10
Family and Friends
I was at one point tempted to return prematurely to Australia. The call came from Gareth Evans when he was Bob Hawke’s attorney-general. Michael Kirby had moved on from chairing the Australian Law Reform Commission, and had recommended me as his replacement. ‘I can’t make you chairman,’ said Gareth, ‘because you have to pay your dues. But I can offer you—’
At this point his telephone line crossed with another, that of an unknown Australian woman who insisted that her conversation continue instead of ours.
‘Madam, please get off the line,’ said Gareth with mounting irritation.
‘No, you get off the line,’ replied the lady.
‘Madam,’ said Gareth imperiously, ‘I am the attorney-general of Australia. Now, please hang up.’
‘I don’t care if you’re the queen of bloody Sheba. You hang up.’
Gareth knew when he was beaten. When he called back, the job offer was the deputy chairmanship of the commission. I thought about it seriously, and declined. I was touched, however. Politicians do not offer jobs to the likes of me: Nick Greiner, when he was New South Wales premier, tried to appoint me to inquire into the New South Wales legal profession, but the lawyers in his party objected, doubtless afraid I might stop solicitors stealing the interest on client money in their trust accounts. In the UK, of course, there is always Sir Humphrey to remind politicians that I am rather my own man, and not theirs.
By then I had more or less settled in London – rather less than more, in the early days at the Bar. My Rhodes stipend saw me through my first year in London, and my Oxford bank then extended a large line of credit in the belief that Oxford chaps came good in the end. I had hopes of discharging it when my play about the Oz trial was acquired by a Broadway producer, Van Wolf, who had been involved in the making of the notorious film about the Rolling Stones, Gimme Shelter. He was dying of cancer and wanted to leave my play to posterity. I was regularly summoned to his bedside at Mount Sinai Hospital, where text changes were discussed while his friend Allen Ginsberg, in lotus position, said mantras and played a Peruvian flute to keep Van Wolf’s cancer at bay until opening night.
At Van Wolf’s request, the play was turned into a musical, and songs were donated by John and Yoko (‘God Save Oz’) and Mick Jagger (‘Cocksucker Blues’). It had Jim Sharman’s inspired direction, and when it opened on Broadway every notice was favourable, except for the only one that counted, in the New York Times. A surly Englishman named Clive Barnes, whose reviews at the time made or unmade shows in the city, hated Oz and it closed after six weeks, leaving me without royalties, and only with one of those free Broadway show programs, which impresses visitors to my toilet, where it remains on framed display.
Jim Sharman, in London for his next musical, Jesus Christ Superstar, generously allowed me to share his Robert Stigwood-owned apartment in Swiss Cottage and we were joined there by an insanely beautiful twenty-year-old, famously seen in a bikini diving into a tank on the Mike Willesee show A Current Affair. When I came back the day after her arrival in London to find Dudley Moore edging towards her on the sofa, it occurred to me that Lyndall Hobbs would never have much trouble finding accommodation. We chummed up, along with her Melbourne friend Gael McKay, and enjoyed free accommodation at a number of salubrious addresses in Kensington and Chelsea provided by Lyndall’s eventual boyfriend, Michael White, the film and theatre producer (of Oh! Calcutta! and other ground-breaking shows). I lost touch with Lyndall for some years when she was living with Al Pacino in the States, but I recommended her for an Australian Story on the expatriate nightmare of parental illness – she gave up her career in America to nurse her father dying slowly in Melbourne.
Our frequent changes of address caused a traffic offence notice to go astray – I had incurred a ticket for parking outside a court. A particularly malevolent magistrate issued a warrant for my arrest, which was fine, but did not back it for bail, which was outrageous. This meant that when this first offender turned up one evening at Chelsea police station, I was greeted by a semi-apologetic policeman who pointed out that since the courts were closed they would have to keep me in custody overnight. I was escorted, in a state of some shock, to a dingy cell. After they left me in it for over an hour, the white walls and filthy mattress and smell of urine and boiled cabbage began to work their magic: I was prepared to confess to the Ripper murders, the Lindbergh kidnap, whatever, just to get out. ‘Don’t I get one free phone call?’ I had the nerve to ask. I didn’t (I had been watching too many American movies) but the coppers let me use the payphone to contact my astonished pupil-master. Jonah Walker-Smith, scion of a fine old Tory family, was scandalised that police would dare to arrest his pupil. ‘Hold on, I’ll be right there,’ he promised, not that there was any prospect of my going anywhere. I was led back to the cells and so did not witness his superhuman effort of borrowing the arrest warrant and taking it late that night to the home of another magistrate, whom he persuaded to give me unconditional bail. ‘I am not sure I should be doing this,’ the beak is reported to have said. ‘It should be a requirement for every young barrister to spend a night in the police cells.’
