Memoirs of a Private Man

by Winston Graham

  Driving on the opposite side of the road has seldom troubled me. (I remember once leaving Compiègne and taking the wrong way round a roundabout. In England this would have resulted in a barrage of flashing lights and blaring horns. The French just ignored me until I came to my senses.) But being launched out into the Los Angeles traffic and trying to ignore one’s left foot was another matter. At the first lights we jerked to a violent halt. Both our heads tried to go through the windscreen. We proceeded in a volley of jolts and jerks – and here again the American drivers, though I was driving an American car, seemed to sense that I was a Limey and merited their forbearance, for I never heard an impatient horn.

  Presently we spotted a sign pointing to the required highway and we were really off. Even this did not imbue any sense of confidence or ease, for we found ourselves part of a convoy of enormous automobiles all proceeding together down a four-lane highway at sixty miles an hour. There was no way of getting out of it. We could not accelerate without breaking the law. We almost came to be on nodding terms with our fellow travellers to right and left. At long last the congestion began to thin out.

  I said to Jean: ‘What’s that noise?’

  ‘ The radio,’ she said.

  ‘ Who switched it on?’

  ‘ They must have. It was on when we left.’

  I hadn’t heard it. Imminence of death concentrates the mind wonderfully.

  When The Walking Stick was published in America, Double-day invited me to go over to publicize the book. When issuing the invitation Ken McCormick, the most distinguished editor Doubleday have ever had, said to me: ‘Mind, we shall expect you to work hard.’ I said OK, and despite this Jean, who had just had her premonitory stroke, chose to come with me.

  It was an interesting experience. I gave a talk (lecture) and four interviews in Washington, six interviews – two on television, two on radio and two to the press – in New York, a similar number in Chicago and rather more in Detroit and San Francisco. It isn’t an experience I want to repeat, but I saw it as a challenge.

  In Washington the lecture was to the English-Speaking Union, and I had taken a good deal of trouble to prepare what I was going to say, which was to be fairly wide-ranging and including speculation as to the future of the novel both in America and in England. Five minutes before I went on the platform the editor from Doubleday said to me: ‘Make it nice and folksy. And don’t forget to talk about your new novel.’

  Swallowing my script, I began by saying that I had originally intended to talk about the novel in general but it had been suggested to begin that I talk first about one novel in particular, etc. etc.

  It was a full house, and there was one tall middle-aged lady in the front row who fixed me with an eye and shook her head disapprovingly. After going on a couple of minutes more I hastened to add that nevertheless I wanted to make this lecture fairly wideranging, and shortly I would be broadening my approach. I glanced down and saw the lady shake her head disapprovingly at me again. I made a fairly good joke, to which most of the audience responded, but she still didn’t like me at all.

  I went on, trying to avoid her gaze and consoling myself that there were about 299 people in the room who didn’t necessarily feel as she felt. Nevertheless it was disconcerting. It took me about another five minutes to realize that disapproval was not the expression on her face, and that she suffered from a nervous tic, causing her head to jerk negatively from side to side at irregular intervals.

  One thinks of the Maugham story in which there is a woman who jerks her head backwards in such a way that she seems to be inviting every man she meets to come with her into her bedroom.

  As it happened, I almost felt I was receiving such an invitation at the dinner of the Association of American Publishers the following night. I was put next to a really beautiful girl whose father ran a bookstore in North Carolina.

  As soon as I sat down she said: ‘Oh, Mr Graham, I’m real glad to be setten’ next to you. I took you to bed with me last night, but I was feeling sleepy so we didn’t get very far.’

  I was about to reply on what I thought was the same plane, telling her that it would give me the greatest pleasure to help her to try again, when I gazed into her liquid brown eyes and saw not a spark of humour in them. Not for the first time I remarked to myself on the dangers of a common language. No French girl would have said that, but I would have understood the signals better.

