Cultural Amnesia (128 page)

There are few passages of poetry that I have ever underlined, put a mark beside, or
made notes on, because any real poem or body of poetry is not susceptible to having fragments snapped from context without the fragments losing color. In the Selfridge’s Shakespeare I carry
with me on long trips I put dots in the margin, but they are not admonitions as to what I should remember, merely guides back to what has already been remembered, so that I can check up on
whether distortions have crept in. Otherwise, in less copious reservoirs, if poetry makes me remember it, I remember it all: omnia mea mecum porto. I carry it all with me. But here are two lines
I marked in the margin of a newspaper. “Nicole, your eyes are like the stars/ I think of them in various bars.” As far as I know, these two lines constitute the complete poetic works
of Elmer O. Noone as they have come down to us, and perhaps repay study on the clinical level, if not the critical and aesthetic. To cease being coy for a minute, I should grasp the nettle, or
poisonous coral fragment: Elmer O. Noone is a stalker, and his poem was addressed to Nicole Kidman.

When you know that much for background, his seemingly slight poem gains weight, in the same way that a
cockroach would gain weight on the surface of Jupiter. In 2001 Nicole Kidman applied for a restraining order against Elmer O. Noone: an action which automatically ranked him high in her swarm of
stalkers. Any female celebrity of her eminence attracts dozens of them, but we assume that most of them can be seen off by private action. Since to go public inevitably generates an atmosphere of
vulnerability that excites a fresh supply of
heavily breathing candidates to try their hand, Elmer O. Noone must have been unusually persistent even in a field where
persistence is one of the chief qualifications. By what we know of him, he had a romantic sensibility to temper his determination, although it is fair to assume that his unsolicited tenderness
made her feel even worse. He must have been horrifying enough when he rang her doorbell a few hundred times, but he also brought flowers. He invited her to the ballet. He offered to tutor her
children, pointing out that such an arrangement “would give us the chance to know each other better.” Possibly it was his avuncular concern with her children that sent her to the
cops, but his protestations of courtly love would have been enough.

The most depressing aspect—depressing because it concerns us all—is that it was love, and
probably still is. I have talked of him in the past tense so far because time has gone by and he has not yet been given his own talk show. He has submerged, down to where the forgotten stalkers
slowly swim. The three-year restraining order might have made him give up. (It sometimes happens, although I personally know two female television presenters and one actress whose stalkers
regarded their restraining orders as a mere bachelor’s degree on the academic ladder towards a doctorate.) After the court found against him, he concentrated his efforts on suing Nicole for
300,000 US dollars on the grounds that she had defamed him, and on persuading the next court to find for him, on the grounds that his human rights had been abused. I had expected him to take his
case all the way to The Hague by now. Whether he is out of action or not, however, he will never get over his relationship with Nicole. For him, the fact that the relationship never existed will
be the least of his considerations. He believed it did exist. He felt it. But something went slightly wrong. He could have fixed it, if only he could have explained it to her: if only she had
given him a chance. If only she had listened. And here is the connection with the rest of us. When we are given the elbow, there is always a terrible, sleepless period when we believe that one
more phone call will set things right. The phone call doesn’t work out. She tells us we are making too many phone calls. No, it can’t end like this. She hasn’t understood.
Better call her again. She’s not picking up. How can she do that? Luckily, in all this turmoil, the moment arrives when we realize that if we really love her, her welfare comes before ours,
and
that we owe it to her, for the love we have had, not to punish her for the love we have lost. Better call her and tell her that. No, better not. Put the phone down. The
moment of sanity.

For the stalkers, the moment of sanity never comes. Love can unbalance anyone for a time, but Elmer O.
Noone was unbalanced all the time. His feelings of love were so powerful that they drove him to poetry. But he was a solipsist. He believed that Nicole would reciprocate his feelings if she were
allowed to, because he couldn’t imagine that she might not. It wasn’t that her welfare meant nothing to him: he thought that to love him was her welfare, and all she needed to do was
admit the fact. Most men spend a good part of their lives learning that other people are alive too, but in a democratic society all normal men learn it to some degree. Elmer O. Noone never learnt
it, because Elmer O. Noone was a psychopath. (I have changed his name in this piece, because on past evidence he is perfectly capable of bringing a court case that he is bound to lose, simply for
the satisfaction of tying up a sane person’s life for years on end.) In him, solipsism and egomania were compounded into a one-man universe. The woman destined to be his bride turned out to
be Nicole Kidman, not that nice-looking girl at the checkout counter in his local Wal-Mart. Apart from his eminence in the field of sexual allure, he was equally exalted in his worldly ambitions.
He announced that he had plans to become “a trillionaire.” Being a mere billionaire obviously wouldn’t do. He wanted to be elected President. No Vice-Presidency for him, and
don’t even mention Secretary of State. Where have we heard this sort of stuff before?

We’ve heard it from adepts of the occult: from people whose current earthly existence is a mere
episode in their miraculous ability to be born and re-born in all the most resplendent epochs of history. Frequently to be seen on television—in America they have their own cable
channels—they tell us who they used to be. The lady with the bangles, the purple bouffant, and the asymmetrically lifted face used to be Mary, Queen of Scots. The man with the mascara and
the comb-over used to be Tutankhamun. He is one of the many currently practicing occult adepts who once held the rank of Pharaoh, supreme ruler of Upper and Lower Egypt. It is notable that none
of them, during their ancient Egyptian incarnations, used to be the hundred and fifty-seventh slave
from the left at the raising of the obelisk. What they used to have was a
world in which their will was law, and that is what the stalkers have now: unrestricted individual significance.

