Alan
Whicker
Journey of A Lifetime

For Valerie, of course—who retraced every step

with me and made each one happy…

And for our friends Anne and David Crossland

who joined this kaleidoscope of Whickerwork and

spread a lot of happiness we were often lucky

enough to share.

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

UNKNOWN PLACES FIT FOR EAGLES AND ANGELS

1 - THERE’S BEEN A CHANGE OF MANAGEMENT

2 - A TALK WITH SOMEONE WHO’S NOT TREMBLING

3 - TWO LHASA APSOS AND A COUPLE OF PANTECHNICONS

4 - CITY OF DREADFUL JOY

5 - RELIEVING PATIENTS OF MANY POUNDS—ONE WAY OR THE OTHER

6 - RANDOLPH: AS RUDE TO AMBASSADORS AS HE WAS TO WAITERS

7 - NO ONE CARED ENOUGH

8 - STILL NO DEAL WITH THE DEVIL

9 - IN AMERICA’S SMARTEST SOCIAL RESORT ONLY THE LONELINESS GETS WORSE

10 - YOU DIDN’T LOOK LIKE THAT IN HELLO!

11 - IN MEXICO DEATH KNOCKS MORE OFTEN AND MUST MORE FREQUENTLY BE ADMITTED

12 - EASY TO TEACH WOMEN TO SHOOT, HARDER TO TEACH THEM TO KILL

13 - A POM WHO’S MADE GOOD—IF THAT’S THE WORD

14 - A MOST SIGNIFICANT PINNACLE OF CORAL

15 - THAT’S FOR THE RELEVANT DEMON-GIANT TO WORRY ABOUT

16 - ALL THE TIME YOU HAVE A SENSE OF IMPENDING DISASTER

17 - I’VE ALWAYS WISHED I HAD A BETTER PERSONALITY

18 - THEY FEED THE PIGS ON PASSION FRUIT, THE SHEEP ON WILD PEACHES

19 - TROUBLED SPIRITS, NEVER QUITE COMFORTABLE IN THEIR SKINS

20 - I DON’T MIND A BEATING PROVIDED IT’S BEDSTAKES AFTERWARDS

21 - THEY LIVE IN BAREFOOT POVERTY—AND NEVER SEE A MAN

22 - A FEW LEFT BEHIND WHEN THE TIDE RAN OUT

23 - NO MONEY, NO ENGLISH—AND NO TROUSERS

24 - I AWAITED THE STRETCHER-BEARERS, BLEEDING QUIETLY

25 - A RATHER SMALL UTRILLO

26 - THIRTY BODYGUARDS FOR DINNER

27 - THE RIGHT INTERESTS: LADIES, HORSE-RACING—AND TAKING THE LOCALS FOR A RIDE

28 - BACKSTAGE AT THE ROYAL PALACE

29 - NEVER A FRIENDLY ARMOURED DIVISION AROUND WHEN YOU NEED ONE

30 - THE PARTY’S OVER—IT’S TIME TO CALL IT A DAY

Index

Acknowledgements

Other Books By The Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

UNKNOWN PLACES FIT FOR EAGLES AND ANGELS

My first television programme fifty-two years ago involved travel. With a BBC crew of three we struck out for the Near East, and this book recalls the filming of the earliest Journey of a Lifetime. The excitement was intense. Nothing daunted, we arrived in…Ramsgate. Yes, we were considering the livelihood of seaside landladies. Well you have to start somewhere, and they were unflinching.

Mrs Evelyn Stone’s poodle Candy wore a new blue and red coat for the occasion, I recall. Opposite us, overlooking the sea, a sight which surely dates the picture—not to mention me. Across the road in Nelson Crescent, a blitzed building: roofless and desolate.

Now the BBC has asked me to join in this celebration of my first half-century in television with a memory of some thirty Journeys of a Lifetime—a look at the fun, shock and jubilation of half a century spent getting to know interesting people living unusual lives around the world.

The first long-cut of any television film is exciting, the second alarming—for you see and hear where you went wrong. To make the first cut the Editor and Director will have removed the humour, to make room. Jokes are always the first to go. Editors suspect that they take us away from the storyline, or hold up the action. Unfortunately they also take with them much of the elusive flavour we were chasing—our attitude towards the rest of the world.

Then, gradually, later versions of Whicker’s World emerge from the cutting rooms and into my study. Everything slowly comes together, from the first interview to the last frame, which is when we start to believe we’ve caught something special on the screen, whether it’s a person, a place or a moment in time. Once we’ve unlocked the flavour and texture of some people and places, Whicker’s World goes on turning.

Norfolk Island was just such a place, where I first caught islanditis. This pursued me around the world to such an extent that I left a desirable home in the heart of London and went to live on a tiny island in the Atlantic where I knew no one. I had been travelling all my life and was then living happily in a Nash terrace in Regent’s Park, and before that on Richmond Green.

The first different reaction I noticed about Norfolk Island was that whenever two cars passed the drivers always waved to each other. At first I thought my driver had a lot of friends and relations, but then I realized that in an isolated isle of 2,000 people he would surely know every driver, even if he had just missed the last one while those sheep were passing.

Norfolk, a reminder of Switzerland with sea, is about as far as you can go in the South Pacific. It floats in tremendous seas somewhere off Australia and New Zealand—a paradise where nothing bites and nothing stings, where they feed the pigs on passion fruit and the sheep on wild peaches.

The descendants of the Bounty mutineers came to Norfolk when they outgrew Pitcairn. Its towering pines and little mountains stand amid seascapes of deep blue ocean and white water—unknown places fit for eagles and angels.

A contained space where people felt they belonged was comforting for anyone enjoying islanditis, but for the big lifestyle picture I did not want to lose contact with my roots or do without relevant newspapers and television, so some thirty-six years ago I reluctantly gave away the South Pacific and Regent’s Park and settled in Jersey, the major Channel Island where motorists don’t wave much.

Now when I wake in the morning I look towards France across fourteen miles of magnificent seas—sometimes as still and lovely as a turquoise mirror, other days Wagnerian and threatening. Looking along that Normandy coast towards Cherbourg very little has changed, though just out of sight there’s Flammanville and evidence of French determination to rely upon nuclear reactors. A worrisome coastline.

Former Jersey resident Victor Hugo called the Channel Islands “little specks of France fallen into the sea and gobbled up by the English”. I’ve never regretted surrendering to this uncommon situation, although the £8 air fare to London that greeted us thirty-six years ago is now about £100, and counting.

In my island paradise, into which 100,000 residents are now squeezing themselves, I am living happily ever after. It’s a joy to know I shall spend the rest of my days in this tranquil therapeutic island where spring comes a little early, summer seems endless and autumn hangs around.

My last book written here was Whicker’s War, a look at the conflict in Italy in which the men who fought there seemed anxious to keep it private, as is the way of soldiers. This book, as you now know, has been an examination of the highs and lows of my first fifty years of television life, played out in public.

Some kindly folk have already asked me for another collection of memories, but between you and me I’m not sure I’m good for another half-century—not even with the help of my wonderful Valerie…but who knows? It’s always possible we might meet again in another Whicker’s World!

1 THERE’S BEEN A CHANGE OF MANAGEMENT

Flying home from Australia is never a happy undertaking; I’ve tried it every which way—thirty hours non-stop, or peeling off for a night in Singapore or Bangkok, Hong Kong or LA. However you approach it, you face a long haul, rattling with pills. Jet lag always wins.

I’d recommend travel on Christmas Day. Planes are empty, service is great—the stewards have no one else to talk to. Champagne and Anton Mosimann’s best puddings seem to taste even better at 32,000 feet—but this time, flying from Haiti, I had been invited to break the journey in Los Angeles and spend the holiday with Cubby Broccoli, granddaddy of James Bond, and his wife Dana—who took an instant dislike to Fagin, as played by Ron Moody.

We had a Californian Christmas: bright sunshine, extravagant presents, interesting company. One day we flew to Las Vegas with that splendid old actor Bruce Cabot—a relative of Cubby’s—who had been the lead in King Kong. Not much to do with snow and reindeer, but he fitted in beautifully—and the monkey was great.

The day before we left for London, there was a party at the home of Harold Robbins; I’d made a Whicker’s World around him a few months earlier. Harold could behave very much like a character in one of his novels, but I found him oddly likeable. He could be boorish and boastful—which seems to happen to bestsellers—but then in a complex blend he was courteous and charming in a rather old-fashioned way. He was married at the time to Grace, a darkly attractive woman who seemed able to cope with his erratic lifestyle.

While writing in New York he liked to stay at the Elysée Hotel, a quiet place off Madison Avenue favoured by Tennessee Williams and other authors. We left the Plaza to join him and quickly slipped into the Robbins routine, meeting his stable of available ladies in the evening and drinking good Californian burgundy served at precisely 64 degrees.

“Guess what she does?” he demanded, after introducing a leggy blonde in hot pants. I had a pretty good idea what she might do, but suggested instead a model, an actress, beauty consultant, hair designer, nail technician…“No,” he cried, triumphantly. “She’s a store detective.”

Her in-store career came to an abrupt end when Harold’s publishers conveniently noticed that his latest novel was way behind schedule. She was dispatched to a Spanish holiday on a one-way ticket.

I had been pleased with our programme around Harold, I’m the World’s Best Writer—There’s Nothing More to Say. It had a good story—Hell’s Kitchen to Côte d’Azur yachts, by way of one portable typewriter. Interesting locations and an articulate subject who, it later transpired, had a slight problem separating fact from passing fantasy.

Harold’s editor Simon was a splendid, articulate man and I was anxious that he should be included in our programme. I broached the subject during a jolly lunch with them both, but to my surprise he refused point blank: “Didn’t you notice how he started breaking up all those table matches while you were talking to me?” Simon was not about to risk upsetting his golden goose for a few minutes’ exposure on Whicker’s World.

Sitting around the Robbins’s Beverly Hills pool on that bright December afternoon were old friends from London and the Côte d’Azur, Leslie and Evie Bricusse. Leslie was responsible for some of the great standards of the Sixties and Seventies, often with Anthony Newley. If you hear something familiar, plaintive and lyrical, it’s usually Leslie asking “What kind of fool am I?” or somesuch. At the peak of his career he was now hard at work in Hollywood, hitting high notes for friends Sammy Davis Jr and Frank Sinatra, and “Talking to the Animals.”

