Snakes and Ladders

by Dirk Bogarde

  “But this is just a change of route, that’s all … direction.”

  “Oh Pip dear!” She laughed gently and touched my knee. “You are a funny one: not awfully good at looking facts in the face, are you … still not yet? Well, never mind, just let’s call this an entrance; does that feel better?”

  She took up her glass and went up the steps to the kitchen; at the top she turned and looked back. “Such a pretty evening, that light in the trees. I had to give up two ‘points’ for a tiny tin of sardines this morning. Would you believe it? The peace is almost as bad as the war, in little things.”

  Chapter 7

  The voyage on which I had embarked with Mr Dalrymple and “Esther Waters” in such light spirits was fraught with grave dangers. None of it, ever, was to be clear sailing, and there were moments indeed at the beginning when it looked as if it would be just a trip round the lighthouse and back to port, or, worse still, that I should be forced to founder with all hands on the hidden reef of economy. Rank was going through a very difficult period financially (and every other way) but I knew nothing of this until Olive Dodds took me quietly aside and said that owing to impossible financial problems they were going to introduce vast cuts in the economy, clear out all the dead-wood, see the wood for the trees, and try to start all over again with a neater, tighter, more manageable and less extravagant formula. To this end all the Contract Artists, to begin with, would be asked to take severe reductions in salary, otherwise, if they chose not to accept, they could annul their contracts and go free. For some, it was leaving prison.

  She strongly advised me to take whatever cut was offered without question, since she felt that loyalty to the firm would not go unrecognised in the future, and that they would not forget the gesture. I was unsure. She also shoved me, against my will, into another cloth-cap and raincoat role in a film about the Irish troubles called “The Gentle Gunman”. I said that I would certainly accept the cut if she advised it, for she knew a great deal better than I did what was afoot; but that I refused to be on the run yet again in another raincoat part. She was adamant. The film would start just as my Option Period was due, and if I was working, she reasoned, they would be less likely to chuck me out. And chuck me out, she hinted pleasantly, was just what they intended to do at the last Board Meeting. Could I afford that?

  No one, as we have seen, was exactly ecstatic to have me from the very beginning; only Mr Dalrymple and she herself had felt any reason to hope that I would one day prove my worth. My record was hardly outstanding, no one was actually lighting candles to me. And worse than that, I had not made them much, if any, profit. My last effort, as she pointed out, a disastrous attempt at light comedy, had been as funny as a baby’s coffin and although I argued that it had not been my fault, or my choice (the unhappy director, Val Guest, had wanted William Holden but had been forced to have me, as a Contract Artist, instead), Olive Dodds smiled her soft enigmatic smile and suggested that there were forces at work who really did want me out of the way. If I had the sense to accept her plans I might just possibly be saved from the humiliation. It was up to me.

  So I accepted the cut, when it was offered, wielded with an axe rather than a penknife, accepted too the raincoated Irish killer, so that over the dangerous time of the Option Period I was to be found, had anyone so wished, being chased by more Coppers, nightly through the tunnels of Mornington Crescent Underground, and being bawled at by Basil Dearden once again.

  Temporarily, at any rate, my skin had been saved by the advice of the one person in the Organisation who believed that I might, with help, one day pull it off.

  It was a depressing time. Familiar faces slid away, in all departments, to fitful obscurity or television which, in those early fifties, was scooping up all the left overs from the film industry and starting to build up a force which would eventually bring us to the brink of ruin. But for the moment the Organisation, having cleared out its dead-wood, found the land clear and open and with a little more money to spend bought the rights to a best seller called “The Cruel Sea”. Here I thought, wrongly, was a chance for me to break away from the raincoats and caps and play an Officer and a Gentleman, for there had to be one or both, in a film about the Navy. But there was not the slightest chance. I implored, I begged, I grovelled. I offered to test for any part, even if I didn’t get it, just so that I would have the chance to show them that I could speak “proper” and could therefore extend my range. I even offered to work for no money at all. Which didn’t move them in the least. They insisted that I was best in working class roles, no one would believe me as a Gentleman, but that there was a nice little cameo, if I was absolutely determined on being in their epic, of an Able Bodied Seaman who had a “good little moment in a lifeboat”.

