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The Picaresque Life of the Man Who Modernized Neuroscience

by www.nytimes.com Leave a Comment

THE BRAIN IN SEARCH OF ITSELF: Santiago Ramón y Cajal and the Story of the Neuron, by Benjamin Ehrlich

“The devil child,” his family called him.

There are streets named for him all across Spain. He spent decades staring down the barrel of a microscope, scrutinizing the tangled tissues of our nervous system. He was a peasant genius, born in a dirt-poor town in the Aragonese highlands; his father — himself a devil — had high hopes for him: When the boy was just 5 years old, his father dragged him into a small cave in the middle of a barren field, sat him down on a rock and tried to teach him arithmetic, geography and physics. But the boy was stubborn — a “wayward, unlikable creature,” in his own words — completely uninterested in learning, mystified by nature and haunted by his own imagination.

Growing up, he reveled in wickedness: The mayor, the priest and a procession of neighbors would show up at his home demanding satisfaction for his misdeeds. The child was, as one of his teachers recalled, “inattentive, lazy, disobedient and annoying, a nightmare for his parents, teachers and patrons.”

Another teacher predicted that he would end up in jail, “if they do not hang him first.”

He won a Nobel Prize in 1906.

To tame him, his father — a barber-surgeon — would whip him till he bled, beat him with a club or pull on his flesh with heated tongs. “What a great alarm for the soul, and an instigator of energy, is pain!” the boy would later conclude. “Pain is a necessary stimulant to creativity.” But in the hellscape of his youth, he tried to flee from his home; he hid until his father found him, tied him up and marched him through town to shame him.

Around that time, the boy developed an uncontrollable urge to draw — constantly, maniacally — on every available surface, not just on textbooks or scraps of paper, but even on walls and doors. When he did, the world rolled back and disappeared. He would become so utterly enthralled that once, many years later, when he was invited to Cambridge University to receive an honorary degree, he stood in the middle of a crowded street, sketching a facade, and would not move, to the consternation of passers-by. At some point, the police were called.

He dreamed of becoming the next Titian or Velázquez, but his father wanted him to be a doctor. After his father threw his drawings into the fire, the boy started hiding them in fields; he improvised art supplies, making crude brushes with wadded-up paper and milking pigments from cigarette wrappers. It was this artistic fervor that slowly and painfully led him to medicine, then to microscopy and histology; beginning with the cadavers that his father dissected before him (and that the son drew in exquisite, morbid detail), he became engrossed first with the interior of the body, and then the world of cells, making his way toward the organ to which his name is forever tied: the brain. Because that devil-child was Santiago Ramón y Cajal, about whom Benjamin Ehrlich has written a passionate and meticulous biography, “The Brain in Search of Itself.”

A Spanish national treasure, Cajal is one of the most important scientists of all time, considered the father of modern neuroscience after proving that the brain was not made up of a fully continuous labyrinth of fibers — as was thought during the 19th century — but rather by individual cells that we now call neurons, those “mysterious butterflies of the soul,” in his words, “whose beating of wings may one day reveal to us the secrets of the mind.”

His life was one of obsession and hyperbole. The Spanish savant’s real achievements mirror the self-aggrandizing claims that he made about himself: He wrote that, when he played the flute, other children followed him as though he were the Pied Piper; later, when the news broke of his Nobel, he was swarmed by admirers, some of whom followed him home and stood below his window, chanting his name. According to his brother, he was driven by a “blind desire to overcome, to be first in everything without making amends for anything in order to achieve it.” Ehrlich writes that Cajal “claimed to have once spent 20 hours straight at his microscope, traveling one millionth of a meter at a time.” He was an extremely passionate man (“I have a brain that is enslaved to my heart”) who carved his name into history through sheer force of will, but he was also beset by melancholy and illness, and suffered because of his unquenchable desire to see the new; everything else in his life came second.

