Merlin Holland, the grandson of Oscar Wilde, first introduced me to Robert De Niro.
Look, if you’re not into name-dropping, this really isn’t the column for you. Skip straight to Dr Dalrymple on page 43. He’s very much on form this month.
It was at a screening of the film of Wilde’s Salome at the British Film Institute on London’s South Bank.
Sorry, I’ve got that wrong. It was Al Pacino who directed and starred in Salome. That’s who Merlin introduced me to.
So where did I meet De Niro? Now I think about it, it was probably at De Niro’s Manhattan restaurant, the Tribeca Grill, now closed, but a cool dining spot in its day.
And, believe it or not, I think it was one of the grandchildren of the great American poet Robert Frost who effected the introduction.
What I remember of our conversation is that we talked about the number of children a man should have. Robert Frost had had five. De Niro at the time had five. I had just three and said that I felt three was ideal.
‘No,’ said De Niro. ‘Keep going, son. You’re not done as a dad until you’ve had at least seven.’
Well, as you might expect of a double Oscar-winning giant like De Niro, he was as good as his word and in 2023 became a father for the seventh time at the age of 79, two years older than I am now. Boris Johnson, 60, is still having children. I reckon his latest (Poppy, born in May) is probably his ninth. Al Pacino, 85, had his fourth only a couple of years ago and looks ready for more.
Should my wife and I, married now for more than 52 years, take a final plunge into the pool of parenthood? According to my friend De Niro, ‘Having kids keeps you young.’
There is no legal age limit for intended parents in the UK, and science is here to help. Thanks to IVF, an Indian woman, Erramatti Mangamma, became the world’s oldest mother when she gave birth to twins, a few days after her 73rd birthday in 2019.
My wife tells me she has no plans to follow Erramatti’s example. ‘To everything a season,’ she says.
Besides, she’s not sure that, at my age, I’d have the energy for all that’s involved.
I think she means the nappy-changing and the 2am baby feed.
I agree. Late-onset fatherhood is a risky proposition. When Erramatti’s twins were barely toddlers, her husband, Sitarama, 84, died of a heart attack. You have been warned.
It is bad manners at a dinner party to correct your host, so I am a tad nervous about what I am about to say.
I regard The Oldie as the most entertaining dinner party in town and our editor is unquestionably the most delightful and erudite host. So what follows is possibly very (very!) bad form – but, heaven help me, in the name of literary accuracy, I am going to do it anyway.
In last month’s Commonplace Corner (one of my favourite features in the magazine), this quotation was attributed to A A Milne: ‘Promise me you’ll never forget me because if I thought you would, I’d never leave.’ A A Milne, poet, playwright, children’s author, never wrote or said any such thing.
There is a sentiment of sorts a bit like it (but not much) in an exchange between Christopher Robin and his bear towards the end of The House at Pooh Corner, but the quote as given is an invention by an unknown hand.
It is one of scores (yes, scores) of lines wrongly attributed to A A Milne.
In 2025, the most popular ‘Pooh quote’ appearing on the internet is this: ‘You are braver than you believe, you are stronger than you seem, and you are smarter than you think.’
Everywhere, the line is incorrectly ascribed to A A Milne. In fact, the line made its first appearance in 1997 in the Disney movie Pooh’s Grand Adventure: The Search for Christopher Robin. So the credit belongs not to Milne but to the film’s screenwriters, Karl Geurs and Carter Crocker.
I know this because I have just finished writing my latest book, Somewhere, a Boy and a Bear. It’s a biography of A A Milne to be published in the run-up to the centenary of Winnie-the-Pooh this Christmas. My publishers would like me to tell you that you can ‘pre-order’ the book now. I won’t.
‘Pre-order’ is a nonsense word. You can ‘order’ the book now. It will arrive in September.
When I met Robert De Niro I told him my favourite two-line poem about him. Amazingly, he claimed never to have heard it before:
‘Robert De Niro is a screen hero. Only a slob would call him Bob.’
