Читать книгу: «One on One»
Craig Brown
One on One
Dedication
For Frances
Epigraph
Tossed upon ocean waters,
Two wooden logs meet;
Soon a wave will part them,
And never again will they touch.
Just so are we; our meetings
Are momentary, my child.
Another force directs us,
So blame no fault of man.
Ga Di Madgulkar
We have as many personalities
as there are people who know us.
William James
The earth keeps turning round and gets nowhere.
The moment is the only thing that counts.
Jean Cocteau
When Arthur Miller shook my hand I could only think
that this was the hand that had once cupped
the breasts of Marilyn Monroe.
Barry Humphries
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
ONE ON ONE
ADOLF HITLER
JOHN SCOTT-ELLIS
RUDYARD KIPLING
MARK TWAIN
HELEN KELLER
MARTHA GRAHAM
MADONNA
MICHAEL JACKSON
NANCY REAGAN
ANDY WARHOL
JACKIE KENNEDY
HRH QUEEN ELIZABETH II
THE DUKE OF WINDSOR
ELIZABETH TAYLOR
JAMES DEAN
ALEC GUINNESS
EVELYN WAUGH
IGOR STRAVINSKY
WALT DISNEY
P.L. TRAVERS
GEORGE IVANOVICH GURDJIEFF
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT
MARILYN MONROE
NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV
GEORGE BROWN
ELI WALLACH
FRANK SINATRA
DOMINICK DUNNE
PHIL SPECTOR
LEONARD COHEN
JANIS JOPLIN
PATTI SMITH
ALLEN GINSBERG
FRANCIS BACON
HRH PRINCESS MARGARET
KENNETH TYNAN
TRUMAN CAPOTE
PEGGY LEE
PRESIDENT RICHARD M. NIXON
ELVIS PRESLEY
PAUL McCARTNEY
NOËL COWARD
PRINCE FELIX YOUSSOUPOFF
GRIGORI RASPUTIN
TSAR NICHOLAS II
HARRY HOUDINI
PRESIDENT THEODORE ROOSEVELT
H.G. WELLS
JOSEF STALIN
MAXIM GORKY
LEO TOLSTOY
PYOTR IL’ICH TCHAIKOVSKY
SERGEI RACHMANINOFF
HARPO MARX
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
BERTRAND RUSSELL
SARAH MILES
TERENCE STAMP
EDWARD HEATH
WALTER SICKERT
WINSTON CHURCHILL
LAURENCE OLIVIER
J.D. SALINGER
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
FORD MADOX FORD
OSCAR WILDE
MARCEL PROUST
JAMES JOYCE
HAROLD NICOLSON
CECIL BEATON
MICK JAGGER
TOM DRIBERG
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
GEORGE GALLOWAY
MICHAEL BARRYMORE
DIANA, PRINCESS OF WALES
PRINCESS GRACE
ALFRED HITCHCOCK
RAYMOND CHANDLER
HOWARD HAWKS
HOWARD HUGHES
CUBBY BROCCOLI
GEORGE LAZENBY
SIMON DEE
MICHAEL RAMSEY
GEOFFREY FISHER
ROALD DAHL
KINGSLEY AMIS
LORD SNOWDON
BARRY HUMPHRIES
SALVADOR DALÍ
SIGMUND FREUD
GUSTAV MAHLER
AUGUSTE RODIN
ISADORA DUNCAN
JEAN COCTEAU
CHARLIE CHAPLIN
GROUCHO MARX
T.S. ELIOT
QUEEN ELIZABETH THE QUEEN MOTHER
THE DUCHESS OF WINDSOR
Author’s Note
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Other Books by Craig Brown
Copyright
About the Publisher
ADOLF HITLER
IS KNOCKED DOWN BY
JOHN SCOTT-ELLIS
Briennerstrasse, Munich
August 22nd 1931
Earlier this year, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei – the second largest political party in Germany – moved into new offices at Briennerstrasse 45, near Königsplatz. As he approaches his forty-third birthday, its leader, Adolf Hitler, is enjoying success as a best-selling author: Mein Kampf has already sold 50,000 copies. He now has all the trappings of wealth and power: chauffeur, aides, bodyguards, a nine-room apartment at no. 16 Prinzregentenplatz.* His stature grows with each passing day. When strangers spot him in the street or in a café, they often accost him for an autograph.
His new-found sense of self-confidence has made him less sheepish around women. A pretty nineteen-year-old shop assistant named Eva Braun has caught his eye; she works in the shop owned by his personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann. He has even begun dating her. Walking along Ludwigstrasse on this bright, sunny day in Munich, what can possibly go wrong?
A few hundred yards away, young John Scott-Ellis is taking his new car for a spin. He failed to distinguish himself as a pupil at Eton College. ‘I had advantages in that I wasn’t stupid and was quite good at most games,’ he remembers, ‘yet I squandered all this because of an ingrained laziness or lack of will … I was a mess … I cheated and felt no remorse and when threatened with the sack – “You have come to the end of your tether,” is what Dr Alington once greeted me with – I always managed to put on a tearful act and wriggle out.’
He has emerged with few achievements to his name. A letter from his father to his mother, written in John’s second year at Eton, reads:
Dear Margot,
I enclose John’s reports. As you will see they are uniformly deplorable from beginning to end … I’m afraid he seems to have all his father’s failings and none of his very few virtues.
Of course we may have overrated him and he is really only a rather stupid and untidy boy but it may be he is upset by the beginning of the age of puberty. But I must say the lack of ambition and general wooliness of character is profoundly disappointing.
Try and shake the little brute up.
Yours
T.
After leaving Eton last year, John went to stay on one of his family’s farms in Kenya (they own many farms there, as well as a hundred acres of central London between Oxford Street and the Marylebone Road, 8,000-odd acres in Ayrshire, the island of Shona and a fair bit of North America too).
It was then decided that he should spend some time in Germany in order to learn a language. In 1931, aged eighteen, he has come to Munich to stay with a family called Pappenheim. He has been in the city for barely a week before he decides to buy himself a small car. He plumps for a red Fiat, which his friends (‘very rudely’) refer to as ‘the Commercial Traveller’. On his first day behind the wheel, he invites Haupt. Pappenheim, a genial sixty-year-old, to join him. Thus, he hopes to find his way around Munich, and to avoid any traffic misdemeanours.
They set off. John drives safely up the Luitpoldstrasse, past the Siegestor. The Fiat is handling well. The test run is a breeze. On this bright, sunny day in Munich, what can possibly go wrong?
While Adolf Hitler is striding along the pavement, John is driving his Fiat up Ludwigstrasse. He takes a right turn into Briennerstrasse. Crossing the road, Hitler fails to look left. There is a sudden crunch.
‘Although I was going very slowly, a man walked off the pavement, more or less straight into my car,’ recalls John. Many drivers, before and since, have used those very same words, often to magistrates.
The pedestrian – in his early forties, with a small square moustache – is down on one knee. John is alarmed, but the man heaves himself to his feet. ‘He was soon up and I knew that he wasn’t hurt. I opened the window and naturally, as I hadn’t a word of German, let Haupt Pappenheim do the talking. I was more anxious about whether a policeman, who was directing the traffic, had seen the incident.’
All is well. The policeman has not noticed, or if he has, he is unconcerned. The man with the little moustache brushes himself down, and shakes hands with John and Haupt. Pappenheim, who both wish him well.
