Odd boy out, p.30
Odd Boy Out, page 30
You have probably never heard of Beverley Nichols, but he was once so famous you wouldn’t believe it. He was a wunderkind of the Roaring Twenties – a journalist, a novelist, a playwright, he wrote his first autobiography when he was twenty-five. (It was called Twenty-Five and was among the first ten paperback books published by Penguin, alongside A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway and Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles. He was that famous.) When he was at Oxford he was President of the Union, editor of Isis (the student magazine) and performed with the OUDS (the university dramatic society.) I suspect you won’t have heard of Gyles Isham, either. He was President of the Union, too, and editor of Isis, and his Hamlet for the OUDS led to him playing Romeo at the Old Vic and starring opposite Greta Garbo in Anna Karenina. He is quite forgotten now, but my father remembered him and, when I was growing up, Gyles Isham was the only other living Gyles-with-a-y I had heard of.
Just as Ma never left India, so Pa never left Oxford, and I arrived there, aged nineteen in 1967, determined to deliver an Oxford career my parents could be proud of. My contemporaries were dancing to the beat of Fleetwood Mac and the Rolling Stones. I was humming the Charleston and setting my sights on achieving the glittering prizes that had meant so much to my father’s generation – becoming editor of Isis, directing the OUDS, being elected President of the Oxford Union.
‘Have a plan,’ said my Great-Uncle Fox Conner’s friend General Patton, ‘execute it violently, do it today.’ Within forty-eight hours of my arrival in Oxford, I had joined the Union, joined the OUDS, and managed to meet the editor of Isis. How I got hold of his name and address I don’t know, but I did. He was called Peter Adamson. He was older than me, in his third year (or maybe his fourth), fair-haired, blue-eyed, quite tall, a bit rough-looking but immediately friendly. He ran the magazine from his flat in Walton Street. How on earth did I find Walton Street? I’d only ever been to Oxford once before – and that was for my interview. My father talked about Oxford all the time, but we never went there. (Pa also talked about golf all the time, but he never played. His partners gave him a set of clubs to mark his retirement. He never used them.)
I remember now: I bought a street map. I’ve got it still, somewhere. (I’ve got everything still, somewhere.) In my duffel coat, holding my briefcase, wearing my horn-rimmed specs, I walked from New College up Broad Street, past Blackwell’s (the bookshop), past Univ (the university’s oldest college), past Balliol, then I turned right into St Giles (a good name for a street, I thought) and then left, past the Randolph Hotel in Beaumont Street (Oxford’s grand hotel in those days), past the Playhouse (the university theatre – I thought I should put a play on there), and then right again at Worcester College into Beaumont Street. Eventually I found the house, quite a way down the street on the right-hand side. I knocked on the door and Peter answered.
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Who are you?’
‘I’m Gyles,’ I said. ‘I’ve come to talk about Isis.’
He laughed. ‘You’re keen.’
‘Yes, I suppose I am.’
‘Well, you’d better come in.’
He gave me a mug of tea and offered me a chocolate digestive. The flat was littered with half-full mugs of tea and half-finished packets of biscuits – and half-opened boxes of magazines and bits of artwork and long rolls of printers’ proofs. It was everything I hoped it would be – and more, because there was a beautiful girl there, too.
‘This is Lesley,’ said Peter. ‘She’s my wife.’
I didn’t think students had wives, but Peter did. She was twenty-one and a teacher. She had shining eyes and a happy face, and with my second mug of tea she produced a slice of cake.
‘Now there’s an idea for a piece,’ I said. ‘Oxford’s best cakes! Which college is most like which cake? Balliol’s a Battenberg, Magdalen’s a meringue …’ For two hours I sat there pitching ideas like billy-o.
I didn’t realise it at the time, but it was the start of a lifetime of pitching. Apart from those six weeks in the railway reservations department of Thomas Cook & Son, and my five years as an MP, I have never had a job. I have spent my entire life as a freelancer, selling ideas, touting for trade. I remember walking into Broadcasting House with Nicholas Parsons when he was ninety-four and we were trying (and failing) to get a new radio series off the ground. He said, ‘I’ve been doing this for seventy years. The pitching never stops.’ Yes, life’s a pitch and then you die.
