The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories From My Life

by John le Carré

  We are in a windswept beach house in Scheveningen, on the Dutch coast. It’s the last day of shooting The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. It’s a tight indoor set. Leamas is negotiating his own destruction by agreeing to cross into East Germany and betray precious secrets to his country’s enemies. I am hovering somewhere behind Oswald Morris and Martin Ritt, doing my best not to get in the way. The tension between Burton and Ritt is palpable. Ritt’s commands are terse and monosyllabic. Burton barely responds. As always in close scenes like these, film actors speak so quietly and casually that they seem to the uninitiated to be rehearsing rather than acting. So it comes as a surprise to me when Ritt says ‘wrap’ and the scene is over.

  But it isn’t over. An expectant silence settles, as if everyone but me knows what’s about to happen. Then Ritt, who after all is a substantial actor in his own right and knows a thing or two about timing, delivers the speech I believe he has been saving up for this moment:

  ‘Richard, I’ve had the last good lay in an old whore, and it had to be in front of the mirror.’

  True? Fair?

  Not true, not by a long way, and not at all fair. Richard Burton was a literate, serious artist, a self-educated polymath with appetites and flaws that in one way or another we all share. If he was the prisoner of his own weaknesses, the dash of rectifying Welsh puritanism in him was not a hundred miles from Ritt’s. He was irreverent, mischievous, generous-hearted but necessarily manipulative. For the very celebrated, being manipulative goes with the territory. I never knew him in his quieter hours, but wish I had. He was a superb Alec Leamas, and in a different year his performance might have earned him the Oscar that eluded him all his life. The film was grim and black-and-white. That wasn’t what we were wearing in 1965.

  If either the director or his actor had been less, then perhaps the film also would have been less. I suppose at the time, I felt more protective of the podgy, stalwart and embittered Ritt than of the flamboyant and unpredictable Burton. A director carries the whole burden of the film on his back, and that has to include the idiosyncrasies of his star. Sometimes I had the feeling that Burton was going out of his way to belittle Ritt, but in the end I guess they were pretty evenly matched. And Ritt surely had the last word. He was a brilliant and impassioned director whose righteous anger could never be stilled.

  29

  Alec Guinness

  Alec Guinness died with his customary discretion. He had written to me a week before his death expressing concern about his wife Merula’s illness. Typically he had scarcely mentioned his own.

  You could never tell Alec how great he was, of course. If you were fool enough to try, you got the hairy eyeball. But in 1994, to celebrate his eightieth, a successful clandestine operation mounted by the publisher Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson produced a handsome bound volume called ‘Alec’, which was given to him for his birthday. It contained memoirs, poems, simple expressions of affection and thanks, mostly from old friends. I wasn’t there to see the presentation, but I’m sure Alec was suitably grumpy about receiving it. But perhaps he was also a little pleased, if only because he cherished friendship as deeply as he loathed praise, and here at least was a bunch of his friends under one cover.

  By comparison with most of the contributors to the presentation volume, I was a latecomer to Alec’s life, but we had worked closely together on and off for five years or so, and we had remained agreeably in touch ever since. I was always proud of our relationship, but my proudest moment came when he selected the piece I had written for his eightieth birthday as a preface to his last volume of reminiscences.

  Alec was adamant that he wished no memorial service, no posthumous gathering of friends, no emotional outpourings. But I have the excuse of knowing that this little portrait was one that this immensely private man was content to offer the world.

  What follows is taken in part from my preface to his autobiographical memoir, with a few afterthoughts:

  He is not a comfortable companion. Why should he be? The watching child inside this eighty-year-old man has still found no safe harbours or easy answers. The deprivals and humiliations of three-quarters of a century ago are unresolved. It is as though he were still striving to appease the adult world about him; to winkle love from it, to beg its smile, to deflect or harness its monstrosity.

