Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings

by Craig Brown

  The Webbs’ other house guest is the twenty-three-year-old Bertrand Russell, an up-and-coming young philosopher, recently married to the American heiress Alys Pearsall Smith. He too will, in years to come, employ the example of a bicycle in all manner of philosophical propositions. In On Education (1926), he argues that learning to ride a bicycle allows one to pass from fear to skill, which is, he adds, ‘a valuable experience’; in An Outline of Philosophy (1927), he compares the acquisition of speech to learning to ride a bicycle; and in The Analysis of the Mind (1921), he uses the bicycle to highlight the broad distinction between instinct and habit, observing that while every animal eats food by instinct, ‘no one can ride a bicycle by instinct, though, after learning, the necessary movements become just as automatic as if they were instinctive’.

  But do they? On this bright September day, fate seems determined to prove the antithesis: that the necessary movements for riding a bicycle will always remain, for at least one of the two men, just out of reach.

  The two spindly intellectuals set off on their bicycles through the rolling hills of Monmouthshire. Before long, Bertrand Russell, slightly out in front, stops his bike in the middle of the road in order to read a direction sign and work out which way they should head. Shaw whizzes towards him, fails to keep his eyes on the road, and crashes right into the stationary Russell.

  Shaw is hurled through the air and lands flat on his back ‘twenty feet from the place of the collision’, in Russell’s empirical estimation. Following his normal practice, Shaw picks himself up, behaves as though nothing is wrong, and gets back on his bicycle, which is, like him, miraculously undamaged.

  But for Russell, it is a different story. ‘Russell, fortunately, was not even scratched,’ Shaw tells a friend, adding mischievously, ‘But his knickerbockers were demolished.’ Russell’s bicycle is also in a frightful state, and is no longer fit to ride. Russell says of his assailant: ‘He got up completely unhurt and continued his ride. Whereas my bicycle was smashed, and I had to return by train.’

  The train is extremely slow, so Shaw is easily able to outpace it. Never one to let tact get in the way of comedy, he pops up with his bicycle on the platform of every station along the way, putting his head into the carriage to jeer at Russell. ‘I suspect that he regarded the whole incident as proof of the virtues of vegetarianism,’ suggests Russell sixty years later.

  Their relationship never fully recovers, though it bumbles on for half a century or so.100 Russell concludes that, ‘When I was young, we all made a show of thinking no better of ourselves than of our neighbours. Shaw found this effort wearisome, and had already given it up when he first burst upon the world. My admiration had limits ... it used to be the custom among clever people to say that Shaw was not unusually vain, but unusually candid. I came to think later on that this was a mistake.’

  For Russell, the bicycle is to remain a source of sometimes uncomfortable inspiration for years to come. In the spring of 1902, he is cycling from Cambridge to Grantchester, when ‘suddenly, as I was riding along a country road, I realised that I no longer loved Alys’. He finally agrees to a divorce in 1921, threatening to commit suicide if Alys drags the name of his lover, Lady Ottoline Morrell, into the proceedings. ‘Thereupon her rage became unbearable. After she had stormed for some hours, I gave a lesson in Locke’s philosophy to her niece, Karin Costelloe, who was about to take her Tripos. I then rode away on my bicycle, and with that my first marriage came to an end.’

  BERTRAND RUSSELL

  BUTTERS BREAD FOR

  SARAH MILES

  43 Hasker Street, London SW3

  October 1964

  Sixty-nine years later, Bertrand Russell befriends a huge white Pyrenean mountain dog which has taken to prowling past his front door in Chelsea.

  The dog’s name is Addo. He is owned by Sarah Miles, the sexy young actress who lives at number 18. Addo has recently been the subject of a petition from various other residents of Hasker Street, who want to stop him roaming around unaccompanied. If his roaming continues, dog and owner may both face eviction.

  Sarah thinks this most unfair. ‘If Addo had been ferocious, I would have understood, but except for lusting after cleaning fluid and window-cleaners, he’d never put a foot wrong. How could I hold up my head coming home to Addo, knowing he was chained up in a dark, smelly patio? Simply too cruel after almost two years of front-doorstep heaven.’

