By December, Brickhill was off the Reserpine and feeling able to get back to work on his novel. Needing privacy, he rented a room in a house at Montecatini Terme, a Tuscan spa town between Florence and Pisa favoured by composer Giuseppe Verdi. Brickhill had been there a week when loneliness overwhelmed him. When he returned to the Villa Tortoli on Christmas Eve, Margot refused him entry. He was back next afternoon, Christmas Day, bearing a £200 gold necklace as a Christmas gift. This time, Margot let him in.
22.
End of Exile
THE DELAY IN the release of the Dam Busters movie had increased public interest, and receipts. It topped the British box office for 1955, and restored Associated British’s fortunes. The news was of little comfort to Brickhill. In early 1956, he had a mental relapse and was again admitted to an Italian hospital.
By the spring, he’d recovered sufficiently to drive Margot to Fiesole from Florence along a narrow mountain road. Inevitably, they fell into an argument en route. When she praised her mother, Brickhill’s temper flared.
‘Your mother, and all women, are useless,’ Brickhill declared. ‘With the exception of my mother, of course.’
‘How did you come to except your mother?’ she snorted.
Brickhill’s mother was, to him, beyond reproach, and his anger rose like an erupting volcano. Without warning, the back of his hand collected Margot on the side of the face.282
Flying in from Italy for five days, Brickhill and his wife were among the guests of honour at the world premiere of Reach for the Sky at Leicester Square’s Odeon Theatre on 5 July. Among the VIP guests were Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies and two senior British cabinet ministers. Brickhill would later say that Margot ‘vindictively humiliated’ him at the event. He wouldn’t describe the nature of that humiliation, but, because of it, he vowed to never take Margot to another premiere. He kept his word, going alone to the film’s Edinburgh and Paris premieres.283
Douglas Bader declined the Rank Organisation’s invitation to attend the London premiere. He had visited at least one location during filming, and prior to the shoot he’d seen the first draft of the screenplay and had played a round of golf with Kenneth More, the actor cast to play him. More, who’d recently starred in Genevieve, a popular comedy about a man and his antique car on a rally to Brighton, didn’t mind that Bader beat him on the golf course. He was taking in his legless companion’s gait, which he would get down pat in the film. More had wanted the part the moment he’d read Brickhill’s book, but Richard Burton had initially been cast as Bader. Only after Burton dropped out did More’s agent receive a call from producer Danny Angel.
Bader would not only stay away from the film’s premiere; bitter because he didn’t make a penny from the film – as a consequence of the renegotiated deal he’d pushed through with Brickhill – he would never see the movie in a cinema. Not even the fact that Thelma’s composer stepbrother John Addison wrote the film’s score would induce him to see it. Eleven years after its release, with Thelma, Bader would watch the film for the first time, on television. From that time forward, Bader referred to the film, and the book, disparagingly as Reach for the Sticking Plaster.
Reach for the Sky became Britain’s top-grossing film of 1956, breaking box-office records. It also won ‘film of the year’ at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) awards. It cemented Bader as a national celebrity, and made More a major star. More would tour America to promote the film on its US release in 1957, but, seen as another film about Brits winning the war, like The Dam Busters, it didn’t do well in the States. Released in Australia a year after its British release, it emulated The Dam Busters in becoming a major hit in Brickhill’s homeland.
Brickhill’s accountant had advised him he could now resettle in England, and as soon as the couple returned to Italy they commenced packing their twenty trunks. Still seething over Margot’s perceived humiliation of him at the movie premiere, Brickhill then drove back to England in the Alfa, leaving his wife to make her own way back. Hers was a leisurely return, interspersed with stays at several French resorts.
They rented in South Ascot, and in August Brickhill went to Deauville to sail the Mediterranean with Stalag Luft 3 chum Johnny Dodge. On his return in September, Brickhill took his wife to a ball at the Savoy Hotel in aid of Leonard Cheshire’s charitable home, with pianist Winifred Atwell among the entertainers. An Ashes cricket Test series was underway, and Australian and English players attended the ball, among them Keith Miller, Ray Lindwall, Tony Lock and Fred Trueman. A new dance craze, the Kangaroo Hop, had arrived in town with the Aussies, and a magazine photographer snapped Margot in the act of energetically kangaroo hopping with her husband’s colourful publisher Billy Collins, who loved to dance.
