Snakes and Ladders

by Dirk Bogarde

  “But then it gets better?” I said.

  “Sure it gets better; the moment I open my mouth. You know once at the Hollywood Bowl a damned great moth, yes a moth!, flew right in there!”

  Her eyes were wide with remembered horror.

  “What did you do?”

  She shrugged slightly. “Oh … I parked it … what else? But I’m so sure, you know, that one day they’ll find me out.” She suddenly burst out laughing, shaking her head. “You know, I can’t really sing, not really; I holler, like I said. Oh sure, I’m no Deanna Durbin, now she really can’t sing, and that silly horse, Jeanette MacDonald, yakking away at wooden-peg Eddy with all that glycerine running down her Max Factor! I havea voice that hurts people where they think they want to be hurt, that’s all … and I can t act a row of beans either; I’m just me. And I’m so damned scared they’ll all find out one day. Can you imagine the pleasure everyone will have? But just now I feel what the hell! I feel good! I feel great! I am great, and I love you.”

  For Judy then, another start, for me, at that time, another move from Beel House to the stone and marble Children’s Home, now gutted, redecorated, and far too opulent and rich for my present position of almost complete limbo.

  It was Christmas again, another house full, the same cast as the year before in Rome, and my gloom and foreboding of that Christmas were in no way relieved. However, there were presents to wrap, a tree to decorate, a job my father had done every year since I was born and which he still took extremely seriously. Wreathed in yards of tinsel he sat on the top of a ladder fixing glittering balls among the branches, and fitting barley sugar candles into holders. The telephone rang, it was Basil Dearden. My heart sank, I thought he’d found something wrong with the plumbing at Beel.

  “No … nothing wrong, thanks, we’re very comfortable. Melissa is spending a fortune, of course, putting in a new bathroom, stripping the panelling all over the house … and planning an Italian Garden where the old tennis court was.”

  “Oh good. I thought the central heating had blown up.”

  “No, it’s working. I gather the Liszt epic did though?’

  “You gather correctly.”

  “And the other two. My spies tell me the bandit thing is a sod.”

  “Could be. I haven’t seen it.”

  “Getting a bit old for leather knickers, aren’t you?”

  “I’m beginning to think so.”

  “A bad run really … anything planned for next year?”

  “Nothing … you got anything planned?”

  “Sent you a script over this afternoon, by messenger. Might interest you. Read it over the holiday and let me know, OK?”

  “I’ll try … got a full house here, family.”

  “You may not like it. No one else does. Everyone we offered it to has turned it down. You’re our last chance.”

  “Thanks. What’s it about, paedophilia?”

  “No. But our first choice said that it would prejudice his chances of a Knighthood.”

  “What is it? The October Revolution?”

  “No. Homosexuality, actually. Middle-aged married man with a yen for a bloke on a building site.”

  “Can you make a film about that?”

  “Rank have said they’ll distribute, the lawyers say there’s nothing wrong libel-wise; just wanted to wash their hands after reading it.”

  “It gets better and better.”

  “Better still. An accountant read it for costing and said he felt he should have a gargle.”

  “Must have read it aloud.”

  “Must have. If it’s any comfort we don’t call anyone a queer, homo, pouf, nancy or faggot.”

  “What the hell do you call them then?”

  Basil’s voice was silky.

  “Inverts.”

  My father was struggling at the top of the tree trying to fix the fairy on top. A little pink angel with wings and benevolent wand. He came slowly clambering down the steps, puffing a bit. “Jolly hot work this tree business. I think a nice little sip of one of your Worthingtons would be just right now. What’s the matter?”

  “Pa … would you mind if I made a rather, difficult film … I mean difficult in the moral sense; serious stuff?”

  “I don’t think I quite follow you. Political do you mean?”

