Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings (48 page)

The Duchess of Windsor: The Uncommon Life of Wallis Simpson
by Greg King (Aurum 1999)

Redeeming Features: A Memoir
by Nicholas Haslam (Jonathan Cape 2009)

Adventures of a Gentleman’s Gentleman
by Guy Hunting (John Blake 2002)

101) The Duchess of Windsor + Adolf Hitler 1937

The Heart Has its Reasons
by the Duchess of Windsor (Tandem 1969)

The Duchess of Windsor
by Michael Bloch (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1996)

The Duchess of Windsor: The Uncommon Life of Wallis Simpson
by Greg King (Aurum 1999)

A Lonely Business: A Self-Portrait of James Pope-Hennessy
edited by Peter Quennell (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1981)

The Book of Royal Lists
by Craig Brown and Lesley Cunliffe (Routledge and Kegan Paul 1982)

Hitler’s Table Talk 1941–44
edited by Hugh Trevor-Roper (Oxford University Press 1988)

Harold Nicolson: Diaries and Letters 1930–39
edited by Nigel Nicolson (Atheneum 1966)

The Rise and Fall of the House of Windsor
by A.N. Wilson (Sinclair-Stevenson 1993)

Behind Closed Doors: The Tragic, Untold Story of the Duchess of Windsor
by Hugo Vickers (Hutchinson 2011)

Redeeming Features
by Nicholas Haslam (Jonathan Cape 2009)

Forget Not
by Margaret, Duchess of Argyll (W.H. Allen 1977)

Wait for Me!: Memoirs of the Youngest Mitford Sister
by Deborah Devonshire (John Murray 2010)

The Way the Wind Blows
by Sir Alec Douglas-Home (Collins 1976)

ENDNOTES

¹
‘The flat was all in brown and white, really rather ugly and quite plain,’ wrote Deborah Mitford in her diary on June 7th 1937, after going with her sister Unity and their mother for tea with Herr Hitler.

²
Now the Cuvilliés-Theater.

³
In 1946 he inherits the title Baron Howard de Walden. He dies in 1999, aged eighty-six. Hitler dies in 1945, aged fifty-six.

⁴
Twain is equally flexible with the truth of stories about other people’s lives. As a young journalist, he regularly makes up stories and puts them in the local newspaper. When someone falls out with his older brother, he gets his own back by writing a story headlined ‘Local Man Resolves to Commit Suicide’.

⁵
Kipling himself proves less gracious with journalists. Just three years later, in 1892, during his ill-fated time living outside Brattleboro in Vermont, a journalist from the Boston
Sunday Herald
drops by. The two men have an altercation outside the house. ‘I refuse to be interviewed,’ says Kipling. ‘It is a crime. I never was. I never will be. You have no more right to stop me for this than to hold me up like a highwayman. It is an outrage to assault a man on the public way. In fact this is worse.’

The journalist won’t take no for an answer, and tries every ploy. ‘Mr Kipling, you are a citizen of the world, and you owe it something and it owes you.’

‘Yes, and that little debt has got to be paid me first, and I shall never pay mine.’

‘You were a member of the press, and the profession wants to know what you have to say. You owe it something.’

‘Damn little.’

‘... Why, Mr Kipling, I wouldn’t have missed this interview, to use your favourite word, for anything.’

‘You haven’t got anything anyway.’

‘Oh yes I have. I’ve got enough to tell people to keep away from you.’

‘That’s what I want ... Say I am a boor, for I am, and I want people to learn it and let me alone.’

With that, Rudyard Kipling slams the door.

⁶
She is, in a way, the Nelson Mandela of her age: however great you are, you can’t feel really good about yourself until you have shaken hands with Helen Keller. Albert Einstein declares himself ‘a great admirer’; Alexander Graham Bell feels that ‘in this child I have seen more of the Divine than has been manifest in anyone I ever met before’; Winston Churchill calls her ‘the greatest woman of our age’; and to H.G. Wells she is ‘the most wonderful being in America’.

⁷
‘It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live,’ he writes after receiving a telegram saying, ‘Susy was peacefully released today.’

⁸
She unites both sides in the Cold War: after a sexually explicit production of
Phaedra
, her work is condemned as ‘pornographic’ in the House of Representatives, and in the Soviet Union she is attacked as a disturbing influence on the young.

