Where There's a Will

by John Mortimer

  Rita, the hotel's Moroccan owner, was the granddaughter of a grand vizier to the king, a man able to sit down to dinner with a different wife every day of the week. She is married to an Italian and she is one of the few Muslims to have gone through a Catholic wedding ceremony. She talked about the Sunnis and the Shias in Iraq who, sharing almost exactly the same religion, hate each other more bitterly than they hate Christians or Jews. There seems to be no greater cause for mutual loathing than sharing similar religious beliefs, so Catholic and Protestant have slaughtered each other throughout history. The end of Saddam, Rita said, will mean civil strife, anarchy and chaos.

  We thought we were going to war because Saddam Hussein refused to reveal the existence, or non-existence, of ‘weapons of mass destruction’. Had he done so, it seemed, he would have been allowed to go on tyrannizing in peace. Then the story changed and we were going to fight him anyway, and for the more persuasive reason that Iraq was ruled by terror, torture and mass executions. Perhaps wars don't happen for logical or even readily understandable reasons. Who remembers in what war, for what just or unjust cause, the charge of the Light Brigade was blunderingly launched? Who can disinter, with any accuracy, the causes of the 1914–18 war, in which millions marched cheerfully to their deaths? What exactly were the decimated regiment of the Gloucesters up to in Korea? What was the point of the long-drawn-out death, destruction and demoralization of the unsuccessful American war in Vietnam? Do world leaders provoke wars because they are thought to unite the electorate and make loyalty to the government a patriotic duty? Or is it that societies feel, like the doctors who applied the leeches to Lord Byron's temples, that an occasional bloodletting is essential to our health?

  Whatever the reason, it seemed a good idea to sit in a garden where the roses bloom in winter and enjoy the moment of safety in a peaceful Arab country. All this was before the war which would end quite suddenly, when Saddam Hussein took my father's advice and avoided the temptation of doing anything heroic.

  No weapons of mass destruction would be found and the Al Qaeda terrorists would turn up, alive and unharmed, in Saudi Arabia. The blasted ruins of Mesopotamia are to be repaired by companies close to President Bush's government, and the discovery of mass graves has persuaded us, if we need persuading, of the horrors of Saddam's regime. The Shias, the Sunnis and the Kurds are now free to quarrel with each other, and there is nothing, unhappily, to suggest that the times are likely to become less interesting.

  16. Timing and the Art of Advocacy

  The art of advocacy is not used only in courtrooms. Lovers pursuing their claims, parents persuading their children, businessmen after a bargain, salesmen trying to sell double glazing, husbands making excuses for absences and neglect, all have to find persuasive arguments, presenting their cases with as much charm as possible and hoping for a verdict of ‘not guilty’. Pleas in mitigation have to be made to aggrieved partners. Arguments have to be won by searching questions. In all these situations tact is necessary and appropriate timing is essential.

  My father once appeared in court for a comedian who told him, after the case had been won, that he greatly admired his timing. Rightly realizing that pauses, moments of, if possible, pregnant silence that keep the audience waiting eagerly were extremely effective, he adopted the practice of silently counting up to ten before he asked the first question in cross-examination. When I tried this, totally lacking his authority, the judge told me, quite crossly, to get ‘on with it’, and added, ‘We can't all sit here watching you standing in silent prayer, you know.’

  I admired another smoothly accomplished advocate, Cyril Salmon, who used to stroll negligently up and down the front bench, toying with a gold watch chain or cigar cutter, as he lobbed questions deftly over his shoulder at the witness box. When I tried this, another judge said, ‘Do keep still! It's like watching ping-pong.’

