It Takes Two

Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020

Copyright © Cathy Newman 2020

Cover design: Jo Thomson

Cathy Newman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008363338

Ebook Edition © July 2020 ISBN: 9780008363352

Version: 2020-09-29

Dedication

It takes two in my life too: love, respect and gratitude to John and our dynamic duo Scarlett and Molly.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

1 Commitment

2 Communication

3 Competitiveness

4 Tension

5 Serendipity

6 Love

7 Power

Epilogue

Picture Section

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

Introduction

One of the pleasures of promoting my last book, Bloody Brilliant Women, was doing the rounds of literary festivals and bookshops and getting the chance to meet readers. I’d never written a book before, so I had no idea what to expect. It was a wonderful feeling – and, I must admit, a relief – when the reception turned out to be so warm, generous and enthusiastic.

The book was a kind of alternative history of modern Britain: at its heart the forgotten heroines who played such a crucial part in our shared past. But something which surprised me when I chatted to readers at these events was the level of interest shown in stories about collaboration between couples – not just married or otherwise romantically linked couples, but other kinds of partnerships to do with, say, business, politics and scientific research. I hadn’t realised until it was pointed out to me how many I’d included.

People seemed to enjoy reading about characters such as Louisa Garrett Anderson and Flora Murray, the doctors who formed the Women’s Hospital Corps shortly after the outbreak of the First World War. They also liked Edith Lomax and her assistant Elsie Harrison, the two highest ranking women in MI5 during the same period. Very much thought of as a pair, this duo handled all personnel matters for the hundreds of women who worked for them, storing, classifying and retrieving secret documents in MI5’s hallowed registry.

Moving further into the century, the Second World War gave us the mixed-gender pairing of Elsie Widdowson and Dr Robert McCance, Imperial College research partners whose vital work on food nutrition informed the wartime government’s rationing programme. Then there were the architects Jane Drew and Edwin Maxwell Fry, who married in 1942 and worked together on projects such as the Rodent House at London Zoo, as well as housing and public buildings in Britain’s colonial territories: after the partition of India in 1947 they were invited by Prime Minister Pandit Nehru to design Chandigarh, the new capital of Punjab.

One of my personal favourite couples from Bloody Brilliant Women is Jennie Lee, Minister of the Arts under Harold Wilson between 1964 and 1970, and her husband Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan, who helped to establish the National Health Service as minister of health in Clement Attlee’s postwar Labour government. Lee’s lasting legacy is the Open University, the ‘university of the air’ that used TV and radio as its teaching platforms. But really that had its roots in her relationship with Nye. Both were working-class autodidacts. Nye had helped to pay for his sisters to attend college. As a result, Lee explained, ‘we knew, we both of us, from our backgrounds, that there were people in the mining villages who left school at fourteen or fifteen who had first-class intellects’.[1]

All of this set me thinking about the ‘power of two’ – the unique, contained bond that can form between two people and generate a particular kind of catalysing spark. There is something about a duo … a reason why Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about Holmes and Watson and not Holmes, Watson and Mrs Hudson (no disrespect to their housekeeper); why we are fascinated by so-called ‘odd couples’ but not odd trios; why we love watching double acts and obsess over the antics of Hollywood couples; and why so many great achievements seem to have been the work of dual partnerships, from Lennon and McCartney, to Marie and Pierre Curie, French and Saunders. But what is that something?

Perhaps one of the reasons I’m so drawn to duos like this is that I am not a natural collaborator. As a child, I ploughed my own furrow and was, I suspect, rather similar to Briony, the heroine of Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement: ‘one of those children possessed by a desire to have the world just so’, as McEwan puts it.[2] Briony not only writes the play she puts on at the start, but designs the posters, programmes and tickets – and constructs the sales booth. Way to go, Briony!

Well, up to a point. In my professional life I’ve had to learn to be collegiate. Television – and to a lesser extent newspapers – relies on teamwork to get the programme to air or the paper to press.

Of course, nobody loves wishy-washy groupthink. But equally, while journalistic myth often glorifies the lone-wolf reporter, the biggest political scoop of the last fifty years – uncovering the Watergate scandal – was the achievement of two journalists working in tandem. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein at the Washington Post subsequently inspired one of the best-known cinematic pairings when Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford played them in All the President’s Men.

When I first joined Channel 4 News fifteen years ago, I realised there was a special magic about the relationship between correspondent and producer. In a good pairing, both halves of the couple know almost instinctively how to approach a story, who is doing what, and how to go from a standing start to three or four minutes of film by the end of the day.

