Yet in spite of all the newspaper articles, I still did not believe the story about my mother and Harold. I even remember being with Mrs. Hepburn, our cook, and Jean Leyland, my younger brother’s nanny. They were complaining about the unpleasant tone, and I said words to the effect of “Yes, it’s amazing when you realize that it’s all based on lies.” Both looked a little embarrassed.
I returned to our house in London and found stacks of mail waiting for my mother. When remarking on the fact, I was informed that it was to be expected since she was living elsewhere with Harold. I froze. Barefaced lies can do that. After an argument with a sibling, I then decided that it was going to be the beginning of a new life. Much as I loved my parents, I couldn’t stand being with them when they were together. The tension was intolerable.
On the other hand, the introduction of Harold in my life was a win-win situation and I never felt disloyal to my father either. I found Harold honest and straightforward, a force of nature. Let others beat around the bush, not HP. He avoided the hypocritical, back-biting behavior that could be prevalent among the English. We shared a love of Hollywood and film that became a key element of our relationship. He had just written the screenplay for The Last Tycoon, a film that would be directed by Elia Kazan and star Robert De Niro, Tony Curtis, and Jack Nicholson in 1976. When he began his relationship with my mother, he kept a considered distance. That “distance” thawed and then turned to a paternal type of love.
Around that period, The New Yorker published a cartoon with a fairly typical-looking intellectual Manhattan couple. Underneath, the punch line went something like “I don’t know what you’re complaining about. Even before Harold Pinter, our marriage was full of pregnant pauses.” Ignorant about Harold’s work, I had no idea what this meant. However, I did sense that having him in our lives meant a significant change. Representing the dire opposite of the British mentality—“Never complain and never explain”—Harold did furiously complain and want explanation. He could be trying and exhausting, but he had enough self-effacement and humor to get away with it. As for the notion of becoming difficult with success, it was absolutely not the case. According to Henry Woolf, who’d been to grammar school with him and had both encouraged and staged his first play, The Room, “Harold was always the same.”
Finding him touching and loyal, I admired Harold bringing his tailor father into retirement and what a devoted son he was to his parents. His convertible silver Mercedes with black leather lining—nicknamed “Myrtle” by Mum—wasn’t bad either. There were balmy evenings spent in Dorset, a place that Harold favored, because of Thomas Hardy. After eating out at a local restaurant like Maisie’s Farm, Harold and Mum would be sitting up front, my brothers and I behind. With the wind in my hair, I’d feel punch-drunk on the heady air. On one occasion, I recited a poem about a woman and her zither. An innocent, I couldn’t quite understand why the lines “She twangs it and she twiddles it hither and thither” and “She tweaks it from the moment she takes her morning bath” led to so much laughter from the front-seat passengers.
Thanks to Harold—both gregarious and generous—our lifestyle soared. Suddenly my younger brothers and I were attending premieres of plays like Dracula, starring Terence Stamp, and meeting Hollywood producers like Sam Spiegel, and watching cricket matches with film stars like John Hurt or leading playwrights like Simon Gray, Ronnie Harwood, and Tom Stoppard, and eating in delicious restaurants like Mr Chow and Rowley’s on Jermyn Street. There were no more jaunts to Paradiso & Inferno, a questionable eatery in the West End that my mother loved; every time we entered, the female owner would rush over and say, “Children, your mother is the most beautiful woman in the world.”
I was often struck by Harold’s precision, his choice of words to narrate a tale, his clarity, his large black handwriting, well spaced on yellow legal pads, and his spontaneity. How he could burst into song—Irving Berlin’s “Heat Wave” was a favorite—or dance with a baby step-granddaughter in his arms, singing “Falling in Love Again,” and how his passion for theater and film was steeped in knowledge of the craft of acting. I discovered Carol Reed’s films with him—Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol, and The Third Man—and was exposed to a different standard of performance.
