Nobody could persuade Damian to dress up that afternoon before the party. He was extremely shy and his lips too could only be glimpsed, full and sensuous behind his thick long dark hair. All the girls wanted him, and so did some of the boys. Parents said he couldn’t look one in the eye, one of their sink-or-swim yardsticks, but we didn’t care. We were looking at his lips. He was the richest of my friends. He had a credit card while the rest of us wrote cheques (which invariably bounced). We tore these meaningless contracts with abandon out of large flapping books from such exclusive banking houses as Coutts and Hoare’s, or, in my shameful case, Lloyds. Damian’s cheques, on the other hand, came from a bank in Nassau. This was indeed glamour. But then Damian’s father was a film star, the famous hellraiser, Richard Harris.
Now Damian and Liza were having an affair. She had stalked him through the drawing rooms and discos of SW1 with the intensity of a tigress on a feeding mission. Damian accepted her briefly, but he was a slippery fish when it came to girls and that night of Nicky’s party was their spring, summer and autumn merged into one. But everyone was impressed. These were the days when avocado pears were a novelty, and a bottle of plonk washed them down, at dinners and weekends largely populated by chinless creatures with wonky noses and teeth, youthful stoops and potatoes in their mouths. In this milieu Liza and Damian exuded a curious new international glow, and I was right there next to them, bathing in the reflected glory.
And what was I, exactly, that summer night by the river in our garden at home? Certainly no beauty, although straining every nerve to become one. A manic beanpole show-off, with blue-black hair and shaved eyebrows, looking, as Antony Price remarked one night after sex, like a cross between Anne Frank and Snow White.
My poor parents clenched their jaws and barely managed to restrain themselves from leaping upon me and tearing me limb from limb. Every latest antic, every newest affectation – my refusal to get a job, get up, stand up when grown-ups came into the room, my eccentric appearance – all this had worn their nerves to shreds. A cartoon storm hung over our heads with lightning forks pointing in all directions. Recently a letter had been received from a business associate of my father’s – a man currently employing my elder brother – in response to one from my dad, in which he (my dad) had complained that my brother wasn’t working hard enough.
‘Why worry so much about your elder son,’ the letter said, ‘when your younger son is a drug addict, a homosexual and a prostitute?’
Very cleverly, my parents never said a word about this letter, although one can imagine the epileptic fit it engendered. My father only mentioned it years later, casually, one evening at dinner, but by then everything had changed.
However, that night of Nicky’s party it was all going on. Without knowing it, I was skating on very thin ice, so that what appeared to be an idyllic country evening in the garden held all the potential of a Greek tragedy. The drama was resolutely kept offstage inside buttoned lips and suppressed groans, but any minute now the whole thing could blow up, and I might be dragged to the river and held under water until I saw sense, my whole, short, wasted life passing before me.
‘Did you hear? Tony Everett killed his son. Drowned him in their river. There was some awful bust-up on the night of Nicky Haslam’s party.’
‘No? How ghastly. Sara must be distraught.’
‘Yes and no. I think she had come the end of her tether, frankly.’
I had come downstairs in my warrior outfit and sat on the drawing-room sofa, leaving an imprint like the shroud of Turin all over it. My mother had a heart attack. Hardly appeased, but a resolute hostess nonetheless, she bumped a trolley over the lawn towards the summerhouse, rallying her guests from the house, and we all came out and helped ourselves to Pimm’s. My father glanced over his paper at Liza’s nipples peeking through cunning little slits in her dress. Liza wasn’t fussy where the admiration came from and played up furtively from beneath her bangs, watching my mother from the corner of her eye, just in case that lady noticed, but she needn’t have worried. Sex was a myth rather than a reality to my mother, and anyway she never stopped moving, jumping up to dead-head a rose, cantering into the house to answer the telephone, coming out with a fresh jug of Pimm’s and inspecting my thong, all in one endless flurry of activity.
