by Jeremy Scott
Hamish occupied the basement flat, David had the same room he’d had since childhood, which he used only during the holidays, but the family home was otherwise empty. The house was in a disastrous state. Apart from emergency botch-ups, nothing had been done to maintain it for forty years. The 1940s linoleum in the bathroom had cracked into a curlededge mosaic, the period geyser roared and shook, flaking rust, while discharging a thin dribble of tepid water into the enormous tub. The bomb damage had never been repaired and the top storey, rendered uninhabitable by damp, had been abandoned and shut off.
It was evening when I moved in; having unpacked, I realised there was nothing to eat in the place. I was not at all hungry; shock had sent me manic as it always does, and I had not been able to face food or to sleep for days. But I knew I must eat and went out to buy something from a delicatessen.
I laid a place for one at the Regency table in the dining room, whose leg had given way in 1957 to be refixed crookedly with Seccatine. Swatches of wallpaper bellied from the stained walls, the parchment shades on the light brackets had charred black and two of the forty-watt bulbs were dead. While searching for candles to brighten the room, I found in a kitchen drawer the dried carcass of a mouse imprisoned there when it had shut on him months, perhaps years, before.
Setting the cold turkey, salad and bottle of red wine I’d bought on the table, I sat down to eat. Secluded in its garden, the house was very quiet. I was wired and exhausted, buffeted by recent events, but here was a slightly eerie peace. It felt strange to be eating at this same table where I’d sat as a child, but now alone and at the head of it. The house was full of associations for me; with photographs, letters, school reports, dance cards, invitations, bills, cheque stubs and papers going back 150 years. We’d found an insurance document taken out in New Orleans by Mother’s great-grandmother, Héloïse de Mailly, insuring her luggage and two slaves for travel in 1842. And we’d come upon an envelope of love letters to Mother from a married family friend we’d known all our lives. They were devoted to schemes designed to outwit Nanny so they could meet, but there was deep affection there and passion. To read them felt like an intrusion, and to glimpse a stranger who possessed a humanity and capacity for emotion I had not suspected.
The house would not be part of our lives for much longer as my brothers and I had decided to sell it. Despite its dilapidated condition, it was worth a lot of money, for this was the middle of the ’eighties and London property prices were soaring. The value of our eight-bedroomed house in Gilston Road was going up by £2,000 a week.
Over dinner I tried not to brood over the recent past but think positively about the future. In material terms I owned half the mill property, still unsold in France, and a third of a house in Chelsea. My brothers and I lived in squalor but the prospect of wealth was just around the corner. As I mused on my inability to control my own destiny the antique telephone in the hall sprang to life with a particularly loud and strident ring. I went to answer it; it was Susan Newman calling from Los Angeles. She said, ‘You’ve moved house? I called your old number.’
I’d met her on a blind date in New York the year before. The date had been organised by the wife of a director friend, Sally Sapphire, who, after making the suggestion, had called Susan there and then to propose it … then listened to what was obviously a query about my suitability for a particular event. ‘No, no problem,’ I heard Sally reassure her, ‘You can take him anywhere.’ I thought I’d like the endorsement engraved upon my tombstone.
I didn’t really know Susan. I’d accompanied her with her father Paul and stepmother Joanne Woodward to the ballet, the theatre and a couple of parties in Manhattan, but no misconduct had taken place, for I was then ‘with’ Jenny, who would join me in New York. Now Susan was calling me at Gilston Road to say, ‘They’re giving a party for Dad on Friday. Do you want to come as my date?’
‘Why yes, I’d love to,’ I told her.
On the flight to LA two days later I still felt displaced, and the sense of unreality was heightened by jetlag. After landing, I looked for Susan, but couldn’t spot her among the crowd at the arrivals gate. A figure stepped forward to say ‘Hi!’ and I stared at her, shaken. In New York she’d been a tall, svelte young woman who had a contract with Estée Lauder. In the months since I’d seen her she’d put on three stones. Dressed in a loose, full-length cotton smock, I’d not recognised her.
