Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings (52 page)

He never posts this letter.

¹⁵²
The final film includes this dialogue between Bogart and the gambler and blackmailer Brody:

Marlowe:
Hmm, hmm. You know where that Packard is now? ... It’s in the Sheriff’s garage. It was fished out of twelve feet of water off Lido pier early this morning. There was a dead man in it. He’d been sapped. The car was pointed toward the end of the pier and the hand throttle pulled out.

Brody:
Well, you can’t pin that on me.

Marlowe:
I could make an awful good try ... You see, the dead man was Owen Taylor, Sternwood’s chauffeur. He went up to Geiger’s place ’cause he was sweet on Carmen. He didn’t like the kind of games Geiger was playing. He got himself in the back way with a jimmy and he had a gun. And the gun went off as guns will, and Geiger fell down dead. Owen ran away taking the film with him. You went after him and got it – how else would you get it?

Brody:
All right, you’re right. I heard the shots and saw him run down the back steps and into the Packard and away. I followed him. He turned west on Sunset and beyond Beverly he, uh, skidded off the road, and uh, came to a stop. So I came up and played copper. He had a gun, he was rattled, so I sapped him down. I figured the film might be worth something so I took it. That’s the last I saw of him.

Marlowe:
So you left an unconscious man in a car way out near Beverly someplace and you want me to believe that somebody conveniently came along, ran that car all the way down to the ocean, pushed it off the pier, and then came back and hid Geiger’s body.

Brody:
Well I didn’t.

Marlowe:
Somebody did.

¹⁵³
Now the Lakeside Golf Club.

¹⁵⁴
The golfing sequence in
Bringing up Baby
was shot at the Bel Air Country Club.

¹⁵⁵
When W.C. Fields is invited to play at the Lakeside with someone he doesn’t like, he replies, ‘When I want to play with a prick, I’ll play with my own.’

¹⁵⁶
When Katharine Hepburn is playing the tenth hole of the course in 1936, a two-seater plane lands in front of her. Out climbs Hughes, brandishing a bag of clubs and saying, ‘Mind a third?’ Their three-year affair begins later the same day.

¹⁵⁷
His grandfather Pasquale Broccoli arrives in New York from Calabria with only a packet of broccoli seeds. Other immigrants to America have tried planting broccoli, but with little success. But the Broccolis’ broccoli – from the family de Cicco strain, which sells for $16 an ounce – proves triumphant. The family goes on to grow many other types of vegetable – spinach, carrots, radishes, cucumbers – but broccoli remains their pride and joy.

¹⁵⁸
He is meant to be designing a top-secret medium-range bomber capable of flying at 450 miles an hour for the US Air Force, but this has to take a back seat to Miss Russell’s breasts.

¹⁵⁹
A later film Jane Russell makes with Howard Hughes, a 3D Technicolor musical called
The French Line
, is promoted with the slogans ‘J.R. in 3-D. It’ll knock BOTH your eyes out!’ and ‘Jane Russell in 3 Dimensions – and what dimensions!’ The Archbishop of St Louis, where the film is premiered in 1953, issues a warning to his parishioners. ‘Dearly beloved, since no Catholic can with a clear conscience attend such an immoral movie, we feel it our solemn duty to forbid our Catholic people under penalty of mortal sin to attend this presentation.’ The Archbishop does not realise that this is exactly the reason Hughes chose to premiere the film in St Louis, with its 65 per cent Roman Catholic population.

¹⁶⁰
The unknown Timothy Dalton drops out of the running, believing himself, at twenty-one, too young for the part.

¹⁶¹
To date, it is estimated that James Bond has killed more than 150 men and slept with forty-four women, three quarters of whom have tried to kill him.

¹⁶²
In the original script, the switch from one James Bond to another is explained by Bond having undergone plastic surgery so as to disguise him from his enemies. In subsequent revisions, this explanation is dropped in favour of no explanation at all.

¹⁶³
Lazenby’s future work as an actor is sporadic. Over the years he has occasional roles on television, among them episodes of
Baywatch, Kung Fu
and
Hawaii Five-O
. In the 1990s, he appears in a number of the
Emmanuelle
movies.

¹⁶⁴
A brand-new late-night chat show is hosted by a relative unknown, whose name is Michael Parkinson. Dee’s slot on the BBC is given to the actor Derek Nimmo, in
If It’s Saturday, It Must Be Nimmo
. Among Nimmo’s first guests is Basil Brush, a leading glove puppet.

