Wish You Were Here
Contents
ONE Not from Guildford After All
THREE St. John’s, Smokers, Networks and Friends
FIVE The Origin of the Species
NINE Hippodust, Films and the Telly Saga
ELEVEN More Books, Money and a Sense of Place
FOURTEEN Turtles All the Way Down
APPENDIX ONE Twenty-five Years On
APPENDIX TWO Chronology of the Major Works
APPENDIX THREE Full Credits for the Radio Series
APPENDIX FOUR Douglas’s Favourite Beatles’ Tracks in Order of Preference
For Susan
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would particularly like to thank Jane Belson for her help and big-hearted agreement to let me have access to Douglas’s papers. Jane and the other members of the family were patient with my clumsy questions when they were still shocked with grief. Janet Thrift, Douglas’s mother, was brave to face a biographer so soon after her son’s death and also deserves special thanks. In the diaspora of the Adams and Thrift families, Sue, Heather, Jane, James, Rosemary and Karena were generous with their time and invaluable insights in what must have been trying circumstances. Shirley Adams, from another branch of the family, gave me the benefit of her scholarly researches into the family tree. The Thrifts and Adamses are a remarkable lot.
Ed Victor, Maggie Phillips and Sophie Hicks at the Ed Victor Agency were unfailingly helpful. Pan Books was kind enough to let me look through its archives—my special thanks to Jacqui Graham for arranging it. Many others contributed interviews, or help with research, including Will Adams, Mary Allen, Sophie Astin, Nick Austin, Peter Bennett-Jones, Nick Booth, Trevor Bounford, Simon Brett, Jonathan Brock, Dr. Mark Bryant, Margo Buchanan, Michael Bywater, Jon Canter, Mark Carwardine, Maggie Crystal, Richard Curtis, Brian Davies, Professor Richard Dawkins, Sally Emerson, Don Epstein, Ken Follett, Susan Freestone, Jacqui Graham, Yoz Grahame, Peter Guzzardi, Bruce Harris, Richard Harris, Terry Jones, Michael Leapman, John Lloyd, Jim Lynn, Andrew Marshall, Simon Master, Reverend Ian Mackenzie, Debbie McInnes, Sonny Mehta, Isabel Molina, Michael Nesmith, Chris Ogle, Rick and Heidi Paxton, Geoffrey Perkins, Christophe Reisner, David Renwick, G.R. Roche, Kanwal Sharma, Martin Smith, Robbie Stamp and Caroline Upcher.
Published sources that were very useful were Neil Gaiman’s
Don’t Panic
and M.J. Simpson’s
Hitchhiker’s Guide.
They are essential reading for the serious buff; I have acknowledged them wherever they were the principal source of information.
The Best of Days?,
a collection of memories from Brentwood School and expertly published by the school itself, gave an insiders’ flavour of life there.
The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made
by David Hughes is grimly fascinating. Neil Richards’s
Starship Titanic Guide
is invaluable for navigating through the game and understanding the thought processes behind it.
From Fringe to Flying Circus
by Roger Wilmut is a lot of fun and helped to put the Cambridge Footlights phenomenon into perspective. My thanks to Punch Cartoon Library for permission to reproduce the Crum cartoon about hippos.
Douglas himself gave innumerable interviews, and a large proportion of them can still be found on the Internet. There are many websites, including the official one, on which information is posted by fans and then maintained and updated out of sheer enthusiasm. The World Wide Web is a very rich source for a researcher, but it is so diverse that it is only possible to acknowledge it in the broadest terms.
Finally I am grateful to Susan Webb for her help in transcribing the interviews and for her expert editing. The errors that remain are entirely mine.
A COMMENDABLY BRIEF
Introduction,
BUT YOU MAY SKIP IT
IF YOU LIKE
C
ontemporary biography is the Area 51 of the literary world. There’s a lot of circumstantial evidence that it exists, but very few get to visit. The rest of us wonder what the hell is going on behind the perimeter fence.
Biography set in the past is less mysterious. Disappearing from sight, the writer tunnels through a mountain of research—emerging, dazzled by the light, years later with a book. If this contains some entertaining history, sixteen pages of attractive pictures, an argument about the subject that can be supported—perhaps with a little casuistry—from the documentation, and it doesn’t cost more than $24.95 ($35.00 if it’s a whopper), the book is acceptable.