Ehrlich might share at least some of his subject’s obsessive nature. Almost all he has published so far pertains to Cajal: a full translation into English of the Spaniard’s dream journal and several articles. After a decade’s dedication to this man, Ehrlich has profound sympathy and great insight into the workings of his mind. This comes across clearly in “The Brain in Search of Itself,” a deeply researched, well-written and lovingly crafted biography. But the strength of the book lies less in the writing than in the life of its protagonist, filled with picaresque adventures. As a boy, he learned how to make gunpowder, built a makeshift cannon and fired it at his neighbor’s house; he served as a military physician in Cuba, where he contracted malaria and, during a guerrilla attack, became delirious and shot his Remington out the window of the infirmary; he was a cobbler’s apprentice, a bodybuilder (who “strutted through the streets,” Ehrlich writes, “toting an iron bar instead of a walking stick, which he dragged along the pavement”), a hypnotist, a chess player, a photographer, a hypochondriac, a writer, a juvenile delinquent, an insomniac and a veritable magician with the microscope. Every time that Cajal’s voice takes the foreground, the book comes alive and reads much like a novel.

But it suffers from the constraints of genre: It is, like so many biographies, crammed with information that not many casual or literary readers will appreciate. It gets bogged down in overly detailed political anecdotes, descriptions of everyday life in 19th-century Spain, and burdensome exposition of histological techniques. Ehrlich goes to great lengths to give a full and exacting portrait of a fascinating scientist, and while he delivers thought-provoking metaphors, unforgettable scenes and many beautifully worded phrases, to find these pearls one must also endure the rigors of academia and of strict biography, which seemingly dictate that we must follow a person from birth all the way to death.

But a full life is filled with tedium, ordinary occurrences and minutiae that fiction can expunge, to reach a deeper stratum of truth. Ehrlich is aware of this, and effectively applies “literary and narrative treatments” to reveal the mysteries that facts can obscure. And yet one of the great strengths of his book (the gathering, as he writes, of “every trace of him, every sliver of his life and scrap of his work, every piece of information about his science, his country and his world”) may not resonate with a wide audience, though it will undoubtedly give pleasure to readers who relish this sort of writing, and who are drawn to devoted and punctilious works of history.

Benjamín Labatut is the author, most recently, of “When We Cease to Understand the World,” one of the Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2021.

THE BRAIN IN SEARCH OF ITSELF: Santiago Ramón y Cajal and the Story of the Neuron, by Benjamin Ehrlich | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | 464 pp. | Illustrated | $35

The grubby truth about Elvis and his women

by www.stuff.co.nz Leave a Comment

Elvis is now screening in cinemas nationwide.

Imagine it. The year is 1957. Just a few years ago, you were a poor boy from the wrong side of a small town in Mississippi – now you’re the world’s most famous rock ‘n’ roll star.

Millions of fans are keeling over with desire for you. You only have to stand still and wiggle one little finger for the audience to go nuts, so much so that the police recently warned you not to move during your show. Last year, ending a concert in Jacksonville, you said: “Girls, I’ll see you all backstage.” What followed was a riot, in which your clothes were ripped from your back.

In a moment of rare candour, you confess to your current “best girl” that being on stage is like making love, but better. But how do you actually make love? How do you forge a relationship with one woman, your best girl, rather than thousands? This was the problem Elvis Presley faced.

It is also a problem largely side-stepped by Baz Luhrmann’s new biopic Elvis (starring Austin Butler giving the best impersonation of the musician to date). The film focuses instead on the singer’s ascent, meticulously crafted by his greedy, conniving manager Colonel Tom Parker, played by Tom Hanks, who encourages Elvis to appear single for marketing purposes. His wife, Priscilla Beaulieu, remains a peripheral character, loyal to her husband despite his constant infidelities. In fact, the film portrays a rather sanitised version of his relationship with Priscilla. The reality was that his behaviour was much more disturbing – as were most of his relationships with women.

READ MORE: Priscilla Presley reacts to Austin Butler’s performance in Elvis biopic Sequins and minors: Baz Luhrmann is dressing up Elvis for the screen Graceland: A night with Elvis

Even before he started school, Elvis was the man of his house. In 1938, when he was three years old, his father was sent to jail for forging a cheque. From that period on, Elvis, who was an only child, called his adoring mother, Gladys, “Baby” and was deeply solicitous to her needs.