‘I don’t suppose you know who that was?’ says Haupt. Pappenheim as they drive away.
‘Of course I don’t, who is he?’
‘Well, he is a politician with a party and he talks a lot. His name is Adolf Hitler.’
Three years later, in 1934, Adolf Hitler is sitting in a box at the small rococo Residenztheater* waiting for the opera to begin. By now he is the German Chancellor, the talk of the world. In the adjoining box is the twenty-one-year-old John Scott-Ellis, celebrating the first night of his honeymoon by taking his young German bride to the opera. John looks to his left. Isn’t that the very same fellow he knocked down three years ago?
The young man leans over. He seems to want to say something. Hitler’s bodyguards are taken aback. Who is he, and what the hell does he want?
John Scott-Ellis introduces himself. He seizes the moment and asks the Führer if he remembers being knocked over in the street three years ago. To his surprise, Hitler remembers it well. ‘He was quite charming to me for a few moments.’ Then the orchestra strikes up, and the overture begins. The two men never meet again.
Over the years,† John often tells this tale of his unexpected brush with Adolf Hitler. ‘For a few seconds, perhaps, I held the history of Europe in my rather clumsy hands. He was only shaken up, but had I killed him, it would have changed the history of the world,’ he concludes of his own peculiar one on one.
JOHN SCOTT-ELLIS
TALKS OF THE BOCHE WITH
RUDYARD KIPLING
Chirk Castle, Wrexham, North Wales
Summer 1923
In the summer of 1923, John Scott-Ellis is still only ten years old, yet he has already lunched with G.K. Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw.
John lives in a vast thirteenth-century castle. His father, the eighth Baron Howard de Walden, dabbles in the arts, writing operas, poetry and plays. At one time he owned the Haymarket Theatre, putting on a good many highbrow productions, including works by Henrik Ibsen. When these failed to make money, he was persuaded to stage a comedy called Bunty Pulls the Strings; it ran for three years.
The eighth Baron’s castle acts as a tremendous draw to artists and writers. Young John is now used to passing the time of day with Hilaire Belloc, Augustus John, George Moore or Max Beerbohm. Some of these grandees are more friendly than others. Belloc teaches him all sorts of tricks with paper, such as how to make a bird which flaps its wings when you pull its tail. By cutting out two triangles and placing them on a sheet of paper in a particular way, he also shows him an easy way to prove Pythagoras’ Theorem. ‘While I remember how to do this, I am sad to have forgotten his absolute proof of the Trinity, which he demonstrated in a somewhat similar fashion,’ John recalls in old age. He remembers, too, the Irish novelist George Moore (‘always rather preoccupied’) tackling his father with a problem he was finding impossible to solve.
‘I keep on writing down “she was in the habit of wearing a habit”, and it isn’t right and I can’t think how to alter it.’
‘What about, “she was used to wearing a habit”?’ suggested Lord Howard de Walden. Moore went away happy.
In the summer of 1923, Rudyard Kipling comes to stay at Chirk. The great author and the young boy go for a walk around the garden together. It was in such a setting that Hugh Walpole observed of the five-foot-three-inch Kipling, ‘When he walks about the garden, his eyebrows are all that are really visible of him.’
At the age of fifty-seven, Kipling encourages children to call him Uncle Ruddy. He finds it hard to make friends with adults, but speaks to children as equals, which is how he writes for them too. ‘I would sooner make a fair book of stories for children than a new religion or a completely revised framework for our social and political life,’ he explains.
Among children, he becomes a child. On a trip to South Africa, he lay himself flat on the deck to teach a little boy how to play with soldiers. But he can be short-tempered with those who lack his sense of adventure. He once handed his revolver to a youngster and urged him to fire it. Seeing him hesitate, Kipling snapped, ‘At your age I would have given anything to shoot a revolver!’
But Kipling and John operate on the same wavelength. Kipling has long been fascinated by the paranormal, so he is perhaps attracted by the boy’s unusual powers: John is able to throw a pack of cards face down on the floor and then pick out the four aces. ‘I claim absolutely no strange powers but probably I had, or even have, this ESP slightly higher than others,’ he recollects. One afternoon, a visiting Admiral with an interest in psychic matters asks him to throw two dice, and wish for high. ‘For about twenty throws or more I never threw less than four and frequently double sixes.’ The Admiral then tells him to wish for low. ‘I started with double ones and continued in much the same vein.’
On their walk around the garden, John chats with Rudyard Kipling about Germans. Kipling says he hates them. Their talk turns to aeroplanes. Kipling says they are always trying to knock down his chimneys.
John asks him if he would ever travel in an airship.
‘What!’ exclaims Kipling. ‘Locked in a silver coffin with lots of Boche?!’
Such a quote may seem almost too good to be true, but Kipling has a curious capacity to become his own caricature. Dining with Somerset Maugham at the Villa Mauresque, the conversation turned to a mutual friend. When Kipling declared, ‘He’s a white man,’ Maugham thought to himself, ‘This is characteristic. How I wish, in order to fulfil my preconceptions of him, he would say he was a pukka sahib.’
‘He’s a pukka sahib all right,’ continued Kipling.
After their walk, Kipling accepts John’s invitation to take a look at John’s collection of his complete works in their smart red-leather pocket edition. Kipling offers to sign them for him, but as if by magic, Kipling’s formidable wife Carrie suddenly swoops into the room and tells him not to. This, too, is characteristic. Carrie spends her time protecting her husband from his readers, and is often derided for it. To Lady Colefax she is ‘a super-bossy second-rate American woman, the sort of woman you could only speak to about servants’. A young boy called Henry Fielden was in the habit of dropping in at Kipling’s house, Bateman’s, to borrow books. Once when he arrived he saw Kipling standing at the window, so he waved, and Kipling waved back. But when Henry knocked on the front door, a maid told him that Mr Kipling was not at home. Henry insisted that they had just waved to each other, and the maid rushed away in confusion. A short while later, a furious Mrs Kipling appeared, saying through tight lips that her husband would be down in a minute.
The day after their interrupted book-signing, Kipling takes John to the sheepdog trials in Llangollen. John notes how comfortable Kipling is in the company of the shepherds, ‘getting them to talk and explain all about the trials and their lives’. On their way home, Kipling promises to write a story about these very shepherds. ‘But sadly,’ observes John, by now an old man, ‘he never got round to it.’
RUDYARD KIPLING
HERO-WORSHIPS
MARK TWAIN
Elmira, New York State
June 1889
In 1889, Rudyard Kipling is twenty-three years old, though he looks closer to forty. He arrives in San Francisco on May 28th, after a twenty-day voyage from Japan.
He is greedy for life. He witnesses a gunfight in Chinatown, lands a twelve-pound salmon in Oregon, meets cowboys in Montana, is appalled by Chicago, and falls in love with his future wife in Beaver, north Pennsylvania.
Before he leaves the United States, he is determined to meet his hero, Mark Twain. He goes on a wild-goose chase – to Buffalo, then Toronto, then Boston – before tracking him down to Elmira, where a policeman tells him he spotted Twain ‘or someone very like him’ driving a buggy through town the day before. ‘He lives out yonder at East Hill, three miles from here.’
