The Old Un’s Notes
The monstrous behaviour of Harvey Weinstein has produced a brilliant new book by Ronan Farrow (son of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow), who first broke the story in the New Yorker.
And now there’s a film, Harvey, starring Steven Berkoff, king of the Hollywood baddies, as Weinstein. Berkoff based the film (available on DVD) on his play of the same name.
At 82, Berkoff is an oldie firing on all cylinders. He tells the Old Un, ‘I’m fascinated by evil villains and monsters. Weinstein is a classic Hollywood monster, an ugly, demonic beast. He suffered from a misguided belief in his charisma and believed that women would play along with that. At the same time, he had a sense of his ugliness: “Women don’t really like me. They’re just playing up to me to get a part in a film.” ’
When the allegations of rape and abuse by Weinstein first came out, Berkoff started researching and writing the play.
Berkoff wanted to examine
Weinstein’s justification for his abusive behaviour.
He did meet Weinstein once. ‘He was fascinating and fairly transparent. He was infamous for being a sadistic bully. You didn’t want to get on the wrong side of him. And now his insatiable hunger for power and fame and his sexual compulsion have stripped him of everything.’
Comedy legend Barry Cryer and star actress Thelma Ruby were photographed at Oscar Wilde’s 165th birthday party, held at Grosvenor House by Gyles Brandreth.
Barry and Thelma were both born in Leeds on the same day, ten years apart. Actress Thelma is celebrating her 95th birthday next year by performing at the King’s Head in Islington. Spring-chicken Barry, a mere 84, then wowed the audience at the East India Club in conversation with Oldie editor Harry Mount, only a few days after Oscar’s birthday.
Susanna Johnston, sister of our muchmissed late editor, Alexander Chancellor, is publishing her memoir, Rescuing My Father (Zuleika), in December.
Alexander would have turned 80 on 4th January next year. Susanna recalls his early days in the Chancellor home in Hertfordshire.
The house was close enough to London that it was threatened by the Blitz, and baby Alexander took to sleeping in a giant gas mask.
‘Many of our windows were fragmented,’ writes Susanna, ‘but never the one that was sited immediately above Alexander as he slept in his gas mask.’
Susanna Johnston also recalls the time the 16-year-old Crown Prince Akihito of Japan (later the Emperor, who abdicated earlier this year) came to stay with the Chancellors in 1949. The Crown Prince proceeded to thrash Susanna at ping-pong.
Nearly 50 years later, in 1998, during Akihito’s controversial state visit to the UK, Alexander revived this humiliating event in print.
‘My sister is not completely ready to normalise relations with Japan,’ he wrote, ‘since she is still hoping for an
apology from the Emperor for having cruelly defeated her at ping-pong some 50 years ago.’
Last year we ran a piece on Nigel Molesworth and his onlie begetter, Geoffrey Willans (1911-1958). Now the Old Un is delighted to learn that thanks to the efforts of Willans’s nephew, Robin Gilbert, a commemorative plaque is to be unveiled at 19 Alexander Road, Gloucester, where Willans grew up.
A previous initiative to have a similar plaque installed on the building that used to be Glyngarth, Willans’s prep school, was rejected by Cheltenham Ladies’ College, the present owners, on the grounds that ‘it might set a precedent’. Chiz! Chiz!
The Old Un usually finds personalised numberplates impossibly vulgar but, in this case, he’s prepared to make an exception.
In October, this ‘OLD 1’ numberplate went up for sale at Brightwells, the auctioneer in Leominster. Amazingly, no one bought it at an estimated sale price of £90,000 to £100,000. The Old Un would consider buying it for his own wreck of a jalopy – but is concerned by the mismatch of having a numberplate that’s worth a thousand times as much as his car.
This issue of The Oldie is a Latin special, with articles on Asterix by Giles Coren and the Pope’s Latinist, Father Reginald Foster, by Katie Walker.
Latin isn’t thriving everywhere, sadly. Melancholy news reaches the Old Un that Finnish public radio has, on cost grounds, decided to end its weekly news broadcast in Latin. The show was getting an average audience of only 50,000. That leaves the Vatican with a five-minute Latin news bulletin and a half-hour Latin conversation programme, plus Radio Bremen’s monthly Latin news broadcast.
As Cicero was fond of saying, ‘ O tempora, o mores!’ Daisy Ashford’s classic, The Young Visiters, has found its perfect illustrator in the great artist Posy Simmonds.
Simmonds captures perfectly the late-victorian, comic views of Ashford, who was only nine when she wrote
the book in 1890. The book wasn’t published until a century ago this year, in 1919.
Ashford herself was the ultimate one-hit wonder and child star combined. She died, aged 90, in Norwich in 1970, having run a flower-growing business in Norwich and the King’s Arms Hotel in Reepham with her husband, James Devlin. The new edition of The
Young Visiters, introduced by Lucy Mangan, published by Chatto & Windus, is out on 7th November.
