by Gully Wells
THAT SUMMER Peter had stayed behind in New York while Rebecca and I made our annual pilgrimage to La Migoua. The truth is that after the horror show of our last visit with Peter hissing in my ear, “But you said she wouldn’t be here,” the thought of them together for several weeks in the same house was more than I could take. If I hadn’t married somebody quite so much like her everything would have been easier, or so I thought. But as it was I had fallen for a man who was every bit as smart as she was, who made me laugh just as much as she did, who did outrageous things like stopping his car in traffic to have a pee in the middle of Parliament Square, who had yet to master the useful art of suffering fools, who couldn’t help showing off his considerable intelligence, and whose love I have never doubted. Just as I never doubted hers.
Of course they had their differences. Peter wasn’t much use as a snob, never having seen the point of posh people per se, his tongue lacked that fine stiletto edge, and with all the expensive education his parents had given him—and hers had failed to give her—he could win any argument that depended on real knowledge as opposed to my mother’s preferred, but highly effective, weapon of wit and wild chutzpah. Sadly his swearing never approached the masterful pitch of hers and his desire to shock the world into submission was minimal, but these were minor, and forgivable, failings.
Like the Jesuits, my mother had gotten hold of me at an impressionable age and had nourished me on such a rich and unpredictable diet that most other people seemed utterly bland in comparison. The terror of boredom—this came from her, whether by nature or nurture I do not know—must have made me crave the kind of emotional and intellectual excitement I had grown accustomed to. And which both she and Peter provided, sometimes in exhausting abundance. No danger of ever being bored with those two roaming around inside your psyche, but plenty of danger of thrilling fireworks with them roaming around inside the same small house. Or at least that’s how it seemed to me. So for the sake of my fragile sanity I preferred not to put my theory to the test.
THERE WAS NOTHING Freddie adored more than a party. An extraordinarily good dancer—he taught Rebecca the Charleston when she was four and he was seventy-seven—he liked to flirt, he liked to talk, and I’m afraid he never could resist showing off, which is always lots more fun with an audience. That first fall he was with us, after Vanessa died, I thought it might cheer him up if the two Scorpios—“Jesus, all you two ever think about is sex and death”—had a joint birthday party. We would have lots to drink, get Balducci’s to do the food, hire a barman, Freddie would ask all his old—in both senses of the word—friends, Peter and I would round up ours, we’d throw them all together and hope that at least a few people misbehaved. It would be a strange mix—but isn’t that the whole point?
Distinguished oldsters like Meyer Schapiro (the brilliant art historian, pushing ninety), Mary McCarthy, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and the birthday boy were carefully propped up on the sofas, people who liked to drink (Anthony Haden-Guest, Charles Kuralt, our downstairs neighbor, Christopher Hitchens) stuck close to the bar, the lady (no name) who was up to no good with somebody else’s husband (no name) hung out in the shadowy hallway, kindhearted people (Nick, Quentin Crisp) talked to Rebecca, and everybody else just did the best they could in whatever space was left over. I can’t say there was any serious misbehavior, unless you count the host going to bed before the last guest had left, and the hostess disappearing to Da Silvano’s for spaghetti puttanesca with an old friend (Michael Stone) soon afterward. Jeffrey and Caron Steingarten stepped into our delinquent shoes and ended up cooking Freddie, Ed Epstein, and his date, Susannah Duncan, the best bacon and eggs any of them had ever tasted. La Rochefoucauld was right, hunger is always the best sauce.
Ed’s date was the highlight of Freddie’s evening. A doctor in her late thirties who looked like a dark-haired Grace Kelly, crisp and detached in that cool English way, she had driven the poor man into a terminal tizzy. Battling a ferocious hangover the next morning, I did what I could to calm him down.
“Oh dear, oh dear, I can’t possibly call her. Can I?”
“Of course you can. Did she give you her number?”
“Yes, she said it was G-R-A-B-T-R-Y.”
The minx.
“That must be a secret code for those very special men she’s attracted to. The rest get the numbers.”