Now, after years of renting in five countries, Brickhill committed to buying a house of his own. Overjoyed, Margot went scouting in the Alfa Romeo. With mind-blowing financial and critical success for Brickhill, and on the quest for their first real home, the Brickhills had every reason to be happy. And, for a time, their stormy arguments subsided. Their love life was reborn; Margot would later say that she had only started enjoying sex after she gave birth to Timothy.284 In December, Margot again fell pregnant.
In early 1957, the Brickhills found their dream home, in Surrey’s exclusive Wentworth Estate, outside Virginia Water. Set on 700 country acres, the estate was dominated by a golf course set around a nineteenth-century house, the Wentworths. Once owned by a brother-in-law of the Duke of Wellington, the Wentworths was now the golfing clubhouse, its championship course noted for hosting the first Ryder Cup. As a house owner here, Brickhill could play a round whenever he fancied.
The estate had been developed in the 1920s by W. G. Tarrant, who’d had the first houses built on large lots and in grand style. Most were half-timbered, with tall chimneys, gables, dormer rooms, leaded lights and handmade bricks and tiles. The largest houses featured stonework around their front doors and fireplaces, plus marble-floored entrance halls. The Great Depression had hit Wentworth Estate hard, sending Tarrant into bankruptcy in 1931, the same year that George Brickhill’s disastrous financial decline had begun.
Paul Brickhill’s company purchased ‘Little Barr’, a Wentworth Estate house with a large, mature garden for young Tim to play in. That garden backed onto the golf course, with a hedge separating the two. The Alfa Romeo would be joined in the garage by a new company car, a two-year-old Mark II Jaguar bought second hand by Brickhill in an attempt to excuse a long-held ambition with the gloss of economy.
Struggling to write his own work of fiction in 1957, Brickhill helped Morris West with his novel The Backlash, later filmed by Hollywood as The Second Victory. West, now Europe-based, set his book in Austria in 1945, just after the war, a time and place Brickhill knew well. When the book was published in 1958, West’s dedication page would read: ‘For Paul Brickhill.’
By this stage Brickhill was lusting after an exotic Northern Hemisphere residence with a warm climate, and considered Malta, Ghana, even Beirut. While on a scouting visit to Malta, he left Margot to entertain his visiting brother Lloyd and his South American wife, who spoke no English. After Margot showed no interest in any of Brickhill’s foreign destinations, the idea was dropped. In April, with a brainwave for a new novel, set in France, Brickhill drove to Cannes. Staying a month on the Riviera researching the book, he spent time in Marseilles, home of Algerian immigrants, who would play a key role in his plot.
On his return to England in May, the family moved into ‘Little Barr’. Brickhill employed a full-time children’s nurse, a daily charlady and a part-time gardener, but Margot astonished him by working in the garden herself. She seemed happier than Brickhill could remember. Alas, by July, they were again fighting. When Margot, eight months pregnant, became overwrought, Brickhill twice slapped her face. The arrival of daughter Tempe Melinda in August should have been the highlight of 1957 for Brickhill. But following Tempe’s birth, he became ultra-jealous, privately acc
using Margot of improper behaviour with one man in London and publicly accusing a Wentworth neighbour of seducing his wife.
‘If you continue your behaviour towards me, Paul,’ a fraught Margot declared, ‘I’ll break down under the strain!’285
As Brickhill continued to wrestle with his latest attempt at a novel into 1958, his marriage disintegrated around him. Margot could not understand why he was not able to simply sit down at his typewriter and bash it out, the way he’d always done. And the more he said he was unwell, the less she believed him.
This year, John Sturges again came courting the film rights to The Great Escape. Still unaware that Fred Coe held the option, he was again sent away, unsuccessful. Brickhill was by this time living almost entirely on his investments. Book income had dropped significantly after his meteoric sales earlier in the decade. He would have been interested in talking to Sturges, but Coe’s option still had more than two years to run.
