Ever, Dirk: The Bogarde Letters

by Unknown

  Although his letters and cards were returned to him after Dorothy Gordon’s death, they, and hers, were consigned to the bonfire before Dirk left Provence. She makes little impression in the pages that follow, except as someone to whom Dirk refers with due appreciation. This book, therefore, is largely concerned with his other ‘particular friendships’, at least one of which was, in its way, as passionate. Norah Smallwood, who ran Chatto, opened the door to Dirk’s new life as an author. She saw him, by chance, on a weekend television chat show, and said to her senior colleagues when they met on the Monday morning that ‘if he writes as well as he talks, he might have a book in him’. Her shrewd judgement and her encouragement swiftly earned her the right to the title of Dirk’s second ‘Needlewoman’. ‘I WANT to write,’ he told her a few days after the publication of A Postillion Struck by Lightning. ‘I WANT. I WANT. And it’s all your fault.’

  Who else, apart from Dirk’s family, qualifies for that ‘particular’ billing? Some of his friends in the film business feature heavily in these pages, among them Bee Gilbert, who was not-quite-married to Ian Holm; Ann Skinner, who met Dirk while handling the continuity for Darling; the actor David Frankham; the director Bertrand Tavernier; the critic Dilys Powell; and, primarily, Joseph Losey, with whom Dirk worked five times, and his wife Patricia. Losey is as much a subject of Dirk’s letters as he is a recipient, and often he seems to be the object of disparagement – but there is no disguising the mutual respect and the affection that informed their productive, radical and exciting professional association. Theirs was, in its masculine way, another love affair. Luchino (‘The Emperor’) Visconti and Alain Resnais, two dominant figures from Dirk’s European period in the 1970s, are less well represented than they deserve because there were few written exchanges with the former and those with the latter have not been traced. However, there is compensation from unexpected quarters – for example, Hélène Bordes, a French academic who sought Dirk’s permission to write a paper on his first three volumes of autobiography. Norah Smallwood had died two weeks before, and he was despondent about the future of his own writing. The fortuitous timing of Mme Bordes’s approach led not only to her being christened ‘The Plank’ but also, again, to a kind of love. They met eventually, just once, and happily. Then there was the writer Kathleen Tynan, who hit it off immediately with Dirk and Tony while assigned to cover the filming of Justine. And, perhaps most significant, there is Penelope Mortimer. Another successful writer, of novels and screenplays, she made contact with Dirk in the hope of producing a script that might bring him together with Bette Davis. This tantalising prospect never came even close to realisation, but a remarkable, interrupted, correspondence developed in which Dirk was at his most confessional.

  There are other, less easily explicable ‘friendships’. Two of those which I have been able to identify were with women in the north of England who have nothing whatever to do with either the film business or publishing. When she was ill the family of Susan Owens wrote in the hope that a message from Dirk would cheer her up; the subsequent twenty years’ worth of his cards and letters filled two straining lever-arch files. Tina Tollitt was a schoolgirl who picked up a copy of The Films of Dirk Bogarde, by Margaret Hinxman and Susan d’Arcy, and found that ‘something clicked’, but ‘not in a heartthrob sort of way’. She wrote to Dirk and so began a charming, occasional exchange, unfortunately now lost, in which he took on the role of a Dorothy Gordon or a Norah Smallwood. He was, in effect, Tina Tollitt’s ‘Needleman’, urging her to write and advising her on whom to read.

  As is apparent, most of the enduring contacts were with women, some of whom were high-achieving professionals, while others lived quieter, more obscure, lives. Some were equipped with a razor-sharp intellect, education at the highest level and the experience of the well travelled; others, with a more gentle wisdom. What they all had in common were, first, a neediness – it was said most astutely of Dirk that ‘he needed to be needed’; and, second, a complete lack of dissimulation, or what he would call bullshit. In their different ways they all spoke the same language as he did – direct, unfussy, blunt and, in several cases, very funny.