  “Homosexual”

  He pulled out his handkerchief and mopped his brow gently; had a sip of his beer. “Oh my dear boy, we get so much of that sort of thing on television. Mother and I find it dreadfully boring, all those doctors and psychiatrists bumbling on. Now if you want to do something really serious, why on earth don’t you do The Mayor of Casterbridge?”

  “Well, you remember what I said in Rome last year?”

  “Yes, I do. I do. Something about disturbing. I can’t really remember …”

  “Yes, disturb, educate, that sort of thing.”

  “You know I must confess that I really didn’t understand what you were talking about. Got into a bit of a muddle, I seem to recall. Personally I think there are quite enough people doing that all over the place without your having to do it in the local fleapit, but that’s up to you. Just remember that mother and I live in a small village, we have to get on with our neighbours, not always easy. Try not to do anything which would embarrass her, people are so narrow, you know. That’s all I have to say.”

  Forwood and Capucine were laying cloths on the long tables in the hall ready for the evening party. He looked up.

  “Who was on the telephone?”

  “Dearden. He’s sending a script over. It’s a bit of a problem one.

  “Oh. Why?”

  “Married man with a secret passion.”

  “What’s the problem there?”

  “The passion is another bloke.”

  “I don’t see the problem,” said Capucine. “My God! You English. You think that nothing happens to you below your necks.”

  “And in any case,” said my father settling comfortably down into his chair, “I’ve told him that I think he ought to do The Mayor of Casterbridge.”

  But I did “Victim” instead, and played the barrister with the loving wife, a loyal housekeeper, devoted secretary and the Secret Passion. It was the wisest decision I ever made in my cinematic life.

  It is extraordinary, in this over-permissive age, to believe that this modest film could ever have been considered courageous, daring or dangerous to make. It was, in its time, all three.

  To start with, very few of the actors approached to play in it accepted; most flatly refused, and every actress asked to play the wife turned it down without even reading the script, except for Sylvia Syms who accepted readily and with warm comprehension. The set was closed to all visitors, the Press firmly forbidden, and the whole project was treated, at the beginning, with all the false reverence, dignity and respect usually accorded to the Crucifixion or Queen Victoria. Fortunately this nonsense was brought to a swift end by one of the chippies yelling out, “Watch yer arse, Charlie!” to a bending companion, and we settled down to work as if it was any other film. Except that this was not.

  Janet Green’s modest, tight, neat little thriller, for that is all it was fundamentally, might not have been Shaw, Ibsen, or Strindberg, but it did at least probe and explore a hitherto forbidden Social Problem, simply, clearly, and with great impact for the first time in an English-speaking film. It was refused a Seal of Approval in America for being too explicit and it was many years before Hollywood even dared to tread the same path with any truth or honour. Some critics complained that it was only a thriller with a message tacked on rather loosely; but the best way to persuade a patient to take his medicine is by sugaring the pill—and this was the only possible way the film could have been approached in those early days. Whatever else, it was a tremendous success, pleasing us and confounding our detractors. The countless letters of gratitude which flooded in were proof enough of that, and I had achieved what I had longed to do for so long, to be in a film which disturbed, educated
, and illuminated as well as merely giving entertainment. I had been fortuitously pointed in the right direction again, just in time. This time the door I had chosen to enter was not just ajar … it had been wide with a blaze of light and I was not to retreat ever again.

  Incredibly, the fourteen-year-old image was almost instantly shattered. The fans, that is those who thought that being queer meant having a head cold or the belly ache, whirled away like chaff in a gale. They were bored by the subject I had chosen, felt betrayed that I had, as they said, gone serious, and had admitted my age; and in any case they had heard a different sound on the wind, the sound of the sixties—Youth. Elvis Presley led a whole generation away from my kind of old-fashioned cinema; television gave them all they needed in the way of visual entertainment. What they wanted now was music, anew beat, a new sound, a new believing and new identification with themselves, and they got it from him … and while he was leading them out of the fifties, five young Liverpudlians in Hamburg were waiting to grab them and remove them from sight for ever. The kids were leaving Hamelin, and although half-hearted attempts would be made to lure them back they would pay no heed, and I would have to learn to play my new pipes and go off on my own.

