Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings

by Craig Brown

  118 Salinger returns to London with his children in 1969, taking them to see the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace, Hampton Court, Harrods Food Hall and Carnaby Street. One afternoon they visit Edna O’Brien. Salinger tells his daughter Margaret with a wink that she is a good writer, and a hell of a nice girl, but that she writes some really dirty stuff. They also go to see Engelbert Humperdinck starring as Robinson Crusoe at the London Palladium. ‘Awful, but we all sort of enjoyed it, and the main idea was to see the Palladium itself, because that’s where the last scene of The 39 Steps was set,’ he writes to his friend Lillian Ross. In January 2011, newly released letters to an English friend reveal more of his unexpectedly prosaic pleasures, including Whoppers chocolates (‘better than just edible’), the TV series Upstairs Downstairs, the Three Tenors, Tim Henman and Burger King.

  119 Since named the Hemingway Bar.

  120 ‘I know my father claimed to have killed 122 “krauts” as he called them but I think that’s what he probably wished he had done,’ his son John tells Hemingway’s biographer Denis Brian, who concludes, ‘There’s no hard evidence that he killed even one.’

  121 Throughout the war, Salinger never stops writing. He has written eight stories since landing in Europe in mid-January, and a further three between D-Day and September 9th. ‘He tugged that little portable type-writer all over Europe ... Even during the hottest campaigns, he was writing, sending off to magazines,’ recalls a fellow soldier.

  122 Later, the legend grows that Hemingway visits Salinger in his unit, and the two men argue about the relative merits of Hemingway’s German Luger and Salinger’s US .45. To prove his point, Hemingway is meant to have aimed his gun at a chicken and blasted its head off, making Salinger very upset. But there is no evidence this ever happened. Rather, it shows that readers like their writers to behave in person as they would in print: Hemingway tough and blood-thirsty, Salinger sensitive and fearful.

  123 After Paris, his regiment is trapped in the notorious Huertgen Forest; five hundred of his comrades die in five days, many of them freezing to death.

  124 Though she too counts the cost. When she later writes that Scott Fitzgerald ‘will be read when many of his well-known contemporaries are forgotten’, and that Hemingway is the creation of herself and Sherwood Anderson, and that they are ‘both a little proud and a little ashamed of the work of their minds’, Hemingway sends her a copy of Death in the Afternoon inscribed, ‘A Bitch is a Bitch is a Bitch is a Bitch. From her pal Ernest Hemingway.’

  125 They are written in pidgin English by Elsa von Freytag von Loringhoven, a German poetess who wears an inverted coal scuttle on her head and ice-cream spoons for earrings.

  126 Others share Hemingway’s distaste for Ford’s physique. Rebecca West describes being embraced by him as like ‘being the toast under the poached egg’.

  127 John Fothergill, part of Wilde’s circle in his youth, later a famously irritable innkeeper, recalls: ‘Oscar Wilde once told me that when he went to heaven, Peter would meet him at the gate with a pile of richly bound books saying, “These, Mr Wilde, are your unwritten books.”’

  128 Though he has gained his reputation as much through his children’s stories and his poems: his major plays are yet to be written, and The Picture of Dorian Gray, which was the talk of London last year, has yet to be published in France.

  129 Proust puts these same words into the mouth of Baron Charlus in La Prisonnière. Charlus speaks them, we are told, ‘with a mixture of insolence, wit and world-weariness’.

  130 Alas, unrecorded.

  131 Proust does not like Wilde – in a letter to Cocteau in 1919, he even goes so far as to say ‘I detest Wilde’ – but he maintains some sympathy for him after his downfall, chiding André Gide for his lack of charity towards him. ‘You were very patronising towards Wilde. I don’t much admire him. But I don’t understand reticence and harsh words towards a person who is down on his luck.’ In Sodome et Gomorrhe, he writes of the instability of the homosexual life: ‘Their honour precarious, their liberty provisional, their position unstable, like the poet once fêted in all the drawing rooms, and applauded in every theatre in London, and the next day driven out of every lodging house, unable to find a pillow on which to lay his head.’

