CLINGING TO THE WRECKAGE

by John Mortimer

  Later I found the beautiful parts of Los Angeles, Malibu and the Italianate landscape of Topanga Canyon, where the houses were built of wood and plaster and hung perilously to the space between the precipice and the road. ‘I had a bad situation here,’ a girl who lived in one of these houses told me. ‘Two idiots in a Buick, they must have been stoned out of their minds, missed the corner and drove straight into my bedroom. Knocked the bed clear across the room. Since when this house lets in air.’

  Writers, in the first days when I visited Hollywood, suffered even greater risks than those of falling possum traps or head-on collisions between a Buick and a brass bedstead. They were put in small, similar offices in the studio and were not supposed to go ‘off the lot’. Nothing, I found, stifles creative endeavour more quickly than a desk in an air-conditioned cell, piles of yellow pads and stacks of sharpened pencils with a secretary waiting eagerly to type out ‘the pages’. Every twenty pages had to be shown to the producer who first read it with deeply sincere admiration, and then having shown it to his wife, a number of old friends, three or four guys from the front office, his children and his devoted grey-haired secretary, found that it was sadly lacking in drama, was too literary, contained too many words, contained characters who were as flat as a pancake and many another fatal flaw. The most unnerving producer in this regard was Mr Sam Spiegel who would receive pages of pure gold in the evening which, like some Rumpelstiltskin in reverse, he would cause to dwindle to a small pile of rubbish by the following day.

  Another great handicap for a writer was the ‘story conference’ where as many people as possible were supposed to sit round joining in the discussion, with the result that the plot, out of sheer boredom, crept away and died. The story having been decided in committee, the characters in the drama were meant to follow it faithfully and never had a chance of changing its course without the producer’s consent. Successful fiction writing, which depends on privacy, secrecy and a writer’s occasional ability to take himself by surprise, was impossible under these conditions. In fact the ground rules of Hollywood scriptwriting seem to have been designed to ensure that the film, unlike the theatre, radio or even television, can never be mistaken for a literary art, and the cinema has not yet produced a memorable writer.

  With all this to contend with I was surprised to find my fellow-prisoners in what was appropriately called ‘The Writers’ Block’ reasonably contented. As producers didn’t read books they had to have scripts written in order to find out that no one wanted to make the movie. So a handsome and extremely safe living could be made from writing films that never went into production. There were also writers who had perfected the art of remaining on the payroll of a film which was, in fact, being written by someone else. They could then spend relaxing days taking their children to Disneyland or picking up girls in Schwabs’ Pharmacy, and if the film got made they could enter into a fierce struggle for the credit. In Hollywood it seemed to be a basic rule that it is better to have a credit on a bad film you haven’t written than to have no credit at all. No doubt such recognition gave the scriptwriters the feeling of being loved; it was as though they lined their mantelpieces with invitations to parties to which they never went and which they certainly wouldn’t have enjoyed.

  Movies in those days were more remarkable for the trips than the work in hand. The old-style film producers regarded the world as their oyster, a quite manageable setting for any drama they felt inclined to stage. For the writer, imprisoned in so much solitude, the idea of a medium which could take him anywhere in the world at the drop of a contract provided a strong temptation. In due course Penelope and I were asked to write a quite effective film for Mr Otto Preminger. Bunny Lake is Missing was a thriller set in and around a nursery school in Swiss Cottage where we lived, yet to write it Mr Preminger summoned us to Hawaii, where he was restaging the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. We walked on the beach among blue-haired American matrons who wore plastic grass skirts, we breathed in the seductive perfume of pineapple-canning factories and we watched a pool full of charming dolphins who rang bells and danced the Merry Widow waltz. We did our best to recapture the life of NW6 from the eighteenth floor of the Ilikai Hotel. I remember that the best thing to eat in the hotel restaurant was a dish, rather like swordfish, called ‘Mai-Mai Steak’. What on earth was ‘Mai-Mai’? Mr Preminger, who had a somewhat merciless attitude towards actors, assured us that we were eating those dolphins who failed in the performance of the Merry Widow waltz.

