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Six degrees of separation

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Post  Guest Thu Oct 06, 2011 10:49 pm

Six degrees of separation refers to the famous idea that everyone is on average approximately six steps away, by way of introduction, from any other person on Earth, so that a chain of, "a friend of a friend" statements can be made, on average, to connect any two people in six steps or fewer. It was originally set out by Frigyes Karinthy and popularized by a play written by John Guare.










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Post  Guest Thu Oct 06, 2011 11:05 pm

I was thinking about this (I like silly ideas) and I wondered... at how many degrees of separation am I, as far as I know, for example, from Chaplin (although he's dead)?

It's been surprisingly easy.

I have a friend who knows an actor who has worked for Almodóvar for whom Geraldine has worked too and she is a Chaplin's daughter.
So I am at five degrees of separation from Charles Chaplin as a maximum.

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Post  eddie Fri Oct 07, 2011 1:27 am

Craig Brown: Memorable meetings

It takes only three handshakes to get from Rasputin to Paul McCartney. Craig Brown on how a series of memorable meetings led him to construct a daisy-chain of celebrity encounters

Craig Brown
guardian.co.uk, Friday 30 September 2011 22.55 BST


I once came within touching distance of Edward Heath. We were at the 1987 Conservative conference at Blackpool. I was there to write about it; he was there to loom. As he strode through the various stalls outside the main conference chamber, his arm outstretched in a gesture of camaraderie, old colleagues could be seen darting into the shadows.

And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

This was the heyday of Mrs Thatcher, and Heath was very much the spectre at the feast. Though there was an undeniable bulk to him, there was also something of the apparition. Just under 20 years later, I spotted him once more, this time sitting solidly in the front row in Salisbury Cathedral, where my daughter was singing with her school choir. Salisbury people had grown used to his sudden appearances. In old age, he would get his chauffeur to drive him to pubs outside town, where he would sit alone, nursing a malt whisky in silence.

Like a ghost in a story by MR James, he would also pop up in the dreams of the most unlikely characters. In his posthumously published dream diary, Graham Greene chronicles a dream in which Heath offers him the post of ambassador to Scotland. "I refused. However, when I read in the paper that no one else would accept, I went to him and told him that I was ready to be appointed after all … Perhaps as a mark of friendship, we went swimming together in a muddy river, and to show my keenness for my job I suggested we should hold a World Textile Fair in Scotland. He replied that David Selznick had once told him that such fairs might possibly do good in the long run, but that the last one had ruined many local industries."

The angular comic Kenneth Williams also dreamt of him. On 9 March 1974, he recounts this dream in his diary: "I was attending a political meeting addressed by Harold Wilson: I was talking to him & he was complaining of the sparse attendance, and I saw Heath in the front row smiling and wearing a ridiculous square shouldered ladies' musquash coat."

By chance, five years ago, I happened to read two more books in which Heath makes surprise appearances, only these were for real. In Matthew Sturgis's biography of Walter Sickert, the elderly painter is sitting in his house in Kent in December 1934, when he is disturbed by the sound of carol singers. One of them is the neat and tidy 18-year-old Edward Heath. The group sing two carols, then wait expectantly by the door, as they can see a light on. No one emerges, so they press the doorbell and bang the knocker. "Eventually, the curtain at the window was drawn aside and through the chink we saw a small, wizened, grey-bearded face," recalled Heath, nearly 40 years later, in his post-prime ministerial potboiler, Music: A Joy for Life. "Almost immediately the curtain slipped back again. We waited. Then the door, on a chain, was opened a fraction. 'Go away!' said Sickert, and we left."

A few weeks later, I was reading the second volume of John Fowles's journals, when up popped Heath again. On 17 February 1968, Fowles is chatting to Terence Stamp in Albany, Piccadilly, where he lives. It so happens that Stamp's next-door neighbour in this exclusive apartment block is Edward Heath, who recently asked Stamp to lunch. Heath had confided to Stamp that Harold Wilson always frightened him at question time, and he usually came away hurt.

