Allen Ginsberg was disappointed Patti Smith wasn’t a boy. (Richard E. Aaron/Redferns)
Martha Graham (center) taught Helen Keller what dancing is. (
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Princess Grace to Princess Di: “Don’t worry, it gets worse.” (Tim Graham/Getty Images)
Hello Goodbye Hello
A Circle of 101
Remarkable Meetings
by Craig Brown
Simon & Schuster
When Michael Jackson turned up to meet Madonna for the first time at the Los Angeles hotspot The Ivy in 1991, Jackson was already less than impressed with her, having told confidantes, “I don’t get it. She’s not a great dancer or singer. But she does know how to market herself. That must be it.”
But Madonna’s efforts to win Jackson over took a bigger hit when, shortly after they sat down, she grabbed the Gloved One’s legendary sunglasses, pulled them off his face, and threw them across the room.
“I’m your date now,” she said. “And I hate it when I can’t see a man’s eyes.”
“Hello Goodbye Hello,” the juicy new book by British journalist Craig Brown, is celebrity gossip with a six degrees of separation twist. Brown researched 101 get-togethers between various celebrities, politicians and royalty, and wrote about each in exactly 1,001 words. He linked all consecutive tales, so that a participant in one carries over to the next. In between, he details affairs and feuds, surprising couplings and awkward engagements, and even a burning hatred or two.
In the case of Jackson and Madonna, the sexpot starlet further inflames the King of Pop when, after supposedly catching him peeking at her breasts, she “snatches his hand and places it upon them,” having an effect on Jackson of “instant queasiness.”
The next story involves Jackson and Nancy Reagan, who meet when the White House presents the singer with an award in exchange for permission to use his “Beat It” for an anti-drunk-driving campaign.
After the ceremony, Jackson is to have a private meeting with the first couple and some of their staffers’ children. But when he enters the room and finds 75 adults, he freaks out, runs into a nearby bathroom and locks the door.
“They said there would be kids. But those aren’t kids!” he tells his manager through the door, refusing to emerge until the adults are gone.
The Reagans pick up the thread, as Andy Warhol visits the White House for an Interview magazine story. He’s at his cattiest after he’s ushered into a reception area and served nothing but water.
“She could have done it in a good room. She could have used the good china!” Warhol wrote. “I got madder and madder thinking about it.”
Though not quite as mad as Jackie Kennedy got at him in 1978 for bringing an uninvited guest to one of her parties. Warhol thought Kennedy was worried that this guest would spread gossip about something “disgusting” Warren Beatty had done in a hallway at her most recent soiree (Warhol doesn’t know what), and she retaliates by making Warhol persona non-grata at her parties from then on.
“Shook hands with Jackie O.,” Warhol writes after seeing her at a Helmsley Palace black-tie affair. “She never invited me to her Christmas party, so she’s a creep.”
Another enveloping story thread begins with Frank Sinatra’s relationship with actor Eli Wallach. As Brown tells it, the scene in “The Godfather” where the Corleones pressure a film director into hiring Don Corleone’s godson, Johnny Fontane, was based on the casting of “From Here To Eternity,” when Wallach was offered a role that suddenly, inexplicably, went to Sinatra instead.
But the next tale makes Sinatra sound as vicious as any crime boss.
For unknown reasons, the Chairman of the Board took a tremendous dislike to then-TV producer Dominick Dunne. Whenever they turned up at the same event, Sinatra would call him a “no-talent hack,” or tell Dunne’s wife that she married a loser. Once, when the Dunnes were dining with Lauren Bacall, Maureen O’Sullivan and agent Swifty Lazar, a drunk Sinatra began loudly berating them, then “grabbed the tablecloth and pulled it from beneath all their plates and glasses, threw a plate of food over Lazar and stomped out.”
The worst, though, was the night in 1966 at the Los Angeles restaurant The Daisy, a regular haunt of Dunne’s, when Dunne and some friends found themselves at an adjacent table to Sinatra and his family.
The restaurant’s maitre d’, a “very nice guy called George” whom Dunne had known for some time, taps him on the shoulder and says, “Mr. Dunne, I’m so sorry about this, but Mr. Sinatra made me do it.” George then “leans back, clenches his fist, and hits Dunne smack in the face,” as Sinatra looks on “with a smile.”
Violence also arises in Brown’s tales of Phil Spector (connected by Dunne having to make awkward small talk with him while waiting for him to finish at a urinal during Spector’s murder trial, which Dunne was covering).
When singer Leonard Cohen’s career hit the skids in the late ’70s, his manager suggested pairing him up with Spector. After meeting the famed producer at a party at Spector’s “dark and dreary” mansion, Cohen goes to leave, except that “Spector locks the front door and informs Cohen that he is not allowed to leave.”