At East Hill, he is informed that Twain is at his brother-in-law’s house downtown. He finds the house and rings the doorbell, but then has second thoughts. ‘It occurred to me for the first time Mark Twain might possibly have other engagements than the entertainment of escaped lunatics from India.’
He is led into a big, dark drawing room. There, in a huge chair, he finds the fifty-three-year-old author of Tom Sawyer with ‘a mane of grizzled hair, a brown mustache covering a mouth as delicate as a woman’s, a strong, square hand shaking mine and the slowest, calmest, levellest voice in all the world … I was shaking his hand. I was smoking his cigar, and I was hearing him talk – this man I had learned to love and admire 14,000 miles away.’
Kipling is transfixed. ‘That was a moment to be remembered; the landing of a twelve-pound salmon was nothing to it. I had hooked Mark Twain, and he was treating me as though under certain circumstances I might be an equal.’
The two men discuss the difficulties of copyright before moving on to Twain’s work. ‘Growing bold, and feeling that I had a few hundred thousand folk at my back, I demanded whether Tom Sawyer married Judge Thatcher’s daughter and whether we were ever going to hear of Tom Sawyer as a man.’
Twain gets up, fills his pipe, and paces the room in his bedroom slippers. ‘I haven’t decided. I have a notion of writing the sequel to Tom Sawyer in two ways. In one I would make him rise to great honor and go to Congress, and in the other I should hang him. Then the friends and enemies of the book could take their choice.’
Kipling raises a voice of protest: to him, Tom Sawyer is real.
‘Oh, he is real. He’s all the boys that I have known or recollect; but that would be a good way of ending the book, because, when you come to think of it, neither religion, training, nor education avails anything against the force of circumstances that drive a man. Suppose we took the next four and twenty years of Tom Sawyer’s life, and gave a little joggle to the circumstances that controlled him. He would, logically and according to the joggle, turn out a rip or an angel.’
‘Do you believe that, then?’
‘I think so; isn’t it what you call kismet?’
‘Yes; but don’t give him two joggles and show the result, because he isn’t your property any more. He belongs to us.’
Twain laughs. They move on to autobiography. ‘I believe it is impossible for a man to tell the truth about himself or to avoid impressing the reader with the truth about himself,’ Twain says. ‘I made an experiment once. I got a friend of mine – a man painfully given to speak the truth on all occasions – a man who wouldn’t dream of telling a lie – and I made him write his autobiography for his own amusement and mine … good, honest man that he was, in every single detail of his life that I knew about he turned out, on paper, a formidable liar. He could not help himself.’*
As Twain walks up and down talking and puffing away, Kipling finds himself coveting his cob pipe. ‘I understood why certain savage tribes ardently desire the liver of brave men slain in combat. That pipe would have given me, perhaps, a hint of his keen insight into the souls of men. But he never laid it aside within stealing reach.’
Twain talks of the books he likes to read. ‘I never cared for fiction or story-books. What I like to read about are facts and statistics of any kind. If they are only facts about the raising of radishes, they interest me. Just now for instance, before you came in, I was reading an article about mathematics. Perfectly pure mathematics. My own knowledge of mathematics stops at “twelve times twelve” but I enjoyed that article immensely. I didn’t understand a word of it; but facts, or what a man believes to be facts, are always delightful.’
After two hours, the interview comes to an end. The great man, who never minds talking, assures his disciple that he has not interrupted him in the least.*
Seventeen years on, Rudyard Kipling is world famous. Twain grows nostalgic for the time he spent in his company. ‘I believe that he knew more than any person I had met before, and he knew I knew less than any person he had met before … When he was gone, Mr Langdon wanted to know about my visitor. I said, “He is a stranger to me but is a most remarkable man – and I am the other one. Between us, we cover all knowledge; he knows all that can be known, and I know the rest.”’
Twain, now aged seventy, is addicted to Kipling’s works. He rereads Kim every year, ‘and in this way I go back to India without fatigue … I am not acquainted with my own books but I know Kipling’s books. They never grow pale to me; they keep their colour; they are always fresh.’
The worshipped has become the worshipper.
MARK TWAIN
BIDS FAREWELL TO
HELEN KELLER
Stormfield, Connecticut
February 1909
As Helen Keller’s carriage draws up between the huge granite pillars of Mark Twain’s house, the most venerable author in America is there to greet her, though she can neither see him nor hear him. Her companion Annie Sullivan – her eyes and ears – tells Helen that he is all in white, his beautiful white hair glistening in the afternoon sunshine ‘like the snow spray on gray stones’.
Twain and Keller first met fifteen years ago, when he was fifty-eight and she was just fourteen. Struck deaf and blind by meningitis at the age of eighteen months, Helen had, through sheer force of will, discovered a way to communicate: she finds out what people are saying by placing her fingers on their lips, throat and nose, or by having Annie transpose it onto the palm of her hand in letters of the alphabet.
Taken up as a prodigy by the great and the good,* she formed a special friendship with Twain. ‘The instant I clasped his hand in mine, I knew that he was my friend. He made me laugh and feel thoroughly happy by telling some good stories, which I read from his lips … He knew with keen and sure intuition many things about me and how it felt to be blind and not to keep up with the swift ones – things that others learned slowly or not at all. He never embarrassed me by saying how terrible it is not to see, or how dull life must be, lived always in the dark.’
Unlike other people, Twain has never patronised her. ‘He never made me feel that my opinions were worthless, as so many people do. He knew that we do not think with eyes and ears, and that our capacity for thought is not measured by five senses. He kept me always in mind while he talked, and he treated me like a competent human being. That is why I loved him …’
For his part, Twain is in awe. ‘She is fellow to Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon, Homer, Shakespeare and the rest of the immortals. She will be as famous a thousand years from now as she is today.’ Shortly after their first meeting, Twain formed a circle to fund her education at Radcliffe College, which led to her publishing an autobiography at the age of twenty-two, which in turn led her to become almost as celebrated as Twain himself.
But the intervening years have struck Twain some heavy blows. One of his daughters has died of meningitis,* another of an epileptic fit in a bathtub, and his wife Livy has died of heart disease. Throughout Helen’s stay he acts his familiar bluff, entertaining old self, but she senses the deep sadness within.
‘There was about him the air of one who had suffered greatly. Whenever I touched his face, his expression was sad, even when he was telling a funny story. He smiled, not with the mouth but with his mind – a gesture of the soul rather than of the face.’
But for the moment, he welcomes them into the house for tea and buttered toast by the fire. Then he shows them around. He takes Helen into his beloved billiard room. He will, he says, teach her how to play just like his friends Paine, Dunne and Rogers.
‘Oh, Mr Clemens, it takes sight to play billiards.’
‘Yes, but not the variety of billiards that Paine and Dunne and Rogers play. The blind couldn’t play worse,’ he jokes.
They go upstairs to see his bedroom. ‘Try to picture, Helen, what we are seeing out of these windows. We are high up on a snow-covered hill. Beyond, are dense spruce and firwoods, other snow-clad hills and stone walls intersecting the landscape everywhere, and, over all, the white wizardry of winter. It is a delight, this wild, free, fir-scented place.’
He shows the two women to their suite. On the mantelpiece there is a card telling burglars where to find everything of value. There has recently been a burglary, Twain explains, and this notice will ensure that any future intruders do not bother to disturb him.
