Chapter 5
My father used to take us each year to what was then called the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon. There I saw the actors I most admired: Randle Ayrton, now an unknown name but an unforgettable Lear for me, and Donald Wolfit, gone down in history as an irredeemable ham, who was the actor who most easily, in those days, made me cry. In London, during the holidays, we also went regularly to the theatre, after prolonged dinners at the Trocadero. Perhaps it was my father’s fault that I longed to be an actor, and then a dramatist, and finally caused his character to become submerged by a sea of leading players.
Ten years after my father’s death I wrote a play about him and much of him departed into fiction. In A Voyage Round My Father I made up new dialogue for him and began to forget which words he had spoken in his lifetime and which I had given to his subsequent shadows. Most people keep their memories, and their fathers, mothers, husbands, wives and lovers, safely within them. For writers, such characters are redrawn, reconstructed and given away in books and plays; they leave and go for a while into the public domain, until they and their authors are forgotten. My father’s spirit drifted into strange company.
He was excellently acted by Mark Dignam at the Greenwich Theatre. At the Haymarket he was performed by Alec Guinness, an actor of great subtlety who was extremely moving but perhaps not sufficiently aggressive to encompass my father’s rages. When Michael Codron, who put the play on in the West End, plucked up his courage to mention this, Guinness protested that he did, indeed, hit his egg very hard in the breakfast scene. After Alec Guinness left, my father was taken over by Michael Redgrave, then coming to the end of a distinguished career. He had difficulty in remembering his lines and wore a sort of hearing-aid into which they were repeated, together with stage directions, from the prompt corner. I was told that one night the hearing-aid picked up messages from radio taxis. Redgrave sat down on a sofa beside the actress who was playing my mother and said loudly, impressively and to her complete astonishment, ‘I must now proceed immediately to Number Four Flask Walk.’ I hope that this story is true.
Then there was, as they say, some film interest and a character, about as far removed from my father as my father was from Don Giovanni, was about to take up his clouded malacca walking stick and put on his hat. Rex Harrison was, undoubtedly, one of the best light comedy actors the world has seen. He had impeccable timing and a sort of highly charged, nervous and rapid delivery handed down from Seymour Hicks and Gerald Du Maurier, the stars of the Edwardian theatre. He also had, on the stage or in films, a quizzical and baffled charm which most people, and particularly women, found irresistible. He had once flirted with an earlier play of mine, but as he always avoided meeting me and the producer in restaurants I wasn’t sure of his intentions and he ended up by turning us down. However, I thought his comedy well suited to the way I write and I lived in hope. Then an American producer announced that he was anxious to make a film of A Voyage Round My Father in which Rex Harrison had agreed to act.
Some actors of the old school fall into the error of thinking that the characters they play must be sympathetic. Actors of genius, such as Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud, know better and realize that the plum roles are given by writers to complete bastards, or at least to persons who are a considerable pain in the neck. Richard III comes on to the stage, seduces a grief-stricken widow over the coffin of the husband he has murdered, and then goes on to do in practically everyone in sight, including the Duke of Clarence and the little Princes in the Tower. But there was never a better part for an actor. Henry Irving did very well out of a murderer in The Bells and Charles Laughton can never be entirely separated from a sadistic sea captain. Rex Harrison, however, seemed not only anxious to appear, in drama as in life, as charming and sexy, he set out to minimize any characteristics which his many fans might find unacceptable in their adored Rex. In the early days of our acquaintance he was playing a homosexual but he was careful, he said, to make it clear that his character wasn’t ‘really gay’. In a Feydeau play I translated, the entire plot turns on the fact that a wife finds her husband incapable of making love and so jumps to the conclusion that he has exhausted himself with other women. When he played the character in a disastrous film version of A Flea in Her Ear Rex Harrison spent hours at the Boulogne studios explaining to me that his fans would not, of course, accept the absurd suggestion that their much-loved star was impotent and Monsieur Chandebise’s incapacity was, at worst, a momentary hiccup.