In fact, duos are the linchpins of countless live TV shows: Ant and Dec, Phillip and Holly, Mel and Sue, Phil and Kirstie, Dick and Dom, Piers and Susanna, Richard and Judy. Many news programmes, including Channel 4 News, follow the convention.

It’s nearly a decade since I started presenting the programme and I most often share the studio with veteran anchor Jon Snow. I have boundless respect for someone who has witnessed all the big moments in recent history – from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the release of Nelson Mandela. I’ve learnt an enormous amount from him about the presenter’s craft. So on the rare occasions when I’m the solo anchor, the programme feels as if it’s missing something, the studio rather cavernous, the business altogether lonelier. Even in TV, where big egos abound, it takes two, after all.

The technical term for a basic unit of two individuals is a dyad. In the dry language of social network theorists, a dyad is ‘an unordered pair of actors and the arcs that exist between the two actors in the pair’.[3] What matters is the nature of these ‘arcs’. We could be talking about a strictly professional relationship. Or a romantic or sexual relationship. Or an intense friendship. Or what theorists call a multiplex, where the bond consists of two or more of those elements.

Dyads tend to work best horizontally rather than vertically. Things get awkward when the relationship becomes hierarchical – when one person, for whatever reason, moves into position above the other.

When this happens, it is not necessarily immediately obvious. To give another example from the world of television, back in 2016 there was much discussion in the media about whether it was correct for the BBC Breakfast presenter Louise Minchin to sit to the right of her co-anchor Dan Walker. In TV, the unwritten rule is that the ‘main’ presenter sits on the left. And patriarchy being what it is, this presenter is usually a man.

I sympathise with the feminist argument against it but, as I said at the time, I’m willing to bet that most viewers tune into BBC Breakfast, ITV’s News at Ten or Channel 4 News without giving a second thought to presenter placement. What matters more is whether one half of the duo seems to have the upper hand or reduces the other half to a ‘silent partner’. Generally, couples who have chemistry and seem to get on (Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield, say) do best; though it is possible to have chemistry and seem not to get on, as in the case of Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid on Good Morning Britain, who make a virtue of winding each other up (and, as far as I am aware, get on perfectly well offscreen).

Some of the most intriguing thinking about the power of two was done by the German philosopher Georg Simmel. Born in Berlin in 1858, Simmel was the youngest of seven children. He studied philosophy and history at the University of Berlin, but his range of interests was vast, taking in psychology, economics and the discipline we now call sociology, of which he is regarded as a founding father.

Simmel was intrigued by social geometry, especially the role of dyads and other small groups in shaping behaviour. He was curious as to why the number of individuals in a group affects the behaviour of that group; why, the bigger a group gets, the more isolated its individual members feel.

In his best-known book, The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903), Simmel considers the profound way the ‘overwhelming fullness’ of fast, modern, big-city life affects individuals so that ‘the personality … cannot maintain itself under its impact’.[4] The more meaningful relationships, established over a long period, that characterise rural life have no place in a city. Instead, urban dwellers form attachments to money rather than to other humans.

For Simmel, a dyad contains the germ of other more complex forms, but is also important in itself. Dyads are different from, say, triads (groups of three) because they have greater unity, co-responsibility and interdependence. As a result, ‘a common fate or enterprise, an agreement or secret between two persons, ties each of them in a very different manner than if even only three have a part in it’.[5]

By comprising only two people, dyadic groups preserve the individuality of their members and encourage complicity between them. But they are also fragile. Either party can end the relationship voluntarily by withdrawing from it, or involuntarily by dying. Awareness of this colours the interaction so that a dyad ‘feels itself both endangered and irreplaceable’.[6] In a triad, the dynamic is different because if one person withdraws, the group lives on.

As Simmel explains, the decisive characteristic of the dyad is that each member must ‘actually accomplish something’. In the case of failure, only the other person remains. And this is important. ‘Precisely the fact that each of the two knows that he can depend only upon the other and on nobody else,’ says Simmel, ‘gives the dyad a special consecration – as seen in marriage and friendship, but also in more external associations, including political ones, that consist of two groups … The dyad element is much more frequently confronted with All or Nothing than is the member of the larger group.’[7]

In a dyad, neither member shares the other’s attention with anyone else. Triads are trickier because when three people are involved there is a possibility of a dyad forming within the triad. And this is a problem because it threatens the remaining individual’s independence and causes her or him to become subordinate. Nobody wants three people in a marriage.

