Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings Read online

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  CONTENTS

  Note to the U.S. Edition

  Author’s Note

  Adolf Hitler + John Scott-Ellis

  John Scott-Ellis + Rudyard Kipling

  Rudyard Kipling + Mark Twain

  Mark Twain + Helen Keller

  Helen Keller + Martha Graham

  Martha Graham + Madonna

  Madonna + Michael Jackson

  Michael Jackson + Nancy Reagan

  Nancy Reagan + Andy Warhol

  Andy Warhol + Jackie Kennedy

  Jackie Kennedy + HM Queen Elizabeth II

  HM Queen Elizabeth II + The Duke of Windsor

  The Duke of Windsor + Elizabeth Taylor

  Elizabeth Taylor + James Dean

  James Dean + Alec Guinness

  Alec Guinness + Evelyn Waugh

  Evelyn Waugh + Igor Stravinsky

  Igor Stravinsky + Walt Disney

  Walt Disney + P.L. Travers

  P.L. Travers + George Ivanovich Gurdjieff

  George Ivanovich Gurdjieff + Frank Lloyd Wright

  Frank Lloyd Wright + Marilyn Monroe

  Marilyn Monroe + Nikita Khrushchev

  Nikita Khrushchev + George Brown

  George Brown + Eli Wallach

  Eli Wallach + Frank Sinatra

  Frank Sinatra + Dominick Dunne

  Dominick Dunne + Phil Spector

  Phil Spector + Leonard Cohen

  Leonard Cohen + Janis Joplin

  Janis Joplin + Patti Smith

  Patti Smith + Allen Ginsberg

  Allen Ginsberg + Francis Bacon

  Francis Bacon + HRH Princess Margaret

  HRH Princess Margaret + Kenneth Tynan

  Kenneth Tynan + Truman Capote

  Truman Capote + Peggy Lee

  Peggy Lee + President Richard M. Nixon

  President Richard M. Nixon + Elvis Presley

  Elvis Presley + Paul McCartney

  Paul McCartney + Noël Coward

  Noël Coward + Prince Felix Youssoupoff

  Prince Felix Youssoupoff + Grigori Rasputin

  Grigori Rasputin + Tsar Nicholas II

  Tsar Nicholas II + Harry Houdini

  Harry Houdini + President Theodore Roosevelt

  President Theodore Roosevelt + H.G. Wells

  H.G. Wells + Josef Stalin

  Josef Stalin + Maxim Gorky

  Maxim Gorky + Leo Tolstoy

  Leo Tolstoy + Pyotr Il’ich Tchaikovsky

  Pyotr Il’ich Tchaikovsky + Sergei Rachmaninoff

  Sergei Rachmaninoff + Harpo Marx

  Harpo Marx + George Bernard Shaw

  George Bernard Shaw + Bertrand Russell

  Bertrand Russell + Sarah Miles

  Sarah Miles + Terence Stamp

  Terence Stamp + Edward Heath

  Edward Heath + Walter Sickert

  Walter Sickert + Winston Churchill

  Winston Churchill + Laurence Olivier

  Laurence Olivier + J.D. Salinger

  J.D. Salinger + Ernest Hemingway

  Ernest Hemingway + Ford Madox Ford

  Ford Madox Ford + Oscar Wilde

  Oscar Wilde + Marcel Proust

  Marcel Proust + James Joyce

  James Joyce + Harold Nicolson

  Harold Nicolson + Cecil Beaton

  Cecil Beaton + Mick Jagger

  Mick Jagger + Tom Driberg

  Tom Driberg + Christopher Hitchens

  Christopher Hitchens + George Galloway

  George Galloway + Michael Barrymore

  Michael Barrymore + Diana, Princess of Wales

  Diana, Princess of Wales + Princess Grace

  Princess Grace + Alfred Hitchcock

  Alfred Hitchcock + Raymond Chandler

  Raymond Chandler + Howard Hawks

  Howard Hawks + Howard Hughes

  Howard Hughes + Cubby Broccoli

  Cubby Broccoli + George Lazenby

  George Lazenby + Simon Dee

  Simon Dee + Michael Ramsey

  Michael Ramsey + Geoffrey Fisher

  Geoffrey Fisher + Roald Dahl

  Roald Dahl + Kingsley Amis

  Kingsley Amis + Anthony Armstrong-Jones

  Lord Snowdon + Barry Humphries

  Barry Humphries + Salvador Dalí

  Salvador Dalí + Sigmund Freud

  Sigmund Freud + Gustav Mahler

  Gustav Mahler + Auguste Rodin

  Auguste Rodin + Isadora Duncan

  Isadora Duncan + Jean Cocteau

  Jean Cocteau + Charlie Chaplin

  Charlie Chaplin + Groucho Marx

  Groucho Marx + T.S. Eliot

  T.S. Eliot + Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother

  Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother + The Duchess of Windsor

  The Duchess of Windsor + Adolf Hitler

  Acknowledgements

  About Craig Brown

  Bibliography

  For Mosh and Don

  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

  NOTE TO THE U.S. EDITION

  George Brown (1914–1985) was the Deputy Leader of the British Labour Party from 1960 to 1970. He is now chiefly remembered for his prodigious consumption of alcohol, which led to frequent mishaps, often at major diplomatic events. At the end of a banquet laid on by the Belgian government in his honour in 1967, Brown stood in the doorway, barring his fellow guests from exiting. He then bellowed at the top of his voice that, while the British army were busy defending Europe, the Belgian army were making merry “in the brothels of Brussels.” He was Foreign Secretary at the time.

