Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings (51 page)

¹¹¹
Though he only serves as Prime Minister for four years, Heath has some of the qualities of an apparition, popping up where you least expect him. Both Graham Greene and Kenneth Williams confess to dreams of meeting him. On Saturday, March 9th 1974, Williams writes in his diary, ‘Went to bed & dreamed that I was attending a political meeting addressed by Harold Wilson: I was talking to him & he was complaining of the sparse attendance, and I saw Heath in the front row smiling and wearing a ridiculous square-shouldered ladies’ musquash coat. It was absurd.’

In his posthumously published dream diary, Greene recounts a dream in which Heath offered him the post of Ambassador to Scotland, ‘and I refused. However, when I read in the paper that no one else would accept, I went to him and told him that I was ready to be appointed after all.

‘He looked exhausted and a little suspicious of me, so I explained that the only reason I had at first refused was that I felt incapable. But I would do my best. Perhaps as a mark of friendship we went swimming together in a muddy river, and to show my keenness for my job I suggested we should hold a World Textile Fair in Scotland. He replied that David Selznick had once told him that such fairs might possibly do good in the long run, but that the last one had ruined many local industries.’

¹¹²
In 1940, when Sickert is facing bankruptcy, Churchill arranges for his Civil List pension to be supplemented by the Royal Bounty fund. He dies in relative poverty on January 22nd 1942.

¹¹³
Francis Bacon tells Churchill’s biographer Martin Gilbert that Churchill’s technique is ‘not to be scorned’.

¹¹⁴
On visits to the theatre, Churchill always books three seats: one for himself, one for his companion – generally his daughter Mary – and a third for his hat and coat. ‘I thought this one of the most sensible extravagances I had ever heard of,’ enthuses Olivier.

¹¹⁵
When the Book of the Month club asks him to change the title, Salinger explains that Holden Caulfield won’t agree to it.

¹¹⁶
‘J.D. Salinger wrote a masterpiece,
The Catcher in the Rye
, recommending that readers who enjoy a book call up the author; then he spent his next twenty years avoiding the telephone’ – John Updike.

‘Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy,’ Salinger writes to a friend many years later. ‘There is a marvelous peace in not publishing.’ Some estimates suggest that by the time of his death he may have written as many as fifteen full-length novels, unread by anyone but himself.

¹¹⁷
The commercial artist E. Michael Mitchell, who created the final cover of
The Catcher in the Rye
.

¹¹⁸
Salinger returns to London with his children in 1969, taking them to see the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace, Hampton Court, Harrods Food Hall and Carnaby Street. One afternoon they visit Edna O’Brien. Salinger tells his daughter Margaret with a wink that she is a good writer, and a hell of a nice girl, but that she writes some
really
dirty stuff. They also go to see Engelbert Humperdinck starring as Robinson Crusoe at the London Palladium. ‘Awful, but we all sort of enjoyed it, and the main idea was to see the Palladium itself, because that’s where the last scene of
The 39 Steps
was set,’ he writes to his friend Lillian Ross. In January 2011, newly released letters to an English friend reveal more of his unexpectedly prosaic pleasures, including Whoppers chocolates (‘better than just edible’), the TV series
Upstairs Downstairs
, the Three Tenors, Tim Henman and Burger King.

¹¹⁹
Since named the Hemingway Bar.

¹²⁰
‘I know my father claimed to have killed 122 “krauts” as he called them but I think that’s what he probably wished he had done,’ his son John tells Hemingway’s biographer Denis Brian, who concludes, ‘There’s no hard evidence that he killed even one.’

¹²¹
Throughout the war, Salinger never stops writing. He has written eight stories since landing in Europe in mid-January, and a further three between D-Day and September 9th. ‘He tugged that little portable type-writer all over Europe ... Even during the hottest campaigns, he was writing, sending off to magazines,’ recalls a fellow soldier.

¹²²
Later, the legend grows that Hemingway visits Salinger in his unit, and the two men argue about the relative merits of Hemingway’s German Luger and Salinger’s US .45. To prove his point, Hemingway is meant to have aimed his gun at a chicken and blasted its head off, making Salinger very upset. But there is no evidence this ever happened. Rather, it shows that readers like their writers to behave in person as they would in print: Hemingway tough and blood-thirsty, Salinger sensitive and fearful.

¹²³
After Paris, his regiment is trapped in the notorious Huertgen Forest; five hundred of his comrades die in five days, many of them freezing to death.