In September, Brickhill came to his wife, eyes sparkling. ‘I’ve had a breakthrough with the novel!’ he declared.
‘Too late!’ she retorted. ‘I’m leaving you.’286
She moved out on 21 September, rented a farmhouse at Croyde in Devon, and had a lawyer initiate a six-month legal separation. Margot much later revealed that she would have filed for divorce, but she hadn’t lived back in England long enough to do so under English divorce law. A legal separation was her only option at that time. Brickhill, as he had in the past, tried to woo back his wife. In October, he undertook to take them back to Australia the following year. And he made a vow: ‘Never again, under whatever provocation or circumstance, will I strike you. I’ll prove to you I’m not totally evil.’287
Still they remained legally estranged. By December, Margot had moved to a house at Ascot. Brickhill paid her rent, and paid for a live-in maid. When Margot invited him to visit the children, he arrived with a £200 diamond brooch as a Christmas gift.
‘What will the judge think?’ Margot joked, as she accepted the offering.
Over Christmas they twice made love, but Margot asked him not to tell anyone. ‘I wouldn’t want this to happen too often,’ she said.288
In the new year, they agreed to give the marriage another try. With the marital waters calmed, and as they began planning the trip to Australia later in the year, Brickhill had an idea for yet another book, a novel about British immigrants going to Australia. Approaching the Australian Government, he convinced them to agree to pay for Margot, the two children, a nanny and himself to travel on an immigrant ship to Sydney free of charge, in return for writing the immigration novel, which would have to be completed by a set date in 1960.
Through the first half of 1959 he made progress on his French novel, finding Margot mature and agreeable despite occasional tantrums if she didn’t get her own way. Selling Margot on a ten-day trip to Paris as a second honeymoon, Brickhill took the family there in June. As Brickhill trawled Parisian backstreets to trace their layout, haunted sleazy bars to study their clientele, and applied a forensic eye to the work of the French police, he was in his element. Margot, meanwhile, complained there was almost nothing to do but eat. After Paris, in preparation for the trip home, Margot gave up potatoes, went to the hair salon every five days for blonde tips, and toasted herself under a sun lamp.
On 26 October, accompanied by twenty-two-year-old German nanny Margarete Haselwander, forty-two-year-old Brickhill, his thirty-one-year-old wife, and their five- and two-year-old children boarded the Fairsky at Southampton, and sailed for Australia along with 1400 British migrants.
23.
Return to Oz
AFTER THEY DISEMBARKED from the Fairsky in Sydney on 19 November, a chauffeur-driven limousine whisked Brickhill, his wife and their children to the Hydro Majestic Hotel at Medlow Bath in the Blue Mountains, where they were joined by the couple’s parents. All spent twelve days there at Brickhill’s expense, as the children enjoyed their first taste of Australia and enjoyed the attentions of their grandparents.
Before leaving England, Brickhill had arranged a lease on the same waterfront Stokes Point house they’d lived in back in 1954. The lease included the owner’s car, and, to lower the rent, Brickhill allowed their landlord, who was in England, to use his Jaguar there. The Brickhills moved into the Stokes Point house in time for Christmas. During December, Brickhill recorded an ABC Radio interview, talking about his immigration book.
After this was aired on 29 December, the press quickly latched onto a comment of Brickhill’s that British people were becoming less inclined to migrate to Australia. This would generate a rapid response from immigration minister Alick Downer, who blustered that, not only was there still a very strong flow of British immigrants, the government would soon launch a campaign to attract UK university graduates to Australia. Brickhill had trodden on the toes of the very man who’d approved the subsidisation of his immigration novel.
But Brickhill wasn’t in Australia for the fallout from his radio interview. On Boxing Day, with Margot’s keen encouragement, he flew out of Sydney to Los Angeles. The persistent John Sturges wanted to talk about filming The Great Escape. The urgency of his request, the lure of Hollywood and the fact that Sturges was paying the author’s way, first class, in one of the new Boeing 707 jets that had started on the trans-Pacific route that year, combined to suppress Brickhill’s dread of flying.