His Aunt Lillian remembered that, as a young teenager, Elvis would sing on the steps of his apartment block in Memphis. “He’d get out there at night with the girls [from the block] and he just sang his head off. He’d rather have a whole bunch of girls around him than the boys – he didn’t care a thing about the boys.”

Elvis had learnt the rewards of paying close attention to the opposite sex and his womanising began early in his career. Jimmy Snow, the country singer who roomed with him on tour in 1955, remembered Elvis bringing as many as three girls a night back to their hotel. While staying in the Beverly Wilshire for the filming of Jailhouse Rock in 1958, the agent Byron Raphael remembers Elvis complimenting him on his wife, Carolyn: “That’s the kind of girl I been looking for,” he said. “There must be a hundred girls outside the gate. Why don’t you see if you can find me another Carolyn? In fact, take care of business for me.” In other words, select a girl and bring her to his suite.

Elvis’s entourage – popularly known as the Memphis Mafia – often had to “take care of business” in this way and all knew the singer’s preference for young brunettes with pretty eyes and round behinds. Between 1958 and 1968, when Elvis’s career was focused on Hollywood movies, they would bring a selection to his hotel most nights, so he could take his pick.

While all this was going on, Elvis always had one “best girl” – virginal, devoted and domesticated – waiting at home. The precedent was set by Dixie Locke, who was his steady girlfriend when he first became famous. When he was on the road, Dixie often slept in Elvis’s bed in the family home and would accompany Gladys shopping while waiting around for the King’s return.

The pattern was repeated with his subsequent “steadies”: Barbara Hearn, Anita Wood, and then, of course, Priscilla. All were promised marriage on the condition they keep themselves “pure”, tolerate his behaviour with other women, fashion themselves to his ideal image, and basically obliterate any trace of their core selves.

With Priscilla this bargain seems to have been particularly extreme in a way Luhrmann’s film overlooks. The Priscilla in Elvis is loved (in a limited way) for being herself. “I never met anyone like you,” Elvis says. But a little research into the story suggests a rather different picture. She was only 14 to his 24 when they met in the summer of 1959 in Germany, where Elvis was doing his national service and Priscilla was living with her step-father, a US Army captain.

Elvis had form with teenage girls: there had been, among others, the three 14 year-olds who used to visit his Audubon Drive house in Memphis for pyjama parties, where they would have their hair washed and dried and then be given kissing lessons by the then 21-year-old King.

One of them, Frances Forbes, remembers, “Elvis was always kissing, and it was a good kiss, a real good one.” Then there was the president of the Elvis Presley fan-club, Kay Wheeler, who was 17 when she visited Elvis in his hotel after a show at the Louisiana Hayride. “He threw me against the wall and started grinding his pelvis, pushing on me… I wanted moonlight and roses. It was one of the biggest let downs of my life,” she later reflected.

Elvis’s abuse of his powerful position with such girls is disquieting, to say the least. Many aspects of the Priscilla-Elvis romance are similarly unsettling, and similarly glossed over in the movie – as is his predilection for dry humping and voyeurism over intercourse, and an apparent loathing of oral sex.

Priscilla’s parents let her travel alone from Germany, aged 17, to spend two weeks with Elvis in his Los Angeles home in 1962. He took her on a road trip to Vegas to stay at the Sahara Hotel, and gave her uppers and downers so she could keep up with his up-all-night-sleep-all-day routine. That same year she came for Christmas at Graceland and ended up knocked out for two days when he gave her a couple of his sleeping tablets.

The next year, though she hadn’t yet finished school, Priscilla moved in to Graceland, where she spent most of her time waiting for Elvis to tire of messing around with the guys, or to come home from filming. He criticised her constantly: don’t slump; don’t wear chipped nail polish; don’t frown – you’ll get wrinkles; don’t eat tuna because I hate the way it smells. He also gave her a small pearl-handled derringer to keep in her bra.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Elvis didn’t manage to have any meaningful relationships with women, aside from his mother, whose early death in 1958 almost undid him. Girls were everywhere, but women – independent grown-ups with a sense of who they were and who could have provided proper, emotional support – were absent from his life.

