Pope Leo's reported struggle with bank red tape highlights that the most-celebrated and glorified people occasionally walk among us. Photo / Getty Images
“All those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted,” Jesus Christ says in Luke 14:1. This passage was Pope Leo’s social media “Gospel of the Day” in August last year, and came with an interpretation from the pontiff himself.
“Humility is really freedom from ourselves,” he wrote. “Those who exalt themselves think that nothing is more interesting than themselves.”
Sage words, as you might expect from the Successor of the Prince of the Apostles. But while the Bible may be thorough in its teachings, it is also antiquated in parts. As it is, the Pope might consider a little update.
Something along the lines of: “Humility is great, but if you’re stuck on the phone with a bank customer services representative and find you’re getting nowhere, there’s no harm in trying to pull rank.”
That’s if you believe Pope Leo’s close friend, the Reverend Tom McCarthy, anyway. Last week, McCarthy told a group of Catholics in Naperville, Illinois, that two months after Robert Prevost was elected as pope last year, he found himself on the phone to his US bank, trying to change his address.
Leo reportedly cruised through the security questions, but the woman from the bank – who at this point thought he was Mr Prevost, notable only for being probably the most tranquil customer she’d ever spoken to, as well as the only one who’s called from Vatican City’s country code – was not satisfied. She asked whether he’d come into the branch in person.
“He said, ‘Well, I’m not going to be able to do that’,” McCarthy told his audience at the event last week. The Pope’s divine serenity was being tested. “I gave you all the security questions.”
When the woman on the phone reiterated the request, Leo gave up. “Would it matter to you if I told you I’m Pope Leo?” he asked. It would not. Click. The woman hung up. She must have been more of a Cardinal Pietro Parolin fan during the conclave.
Father McCarthy’s audience laughed, of course. Notwithstanding the buried lede (that Pope Leo managed to get through to a human who works for his bank rather than having to engage in online jujitsu with an AI chatbot), the anecdote revealed two quietly reassuring things: that even the Vicar of Christ can be tripped up by red tape and, perhaps more excitingly still, that even the most celebrated and glorified people in the world do, occasionally, walk among us.
And they do. The tapestry of recent decades is studded with joyful vignettes involving stupendously well-known people blending in with us mortals. Perhaps the most charming concerned Elizabeth II, who may have famously reckoned “I have to be seen to be believed”, but that didn’t always work.
At the Platinum Jubilee in 2022, the late Queen’s long-time protection officer Richard Griffin told the story of the day the two of them were out for a walk near Balmoral when some American hikers crossed their path for a chat.
One asked where she lived. “I live in London, but I’ve got a holiday home just the other side of the hills,” she told the man. He asked how long she’d been coming up. “Oh, I’ve been coming up here ever since I was a little girl, so over 80 years.”
At this, something clicked – just not everything. “If you’ve been coming up here for 80 years, you must have met the Queen.” Without missing a beat, she turned to Griffin and said, “Well, I haven’t, but Dick here meets her regularly”.
Astounded that he was meeting somebody who knew Elizabeth II, one of the hikers switched focus and asked Griffin what she was like. “Oh, she can be very cantankerous at times, but she’s got a lovely sense of humour,” came the response. The hiker asked to take a photo with each of them individually. Afterwards, the late Queen said to Griffin: “I’d love to be a fly on the wall when he shows those photographs to friends in America and, hopefully, someone tells him who I am.”
Balmoral seems a good spot to run into a relaxed monarch in the wilderness. The next year, a group of cyclists was riding across the estate when they saw a pensioner in a flat cap shambling in the other direction. You could forgive them for thinking an infected midge bite had caused them to hallucinate the appearance of the King, all alone with a hiking stick, but there’s GoPro footage to prove it. The group had a remarkably easy conversation with the King about bothies, weather, cycling and summer plans.
There are similar tales about Prince Philip, who would travel around London in a specially modified Edinburgh Green Metrocab to blend in, occasionally shocking other motorists at traffic lights.
And Prince William, as well as working undercover as a Big Issue seller and sleeping in the streets as part of his charity work, used the alias “Steve” to avoid unwanted attention at the University of St Andrews. Curiously, his uncle, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, has the opposite effect these days: no matter how hard he tries, no members of the public want to stumble across him.
As Pope Leo now knows, people can’t be so sure it’s you on the phone. Justin Bieber once called into a Radio 1 show to wish an 8-year-old fan a happy birthday, starting by calling her Sophia. “Pardon? No, this is Sophie,” came the response. A flustered Bieber tried to keep things rolling by asking where she lived. “I don’t… um… I have to go,” she said – and put the phone down.
Over the course of four years between 1988 and 1991, the comedian Peter Cook rang in to Clive Bull’s LBC show under the guise of “Sven from Swiss Cottage”, a Norwegian fisherman who had come to London to escape the fish-obsessed phone-ins of Norway and to look for romance.
Two decades later, Bob Mortimer would regularly ring up Iain Lee’s late-night talkRADIO show as “Keith”, a Geordie who persistently tried to get Lee interested in videos of his nephew’s sprinting prowess. “He’s the third or fourth best in his year group, Iain,” Keith would insist.
Michael Barrymore once phoned into a talent contest on Bull’s show as himself, and came seventh. This is a theme in the celebrity world – failing to win. Dolly Parton entered a Dolly Parton lookalike contest and lost to a drag queen. There’s a similar story (minus the drag queen element) about Charlie Chaplin.
In fact, name a superstar and there’s a possibly apocryphal yarn about them attempting to mingle with the masses without being noticed. Disguises can help. Legend has it that Princess Diana was smuggled into the Royal Vauxhall Tavern in the 1980s as a “rather eccentrically dressed gay male model” by Freddie Mercury, Kenny Everett and Cleo Rocos.
Paul McCartney, meanwhile, employed the costume department from A Hard Day’s Night to make him a wig and glasses so he could go on a driving holiday around Europe. The result, at least according to one set of photos, was McCartney in some spectacles. Yet somehow it worked.
“I put a long blue overcoat on and slicked my hair back with Vaseline and just wandered around and of course nobody recognised me at all. It was good, it was quite liberating for me,” he remembered, in Barry Miles’ Many Years From Now.
“I’d walk around the town and then in the evening go down to dinner, sit on my own at the table, at the height of all this Beatle thing, to ease the pressure, to balance the high-key pressure. Having a holiday and also not be recognised. And re-taste anonymity.”
Michael Jackson (who, it should be pointed out, never looked like himself anyway) had a whole wardrobe full of disguises, complete with terrifying prosthetics. Daniel Radcliffe, a fan of comics, once dressed in a full Spiderman outfit in order to covertly attend his first Comic Con.
Jude Law once caused a security alert when he acted suspiciously with a hood up at Bath’s Odeon. And Cary Grant was once convinced to go to an Alice Cooper gig in the 1970s by an ex-girlfriend, Maureen Donaldson, agreeing only on the condition that he go incognito.
“I disguised him as best I could in the ‘style’ of a more than slightly seedy agent. I wrapped sunglasses around Cary’s eyes, a gold chain around his neck and a chequered jacket around his shoulders, sharkskin pants,” Donaldson recalled. Grant did not enjoy himself.
Of course, there is a lesson, particularly in the approach taken by the royal family, and it’s that if you’re casual enough about it, even the most well-known people in the world don’t need a disguise to get away with it. Greta Garbo lived in New York City for decades without much bother. So did David Bowie.
Instead, they kept on moving, kept on living among us, and left the public with only a “Wait, was that…?” Do that, and nobody will ever believe it’s really you. Pope Leo’s found out that’s not always a blessing.
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