  Proof of this can, fortunately, be found in the case of Penelope Mortimer, to whom Dirk once wrote with reference to the celebrated correspondence between Bernard Shaw and Mrs Patrick Campbell: ‘We may not be the GBS and Mrs P of the seventies, but it might be simply lovely to try!’ It was she who hit the nail most smartly on the head when she told him: ‘I know you’re a great believer in long distance and remote devotion.’ To my delight I found I could hear both sides of their conversation, because Dirk kept her letters; and when his were returned to him he chose, uniquely, to add them to his manuscripts at the University of Boston. Perhaps in doing so he was giving a nod towards, if not exactly an invitation for, a volume such as this. He was far too aware of the literary value in his social writings not to predict that A Particular Friendship would one day need to be, not superseded, but succeeded; and with a much wider reach of source material.

  Literary value is one thing; literacy value quite another. Poor Dirk. As mentioned at the outset, his letters are an orthographical, grammatical and syntactical nightmare. In a 1974 letter to Penelope Mortimer, he writes of a recent visit from Losey: ‘He said that he still liked me even though I used the worst grammer [sic] and wrote the worst spelling he had ever seen or heard.’ It was ever thus. The 1931 Michaelmas term report from University College School on the ten-year-old Derek Van den Bogaerde pronounced his performance in English ‘Terribly inaccurate’; by the Lent term in 1934 matters had not improved: ‘Promise – in the way of oral work – is always so much better than performance of written work.’ Half a century after those adjudications he wrote to Norah Smallwood: ‘I should have been educated, really. I might have done awfully well …’. Because he was so conscious of his failings, and so often apologised for them, his letters are rendered here as he wrote them. Those dots, or ellipses, speckle the text like measles. They were his preferred punctuation; for him it was far too much of a chore to work out whether a full-stop, a colon, a semi-colon, a comma or a dash was the most appropriate. He also had a tendency to use an initial capital in mid-sentence, sometimes for emphasis; these too are preserved. For practical reasons his paragraphing, which varied with the years, has been somewhat formalised, as have the dates on which he wrote, except in those cases where he seems to be making a point of them. It is a pity, really, that practicalities also prevent reproduction in facsimile, à la Henry Root. As Ann Skinner observed: ‘I think the look of Dirk’s letters is very interesting because they do consist of a stream of thought (rather than consciousness).’

  Hanging participles, dangling nominatives, split infinitives and other provokers of Fowler’s frowns, were grist to Dirk’s mill. The correct use of the apostrophe was as alien to him as Sanskrit; so dont, cant (for cannot), are’nt, were’nt, could’nt and should’nt proliferate. As for his spelling … (those dots are catching) … during the transcription process I could have sworn I heard sounds of anguish from the inner workings of sundry computers, where the checking programme has been worn to a frazzle: athmosphere, definatly, careing, embarress, hideious, excercise, immensley, infinate, shareing, valient, seldome, randome, whome, and many others recur throughout. They have been left alone, as have some misspelled names, such as Deitrich, which require no further identification or explanation, and appear as they should in the Index. In one or two cases, a word has become so mangled – primitavte – that it is given correctly. ‘I’m typing terribly badly this afternoon,’ he groaned in mid-letter to Penelope Mortimer. ‘I am thinking too fast .. and thus all the letters on the machine get stuck together or go back to front ilek hist. Sorry.’

  That his spelling, as opposed to his typing, should have been so bad is odd. Here was a man of wide knowledge and fierce intelligence, who made his mark in a profession where the script carries biblical weight. Dirk knew not only how to read scripts with attention to every nuance,
but also how to amend them and, in one case, write an entire film. By that time he was ten years into a second, parallel, career where the drafts for his own books were corrected and returned to him from England by his dedicated typist, Sally Betts, before a proof stage, and sometimes bound proof copies, for his further attention. Surely he would have noted the basic alterations and stored them away in that receptive brain? Surely from his reading – which became very wide indeed, both in the classics and in modern biography, history and fiction – enough would have been absorbed to inform his own deployment of words? Surely he could simply have reached for the dictionary on the shelf a few inches away? No; to John Charlton, the patient and meticulous editor who worked at Norah Smallwood’s right hand, Dirk admitted: ‘I just “bash” along I fear, and things get left behind rather.’ Added to which was a famous impatience; a desire to press on, to finish or to embark on something new; and, most probably, a touch of the dyslexia that runs in the family. All contributed to a carelessness for the detail which counts for little, if nothing, in speech. If we accept that to read Dirk’s letters is to hear him talk, we should perhaps then ask ourselves how often we correct our utterances? In any case, to be exposed to his descriptive passages about the sun setting on his terrace in the hills above the Riviera; his startlingly original use of simile and metaphor; and, alas!, the odd droplet from his acid tongue about his fellow man – all tend to elicit forgiveness of his offences against strict usage.