We had not met for months, and were anxious to catch up. He had been writing the music for Dr Doolittle, so we swapped the usual “Rex Harrison as Producer” horror stories. I told him of my excitement at finally buying a house in Jersey—my first permanent home. He looked alarmed. “I wouldn’t set foot on that island,” he said. “We’ll never visit you there.” This seemed surprising, and odd. Jersey is peaceful and off the beaten track for globe-trotting Hollywood winners. How come that fierce reaction?

Leslie had quite rightly become hugely successful. He had a cute wife, Evie, and homes in Mexico, France, London, Malta and Beverly Hills. His income had grown so much that he had been told to restructure his finances. An international lawyer living in the Channel Islands was recommended as his saviour, and a hugely complicated scheme had been hatched with law offices around the world which the Jersey lawyer would administer, and in return for this legal expertise Leslie would pay him 10 per cent of his earnings over a period of ten years. It was that kind of nightmare financial complication that you wish was keeping you alive.

A few months after signing that contract the Bricusses began to regret their involvement with this pedantic little Jerseyman. Pages of notes would arrive on a weekly basis suggesting changes to score and libretto. Not unnaturally, Leslie did not take kindly to such improbable interference from an insufferable musical know-all. Stressed out and working hard, he decided he must break the agreement—but found his new legal partner had no intention of releasing him.

Expensive law firms on both sides of the Atlantic were once again consulted. The contract was found to be binding and watertight. To fight it would have taken years and sapped Leslie’s creative energy while he was still on his winning streak. He was forced to capitulate. A settlement was reached whereby the Jersey lawyer would instead take 90 per cent of his earnings for one year—and then release him. This was expected to be the year of his greatest successes when all his projects were hits, but he was cleaned out. Frustrated after signing away the fortune he’d spent a lifetime building, the mild and gentle Leslie went home and trashed every breakable object in his house.

Smiling and soft-spoken, he was popular at the studios. Soon everyone had heard of his fury and despair that he had been strangled by the small print. Several friendly groups generously offered to “sort out” the villain of the piece—that Jersey lawyer. The agreement might have been watertight, but these friends were not smiling all the time.

The local Mafia boss made it known that he would be only too happy to do Leslie a favour and remove any financial blockage, as between men of honour you understand.

The Las Vegas backstage fraternity also offered help in his hour of crisis, which sounded seriously final. As a last graphic decision, there was a group of friendly stunt men from Pinewood who spent their lives being thrown off bridges and fighting each other. They knew the island well, so also hatched a detailed plot to rescue poor Leslie.

The house where the Jersey lawyer lived was on a hilltop above a secluded bay with a perfect view of France, 14 miles away. A forest path snaked up from the sea through the garden and right up to his front door. They could arrive at night by a boat with padded oars, do whatever deed was required while the island—and the lawyer—slept, and steal away. Piece of cake.

I don’t think the people at that Beverly Hills party realized life-and-death decisions were being discussed and agreed. While I listened, some of Leslie’s friends explained the lie of the land to each other, and I began to realize they were not merely talking about the house—“Lovely position, lovely!”—but my future.

It was my new home they were planning to visit that night. “Perfect for the getaway, that coastline.”

“Listen,” I said, when I got my voice back, “I’ve just bought that house. I’m planning to live in it for years. Now you’re going to kill the guy in the main bedroom! That’s me. Please tell all your friends there’s been a change of management.”

2 A TALK WITH SOMEONE WHO’S NOT TREMBLING

I passed a couple of restless days in Miami—a place quite easy to dislike. I was bracing myself to fly somewhere even worse. Far worse. I had just completed a series of Whicker’s Worlds in South America. All the fun and excitement of filming in Argentina (brilliant), on to Peru (druggy), then up among the volcanoes outside Quito in Ecuador (enchanting) and finally coming to rest in downtown Miami for a couple of apprehensive days awaiting PanAm’s lifeline flight to the kidnap capital of the world: Haiti.

Miami Beach was the place where, waking one morning in a vast white hotel totally surrounded by avarice, I took a taxi to the airport and asked for a ticket to anywhere. They thought I was mad—and probably by then I was, a little.

Now—ice-cold sane—I was approaching a far more dangerous destination: Haiti. The first black republic was only some 700 miles away, but its reputation made trigger-happy Floridians seem cool and chummy. This poorest country in the Western hemisphere survives with 80 per cent of its population below the poverty line.

I was on my reluctant way to examine Papa Doc’s republic—and Papa Doc, I had heard, was about to examine me. Not everyone walked away from those check-ups, our pilot told me cheerfully. In the world’s kidnap centre the dungeons were active, with Papa Doc as a frequent spectator.

Our jet, not surprisingly, was almost empty. It was a good plane to miss. We flew across the fringe of the Sargasso Sea, which seemed a suitable setting for any adventure, landed at François Duvalier Airport in Port-au-Prince, and drew breath. So far, so still alive.

This despairing nation was under the lash of a President for Life whose years of absolute power had brought terror to his people and ruin to his country. As I walked through the damp heat towards the decrepit arrivals building I saw, seared across the peeling white plaster of the wall that confronted me, a pockmarked line of bullet holes.

This was a fairly emphatic take-it-or-leave-it statement. It didn’t say whether it was a gesture from the Tourist Division of the Chamber of Commerce, but it was surely more arresting than the traditional view of Port-au-Prince from the mountains. It was the only airport welcome Haiti offered its rare visitors, and it was right in character.

Inside the building, a more friendly reception from the Pres-ident’s official greeter, Aubelin Jolicœur. This small, unctuous executive silenced the customs men who had scented rich pickings from us with a wave of his ivory-handled cane. I recognized him instantly: he had been drawn to perfection as Petit Pierre in Graham Greene’s frightening The Comedians.

He may have been smiling, but the Haitians watching us in the arrivals hall were expressionless, which suggested he wasn’t all that funny. Tontons Macoutes no longer stripped or frisked arrivals, though I was uncomfortably aware that the airport had just experienced one of those dramatic bloodlettings which would have seemed improbable fiction from Graham Greene.

The eldest of Dr Duvalier’s three daughters, his favourite Marie-Denise, had just married the 6′3″ Commander of his Palace Guard, Captain Max Dominique, who instantly became a Colonel. Then Papa Doc, acting upon different advice, decided his new son-in-law was involved in the plot against him for which he had just executed nineteen brother-officers.

Having considered the pleas of his wife and daughter, then pregnant, he spared Col. Dominique, but sent him into exile and out of the way as ambassador to Spain. As they left for Madrid, the President and Mrs Duvalier came to the airport to bid a sorrowful farewell to Di-Di.

For the traditional VIP goodbye picture the young couple stood at the aircraft door, waving to parents, friends and staff. As the door was closing upon the happy couple, there came a nod from Papa Doc. Their chauffeur and two bodyguards were shot down in front of them. Dr Duvalier was making his own farewell gesture of disapproval.

He turned and left the bloodstained tarmac without another glance at the dying men. They lay in the sunlight under the eyes of the few horrified passengers en route from Miami to Puerto Rico. The aircraft then departed abruptly. An American airman who had seen it all told me, “That captain practically took off with the door open. They just wanted to get out of there.”

There were no further executions on the evening of our arrival, but the scarred walls were adequate reminders. Outside we were distributed among waiting taxi drivers. They were all Tontons Macoutes, Papa Doc’s private army licensed to extort. Driving a cab was the best-paid job in the land at the time—the only one in which a Haitian could get his hands on foreign currency.

My personal Tonton was silent and sinister, with a Gauguin face. He had the poetic name of Racine. He also had red eyes.

There was no question of hotel selection; you went and lived where you were put. Racine drove us skilfully through the bumps and up the hillside to the white concrete Castelhaiti Hotel, overlooking the town. It was empty—but ready for us.

That evening ours was the only occupied table as we tackled some stringy chicken. Groups of listless waiters stood around in the gloom, watching and whispering while a piano and violin wailed mournfully in the shadows. Outside the fearful town, hushed and tense, awaited its regular power cut.

My crew soon gave up, and went to sort their equipment. It was jollier. We had called the camera for tomorrow and would find something to shoot. We needed to establish contact with the inaccessible Papa Doc. “Once we’ve been seen with him, talking to him, we’ll be all right,” said my Australian researcher, Ted Morrisby, who as usual had tuned in cleverly. “Then the Tontons and the rest of the town will know he accepts us. That means we shan’t get hassled, or shot.”

Well, he convinced me. In a land where we had no friends for protection, no embassy to turn to, there was a convincing argument for establishing contact before any more shots rang out.

Certainly Papa Doc was not easy to reach. His massacres had generated terror and despair and hidden fury, so every day he prepared to face some sort of counter-attack. He rarely left the white American-built National Palace, the only important building in town which could be instantly switched into a floodlit armed fortress, yet he did not feel secure even behind its walls and guarded gates.

The President had ousted Paul Magloire, who had twice sent in old B25 aircraft on bombing runs. The grounds were ringed by anti-aircraft guns and elderly armoured cars. The President also beseeched protection from a new prayer of which he was author. He sought support from all sides:

Our Doc, who art in the National Palace for Life,

Hallowed be thy name, by present and future generations

Thy will be done at Port-au-Prince and in the provinces.

Give us this day our new Haiti and never forgive the

trespasses of the anti-patriots…

By a stroke of Whicker’s luck we discovered that next day Our Doc was making a rare expedition into the anxious surroundings outside his palace. He was to open a new Red Cross centre, a small building a few hundred yards from his fortress.

We left our silent hotel at dawn and reached the area as troops and armed men began to assemble for the ceremony. There were hundreds of soldiers in well-pressed khaki with medals and white gloves, and of course a lot of armament. Militia wore blue denim with a red stripe for the occasion, like army hospital patients; more guns, of course. Mingling with authority among them were men in thin tight suits, snap-brimmed fedoras and shades, like Mods heading for Brighton Beach and waving light automatics around casually: the Tontons.

As usual when overwhelmed by armed men enjoying a little brief authority, I adopted an attitude of polite preoccupied condescension—like a prefect moving down upon a third-former whose mother is hovering. For a new and meaningful relationship with an unwelcoming armed guard, it helps to be slightly patronizing but brandishing a permanent smile. It also helps if you’re saying something like, “Do you mind standing aside, please. British television filming the President. Thank you so much, just back a bit more…” He doesn’t understand, but he gets your drift and suspects you might be Somebody, or know Somebody.

It is hard to shoot a man, or even strike him with your rifle butt, when he is smiling at you in a friendly way and talking about something foreign. It helps the odds.