  Taking time requires a certain amount of courage. The vital words in the theatre and the law courts are ‘slow down’. The most accomplished timer of jokes I ever encountered is the actor Leslie Phillips. Born into a poor family with a father who died young, he started his stage career at the age of eleven and has hardly been out of work since. He grew from a child actor into a juvenile lead in the ‘Doctor’ films and radio comedy. His way of saying ‘Hellow!’ in a drawn-out and lecherous manner made him famous. I met him first when he fell in love with my stepdaughter and there was a serious danger that he might end up calling me ‘Dad’ or, worse still, ‘the Guvnor’. No marriage, however, took place. Leslie went on to play Falstaff and Gayev in The Cherry Orchard and, to my great delight, consented to be in a play of mine. His slow, amused, sardonic delivery delighted the audience but what I found most remarkable was his ability to get two laughs out of one joke.

  The Leslie Phillips technique is to receive the feed line in silence but to act the response so that the audience is almost sure of what the answer's going to be. They feel safe to laugh for the first time. After a suitable wait, Phillips delivers the punch line and the audience laughs louder and again, because their guess has proved correct. Unhappily I had by this time left the bar and couldn't give his technique a try-out in court.

  I'm also grateful to Leslie for a story he told me about a time when he was a young assistant stage manager in a West End theatre. The star was a well-known actor, famous for his infallible comic timing. At one point in the play he had to leave the stage with the leading lady and return immediately to answer the telephone. Accordingly they both left, but the male star didn't return. The audience was left to enjoy the spectacle of an empty stage and listen to an unanswered telephone. When the actor's absence was further prolonged the young Leslie Phillips was sent to find him. He discovered him without difficulty making passionate love to the leading lady up against the ropes at the back of the stage. A tug on the back of the star's jacket merely got a command of, ‘Go away, boy.’ The audience had to endure another ten minutes of watching an empty stage. This is an example of very poor timing indeed.

  Nothing delights an audience more than to have their suspicion of a joke, or the mystery which conceals a crime, confirmed. Much has been written about similarities between the law courts and the theatre – usually missing the point. However, talking to a jury has this in common with writing a story or unfolding the plot of a play. The first rule is not to be boring. This is hard in long cases about such matters as the evasion of value added tax and I remember, at the end of one such trial, congratulating the jury on having sat through what was undoubtedly one of the most tedious cases ever heard at the Old Bailey. The judge countered this by starting his summing-up, ‘It may surprise you to know, members of the jury, that it is not the sole purpose of the criminal law of England to entertain Mr Mortimer.’

  The rebuke was no doubt well phrased and entirely just. But awakening the imagination of a jury, making your listeners see themselves in strange circumstances, understanding the motives of a different, no doubt alien cast of characters – all this is necessary if a jury, or even a judge, is to arrive at the truth. Criminal responsibilities can't be judged by statistics, or social surveys, or even by referring to similar cases. It's necessary to imagine just what it would be like to be the man in the pub quarrel, the wife in the violent domestic dispute, the abused Asian student on the night in question in Kensington, Bradford or Birmingham Perry Bar.

  Overacting in the theatre and law courts is finished. Gone and forgotten are the arrivals in court of such advocates as Sir Edward Marshall Hall. He was always preceded by a clerk carrying a pile of clean handkerchiefs, a second followed with a carafe of water and the third brought the air cushion. If the prosecution evidence got nasty, Marshall Hall would blow his nose, a sad and terrible trumpet, on each of the handkerchiefs. If it got worse, he would knock over the carafe of water. If it became really dangerous, he would slowly and deliberately blow up the air cushion until the jury could pay attention to nothing else.

  John Maude, son of the actor Cyril Maude, who became
an Old Bailey judge, used to announce that his client was going to give evidence in a criminal trial (always a dangerous proceeding) by saying, ‘You can imagine what a nerve-racking experience it must be for anyone to go into that witness box, members of the jury. It must be terrible for the innocent. I will now call William Sykes’ (or whatever his client's name might have been). So he conferred an aura of innocence on however shifty a character he was defending.

  As in the world outside the courtroom, you can soon tell your friends from your enemies. The jury members who laugh at your jokes and those who greet them with expressions of stern disapproval, those who lean forward to be sure of catching every word of your cross-examination and those who put down their pencils and stare vaguely up to the ceiling. You have to decide between strengthening the resolve of your friends and trying to convert your enemies. By the time it comes to your final speech you'll hope to have done as much as possible of both. At the conclusion of the speech we all have our favourite peroration.

