Once back in England, she spotted an advertisement for a job at the University Appointments Board. This employment exchange for graduates was housed in a four-square Georgian building off Chaucer Road, at the far end from the city to Montagu Road. Beetle was interviewed (and obliged to take an intelligence test) by J. G. W. Davies, whose fame derived from his having bowled Don Bradman, at the height of his powers, for a duck when the touring Australians played Cambridge University at Fenner’s. He did wonder why Miss Glatt should seek a job for which she was manifestly over-qualified, but she did not indulge his curiosity. She left V. G. with more regret on his part than on hers.
When my mother heard of Beetle’s plan to live in Cambridge, she was displeased, although no mention had been made of our sharing the same digs. By this time, Irene had surely guessed that we were lovers. Even her daily help, Mrs Garrod, asked me what it was like making love with that beautiful dark-haired girl. Irene called Beetle’s mother to inform her of her daughter’s imminent delinquency. Ray was neither shocked nor intimidated. She had winced when first informed of Beetle’s decision but she knew better than to hope to change it. Ray told Irene that Beetle was a grown woman; she had no wish, or ability, to interfere with her life.
We filled the other rooms in 28 Montagu Road without difficulty. One was rented by a Siamese student whose surname was Punyanita. ‘Poony’ spoke pidgin English with a fluent paucity of vocabulary. Her response to any jest (and there were many) that she failed to understand was ‘You clazy!’ Her father was said to own all the prisons in Thailand as well as a zoo. ‘Poony’ was soon attached to Paddy Dickson, an always smiling medical student who also played piano for the Footlights. Paddy had an equally cheery double, a Johnian called Robert Busvine, who hung on the fringes of the Gaiety. So alike were they that I was never sure which one I was talking to until the course of the conversation veered towards some identifying marker. David Gore-Lloyd, who was also reading Moral Sciences, although he never came to supervisions with me and Tony, rented the top room in Montagu Road.
David made no marked contributions to our philosophical causeries, but he did once suggest that a machine for sorting bad eggs from good could be said to be ‘biased’ against the bad ones. This seemed to imply that a machine could have mental attitudes. The prospect of sophisticated computers programmed to disqualify certain people, or types of people, from benefits or even from medical attention, makes the notion of a biased machine less comic now than it seemed in the 1950s. David formed a romantic attachment to Poony’s sister ‘Pussy’, who lived in the dormitory for foreign students run by ‘Pop’ Prior at an address that Poony called ‘Nigh Ada Lo’ (otherwise 9 Adam’s Road). One day, David discovered that he had a lump in one of his testicles. His mother insisted that he go to London to be seen by a specialist.
Since our house was so distant from the centre of Cambridge, I spent a good deal of time in Leslie Bricusse’s new rooms in a Caius annexe on the other side of Trinity Street. He approved of the work I had done on the ‘book’ and set himself to getting costumes, sets and cast for a December production. Although he showed no interest in the ADC, he was eager that their new president, Gordon Gould, play the part of our (in fact Canadian) heroine’s American millionaire father. I had written a scene to open the second half in which Jinx, as I called our heroine, in memory of Mary Jane Lehman, whom I had loved briefly, but keenly, in New York, was at breakfast, at a very long polished table, with her badly hungover papa. It called for clever playing, in very slow motion, as the two of them slid various elements in the breakfast diet, with exhausted effort, from one end of the table to the other. I have no idea why we thought that this would be funny, but Leslie endorsed it, so long as we could get Gordon to take the part. No one in literary or theatrical Cambridge thought well of Leslie or of his artless ambitions. Not without a prolonged show of important doubt, Gordon Gould did, however, eventually agree to be of our company.
I rehearsed the actors with a facsimile of the confidence with which I had drilled my Lockite platoon. My jokes amused the cast enough to convince them that they would get laughs from the audience. Armed with the licence of authorship, I did not hesitate to coach Gordon Gould. If he came to scoff, he remained to play. Brian Marber was recruited to play a Dago racing driver based on Juan Fangio; Joe Bain (who had stayed in Cambridge to do a ‘Diploma of Education’) was Sir Roland Butter, the father of the tenor Dai Jenkins, a handsome Welshman who was engaged, in reality, to a very pretty, if short-stemmed, English rose called Norma. Tony Becher had not been slow to coin the phrase ‘See Norma and Dai’.