“Do you really think so?”
“Absolutely.”
A few days later, at about four in the afternoon, a beaming only slightly intoxicated Freddie was entertaining Rebecca with a soft-shoe shuffle and a soulful rendition of “Night and Day.” After that he moved on to “If You Were the Only Girl in the World.”
“How was lunch with Grabtry?”
“Well, now that you ask, I have to say it went extremely well.”
That night after I had gone to bed, Freddie and Peter sat up, with a bottle of brandy to keep them company, and wrestled with that age-old masculine conundrum: How to figure out if an irresistible, flirtatious minx has the slightest intention of ever sleeping with you.
“One doesn’t want to make a total ass of oneself.”
“God, no!”
“And yet, if one does nothing, how’s one ever to know?”
“Too true, too true!”
Several more lunches followed, but I suspect that Grabtry’s honor and Freddie’s dignity must have remained intact, because if they hadn’t my dear stepfather could never have resisted telling me all about it.
THE MANAGEMENT’S POLICY at the Hotel Bank Street was to include our guests in all invitations. Which is how Freddie and Fernando Sánchez, a charismatic designer of ladies’ lingerie, came to meet. Introduced at a dinner given by my friend Sarah Giles, they had so charmed one another that Fernando called the next morning and asked us all to a party he and his boyfriend were giving the following week.
For whatever reason Peter and Bob Friend, a BBC colleague, had thought it would be a good idea to arrive chez Sánchez early and drunk. They found their surprised and irritated hosts, dressed in matching silk peignoirs still attending to their hair and makeup. Parked in the drawing room, Peter and Bob helped themselves to a few more drinks, and by the time the other guests started to drift in, Bob Bloke (as Hitch used to call him on account of his total blokishness) was in a fine state. Of course he knew that such people existed, he was a sophisticated man of the world, and he’d met one or two of them in his time, but it was a bit much to find yourself surrounded by the buggers.
“I expect you’re a homosexual. Everybody else here seems to be.”
Freddie looked appalled.
“I most certainly am not!”
“Well, thank God for that, is all I can say!”
Apart from us the guests looked as though Fernando had chosen them by flicking impatiently through the pages of model-agency look books, rejecting all the dogs—“Oh dear, can’t think he’s much in demand. Honey, you’re wasting your time—take my advice and get back to Kansas!”—and picking out the hundred or so true dazzlers. A perfectionist with an artist’s eye, Fernando worshipped at the altar of beauty—whether it was the priapic black ambergris candles (how Robert Mapplethorpe would have loved them!), the gigantic flowering gardenia bushes, the heavy white linen curtains, or the exquisite creatures that filled his apartment.
But he was also a kindhearted host, and when he saw one of his guests standing all alone, he grabbed my arm. “You must meet Naomi Campbell, she’s just arrived from London and knows no one.”
Naomi was ten feet tall, sixteen years old, and unspeakably beautiful.
“Mum and I got here last week. I’m doing a bit of modeling.”
“Sounds to me like you have chosen the perfect career.”
“Yeah, I hope it’s going to work out.”
“I don’t think you need worry.”
Naomi smiled. She didn’t look worried at all.
Freddie was just about to get up and pile lots more smoked salmon on to his plate, when Sarah came rushing
over to our table. “The most terrible thing is going on upstairs. This poor girl is pinned up against the wall and the man won’t let her go.”
Who better than a seventy-seven-year-old philosopher to take on an overenthusiastic suitor? Perhaps he could try engaging him in a discussion of ethics.
The scene was just as Sarah had described it. Naomi was squealing, the man had her rammed against the wall, and, distracted by the effort of trying to shove his tongue down her throat, he didn’t notice when Freddie tapped him on the shoulder. So Freddie tapped him a bit harder; the man swung round, adjusting his fly, and glared at the old geezer. “And who the fuck are you?”
“I happen to be rather a famous philosopher. My name is Professor Sir Alfred Ayer. And who are you, if I may ask?”
