Wicked Little Joe

by Joseph Hone

Later we went on location to the London docks for two weeks, to shoot in an old warehouse and on a Yugoslav tramp steamer on which Mature and Howard at once struck up a bibulous friendship with the Serbian captain. Instead of whiskey it was slivovitz time now and the two actors, while waiting to be called, more or less camped out with the captain on the bridge of the steamer. I would find the three of them fairly well oiled, playing at driving the ship, with Mature at the wheel and Howard shouting commands: ‘Hard a port, me hearty!’ ‘Steady as she goes …’ ‘England expects!’ ‘Engage the enemy more closely!’ and finally ‘Splice the mainbrace!’ with a rollicking footloose return to the slivovitz to do just that.

  I was interested to see that, old pros that they were, none of this boozing affected their performances at all. It seemed to put a nice quizzical edge on Howard’s grizzled performance as the British Interpol man. Mature, as his American counterpart, was particularly impressive and sure-footed when he got to the warehouse set, where, in a long reverse tracking take, he had to run hither and thither over the wide space, stopping and starting, glaring this way and that with his gun. And having rehearsed it he did all the complex manoeuvrings in one take. I was on good terms with Mature by then, so I asked him how he’d managed to act it out so skilfully. ‘It’s not acting, Joe. It’s all about hitting your marks.’ ‘Your marks?’ ‘Yes, all those little bits of wood nailed down over the warehouse floor – I hit them with the toe of my shoe each time I get up to them, know where I am and where to stop for the camera then. Acting?’ he said dismissively. ‘It’s hitting your marks that really counts in this business.’ Indeed Victor couldn’t act, except in three modes. His most usual one was a rush to camera, when he would jerk to a stop and give a fierce strangulated grimace in close up as if he was about to do battle with the Gorgon in a biblical epic, when in fact it was supposed to be a sexy look aimed at Miss Ekberg on the reverse shot. His other mode was a rock-faced, narrow-eyed, motionless, Moses-on-the-mountain look. And his third was a leery smile, which, in his floppy suit, tousled brilliantined hair, open collar and loose tie, suggested he’d just been bedding a woman in a crummy motel. But none of this much mattered in this pretty third-rate movie. In fact his hammy acting gave the picture a splendidly lurid quality where you watched his glaring face, beefy charges and gyrations with fascination. Mature was a very nice man. Indeed, in the right hands, he did come to act in more than three modes – very creditably and entertainingly, when Vittorio de Sica took him in hand years later in Mature’s last picture, After the Fox.

  At the end of Interpol loose ends loomed again. I was still living with my aunt and uncle in Hampstead, but I spent more time now down at Grosvenor Crescent Mews with Brian, meeting his extraordinary entourage of hangers-on and visitors, endlessly varied. A new ‘slave’ would appear on the scene every few weeks, to cook and clean, and other handy work no doubt upstairs in Brian’s bedroom; actors – famous and unknown, straight and bent – would arrive at all hours, to talk serious work for some film Brian was hoping to make, or to talk and play with less serious ends in view; Michael Redgrave and strapping guardsmen from the Knightsbridge barracks, cockney conmen and famous east-end villains, prissy male models and limp-wristed women’s hat makers, trendy new directors or technicians from his old movies down on their luck who would get a fiver or two from Brian on the way out, and other film friends rocketing on the way up such as Terence Young, who was soon to embark on directing all the early James Bond films. All men, of course, but all meat and drink for Brian, or rather smoked salmon, scrambled eggs and Champagne for Brian and his posh friends, with brown ale and bread-and-cheese for the guardsmen and lower orders out in the kitchen, which was the standard fare in the house.

  But there were a few women visitors. His old friends Hermione Gingold and Siobhan McKenna and the odd young woman or two, whom Brian laid on for his straight men. Including me, when he more or less put me still a virgin into bed in the spare bedroom with a lovely bohemian Australian girl, Rita. I have more than getting into pictures to thank Brian for.

  At other times, when there were just a few of us, Brian would embark on one of his stories, fact or fiction, one hardly ever knew, of how he met Ford in Hollywood: ‘I didn’t meet him at the studios. I’d no interest in pictures then. I was going round the world, with a rich Russian countess I’d met. Staying at the Beverly Wilshire. Met him in the revolving doors – he was pushing out of the lobby and I was pushing in. But he was pushing the wrong way – Jack always had poor eyesight. So I swore at him through the glass, and he swore back, a string of Irish curses from both of us. Got to be friends at once. I had a big open Buick and I drove Jack out to the studios, told him I was a painter. “Well, come along in then,” he said, “and paint something for me.” So I did, some phoney Bavarian murals for the picture he was going to make, Four Sons. After that I did more painting and set designs for him. Became best friends.’

