Wicked Little Joe

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by Joseph Hone


  Towards the end though he had to forsake the beer and all the bars. Falling ill with a recurrence of his tuberculosis, and then cancer of his remaining lung, he returned to Dublin a year later, and died in the Jesuit nursing home in Leeson Street, with half bottles of Champagne and oxygen to see him out. My mother was with him over all his last days, and Nat was converted at last to the true faith by the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, Dr McQuaid, in the nursing home. If Nat started off his life with a silver spoon in his mouth, and spent most of it drinking the bitter, he ended up with the wafer and wine, the Body and Blood of Christ on his tongue – his slate wiped clean, I hope. I came over to Dublin, and visited him in the nursing home. He was drifting in and out of consciousness and barely spoke, absorbed in his dying. I went to see him the next day and he was dead. My mother had been with him all night. He was stiff and chilly-looking on the bed, a dull, distant expression on his thin features, the sheet pulled up to his stubbled chin. My mother kissed him gently on the forehead, and we left. I was still working at Pinewood, so I went back to England at once. I didn’t stay for the funeral. I should have done, as a support for my mother at least. But the truth was that I ran out on it all, unable to face the fact that I should have felt some real emotion for both of them, and didn’t.

  Biddy died five years later, of womb cancer in a Bath hospital. In the last months of her life she had gone to live in Chippenham with one of her sisters. Before that she had lived alone in small damp flats in Cheltenham and in the village of Winchcombe in the hills outside the town, where I stayed with her for a few days now and then while she was still working as a filing clerk with Walker Crossweller. She had good friends in Cheltenham, but I should have gone to see her more often, and I feel guilty about that too.

  Yet what she had lost with me, by allowing me to be packed off to Dublin twenty years before, I was never able to regain with her. My mother remained for me a rather distant, distressed relation. Her life was as sad as Nat’s. She would certainly have been better off leaving Nat permanently, when she would surely have found a much more secure and congenial relationship with another man. She and Nat had something special between them from the start – their trump, their only card: they were nearly always lovers, physically and emotionally, to Nat’s end and hers, for, apart from her fling with Ian McCorkadale, she never had serious eyes for any other man but him. That’s the best I can say of them.

  But to resume my own life at the time. When Retour de Manivelle was finished, there were no more Rank movies for me in France. So having returned to London, and by courtesy of Brian again, I went back to Pinewood as a runner. Brian was preparing another picture there. But I was just an eight-pound-a-week dogsbody again, and it seemed that was all I was ever likely to be in the movie business, the union ticket as far away as ever.

  Then came a further lucky break. I was assigned as runner to another Rank technicolour costume epic, The Gypsy and the Gentleman, with the Australian actor Keith Michell as the gentleman and Melina Mercouri as the gypsy. And what a gypsy she was! I’d seen her already in the Greek movie Stella at the Everyman cinema in Hampstead, this sexy, slinky, husky-voiced woman with the huge dark eyes, and here she was, at my visual disposal at least, when I went to call her in her dressing room. She was quite out of the ordinary run of movie stars: those smouldering eyes, ironic, provocative, funny, highly intelligent. How such a little-known and unconventional foreign actress (so different from any of Pinewood’s charm school girls) came to be in one of Rank’s big pictures I’ve no idea.

  However, the real surprise was that Mercouri (and Michell, an equally intelligent, if more quietly pitched actor) had been teamed up with director Joseph Losey on the picture. Losey, one of the best and most politically committed American directors, had fallen foul of the McCarthyite communist witch hunts in 1950s Hollywood, was compelled to leave America and had come to work in London a few years before. Since he’d been blacklisted in Hollywood, he’d had to make his first two pictures in England, The Sleeping Tiger and The Intimate Stranger, under assumed names. Though he had no real affiliations with the communist party now (if he’d ever had), he must have been seen as something of a Red in the British film industry. And so again it was all the more unexpected that he should be given a big picture to make by the politically correct and wary John Davis, head of the studios at Pinewood, and his boss the very Christian Lord Rank. But so it was. So, by chance, I was assigned as runner on the movie.