Over dinner, Twain holds forth, ‘his talk fragrant with tobacco and flamboyant with profanity’. He explains that in his experience guests do not enjoy dinner if they are always worrying about what to say next: it is up to the host to take on that burden. ‘He talked delightfully, audaciously, brilliantly,’ says Helen. Dinner comes to an end, but his talk continues around the fire. ‘He seemed to have absorbed all America into himself. The great Mississippi River seemed forever flowing, flowing through his speech, through the shadowless white sands of thought. His voice seemed to say like the river, “Why hurry? Eternity is long; the ocean can wait.”’
Before Helen leaves Smithfield, Twain is more solemn. ‘I am very lonely, sometimes, when I sit by the fire after my friends have departed. My thoughts trail away into the past. I think of Livy and Susy and I seem to be fumbling in the dark folds of confused dreams …’
As she says goodbye, Helen wonders if they will ever meet again. Once more, her intuition proves right. Twain dies the following year. Some time later, Helen returns to where the old house once stood: it has burnt down, with only a charred chimney still standing. She turns her unseeing eyes to the view he once described to her, and at that moment feels someone coming towards her. ‘I reached out, and a red geranium blossom met my touch. The leaves of the plant were covered with ashes, and even the sturdy stalk had been partly broken off by a chip of falling plaster. But there was the bright flower smiling at me out of the ashes. I thought it said to me, “Please don’t grieve.”’
She plants the geranium in a sunny corner of her garden. ‘It always seems to say the same thing to me, “Please don’t grieve.” But I grieve, nevertheless.’
HELEN KELLER
AND …
MARTHA GRAHAM
66 Fifth Avenue, New York
December 1952
Before she taught Helen Keller each new word and phrase, Annie Sullivan used to say, ‘And …’
‘AND open the window!’
‘AND close the door!’
Everything life had to offer began with this little word.
The first word Helen ever learned was w-a-t-e-r. In Helen Keller’s dark, silent childhood, her teacher placed her hand beneath the spout of a well.
‘As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten – a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that “w-a-t-e-r” meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! … I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me.’
Now aged seventy-two, Helen Keller still dreams of being like other women: what must it be like, she wonders, to see and hear? However much she gains the upper hand over her disabilities, there are still many perfectly simple and basic things within easy reach of everybody else that she can never hope to master, or perhaps even to comprehend: dance, for instance.
She has gained the respect of some of the most distinguished people in the world, but sometimes she thinks she would swap it all for the chance to dance. ‘How quickly I should lock up all those mighty warriors, and hoary sages, and impossible heroes, who are now almost my only companions; and dance and sing and frolic like other girls!’ she confesses to a friend.
But she abhors self-pity; when she feels it looming, she forces herself to count her blessings. ‘… I must not waste my time wishing idle wishes; and, after all, my ancient friends are very wise and interesting, and I usually enjoy their society very much indeed. It is only once in a great while that I feel discontented, and allow myself to wish for things I cannot hope for in this life.’
Dance comes to symbolise the carefree land from which she is for ever exiled. ‘There are days when the close attention I must give to detail chafes my spirit, and the thought that I must spend hours reading a few chapters, while in the world without other girls are laughing and singing and dancing, makes me rebellious; but I soon recover my buoyancy and laugh the discontent out of my heart. For, after all, every one who wishes to gain true knowledge must climb the Hill Difficulty alone, and since there is no royal road to the summit, I must zigzag it in my own way … Every struggle is victory.’
Still fêted wherever she goes, Helen Keller is taken by a friend to meet the electrifying Grande Dame of modern dance, Martha Graham. Graham is immediately taken by what she calls Helen’s ‘gracious embrace of life’, and is impressed by what appears to be her photographic memory. They become friends. Before long, Helen starts paying regular visits to the dance studio. She seems to focus on the dancers’ feet, and can somehow tell the direction in which they are moving. Martha Graham is intrigued. ‘She could not see the dance but was able to allow its vibrations to leave the floor and enter her body.’
At first, Graham finds it hard to understand exactly what Helen is saying, but she soon grows accustomed to what she calls ‘that funny voice of hers’. On one of her visits, Helen says, ‘Martha, what is jumping? I don’t understand.’
Graham is touched by this simple question. She asks a member of her company, Merce Cunningham, to stand at the barre. She approaches him from behind, says, ‘Merce, be very careful, I’m putting Helen’s hands on your body,’ and places Helen Keller’s hands on his waist.
Cunningham cannot see Keller, but feels her two hands around his waist, ‘like bird wings, so soft’. Everyone in the studio stands quite still, focusing on what is happening. Cunningham jumps in the air while Keller’s hands rise up with his body.
‘Her hands rose and fell as Merce did,’ recalls Martha Graham, in extreme old age. ‘Her expression changed from curiosity to one of joy. You could see the enthusiasm rise in her face as she threw her arms in the air.’
Cunningham continues to perform small leaps, with very straight legs. He suddenly feels Keller’s fingers, still touching his waist, begin to move slightly, ‘as though fluttering’. For the first time in her life, she is experiencing dance. ‘Oh, how wonderful! How like thought! How like the mind it is!’ she exclaims when he stops.
Helen Keller and Martha Graham appear together in a documentary film, The Unconquered, in 1953. Still wearing her hat, Keller stands in the middle of a group of dancers ‘feeling’ the dance, while Graham and her dancers circle around her. She has a look of ecstasy upon her face.
Almost half a century later, Martha Graham, now aged ninety-six, is busy dictating her autobiography. Her hands are crippled with arthritis. She looks back on Helen Keller, who died over twenty years ago, as ‘the most gallant woman I have ever known’. And then it suddenly strikes her why, way back in the 1950s, Helen had been quite so excited by her visits to the studio.
‘The word “and” is inseparable from the dance, and leads us into most of the exercises and movements. It led her into the life of vibration. And her life enriched our studio. And to close the circle, all of our dance classes begin with the teacher saying, “AND … one!”’
MARTHA GRAHAM
SILENCES
MADONNA
316 East 63rd Street, New York
Autumn 1978
By 1978, Martha Graham has a formidable reputation. Over the course of her career, she has danced at the White House for eight US presidents, and baffled almost as many.*
Her work is adored and reviled in roughly equal measure. The Graham technique, taught at the school she founded half a century ago, is tense, percussive, sexually explicit. It is her belief that female dancers should ‘dance from the vagina’. One of her acolytes explains that ‘Martha’s premise was that an act of lovemaking was an act of murder.’
Aged eighty-four, she maintains a ferocious temper, storming in or out at the drop of a hat. She has been known to pull the cloth from a restaurant table, scattering everything to the floor before making her exit. Nowadays, she is spotted only rarely in her school, though rumour has it that she is always there, like a demanding ghost.
The nineteen-year-old Madonna Ciccone has just taken her first trip in an aeroplane. She arrives in New York City from Michigan, with $35 and a bag of dance tights, determined to make her name as a dancer. After she tells the cab driver to take her to the centre of everything, he drops her off in Times Square.
She auditions for a dance company, but fails. They tell her she has drive but no technique, and advise her to enrol in the Martha Graham Dance School. Within twenty-four hours she has signed up for beginners’ classes, paying her way by working in a fast-food restaurant.
‘I dug this place. The studios were Spartan, minimalist. Everyone whispered, so the only sounds you heard were the music and the instructors, and they spoke to you only when you were fucking up – which was pretty easy to do around there. It’s a difficult technique to learn. It’s physically brutal and there is no room for slouches … At one time in my life, I had fantasized about being a nun, and this was the closest I was ever going to get to convent life.’
