With the Dodge project stalled, Brickhill decided to write a screenplay, based on the adventures of another wartime colleague. Friends Jon Cleary and Morris West routinely wrote the screenplay adaptations of their novels. How difficult could it be? His subject would be Harry ‘Wings’ Day. Brickhill’s typewriter was soon clacking away in a flat he purchased that year in the Lower North Shore beachside suburb of Balmoral. This modest apartment would be Brickhill’s Sydney home for the rest of his life.
On 20 December, Brickhill celebrated his fiftieth birthday. By the end of 1966, he had completed two thirds of the Wings Day screenplay. Only then did he make contact with Day, suggesting they meet to discuss the project. Day was spending the northern winter at a villa in Monaco, and he promptly invited Brickhill to come over and stay, telling him he was also working on a project with their former fellow kriegie Sydney Dowse. This latter news would have alarmed Brickhill. Concerned that Dowse might prove competition, Brickhill resolved to suppress his dislike of flying to get to Day as soon as possible. In the middle of February, he flew to London with script and typewriter in his baggage.
In London, on Wednesday, 25 January 1967, Brickhill caught up with an AAP colleague at his old Fleet Street work-place, and over a drink told him about his Wings Day project. Two days later, under the headline ‘Brickhill’s New Film’, a news item about Brickhill’s Wings Day project appeared in the Australian press.
‘He said the script would be ready in two or three months,’ reported the news service journalist, ‘and the film would be produced by an American. He would later write a book, based on the script, and this would take him about a year.’313 The likely producer concerned was John Sturges.
To Monaco went the expectant author, to a warm welcome from the courtly Wings Day. And a shock. The project with Sydney Dowse was Wings’ biography, being written by Dowse under the pseudonym of Sydney Smith. Still, Wings was not overly happy with the way the book was panning out. Dowse’s style didn’t suit him, and he didn’t like the way Dowse was portraying him. In contrast, Wings liked Brickhill’s script and his approach. With his financial picture at the time not as bright as he would have preferred, Wings wanted both Dowse’s book and Brickhill’s movie to go ahead. He had a share of Dowse’s proceeds from the book deal, and Brickhill was offering him fifty per cent of any film deal he secured based on his screenplay.
When Brickhill pointed out that each project was directly competitive, and Wings couldn’t have both, Wings chose to go with Brickhill, the man with the Hollywood connections. By comparison, Dowse was an amateur. Wings made up his mind to get out of the deal with Dowse. But this wasn’t going to be easy. Dowse and his publisher had a written agreement with Wings, and that included the film rights. When Wings showed the agreement to Brickhill, the Australian’s heart sank. Dowse had contracted the book to Brickhill’s own publisher, William Collins, and Brickhill knew what a tough cookie Billy Collins could be when it came to contracts.
Sure enough, Collins would not let Day out of the agreement. And Brickhill knew the publishers would take legal action against anyone infringing their rights to Day’s story. Dowse’s book, Wings Day, would be published by Collins the following year. It would do quite well, despite being error-strewn – when talking about the Great Escape, for example, Dowse got both the date and number of escapees wrong. He also got the date of Day’s earlier Schubin break wrong. Not surprisingly, having become aware that Brickhill had almost snatched his Wings Day project from under his nose, Dowse failed to mention Brickhill in his tome. Read Dowse’s book, and you would never know that Brickhill had been at Stalag Luft 3, let alone a leading light in X Organisation, or had authored The Great Escape, the book that gave Wings a public profile in the first place.
Brickhill was devastated. He had wasted the best part of a year on his Wings Day project, which had now to be jettisoned. His screenplay was worthless. However, he would have saved himself a lot of trouble had he contacted Wings earlier. Meanwhile, there was still no movement on the Johnny Dodge project.
Precisely what happened to Brickhill following this great disappointment is a mystery. He would not return to Australia until almost three years later. Brickhill himself said he went to live in Canada. Where and why is unknown. His relocation may have been inspired by Wally Floody, who encouraged George Harsh to move from the US to the Canadian town where he lived, which he did.
For the next two years, Paul Brickhill disappeared off the map.
27.
