Patrick Skene Catling
When I first met Patrick Skene Catling he was smoking an enormous Corona
Corona cigar and drinking a glass of champagne in The Wig and Pen club
(“We serve lunch up until 6 p.m.”), opposite the Law Courts
in Fleet Street. Here was a man who enjoyed good living. I
told him that I had met the author of what I believed was the Great American
Novel, From Here to Eternity: James Jones, who, living in Paris,
would pop over to London to drink pints of bitter in favourite pubs and
clubs, especially the Wig and Pen. The club was an invention
of one of Patrick’s friends, Warwick Charlton, the man who told
Montgomery to improve his image by wearing two cap badges. Patrick
told me of an occasion in Nassau, in 1962 at a cocktail party, when President
Jack Kennedy turned to him and said: “What are you doing here, Pat? Nothing’s
going to happen.” This was at JFK’s conference with
Macmillan which resulted in the cancellation of the Skybolt missile and
the formation of the Polaris base in Holy Loch. JFK liked
Patrick and was always friendly to him, but one journalist the President
could not abide was Randolph Churchill, the infamous son of a famous man
. Randolph, a trouble maker and a bad drunk was a journalist
even editors feared. Useful at election time (he had correctly
forecast that Alec Douglas Home would be PM, headlined in the Evening
Standard), this scoop was followed by a trip to Moscow when the
telephone call with his story (he had difficulty speaking, possibly suffering
from Smirnoff flu) cost the paper £600. Multiply that
by four today and imagine the Editor’s chagrin.
The next time I met Mr. Catling
was in the famous Flask public house in Flask Walk, Hampstead. There were
thirty drinkers in the saloon bar, but Patrick and his school friend (St. Alfred’s)
Jocelyn Kelsey were the only ones who had actually been born in Happy Hampstead. The
rest were Jocks, Tykes, Geordies, Scousers, Taffies, and myriad foreigners
trying to make it in London, whose streets, they had heard, were paved with gold. Some
did. Patrick Wymark, Marty Feldman, Tony Booth, John Hurt, David Warner,
Ronnie Fraser, J.B. Priestley, Kingsley Amis struck gold, but the others struggled
on, drowning their sorrows. The clientele of this pub had been described
in the 19th century as “second rate characters, occasionally in a swinish
condition” which the local newspaper The Ham and High (called by Wally
Fawkes The Ham and Egg, which was also the staple diet of its editor who lunched
there daily) repeated frequently, the editor clearly envious of the freedom of
the Bohemian crowd as he was trapped 9-5 on a pittance.
We joined forces to write a
film in Ireland. At the customs desk, Patrick was asked: “Do
you have any guns in that case, sor?” “No” he replied. “Roight,
then, through you go...” In the office of the Irish Tourist Board
we heard funny stories: the lorry that collided with a taxi on the
Dublin quay and the driver leant out of his taxi and cursed him
for a full five minutes, calling him “a stupid gorrier” and other
ripe phrases. When he finally stopped, the lorry driver removed his hand
from beneath his chin and said: “You know -- you took the words right
out of me mouth.” We heard of the two IRA men asking: “Do you want
to buy a ticket for the Policeman’s Ball, Madam?” and the housewife
replying: “No, because we can’t dance.” “It’s
not a dance -- it’s a raffle” they said. While in a nearby
street Guinness brewery officials said: “We have bad news, Mrs. Riley,
your husband drowned in a vat of Guinness at the works today.” “Holy
Mother of God, what a terrible death,” she said, and they said: “Oh,
it wasn’t all that bad. He got out three times for a piss.”
But when it came to jokes and
pranks, Patrick Skene Catling left them all standing. He recounts some
of his master strokes and anecdotes in The Joy of Freeloading and Better than
Working (the latter title coming from his father who asked him what he wanted
to do in life, and when he replied “Journalism” his father said: “Well,
it’s better than working.”).
I knew a reporter whose story
of a wedding had the headline: “Bride wore Dutch cap”, but as a junior
reporter on the Baltimore Sun (H.L. Mencken, who had worked there wrote that
a journalist should have “the worldly wisdom of a police desk sergeant,
the cunning of a shyster lawyer and the tenderness of a midwife”) assigned
to reporting the local social news he managed to switch to crime by writing that “the
blushing bride wore a beautiful white silk gown, trailing ten yards of orgasma.”
Covering the Korean war, his
pal Patrick O’Donovan of The Observer wore his Irish Guards officer’s
cap, showing off. Catling acquired flowing white robes, a coolie’s
pointed straw hat and flip-flops and followed him into press conferences bowing
and scraping and pretending to be O’Donovan’s attendant slave.
Mr. Catling specialised in fake
letters:
“Dear Madam,” he
wrote to the wife of a boring, loud, overbearing “Aahm a self-made man. Nice
to get away from the wife...” Lancashire businessman, whose address
he acquired, along with a sheet of hotel notepaper from reception in their Brighton
conference hotel, “We regret that you decided to return home after all,
after only one night with us, and trust that you found your accommodation satisfactory,
though, of course, we had prepared your room at first only for single occupancy. We
hope that your husband and you will come and stay with us again on some future
occasion when we will be able to honour your request for a double bed. We
will send on your night attire by parcel post as soon as it returns from our
seamstress.”