The topic of Martha Graham provides the backdrop to every conversation. ‘I wanted to meet the mother superior, the woman responsible for all this.’ She hears that Graham visits the building often, and she even sits in on classes from time to time, either to check up on the teaching staff or to scout for talent. Madonna grows obsessed with meeting her, much as a visitor to Loch Ness might long to meet the monster. ‘She stayed pretty hidden. I had heard she was vain about growing old. Maybe she was really busy, or really shy, or both. But her presence was always felt, which only added to her mystique and to my longing to meet her … She had a serious Garbo vibe about her and seemed like she really wanted to be left alone.’
Madonna begins to daydream about running into her. ‘I was gonna be fearless and nonchalant. I would befriend her and get her to confess all the secrets of her soul.’
With this aim in mind, she signs on for extra classes, and lingers in the hallways in the hope of catching a glimpse. Sometimes, she invents excuses to enter the offices. And then, one day, quite by chance, it happens.
Madonna is in the middle of her 11 a.m. class. She has drunk too much coffee. Against the rules, she nips out ‘with my bladder at bursting point’. She heaves open the heavy door to the hallway and steps outside the classroom, only to find herself face to face with Martha Graham. ‘There she was, right in front of me, staring into my face. OK, not exactly in front of me, but my appearance must have taken her by surprise: no one ever left the tomb-like classrooms until classes were over.’
Graham stops dead in her tracks. Madonna is paralysed and, for the first time in her life, and possibly the last, struck dumb. ‘She was part Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. The rest of her was a cross between a Kabuki dancer and the nun I was obsessed with in the fifth grade, Sister Kathleen Thomas. In any case, I was overwhelmed, and all my plans to disarm her and win her over were swallowed up by my fear of a presence I’d never encountered before.’
Graham doesn’t say a word. ‘She just looked at me with what I thought was interest but was probably only disapproval. Her hair was pulled back severely, displaying a pale face made up like a porcelain doll. Her chin jutted out with arrogance and her eyes were like shiny brown immovable marbles. She was small and big at the same time.’
Madonna waits for words to spring from Martha Graham’s mouth, and daggers to fly out of her eyes. ‘I ignored the aching in my lower abdomen. I forgot that I had a big mouth and that I wasn’t afraid of anyone. This was my first true encounter with a goddess. A warrior. A survivor. Someone not to be fucked with.’
Martha Graham says nothing, but flicks her long skirts and disappears into a room, closing the door behind her. ‘Before I could clear my throat, she was gone. I was left shaking in my leotard, partly because I still had to go to the bathroom but most because I had encountered such an exquisite creature. I was truly dumbfounded … Much has happened in my life since then but nothing will diminish the memory of my first encounter with this woman – this life force.’*
Ten years later, Madonna is by far the most famous female pop star in the world. Her performances incorporate elaborate dance routines: tense, percussive, sexually explicit. One day, someone from the Martha Graham Dance School contacts her office, saying that the school is facing bankruptcy. ‘Give it one day,’ comes the reply. The very next day, Madonna’s office rings back, offering $150,000. When Martha Graham, now aged ninety-four, is presented with the cheque, she bursts into tears.
MADONNA
INDUCES QUEASINESS IN
MICHAEL JACKSON
The Ivy restaurant, Beverly Hills, Los Angeles
March 15th 1991
Wondering who might be sufficiently glamorous to accompany her to the Academy Awards, where she is due to perform, Madonna has a brainwave. ‘How about Michael Jackson? Oh my God, what a great idea! Don’t you love it?’ she exclaims to her manager, Freddy DeMann, who used to manage him.
DeMann negotiates with Jackson, and reports back: he has managed to arrange a preliminary dinner. The two biggest-selling stars in the world are booked to meet at the Ivy in Beverly Hills, ten days before the ceremony.
In the past, Jackson has been puzzled by Madonna. Though he is an astute businessman, he can’t fathom her appeal. ‘She’s always in your face, isn’t she?’ he once complained to a friend. ‘I don’t get it. What is it about her? She’s not a great dancer or singer. But she does know how to market herself. That must be it.’
Two years ago, he was somewhat put out to discover that she was being advertised by Warner Brothers as the ‘Artist of the Decade’. It was only in a trade publication, but even so. ‘It makes me look bad,’ he explained. ‘I’m the artist of the decade, aren’t I? Did she outsell Thriller? No, she did not.’
At their table at the Ivy, Madonna wears a black jacket and hot-pants with lacy stockings. Around her neck hangs a crucifix. Jackson is wearing black jeans, a red shirt and matching jacket, topped off with a fedora. He keeps his dark glasses on.
‘I had my sunglasses on, and I’m sitting there, you know, trying to be nice. And the next thing I know, she reaches over and takes my glasses off. Nobody has ever taken my glasses off … And then she throws them across the room and breaks them. I was shocked. “I’m your date now,” she told me, “and I hate it when I can’t see a man’s eyes.” I didn’t much like that.’
As the dinner progresses, Madonna thinks she has spotted Michael Jackson taking a crafty peek at her breasts. Grinning, she snatches his hand and places it upon them. Jackson recoils. When all is said and done, this is not his style. But Madonna is not the kind of person to take no for an answer; later during their dinner, she saucily drops a piece of bread down her cleavage, then fishes it out and pops it into her mouth. The effect on Jackson is one of instant queasiness.
‘Oh my God, you should see the muscles on that woman! I mean, she’s got muscles in her arms way bigger than mine. They’re, like, rippling, you know? I wanted to know how she got muscles that big, but didn’t want to ask because I was afraid she’d make me show her my muscles.’
Their exploratory dinner at the Ivy cannot, therefore, be judged a great success, but at least it is not so disastrous as to derail their joint entrance at the Academy Awards ceremony at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles.
Both of them have made an effort. They cut a dash together, Jackson in a white-sequinned suit with a large diamond brooch, plus gloves and gold-tipped cowboy boots, Madonna preferring a Marilyn Monroe look, with a skin-tight low-cut gown, also white-sequinned, and $20 million-worth of jewels, on overnight loan from Harry Winston.
Afterwards, they go to Swifty Lazar’s annual Oscar night party at Spago. As she is making her entrance, Madonna is asked by a Hollywood reporter how she managed to convince the normally reclusive Michael Jackson to accompany her. ‘Oh, Michael’s coming out more,’ she replies. Cynics detect a sneaky joke.
Once inside Spago and away from the cameras, it is not long before Madonna drifts towards her former lover Warren Beatty, leaving Jackson all alone. He is rescued by his old friend Diana Ross. ‘Well, I just don’t understand it, Michael,’ Ross says loudly, so that everyone can hear. ‘I mean, she’s supposed to be with you, isn’t she? So, what is she doing with him?’
‘I don’t know,’ whispers Michael Jackson. ‘I guess she likes him better.’
‘Well, I think she’s an awful woman,’ says Diana Ross, reassuringly. ‘Tacky dress, too.’
