by Dirk Bogarde
This was the test. The biggest I had had to face on my own for years. Could I make it? All alone? Would I have lost my touch? Did I remember my French? It was all to be made in the South, only three characters, a not-quite-right script. But it offered me the chance to stand on my own two feet, to work with a brilliant director, and to try, finally, to eradicate the acute distress of the last two films I had made, I thought, for ever. I really didn’t want to end a fair career with a dud routine war epic and a hacked-about movie called Despair. Give it one more try? Just one? I had gingerly inched back to the theatre with the Saki evening, now I must lay old ghosts, try again, see if I could cope.
I bought, for the first time since I burned everything by the pond on the hill, a diary at W.H. Smith’s to record this singular event day by day.
Tuesday, 12th September
Airborne for Paris and the Hotel Lancaster, where we shall have the script conferences, wardrobe fittings, make-up. The first will be enormous, the second easy (I have all my old gear in the baggage compartment), the final nil. I never wear make-up, and as a ‘dying old man’ won’t need to. I’m ready as I am for the camera. Up here, crossing the Channel, I realize, with a start, that this is my first movie for over twelve years. I hadn’t realized it was so long. Supposing I can’t do it now? I may not just be dusty. Merely out of touch, out of date. Have I lost the trick? I’m playing a retired English (useful for my forgotten French) commercial traveller for Yardley’s who has just had a double by-pass. All jolly fun. Most of it will be in French. The fun ends there. Tavernier awaits me for luncheon at the hotel. Maybe I’ve bitten off a bit more than I can, actually, chew. Over Dieppe now. Too late to turn back.
Evening, 12th
Hotel Lancaster
Why did I think that he would look like Truffaut? Neat, agile, dark, intense. Until he arrived at the flat I had this vivid, inaccurate picture of him in my mind. At lunch today he was suddenly very tall, white-haired, eyes laughing behind thick glasses, perfect English and an hysterical laugh. He loves his food and wine. Very much his own master and knows it, expects one to know it too. I do, anyway. We have an instant bonding. My heart soars, fear almost lifts but the not-very-good script remains. A worry. Dinner tonight at Le Val d’Isére.
‘A little late to say you don’t like it! Why?’ Pouring his Sauvignon liberally.
‘Well, Bertrand. It’s a bit, sort of, well … yucky. Sweet. Whimsy. You know?’
‘Not at all. My ex-wife wrote it. She is very clever. Irish. I adore it.’
I mentally ducked, and suggested that we’d all get it right during the playing. Somehow. We went on eating our fruits de mer. Jane Birkin was my ‘daughter’ and Odette Laure, from the theatre, my ‘wife’. They were both adorable. Thank God.
Night, 19th
Hotel Lancaster
Just we three in a small villa in Cinemascope. Rather amazing. They usually use that for battle scenes and disaster movies. Tavernier grins at my surprise, waves hands exuberantly. That is why! He chooses Cinemascope because it will be such a challenge composing three people in such a wide area. ‘Composing for the big screen will mean you will have to be very patient,’ he says. I promise faithfully. This is obviously not going to be small-screen stuff, all of us jammed together in a row. Certainly not television. Tomorrow we leave for Bandol in the South.
The Lancaster held no ghosts for me. It was odd. Everything was just as it had always been: the red-lacquer lift, the blue carpets, marble floors, flowers, and the familiar and attentive staff. All as before. I even had my usual wing-armchair in the bar. The monkeys were still stealing fruit on the murals. That morning, on the way to pay my bill, two laughing women came out of the old suite. I passed them in the corridor, a haze of Shalimar, very chic, a good deal of gold. Clattering the brass key. Were the curtains still rife with parakeets and twirling ribbons? Anyway, no ghosts, no shades anywhere. It was exactly as if a slate had been wiped clean, leaving not a wrack of memory behind. I was setting off again. Amazed how I had managed to get myself to Paris all on my own, with baggage, tickets, travellers’ cheques, passport. Never done that before. Well, not for over thirty years. Never had a cheque book, credit cards, carried money. You have to relearn everything. But I was most surprised by the lack of hurt. The Lancaster was simply an hotel. I had only ever been a client. It was all finished.
