Murderers and Other Friends

by John Mortimer

  Much has been written about the theatrical nature of trials but the parallel is not exact. Boredom is a weapon you can use in court; given sufficient endurance you can bore a judge into submission by going on until he’s in real danger of missing his train to Hayward’s Heath and is ready to submit. You can’t, in any other form of drama, win over an audience with relentless tedium. Legal dialogue, however, is often as artificial as anything in Restoration comedy. Addressing judges, a barrister says: ‘in my humble submission’, ‘with the very greatest respect’, ‘if I might be allowed to bring to your Lordship’s attention an argument with which your Lordship, with your Lordship’s great experience, will be entirely familiar’. What these ornate phrases mean is ‘Keep quiet, you boring old fart, and listen to what I’ve got to say.’ Judges not only make judge-like remarks, such as, ‘Who is Kylie Minogue?’ and ‘What is a T-shirt?’, they sum up to juries as though they believe that the twelve random citizens are commonsensical, worldly-wise members of the Garrick Club who got their moral code from a rather decent housemaster at Winchester. And the criminal (as well as the sentencing) classes take part in the performance and adopt the role of cheerful Cockney characters which they hope will entertain the jury.

  To all of this artificiality must be added the British passion, no doubt the result of having produced the best in world drama, for dressing up. I defended an unstable character accused of having committed a murder, apparently motiveless, in a van which was sent round to accommodate chest X-rays. He was due to come to trial on the opening day of the Old Bailey session, so he was brought up from the cells and emerged mole-like in the dock, where he blinked at the ceremonial customary at such a time. A city dignitary, with what looked like an outsized fur muff on his head, was parading with a huge sword. After him came the Mayor, wearing lace and a three-cornered hat decorated with black ostrich feathers. He was followed by the judge, dressed in scarlet and ermine, who was carrying a nosegay of flowers designed to protect his delicate nostrils from the stench of Newgate Prison, which had closed about a hundred years before. Unhinged by this extraordinary spectacle my client cried out, ‘The Day of Judgement is at hand!’ and had to be removed to a criminal lunatic asylum.

  So when I slid away from the final speeches of my learned friends, the summing-up and the verdict, to a rehearsal in a chilly youth club or drill hall, I felt I had escaped to a more rational world. Few people become criminally insane from watching plays, and even the most disastrous flop in the theatre doesn’t carry with it a sentence of imprisonment. Moreover, I was moving from a world I often mistrusted to one I loved, from one which I knew I would choose to abandon in time to one I hope and pray I shall be allowed to inhabit until the day I die.

  I did not, as a child, put on a small wig and address my mother and father as though they were a jury. I spent my holidays making model theatres, painting scenery, performing one-boy versions of Shakespeare’s plays and of musicals to my, no doubt, embarrassed parents. All these efforts culminated, I suppose, in the production of A Voyage Round My Father at the start of the seventies. Three years later I wrote a play called Collaborators. A husband and wife try to keep a large household of children afloat on almost no money and collaborate on a script for an American producer whom they both, in their separate ways, exploit. Michael Codron liked the play and persuaded Glenda Jackson, John Wood and Joss Ackland to be in it. It was directed by Eric Thompson, who died ridiculously young, having fathered Emma who was to grow into a remarkable actress. I remember the rehearsals as being entirely happy. I was back in the excitement of an empty theatre, watching actors try out lines I’d written. I was still excited by the smell of plush seats and backstage corridors, and the dread approach of a first night when they let an audience in and nothing is ever quite the same again.