He was right, of course, and had this been a qualification for the Bar it might not have been so hard for judges to realise how the oppressive atmosphere of custody can conduce to false confessions. A few hours inside was quite enough for me, although when I came as a defendant to court next morning I was hailed as Houdini and my traffic violations were dismissed with a fine of £1. I could pay little more: my money problems had become increasingly severe.
By the end of 1973 I had a massive overdraft and even my Oxford bank was becoming worried. I began a second string in journalism, becoming a commentator on legal matters for the New Statesman. It did not pay much, and the Guardian, for which I also began to write, not much more, although the payments kept my overdraft from ballooning further. I needed, for example, a dark suit – my wardrobe of brown and velvet could not, by the rules of the Bar, be worn under a black gown. Lyndall took me down to the King’s Road on the day before my first court appearance and selected a charcoal-striped three-piece suit for which I paid £33 – the exact payment for my first Guardian article on the flaws in the government’s draft Indecent Displays Bill, which threatened art gallery nudes. (‘How to Catch Rubens in a Draft’ was how the Guardian headlined it.) In due course my bank manager’s faith in my financial future was justified, although as the Beatles put it, I never cared much for money. When Tatler, many years later, published a list of the remuneration of the ‘top silks’, I was charging the least – so little, indeed, that the others said I was letting the side down and demanded I increase my fees.
Barristers pretend to have nothing to do with filthy lucre – they let their clerks ‘negotiate’ their large emoluments. I had difficulty accepting this subterfuge and often negotiated fees myself – invariably I was a soft touch, offering discounts and often acting for no fee at all in cases which concerned civil liberties. I can understand the satisfaction that comes from an hourly rate which shows the labourer is worth his hire, and it must be said that my fees from wealthy American media corporations, ranging from the Wall Street Journal to Penthouse, subsidised all the pro bono work I did on death sentences and the like and allowed me to take time off to write books (mine do not make money). The Bar is a ridiculous profession in financial terms: solicitors pay themselves millions as partners, have large offices and retire with a big bonus. For barristers, retirement does not even bring a gold watch – we are independent of our colleagues and our chambers, and can accept no perks. Independence is worth it, for all the loneliness and lack of resources; but if you want money, become an estate agent or hedge-fund trader or property developer.
In 1993, when as a newly established silk I could have been earning the large sums that would cushion a retirement (or a retirement to the bench); instead, for six months, I was working for free, fourteen hours a day in my basement study, on a k
ey death penalty case, Pratt & Morgan v Attorney-General for Jamaica. My son had just been diagnosed with autism, and my wife in this period had to bear the brunt of his behaviour. The result of my work was that hundreds of men – most of them probably guilty of murder – were saved from the gallows after a month-long hearing in the Privy Council, but was it necessary for me to devote so much time to saving their necks? At the time, I suppose I was driven by a sort of ambition (although success in such cases never brings material reward or popular applause, other than in the cells of the condemned) and by a fear of failure – a bug that sits deep in my stomach but has always driven me to succeed. Or at least to ‘strive to achieve’, and I wonder whether my insecurity may have stemmed from those lowly school origins – would it have been different had I gone to Sydney Grammar or Eton? These are thoughts that only come on a psychiatrist’s couch (or when writing an autobiography) and I have never felt the need to be shrink-wrapped.