Sturges’ star was now high in Hollywood. After a string of hit westerns including Gunfight at the OK Corral in 1957, his 1958 film was very different: The Old Man and the Sea. Adapted from the Ernest Hemingway novella, it earned Spencer Tracy an Oscar nomination for best actor. Sturges would soon be basking in the success of his 1960 blockbuster western The Magnificent Seven. Here was a Hollywood heavy hitter who might do The Great Escape justice on the big screen. By comparison, Fred Coe wasn’t in Sturges’ league. Coe’s ten-year option still had eight months to run, but if Brickhill liked Sturges and what he had to offer, he might be able to stall him until the rights reverted in the second half of 1960.
In Los Angeles, Sturges laid out the welcome mat for Brickhill. He habitually put up guests at his palatial Hollywood home, and had a reputation for entertaining them royally. For the past two years, Sturges had been working successfully with the Mirisch Corporation on a non-exclusive production arrangement. The very day they brokered that agreement, Sturges had spoken excitedly to Walter Mirisch about wanting to film The Great Escape. It was following this that they’d made the unsuccessful 1958 approach for the rights. Now, Sturges and Mirisch teamed up to woo the Australian author on their home turf.
Mirisch would recall that, from his first LA meeting with Brickhill, the author played hard to get. Brickhill, while failing to reveal that the screen rights were not his to sell at that moment, or that he was keen to secure the money a Hollywood film deal would bring, was nonetheless truthful when he told Mirisch he was sceptical that American producers could authentically play out the details of the escape from Stalag Luft 3.
‘I don’t want an Errol Flynn picture,’ Brickhill told Mirisch.289
As it dawned on the producers that this courtship could still be a long one, Sturges took Brickhill to his favourite hangout, the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Hollywood A-listers went to see their peers, and to be seen by their peers. According to novelist Bill Gulick, who was similarly wooed, Sturges was ‘a plain speaking man’, but ‘very hospitable’.290 Sturges told Brickhill about his own Air Force service during the war, and quizzed him about every aspect of the book and the men who peopled his Great Escape. During these convivial sessions, Brickhill, glass in hand, told Sturges about his colleagues, his claustrophobia in the tunnel and his own escape plans. Sturges took it all in, filing details away in his mind as building blocks for the story he would tell on screen. Sturges told Bill Gulick, ‘To me, the story comes first.’291
The sweet talking of Brickhill went on for two weeks. As they conversed, Sturges told Brickhill that, even though he hadn’t been a POW
, as a former airman he knew the kind of men who’d been in Stalag Luft 3, and knew their lingo. Sturges would remember a long lunch with the Australian during which he guaranteed his movie would stick to the facts of the story.
‘We’ll do the thing justice,’ Sturges assured Brickhill, adding that this wouldn’t be an American ‘How we won the war’ movie.
Brickhill seemed impressed, especially when Sturges gave him a written outline setting out how he would film The Great Escape.
‘Have I convinced you I’m on the level?’ Sturges asked.
‘Yes, you have,’ Brickhill acknowledged.292 But who, he wondered, did Sturges have in mind to write the screenplay?
Sturges immediately nominated Walter Newman. He owed Newman a favour. They’d fallen out when the writer demanded his name be removed from the writing credits for The Magnificent Seven after Sturges brought in ‘script doctor’ William Roberts to polish Newman’s original screenplay. Newman was known as a writer of snappy dialogue, and in years to come would receive three Oscar nominations for his screenplays, including 1965’s Cat Ballou. Sturges thought Newman and Brickhill would get along, being the same age and both coming from journalistic backgrounds, and promised to put them together.
Days passed, without Newman appearing. The screenwriter was apparently caught up out of town. Brickhill’s patience gave out. Flying to Hawaii, he told Sturges he could bring him back to LA if and when the screenwriter showed up. For five days, Brickhill swam in Waikiki’s balmy waters and downed a Mai Tai or two. Finally, with still no sign of Newman, Brickhill telephoned Sturges to tell him he was going home. He also told him he felt duty-bound to run Sturges’ outline by Wings Day and the relatives of Roger Bushell and other members of the Fifty before he signed over the film rights, just as the screenplay for The Dam Busters had been circulated to key insiders.
The Hero Maker Page 26
