Best and Edwards by Gordon Burn
Author:Gordon Burn [Burn, Gordon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571265077
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 2011-03-01T16:00:00+00:00
Billy Barr started to let rooms at the Brown Bull. Actors and others filming at Granada found the trip upstairs easier than going back to a hotel. ‘There’s a nice young lady in number four,’ Billy would tell Bestie. ‘Why don’t you knock on her door and see if she fancies coming down for a drink?’
It was madness. It was non-stop. Around this time, Michael Parkinson met a woman – ‘married, beautiful and quite intelligent’ – who told him the following Best story: ‘He had the most marvellous eyes and a shy boyish charm. I talked to him for a long time and entertained thoughts of seducing him. I wondered how I might go about it. We talked for about half an hour and all the time I fantasized an affair with him. All of a sudden a blonde girl came up to him. She said, “Hi, I’m Julie, would you like a quick fuck?” He said, “Certainly.” He turned to me and said, “Excuse me,” and went upstairs with her.’
(Best’s eyes occasioned a great deal of discussion over the years. ‘Now that the nation has seen in a thousand photographs those same eyes staring widely out of cavernous sockets, the only living things in George’s wasted face,’ Greer wrote, ‘there can be no argument about their colour: deep, stormy ocean-blue. Many a drunk in many a pub from Enniskillen to Sydney has those heart-breaking Irish eyes.’ Parkinson, however, was very definite about ‘the violet eyes, with the long lashes’. ‘He looked like Elizabeth Taylor around the eyes,’ he once said. ‘There was something very effeminate about that area of George.’)
It must have occurred to some of the readers among the revellers at the Brown Bull that life had taken a bittersweet F. Scott Fitzgerald-like turn – the Fitzgerald who wrote about failure (if not the real thing, then a sense of failure) as the inevitable dark lining of success. ‘[We were embarked] on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history and there was going to be plenty to tell about it … [Yet] all the stories that came into my
head had a touch of disaster in them – the lovely young creatures in my novels went to ruin … In life these things hadn’t happened yet, but I was pretty sure living wasn’t the reckless, careless business these people thought – this generation just younger than me.’
The debauch and bacchanal went into free fall when United finally brought the European Cup home to Manchester, a decade after Munich, in 1968.
They had won the FA Cup in 1963. It was their first major trophy since the accident and, to mark the occasion, one of the surgeons who had treated the injured at the Rechts der Isar hospital had been invited over for the match at Wembley and the celebration dinner afterwards at the Savoy. Shortly before the dinner, however, Frank Kessel suffered a severe nosebleed while he was changing at his hotel. Frank Taylor of the News Chronicle, the only journalist
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