  Later still we were employed by the greatest of all the tycoons, Mr Sam Spiegel, whose home was a private yacht, about the size of a small Channel steamer, which wandered lazily about the Mediterranean Sea. Once a writer was lured aboard there was no escape, the yacht might up anchor during the night and make off in the direction of St Tropez. All the boats which might put you ashore were in Mr Spiegel’s command, and there was no alternative to sitting in the stateroom, drinking Bullshots and trying not to pay too much attention to the producer’s alternate praise and abuse of your script.

  There were two highlights to life on Mr Spiegel’s yacht. One was when the walkie-talkie which he used when on shore to summon the ship’s motor boat to take him on board failed after he had visited a Casino. He was unable to call the yacht from the beach at Cannes and seemed marooned. However the man who had produced Lawrence of Arabia was not easily deterred from his purpose. He rose to the occasion and hired a pedalo and the great producer, in a dinner jacket, sat in the small craft while his chauffeur in uniform, his cap firmly on his head, pedaloed them both across the moonlit Mediterranean.

  On another occasion I asked Mr Spiegel if I could swim from the yacht. This appeared to be a somewhat unusual request, but in due course a gangway was lowered, sailors brought towels and the steward stood by with a huge Bullshot should I need reviving. The Captain stopped the engines, other guests lined the rails and I walked slowly down to the sea. And then, as I entered the clear water, a sailor flushed a lavatory somewhere in the steerage. As I swam I was suddenly surrounded by floating lavatory paper and even less attractive material. Such were the splendours and miseries of a life in show business.

  On my first visit to Hollywood I pursued Mr de Grunwald’s story through a number of changes, doing my best to camouflage its basic improbability. I met George Cukor, the charming, waspish director of great actresses, the old wizard who wheedled unforgettable performances out of Garbo and Katherine Hepburn, in his quiet house and Italianate garden with its lawns and white pillars just behind the line of ‘Topless’ and ‘Bottomless’ bars on Sunset Strip. I went to a party in the ruins of a palace in Bel Air which William Randolph Hearst had built for Marion Davies. The swimming pool was built round the house like a moat, but its walls were cracked, trees had fallen into the water and the place had been taken over by a group of abstract painters who sat on large cushions in the ballroom smoking and drinking iced tea. ‘It’s wonderful to be in such a historical place,’ one of them said. ‘This was a house built of pure love. You do feel that, don’t you?’

  I sat by the pool in the Beverly Hills Hotel, a place where actors paid their agents to telephone them often so that their names might be heard repeatedly over the Tannoy. I had a sudden nostalgic longing for the High Court of Justice, for the great hall in which it is never quite daylight and where the secretaries come out of their small offices to play badminton at night. I wanted to see the old barristers climbing like black beetles up the marble staircases again. I even longed to meet a client and deal with the plots and dramas of real life, matters which could be proved to have happened instead of flawed speculations from the producer’s office.

  ‘I think I’d like to go back to England,’ I said to Mr de Grunwald. ‘It’s the divorce, you see.’

  ‘The divorce?’ Tolly de Grunwald looked genuinely concerned and put an arm about my shoulder, holding me in an increasingly bear-like hug as he said, ‘That’s never going to happen to me. I’ve made my wife a promise, you see, of a purely persona
l and private nature. All the same, if you’re going to have a divorce I’d better let you go. Pity. The last pages were just perfection.’

  I got back to England and comforted myself with the simplicities of the law. Mr de Grunwald followed me later and his film, which might with any luck have followed 90 per cent of such projects into oblivion, was unfortunately made. From time to time Mr de Grunwald rang my chambers and asked, in hushed and reverent tones, if I felt any happier. Then he would ask me if I could think of a good new ending for our story. ‘We’re shooting the last scene tomorrow,’ he said once with a kind of unearthly detachment. ‘You got any ideas about what it ought to be?’

