by Craig Brown
74 Except for George, who briefly meets him backstage at Madison Square Garden in the early ’70s.
75 Cogan is famous for her bouffant hairdo, her glittery dresses – she sometimes changes costumes eleven times over the course of a show – and her novelty records like ‘I Can’t Tell a Waltz from a Tango’. Her song ‘Never Do a Tango with an Eskimo’ is a huge hit in Iceland. Paul McCartney is to be heard playing tambourine on her single ‘I Knew Right Away’. After writing ‘Yesterday’, McCartney is worried that the tune is so simple that it must already exist, but when he plays it to Alma Cogan, she assures him it is original.
76 In West End hotels, generally registering as ‘Mr and Mrs Winston’.
77 Or perhaps one should: six months later, Coward’s rage has not abated: ‘I am INFURIATED by those bloody little Beatles going to Buckingham Palace and all those “Teenagers” knocking policemen’s hats off and Paul Macartney [sic] saying the Queen was just a “Mum”. I DO know what the younger generation is coming to non mi piace at all, at all.’
78 Youssoupoff was known as Count Felix Elston while he was an undergraduate at Oxford University.
79 There are many different accounts of Rasputin’s assassination, most by those who were not there to witness it. Sixty years later, his daughter Maria claims that prior to her father’s murder, Youssoupoff ‘used him sexually’, and that after it ‘with the skill of a surgeon three elegant young members of the nobility castrated Grigori Rasputin and flung the severed penis across the room’. Maria’s co-author, Patte Barham, claims to have been shown the penis in question on a visit to Paris, preserved in a velvet case and guarded by a group of White Russian ladies.
Of this notably long-winded murder, Leon Trotsky later priggishly observes that, ‘It was carried out in the manner of a scenario designed for people of bad taste.’ Maria Rasputin agrees. After reading Youssoupoff’s account of the murder, she complains, ‘To me it is atrocious, and I do not believe that any decent person could help feeling a sentiment of disgust in reading the savage ferocity of this story.’ She condemns Youssoupoff, saying that he ‘vomited forth the vilest calumnies against my father’. In an unexpected move, this cabaret-singer-turned-lion-tamer is to name her two pet dogs Youssou and Pov.
80 Apparently this was not the only trick he kept up his sleeve. ‘I remember his strange ability to transform himself instantaneously, like a magician of old: strike the ground and up jumps a grey wolf, roll over and up flies a black raven, fall like a stone to the ground – and away creeps a green wood goblin,’ recalls V.A. Jukovskaya, a devoted member of Rasputin’s circle.
81 Colonel Roosevelt, as he likes to be styled, knows all about miraculous escapes. Campaigning two years earlier in Milwaukee for his own Progressive Party, he is shot at by a saloonkeeper by the name of John Schrank. The bullet passes through his steel spectacle case, and then through a folded fifty-page speech he is carrying in his jacket, before lodging in his chest wall. A keen big-game hunter, Roosevelt correctly determines that, as he isn’t coughing blood, the bullet hasn’t reached his lung, and so decides to carry on with his speech before calling in at a hospital. The speech lasts ninety minutes, during which blood pours down his shirt. The bullet remains buried in Roosevelt’s chest muscle for the rest of his life.
82 ‘You must always remember that the President is about six,’ says the British Ambassador to the United States, Cecil Spring Rice, who was Roosevelt’s best man at his wedding to Edith Carrow. Spring Rice is today best known as the author of the poem ‘I Vow to Thee My Country’, later set to music by Gustav Holst.
83 His escapology, in particular, baffles everyone at the time, but years later an onlooker seems to have cracked it. Before any death-defying stunt, Houdini would insist on being kissed by his wife, just in case he never saw her again. Having been manacled, handcuffed, wrapped in chains and then in a sheet, and searched by police, he would kiss his wife before being lowered into a pit. Earth was then shovelled on top of him. For two minutes, the crowd stared at the ground, and then suddenly two hands would appear, followed by the rest of Harry Houdini.
‘It took me years to work that one out,’ says the bystander, who in 1941 had been sitting in a cinema watching You’re in the Army Now, the film in which Regis Toomey gives Jane Wyman a three-minute kiss – the longest in cinematic history. ‘Halfway through that scene the answer hit me. I found myself thinking, “With all that kissing time, Mrs Houdini could have slipped Harry an entire bunch of keys.”’