Back, for Good
WITH MOST CELEBRITIES now arriving in Australia from overseas by jet, the press’ habit of grabbing interviews with ‘name’ arrivals by ocean liner had almost died out by 1969. Just the same, the first day of December was a Monday, a slow news day, and a reporter for Perth’s West Australian thought he might get a few paragraphs out of one particular passenger aboard the Lloyd Triestino liner Galileo after it docked at Fremantle following a voyage from Europe. The reporter had spotted a name he knew on the ship’s passenger list – Paul Brickhill. Fifty-two-year-old Brickhill, with receding hairline and gaunt face, looked tired as the reporter waylaid him with his opening question.
‘Why are you back in Australia, Mr Brickhill?’
‘I’m returning to Sydney to do more writing,’ Brickhill replied, without elaborating.
Brickhill’s hackles were raised when asked why he hadn’t released more books in the past decade and a half.
‘I’ve virtually finished writing books,’ he airily replied. ‘I found I was working for the tax man, the publisher and the accountant. I was getting little for myself.’ He went on to lament the high cost of hardback books, and the high number of paperbacks vying for bookseller attention. ‘I had intended concentrating on writing for films,’ he explained, ‘but the film industry is now sick.’
There was a little bitterness in his tone, as he declared that Hollywood was no longer the centre of the film world, with just a few features being made. Television movies were now all the rage, he growled, and low-budget sex films. He’d been told, no doubt by John Sturges, that big budget action movies like The Great Escape rarely as much as broke even these days.314
Brickhill wasn’t bothered by the press when the ship docked in Adelaide, as it traced the same route around Australia’s southern shores followed by the Orontes and Fairsky in years gone by. When the Galileo docked in Melbourne the following Friday, the local press likewise showed no interest in Brickhill, considering him a Sydney boy. By the same token, several Sydney papers thought his arrival would interest their readers, and sent reporters to meet him. And Brickhill, initially at least, was more amenable than he’d been in Fremantle. He gave Graham Cavanagh of the Australian a lengthy interview.
Cavanagh began by asking where Brickhill was heading, and why, after so many years in ‘non writing exile’.
‘I’m heading for a little pad in Sydney, where I’ll settle down to write three books,’ Brickhill replied. ‘I pulled out of the rat race and I’ve been sitting around doing nothing since. But it’s no kind of life, and so I go back to work.’
‘A comeback?’ The surprised Cavanagh pressed him to describe the trio of books he would work on, sixteen years after his last major work.
Brickhill declared he would pen two books with a war base, one of which would be made into a film by an independent Hollywood film company, and a third nonfiction work, which he wouldn’t go into detail about. The latter was actually an update of The Dam Busters for Pan in London, stimulated by the release earlier that year by the British Government of thousands of pages of previously classified documents relating to 617 Squadron and its top-secret weapons. Although he revealed nothing to Cavanagh about any of his planned projects, the other two war books were Johnny Dodge’s story, on which John Sturges still held a screen rights option, and Wings Day’s story. Both offered rich source material for fiction, and Brickhill was thinking of turning them into novels.
When Cavanagh continued to press him about the reasons
for his long absence from writing, Brickhill trotted out the same excuse he’d used at Fremantle. ‘There was no point in working for the tax collector all the time,’ he flippantly replied, keeping well away from the real reasons, the breakdown of both his mental health and his marriage.
He went on to list all the others who’d made big dents in his literary income – his lawyer, accountant, literary agents, friends and relatives – before complaining about all the approaches for money he’d received over the years. ‘I just got sick of all the bums and the bludgers that gathered around.’ He recalled a year when his accountant had told him he’d earned a quarter of a million dollars. ‘Christ!’ he’d thought at the time. ‘The trouble that’s coming out of this.’
Now that he’d uncorked his frustrations by letting fly at all who thought he was rich, he vented against those who thought that writing a bestselling book was easy. He couldn’t imagine anyone holding down a full-time job and writing a book. There would not be any mental energy left for creativity, he said. And if there was, it would be destroyed by the demands of a man’s wife and children. He returned to his hobby horse that too many books were being published, before the reporter’s apparent condescension had him reminding Cavanagh that he had sold more than five million books in seventeen languages, and sold more hardbacks than Homer.
