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THIRTY-EIGHT

On October 3, 1975, I turned fifty, an event that I wanted to keep secret. I cannot imagine anyone willingly celebrating time’s ruthless one-way passage. But that year friends decided to do something and Kathleen Tynan, second wife of the critic Kenneth Tynan, and my old friend Diana Phipps decided to give a party in London where over the years I had come to know more people than anywhere else. A club with a good cook was the site. Howard and I flew to London and stayed not as always before at the Connaught but at the Ritz. I remember I had a pile of letters to answer and so the morning of the third I was up early answering them in longhand. Then Howard and I took the lift down to the lobby. It was a small lift lined with mirrors. Halfway down it stopped to admit another passenger, a woman in a white trench coat. Our eyes met in mute shock: it was Jackie Kennedy Onassis. Relations between us had broken off after my row with Bobby in 1961 and time certainly had not improved my mood. First, the IRS went after my father with a long pointless audit. Then I heard from Mississippi that someone from Bobby’s Justice Department had been snooping around trying to dig up scandal about Senator Gore while several court journalists were always available to think up items about me. I certainly never blamed Jackie for taking his side in a complicated unbecoming row but her contribution was that we had not known each other until a chance encounter at a horse show, the last place I would ever be found unless it was after dinner at the White House when Jackie dragged Jack and me there. With that in mind, to Howard’s horror, I turned my back on her to discover in the mirror a smudge of ink on my brow. As I used a handkerchief to remove the ink the lift door opened and she sighed in her best Marilyn Monroe voice, “Bye-bye” and vanished into Piccadilly.

At the beach house of Kenneth and Kathleen Tynan and several of their children: Kathleen is at left, then director Tony Richardson, Princess Margaret, me, and Jack Nicholson. Ken was writing a biography of Laurence Olivier who, when he heard how much Ken was being paid for the book, ceased to cooperate and wrote his own tedious book. Ken, who was dying of emphysema, changed his publisher’s contract to a sort of personal memoir; he died before he completed it. Then Kathleen, also dying of cancer, did finish the book. Each summer for several years she would come to La Rondinaia and faithfully do her exercises in the pool. Olivier, in explanation of his bad behavior, told me: “I owe Ken Tynan many things but not my life.” My rejoinder was a muttered expletive. After all, it was Ken not Olivier who was most responsible for England’s National Theatre.