Keith Waterhouse
I first met Keith Waterhouse in the Groucho Club in the late 1990s. There he sat with the usual glass of champagne, his canopy of silver hair hitting the shoulders of a crumpled jacket (he was no dandy).
When I was introduced to him, he glanced up briefly, the larger of his gooseberry eyes quite unblinking, and then looked away. I was rather mortified, but was assured that he was always this frosty with newcomers. He first had to ascertain that you were not a bore (the very worst crime) and then you’d be fine. I must somehow have passed the test because, very soon after, we became good chums.
Keith and I would often meet at Gerry’s Club, a subterranean sanctuary in Dean Street – after a long lunch, this was the place to be, along with a colourful crew of resting actors, hacks and drifters whom Keith always rather loved. He had a strict work ethic, though. In the morning he would concentrate on his twice-weekly Daily Mail column, a novel or a play, which made him feel he had earned the right to slope off to Soho for the rest of the day (and a fair proportion of the night).
He was the author of a slim and delightful volume entitled The Theory and Practice of Lunch, in which he extolled the wonders of that glorious institution. The joke was that he never actually ate anything. He adored the ritual of meeting friends at restaurants, whereupon he would move his food around on the plate. The only meal I ever saw him eat and truly enjoy was egg and chips, which we often had with (more) champagne at Kettner’s in the small hours. He once said to me, ‘I never drink when I am working. However, I quite often work when I am drinking.’ At first this sounds no more than a neat piece of nonsense – but writers will see the truth in it.
If you were really lucky, you would be treated to the egg trick. On top of a pint glass of water Keith would place a tin lid, this surmounted by the hull of a matchbox. A fresh egg was balanced above – whereupon Keith would strike the lid with his shoe. The lid and matchbox would go flying, and the egg would plop into the glass. Unless it didn’t work, of course – when the yolk was on you. Watching Peter O’toole in a revival of his wonderful play Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell, Keith said to me with reverence, ‘Behold – a masterclass.’ I had to assume he was talking of the actor and not the playwright, though it was hard to be sure. I was a founder member of his brainwave the Useless Information Society, the idea being that about 20 of us would occasionally meet for dinner, and each would spout information that was brief, true and utterly useless: harder than it sounds. ‘This society,’ he said, ‘will be a male institution, for it is felt that women have no use for useless information.’ The dear man died in 2009 at the age of 80. His friends still miss him – and Soho was suddenly dimmer.