⁹
Their respect was, eventually, mutual. Before she died, Martha Graham expressed her approval of Madonna’s performances: ‘She is naughty and dares you to react. But she only puts onstage what most women hide, and yes, it may not be respectable ... Respectable! Show me any artist who wants to be respectable.’

¹⁰
‘A Ceremony on the S. Lawn to honor young Michael Jackson who is the sensation of the pop music world – believed to have earned $120 mil. last year,’ writes Reagan in his diary that evening. ‘He is giving proceeds from one of his biggest selling records to the campaign against drunk driving ... He is totally opposed to Drugs & Alcohol & is using his popularity to influence young people against them. I was surprised at how shy he is.’

Twenty-five years later, when Jackson dies, an autopsy reveals traces of lidocaine, diazepam, nor-diazepam, lorazepam, midazolam and ephedrine in his blood. The cause of death is given as ‘acute propofol intoxication’. Propofol is an anaesthetic generally employed in major surgery. A total of thirteen puncture wounds are discovered on Jackson’s neck, both arms, and both ankles.

¹¹
The fault is probably mutual. ‘She was full of complexities and contradictions,’ a longtime friend of Jackie Kennedy tells her biographer. ‘There was a great sense of competition and hostility. Taking people up, making much of them, then a drop and no one ever knew why.’

¹²
He gives the newlyweds a painting of the bride by himself. Another work of art – a sculpture – is a gift from Kurt Waldheim. ‘It was really ugly,’ notes Warhol. He also notes that ‘Watching this story book wedding, you just wonder about what it’ll be like when the divorce comes.’

¹³
Jackie is particularly gratified when de Gaulle replies to her thank-you letter to him ‘promptly and at length’, while her husband’s goes unanswered.

¹⁴
The Duchess of Devonshire is given pride of place at Kennedy’s inauguration. ‘Our fast young sister went over that ocean & had loving
tete a tetes
with your ruler,’ writes her sister Nancy. ‘Andrew [Duke of Devonshire] says Kennedy is doing for sex what Eisenhower did for golf.’

¹⁵
Always an unwise move.

¹⁶
On French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s state visit to Britain in March 2008, he asks the Queen whether she ever gets bored. ‘Yes, but I don’t say so,’ she replies.

¹⁷
‘I have worked out that with average luck, we should, at the end of 1969, be worth about $12 million between us. About $3 million of that is in diamonds, emeralds, property, paintings, so our annual income will be in the region of ½ million,’ Burton writes in his diary.

¹⁸
After the Duchess’s death, Taylor buys it at auction for $449,625, bidding over the telephone while sitting by her swimming pool. ‘All along I knew my friend the duchess wanted me to have it,’ she tells the press, pointing out that ‘it’s the first time I’ve ever had to buy myself a piece of jewellery.’

¹⁹
To journalist Kevin Sessums when he interviews her in 1997 for a magazine for people living with AIDS, prefacing her remarks with, ‘I’m going to tell you something, but it’s off the record until I die. OK?’

²⁰
Guinness is received into the Catholic Church less than a year later, in April 1956.

²¹
Victoria Glendinning identifies this lady as Evelyn Weil, and the Portuguese poet mentioned later as Alberto de Lacerda.

²²
Later, he writes to Edith Sitwell, thanking her for choosing him as her sponsor. ‘I thought your circle of friends round the table remarkably typical of the Church in its variety and goodwill ... I liked Alec Guinness so much and will try to see more of him. I have long admired his art.’ He goes on to warn her that among her fellow Catholics she must expect to find ‘bores and prigs and crooks and cads’.

²³
Waugh is always very particular about food. Before going to bed that night, he sends £2 to the chef at the Grand Hotel, along with a note demanding that all the dishes for him must be cooked specially, never just kept warm.

²⁴
For Mr Pinfold, ‘the tiny kindling of charity which came to him through his religion, sufficed only to temper his disgust and change it to boredom’.

²⁵
‘If he was accused of some quality usually regarded as contemptible ... he studied it, polished up his performance, and, treating it as both normal and admirable, made it his own’ – Frances Donaldson.