  It would be a great deal easier, I thought, than learning to play a piano.

  Chapter 10

  Another serious miscalculation on my part. It was far harder. After the failure of my Hollywood ventures, and the equal failure of my attempts as a Mexican bandit on a white horse, a cool, not to say chilling, wind rustled down the long corridor of power which I had once so blithely walked in august company. Now I was alone there; not often accompanied. No longer by Mr Davis at least, of whom, sadly, for he had been a good friend, I now saw very little. Dolly Rubin’s words echoed in the solitude. Bluntly, Rank had no plans for me in the foreseeable future, and suggested that I have a look round for subjects myself which might be of interest to us both. Which I knew would be extremely unlikely.

  I owned, at this time, the rights to John Osborne’s play, “Epitaph for George Dillon” and had spent a considerable sum of money having it scripted as a film. This I carried to Earl St John who pronounced it downbeat and negative and that was that. Despairingly I asked for release from my contract, not out of pique, but from a steadily mounting sense of hopelessness. I was determined to break into a new kind of cinema, they were equally determined not to.

  Freddy Joachim, after a long and happy partnership felt that I was being both impetuous and childish. Which perhaps I was, but his very gentleness and caution and innate sense of fair play were paper swords in a duel with an adversary, for this is how I now openly considered St John, armed with steel. My release was refused, but I heard growing rumours that plans were afoot to sell the remainder of my contract elsewhere. Which they had a perfectly legal right to do if they wished. I was in a state bordering panic, and bitterly resented the idea that after so many years loyal work I should be offered up like a packet of the Miller’s own flour. Freddy and I agreed to differ on the subject, and after fourteen happy years we parted company in a warm and friendly manner.

  I was still determined to obtain my release but neither Forwood nor myself was capable of negotiations which were, to say the least of it, strained and dangerously fused. Robin Fox and Dennis van Thal, who had a thriving agency, agreed to take me on and help me in the uncomfortable struggle. Eventually, under pressure, Earl St John agreed to let me go, immediately, on condition that I surrender a large amount of money due to me by contract which I could ill-afford. John Davis, in a final gesture of goodwill overruled this and in return I offered to make a film for them at a later date at a much reduced salary. Accordingly a handout was drawn up for the Press, which merely stated that “at the request of Dirk Bogarde, the Rank Organisation has not exercised the option on his contract with them”. After fourteen years, twice the amount of time I had expected even in my most optimistic dreams, I was released. Nobody waved goodbye. Nor did they telephone any more. It was like a protracted armistice, except that it had finally been a compromise rather than a battle. But I was free at last.

  For the time being I rattled round my vast stone edifice like a glass marble; Elizabeth’s husband George, now running a very successful business as a tree surgeon and garden consultant, spent hours with his team of men laying out the long-neglected borders, making a vast lagoon with water-lilies and fountains, wrenching up brambles and overgrown rhododendrons and planting walks and alleys; I was very busy hunting for specimen plants, costly shrubs, and old-fashioned roses, spending capital with nothing coming in; if I felt optimistic, Forwood felt the reverse.

  “It always amazes me that just when you should be pulling in you expand. Every time there is a crisis you buy a palace; you have no savings, no work in the future and there’s George hacking about out there like Capability Brown, and you playing a latter-day Linnaeus.”

  “That’s what I have always done. Something will happen.”

  “You’ll end up in a debtors’ prison, that’s what’ll happen.”

  “I’m spending my own money, for God’s sake.”

  “You’re spending your tax reserve money, my boy.”

  “Well, they can bloody well wait … they’ve taken a hell of a chunk of my loot already.”

  “They don’t wait, they sit in their bungalows in Hillingdon and Edgware planning how to give you the chop. Their wives haven’t got a mink coat, so why should you?”

  “I haven’t got a mink coat.”