Our house, and the valley in which it lay, was several feet below sea level and maybe this was another factor contributing to the pent-up atmosphere in the garden that night. There was a strange magnetic pull, as if gravity there was somehow stronger. When you climbed the hill onto Salisbury Plain above, you suddenly felt weightless. It was true that the people who lived in the clusters of thatched doll’s houses on the banks of the meandering river below were strange haunted folk, tinged with inbreeding, from a world poised on the edge of extinction. Soon the tree-tunnelled road that ran along the side of the valley would become a hurtling, murderous short cut for trucks and tourists, and the peace of a thousand years would be shattered for ever. But as dusk fell that summer night on the vast empty plain around us, our little valley, hidden and forgotten behind its hedgerows and woods, shrouded in purple shadows, still held that deep uncanny silence that might have come from the dawn of time. The hill was a black line against the mauve sky, and the quiet was broken only by the odd car changing gear as it went round a corner, its muffled engine a faraway bluebottle banging against a window. Wood pigeons flapped around in the poplar wood. The river gurgled and splashed over the weir. Moorhens squabbled in the water and we squabbled in the garden. Windows and doors were all open in the old house cloaked with wisteria. My father’s lurcher loped across the lawn towards us.
‘Drat you, darling!’ My mother’s shriek from inside the house stopped everything in its tracks, including the river. ‘You’ll have to redo your bottom. Most of it’s come off on my sofa. Couldn’t you wear some trousers?’
‘No!’ I shrieked. ‘It would ruin everything!’
It never crossed our minds in those days to drink without driving, but the tiny Wiltshire roads were still in a post-war summer haze that night, folded into the plain between the high banks of cow parsley and may that waved us on as we sped towards the ball. Night fell and the heart-stopping smell of the English country evening wafted through the windows on the cool breeze. It was ours, effortlessly, without a thought: all this. We never imagined anything bad could ever happen and so we roared along, screaming, and arrived at the party just after dark.
Nicky presided over the festivities from a throne inside a large striped marquee, dressed as a maharajah. He wore white jodhpurs over high boots, a white safari jacket, a large pink turban and strings of ammunition. He looked like a marvellous villain from a silent film, as if he might pull a gun at any moment on Lady Diana Cooper, sitting beside him. That lady, dressed in a toga with a wreath on her head plucked from the garden, of wisteria, ivy and laurel leaves, still swarming with mosquitoes, glowered lovingly at Nicky like a chihuahua that had been dressed up by its busker master and sat in front of the hat full of coins, smiling or growling – who knew which – at the passing trade. After fifteen years living the American dream – rancher, biker, body-builder: you name it, Nicky did it – his return from exile was perfectly timed. Thatcher, Punk, Safeway’s and Nicky. They all came together, and at his ball Nicky threw down the gauntlet to the next chapter of his life. He would grow old disgracefully.
Our arrival didn’t cause quite the stir that I had anticipated. A fat lady in a wetsuit with enormous flippers looked daggers at me through her snorkel mask and brandished her harpoon. ‘Get away from me, nudist!’
But Nicky was a little more generous. ‘You look wonderful, darling. Who are you? Gandhi?’
The party went on all night. There were fireworks, photographers, a band, a discothèque for the young. Liza, Damian and I finally left at about six o’clock in the morning. On the Basingstoke bypass, the engine cut as we ran out of petrol so we glided onto the hard shoulder, had a cigarette and made plans. Cars and lorries roared past
, shaking our little vehicle like a leaf. It was a bright summer’s morning and we were all desperately hung-over, squinting at one another through the haze of cigarette smoke, tempers slightly frayed. Finally lots were drawn, and Liza, dressed for a Tarzan movie, and Damian for Miami Vice, hitched a ride in a lorry to a service station, while I covered myself with my cape and had a quiet nap in the back of the car.
An hour or so later, the two lovers, now in another lorry, with a can of petrol, were thundering back up the other side of the motorway when they saw my poor Mini surrounded by flashing police cars, and me spreadeagled against one of them, cape flying in the wind, naked, being frisked by a policewoman. Arriving at the scene of the crime, they found the whole thing so amusing that we nearly all got arrested. I was trying to explain to the police that the gash in the car’s front was an ancient war wound, not recently inflicted, and was being quite convincing, until Tarzan and Jane appeared and were unable to answer the simplest of questions without bursting into tears and clutching their sides as though they were going to explode. The crosser I got, the more they laughed. Finally the police realised we were simply a trio of deranged inbred morons and began to laugh too. We were allowed to go on with our journey, arriving home at about nine o’clock, just in time for breakfast, where we regaled my mother with embroidered stories of the party and our scrape with the law, before going to bed for the rest of the day.
