The Belgian and The Beekeeper

by Peter Guttridge

  She shook her head.

  “Should my husband ever see this…or the police…”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Rathbone said. “Such films are illegal and now that we have been alerted I’m sure we can find a way to deal with Mr Harvey.”

  “Without involving the police?”

  Rathbone stroked his chin.

  “Let us see.”

  Bruce said, a little nervously:

  “Could Harvey have drugged you, my dear?”

  The film had been explicit and there had been a number of close-ups of the ecstatic face of Mrs Cunliffe when Charlotte was caressing her.

  “Perhaps alcohol? You told us yourself you had no tolerance for it.”

  Mrs Cunliffe said nothing but shook her head. To break the awkward silence, Bruce continued:

  “Charlotte has the look of Madelaine Carroll. Damned pretty woman.”

  “Quiet a moment, there’s a good chap,” Rathbone said, his eyes narrowed in thought.

  “Vain though. Very vain. Would only be photographed from her left side you know. Ronald Colman was the same.”

  “Willy, please. I’m trying to think.”

  “Sorry, old boy,” Bruce said, looking hurt, but continuing, his voice tapering off. “Getting a shot of the two of them looking at each other was almost impossible when they made The Prisoner of Zenda.”

  Rathbone looked sharply at him.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said it was almost impossible to get a shot of them together looking at each other. You know, because they both wanted to face the same way in profile. They never did two-shots.”

  “Two-shots?” Mrs Cunliffe said.

  “Of course! That’s it! What a fool I’ve been.”

  “There you go again,” Bruce grumbled. “It’s all as clear as mud to me.”

  “I have the final pieces of the puzzle thanks to you, Willy.”

  Rathbone paused, as if waiting for some heightening music.

  “Well, I wish you’d explain it to me,” Mrs Cunliffe said, moving away from the projector and sitting down by the fire, her shoulders hunched.

  “We believe, if it is a well-made movie, that it is somehow real,” Rathbone said, starting to pace the room. “We actors, of course, know it is all artifice. Do we not, Willy?”

  Bruce was casting covert glances at Mrs Cunliffe and making noises in the back of his throat. He jerked to attention.

  “What, what? Oh, of course. Of course we do.”

  “You doubtless saw Casablanca during the war –“

  “Will you excuse me for a moment,” a white-faced Mrs Cunliffe said abruptly before hurrying to the door and exiting the room.

  “Poor woman,” Rathbone said.

  “What’s all this about Casablanca?” Bruce said. “Looks pretty clear to me. Either he drugged her, the beast, or she did it willingly. There’s no doubt it’s her.”

  “Willy, would you agree you are the most incurious of people when it comes to how a film is put together?”

  “I believe I’m about average, thank you very much. Why?”

  “Remember the story we heard from Johnny Carradine on the set of The Hound of the Baskervilles. No? Let me remind you. In early 1931, Johnny, then scarcely known, approached the great John Barrymore on the Warner Brothers sound stage. Would Barrymore get him a screen test? Barrymore agreed. In fact a test for a major part in his new movie was coming up soon.

  “The test was simple. All Carradine had to do was walk out of a door, lick his lips and exclaim, ‘Delicious’. Johnny did the test then went with Barrymore to a Warner projection room. First, the footage showed Carradine coming out of a door and delivering his line. It was immediately followed by a shot of Barrymore walking out of the same door, smiling at the camera – and buttoning up his fly.”

  It took a few moments for Bruce to understand then he began to chortle. He stopped abruptly when Mrs Cunliffe slipped back into the room.

  “I’m sorry, gentlemen. I felt quite nauseous. Please continue, Mr Rathbone.”

  “Films use a mixture of camera shots, including one-shots and two-shots. A two-shot is when you have two people in the frame at the same time. A one-shot usually has an actor looking straight into camera, as you told us this filmmaker had you and Charlotte do. Such shots are used as inserts in scenes between two people to give the impression that we are watching the conversation from one or the other of the participants’ point of view. Love scenes, such as those in Casablanca, gain emotional power by mixing the inserts with two-shots.”