²⁶
The story does the rounds of Stokowski saying, ‘Why don’t we do
Sacre
?’, to which Disney replies, ‘Sock? What’s that?’ But a correspondent to the
New York Times
in 1990 points out that a stenographer was present at the meeting between Stokowski and Disney on September 13th 1938, and this snippet of dialogue is nowhere in the transcript.

²⁷
After the initial failure of
Fantasia
, Disney tells his studio chiefs, ‘We’re through with caviar. From now on it’s mashed potatoes and gravy.’ Yet no Hollywood studio ever entirely shook off the quest for respectability. Stravinsky likes to tell the story of Arnold Schoenberg, who turns down a fortune to supply music for Irving Thalberg’s
The Good Earth
when it comes with impossible artistic conditions attached. Schoenberg refuses, declaring, ‘You kill me to keep me from starving to death.’

²⁸
Recordings still exist of the daily conferences between the scriptwriters and P.L. Travers. On the first day, they start from the beginning: ‘17 Cherry Tree Lane, the Banks household is in uproar ... The father comes home to find the children misbehaving. Mr Banks talks of his wife’s job.’

‘Just a minute,’ says Travers. ‘That’s, that’s, not job, ah, ah ...’

‘Domain?’

‘Er, yes.’

‘Responsibility?’

‘Well, we can’t have job.’

²⁹
Somehow, Walt Disney manages to keep her from meeting Dick van Dyke. By mid-1963, with filming under way, Julie Andrews writes to Travers telling her not to worry about anything, adding that Dick van Dyke is good as Bert, but that ‘he will be an “individual” cockney instead of a “regular type” cockney’. Disney originally wanted Cary Grant to play the part, but he turned down the role, as did Laurence Harvey and Anthony Newley.

³⁰
When Walt Disney is dying of lung cancer, he asks the film’s composers, the Sherman brothers, to play his favourite song from the soundtrack when they drop by every Friday. Each time they play ‘Feed the Birds’, Disney goes over to the window and weeps.

³¹
He may have been born in 1866, or in 1877, in any year in between these two dates, or indeed either side of them.

³²
Today, these beliefs may seem a little far-fetched, but in their day they attracted a good many followers, among them Georgia O’Keeffe and Katherine Mansfield.

³³
Stalin’s daughter Svetlana, who marries the husband of Olgivanna’s late daughter (curiously also called Svetlana), compares her running of Taliesin to Stalin’s running of the Soviet Union. ‘This hierarchical system was appalling: the widow at the top, then the board of directors (a formality); then her own close inner circle, making all the real decisions; then working architects – the real working horses; at the bottom, students who paid high sums to be admitted, only to be sent the next day to work in the kitchen to peel potatoes ... Mrs Wright’s word was law. She had to be adored and worshipped and flattered as often as possible.’

³⁴
In 1954, J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the FBI, reports in a secret memorandum that Gurdjieff is brainwashing Frank Lloyd Wright. He is apparently unaware that Gurdjieff has been dead these past five years.

³⁵
Later, when cheekily asked on a talk show, ‘What do you think of Miss Monroe as architecture?’ Wright replies, ‘I think Miss Monroe’s architecture is extremely good architecture.’

³⁶
Wright also incorporates an elaborate nursery suite in his plans, but thirty years later Miller fails to mention this detail in his autobiography.

³⁷
Hearing this, Marilyn’s long-suffering director Billy Wilder remarks that Khrushchev should direct her next picture.

³⁸
Throughout the racy can-can routine, involving a male dancer diving under the skirt of Shirley MacLaine and emerging holding her red knickers, the Russian Premier appears to be having a whale of a time, but he later denounces it as immoral, pornographic exploitation, adding that ‘a person’s face is more beautiful than his backside’.

³⁹
Her husband Arthur Miller, who was not invited, gives a rather diplomatic account of Marilyn’s opinion of Khrushchev in his autobiography. ‘The Soviet chairman was very obviously smitten with her, and she in turn liked him for his plainness,’ he writes. Miller’s achievements are in many ways overshadowed by his association with Marilyn. ‘When Arthur Miller shook my hand I could only think that this was the hand that had once cupped the breasts of Marilyn Monroe,’ recalls Barry Humphries in July 2010.

⁴⁰
Harold Macmillan describes him as ‘a kind of mixture between Peter the Great and Lord Beaverbrook’.