  But he loathes its flattery, and mistrusts its praise. He is as wary as children learn to be. He gives his trust slowly, and with the greatest care. And he is ready any time to take it back. If you are incurably fond of him, as I am, you do best to keep that fact to yourself.

  Form is desperately important to him. As someone all too familiar with chaos, he treasures good manners and good order. He inclines gratefully to the good-looking, but also loves clowns, apes and quirkish figures in the street, gazing on them as if they were his natural allies.

  Day and night he studies and stores away the mannerisms of the adult enemy, moulds his own face, voice and body into countless versions of us, while he simultaneously explores the possibilities of his own nature – do you like me better so? – or so? – or so? – ad infinitum. When he is composing character, he steals shamelessly from those around him.

  Watching him putting on an identity is like watching a man set out on a mission into enemy territory. Is the disguise right for him? (Him being himself in his new persona.) Are his spectacles right? – No, let’s try those. His shoes, are they too good, too new, will they give him away? And this walk, this thing he does with his knee, this glance, this posture – not too much, you think? And if he looks like a native, will he speak like one – does he master the vernacular?

  And when the show is over, or the day’s shoot, and he is once more Alec – the fluid face shiny from the makeup, the small cigar trembling slightly in the thick hand – you can’t help feeling what a dull world he has come back to after all the adventures he has had out there.

  He may be a solitary, but the former naval officer also loves to be part of a team. He wishes nothing better than to be well led, able to respect the meaning of his orders and the quality of his comrades. Acting with them, he knows their lines as well as he knows his own. Beyond all self-consideration, it is the collective illusion that he treasures most, called otherwise The Show: that precious other world where life has meaning, form and resolution, and events proceed according to written rules.

  Working on scripts with him is what Americans call a learning experience. One scene may go through a dozen versions before he is persuaded by it. Another, for no reason, is nodded through without debate. It’s only later, when you see what he has decided to do with it, that you discover why.

  The disciplines he imposes on himself are rigorous, and he expects no less of others. I was present once when an actor who has since become teetotal turned up drunk for filming – not least because he was terrified of acting opposite Guinness. The offence, in Alec’s eyes, was absolute: the poor man might as well have gone to sleep on sentry duty. But ten minutes later Alec’s anger had given way to an almost desperate kindliness. The next day’s shoot went like a dream.

  Ask Alec to dinner, he will be on your doorstep brushed and polished while the clock is still chiming the appointed time, never mind the blizzard that has brought London to a standstill. If you are his guest – a more likely eventuality, since he is a compulsively generous host – then a postcard, in neat and beautiful handwriting sinking gracefully to the south-east, will confirm the arrangement you made on the telephone the day before.

  And you will do well to repay him the courtesy of his punctuality. Your gestures matter very much to him. They are a mandatory part of life’s script, they are what distinguishes us from the indignity and disorder of his wretched early years.

  But God forbid that I should paint him as a stern man.

  Alec’s bubbling laughter and good fellowship, when they come, are all the more miraculous for the uncertain weather that preceded them. Th
e sudden beam of pleasure, the marvellously paced anecdotes, the flashes of physical and vocal mimicry, the mischievous dolphin smile that spreads and flits away, are all before me as I write. Watch him in the company of fellow actors of every age and provenance, and you see him settle to them like a man who has found a favourite fireside. The new never shocks him. He loves to discover young talent and give it a helping hand along the hard road he has trodden.

  And he reads.

  Some actors, offered work, first count their lines to calculate the importance of the part. Alec is as far removed from them as it is possible to be. No film director, producer or screenwriter of my acquaintance has a better eye for structure and dialogue, or for that extra something that he is perennially on the scent of: the McGuffin, the bit of magic that lifts a piece out of the common ruck.

  Alec’s career is studded with brilliant and unlikely roles. The talent that chose them was as inspired as the talent that performed them. I have heard too – is it one of Alec’s well-kept secrets? – that his wife Merula has much influence on his selections. I would not be in the least surprised. She is a wise and quiet woman, and a most gentle artist, and she sees a long way.

