Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings

by Craig Brown

  To celebrate Olivier’s birthday, Churchill invites the Oliviers to Sunday lunch at Chartwell. Churchill is smitten by Vivien Leigh, and presses one of his paintings onto her; later, they are told that this is the only painting Churchill has ever given away. (He has an eye for a pretty face: at a later dinner, when the women have left the room, Churchill turns to Olivier and says, ‘By Jove, she’s a clinker!’)

  After lunch, Churchill stays indoors while Churchill’s son-in-law, Christopher Soames, shows the visitors around the farm. On their way round, they hear a bull issuing ‘a groan of agonised pain and grief; his head was pressed tightly against the wall and his wild eyes rolling’. Soames explains that the bull has already killed a man, and the only way to get him out of his stall to clean it is to entice him into another stall with a cow in season.

  When they return to the house, Olivier tells Churchill that he is worried about his bull. ‘Oh, he’s all right,’ says Churchill. ‘And even if he does lead a life of unparalleled dreariness, it is punctuated ...’ – he pauses for dramatic effect – ‘by moments of intense excitement.’

  Years later, on January 30th 1965, Olivier speaks the commentary for the ITV broadcast of the funeral of Winston Churchill. It is, he believes, ‘more than a day of national mourning’. Rather, it is ‘a celebration of a nation’s overwhelming gratitude for the life of their “Valiant Man,” to whom they owed so incalculably much’. In his memoirs, he boasts that he was ‘proudly informed’ that of the broadcasts on BBC and ITV his own ‘gained the greater viewing audience of the two’.

  But the story of the two men does not end there. In 1968, Olivier, by now Director of the National Theatre, is enveloped in a debate over whether a play called Soldiers by Rolf Hochhuth should be staged there. The play is highly critical of Churchill’s saturation bombing of German cities, and accuses him of complicity in the assassination of the Polish leader Władysław Sikorski.

  Kenneth Tynan is determined to stage it; the Chairman of the National Theatre, Lord Chandos, a member of Churchill’s war cabinet, is equally determined to prevent it being staged. Olivier, confessing himself ‘deeply distressed and torn about’, flounders around in the middle. He is torn, he explains to the board, between his prejudices as an Englishman and his wishes for the National Theatre. His position is further complicated by the fact that Tynan is keen for him to play the part of Churchill.

  Tynan detects much in common between the actor and the statesman. ‘My god how like you the old bastard is!’ he writes to Olivier. ‘The passionate maddening love of detail; the concentration that can wither people by simply ignoring their presence; the sudden changes of subject; the sudden focusing on apparent irrelevancies; the love of anecdote and quotation ... the brutally realistic assessment of human motives; the impatience; and the patience.’

  LAURENCE OLIVIER

  BRINGS OUT THE PHONY IN

  J.D. SALINGER

  4 Christchurch Street, London SW3

  May 21st 1951

  In the same season, Laurence Olivier performs before the up-and-coming American novelist J.D. Salinger.

  On May 8th 1951, Salinger sets sail for Britain on the Queen Elizabeth, hoping to avoid the hoo-ha surrounding the American publication of The Catcher in the Rye. There have already been requests for a rewrite and a change to the title,115 along with a succession of misunderstandings involving publicity.116 The New Yorker has refused to serialise the novel, complaining that the characters lack credibility, but his British publisher, Hamish Hamilton, has proved far more sympathetic. On Salinger’s arrival, Hamilton presents him with the British edition; as requested, it has a subdued cover, no author photograph and no biographical details.

  Salinger’s entertainment in London is orchestrated by Hamish Hamilton, who Salinger calls ‘a professional get-together boy’. Hamilton treats his author to a series of nights out involving what Salinger describes as ‘tearing around to theater, supper parties’.

  Among the plays they attend are two on the theme of Cleopatra – Antony and Cleopatra by Shakespeare, and Caesar and Cleopatra by George Bernard Shaw – both starring Sir Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. ‘Very good, very pure,’ Salinger observes appreciatively, adding that, ‘The audiences here are just as stupid as they are in New York, but the productions are much, much better.’ Afterwards, Hamish Hamilton is particularly buoyed up to have secured an invitation for himself and his author to dinner with the Oliviers at their house in Chelsea.

