Ever, Dirk: The Bogarde Letters

by Unknown

  And a new war we have.2 Oh shit. Not AGAIN. Surely? One looks with a vaguely apprehensive eye towards oil and petrol … and vague thoughts of having to flee the house, and shoot the dogs, and make for Geneva; enter ones head. (And try not to stay there.) I sometimes DO feel a foreigner in a large, frontiered, Country .... and images of Polish friends fleeing the Russians in ’44 cant but help stick in the head. I knew one Lady who had two hours to leave 800 years of life and family in her great Estate .. and having bid the staff to burn their livery, turned the horses loose, she herself clad in old ski-ing gear, filled two saddle bags with some food and family papers and a bit of jewellery, and rode like hell for the Yanks who were fiddling about somewhere in the German area .... she never saw her home again. Now why did I tell you that? Sunday sort of gloom … except that it really is THE most glorious day after all that rain … and the hills look like something out of a Drury Lane Production of ‘The Sound Of Music’ … all glorious colours .. fretworked against the arc of the sky … an incredible blue .. with the Mistral starting over the hills behind. Pretty. Oh yes. You can come when you want to. There is a pleasant guest suite now that I have sacked the Staff and turned their rooms into something reasonably un-smelly. I DO know what ‘the smell in a Maids bedroom’ means now. It was not a nasty Mitfordish remark. It was true. We have had the windows wide open to the air since May … repainted the place .. washed all the blankets and the damn carpet … cleaned everything in sight. And the odour of ‘frustiness’ and sweat has only just now gone. To return. Better to wait until I get a few more of these jobs out of the way … Programms I mean … I spend most of the time wandering about wondering what to say about Vivaldi … or Ethel Shutta … or how to be tactful about Golders Green … Radio Audiences are so dreadfully sensitive ... I recently, on Telly, said that I was very happy to live here (I’m always being asked that; with the implication that I have either come to avoid VAST tax, or have burned the Union Jack in Grasse Market … or both; cunts.) happy to live here because it was warm and un-Fallish … but that sometimes it could look like Tunbridge Wells on a wet Sunday … Whereupon the ENTIRE population of the sodding place wrote furious letters (D. Bogarde. France.) asking what was the matter with T.W. And I wrote back and said that if they did’nt know, they were living in bliss; and if they DID know they’d be somewhere else. Grumpy, touchy, lot … well you know that yourself.

  [ … ]

  Two Hours Later

  Had to stop there very quickly; telephone calls from family with one horror chasing in on top of the other .... News has been broken, to OUR Mrs B., that the rest of her life is going to be spent, very comfortably and at great bloody expense, in a pretty and small and near-to-the-family Nursing Home. Not an easy moment to arrive at. Not an easy thing, at seventy five, to accept. Deed done. Now for the letter .... tomorrow … to explain from a distance (In My Case.) why. Why? She cried … Where do I go … what will I do?

  Well … she wont fall down as often […] but, oh shit. How I have dreaded this day … for so many years … years and years .... anyway; we’ll all (the kids that is) have to fork out here and there and make the next ten .. (I reckon a hundred for her) … years comfortable and happy as possible.

  Not that she’ll ever be happy really. The day after her honeymoon, in 1919,1 she was busily packing a bag to join the Jesse Lasky Players in Hollywood. My Pappa, aged all of 27, said ‘Me or It.’ and so she stayed and I was born. And she has never, ever, forgotten, nor will she ever, her Resentment. As she calls it. Christ! A loving and loyal husband .. and a very sexy fellow to boot … and five children2 and nannies and so on … and now sitting in a titchy, but pleasant, Nursing Home in Haywards Bloody Heath. [ … ]

  Where are the morals? What, as Lotte Leynia says, Would You Do.

  Anyway done.

  I dont know; one always wants so desperatly to be ‘Grown Up’ … it is’nt all that cop, is it? Except for one or two moments of wild, and stupidly glorious, happiness, it was MUCH nicer being little Dirk … with nothing more worrying than how my Lizards and Frogs were breeding (if they were.) or the results of my French and Maths Exams .... or were there worse things really? I dont know. Wanting, desperatly, to win a canary at the village Fair ..... I’d rather have those than worrying about the letter to that nursing home in Haywards Heath tomorrow. And I liked my war. So there we are … where are we? .. Oh! It is so confusing to be middleaged … so lovely to worry only about babies and Biba and if you are ‘with it’ or without whatever IT is … enough.

