Book of Obituaries

by Ann Wroe

  Kathryn Murray

  Kathryn Murray, America’s dancing partner, died on August 6th 1999, aged 92

  The way to put “a little fun in your life”, Kathryn Murray would say, and say it quite often, was to learn to dance. Over the years millions were persuaded. Learning to dance in the chain of the 500 or so studios of Kathryn and Arthur Murray seemed as properly American as drinking Coca-Cola or buying a Ford car. Like the drink that was “it” and the car that gave you freedom, learning to dance tapped into a social need, expressed in an early advertisement, written by Arthur Murray, headlined “How I Became Popular Overnight”.

  Men, perhaps lonely or simply shy, could break the ice by asking a woman to dance. Or so it was said. And the woman need never again be a wallflower. There is probably no better excuse for two people to touch each other, without any suggestion of impropriety, than to take to the dance floor. George Bernard Shaw put it quite brutally: “Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.”

  Sex, though, while implicit in the Murray message, was never stressed. The 1940s and 1950s, when the Murrays were at their most successful, seem in retrospect wonderfully innocent. Carnal contact in the movies rarely progressed beyond a kiss. Love songs were restricted to yearning. Arthur Murray was happy to think of himself as a traditionalist. He had been born at the end of the 19th century. The favoured dances of his youth were waltzes and polkas. Ragtime was for riffraff. He most enjoyed the dancing of Vernon and Irene Castle, then the king and queen of America’s ballrooms. He was a good enough dancer to give lessons to pay for his way through college, where he studied business administration. Combining the two disciplines, he set up a business that taught dancing by mail. In 1925, he married Kathryn, a schoolteacher and dancing enthusiast. At 17 she was 12 years younger than Arthur and became the driving force behind the business. A wag remarked, perhaps cruelly, that Arthur Murray became rich “by the sweat of his frau”.

  No doubt many Americans were so keen to learn to dance that they were willing to toil through the outlines of shoes and the arrows on the diagrams of Arthur Murray’s original correspondence course. But it was no way to become the star of the dance floor. Kathryn and Arthur decided to teach dancing personally in a studio they set up in New York. It did so well that they started to sell franchises of the Murray method of teaching dancing in only six easy lessons.

  Then television came along. Kathryn recalled that, now forty-something, she was reluctant to be the hostess of their show, “The Arthur Murray Party”. Arthur, practical, if not always polite, said she did not have to be beautiful to be on television. People had such small sets and the reception was so poor that they wouldn’t be able to tell.

  Kathryn turned out to be a winner as a presenter. She realised that demonstrating the waltz could not alone keep viewers’ attention for half an hour, and discovered a talent for comedy. “I’ve danced with bears and danced on roller skates as part of the show,” she said. The show was, in essence, a sales pitch. Fast learning was as tempting as fast food. During the 11 years the show ran from 1950, the Arthur Murray

  dance empire spread in America and to a dozen other countries. A sardonic song by Johnny Mercer did the business no harm:

  Arthur Murray taught me dancing in a hurry.

  I had a week to spare.

  He showed me the groundwork, the walkin’ around work,

  And told me to take it from there.

  The quality of your walkin’ around work after six lessons no doubt depended on the tolerance of your partner. The Murrays encouraged pupils to take further lessons to master the more complicated geometry of the dance floor. They would watch, say, Latin American dancers to see if their talents, and passions, could be simplified for their novices.

  Kathryn wrote the training manuals for teachers in the franchises. Well intomiddle age she was an enthusiastic explorer of new dance steps, and could perform the open swivel or the flirtation scallop like a teenager. She declined to criticise the style of dancing to rock music that became popular in the 1960s. You had to keep an open mind, she said, otherwise the young would think you were past it. But for Arthur there seemed no business future in a dance, such as the twist, that needed no tuition, and where you did not even need a partner.

