The Chap Issue 103

ISSUE 103

SPRING 2020

EXPAND YOUR MIND, REFINE YOUR WARDROBE

Alec Baldwin “I have always avoided looking like one of those guys chasing youth.

I don’t own any jeans. Act your age is a good personal style”

AVA GARDNER

A tribute to the sassiest of all Hollywood icons of the Golden Age

RITA TUSHINGHAM

The Taste of Honey star on playing a witch in Agatha Christie’s The Pale Horse

ROBERT MITCHUM The hippest cat of Old Hollywood and his impeccable threads 03>

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ISSUE 103

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O N E F A M I LY

F O U R G E N E R AT I O N S

136 YEARS OF KNOWLEDGE

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Editor: Gustav Temple

Art Director: Rachel Barker

Picture Editor: Theo Salter Circulation Manager: Susan Brennan

Sub-Editor: Romilly Clark Subscriptions Manager: Jen Rainnie

Contributing Editors: Chris Sullivan, Liam Jefferies, Alexander Larman

CONTRIBUTORS

OLLY SMITH

LIAM JEFFERIES

CHRIS SULLIVAN

ALEXANDER LARMAN

MATT DECKARD

Olly Smith is an awardwinning wine writer and broadcaster. He has been International Wine and Spirits Communicator of the Year, and Drinks Writer of the Year at the 2017 & 2016 Great British Food Awards.

He is a regular on Saturday Kitchen and BBC Radio 2.

Olly hosts his own drinks podcast www.aglasswith.com

Liam Jefferies is The Chap’s Sartorial Editor, in charge of exploring new brands, trends and rediscoveries of forgotten gentlemanly fashions. Liam’s expert knowledge covers the dark heart of Savile Row to the preppy eccentricities of Ivy Leaguers. You can follow him on Instagram @sartorialchap

Chris Sullivan is The Chap’s Contributing Editor. He founded and ran Soho’s Wag Club for two decades and is a former GQ style editor who has written for Italian Vogue, The Times, Independent and The FT. He is now Associate Lecturer at Central St Martins School of Art on ‘youth’ style cults and embroidery.

Alexander Larman is The Chap’s Literary Editor.

When neither poncing nor pandering for a living, he amuses himself by writing books: biographies of great men (Blazing Star) and examinations of greater women (Byron’s Women). His book about Edward VIII’s abdication,The Crown in Crisis, is published this year.

Matt Deckard has an appetite for adventure. “I get dirty a lot and clean up nicely,” he says. “I crawl through tunnels and I stay in hostels when on vacation. When the need arises I will pull out the cash for the grand hotel now and again.” Deckard likes the outdoors and European cities. He lives in Los Angeles and is a clothing connoisseur.

DAVID EVANS

SOPHIA CONINGSBY

David Evans is a former lawyer and teacher who founded popular sartorial blog Grey Fox Blog eight years ago. The blog has become very widely read by chaps all over the world, who seek advice on dressing properly and retaining an eye for style when entering the autumn of their lives.

Sophia (pronounced to rhyme with ‘a fire’) is a writer and cigar expert from Devon who likes shooting guns, smoking cigars and nature. Sophia spends her autumns and winters hunting with a sparrow hawk and her springs and summers fly fishing on the Devon rivers.

Office address The Chap Ltd 69 Winterbourne Close Lewes, East Sussex BN7 1JZ

DARCY SULLIVAN

GOSBEE & MINNS

Darcy Sullivan writes about comic books, aesthetes and algorithms. His articles have appeared in The Comics Journal, The Wildean and Weird Fiction Review. He is a proud member of the Oscar Wilde Society and the curator of the Facebook pages ‘The Pictures of Dorian Gray’ and ‘I am Mortdecai’.

Peter Gosbee is a jeweller, antiques purveyor and keen disciple of the sartorial arts, often to be found at markets, briar in hand and suitcase brimming with treasures.

John Minns was brought up in what is commonly known as the rag trade. He cut his sartorial teeth working with ‘the King of Carnaby Street’ John Stephen.

Advertising Paul Williams paul@thechap.co.uk +353(0)83 1956 999

Subscriptions Webscribe Ltd, Unit 4, College Road Business Park, College Road North, Aston Clinton, HP22 5EZ 01442 820 580 contact@webscribe.co.uk

NICK OSTLER Nick Ostler is an Emmywinning and BAFTA-nominated screenwriter of family-friendly entertainment such as Danger Mouse, Shaun the Sheep and the upcoming adaptation of Tove Jansson’s classic Moomin novels, Moominvalley. He is also co-author, with Mark Huckerby, of the British fantasy adventure trilogy Defender of the Realm, published by Scholastic.

E chap@thechap.co.uk W www.thechap.co.uk Twitter @TheChapMag Instagram @TheChapMag FB/TheChapMagazine

Printing: Micropress, Fountain Way, Reydon Business Park, Reydon, Suffolk, IP18 6SZ T: 01502 725800 www.micropress.co.uk Distribution: Warners Group Publications, West Street, Bourne, Lincolnshire, PE10 9PH T: 01778 391194

THE CHAP MANIFESTO 1 THOU SHALT ALWAYS WEAR TWEED. No other fabric says so defiantly: I am a man of panache, savoir-faire and devil-may-care, and I will not be served Continental lager beer under any circumstances.

2 THOU SHALT NEVER NOT SMOKE. Health and Safety “executives” and jobsworth medical practitioners keep trying to convince us that smoking is bad for the lungs/heart/skin/eyebrows, but we all know that smoking a bent apple billiard full of rich Cavendish tobacco raises one’s general sense of well-being to levels unimaginable by the aforementioned spoilsports.

3 THOU SHALT ALWAYS BE COURTEOUS TO THE LADIES. A gentleman is never truly seated on an omnibus or railway carriage: he is merely keeping the seat warm for when a lady might need it.

Those who take offence at being offered a seat are not really Ladies.

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4 THOU SHALT NEVER, EVER, WEAR PANTALOONS DE NIMES. When you have progressed beyond fondling girls in the back seats of cinemas, you can stop wearing jeans.

5 THOU SHALT ALWAYS DOFF ONE’S HAT. Alright, so you own a couple of trilbies. Good for you - but it’s hardly going to change the world. Once you start actually lifting them off your head when greeting passers-by, then the revolution will really begin.

6 THOU SHALT NEVER FASTEN THE LOWEST BUTTON ON THY WAISTCOAT. Look, we don’t make the rules, we simply try to keep them going. This one dates back to Edward VII, sufficient reason in itself to observe it.

7 THOU SHALT ALWAYS SPEAK PROPERLY. It’s really quite simple: instead of saying “Yo, wassup?”, say “How do you do?”

8 THOU SHALT NEVER WEAR PLIMSOLLS WHEN NOT DOING SPORT. Nor even when doing sport. Which you shouldn’t be doing anyway. Except cricket.

9 THOU SHALT ALWAYS WORSHIP AT THE TROUSER PRESS. At the end of each day, your trousers should be placed in one of Mr. Corby’s magical contraptions, and by the next morning your creases will be so sharp that they will start a riot on the high street.

10 THOU SHALT CULTIVATE INTERESTING FACIAL HAIR. By interesting we mean moustaches, or beards with a moustache attached.

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CONTENTS 8 AM I CHAP?

Readers submit their photographs for the ultimate sartorial assessment

12 EXTREME BUTLING

Mr. Gimpley-Spankworth addresses sartorial and etiquette matters, and other gentlemanly disciplines

15 GROOMING

News of an exciting collaboration between The Chap and Captain Fawcett’s Gentleman’s Grooming Emporium

FEATURES 22 ALEC BALDWIN

Gustav Temple meets the stylish actor to find out who he rates as his icons of the Golden Age of Hollywood

30 A VA GARDNER

hris Sullivan recounts the extraordinary life and career of one C of Hollywood’s greatest screen legends, plus an Ava Gardner film guide

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SPRING 2020

22 SARTORIAL FEATURES 44 FASHION PHOTO SHOOT

Glamorous ladies from the UK and the United States are photographed in classic Hollywood style

54 INTERVIEW: CHARLOTTE MITCHELL

The costume designer whose credits include style icon Villanelle in Killing Eve on recreating the early 1960s in Agatha Christie’s The Pale Horse

64 S ARTORIAL LONDON

Professional City tour guide Mr. Russell Nash takes us on an elegant ramble through the fashion and menswear history of the capital, from Beau Brummell to Mr. Fish

72 T HE ALBERT SLIPPER

Liam Jefferies on the indoor footwear that can sometimes be worn out-of-doors, such is their discreet elegance

76 THE SPEARPOINT COLLAR

Matt Deckard fumes at the horizontal direction shirt collars have taken over the last few decades, and advocates a return to the classic and universally flattering spearpoint collar

82 T HE TEBA JACKET

Gustav Temple road tests a Spanish take on the Hacking Jacket that has its origins in the aristocratic circles of the 1930s

88 G REY FOX COLUMN

David Evans celebrates reaching ‘retirement age’ by hitting the road on a gravel bike in some Dashing Tweeds

LONGER FEATURES 94 ROBERT MITCHUM

The roustabout actor who laconically drawled his way through a stellar film career, mostly while high on marijuana

102 DRINK

Olly Smith sings fulsome praises to the grandfather of all gentlemanly drinks, Whisky

108 B ARBADILLO

A visit to the splendid bodegas of Sanlúcar de Barrameda to sip Manzanilla straight from the barrel

114 BUTTERFLIES

Nick Ostler turns his binoculars away from avian species and on to the equally enthralling and just as elusive butterfly

118 T RAVEL: HOLLYWOOD

Chris Sullivan trawls the streets of Hollywood and Los Angeles in search of vestiges of the Golden Age

REVIEWS 128 A UTHOR INTERVIEW

Alexander Larman meets Fergus Butler-Gallie, author of two highly regarded books about the clergy

132 BOOK REVIEWS

Books about the Old Bailey and Reginald Kenneth Dwight

134 NINA ANTONIA

Darcy Sullivan meets the writer who has chronicled the lives of decadent poets and New York glam rockers

140 RITA TUSHINGHAM

We meet the 1960s icon and hear her views on witches, the supernatural and LSD

147 CUBAN CIGARS

Sophia Coningsby on the cigars considered the best in the world since the days of Christopher Columbus

152 RESTAURANT REVIEW

A spin in an MG BGT to the Art Deco monument that is the Midland Hotel, Morecambe

157 MINNS & GOSBEE

Our antiques experts extol the virtues of the signet ring, ivory and bone

160 CROSSWORD

Cover photo: © El Dorado Pictures

ISSUE 103

SEND PHOTOS OF YOURSELF AND OTHER BUDDING CHAPS AND CHAPETTES TO CHAP@THECHAP.CO.UK FOR INCLUSION IN THE NEXT ISSUE

“I am sending you this Photograph of my brother James White,” writes Mr. S White, “who is a Mr. Toad of the highest order, living on a narrow boat and riding a motorcycle sidecar combination to explore the green lanes and waterways of this fine land. I make no excuse for the button faux pas on his Waistcoat, but he has hinted with a wink that he may be able to procure cheap entry tickets to Longleat Safari Park.”

In that case you shall also have to overlook your brother’s oversized jacket, peculiar brimless trilby and rather unkempt coiffure. Presumably there are no mirrors on his narrowboat?

“Please find attached a recent photo of my good self,” writes James Parker. “What do you think?”

We think you must have sent us the wrong photograph, sir, for this one appears to show your bad self.

“Please find attached a photo,” writes Lisa Harrington, “of my husband James Patrick Harrington (right) and Adrian Crawford-McKellar, just before attending Mr. B the Gentleman Rhymer’s gig at Bedford Esquires earlier in the year.”

Madam, thank you for sending use this photograph of the parking attendants outside Bedford Esquires, though we’d also like to see one of your spouse and his chum, if available.

“Lady Kay took me to a lovely place called Falconer's Lodge in Thetford Forest, Norfolk for my birthday, and, of course, if you’re going to spend quality time in such a Lordly place, you must dress accordingly.”

Indeed, sir. Yet you chose to attend without a suitable doggy jacket, and allow yourself to be photographed with the gamekeeper?

“I spent the summer on safari with the memsahib,” writes James Berkley-Hunt. “The female is some doxy I picked up in a bar in Mombassa, the memsahib being unavoidably detained, having been savagely attacked by half a dozen ravenous lions who mistook her for a passing warthog (the local warthogs are particularly ugly). The good news is that with intensive medical care and long recuperation, the lions are expected to make a full recovery, though scared for life. Am I a chap?”

There is more to being a Chap than donning a pith helmet and being rude about your wife, sir. A lot more.

“Autumn feeling and a man in his 30s,” writes Stelios CHaralambous. “Stelios with colours!”

Depressing feeling and a man in pantaloons de Nimes. This can only be a Greek tragedy.

“I have finally broken down and am allowing my anonymity to be destroyed,” writes Will Dailey, “but I thought you might find a disparaging remark to be added to one of these ultimate fashion faux pas to be published in your next journal.”

Happy to oblige, sir, though your appallingly accessorised and shabbily buttoned suit speak for themselves.

“It was suggested that I submit this photo to re-assess my Chap credentials,” writes Frank Annable. “I said those discerning people at Chap would probably home in on the gentleman in the background having a ‘Crisis of trouser’, thus ignoring me entirely.”

Sir, we always welcome your impeccable sartorial submissions, and we can only congratulate you on hiding under an aeroplane while men commit unspeakable acts in front of Army Jeeps.

“I am a schoolteacher by trade, inspiring the chaps of tomorrow,” writes Mr. Bronson. “As you can observe, it is 4.30 pm and I am in more serene surroundings at home reading your publication. The perfect antidote to the hustle bustle of the hoi polloi.”

10/10, Bronson. But see me in my office about that tucked-in Fair Isle.

“Waiting for my flight from Toronto to NYC,” writes James Rana.

Sir, thank you for the flight information update.

We wish you a pleasant journey, and suggest that, upon arrival at New York City, you head for the nearest emporium of decent neckwear.

Dressing as a Peaky Blinder in one’s forties is frankly embarrassing, but striving for a look in one’s first decade that is guaranteed to frighten one’s parents into opening an account at the nearest tweed emporium is more than commendable, sir.

FLÂNEUR SHAVING SOAP AND AFTER-SHAVE BALM

S

ince the launch of The Chap’s first eau de cologne, Flâneur, earlier this year, the range has now been expanded to include a shaving soap and an after-shave balm, both with the same scent used in the original Flâneur: Amber, patchouli, vetiver and vanilla base, middle notes of violet, iris, geranium and rose, top notes of bergamot, verbena and pink pepper. Two new pocket squares, designed by Caroline Lindop, also accompany the scent. In different ways, both designs reflect the languorous stance of the Flâneur and his (or her) desire continually to wander sans destination.

All the above products are available from

www.thechap.co.uk

Extr eme

Butling

Our erstwhile butler Mr. Bell has moved to the outskirts of Amsterdam to become a tulip farmer and goat fancier. He left us in the capable hands of his factotum and personal assistant, Mr. Gimpley-Spankworth, who is here to offer readers advice on social, sartorial and etiquette matters. Send your queries to gimpley@thechap.co.uk

Chris McWilliam: I’d be mightily grateful for any advice on sourcing proper silk shirts in the UK. I can only find inferior foreign ones on the Bay of E. Mr. Gimpley-Spankworth: Empress His Ling Shi discovered the Bombyx mori silkworm while sipping tea under a mulberry tree in the 27th century BC, and today China continues to produce the world’s finest silk. Tightly spun Mulberry Silk is by far the most suitable for tying a gentleman to the bedposts, Master, for it can be knotted securely yet leaves no visible chafe. As to the actual garments, I am reliably informed that Hawes & Curtis make silk shirts, while another company, www.silkwoodsilk. com, makes one iteration of a silk shirt in a charming shade of ivory, while a pricier version may be acquired from www.emmawillis.com.

My Master, Mr. Bell, however, suggests that if one’s primary concern is the sheen of one’s shirt, a far more thrilling lustre is provided by shirts made of latex.

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As to ‘Brown in Town’, I have no idea. I haven’t been to Town since that unfortunate incident at Albany involving the Duke of Rutland and a badger.

Funnily enough, I was wearing a pair of skintight leather gloves, which were black – so perhaps this provides an answer of sorts.

Colin Quench: My dear Mr. Gimpley, with the warm summer weather almost upon us, could you please offer advice on suitable footwear for the season? I never thought I would ever utter these words, but with the perils of climate change also very much upon us and the rising threat of bushfires in the Quantocks, could you suggest appropriate open-toed solutions both for promenading and/or the privacy of one’s own home?

Francis Hull: I was raised to obey the rule ‘Do not wear brown in town’, meaning don’t wear brown shoes in town, but does this rule also apply to wearing a brown hat or brown gloves in town?

Mr. Gimpley-Spankworth: Ah gloves! Lovely, shiny, skin-tight leather gloves which fit one’s digits so snugly that one’s fingerprints still leave a mark.

Though I do like to remind Master that great care should be taken in a strangling situation, so as not to leave any such marks on the victim. My advice has always been ‘Too much ‘choky’ and you’ll end up in ‘chokey’, Sir!

Mr. Gimpley-Spankworth: My dear Master, you raise an interesting conundrum! No doubt the management of this publication will censure my admiration for open-toed footwear, and I may receive a horsewhipping for my views (oh dear!). But quite frankly I’m all for toes and believe they should be viewed as much and as closely as possible.

However, the official line is of course that opentoed is not a solution, but a problem. You also raise an interesting point, Master, about climate change.

One can almost foresee a post-Apocalyptic world, with burnt-out cars and collapsed buildings, the populace running about with their clothes in tatters searching for food… Mmm, sounds rather appealing, doesn’t it? At such a time, an open-toed shoe might be useful for attracting a new mate, and as such I would recommend the ones available from www.grenson.com or reproduction WWII sandals from www.onlinemilitaria.net.

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Grant Jukes: As a Chap who is vertically challenged, I would welcome your advice on the matter of pleats. Should one opt for flat fronted trousers or for garments with pleats, and if so, should these be forward or reverse? Also, to give more height, should one opt for turn-ups or a plain hem? I remain sir, your most obedient servant.

Mr. Gimpley-Spankworth: Au contraire, Master – it is I who have the honour of remaining your obedient servant! But down to the matter at hand, to wit, pleats. As I’m sure you already know, forward pleats – those that face a Chap’s nether regions – are the English style, while reverse pleats (facing the pockets)

are somewhat Italianate and favoured by Americans.

As to flat fronted trousers – who on earth wants those? Surely a rising trouser is the thing to aim for, Master, especially when presented with a pulchritudinous lady!

No amount of trouser pleats will increase your height, I’m afraid, so regarding that particular matter I would suggest high heels, or make friends with dwarves. I can arrange the introductions if required, for I number many ‘Table Bashers’ among my associates. Consorting with those ungifted of height will make you feel like a giant among men. n

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Grooming

DEBONAIR IN KING'S LYNN Gustav Temple drives for three hours to don a white coat and experience the pleasures of creating a new moustache wax

U

pon receiving an invitation to visit the famed Captain Fawcett factory of all things hirsute in Norfolk, my first concerns were sartorial. Would such a visit require the donning of white coats, plastic sunglasses and special safety equipment and, most importantly, would I be permitted to smoke my pipe?

I buried these deep concerns for the threehour drive from Chap HQ , having secured a billet at the Dragonfly Hotel, situated a stone’s throw

“The place was crawling with staff, from brisk admin ladies to whitecoated laboratory technicians; it was much like being in a Pathé News clip about factories from the 1940s”

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from Fawcett HQ in King’s Lynn. This was my first ever visit to the mediaeval city known for its prime role in the Hanseatic League of Ports of the 15th Century and its history of priestly guilds, and I was prepared, upon arrival, to nose my jalopy along narrow cobbled streets lit by gas lamps.

Instead, the vehicle did a lot of nosing around various sprawling roundabouts until I located the exit for the industrial estate that houses both Captain Fawcett and my accommodation for the night.

However, this was no time for gentle tourism.

I was here on a mission to create a new moustache wax with mine host, known as Captain Fawcett’s Right Hand Man (RHM), and there was much to be done.

The factory is amusingly, and perhaps intentionally, situated a few units along from a wholesaler of erotic wares, and I was glad not to have accidentally stumbled in there asking for lip weasel lubrication and gentlemen’s accoutrements.

The unit housing Captain Fawcett is a cut above the rest, with a sparkling original red telephone box at its entrance. The wide doors usher one into a vast edifice crammed to bursting with hirsute paraphernalia (see The Chap 102), vintage motorcycles, a bar and several Chesterfield sofas.

Captain Fawcett’s RHM gave an effusive and loud greeting, once I’d been granted ingress by one of his many factota. The place was crawling with staff, from brisk admin ladies to white-coated laboratory technicians; it was much like being in a Pathé News clip about factories from the 1940s.

A brief tour of the premises revealed that, as well as the immense volumes of barbershop accoutrements mentioned in the previous issue, there were also suites of wood-pannelled offices, warehouses and a sleek white laboratory where all the Captain Fawcett unguents are made.

The mission was to create Debonair, a new moustache wax for The Chap. The ingredients had previously been discussed, my simple brief being that it should smell of pipe tobacco and old leather armchairs. This was more or less precisely the aroma that wafted from the first tin I was shown.

The wax itself is made in a machine that looks like it could make anything – shampoo, engine lubricant, marshmallows. When the RHM invited me to take a closer look, my worst fears were founded when he produced a white coat and the sort of woven white trilby that butchers used

to wear. With the strict edict that I was not to be photographed in this attire, I swiftly pulled it over my tweeds and we marched into the lab – closely followed by not one, but two photographers.

However, once I saw what they had made the bearded chap manning the machines wear, I suddenly felt exceedingly well dressed. The fellow had a vast snood encompassing his chin growth and a red hair net, though, perhaps due to familiarity, seemed perfectly comfortable in such attire.

We watched the machine spew its aromatic juice, then observed it being inserted into tins. If this had indeed been a Pathé News clip, all of us would have been puffing merrily on our pipes, but sadly the No Smoking sign was quite clear, though I had managed to slip past a sign reading ‘Beards or Moustaches Must Be Worn Beyond This Point’.

Getting my first sniff of Debonair made me wish I had spent the last three months doing something useful like growing a moustache.

Mercifully, the time had come to remove our white coats and straighten our neckties for some

photographs and video recording. A very patient young lady named Bryony recorded take after take of our unscripted ramblings, but the rapport betwixt myself and mine host was not difficult to summon. The aims and outlook of Captain Fawcett are not a million furlongs from those of The Chap.

Vintage items and practices of the early 20th century are venerated, and the attention to detail in the factory must make for a very agreeable place to work (apart from when the postman arrives and a very loud klaxon interrupts our filming). Everything in the building, from the Victorian barber’s chairs to the drinks coasters, has either been lovingly restored or beautifully recreated.

My day at Captain Fawcett HQ had been steeped in old-world glories, convivial characters and gallons of sweet-smelling moustache wax, which more than made up for missing out on the historic centre of King’s Lynn. n Debonair Moustache Wax is available from www.captainfawcett.com and www.thechap.co.uk

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Features Interview: Alec Baldwin Ava Gardner

(p30)

(p22)

Ava21Gardner Film Guide (p38)

Interview

ALE C B AL D W I N Gustav Temple encounters the sharply-dressed New Yorker who has been raising male standards of dress in Hollywood for several decades

“We’re adding a little something to this month’s sales contest. As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac El Dorado. Anyone want to see second prize? Second prize is a set of steak knives.