  What I remember most clearly about the theatre at that time is the smell of coffee as I went up the narrow staircase to Peggy Ramsay’s office in Covent Garden. The door was open and Peggy was always talking on the telephone, often standing astride an electric fire with the heat blowing up her skirts. As a writer’s agent she didn’t so much woo managements as inform them, gently but firmly, what plays they were to put on. As she had no hesitation in rubbishing many of her authors’ works, her seal of approval was universally respected. I once heard her answering the telephone to a manager who wanted to put on a play by an extremely famous writer out of whom Peggy had made so much money she had turned it into precious jewellery which she kept in shoeboxes under her bed. ‘Do have a bit of sense,’ she was telling this manager. ‘You really don’t want to put on a play by a boring, middlebrow, middle-of-the-road writer like him. Everyone’s done him to death. For God’s sake, be adventurous! Back the future! And do give me a ring when you’ve had an interesting idea.’ She looked, at that time, like an extremely intelligent cockatoo, with bright reddish hair and protruding eyes behind glasses she constantly mislaid. No other agent has ever understood writers and writing so well, or been so kind to young playwrights during their struggle for existence. Her reward was that most of the dramatists of the seventies and eighties struggled up her narrow staircase, welcomed her to share their royalties and got called by someone else’s name. There was a time, I remember, whenever she saw me she would say, ‘Hallo, Mercer. Mortimer’s fallen in love again and can’t write a word.’

  It was hard to discover the past history of Peggy Ramsay. She had, it seems, come from South Africa, where a pilot fell so much in love with her that he flew constantly over her house, dipping his wings by way of amorous salute. She married a husband who was a disappointment to her; ‘couldn’t do it, darling’ was the way she put it. They came on a honeymoon to the Savoy Hotel in London. On the third or fourth day she told him she was going out shopping and would be back for tea. She never came back and so far as we knew he was still waiting for Peggy among the cucumber sandwiches. That afternoon she joined the Carl Rosa opera company and became, for a while, the most short-sighted Valkyrie of them all. She also committed the solecism of walking down the stream on which the swan was to float in Lohengrin. Despite this, she was promoted to small parts and, ‘Darling,’ she said, ‘didn’t the other girls in the chorus hate me for it!’ Whether or not it was a great loss to the opera, she eventually left the Carl Rosa, ran the little Q theatre for a while and then two far-sighted writers decided to set her up as an agent in a couple of small rooms off St Martin’s Lane. Her first client was Robert Bolt and from then on her future was assured.

  When I had done my first short plays, The Dock Brief and What Shall We Tell Caroline?, Peggy had written to me. So the climb up the narrow staircase in Goodwin’s Court began. I showed her everything I wrote, discussed all my plans for writing and for life. I always listened to what she told me, although now I can’t remember any of the advice she gave. And Peggy’s judgement was by no means infallible. When Peter Nichols presented her with A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, undoubtedly his finest play, she said, ‘For God’s sake, darling, put it away in a drawer and forget it.’ And yet she was one of the few agents who loved writing with a passion which could overwhelm managers, theatre owners and even critics. Her enthusiasm pushed you on like a great gust of wind; her rages could be terrible. Her staff went in some fear of her and she once poured a pint of beer over the head of the late Caryl Brahms, novelist and writer of musicals. She was thought to have been in love with the small, rotund, French playwright Eugène Ionescu. She had as a lover, but rarely displayed, a quiet, gentle, English actor who wore double-breasted blazers and had appeared in many drawing-room comedies. She had an extraordinary eye for new writers and discovered and nourished Edward Bond, David Mercer and David Rudkin, as well as representing such hugely popular dramatists as Alan Ayckbourn. She was more responsible than anyone for the revival of British playwriting in the sixties and seventies. I could have found no one better to fan the flames of a long-neglected passion for the theatre.

  Peggy was wonderful to her writers when they started out in the stra
nge and fickle theatrical world. When I had my first plays on in the fifties she’d spend hours talking to me, improving the construction of scenes and buying me lunch. When my life was in turmoil she lent me her flat. Hardly a day passed without one of her phone calls, which always started at a high point of excitement and went on in a crescendo of plots and counterplots. As she never said, ‘Hallo, how are you?’ or used any such preliminaries, her words came drifting mysteriously across the air like Caliban’s voices and I was never quite sure if I was the author she meant to ring up. ‘Mercer,’ she said once, her voice vibrant with excitement, ‘Bolt wants to speak to you at once. What the hell have you done now, darling? Gone off with his wife?’ ‘But I’m not Mercer!’ ‘I know that, darling. Mercer’s in a state and can’t cope with his material.’ ‘But I hardly know Mrs Bolt.’ ‘Is that your story, darling? Then you’d better keep to it.’ Suddenly her voice vanished, to trouble another writer and no doubt spread the gossip. When I rang Robert Bolt, it appeared he only wanted my legal advice for a friend who was going for a divorce; he had tried to explain this to Peggy, but she preferred her own version and was sticking to it. Life with Peggy was almost unbearably exciting when you were starting to write for the theatre.