  The script, and the picture as it turned out, was a rigmarole of boozy bucks and bosomy barmaids, the last sort of movie that Losey, who had made classic dark and violent thrillers in Hollywood (The Prowler and M), might have been expected to be interested in. The reason was simple, though: Losey badly needed the work, any kind of movie work.

  Initially, I knew little or nothing of Losey’s American background or his movies. What I first saw of him on the set was a tense, middle-aged, perpetually harassed man, pretty well at sea with this Regency melodrama. But what I also saw was how good he was with the crew and the actors – quiet, precise and easy in his directions to the former and never giving more than a few small tips to the latter. I saw how imaginative and painstaking he was with his set-ups, some of them elaborate, where he filmed the master shots in long tracking takes. He knew exactly what he was doing technically. He had, too, that special gift in movie making – the ability to see what could be developed in a script, with an actor, or in a set-up, camera movement, or in the editing to create a sudden frisson, that unexpected ‘moment of illumination’ in his pictures. Like Ford he was speedy and economic in his shooting, with little wasted footage, so that he was furious with the slowness of the British lighting gaffers and electricians, who always had to pull the switches and break for tea and bacon butties, just as Joe had finally got a shot lined up and the actors ready.

  One of the first elaborate studio set-ups and long tracking takes involved a group of bucks at a wild country fair where, with a big crowd of drunken bucolics, the gentleman met the gypsy, and where the main business of the scene was the catching, for various wagers, of a greased piglet. Needless to say (never act with animals or children), nearly everything that could go wrong did. The greased piglet, under the bright lights, became meltingly slippery, then squealingly hysterical and uncatchable. It ran about madly, in and out of shot, snouting the electricians beyond the camera, before galloping off round the sound stage. Or it was momentarily caught by one or other or all of the bucks. But so pugnacious did piglet become that it floored the Regency rakes, or pulled them along the grease-sodden floor, ruining their foppish costumes. Panic and pandemonium as the shot had to be taken again and again. For Losey all this overblown malarkey must have been a sore trial, work very far removed from his chilling minimalist direction of The Prowler and M. But he stuck to it gamely.

  Other than lurking about, watching the shooting and waiting to call someone or other to the set, I had little to do with Losey to begin with. But one day he stopped me outside the production office. ‘I hear you’ve been working in France, on some French pictures, so you speak French?’ I nodded, since I did speak French quite well by then. ‘Well, I wonder if you could help me out? I have a French guy coming to interview me tomorrow, for a movie magazine over in Paris, Cahiers du Cinéma. Would you look after him until I can get to see him? Give him a coffee or a drink.’ And this I did. After this I was closer to Losey and he called me Joe and I called him Joe, and we became good friends, both personally and professionally. When we’d both left Pinewood, I went location hunting and working on scripts with him, on The Criminal and King and Country, his First World War picture with Dirk Bogarde and Tom Courtney.

  But this work was after a crisis on Gypsy. Halfway through the shooting Joe had had a serious run-in with John Davis about something; the script or the sets, or the budget, I think. Davis decided that, apart from possibly being a Red, Joe was a difficult arty bugger, and was about to fire him. Luckily, Brian – who had already met Joe, liked him an
d what he’d heard about his earlier pictures – was at Pinewood preparing another movie. (Brian had a three-picture deal with Rank at the time.) Learning of the trouble, Brian went to see Davis and said he shouldn’t fire Joe. He was a good director. And if he did – well, Brian thought that might be awkward: he mightn’t care to go on working for Rank. Besides there would be bad publicity when the news got into the papers, as Brian implied it would, through him, of how Joe had been victimized for no good reason by the supposedly charitable Lord Rank. Joe wasn’t fired.

  This was another quixotic act of Brian’s, calling Davis’s bluff, since Davis, big cheese movie mogul that he was, might well have fired both of them. And at the rate Brian spent money he probably needed Rank’s cash more than Joe did. But then, as I knew already from Brian’s business with Earl St John over the ballroom staircase and Belinda Lee’s bad profile, Brian had a way of dealing with movie moguls, with a mix of cajoling blarney and subtle threat. I wasn’t the only one who benefited from Brian’s generosity.