  Olive Dodds had done as much as possible and could help no more. I refused the Able Bodied Seaman in the lifeboat and went back to my uncertain role of Country Squire at Bendrose; but not for long. Ironically they cheerfully rented me out (they got half the salary) to a small company who offered me the part of a Wing Commander in a film about Bomber Command. He was an upper-class Wing Commander at that; never wore a raincoat and never saw a Copper. “Appointment in London” was the first time that I actually made any kind of impression for good on the screen. The Daily Mail suggested that I could act with my skin, The Graphic said it was my finest hour, The Telegraph welcomed me into the front rank of English screen actors, and Picturegoer threw all caution to the wind and hailed me as the foremost young actor on the British screen.

  But no one from the Rank Organisation ever went to see it; nor did they make any comment whatsoever. As far as they were concerned I was still Working Class League. It was a crushing blow. It was made all die worse by the deep-seated knowledge, which I had always known but put aside in my usual way, that I had an enemy at court. Earl St John, for all his charm, and he had a great deal, had never been able to overcome the overcoming of his first edict, that I had no future for the cinema, and that I was not cinema material, and he never saw reason to change his mind. A few years ago, shortly before he died, at a party in the South of France at which I was the host, he came across the bustling, noisy restaurant, greeted me warmly, one arm round my shoulder like a loving friend, and said, with the implacable smile and eyes of a baby shark caught in shallow waters, “I said you’d never make it, kid. And you won’t.”

  Whether he was right or wrong is neither here nor there at this particular moment. But I did make it, albeit briefly, with Philip Leacock and “Appointment in London”. He, with Dearden, showed me that screen acting was more to do with the head than the left profile or the capped teeth. He made me more aware than any other director up till then that it was the thought which counted more than the looks.

  And the fans found me quite acceptable without my raincoat, to such an extent that the mail trebled, a fact which could not possibly have gone unnoticed by the Organisation since it kept tallies on all the mail received by their Artists, but to which they never referred. Of the hundreds of letters which were received in the Fan Mail Department in South Street, only the most apparently private or personal mail was sent on to my home. Among them one day my secretary, Val, found a glossy picture postcard with an Amsterdam postmark. “This is something you’ll have to deal with. I can’t understand it.” Gabled houses reflected in a sluggish canal. On the back the once-familiar printed writing.

  “I saw you again at a cinema last night. You were in the RAF. Do you remember the cards? A different uniform, different badges, a bird, and lights everywhere? You see?” It was signed Harri. There was no address.

  * * *

  A great deal of my time, during the war, was spent, clenched-buttocked and white-knuckled, flying through German flak in lumbering planes which, as often as not, landed nose down in extremely unsuitable terrain. I never enjoyed these journeys, and was absolutely convinced that flying, for pleasure, or anything else, would not catch on in peace time. A serious miscalculation. So it took a great deal to persuad
e me back on board to fly all the way to Cyprus to make my first foreign location film. The persuasion was Lewis Milestone, a legendary director whose masterpiece, “All Quiet on the Western Front” stands as one of the ten greatest films ever made. He it was who would direct this film, and I was very happy and proud to be asked to participate. The fact that I had not much cared for the script didn’t really worry me, for I felt sure that if Mr Milestone had agreed to direct it then he must also have liked what he read. Another serious miscalculation.

  I discovered, far too late to cancel the flight, that he detested what he had read and demanded changes; these were promised, and he read the new material on the flight to Athens. Crossing the tarmac from the London ‘plane, we were rather disconcerted to see him shredding the new material into confetti and chucking it over his shoulder into the cool Greek air.

  “I don’t mind,” he said, “people carrying shit about with them in their pockets. What I do mind is that they don’t know it’s shit.” Lewis Milestone was a man of few words; all of them effective.

