Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings (8 page)

Before they go into the restaurant, James Dean says, ‘I’d like to show you something,’ and takes them into the courtyard of the restaurant. There, he proudly shows them his new racing car, one of only ninety Porsche 550 Spyders ever produced. He has had it customised: it now has tartan seating and two red stripes at the rear of its wheelwell, all designed by George Barris, the man who will go on to design the Batmobile. ‘It’s just been delivered,’ Dean says, proudly. On the lower rear of the engine cover are the words ‘Little Bastard’. The car is so brand new that it is still wrapped in cellophane, with a bunch of roses tied to its bonnet.

Alec Guinness is seized by one of his premonitions.

‘How fast can you go in that?’

‘I can do 150 in it.’

‘Have you driven it?’

‘I’ve never been in it at all.’

And then – ‘exhausted, hungry, feeling a little ill-tempered in spite of Dean’s kindness’ – Guinness hears himself saying, in a voice he can hardly recognise as his own, ‘Look, I won’t join your table unless you want me to, but I must say something. Please do not get into that car.’ He looks at his watch. ‘I said, “It’s now 10 o’clock, Friday the 23rd of September 1955. If you get in that car you will be found dead in it by this time next week.”’

Despite this grim prognosis, Dean laughs. ‘Oh, shucks!’ he says. ‘Don’t be so mean!’

Guinness apologises, blaming his outburst on a lack of sleep and food. The three of them then have dinner together – ‘a charming dinner’ – before going their separate ways. Guinness makes no further reference to the car, ‘but in my heart I was uneasy’.

Though Dean himself has an interest in morbid premonitions – passages about death and degradation are heavily underlined in his copy of Ernest Hemingway’s
Death in the Afternoon
– he ignores Guinness’s warning. A week later, on September 30th, he is driving his new Spyder across the junction of Route 46 and Route 41 near Cholame, California, when he collides head-on with a Ford Custom Tudor coupé driven by a student with the inappropriately comical name of Donald Turnupseed.

James Dean is taken by ambulance to Paso Robles War Memorial Hospital, where he is pronounced dead on arrival at 5.59 p.m. His last words, uttered just before impact, are, ‘The guy’s gotta stop ... he’ll see us.’

Fifty years after his death, this section of the road is renamed the James Dean Memorial Junction.

‘It was a very odd, spooky experience,’ recalls Alec Guinness of their strange meeting. ‘I liked him very much. I would have liked to have known him more.’

CRAWLS WITH

The Church of the Immaculate Conception, Farm Street, London W1

August 4th 1955

On Tuesday, July 19th 1955, the postman delivers a parcel and a letter to Evelyn Waugh. The parcel contains his weekly box of cigars. He is put out when the postman tries to charge him almost £8 duty on it. The letter is from his sixty-seven-year-old goddaughter, Edith Sitwell. She says she is to be received into the Roman Catholic Church in just over a fortnight. The news makes Waugh uneasy. He is aware of her tendency to show off. ‘She might be making an occasion of it,’ he confides to his diary, adding that he has written to her confessor, Father Caraman, ‘urging the example of St Helena’. This particular saint is noted for her piety.

August 4th is a bright, sunny day. Waugh wakes up in the Grand Hotel, Folkestone. The staff are civil and obliging, the food dull and lukewarm. ‘If only the cook and the patrons were better it would be admirable,’ he thinks. He keeps sending notes to the chef (‘Don’t put cornflour in the sauce’), who reacts badly. ‘He comes up and glowers at me in his white hat from behind a screen in the dining room.’

Waugh catches the 9 a.m. train to Charing Cross. One of his fellow passengers is ‘a ginger-whiskered giant who looked like a farmer and read the
Financial Times
’. Waugh’s journey is enlivened by a cinder blowing in from the engine, landing on the giant’s tweed coat and burning a hole in it.

From Charing Cross, Waugh walks to White’s Club, stopping to buy a carnation on the way. At White’s, he refreshes himself with a mug filled with stout, gin and ginger beer, before arriving at Farm Street at 11.45 a.m. He is wearing a loud black-and-white houndstooth tweed suit, a red tie and a boater from which stream red and blue ribbons. Waugh enters the Ignatius Chapel, which he finds empty save for ‘a bald shy man’ who introduces himself as Alec Guinness.

