SO LOW IN SOHO
Crazy life of Jeffrey Bernard, a genius who drove a coach and horses through sobriety
Jeffrey Bernard, who used to write the Spectator’s Low Life column, worked to a strict deadline: 11am, the time when his Soho watering hole opened.
“Whenever I have to deliver a piece,” he once said, “I get up early enough to write it and get it out of the way by the time the Coach and Horses in Greek Street opens, because that’s where I go at eleven and I usually stay there for the rest of my day.”
Bernard’s column made sublime reading and a perfect foil for the High Life column written by Taki Theodoracopulos, the journalist son of a Greek shipping tycoon, whose datelines included swanky spots such as New York and Gstaad, where he had homes.
He came to journalism late. Bernard was 31 by the time editor Dennis Hackett gave him a racing column on Queen magazine (later Harper’s and Queen). But the work soon came thick and fast – Town magazine, two racing columns in Sporting World and a piece every week for Mike Molloy’s Mirror magazine.
But the young Bernard did not join dissolute colleagues in the bars and restaurants of Fleet Street. “I never liked any of the pubs or El Vino or anywhere,” he said. “I always used to jump in a taxi and come back here to Soho.
“This is where my home has always been: The French pub, Muriel’s [the Colony Club, haunt of Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon], the Kismet, all the pubs and restaurants round here.”
He added: “I hated Fleet Street. Journalists become very boring when they start to talk about all the scoops they’ve had, as if anybody cared.”
Like many a cultured wastrel, Bernard had quite a privileged upbringing. He was born in Hampstead to Oliver Bernard, an architect and stage designer, and his wife Edith Hodges, an opera singer.
Bernard called his parents middle class Bohemians, though his mother was from “a working class background with vague gipsy origins” as he put it in the introduction to a book of his Speccie columns.
His father, who acquired an office in London’s Park Lane and a house in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, designed the Lyon’s Corner Houses and the celebrated entrance to the Strand Palace Hotel. He died when Bernard was just seven.
His mother sent him to Pangbourne College “in the hopes that I might become an officer and a gentleman” but after two years the school complained that he was “psychologically unsuitable for public school life”.
He tried the Army but went AWOL, then worked in coal mines, as a stagehand, a dish-washer, a film editor, a boxer, and an actor.
Pictures show him as a louche, floppy-haired posho, a glass of Smirnoff vodka in one hand, a Capstan burning down between his fingers.
The Low Life idea germinated in a letter he wrote to the New Statesman, where he was working as a columnist. He had got fed up with “all those endless letters from serious people who were writing a biography of, let’s say, Jane Austen… ‘Could you please send me any letters you might have which could cast light on any period of her behaviour’?”
His own letter said: “I have just been commissioned by Michael Joseph to write my autobiography and I’d be most grateful to any reader who could tell me what I was doing between 1960 and 1974.”
“That created quite a stir,” he said. “I never did write the autobiography and I don’t suppose I ever will now. Nearly everything that I’ve ever written makes me cringe. I suppose I must have written about 600 consecutive columns for the Spectator over the last 12 years [this was 1989] and out of all of those only about 20 are all right by my standards.”
He was being harsh on himself. Right to the end, his writing was lyrical, full of regret and longing and loss – of his innocence, his four wives, his health, his money and many, many weekends he could not remember and would never get back.
When he wrote for the Spectator, Bernard said, he could write what he liked. But writing for the Sunday Mirror, he had to be careful not to offend readers.
“As far as the new technology is concerned, I don’t use a word processor. I don’t need a word processor, because I’ve got one, between my fucking ears, haven’t I? It’s called a brain, isn’t it?”
In passing, Bernard, who died in 1997 aged 65, gave his considered view of the newspapers of his day. The Times had declined, though he still took it; the Sun revolted him; the Mirror was not as good as it had been but was “still the best of them”; The Express was rubbish; the Mail a woman’s paper; and the Guardian was smug.
His Low Life column was “about the way I live, about being in debt, about being drunk and gambling and fast women and slow horses, that sort of thing.”
When he failed to file because of a bender, the Spectator would carry a line saying “Jeffrey Bernard is unwell”. Once, to his fury, it read: “Jeffery Bernard has had his leg off”. It was true. Surgeons removed the right one because of alcohol-induced diabetes.
His Mirror colleague Keith Waterhouse wrote a play about him called Jeffery Bernard Is Unwell, set in the Coach and Horses. It was produced by Ned Sherrin and starred a perfectly-cast Peter O’Toole as Bernard.
Those of us who saw it laughed. But in sadness as much as mirth.
*****
I ran into Ranulph Fiennes last week. The great explorer was attempting a solo circumnavigation of the vast wasteland that is Westfield in Shepherd’s Bush.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I had been round the bloody place twice by the time our paths crossed. Whoever designed this West London cathedral of retail took his inspiration from the Hotel California: You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.
I must admit I committed a bit of a faux pas with the great man. I was pretty sure it was him – the grizzled, weatherbeaten face was familiar from a thousand newspaper tales of derring-do (and the dog sled was a bit of a giveaway).
But we had never met and so I couldn’t be sure. I know, I thought, I’ll sneak a look at his hands. They were frostbitten on one of his epic adventures and later his wife caught him in the garage with his hand in a vice, trying to saw his fingertips off.
But he realised what I was up to, gave me a big grin… and then he was gone, swallowed up in the hell of Westfield.
I finally made it out, but on the wrong side, by the railway, a full 15-minute codger’s shuffle from the bus station. And what did I find as I emerged blinking into the light? Lots of policemen wearing blue forensic gloves poking sticks into the shrubbery. They had dogs with them.
I inquired of a sergeant whether there had been a stabbing – such things are not unknown in Shepherd’s Bush – but he said no, they were looking for clues in the case of the body parts left in a suitcase beside the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol.
Once, I could have spun this into a Page One exclusive. But I just turned my face into an imaginary blizzard and trudged onward, determined to plant the Union Flag at the bus stop.
*****
A tomcat hijacked a plane, stuck a pistol into the pilot’s ribs and demanded: “Take me to the canaries.” — Bob Monkhouse.
RICHARD DISMORE
16 July 2024
