by Gully Wells
IN ADDITION TO HER HUMANITARIAN concern for the Lakota and her energetic social life, my mother was also busy with her work as a journalist and, increasingly, as a regular guest on television talk shows. Imagine getting paid—and paid very well—to argue, shock, hector, and harangue your way into millions of living rooms across the country, when it was something you had been doing all your life for free! It was too good to be true. My mother “knew from talk,” as they say in New York, and she was a television producer’s dream booking for the same reason that William Miller found her so fascinating. Clever, rude, witty, and above all opinionated, she sparkled even more brightly in front of a television camera than around the dinner table. Fame may be the ultimate aphrodisiac, but it also has a strong autoerotic component. I think being on television made her feel sexy—and powerful—at a time when she was beginning to worry about the horror of approaching middle age (which enveloped you in its sweaty menopausal grip a good decade earlier than it does now).
Just after Nick was born she started appearing five nights a week on a program called Three after Six. The format could not have been simpler: Invite three journalists into the studio and switch on the camera while they yacked on about that day’s news. It was live, which gave it an added frisson, and the producers tried to goad the guests into an argument—never a problem with my mother—by mixing hard-core Tories with permissive society socialists. My mother’s instinctive mistrust of authority made her deeply suspicious of all cops, and I remember watching her one evening—just after some Goya had been stolen from the Duke of Wellington—let fly on what the police would do next: “What they want is to get this poor hopeless little nut into the station and beat him up and let him fall down a couple of flights of stairs, and then say: ‘Well, we’ve dealt with that ruffian.’ In that splendid police way.”
Three after Six was a straightforward chat show, but Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life, on which she also appeared, was rather more ambitious. Hosted by the ubiquitous David Frost, it combined satirical skits, music, and appalling one-liners—especially written for Frost by his tame hacks—with the guest yackers. It was on this program that Freddie had made a total fool of himself one Valentine’s Day, discussing the mysteries of love with a flirtatious Eartha Kitt, who had cooed in his ear—“Oh, Professor”—while he droned on about the troubadours. Between their frequent television appearances, her newspaper column, and Freddie’s persona as a public intellectual, they became surprisingly well known. Instead of writing about other people my mother was now the one being interviewed and profiled in magazines and newspapers. I suspect that she liked it much better that way.
Freddie must have been vaguely aware that the times they were a changing, but actually not too much changed for him. He spoke up against the Vietnam War, supported all the usual liberal causes, believed people should do whatever they wanted so long as it didn’t hurt anybody else, and had always slept around: So what did the sixties have to teach him? As a respectable gentleman of sixty who was au fond part of the Establishment, he loathed any form of chaos, and had no interest at all in any of the wilder aspects of that thrilling epoch. Not so my mother. She felt that the world had—finally—come around to her way of thinking. Boats were rocked, royals mocked, rules challenged, satire boomed, the Labour Party ruled, skirts shrank, students revolted, and everybody got high. The satirical review Beyond the Fringe, which our neighbors Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett had written and performed with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in the early sixties, was part of the same wave that created Private Eye magazine and its general piss-taking of … the Establishment. The dreariness and conformity of the fifties had been swept away by a whole new set of attitudes Time magazine conveniently shoved under that capacious psychedelic umbrella it called “Swinging London.”
Within the dynamic of my mother and Freddie’s marriage, the sixties had a lot to answer for. Increasingly she started viewing him as an uptight old fart stuck in the past, while he began to see her as a loudmouthed harridan swept up in the idiocies of the present. And neither of them was entirely wrong.
In her novel Jane, which she started writing in 1970, she describes the heroine’s posh boyfriend, Anthony, like this:
In bed he was lovely. When not in bed, he was too English. He never helped do the dishes. He never carried things, not even potatoes. If Jane started the Times crossword puzzle and put it down even just to answer the phone, he’d finish it. In ink.
If he took a shower he always let the curtain hang outside the tub and couldn’t understand why it made her cross. If he took a bath he’d leave his facecloth unwrung-out and folded in a neat square on top of the soap, where they fused in a cold slime. He used her toothbrush, too. But this could have been a genuine cultural difference; she had known enough Englishmen to know by now that they all used whatever toothbrush happened to be there, even if it was a wet one.
Anthony’s other main drawback is that he is emotionally remote. Detached from, and not really interested in, other people’s feelings, he is hardly any more familiar with his own. And, having gone through the usual upper-class mill of nannies, prep school, and Eton, he has never begun to solve the impenetrable mystery of what goes on between women’s ears, as opposed to their legs.
After long stretches with Anthony you got the feeling you’d been playing tennis against a brick wall. The ball came back each time you hit it—sure—and right there that’s more than you can say about playing tennis with people. But when you play a wall the only energy in the game is your own. You have to begin it. You have to keep score. You have to decide when the game is over and who, if anybody, won. And it’s only you that gets sweaty and tired.
What you can say in favor of playing with a wall is that it never says no or complains. And it never plays any better or worse than the time before; you know where you are with a wall. The catch is, though, that the wall never really gives a damn. It’s like children who go all limp and dull-eyed and say, “I don’t care,” when you ask them if they want an ice-cream cone. Except with them it’s probably a primitive hedge against the possibility that the offer of the ice-cream cone may not be genuine. The wall, alas, really means it.