  Marshall Hall had his great ‘scales of justice’ act. ‘If you are in doubt, members of the jury,’ he used to say, ‘if you find the case for the defence and the prosecution evenly balanced—’ here he would stretch his arms out like a pair of scales – ‘then you must put into the defence side that little featherweight – the presumption of innocence.’ And now one outstretched arm would sink. ‘And the answer should be, must be, a verdict of not guilty!’ One cynical judge told the jury he was always thankful when Sir Edward started his ‘scales of justice’ act because it meant that his speech would soon be coming to an end.

  I worked out a slightly different conclusion. ‘Members of the jury,’ I used to say, ‘tomorrow you will go back to your jobs and your homes. You will forget all about the Black Spot pub, the missing diary pages, the broken salad knife and the uneaten dog food at Number 12A Mafeking Avenue’ (or whatever the particular facts of the case might have been). ‘To you this has been only a short interruption. A minute part of your life. But to the man/woman sitting there in the dock, it means the whole of his/her life. And we leave that life, with confidence, in your hands.’ I thought this good enough to give to Rumpole, my fictional barrister, who was successful with it in a number of cases.

  Things don't always run smoothly, however. A friend of mine had just embarked on the peroration of his final speech for the defence to an attentive jury when he saw that the judge was busily engaged in writing a note. When it was finished, it was folded and given to the usher, who brought it to my learned friend just as he had reached the most moving and dramatic moment. He paused and looked down at the note, which said, ‘Dear Jim. I thought you'd like to know that your flies are open and I can see your cock.’

  An advocate's life is not an easy one, and dangers and pitfalls should always be expected.

  17. Male Clothing

  Montaigne found it incredible that

  men alone should have been brought forth in a difficult and necessitous state which can only be sustained by borrowing from other creatures… if we had been endowed at birth with under garments and trousers there can be no doubt that Nature would have groomed those parts of us which remained exposed to the violence of the seasons with a thicker skin, as she has done for our finger tips and the soles of our feet.

  As the process of evolution hasn't led to our being born with trousers, men have to choose an appearance in which to dress themselves for life as an actor chooses clothes for a part. It's a good and perhaps the easiest thing to stick to the clothing of the best part of your life, probably the fashions of your youth.

  My father wore spats to his work in the Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division. Spats have now gone totally out of existence and the word is now used only for an argument or the past ejection of saliva. My father's spats were made of cloth that fastened under his feet and crossed his ankles and the top half of his shiny black boots. In summer his linen spats were white and he also wore a white waistcoat. In winter the waistcoat was black and the spats dark grey. He also wore a stiff winged collar with a bow tie, as Winston Churchill did, a gold watch chain across his stomach, a black jacket and dark striped trousers. He was uncomfortably aware of the words of one of the judges of the Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division who had said to a less carefully dressed barrister, ‘It gives me little pleasure to listen to a legal argument from a member of the bar wearing light grey trousers.’

  When I was very young I collected cigarette cards portraying the great dandies. My favourite was Beau Brummell, who would cheerfully spend two hours attempting to tie the perfect cravat and who asked a fellow snappy dresser, out walking with the Prince Regent, ‘Who's your fat friend?’ I wrote up for a small walking stick (then known as a ‘whangee’) and a monocle, as I hoped to look like Bertie Wooster, a member of the Drones Club and the employer of the incomparable Jeeves, who enforced strict codes of clothing on his master.

  I also wore a dinner jacket with a soft turned-down collar to my shirt (instead of the conventional stiff and upstanding variety). In this I was imitating King Edward VIII, who had fallen in love with an American divorcée and was about to abdicate. My father and I always wore dinner jackets when dining in hotels and restaurants or going to the theatre. When we turned up in evening dress at a cinema in Torquay the whole audience burst into spontaneous applause. At Harrow we wore top hats and tails on Sundays and for attending the annual cricket match against Eton. On this occasion a silver-topped cane with a dark blue tassel was also carried. The whole outfit caused considerable mirth on the Underground when you travelled on your way to Lord's.