Getting dressed this morning, Alec Guinness found it hard to know what to wear. Eventually, he picked a navy-blue hopsack suit as ‘suitably formal’. He felt a black or grey tie would be ‘too severe’, preferring a bright blue tie as ‘more in keeping for what I assumed was a joyous event’. He has not yet become a Catholic himself.
²⁰

They are joined, in Waugh’s words, by ‘an old deaf woman with dyed red hair whose name I never learned’. Guinness, too, fails to catch her name, ‘even when she barked at us’. She walks unsteadily with the aid of two sticks, and her bare arms are encased in metal bangles which give him the impression that she is some ancient warrior.
²¹

Guinness watches as she attempts to sit down on a complicated seat she has brought with her – ‘half prie-dieu and half collapsible deckchair’. Somehow, she manages to entangle herself in the mechanism, with disastrous results: ‘The sticks slid from under her, the chair heaped itself on the floor and all the bangles rolled down her arms and sticks and propelled themselves in every direction around the room.’

‘My jewels!’ she cries. ‘Please to bring back my jewels!’

Waugh and Guinness dutifully get down on all fours and wriggle their way under the pews and around the candle sconces, trying to retrieve ‘everything round and glittering’.

‘How many jewels were you wearing?’ Waugh asks the old deaf woman.

‘Seventy,’ she replies.

Under the pews, Waugh whispers to Guinness, ‘What nationality?’

‘Russian, at a guess,’ says Guinness, sliding on his stomach beneath a pew and dirtying his smart suit.

‘Or Rumanian,’ says Waugh. ‘She crossed herself backwards. She may be a Maronite Christian, in which case beware.’

The two men start laughing, and soon, according to Guinness, get ‘barely controllable hysterics’. They pick up all the bangles they can find. Guinness counts them into her hands, but the old deaf woman looks suspiciously at the pair of them, as if they might have pocketed a few.

‘Is that all?’ she asks.

‘Sixty-eight,’ says Guinness.

‘You are still wearing two,’ observes Waugh.

At that moment, the organ strikes a deep note, and the other three witnesses enter. Waugh turns his unforgiving owlish stare upon ‘Father D’Arcy ... a little swarthy man who looked like a Jew but claimed to be Portuguese, and a blond youth who looked American but claimed to be English’. Guinness notes that the Portuguese man, a poet, looks ‘a little peevishly atheistic’.

Then, up the aisle, ‘swathed in black like a sixteenth-century infanta’, glides Edith Sitwell, to be received into the Church by Father Caraman.
²²

The service concluded, they are driven in a Daimler from Farm Street to the Sesame Club, just two streets away. Waugh has heard bad things about it, but is pleasantly surprised by the ‘gargantuan feast’ that has been laid on: cold consommé, lobster Newburg, steak, strawberry flan and ‘great quantities of wine’. All in all, he considers it ‘a rich blow-out’.
²³
Guinness notes, ‘Edith presiding like a bride in black and Fr Caraman frequently casting his eyes heavenwards as if in ecstasy.’

An awkward moment comes when the old deaf woman suddenly says, ‘Did I hear the word “whisky”?’

‘Do you want one?’ asks Waugh.

‘More than anything in the world.’

‘I’ll get you some.’

But at this point the Portuguese poet steps in. He nudges Waugh and says, ‘It would be disastrous.’ So Waugh persuades her to stick with the white wine. Repeating the words of the Portuguese poet, he explains to Guinness that ‘we couldn’t face another disaster from that quarter.’

Over lunch, Guinness tipsily shares his few remaining theological anxieties with the blond English youth and the Portuguese poet. ‘Would we
have to drink the Pope’s health? If Edith died on the spot would she go straight to heaven? And would that be a case for ecclesiastical rejoicing or worldly and artistic distress?’ A great deal is drunk; the following morning, try as he may, Guinness cannot recollect any of them leaving the table.

WRONG-FOOTS

The Ambassador Hotel, Park Avenue, New York

February 4th 1949

Evelyn Waugh claims to dislike all music, with the possible exception of plainchant. This does not bode well for Igor Stravinsky as he prepares to meet him in New York. He has already been warned by Aldous Huxley that Waugh can be ‘prickly, pompous, and downright unpleasant’. But he is an admirer of Waugh’s writing, particularly his talent for dialogue and the naming of characters (Dr Kakaphilos; Father Rothschild, S.J.), and is pleased when a friend arranges a meeting.

Stravinsky spent last night in the more congenial company of Vladimir Nabokov, W.H. Auden and George Balanchine, playing them his draft score of Act 1 of
The Rake’s Progress
. As usual, he found himself a little irritated by Auden’s tendency to talk during any performance, but this is small fry compared to what lies ahead: Waugh is, after all, notoriously prickly.

