ANOTHER VOICE

The unutterable tedium and stupidity of children who complain of their parents being famous

PE TRONELLA WYATT

In my last column I wrote that one of the delusions of our age was that some sections of the human race were more deserving of pity than others. In that article I identified as such a group 'fat women'. This week I am going to talk about a minority called `children of famous parents'.

The other day there was an interview in the Daily Telegraph. As it was not written by me — I interview for that paper — I began to turn the page over. Then I noticed that the interviewee was a young actor called Toby Stephens. He was complaining about having famous parents.

Mr Stephens can be seen in the adapta- tion of Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wild- fell Hall, on BBC 1. His parents are Dame Maggie Smith and the late Sir Robert Stephens, who died about a year ago, after having a liver transplant.

In the Telegraph, Toby Stephens commit- ted what is these days an obligatory sin he whinged about his family. If one's par- ents are famous, it is now modish to wish them unknown; if eccentric, ordinary; if drinkers, that they had been temperance folk. In fine, the modern parent is required to be at once anonymous and dull.

It cannot be long before it is possible for children to sue their parents for being famous, on the grounds that it caused them irreparable mental damage: `111'lud, how could I have been expected to form normal relationships when my father was always cavorting on Question Time with that chap with the stress-inducing bow tie?' Mr Stephens said, 'It would be great if my par- ents were ordinary, if Dad had been a banker and Mum had been a schoolteacher and I had come out of nowhere.'

Very well. But has Mr Stephens never considered — have the children of other famous mothers or fathers never consid- ered — that had their parents been from suburban nowhere then that is precisely where they might have remained?

I cannot claim to have parents as fabled as Mr Stephens's, but I have a father who is quite well-known. As far as I am con- cerned, this brings advantages. Of course there are drawbacks as well. When I was given my first job as a journalist, more churlish colleagues claimed it was only because of my father — and had no qualms about saying so to my face. Still, I never ceased to think of myself as fortunate.

In any case, the quality of being unfor- gettable or personally impressive has not always been greatest in those who have acquired the greatest public fame. One of the most famous men I ever met was a pleasant, dull old stick who would have been very much at home at a Tory ladies' Tupperware party. On the other hand, one friend's father used to stalk about the coun- tryside in a purple cloak, incurring our childhood scorn, but he was only an unknown junior solicitor.

Irregular behaviour that springs not from pretension but from a spark of divine fire is quite another matter. There have been a series of articles recently along the lines of 'My drunken father hell'. Many children of famous parents, including Rebecca Nicolson, have written complaining that their relations drank too much. A friend of mine has just complet- ed an article for this magazine on what it was like to live with a father who was often sozzled.

But, except in rare cases of genuine alcoholism, what is wrong with a parent who drinks? Drinking does not automati- cally constitute a drunken hell. Indeed, my father behaved hellishly only during periods of teetotalism. As a child I encouraged him to drink. It made him kind, generous and merry. One never felt that one came third in his life, after gin and tonic.

One does not deny that such parents can be occasionally embarrassing. Perhaps, at the time, I wished that my father had not arrived at my school sports day accompa- nied by Sir Robin Day and two folding deckchairs, which they set up in the middle of the finishing line. Perhaps, at the time, it would have more considerate if he had not barked at my 12-year-old girlfriends, 'Are you a virgin?' Since then I have faced angry hecklers and been spat at on television, but never again have I felt such terror as in that searing moment.

Perhaps, perhaps. But perhaps, in retro- spect, I am gladdened by even these humili- ating incidents. It is a puny child that finds his parents' oxygen too strong to breathe. The most dispiriting and onerous of emo- tions is boredom — it was one from which I never suffered.

Toby Stephens and all the other whing- ing children should mark this and be thank- ful. Unusual parents, as I am sure Mr Stephens realises, bestow another unique boon — they provide excellent copy for newspaper articles. Most of the hostile criticisms of Michael Collins seem justified — in particular con- cerning the omission of the London Treaty negotiations and the movie's romanticising of the Kitty Kiernan business, when in fact Collins was scattering his seed in the direc- tion of the wife of a British toff, Lady Lavery.

At the same time, however, the film is marginally better than what might have been expected given Neil Jordan's anti- Britishness. As a friend of Mr Jordan recently put it to me, 'It's the first film about Collins by an Irishman, so it would hardly be any different.'

It turned out actually that he was wrong. A few days ago, while reading a book about 1930s Hollywood, I discovered to my sur- prise that Jordan's bio-pic is not the first film about Collins. In 1936, Samuel Gold- wyn produced a picture, Beloved Enemy directed by H.C. Potter, a man of Irish descent.

Although the hero is called Dennis Rear- don, played by Brian Aherne, he was based on Collins. Accordingly, I telephoned the British Film Institute. To my astonishment, Beloved Enemy was available on video. One's hopes for it were low. It was doubt- less full of `Goldwynisms'. Collins/Reardon would probably tell the British: 'In two words, im-possible' or, worse, 'We've passed a lot of mortar since then.' One anticipated a greater anti-British bias than in the Jordan account. After all, 1930s Hol- lywood was packed with Irish-Americans.

The extraordinary thing is that Beloved Enemy is an excellent film. Potter, whatever his political opinions may have been, strove hard for objectivity. There are no concoct- ed civilian massacres committed by the British. Nor did Potter attempt to either palliate or ennoble the terrorist killings.

Most interesting is the film's account of Collins himself. Truer to history, the piv- otal 'love interest' is Lady Lavery, here called Lady Helen Athleigh. Lady Lavery's influence was probably decisive in persuad- ing Collins to deal with Lloyd George. Much of the film is taken up with the treaty negotiations, as Reardon's supporters become disgusted at their leader's apparent seduction by London society.

Beloved Enemy is on sale at Virgin mega- stores. There are, of course, liberties with the actuante. Mr Aherne is duly shot — but survives. 'A good Irishman', he says in justi- fication for this departure from history, `never does what is expected of him.'