Story Frame 36 – A Man of Many Enthusiams & What I Discovered in His Loo

“Oh no!” I exclaimed. The words popped out of my mouth before I realized it.

I was reading one of the London morning newspapers over a cup of coffee before Martin and I headed over to Lord Norwich’s home for our interview.

“Bad news?” Martin asked, looking up from his own newspaper and coffee.

“Yes,” I said. “Parliament, under Tony Blair’s government, has just passed the House of Lords Act!” I hastily scanned the article looking for one particular name. And then I found it.

“About half of them got the sack, including Lord Norwich! And on the morning we are scheduled to interview him. How’s that for crap timing?!”

Martin looked startled. Normally, this kind of news would have barely registered with either of us. But as we were in London to film an interview with Norwich himself, I was worried. After nearly five years of working on this documentary, he was our last and most important interview, our icing-on-the-cake interview.

Norwich was considered the preeminent Byzantinist at the time. A scholar, journalist and broadcaster, in the late 1980s, he’d set out to write a history of the Byzantine empire from its creation by Constantine the Great in the fourth century to its fall to the Turks eleven hundred years later. The three volumes of Byzantium appeared between 1988 and 1995. I had a copy of A Short History of Byzantium – a more reasonable 421 pages.

There was no better expert on the topic for us to interview. Getting an interview with him would be a huge leg-up for the documentary. Martin said we could fly to London after our shoot in Istanbul and interview him – if I could book it.

Not knowing exactly how to accomplish this, I began with Parliament, specifically the House of Lords, looking for guidance. I found a phone number in a directory at my local library and placed the call to London from the documentary workspace.

“Good afternoon, Houses of Parliament,” a disembodied voice answered, surprising me. You can actually phone them, and they’ll answer?!

I explained I was a documentary filmmaker calling from America, trying to get in touch with Lord Norwich in order to interview him.

 “Hold one moment, please,” came the polite response.

Moments later, the voice returned.

“Here’s his home number,” he said graciously in perfect BBC accented tones. Wait, the home number for a member of Parliament?! Surely, I had heard wrong. But no.

When I rang the number given me, I was surprised when a polite and proper female voice answered. And even more surprised when she put Lord Norwich himself on the phone. He heard me out, then cheerfully offered to sit for an interview. We agreed on a date and time in November. And then, even more astonishing to me, Lord Norwich gave me his home address. It turned out he lived in the Little Venice area of London. How appropriate, I thought, aware of his advocacy work for the Venice in Peril Fund.

I hung up, feeling a bit star struck and shared the good news with Martin. “Can you believe that?!” I’d said, still a bit in shock. “A member of the House of Lords, and they gave me his home telephone number!”

I couldn’t fathom that happening in Washington DC, if I called to get a number for someone in the Senate or House of Representatives.

And now, of all things, Lord Norwich had gotten the sack the same day we were set to interview him.

“I have his home phone number. Do you think we should call him?” I asked Martin. “Perhaps he might want to reschedule!”

Martin pondered for a moment before responding, “Nope. We’re here now and the camera is already booked. Let’s just show up and hope for the best.”

I was very intrigued to meet him, so I hoped like crazy it would somehow work out. Lord Norwich seemed, from everything I’d read, the very personification of British peerage. On his father’s side, he was descended from King William IV and his mistress, Dorothea Jordan.

Norwich’s father was the late Duff Cooper, a conservative politician and diplomat, and World War II Minister of Information. His mother was Lady Diana Manners, a celebrated beauty and society figure, said to have chosen her wealthiest 17 friends as her only child’s godparents – Lord Beaverbrook and the Aga Khan among them.

Lady Diana was also a close friend of novelist, biographer, and journalist, Evelyn Waugh, who was so smitten with her he modeled his character “Mrs Stitch” after her.

Writing in the Guardian, Jeffrey Manley would later describe Norwich as “a man of many enthusiasms – for books, music, architecture, paintings – and his great talent was to be able to convey those passions to the public at large, through books, radio broadcasts and in nearly three dozen television documentaries from the BBC.”

That was almost an understatement.

In addition to being a writer for thirty-five years, Norwich had also served as editor for Great Architecture of the World, The Italian World, and The Oxford Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Art. He often contributed to Cornucopia, a magazine devoted to the history and culture of Turkey. His television documentaries included The Fall of Constantinople, The Antiquities of Turkey, and The Gates of Asia.

(Intriguingly, Norwich was also the father of Allegra Huston, a result of his affair with film director John Huston’s wife, the ballet dancer Enrica Soma.)