And so the King’s womanising continued, right through his divorce from Priscilla and until his death.

Elvis lovingly recreates an extraordinary scene from the 1970 concert documentary Elvis: That’s the Way It Is, in which he leaves the stage and walks through the audience, kissing as he goes. Without any security presence, he neither hurries nor dawdles, but moves at a brisk pace through the aisles, oozing sweat and sex appeal. He must kiss at least 20 different women, yet with each kiss there is something tender: often, he cups a woman’s face in both hands and holds her gaze for a moment longer than strictly necessary before moving on to the next fan.

But it’s hard to spend your life making love to audiences and have anything left for individuals, or perhaps even for yourself, as Luhrmann’s film suggests. Towards the end, Tom Hanks’s Colonel Parker states that “love” killed Elvis. Not drugs, not the machinations of his avaricious manager, not the pressures of being the world’s first global rock star, but love for music and – by extension – love for his fans.

The Telegraph, London

Baz Luhrmann on his new Elvis biopic and the tragedy of the American showbiz dream

by www.abc.net.au Leave a Comment

Elvis: he’s everywhere and nowhere, a mononym as familiar as Coke and a cipher as abstract as the clichés he came to (dis)embody. Both the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll and a costume party punchline, the man born Elvis Presley left the building an icon, his image now so ubiquitous — and for so long — that it’s easy to forget how seismically his appearance ruptured the culture in the 50s.

As music critic Greil Marcus once wrote : “Elvis was not a phenomenon. He was not a craze. He was not even, or at least not only, a singer, or an artist. He was that perfect American symbol, fundamentally a mystery.”

“We could call him the original superhero. He is born of dust,” says Baz Luhrmann, whose new film – simply titled Elvis – confirms the Australian director as one of the few remaining non-franchise filmmakers whose movies are an event at the comic-book-dominated multiplex.

The film literalises that heroic parallel: before the jumpsuits and the capes and the Vegas excess, there’s the young Tupelo, Mississippi boy (played by Chaydon Jay) poring over a Captain Marvel comic with fascination.

For a kid growing up in small-town Australia, as Luhrmann did, Elvis may as well have hailed from outer space. Luhrmann’s father at one time ran the local movie house in Herons Creek, NSW, where, the director recalls: “Every Sunday we would have Elvis matinees. I’m probably forgetting how silly it all was, but I just thought he was the coolest guy in the world.”

In Luhrmann’s new film, an ambitious production that was filmed in Queensland and endured a pandemic shutdown thanks to co-star Tom Hanks’s COVID diagnosis , the director may have found his perfect muse.

Never one to resist the grandest of pop tales (see: Moulin Rouge!, Romeo + Juliet and The Great Gatsby), Luhrmann doesn’t so much set out to humanise Presley, or seek to explain his life — an impossible, foolish errand — as he does to capture his ability to channel both personal emotions and ideas that span the entirety of post-war pop culture, from music to race, politics, sex, and stardom.

The result is a hyperkinetic whirl of sound and vision that rarely slows to catch its breath. Luhrmann’s film knows that Elvis was the rock star myth from which all the music biopic clichés were forged, and is canny enough to lean into those tropes — upholding the iconography in order to transcend it.

With Elvis, Luhrmann takes his feelings — our feelings — for the King and plays his life as a distinctly American jukebox tragedy, a prism through which to refract the rise, fall and eventual reincarnation of a star-as-eternal-product.

“When the business gets out of whack with the show, then tragedy ensues.”

To tell the story, the director turned to what he knows best: showbiz razzamatazz, framing the star’s life through the slippery perspective of Colonel Tom Parker, the one-time carnival barker turned Elvis’s infamously exploitative manager.

As played by Hanks — with a mischievous twinkle that occasionally strays toward Goldmember burlesque — the Colonel is a complex, paradoxical figure; an immigrant corrupted by the dark heart of the American dream.

“It’s a kind of toxic marriage; a marriage that is amazing and loving in the beginning, and becomes stultifying and destructive,” Luhrmann explains.

