Bush came to lunch, Fergie drank him under the table...David Frost knew everyone who was anyone - but did they really know him?
- New biography of David Frost, who died two years ago
- The book covers his hectic life as an impressive interviewer
- Roger Lewis thinks it is a loving tribute which reads like an eulogy
Book of the week
FROST: THAT WAS THE LIFE THAT WAS
by Neil Hegarty
(W.H. Allen £25)
Sir David Frost, who died two years ago in his cabin while preparing to give a one man show aboard a cruise ship, was such a dedicated entertainer and pundit that his face was almost permanently caked in orange make-up.
He spent his life hurtling from one stage or studio to the next, sustained by the adrenaline-rush of live shows - and he was the original transatlantic commuter. His single regret, he said, was that he never got around to opening 'the first television station on the moon'.
On Monday mornings, Frost would catch the BA flight to JFK - Concorde, when it existed - and he'd appear before the cameras in New York at 4pm.
Frosty attitude: Mocking Christine Keeler in 1963
On Wednesdays he'd return First Class to London to prepare for weekend broadcasts. This punishing schedule went on for nearly half a century, and Frost earned a reputation for being in at least two places at once.
His widow and wife of 30 years, Lady Carina, first saw him on television when she was a convent schoolgirl. 'This is the man I'm going to marry', she told the Mother Superior, with eerie premonition. 'Is he religious?' queried the nun. 'Oh, yes, Mother, he thinks he's God.'
Frost was born on Good Friday 1939 in Kent, the son of a chapel minister, who could 'preach persuasively and with passion to his flock', according to biographer Neil Hegarty. It is not hard to see that Frost's evangelistic personality, his need to perform, was the television equivalent of standing in a pulpit.
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From Gillingham Grammar Frost went to Cambridge, arriving in 1958. He quite ignored his formal studies - F.R. Leavis said Frost's examination papers were the most disgraceful in the history of the English faculty - and instead began to 'network, before the term was even invented'.
This meant getting involved with Footlights and cultivating the friendship of the era's greatest genius, Peter Cook. The rivalry between them is fascinating. Cook, a public school snob, looked down on the eager, state-educated Frost as 'suburban', and mocked him for his 'opportunistic streak'.
Frost had 'a game plan that would lead to his assuming his rightful place in the world', even if, initially, this meant copying Cook's mannerisms and whiny voice. As editor of the student newspaper Granta he ran up expenses, ordering a chauffer-driven car to take him around Cambridge, and had breakfast delivered to his rooms from a local hotel.
Cook later said his one regret in life was that he'd saved Frost from drowning when they were both in America. He was clearly jealous that while he'd founded The Establishment Club, in Soho, it was Frost's television show, first aired in November 1963, That Was The Week That Was, which was proving much more influential and successful.
David Frost with former U.S. President Richard Nixon in 1977, when he made a series of exclusive interviews with the disgraced politician
David Frost with Sarah Ferguson in 2007, when they arrived for the opening of the Broadway play Frost/Nixon
Frost adored appearing on the box: 'This is home. This is where I'm meant to be!' he cried. Frost instinctively understood that television, much more than print or cinema, let alone Soho clubs, was the medium now being enthusiastically absorbed by millions.
That Was The Week That Was had an intimate nightclub feel, with sketches, music, and topical satire about the intricacies of international politics. When Frost mocked Harold Macmillan, the prime minister told his advisers in a document that has only recently come to light: 'It's a good thing to be laughed at - it is better than to be ignored.'
It is a sign of those times (1963) that the press lambasted Frost as 'dirty beyond belief' for even mentioning the word 'contraception' on late night television.
He became an impressive interviewer, 'sharp, agile and yet empathetic. He could get people to say more than they had planned' - as the likes of Oswald Mosley, Billy Graham, Henry Kissinger, John Lennon, and Richard Nixon were to discover.
With a salary, in 1969, of $350,000, Frost repeated the formula in America. He interrogated heads of state and world leaders, his illegible research notes in black felt tip covering stacks of envelopes and folders.
The culmination of his achievement was in 1977, when he confronted Nixon, who had resigned from the presidency in disgrace after Watergate.
Frost paid Nixon $600,000 for his time and for the editorial rights to the interview tapes.
Hegarty says Frost was hopeless at small talk, 'unless one was talking deals'. In private life, 'he didn't ask too many questions, because he didn't want to create a space in which questions might come back at him'. He had many thousands of acquaintances but no real friends.
David Frost interviewing Richard Nixon in a rented house near Nixon's in San Clemente, California
Cabinet Ministers would find they'd no longer be invited to Frost's parties once they'd become ex-Cabinet Ministers. He never mixed with ordinary people. His children were read bedtime stories by John Major. Sunday lunch guests would include President George H.W. Bush, Michael Parkinson, Imran Khan, Tony Blair, Fergie and Prince Andrew.
'Frostie and I proceeded to drink the lunch away,' recalls Fergie. 'Goodness knows why Andrew asked me to marry him after seeing that!'
FROST: THAT WAS THE LIFE THAT WAS by Neil Hegarty
'He was difficult to pin down, politically and ideologically,' says Hegarty: 'He didn't sing, he didn't dance, he didn't play the ukulele. He was just clearly very good at being David Frost.'
In spite of Cambridge, Frost never knew about literature. 'He remained uninterested in . . . the visual arts, in radio, cinema and theatre.'
He never knew the difference between a squirrel and a partridge, despite the fact that, having divorced the 'troubled and unstable' Lynne Frederick, in March 1983 he married Lady Carina Fitzalan-Howard, sister of the Duke of Norfolk, which meant Frost was at the epicentre of the shooting and fishing classes.
Well, he was from Gillingham. He defiantly retained common habits. He thought tomatoes, garlic, onions, pepper and seafood were foreign muck.
His Desert Island Discs luxury was an unending supply of crisps. He said things like toilet, pardon and lounge. Tongue in cheek, and fair play, he referred to the British Airways First Class lounge as the British Airways First Class Drawing Room.
Good for him - he refused throughout his life to acknowledge the slightest setback or failure or humiliation. 'Well, I thought that went very well, don't you?' he'd announce with baffling sincerity after a manifest cock-up.
What characterised him was a thorough lack of embarrassment. He saw no come-down, for example, in going from Richard Nixon to presenting Through The Keyhole.
When replaced by Andrew Marr at the BBC, Frost joined the Arabic satellite network Al Jazeera, at £1million for 40 shows. Next came the cruise ship lectures, where he sadly died, all alone in his cabin.
This book is a loving tribute, which reads like an extended eulogy. No attempt is made to be objective or searching.
If I were married to him, I'd have been a bit infuriated, but here is a person who was 'never required to pick up after himself, to cook a meal, iron a shirt, or pack a case.' He was, we are told, 'thoroughly spoiled' and 'not the sort of man who would apologise. Other people did that, but not Frost'.
Nevertheless Hegarty has told an extraordinary and important story, which says a great deal about British popular culture from the Sixties on.