This was, of course, a portrait of Freddie, the Aspergian snail. Freddie’s shell was always his work, and when he was writing, his ferocious powers of concentration meant that he noticed absolutely nothing of what went on around him. But even when he wasn’t working, he didn’t notice a whole lot more. That was how he had been when she first fell in love with him, and that was how he remained when she fell out of love with him. He didn’t change, and why should he, even assuming he could have? She may have found this exasperating, but Nick was clever enough to spot what a huge asset this character trait could be in a doting father.
The routine on Saturday mornings went like this. Freddie would have his tea, toast, and The Times, followed by his customary session in the bathroom—enlivened by William’s all-too-fleeting appearance—and then he would settle down to work in his study. Sitting at a big round table, his back to the window, twiddling his silver chain in his silken hands, he would get so carried away by the question of ontology and relativism, the relation between experience and theory, and the extent to which what counts for us in the world depends on our conceptual system that he wouldn’t notice that his son had been standing beside him for a good five minutes. Nick wanted his pocket money and he’d quite like it now, if his father didn’t mind.
“Oh darling, I’m so sorry,” and Freddie would hand over a five-pound note, without taking his eyes off the piece of paper—covered in his own inimitable and incomprehensible blue-black squiggles—in front of him. Ten minutes later, Nick would be back.
“Oh darling, did I forget to give you your pocket money? Forgive me,” and another note would change hands. Twenty minutes later—better give the old fool plenty of time to get lost in that crazy maze inside his head—Nick would reappear. This would be repeated at regular intervals—I think the record was fou
r, or was it five?—with Nick’s tone becoming increasingly aggrieved with each visitation.
“Dad, it’s almost lunchtime and you still haven’t given me my money.”
“Darling, are you sure? I thought I had. I am silly, am’t I?”
Finally Nick, the ever-artful dodger, recognized that the game was up and that he couldn’t go on gaslighting his poor old dad any longer, and then he’d retire to his room with a pile of five-pound notes, and have lengthy pornographic fantasies about all the candy, Action Men, and comics he would be able to buy with his ill-gotten gains.
MY MOTHER WAS DEFINITELY going off Englishmen. And the longer she was away from America, the more attractive the men there looked. Even my dear father, who got only more handsome as he aged, was completely rehabilitated. Whatever crimes he may have committed—all she could ever come up with was that he was a bit tight with money, and that she’d gotten bored with being married to him—were forgotten, and his many, and varied, qualities were constantly remarked upon. Was there any man in the entire world better at planning a trip? How about that journey to the Shan states in Burma, where they had met that prince who ate live monkey brains? Or an impromptu party? What about that time they had drunk vodka until dawn, with those Russians who lived near the Palais Royal? Nobody was better at hooking up an outdoor shower. Or building a log fire. Or charming his way into a château that was closed to the public. Or fixing a furnace. Or cleaning up dog shit. He was also extraordinarily gifted at doing the dishes, driving a car, and carrying potatoes.
A few other American men also had their own special place in her heart. Larry Adler was famous (always a plus), had been hounded out of the country by McCarthyism (a double plus), adored my mother (even better), and played the harmonica rather well. Harvey Orkin, a TV and screenwriter, was another favorite, who made up for not being famous with his wit and sweetness. S. J. Perelman (famous and funny) made a brief appearance. As did Julian Bond, the civil rights activist (liberal, good-looking, and black, a triple plus) who dropped by once for a drink with his sad sister (underdog, in need of rescuing), who lived in London and so was invited round all too frequently.
As luck would have it, David Bruce, who had given my mother away at her wedding to my father, was the American ambassador in London at the time, so embassy parties were always a happy hunting ground for new American friends, as was any gathering at Tony and Linda Lewis’s house. One summer I remember her coming back from a lunch party chez Lewis, giddy with delight. Guess what? They’d had hamburgers and hot dogs in the garden—could it have been July Fourth?—and lots of kids were running around on the grass, and Bobby Kennedy had been there, making ice-cream cones for the children. With sprinkles! Sprinkles were always big with my mother. The kitchen cabinet was full of jars of tiny silver balls and technicolored sprinkles that lurked at the back gathering dust, waiting to decorate the cakes that were never baked. Sprinkles represented America, the summer, her youth, and the drugstore in New Bedford that she used to hang around in with her brother. They were decidedly not English. But it was the image of Bobby in the blue button-down Oxford shirt that matched his eyes, sleeves rolled up, forearms tanned, handing out the cones—did she have one too?—that had enchanted her. So relaxed, so Massachusetts, so (newly) liberal, so Kennedy—he was everything she missed about America. He was everything Freddie/Anthony was not.