  At university I took, for a while, to purple corduroy trousers, bow ties and a large-brimmed sombrero. I would wear this outfit whilst smoking black Balkan Sobranie cigarettes. I must have looked ridiculous. Luckily I started to go to the tailor in Oxford who has made my clothes ever since and who has a long record of my unfortunately expanding body. In this shop men are judged by their clothes. When a Mr Varney was in charge he said he couldn't bear to see Robin Day, a famous political commentator and interviewer on television. ‘That Mr Day,’ he said, ‘is a national disgrace, an object of scorn and derision who should never be allowed to appear on television as the mere sight of him must cause universal pain and distress.’ When I asked him what exactly was so appalling about Robin Day, he spoke as though naming the most unforgivable sin. ‘I don't know who cuts his jackets,’ he said, ‘but when that Mr Day points his sleeve almost rides up to his elbow.’

  I grew up in the days of ‘sports jackets’ made of tweed and preferably so well worn that they had leather round the cuffs and leather patches on the elbows. They were worn with cavalry-twill trousers and chukka boots to visit the saloon bar before Sunday lunch. Those were the days of three-piece suits and trousers with braces, although sock suspenders were already on the way out. A friend of mine laughed so loudly at Frank Sinatra's sock suspenders (she called them braces on his socks) when he prepared himself for an act of love that the great singer was deeply hurt and sex was taken off the menu. I survived, at least young at heart, into the era of Afghan waistcoats, velvet trousers, bangles, beads and Nehru jackets.

  Since then I have reverted to the sort of clothing I wore when I emerged into life, became a barrister, published a first novel and took on a wife with four children and, in the years immediately following, would have two more. Costume designers, in period plays and films, seldom realize that men hope to preserve the appearance of their youth and may be as much as forty years behind the fashion. In A Christmas Carol, written in 1843, old Mr Fezziwig is still wearing a Welsh wig. So the fashions of today, unstructured suits, fleeces and baseball caps worn back to front, may still be decking out very old men in the year 2050.

  Defence barristers down at the Old Bailey had to avoid looking too rich or too inexperienced. Gowns should be elderly, perhaps torn and inexpertly mended. Waistcoats were probably egg-stained. The wigs, obstinately retained since they were the height of fashion, should be yellowing with age and, i
f possible, disintegrating. If one had to be bought new, an alarmingly expensive purchase, it should be kicked round the room and left out in the rain, a white wig being a sure sign of a far too recent call to the bar. This is Rumpole's courtroom appearance and was mine also. To it I added large cuff links which twinkled at the jury and, I hoped, retained their interest when all else failed.

  Writers have been less anxious to conceal signs of success. Dickens appeared all decked out in gorgeous waistcoats with gold chains and rings, as did Disraeli. Oscar Wilde progressed from velvet knee breeches and carnations dyed green to curly brimmed bowler hats and coats with astrakhan collars. Nowadays any collection of writers is deliberately ‘dressed down’ like workers in city offices, determined to bond with each other by wearing only casual clothes on Fridays.

  Finally, a few words of warning. T-shirts are unflattering to aged and scrawny necks, shoulder-length hair seems unsuitable when it's grey and ponytails trapped in an elastic band are always a danger. An exception to this rule is the shortish, neat, impeccably clean, grey to white ponytail of my friend Jon Lord, late of Deep Purple, now the composer of classical music. He also wears his ponytail with impressively dark clothing. Someone described Baudelaire's ‘fine sombre clothing’ and that always seemed to me a desirable way to dress. But then Baudelaire's hair was cropped very short, like, as they also said, ‘une vraie toilette de la guillotine’, so perhaps that's not such a good idea either.