On Saturday RJ and Natalie invited me to their poolside in Beverly Hills, together with Juliet Mills. That night we went to dinner given by one of Hollywood’s topmost lawyers, Paul Ziffren, and his wife Mickey. They had the largest house in Malibu Colony. A dozen and a half tables were each laid for ten people. At the end of dinner Mr Tom Bradley, the black mayor of Los Angeles, gave a bullish political speech while we replenished each other’s wine glasses.
I met Charlton Heston, looking ever more like Moses as he aged. I was dying to have a chat with him about the film Gordon of Khartoum, where he had played the lead and Larry had given his miraculous performance as the Islamic fundamentalist Mahdi. After only a minute’s discussion with him I felt completely drained. On screen he had a most magnificent presence, two-dimensional perhaps, but focused and uplifting. Meeting him was different. He had the ambit of a man who does not exude energy, he absorbs it.
I rented a car and drove down San Vicente, past Brentwood Town and Country School, along Sunset Boulevard, past the polo fields, Gladys Cooper’s old house and up to Pacific Palisades. I parked outside 1535 San Remo Drive, where my mother, grandmother Eva and I had lived during the war.
As I walked past the plumbago and poinsettias of my childhood I felt as if my feet were not touching the ground. Trance-like with memories, I went over to the trees the other side of the road, surrounding Thomas Mann’s old house. Now this may sound fanciful, but it’s worth the risk. That moment was so important. I felt those self-same trees remembered me. When studying Buddhism in Chiengmai I had been captivated by one of its most attractive precepts; the Oneness of Life. Now, embraced by the very air I was sharing with the trees, I sensed that Oneness as never before. It is wonderful to recall. That moment brought together so much: the childish years’ continuum of gladness I had known in California, the house where my mother and I had lived, and now the unique first-time closeness I was enjoying with Larry. There is an ecstasy which combines such summits of life that cannot be exceeded, where the living moment makes memory, so many memories, more vivid than ever. That was the place and that was the moment I learned how to enter that balm, again and again.
I traced a friend from my childhood: Brooke Hayward. She was the daughter of the star actress Margaret Sullavan and the leading Holly-wood agent Leland Hayward. They had built two houses side by side. The Barn was for us children, with the upstairs bedrooms round an atrium looking down on the play area. The Other House, where we never went, was for grown ups. I was six, not yet in love with Judy Garland, Brooke was five, dark, intense, could be wantonly destructive, yet was full of sunshine. Her younger sister Bridget was a platinum blonde, with pointed features, deeply quiet and didn’t give a damn about me. Their young brother Bill had just learned to walk. Bridget was the one I was after. I was the one Brooke fell for. A love triangle so early in life.
A few years after the war Leland fell in love with the much-married Pamela Harriman. Maggie took her time to get over the shock. She stayed with us at Apple Porch to get away and talk everything over with my mother. Eventually she married a quiet English banker, Kenneth Wagg, who had three times won the doubles rackets championships in England and America. Everything went wrong. The marriage estranged Brooke from her mother. Bill suffered mental problems for a while. Bridget, after becoming a theatre actress and having an affair, died at the age of twenty-one. Finally Maggie, while rehearsing for a Broadway opening, suddenly died. Brooke wrote an astonishingly good book called Haywire. Leland’s telegraphic address had been ‘Haywire: ten percent’. Her memoir was a number one best seller and on Time Magazine’s list for almost a year. It portrays Hollywood and Broadway in their halcyon days, and describes how she came to terms with what had happened to her family.
We had a dinner date. She was divorced, very attractive, with her mother’s husky voice, and our shared past gave us a feeling of trust. She told me of the turbulent life she had led. She had married a drug-crazed alcoholic, Dennis Hopper. He made the low budget movie Easy Rider, which became a break-through cult movie celebrating licentiousness and abuse. A whole new breed of actors crowded in and marked a renaissance in Hollywood. She tried for the sake of their daughter Maria to stay loyal to him, even after he broke her nose. She had been through Tinsel Town in its hypocritical guise as heaven, and then its wild and pretentious version as hell.
