BOOK OF THE WEEK
My Lunch With Marilyn And Other Stories
by Stanley Price (Sandycove £14.99, 208pp)
When, in days passed by, and within the line of responsibility, I encountered Olivia de Havilland in Paris, Barry Humphries in a classic automotive museum, or Maureen Lipman up the Amazon, such sacred beasts went on to be my buddies, who by no means appeared to thoughts if I used to be impolite or indiscreet about them in print. Barbara Windsor even let me share her foot spa.
A time there was when the attraction of journalism was assembly celebrities on their very own. Stanley Price, who died in 2019, in his 88th 12 months, was one other old-school hack who was lucky to be working at a time with out the interventions or encumbrances of the minders and attorneys insisting upon signed-in-triplicate confidentiality agreements, which at the moment make everybody of Z-list standing and above tediously cautious and controlling.
Star energy: Sophia Loren and Stanley Price met in Wales on the set of Arabesque
Stars now count on copy approval, headline approval, {photograph} approval. But Stanley, when working for the leisure division of Life journal and different publications, might merely choose up the cellphone and take anyone to lunch.
For instance, Mandy Rice-Davies got here his approach. Mandy, a mannequin from Wales, was the cunning pal of Christine Keeler, together with her personal half to play within the Profumo scandal again in 1962. When Lord Astor denied having had an affair together with her, Mandy instructed the choose, ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’. A riposte now present in The Oxford Book Of Quotations.
Stanley escorted Mandy to a photoshoot, the place she was to decorate up in 18th-century wench’s garb. The proprietor of the journal was Michael Heseltine, who determined to be current, ‘to keep an eye’ on his funding. There had been some pressing discussions with the photographer, Terence Donovan, who turned away from Heseltine to say, ‘Mandy, love, bit more of the knockers!’
Mandy ended up working a nightclub in Tel Aviv and was ‘directed in a Ray Cooney farce in Hebrew’, in keeping with Stanley, who himself was Jewish and raised in Dublin.
During National Service he was a sergeant within the Army Educational Corp, then learn History at Cambridge. His mother and father had been initially disenchanted, hoping Stanley would have skilled to be a physician. ‘Your son will be an educated man,’ one of many dons instructed Stanley’s father, who took this as a reassurance. (I’m an informed man — it will get you nowhere.)
Stanley watched Churchill’s state funeral on tv within the firm of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, who each wept copiously whereas ingesting champagne. Burton was carrying cufflinks Churchill had given him — he used to observe the Welsh actor carry out on the Old Vic and got here backstage to make use of the rest room.
In Cuba, Stanley’s lunch with Graham Greene was interrupted by ‘the odd, accidental burst of machine-gun fire’. Greene was ‘all affability’, and really eager on acquiring details about Havana’s prostitutes, availing himself of their providers.
A greater title would have been, I Didn’t Really Have Lunch With Marilyn (pictured at a restaurant within the Fifties)
My Lunch With Marilyn And Other Stories is screenwriter Stanley Price’s celeb packed, gossipy memoir
Stanley laboured on Arabesque, the place Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren (pictured on set) are pursued throughout the Crumlin Viaduct in Wales
Stanley ought to have launched the novelist to his pal Lady Jeanne Campbell, someday spouse of Norman Mailer, and stepdaughter of the Duchess of Argyll, who within the house of some months, hearsay had it, slept with three presidents — Kennedy, Khruschev and Fidel Castro (the final two hotly denied by her daughter).
Eventually, Stanley branched out, publishing novels, writing performs, and hiring himself out as a script physician for Hollywood, the place the ethos was, ‘If you’ve acquired cash, something is on the market’.
He laboured on Arabesque, the place Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren are pursued throughout the Crumlin Viaduct in Wales. Though Stanley wrote the script, he and the crew ‘never did quite understand the plot’. Loren instructed him, ‘Everything you see, I owe to spaghetti’. Stanley was invited to kiss her, however sadly, her face was caked in latex make-up.
Anthony Quinn, in contrast, was armoured solely inside his personal silly ego. He needed the whole lot rewritten on a forgotten epic referred to as Caravans, made in Iran, to inflate his position. Quinn banged his fist on the desk, bashed the furnishings and carried on like a lunatic. ‘You think this is an ending for me? To die? I never die in my films!’
The aged Stewart Granger was simply as useless, anticipating the Scotland Yard inspector he was enjoying to finish up in mattress with the younger heroine (Susan Hampshire).
It was Stanley’s job to clarify to Granger that this was an unsavoury suggestion — ‘I mumbled something about the exigencies of the plot’.
Stanley lived in Muswell Hill in North London, however even this wasn’t with out drama. His neighbour was Dennis Nilsen, who blocked the drains with the stays of his homicide victims. Kate Adie was exterior for weeks, giving TV bulletins. The principal impact on Stanley was that his home was unsellable for 17 years.
Offered at a knockdown value, not even TV actress Liza Goddard and her (then) husband, pop star Alvin Stardust, had been eager. Maureen Lipman, within the foreword, says Stanley was ‘erudite, emotional, dry, witty and intellectual’.
Marilyn tries some cake within the Enlisted Men’s Mess Hall at Headquarters Company, 2nd Infantry Division, close to Seoul
Loren instructed him, ‘Everything you see, I owe to spaghetti’ (file picture)
And though these qualities are intermittently mirrored on this guide, it should be mentioned that Stanley’s lunch with Marilyn was considerably inconsequential. His job was to gather her from the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, and he discovered her nervous, a large number.
‘I don’t know why I agreed to have this loopy lunch,’ she muttered. The lunch happened on the prime of the Time-Life Building on Sixth Avenue. The host was Henry Luce, the billionaire panjandrum whose magazines dominated U.S. well-liked tradition within the days earlier than tv.
Marilyn was feted with oysters, caviar, champagne — she was an ideal instance of Luce’s perception that what readers needed had been ‘titillating trivialities’ about glamorous celebrities. Stanley sat silently down the opposite finish of the desk, miles under the salt.
So, a greater title would have been, I Didn’t Really Have Lunch With Marilyn. Stanley had misplaced her on the best way to the carry. She wandered away down corridors. Eventually she was found within the Ladies, popping a thriller tablet.
Pharmaceutically enhanced, she reworked herself into Marilyn. ‘She looked almost like her publicity photos’, in her scarf and darkish glasses. ‘Thank you for looking after me,’ Marilyn whispered flirtatiously to Stanley, who was weak on the knees.