  Success brought about a noticeable decline in her interest in you. Considerable success might lead her to persuade managements to try to do something more novel than your plays, and when I had been married to Penny for some while her disappointed voice came unexpectedly and unannounced over the wires, ‘You’re not still with that little girl, are you? I never thought that’d last.’

  Collaborators was set in a tall, North London house, where the children were offstage voices, insistent and, at times, threatening. The room was full of plastic basins of washing, nappies and knicker-linings, sodden bicky-pegs dangling on ribbons tied to playpens – and the story was furnished with memories of living with six children and an unmanageable overdraft in the early days of my first marriage. Those were the times when I used to leave home after a terrible domestic row, sometimes torn about the shirt or scratched about the neck, the children were suffering from infectious diseases, the au pair girl had left home and I used to force the front door open against a great pile of bills. The overdraft was about to be stopped and the washing-machine repossessed. I would stagger into the street and find the car had been stolen. I would thumb a lift to my chambers in the Temple, sink behind my desk exhausted, and I was perfectly capable of advising sixty-year-old company directors on exactly how to conduct their married lives. ‘You know what it’s like,’ the husband in Collaborators says, ‘living with small children? It’s like spending your days in a home for very old, incontinent Irish drunks! It’s like life in a colony of hostile meths drinkers! They come swaying up to you with their dribble and their deep, hoarse cries and you smile – a smile of propitiation – and then they take a great swipe and smash the other candlestick.’ And yet those menacing children, four step-and the two I had fathered, with their huge consumption of Farex and knicker-linings, became friends, companions, shrewd and sensible supporters. That house in Swiss Cottage, a small Victorian island lost in a sea of high-rise flats; those holidays in rented villas we couldn’t possibly afford; those Christmases which required, if everyone was to give something to everyone else, around eighty-four presents, were from a past for which Collaborators was, no doubt, an inadequate obsequy. The notices were what is politely known as ‘mixed’. Michael Billington, in a review in the Guardian, which was, on the whole, very favourable, said that I covered pain with jokes. I don’t think that’s an altogether bad thing to do and it is, at any rate, a part of my inheritance.

  For as long as Glenda Jackson stayed in it, Collaborators did well at the box office. Penny and I went off to North Africa for a holiday, which, like the play, was not entirely successful. In the aeroplane we were told that Tunis was colder than London, and the hotel we stayed in was little more than a building site. On my birthday two boy waiters made me a rock-like and inedible cake and we drank Tunisian champagne, which seemed indistinguishable from Eno’s Fruit Salts. Penny had found an English newspaper and we opened it eagerly to find an extremely hostile notice of Collaborators. I was half a century old, and in the years to come I would drift away from the theatre and climb Peggy Ramsay’s stairs less often. I also became wary of opening newspapers.

  It was during the run of Collaborators that we called on Rex Harrison in the South of France. I rang David Niven, who lived near Beaulieu, and told him that I was off to see Rex, a man to whom he didn’t particularly warm. I hoped we might meet later for dinner. I then put down the phone, but minutes later it rang and I heard Rex’s voice. ‘Hallo, John. Rex here. Just want to tell you, before you get here, that you’re a shit and you always have been. Have you got that perfectly clear? I didn’t want to say you’re a shit in front of the others. That was rather decent of me, wasn’t it?’ I was not only taken aback but somewhat wounded by this instant analysis of my character. It was, of course, just the sort of thing Rex would say – he who had called his agent’s wife a ‘clockwork cunt’ because she thought a play he was in was a little too long. But did he, in all fairness, have a point? I was worrying about this when a gust of laughter came from the telephone in my hand. It was Niven who had been doing his Rex Harrison imitation.