  132 Proust’s handshake lacks vigour. ‘There are many ways of shaking hands. It is not too much to say that it is an art. He was not good at it. His hand was soft and drooping ... There was nothing pleasant about the way he performed the action,’ writes his friend Prince Antoine Bibesco.

  Joyce’s right hand is another matter. When a young man comes up to him in Zürich and says, ‘May I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses?’ Joyce replies, ‘No – it did a lot of other things too.’

  133 Some maintain this dialogue cannot be accurate, as Joyce tells a friend in 1920 that he has read ‘some pages’ of Proust, adding, ‘I cannot see any special merit but I am a bad critic.’ But Joyce can be perverse like this: on meeting Wyndham Lewis, he pretends not to have read his work, though he definitely has.

  134 The murder is never solved.

  135 Cyril Connolly nicknames him Rip Van With-It.

  136 Mord und Totschlag (A Degree of Murder), directed by Volker Schlöndorff.

  137 Reading Beaton’s published diary of their time in Morocco, Keith notes: ‘I used to spend hours stitching old pants together to give them a different look. I’d get four pairs of sailor pants, I’d cut them off at the knee, get a band of leather and then put another colour from the other pants and stitch them in. Lavender and dull rose, as Cecil Beaton says. I didn’t realize he was keeping an eye on that shit.’

  138 He makes a practice of this type of comment. Driving with the future Prime Minister James Callaghan, the two men stop to urinate at the verge of the road. ‘While I was peeing, Tom came up to me and took hold of my penis,’ Callaghan confides to their colleague Woodrow Wyatt. ‘“You’ve got a very pretty one there,” he said.’ But Callaghan is not that way inclined. ‘I got away as quick as I could.’

  139 Driberg keeps in touch with Faithfull for some time after she has split up with Jagger. In 1972, he invites her to dinner at the Gay Hussar with W.H. Auden. ‘In the middle of the evening Auden turned to me and, in a gesture I assume was intended to shock me, said, “Tell me, when you travel with drugs, Marianne, do you pack them up your arse?”

  ‘“Oh no, Wystan,” I said. “I stash them in my pussy.”’

  140 As Lord Bradwell. The occasion is celebrated in verse by his old friend John Betjeman:

  The first and last Lord Bradwell is to me

  The norm of socialist integrity;

  He makes no secret of his taste in sex;

  Preferring the lower to the upper decks.

  141 ‘From first to last, Driberg was a homosexual philanderer of a most pertinacious and indefatigable kind, wholly shameless, without the smallest scruple or remorse, utterly regardless of the feelings of or consequences to his partners, determined on the crudest and most frequent form of carnal satisfaction to the exclusion of any other consideration whatever: a Queers’ Casanova,’ observes Paul Johnson, a little ungenerously, in the Daily Telegraph.

  142 Lambert possessed other talents, even more hidden. ‘When the weather is right, I can play “God Save the King” by ear,’ he would say. ‘Literally.’ Lambert was deaf in his right ear, having sustained a punctured eardrum as a child. He was able to hold his nose, take a breath through his mouth, and blow the tune through his ear. Anthony Powell testified to the truth of this: when he leaned close, faintly from the ear in question he heard the recognisable notes ‘God save our gracious King ...’

  143 Later, he tells the viewers of Al Jazeera that the ‘globalised capitalist economic system ... is the biggest killer the world has ever known. It has killed far more people than Adolf Hitler.’

  144 Hitchens has always been free with his abuse. In his memoir, Hitch-22, he describes Bill Clinton as ‘loathsome’, Henry Kissinger as ‘indescribably loathsome’, Ji
mmy Carter as a ‘pious born-again creep’, Alexander Haig as ‘vain, preposterous’ and Ronald Reagan as ‘appallingly facile’. Elsewhere, he calls Mother Teresa ‘a fanatic, a fundamentalist and a fraud’.

  145 Respectively, Mr Galloway Goes to Washington and Love, Poverty and War.

  146 For this he earns the ire of Germaine Greer. After assuring Guardian readers that she cannot watch Celebrity Big Brother, she goes on to say that ‘anyone who can remember what a thoroughly supercilious and nasty performer Barrymore always was, must watch unmoved as he dissolves in snot and tears.’ She adds that ‘for Galloway to blame Barrymore’s pathetic condition on Jodie Marsh is outrageous.’

  147 In June 2010 the dress is bought at a London auction for £192,000 by a fashion museum in Chile.

  148 The wedding itself goes smoothly. Three miles of red carpet are laid throughout Monaco, and Aristotle Onassis hires a seaplane to drop thousands of red and white carnations over everyone. In return for documentary rights, MGM agree to pay for basic essentials such as the wedding dress, and on top of all this Rainier makes $450,000 from the sale of commemorative stamps. The only blot on the horizon is that Queen Elizabeth II sends a telegram refusing her invitation. ‘The fact that we have never met is irrelevant,’ harrumphs Rainier. ‘This is still a slap in the face.’

  149 ‘Grace had more lovers in a month than I did in a lifetime,’ Zsa Zsa Gabor puts it modestly. Playing golf with David Niven, Prince Rainier asks him who, out of all his former lovers, was the best at fellatio. Without thinking, Niven replies ‘Grace –’ before quickly correcting himself, ‘Gracie Fields.’ But Noël Coward maintains that Niven did indeed mean Gracie Fields. ‘It’s absolutely true. It was a speciality of Rochdale girls,’ he says. ‘They called it the Gradely Gobble.’

  150 ‘Suspense as an absolute quality has never seemed to me very important,’ he writes to Bernice Baumgarten while working on his screenplay. This might explain his lack of empathy with Strangers on a Train, both the book and the film.

  151 On December 6th 1950, Chandler writes a furious letter to Hitchcock after Warners have sent him a copy of the final script. ‘In spite of your wide and generous disregard of my communications on the subject of the script of Strangers on a Train and your failure to make any comment on it,’ he begins, ‘and in spite of not having heard a word from you since I began the writing of the actual screenplay – for all of which I might say I bear no malice, since this sort of procedure seems to be part of the standard Hollywood depravity – in spite of this and in spite of this extremely cumbersome sentence, I feel that I should, just for the record, pass you a few comments on what is termed the final script ... What I cannot understand is your permitting a script which after all had some life and vitality to be reduced to such a flabby mass of clichés, a group of faceless characters, and the kind of dialogue every screen writer is taught not to write ...’

  He never posts this letter.

  152 The final film includes this dialogue between Bogart and the gambler and blackmailer Brody:

  Marlowe: Hmm, hmm. You know where that Packard is now? ... It’s in the Sheriff’s garage. It was fished out of twelve feet of water off Lido pier early this morning. There was a dead man in it. He’d been sapped. The car was pointed toward the end of the pier and the hand throttle pulled out.

  Brody: Well, you can’t pin that on me.

  Marlowe: I could make an awful good try ... You see, the dead man was Owen Taylor, Sternwood’s chauffeur. He went up to Geiger’s place ’cause he was sweet on Carmen. He didn’t like the kind of games Geiger was playing. He got himself in the back way with a jimmy and he had a gun. And the gun went off as guns will, and Geiger fell down dead. Owen ran away taking the film with him. You went after him and got it – how else would you get it?

  Brody: All right, you’re right. I heard the shots and saw him run down the back steps and into the Packard and away. I followed him. He turned west on Sunset and beyond Beverly he, uh, skidded off the road, and uh, came to a stop. So I came up and played copper. He had a gun, he was rattled, so I sapped him down. I figured the film might be worth something so I took it. That’s the last I saw of him.

  Marlowe: So you left an unconscious man in a car way out near Beverly someplace and you want me to believe that somebody conveniently came along, ran that car all the way down to the ocean, pushed it off the pier, and then came back and hid Geiger’s body.

  Brody: Well I didn’t.

  Marlowe: Somebody did.

  153 Now the Lakeside Golf Club.

  154 The golfing sequence in Bringing up Baby was shot at the Bel Air Country Club.

  155 When W.C. Fields is invited to play at the Lakeside with someone he doesn’t like, he replies, ‘When I want to play with a prick, I’ll play with my own.’

