piano like Red Garland, and undermines the whole thing with fart noises and stupid bleeps. It opens with the sound of a match striking and a cigarette being lit, ice cubes clinking into a glass, and closes with the sound of two hands clapping. It is a precise portrait of him: musically sublime, funny, seductive, naughty, self-sabotaging, vulgar, beautiful, ridiculous.
My memory is that Robert sent a cassette of it to a girl he was flirting with who took it as a love declaration; it caused some confusion. My memory is, I was sad he hadn’t sent it to me. But you know, we weren’t going out together. It would have been during one of our off periods. Steve’s memory is that late one evening, after they had finished recording Robert’s piano overdubs for a film soundtrack, they were about to drop into the Lily Langtry when Robert asked if he could run in to the studio and record something extra. The piano was still set up and Steve had some sound effects running live in the S1000 sampler. He popped in a tape and hit record; Robert started to play and sing. It was all very ad hoc and they only did one take. ‘And then,’ Steve told me, ‘if I remember correctly he asked me to run off a cassette so that he could give it to you.’
I like this incorrect memory very much. I could have this one for myself – look, I have a witness that says it wasn’t for her, it was for me. Perhaps I remembered incorrectly! Perhaps it was for me! Certainly, it is for me now: the tenderness with which he sings; the slight echo of laughter as you-hoo-hoo kiss me, the fart noises bubbling up when he hears the sound of mandolins; the clink of the ice cubes as he wonders whether we know we’re life itself.
Tiomkin was second only to Bernard Hermann in Robert’s pantheon of film composers. He revelled in tales of the great Russians and Germans who went to Hollywood in the 1930s and 40s; Schoenberg writing his Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene without there actually being any film; and on being complimented on his ‘lovely music’ snarling ‘I don’t write lovely music’. And Stravinsky – or was it Shostakovich? Or Schoenberg again? – could be all of them – who when invited to write a score wrote it and sent it in, and when told no, he needed to see the film and write the music to go with it, suggested that the director cut the film to go with the music.
Steve emailed ‘Wild Is the Wind’ to me in 2012, with the message ‘I know he wanted you to have this. No one who didn’t know him can understand what we have lost.’
*
In London Robert’s regime was to work all night, sleep till 3 p.m., wake up and get a cab to his preferred curry house. It was beautiful to see him working. It remained unchanged all his life: manuscript paper, pencil, sharpener, rubber, pack of fags, lighter, ashtray. Seven items denoting concentration. Initial work could be done anywhere – in the margin of the newspaper often – the five lines of the stave sketched, the phrase or chord that struck him jotted down over a coffee (double/triple/quadruple espresso, lots of sugar, several cigarettes, a brandy or calvados or two) in the sun somewhere, on a paper napkin over lunch, in a pub. But for concentration he preferred an actual table, and silence. In his flat, this was regularly assaulted by his neighbours’ building work. Hence his frequent presence in my house, or in Wiltshire. I can see the curve of his back now. His terrible posture.
‘Don’t you need a piano?’ I asked. He was working on the soundtrack for Distant Voices, Still Lives: full orchestra, serried ranks of gorgeous strings, muted brass, moody woodwind, crashing percussion, the whole shebang. No, he didn’t need a piano. He needed to Sellotape leaf after leaf of music manuscript into a great accordion of folds, and to rule and label the staves and the bars and the keys and the time-signature for every part of the orchestra. Then he needed to write down all the music that was in his head, individual parts, a line for each instrument, twenty or thirty parts. Occasionally he’d go and check something on the Dulcitone – that least dulcet of instruments, its tuning forks well out of tune after seventy years in a Wiltshire cottage – but otherwise the orchestra flowed direct from his mind to the paper. When Daniel Barenboim was on Desert Island Discs, he said he’d rather take the scores than any recordings of music, because when he read the scores he could recall and enjoy every performance he’d ever heard.
I am a puddle of admiration for this kind of capacity. This admiration makes it difficult for me to talk about Robert’s music. I fall at the first hurdle: I love it. I loved things he said were crap; I was bedazzled by his skill, by the ease with which he created pure beauty, by the delicacy with which he could shift a mood, by his versatility. He’d produce a piece of cracking 1920s flapper jazz; a haunting scrap of electronica with chanting sopranos; a lush nineteenth-century orchestral waltz; a fair imitation of 1959 Miles Davis; a driving hard rock piece with electric guitars; a sprightly yet somehow corrupt carousel melody; something feral and Celtic that seemed to be made entirely of cloud and a girl’s voice, a hackneyed 1980s-style TV crime theme. ‘They want hackneyed,’ he said. ‘I give them what they want.’ De-composing, he’d call it. But even if he tried, he couldn’t write bad music. Everything had something in it which stopped you, or moved you. God knows he was articulate in English but music was his first language. It was a language I could understand but not myself speak, though I devoutly wished I could. It meant, to me, blood and love and beauty. It meant my father at home.
And then I was sent to interview Johnny Cash, at home in Tennessee. At that time, he was almost a has-been; his rebirth as Patriarch of Americana was many years in the future. We got talking about the evils of the world. I mentioned a song he recorded, ‘Here Comes that Rainbow Again’ by Kris Kristofferson. It’s a small drama, based on an intensely touching scene from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
‘You know that book?’ Johnny said, his face lighting up.
‘I love that book,’ I said. ‘And you know that book!’
‘I was that book.’ He smiled at me. It was like being smiled at by Monument Valley, or the Hoover Dam.
‘You like that song?’ he said, and pulled over his guitar. He tuned up, and played, and sang – all my favourites, all afternoon, in that shadowy room with the sun hot outside, and it was one of the finest afternoons I’ve ever spent, and definitely the worst interview I’ve ever done. We hardly talked, because this music was his way of communicating. He did say one thing I remember: ‘You have to be what you are. Whatever you are, you gotta be it.’
I came away realising that I didn’t want to be a journalist any more. Although it was journalism that had given me this extraordinary day, I didn’t want to be the person oohing and aahing on paper about Kris Kristofferson, John Steinbeck and Johnny Cash. I wanted to be the person writing and making the stuff that makes people ooh and ahh. Cash loving Kristofferson’s song; Kristofferson loving the way Cash sang it, both of them loving Steinbeck’s book. I wanted to be one of them. I might as well admit it.
Somebody took a photo with my camera of Johnny Cash and me in the low spring sun. He has his arm round my waist. He picked me a daffodil from his front garden, gave me a kiss, and then I went home to start trying to be what I was: someone who wanted to create. I had the daffodil on my desk while I wrote my first book, a biography of my father’s mother, Kathleen, the sculptor. I still have it – a little dried-up papery ghost of a thing, reminding me that that’s what integrity means: being what you are. It’s somewhere in a pile of significant flowers (a rose from a May Ball, jasmine and marigold from the Taj Mahal, a tuber-rose from Graz, a tuft of the last cotton Tammy Wynette ever picked). I kept it in a bowl by my bed, until Robert set fire to it – rather unsuccessfully – with a cigarette end.
London, Wiltshire, Paris, 1992–3
Well, I was only half in love with him, and just as well, as I had every reason to tell myself. Imagine the chaos if I had been fully in love with him! He was trouble. Not nothing but trouble – he was plenty else, but all that just added to the trouble. And anyway, I had other fish to fry.
In early summer 1992, I found I was pregnant, and not by Robert. This was a massive surprise, a great adventure, and, strictly, another story. Briefly, it was the only night Louis