84 In 1941, five years before his death, Wells suggests his own epitaph should be: ‘I told you so. You damned fools.’
85 Wells is to meet three further US presidents: Harding (‘all loud geniality and hand-shaking’), Hoover (‘a sickly overworked and overwhelmed man’) and FDR (‘something more than open-minded ... the most effective transmitting instrument for the coming of the new world order’).
86 George Bernard Shaw is scornful of this interview, believing that Wells is too keen on the sound of his own voice, and insufficiently reverential. ‘Wells trots into the Kremlin and tells Stalin that his head is over-stuffed with some absurd nonsense called class warfare ... Wells does not listen to Stalin: he only waits with suffering patience to begin again when Stalin stops. He has not come to be instructed by Stalin, but to instruct him.’ Stalin is, he adds, ‘a first-rate listener’, while Wells is ‘the worst listener in the world’.
Shaw’s enthusiasm for Stalin is both more cold-blooded and more realistic than Wells’s. ‘We cannot afford to give ourselves moral airs when our most enterprising neighbour [the USSR] humanely and judiciously liquidates a handful of exploiters and speculators to make the world safe for honest men,’ he declares, at the height of Stalin’s purges.
87 Ekaterina Kuskova.
88 In 1990 it is renamed Nizhni Novgorod.
89 Respectively, Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars and Defence Commissar.
90 He has a library of some 20,000 volumes, and a particular liking for Zola, Chekhov and Galsworthy. It also includes The Last of the Mohicans. In an unusually carefree mood, he once greeted a young translator with the words, ‘Big chief greets paleface.’
91 In both senses: he is born Aleksey Maximovich Peshkov. He considers his surname, Peshkov, meaning ‘pawn’, inappropriate, and so in 1892 he reverts to the nickname his father was given: Gorky, meaning ‘bitter’.
92 After Tolstoy’s death, Gorky writes a long and detailed memoir of him, but he leaves out various incidents he has mentioned to others. For instance, he once told Victor Shklovsky of the time when ‘Tolstoy’s daughters brought a rabbit with a broken leg up to the balcony. “Oh, the poor little rabbit!” Leo Nikolaievich came down the stairs. Almost without stopping, he took the rabbit’s head in his big hand and, with the practised movement of a professional hunter, throttled it with two fingers.’
93 He has an element of the wind-up merchant. ‘Tolstoy would spend many years of his life trying to persuade people that Shakespeare was no good; that Jesus wasn’t a Christian; that folk songs were better than Beethoven and that property is theft’ – A.N. Wilson.
94 Five years later, he has changed his mind, writing to another brother, Anatolii, that he has recently read Anna Karenina all the way through for the first time ‘with an enthusiasm bordering on the fanatic’.
95 It is at the Garden of Allah that a friend of Robert Benchley tells him that drink is a slow poison, prompting Benchley to reply, ‘That’s all right. I’m in no hurry.’ Humorists are attracted by the irreverent atmosphere of the Garden of Allah, among them Arthur Sheekman, one of the Marx Brothers’ scriptwriters, who plays Cecil B. DeMille’s The Crusades over and over again in his bungalow simply so that he can hear Loretta Young say to her husband, Richard the Lionheart, ‘Ya gotta save Christianity, Richard, ya gotta!’
96 ‘There is a character who goes by the same name I do who is kind of a celebrity,’ he writes in Harpo Speaks!. ‘He wears a ratty red wig and a shredded raincoat. He can�
�t talk, but he makes idiotic faces, honks a horn, whistles, blows bubbles, ogles and leaps after blondes and acts out all kinds of hokey charades. I don’t begrudge this character his fame and fortune. He worked damn hard for every cent and every curtain call he ever got. I don’t begrudge him anything – because he started out with no talent at all. If you’ve ever seen a Marx Brothers picture, you know the difference between him and me. When he’s chasing a girl across the screen it’s Him. When he sits down to play the harp, it’s Me. Whenever I touched the strings of the harp, I stopped being an actor.’
97 He left school aged eight.
98 Later that same week, Harpo drives Shaw in his open jalopy to Cannes, where a friend of Shaw called Rex Ingraham is directing a movie called The Three Passions. Ingraham sets Shaw and Harpo to work as extras, playing billiards together. Alas, the scene is cut from the final movie. ‘No audience could ever mistake us for extras, lost in the crowd. The way we shot pool we could only be taken for what we were – a couple of ringers, a couple of sharpies.’
