Free Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings by Craig Brown Page A

appearance on Face to Face , he is at pains to point out that his house has no television set and a radio only in the servants’ quarters. He then serves them a large tureen of green-tufted strawberries. ‘Too late I saw the problem,’ recalls Burnett. ‘Put the strawberries on the plate, add the cream, take the spoon – and you were trapped with the strawberry tufts. My attempt to spear one shot it under the sideboard. That was the BBC disgraced. Topolski, seeing what had happened, did the socially unthinkable – dipped a strawberry into the cream with his fingers. “Ah, Mr Topolski,” Waugh observed helpfully, “You need a spoon.”’ When the day for the recording comes, Burnett introduces him to his interviewer, John Freeman. ‘How do you do, Mr Waugh,’ said Freeman.
    ‘The name is Waugh – not Wuff!’ he replied.
    ‘But I called you Mr Waugh.’
    ‘No, no, I distinctly heard you say “Wuff”.’
    During the interview, Waugh confesses that his worst fault is irritability. What with? asks Freeman. ‘Absolutely everything. Inanimate objects and people, animals, anything.’
    The Stravinskys and the Waughs meet up at the Ambassador Hotel on Park Avenue. Waugh is never at his best in America: he finds the natives unappealing, and upsets them with observations such as, ‘Of course the Americans are cowards. They are almost all the descendants of wretches who deserted their legitimate monarch for fear of military service.’
    Stravinsky soon finds that the cutting edge in Waugh’s work is even sharper in his person. ‘Not an immediately endearing character,’ he thinks. After they have introduced themselves, Stravinsky asks Waugh whether he would care for a whisky. ‘I do not drink whisky before wine,’ he replies, his tone suggesting faint horror at Stravinsky’s ignorance.
    Waugh seems to rejoice in causing all Stravinsky’s remarks, polite, lively or anodyne, to bounce back in his face. At first, Stravinsky speaks to Waugh in French, but Waugh replies that he does not speak the language. Mrs Waugh contradicts him pleasantly, but is swiftly rebuked.
    The conversation stutters on. Stravinsky says he admires the Constitution of the United States. Waugh replies that he deplores ‘everything American, beginning with the Constitution’. They pause to study their menus. Stravinsky recommends the chicken; Waugh points out that it is a Friday.
    ‘Whether Mr Waugh was disagreeable, or only preposterously arch, I cannot say,’ Stravinsky recalls. 25 ‘Horace Walpole remarks somewhere that the next worst thing to disagreeableness is too-agreeableness. I would reverse the order of preference myself while conceding that on short acquaintance disagreeableness is the greater strain.’ Desperately trying to find common ground, Stravinsky attempts to relate his own recent sung Mass to the theme of Waugh’s current lecture tour. ‘All music is positively painful to me,’ replies Waugh.
    The only subject on which the two of them achieve a measure of agreement concerns the burial customs of the United States. Stravinsky is impressed by Waugh’s knowledge. Waugh claims that he himself has ‘arranged to be buried at sea’, though this, it turns out, is just another of his little teases.

IGOR STRAVINSKY
    IS APPALLED BY
WALT DISNEY
    Burbank Studios, Los Angeles
    December 1939
    Igor Stravinsky is himself not the easiest of folk, but Walt Disney is not to know this when the composer drops round to his studio.
    Disney is at the height of his success. Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck are the most durable and biddable stars Hollywood will ever know, and his recent Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs will gross $8 million. He has just built himself a palatial studio in Burbank, the size of a modest town, complete with its own streets, electric system and telephone exchange.
    Meeting Leopold Stokowski, the conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, at a dinner party, Disney mentions an idea he has had for a two-reel version