by Craig Brown
168 For the next three decades, he attempts any number of comebacks, but they all end in tears. He walks out on the Radio 4 Today programme after just two broadcasts, from a Fairy Liquid commercial during lunchtime on day one, and from a Reading radio station on the very first morning, after refusing to interview Alvin Stardust. Over the years, he finds himself in court for, successively, shoplifting a potato peeler, non-payment of rates, smashing up a loo set in a shop, and assaulting a policeman outside Buckingham Palace after being told he cannot speak to the Queen. In 1974 he serves twenty-eight days in Pentonville Prison for non-payment of rates on his former Chelsea home.
‘No bank will give me an account now,’ he says to an interviewer in 2004. ‘They say they don’t know who Simon Dee is. I give them videos of Simon Dee on LWT and they absolutely say no, they can’t accept that. I even faxed the chairman and told him what was going on, and he got in touch with the manager, and told him to keep throwing me out.’ At the time of his death aged seventy-four in 2009, he is living in a one-bedroom flat in Winchester with twenty-six scrap-books stuffed with his newspaper cuttings, beginning in 1964 and ending in 1972.
169 ‘In 1975, a group of chaplains went to lunch,’ recalls one of them, Father Stock, ‘and afterwards I was sitting upstairs in the study and Michael began to talk about the Pope’s attitude towards sex. “Masturbation, masturbation, so silly of the Pope to make such a fuss about masturbation. It’s the sort of thing we all do, and we hope one day something more interesting will come along to take its place.” Well, it was a warm day and the windows were wide open, and I thought, what on earth will people think if they hear all this!’
170 The Bishop of Southwark, Mervyn Stockwood, remembers Ramsey at Church Assembly drawing up cricket teams composed of the greatest bores among his colleagues. For every five minutes they speak, they score a run. ‘He’s got a boundary today!’ he exclaims whenever one of his bores exceeds himself.
171 In his diary, Macmillan also describes Fisher as ‘a silly, weak, vain and muddle-headed man’. He complains of his meetings with Fisher, ‘I try to talk to him about religion. But he seems quite uninterested and reverts all the time to politics.’
172 But it is easy to get these things wrong. Amis himself was once quoted in an interview with John Mortimer as admitting that he had ‘hit his son with a hammer’; in fact, he had said that he had hit his thumb with a hammer. Likewise, his host, Tom Stoppard, was once quoted by Kenneth Tynan as saying, ‘I am a human nothing’; Tynan went on to say that Stoppard’s plays should be read as an attempt to come to terms with this bleak truth. Thirty years later, Stoppard writes a letter to the Guardian stating, with characteristic good humour, that what he in fact said was ‘I am assuming nothing.’
Dahl’s authorised biographer, Donald Sturrock, offers a paraphrase of the conversation and attempts a defence, arguing that ‘many of Dahl’s English literary contemporaries ... resented his skill at making money and disliked the pride he took in his own financial successes’, adding that this ‘frequently caused misunderstandings ... He knew that Amis, like most of the guests, did not respect children’s writing as proper literature and this attitude made him vulnerable. Drunk and ill at ease, he probably felt that the only way to keep his head up was to talk money. The clash of attitudes was bitter and fundamental.’ However, though he seems to go along with Amis’s account, nowhere in his otherwise detailed rendition of their meeting does Sturrock either repeat or refute the words ‘Never mind, the little bastards’d swallow it.’
173 Or not so single: when the Queen Mother telephones Cecil Beaton to tell him the news, he says, ‘Oh, how wonderful, you must be thrilled ma’am, how simply marvellous, he’s terribly clever and talented.’ But when he puts down the phone, he turns to a house guest and exclaims, ‘Silly girl! Not even a good photographer!’
174 ‘I was born with a priceless gift,’ says Dame Edna Everage. ‘The ability to laugh at the misfortunes of others.’
175 305 × 345 cms.
176 Others include Her Majesty’s Male, a painting of Queen Elizabeth II with a 5 o’clock shadow, and Cakescape, a cake pressed between two panes of glass, looking a little like a Jackson Pollock.
177 ‘Alas,’ Humphries writes in one of his memoirs, ‘rather like Yoko Ono, Senora Dalí lacked her husband’s genius, and her surrealist postures were always rather humourless and uninspired.’
178 He seems to have got off a good deal more lightly than the art critic Brian Sewell, who a few years later, whilst holidaying alone in Cadaqués, is invited back by Salvador Dalí, then taken to an olive grove, where he is required to lie naked in the foetal position and masturbate as Dalí takes photographs and fumbles in his own trousers. ‘Sheepish and in silence’, the two men then walk back to Gala, who is sitting in a giant eggshell in the garden.
179 Freud’s recent eightieth birthday brought him greetings from, among others, Thomas Mann, H.G. Wells, Albert Schweitzer and Albert Einstein.
180 Ten years later, in an interview with Malcolm Muggeridge on the Panorama programme on BBC Television, Dalí appears to have moved on. ‘All your wonderful jokes that we know about – taxi cabs with the rain inside and so on,’ says Muggeridge, ‘you’re going to go on with those jokes?’
‘Eh, thees correspond to le first period of my life,’ replies Dalí. ‘The moment of myself is very beeg interest in psychoanalysis, coming in London for meet le Doctor Freud. But now my only interest is about le treeee-mendous progress of nuclear recherches and nuclear physics.’
‘And so really that represented a phase in your career, those jokes that we all know about, and now you move on, and all your life will be to the rhythm of atomic explosion?’
‘Exactly, one new kind of, eh, atomic and nuclear mysticism.’
‘Well, thank you very much, that’s a fascinating phrase, nuclear mysticism.’
181 Lucian Freud remembers his grandfather as someone who ‘always seemed to be in a good mood. He had what many people who are really intelligent have, which is not being serious or solemn, as if they are so sure they know what they are talking about that they don’t have the need to be earnest about it.’
182 She has relationships with, among others, Gustav Klimt, Max Burckhard, Alexander Zemlinsky and Oskar Kokoschka. She marries Gustav Mahler in 1902, Walter Gropius in 1915 and Franz Werfel in 1929.
183 ‘He was convinced at the time, and remained convinced for the rest of his life, that the architect had deliberately addressed the letter to him as his way of asking him for my hand in marriage,’ wrote Alma much later.
184 Contemporary psychoanalysts seem to think that such a brief consultation cannot truly be classified as psychoanalysis. Yet it seems to have been in many ways more productive, and more constructive, than many courses of treatment that last a lifetime.
185 At the Mahler wedding, his little niece Eleanor is caught mimicking Mahler’s gait, and sent home in disgrace.
186 ‘The use of the commonplace ... as a means of expression foreshadows the main trend in twentieth-century art,’ writes Donald Mitchell in his essay ‘Mahler and Freud’ (1958). Freud himself is no judge of music: he is tone deaf.
187 Alma lives for another fifty-three years.
188 Once she gets going, she very much enjoys sex. ‘I became a quivering mass of responsive senses in the hands of an expert voluptuary ... Like a flock of wild goats cropping the herbage of the soft hillside, so his kisses grazed over my body, and like the earth itself I felt a thousand mouths devouring me,’ she writes of her first liaison with Princess Winaretta’s brother, Isaac Merritt Singer. She describes going to bed with the poet Mercedes de Acosta with similar gusto: ‘... A slender body, hands soft and white, for the service of my delight, two sprouting breasts round and sweet, invite my hungry mouth to eat, from whence two nipples firm and pink, persuade my thirsty soul to drink, and lower still a secret place where I’d fain hide my loving face ...’
189 It is Sir Francis Rose of whom Gertrude Stein is la
ter to write ‘A rose is a rose is a rose.’
190 Isadora prefers a bare minimum of clothes, if that. In Boston in 1922, she electrifies a room by lifting the folds of her scarlet tunic to reveal her naked body and crying, ‘You don’t know what beauty is! This – this is beauty!’
In Vienna, a distraught Princess Metternich asks why Isadora is dancing with so little on. ‘I forgot to tell you how amiable our artiste is,’ says her fellow dancer Loie Fuller. ‘Her baggage has not yet arrived, but rather than disappoint us, she has agreed to appear in her practising costume.’
191 And is still, in 2011, the last Englishman to have won Wimbledon.
192 Groucho dies on August 19th 1977, Chaplin four months later, on Christmas Day 1977.
193 The panellists are Kingsley Amis, Brian Epstein, Susan Hampshire and Groucho’s third wife, Eden Hartford. The pilot goes badly, and the show is never aired.
194 Twenty-five years later, I am present at a similar meeting, between Anthony Burgess and Benny Hill.
Watching old Benny Hill shows in Monaco (long after they had fallen out of fashion in Britain), Anthony Burgess has become an unabashed admirer of the comedian. Reviewing a new biography of Hill, Saucy Boy, in the Guardian in 1990, he declares him ‘one of the great artists of our age’.
The two men meet for the first time shortly after the review appears. I am lucky enough to be present at this bizarre but historic encounter. Both of them prove to be remarkably as they are on television. Hill arrives first, as perky as can be, apparently over the moon at having been driven by a female taxi-driver (‘Oooh, I said, you can take me ANYWHERE, my love!’). Burgess – histrionic, loquacious, with deep voice and furrowed brow, putting the emphasis on unexpected words – behaves just like a slightly hammy actor playing the part of Anthony Burgess.
The two of them are full of praise for each other, but never quite find common ground. All in all, the encounter follows a similar pattern to T.S. Eliot’s meeting with Groucho Marx: the author wanting to show off his knowledge of comedians, the comedian wanting to show off his knowledge of authors. By the end of the dinner it seems to me unlikely they will ever meet again, and as far as I know, they never do.
But then, neither man has long to live. Hill dies in 1992; Burgess in 1993.
195 The British royal family traditionally views writers and artists as more to be endured than enjoyed. Queen Elizabeth’s father-in-law, King George V, perhaps the most philistine of all monarchs, once came across a painting by Cézanne at an art exhibition. ‘Come over here, May,’ he said, summoning his wife, ‘here’s something that will make you laugh.’
His son, King George VI, commissions John Piper, well known for his brooding, stormy pictures, to paint a series of Windsor Castle. The artist duly delivers the paintings, but hears nothing. Some time later, he is presented to the King at a garden party. ‘Ah yes ... Piper,’ says the King. ‘Pity you had such awful weather.’
Royal encounters with writers and poets rarely go smoothly, and often end in conversational cul-de-sacs. When Robert Graves goes to the Palace to receive the Queen’s Medal for Poetry, he says to the Queen, ‘You realise, ma’am, that you and I are descended from the prophet Mohammed.’ ‘Oh, really?’ says the Queen. ‘Yes.’ ‘How interesting.’ ‘I think that you should mention it in your Christmas message, because a lot of your subjects are Mohammedans.’
196 Wilson comes in for heavy and immediate criticism for betraying the confidences of the dinner table. His host, Lord Wyatt of Weeford, complains that it is ‘a shabby trick’ and that Wilson ‘is boastfully shameless in being a scoundrel ... his underhand behaviour does not square with the Christian ethics he professes. Nor with those of a gentleman, which I had naïvely thought him to be.’ Nicholas Soames MP condemns it as ‘an intolerable betrayal ... For Mr Wilson to have broken every convention of civilised society in this regard is bad enough. Worse, it shows an appalling want of chivalry.’
Before his death, Wyatt arranges for the posthumous publication of his diaries, which, coincidentally, contain detailed reports of many private conversations with the Queen Mother.
197 By chance, she welcomes the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro to Balmoral during his gap year in 1973, but only as a beater.
