The Hero Maker

by Stephen Dando-Collins

  Brickhill was undoubtedly genuine in this desire, but it also provided a way to string Sturges along, potentially until the northern summer when the rights reverted from Fred Coe. Back to Sydney went Brickhill, praying that Sturges would wait.

  Margot was to complain that Brickhill was fixated on film rights through 1960, and on his health, and was impossible to live with.293 Brickhill was sweating on getting back the screen rights to The Great Escape from Fred Coe, without Coe learning that he was talking to Mirisch and Sturges. Had Coe found out, he may have done a deal with Mirisch Corp to assign the rights to them, for a share of the film and a credit as co-producer. This was how Hollywood worked, and still works; producers holding rights to a property like to make money from them.

  In February 1960, back at Stokes Point, Brickhill began work on the immigration novel, driven by the delivery deadline and inspired by people he’d met and stories he’d heard aboard the Fairsky. By April, he’d produced four chapters, which he gave Margot to read. She was singularly unimpressed. Her lack of enthusiasm was enough to sap Brickhill’s confidence. Casting the manuscript aside, he lapsed into despair. Daily, he would sit on a balcony gazing out over peaceful Pittwater. At midday, he started drinking wine or sherry. By late afternoon, he was almost incoherent.

  One day, Margot overheard him mumbling that he should have married childhood sweetheart Mary Callanan. Picking himself up, Brickhill drove to the home of Callanan’s parents. With a bunch of flowers, he arrived unannounced. When he returned, he overflowed with apologies to Margot. Confessing he’d possessed a ‘nostalgic affection’ for Mary, he now realised what an idiot he’d been. From Mary’s parents he’d learned that she had indeed ‘consorted’ with an American years before. She had married Dr Hugo Baum and settled with him in Chicago, where they were raising a family.

  In search of balm for his soul, Brickhill attended an evangelical Church Army Mission service. This inspired him to join the congregation of the Avalon Anglican Church, whose services, he assured Margot, were doing him good. After entering Stalag Luft 3 an atheist, he’d come out an agnostic, prepared to believe that some greater power governed human life, and death. Now, he found comfort in the Bible. Despite this, personal, creative and commercial pressures caved in on him, and, on 29 May, Dr Frank Ritchie admitted him to St Luke’s Private Hospital at Kings Cross for a complete rest.

  Brickhill’s day nurse at St Luke’s, on duty between 8.00 am and 8.00 pm, was Maria Lupp. Born in New Zealand, Maria had completed her nursing training in Sydney. She found Brickhill deeply depressed, and on any given day his condition ranged between lethargy, tears and anger. However, he never became violent, which many of Nurse Lupp’s patients did. When his anger rose, she would calm him by being firm but kind.

  ‘Now, settle down,’ she would say. And, overcome with remorse, he would.

  Brickhill’s doctors had him on a cocktail of drugs for chronic depression and to help him sleep. Each morning after breakfast, he and Nurse Lupp went walking in the hospital grounds. For maximum rest, she encouraged him to sleep in the afternoons. He fought this, worrying that if he slept during the day he wouldn’t sleep at night. Eventually, Brickhill managed to convince his nurse to go to a pub every second day to buy him a bottle of Scotch whisky. The Scotch was his only solace.

  ‘Give us the whisky,’ he would say to Maria. ‘Just a little drop.’

  She rationed the whisky as best she could. ‘Settle down,’ she would say when he became too demanding.294

  Brickhill had few visitors at St Luke’s. Margot came occasionally, discussing personal business in hushed tones. Their time together was usually tense. Nurse Lupp was unaware of it, but Brickhill felt that Margot was spending with abandon, which only increased his angst. Before he went into hospital, Brickhill had set up a joint bank account. Now, he would later complain, cheques written by Margot were bouncing. Margot would say she couldn’t imagine any bank bouncing the cheques of the famous Paul Brickhill.

  ‘I’m living to the standard you require,’ Brickhill would recall Margot saying.295

  While Brickhill was furious about the cheques, fearing they would damage his cherished reputation as a man who never got into debt, he spoke not a word about his wife or his children to Maria Lupp, although they talked at length. Once, in tears, he said to her, ‘You’re so nice to me.’296

  After five weeks at St Luke’s, Brickhill discharged himself, feeling the rest cure wasn’t working. In every waking moment his mind was still active, and short of extremely heavy sedation, he still wasn’t sleeping. As he departed hospital, he promised to send Nurse Lupp one of his books.