Third prize is you’re fired”

T

he Hollywood actor Alec Baldwin entered the humble life of The Chap in a rather odd manner. We received a phone call from Mr. Baldwin, enquiring about the ownership status of the estate of a deceased Savile Row tailor.

The actor had read something about Douglas Hayward in the magazine and assumed that we would be the first port of call in an enquiry relating to the estate of Mr. Hayward.

Of course Mr. Baldwin was right, and it only took a few telephone calls to our contacts on the Row to secure the information he required.

Naturally we immediately requested an interview with the actor. His interest in Savile Row reflected a general impression of a well-dressed man who is rarely pictured unsuited off screen, and the roles he has chosen nearly always display similar sartorial precision.

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Alec Baldwin’s career began in the 1980s, his first break in Knots Landing, a spin-off of Dallas that went on to outperform that epic saga and become one of the longest-ever primetime series on American television. He went into a film career immediately afterwards, beginning with Forever Lulu in 1987, taking the lead role alongside Debbie Harry. After that came Beetlejuice (1988) Great Balls of Fire (1989) and The Hunt for Red October (1990). But the role that defined his future career was as Blake in Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), in which he played a mysterious salesman from Mitch & Murray, sent to rouse the flagging real estate salesmen at Glengarry: “We’re adding a little something to this month’s sales contest. As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac El Dorado. Anyone want to see second prize? Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired.”

played Juan Trippe, head of Pan American Airlines. With its setting in the Golden Age of Hollywood, The Aviator, at least sartorially, was a celebration of stylish actors of the past, and Baldwin cites “Humphrey Bogart, William Holden, Montgomery Clift, Clark Gable and Omar Sharif ” as his sartorial icons of that age. But it was not until playing Jack Donaghy in television’s 30 Rock (20022013) that the actor began to be cast in parts that reflected his own sartorial credentials.

“Why are you wearing a tux?” asks Liz Lemon.

Jack Donaghy replies, “It’s after six o’clock, Lemon.

What am I, a farmer?”

This was also one of the productions that Baldwin recalls as a sartorial highlight in his career.

“On 30 Rock I wore a suit and tie nearly every moment on screen. That did carry over for a bit afterwards, but now, four children later, I dress like I’m coming to clean your garage.”

When asked what film, tv or theatre part gave him the most enjoyable wardrobe to wear, Baldwin replies: “Johanna Johnston in Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation. She is a pro and a doll. I am very clear on what I want the character to wear, and the costume designers I have shot with nearly always appreciate that. I’ve worked with some of the greats: Colleen Atwood, Bob Ringwood, Jeffrey Kurland, Johanna Johnston. All fabulous.”

The tailor on Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation was none other than our very own Timothy Everest, though he was uncredited. Everest came up with the ‘Ethan Hunt’ Grey Suit: a slick three-button jacket with narrow lapels and plain-fronted trousers, paired with tone on tone shirts and ties in blues and lilacs; “It’s all very Sixties-looking, all quite neat,” said Everest at the time.

We had to take the opportunity to delve into Mr. Baldwin’s broader interest in British tailoring, and so we mentioned that he comes across as something of an Anglophile, and asked whether this was true and whether there was any particular reason for it. “When I go to England,” he replied, “I’m happy to be in the foreign country with the common language, as I am essentially lazy.

Also, I think Brits are interesting. At times, the dullest Briton seems more clever than the funniest American.”

“On 30 Rock I wore a suit and tie nearly every moment on screen. That did carry over for a bit afterwards, but now, four children later, I dress like I’m coming to clean your garage” Baldwin only plays a cameo, delivering one killer speech to a room full of Hollywood veterans including Jack Lemmon, Ed Harris and Alan Arkin, but the speech is now seen as the most memorable episode in the whole film, summing up the desperate aspirations of all the salesmen.

Blake’s suit is also much sharper, his tie better knotted and his shirt more French-cuffed than all the other characters.

Other film highlights of the 1990s included The Shadow (1994), The Edge (1997), with Anthony Hopkins and Mercury Rising (1998), and then Baldwin made a surprise career move by becoming the narrator of the US version of Thomas the Tank Engine, a role taken by Ringo Starr in the UK. He donned a suit – this time a double-breasted pin stripe, accessorised with a pipe – for Martin Scorsesse’s The Aviator (2004), in which Baldwin

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“I have some beautiful suits in cashmere with heavy linings. You can walk outside in cold weather with no topcoat and just a scarf. Armani made nice suits in heavier fabrics back in the day, as well as Cerutti, who is one of my favourites”

Baldwin’s latest part is as Moses Randolph in Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn. Baldwin rather modestly described his outfits as “more Lee J Cobb in On the Waterfront”, but his styling, by Amy Roth, pits his sharp-suited city developer (based on real life ghetto bulldozer Robert Moses) against the scruffier outfits worn by the investigators on his tail, played by Norton and Willem Dafoe. A film celebrating the New York of the 1940s must have appealed to Baldwin, having been brought up in Massapequa on Long Island, and also studying at the Lee Strasberg Institute in New York. Motherless Brooklyn’s production designer Beth Mickle restyled New York as a gritty, chiaroscuro city where everyone casts long shadows and on every street corner there’s a cool jazz joint full of sharply dressed hep cats. Willem Dafoe’s character Paul lives above the sort of tatty Brooklyn hatters that would have vintage shoppers drooling if they discovered it in present-day New York.

Does he have a preference for either of the sartorial styles to be found on each side of the Atlantic?

“There are still pockets of the United States that have not excessively relaxed their dress code.

But, by and large, the UK and Europeans in general maintain a more formal standard.”

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He donned a suit – this time a double-breasted pin stripe, accessorised with a pipe – for Martin Scorsesse’s The Aviator (2004), in which Baldwin played Juan Trippe, head of Pan American Airlines.

Thankfully, Baldwin is not one of those actors who appear on screen in sharp suits and then are spotted lurking about coffee shops in beanies and combat trousers. It is near impossible to find a photograph of him in anything but a well-cut suit and usually a tie. Men should stick to their sartorial guns when peaking past middle age, says Baldwin. “I have always avoided looking like one of those guys chasing youth. I don’t own any jeans. Act your age is a good personal style.”

The climate of Baldwin’s native New York is at least, unlike Los Angeles, more conducive to a decent wardrobe. Does he ever dabble in tweed?

“I have some beautiful suits in cashmere with heavy linings. You can walk outside in cold weather with no topcoat and just a scarf. Armani made nice suits in heavier fabrics back in the day, as well as Cerutti, who is one of my favourites.”

We can only hope that Mr. Baldwin’s enquiry into Douglas Hayward results in a business venture along the lines of Cary Grant launching a menswear emporium in Hollywood in the 1950s.

Douglas Hayward was tailor to Michael Caine and Sean Connery, among many others, and it would be appropriate for his name to be carried by someone with an appreciative, as well as practical, approach to men’s clothing. n

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Hollywood

Ava Gardner Chris Sullivan recounts the extraordinary life and career of one of Hollywood’s greatest screen legends, concluding with an unexpected encounter with her in London

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va Gardner loved drinking, staying up all night, sex, jazz, four-letter words, dogs, driving fast and Frank Sinatra.

Her luminescent white skin, jet black hair, emerald green eyes, feline grace and dancer’s elegance was known to have stopped even the most hardened casting couch-abusing Hollywood producer dead in his tracks. She was thoroughly unimpressed with the movie business, considered acting not only silly but an embarrassing torment tolerated only to fund her extravagant lifestyle, was the prototype jet setting hedonist who, pursued by paparazzi, was constantly in the headlines for fighting and drinking and staying up all night.

I’d say she was the most perfect woman you’d never want to live with.

‘I’m just a plain simple girl off the farm and I’ve never pretended to be anything else,’ Ava was oft to say, but her story was the stuff of myth.

A bona fide rag to riches tale of a gal from the Southern back woods who became one of the world’s biggest film stars.

Ava Lavinia Gardner was born the youngest of seven children to Molly and Jonas Gardner, dirt-poor Baptist cotton and tobacco sharecroppers in Grabtown North Carolina, on Christmas Eve

1922. Aged 18, local lad Ace Fordham took her to New York to see her sister Bappie. Photographer Larry Tarr, Bappie’s boyfriend, took countless shots of Ava, installing one of them in the window of his studio on Fifth Avenue. In the spring of 1941, who should see it but Barney Duhan, a runner for Loew’s Inc, the parent company of MGM Studios.

Duhan got hold of a few more shots of Ava and dropped them off at the MGM offices in Times Square. That summer MGM asked to see the young girl.

Al Altman was MGM New York’s screen-test director. He had introduced MGM to hundreds of the most beautiful girls in the world, but for him Gardner was ‘the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.’ Executives saw her clumsy test but were still in abject awe. Ten days later she was signed to MGM and flown to Hollywood. Louis B. Mayer saw the test and signed her up for the MGM grooming school.

First of all they had voice coach Gertrude Fogler change her accent. But it seems that Ava’s biggest challenge was fighting off the wolves, such as Wizard of Oz producer Arthur Freed, just one of many executives who thought their job was a short cut to molesting young beautiful naive girls

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Photo: © Snap/Shutterstock

Al Altman was MGM New York’s screen-test director.

He had introduced MGM to hundreds of the most beautiful girls in the world, but for him Gardner was ‘the most beautiful woman he had ever seen’

Photo: © GTV Archive/Shutterstock

(cf Harvey Weinstein). Thus the young starlet was reticent about attending parties, going on dates or even talking to men. Odd then that she should date and then marry legendary diminutive sleazebag Mickey Rooney, who was fond of boasting of his sexual conquests.

‘When I saw Ava everything stopped,’ he said in his 1965 autobiography. ‘My heart, my beating, my thinking.’ He had to have her, and as one of Hollywood’s biggest box office draws, it was only a matter of time. The studio sent minions to persuade Ava to go to dinner with him. Eventually browbeaten from all sides, she acquiesced and on that first dinner he proposed and she ran away crying. Then, to impress her, he got her a part in a movie, Strange Testament, and suddenly Ava was Mickey’s girl. Pictures appeared of them dancing at the Mocambo, she in her heels ten inches taller than him. Eventually he cornered her and proposed again and, thinking that 50 million moviegoers couldn’t be wrong, Ava said yes.

One the wedding night Rooney was so drunk he passed out on the bed while Ava cowered in the bathroom. Ava would later say, ‘Don’t let the little guy fool you. He knew every trick in the book,’ while the man himself said, ‘It was the perfect honeymoon. Sex and golf and sex and golf.’

Rooney was repeatedly unfaithful; he was married to one of the world’s most beautiful women but he still had to prove himself to himself.

Ava took to drinking. When drunk, she became paranoid and prone to violent outbursts. One night, in a drunken rage, she took a knife and slashed and shredded every couch and cushion in their apartment and refused to see Mickey. He sent flowers, mink coats and cried in her driveway. She filed for divorce on January 15th, 1942, just a year after they’d married.

MGM kept Ava on. They knew she had something. So did Howard Hughes who, after reading of the divorce, muttered, ‘The little runt couldn’t satisfy her.’ Top weirdo Hughes was 40 years old, the son of a Texan tycoon who inherited millions as a teenager from his father, the majority shareholder in Trans World Airlines and owner of RKO studios. He considered copulation with actresses, particularly young recently divorced ones with large breasts, a hobby, rather like stamp collecting or big game hunting. If he couldn’t get you he’d ruin your career, and now Ava Gardner was in his sights.

But Ava found him too strange; there were rumours about his having a venereal disease and

he smelled bad. She described him as ‘painfully shy, completely enigmatic, and more eccentric than anyone I had ever met’. He ate the same meal of steak and exactly 25 peas every day.

Hughes had Ava watched round the clock, seven days a week. He installed secret tape recorders in her bedroom and, after she welcomed Rooney back into her bed, Hughes turned up in a rage. That October Hughes disappeared, Rooney was conscripted and Gardner went looking for the next unsuitable partner.

Artie Shaw was in effect a pop star, regarded as one of jazz’s finest clarinettists, and and was also actor and a writer. He gave Ava a reading list when they started their relationship. “The only thing he could ever say about her was what a beautiful ass she had,” reported his friend, screenwriter Budd Schulberg.

“Yes I do have a reputation for a sexpot, and let me tell you it’s pretty fucking well deserved” Just when that relationship started going down the pan, along came The Killers (1946), Ava’s first big part in a big movie. Seen as sensationalist, the film was a massive cult hit, with queues around the block, while Ava was the subject of an eight-story billboard on Broadway, resplendent in black Satin dress, blood red lipstick and jet waves. Meanwhile her relationship with Shaw had finished. ‘I don’t trust love anymore,’ said Ava. ‘It has led me astray.’

Now a star, Gardner supped at the cup most nights every week. She hung out with a gang of uninhibited Hollywood playgirls, including Marilyn Maxwell, Peggy Maley (of The Wild One) Lana Turner and Ann Sheridan. They were a crazy gang who loved drinking, carousing, swearing and men.

Now her film career was moving. She starred with Clark Gable in The Hucksters (1949), though didn’t have an affair him until Mogambo (1953). She then had an affair with David Niven who, at the time, suffered from satyriasis – a medical condition that caused an almost permanent erection. Ava didn’t notice, as all her men had had a permanent erection when in her company.

But for Ava Gardner it wasn’t all sex and booze.

She aligned herself with Henry Wallace and his third party 1948 presidential campaign against Harry Truman. Wallace called for strong civil rights legislation, but this was the USA in 1948

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and supporting anyone with such radical views was not on for a big movie star. Louis B Mayer was livid and barked at her to stay away from such political allegiances.

Of course, multi millionaire groper Mayer was simply concerned about his financial investment in Gardner. As well her political leanings, his spies relayed tales of her tour of San Francisco’s most notorious brothel, where she hung out with the hookers and checked out their work from behind two-way mirrors, while on a publicity tour for The Hucksters. “And all the money I’ve put in to this meshugenah,” cried Mayer – who had paid her a paltry sum from the off and had already received a 7,000 per cent return on his ‘investment.’

“Yes I do have a reputation for a sexpot, and let me tell you it’s pretty fucking well deserved,” Ava told a press conference. By then she had caught the attention of Frank Sinatra.

Their first groping session took place in Frank’s Cadillac Brougham convertible. Sinatra took out his Smith and Wesson .38 and shot out a streetlight.

Ava took his other gun and fired it into a hardware store window. Handcuffed to each other in the cop shop, Sinatra made a call to his publicist, who arrived in a private jet a few hours later with a suitcase full of greenbacks to bribe the police.

Ava later told her sister that she’d had the most wonderful time with Frank.

Frank and Ava were ideally suited. Both came from humble backgrounds who had lived through the Great Depression, defended underdogs, wary of the rich, uncomfortable with their lack of formal education and both loved nightlife and a good hump. Still married to his wife Nancy, the gossip columnists hammered Sinatra and he received a deluge of letters from outraged fans.

He officially announced his separation from Nancy on Valentine’s Day, 1950. Ava went to Spain to make a movie. Meanwhile Sinatra fell to pieces.

“He was absolutely obsessed with Ava,” recalled Skitch Henderson, Sinatra’s pianist. “He would do anything for Ava. She was ruthless with him. If I ever knew a tiger or a panther… I am trying to think of an animal to describe her. I stayed out of her way. I was scared to death of her.”

Her next role in Pandora and The Flying Dutchman opposite James Mason took her to Spain, where the parties began at midnight and went on past dawn.

For the role of Juan Montalvo, they cast bullfighter Mario Cabré, who instantly fell in love with the wild and reckless actress. After a particularly heavy night Ava ‘woke up to find myself in bed with

Mario Cabré.” Sinatra landed in Barcelona on May 11th, looking like hell. Mario Cabre said he would kill Sinatra. He was serious. Matador means ‘killer’.

After filming, Ava went back to Frank and filmed the musical Showboat (1951), which was a huge hit. Ava was an A-list movie star, while Frank’s popularity was on the wane. On 7th November 1951, Frank and Ava tied the knot.

Mogambo (1953) secured Ava a Best Actress Oscar nomination in 1954 but she lost to Audrey Hepburn. At the same ceremony, Frank won Best Supporting Actor Award for From Here To Eternity.

Ava griped that the award had made him more arrogant than ever and that he no longer did the biz in bed. “Its like being in bed with a woman,” she told ex Artie Shaw.

“Handcuffed to each other in the cop shop, Sinatra made a call to his publicist, who arrived in a private jet with a suitcase full of greenbacks to bribe the police. Ava later told her sister that she’d had the most wonderful time with Frank” Frank, meanwhile, was celebrating his return to the big time by riding into as many showgirls as he could manage. In October that year, MGM issued a press release saying that the marriage was over.

Frank was inconsolable. Ava left for Rome to film The Barefoot Contessa opposite Humphrey Bogart and afterwards left to spend her 31st birthday in Madrid. Here she met Luis Miguel Dominguín, Spain’s number one bullfighter. “What a charming creature,” she announced. Hours after they had made love at the Hotel Wellington, Sinatra appeared in Madrid. Ava returned with Frank to the US but was anxious to get back to her matador, who instead came to her. Sinatra was livid.

Ava filed for divorce, requesting the now extremely wealthy Sinatra for a financial settlement to repay her for the money she’d spent funding their lavish lifestyle when his career was going down the drain. He accused her of being a gold digger, so she withdrew divorce proceedings and flew to Havana to swim naked in Hemingway’s pool, gamble, drink endless daiquiris, dance to Afro Cuban bands and

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screw as many Cuban waiters as you could shake a cocktail stick at.

Back in New York, Ava did a photo shoot, seated on the knee of Sammy Davis Junior dressed as Santa Claus. The shots ended up in what is perhaps the most scurrilous publication of all time, Confidential. The lurid editorial linked Ava to other black musicians Dizzy Gillespie and the Cuban Perez Prado. ‘Dark skinned gents have been proving their powerful fascination for Ava for years’ wrote the pseudonymous Horton Streete. “People said they would never go see her pictures again,” a Metro executive told journalist Joe Hyams. Shreveport, Louisiana banned all future Ava Gardner movies from the city, while Smithfield chamber of commerce removed the BIRTHPLACE OF AVA GARDNER from all their promotional literature. “Even my own family criticised me,” said Gardner.

In 1955 she moved house in Madrid and set up permanent residence. She hung out in the gypsy flamenco clubs and would bring the musicians back to her house. She became friends with poet/writer Robert Graves and had a lot of men in and out of her boudoir.

In Rome filming The Naked Maja in 1958, Ava was relentlessly pursued by paparazzi and she and her co-star Tony Francioso got in a fistfight with photographers. Federico Fellini saw the story in the papers and developed La Dolce Vita around it. Undoubtedly Ava was the prototype for Anita Ekberg’s stunning free spirited screen idol, who revels deep into the night, much to the disgust of her actor husband. The film might have been about Ava. After The Naked Maja, Ava’s MGM contact lapsed after 18 years, though she continued to co-star in a succession of movies by great directors such as On The Beach (Stanley Kramer, 1959) 55 Days at Peking (Nicholas Ray, 1963) and Seven Days in May (John Frankenheimer, 1964) but every production was marred by her anxieties on set. It wasn’t until John Huston’s The Night of The Iguana (1964, see Film Guide, overleaf) that she appeared in anything remarkable.

Ava then turned down the role of Mrs Robinson The Graduate. “I can’t act,” she simply (and inaccurately) said to director Mike Nicholls.

In 1968, she moved into a luxury pad in Park Lane, London. She wanted to start a new life with less brawls, no excessive all night drinking sessions, and no more crazy love affairs with crazy men.

She then moved to 34 Ennismore Garden, Knightsbridge, where she remained until her death.

She bought her local pub, the Ennismore Arms, its first jukebox, on the condition that they filled it with Sinatra platters. She turned 60 in 1982 and wasn’t concerned about her age. “I’m one hell of an old broad,” she’d say. Her last acting job was in a TV movie called Maggie in 1986.

I used to see Gardner often in San Lorenzo or Montepuliano in Knightsbridge, usually with Charles Grey, who played Blofeld in Diamonds Are Forever. One lunchtime around 1985 in San Lorenzo, I was dressed like a bit part player in a Hollywood film noir circa 1949. I passed the icon’s table to say hello to a friend seated nearby. As I walked past, she looked up, did a double take and smiled. Perhaps, dressed as I was, I reminded her of her youth.

“Who’s the older lady looking at you smiling?”

Asked my uncultured lunch companion. “She looks like somebody really famous, sort of regal, like some big movie star or a countess.”

“She is,” I was proud to whisper.

“That’s Ava Gardner.” n Ava Lavinia Gardner died of pneumonia aged 67 on January 25th, 1990.

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AVA GARDNER FILM GUIDE

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s we have already seen, Ava Gardner was a fascinating, beautiful, damaged woman, but was she a good actress? She did not, it has to be said, take her ‘craft’ very seriously, but nevertheless – almost accidentally – she turned in a handful of excellent performances in some truly excellent films. The Chap has saved you the trouble of wading through all the not-so-excellent ones to provide a definitive list of the top five Ava Gardner films.

THE KILLERS (1946) Directed by Robert Siodmak “I’m not stalling, Mr. Reardon, not now. I know when I’m beaten. I’m fighting for my life; not Kitty Collins’ life, but mine. I have a house now, and a husband. I’ve got a life worth fighting for and there’s nothing in this world I wouldn’t do to keep it just the way it is.”

“Well, we might still be able to do business, if you put a prize in with the crackerjack.”

“What do you mean?”

“I want a fall guy for the Law.” “Who would that be?”

“Colefax.”

“Even the old Kitty Collins never sang, Mr. Reardon.”

The Killers, with Burt Lancaster and Edmond O’Brien and based on a story by Ernest Hemingway, is the first film in which Ava Gardner’s talent begins to shine. It’s a classic film noir, told true to form via flashback, in which Ava’s Kitty Collins is a sultry femme fatale who eventually turns the tables on her former lover, Lancaster’s The Swede. Steeped in the moody lighting, long shadows and sharp dialogue of film noir, Ava Gardner’s performance is light years away from any of her previous work and her true talent comes to light with the perfect part for her.

The script is all the more impressive for the vast quantity of revisions enforced by The Breen Office, the censorship board that had to approve all scripts before shooting began. The Killers’ huge report contained such instructions as ‘please omit any liquor or drinking in scene’; ‘change showing of gun blasting straight into camera’; ‘avoid showing unmade bed’; ‘sign should read ‘Ladies Lounge’ and no sawn-off shotguns with criminals’.

One can only imagine the violent, sexually suggestive film that would have been made without any censors, but The Killers can still pack a punch even to today’s Netflix-jaded viewers.

THE GREAT SINNER (1949) Directed by Robert Siodmak “I consulted my cards…

The ten of clubs, that’s wealth from an unexpected source. The deuce – a love affair. The Queen of diamonds – that’s danger.

It means a selfish female that you can’t resist. So you see there’s nothing you can do about it – I’m going to make a gambler out of you.”

“I’ve another proposal – let me make a woman out of you.”

“Anything you like, only bring me luck.”

“I warn you, morality is contagious.”

“So is vice, gambling most of all. Now we’ve both been warned, shall we go and find out who is stronger?”

The Great Sinner, in which Ava stars opposite Gregory Peck, is as powerful a portrayal of the evils of gambling as any hard-hitting modern documentary.