This explains why, within a group of three or more, it’s sometimes the relationship between two particular individuals that is the important one.

The quest to develop penicillin into a workable drug after it had been discovered years before by Alexander Fleming involved a whole team of people. At the core of this team was a triad of brilliant research scientists: Norman Heatley, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain. But at the core of this triad was a dyad.

Heatley was no-nonsense and humble, happy to stress the role of luck not just in his having secured a job at Oxford University’s Dunn School of Pathology in the first place, but in the successes that followed. Shy, solitary Florey – an Australian – and the gregarious Chain – a half-Russian, half-German Jew from Berlin – were much thornier personalities. Chain had only ended up working on the penicillin project because the biochemist Florey originally wanted on his team was not available. A talented musician, Chain left Berlin aged twenty-six when Hitler came to power on 30 January 1933, and had been working in Cambridge, studying how snake venoms cause fatal paralysis, when Florey came calling. Short and with (for the time) uncommonly long, flowing hair, Chain was an excitable character – famous for pacing the room and gesticulating wildly: totally the opposite of the reserved, taciturn Florey.

Chain ‘brought to science an artistic temperament, true inspiration, and originality – an emotional approach that gave joy in achievement and despair in supposed failure’,[8] writes Florey’s biographer Gwyn Macfarlane. It was Chain who, while researching the action of an enzyme called lysozyme, came across Alexander Fleming’s old paper on penicillin in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology and thought it warranted further investigation; Chain who was unafraid of asking Oxford’s cash-strapped authorities for the equipment he needed.

The friendship that formed between Florey and Chain was, on the face of it, a surprising one. For one thing, Florey was known to be anti-Semitic. For another, he distrusted flights of fancy and displays of emotion; his idea of praise was to tell someone: ‘We don’t seem to be going backwards.’ He was quite withdrawn and could be ruthless and brutal.

Yet Florey had great sympathy for the underdog. And Chain was very much his charge: his first protégé, ten years his junior; a man who knew things Florey did not.

Every day, the pair would walk together through Oxford’s University Parks, chatting mostly about their research, for Florey hated small talk. But it was a closer friendship than any the Australian had previously permitted himself. In an odd way, the two men’s personalities were as complementary as their talents. As Macfarlane says: ‘Chain’s intuitive brilliance and originality balanced Florey’s equally intuitive sense of direction and his genius for picking his way by simple, methodical experiments through a maze of attractive side issues.’[9]

Funnily enough, it was Heatley with whom Chain clashed over such matters as whose name went first on a paper. Chain identified ‘a certain pettiness and lack of generosity’[10] in Heatley’s character, while Heatley accused Chain of ‘servility towards those in higher places’.[11] Chain and Florey argued so fiercely that the walls of Florey’s office shook, but it never stopped them working together when that was what mattered.

They saved their falling out for after penicillin had been tried, tested and found to be miraculous. By the end of the 1940s they were communicating only in writing – Chain claiming he had received insufficient credit for leading the Dunn School team down the route that ultimately led to penicillin’s mass production.

Perhaps it is significant that Chain was a musician. Crucial to being a great musician is learning how to play with others. Even concert pianists must learn to play with an orchestra. But it isn’t easy.

A sense of when to lead and when to submit to being led seems to be a key quality in successful couples. Some possess it intuitively. Others have to learn it.

Gerald Moore was one of Britain’s best-known piano accompanists. In the course of a long and illustrious career he played alongside giants such as the cellist Pablo Casals and the soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. His job, he was always aware, was to restrain himself so that he did not overwhelm the soloist – though not so much that he made himself inconspicuous, because that wouldn’t do either. He said that he learned a lot from the tenor John Coates, for whom the accompanist was a partner sharing equally with him the mood of the composer. ‘Joy, sadness, passion, exultation, serenity, rage,’ wrote Moore, ‘must be experienced by each of them. How can the singer project an emotion to the listener if the accompanist holds back self-effacingly from the scene? … The accompanist should be a source of inspiration.’[12]

As with everything else in life, it is about striking a balance. And Moore admitted that being the half of the duo who was obliged to hang back and keep a low profile occasionally riled him. ‘Nobody notices the accompanist at all,’ he wrote. ‘He looks so slender and shy and so modest that people think he’s there just to do what he’s told, to follow the singer through thick and thin. Well, there’s a great deal more to it than that.’[13]

Indeed there is.

Something Simmel would have found fascinating, if unsurprising, is the extent to which the tech field is dominated by dyads. Google, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft – all were founded by duos. All, to some degree, were the fruits of nerdy friendships between essentially unsociable people – risk-taking outsiders who relished being, in Simmel’s words, ‘confronted with All or Nothing’.

