is so brand new that it is still wrapped in cellophane, with a bunch of roses tied to its bonnet.
Alec Guinness is seized by one of his premonitions.
‘How fast can you go in that?’
‘I can do 150 in it.’
‘Have you driven it?’
‘I’ve never been in it at all.’
And then – ‘exhausted, hungry, feeling a little ill-tempered in spite of Dean’s kindness’ – Guinness hears himself saying, in a voice he can hardly recognise as his own, ‘Look, I won’t join your table unless you want me to, but I must say something. Please do not get into that car.’ He looks at his watch. ‘I said, “It’s now 10 o’clock, Friday the 23rd of September 1955. If you get in that car you will be found dead in it by this time next week.”’
Despite this grim prognosis, Dean laughs. ‘Oh, shucks!’ he says. ‘Don’t be so mean!’
Guinness apologises, blaming his outburst on a lack of sleep and food. The three of them then have dinner together – ‘a charming dinner’ – before going their separate ways. Guinness makes no further reference to the car, ‘but in my heart I was uneasy’.
Though Dean himself has an interest in morbid premonitions – passages about death and degradation are heavily underlined in his copy of Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon – he ignores Guinness’s warning. A week later, on September 30th, he is driving his new Spyder across the junction of Route 46 and Route 41 near Cholame, California, when he collides head-on with a Ford Custom Tudor coupé driven by a student with the inappropriately comical name of Donald Turnupseed.
James Dean is taken by ambulance to Paso Robles War Memorial Hospital, where he is pronounced dead on arrival at 5.59 p.m. His last words, uttered just before impact, are, ‘The guy’s gotta stop … he’ll see us.’
Fifty years after his death, this section of the road is renamed the James Dean Memorial Junction.
‘It was a very odd, spooky experience,’ recalls Alec Guinness of their strange meeting. ‘I liked him very much. I would have liked to have known him more.’
ALEC GUINNESS
CRAWLS WITH
EVELYN WAUGH
The Church of the Immaculate Conception, Farm Street, London W1
August 4th 1955
On Tuesday, July 19th 1955, the postman delivers a parcel and a letter to Evelyn Waugh. The parcel contains his weekly box of cigars. He is put out when the postman tries to charge him almost £8 duty on it. The letter is from his sixty-seven-year-old goddaughter, Edith Sitwell. She says she is to be received into the Roman Catholic Church in just over a fortnight. The news makes Waugh uneasy. He is aware of her tendency to show off. ‘She might be making an occasion of it,’ he confides to his diary, adding that he has written to her confessor, Father Caraman, ‘urging the example of St Helena’. This particular saint is noted for her piety.
August 4th is a bright, sunny day. Waugh wakes up in the Grand Hotel, Folkestone. The staff are civil and obliging, the food dull and lukewarm. ‘If only the cook and the patrons were better it would be admirable,’ he thinks. He keeps sending notes to the chef (‘Don’t put cornflour in the sauce’), who reacts badly. ‘He comes up and glowers at me in his white hat from behind a screen in the dining room.’
Waugh catches the 9 a.m. train to Charing Cross. One of his fellow passengers is ‘a ginger-whiskered giant who looked like a farmer and read the Financial Times’. Waugh’s journey is enlivened by a cinder blowing in from the engine, landing on the giant’s tweed coat and burning a hole in it.
From Charing Cross, Waugh walks to White’s Club, stopping to buy a carnation on the way. At White’s, he refreshes himself with a mug filled with stout, gin and ginger beer, before arriving at Farm Street at 11.45 a.m. He is wearing a loud black-and-white houndstooth tweed suit, a red tie and a boater from which stream red and blue ribbons. Waugh enters the Ignatius Chapel, which he finds empty save for ‘a bald shy man’ who introduces himself as Alec Guinness.
Getting dressed this morning, Alec Guinness found it hard to know what to wear. Eventually, he picked a navy-blue hopsack suit as ‘suitably formal’. He felt a black or grey tie would be ‘too severe’, preferring a bright blue tie as ‘more in keeping for what I assumed was a joyous event’. He has not yet become a Catholic himself.
They are joined, in Waugh’s words, by ‘an old deaf woman with dyed red hair whose name I never learned’. Guinness, too, fails to catch her name, ‘even when she barked at us’. She walks unsteadily with the aid of two sticks, and her bare arms are encased in metal bangles which give him the impression that she is some ancient warrior.
Guinness watches as she attempts to sit down on a complicated seat she has brought with her – ‘half prie-dieu and half collapsible deckchair’. Somehow, she manages to entangle herself in the mechanism, with disastrous results: ‘The sticks slid from under her, the chair heaped itself on the floor and all the bangles rolled down her arms and sticks and propelled themselves in every direction around the room.’
‘My jewels!’ she cries. ‘Please to bring back my jewels!’
Waugh and Guinness dutifully get down on all fours and wriggle their way under the pews and around the candle sconces, trying to retrieve ‘everything round and glittering’.
‘How many jewels were you wearing?’ Waugh asks the old deaf woman.
‘Seventy,’ she replies.
Under the pews, Waugh whispers to Guinness, ‘What nationality?’
‘Russian, at a guess,’ says Guinness, sliding on his stomach beneath a pew and dirtying his smart suit.
‘Or Rumanian,’ says Waugh. ‘She crossed herself backwards. She may be a Maronite Christian, in which case beware.’
The two men start laughing, and soon, according to Guinness, get ‘barely controllable hysterics’. They pick up all the bangles they can find. Guinness counts them into her hands, but the old deaf woman looks suspiciously at the pair of them, as if they might have pocketed a few.
‘Is that all?’ she asks.
‘Sixty-eight,’ says Guinness.
‘You are still wearing two,’ observes Waugh.
At that moment, the organ strikes a deep note, and the other three witnesses enter. Waugh turns his unforgiving owlish stare upon ‘Father D’Arcy … a little swarthy man who looked like a Jew but claimed to be Portuguese, and a blond youth who looked American but claimed to be English’. Guinness notes that the Portuguese man, a poet, looks ‘a little peevishly atheistic’.
Then, up the aisle, ‘swathed in black like a sixteenth-century infanta’, glides Edith Sitwell, to be received into the Church by Father Caraman.
The service concluded, they are driven in a Daimler from Farm Street to the Sesame Club, just two streets away. Waugh has heard bad things about it, but is pleasantly surprised by the ‘gargantuan feast’ that has been laid on: cold consommé, lobster Newberg, steak, strawberry flan and ‘great quantities of wine’. All in all, he considers it ‘a rich blow-out’.
Guinness notes, ‘Edith presiding like a bride in black and Fr Caraman frequently casting his eyes heavenwards as if in ecstasy.’
An awkward moment comes when the old deaf woman suddenly says, ‘Did I hear the word “whisky”?’
‘Do you want one?’ asks Waugh.
‘More than anything in the world.’
‘I’ll get you some.’
But at this point the Portuguese poet steps in. He nudges Waugh and says, ‘It would be disastrous.’ So Waugh persuades her to stick with the white wine. Repeating the words of the Portuguese poet, he explains to Guinness that ‘We couldn’t face another disaster from that quarter.’
Over lunch, Guinness tipsily shares his few remaining theological anxieties with the blond English youth and the Portuguese poet. ‘Would we have to drink the Pope’s health? If Edith died on the spot would she go straight to heaven? And would that be a case for ecclesiastical rejoicing or worldly and artistic distress?’ A great deal is drunk; the following morning, try as he may, Guinness cannot recollect any of them leaving the table.
EVELYN WAUGH
WRONG-FOOTS
IGOR STRAVINSKY
The Ambassador Hotel, Park Avenue, New York
February 4th 1949
Evelyn Waugh claims to dislike all music, with the possible exception of plainchant. This does not bode well for Igor Stravinsky as he prepares to meet him in New York. He has already been warned by Aldous Huxley that Waugh can be ‘prickly, pompous, and downright unpleasant’. But he is an admirer of Waugh’s writing, particularly his talent for dialogue and the naming of characters (Dr Kakaphilos; Father Rothschild, S.J.), and is pleased when a friend arranges a meeting.
Stravinsky spent last night in the more congenial company of Vladimir Nabokov, W.H. Auden and George Balanchine, playing them his draft score of Act 1 of The Rake’s Progress. As usual, he found himself a little irritated by Auden’s tendency to talk during any performance, but this is small fry compared to what lies ahead: Waugh is, after all, notoriously prickly.
‘Why does everybody except me find it so easy to be nice?’ asks the distracted Gilbert Pinfold in Waugh’s most autobiographical novel.
Tom Driberg identifies this as ‘a true outcry’ from Pinfold’s creator. At the age of only forty-five, Waugh has somehow boxed himself into the character of a grumpy old curmudgeon: Penelope Fitzgerald sums up the social message he wishes to convey as: I am bored, you are frightened.
His rudeness has no age limit. When Ann Fleming brings her uninvited three-year-old son to tea at the Grand Hotel, Folkestone, Waugh is so annoyed that he puts ‘his face close to the child’s, dragging down the corners of eyes and mouth with forefingers and thumbs, producing an effect of such unbelievable malignity that the child shrieked with terror and fell to the floor’. Fleming retaliates by giving Waugh’s face a hard slap and overturning a plate of éclairs.