  One morning, she looks out of her drawing-room window and notices Addo walking along the street with an old man in carpet slippers. ‘They were so deep in conversation that I thought I’d leave them to it.’ Over the course of the summer, she often spots the two of them out together. ‘Off they’d set on their meander in harmless rhythmic contemplation.’

  One afternoon, opening the window, she notices the old man, still in his carpet slippers, sitting with Addo on the doorstep in the sunshine. She surmises that the old man and the dog are locked in silence, ‘as if mutually having discovered the secrets of the universe’. But the sound of the window opening breaks the spell. The old man turns round to look at her. ‘And in that instant,’ she recalls, ‘I knew he was a flirt.’

  ‘What a day we’re having!’ he exclaims.

  ‘Splendid. You and Addo certainly hit it off.’

  ‘We have ... how shall I put it? ... an affiliation.’

  The other-worldly Sarah Miles is surely the only person in the street not to know that the old man at number 43 is the most famous philosopher in the world. Two years ago, his ninetieth birthday was celebrated with a festschrift with contributions from, among others, Dr Martin Luther King, Leonard Bernstein, Jawaharlal Nehru, Kenneth Kaunda, U Thant, Albert Schweitzer and David Ben-Gurion. But Sarah mixes in different circles: Robert Morley, Eric Sykes, Terry-Thomas, Flora Robson and Benny Hill are all in her next film.101

  For a few minutes, the three of them – the philosopher and the actress and the dog – let their minds drift through the mellowness of the Indian summer. ‘Care to come over one afternoon for tea?’ asks Russell.

  ‘I’d love to.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘At the moment, I’m here most of the time.’

  ‘Good, tomorrow afternoon. Five o’clock.’

  He says goodbye to Addo, rises and crosses the street without looking back; but Sarah can feel his mischief brewing. The next day, she knocks on the door of number 43 sharply at five.

  ‘Right on the dot. I am impressed. Come on in and make yourself at home.’

  For Sarah, ‘his eyes dazzled with a friendly foxiness’. She is captivated by his house, its dusty old furniture and fraying carpets. She sits down on a wobbly chair that topples over.

  ‘Sorry. We’re all a bit dilapidated in here.’

  He goes into the kitchen, and bids her follow him. ‘Don’t leave me to make tea all on my own!’

  The sunlight spotlights his silky silvery hair. ‘Holding his head sideways, he reminded me of a remarkably alert mottled hawk, scrutinising my every move.’

  ‘I trust you’ll take cucumber sandwiches with your tea?’ He starts cutting a loaf of brown bread. ‘Each slice has to be paper thin, enough to see daylight through.’ He places his hand between a slice of bread and the window. ‘Hopeless,’ he says, throwing it in the bin. He cuts another; it too fails the test, so he chucks it in the bin too. And another.

  Sarah realises they have not introduced themselves.102 ‘What’s your name?’ she asks.

  ‘Someone told me you were a film star,’ he replies, ‘yet I don’t need to know your name.’

  By now, he has assembled six acceptably thin slices of bread from a whole loaf. They are ready to be buttered. Sarah tells him that she has never been able to butter bread without tearing it.

  ‘Ha! It’s all in the butter texture. Easy when you know how.’

  He beckons her over to watch. ‘No fun to be had in a mean sandwich.’

  He gives her a funny look, as if they are talking about much more private things. Dirty old man,
thinks Sarah, who then catches him peering up at her breasts.

  ‘Essential that everything be paper thin except the quantity. Now for the cucumber. Here again, there must be plenty of daylight.’

  Again, he raises his hand between the slice of bread and the sunlight. ‘Ample,’ says Sarah. ‘Three sandwiches each.’

  ‘Incorrect.’ Obviously no mathematician, thinks Sarah. But he piles them on top of one another and slices them diagonally down the middle. ‘Six each.’

  They sit down to eat the cucumber sandwiches off Russell’s porcelain peacock tea-set. As they eat, he keeps squeezing her knee under the table, ‘not half-heartedly, either’. Sarah is thankful Addo is nearby, asleep beneath the table. Russell asks all the questions, so she leaves his house knowing nothing about him at all.

  A week later, he invites her back. Again, he asks all the questions. She thinks it is a way of distracting her attention from the tweaks he is giving her knees. She doesn’t know how to tell him to stop, so lets him carry on.

