Letter from London

...This was not only offensive, but a lie...

...But it was Randolph who was suing the enemy...

...For he was, if anything, the indisputably greatest Englishman of the century, and he stood at the podium, peering in that celebrated squint over the rims of his spectacles, peaceful, pleased, aloof, as if he were almost ensconced in the happy beyond of historical immortality...

...Item: "I have a good wife, one of the best, but there is something missing in our happiness...

...adding with an ill-tempered finality meant to destroy governments, "no confidence al all, sir...

...and as his publisher he gave me a copy of son Randolph's best-selling little diatribe, What I Said About the Press...

...But the "Sunday pornography" goes on...

...When are we going to stop crawling around on our knees...

...But he was not a "paid hack...

...I assure vou—the feeling is mutual...

...Call him wrong, call him foolish, call him funny—but to say that articles were written to order for money was a gross libel on professional character...

...The libelous passage which he took into court included the remark that he was "that slightly comic son of our greatest statesman," that he was an "ignorant word-spinner," a "wild blather-er," that he was too cowardly to run for office, and that he was a "paid hack, paid to write biased accounts...

...He was ordered to pay ?2, 4s...

...hesitate again almost interminably, say it for a third time...

...Sharp, piercing cries went up from the back, from an embittered young woman, from a distinguished, bearded old man, members evidently of some right-wing "Empire" fraction...

...Perhaps the flesh-pots of Greenwich Village had been too jading, but I could not help but feel that all this would have interested David Riesman more than Alfred Kinsey...

...he called on advertisers to channel their ads away from the "gutter press" masquerading as newspapers...

...He has no need to do it to earn a living like some others...

...What he had had to say about England's sensational press—and the "press lords" (all friends of the family), Lord Rothermere, Lord Beaverbrook, etc...

...And this infuriated him only more...

...The Primrose League clapped hands gleefully...

...A point was scored...

...the speaker, clearly cut to the quick, retaliated at long last...

...And so felt the judge, too, especially when the defense counsel, nettled and embarrassed and exhausted by the Churchillian eloquence, practically threw in the towel...

...There is more wisdom and advice there than is apparent...

...I hurried to the Royal Albert Hall, expecting possibly half of London to be there, and with a mixture of relief and indignation found half of that huge barn gapingly empty...

...But when the shrill young woman screamed "Lord Hailsham...

...The fabled world of English prudery would seem to be very much with us, that dainty, white-laced Vic-torianism with which the zoo-keeper replied to the foreigner who had inquired whether the hippopotamus was male or female, "Sir, that is a question which should interest only hippopotami...

...In London's smaller theaters, now organized as "private clubs," one could taste of all the forbidden fruits of modern playwriting...

...His presence radiated a unique sense of belonging "to the age," and he motioned with much pride, and a little modesty, to halt the tribute of his countrymen...

...Why must we play second fiddle to Ameddica...

...I have known Lord Rothermere all my life," he said, "but I can only -confess myself as utterly baffled that so rich and cultivated a man should hire people to prostitute his papers in this way...

...He touched on the topics of the clay, from Suez and Eden to the H-Bomb and "the secrets of the future...

...The jury went out for one hour and fifteen minutes, and returned to award the sum of ?5,000 damages...

...At one point, the meeting was almost in an uproar...

...he made the suggestion that perhaps the Crown should appoint a "Pornogra-pher Royal...

...And just at the point when tender-souled old ladies were beginning to mutter fervent prayers (it was Churchill's father, I think, who got stuck in the very last speech of his career, stuck on a word helplessly, like in a broken record, to the ghastly embarrassment of the House of Commons), he lifted his head, grinned like a playful old man, and masterfully polished off the sentence...

...When the old man came in to take his place of honor, women seemed on the verge of tears and men roared out the tones of "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow...

...he said, gently, firmly, almost whispering to his attractive antagonist in the very last row of Albert Hall...

...Hypocrisy, you see, may one day be taken to be one of the virtues of free society...

...I wonder...

