WHEN NICK WAS ABOUT SEVEN YEARS OLD he came home one afternoon after playing with a friend who lived around the corner, and told me about the picture that hung above the fireplace in Tom’s house. His description was somewhat confused. As well it might have been, poor little chap. It was a lady’s face, he said, and she had curly dark hair, not too long and not too short, but her eyes were funny because they were huge and round, like tennis balls that bulged right out of her face, and he opened his own eyes very wide and tried to make them stick out. And then there was her mouth—a dark triangle that didn’t look like a mouth at all—and he squidged up his own lips as tight as he could to demonstrate. “What was her nose like?” I asked, and he had to think for a moment, conjuring up the image of the strange lady inside his head, and then said that she didn’t really have a nose, just a little hole that looked like a belly button. I laughed and said she sounded like a very funny lady indeed and Nick nodded in agreement. “She is funny, but I like her.”
The lady in question belonged to Tom’s dad, George Melly, and had been painted by René Magritte in 1934. It was called The Rape. Maybe at seven Nick didn’t understand what made her look so odd—or why he found her so fascinating—but when he got to be just a bit older he realized that her startled-looking face was composed of “all the naughty bits,” which can only have added to her already considerable allure.
George had discovered the surrealists in London as a young man in 1944, on leave from the navy. He once told me that the recruiting officer had looked a bit surprised when he said the reason he wanted to be a sailor was because “the uniforms are so much nicer” and was deeply disappointed when he was assigned to some boring desk job and didn’t get to mince around on deck in a pair of bell-bottoms.
George never lost his taste for flamboyant clothes, and by the time I got to know him he tended to favor the thirties gangster look with a dash of Harlem pimp—dark shirts, loud ties, pale double-breasted suits, and a fedora. A brilliant jazz musician and blues singer—his heroine was Bessie Smith, whose voice he imitated perfectly and whose “avoirdupois” he acquired—George also never lost his taste for anarchy, subversion, and the louche side of life. Warmhearted and extremely funny—he wrote an autobiography called Rum, Bum and Concertina—no wonder he and my mother were so fond of each other. (And, as a true friend and soul sister, he sang the blues at her memorial service almost forty years later.)
George was married to the beautiful Diana, having left the sailors and bell-bottoms behind long ago, and they lived in Gloucester Crescent, a leafy enclave of solid Victorian houses that curved around behind Regent’s Park Terrace, where our house was. I always thought of the “terrace” as being Freddie’s territory—our neighbors were respectable people like V. S. Pritchett, a couple of judges, and Ralph Vaughan Williams’s widow—while the much more raffish “crescent” was my mother’s domain.
At the back of our house we had a long, dank garden kept in permanent shade by two huge trees, where a few etiolated plants eked out some kind of sad existence but were far too depressed ever to produce a single flower. My mother didn’t really do gardens—witness the gravel-strewn parking lot in front of the house in France—so the space became a bucolic bathroom for our two dogs, when they could be bothered to use it. Usually they found it much more comfortable and convenient to relieve themselves indoors on the carpet, and the only times my mother ever went near the garden was when she was screaming and beating them with a rolled-up newspaper while shoving them out the back door. This happened about twice a day. Her difficulties with house-training pets was nothing new, and she told me that in Burma she had adopted a monkey who was no better behaved than our dogs, so she would hit him on the bum and throw him out the window—they lived in a bungalow—until the clever little creature quickly learned the correct routine. First he’d pee or shit on the floor, then he’d smack himself, and then he’d jump out the window.
The garden’s only other purpose was as a shortcut for Jonathan Miller’s sons, Tom and William, to use when they came over to play with Nick. Actually Tom, who was older and much better behaved than his younger brother, mostly took the more conventional approach, and would walk around on the sidewalk and ring the front doorbell. But William thought it was quicker and much more fun to climb over the garden wall, run up the steps, and come through the door at the top. Which would have been fine if the door hadn’t opened into the bathroom. Freddie was an old-fashioned gentleman who liked to have a quiet breakfast—tea, toast, and The Times—in his pajamas and dressing gown and then retreat for a long ruminative soak in his bath afterward. What he didn’t like was to have “that bloody William Miller,” as he understandably called him, burst through the door and dash by on his way upstairs to see his son. Or, more likely, his wife.
