Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings

by Craig Brown

  Jagger agrees to pose for photographs. Beaton takes him to a shady spot, and finds him transformed: ‘A Tarzan of Piero di Cosimo. Lips of a fantastic roundness, body white and almost hairless. He is sexy, yet completely sexless. He could nearly be a eunuch.’

  Gradually, the others appear. Beaton notes their ‘marvellously flat, tight, compact figures’, but fails to detect the underlying tension. Out of his hearing, Jagger says, ‘It’s getting fucking heavy,’ and leaves for London. Beaton is left alone with the rest of the group. Conversation around the pool is conducted largely in grunts. Beaton examines their wardrobe, and finds it wanting. ‘Keith himself had sewn his trousers, lavender, dull rose, with a band of badly stitched leather dividing the two colours.’137

  Late for lunch, they get into a row with the elderly waiter, who retorts, ‘You’re a lot of pigs.’ For Beaton, the Rolling Stones lack glamour without Jagger. ‘Gosh, they are a messy group ... One can only wonder as to their future.’

  MICK JAGGER

  TALKS POLITICS WITH

  TOM DRIBERG

  Harley House, Marylebone, London NW1

  Spring 1967

  Mick Jagger is wearing a jerkin and tights when the Labour MP Tom Driberg drops round to his flat accompanied by their mutual friend, the poet Allen Ginsberg.

  Ginsberg has arranged the meeting; Jagger is interested in politics, while Driberg is interested in youth. Two years ago, after a magistrate described the Rolling Stones as ‘complete morons who wear their hair down to the shoulders and wear filthy clothes’, Driberg introduced a motion deploring ‘the action of a Glasgow magistrate ... in using his privileged position to make irrelevant, snobbish and insulting personal comments on the appearance and performance of a “pop” group, the Rolling Stones, who are making a substantial contribution to public entertainment and the export drive’.

  Driberg is on a mission to persuade Jagger to enter politics. Since he was busted for drugs in Keith Richard’s house in Wittering, Jagger has been issuing semi-political pronouncements such as, ‘Teenagers the world over are being pushed around by half-witted politicians who attempt to dominate their way of thinking and set a code for their living.’ Jagger’s girlfriend Marianne Faithfull thinks that, though he is not particularly interested in politics (‘certainly not left-wing politics’), if anyone can persuade him to become a politician it is Driberg, who she describes as ‘utterly charming and beautifully dressed. Such a perfect model for Mick, too, because he had a lot of money. He had a country house, he was homosexual, and he was a Labour MP. A real socialist of the old school, with ideals and all that. All these apparently contradictory things in one person ... a shining example.’

  The four of them – Driberg and Ginsberg, Jagger and Faithfull – sit on cushions discussing art and politics. Ginsberg unveils an idea for turning William Blake’s poems into rock lyrics. They talk of drugs, and of the Establishment’s suppression of youthful rebellion.

  ‘Why don’t you try politics, Mick?’ suggests Driberg. Jagger asks him where a man with his anarchistic feelings would fit in. ‘The Labour Party, of course,’ replies Driberg. ‘Labour is the only hope.’

  Britain is on the brink of revolution, he adds. ‘I know that’s the view of some of the Trotskyites, that it is all breaking up and loosening up. And the Labour Party is where a young man should be when it happens.’ He later confesses his surprise at hearing himself say this, as he doesn’t believe a word of it. ‘But one begins to share that revolutionary hope when one is in the company of someone like Mick,’ he explains.

  Mick takes the idea perfectly seriously, at least for a while. ‘What about touring and that?’ he asks. ‘My first commitment is to my music, so I wouldn’t want to have to give any of that up to sit behind a desk.’

  ‘Oh, that wouldn’t be a problem. You could carry on with your music the same as you always have and still do something very important for the party.’

  ‘I mean, I don’t exactly see myself scrutinising the Water Works Bill inch by inch, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Dear boy, we wouldn’t expect you to attend to the day-to-day ephemera of the House. Not at all. We see you more as, uh, a figurehead, like, you know ...’

  ‘The Queen?’ says Jagger, completing the sentence.

  ‘Precisely!’ exclaims Driberg.