The confident, cheerful attitude won through again. When they expect you to be humble and timid, a certain pleasant senior-officer asperity throws them off-balance. This is even more effective when guards or police or hoodlums don’t understand English.

To attempt their language, whatever it is, instantly places you in the subordinate position of supplication, and invites questions. Since adopting this haughty approach, I am pleased to say I’ve hardly ever been shot.

So we stood in the searing sunshine in what seemed like a sharpshooters’ convention, waiting for Papa. I became aware that one or two of the more heavily armed men had started talking about us and doubtless about our presence as interlopers upon their scene. Before they could get their little brief authority together, there was a distant roar of massed motorcycles.

The first arrival was, improbably, a chromium-plated Harley-Davidson, ridden by a large black dressed like a tubby boy scout. On his pillion was a younger man in a sort of beach gear. Presumably they were significant figures, but they didn’t seem to threaten my prefect, who was at that moment telling senior spectators to move back a bit to allow better pictures.

They were followed at a distance by a horde of regulation military outriders surrounding an enormous black Mercedes 600. This noisy group had come at least 600 yards from the palace gates. The limo stopped. A sort of tremor ran through the massed troops.

A couple of portly colonels with machine guns struggled out and stood to attention, quivering. After a long pause, a small stooped figure in a dark suit emerged, with a white frizz under his black homburg. Blinking behind thick lenses in the sudden silence, he asked in a whisper for what appeared to be the Mace of Haiti: the President’s own sub-machine gun. This was handed to him and, reassured, he restored it to a guard. His gestures were those of fragile old age, and he walked with a slight shuffle; yet this was the man who held a nation by the throat.

He noticed our white faces and camera instantly, but without acknowledgement. He had presumably been alerted by Joliecœur. After military salutes and anthems, he entered the small Red Cross building with his wife, Mme Simone Ovide Duvalier, a handsome Creole in a large white hat, closely followed by me, as usual brushing machine guns aside with a polite smile and a “So sorry, do you mind?”

In the scrimmage Ted Morrisby and I managed to converge upon the President. In a way we were expected. We explained we had crossed the world to see him for an important programme, and after some hesitant queries received a murmured invitation to visit his palace next day. We fell back with relief from the small figure who seemed to wish us no harm.

Later we learned that his chargé d’affaires in London was a Whicker’s World enthusiast, and upon our request for visas had sent Papa Doc an approving telex.

Coming to power in 1957 with the support of the army, the astute Dr Duvalier had observed that dictators were always overthrown by their own armies—usually the Commander of the Presidential Guard—so he overthrew his, quite quickly.

He explained his military philosophy to me later, in an angry rasp: “Only civilians can own a country, not the military men. The military man must stay in his barracks and receive orders and instructions from the President, from the King, from the Emperor. This is my opinion, this is my philosophy. To have peace and stability you must have a strong man in every country.”

“A dictator?” I suggested. The hesitant soft voice rasped again: “Not a dictator, a strong man! Democracy is only a word—it is a philosophy, a conception. What you call democracy in your country, another country might call dictatorship.”

His Haitian army once had 20,000 men—6,500 of them generals. It was now reduced to ceremonial duties, and colonels. In its place the President created his Volunteers for Defence—the evil militia of Tontons Macoutes. This unthreatening phrase meant “Uncle Bagman” after the legendary giant bogeyman who strode the mountains stuffing naughty children into his knapsack.

In return for loyalty, Duvalier gave his army bully boys the right to lean upon the terrified populace, to tax and torment. Every nationalized hoodlum performed discipline duties with which Papa Doc did not wish to be publicly associated, and was licensed to kill. To provoke or deny any bogeyman intent upon stuffing his knapsack was to invite a beating, at least.

All hope drained from the nation during Duvalier’s years of sudden and unaccountable death, as Haitians submitted to the gangster army which stood over them, controlled improbably by Mme Rosalee Adolph, Deputy, wife of the Minister of Health and Population, who had since 1958 been the Supervisor General of the Volunteers: “They are not paid—though I am paid, because I am a Deputy. If we are attacked someone has to defend the Head of Government. I have always got my gun. It is always ready.”

The smiling little woman packed it, demurely, in her handbag. After she had proved her firepower we all went, obligingly, up a mountainside to see some of her volunteers in action. We had expected a mass of toiling figures but found only a handful working on a road, watched by twice as many whose duty, it seemed, was to watch. Tontons did not volunteer to work—they volunteered to supervise.

By then Papa Doc was believed to have executed 2,000 Haitians and driven 30,000 into exile and the rest into terrified silence. In that manacled land it seemed unlikely that there was anyone left to criticize, let alone attack. A missing Haitian would be unimportant and unnoticed, though the arrest or death of a foreigner could only be ordered by the President. There was little comfort in that, for he seemed totally unconcerned about international criticism.

A foreign passport was no protection. The Dominican consul was found with his throat slashed so ferociously that his head was almost severed. Cromwell James, a 61-year-old British shop owner, was arrested by Tontons and severely beaten—presumably for resisting extortion. It took ten days for his lawyer to reach him in jail, to find he had been charged with highway robbery! He died four days later: gangrene, from untreated wounds.

In a destitute land, such extortion yielded diminishing returns, for there were always fewer victims to be squeezed. When the Tontons began to demand money from foreigners the British Ambassador, Gerald Corley-Smith, complained. He was thrown out and the embassy closed. Duvalier renounced the convention of political asylum and raided other embassies to get at terrified Haitians hiding from the Tontons. Washington was curtly told to recall its ambassador, Raymond Thurston—who was Papa Doc’s financial crutch.

Though Haiti was officially Catholic, the church was also attacked. Archbishop Raymond Poirier was arrested and put on a Miami flight wearing a cassock and sash and carrying one dollar. Soon after his successor, the Haitian Bishop Augustus, was dragged from his bed by Tontons and not even allowed to put in his false teeth before he was deported. The Catholic Bishop and eighteen Jesuit priests followed him, as did the American Episcopal Bishop Alfred Voegeli, who had ministered to Haitians for twenty years. Papa Doc accepted the Pope’s excommunication with his usual equanimity and went on to ban the Boy Scouts.

Next year President Johnson agreed to send another ambassador to Port-au-Prince, Mr Benson Timmons III. Papa Doc kept him waiting five weeks for an audience, and then gave him a stern lecture on how a diplomat should behave.

Committing international hara-kiri, antagonizing the world while continuing to ask for aid, may not have made economic sense, but to Haitians it made some emotional sense: proud Haiti, first to defy the slave master, once again standing alone. From their point of view Dr Duvalier had one vital thing going for him: most of Haiti’s presidents had been upper-class mulattoes with light skins, but Papa Doc was as black as his hat.

In the years following the war some hundreds of millions of dollars were given or loaned to this friendless nation, much of it going directly to President Duvalier. The world finally realized Haiti was too corrupt and hopeless to help, so the dollars dried up. When we arrived in December 1968 the economy was in a state of collapse—finance in chaos, public works decaying, few passable roads and a government so venal that all trade not offering corrupt officials a rake-off was at a standstill.

With the lowest income, food intake and life expectancy in the hemisphere, the lives of the amiable, long-suffering Haitians have changed little since the days of slavery two centuries ago. Shoes are still a luxury. I found it impossible to exaggerate the poverty of a land so out of step with the rest of the world. From a workforce of two or three million, only 60,000 had jobs—almost all on the government payroll.

There seemed little chance of strikes. The unemployed had heard the President’s personal physician Dr Jacques Fourcand warn what would happen if Haiti ever found the energy to rise against Papa Doc: “Blood will flow as never before. The land will burn. There will be no sunrise and no sunset—just one enormous flame licking the sky. It will be the greatest slaughter in history—a Himalaya of corpses.” That benevolent doctor was a neurosurgeon and President of the local Red Cross, when not attending to the Father of the Nation.

Fear and violence were not new to that fevered land where the cheapest possession had always been life. It was once the richest French colony, but after the only successful slave revolt, in 1804, suffered a succession of tyrannical black governors, emperors and kings. In half a century there were sixty-nine violent revolutions. They left behind the world’s poorest country—a mountainous, teeming tropical land, only twice the size of Yorkshire. Nine out of ten of the 5 million Haitians are illiterate, but they are a sympathetic and artistic people, the women docile and, it was said, like panthers dreaming.

My only pleasure in that cowed capital came from the Peintres Naïfs. I was particularly taken with Préfet Duffaut, a sort of Haitian Lowry who always painted his native village of Jacmel and peopled it with busy matchstick figures. I bought two of his paintings and later gave the better one to my friend, the lovely Cubby Broccoli who was my Christmas host later that month in Beverly Hills. I realized on arrival at Cubby’s new home that the simple, charming primitive painting was quite out of place in his grand new mansion off Sunset Boulevard, and was surely destined to rest in one of his distant loos. I longed to ask for it back in exchange for something more suitable—say, a Rubens.

For any foreigner not affected by poverty or tyranny, Haiti still provided a dramatic holiday background. In those stricken days one cruise ship arrived each week from Miami. This stayed only a few hours, as most of the passengers were too frightened to go ashore.

To tidy up the foreground for the adventurous, all beggars were banished to the countryside for the day. Jealous Tontons stood watching for the braver to file ashore and fill their predatory line of elderly taxis. They were then driven up the lowering mountainside behind the capital to the little resort of Kenscoff, where they watched some flaming limbo dancers across their cold buffets before returning with relief to their ship, and sailing away.

We recorded their sad celebration amid despair, but left early to be ready to film the dockside departure. As we drove down the mountain, there in the middle of the road was a brand new corpse, still bleeding.

The unfortunate man was obviously dead. A body asleep, drunk or just unconscious is somehow…different. I told Racine to stop so that we could go back and at least cover the poor chap. He refused, and drove on faster. No Haitian would ever touch or rearrange any Tontons’ handwork for fear of suffering the same fate. That was why those bullet-scars across the airport walls had been left uncovered.

So all the cruise passengers in their motorcade which followed us down the mountain had to drive solemnly and in procession around that corpse. What the blue rinses from Pasadena made of this holiday demonstration I cannot imagine, but it surely did nothing for the Tourist Board’s “Come to Happy Haiti” promotion.

Haitians have seldom been able to summon up more energy for imported Christianity than was required to bury their dead, Tontons permitting. They may be 90 per cent Catholic, as the reference books say, but they are 100 per cent voodoo. In Haiti the supernatural is still alive.

