Uncle Clive
Clive Hislop was the youngest of all the Hislop children; my mother being the fourth in line. She and Clive were supposedly very close when they were growing up but at age 8 she was sent to Lowther College and he was sent to some boys’ boarding school. He was gay before it was acceptable. After school he was a tour director and took boatloads of rich Americans to the South of France. He used to have to blockade his bedroom door to stop the ladies from trying to get to him. He looked like Farley Granger, very dark and handsome. By the time I met him he was going through his outrageous phase. But prior to that he had been quite conservative. His dark good looks fascinated Howard Capes, the Battle of Britain hero who was shot down with Douglas Bader. Howard had been engaged to a flaming redhead who jilted him when he returned from war. In any event Howard and Clive immediately set up house together in Barkston Gardens in the Earl’s Court area of London. One of the first things Howard did was give Clive a puppy, a Pekinese they would name Butch after the movie Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid.
It was at this point in 1964 that I arrived in London and Clive immediately took me under his wing. Actually they both did. Howard taught me how to cook and played Claire de Lune for me on the piano only to find out years later that he loathed Debussy. We would have elegant dinners in French restaurants which would usually leave me sick from the richness of the food and the copious wine that flowed.
Clive was outrageously gay. Absolutely outrageous. He and his lifetime partner, Howard Capes, met at an air show in Paris some ten years before. Howard was the PR director for Decca Navigator (the business side of Decca Records who had just turned down the Rolling Stones). They had a Pekinese named Butch after Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the movie. They had a beautiful flat in Barkston Gardens in Earl’s Court. They had beautiful paintings, antiques, furniture, an autographed drawing of Rudolph Nureyev.
Howard drove a Bentley. They were outrageous snobs and lived very high on the hog. Their relationship was rather similar to Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Whose Afraid of Virginia Wolf. Clive was a courier, a tour guide. I think he might have passed his O levels.
He read The Daily Express. He was very ignorant about lots of things except entertaining, cooking and my life. He took his avuncular duties very seriously.
Anthony Blount went to Oxford with Howard and they were age old friends. Howard said he was the illegitimate son of John, the old Duke of Bedford and Mrs. Capes, but despite a strong resemblance with the current Duke of Bedford, that turned out not to be true. Howard was erudite, Oxford educated, a brilliant painter, member of the Royal Academy of Art, pianist, cook; he was very intelligent. He had been an ace fighter pilot during the war; fought alongside Dougie Bader in the Battle of Britain (so he said!). He was engaged to be married before the war and after the war, he was very badly shot up and convalescing and she went off with someone else (so he said!).
Clive was an excellent cook, too. But other than that one skill he was a total airhead. Gossipy, mean-spirited to those family members he did not care for (my mother, his brother John). He was very generous to me and really was more of a parent than either of my parents ever had been. He was indulgent and kind. He gave me a luncheon at the Dorchester Hotel for my 21st birthday and allowed that I could invite two friends.
He gave me very expensive clothes from Jaeger for birthdays and Christmases. He gave me hand-me-downs from his kitchen or dining room that he didn’t want. China and cutlery I still use today. He taught me how to cook. My mother was such an unspeakable snob that I was pretty polished already but he just finished me off as it were. We were very fond of each other.
Howard was the illegitimate son of a Mrs. Capes who was the lover of the Duke of Bedford. The old Duke shot himself and the succeeding Duke of Bedford was a contemporary of Howard’s. They looked very alike. Every year he would put a Christmas card on the piano which said “Love from Alexandra and the girls.” He pretended connections to the Royal family, Eton and Harrow and finally Oxford. After his death Clive confessed that it was all Walter Mitty fantasy. He carried on that pretense for forty years and everyone believed him.
The one thing that Howard did that no one else ever did for me, was defend me. He wrote a letter to my mother telling her in no uncertain terms how terribly she and my father both had treated me. Of course she would never speak to him again and did not know that I had read the letter before he posted it and so I knew exactly what it said.
The text follows:
August 16th, 1964
Dear Shirley:
If this letter comes as a surprise, I couldn’t be more delighted, it’s about time somebody around Riverside, CT got shaken up a bit.