99 Founders of the London School of Economics (1895) and the New Statesman (1913).
100 At lunch with the Shaws, Russell would be filled with envy of Shaw’s delicious vegetarian meal, compared with the drabber meat dish set before his guests. He would also notice the ‘look of unutterable boredom’ that used to appear on the face of Mrs Shaw as she found herself having to sit through one of her husband’s well-trodden anecdotes.
Shaw’s insensitivity and heightened sense of competition, evidenced on those Monmouthshire railway stations, is never to wane. At a lunch held in honour of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, Russell witnesses Shaw explaining Bergson’s philosophy to Bergson, and brooking no interruption from Bergson himself. When Bergson mildly interjects, ‘Ah, no-o! It is not quite zat!’ Shaw is unabashed, replying, ‘Oh, my dear fellow, I understand your philosophy much better than you do.’
Bergson, recalls Russell, ‘clenched his fists and nearly exploded with rage, but, with a great effort, he controlled himself, and Shaw’s expository monologue continued’.
101 ‘And there was I topping the bill for merely being the Fuckable Object,’ she observes about the film in question, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines.
102 As a child, Bertrand Russell met Gladstone, so Sarah Miles, born in 1941, is just one meeting away from Gladstone, born in 1809. Gladstone himself used to breakfast with the elderly William Wordsworth, who was born in 1770. On the BBC programme Face to Face on March 4th 1959, Russell reads out an obituary of himself that he wrote in 1937. It begins, ‘By the death of the 3rd Earl Russell, or Bertrand Russell, as he preferred to call himself, at the age of ninety, a link with the very distant past has been severed. His grandfather, Lord John Russell, the Victorian Prime Minister, visited Napoleon on Elba. His maternal grandmother was a friend of the Young Pretender’s widow ...’
103 Throughout their affair, Olivier gets her to call him ‘Lionel Kerr’. He explains that Lionel means ‘Lionheart’. Decades later, Miles dedicates the middle of her three volumes of memoirs to ‘Lionel Kerr’.
104 Byron lived in Albany with a macaw and a maid called Mrs Mule. Other past and future residents include Lord Snowdon, Terence Rattigan, Graham Greene, Thomas Beecham, Bruce Chatwin, T.S. Eliot, Dame Edith Evans, Alan Clark MP and William Gladstone.
105 On which Heath will one day trot out ‘The Red Flag’ in response to a request from Vic Feather, at a supper party in Albany for trade union leaders. ‘It put the seal on a jolly evening, although I must say that Ted did not play “The Red Flag” very well,’ remembers Jack Jones.
106 Prime Minister Harold Wilson.
107 In his autobiography, written forty years later, Heath fails to record this meeting, or the advice he was once offered by London’s most fashionable young actor. As a young man, he yearned to be someone different, someone rather more like Terence Stamp. ‘I have a desire, perhaps when analysed not very rational or even sane, to get “hard” like other men,’ he confided to his diary while he was awaiting his army call-up in March 1940, ‘to take the knocks they can take, to go wining and whoring with them. Yet whenever I meet them I feel repelled by their lack of intelligence and concern only with things like pay, leave and food. Perhaps my nature’s different.’
108 He remains standoffish for the rest of his life. ‘He has no social graces whatever. He is not faintly interested in women, probably not men either,’ complains James Lees-Milne to his diary in July 1974, after attending a dinner party at which Heath talked across his female neighbour for the entire meal. Four years later, Lees-Milne encounters him again. ‘He looked like a figure cut from a turnip, as it were for All Hallows E’en, quite square and pointed, his profile, nose and mouth sharp gashes.’
109 Sickert never loses his interest in the sexual act. At a Henry Moore exhibition at the Leicester Galleries, Moore gestures to one of his nudes – a large stone with a hole in the middle – and tells Sickert earnestly that he ‘had to use a very special tool to do her’. Sickert considers the sculpture before replying, ‘I think I would need one too.’
110 Three years later, he is to set eyes on two other famous men. Travelling in Germany in the summer of 1937, he receives a chance invitation to attend a Nazi rally in Nuremberg. He is placed in a gangway seat, so that when Adolf Hitler marches alone up the centre aisle, he almost brushes Heath’s shoulder. ‘He looked much smaller than I had imagined and very ordinary. His face had little colour and the uniform seemed more important than the man.’ The next day, Heath is invited to a party given by Heinrich Himmler, who he describes as ‘peering rather short-sightedly through his pince-nez. I remember him for his soft, wet, flabby handshake.’ He also meets Goebbels, ‘his pinched face white and sweating – evil personified’.
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.