Boswell said that writing his biography of Dr. Johnson was a presumptuous exercise. It is indeed an odd idea that you can squeeze someone’s life between the covers of a book. Writing about somebody of the moment who died suddenly, and far too young, is trickier still. There are many people over whose feelings the author can clodhop, and they will all have a different view of the person from the one offered. Some of those views will appear not to refer to the same person at all. The biographer will have to rely less on historical records and more on people’s fallible memories. (“Hmm,” they say, “it was 1982—no, I tell a lie, ’84—oh, the eighties anyway . . .”) The whole truth that the courtroom witness so recklessly undertakes to deliver is a notion that should be melted down for scrap and deleted from legal procedure forthwith. The whole truth is unknowable—it can only be lived and not described.
In the case of Douglas Adams the difficulty is compounded. First of all he was immensely clever and gave such good interviews that he was in constant demand. Every time you think you’ve had an insight into the man, it turns out that he had it first—and expressed it with more wit than any biographer could muster, though in the process he turned such revelations into suspiciously polished artefacts.
To complicate matters further, he was wildly exuberant about his interests. Despite being the finest comic author since Wodehouse, this enthusiasm did not embrace writing (which he did reluctantly, and with enormous anguish). Any biography also has to deal with the fact that he was an enormously prescient and creative thinker, and much of what he thought was never located on paper.
Douglas’s passions were lifelong; they resist any attempt to tidy them into phases. Why would he stop loving music because he discovered Apple Macs, for instance? Besides, as Kierkegaard said, life is lived forwards but understood backwards—thereby, in my view, imposing a subtle but misleading formalism upon a messy business. We human beings are rarely as consistent as characters in fiction from whom we expect a purposeful direction seldom achieved in real life.
With a straight chronology the word “meanwhile” would soon become tiresome. Douglas was not conventional. This book abandons a strictly chronological structure in favour of illuminating aspects of a brilliant, engaging and complex man. You will judge whether this works. My hope is that at least the book will be good company—like the man himself.
Prologue
“A towel is about the most massively useful thing any interstellar hitchhiker can carry. For one thing it has great practical value—you can wrap it around you for warmth on the cold moons of Jaglan Beta, sunbathe on it on the marble beaches of Santraginus Five, huddle beneath it for protection from the Arcturan Megagnats as you sleep beneath the stars of Kakrafoon, use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy river Moth, wet it for use in hand to hand combat, wrap it around your head to avoid the gaze of the ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (which is such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you), and even dry yourself off with it if it still seems clean enough.”
T
HE
N
ARRATOR
, F
IT THE
S
EVENTH
,
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
I
n the time of the Revolution, so the story goes, when the Terror was at its height, a French count, suitably disguised by scruffiness, made a run for the coast in order to escape to England. He was a cultured man, a flower of the Enlightenment, rational, charming and educated.
Just a few kilometres short of Boulogne and safety, he stopped to rest his horses and have a meal at a handy
auberge.
Even 200 years ago the roadside snack was treated with Gallic seriousness.
After a certain amount of large French small talk, the waiter got down to business. The dialogue went something like this:
“
Dis donc,
citizen. What would you like to eat? We can offer bread, some amusing cheese
paysanne,
and fresh eggs.”
“Thank you, citizen. The eggs sound good. Perhaps an omelette?”
“Of course, citizen. And how many eggs would you like in your omelette?”
Now, since birth the aristocrat’s family had employed a team of people to look after his every need. Anticipating a hint of nasal drip, a servant would appear with a fine linen handkerchief before the well-bred nose needed blowing. The number of eggs that normally went into an omelette was not a fact with which the aristocratic mind had ever had to burden itself.
“Um. Douze, thank you,” he said.
“Douze?
Douze?
” said the waiter, aquiver with revolutionary suspicion. “And what is it you do, citizen, may I ask?”
Doubtless the count did the French equivalent of dropping his aitches as he laboured to sound like a rough-hewn son of toil: “I’m a carpenter, innit, citizen, me old mate.”
But it was too late. The waiter had clocked the refined accent, and one look at the count’s soft hands, never sullied by manual work, gave the lie to the carpentry story. Nipping back into the kitchen, the waiter reappeared shortly with the chef, an enormous man equipped with a cleaver—a small preview of things to come.
Transported back to Paris, the count was swiftly guillotined.
Perhaps death is always absurd.
Douglas Adams was a comic genius and creative thinker, a highly complex man. His death, at the age of forty-nine, on 11 May 2001 in Platinum Fitness, a private gymnasium in Santa Barbara, was almost as daft, and really much sadder, than that of the
comte.
