Phillip Adams (34 page)

Adams: ‘Hasn't it been a sad story ever since? That was the mountain. The valleys seem to have got deeper and deeper.'

Cairns: ‘No Australian parliament, federal or state, has any values other than money values.' Adams: ‘And that is true of all Western democracies.'

Cairns: ‘It's true in England and Europe. It's very disappointing and very serious. The alternative to concentrating entirely on economic growth is to concentrate on full employment. To reduce unemployment depends on a high level of government spending. And we can't have that because the ownership of Australia's economic structure has moved into foreign hands. Those companies pay their taxes overseas and foreign companies contribute only about ten per cent of total Australian taxation.'

Adams: ‘You didn't run away over Junie Morosi. You copped it. No-one in public life had ever done that. Do you feel, as others have said, that you are one of the tragedies of politics and you blew your opportunities?'

Cairns: ‘I presume that refers to 1975.'

Adams: ‘'You were dismissed before the Dismissal.'

Cairns: ‘But to say I blew the opportunities is completely invalid. By the beginning of 1975, the Whitlam Government was finished. Whitlam had sacked three ministers and the speaker in six months. Kerr (the governor general) was looking for an opportunity to sack Whitlam. All this I knew, and I told Whitlam about it. The only thing Whitlam could have done was to recommend to the Queen that Kerr be replaced. But Whitlam was incapable of making a decision of that kind. I didn't blow the opportunity. I went out with it.'

***

Revelations about Charles Dickens' women:
Adams said on
Late Night Live
on September 10, 2007: ‘My friends have warned me about Miriam Margolyes. Miriam is an acclaimed British thespian and now an Australian citizen. She's taking her show,
Dickens' Women
, across Australia.'

Margolyes: ‘Dickens was a bit of a shit, a very bad husband, an adulterer, cruel, and he bore grudges, but he wrote like a god. He had a bad time with women and felt betrayed by them. He was not gay, but he was effeminate. His mother and his first love both let him down. He couldn't stand humiliation. His women were scary but funny. He had a relationship with his mistress, Ellen Ternan, for 12 years, and founded a home for fallen women in Shepherd's Bush in London. They must have loved having this nice man come and question them for hours. Dickens was a social reformer and was fascinated by people on the underbelly of life. I think all men are a bit titillated about talking to prostitutes.'

Adams: ‘One of the great things about Dickens was his recognition of the relationship between melancholia and happiness. They mingle and blend and enrich each other. That's what is wrong with many television shows — people have only one emotion. It's a comedy, a thriller or a series.' Margolyes: ‘Everything's become so bland, one colour. I require highs and lows and that's why my shows are so jolly good. They make you laugh and cry, often at the same time. I do 22 women and two men, and I expose what a cad Dickens was to his wife, Catherine.'

Adams: ‘What would Dickens make of your show?'

Margolyes: ‘He would be furious! He would have regarded it as an infringement and an impertinence and would have tried to close it down.'

Adams: ‘You have been doing this show for 20 years.'

Margolyes: ‘I'm 66. I hang on to every year.'

Adams: ‘How does the show translate across cultures?'

Margolyes: ‘India loved it. But I went back only once to Jerusalem. I'm proudly Jewish but also pro-Palestine, a very uncomfortable position to hold because Jewish people feel I am betraying them. I'm not.'

Adams: ‘What did the Queen say to you when you were awarded the Order of the British Empire?' Margolyes: ‘I got it from Prince Charles, who I like very much. The Queen, when I met her at Buckingham Palace, told me to shut up! I spoke when I should not have spoken, not according to protocol.'

***

The Romanovs' tense last days:
Ekaterinburg, the Russian city in the Urals where the Bolsheviks imprisoned and killed the royal Romanovs after the 1917 Russian Revolution, was a city on the brink of chaos and seething with soldiers and spies; the counter-revolutionary Whites were advancing on it, the British author Helen Rappaport told
Late Night Live
on July 30, 2008. She wrote
Ekaterinburg: The Last Days of the Romanovs
(Hutchinson) about the last Tsar (Nicholas 11), his wife Tsarina Alexandra, their daughters Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and son Alexei, all of whom the Bolsheviks shot dead on July 17, 1918, after 18 months' captivity.