  On his return to Stokes Point, Brickhill, doped to the eyeballs on antidepressant ‘happy pills’, exclaimed to Margot, ‘It’s extraordinary! In five weeks, you have absolutely changed.’297 In fact, it was he who had changed.

  Maria Lupp had forgotten Brickhill’s promise when, in July, a small parcel arrived at St Luke’s – a copy of Reach for the Sky, with a note inside. ‘I hate wrapping books and it takes me a long time,’ said Brickhill. Describing himself as a ‘troublesome patient’, he went on, ‘Thank you for your special attention – and your discipline. I’ll have to go sick again and send for you.’298

  Not long after Brickhill returned to Stokes Point, the house’s lease ran out. While in hospital, Brickhill had lost all track of practicalities. Margot was far from happy when told they had just days to pack and leave. Brickhill’s novelist friend Jon Cleary had become a major success, and had built a house on Stokes Point, in Riverview Road, just around the corner from the Brickhills in Cabarita Road. Cleary was then living in Europe. In desperation, Brickhill rang him, and Cleary told his mate to move into his house at once, and to use his garaged car as well. Days later, the family hurriedly moved into the Cleary residence.

  It was now summer in the Northern Hemisphere, and finally the rights to The Great Escape reverted to Brickhill from Fred Coe. Fortunately for Brickhill, Coe was obsessed during this period with turning William Gibson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Miracle Worker into a feature film. This wrenching story of Anne Sullivan’s struggle to teach blind and deaf Helen Keller how to communicate, starring Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke, would be released in 1962. With his focus on The Miracle Worker, Coe took his eye off The Great Escape. Immediately, Mike Watkins swooped, wrapping up a new rights deal with the Mirisch Corporation.

  Walter Mirisch sighed with relief after what he characterised as rights negotiations with Brickhill that had been ‘exceedingly difficult’.299 He would never know the real reason for Brickhill’s stalling tactics. Mirisch paid an option fee of £1000, against a final execution fee of £15,000 once production commenced.300 The equivalent of US$60,000, this rights fee was below par by Hollywood standards. Bill Gulick was paid US$85,000 by Mirisch Corporation the following year for the rights to Hallelujah Train, which Sturges would film as Hallelujah Trail. Unlike Gulick, however, Brickhill was a comparative unknown in the US.

  As soon as the rights were secured, Mirisch Corporation announced The Great Escape as one of fourteen movies it would produce over the next three years, and Sturges put Walter Newman to work on a first draft screenplay. This sent Brickhill’s spirits soaring, along with his hopes, only for things to soon go quiet on the Mirisch Corporation front. Mirisch was having a hard time selling the project to film investors. The lack of progress again saw Brickhill lapsing into depression.

  By the time the deadline for producing the immigration novel arrived that spring, Brickhill had made no further progress on it, and he repaid the Australian Government the entire cost of his family’s Fairsky passages. To escape his moods, Margot took the children to Hong Kong for four weeks in November. In December, after her return, she took the children Christmas shopping, and stayed away five days. When she came back, she told Brickhill she’d only returned because she’d run out of money and clothes.

  ‘Maggie,’ Brickhill wailed, ‘the furores you create will only have a bad effect on the c
hildren.’301

  Several weeks later, when both their families came to Stokes Point for Christmas dinner, Brickhill only dragged himself out of bed thirty minutes before their guests arrived.

  The new year saw movement on The Great Escape in Hollywood. In February, Mirisch announced that Steve McQueen, riding high on the success of The Magnificent Seven, had been signed to star, and that discussions were ongoing with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. Production was slated to commence in June. Sturges, unhappy with Newman’s screenplay, which remained faithful to Brickhill’s book, gave it to William Roberts to rework. Apart from his work on Newman’s script for The Magnificent Seven, Roberts was best known for creating TV’s Donna Reed Show in 1958.