Still, it took time to acclimatize to the situation. I wasn’t against my mother daring to get up and go. However, I was pretty annoyed about the lies during the holidays. We had a scene in her boudoir where I admonished her for lying about Harold and she swore that it had been my father’s decision to lie about the situation. Oddly enough, it probably was. Still, I refused to write to her. Or rather, that first term of school, I would send letters to my father and in the postscript instruct him to pass them on to her, sensing that he might not. It got to the point where my headmistress, Mother Brigid, had to intervene. An atrocious snob who courted European royalty and power—this explained why Caroline of Monaco, Elena of Bourbon, and Irene Marcos were pupils—she was also worldly. In the intimacy of her study, she gave me a light lecture about life having twists and turns and, becoming eagle-eyed, said, “Natasha, you need to write to your mother as well.” Eventually it became much easier.
As for my classmates and indeed their parents, I’ll always be grateful for their grace and humanity. Only one person out of the thirty girls referred to the horrors of the press, and she was quickly hushed up. Everyone carried on as if nothing had happened. Nor did anyone else react at St. Mary’s and that counted over two hundred pupils. It was a relief. Their behavior made me realize that there were decent types in England.
As for my poor father, his annus horribilis continued. In October 1975, the IRA attempted to kill him. He had been receiving death threats but refused to give them any credence. However, on the evening of October 22, they planted a car bomb under his forest-green Jaguar. The next morning, he was about to leave for the House of Commons when the telephone rang. The call saved my father’s life. While talking, he was suddenly blown off his chair.
Binny, the dog of our neighbors, the Hamilton-Fairleys, had set off the bomb. Instead of my father, it had killed Professor Gordon Hamilton-Fairley, a leading cancer specialist. When I heard the news, I went numb. It was a feeling caused by profound relief and terrible guilt. My elder siblings and I knew his four children. His daughter Fiona Hamilton-Fairley was exactly my contemporary and had been at nursery school with me.
Australian in origin, the tight-knit family had a remarkable energy. Early pioneers of organic food, they were sporty, warm, and inclusive. I’d gone on a day-trip with them once and gotten seriously sunburned. Not a drama, they had the right cream and so forth. I didn’t know the professor well, but he had the kindest eyes and the simplicity of the great. Later, I learned that he had turned down the appointment to be Elizabeth II’s personal physician, choosing to work with the public. Such a decision typified him. Daphne Hamilton-Fairley, his very attractive Anne Bancroft–type wife, was his ideal counterpart, being punchy and clever and a recognized powerhouse with regard to dyslexia and dyspraxia.
At the time, Caroline Kennedy was staying with my father. The daughter of his friend Jackie Onassis, she was doing a course at Sotheby’s in London. Certain newspapers even wondered if she was the IRA’s target. Hardly. The Provisional IRA group, later identified as the Balcombe Street gang, went after my father because of his prominence as a politician and his hard line on republicanism in Northern Ireland. In actual fact, being a Roman Catholic, he felt tremendous sympathy for those born of his religion.
The IRA terror campaign reigned throughout 1974 and 1975. Under the command of Brian Keenan, forty bombs were detonated across London in public places like the Green Park Tube station and Harrods. True, the IRA gave ten-minute warnings, but thirty-five people were killed, mostly civilians, and many more were injured. Professor Hamilton-Fairley was the only medical doctor to die. A blue plaque in the crypt of St. Paul’s Cathedral commemorates him: GORDON HAMILTON-FAIRLEY DM FRCP, FIRST PROFESSOR OF MEDI
CAL ONCOLOGY, 1930–75. KILLED BY A TERRORIST BOMB. IT MATTERS NOT HOW A MAN DIES BUT HOW HE LIVES.
Just after the bomb incident, I returned to my father’s home and found the dining room table covered in threatening letters sent by the IRA. In content, they were fairly similar, a lot of “STOP . . . OR ELSE,” and were all created using a ransom-note typeface. Scotland Yard had given Poppa a long contraption with a mirror at the end that he was meant to use to check under his car. In typical fashion for him, he tried it out once and then ignored it. I do remember asking if he was scared and his replying that he refused “to be terrorized by such cowards.” As a war hero, he could warrant such an attitude. Nevertheless, in retrospect, it did mark me. Why should cowards hold one back? And as the years unfolded, I began to believe that people could be divided between the brave and the fearful.