As you may be aware, your daughter arrived on our doorstep just slightly pregnant and broke. How in hell you can treat her this way at such a time is between you and your conscience but I would like to enumerate the following points:
Her arrival loused up the last part of our holiday, so far her stay had completely mucked up two weekends. Clive has been at his wits end: what with abortionist, doctors, money, etc. he’s damned near out of his mind. And is considerably out of pocket owing to absence from the office. Our home life has been totally destroyed. I have been flying around to doctor’s solicitors and God knows what. In the meanwhile, we have been stuffing expensive food down the throat of your errant brat at no small expense.
Clive, God bless him, is all for turning the other cheek. But I’m damned if I am. You seem to have deliberately pushed off your responsibility on to us; and whatever else I don’t really care for women having hemorrhages all over the place.
This can all, to an extent, be rectified in terms of cash. By the end of this week Candace will have been with us for three long weeks, I reckon 12 pounds per week – a fair low charge for her accommodation. In addition there is an extra doctor’s bill of 10 pounds. Clive has spent over 4 pounds on taxis, and I’ve had to take legal advice as the subject of being an accessory to the procurement of an abortion. My lawyer’s fee is 15 pounds. So you wouldn’t mind sending a check for 65 pounds to Clive at least we shan’t be much out of pocket.
Incidentally, you might send Candace some money or we shall have to subsidise her as well as house her.
You’re a great mother. Yours, Howard
P.S. As I said, please send the check to Clive. He’s holding all the bills, including the grocers.
Upon receipt of this letter, my parents telephoned me long distance and told me to get on the next plane back. I refused. My father bellowed down the phone “They are a pair of queers, you know that don’t you?” Well I didn’t actually, I was that naïve but I certainly knew now. On the photocopy of this letter that was returned to me, my mother wrote “Please settle up these “incidental” expenses.”
Alcohol was very much part of their lives and that of their friends. They drank anything and everything but in those days Clive’s poison was gin and tonic. He and Howard would have tremendous rows and practically kill each other. Every time I went over there would be another piece of furniture or bric-a-brac missing or broken, victim of their quarrel the night before.
Clive may have read the Daily Express if it had some titillating story like the Jack Profumo scandal but basically he was a very ignorant and provincial man. He understood nothing of politics, government, the sciences. He read little if at all. He assisted Howard at Decca and with the exception of the Farnborough Air Show once a year, probably did little of real work. He cared for the house, the cooking, eventually another Peke, Cassidy and Howard. Those were the concerns of his life.
As time went by, his drinking became obsessive. One could not have a conversation with him. He and Howard would go at each other with knives. Clive would cut the telephone wire so Howard would not call the police. These two once-elegant and amusing guys had become two worn out old drunks.
Eventually Clive and Howard took all their London stuff and moved to little cottage in Kingston-on-Thames. Finally Howard was given a golden handshake to leave Decca and they moved to Brighton on the premise that property taxes in London were so high. They bought a first floor flat in a lovely row of Queen Ann houses not far from the beach. All the antiques transitioned nicely and it was very comfortable with a studio for Howard and a little garden in the back for the dogs.
The illness factor was murky and vague. I am convinced they both died of AIDS but they would never say. First Howard went. After 38 years together Clive was stunned to be on his own and would call me in the US weeping and wailing at his sorry lot. He died about three years ago but my wonderful family neglected to tell me. I did have one last visit with him before he died. But he was a shadow of his former self both physically and mentally.
I visited him in Brighton: a surreal experience but it was during my last hours with him when I determined he was so far gone mentally that there was little left of our once intense friendship. He was drinking a bottle of brandy a day. He weighed about 90 lbs. He sat in great backed chair all day staring out of the window. He could not walk without a walking frame. There were what looked to me like Kaposi’s sarcomas all over his legs and his feet were bandaged from an “infection.” He was incontinent and had to wear a diaper. He told me that I had lost my femininity and that the cure for that was to put a “dab of scent behind the ear lobes on the way out in the morning time.”
After two days of him and his dirty diapers and his drinking, I left. It was a shame but it was no longer possible to communicate with him. He went into a rage because of my friendship with a gay friend in Rome. He thought Clinton’s head was too big. He just had deteriorated to a point where I could not cope with him. And some time after that he died, the circumstances of which I am unaware but can quite easily imagine.
Rather like the British actor, George Sanders who ultimately committed suicide, he had lost all interest in living. He was relatively young at 67 when he died but his body just could not handle the abuse and if it was AIDS then I think I was dealing with premature dementia.