When I was told that Rex was to play my father, in a film which opens with his being struck blind, I knew exactly what to expect. I visited him in his London house and he stood, dressed with his usual elegance, rubbing his forehead, his voice rising to that high note of comic petulance which was so effective in the song ‘Why Can’t a Woman be More Like a Man?’ He made it clear that his public wouldn’t accept the tragic fact that their hero was totally blind. ‘I’m quite sure,’ he told me, ‘that he can see shapes’ It was in vain that I told him that my father couldn’t lift the food to his mouth and my mother had to do it for him, that he couldn’t cross a room without his hands outstretched and his knees knocking into the furniture, that after the retinas left the backs of his eyes, and despite his best efforts to deny his own helplessness, he had no idea of the size of his grandchildren unless he felt them carefully with his hands. Rex’s mind was made up; he wasn’t going to play a character who couldn’t see shapes.
So filming began, for the first time, in the house, which became, not a home for my new family, but a set, a place where the walls were repainted, bookcases walled over and the garden, unable to act springtime in late autumn, filled with artificial flowers and that uncheckable growth of paper cups which shows that a film unit, with its incessant demands for meals, has been in occupation.
‘Play one of the scenes in a conservatory,’ the American producer said, breathless with enthusiasm. ‘And consider the lighting, Rex. Can’t you just see the lighting possibilities?’ ‘Oh, my God. Yes!’ The Harrison voice went up an octave and he massaged his forehead in a light comedy version of amazement. My father never owned a conservatory but one was constructed, an elegant octagonal building set against a wall of the house, where it remained for many years, acting, for as long as it could, as a genuine plant house though now, as if reconciled to the fact that it had only been run up for a movie, it has gently collapsed.
Apart from the brilliantly nervous acting and the determination not to disappoint his admirers by playing the handicapped, there was a ruthless side to Rex. When a film was to be made of My Fair Lady, in which he had enjoyed an enormous success in the theatre, the producers, so the story goes, wanted another star to play Professor Higgins. The director, George Cukor, with commendable good sense and loyalty, battled for months against that decision and finally said that he would refuse to make the film if the leading role were not offered to Rex. The day of decision came and Rex Harrison, who knew exactly what was going on, was pacing up and down in his villa in Portofino, chain-smoking and waiting for a call from the producers. Then the telephone rang and a deep and distant Hollywood voice growled, ‘Well, Rex. We’ve taken George’s advice and we want to ask you to repeat your great stage performance in My Fair Lady.’ It is rumoured that Rex was silent for a moment and then said, no doubt in his voice of comic bewilderment, ‘Are you sure that George Cukor is quite the right director for us?’ In the discussions before we started our filming, he was similarly disconcerting. The director, Alvin Rakoff, a Canadian, suggested we might profitably ‘investigate the character of the mother’. ‘That’s the trouble with you bloody Americans,’ Rex said with no touch of light comedy. ‘You want to investigate everything. That’s what’s got you into all this trouble over Watergate.’ This conversation occurred, if I remember, during dinner in a restaurant where he had ordered the most expensive wines, two bottles of Pichon Longueville. When the bill came, light comedy returned as he slapped his pockets, smiled helplessly and discovered
that he had left all means of paying at home.
Rex Harrison was a man of many wives and lovers; my father, determinedly monogamous, said that ‘Sex has been greatly overrated by the poets.’ Rex Harrison sang ‘I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face’ and my father stayed with ‘Pretty Little Polly Perkins of Paddington Green’, and yet the actor’s talent was enormous and the two might have merged into a convincing, even a moving, character. Fate and the harsh realities of show business decided otherwise. The producer, who had been speaking hopefully of ‘lines of credit’ and a ‘garbled telex’ from an American bank, suddenly discovered that he had no money. Rex Harrison never played his first scene as my father; the crew evacuated our house and garden and no signs of them were left, except the fragile conservatory, the paper cups and an unlikely tulip, blooming in the autumn, which turned out to be made of plastic.