  It all goes well; Salinger enthuses to a friend117 about ‘a marvelous little house, very posh evening – formal clothes and all that’. Olivier, he says, is a ‘very nice guy, very bright. He’s knocked out about his wife, which was nice to see. She’s a charmer. Naturally, while we were having drinks in the living room, some gin went up my nose. I damn near left by the window.’

  On the other hand, Salinger can’t help feeling a bit of a phony. When Hamilton arranged the invitation, he had apparently overlooked a passage in Catcher in the Rye in which the protagonist, Holden Caulfield, rants against the phoniness of actors in general, and one actor in particular:

  I don’t like shows very much, if you want to know the truth. They’re not as bad as movies, but they’re certainly nothing to rave about. In the first place, I hate actors. They never act like people. They just think they do. Some of the good ones do, in a very slight way, but not in a way that’s fun to watch. And if any actor’s really good, you can always tell he knows he’s good, and that spoils it. You take Sir Laurence Olivier, for example. I saw him in Hamlet. D.B. took Phoebe and I to see it last year ... But I didn’t enjoy it much. I just don’t see what’s so marvelous about Sir Laurence Olivier, that’s all. He has a terrific voice, and he’s a helluva handsome guy, and he’s very nice to watch when he’s walking or dueling or something, but he wasn’t at all the way D.B. said Hamlet was. He was too much like a goddam general, instead of a sad, screwed-up type guy ... The only thing old Phoebe liked was when Hamlet patted this dog on the head. She thought that was funny and nice, and it was. What I’ll have to do is, I’ll have to read that play. The trouble with me is, I always have to read that stuff by myself. If an actor acts it out, I hardly listen. I keep worrying about whether he’s going to do something phony every minute.

  However, none of these qualms is evident during his dinner with Olivier. In fact, Salinger gives every appearance of having countermanded the suspicions of Caulfield, exchanging lively conversation with the actor his creation considers to be teetering on the phony.

  A few days later, Salinger sets off around England in a Hillman car he has bought, driving to Stratford-upon-Avon, where he rows a young lady on the river instead of going to the theatre, to Oxford, where he attends Evensong at Christchurch, and to Yorkshire, where he thinks he may have spotted the Brontë sisters running across the moors. He then travels to Ireland and then on to Scotland, where he thinks of settling. From London, he goes back to New York, taking his new Hillman with him.

  It is only on his return to New York118 that Salinger entertains second thoughts about whether he was entirely genuine with the Oliviers. Had they read Caulfield’s views on Olivier? Salinger’s worries are possibly exacerbated by the news that the Oliviers are planning a trip to New York, and have asked to see him again. He writes Hamilton a panicky letter, explaining that Caulfield’s opinion of Olivier’s acting is not necessarily his own, and asks him to explain all this to Olivier, and to apologise for any hurt caused.

  Hamilton does so, and in turn Olivier sends Salinger a sympathetic letter. On September 1st, Salinger writes back: ‘At risk of sounding terribly oracular, not to say presumptuous as hell, I’d like – in fact I’d love – to tell you what I personally think of your acting ... I think you’re the only actor in the world who plays in a Shakespeare play with a special, tender familiarity – as if you were keeping it in the family. Almost as if you were appearing in a play written by an older brother whom you understand completely and love to distraction. It’s an almost insup
erably beautiful thing to watch, and I certainly think you’re the only actor who can bring it off.’

  Nevertheless, two years later when Olivier asks, through Hamilton, for his permission to adapt ‘For Esmé – with Love and Squalor’ into a radio drama, Salinger refuses. As time goes by, his doubts about Olivier increase. In 1983, thirty-two years after his ‘very posh evening’ in Chelsea, Salinger writes a letter to a friend unfavourably comparing Olivier’s acting with John Wayne’s performance in The Shootist.

  J.D. SALINGER

  SEEKS OUT

  ERNEST HEMINGWAY

  The Ritz Hotel, 15 place Vendôme, Paris

  Late August 1944

  The twenty-five-year-old Jerry Salinger is experiencing a terrible war. Of the 3,080 men of the 12th US Infantry who disembarked with him at Normandy on D-Day, only a third are still alive.

