Murderers and Other Friends

by John Mortimer

  The English have always been drawn to Tuscany, so that in the last century the common Italian word for foreigners, no matter from what country they came, was inglesi. One hotel porter in Siena was apparently heard to say, ‘We’ve got six English in tonight: three of them are French, two German and one Russian.’ The fountain of all knowledge about the Brits in Chiantishire was Harold Acton. Was he the original Anthony Blanche, the prickly aesthete in Brideshead Revisited? Admittedly he used to recite The Waste Land through a megaphone while at Oxford. When I visited him he lived in a villa, built by a Medici banker, on the outskirts of Florence. If it always seemed late afternoon indoors, the garden was full of sunshine. It boasted huge statues and a theatre made of lawns and hedges in which the Diaghilev Ballet, marooned in Florence during the 1914 war, once danced for the boy Acton. He was an old man, looked after by servants who may once have been handsome but now seemed grumpy in their old age. We sat together between two giant statues and his mind went back so far, to so many famous and notorious English visitors, that I asked him, in a moment of complete confusion, if he’d ever met Browning.

  ‘Not Robert Browning, of course, but I knew his son Pen. Pen Browning had one great interest in life and that was (here he separated the syllables as delicately as though he were peeling a peach with a sharp silver knife) forn-ic-ation. In fact Pen was so fond of forn-ic-ation that his offspring were to be found in all the villages round Florence.’ I thought of the cafés in Fiesole where the barmen and the customers are, perhaps, descendants of the Barretts of Wimpole Street. As the tall, bald man wearing a dark city suit in the Italian sunshine went on talking with immaculate courtesy in his precise accent (‘My mother’s family,’ he said, ‘comes from Chee – car – go’), great ghosts of the past seemed to steal out from behind the clipped hedges and wander among the white marble gods and heroes. There went a Miss Paget, who knew Browning well, and there Max Beerbohm (‘A bit of an actor with a wife who was humourless although she had been on the stage’). And then D.H. Lawrence (‘A genius as a writer but a disagreeable man with a ferocious German wife’). Also present was Reggie Turner, who was with Oscar Wilde when he died. Then came Ouida, the Victorian Barbara Cartland (‘She died in poverty because she spent all her money on her dog’), and Ronald Firbank, ‘the ornate and nervous novelist’ who wrote Valmouth. (‘Firbank admired Oscar Wilde so much that he bought armfuls of lilies and threw them at Reggie Turner, who was a very ugly little man with a face which looked as though it had been carved out of India rubber.’) So why did these extraordinary English make their way to Chiantishire? ‘Because,’ said Sir Harold, ‘the English and the Tuscans are very similar characters. We’re both practical, undemonstrative people with a love of proverbs. We both like the same sort of food, nursery cooking.’

  Harold Acton said in Who’s Who that his recreations were jettatura (which I take to mean putting the evil eye on persons) and ‘hunting the Philistine’. When I asked him about this he said, ‘It really comes from the time I was at Oxford. I used to go at them with my umbrella. They usually ran away. All Philistines are cowards at heart.’

  Much of Summer’s Lease goes on in the mind of the central character, a bothered housewife whose life takes on a new dimension during an Italian holiday. This made it a hard book to dramatize but thanks to the director and cameraman and an extraordinary cast I think the television version worked well. The book contains a lecherous old journalist, author of an appalling column called Jottings, which he fills with random and frequently pretentious thoughts. Haverford Downs insists on joining the family holiday and does his best to shock his grandchildren. Grandchildren are now, of course, quite unshockable, so he has to be content with shocking his boring solicitor son-in-law, which is rather too easy, and his daughter Molly, who is not quite so vulnerable. To my surprise and total delight, John Gielgud agreed to play Haverford, a consummation I had never hoped for when, a myopic eleven-year-old boy, I had sat in the stalls and heard the handsome and troubled student prince say, ‘Nymph, in thy orizons be all my sins remembered’, the line that always brought tears to my father’s eyes.