Based on The Gambler, a novella by Dostoyevsky, The Great Sinner finds an erstwhile cynical Fyodor (Peck) heading for the roulette tables, in order to win enough money to squire Pauline (Ava Gardner) out of a marriage arranged to settle a $200,000 debt to

the House. Ava, who won the role from both Deborah Kerr and Lana Turner, appears in a series of ever more extravagant ball gowns, set against Peck’s odd Doc Holliday ensemble (the film is set in the late 19th century). Naturally, she plays a double-dealing, heartless femme fatale of the most glamorous order.

The lengths to which Fyodor will go, once addicted to roulette, are shown by his ever more desperate offers of security against further gambling debts, eventually offering the House all of his literary royalties in perpetuity. Dostoyevsky, an inveterate gambler himself, would have enjoyed this fable of the addict selling his literary soul.

THE BAREFOOT CONTESSA (1954) Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz “Now my five ordinary senses, what with alcohol and other forms of abuse, are nothing special. But I have a sixth sense that any witch in the world would give her left broomstick to have.”

“And, with sense number six, you feel something about me?”

“Owing to circumstances beyond my control, I hereby advise you not to come to Rome to make the test. Not to come to America, at least not

for a while.”

“At least not to Mr. Kirk Edwards. Is that what you feel?”

“Part of it. Let’s say that’s the only part I can put into words.”

While not a stunningly original or intellectually demanding film, The Barefoot Contessa stands as an occasionally eerie prediction of the real life of its star, Ava Gardner. It tells the story of Maria Vargas, a Spanish flamenco dancer plucked from poverty and obscurity to become a famed actress. Poor old Maria cannot let go of her authentic gypsy soul, even when mingling with the jet set of California, and prefers to steal away in the night to dance her beloved flamenco with her Gitano brethren.

Yes, it’s all bit limp and pointless, but Humphrey Bogart’s in it as well as Ava Gardner more or less playing herself (she became infatuated with Spain and had various affairs with bullfighters, one of whom, Luis Dominguín, she brought with her on set). One of the first films of a genre that came to be known as ‘Hollywood on the Tiber’ it was made as a joint venture between United Artists and Cinecittà Studios in Rome. Ava divided her pre-production time between fittings for dresses at the House of Fontana and posing for a life-size sculpture of the Contessa, which ended up in Frank Sinatra’s Beverly Hills garden before he started throwing bricks at it.

Humphrey Bogart had arrived with his wig-maker and installed himself at the Excelsior Hotel, where he

favoured both the bartender and the nearby restaurant that served ham and eggs.

The two stars did not hit it off. Bogie ruined dozens of takes by constantly needling the less experienced Ava, and disrupted others with his hacking cough, an early sign of the lung cancer that would eventually kill him. However, the end result is an enjoyable fictional romp through Ava’s life, and the outdoor flamenco dance sequence is worth the price of admission alone.

THE ANGEL WORE RED (1960) Directed by Nunnally Johnson “Is that good for an eyeball – water?”

“It’s not water, it’s English gin, very antiseptic.”

“But do you need four eyeballs?”

“Every gentleman needs at least four, for routine social events. This one has a rather wicked glint in it, for winking at you girls after midnight. This one has a good, clean, honest look, for dealing with mothers. This one’s for patriotic occasions; it has a small American flag painted across the pupil. A tribute to God’s country impossible for the old-fashioned two-eyed man.”

It is extremely rare to find a film totally dismissed by critics when released that turns out to be a ‘lost classic’, but this is certainly true of The Angel Wore Red. Another Hollywood on the Tiber coproduction, it was filmed in Rome but set in Spain during the Civil War (Franco would not allow them to film in postwar Spain).

Director Nunnally Johnson summarised the plot as “Horny priest and virgin-type prostie” but that does the film a disservice. Dirk Bogarde plays a renegade priest, on the run from Republicans who are rounding up the clergy across the country, given a place to hide and a bosom to lean on by Ava’s harlot with a heart of gold. Joseph Cotton is in fine form as the grizzled one-eyed hack in search of a human angle on his Civil War dispatches. The script is full of sparkling, witty dialogue, and the final graphically depicted torture scenes inside the cathedral are as harrowing today as they would have seemed in 1960.

THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA (1964) Directed by John Huston “Where’s Fred?”

“Dead.”

“Is he dead?”

“That’s what I said. Fred’s dead.”

“I was counting on Fred helping me out, on bailing me out. He was my hope of salvation. I had all my chips on Fred.”

“Baby, you’re going to pieces, aren’t you?”

“Yes, they are tearing me to pieces. I was just hanging on until I could get here, to the hammock on the veranda over the rainforest and the stillwater beach. That’s all that can pull me through.”

“Honey, you just sit down there on the hammock and I’ll fix you a nice rum coco.”

Based on Tennessee Williams’ last theatrical success, The Night Of the Iguana united, finally, the three wildcats of Hollywood that were destined to work, drink and play together: Richard Burton, John Huston and Ava Gardner. Huston reworked the part of Maxine Faulk, which he felt revealed Williams’ fear of women in the play, and reshaped her as more lovable, funny, sexy, profane and flawed – qualities that he thought Ava Gardner possessed in spades. The hard drinking trio got on like a house on fire on location in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, whose lush tropical setting Huston oddly chose to film in black and white.

Both Ava Gardner and Richard Burton turn in two of the finest performances of their careers, guided by the authoritarian and pistol-whipping Huston. Burton’s dishevelled, dipsomaniac priest probably wasn’t very difficult to summon up for the actor, while Ava Gardner’s sassy, ageing, rum-toting hotelier chimed with the beginning of the unquiet autumn years of her career. Her role is offset by Deborah Kerr’s puritanical christian and Sue Lyon’s (who had played Lolita two years before) teenage temptress. One man, three women, one night indeed. n

Hollywood Style Photoshoot (p44) • Interview with Charlotte Mitchell (p54) • Russell Nash Tour (p64) • The Albert Slipper (p72) • The Spearpoint Collar (p76) • The Teba Jacket (p82) • Grey Fox Column (p88)

Model: Pandora Harrison Photo: Hanson Leatherby

SARTORIAL

MODEL: Goldy Loxx (@goldyloxxroxx) PHOTOGRAPHY: Photo My Boudoir (@nicolamyboudoir)

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MODEL: Stephanie Jay (@stephaniejay_uk) PHOTOGRAPHER: Nils Bratby

MODEL: Candice Gutmann PHOTOGRAPHER: Rose Callahan (@rcallahanphoto)

MODEL: Autumn Adamme PHOTOGRAPHER: Rose Callahan

MODEL: Kayla Ferguson PHOTOGRAPHER: Rose Callahan

MODEL: Colleen Darnell PHOTOGRAPHER: Rose Callahan

MODEL: Syrie Moskowitz PHOTOGRAPHER: Rose Callahan

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MODEL: Isabella Bliss (@miss_isabella_bliss) PHOTOGRAPHER: Scott Chalmers

Interview

CHARLOTTE MITCHELL Gustav Temple meets the costume designer on the BBC’s new production of Agatha Christie’s The Pale Horse, whose previous credits include Killing Eve

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“The whole premise behind the costume design and the story is rural English postwar life versus the more modern Americanisation that’s coming into the city.

Everything I do is trying to tell a story through the styling, whether it’s Killing Eve or the Pale Horse”

hat precise year is The Pale Horse set in?

It’s very precisely set in 1961.

When people think of the sixties, they think, Oh wow, the swinging sixties, mini skirts, summer of love, but that all comes later. 1961 actually had massive echoes of the 1950s; it’s still very conservative, and people of a certain generation still wore clothes from the 1940s and 50s. All those considerations of what goes on in society have to come into the costume, to make it real.

Were the three witches the exception; could they go off period because they’re witches?

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Yes, they can go off-piste because they’re witches, but you have to stick to the accuracy of the period for the person who’s playing the character. The witches live in a village and you take that into account; and also they’re of different ages. So we had Rita Tushingham (above left) and we backdated her, because she is of a certain age. In the 60s anyone in their 40s or 50s would refer back to an earlier period in their clothes. Rita’s character Bella is very much of the land, so she’s made do and mended from that wartime generation.

We had the younger witch, Sybil (Kathy Kiera Clarke, above centre), who also refers back to the fifties, with fuller skirts and so on, even though she’s younger, because of living in a rural community.

Sheila Atim as Thryza (above right) is very tall and beautiful, so we went for a very androgynous style for her. Even though she’s of the land, we gave her more of a Marlene Dietrich flair, with a rustic edge, to make it look like she belonged in the village.

How was it styling such an icon of the 60s in costume that harks back to the very period she is most known for?

I think Rita was pleased that we actually went for a more wiry, old crone kind of look that didn’t refer to the sixties at all!

For the suits worn by Rufus Sewell and others, did you source vintage items or have them tailored?

I found one original suit that was correct for the period, and it fitted Rufus like a glove. Then I had that copied by Academy Costumes so we’d keep the same shape, made from some amazing original sixties fabric that they had, with the slightly heavier, denser weave of the period. But the key thing to making a suit look correct for the 60s is what you put inside – the canvas was always quite a heavyweight canvas, which makes it look very different from a modern suit, which has a much softer drape.

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Rufus has a particular knack of being able to hold himself in the correct way.

He’s a fantastic clotheshorse, let’s face it

You also see Rufus in a couple of scenes in his weekend attire, and that pale blue sports jacket and dark blue trousers outfit was also vintage. The rest of his suits were all tailored, based on that one vintage suit.

When you compared this to, say, season two of Killing Eve, in which you had free rein to use and even invent contemporary styles, is a period piece more limiting to design?

It isn’t, because we still want to tell a story and a

He seems to have moulded his form well for the period. I’m sure I’ve seen that exact pose he’s striking next to the Bentley in countless 60s menswear fashion catalogues.

Absolutely! Rufus has a particular knack of being able to hold himself in the correct way. He’s a fantastic clotheshorse, let’s face it. He’s done a few sixties shows, like The Man in the High Castle, so I think he’s done a lot of referencing to the period. So it’s a dream to put the right clothing on him and for him to hold himself correctly in it, in a period way and not a modern way. From a design point of view, I spend a lot of time talking to actors about how they should hold themselves when things are cut differently. Actors appreciate being advised on how to hold themselves, as it helps to own the character.

“I also look at the real thing in clothes from a specific period, in this case 1961. I’ll read about what was going on at that time; not just the clothes, but what else was going on, to understand why fashion was going that way. Because fashion always reflects what’s happening in society” 58

The whole premise behind the costume design and the story is rural English postwar life, versus the more modern Americanisation that’s coming into the city

big part of that is told through the costume. Even though this drama is set in 1961, there are so many characters of different ages, from so many different walks of life, that I can have just as much fun with them as with a contemporary piece. Having the job of creating a personality through costume means that I’m not restricted. With Mark Easterbrook (Rufus Sewell) and Hermia (Kaya Scodelario) I had to conform, because they definitely conformed to the values of 1961. The styling behind it was really designed to push that. We even threw in a bit of an American feel, to differentiate them from the witches in the village.

The whole premise behind the costume design and the story is rural English postwar life versus the more modern Americanisation that’s coming into the city. Everything I do is trying to tell a story through the styling, whether it’s Killing Eve or The Pale Horse.

Oh sure, but only people that really grab me and are relevant to the show I’m currently working on.

So I do have heroes but they relate to what I’m doing at the time, rather than saying, Oh, this is my hero and that’s who I follow all the time. But I don’t watch films and only observe the costume design – it’s the whole element of how it was filmed that inspires me.

I’m from a fashion background, and I love to look at how real period fashion worked, and how you can style them with a modern eye for the audience to relate to them. Obviously I’m influenced by previous costume designers, but I’ll also look at the real thing in clothes from a specific period, in this case 1961. I’ll read about what was going on at that time; not just the clothes, but what else was going on, to understand why fashion was going that way. Because fashion always reflects what’s happening in society.

“When this came along, set in the 60s, it seemed so exciting and fresh. So then I realized I wanted to find out more, because this is something people aren’t used to seeing, so we’re really going to heighten the almost Mad Men-esque feel to the styling”

Do you ever dress actors to try and express something about the moral standpoint of their character? It was common in films produced in the 60s to portray a caddish character wearing a cravat, as opposed to the necktie of a supposedly more gentlemanly character. Is neckwear used in this way at all in The Pale Horse?

Yes, there are elements of showing silhouette and colour to show who’s bad and who’s good. I wanted to show Mark’s world as not necessarily sinister but just a bit cold. So I used a steely, icy colour palette to express that. Then I put more interesting textural colours into the clothes of the villagers. The cravat you mention was not to express character but age, compared to Mark who always wears a tie with a tie clip, then David, the younger character, in an open-collared shirt. That shows the progression of fashion through ages. So in one year, differentaged characters are wearing what would be right for them. The director wanted touches of red, to hint at something sinister going on, hence the red cravat. It didn’t have to be on particular people to give the game away.

We also used cufflinks in this way. Osborne, the hardware store owner, is in button cuffs, with no extra details. With Mark, he’s got cufflinks, tie clip; everything is correct. Even David, the younger character with his open-collared shirt, still has cufflinks and a pinkie ring, to show his class. It’s the little details that are really important. n

It’s quite rare for an Agatha Christie adaptation to be set in the sixties. Was the book written quite late in her career?

Yes, this story delves much more into the supernatural, which Agatha Christie got interested in as she got older. Back in the day when I was still working my way up the ladder in costume, I did some Agatha Christie adaptations and they were all Poirot, set in the 1920s/30s, so when this came along, set in the 60s, it seemed so exciting and fresh. So then I realized I wanted to find out more, because this is something people aren’t used to seeing, so we’re really going to heighten the almost Mad Men-esque feel to the styling.

In the world of costume designers, do you, like actors, refer back to what was done before by others? Do you have costume designer heroes?

Agatha Christie’s The Pale Horse is on BBC One

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Sartorial

SARTORIAL LONDON Gustav Temple takes a highly educational sartorial stroll around the West End of London with professional city tour guide Russell Nash

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e meet on the steps of the Athenaeum Club and head along Pall Mall towards St James’s Palace, where we briefly pause to reflect on its most sartorially elegant resident. Russell takes up the story:

“The man who lived here between 1919, when he became Prince of Wales, and 1936, when he became King, was Albert Edward Christian George Patrick Andrew David Windsor, known to everyone as David. All Princes of Wales since the days of Queen Victoria were called Albert until our very own Charles. You’ve covered the Duke of Windsor a lot in The Chap, but my favourite fact about him was that he maintained a 30-inch waist throughout the whole of his life, from 18 to 77 years old. He died leaving 15 evening suits, 55 lounge suits and a hundred pairs of shoes, among many others.

David was modernist and didn’t like dressing formally, and thus brought a more relaxed style into menswear. He danced the Rumba and the Charleston rather than the Gavotte and the Foxtrot;

he played golf rather than go shooting. He had a very stern, unbending father, George V, who had said of his parents: “My father was terrified of his father; I was terrified of him, and by God, my children will be terrified of me.” He also said about David: ‘After I’ve gone, the boy will ruin himself within a year.’ And he was right about that.

“In the fashion business, designers decide what they’re going to make and people buy into that. With bespoke, the customer is the designer. Most customers at Lobb will get fairly conservative shoes that won’t go out of fashion and can be worn every day” 65

When a young aristo named Mr. Coke wanted a hat for his gamekeepers, whose top hats were being knocked off by branches, he required something that would sit close to the head but also offer protection.

So he came to Lock & Co in 1849 and they came up with a rounded hat, which they hardened using Shellac, made from beetles, produced by the Bowler Brothers down in Southwark. The famous story is that the Earl brought the new hat out on to the pavement and jumped up and down on it to ensure it wouldn’t break. By the beginning of the 20th century they were making 60,000 Coke Hats a year.”

“George Melly said of Vince’s Man’s Shop that if you go in to buy a tie, they insist on measuring your inside leg. But it was here, in the mid-1950s, that John Stephen – the million pound mod – worked” So David lived here in York House, part of the Palace, which I think is where the unmentionable one now lives.”

JOHN LOBB Inside the hushed, reverent room, full of softly-lit cabinets displaying the finest men’s shoes ever created, Russell confides in me his theories about the difference between fashion and style: “In the fashion business, designers decide what they’re going to make and people buy into that. With bespoke, the customer is the designer. Unless you’re a rock star or a movie star, at these sorts of prices, most customers at Lobb will get fairly conservative shoes that won’t go out of fashion and can be worn every day. So what we see on display are your brogues, Oxfords, etc, but you can

LOCK & CO “In 1676, James Lock opened a hat shop very close to here. At the time, this area behind the Palace was being developed. Henry Jermyn, who had taken a lease on the land, developed it and the aristocracy started to move in, and with them all the services they needed. The current Lock & Co shop front dates from the early 1800s, one of the oldest intact original London shop fronts.

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Hor nets

Men’s Vintage Classic British & Designer CLOTHING SHOES ACCESSORIES HATS Three shops in the heart of Kensington near the Palace 2/4 Kensington Church Walk, London W8 4NB hornetskensington.co.uk 0207 937 2627 hornetskensington

have absolutely anything made here, as long as you pay for it.” We notice a cabinet full of velvet Albert Slippers, and both agree that every gentleman should own at least one pair.

four shirts. Where these buildings intersect is where Beau Brummell’s grandfather William Brummell had a set of rooms that he let to aristocrats. Lord North came to London to take his seat in the House of Lords and took some rooms at William Brummell’s.

Brummell asked him if there was any work for his son Billy. So Billy, father of Beau Brummell, went to work for Lord North and eventually became his chief of staff when Lord North was prime minister.

George ‘Beau’ Brummell was then reputedly born in a grace and favour apartment in Hampton Court Palace, went to Eton, and by the time his father died he was one of the 500 richest men in the country. His sister gave her inheritance to her two daughters as dowries, his elder brother set himself up as a country squire, and Beau Brummell spent his inheritance on the finest set of clothes he could find and set himself up in some rooms on Chesterfield Street, and launched himself on London society. He was tall, elegant and perfectly proportioned and it was said of him that, had he needed to, he could have been an artist’s model.

It was a time when tastes were changing; the French Revolution had happened; the Treaty of Alexandria of 1801, after Napoleon’s disastrous

CROWN PASSAGE At the entrance to this gas-lit alley off Jermyn Street, Russ pauses eloquently to quote Samuel Johnson, who said of London: “If you wish to have a just notion of the magnificence of this city, you must not be satisfied with its grand streets and squares, but must take full survey of its innumerable little alleyways and courtyards. When you come down Crown Passage, you really get a feel for what he meant. It still has gas lamps. There are about 1,600 gas lamps in this part of London, powered by mains gas operated by timers. Until 1980 they were all still lit by hand every night. There are still four full-time employees who maintain the gas lamps of London, who work for British Gas.” TURNBULL & ASSER Bury Street. “This has been Turnbull & Asser’s bespoke outlet since 1885; the main shop is up there on Jermyn Street. They have a minimum order of

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campaign in Egypt, had brought the booty of war to London, mostly to the British Museum. Lord Elgin brought the marbles from the Parthenon, and people saw these well-built, classical, beautifully proportioned objects, and that became the standard of the day. The Napoleonic Wars also brought in a militaristic look, and a rejection of the French style.

Brummell’s look was ordered, classical, post-French revolution and British.”

new, something you could afford, music blaring out of the shops. On the other side of the Charing Cross Road, Cecil Gee was selling imported Italian clothes – but it was still middle-aged men in suits behind the counter serving the mods. What John Stephen was doing was more like what we’d call fast fashion today. Carnaby Street became the centre of it; at one stage John Stephen owned 13 shops just on this street. By the 1970s every town in the country had a fancy menswear shop selling John Stephen’s style of clothing. He was a working class lad and, for the first time ever, fashion was not being dictated by well-born fashion designers; it was coming up from the streets. And the same is true today; apart from Savile Row, most of the fashions in London Fashion Week come from the street.

Carnaby Street really went downmarket in the 1980s, with lots of cheap, tatty shops and tattoo parlours, whereas today it’s undergone a massive resurgence. However, around the corner is a green plaque to another massively important fashion man who predates even John Stephen. As we pass Marshall Court, let’s not forget Mark Powell, still going strong as a Carnaby Street tailor since 1985.

In the mid-50s the grey slate of austerity was still hanging over Britain, and this part of northern Soho was quite run down, with lots of sweatshops.

The next street is Marshall Street, and here were the public baths. Although homosexuality was still illegal, they were very popular with discreet gentlemen. One of them opened a new shop, Vince’s Man Shop, and that man was Bill Green.

Originally a photographer, Bill Green got into trouble by publishing what were described as ‘underwear catalogues’. Then Vince’s Man’s Shop became very popular with musicians and society people such as Anthony Armstrong-Jones.

George Melly said of Vince’s Man’s Shop that if you go in to buy a tie, they insist on measuring your inside leg. But it was here, in the mid-1950s, that John Stephen worked. It’s been described as Bill Green being the Bill Hailey to John Stephen’s Elvis. So Bill Green’s shop was the first of a new wave of menswear shops, and from that came John Stephen and the Peacock Revolution, and it all started right here on Marshall Street.” n

CLIFFORD STREET We leapfrog two centuries for our next visit, to Clifford Street on the edge of Savile Row, and the site of the premises of Mr. Fish.

“Mr. Fish was chief cutter at Turnbull & Asser and set up on his own, with the backing of Barry Sainsbury. Turnbull & Asser had given him a lot of free rein to create more outré garments, which made him realise there was a market for them.

But this was not the King’s Road; this was Clifford Street, the heart of Savile Row, with Bond Street and Dover Street nearby. So in the sixties Mr. Fish charged, from this shop, £100 a suit, the same as you’d have paid on Savile Row.

Beau Brummell had famously said that a welldressed man should not be noticed, but Mr. Fish now said, not any more.

Mr. Fish was very tied into the counterculture; he was a regular at the UFO Club. The press loved him for his slightly trippy, out-there way of talking, always good with the quotes. But he wasn’t actually selling to the hipsters; he was selling to those that could afford it. Savile Row was atrophying in the 1960s, due to the fact that men no longer wanted to dress like their fathers. The other major difference was that a boy from the East End could now mingle with the aristocracy, and it also worked the other way round, so members of the aristocracy wanted to dress more like the Rolling Stones.

This led to shops like Blades on Dover Street, around the corner, owned by Rupert Lycett-Green, who was a proper toff. He was producing a more stripped down, Pierre Cardin type of look, cut by Eric Joy. But once Joy left and Lycett-Green started making kaftans, things went downhill fast (though he is currently a very wealthy man – but not from menswear).”

Russell Nash Blue Badge London Tourist Guide

CARNABY STREET “John Stephen, the King of Carnaby Street, the million pound mod, owned a Rolls Royce at 24.

He invented a new style of retailing with young people working in the shops, always something

www.guiderussell.co.uk @guiderussell

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Footwear

SLIPPERS Liam Jefferies on the indoor footwear that can sometimes be worn out-of-doors, such is their discreet elegance

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“It is here that we arrive, as readers of this humble organ often do, at Beau Brummell, who, alongside so many other garments in menswear, popularised the slipper”

ith the festive season well and truly behind us, chaps have put away their smoking jackets, housecoats and fezzes until the next time of year it is deemed appropriate to don one’s pyjamas until noon. However, there is one item in the arsenal of household accoutrements that deserves its inclusion into everyday wear: the slipper.