So Nicky was back for the eighties, redecorating Thacherite London with his own brand of throwaway country-house chic. He was pompous – ‘My mother was a Ponsonby, you know’ – and humble – ‘If I wasn’t such a wicked old witch, I’d ask you back,’ all in the same breath. At dinner he was vastly entertaining, regaling newcomers with all the glittering names from his past, dropped into the conversation, like commas and semicolons punctuating the long, sometimes complicated phases of his life in America, which sounded like short stories by Tennessee Williams. Once, for example, Nicky ran over a local peasant on the road outside Puerta Vallarta in the early sixties. He was arrested, roughed up and chucked into a paddy wagon by a gang of thrilling Mexican policemen, to the horror of his two companions, the society beauties Romana McEwen and Anne von Zigeiser.
‘What shall we do?’ cried the ladies, as the door of the police van was slammed shut.
Nicky’s face appeared through the bars, purple and bloody. ‘Call Merle Oberon, and tell her to call the President!’ he shouted. And then he was gone.
The girls booked into a hotel, all the while pondering the mystery of Nicky’s final words. Had they heard him right? How on earth could they get Merle Oberon’s number, and what she was going to do if they did manage to contact her? And maybe he hadn’t said Merle Oberon after all.
‘There is an Earl of Oban, I think,’ drawled Romana. ‘But he’s a frightful bore, and I’m not sure how sympathetic he would be to Nicky’s cause, in any case.’
They were on the point of packing up and going back to Mexico City, putting the whole thing behind them and into the hands of the British Embassy there, but they ordered some drinks and got on the phone anyway. Of course nothing is beyond the network of a well-todo beauty, and soon Anne was speaking to the squeaky little midget herself in Hollywood. Within a matter of hours, Nicky was out of gaol and aboard a government plane heading for Mexico City.
The great thing about Nicky was that he didn’t really care what other people thought. As far as he was concerned he started life as ‘an ugly little thing’ and would soon be an ugly old thing, and that was enough for him. He didn’t look for any further criticism. He was authentic to himself and that was all that mattered. In Thatcher’s queer nation he remained fairly conservative, but in 1997 – at the shocking-pink dawn of Cool Britannia, when the whole of Britain rose up in a frenzied euphoria, like the last night of the Proms and the Cup Final all rolled into one, with Tony Blair as conductor and the captain of the English team, heralding a brave new world of all-day drinking in your burka – a curious new character erupted from Nicky. Like a medium drunk on ectoplasm, he was suddenly possessed, and overnight channelled himself from Michael Heseltine into Liam Gallagher. He dyed his hair black, had a brilliant facelift, wore tight torn jeans over cowboy boots with loo chains around his neck, lashings of Egyptian-coloured pancake on his face, and at a hundred yards he was indistinguishable from his new hero. He was the mirage of Oasis and Oasis was the mirage of New Labour. The effect was mesmerising. Until he opened his mouth. Then he was more Noël Coward than Gallagher.
Britain exploded and so did Nicky Haslam. Suddenly he was more famous than he had ever been. ‘A proper celebrity!’ He wrote a column in Hello! and another in the Evening Standard. Nobody was safe, and all were grilled at some point or other. He won The Weakest Link and his extraordinary wardrobe became legendary as it lurched from Oasis to Biggles to Sid Vicious and back again. He indulged his every whim, and mid-life for Nicky was like the blooming of an exotic orchid, seen once in a lifetime and never forgotten. The crisis was for everybody else.
Nobody knew quite how to handle this new rock legend, except for his Russian clientele, who probably found him the most normal-looking person they had ever met. Suddenly he didn’t just know everyone from the pages of Burke’s or Dun & Bradstreet, he knew everyone. Like the White Rabbit, he popped up everywhere in the enchanted forest of New Labour London, one night chatting with Princess Julia, the DJ, in the toilets of a Hoxton pub, the next in a tête-à-tête with the Duchess of Cornwall at Highgrove. Nothing was too high or too low.