  So at Pinewood, in meeting Joe, the long train of luck held for me again – from climbing a high wall in Dublin to thus meeting Ford, and through him Brian, to Brian getting me into French movies, so that Joe asked me to help him with the Cahiers du Cinéma interview, which was how I got to know and work for him afterwards. If luck is a pre-condition of success in life, and especially in the picture business, then I had full measure of it. Luck, and a bit of assumed front and brashness. The way things were going for me at the time, with all this lucky influence on my side – why, I might have made it as a movie director in a few years time. Ah, but that elusive ACT union ticket …

  But it wasn’t the union ticket. I knew in my heart I was never going to make it as a movie director. I didn’t have the self-confidence, or the tough guts needed for the job, and doubted I would ever have the technical skills either to control the camera work, the actors, the set-ups, the editing or handle a film unit generally. And I think I knew then, in those last Pinewood days, that I would have to head off in some other direction. I had no idea where.

  FOURTEEN

  So it was back to Dublin, staying with my grandparents again in Winton Road. My grandfather didn’t moan about my unemployed arrival. Approaching eighty (he died a year later), I think he was tiring of life generally, and certainly of all the Little Joe problems. Since I had some money saved from my curtailed movie career, I didn’t have to put the bite on him financially and kept out of his way. I went downtown most days to see friends, and a friend I bumped into outside the gates of Trinity College one afternoon was a teacher I’d worked with at Drogheda Grammar School two years before, Alec Reid, who had taught English and French to the older pupils there.

  Alec was a remarkable man – early forties, small, portly, albino, pink-cheeked, badly sighted, academically gifted, witty and passionate about theatre. Heroically, he treated his physical disadvantages as if they simply didn’t exist. He had come over to Dublin some years before, with his attractive English wife. I don’t know why the Reids had come to Ireland. Perhaps Alec thought his offbeat character, his interest in theatre (he later wrote one of the best books about Sam Beckett’s work) and his generally droll characteristics would be viewed more sympathetically in Dublin than in England, as indeed they were, in a city well used to brilliant eccentrics. His friends, and his students particularly, liked him and appreciated his conceits. In his oddities he became more Irish than the Irish themselves.

  In any case he got two days a week teaching up in Drogheda, a junior lectureship in English in Trinity, and was taken on by The Irish Times as a second-string theatre critic and third leader writer, writing witty or cleverly inconsequential pieces once or twice a week. Alec, by the time I got back to Dublin, was a well-known figure, strolling around Trinity with his rolling sailor’s gait, newspapers, exam papers and God knows what other papers coming out of every pocket, heavy magnifying specs jammed sideways on his nose, a row of pens in the top pocket of his tight-fitting, rather food-spattered tweed jacket. A Heath Robinson professor.

  That afternoon, stopping me outside Trinity front gates, he said casually, as if we’d met the day before: ‘Ah, Joe, just the man I wanted to see. I’m sure you’d like to go to Egypt.’ This was the last thing I was sure I would like to do just then. ‘I’m recruiting English teachers,’ Alec went on merrily, wagging one of his pens at me. ‘For the ex-British schools in Cairo and Alex. The British have all been chucked out of Egypt, of course. But the Colonel is keen to keep these schools going as they were – with Irish teachers.’ ‘The Colonel?’ I asked. ‘Why, Colonel Nasser of course.’ ‘I see,’ I said. ‘Yes, I’ve been in touch with him – he’s been in touch with the College here, and I’m to drum up a score of likely pedagogues. Their Minister of Education, Dr Khaki, is to be here next week, for interviews. Come along and see him – you’ll like it out there.’ ‘Yes, but, well, I only have four ‘O’ Levels …’ ‘Oh, that won’t matter, not in Egypt now. As long as you speak English they won’t worry about qualifications. And I’ll vouch for you. You were good with teaching the boys at Drogheda Grammar. You come along next week and see Dr Khaki. I’ll have primed him about you. Nothing to worry about. You’ll like it out there.’