My mother adored William, and the more he teased and tormented silly old Freddie, the fonder she grew of him. And William adored my mother because she was wicked, glamorous, funny, opinionated, unpredictable, and ferociously rude. His own mother, Rachel, had many qualities, but these were not among them. Who wouldn’t fall for a woman who, when you said you were bored, bound your hands in Scotch tape until you begged to be released? Or who suggested you dial a telephone number, and when the voice at the other end answered with a crisp “Buckingham Palace,” told you that the cops were coming to get you? (This was an old trick of hers that had terrified me—every time—when she used to play it on me.) Or, when you were a bit older, gave you a marijuana plant, all your own, to take home and keep on the windowsill in your room? There was no end to the fun they had together. But it was fun that excluded her son. At the beginning it was scarcely perceptible—she just behaved in the same hilarious and outrageous way with William as she did with everybody else—but gradually, as the years passed, it became more noticeable. Of course none of this was William’s fault—he was just a young boy—but how about the other boy who watched while his mother amused herself with his friend? What was she doing? And why? Forty years have gone by and I still have no answer.
William was so taken with my mother that he soon started talking like her, which caused some consternation at his school. His parents were a bit surprised to get a call one day from his teacher, who said she was “very disturbed” by William’s language, and perhaps they would like to come in and discuss the problem. Were they aware that his ever-expanding vocabulary included “fuck off,” “goddammit,” and “son of a bitch,” and where did they suppose he might have picked this up? Only one place, they said, and promised to wash out his mouth with carbolic soap just as soon as they could lure him home from that well-known den of sin around the corner.
FROM ABOUT THE MIDSIXTIES to the midseventies the Ayer-Wells den of sin was just where you wanted to be. No wonder “that bloody William Miller” was constantly barging through Freddie’s bathroom. And plenty of other even-more-scintillating guests used to barge through the front door for lunch, drinks, dinner, and big parties, where people would spill out of the drawing room and spread out all over our five-story house. Politicians like Roy Jenkins or the foreign secretary, Tony Crosland, would find themselves sitting around the table with Sue and Basil Boothby from Burma, newspaper editors like Charles Wintour, writers like Kenneth Tynan, Stephen Spender, or Alan Bennett (who lived in the crescent opposite the Millers); and then there would usually be a few Americans to remind my mother of home. Sometimes a certified superstar like Norman Mailer—fame was always her great faiblesse—would be produced; sometimes it was an old girlfriend like Colette Douglas (who had been a bridesmaid at her wedding to my father) or Anthony Lewis, the New York Times man in London. Once it was a visiting American Indian chief from South Dakota. Honestly. Hey, it was the sixties! And bliss it was to be alive in that extraordinary time, but to be young—or at least in your midforties, like my mother—was very heaven.
I don’t now recall how Chief Spotted Eagle came into our lives, but he seemed to hang around for an awfully long time. The Bernsteins had their Black Panthers and my mother had Spotted Dick—as I called him. (spotted dick is a leaden Victorian pudding, full of suet and dried fruit, that was served under a thick blanket of lumpy Bird’s Custard at school.) A man of few words, he was a tall laconic Lakota Sioux, who had come to London for a benefit—organized by my mother and other guilt-ridden expatriate Americans—to benefit the tribe back home on the reservation. The date chosen for this festive event was the anniversary of the massacre at Wounded Knee. Sadly I missed the party (maybe I was in Oxford) but that didn’t mean I missed Spotted Dick, who had settled into our spare room and was soon quite at home in London, showing no sign at all of missing the wide-open spaces of his native land. He had long black hair and favored tight jeans, colorful shirts, and necklaces made of shells, beads, and teeth that looked as though they might once have belonged to a mountain lion, or a shark. Or possibly just an extremely large dog. Not averse to the odd cocktail, Spotted Dick was particularly fond of firewater from Bordeaux, having found a case of claret in the cupboard in Freddie’s study—“That bloody Indian has drunk all my best wine. Really, it’s too much. When the hell is he leaving?” But what he liked best of all was radical-chic pussy, of which there was an endless supply in London at that time. He managed to have his wicked way with several of my mother’s friends, starting with, a hirsute poetess who lived in Hampstead, and then moving on to several other adventurous ladies d’un certain âge.