He and his family had moved from London to Southern California two years before and had settled in Santa Barbara, or, more precisely, Montecito, a verdant village of Heinleinesque gated enclaves and huge houses looking like escapees from the set of Dallas. Douglas needed to be “on the Coast”—not so much a location as a state of mind having nothing to do with the seaside but everything to do with Hollywood. Finally, after several decades of false starts and uncertain flirtations, it looked as if the film of
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
*
1
was going to happen.
Douglas loved it there. His wife, Jane Belson, enjoyed it too though she did suffer intermittent bouts of what long-term prisoners call gate fever. The affluent, cosmetically adjusted locals with those teeth that only Americans and people in television seem to manage, the Potemkin supermarkets with their rows of shiny technicolor fruit (tasting of nothing), and the endless days of dappled sunshine all contrived to give the place a certain unreality in her mind. “Sometimes it could be a bit
Stepford Wives,
” she observed. But Jane was happy that Douglas was happy, and she had put her own career as a barrister on hold because she could see how much her husband wanted the movie to happen. They were both delighted that their adored young daughter, Polly Rocket Adams, took to California with joyful exuberance.
In appearance, Douglas Adams was like some large, friendly marine mammal. In his opinion, Elaine Morgan’s*
2
idea that evolution had taken the hominids through an aquatic phase had more virtue than conventional wisdom was prepared to grant it. Douglas never claimed that his liking for water stemmed from mankind’s deep evolutionary past, though he certainly had an affinity for it. Exactly like the captain of the B-Ark on Golgafrincham, he took to his bath when stressed, and he regarded scuba diving as so pleasurable that it was bound to be illegal somewhere. He was huge, a smidgen over 6’5", left-handed, rather ill-coordinated, a little clumsy. He sometimes gave the impression of fitting awkwardly into the world. Eyes: brown; eyelashes: enviable—as long as a giraffe’s; face: often lit with a half-suppressed smile, for he had a prodigious sense of humour and found the world funny when it wasn’t tragic. He had a habit of looking into the middle distance and saying “um” when thinking. “Heroic” best describes his endowment in the nose department; his schnozzle was a mountain range of a thing.*
3
He once observed that if he swam on his back in the sea, parallel to a beach, everyone would run screaming out of the water.
Obviously, food and drink were put upon the Earth for his pleasure. He was extravagant with champagne. He had a particular weakness for Japanese restaurants, but his lifelong affair with all restaurants was disgracefully promiscuous. He was not put off even by the pretentious ones where every mouthful is a week’s wages. Not surprisingly, he was prone to putting on weight and he had been hit by late-onset diabetes, known as “Type Two” in the USA which boasts some of the most enormous bipeds on the planet (and where this form of diabetes has become almost epidemic). Douglas himself had been as heavy as 19 stone (266 lbs) but he had always succeeded in losing any excess. The diabetes was not acute and soon disappeared, but in 1999 he went on a round of medical checks—for he loved hospitals and doctors—and discovered that he had developed high blood pressure. He had reached that age when men used to rude health all their lives become uncomfortably aware that their bodies cannot do what they did at twenty.
An infamous writing block had persisted all decade, though he had found myriad interesting alternatives; to say he failed to write is like saying that Columbus failed to find India. Nevertheless, the missed deadlines—not quite an industry record, but impressive—were a source of anxiety, and occasionally despair, that had weighed upon him without remission.
Douglas’s Internet and computer game business venture had also run into the sand. All over the landscape there had sounded the thunder of giant wallets being slammed shut by men in suits. Historians of the future will look back on the last two decades of the twentieth century with fascination and bewilderment. Was it something we’d eaten? Enormously canny and prudent investors used their elbows as they ran to the front of the queue clutching thick wads of their own and, more usually, other people’s money in a headlong rush to finance telecom and dotcom companies. Many of these boasted business propositions that depended on markets and technologies that were yet to be called into existence. The
Financial Times
estimates that this global financial bubble wasted $1,000 billion of real cash in ridiculous investments.*
4
You may think: well, tough. All those acquisitive young men in the City with stripy shirts and spotty ties (to say nothing of those techies who could have been speaking Inuit for all the sense they made)—who cares if they lost a packet? After all, the Internet revolution threw up business ventures without number—some brilliant, some fathered by hope and greed. Presumably the ones with real merit survived while the crowds of dodgy ones melted away. But the truth is that many of those failed businesses were not nonsense; some were genuinely visionary and inventive. Douglas’s venture, originally called The Digital Village, was years ahead of its time.
