Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings (53 page)

¹⁸⁶
‘The use of the commonplace ... as a means of expression foreshadows the main trend in twentieth-century art,’ writes Donald Mitchell in his essay ‘Mahler and Freud’ (1958). Freud himself is no judge of music: he is tone deaf.

¹⁸⁷
Alma lives for another fifty-three years.

¹⁸⁸
Once she gets going, she very much enjoys sex. ‘I became a quivering mass of responsive senses in the hands of an expert voluptuary ... Like a flock of wild goats cropping the herbage of the soft hillside, so his kisses grazed over my body, and like the earth itself I felt a thousand mouths devouring me,’ she writes of her first liaison with Princess Winaretta’s brother, Isaac Merritt Singer. She describes going to bed with the poet Mercedes de Acosta with similar gusto: ‘... A slender body, hands soft and white, for the service of my delight, two sprouting breasts round and sweet, invite my hungry mouth to eat, from whence two nipples firm and pink, persuade my thirsty soul to drink, and lower still a secret place where I’d fain hide my loving face ...’

¹⁸⁹
It is Sir Francis Rose of whom Gertrude Stein is later to write ‘A rose is a rose is a rose.’

¹⁹⁰
Isadora prefers a bare minimum of clothes, if that. In Boston in 1922, she electrifies a room by lifting the folds of her scarlet tunic to reveal her naked body and crying, ‘You don’t know what beauty is! This – this is beauty!’

In Vienna, a distraught Princess Metternich asks why Isadora is dancing with so little on. ‘I forgot to tell you how amiable our artiste is,’ says her fellow dancer Loie Fuller. ‘Her baggage has not yet arrived, but rather than disappoint us, she has agreed to appear in her practising costume.’

¹⁹¹
And is still, in 2011, the last Englishman to have won Wimbledon.

¹⁹²
Groucho dies on August 19th 1977, Chaplin four months later, on Christmas Day 1977.

¹⁹³
The panellists are Kingsley Amis, Brian Epstein, Susan Hampshire and Groucho’s third wife, Eden Hartford. The pilot goes badly, and the show is never aired.

¹⁹⁴
Twenty-five years later, I am present at a similar meeting, between Anthony Burgess and Benny Hill.

Watching old Benny Hill shows in Monaco (long after they had fallen out of fashion in Britain), Anthony Burgess has become an unabashed admirer of the comedian. Reviewing a new biography of Hill,
Saucy Boy
, in the
Guardian
in 1990, he declares him ‘one of the great artists of our age’.

The two men meet for the first time shortly after the review appears. I am lucky enough to be present at this bizarre but historic encounter. Both of them prove to be remarkably as they are on television. Hill arrives first, as perky as can be, apparently over the moon at having been driven by a female taxi-driver (‘Oooh, I said, you can take me ANYWHERE, my love!’). Burgess – histrionic, loquacious, with deep voice and furrowed brow, putting the emphasis on unexpected words – behaves just like a slightly hammy actor playing the part of Anthony Burgess.

The two of them are full of praise for each other, but never quite find common ground. All in all, the encounter follows a similar pattern to T.S. Eliot’s meeting with Groucho Marx: the author wanting to show off his knowledge of comedians, the comedian wanting to show off his knowledge of authors. By the end of the dinner it seems to me unlikely they will ever meet again, and as far as I know, they never do.

But then, neither man has long to live. Hill dies in 1992; Burgess in 1993.

¹⁹⁵
The British royal family traditionally views writers and artists as more to be endured than enjoyed. Queen Elizabeth’s father-in-law, King George V, perhaps the most philistine of all monarchs, once came across a painting by Cézanne at an art exhibition. ‘Come over here, May,’ he said, summoning his wife, ‘here’s something that will make you laugh.’

His son, King George VI, commissions John Piper, well known for his brooding, stormy pictures, to paint a series of Windsor Castle. The artist duly delivers the paintings, but hears nothing. Some time later, he is presented to the King at a garden party. ‘Ah yes ... Piper,’ says the King. ‘Pity you had such awful weather.’

Royal encounters with writers and poets rarely go smoothly, and often end in conversational cul-de-sacs. When Robert Graves goes to the Palace to receive the Queen’s Medal for Poetry, he says to the Queen, ‘You realise, ma’am, that you and I are descended from the prophet Mohammed.’ ‘Oh, really?’ says the Queen. ‘Yes.’ ‘How interesting.’ ‘I think that you should mention it in your Christmas message, because a lot of your subjects are Mohammedans.’

¹⁹⁶
Wilson comes in for heavy and immediate criticism for betraying the confidences of the dinner table. His host, Lord Wyatt of Weeford, complains that it is ‘a shabby trick’ and that Wilson ‘is boastfully shameless in being a scoundrel ... his underhand behaviour does not square with the Christian ethics he professes. Nor with those of a gentleman, which I had naïvely thought him to be.’ Nicholas Soames MP condemns it as ‘an intolerable betrayal ... For Mr Wilson to have broken every convention of civilised society in this regard is bad enough. Worse, it shows an appalling want of chivalry.’

Before his death, Wyatt arranges for the posthumous publication of his diaries, which, coincidentally, contain detailed reports of many private conversations with the Queen Mother.

¹⁹⁷
By chance, she welcomes the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro to Balmoral during his gap year in 1973, but only as a beater.