  There was never a dull moment at number 24. One evening, halfway through a carefully crafted story about staying at Castle Leslie in Ireland where a fabulous naked youth had emerged from his bedroom wardrobe, we heard screams from the next-door mews house and a rattle on Brian’s window. ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ Brian said. ‘It’s just Tony’s girlfriend – Tony’s trying to kill himself again.’ Brian let a distraught young woman in. ‘No, it’s really serious this time, Brian. Come quickly.’ Brian went rather wearily next door and I followed. This was Tony Wright (known as ‘Tony Wrong’), a beefy blond Rank star, musclebound and hammy, who had figured in quite a few Rank tough-guy B-pictures, but who had felt recently that he wasn’t getting his due with serious pictures out at Pinewood. He had taken to bouts of pretend suicide with his girlfriend. But this time it was almost for real. We found him on the floor of the living room, laid out motionless, looking very pale. ‘He’s had half a bottle of aspirin this time, Brian!’ Brian knelt over him, took his pulse, stripped open his shirt and listened to his heart. ‘Well, it’s still ticking. Just …’ He looked up at the girlfriend. ‘Got a stomach pump here?’ he asked her casually. ‘Of course I haven’t got a bloody stomach pump here!’ ‘With Tony in these moods … should keep one handy.’ He turned to me. ‘Run round to St George’s, Joe. Get an ambulance.’ The hospital was just round the corner and Tony Wright-and-Wrong was saved.

  Apart from Champagne breakfasts and sides of smoked salmon from Harrods, Brian was a big spender on other items: a lovely navy-blue open-topped Bentley in a garage round the corner, evenings at Les Ambassadeurs, an exclusive dinner and gambling club off Park Lane, and fivers all round to old and new boyfriends. Since he wasn’t at that point making a film, I wondered where all his ready cash came from.

  ‘Come,’ he said one afternoon. ‘We’ll go call on my sister Pat.’ He took the Russian icon of Saint Bridget off the wall and we were soon cruising round the park in the open Bentley, with Brian, white hair aflow in the wind, summing up the talent on the pavement as we passed. ‘My passion wagon,’ Brian said of the car. ‘I have lots of luck with it. George Cukor was over here to prepare Les Girls and wanted to buy it off me thinking he’d have the same sort of luck with it. George is somewhat small – in height, not the other way. I said “But George, your feet won’t reach the pedals.” “Never mind, Brian. I’ll just have it stopped here in the park and wait in it.”’

  Patricia had an apartment in Dean’s Yard, a cul-de-sac next to the Dorchester. We went upstairs and she opened the door. She was a generously built, elderly, white-haired woman in flowing, flower-patterned Indian-style robes and turned-up Turkish slippers, living in a small apartment crammed with antique furniture, porcelain and other glittery objets d’art.

  ‘This is Joe Hone, my “nephew”.’ ‘Indeed …’ She eyed me without favour. ‘Oh, no – he’s kosher. Won’t steal the silver. Friend of Jack Ford, worked with him in Ireland.’ ‘That’s no great recommendation. As it wasn’t for you. It’s a pity you ever met Ford. You could have been a good painter.’ ‘I am a good painter. See, I brou
ght you my Saint Bridget. You said your shares weren’t prospering. We’ll say a few prayers to her.’

  Patricia continued to eye me sourly. She brought me over to the mantelpiece. There were two beautiful blue-patterned Chinese lacquer vases at either end. ‘Smell them,’ she said. ‘Each of them.’ I smelt each of them. Both exuded a strong musky odour, with violets, peaches, I didn’t know what. There was nothing inside the vases. I told her what they smelt of. She turned to Brian. ‘Well, he’s all right then.’ Brian explained to me. ‘Very few people can smell anything in those vases. Absolutely nothing. So you’re all right.’

