Once again, I was the narrator, and Dai kindly stepped forward to play all the male parts including the Prince of Wales, for which role he developed a tone so strangled that he put his vocal cords in jeopardy: he would practise whole speeches with his teeth locked together, the words emerging only from his sinuses. So far, so normal. The innovation lay in asking Pamela Stephenson to join the cast. Pamela had become famous for the improbable combination of elfin prettiness and comic skill she brought to the BBC TV show Not the Nine O’Clock News. She liked my script, and from the minute she came on stage at the first dress rehearsal in her Bruce Oldfield silver dress, everyone involved on the finance side liked her. It was one huge love affair all round right into the previews, which were smash hits. The audience howled and raved every night. I started regretting not having invested a few grand. Say, ten. Maybe twenty? I gave cocky interviews, in which I counted chickens by the squadron. Australian correspondents interviewed me in my black tie on the afternoon of opening night. Television cameras, after they had finished circling around Pamela like sharks, waited for me down corridors. Out in the street, they pointed their lenses upwards to capture my name. It was up there on the front of the theatre: my name in lights.
Well, you guessed it, but you can’t possibly guess the details. As Count Ugolino tells Dante in the Divine Comedy, yes, my death was terrible, but let me tell you how terrible it was. The preview audiences had been a cross-section of the general public, and their manifest delight had led me to believe that the press-night audience would react in the same way. But the press-night audience was a cross-section of the press, plus a cross-section of the backers’ families and friends. Naim Attalah, in particular, seemed to know almost nobody except platoons of well-bred English young ladies who said ‘Oh, really?’ as a sign of enthusiasm. The relatives of other backers seemed to consist mainly of people whose command of English had been only recently acquired. From the moment we started to recite, you could hear a discreet rattle of knuckles cracking from the number of people sitting on their hands. Lines that had earned a gale of laughter on the preview nights now were lucky to get a titter. The first time that I paused for a laugh that didn’t come, a violent attack of flop sweat came instead. Under my jacket, the sides of my white shirt were suddenly soaked, and by the end of the first half even my shoes were full of water. During the interval I needed a complete change of kit, and I was already thinking that I might need a complete change of address, not to mention of personality. How had I got myself into this, and other people along with me? It wasn’t as if I hadn’t learned this lesson long ago. But I had lulled myself into forgetting it, and now, suddenly, there was an even harder lesson to be learned. Pamela and Dai taught it to me. They gave me a lesson in keeping my nerve, and on the whole we got through the evening with a show of confidence. Indeed I thought we had done better than get away with it. There was solid applause at the end, and people ‘came around’ afterwards to say they thought it was something new under the sun. Rowan Atkinson said that he had been roped in by the impresarios and hadn’t expected to enjoy it at all, but he really had. Alas, none of these people were writing the reviews. The press were writing them instead, and the press killed me. The worst review came from James Fenton, who said it was the most embarrassing evening he had ever spent in his life. What made it the worst review was that it was also the best written. I tried to believe that I would have put it more kindly had I been reviewing him, but I had signed up to take my chances in a theatrical event, not group therapy.
The press decided the matter. The word of mouth from the previews was good enough to keep the thing going, but from the second night the audiences started getting smaller. It was a big theatre, so if you had watched a speeded-up film of the auditorium from night to night you would have seen an increasing emptiness seeping down from the gallery to the back of the stalls, and then rolling forward until finally, on the last few nights, only a few of the front rows were occupied. Every night of the run my two brave cast members, when they took up their beginners’ positions, would find me looking through the peephole in the front curtain as I counted the house like the quartermaster at Rorke’s Drift counting cartridges. To keep the thing running for the promised number of nights, I had started putting my own money into it, chasing bad money with good in the full knowledge I was doing so – and in the full knowledge, also, that the money belonged to my family. Dai was uncomplaining as always, and Pamela was saintly. At the shining start of her career, the last thing she needed was to be imprisoned in a flop. But she went on every night and gave me a continuous lesson in how to lavish everything you have on the people who attend, and to forget those who don’t. After all, the fewer tickets you sell, the smaller the number of people who know or care that anything has gone wrong. Among those who did attend were some very intelligent people who told me afterwards, either personally or by letter, that they thought the venture original. These paragons, however, were just a few voices in a mighty show of indifference.