When we are in love, we all have a touch of that. We get a taste of what it feels like to be deranged. It
feels as if all uncertainties have been expunged. It feels, that is, like the very opposite of derangement. Luckily, if we are normal, we remain sane enough to realize that we have gone crazy.
There is a way back to a pluralistic world, in which the possibility exists that the adored woman was born not to fulfill our lives but to fulfill hers. We can argue with ourselves, and make
ourselves see reason. But the stalker brooks no argument: not from his victim, who is not really protesting, merely failing to accept the inevitable; and least of all does he brook argument from
himself. He has a perfectly integrated personality.

Should women fear us? Only for what we might do. If they feared us for what we might think, there would
be no end to it, and no continuing with human life. Female beauty projects a male into a realm of fantasy, and does so because it is meant to. Sanity is not to be without fantasy, but to know
reality, and remember the difference. When I was much younger, I might have felt about Nicole Kidman the same way Elmer O. Noone did, and might well have written a poem, which might well have
been even worse. (When I was still in short pants I certainly felt that way about Audrey Dalton, the ingénue in the best ever movie about the
Titanic
. A Google search reveals that she is still alive, in her early seventies. Does she remember what I said to her, as I lifted her into the lifeboat and kissed her
goodbye? She should: I said it every night for months on end.) But even when young and stupid I would have turned away from Nicole’s door when my first bunch of flowers was rebuffed.
Similarly with regard to my current fantasy about Nicole, in which I arrange a cheap date with Elmer O. Noone, stick the muzzle of my .44 Magnum in his mouth, and blow his diseased brains all
over the back wall of Burger King. I don’t even tell her I’ve done it. I require no reward: not from her or from any other woman whose little problem I have been glad to solve. All
over the world, the stalkers— they call me The Vigilante—are thinking twice before they order those flowers, book that ballet ticket, write that poem. I wish it could be true. But
what can one man do? Well, one thing he can do is realize that
when Nicole Kidman looks straight at him out of the screen, she is almost certainly in love with someone else,
even if it seems to defy all reason that it should be so.

—
Weekend Australian
, April 15–16,
2006

DAMON’S BRAVEST DAY

In his championship year, I wrote and presented a television special in which Damon
Hill said a lot of good things, but he was a guest on my weekly studio talk show when he said his best thing: “What’s the hurry?” His frustrating last season was coming to an
end. It would have been easy to blame a slow car: the Arrows had some promise, but it was a farm tractor compared with the Williams he was used to. There was no need for him to admit that his
motivation was gone. But it was, so he said so. Self-deprecating candor is typical of him, although nobody should ever underestimate his fierce pride: an abundance of confidence was the main
reason why he could afford not to bottle up his honesty.

The scene he was evoking was the mad drag between the starting grid and the first corner on the opening
lap of a Grand Prix—any Grand Prix. He had lived with that hurtling potential shambles for the whole of his career, and the day had come when he asked himself this question: the day to
quit. The great drivers are never suicidal, but in the matter of the time taken between two given points they must have nothing else in mind except the minimum. Damon had his world championship
and was unlikely to get another. He had a wonderful family he loved to be with. He had reached the point where he could weigh his achievements against the risks of going on. He had reached the
point where he had started to think. Possessing a good, well-stocked brain to think with, he could reach only one conclusion.

The German writer Ernst Jünger drew a distinction between the generals whose broad view of life
helped them to fight well and the
generals who fought even better because they were interested in nothing else. There was something to it. The principle can be applied
usefully to the top rank of British racing drivers since World War II. Jim Clark, the most conspicuously talented even at the level where supreme talent is a common property, was fully focused on
driving. So was Nigel Mansell when he wasn’t playing golf with Greg Norman. Mike Hawthorn was too much of a gentleman, James Hunt too much of a wastrel: they both had too much to them.
Stirling Moss would have won at least one world championship if he had not been a patriot: for a crucial part of his career he condemned himself to the wrong cars just so as to fly the flag, and
when he signed for Mercedes the small print said that he had to come second to Fangio.

The principle breaks down, however, when it is applied to Jackie Stewart. Clever and complex enough to
run a business empire and a whole racing team of his own, even better at the social round in Monaco than Damon’s father, Jackie Stewart was nevertheless the fully equipped, undistractedly
dedicated winning animal. Later on he used the position he had gained by his abilities to transform the sport through placing a new emphasis on safety. It is largely due to him that drivers now
walk away from the kind of crash that once killed several of them a season. On various occasions which they forgot instantly but which I treasure as fringe-dwellers always do, I have sat down to
dine with four drivers who came back from what once would have been certain death: Niki Lauda, Gerhard Berger, John Watson, and Mika Hakkinen. Admittedly I also talked with two who died: Gilles
Villeneuve and Ayrton Senna. But they both had accidents so freakish that nothing could have saved them. On the whole, anything that can be done for safety in an inherently dangerous sport has
been done, and all because of Stewart. This achievement has rather taken the shine off what he was like as a driver. It should be remembered that when he was in the car the last thing he was
thinking of was whether the helicopter was properly fueled up to take him to hospital. He was thinking of nothing except getting in front and staying there: an aim to which he brought such an
intensity of motivation that he has ever since been unable to quell it even when a passenger in a limousine—he is a notorious back-seat driver. Any slow car would become faster when he
drove it, but that was not a point he was keen to prove. He took the
best machinery by right: the mark of the driver for whom coming first comes first, for whom the sport is a
means to an end.