  What joins us, then, those of us who have been lucky enough to share a mile or two of Alec’s long life? I suspect, a constant bewilderment about who to be for him. You want to show him your love, but you want also to give him the space he clearly needs. His talent is so near the surface that your immediate instinct is to protect it from the buffetings of daily life. But then he can manage quite nicely by himself, thank you.

  So we become like the rest of his great audience: frustrated givers, never able to express our gratitude, reconciled to being the beneficiaries of the genius he so resolutely refuses to acknowledge.

  It is lunchtime on the top floor of the BBC, one summer’s day in 1979. The cast, crew, producers, director and writer of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy are gathered in their best suits, sipping at their warm white wine, one glass each, before proceeding to the dining room where a celebratory feast of cold chicken awaits them.

  But there is a small delay. The gong has sounded, the BBC’s barons are on parade. The writer, producers and director have long been present and correct. The barons are sticklers for time. The cast too has arrived early and Alec, as ever, earlier still. But where, oh where, is Bernard Hepton, our leading supporting actor, our Toby Esterhase?

  As our glasses of wine get warmer, all eyes gravitate towards the double doors. Is Bernard ill? Has he forgotten? Is he sulking? It is rumoured there was friction on set between Alec and Bernard.

  The doors part. With studious unconcern, Bernard makes his entrance, dressed not in the dreary greys and navy blues of the rest of us, but in a three-piece suit of shrill green check, set off by orange patent shoes.

  As he advances smiling into the room, the melting voice of George Smiley rings out in welcome:

  ‘Oh, Bernard. You came as a frog.’

  30

  Lost masterpieces

  One day, I trust, it will be recognized that the best films of my work were the ones that were never made.

  In 1965, the year in which the movie of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was released, I was persuaded by my British publisher to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair, which I dreaded, to publicize a novel of which I had low expectations, and generally make myself agreeable and interesting to the media. Sick of the sound of my own voice – and of being passed around foreign journalists like a bag of goods – I retreated to my suite in the Frankfurter Hof to sulk.

  And that was what I was doing one late afternoon when my house phone rang and a woman’s voice, speaking a husky, accented English, advised me that Fritz Lang was in the lobby and wished to see me, and would I please come down?

  The summons did not impress me. Langs in Germany are two-a-penny, Fritzes also. Was this the same odious literary gossip writer I had fended off earlier in the day? I suspected it was, and using a woman as his lure. I asked her the nature of Mr Lang’s business.

  ‘Fritz Lang, the film director,’ she corrected me reprovingly, ‘he wishes to discuss a proposition with you.’

  If she had told me Goethe was waiting in the lobby, my reaction would not have been much different. When I was studying German in Bern in the late forties, we students had passed whole nights debating the genius of Fritz Lang, the great film director of the Weimar years.

  We knew his life too, to a point: an Austrian-born Jew brought up as a Catholic, three times wounded fighting for Austria in the First World War, and thereafter in quick order actor, writer and expressionist director in the glory days of Ufa, the fabled Berlin film production company of the twenties. As students, we had earnestly discussed such expressionist classics as Metropolis, had sat through five hours of Die Nibelungen and four hours of Dr Mabuse the Gambler. Probably because it suited me to think of crooks as heroes, I had a particular affinity for M, in which Peter Lorre plays a child murderer who is hunted down by the criminal underworld.

  But after 1933? Lang? Thirty years on? I had read that he had gone on to make movies in Hollywood, but I didn’t remember seeing any. For me he was Weimar Man, and that was it. To be truthful, I didn’t know he was still alive. And I still thought that the phone call might be a hoax.

  ‘So you’re telling me that Dr Mabuse is downstairs?’ I ask the beguiling female voice, with what I hope is haughty scepticism.

  ‘It is Mr Fritz Lang the film director and he wishes a positive discussion with you,’ she repeats, not giving an inch.