“I’m Mike Tyson—the heavyweight champion of the world.”
“Well in that case, my dear boy, we are both supreme in our field.”
Which settled everything.
Whether Naomi really needed rescuing, I’m not so sure. All I do know is that Freddie was thrilled with his heroic feat that there was no dragging him away from the party. No, he didn’t want to come home with us—it was well past midnight—on the whole he’d rather remain just where he was, on a sofa surrounded by admiring ladies eager to hear what had really happened when the two champions had gone mano a mano, or at least come face-to-face.
The next morning something was wrong with Freddie’s hearing. He hopped about, shaking his head to one side, then the other, as if he was trying to get water out of his ear. Nothing serious, but he did hope it would get better soon. And what could possibly have caused this? Around two in the morning, when he finally left the party, Freddie had gone down in the elevator with a group of extremely large, high-spirited black men who turned out to be part of Tyson’s entourage. Hey, it’s that old-timer who stopped Mike having a good time! Playfully, they meant no harm, it was all a joke really—they started boxing him around the ears. Mess with Mike and here’s what you get!
The doorman was not amused. He didn’t need a gang of hooligans laughing and shouting and jumping about in his hallway at that hour of the night. That little gray-haired man couldn’t just let them run wild. “Hey, you their manager? You gotta keep these guys under control. Get them outta here!”
Poor Freddie. First Bob Bloke thought he was queer, and then he had turned into a boxing manager. But at least his hearing came back.
Les Cigarettes
AS A CHILD I NEVER THOUGHT ABOUT SMOKING. Like getting divorced, it was just something most grown-ups did. My mother and Freddie did it, just about all their friends did it, and I assumed I’d do it when the time came. Newspapers, coffee, and cigarettes were what my mother had for breakfast; Martin followed a similar diet, as did Tom, Anna Haycraft, Peter, his mother, Nick, Emma Soames, Francette—all of them my favored breakfast companions at one time or another. Since I was a bit slow on the uptake, my smoking only really got going in my early twenties, but I was a quick study and soon caught up. Every now and then I would contemplate quitting, until one day a profligate boyfriend gave me a gold Dunhill lighter with GW engraved on the top. Reassuringly heavy, perfectly proportioned, like a miniature Seagram Building, it was an object of great beauty that nestled in my handbag, following me wherever I went. Now you couldn’t just abandon a lovely thing like that, could you?
By nature defiant, by choice delinquent, my mother had been a precocious smoker, starting around thirteen. It suited her. It’s what bad girls did. Of course she knew it screwed up your health. But since when had she ever played it safe? She despised goody-two-shoes behavior on principle. Regular brisk exercise/plenty of leafy greens/no more than one glass of wine/and forget about anything and everything you might enjoy putting in your mouth, which of course would include cigarettes. Imagine actually living like that. I couldn’t, and neither could she.
Forty years after my mother had shared a cigarette with her brother Jackie in that drugstore in New Bedford where they used to hang out, she wrote to Hylan. She was frightened:
Lovely Hylan, I haven’t written before now because I am so desperately trying to stop smoking and I can’t type without smoking so therefore I can’t type. So this is an experiment: can I get all the way through a letter without smoking? I never have. But I’m so truly worried about what the smoking is doing to me that I’d do almost anything to stop … yesterday I thought I’d call the miracle acupuncturist in Marseille … but then I made up 27 convincing reasons why he wouldn’t be there on a Saturday in July, so I didn’t call. (And now I’ve just lit the cigarette, I really have.… I don’t want to die before Nick’s about … well, 25, in my more bleak moments but to be truthful 45 would suit me better. Now—and how about this for feeble—I’m trying to see how long I can just let it lie in the ashtray without me touching it.)