¹⁶⁵
One day, furious at not being allowed Matt Monro on his show, he decides to ‘cause them a bit of bother by seeing how they manage to broadcast
The Simon Dee Show
without Simon Dee appearing on it’. He simply fails to show up. ‘They phoned me every day if not every hour to try and find out when I might be back, but I answered – sounding perfectly fine, of course – that I was too ill to speak and needed to go back to bed. It was delicious!’ He arrives at LWT at the last possible moment, just as his emergency replacement, Pete Murray, is preparing to go on. ‘I came out and said, “Hello everyone, well, as long as you’ve got your health, what else matters, eh? And for those of you who tuned in tonight to see Pete Murray ... sorry!” It got a big laugh from the studio audience and went on to be one of my best LWT shows.’

¹⁶⁶
‘He did not think that there was enough quiet in the world. To realise God you need silence. He loved spaces for silence, and places of silence. He encouraged the practice of retreats. He was an inspiring conductor of retreats. He thought of the religious communities as little havens of quiet scattered across society ...’. From Owen Chadwick’s memorial address.

¹⁶⁷
At the end of the year, Ramsey flies to South Africa, where he preaches against apartheid. ‘If we exclude a man because he is of another race or colour,’ he asks, ‘are we not excluding Christ himself?’ He expresses these views even more vehemently in a frosty meeting with President Vorster. He is determined not to be photographed looking cheerful with the President, so before the meeting, ‘I practised making one unpleasant face after another while shaving. I did it so I should get a sort of continuity of unpleasant faces.’

¹⁶⁸
For the next three decades, he attempts any number of comebacks, but they all end in tears. He walks out on the Radio 4
Today
programme after just two broadcasts, from a Fairy Liquid commercial during lunchtime on day one, and from a Reading radio station on the very first morning, after refusing to interview Alvin Stardust. Over the years, he finds himself in court for, successively, shoplifting a potato peeler, non-payment of rates, smashing up a loo set in a shop, and assaulting a policeman outside Buckingham Palace after being told he cannot speak to the Queen. In 1974 he serves twenty-eight days in Pentonville Prison for non-payment of rates on his former Chelsea home.

‘No bank will give me an account now,’ he says to an interviewer in 2004. ‘They say they don’t know who Simon Dee is. I give them videos of Simon Dee on LWT and they absolutely say no, they can’t accept that. I even faxed the chairman and told him what was going on, and he got in touch with the manager, and told him to keep throwing me out.’ At the time of his death aged seventy-four in 2009, he is living in a one-bedroom flat in Winchester with twenty-six scrap-books stuffed with his newspaper cuttings, beginning in 1964 and ending in 1972.

¹⁶⁹
‘In 1975, a group of chaplains went to lunch,’ recalls one of them, Father Stock, ‘and afterwards I was sitting upstairs in the study and Michael began to talk about the Pope’s attitude towards sex. “Masturbation, masturbation, so silly of the Pope to make such a fuss about masturbation. It’s the sort of thing we all do, and we hope one day something more interesting will come along to take its place.” Well, it was a warm day and the windows were wide open, and I thought, what on earth will people think if they hear all this!’

¹⁷⁰
The Bishop of Southwark, Mervyn Stockwood, remembers Ramsey at Church Assembly drawing up cricket teams composed of the greatest bores among his colleagues. For every five minutes they speak, they score a run. ‘He’s got a boundary today!’ he exclaims whenever one of his bores exceeds himself.

¹⁷¹
In his diary, Macmillan also describes Fisher as ‘a silly, weak, vain and muddle-headed man’. He complains of his meetings with Fisher, ‘I try to talk to him about religion. But he seems quite uninterested and reverts all the time to politics.’

¹⁷²
But it is easy to get these things wrong. Amis himself was once quoted in an interview with John Mortimer as admitting that he had ‘hit his son with a hammer’; in fact, he had said that he had hit his
thumb
with a hammer. Likewise, his host, Tom Stoppard, was once quoted by Kenneth Tynan as saying, ‘I am a human nothing’; Tynan went on to say that Stoppard’s plays should be read as an attempt to come to terms with this bleak truth. Thirty years later, Stoppard writes a letter to the
Guardian
stating, with characteristic good humour, that what he in fact said was ‘I am
assuming
nothing.’