¹⁹⁸
Opinion among staff remains divided. ‘She is quiet and easy to please,’ an unnamed female employee of Raymond’s hairdressing salon is quoted as saying in 1949. But in 2002, a former Buckingham Palace footman, Guy Hunting, recalls the dislike for the Duchess of Windsor felt by the Duke’s former valet, Walter Fry. ‘It was not the fact that she was foreign or divorced or untitled that rankled, it was simply that she did not seem to know how they [the servants] should be treated. The worst example of this was her behaviour at table. At lunch or dinner most people react immediately when they are aware that someone is standing beside them holding a dish of meat or vegetables. The well-mannered turn slightly, without breaking off conversation, and help themselves to whatever is offered. Wallis Simpson’s habit was to ignore poor bent (no pun intended) footmen for as long as possible. When Walter realised that this was a game she enjoyed playing at every opportunity, he decided that she must be taught a lesson. During dinner one evening he waited patiently beside her to see if she was up to her usual tricks. When she failed, yet again, to acknowledge the presence of the large dish of roast pheasant that was getting heavier and heavier, he moved it sightly to the left until it brushed gently against the bare flesh of her upper arm. The heat of the silver generated an immediate response, and a withering glance from the lady from Baltimore. After that little incident she played by the rules, and Walter was a hero.’

¹⁹⁹
Less chummily, the Duke of Windsor describes his mother and his sister-in-law as ‘ice-veined bitches’.

²⁰⁰
Like a pantomime character, the Duchess of Windsor continues to arouse fierce reactions, both for and against. Nicky Haslam writes in 2009, ‘On the day the Duchess died, I was dining with David Westmorland, Master of the Horse to the Queen, and his wife, Jane. The dinner was for Princess Margaret. I summoned up the courage to ask her what she felt about the Duchess. The Princess replied simply: “It wasn’t her we hated, it was him.”’

²⁰¹
The Windsors’ circle always style her ‘Your Royal Highness’, even though it is not, strictly speaking, correct. Early on, this causes a dilemma for those torn between loyalty to the past and present Kings. When speaking to the Duchess, should they address her as Your Royal Highness or not? The high-society diarist Harold Nicolson records the anxiety of those staying as guests with W. Somerset Maugham at the Villa Mauresque in the South of France in August 1938 as they prepare to greet the Windsors: ‘We stood sheepishly in the drawing room. In they came ... Cocktails were brought and we stood around the fireplace. There was a pause. “I am sorry we were a little late,” said the Duke, “but Her Royal Highness couldn’t drag herself away.” He had said it. The three words fell into the circle like three stones into a pool. Her (gasp) Royal (shudder) Highness (and not one eye dared to meet the other) ...’

²⁰²
The Duchess’s looks struck several of those who met her as peculiar. ‘This is one of the very oddest women I have ever seen,’ observes her mother-in-law’s biographer, James Pope-Hennessy, after going to stay with the Duke and Duchess in 1958. ‘... She is, to look at, a phenomenon. She is flat and angular, and could have been designed for a medieval playing-card. The shoulders are small and high; the head very, very large, almost monumental ... Her jawbone is alarming, and from the back you can plainly see it jutting beyond the neck on each side.’ Nicholas Haslam recalls meeting her in a restaurant in New York in the early 1960s: ‘Across the restaurant – cheek-kissing, air-kissing, winking, waving – comes this minute figure, the flat cubist head made higher and wider by black bouffant hair parted centrally from the brow to the black grosgrain bow at the nape, dressed in an impossibly wide-weave pink angora tweed Chanel suit, concertinaed white gloves, black crocodile bag and shoes ... “Oh, the Beatles. Don’t you just love ’em? ‘I give her all my love, that’s all I do-oo,’” she sings. “Adore ’em. Do you know them? Oh, you are lucky.”’

Margaret, Duchess of Argyll remembers meeting the then Mrs Ernest Simpson at a luncheon party in the mid-1930s: ‘She was not outstanding in any way, not well dressed. Her hair was parted down the middle, arranged in “earphones”, and her voice was harsh. My impression was of quite a plain woman with a noticeably square jaw, and not particularly amusing. But she was a pleasant person, and we were to remain friends.’

²⁰³
Deborah Mitford, later the Duchess of Devonshire, also takes tea with Hitler in 1937. He is a friend of her sister Unity. ‘He isn’t very like his photos, not nearly so hard looking,’ she writes in her diary. On a visit to his bathroom, she notices that he has ‘some brushes there, with “AH” on them’. Through her sister Diana Mosley, the Duchess also encounters the Duchess of Windsor: ‘I could not like her, she seemed so brittle, her face bony, angular and painted, her body so dangerously thin she might snap in half.’

²⁰⁴
In his memoirs, Sir Alec Douglas-Home confesses to a different impression of the Führer: ‘I noticed that his arms swung low, almost to his knees. It gave him a curiously animal appearance.’

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Copyright © 2011 by Craig Brown

Preface copyright © 2012 by Craig Brown

Originally published in Great Britain in 2011 by HarperCollins
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Brown, Craig, date.

[One on one]

Hello goodbye hello : a circle of 101 remarkable meetings / Craig Brown.

p.            cm.

Originally published under title: One on one. London : Fourth Estate, 2011.

Includes bibliographical references.

1. Celebrities—Quotations. 2. Celebrities—Humor. 3. Title.

PN6084.C44B76         2012

082—dc23        2012003987

ISBN 978-1-4516-8360-8

ISBN 978-1-4516-8452-0 (ebook)