  The film was called “They Who Dare” (it was later dubbed by the Press, “How Dare They”, but we weren’t to know that for a time). A commando story, based on real events in Crete. There were eight of us in the cast. Eight commando packs, under the instructions of Mr Milestone himself, were packed for us by a combat unit in Malta. They weighed ninety pounds a piece. The first time we all struggled into them we fell flat on our faces before him; Moslems in Mecca. He suggested a week’s training in the Troodos mountains, while he got on with the script and we got used to the packs. For some days we crawled, sobbing and moaning, up crags, ledges, gorges, cliffs and along the sheer edges of gaping ravines into which we plummeted, with astonishing regularity, to lie crumpled and groaning among the startled goats. No one was actually killed during these activities, but many of us longed for death as a speedy relief, for we expected every sortie to the mountains to be our last. Mr Milestone (we had by now actually overcome fear of him by fear of our exercises and called him Millie to his face) had a perfectly valid point. You cannot act weight. And neither you can. But actors we were, not commandos; and it is quite hard enough to act without a pack weighing ninety pounds let alone with one dragging you constantly towards oblivion. I pointed out to him that it might be wiser, should we ever start the film, to try and finish it, all in one piece and alive, than to have to abandon it because of a couple of random deaths somewhere towards the middle of things, when the insurance people would make things difficult. So, reluctantly, the packs were lightened to sixty pounds, and although we still careened into endless ravines, apparently for ever, we managed to give the impression, anyway, of a respectable band of brave desperados, tough, rough and bloodied. The only thing we hadn’t got was a script.

  We never actually got one. A writer was despatched from London to assist, but Millie took a dislike to him almost instantly, set him on a high stool in die middle of his room, and walked slowly round and round him dictating his notes, until the poor man, mesmerised, like the guinea fowl with a fox who makes slow circles round their roosting tree, was overcome by giddiness, slipped from his perch, cracked his skull on the stone floor and was jubilandy returned to London. Millie didn’t like being bugged; as he put it quiedy in the bar later. If I give the impression that he was a monster I hasten to correct. He was not. And we all worshipped him; he was funny, scathing, hated the Front Office, and was splendidly irreverent about everything. Except his work. Even though we had not much to go on as far as a script was concerned, we all worked together with him, as a great adventure, and did the best we could. And if nothing else, and there wasn’t much else alas, we all enjoyed ourselves tremendously. Anyway—I was back in the Army and consequently in my element.

  He was a thick-set, heavy man, in his middle sixties at that time. And he never ever seemed to sit down, even on the roughest terrain or the highest peaks. I bought him a shooting-stick.

  He accepted it gravely. His green, Russian eyes flicking about like a lizard’s, suspiciously.

  “What is it?”

  “A shooting-stick.”

  “What the hell for?”

  “For you.”

  “What do I shoot with it?”

  “You sit on it.”

  His eyes flicked across my face, narrowed. His lips pursed doubtfully.

  “This thing! This tin stick! I sit on it?”

  “Yes … look, it has two little flaps which unfold, like this, makes a seat.”

  He closed his eyes thoughtfully. “Appreciate the thought. You see the size of my ass? You want this thing to go right through me? Upwards? Head on a pike?”

  He used it as a walking stick, and viewed it with dull suspicion all through the work.

  After two and a half months shooting we still hadn’t really got much idea of an ending for our epic. He knew that I was worried, and took action to comfort me.