  With commencement of filming seemingly imminent, along with a £14,000 rights cheque, Brickhill bought a zippy Triumph Herald for Margot, and contemplated buying himself a Bentley. Despite Margot’s encouragement, in the end he couldn’t see past the massive import duties; he could have bought a Bentley for half the price in England. With Margot complaining she lacked financial independence, he gave her £2000. Brickhill also set up a £20,000 trust for his children, in his parents’ name, assigning the deeds to 41 George Street to it. The trust soon purchased an investment property at Hunters Hill.

  Brickhill’s enthusiasm for the French novel returned, and when he assured Margot that, between a book and a movie, it could generate £50,000, she became his greatest supporter. Finding the study at the Cleary house too small, he took a flat down the street as his daytime writing roost. Margot even brought meals to him there, becoming a critical reader of his output as he typed away. ‘The style of the writing is good,’ she declared, ‘and so is the general action of the plot. But the central character is too dull and colourless to grip the attention of the average reader.’ She urged him to put it aside and resurrect the immigration novel.302

  At first crushed, he subsequently rebelled against her opinion, deciding to return to England to finish the French novel in peace at ‘Little Barr’. Margot and the children would join him there later, flying via a stop in Hong Kong. Brickhill also decided to finally buy a Sydney house and leave behind the rental cycle his parents’ experience had ingrained into him. After his £33,333 offer on an Avalon mansion failed, he found ‘Craig Rossie’. High on a bend at Palm Beach, the 1936 two-storey, five-bedroom, brick-and-stone house overlooking Pittwater had direct frontage to Sandy Beach and even possessed a boathouse. Its one-acre grounds encompassed a bowling green and gardener’s cottage. Inside, ‘Craig Rossie’s wood-panelled walls and ceilings and stone fireplace were reminiscent of ‘Little Barr’. Brickhill had found his Palm Beach dream house.

  When he departed Sydney for England that Easter, he left Margot and the children excitedly preparing to move into ‘Craig Rossie’ once settlement was completed, giving her £5000 to furnish it as she wished and to pay for flights to Britain via Hong Kong in August. After taking up residence at ‘Craig Rossie’, Margot would feature in a Woman’s Day photo-spread shot at the house. Brickhill would say he knew nothing about this at the time.303

  Now that Brickhill had fine homes in Australia and England, he planned to move back and forth between the two, following the sun as he wrote his novels. That northern autumn, at ‘Little Barr’, he completed the French novel, The Deadline. Writing in the first person, he made his Australian hero Robert Mackay an auto engineer and racing car driver with, like himself, a love of Jaguars and Coopers. Putting Mackay in his twenties, at one point he had him rail against ‘the tyranny of women’. In Brickhill’s plot, Mackay is visiting Paris when he becomes implicated in a political assassination by Algerian terrorists. Mackay falls for Simone Dumail, a beautiful French girl. But is she one of the terrorists? The book’s last act becomes a race against time as Mackay strives to prevent a terrorist from infecting the Paris water supply with deadly cholera bacteria, and, in the end, to save Simone and himself.

  For the book’s back cover, Brickhill had an artistically lit portrait taken in a London photographic studio. William Morrow in New York, who would publish the novel in the USA in 1963 under the title War of Nerves, didn’t like the picture. To satisfy Morrow’s request for a shot that made him look like a successful author rather than a shady hypnotist, he had himself photographed at ‘Little Barr’ leaning on the bonnet of his Jaguar, gold watch to the fore.

  Through these months, Brickhill was writing regularly to Margot and the children. Initially, Margot wrote loving responses, but as time passed her tone cooled, and she put off the departure to England by the children and herself. In October, she wrote to say they wouldn’t be coming to England after all. Sensing something was amiss, Brickhill jumped on a plane and rushed back to Sydney, to find that Margot had moved the children and herself out of ‘Craig Rossie’ and into a four-bedroom house at Turramurra, a bushland northern Sydney suburb well inland from Palm Beach. She now informed her husband that she wanted a divorce.

  Brickhill spent Christmas with his parents. In February, he was served with a writ: Margot was suing for divorce on the grounds of cruelty and desertion. In 1962, divorce was a messy business. Margot, the applicant, would have to prove her husband guilty of cruelty and desertion in court. Today’s no-fault Australian divorce law, introduced by the Whitlam Government, was still more than a decade away. In the 1960s, divorce cases could run for years, and make lawyers rich.