These companies’ creation myths repay scrutiny, not least because of the questions they raise. Does success change the dyad’s status from horizontal to vertical? Is it desirable for the soloist/accompanist dynamic to remain stable, or does that impede progress? Do you need that volatility to be truly successful?

Microsoft founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen were childhood friends at Lakeside private school in Seattle, where they shared a passion for computers and would often skip lessons to hang out in the school’s computer room. At the age of fifteen, Gates hacked into a major corporation’s computer network and was banned from using computers for a year.[14] In 1973, he left Seattle to attend Harvard University as a pre-law student, but spent most of his spare time in its computer department. Allen moved to Boston too, where he worked as a programmer. He encouraged Gates to leave Harvard so they could collaborate. Both men were, says Allen in his memoir, Idea Man, restless and ready to try something new.

Allen had read an article in a magazine about the Altair 8800 microcomputer which he showed to Gates. Gates contacted its manufacturer, suggesting he and Allen write a version of the new BASIC programming language for it. It took them eight weeks, after which the pair jointly formed Microsoft on 4 April 1975.

The impetus behind Microsoft came from its dyadic origins, the ‘special consecration’ Simmel talks about. But the relationship between Gates and Allen couldn’t endure because it quickly stopped being horizontal and became hierarchical.

Allen had always assumed his partnership with Gates would be a 50–50 proposition. In his book he casts himself as the thinker, the seer-like visionary asking the big questions: ‘Where is the leading edge of discovery headed? What should exist but doesn’t yet? How can I create something to help meet the need, and who might be enlisted to join the crusade?’[15]

Gates obviously appreciated his friend’s worth, but did not agree that Allen was an equal partner. He argued that he had worked harder – and unsalaried, unlike Allen – on the initial BASIC project. He proposed a 60–40 split in ownership, which ended up being 64–36.

Gates was – is – the son of a lawyer. He knew how to push for what he wanted and had greater entrepreneurial flair. Awareness of Gates’s exceptional abilities left Allen wondering about the weight of his contribution and how it deserved to be rewarded. What was ‘the value of my Big Idea – the mating of a high-level language with a microprocessor – or my persistence in bringing Bill to see it? What were my development tools worth to the “property” of the partnership? Or my stewardship of our product line, or my day-to-day brainstorming with our programmers?’[16]

It was Allen who had come up with the name Microsoft; Allen who had overseen the big deal with IBM that was so crucial to Microsoft’s initial success. Everyone worked hard at Microsoft in the early days. But Gates was fiercely driven and aspired to be more ‘hardcore’ – a favourite adjective of his – than everyone else, often working through the night and coming in the next day grumpy and with bloodshot eyes.

As Gates’s power grew, it became Allen’s job to have the rows with him that nobody else could have. ‘As longtime partners,’ he wrote, ‘our dynamic was unique. Bill couldn’t intimidate me intellectually. He knew I was on top of technical issues … And unlike the programmers, I could challenge Bill on broader strategic points … On principle, I refused to yield if I didn’t agree. And so we’d go at it for hours at a stretch, until I became nearly as loud and wound up as Bill.’[17]

The high-stress environment that Gates relished did not, in the end, suit Allen: ‘My sinking morale sapped my enthusiasm for my work, which in turn could precipitate Bill’s next attack.’[18] By the time Allen left Microsoft in early 1983, having been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma the year before, he and his old friend were barely communicating.

A similar drama played out at Apple. Steve Wozniak was twenty-five and working at Hewlett-Packard designing calculators when the company turned down his revolutionary idea for a home computer with its own built-in keyboard and video display. So Wozniak set up Apple with his twenty-one-year-old friend Steve Jobs, who had dropped out of college to work at the video game company Atari.

Wozniak was the engineering brains in the duo. Unlike Jobs, he had no real desire to run a company: ‘I’d decided long ago that I would never become someone authoritative,’ he told Walter Isaacson, Jobs’s biographer.[19] Jobs had to cry, scream, have tantrums and repeatedly call Wozniak’s family before he agreed to co-found the company.

But the dyad could not withstand Wozniak’s wish to keep a low profile and have nothing to do with Apple’s management. By the time he left Apple in 1985, Wozniak was working as a mid-level engineer on the Apple II, a product he had helped to invent but felt Jobs did not value, despite the fact that it accounted for 70 per cent of Apple’s sales at the end of 1984.