Gaby Wood

I look at pictures of her and I just can’t see it. She’s elegant, composed, straight-backed. She’s in a tweedy suit on the beach, scowling at the sun, one hand in pocket, the other holding sunglasses, as if about to make some school-ma’amish point. She’s neat, both modern and quintessentially luxurious; dark hair pulled back into a bun, eyes like soft triangles, sweeping cheekbones, it is a sculpted head, a lukewarm, intelligent face. She might be an actress, a spy, a photographer.

For years, all that passed across our TV screen was a series of grins. Harpo, Chico, Groucho, wide-eyed and cheesy, and, over and over again, Gene Kelly. There must have been other videos, programmes even, but all I remember are these movies my brothers and I gazed at as if we knew all about classics (Singin’ in the Rain, An American in Paris) though for all we cared they could have been made the day before. We would rerun ‘Moses Supposes’ (Kelly and Donald O’Connor spinning and pinning down their elocution teacher in a tap dance of schoolboy naughtiness), ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ (flu-defying splashes in puddles), ‘I Got Rhythm’ (Kelly teaching French kids how to dance like aeroplanes and ‘chu-chu trains’), an instrumental in It’s Always Fair Weather (three soldiers crashing rhythmically around the streets with enormous trash-can lids on their shoes). It was an endless party, a crazy magic show set to music, and every so often Gene Kelly’s raised eyebrow, sidelong smile would open up his face like an upside-down wink.

My great-grandfather’s watch did not confer immortality … it was proof against age and against all those processes by which we are able to say that a man’s time runs out, but it was not proof against external accident.

Richard Rayner’s The Blue Suit is a memoir, a work of non-fiction. In it his father dies several times: of cancer, in a car crash, missing presumed drowned and, finally, of a heart attack. He makes guest appearances in between, as a sick man in Scotland, as a diplomat in Australia, as a stepfather. These events all form part of a story, a sort of Arabian Nights of the confessional, in which Rayner admits his real life to his girlfriend (‘one confession veiling the next’), and the whole truth turns out to be a narration of the lies he has told.

Of all the Hollywood beauties of her time, only Katharine Hepburn had the grace to be irritating. She was beautiful, but not always, her looks could change from shot to shot. She was oddly elegant, sometimes bouncy, sometimes brittle. She was mocking, brash, hoity-toity. What she never was, in her films, was silent. John Ford admired her ‘strange, sharp face’ which made Tennessee Williams think of ‘a medieval saint in a Gothic cathedral’. Her voice has been described as ‘nasal’, ‘metallic’, and by one biographer as ‘a cross between Donald Duck and a Stradivarius’. She has been nicknamed ‘Katharine of Arrogance’ and she reminded Tallulah Bankhead of ‘a New England spinster’. Humphrey Bogart, her co-star in The African Queen, was clear about his first impressions: ‘She won’t let anybody get a word in edgewise and she keeps repeating what a superior person she is. Later, you get a load of the babe stalking through the African jungle as though she beat Livingstone to it … About every other minute she wrings her hands in ecstasy and says, “what divine natives! what divine morning glories!” Brother, your brow goes up … is this something from The Philadelphia Story?’…