Halfway through dinner her fifteen-year-old daughter burst into the restaurant wanting to meet her mother’s big date. ‘Everything okay?’ She was very like Brooke to look at, except for her head and neck under frizzy hair, and the same careful low voice. Satisfied with her glimpse of me she was off some place.
Brooke wanted me to drive her to the house of the industrialist Norton Simon in Malibu. The security guard let us in and went back to sleep. The hall had two classical Greek statues. The swimming pool was dimly lit with a plate glass fence to protect it from the breeze, the Pacific Ocean fifty yards away, bumping and seething. We took off our clothes and for a long time lay separately on the still water. It was a slow start to a wonderful night.
I read Haywire.She inscribed it ‘For Tarquin – An inscription – or toast – to the sweetest revenge of all: seeing one’s first (and most impor-tant) love again after so many years and finding that those long ago primal instincts were unerringly perfect. Love, love (note pages 91–93) Brooke.’ Those pages referred to were of delicious hyperbole: ‘Tarquin was standing regally, taller and more handsome than he’d ever been before.’
The only time anyone has ever called me ‘tall’.
She was wonderful company. Her book was an eye-opener on the human condition, revealing, as described by the blurb, the disparity between outer and inner circumstances. We had plenty to talk about.
RJ and Natalie asked me to join them for the weekend on their powerful twin-engined yacht called Splendor. It was the largest on the LA Marina. They were now married to each other for the second time. She had with her the four-year-old daughter whom she had had with her interim husband Richard Gregson, and his sixteen-year-old daugh-ter from a previous marriage. RJ was a qualified sea mariner so there was no crew, just ourselves, fancy free for two days. For them this unwinding was an essential respite from the extreme disciplines of film actors, with their early wake-up calls. We cruised for a few hours out to sea and south to the island of Catalina. We anchored in Avalon Harbour and RJ made fast most expertly at his own mooring plug. Larry and my mother had been there in the Thirties and I still have her home movie of him catching a marlin.
After lunch on board we had a siesta. All except for Natalie’s four-year-old daughter, who wandered around naked except for a life jacket. No danger of falling overboard. I was awakened by the sound of the anchor motor starting, and the chain clunking through the fairlead. I felt the boat pulled down by the tautness of the chain. I shot up to the wheel-house, pushed the little girl to one side and switched off the motor. I told her calmly, and so as not to disturb the others it really was calmly, that she could have sunk the boat. Her inimitable wailing response was: ‘But I want the boat to siyink.’
To develop an appetite for dinner RJ and I water-skied behind his large Avon rubber dinghy. We dined on shore at a fish restaurant. We returned to Splendor to have a fun series of increasingly noisy night-caps, collapsing into bed in the not so early hours after a wonderful time of story-telling and gossip. We left Avalon very early while Natalie laid the table for breakfast.
With Larry’s return to Malibu I resumed the routine of getting him up, making his breakfast and putting him into his limo. In the evenings I heard him his lines, cooked the dinner which the maid had prepared and then we enjoyed each other’s company more and more. One Satur-day for lunch we picnicked. The garden had teak furniture, everything silvery and the only colours were our glasses of pink gin.
In the evening Juliet and Michael took us to the Hollywood Bowl. The orchestra was conducted by the great Bangladeshi, Zubin Mehta. He strutted on stage, moving in a series of jerks, redolent of certa
in birds’ pre-mating antics. The second half of the concert was Tchaikovsky’s ‘1812’. Only Hollywood could get away with such exuberance. When the time came for Moscow to be set on fire a whole row of smoke dis-pensers popped into action, along the top of the huge shell-shaped roof above the orchestra. The smoke rose up. As it cooled it drifted down. On the mountainside the cannons were fired. Further billows of smoke com-bined and lowered. They wafted above the conductor’s platform, and down his arms still beating time. He became completely enveloped but the orchestra visible beneath played on. The bells peeled, the casa grande thumped, the cymbals clashed as all the instrumentalists became hidden. The conductor’s head and arms reappeared above the smoke, seen only by us, invisible to the players, sweeping his arms above the swirling cacophony milling around beneath him unseen. The audience, stretch-ing high up the slope behind us, was convulsed with laughter. The air cleared as the players surged to the glorious ending and the whole orchestra became visible. There were shouts of applause.