The catastrophe would have been complete if it had not also been the making of me. Had it happened sooner in my life, I would almost certainly have cut and run. But I stayed with it, all the way to the end, even though I accepted quite quickly that the critics had been right. Mark Boxer had warned me even during the triumphant previews that the show was too big to be attractively small but too small to be big: for a ticket costing that much, the West End audience wants to see something that fills the stage. Words alone, no matter how cleverly written, won’t do the business. Those critics who had found my political opinions absurd I still thought narrow-minded, but their objections would have been only incidental if I had swept them off their feet. I hadn’t done so, and now I was off my own feet – flat on my back, in fact. I retired to Cambridge and made myself useful around the house: always a tacit confession that I was severely wounded. Those in residence did their best not to look accusingly at the man who had robbed them.
Luckily I had other irons in the fire. By their combined glow I could dimly see the way ahead. When the Paris Fashion Show went to air, it was watched by an audience that would have packed my West End theatre every night of the week for fifty years. Drewett said we could do a lot more stuff like that, but it would be a full-time job. William Shawn wrote asking me to review Robert Hughes’s new book The Fatal Shore for the New Yorker. If I myself need convincing – and for a while I did – here was evidence that there were things I knew how to do. Surely people would not be asking me to do these splendid things if I really was as incompetent as I felt. Even more encouraging, for the long run, was the growing evidence that there were things I knew how to avoid. The impresario Michael White wanted me to write a screenplay based on Unreliable Memoirs. I said I would if I could direct the film. Such a degree of hubris was not unfamiliar to him, but he agreed, and there was a token fee of five thousand pounds to seal the deal. Educated by my West End fiasco, however, I thought again about a project that I wasn’t sure I could deliver on, and I gave the money back. White told me that it was the first time anyone had given him back the money. That felt like progress.
But I still felt that the time had come for more demanding pursuits than regular journalism, even if they were less certain. Helping to cut film in the editing room had given me the taste for composition on a larger scale, in more than one dimension. My TV column had got to the point where I was feeling the lack of room when a serious subject came up. When I wrote about the much-derided American series Holocaust, and predicted – correctly, as it happened – that its soap-opera qualities might be the very element that would ensure its beneficial effect in Germany, Conor Cruise O’Brien kindly said that I should be writing that kind of thing more often. The implication was that I wasn’t writing that kind of thing often enough. Journalism had me trapped with its money. Each year Harry Evans of the Sunday Times called a meeting to make a bid for my television column. With rare acumen I always got him to stage the meeting over lunch at the Garrick Club, a notorious stock exchange for
Fleet Street gossip. The news that Harry was talking to me was back in Donald Trelford’s office before we had finished our dessert. Only after that did I enter into a new salary round with the Observer’s corridor-stalkers. I could still convince myself that I was worth what they paid me, but surely the day would come when I would give short weight. My time in Fleet Street reached an unmistakable peak with a brace of Postcard essays I sent back from China. I joined the press corps for Margaret Thatcher’s visit to Beijing, where she talked with the Chinese leaders about the upcoming handover of Hong Kong. The two Postcard pieces, one written in Beijing and the other on the flight back to England from Hong Kong, were, from the technical angle, the most taxing efforts I ever pulled off as a journalist. The first one, in its entirety, I phoned back to the Observer from the Beijing post office, which had equipment with Alexander Graham Bell’s name still on it. Perhaps benefiting from the pressure, the two pieces, which collectively carried the title ‘Mrs T in China’, were the best writing I could do. I knew as I wrote them that I would never do better in the genre. On the RAF VC-10 from Kai Tak to Heathrow, I put the draft of the second piece aside for half an hour to write a little play about the tour. Mrs Thatcher and the Downing Street personnel were riding at the front of the aircraft, with the press in the zoo section at the back. The Downing Street people, the Prime Minister included, came back to watch the play. Anne Robinson, in those days still a mere journalist, played Mrs Thatcher. It was a stunning performance, although perhaps not quite as amazing as her current imitation, on The Weakest Link, of a woman nothing like as nice as her real self – and, let it be said, more than a touch younger. As Anne’s talented voice made the lines I had written swoop, howl, and whine through an authentically Thatcherite tessitura, I knew that I would always go back to the theatre, but also that I would never again forget to keep it small, like this: like a cabaret. You have to get the expectations down, not up. Then the words become a plus, a wealthy return on a cheap ticket, and nobody notices that nothing has been spent on costumes and sets. Mrs Thatcher quite enjoyed being sent up, incidentally. She was already at forty thousand feet, and anyway she never minded satire, as long as it was accompanied by abject worship and total agreement.