IN ADDITION TO HER HUMANITARIAN concern for the Lakota and her energetic social life, my mother was also busy with her work as a journalist and, increasingly, as a regular guest on television talk shows. Imagine getting paid—and paid very well—to argue, shock, hector, and harangue your way into millions of living rooms across the country, when it was something you had been doing all your life for free! It was too good to be true. My mother “knew from talk,” as they say in New York, and she was a television producer’s dream booking for the same reason that William Miller found her so fascinating. Clever, rude, witty, and above all opinionated, she sparkled even more brightly in front of a television camera than around the dinner table. Fame may be the ultimate aphrodisiac, but it also has a strong autoerotic component. I think being on television made her feel sexy—and powerful—at a time when she was beginning to worry about the horror of approaching middle age (which enveloped you in its sweaty menopausal grip a good decade earlier than it does now).
Just after Nick was born she started appearing five nights a week on a program called Three after Six. The format could not have been simpler: Invite three journalists into the studio and switch on the camera while they yacked on about that day’s news. It was live, which gave it an added frisson, and the producers tried to goad the guests into an argument—never a problem with my mother—by mixing hard-core Tories with permissive society socialists. My mother’s instinctive mistrust of authority made her deeply suspicious of all cops, and I remember watching her one evening—just after some Goya had been stolen from the Duke of Wellington—let fly on what the police would do next: “What they want is to get this poor hopeless little nut into the station and beat him up and let him fall down a couple of flights of stairs, and then say: ‘Well, we’ve dealt with that ruffian.’ In that splendid police way.”
Three after Six was a straightforward chat show, but Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life, on which she also appeared, was rather more ambitious. Hosted by the ubiquitous David Frost, it combined satirical skits, music, and appalling one-liners—especially written for Frost by his tame hacks—with the guest yackers. It was on this program that Freddie had made a total fool of himself one Valentine’s Day, discussing the mysteries of love with a flirtatious Eartha Kitt, who had cooed in his ear—“Oh, Professor”—while he droned on about the troubadours. Between their frequent television appearances, her newspaper column, and Freddie’s persona as a public intellectual, they became surprisingly well known. Instead of writing about other people my mother was now the one being interviewed and profiled in magazines and newspapers. I suspect that she liked it much better that way.
Freddie must have been vaguely aware that the times they were a changing, but actually not too much changed for him. He spoke up against the Vietnam War, supported all the usual liberal causes, believed people should do whatever they wanted so long as it didn’t hurt anybody else, and had always slept around: So what did the sixties have to teach him? As a respectable gentleman of sixty who was au fond part of the Establishment, he loathed any form of chaos, and had no interest at all in any of the wilder aspects of that thrilling epoch. Not so my mother. She felt that the world had—finally—come around to her way of thinking. Boats were rocked, royals mocked, rules challenged, satire boomed, the Labour Party ruled, skirts shrank, students revolted, and everybody got high. The satirical review Beyond the Fringe, which our neighbors Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett had written and performed with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in the early sixties, was part of the same wave that created Private Eye magazine and its general piss-taking of … the Establishment. The dreariness and conformity of the fifties had been swept away by a whole new set of attitudes Time magazine conveniently shoved under that capacious psychedelic umbrella it called “Swinging London.”
Within the dynamic of my mother and Freddie’s marriage, the sixties had a lot to answer for. Increasingly she started viewing him as an uptight old fart stuck in the past, while he began to see her as a loudmouthed harridan swept up in the idiocies of the present. And neither of them was entirely wrong.
In her novel Jane, which she started writing in 1970, she describes the heroine’s posh boyfriend, Anthony, like this:
In bed he was lovely. When not in bed, he was too English. He never helped do the dishes. He never carried things, not even potatoes. If Jane started the Times crossword puzzle and put it down even just to answer the phone, he’d finish it. In ink.
If he took a shower he always let the curtain hang outside the tub and couldn’t understand why it made her cross. If he took a bath he’d leave his facecloth unwrung-out and folded in a neat square on top of the soap, where they fused in a cold slime. He used her toothbrush, too. But this could have been a genuine cultural difference; she had known enough Englishmen to know by now that they all used whatever toothbrush happened to be there, even if it was a wet one.