For my birthday that Sunday, 21 August 1977, my forty-first, Larry took me, RJ and Natalie out to dinner. RJ had noticed the swollen arthritic state of my hands. He gave me a copper bracelet made by Sabona, of Bond Street, like the one he was wearing. It took him some time to fit it precisely round my wrist, so that it did not move out of place. That was the key. That night, around two o’clock, at a time in my life when I slept the whole night through, I was awakened by the pain leaving both hands. Within a few weeks the swelling disappeared and the knuckle bones became visible, back to normal. It no longer hurt to carry a briefcase, even a suitcase, and I could play the piano again. I have worn it ever since. The physical symptoms of a broken heart had been dissolved.
In England much blessed time was with the children, all three of them, in Brighton and Steyning, with Larry and Joan and their brood, and in Sutherland Grove with my mother and Joy. Clavelle was full of questions. She had heard that I had had difficulty getting a toothbrush into my mouth, having to hold the brush with both hands. ‘Was the toothbrush too big?’ she asked.
In Hong Kong I had a visit from Basingstoke from my old colleague Alexis Napier. The problem was that Charles Cardiff, my predecessor in South-East Asia, now sales director, wanted me to engage the services of a certain agent in Macau. I said that the man was corrupt, and that my monthly visits to Macau had secured sound relationships with the Finance Minister and the Governor of the Bank. Besides, it would soon become known in nearby Hong Kong if we retained a rogue for an agent. Alexis came out to adjudicate.
He enjoyed the 60 m.p.h. jet foil ferry across the Pearl River Estuary. We stepped ashore in Macau and we took a cycle rickshaw. He wished we’d had a camera to record it. At the bank he saw that we were well placed to challenge Bradbury as their current printer. Our new designs were under way. During our meeting we were joined by a director from the Bank of Portugal who practically embraced Alexis. As we left Alexis agreed with me not to appoint the agent.
That evening he went to bed early in my spare room. I decided to give a dinner party the following day and invited twenty people. Twelve came, including the Hong Kong actress Nancy Kwan who had played Suzie Wong in the movie. A friend in California had given me her phone number. She wanted to bring her German boyfriend so I said ‘Of course.’ While we did not end up bathing in the South China Sea it was one of the best parties. Charles and Felicity Hoare were there and other favourite friends. Alexis was overcome by the beauty of Nancy Kwan. After they had all gone and he was going off to bed he said: ‘Really, you’ve got it made here.’
Next day he told me De La Rue wanted me to be based in Basingstoke, and look after the Middle East. After the loss of Indochina and the Philippines, the Middle East was the most important region for banknotes and coins. It would have been a natural progression from there to my becoming sales director, following Charles Cardiff. Cash-wise it would have cost me my 30% overseas allowance, two-thirds school fees (though their continuation was to be expected), the rent from Queensdale Road, and the divine Hong Kong income tax, which was 15% and only for those days I was actually there. Whenever I was away from home I was tax-free. In addition I loved my romantic and varied lifestyle in Asia and the Pacific where I had so many friends, from the top down. I knew no one in the Middle East, hated desert, and the proposal did not appeal. Mine was a gut reaction and I sometimes do wonder. But supposing everything had panned out; I could not possibly take on a big job like sales director and go on living in London, facing a forty-seven-mile car drive there and back every day. The thought of living as a single divorcé in Basingstoke was terrible. I was a Londoner.
The children arrived in Hong Kong on 22 December, all three of them, with Tristan very much in charge since becoming a junior monitor at Cottesmore School. We had Christmas Day lunch with my cousin Jasper and Virginia and their two little daughters. He had taken up resi-dence in the next bay to mine, and was Hambros’ local director. Next day we, as a family, gave a lunch for three couples and then flew off to Manila. Gordon Martin was going home for Christmas so he lent me his Ford Zephyr and we drove up to Baguio, capital of the Mountain Province. It was a perfect place for children with pools, playgrounds, pedal car races and a beautiful forest.