¹²⁴
Though she too counts the cost. When she later writes that Scott Fitzgerald ‘will be read when many of his well-known contemporaries are forgotten’, and that Hemingway is the creation of herself and Sherwood Anderson, and that they are ‘both a little proud and a little ashamed of the work of their minds’, Hemingway sends her a copy of
Death in the Afternoon
inscribed, ‘A Bitch is a Bitch is a Bitch is a Bitch. From her pal Ernest Hemingway.’

¹²⁵
They are written in pidgin English by Elsa von Freytag von Loringhoven, a German poetess who wears an inverted coal scuttle on her head and ice-cream spoons for earrings.

¹²⁶
Others share Hemingway’s distaste for Ford’s physique. Rebecca West describes being embraced by him as like ‘being the toast under the poached egg’.

¹²⁷
John Fothergill, part of Wilde’s circle in his youth, later a famously irritable innkeeper, recalls: ‘Oscar Wilde once told me that when he went to heaven, Peter would meet him at the gate with a pile of richly bound books saying, “These, Mr Wilde, are your unwritten books.”’

¹²⁸
Though he has gained his reputation as much through his children’s stories and his poems: his major plays are yet to be written, and
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, which was the talk of London last year, has yet to be published in France.

¹²⁹
Proust puts these same words into the mouth of Baron Charlus in
La Prisonnière
. Charlus speaks them, we are told, ‘with a mixture of insolence, wit and world-weariness’.

¹³⁰
Alas, unrecorded.

¹³¹
Proust does not like Wilde – in a letter to Cocteau in 1919, he even goes so far as to say ‘I detest Wilde’ – but he maintains some sympathy for him after his downfall, chiding André Gide for his lack of charity towards him. ‘You were very patronising towards Wilde. I don’t much admire him. But I don’t understand reticence and harsh words towards a person who is down on his luck.’ In
Sodome et Gomorrhe
, he writes of the instability of the homosexual life: ‘Their honour precarious, their liberty provisional, their position unstable, like the poet once fêted in all the drawing rooms, and applauded in every theatre in London, and the next day driven out of every lodging house, unable to find a pillow on which to lay his head.’

¹³²
Proust’s handshake lacks vigour. ‘There are many ways of shaking hands. It is not too much to say that it is an art. He was not good at it. His hand was soft and drooping ... There was nothing pleasant about the way he performed the action,’ writes his friend Prince Antoine Bibesco.

Joyce’s right hand is another matter. When a young man comes up to him in Zürich and says, ‘May I kiss the hand that wrote
Ulysses
?’ Joyce replies, ‘No – it did a lot of other things too.’

¹³³
Some maintain this dialogue cannot be accurate, as Joyce tells a friend in 1920 that he has read ‘some pages’ of Proust, adding, ‘I cannot see any special merit but I am a bad critic.’ But Joyce can be perverse like this: on meeting Wyndham Lewis, he pretends not to have read his work, though he definitely has.

¹³⁴
The murder is never solved.

¹³⁵
Cyril Connolly nicknames him Rip Van With-It.

¹³⁶
Mord und Totschlag
(A Degree of Murder), directed by Volker Schlöndorff.

¹³⁷
Reading Beaton’s published diary of their time in Morocco, Keith notes: ‘I used to spend hours stitching old pants together to give them a different look. I’d get four pairs of sailor pants, I’d cut them off at the knee, get a band of leather and then put another colour from the other pants and stitch them in. Lavender and dull rose, as Cecil Beaton says. I didn’t realize he was keeping an eye on that shit.’

¹³⁸
He makes a practice of this type of comment. Driving with the future Prime Minister James Callaghan, the two men stop to urinate at the verge of the road. ‘While I was peeing, Tom came up to me and took hold of my penis,’ Callaghan confides to their colleague Woodrow Wyatt. ‘“You’ve got a very pretty one there,” he said.’ But Callaghan is not that way inclined. ‘I got away as quick as I could.’

¹³⁹
Driberg keeps in touch with Faithfull for some time after she has split up with Jagger. In 1972, he invites her to dinner at the Gay Hussar with W.H. Auden. ‘In the middle of the evening Auden turned to me and, in a gesture I assume was intended to shock me, said, “Tell me, when you travel with drugs, Marianne, do you pack them up your arse?”

‘“Oh no, Wystan,” I said. “I stash them in my pussy.”’