Parker’s shapeshifting narrative, a giddy blend of fact and fancy, lets Luhrmann loose from the shackles of realism to find the kind of truth that only artifice can reveal. Luhrmann’s camera is both showman and fan, pop historian and swooning teenager.

With his smoky eyeliner and pretty perma-pout, there’s a queerness to this Elvis that catches the singer’s androgynous, otherworldly appeal.

For the daunting lead role, Luhrmann cast 30-year-old Californian Austin Butler, a musician and actor who — when he discovered the filmmaker was making an Elvis picture — sent in an audition tape of himself performing Unchained Melody , an ode to his recently departed mother who, much like Elvis, he lost at a young age.

It was an emotional moment for Butler, who grew up in a house of Elvis fans, including his grandmother, who was a high-schooler during the star’s rise to fame.

“I don’t really remember a time where I didn’t know who he was. There was always Elvis music around,” says the actor, whose hair is sandy, almost surfer-like when we meet – a detail that can’t help but recall Elvis’s own pre-dye locks.

Butler’s electrifying performance doesn’t so much impersonate Presley as commune with his spirit; it’s wired and nervy, like a pop culture big bang detonated in a body that can barely contain the energy.

Luhrmann compares the actor’s presence to Leonardo DiCaprio in Romeo + Juliet.

Both director and star knew the performance couldn’t be an Elvis impersonation, that they’d have to summon something special. Butler says the key was finding his character’s internal motivation rather than simply focusing on external, physical mimesis.

“It is a tricky balance, because you [also] want to be incredibly specific. And so physically, it was like, ‘What are his eyes doing? What is his mouth doing, and what is his head doing? What was every aspect of his body doing?’ At times it felt nearly impossible because it was so much information that I was taking in.”

The captivating thrill of the film might come as a surprise, especially for those who grew up knowing Elvis as little more than a caricature, or — for a younger generation — a cultural line in the sand.

“Elvis was a hero to most, but he never meant shit to me,” went Public Enemy’s notorious line in 1989’s Fight the Power , a throwdown that vocalised Black culture’s thorny relationship with Presley, who came to be the symbol of white rock ‘n’ roll’s theft of their music. As cultural critic Margo Jefferson put it in her 1973 essay for Harper’s : “Elvis Presley was the greatest minstrel America ever spawned, and he appeared in bold whiteface.”

Luhrmann’s film doesn’t shy away from these elements, focusing on key supporting players, from Big Mama Thornton to B.B. King and Little Richard, who can only watch from the sidelines as their white peer is plucked for instant stardom.

But the film also gives us the Southern boy who grew up poor and lived for a spell in an all-Black neighbourhood; who immersed himself in the blues and gospel music to which he felt spiritually drawn.

The soundtrack, a typically Luhrmann-esque mix of contemporary pop and period-accurate music, draws a line from a star who scandalised white audiences in the 50s with his Black sound to the current chart dominance of Black pop. When Thornton’s Hound Dog bleeds into Doja Cat’s hip-hop track Vegas , it’s as though time and space have collapsed.

That Elvis might continue to resonate in pop is a testament to just how much he set the template for superstardom. Yet he also established another blueprint, that of the tragic, Icarus-like icon who flew, as Luhrmann is fond of saying, too close to the sun — for dearly beloved artists like Prince, Whitney Houston, and Presley’s one-time son-in-law and heir to his singular superstardom, Michael Jackson.

“All icons are really flawed. We want them to be perfect. We want them to be gods. We want them to be young and beautiful forever. And at some point, they’re just human beings and reality and life just exhausts them,” Luhrmann says, his voice contemplative, tinged with sadness.

“I knew Prince well. I knew Michael a bit. We were working on something, trying to do a song on Moulin Rouge! I’d get the occasional midnight phone call from Michael with a funny voice,” he continues.

“The thing is, though, Michael and Prince and Elvis — who are icons, they’re not just great pop stars — they are all only living for the unconditional love across the footlights. They all said that they’re anti drugs but all of them ended up addicted to opioids, variously for physical ailments, and I think to numb the fact that, unfortunately, when you have that much love coming across the footlights, nothing else kind of does it for you, you know?