  “Delicious,” Bruce said, shaking his head and chuckling. He saw Rathbone’s look. “Sorry, old chap. Do go on.”

  “A good director will use them in such a way that it will look seamless although inserts may well have been filmed weeks before the two-shot. Further, for the one-shot, darling Ingrid will have been mouthing her words of love not to Bogart but to a camera with some assistant director standing beside it reading Bogart’s lines from the script.”

  “I understand all that but I don’t understand your point.”

  “My point is that amazing illusions can be created by use of film editing. A one-shot of your face followed by a shot of a naked woman with hair like yours concealing her face, then a one-shot of your face again – the viewer will assume the naked woman is you.”

  “A stand-in,” Bruce said. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “Exactly, Willy. When I fought Flynn in Robin Hood he could only keep the tempo of the fight up for two minutes or so before he got puffed – the drink you know – so we had to patch the fight together from a number of different bits. Many of those bits used our stunt doubles, dressed as we were but with their faces obscured. The principle is the same in your case, Mrs Cunliffe –“

  “Though without the clothes,” Bruce said. He caught Rathbone’s look and spluttered for a few moments. Mrs Cunliffe said eagerly:

  “I see what you are getting at.” Then she blushed deeply. “But the look on my face when Charlotte…”

  “Context, my dear, context,” Rathbone said. “An early Russian pioneer of film once did an experiment with an audience. He filmed a man looking straight into the camera without expression. Then he juxtaposed this shot with a bowl of soup, a young child, a woman, and someone dying. Audiences watching these sequences saw in his expression respectively hunger, paternal love, the love of a man for a woman, and grief. Yet it was the same expressionless shot of the man each time.”

  “But –“

  Rathbone took a step closer to Mrs Cunliffe.

  “Forgive my being so indelicate, my dear, but I believe the war has allowed many things formerly unsaid to be expressed. Mr Harvey filmed you in pain from your wasp sting, did he not? Juxtapose that with a scene of passion and, well, in my limited experience the expression on a person’s face during ecstasy –“

  It was Rathbone’s turn to blush. Bruce coughed and spluttered a little.

  “Mr Rathbone,” Mrs Cunliffe said warmly, clasping his hand. “You have married your film knowledge to the deductive processes of the character for which you are best known. This solution is indeed worthy of Sherlock Holmes.”

  Glancing at Bruce, who was once more staring glumly into the fire, Rathbone said gently. “If it is indeed Sherlockian then it must be my Last Bow as that remarkable character.” He released the spool of film from the projector. “And I am pleased that my last Holmesian incarnation has been in your service.”

  He moved to the fire, carrying the spool with him.

  “There is one more attribute of the film that I have not yet mentioned,” he said.

  “And what is that?” Bruce said, grumpy again. “Seems like you were positively encyclopaedic.”

  “Why, Willy,” Rathbone said, dropping the spool onto the fire and stepping back smartly. “That it is highly inflammable.”

  The End

  Author’s Note for His Last Bow:

  Basil Rathbone’s decision to give up his most famous ro
le did cause a temporary rift with his friend, Nigel Bruce. Bruce made thirty nine further Sherlock Holmes radio shows, sponsored by Kreml hair tonic, with the wooden Tom Conway as Holmes.

  Rathbone was indeed typecast as Sherlock Holmes so was unable to achieve the more varied successes he had hoped for. He received some critical acclaim but small audiences for appearances on Broadway but by 1953 was again playing Sherlock Holmes there in a play written by his wife, Ouida Bergere (real name Eunice Branch from Little Rock, Arkansas). Bruce was too ill to play Watson (he died that year) and the play closed after three performances.

  Several of Rathbone’s film appearances were parodies of his earlier swashbucklers or of his Sherlock Holmes persona. To pay for his wife’s lavish lifestyle he was a regular on TV game shows and as a guest actor in TV drama anthologies. He ended his film career in poverty row horror films. His last film was the Mexican horror film Autopsy of A Ghost (1968).