Observing him at Pratt’s Club, Malcolm Muggeridge thinks Waugh presents a ‘quite ludicrous figure in dinner jacket, silk shirt; extraordinarily like a loquacious woman, with dinner jacket cut like a maternity gown to hide his bulging stomach. He was very genial, probably pretty plastered – all the time playing this part of a crotchety old character rather deaf, cupping his ear – “Feller’s a bit of a Socialist, I suspect.” Amusing for about a quarter of an hour. Tony [Powell] and I agreed that an essential difference between Graham [Greene] and Waugh is that, whereas Graham tends to impose an agonized silence, Waugh demands agonized attention.’
Some of his rudest remarks are delivered in such a way that few, perhaps including himself, can tell whether they are intended. ‘I spent two nights at Cap Ferrat with Mr Maugham (who has lost his fine cook) and made a great gaffe,’ he writes to Harold Acton in April 1952. ‘The first evening he asked me what someone was like and I said “A pansy with a stammer.” All the Picassos on the walls blanched.’
He delights in wrong-footing one and all. When Feliks Topolski and Hugh Burnett arrive for lunch at Combe Florey to prepare for Waugh’s appearance on Face to Face, he is at pains to point out that his house has no television set and a radio only in the servants’ quarters. He then serves them a large tureen of green-tufted strawberries. ‘Too late I saw the problem,’ recalls Burnett. ‘Put the strawberries on the plate, add the cream, take the spoon – and you were trapped with the strawberry tufts. My attempt to spear one shot it under the sideboard. That was the BBC disgraced. Topolski, seeing what had happened, did the socially unthinkable – dipped a strawberry into the cream with his fingers. “Ah, Mr Topolski,” Waugh observed helpfully, “You need a spoon.”’ When the day for the recording comes, Burnett introduces him to his interviewer, John Freeman. ‘How do you do, Mr Waugh,’ said Freeman.
‘The name is Waugh – not Wuff!’ he replied.
‘But I called you Mr Waugh.’
‘No, no, I distinctly heard you say “Wuff”.’
During the interview, Waugh confesses that his worst fault is irritability. What with? asks Freeman. ‘Absolutely everything. Inanimate objects and people, animals, anything.’
The Stravinskys and the Waughs meet up at the Ambassador Hotel on Park Avenue. Waugh is never at his best in America: he finds the natives unappealing, and upsets them with observations such as, ‘Of course the Americans are cowards. They are almost all the descendants of wretches who deserted their legitimate monarch for fear of military service.’
Stravinsky soon finds that the cutting edge in Waugh’s work is even sharper in his person. ‘Not an immediately endearing character,’ he thinks. After they have introduced themselves, Stravinsky asks Waugh whether he would care for a whisky. ‘I do not drink whisky before wine,’ he replies, his tone suggesting faint horror at Stravinsky’s ignorance.
Waugh seems to rejoice in causing all Stravinsky’s remarks, polite, lively or anodyne, to bounce back in his face. At first, Stravinsky speaks to Waugh in French, but Waugh replies that he does not speak the language. Mrs Waugh contradicts him pleasantly, but is swiftly rebuked.
The conversation stutters on. Stravinsky says he admires the Constitution of the United States. Waugh replies that he deplores ‘everything American, beginning with the Constitution’. They pause to study their menus. Stravinsky recommends the chicken; Waugh points out that it is a Friday.
‘Whether Mr Waugh was disagreeable, or only preposterously arch, I cannot say,’ Stravinsky recalls.
‘Horace Walpole remarks somewhere that the next worst thing to disagreeableness is too-agreeableness. I would reverse the order of preference myself while conceding that on short acquaintance disagreeableness is the greater strain.’ Desperately trying to find common ground, Stravinsky attempts to relate his own recent sung Mass to the theme of Waugh’s current lecture tour. ‘All music is positively painful to me,’ replies Waugh.
The only subject on which the two of them achieve a measure of agreement concerns the burial customs of the United States. Stravinsky is impressed by Waugh’s knowledge. Waugh claims that he himself has ‘arranged to be buried at sea’, though this, it turns out, is just another of his little teases.
IGOR STRAVINSKY
IS APPALLED BY
WALT DISNEY
Burbank Studios, Los Angeles
December 1939
Igor Stravinsky is himself not the easiest of folk, but Walt Disney is not to know this when the composer drops round to his studio.
Disney is at the height of his success. Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck are the most durable and biddable stars Hollywood will ever know, and his recent Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs will gross $8 million. He has just built himself a palatial studio in Burbank, the size of a modest town, complete with its own streets, electric system and telephone exchange.
Meeting Leopold Stokowski, the conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, at a dinner party, Disney mentions an idea he has had for a two-reel version of Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, starring Mickey Mouse. Stokowski grows tremendously excited at the idea of animating great works of music. He suggests other pieces Disney might transform into colour: Bach’s Organ Toccata in D-minor, for instance. Disney sees it as orange. ‘Oh, no, I see it as purple,’ counters Stokowski.
Disney’s modest idea balloons into a full-length film, with classical music galore. Both men become over-excited: no idea seems too preposterous. Stokowski suggests a Debussy prelude, ‘Les Sons et les parfums tournent l’air du soir’, explaining that he has always craved perfume in theatres. Disney goes overboard for it. ‘You’ve got something!’ he says. ‘You could get them to name a special perfume for this – create a perfume – you could get write-ups in the papers! It’s a hot idea!’
Disney wants a sequence showing the creation of the world, full of volcanoes and dinosaurs. But what music to use? His researchers can only come up with Haydn’s Creation, but Disney thinks it doesn’t carry quite enough oomph. At this point, Stokowski alerts him to Le Sacre du printemps by Igor Stravinsky.
Disney listens to it, and is immediately gripped. He offers Stravinsky $5,000 for the rights, though Stravinsky will remember it as $10,000. According to Stravinsky, Disney hints that if permission is withheld he will use the music anyway: pre-Revolutionary Russian copyrights are no longer valid.
Stravinsky accepts; Disney steams ahead. Before long the human inhabitants of the Burbank studio find themselves working alongside animals in cages, including iguanas and baby alligators, with skilled animators studying their movements close-up. ‘It should look as though the studio has sent an expedition back to the earth six million years ago,’ enthuses Disney. He is so excited that he starts free-associating to the music: ‘Something like that last WHAHUMMPH I feel is a volcano – yet it’s on land. I get that UGHHWAHUMMPH! on land, but we can look out on the water before this and see water spouts.’ As he listens to the music, he gets so worked up that he suddenly blurts, ‘Stravinsky will say: “Jesus, I didn’t know I wrote that music!”’
Which, as it turns out, is roughly what Stravinsky does say. In December 1939, he drops into the Burbank studio for a private screening of Fantasia. The experience leaves him with the most awful memories. ‘I remember someone offering me a score, and when I said I had my own, that someone saying, “But it is all changed.” It was indeed. The instrumentation had been improved by such stunts as having the horns play their glissandi an octave higher in the Danse de la terre. The order of pieces had been shuffled, too, and the most difficult of them eliminated, though this did not save the musical performance, which was execrable.’
As Stravinsky remembers it, Disney tries to reassure him by saying, ‘Think of the number of people who will now be able to hear your music.’ To which Stravinsky replies, ‘The numbers of people who consume music … is of no interest to me. The mass adds nothing to art.’
But Disney’s memories of the meeting are quite different. Stravinsky, he maintains, made an earlier visit to the studio, saw the original sketches for the Fantasia version of Le Sacre and declared how excited he was. Later, having seen the finished product, Stravinsky emerged from the projection room ‘visibly moved’. Disney remembers the composer saying that prehistoric life was what he always had in mind when he wrote it. But Stravinsky disagrees. ‘That I could have expressed approbation over the treatment of my own music seems to me highly improbable – though, of course, I should hope I was polite.’
Either way, he is much less polite twenty years later, when he and Disney clash in the pages of the New York Times. He dislikes what was done to his music, he writes, and furthermore, ‘I will say nothing about the visual complement as I do not wish to criticise unresisting imbecility.’
Whose memory are we to trust? There may be a temptation to favour the highbrow over the lowbrow, the intellectual over the populist; but self-delusion rains on all, high and low. Many artists who took money from Hollywood felt able to absolve themselves by seeking a divorce from the finished product. For them, the prevailing myth of the philistine Hollywood producer offered a welcome escape hatch.
By and large, the evidence favours Disney. Less than a year after their supposed contretemps, Stravinsky cheerfully sells Disney two more options – one on the musical folk tale Renard, the other on The Firebird.