You can feel this in the film’s extraordinary final sequence, in which the late-period Vegas performer — embodied first by Butler and then, via a startling jump cut, footage of real-life Elvis — sweats through his performance of Unchained Melody, a bloated, decaying husk from which that voice soars, like some supernatural entity finally freed of its human form.

The scene brought Butler full circle to that first audition tape.

“It was really emotional for me, getting to do that performance, it was really special and tragic, and difficult and euphoric — all at the same time,” says the actor.

That sense of euphoric tragedy powers the movie’s unabashed, heart-on-rhinestone-spangled-sleeve catharsis, which is unafraid of courting big, melodramatic sentiment: Elvis was living for the unconditional love of his fans, and that love killed him.

The film understands that there is power in cliché, that pop music’s universality gives us permission to feel emotions and write them large. In that final sequence, Elvis is Michael and Prince, he’s Whitney, he’s Kurt and he’s Amy. He’s also, through the sound of that voice, a vessel for everything all of us might be going through in that moment.

When I tell Luhrmann just how much, and how unexpectedly, I was moved by the film, he pauses; the vulnerability is momentarily disarming.

“It’s been hard times, you know,” he says, pointing toward the theatrical experience as something that might bring audiences back together.

“If one person gets any emotion from anything we collectively toil to make, it means all the world to us. It really does.”

Elvis is in cinemas now.

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Tantrums and tiaras: LOUISE FENNELL reveals the hilarious story behind her marriage to the King of Bling

by www.dailymail.co.uk Leave a Comment

Today the Fennells enjoy an envious lifestyle, with celebrity jeweller Theo designing for A-list clients including Elton John and Naomi Campbell . The couple’s two daughters are Emerald, an Oscar-winning screenwriter, and Coco, a fashion designer. But, as Theo, 70, publishes his star-studded memoir, here, his wife and author Louise reveals the distinctly less ritzy start to their relationship . . .

When I first clapped eyes on Theo in 1977, it was at a racy party on a rooftop in London ‘s Mayfair, which my friend Mark and I had gatecrashed. Mark used to tell people on the door that he was Mark Getty, grandson of oil baron Jean Paul, and that got us in anywhere. It was the 1970s, nobody knew what anyone looked like.

When I asked who the ridiculously handsome blond man was, on the other side of the terrace surrounded by women, Mark told me it was Helmut Berger, an actor known for his beauty and sexual ambiguity. I had no idea whether this was true or not because I knew very little about anything, but what I did know was that ‘Helmut’ was the man for me.

People talk about seeing a person across a crowded room and just knowing that person is the one. I could say that too, but it would be too schmaltzy. I was 19, reckless and carefree, so I whizzed over to chat him up. He told me he was called Theo, not Helmut, and he was a jewellery designer. That’s where it all began.

Louise Fennell explains that she first met Theo in 1977, pictured now together, at a party on a rooftop in Mayfair

The duo, pictured on their wedding day 25 years after their first ceremony, began dating within a few weeks of knowing each other and spent time at Theo’s flat in Chelsea which Louise describes as a squat

Within a few weeks we had disengaged ourselves from our other romantic entanglements and became firmly entangled with one another. Theo had a flat on the Fulham Road in Chelsea. He called it a flat but, when I first set eyes on it, it could only have been described as a squat.

The thin walls reverberated with the sound of the number 14 bus which stopped outside, a few feet from the bedroom window. There were wastepaper bins full of old burgers, wine bottles and God knows what else. Records were strewn about, ashtrays overflowed on to every surface.

The electricity was frequently turned off in our early years together, as neither of us ever paid the bill. In fact, we rarely had any of the utilities — hot water, heating, telephone — on at the same time.

Theo says he can’t remember the exact words he used for his proposal on that mellow afternoon, a month or so after we’d met. But I can. We were both a bit drunk and he slurred the words, ‘I just wondered what you were planning to do with the rest of your life?’ Not a question I had ever given any thought to, so I responded with, ‘What do you mean?’