  I had got to know John Gielgud a little since we had met at Tony Richardson’s London house. Emily was a baby then and we had brought her with us in her carrycot and left her in a spare bedroom. We were lugging this pink plastic box out of the front door when Gielgud saw us and said, ‘Why on earth didn’t you leave your baby at home? Were you afraid of burglars?’

  The great tragedian became a great comic actor; this is understandable because of the number of jokes in Hamlet and King Lear (Macbeth’s ambition ruled out a sense of humour). The wartime The Importance of Being Earnest has gone down in history because of the way Edith Evans said the word ‘handbag’; it was equally notable for Gielgud’s wonderfully serious-comical performance as John Worthing. His understated comedy and immaculate timing became apparent to cinema audiences with Tony Richardson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade, in which he acted Lord Raglan. He had some, although not much, previous experience of war scenes and horses. He played King Louis of France in the film of Becket and played it on horseback. The director told him he would say the line and then the horse would move one pace forward. At the first take he said the line, of course impeccably, but the horse remained immobile. By the seventh take the horse had still not moved on cue, or at all. Then a puzzled Gielgud asked the director, ‘Do you think the animal knows?’

  The young Gielgud had the talent of all the Terrys (‘poor lachrymal glands, you know’) of crying at will. His movements were less certain; his first drama teacher said he walked like a ‘cat with rickets’, and a hostile critic said, I’m sure without justification, ‘Mr Gielgud means absolutely nothing from the waist down.’ But although he was never an athletic actor like Olivier, he arrived on the set of Summer’s Lease at the age of eighty-five with a straight back, blue eyes bright with curiosity, chain-smoking and bubbling with reminiscences: ‘You know Marlene Dietrich played me records of her concerts which consisted solely of applause?’; ‘Elisabeth Bergner in As You Like It made Olivier film his scenes with Rosalind entirely by himself so she could work out how to upstage him’; ‘Tynan said I only had two gestures: the left hand up, the right hand up. What did he want me to do, bring out my prick?’; ‘Another critic, James Agate, came round to see me during the interval when I was playing Macbeth and said, “I’ve come to congratulate you now; by the end of the performance I’ll probably have changed my mind!” ’

  During the filming Gielgud was taken ill and had to be flown to England for a small but necessary operation. He was soon back, as straight-backed and elegant, smoking and talking as energetically, as before. He had a scene with Chaliapin’s son, who was also over eighty and played an aged Italian count with whom Haverford Downs gets into bed by mistake. ‘Do you think,’ Gielgud asked with genuine concern, ‘the old boy will be able to remember his lines?'

  We had a party scene to shoot that would require working all night in the garden of the huge rose-pink and floodlit Villa la Vignamaggio near Greve in Chianti. The Italian assistant shouted, ‘Silenzio, giriamo!’ and the English assistant called, in more apologetic tones, ‘Settle down now, we are shooting.’ Word went out on the walkie-talkies and, on dark and distant roads, the shrill cries of Fiats and the falsetto solos of buses were silenced. Only films provide a writer with a chance of stopping the traffic. When we broke for supper, and the extras made a concerted rush for the catering van, I sat on the terrace with John, who had just been reading a book about Lord Lucan. ‘Could you really get someone to do a murder for £3,000?’ he asked with genuine curiosity. ‘I suppose Donald Wolfit might almost have paid that to get rid of me. He did hate me so much.’

  And then he remembered, as Harold Acton had, relics of the heyday of Oscar Wilde and the friends and enemies who survived him. ‘Lord Alfred Douglas was a beautiful young man who ended up sour and ugly. Can you believe this? He was at the first night of The Importance of Being Earnest, so I asked him ho
w it was played. Was it done as satire or as a comedy of manners, and how broad was the comedy? Do you know, Douglas just couldn’t tell me! He was Wilde’s closest friend and he couldn’t remember anything about the production at all.’

  John Gielgud went to bed early, long before we finished work on the other scenes. It was five o’clock in the morning, the nightingales in the villa garden had fallen silent and there was an increased sense of urgency. The night scene had to be finished quickly before it was flooded with the cruel light of day and would become completely unreal.