  Brickhill thought that Margot was bluffing, was grandstanding for attention. And it infuriated him that the documents from Margot’s lawyers were riddled with errors. His date of birth and birthplace were wrong; so, too, the date of their marriage. Tempe’s middle name had been misspelled. Numerous other dates and details were incorrect. And Margot was making claims about his actions that simply didn’t accord with the facts, as far as he was concerned. Most of all, it irked him that Margot was claiming he’d deserted her by going to England the previous Easter; shades of her earlier desertion claim when he’d gone to Cornwall with the Baders.

  Brickhill, shocked, gutted, and alone at his dream mansion ‘Craig Rossie’, couldn’t bring himself to address the legal documents, or the fact that Margot had gone this far. Casting the documents aside, he again lapsed into deep depression. His doctor readmitted him to St Luke’s.

  In the autumn of 1962, Sydney Morning Herald journalist Robert Willson was visiting a friend at St Luke’s Hospital when he stumbled on another patient he recognised – Paul Brickhill. The author said he wasn’t expecting any visitors that morning and encouraged Willson to stay and chat. With Brickhill lucid and in good spirits, they talked at length, with Willson relishing the opportunity to discuss the famous author’s books.

  Before the reporter departed, Brickhill showed him the proofs for The Deadline, recently arrived from William Collins in London. He was slowly correcting them. Billy Collins was hopeful the novel would cash in on Brickhill’s name, which would appear much larger on the cover than the title. And Brickhill would be cited as author of Reach for the Sky, his most recent hit in Britain. For the cover design, Collins hired John Heseltine, a leading British artist noted for illustrating the covers of the bestselling thrillers of Scottish author Alistair MacLean.

  When Brickhill left hospital, he didn’t return to Palm Beach. Encouraged by his parents, he joined them at 41 George Street. Dot and George, both unwell, had been using separate bedrooms for years. Although Dot had not long before recovered from the second of two strokes, she gave up her bedroom to her son and moved back into the master bedroom with George. There, at Greenwich Point, Brickhill completed correcting The Deadline proofs. Before he mailed them back to Bonham Carter in London, he added a dedication: ‘For Dot and George, bless them.’

  By the second half of April, he was feeling well. Clear-headed, he completed his detailed responses to the claims from Margot’s lawyers. Now, several trunks arrived by sea from England. Brickhill was expecting them, having asked that all personal items left at ‘Little Barr’ be collected up and sent out to Sydney. Going throug
h the trunk contents, he came across some of Margot’s papers interspersed with his own. To his astonishment, among her papers he found Mark Bonham Carter’s thirteen-page 1953 Reach for the Sky report. Thoughtful and perceptive, this was by far the best editor’s report Brickhill had ever seen.

  But, what was it doing in his wife’s papers? Had it reached Margot prior to her departure to board the Orontes, or after it? Only now did it occur to Brickhill that Margot may have kept the report from him. He could only imagine it’d been through neglect. On 24 April, he typed a letter to Bonham Carter, telling him he’d just unearthed the report, thanking him for it and apologising profusely for the misunderstanding and his complaints a decade before.

  ‘Margot is a very nice girl in many ways, but a bit shaky on some respects of responsibility,’ he told Bonham Carter. ‘You may have heard that there is more domestic trouble between us. This time it is a somewhat nasty story but at least I’m fit now for the first time in a long, long time, and it won’t throw me as before.’ He went on, ‘I’ve got two more novels all set to go, and as soon as I get rid of a few legal details, I’ll be all set to go.’304

  Bonham Carter passed Brickhill’s letter on to chairman Billy Collins, noting on it that Brickhill seemed in an unbalanced condition.305 In responding to Brickhill, Bonham Carter apologised for any confusion back in 1953. If he’d been a little more perceptive he would have realised that Brickhill had never received his report.

  The ‘few legal details’ that Brickhill referred to involved his divorce case. More accusations continued to arrive from Margot’s lawyers. She claimed that early in their marriage he’d twice taken Pat Dunne out for meals when she’d visited from New York, had contributed money to her divorce, and had corresponded with an Enid Trill and a Dorothy Fielder, all of which had made her feel very insecure. In his response, he said he’d taken Pat out with Margot’s knowledge and agreement, had been unaware Pat divorced – let alone financed that divorce – and Enid and Dorothy were old platonic friends.