  In Detroit my fellow guest on a television programme was Muhammad Ali, or Cassius Clay: that is, we were joint guests. He was then at the height of his powers as one of the greatest of heavyweights, and in the height of his youth and good looks. Quizzed closely by the host about his attitude to patriotism, colour bars, conscription, etc., he was, I thought, very reasonable and very well behaved. None of the bragging, macho attitude one had come to associate with his name in the media.

  We shared a taxi back to the hotel and shared a lift to our rooms. The lift attendant was a pretty young black girl. Ali gave his floor number as 5, I gave mine as 12. As he got out of the lift he gave the lift girl a smile. We then went up to floor 22.

  I said: ‘No, I wanted twelve.’

  ‘ Oh, sorry, suh,’ she said, ‘I was goin’ wa-ay up to heaven.’

  In Chicago I did my usual round, including the famous Kup’s talk show, to which about a dozen personalities were invited and over a period of three hours were casually questioned on this and that, and one was given a cup by the host Kupcinet and told one might have it filled with the liquid of one’s choice. Unknown to us in the cloistered circle of the TV lights, a violent storm broke over Chicago while we were there, decimating a carnival procession, organized by the Puerto Ricans to commemorate some anniversary, and flooding the streets. My wife, who had come with me to the studio, had a grandstand view of it all, saw the dancing girls drenched and the long display floats stripped of their hangings. When at last I came out we had great difficulty in getting back to our hotel, and when we reached it the kitchens were six feet deep in water and the lifts had failed. (By a crowning mercy one service lift still operated.) It seems that in their eagerness to cover the whole area of the lakeside city in concrete, the planners had not allowed for drainage to cope with emergencies.

  While I was in Chicago I was invited by a journalist I knew to attend the seventieth birthday party of ‘ one of the last gangsters’, a man called Paddy Bauler. He had been a bootlegger and was said to have personally shot and killed a policeman years ago, but nothing could be proved. I have his invitation before me now. It has a Hong Kong postmark and carries a rather splendid frontispiece with a Chinese painting of cloud-covered mountains. Inside it states in large letters:

  Neither

  DEATH, TAXES or ELECTIONS

  Can Stop

  PADDY BAULER’S ANNUAL ART FAIR PARTY

  You are commanded to be present at the

  49th WARD CULTURE CENTER

  403 WEST NORTH AVENUE

  on Sunday 11th June beginning at 4 p.m.

  The committee was twelve-strong, and included such interesting names as the Illinois Assistant Attorney General Joe Rubinelli and jazz club owner Earl Pionke. Heading the list was Governor Otto Kerner and Mayor Richard Daley. Third was the newspaperman Herman Kogan, who arranged my invitation, so I was in influential hands.

  It was a brownstone house in an unexceptional street – except that it had been swept and scoured of all litter, and blue-washed, sidewalk, street and all, and was guarded by armed and uniformed policemen sitting astride motorbikes. You went in through a small hall into a much larger one, with two other rooms beyond and then a backyard, also blue-washed and guarded. We were given chicken legs and hamburgers, and beer to drink. A German band played music and an operatic soprano sang items from the shows of the time, accompanied by a zither. Many influential people were there, including a Catholic bishop, several judges and aldermen, a district attorney or two, and Adlai Stevenson junior.

  Although recently having stepped down as an alde
rman, Paddy was still powerful in the Democratic Party; also he had a rake-off from most of the one-armed bandits in clubs and arcades in the city, so he was very rich. In his later and more respectable years he had developed a passion for things Chinese, hence the appearance of the invitation card. All the names of the committee had their Chinese equivalent in gold leaf beside their own on the card. There were Chinese lanterns in the rooms, and numerous bonsai on pedestals. Fireworks occurred later in the yard.