Intelligent and well educated with degrees in French and Russian from Oxford, Norwich had inherited the title Viscount Norwich upon his father’s death in 1954, a title he’d apparently now just lost. Other than that, he was just perfect for us.

At the appointed time, we rang the front doorbell of Lord Norwich’s beautiful home, a large detached Victorian house on Warwick Avenue which ran alongside a canal in the Maida Vale section of London.

The nickname “Little Venice” is said to have come either from the poet Robert Browning, who lived not far from Norwich’s house in the second part of the 19^th century. Or, perhaps Lord Byron, who may have actually been the first person, fifty years earlier, to compare the area to Venice. Regardless of the origin of the nickname, it was a very appropriate place for Norwich to call home given his passion as Chairman of the Venice in Peril Fund.

The housekeeper opened the front door but Norwich himself was right behind her.

“Come in, come in!” he said, his arm gesturing in a sweeping circle to welcome us into his home.

He ushered us through a spacious entry hall into a large library lined with bookshelves weighted down by hundreds of leather-bound books with gold embossing on them.

“Lord Norwich,” I said. “We’re so very pleased to meet you. Thank you for permitting us an interview.”

“Not at all,” he replied. “Delighted! Only I must tell you straight off that I’m not ‘Lord Norwich. Technically, my title is – or rather, was, until today – The Right Honourable, the Viscount Norwich, CVO.

“However, that’s a dreadful mouthful, don’t you think?” he said laughing. “Please just call me John Julius.”

He went on to say he didn’t really mind at all getting the sack and actually said it was something of a relief as now he could just write and not be bothered with ‘all that other stuff.’

He spoke in manner of one who had been educated at Oxford – upper class, well-articulated English. His grayish-white hair was combed back neatly. He was wearing a blue button-down shirt underneath his tweed jacket. The blue brought out the blue in his eyes, I noted with appreciation. He’s done this before, of course, many times.

(Sidenote: It makes it so much easier when the subject of your interview knows and understands what looks good on camera, and what doesn’t. You want everyone watching your film to be concentrating on what interviewees are saying, not what they are wearing or wondering who on earth did their make-up and don’t they have a mirror somewhere they can check themselves in, etc.)

Norwich, of course, was a pro. He was 70 years old at the time and had done this a hundred times before, perhaps even more. He answered all of our questions directly. His enunciation was wonderful, very British, very confident, and he gestured effectively with his hands to illustrate his points. One could hear the italics when he spoke.

Having done the research, read the books and made the initial contact with Norwich, I would very much have liked to have been the one interviewing him. Martin, however, decided to do it himself.

Although I was disappointed, having Martin do it left me with lots of free time inside my head, space I filled with thoughts of going out to a lovely dinner somewhere special and listening to John Julius talk about Italy or the Byzantine Empire all night long. I’d never met such an interesting man. Nor have I since.

At the end of the interview, as Martin and the cameraman packed up the gear, I waited for a pause in conversation then asked John Julius if I might use the loo.

“Yes, yes, of course, my dear!” he said immediately. “First door on the right in the front hallway.”

There was no problem locating it off the spacious square front hall. Inside, the walls were adorned with framed photos and letters from famous and interesting people. I paused to read some of them while washing and drying my hands. One especially caught my eye. The salutation was to Lady Diana, Norwich’s mother, and signed from author Evelyn Waugh.

I returned to the sitting room as the last gear bag was being zipped up, the last case closed.

"I have a question for you, John Julius," I said with a smile. "Are you the 'little shit'?"

The room fell silent. All eyes turned to me. Martin stood still in shock, horror and disbelief on his face, but I no longer cared. His reaction didn’t matter and besides, what more could he do? He’d already fired me months ago. I smiled back at him serenely.

I looked back at Norwich. He didn’t look shocked at all. In fact, there was just a hint of bemused puzzlement on his face. I waited. Then, to my immense relief, he threw back his head with a great roar of laughter.

“You read Evelyn Waugh’s letter to my mother!” he exclaimed. “Yes, yes, that was me, ‘the little shit’ he was referring to!” He appeared delighted I’d noticed that particular letter.

I brought out my copy of A Short History of Byzantium and asked if he’d sign it, which he did.

Martin and Kristin,

With thanks for a particularly sympathetic and enjoyable interview!

John Julius

London 12.11.99

As we prepared to leave, I put my hand out to shake his, but John Julius hugged me to him in a warm embrace.

“Wonderful, my dear, thank you for this interview. I look forward to seeing your film!”

This handsome, intelligent and lovely man of many enthusiasms lived another nineteen years but I never saw him again.

How very lucky I was to have met him.

Coming up next … Time lapses & Tiny Bubbles