Anthony’s other main drawback is that he is emotionally remote. Detached from, and not really interested in, other people’s feelings, he is hardly any more familiar with his own. And, having gone through the usual upper-class mill of nannies, prep school, and Eton, he has never begun to solve the impenetrable mystery of what goes on between women’s ears, as opposed to their legs.
After long stretches with Anthony you got the feeling you’d been playing tennis against a brick wall. The ball came back each time you hit it—sure—and right there that’s more than you can say about playing tennis with people. But when you play a wall the only energy in the game is your own. You have to begin it. You have to keep score. You have to decide when the game is over and who, if anybody, won. And it’s only you that gets sweaty and tired.
What you can say in favor of playing with a wall is that it never says no or complains. And it never plays any better or worse than the time before; you know where you are with a wall. The catch is, though, that the wall never really gives a damn. It’s like children who go all limp and dull-eyed and say, “I don’t care,” when you ask them if they want an ice-cream cone. Except with them it’s probably a primitive hedge against the possibility that the offer of the ice-cream cone may not be genuine. The wall, alas, really means it.
This was, of course, a portrait of Freddie, the Aspergian snail. Freddie’s shell was always his work, and when he was writing, his ferocious powers of concentration meant that he noticed absolutely nothing of what went on around him. But even when he wasn’t working, he didn’t notice a whole lot more. That was how he had been when she first fell in love with him, and that was how he remained when she fell out of love with him. He didn’t change, and why should he, even assuming he could have? She may have found this exasperating, but Nick was clever enough to spot what a huge asset this character trait could be in a doting father.
The routine on Saturday mornings went like this. Freddie would have his tea, toast, and The Times, followed by his customary session in the bathroom—enlivened by William’s all-too-fleeting appearance—and then he would settle down to work in his study. Sitting at a big round table, his back to the window, twiddling his silver chain in his silken hands, he would get so carried away by the question of ontology and relativism, the relation between experience and theory, and the extent to which what counts for us in the world depends on our conceptual system that he wouldn’t notice that his son had been standing beside him for a good five minutes. Nick wanted his pocket money and he’d quite like it now, if his father didn’t mind.
“Oh darling, I’m so sorry,” and Freddie would hand over a five-pound note, without taking his eyes off the piece of paper—covered in his own inimitable and incomprehensible blue-black squiggles—in front of him. Ten minutes later, Nick would be back.
“Oh darling, did I forget to give you your pocket money? Forgive me,” and another note would change hands. Twenty minutes later—better give the old fool plenty of time to get lost in that crazy maze inside his head—Nick would reappear. This would be repeated at regular intervals—I think the record was four, or was it five?—with Nick’s tone becoming increasingly aggrieved with each visitation.
“Dad, it’s almost lunchtime and you still haven’t given me my money.”
“Darling, are you sure? I thought I had. I am silly, am’t I?”
Finally Nick, the ever-artful dodger, recognized that the game was up and that he couldn’t go on gaslighting his poor old dad any longer, and then he’d retire to his room with a pile of five-pound notes, and have lengthy pornographic fantasies about all the candy, Action Men, and comics he would be able to buy with his ill-gotten gains.
MY MOTHER WAS DEFINITELY going off Englishmen. And the longer she was away from America, the more attractive the men there looked. Even my dear father, who got only more handsome as he aged, was completely rehabilitated. Whatever crimes he may have committed—all she could ever come up with was that he was a bit tight with money, and that she’d gotten bored with being married to him—were forgotten, and his many, and varied, qualities were constantly remarked upon. Was there any man in the entire world better at planning a trip? How about that journey to the Shan states in Burma, where they had met that prince who ate live monkey brains? Or an impromptu party? What about that time they had drunk vodka until dawn, with those Russians who lived near the Palais Royal? Nobody was better at hooking up an outdoor shower. Or building a log fire. Or charming his way into a château that was closed to the public. Or fixing a furnace. Or cleaning up dog shit. He was also extraordinarily gifted at doing the dishes, driving a car, and carrying potatoes.