Leslie had written all of the lyrics and composed several of the tunes. The rest of the musical work, and the orchestration, fell on Robin Beaumont, a handsome, versatile musician. Leslie took it for granted (neither Robin nor I chose to dissent) that he himself deserved a shared credit in both the writing and the music. The three of us were a triumvirate in which there was no doubt who played Julius Caesar. When the programmes for Lady at the Wheel arrived, a couple of days before we were due to open, the front cover announced the credits that we had all agreed, but there was a supplementary line, at the bottom of the page, in bold capital letters: ‘The entire show devised and produced by Leslie Bricusse’. I was not pleased. When I indicated as much to Leslie, he said, ‘Bloody printers!’
Success swept away petty resentment; in truth, Leslie could fairly claim that it could never have happened without his organisational thrust. The first-night house was full; laughs came immediately and loudly. Judging from the applause, the songs, however jejune (‘Somewhere, somehow, some day…’), might have been by Jerome Kern. Leslie and I sat on the top steps of the circle swamped by a delectable torrent of laughter and cheers. I was anxious lest the second-act breakfast scene would be too slow, but Gordon Gould’s drollery proved even funnier than in rehearsal. Another American recruit to the show, Mike Kitay, did a virtuoso meta-Charleston dance routine that capped the final scene, in which, of course, Jinx’s car won the rally, the German driver was disqualified and everything ended as happily as contrivance could manage. Even the ranks of Tuscany could scarcely deny that we had had a triumph. Gordon Gould had the grace to seek me out and apologise for his lofty reluctance to give himself into our hands.
Yet another American graduate student, James Ferman, had been in our audience and declared himself willing to be involved in a future production by the Musical Comedy Club. He had had experience of the musical stage while at Cornell. Like Norwood Russell Hanson, he had been in the US air force, although never in combat. With a keen smile and a drophead second-hand MG, he soon took up with Monica Beament, who was, in Groucho Marxist terms, something like the ‘college widow’. A divorcée famed for her lack of inhibitions, she rode round Cambridge, in red slacks with obvious fly-buttons, on a hand-painted bicycle with an unfeminine crossbar. I had acted with her in a production by Miles Malleson of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country.
Malleson was recognisable in British films because of his lack of a chin. He had played the obsequious hangman with the silken cord in Robert Hamer’s Kind Hearts and Coronets. His beautiful wife Constance made him the best-known, and most complaisant, cuckold in the theatre: she was Bertrand Russell’s mistress. I played the part of Turgenev’s sulky artist. Malleson instructed me in tactful direction by asking whether I ‘felt like sitting down’ on a certain line.
After the last night of A Month in the Country, there was a party in a big house somewhere off Jesus Lane. I left my coat in a deep closet and had to go in, and out of sight, to find it. While I was in there, I heard two people, one our business manager, a north Londoner called Derek Taylor, the other John Tanfield, our leading man, who was a star teacher at the Perse School, talking quietly about someone who ‘could be charming when he wants to’ but tended to be ‘a bit too clever for his own good’. I wondered for a minute or so who this vexing person might be. Then Derek said, ‘What can you do? That’s Freddie for you!’ I stayed in the closet until, as movie
people say, they cleared.
Lady at the Wheel was denounced as flash, vulgar and much too American for the taste of Cambridge critics dedicated to the common pursuit of self-importance. Leslie’s rooms became a mecca for chancers of one kind and another. An aspirant literary publisher, Peter Marchant, came for advice on raising funds for a new magazine, in which he promised to feature my work. Peter de Brandt, a handsome, well-funded playboy, appeared in the hope of making contact with some of the pneumatic girls who had rallied so willingly to Leslie’s call. He had been introduced to a beautiful French call girl in the summer vac. Uncertain how to begin, he tried talking about Balzac. The girl looked at her watch, took off some of her clothes and then, ‘as if she were going to pray to me’, made a wanton frontal attack on her client. ‘Well worth the ten pounds.’ I never saw de Brandt again, but I attached his name, slightly modified, to Julie Christie’s demon lover, Miles Brand, played by Laurence Harvey, in Darling.
