DIARY
BARRY HUMPHRIES Afemale friend is fond of exclaiming, `Well done' at the drop of a hat. This verbal pat on the head is sometimes bestowed at unexpected moments. For example, I said good morning to her recently and with a bright smile she replied, 'Well done' as though I had been responsible for the weather or as if I had long been in the habit of bidding her a matutinal 'good evening' and had at last cured myself of this perver- sity. I seized the opportunity politely to hint that her favourite term of approbation had degenerated into a slight, but lovable tic. She must have taken that on board because the other day when I told her I was making a cup of tea she looked up at me with a malicious twinkle and cooed 'good for you!'
Afriend of mine, a successful author but an appalling judge of character, simul- taneously married a fruitcake, employed an alcoholic accountant, a business manager who was a compulsive gambler, a social climbing literary agent who was regarded as a joke by everyone other than my friend, and a dodgy lawyer who couldn't write a comprehensible letter. These buffoons and rogues remained passengers on my friend's gravy train for years and only alighted sec- onds before it finally ran off the rails and plummeted into the abyss. I was reminded of this the other day when I received an Australian lawyer's letter which made no sense whatever. Laboriously, I translated it into English and faxed it back with a ques- tion, 'Is this roughly what you were trying to say?' Back came another few paragraphs of legal gobbledygook. Why do lawyers employ this occult language? The answer came to me last night in a blinding flash. They write this obfusc jargon so that you are forced to reply with a demand for clari- fication — thus prolonging a profitable cor- respondence. But, more importantly, lawyers are smart enough to know that if they express themselves lucidly, in plain English, we might understand what was going on and solve the problem ourselves without the aid of learned counsel. Lawyers love their masonic rituals and anachronistic trappings, for these make them feel impor- tant, custodians of a secret wisdom, part of a venerable tradition. Why else do they infiltrate decent clubs and collect Georgian silver, rare vintages and modern firsts?
Was Alfred Hitchcock blind? There is astrong body of evidence to support this: his films. The big, wildly acclaimed scenes in his movies are all played against painted backgrounds, very badly painted backdrops. He also used crude back-projection ten years after everyone else in Hollywood had abandoned the device. If this is not enough to rob his films of any credibility, the acting is usually woeful, and one wonders if Hitch- cock directed his stars at all. The stories are predictable, the scenes badly planned and the 'thrills' usually ludicrous. Vertigo is plain silly and The Birds is a joke. I am pro- voked to this expostulation by the announcement of yet another Hitchcock festival somewhere. Once again, I see this vainglorious old ham is to be lauded as offi- cial genius and 'master of suspense'. Unless we accept him at his own estimation of himself — and many equally blind people seem to — we must admit that, at his best, he was a pauper's Fritz Lang. He had worked at UFA, and he later dished up tenth-rate versions of Lang's effects, but without their emotional or expressionistic edge. Hitchcock's is one of those truly baf- fling reputations like that of, say, Matisse (Henri Matisse is a near anagram for hit and miss). Most of his pictures look as if they'd been done with a bit of charcoal tied to the end of a long stick. Marquet, Dufy and van Dongen leave him for dead.
John Schlesinger's feature-film version of Cold Comfort Farm is up the road and I have, coincidentally, received a letter from Stella Gibbons's nephew, who is writing her life. He has discovered that his aunt and I corresponded at the end of her life. It is true that I wrote her a fan letter but not in connection with Cold Comfort Farm — this book was thereafter only referred to as 'you know what' in our letters. I had written to Stella Gibbons about her poetry, which I admired and still do. Eliot published her in the Criterion and Squire in the London Mer- cury. She loved Keats, was influenced, I sup- pose, by de la Mare and sometimes reads like the best Drinkwater, which is very good indeed. When we finally met in 1982 after a long correspondence I took her to a restau- rant in Soho frequented by noisy yuppies and agents and their floozies, which served things like skate and parsnips in a kiwi fruit coulis. The lunch was not the success I had hoped for and, though Stella thanked me charmingly, we never met again. She hated `you know what' and thought her best book was Ticky, a strange Ouida-like yarn about a crack Victorian regiment. Another artist I knew at the end of his life was Misha Spo- liansIcy, the Cole Porter of Weimar Berlin, who lived in Mount Street — the best high street in Britain — between the pub (the Connaught) and the fish and chip shop (Scotts). Mischa was so overlooked that I could not, in the mid-1980s, get a profile I had written about him published, so it was very moving to be at Ute Lemper's last elec- trifying concert when the audience rose to its feet and cheered a Spoliansky song.
Was Henry James an early luvvie- basher? I own one of his letters which I don't think has been published. In it he declines an invitation to write something for the Century on Eleonora Duse. James writes: The truth is I can't write any more about the- atrical people — and I don't want to! I think the whole periodical press takes a vastly dis- proportionate view of the importance and interests of mountebanks . . . and that the immense resonance given by that vast machinery for publicity to their little 'person- alities' (as they like to call them) is one of the features of our Terrible Times at the expense of which much, or most, profane mirth might be caused to flash.
Today, it isn't just actors who get too much publicity. Even bureaucrats tenuously con- nected to entertainment get headlines. Reshuffles and power struggles at the BBC are conspicuously publicised, but why? Who could possibly be interested? BBC paper-pushers even get invited on Desert Island Discs, a show which must be really scraping the bottom of the barrel. Since actors do get so much attention — they even have their own newspaper, the Stan- dard — they should really set more of an example in public in the sartorial depart- ment. A friend of mine avoided two tramps outside the Old Vic the other day in case they importuned him for money. The tramps turned out to be Ben Kingsley and Alan Howard. Only the critics dress nicely these days. Milton Shulman, the Baroness Thatcher of theatre criticism, in his hat and casually flicked scarf looks like Albin in La Cage aux Folles.
Meanwhile, according to banner headlines, Baroness Thatcher is having secret meetings with Tony Blair. If they are secret, how come we know about them? Surely those Major-bashing colloquies could have been conducted at a less con- spicuous rendezvous. What does the press mean by secret? POPE STANDS ON BALCONY IN ST PETER'S SQUARE AND GIVES SECRET BLESSING TO THOUSANDS OF TOURISTS.
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