It is the very last time that Michael Jackson and Madonna will go out on a date together. However, a month or two later, Jackson asks Madonna to appear in his new video. Madonna, very excited, thinks they should do something ‘utterly outrageous’. As the title of the song is ‘In the Closet’, she thinks it would be a good idea if she were to appear as a man, and Jackson as a woman. Jackson is not so sure; might it not just confuse everyone? After all, the song is intended to be solidly heterosexual: the title, ‘In the Closet’ refers only to the singer’s desire to keep a relationship between himself and his girlfriend under wraps. Jackson’s sister Janet has always been sceptical about Madonna (‘If I took off my clothes in the middle of a highway, people would look at me, too. But does that make me an artist?’), but she expresses enthusiasm for the project. ‘What a statement!’ she says.
In the end, Jackson decides against, and the model Naomi Campbell appears in the video instead. The very first lines of the song are spoken in a breathy whisper by, of all people, Princess Stephanie of Monaco. ‘There’s something I have to say to you, if you promise you’ll understand. I cannot contain myself: when in your presence I’m so humble. Touch me. Don’t hide our love … woman to man.’
Naomi Campbell writhes around in a desert, wearing very little. She smooths her breasts with her hands while the gyrating Michael Jackson, in a sleeveless white T-shirt and black jeans, performs energetic thrusts, cupping his hands hither and thither around his pelvis while singing:
Because there’s something
About you baby
That makes me want
To give it to you!
The two of them barely look at one another, let alone touch.
MICHAEL JACKSON
INTRIGUES
NANCY REAGAN
The White House, Washington DC
May 14th 1984
A month or so ago, Michael Jackson’s lawyer, John Branca, was contacted by the White House to ask whether Jackson might donate his song ‘Beat It’ for advertisements against drink-driving.
Jackson was reluctant: ‘That’s tacky. I can’t do that,’ he told Branca. But he then had second thoughts. ‘You know what? If I can get some kind of an award from the White House, then I can give them the song. How about that?’ He wants to be on a stage at the White House with President Reagan. ‘And I sure want to meet Nancy.’
Within days, they have a deal. The President has agreed to present Michael Jackson with a special humanitarian award, and the First Lady will be there too.
Fans gather at dawn to peer through the fence of the White House. At 11 a.m. the South Lawn is thronging with media, along with hundreds of White House staff, most of them clutching cameras.
The President arrives in a navy-blue suit. The First Lady wears a white Adolfo suit with gold buttons, trimmed with gold braid. Jackson wears an oversize military jacket with sequins, plus floppy gold epaulettes and a gold sash, a single white glove, checkered with rhinestones, and droopy dark glasses.
‘Well, isn’t this a thriller?’ chuckles the President, behind his dais. ‘I’m delighted to see you all here. Just think: you all came to see me. No, I know why you’re here, and with good reason – to see one of the most talented, most popular and one of the most exciting superstars in the world today – Michael Jackson. Michael – welcome to the White House.’
After dutifully peppering his speech with the titles of some of Jackson’s hits – ‘Off the Wall’, ‘I Want You Back’ – the jovial President gets down to business. ‘At this stage of his career, when it would seem he has achieved everything a musical performer can hope for, Michael Jackson is taking time to lead the fight against alcohol and drug abuse … Michael Jackson is proof of what a young person can accomplish free of drink or drug abuse.* People young and old respect that, and if Americans follow his example then we can face up to the problems of drinking and driving. And we can, in Michael’s words, Beat It.
‘Nancy spends a great deal of her time with young people talking about the problems of drink and drug abuse, so I speak for both of us when I say thank you, Michael, for the example that you’re giving to millions of young Americans … Your success is an American dream come true.’
Amidst applause, Jackson comes to the podium to receive his award. ‘I’m very, very honoured,’ he says in his high-pitched voice. ‘Thank you very much, Mr President.’ He then giggles to himself before adding, ‘And Mrs Reagan.’
The President and Mrs Reagan usher Jackson inside, leaving him and his entourage to tour the White House. Jackson shows an interest in a portrait of his namesake, the seventh President of the United States, Andrew Jackson, who is in a similar military uniform, though without the sequins.
Afterwards, Jackson is to have a private meeting with the Reagans, along with one or two children of staff members. But when he is ushered into the Diplomatic Reception Room, he is confronted by seventy-five adults.
He turns on his heels, running down the hall into the rest room off the Presidential Library. He locks the door, and refuses to come out. ‘They said there would be kids. But those aren’t kids!’ he protests to Frank Dileo, his manager.
Dileo has a word with a White House aide, who immediately rounds on an assistant. ‘If the First Lady gets a load of this, she’s going to be mad as hell. Now you go get some kids in here, damn it.’
Dileo shouts through the rest-room door, ‘It’s OK, Michael. We’re going to get some kids.’
‘You’ll have to clear all those adults out of there before I come out,’ demands Jackson.
An aide runs into the Reception Room. ‘OK, out! Everybody out!’ A member of Jackson’s entourage arrives in the rest room. ‘Everything is OK.’
‘Are you sure?’ asks Michael.
At this point, Frank Dileo grows edgy. ‘OK, Mike, outta there. I mean it.’
Michael Jackson returns to the freshly vacated Reception Room. A handful of children are waiting. While he signs a copy of Thriller for the Transport Secretary, the Reagans arrive. They usher Jackson into the Roosevelt Room to meet a few more aides and their children.
As Jackson talks to the children, Nancy Reagan whispers to one of his staff, ‘I’ve heard he wants to look like Diana Ross, but looking at him up close, he’s so much prettier than she is. Don’t you agree? I mean, I just don’t think she’s that attractive, but he certainly is.’
Jackson’s employees are forbidden from discussing their employer, so he does not reply.
‘I just wish he would take off those sunglasses,’ continues Mrs Reagan, adding, ‘Tell me, has he had any surgery on his eyes?’
There is still no reply. ‘Certainly his nose has been done,’ whispers Mrs Reagan, peering hard at Jackson, who is now talking to her husband. ‘More than once, I’d say. I wonder about his cheekbones. Is that make-up, or has he had them done too? It’s all so peculiar, really. A boy who looks just like a girl, who whispers when he speaks, wears a glove on one hand and sunglasses all the time. I just don’t know what to make of it.’ She lifts her eyes to the ceiling and shakes her head.
The Jackson aide begins to think it may be rude to say nothing at all to the First Lady. ‘Listen, you don’t know the half of it,’ he says, with a conspiratorial smile. But the First Lady reacts as though she disdains such idle gossip.
‘Well, he is talented. And I would think that’s all that you should be concerned about,’ she snaps.
NANCY REAGAN
DISAPPOINTS
ANDY WARHOL
The White House, Washington DC
October 15th 1981
‘The funny thing about movie people,’ says Andy Warhol to the First Lady over tea in the White House, ‘is that they talk behind your back before you even leave the room.’
Nancy Reagan’s eyes, already preternaturally wide, grow still wider. She looks at Warhol as though he were unbalanced.
‘I am a movie person, Andy,’ she replies.
The interview has been stiff throughout. Mrs Reagan never reacts well to criticism, and can spot it from a great distance. It is written in her stars. ‘Cancers tend to be intuitive, vulnerable, sensitive and fearful of ridicule – all of which, like it or not, I am,’ she explains in her autobiography. ‘The Cancer symbol is the crab shell: Cancers often present a hard exterior to the world, which hides their vulnerability. When they’re hurt, Cancers respond by withdrawing into themselves. That’s me all right.’
