by Craig Brown
27 After the initial failure of Fantasia, Disney tells his studio chiefs, ‘We’re through with caviar. From now on it’s mashed potatoes and gravy.’ Yet no Hollywood studio ever entirely shook off the quest for respectability. Stravinsky likes to tell the story of Arnold Schoenberg, who turns down a fortune to supply music for Irving Thalberg’s The Good Earth when it comes with impossible artistic conditions attached. Schoenberg refuses, declaring, ‘You kill me to keep me from starving to death.’
28 Recordings still exist of the daily conferences between the scriptwriters and P.L. Travers. On the first day, they start from the beginning: ‘17 Cherry Tree Lane, the Banks household is in uproar ... The father comes home to find the children misbehaving. Mr Banks talks of his wife’s job.’
‘Just a minute,’ says Travers. ‘That’s, that’s, not job, ah, ah ...’
‘Domain?’
‘Er, yes.’
‘Responsibility?’
‘Well, we can’t have job.’
29 Somehow, Walt Disney manages to keep her from meeting Dick van Dyke. By mid-1963, with filming under way, Julie Andrews writes to Travers telling her not to worry about anything, adding that Dick van Dyke is good as Bert, but that ‘he will be an “individual” cockney instead of a “regular type” cockney’. Disney originally wanted Cary Grant to play the part, but he turned down the role, as did Laurence Harvey and Anthony Newley.
30 When Walt Disney is dying of lung cancer, he asks the film’s composers, the Sherman brothers, to play his favourite song from the soundtrack when they drop by every Friday. Each time they play ‘Feed the Birds’, Disney goes over to the window and weeps.
31 He may have been born in 1866, or in 1877, in any year in between these two dates, or indeed either side of them.
32 Today, these beliefs may seem a little far-fetched, but in their day they attracted a good many followers, among them Georgia O’Keeffe and Katherine Mansfield.
33 Stalin’s daughter Svetlana, who marries the husband of Olgivanna’s late daughter (curiously also called Svetlana), compares her running of Taliesin to Stalin’s running of the Soviet Union. ‘This hierarchical system was appalling: the widow at the top, then the board of directors (a formality); then her own close inner circle, making all the real decisions; then working architects – the real working horses; at the bottom, students who paid high sums to be admitted, only to be sent the next day to work in the kitchen to peel potatoes ... Mrs Wright’s word was law. She had to be adored and worshipped and flattered as often as possible.’
34 In 1954, J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the FBI, reports in a secret memorandum that Gurdjieff is brainwashing Frank Lloyd Wright. He is apparently unaware that Gurdjieff has been dead these past five years.
35 Later, when cheekily asked on a talk show, ‘What do you think of Miss Monroe as architecture?’ Wright replies, ‘I think Miss Monroe’s architecture is extremely good architecture.’
36 Wright also incorporates an elaborate nursery suite in his plans, but thirty years later Miller fails to mention this detail in his autobiography.
37 Hearing this, Marilyn’s long-suffering director Billy Wilder remarks that Khrushchev should direct her next picture.
38 Throughout the racy can-can routine, involving a male dancer diving under the skirt of Shirley MacLaine and emerging holding her red knickers, the Russian Premier appears to be having a whale of a time, but he later denounces it as immoral, pornographic exploitation, adding that ‘a person’s face is more beautiful than his backside’.
39 Her husband Arthur Miller, who was not invited, gives a rather diplomatic account of Marilyn’s opinion of Khrushchev in his autobiography. ‘The Soviet chairman was very obviously smitten with her, and she in turn liked him for his plainness,’ he writes. Miller’s achievements are in many ways overshadowed by his association with Marilyn. ‘When Arthur Miller shook my hand I could only think that this was the hand that had once cupped the breasts of Marilyn Monroe,’ recalls Barry Humphries in July 2010.