At this self-revelatory point, I should say something about my politics, if only because they have been depicted as ‘left-wing’ or ‘extreme left-wing’ by media critics (notwithstanding my role at the weddings of both Nick Greiner and Malcolm Turnbull). I was an admirer, in some respects, of Gough Whitlam, but have never been minded to join either of the main Australian political parties, and think it pointless to join any other. I don’t object to socialism, at least when it is pragmatic (which it rarely is). The Labor Party is too much influenced by trade unions, some of them massively corrupt, while the Coalition remains the party of the rich – some of them massively corrupt. I am still in principle a Gladstonian liberal, and in practice a Cromwellian puritan. My credo is human rights, interpreted commonsensically in the secular way I have argued in my books, although I have never denied (and sometimes proclaimed) the influence of Jesus Christ’s parable of the Good Samaritan. Christians irritate me only when they are cruel, as they sometimes are, and so do Muslims when they want to impose sexist customs like Sharia law, and likewise Jewish people who believe Israel can do no wrong. I love the Enlightenment because of its preference for rationality over dogma. As a puritan I regard relief of the poor as an overwhelming duty. Whether it fast-tracks you to heaven or not, it is the standard by which all politicians should be judged in their obituaries. Inequality is the gravest problem of our society and we should begin to address it in advanced countries by, for example, reforming the tax system, by publishing everyone’s tax returns, by placing statutory caps on executive salaries and transfer pricing, and by bringing back some death duties. My main concern has not been for those workers who have trade union protection, but for those who are out of regular work or otherwise disadvantaged – those down underdogs who fall through the cracks of a rich society. I would like to see a ‘war on greed’. I also believe we should exterminate ISIS, admire Arthur Phillip, loathe Ned Kelly, keep the attractive Australian flag, recognise our Indigenous people in the constitution and replace our doggerel national anthem with ‘Waltzing Matilda’. I don’t mind a change of government from time to time – I generally prefer Labor (or Labour) because it promises more for the poor, but those of any political stripe can become calcified and corrupt if in power for too long. Labels like ‘left’ and ‘right’ are pinned by lazy journalists: what matters is a government that can provide the greatest happiness for the greatest number and the least misery for the rest of us.
As for my critics – and I have had a few – I do not mind at all if they take issue with my views on law or politics or religion. Ad hominem remarks are pretty contemptible, however, as are ad feminem – once an associate professor of law reviewed my book The Statute of Liberty as if the main weakness in my argument for a charter of rights was that I had by that time married Kathy Lette. Paddy McGuinness, for some reason a much-loved Sydney journalist and drunk, threw a few insults, but why take seriously anyone who stayed in the Communist Party after the Soviet invasion of Hungary?
Then there are some who cannot refute my arguments other than by snarking about the vowel sounds with which they are pronounced. I can understand why Alex Downer needed a voice coach when he briefly became leader of the Liberals, to teach him to nasalise his vowels and replace his BBC pronunciation with Channel 9 Australian. Having forsworn a career in Australian politics, I live with my vocal disabilities, which have no doubt become accentuated by many years of bowing and scraping in the English courts. In my very first appearance at the Old Bailey I struck a terrifying and sarcastic judge, before whom I had to appeal against the conviction of a wearer of an indecent t-shirt. Still in possession of some nasal vowel-sounds – the kind that lengthen the ‘a’ in words like France and branch – I nervously stood to explain: ‘This case is about an allegedly indecent t-shirt, m’Lud. The logo read “Fuck Art, Let’s Dance”.’
There was a terrible silence, then a judicial boom. ‘Fuck Art, Let’s WHAT, Mr Robertson?’
‘Dance, my Lord. Dance.’
Another silence, then the punchline. ‘Oh, you’re an Australian. What you need to say, Mr Robertson, if you want to succeed at the English Bar, is “Fuck Art, Let’s DARNCE”.’ There was much laughter from his court sycophants, and he was so pleased with himself that he acquitted my client.
Occasionally I come across blogs accusing me of being a ‘liberal interventionist’ who was in favour of the disastrous and illegal 2003 Bush–Blair invasion of Iraq. This is at worst a lie and at best a mistake – the Gulf War that I favoured was the first, under George Bush Sr in 1990–91, which pushed Saddam out of Kuwait, a country that he had illegally invaded. Rightly, the coalition forces did not march on Baghdad.