  Paddy was known to give not unvaluable silk kimonos to those who took his fancy at such parties, and he was wearing one himself on the night, with Chinese silk trousers. He was a very small man, and he sat on a high chair surrounded by his henchmen. His face was lined, his head shrunk between his shoulders, his eyes small and a faded blue. Herman introduced me. ‘This is Winston Graham, the celebrated British novelist, who is over in our city on a brief visit.’

  Paddy took a shrivelled-looking cheroot from between his lips and stared at me belligerently.

  Presently he said: ‘ You look like an egghead.’

  I smiled apologetically and said: ‘ Oh, I don’t know about that. Just a writer, I suppose.’

  He continued to stare and then snarled: ‘ Your country starts all the wor-rs.’

  This was the end of the interview. I didn’t receive a kimono.

  San Francisco was chock-a-block with some convention, and my publishers had had to get us accommodation in one of the older hotels instead of at the Fairmont where we had previously stayed. Breakfast in our room proved an almost insurmountable obstacle. Telephone calls were to no avail. Hours seemed to pass. I was due for a radio interview at eleven, and only just made it.

  The hotel where we were staying was the one where Fatty Arbuckle, one of the most famous of the earlier film stars of the silent screen, had many years before committed suicide in mysterious circumstances. Arriving at the restaurant (it was to be an interview in a restaurant) feeling frustrated and very angry, I was about to say that I had at last solved the mystery of Fatty Arbuckle’s suicide. He had shot himself, at the hotel where I was at present staying, in frustration waiting for his breakfast.

  But as the interview began I happened to glance down and see a printed notice on the table saying something to the effect that ‘interviewees’ were ‘personally and legally responsible for any action for libel or slander brought by any person or persons as a result of this interview’.

  I have never seen this notice before or since. Perhaps it is everywhere – if so I haven’t spotted it. But perhaps it is as well I took heed. Knowing something of the speed of the American law processes, I think if I had spoken out, I might just still have been over there fighting my corner.

  Between Charterhouse and university Andrew took a year off and worked for my American publisher in New York, before travelling widely round the States by Greyhound bus. He had done well at school, though was not perhaps ‘facile princips’, as the headmaster of the Cathedral School, Truro, presciently described him. He coasted along pleasantly at St Edmund Hall for a couple of years, but in the third year began to make big strides. It was a time when the National Economic Development Council (NEDDY) was in its infancy, and an official came round seeking likely recruits. His tutor recommended Andrew, who was invited for an interview and offered an appointment before he sat his Finals.

  So to the tall new building on the banks of the Thames; but within a few months George Brown created the Department of Economic Affairs and invited Sir Donald MacDougall to lead it and to bring with him from NEDDY a half-dozen of the brighter young economists. Andrew was one of them.

  He came home one weekend and told us there was a vacancy in the Cabinet Office, and it had been suggested to him that he might apply. He did so apply, and was appointed; but found when he arrived that he was not to be in the Cabinet Office but in 10 Downing Street itself, where he was to be the junior in an office of five under the then Sir Thomas Balogh.

  In a fairly short time one after the other of his seniors in the office left to take up other posts and were not replaced, and he found himself Balogh’s personal assistant. Then Balogh accepted a peerage and came to spend most of his time in the House of Lords, and Andrew was left on his own with two secretaries and five telephones at his disposal.

  In the meantime Harold Wilson had taken a liking to him, and he became accustomed to accompany Wilson to Cabinet meetings and subcommittees and sit with Wilson’s secretary, taking notes. By this time Henry Kissinger was already emerging as senior adviser to the President. Wilson wanted to send him a résumé of Britain’s view of how the world economic situation had developed since the days of Bretton Woods, and he asked Andrew, then twenty-five, to write it. Andrew came home with about thirty pages he had written, and with an occasional notation from the Prime Minister made in bright green ink. In due course this was sent off.

  The following year Andrew told me there was a vacancy for an economics fellowship at Balliol, and it had been suggested he might apply. What should he do? I said there was no harm in his applying so long as he didn’t expect to get it. So he applied, and got it. He was one of the youngest dons to be appointed to Balliol in half a century.