‘I wondered if you would consider spending it with me?’ I promptly replied, ‘Yes’. No one this handsome or hilarious was ever going to ask me to marry them again and I really didn’t have any other plans. Who thought that it’s a good idea to know anything about a person before you marry them? Hardly anyone in the 1970s, that’s for sure.

Famous friends: At a party with Joan Collins in 2002. Theo is a jeweller to the stars, with clients including Naomi Campbell and Elton John

When I rang my mother to tell her that I was engaged, she said, without missing a beat, ‘How lovely, who to?’ She must have felt a jolt of dread. The last boyfriend I had brought home, only a couple of months previously, was already married with two small children. In mitigation, his wife had left him for an Argentinian polo player before I met him.

I reassured Mum it wasn’t him, but a lovely, funny, handsome 25-year-old called Theo, and she seemed remarkably unfazed by the news that she and my father might have to stump up for a wedding, even though my sister’s wedding invitations had already gone out and there was no chance of any more money to pay for ours anytime soon.

In hindsight, my mother’s calm reaction may have been rooted in her assumption that this was another one of my ‘fads’, which she told Theo, with glee, almost as soon as she met him. He laughed. My mother adored him.

The next hurdle was to meet my future mother-in-law. We whizzed up to Yorkshire by train and, as soon as I met her, my first thought was: this can’t be Theo’s mother, surely she was given the wrong baby? Where Theo was tall, blond, warm and funny, she was small, dark and on the frosty side of cool. But then I saw pictures of his dear, departed father and knew we were in the right house after all.

I did nothing to endear myself to her at that first meeting, for lots of reasons, but the main one still makes me shudder with mortification.

Louise, pictured now, said that her husband gave her two rings to choose from for their engagement but instead of picking between them she kept both

Theo woke me on the first morning of our stay and gently put two rings on my finger, one diamond and one ruby, saying excitedly, ‘What do you think?’ and I sleepily replied, ‘They’re lovely, darling, thank you. Two rings, wow! Are you going to make them into one?’

What he should have said was: ‘No, you idiot, just choose one. They are my mother’s and she said I can give you whichever you like best.’

But he did not say that. He simply said, ‘I’m so happy you like them.’

Bafflingly, it wasn’t until about 15 years later that I realised my mistake, by which time obviously the damage had long been done.

The wedding shambles began in earnest. We weren’t going to wait. We would ‘help’ my poor parents with the cost, how I cannot imagine, but that was the plan. We booked Chelsea Old Church and an unglamorous hall next door for the reception; three months from meeting to marrying seemed perfectly reasonable to us.

Next, I would need a dress. I had been working as a shop girl for a designer called Thea Porter since I was 17. As soon as she heard of my impending marriage, she generously volunteered to make me a dress as a wedding present.

Thea made the most exquisite clothes in the world for the glitterati of London, Paris, New York and LA. Barbra Streisand, Diana Ross, Joan Collins and Elizabeth Taylor were amongst her fans. She had a shop in Soho, where I worked, and another in Paris, where she was spending a lot of time. So the dress would be made in France and would be a surprise.

She said that before the wedding she had one night when she worried about marrying him but then said she wondered how she could have thought to call off the engagement afterwards

The days leading up to the wedding were a little tense. Thea was still in Paris, as was my dress, still a mystery in form and style.

We just had one more party to go to before the wedding, thrown by Theo’s old friends, Sid and Vic, in our honour in a pub in the East End. I hadn’t met Sid, but on the one occasion I’d been introduced to Vic, his opening gambit had been, ‘Blimey, you don’t look nearly as good in real life as you do in your photos, do you love?!’ Which didn’t endear him to me much. So I did the sensible thing and wriggled out of going. Theo wasn’t too thrilled.

I woke with a jolt in the middle of the night, Theo still wasn’t back and I thought, ‘What the hell am I doing? How could I marry someone I hardly know?’ We were penniless and too young and I still didn’t have a bloody dress to wear. I had to ring my parents to tell them.

I picked up the phone and dialled. Nothing happened — it had been cut off! In order to cancel the wedding, I realised I would have to get dressed, go down the road into a dark, scary alley and use the phone box. F*** it, I was just going to have to marry him and deal with the fallout later.