  Demand for the Murray way on the dance floor did fall off. The couple gave up management of the business in 1964, sold most of their interest and went to live in Hawaii. Arthur died in 1991. Kathryn, though, lived to see a big revival in formal dancing. The Australian film “Strictly Ballroom” has been a runaway success, and not only among those old enough to remember the foxtrot. Ballroom is advertised these days as a way to lose weight and to stay young for ever, although making you instantly popular remains its greatest appeal. “Learn to dance tonight,” says an Arthur Murray studio on the internet. Tonight? Is that a promise?

  Kiharu Nakamura

  Kiharu Nakamura, a geisha, died on January 5th 2004, aged 90

  THE question was one familiar to Kiharu Nakamura: what exactly was a geisha? In television interviews, at lectures and in her books she would explain that the word was composed of two Japanese characters, sha meaning entertainer and gei meaning artistic. Artistic entertainer: was that all? All? Miss Nakamura would list the accomplishments of a successful geisha: she would have to play musical instruments with feeling, usually the shamisen, a type of guitar, and the tuzumi, a small drum; she would have to sing and dance well and, most important, be a good conversationalist, with a ready flow of stimulating repartee.

  What about sex? Miss Nakamura considered the word carefully. Perhaps, she said, the questioner was thinking of the oiran? Like a geisha, an oiran was a cultured woman but would be available to spend the night with a man for a high fee. The two professions were often confused by westerners. That said, it would be misleading to suggest that a geisha never had sex. She might form a relationship with a client and sex would follow naturally. But the distinguished men Miss Nakamura entertained, many of them important politicians and industrialists, were often too tired for sex or too old to bother with it. What they wanted was for their cares to be lifted for a few hours, to be soothed and perhaps gently amused. A geisha, she said, “knew how to handle men”. They might boast to their friends that they were real dogs, but Miss Nakamura knew different. And of course she would never betray a confidence.

  The idea that geishas were tarts seems to have been spread by soldiers from America and other victorious countries who occupied Japan after it was defeated in 1945. The girls who serviced the soldiers were happy to call themselves geishas and often wore geisha costumes, as many still do today. Geisha culture continues to be studied by Japanese historians. But for Miss Nakamura the war had ended a profession that dated back hundreds of years to a time when only men were considered to have the accomplishment to be geishas (just as today men still play the female roles in kabuki theatre). In old age she saw herself as one of the few surviving classical geishas, perhaps the last one.

  She must have been a handful as a daughter. Her parents had assumed that she would have an arranged marriage: that was the way things were in the Ginza district of Tokyo, where her father was a doctor. But the teenager had other ideas. She was fascinated by Tokyo’s apprentice geishas as they paraded around town, and she copied their fancy costumes and heavy make-up. She stamped her little clogs and eventually her parents gave way.

  At 15 she entered a school for geishas run by teachers who were honoured as “living national treasures”. She in turn became the treasure of the school. Her teachers were charmed by the quavers she put into her voice and her ability to walk with her feet together. She tolerated subjects she found boring, such as flower arranging. The name she had been born with, Kazuko, was changed to Kiharu, which means happy spring. She says she managed to avoid the ceremony of mizuage (deflowering) by conversing with the guest who had paid for the privilege until he fell asleep.

  She was one of the few geishas to learn English. Visitors to Japan who were curio
us about geishas were brought to see her. Most are now forgotten, but they were famous at the time: baseball’s Babe Ruth, William Randolph Hearst, the model for “Citizen Kane”, and Jean Cocteau, a French writer and artist who was smitten and wrote a poem about Kiharu.

  Japan’s secret service, perhapsinfluenced by stories of Mata Hari, a dancer who became a spy in the first world war, asked Miss Nakamura to spy on a foreign client. Understandably, she was a reluctant agent: Mata Hari had been shot at dawn. But no doubt she did her patriotic duty. When Japan went to war in 1941 she travelled to India, carrying a message from the Japanese government of support for an anti-British movement.

  At the end of the war, Miss Nakamura felt that the geisha profession, like Tokyo itself, had been destroyed. She was 32, she had some savings and a baby son from a brief marriage. She worked for several years as a translator in Japan, but the future, she decided, was America. Her new life there was, in its way, a typical immigrant’s success story. She had something to sell, her experience as a geisha and of Japanese culture, and she worked hard to market it. When the Metropolitan Opera did “Madame Butterfly” they employed Miss Nakamura as an adviser. Puccini’s story might be ridiculous, but at least she could ensure that the costumes were correct.