07 The Effect of Punk Rock on England
Andy Warhol was always the first to acknowledge an important new trend and/or movement. And this was demonstrated by his posing with Jordan. The event was the London premiere of Saturday Night Fever in 1977, the scintillating disco film of his producer friend Robert Stigwood. He might have posed with John Travolta, a new Hollywood star and future cover boy of his Interview magazine, but Andy recognized that the “hip pic” was the one with Jordan, universally recognized as the female embodiment of punk. According to Alexander Fury, the reputed fashion critic, “no one wore punk’s trademark sartorial spit-in-your-face better than Jordan,” yet nothing was gross in her general attitude.
As always, the American Pop artist was soberly dressed in signature white shirt, dark jacket, and jeans. Jordan, on the other hand, had tonsured hair and a face described by Fury as being “spliced up like a Picasso painting with eye shadow and kohl.” There was also her attention-grabbing attire of big white panties worn over black panty hose, and a tank with Venus spelled out with safety pins and various pins worn over a lacy top. Andy looked lightly amused and Jordan defined nonchalant.
The American artist was world-famous, but she was the main attraction at Seditionaries, Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s boutique. Bold about her wardrobe, she ignored efforts to arrest her for “being indecently dressed in public.”
Punk rock aimed to cause turmoil and discord. Adopted by the young, poor and privileged alike, the cultural phenomenon swept through Britain in the mid-’70s. Bristling with rage, it rebelled against the class system, grim living situations, unemployment, and other social injustices.
It was pretty extreme and fairly dark, yet punk rock lit a quiet match within the heart of my generation and had an extraordinary and lasting effect. No doubt it was because punk rock’s genesis was the music world and, as always, nothing was more influential on British youth than music.
There were bands such as the Damned, the Ramones, the Dead Kennedys, and the Clash, but few stirred like the Sex Pistols. It was a mixture of the intelligence of lead singer Johnny Rotten and the sharp, commercial sense of Malcolm McLaren, the band’s manager, who described the venture as making “cash from chaos” and the rebellious nature of English youths who, given a chance, enjoyed behaving spectacularly badly. Neither Rotten nor McLaren trusted the other, but their joint efforts were alchemic and exploded their world. Music-wise, there was definitely a before and an after the Sex Pistols; their influence was that relevant.
“Anarchy in the U.K.,” released in 1976, was their first single. True, I was a privileged convent schoolgirl, but the music and the song’s lines—such as “I am an anti-Christ, I am an anarchist” and “Destroy!”—hit a spot and offered a dramatic escape from my circumstances. Nihilism was promoted and that also attracted because it had nothing to do with my parents and background. The Sex Pistols became my own private place. I didn’t pierce my nose and spike my hair, because I didn’t need to. Occasionally my new, hardened attitude showed in my behavior at school. During my fencing class, I persuaded Princess Elena of Bourbon to step on a stink bomb. No one would touch her, as she was royalty, I reckoned. So taking her épée en garde position, Juan Carlos’s daughter thrust her leg forward and crushed the stink bomb’s glass phial. It was in St. Mary’s gymnasium and, to the fury of our teacher, stank out the entire establishment. Blond, good-looking, and the proud owner of a Porsche, our fencing maître had been fairly tolerant of my cheeky behavior—I was always slightly pulling his beard—but this pushed him over the edge. Alas, that was the goal.
Nevertheless, it was mild in comparison with the Sex Pistols, who were christened “the filth and the fury!” by the Daily Mirror for swearing and behaving abominably on live television. A few weeks later, when leaving for concerts in the Netherlands, they were reported by the London Evening News as having “vomited and spat their way” to their plane at Heathrow Airport. According to The Guardian, their single “God Save the Queen”—released in Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee year—was banned by the BBC and almost every independent radio station, making it “the most heavily censored record in British history.” Yet it sold, sold, sold. On a school outing at Chester Zoo, I marched into WHSmith asking for the notorious single. In clipped tones, I was informed that they did not stock or sell “such records.” But while I was leaving the shop, a little old lady with gray hair and a lilac-colored coat came up and said, “Listen, if you go down this street, turn to the left after the traffic lights and then the immediate right, you’ll find ‘God Save the Queen’ in the shop next to the newsagent.”