  The meeting has got off to a flying start, with, in Faithfull’s words, ‘lots of funny chat and zinging questions’, when Driberg’s eyes stray towards Jagger’s tights, causing his attention to wander. There is an awkward moment of silence as Driberg looks at Jagger’s crotch. ‘Oh my, Mick, WHAT a big basket you have!’ he says.138

  Jagger blushes, the conversation founders; even Ginsberg feels ‘slightly embarrassed, as Driberg was my guest. I was also astounded at his boldness. I had eyes for Jagger myself, but I was very circumspect about Jagger’s body. Yet here was Driberg coming on crude. There was a kind of Zen directness about it that was interesting: I suddenly realised that with directness like that you could score many times.’

  But the moment passes, and the talk returns to politics. Marianne Faithfull thinks Driberg ‘very clever ... because he could see exactly what Mick wanted, which was a form of respectability’.

  In June, Jagger is found guilty of possessing a potentially harmful drug, and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment. The case goes to appeal. Meanwhile, Driberg argues in Parliament for the legalisation of cannabis. When a Home Office minister asks, ‘What sort of society will we create if everyone wants to escape from reality?’ Driberg rises to his feet: ‘They want to escape from this horrible society we have created.’

  Over the next year, Driberg and Jagger enjoy regular lunches together, often at the Gay Hussar. A pattern emerges: Jagger, buoyed, returns home telling Marianne Faithfull he is going into politics. She grows excited – ‘Mick Jagger, leader of the Labour Party! And me, the little anarchist in the background, pushing the great man further into folly!’ – but by the next day he has invariably changed his mind.

  Driberg is not easily dissuaded; he even hatches an idea of a breakaway party, headed by Jagger and himself. On February 4th 1969 he writes to Sir Richard Acland, who formed the doomed Common Wealth Party during the Second World War. ‘I have been discussing the electoral possibilities, and the problems of revolution (and the difficulty of founding a new party) with two people, friends of mine, who could have some influence among the young: Mick Jagger and his lady, Marianne Faithfull – both more intelligent than you might suppose from their public personae. They would like to meet you. Would you?’139

  The meeting never takes place, and Jagger’s interest in a career in politics wanes, largely because, as Marianne Faithfull recalls, ‘It would be unbelievably dull.’ It is Keith Richard who finally puts a stop to it. When Jagger asks him for his opinion as to whether he should become an MP, Richard says it’s the worst idea he has ever heard.

  TOM DRIBERG

  TAKES HIS EYES OFF

  CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

  601 Mountjoy House, the Barbican, London EC2

  June 1976

  Now aged seventy-one, and recently ennobled,140 Tom Driberg – socialist, gossip columnist, High Churchman, suspected spy, sexual predator141 – is beginning to feel his age. ‘I wish I were sixteen again,’ he announced at a party to celebrate his seventieth birthday. ‘No I don’t. I wish I were dead.’

  He is, in the words of his swashbuckling young journalist friend Christopher Hitchens, ‘at the fag-end of his career ... tending to live off his store of anecdotes and acquaintances’. He occupies much of his time dropping names from the past. Whenever he dines in an Indian restaurant, he makes a point of drinking milk simply so that he can say, ‘Aleister Crowley – the Beast, you know – always advised it.’

  He is particularly proud of his private collection of dirty limericks by W.H. Auden and Constant Lambert;142 he likes to recite them whenever there is a lull in a conversation.

  ‘That will do!’ said the Lady Maude Hoa
re.

  ‘I can’t concentrate any more.

  You’re perspiring like hell,

  There’s that terrible smell –

  And look at the time – half-past four!’

  But he still makes space in his diary for his old pursuits. ‘In only one respect did he keep his old life up to speed,’ says Hitchens, indiscreetly. ‘He would go anywhere and do anything for the chance to suck somebody off.’ But what was once a pleasure has now become more of a chore, and he claims to do it on doctor’s orders (‘the potassium ingredient is frightfully good for one’). His twenty-five-year marriage to Ena Binfield has done nothing to convert him to the joys of heterosexuality. ‘She tried to seduce me! On our HONEYMOON!’ he tells his friends in horror.

