Eric Vaughan Remembered «

Eric Vaughan Remembered

Friday 10th March 2017

The Memorial for Eric Vaughan: Wilton’s Music Hall. Lady Plowright was conveyed from Stenning. Robert Nevil saw her but I didn’t. Eddie Sedgwick’s consort, the Labour MP for Whirly and Lorraine, sat next to her. We had Drusilla next to us, who, along with Pamela Harlech, wrote leading works on stain removal in her day. Eric’s life was narrated from the stage by Nickolas Grace with film interludes. I never knew that Eric had been a Bevan Boy. Somehow he progressed to doing windows for Jaeger in Regent Street. Ernestine in the Sunday Times went wild about his windows and he was made. Nicky said the blue-dyed fishnet with real starfish stuck on was very common. Nicky wasn’t there, by the way: the Oscars. But Eric was marvellous: I once met him by chance in Kensington Church Street and he boomed the length of that street about the state of some of the nudists on Brighton nude beach. It was amazing the chandeliers in Mrs Thingy’s chandelier shop didn’t shatter from the unspeakable detail. Eric took Elisabeth Welch, the great Blues singer, under his wing when she began to fail. Hermione Gingold, Judy Garland, Claudette Colbert (the Bahamas, my dear) – they were his world. He decorated a house for Ringo and he loved Shakespeare: Jeremy Irons read from Cymbeline. Phoebe Nichols rendered the Greasy Joan speech from Love’s Labour’s Lost, with marvellous owl sounds. Diana Quick’s contribution was ‘Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day’ (so well-read) and finally Lionel himself heaved up onto the stage to announce that he is nearly 96 and how lucky he and Eric had been and how the occasion would have been perfect for Eric since everybody would be talking about him. But he, when alive, talked to…. how he gave and gave, an unstoppable stream of glorious carry-on, good-natured but outrageous which isn’t easy to bring off. Mikki Sekkers, the silk manufacturer was mentioned at the Memorial but what wasn’t mentioned was his story, re-tweeted (as it were) by Eric, about how the Queen arrived in Bond Street one day in the 60s, self-driven in a Mini and said that the parking wardens around there were something else and everybody should watch out.

It was hard to be sad when Eric made so bold as to lead a charmed gay life years before it was really permitted in the compass of celebrity that lives forever.