And his artistic halo always has a certain rubbery quality about it: he composes some hunting music for Orson Welles’s Jane Eyre, and after contractual negotiations break down, uses the very same piece for a commission from the Boston Symphony Orchestra, transforming it into an ode to the memory of the wife of Serge Koussevitzky. On another occasion, he lifts the incidental music he has been commissioned to write for a film about the Nazi occupation of Norway, Commandos Strike at Dawn, straight from a collection of Norwegian folk tunes his wife has stumbled upon in a second-hand bookstore in Los Angeles. When this deal falls through, he further rejigs it into a piece for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, solemnly retitling it ‘Four Norwegian Moods’.
WALT DISNEY
RESISTS
P.L. TRAVERS
Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, Los Angeles
August 27th 1964
It is all smiles as Walt Disney and his most recent collaborator, P.L. Travers, pose with Julie Andrews at the world premiere of Mary Poppins. This, he tells reporters, is the movie he has been dreaming of making ever since 1944, when he first heard his wife and children laughing at a book and asked them what it was. At his side, Travers, aged sixty-five, appears equally thrilled. ‘It’s a splendid film and very well cast!’ she enthuses.
The premiere is a lavish affair. A miniature train rolls down Hollywood Boulevard with Mickey Mouse, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Peter Pan, Peter Rabbit, the Three Little Pigs, the Big Bad Wolf, Pluto, a skunk and four dancing penguins on board. At the cinema, the Disneyland staff are dressed as English bobbies; at the party afterwards, grinning chimney-sweeps frolic to music from a band of Pearly Kings and Queens.
The next day, Travers is over the moon, wiring her congratulations to ‘Dear Walt’. The film is, she says, ‘a splendid spectacle … true to the spirit of Mary Poppins’. Disney’s response is a little more guarded. He is happy to have her reactions, he says, and appreciates her taking the time, but what a pity that ‘the hectic activities before, during and after the premiere’ prevented them from seeing more of each other.
Travers writes back, thanking Disney for thanking her for thanking him. The film is, she says, ‘splendid, gay, generous and wonderfully pretty’ – even if, for her, the real Mary Poppins remains within the covers of her books. On her copy, she adds a note saying that it is a letter ‘with much between the lines’. The same month, she complains to her London publisher that the film is ‘simply sad’.
Those smiles at the premiere are, in fact, the first and the last they will ever exchange. Pamela Travers is a long-time devotee of Gurdjieff, Krishnamurti, Yeats and Blake. For her, the Mary Poppins books were never just children’s stories, but intensely personal reflections of her Alphabetti Spaghetti blend of philosophy, mysticism, theosophy, Zen Buddhism, duality, and the oneness of everything. In the last year of her life, she will reveal to an interviewer that Mary Poppins is related to the mother of God. Disney’s own conception of the finger-clicking nanny is rather more straightforward.
Nothing about the film of Mary Poppins has been easy. The contract alone took sixteen years to negotiate: Travers finally accepts 5 per cent of gross profits, with a guarantee of $100,000. But this is to prove inadequate compensation: she soon begins to complain that Disney is ‘without subtlety and emasculates any character he touches, replacing truth with false sentimentality’.
Walt Disney’s attitude to Travers is one of damage limitation. He wants to keep her on board, but positioned as far as possible from the driver’s seat. This does not stop Travers making frequent lunges for the steering wheel, generally with a view to forcing the vehicle into reverse. She complains about everybody and everything, even stretching to the type of measuring tape Mary Poppins would use.
She objects to all the Americanisms that seem to be creeping in – ‘outing’, ‘freshen up’, ‘on schedule’, ‘Let’s go fly a kite’ – and considers the servants much too common and vulgar. Furthermore, the Banks home is much too grand, and any suggestion of a romance between Mary Poppins and the cockney chimneysweep Bert is utterly distasteful. Finally, she objects to Mrs Banks being portrayed as a suffragette, and considers the Christian name they impose on her – Cynthia – ‘unlucky, cold and sexless’, her own preference being Winifred.
Travers even believes her responsibilities extend to the casting.
The day after Julie Andrews gives birth, she phones her in hospital. ‘P.L. Travers here. Speak to me. I want to hear your voice.’ When they finally meet, her first remark to the actress is, ‘Well, you’ve got the nose for it.’
Mary Poppins is a worldwide success. Costing $5.2 million to make, it grosses $50 million. But the more the money rolls in, the more Travers’ attitude to the film and its creator sours. She tells Ladies’ Home Journal that she hated parts of the film, like the animated horse and pig, and disapproved of Mary Poppins kicking up her gown and showing her underwear, and disliked the billboards saying ‘Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins’ when they should have said ‘P.L. Travers’ Mary Poppins’.
She writes to a friend that Disney wishes her dead, and is furious with her for not obliging. ‘After all, until now, all his authors have been dead and out of copyright.’ But there is always the promise of a sequel, and yet more money. It is only when Disney dies in December 1966
that her objections become more concentrated and vocal. In 1967, she says that the film was ‘an emotional shock, which left me deeply disturbed’, and in 1968 that she ‘couldn’t bear’ it – ‘all that smiling’. In 1972, she declares in a lecture that ‘When I was doing the film with George Disney – that is his name, isn’t it – George? – he kept insisting on a love affair between Mary Poppins and Bert. I had a terrible time with him.’
Her invitation to the world premiere is, it later emerges, not achieved without a struggle. Failing to receive an invitation, she instructs her lawyer, agent and publisher to demand one on her behalf. When it is still not forthcoming, she sends a telegram to Disney himself, informing him she is in the States, and plans on attending the premiere: she is sure somebody will find a seat for her, and will he let her know the details? Her attendance is, she adds, essential ‘for the dignity of the books’.
Disney writes back saying that he has always been counting on her presence at the London premiere, but is now delighted to know she will also be able to come to the premiere in Los Angeles. And yes, they will happily hold a seat for her.
P.L. TRAVERS
WATCHES OVER
GEORGE IVANOVICH GURDJIEFF
The American Hospital of Paris, Neuilly-sur-Seine
October 30th 1949
Any meeting between the living and the dead is inevitably one-sided. Do they know something we don’t know?
On October 30th 1949, P.L. Travers sits all night in a private room on the first floor of the American Hospital of Paris, gazing lovingly at the corpse of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff.
Pamela first encountered Gurdjieff thirteen years ago, in 1936, at his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, near Fontainebleau. After spending much of her life pursuing poets and mystics, she found in Gurdjieff what she had long been looking for, and was particularly drawn to his unusual emphasis on finding truth through dance. Back in London, she was to teach these Gurdjieffian dances before progressing to teaching the teachers; she spread his beliefs for the rest of her life.
Gurdjieff was a guru with an opaque past. Half Armenian, half Greek, he cultivated obscurity about many things, not least his age.
He tried his hand at many trades, dealing, in different places and at different times, in a range of products including carpets, antiques, oil, fish, caviar, false eyelashes, sparrows and corsets.
But around 1912, he found his calling as a guru, his core belief being that ‘modern man lives in sleep, in sleep he is born and in sleep he dies’. Only by subscribing to Gurdjieff’s special training could modern man snap out of it, rise to a higher level of consciousness, and find God, or, as Gurdjieff preferred to call Him, ‘Our Almighty Omni-Loving Common Father Uni-Being Creator Endless’.
Among his many other beliefs was that the moon lives off the energy of dead human beings, known as Askokin, and controls all man’s actions. To guard against rebellion, the higher powers have implanted an organ at the base of man’s spine called the Kundabuffer, which stops him becoming too intelligent.
Only those who follow Gurdjieff’s path can break away from their fate as food for the moon, and thus attain immortality.
P.L. Travers’ most famous creation, the flying nanny Mary Poppins, might be seen as Gurdjieff in a long dress, shorn of his handlebar moustache and propelled by an umbrella: in some of the stories, Poppins guides her charges to the secrets of the universe, with the planets all indulging in a great cosmic dance. In the chapter ‘The New One’ in Mary Poppins Comes Back, Mr and Mrs Banks give birth to a new baby, Annabel, who, it emerges, is formed from the sea, sky, stars and sun. Mary Poppins is, to all intents and purposes, one of the enlightened, aware of worlds beyond.
As Pamela Travers sits beside the corpse of Gurdjieff, she believes that the real Gurdjieff is somewhere else, somewhere on another plain, reunited with the being he used to call the Most Most [sic] Holy Sun Absolute. Alive, he was the most earthy of men, enjoying huge three-course meals, washed down with Armagnac, while his followers made do with bowls of thin soup. Some non-believers found his personal habits unseemly. In his palatial flat at his institute in Paris, he often didn’t bother to visit the lavatory, preferring to defecate willy-nilly. ‘There were times when I would have to use a ladder to clean the walls,’ recalls one of the residents. He demanded unquestioning obedience from his wealthy followers, and enjoyed humiliating them; it was almost as though he relished the sight of grown men in tears. He was a stranger to celibacy, and loved to boast of all the babies he had fathered, peppering his pidgin English with the word ‘fuck’. But for his devotees this only added to his air of other-worldliness: surely a guru so un-gurulike could not possibly be a fraud?
The Second World War separated the guru from his protégée. Stuck in Paris, Gurdjieff refused to let the Nazi occupation hinder his lifestyle, feasting on delicacies from local suppliers attained with promises – bogus, as it turned out – of massive wealth owed to him from a Texan oilfield.
