Slowing Down (20 page)

That night there was no danger of that. Most of the artists were middle-aged but well known. Many of them I knew. I was especially pleased to meet again Frank Auerbach whom I had not seen for many years, and who was as friendly as if we had last talked together the week before in the Colony Room.

My reaction to the work of that vicious and quarrelsome queen and genius, Caravaggio, I have already described. Afterwards Greckel and I had supper together, although it ended badly. After a bottle of saki (and we had both had a few drinks earlier) I became rather pompous and started criticizing her several destructive traits (pomposity is one of the major dangers of old age) and she, when she’d had enough of me and the saki, left the Chinese restaurant in a huff. Of course we rang each other up the next day and both apologized. We love each other too much not to.

I remain for ever grateful to Craigie for arranging our attendance at the exhibition via the director of the National Gallery. His passion for painting is the equivalent of the lifelong driven obsession of Matisse. His naiveté in day-today life pays off against most odds in his favour. When I first knew him I likened him to a fox, but no more. He is a driven man. His take on the world is as fanatical as any business tycoon’s but it is much more sympathetic. Recently, in Tuscany where he owns an underfurnished former farm, Greckel told him that in the local market it was customary to bargain. Craigie took this in apparently, but on his next visit put it into practice by doubling the prices asked for aubergines, say, or a loaf of bread. This of course astounded and shocked the market traders. ‘You want two!’ they cried in disbelieving frustration. It was close to Derek Taylor’s
insistence on offering more and more for the Glaswegian’s banal lighter, but for Derek it was out of conscious mischief, in Craigie’s case from a genuine misunderstanding of what ‘bargaining’ implied.

Some years ago Craigie was awarded a
CBE
and went along to Buckingham Palace with Greckel to receive it. Craigie has a large head with long but beautifully presented white hair. He dresses colourfully. His face is as changeable and unreadable as a baby’s. Will it cry? Will it laugh? His voice, with just a tinge of Scots accent, is high-pitched. His head nods quite often, he shuffles, as I do, rather than strides out. His house, inherited from his mother, has rather good furniture, brightly regilded, and its walls decorated in his favourite colours, shades of pink especially. Every flat surface is covered with kitsch, mostly broken ornaments transformed as if by a magician into glittering treasures. He loves dogs obsessively, especially Bedlingtons, of which he owns several. He often wears a T-shirt on which is printed ‘Bedlingtons are best’.

Here, with some guilt, I find myself unable, as I so often am (another increasing and regrettable tendency of age), to resist inserting a joke of my father’s. An Italian is criticizing his best friend: ‘You come in da house, you eata alla da spaghetti, you drinka alla da chianti, you fucka da wife, you knocka da Jesus Christ offa da mantelpiece and breaka da legs. One day, ma friend, YOU GO TOO FAR!’

Greckel dresses in a very personal way too, not at all identical to the fiancé, but with a shared love of pink. The two of them must have looked quite odd at the palace, like slightly dishevelled tropical birds surrounded by formal rooks and magpies.

When it was Craigie’s turn to approach the Queen, I imagine she must have glanced at her list to see what he actually did. After all, HM isn’t noted, despite owning one of the best collections in the world, for being very interested in art and especially, unlike her late mother, contemporary art. If Craigie had been a jockey it would have been different. She has no obligation to prefer painting to racing, but I can’t see her spending a spare evening leafing through her unique drawers full of Leonardo drawings at Windsor Castle. Still, she always fulfils her obligations.

When he shuffled forward she said, ‘I see you’re a painter, Mr Aitchison. What are your favourite subjects?’

This encounter he described immediately after receiving his medal to the naturally curious Greckel, who asked him how he’d answered the Queen’s polite question.

‘Jesus Christ, black people and doggies,’ he’d told her. She hadn’t commissioned him to paint the corgies, however.

There is nothing whimsical or affected in calling his Bedlingtons ‘doggies’. He never calls them anything else. Nor is he religious, as far as I know, despite the fact that he paints JC so often and has been commissioned by several churches. Not being much of a draughtsman, he usually paints Christ without arms, although often comforted by little birds and sometimes with a Bedlington at the foot of the cross.

He once was given an exhibition in Monte Carlo, although naturally the French couldn’t see his point. One day a critic approached him. ‘Why do you h’always paint h’our Lerd wizout erms?’ he asked him. Craigie answered with irritated dignity, ‘Not everybody is born with arms, you know.’ Greckel told me this.