  Back to your letter and your, as usual, questions. You cant see ‘Night Porter’ until it opens in Jan in Parigi .... and then you could come with Lilly and me. She hates me calling her Lilly … and it simply does’nt suit her one bit. Tom or Dick or Harry would do much better … but she is my personal person. My Lilly. Just as, idiotically, you are my Pennylopé. With the acute.

  […] Off to feed dogs and cut the last remaining grapes for the rather nasty Grape Jelly that my Daily Ladie makes … but why leave them to the wasps and fee-fies? .. Oh shit. This has gone on long enough.

  A thoroughly rotten letter – as you said – ‘there are writing days – and non-writing days’. This is one of the latter for me and, as recipient, for you too —

  Love –

  Dirk

  With its American backers dismayed by The Night Porter, Dirk had arranged a private and ‘off-the-record’ screening in London for four selected critics. Alexander Walker of the Evening Standard broke the embargo and the others felt obliged to follow – among them Dilys Powell, who wrote a brief and complimentary review in her column on Sunday 20 January.

  To Dilys Powell Clermont

  24th January [1974]

  Thursday evening.

  [ … ] Thank you so very much for Sunday. It was a rather marvellous day [ … ] And now, you may be amused to know, the film has been rushed back, at urgent request, to the States. There you are, you see. We now await their verdict … the bastards. I fear that it wont be dirty enough for them .... or even Pekenpaish-Violent.1 They really DO like it spelled out in letters of fire.

  No; I agree with you utterly. I dont think that the general public WILL go along with it … but we did’nt make it for them anyway. It can only possibly work in a small cinema where people who care about the cinema itself … I mean the Work of the cinema can see it … it is not for general consumption. Whatever our rather nitwitted, but kind, producer thinks! I remember once when Visconti was asked by a rather bewildered and angry American Critic ‘Why’ he made ‘Death’, he replied very gently ‘Bogarde and I made it for ourselves.’ ... which was true, but rather naughty and not to be at all encouraged!

  I dont think, and dont be cross with me for saying this, but I dont think one can really see the ‘NP’ thing unless you, or one rather, has been desperatly, solidly, passionatly in love. Or unless one has been loved. That is, ultimatly, what it is about. At least Charlotte and Lilliane and I thought so … we hacked and cut and clipped the ten other plots away from the original script and tried to get to the bottom of Love.

  Patrick White says somewhere in ‘The Eye Of The Storm’ ..... ‘there is no desecration where there is Love.’ I rather think that he is right ..... Enough of that. You’ll probably never see it again. But at least you DID see it … it was real .... your presence made it so. For that, if for nothing else, my humblest gratitude.

  Spring is being a bit dotty here in the hills .... it’s deceptivly warm and birds and things are scuttering about the olives as if it were April. The violets are thick and blue under the walls, and the primulas are fat, rather vulgar, cushions in the softest green grass .... of course, as I well know in these hills, tomorrow it can snow .. we had five meters of the blasted stuff four years ago … oranges tumbled into the drifts, and the dogs had hysterics of delight. And I must be in London on Sunday for a week .. oh! hell! … to see ageing Mamma somewhere near Haywards Heath and deal with Family Problems generally … then, happily and hopefully, back the next
Sunday. To snow drifts!

  It’ll be the first trip for 18 months. I ought to feel excited .. but apart from a visit to nice Miss [Joy] Parker at Hatchards and a bit of a spend in Floris .. I dread it all.

  It would be different if you were coming with one. We might find a lovely book on Iran!1 But I suppose you have them all anyway … end of page .. but NOT end of love – from Dirk –

  To Dilys Powell Clermont

  7th February 1974

  Thursday afternoon.

  They tell me that it is the Mistral which is blowing across my hill; but I think it is the other, and nastier, wind. The Tramontine. And I simply loath it. The trees are bending to the earth … tall cypress like ostrich feathers at a dance … the olives wrenching and rolling .. and slates ripping across the terrace like old leaves. And it makes me most dreadfully fretful. Like the fern2 in Austria … beastly feeling. Weak and worried and a sense of apprehension. Last December we had a smashing wind .. of 150 kms an hour .. plus awful forest fires .... houses burned like matchboxes, and trees flew through the air as if an angry child was demolishing his Noahs Ark. I dread that it will not die down until tomorrow … and I hate it all shuttered in the cottage with the roof sagging and the awful roaring everywhere.

