One on One
101 chance meetings, juxtaposing the famous and the infamous, the artistic and the philistine, the pompous and the comical, the snobbish and the vulgar, each 1,001 words long, and with a time span stretching from the 19th century to the 21st.Life is made up of individuals meeting one another. They speak, or don’t speak. They get on, or don’t get on. They make agreements, which they either hold to or ignore. They laugh, they cry, they are excited, they are indifferent, they share secrets, they say ‘How do you do?’ Often it is the most fleeting of meetings that, in the fullness of time, turn out to be the most noteworthy.‘One on One’ examines the curious nature of different types of meeting, from the oddity of meetings with the Royal Family (who start giggling during a recital by TS Eliot) to those often perilous meetings between old and young (Gladstone terrifying the teenage Bertrand Russell) and between young and old (the 23 year old Sarah Miles having her leg squeezed by the nonagenarian Bertrand Russell), and our contemporary random encounters on television (George Galloway meeting Michael Barrymore on Celebrity Big Brother).Ingenious in its construction, witty in its narration, panoramic in its breadth, ‘One on One’ is a wholly original book.
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Craig Brown
One on One
Dedication
For Frances
Epigraph
Tossed upon ocean waters,
Two wooden logs meet;
Soon a wave will part them,
And never again will they touch.
Just so are we; our meetings
Are momentary, my child.
Another force directs us,
So blame no fault of man.
Ga Di Madgulkar
We have as many personalities
as there are people who know us.
William James
The earth keeps turning round and gets nowhere.
The moment is the only thing that counts.
Jean Cocteau
When Arthur Miller shook my hand I could only think
that this was the hand that had once cupped the breasts of Marilyn Monroe.
Barry Humphries
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
ONE ON ONE
ADOLF HITLER
JOHN SCOTT-ELLIS
RUDYARD KIPLING
MARK TWAIN
HELEN KELLER
MARTHA GRAHAM
MADONNA
MICHAEL JACKSON
NANCY REAGAN
ANDY WARHOL
JACKIE KENNEDY
HRH QUEEN ELIZABETH II
THE DUKE OF WINDSOR
ELIZABETH TAYLOR
JAMES DEAN
ALEC GUINNESS
EVELYN WAUGH
IGOR STRAVINSKY
WALT DISNEY
P.L. TRAVERS
GEORGE IVANOVICH GURDJIEFF
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT
MARILYN MONROE
NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV
GEORGE BROWN
ELI WALLACH
FRANK SINATRA
DOMINICK DUNNE
PHIL SPECTOR
LEONARD COHEN
JANIS JOPLIN
PATTI SMITH
ALLEN GINSBERG
FRANCIS BACON
HRH PRINCESS MARGARET
KENNETH TYNAN
TRUMAN CAPOTE
PEGGY LEE
PRESIDENT RICHARD M. NIXON
ELVIS PRESLEY
PAUL McCARTNEY
NOËL COWARD
PRINCE FELIX YOUSSOUPOFF
GRIGORI RASPUTIN
TSAR NICHOLAS II
HARRY HOUDINI
PRESIDENT THEODORE ROOSEVELT
H.G. WELLS
JOSEF STALIN
MAXIM GORKY
LEO TOLSTOY
PYOTR IL’ICH TCHAIKOVSKY
SERGEI RACHMANINOFF
HARPO MARX
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
BERTRAND RUSSELL
SARAH MILES
TERENCE STAMP
EDWARD HEATH
WALTER SICKERT
WINSTON CHURCHILL
LAURENCE OLIVIER
J.D. SALINGER
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
FORD MADOX FORD
OSCAR WILDE
MARCEL PROUST
JAMES JOYCE
HAROLD NICOLSON
CECIL BEATON
MICK JAGGER
TOM DRIBERG
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
GEORGE GALLOWAY
MICHAEL BARRYMORE
DIANA, PRINCESS OF WALES
PRINCESS GRACE
ALFRED HITCHCOCK
RAYMOND CHANDLER
HOWARD HAWKS
HOWARD HUGHES
CUBBY BROCCOLI
GEORGE LAZENBY
SIMON DEE
MICHAEL RAMSEY
GEOFFREY FISHER
ROALD DAHL
KINGSLEY AMIS
LORD SNOWDON
BARRY HUMPHRIES
SALVADOR DALÍ
SIGMUND FREUD
GUSTAV MAHLER
AUGUSTE RODIN
ISADORA DUNCAN
JEAN COCTEAU
CHARLIE CHAPLIN
GROUCHO MARX
T.S. ELIOT
QUEEN ELIZABETH THE QUEEN MOTHER
THE DUCHESS OF WINDSOR
Author’s Note
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Other Books by Craig Brown
Copyright
About the Publisher
ADOLF HITLER
IS KNOCKED DOWN BY
JOHN SCOTT-ELLIS
Briennerstrasse, Munich
August 22nd 1931
Earlier this year, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei – the second largest political party in Germany – moved into new offices at Briennerstrasse 45, near Königsplatz. As he approaches his forty-third birthday, its leader, Adolf Hitler, is enjoying success as a best-selling author: Mein Kampf has already sold 50,000 copies. He now has all the trappings of wealth and power: chauffeur, aides, bodyguards, a nine-room apartment at no. 16 Prinzregentenplatz.>* His stature grows with each passing day. When strangers spot him in the street or in a café, they often accost him for an autograph.
His new-found sense of self-confidence has made him less sheepish around women. A pretty nineteen-year-old shop assistant named Eva Braun has caught his eye; she works in the shop owned by his personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann. He has even begun dating her. Walking along Ludwigstrasse on this bright, sunny day in Munich, what can possibly go wrong?
A few hundred yards away, young John Scott-Ellis is taking his new car for a spin. He failed to distinguish himself as a pupil at Eton College. ‘I had advantages in that I wasn’t stupid and was quite good at most games,’ he remembers, ‘yet I squandered all this because of an ingrained laziness or lack of will … I was a mess … I cheated and felt no remorse and when threatened with the sack – “You have come to the end of your tether,” is what Dr Alington once greeted me with – I always managed to put on a tearful act and wriggle out.’
He has emerged with few achievements to his name. A letter from his father to his mother, written in John’s second year at Eton, reads:
Dear Margot,
I enclose John’s reports. As you will see they are uniformly deplorable from beginning to end … I’m afraid he seems to have all his father’s failings and none of his very few virtues.
Of course we may have overrated him and he is really only a rather stupid and untidy boy but it may be he is upset by the beginning of the age of puberty. But I must say the lack of ambition and general wooliness of character is profoundly disappointing.
Try and shake the little brute up.
Yours
T.
After leaving Eton last year, John went to stay on one of his family’s farms in Kenya (they own many farms there, as well as a hundred acres of central London between Oxford Street and the Marylebone Road, 8,000-odd acres in Ayrshire, the island of Shona and a fair bit of North America too).
It was then decided that he should spend some time in Germany in order to learn a language. In 1931, aged eighteen, he has come to Munich to stay with a family called Pappenheim. He has been in the city for barely a week before he decides to buy himself a small car. He plumps for a red Fiat, which his friends (‘very rudely’) refer to as ‘the Commercial Traveller’. On his first day behind the wheel, he invites Haupt. Pappenheim, a genial sixty-year-old, to join him. Thus, he hopes to find his way around Munich, and to avoid any traffic misdemeanours.