  If it’s the real Lang, he’ll be wearing the eye-patch, I tell myself as I pull on a clean shirt and select a tie.

  He was wearing the eye-patch. He was also wearing spectacles, which confused me: why two lenses for one eye? He was a heavy, daunting man with a face made in muscular curves. A fighter’s jutting jaw, a not-very-nice smile. A tall grey hat, with a brim that left his good eye in shadow from the overhead light. Seated like an old pirate, bolt upright on his hotel chair. Head tilted back, listening to something he’s not sure he likes. Powerful hands clenched over the handle of a walking stick wedged between his knees. This was the man, as legend had it, who, when he was directing M, threw Peter Lorre down a flight of stairs in a fit of creative passion.

  The husky-voiced woman I had spoken to sat beside him and I shall never know whether she was his mistress, his new young wife or his business manager. She was closer to my age than his, and clearly determined that our conversation should be a success. She ordered English tea and asked me whether I was enjoying the book fair. I lied and said very much. Lang went on smiling grimly into the distance. When we stopped talking our banalities, he left us to our silence for a while, until:

  ‘I want to make a movie of your little book A Murder of Quality,’ he announced in a declamatory German-American, laying a heavy hand on my forearm and keeping it there. ‘You come to California. We make a script together, we make a movie. You wanna do that?’

  ‘Little book’ about summed it up, I reflected as I came to my senses. I had written it in a few weeks soon after I arrived at the British Embassy in Bonn. The story tells of a public school master on the point of retirement who murders his own pupil in order to cover up a previous crime. George Smiley, summoned to the rescue, unmasks him. And now I came to think about it, I could imagine that, for all its shortcomings, it might indeed attract the director of M. The only problem was George Smiley. Under the terms of a film deal I should not have signed, he was under contract to a major film studio. Lang was undeterred.

  ‘Listen, I know those people. They’re my friends. Maybe we let them finance the movie. That’s a good deal for a studio. They own your character, so they get to make a movie about him. That’s good business for them. You like California?’

  I like California very much.

  ‘You come to California. We work together, we make a script, we make a movie. Black-and-w
hite, like your Spy Who Came in. You got a problem with black-and-white?’

  No problem at all.

  ‘You got a movie agent?’

  I name my movie agent.

  ‘Listen, I made that guy’s career for him. I talk to your agent, we make a deal, after Christmas we settle down in California, write a script. After Christmas good for you?’ – still smiling ahead of him, still with his hand anchored on my forearm.

  After Christmas suits me fine.

  By now I’ve noticed how the woman at his side lightly guides his free hand whenever he reaches forward for his cup. He takes a sip of tea. With her guidance he sets the cup down. He returns the hand to the crook of the walking stick. He reaches for his cup, and she guides his hand back to it.

  I never again heard from Fritz Lang. My film agent said I never would. He made no mention of Lang’s incipient blindness, but the death sentence he uttered was absolute all the same: Fritz Lang wasn’t bankable any more.

  In 1968, my novel A Small Town in Germany briefly inspired Sydney Pollack. Our collaboration, complicated by Sydney’s discovery of the Swiss slopes, had not fulfilled its promise and the company that had bought the original rights had gone out of business, leaving them lost in a legal maze. If I had learned anything at all about the film business, it was never again to allow myself to be swept along by Sydney’s glorious but short-lived bursts of enthusiasm.

  So it was only natural that when twenty years on he called me in the middle of the night and told me at the top of his melodious voice that my new novel The Night Manager would be the inspirational film of his career, I dropped everything and caught the first available flight to New York. This time round, Sydney and I agreed, we were going to be older and wiser. No Swiss villages for us, no tempting snow falls, no Martin Epps, no north face of the Eiger. This time round, Robert Towne himself, in those days the biggest star in the screenwriters’ universe, and surely its most expensive, would write the script for us. Paramount agreed to buy the rights.