Nicky Haslam has had a variety of bedfellows but none more surprising than General Sir John Hackett, GCB, CBE, DSO & bar, MC and Sir Max Hastings. His autobiography, Redeeming Features, lies between Hackett’s I was a Stranger and Hastings’s Did You Really Shoot the Television? on my biog/diary shelves.
I was a Stranger is one of the most moving memoirs I have read. Hackett was a Brigadier at the Battle of Arnhem, was badly wounded and hospitalised. Surgery by a Dutch doctor saved his life. The Dutch Resistance rescued him and for most of a bitterly cold winter he was hidden in the home of a Dutch family. They took a great risk sheltering him and suffered hardship sharing their scarce food with him. It is a very moving account that is unexpected coming from the pen of a successful professional soldier. His depiction of the lives his protectors led will move you.
Nicky Haslam is no John Hackett. His book is a litany of indiscreet, lubricious, name-dropping and it is at least to Haslam’s credit that he has enough names to drop to fill more than three hundred pages. Try this extract.
… one of the most beautiful people I have ever seen sauntered through the French windows. Extremely tall and lean, naked under khaki dungarees, Gordon had the pale blond hair and dark almond eyes that revealed the German-Chinese blood I’d just been told he possessed. … Gordon, near-naked now and gold-bronze, his hair to his waist, bareback on a small grey horse, leading a donkey clanking with cooking things and followed by a string of dogs, rode from the Alpes-Maritimes to the towering, blue Amalfi coast and reached the narrow path to Gore’s (Vidal) eerie. Near the house the film director Wes Anderson was shooting a scene as this cavalcade appeared. I was told that his star, Anjelica Huston, fainted at the sight.
It takes some chutzpah to describe that at second hand. The film is The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, released in 2004. It’s a comedy, homage to Jaques Cousteau. By the way, when I saw Anjelica at John Julius Norwich’s memorial service she didn’t faint.
Haslam is described as an interior designer and socialite but can append cabaret performer. I am going to his show at The Pheasantry in the basement of Pizza Express in the King’s Road. In fact I will have been by the time you read this.