When Cohen diplomatically suggests they try to write some songs together, it goes surprising well and they spend the next three weeks writing 15 songs and drinking “a great deal of alcohol.”
But it’s not long before Spector’s darker side comes to dominate, the side that Cohen calls “megalomania and insanity and devotion to armaments that was really intolerable.” Cohen — who had the “Wall of Sound” producer once stick a pistol to his neck — refers to Spector’s mental state as “post-Wagnerian, I would say Hitlerian. The atmosphere was one of guns . . . People were armed to the teeth, all his friends, his bodyguards, and everybody was drunk, or intoxicated on other items, so you were slipping over bullets, and you were biting into revolvers in your hamburger.”
Cohen has a sexier, less dangerous time when he meets Janis Joplin in the elevator of the Chelsea Hotel. Cohen asks if she’s looking for someone, and she responds that she’s looking for Kris Kristofferson. Cohen tells her that he is Kris Kristofferson, and “by the time the lift reaches the fourth floor, it is clear to both of them that they will be spending the night together.” (Cohen will later write the song “Chelsea Hotel” about the encounter.)
Joplin then meets a starstruck, 23-year-old bookstore assistant named Patti Smith at the Chelsea, when Smith lived in the hotel’s smallest room with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
Smith “walks around the hotel in awe,” soaking in the presence of cultural luminaries such as Jimi Hendrix, Arthur C. Clarke and beat poet Gregory Corso, who thrills her when he falls asleep in her room while reading one of her poems, leaving a burn mark from his cigarette on her chair.
As Smith befriends Joplin, she becomes privy to the blues singer’s tumultuous love life, like the night after a concert when Joplin pines for a man who leaves with a prettier girl, and then “bursts into tears,” telling Smith, “This always happens to me, man. Just another night alone.”
Around the same time that Smith and Mapplethorpe stage a “happening” called “Robert Getting His Nipple Pierced” — which consists of the title activity occurring as “Patti intones a meandering monologue about her love life” — Smith brings her required 55 cents to the automat for her favorite cheese and lettuce sandwich, only to find they’d raised the price by a dime.
A voice behind her says “Can I help?” and the speaker is famed “Howl” poet Allen Ginsberg. She accepts his dime, gets her sandwich and they sit together. As they speak, though, something “strikes” Ginsberg.
“He leans forward in his chair,” Brown writes, “and looks at her quizzically. ‘Are you a girl?’ he asks. ‘Yeah. Is that a problem?’ ”
Ginsberg, who was gay, laughed. “ ‘I’m sorry. I took you for a pretty boy.’ ” Smith asks if she then has to return the sandwich. Ginsberg says no, and the misunderstanding leads to a lifelong friendship.
Many of Brown’s stories contain choice bits about figures that are secondary to that particular story, such as when John Lennon shows up in a tale about the writer Kenneth Tynan, suggesting a scene for Tynan’s blue new play, “Oh! Calcutta!” in which four men would pleasure themselves while giving each other descriptive images for inspiration. As Lennon goes on, actress Sharon Tate, newly married to director Roman Polanski, doles out fresh-baked hash brownies nearby.
The book contains moments of inspiration, as when choreographer Martha Graham helps Helen Keller understand the meaning of the word “jumping” by placing Keller’s hands on dancer Merce Cunningham’s waist and having Cunningham perform tiny leaps so Keller can feel the sensation; sadness, as when 19-year-old soon-to-be-Princess Diana bursts into tears at a Buckingham Palace reception, only to have older and wiser Princess Grace console her with, “Don’t worry, dear. It’ll only get worse”; and even the psychic creepiness of Alec Guinness warning James Dean that if he got into his new Porsche 550 Spyder, he would “be found dead in it by this time next week,” a prediction that proved exactly correct.
There are also moments of humor, as when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev reacts to being refused a Disneyland visit due to security concerns by bellowing, “Why not? Do you have rocket launching pads there?”; or, during the filming of “The Outlaw,” director Howard Hughes screaming at his cinematographer about leading lady Jane Russell, “We’re not getting enough production out of Jane’s breasts!”
Overall, “Hello Goodbye Hello” makes you consider how little encounters can inspire and maybe even change the course of history.
Or, in the case of John Scott-Ellis, fail to alter history.
In 1931, the English lord-to-be was driving through Munich in a red FIAT when “a man walked off the pavement, more or less straight into my car.” The man was knocked onto one knee, but then stood, unharmed.
Political party leader and best-selling author Adolf Hitler survived with nary a scratch. “For a few seconds,” Scott-Ellis later said, “I held the history of Europe in my rather clumsy hands.”
If only he’d been driving a bit faster.