  Excerpt from Seven Days in Hollywoodland

  [to be published in 2012]

  Chapter One

  1939

  Greta Garbo was naked except for a girdle of long carrots hanging by their green roots from a leather belt around her slender waist. She was standing, one hip jutting out, hands on her hips above the carrots, looking out at the dolphins arcing in and out of the water off the headland. Her face and left breast were in profile, head slightly tilted upwards, tautening the line of her jaw. She was tanned a deep brown.

  “She seems oblivious to us,” Willy Bruce said.

  “Be assured she is conscious of us, Willy,” Basil Rathbone replied. “A great actress, but lacking something of the rounded human being.”

  I coughed and the two men turned.

  “George!” Rathbone said. “Always a pleasure.”

  I inclined my head as he took a drink from my tray. Bruce picked up another one.

  “Thanks, George,” he said.

  “Admiring the view, gentlemen?” I said with a slight smile.

  “Quite so, quite so,” Bruce said, with a sort of spluttering chortle.

  “I gather Miss Garbo is here as a house guest for a while.”

  Here was a hilltop hacienda in twenty-four acres with a kidney-shaped swimming pool. It had beautiful views up into the Hollywood hills, down to the Pacific ocean and, at the moment, much closer to hand.

  “I see her vegetarianism has gone a stage further,” Rathbone said drily.

  Bruce leaned in to me.

  “Have you booked your passage yet, young fellow-me-lad?”

  I started to answer but at that point Garbo turned first her head then her body towards us. Bruce started to huff and puff, trying hard not to look at the tangle of blonde hair framed by two outsize carrots.

  “My dear,” Rathbone called, stepping towards her.

  “Extraordinary,” Bruce mumbled as he limped behind his friend.

  I watched them go. I liked both men as they were more than courteous towards a fellow Englishman. However, I never overstepped the line. There was definitely a class hierarchy at work among the British expatriates in Hollywood. They were known as the Hollywood Raj and the public school types – Boris Karloff and the others – tended to stick together.

  The problem with most of my fellow countrymen was that they were on the whole not very good actors. They provided a parody of the Englishman. They did well in the Thirties when there were a lot of tuxedo scripts but no damned tuxedo actors except the English.

  I liked Baz and Willy well enough but I was wary of all other British movie stars. They all wore the right clothes, they had all gone to the right schools but they had the morals of skunks. If skunks have morals.

  David Niven was probably the friendliest. But then he had told me that he knew from when he first arrived what it was like to be unsuccessful yet still be mixing with the big stars. He gave me an invaluable piece of advice: it was good to mix with the expatriate British but don’t overstep the mark by asking help from the successful ones.

  Niven shared a house these days in Santa Monica with Errol Flynn. It was known for its 24-hour entertaining. Carol Lombard, Cary Grant and Ida Lupino had named it Cirrhosis-by-the-Sea.

  I’d been there many times but then I was usually a bit-player or an extra at all the big parties. I guess I was one of the most familiar faces around Hollywood on that account – but I also know that if the people I mixed with at night saw me on the street in the day they wouldn’t know me from Adam.

  And I never got invited to the intimate soirees. That would be evenings at Cole Porter’s listening to Cole and his friends Irving Berlin and George Gershwin trying out half-written songs from future hit shows.

  I heard all kinds of talk at parties. I tend not to say much. I mean, I’ve got my opinions but I like to hear other people mouthing off. I pick up all kinds of stuff that way. And I like to watch. Whose getting drunk with whom, whose wife is off with another man or, just as likely, woman.

  The word on Garbo was that, despite her big affair with John Gilbert, she was part of the Sewing Circle. The Hollywood lesbians. Aldous Huxley had told me about them: his wife joined them for a while.

  “Although, strictly speaking, she’s a Gillette Blade, George.” He saw my puzzlement. “She cuts both ways.”

  Nobody minded the lesbians too much as long as such women occasionally slept with a man to keep up appearances.

  And I didn’t mind if women wanted to do whatever they wanted to do, although I admit I was shocked when I first heard about it. But this Sewing Circle lured my sister in. By the time Hollywood had finished with her, my sister Ruth had come to know many circles – of hell that is.