Brickhill added that his novel, The Deadline, had been published seven years back, so the last decade had not been entirely wasted. When Cavanagh responded that he’d never heard of that book, Brickhill dismissed it as ‘a lesser work’, and changed the subject. Cavanagh would mention Brickhill’s lone novel in his subsequent article, but would get its title wrong, calling it The Dead Lion. To Brickhill, it had been more of a dead squib.315
The interview with Cavanagh had ruffled Brickhill’s feathers. When he was shortly after tackled by a reporter from Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, he was like a bear with a sore head. The exchange would stimulate an article describing him as ‘kicking out at everything’. According to the Tele’s reporter, who exhibited a turn of phrase which emulated Brickhill at his best, the author ‘approached his topics like an advancing circular saw’.
Brickhill allegedly said that: sex films were out – which contrasted with his statement at Fremantle that they were in; that Australia was dull and insignificant; that Hollywood was finished, but Australia could not hope to attract filmmakers. And he was quoted as saying, ‘I loathe writing war novels, but for one I am committed to Hollywood.’ In fact, he was hoping for the Dodge movie to go ahead so his novel could ride on the back of it. ‘And the other is something I have wanted to get off my chest for some time.’ This would be his answer to the Sydney Smith book that had wrecked his earlier plans for a Wings Day movie.316
The ship sailed on. By the time the Galileo terminated its voyage in Sydney, the far from complimentary Daily Telegraph article had appeared. A reporter from the Sydney Morning Herald, now a stable mate of Brickhill’s old paper the Sun, ambushed Brickhill as he landed, with orders from his news editor to get a quote from the author from some fresh angle.
In answering the stock question about his reason for returning to Australia, Brickhill made his first mention of Tim, now fifteen, and twelve-year-old Tempe, with the paper reporting the following Monday: ‘He will visit his two children and start work on two novels.’ The brief article would be headlined ‘Author Hits Textbooks’. After the reporter sought comment from him on the state of school textbooks, Brickhill observed that the Department of Education should employ ‘rewrite men’ to edit back the turgid prose in textbooks and inject a touch of humour.317
Brickhill then retreated to his Balmoral Beach apartment, opening it up for the first time in more than two years and letting the sea air and sunlight flood in. Setting his typewriter on the table and unpacking the notes he’d compiled after going through the declassified 617 Squadron material in London, he set to work on the rewrite of The Dam Busters.
Privately, Brickhill conceded that his return had brought him back to Australia for good. In the new year he applied to the Australian Government’s Repatriation Department for treatment for ailments including what today would almost certainly be diagnosed as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, stemming from his war service. In 1970, too, Brickhill finally registered to vote in Australian elections; another acknowledgement, to himself and the world, that he was home to stay.
He would still make the occasional overseas jaunt. His return by air from a trip to Hong Kong attracted snapping newspaper photographers at Sydney Airport when they spotted him sporting a huge black eye. He told the press he’d scored the ‘shiner’ after a fall while rushing to catch Hong Kong’s Star Ferry. Those who knew him intimately would suspect the fall had more to do with his heavy drinking.
No longer could he dash off a manuscript in a few months. For a year and a half following his 1969 return to Sydney, Brickhill laboured over his rewrite of The Dam Busters. Still hooked on booze and sleeping-draughts, he found it a monumental struggle, but he rated himself the kind of person who never gave up. By the time he completed the task, he’d deftly inserted another 12,000 words into The Dam Busters. In early 1971, he completed correcting proofs of the new edition.
Pan’s British editors subsequently disappointed him by deleting the photograph of 617 Squadron’s Australians included in the original edition, and by dedicating a page to photographs of British COs of the wartime squadron, but leaving out Micky Martin, the unit’s Australian commander. This new edition of The Dam Busters would sell well, but would never achieve the sales figures of the original.