But the thing about the China trip that would eventually have the most drastic effect on my life was working too deep inside my soul for its implications to be considered yet. The mainland schedule had been crushing, and in Hong Kong we were granted a couple of days to recover the use of our credit cards. (‘We’re back on plastic,’ said one of the female journalists. I wish I could remember her name: she was a poet.) While the tireless Mrs Thatcher bustled around visiting military bases and reassuring the locals that the Communists would behave when they took over or else she would get her friends the Americans to drop atomic bombs on them, we of the press caught up with our real lives. It was my first time in Hong Kong, and after an hour in a foam bath at the Hilton there could be no doubt about what had to be my first destination. I caught a cab out to the Australian Military Cemetery at Sai Wan Bay and visited my father’s grave. I have visited that quiet place many times since then, and after my mother died two years ago I have even felt able to write about it, but the memory of that first visit is still clear in my mind. Down the hill between the terraces of headstones, the long lawn that tilts down to the sea, I walked to find his name and number. When I did, I fell to my knees and cried. I cried to heaven, which never listens, but has the excuse that it never causes anything either. There is only chance. I cried as I had never cried since I was very young. It was the dates that did it. Already I was ten years older than he had been when he was killed. Time to get something done.
17. NICE BIKE, CAPTAIN STARLIGHT
You will have noticed, during the preceding book, that I was more than once jolted by harsh reality into the feeling that I had not yet achieved anything substantial. But that doesn’t mean I skimped what I previously did. I have done my best to give this book a beginning, middle, and end, and now here are a few paragraphs by way of a coda. Clearly another volume will be necessary: more than half my working life was still ahead of me, and it would turn out to be full of stories about the stars, whom I met in great profusion, and not always when they were at their best. If I can’t keep the reader interested while I tell stories like those, I won’t need anyone else to turn me off at the wall: I’ll pull the plugs myself. But the previous chapters contain the story that matters most about the author. These were the years in which I really learned my stuff. Later on I just got a bit better at avoiding the big mistakes. But, as I have tried to show, without those big mistakes I would never have learned anything in the first place. The graph of your increasing profit from your own errors is the only authentic measure of progress.
Everything else is just time passing on the way to death, which has since overtaken quite a lot of people mentioned in this book. Some of them I met only briefly: Lord Bernstein, Lew Grade, Maurice Richardson, Edward Crankshaw, John Weightman, Richard Boston, Bill Grundy, Noele Gordon, Johnny Mercer, William Shawn, Burt Lancaster, Robert Mitchum, Peter Sellers, Richard Burton. Some I worked beside long enough to know their character, and almost always to be grateful for it: Russell Harty, Ken Tynan, Donald Pleasence, Barry Took, Willy Donaldson, Richard Findlater, Helen Dawson, Charles Monteith, John Wells, William Rushton, Viv Stanshall, Spike Milligan. Others were close to my heart: Jonathan James-Moore, Alan Sizer, Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, Terry Kilmartin, Ian Hamilton, Amanda Radice, Mark Boxer, Terence Donovan. In all categories and in every case, I was surprised that any of them should leave without my permission, but I rarely railed at fate. Although I was so annoyed with Donovan that I boycotted his funeral, I still thought that he had had a fair spin. Unless they die young, I hardly notice. Probably I just got too used, too early on, to the idea that living a reasonable span was a luxury, and that the thing to do, as Montaigne once insisted, was to live every day as if you would die tomorrow. I grew up with the Grim Reaper as a house guest. Every night he sat down with us to dinner in the glassed-in back veranda, the stave of his scythe bumping against the plasterboard ceiling. He stank a bit, but he was part of the furniture. I felt old when I was young, and feel young now I am old. I have never had a very well-developed sense of chronology. I just know that the dice roll and the river flows. I didn’t know, while the period recorded in this book was going by, that some of the best things in it were already on their way out, never to return.
In Fleet Street, the age of hot metal was coming to an end. I loved the old technology, but there was never any doubt that the new technology would take over, although it took a futurologist to predict that a newspaper office, of all places, would become as silent as an aquarium. Since the spanking new equipment was not only a lot quieter than the clattering junk it superseded but also much lighter and far less demanding of total space, here was a neat example of how an economy, as it expands, actually gets smaller. When the print unions tried to keep the change under their control, Rupert Murdoch saw his chance. He broke the unions and saved the diversity of the newspaper business. If he hadn’t done so, London would now be essentially a one-paper town, like New York. But when he broke the unions he broke Fleet Street as well. Freed from their shackles to the obsolete investment in the Linotype machines and the heavy presses, the newspapers took their offices wherever the rent was cheap, and within a year Fleet Street was no longer a real place. By now it is just a memory.
