Old friends: gone but not forgotten

I first knew Tony Holden, who died last weekend, through my pal David Blundy. They were hacks on Harry Evans’s Sunday Times, young guns making names for themselves covering the Troubles in Northern Ireland. It was the mid-seventies and I, barely yet a Derringer, was just starting out as a reporter in Belfast for The Irish Times. 

Blundy – always “Blundy” – was shot dead in 1989 during the civil war in El Salvador by a sniper who almost certainly had no idea who he was. Tony – always “Tone” to Blundy – lived on for a further 34 years, winning an enviable reputation as a biographer and poker player before suffering a stroke, aged 70, that left him semi-paralysed for the last six years of his life. 

As you reach old age (I turned 75 in September), you find, inevitably, that the ranks of your old friends is thinning out. I have lost three more in the last six months alone. You mourn the dear departed (while noting smugly that in some way you are now more special than ever), but you also feel yourself shuffling towards the finish line. 

Blundy was not my first casualty. That distinction goes to Ronnie Bunting, my best friend and chief tormentor at school, who was murdered in 1980 while head of the Irish National Liberation Army. But Blundy’s death hit me harder. He was what in Ireland is known as a terrible “messer”. Tall and rangy, with a dress sense that owed everything to Clint Eastwood as both Dirty Harry and The Man with No Name, he lived life entirely according to his own rules. Evans once demanded to know why he wasn’t wearing the suit he had asked him to buy, on expenses, to be worn while working in the office. The reply was classic: “I am wearing it, Harry.” 

In 1972, I shared a rented ground-floor flat in south Belfast. One morning, while I was having a bath, he climbed in through the bathroom window and stood there, knee-deep in my soapy water, wondering if I fancied lunch. On holiday in Tunisia in 1973, he insisted that we run at full speed each morning down a dingy hotel corridor towards the breakfast room, guarded by an invisible glass door that was either open or shut. If we’d smashed into the door, it could have ended horribly, but we never did. What were the odds? 

Tone would have known. He took me once to a crimson casino in London’s West End, where he liked to play big boys’ poker. I have no interest in games, or gambling, and spent most of my time at the bar counter, where they served fast food. But Tony was obviously a natural, as readers of Big Deal, his bestselling account of a year as a professional poker player, will recall. As he built up his chips, I looked on, eating mine. I was bored and fascinated at the same time. 

Decades later, when we were both working in New York, he lived in a luxury apartment in mid-town Manhattan that overlooked (or so it seemed) the Empire State Building. He had just been installed as the inaugural Fellow of the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, but, to add insult to my injury, was also paid a bundle as editor-at large on Tina Brown’s short-lived Talk magazine. 

Full of beans, he was inordinately proud of his lofty address, from the balcony of which, while dispensing champagne, he regaled me with tales of his fabulous friends, one of whom at the time, was apparently Placido Domingo. The acclaimed tenor (since revealed as a sexual predator) had, I was assured, asked him to collaborate with him in writing an opera, which did not surprise me. If he had said that Lucien Freud had asked him to sit, naked, for his portrait, that wouldn’t have surprised me either. 

Tony – always Tony to me – was an indefatigable name-dropper. He peppered even the most inconsequential conversations with references to celebs he knew, literary, political and social. The odd thing was that, while he obviously hoped to impress, he was at the same time tickled pink by the range and depth of his Rolodex. He was, after all, a Lancashire lad, empowered by his three years at Oxford, during which, while translating Greek drama, he edited Isis and was the first to publish the rapscallionally Chris Hitchens. 

Just months ago, having belatedly read his autobiography, Based on a True Story, I tried to get back in contact, but failed. He’d probably changed his email address and took no interest in his lingering Facebook presence. But I suspect he also felt diminished by his stroke and wouldn’t have wished me to see him in his reduced circumstance. 

It was “Tone” who put together The Last Paragraph, a collection of Blundy’s journalism published a year or two after his death. A number of the pieces he chose were very funny, especially if they were about Ronald Reagan and his circle, written from Washington. Others, while sharply observed, have not aged well. The various small wars and insurrections that took up so much of his time in the eighties hold little resonance today, and Tony confided in me that he was surprised by how little of his close friend’s output had stood the test of time. 

But such is journalism, and such is life. Very few of us stand the test of time. 

My memories of Blundy center entirely on his outsize personality. If it is possible to be literally larger than life, that was him. I enter in evidence an image of him in his room in Belfast’s Europa Hotel working on a story featuring his encounter earlier that evening with a notorious Provisional IRA killer. As he typed, drinking from a copiously supplied glass of whiskey, there came a violent knock on the door. A woman’s voice from the corridor begged “David” – always David to his myriad conquests – to let her in as she had assumed he would spend the night with her. But “David” was having none of it. “Go away!” he shouted, or words to that effect. “I’m working.” The noise off continued for several minutes before fading into muttered imprecations. 

The last time I spoke to Blunders – as I sometimes thought of him – was a week or so before he was shot. I hadn’t seen him for at least three years and was somewhat miffed when I came across him in the snug of the Groucho Club around midnight talking to our mutual friend Patrick Cockburn. I didn’t know he was home and felt slighted. But a week later, the phone rang. It was Blundy, back in Washington, full of apologies. He was about to leave for San Salvador, he told me, but looked forward to seeing me again soon. He spoke of his fears of growing old (he was 44) and asked me, with a note, I thought, of quiet desperation, about how one went about creating a pension pot. 

I heard his voice one last time, on his answer machine. I was in New Delhi covering the Indian general election for the Sunday Times and had just seen on CNN that he had been shot and was in a critical condition. On a mindless impulse, I called his number in Washington and listened as he told me, tinnily, that he was out of town on assignment but would get back to me when he got my message. I left no message and, needless to add, he didn’t call. 

And now Tony, or Tone – or Anthony Holden as his obituarists would have it (how he would have loved a knighthood!) – is gone as well. He and Blundy had very little in common other than talent, boundless energy and an unputdownable love of life. Their differences were as nothing compared to these. I miss them both. 

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