  In the Prologue to A Particular Friendship, composed in 1989, he confesses that while reading the edited letters to ‘Mrs X’ someone (a senior executive at Penguin Books) said that for the first time in his life he felt he must vote socialist. ‘My arrogance and politics’, wrote Dirk, ‘apparently “got to him”, although I am as political as a garden gnome.’ Nevertheless Dirk decided not to make alterations of that kind because, after two decades of living abroad, he now saw himself as one who ‘has had a lot of opinions altered and his life-style greatly changed. I hope for the better.’ Such opinions ran counter to a literal interpretation of ‘political correctness’. Those who monitor its present, much wider, meaning will probably experience the heebie-jeebies if they happen upon one or two observations in this volume. The very frankness which makes Dirk’s writing so compelling might, like that of Philip Larkin and others before him, be his undoing. Even allowing for the passage of time – and, more important, the privacy of the medium – we can only wince at some of his asides about the blacks, the Asians and the Jews. Yet although he could make a crude generalisation, Dirk was neither truly a racist nor an anti-Semite. Despite his frequent use of the words ‘detest’ and ‘loathe’, and his unwillingness to step into a lift with the Japanese because of what he had seen and heard in the Far East during the war, he was not full of hate. Yes, he could be waspish, cutting, bilious, sometimes cruel. Yes, he was impatient with trivia, and fools were not suffered gladly. Yes, he could be hasty to judge: we see, for example, how dramatically his opinion of one of our foremost actresses changed from scorn to admiration once they had worked together. Yes, he could offend. But he was no bigot. On the contrary, he was an admirer of the ‘great Tolerant’, Voltaire. He had seen too much extreme prejudice to espouse it himself.

  One further understanding is asked of the reader. At a very rough guess two million of Dirk’s written words were considered for this selection. About half a million were transcribed, and, after extensive cutting, some 250,000 remain. An early decision was required about whether to allow the longer letters to run, or to pick nuggets. I chose the former, partly because many of the ‘highlights’ were used in Dirk Bogarde: The Authorised Biography; more important, because there is an advantage as well as an allure in being able to follow, to listen to, Dirk’s train of thought as he flits from one subject to another. Inevitably this course had implications for the number of items which could reasonably be included, and in order to prevent an already long book from becoming one of those which are impossible to pick up rather than to put down, most of the letters from which I quoted at length in the Life are omitted. That volume, published in 2004, was criticised in some quarters as being too heavy to read in bed; but fortunately a paperback edition followed. Much, if not all, of the essential background to the correspondence presented here is given in the biography – for example, a detailed account of the controversy surrounding Dirk’s portrayal of ‘Boy’ Browning in Richard Attenborough’s film of A Bridge Too Far, and, at a less momentous but more grotesque level, the eye-witness testimony from the late Willis Hall of a hideous lunch chez Dirk and Tony at Drummer’s Yard which he attended with Keith Waterhouse. To avoid duplication, therefore, explanatory linking passages have been kept to a minimum. Which means that – at the risk of my seeming to indulge in shameless auto-publicity – the context of these letters will be most easily understood if a copy of the earlier book is within reach.