Whether provoked by this impertinence or perhaps shaken by how often this question was put to him, the painter has quite often since given his Christs ‘erms’. I feel it’s not a significant improvement, as they are usually far too long and drape over the cross-beam rather than being nailed to it. But for me they are just as beautiful.

My next treat, just by chance, also involved Buck House. I got an invitation from the Queen and her saloon-bar philistine of a consort to ‘an evening’s celebration of British Music’. With my fear of being charmed, swallowed and digested by the Establishment, I asked my manager to find out if Lyttelton was going. ‘I think you should make up your own mind,’ said the WingCo; but I needed Humph’s say-so. That is because he, by birth related to many grand families, has always turned down what I’m sure has been the offer of many honours, including, I dare say, a life peerage. He has refused them all, remaining faithful to his left-wing rejection of his heritage, although he still retains the perfect manners and accent of his origins. ‘Yes,’ he told my agent Jack Higgins, and so I, who was cat-like with curiosity anyway, felt it possible to accept.

My new house-sharer Mark agreed to drive me there, an official clearance sticker on his windscreen. Although I’d warned him I’d no way to get him in, he was still curious enough to park in the official car park in the central courtyard, taking with him one of his approved religious books. We sailed through. No doubt being black, in these PC days, probably ensured his easy passage. At the entrance I was greeted as ‘George’ by several policemen and officials in charge. A lot of the more mature ones do this, some of
them because they’re jazz lovers or because they’ve seen me on TV. This has often happened in recent years, even though, on
Room 101
, the royal family were one of my successful choices for the drop, (the others were swans and Boyz Bands). ‘Bad for your street cred,’ said my friend and one-time lover Louisa Buck, but it doesn’t seem to have made any difference there.

Inside, up an impressive staircase with royal ancestors on both walls, I entered a series of huge rooms with enough gilt to satisfy Craigie on his earlier visit, and more dodgy monarchs two deep
in situ
. The canapés weren’t up to much but there were ashtrays on every valuable flat surface. (I don’t suppose even Blair will have the right to ban these – another reason among many for hoping he’ll never be elected Life-President.) Even better, instead of the usual reception glasses of ferret’s piss or red ink, there were bottles of good whiskey and pretty obliging boys to replenish my glass.

The musicians present were largely, I suspect, classical conductors, composers and soloists (I’m an ignoramus, a philistine, when it comes to ‘serious music’), but I did meet and chat with a charming couple, not in the first flush of youth although much younger than I, who give singing recitals of whatever is required including Gilbert and Sullivan, a love of which I have inherited from my father, he from his Victorian relatives.

Otherwise, I saw no jazz musicians except H. Lyttelton. Like ‘Pussy cat, Pussy cat’, we both saw the Queen and Phil the Greek in the distance. There were people all round them and passing in front of them, hoping for a smile or a word, but neither Humph nor I joined the oboists or conductors.
Humph told me that when he was a trainee Guards officer stationed in Windsor, he was sometimes detailed off with a colleague to dance with the two princesses at the Castle. As they, especially Margaret Rose, were quite short and he over six foot with enormous feet (size thirteen, I think), and as furthermore most jazz musicians are not usually adept at strictly ballroom, he told me he never enjoyed it.

When people started to leave I followed their example, and Mark drove me back to Shepherd’s Bush for supper. I can’t say I hadn’t been fascinated, but then, though no royalist, I always read everything about the House of Windsor, just as, while no Catholic, I watched the last hours and subsequent funeral of the Pope. When he was editor of
Punch
, Alan Coren, on hearing that the Holy Pole had been named ‘John Paul the Second’, suggested the next one should be installed as ‘George Ringo’. Well, my crimson cardinals, now, while black smoke still belches from the Vatican chimney, is your chance to follow this up! But I don’t suppose you’ll take it.