40 Harold Macmillan describes him as ‘a kind of mixture between Peter the Great and Lord Beaverbrook’.
41 Yet behind closed doors, his talk seems to be less about missiles than about his coiffure. When the British secret service bugs his room at Claridge’s, they are, according to Peter Wright, surprised to hear nothing about the Cold War, ‘just long monologues addressed to his valet on the subject of his attire. He was an extraordinarily vain man. He stood in front of the mirror preening himself for hours at a time, and fussing about his hair parting.’
42 He is to omit this interjection from his memoirs, In My Way, perhaps thinking it insufficiently statesmanlike.
43 Brown has a knack for putting his foot in it. As Foreign Secretary in 1967, he conducts a European tour in pursuit of British membership of the European Economic Community. Arriving at the British Embassy in Brussels, he is greeted by the Ambassador.
‘Secretary of State – welcome to my embassy.’
‘It’s not your bloody embassy – it’s mine.’
At the end of a day of talks, the Belgian government throws a grand banquet in honour of Brown and his delegation. As the party is breaking up, Brown blocks the main door, waves his hands in the air and says, ‘Wait! I have something to say!’ He then says, ‘While you have all been wining and dining here tonight, who has been defending Europe? I’ll tell you who’s been defending Europe – the British Army. And where, you may ask, are the soldiers of the Belgian Army tonight? I’ll tell you where they are. They’re in the brothels of Brussels!’
‘We got him out of the room,’ recalls an onlooker, ‘but by that time the Belgians, who’d been shifting uncomfortably from one foot to another during this extraordinary outburst, were all absolutely frozen with embarrassment.’
44 Though Harold Macmillan, the leader of the Conservative Party at the next general election, fails to reciprocate his admiration, at least in private. ‘How can this fat, vulgar man with his pig eyes and ceaseless flow of talk be the head – the aspirant Tsar – for all those millions of people?’ he asks.
45 And, such is the unfairness of posterity, they have guaranteed that he is remembered long after his more sober colleagues have been forgotten. Stories illustrating both characteristics are legion. Presented to Princess Margaret at a reception, Brown kneels on the floor to kiss her hand, only to find himself unable to get up again. On another occasion, just as he is sitting down to a formal dinner, he makes what his biographer describes as ‘a salacious suggestion’ to the wife of an ambassador to the Court of St James’s. ‘Pas avant la soupe, Monsieur Brown,’ she replies.
An unverifiable story involves Brown’s official visit to Brazil in his capacity as Foreign Secretary. He is said to have attended a glittering reception at the Palace of the Dawn. The military officers were in full dress uniform and the ambassadors in court dress. A member of his party takes up the story: ‘As we entered, George made a bee-line for this gorgeously crimson-clad figure, and said, “Excuse me, but may I have the pleasure of this dance?” There was a terrible silence for a moment before the guest, who knew who he was, replied, “There are three reasons, Mr Brown, why I will not dance with you. The first, I fear, is that you’ve had a little too much to drink. The second is that this is not, as you suppose, a waltz that the orchestra is playing but the Peruvian national anthem, for which you should be standing to attention. And the third reason why we may not dance, Mr Brown, is that I am the Cardinal Archbishop of Lima.”’ The story is occasionally told of other notorious drinkers.
When the General Secretary of the Labour Party, Len Williams, is appointed Governor-General of Mauritius in 1968, Brown corners his old enemy in the House of Lords bar. ‘Tell me, Len, when you’re Governor-General, will you have to wear one of those plumed hats?’ he asks.
‘Yes,’ replies Williams.
‘Well, I hope your fucking feathers all fall out.’
46 Martino has recently confirmed that the mafia put pressure on Francis Fo
rd Coppola to cast him as Johnny Fontane. Coppola had originally cast Vic Damone. ‘There was no horse’s head, but I had ammunition ... I had to step on some toes to get people to realise that I was in the effing movie. I went to my godfather, Russ Bufalino,’ he says, referring to the East Coast crime boss. When word got around that Martino had obtained the part, he claims to have been ‘completely ostracised on the set ... Brando was the only one who didn’t ignore me’.