¹⁴⁰
As Lord Bradwell. The occasion is celebrated in verse by his old friend John Betjeman:

The first and last Lord Bradwell is to me

The norm of socialist integrity;

He makes no secret of his taste in sex;

Preferring the lower to the upper decks.

¹⁴¹
‘From first to last, Driberg was a homosexual philanderer of a most pertinacious and indefatigable kind, wholly shameless, without the smallest scruple or remorse, utterly regardless of the feelings of or consequences to his partners, determined on the crudest and most frequent form of carnal satisfaction to the exclusion of any other consideration whatever: a Queers’ Casanova,’ observes Paul Johnson, a little ungenerously, in the
Daily Telegraph
.

¹⁴²
Lambert possessed other talents, even more hidden. ‘When the weather is right, I can play “God Save the King” by ear,’ he would say. ‘Literally.’ Lambert was deaf in his right ear, having sustained a punctured eardrum as a child. He was able to hold his nose, take a breath through his mouth, and blow the tune through his ear. Anthony Powell testified to the truth of this: when he leaned close, faintly from the ear in question he heard the recognisable notes ‘God save our gracious King ...’

¹⁴³
Later, he tells the viewers of Al Jazeera that the ‘globalised capitalist economic system ... is the biggest killer the world has ever known. It has killed far more people than Adolf Hitler.’

¹⁴⁴
Hitchens has always been free with his abuse. In his memoir,
Hitch-22
, he describes Bill Clinton as ‘loathsome’, Henry Kissinger as ‘indescribably loathsome’, Jimmy Carter as a ‘pious born-again creep’, Alexander Haig as ‘vain, preposterous’ and Ronald Reagan as ‘appallingly facile’. Elsewhere, he calls Mother Teresa ‘a fanatic, a fundamentalist and a fraud’.

¹⁴⁵
Respectively,
Mr Galloway Goes to Washington
and
Love, Poverty and War
.

¹⁴⁶
For this he earns the ire of Germaine Greer. After assuring
Guardian
readers that she cannot watch
Celebrity Big Brother
, she goes on to say that ‘anyone who can remember what a thoroughly supercilious and nasty performer Barrymore always was, must watch unmoved as he dissolves in snot and tears.’ She adds that ‘for Galloway to blame Barrymore’s pathetic condition on Jodie Marsh is outrageous.’

¹⁴⁷
In June 2010 the dress is bought at a London auction for £192,000 by a fashion museum in Chile.

¹⁴⁸
The wedding itself goes smoothly. Three miles of red carpet are laid throughout Monaco, and Aristotle Onassis hires a seaplane to drop thousands of red and white carnations over everyone. In return for documentary rights, MGM agree to pay for basic essentials such as the wedding dress, and on top of all this Rainier makes $450,000 from the sale of commemorative stamps. The only blot on the horizon is that Queen Elizabeth II sends a telegram refusing her invitation. ‘The fact that we have never met is irrelevant,’ harrumphs Rainier. ‘This is still a slap in the face.’

¹⁴⁹
‘Grace had more lovers in a month than I did in a lifetime,’ Zsa Zsa Gabor puts it modestly. Playing golf with David Niven, Prince Rainier asks him who, out of all his former lovers, was the best at fellatio. Without thinking, Niven replies ‘Grace –’ before quickly correcting himself, ‘Gracie Fields.’ But Noël Coward maintains that Niven did indeed mean Gracie Fields. ‘It’s absolutely true. It was a speciality of Rochdale girls,’ he says. ‘They called it the Gradely Gobble.’

¹⁵⁰
‘Suspense as an absolute quality has never seemed to me very important,’ he writes to Bernice Baumgarten while working on his screenplay. This might explain his lack of empathy with
Strangers on a Train
, both the book and the film.

¹⁵¹
On December 6th 1950, Chandler writes a furious letter to Hitchcock after Warners have sent him a copy of the final script. ‘In spite of your wide and generous disregard of my communications on the subject of the script of
Strangers on a Train
and your failure to make any comment on it,’ he begins, ‘and in spite of not having heard a word from you since I began the writing of the actual screenplay – for all of which I might say I bear no malice, since this sort of procedure seems to be part of the standard Hollywood depravity – in spite of this and in spite of this extremely cumbersome sentence, I feel that I should, just for the record, pass you a few comments on what is termed the final script ... What I cannot understand is your permitting a script which after all had some life and vitality to be reduced to such a flabby mass of clichés, a group of faceless characters, and the kind of dialogue every screen writer is taught not to write ...’