Late in 1985 Peter’s mother, Katherine, lay dying of lung cancer in a London hospital, and one night I went to see her on my way back from dinner. The nurse showed me into her room where she lay in bed, her eyes closed. She had given up on eating, watching television, listening to the radio, or reading—what would have been the point? She had lost her hair, she could barely speak, the chemo made her nauseated, she was so thin her body hardly seemed to exist, but there was still one thing we could do together to distract us from the horror. We could share a cigarette. Too weak to lift her own arm, I held it up to her lips as she inhaled, took a puff myself, and held it up for her again. After that I sat with her while she drifted off to sleep, kissed her good-bye, and tiptoed out of the room. She died later that night.
You might have thought that her son’s grief would have inspired him to quit—it certainly had that effect on her daughter-in-law—and Peter did for a few months. After that he smoked in secret, or so he thought. (Cigarettes, like mistresses, never stay hidden for long.) And after that he smoked anywhere he damn well pleased, and his wife stopped nagging him about it. Naturally there was no point in nagging my mother about anything, least of all her smoking. As far as I know she never succeeded in stopping for more than an hour or two, and by the time she had her first heart attack, she must have been at it for fifty years.
It wasn’t a drop-dead kind of heart attack, it was more a dizzy feeling that took her to the hospital where they did some tests and by the time I got there, she was sitting up, eating ice cream, and making the nurses laugh. The doctors did an angioplasty, propped her arteries open with stents, gave her blood-thinning drugs, and sent her home a few days later with a list of goody-two-shoes instructions of the brisk exercise/leafy green vegetables/one glass of wine/lose weight variety. And for almost a year she behaved extremely well. Hylan helped her keep on the straight and narrow, watched her diet, made tempting salads, and encouraged her when she started writing again.
But, as she had said in that letter to him—“I can’t type without smoking, therefore I can’t type”—and it was the writing that did her in. Try following up on a wildly successful first novel—it sold two million copies worldwide—when you know that it wasn’t a novel at all. She liked to pretend, disingenuously, that Jane was a work of fiction but she understood better than anyone that the heroine—an American journalist in London with an evil sense of humor, three boyfriends, and an outsider’s take on the bizarre ways of the English—was her. I imagine—because she never liked to talk about it, at least not to me—that she felt she wasn’t a real novelist, she didn’t know how to make things up, create characters, and place them in situations that she herself had never experienced. So what was she supposed to write about? I tried to persuade her to start a memoir, but I don’t think she could face going back to the misery of a childhood that she had spent her entire life trying to escape. And so she sat there alone in the apartment worrying, staring at the blank sheet in the typewriter, until one day she reached for a cigarette.
She worried about not working, she worried about money, she worried about Nick, she worried about growing old, she worried about Hylan (with good reas
on), she worried about my disastrous choice of husband (unnecessarily—her daughter was happier than she had ever been), and I am sure she was haunted by the realization (if she could bear to face it) that the move to New York seven years before had been a huge irrevocable mistake. It was enough to drive anybody back to the comfort of nicotine.
Hylan was horrified: “When she started smoking again, I knew she had chosen slow suicide. She didn’t care. She had given up the fight.” Which didn’t mean she had given up fighting. Oh no. She was full of energy and would stomp around in her favorite T-shirt, black, with “DIE YUPPIE SCUM” printed across the front in big white letters, her ire usually directed at the idiocy of the people who thought they were in charge of running the world, but sometimes the gun turret swiveled around and caught one of us in its sights. Frustrated, angry, frightened, and depressed—this wasn’t how her life was supposed to turn out. She had gambled and lost, first with New York and now, far more heartbreakingly, with Hylan. That was the terrible truth.
The man she had loved for sixteen years had decided to leave her. That summer, 1987, she went to the house in France alone, and by the time she returned in September, he would be gone. They both agreed it would be less painful that way. So why, I have always wondered, did he have to wait until the day she came back from JFK to start moving? Nick remembers turning onto Twenty-second Street and seeing, halfway up the block, Hylan and his friend going in and out of the house, lugging cardboard boxes, suitcases, bulging trash bags, and dumping them in the back of a van. This was a horror show he wanted no part of, so quite sensibly he hid around the corner until it was all over. Nick wasn’t deserting his mother, he just needed to gather his strength for the night ahead.