At the time of the Suez crises,
visiting 10 Downing Street where Anthony Eden was briefing the Press, he acquired
a sheet of the heavily embossed notepaper. “Dear Mrs.
Catling,” he wrote to his mother in Baltimore, “it is with great
pleasure that I can now inform you that your eldest son has recently made a most
important contribution to world peace and thus, of course, to the security of
the United Kingdom. Thanks to his intrepid and resourceful actions, we
may now all rest easier. I wish I could tell you the precise nature of
his exploits, but I am sure you will understand that his continuing effectiveness
will depend in no small part on the discretion of all concerned. I need
hardly tell you that to him discretion is as natural as breathing. If by
any chance you have wondered why he has not been writing many letters to you
recently, may I, as a fellow parent, suggest that you wonder no more?”
The letter was signed by the
Prime Minister. Mrs. C. in Baltimore, Maryland, was most impressed.
Patrick was a favourite contributor
to Punch magazine when Malcolm Muggeridge was editor and Michael Parkinson called
him: “The fashion icon of Fleet Street.” After
interviewing The Beatles, they would not let him leave the house until he had
told them more of Peggy Lee, whose singing, and that of Little Richard,
influenced them. Patrick was the lover of Peggy Lee in Hollywood. She
had a Polish butler who wore white gloves and served Nuits St George straight
from the refrigerator, and Peggy had an unfortunate habit of eating pistachio
ice-cream in bed and spilling some on the sheets. One morning she
said: “Get up and get dressed and packed, Patrick...” “Where
are we going?” “To Mexico to get married...” He
dressed, packed his bag and took the next flight back to London, and journalism. He
was commissioned by Howard Hughes to write Jane Russell’s life story (Hughes
had designed her famous bra for her appearance in The Outlaw). Patrick
had met her in Baltimore when he took her to dinner and a jazz club and, upon
delivering her back to her hotel suite (to quote from Better than Working): “she
kissed me so effectively that she felt that she had to get down on her knees
to pray for detumescent peace.” and he added: “Saying goodbye,
she told me she had had a ball...” Mr. Catling certainly had a way
with words.. The biography ran into the sand because Jane could not remember
enough to fill the first chapter. Once again he returned to London and
journalism.
At 18, Patrick had been a pilot
officer in the Royal Canadian Air Force. He had what is known as a “good
war” being assigned to deliver planes all over the world, to England,
the USA and, a favourite watering hole, the Bahamas. Landing in chilly
England the fliers slept in officers’ quarters and were awakened by girls
in the women’s branch of the Royal Air Force, who, doing their duty helping
the war effort, lit their fires and then jumped into bed with the Canadian visitors. Patrick
remembered this warm comforting later when, in that freezing winter, he took
part in the Berlin air lift.
The Bahamas, however, was an
even better stop-over. Here was the Duke of Windsor, the Governor,
rather tipsy, driving his Cadillac convertible along the fairways of the Nassau
golf club, as he hated walking, waving to Patrick on the 16th and indicating
that he was heading for the bar. The Duke was in mufti: lime-green
shirt and doeskin slacks, which were “Schiaparelli Shocking Pink”. At
4.45 p.m. having invited Patrick to several drinks, he suggested a drive to the
slums of Nassau.
Urchins ran from their wooden
shacks at the blast of the Duke’s horn, and all were armed with homemade
wooden guns and sticks. The Duke, standing up in the Cadillac, put
on a General’s cap with its bright red band, looking very colourful with
the green shirt and pink slacks, and commanded his troops to “Fall in”. He
then drilled the platoon, “quick march, ab.....out TURN, slo-ope ,,,
ARMS. By the left ... quick MARCH. Then, after taking the
salute, he commanded his platoon to stand at ease, then to stand easy,
and the miniscule soldiers became boys again and scrambled for the silver coins
thrown in the dust by the Duke.
If anyone reading my EHABIT
section (writing advice from five authors) prefers to go into journalism rather
than suffer the long and painful struggle for authorship, then I can recommend
the reading of Better than Working, to see what fun and adventure it can be,
and how journalists (who do not have to be polite to anyone) can pay off
scores and ridicule the high and mighty who think they run the world.
The last lines of this excellent
book are:
“How His Excellency laughed! I
thought he was an awful shit and a fool, but I was grateful to him, and I am
still, for demonstrating so vividly that warfare is absurd.”
Living in semi-retirement
(no author ever retires completely) in County Cork, Southern Ireland,
he worries about obesity amongst children in America. His popular
children’s book “The Chocolate Touch” is read in schools
and then the pupils are taken on a visit to the local chocolate factory,
where they finish the tour by consuming lots of free samples, making parents
worry that their offspring are growing sideways as well as upwards...