  Sarah Miles (1941– ) went straight from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts to star opposite Laurence Olivier in Term of Trial (1962) and Dirk Bogarde in The Servant (1963). “Sarah Miles was originally typed as slut material—a husky, wide-eyed nymphet” writes David Thomson in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. “But in The Servant... she shattered the stereotype and thrust sexual appetite into British films.” Her two volumes of autobiography reveal further sexual dalliances with, among others, Steven Spielberg, Robert Mitchum, and James Fox. Often regarded as unconventional, she drinks regular doses of her own urine, apparently for health reasons.

  As an aspirant actor, Terence Stamp (1939– ) shared a flat with Michael Caine. Their names became synonymous with London in the Swinging Sixties. Stamp first rose to fame opposite Peter Ustinov in Billy Budd (1962) and then starred in seminal Sixties movies such as The Collector (1965), Modesty Blaise (1966), and Far from the Madding Crowd (1967). More recently, he has appeared in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999), Bowfinger (1999
), and as the transsexual Bernadette in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994). He now owns a company that produces food for those with dairy and wheat allergies.

  When Terence Stamp was the most fashionable man in London, Edward Heath (1916–2005), a frosty bachelor, was possibly the least. Heath’s period as Prime Minister (1970–74) was particularly troubled. He exhibited a talent for the piano but none for sociability. Once, after dinner at the White House, President Nixon pointed to the grand piano and suggested they play a duet. Heath simply shrugged his shoulders, said nothing, and walked on. He never recovered from Margaret Thatcher seizing leadership of the Conservative Party and spent the rest of his life nursing grievances against her. His nickname was The Incredible Sulk.

  Walter Sickert (1860–1942) was a prolific painter, particularly gifted at conveying the thrill of the Victorian music hall. He also specialized in drab interiors, invariably populated by gloomy couples. “The more our art is serious, the more it will tend to avoid the drawing-room and stick to the kitchen,” he once said. A friend of Oscar Wilde and Rodin, he remains far more celebrated in Britain than in America, where he is perhaps best known as the unlucky man identified by the excitable crime novelist Patricia Cornwell, for no comprehensible reason, as having been the serial killer Jack the Ripper.

  The political career of Tom Driberg (1905–1976) was wholly reliant on the discretion of the press. A Labour MP, he was also a promiscuous homosexual, regularly picking up young men in public lavatories. He was suspected by many of his friends and enemies of being a Russian spy, though this was never satisfactorily proved either way. He was an inveterate and unapologetic social snob. “My dear Richard,” he once complained to the editor of the satirical magazine Private Eye, “I am astonished that you don’t appear to know the correct way to refer to the younger daughter of a Marquess.”

  George Galloway (1954– ) was expelled from the Labour Party in 2003 after describing the government as “Tony Blair’s lie machine” and calling on British troops in Iraq to refuse to obey orders. He remains on the extreme left: in 2008, he described the disappearance of the Soviet Union as “the biggest catastrophe of my life.” He combines radical politics and fiery rhetoric with a touch of showbiz: in 2010, he was reported to have completed a musical about the singer Dusty Springfield. The Times once noted his “gift of the Glasgow gab, love of the stage and inexhaustible fund of self-belief.”

  In the UK, Michael Barrymore (1952– ) is the living embodiment of the showbiz fall from grace. During the 1980s and 1990s he was the highest-earning family entertainer in Britain. In 1993, he topped the bill of the Royal Variety Show, singing “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” The answer, when it finally came, was a definite no: following a series of mishaps, including the discovery of a male corpse in his swimming pool, Barrymore’s television career came to an end. After his car hit a kerb in November 2011, he was convicted of possession of cocaine and fined $1,240.

  George Lazenby (1939– ) and Simon Dee (1935–2009) were pioneering sufferers from the same disease—excelebrititis—that now afflicts Michael Barrymore. At the start of 1970, both men were superstars, one the new James Bond, the other British television’s most popular chat-show host. By the end of that year, undone by hubris, they had both passed into oblivion. Eerily, their downfalls coincided with their first joint TV appearance. By 1974, Dee was being described in court, as “living the life of a vagrant.” Lazenby still insists he enjoyed his time as Bond. “Too bad I couldn’t act, but it was fun.”

  Michael Ramsey (1903–1988) was the 100th Archbishop of Canterbury, succeeding his old headmaster, Geoffrey Fisher (1887–1972) to an office dating back over 1400 years to St. Augustine in 597. The Archbishop of Canterbury is the leader of the Church of England, and is appointed by the Prime Minister. Fisher was headmasterly and conventional. Ramsey, on the other hand, was eccentric and anti-Establishment. He was once overheard repeating “I hate the Church of England” to himself, over and over again. By way of explanation, he replied, “Oh, but it’s true. I do hate the Church of England. Indeed I do.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Everything in this book is documented. Nothing is invented. When accounts of the same meeting differ, as they almost always do, I have sided with the most likely.

  To lend a pattern to a book that revolves around chance, and to insert a note of order into the otherwise haphazard, I have described each of the 101 meetings in exactly 1,001 words, which makes Hello Goodbye Hello 101,101 words long. The acknowledgements, prefacing quotes, note to the U.S. edition, book description, author’s biography, and list of my other books each consist of 101 words, as does this note.

  C. B.

  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.1 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 pa
vement, 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 Residenztheater2 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,3 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.