Like Mel Brooks’s character the Two Thousand-Year-Old Man, Peter Lewis has met everyone of consequence. Though he doesn’t mention being an eyewitness at the Crucifixion, he was told by T.S. Eliot that working in a bank was quite nice (‘I never thought about poetry in the day’). Frankie Howerd wanted Lewis to give him a massage (‘I have this trouble, a hernia, you see. Gives me a lot of discomfort’); Diana Dors confessed to him that she’d rather watch television than go to orgies (‘but I had to become a sex symbol on tiger rugs and in mink bikinis’); and Samuel Beckett made his excuses and fled (‘Sorry, I just have to go to the lav’).
Lewis, a venerable freelance reporter, attended CND rallies with Bertrand Russell, located Sean O’Casey as a recluse in Torquay, and, like Mel Brooks claiming he’d dated Joan of Arc, all Lewis’s Christmases came at once when he comforted Judi Dench after she’d been ditched by John Neville: ‘We took a long, memorable walk in the Warwickshire woods.’
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