  ‘You didn’t tell me you were Bertrand Russell.’

  ‘You never asked.’

  She might have to leave the street, she says, because of their neighbours’ attitude to Addo.

  ‘What utter nonsense. Addo wouldn’t hurt a fly.’

  ‘Tell them that, will you?’

  By now, his hand has moved from her knee to her thigh.

  ‘Worry not. Consider it done.’

  From that moment on, Sarah Miles doesn’t hear another peep from the other residents of Hasker Street.

  SARAH MILES

  FAILS TO BE EXCITED BY

  TERENCE STAMP

  Bray, the Republic of Ireland

  January 1961

  Aged nineteen and fresh out of RADA, Sarah Miles has landed a part in a film, Term of Trial, opposite the fifty-three-year-old Laurence Olivier. She has had a crush on him ever since she was eleven years old and on a rainy Sunday-afternoon outing from Roedean School saw him as Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. ‘The moment he stood at the window, looking out across the misty moor, searching for his soulmate and crying, “Cathy! Cathy! Cathy!” I was a goner.’

  From then on, she kept his photograph under her dormitory pillow, ‘sometimes dreaming he would come galloping towards me on his white charger, scoop me up into his arms and carry me off. He had brought my first glimmer of sexual awakening, and here I was about to star opposite him.’

  As her plane descends into Dublin, where the film is to be shot, she hums the song ‘Once I had a secret love, that lived within the heart of me’, and wonders whether her love for Olivier will blossom, though he is, she estimates, ‘almost old enough to be my grandfather ...’

  Terence Stamp is twenty-two, and bound for stardom. He has just finished shooting his first major feature film, Billy Budd, and has already spent the £900 fee. His agent phones to tell him that he has been offered an audition for a role in a new film, Term of Trial. He reads through the script with mounting disappointment: his role is so small that he can barely find it.

  ‘Blimey,’ he says to his agent. ‘It’s about as big as No Smoking in the Auditorium.’

  ‘I know, but it will be distinguished.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe, but I won’t. The part is a yobbo schoolboy, strictly one-dimensional stuff.’

  ‘Just go and see them, all right?’

  Grudgingly, he agrees. At the audition, the director wants him to put on a Northern accent. He has recently watched Albert Finney in an interview, so he mimics him saying ‘I can read, but I’m not an avid reader,’ in a broad Mancunian accent. With no intention of taking the part, he plays it for laughs, ‘clenching my teeth and rolling my eyes like an Albert’s brother who was completely off his rocker’. He is immediately given the job. ‘You’d better speak to my agent,’ he says.

  They offer £2,000 for ten days’ work, but Stamp turns them down. Peter Ustinov has advised him only to take on good work, and he doesn’t think Term of Trial falls into that category. They raise the fee to £4,000. Reluctantly, he agrees.

  It takes a whole day to film the scene in which Terence Stamp gets his gang to hold Sarah Miles down as he attempts to rape her and fails. He doesn’t enjoy it, and neither does Sarah, who is wishing fervently that it was Laurence Olivier who was attempting to rape her.

  Both Stamp and Sarah Miles are having second thoughts about the film. Sarah has already lost confidence in the director, Peter Glenville. She thinks him too cultured and ‘soft’ to capture the true horror of the action: what should be a violent gang rape is, she thinks, going to end up as a polite, late-fifties-style simulation. ‘It was cold and uncomfortable lying there in the unyielding schoolyard hour after hour, knowing none of it tasted of truth ... Although this was my first film, I realised, lying there with my skirt up, that Term of Trial wasn’t going to turn out the winner that I felt it could have.’

  Whenever she lifts her performance so as to capture the true terror of rape, Glenville says, ‘Cut! That’s too much, Sarah – we’ll have them fleeing the cinema scared to death.’ Eventually, with more experience, she will be able to judge within the first two days of any shoot whether or not the film will be a success.

  She is also put out by the figure of Terence Stamp. For most people he is, she can quite understand, a tremendous sex symbol, ‘a startling creature: dark brown glossy locks and piercing bue eyes, with a virgin complexion and rosebud lips. So striking were his features, within such a pale and sullen countenance, that any healthy young maiden would have been struck right between the eyes – before being quickly struck somewhere else. But not me.’