At the beginning of the following term, I returned to the offices of Varsity and proposed myself as a contributor to the new editor. Like Trevor Chinn, Michael Winner was a curly-haired London Jew of a brasher style than I ever dared or cared to flash. He sported an unreformed accent that owed nothing to Oxbridge phonetics and a slouchy black leather blouson. Before coming up, he had bluffed his way into the job of movie critic for a clutch of suburban newspapers. I never guessed from his impersonation of an upwardly mobile barrow-boy that his father was a very rich man. I played the old Fleet Street hand and was offered a column in the paper. It was no great chore to compose 800 words on weekly topics that might yield a laugh or provoke brief outrage.
Nicholas Tomalin was president-elect of the Union, as well as a joint editor of Granta, in which he had sniped at Lady at the Wheel for selling out to what is now known as ‘product placement’: in a café scene, Colin Cantlie (a general’s son) had asked, in a Teutonic way, for ‘drinking chocolate’. In return, Cadbury’s agreed to buy a full page of advertising in the programme. It seemed an innocuous iniquity, but Nick denounced it as the insidious thin end of venal commercialisation. Envy and moral presumption are the twin propellers of journalism.
Not long afterwards, Tomalin sensationalised his presidency of the Union by inviting Oswald Mosley to come and speak. Mosley’s Fascist past had not disposed him to post-war self-effacement. He advocated his cleansed version of ‘Europeanism’ with the rhetorical adroitness and virile posturing that had won him admirers literally left and right. In a Varsity interview, Nick announced that our soft generation had been intimidated by what amounted to ‘a row of asterisks’ into reacting with incoherent indignation at ideas that we could not articulate. For our political education, Mosley merited a hearing. The Holocaust was never mentioned either in the debate or in print.
The column in which I denounced Master Tomalin appeared after Mosley had paraded the civilised version of himself at the Union. There had been no ugly scenes, although the police were out in some force and the CU Socialist (i.e. Communist) Party had deployed a phalanx of its five or six cadres to cry down the Fascist. I remarked that, while Mosley ‘behaved quite well’, it had been Nick’s crude pleasure to put the cat among the goldfish and the plutonium into the reactor. Ignoring what Mosley’s Fascist friends had done, he depicted as hooligans only those who opposed him. Tomalin’s self-promotion made me quite eager for a cup of honest drinking chocolate. If I had a desire to give Nick a double dose of his own medicine, I had no solemn grudge. My sarcasm owed more to the rhetorical vanities of Cicero and Juvenal than to personal animus. One display of undergraduate grub-street opportunism deserved another. Michael Winner was pleased to report that Nick was consulting his solicitor. I was sure that he was conducting an exercise in intimidation; and I was right: no suit was brought.
A few years later, I had lunch at Overton’s fish restaurant, in Victoria, at a table next to Mosley and his friends. Dressed in a whitish tweedy suit, like a bookie in his Epsom best, he was liver-spotted, thick-bodied and hump-shouldered. His most noticeable feature was the large, jutting nose. He called out in a cultured voice, ‘Two more brandies, waiter,’ and smiled without showing too many uneven, varicoloured teeth. He spoke of ‘Hugh’ (Dalton) and ‘Nye’ (Bevan) and ‘Anthony’ (Eden) with equal familiarity.
My Varsity column’s term of eight issues impelled me to obey the dictum of Byron’s pugilistic coach and ‘mill away right and left’. Under deadline pressure, I found occasion to repeat in print Joe Bain’s allegation that Bob Gottlieb and his wife, like the three Greek mythological crones who shared a single eye, disposed of only one pair of spectacles between them. What fellow citizen of Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott would resent a little knockabout? In fact, my squib made Gottlieb my lifelong and, in due time, powerful enemy. Did my willingness to make him my butt have anything to do with the fact that he was, as I was under the skin, an American Jew?
Gottlieb’s sights were set on a career beyond Cambridge and outside England. He accelerated to literary, rather than theatrical, importance. He joined, and later presided over, the New York publishers Simon & Schuster. In 1987, he was appointed editor of the New Yorker, only to disappoint its owners. They replaced him with Tina Brown, whose cosmetic extravagance goosed the magazine into the Age of Celebrity. Once in an influential position, Gottlieb took remorseless revenge on me for my juvenile squibs by scorning my novels in the US, for which he could be forgiven, though not by me. He had by that time disposed of his first, bespectacled wife.