In my childhood the theatre was dominated by actors who seemed to me twin gods, Gielgud and Olivier. John Gielgud was a perfect Hamlet: a handsome, sensitive, princely intellectual, cruel and gentle, witty and profound. I wrote up for his photograph and got back one of him wearing a hat at a rakish angle which I pinned to my wall beside those of Annabella and Greta Garbo. Olivier was always the most dangerous and physical of actors. His Hamlet was an Olympic athlete, leaping from a great height, sword in hand, to fall upon the king, like the angel of death, to avenge his father’s murder. When he died, as Coriolanus, he rolled down an interminable flight of steps and almost into our laps as my father, mother and I sat amazed in our front-row stalls at the Old Vic. When he played the same part at Stratford after the war, he fell from a rostrum, spear carriers caught his ankles and he died swinging upside down in the manner of Mussolini. Olivier’s clipped, staccato way of speaking the verse was then thought by critics to be greatly inferior to Gielgud’s mellifluous tones, which I also preferred. Many years later traces of my Gielgud voice, my attempt at beautifully orchestrated pathos, would return when I was addressing the jury on behalf of some car thief or bank robber, although I doubt if it had much effect on the verdict.
Stories abound about the differences between these giants, but Gielgud seems to have produced nothing but devotion among all those who worked with him. Later, when he was no longer a prince but an elegant, witty, chain-smoking, wonderfully tactless old man, he played some parts I had written and I found him to be the only actor you’d wish to take to a desert island. Olivier had some reputation for ruthlessness. Alec Guinness played the Fool in his Lear and was surprised that he was the only one of the supporting cast to receive any attention from the critics. Wondering at this, he remembered that the Fool only enters with Lear and leaves the stage when the King does. Then he noticed that the lights went up a good many points every time Olivier came on to the stage and dimmed to a similar extent as he departed. The Fool was therefore the only character to share in the star’s illumination, whereas Goneril, Regan, Edmund and Gloucester were left to stumble around in the dark.
I don’t think that Olivier is to be blamed for these tricks; no doubt they’ve been part of the armoury of all the great actor-managers of the past. He has traced the secret of Shakespearian acting as whispers passed on from Burbage to Betterton, from Betterton to Garrick, from Garrick to Kean and Kean to Irving, on whose memory Olivier’s generation was raised. His well-justified claim to be part of this great chain was mixed with a very theatrical humility, a good deal of laying of the hand on the heart and the announcement that he was, indeed, a miserable sinner and altogether unworthy of the honours and praises bestowed on him. He used to address the National Theatre board in the obsequious tones of Othello before the Senate, scarcely forbearing to call us, with a great deal of mock humility, ‘my very noble and approved good masters’. He said that he got his timing, essential in playing tragedy, from great comics like Jack Benny and Bob Hope. He also admitted that when he played ‘the Black One’ (‘by far the most exhausting, dear boy’), he thought of the pompous way in which Charlie Chaplin used long words and convoluted phrases – so his addresses to the board came from Othello by way of Chaplin. In spite of these moments of dramatic self-abnegation, he was a genuine old actor laddie at heart and his favourite stories were those that elderly pros might tell in the Last Gulp, the bar in the wings of the old Brighton Theatre Royal. He loved to remember the Gloucester who staggered on to the stage to be greeted by a cry of ‘You’re drunk!’ from the gallery. ‘You think I’m drunk?’ the actor went down to the footlights and asked with great dignity. ‘Just wait till you’ve seen the Duke of Buckingham!’ He liked, even more, the story of the bankrupt touring company which was performing Macbeth when a man from the Electricity Board came to cut off the supply. Understanding that the matter was urgent, the stage-door keeper swathed himself in a cloak, put on a broad-brimmed hat and, coming on in the banquet scene, marched up to the unhappy king, who was about to see Banquo’s ghost, and said, ‘My Lord, an’t please you. There is one without that, but for us placing upon his palm certain gold pieces within the instant, threateneth to douse yon glim!’ The story, no doubt, went back to the dawn of the century, but Laurence Olivier loved it no less for that.