...for the very faintest suggestion of homosexuality—where there is so much of the thing, even the word is excessive—smacks of sin and corruption...

...in fact, he liked to think of By Melvin J. Lasky himself as having that irresistible gift, for (in the words of Anatole France which he has liked to quote) "the world decides only in favor of those who are sometimes wrong . With that great voice, so rich in music and ironic inflection, he indulged only in impish, impudent exercises, thrills enough for a Friday afternoon...

...His advice to the nation was simple and quiet, and could be agreed with or not...

...He minced no words as to his disgust with the endless reports of sex and violence...

...After having fumed and fulminated—one editor was an "old hack," another publisher was an "unctuous humbug," a third was a "loud-mouthed vaporer"—Randolph took time out to feel offended about what The People, a Sunday paper with about four to five million circulation, said about him...

...And "the Grand Master" teamed...

...When Churchill was done, a young Cabinet minister named Lord Hails-ham rose to make a rather polemical political speech, and I was amazed to find myself in the midst of some of the most vociferous heckling from the floor I have ever heard...

...He has sometimes been wrong...

...But here was true civilized English moderation: The Lord Chamberlain, stern defender of public morality, closes his eyes to private vice...

...His speech was brief, his words well-chosen...

...If you're after Churchilliana," George Weidenfeld said, "then why not the one who is still in the thick of it...

...The "hippopotami" have been getting together and taking up privately the questions which interest them...

...It had only been for emphasis, you see, and possibly to let us know that "Winnie" of the cherubic jest was still there, all there...

...which was a typical bit of English understatement...

...But only one, it seemed to me, was worth the adventure of the temptation...

...Over each London weekend I plowed through the sensational press, mountainous reports of murder, divorce, adultery, and assorted immoralities...

...Stop this Sunday pornography...

...became his battle-cry— and then came the libel suit...

...He would halt over a word, pause a second too long, repeat it...

...So I have been seeking happiness looking through windows to watch other people's happiness to make up for what I can't find in my own home...

...The Lord Chamberlain, in his antiquated role as censor of the London stage, had effectively managed to prevent English productions of plays by Samuel Beckett, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and others that have been presented almost everywhere else...

...The play, The Balcony by Jean Genet, was, I thought, a minor masterpiece, a stunning and surprising visionary comedy...

...Madame...

...The youth, Brian Dann, aged 19, of Ebenezer Street, Ilkeston, Derbyshire, admitted acting in a manner likely to cause a breach of the peace...

...In some of the most brilliant conversation ever submitted before a judge in testimony, Randolph Churchill did not deny that he attempted to be amusing, that as a journalist he was obliged to spin words and turn phrases, that in the face of "disgusting impertinence" he had fits of wildness, and that after having been defeated for Parliament several times (by Labor's Michael Foot, another word-spinning journalist) he did not choose to run again...

...A small notice in the morning paper stated that Sir Winston Churchill, 82, would be breaking a year's silence by making a brief address that afternoon in his capacity as Grand Master of the Primrose League, whatever that was...

...These remarks, as he might well have expected, were printed nowhere in the London press (the Manchester Guardian, as always, was the exception...

...Sir Winston's enjoyment of it all seemed tempered only by the inability of his ears to catch all the rhetorical by-play and his concern for the young Tory who was taking a beating...

...had alarmed his lawyers to the possibility of a libel suit...

...It must be a case of pornography for pornography's sake...

...Item: " 'Our television conked out and I had nothing else to do,' was the excuse offered to the police by a youth caught peeping at a girl through a chink in some bedroom curtains...

...If in the press it was "sex" that our friends were trying to get out, in the theater it was sex that they were trying to get in...

...alas, all I could come up with were two mousy little tidbits, both in the "worst offender" of them all, the notoriously wicked News of the World...

...Apparently there was still some fight left in the younger generation...

...Will it ever be played in the U.S...

...Not a sign of gentlemanly political manners here...

...He was making, obviously, no strenuous effort to plumb the depths of his wisdom or his eloquence...

...and the speaker politely paused, "Lord Hailsham—sir—we have no confidence in you...