The pitching in Walton Street that October afternoon went well. Peter asked me to write a piece – and then another. And soon he asked me to write a column, and by my second term I was writing for Isis every week. I repaid his kindness by trying to cop off with his wife – which is why, eventually (and understandably), he took a fist to me in Robert Maxwell’s garden.
Was I a little mad during my time at Oxford? Perhaps I was. I certainly lived life at a crazy pace. In my first forty-eight hours at the university, as well as meeting the Adamsons, my diary records encounters with more than thirty named individuals – the first being possibly the most significant: Jack, my ‘scout’. I am ashamed to say that I don’t know his surname. I never thought to ask. Nor did I think to question the fact that, at the age of nineteen, I was being supplied with a manservant, there to make my bed for me, do the washing-up, organise my laundry … extraordinary when I think about it now.
Jack was in his sixties, I suppose, friendly but formal. He looked after me and the other nine men on our staircase. He supplied me with my scholar’s gown (longer and fuller than the regular undergraduate gowns) to be worn without fail for lectures, tutorials and in hall. He gave me the rundown on the local rules and regulations. The college gates were shut at 11.00 p.m.: he advised me which wall was the easiest to climb over in the event that I was out after that. He showed me how my room had one doorway, but two doors. If I left the outer door open, it meant I was happy to receive visitors. If I closed the outer door – known as ‘sporting your oak’ – it meant I didn’t want to be disturbed.
Who else did I meet during that first forty-eight hours? The college chaplain, Gary Bennett – he was my immediate next-door neighbour. He nodded as we passed on the stairs, but did not look me in the eye. (I got to know him in time. He had a shy manner, but a sharp wit. A conservative Anglican, in 1987 he published an anonymous critique of the Church of England establishment, and when he was ‘outed’ as its author, he killed himself.)
The Home Secretary’s son was on our staircase, too. Charles Jenkins, son of Roy, was even more shy than the chaplain. He didn’t even nod as we passed on the stair. Head bent, he just hurried by. I liked Xan Smiley: he was an amusing, fair-haired Old Etonian who looked you straight in the eye and whose father seemed to be a sort of latter-day Lawrence of Arabia. I liked Julian Radcliffe, another OE, who thought he was Lawrence of Arabia. I liked Victor Bulmer-Thomas: his father was an MP and Church Commissioner. I got on at once with Anthony Palliser: his father was at the Foreign Office (and became the head of it) and his grandfather (Paul-Henri Charles Spaak) had been Prime Minister of Belgium and was one of the founders of the European Union. Anthony, now one of my closest friends, was already an artist. So was Antony Dufort: he later sculpted the statue of Margaret Thatcher that stands in the House of Commons and the head of Britannia that features on the £2 coin. I liked Peter Torry, who became an ambassador. I liked David Graham, who became a merchant banker and my partner in several (not always successful) business ventures. I liked Rick Stein who became Rick Stein.
I wonder if any of us had any idea of how privileged we were? On our second night, in hall (high-ceilinged, oak-panelled, adorned with oil paintings of former New College luminaries, including Warden Spooner who gave us the spoonerism and saluted Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee with the cry, ‘Three cheers for our queer old dean!’), the present Warden (Sir William Hayter, formerly ambassador to Moscow) did his best to remind us. ‘Look up while you are here,’ he said, sonorously, ‘look around at the buildings. Unless you choose to live in Venice, you are unlikely to live in such a beautiful city again.’
I loved the buildings (the Bodleian Library was my favourite), but I loved the people more. Outside of New College, the group I spent most time with in the early days was the Isis crowd. It wasn’t just my ambition and Lesley that drew me to them. They were interesting people. The editorial team included Anthony Holden (a good friend who made me editor of Isis when he was editor-in-chief), Denis Matyjaszek (who changed his name to Denis MacShane, became a Labour MP and ended up in prison for fiddling his expenses), and Philip Maxwell (whose dad, publisher Robert Maxwell MC, MP, could probably have taught Denis a thing or two about fiddling his expenses).