Wendy Cope, a favourite poet among oldies, was an ideal judge for this year’s annual John Betjeman Poetry Prize for a poem written by a child under 13.
Cope spent 15 years as a primary-school teacher before publishing her 1986 collection, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis – which Amis himself pronounced ‘bloody good’.
She and her co-judge, her poet husband Lachlan Mackinnon, decided without a word of argument that the ‘exceptionally moving’ poem by 13-year-old Fin Perry, written when his mother was ill in hospital, should win. (Fin’s parents are a husband-and-wife team who write teenage vampire romances under the nom de plume of Mia James.) The winning poem is printed in the Oldie Review of Books, inside this issue.
At St Pancras Station, where the prize is presented annually in front of Martin Jennings’s lovable and lifelike Betjeman statue, the children’s reading aloud of their own verses was interrupted as usual by
blaring Tannoy announcements of Eurostar arrivals, plus those infuriating warnings: ‘See it. Say it. Sorted.’
Yet the audience managed to listen raptly to the children’s words. Especially to a poem called Renaissance Rondeau, about a choir singing Verdi in a church with a perfect acoustic – ‘Like Greek theatres where sound was sharp as spears.’ This was written by tiny Herbie Wares, who won the new award for the best poem by a 10-yearold, given in memory of Betjeman’s late mistress Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, who died last year, aged 92.
Wendy Cope was intrigued by Herbie, who attends the independent Dwight School in north London, and asked how he knew about such things. It turned out he had researched the subject after playing the violin in a church with what his teacher said was a T30 reverberation (T30 is a measurement of the ‘decay time’ of a sound).
‘A very impressive little boy,’ said Wendy. And, as her husband – former English master at Winchester – added, ‘We should celebrate the teachers who create young writers and young readers. They inspire the next generation, often in difficult circumstances.’
Remember Nova magazine?
From 1965, it smashed up every preconception about women’s mags, with its pioneering photography, bold typefaces and edgy features.
A best-of- Nova anthology, edited by its art director David Hillman (who in 1988 went on to redesign the Guardian), was launched recently.
Several Nova contributors were present at the launch, including our fashion columnist Brigid Keenan ( Nova’s assistant editor), Dame Ann Leslie, Irma Kurtz, and Roger Law of Spitting Image (who produced puppets for Nova’s satirical illustrations).
Hillman told the story of how Nova was dealt a fatal blow. In 1972, the sassy American magazine Cosmopolitan was due to launch in Britain with its theme of how-to-snareyour-man (by sex), which was insultingly retrograde compared with Nova’s staunchly feminist stance.
What Nova needed that month was a killer scoop. They decided to use newfangled computer-dating, and find a wife for the bachelor prime minister, Edward Heath, then aged (like Boris Johnson now) 55. Ads were placed, anonymously, for a nice middle-aged lady to take on the Bach-playing master of Morning Cloud.
The chosen responder was Yvonne Manson, aged 52, a Tory-voting divorcee who was appalled at the idea of being matched with Ted: ‘Arrogant … no human understanding … and he’s rude.’
But she posed for photographs, and Nova created mock-up images: on the cover, a spoof tabloid front page (‘TED WEDS: “No more boats,” says bride’). Inside was her vision of their raspberry-pink bedroom, and her formula for a Downing Street dinner party including Enoch Powell, Jackie Onassis, Liz Taylor and Bernadette Devlin (plus new baby) around the table.
The ‘bride’ was happy to do interviews, and high sales were confidently expected. The mag went to press in Milan as usual. Then came the blow: a call from ‘Mrs Manson’ to confess that she was, in fact, still married; and as it happened, one of her grown-up children was on the run, sought by Interpol for importing quantities of cannabis. The whole issue had to be binned.
So Cosmo launched without any rivalry from Nova, which began to hit the skids soon after – limping on, reduced in size, to its final demise in 1975.
Irma Kurtz, one of whose last columns declared that ‘Sex is vastly overrated’, went on to become Cosmo’s agony aunt for the next 40 years.
The Old Un doesn’t like mentioning Christmas until Christmas Eve, when he starts contemplating which road atlas to buy from the local petrol station as a present for Mrs Old Un.
He makes an exception for his favourite charity, Horatio’s Garden, which boosts spinal-injury patients by making lovely gardens in NHS spinal-injury centres.
The Horatio’s Garden carol concert this year is in St Marylebone Parish Church, London, on 2nd December at 6.30pm. The St Marylebone parish is home to the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital, the sister establishment to the site at Stanmore, where the fifth Horatio’s Garden is due to open next year.
The carol concert features lovely music and readings. Go to info@horatiosgarden.org. uk to get tickets or to give a donation.