My Cinderella-like visit to the Palace is over, and I doubt it will be repeated. (How my mother would have milked it for all it was worth, using a special offhand voice she always adopted to swank about her children.) Now that I’ve shaken the gold-dust of the Palace carpets from my shoes, I should mention some other invitations which, without Humph, I always attend whenever I can: One: the Ian Mackintosh Memorial Lunch and Good-time Afternoon. I’m aware that most people, apart from those who remember the fifties and sixties jazz world, won’t know who Ian Mackintosh was, nor why his passing should be remembered with an annual lunch. He was a timber merchant living in Cuffley, very
conventional in most ways but also a Louis Armstrong fanatic and a rather loud good disciple of his hero, but unfortunately tending to blow increasingly louder and eventually all over the place when in his cups. I don’t know how far in the past lay his Scottish roots, but apart from being called Mackintosh, and the names he gave his sons, there was no trace of them. Indeed the same is true of most upper-middle- and upper-class Scots that I have known. One of his sons you may indeed have heard of. His name is Cameron, the millionaire producer of many worldwide musical hits of recent years,
Les Misérables
for example.

There is one story which neatly encapsulates the two sides of Ian and ‘Spike’, as he was nicknamed in his Satchmo persona. It was at a party at Wally Fawkes’s large white house near Swiss Cottage during his younger and wilder days, when he was still with Sandy, his first and raving wife. We were all, including Ian, punishing the drink, and, as often then, a jam session materialized. Ian metamorphosed easily into Spike and began, as the booze worked its black magic, to blow at top volume and finished an LP-length solo with the usual disintegrating multiple coda.

He’d blown so loudly as to wake Wal and Sandy’s two young daughters and they’d got up to see what was going on. They were leaning on the top banister. Spike spotted them and immediately returned to Ian. ‘Wally,’ he growled, ‘shouldn’t those children be in bed?’

You could be confident about Spike’s reaction to any situation. Once, in the fifties, there was a convention of timber merchants in London and Spike was expected to arrange some entertainment. From somewhere he heard of a detective inspector who, assisted by a policeman with a
projector and a constable in uniform to rewind the films in the kitchen, could provide ‘a nice evening’s entertainment’, as Dame Edna puts it. The detective inspector said yes – I presume at a price.

Spike, or Ian, next asked Simon Watson Taylor, with whom I was sharing a basement flat near the Fulham Road, after the temporary collapse of my first marriage, if he would allow his premises to be turned into a cinema. Simon, ex-secretary of the Surrealist Group in this country, anarchist and later a prominent adept of pataphysics, the science of imaginary solutions, who savoured anything which proved the hypocrisy of the Establishment, also said yes.

The evening, as you may have guessed by now, was a showing of the history of cinematic porn from late-Victorian days to what was then the present. Simon’s only demand was that Mick and I were to join the timber merchants. I found the whole programme fascinating but unarousing, the earliest examples especially. There, with a photographer’s rather wobbly period backcloth and the ubiquitous potted palm-tree which often appeared in straight family portraits of that era, were a series of men wearing false beards who had their speeded-up way with women, with both sexes frequently dressed as monks or nuns. (Towards the end of Joyce’s
Ulysses
there is a list of the contents of Leopold Bloom’s bureau drawers, including several photographs of similar images.)

It occurs to me that pornography, to work, must be contemporary. So many of these monks and nuns, and probably those taking part in the decades that followed, were performers who are long dust – not in any way a turn-on, at least for me.

There was one film, made not long ago (but a week can be a long time in pornography), which showed a woman in the country who sees a man approaching and pretends to faint in the heather by the side of the path, having first carefully disarranged her clothing. The man, spotting her as she intended, takes advantage of her, or vice versa – comic rather than wank-material. The inspector, in his neutral policeman’s voice, pitched as though reading a charge, told us, ‘She’s in Holloway. He’s in the Scrubs.’

The final film was more or less contemporary. It showed a fairly established film starlet (presumably ‘resting’ at the time) and a fairly attractive young man. Simon observed, as he would, that she had a well-developed pile.

But it was a movie he showed earlier that he claimed to be ‘the best we have – French’, which indeed proved to be the most imaginative and surrealist in the proper sense. A young girl, just before Christmas, indulges in aggressive lesbian horseplay with her governess. Once she is left alone, down the chimney, to her surprise, comes Santa Claus, wearing a carboard mask. Making a magician’s pass, he materializes an enormous paper parcel. She eagerly unwraps it to discover a full-size vaulting horse only with a handle on one side, to manipulate back and forth a large model penis at the end. After only a short hesitation, the girl hauls up her nightdress and makes full use of it. A winged female angel appears and engages the attentions of the be-masked Father Christmas. Her wings fall off, and… After all have climaxed, the last shot of the film is of the angel’s bottom with the discarded mask of Father Christmas placed on it.