The moment the war was over, Pamela travelled to Paris on one of the first trains. She sat with Gurdjieff’s other disciples and imbibed his latest thoughts and aphorisms such as ‘Mathematic is useless. You cannot learn laws of world creation and world existence by mathematic,’ and ‘Useless study Freud or Jung. This only masturbation.’ He advised Pamela and his other followers to have an enema every day, then donned a tasselled magenta fez to play his accordion in a minor key. ‘This is temple music,’ he assured them. ‘Very ancient.’
Pamela saw Gurdjieff in Paris for one last time a little under a month before he died. She brought her adopted son, Camillus, who told Gurdjieff that he had no father. ‘I will be your father,’ said Gurdjieff. On October 25th 1949, Gurdjieff was taken to the American Hospital, carried into the ambulance in his bright pyjamas, smoking a Gauloise Bleue and exclaiming merrily, ‘Au revoir, tout le monde!’
He died four days later. The next day, Pamela travels from Victoria Station to Paris with a group of his followers. She pays homage to his corpse first in his bedroom, and for the remainder of the week in the chapel. On November 2nd she sets eyes on him for the very last time. While she is there, the undertakers come to collect him, but the coffin is too small, and a fresh one has to be ordered.
She attends his funeral at the Alexandre Nevski Cathedral. Afterwards, she files up and kisses the coffin. He is buried at Avon near Fontainebleau; with the other mourners, she throws a handful of earth on his grave.
Travers dies aged ninety-five, in 1996, leaving £2,044,078 in her will, including a generous bequest to the Gurdjieff Society. At her funeral in Chelsea, her lawyers and accountants sit on one side of the aisle, her fellow Gurdjieffians on the other. As her coffin is carried away from Christ Church, these two sides of the congregation join together in a rendition of ‘Lord of the Dance’.
GEORGE IVANOVICH GURDJIEFF
COOKS SAUERKRAUT FOR
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT
Taliesin, Spring Green, Wisconsin
June 1934
Gurdjieff is no easy traveller. He arrives at Grand Central Station with seven suitcases, furious at the train driver for refusing to delay the departure of the midnight express until he is in a mood to board.
Cursing loudly, he bangs his way through thirteen Pullman cars, disturbing the sleeping passengers. Throughout the night, he moans and groans at theatrical volume. At breakfast, he refuses everything on the menu, informing the steward, at exhaustive length, about his complicated digestive processes and special dietary needs. For the rest of the journey he infuriates his fellow passengers with his chain smoking, drinks furiously and produces all sorts of smelly food, including an over-ripe Camembert. From Chicago, he travels to the Wrights’ 1,000-acre architectural fellowship, Taliesin. ‘Now must change, we are going to special place,’ he informs his long-suffering assistant.
Gurdjieff and Frank Lloyd Wright have never met before. Both men are, by nature, leaders, not disciples: a clash of egos seems on the cards. Furthermore, there is a question of jealousy: Wright’s wife Olgivanna was, for many years, one of Gurdjieff’s sacred dancers. ‘I wish for immortality,’ she tells him on their first meeting, and Gurdjieff had agreed to organise it for her. Added to this, the Wrights’ six-year marriage – his third, her second – is going through a stormy patch. Wright has taken to blaming Olgivanna for all his worst moods. One moment he will take an outlandish view, bulldozing her into agreeing with him, then he will change his mind and chastise her for letting him think like that. A few days ago, he dreamed that Olgivanna was in bed with a black man. When he woke up, he placed the blame on her. ‘There must be something in you that led me to the conclusion of such a dream!’ he said. Before the arrival of Gurdjieff, Olgivanna has been thinking of leaving Wright. ‘I cannot bear this abuse any longer,’ she tells her daughter.
Gurdjieff is no shrinking violet. The moment he sets foot in Taliesin he takes charge of the cooking, producing many little bags of hot spices and peppers from his various pockets. He takes control of the entertainment, too. After dinner, he supervises the playing of twenty-five or thirty of his own compositions on the piano: he is the self-proclaimed pioneer of a revolutionary new school of ‘objective’ music, the first ever to produce exactly the same reaction in all its listeners.
Without fuss, Wright becomes a willing disciple. Just twenty-four hours in the company of Gurdjieff have served to convince him of his genius. He compares him to ‘some oriental buddha’ who has ‘come alive in our midst’; like Gandhi, though ‘more robust, aggressive and venturesome … Notwithstanding a superabundance of personal idiosyncrasy, George Gurdjieff seems to have the stuff in him of which genuine prophets have been made.’ Wright sees him as ageless, like God. He is, he says, ‘a man of perhaps eighty-five looking fifty-five’. In fact, though nobody knows for sure, most people reckon his year of birth to be 1866, which would in fact make him more like sixty-eight.
Gurdjieff loves to be in command, and is never happier than when a lot of people are doing exactly what he says. Before his stay is over, he has made everyone cook great quantities of sauerkraut from his own recipe, involving whole apples, including their skins, their stems and their cores. Even his most devoted disciples find it hard to swallow. On his departure from Taliesin, he leaves behind two fifty-gallon barrels of the stuff. In the first flush of discipleship, Frank Lloyd Wright will not hear a word against the sauerkraut. He insists the barrels must be transported to his Fellowship’s desert camp in Arizona, watching attentively as they are loaded onto a truck.
The sauerkraut truck gets as far as Iowa before the crew decides to call it a day. ‘We loosened the tailgate ropes,’ one of them confesses years later, ‘and dumped the barrels into a ditch.’
Even after such a brief meeting, Wright never loses his faith in Gurdjieff. Mysteriously, his rows with Olgivanna come to an end. ‘I am sure Gurdjieff told Olgivanna to be devious, because it all changed,’ notes a friend. Or was it something in the sauerkraut?
As time goes by, Taliesin comes increasingly to resemble Gurdjieff’s Institute of Harmonious Development, particularly in its strictly pyramidical approach to harmony. ‘Never have so many people spent so much time making a very few people comfortable,’ remarks one disaffected disciple. By the late 1940s, the Wrights have taken to sitting on a dais, eating different meals to their followers, who are given fried eggs.
The two men meet again from time to time. Whenever they clash, it is Wright who gives way: there is never any question as to which is the guru and which the disciple. When Gurdjieff returns to Taliesin in 1939, Wright suggests he sends some of his own pupils to Gurdjieff in Paris, ‘Then they can come back to me and I’ll finish them off.’
‘YOU finish! You are IDIOT!’ snaps Gurdjieff. ‘YOU finish? No. YOU begin. I finish!’
In November 1948, Wright visits Gurdjieff in the Wellington Hotel, New York, where he is staying with his varied entourage. Gurdjieff places Wright beneath an enneagram constructed of large leaves, and listens attentively as Wright talks him through his problems with his gall bladder. ‘I seven times doctor,’ announces Gurdjieff, prescribing him a meal of mutton, avocado and peppered Armagnac. Oddly enough, it seems to do the trick. Gurdjieff then brings out his harmonium. ‘The music I play you now came from monastery where Jesus Christ spent from eighteenth to thirtieth year,’ he explains.
One of Gurdjieff’s most striking pronouncements is, ‘I am Gurdjieff. I will NOT die!’ But die he does, just under a year later.
‘The greatest man in the world has recently died,’ Wright announces to the audience as he is being presented with a medal in New York. ‘His name was Gurdjieff.’
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT
DESIGNS A HOUSE FOR
MARILYN MONROE
The Plaza Hotel, Fifth Avenue, New York
Autumn 1957
One afternoon in the autumn of 1957, the most venerated architect in America, Frank Lloyd Wright, now aged ninety, is working in his suite in the Plaza Hotel, New York, when the doorbell rings. It is Marilyn Monroe, come to ask him to design a house.
Since their marriage in June 1956, Arthur Miller and his bride Marilyn Monroe have been based at Miller’s modest two-storey country house near Roxbury, Connecticut. Dating from 1783, it has 325 acres of land planted with fruit trees. A verandah at the back looks out across endless hills. A short walk from the house is a swimming pond, with clear spring water.
It is just right for Miller, who likes to live in the countryside, away from the flash world of celebrity, and is known to be careful with money. But Marilyn has other plans. She loves to spend, and has firm ideas about what is glamorous and what is not. Her self-esteem is bound up with her ability to splash out: she craves nothing but the best.
Like so many men, Frank Lloyd Wright is immediately taken with Marilyn.
He ushers her into a separate room, away from his wife and his staff, and listens intently as she describes the sort of home she has in mind. It is spectacularly lavish. Once she has left, Wright dips into his archives and digs out an abandoned plan for a building he drew up eight years earlier: a luxury manor house for a wealthy Texan couple.
The parsimonious Miller is taken aback when he hears of Marilyn’s grandiose vision for their new home. ‘That we could not really afford all of her ideas I did my best not to dramatize, but it was inevitable that some of my concern showed.’ When she tells him the name of the architect, Miller’s heart sinks. But he bites his lip, hoping good sense will prevail. ‘It had to seem like ingratitude to question whether we could ever begin to finance any Wright design, since much like her, he had little interest in costs. I could only give him his day and let her judge whether it was beyond our means or not.’