  His regiment is the first to enter Paris. They are mobbed by happy crowds. Salinger’s job as an officer in the Counter-Intelligence Corps entails weeding out and interrogating Nazi collaborators. As they go through Paris, he and a fellow officer arrest a collaborator, but a crowd wrests their prisoner away and beats him to death.

  Salinger has heard that Ernest Hemingway is in town. A writer himself, with a growing reputation for his short stories, he is determined to seek out America’s most famous living novelist. He feels sure he will find him at the Ritz, so he drives the jeep there. Sure enough, Hemingway is installed in the small bar,119 already bragging that he alone liberated Paris in general and the Ritz in particular.

  To this latter claim, there is a slight smidgin of truth. ‘It was all he could talk about,’ remembers a fellow member of the press corps. ‘It was more than just being the first American in Paris. He said, “I will be the first American at the Ritz. And I will liberate the Ritz.”’ In fact, by the time he arrives, the Germans have already abandoned the hotel, and the manager has come out to welcome him, boasting, ‘We saved the Cheval Blanc!’

  ‘Well, go get it,’ snaps Hemingway, who then begins slugging it down.

  Hemingway proceeds to make the Ritz his home. From then on, he can’t be bothered to cover the liberation of Paris, though he lends his typewriter to someone who can. Instead, he spends most of his time drinking Perrier-Jouet in the bar.

  Over brandy after lunch on liberation day, a female guest says she wants to go and watch the victory parade.

  ‘What for?’ says Hemingway. ‘Daughter, sit still and drink this good brandy. You can always see a parade, but you’ll never again lunch at the Ritz the day after Paris was liberated.’

  As the days go by, he continues to hold court in the Ritz, boasting how many Germans he has killed, though no one with him can remember him killing a single one.120

  Upon Salinger’s arrival, Hemingway greets him like an old friend, saying that he recognises him from his photograph in Esquire and has read all his short stories. Does he have any new work with him?121 Salinger produces a recent copy of the Saturday Evening Post containing one of his stories. Hemingway reads it and congratulates him. The two writers sit and talk for hours. Salinger (who secretly prefers Fitzgerald’s writing) is pleasantly surprised by the difference between Hemingway’s public and private personas; he finds him ‘a really good guy’.

  A few days later, Hemingway tells a friend about meeting ‘a kid in the 4th Division named Jerry Salinger’. He notes his disdain for the war, and his urge to write. He is also impressed by the way Salinger’s family continues to post him the New Yorker.

  The two men never meet again,122 but they correspond. Hemingway is a generous mentor. ‘First you have a marvelous ear and you write tenderly and lovingly without getting wet ... how happy it makes me to read the stories and what a god damned fine writer I think you are.’

  The chumminess of their single meeting is captured in a letter Salinger writes to Hemingway the following year from the military hospital in Nuremberg where he is being treated for combat stress:

  Nothing was wrong with me except that I’ve been in an almost constant state of despondency and I thought it would be good to talk to somebody sane. They asked me about my sex life (which couldn’t be normaler – gracious!) and about my childhood (Normal) ... I’ve always liked the Army ... There are very few arrests left to be made in our section. We’re now picking up children under ten if their attitudes are snotty. Gotta get those ole arrest forms up to Army, gotta fatten up the Report.

  ... I’ve written a couple more of my incestuous stories, and several poems, and part of a play. If I ever get out of the Army I might finish the play and invite Margaret O’Brien to play with me in it. With a crew-cut and a Max Factor dimple over my navel, I could play Holden Caulfield myself. I once gave a very sensitive performance as Raleigh in ‘Journey’s End’.

  I’d give my right arm to get out of the Army, but not on a psychiatric, this-man-is-not-fit-for-the-Army-life ticket. I have a very sensitive novel in mind, and I won’t have the author called a jerk in 1950. I am a jerk, but the wrong people mustn’t know it.

  I wish you’d drop me a line if you can manage it. Removed from this scene, is it much easier to think clearly? I mean with your work.

  Around this time, Salinger experiences some sort of nervous breakdown fuelled by the horrors he has endured.123 His biographer Ian Hamilton suggests his chummy letter to Hemingway cannot be taken at face value. It is, he believes, ‘almost manically cheerful’. He is probably right. Years later, Salinger tells his daughter: ‘You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live.’