When a peasant dies, before being placed in his coffin he may be dressed in his best clothes—if he has any—and seated at a table with food and a lighted cigarette between his lips or, if a woman, a clay pipe. When friends and neighbours arrive the feasting and dancing of the wake begins. Although by law the corpse is supposed to be buried within twenty-four hours, decomposition is often allowed to set in. This ensures that sorcerers will not dig him up and make a zombie, a work slave, out of him. The heavy stone slabs with which Haitians cover their graves are added insurance that the dead will not rise to slave as zombies for the rest of time.

Papa Doc angrily denied to me that he was a houngan, a voodoo priest—or even a follower of Baron Samedi, the most powerful and dreaded god in the voodoo pantheon. Baron Samedi personified death itself. He was always dressed in black and wore dark glasses. The President’s choice of wardrobe may not have been accidental.

In 1963 President Duvalier received information that one of his few political opponents still alive, Clément Barbot, a former Commander of the Tontons Macoutes but now in hiding, had transformed himself into a black dog. Papa Doc quickly ordered that all black dogs in Haiti should be killed. Barbot was later captured and shot to death by Tontons; he was still a man.

Certainly there were many stories about the brutal President, some terrible, some silly. It was said that he sought guidance from the entrails of goats, that he lay meditating in his bath wearing his black hat; that he had the head of one of his few enemies still about, Captain Blucher Philogènes, delivered to him in a pail of ice. He then sat for hours trying to induce the head to disclose the plotters’ plans…

He was merciless, despotic, malign; yet he received me in his study with eerie amiability. Behind him were signed portraits of the men he admired: Chiang Kai-Shek, President Lyndon Johnson, the Pope and Martin Luther King.

He told me he blamed the world-wide loathing he had earned on an “international conspiracy set up by several white nations who spent many millions of dollars to destroy our Fatherland, sending the North American 6th Fleet to violate our national sea”.

He then muttered darkly, “The USA has been sending uncapable ambassadors so there is no talk between them and the President of Haiti. It is a question of men. The FBI is doing a good job, but the CIA not. It makes much trouble and must be blamed for the bad impression the world has of my country.”

He dismissed the insurgents’ bombing of his palace: “They are crazy. They will never reach their aim because I know who I am and I can’t be killed by anyone. I have faith in my destiny. No other President of Haiti could stand up and do what I did in the past eleven years—facing eight armed invasions and three hurricanes.”

Though he was President for Life and apparently convinced of his immortality, I wondered whether he had thought of a successor. He had not. “All of them are at school now—they are the young people.”

His only son Jean-Claude was sitting beside us in the presidential study. What he would do with his life? The fat moon-faced 17-year-old was embarrassed. “That depends on him,” said Papa Doc, regarding his son with pride. “I hope he will follow the advice of his father, of his mother, and become a medical doctor.”

As I grew more familiar with the President, I became more convinced that nobody’s all good or all bad. He had been a mild little country doctor looking after the peasants and earning his famous nickname. This non-smoking teetotaller who loved his family now saw himself as a poet. He presented me with Copy No. 892 of his Breviaries of a Revolution, and inscribed a collection of his poems, Souvenirs d’Autrefois, “to a friend of the first Black Revolution, Mr Alan Whicker, in souvenir of his short stay in the Island of Quisquetya, Sincerely, François Duvalier”.

It was said that after dinner in his palace he would sometimes go down to the dungeons to watch some political prisoners tortured, and on occasion might torture them himself. He was certainly known to slap ministers around his study, under the protective gaze of the Presidential Guard. A man of moods, he was sometimes almost playful and anxious to make a good impression, then glowering with suppressed fury at a critical word.

I had played myself in tactfully while getting to know him, leaving the tougher questions for a later visit. Then half-way through one conversation, I caught him regarding me balefully during a long silence. With a low menacing rasp, he said, “Mr Whicker, you are talking to the President of the Republic of Haiti.” It seemed a telling rebuke.

My crew had caught the distant clang of cell doors slamming, so when I turned to less sensitive matters there were audible sighs of relief from behind the camera. On a following day I reverted to my critical questions, about which he was matter-of-fact. It seemed that his occasional moods might be medically induced.

On one of these jollier days he even decided to show us his capital—and certainly one of the best views of Port-au-Prince had to be from the President’s bullet-proof Mercedes 600 limousine.

Papa Doc settled on the back seat alongside his gloomy bodyguard, Col. Gracia Jacques. We had no radio mikes in those days so our recordist Terry Ricketts rigged the unprotesting President with a neck mike and a long lead hidden around his body. Upon jumping out of the limo he several times did himself a slight injury, but without complaint.

He obviously wanted to show how popular he was, and certainly knew how to attract and hold an audience. A breathless cheering crowd chased us as we drove slowly through the town. Then I noticed Papa Doc was throwing handfuls of money out of his window. Our pursuers, scrambling in the dirt, were going frantic. When we stopped the President increased the excitement by bringing out packets of brand-new notes, peeling off wads and handing them out to anyone who seemed to have the right attitude.

In this land of destitution, the arrival of the black Mercedes amid a shower of free banknotes caused far more ecstasy than Santa Claus. With an annual income in every crisp wad handed out, it was well worth trying to keep up with the Duvaliers.

It seemed unreal to be riding around with one of the world’s most feared men, discussing subjects none of his countrymen would dare think. I asked how he felt about Graham Greene and The Comedians. He brushed the novel and the gory film aside. “He is a poor man, mentally, because he did not say the truth about Haiti. Perhaps he needed the money, and got some from the political exiles.”

He was far more bitter about a predecessor, Major Magloire, then living in New York but threatening to return, because he had got away with the money: “He took $19 million from the National Bank of Haiti and used this money to finance armed invasions and to bomb the palace. He tried to kill me when he was president. I was in hiding for several years. Why did he not come here himself instead of sending his young officers?”

He answered that one himself, right away: “If he comes here he will be killed, because he is what you call a vagabond. A vagabond.”

Almost half of Haiti’s revenue was spent on Papa Doc’s personal security. So I questioned the use of his hated Tontons Macoutes: “It is a militia, they help me to clean the streets, they help me to cultivate the land, they help the Haitian army and they fight side by side in face of armed invasions.” Papa Doc got out of the limo, and the escort of Tontons instantly set up defensive positions around us, as though assassination was imminent.

He could not understand why he was dreaded by so many of his people: “I am the strongest man, the most anti-Communist man in the Caribbean islands. Certainly the question is a racial one because I am a strong leader. The US considers me a bad example for the 25 million Negroes living there. I should be the favourite child of the United States,” he said, stumbling in his enthusiasm for the subject. “Instead of which they consider me…the black sheep!” He gave me our programme title—a cackle, and one of those ghoulish grins.

Although his 500-strong Palace Guard now recognized us and knew we were harmless and acceptable, they were all permanently terrified of doing anything new, like allowing us through the wrong door. Getting in to see him was a daily problem.

I had the forethought to arm myself with a pass sternly addressed to “All Civil and Military Authorities” and signed by the President himself. This got me through the sentries on the palace gate, past a quiver of anxious guards on various doors, up the stairs and along the corridor and right up to the entrance to his chambers. There I was stopped by the Presidential Guard itself, a nervous group of captains and lieutenants who admitted they knew he was expecting me, but had no authority to disturb him. This was the Haitian “Catch-22”.

The only person who could actually approach him was his secretary, Mme Saint-Victor, a formidable lady and sister of another son-in-law—but she was away ill. So we sat under the chandelier in his annex while the President sat inside and waited, and nobody had the determination to knock on his door.

In exasperation I finally broke the stalemate by leaving the palace and going to the town’s telegraph office. I had seen a telex in Papa Doc’s inner sanctum and noted the number—3490068—so sent a message: “Mr President, I am waiting outside your door.” This worked.

Encouraged by our successful tour of the town, I suggested he might show us Duvalierville, which he ordered built several years ago as a national showplace, a sort of governmental Brasilia which would be his memorial. He said it was 20 miles away, and that was too far for him to travel. He was always most cautious when on the open road.

We later went to look for ourselves and found he was not missing much. Like everything else in Haiti, his empty dream had died for lack of finance. Crumbling and overgrown, the few piles of cracking white concrete stood in wasteland populated by a few listless squatters. It seemed a fitting monument. However, the President agreed to organize a visit to a nearby health centre. I listened as on one of the few working telephones in the land he chased his daughter to become an extra: “C’est le President de la République! Where is Di-Di?”

A stoic health centre patient with hepatitis had been organized to be looked at by Papa Doc, so now he would not dare to die. Across the body I recalled that the President was still a Fellow of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine in London. He was delighted. “Do you know that? Yes, I am surprising, eh? I am still interested in medical matters and until I die I am just an MD and after that President of Haiti. It was the best time of my life, when I was practising medicine.”

I wondered what he now did for relaxation. “My reading and writing, because this is another aspect of Dr Duvalier. He is a writer and a reader. Even when I am going to sleep I have a book in my hand. This is morphine for me. If I do not read I cannot sleep.” Sometimes he was a hard man to dislike.

I had established an unusual relationship with him, and on occasion he could even make him laugh. Despite the fact that I was persuading the grim but courteous Papa Doc to speak English—he was far more comfortable with French or Creole—it seemed he was beginning to enjoy a conversation withsomeone who was not trembling.

Ambassadors and archbishops expelled, ministers sacked, critics shot, yet television entertained and hostile questioning accepted…A strange world.

It was getting stranger, for we were running out of film. We had already shot programmes in Argentina, Paraguay and Ecuador, and our messages calling for the dispatch of further film stock were growing more urgent. Yorkshire Television had only been running a few months and was still not quite sure what owning a major television centre was all about. Our cables were ignored because it was a weekend, and Christmas was approaching.

When stock was eventually dispatched from Leeds it was not sent directly to Jamaica, our neighbouring island, but via PanAm’s notorious Cargo section in New York where, as we feared, it disappeared from sight.

Filming, however, was going brilliantly. All we needed for our documentary was a climax, and we got that when Papa Doc told me that next day he was going Christmas shopping with Mme Duvalier and Di-Di, and would I like to film the expedition? When presidents start suggesting their own sequences, even I begin to feel quietly confident. The prospect of the terrifying dictator taking our film crew shopping around his capital was like a skeleton in a paper hat: macabre, but fascinating. It had to be the televisory situation of a lifetime.

My crew sensed an award-winning programme. This reconciled us wonderfully to the gloom and anxiety, the inedible food and the unpredictable presidential moods, the constant fear that at any moment something could go fatally wrong—and no one would hear a cry for help.