Warhol himself has been notably crab-like in his advance on the Reagans. Two months before the 1981 presidential election, he befriended the Reagans’ son Ronald Junior, then their daughter Patti. Both sides are happy: the younger Reagans mix with the most famous artist in America, and in turn Warhol mixes with America’s imminent first family. Warhol likes Ronald Junior. ‘He turned out to be a really nice kid. God, he was so sweet … and he’s very smart. Lispy and cute.’ At their first lunch together, Warhol is tongue-tied. ‘I didn’t know what to talk to him about. I was too shy and he was too shy.’ Warhol finds himself asking an awkward question about whether or not his father dyes his hair. Ronald Junior tries to change the subject. His mother, Nancy, is, he tells Warhol, ‘very sweet and very adorable’.
Warhol seizes the moment. ‘So then I got sneaky and brought Ordinary People up, and I told him how much I hated Mary Tyler Moore, that after I saw the movie if I saw her on the street I’d just kick her. And at that point he was almost going to say something about Nancy, but then somehow he got the drift of it and changed the subject. Because I think the mother in Ordinary People is just like Mrs Reagan. Really cold and shrewd.’
They discuss what to order. Warhol tells Ronald Junior that he has never eaten frogs’ legs, ‘and he was so sweet he ordered them just so I could try it. He’s really sweet, a beautiful body and beautiful eyes. But he just doesn’t have a pretty nose. It’s too long.’
Two weeks later, Patti Davis, Ronald Junior’s older sister, drops by the Interview office. ‘She looked sort of pretty to me, but then looking at her later on the video, how could these kids have missed their parents’ good looks? I mean, Dad was so gorgeous.’
Between Ronald Reagan’s election and his inauguration, Andy Warhol goes out with Ronald Reagan Junior and his wife Doria to see the movie Flash Gordon. By the end of the evening, he has given Doria a job on Interview magazine.
Warhol doesn’t encounter Nancy Reagan until March 1981, when, by chance, he spots her eating in the same restaurant. ‘We were leaving and didn’t want to go by the President’s table because it was too groupie-ish – everybody else was stopping at the table – so we went the other way, but then they called us over. Jerry Zipkin was yelling, and I met Mrs Reagan, and she said, “Oh you’re so good to my kids.”’
The possibility of an interview with Nancy Reagan is mooted in September 1981. By now Nancy has taken to ringing Warhol’s sidekick Bob Colacello at the office, fussing about Ron and Doria, ‘causing no end of envy to Andy’. Colacello negotiates with the White House for an interview with Mrs Reagan: they give their approval, thinking it might lighten her imperious image. But, perhaps sensing Colacello has overtaken him on this particular social ladder, Warhol affects to pooh-pooh the idea. ‘I think she is too old and it’s old-fashioned. We should have younger people. What is there to ask her? About her movie career? Oh, it’ll never happen anyway.’
But it does. A month later, Warhol and Colacello leave for Washington. Colacello warns Warhol not to ask her any ‘sex questions’. This upsets Warhol. ‘I just couldn’t believe him. I mean, I just couldn’t believe him. Did he think I was going to sit there and ask her how often do they do it?’
The two of them, plus Doria, arrive early at the White House and are placed in a reception room. There they remain: when the First Lady arrives, she fails to lead them to somewhere more grand or more intimate. Warhol, ever-alert to matters of status, is affronted; a waiter brings them each a glass of water, and Warhol is further affronted.
The interview never really gets going. ‘We talked about drug rehabilitation, and it was boring. I made a couple of mistakes but I didn’t care because I was still so mad at being told by Bob not to ask sex questions.’
Soon, it is all over. Before ushering them out, Nancy Reagan gives Doria a piece of Tupperware (‘not wrapped up or anything’) and socks for Ron Junior. Colacello tells Nancy what a good mother she is, and asks what they are doing for Christmas. Nancy says they will stay at the White House, ‘because nobody ever stays at the White House’.
Warhol leaves feeling he has been snubbed. A glass of water! When he gets home, his phone is ringing. ‘It was Brigid asking me what kind of tea Mrs Reagan served us, and then I started thinking and I got madder. I mean, she could have put on the dog – she could have done it in a good room, she could have used the good china! I mean, this was for her daughter-in-law, she could have done something really great for this interview but she didn’t. I got madder and madder thinking about it.’
ANDY WARHOL
BLANKS
JACKIE KENNEDY
1040 Fifth Avenue, New York
December 20th 1978
Somehow, Andy Warhol has no luck with Presidents or First Ladies. They never seem to hit it off. After a party for Newsweek in 1983, he observes, ‘It was a boring party. No stars. Just Nancy Reagan and President and Mrs Carter.’
But they have their uses. On November 22nd 1963, he was walking through Grand Central Station when the news came through that President Kennedy had been assassinated. Warhol paused to absorb this and then, in a matter-of-fact manner, said to his assistant, ‘Well, let’s get to work.’
Within months, he had produced any amount of pictures of Jackie Kennedy, some adapted from a photograph of her smiling just before her husband was shot, some from photographs of her at his funeral, others a combination of the two.
As the years roll by, the paths of America’s most famous widow and America’s most famous artist cross on a regular basis. He is mesmerised by her fame. Possibly as a result, she is often standoffish towards him.* This makes him touchy. In 1977, Warhol is invited to a fundraising dinner Jackie has organised. ‘The dinner was a horror. They put us at such a nothing nobody table,’ he records in his diary. ‘So here we were in this room where we didn’t even recognise anybody except each other and this girl comes over to me and says, “I know you have a camera, and you can take pictures of everyone here except Mrs Onassis.”’ A few minutes later, Warhol enters the main room and finds not only that ‘there was everybody we knew’, but ‘there were 4,000 photographers taking pictures of Jackie. And that horrible girl had come over to tell me I couldn’t!’
The following year, Warhol is irritated to be told that Diana Vreeland doesn’t think he is avant-garde any more, and Jackie doesn’t either. That November, he hears that Jackie has thrown a party without inviting him. ‘Robert Kennedy Jr told Fred that they had a big question about whether to invite us and decided not to. Jackie really is awful, I guess.’
A week later, things look up. He receives an invitation to Jackie’s Christmas party. Warhol invites his friend Bob Colacello. They arrive late. ‘Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton were there and Bob heard – overheard – Jackie saying that something Warren did in the hall was “disgusting”, but we were never able to find out what it was.’
Over dinner at Mortimer’s afterwards, someone says Beatty has had sex with Jackie. Bianca Jagger says Warren has probably just made it up, because he made up that he slept with her, and when she saw him in the Beverly Wilshire she embarrassed him by screaming, ‘Warren, I hear you say you’re fucking me. How can you say that when it’s not true?’
Then Bianca says that Warren has a big cock, and Steve asks how would she know, and she says that all her girlfriends have slept with him. Colacello is ‘in heaven’ because Jackie is so nice to him, even sharing her glass of Perrier with him when the butler forgot to bring his, and saying, ‘It’s ours.’
But the next day, Jackie has turned turtle. She calls Warhol three or four times at his office. ‘But I didn’t call back, because the messages were complicated – they were like, “Call me at this number after 5.30, or before 4.00 if it’s not raining.”’ Finally, she catches him at home. She is frosty. ‘She sounded so tough. She said, “Now Andy, when I invited you, I invited you – I didn’t invite Bob Colacello.”’ She complains that Colacello ‘writes things’. This leads Warhol to suspect that ‘something must have happened there that she doesn’t want written about. She was thinking about it all day, I guess.’ Could she be referring to the disgusting thing Warren Beatty did in her hall?