  After some desultory chatter between the two of them, Pat said ‘All right, Brian, I know what you want.’ She went to a fine inlaid French escritoire, opened a drawer, took out a cheque book, wrote a cheque and handed it to him. He pocketed it without looking at it. Then Pat said, ‘Brian, I’m worried about you.’ She returned to the escritoire, got out a pack of Tarot cards, sat down with Brian at a small table and laid the cards out. They gazed at them intently. After pondering things for a while Pat said, ‘They look all right. I see good things coming for you, Brian.’ ‘What’s he like?’

  Brother and sister lived by signs, by Tarot cards and by prayers to Saint Bridget and Saint Teresa. Pat, by such devotions and second sight Brian told me, had shared quite a fortune on the stock market, which she had played with an old friend of hers, Harry de Vere Clifton, an eccentric Lancashire millionaire aristocrat who owned half of Blackpool. It was from his sister Pat that Brian got his ready cash, when he wasn’t extracting money from Lord Rank. It was from Harry Clifton that Brian got the money to make his first movie back in the early thirties, Synge’s Riders to the Sea, filmed on a wild Atlantic beach in the west of Ireland. ‘He wrote me out a cheque for three thousand pounds on the back of a Goldflake cigarette packet. My bank manager called me next morning. “Is this cheque all right, Mr Hurst?” “It would be all right for a thousand times as much,” I told him.’

  Luck of the Irish. And Brian had bucketfuls of it. Which was another reason why he took life easy: ‘She bade me take life easy, as the leaves grow on the tree.’ ‘Down by the Sally Gardens’ was one of Brian’s favourite Irish ballads which he sang rather nicely of an evening over the Champagne.

  When I had finished with Interpol, Brian got me a job as a runner with the Rank Organization out in Pinewood. He was preparing a big picture there himself, Dangerous Exile, a story of the young Dauphin in the tower after the revolution; a big technicolour costume drama with a huge budget for the time, close to £400,000, and elaborate sets to be built on a huge sound stage and the back lot, featuring big stars of the time – Louis Jourdan (just finished on Gigi with Maurice Chevalier) and Belinda Lee, another blonde bombshell from the Rank charm school, and other fine British character actors. Now Brian cut out the Champagne breakfasts and the brown-ale boys. This was serious business, the most expensive film Rank had ever made. He was up and out at Pinewood by eight. Now there was a different side to him – the professional, hard-headed movie maker.

  At Pinewood I was assigned to a group of runners, half a dozen young men, anxious like me to get a union ticket and a real job as an assistant director. At the time, in what turned out to be the last years of Rank’s production-line picture making, there were six or eight films in production when I arrived. It must have been a bit like Hollywood in the old days – the whole studio alive with the bustle of all sorts of movie making, hundreds of actors and technicians wandering or running about the place, the clatter of movieolas from the cutting rooms, great plaster sets being constructed in the carpenter’s shop, skips of lavish period costumes from Nathans being taken round every day to Wardrobe.

  Brian took me out to Pinewood on my first day in his splendid open-topped Bentley. I suggested he might drop me some way down the road from the studio gates, not to make it seem too obvious that I was one of his ‘boys’. ‘Certainly not,’ he said. ‘I don’t give a fuck what they think – of you or me.’ And we sailed through the studio gates, the gatemen opening the barrier and saluting Brian smartly.

  I was first attached as a runner to a Norman Wisdom farce, and I really ran now, from the production office up and down the long corridors where the stars’ dressing rooms were, to and from the sound stage and then, late in the afternoon, collecting the scores of call sheets for the next day’s work and delivering them all round the place. This wasn’t the most interesting sort of movie work for me. ‘That doesn’t matter,’ Brian told me sharply one evening on the way back to London. ‘For you, you should learn much more from bad pictures than good ones.’

  The next picture I ran on, Windom’s Way, was much better, directed by Ronnie Neame with Peter Finch as the doctor out in the Malayan jungle, the whole bamboo, palm-tree jungle, dispensary, cabins and a small lake all built out on the back lot. Finch was reaching the height of his fine movie acting – very masculine, but subtle and immensely capable in his technique; and highly intelligent, always getting something unexpected and original out of often dull parts. Aside from his professional skill, off duty he was a real card – witty, incisive and something of a drinker when he liked a bit of a lark. I would sometimes have to call him in the bigwigs’ panelled dining-room and bar. I once found him at the bar, well away with the Irish actor Jack McGowran, whom I knew; a marvellous slip of a man with a fabulously mobile rubber face, and afterwards the great interpreter of Beckett’s plays. Finch knew that Jackie was in need of any extra movie money he could get, so he said to me: ‘Now listen, Joe, I want to see if we can get Jackie out on the lot after lunch, as one of the Malayan coolies. Ideal casting.’ ‘But I think Jackie is on another picture.’ ‘Doesn’t matter. Take him to Wardrobe, get him into a sarong, then make-up with a good dark daub of Lichener Number Five all over – and Ronnie won’t know he wasn’t born and bred in Kuala Lumpur.’ ‘Yes, Mr Finch …’ It didn’t quite work out like that, but no matter. Finch was the splendid matter then. And so was Jackie McGowran.