A few other American men also had their own special place in her heart. Larry Adler was famous (always a plus), had been hounded out of the country by McCarthyism (a double plus), adored my mother (even better), and played the harmonica rather well. Harvey Orkin, a TV and screenwriter, was another favorite, who made up for not being famous with his wit and sweetness. S. J. Perelman (famous and funny) made a brief appearance. As did Julian Bond, the civil rights activist (liberal, good-looking, and black, a triple plus) who dropped by once for a drink with his sad sister (underdog, in need of rescuing), who lived in London and so was invited round all too frequently.
As luck would have it, David Bruce, who had given my mother away at her wedding to my father, was the American ambassador in London at the time, so embassy parties were always a happy hunting ground for new American friends, as was any gathering at Tony and Linda Lewis’s house. One summer I remember her coming back from a lunch party chez Lewis, giddy with delight. Guess what? They’d had hamburgers and hot dogs in the garden—could it have been July Fourth?—and lots of kids were running around on the grass, and Bobby Kennedy had been there, making ice-cream cones for the children. With sprinkles! Sprinkles were always big with my mother. The kitchen cabinet was full of jars of tiny silver balls and technicolored sprinkles that lurked at the back gathering dust, waiting to decorate the cakes that were never baked. Sprinkles represented America, the summer, her youth, and the drugstore in New Bedford that she used to hang around in with her brother. They were decidedly not English. But it was the image of Bobby in the blue button-down Oxford shirt that matched his eyes, sleeves rolled up, forearms tanned, handing out the cones—did she have one too?—that had enchanted her. So relaxed, so Massachusetts, so (newly) liberal, so Kennedy—he was everything she missed about America. He was everything Freddie/Anthony was not.
Less than a year later he was dead. I came home from school that afternoon in June 1968 and found my mother in bed, the curtains drawn, so depressed she could not get up. I had never seen her like this before, and it took weeks for her to slowly heave herself out of this deep black hole. Kennedy had been shot—again. Martin Luther King had been shot. Maybe America wasn’t quite so wonderful after all. Thirty years later in France, as we were sitting around under the lime tree, I finally understood why she had taken to her bed. Yes, she had seen him again after that sunlit party, with the hot dogs and the ice cream and the sprinkles. How often she didn’t say, and I never asked. My mother had actually met Bobby Kennedy once before at his house, Hickory Hill, outside Washington in 1962. Arthur Schlesinger had invited Freddie to an informal symposium, hosted by the Kennedys, where the subject under discussion had been—what else?—God. Somewhat ill-advisedly, Ethel decided to take on the infamous atheist, and as she sank ever deeper into the quicksand of Freddie’s intellect, Bobby finally put an end to her floundering and told her to “Drop it, Ethel.” Naturally enough this was one of my mother’s favorite Freddie stories, and, one assumes, made even more privately delicious after her secret affair with Bobby.
As my mother soon discovered, she had married a man firmly set in his ways. Freddie wasn’t about to start doing the dishes, or carrying potatoes, or picking up dog shit, and he never did learn to drive. And he certainly was not about to stop sleeping with other women. Who knows when or with whom he resumed this lifetime habit, or when she found out, but she did tell Ben Rogers, Freddie’s biographer, that she had gotten used to his disappearing in the afternoon to play “chess” with various lady friends, or simply going off to his club to “sit and read.” I don’t imagine she liked it at all, but so long as they were old girlfriends or casual new ones, maybe she felt it didn’t really matter that much. In any case there was nothing she could do about it.
Like all sensible wives she also made a clear distinction between a fling and a real love affair. We like to think we can cope with the first and come out the victors. After all we have the house, the children, the shared friends, the shared money; and husbands on the whole seem reluctant to see their entire lives—and bank accounts—go up in smoke. If it’s just a fling he’s bound to get bored with her eventually, or at least that’s what our girlfriends always tell us. Odd, though, how perfectly sane and intelligent husbands can sustain an interest in mad and stupid mistresses for surprising lengths of time. And even odder how that first type of affair often mutates into the second—and once that happens the only victory a wife can ever hope for is the kind that King Pyrrhus brought back from Heraclea in 280 BC.