47 Others take a more easy-going attitude. On the night before Dunne flies out to LA, he bumps into Yoko Ono at a party in New York, and tells her he is going to be covering the trial of Phil Spector. ‘She smiled sweetly and said, “Oh, Phil,” in the most affectionate manner. I said, “What do you mean, ‘Oh, Phil’? He pulled a gun on your husband.” Yoko said, “Oh, that story has become so exaggerated. He took out the gun and shot it in the ceiling.”’
48 ‘He was demonic,’ writes Nik Cohn, prophetically, in his landmark 1970 history of pop, Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom. ‘He’d take one good song and add one good group, and then he’d blow it all up sky-high into a huge mock-symphony, bloated and bombasted into Wagnerian proportions. Magnificent, chaotic din ... huge outpourings of spite and paranoia, rage and frustration and visioned apocalypse. And if you were teenage, you probably felt exactly the same way, and you loved it.’
49 The Chelsea is the setting for many songs, among them ‘Chelsea Girl’ by Nico, ‘Chelsea Morning’ by Joni Mitchell (which, in turn, gave Chelsea Clinton her name), ‘Third Week in Chelsea’ by Jefferson Airplane, ‘Hotel Chelsea Nights’ by Ryan Adams, and ‘Sara’ by Bob Dylan, which includes the line ‘Staying up for days in the Chelsea Hotel, writing “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” for you’.
50 ‘I hoped that Janis might have been in for a long haul the way that Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell have been but you kind of knew that the candle was burning at both ends and she probably wouldn’t make it. Just in the way that she sang and the way that she lived. But at the time we didn’t know that you couldn’t do that forever. It’s like now they say that cigarettes and sugar and even white bread can kill. But we didn’t even know that heroin could kill you,’ Leonard Cohen says in an interview with Q magazine in 1991.
51 He co-writes Joplin’s song ‘Mercedes Benz’.
52 Janis Joplin also covers the song for inclusion on her Pearl album a few days before her death in October 1970. Kristofferson does not find out that she has covered it until after her death (the first time he hears it is the day after she dies).
53 Perhaps odder than their shared ‘J’s is the fact that all three of them died at the age of twenty-seven.
54 At a party in London in the mid-1960s, Ginsberg is wearing nothing but a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign attached to himself when John Lennon arrives with his first wife. ‘You don’t do that in front of birds,’ complains Lennon, and leaves the room.
55 Though when Ginsberg offered Dame Edith Sitwell heroin she declined, saying, ‘It brings me out in spots.’
56 Joe Orton, Kenneth Williams, Noël Coward, Tennessee Williams, Paul Bowles, William Burroughs and Ronald Kray are among those who take advantage of its charms.
57 The conversation continues:
Burroughs: Do you remember the alligator that Paul and Janie Bowles had in Tangier? Such a delicate little thing.
Bacon: She died there, you know, Janie.
Burroughs: Didn’t she die in Malaga?
Bacon: Died in a madhouse in Malaga, it must have been the worst thing in the world. Looked after by nuns, can you imagine anything more horrible?
58 Servants, too, find Princess Margaret a trial, but they also take pleasure in transforming mis-demeanour into anecdote. The former royal butler Guy Hunting recalls the uphill task faced by the Princess’s dresser, Isobel Mathieson, each morning. ‘During her many years with Princess Margaret, the biggest challenge Isobel faced each day was separating the royal body from its bed. On a non-engagement day (and there were many) the 10 o’clock tray of tea seldom did the trick. Opening the curtains produced a moan but no serious improvement. Only after the teapot was replenished two or three times was the order likely to be given for the bath to be run.’
59 ‘I doubt I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger’ – Kenneth Tynan. ‘Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it’ – Truman Capote.
60 Capote aged fifty-nine, from drinking too much; and Tynan, aged fifty-three, from smoking too much.
61 On the other hand, Tynan’s first wife, Elaine Dundy, considers the cause of Tynan’s outrage less principled. ‘His pique at Truman was just jealousy. He wanted to write that book In Cold Blood himself. What was he doing – Oh! Calcutta!’ she tells Capote’s biographer, George Plimpton. ‘Oh, no, it was just jealousy.’
