THIRTY-EIGHT
On October 3, 1975, I turned fifty, an event that I wanted to keep secret. I cannot imagine anyone willingly celebrating time’s ruthless one-way passage. But that year friends decided to do something and Kathleen Tynan, second wife of the critic Kenneth Tynan, and my old friend Diana Phipps decided to give a party in London where over the years I had come to know more people than anywhere else. A club with a good cook was the site. Howard and I flew to London and stayed not as always before at the Connaught but at the Ritz. I remember I had a pile of letters to answer and so the morning of the third I was up early answering them in longhand. Then Howard and I took the lift down to the lobby. It was a small lift lined with mirrors. Halfway down it stopped to admit another passenger, a woman in a white trench coat. Our eyes met in mute shock: it was Jackie Kennedy Onassis. Relations between us had broken off after my row with Bobby in 1961 and time certainly had not improved my mood. First, the IRS went after my father with a long pointless audit. Then I heard from Mississippi that someone from Bobby’s Justice Department had been snooping around trying to dig up scandal about Senator Gore while several court journalists were always available to think up items about me. I certainly never blamed Jackie for taking his side in a complicated unbecoming row but her contribution was that we had not known each other until a chance encounter at a horse show, the last place I would ever be found unless it was after dinner at the White House when Jackie dragged Jack and me there. With that in mind, to Howard’s horror, I turned my back on her to discover in the mirror a smudge of ink on my brow. As I used a handkerchief to remove the ink the lift door opened and she sighed in her best Marilyn Monroe voice, “Bye-bye” and vanished into Piccadilly.
At the beach house of Kenneth and Kathleen Tynan and several of their children: Kathleen is at left, then director Tony Richardson, Princess Margaret, me, and Jack Nicholson. Ken was writing a biography of Laurence Olivier who, when he heard how much Ken was being paid for the book, ceased to cooperate and wrote his own tedious book. Ken, who was dying of emphysema, changed his publisher’s contract to a sort of personal memoir; he died before he completed it. Then Kathleen, also dying of cancer, did finish the book. Each summer for several years she would come to La Rondinaia and faithfully do her exercises in the pool. Olivier, in explanation of his bad behavior, told me: “I owe Ken Tynan many things but not my life.” My rejoinder was a muttered expletive. After all, it was Ken not Olivier who was most responsible for England’s National Theatre.
THIRTY-NINE
Recently a new mystery was revealed. There is some TV footage of Jack, Jackie, and me making our entrance at a Washington horse show where I end up sitting to Jack’s left; then there is Jackie to my left and an unknown lady behind us. Just visible, back of us, was the memorable hat of Alice Roosevelt Longworth who had been at dinner in what had once been her bedroom. A lady has currently written a book about life at the Kennedy court. I showed her the TV footage. She had questioned my story of the placement at the horse show. Apparently she had “proof” that Alice sat beside the president. I agreed that she should have but she didn’t. The journalist then sent me an archival photograph of the event in which I have been neatly cropped out and replaced by Alice and her hat. Nowadays when we are more used to creative history and fictional presences this seems par for that particular course. But in Palimpsest there is a picture of Jack talking into my right ear at the horse show. This could not have happened unless I were sitting on poor Alice’s lap, a most indecorous thing for me to have done. Later at my birthday party Princess Margaret provided me with extra dialogue in response to “Bye-bye.”
Much of half a century of my English life was present at the birthday party. From the 1940s the novelist John Bowen. From the present day, Evangeline Bruce, wife to our ambassador, and then an ambassadress from long ago, Diana Cooper who spent her honeymoon with Duff Cooper at Villa Cimbrone back of our Ravello house. I have no list of who else was there. Diana Phipps who makes collages*1 out of pictures cut from newspapers and magazines did a fine memorial of the occasion including friends and foes as well as those present and absent. Clive James, a friend of Diana’s, wrote an amiable poem to celebrate the occasion. Diana Cooper took it away to study at home. When I wrote her a polite note asking for it back she sent it to me along with my note requesting it, an odd bit of one-upmanship. As a child she had known and admired George Meredith, a friend of her mother. When he died she dressed herself in her mother’s mourning clothes complete with thick veil, and attended Meredith’s funeral where she was noticed by all as the mystery lady who sobbed so loudly throughout the service, adding unexpected romance to Meredith’s troubled life.