One grey autumn morning, the Millers drive Frank Lloyd Wright to Roxbury. Wright is wearing a wide-brimmed cowboy hat. He curls up in the back seat and sleeps throughout the two-hour journey.
The three of them enter the old house together. Wright looks around the living room, and, in what Miller describes as ‘a tone reminiscent of W.C. Fields’s nasal drawl’, says disparagingly, ‘Ah, yes, the old house. Don’t put a nickel in it.’ They sit down to a lunch of smoked salmon. Wright refuses any pepper. ‘Never eat pepper,’ he says. ‘The stuff will kill you before your time. Avoid it.’
After lunch, Marilyn remains in the house while the two men trudge half a mile up the steep hill to the crest on which the new house is to be built. Wright never stops to catch his breath: Miller is impressed. At the crest, Wright turns towards the magnificent view, unbuttons his fly and urinates, sighing, ‘Yes. Yes indeed.’ He glances about for a few seconds, then leads the way back down the hill. Before they go back into the house, Miller steals a quick private word with Wright. ‘I thought the time had come to tell him something he had never bothered to ask, that we expected to live fairly simply and were not looking for some elaborate house with which to impress the world.’
The message is plural, but it should have been singular. An elaborate house with which to impress the world is, in a nutshell, just what Marilyn is after, which is why she hired Frank Lloyd Wright in the first place. But Wright affects not to hear. ‘I saw that this news had not the slightest interest for him,’ says Miller.
A few days later, Miller visits the Plaza Hotel alone. Wright shows him a watercolour of his extravagant plan: a circular living room with a dropped centre surrounded by five-foot-thick ovoid columns made of sandstone with a domed ceiling sixty feet in diameter, rounded off with a seventy-foot-long swimming pool with fieldstone sides jutting out from the incline of the hill. Miller looks at it in horror, mentally totting up the cost. He notes with indignation that Wright has added a final flourish to his painting – a huge limousine in the curved driveway, complete with a uniformed chauffeur.
Miller asks the cost. Wright mentions $250,000, but Miller doesn’t believe him: it might cover the cost of the swimming pool, ‘if that’. He also notes that Wright’s ‘pleasure dream of Marilyn allowed him to include in this monster of a structure only a single bedroom and a small guestroom, but he did provide a large “conference room” complete with a long board-room-type table flanked by a dozen high-backed chairs, the highest at the head, where he imagined she would sit like the reigning queen of a small country, Denmark, say’.
The marriage goes from bad to worse. Miller and Monroe have nothing to say to each other. ‘He makes me think I’m stupid. I’m afraid to bring things up, because maybe I am stupid.’ Marilyn adds that ‘I’m in a fucking prison and my jailer is named Arthur Miller … Every morning he goes into that goddamn study of his, and I don’t see him for hours and hours. I mean, what the fuck is he doing in there? And there I am, just sitting around; I haven’t a goddamn thing to do.’
Miller fails to give the go-ahead to Wright, who dies in April 1959. Miller and Monroe divorce in 1961; Monroe dies in August 1962.
Thirty years later, the plans are dusted off and enlarged. Marilyn’s dream home finally emerges as a $35-million golf clubhouse in Hawaii, complete wtih banqueting rooms, a men’s locker room and a Japanese furo bath with a soaking pool, not to mention seated showers.
MARILYN MONROE
WEARS HER TIGHTEST, SEXIEST DRESS FOR
NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV
The Café de Paris, Hollywood
September 19th 1959
In her bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Marilyn Monroe is preparing to meet the Soviet Premier, Nikita Khrushchev. When she was first invited, his name hadn’t rung a bell, and she wasn’t keen to go. It was only when her studio told her that in Russia, America meant two things, Coca-Cola and Marilyn Monroe, that she changed her mind. ‘She loved hearing that,’ recalls Lena Pepitone, her maid. Marilyn tells Lena that the studio wants her to wear her tightest, sexiest dress. ‘I guess there’s not much sex in Russia,’ she concludes.
Her preparations are lengthy and elaborate, involving a masseuse, a hairdresser and a make-up artist. When they are halfway through, the president of Twentieth Century-Fox, Spyros Skouras, arrives, just to make sure that, for once in her life, Marilyn will be on time. As agreed, she squeezes into a low-cut, skin-tight black lace dress. Her chauffeur drops her at the studio before noon. The parking lot is empty. ‘We must be late! It must be over!’ gasps Marilyn. In fact, they are far too early.
Nikita Khrushchev’s American tour has had more than its share of ups and downs. He is a temperamental character, apt to flair up at the slightest provocation. Perhaps because of this, the American media cannot get enough of him. ‘It’s Khrush, Khrushy, Khrushchev!’ writes a columnist for the New York Daily News. ‘The fellow’s all over the dials these days … The pudgy Soviet dictator is smiling, laughing, scowling, shaking his forefinger or clenching his iron fist.’ Others have been less generous. A rival columnist in the New York Mirror describes him as ‘a rural dolt unwittingly proving a case against himself and his system’. The three main television networks show live coverage of his visit, repeating it every night in special thirty-minute bulletins. He is followed everywhere by 342 reporters and photographers, the largest travelling media group the world has ever known.
On the fifth day of his tour, Khrushchev arrives in Los Angeles, in time for lunch for four hundred people at Twentieth Century-Fox. There has been such demand for places that spouses have been banned unless they also happen to be stars. There are one or two couples – Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh – but they are few and far between.
Khrushchev enters a packed room. Everyone who is anyone is here: Edward G. Robinson, Judy Garland, Ginger Rogers, Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis, Dean Martin, Debbie Reynolds, Nat ‘King’ Cole, Frank Sinatra, Maurice Chevalier, Zsa Zsa Gabor. Mrs Khrushchev is seated between Bob Hope and Gary Cooper. Conversation proves stilted.
‘Why don’t you move out here? You’ll like the climate,’ suggests Cooper.
‘No,’ replies Mrs Khrushchev. ‘Moscow is all right for me.’
Khrushchev is on the top table, next to Skouras. Lunch has its awkward moments. When Khrushchev is told that his spur-of-the-moment request to visit Disneyland has been turned down, owing to security worries, he sends the American Ambassador to the UN a furious note. ‘I understand you have cancelled the trip to Disneyland. I am most displeased.’
The after-lunch speeches are awkward. Khrushchev heckles Skouras during his speech of welcome, and further heckles Henry Cabot Lodge as he speaks of America’s affection for Russian culture. ‘Have you seen They Fought for Their Homeland?’ he yells. ‘It is based on a novel by Mikhail Sholokhov.’
‘No.’
‘Well, buy it. You should see it.’
In his own speech, Khrushchev grows very bullish. ‘I have a question for you. Which country has the best ballet? Yours?! You do not even have a permanent opera and ballet theatre! Your theatres thrive on what is given to them by rich people! In our country, it is the state that gives the money! And the best ballet is in the Soviet Union! It is our pride!’
After going on like this for forty-five minutes, he suddenly seems to remember something. ‘Just now, I was told that I could not go to Disneyland. I asked, “Why not? What is it? Do you have rocket-launching pads there?” Just listen to what I was told: “We” – which means the American authorities – “cannot guarantee your security there.” What is it? Is there an epidemic of cholera there? Have gangsters taken hold of the place?’ He punches the air, and starts to look angry. ‘That’s the situation I find myself in. For me, such a situation is inconceivable. I cannot find words to explain this to my people!’
At last he sits down. The Hollywood audience applauds. As he is being shown to the sound stage to watch the movie Can-Can being filmed,
he recognises Marilyn Monroe and darts over to shake her hand. All wide-eyed, Marilyn delivers a line that Natalie Wood, a fluent Russian speaker, has coached her to say. For once, she gets it right first time: ‘We the workers of Twentieth Century-Fox rejoice that you have come to visit our studio and country.’
Khrushchev seems to appreciate her effort. ‘He looked at me the way a man looks on a woman,’ she recalls.
‘You’re a very lovely young lady,’ he says, squeezing her hand.
‘My husband, Arthur Miller, sends you his greeting. There should be more of this kind of thing. It would help both our countries understand each other.’
Afterwards, Marilyn Monroe enthuses, ‘This is about the biggest day in the history of the movie business.’ But when she gets back home, she has changed her tune. ‘He was fat and ugly and had warts on his face and he growled,’ she tells Lena. ‘Who would want to be a Communist with a President like that?’
But she is pretty sure that the Premier enjoyed their meeting. ‘I could tell Khrushchev liked me. He smiled more when he was introduced to me than for anybody else at the whole banquet. And everybody else was there. He squeezed my hand so long and so hard that I thought he would break it. I guess it was better than having to kiss him.’
NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV
LAMBASTS
GEORGE BROWN
Harcourt Room, Palace of Westminster, London
April 23rd 1956
A formal dinner is being held by the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party to honour Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union, and Marshal Nikolai Bulganin, his Premier, both of whom are in Britain at the invitation of the Conservative government.