Roughly the same thing happened to my other great romance, the Modish London Literary World. The hard-core personnel of the Friday lunch became first busy, then successful, then celebrated, then world famous. Just as the venue had moved uptown from Mother Bunch’s to the Bursa Kebab House, it moved upmarket from the Kebab House to Bertorelli’s in Charlotte Street, and finally it moved from Bertorelli’s into limbo, and from there into legend. Like a star that grows more brilliant in its dying days, the Friday lunch had gone nova. Some of the remnants still get together once a year, to make promises, nev
er fulfilled, about meeting more often. But it should be said that the centrifugal forces that eventually pulled the thing apart had nothing to do with ill will. It was lack of spare time that did the trick. Quarrels were always repaired, and still are. The intelligent and the talented always look like a mafia for the simple reason that they value each other’s friendship. That was the point that the bunch who came up next had trouble grasping. The Modern Review crew thought that our lot had smoothed the way for each other. It was never true. We cared too much about our own integrity, and I, for one, could always count on receiving my fiercest criticism from among my friends. (After he read a serialized instalment of my royal epic, Christopher Hitchens was actually being quite restrained when he said, ‘You don’t really believe all this shit, do you?’) In time, the new guard learned that the only road to the top was the one on which the goods are delivered. We could have told them, but they weren’t listening. Youth rarely does listen, although the most gifted among the young are invariably those who have the capacity to take a lesson in when it hits them over the head. I suppose this book is meant to prove that I was once like that. I must have had something, or why would I have so often been brought whimpering to my knees?
There is a false equation there, of course. Not everyone who gets knocked out comes back, and some who fail deserve to. But for those who learn in the hardest way that they are not cut out to do the thing they love, there is always the opportunity to do it some service. And for those who can do the thing they love, but who encounter a disheartening setback, there is the chance to rediscover the solid discipline that should always underlie bravura, and which is sometimes eroded by the photon stream of the spotlight. Success can weaken anyone if it goes too long uninterrupted. The muscles go, like an astronaut’s in space. The experienced practitioner knows this, and gets more interested in both himself and his craft when the going gets rough. A big crash is just a concentrated version of what is happening all the time as he learns his business. He learns by falling short, and finding out why. Anyone who can write can write better. But he can do so only if he realizes his mistakes. The most common and most destructive mistake is to neglect the simple for the sake of the spectacular. Some of my favourite works of art are stunning for the wealth of their technique. In the garden of the Nymphenburg Palace, the dwarf architect Cuvilliés built a little pavilion called the Amalienburg that is almost too beautiful to look at even in the detail of its decoration, and in its totality almost makes you believe in the inherent virtue of the human race. But the first thing it was designed to do was to keep out the rain. When the writer is licking his wounds after a public disaster, he has been given time to remember what he was put on earth to do. He might one day make history and might even make a million pounds, but the first thing he must do is make sense. Sometimes it helps to write nothing at all for a while, rather than even one more sentence that tries too hard to impress. Let the field lie fallow. After my defeat in the West End, I drifted around the house in Cambridge looking exactly like a zombie. For a while my dead eyes saved me from being asked to carry heavy objects upstairs: what wife wants her new chest of drawers covered with scraps of decaying flesh? But somewhere in the throbbing haematoma that had once been my brain, calculations were being made. It was at this time that I had the first glimmer of the plan, finally carried out twenty years later, to include my own enthusiasm among potential threats to the family finances, and to build in a protection barrier so that I could not get at my own money when hit with yet another idea that would duplicate the effects of the Italian Renaissance while helping to save the baby seals in the rain forest. This train of thought had the merit of putting the family first: a reliable way of getting the emphasis away from myself, and thus partly nullifying the characteristic that had got me into trouble in the first place. People who dress up as Superman don’t always jump off buildings under the impression that they can fly, but the costume and the air of superiority are powerful hints that they might. The advantage of having a couple of children scooting around the place is the reminder they offer that you used to be one of them. You used to be a lot closer to your instinct. Whatever creativity you might have developed since, your instinct was where it came from.