Stamp informed Fowles that he had readily given Heath the benefit of his advice: "OK, you're sitting on the opposition front bench, old Wilson gets up. As soon as he starts annoying you, you just think, 'This morning Harold got up at No 10, he went downstairs to the kitchen, got out the best tea, warmed the pot, did it all perfect, took it upstairs to the old woman, thinking maybe this is it, this time, she'll open her arms and we'll have a lovely screw. Instead of which the old bag just says, 'Oh gawd', and turns over and goes to sleep again. You just think it's not me he's trying to hurt, it's his missus or whatever. All I got to do is work out what it is in Wilson's life that makes him have to hurt me. Then I can handle him."

Fowles records that he then asked Stamp whether Heath appreciated his advice. "He didn't understand," sighed Stamp. "He's forgotten how to listen."

From Walter Sickert to Edward Heath to Terence Stamp: I found myself addicted to these wild, random swoops in time and society. For the next few years, whenever I spotted an unexpected meeting between incongruous people, I would jot it down, in the hope that, at some later date, I might be able to make them all link up.

Of course, a political grandee like Heath will, by the end of his life, have made all sorts of strange meetings. In 1937, on a visit to Germany to brush up his German, he met both Goebbels ("small, pale and insignificant") and Himmler ("I shall never forget how drooping and sloppy Himmler's hand was when he offered it to me"). Around 50 years later, he dropped in on Saddam Hussein and found him "not mad in the least … a very astute person, a clever person". At the White House, the equally awkward President Nixon pointed to the grand piano and suggested they play a duet together. Characteristically, Heath simply shrugged his shoulders, said nothing, and walked on.

I began to resemble a trainspotter, but a trainspotter on the lookout for collisions. I began to make strange, ever-expanding bubble-charts and Venn diagrams detailing all the different people who had bumped into one another at different times. Thus, Heath met Sickert and Sickert met Winston Churchill and Churchill met Laurence Olivier and Olivier met JD Salinger and Salinger met Ernest Hemingway. In the other direction, Heath met Terence Stamp who met Sarah Miles who met Bertrand Russell. The Russell-Miles meeting is a particular delight: I love to see time concertina-ed. He was 92, she was 23. The two met in Chelsea in 1964, brought together by her stray dog. Russell flirted with Miles over thinly sliced cucumber sandwiches, squeezing her knee under the table.

As a child, Russell had met Gladstone, who was born in 1809; Gladstone himself used to breakfast with the elderly Wordsworth, who was born in 1770. As a little boy Bertrand Russell played with his grandfather, Lord John Russell, who had visited Napoleon on Elba. So there are only two degrees of separation between Sarah Miles and Napoleon.

I love these leaps. Mark Twain (born 1835) was an early supporter of the deaf and blind Helen Keller. Keller was taught to dance in her 60s by Martha Graham, who, in extreme old age, encountered the young and penniless student Madonna Ciccone (born 1958) in a corridor of her dance school: from Mark Twain to Madonna in three moves.

Again, Felix Youssoupoff assassinated Rasputin in 1916. Thirty years later, he met Noël Coward in Biarritz. "He is made up to the teeth," noted Coward. "I looked at him: a face that must, when young, have been very beautiful but now is crackling with effort and age. I imagined him luring Rasputin to his doom with that guitar and 'dem rollin' eyes'."

Twenty years after his meeting with Youssoupoff, Coward had a shifty little encounter with Paul McCartney after a Beatles concert in Rome, at first fibbing that he had been misquoted as saying to a reporter that the Beatles were "totally devoid of talent", then sending effusive messages of congratulations to McCartney's colleagues. ("Although the message I would have liked to send them," he admitted later, "was that they were bad-mannered little shits.") Once again, it takes only three handshakes to get from Paul McCartney to Rasputin.

The meeting between Youssoupoff and Rasputin fulfilled my desire for at least one meeting involving an assassination. Most assassins are notably poor at networking, and so are not connected to anyone illustrious. I failed in my dogged attempt to link Abraham Lincoln's assassin John Wilkes Booth (a well-known actor in his day) with Oscar Wilde (perhaps via the playwright Dion Boucicault), and spent a fruitless week trying to establish a claim I had read that Jack Ruby, the assassin of Lee Harvey Oswald, had once thrown Miles Davis out of his nightclub for urinating onstage. So the tried-and-tested Felix Youssoupoff proved a godsend, and the chain of Rasputin-Youssoupoff-Coward-McCartney held firm.