Rappaport: ‘I walked the streets of Ekaterinburg in July 2007 and stood in an all-night vigil with thousands of people commemorating the Romanovs' deaths. It was an experience I will never forget and it connected me with the story. Boris Yeltsin had the house where they were held pulled down because the government was worried about the pilgrims. The Bolsheviks put a 15ft fence around the house, imprisoned the family on the top floor and painted out all the windows. On July 4, there had been rumours of monarch groups planning to get them out and their guards began to sympathise with them. Moscow tightened the security.'

Adams: ‘Was there a welcome mat anywhere in Europe for them?'

Rappaport: ‘No European royal family volunteered to take them. It was too much a political hot potato. Alexandra was hard to like — she had embraced Russianness to marry the Tsar but her spikey, unsmiling personality did not endear her to people. Once her son was born and found to be a haemophiliac, her world imploded and her life was spent willing him to survive. Nicholas was devoted to her but was dreadfully henpecked and weak, dominated by a very clever woman, a shrew who nagged him but who was a sick, hysterical woman. The government planned how to kill them as the White Russians advanced towards Ekaterinburg. Alexandra and Nicholas had a passionate physical relationship and an assortment of condoms was found in their room after they were murdered.'

Adams: ‘Heavens above! The Pope's just been to Sydney. You shouldn't say that. Wash your mouth out! We can't ignore Rasputin in all this.'

Rappaport: ‘I'm a bit bored by Rasputin because he's had such a lurid press. He wasn't as influential in state affairs as people make out.'

Adams: ‘Did they realise they were about to die?'

Rappaport: ‘That's the $64,000 question. Nicholas must have known he was doomed. But what parent would for one moment think that their children would also be slaughtered? There is no way the Bolsheviks would have taken the final step without Lenin's say-so.'

Adams: ‘How much of the Romanovs resonates in Russia today?'

Rappaport: ‘This is the key. They represented nationhood to the people, a link to the past, to Mother Russia. With the Romanovs being canonised (their bodies are now buried in St Petersburg Cathedral), they are being turned into plaster saints. Even though all their bodies have now been found and identified, false claims by “descendants” will never die down.'

***

Noel Coward, the entertaining spy:
Barry Day, Trustee of the Noel Coward Foundation, told Adams on
Late Night Live
on January 31, 2008 about his book,
The Letters of Noel Coward
: ‘Noel was spying for the Foreign Office from 1937 and this is revealed in his letters to and from them. Everything he wrote had an ironic touch.'

Adams: ‘He was the son of a piano tuner and created his own persona, educated himself and learned rather than was taught. Things would come at him and he would absorb them and express them.'

Day: ‘He said his good fortune was to have a bright, inquisitive nature but not an intellectual mind. He had to get out there and earn his own living.'

Adams: ‘He was only 24 when he started to make good. Did he fall into the celebrity trap of believing his own hyperbole? He was intent on shaping Noel Coward, behind whom he could hide, which he certainly did. Being Noel Coward was his best disguise as a spy.'

Adams read from a letter in Day's book: ‘I love smoking, drinking, moderate sexual intercourse on a diminishing scale, reading and writing, not arithmetic and I have a selfless absorption in the wellbeing and achievements of Noel Coward.' He addressed a letter to his mother, ‘Dear darling old Mummysnooks, I know you don't love Daddy nearly as much as me.'

Day: ‘He was certainly a mummy's boy and quite proud of it.'

Adams: ‘There is a vast correspondence with celebrities. Are we talking of genuine friendships, or networking?'

Day: ‘You're talking networking. As a young man, he would list the people he knew. But he had some genuine friendships, Gertrude Lawrence for sure, and Laurence Olivier, although that soured.'