  “Hell! I didn’t have an ending for ‘All Quiet’ until the last minute. The Studio took the film away from me, said it was too long, too down-beat. They wanted to end it with some damned montage of thousands of marching soldiers singing some damn-fool patriotic song, flags waving, all that crap. Withdrew the money. I was sunk. There was just me and the camera crew left, in a car, coming away from the Studio with the bad news. I have never been so low in my life. A picture, and no ending. Stopped at an intersection. Rain so heavy you just couldn’t see out the car. The windscreen wipers squeaking across the glass, backwards and forwards, they made a funny noise. It seemed to me like Schmetterling, Schmetterling, that’s the German for butterfly … Schmetterling, Schmetterling, and suddenly I got it! I got the end. We turned right round and went to a butterfly farm, bought boxes of them. Found a building lot just off Sunset, in all the rain. No lights, so we used the headlamps of the car, turned them on a muddy bit of land, let the butterflies go … most of them flew away, but one little fellow, he just settled happily in the warmth of the lamps, flitting his wings. I reached out my hand, very gently to take him, and then he was gone. And that was the last shot of ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’. Don’t worry,” he grinned and thumped my knee with affection, “we’ll get an ending.”

  He made a cut of his version of the film and flew off to America; the producer made his cut and between the two of them we were a catastrophe. But it had been great fun and marvellous experience. And Millie taught me one of the greatest lessons to be learned in the cinema. “You can make a good script bad; but you can’t ever make a bad script good. Never forget that.” I was to be constantly reminded of his words for years to come. It is a lesson very few have bothered to remember.

  * * *

  While we were struggling to find an ending for a poor script in Cyprus, Miss Betty Box, on a long and tiring journey from Scotland, left her train for a few minutes at Crewe to purchase some reading matter, magazines and a slim book, to while away the remainder of the trip to Euston. She was quite unaware that this simple action was to switch the points, so to speak, not only on her own life, but on mine and the Miller’s and his men as well. By the time she had reached London she had made up her mind to buy the rights of the book, and being the most far-sighted producer in the Rank Organisation at the time, did so, had a script roughed out, and sent it to me to see if I would like to play the young student. It was called “A Doctor in the House”.

  I was not, I remember, immediately impressed. It all seemed a bit light, the role a bit dim-witted, and every other character had funnier things to say and do. I was to be the simple Juvenile. Forwood, by now disenchanted with acting himself, although very successful, had generously renounced his own career and agreed to become my Personal Manager since I could now no longer handle my own affairs alone. He was in complete disagreement with me; here was a comedy, for the first time, which could well be an important success and lead me away from spivs and service heroes to which I was obviously becoming addicted. He urged me to accept the offer immediately before it went to someone else. Impressed by
his seriousness I telephoned Miss Box and said yes. But Miss Box, in her low and pleasant voice, confessed that there was, unfortunately, a hidden snag. Mr St John, she explained gently, was strongly opposed to her choice of myself for the part. He didn’t think that I could play light comedy; my metier, he said, was action stuff. I did not have the necessary charm or lightness, and he reminded her that my last effort at comedy, at his own instigation, had been a complete and total catastrophe for all concerned; especially myself. It would be disastrous to play me in such a part.

  Miss Box, happily for me and my future, disagreed with him. She had a hunch it would work. So fortunately did her director, Ralph Thomas, and together they fought a quiet battle to get me, and won. There is no question in my mind whatsoever that if they had not taken this courageous stand I should never have had a career in the cinema at all; it was the absolute turning point, and by their action they secured me in my profession. A debt it is impossible to repay.

  It was one of the happiest times I have ever spent in a Studio, made all the happier when, one morning, I was taken in a great bear-hug from behind and a well-remembered voice said in my ear, “Caught you up at last!” Kenneth More. It had taken six years from the tatty dressing room in the New Lindsey Theatre to this splendid moment, made all the pleasanter eventually when he stole the picture from under all our noses. As Doctor Simon Sparrow I did surprisingly well. The film was a phenomenal success at the box office and Betty and Ralph immediately started planning sequels. Their hunch, and Olive Dodds’s astute strategy, had paid off. It seemed that, at last, things were going to be all right for a time. I had proved my worth, if only modestly, and the dreaded yearly option could, more or less, be set aside. An immensely encouraging feeling, since my salary would increase comfortably each year. It was possible that I might even make the Seven Year Stretch.