by Peter Hall
I gathered an amazing cast for The Rope Dancers: Siobhan McKenna, Art Carney, Joan Blondell and Theodore Bikel. Best of all, Boris Aronson, a superb artist with a wily understanding of Broadway, agreed to be the designer. He was an immigrant Jew from Russia whose expressionistic work created poetry out of ordinariness. He made haunted landscapes of New York, so that I looked at the city with new eyes. I learnt avidly from him. Three years later, I brought him to Stratford to design Coriolanus.
I designed my own lighting for The Rope Dancers – a difficult and time-consuming job. I had learnt the technique from experience; having always done my own lighting as a matter of course. Since Peter Brook started the fashion, it had become almost a badge of a director’s virility. Boris sat with me during all the long hours in which I focused and set the lights. He was watching over the look of his set no doubt, but he was also getting the best out of me. He encouraged me to be confident about colour and shape and shadow. He was friend and taskmaster.
It took me many years to realise that to spend forty-eight hours without going to bed (as I did once as a production reached the lighting stage) is not a good use of a director’s energies. He should be nursing his actors rather than playing with the lamps. But I am glad I had ten years of lighting my own productions; it helped me understand space in the theatre.
After a couple of weeks in New York, Leslie and I flew to Key West to stay with Tennessee Williams. I was going to direct Camino Real in London and I jumped at the chance to spend some time with him.
Tennessee had a house in New Orleans in which he lived fitfully; but Key West was home to him. He loved the climate, the swimming and, most of all, I suspect, the rather run-down unfashionable air. It was a place for outsiders, and already a colony for homosexuals. This was never even mentioned, because nobody then would think of being that up-front. But there was an atmosphere of covert naughtiness – as if a wicked party was just about to begin. Both Leslie and I found it very congenial. Nonetheless, as a young married couple expecting a baby, we felt like visitors from another world.
After an early start, Tennessee tapped away through each morning on his faithful old typewriter, no matter what. He wrote every day of his life. Then, before lunch, he swam up and down his pool, a porpoise with a serious purpose. After that, he felt free to indulge in drink and fun and friends for the rest of the day. Or he might suddenly disappear. He was always on the move, taking a plane here or there, sometimes to the most outlandish places. He believed that a moving target was less likely to be hit. Whenever he was in London, he would leave me word to phone him at Claridge’s or the Savoy or Brown’s; but by the time I called back he was usually gone – to Tokyo or Rome or Mexico. The last time I tried to return his call was only a few years ago. He was already back in New York, lying dead in a hotel room, asphyxiated by a bottle cap.
Tennessee was a shrewd and generous man, with an anarchic sense of humour. He could be silent for long periods, with no unease. He might be busy thinking about something; or he might be watching, carefully listening. Then, suddenly, he would decide to take part and the wit would flow and the laughter spurt out of him. He often found things very funny which others found only mildly amusing. He saw comedy in the blackest things. He laughed his way through Maggie Smith’s first night of Hedda Gabler at the National, and though this thoroughly disconcerted the actors and the audience I think Ibsen would have approved.
I tried hard, but didn’t get much out of him about Camino Real. He didn’t like talking about his plays – not in theory. He was a practical man, and he could only be illuminating about them once they were on the stage. So Leslie and I rested and sunned ourselves and got to know his companion, Frank Merlo, a Sicilian from New York. He was the love of Tennessee’s life, and cared for him until Frank’s tragic death in the early Sixties. I don’t think Tennessee ever fully recovered from the loss. He called him the Little Horse because he always flashed an infectious toothy grin. Loving Frank was the inspiration behind Tennessee’s comic masterpiece, The Rose Tattoo. It is his only play with a happy ending.
Leslie and I sailed sedately back to England on one of the great old liners, the America. It was like being locked up for five days in a not very good hotel that smelled of oil and the sea. I didn’t care for it. You could never get away from the people; nor from the enforced camaraderie of the Captain’s table. Leslie suffered as the movie star who was always watched and always whispered about. It was a curse to be perpetually on show. She often longed to be nobody.
Christopher was born between the technical rehearsal and the first dress rehearsal of Camino Real. Eighteen months later, Jennifer joined him. We showed off our children to the Caron family on frequent trips to Paris.
I did more and more productions: Peggy Ashcroft in Cymbeline; Kim Stanley in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; Dorothy Tutin and Geraldine McEwan in Twelfth Night. Leslie continued her spectacular progress as an MGM star. She made Gigi as a musical, and with all this work came new acquaintances.
One of them, Cecil Beaton, who designed Gigi, I loved for his constantly surprising taste and equally surprising tongue. Some years later I tried to get him to design a production, a Shakespeare comedy. But it was almost impossible to collaborate with him; the ability to change simply wasn’t there; you had to accept what he did. He wanted a series of pictorial sets that would have taken for ever to change and would have ruined the rhythm of the play. I wanted a set that allowed scene to follow scene in quick contrasting articulation. He wouldn’t bend; neither would I.
Despite this, we remained friends. He was not friends with everybody though. I remember one night working on the model with him at my house when the doorbell rang. I told him it was Peter Brook and his wife, Natasha, come for dinner. Without a word, Cecil rushed down into the basement and hid under the stairs. He waved at me to let the Brooks in. But once they were in the drawing room he made a secret, speedy exit out into the night. He explained later that he was not talking to Peter Brook …
Gigi’s first day of shooting was in Paris, in the Bois de Boulogne. Maurice Chevalier and Hermione Gingold were out for a carriage ride among the spreading trees. I leant against one of the trees to watch. It gave under my weight because it was false. The Bois had been replanted here and there so that the trees could be adequately ‘dressed’ to camera. The pictorial sense of Gigi’s director, Vincent Minelli, moved trees as well as actors.
He was a man I immediately liked and a director whose political acumen I learnt to respect. His reputation was as a great designer of images. But to survive in the dream factory of Hollywood as he did, while passing some highly individual work through its sausage machine, takes a very shrewd operator.
Leslie and I went to Hollywood. It was completely unlike the place I had imagined. There was a stink of exhaust fumes and the endless prospect of a geometric wasteland, the houses and architecture often less realistic than the back lot of the nearby movie studio. There was no indigenous style. It seemed you could have whatever kind of house you wanted: French château, Elizabethan Tudor, Mexican ranch, Swiss chalet, even Japanese. They were all built of concrete and then faced with the required decor.
Leslie hired a black, open-topped Thunderbird and we drove from Sunset Strip all the way to the ocean. I enjoyed the sky, the light, the sun, the sunsets. I enjoyed, too, my first encounter with Japanese and South Sea Island food. But I couldn’t stand the prodigal use of land, the wasted space and the endless parking lots. The motor car was more important than the person, nobody walked and there was no street life. Hardly anything man-made was beautiful; nothing was old. Nostalgia is a dangerous drug; society must renew itself, and art is born out of change. But our heritage needs to be preserved as a counterbalance to our ruthless pursuit of the new. Very little would be lost if most of Los Angeles were dismantled. Indeed, it might be good to start again. I dreamt, on that first visit, of what it must have been like when the early settlers arrived – a miraculous valley by the sea. Or when those pioneer movie-makers s
et up their tripods for the first time in the everlasting sun.
Whenever Leslie’s film work took her to Hollywood in the late Fifties, which was quite often, I joined her between plays. Our lives proceeded, marked by a series of agonising separations. We both felt guilty and defensive about the work that kept us away from each other. The emotional and sexual agonies were almost too much to bear. Our two beautiful children played on, looked after by their French nanny.
In Hollywood, we generally stayed at the Château Marmont on Sunset Strip. It was a large tumbledown building, and the fashionable place in those days for cool people from the east coast and Europe. There was always a gathering of disaffected actors and writers who complained edgily while lounging by the pool. The whole place was tacky and tawdry. Outside, down the drive, an enormous Thirties bathing belle in gleaming plaster held a ball above her head while she revolved round and round, day and night. I think she was advertising laxatives. One of Christopher’s first pleasures as a baby was to gaze up entranced at this slowly turning monster. Perhaps she was as potent to him as the Ovaltine lady had been to me.