In turn, Rasputin linked with Tsar Nicholas, and Nicholas with Houdini, who once performed an amazing stunt for him, waving a handkerchief and reciting a mysterious incantation before successfully commanding the bells of the Kremlin to ring for the first time in a century. Ten years later, Houdini was to perform mind-reading tricks aboard a cruise ship for President Teddy Roosevelt.

Encounters between politicians and entertainers rarely go to plan. They are in pursuit of different objects: the entertainers crave status, while the politicians crave the popular touch. Following Coward's link to Paul McCartney, I pursued McCartney's only encounter with Elvis Presley, and from there Elvis's meeting with Richard Nixon.

Presley and Nixon met on 20 December 1970. Elvis had flown to Washington on impulse, writing Nixon a letter of introduction during the flight. "Dear Mr President," he began, "First, I would like to introduce myself. I am Elvis Presley and admire you and Have Great Respect for your office." He went on to express concern for their country. "I call it America and I love it." His over-riding wish was to be appointed a federal agent at large, so that he could pursue his drive against drug abuse among "the hippie elements … First and foremost I am an entertainer but all I need is the federal credentials."

He dropped off the letter at the White House at 6.30am. The president's chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, thought such a meeting would be "extremely beneficial" in boosting Nixon's standing among the young. Elvis was accordingly invited to meet the president at 12.30 that afternoon.

He arrived at the White House in full makeup, wearing a large brass-buttoned Edwardian jacket over a purple velvet tunic with matching trousers, held up by a vast gold belt. He brought along a gift for the president: a chrome-plated second world war Colt 45. He then spread his collection of police badges over the Oval Office desk for the president to admire.

The two men talked about young people, leading Elvis into a passionate diatribe against the Beatles, and the way they had merrily taken American money only to return to England to foster anti-American feeling.

"The president nodded in agreement and expressed some surprise," reads the memo of the meeting written by the deputy counsel to the president. Elvis then asked the president for a Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs special agent badge. The president looked to his aide for guidance: the aide looked back, not knowing what to do. Nixon eventually said, "See that he gets one", and a delighted Elvis hugged this least tactile of presidents to his chest. Managing to extricate himself, Nixon stepped back and said: "You dress kind of strange, don't you?"

"You have your show and I have mine," explained Elvis. Some years later, his wife Priscilla claimed that he only wanted the badge so he could transport his prescription drugs and guns to and fro without being arrested.

Another key 20th-century meeting between showbiz and politics came on 19 September 1959, when Marilyn Monroe met Nikita Khrushchev on his American tour. When Monroe was first invited to meet the Soviet premier, his name hadn't rung a bell, and she had refused. But then her studio informed her that in Russia, America meant two things: Coca-Cola and Marilyn Monroe, and she changed her mind.

When the big day comes, Monroe tells her maid that the studio wants her to wear her tightest, sexiest dress. "I guess there's not much sex in Russia," she concludes.

Khrushchev is a far cry from the dour, stony-faced monoliths who are due to succeed him. He is shouty and quick-tempered and wonderfully undiplomatic, but sometimes erupts in laughter. "The fellow's all over the dials," says the New York Daily News, while the New York Mirror describes him as "a rural dolt".

Over lunch with 400 stars and bigwigs at 20th Century Fox (Edward G Robinson, Frank Sinatra, Nat "King" Cole, Gary Cooper and so on), Khrushchev is informed, in a note, that his spur-of-the-moment request for a tour of Disneyland has been turned down. He is furious, and his anger has not abated by the time he rises to reply to the speech of welcome from the president of 20th Century Fox. First, he berates the US for its lack of culture ("You do not even have a permanent opera and ballet theatre!"). Then the cancelled Disney tour bubbles up into his mind. "Just now, I was told that I could not go to Disneyland. I asked, 'Why not? What is it? Do you have rocket-launching pads there? … Is there an epidemic of cholera there? Have gangsters taken hold of the place?'" He punches the air. "For me, such a situation is inconceivable. I cannot find words to explain this to my people."