Less than a year later he was dead. I came home from school that afternoon in June 1968 and found my mother in bed, the curtains drawn, so depressed she could not get up. I had never seen her like this before, and it took weeks for her to slowly heave herself out of this deep black hole. Kennedy had been shot—again. Martin Luther King had been shot. Maybe America wasn’t quite so wonderful after all. Thirty years later in France, as we were sitting around under the lime tree, I finally understood why she had taken to her bed. Yes, she had seen him again after that sunlit party, with the hot dogs and the ice cream and the sprinkles. How often she didn’t say, and I never asked. My mother had actually met Bobby Kennedy once before at his house, Hickory Hill, outside Washington in 1962. Arthur Schlesinger had invited Freddie to an informal symposium, hosted by the Kennedys, where the subject under discussion had been—what else?—God. Somewhat ill-advisedly, Ethel decided to take on the infamous atheist, and as she sank ever deeper into the quicksand of Freddie’s intellect, Bobby finally put an end to her floundering and told her to “Drop it, Ethel.” Naturally enough this was one of my mother’s favorite Freddie stories, and, one assumes, made even more privately delicious after her secret affair with Bobby.
As my mother soon discovered, she had married a man firmly set in his ways. Freddie wasn’t about to start doing the dishes, or carrying potatoes, or picking up dog shit, and he never did learn to drive. And he certainly was not about to stop sleeping with other women. Who knows when or with whom he resumed this lifetime habit, or when she found out, but she did tell Ben Rogers, Freddie’s biographer, that she had gotten used to his disappearing in the afternoon to play “chess” with various lady friends, or simply going off to his club to “sit and read.” I don’t imagine she liked it at all, but so long as they were old girlfriends or casual new ones, maybe she felt it didn’t really matter that much. In any case there was nothing she could do about it.
Like all sensible wives she also made a clear distinction between a fling and a real love affair. We like to think we can cope with the first and come out the victors. After all we have the house, the children, the shared friends, the shared money; and husbands on the whole seem reluctant to see their entire lives—and bank accounts—go up in smoke. If it’s just a fling he’s bound to get bored with her eventually, or at least that’s what our girlfriends always tell us. Odd, though, how perfectly sane and intelligent husbands can sustain an interest in mad and stupid mistresses for surprising lengths of time. And even odder how that first type of affair often mutates into the second—and once that happens the only victory a wife can ever hope for is the kind that King Pyrrhus brought back from Heraclea in 280 BC.
Just before he married my mother, Freddie had become the Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford, which meant that he spent the middle of each week, during term time, in New College. He would set out for Paddington Station with his neat little overnight bag on Tuesday morning and return on Friday afternoon just in time for tea. He had had his doubts about this arrangement, and in a letter to Marion Cummings had wondered whether it might strengthen or weaken his forthcoming marriage. But there was no way my mother or Freddie could have lived in Oxford full-time—they were both far too attached to the bright lights of the big city—so they decided commuting was the solution. Maybe they also felt that this weekly break—like the crisper drawer in the fridge—would keep things fresh longer. It wasn’t as though Freddie had been frantic to get married—rather the opposite in fact. The siege had been lengthy, and fortress Freddie had withstood five years of seduction, cajoling, persuasion, and hoodwinking before finally admitting defeat and signing a peace treaty at St. Pancras Register Office. I imagine he was rather relieved to have a bolt-hole in Oxford to escape to. And as bolt-holes go, it wasn’t bad.
EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT New College is one of the most beautiful colleges in Oxford, and everybody at New College knew that Freddie’s set of rooms was probably the most delectable piece of real estate in the entire place. They occupied the corner of a beautiful eighteenth-century quad, built from that honey-colored Cotswold stone that glows in the sun—when the English sun can be bothered to put in one of its tantalizing appearances. A paneled drawing room overlooking the gardens, a small bedroom, a study that doubled as a dining room, and an enormous drafty bathroom with a fire-breathing water heater: It was an apartment that cried out for company. Freddie, that most social of men, entertained his students there for sherry parties, his friends for luncheons, and his mistresses for cinq-à-sept assignations. He may have thought he was being discreet, but he was surrounded by prurient undergraduates and fellow dons who were all too aw
are of what he was up to. Some of them even trained their binoculars on his windows to see what they could see.
One of the many reasons I loved being at Oxford was because Freddie was there. I had always adored his company, and with him at New College, I felt instantly at home. He let me charge books to his account at Blackwell’s, he took me to dinner at High Table, and if I was feeling a little hungry around lunchtime, I would just turn up at his rooms, and then we would wander across the quad together for some comforting nursery food in the college dining room. One day I found myself sitting in the Radcliffe Camera, a monumental circular library loosely modeled on the Pantheon, struggling with the bloodthirsty but still amazingly dull doings of some medieval king, when I started daydreaming about steak-and-kidney pie and rhubarb crumble. I looked at my watch, I looked at the cute guy across from me, I gazed out the window, and finally I gave up. It was almost one o’clock. I abandoned King Ethelred the Unready, son of King Edgar and Queen Elfthryth, husband of Queen Elfgifu, to his endless tribulations with the Vikings, and decided to continue my research into early English history at New College. I walked through the medieval gateway, built in 1379, during the reign of Richard II, passed the cloister where the monks used to hang about until Henry VIII got rid of them—I’ve always been a great believer in history by osmosis—climbed up an oak staircase (circa 1750), and knocked on Freddie’s door.