Please do not take the term ‘slipper’ to mean the fluffy post-bathing footwear served up in hotel rooms and alongside cheap cologne gift sets, for there are much more refined examples occupying their rightful place in the classic wardrobe.

The only notable defining characteristic of the slipper is that one must be able to slip them on and off without fastening, as the name denotes.

No prizes there. Generally constructed from soft materials with minimal structuring and a thin sole, slippers are intended primarily for indoor use, with a focus on comfort over functionality.

In The Poetical Works of Dr. William King Vol II, published 1781, slippers and their connotations with

the home are used to comedic effect in the scolding of an errant and journeying husband:

“For if he went abroad too much, she’d use

To give him slippers and lock up his shoes”

Similarly, it is said that the harems of the Ottoman Turks were shod in slippers to mar their escape, though perhaps the earliest usage of the style was 4700 BCE China, where slippers were viewed as a status symbol, as no manual labour could be performed in them. This practice carried through to the West, as high-status burials from Roman Britain suggest.

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It is here that we arrive, as readers of this humble organ often do, at Beau Brummell, who, alongside so many other garments in menswear, popularised the slipper, or rather a version of it, with the bourgeoisie of the time: the opera pump.

It may have been just as ill-suited to outdoor wear, though the Bon Ton rarely had to foot it to their evening engagements. This variant, albeit with a hardier sole, is still seen as de rigueur with white tie dress codes and court dress to this day.

The most recognisable of slipper styles is the Albert. Named for the royal consort of Queen Victoria alongside the tie knot, the style harks back to his favoured model, seen in portraits since the 1840s. Black velvet being the material of choice, the Albert is also known as the ‘Churchill’, when it was constructed from leather for the Prime Minister, one century later, who also had a penchant for the slipper.

The Albert model slipper is perhaps a fellow’s prime opportunity to showcase his personality in the footwear department, and what better

form of rakish personalisation than embroidered monogramming? One could be forgiven for considering velvet slippers a bridge too far for those not on first-name terms with their local shoemaker.

However, one company provides an affordable and well-constructed take on the authentic slipper, with the provenance to match.

Bowhill & Elliott was established in 1874 at 65, London Street in the heart of Norwich’s historic shoe quarter, when founder Obadiah Bowhill purchased the business from Wright & Co. The business passed to son and from son to sonin-law, one Thomas Baines Elliott, at the end of the 19th Century. This partnership of Bowhill and Elliott would continue to the present day, under the direction of Roger Jury, descendant of Mr. Elliott.

From its shop in Norwich, the company stocks a large selection of footwear, including Northampton-born brands such as Crockett & Jones, Cheaney, Barker’s, and Loake. However, it is within these walls that a small factory is located, where Bowhill and Elliott manufacture slippers

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www.herring.co.uk

and house shoes. Specialists in producing handembroidered house shoes from velvet, tweeds, needlepoint and even tapestry, the fact that such artisan production is still practised in the very building in which it was first established proves the company’s proclivity towards the traditional.

watchful eye of Roger Jury, where, from pattern to hand-lasting to final embroidery, customers can be assured of the company’s trademark level of craftsmanship. Slippers can be monogrammed with one’s initials, insignia, family emblem, school crest or custom design limited only by one’s imagination or daring.

Another characteristic feature of B&E slippers is the innovation of the ‘Street Slipper®’, a trademarked rubber sole allowing for wear outdoors, bringing panache from the ballroom to the boulevard. Of their in-house signature styles, Chap favourites include embroidered rampant lions, skull and crossbones, and of course a cabaret skeleton, complete with cane and top hat. n

“Black velvet being the material of choice, the Albert was also known as the ‘Churchill’ when it was constructed from leather for the Prime Minister, one century later, who also had a penchant for the slipper”

Bowhill & Elliott 65 London Street Norwich www.bowhillandelliott.co.uk

Orders from around the world arrive at the Bowhill and Elliott factory, which is located beneath the shop’s floor and run under the

@sartorialchap

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Sartorial

EVERYONE LOOKS GOOD IN A SPEARPOINT COLLAR Matt Deckard fumes at the direction collar points have headed over the last few decades, and advocates a return to the classic and universally flattering spearpoint collar

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he man’s shirt collar has been shrinking over the years. Not only shrinking, but also it’s been running away from the knot of your tie. You can see it clear as day; those collar points are spreading farther and farther apart. I believe part of this is caused by the erroneous notion that the ‘fashion elite’ like to press on the public, that there are certain collars that work best with certain face shapes, and they have a ritualistic standard that is all you should follow.

Now I’m not completely disputing that there is some balance between face shape and collar style that should be adhered to, but one collar, regardless of face shape, has always stood out and been the best of the best, when going for that true masculine standard of covering all bases without looking out of place. It works for spendthrifts, ne’er do wells, aristocrats and the homeless.

But back to the ‘fashion elite’ and what they think works for whom. Too many style guides like to proclaim: round face, spread collar. NO!

That just makes your face look like a balloon on a platform. Any sense of regality you assume it gives you – it doesn’t. It just rounds out your face even more. Put on a classic spearpoint collar. Out of fashion now, yes, but that’s because we are in the post-apocalyptic future, where people assume we should be wearing jumpsuits without collars, and the industry has decided to go with a simple ‘spread collar’ and ‘not spread’ collar on the shelves, only until customers find the the jumpsuits. Also, every factory has a cookie cutter, and the spearpoint, with that half-moon cutout shape forming a fang at the end, isn’t the easiest thing to cut and then sew.

But what about the long face, you may ask… does that work with the spread collar? More so than the round face, yes, but the strangest thing: this is the case where modern fashion tells those people to go for the point collar, the in-between child of the spread and the spearpoint, which all companies favour to try and make us all blend together aesthetically. Good enough for politicians that have become the brand ambassadors of these fashion

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“Wars and concert T-shirts, and not having to go outside to see the sun or other people these days, have whittled away at the need for an understanding of why things like the spearpoint collar were once de rigeur in a man’s closet” companies, but not good enough for the Chaps and dandies and rock stars, who have to head to thrift shops to find classic spearpoint collars that have an edge and some style.

When it comes to the long face, ‘no spread’ is the advice, as they claim it makes a face too long (a face can never be too long), so they advise just a point collar. The collar standard of today, as stated before, has got shorter and further away from your tie knot, as if it’s thinking, “Why am I even here?” With this setup, the tie knots get bigger and bigger as they try to reach out to the runaway collars. Result: collars that can’t accommodate a collar bar or pin, as these simply can’t reach the other side.

Here in the US, Rockefeller and Edison and Henry Ford could easily have J.C. Penney’s deliver a box of round edged, starch stiffened, celluloid fire hazards to put around their necks. But when it came to the generation that realized this was quite uncomfortable, they went and had their tailors make soft spearpoint collars which point down and

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resemble beautiful floppy romance caressing a silk tie.

Even better when that tie is cradled by the soft collar points being pulled together by a collar bar.

Wars and concert T-shirts, and not having to go outside to see the sun or other people these days, have whittled away at the need for an understanding of why things like the spearpoint collar were once de rigeur in a man’s closet. Today, what used to be Hollywood is using many recreations to fill the void of what they can’t find on the rack when they make movies like Fantastic Beasts or the upcoming Kingsman movie, or even Christopher Robin, which is set in the 1930s. Ewan McGregor should never wear another collar style again, as I’m sure Pooh would agree.

Ten years ago, men rediscovered the waistcoat (I think they saw me wearing ones that matched my bespoke suits, and they thought they were missing something). Nonetheless, it looked good and right, adding a smartness that the waistcoatless were living without.

The spearpoint collar looks good on everyone.

Whether it’s hanging outside and over a jacket, worn next to a flaming biplane under a leather jacket, or with a chalk stripe suit behind the desk of a bank full of computers where people once were. It’s over three inches long and loves to hug a tie. There are a few different versions, and here in the states Hollywood kept making them grow, but they are now very hard to find, though an essential part of what made Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart and Walt Disney the beguiling entities we aspire to be: men wearing spearpoint collars who didn’t give a damn.

Everyone looks good in a spearpoint collar.

Just look at Bertie Wooster! n

Reliable suppliers of spearpoint collared shirts from both sides of the Atlantic:

MR. FREEDOM www.misterfreedom.com Based in Hollywood, their attention to detail is so iconic, people travel across the globe to see the latest stylings.

ADAM OF LONDON www.adamoflondon.com Shirts quite fitted in the torso, but a beautiful rendition of the daggered look we love.

PROHIBITION CLOTHING COMPANY www.prohibition clothing.com Often making appearances with booths at cocktail filled events in New York, this is a welcome addition to a city desperately in need of spearpoint collars.

DOUBLE RL www.ralphlauren.com/brands-double-rl-men The vintage arm of Ralph Lauren. Yes, all his clothes riff off vintage in some way or another, but this line is meant to be the exact copies. It is said that if you clap hard enough, Ralph Lauren himself will bring back their spearpoint remakes.

Some years they have them, some years they don’t. This isn’t our year.

CHESTER CORDITE www.chester cordite.com Not only do they make a spectacular American style bolder spearpoint, but they also have an amazingly detailed array of action back suits.

Sartorial

THE TEBA JACKET Gustav Temple road tests a Spanish take on the Hacking Jacket that has its origins in the aristocratic circles of the 1930s

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“When King Alfonso went into voluntary exile to Rome in 1931, the Teba Jacket also went into exile, only emerging from the dusty cupboards of menswear retailers in the last few decades”

mages of southern Spain, usually composed of matadors, barrels of sherry, women in flamenco dresses and orange trees wilting in the heat, do not commonly include tweed jackets. It’s rarely cold enough in Andalucía to don even a waistcoat, never mind a full tweed ensemble.

Yet during the 1930s there emerged, from the royal and aristocratic country set, an Andalucian take on the Hacking Jacket that came to be known as the Teba Jacket.

It was named after the snappily titled Don Carlos Mitjans y Fitz-James Stuart, XXI Conde de Teba y XV Conde de Baños, Grande de España, or Conde de Teba for short, who was a bit of a dandy, a lover of country sports and close chums with the King of Spain, the also rather dandiacal Alfonso

XIII. The pair went shooting frequently when Teba was very young, eventually earning himself the nickname ‘Bunting’ from the King, who was impressed with the young dandy’s shooting skills.

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“Any visit to Seville, Jerez or Cadiz will reveal a sartorial affinity with the British among Andalucian men; the streets abound with menswear emporia brimming with plus fours, trilbies and hacking jackets�

When King Alfonso (above) next visited his Savile Row tailor, he commissioned a suitable jacket for hunting, with the flexibility, pockets and panache required, and then immediately presented the finished product to his pal and named it after him – the Teba Jacket. The Count himself suggested a few modifications, with the result being a jacket with distinctly Andalucian qualities setting it apart from its British counterparts.

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“Half lined and unstructured, the Teba has a soft shoulder silhouette similar to Neapolitan tailoring.

It features characteristic un-notched lapels and a four-button front (one should only button the second and third button)”

Any visit to Seville, Jerez or Cadiz will reveal a sartorial affinity with the British among Andalucian men; the streets abound with menswear emporia brimming with plus fours, trilbies and hacking jackets. But this sartorial homage did not take place under Generalisimo Franco. When King Alfonso went into voluntary exile to Rome in 1931, in order to avoid the public violence that might erupt as the nation ceded to a republic, the Teba Jacket also went into exile, only emerging from the dusty cupboards of menswear retailers in the last few decades. Today, one may acquire a Teba Jacket easily in Andalucía, and also in the UK.

Curzon Classics, based in Seville for the last 25 years, manufacture classic British country clothing as well as the Teba Jacket in a multitude of fabrics, including linen, cotton twill and tweed.

Tweed Tebas offer an interesting British spin on the original Spanish design. A half lining and lined sleeves eliminates the ‘drag’ of the wool fibres when removing the jacket. The Teba has several signature features that set it aside from other tweed jackets. A soft shoulder silhouette similar to Neapolitan tailoring, characteristic un-notched lapels and a four-button front (one should only button the second and third button).

Leather or nacar are the buttons of choice. The Teba has no rear vents and its shirt-style barrelled cuff offers the option of a formal closed cuff or a more relaxed folded back look. n

The Teba pictured right is made from forest green herringbone tweed and is available from www.curzon.es

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Mature Style

THE GREY FOX COLUMN David Evans celebrates reaching ‘retirement age’ by hitting the road on a gravel bike in some Dashing Tweeds

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mentioned at the end of my last column that I’d become a grandfather. While I don’t feel old enough to be a grandparent, the calendar cannot lie and I’ve now reached the age of 65. This was at one time the age of retirement – out would come the slippers and the moth-eaten cardigan and a chap would then sit around waiting for the grim reaper.

I don’t remember my grandparents’ generation doing much after retirement. I suppose some made models of Tower Bridge from matchsticks, or played darts and drank brown ale down at the Conservative/Labour/Liberal Club, but things are very different nowadays. There’s all that tosh about fifty being the new forty and sixty the new forty or whatever. That’s all very comforting, but there’s no doubt that we are blessed

with better life expectancy than our grandparents, with better healthcare (well, up to a point) and more active lifestyles. It’s sad that this improvement in life expectancy from generation to generation is coming to an end, thanks to the evils of sugar and fast food. It seems that many of our children will suffer from the increase in obesity and diabetes resulting from poor diet. But in general the better health of the older generations enables us to not only be a drain on pension funds for decades to come, but also to have more fun.

So why am I dripping on in this way? Is it simply senility or do I have some ulterior theme? I simply wanted to use this as an opportunity to say that my 65th birthday has firstly encouraged me to recommit myself to keeping trim. I also want to regain my former enthusiasm for the bicycle. At

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one time I would cycle nearly 4,000 miles a year.

A cycling accident put a stop to that, but I never forgot the joys of cycling. The feeling of speed, wind in the ears, the smells of the country (some good, some not), the hum of the high pressure tyres on the road, the companionship with fellow riders was we tore around the lanes of Surrey within inches of each other at speeds often well in excess of 20mph.

My accident removed any confidence I felt in cycling on the road, but I have continued, on and off, to ride off-road on mountain bikes and more recently on a gravel bike. While the former goes on mountains, the latter travels on gravel– unmade roads, towpaths and byways. A gravel bike looks on the face of it like a road bike, with drop handlebars but with much fatter tyres. And great fun they are

too, allowing short day fun or longer tours laden with luggage. If the idea of dicing with taxi drivers, white van men on their phones catching up with their social media, or aggressive BMW owners doesn’t appeal, I very much recommend that you try a gravel bike. I bought a reasonably priced Pinnacle Arkose from Evans Cycles (no relation) and am loving every moment of it.

“I never forgot the joys of cycling.

The feeling of speed, wind in the ears, the smells of the country (some good, some not)” 89

Of course, for the man or woman of style (that’s all of you, I know) buying a new bike is an excuse for buying kit: stylish stuff to make one look dashing/adventurous/cool while in the saddle. Like any man, a lot of research goes into buying anything. I decided to try and buy as much British-made kit as I could, and have found several brands making cycle clothing and accessories here in the UK. Making clothing for men and women in Manchester is Lusso, and there’s R.E.W. Raynolds Northampton-made cycling shoes. Alpkit also make some products here. For cycling bags try Carradice (in Nelson) and Restrap (Leeds). I’m sure there are other cycling brands that make stuff here; let me know if you can recommend any.

@wristwatchstyle to attempt to record these aspects of watch ownership, so please follow me there and contribute images of your watches in action.

I’ve always worn vintage or older watches.

There’s something attractive about owning an object with history. In general older watches are sensible sizes (why are so many new watches so huge?) although thankfully fashion is now swinging back to the smaller watch. A problem with always wearing older watches is that they are more vulnerable to knocks and water ingress. With this in mind I bought a new watch – a Tudor Black Bay 58. It follows a common theme among watch brands, in reviving the looks of a watch in the archive – in this case a 1950s dive watch. So often such revivals see a reasonably sized watch increased in size for modern tastes; something which is rarely successful as the proportions cannot simply be sized up (in my view). However, the Black Bay 58 is, at 39mm, about the same size as its original. The watch has been so successful that there’s now a waiting list and I’m sure that the decision to make it that size has contributed to its success. I now have a robust watch which I don’t have to worry about in the rain, shower, swimming or on the bike.

Anyway, the sun’s shining and I’m off for a ride. n

“I’ve long felt that a watch is a vital part of the style equation... Its design, practicality, what I wear it with and even history add so much to how I feel about a timepiece”

Of course, many of you see tweed as the way to go for cycling, as the Tweed Run shows so these brands may not be for you. Lycra and man-made fibres have their uses, keeping you warm and dry, but nothing beats sustainable and natural fabrics made from wool, cotton and bamboo.

For wonderful tweeds for cycling try Dashing Tweeds (with their reflective threads) or go vintage at Hornets, Tweedmans, Savvy Row or your local charity/thrift shop.

I started by talking about time and this brings me to watches. I’ve long felt that a watch is a vital part of the style equation. Most watch blogs and social media posts focus on the geeky side; the movement, case and strap, but I feel that there’s much more to a watch. Its design, practicality, what I wear it with and even history add so much to how I feel about a timepiece. I’ve started an Instagram account called

Shackleton www.shackletonlondon.com Lusso www.lusso.bike REW Reynolds www.reynolds-england.com Alpkit www.alpkit.com Carradice www.carradice.co.uk Restrap www.restrap.com The Tweed Run www.tweedrun.com Hornets www.hornetskensington.co.uk Tweedmans www.tweedmansvintage.co.uk Savvy Row www.savvyrow.co.uk

@wristwatchstyle

90 Pictured right: David with Dashing Tweeds doyen Guy Hills

Mature Style

Robert Mitchum (p94) • Olly Smith (p104) • Barbadillo (p108) • Butterflies (p114) • Travel: Los Angeles & Hollywood (p118)

© Moviestore/Shutterstock

LONGER FEATURES

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Hollywood

ROBERT MITCHUM Chris Sullivan on the roustabout actor who laconically drawled his way through a stellar film career, mostly while high on marijuana

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“RKO made the same film with me for ten years,” said Mitchum. “They were so alike I wore the same suit in six of them and the same Burberry trench coat. Only two pictures in that time made any sense whatever”

h, little lad, you’re staring at my fingers. Would you like me to tell you the little story of right hand, left hand? The story of good and evil? H-A-T-E! It was with this left hand that old brother Cain struck the blow that laid his brother low. L-O-V-E. You see these fingers, dear hearts? These fingers have veins that run straight to the soul of man. The right hand, friends! The hand of love!

Now watch and I’ll show you the story of life.’

Robert Mitchum, The Night of the Hunter (1955)

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‘The three toughest guys in the movie business were Jack Palance, Robert Ryan and Bob Mitchum,’ claims director Budd Boetticher. ‘And Mitchum was the toughest. And very soft and tender, like a lot of real tough guys. He didn’t have to prove himself in anything. He had done it all.’

I doubt if anyone had ever met anyone like Robert Charles Durham Mitchum. In the course of my research I’ve availed myself of his many YouTube clips (do watch them) and found a plethora of Mitchum’s past TV interviews. And, for the most part, the man seems amazed that anyone should want to know anything about him, and baffled as to why these saps should be paid good money to ask him ridiculous questions.

Mitchum’s modus operandi was to take the piss, josh, lie and tie interrogators up in knots. In one interview for the BBC in 1972, Michael Parkinson asked the then 53-year-old actor, ‘When was the last time someone took a swing at you?’ Mitchum lowered his eyes but Parkinson pushed it.

to the party, that kid’. He didn’t think much of method actors such as Pacino, De Niro and Jack Nicholson (‘they’re all small’), while John Wayne simply irritated him (‘he had four-inch lifts put in his shoes… they probably buried him in his goddamn lifts… And sure, I was glad when he won the Oscar… I’m always glad to see the fat lady win the Cadillac on TV, too.’). As he said later, ‘The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I’ve spent more time in jail’.

Robert Mitchum was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, on 6th August 1917, to Ann Harriet Mitchum (née Gunderson), the immigrant daughter of a Norwegian sea captain, and James Thomas Mitchum, of Scottish, Irish and Blackfoot descent.

His tough guy father died while working on the railroad when the actor was just two, leaving behind his pregnant wife, young Robert and older sister Annette. Things were never easy.

A boisterous child both physically and intellectually, young Bob wrote poems, some of which were published in the Bridgeport local paper when he was seven years old. They moved to a farm in the country shortly after he and his younger brother, John, found themselves fending off the local hick bullies, putting a few in hospital, thus earning the nickname ‘them ornery Mitchum boys’ ‒ a phrase that brother John would later use as the title of his autobiography.

In 1927, Anne married former English soldier Hugh Cunningham Morris and they had their own child. Two years later Bob was expelled from school, Wall Street crashed, the farm went under and the family moved to a tiny tenement apartment in the tough New York City west-side slum, Hell’s Kitchen.

Now it was the brothers who were the hicks who had to fight the local gangs to survive. But young Bob ‒ the consummate chameleon ‒ sounding now like a West Side New York Paddy, fought all comers, earned the broken nose he later attributed to a boxing career (and then denied) and became known as a young man best left alone.

Two high school expulsions followed and, aged 14, he left home to work as a deck hand on a salvage vessel. A year later, in 1933, in the midst of the Great Depression, he left home for good and headed for California. When Michael Parkinson asked him in 1971 why he had left home at such a tender age he replied, ‘Suddenly I came home and there was no place at the table so it was time to split. I got the message and took off, and so I became a hobo, knocking on doors, asking the kind for a crust of bread, never offering to mow the lawn, just dealing

“Suddenly I came home and there was no place at the table so it was time to split. I got the message and took off, and so I became a hobo, knocking on doors asking the kind for a crust of bread, never offering to mow the lawn, just dealing with the kind lady. I just kept moving.

No purpose” ‘The last was a very good one,’ replied Mitchum. ‘I was in Colorado and a fella came over and threw a piece of used toilet paper on my plate and said, “Sign that.” So I picked up my fork and ran it up through his chin and into his upper palette and said, “Take him to the hospital.”’

‘It’s great story,’ replied Parkinson. ‘But I didn’t believe word of it.’ Mitchum sighed, obviously annoyed. ‘But did you always want to be a movie star?’ continued Parkinson. ‘No,’ said Mitchum, looking at Parkinson with measured derision, ‘I wanted to be the queen, but I couldn’t make the weight.’

Mitchum disliked other actors, for example Steve McQueen: ‘He sure don’t bring much brains

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Luxury capmakers and handweavers

Distinctive tweed and linen caps for discerning Chaps and Chapesses.

with the kind lady. I just kept moving. No purpose.’

Annette, his sister, begged to differ. ‘He didn’t run away. Mother packed his bags for him. He was so, so eager to see all these places he’d read about and so he went.’ But Mitchum never denied his abuse of the truth: ‘I learnt early in life that by telling a story far more colourfully than the truth, one’s truth would be left alone. I like to be left alone.’ And when a journalist asked if all the stories he had read were true, the actor replied, ‘Yep they’re all true ‒ booze, brawls, broads, all true. Make up some more if you want to.’

As one pieces the Mitchum jigsaw together, everything about him starts to make sense ‒ sort of.

As a 15-old itinerant, his intention had been to get to California to join his sister, who’d married a navy medic and settled in Long Beach. But he was arrested for vagrancy and ended up on a prison farm on another charge.

‘The judge accused me of robbing a shoe store on a Wednesday,’ he told talk show host Dick Cavett.