  Chapter 18

  Poor times are good times for the countryside. Bankrupt developers are unable to pollute what they like to call ‘greenfield sites’. The eighties brought a curse which some people called prosperity. It was the age when self-respect went with two cars and owning your own house; if you had less than these minimum requirements you might well be living in a cardboard box. House prices in our valley spiralled to dizzy heights; a cottage with a leaking roof and a handkerchief of a garden could cost as much as a sizeable London house. Motorways were built and seemed in instant need of repair, so travellers who might have been speeding along in trains crawled, at the speed of a slow nervous breakdown, among the cones. Market towns, which had boasted wide streets, Georgian town halls and ancient churches were developed, operated on and degutted. Dreary and lifeless pedestrian precincts and shopping centres were inserted like useless pacemakers into their hearts. In such centres the wind blew empty Coca-Cola tins among concrete pots in which shrubs died, and the shops sold nothing anyone might want – such as fish, meat or ironmongery – but specialized in ‘gifts’, padded coathangers and embroidered knicker-bags, and greetings cards. These shops rapidly went bankrupt and the pedestrian precincts became places where the outcasts of the monetarist society might urinate and sleep, or where pupils from the local polytechnic, now called a university, could deal in more or less harmless drugs.

  Henley, a small riverside town, suffered from the current malaise. It has a handsome bridge, decorated with sculptured masks of Thames and Isis; a fourteenth-century chantry house; the Red Lion, where Coleridge was billeted when a dragoon; and a small Regency theatre where, it’s said, Sarah Siddons once acted. Cavaliers and Roundheads fought a battle in Duke Street. William Lenthall, the Speaker of the parliament that defeated Charles, was born there and Prince Rupert hanged a spy on a tree outside the smaller post office. In the eighties, rapacious landlords made its tradesmen’s lives impossible, useful shops vanished and an ever-changing assortment of boutiques and pine furniture stores took their place. The small shops not only had to struggle with their landlords but with the local supermarket, part of a prosperous chain, which planned to grow enormously in size and pull down the cinema.

  Some people said we had a greatly exaggerated affection for the Henley cinema. It was a 1930s building, but perhaps not to be mentioned in the same breath as the Hoover building or the Odeon, Leicester Square. However, it had one of the finest cinema organs in the land, which rose up miraculously from the bowels of the earth in a beam of changing purple, green, orange and scarlet light. At the end of the recital (‘Deep Purple’, ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ and ‘The Isle of Capri’), a disembodied voice would tell us that ‘All the music played at this performance is available from Messrs Woolworths.’ I first saw Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers there, and Bob Hope, Dorothy Lamour and Bing Crosby, and Greta Garbo in Queen Christina. I saw, and shall never forget, a film called The Mummy in which some long-entombed Egyptian prince left his hieroglyph-covered case and slowly crossed the room, trailing his bandages behind him. On the way home I pretended to be asleep in the back of the Morris Oxford in order that I might be carried up to bed, where I lay for hours with my eyes open, terrified of seeing a trail of mouldering linen curling round the door.

  The fight for the Henley cinema was protracted. We gave star-studded concerts in the theatre, law-suits were financed and, at one mass rally, the marketplace looked, for a glorious moment, something like Wenceslas Square at the collapse of Communism. Waitrose Ltd and the South Oxfordshire District Council proved, however, harder nuts to crack than the red peril and were quite unwilling to surrender to any velvet revolution.

  Fighting for the countryside broke out on all fronts. Bands of developers, buying options on land from greedy farmers, were constantly seeking to build new towns. One such scheme was suggested near Thame, which would have swallowed up a number of villages and village churches and caused even more traffic confusion. Any person wishing to provide housing, which is no doubt needed, could have built a new town on the outskirts of Cowley. Of course greenfield sites were cheaper and the developers applied for permission for Stone Bassett – soulless urban sites are always given charmingly rustic names such as Broadwater Farm and Blackbird Leys, a god-forsaken housing estate where stolen cars are raced and then burnt.

