It Takes Two by Cathy Newman

Author:Cathy Newman [Newman, Cathy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2020-08-20T17:00:00+00:00

5

Serendipity

For some reason the music of chance is always pleasing to the ear. We think of chance as random, but as any gambler knows, it isn’t really – there’s a science to it, a side that manifests itself in quantum mechanics and probability theory. When we experience chance, we are experiencing the tension between chaos and a kind of order, albeit one most of us aren’t clever enough to grasp.

We love chance meetings and serendipitous friendships. They are a staple of novels and films, especially romantic comedies, where the initial ‘meet cute’ between the two main characters is often accidental. The structure of one of my favourite films, When Harry Met Sally, is organised around a series of chance meetings. Harry Burns and Sally Albright have never met until they agree to share the drive from the University of Chicago to New York. Their next chance meeting, five years later, is on a flight. The next is in a bookshop. This apparent randomness is the soil that allows first their friendship and then their romance to bloom.

The scientist Louis Pasteur famously said: ‘In the field of observation, chance favours the prepared mind.’ But some chance couplings are so strange and incredible that they are impossible to prepare for. Mindful of this, the satirist Craig Brown, in his brilliantly funny book about remarkable random meetings between famous people, Hello Goodbye Hello, introduces ‘a note of order into the otherwise haphazard’,[1] by describing each of the 101 meetings he recounts in exactly 1,001 words.

Two people do not need to have known each other for long for their meeting to have unfortunate consequences. I am always cheered by meetings that are happy, unexpected accidents; but in some cases what we are dealing with is the opposite of serendipity – what the novelist William Boyd has called ‘zemblanity’: ‘the faculty of making unhappy, unlucky and expected discoveries by design’.[2]

Consider, as Brown does, the case of 1960s DJ and TV star Simon Dee and actor George Lazenby. The unhappy discovery both men made after Lazenby’s catastrophic appearance on Dee’s ITV chat show on 8 February 1970 was that both their careers were en route to the toilet.

Lazenby was a good-looking, self-assured Australian who had moved to London in 1963 and worked as a used-car salesman before drifting, with some success, into male modelling, notably in a TV advert for Fry’s chocolate. After Sean Connery decided he had had enough of playing James Bond, Lazenby won the part by engineering a meeting with the spy series’ producer Cubby Broccoli – he arranged to have his hair cut at a salon Broccoli frequented at a time when he knew that the producer would also be there – and impressing the women working in Broccoli’s office with his rangy masculinity. His performance in the subsequent film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, received mixed reviews – he had fibbed about the extent of his acting experience – and his arrogant behaviour on set alienated both cast and crew. Despite this, Lazenby had been offered $1 million to reprise the role.

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