As for the two novels Brickhill had referred to in December 1969, he continued for several years to hold hopes of turning The Artful Dodger into a novel, and of novelising the Wings Day screenplay. John Sturges commissioned Stirling Silliphant to write eight screenplay drafts, briefing the screenwriter to have Johnny Dodge escape from Stalag Luft 3 and combine with the French Resistance to fight the Nazis. He also asked for loads of railroad action, having purchased a vintage steam locomotive. Retitling it The Yards at Essendorf, Silliphant set the story in European railway marshalling yards, and with each draft it had less and less to do with the true story Brickhill had committed to paper.
Unhappy with Silliphant’s efforts, Sturges passed the project to TV dramatist Mayo Simon, asking for a climactic scene where two locomotives crashed headlong into each other. Mayo worked on it for another year before the project was shelved in 1970, with Silliphant blaming its failure on Sturges, who he thought was diverted by his passion for building a luxury yacht at the time. Sturges would blame both scriptwriters for failing to deliver a winning screenplay, plus lack of studio interest in another grand-scale war movie.
Without the incentive of the movie going ahead, Brickhill couldn’t bring himself to tackle the Johnny Dodge novel, let alone start the Wings Day book. Increasingly, he cut himself off from most old friends, and had nothing to do with the Australian Society of Authors, which Morris West had helped found in 1964, serving as its inaugural vice-president, or with any other organisation. Brickhill’s early meteoric success and subsequent lack of productivity were making him feel a has-been, and a bit of a literary fraud. He’d come to find the whole business of being a successful author and public figure a charade.318
West was again living overseas by the time Brickhill resumed residency at Balmoral, but another mate, Jon Cleary, returned to live in Australia in the 1970s, building a house on a block at Kirribilli opposite the new Sydney Opera House, only ten minutes by car from Brickhill. Cleary and others urged Brickhill to get on with his planned novels.
‘Just sit down to the typewriter and write,’ they said. ‘It’ll come.’319
It didn’t come. And, irritated by his friends’ seeming lack of understanding, Brickhill became a veritable hermit. No longer did he communicate with writing or air-force chums abroad. In the Balmoral apartment, years of unanswered letters gathered dust in ever-growing piles. Brickhill ignored invitations to Stal
ag Luft 3 reunions. Others, including Wings Day, Jerry Sage and Wally Floody, thrived on these get-togethers. At the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Great Escape held in London in 1969, which Brickhill didn’t attend even though he was in England that year, Day and Sage had recited the Jabberwocky together, as they had in North Compound’s theatre in 1943. They’d then proceeded to get very drunk, doing Cossack dances with arms around each other’s shoulders.
Brickhill now passed his days swimming at the beach on his doorstep and putting in two-mile walks around the hilly Balmoral area. His flat was equipped with radio and TV, but he rarely turned them on, preferring to read newspapers and magazines for news on current affairs – on which he held strong opinions, even though he had hardly anyone to share them with.
He closely followed the career of his childhood friend Peter Finch, whom he still credited with starting him down the road to success as a writer. In many an interview over the years, Finch spoke with affection of growing up in Sydney, mentioning Norman Johnson, Donald Friend and others who had figured in his life back then. But never once did he mention Brickhill. That didn’t seem to bother Brickhill, or diminish his regard for his childhood mate.
By 1976, Finch had garnered five BAFTA awards in Britain as best actor in various films, winning the latest for Network, in which he played the role of demented news anchor Howard Beale, delivering the epic line, ‘I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!’ He won the best actor Golden Globe award that year for the same role, and was nominated for an Academy Award. Finch had been nominated for an Oscar before, but he was a hot favourite this time, despite his competition including Robert De Niro for the lead role in Taxi.
On 13 January, in Los Angeles where he lived, Finch taped a studio interview with Johnny Carson for that night’s Tonight Show on NBC. The following morning, due to appear live on ABC’s Good Morning America, he rose early, and walked to the Beverly Hills Hotel to meet director Sidney Lumet, a fellow GMA guest. There, sitting in a chair in the hotel’s lobby, Finch suffered a heart attack. Rushed by ambulance to the University of California hospital, he was declared dead at 10.19 am. In the Academy Awards ceremony on 28 March, Finch was awarded the best actor Oscar for his Network performance, becoming the first actor to receive the award posthumously.
The Hero Maker Page 30