This was four years before a Department of Trade inquiry reported, ‘with regret’, that Robert Maxwell ‘is not in our opinion a person who can be relied on to exercise proper stewardship of a publicly quoted company’ – and seventeen years before he acquired Mirror Group Newspapers and proceeded to fraudulently misappropriate the company’s pension fund. Intriguingly, even as teenagers we knew there was something dodgy about Robert Maxwell, the original ‘bouncing Czech’. That said, I liked Philip (who was at Balliol, and an odd mix: shy and bombastic at the same time), I liked his sister Anne (who was at St Hugh’s), and we were grateful to ‘Captain Bob’, as he was known, because he both subsidised our magazine and invited us to parties at his house, Headington Hill Hall – a huge Victorian pile on the edge of Oxford, pillared, palatial, and a touch gaudy in the decoration.
The first time I met Robert Maxwell he put his arm around my shoulder in a jovial and slightly menacing way. He had the build of a bull and the face of a toad. I told him that I was honoured to be visiting Headington Hill Hall – especially because Oscar Wilde had come to a ball at the house when he was at Oxford. Oscar came dressed as Prince Rupert of the Rhine. ‘And who have you come dressed as, young man?’ he growled.
The Maxwells hosted a ball every June – 9.00 p.m. to 3.00 a.m. and beautifully done, with drinks in the house, dinner in the marquee, dancing and breakfast on the lawn. It nearly went awry early in the evening in the drawing room when I was ‘entertaining’ the crowd with my ‘impression’ of our host, hunched forward, gurning and grunting, when, suddenly, I felt a heavy hand on my shoulder. I turned around – and there he was, gazing at me steadily. He held the moment, and then, slowly, he began to chuckle.
I had never been to a party like it. We all had formal dance cards (with little pencils attached to them with red string), telling us to choose five different partners for five special dances. There was a band, a pop group, a discotheque – and steaks and ribs served at the barbecue between dinner and breakfast. And I had never met a man like Maxwell before. (And I have only met one or two like him since.) He was clearly a rogue – and not a lovable one – but, somehow, we all went along with it.
Twenty years later, because by then I was doing bits and pieces of work for different companies he owned, I was still going to the Headington Hill Hall parties, still mocking him behind his back, but still accepting his hospitality. The later parties were less convivial because the Maxwell children I was friends with – Philip, his second son, and Anne, his oldest daughter, two totally decent people – had fled the family scene and Captain Bob had become a caricature of himself. He was personally amplified, and with the turn of a dial in his pocket he could increase the volume of his voice, so that at one moment he could be whispering in your ear and at the next he could be addressing every room in the house at full volume.
I met Ian and Kevin in the 1980s and thought they were ridiculous, ‘acting’ like tycoons, while Philip and Anne always seemed to be real people. When Maxwell Senior fell off his boat, the Lady Ghislaine, in 1991, Kevin became the biggest personal bankrupt in UK history, with debts of £406.5 million. Ghislaine I never knew (I hasten to add), but all I can tell you is her father was a rum one.
Through Isis I met a number of interesting characters. I leafed through the pages of Who’s Who and simply wrote to them, asking if I could interview them for the university magazine. Yehudi Menuhin, the great virtuoso violinist, said no, but nicely, and encouraged me to improve my life by changing my diet. The great wartime general Field Marshal Montgomery of Alamein said no, too, but in his reply shared with me what he believed were the qualities a young person needed to succeed in life.
Moral courage – always do what you believe to be right.
Complete integrity – no lies, no deceptions – honesty and transparency.
Ceaseless hard work.
But usually they said yes. I went to the House of Commons for the first time to interview Sir Gerald Nabarro, the Conservative MP for South Worcestershire. He was fifty-five, 5 foot 5 inches tall, and was then appearing on television more than any other MP. With his mutton-chop whiskers, and his five cars numbered NAB1 to NAB5, he was a self-created Commons ‘character’ with truly appalling views. On Any Questions? he had asked, ‘How would you feel if your daughter wanted to marry a big buck n– with the prospect of coffee-coloured grandchildren?’ He said to me, ‘I am not willing to be told by law that I must love my coloured neighbour or otherwise I shall be fined or sent to prison.’ He couldn’t abide ‘revolting students’ – especially those then on strike at the LSE. ‘I expect undergraduates to behave like gentlemen, not undisciplined hooligans.’ It was all down to ‘a decline in moral standards’ and there were only three remedies: bring back the noose, the lash and national service.