When I heard that Jim Ferman, whom I scarcely knew, had passed scathing comment on the witlessness of Lady at the Wheel, I used journalistic licence to refer to him as ‘Grim Jim’. As my deadline approached, even the beautiful Joan Rowlands, with whom I played tennis on the Newnham grass court, was labelled ‘the Bakewell Tart’ with Grub Street lack of scruple. The celebrated future Baroness Bakewell took it well, and I was glad; but I learned how easily journalism becomes a solvent of loyalties.
I took my cue from Bernard Levin’s pseudonymous column in The Spectator. His ‘Taper’ was the scourge of the resurgent Tories. The attorney general, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, had been promptly, not all that subtly, dubbed ‘Sir Reginald Bullying-Manner’; Sir Hartley Shawcross was re-sectioned into ‘Sir Shortly Floor-Cross’, which was indeed apt: the suave ‘socialist’ lawyer who had said, in 1945, ‘We are the masters now’ was soon to rally to the capitalist cause and became the chief legal pundit for Shell Oil. My mother went shopping with his wife in Putney High Street.
David Gore-Lloyd was absent from Montagu Road during most of the summer term of 1954. Diagnosed with testicular cancer, he had to go into hospital for the treatment then current for what is now one of the more easily cured forms of carcinoma. The bedroom above mine and Beetle’s was taken over, at least some of the time, by little Dudy Foulds and her very tall lover John Nimmo. He walked her around Cambridge with his hand resting on the top of her head. At night, they made protracted love directly above our heads. ‘Our gal Rosemary Clooney’ singing on the American Forces Network was not enough to drown the sound of their accelerating bed. When David Gore-Lloyd returned, briefly, it was at the wheel of a grey Ford Popular, a present from his parents. It had a vertically striated metal radiator and a crank for emergency starts. Believing that he was cured, David drove us to Royston for celebratory tea in a nice hotel.
Beetle’s job at the Appointments Board was not unduly testing. Jack Davies took her to Lord’s and showed her the mementos in the Long Room. He wore his handkerchief up his sleeve and referred to his son as ‘the boy’. The other secretaries treated ‘Miss Glatt’ politely, but she became aware, as she consulted the cabinets in which were filed the confidential details of undergraduate job-seekers and their possible employers, that Davies’s colleagues took candid appraisal to anti-Semitic lengths. One of our acquaintances was ticketed as ‘looks Jewy and wears Jewy-cut clothes’. Nor were prospective employers spared: ‘Looks like a Jewish Mr Truman.’ Jack Davies was in
nocent of these routine reflexes; but Beetle was sufficiently indignant to take discreet copies.
During the vacations, I returned like any creeping Turk to Manor Fields. I purloined the phrase ‘creeping Turk’ from a poem in the works of T. E. Hulme, a pugnacious Johnian of proto-fascistic tendencies acquired mainly from French sources. Hulme was killed at the age of thirty-three in the Great War. His Speculations were lodged in a trenchant, abrasive volume of philosophical pensées, inspired by Georges Sorel. His ‘Complete Poems’, consisting of a dozen or so pieces in a bony symbolist style, supplied the appendix. At once anarchist, playboy and stylist, Hulme was a coiner of tellingly far-fetched phrases: one poem begins, ‘In finesse of fiddles found I ecstasy’. It supplies an apt rubric for modern financiers and politicians. One apocryphal story tells of Hulme pissing through the railings of Berkeley Square in the early hours. Approached by a constable in corrective mode, Hulme said, ‘I would have you know that you are addressing a member of the Middle Class.’ It is claimed that the constable said, ‘Beg pardon, sir,’ and folded away his notebook.
During my absences, Beetle continued to work in Cambridge. She did not lack handsome company, but I never doubted her fidelity, even when she was, unsurprisingly, found attractive by ‘Tadge’ Leadley, Olympic oarsman and president of the CU Boat Club; and not only by him. Her presence in Cambridge was sufficiently remarkable for her to be noticed, black hair streaming, as she pedalled, long-legged, past St John’s on her way to Chaucer Road. I was told that Guy Lee, who had taught me Latin verse composition in my first year, met my tutor, R. L. Howland, and said to him, ‘Do you know about Freddie Raphael living with this beautiful dark-haired girl out in Montagu Road?’
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