I showered and changed at Susan’s apartment and we went to pick up her father from the dentist’s. A slight figure in Levi’s and check shirt, he’d undergone minor heart surgery only a couple of weeks before, and in the car he had the disheveled, slightly traumatised look of someone emerging from a prolonged session of heavy dentistry. His jaw was still numb from anaesthetic and he couldn’t speak properly. I thought he could not be looking forward to the party.
The bash was taking place at a hotel in Century City; Susan and I had a drink in Newman’s suite while he changed. When he emerged a half-hour later in a tuxedo he was a different man.
Charisma is a quality too elusive to pin down. Though you can recognise it at once, it is impossible to define – yet, seated opposite Newman at the party which followed, I tried to do so. I knew from New York he did not behave like a star; he moved unaccompanied by hangers-on, he had no entourage. He was without pretension. Here at the party he bore no resemblance to the somewhat shattered 60-year-old man we’d collected earlier from the dentist; somehow he’d grown, his light had come on, he had presence. Surrounded by personable, well-groomed, thirty-something Jewish movie executives and their equally shined-up partners, he gave off a quality utterly different from anyone else. Partly it was his stillness. Others gesticulated while they spoke, fiddled with their wineglasses, or smoked (this was then), he did none of these. Gracefully, without stiffness, he sat calm and still, at ease with himself and the world around him.
The reason for the party was to present him with an award. Accepting it, he gave a speech which was short, deprecatory and funny. After that came a charity auction, its first prize of a mink jacket won by Kenny Rogers, who sang with Dolly Parton as cabaret. Following which the guests circulated and worked the room.
For someone whose adolescence had been passed watching American movies it was an odd experience to meet withered oldsters within whom the icons I’d revered were identifiable only as crumbling ghosts. Old Cary Grant was there, fine and immaculate as ever. Gene Kelly – who wore the red ribbon of the Légion d’honneur given him for An American in Paris – had the bull-necked, bull-chested bulk of a retired heavyweight boxer, wrecked and run to fat, and a massive benignity. He was with Robert Wagner, whom I was curious to meet, for reasons I am forbidden to state, but it seemed a bad moment; tired and emotional, he was not in party mood at all. My encounter with Warren Beatty was no more successful. Our only point of contact was David Puttnam. I mentioned that I’d run into Puttnam – whom I liked – the week before in London. Beatty glanced at me without warmth, his mouth tightened. ‘And what’s that asshole up to now?’ he snarled.
Next day Susan and I drove to Big Sur, that mountain wilderness which was home to Big Foot and, at one time, Henry Miller. The travel lodge was set among giant redwoods, our private deck thirty feet above the ground; it felt like being in a tree house.
‘Maybe we should order a bottle of champagne,’ Susan suggested. ‘Not domestic – imported would be more appropriate under the circumstances, don’t you think?’
It was served. We sat on the wooden deck as the warm afternoon faded into evening. Up there among the branches the air smelt sweet and aromatic; surrounded by nature, this was the perfect spot for such an adventure. I moved to sit by Susan on her lounger … and all at once a wave of devastating grief broke over me. A great tidal roller caught me up and pressed me down to the bottom beneath the overpowering weight of it. I was desolate with sadness and regret. Grief for Nanny’s death; grief for Mother’s, and regret that I’d never been able to like, far less love her. For Jenny, for our bre
ak-up and, I knew, causing it to happen because we’d grown bored with each other in bed. Sorrow poured over me, I was overwhelmed by sadness. Tears streamed down my cheeks, I wept uncontrollably.
It was not quite what Susan had expected.
Three weeks later, back in England, I received a call from her. ‘Joanne and Dad want to visit the women’s camp at Greenham Common. We thought we’d come stay with you,’ she said.
The notion was startling. How the Newmans, used to Beverly Hills luxury and the comfort of their West Hampton estate, would adapt to mould growing on the bedroom walls, the only bathroom with its shuddering geyser and dribble of tepid water, the lavatories whose sepia-stained pedestals were veined with cracks and inscribed Thomas Crapper and Sons 1848, was hard to imagine. ‘It’s not that I want to put you off …’ I said.
In the end they stayed at the Connaught, and only Susan put up at Gilston Road. Travelling to Greenham Common, Newman and Woodward fraternised with the heavy-sweatered, muddy-booted protesters outside the airbase, raising the tone of the tented encampment considerably. That evening I threw a small party for them at the house, inviting a few guests.