While Leslie was filming, I was made much of, as the husband of a famous movie star, and as a young director known to have earned his spurs in London. One day I was given lunch in MGM’s executive restaurant by Arthur Freed, the producer of many immortal Hollywood musicals, among them An American in Paris, Gigi and Singing in the Rain. He had started life as a lyricist in Tin Pan Alley and having written the lyrics for the song Singing in the Rain had used it to great effect in no fewer than three Hollywood musicals.
Arthur was a man of awesome silences. I never heard him express an opinion which helped me understand how he had created such wonderfully exhilarating and popular movies. Keeping silent at a meal clearly gave him no embarrassment, no feeling he should be making social chat. Everybody else talked and talked in compensation. Arthur sat in silence while their voices became shrill.
Before lunch, and before we entered the MGM sanctum, Arthur warned me not to mention last night’s or indeed any other night’s television. I said I wouldn’t; I had not been watching television. He showed relief at this. Few people in the movie business in America at that time admitted that TV existed, it was the secret spectre stalking the great studios. Canute-like, the executives tried to outface the tide.
I met many Hollywood legends with Leslie. Fred Astaire was charming, yet his charm was clearly a protective mask that allowed him to be secret and detached. Gene Kelly was exuberant and noisy but, like many veterans in show business, only really warmed up when the subject was himself. By the side of Vincent Minelli’s swimming pool I made friends with a scrawny eleven-year-old with enormous teeth-braces: Liza. I did not meet her mother, Judy Garland, until my later New York days.
Any student of drama should, I think, study how Garland sings. She could turn a banal lyric into a little one-act drama that expressed a truth about human emotions. She also had beautiful diction, a model for all singers. She and Frank Sinatra leave a body of work in their songs which is without falseness or striving for effect, and which contains some of the truest acting of the twentieth century.
Stan Laurel was eager for visitors. He was living in a modest little flat by the ocean, crammed with pictures and cuttings and awards. He was old and felt he had been forgotten. We tried to reassure him; a sad and anxious little Englishman.
We spent several evenings with Alfred Hitchcock and found him almost as silent as Arthur Freed and slightly more inscrutable. He seemed not to approve of anything or anybody.
I have known two really great film directors – men who made something out of nothing, true creators who wrote with the camera: Orson Welles and Jean Renoir. Welles I met on a few uproarious occasions and was always entranced by his performance (for performance it was) as a roguish mountebank. But I did not know him well. Jean Renoir became a friend. Leslie had acted in a play for him in Paris in the early Fifties, and he was clearly besotted with her, mainly, I think, because she looked so astonishingly like the children in many of his father’s paintings.
When I met Jean, he was a vigorous man in his sixties with the sly, marmoset face of a French peasant. To be with him was like an expedition to the French countryside for a very good lunch. There were roars of laughter at unexpected jokes; then sudden changes into seriousness. He talked often and lovingly of ‘mon père’ and this blew my mind as surely as many years later hearing Wolfgang Wagner talk about ‘mein Grossvater’.
Jean and his wife came to stay with us when Leslie and I were living in Stratford. We suggested he might like to see a play. He shied like a startled horse. Many directors don’t much enjoy going to the theatre or seeing other people’s movies. Orson Welles always said that he never saw other people’s work because he wanted to preserve his innocence. Jean, I think, preferred living and talking, drinking and doing, to watching the fantasies of others. Nevertheless, I persuaded him into the car and slipped him into the theatre to stand – just for a moment – at the back of the stalls. On stage was a girl like a rush of sunlight. After a short time I took his arm to show him the way out, but he resisted and stayed, his eyes alight. He was watching the twenty-four-year-old Vanessa Redgrave play Rosalind, her first unqualified triumph.
During the years before his death, Jean lived mainly in Hollywood. His son was a cameraman there, and Jean’s sense of family was at the centre of his being. He was still desperate to make films and always bubbling with new ideas. But he had gone out of fashion, and in the eyes of Hollywood was no longer ‘hot’. There is of course an endless string of geniuses that the movie capital undervalued, the refugees from Germany – Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Arnold Schoenberg and Bertolt Brecht – among them. Jean Renoir was a master of the town’s very own medium: film. But it still ignored him. It can be a shameful place, and its spectacular wins should not blind people to the fact that it gambles and wastes talent as if it were money in the fruit machines of Las Vegas.