  Before the film came out a miracle occurred. An old Hollywood writer who had once done some work on it long before claimed, to my enormous relief, the sole credit. He was, Mr de Grunwald told me, prepared to pay top lawyers and argue the matter at length before the Screen Writers’ Guild, so determined was he to accept responsibility for my failure. I gave it to him without making the smallest trouble.

  Chapter Eighteen

  It was a relief to return to the theatre, where I had undertaken what seemed to me the superhuman task of writing a full-length play, one which could occupy the audience’s life for two and a half hours, including the intervals when they fought to wrest a warm gin and tonic from an overworked lady in black bombazine.

  I had enjoyed, up to then, writing short plays for the theatre and for television. I have to confess to a low threshold of boredom. At one distant Edinburgh Festival I recall that Kenneth Tynan called us the ‘Half Time Mortimers’, and though I have often been with Saint Joan when she picks out the Dauphin I have not always been among those present when she makes her posthumous return to his sleepless bedroom. I have some sympathy for the Victorian Liberal, Sir Charles Dilke, who never saw more than one act of any play. He loved the theatre deeply but enough, he no doubt felt, was as good as a feast. I have even more sympathy with that member of the House of Lords who fell asleep during his own maiden speech. The only rule I have found to have any validity in writing is not to bore yourself.

  So, with a good deal of trepidation, I began a ‘full-length play’. The central character was our house in Swiss Cottage and I called the play The Wrong Side of the Park. Michael Codron presented it, and it was directed by Peter Hall, who was married at the time to Leslie Caron. I used to sit in his house which was filled with the gilded cherubs and strawberry-coloured velvet of the Belle Epoque and discuss NW6. When he married for the second time the décor changed dramatically and became Italian functional, not to say futuristic; the cherubs were replaced by automatically rotating abstract sculpture. I have always liked Peter Hall and we have remained friends over the years. He had an admirable determination which led him, inevitably, from the stationmaster’s house to directorship of the National Theatre. He told me that when he first arrived at Cambridge with a scholarship he paused, in his walk from the station, to book the Arts Theatre for the production he knew he would be doing there in two years’ time. Like many people in the theatre who came from relatively poor backgrounds, he was anxious to enjoy his prosperity: it was only the directors with comfortable bourgeois backgrounds who seemed, in the sixties, so doggedly anxious to appear working class.

  Among the putti of Peter Hall’s Montpelier Square pad we got the news that Margaret Leighton had agreed to play the wife in The Wrong Side of the Park. She came back from Hollywood, a beautiful, nervous, strong actress who ate, apparently, nothing at all. She was married, then, to the actor Laurence Harvey and they lived in a lavishly converted squash court somewhere in Mayfair. Mr Harvey used to ride about on the pillion of a chauffeur-driven motor-scooter. He was a man of considerable charm and did surprisingly good imitations. He always seemed to treat his wife very badly and in restaurants he would call out to the wine waiter for ‘another drink for my mother’. However I noticed that if he stopped mistreating her she would turn on him and insult him with far more imagination than he could command. Although it was an improbable marriage they seemed well suited and I was sorry when it broke up. When it did so, in return for her superb acting in my play, I conducted Miss Leighton’s divorce. She arrived at the High Court of Justice in full mourning, very pale, supported on the arm of Terence Rattigan who also seemed to be dressed for a State funeral. It was one of the most theatrically effective ‘undefendeds’ I have ever done.

  The play, at the time, appeared to be a success. In a way that time marked the beginning of the end of our living in the house, because although we stayed on for a number of years we had begun, perhaps unconsciously, to make secret preparations for our departure. It was the last play of mine that my father ‘saw’.

  In the last years of his life my father’s garden became mutinous. He depended on a changing stream of gardeners and garden boys whose attendance was sporadic. In their absence the weeds took over more and more territory and a large part of the fruit cage collapsed. He went less and less often to his chambers and occasionally, in a strange reversal of our roles, he did the paper work and drafted the legal pleadings which I had no time to do.