Dahl’s authorised biographer, Donald Sturrock, offers a paraphrase of the conversation and attempts a defence, arguing that ‘many of Dahl’s English literary contemporaries ... resented his skill at making money and disliked the pride he took in his own financial successes’, adding that this ‘frequently caused misunderstandings ... He knew that Amis, like most of the guests, did not respect children’s writing as proper literature and this attitude made him vulnerable. Drunk and ill at ease, he probably felt that the only way to keep his head up was to talk money. The clash of attitudes was bitter and fundamental.’ However, though he seems to go along with Amis’s account, nowhere in his otherwise detailed rendition of their meeting does Sturrock either repeat or refute the words ‘Never mind, the little bastards’d swallow it.’

¹⁷³
Or not so single: when the Queen Mother telephones Cecil Beaton to tell him the news, he says, ‘Oh, how wonderful, you must be thrilled ma’am, how simply marvellous, he’s terribly clever and talented.’ But when he puts down the phone, he turns to a house guest and exclaims, ‘Silly girl! Not even a good photographer!’

¹⁷⁴
‘I was born with a priceless gift,’ says Dame Edna Everage. ‘The ability to laugh at the misfortunes of others.’

¹⁷⁵
305 × 345 cms.

¹⁷⁶
Others include
Her Majesty’s Male
, a painting of Queen Elizabeth II with a 5 o’clock shadow, and
Cakescape
, a cake pressed between two panes of glass, looking a little like a Jackson Pollock.

¹⁷⁷
‘Alas,’ Humphries writes in one of his memoirs, ‘rather like Yoko Ono, Senora Dalí lacked her husband’s genius, and her surrealist postures were always rather humourless and uninspired.’

¹⁷⁸
He seems to have got off a good deal more lightly than the art critic Brian Sewell, who a few years later, whilst holidaying alone in Cadaqués, is invited back by Salvador Dalí, then taken to an olive grove, where he is required to lie naked in the foetal position and masturbate as Dalí takes photographs and fumbles in his own trousers. ‘Sheepish and in silence’, the two men then walk back to Gala, who is sitting in a giant eggshell in the garden.

¹⁷⁹
Freud’s recent eightieth birthday brought him greetings from, among others, Thomas Mann, H.G. Wells, Albert Schweitzer and Albert Einstein.

¹⁸⁰
Ten years later, in an interview with Malcolm Muggeridge on the
Panorama
programme on BBC Television, Dalí appears to have moved on. ‘All your wonderful jokes that we know about – taxi cabs with the rain inside and so on,’ says Muggeridge, ‘you’re going to go on with those jokes?’

‘Eh, thees correspond to le first period of my life,’ replies Dalí. ‘The moment of myself is very beeg interest in psychoanalysis, coming in London for meet le Doctor Freud. But now my only interest is about le treeee-mendous progress of nuclear recherches and nuclear physics.’

‘And so really that represented a phase in your career, those jokes that we all know about, and now you move on, and all your life will be to the rhythm of atomic explosion?’

‘Exactly, one new kind of, eh, atomic and nuclear mysticism.’

‘Well, thank you very much, that’s a fascinating phrase, nuclear mysticism.’

¹⁸¹
Lucian Freud remembers his grandfather as someone who ‘always seemed to be in a good mood. He had what many people who are
really
intelligent have, which is not being serious or solemn, as if they are so sure they know what they are talking about that they don’t have the need to be earnest about it.’

¹⁸²
She has relationships with, among others, Gustav Klimt, Max Burckhard, Alexander Zemlinsky and Oskar Kokoschka. She marries Gustav Mahler in 1902, Walter Gropius in 1915 and Franz Werfel in 1929.

¹⁸³
‘He was convinced at the time, and remained convinced for the rest of his life, that the architect had deliberately addressed the letter to him as his way of asking him for my hand in marriage,’ wrote Alma much later.

¹⁸⁴
Contemporary psychoanalysts seem to think that such a brief consultation cannot truly be classified as psychoanalysis. Yet it seems to have been in many ways more productive, and more constructive, than many courses of treatment that last a lifetime.

¹⁸⁵
At the Mahler wedding, his little niece Eleanor is caught mimicking Mahler’s gait, and sent home in disgrace.