PHOTO/Queen Mary

Howelings

Dishing Out Great Dish

By Mark Howell

 

Good dish is so very important in this season of fancy dinners, whether in Key West or in Connecticut.

By “dish” we mean serving up an item of juicy gossip, preferably about the high and the mighty.

The earliest dish I personally can claim heir to occurred when I was but a baby in Great Britain and features (one can’t get much higher than this) Queen Mary, born Victoria Mary Augusta Louise Olga Pauline Claudine Agnes May, whose oldest son Edward became Edward VIII following the death of George V.

After the Second World War she visited the home of my grandfather, John Howell, at Royal Crescent in Cheltenham Spa by virtue of the fact that grandpa, a surgeon, was also the mayor of Cheltenham.

Our entire family was in attendance, of course, including me and my twin brother Michael, two babes in the arms of Nanny, sputtering spit bubbles in a photo of the occasion.

I remember none of this, naturally, except for the family legend that, upon leaving the premises, her royal highness nicked (slang for stole) a silver article of tableware known as a saltcellar from a sideboard in the dining room.

Queen Mary was famous for lifting (posh for stealing) items of interest that caught her attention in the homes of her loyal subjects, so no umbrage could be taken, but it has made for the most delicious dish ever since.

A once and future celebrity whom I can claim to know well enough to dish about is David Gilmour, the Pink Floyd guitarist and songwriter. I met and got to know him at the Criterion pub, located in Rose Crescent in the university town of Cambridge and lovingly known to the likes of us as the Cri.

Dave’s dad was about to become a senior lecturer in zoology at the university of Cambridge, and his mother was a teacher in town. They lived in Grantchester Meadows, although Dave seemed to live mostly in the Cri. He’d already started teaching himself the guitar with the help of a book and a set of records by Pete Seeger.

When I got to know him, he and Syd Barrett had just returned from busking around Spain and France, performing songs by the Beatles. They were actually arrested while living hand-to-mouth and Dave ended up needing treatment for malnutrition. Back in England, Dave went to see Syd at the recording session for “See Emily Play and became upset that Syd (already a serious acid head) failed to recognize him. It was Nick Mason who invited Dave to play with the Floyd.

The best dish I have on Gilmour is the fact that ever since the band became globally huge, each time that he’s purchased himself a mansion and then moved on to another one, he’s deeded the vacated home for free to an organization that houses the homeless.

In 2005, Queen Elizabeth made Gilmour a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, not in fact for this noble generosity to the homeless of his country but for his services to music.

My next dish target is movie star Chevy Chase, or rather his father, Ned Chase, who headed up New American Library in New York City while I was employed at New English Library in London.

Whenever Mr. Chase would cross the Atlantic to visit we paperback editors in our offices on High Holborn, he’d complain about his son. “He takes these deliberate pratfalls, you know,” he’d tell us in his slow drawl. “I worry about him. And he’s not funny, right? Modern humor just isn’t funny, is it? Know what I mean?”

It was at New English Library that we all got to meet all sorts of famous folk, usually for a wine-soaked lunch in London’s Soho. Notable among them was the late Irwin Shaw, who had such a huge hit with “Rich Man, Poor Man” as a TV series that it eclipsed his literary reputation from such masterpieces as “The Young Lions,” Made into a movie starring Marlon Brando.

Speaking of Brando, whom I regret I never did get to meet, there is a tidbit of dish about the great Marlon that I’m entitled to recount on account of my Welsh heritage.

Aside from the fact that he was the father to 16 known children, three of whom were adopted, while certain sources claim he fathered as many as 17 children or more, Brando had a number of lovers and wives, among them actress Anna Kashfi, whom he married in 1957.

She was born in India in but is said to have been the daughter of a Welsh steel worker of Irish descent, William O’Callaghan, who was once a superintendent on the Indian State Railway. But in her book, “Brando for Breakfast” (such dish!), she claimed that she was really half Indian and that her real father was Indian. However, Brando, who died in 2004, is said to have fallen for her because he thought Anna, with her jet-black hair, was Tahitian.

Now here’s the latest dish on the late, great, literally huge actor as revealed in a just-published biography by Susan Mizruchi titled “Brando’s Smile: His Life, Thought and Work.”

This we never knew. In the words of Ms. Mizruchi: his work from 1990 until his death is marked by a movie ranking among the worst ever made, “The Island of Dr. Moreau.”

For that film, Brando, receiving his lines from an earpiece hidden beneath an ice bucket that he insisted on wearing as a hat, stipulated that his friend, Nelson de la Rosa, one of the shortest men in history (he was two feet, four inches tall) be written into the script and appear with him in every scene. This apparently was the inspiration for the Mini-Me character in the Austin Powers sequels by Mike Myers.

You can pick yourself up off the floor now.

 

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