  The fight against Stone Bassett cost the local villagers, who had never invited it, huge sums of money. Michael Heseltine, the member for Henley-on-Thames, gave evidence in support of the view that Stone Bassett would do great harm to the district. After the case was won, I congratulated him on behaving extremely well. He thanked me but begged me not to repeat my kind words in public. Any praise from me, he was convinced, would ruin his chances in the Conservative Party. He seems to be one of the few remaining politicians with anything like a personality, so I assured him I wouldn’t breathe a word in his praise. I went further. I promised that if he went on behaving admirably, I would write a scathing attack on him. He seemed grateful for that.

  It took over a year to make Paradise Postponed, which filled eleven hours of television. In time, if nothing else, it was like writing the three parts of Henry VI or a couple of pretty hefty Wagner operas. Michael Hordern, who had made The Dock Brief a success, played the comfortably off left-wing vicar. There were memorable performances from Jill Bennett, Zoe Wannamaker, Peter Egan, Annette Crosbie, Paul Shelley and many more. The production was not entirely happy. The director was Alvin Rakoff who had done A Voyage Round My Father very well. I was delighted when he said he’d do the series. Then things began to go wrong. He quarrelled with Jacquie Davis, the gentlest of producers, who, as always, was desperately anxious that every detail and every performance should be exactly right. The enormous schedule took its toll and the days often ended in tears. However, the shooting ended without any serious casualties. The greatest embarrassment was caused to the business man who rented part of his converted vicarage as Michael Hordern’s home. During the Easter break he invited a Conservative politician to dinner without telling him that he had hired out some of his house for filming. On his way back from the loo the politician stumbled into a room we had dressed as the vicar’s study. He was astounded to see a bust of Karl Marx, numerous CND posters and Left Book Club hardbacks next to bound copies of Tribune. He came to the conclusion that our landlord was a closet lefty of the most dangerous variety.

  The discovery was David Threlfall and the credit for it must go to Alvin. I had only seen Threlfall as Smike, the ill-used, put upon and pathetically grateful victim of Dr Wackford Squeers in Nicholas Nickleby. I had no idea he could play that political rottweiler the Rt Hon. Leslie Titmuss, MP, and his performance only emerged slowly. At the read-through the older actors sat on one side of a long narrow table, referred to by Michael Hordern as the ‘generation gap’, and the younger actors sat on the other. The gap was immediately apparent when the reading began. Older actors perform, are audible, rush to meet their characters with open arms; the young ones give a muttered rendering that is little help to the author and take care not to give away what they plan to do.

  Nothing emerged from David in the first days, but the performance, when it came, was extraordinary. The cold, classless, carefully ironic voice, the pale intensity, the unremitting tension and moments of sarcastic delight – David Threlfall became Titmuss in the way Leo McKern became Rumpole. When he acted, it was impossible to think of the part being played by anyone el
se.

  I thought it might be interesting to follow the fortunes of Leslie Titmuss past the Falklands War, when Paradise Postponed ended, into the late Thatcher years. I thought we might see Titmuss in love. And then Nicholas Ridley, a cabinet minister who always expressed himself as being passionate for freedom from government restrictions, was found to have been just as passionately in favour of the planning laws when there was a building development threatened near to his Georgian country house. I thought of facing Titmuss with a similar dilemma. All we had gone through trying to save the cinema and stop the new town should provide ample scope for comedy.

  To make the television version of Titmuss Regained and our subsequent productions, Jacquie and I started a production company and became, if not complete converts to the Titmuss view of life, at least entrepreneurs, mini-capitalists running a small business. The risks we took were not enormous. Thames Television provided the money, but we had the responsibility of spending it; we could engage the performers and technicians and we had to keep within our budget. On the first day of filming we looked at the great army we had recruited – the Winnebagos for stars’ dressing-rooms, the make-up and wardrobe vans, the catering lorry, the honey wagon, where the army could pee, and the huge bus where they could sit and eat breakfast, elevenses, lunch and tea (unlike schools, television companies still have to provide free dinners) – and I, at any rate, felt a certain terror. I have absolutely no head for figures and, when a barrister, always avoided fraud cases for that reason.