  In Greenwich Village in 1946, Jerry Salinger has regained some of his old bravado. To his poker-playing friends he speaks disparagingly of many well-known writers, Hemingway among them. ‘In fact, he was quite convinced that no really good American writers existed after Melville – that is, until the advent of J.D. Salinger,’ recalls one.

  Hemingway, on the other hand, is happy to name Salinger one of his three favourite contemporary authors; when he dies, a copy of The Catcher in the Rye is found in his library. He is neither the first writer with a disciple who turns against him, nor the last.

  ERNEST HEMINGWAY

  TURNS AGAINST

  FORD MADOX FORD

  La Closerie des Lilas, 171, boulevard du Montparnasse, Paris

  Autumn 1924

  Twenty years earlier, Ernest Hemingway is himself a young man of twenty-five. He is sitting outside his favourite bar in Paris, when he hears the words, ‘Oh, here you are. May I sit with you?’ His mentor, Ford Madox Ford, twenty-five years his senior, joins him at the table.

  Eighteen months ago, Ford, novelist and editor, launched transatlantic review, largely as an outlet for younger writers. He is Hemingway’s keenest supporter: ‘I did not read more than six words of his before I decided to publish everything that he sent me.’ He has also taken him on as his assistant editor, published his stories, and introduced him to Paris literary society. But the familiar tale of discipleship is soon to unwind: the more Ford helps Hemingway, the more Hemingway despises him.

  Encouragement is repaid with irritation. ‘The thing to do with Ford is kill him,’ Hemingway complains to Ezra Pound. ‘... I am fond of Ford. This ain’t personal. It’s literary. You see Ford’s running the whole damn thing as a compromise.’ He believes Ford has reneged on his promise to favour young writers, and has settled for the old and the mainstream, ‘except Tzara and such shit in French. That’s the hell of it.’

  Hemingway’s claim to be fond of Ford grows shakier and shakier. He is irritated by Ford’s mannerisms, his walrus moustache and his war reminiscences (‘I’m going to start denying I was in the war for fear I will get like Ford’). Nor does he trust him. ‘He is an absolute liar and crook and always motivated by the finest synthetic English gentility.’

  Hemingway is scooped up by the burly grande dame of Parisian literary life, Gertrude Stein. Bypassing Ford, he assures her that transatlantic review will publish her vast novel The Making of Ame
ricans, all 925 pages of it. It is, he says, ‘one of the very greatest books I’ve ever read’, and ‘a remarkable scoop for his magazine’. Stein shares his high opinion, and is delighted.124

  In fact, Hemingway has told Ford that The Making of Americans is merely a long short story, not a six-volume novel, which leaves Ford in the awkward position of having to tell Stein he can’t publish it in its entirety. Consequently, Stein is furious with Ford. Is this all part of Hemingway’s plan?

  Soon he is undermining Ford’s authority with almost systematic rigour. The moment Ford leaves for America to rustle up funds for his ailing magazine, Hemingway changes the July and August issues. He prints an attack on Ford’s beloved Dadaists, as well as writing an unsigned editorial against three of Ford’s favourite authors: Jean Cocteau, Tristan Tzara and Gilbert Seldes. He also drops the scheduled serialisation of Ford’s own novel, replacing it with terrible poems already rejected by Ford.125

  Ford is a very forgiving man, so doesn’t sack him. Hemingway regards such magnanimity as a sign of weakness. When his old friend and collaborator Joseph Conrad dies on August 3rd, Ford persuades Hemingway to contribute to a special memorial issue. Hemingway writes in it that he could never reread Conrad, and is even ruder about another friend of Ford: ‘if I knew that by grinding T.S. Eliot into a fine dry powder and sprinkling that powder on Mr Conrad’s grave Mr Conrad would shortly appear ... I would leave for London early tomorrow morning with a sausage grinder’. Ford apologises to Eliot for this insult; his apology further annoys Hemingway.

  ‘Oh, here you are. May I sit with you?’

  This is the beginning of Hemingway’s description of having a drink with Ford, written thirty-five years later, when Ford is safely dead. He describes him as resembling an ‘up-ended hogshead’ with a ‘heavy, stained mustache’. He is a ‘heavy, wheezing, ignoble presence’.126