But building a business is hard to do within the time limits demanded by your free-range western venture capitalist. Such creatures have an icy spreadsheet where their hearts should be, and their expectations for the return of some whole number multiple of the initial investment rarely extend beyond three years. As long as the share prices were rising, this short-term myopia did not matter, but as technology stocks ramped up from optimistic valuations to downright silly ones, eventually the overvaluation of tech stocks became unsustainable. When the high tide of money retreated and left thousands of enterprises flapping about on the beach like dying fish, the good suffocated along with the bad. Douglas’s enterprise was not spared.
During these years too, the film of
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
was something that Douglas passionately wanted to be made. For nearly a quarter of a century the project had inched its way fitfully through a contractual maze and a development hell so capricious that even jaded Hollywood insiders smote their foreheads and sighed. Many times it had come to within an angstrom or two of greenlighting before, triumphantly, it found the right director and a workable budget. All seemed well at last, but then, in 2000, it foundered again.
Douglas had made lots of money. A rich author is paid in cash; his wealth is not tied up in the equity of some business, the value of which, as financial advisors sometimes forget to point out, can fall as well as plummet. A writer’s assets are built in and enviably portable: talent and fingers. But Douglas was never as rich as people imagined. He was self-indulgent and hedonistic—and extravagantly generous both to individuals and his favourite good causes. The concept of Treat was seldom far from his thoughts, and he applied it to others as well as self. Money was for pleasure. His talent for making it was more than matched by his genius for spending it.
For all his warmth and humour, Douglas was sometimes hard to live with, a trait often shared with very creative people. In many ways he was an emotionally fragile yet precociously brilliant child. Children can oscillate between joy and gloom with mercurial rapidity, and anyone who has spent time looking after them knows that nature, for sound Darwinian reasons, has programmed the little so-and-sos with a certain egotism. Douglas was romantic, warm, funny, exuberantly enthusiastic and possessed of a quite exceptional brain; he also had his demons, and could be depressed, self-absorbed, sulky and difficult.
But, despite all the problems, by 2001 things were looking up. Admittedly, the film was still in the Horse Latitudes and drifting, but it was at least afloat. Douglas, who now had a personal trainer, was being conscientious about getting himself fit. Physically he appeared to be in better shape than he had been for years. The weight was melting away. The diabetes had gone. The marriage, that had had its turbulent moments, was happy. He and Jane (who in their household was invariably the standard bearer for practical intelligence) had recently bought a beautiful house, redolent of rural England in its charm, which won a local prize for the excellence of its presentation. They found it much more sympathetic than their rented mansion where at any moment one expected a soap opera star with big hair and an improbable suit to appear. Also they had made some good friends in Chris and Veronica Ogle, a local Australian couple.
Polly was happy there too. She was tall for her age, earnest, pretty and bespectacled. The outdoors life suited her, she loved riding and had also made friends with the Ogle boys, particularly the seven-year-old Joshua. Tom, Chris’s youngest boy who was then five, was very fond of Douglas and missed him a lot when he died. “He had great farts,” he said, and indeed Douglas was capable of the odd duvet-billowing eructation. It always amused him; one of the most memorable definitions in
The Meaning of Liff
was the Affcot—the sort of fart you hope people will still talk about after.
The families were close. Chris is in the clothing business and successful in a field far removed from Douglas’s own, something that was probably good for Douglas as the media world operates in an orgy of self-regard that can become oppressive. Douglas and Chris otherwise had much in common: their love for their children, an enthusiasm bordering on the reckless for Apple Macs, Mercedes cars, and good food and wine. They even sported the same make of fine but obscure wrist watch (an Ulysse Nardin).
In 2000, the families had enjoyed a blissful holiday together in Fiji. Douglas, a keen diver, had been so overjoyed with the experience that he had to call someone to share it. (Throughout his life if he found something pleasurable he would encourage others to try it.) He was thrilled to learn that his state-of-the-art cell phone would work there, so he stood clutching his high-tech gizmo in thigh-deep water in a cove on a tiny island, and rang Sophie Astin, his assistant in The Digital Village. With a certain edge to her voice, she reminded a contrite Douglas that the world was round even for him. In London it was darkest night; she had been fast asleep. Later Douglas discovered that the coverage was so good because they were only twenty minutes away from Castaway Island where Tom Hanks had starred in the movie of the same name. Apparently, he had arranged for a local satellite relay to be installed so he could ring his agent. “What a pity,” Douglas said afterwards, with his writer’s magpie instinct for an anecdote, “that Tom Hanks had never made a road movie on the Pacific Coast Highway.” Mobile coverage is notoriously patchy along that route.