  Her ten books, memoirs and novels brought her into contact with universities. Perhaps her best known work, “The Memoir of a Tokyo-born Geisha”, has been translated into eight languages. Miss Nakamura’s lectures at Princeton, Columbia and other institutions were packed out. She would entrance her audience with the same verve she had shown when she entertained her clients as a geisha. “Now, another question, please, preferably not about sex.”

  Eric Newby

  Eric Newby, travel writer and fashion buyer, died on October 20th 2006, aged 86

  BY THE standards of many British explorers, Eric Newby was not particularly intrepid. He could not bear the thought of pain, and would faint away in any film that featured an operating theatre. Horses terrified him, especially when, in Italy, a reluctant mare he was riding was persuaded to clear a ditch by having a lighted cigarette inserted up its backside. Forced to sleep on rocks – to Wilfred Thesiger’s huge disdain – he would blow up an air-bed to cushion the ordeal.

  But then Mr Newby did not see himself as an explorer in the Thesiger mould. He was a traveller to whom things happened, and he would set off in that inquiring, ill-prepared, innocent way that has characterised Englishmen abroad from Chaucer to Evelyn Waugh. He was an amateur whose 25 travel books – most famously “A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush” (1958) and “Love and War in the Apennines” (1971) – were full of serendipity and surprise. A sudden view of a ravine with a grey heron winging across it; the moon rising “like a huge rusty coin”; Parmesan cheese, eaten after days of hunger, with “hard, salty nodules” of curd in it; the shock of blue and green phosphorescence dripping from his oar. Possibly only Mr Newby could notice, while treading water off the east coast of Sicily in 1942 and trying to avoid being shot at by Germans, that the plume of smoke over Etna looked like the quill of a pen stuck in a pewter ink-pot.

  Well-equipped he may seldom have been, but he was usually well-dressed. For Mr Newby had another life. For 20 years, to finance his travelling and writing, he worked in the garment trade. After helping run the family firm of Lane and Newby Ltd, Wholesale Costumiers and Mantle Manufacturers, he joined the John Lewis Partnership in the Intelligence Department, meaning that he checked whether trousers fitted or not. After this, he was promoted to “Model Gown Buyer”. If this life of pins and patterns seemed a come-down to a man dreaming of the Ganges or the Sahara, he certainly did not admit to it. To make “The Journey” as a sales rep through industrial Britain, rattling north overnight unsleeping in a third-class seat and then staggering up the back stairs of department stores with wicker baskets full of suits, was every bit as exciting.

  Besides, he loved clothes. He had been drawn to travel in the first place, as a restless child growing up in suburban south-west London, by the pictures of foreign boys in petticoats in Arthur Mee’s “Children’s Colour Book of Lands and Peoples”. His first unaccompanied journey, following a Devon stream down to the sea through nettles and cowpats at the age of five, was made in brown lace-up shoes and “a hideous red and green striped blazer with brass buttons”. Apprenticed at 18 on a four-masted barque that ran the last great Grain Race from South Australia to Ireland, he first ran up the oily rigging, teetering 160 feet above Belfast, in grey flannel trousers and a Harris tweed jacket.

  All this sounded rather upper class. And Mr Newby cut such a figure, handsome in immaculate safari suits and, in London, a trilby hat. He had a gentleman’s cavalier attitude to expenses when, from 1964–73, he was the travel editor on the Observer, and a gourmet’s approach to his later journeys. (“Had a delicious mini-picnic under a tree,” he noted during a bicycle ride through France in 1971; “small, ripe, melons and a bottle of cold Sancerre.”)

