A Rogues’ Gallery, by Peter Lewis – review

Like Mel Brooks’s character the Two Thousand-Year-Old Man, Peter Lewis has met everyone of consequence. Though he doesn’t mention being an eyewitness at the Crucifixion, he was told by T.S. Eliot that working in a bank was quite nice (‘I never thought about poetry in the day’). Frankie Howerd wanted Lewis to give him a massage (‘I have this trouble, a hernia, you see. Gives me a lot of discomfort’); Diana Dors confessed to him that she’d rather watch television than go to orgies (‘but I had to become a sex symbol on tiger rugs and in mink bikinis’); and Samuel Beckett made his excuses and fled (‘Sorry, I just have to go to the lav’).

Lewis, a venerable freelance reporter, attended CND rallies with Bertrand Russell, located Sean O’Casey as a recluse in Torquay, and, like Mel Brooks claiming he’d dated Joan of Arc, all Lewis’s Christmases came at once when he comforted Judi Dench after she’d been ditched by John Neville: ‘We took a long, memorable walk in the Warwickshire woods.’ The precise extent of these memories is chivalrously not divulged.

Particularly agreeable are Lewis’s asides — pepperings of asperity to remind readers that here we have a highly intelligent and observant man. Of Anthony Burgess: ‘You could not say he strove to be liked’; of Richard Harris: ‘He wasn’t quite as great an actor as he thought’; of David Frost: ‘He harboured illusions of being gifted as a comic performer’; and of Esmond Rothermere: ‘He had one undoubted gift — for making the wrong decision.’ If his editors won awards, he sacked them.

Lewis is caustic about press barons and their executive minions, holding them largely responsible for ‘the dumbing down which had started and wasn’t going to stop’.