Khrushchev is never the easiest of guests.
Mrs Anthony Eden thinks his idea of dinner-table repartee is to declare that Soviet missiles ‘could easily reach your island and quite a bit farther’.
Fortunately, dinner with the Queen earlier in the week passes without incident: she is not one to pick an argument. In fact, Khrushchev finds her ‘completely unpretentious, completely without haughtiness … the sort of young woman you’d be likely to meet walking along Gorky Street on a balmy Sunday afternoon’.
During the Labour Party dinner, the Shadow Minister of Supply, George Brown, puffs away on his pipe, dutifully listening to a welcoming speech by the Chairman of the Labour Party, then to a speech by Bulganin. Before long, a few of his more left-wing colleagues, keen to demonstrate their friendliness towards the Soviet Union, start thumping the table and chanting, ‘We – want – Khrush-chev,’ over and over again.
Never short of things to say, Khrushchev leaps up with a great beam on his face to deliver an impromptu speech. The way Brown remembers it, Khrushchev ‘just went on and on. He delivered a great denunciation of Germany, put in a lot of stuff about the beginning of the war, and followed this with a particularly offensive passage about Britain’s role in the war – how we had thrown the blood-thirsty Germans at the throat of the nice Russians, and so on.’
For Brown, enough is enough. He remembers muttering, ‘May God forgive you,’ but to his fellow guests the mutter emerges as more of a bark. Khrushchev stops speaking. He turns to Brown and asks him to repeat what he has just said. Brown does not reply, and those around him urge him to stay silent. But Khrushchev is spoiling for a fight, and announces to the room that Brown is clearly too afraid to repeat his remark.
Brown isn’t going to take this lying down. ‘I will gladly repeat my remark!’ he announces. ‘I said, “May God forgive you!” … What I meant was that it was you who signed the treaty with Ribbentrop, not us, and that if you hadn’t signed your treaty with Ribbentrop, we wouldn’t have been at war for a whole year before you even got started, that a lot of my comrades wouldn’t now be dead, and that a lot of brave Poles wouldn’t now be dead!’
At this, pandemonium breaks out, with Khrushchev launching a tirade against democratic socialists, against Britain, and, in Brown’s words, against ‘pretty well everybody’. Neither man is prepared to back down. Whenever Khrushchev pauses for breath, Brown puts his oar in, voicing his support for the Eastern European political prisoners whom the Labour Party has solemnly agreed, in a pre-dinner arrangement, not to mention. For good measure, he adds that Khrushchev’s son Sergei, who is there at the meal, dares not disagree with his father. Khrushchev replies with a lengthy speech, delivered, thinks the mild-mannered Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, ‘with vehemence, even brutality’, and ends by telling his hosts they should make an alliance with the Russians, because if not, they will be swatted ‘off the face of the earth like a dirty old black beetle’.
At this point, the Welsh firebrand Aneurin Bevan leaps to Brown’s aid, wagging his finger and repeating, ‘But this is ridiculous, Mr Khrushchev, but this is ridiculous.’ Gaitskell attempts a conciliatory speech, ending with a toast ‘to our next meeting’.
‘Not for me!’ shouts Brown.
In Brown’s memoir, he insists that ‘I don’t want to leave an impression that the events of this Khrushchev dinner were all either ludicrous, or bad-tempered, or bitchy … It was not just a boorish evening with the hosts being discourteous to the guests.’ He then rather ruins the impression of composure by adding a coda that might best be summarised as ‘He started it’: ‘Khrushchev asked for what he got by the way he spoke to us – and it is just as important that a guest should not be rude to a host as that the host should be courteous to a guest.’
The next day, the Speaker throws a lunch for the Soviet visitors at the House of Commons. Brown is once again invited. He decides to adopt a low profile, ‘so when the drinks were being handed round before lunch I stayed in a corner with one or two of my own cronies and didn’t go anywhere near where the Russians were being made much of by people who seemed to me a bit over-anxious to mollify their feelings’.
All goes fine until after they have finished eating. They are sipping coffee, ‘when who should approach me but Bulganin. He looked closely at me with those lovely blue eyes and said something in Russian which clearly meant something like, “So you are the naughty fellow from last night!” … and I said, “Oh yes.”’
Bulganin invites Brown to come and see Russia for himself. Brown says he would be delighted. At this point, Khrushchev strides over to the two of them, and asks the interpreter what is going on. Brown doesn’t want to get involved. ‘I wished him a pleasant journey and said that I looked forward to seeing him in Moscow when I was able to take up Bulganin’s invitation.’
Brown holds out his hand. Khrushchev refuses to shake it – ‘Nyet, nyet!’ – and moves away. Brown leaves for his constituency. The Conservative politician and diarist Harold Nicolson is told all about it by a Labour contact. ‘My friend told me that in a long experience of unsuccessful banquets, that will live in his memory as the most acid failure that he has ever witnessed.’
Khrushchev subsequently remarks that if he were British he would vote Conservative.
Brown’s invitation to Moscow fails to arrive.
GEORGE BROWN
BERATES
ELI WALLACH
Rediffusion TV Studios, Kingsway, London WC2
November 22nd 1963
Neither his temper nor his love of alcohol prevent George Brown from becoming deputy leader of the Labour Party.
This evening, he has been enjoying one or two drinks – a few at the Lebanese Embassy, followed by a few more at a mayoral reception at Shoreditch Town Hall – when he is called to the phone. It is Milton Shulman, from Rediffusion Television, with the news that President Kennedy has been shot. Will Brown come and appear on a special Kennedy Assassination edition of the current-affairs programme This Week? Realising he is already the worse for wear, Brown’s wife attempts to dissuade him.
‘George, you mustn’t.’
‘I must!’ he replies.
Minutes later, Brown is driven from Shoreditch to the TV studios in Kingsway. He is a little early, so he helps himself to a couple more drinks in the green room. Before long, he is joined by two of the other guests – the historian Professor Sir Denis Brogan and John Crosby of the New York Times. Over another glass or two, he begins to hold forth about his close friendship with the late President and the future of the United States of America.
A third guest now puts his head round the door. It is the actor Eli Wallach, still clearly upset by the news of the assassination. Wallach is introduced to Brown, who tells him how much he admires his work. Wallach accepts Brown’s compliments gracefully, but he is an unassuming man, so tries to steer the conversation away from himself.
Brown misinterprets his modesty. ‘Why are American actors so conceited?’ he asks loudly, adding, ‘Someone like you always carries a newspaper sticking out of his pocket with his name in the headlines!’ Wallach attempts to defend himself, saying that, on the contrary, he is always bumping into people who can’t put a name to his face.
‘Have you ever been in a play by Ted Willis?’ asks Brown, randomly.
‘No,’ replies Wallach. ‘Who’s Ted Willis?’
‘You’ve never heard of Ted Willis?!’ exclaims Brown, as though this is further proof of Wallach’s vanity.
Wallach moves away, and finds himself a place on a sofa, but Brown follows him, sits down nearby, and continues to make noisy remarks about the conceit of American actors. Suddenly, Wallach loses his temper, rises from the sofa, points at the deputy leader of the Labour Party, and yells, ‘I didn’t come here to be insulted! Is this bastard interviewing me on the programme? If so, I’m leaving now!’
Brown is in no mood to be conciliatory. He repeats his remark about the conceit of American actors. Wallach then takes off his jacket and says, ‘Come outside! Come outside and I’ll knock you off your can!’
Brown tells Wallach to shut up and sit down. Wallach rushes forward and is about to strike when Milton Shulman leaps between the two men, pushing Wallach back on the sofa. At this point, in comes Carl Foreman, the director of The Guns of Navarone, who imagines the dispute is between Wallach and Shulman, and attempts to intervene. Meanwhile, Shulman is trying to placate Wallach. ‘He’s not going to interview you! He’s one of the guests!’
‘I don’t care who he is,’ says Wallach. ‘I’ll still knock the shit out of him!’ By now, Brown has been reduced to silence. The time has come to go downstairs to the studio, always a sobering moment. Brown goes over to Wallach. ‘Brother, brother,’ he says, ‘I don’t think we should go into the studio this way … Let’s shake hands.’ They shake hands awkwardly. Wallach goes through the door first. As he advances along the corridor, Brown shouts after him, ‘And now you’ll know who Ted Willis is!’
The live broadcast begins. The urbane interviewer, Kenneth Harris, turns first to Brown. ‘I know you met President Kennedy once or twice,’ he says. ‘Did you get to know him as a man?’
A look of intense irritation flashes across Brown’s face. ‘Now, you’re talking about a man who was a very great friend of mine!’ he barks. Tears welling in his eyes, he embarks on a slurred and rambling monologue, ‘a compound’, in his biographer’s view, ‘of maudlin sentimentality, name-dropping and aggression’ about ‘Jack’ (‘who I was very near to’), ‘Jackie’ and their children. Brown’s colleague Richard Crossman is watching the programme at home. ‘At the first moment I saw that he was pissed and he was pretty awful. He jumped up and down and claimed a very intimate relationship with Kennedy.’
