Air Mail: Obituaries

The Real Benjamin Braddock

Air Mail — Sat, 27 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft in The Graduate, based on the novel by Charles Webb. Screenwriter Buck Henry said he took 80 percent or more of the dialogue directly from the book.

Charles Webb rebelled against his privileged upbringing by writing The Graduate—then renounced his own phenomenal success

At the poignantly ambiguous end of The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross leap aboard a bus and ride off into the sunset leaving cinemagoers to speculate on what the future holds for the young lovers.

Far stranger than fiction, though, was what became of Charles Webb, the author of the novel on which the film was based. Webb had sold the rights to his story for $20,000. It was a paltry sum given that the film went on to gross more than $100 million. Many years later, when a British newspaper compiled a list of “the world’s READ ON

Live at the Front

Max Hastings — Sat, 20 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

“Forces’ Sweetheart” Vera Lynn serves tea to servicemen in Trafalgar Square, 1942.

Vera Lynn’s torch songs were not high art, but they kept up morale among the rank-and-file British soldiers fighting W.W. II

By Max Hastings

Long after the Second World War, a former naval officer wrote: “Whenever I hear Vera Lynn singing her wartime songs I am carried back to the heaving messdeck of a destroyer, and see again the tired men, the sea-sick, hushed and listening, some with trembling lips and moist eyes.”

Many people and events associated with the conflict are misrepresented or sentimentalised today, but there is no doubt of the vast, authentic popularity of the Forces’ Sweetheart, with her haunting mid-Atlantic tones.

Vera was never a sexpot like Lili Marlene, the hooker of Marlene Dietrich’s song — a character especially READ ON

James Sherwood

Air Mail — Sat, 6 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Among the properties James Sherwood owned were the Hotel Cipriani, in Venice; the Hotel Splendido, in Portofino; Harry’s Bar, in London; and the ‘21’ Club, in New York.

In 1982, he boldly resurrected the fabled Orient Express. It became the cornerstone of Belmond, the billion-dollar hotel group

In October 1977 Jim Sherwood bought two shabby prewar sleeping carriages at a Sotheby’s sale held in a freight yard of Monte Carlo’s railway station. They were not any old carriages, however: they were all that remained of the fabled 1920s Orient Express train and had featured in the film Murder on the Orient Express. He paid $72,800 for the first one and $41,000 for the second.

Sherwood’s plan was to use them to recreate the Orient Express train and operate it between Paris and Venice, where he had bought the Cipriani hotel the year before. He had budgeted $5 million for the project that he reckoned would take two years; in fact it cost $30 million and took five years. READ ON