‘But, as I told the judge, I’d been in jail since the Sunday before and was in the bucket, so he threw me in the can anyway ‒ Chatham County Camp Number One, Georgia. I was busted for mopery with intent to gawp. I was only fifteen. They categorised me as a dangerous and suspicious character with no means of support.’

He often claimed he escaped. ‘I just didn’t turn up one day and they didn’t miss me and I ran, so they fired a few warning shots over my head,’ he told Cavett. What is certain is that he returned home with a badly lacerated ankle infected by the leg irons, and his mother refused to allow the doctor to amputate.

As soon as he recovered, Bob was off again and made it to Los Angeles, sleeping in the Midnight Mission in downtown LA. Soon back on the hobo express, he was imprisoned for a short while in Texas and ended up working in a coal mine in Delaware for a week. Along the way he had fallen for a young woman called Dorothy Clement Spence and elicited

“They gave him a troublesome horse that threw him twice, so, with his job on the line, he punched the horse on the nose and it didn’t throw him again”

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a promise from her that she would marry him just as soon as he found a proper job, after which he left again for California.

Meanwhile, his sister had started working with a theatre group in Long Beach and, in an attempt to keep him out of trouble, persuaded her errant brother to tread the boards. It was 1937. He was now twenty years of age. The following year he starred in his first theatre production as Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest. Mitchum was also writing material for comedians and singers (he’d learned to play the saxophone while in New York), including an oratorio for the 22-year-old Orson Welles. Another writing job followed for the celebrity astrologer Carroll Righter.

Subsequently he accompanied Righter on a tour that included Philadelphia, where his former paramour Dorothy was now living. They married on 16 March 1940, and stayed together until his death almost fifty years later.

Back in LA, he found work at the Lockheed aircraft factory, assisting a skilled worker named James Dougherty ‒ whose young wife Norma Jean was soon to become known as Marilyn Monroe ‒ and found his first paid job as an actor in an episode

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of the ‘hoss opry’ Hopalong Cassidy series, in which he played the bad guy.

‘They paid me a hundred bucks a week and I could take all the horse manure home I wanted and a free lunch,’ he was oft to say. ‘But I never went after a job. They just seemed to come after me. The bread kept getting better and it sure as hell beat punching a time clock.’

Initially, Mitchum had a tough time as a cowboy. He told his employers he had been a ranch hand in Texas, but he couldn’t ride for shit. They gave him a troublesome horse that threw him twice, so, with his job on the line, he punched the horse on the nose and it didn’t throw him again.

In 1940 Mitchum played a heavy in the Laurel and Hardy vehicle The Dancing Masters, while Dorothy had another son, Christopher. The following year America joined the war and his brother and brother-in-law were drafted while Bob was deferred, firstly because his job at Lockheed was classified and secondly because he was the only breadwinner for his ever-growing clan, who now all lived in the same street and included his mother, sister, sister-in-law and all their respective offspring. He was eventually drafted and his service for his country included checking recruits’ genitals for venereal disease – ‘a pecker checker’. He was honourably discharged as a private first class and received the World War II Victory Medal.

Over time, Mitchum’s reputation as a reliable actor increased, as did his proclivity for drinking, womanising and brawling. On the set of war film Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944) he battered a real-life army sergeant who had the temerity to proclaim in Mitchum’s presence that all film actors not in the services were draft-dodging queers and, although managing to avoid the gossip columns, he gained a rep for tupping many a young secretary and starlet.

Mitchum soon became a pin-up for the bobbysoxer crowd, who loved his bad boy image. Calamity struck, though, on 31 August 1948, when at a rented house in Laurel Canyon he was caught smoking weed in the company of his best friend Robin Ford, Lila Leeds (one of the most beautiful of all Hollywood starlets) and her friend Vicki Evans.

Mitchum was sentenced to two years’ probation, sixty days of which would be spent behind bars. Bob had picked up his lifelong marijuana habit as a young hobo. In those days the weed grew wild and he and his fellow homeless peripatetics used it during those long train rides to kill boredom, help stave off cold or simply to get to sleep. So when Mitchum made his way west to Hollywood, his

infatuation with the weed went with him. In 1948 this was a major deal and a huge Hollywood scandal. In my opinion the man was simply ahead of his time.

But perhaps the furore was a good thing. The year before he had made two fine films, both lowbudget film-noirs. The first, Crossfire (1947),directed by the great Edward Dmytryk, dealt with the death of a soldier whose only crime was that he was Jewish, while the second, an undoubted classic of the noir genre, Out of the Past (AKA Build My Gallows High, 1947), directed by Jacques Tourneur and costarring Jane Greer and Kirk Douglas, is still hugely regarded.

Now contracted to RKO (Radio-Keith-Orpheum) Pictures, whose boss Howard Hughes cared little about a marijuana beef and saw the actor’s money-making potential, Mitchum was given a slew of low-budget noirs such as The Big Steal (1949), which made a fortune at the box office, His Kind of Woman (1951), and Macao (1952), directed by one of the men who created noir itself ‒ Josef von Sternberg.

“‘Listen,’ he explained in the 1970s, ‘I got three expressions: Looking left, looking right and looking straight ahead. I’ve still got the same attitude I had when I started. I haven’t changed anything but my underwear’” ‘RKO made the same film with me for ten years,’ said Mitchum. ‘They were so alike I wore the same suit in six of them and the same Burberry trench coat. Only two pictures in that time made any sense whatever. I complained and they told me frankly that they had a certain amount of baloney to sell and I was the boy to do it. In 1946, I worked with Greer Garson in Desire Me and gave up being serious about making pictures. She took 125 takes to say no.’

All misgivings aside, Mitchum was still on the up. As he said in a 1973 interview, ‘I came back from the war and ugly heroes were in, so I took my chances.’ This was a new and attractive entity for the general public. Here was an actor who wasn’t that enamoured of the task at hand, was a drinker,

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“In later years, when asked about what his career meant to him, he said, ‘Years ago, I saved up a million dollars from acting, a lot of money in those days, and I spent it all on a horse farm in Tucson. Now when I go down there, I look at that place and I realise my whole acting career adds up to a million dollars’ worth of horse shit”

other hand, was a full-on English thespian known for immersing himself in roles such as Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty and Henry in The Private Life of Henry VIII. By all accounts he was unable to come to terms with both his physical ugliness and rampant homosexuality (a tricky combination), so was much troubled and consequently intense.

Yet undeniably it was this dichotomy that allowed him to make such a film as The Night of the Hunter, which works on so many levels. Obviously, as a homosexual in the 1950s he was more than cognisant of all the hypocrisies of the so-called puritan Christian right wing and all the hootin’-anda-hollerin’ bible-bashing preachers who roamed the South, threatening everlasting hell and damnation for all fornicators who succumbed to the ways of the flesh. As such, Laughton was decades ahead of his time.

Since its release, the film’s reputation as a thoroughly exceptional piece of cinema has grown immeasurably. It is now regarded as one of the great artistic anomalies in cinema history that succeeds against all the odds. Unfortunately, Laughton was never allowed to direct another movie and spiralled headlong into depression. He died seven years after its release.

Mitchum, on the other hand, continued working until he died of emphysema in 1997, but even though he made some fine films and was beyond reproach as Max Cady in Cape Fear (1962), and as Eddie in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), few of his subsequent performances ever matched his rendering of the psychotic parson in The Night of the Hunter.

In later years, when asked about what his career meant to him, he said, ‘Years ago, I saved up a million dollars from acting, a lot of money in those days, and I spent it all on a horse farm in Tucson. Now when I go down there, I look at that place and I realise my whole acting career adds up to a million dollars’ worth of horse shit.

‘But people make too much of acting. You are not helping anyone, like being a doctor or even a musician. In the final analysis, you have exalted no-one but yourself… These days young actors only want to talk about acting method and motivation; in my day all we talked about was screwing and overtime.’ n

brawler and anti-hero. Men, boys, girls, women, all loved his attitude. ‘Listen, I got three expressions,’ he explained in the 1970s. ‘Looking left, looking right and looking straight ahead. I’ve still got the same attitude I had when I started. I haven’t changed anything but my underwear.’

For a while Mitchum’s nonchalance and disinterest was all too evident. Little he did between 1952 and 1955, including the Marilyn Monroe vehicle River of No Return, is worth mentioning.

And then came Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955), one of the finest, most menacing, haunting and accomplished movies in cinema history. François Truffaut wrote on the film’s release, ‘This film makes us fall in love again with an experimental cinema that truly experiments, and a cinema of discovery that in fact discovers.’

Mitchum’s performance, even though the film received bad reviews and an even cooler reception from the public, was highly lauded. Most critics regard it as the best performance of his career. As New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther put it, Mitchum ‘plays the murderous minister with an icy unctuousness that gives you the chills. There is more than malevolence in his character. There’s a strong trace of Freudian aberration, fanaticism and iniquity.’

Looking at the film today, it’s clear that both director and star were having a creative field day, but they were an odd couple to say the least. In many ways they were diametrically opposed. The actor was physically handsome, nonchalant and enjoyed the fruits of his fame. Laughton, on the

This is an excerpt for Chris Sullivan’s book Rebel Rebel: Maverick’s Who Made Our Modern World, published by Unbound

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Drink

Whisky Galore Olly Smith sings fulsome praises to the grandfather of all gentlemanly drinks, Whisky

“We can speak idly of Whisky Galore, share our admiration for James Bond’s penchant for expensive iterations of The Macallan, or even live by the irrefutable logic of Anchorman’s toast: Scotchy, scotch, scotch. Here it goes down.

Down into my belly”

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n John Landis’ 1983 comedy Trading Places, the villainous duo of Mortimer and Randolph Duke attempt to lure Eddie Murphy into their limousine by proffering a small bottle with the words “whisky – all you want!”. As a child, this always struck me as an intriguing gambit. Could any drink possibly be so good that one could be irresistibly drawn to it, like a magnet tugging on the very metal of a robot’s brain? Some years later, I was taught never to resist the dram’s allure by my ferocious grandparents who lived in Scotland. Jay

and Mary-Pat, both priests, were fastidious in their mysterious devotion to various eccentric codes: occasional formal attire for driving the car (hats included), toasting their long-dead dog every time a drink passed their lips to loud bellows of “THE DOG!” and sporting false noses whenever and wherever it was least expected. But perhaps the most splendidly consistent quirk of theirs was their daily dip into the deliciousness of whisky.

They lived in Falkirk, between Glasgow and Edinburgh and, while Burns Night has already set

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sail on clouds of hairy haggis as you read this, I reckon my dear grandparents’ daily devotion to a drop serves as the natural riposte to the ludicrously limiting concept of celebrating liquid fire just once a year. While some of us muttered a few lines of Burns’ poetry on the 25th January, the great poet’s Selkirk Grace was emblazoned on my grandparents’ kitchen table and they sank heroic quantities of scotch on a daily basis.

I think this should form the core of our plan.

The plan that you may not have even been aware we are working on, but which we are now very much committed to delivering. We can speak idly of Whisky Galore, share our admiration for James Bond’s penchant for expensive iterations of The Macallan, or even live by the irrefutable logic of Anchorman’s toast “Scotchy, scotch, scotch. Here it goes down.

Down into my belly”. But we must, surely, agree that the wonder of whisky cascades from its diverse – and frankly perverse – font of ever changing flavour.

Mark Twain was bang on: “Too much of anything is bad, but too much whisky is barely enough”.

Thankfully, the lexicon of whisky is an ever-receding frontier. You simply cannot reach the end of its roaring rainbow. Whether the purity of a Speyside malt

is your top tipple, or the smoky power of Islay ignites your inner firework, getting to know the impact of origin, tradition and age are as unexpectedly thrilling as hang-gliding into a valley of speaking marmosets.

And these particular marmosets, it transpires, are masters of distillation. Across the world, marmosets – and even people – are translating the flavours of malted barley through fire, evaporation and slow maturation delivering their own iterations of this moreish marvel. Barrels are what gives whisky colour as well as guiding it towards its final flavour – if the barrel has previously contained, for instance, Port or Sherry, so the whisky will be funneled via those echoing influences. And whether it’s a single malt from one distillery, or a particular blend or brand to which you may have an affinity, there is truly a whisky – and a way of drinking whisky – to suit all moods and moments.

It goes without saying that a dreamy dram can serve to warm on a frosty morning, or comfort and even restore tranquility after dealing out a thrashing to an insolent invisible adversary – we’ve all done it. But should you find yourself in a social situation involving whisky and someone trots out the inevitable garbage about drinking whisky unadulterated,

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read this aloud: “Silence, insect. You are hereby relieved of your conversational command, and from this day your thirst may only be quenched with the imaginary drivel secreted from your empty head.”

Keep reading this statement until they have left the building, or preferably the neighbourhood, and be sure not to engage with them ever again. Quite aside from the sheer impertinence of telling you how to drink, the very idea of only drinking whisky as it comes is nothing more than a small song whose words have been forgotten by a long-dead ant buried at the very pinnacle of Mount Balderdash itself.

I’ve yet to meet a single master distiller who insists on one way of drinking anything, let alone whisky. Of course it all depends on the whisky’s characteristics, the moment you are faced with and indeed your mood. I’ve heard a range of seemingly heretical ways to savour some of the very choicest drams, including from the creator of one highly prestigious single malt, who gleefully insisted that the best way to enjoy his particular 12-year-old drop was direct from the freezer while simultaneously nibbling a square of dark chocolate.

When you consider that some whisky is cask strength, often with heroically high alcohol, where others have been diluted back towards 40%, it becomes easier to engage with the uniqueness of every instance you pop a bottle. I recently tasted Nikka Days, a bright, light and refreshing whisky from Japan that’s packaged in a modern shroud and delivers a spirit of enviable purity. Now, I’ve sipped this whisky neat, I’ve tasted it with a splash of water and even over ice. But the other night when I tottered home from the pub, locked in conversation with two of my greatest friends, this Nikka Days whisky was beyond scrumptious laced with soda, lemon slice and miniature icebergs glistening up through the glass.

It was precisely the level of refreshment required at precisely the correct moment, which led us to the luminous first flashes of dawn deciding to join us for a drink. Who cares if someone else doesn’t want you to drink it that way? Take it how the devil you like and let the devil take the hindmost.

And if all else fails, remember the gem that always hides in plain sight whether you’re in an airport, embassy or already under the table: the reliably sweet smoky glory of Johnnie Walker Black Label, to which you should almost always apply the logic of Withnail: “A pair of quadruple whiskies and another pair of pints, please.” And if you remember to wear your false nose, my grandparents may even descend for a dram themselves. Just hide the bottle after toasting the dog – spirits and spirits rarely mix well. n

RECOMMENDATIONS ALDI HIGHLAND BLACK (40%) £12.99 For sheer value it’s hard to deny the appeal of this rich 8-year-old blend. Pour it all over yourself.

WINE SOCIETY BLENDED SPEYSIDE (40%) £20 Sweetness and light rendered into liquid form.

Silk for a cotton price. thewinesociety.com

NIKKA DAYS (40%) £37.90 Radiant, refreshing and outrageously tasty, this is an awesome daily dram to take your taste buds soaring. masterofmalt.com

ARRAN SHERRY CASK (55.8%) £53.95 Crikey. This is sumptuous stuff to savour, richly layered and altogether lovely.

The complexity of a Dickens novel distilled into every sip. thewhiskyexchange.com

Drink

BARBADILLO Gustav Temple pays a visit to the Barbadillo Bodegas in Sanlúcar de Barrameda, to settle once and for all what the difference is between Fino and Manzanilla

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visit to Sanlúcar de Barrameda, a small town on the coast of the Cadíz province, is a visit to the bodegas owned by Barbadillo, such is the spread of their empire throughout the mediaeval lanes of the Barrio Alto. Founded in 1821 by Benigno Barbadillo, the first local cellar he bought was the 17th century Bodega del Toro. His empire quickly flourished and he bought up most of the other buildings on the two streets still occupied by Barbadillo today.

You can smell the bodegas before you see them; the scent of sherry in all its forms wafts about the town as you wander down from the railway station, becoming stronger as you reach the Barrio Alto. I was shown around the Barbadillo bodegas

“You can smell the bodegas before you see them; the scent of sherry in all its forms wafts about the town as you wander down from the railway station, becoming stronger as you reach the Barrio Alto”

by Tim Holt, a dapper British expatriate dressed like an Andalucian señorito: blue blazer, crisp unbuttoned pink shirt and grey chinos.

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We started in Benigno Barbadillo’s original office, now more of a museum, its principal exhibit a bottle of Versos 1891, an amontillado from a single cask which was dedicated on that year for Manuel Barbadillo, so valuable that no-one is even allowed to touch it, never mind take a swig from it. I waited for my host to leave the room for a few seconds, but he must have read my mind and the bottle remained firmly ensconced on its plinth. But there was plenty of swigging to come later, as we continued our tour.

I was led into cellar after cellar, all brimming with barrels of the finest sherry in the land. Some are reached by crossing charming, sunny courtyards full of trees, old barrels and even miniature samples of grapevines in the gritty soil mimicking the local regions they are cultivated in, known as the Sherry Triangle. Other cellars are reached by crossing the

street into another of Barbadillo’s many buildings.

The most impressive is the last one we visit, a vast cathedral of a cellar, its walls spotted with enough black damp marks to give a British builder a heart attack. This style of cellar is indeed known as a ‘cathedral bodega’ and the damp, Mr. Holt informs, me, is actively encouraged. Various barrels are dipped into with a wooden ladle for a quick sample of the contents. We start with Barbadillo’s

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famed Solear Manzanilla, the most perfect iteration of this Andalucian staple, at the driest end of the sherry spectrum.

People often ask what is the difference between Fino and Manzanilla, as they taste very similar, and the answer, Mr. Holt informs me, is simply the sea. Fino is produced inland at Jerez, while Manzanilla comes from the coastal Sanlúcar.

The grape growing season in Sanlúcar is right throughout the year, whereas in Jerez it’s only during autumn and spring.

The final destination on our extensive tour was a large sampling room with vast windows looking out over the Golfo de Cadíz, whose crisp easterly breeze dapples the maturing Manzanilla with its essence. I took a photograph of this wind, purely because it seemed somehow poetic to photograph a breeze. Luckily the climate in this area is pretty

constant; any dramatic change in temperature would have adverse effects on the precious barrels and the levels of damp might actually start to cause heart attacks.

Before witnessing the wind that shakes the barrels, I was taken to the dark heart of sherry production, into a special chamber designed purely for demonstration. Here, one barrel has been fitted with a glass front, so that visitors can see the fermentation process in action. Sherry is an unoxidised wine, its flavour emanating from a gathering of bacteria on the surface of the liquid known as ‘flor’. There was something quite magical about this dark cellar with its glowing orange barrel, something like finding the sun in a burial chamber.

“The flor grows more thickly here in Sanlúcar than anywhere else in the sherry district, because of the humidity and temperature never getting too

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cold or too hot. Because flor is constantly growing, it’s also constantly dying, so you can see the dead flor collected on the bottom of the barrel, which has to be drained out every so often. Flor is a strain of yeast called Saccharomyces beticus, essentially fighting for survival on the surface of the wine. And that actively takes out any oxygen from the liquid and prevents oxidisation. Ordinary wine is in a cask with air infiltrating through the wood, which makes it darken and oxidise. With flor, any oxygen dissolved is taken up by the yeast rather than oxidising the wine.”

As well as all the varieties of sherry, from Manzanilla through to Amontillado and Oloroso, culminating in the extraordinarily dark and sweet Pedro Ximénez (described by Olly Smith in this

publication as ‘a cross between a mince pie and Edvard Munch’s The Scream) Barbadillo also produces other wines. They have a signature white wine, Castillo de San Diego, a range of red wines, brandies, and have recently relaunched Atamán, a vermouth created by Barbadillo in the 1940s, with a logo straight out of a Spanish Civil War poster.

The new version, based on the original recipe, uses absinthe, quassia tree bark, rosemary, Seville orange and elderberry on a base of Manzanilla sherry, with some of the original blends, held in barrels for over 50 years, added to the bottling.

I left Bodegas Barbadillo with my clothes slightly smelling of flor, a belly full of sherry and a much more forgiving attitude towards damp patches on walls. n

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Lepidoptera

The Butterfly Effect Nick Ostler turns his binoculars away from avian species and on to the equally enthralling and just as elusive butterfly

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s everyone knows, if the first butterfly you see is yellow the summer will be a happy one. If it is white then you will just have a quiet summer.

Black and brown butterflies should never be talked about – they are much too sad.”

So said the great Finnish writer/illustrator Tove Jansson in her 1948 classic, Finn Family Moomintroll. I spent most of 2019 adapting Jansson’s beloved tales of the hippo-like Moomins for a new television series. When I wasn’t chained to my desk, I was out and about in the sunny climes of the South Downs and beyond in pursuit of my new obsession: butterflies.

“Soon I was to be found crawling on my hands and knees through the scrub, attempting to photograph a small grey creature that I very much hoped was a Dingy Skipper”

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MY FIRST BUTTERFLYING YEAR 21ST FEBRUARY On a whim I had asked for a copy of The Butterflies of Sussex: A Twenty-First Century Atlas by Michael Blencowe and Neil Hulme for my birthday. Aside from the lavishly illustrated run-down of every species, how and where to find them, it told me two crucial exciting things.

First, there are 52 species or thereabouts in the UK. Secondly, I had accidentally chosen to live in possibly the best county in England to find them. With ancient woodlands and rare chalk downlands, all located on the warm south coast, Sussex is just about as good as it gets if you’re a British butterfly.

Not every butterfly dies after laying its eggs at the end of the summer. Some hibernate – in the ivy on your wall, or inside your garden shed – primed to emerge at the first hint of a warmer day. This quickly became a growing obsession that would have to fight for space amid a busy year of work and family life. But by the end of the summer it would have found its way into every walk, picnic, trip and holiday.

1ST MARCH – MALLING DOWN, EAST SUSSEX A male Brimstone flutters along a bramble hedge on our first sunny walk of the year – our only resident yellow butterfly, so easily recognized and a happy omen (according to the Moomins anyway). We’re off!

13TH APRIL - ABBOTT’S WOOD, EAST SUSSEX

My repertoire has already expanded to two more easy-once-you’ve-got-your-eye-in species: the Comma (above) – a confiding, orangeybrown character with uniquely serrated wings

that seem to have been attacked by a toddler with scissors; and the Speckled Wood, all hot chocolate brown with marshmallow dots, often to be seen fighting in spiraling pairs wherever sunlight reaches the forest floor. But now the time had come to aim for something rarer.

The exquisite-sounding Pearl-Bordered Fritillary had leapt off the pages of my new book. When open, its wings are a rich orange, scattered with an array of black dots. But when closed its wings reveal its ‘pearls’ – seven silvery panels inlaid against a subtle yellowy-brown checkerboard (‘fritillus’ is Latin for ‘dice-box’).

Once a common sight in woodlands across Britain in early spring, it suffered a steep decline due to the post-war fashion for nonnative conifer plantations – violets. Thanks to the targeted reintroduction of coppicing by Butterfly Conservation, the ‘PBF’ is now staging a recovery in Sussex.