She punishes Warhol for his tardiness and his uninvited guest by asking her friends not to invite him to their parties. Warhol gets wind of his exclusion; their relationship deteriorates further. She never invites him to another Christmas party. It rankles. He records each fresh omission in his diary. ‘Shook hands with Jackie O.,’ he writes after attending a black-tie charity do at the Helmsley Palace. ‘She never invited me to her Christmas party again, so she’s a creep. And now I wouldn’t go if she did. I’d tell her to go mind her own business. I mean, I’m the same age, so I can tell her off. Although I do feel like she’s older than me. But then, I feel like everybody’s older than me.’
Warhol never quite gets over his exclusion from Jackie’s party list. In 1985, he is still fulminating. ‘I don’t understand why Jackie O. thinks she’s so grand that she doesn’t owe it to the public to have another great marriage to somebody big. You’d think she’d want to scheme and connive to get into history again.’
On Saturday, April 26th 1986, he attends the Cape Cod wedding of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver,* and notes, ‘Jackie never smiled at anyone, she was a sourpuss.’ At the reception, he blanks her. ‘I didn’t look at Jackie, I felt too funny.’ The two of them never see each other again. Less than a year later, Andy Warhol dies unexpectedly, following an operation to remove his gall bladder.
Twenty-two years after his death, archivists are sifting through 610 cardboard boxes, filing cabinets and a shipping container full of the belongings of Andy Warhol. They find, among much else, a piece of old wedding cake, various empty tins of chicken soup and $17,000 in cash. They also come across a photograph of Jackie Kennedy swimming naked. It is signed by her, ‘For Andy, with enduring affection, Jackie Montauk’ – a reference to Warhol’s estate on Long Island. No one knows how on earth it came to be there, or the story behind it; but it undoubtedly dates from a time before their falling-out in 1978.
JACKIE KENNEDY
IS ILL-AT-EASE WITH
HRH QUEEN ELIZABETH II
Buckingham Palace, London
June 5th 1961
It is barely four months since President Kennedy’s inauguration. Mrs Kennedy is still finding her feet.
Jackie is unsure of herself. In public, she smiles and waves. In private, she bites her nails and chain smokes. She is prone to self-pity. She is overheard saying, ‘Oh, Jack, I’m so sorry for you that I’m such a dud,’ to which Kennedy replies, ‘I love you as you are.’ Is each of them telling only half the truth?
Socially, she is an awkward mix of the gracious and the paranoid. ‘At one moment, she was misunderstood, frustrated and helpless. The next moment, without any warning, she was the royal, loyal First Lady to whom it was almost a duty to bow, to pay medieval obeisance,’ is the way her English friend Robin Douglas-Home puts it. ‘Then again, without any warning, she was deflating someone with devastating barbs for being such a spaniel as to treat her as the First Lady and deriding the pomp of politics, the snobbery of the social chamber.’
But now, on their whistle-stop tour of Europe, Jackie suddenly appears formidable. The French take to her as one of their own: born a Bouvier, she has French ancestry, and spent a year at the Sorbonne. She speaks fluent French and has arrived with a wardrobe of clothes specially designed for her by Givenchy. At a banquet at Versailles, President de Gaulle greets her by saying, ‘This evening, Madame, you are looking like a Watteau.’*
The political editor of Time reports that, ‘Thanks in large part to Jackie Kennedy at her prettiest, Kennedy charmed the old soldier into unprecedented flattering toasts and warm gestures of friendship.’ At a press conference, President Kennedy says, ‘I do not think it altogether inappropriate to introduce myself … I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris, and I have enjoyed it.’
Over dinner in Vienna, Jackie Kennedy charms Mr Khrushchev. As the evening unwinds, the Soviet Chairman draws his chair closer and closer to her. He compliments her on her white evening gown, and their subsequent conversation encompasses everything from dogs in space to folk dances in Ukraine. At the end of it, Khrushchev promises to send her a puppy as a present.
But the next morning, Khrushchev is back to his grumpy old self. He has no interest in charming the President, still less in being charmed by him. Kennedy emerges from their meeting feeling humiliated. On the flight from Vienna to London, both Kennedys appear downhearted, their gloom increased by the President’s perennial back problems. Their doctor administers drugs to buck them both up: amphetamines and vitamins for the First Lady and novocaine for the President, who is also taking the powerful painkiller Demerol.
In London the next day, the President informs the avuncular British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, of the battering he has received. ‘The President was completely overwhelmed by the ruthlessness and barbarity of the Russian Chairman,’ records Macmillan. ‘It reminded me in a way of Lord Halifax or Neville Chamberlain trying to hold a conversation with Herr Hitler. For the first time in his life Kennedy met a man who was impervious to his charm.’
In the morning, they attend the christening of Jackie’s niece Christina Radziwill. From there, they go to an informal lunch with the Prime Minister and a number of friends and relations, including the Ormsby-Gores and the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. The Duchess, an old friend of the President,* has mixed feelings about Jackie. ‘She is a queer fish. Her face is one of the oddest I ever saw. It is put together in a very wild way,’ she observes to her old friend Patrick Leigh Fermor.
That evening, the Kennedys attend a dinner at Buckingham Palace. It proves a minefield. The guest list has been the subject of negotiation: traditionally, divorcees are not invited, so the Queen has been reluctant to welcome Jackie’s sister Princess Lee Radziwill, who is on her second marriage, or her husband Prince Stanislaw Radziwill, who is on his third. Under pressure, she relents, but, by way of retaliation, singularly fails to invite Princess Margaret or Princess Marina, both of whose names Jackie has put forward. Jackie’s old paranoia returns: she sees it as a plot to do her down. ‘The Queen had her revenge,’ she confides to Gore Vidal.* ‘No Margaret, no Marina, no one except every Commonwealth minister of agriculture they could find.’ Jackie also tells Vidal that she found the Queen ‘pretty heavy-going’. (When Vidal repeats this to Princess Margaret some years later, the Princess loyally explains, ‘But that’s what she’s there for.’)
Over dinner, Jackie continues to feel awkward, even persecuted. ‘I think the Queen resented me. Philip was nice, but nervous. One felt absolutely no relationship between them.’
The Queen asks Jackie about her visit to Canada. Jackie tells her how exhausting she found being on public view for hours on end. ‘The Queen looked rather conspiratorial and said, “One gets crafty after a while and learns how to save oneself.”’† According to Vidal (who is prone to impose his own thoughts on others), Jackie considers this the only time the Queen seems remotely human.
After dinner, the Queen asks if she likes paintings. Yes, says Jackie, she certainly does. The Queen takes her for a stroll down a long gallery in the palace. They stop in front of a Van Dyck. The Queen says, ‘That’s a good horse.’ Yes, agrees Jackie, that is a good horse. From Jackie’s account, this is the extent of their contact with one another, but others differ. Dinner at Buckingham Palace, writes Harold Macmillan in his diary that night, is ‘very pleasant’.
Nine months later, Jackie pays another visit to the Queen at Buckingham Palace, this time by herself. She is more in the swing of things now. ‘I don’t think I should say anything about it except how grateful I am and how charming she was,’ she tells the television cameras as she makes her escape.
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