had avoided the showbiz staples of English Vicarage, Hollywood Medieval, Cockney Moroccan and that style that by now is almost generic – flocked lamps, cascade chandeliers, ‘Regency’ telephones, deep blush velour –known in the trade as Chapel-of-Rest Cheesy or Jewy Louis.
She’d covered the walls and floors neutrally in buffs and drabs and installed a few good pieces of modernist, low-to-the-ground Italian furniture. Apart from lamps and some vases and ashtrays, there was little in the way of what she dismissed as tchatchkas .
‘Never collect inanimate objects, or in the end they will possess you, and you will lose your freedom,’ she’d say, parroting verbatim the latest gem picked up from the women’s magazines or the radio. ‘Only invest in jewellery, so that if everything else gets taken you still have something left to sell.’
(‘Was hectored in the usual scarifying fashion by that stout little woman who is always at Alma Cogan’s – by and large charming – parties in Kensington claiming to be her mother,’ Noel Coward noted in his diary of March 5, 1963.
(‘What a truly odd phenomenon. Whoever it was said we can’t choose our parents must surely have had Mrs C. – could there ever have been a Mr C? – in mind. Somebody ought to drop the word that professionals really must be allowed to show off to their hearts’ content, without too much competition from amateurs. Rather gratifying, though, to have the Paul Beatle at my feet for much of the evening. The drummer, however – Ringo? – remains butchily surly.’)
There would be no point giving a roll-call of all the people who packed themselves into our small rooms like rice in a bowl between, say, 1956 and 1964, when for a time London really did feel as if it was the centre of something. It wouldn’t be a case of dropping names so much as spilling them like marbles.
Let me just say that, in that period, virtually everybody who was anybody in the world of entertainment, plus painters, book writers, politicians, academics, sportsmen (and more than a smattering of gentleman villains and others ‘from the flip-side of the social disc’ – Donald Zec in the Mirror ), came and went.
‘You know, this place has become a kind of Lincoln Tunnel,’ I remember a visiting American drawling on one occasion. ‘I know by coming here I’ll meet all passing traffic.’
When the time came and I was no longer the hotcha-potatcha I once had been (and it was always coming), I had plenty of favours to call in. Not that I ever had to do much calling, to be truthful.
There wasn’t a party in London – and few outside – that I couldn’t be guest-listed for, if I said the word. I was constantly on the receiving end of offers of tickets, holidays, expensive dinners, clothes. A number of people whose names you would recognise, but who want to remain anonymous, continue to slip the occasional life-saver into my account. This cottage, the childhood home of a friend of a friend, is just one example of supporters rallying round.
It had become obvious to other people that I was going to have to get out of London long before it became obvious to me. But when it happened, it happened with more of a whimper than a bang. There were no histrionics; no chewing the scenery. I didn’t disgrace myself in public. The police weren’t involved. It was simply that, after years of steadily upping the intake, the drink started to have a depressive effect. There were some small signs of memory loss. I was rarely up and about before mid-afternoon. Then I sneaked into the papers again.
The celebrity snappers hadn’t wasted any film on me for a long time; in fact, they made a point of gloomily turning awaywhenever I de-cabbed. Then one day, because I happened to be standing shank-to-shank at a reception with somebody high on the current wanted list, I turned up in the ‘candids’ section of a Sunday supplement.
‘Sugar in the morning, sherbets in the evening …’
She’d covered the walls and floors neutrally in buffs and drabs and installed a few good pieces of modernist, low-to-the-ground Italian furniture. Apart from lamps and some vases and ashtrays, there was little in the way of what she dismissed as tchatchkas .
‘Never collect inanimate objects, or in the end they will possess you, and you will lose your freedom,’ she’d say, parroting verbatim the latest gem picked up from the women’s magazines or the radio. ‘Only invest in jewellery, so that if everything else gets taken you still have something left to sell.’
(‘Was hectored in the usual scarifying fashion by that stout little woman who is always at Alma Cogan’s – by and large charming – parties in Kensington claiming to be her mother,’ Noel Coward noted in his diary of March 5, 1963.
(‘What a truly odd phenomenon. Whoever it was said we can’t choose our parents must surely have had Mrs C. – could there ever have been a Mr C? – in mind. Somebody ought to drop the word that professionals really must be allowed to show off to their hearts’ content, without too much competition from amateurs. Rather gratifying, though, to have the Paul Beatle at my feet for much of the evening. The drummer, however – Ringo? – remains butchily surly.’)
There would be no point giving a roll-call of all the people who packed themselves into our small rooms like rice in a bowl between, say, 1956 and 1964, when for a time London really did feel as if it was the centre of something. It wouldn’t be a case of dropping names so much as spilling them like marbles.
Let me just say that, in that period, virtually everybody who was anybody in the world of entertainment, plus painters, book writers, politicians, academics, sportsmen (and more than a smattering of gentleman villains and others ‘from the flip-side of the social disc’ – Donald Zec in the Mirror ), came and went.
‘You know, this place has become a kind of Lincoln Tunnel,’ I remember a visiting American drawling on one occasion. ‘I know by coming here I’ll meet all passing traffic.’
When the time came and I was no longer the hotcha-potatcha I once had been (and it was always coming), I had plenty of favours to call in. Not that I ever had to do much calling, to be truthful.
There wasn’t a party in London – and few outside – that I couldn’t be guest-listed for, if I said the word. I was constantly on the receiving end of offers of tickets, holidays, expensive dinners, clothes. A number of people whose names you would recognise, but who want to remain anonymous, continue to slip the occasional life-saver into my account. This cottage, the childhood home of a friend of a friend, is just one example of supporters rallying round.
It had become obvious to other people that I was going to have to get out of London long before it became obvious to me. But when it happened, it happened with more of a whimper than a bang. There were no histrionics; no chewing the scenery. I didn’t disgrace myself in public. The police weren’t involved. It was simply that, after years of steadily upping the intake, the drink started to have a depressive effect. There were some small signs of memory loss. I was rarely up and about before mid-afternoon. Then I sneaked into the papers again.
The celebrity snappers hadn’t wasted any film on me for a long time; in fact, they made a point of gloomily turning awaywhenever I de-cabbed. Then one day, because I happened to be standing shank-to-shank at a reception with somebody high on the current wanted list, I turned up in the ‘candids’ section of a Sunday supplement.
‘Sugar in the morning, sherbets in the evening …’
Similar Books