At that moment we ran out of film.

This presented endless new problems. As I had discovered with General Alfredo Stroessner of Paraguay, filming a dictator who does not want to be filmed can be quite dangerous. What is even more fatal, however, is not filming a dictator who wants to be filmed. He is not used to arguments or excuses or sweet reason. Dictators can only dictate.

Back at the hotel we had a despairing conference around empty camera magazines. What to do? One way or another he was going to be displeased. This could lead to a sudden restriction of liberty—or even a spilling of blood.

We could hardly say we were not interested any more, thank you, Mr President. We could not stand him up, or we might be escorted downstairs to the dungeons. We could not leave the country without an exit visa—and anyway our movements were followed by scores of eyes.

We had been anxious to establish a relationship, but now it seemed, to my surprise, that one could get too close to a dictator.

On the morning of our Christmas present expedition I was half hoping the guards outside the palace would hold us up again, even more firmly, but of course for the first time we were swept straight in, with salutes. So I handed my cameraman Frank Pocklington the small pocket camera I used, a little half-frame Olympus Pen F, and went on to spend the morning chatting with a marvellously relaxed President in various jewellers’ shops while my cameraman took happy-snaps, in anguish. For a documentary it was a dream situation—except that our cameraman was taking despairing paparazzi pictures, incredulous at what he was missing.

Papa Doc did not notice the absence of our Arriflex, of course. He was far too busy selecting the best jewellery he could find in the guarded shops, while behind him his womenfolk went through the stock with shrewd and practised eyes. I watched Di-Di riffle through a boxful of diamonds; she was surely a chip off the Old Doc.

As our presidential cortège arrived, each jeweller’s face became a study: on one hand, it was a great honour to be “By Appointment” to Dr Duvalier. Such presidential approval had all sorts of side benefits, like the Tontons did not kill you. On the other hand there was one slight but unavoidable snag: he never paid for anything.

He would make his selections with much care and then, instead of handing over his credit card, would shake the shop-keeper’s hand and award him a wolfish smile. He got a few wolfish smiles back, as though the jeweller was going down for the third time, but there was nothing they could do. At least he only took one item from each shop, and, knowing the gift you carry gets home first, Papa Doc always carried his with him, gift-wrapped, when he left. No exchanges required.

Back in our gloomy hotel, beyond caring and defeated by a distant delivery system, we booked seats on the next flight out to Miami. We had not exposed a foot of film on that unreal and unrepeatable scene. It was lost, along with the remainder of our planned programme climax. Papa Doc had been spared my most pointed questions, which I was thoughtfully withholding for the night before we flew away.

For despair and frustration it was my worst television experience. I went back to the palace to say my farewells, tackling the succession of sentries for the last time.

Yorkshire twice transmitted our programme, Papa Doc—The Black Sheep. It was later shown several times by ITV, and submitted by our Controller, Donald Baverstock, for the Dumont Award. This international accolade for television journalism was presented by the University of California and the West Coast philanthropist Nat Dumont. Among the heavyweight judges were the United Nations Undersecretary General, Dr Ralph Bunche, Mrs Katharine Graham, owner of the Washington Post, and George Stevens Jr, Director of the American Film Institute. There were 400 entries and 40 finalists.

Papa Doc won.

The runner-up for this prestigious award was a film by Austrian Television which dealt with the US Strategic Air Force. The awards merited stern West Coast editorials complaining that foreign stations had walked away with US television’s main prizes. The Los Angeles Times said, “What is ironic is not only that foreign television is beating us at our own game—but with our own stories.”

I flew to Los Angeles for the ceremony, where the Univer-sity’s Melnitz auditorium was crammed with distinction and champagne, and received the award from the Chancellor, Charles E. Young. Afterwards there was a grand reception and banquet at Chasen’s attended by stars, network executives and advertising agencies.

Yorkshire had been desperate to break into the affluent American television market and still had not done so, yet on this grand occasion they failed to support me with even one handout. Lew Grade would have sent an army of salesmen and a ton of hard-sell literature. In a golden moment when the unknown Yorkshire Television was the target of every professional eye, I was absolutely alone. I spent most of the evening laboriously spelling my name to reporters who had never heard of me, or of Yorkshire TV.

After watching the programme everyone was most laudatory, once they knew who the hell I was. The Governor of California, Pat Brown, had just handed over to Ronald Reagan and become a lawyer. He asked if he could represent me in America. I agreed to everything, flew home—and was of course instantly forgotten.

Before I started filming again I had to face the ultimate penance of the Dumont Award; a lecture and interrogation before the UCLA Faculty of Journalism. This was the main centre of journalistic instruction in the land and, knowing how intense American students can be, how eager and ambitious, I was anxious not to let British television down before such a critical group.

I boned up on the wider implications of our programme and its background, the position of the United States within its Caribbean sphere of influence. I was apprehensive, but the massed undergraduates were an attentive and appreciative audience: alert reactions, laughter in the right places, endless notes. I completed my tour d’horizon amid unaccustomed applause, gratified by the impact.

The Dean made a few graceful remarks, and asked for questions. This was the testing moment. I braced myself for penetrating and informed demands, probably beyond my knowledge. The prize-winning film-maker at their mercy. After a long silence, a plump young women in the front row edged forward nervously. She had been absorbing my description of that Haitian life of terror with particular concentration.

“Mr Whicker,” she began, weightily, “is it true that…you married an heiress?”

The whole Papa Doc experience had been full of fear and laughter, disaster and triumph—a black and sinister tragicomedy.

In April 1971 President Duvalier died of natural causes—a rare achievement for any Haitian president. He was succeeded by his 19-year-old son, Baby Doc, who became the ninth Haitian since the 1804 Revolution to decide, like his father, to rule for life. That was his intention. He was later dismissed in a standard revolution and retired to live in some poverty in the South of France.

Papa Doc’s fourteen-year rule had been marked by autocracy, corruption and reliance upon his private army of Tontons Macoutes to maintain power. He used both political murder and expulsion to suppress opponents. It was estimated that he killed 30,000 of his countrymen.

In 1986, after Baby Doc’s exile, a mob stormed the Duvaliers’ marble-tiled family vault to look for Papa Doc’s body. The intention was to beat up his corpse to ensure that he could never rise again, even on Judgement Day. The mob was silenced and terrified to find the tomb empty.

They finally exhumed another grave, and beat up that body. Mobs are not selective. But was Papa Doc a zombie, out there working the fields?

3 TWO LHASA APSOS AND A COUPLE OF PANTECHNICONS

If ever there were a true 20th-century chameleon, it was Fanny Cradock. She invented reinvention. She had a number of names, and at various times had been an actress, journalist, romantic novelist, restaurant critic—apart from her own brilliant creation filling the Albert Hall as the original show-biz cook.

She was a television buccaneer years ahead of her time, and we met in her heyday, the time of cooking demonstrations before thousands where she would arrive on stage in white overalls and, just as the audience were sympathizing with her workaday life, strip off to reveal underneath a full-length crimson evening dress and diamonds—like Sean Connery unzipping his wetsuit. In the background Johnnie modestly revealed his white tie and tails.

There was nothing grey about Fanny. Everything was direct and startling: her opinions, her clothes, her generosity, her energy, her friendships and enmities, her impossible manners…This last trait was to be part of her undoing.

Fanny arrived in Jersey with Johnnie, two Lhasa Apsos and a couple of pantechnicons crammed with possessions. Also, strong opinions ready-made about everything and everyone.

They had left their home in Eire in fear after the murder of the British Ambassador in Dublin. She had grown afraid to turn on a kitchen light if the curtains were not drawn, and was scared of people lurking in the darkness around the house. It must have been a very serious scare for Fanny to admit to being frightened of anything. Alternatively it is just possible she had a noisy meeting, not with the IRA but with some inoffensive local shopkeeper who is still stunned by what hit him.

It is not easy to offend everyone in a small and tolerant island like Jersey, but Fanny managed it in a few short weeks. An innocent local photographer would be dismissed with a short sharp scream, a young waiter shyly proffering the Jersey Royals she was supposed to have cooked with her own skilful hands would receive a snarling, “Take those away, we think they’re disgusting”…

Her senior dog, which bit any hand that tried to feed it, sent our friend Ruby Bernstein dashing to the nearest hospital for a precautionary rabies injection, while wondering whether husband Albert—who had bravely sucked the tiny wound—should have similar treatment.

There was not much local sympathy, though I did warn that the dog might suffer an attack of Rubies.

Fanny rarely enjoyed a smooth path. Writing a dreadful review of a long-established St Helier restaurant was hurtful. Jumping queues in the splendid fish market did not go down well, nor did complaining loudly at the butchers when waiting in the queue was the wife of the Housing Chairman. What started as little ripples of irritation became waves of discontent among island politicians: “We’ve had one Norah Docker, we don’t need another.”

It became obvious that Fanny did not much care for established restaurants, she liked to earn credit for discovering some hidden gem at the end of the jetty no one knew about. Fortunately this also extended to private cooks, as in Valerie’s case entertaining was a new experience and each meal a hit-and-miss adventure. After that first dinner she was generous in her praise and managed to eat everything, only pausing as she left to offer a bain-marie. So far so good.

The Cradocks had been generous and hospitable when I was working in Fleet Street, so upon their arrival in Jersey I tried to ease their passage by arranging a lunch to introduce them to the great and good of the island. Fanny arrived dressed from head to toe in forest green, a veiled green bowler topping her orange make-up—a cross between Boadicea and Robin Hood. Her requested drink was predictably odd—Martini and sweet sparkling lemonade. This improbable mixture caused grinding of teeth and delay at the bar, and held up my distribution of conventional champagne.

After a short while she offered to help in the kitchen. To discourage such good intentions we fed her first. Suddenly out of nowhere came a deafening crash…and there lay Fanny, flat out on the parquet like a green turtle. No movement, blood everywhere.

We hauled her upstairs and propped her up on a bed—hat and veil only slightly askew. A tentative search for injuries revealed nothing. Later it transpired she had gashed herself with her enormous rings. We went to warn Johnnie, who was sitting in his wheelchair by the dining-room fire, talking to admirers. We were worried the bloody incident might disturb him.

“Oh,” said Johnnie, noticeably undisturbed, “she’s done that again, has she?” He went on smoking his pipe. It was not my planned introduction to the Housing Committee.

They considered buying a pretty granite cottage a few hundred yards from us. We shivered a little, cautiously. In a way it was a shame. “Given a choice,” I said, “I’d rather keep a few parishes between us.”