Thursday, 28th
Toulon. Rest Room
Flat on my back. No pillow, of course. Intensive-care ward in huge, new heart hospital. Glittering, vast, efficient, gigantic, terrifying. Makes most London hospitals look like garden sheds, and this is in ‘the sticks’. Drip-feed, tubes of blood, a catheter (thank God! unattached), oxygen cylinder, mass of plastic writhing about me make me feel like Gulliver. Helpless. Fear catches my bladder, nags away. Do I, don’t I? If I do want to pee the nurses (real, crisp, efficient) will take half an hour to unlace me and release me from this transparent spaghetti jungle. I lie still, dousing panic, trying to remember my first line in French in the script. ‘I’m going to die, aren’t I?’ Just how I feel.
Sunday, 1st
Bandol. Hotel Pullman
In my room here. A concrete slab of a place. Cardiff and the Holiday Inn again but with a glorious view across the sea. Fin de saison, so it’s empty except for me, three waiters and a vaguely hostile woman in reception who won’t smile. Rest of crew in humbler accommodation or have rented flats or little villas. Sensible. Lonely as hell up here. Now I do know what loneliness means. Now it hurts. Only a 40 watt bulb in the bedside lamp. Wrestle with the ‘cuteness’ of the script, trying to eliminate the ‘Daddykins’ and ‘Pussykins’. French to English is hard. We do not speak the same language. No French word for ‘naughty’, no English word for ‘merde’. Bertrand has closed the set up the hill, thank God, so no press or idiot interviews while you try to work and create a new world … I am beginning to enjoy myself, except on Sundays like today. No work. The crew off to the sea or beach, Jane with her children somewhere and I can’t get the BBC World Service on my little tin transistor. Still, I’m beginning to like this …
Tuesday, loth October
Bandol
Jane, Bertrand and I worked after dinner at the script. Hacking away. Looks are more useful than words. The cinema is a visual medium. One brilliantly exchanged look between two people is worth far more than two paragraphs of sweet polemic. Yesterday Bertrand patted my head, kissed Jane. We felt like teacher’s pets and liked it. I wrote him a letter last night to tell him just how amazing he is, if I simply said it he’d forget it in half an hour. I want him to remember. So I write it down. The written words linger. Spoken they evaporate.
Saturday, 14th
Bandol
A weekend. Alone. Oh well. Many stage actors insist that cinema work is not acting at all. Dead easy, boring. All that waiting about. You can do it reading the small ads in the Evening Standard. That’s why, I suppose, they are seldom any good on the big screen but make it on TV? Every character actor becomes a star on the small screen. For a little time. Bertrand works in ten- to twelve-minute takes. A whole magazine. Exciting for theatre-trained players. Tough on the others. Exhausting but nerve-wracking if one makes a titchy error. All that work over again, and Jane and I overlap and ad-lib a lot. A luxury in which I revel. Forbidden in my early days in the British cinema. The script was always sacrosanct. And inevitably stilted. Mostly they were written by elderly ladies of both genders. Disasters all.
Brock, amazingly, has just called to say that he and Kimbo are to make me a great-uncle! Do I mind? Wow! Great!
Wednesday, 11th
Bandol
Shooting in the dreary bar of a closed-up hotel. Jane leads me with amazed joy into an even drearier little room adjoining, which contains a plaque stating that Katherine Mansfield wrote two novels here. I wonder if she died here too? It’s so depressing and dark. Perhaps in her day Bandol was glorious? Now, like so much along the coast, it has all gone. A vast marina full of hideous yachts bobbing
and swaying, gladioli in jars on all the cockpit tables. The standard yachting decoration. High-rise flats where the pines once were. The present inhabitants, anyway at this time of year, all over sixty, in floral prints, sagging shorts, ‘cardies’, both sexes, hillocked with varicose veins. I trudge through this lot every evening to the harbour to try and get an English paper. Only the Financial Times or the Mirror. Both useless. Take Newsweek at vast expense. Hobble back here in the fading evening. Walking still tiring, breathing pretty breathy. I’ll manage.
