The British cellist Jacqueline du Pré and the pianist/conductor Daniel Barenboim return to London after getting married in Israel a year after they met. Du Pré was a child prodigy who would go on to tour with the world’s most prestigious orchestras. She also performed with her husband, but despite their united front on stage, theirs was a tempestuous union and both had affairs during their marriage. In 1972, after developing multiple sclerosis and losing the sensitivity in her fingers, du Pré turned to teaching. She died in 1987, at the age of 42. In less than a year, Barenboim had remarried.
BIG SPENDER
What it cost then... and what it’s worth now
Trustees of Marilyn Monroe’s estate had always held back from selling her most intimate belongings. But this month they auctioned bras that belonged to the star, with letters she had written to President Kennedy, her divorce papers from Joe DiMaggio, and a note from her beauty salon telling her how to dye her hair. The bras ranged in size from 36B to 38C. One, made of black lace, sold for $5,700.
BLUNDERS OF THE WORLD
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Wrong gear for coin collectors
To celebrate the great industrial advances of our time, a specially designed £2 coin was minted in 1998. It made an eye-catching first impression when issued by the Royal Mint, but turned out to be fraught with problems.
The coin was gold on the edge and silver in the middle — evidently a lot of thought had gone into finding the appropriate symbolism to depict the nation’s industrial developments. On one side of the coin, the Queen’s normal profile is engraved. On the centre of the other side is a chariot wheel surrounded by a circle of 19 gears; this was apparently intended to represent the industrial revolution. A pattern on the outer gold circle represents the internet. Engraved on the gold edge is part of the famous Newton quote, “Standing on the shoulders of giants”.
Sadly, one aspect of the coin lets the whole project down: there is an odd number of gears in the circle. This is an engineering goof, because each gear turns the next in the opposite direction, so only an even number of gears would engage with each other to turn successfully. The 2003 coin replaced the gears with a design representing the structure of DNA (to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA) and an edge that reads “deoxyribonucleic acid”. But the gears kept returning: some of the 2004 £2 coins also displayed the useless gears. Nobody recalled the 1998 coin, and it circulates freely round Britain today, albeit with a set of wonky gears.
ROOTFINDER
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To “spill the beans”
This widely used term for disclosing something confidential derives from a tradition that started in ancient Greece. Back then, the method for electing a new member to a private club was to give each existing member a white bean and a brown bean with which to cast their votes. The white bean signified a ‘yes’ vote and the brown bean meant an objection. The beans were then secretly placed in a jar and the prospective member would never know how many people had voted either for him or against him. Unless, that is, the jar was knocked over and the beans were spilt. Then the club members’ secret would be out.
From Red Herrings and White Elephants: The Origins of the Phrases We Use Every Day, by Albert Jack (Metro Publishing, £9.99)
THE UNLIKELY EVENT
A curse on the road
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James Dean’s obsession with fast cars proved fatal for the actor. In 1955 he bought a Porsche Spyder, dubbed it “the Little Bastard” — as the Warner Bros studio head, Jack Warner, called him — and planned to race it. But on September 30 Dean crashed his car and died, aged 24. The wreckage was exhibited at county fairs, ostensibly part of a road-safety campaign. Later, George Barris, a car designer, bought it and sold off the parts. Troy McHenry, an LA doctor, transferred some of Dean’s parts to his own Porsche, and died when he crashed into a tree. A second motorist, William Eschrich, installed the engine in a Lotus IX and collided with another car. Another story suggests Barris took the shell of the car to a show in Salinas, California, and en route the driver of the truck carrying it was killed. Today, the whereabouts of the Little Bastard are unknown, which is perhaps a relief for the Sunday drivers of America.