  I read a lot. In the daytime I’m usually down at the library. The history of Los Angeles fascinates me. Back in the 1890s, Los Angeles used to be called “the city for those with one lung”. The climate attracted thousands of people suffering from tuberculosis or rheumatism. They sucked in the hot air and tried the hot springs.

  Now it’s full of people with heart problems. As in: they don’t have them. A place where people tread all over little people.

  Ruth was keener on becoming a movie star than I was. I tagged along to look after her really. We’d come over in 1938. She had heard that Selznick was taking open casting for the part of Scarlett O’Hara. She was convinced she could get it. We saw Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh around the ship we crossed from England on and assumed they were heading for Hollywood too. We didn’t know Vivien Leigh had the same role in her sights.

  We’d docked in New York then taken another boat via Havana to San Pedro. On the bus up from the harbour we’d passed through oil fields and citrus groves then on up the coast highway with the long sandy beaches and the bright blue Pacific with the white waves rolling in. And wafting through the open windows of the bus, the sickly sweet smell of rotting oranges.

  That should have been a warning. That beneath all the beauty, Hollywood too was rotten.

  Gone With The Wind was the main topic of interest when we arrived in Hollywood. All the big stars wanted the part of Scarlett. The gossip was that Selznick was working through various permutations of male and female stars for Rhett and Scarlett.

  First he wanted Gary Cooper to play Rhett but he had no Scarlett. He was interested in Paulette Goddard as Scarlett but she was embroiled in a scandal over living with Charlie Chaplin.

  He moved onto Errol Flynn playing opposite Bette Davis. Davis nixed that so Basil Rathbone was in the frame for a long time. Kate Hepburn pretended to be uninterested in the part of Scarlett but the word was that she had delayed the start of filming The Philadelphia Story in case she got the call.

  Nationwide polls had Clark Gable as by far the most popular choice for Rhett. Selznick needed to start filming in January 1939. So he decided to launch a Search For Scarlett – which was, of course, nothing more than a casting couch so far as the unknowns were concerned.

  Ruth didn’t even get to the couch. He bent her over his desk. She said he didn’t take his trousers off. He
ll, he didn’t even loosen his braces.

  I was enraged; Ruth was philosophical.

  “At least he didn’t take long,” she said. He was on a tight schedule, with a new girl every twenty minutes. “I should feel privileged,” she said. “He can’t have had every girl he saw, just those who found favour in his eyes. And I did get a screen test. With Gable too.”

  He happened to be on the lot that day, discussing the part of Rhett, and wanted to try a few lines.

  “He was a gent,” she said, “although it was a kissing scene.” She grinned at me. “I wouldn’t have minded if he had wanted to go all the way – I’m not the only one who goes swoony for him. Even with the bad breath.”

  “Bad breath?”

  “His dentures.”

  As you can tell, Ruth had always been frank with me. I knew she was no innocent. You don’t do rep in Britain for two years without picking up some loose ways. I wasn’t disapproving but I had a different perspective as her older brother. I’m 25, she’s 21. Was 21.

  Ruth had high hopes for Gone With The Wind. After all, her screen test had been with Gable and he’d called her “honey” and patted her bottom when they parted. Then we heard about Vivian Leigh and, quite suddenly, things started to slide.

  Ruth went to the Central Casting Office on Western Avenue. They specialised in extras. Bit part or small part actors needed an agent. Getting an agent required her to get down on her knees and for the time being she didn’t want to do that.

  The inverts of the Sewing Circle bought their men’s suits and pomade in stores in Santa Monica canyon and hung out in two or three bars along Sunset Boulevard. In the bars, producers’ wives whispered to eager young actresses about roles that were up for grabs. If the young actresses agreed to be up for grabs.

  Around Second Street major financial institutions were side by side with sleazy hotels where the prostitutes took sailors. I was coming out of a liquor store there when I saw Ruth coming out of one the bars, arm in arm with an older woman.

  At least the woman wasn’t a bull dyke. I watched them head towards a hotel, Ruth leaning in. My sister.