I met Buster Keaton briefly. I admire him above all the stars of the silent cinema, both as director and actor. His comedy deals honestly with pain and danger, whereas Chaplin’s is often manipulative and sentimental. It is curious that Chaplin was for a time the most famous man in the world and became a myth, while Keaton, the complex and contradictory artist, never reached the same level of popularity. When I saw Keaton he was a dried-out drunk. He was also hard-up, because he had not been as clever with his money as Chaplin. I wished I hadn’t met him. There was almost nothing to meet.
I had the same disillusionment once in the fine old Savoy Grill, now ruinously modernised. I was lunching with Laurence Olivier; he wanted to talk about the coming of the National Theatre. He suddenly waved at a figure finishing his lunch alone across the room: ‘It’s Charlie.’ ‘Charlie who?’ I asked. ‘Charlie Chaplin. Do you know him?’ enquired Larry. I said I didn’t. So I found myself in my late twenties sitting at a table having after-lunch drinks with two of the legends of my lifetime. I looked from one to the other with awe and admiration. They then proceeded to out-boast each other about their possessions, lifestyles, houses, coming projects and conquests. They were like a couple of competitive schoolboys.
Talent is often richer and more interesting than the people who possess it. ‘Never trust the artist, trust the tale’ said D. H. Lawrence. It’s difficult, in any case, if you are by nature a hero-worshipper, to know how to come face to face with your hero. You should perhaps always keep your distance and worship from afar. Otherwise, what happens? To ask penetrating questions, or difficult questions, is pretentious and presumptuous. So you stare and make small talk. Embarrassed by the unnaturalness of the situation, the hero, on his part, often defends himself by trying to live up to his reputation and over-acting. Or he says nothing and is disappointing.
Edward Gordon Craig is a special hero of mine. His book On the Art of the Theatre has had a lasting effect on the way I have tried to go about my work. In old age, he lived in the South of France, to all intents and
purposes a recluse. But Peter Brook used to visit him and, in the early Sixties, said that Craig, who kept up with the theatre by reading all the latest newspapers and magazines, would like to meet me. I agonised, then made an excuse. I was frightened to meet another legend. I wish now I had taken the risk.
My longest period in Hollywood was for some eight weeks when Leslie was making The Man Who Understood Women with Henry Fonda. While there, I prepared productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Coriolanus which I was to stage in 1959 for Stratford’s 100th season, Glen Byam Shaw’s last as the theatre’s director.
This Hollywood visit was twice blessed. It gave me time to work on the texts of the two plays; it also gave me an opportunity to talk to my two stars. Charles Laughton was to play Bottom, and Laurence Olivier was to play Coriolanus – and both actors were at Universal Studios filming Spartacus.
Laughton lived up on the Hollywood hills in an elegant mansion. Around his swimming pool was a large collection of pre-Columbian statuary – bulbous stones with vast faces all looking rather like their proud owner. He had just turned sixty, and was an unhealthy hulk of a man, quick of speech and of eye. His mind worked at a furious speed, only barely hiding the anxieties below the surface. He had been away from the English classical theatre since the mid Thirties. His performances as Angelo and as Macbeth at the Old Vic had received the kind of enraged comments that critics reserve for actors who, like the young Olivier, Burton or David Warner, remake the classical mould.
Laughton constantly justified Hollywood to me. He said that it had brought entertainment and drama to a whole new world of people, and I believed him. But he also maintained that had Shakespeare been alive today Shakespeare would have been working in Hollywood. Of that I wasn’t so sure.
He was obsessed by Olivier, at that time the unquestioned monarch of the British theatre. His feeling had added resonance because Charlie was of course an international film star and Larry, despite all his charisma and the legend that glowed around him, was not – not quite. Charlie couldn’t help thinking of the coming Stratford season as his return to his rightful place at the head of the English classical theatre. He thought this particularly since he was leading the company alongside Olivier, playing King Lear as well as Bottom.