This plan, like most of Fanny’s good intentions, did not go well. A pity. There should always be room for the outrageous and the eccentric—though preferably not living next door. Eventually they settled in Guernsey, creating waves and mutterings of discontent. She was always high-handed and difficult, leaving chaos behind her and so much unpopularity that a local bookshop refused to stock her novels.

Causing a minor car crash at a crossroads, she blamed everyone else. Confronted by photographic evidence, she smiled dismissively: “Just shows the camera can lie.”

We watched from the sidelines as her star dwindled. She shot herself in the foot on an Esther Rantzen programme, sneering at some poor housewife’s attempt to cook a banquet. She was crucified by unkind editing—though what could you expect? In a few moments she was transformed from likeable monster to cruel bully, and her television career was over. She was probably the first fatal victim of a reality show.

We saw her a few months after Johnnie’s death. Forlorn and broken, she was spending Christmas in a small Jersey hotel, doubtless one of those interesting little discoveries we had managed to avoid. She came to us for lunch and Valerie gave her a bulging Christmas stocking, full of delicious and caring goodies, but it hardly registered. The fire had gone out of her life.

Johnnie, hen-pecked and dominated all those years, had been her secret strength. Without him she let life go, and withered away. “Nothing separates us, except rugby and the lavatory,” she had said, but now she was just a shell. Her old pugnacious fury had evaporated.

Our sacred monsters are different now: more beautiful, less genuine, more confident, less intelligent. They are created by PR and by management, not driven ambition. We know more about them but there are fewer layers to explore and no surprises. Everyone needs to test his courage against a Fanny Cradock, that furious pink stripe in a grey world.

4 CITY OF DREADFUL JOY

From a distance the contrast between life in California and life in Florida seems minimal—but close up these two golden states are a world apart. California, for all its self-conscious introspection, is a place to work; Florida is a place to retire, a sprawling mass of tidy housing and safe compounds, playgrounds for the like-minded old. Hard to imagine the far-out Wagners, Kurt and Kathy, a couple who had embraced every Seventies fad from Est to roller-skating, settling for life among golfers, bridge players and yoga.

Back in the Seventies Kurt would talk about an ageless society, a time when there would be no such thing as old age—as if the surgeon’s knife could be the answer to all ills. These communities for the Sprightly Old do not quite match his prophecy, but their gated estates with gyms, pools and libraries are safe, warm and welcoming. In a country where youth is all, Florida provides an all-enveloping lifestyle for a group who would be invisible in many other states. Here, grey power has real power and the financial clout to back it up. Yes, bright sunlit winters do invigorate.

Aldous Huxley called Los Angeles the City of Dreadful Joy…However, he never found it so dreadful that he was tempted to return to the damp discomfort of Britain. For Anita Loos, actress and screenwriter who wrote Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, there was just no there…there.

For many journalists on the outside looking in, there was a sense of superiority, a thin-lipped disapproval of the Californian way of life that seems too easy, too relaxed, too open. Something rotten at the core, surely?

Old films show how our perception of America—particularly California—has changed. Now we all want a slice of that eternal sunshine, those excellent wines, the right to choose illusion before reality. In Beverly Hills, if it’s not adequately beautiful, you change it. This could be a house—or a chin. That state of mind slid stealthily into our own world, so if the amount of happiness in your life is inadequate, go out and buy some more.

In LA, ageing without cosmetic surgery is now hardly an option. I suppose there may be women on those brilliant shopping avenues around Rodeo Drive who are indifferent to their wrinkles, but they have to be tourists, or foreigners.

Californian priorities used to be the pool, the second car—and after that, well, there’s always something to remove, or tighten. Now it’s unlikely that the pool and those cars would be on offer without the perfecting knife.

Before the Seventies, cosmetic surgery was a dark secret, a frivolous, guilty indulgence to be hidden from all but your closest friends. Names would be whispered and shared between those in the know, like that once-upon-a-time passing around of the numbers of surgeons willing to perform an abortion.

Many women would travel from the other side of the world for treatment by the famous Dr Pittanguy of Brazil, or an exotic Frenchman with a surgery in Tahiti. In London there was a man well known for experimental penis enlargement, an enthusiasm which for some reason never caught on…

In England where youth—that revolution discovered in the Sixties—had only just begun to take over, all this was still seen as the territory of the rich and spoiled, of actresses and their spin-offs. So when in the Sixties and Seventies I chose to look at the life and work of the Beverly Hills cosmetic surgeon Kurt Wagner, we inadvertently opened a window on a scene that was changing many lives.

I have filmed Kurt and his wife Kathy three times during these thirty-five years. They amused and irritated viewers in equal measure and drew mountains of mail from prospective patients. Outwardly content, living with the two daughters from his first marriage and an adopted son, they had all the trappings of Californian success—his Rolls, her Ferrari, their grateful patients, the perfect home in the Valley, a booming business in instant youth…what else was there?

Surgery aside, Kurt’s self-centred arrogance and Kathy’s breathy homilies on how to keep a husband happy were enough to keep a stoic British audience enthralled and appalled. With success came the usual California angst and the usual California panacea—therapy and infidelity, though not necessarily in that order.

I liked Kurt; he paraded his faults without concern—and Kathy was always instant joy. Piles of viewers’ mail stimulated the protests, and the scoffing always came down to: “Why can’t they act their age?” It was the Palm Beach syndrome, stimulating the constant jealous rejoinder: they’re too old to be having that much fun…

It wasn’t always fun, not even with a top cosmetic surgeon in the family. Over the years there was disquieting news: Kurt’s daughter had shot and killed herself on his bed with his gun. Kurt was arrested for receiving property stolen from the home of some renegade Saudi sheikh. He had been forced to sell his treasured collection of Toulouse-Lautrec posters. Their son had a drug habit. Kurt, bored with the beauty business, had invested their savings in Hollywood, of all places—and lost the lot. Chatty Kathy had taken to wearing exotic hats and wished to be known as Kathleen…yet to me she seemed, as always, uncomplicated and funny.

Filming Journey of a Lifetime, we found them living in Florida, miraculously still married after forty-one years. Kurt, in his fiftieth year as a surgeon, was back at work—this time in a sparkling glass building in Boca Raton full of the latest equipment for the war against ageing, into which he attempted to enlist me.

One particular machine was especially threatening. It could look into the future and show you what would happen to your skin should you choose not to take the expert’s treatment and advice—a brilliant marketing device. One look and, aghast, you’re calling your surgeon, any surgeon.

Kurt was heavier after another ten years, his face owing much to the latest techniques, the hair suspiciously thick and black. He had suffered two hip replacements and a brush with cancer. The old ebullient self-confidence was still there, but he was softer, kinder.

Kathy had not turned into prim Kathleen. Dressed in a leopard print turquoise top and three facelifts down the line, she was plump and giggly as ever. Furious with Kurt for losing all their money, she had forced him back to work and made it her business to be his living billboard. At clubs and parties she talked happily about her operations and encouraged friends to pay him a visit.

Leaving California had been a wrench for Kathy. She had thought of letting him go alone to start a new life in Florida but decided, upon reflection, that days spent breaking in a new man would be time-consuming, and possibly fruitless.

5 RELIEVING PATIENTS OF MANY POUNDS—ONE WAY OR THE OTHER

Anyone can be beautiful and loved: it’s just a matter of applying something, taking a course, buying a pot, denying yourself—or being operated upon, slightly. Trying to keep up in the Face Race the average woman, when last counted, spends five years fourteen weeks and six days of her lifetime in front of a mirror. It certainly feels that way when you’re waiting downstairs.

In view of all this I went to Texas at the birth of Spa Culture to observe the acolytes in The Greenhouse, the ultimate purpose-built fat farm or, if you prefer, health resort. This perfumed palace outside Arlington cost a million pounds to contrive and stands bathed in the soft glow of money, dedicated to the sale of dreams.

Women of a certain age (and some a little younger) were queuing to pay many hundreds of dollars a day for the possibility of rejuvenation. Some stayed months, refusing to give up. The ageing and wrinkled, the plump and the bored surrendered dollars and dignity in exchange for solace and repair, for the mirage of being lovelier and sexier—while outside in the harsh sunlight gardeners symbolically dyed parched Texas grass green.

In Britain, where we at least let grass decide its own colour, narcissism has also come to stay—observe the stately march of opulent health farms where the submissive can easily lose, along with avoirdupois, several hundred pounds a week. Only a couple of these country mansions were in operation when I filmed my first report in 1960; today scores of them are relieving patients of many pounds, one way or the other.

Even for Panorama it was hard to deal with the subject too seriously when the presenter was Richard Dimbleby, and not at all sylph-like. He came rolling up to me at the end of the programme, making predictably caustic comments about slimming. We also got a lot of irritable correspondence from enthusiasts after that, yet I have always held that for anyone with the money and the time such a regime can do nothing but good. It is like being lectured by Nanny and sent to bed without supper.

Establishments vary from earnest nature cure centres catering for those with little faith in orthodox medicine, to antiseptic Victorian mansions where society matrons tussle with the years and Show Biz straightens its elbow.

For anyone not really sick, one of the cheerier hydros full of tubbies expensively repenting excess is a more agreeable retreat than those chintzy halls where arthritic old ladies knit by the fireside and silently disapprove of the merely weak-willed. The Surrey hydro where we filmed was populated by jolly carboholics resisting the temptation, alcoholics drying out and executives escaping the telephone: “For a break my Chairman goes to the South of France and puts on a stone. I come here and lose one. He feels guilty; I feel great.” Both ways, it’s expensive satisfaction.

One night during my recce I was watching television amid a subdued group in dressing gowns. The Saturday night play was just reaching its climax when a man in the statutory white Kildare coat strode in and switched off the set, in mid-sentence! I leapt up in outrage. “Ten o’clock,” he said, reproachfully. “Time for bed.” I was about to dash him to the floor when it came to me that this was exactly what we were all paying heavily for: a return to the secure days of Nanny knows best.

Once you have accepted such discipline there is a certain consolation in surrendering to father-figures who know what is good for you, having your days planned down to the last half-grapefruit. The carrot cocktail bar, where you sit and boast about the number of pounds you’ve lost, exudes a dauntless Blitz spirit and a communal sense of self-satisfaction at growing, if not lovelier, at least a little lighter each day.

Whatever the economic charts indicate, we are in the middle of one expansionist trend; at least 10 million men and 12 million women are overweight. We spend some £50 million a year on slimming foods which usually taste like crushed cardboard, exotically packaged lotions, complicated massage and exercise equipment, and pills—yet we all lose weight best by practising one magic exercise performed sitting down, though still difficult: you shake your head from side to side when proffered a plateful.

