The Tom Stoppard I Knew

UK Special Coverage Tom knew the best people, threw the best parties, and was the best of friends. UK Special Coverage Photo by Neil Libbert/Getty Images I grew up in a Buckinghamshire village called Iver, living for 18 years in a Queen Anne house called Copthall. In the early 1970s, when I was about 10, a glamorous couple moved to the other end of the village: Tom and Miriam Stoppard. Tom soon became a close friend of my father, the historian and journalist Paul Johnson. I suppose there weren’t many other successful writers living in the village, and convenience is a powerful factor in life. In some respects Tom and my father plowed different furrows: Tom wrote fictional scripts for stage and screen, while my dad wrote big factual books like A History of the American People or A History of the Jews. But they were close friends for over 50 years. When my father died two years ago, Tom and I read the eulogies at his funeral. My dad was older than Tom, and towards the end of his life he had outlived all his other close friends, so visits from Tom were always very special. Tom was a rare individual. He was famous and hugely esteemed—and yet he was a fundamentally kind man with a good heart. I’ve met a few showbusiness grandees over the years, and most are narcissists. Who knows if they started like that or their celebrity warped their personalities? Tom was the opposite; he was interested in other people, self-deprecating, and never self absorbed. Because Tom and my dad lived down the road from each other, and both worked from home, they supported each other in very personal ways. My father was a heavy drinker until he gave up the booze in his 50s; on one legendary occasion, my mother Marigold was obliged to call Tom to help get my drunk dad out of the bath. Meanwhile, Tom would suffer from bouts of writer’s block. This was a condition from which my father—who wrote over 40 books and thousands of newspaper articles—never suffered. So when Tom was struggling to put pen to paper, my dad would often provide encouragement and wise advice about how to get the words flowing again. I think my father’s views on politics probably influenced Tom. In the late 1970s, when the trade unions were destroying Britain, my father moved from socialism to becoming a vocal supporter of free enterprise, the Conservative Party, and in due course, Margaret Thatcher. Unusually for a figure in showbusiness, Tom Stoppard was an anti-communist (he was a refugee from Czechoslovakia) and a great believer in Western liberal democracy, so he had much in common with my dad when it came to politics, philosophy and history. By contrast, my parents were also close friends with Harold Pinter, who had married one of my mother’s oldest friends, Antonia Fraser. Harold was a passionate left-winger, and strongly disagreed with my father’s politics. Luckily, I never talked to him about that: we used to discuss cricket, which he loved almost as much as theater and film. Tom and Miriam Stoppard were endlessly generous to me. They lived in a beautiful Palladian house called Iver Grove, surrounded by spectacular gardens. I can recall one day I was in their splendid drawing room full of bookshelves, and Tom asked me which authors I liked. I said I loved Raymond Chandler, but that I had read all seven of his novels. Tom was an autodidact who read very widely. He had of course read Chandler, and he immediately pulled out the perfect recommendation for me from his bookshelf: The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins. I became a lifelong fan of the novelist and have read all his books too. Miriam was actually more famous among non-theater people than Tom in the 1970s and 1980s, because she was a high-profile medical doctor who wrote books and newspaper columns and presented popular TV shows. She was also a managing director at Syntex, a multinational pharmaceutical business with a factory nearby, where I worked one summer holiday. She partly inspired me to study medicine at Oxford, although while there I discovered business and never qualified as a doctor. Meanwhile, Tom inspired my interest in the theater. I became a co-owner of Assembly Festival, the largest complex of theater spaces at the Edinburgh Fringe, some decades ago. Later I served for six years as chairman of Channel 4 Television; I was also chairman of the Almeida Theatre in London, and through various producing partnerships, I have backed hundreds of West End shows over the years. It all stems back to Tom the family friend—and perhaps Britain’s most talented playwright. Subscribe Today Get daily emails in your inbox Tom was also a world-class party host. I can remember going to sophisticated summer gatherings as a teenager, full of well-known actors and intellectuals. One year two guests arrived by helicopter, landing in the field beside their house. Out stepped Bianca Jagger and Roald Dahl! Tom was then at the height of his talents; when he sent you an invitation, you accepted. After Tom moved from Iver in the 1990s, he would host a biennial party in the Chelsea Physic Gardens, next to the River Thames in London. I must have attended at least 10 of them; they were reliably the best party of the year. The guests were a glittering array of performers, politicians, writers and assorted friends. They ranged from Mick Jagger to Rupert Murdoch. One year my daughter hit it off with the brilliant Barry Humphries; my wife and I met four of our closest friends at one of his parties. There was live jazz, a Punch and Judy show for children, an incredible array of food and drink from midday until dusk, all in the most sublime surroundings London has to offer. And the sun always seemed to shine. Of course Tom was a renowned playwright and Oscar-winning scriptwriter. But to me he was more than that: a luminous presence during most of my life, a deep family friend and a truly generous spirit. Tom was a genuine star but also a really fine human being—a rare and special combination.