In fact, the records show that Brown’s acquaintance with Kennedy extended to three brief official meetings: on July 9th 1962, from 5.15 p.m. to 6.08 p.m.; on June 14th 1963, from 11 a.m. to 11.55 a.m.; and between 5.30 p.m. and 5.40 p.m. on October 24th 1963. Nevertheless, in his autobiography he feels able to boast: ‘Jack Kennedy was one of the two Presidents of the United States whom it has been my privilege to know well. I came to love and admire him …’ Who knows what the President thought of Brown? His initial briefing note on him from the American Embassy in London advises that ‘certain character defects such as irascibility, impulsiveness and heavy drinking have left his future position in the Party in doubt’.
Brown’s television appearance, and a subsequent, widely disseminated, report in the New York Times of his set-to with Eli Wallach, prompt many complaints from the general public, to all of which Brown dispatches the same printed reply: ‘Thank you very much for your letter, and may I say how sorry I am that you felt that you had to write in those terms.’
Two months after the assassination, on January 23rd 1964, Brown finally gets down to writing a letter of condolence to Jackie Kennedy. ‘You may remember vaguely that we caught sight of each other when your husband was showing my daughter around the garden as late as last October,’ he begins, ‘and we exchanged greetings across the garden when you were in the room upstairs.’
ELI WALLACH
IS WELCOMED BY
FRANK SINATRA
Caesars Palace, Las Vegas
February 1974
The most belligerent people are sometimes unexpectedly warm-hearted. Even Frank Sinatra can disappoint onlookers who have been spoiling for a fight. Or is this just another example of his cruelty?
Ten years after his unfortunate contretemps with George Brown, Eli Wallach flies into Las Vegas. As he comes down the steps of the plane, he sees a huge billboard featuring two blue eyes. The caption states simply, ‘HE’S HERE’.
Ol’ Blue Eyes is back in Las Vegas, even though he promised four years ago never to return following a very public fight with the casino manager of Caesars Palace.
At that time, Sinatra had been under surveillance by the IRS. Their agents had noticed that he was cashing in his winnings at blackjack without paying for the chips – an easy way to pocket money tax-free. Leaned on by the IRS, the casino manager, Sanford Waterman, had confronted Sinatra, telling him, ‘You don’t get chips until I see your cash.’
Sinatra had called Waterman a kike; in turn, Waterman had called Sinatra a bitch guinea. Things had gone from bad to worse: Sinatra grabbed Waterman by the throat; Waterman pulled out a pistol and placed it between Sinatra’s eyeballs; Sinatra laughed, called Waterman a crazy hebe and exited, declaring that he would never work at Caesars again. In the end, Waterman had been arrested for pulling a gun.
The next day, Waterman told the District Attorney he had heard Sinatra say, ‘The mob will take care of you.’ This caused the Sheriff to say, ‘I’m tired of Sinatra intimidating waiters, waitresses, and starting fires and throwing pies. He gets away with too much. He’s through picking on little people in this town. Why the owners of the hotels put up with this is what I plan to find out.’
The District Attorney’s report indicated Waterman still had the finger-marks on his throat where Sinatra had grabbed him. ‘There seems to be reasonable grounds for making the assumption that Sinatra was the aggressor all the way.’ The charges against Waterman were dropped: he was judged to have acted in self-defence. It was at this point that Sinatra, denying he ever laid a finger on Waterman, vowed never to set foot in Nevada again. ‘I’ve suffered enough indignities,’ he said.
But four years later, things have changed. The casino manager has been arrested for racketeering, the District Attorney has been voted out, and the new management of Caesars Palace has tempted Sinatra back with the promise of $400,000 a week, plus full-time bodyguards ‘to avoid any unpleasant incidents’.
The new Sheriff is delighted to welcome Sinatra back to Las Vegas. To celebrate his return, Caesars Palace is proud to present each member of the audience with a medallion inscribed, ‘Hail Sinatra. The Noblest Roman Has Returned’.
But what of Eli Wallach? Ever since the publication of The Godfather in 1969, and its film adaptation in 1972, Wallach and Sinatra have been linked in the public mind as bitter rivals. The scene in which a studio boss wakes up to find the severed head of his favourite racehorse lying next to him in his bed has been the inspiration of an urban myth. In the film, it is the mafia’s revenge for the studio boss’s refusal to award a starring role to one of their own singers, Johnny Fontane. The horse’s head helps him change his mind: he immediately drops the actor who has already been cast and replaces him with Fontane. Over time, word has got around that Johnny Fontane is really Frank Sinatra, and the dropped actor is really Eli Wallach. After all, twenty years ago, hadn’t Harry Cohn offered Wallach a leading role in From Here to Eternity – and hadn’t it unaccountably gone to the inexperienced Italian Frank Sinatra? Small wonder, then, that when Eli Wallach walks into the Frank Sinatra show at Caesars Palace, a frisson runs around the audience.
Halfway through his act, Sinatra stops singing, looks over to his wife in the audience and says, ‘Barbara, did Eli get here?’
‘He’s sitting right beside me!’ she replies.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ says Sinatra, ‘I’d like to introduce a friend. Our paths have often crossed, and he played a big part in my career …’
The audience stirs. They all know what he is talking about. They sense a drama about to unfurl, perhaps even a fight. Sinatra pauses, looks over towards Wallach and says, ‘… Ah, the hell with that! It’s an old story! I don’t feel like telling it!’
Perhaps the audience is disappointed by this anti-climax, but Eli Wallach finds it hilarious. ‘I fell out of my seat laughing. Every time Frank saw me after that, he’d say, “Hello, you crazy actor.” And every time he came to New York, he’d send a limo for Anne and me. We’d sit in a box at the theater. He’d look up, smile at us, and afterward we’d have a late supper at 21.’
On the other hand, it may be worth adding that the author of The Godfather, Mario Puzo, does not get off so lightly. By chance, one night in 1970, after the book has become a bestseller, but before the film has been shot, he enters Chasen’s restaurant in Beverly Hills and sees Sinatra dining there. ‘I’m going to ask Frank for his autograph,’ he tells his companion, the film’s producer Al Ruddy.
‘Forget it, Mario. He’s suing to stop the movie,’ replies Ruddy. But Puzo persists, and goes up to Sinatra’s table. Sinatra loses his temper. ‘I ought to break your legs,’ he grunts. ‘Did the FBI help you with your book?’
‘Frank is freaking out, screaming at Mario,’ Ruddy recalls thirty years later. As Puzo remembers it, Sinatra calls him ‘a pimp’, and threatens to ‘beat the hell out of me’.
‘I know what Frank was up to,’ explains Al Martino, who eventually plays the part of Johnny Fontane.
‘You know how much Johnny Fontane was in the book? He was trying to minimise the role.’
FRANK SINATRA
DEALS WITH
DOMINICK DUNNE
The Daisy, Rodeo Drive, Los Angeles
September 1966
On a normal day, Frank Sinatra is not slow to take umbrage, nor to accompany it with the promise of revenge, a promise he enjoys keeping. ‘Make yourself comfortable, Frank! Hit somebody!’ the fearless comedian Don Rickles once greeted Sinatra as he strode into his cabaret lounge.
The TV producer Dominick Dunne has never been able to fathom why Sinatra has taken against him. ‘I wish I knew, but he took a major dislike to my wife and me.’ One moment, he was part of Sinatra’s wider circle, the next the object of abuse. ‘You’re a no-talent hack,’ Sinatra says to Dunne as he passes him at a party; whenever Sinatra sees Dunne’s wife Lenny, he tells her she married a loser. Why this change of heart? Dunne can only imagine that Sinatra bears him some sort of grudge for a TV show on which they worked together some years ago.
Sinatra’s ire appears to increase with their every encounter. Last year, Dunne was having dinner at the Bistro in Los Angeles when Sinatra, clearly drunk, abused him loudly from a neighbouring table. Sinatra then turned his venom on Lenny, before continuing around the table, going for Lauren Bacall, Maureen O’Sullivan and Swifty Lazar, in rapid succession. Finally, he grabbed the tablecloth and pulled it from beneath all their plates and glasses, threw a plate of food over Lazar, and stomped out.
This year, Sinatra has been involved in any number of fights. In June, for instance, a businessman called Frank Weissman asked him and his party in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel if they wouldn’t mind piping down: Weissman ended the night in a coma at the emergency hospital.
Tonight, Dominick Dunne is out for dinner at the Daisy with his wife and a small group of friends after attending a wedding. He often eats here, and knows the staff. By chance, Frank Sinatra is sitting at the next table, along with his two daughters, Nancy and Tina, and his new wife, Mia Farrow, who at twenty-one years old is younger than each of them. Over the past months, Sinatra has come in for a good deal of ribbing about his child bride, which perhaps explains his bad mood. ‘Frank soaks his dentures and Mia brushes her braces …’ one of his most vocal tormentors, the comedian Jackie Mason, joked in his stage act a few months ago, ‘then she takes off her roller skates and puts them next to his cane … he peels off his toupee and she braids her hair …’
It probably wasn’t a wise move. The next day, Mason received an anonymous call telling him that if he valued his life, he should consider changing his material. When he failed to follow this advice, three shots were fired through the glass door of his Las Vegas hotel room. But the police saw no reason to pursue an investigation. ‘I knew that Sinatra owned Las Vegas when the detectives there made me the prime suspect and asked that I take a lie detector test,’ said Mason, adding, ‘I have no idea who it was who tried to shoot me. After the shots were fired, all I heard was someone singing, “Doobie, doobie, doo”.’ Over the following year, Mason will have his nose and cheekbones broken, again by a complete stranger.