I composed the guest list carefully. Newman had said that if he hadn’t gone into movies he’d have liked to teach at Yale; despite his age, he still raced cars. I invited Mark Ramage, who sponsored the Lotus Grand Prix team for Players and could discuss Wittgenstein and Nigel Mansell’s cornering with equal authority; I did not ask Nigel Broackes, for two kings at the same court doesn’t work, but I did ask Kim Waterfield with his current six-foot girlfriend, for one requires a pinch of notoriety and some beauty. Ben Fisher, for his charm and ease with all; the Stephen Tuckers, because they were pretty and the most determinedly upwardly mobile young couple I knew; my daughter Sasha, aged sixteen; Harry-the-old-lag, a skilled raconteur who’d burgled high society on three continents; Whitepowder Henry, for obvious reasons; and my spiritual counsellor, now become the Venerable John Barton, whom I had need of, for I’d denied Christ over a glass of Chardonnay at a dinner party the night before and was ashamed of how I’d acted.
Gore Vidal had been haranguing the table on the subject of President Reagan, the most powerful man in the world, whose brain was decomposing into cream cheese, whose closest advisers were a dippy, post-menopausal wife and an astrological fortune teller, a President and declared Christian raving about the ‘Evil Empire’ and professing fundamental belief in the apocalyptic scenario detailed by the Book of Revelation, who knew it was God’s will the world should end in a fiery Armageddon … and who sat day after day in the Oval Office with a red button labelled ARMAGEDDON only inches from his spastically twitching fingers. ‘It should be an article of the Constitution that anyone holding the Christian faith should be automatically disqualified from the office of President,’ Vidal stated and turned on me. ‘Don’t you agree?’ he demanded.
‘Well, Gore, old fruit, actually no …’ I should have said, but didn’t. Instead I’d laughed slavishly … and outside the windows of the Connaught somewhere in the Mayfair dark I’d heard a cock crow twice.
At Gilston Road Susan and I soaked the tarnished silver in hot water then polished it, along with the battered Georgian candelabras. In candlelight the threadbare carpet was unnoticeable unless you caught your heel in it, and the double living room had a shadowy, distressed near-elegance.
Many of our guests I hadn’t seen for some while. Fisher was among the first to arrive, explaining he must leave early, he was booked on a 4 am flight to Brazil next day. ‘How glamorous,’ I remarked, but he assured me it wasn’t. It was the cheapest available charter; he was going nowhere near Rio but to camp on a fly-blown swamp in the Amazon delta where he would hunt moths. He could be away only ten days as he worked in the research department of a City stockbroker. ‘Not glamorous, and not particularly secure, either; when the Big Bang comes, I think they may axe me,’ he confided.
‘Never mind, you may discover a new species,’ I consoled him, and he laughed wistfully. ‘If only!’
I introduced him to Kim Waterfield who – now divorced from Penny Brahms – had brought a striking girl whom he introduced as ‘my apprentice mistress’ … causing Susan to tense but others with myself to laugh. His life like my own had plunged somewhat only in his case to soar again in characteristic roller-coaster fashion, for he had founded an international beauty pageant and been travelling South-East Asia to set up the venues. I left him explaining the world scale of the contest to a rather bemused Fisher, almost the only happily married man I knew.
Susan was my date at the party, of course. At one point she, her father, Sasha and myself stood discussing how impossible it was for a child ever to satisfy its parents. Newman then told of how he’d collected his elderly mother and brought her to stay with them in Beverly Hills. He gave a party in her honour. This was in 1970, the year after Butch Cassidy had been released; he was the highest-paid film star in the world. The cream of the Hollywood A-list came to the soirée casually dressed; he himself was in a caftan. All were at their best and the evening unrolled successfully, but the party failed to make his mother joyful. Towards its end she said to him dolefully, ‘Oh, son, you could have been a doctor, a dentist … You could really have made something of yourself and become someone. And when I look at you now wearing a dress …!’