Tuesday, 17th
Bandol
The location, an empty hotel up the hill, is hellish to get to. I drag up each day on foot. It’s only minutes from my hotel but might be at the end of the earth. Leg bloody painful. So have to rest every twenty yards or so. Feel so silly just standing in the gutter resting my slightly withered ‘relic’. And I gasp like a fish out of water. I now understand absolutely what the phrase means. My French, however, after three years in England, is coming back at last. A great joy. The kindness of the crew almost makes me blub, if I were the blubbing kind. Tonight they have all gone off to the dailies. I never do. Never have. The feeling on set is pretty good; we manage to work about sixteen hours a day with no draining tea-breaks. Jane and I share one room in the empty hotel to dress in, there is a single working loo, no seat or bolt on the door. Otherwise it’s into the pines. Wouldn’t do for some. The single loo is for us all, crew included. So it does get rather ‘noisy’. I can’t imagine any of the bruvvers in the UK accepting this deal.
Bertrand works very much like Visconti; he is the nearest director I have come to who has that kind of magic with his players. A complete understanding of the mind at work. I really am beginning to enjoy this. Thank God, or Fate, that Bea made that daft telephone call for Mr XYZ’s number. The thaw has started. I really do believe.
Friday, 20th
Bandol
Last night Bertrand sent me a ‘love letter’. Slipped it under my door when I was down at dinner. ‘You made me weep during the dailies tonight. I do not do that.’ I was touched and very happy. However, the dailies are screened in a clapped-out little flea-pit in the next town. The sound is out of sync, the picture bleeds across the proscenium curtains and the walls. It only has a regular screen, and the colour is a washed out navy blue and yellow. So how can he tell? Maybe that is what made him weep? Lab reports from Paris, however, are excellent and full of praise for us all. So that’s all right. Perhaps?
Thursday, 26th
Bandol
A difficult day today: we are getting tired. Ton-Ton, the sound engineer, can’t speak a word of English but knows instinctively when a scene has been right. He just sticks up a thumb high above his head, earphones clapped to his ears. Jane and I play some of our scenes in English only. Ton-Ton has a desperate job on this location. Gulls screaming continuously, ring-doves cooing in the trees all round the place. They have colonized the woods. A half-hourly ferry chugging slowly across the bay to the islands, motorbikes of yobbos who rev up just to infuriate him and screw up a take. Plus helicopters and Mirage jets from the base at Toulon! It plays hell with intimate scenes. Ton-Ton fires a vast gun into the air in fury. This scatters the birds and sends the gulls into a frenzy because they fear that one of their number has been killed. Peace until the next ferry; we try to grab a scene of ‘heart-breaking intensity’, or something, but the gulls return in a dreadful squadron and dive-bomb us with rage. It’s all tremendous fun. But a great deal better than sitting alone in my room. Life is a cabaret, they say … Never been a truer phrase.
Friday, 27th
Bandol
The last day, apart from one day in Cannes next week, arrives. They usually do. Chaotic, grabbing bits and pieces, extra lines to record for voice-overs, we all do everything we can except actually say ‘Goodbye’ or ‘That’s a wrap.’ It isn’t anyway, but only a token crew will come to Cannes. So it is the end for most, and it has been intensely happy. We have been a family for weeks. Now there is nothing left to do but start wrecking the sets and packing. Tavernier wandered away, alone, down the dusty lane to his hotel. I called out after him and he stopped and we embraced in silence. Very firmly. I watched until he was out of sight hidden by the oleanders and pine trees, walking alone down to the sea. It has been a wonderful, healing time for me. Now it’s all over. Funny way to earn a living, I reckon. Filming. And this is the very last I’ll ever make. It’s a splendid way to finish.
I abandoned the Smith’s diary about then, just entered dates and times and things, so I rather flounder now, relying on my memory – not awfully good at the best of times. I do remember that the last day of work was on the terrace of the Carlton Hotel in Cannes at dawn, to avoid the traffic noises and crowds, and that we played a key scene, Jane and I, in the half-light of the morning, clutching our buttocks with apprehension while someone held up the traffic on the Croisette.
And then it really was all over, and we all peeled off and I wandered off to find a chemist I had known for years, and a bookshop-newsagent I always went to when Forwood and I came down into town to the bank or to get haircuts. They had both gone. Wrecked. Holes in the ground, like the old Palais de Festival which had held so many memories. But it was useless to even think of memories now, no good looking for the past, it wasn’t there any more. Time, even a meagre three years, had cleared away so many things and places I once knew.