  The novelist Kingsley Amis is compiling The New Oxford Book of Light Verse, and has heard of Driberg’s colourful collection. Amis asks Hitchens to ask Driberg if he might be induced to share it. If so, he will treat him to a meal at a restaurant of his choice with Hitchens and Amis’s son Martin. Hitchens duly telephones the friend he calls ‘the old cocksucker’ and puts the proposition to him.

  ‘I’d be most interested to meet the senior Amis,’ drawls Driberg. ‘But do tell me, is he by any chance as attractive as his lovely young son?’

  ‘Yes, Tom, absolutely,’ replies Hitchens. ‘But – how shall I put it? Kingsley is old enough to be Martin’s father.’

  ‘Oh, dear, yes, I suppose he must be,’ sighs Driberg.

  In return for his saucy limericks, Driberg proposes lunch at the Neal Street Restaurant. The four are escorted to a table halfway down the room. Kingsley Amis, no stranger to irritation, is perfectly satisfied with it, but both he and Hitchens note Driberg’s dissatisfied glances.

  ‘Complaint coming up,’ mutters Hitchens to Amis.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘He has to find fault with something to feel properly settled in.’

  At that very moment, Driberg summons the manager and demands to be moved to a quieter area of the restaurant. He is a stickler for prompt service and fine food. In his new role as a peer of the realm, he tells Hitchens he disapproves of the ‘abysmal’ food served in the dining room of the House of Lords. ‘The white wine is warmer than the food,’ he complains.

  The lunch never really gets going. In Kingsley’s view, Martin does not exert himself. While Kingsley and Hitchens gabble away, Driberg remains very quiet. ‘I have since thought he might have been ill,’ Kingsley reflects in his memoirs, ‘since he was to die within months of our meeting.’

  Driberg announces that his poetic trove is back in his flat in the Barbican, and so off the four of them set, a little unwillingly. Over whisky, he produces a bundle of the famous Constant Lambert limericks and proudly presents them to Kingsley Amis, who eagerly starts to read them. Meanwhile Martin asks Driberg if he can ring for a mini-cab. Driberg leads him to the phone in the bedroom.

  As he reads on, Kingsley grows vaguely aware that he is sitting alone in the room with Hitchens: the other two have disappeared. After a while, Driberg reappears, followed a little later by Martin.

  The limericks are not to Kingsley’s liking. ‘Written out in an unattractive hand, they featured one at a time all or many of the diocesan bishops of probably England and Wales. Each limerick had e.g. the Bishop of Truro in its first line, a limited amount of technical ingenuity and an obscenity of some kind, usually mild. Nothing else of significance, for example humour, was anywhere present.’

  The Bishop of Central Japan

  Used to bugger himself with a fan;

  When taxed with his acts

  He explained: ‘It contracts

  And expands so much more than a man.’

  There is only one poem by Auden, and it rules itself out even faster ‘by being a long and detailed account of an act of fellatio told by the fellator in the first person. This too I politely kept my eyes on for some time.’ Amis reads them all through ‘with simulated care and interest’ before announcing ‘with pretended regret and real evasiveness’ that he is afraid they won’t quite do for the Oxford University Press.

  The three of them make their excuses and leave. The next morning, Martin telephones Kingsley. ‘A fine fucking father you are. The slag at the cab firm told me to hold on a moment, please, caller, and in no time bloody caller was holding on with one hand and beating Driberg off with the other. We must have gone round the bed about five times before he clapped me on the shoulder, said, “Fair enough, youngster,” in a sort of bluff style and buggered off.’

  ‘That was sporting of him,’ replies Kingsley. ‘Anyway, you should have taken the Hitch into the bedroom with you.’

  ‘Maybe. And maybe not.’

  Reflecting on the incident later, Kingsley Amis wonders whether exhaustion from chasing his son around the bed might have hastened Driberg’s demise.

  ‘The idea does not displease me much,’ he adds.

  CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

  TRADES ABUSE WITH

  GEORGE GALLOWAY

  Baruch College, 55 Lexington Avenue, New York

  September 14th 2005

  Nearly thirty years on, Christopher Hitchens is living in America. A celebrated iconoclast, contrarian and master of what Auberon Waugh termed the vituperative arts, he is a vociferous supporter of the allied invasion of Iraq. For all these reasons, he holds the radical politician George Galloway in particular contempt.

  There is no one more radical than Galloway. A throwback to an earlier, more revolutionary era, he has been expelled from the Labour Party for bringing it into disrepute, and now heads his own party, ‘Respect’, or ‘Respect (The George Galloway Party)’, as he calls it on the ballot papers. Like Hitchens, he stalwartly refuses to hide his light under a bushel.

  The two men have much else in common: a passion for smoking (cigarettes for Hitchens, cigars for Galloway), a roguish theatricality, an instinctive command of rhetoric, a simple delight in their own capacity for holding the strongest opinions. Only a few years ago, Galloway viewed Hitchens as a comrade, praising him as ‘that great British man of letters’ and ‘the greatest polemicist’. But things have soured. Now Galloway includes him in his list of the damned. ‘The people who invaded and destroyed Iraq and have murdered a million Iraqi people by sanctions and war will burn in Hell in the hell fires, and their name in history will be branded as killers and war criminals for all time,’ he says.143

  The two men met for the first time on the steps of the Senate building in Washington a few months ago, as Galloway prepared to defend himself before a Senate committee against its allegation that he had traded in oil. With television cameras whirring, Hitchens approached him and questioned a few of his claims.

  GALLOWAY: This is a bloated, drink-sodden former Trotskyist popinjay, who is just walking around as a sort of bag lady in Washington.

  HITCHENS: Just enquiring ... I just wondered. You said you’d contacted the committee by letter, by email. Did you bring copies of the letters with you?

  GALLOWAY: Has anyone got any sensible questions?

  HITCHENS: Or the email?

  GALLOWAY: You’re a drink-soaked, bloated –

  AMERICAN REPORTER: Are you going to answer his question? The substance of his question?

  GALLOWAY: I’m here to talk to the Senate.

  Hitchens followed him inside the building, and continued to barrack him with questions. Perhaps unsurprisingly, ‘a fresh hose of abuse was turned on me’.

  GALLOWAY: Your hands are shaking. You badly need another drink.

  HITCHENS: And you’re a real thug, aren’t you?

  Soon afterwards, Galloway accepts Hitchens’ invitation to a public debate. Meanwhile, Hitchens accelerates his personal attacks. ‘Study the photographs of Galloway from Syrian state television and you will see how unwise and incautious it is for such a hideous person to resort to personal remarks,’ he writes in one of his many columns. ‘Unkind nature, which could have made a perfectly good butt out of his face, has spoiled the whole eff
ect by taking an asshole and studding it with ill-brushed fangs.’144

  Hitchens announces the ground rules for their forthcoming confrontation. ‘There’ll be no courtesies and no handshakes.’ On the evening of their debate on the motion ‘The March 2003 war in Iraq was necessary and just’, Hitchens stands outside Baruch College distributing leaflets listing some of his opponent’s more outlandish remarks, among them his greeting to Saddam Hussein in 1994: ‘Your Excellency, Mr President ... I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability.’

  Galloway remains undeterred. Aptly, he picks an analogy from the world of heavyweight boxing. ‘He’s all washed up, like Sonny Liston,’ he says.

  At their separate podia, Galloway, spruce, tanned and besuited, resembles a prosperous capitalist, while the bearded Hitchens, sweat stains inching along his purple shirt, his jacket tossed any-old-how to the floor, looks the very model of a modern rebel socialist. Over the next two hours, they exchange insults, with Iraq as the backdrop. Galloway attacks Hitchens for his ‘crazed shifts of opinion’ and asks, ‘How can anybody take you seriously?’

  Hitchens congratulates Galloway on being ‘absolutely 100 per cent consistent in your support for unmentionable thugs and bastards’. Galloway calls Hitchens a hypocrite, ‘a jester at the court of the Bourbon Bushes’, and speaks of his voyage from left to right as ‘something unique in natural history ... the first metamorphosis of a butterfly back into a slug’. Hitchens counters by saying that Galloway’s ‘vile and cheap guttersnipe abuse is a disgrace ... beneath each gutter there’s another gutter gurgling away’. To which Galloway replies, ‘You’ve fallen out of the gutter into the sewer.’