19TH APRIL – PRESTBURY HILL BUTTERFLY RESERVE, THE COTSWOLDS

Easter weekend, and time to see what other parts of the country had to offer. When the subject of a walk came up, I casually suggested nearby Prestbury Hill, failing to mention the ‘Butterfly Reserve’ bit. This was supposed to be a pre-lunch stride out, not a painstaking bush-by-bush butterfly hunt. Soon I was to be found crawling on my hands and knees through the scrub attempting to photograph a small grey creature that I very much hoped was a Dingy Skipper (above). That name might not make it sound very beautiful and well, it’s not. It’s small and grey-brown and looks more like a fairly dull moth. But it was something I’d never seen before and I was desperate for this to be one.

It wasn’t. It was a Common Heath Moth. Which was all right, but wasn’t this supposed to be a BUTTERFLY reserve?

I was just starting to lose hope when one of my friends spotted a small brown butterfly flitting across the dried muddy bank by the path. Was this the skipper?

No, because when it landed and closed its wings it revealed a shimmering green underside dotted with an arc of five white flecks.

A Green Hairstreak! I remembered from my field guide that there was only one truly green butterfly in the UK. 26TH MAY – 1ST JUNE - CHARENTESMARITIME, FRANCE A lazy week amid French vineyards allowed for some long walks to get to grips with some of the commoner species – the strikingly pied Marbled White (below), the ubiquitous Meadow Brown

(below), the charming little Common Blue and the very similar Brown Argus – which is actually a member of the Blue family and only so called in reference to the multiple eye-like patterns on its underwings reminiscent of Argus, the hundred-eyed giant of Greek mythology. It might have been the holiday effect of long days spent outside, but it seemed to me that the sheer abundance of insect life in rural France was demonstrably greater than that in the UK. Sadly recent studies confirm this. Threequarters of our butterfly species have been in steep decline over the last half a century.

15TH JUNE – DITCHLING COMMON, EAST SUSSEX As midsummer approached I couldn’t help feeling that my first proper butterflying year was still proving rather hit and miss. Some guidance was clearly needed.

And so I reported to the car park of Ditchling Common, along with two dozen others of a certain age, to attend my first guided butterfly walk. One of our Butterfly Conservation Sussex branch guides was a softly spoken young man

called Jamie Burston. As we squeezed our way along muddy footpaths in between blackthorn hedges, Jamie told me about the project he’d been running with school children in Lancing to plant more elm trees – the sole habitat of the White-letter Hairstreak, which has suffered a disastrous decline ever since the spread of Dutch Elm Disease in the 1960s.

The species we were there to see was the even rarer Black Hairstreak (above). Like its Elm-loving cousin, it sits with folded wings displaying delicately drawn white lines like spilled Tippex on buff paper, but in a slightly different pattern. Previously confined to a small part of Oxfordshire, the Black Hairstreak seemed doomed to die out thanks to its apparent antipathy for travel. But then in June 2018 headlines were made when a colony was found far to the south at Ditchling Common. Experts believe the Black Hairstreak could have lived here undiscovered since the 1980s.

6TH JULY - BARCOMBE, EAST SUSSEX The full heat of summer had hit the UK with a vengeance and with it had come an explosion of butterflies. Hundreds of Meadow Browns patrolled the field edges, Commas perched on every bramble clump. Painted Ladies (below) powered through breathlessly. I picked my way past the preparations for an idyllic outdoor wedding into a lush private wood and found two new species. A Fritillary at last! Not the longsince departed Pearl-Bordered, but rather the commoner but no less impressive Silver-Washed.

And then a single White Admiral (above right) – dark brown with a bold white stripe daubed vertically down each wing.

22ND JULY – LEWES DOWNS, EAST SUSSEX And so to my single greatest day’s butterflying of the year. A fellow butterfly obsessive offered to take me ‘somewhere special’, and with the first hot sunny day in a week came

a text: ‘My place, 11-ish?’ What I’d expected to be a casual lunchtime stroll turned out to be a ten-mile route march deep into the Sussex countryside. It was more than worth it. Butterflies seemed to throw themselves at us – every common species I’d seen so far that summer, plus several I had not. My guide showed me how to pick out the tricky and curiously named Wall (right), a wide-winged golden brown butterfly with an arc of ‘eyes’ like bullet-holes on its underwing. At the end of this dazzling

very cove that gave them their name two hundred years ago.

The upside-down golden U on the wing of the female looked to me like a brand made of sunlight.

On the cliffs at Durlston, the Painted Lady invasion was still in full effect and in a sheltered spot I found a lone Small Blue – a tiny, unassuming little gem.

16TH-30TH AUGUST – WEST WITTERING, EAST SUSSEX A lazy end to the summer by the beach brought no new species, but dwindling numbers of Holly Blue, Painted Lady and Speckled Wood. I already felt sad at the prospect of the coming butterfly-free months, and regret for the ones I had failed to see this year – the Pearl-Bordered Fritillary, the Purple Emperor and many more.

But there’s always next year.

trek lay our target – a magical woodland nestled in a hidden valley in the shadow of the South Downs Way. The dense undergrowth was full of Ringlets and Silver-Washed Fritillaries. We also encountered a sparkling little Purple Hairstreak. Slogging home on weary legs we stopped to admire a crowd of mating Chalkhill Blues perched on one of their favourite plants, the deep blue, sea anemone-shaped RoundHeaded Rampion, ‘Pride of Sussex’. We finished on nineteen species – over a third of all the UK’s butterfly species in six unforgettable hours.

26TH-2ND AUG – ISLE OF PURBECK, DORSET Patiently, I tracked down several pairs of the extremely localized Lulworth Skipper in the

20TH SEPTEMBER – UNDISCLOSED LOCATION IN EAST SUSSEX We’d moved out of town into the countryside, and were enjoying the abundance of birds and insects in what would turn out to be a last burst of sun before months of rain. In our garden stood a disused red phone box. Suddenly a small, pale brown butterfly landed on the crabapple tree above it. It opened its wings to reveal flashes of orange. I knew what it was because I had dragged the family on a fruitless detour to Steyning to try to see one . It was the elusive Brown Hairstreak – my 33rd and final species of the year – not bad for a beginner.

ESSENTIALS FOR THE BUTTERFLYING BEGINNER Leave the net at home. This is all you need to guarantee a bounty of butterflies.

• Wildflowers. Rewild a part of your garden, or

even plant them in pots. And if you don’t cut down your nettles, you might get Small Tortoiseshell and Peacock caterpillars.

• A good field guide – no point messing around here; what you need is ‘Butterflies of Britain and Ireland’ by Jeremy Thomas & Richard Lewington.

• Binoculars – the Purple Emperor and the Whiteletter and Purple Hairstreaks are canopy dwellers who rarely come down to ground level.

• Sun – most butterflies require warmth and sunlight to do their thing. If it’s raining, forget it. But if the sun’s out and you’re stalking your prey for

that perfect photo, just be careful not to cast a shadow over them, or they’ll fly away.

• Inspiration – If it’s still winter or raining, stay home and read ‘Rainbow Dust’, Peter Marren’s terrific history of three centuries of butterfly enthusiasts, or ‘In Pursuit of Butterflies: A Fifty Year Affair’ by Britain’s foremost lepidopterist, Matthew Oates.

• Membership of Butterfly Conservation – This charity has gone from strength to strength in the last couple of decades. Their projects to save endangered species and educate the public really do work, but they need our support. www.butterfly-conservation.org

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Travel

LOS ANGELES & HOLLYWOOD Chris Sullivan’s first of 31 visits to Los Angeles was in 1978, aged 17, for a four-month stay on $200. His recollections of that first visit provide a handy guide to the best spots in the city that recall the golden age of Hollywood

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e took the 10-hour journey in Titch’s huge 1970 Dodge convertible on the magnificent Highway 1 that perilously follows the coast, edging over mighty cliffs with the raging Pacific Ocean 100 metres below. I experienced my first taste of Hollywood at Hearst Castle in San Simeon. Once home to absurdly rich newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst and his main squeeze Marion Davis, the mansion was featured under the name of Xanadu in Citizen Kane.

Known formally as ‘La Cuesta Encantada’ (The Enchanted Hill) throughout the 1920s and 30s, the tycoon would invite Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Buster Keaton, Mary Pickford and George Bernard Shaw to hobnob with Winston Churchill and President Calvin Coolidge. His soirees were renowned for their total lack of anything enjoyable

“You hit Ventura and a thousand film noir memories come and smack you in the kisser – femmes fatales Stanwick and Gardner coming on, private dicks Mitchum and Powell looking for it and villains Sterling Hayden and Jack Palance being naughty” and were the laugh of the town, described as ‘like doing national service’. Used as the location for the famous horse head in the bed scene in The Godfather, this is one lavish bachelor pad.

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Driving South on Highway 1, we passed through San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, hugging the coast like an old friend; you see signs for Bakersfield to the North East, hit Ventura and a thousand film noir memories come and smack you in the kisser – femmes fatales Stanwick and Gardner coming on, private dicks Mitchum and Powell looking for it and villains Sterling Hayden and Jack Palance being naughty.

Half an hour later and you’re in Malibu and on the famed Pacific Coast Highway. We have all read of Malibu – the playground of the rich and famous, and it is just that – and what’s left of it after the fires is worth a look. You have the pier and a few very long beaches but the cream of the area is The Old Place in Cornell (above), which sits in the folds of the Santa Monica Mountains between Agoura Hills and Malibu.

Opened in 1970, it’s a restaurant/bar housed

in a 103-year-old building (once the Cornell post office and general store) that looks like something from the 19th century: wood, wood and more wood, serving hearty American classics such as steamed clams in a splendid garlic broth, halved Brussels sprouts with apples and strips of bacon, and the finest steak cooked over an oak fire with baked potato dripping butter, sour cream and chives flecked with chunks of pancetta. It’s certainly worthy of the long trip from Hollywood, but best visited of an evening, after a day on a Malibu beach such as El Matador State Beach (their best-kept secret) or the Malibu Lagoon State Beach.

On the way back you pass the quite wonderful Topanga Canyon (above right), still a hippy enclave and the destination for Hollywood bohemians of the 1920s. More recently, Dennis Hopper hung out with Dennis Wilson, who smoked a bong with his

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housemates Charles Manson and his lovely family; Neil Young recorded After the Gold Rush in his home here, while Jim Morrison was inspired to write Roadhouse Blues by the Topanga Corral nightclub.

Not far from Topanga lays the Getty Villa, worth a peek if only to see just how damn rich this son of a gun was. Of Scottish American stock, it was his teetotal devout Christian Scientist dad who discovered oil, became a millionaire and gave his son $10,000 ($250k in today’s money) in June 1913 to get cracking. By all accounts Getty was as tight a gnat’s arse. He did however buy lots of art; housed in the aforementioned Villa (now a museum), none of it exceptional. As Getty’s partner in later life Penelope Kitson said, “Paul was really too mean ever to allow himself to buy a great painting.”

Moving east and heading for Hollywood through Century City, it’s worth checking out Beverley Hills, just to get a feel of the place, albeit an aggrandised blingtastic feel. One of the most impressive mansions in the area is Greystoke, a 55room, Tudor-style, 46,000 square footer situated on 16 acres of land commissioned by oil tycoon Edward L Doheny (the inspiration for Daniel Plainview, played

by Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood) who was involved in all kinds of bribery and corruption scandals, and gave the mansion to his son.

When in this part of the world my first port of call is the wonderful Musso & Frank Grill on Hollywood Boulevard. Opened in 1919, it was named after founders and owners Joseph Musso and Frank Toulet, and still boasts its original dark

wood panelling and red booths, where Chaplin lunched with Fairbanks, Stewart with Hitchcock, Newman with Redford. The waiters dress in the same red tuxedos that they’ve worn for decades. As for the menu, it hasn’t changed in decades either and is still classic LA – remarkable steaks, clams on the half shell, jumbo lump crab cakes, while they’re Martinis are the stuff of myth.

Naturally it was the centre of the Hollywood film industry’s social life. Situated across the street from the Screen Writers Guild Office, it played second home to writers F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck and especially Raymond Chandler, who wrote several chapters of The Big Sleep in its legendary Back Room. More movie deals were stuck in Musso than in any other Los Angeles establishment. Last time I was there Brad Pitt was lunching with Tarantino, only for George Clooney to pop in and say hello.

Another great Hollywood institution is The Frolic Room, on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It began as a speakeasy in 1930 during prohibition and opened legally in 1934. Situated next to The Pantages Theatre (where the Oscar ceremonies were once held) it was an instant hit with the movie cognoscenti.

Regulars included Lana Turner and her boyfriend mob enforcer Johnny Stompanato, Frank Sinatra, Ava Gardner, Judy Garland and gang boss Bugsy Siegel.

It was the last place Elizabeth Short, AKA the Black Dahlia, was spotted before her gruesome murder in 1947. More recently, Charles Bukowski propped up the bar so often that his picture still hangs over the

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till. It’s a cosy little bar with bartenders in suits selling cheap drinks, with a priceless deco interior with a cracking cartoon mural on the back wall featuring the Marx Brothers, Einstein, Monroe and W.C. Fields.

Perhaps my favourite bar in the locale is The Formosa Café on Santa Monica Bvd. Founded in 1925, it was gutted for a new interior but, due to public outcry, the vintage interior has been restored and it opened again June 2019. Open from 4pm-2am, the terrazzo floors and deep red leather booths sit proud, as does the trolley car trapped inside, while the walls are once again adorned with newspaper clippings, period art and classic photos of true regulars such as Gable, Brando, Bogart, Bacall, James Dean.

This was Sinatra and Dean Martin’s main drinking den back in the day. It was in the Formosa in 1984 that I was introduced to the latter by Bing Crosby’s grandson, my wife’s close friend. Dino was 67 and, apart from the red tracksuit and the slippers, looked like the Dean Martin we all know and love.

Tom Bergin’s on Fairfax is another prime location. Holder of one of Los Angeles’s oldest alcohol licenses, the 83-year-old property is an Irish pub with Irish grub, but is unlike any Irish watering hole I have ever visited. Once known as Tom Bergin’s Horseshoe Tavern and Thoroughbred Club, it is adorned with cardboard shamrocks embellished with the names of its famous clientele, such as Cary Grant, Keifer Sutherland and Ronnie Reagan. And then there’s Tam O’Shanter Inn, opened in 1922, which features English and

Scottish medieval weapons, kilts, Coats of Arms and Crests all over its kitsch walls.

Before the immigrants came to California there were the Mexicans (the US bought California, New Mexico, Utah and Arizona from the Mexican government in 1848 for $15 million, in one of the biggest land scams on record). Two of my regular rendezvous are El Compadre on Sunset Boulevard and Casa la Golondrina on Olvera St (downtown LA’s oldest street). El Compadre is a classic no-frills restaurant, replete with classic rancho interior and a traditional Mexican band on every night.

Here you will find seasoned Los Angelinos and celebs chowing on the likes of Enchiladas Estillo Acapulcoa (Flour tortillas stuffed with King Crab, shrimps and a green tomatillo sauce), the finest guacamole I have ever tasted and Cadillac Margaritas that are so called, I believe, because after a few you need a Caddy to take you home.

Casa la Golondrina is a little hole on the wall serving mama’s home style cuisine such as Mole Poblano, a rich chocolate, nut and chilli seasoned sauce, served over chicken breast. And one cannot talk of LA Mex tuck without recommending the excellent Taco Trucks or loncheros that open all hours. One favourite is Taco Truck, on Sunset and Montrose, whose fresh, spicy tacos will knock your socks off and cost just $2.

One LA nightclub that is worthy of your attention is La Descarga. From the outside it looks like a nondescript East Hollywood apartment block, but once you make your way up the grimy, candlelit

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DRINK HERE Matt Deckard’s top watering holes for Chaps in Los Angeles and Hollywood THE DRESDEN ROOM 1760 N Vermont Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90027 If I were Terry-Thomas, this would be the absolute hangout for a well-dressed bounder with a wardrobe and vocabulary that fit the surroundings like a missing puzzle piece. The preferred drink is a Blood-and-Sand, and the piano up front nightly features a couple you may recognize from the movie Swingers, Marty and Elayne.

TAM O’SHANTER 2980 Los Feliz Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90039 It is said that Walt Disney had one choice when it came to the costumes worn in Disneyland. His wife designed the rest. His contribution was a dedicated replica of the Tam O’Shanter waitress uniform, with the addition of a riding helmet and riding crop.

THE MAGIC CASTLE 7001 Franklin Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90028 Perhaps one of the most exclusive true members’ clubs left in the US. You must know a card-holding member to get in, and if you do get in, you will experience inebriation and lots of plot holes you can’t fill within the fabric of time. Tell the piano player I said hello.

JOE’S GREAT AMERICAN BAR AND GRILL 4311 W Magnolia Blvd, Burbank, CA 91505 Los Angeles is the only city in the world where you can still find a place to swing dance every night of the week, and the finest place to go and see the best dancers in the world is Joe’s. Mondays its quite 1920s in music, and Tuesdays moves toward the 40s and 50s. Live music constantly with no cover charge. Wear leather soled shoes.

EDISON BAR 108 W 2nd St #101, Los Angeles, CA 90012 I was there on opening day, just to see what all the hubbub was about. It was about a bar that takes up the entire basement of the Edison Building in downtown LA, with silent films projected on the walls and green painted ladies serving absinthe. Thursdays, when it’s less trafficked, are better. This is one LA staple I hope never disappears.

POUR VOUS 5574 Melrose Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90038 I’d say this was a true Parisian cocktail lounge; it just needs Parisians.

This is where the Chaps step in. Feel free to dress like a vampire, have some Absinthe, watch some burlesque, and if you really want to throw the crowd a curveball, hang out in the recessed circular dining area, pull out a laptop and start writing while sipping your drink by the fireplace. Nothing inspires creativity like absinthe and burlesque.

BIGFOOT LODGE 3172 Los Feliz Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90039 This place gives you all the feel of camping, but without the inconvenience, and also the feel of US National Park protection while you pull up a tree and have a seat. Covered in wood and furry creatures on the wall, this should be on a list of places you’ll just want to see. I tend to wear my pith helmet when I go.

DAMON’S STEAKHOUSE 317 N Brand Blvd, Glendale, CA 91203 If you truly want to know what the postwar demob culture was like in the States, then this is the standing example of what you want in a tiki establishment. Wear a Hawaiian shirt and maybe a big straw hat. I tend to go all linen suited, but that’s just me. If you want a steak while in LA, get one here; but I warn you, if you don’t have a tiki cocktail, you’ll go home with a curse.

CICADA CLUB 617 S Olive St, Los Angeles, CA 90014 There was a time when you could go up the penthouse at the James Oviatt building to see the apartment on the rooftop and dance the night away. But for now, you’ll have to dance the night away on the main dancefloor downstairs, like the rest of Hollywood. Maxwell Demille’s dream was to bring back the nightclub that he thought we wished existed, and here it is… dining, dancing, orchestra and all. This is the place to wear your black tie.

staircase you’ll be in a nightclub that looks as if it was built in 1940s Havana and left to decay.

Leather booths, chandeliers, candlelight abounds, while Afro Cuban jazz musicians play live on the balcony overhead with Latino burlesque dancers.

The crowd are well dressed by LA standards (there is a strict dress code) the mainly rum drinks are immense and the dancers fabulous. Rather like joyously stepping back in time, it’s a spectacular night out for the discerning chap and chapette.

“The terrazzo floors and deep red leather booths sit proud, as does the trolley car trapped inside, while the walls are once again adorned with newspaper clippings, period art and classic photos of true regulars such as Gable, Brando, Bogart, Bacall, James Dean”

Finding the clothes to match such a journey back to the fifties isn’t at all difficult in Los Angeles. Melrose Avenue still has a few good vintage stores, such as Regeneration Vintage, and one should always try to make one’s trip coincide with a market day. The Saturday flea market at Melrose is worth a look, while the Long Beach Antique Market is an immense gathering of 800 vendors selling items we have only ever dreamed of. The King of Flea, however is the Rose Bowl Flea Market on the second Sunday of every month, $10 to get in and worth every cent. 2500 stalls occupy an area the size of four football stadiums, selling furniture, bric-a-brac and clothing that will make you swoon.

My advice is to take a bunch of cash, get there at 9am, peruse the whole market and buy enough kit to last a few years. Last time I was there I bought enough vintage clothing to fill an extra large suitcase (bought at the market), all for less than £$300. In the UK such a collection of essential mufti would be more like £1000, so in a way the trip paid for itself.

Penning this has prompted me to take another trip to the City of Angels, and I found a return flight on Norwegian Air for £299, though by all accounts you have to bring your own sarnies. I’ll bring some tacos on the way back. n

Travel

SEXTON BLAKE IS BACK! As brilliant as Holmes, as daring as Bond, the Jack Reacher of his day returns!

Introduced by author Mark Hodder – winner of the Philip K. Dick Award and Sexton Blake expert.

Sexton Blake Library Book 1 features three gripping stories!

One of literature’s greatest detectives, back in print for the first time in decades!

“Delighted to see Sexton Blake still going strong – and with such aplomb!”

— Agatha Christie

SEXTON BLAKE AND THE GREAT WAR (Sexton Blake Library Book 1) ISBN: 9781781087824 • Trade Paperback $11.99/£8.99 • April 16, 2020

A L S O

JUNE

A R R I V I N G

AUGUST

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OCTOBER

2 0 2 0

DECEMBER

www.rebellionpublishing.com facebook.com/rebellionpublishing @rebellionpub

REVIEWS •

Author interview: Fergus Butler-Gallie (p128) Book Reviews (p132) • Dark Angels: Nina Antonia (p134) • TV Interview: Rita Tushingham (p140) • Cigars (p147) • Restaurant: The Midland, Morecambe (p152) • Peacocks & Magpies: Antiques (p157)

Author Interview

FERGUS BUTLER-GALLIE Alexander Larman meets the young curate, writer and wit who, at the tender age of 29, has already published two highly regarded books about the clergy

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bestselling A Field Guide to the English Clergy, in 2018, and then its follow-up, the wonderfully titled Priests de la Resistance last year. And somehow he manages to combine this with his vocation as assistant curate at Liverpool Parish Church. Are his inspirations sacred, profane or satirical? The Chap conducted the most rigorous of investigations into what makes this particular man of the cloth tick.

here are relatively few people who could get away with describing themselves as ‘writer, clergyman and fool’, as the Reverend Fergus Butler-Gallie does on his Twitter profile, but this witty cleric is a breed apart. He is young (not even 30) and disgustingly talented, having published his first book, the

CHAP: Congratulations on Priests de la Resistance. The title is the best pun we’ve encountered in a long time. Who came up with it?

FERGUS: Not me! My wonderful publisher Alex jokingly entitled one of the early emails discussing the proposal with the pun, but we agreed it was so good that it was worth making it the permanent title.

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CHAP: It’s a book about faith and heroism, with (excellent) jokes. Did you find that the balance was a hard one to pull off?

FERGUS: It wasn’t easy, and I’m sure there are people who think I didn’t pull it off at various points, but many of the figures therein had such joie de vivre that, even in incredibly trying times, their humour was infectious.

“I’m in clerical attire most of the time, but that can vary from cassock and heavy overcoat to a simple dog collar. Black is very flattering but I think it’s important not to overdo it on the dashing front”

CHAP: Who was your favourite of the various heroic clerics that you included?

FERGUS: Oh I think it has to be Canon Kir.

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His was the tale that really inspired the whole thing, and meant I got to spend vast amounts of time necking crème de cassis by way of ‘research’, and so for that I am enormously grateful.

A Field Guide To The English Clergy. That was a lighter book, but still filled with fascinating detail and great stories. What gave you the idea for it?

