The Lost Diaries

She passes me the receiver. Someone is talking on the other end.

It’s the Home Secretary. Douglas Hurd is my godson, and still runs the occasional errand for me.

‘Oh, Dukey, how would you like to be in charge of the BBC?’ he asks.

‘BBC?’ I say. ‘…Remind me.’

‘Broadcasting. Radio, telly, that sort of hoodjamaflip.’

‘To be perfectly frank, Douglas,’ I say, ‘I’ve got no use for a telly. I mean, where would one put it?’

‘But you don’t have to buy a television, Dukey – you just have to be in charge of it.’

‘You’ve convinced me,’ I say, and go to sleep.

MARMADUKE HUSSEY

February 25th

I’ll never forget something the great Laurens van der Post

(#litres_trial_promo) once told me. Things, he said, are as they are. Yet being what they are, they are also somehow different. And if things were not as they are, they could not continue to be what they both have been and will be. And consequently, they – the things in question – will always be not only what they might have been and what they are, but also what they will be. It is these simple truths that we are, I fear, in danger of losing.

HRH THE PRINCE OF WALES

February 26th

I am halfway through Tess of the D’Urbervilles when I throw it away in disgust. Thomas Hardy had no right – no right whatsoever – to write a book about me without my express permission. His presumption in this matter represents a total invasion of my rights to privacy. May I also point out that, like many a hack before him, he has got a startling number of the facts wrong.

FACT: I was born in Australia, not Wessex.

FACT: I was christened Germaine, not Tess, a name I have long despised. Has the guy never considered checking his facts?

FACT: I was never impregnated by a guy called Alec.

FACT: I have never – I repeat NEVER – been arrested and hanged.

GERMAINE GREER

February 27th

I peel the onion of my memory, first one layer, then another, and then assuredly another, when suddenly buried deep in it I espy the glint of something unexpected, namely something I had not expected to espy therein.

At first I can make out the shape distantly only, but then I realise that it is – oh yes! oh no! oh yes! oh no! – a hat, quite military, initialled with two distinctive letters, both the same. The first is S and so is the second. SS.

My goodness, the hat in question is undeniably an SS helmet, and at that moment I recall with a start that I was, unbeknownst to me, a member of the SS, an organisation that had done uncalled-for things but so very many years ago that it is most extremely hard to remember without forgetting.

GÜNTER GRASS

Picasso’s attitude to boiled sweets has been the subject of much debate. His preference, some say, was for Barley Sugar, whilst others maintain he preferred the old-fashioned ‘gob-stopper’.

One or two, including the meretricious Clive Bell, have even suggested he enjoyed Liquorice All-Sorts. Such a claim flies in the face of reason, since experts have proved that the Liquorice All-Sort has never counted as a boiled sweet. For one thing, it is far too chewy, but these stupid people – among them the pushy Clive Bell, who had no knowledge of boiled sweets whatsoever – couldn’t be expected to know that.

Did Picasso ever include a boiled sweet in a painting? Received wisdom suggests that his Weeping Woman II (1936) is seeking comfort from a throat lozenge. Others point to the figure on the right in his Bathers Outside a Beach Cabana (1929) and say that her transparent sense of Weltschmerz is caused by the bubble-gum that may have enlodged itself in her tresses. And then there will always be those who maintain that the gentleman’s erect member painted as a circle in Seated Male Nude (1927) is in fact a Polo Mint.

JOHN RICHARDSON

(#litres_trial_promo)

News comes through of the death of Harold Acton. For me, no man was less like the area of London associated with his name. To be linked with that most unprepossessing part of West London must have been a matter of perpetual ignominy for poor, dear Harold.

DIANA MOSLEY

Today was the day of my funeral, which was so great. I came in a hearse ($154) in this beautiful open coffin in a black cashmere suit ($374) and sunglasses ($56) and the church was full of people like Diane von Furstenberg and Liza and Calvin Klein and Yoko and Bianca and Robert Mapplethorpe and just about everybody, they all showed up and everyone was saying how great I was looking and how I’ve never looked better which was really great, and my blood pressure’s right down which is great. Liza’s put on weight though, and I spotted Calvin’s got a pimple on his nose and everyone could tell he was embarrassed about it. Afterwards, I was buried in Pittsburgh, so totally depressing.

ANDY WARHOL

February 28th

One of the key things I’ve uncovered during my research is that Victoria became Queen of England at a very young age – and managed to remain Queen all the time until she died! And as a Duchess myself, I feel I have a duty to let the rest of the world into this truly extraordinary secret which has been kept undercover for a century, which is nearly a thousand years.

Instead of a childhood filled with the bestest kind of great big huggy-hugs, the young Victoria had to cope with a starchy, no-can-do, hands-off atmosphere of stuffy, po-faced courtiers telling her do this, don’t do that: no, you can’t get your rocks off with all the hunkiest blokes on the disco floor of Kensington Palace; no, you can’t have a bit of fun going skinny-dipping in the Balmoral pond when there’s a hoity-toity, tutty-tutty garden party in progress; no, you can’t let it all out with a jolly good scream in the middle of a formal dinner party for the President of Snooty-Land, even if you are feeling stressed-up.

But Victoria wasn’t the kind of girl to let a rulebook stand in her way. ‘No way, José!’ she exclaimed, ‘I’m out to have fun!’ One of my totally favorito scenes in my screenplay is when the young Victoria gets a fit of the absolute gigglies when her chewing-gum shoots out of her mouth while she’s talking to the Archbishop of Canterbury, a very senior vicar at that time! And the next minute, she’s standing up to the German Prime Minister Adolf Hitler, telling him straight up that no way is he going to invade England, not while she’s Queen. It’s that kind of period detail – fun and laughter, yes, but also quite a few tears – that’ll make the whole film such an emotional roller-coaster!

SARAH, DUCHESS OF YORK

Henry James died today, in 1916. He was the worst writer in the world. He never went out. He never rolled up his sleeves and put his arm up the backside of a cow. He never slapped a woman about the face to teach her a lesson. He never lived. It is an absence which shows in his ‘novels’.

V.S. NAIPAUL

March (#ulink_3bac504a-8a01-579e-ab58-6a632b6804e5)

March 1st

Harold a little peeved over dinner at L’Artiste Assoiffé when the under-waiter fails to congratulate him on the truly splendid production of The Caretaker that is presently running to ‘packed houses’ (theatrical speak for ‘full up’!) at the Shaw Theatre. I don’t think anyone else around the table notices, but I can always tell when Harold is a bit ‘put out’ because he tends to smash the plates with his fists.

But otherwise an evening of great jollity, with the best intervention coming from David Hare who expatiated on how we must all strive to help liberate the ‘working class’. (How I hate that term – it implies that some of us aren’t workers, even though we may work fearfully hard on a biography of Marie Antoinette for absolutely years and years!!) When the aforementioned waiter comes over and asks whether everything was all right for us, Harold interjects – brilliantly – that it’s a damn fool question.

We end by ordering a bottle of Château d’Yquem on behalf of the sugar-plantation workers of East Timor.

LADY ANTONIA FRASER

Buy new fuckin house for a load of bread, but at least it has a brilliant swimmin pool for the car.

KEITH RICHARDS

March 2nd