Another criticism I notice when I make the mistake of reading comments attached to my articles on newspaper websites is that I supported the dropping of the atom bomb in 1945. I was not alive at the time, but this opinion is singled out on Wikipedia by I don’t know whom (I have never tried to edit the farrago). In fact, my historical research leaves no doubt that Truman was justified in dropping the bomb on Hiroshima (but not the second on Nagasaki) because it terminated a war that would otherwise have had to end with the invasion of Tokyo, in which hundreds of thousands of Japanese as well as Allied soldiers and airmen would have died, some of them (perhaps including my father) Australian. I wrote Mullahs Without Mercy: Human Rights and Nuclear Weapons to show how the scramble for nukes by brutal or unstable regimes poses the clearest present danger to the peace and the climate of the world, and to suggest ways in which international law might assist the elimination of a weapon with the power to destroy us all.
In due course I became a man of property – mortgaged property in the form of a small two-bedroom bachelor flat in Notting Hill Gate. It was located in Pembridge Crescent, an address which features in English literature only in a Clive James poem (‘Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage’), where it is used, somewhat ham-fistedly, to rhyme with ‘dined on pheasant’.
Notting Hill was a congenial place to live in the seventies – it was not unlike the Hugh Grant film, with Portobello Market, a good range of restaurants and reasonable proximity to Heathrow. After some years, I bought a real house in Islington, a borough at the bottom of the Monopoly Board but gaining in value by then because of its proximity to the City. It was sometimes called the ‘People’s Republic of Islington’ because of the progressive policies of its council – over-progressive, perhaps, when it offered to provide a ‘women only’ cemetery for females who did not want to lie next to abusive (but dead) males.
London was a perfect place to indulge my love of opera. I began as a poor student, standing in the gods of the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden watching Tito Gobbi’s unforgettable entry as Scarpia in the Zeffirelli Tosca. From there I descried the two seats in the middle of the front row, discounted in price because the conductor might obscure the view. I usually obtained them – head-twisting when the conductor was the towering Colin Davis (who also had the irritating habit of humming loudly along with the orchestra) but a great bargain when it was the tiny Charles Mac
kerras. Fortunately I was seated well back in the stalls when ‘our Joan’ made her final appearance in her signature piece, Lucia di Lammermoor. From my vantage point, she pulled off an optical illusion with her voice: this large middle-aged soprano became in the mad scene a slim, love-crazed sixteen-year-old. La Stupenda indeed – I have never seen so many flowers as were thrown towards her that night.
Not far from Covent Garden was the Coliseum, where the English National Opera strove to achieve the socialist aim of its founder, Lilian Baylis, to provide opera in English that workers could afford. It did have some great successes – Orpheus in the Underworld was a comic one – and under the magisterial baton of Reginald Goodall it introduced me to Wagner’s Ring Cycle, with the immolation of the great Rita Hunter (who later joined Opera Australia but who could never do her magical Brünnhilde in my hometown – the Sydney Opera House stage was too small).
John Mortimer always said that he was glad he did not discover Wagner until he was sixty, otherwise he would have spent months of his life Ring-cycling (it would have been his only exercise). I discovered Wagner when I was thirty and must have spent months absorbing his leitmotifs (the length of attendance at the Ring compares with a flight from London to Australia). Degas’ drawings excepted, I can’t help but find ballet silly, and I do not have the patience to sit through orchestral concerts. I cannot actually sit still in a living room on a wet Sunday afternoon and listen to or watch an opera: I need the expensive thrill of a live performance. After a long wait in the queue I became a member of Glyndebourne, a special treat in Britain’s most beautiful countryside. We have taken Australian friends – the Williamsons, the Careys, the Spigelmans, Douglas Adams and his Australian barrister wife, Jane Belson. We took my brother Tim and his mother-in-law, Duane deLano Davis, who looked out from our picnic on the sun-drenched lawn during the interval and announced, ‘This is the most wonderful day of my life.’ Sadly, it was also the last, but it was a consolation after her heart attack the next day to know that she died happy.
Rather His Own Man Page 23