Insurance companies say that any man of 45 who is 25 lb above his proper weight has lowered his expectation of life by 20 per cent. Put in a more daunting way, he will go at 64 when he might have made 80. Repeat after me: No, thank you…

A sensible girl I took out in New York refused her apple pie à la mode with the boring chant, “A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips”. She had a tidy diet which did away with tiresome calorie and carbohydrate counting: the Zero-Cal. She did not eat.

In California Elaine Johnson, a 35-year-old housewife, was 20 stone and so fat she could not cross her legs or sit without breaking the chair. She started her rigorous regime after getting wedged in a cafeteria doorway—a telling position from which to face facts.

At the same hospital Bert Goldner weighed in at 425 lb, or almost 4 cwt. He was so spherical he could not sit or lie without fainting from lack of oxygen, so had to sleep standing up or kneeling. During a nap he once toppled over and broke a leg.

In Beverly Hills I went to see that little round impresario Allan Carr, living in disco style behind his guarded electric gates. He had made his fortune from Saturday Night Fever and Grease, and thought he had won a lifelong battle with avoirdupois after a major bypass operation ensured that all food would just slip through his stomach without registering. Many people undergoing that six-hour operation die of heart failure, so he did sincerely want to be slim.

During the next five years he lost 150 lb. Then, in the interests of staying alive, he had to have it all put back in old-fashioned order again, and immediately gained 75 lb. Allan Carr may be small and round and aggressive, but he is a man of decision: he had his jaw wired up so he could not eat.

“It also prohibits you from talking,” he told me, “which is worse than not eating. I was very frustrated, as you can imagine, but you always carry little clippers around with you in case you choke or something, when you can snip the wires. So there I was sitting in the movie theatre watching Diana Ross in The Wiz.

“I knew it wasn’t going to be good—I have these instincts about certain movies, so I didn’t go to the première because I didn’t want to lie to people, or hurt their feelings. I went on a Saturday. By the end of the first 45 minutes I disliked it so much, I was so nervous and agitated I just had to tell my friends what I thought about it.

“So I went to the men’s room and took the clippers out and snipped my mouth open. I just couldn’t stand not talking, at that moment. That’s how I lost my mouth wiring. I’d had it on for ten days and I couldn’t yell, I couldn’t carry on, I couldn’t talk on the phone very much. It was just terrible.”

One of the few remaining ways of drastic dieting open to him, I suggested, was sleep therapy, as practised in India, where it’s a relief to stick to boiled eggs and a Coke.

“I’ve thought about it. You just go down to Rio for the Carnival, wear yourself out, and then sleep naturally for two or three weeks afterwards; but that’s too slow, I haven’t got the time to spare.”

I suggested he should travel to some of those places I had visited around the world where food was anything but enticing. He had done that, too: “The best place is Egypt. It’s like going on a scenic vacation and a diet at the same time. There’s absolutely nothing you can eat in Egypt.”

Mixing with people with extreme weight problems makes one feel slim, instantly. Even reading diets offers a sense of quiet achievement; in a health farm it’s positively therapeutic.

The form at our farm was a Sunday arrival with pseudo-medical test that evening: blood pressure, heartbeats, weight, and the old army how-do-you-feel routine. The usual treatment is a complete fast, by which they mean three oranges a day. Should you be determined to take on the world, reduce to three glasses of hot water a day, with a slice of lemon to take the taste away.

Mornings are filled with mild action: osteopathy, ultrasonic therapy, infra-red and radiant heat, saunas, steam and sitz baths, plus various combinations of sweat-inducing bakery: mud, wax, cabinet, peat and blanket baths. Best of all, massage and manipulation, which comes in all forms from distinctly painful to Wake up, Sir.

A health farm is rigorously asexual—all slap and no tickle—but, as I always say, it’s nice to be kneaded.

Looming ominously behind such agreeable time fillers, there are enemas and colonic irrigations. Nature-cure enthusiasts explain that in decoking the engine, waste poisons must all be swept away for a fresh, empty start—and that’s the way they gotta go. This may or may not be medically sound, but it is not a thing I will willingly take lying down.

The various spin-off activities, or non-activities, seem more therapeutic: complete rest (or stultifying boredom); non-availability of demoralizing distraction, like pleasure; the spiritually uplifting and unusual sensation of being above temptation. I derived additional and permanent benefit by giving up smoking forty or fifty a day on the assumption that if I had to be mildly unhappy anyway I might as well be totally miserable. I have never restarted that horrible habit.

On a fast, with a dark brown mouth, cigarettes are as resistible as everything else. The whole system is so outraged, one further deprivation goes unnoticed. I commend this ploy to the addicted. I also—giant stride for one man—cleaned my car, a beneficial and constructive exercise which took care of two soporific afternoons.

Because of the pressure of television I have had no time for health farms for several years—so the car needed another visit even more than I did. Then the Metropole at Brighton launched the largest health hydro in Europe. I joined a cheery group drinking mimosas on a private Pullman from Victoria and submitted to the inaugural weekend of events and slimming treatments. Without any struggle at all, I put on five pounds.

Nature cure, treated seriously, is not an expensive folly. Ignoring its unworldly cancer-cure fringe, the theory seems eminently reasonable: rest, restraint, simple food. Write off those who triumphantly smuggle scrummy-tuck into their bedrooms or creep off on afternoon dainty-tea crawls; their weighty problems are here to stay.

The ideal fortnight, down on the farm, is ten days’ fast (during which you lose a stone) and four days’ gentle return, via yoghurt, to salads and plain food. This puts four pounds back into that shrunken stomach. The more flab you take with you, the more you leave behind. Heavy drinkers and the very fat watch, fascinated, as it melts away and long-lost toes creep coyly into sight.

The benefit of the outrageous bill at the end of it all is that one may be stunned, upon release, into sensible eating— though most patients edge slowly up to the weight they took with them. Sterner souls change their life pattern—better and smaller people for ever.

All right—so I got the car cleaned.

6 RANDOLPH: AS RUDE TO AMBASSADORS AS HE WAS TO WAITERS

After the well-regimented, almost gentlemanly war I had known with the Eighth Army in Sicily and Italy, I saw at once that Korea was going to be something else: dirtier, more confusing, prisoners murdered, not a good place to be. There was no front line—every divisional HQ was in as much danger as its forward company.

As the US Army was due to rediscover in Vietnam, all an enemy soldier had to do to become a peaceful and invisible civilian was to hide his weapon, take off his jacket and stroll through our defences. I don’t even want to write about their treatment of prisoners.

The war that we had just won with the capture of North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang, was unwinding almost as soon as we’d finished their Hungarian caviare and champagne—a trifle sweet, but quite acceptable at that hour in the morning. We were sitting on the tatami after sleeping in ditches, so it felt like the Ritz, but we were not happy.

One of the early tragedies of any war is communication. At the front in the dying months of cable, a correspondent hands his story in to US Army Signals with blind faith and from then on it’s up to them and the cable company, right through to Fleet Street.

Meanwhile the US Army apparently had too much on its plate to deal with us adequately. For a short period, all our messages were lost. This was the time for suicide or murder, knowing what we had risked to get those stories.

Along with most of the other foreign desks, ExTel despaired and gave up, telling me to make my way home to London. It was an escape clause: one such instruction was enough.

We were miserable enough anyway, with our missing copy which never left the battlefield. By then we were ready to catch any flight to anywhere that wasn’t Korea. To ensure my final story got through, I had wangled a lift back to the Japanese mainland and handed the fragile news in to the Eastern Telegraph office in Kobe. At least I knew that story would be in London within a couple of hours.

In return the cable office handed me a mass of anguished messages from ExTel in London, warning me that few of my stories were getting through. The US Signals proved so chaotic that despite assurances from their PIO most copy had been mishandled, due possibly to incompetence or, more likely, unpleasant interference by the Chinese army. Correspondence had been lost for days—then sent full-rate.

Behind our backs, in a frozen Korea which we had left so triumphantly to return to Tokyo, the enemy had recaptured the capitals of Pyongyang and Seoul, and despite all this, or perhaps because of it, the Tokyo press corps continued to file and add to the piles of unsent messages, though it was no longer a big story. Both sides were closing down. The world was almost as weary of Korea as we were.

My recall was surrounded by Louis Heron of The Times, Tommy Thompson of the Telegraph and most of the fraught press corps. Front-line correspondents were moving back to their normal Far East stations, or going south to look at the increasingly threatening situation in French Indo-China which seemed favourite for the next upheaval.

In Tokyo, Gordon Walker, my friend with the Christian Science Monitor and an old Japan hand, drove me to Haneda Airport with Randolph Churchill and gave us our Japanese-style farewell presentos. Then we boarded, flew towards Mount Fuji and home. It was a happy relief to surrender to the deep, deep comfort of a BOAC Argonaut.

Randolph, easily diverted by conviviality, had not been a spectacular success as a correspondent—though he wrote well enough when he wanted to. He had been flown out by the Daily Telegraph to replace poor Christopher Buckley, killed by a mine within an hour of reaching Korea. Unlike Randolph’s father Winston, who had success as a correspondent in the South African war, he had little experience of the nuts-and-bolts legwork in the field of cabling and deadlines, nor, I suspected, was he much interested.

I had on occasion stepped in at the last moment when he was over-tired or emotional, to complete and file the Daily Telegraph piece for the unexploded Randolph. That may have been why I found this choleric character usually friendly.

He was also something of a celebrity, particularly among Americans. This was a new experience for me—“celebrity” was a different status which could prove a hindrance for other working press men who were not being asked for their autographs. Randolph, however, never objected to holding the stage.

“I can never win,” he told me. “If I achieve anything they all say it’s only because of Father, and when I do something badly they say, ‘What a tragedy for the old man.’”

He was said to drink a couple of bottles of whisky a day, though I never ran into that. He had lost six attempts to enter Parliament, though he held an uncontested wartime seat in 1940-45. A biographer wrote, “Aside from his heroically dismal manners, gambling, arrogance, vicious temper, indiscretions and aggression, he was generous, patriotic, extravagant and amazingly courageous.” Michael Foot, a political opponent, said, “I belong to the most exclusive club in London: ‘The Friends of Randolph Churchill’.”