FERGUS: Well, every profession has its stories of mad predecessors, etc, and I lapped up the clerical ones. I ended up doing a light-hearted couple of posts on Twitter about some of the best ones I’d heard shared at conspiratorial clerical supper parties, and it took off. The publishers spotted it and asked if I thought there was a book in it.

CHAP: And did you have to omit anyone whose absence you regret?

FERGUS: There could have been hundreds more, from the Anglican chaplain in Vienna to the Catholic White Rose movement, via indomitable Greek bishops innumerable, but we made a decision to keep it to a couple per nation. I hope there’s enough variety amongst the figures in there to give a sense of the scope and diversity of Christian resistance.

CHAP: What have been your insights into the publishing industry so far?

FERGUS: A lot of wonderful people (with considerably more talent than certainly this writer!) work very hard behind the scenes to transfer idle authorial brain fart into glorious book!

CHAP: Do you have any further plans for books at the moment?

FERGUS: Yes, but I’m not sure what they are yet...

CHAP: It’s the follow-up to the ‘sleeper hit’

CHAP: How do you manage to combine your clerical work and your writing career?

FERGUS: Lack of sleep, lack of spouse, excess of brandy.

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CHAP: How do you think that young, social media-savvy clergymen, such as yourself, can make the church relevant in the 21st century?

FERGUS: I think the Church’s message – of faith, hope, love, and the rest – is eternally relevant (as is its message about human fallibility and the reality of sin).

I do think we all have to use what talents we have to communicate that accordingly. The only thing I’ve ever been any good at is raising a laugh, so if I can use that to draw people in then I think that can’t be a bad thing.

attire most of the time, but that can vary from cassock and heavy overcoat to a simple dog collar.

Black is very flattering but I think it’s important not to overdo it on the dashing front. Here in Liverpool we get a lot of hen parties and I have been mistaken for a stripper before, which perhaps says something about the low aesthetic quality of gentleman-entertainer in the North West.

CHAP: And have you made any fashion faux pas in the past that you are especially ashamed of ?

FERGUS: As a student I was besotted with an ‘I heart Roma’ T-shirt that was two sizes too small for me. Various women in my life eventually conspired together to bin it. There were plenty of others. Put it this way, I’m more likely to be sought for advice on matters spiritual or satirical than sartorial.

“Here in Liverpool we get a lot of hen parties and I have been mistaken for a stripper before, which perhaps says something about the low aesthetic quality of gentleman-entertainer in the North West”

CHAP: How would you like to be remembered?

FERGUS: As a sinner saved by Grace (and who always got his round in). n

CHAP: Who have been your greatest influences, both literary and theological?

FERGUS: Jonathan Swift in both cases. I think the religious aspect of his writing isn’t taken seriously enough. He was crucial in convincing me intellectually that a marriage of misanthropy and Christianity was not only possible but also desirable.

Swift aside, there are many good and holy priests, alive and dead, whom I look to for theological guidance. As an Anglican I am utterly shaped

by Cranmer and the Book of Common Prayer, it remains my absolute touchstone. It shapes so much from my sentence structure to my faith, so I suppose it’s literary and theological too.

CHAP: And who are your favourite writers, and why?

FERGUS: Swift, as per above, and those other clerical jokesmiths Laurence Sterne and Sydney Smith. I adore Austen, predictably. Plus everything in Viz magazine – it never fails to brighten my day.

CHAP: As this is a Chap interview, it would be remiss not to touch on matters sartorial.

What is your preferred ensemble?

FERGUS: Well it rather depends; I’m in clerical

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Book Reviews

ME

Britain’s least convincing flower child’), candidly discussing his drug use (‘If you fancy living in a despondent world of unending, delusional bullshit, I really can’t recommend cocaine highly enough’) or enlightening the reader with his tales of voyeurism and sex on snooker tables (‘Don’t come on the baize!’), this has to be one of the liveliest and funniest rock memoirs ever written.

Those expecting much in the way of musical analysis will be disappointed; as far as Elton presents it here, he receives Taupin’s (often, to be fair, dreadful) lyrics, and then sits down at the piano and bashes out an appropriate tune. He began his career as a would-be Tin Pan Alley songwriter, and that dedication to graft is ever-present; whether he’s playing hundreds of gigs a year or knocking out songs one after the other, before (back in the day) plunging his face down into a mountain of cocaine or (today) having a wholesome game of tennis before playing with his two young sons with his husband, David Furnish.

The book is at its funniest and most enjoyable in the first two thirds, with walk-ons from virtually every great musical star of the 20th century, and memorable appearances from a variety of industry grotesques. When Elton embraces sobriety and married life, the narrative begins to sag, although there are still excellent stories of absurd diva behaviour and a riotous/disturbing account of his playing a concert almost immediately after major surgery, and realising that he has urinated uncontrollably while taking the audience’s applause. And his account of his love of his young sons feels sincere and moving, rather than gushily sentimental, although it is hard to take seriously his claims that they will have a ‘normal’ childhood; still, one only hopes for their sake that it will be a happier one than his.

It might seem extraordinary that a plump, balding young man could go on to become one of the most successful musical stars that Britain ever produced, and certainly one of the likeable aspects of Elton’s story is that, decades after his first success, he still seems faintly incredulous that it managed to work out for him. He writes affectingly about the loneliness and boredom that he often felt, even at the peak of his fame, and yet again manages to give the impression that

By Elton John (Macmillan, £25) Reviewed by Alexander Larman

I

n our increasingly dull and sanitised age, where our rock and pop idols tend to be the privately educated milquetoast children of investment bankers and has-been soap stars, there is something rather wonderful about the continued existence of Sir Elton Hercules John, recently appointed to the prestigious order of the Companionship of Honour. Quite what Her Majesty will make of The Artist Formerly Known As Reg is a mystery, especially assuming that some flunkey or other has read her Sir Elton’s hilarious, jaw-droppingly candid memoir Me. It is, frequently, enough to make her hide the corgis away and wonder what on earth she has done.

Elton John is, in that dreadful, sycophantic cliché, a national treasure, although on the evidence of this scintillating book, less so for his musical career and more for having survived decades of debauchery with his wit, if not his hair, intact.

His early years in Pinner were grim, with a cold, distant father who was more interested in his record collection than his son, and a blowsy, domineering mother whose major contribution to his life was to recognise his musical talent, ensuring that he was accepted for study at the Royal Academy of Music.

After he had served as keyboard player to the thenfashionable singer Long John Baldry, he changed his name, began collaborating with Bernie Taupin, and the rest is history.

Except, of course, it isn’t. Elton has made the excellent choice to work with Alexis Petridis as his ghostwriter, and anyone who has enjoyed Petridis’ writing in the Guardian in the last couple of decades will know of his finely honed way with a laugh-out-loud joke, and virtually every other page has some quotable bon mot. Whether he’s bemoaning his failed attempts at hippydom (‘I looked like a finalist in a competition to find

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multi-millionairedom is as much of a curse as it is a blessing – although Petridis, who frequently rails in his reviews at how boring a lyrical theme a superstar moaning about success is, manages to make this wryly amusing rather than self-indulgent – even while coyly hinting that there are even more outrageous stories that have been omitted from the book on legal or spiritual advice.

Still, what we have is a riotously engaging romp through an era where bad taste and great music walked happily together, and where a sentence like ‘I sat in a dressing gown covered in puke, wanking’ is not even the most eyebrow-raising revelation of the chapter. The Queen might not quite be prepared for what she is getting into with her Honourable Companion, but the rest of us will be extremely grateful for so candid and uproarious a dive into a life lived to the full.

Grant begins relatively straightforwardly, introducing us to a court in which it was quite commonplace to see the leading actors and writers of the day, all of whom were mining the Old Bailey for ‘colour’ in their work. The legendary barrister Edward Marshall Hall is shown defending the obviously guilty artist Robert Wood in the so-called ‘Camden Town Murder’, and doing so with some style and aplomb. The more esoteric story of ‘The Cult of the Clitoris’ introduces us to the MP Noel Pemberton Billing, who, after accusing the dancer Maud Allan of lesbianism, claimed in court that he had access to a ‘Black Book’ of 47,000 German agents, which included the judge in the case, Charles Darling. And, heartbreakingly, Grant retells the story of 10 Rillington Place, in which the necrophile serial killer John Christie managed to murder his lodger Timothy Evans’ wife and child, and send the innocent Evans to the gallows as well.

Many of the stories in the book will be familiar to a wide audience, such as that of Jeremy Thorpe (perhaps the only vignette in the book that feels redundant, after the superb book and TV series A Very English Scandal) and the concluding saga of Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr. Even the familiar, however, is brought to intoxicatingly gripping life

by Grant. His legal expertise means that he is able to illuminate the theatricality of the courtroom, calmly explaining when a barrister’s oration owed more to the West End stage than it did to the facts of the case, or when a judge allowed their personal preference to cloud an unbiased summing-up.

Grant is clearly a liberal, and some of the judgements that he makes might seem slightly anachronistic; I remained unconvinced that Billing, for all his bizarre charisma, was really a forerunner of Donald Trump, for all his manipulation of ‘fake news’, and if one detects a greater degree of authorial sympathy for William Joyce, the socalled ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, than he merited, then this can be explained by a natural antipathy towards a panicking society that, in the wake of WWII, wanted to find as many scapegoats as possible.

Yet these are simply nit-picks against a far greater achievement, which is to take these disparate cases and turn them into a book of serious moral purpose that has a vast amount to say about the law, and its (mis)uses over the past century. Just like Case Histories, it should become a bestseller; even more so than that book, it should be regarded as something of a classic of its kind. n

COURT NUMBER ONE

By Thomas Grant (John Murray, £25) Reviewed by Alexander Larman Barrister and author Thomas Grant’s second book is another legally-minded piece of non-fiction, following on from his much-acclaimed and bestselling account of the legendary barrister Jeremy Hutchinson’s career, Case Histories.

His first book was a beautifully written and entirely engaging account of his mentor’s career at the bar. However, the suspicion remained that Grant was writing the book as much as a favour to a great friend as to prove his worth as an author.

On the evidence of Court Number One, these suspicions were groundless. This is an extraordinarily gripping and beautifully written account of eleven of the most notorious trials of the twentieth century, all of which took place in the Old Bailey’s infamous Court Number One; the ne plus ultra of criminal courts in Britain.

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Books

Nina Antonia, photographed by Melanie Mudkiss

DARK ANGELS From glam rock to fin-de-siècle decadents, Nina Antonia has charted the rise and fall of doomed pretty boys, as Darcy Sullivan discovered when he met her

W

hen she was 13, Nina Antonia was poring through teenybop magazine 16 when she saw a picture of a rock band that changed her life forever.

Of course, thousands of girls developed their first crush on The Beatles this way, or The Bay City Rollers. But Nina fell for a very different band: glam-punk kings The New York Dolls, who looked like junkie transvestites after a catfight. Nina’s eyes and heart focused on the prettiest one: guitarist Johnny Thunders.

Thunders would become a legendary cautionary tale about drug addiction. After

“People like Johnny Thunders and Marc Bolan bring magic to the world.

Johnny had incredible charisma. Sometimes the good guys don’t wear white. I’ve always found the bad boys to be preferable” 134

Johnny Thunders and Nina Antonia. Photo by Jon Tiberi

the Dolls split, he would also lead one of the most important New York punk bands, The Heartbreakers, who would be accused of bringing heroin to the London punk scene. And Nina Antonia would be his chronicler. At a time when there were few women in rock, and fewer still in rock journalism, Nina kick-started her writing career by championing one of rock’s lost boys.

“People like Johnny Thunders and Marc Bolan bring magic to the world,” says Antonia.

“Johnny had incredible charisma. Sometimes the good guys don’t wear white. I’ve always found the bad boys to be preferable.” Nina has built a career chronicling bad, beautiful boys with sad, short lives.

She even lives in London suburb Barnes, a mere screech of tyres from where Bolan died in a car crash. She’s a cult author who says, “Cult means

there’s rarely any money when you are alive. Once you are dead, however, there’s an armada of riches to be had.”

JET BOY, JET GIRL The first obstacle in Nina’s way was location. “I grew up in Liverpool, which had a different aspect than the Vivienne Westwood/Malcolm McLaren stronghold of London,” she explains. “My peer group was people like Pete Burns and Holly Johnson – I didn’t know him but he babysat my daughter once. We were all very dream-focused in the class of 1980 in Liverpool.”

Her appreciation of highly feminised men was nurtured by seeing a reading by Quentin Crisp.

“I remember standing in the queue with Pete Burns to get his signature. Quentin was a marvellous

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Johnny Thunders and Nina Antonia. Photo by Jon Tiberi

creature, rather powdery and wise.” Passionate about Johnny Thunders, she found an opportunity to write his biography when Jungle Records reissued some of his music in the mid-1980s. “I was living in a coldwater flat as a single mum, raising my daughter,” Nina says. “To be a writer was very cheap, you just needed a typewriter and paper.”

But getting the book published was another matter: “No proper publisher wanted to know about the book, even Virgin. The NME slagged Johnny off as well. All of these things made me think it was a great campaign.”

She and Thunders became friends (but not lovers, Nina says), and in photos they looked like bandmates or gypsy twins. So was Thunders as difficult as legend states? “To a promoter that he wanted money from upfront, he would have been bloody difficult!” she says. “He took people as he found them. He saw that I was shy, and he was kind.”

Stories about Thunders’ bad behaviour abound. This author remembers a night at LA’s Whisky when Thunders played a storming first set, but started the second set by playing a different song from the band, who dragged him off the stage. Nina saw incidents like this, but remembers a sweeter side. “We went to the shops together, because he wanted some strawberries and ice cream. He went out in his pyjamas, and got his hand caught in the freezer trying to get the ice cream.”

Johnny respected Nina, but the rock world in general didn’t. “I was treated like a groupie,” she says. “When Wikipedia started, the entry on me said I was a groupie that started writing books. Why was that acceptable? No one would have said that about Lester Bangs or Nick Kent.” In Cold Blood, the Thunders biography, sold well and delighted fans; it was reissued in 2000 and is now an e-book. But in terms of Nina’s career, she says, “I was back to square one.”

While bouffant boys with guitars and fishnet stockings may seem a long way from the aesthetes and poets of the Victorian era, Antonia has always been fascinated with both brands of strange flowers. For several years, she has been writing about the so-called decadents of the 1880s and 90s, who shocked society with their morbid themes and coded homosexuality. As usual, she has focused on the less popular characters.

“I started to become interested in how Lord Alfred Douglas was portrayed, because he was the underdog in that situation,” says Nina, referring to Oscar Wilde’s young lover. “He was beautiful, and a crazy aristocrat, and a bad boy. He was asking for trouble and he found it.” For 125 years people have been blaming ‘Bosie’ Douglas for Wilde’s downfall, and wondering how Wilde would have fared if he’d never met the erratic aristo.

“When Wikipedia started, the entry on me said I was a groupie that started writing books. Why was that acceptable? No one would have said that about Lester Bangs or Nick Kent” THE DARK ANGEL Which leads to Nina’s latest project: rescuing Lionel Johnson from the footnotes of Wilde’s story. Johnson, a talented young poet and friend of Douglas, introduced him to Wilde, setting in process a love affair that would end so tragically.

“I loved the thought of this delicate, filigreed creature and his dreams of poetry,” Nina says of Johnson. “In all the Wilde biographies, he gets such shoddy treatment. One of the rules of Wilde scholarship seems to be to brush him off.”

Her first dance with Johnson was in The Greenwood Faun, her 2017 novel, which places the poet in a sequel to Arthur Machen’s decadent novel The Hill of Dreams. “Under normal circumstances, I’d have been wary of anything which might be a ‘sequel’ in any sense to a classic novel, but Nina had surprised me before,” says Mark Beech, publisher of Egaeus Press. “But this was clearly not a sequel at all. Nina hadn’t attempted to emulate

FROM GLAM TO DECADENCE Antonia’s next three books also covered unusual rockers: a history of The New York Dolls was followed by a biography of Peter Perrett from The Only Ones. “Peter was in the depths of user hell at that point, living in the shelter and protection of his wife, who is amazing,” Nina says. “Peter was a very different kettle of fish. Johnny is like Rimbaud, a stormy elemental, while Peter is like Baudelaire, who has that fantastic urban cynicism.”

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or capture Machen’s prose, or the monomaniacal claustrophobia of Hill of Dreams. The Greenwood Faun is the story of a world Lucian (the protagonist of The Hill of Dreams) was oblivious to; one of Edwardian commerce and train journeys and pub lunches. And also ghosts. At times, it reads as barely even fictitious.”

Johnson was Catholic, like so many decadents, like Thunders – and like Antonia herself, a relatively recent convert. “When you say you’re Catholic, people think you’re judgmental,” Nina says. “I think only God is allowed to judge us, we shouldn’t judge each other. I never say what someone should and shouldn’t do.”

Surely the glamour is also part of the appeal, given Nina’s passion for androgynous dandies. “I believe in glamour,” says Nina. “But now that I’ve reached 60 I need some of Marlene Dietrich’s wardrobe tricks. And I do want a walking stick with Aubrey Beardsley drawings.” n

“I believe in glamour,” says Nina. “But now that I’ve reached 60 I need some of Marlene Dietrich’s wardrobe tricks. And I do want a walking stick with Aubrey Beardsley drawings”

For more on Nina, including her amazing decorated fairies, visit www.ninaantoniaauthor.com, or follow her on social media

@NinaAntonia13

Nina’s latest book, Incurable: The Haunted Writings of Lionel Johnson, the Decadent Era’s Dark Angel, collects Johnson’s poetry and provides a long biographical essay. Researching it, Nina discovered a bizarre incident toward the end of Johnson’s life, when his lodgings at Lincoln’s Inn Fields were apparently haunted by a large, ghostly bird.

“Incurable struck us as important for a number of reasons,” says Mark Pilkington, publisher of Strange Attractor Press. “We see Johnson as a good exemplar of the pre-20th century counterculture, which fits our remit of documenting British countercultural history. And we liked the dark, fantastical nature of much of his work, as well as the fated and supernatural aspects of his own short life.”

I’ve been buying Nina’s books since discovering In Cold Blood at a Los Angeles record store in 1987. For the past few months, I’ve been interviewing Nina onstage in a series of talks on Johnson and his circle. I’ve got to know Nina as a warm and witty soul, with divine taste and a remarkable circle of friends. The audience when we spoke at London’s Gay’s the Word bookstore included Walter Lure from The Heartbreakers and Mick Rossi from Slaughter & the Dogs, who were performing at the 100 Club that week.

What would modern readers find attractive about Johnson’s poetry? In poems like Dark Angel, he pushes gloom to the Poe end of the scale. Phrases like “priests of a fearful sacrament” have the gothic thrill of death-metal verses. It’s not surprising that

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@officialninaantonia

Int e r vie w

RITA TUSHINGHAM Gustav Temple meets the actress who launched her career aged 18 in A Taste of Honey and now appears in Agatha Christie’s The Pale Horse

Are you excited about The Pale Horse coming to our screens soon?

Yes I am, because everyone loves Agatha Christie but this is a very different type of production, because you don’t have Poirot or Miss Marple.

I spoke to the costume designer and you’re not in a black pointy hat, are you?

No, though I do have a different kind of hat and I also wear a wig. I wanted Bella to be a normal woman who lives in this village, rather than a caricature. It’s like, if you play a saint, you don’t walk around with a halo, do you? We all wanted the witches to be slightly believable, even though they’re slightly strange.

You were in a Miss Marple, weren’t you, in 2006?

Yes I was, The Sittaford Mystery. The Pale Horse is very different; you don’t have the usual Agatha Christie thing where people are questioned, although the plot obviously is solved.

Is this the first time you’ve played a witch in a drama?

I might have played one in real life!

A Taste of Honey came out in 1961. The Pale Horse is set in 1961. Is this a coincidence?

It’s interesting, because when you look at the fashion from then, it was very nice to work with such a brilliant costume designer. So it took me back, because I remember that period very well, and it was nice to revisit that period, not just by watching old footage. Not that my costume is particularly glamorous!

“If you play a saint, you don’t walk around with a halo, do you? We all wanted the witches to be slightly believable, even though they’re also slightly strange”

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Is the supernatural something you’re interested in?

I wouldn’t say supernatural, but I’m interested in unexplained things that happen; sometimes you’re thinking of someone and then you get a phone call from them. Or if people have passed away, sometimes you can feel their presence. I’m interested in that, and in a way it’s comforting, rather than in a negative way.

Maybe the fact that you never tried LSD is precisely why your career is still going strong?

For a lot of people I knew, it helped them. I know a couple of artists who painted when they’d taken LSD, and they felt that it helped them creatively.

Though I’d imagine that LSD wouldn’t really go with the craft of acting, would it?

My God, I wouldn’t think so! You’ve got to remember where you are and what came before and what comes after and so on. You’ve got to be absolutely tuned in on things.

Ever had any paranormal experiences?

The odd experience when you’re staying in an old building and things happen. But you try not to put too much on it, because everyone wants to explain things that don’t seem normal. I think if you experience something odd, you want it to be a positive experience.

You were very keen to go into acting from an early age, weren’t you?

Yes, I worked backstage at Liverpool Rep from the age of 15. Then I became assistant stage manager and worked my way up. I started playing small roles and then I saw an ad in the paper saying they were looking for an unknown actress to play the part of Jo in A Taste of Honey. And that’s where it all started.

I’d never thought of doing film; I wanted to be in the theatre, and suddenly this opened up a whole new world for me.

You grew up in the sixties and wasn’t it rather popular to think about things like that?

Yes, we were beginning to be more spiritual. But it wasn’t just experimenting with psychic phenomena, but also with drugs. It was a mixture of everything.

Well there is something quite supernatural about LSD, isn’t there?

Well yes, although I’ve never done it, but I’ve been with people who have and it seems quite supernatural. It’s interesting what people get from that, and all the lights they see and everything.

There is currently a West End play of A Taste of Honey. Have you seen it?

I’ve never seen it in the theatre. Tony Richardson, the director of the film, had said to me at the time, we don’t want you to see it on stage. And that sort

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I wanted Bella to be a normal woman who lives in this little village, rather than a caricature. We all wanted the witches to be believable, even though they’re slightly strange

of stuck in my mind, even after all these years. I was invited to go along to this new production but I couldn’t because I was working. And I wouldn’t want to go along and make it all about me. I’d rather just go along and see the play.

cast and crew – Murray Melvin, Dora Brown, Robert Stephens, Paul Danquah, Tony Richardson, John Osborne. I’d never been in front of a camera before but it immediately became my first love.

Is it true that they bumped Audrey Hepburn off the role of Jo to give it to you?

Tony Richardson, the director, wanted an unknown actress to play the role of Jo. But the studio wanted someone who was known, and they suggested the wonderful Audrey Hepburn. But Tony said, absolutely not. Luckily for me, he stuck to his guns.

“The director wanted an unknown actress to play Jo. But the studio wanted someone known and they suggested the wonderful Audrey Hepburn. But Tony said, absolutely not. Luckily he stuck to his guns”

Luckily for all of us, I think. It wouldn’t have been the same film with Audrey Hepburn.

She was beautiful and extraordinary and an amazing actress, but I think Tony was right, in that if it’s a face you don’t know, it’s easier to identify with the character. We actually started shooting the film on my 19th birthday.

Maybe you should go in your wig from The Pale Horse and be incognito!

[Laughs] Yes – in my witch’s costume! Anyway, the play is doing very well, which is great, after all these years.