  Yet he himself was “middle-middle class”. He had been to St Paul’s, not Eton, and had left school at 16 because his family could no longer afford it. His time as a prisoner-of-war, from 1942 onwards, was diverting to him not only because it led him to his future wife (a tall, blonde, determined Slovenian girl who came to visit him when he was transferred to an outside hospital) but also because he could observe those strange creatures, the English upper classes, up close. Before that he had mostly met them in Harrods, small boys like him braving the “unending, snowy-white wastes” of the Linen Hall and the “savannahs” of Model Gowns, “endless expanses of carpet with here and there a solitary creation on a stand rising above it, like lone trees in a wilderness.”

  In his travelling life he had many a narrow escape. On the great Grain Race, he was almost washed away in a hurricane. Hunting with princes in Andhra Pradesh he was charged by a bear, but failed to shoot it because he dared not use a rifle (a .465 Holland & Holland India Royal) that had cost £800. In Italy during the war, a fugitive prisoner, he woke from a sleep on a mountainside to find a German officer standing over him. But the officer wanted merely to chat and catch butterflies. “The last I saw of him”, he wrote, “was running across the open downs with his net

  unfurled ... making curious little sweeps and lunges as he pursued his prey.”

  Mr Newby was often asked why he loved to travel. It was, he said, to do with being free. But his attitude to freedom could be ambivalent. Twice, when he had got out of prisoner-of-war camps, he found himself musing that “real freedom” lay back inside the fence. There was no need, he wrote, to worry about anything there: no need to work, to earn money, or to think about what to eat. Or, indeed, what to wear. n

  Stavros Niarchos

  Stavros Spyros Niarchos, master of the high seas, died on April 16th 1996, aged 86

  Tycoon, a word of Japanese origin meaning great prince, was often applied to Stavros Niarchos. The description was almost accurate. Mr Niarchos had a touch of greatness and lived in a style that few real princes can afford. There was, though, an amorality in his business dealings that a Japanese taikun might have thought not quite honourable. In 1970, when Greece was under a military dictatorship, Mr Niarchos, by then a major industrialist and the owner of the world’s largest merchant fleet, gave public support to the junta and was rewarded with control of a state-owned oil refinery. Nothing exceptional in such a deal, perhaps, for a conservative and a Greek patriot, except that, at the height of the cold war, the Niarchos shipping fleet was also distributing Russian oil around the world.

  Mr Niarchos took the view that, as an international businessman, he had the right to trade freely. America, a citadel of free trade, could hardly disagree, but it frowned on a Niarchos deal that allowed Russian oil to be shipped to Cuba. Mr Niarchos had an equivocal relationship with America. His parents were naturalised Americans, but he was born in Athens, and stayed Greek. Much of his early business was done in America, but his ships were registered in Panama to avoid paying American taxes. In 1953, when he was
accused of breaking an American law by getting control of ships prohibited to foreigners, he moved his American business to Europe. He kept a house in New York, one of several around the world, but his palatial home was in Greece, on an island he owned in the Aegean. His preferred company was titled Europeans.

  Stavros Niarchos’s first job was as a clerk in a firm owned by his uncles, who were grain dealers. According to family legend, young Stavros persuaded his uncles to buy their own ships, making a big saving on grain imports. In 1939 he was given, or acquired, his own ship. In the second world war the ship was sunk in Antwerp harbour by a German bomber. Several other ships he later acquired were bombed, or sunk by submarines. The insurance money was the foundation of Mr Niarchos’s fortune.

  After the war Mr Niarchos came by a number of Liberty ships, which America had mass-produced in great numbers and was selling cheaply or giving away. But many of the Liberty ships were worn out. They were welded together (rather than riveted) for speed of manufacture, and the welds sometimes came apart, sending the ship to the bottom. Mr Niarchos started to order his own ships, usually from Asian yards, where costs were kept down through government subsidies. He is sometimes credited with inventing the supertanker: of hitting on the idea that a ship with twice the capacity did not cost twice as much to build and operate. But it had long been realised in every area of manufacturing that fixed costs, particularly labour, do not necessarily scale up to the size of the product. What Mr Niarchos did was to apply this truism to transporting oil, which he was sure would overtake coal as the chief fuel in the rich economies. That was his vision. In 1956 he launched a ship (named after himself) of more than 47,000 tons, then the largest tanker afloat.