Just before he married my mother, Freddie had become the Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford, which meant that he spent the middle of each week, during term time, in New College. He would set out for Paddington Station with his neat little overnight bag on Tuesday morning and return on Friday afternoon just in time for tea. He had had his doubts about this arrangement, and in a letter to Marion Cummings had wondered whether it might strengthen or weaken his forthcoming marriage. But there was no way my mother or Freddie could have lived in Oxford full-time—they were both far too attached to the bright lights of the big city—so they decided commuting was the solution. Maybe they also felt that this weekly break—like the crisper drawer in the fridge—would keep things fresh longer. It wasn’t as though Freddie had been frantic to get married—rather the opposite in fact. The siege had been lengthy, and fortress Freddie had withstood five years of seduction, cajoling, persuasion, and hoodwinking before finally admitting defeat and signing a peace treaty at St. Pancras Register Office. I imagine he was rather relieved to have a bolt-hole in Oxford to escape to. And as bolt-holes go, it wasn’t bad.
EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT New College is one of the most beautiful colleges in Oxford, and everybody at New College knew that Freddie’s set of rooms was probably the most delectable piece of real estate in the entire place. They occupied the corner of a beautiful eighteenth-century quad, built from that honey-colored Cotswold stone that glows in the sun—when the English sun can be bothered to put in one of its tantalizing appearances. A paneled drawing room overlooking the gardens, a small bedroom, a study that doubled as a dining room, and an enormous drafty bathroom with a fire-breathing water heater: It was an apartment that cried out for company. Freddie, that most social of men, entertained his students there for sherry parties, his friends for luncheons, and his mistresses for cinq-à-sept assignations. He may have thought he was being discreet, but he was surrounded by prurient undergraduates and fellow dons who were all too aware of what he was up to. Some of them even trained their binoculars on his windows to see what they could see.
One of the many reasons I loved being at Oxford was because Freddie was there. I had always adored his company, and with him at New College, I felt instantly at home. He let me charge books to his account at Blackwell’s, he took me to dinner at High Table, and if I was feeling a little hungry around lunchtime, I would just turn up at his rooms, and then we would wander across the quad together for some comforting nursery food in the college dining room. One day I found myself sitting in the Radcliffe Camera, a monumental circular library loosely modeled on the Pantheon, struggling with the bloodthirsty but still amazingly dull doings of some medieval king, when I started daydreaming about steak-and-kidney pie and rhubarb crumble. I looked at my watch, I looked at the cute guy across from me, I gazed out the window, and finally I gave up. It was almost one o’clock. I abandoned King Ethelred the Unready, son of King Edgar and Queen Elfthryth, husband of Queen Elfgifu, to his endless tribulations with the Vikings, and decided to continue my research into early English history at New College. I walked through the medieval gateway, built in 1379, during the reign of Richard II, passed the cloister where the monks used to hang about until Henry VIII got rid of them—I’ve always been a great believer in history by osmosis—climbed up an oak staircase (circa 1750), and knocked on Freddie’s door.
My stepfather was not pleased to see me. Not at all pleased. He stood there, looking wild-eyed and completely mad, blocking the doorway, and finally mumbled something about this not being “an ideal moment.” Apparently. A little perplexed, I backed away and went down the staircase again, crossed the quad, and, as I was going out through the fourteenth-century gateway, bumped into a reincarnation of Queen Nefertiti. Tiny, with inky black hair, flawless cappuccino skin, bitter-chocolate sloe eyes, this exotic vision was dressed, somewhat incongruously, in a childlike flower-sprigged cotton dress with a high waist and little puff sleeves. It was as if the Egyptian queen had decided to have a little something run up by Jane Austen’s dressmaker. And since I spent so much time at grown-up parties with my parents, I knew exactly who she was. Her name was Vanessa, and she was married to Nigel Lawson (always called “Pig Lawson” by my mother, on account of his Tory politics and his generously proportioned body), who was at the time editor of the Spectator magazine. Surprised to see her in Oxford, I suggested that as she happened to have wandered into New College, she should really go call on Freddie, and spent some time explaining to her precisely where his rooms were. She listened patiently, smiled sweetly—God, she was beautiful—and did just that.
The next time I was in London I quite innocently told my mother about the encounter, and she narrowed her eyes, and said, “Oh, really.” We both agreed Vanessa must be having an affair with somebody in Oxford. I imagined some handsome Byronic young don, but Mummy came to a different conclusion.