Are you still in touch with Murray Melvin, or anyone else from the original cast?

Yes, Murray is still alive and an extraordinary man and actor. But sadly everyone else from the film has died. Paul Danquah was such a close friend and godfather to my first child, and he died three years ago. So it’s just Murray and I left.

Isn’t it something of a period piece?

Well in a way it is, but there are still people who are struggling, there are still young girls getting pregnant, there are still racial problems. We have moved on, but have we moved on that much? Someone from the BFI told me recently, and I hadn’t realized it at the time, that A Taste of Honey featured the first inter-racial kiss on screen. This was 1961 and it’s incredible that it hadn’t happened sooner.

Did you ever meet Terry-Thomas?

Briefly, I did, in the sixties. I was lucky to meet lots of people through the years, from Shirley Temple on. n

And you were only 18 when all that happened to you?

Yes, and so lucky to have worked with such a great

The Pale Horse is on BBC1

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Smoking

CUBAN CIGARS Sophia Coningsby turns her expert attention to the cigars that have been considered the best in the world since the days of Christopher Columbus

O

n 28th October 1492, Christopher Columbus and his merry crew members discovered Cuba. By November at least one of the crew (Rodrigo de Jerez) had discovered cigars. This is how the story goes. Rodrigo happened to chance upon a Taino Indian who offered him a roll of fragrant leaves to smoke. The roll of fragrant leaves was called a ‘Cohiba’. Rodrigo liked what he smoked and took some of these rudimentary cigars back home with him to Spain. While puffing away on a Cohiba in his garden, his wife (seeing smoke coming from his mouth) informed the Spanish Inquisition, who arrested him and decided that he was a devil.

Rodrigo was imprisoned for seven years. On his release from the clink, he saw that everyone around him was now smoking cigars. But he had been the first: the first European cigar smoker and the first

“Tobacco in Cuba is a very serious matter, from the extraordinary labour invested in the tobacco crops by the farmers to the months and years of patient waiting before the leaf is deemed fit for a Habano, not to mention the pride they feel in knowing that they are producing the best cigars anyone will ever smoke” 146

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importers of Cuban cigars into the UK, to meet the highly entertaining and gloriously informed Jimmy McGhee.

We sat in the boardroom smoking Ramon Allones and talked about the qualities and characteristics of various cigars.

I often think it’s bunkum when people describe cigars as tasting of chocolate or nutmeg, cinnamon, coffee etc. For me it’s often a predominant flavour that you get, and, more often, they put you in mind of a place or setting. Yes, you can often taste a fresher taste, like new grass, or old leather, but there’s only so much (in reality) that you can identify, because the taste of a cigar (like that of wine) is really quite personal.

Jimmy is of a similar mind. We are both great admirers of H. Upmann and Jimmy described them perfectly:

person to smoke a cigar in Europe. He was also the first martyr to the anti smoking laws under which we all labour today. I often wonder how Rodrigo greeted his wife on release from his seven-year incarceration. Since that time though, Cuban tobacco has been considered the best in the world.

The distinction remains incontestably valid after more than five hundred years.

Tobacco in Cuba is a very serious matter, from the extraordinary labour invested in the tobacco crops by the farmers to the months and years of patient waiting before the leaf is deemed fit for a Habano, not to mention the pride they feel in knowing that they are producing the best cigars anyone will ever smoke.

To talk about Cuban cigars, I went to the headquarters of Hunters and Frankau, the only

Jimmy: They’re good company, charming, refined and slightly reserved.

Sophia: What about Partagas?

Jimmy: They’re insistent, they’re asking to be noticed. They have more passion, they are more rock and roll.

Sophia: The last article I wrote for The Chap was on New World cigars and I talked about the snobbery associated with cigars and bands too.

I was always told, for example, that only a cad smokes a cigar with the band on.

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Jimmy: Cigar bands were developed by Don Gustavo Bock in the 1860s. Bock was aware that his British customers were wrapping tissue paper about their cigars, to stop their white kid gloves from being stained by nicotine, so he decided to put bits of paper about the cigars to save them the trouble.

Sophia: But now that we don’t wear white kid gloves?

only in particular areas of the island that are also protected as Denominations of Origin. In English, we say Havanas, and we use that term to mean the best cigars in the world) with over five flavour classifications (gloriously unscientifically, they range from light to full). Of course flavour is environment influenced (rain, sun, soil etc) but with Cuban cigars the taste is always consistent because the blenders are such experts. But there are of course variables because the cigars are so natural. You will also find that with a Cuban cigar the burn will sometimes be uneven, whereas a New World cigar often has a more even burn and consistent construction. But rather than being disappointing, this is more proof of the idiosyncrasies of a Cuban cigar. There is something organic and tailor made in the Cubans; you can tell it’s been made by a

Jimmy: Yes, it can be seen as an ostentatious display of wealth to keep the bands on. But if you do take the band off, do it when the cigar is lit and warm, as then the glue of the band won’t rip the cigar wrapper leaf.

Sophia: So, back to snob value: Cohiba. Maybe I’m an inverted snob, but I don’t feel that Cohibas deserve the high prices they do, compared to H. Upmann, for example. If I’m seen smoking a cigar, the uninformed will always say “is that a Cuban?” or “is that a Cohiba?” because everyone has heard of Cohiba, the flagship brand of Cuban cigars, also, generally, the most expensive. But most expensive doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the best.

Jimmy. Cohiba has a very interesting history. The story goes that Fidel Castro’s bodyguard offered him his first ‘Cohiba’ but they weren’t called ‘Cohiba’ at that time. In fact, they weren’t called anything at that time. A roller named ‘Eduardo Rivera’ was responsible for making them and gave his friend Bienvenido Perez (‘Chicho’ to his friends) a cigar. Chicho was Fidel’s bodyguard, and offered it to Fidel (when he didn’t have a cigar on him) and Fidel was so impressed that he started having the cigars made by Rivera in a secret location (the now world famous El Laguito factory) with the help of his staff’s wives and girlfriends. In the beginning, Cohibas were only given to heads of state and visiting diplomats. But since 1982 Cohiba has been available in limited quantities to the open market.

So the high prices of Cohiba come from the limited quantities of them on the market. But the leaves used to make Cohiba are the ‘selection of the selection’ from the five finest Vegas de Primera in San Juan y Martinez and San Luis districts of the Vuelta Abajo zone.

Cuba has under half the land mass of the UK and produces 27 Habanos brands (Habanos is the word used to describe the most outstanding brands of cigars, which are manufactured in Cuba to the most exacting standards established by the Regulatory Council, from tobaccos grown

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human being. There is of course, generally, also more complexity of flavour in Cuban cigars.

A Habanos cigar has to be 100% tobacco with no additives at all; the majority use long fillers and are hand made. Jimmy tells me that Havana cigars account for 75-80% of all the premium cigars sold in the UK. Jimmy. In 1988 Cuba decided to have a distributor in every region. Hunters and Frankau signed the agreement in 1990. Since then, we have been custodians for all of the Habanos brands.

Sophia: Tell me a bit about the history of Hunters and Frankau.

Jimmy. We were established in 1790 by John Hunter, a doctor listed in early documents as a surgeon (specialising in importing leeches). We believe that he started importing cigars some time after the Peninsular wars. The British fought alongside the Spanish against the French. The British were smoking pipes, the Spanish, cigars.

After the war the British went home victorious and had a taste for cigars. So, then cigars began to be imported into the UK.

The Frankau side of the business is linked to H. Upmann. Herman and August Upmann left Germany and went to Havana to set up a bank.

They fell in love with the cigar scene and decided to establish their own brand, which they did in 1844. As the brand became more established they looked for someone to distribute their cigars in the UK and chose J. Frankau. Now, after the First World War the Cubans blacklisted lots of German companies and the bank went bust. The cigar factory was going to go bust until it was bought

by Frankau (that was Jemma Freeman’s (H&F executive chairman) great, great grandpa). Hunters and Frankau didn’t combine forces until the 1950s.

Oh and H&F don’t own H.Upmann any more.

“Our top fives are a bit pricey,” says Jimmy, “but you don’t need to spend a fortune to get a good Cuban cigar. The Quintero range is incredibly reasonably priced (a little over £10 a piece) and I find them to be always very reliably good cigars. And I can’t think of a bad Cuban cigar or even a not very good one. There are just excellent and better ones. Franz Liszt said, “A good Cuban cigar closes the doors to the vulgarities of the world” and I couldn’t agree more.” n

CHURCHILL’S HABANAS Winston Churchill became a devotee of the brand Romeo y Julieta after his visit to Cuba in 1946, but had been smoking them long before this time. His name has not only been commemorated on a band, but it has also served to describe the marque’s most famous size ‘Romeo Y Julieta Churchills’.

On two occasions during the Second World War, the Cuban government sent cigars to London for Churchill. The most notable arrived at 10 Downing Street on 19th September 1941, during a meeting of the chiefs of staff to decide how much military aid Britain could afford to send to the Soviet Union. After many hours of bitter dispute, the meeting was in deadlock.

Churchill then decided to ignore the advice of his security team and try the cigars (Churchill received a lot of cigars from well-wishers, almost all of which were destroyed by concerned security men). Churchill handed a cigar to each member of the group; they lit up, and within half an hour the matter was resolved. “A perfect example,” says Jimmy, “of how Havana cigars have influenced the course of world history”.

www.cigars.co.uk

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The Chap Dines

THE MIDLAND, MORECAMBE Reviewed by Actuarius. Photographs by Actuarius

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“Although we stood out a little in our evening dress, this was more a reflection of the times we live in than that of the hotel; besides, isn’t it the duty of a Chap to lead by example?”

hen we first saw the Grade II listed Art Deco icon that is the Midland Hotel in Morecambe, it was slumbering in what we feared to be perpetual decay. A few years later, it was shrouded and part way through a lengthy restoration and modernisation programme. Then we had the chance to buy our own Art Deco gem, which happens to be situated less than two hours away from the now gloriously restored hotel.

One Friday in early October, I dashed home from work and dressed for dinner as our coconspirators, Bart and Karen, pulled up outside in their immaculately original version of our scrappy V8 example of MG’s 1970s Grand Tourer, the BGT.

The current iteration of the Midland Hotel was built in 1933 by the LMS railway to encourage tourist business into the area. In many ways, the design commissioned from architect Oliver Hill was something of a departure from policy. The LNER,

their great rivals in the run to the North, were the ones who tended to lead the way in adopting avant-garde tastes. Whatever the reasons behind the decision to adopt what has become known as the ‘Streamline Moderne’ style, Mr. Hill took his chance and ran with it; embracing a Bauhaus-esque approach by both designing the building and specifying the interior décor.

The level of detail in the design is sublime, from the sparkling white exterior enhanced with

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three types of glass mixed into the render, mimicking the original electrically polished finish, via the gently curving facade welcoming guests as they approach the backlit centrepiece that is the stairwell, to the Eric Gill flourishes and the modern homage to Eric Ravilious’s now lost mural. The spacious reception area is flanked on one side by a rather racy relief depicting Nausicca greeting Odysseus – we are talking Gill after all. Architecture combines with art as the spiral staircase draws the eye up to a ceiling medallion showing Neptune and the nymphs. It is almost impossible not to imagine Chanel, Olivier and Coward walking through the door; something that did regularly happen before cheaper air travel in the 1970s led to a steady decline here, as more exotic locations became more accessible to those in search of glamour.

The Midland has now come full circle and once again found favour among the stylish. Having fully taken in our surroundings, we were led through to the restaurant, which has been remodelled by extending it out towards the bay with large glass panels. Although we stood out a little in our evening dress, this was more a reflection of the times we live in than that of the hotel; besides, isn’t it the duty of a Chap to lead by example?

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The roast pigeon with black pudding Scotch egg, soup and basil quinoa selected by those at our table were all well presented and soon dispatched after our appetite inducing two-hour drive. If there had been any fear that the quality of the food would not match the expectation instilled by our surroundings, it had immediately been proved unfounded. This was the sophisticated fare more usually found in the better London restaurants, and goes to prove that Town need not be the default destination for such experiences.

The main courses of roast rump of lamb with herb risotto, roast pork fillet accompanied by butter beans and chicken fritter with peas and broad beans continued the high standard set by the preceding course. The tastes were subtle and well balanced; they excelled through the brilliant execution of what they did rather than trying to dazzle by being overly clever or flamboyant. Overall it struck me as avoiding the caricature of how Nouvelle Cuisine can be and instead showed what it really should be.

Despite our feeling suitably replete after two courses, we reflected upon our duty to you, dear reader, and tried the lemon tart accompanied by a selection of coffees and brandy. They were, of course, delightful.

“Ironic, as in this case the surroundings were a product of the streamline age, where speed was the new God. Eventually we came to the point where we could no longer put off leaving our table and moved outside for a postprandial perambulation”

the building. The cylindrical glass wall is supported by slim columns intersecting the main element, with its steps rippling down towards the shoreline, from where an enticing view of brightly lit partying and cocktails within can be glimpsed. Too cold to linger, we returned to the cars and headed off home through a now almost deserted Morecambe.

The equally quiet motorway passed as unpunctuated miles, the cosy glow of the instrument panel enhancing the experience of once more slipping effortlessly through the countryside in our miniature grand tourers. Arriving home there was time for one last snifter in our own cocktail lounge, ‘Dark and Stormys’ being the poison of choice.

An appropriate end to a rather special event, one where we weren’t so much harking back to bygone days or enacting some kind of fantasy, but instead simply making the most of being fortunate enough to be able to do this sort of stuff. To deny ourselves by conforming to the often unspoken yet accepted paradigms of ‘no-one dresses for dinner these days’ or ‘classic cars are for sparing use when it’s not raining’, we concluded, would be unacceptable.

Something that for me lies at the core of what it is to be ‘Chap’. n

By the time we had finished, the other diners had drifted away to their rooms or out into the night. We were left to appreciate how digestion is helped by the relaxed air that comes with such surroundings, granting as they do a licence to be languid and to take time. Ironic, as in this case the surroundings were a product of the streamline age, where speed was the new God. Eventually we came to the point where we could no longer put off leaving our table and moved outside for a postprandial perambulation. This gave us a chance to appreciate the Midland’s design ‘in the round’. The corner with the Rotunda is one of the most interesting parts of

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Peter Gosbee and John Minns point their loupes at that most ancient and significant item of jewellery, the signet ring

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o other single item of jewellery conjures up more intrigue and symbolism than the signet, or ‘pinky’ ring. Wearing a ring on the little finger has been adopted by people as varied as actors, politicians, gangsters, dandies and monarchs.

The first known finger rings in the form that we are familiar with today, i.e. made of gold or silver, and often with the inclusion of precious or semi-precious stones set into the top of the ring (the bezel), were produced around 2500 BC by the Hittites, around the area we now know as Syria. Their skills were adopted by the Egyptians, who produced not only the famous and instantly recognisable scarab ring, but also the ‘Intaglio’. This is a process of carving into the stone inset to create initials, monograms and deities, or a unique personal logo, making it what we now know and identify as the signet ring. These skills were honed by successive civilisations, such as the Greeks and the Romans, who produced some of the finest rings in antiquity, highly prized by collectors today.

The signet ring is not just an aesthetic item, but a practical and usable object, used to identify the wearer. The ring, while still on the finger, would be pressed into hot wax, leaving the wearer’s ‘signature’ on any document, contract or deed. The little finger would be the most obvious and pragmatic place to wear it, thus creating the pinky ring. The Victorians popularised the wearing of a ring on this finger, for both men and women, as it denoted to others that they were not interested in marriage.

Also during Victorian times there was a resurgence of all things connected with ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt, and a number of artists, such as David Roberts, Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema and John William Godward, promoted this theme. The often romanticised and intriguing subject matter stirred the British populace and their need for it became insatiable. The term ‘Egyptomania’ was coined and Thomas Cook organised tours to Egypt and the Nile. The new wave of modern furniture, architecture and jewellery all carried the same aesthetic.

PINKY RING WEARERS Notable figures from history who wore a pinky ring include Richard Burton, the British Hollywood actor and megastar with the resonant voice honed from the bedrock of the welsh valleys. He seemed to have ignored the basic rule of wearing the pinky ring to denote his unavailability for marriage, ending up getting married five times; twice to the same woman, Elizabeth Taylor.

and there is evidence that the Romans considered dispensing poison from the ‘digitus minimus’ the most surreptitious and effective way of dealing with your enemies. This tradition was doubtlessly the reason Alphonse Gabriel ‘Al’ Capone adopted the wearing of a signet ring.

Oscar Wilde, flamboyant poet, playwright, raconteur and advocate of ‘Greek love’, was known to have worn a Scarab beetle ring on the pinky finger of each hand at the same time.

The original etymology of the scarab ring meant mortality and resurrection, though in Oscar’s case it resulted more in immortality and insurrection.

Queen Elizabeth I, arguably the greatest monarch that ever lived, commissioned the building of a huge quantity of fighting ships, thus creating the greatest navy in the world, leading to a legacy which made Britannia rule the waves for hundreds of years. She stuck steadfastly to her guns by adhering to the pinky ring rule of ‘none marriage’, stating that she would rather be a beggar and single than a queen married.

Another intriguing but disturbing use of the pinky ring was when it was used to carry and to dispense poison. The poison ring, or ‘locket’ ring, dates back to at least the ancient Greeks

Al Capone’s 4.25ct diamond and platinum ring, with a 3.65-carat centre stone with shield cut diamonds on either side in a sword design.

Royal personages such as Edward, Duke of Windsor, and later Prince Charles, carried on with the tradition of wearing the pinky ring, in conjunction with a wedding ring; a somewhat confusing anomaly considering its history as a token of single status. Franklin D Roosevelt also used to wear his rings in the same manner.

IVORY AND BONE Ivory and Bone have a long history in the jewellery world; some of the earliest known examples of body adornment have been crafted from these beautiful and surprisingly durable substances.

Ivory has been treasured by humans for aeons and its use in jewellery covers most periods and fashions. From Georgian miniatures in lockets painted on to wafer thin ivory sheet, through to fully functional pocket watches carved entirely (minus the spring) from ivory, including the chain!

Bone, commonly perceived as the slightly poorer relative of ivory, was not only used in imitation but as a material in its own right; a great deal of beadwork, specifically in the form of rosary beads, was produced from bone, alongside more utilitarian objects such as buttons and hair combs.

The popularity of ivory (and to a slightly lesser extent bone) had its heyday in the jewellery word during the period of Queen Victoria’s mourning, its subtle yet luxurious lustre complementing the monochromatic aesthetic so popular at the time. Demand for ivory in the context of jewellery continued right through until popularity waned in the late 1950s, due not only to the public attention to the less than ethical production values, but also to the advances made in synthetic polymers and resins, which were easier to form and therefore more cost effective to produce.

In the early 21st century a ban was imposed in the United Kingdom on selling any ivory produced post 1947, in an effort to aid the dramatically ailing African and Asian elephant population. Subsequent bans all over the world continued this trend, and now elephant populations have, in some areas, begun to stabilise and slowly recover.

The most recent update to the law bans the sale or trade of ANY ivory product (or product

featuring up to 10% ivory parts) regardless of date or provenance. Even if the item you wished to sell were to comply with the 10% restriction, you would be obliged to register it before sale, along with paying a fee. This has ruffled a few feathers, not only in the antiques trade but also among museums and purveyors of antique oriental collectables. Imagine if you had a beautiful set of ivory-handled Victorian cutlery, and in order to sell them you had to cut off the handles and sell the silver as scrap! Although the author unequivocally supports the efforts regarding the sustained recovery of our pachyderm brothers, this debasement seems not only draconian but also culturally damaging.

At the time of writing, the bill is still to come into effect, the previous 1947 rule still standing, but the new law is imminent, so perhaps beginning your collection of ivory netsukes today would not be the wisest investment. The Antiques trade is keeping a very close eye on the progress of this situation, but until it comes into full effect, here are some ways you can recognise both ivory and bone.

Ivory, when polished, should hold a highly reflective, rippling shine when caught by the light; it should have tonal depth and a degree of translucence giving a slight warmth.

Bone cannot receive a finish to the same degree of finesse due to its formation, but can still polish well. Ivory will have a uniform texture, not pitted or displaying any minute holes, which would suggest bone – take care to observe this subtle but significant difference. Both materials, when exposed to sunlight, will eventually bleach; yellow ivory and bone have either been in prolonged storage or on the receiving end of a forger’s teabag! When tapped with a metallic object, ivory will give a clearer tone than bone (think lead crystal over glass) and also feel denser in the hand, due to the lack of a micro capillary substructure.

THE FLUMMOXER This delicate object is made from ivory, ribbon and lace – but what precisely is it for? One lucky provider of the correct answer receives a Fox Signet Ring from Mr. Gosbee’s own delicate hand.

Send your answers to chap@thechap.co.uk

Stephen Lord correctly identifed the last issue’s flummoxer as the lamp from a Nissen Hut.

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Solutions to crossword Issue 102 Chap Winter 19 S U K E Y R I E T G I B E E F T H A C O W L A A K T H U E T S U R R O S P U I N H A S E I T I D L E S

A A U D E M E R A R V A S E Z E A L A E A N O M L C O N T A G I E J S N D E R B O L T O R I I C G A C Y L A E L I G H T T E V I Y R N E S S P R I L T T M

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Down 1. 1 Academy Awards for Isaac and Wilde (6) (6) 1. Some pop era teens find work (7) Academy Awards for Isaac and Wilde 4. Child is more pleasant if start of class is very quiet (6) Fuel containing trace radiation 1 2.

Some pop era teens findofwork (7) causing 4 Child is more pleasant if start of class is very 9. Shred, or maybe it’s shed? (4) marine growth (5) 2 Fuel containing trace of radiation causing quiet (6) 10. At my regret, fiddled intelligence... (4,6) 3. Stupid Watergate! We lost series of races (7) marine growth (5) or maybe it'sBaldwin’s shed? (4) 11. 9 ...Shred, about tax and Alec primaries vote (6) 5. Primarily in medicine, meaning unsusceptible; 3 Stupid Watergate!

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I’mregret, given penny o’ change for? (3,5)(4,6) not exposed (6) We lost series of races (7) 10 What At my fiddled intelligence...

13. Sit before dancer removes clothes perhaps (9) Clap Mr. on long time backing (9) 5 6.

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24. Mum viewed a dodgy frequency (6,4) Coming back in Spring To stay calm, have a style(7)supervisor 15 Honest price for the audience (4) (4,1,4,4) 25. Immanuel ignores the odds to attack (4) 20.

Miserable detective hits back (6) 16 Clearly Setter no is awriter common is a pro (4) 26. beforeone fiftybut getshe Hollywood at heart (6) 14 23.

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18 Decline if theologian hangs around unruly scene (7)

19 Coming back in Spring (7) 160

20 Miserable detective hits back (6) 23 Unfinished bar at the foot of strange cuban

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For 20 years, The Chap has been providing chaps all over the world with crucial advice on sartorial rectitude and anarcho-dandyist etiquette.

Best of The Chap brings together in one volume all the features from the last 100 issues that have defined the publication’s manifesto.

This mighty 300-page tome assembles the very best features, photoshoots, interviews and stories from the last 100 editions, most of which are completely out of print in magazine form. If you’re new to The Chap and want to catch up on what you’ve missed for the last 20 years, or if you’ve read the occasional issue and wished you’d read more, Best of The Chap tells the whole story.

BEST OF THE CHAP is available in all good bookshops and directly from www.thechap.co.uk