  All day, Stamp simulates raping her, and she simulates being raped; but, in truth, their minds are elsewhere. Stamp is regretting taking the money for an unsuitable part in a film in which he has no interest; Sarah is thinking of her boyfriend back home, James Fox, and, more especially, her leading man here, Laurence Olivier, with whom she has already started to flirt, and is shortly to embark on an affair.103

  And what of Olivier?

  He, too, is preoccupied by other things. He is already sleeping with Simone Signoret, who is playing his on-screen wife, but Signoret is distracted by the fact that her husband, Yves Montand, is sleeping with Marilyn Monroe. On top of all this, Olivier’s new wife, Joan Plowright, has recently given birth to a baby boy. To complicate matters still further, Olivier has suggested to Sarah Miles that ‘you should make a play for Simone. She has lovely breasts.’

  Later on in the film, Sarah Miles attempts to seduce her alcoholic schoolteacher, played by Olivier, but he rejects her. ‘Listen,’ says Olivier’s character, ‘think how young you are. I’m more than twice your age. I have a wife. I love her ... You’re a beautiful young creature, but I can’t allow myself to think of you like that.’ These eerie cross-currents between real life and the drama make everything terribly complicated, particularly as real life seems so much the more dramatic.

  Having finally completed his filming, Terence Stamp leaves them all to it. On his return to London, ‘to celebrate my release from bondage’, he buys himself a lovat-green Mercedes 220SE convertible with antique red leather seats, and rides around in it with the top down, freezing to death.

  TERENCE STAMP

  ADVISES

  EDWARD HEATH

  F2, Albany, Piccadilly, London W1

  February 1968

  Albany is the grandest apartment block in London. It is sometimes called The Albany by those not in the know. In another of those linguistic booby-traps employed by the upper classes to keep outsiders at bay, the flats in Albany are referred to not as flats or apartments but as ‘sets’. There are sixty-nine sets in Albany.

  As a teenage messenger boy, Terence Stamp peeked through the back entrance in Burlington Street and looked in awe at the arcade entrance, lined with rhododendrons. Ever since then, he has dreamed of living there; now, with the success of Billy Budd and The Collector, he can afford to. He sees himself as ‘a new kind of Englishman ... very swinging, very aw
are, well-dressed and all that but with great phsyical and mental strength ... the working-class boy with a few bob as opposed to the chinless wonder’.

  The interior decorator Geoffrey Bennison is the first person to take Stamp inside, having invited the actor and his famous girlfriend, the model Jean Shrimpton, to tea with the art critic John Richardson, whose set is on the ground floor. ‘I took in the high ceilings, the walls festooned with paintings and prints, all surfaces scattered with objets d’art ... I was under a spell.’

  Richardson informs him that, until recently, residents were obliged to sign a covenant declaring that they won’t ‘behave in an unacceptable manner, keep pets, or entertain ladies overnight in their chambers’.

  ‘Ladies?’ replies Stamp, addressing Richardson and Bennison. ‘D’you mean I’d have to dress the lovely Shrimpton up as a chap?’

  Richardson explains that the rule has now been repealed.

  ‘So girls live here now?’

  ‘Oh, yes, thin end of the wedge. Changed the whole tone. Chaps moved out, wasn’t top drawer any more.’

  But Stamp is reassured, and asks Bennison to let him know if ever he hears of a set coming onto the market. Sure enough, a month later Bennison passes on the news that a Mr Timewell, who leases D1, is moving to Morocco, and wants to sell.

  ‘He knows it’s me?’ Stamp asks Bennison.

  ‘Oh, yes, dear, he knows it’s you. He’s seen that butch photo in the supplement. Quite curious to meet you in the flesh, he is.’

  Stamp snaps it up. Bennison takes on the decoration, stripping D1 to its bare bones, painting the floorboards of the two main rooms white, and placing a fashionable polar-bear skin in front of the specially widened Empire bed. He covers the bed with a black, biscuit and cream overlay, with matching sausage bolsters at each end. A Goan ebony chest inlaid with flowers and clouds completes the picture. Stamp is delighted. ‘That first afternoon I rolled around on the carpet in front of the fireplace, hugging myself in reassurance it was true.’