LIZ JONES: 'It's too small,' my ex-husband wailed, ungrateful b****** that he was...

By LIZ JONES, COLUMNIST, YOU MAGAZINE

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I feel as though everyone is dead. Michael, Prince, George, David (not my David), Whitney, Freddie. The news breaks that Robert Redford has passed away, aged 89. How did he get that old?

Paul Newman was always my favourite, but I loved Robert Redford for being his friend. I remember getting the number 11 bus to the Odeon in Chelmsford to see Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, wailing to my sister that it was in sepia. ‘No!!! No!!! Return that choc ice!! I can’t see Paul’s blue eyes!’

Happily, the awful brown, hard-to-make-out effect ended after the opening sequence, swiftly replaced by Technicolor. Thank god. Now I could bathe in the presence of the two men who, on horseback (I remember watching the movie, even then, in 1969, thinking, ‘Poor horses, get off, give them some water!’), adorned my bedroom wall. I always wanted to be Katharine Ross. The huge, dark, liquid eyes, the curtain of chestnut hair, the broderie anglaise bodice. She was loved by both Newman and Redford in a delicious sandwich. What woman could want for more?

So the day after Redford died, I rewatched The Way We Were and I realised, not having seen the film for many years, that Katie (played, of course, so brilliantly by Barbra Streisand) and I are twins. The way she says to Hubbell, played by Redford, ‘It’s ’cos I’m not attractive enough, isn’t it? I know I’m attractive, sort of. But I’m not attractive in the right way, am I?’ The self-doubt, despite her intelligence and wit. 

The way she buys Hubbell groceries – ‘I’ve got steaks and salad and fresh baked pie’ – to make him stay, to like her. ‘What kind of pie?’ he asks, with a delicious smirk. The way, drunk, he rolls over in bed and has sex with her, half asleep, not even aware of which woman she is. Ditto! The way he treats her apartment like a hotel; um, hell yes! He cheats on her, as well. Yup, Hubbell is a bona-fide b*****d. Katie gives him a gift tied up with a great big bow. Dear god, the parallels! 

For his birthday last year, I bought the German an N Peal cashmere sweater, encased in a gold-embossed box, tied up with a great big ribbon bow. When I was married, I bought my husband – like Hubbell, an aspiring novelist, as thirsty for praise and prickly as a long dead cactus – a brand-new Apple laptop. ‘It’s too small!’ he wailed, ungrateful b*****d that he was. I told him the keyboard is always the same regulation size, just I had bought him the smallest surround to make it lighter to carry as he travelled across a doubtless scorching India. ‘Don’t worry, your fat fingers will still fit!’

And this is spooky! Katie buys Hubbell a typewriter! Oh my god, the desperation, the wanting with every fibre of her being to be loved! She and I both know to our cost that never, ever works. They merely resent you.

Of course, the men always end up with boring bints, don’t they? Not the interesting, funny women, the ones with hard edges who will challenge you and make you honk with laughter. The Annie Halls of this world. Katie was more generous to her usurper than I would ever be, though, should I bump into any one of those saps outside New York’s Plaza hotel. Your girl isn’t lovely, Hubbell, she’s a dwarf in a bad fur hat and really awful jazzy leggings. Your girl isn’t lovely, Hubbell, she’s a drunk blonde in a bad coat, what on earth were you thinking?

I hadn’t realised all the connections when I last saw the film; maybe I saw it before I, like Katie, had been cheated on. Replaced with someone dimmer and certainly not slimmer.

Katie gives birth to their daughter, snags another husband and gets to live in New York, my favourite city in the world after London, so she is infinitely better off than me: barren, alone, living in rural Yorkshire with mad hair. But, of course, Hollywood endings, like Hollywood waxes, are always far neater than in real life…

 

JONES MOANS... WHAT LIZ LOATHES THIS WEEK

  • I’m like a character in a Richard Osman cosy crime novel. My gardener, planting bulbs out front, unearthed human remains. Clearly a pelvis and hip sockets and balls (not the soft type). Maybe the owner got a hip replacement. The vicar told me not to call the police as, ‘Unless the bones are recent, this is a churchyard, and bones have been unearthed before.’ Let’s hope Teddy doesn’t get a whiff.
  • A Diptyque candle dropped on my foot as I was dusting it.
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