William Miller is giving me a tour of Gloucester Crescent in Camden, northwest London, the extraordinary nexus of literary talent where he grew up as the middle child of the writer, director and television presenter Jonathan Miller and his long-suffering GP wife, Helen. William, a 54-year-old TV executive, points out the house where his parents, retired but active at 84 and 82, still live and the house opposite where their family friend Alan Bennett wrote so much of his work, including The Lady in the Van, about the irascible homeless woman who lived on his driveway for 15 years.
Steadily, Miller’s moving finger ticks off the sometime abodes of the former Royal Court director Max Stafford-Clark; the singer and surrealist George Melly and his wife, Diana; the London Review of Books editor Mary-Kay Wilmers (who took over the LRB job from William’s uncle Karl Miller and is the ex-wife of the film director Stephen Frears) and the biographer Claire Tomalin.
Miller moved back in 2008 with his wife, Trine Bell, and their two teenage daughters, into a lovely house three doors down from his parents and has written a book himself. It’s called Gloucester Crescent and, unlike Bennett’s work, or Love, Nina, Nina Stibbe’s memoir of being Wilmers’s nanny, it presents a child’s-eye view of Gloucester Crescent. And of the slightly posher street behind, Regent’s Park Terrace, home to the philosopher AJ “Freddie” Ayer and his glamorous American wife, Dee Wells; Shirley Conran and her sons, Jasper and Sebastian; the novelists VS Pritchett and Angus Wilson; and the publisher Colin Haycraft and his wife, the writer Alice Thomas Ellis.
It depicts a life of bohemian privilege, but also one where the adults were often more interested in their work than their children. “Colin Haycraft, Freddie, all the men just couldn’t be bothered,” Miller says. “They lived on what Dee Wells called ‘Planet Couldn’t-give-a-f***’.” Miller’s father is revealed to be brilliant, depressive, impractical and massively progressive (their Jamaican cleaner’s daughter Jeanie effectively became their fourth child in the still-racist 1960s), but incapable of giving his children praise. “I was a kid who went in search of relationships with other grown-ups because of my father,” William says. His mother, he adds, is “a saint for putting up with him”.
Jonathan Miller was the talented doctor who gave up medicine to resume his Oxbridge comedy career as one quarter — with Bennett, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore — of the revolutionary satirical troupe Beyond the Fringe in 1960. He went on to direct films, theatre and opera and make TV shows on medicine, biology and atheism. His wife, it seems, was both his anchor and his thrall.
“My father lived in a world filled with people who admired and chased him, but at the end of the day his love for my mother knew no limits,” William says. “He was obsessed with her from the age of 18 and he was so cack-handed at the whole business of courting women, he had to enlist his two best friends, Eric Korn and Oliver Sacks, to help him.” Those two other bright, Jewish St Paul’s pupils also became famous, as a bibliophile/radio panellist and a neurologist respectively.
“He’d come home and say, ‘I hate work and I want to kill myself,’ ” William says. “Two nightmares haunted my childhood: my father killing himself or them getting a divorce. Everybody else’s marriage was collapsing, but theirs didn’t.” If William or one of his siblings were reading a book, Jonathan would say it was the wrong one; if they expressed an interest in a subject, he would suggest something more interesting (to him). The family were watching the Apollo moon landing in 1969 when Jonathan got bored and turned it off.
“He never showed disappointment, but whatever you presented him with was never good enough,” says William. “He was very difficult, but I never stopped loving him.” Did his father ever seek therapy for what was clearly depression? “I think once he went for half an hour,” William says, smiling, “but he said the man was an imbecile.”
Jonathan was prone to rages too, calling the editors of Private Eye “stupid bloody irresponsible c***s” for using his medical title in error. Tories ranked alongside Hitler, Idi Amin and theatre critics on Jonathan’s hate list. He could also alienate friends. During documentary filming of rehearsals for the Secret Policeman’s Ball charity in the 1970s, William heard Alan Bennett tell Terry Jones of Monty Python that he didn’t think he could work with his father again.