After lunch, he finally gets to meet Monroe in her low-cut, skin-tight black lace dress. All wide-eyed, Monroe delivers a line that Natalie Wood, a fluent Russian speaker, has taught her. "We the workers of 20th Century Fox rejoice that you have come to visit our studio and country."

It seems to work like magic. Khrushchev cannot take his eyes off her. "He looked at me the way a man looks on a woman," she recalls.

"You're a very lovely young lady," he says, squeezing her hand.

"This is about the biggest day in the history of the movie business," Monroe tells the cameras. But when she gets home, she has changed her tune. "He was fat and ugly and had warts on his face and he growled," she tells Lena, her maid. "He squeezed my hand so long and so hard that I thought he would break it. I guess it was better than having to kiss him."

My aim had always been to make a daisy-chain of all these meetings, so that the last person would end up meeting the first. To create a further complication for myself, I decided to write a book consisting of exactly 101 meetings, and to call it, by way of a pun, One on One.

I have always liked playful French writers such as Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec, with their love of linguistic and mathematical constraints. What is a game if not a constraint? So, taking a leaf from their books, I wanted to describe each meeting in exactly 1,001 words, which would mean that the book would come to 101,101 words in all. By the time I had finished, I had imposed the 101 word rule on other areas of the text too, including the prefacing quotes, the blurb, the list of my other books, the acknowledgements, and even the note in which I explained the 101-word rule.

In this, I had a purpose beyond making things difficult for myself (though I achieved this, too). I wanted to impose order on chance, and project an aura of design and determination on to so many seemingly random meetings.

For every meeting I included, I must have researched at least 10 others. Some perfect meetings half-remembered by friends turned out never to have happened. For instance, I hoped to include a meeting between one of the greatest writers of the 20th century and one of the greatest politicians: PG Wodehouse and Clement Attlee. Both men were famously taciturn, and – or so the story went – when they were introduced, Wodehouse said: "How do you do?" and Attlee replied: "How do you do?" and that was that.

This story provided a perfect example of English reticence. I could then link Wodehouse with WS Gilbert, of Gilbert and Sullivan, and Gilbert to Stanley Spencer (via Spencer's second wife, Patricia Preece, who was saved from drowning as a child by the elderly Gilbert, who died in the attempt) and from Spencer to Zhou Enlai, whom he met on his visit to China with the British Council shortly before his death. ("Hello, I'm Stanley from Cookham," Spencer said to Zhou Enlai, by way of introduction.)

At the same time, I had high hopes of linking Attlee with the serial-killer, John Haigh, who, in one book I read, once managed to blag his way into Attlee's box at the races. In his last meeting of all, Haigh linked with the hangman Albert Pierrepoint, and Pierrepoint with the second world war traitor John Amery ("I've always wanted to meet you, Mr Pierrepoint," said Amery, "though, of course, not under these circumstances") and from Amery to the TV globetrotter Alan Whicker, who just happened to be the British captain who had arrested him in Italy in 1945.

All well and good, but two of the links proved shaky. I could come up with no firm evidence for either Attlee's meeting with Wodehouse or Haigh's gatecrashing of Attlee's box, so the whole chain fell apart, and I was forced to go back to the drawing-board, or, in my case, back to interminable charts with mad arrows linking even madder scrawlings.

But in the end, I managed to pull it off: 101 verified meetings, all in a circle, ranging across three centuries, from Tolstoy's edgy meeting with Tchaikovsky in 1876 to Dominick Dunne's even edgier meeting with Phil Spector in a courtroom toilet in 2007.