62 Also Claudette Colbert, the Maharajah and Maharani of Jaipur, Rose Kennedy, Virgil Thomson, Irving Berlin and Anita Loos. It is the hottest ticket in town. On the big night, a bellboy at the nearby Regency Hotel is overheard saying, ‘Boy, is this town full of phonies! Do you know, there are people hanging around here in black and white clothes who ain’t even going to Truman’s party.’
Cecil Beaton writes in his diary: ‘It seems such a terrible waste of money to spend so much on one evening ... What is Truman trying to prove?’ But he then cheerfully flies across the Atlantic, just to be there.
63 Though he is not without his own superstitions. ‘I have to add up all numbers: there are some people I never telephone because their number adds up to an unlucky figure,’ he tells the Paris Review in 1957. ‘I won’t accept a hotel room for the same reason. I will not tolerate the presence of yellow roses – which is sad because they’re my favourite flower. I can’t allow three cigarette butts in the same ashtray. Won’t travel on a plane with two nuns. Won’t begin or end anything on a Friday.’
64 Peggy Lee has performed for a president before. In May 1962, she sings at the birthday party for President Kennedy at Madison Square Garden, but the evening is chiefly remembered for the act that followed her – Marilyn Monroe singing a breathy ‘Happy Birthday’ wearing a dress Adlai Stevenson described as ‘skin and beads’. Other performers outshone by Monroe that night include Jack Benny, Jimmy Durante, Ella Fitzgerald and Maria Callas.
65 Not all presidents are so standoffish. On June 20th 1983, Tammy Wynette sings for President Reagan at a catfish dinner in Jackson, Mississippi. After her performance, the President is photographed kissing her. ‘Ronald Reagan definitely had a thing for Tammy,’ says her hairdresser, Jan Smith. ‘After it was over, Tammy said to me, “Oh, my God, Jan, that was so embarrassing! He swabbed my tonsils!” Well, Nancy Reagan got real out of joint about it.’
66 It is another eighteen years before Peggy Lee is invited to perform again at the White House, this time at dinner for another French President, François Mitterrand. The thirty guests include Jerry Lewis, Oscar de la Renta, Rudolf Nureyev and Jacques Cousteau. It all goes fine.
67 Who, incidentally, was once chauffeur to Sir Winston Churchill.
68 Presley misses an earlier opportunity to meet the President. He has been invited to perform at the White House, but on hearing that no payment is involved, his manager, Colonel Parker, refuses on his behalf.
69 The lead singer of Jefferson Airplane, Grace Slick, is denied admission to a tea party at the White House for alumni of Tricia Nixon’s alma mater, Finch College, where she has also been a pupil. It is perhaps just as well: before setting off, she calls Abbie Hoffman. ‘We decided Nixon needed about 600 micrograms of acid. It’s very small so I could have put it into his teacup, and it’s tasteless. But I never got in, not because I wasn’t invited but because they recognised Grace Slick unfortunately, and they said you can’t come in because you’re on the FBI list, I guess because of some of my lyrics.’
70 ‘We all wanted to be Elvis,’ Lennon recalls. ‘Before Elvis, there was nothing.’
71 Colonel Parker has secretly been keeping the Beatles sweet, sending them
a congratulatory telegram after their Madison Square Garden show, and a consignment of four cowboy suits, complete with real six-shooters and holsters.
72 Other than Wild in the Country (1962), in which he plays a troubled young man from a dysfunctional family who hopes to become a writer. It loses money.
73 In the long run, this meeting does little to lessen Elvis’s natural suspicion towards the Beatles. An official memo of a tour by Elvis of the FBI building in Washington on December 30th 1970 notes that ‘Presley indicated that he is of the opinion that the Beatles laid the groundwork for many of the problems we are having with young people by their filthy unkempt appearances and suggestive music while entertaining in this country during the early and middle 1960s.’