“This was a man who came to every single meal at our house, who was happy to be a sort of uncle for us,” William says. “And I know in the Sixties he would turn to my father for help if a play wasn’t going well.” This is said with sympathy rather than rancour towards Bennett.
There were happier childhood moments: going to watch his father at work on radio programmes aged seven or eight, “where you would see him shine”. Then, at 13 or 14, going with him to BBC Television Centre. “My father being an atheist, that was the nearest thing I had to God,” he says.
He and his contemporary Nick Ayer would sneak into AJ Ayer’s study and tie the great man’s shoelaces together, and William would spend hours talking to Ayer’s glamorous,
foul-mouthed wife, Dee. The Ayers had an open marriage. Ayer was enamoured of, and eventually married, Nigel Lawson’s ex-wife, Vanessa. William remembers Vanessa’s daughter, Nigella Lawson, as “this beautiful, sexy, slightly older girl who made us feel like quivering teenagers”.
Many of the book’s tales are a mixture of the sad, the starry and the hapless. Dee gave teenage William a marijuana plant, but he was only interested in “busy lizzies” and his mother smelt it and made him throw it out. His privately educated parents, “caught up in the euphoria of change”, sent him and his siblings to the new-fangled comprehensives, but William was beaten up at Pimlico School for being an oboe player and part of a group that shunned school dinners in favour of an Italian restaurant.
When Nonny, the daughter of family friends in Connecticut, offered to relieve him of his virginity, his reply was: “Can I think about it and get back to you?” William eventually moved to the hippyish boarding school Bedales, where one of his friends was Princess Margaret’s daughter, Sarah Armstrong-Jones. This led to an excruciating evening going to see Cats with HRH and spilling dinner down himself afterwards at Kensington Palace while she slugged whiskies. “I had never seen anyone drink so much,” William says. “It went from the absurd to the ridiculous. You were in this inner sanctum that you only wanted to escape from.”
After failing his A levels, William fled to New York (he was born there, when Beyond the Fringe played Broadway, and has an American passport). He got a job in PR through one of of his dad’s contacts and a job in a restaurant owned by Keith McNally, a friend of Alan Bennett and now the owner of Balthazar, among others. He went on to work with Patrick Uden, who had produced his father’s TV opus, The Body in Question, then teamed up with Nigella Lawson to produce her TV shows. He now has a TV production company.
Pursuing a management path in the media meant that “I was considered by my father and his friends as ‘the man on the sixth floor’, which was sort of evil. And my father has never praised or complimented me on what I have achieved. But my brother, who is a photographer, is seen as an artist.” None of Jonathan’s children got an academic qualification, although Kate’s daughter has just qualified as a doctor, “so she walks
on water”. Kate works in the “evil” admin side of TV.
In his thirties William qualified as a pilot. “I thought, ‘I’ll show my father something he couldn’t do’ — he can barely drive a car. I took him up in a plane and he didn’t say a word. We flew out as far as Canary Wharf, and I tilted the wings, and all he said was, ‘That’s where those c***s from the Telegraph live.’ When we landed he didn’t say ‘thank you’, or ‘that was amazing’, but I heard from other people he had gone around boasting about it.”
There is no doubting the fierce love William and his family have for each other. He calls on his parents every other day, “and my mother occasionally likes to sneak over to see us for a whisky and a gossip”.
His siblings are “very private” and wish he hadn’t written the book. His father hasn’t read it. “And it wasn’t an easy read for my mother,” he says. “It was the realisation for her of just how miserable I was, and her and my father were responsible for that. They dumped us in those schools and when we said, ‘It’s a nightmare,’ they weren’t prepared to do anything about it because they couldn’t believe it was that bad.”
His daughters attend private schools. Is he a more engaged, demonstrative parent than his father? He gives a sharp laugh. “Yes, is the short answer.”
Gloucester Crescent: Me, My Dad and other Grownups by William Miller is published by Profile, £14.99
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/william-miller-the-primrose-hill-set-i-grew-up-in-it-s3208cb9j
