Tim Walker (2021) Star Turns.

I’d no idea who Tim Walker was or is, but because he writers for the Daily-hate-Mail and often works as a theatre critic, I’d stick him down as being a run-of-the mill and middle-class lad who done good for himself.

His 71 pen portraits were mostly of people I knew, famous people. It helped that each interview had a photo. I could flip to that to see if I knew the face. Even with a photo, I didn’t remember who Antonia de Sancha was. Her publicist, in the photo with her, Max Clifford, was a kind of Trumpian (or Boris figure) and was in jail for multiple counts of indecent assault. The punchline was Walker was being set up to promote a woman who wanted to be famous for being famous, which sounds commonplace now.  Remember the rather frog-like face of David Mellor? John Major’s Cabinet promoting Family Values and that Mellor’s toe-sucking? Hmm.

Most of Walker’s interviewees lived to a grand age, by which I mean over 80, with a few centenarians.   Dame Gwen Ffangcon Davies was born in 1891 and died in 1992 aged 102. An actress who shared a stage with Vivien Leigh and lived much longer. Davies said she always courted work and could act much younger.

Perhaps one surprising thing about the book was how insecure most legendary actors remained. Walker interviewed a few other Dames and two James Bonds, Connery and Moore.

The book begins with Lauren Bacall. Famous for being Lauren Bacall and for having married Humphrey Bogart, twenty-four older than her and another wig wearer. Walker outs a few wigees. Almost all famous people have publicists, strict schedules, and an increasingly long list of things that can be asked and can’t be. Walker was asked not to talk about Bogie. But that is all Bacall really wanted to talk about. Famous people do what they like. And find a reason, which often sounds rehearsed and reheated. ‘Interviews are like blind dates… You never know who the hell you’re going to end up with, so the one thing I always insist upon is choosing the restaurant.’

Many of those interviewed were before Brexit. Walker was strongly anti-Brexit as was wee Ronnie Corbett.  He was unimpressed with then Prime-Minister David Cameron, whom he thought lacked gravitas and lacked any sensible polices apart from stealing money from the poor and shovelling it towards rich folk.

Well, that’s the way I remember it. He compounded his stupidity by calling for a referendum, in which England voted to leave the EEC and cost Britain, so far, hundreds of billions and allowed an even larger charlatan, and fellow old Etonian, Boris Johnston to become Prime Minister.

I’m not sure Walker said any of this. Step forward actress, Susanah York, pretty, middle-class and wanted Brexit done. She was born in 1939.

‘I thought when I was younger that I’d a God-given right to happiness’.   

Most middle-class people do. But then again, York died in 2011. She didn’t see Brexit,  but I suppose did feel it. She played Superman’s mum. Marlon Brandon was his dad.  

Ian Lavender? Any idea who that is? But he’s holding a giant photo of his younger self—‘stupid boy’—Private Pike. Dad’s Army, which must be one of the most repeated shows ever on BBC.

I banged my head the other day, and quipped to the female nurse ‘That was like Laurel and Hardy’. But then I had to ask, if she knew who they were?

This book is a pick-and-mix for older folk with faces that are vaguely familiar.

Sir Patrick Stewart detested Trump and calls him out for normalising offensiveness. Legitimising it. ‘great big lies or outrageous thing and it gets all the headlines.’

Truth called fake news.

But one of the more interesting stories is about Tim Walker’s mum.  She returned to Britain from America in 1939 when the Second World War began. Claudine Mawby. One of the photogenic and blonde Mawby triplets that took Hollywood by storm and preceded Shirley Temple as child actresses.  Their handprints were set in cement outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood beside other Hollywood icons. No one seemed to mind, they weren’t triplets. It was set in stone, it didn’t matter. Print the legend. Read on.