He was an instinctive actor and you could no more ask him to describe his performances than you could expect Picasso to let you in on the secret of how he painted a picture. They were not entirely unconsidered, however. In thinking of the way Oedipus screamed when he was blinded, he remembered reading about the way they trap ermine. Salt is put down on the ice, he said, and the small animal tries to lick it off so its tongue becomes frozen to the ground. He imagined the agony of being pinioned in that way and the result was Oedipus’s terrible cry of pain, which rent the theatre. Unlike Gielgud, who retains much of himself, Olivier only became an actor when he put on a nose, a wig or an accent which was so carefully chosen that he could tell which side of Chicago it came from. During the production of A Flea in Her Ear at the National Theatre, he played the smallest part, the butler, and, although the lights didn’t brighten at his entrances and dim at his exits, it was a similar exercise in attention grabbing, because, when he was on the stage, the audience couldn’t look at anyone else. The great quality of Olivier’s acting was danger and no one could be sure what the butler was going to get up to next.
He had battled against illness and scared away death. When the cures became even more dangerous than the disease, he went to Italy, dived off high rocks and swam great distances. The dark beauty of Romeo and Heathcliff had long gone when he came to do another film of A Voyage Round My Father. His features had become pinched, his hair thin and, with spectacles and a grey moustache, he looked like an ageing military man who had suffered severe fever in the tropics. But his eyes were still as magnetic as ever and his consonants still cut the dialogue like a knife. When he agreed to play the part, he asked me to read the entire script to him one evening in his house in Chelsea. I used to read aloud every night to my blind father: Browning, Wordsworth, Evelyn Waugh, the Sherlock Holmes stories, and even, as the time went on, chapters of a novel I was writing. I had never contemplated reading to the actor who was going to play my father’s part. I suppose I did my best and when I had finished he said, with that fatal clarity, ‘That was a bloody awful reading, dear boy, but never mind!’
What Olivier brought to the memory of my father was the danger, the genuine fear produced by an often sentimental man who could weep with laughter at absurd stories or happy endings but, left to wait for five minutes on the platform at Henley-on-Thames, could give a convincing imitation of King Lear abandoned to the storm.
So, for the second time, the lorries and the catering vans, the honey wagon (which contained the lavatories), the false flowers, the paper cups and the camera crew, the sound man (whom nobody consulted), the wardrobe and make-up caravans, came back to the house in the country. The books were again walled up and the conservatory repaired and repainted. Looking out of a window I saw myself as a small boy, carrying a bucket, and Olivier, wearing my father’s clothes and my fa
ther’s straw hat, going towards the border to drown the earwigs, which they would pretend had infested the artificial dahlias, a curious form of blood sport which I had long ago abandoned.
In the big bedroom, with the balcony that overlooks the garden, I had watched my father die in a bed which I now shared with a new wife. I stood among trailing cables, dazzled by lights, squashed in the doorway behind make-up girls and electricians, watching an actor perform my father’s death. He stirred and said the line which I think my father had also prepared carefully: ‘I’m always angry when I’m dying.’ Then he stopped breathing, watched by me, sitting at his bedside in the handsome person of Alan Bates. It seemed to me then, it seems to me now, a metaphor of a writer’s life. You live through a terrible and private experience which you reinvent for artificial lights and actors and then give it away in public. I don’t know if I did justice to my father’s memory when all that happened or whether I diminished it. I really do not know.
Chapter 6
The humdrum nature of much crime is a disappointment to judges, crime reporters and politicians, who like to give the impression that we are living in a world lit by the flames of Hell, where good and evil do battle for our souls and where we are bowed down by the weight of original sin. England, in truth, has a lower murder rate than many, indeed most, countries in the world, including peace-loving Canada. The great majority of crimes in this country are committed without violence; when it comes to murder, however, judges often let their imaginations run away with them and take refuge in great literature. In those early days of crime, I had to defend a dwarf who had stood on an empty packing-case for the purpose of striking his tall, Irish landlord across the head with a length of lead piping. I should not, in this age of enlightenment, refer to my client as a dwarf; he was, of course, ‘a vertically challenged person’. He was also one of my less successful cases. In sentencing him the judge, determined to be dramatic, said something I found extraordinary and my client deeply wounding. ‘You, vertically challenged person,’ he said. Well, as a matter of fact, being a judge of the politically unreconstructed sort, he said, ‘You, dwarf, are a mixture between Clytemnestra and Lady Macbeth.’ To a vertically challenged male person these harsh words seemed almost more painful than the mandatory sentence of life imprisonment.
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