  I had met Niven years before when we were filming in Spain, doing a movie the main advantage of which was that we had met. His screen acting was always beautifully polished, deftly entertaining and, in such films as Separate Tables, touching. His greatest performances, however, were at restaurant tables, to an audience of a few friends, and his stories were beautifully performed and improved with repetition. In Spain we drank so much cheap brandy that he called me Fundador, and he was delighted to find, in remote villages, tattered posters from his old Hollywood movies still sticking to the walls. In the Alhambra he became a little quiet, as though upstaged by a star as big as himself. His private performances, although irresistible, were never selfish; he had the talent Oscar Wilde was said to have had – of making everyone with him feel more alive, more entertaining than usual. When he visited us he would, if he arrived early, walk about the lanes for fear of boring us, for he was, despite his pleasure in his stardom, a modest man who would never make any great claims for his acting. His first wife, Primrose, had fallen down the stairs of a dark cellar in Hollywood during a game of hide-and-seek and died heartbreakingly young. Some of his jokes, I’m sure, were also to cover pain.

  Now he was married to Hjordis, whom he called the ‘beautiful Swede’. She had been a model, married to a rich husband, and he found her, for some reason, on the set of Bonny Prince Charlie. She sat by the pool making endless telephone calls. ‘My ear is out to here!’ she complained. ‘Making all these telephone calls. What I need is a holiday!’ I remember, because I was still at the cooking stage of my life, asking her if I could see the kitchen. With some difficulty Hjordis found the number of the kitchen – a place, it seemed, with which she was not familiar – rang it up and announced that a visit would not be possible. Niven took us out for drives and to small restaurants. Hjordis stayed at home, a martyr to the telephone.

  So we listened to his ever-improving and ever more polished stories. We heard the long saga about the way his zip came undone when he was skiing down a Swiss slope and the icy wind froze his genitals: ‘I looked down and saw this little Eton-blue acorn!’ We enjoyed once more the way a bone flew out of an actress’s corset and up his nose as he was embracing her on the New York stage, and we heard an entirely new one about the commercial for an underarm deodorant.

  He had been asked to film this advertisement, but had steadfastly refused and when pressed had said he would do it only on three conditions. The first was that he should be paid a huge sum of money, the second that he could film it anywhere in the world he fancied and the third, and most important, was that the commercial should not be shown anywhere but in Japan. All these terms were agreed to. Niven chose to film outside
the palace in Monte Carlo, no doubt because it was near home and perhaps in memory of his long-past but eternally memorable love affair with Princess Grace. He chose to play a sentry, sweating in a scarlet uniform and a busby, who is forced to give his armpit a generous spray of the magic deodorant. He then collected the money, went off to work in America and put the unpleasant incident out of his mind. When he came back to London he was walking into the Connaught Hotel, where he always stayed, with a number of friends and acquaintances when two large coaches drew up outside the hotel. From them emerged a huge party of Japanese who saw Niven and burst into high-pitched laughter, lifted their arms and dabbed at their armpits in hysterical mimicry.

  We sailed through the harbour in a dinghy, slowly, with little wind. The rain, a permanent feature of holidays in the South of France, had stopped suddenly. Niven was talking about the great days of Hollywood, when he had emerged from central casting, an unlikely Scotsman to succeed in the tinsel city. He had shared a house on the beach, which they called Cirrhosis by the Sea, with Errol Flynn. He had organized an elaborate practical joke which again involved Rex Harrison. Niven and Nigel Bruce hired a young hooker to pose as Bruce’s virginal cousin from London, whom he had promised to look after, and then affected outrage when they caught Rex making love to her. He also described the embarrassing moment during the filming of The Prisoner of Zenda when they were riding into the city and his horse, eager as Harrison, reared up and mounted the mare ridden by Douglas Fairbanks Junior. And then, floating along the coast in a moment of silence, we saw a leaking boat, an abandoned wreck. ‘You know what that is?’ Niven said. ‘That’s Flynn’s boat.’ The great old days of Hollywood, the scandals and the fabled romances, were rotting at the quayside and about to disintegrate entirely.