Of course, neither Newman nor anyone else at Gilston Road that evening could fail to notice the ruinous condition of the house. He’d returned from a trip to pee impressed by the many different layers of peeling wallpaper visible in the lavatory, dating back to the early-Victorian original. ‘So, what are you aiming to do with this place?’ he asked me.
Probably sell it, I told him, though at moments I did think it would be satisfying to restore the house to its original elegance and redesign the garden.
‘That would cost a pile,’ he remarked.
‘Sure,’ I agreed. ‘But you never know what the future holds.’
He stiffened, his glance went to Susan standing beside us, then hard to me. His blue eyes hit me with a very sharp look indeed.
Stung by the unspoken suggestion I was a fortune-hunting cad, I reassured him that my intentions towards his daughter were entirely dishonourable.
And therein lay more than a small white lie. For no misconduct had ever taken place between Susan and myself, and since the Big Sur trip it had somehow become impossible. We went out to dinner, to the theatre, to a few parties; we got on together fine, but the fire just failed to spark. We didn’t discuss it, but it lay between us limp and scarcely visible.
The problem was solved for me by the photographer Terry Donovan in an unexpected fashion. Susan and her family had flown back to the States, and he had asked me to find a château for him; he’d been contracted to shoot a calendar with three nude models in some rich ornamental setting.
The eighteenth-century chateau I found for him was tiny and utterly magical. The rooms were hung with frayed hunting tapestries; its pre-revolutionary furniture was chipped and infirm, but the place had an ornate, faded splendour. One afternoon I watched him complete the lengthy business of positioning the three naked girls over the distressed silk furnishings; when the tableau was fully lit he reached out to pinch three pairs of nipples between finger and thumb to make them erect, then stepped smartly back behind the camera to press the shutter. He glanced at me and grinned, ‘’Straordinary to get paid so much for playing with women’s tits! Remarkable, really, when you think about it, innit?’ he observed.
The setting for one of the months of the year was the royal bedroom, which had been designed for a visit by le Roi Soleil. While the lights were being positioned and the models made up, Donovan and I lounged on the four-poster bed, chatting. The bed was hung with curtains, covered in rich brocade, and we were sitting side by side with our backs against the headboard and legs extended. He was wearing a suit and tie, I was only slightly less formally dressed myself. One of us an impressive seventeen stone in weight, the other only eleven, we must have
looked incongruous and comical. The stills photographer took a Polaroid. Framed in the rich boudoir setting of the canopied four-poster, the photograph gave no indication of the ten or so people, equipment and general busyness surrounding us, but this did not occur to me when I mailed it to Susan Newman with a few words on the back. It must have looked as if we were alone together.
The camera lies, of course. That is what commercials and advertising are about, their guiding principle. But sometimes a picture doesn’t convey quite the message you intend. I got a letter back from Susan ten days later. Occupying one side of the paper only, it was quite brief:
You obviously don’t like softik women but I’m happy you’ve found yourself a big fat man.
I wish you both the best
PS You might have told me. – S
28
Westminster Hospital
It was a bright sunny day in June. Dressed in jeans, cotton blazer and white shoes, I was strolling down the King’s Road to buy a couple of bottles of champagne for a picnic with Ben Fisher – who had not been fired in the Big Bang as he’d feared. Instead, the stockbrokers where he worked had been taken over by a much larger financial institution and Fisher now held the exalted post of number two at Citibank for an ‘obscene salary’, he’d told me, though the only difference it had made to his life was that he was now travelling deeper and yet more uncomfortably in Asia and South America in his search for moths.
I was on my way to join him and Bridget for Founder’s Day at Eton, where their two sons were pupils. The sun shone brightly and this morning I was feeling particularly cheerful, God was in his heaven, all right with the world. Gilston Road was sold! For over three years my brothers and I had camped there waiting for Mother’s estate to be settled while the building decayed around us. A large piece had fallen from the roof, almost killing the postman, and the house threatened to turn into a column of dust before a buyer risked his/her life stepping through the garden gate to fall in love with it. But one had, and paid us a million pounds for the place. Nor was that all. Magda had called from France a couple of weeks before to say the last of the two sisters, our sitting tenants, had died. We’d agreed amicably to divide the property; she would keep the mill she was in, I would own the other where the old sisters had lived.