Back at the hotel I lay in splendour on my company paid-for bed and dialled Madame Bruna up the hill. A sharp cry of delight. Quel plaisir! Why and where? Was I well? Yes, all was d’accord with her. Marie-Thérèse had another child, Gilles might have gone off for good, she wasn’t certain at the moment. He was a very sensitive boy. Did I know about Etienne Ranchett? Dead? Poor Florette, quelle catastrophe! He died in the Peugeot of Monsieur Forwood. Bought it from the garagiste in Saint-Sulpice who had bought it from us. He was so thrilled because it was all electric. And air-conditioned! Perfect for him when he went on safari to kill birds and deer and all the other animals in Senegal. He always went to Senegal, did I recall? To kill innocent creatures. And died in the Peugeot because, in the middle of a sand storm, the electric circuit failed. The windows wouldn’t open, the air conditioning seized up and he died, roasted to death from a heart attack in his oven! Wasn’t that incroyable? Et vous, cher Monsieur, vous etês coupable! Delighted laughter.
But all was otherwise very well. Madame Pasquini? Ah, she had been moved to Le Foux now, there was a new person at the bureau de poste; and a terrible Club Méditerranée, with 2,000 beds, had been built up on the hill behind Sainte-Anne-le-Forêt, the lights on all night, six tennis courts! And boom, boom, boom from the disco until dawn. Ah si, si! I left just in time, the whole region was becoming ruined. Germans, Dutch, Americans and Belgians. Yes, yes, bien sûr, Monsieur Rémy was well, and very occupied with all the new properties being built. Monsieur Danté had retired. He had dislocated his back and finished work. Now he just sits in the bar at Le Pré. Oh! She was so happy to hear me. There had been a photo of me in Nice Matin last week. Did I see it? Should she find it for me? It was very good, I looked so well and happy, it was in colour, and my French was much better now than it had been when I lived there. How strange! I said it was perhaps because I was no longer ‘timid’, and she laughed a good deal and we blew kisses and I sent messages of love to everyone, and that was that.
The next morning I got the first flight out for London. Nice airport, once so cruelly familiar, was still the same airport. The palms were the same palms, the newspaper stall still the same stall and in the same place. Monique, behind the till, recognized me after a moment of considered doubt and exclaimed with pleasure. We kept a line of irritated passengers waiting to pay for their journals and cigarettes while we discussed who had left and what had happened to Dominique. Did I know that she had married a boy from Villeneuve Loubet and was now working as a waitress at Le Coin Joli? People got restless. I paid for my two cigarette lighters, one for me, one for Brock. Mine had ‘I
Love Cannes’ on it. Monique and her friend, plain as an old galosh, had always kept the Sunday papers for me under the counter. If Monique or Dominique were on duty we had a luxurious evening up on the hill. If not, well we might have to just rely on Nice Matin or Figaro, but she always did her best.
In the Pullman Bar, on the observation floor, it was just as it always had been over the years. The same chairs and tables, the same Muzak tape gently soothing the nervous traveller with ‘Strangers in the Night’ and ‘Autumn Leaves’, the same hideous murals, the same affectionate waiters: Bernard, Jules. Ah, Monsieur! Mais Monsieur Forwood? Hélas, il est mort, Jules. Ah. Quel dommage, un vrai ‘gentleman’, eh? Un vrai.
On the flight I didn’t look out of the window, I never said farewell to anything. I never had and now never would. Over the Alps I looked vaguely down into snow, felt the gentle bumping in the currents of air, sipped an altogether too early glass of champagne. I’d always insisted before that you could drink champagne for breakfast. And that’s exactly what I was doing. I had no sadness, no regret, just a feeling of quiet surprise that I’d managed the trip and the film all by myself. Proving once and for all that I could manage on my own if I had to. I’d just been too bloody lazy. Protected. I must confess that I was pleased with myself. It seemed to me, sitting in my seat high above Grenoble, that somewhere along the way down my corridor, which had grown pretty dark for a time, after the slamming of a door, I had seen a very thin crack of light far ahead. It was not all Stygian dark and gloom. A slight push at the door marked ‘Saki’ had been rewarded. Behind the door there was a glorious ball going on to which I had been invited. I had accepted the invitation.