  Brian then started shooting his Dangerous Exile epic, which I wasn’t assigned to having been moved to another picture, another expensive costume epic, Ralph Thomas’s A Tale of Two Cities, with Dirk Bogarde. But I would sneak onto the Exile set and watch Brian at work. The interiors, of the palace at Versailles and such like, were vast and elaborate. The movie shot in full Panavision technicolour so that the dozens of big arc lights blazed with such heat that when they were turned off after each set-up the sound stage doors had to be opened to let in the air. I arrived one afternoon to get a glimpse of what Brian had told me was to be one of the major sequences, in the palace ballroom, where there was to be a ball, with scores of extras and playback music, where Belinda Lee was to be filmed on a camera crane coming down a long curved staircase before she mixed graciously with the bewigged and pantalooned guests in the ballroom.

  When I got on the set it was dark. Nothing was happening. Shooting had stopped for the day. Brian told me the story that night. ‘You see, to save money, they only built one staircase for the grand descent, when, as it turned out, they should have built two – on either side of the ballroom, because craning down on the one staircase meant shooting Belinda on her bad profile, and she wouldn’t have this, threw a tantrum, sulked. So I said to the designer: “Well, we’ll just have to build another staircase on the other side, so we can crane down on Belinda’s good profile. Meanwhile we’ll move onto the dungeons in the Bastille set.” But meanwhile Earl (Earl St John, the head of production at the studios then) heard what was happening, called me in and exploded. “You can’t build another staircase, Brian!” “Oh, come on, Earl,” I told him, “it’s flesh and blood against just a bit of wood and plaster.” “Goddamn it, Brian,” he said, “it’s another two thousand pounds against an overrun budget already. Couldn’t you have Belinda walk down the staircase some other way?” “You mean backwards?” “Well, no, but sideways maybe?”

  ‘We’re building another staircase …’ Brian ended the story with one of his wick
ed smiles.

  THIRTEEN

  Having been a runner at Pinewood for six months, and still seeing no chance of getting a union ticket, I decided to try and work in the picture business in France, by first studying movie making properly at the only school for this sort of learning at the time – IDHEC, the Institut de Haute École Cinématographique, run by the veteran director Marcel L’Herbier in Paris. But despite several letters of application, recommendations from Brian and an interview with one of the staff in Paris I failed to get in, and my lack of any proper French was one reason. Froggy Bertin’s French classes hadn’t done me any good, or rather I hadn’t bothered to learn much from them.

  However, there was another, and perhaps broader education waiting for me in Paris with Brian, with whom, when he was finished with Exile, I went over to Paris several times, staying either at the Crillon or the Hôtel Raphael, then a most distinguished and discreet hotel off the Etoile. Though there was no need for discretion as far as Brian and I were concerned – we always had separate bedrooms.

  Brian had many good French friends, particularly the actor-director Gerard Oury, a man-about-town and boulevardier with the boys. With him and others we went out on the town, to the Crazy Horse Saloon, then the most sophisticated and daring of nude-show night clubs – and to drinks with a finicky little snitch of a man, a queery-boots French marquis (known as ‘la Marquise’) in his beautiful seventeenth-century hôtel particulier on the left bank. The marquis owned a vineyard near Bordeaux. In his seventies, he was dressed immaculately à l’Anglaise, Saville Row and Jermyn Street, perfect English, a French aristo of the old school. We met in his palatial salon, a long room with rows of tall windows to one side, filled with gilt and marquetry Louis XIV furnishings with several huge armchairs by a dead fireplace. A Vietnamese servant, white-jacketed and gloved, served us vintage Champagne. Brian owed the marquis some favours, apparently, and was doing a little pimping for him in return.