  Later, the Labour Government fell; but they were not out of office for long, and when he came back Wilson immediately applied for Andrew to return as the economic adviser in his policy unit. This he then did for the next two years. New as he was to Balliol, it was a very exacting time for him, and he was not disappointed, I think, when Wilson’s resignation created a natural break.

  But he expected to be recalled when the next Labour Government came to office – and would have been. He had become personal economic adviser to John Smith, and was a close personal friend, but when Smith unexpectedly died, the top echelons of the Labour Party underwent drastic change, and Andrew was marginalized.

  It cannot really be looked upon as a consolation prize that he has now become Master of Balliol.

  Rosamund, being nearly four years younger, thought naturally enough that when she left school she too would be entitled to travel as her brother had done. But she did not want to go to university. Going on from Truro High School to Westonbirt in Gloucestershire, her routine as a normal schoolgirl had been abruptly, if blissfully, interrupted by a summer on the Côte d’Azur. This too was a fairly natural reaction. Give any pretty blonde a summer in Cap Ferrat, where she spends hours sitting in the sun in a bikini, surrounded by admiring French boys, then returns after two months to the rigours of the English public school, wearing thick grey stockings, flat-heeled shoes and a plain school uniform, and academic life does not appeal. After a year at a finishing school, the Institut Alpin Montesano at Gstaad, she wanted to take another year in the States, working as Andrew had worked, travelling as Andrew had travelled.

  At that time there happened to be a ban on the employment of British secretaries in New York, as the local girls were being deprived of their jobs. So by infinite contrivance I arranged a fictitious job in a publishing firm in Boston. (It did not occur to me at the time that I was arranging for her to spend most of the rest of her life at a distance from us of 8,000 miles, but that, as someone once said, is how the cookie crumbles.)

  Rosamund met a tall, good-looking American, and it was love at first sight. Already divorced, Douglas was still in his twenties; and although I have not been able to monitor his life at close quarters, I get the strong impression that he has never looked seriously at another woman since he first met my daughter.

  After two sojourns in England, where two of their three children were born, they finally settled in California, where Rosamund has been the linchpin of their family life. Maximilian, Dominic and Anthea are all tall and goodlooking. More important is that they are all jolly, cleanliving, affectionate and highly intelligent, the two boys already married. Max is in law, Dominic is in law-enforcement! Apart from bearing and raising the children, Rosamund has worked all through, first at a Californian university, and more lately she has become Director of H
uman Resources for the District of Tulare, responsible for the welfare – and the hiring and firing – of 750 personnel, of mixed races, many Hispanic.

  Before she was married, she rejected the academic life. Now, having raised a family and all the time lived a life of endless and extraordinary activity, she has recently studied for, and been awarded, a BA.

  Both children have now been long and happily married, my son to Peggotty, a remarkably pretty, but not noticeably studious, girl from Somerset. However, since she found they would have no family, she decided to follow a fully academic life of her own, is now an MSc and is at present Dean and Director of Social Sciences at the Open University.

  As to the rest of the immediate family, my niece Barbara (my brother Cecil’s only child) lives at Haywards Heath, not far from Buxted, and – together with her late husband, Ronald – has provided much appreciated support and companionship. Recently widowed, but ever cheerful and competent, she has often stepped in to help at times of domestic crisis.

  Jean’s niece, Jacqui, now married to Geoff Williams and living in Newport, Shropshire, I see far too rarely.

  Chapter Ten

  Slow, slow, fresh fount,

  Ben Jonson wrote,

  Keep time with my salt tears,

  Yet slower yet, O faintly, gentle springs.

  List to the heavy part the music bears.

  Woe weeps out her division when she sings.

  Droop, herbs and flowers,

  Fall, grief, in show’rs;

  Our beauties are not ours.

  O that I could still

  Like melting snow upon some craggy hill, drop.