One evening I went with him to a club in Shoreditch that was so fast and hip that it later closed down because it was too popular. At the door a cluster of freaks were waiting to be vetted by a vitriolic drag queen in a pink bunny rabbit jumpsuit, waving a clipboard. Nicky elbowed his way to the front. This was madness, I thought. Quite often these girls took a dim view of a barging celebrity, and I always stood firmly in line, terrified lest I should be turned on by some hideous gremlin playing to the crowd.
‘Ow yes, dear, Rupert Who? Where’s Madonna now, eh? Ask ’er if you can come in! Get to the back of the bloody line an’ stop fussin’.’
But Nicky had no such qualms. ‘Don’t worry. La Bottomy’s a friend.’
Sure enough the bunny rabbit shrieked with excitement and bashed Nicky over the head with her clipboard. ‘Nickaay, you old tart! What’s happenin’, babes? How many are you?’
The two hugged and chatted, while I marvelled at Nicky’s ease and charm, and we swanned through the velvet rope and into the club. Inside, the place was packed. I immediately spied a brilliant-looking skinhead.
‘That’s Spence,’ said Nicky. ‘Hi, Spence, how are you, darling?’
I couldn’t believe my eyes. As we made our way around the room it was clear that he knew almost everyone, and by the time we got to the bar we had been given a gram of coke, several drinks tickets, an Ecstasy and an invitation to an orgy.
‘I’m exhausted, but Ru might love it,’ said Nicky as though he were talking about lunch on Sunday.
One last image. I am walking past the Grill Room at the Savoy Hotel on my way to some dull corporate party. The restaurant is packed and the lights are dimming. A spotlight quivers over a pair of double doors.
‘Your Royal Highness, my Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen …’ commands a voice over the loudspeaker. ‘Please welcome Mr Nicholas Haslam and his band.’
I stop dead in my tracks. The double doors are flung dramatically open and there is Nicky wincing slightly in the light, clutching a microphone in one hand and a swathe of notes in the other. He has a deep tan and a crew-cut of bright white hair. He trots into the room and the crowd goes wild, whooping and cheering, while he weaves through the tables, kissing the baubled hand of a deposed royal, whispering in the ear of Andrew Lloyd Webber, blowing another kiss to his ex-boyfriend Paolo, standing at the bar. The piano strikes up and Nicky points dramatically at poor Paolo and launches into ‘You Made Me Love You’. The room gasps. Paolo freezes, eyes on stalks. Nicky
knows how to work a crowd. He throws his head from side to side between lines at the sheer anguish of the emotion, pouting like Mick Jagger. The effect is mesmerising. The audience watches, aghast.
‘I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to do it.’
You could fit a large slice of cake into the open mouth of Lord Lloyd Webber. It is an extraordinary performance. Two American ladies stop at the door beside me.
‘Any royals?’ one asks.
‘Yes. Quite a few queens,’ I reply.
Like England, Nicky is slightly more conventional these days. ‘Jolly Good Boating Weather’ has replaced ‘Live For Ever’, and Nicky can be heard regularly at the Savoy Hotel, singing Cole Porter, and will probably be minister for the interior (decoration) before very long. Whatever. But for the time being, the crisis of mid-life has been thwarted, and Nicky is sailing into Porto-Vecchio, flying all colours and making an album too.
One night, some time ago, Nicky had dinner with my father and me.
‘We are going on a pilgrimage to Lourdes,’ said my father.
‘How marvellous,’ replied Nicky, sweet and attentive, always good with family.
‘What?’ said my father.
‘The pope has issued a plenary indulgence.’
It was like playing to the upper circle, talking to my dad sometimes. One had to enunciate every syllable.
‘What’s that?’ asked Nicky.
‘It means that if you take the water, go to confession, have communion and do the candlelight procession, the whole hokey-cokey, this year, the jubilee, a hundred years since the initial apparition, then you will go straight to heaven, come what may.’
Vanished Years Page 11