Thus far but no further! What Lauren Bacall told me the night I walked her to her hotel doorstep...
WHEN my parents bequeathed me my prep school reports, I noted that my headmaster had inexplicably spoken of me as having ‘an eye for the ladies’.
What can he have been talking about? There weren’t any women in sight – apart from one or two elderly cleaners. Be that as it may, it has certainly been my good fortune to meet some of the past century’s most beautiful and dazzling women.
It was at a dinner party in London that I found myself sitting next to Hollywood actress Lauren Bacall. In those days you could smoke anywhere, so I didn’t feel the need to ask her permission before lighting up over coffee.
‘What’s a charming young man like you doing smoking?’ she asked, to my surprise.
My reply somehow didn’t seem to please her. ‘You know how to smoke, don’t you?’ I smiled. ‘You just put your lips together and blow…’
Chilly though her response to this was, it fell to me to drive her back to her Park Lane hotel. After pulling up at the kerb, I leapt out of my car to go round and open her door into the midst of the dark and busy highway, before seeing her safely on to the wide pavement across which I escorted her to the hotel entrance. There she turned around, held aloft a gloved palm, and proclaimed: ‘Thus far, but no further!’
That she even thought I might have any such intentions I found immensely flattering.
Another icon of the era was the wondrous Elizabeth Taylor, whom I was fortunate enough to meet on several occasions – one of them very unexpectedly.
I’d been asked by my pal John
Morley to drop in at an address in Hampstead to pick up some things for a holiday we were taking together. The door was answered by Elizabeth Taylor.
‘Ah yes,’ she said, ‘you must be Anthony. Why don’t you come in for a drink?’
Typical Morley, I thought, still in a state of shock, to warn her but not me. It later emerged he had been tutoring two of her children, hence the unlikely connection. So in I went, and she couldn’t have been more charming. The sometime child star of National Velvet was watching the Horse Of The Year Show on TV.
‘So,’ she said, ‘you’re off to Paris tomorrow, I hear. You must have dinner at our favourite restaurant!’ She surely noticed me trying to work out the polite phraseology for ‘We couldn’t possibly afford
it…’ before she added: ‘As our guests, of course.’
So we duly booked a table – in the name of Burton and Taylor, of course – at said restaurant. Its patron was, however, duly disappointed, given he had set up an elevated table for all to see, when we turned up in our scruffy jeans and T-shirts in place of the expected Burtons in all their glory.
©Anthony Holden, 2021
Abridged extract from Based On A True Story: A Writer’s Life, by Anthony Holden, published by Simon & Schuster on
October 28 at £20. To pre-order a copy for £18, go to mailshop. co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2973 before October 31. Free UK delivery on orders over £20.