Hello, grim reaper Barry Humphries feels young, but he’s now older than the oldest man he ever saw – Augustus John
Keystone Press / Alamy
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he was a babe. A fully paid-up, card-carrying babe. There was absolutely no doubt about it, and she was heading straight for me. She was almost sprinting towards me across the recently reimagined lobby of Claridge’s. She looked up, her scarlet-anointed lips parted in entreaty. A student, I supposed; probably Events Management or Gender Studies – they are both comparative no-brainers. ‘Can I have your autograph?’ she said. A thin garment of a dark, unattractive colour snugly accommodated her convexities. It was a warm summer evening, and her bare feet were betrayed by expensive sandals. She seemed to have neither pen nor paper; certainly none was proffered. I rummaged for a scrap of paper, or an old envelope. I would have even ripped a page out of the Gutenberg Bible to please my young supplicant. ‘The usual spelling of Sidonie?’ I enquired with dry lips. She drew closer, glancing from side to side conspiratorially. I caught a whiff of her product and, faintly, Britney Spears’s Curious which she must have peeled off the cover of an old copy of Heat. ‘My late grandmother was a big fan of yours,’ she said. A peck on the cheek and she was off. But I glimpsed her looking at my autograph – and was that the faintest shadow of disappointment on her face? Did she think I was someone else? I wondered. David Walliams, perhaps, or Jimmy Carr, or even the great Rob Brydon? No, I was too tall, or too short, or too … old. Sidonie’s gran had never even heard of those Johnny Come Latelys. Intimations of senescence come thick and fast. Life is a near-death experience anyway and, as in the W E Henley poem, ‘Death goes dogging everywhere’.
When a taxi driver jumps out of his seat and rushes round to help me to heave myself out of his cab, I feel the chill hand of the Reaper at my elbow. Many men, younger than me, tell me they ‘have to get up a lot at night’ – information that I absorb with smug self-satisfaction. So far, I have been blessed with nocturnal continence. However, I have been getting names wrong for some years. My first hint of that infallible sign of losing it occurred one night at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, after the first act of Die Frau ohne Schatten by Richard Strauss, with its melodramatic action and incomprehensible libretto. After Act One, I spotted the film director Michael Winner at the Paul Hamlyn Hall Champagne Bar. ‘Just up your street, Michael,’ I cried enthusiastically. ‘You could make a great movie out of all that drama.’ The film director regarded me strangely (who doesn’t?). ‘You think so?’ he said, before he was whisked away. ‘Who did you think that was?’ said my wife. ‘Michael Winner, of course.’ ‘No, it wasn’t,’ said she. ‘It was Jeremy Isaacs, General Director of the Royal Opera House.’ Abashed, and compounding my error, I rushed over to the retreating Jeremy. ‘Oh, Jeremy,’ I exclaimed, ‘I’m terribly sorry. You must have thought I was mad. I mistook you for somebody else!’ ‘Who did you think I was?’ he said, still smiling. ‘Michael Winner.’ There was a long pause, as the bells
Old Master: Augustus John, 83, plus self-portrait, 1961
rang summoning us to Act Two. ‘I’ll never speak to you again,’ said Sir Jeremy Isaacs. As I contemplate a long theatrical tour next April and May, I suddenly feel worryingly youthful. I feel all the physical benefits of a life not vitiated by any form of exercise. My hair has a few silver strands but there is no loss of pigmentation elsewhere. A woman I know calls the tangled yellow-grey stooks in her husband’s nostrils ‘distinguished’. It is a distinction I hope to avoid. The oldest man I ever saw was, when I first arrived in London, the veteran artist Augustus John. It was in 1960, at the Royal Academy, when that institution could still be taken seriously. There was a large crowd of art-lovers present. They loved art then, and not ‘artworks’. Most old-style artists, like John, wore beards. Facial hair was the prerogative of Royal Academicians and Captain Birdseye. Now every man you can think of hides under one. TV commercials, which tick boxes to an insane degree, are densely populated by the tufted and the bushy, all indistinguishable from one another. When I met him, my bearded idol Augustus John seemed as old as Methuselah: a portly dotard with his red eyes, his stinking pipe, his beret and deeply stained habiliments. He was then five years younger than I am now. I’m now mourning Stephen Sondheim, whom I loved in spite of his ragged beard, which he was constantly scratching. Santa Claus was another barbate friend. I hope this year he sees to it that thy Christmas stocking runneth over. The Oldie January 2022 19