Adams: ‘There is ambiguity in a letter to Virginia Woolf in 1928: “I am hot and glowing, and completely at your feet. Will you agree to become one of my top 500 best chums?”'

Day: ‘They were friends for a while and then she told someone else that Noel was too clever by half. Most people, when they first came across Noel, felt obliged to be critical because others were so pro.'

Adams: ‘Let's deal with sexuality and his long-term partner Graham Payn. Noel wrote the song, “Mad About the Boy.”'

Day: ‘There are many things you can take either way. One thing that concerns me is that some people want to turn him into a gay icon. There was an impeccable dignity in his sexual life, reticent but untainted by pretense.'

Adams: ‘He handled that part of his life with enormous style. Lawrence of Arabia used to preface his letters with his military serial number, 338171, and Coward replied, “Dear 338171. May I call you 338?”'

Day: ‘They became correspondents and saw each other from time to time. Whether they had an affair we will never know.'

Adams: ‘Why did Churchill stop Noel's knighthood in 1942 after the King had approved it?'

Day: ‘There was a definite mixture of feelings. Each admired the other but there was an edge, and I think it was because of two huge egos. Churchill was an actor also, and wanted to be centre stage. Personal jealousy had a lot to do with it. They made it up over the years, to a degree. In fact, Coward hosted the celebration of Winston's 90
th
birthday. The technicalities of why Winston refused Coward a knighthood were simple. The British Government sent Noel in the early years of the war to America, which was then neutral, to report back on attitudes. He got to know Roosevelt. When he returned to England, those who didn't like him picked on the fact that he had spent his own money to do it and this was a technical crime because finances had been frozen at the outbreak of war. He was taken to court and fined. So Churchill told the King that to give Noel a knighthood would look as if the government was ignoring the offence or rewarding it. Noel didn't get it for another 30 years.'

***

The first Australian combat troops
to go to Vietnam left Sydney in secret late one night in May 1965 with no band and no cheering crowds. One of the five journalists on board was Alan Ramsey, who retired from journalism in December 2008 after reporting Canberra for
The
Australian
from 1966 and then writing an acerbic, notorious half-page in the Saturday
Sydney Morning Herald
for 22 years. When he went to Vietnam he was 27, and he told Adams on
Late Night Live
on October 29, 2009: ‘We had no idea where we were going and most of the ten days at sea we were given lectures on VD. I was given a jeep, painted purple so it could not be mistaken for a military vehicle. You could buy anything you wanted from the US Army stores on the Saigon black market and a lot of Americans became hugely wealthy selling American goods to the Vietnamese.

‘Each of the three prime ministers after Robert Menzies, Harold Holt, John Gorton and Billy McMahon, is remembered for all the wrong reasons, not for good government. As soon as body bags started coming back from Vietnam containing 20-year-old conscripts, people started turning against the Coalition. Vietnam made Harold Holt's prime ministership and then destroyed it, and the next two. Then came the Whitlam Government, but three elections later, it was thrown out on its ear, after ministers had been waiting for 20 years to get into office. Malcolm Fraser became prime minister and his people were determined not to make the same mistakes.'

Adams: ‘Paul Keating was first made a minister in the last three weeks of the Whitlam Government and was desperate to get back into government. He returned as Bob Hawke's treasurer.'

Ramsey: ‘1983 to '87 was the best period of government in the past 60 years. Fraser was a presidential figure and everyone was scared of him but Hawke was a consensus prime minister, although he was not good in Parliament. I never really understood his relationship with the Australian people but he made it work.'

Adams: ‘You were John Howard's most trenchant critic. Why?'

Ramsey: ‘Iraq. All politicians manipulate the truth from time to time but Howard was a serial liar. He was a toad. He debauched the goodwill he had when he came into office and after 9/11 he made himself a creature of the Bush Administration.' Allen & Unwin published Alan Ramsey's collection of columns,
A Matter of Opinion
, in October 2009.