  “Don’t be so bloody dense, you know what I mean. If you don’t get a job in a couple of months you’ll have to sell up. Right away.”

  * * *

  Judy arrived suddenly one morning, pale, tired and under stress, a few weeks after the end of a marathon concert tour of America ending with a final show at Carnegie Hall which had proved to be one of the greatest peaks of her career.

  She came alone again, no Sid and no family. There was a tighter edge to her now; sure, trim, confident, harder, but exhausted.

  “I want to sleep for days. Unwind. Heal. I’m dead. I’ve come to hide. No one knows where I am … I had to get away from them all, they try to tear me apart.”

  The healing started after lunch. She refused to go to bed and instead insisted on a drive into the country which always seemed to relax her better than almost anything else. To Pangbourne, Henley, along the river as far as its source. She sat curled in the back of the car, in slacks and a sweater, impracticable little taffeta boots, her face pale, hands trembling but her eyes delighting in the tumbling blossoms of the orchards, lambs in the fields, the “houses with hay on their roofs” and the soothing peace of May in England. By the time we had got back to The Palace, after tea by the river at Sonning, she was nothing to do with the harassed, pale, tired woman of the morning. In the evening, round the fire in the Study, she handed me a packet almost shyly.

  “This is what I really came to do; to bring you this. I hope you’ll like me. No dancing boys, no Hungarians.”

  Two blue transparent records. No labels. Side One, Side Two. The matrix of the Carnegie Hall concert. “You wouldn’t come, so I brought it to you … you know there were two empty seats waiting there for you until the end of the overture … just in case you made it.” She sat on the floor beside my chair, her head on my knee, the dogs sprawled beside her, once or twice she squeezed my leg hard during key moments, or clapped her hands and cried with laughter at her own version of “San Francisco”. Just before the final number, “Chicago”, she stopped the record.

  “You hear my voice? I had almost gone. I was dead beat … they wanted more and more … they wouldn’t let me go, you can hear? And then when I got to this last song I knew I’d not get through, I couldn’t get the breath … and then something fantastic happened; I want you to listen. Right after the first verse, when I sing … ‘And you will never guess where’ … right there, in the silence, one voice from way, way out in the dark, called out ‘Where?’ … right on beat … and he saved me. I took it
from him and I went, brother I went! I have tried ever since to find out who he was … where he was … to thank him. Do you believe in God?”

  “Sometimes, not often.”

  “Well … God sent this voice … you listen.”

  Although she had said that no one knew where she was, the telephone was almost constantly busy, and one afternoon there was a call for her from California. We were all sitting on the terrace having tea, I saw her come through the study windows, her arms outstretched; she beckoned, and I went to her. She put her arms round me, eyes smiling, tears brimming, lips trembling.

  “It was the Coast. Stanley Kramer. He wants me to do a movie … with Burt Lancaster.”

  “And?”

  “It’s about retarded children; I said yes. Now do you believe in God?”

  “No. But I believe in Stanley Kramer.”

  She punched me, and laughed. “Oh you! You are so damned British, I hate you!”

  “When does it start?”

  “I have to leave at the end of the week.”

  It was a good, happy week. Although she was still tired, still restless, not yet able to sleep, she was happy, funny as always and above all excited at the near prospect of the film. On her last evening we gave a great party for her; she made out a list, and everyone she asked accepted. She had never looked prettier, never been in such form, she was having a really magical time and was the most immaculate hostess. After supper, in the fading light of the summer sun, everyone sat round the grand piano and she and Noël Coward sang for their suppers. She knew all Noël’s lyrics, which pleased him greatly, from “Mrs Worthington” to the entire score of “Bitter Sweet”, and “If Love Were All”, which they sang as a duet, brought the packed room roaring to its feet. It was a shimmering evening; and Noël was the last to leave sometime in the very early hours. I got into bed about five, just as the first light was rising above the trees, under my pillow a note from her. It read in part: