by Ann Wroe
The Republicans were pleasantly surprised. Mr Hampton was undoubtedly an asset to the party that sees itself as the promoter of self-reliance. He had learnt the rudiments of music from a nun at a boarding school where he was placed after his father was killed in the first world war. He worked as a newspaper seller to pay for tuition at a music school. By his late teens he was a professional musician in Chicago, playing piano, vibraphone and drums. Chicago was then the country’s main jazz city, where Armstrong recorded “West End Blues”, considered by some to be America’s finest piece of music, jazz or classical. Mr Hampton worked for awhile with Armstrong, as he did with most jazz musicians over the next 50 years, many of whom, such as Dizzie Gillespie, became famous as innovators. Mr Hampton remained a conservative in his musical style. “All those altered scales and harmonic extensions people were calling modern in the 1940s, I knew all about years earlier,” he said.
He was conservative too in his life offstage. Unlike musicians who blew their money and their minds on drink and drugs, Mr Hampton was a careful saver. He owned a record company and several blocks of flats in New York’s Harlem district. He set up scholarships in music schools. Academe rewarded him with a dozen honorary doctorates. One of his vibraphones is in a Washington museum, along with Goodman’s clarinet.
Mr Hampton became head of a group called Black Republicans. He campaigned for, among others, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George Bush, senior. After they were elected they sent Mr Hampton on world tours to promote American culture. The Germans especially appreciated his concerts. There is a road in Berlin called Hamptonstrasse.
Big-time politics was a temptation. He served on New York’s Human Relations Commission and could perhaps have made it to Congress. The politician in him said, “I always liked to be taking bows.” But he was getting old. It was music, rather than the slog of politics, that made him feel young again; with the mallets falling on the vibes and the driving rhythm that got the crowd going. “Flying Home”. One more time.
Pamela Harriman
Pamela Digby Churchill Harriman, ambassador and courtesan, died on February 5th 1997, aged 76
If you collected a dozen or so of Pamela Harriman’s fancier lovers and put them round a dinner table, you had the makings of a world government. Not in the sense of cabinet ministers and presidents – that would have been far too crude and plodding for the stylish Mrs Harriman – but in the sense that her galaxy of fellows and husbands could, together, have bought much of the world and made it spin.
Imagine the dinner party. Her first husband, the drunken Randolph Churchill, might have brought along his father, Winston. There could have been a general or two, from either side of the Atlantic, whom Mrs Harriman helped win the second world war. The airwaves would have been vibrant enough: Bill Paley of cbs owned a lot of them; Ed Murrow, America’s greatest wartime correspondent, was their master. Fine wine at dinner? Elie de Rothschild, owner – among other things – of Château Lafite, would see to that. Nice pictures on the wall? Even without her Murillos and Renoirs, Carter Brown, director of Washington’s National Gallery, could help out.
Want to go racing tomorrow? Aly Khan, the Aga’s heir, would give you a tip. Something soapy after dinner? Step forward Frank Sinatra. Or something still more soothing? Then why not a late-night viewing of The Sound of Music, courtesy of husband number two, Leland Hayward, who produced it (and left the royalties, trickling in every year, to darling Pamela). If you wanted to leave in a hurry, Gianni Agnelli, who owned Fiat, could provide fast wheels. A more sedate exit? How about one of Stavros Niarchos’s yachts? Mrs Harriman’s life was an astonishing tale of sex, money and – far sweeter smelling than both those coarse commodities – power.
But it was not how she started. Her father, the 11th Baron Digby, was charming and gentle, knowledgeable about pigs and other rural matters. She was red-headed, bouncy more than pretty, always a bit pushy, and slightly unpopular with her crowd. But when she was 19 she met and very quickly – and disastrously – married the only son of the man shortly to be prime minister. When he was away at war, she took up with the rich and famous and glamorous – and never looked back. She rapidly divorced, then played the field for 14 years. Her second marriage, to Hayward, lasted from 1960 until he died, in 1971. Soon after, she married a mega-rich former lover, Averell Harriman, and became an American. Harriman was once governor of New York, ex-ambassador to the Soviet Union and Britain, and one of the Democratic Party’s biggest benefactors. When he died in 1986, leaving her assets worth over $100m, her storm-tossed ship had finally come home.
She became, in her own right, the doyenne of Washington hostesses, giving power-meals largely in the cause bequeathed to her by Harriman: the resurrection of the Democratic Party. She helped promising lads from Hicksville – like a certain Bill Clinton. They were grateful. He gave her a lovely embassy in Paris. At last she was both rich and powerful in her own right. She had won.
Why did she do it? How did she manage it? And did it, in the end, make her happy? From an early age, despite – perhaps because of – her rather dozy background, she was driven to succeed. Perhaps her unpopularity in early life egged her on – to “show those bitches” who was best. She liked glamour. She adored money – not so much for hedonistic reasons as for the sense of security she hoped it would bring. Power, perhaps, became an additional aphrodisiac. Having the ears of presidents and prime ministers as well as tycoons and film stars was marvellously satisfying.
How did she do it? She was tough and manipulative, though not especially subtle. She was not very clever, certainly not bookish. She had little interest in ideology – if Harriman or Clinton had been Republicans, she wouldn’t have minded a jot. Although not a great beauty, she kept a trim figure. Doubtless she was expert between the sheets. The key to her success, though, was her ability to fix her concentration on one man – one at a time; and convince him that she was utterly enthralled. It is a recipe that few could resist. After Harriman died, the prospect of her financial backing was an additional allure. She was loyal to most of her friends. A deal with Pamela, it was said, was a deal. She was good to her two later husbands when they were dying.
Was she happy, though? She sparkled. But, at the end of the day, despite all those luxuries, it was a harsh life. Old British friends, especially, mocked her transparent ambition (which Americans took more at face value). Lovers she hoped to marry dumped her. Her husbands were difficult.
Her stepchildren liked her. Even the goal of financial security eluded her in the end as relations clawed back much of Harriman’s estate.
Was there not always, at the very back of her mind, just a nagging feeling that she was being laughed at, even scorned? Her façade was shiny. It is not certain that, as the French say, she really felt bien dans sa peau.
George Harrison
George Harrison, a Beatle, died on November 29th 2001, aged 58
So much has been written and broadcast about the death of George Harrison that it might be thought that there was nothing left to say. But to hazard such a rash prediction would be to underestimate the resourcefulness of what might be called the Beatles generation, now steeped in melancholy. This may prove to be a long goodbye. The large sections of newspapers that have been devoted to Mr Harrison’s career could be merely the opening bars of a requiem. Already there is talk of biographies and memorial record albums, along with television and radio retrospectives and perhaps a film.
Those who were not even born in the 1960s, when the Beatles were at their most active, may have been surprised that, to take a random example, the Daily Telegraph, a London newspaper that prides itself on the quality of its readership, should have cleared its front page of other news to report Mr Harrison’s death, continuing the saga inside for five more pages. Other British newspapers were equally proliferative. American and European newspapers were more restrained, but generous in their treatment of the famous Brit. Not since the death of Princess Diana, and before that of Churchill, had there been s
o many tears in print.
Still, the young are mostly tolerant of the eccentricities of the middle-aged. Those who had once courted and cuddled to the music of the Beatles and now ran the media were entitled to their harmless indulgence. The death of Mr Harrison seemed also the death of their era. When it was proposed that a minute’s silence should be observed no one objected, even though such an obsequy is normally reserved for the war dead. After all, it wasn’t often that an era died.
It may seem odd that the same vast coverage was not given to the death in 1980 of John Lennon, the founder Beatle. But Lennon was shot dead. The reporting was extensive, but hurriedly put together. George Harrison had been ill for a long time. By the time he died the essays on his life by his admirers had been written and polished. Mostly they were moving, although perhaps avoiding Voltaire’s dictum that “to the dead we owe only truth”.
The story of George Harrison’s life can be simply told. He was a busman’s son who left school at 14 and worked briefly as an electrician’s mate. He won a place in John Lennon’s little group in Liverpool because he played the guitar a bit better than either Lennon or Paul McCartney. He has been called the “quiet Beatle”; perhaps shy is a more accurate adjective. He found it difficult to cope with the publicity that underpinned the Beatles’ success, and for a dark period in his life was addicted to drugs. Like the other Beatles he made huge amounts of money. He bought a house with 120 rooms, and shut himself away from the screaming fans saying, “I would never want that again.” The British film industry was grateful to him for backing several productions during one of its customary hard-up periods, among them “Monty Python’s Life of Brian”. He was married twice. Of Mr Harrison’s songs perhaps “Something” is the best known.
Frank Sinatra thought it great.
A mixed life, but a better one perhaps than mending fuses. He had luck, just as the Beatles had luck. Their luck started when they were taken over by Brian Epstein, who ran a record shop in Liverpool near the Cavern Club, where the Beatles were regularly performing. The role of Epstein has tended to be minimised in the golden memory of the Beatles, perhaps because he was thought to be too fond of young men. But Epstein was the one who groomed the Beatles to look cuddly rather than rough, to brush their hair and to wear neat suits rather than leather.
In 1962, after two years spent hawking their demo tapes around reluctant record companies who said that guitar groups were finished, he got the Beatles their first big deal. Epstein said he would make them “bigger than Elvis”, and so he did. By the mid-1960s they were the most important pop group in Europe and the United States. Any Beatles memorabilia from that time tends to become a museum piece. A few days before Mr Harrison died his first guitar, bought for pennies, drew a bid at an auction in London of £25,000 ($35,500). After Epstein died in 1967 the group began to break up with its membersgoing their own way, sometimes as soloists, sometimes forming new groups, sometimes doing not much. George Harrison for one said he was tired of going “round and round the world singing the same ten dopey tunes”.
A talent for publicity cannot in itself explain why they did so well. And musically they have probably been overpraised. Epstein managed other groups, among them Gerry and the Pacemakers, but although successful they never matched the appeal of the Beatles. Nor did the Rolling Stones with their pastiche of American blues, although some preferred their fiercer music. To use an expression that flourished in the 1960s, it seems that the Beatles more than other groups caught the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age. “All You Need Is Love”, declaimed against a pounding background of cellos, could be hypnotically compelling, although hardly a message of Voltairian truth.
John Harsanyi
John Charles Harsanyi, a pioneer in game theory, died on August 9th 2000, aged 80
It sounds pretty obvious: life is all a game. Charles Lamb (1775−1834) put it rather elegantly: “Man is a gaming animal. He must always be trying to get the better in something or other.” What John Harsanyi and other economists did was to apply mathematical logic to this human urge and make game theory, as it is called, part of their tool kit. At its humblest level, game theory is useful in saving the players from going mad. In devising a strategy you know that your rival may know what you are planning, and he knows that you know he knows, and so on… Even skilled chess-players can feel mentally wounded.
In chess and comparable real-life games, each side has basic information about the other. The problem of Charles Lamb’s gaming animals is that they usually have imperfect knowledge about their opponents. They guessed, or relied on “intuition” or, as Napoleon said of his favourite generals, they were lucky. Until quite recent times, this was the way countries and great companies dealt with their rivals.
Mr Harsanyi’s contribution to game theory was to show that such games need not be played in a fog, or at least not much. It was possible to analyse such games and provide guidance about the probable moves and their outcomes. This advanced game theory was employed, at least by the Americans, in their negotiations with the Soviet Union on arms control. Kennedy and Khrushchev used game theory in their tussle over Cuban missiles in 1962.
Game theory is widely used in commerce, as happened this year when, with great success, the British government sold licences for mobile phone services in an auction designed by an Oxford economist, Paul Klemperer. Some economists are watching with fascination the contest between the European Central Bank and the currency market over the future of the euro, which has at least the look of an exercise in game theory. A Dutch team of economists applied the theory to international football and concluded that a bad team playing at home is more likely to score than a good one playing away. One effect of game theory is to make economists seem quite human.
As often happens when an idea becomes fashionable, there has been some argument about who first thought of game theory. Mr Harsanyi, who shared a Nobel prize in 1994 with two other economists in the same field, John Nash and Reinhard Selten, was happy to acknowledge that game theory had been around in some form for a long time. Players of poker, and of course chess, had been using game theory without calling it that. Philosophy has a claim: it seeks to rationalise the behaviour of people with conflicting interests. As a young man in Budapest Mr Harsanyi had studied philosophy and mathematics and, to please his parents, who ran a pharmacy, he added chemistry.
Hungary entered the second world war on the side of Germany and Mr Harsanyi, a Jew, was imprisoned. He was with a group about to be sent to a concentration camp when he removed the yellow star that Jews had to wear and walked away. A guard stopped him, but not all his fellow countrymen were Nazis, and he let him go. After the war Hungary became
a communist state. Mr Harsanyi put up with it for a time, and continued with his studies, but in 1950 he left for Australia, about as far away from Europe as he could get.
The Australians did not recognise his Hungarian degrees, so he worked in a factory for several years and studied part-time until he gained some Aussie ones. Mr Harsanyi made his way quite swiftly up the academic ladder, first in Australia and then in the United States, where he was a professor in the business school of the University of California at Berkeley for 26 years.
What triggered his interest in game theory appears to have been the work of John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, who in 1944 published a book entitled “The Theory of Games andEconomic Behaviour”. Von Neumann was an American mathematician who, by coincidence, had also been born in Hungary and had attended the same school as Mr Harsanyi. He and Morgenstern may have been the first to show how the philosophical idea of rational behaviour could be applied to economics. They did not develop the idea. In his short life, von Neumann especially had many other interests, including work on quantum theory and the design of the first electronic computers. In paper after paper, Mr Harsanyi and his colleagues took the theory further. It is still being polished.
The philosopher in John Harsanyi saw in game theory a means of improving the human condition. He p
romoted the idea that the rightness or wrongness of an action depended on its consequences, an ethical theory known as utilitarianism. The connection between game theory and ethics is a complex one. His book on this theme, “Essays on Ethics, Social Behaviour and Scientific Explanation”, is a hard read, just as game theory itself demands lots of tricky mathematics. No one would blame you for sticking to Charles Lamb.
Sir Joshua Hassan
Sir Joshua Abraham Hassan, defender of Gibraltar, died on July 1st 1997, aged 81
In June 1969, Spain, then a dictatorship under General Franco, closed its border with Gibraltar. Sir Joshua Hassan, the chief minister of the Rock, reckoned that this was the 15th siege the place had faced since it was taken by the British in 1704. He had no doubt, he assured Gibraltarians, that it would survive the latest threat. Sieges, survival: Sir Joshua often stiffened his language with a military turn of phrase, a practice that he had probably picked up in the second world war when, as simply Gunner Hassan, he had served in the army on the Rock.
In the war Franco had resisted Hitler’s calls to attack the Rock, fearing that Britain would take the Canaries in retaliation. Now Spain was appealing to the United Nations. Surely it was time, Spain argued, for this colony in Europe to be restored to its rightful owners. The un was worryingly sympathetic to Spain, but it agreed with a British proposal that the matter should be put to a referendum. Urged on by Sir Joshua, the people of the Rock decided by 12,138 votes to 44 to remain British. It was Sir Joshua’s finest hour.