We stayed with Ben and Lita Legarda. While he was a Deputy Governor she was the bank’s librarian. They had a nine-year-old daughter called Tweetie who fell deeply in love with Tristan. He was going through a handsome phase. She had her father’s wide face and high cheek-bones, really rather exotic. She followed him everywhere. Whenever we took pictures she pointed to him and said: ‘My love.’ It became too much and Lita said that those words were not appropriate so soon after meeting him. So Tweetie changed her line. She still followed him around, and called him ‘My like.’ Their family house had twenty-year-olds and much younger cousins, but none as engaging as Clavelle.
We took our leave after a wonderful time and drove south, stopping in Manila for cheeseburgers at McDonald’s. Everything was perfect. Then after lunch the car wouldn’t start. It was the Friday before New Year’s Eve. All any garage would sell was petrol. No service of any kind. We had a further three-hour drive to join the Liboros at Matabuncay. We sat in the car and wondered what to do. I remember looking wanly at the pebbles on the surface of the car park. Then as if by magic one of the pebbles seemed to grow and become a mechanic in white overalls, with a bag of tools and a Filipino smile. He diagnosed the engine as having a burnt out coil. Something I had never heard of. It just so happened that he had one in his bag, of the correct length and size. He fitted it. It worked. The car started at once. He charged $30. If I believed in miracles that would qualify. Away we went. We drove between rice fields, through old Spanish villages, the houses with windows latticed with capice, like paper from mother of pearl, alongside sugar plantations, round and over palmy hills with sea views. The Liboros’ compound was on the beach; six two-storey houses with niparoofs. Grandma was there, her daughter Nena Benitez now widowed, various sons and daughters and a scattering of children.
On New Year’s Day all the youngest village children came round in their smartest dresses, jeans and T-shirts and stood in line. All about Clavelle’s age. She and the Liboro children dispensed packets with sweets, balloons and a large one peso coin. Clavelle was given a packet. When we returned to Hong Kong, after the best holiday we had ever had, Tristan and Isis wrote their thank-you letters. I said to Clavelle that I would write whatever she told me.
‘Dear Nena,’ she dictated. ‘Thank you for the money.’
I waited. She had nothing further to say. I asked: ‘Is that really all?’
‘Yes, Daddy.’
‘Don’t you want to thank her for the holiday?’
‘No. Only for the money.’
January was made remarkable by an invitation for me and Mario to join the Marcoses for a night and a day on board Ng Pangulo. Most of the people there I knew well: Ricks Cuanco, head of the telephone company, Jun Luz of the GSIS and chairman of Philippine Airline
s and a number of hotels, Tony Floirendo the banana king, the ubiquitous Gaya Paravicini and Christina Ford, and the Elizaldes, he being Secre-tary for Minority Groups and very close to Imelda with her own port-folio of Human Settlements. The foreign guest was a Spanish count who wanted to build a marina in Manila Bay. Marcos had invited him to play golf on a brand new course laid out by Gary Player – yet to be played on – called Puerto Azul.
We arrived with our overnight cases in the blazing heat of late after-noon. Imelda greeted us on deck. We had ‘merienda’: cakes and fruit, or ‘fruits’ as they say. We then went to our cabins to change into evening clothes, long dresses for the ladies, barong tagalogs for the men. As we prepared ourselves the President was piped on board.
We heard that Imelda had gone to take a rest. This was bad news. If she had a catnap lasting a couple of hours that would be all the sleep she would need for the night. We would have to sit up with her inter-minably. We went to the reception area for our champagne. The sun set in all its Manila glory, a fine crescendo from pink to scarlet which engulfed the entire sky, until at the end it seemed all the beauty of the earth was gathered up in a sad farewell as the sun slipped into the sea. And Imelda joined us. Long after dinner and the withdrawal of the President, all the rest of us had to remain, including a number of mid-western Americans keeping themselves awake with whisky. She with-drew out of kindness at about five, having finished giving dictation to her two secretaries.
We put on clean summer clothes for the golf course. It had only just been seeded. Hardly a sign of grass anywhere on the fairways. The thirty of us, but not Imelda, followed the President and the count, both excellent players with handicaps of six or seven. There was one incident which showed Marcos at his best. He hit an exceptionally long drive, the tiniest bit sliced, and the ball veered in mid flight. It hit a tree and shot upwards and forwards. It landed on a flat stone and bounced high, forward again, and came to rest six feet from the pin. We restrained our instincts to cheer.
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