Sage of Fleet Street
Craig Brown on the clever dandy who combined wisdom, honesty and gay abandon
Perry Worsthorne arrived at the 2012 Oldie Awards in the outfit you see pictured below. Then aged 89, he accepted his award for Fashion Icon of the Year with a characteristic flourish. ‘Having failed to become a sage,’ he said, ‘I will now be remembered as a dandy.’ In fact, he proved himself a perfect combination of the two, with a large pinch of the iconoclast thrown in. A Spectator diary opened with this immortal sentence: ‘Put on coffee enemas as part of a cure to help me break a hellish addiction to the antidepressant Seroxat, I have accidentally discovered, a bit late in the day for me, that they are a sure-fire remedy for hangovers.’ He once recalled how Darcus Howe had phoned him to say Channel 4 was so pleased with their joint programme on race that they wanted to commission a series. ‘My vanity was tickled. Six hour-long programmes on prime time! As to money, that, too, was discussed: a possible sum of £40,000. So rosy did the financial prospect seem that I bought a new Citroën with the, for me, unheard-of extra luxury of leather seats.’
Alas, Perry was then told the project had been cancelled, with not a penny in compensation. ‘How does television get away with such high-handed and unscrupulous, not to say uncivilised and unmannerly, behaviour?’ he asked.
It was his use of such words that led many to see Perry as an old fogey. But it was only half the story. He was also wonderfully candid and incautious: I can’t think of any other journalist who would have mentioned what they were paid, or sent up his own mercenary ambitions with such gay abandon.
He liked to play up to his lofty image, and then to place a whoopee cushion beneath it. Having been guyed about his Christian name in the New York Times, he boasted that the first child born after the Pilgrim Fathers had disembarked from the Mayflower was christened Peregrine ‘and a name good enough for the Pilgrim Fathers ought to be good enough even for the New York Times’.
But he then admitted he had boasted of his Pilgrim Fathers connection to General Eisenhower, whom he met on the campaign train in the 1952 presidential election.
‘After pondering this for a moment, his face broke into the famous Ike smile and he said, “See here, son, I have to tell you that your goddam first name sure never caught on.” ’