There were two 20th century figures – Howard Hughes and JD Salinger – I was keen to include, simply because they had such a reputation for being unavailable. Others I wanted to include because they were heroes of mine: Raymond Chandler, Barry Humphries, Mark Twain, Groucho Marx. There were also mountainous figures such as Tolstoy, Churchill, Stalin, TS Eliot, Sigmund Freud, Adolf Hitler, Charlie Chaplin and the Queen who, for reasons good or bad, are unavoidable parts of our mental landscape. (The Queen is an odd one. She has met more famous people – perhaps more people full stop – than anyone else on Earth, but she has done her best to ensure her meetings were unremarkable, so that there is rarely anything to say about them. In the end, I linked her with the Duke of Windsor, whom she visited on his deathbed, and Jackie Kennedy, who, unusually, felt that the Queen was nursing a resentment against her.)

I have a soft spot for people who come off the rails. As well as the Duke of Windsor, I found a place among my chosen 101 for Michael Barrymore, George Brown, Oscar Wilde, George Lazenby and Simon Dee. The last two met on Dee's chatshow. Lazenby used the occasion to spout a list of senators behind the Kennedy assassination, causing Dee to be given his marching orders by the powers-that-be at LWT.

I kept a handful of socialite diarists up my sleeve – Cecil Beaton, Andy Warhol, Kenneth Tynan – who had written up their meetings with diverse people in meticulously detailed and often wonderfully crabby diary entries. I soon came to realise that whenever two of them wrote up the same event, they invariably disagreed. In the same way, I couldn't help but note the zest with which even well-respected biographers lend a dash of colour to events, regardless of truth. There are, for instance, at least seven very different accounts of the extremely brief and notably uncordial meeting between James Joyce and Marcel Proust at the Hotel Majestic in 1922. Which, if any, is true? For this particular meeting, I decided to include all seven versions; for others, I opted for the most likely.

"We have as many personalities as there are people who know us," wrote William James. Sickert yells at Heath to go away but attentively teaches Churchill how to paint. Truman Capote plots a hideous revenge on Kenneth Tynan but takes pity on Peggy Lee when she describes her horrible childhood.

I tried to capture the extraordinary variety of ways in which humans spark off one another, the curious means by which chance meetings – in lifts or in urinals, on golf courses or on cruise ships – illuminate the essential fluidity of our personalities, our stubborn refusal to jettison any of the characters we keep in reserve. And there is something almost mystical about the daisy chains we unconsciously join the moment we encounter a stranger. Or sometimes consciously: "When Arthur Miller shook my hand," Barry Humphries recently recalled, "I could only think that this was the hand that had once cupped the breasts of Marilyn Monroe."
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Post  eddie Tue Oct 25, 2011 10:18 pm

One on One by Craig Brown - review

Craig Brown's daisy-chain of celebrity encounters is pleasingly restrained

Sam Leith
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 20 October 2011 10.00 BST

Six degrees of separation Photo-of-Marianne-Faithfu-007
Marianne Faithfull: a close encounter with WH Auden. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives

The game is a familiar one. Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, they call it in the film world. Or, in the words of the old song: "I've danced with a man, who's danced with a girl, who's danced with the Prince of Wales."

Six degrees of separation One-on-One
One on One
by Craig Brown

One on One daisy-chains 101 stories of chance encounters between well-known figures, beginning with the story of a man who (alas, not going fast enough) ran over Adolf Hitler in 1931, and ending with Hitler's 1937 meeting with the Duchess of Windsor. In between, through a series of handshakes and bows and snogs and awkward silences, it ranges from the late 19th century to the early 21st, from Moscow to California, and from Rudyard Kipling to George Lazenby.

In a pleasingly Oulipian conceit, as Craig Brown explains in an afterword, "I have described each of the 101 meetings in exactly 1001 words, which makes One on One 101,101 words long. The acknowledgements, prefacing quotes, author's blurb, book's blurb and list of my other books each consist of 101 words, as does this note." Lovely to imagine that Brown's publication history prior to this book could have been deliberately engineered to ensure his back-catalogue was 101 words long.