  His diaries speak of the number of people who worked at the house. There was Dora, a fat cook, who came by bicycle from a nearby village. She was walking out with a man to whom she had been engaged for some thirty years and she was waiting for his younger brother to die before she felt they could marry. Dora helped my father fill in his football coupons. The pools seem to have occurred to him as a source of income in his seventies when the chance of a good ‘money brief’ grew slimmer. Otherwise the diary records his frustrations as he waited for ‘Gerald’ or ‘Thomas’ or ‘Allan’ or ‘Mr Long’ or ‘Mr Richards’ to call and do battle against the weeds. Gerald’s name appears the most often. Gerald’s visits were unpredictable and when he came he often spent hours ‘fiddling with the lawnmower’ and no grass was cut.

  Ever anxious about the world, and hungry for literature, my father persuaded my mother to read him Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker and, to her intense embarrassment, Lolita. In the year we did The Wrong Side of the Park he had a heart attack. The doctor came in the middle of the night and gave him two injections of morphia and later sent a male night nurse called ‘Hare’, a somewhat sinister figure who didn’t expect my father to live. After a while my father banished Hare from his bedroom, so the sullen nurse sat in the kitchen chain-smoking and telling me how long it would be before the end. I think it was mainly to irritate Hare that my father made a determined recovery and ordered a kidney for his breakfast.

  Later the diary records with great satisfaction that Gerald came to work and that Hare was driven to the station in Henley. This ill-tempered harbinger of death was not seen in the house again. For a long time my father’s recovery seemed complete.

  My Uncle Harold having died, my Aunt Daisy arrived with her dog and her shrubs to stay with my parents. Later she bought a house near to them and kept them company. My mother was always a little in awe of her younger sister, perhaps because she was richer and had become independent. My parents got a small income from my Uncle Harold’s Will, which went on a new boiler and the wages of a constantly floating population of gardening mercenaries. And every day my father noted the moments of triumph, as when they walked down to the West Field to admire the wonderful show of crab-apple blossom, or when the berrying shrubs, in particular the cotoneasters, ‘did marvellously’. He also recorded the moments of frustration and near despair, as when Gerald announced that he was going to join the RAF: ‘We were tremendously taken aback.’

  Gerald’s threat seems to have been of a temporary nature and no doubt my father, summoning all his skill as an advocate, managed to persuade him that his real enemy was nearer at hand, growing hourly and threatening to strangle the rose bushes. The next week Gerald was back in the garden, weeding sporadically and ‘fiddling with the lawnmower’. Later Gerald buckled the scythe.

  In the July of his last year, my father had raspberry pie from his own raspberries and th
e peas were demolished by jays. Gerald was kept busy tidying up by the white seat and round the camellias. Someone called ‘Bartholomew’ was weeding on the terrace and in front of the borders. And then, at long last and after much fiddling with the mower, ‘Gerald cut the grass and was paid’.

  August was cold and miserable. My mother read Waiting for Godot aloud, and they wasted time trying to extricate a peach net from the loft and discovered that Gerald had been paid twice for one lot of grass cutting. By the end of the month my father was eating his own tomatoes.

  Suddenly the weather changed and became hot and stifling. It took four men and two Allen scythes to cut the long grass in the West Field. Towards the end of September my father was troubled with a pain in his left wrist which the doctor diagnosed as gout, an affliction he suffered from whenever he ate strawberries. Two or three days later he became very ill and I went to stay in the house. My mother had been left with oxygen cylinders and a mask which she was to put on my father’s face to help him breathe.

  The night was very hot when he died. The doctor called and said there was nothing more he could do, but that we should try to keep my father awake. The huge and unwieldy garden surrounding the small house seemed unnaturally silent and I could hear nothing but the sound of my father’s assisted breathing. At the last moment he wanted to get out of bed and cried out angrily because we wouldn’t let him have a bath. When my mother protested he said, ‘I’m always angry when I’m dying.’ I don’t know if it was something he had prepared for a long time, but those were the last words I heard him say. I held the mask over his face until he no longer had need of it.