In typical British fashion, the people on the street were rooting for the underdog, or rather, the “bad boys” of rock and roll, in this case. (The Queen was not as popular then as she is now; Princes William and Harry were yet to be born.) Meanwhile, the Sex Pistols’ newcomer Sid Vicious, who couldn’t play the guitar, was outrageous. “He was the knight in shining armor with a giant fist,” said McLaren.
In many ways, Malcolm, often viewed as the Godfather of Punk, had Warhol-like elements. His version of the Factory was Seditionaries, the boutique he shared with Vivienne Westwood at World’s End on King’s Road, whose past employees included Chrissie Hynde. Like Andy, who had signed up Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, Malcolm attracted young talent to his side. After the Sex Pistols, he managed Adam Ant, the handsome rock singer who was in Jubilee, Derek Jarman’s film about punk. Malcolm also created Bow Wow Wow and launched the career of the singer Annabella Lwin.
Malcolm represented the wild side of the music world—types viewed as too unpredictable to be entertained by smart London society—whereas the likes of Mick Jagger and Bryan Ferry were definitely in the social swim and favorites with certain hostesses. I was introduced to Bryan Ferry at the eighteenth-birthday party of my sister Flora in October 1976. Despite being an important singer and ravishingly handsome, he spoke to whoever pushed themselves onto him, including yours truly. On the same evening, I met his girlfriend, Jerry Hall, who resembled a Grecian statue. Her blond hair was pinned up and her asymmetrical white Antony Price dress emphasized her shoulders and neck.
Excited to have met both, I remember thinking, That was easy. Yet the encounter made me yearn to leave St. Mary’s—I had two and a half years left—as had going to Paris in the summer of 1976. My godmother Marigold invited me to the ten-day trip. We drove, which was then a norm because flying was so expensive. Our group included her daughter Sophie and sons Luke and Daniel. The latter had just completed his first year at Oxford and was keen to discuss eighteenth-century French philosophers. Fat chance with Sophie, Luke, and me, who drove him mad with our tendency to break into song. “Mum, I can’t believe that we’re in the city of Voltaire and I have to tolerate this,” Daniel would occasionally explode. But we stubbornly persisted. To give an idea, rue Barbet de Jouy, the street that we were staying on, became “Ba ba ba, Barbet de Jouy,” inspired by the Beach Boys’ song “Barbara Ann.”
Nevertheless, Daniel, a gallant guy, was there to defend when a French jerk slapped me across the face for stepping on the lawn in Versailles
. An incident that I quickly forgot and forgave because within a few days, I was smitten by the sophistication of the city even though it was August and emptied of chic Parisians. Fresh baguettes were baked several times a day. Fruit and vegetables were lovingly displayed like jewels in windows. Even exercise books with their different choice of bright-colored covers were attractive. The terraces of places like the Café de Flore had allure with their round tables, wicker chairs, and clutches of different-sized glasses. I still recall my first citron pressé and being struck by the civilized ritual of pouring the water and shaking the sugar.
I returned to England and became a Paris bore. When we went to Ireland, I continued raving about the city of lights. At the beginning of the trip we stayed with Robert Shaw, one of Harold’s oldest friends. Years before starring in Jaws, Spielberg’s mega smash hit, he had appeared in the original productions of The Caretaker and The Birthday Party. Harold was unbelievably charismatic, but Shaw had something else—he embodied danger. Apparent in his eyes, the mole on his cheek, his nose, his regard, and his voice: it was extraordinary to witness. Unfortunately, he had just returned from a press junket for The Deep, and his way of coping with jet lag was drinking morn, noon, and night. He also agonized about having sold out to Hollywood—a feeling that then cursed British thespians—and accused Harold of thinking likewise, when it was not the case. Having started as an actor, Harold understood. Shaw also had to support ten children.
After Andy Page 7