  So, since I’d nothing better to do and my money was almost gone, I turned up outside an office of the Trinity English department, along with some other unlikely interviewees, waiting to see Alec and Dr Khaki. As Alec had promised, the interview went without a hitch. Dr Khaki, a big bear of a man, asked no questions about my educational qualifications. It was clear that I’d taught at Drogheda Grammar – and spoke English – and that was enough. The interview was brief, almost hurried, and I was offered a job at one of the four ex-British schools in Egypt, board and lodging, a year’s contract at thirty pounds a month, a return flight and a fifteen pounds advance for travelling expenses.

  Well, this was luck again. For although I didn’t know it at the time, my year in Egypt was the making of me: not as a painter, poet, actor, or movie maker as I had hoped to be, but as a novelist, which I’d never thought to be at all. And here I see how I should properly thank my grandfather for all this change and bounty that came to me in my late teens – my grandfather on whom I think I’ve been a bit hard so far. For it was Old Joe, knowing Dr Marsh, who had got me the job at Drogheda Grammar, and who afterwards, knowing Lord Killanin, had brought me my first work in movies with Ford. And through Ford I had met Brian Hurst, who had got me into pictures in London and Nice, and so I had learnt to speak French, and thus came to know Joe Losey properly at Pinewood and later do some movie scripting with him.

  My grandfather’s final gift to me was that at Drogheda I had met Alec Reid, who, because of this meeting, had stopped me outside the front gates of Trinity a year later and enticed me to Egypt. So that although my grandfather originally wanted to get shot of me, to pack me off to the merchant navy or the Hong Kong police, the fact is that it was he who led me to all the exciting paths I first took in life. For it was my year as a schoolteacher in Egypt in 1958 and 1959 that brought me ten years later to write fiction, since it was in Cairo that I found the bizarre characters, situations and the setting for my first novel, The Private Sector. ‘A man goes into Egypt and is changed forever.’ And so it was.

  But that’s another story, of the year I taught in Egypt, and afterwards worked in publishing (another job my grandfather arranged for me through his friend Rupert Hart-Davis), then worked in theatre, managing John Ryan’s Envoy Productions in Dublin and later with Joan Littlewood in Stratford East, then as a Talks Producer with BBC radio, before I joined the United Nations Secretariat in New York in 1967; and, for the next thirty years, settled in the Cotswolds with my family, working as a freelance broadcaster with the BBC, doing talks from outlandish parts of Africa, India and South East Asia, as well as writing my novels and travel books. Altogether another story. This one should properly end with my childhood and youth, because it’s a story as much about my minders as it is about me
.

  And besides, after I went away to Egypt the letters about me in the discovered Little Joe file pretty well come to an end. Though in another file of my own there are many subsequent letters to me from Peggy and Hubert and others, but they are no longer in the ‘minding’ form. For better or worse I was Big Joe now.

  No, the question here, on the evidence of the many earlier letters about me, has been about whether my minders may have harmed more than helped me in my growing up; about whether I was by nature, or simply by being abandoned by my parents, a most difficult, selfish, troublesome, thieving boy. However, the Butlers particularly succeeded in launching me on what turned out to be a largely happy and reasonably successful life. More importantly, because of their early love and concern and the familial confidence they gave me through bringing me up at Maidenhall, they set me on my own secure familial road – marriage and with splendid children and grandchildren.

  What of my minders and mentors, of Peggy and Hubert, my grandparents, real parents, my aunt Sally and husband Stanley, Tony Guthrie and Kingsley Scott? What happened to them? And what of my siblings, those other six orphans of the storm? Of my minders and mentors, all except Kingsley have died.

  My grandfather was the first to die in March 1959. I was teaching in Egypt then and only heard several weeks later that he had died of pneumonia. And of worry and sadness? I think so. His had been a life that had started with every advantage, coming from a well-off and cultured Dublin background, where he had shown great intellectual and cricketing promise at Wellington and Cambridge, promise amply fulfilled in his early maturity, playing cricket for County Wicklow (he was good enough, so his friend Sam Beckett told me, to have played for the Gentlemen of Ireland, as Sam himself had done), writing half-a-dozen acclaimed biographies and all sorts of reviews and articles for George Russell’s Irish Statesman, The London Mercury and the TLS.

 

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