  156 When Katharine Hepburn is playing the tenth hole of the course in 1936, a two-seater plane lands in front of her. Out climbs Hughes, brandishing a bag of clubs and saying, ‘Mind a third?’ Their three-year affair begins later the same day.

  157 His grandfather Pasquale Broccoli arrives in New York from Calabria with only a packet of broccoli seeds. Other immigrants to America have tried planting broccoli, but with little success. But the Broccolis’ broccoli – from the family de Cicco strain, which sells for $16 an ounce – proves triumphant. The family goes on to grow many other types of vegetable – spinach, carrots, radishes, cucumbers – but broccoli remains their pride and joy.

  158 He is meant to be designing a top-secret medium-range bomber capable of flying at 450 miles an hour for the US Air Force, but this has to take a back seat to Miss Russell’s breasts.

  159 A later film Jane Russell makes with Howard Hughes, a 3D Technicolor musical called The French Line, is promoted with the slogans ‘J.R. in 3-D. It’ll knock BOTH your eyes out!’ and ‘Jane Russell in 3 Dimensions – and what dimensions!’ The Archbishop of St Louis, where the film is premiered in 1953, issues a warning to his parishioners. ‘Dearly beloved, since no Catholic can with a clear conscience attend such an immoral movie, we feel it our solemn duty to forbid our Catholic people under penalty of mortal sin to attend this presentation.’ The Archbishop does not realise that this is exactly the reason Hughes chose to premiere the film in St Louis, with its 65 per cent Roman Catholic population.

  160 The unknown Timothy Dalton drops out of the running, believing himself, at twenty-one, too young for the part.

  161 To date, it is estimated that James Bond has killed more than 150 men and slept with forty-four women, three quarters of whom have tried to kill him.

  162 In the original script, the switch from one James Bond to another is explained by Bond having undergone plastic surgery so as to disguise him from his enemies. In subsequent revisions, this explanation is dropped in favour of no explanation at all.

  163 Lazenby’s future work as an actor is sporadic. Over the years he has occasional roles on television, among them episodes of Baywatch, Kung Fu and Hawaii Five-O. In the 1990s, he appears in a number of the Emmanuelle movies.

  164 A brand-new late-night chat show is hosted by a relative unknown, whose name is Michael Parkinson. Dee’s slot on the BBC is given to the actor Derek Nimmo, in If It’s Saturday, It Must Be Nimmo. Among Nimmo’s first guests is Basil Brush, a leading glove puppet.

  165 One day, furious at not being allowed Matt Monro on his show, he decides to ‘cause them a bit of bother by seeing how they manage to broadcast The Simon Dee Show without Simon Dee appearing on it’. He simply fails to show up. ‘They phoned me every day if not every hour to try and find out when I might be back, but I answered – sounding perfectly fine, of course – that I was too ill to speak and needed to go back to bed. It was delicious!’ He arrives at LWT at the last possible moment, just as his emergency replacement, Pete Murray, is preparing to go on. ‘I came out and said, “Hello everyone, well, as long as you’ve got your health, what else matters, eh? And for those of you who tuned in tonight to see Pete Murray ... sorry!” It got a big laugh from
the studio audience and went on to be one of my best LWT shows.’

  166 ‘He did not think that there was enough quiet in the world. To realise God you need silence. He loved spaces for silence, and places of silence. He encouraged the practice of retreats. He was an inspiring conductor of retreats. He thought of the religious communities as little havens of quiet scattered across society ...’. From Owen Chadwick’s memorial address.

  167 At the end of the year, Ramsey flies to South Africa, where he preaches against apartheid. ‘If we exclude a man because he is of another race or colour,’ he asks, ‘are we not excluding Christ himself?’ He expresses these views even more vehemently in a frosty meeting with President Vorster. He is determined not to be photographed looking cheerful with the President, so before the meeting, ‘I practised making one unpleasant face after another while shaving. I did it so I should get a sort of continuity of unpleasant faces.’