SHARED OPINION
The truth about Sir Stanley that I wouldn't tell if
The Spectator were read on the terraces
FRANK JOHNSON
Afriend, professionally involved in football, said something to me this week about the newly deceased Sir Stanley Matthews which I found both interesting and disturbing. It was that Sir Stanley was not especially forthcoming with his wallet. He did not always stand his round at the bar. In retirement, when football reporters asked him for a comment, he tended to ask how much he would be paid for it. Far from being ungrudging about the sums earned by such of his successors as Mr Beckham, he was privately sulphurous on the subject.
This aspect of the great player's charac- ter was tentatively and delicately hinted at in only one of the sports writers' tributes that I read. I shall not name the writer for fear of endangering his personal safety over a broad belt stretching from the Potteries to Blackpool and perhaps beyond, in the admittedly unlikely event of this magazine falling into the wrong hands. Nor, for the same reason, shall I reveal the identity of my friend.
I found all this interesting simply because interesting it obviously is. We all want to know as much as possible about the great. Such are our fallen natures, we especially want to know when the great are not as they seem. Thus the popularity, among a limited circle of readers, of revisionist history. Revi- sionist history always revises downwards. It always lowers our estimation of the great. But I said I also found my friend's revela- tion disturbing. This can only be because we also want someone or something to look up to. We want legends. Thus we both enjoy it and dislike it when legends are pulled down. We sometimes put limits on the amount of truth we want disseminated.
I confess that, had I been an editor on the night that Matthews died, or in the days immediately afterwards, and the football correspondent had produced incontrovert- ible evidence that the football legend had long been up to no good, I would not have printed it. This would not only have been for reasons of my personal safety, though that would have been a consideration. It would also have been because it would have undermined a legend which the devout believed in. Even now, I do not think that Matthews's tardiness with his round should be mentioned in a publication read by large numbers of football devotees. It would upset them unnecessarily. I raise it here because I assume that this magazine is not much read on the terraces. The fabled 19th-century American editor, Horace Greeley, had it right: when legend and real- ity conflict, print the legend.
Not that legends are ready made. A lot of people, and things, start out as common- place and become legends. Consider, for example, the film Casablanca. It tends to head, at least in the English-speaking world, all lists of the broad public's favourite films. Yet when it came out in 1943, the leading American film critic of the day among the educated, James Agee, after saying that he liked it, nonetheless continued:
Apparently it is working up a rather serious reputation as fine melodrama. Why? It is obvi- ously an improvement on one of the world's worst plays; but it is not such an improvement . . . Any doubters should review the lines of Claude Rains. Rains, Bogart, Henreid, Veidt, Lorre, Sakall, and a colored pianist whose name I forget were a lot of fun, and Ingrid Bergman was more than that; but even so . Mr Curtiz's [the director's] bit players and atmospheric scenes are not even alien corn.
Agee continued that one of the Bergman character's lines 'takes the season's prize for exposition'. It was, 'Oh, Victor, please don't go to the underground meeting tonight.' Of the same legendary film, the leading British film critic to the educated, the Observer's C.A. Lejeune, who also said she liked it, added that its romance was 'perfunctory' and its message 'dim'.
Yet Casablanca is undeniably a legend. So is Hitchcock's Psycho. But the latter was either cooly or mockingly received by nearly all British critics. Only Kenneth Tynan lauded it. At the height of her fame in the 1950s, the leading Italian critic, Claudio Sartori, said that Maria Callas did not understand melodrama. I myself have long believed that Churchill was wrong about how the second world war would be won.
I had better expand on this last point, since the Churchillians tend to pounce on any questioning of their legend: Churchill assumed that the second world war would be won as the first world war was: by Amer- ican intervention, leading to a successful Anglo-American invasion of Europe. That happened. But it was only an aid to Ger- many's defeat, not, as in the first world war, thd cause; the cause of Germany's defeat in the second world war was the Red Army. Churchill did not predict that. As Mr David Carlton shows in his new book, Churchill and the Soviet Union, when Germany invad- ed the Soviet Union, Churchill believed that the Soviet Union would quickly be defeated. In any case, unlike in the first world war, the United States did not declare war on Germany. Germany declared war on the United States.
Yet Churchill, too, is a legend. The explanation for this is that Churchill looks as if he got the war right. He predicted the war. Or at least, he predicted a war; and he ended it on the winning side. He was lucky. Luck helps make legends. That and our simple need for them. If we are short of legends, we create them. That could explain Casablanca. There will be much legend- making in the summer on the occasion of the Queen Mother's 100th birthday. Mr Charles Moore got off to an unbeatable start in last week's Spectator Diary with his implication that she had done more for the country than this year's other centenarian, the Labour party. Unless anyone is pre- pared to say that she has done more for us than that other 20th-century phenomenon — antibiotics — Mr Moore swiftly becomes legend-maker of the year.
Will there be any more British football legends after Sir Stanley? There will be hundreds. When, in 60 years or so, it will be time to write Mr Beckham's obituaries, they will say that he belonged to a sadly dis- tant day when footballers had enough life in them to be sent off for kicking Argentini- ans, and when they conquered women such as Posh Spice, herself a legend in her own right. We shall see Sir Stanley's like again.
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