He and I planned to take a few days off during this return journey—from battle fatigue, you understand. First we went ashore in Hong Kong, where I bought an export Humber Hawk for eventual delivery at home, thus avoiding a waiting list of several years in the UK market, such were the idiocies of international financial controls.

Here we ran into the Churchill groupies again, chasing the son of the most famous man in the world. It was my first experience of autograph hunters and fans, for which we did not have much time. In Korea it had been a full-time job, and the target was merely to stay alive. Little did I know how life would change.

In Bangkok nobody knew who I was, of course, except that I was travelling with the noisy Englishman who was drinking. We were invited to dinner with the ambassador, which was not noisy at all, but I had the opportunity of observing Randolph on the social rampage. There’s no doubt that, much as I liked him, after a few drinks he could become a responsibility. Excellent and amusing company, he was always in a state of suspended eruption. Other guests had to speak carefully in case he exploded. The nearest to a compliment you could get was to say that he was as rude to ambassadors as he was to waiters; he made no nice social distinction.

One evening Randolph and I filled in an hour of happy irresponsibility pedicab-racing like gladiators through some deserted streets. It sounds most improbable today, when Bangkok shows us only fumes and endless jams.

This was the time when we called in the brilliant Noël Coward; his “Mad dogs and Englishmen” started all the uncertainty. We could never be quite sure about these sharp lyrics: What did they do in Bangkok at 12 o’clock? Did they “foam at the mouth and run” or possibly, as in Hong Kong, “fire off a noonday gun”? I’ve seen that gun. We celebrated “the inmate who’s in late”, and gave up. It was a relief to be singing about a war, instead of trying not to be killed by one…

Bangkok was a very suitable place to relax and watch some blue movies in a palatial House of Pleasure, appreciating the skill of a Thai cameraman which was delicate, even in gross situations.

I returned to London by way of New Delhi and Istanbul, and went on to cover the riots and revolution in Cairo and the Canal Zone. Randolph resumed editing his father’s biography. It was business as usual.

My dictionary merely said, “An oppressive hot southerly or south-easterly wind, blowing in Egypt in the spring”. That didn’t sound too bad, yet it did have curious effects. For days the sun shone through low, hot sand clouds and the world was a hideous bright yellow, as though seen through a pair of cheap sunglasses. Gritty sand got into food, air and bed, tempers frayed, nerves stretched—it was the suicide season and it was not passing unnoticed for I had spent eight months in the Canal Zone, and noticed my occasional twitch and mutter.

“Shouldn’t worry about it, old chap,” I told the shaving mirror one morning, after listening to some aimless chatter. “A lot of people talk to themselves.”

As a foreign correspondent I was used to waking up in a different bed or a different country, but eight months in Egypt was a sentence devoutly to be avoided. We were all growing restless. “I’d prescribe a short swan journey,” said James, soothingly. He was our conducting officer, appointed by the War Office to look after correspondents. “Try Cyprus—it’s our only escape hatch.” It seemed a wise weekend move.

A brisk transport captain offered me a berth on a troopship: “You’ll be in Famagusta in twenty-four hours. You can have three days of wine and women and be back by Monday.” He gave me what the army somewhat disdainfully called “an indulgence passage”.

I threw a toothbrush into my typewriter, thanked James for the thought and sped up the Canal Road for Port Said, past the morning convoy of liners, oil tankers and merchantmen heading east. I was having an expeditionary pink gin in Navy House, enjoying the well-ordered peace of the RN, when a 10,000-ton American Liberty ship called, typically, Joseph E. Brown rammed the jetty with a fearful crash and nearly came upstairs.

Crunching through huge concrete slabs, the bows of the misguided Joe narrowly missed the stern of our cruiser Cleopatra. In keeping with traditional naval fun I urged my hosts to signal their Lords of the Admiralty: “Cleopatra raped!” They would not buy it. The captain gave a thin smile; I could tell he was thinking: “Look, Whicker—we do the jokes.”

Inside the docks I hunted for the Empire Sovereign. “That’s it,” said a sentry. Nothing in sight except small harbour craft. “There,” he said, pointing at the kind of boat which takes trippers from Richmond up to Kingston. “No, no,” I said patiently, “I’m looking for a troopship, ocean-going. Probably around 15,000 tons, promenade decks, restaurants, staterooms…” At that moment the words on the tiny stern came into focus: Empire Sovereign. “Oh,” I said weakly, “that’s it, is it?”

Some troops were being handed lifebelts and ushered below decks and a few Cypriot workers were already being seasick. I was allocated a cabin the size of a medium wardrobe, with eight bunks. Eight! Two passengers were already established; the others, wiser, must have gone by air. Even with three, it was jammed.

When our little craft began to shudder we stumbled up on deck. A fusspot of a tug, only slightly smaller, nudged and chivvied us into mid-stream and we glided towards the Mediterranean, past the Simon Artz store, past the sky-high KLM sign and the broad beach, and those posh passengers travelling port-out-starboard-home.

Deck loudspeakers blared music and people waved from other ships. It was pure Golden Eagle. I felt we were bravely sailing to Margate, watching out for the Luftwaffe.

As we left the shelter of the harbour wall something odd began to happen. The Med, as far as the eye could tell, was a millpond. Ignoring this, the Empire Sovereign forced herself through the water with a peculiar corkscrew motion—none of that straight up-and-down style ships have known and used for centuries. Passengers began to notice, and retreat below.

The troop commander, a pleasant CSM, came round with anti-seasick pills. “I’m never sick,” I said, waving them away. We spiralled into another treacherous swoop. “Well,” I said, clinging on, “practically never.” He then delivered the clincher: “It’s 249 miles.”

We gathered silently in the miniature saloon: a sprinkling of army officers on swans of varying legitimacy, a middle-aged man with little brown hair and a lot of peroxide wig, a thin subaltern freshly married to a young army nurse. She, pale and about to be ill, disappeared morosely to spend her honeymoon night in the Ladies’ Cabin (Gentlemen’s, with chintz) and the groom mooched off down the companionway, kicking things.

A few of us attempted a meal, mostly at a very acute angle, and afterwards I rummaged through the ship’s library. “Real sailors’ books,” mumbled an old Merchant Navy officer. He was wearing a beret, half-glasses, a woollen cardigan and looked like someone’s granny. It turned out he meant 1928 throw-outs from seaside libraries, well-thumbed love stories about counts and heiresses. Certainly no meat strong enough to take mind off motion.

I bought a bottle of whisky for 15 shillings, and settled down with a paratroop officer who confessed he would have flown over but was frightened of landing in an aeroplane. Nobody would play poker, so we lurched off to our cabins, reminding each other it was only for twenty-four hours, after all.

I struggled up into a top bunk, and waited to be rocked asleep. During the night a gale blew up and it began to seem doubtful whether our gallant little ship could make it through the night. I was thrown to the deck three times, which is enough to wake anyone.

In the morning the weather was so bad we could not put into Famagusta, so while my Cypriot friends waited on the quayside my ship waited in a bay up the coast. We lurked there, a mile offshore and heaving, for four days. Nothing to read, nothing to do, drink all gone, madness coming fast.

On the fifth day the weather broke and I stumbled ashore, took a taxi to Nicosia and flew straight back to the Canal Zone and the khamsin. “You look much calmer,” said James, when I reached the press dorm. “Nothing like a holiday, eh?”

“No,” I said. “Nothing like.”

7 NO ONE CARED ENOUGH

They were the generation of women who went into the ’39 war and came out at the other end, unscathed but changed. Well-mannered, well-dressed, determined and resourceful, the Scarlett O’Haras of the post-war years. Brought up expecting to live the opulent lives of their parents, they were aware such a world no longer existed, so, instead of clinging to the past, they reinvented themselves and became the bridge between Mrs Miniver and The Beatles.

Edana Romney was South African, creamy-skinned and red-haired. In the late 40s she starred in films, notably Corridor of Mirrors—remembered fondly by film aficionados for her endless close-ups. It was directed by a youthful Terence Young, who went on to tackle various James Bonds. She was married to John Woolf who, with his mischievous brother Jimmy, dominated much of the British film industry in the Fifties and Sixties—John a producer of significance, Jimmy a powerful agent and lover of Laurence Harvey.

Pictures of Edana show her in billowing evening dresses, waist cinched, a glittering show-business figure in a drab time of rationing and clothing coupons. All plain sailing until her marriage ended. Abruptly she did another Scarlett and began a new career in a new medium: she became BBC television’s first agony aunt, with Edgar Lustgarten.

She moved into a stylish flat overlooking Hyde Park, rented Rose Cottage on the D’Avigdor Goldsmith estate near Tonbridge, and settled down with her elegant mother Min and Freddie the butler. It was an eccentric, stylish ménage that would survive some forty years of adventures on both sides of the Atlantic.

Chintzy Rose Cottage was transplanted lock, stock and steaming crumpets to San Ysidro Drive, a charming house in Beverly Hills, then to Summitridge, once home of Corbina Wright, a notorious gossip columnist. They lived well, though by Hollywood standards frugally.

None of them had ever given a thought to driving a car—so here in California, where only the criminal or the eccentric actually walk anywhere, they lived in grand isolation. Connected to the world only by an overworked telephone, Edana settled down to a new career as a writer.

She had fallen in love with Richard Burton. Not Burton of the velvet voice and Elizabeth Taylor, but Burton the nineteenth-century adventurer and explorer. He translated the Kama Sutra, wrote about and patronized male brothels and polygamous Mormons and, risking death, coloured his skin for a forbidden visit to Mecca, Islam’s most holy place.

For Edana it was almost an eighteenth-century life. She would stay in her boudoir most of the morning on the phone to friends, handing out advice and dreaming dreams of the dashing Burton. She wrote and rewrote her screenplay in a book annotated with ideas for location, strips of fabric for costumes and grand delusions: Sean Connery would play Burton, Richard Attenborough would direct. Someone once suggested that Tom Stoppard might rewrite the script. “Tom who?” she said, grasping the project ever closer to her. She forgot that Hollywood promises have a shorter life than celluloid kisses.

Over the years, many years, Burton became an obsession. To finance her dream she visited the Sahara, courted the sheikhs of the Gulf and the Ivory Coast, mortgaged her home and her life and finally—lost everything.

The Manson murders terrified Hollywood but brushed lightly past Edana. Every high-profile actor expected to be shot or kidnapped any day, but Edana and I were invited to a party at the home of Joan Cohn, the movie mogul’s widow and a major figure in Beverly Hills. It was an A-list party which would surely overcome the fears of the most macho film stars—indeed most of the great and the good in the film world wereon parade.

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