For those who know Brown best as a parodist, this book will come as a surprise. Though often very funny, it's a work of straight non-fiction whose great virtue is not excess, but restraint. The humour is biscuit-dry. "Any meeting between the living and the dead is inevitably one-sided," Brown opens one story, "Do they know something we don't know?" GI Gurdjieff, he writes, "is the self-proclaimed pioneer of a revolutionary new school of 'objective' music, the first ever to produce exactly the same reaction in all its listeners." Throwaway details are allowed to speak for themselves: "One night, the beat poet Gregory Corso drops by, and falls asleep while reading Patti [Smith]'s poems."

Incongruity is one of its pleasures. The quintessential Craig Brown encounter would probably be Ted Heath and Wee Jimmy Krankie, or George Steiner and Benny from Crossroads. Here we get Marianne Faithfull chatting to WH Auden about how to smuggle drugs ("Do you pack them up your arse?" "Oh no, Wystan. I stash them in my pussy"), and Bertrand Russell making cucumber sandwiches for Sarah Miles: "Two years ago, his ninetieth birthday was celebrated with a festschrift with contributions from, among others, Dr Martin Luther King, Leonard Bernstein, Jawaharlal Nehru, Kenneth Kaunda, U Thant, Albert Schweitzer and David Ben-Gurion. But Sarah mixes in different circles: Robert Morley, Eric Sykes, Terry-Thomas, Flora Robson and Benny Hill are all in her next film."

Brown relishes folly and absurdity: his tone is at once amused and wanly forgiving. Frauds and cranks bring out the best in him. Blood-soaked dictators are juxtaposed with half-forgotten figures of light entertainment, great writers and composers with gadabouts and chancers. It feels almost like a medieval story-cycle designed to show the whole human comedy, the fickleness of Fortune, the vanity of human wishes. Celebrity – which is what all Brown's characters have in common – is a stuff that won't endure.

The detail is all. Brown has the certainty of touch, when talking about Kenneth Tynan and Truman Capote, to inform us in parentheses that their middle names are, respectively, "Peacock" and "Streckfus". He quotes sharply, too. The Duke of Windsor "always had something of … riveting stupidity to say on any subject"; or the British ambassador, of Theodore Roosevelt: "You must always remember that the President is about six."

Footnotes are used to land quick, precise jabs. Of the downfall of the chat-show host Simon Dee, a footnote tells us: "A brand-new late-night chat show is hosted by a relative unknown, whose name is Michael Parkinson. Dee's slot on the BBC is given to the actor Derek Nimmo, in If It's Saturday, it Must be Nimmo. Among Nimmo's first guests is Basil Brush, a leading glove puppet." That's comic – but, to me at least, it is also loaded with pathos. The great deeds that live in history are never so poignant as the little human sillinesses that are rescued from it, and what's most unexpected about this book is how moving these stories are, both in their particulars and in aggregate.

When Helen Keller visits her friend Mark Twain's house after his death, she rescues a geranium and plants it in her own garden: "It always seems to say the same thing to me, 'Please don't grieve.' But I grieve, nevertheless." There's Madonna, as a young dancer, encountering the formidable Martha Graham in a corridor and being too afraid to speak – then, 10 years later, writing the cheque that saves the Martha Graham Dance School from bankruptcy: "When Martha Graham, now aged ninety-four, is presented with the cheque, she bursts into tears." There's Cecil Beaton's farewell to the gaga Harold Nicolson. And there's the disgraced Michael Barrymore, "spotted working part-time at a vehicle bodyworks business in Epping".

My only beef is that Brown's determination to tell all his stories in the present tense snarls him up. Because most of the encounters contain some back-story for each participant, some subsequent material, and some discussion of how we know what we know, tenses get muddled. One story opens by telling us that "James Dean is sitting at a table in his favourite little restaurant"; then we get a snatch of Alec Guinness's back-story in the pluperfect, a further snatch in the past simple, then Guinness "arrives in Hollywood", then he and companion "are having difficulty finding a table", then James Dean runs out and invites him in.

But that's a minor technical cavil about a rich and hugely enjoyable book that looks with affection and melancholy on the whirling roundabouts of history and celebrity, and reminds us that the paths of glory lead, handshake by handshake, pratfall by pratfall, to the grave.

Sam Leith's You Talkin' to Me? is published by Profile Books.

© 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

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