  Finally, the purpose of this volume is to complete a quartet, initiated by Dirk’s Estate, and comprising otherwise the Arena television documentary, ‘The Private Dirk Bogarde’, first broadcast by the BBC on Boxing Day 2001; the authorised Life; and the official website, www.dirkbogarde.co.uk, which was launched on what would have been his eighty-sixth birthday in March 2007. It is not some opportunistic indulgence, but an attempt to give the last word to a formidable communicator; one who would receive envelopes addressed to ‘Dirk Bogarde Esq, Legendary British Actor, Chelsea, London, England’, ‘Mr Dirk Bogarde, An apartment overlooking trees, A Short Walk from Harrods, London SW1’ and ‘Sir Dirk Bogarde, Author, (who lives) A Short Walk from Harrods’. Any response would be courteous, but would bring this epistolary equivalent of the cold-call to an abrupt end, and has no place in a distillation devoted almost entirely to the conversations he wished to sustain. Dirk apologised for the fact that the one he preserved as A Particular Friendship was ‘edited by myself rather crudely, and unfinished as a book’, adding that collections of letters ‘can be tiresome, and monotonous’. I bore those adjectives in mind while preparing this fuller and much further-reaching selection, and hope that its readers will agree with John Byrne, the archivist who catalogued Dilys Powell’s papers. He concluded: ‘My impression is that Dirk Bogarde was incapable of writing an indifferent letter.’ Or, indeed, of being dull in conversation. Here, if you like, is a final chance to eavesdrop.

  John Coldstream

  West Sussex 2008

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  Non-family recipients of Dirk’s more significant correspondence, as featured to a greater or a lesser extent in this volume:

  Eileen Atkins – Dirk’s co-star in the BBC production of The Vision (1988), and morale-booster-in-chief when he was at his lowest ebb during Tony Forwood’s final illness and in the aftermath of the latter’s death.

  Hélène Bordes – Former Maître de Conférences at Limoges University, whose study of Dirk’s early autobiographies helped to free him from a ‘block’ at a crucial time in his writing career.

  George Cukor (1899–1983) – Hollywood giant, who rescued two of Dirk’s films, Song Without End and Justine, after mishaps befell their original directors.

  Roald Dahl (1916–90) – Author and at one time near-neighbour, whose response to the stroke suffered by his wife was depicted powerfully in The Patricia Neal Story (1981), starring Dirk and Glenda Jackson.

  Molly Daubeny – Widow of Sir Peter, the impresario who brought Power Without Glory into the West End in 1947.

  Alain and Christine de Pauw – Belgian couple who in October 1986 bought from Dirk his beloved Le Haut Clermont, near Grasse.

  Mary Dodd (née Forwood) – Cousin to Tony Forwood, occasional companion to Dirk and Tony on holidays in the 1950s, and dedicatee of Jericho (1992).

  Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945–82) – Prolific German director for whom in Despair (1978) Dirk gave what he felt was his finest performance, but whose editing damaged the film.

  Daphne Fielding (1904–97) – Former wife of the 6th Marquess of Bath (Henry Thynne); me
t Dirk in July 1956 when her second husband, Xan Fielding, was technical adviser on Ill Met by Moonlight. Dedicated her second volume of memoirs, The Nearest Way Home (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1970), to Dirk.

  David Frankham – Former BBC Radio employee, who interviewed Dirk in the early 1950s; since then he has lived and worked as an actor in the United States.

  Bee Gilbert – Photographer, screenwriter and producer, who met Dirk and Tony on location for The Fixer (1969) when she was living with Ian (later Sir Ian) Holm. He is one of the few colleagues who has written at any length about Dirk (Acting My Life, Bantam Press, 2004).

  Dorothy Gordon (1902–72) – Librarian at Yale University and the ‘Mrs X’ of Dirk’s A Particular Friendship.

  Laurence Harbottle – Solicitor to Dirk from the early 1950s until the latter’s death.

  Olga Horstig-Primuz (1912–2004) – Paris-based agent, who managed some of Dirk’s work in France, notably Providence. They met in late 1954, when her client Brigitte Bardot was cast in Doctor at Sea.

  Patricia (Pat) Kavanagh – Literary agent who handled all Dirk’s books and journalism from 1983. Her husband Julian Barnes exchanged views with Dirk on matters horticultural and culinary.

  Dominique Lambilliotte – Former editor at the Parisian publishing house Editions Fernand Nathan; with her Dirk established the last of his ‘particular friendships’.

  Joseph Losey (1909–84) – Director who worked with Dirk five times: The Sleeping Tiger (1954), The Servant (1963), King and Country (1964), Modesty Blaise (1966) and Accident (1967). His fourth wife, Patricia Tolusso (née Mohan), corresponded with Dirk in her own right.