‘Why does everybody except me find it so easy to be nice?’ asks the distracted Gilbert Pinfold in Waugh’s most autobiographical novel.
²⁴
Tom Driberg identifies this as ‘a true outcry’ from Pinfold’s creator. At the age of only forty-five, Waugh has somehow boxed himself into the character of a grumpy old curmudgeon. Penelope Fitzgerald sums up the social message he wishes to convey as:
I am bored, you are frightened
.

His rudeness has no age limit. When Ann Fleming brings her uninvited three-year-old son to tea at the Grand Hotel, Folkestone, Waugh is so annoyed that he puts ‘his face close to the child’s, dragging down the corners of eyes and mouth with forefingers and thumbs, producing an effect of such unbelievable malignity that the child shrieked with terror
and fell to the floor’. Fleming retaliates by giving Waugh’s face a hard slap and overturning a plate of éclairs.

Observing him at Pratt’s Club, Malcolm Muggeridge thinks Waugh presents a ‘quite ludicrous figure in dinner jacket, silk shirt; extraordinarily like a loquacious woman, with dinner jacket cut like a maternity gown to hide his bulging stomach. He was very genial, probably pretty plastered – all the time playing this part of a crotchety old character rather deaf, cupping his ear – “Feller’s a bit of a Socialist, I suspect.” Amusing for about a quarter of an hour. Tony [Powell] and I agreed that an essential difference between Graham [Greene] and Waugh is that, whereas Graham tends to impose an agonized silence, Waugh demands agonized attention.’

Some of his rudest remarks are delivered in such a way that few, perhaps including himself, can tell whether they are intended. ‘I spent two nights at Cap Ferrat with Mr Maugham (who has lost his fine cook) and made a great gaffe,’ he writes to Harold Acton in April 1952. ‘The first evening he asked me what someone was like and I said “A pansy with a stammer.” All the Picassos on the walls blanched.’

He delights in wrong-footing one and all. When Feliks Topolski and Hugh Burnett arrive for lunch at Combe Florey to prepare for Waugh’s appearance on
Face to Face
, he is at pains to point out that his house has no television set and a radio only in the servants’ quarters. He then serves them a large tureen of green-tufted strawberries. ‘Too late I saw the problem,’ recalls Burnett. ‘Put the strawberries on the plate, add the cream, take the spoon – and you were trapped with the strawberry tufts. My attempt to spear one shot it under the sideboard. That was the BBC disgraced. Topolski, seeing what had happened, did the socially unthinkable – dipped a strawberry into the cream with his fingers. “Ah, Mr Topolski,” Waugh observed helpfully, “You need a spoon.”’ When the day for the recording comes, Burnett introduces him to his interviewer, John Freeman. ‘How do you do, Mr Waugh,’ said Freeman.

‘The name is Waugh – not Wuff!’ he replied.

‘But I called you Mr Waugh.’

‘No, no, I distinctly heard you say “Wuff”.’

During the interview, Waugh confesses that his worst fault is irritability. What with? asks Freeman. ‘Absolutely everything. Inanimate objects and people, animals, anything.’

The Stravinskys and the Waughs meet up at the Ambassador Hotel on Park Avenue. Waugh is never at his best in America: he finds the natives unappealing, and upsets them with observations such as, ‘Of course the Americans are cowards. They are almost all the descendants of wretches who deserted their legitimate monarch for fear of military service.’

Stravinsky soon finds that the cutting edge in Waugh’s work is even sharper in his person. ‘Not an immediately endearing character,’ he thinks. After they have introduced themselves, Stravinsky asks Waugh whether he would care for a whisky. ‘I do not drink whisky before wine,’ he replies, his tone suggesting faint horror at Stravinsky’s ignorance.

Waugh seems to rejoice in causing all Stravinsky’s remarks, polite, lively or anodyne, to bounce back in his face. At first, Stravinsky speaks to Waugh in French, but Waugh replies that he does not speak the language. Mrs Waugh contradicts him pleasantly, but is swiftly rebuked.

The conversation stutters on. Stravinsky says he admires the Constitution of the United States. Waugh replies that he deplores ‘everything American, beginning with the Constitution’. They pause to study their menus. Stravinsky recommends the chicken; Waugh points out that it is a Friday.

‘Whether Mr Waugh was disagreeable, or only preposterously arch, I cannot say,’ Stravinsky recalls.
²⁵
‘Horace Walpole remarks somewhere that the next worst thing to disagreeableness is too-agreeableness. I would reverse the order of preference myself while conceding that on short acquaintance disagreeableness is the greater strain.’ Desperately trying to find common ground, Stravinsky attempts to relate his own recent sung Mass to the theme of Waugh’s current lecture tour. ‘All music is positively painful to me,’ replies Waugh.