I went to the BBC Television Centre at White City for the first time to interview the grand inquisitor himself, Robin Day. Young as I was, I realised that Day, famous as he was, was essentially disappointed with his life. Beetle-browed, sporting his trademark spotted bow tie, he was cross-questioning politicians when really he would have liked to be one. I got to know him better in the 1980s when, although he was twenty-five years older than me, we had children of the same age at the same nursery school. He regretted a lifetime spent simply making a noise, when the best of his contemporaries had been ‘taking decisions and making a difference’.
I went backstage at the New Theatre in Oxford to meet Bruce Forsyth, famous then as a song-and-dance man and the former host of Sunday Night at the London Palladium. He was appearing in Babes in the Wood.
‘I don’t really like pantomime,’ he said, but he was grateful for the money – and he liked being famous. ‘Going on holiday abroad can be a bit of a shock: nobody knows who you are.’ He gave me some advice I have not forgotten. ‘Remember, only half the people will ever like you. Don’t let the other half get you down − the bastards!’
He was quite funny, in a mirthless sort of way, and he was a trouper. On a cold Saturday afternoon in a far-from-full barn of a theatre in a really tatty hand-me-down panto, he gave his all. He came on to that stage like a whirlwind and for three hours he did not let go. I learnt a lot from watching him do that.
My first foreign assignment as an Isis interviewer was in Paris in May 1968 – when many thought France was on the brink of civil war or revolution.
Students and workers were on strike, occupying universities and factories, protesting so effectively that for a while the economy ground to a halt, the national government ceased to function and, secretly, President Charles de Gaulle fled to Germany. ‘Les événements de mai ’68’ encouraged protests around the world. (And graffiti: ‘Be realistic: demand the impossible’ was my favourite.) I was excited to be at the heart of the action as it all kicked off – though, needless to say, my mission was not to interview any of the revolutionary leaders. I was going to interview one of the richest men in the world: the Aga Khan. I had read in Paris Match that he never gave interviews, so I found his address in Who’s Who, wrote to him, and he agreed to give his first-ever interview to me.
My time in Paris was memorable. I was first off the plane at Le Bourget and gratified to find a crowd of well-wishers corralled on the other side of the tarmac waving and cheering. Whistles blew, flash bulbs popped … and then they saw me and the noise subsided. It turned out they were not waiting for me on my way to interview the Aga Khan, but for Ho Chi Minh, due to arrive from North Vietnam at any moment for the Paris peace talks.
In the centre of town there were armed police on every corner. North of the Seine it was relatively calm, but go south of the river and you were in a city in the middle of a revolution: burnt-out cars, pulled-up paving stones, streets closed off. Around the Sorbonne, there were barricades and tanks and armoured vehicles everywhere you turned. At the start of the week there had been full-scale rioting. I saw no fighting, but – being a coward – I took a taxi, just in case. Crossing the Boulevard Saint-Germain, we had to negotiate our way through a throng of protesting students on the march. The taxi proceeded quite slowly and, at first, all was well – then, suddenly, our car seemed to catch the attention of a group of the protesters. They turned on our vehicle and, chanting and jeering, began to rock it to and fro. I looked out of the window, desperately trying to show them that I was a student too. The driver pressed on, honking his horn, and eventually the students let us pass. It was an alarming few minutes.
The Aga Khan lived on the Île de la Cité – which was completely deserted. At 6.20 p.m., as instructed by Miss Bishop, Secretary to HH Shah Karim, Aga Khan IV, I made my way down a squalid backstreet to 10 rue Chanoinesse. I rang a bell, climbed to the third floor and was admitted to a plush suite of offices, where I waited.
Miss Bishop appeared. ‘You haven’t brought a tape recorder, have you?’
‘No,’ I said.
She looked relieved. ‘His Highness won’t want you to have a tape recorder.’ She smiled. ‘You will only ask the questions we agreed?’
‘Of course,’ I said.
She took me down into the street and showed me a little alleyway leading to rue des Ursins.
‘When I get there, do I ring the doorbell?’ I asked.
‘There’s no need,’ she said. ‘Good luck.’