198 Opinion among staff remains divided. ‘She is quiet and easy to please,’ an unnamed female employee of Raymond’s hairdressing salon is quoted as saying in 1949. But in 2002, a former Buckingham Palace footman, Guy Hunting, recalls the dislike for the Duchess of Windsor felt by the Duke’s former valet, Walter Fry. ‘It was not the fact that she was foreign or divorced or untitled that rankled, it was simply that she did not seem to know how they [the servants] should be treated. The worst example of this was her behaviour at table. At lunch or dinner most people react immediately when they are aware that someone is standing beside them holding a dish of meat or vegetables. The well-mannered turn slightly, without breaking off conversation, and help themselves to whatever is offered. Wallis Simpson’s habit was to ignore poor bent (no pun intended) footmen for as long as possible. When Walter realised that this was a game she enjoyed playing at every opportunity, he decided that she must be taught a lesson. During dinner one evening he waited patiently beside her to see if she was up to her usual tricks. When she failed, yet again, to acknowledge the presence of the large dish of roast pheasant that was getting heavier and heavier, he moved it sightly to the left until it brushed gently against the bare flesh of her upper arm. The heat of the silver generated an immediate response, and a withering glance from the lady from Baltimore. After that little incident she played by the rules, and Walter was a hero.’
199 Less chummily, the Duke of Windsor describes his mother and his sister-in-law as ‘ice-veined bitches’.
200 Like a pantomime character, the Duchess of Windsor continues to arouse fierce reactions, both for and against. Nicky Haslam writes in 2009, ‘On the day the Duchess died, I was dining with David Westmorland, Master of the Horse to the Queen, and his wife, Jane. The dinner was for Princess Margaret. I summoned up the courage to ask her what she felt about the Duchess. The Princess replied simply: “It wasn’t her we hated, it was him.”’
201 The Windsors’ circle always style her ‘Your Royal Highness’, even though it is not, strictly speaking, correct. Early on, this causes a dilemma for those torn between loyalty to the past and present Kings. When speaking to the Duchess, should they address her as Your Royal Highness or not? The high-society diarist Harold Nicolson records the anxiety of those staying as guests with W. Somerset Maugham at the Villa Mauresque in the South of France in August 1938 as they prepare to greet the Windsors: ‘We stood sheepishly in the drawing room. In they came ... Cocktails were brought and we stood around the fireplace. There was a pause. “I am sorry we were a little late,” said the Duke, “but Her Royal Highness couldn’t drag herself away.” He had said it. The three words fell into the circle like three stones into a pool. Her (gasp) Royal (shudder) Highness (and not one eye dared to meet the other) ...’
202 The Duchess’s looks struck several of those who met her as peculiar. ‘This is one of the very oddest women I have ever seen,’ observes her mother-in-law’s biographer, James Pope-Hennessy, after going to stay with the Duke and Duchess in 1958. ‘... She is, to look at, a phenomenon. She is flat and angular, and could have been designed for a medieval playing-card. The shoulders are small and high; the head very, very large, almost monumental ... Her jawbone is alarming, and from the back you can plainly see it jutting beyond the neck on each side.’ Nicholas Haslam recalls meeting her in a restaurant in New York in the early 1960s: ‘Across the restaurant – cheek-kissing, air-kissing, winking, waving – comes this minute figure, the flat cubist head made higher and wider by black bouffant hair parted centrally from the brow to the black grosgrain bow at the nape, dressed in an impossibly wide-weave pink angora tweed Chanel suit, concertinaed white gloves, black crocodile bag and shoes ... “Oh, the Beatles. Don’t you just love ’em? ‘I give her all my love, t
hat’s all I do-oo,’” she sings. “Adore ’em. Do you know them? Oh, you are lucky.”’
Margaret, Duchess of Argyll remembers meeting the then Mrs Ernest Simpson at a luncheon party in the mid-1930s: ‘She was not outstanding in any way, not well dressed. Her hair was parted down the middle, arranged in “earphones”, and her voice was harsh. My impression was of quite a plain woman with a noticeably square jaw, and not particularly amusing. But she was a pleasant person, and we were to remain friends.’
203 Deborah Mitford, later the Duchess of Devonshire, also takes tea with Hitler in 1937. He is a friend of her sister Unity. ‘He isn’t very like his photos, not nearly so hard looking,’ she writes in her diary. On a visit to his bathroom, she notices that he has ‘some brushes there, with “AH” on them’. Through her sister Diana Mosley, the Duchess also encounters the Duchess of Windsor: ‘I could not like her, she seemed so brittle, her face bony, angular and painted, her body so dangerously thin she might snap in half.’