Theo then appeared and said everyone had taken my skiving in very good heart. He soon passed out. He looked like an angel when he was asleep. I wondered how I could have thought I wanted to call off the engagement.

The dress arrived the day before the wedding. It was an incredible confection of lace and silver beads. It fitted perfectly and it really did seem, against all odds, that everything was going to be all right.

On the wedding morning, my belo-ved father and I entered the church nave, where we stopped on the threshold for a moment, to survey the scene and to make sure there was actually a groom. There was.

Theo, pictured now, put a wedding ring on Louise’s finger which was much too big for her as he had not made one until the last minute

Theo was looking decidedly peaky, the golden boy turned ashen. When he put the wedding ring on my finger (hastily cobbled together as he’d forgotten to make one until the last minute), it was much too big. I was a little hurt but what did it matter when I had not one, but two engagement rings to hold it on with?

I was also wearing a tiara that Theo’s mother had given him for me, or was it just lent to me to wear on the day? Might there have been two misunderstandings, both of them involving my mother-in-law and diamonds?

She spent years thereafter asking if I ever wore this treasure, where I kept it, etc. I’m sure she knew the only time I’d laid eyes on it was to glance in the mirror before heading to church to say ‘I do’ to a man who had almost nothing left to lose. Not least because he was about to flog the last of the family’s heirlooms (that tiara) and put the money to frivolous use (our wedding and honeymoon).

The couple arrived in Venice for their honeymoon out of season with £50 and neither had a credit or debit card

We arrived in Venice, on honeymoon, out of season. In those days you could only take £50 with you when you went abroad. Neither of us had a credit card and bank cards didn’t exist. Fortunately, a travel agent friend had arranged a room in a small hotel which, conveniently, we could pay for upon our return to London.

Our £50 soon dwindled but we discovered that if we went to the only restaurant affiliated to our hotel for every lunch and dinner, we could sign for it and settle the bill when back home. At this point it became quite clear that neither of us had any money, something about which we had been in denial until then.

We both also had to start owning up to some of the other misleading things we had told one another, which was in turn hilarious, tragic and sometimes emotional. I’m sure it was entertaining to the waiters who witnessed this soap opera each night, but for the actors it was exhausting and demoralising.

Theo and Louise have had a long and happy life together with many ups and downs and a marriage lasting many years

It began to dawn on us that this might be the reason people got to know each other a bit before they got married. Too late — we were on a fast track now and it was make-or-break.

Twenty-five years later, we had another wedding, in Las Vegas, this time with ‘Elvis’ presiding. He was more fun than the vicar from the first time around and the service was accompanied by the sound of Emerald and Coco, our wonderful teenage daughters, squeaking with laughter.

When Elvis sang Can’t Help Falling In Love With You, Theo and I each felt he was singing to us personally and we cried. We love Elvis, possibly even slightly more than we love each other. Our Vegas wedding was a lot more romantic than our first and it only cost about $100.

We’ll be coming up to another 25 years soon — perhaps we’ll get married again. We’ll both be in our 70s by then, so who knows what will happen? But taking a chance on each other all those years ago was the most miraculous, fortuitous thing we could ever have done.

We’ve had a wild and wonderful life together, stumbling from crisis to laughter and joy then back to crisis again. I could never imagine my life with anyone else. But if our phone hadn’t been cut off that night, or if mobiles had been invented, all this might not have been. It almost makes me weep to think of it.

As the novelist William Boyd says, ‘That’s all your life amounts to in the end: the aggregate of all the good luck and the bad luck you experience.’ I’ve often jumped right in and been lucky not to drown. In fact, Theo turned out to be a bit of a lifesaver, quite literally: he once rescued a drowning man from the sea. He just jumped right in. I was there too, but I’m afraid to say I didn’t jump in. My mother-in-law wouldn’t have been at all surprised.

  • Theo Fennell’s memoir, I Fear For This Boy: Some Chapters Of Accidents (£25, Mensch), is out now. To order a copy for £22.50 (offer valid until July 11, 2022; UK P&P free on orders over £20), visit mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.