Whereas Charles Fry, for all his liking for country houses, was irremediably urban, decorating his office with Rex Whistlers and a drawing by Walt Disney in preference to a family of stuffed hedgehogs, Mr Harry pined for country life; and after the Munich Crisis he decided to move the main body of the firm to Malvern Wells in Worcestershire, leaving Fry to run a rump in London. It was in Malvern Wells that, at many removes, I came across Sam Carr’s name once again. At the fag end of the Thirties, Cyril Connolly’s marriage to his American first wife, Jeannie, began to unravel. Both parties had become overweight and overfond of the good life: Jeannie drank too much, while Connolly had become involved with a young art student and, unfairly, blamed Jeannie’s addiction to ‘footling’ and nightlife for his own failure to get down to the writing of books. Shortly before she finally returned to America, Jeannie went on a tour of the West Country, and in March 1939 she found herself taking the waters at Malvern Wells with two sulphurous prima donnas: Denham Fouts, a drug addict from the Deep South and, according to Christopher Isherwood, ‘the most expensive male prostitute in the world’, whose lovers had included Prince Paul of Greece and the margarine millionaire Peter Watson, soon to put up the money for Connolly’s Horizon; and Charles Fry, whom Mr Harry associated with ‘a pair of spectacles worn awry, a gift for fiery anger which trumpets through the house, a chirping sort of wit, and great knowledge of the business’, though Jeannie remembered him becoming ‘pedantic, irrational and sentimental’ after the first drink of the day. Later they were joined by Sam Carr and Brian Cook. They discussed the possibility of Jeannie getting a job with Batsford, but instead she and Fouts borrowed a fiver off Sam Carr, hired some bicycles, and headed off to the Brecon Beacons.
And with that, it could be, the great days of Batsford were over. Brian Cook succeeded Mr Harry as Chairman in 1952, and changed his name to Brian Batsford; in due course he became Tory MP for Ealing South, was knighted, retired to live in Lamb House, Rye, once the home of Henry James, and incurred the short-lived animosity of my overcharged lunching companion. As for Charles Fry, he seems to have gone from bad to worse, with James Lees-Milne cast in the role of recording angel. ‘God help him!’ Lees-Milne exclaimed when he learned that ‘Sachie’ Sitwell was planning a month-long tour of the Netherlands with Fry and Mr Harry; as for Fry’s suggestion that they should visit New York together, ‘I would sooner die than do such a thing.’ ‘Lunched with that fiend Charles Fry at the Ritz,’ Lees-Milne noted in July 1948. ‘He launched into a paean of praise of himself and his business successes. Conversation then lapsed into his drink and sex prowess, which disgusts and bores. During the hour and a half I was with him he consumed five gins and tonics.’
A year later, even Mr Harry had had enough. He had once compared ‘Charles’s deep and abiding attachment to the firm with that of Ulster to the British Crown and Empire’, and claimed that ‘it is impossible to imagine a time when he was not one of the vital, integral parts of the firm’, but in June 1949 Sam Carr told Lees-Milne that Fry had become ‘quite impossible’ and was being sacked. Sent out to open a New York branch of the firm, he had – or so it was rumoured – bought a house off Fifth Avenue, crammed it with Aubusson carpets, and sent his London HQ a bill for £57,000. Enough was enough. For all Fry’s awfulness, Lees-Milne couldn’t help but feel ‘sorry for this clever and deplorable man, losing his livelihood in middle age’.
Four years earlier, a young Hungarian named André Deutsch had set up as a publisher under the name of Allan Wingate (he worried that the name Deutsch might excite anti-German prejudice so soon after the end of the war). Unwisely, as it turned out, he offered Fry a job, and in due course they were joined by a rich young man named Anthony Gibbs, the son of the middlebrow novelist Sir Philip Gibbs, and himself the author of novels about men in sports cars. He was also a useful source of funds – too useful, in fact, since he ended up effectively owning the firm. When I asked André about Fry, he said that he could remember nothing about him except that he was permanently in tears. Diana Athill remembered the tears, but added that, like Gibbs, he was ‘absolutely useless’. In Stet, Diana recalls that Fry – whom she refers to as ‘Roger’ – was often drunk in the afternoons, and that ‘occasionally he came in with a black eye, having been roughed up by an ill-chosen boyfriend’. It may be, she continues, ‘he had thought he would work gently, between hangovers, on elegant books about eighteenth-century chinoiserie or Strawberry Hill Gothick, but he never got round to signing up any such work and made no contribution to what we had on the stocks’.
Then as always the workaholic all-round publisher, André, when not designing display ads or delivering copies in the back of his car, signed up Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, which no other publisher dared to touch, the works of his compatriot George Mikes, and the wartime stories of Julian Maclaren-Ross, who, being permanently broke, sometimes chased his diminutive publisher round his desk in search of funds, waving his silver-topped cane. But André was eventually pushed out of the firm by Messrs Fry and Gibbs, and set up a new business, this time under his own name, once again with Diana and Nicolas Bentley as his partners.
By the time Gibbs got to know him, Fry was a ‘confirmed alcoholic’; he was also ‘the most civilised man I have ever known’, with a vast knowledge of architecture, painting, food and ‘royal bastardy’ and a huge range of first-name friendships ranging from ‘Willy Maugham to Tom Eliot, John Betjeman, Bob Boothby, Dylan Thomas, Gerald Hamilton and Gerry [the Duke of] Wellington’. He had ‘flaming red hair’, and was given to sudden rages: ‘When he began to rap on the table at a mounting tempo, which meant that an explosion was imminent, people ran at the double to execute his lightest request.’ After André, Diana and Nicolas Bentley had left, Allan Wingate limped along somehow without its energetic and enterprising founder. Its offices were in Beauchamp Place, opposite a pub called The Grove: by ten in the morning, according to Gibbs, Fry had begun to tremble so much that ‘the ash tray would set up in sympathetic vibration’, and as soon as The Grove opened, at 11.30, the thirsty publisher hurried over the road, drained three double gins in a matter of moments, and returned to the office in a mellower mood. Lunch at The Belfry, off Belgrave Square, was lubricated by martinis, wine and Armagnac, and by half-past five in the afternoon, when the pubs reopened, Fry was standing impatiently outside The Grove, peering in through the windows and angrily rattling the letterbox. Once installed – and joined by Dylan Thomas, René Cutforth, Peter de Pollnay or Lord Killanin – he might down twenty whiskies before hailing a taxi home to his flat in Nell Gwynn House in Chelsea. After one lunchtime session, Fry is said to have reeled back to the office and announced that he had offered Dylan Thomas £1,000 for what became Under Milk Wood. Gibbs was horrified by this display of extravagance, and cancelled the offer at once.
Apart from commissioning Persona Grata, an anthology by Kenneth Tynan and Cecil Beaton of one hundred living people whom they jointly admired as ‘unique human beings’, Fry’s most dramatic contribution – or non-contribution – to the fortunes of Allan Wingate allegedly involved an elaborate and suitably shady scheme to smuggle his old friend Guy Burgess back from Moscow. Other participants included the writer James Pope-Hennessy, later murdered by