But, in the meantime, we must return to Dunne and his party as they sit there enjoying their dinner. All of a sudden, Dunne feels a tap on his shoulder. He looks up. The maître d’ of the Daisy is looking down at him, ‘very nice guy called George, Italian, we all knew him, gave him Christmas presents, wonderful man’.
George says, ‘Oh, Mr Dunne, I’m so sorry about this, but Mr Sinatra made me do it.’ So saying, he leans back, clenches his fist, and hits Dunne smack in the face. ‘It wasn’t a hit to knock me out, but it was embarrassing,’ recalls Dunne. The crowded restaurant falls silent.
Dunne looks across at Sinatra, who is looking back at him with a smile on his face. Dunne and his wife leave the restaurant. As they wait for their car to be brought around by the concierge, George runs out. He is sobbing, and afraid.
‘I’m sorry, so sorry. Mr Sinatra made me do it,’ he says. He tells the Dunnes that Sinatra tipped him $50. ‘It was the social talk of the town,’ Dunne recalls. ‘I was the amusement for Sinatra. My humiliation was his fun.’
Sinatra’s reputation for violence follows him not only to his own grave, but to the graves of others. On two occasions, he sets his men onto the same newspaper columnist, Lee Mortimer, because Mortimer has written unflattering remarks about him. After Mortimer’s death, Sinatra is travelling with his friend Brad Dexter when he insists they drive to his grave. As he stands on the grave, Sinatra unzips his trousers and urinates on it. When Dexter asks him why, he replies, ‘This cocksucker made my life miserable. He talked against me, wrote articles, caused me a lot of grief. I got back at him.’
‘Frank always had to settle the score,’ explains Dexter.
But Jackie Mason refuses to be silenced. ‘I love Frank Sinatra. You love Frank Sinatra. We all love Frank Sinatra,’ he says in his stage act for many years to come. ‘And why do we love Frank Sinatra? Because he’d kill us if we didn’t.’
Like Mason, Dominick Dunne outlives Sinatra, enjoying a highly successful second career as a newspaper columnist and author with a particular interest in seeing that the guilty are brought to book. He never forgives Sinatra for his behaviour that night. ‘It showed the kind of power Sinatra had, to make a decent man do an indecent act. And you know, I am aware totally that his voice is one of the great voices of his era, if not the greatest. And to this day, I can’t stand the sound of it.’
DOMINICK DUNNE
URINATES WITH
PHIL SPECTOR
The Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center, Los Angeles
April 2007
Forty-one years later, Vanity Fair magazine’s star columnist Dominick Dunne is covering the trial of Phil Spector, who is charged with the murder of the actress Lana Clarkson.
Short of acting jobs, Clarkson had been working as a hostess in the VIP room of the House of Blues, a nightclub on Sunset Boulevard. She hadn’t recognised Spector when he entered, even addressing him as ‘Miss’, perhaps misled by his size – he is only five feet five inches – and by his voluminous candy-floss wig, only marginally smaller. ‘Mister,’ he had corrected her.
This man, a fellow waitress had told her, was the famous 1960s record producer, ‘the tycoon of teen’, as Tom Wolfe once called him. He was known, she added, for his generous tips.
After a drink (he left $450 for a $13.50 bar bill), Spector persuaded the reluctant Lana back to his Castle. ‘Just for one drink,’ she insisted. Travelling back in his chauffeur-driven Mercedes, they watched a James Cagney movie called Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye.
They had only been in the Castle a short time before Spector’s chauffeur, waiting outside in the car, heard a gunshot. After some delay, Spector came out and said, ‘I think I killed somebody.’ The chauffeur called the police, who discovered Clarkson’s corpse on a white French bergère chair.
‘The gun went off accidentally! She works at the House of Blues! It was a mistake! I don’t understand what the fuck is wrong with you people! I don’t know how it happened. It scared the shit out of me!’ Spector screamed, as a policeman held him down. Later, he claimed Clarkson had picked up one of his guns and shot herself in the face.
Ever since the man who murdered his daughter Dominique was given what he describes as ‘a slap on the wrist’, Dunne has had an abiding interest in reporting the murder trials of the rich and famous, among them O.J. Simpson, Claus von Bulow and the Menendez brothers. He is fuelled by outrage at the idea that money may buy an acquittal.
He is already convinced of Spector’s guilt,
and listens impatiently as Spector’s defence attorney complains, ‘The police had murder on their minds!’ He is unimpressed. ‘I should hope to God that the police had murder on their minds, with a woman less than an hour dead, shot in the face, bleeding from the mouth, her teeth all over the floor, life over, in a French bergère chair in the foyer of a castle, and an arrogant man in a house full of guns who had to be Tasered by police. I think that’s cause for having murder on your mind.’
The trial has been going for just a few days when the court takes a break, and Dunne heads for the men’s room. It is empty but for a single man standing at the central urinal, which is lower than the other two, as though designed for little boys.
Spector is wearing the Edwardian frock-coat in which he arrived at the court this morning. He has opened it wide to urinate, so that it billows out and blocks the remaining two urinals, one on either side. Dunne doesn’t quite know what to do, but decides to remain where he is. ‘I didn’t have the nerve to ask him to move his coat and free up a urinal, and I also didn’t really want to pee next to him, considering that he was on trial for murder just down the hall, and I was there to write about him. So I waited my turn in silence in the back by the sinks.’
After he has finished peeing, Spector, who is today sporting a blond pageboy toupee, goes over to the basins, carefully rolls up his sleeves and elaborately soaps and scrubs his hands in hot water. Dunne is reminded of the way germophobes wash obsessively after shaking hands.
As he dries his hands with a paper towel, Spector turns and notices Dunne. ‘Hi, Dominick,’ he says.
‘Hi, Phil,’ says Dunne. The last time the two men met was after Spector asked their mutual friend Ahmet Ertegun to arrange a get-together so he could pick Dunne’s brains about the O.J. Simpson murder trial, by which, like so many people, he was riveted.
Dunne is not sure what to say next, particularly as Spector must know that he is not on his side: he is, in his own words, ‘a longtime victims’ advocate’. Yet Dunne still feels there is something likeable about Spector. Finally, it occurs to him what to say.
‘I went to Ahmet’s memorial service in New York at Lincoln Center last week.’
‘You went? Oh my God, this is the first I’ve heard about it from someone who went. I owe everything to Ahmet. He started me in the business!’
Spector wants to know everything about it. Dunne runs through the famous names present: Eric Clapton, Bette Midler, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Oscar de la Renta, Henry Kissinger. ‘Mick Jagger mentioned you in his eulogy.’
‘Mick mentioned me?’
‘Nothing about this. It was about you and Ahmet and your friendship.’
The two men return to the courtroom, Dunne to the public gallery, Spector to the accused’s chair. From their different vantage points, they watch as a woman testifies about how Spector held her at gunpoint; she is the first of four such witnesses.
The two men never speak again, but a few days later, Dunne is handed a note thanking him for the programme from Ertegun’s memorial service. ‘Dear Dominick … I did so enjoy reading the words about our dear friend; and the pictures were a treasure. Thanks for thinking of me. Love, Phillip.’
The trial comes to an end five months later, with the jury unable to agree on a verdict.
At the retrial, Spector is found guilty and sentenced to a minimum of nineteen years in prison. He is sixty-nine years old. Three months later, Dominick Dunne dies of cancer, at home in Manhattan, at the age of eighty-three.
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Craig Brown
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Юмор и сатира
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: 101 chance meetings, juxtaposing the famous and the infamous, the artistic and the philistine, the pompous and the comical, the snobbish and the vulgar, each 1,001 words long, and with a time span stretching from the 19th century to the 21st.Life is made up of individuals meeting one another. They speak, or don’t speak. They get on, or don’t get on. They make agreements, which they either hold to or ignore. They laugh, they cry, they are excited, they are indifferent, they share secrets, they say ‘How do you do?’ Often it is the most fleeting of meetings that, in the fullness of time, turn out to be the most noteworthy.‘One on One’ examines the curious nature of different types of meeting, from the oddity of meetings with the Royal Family (who start giggling during a recital by TS Eliot) to those often perilous meetings between old and young (Gladstone terrifying the teenage Bertrand Russell) and between young and old (the 23 year old Sarah Miles having her leg squeezed by the nonagenarian Bertrand Russell), and our contemporary random encounters on television (George Galloway meeting Michael Barrymore on Celebrity Big Brother).Ingenious in its construction, witty in its narration, panoramic in its breadth, ‘One on One’ is a wholly original book.