  So, instead of pruning the big vine, or levelling off my pond … which I should be doing, I am in here writing my mail. Well. Some of my mail. The ones I want to answer. It is my day for self indulgence.

  [ … ] I am just back from London. First time in 18 months … to see Mamma (in a pleasant, but naturally sad, House for Elderly widows.) Wretched to see her sitting in a tiny facimile of her own room at home … her own bits and pieces, paintings, pots and jars, a bowl of hyacinths … a television .. a window out over the sussex lanes … but empty.

  Got that over .. in a sort of jolly-sad way … then other family affairs … brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews and god alone knows what else. Suddenly one finds one has no friends anymore. Is’nt it odd? Having left England I am now desperatly out of touch. Actor friends are DREADFULLY dull and boring and egocentric and full of something called Valium! I dont know what is what, or who is who, on the Telly … which seems to rule me out as a conversationalist more than not knowing what is on at the Court or the NFT.… which I do … and I feel that they have all, or nearly all, stopped dead in 1967. A little older .. children have grown … clothes a bit more, or less, Bibaish .. desperatly dull I though[t]. All of them. Except one nice lady who writes books and lives on about five quid a week with whom I lunched … and Losey and his wife who are still ‘alive’ and live in a dotty, but delightful, house in Royal Avenue … I was deeply grateful for a couple of their hours. Refreshment in a dimming, arid, desert of ageing acquantances! Very odd.

  But perhaps it is me. No one knows much about olives or vines or just pottering about at the Market every morning. And few people seem to read much. At least I have all the books here. I mean the new ones as well as Trollop … which was about the only name I heard in London all the time I was there! Because of a thing they are up to on the Telly. Really.

  And apart from horrid news about Mines and Petrol and all the rest, and a rather ‘It Is’nt Really Happening’ sort of thing generally about the streets .... there was very little else. I longed and longed for the airport and the flight home. Which is strange. For I have a ghastly terror of planes and flying. (In the war .. for seven years with the RAF and the Canadian lot … I had to fly here and there. And I was convinced that it was so horrid and beastly and unnatural that when the war was over it would never catch on. I said.)

  Anyway home was a short two hours away … bumping into fearful rain and storms … the sea like molten metal .. the palms screaming and racketing … but the whole place seemed, to me at any rate, golden and glorious. That first smell of France. Cigarettes and tea and coffee and the pines … the dogs going bonkers with joy and fighting each other in a wild showing off of Welcome Home. Unlocking a week-closed house … smell of time .... a clock stopped .... soot down the big chimney … mail in a neat pile made by my bonne … a cold meal set under a cloth .... cold chicken, a mixed salad of watercress, endive and the first chives … bread from the village with a crust … a plump Pont L’Eveque.…

  And then ones own bed after the Connaught elegance … ones own bathroom .. unpacking the loot … Floris bits and pieces … Veganine … razor blades … Marks and Sparks sweaters … a bundle of new books from Hatchards … Country Life and The Field and all the Sunday papers to last me the week.

  And as evening fell the lights sparkled away along the coast … the tower of the Cathedral at Grasse was like a stick of barley sugar in the dusk … the owls and the lambs … peace and silence otherwise. Who would want the other!

  I do go on … an essay of doubtful merit … a note to start with to say how lovely it was to have your note … and your love .. and, indeed, your treasured freindship.

  Self indulgance has got the better of me. I’ll pack it in now.

  [ … ] I have no cat to chase across my machine … Daisy and Labaro, the dogs, are convinced that cats are really rabbits … but forgive my own mistakes, and accept all my love and gratitude … and dont feel, in the least, obliged to reply. Ours is not THAT kind of friendship. As you know … perhaps thats why we have preserved it so well .....

  ‘The desperation of Love’ … you say about the ‘NP’ thing … thats it. Thats exactly what it’s all about. But few, alas, will realise the fact … ah well … better than Percy’s Progress.1 I think.

  My love

  Dirk

  To Bee Gilbert Clermont

  31 March 1974

  Dearest Sno:

  A delayed letter to thank you for your long and full-of-woes one! What a pity about the dog. However if that happens they seldome, if ever, get cured and the only thing is a merciful shot gun. Or a place in Kensington not near the Serpentine. Labbo is a bit like that too; a Pussy-Killer and a Chickie Killer. Got ten pullets in my garden in Rome and chumped them all up happily covered in gore and white feathers.

  Even the old trick of tying a corpse round his neck till it rotted, had utterly no effect. He just had a chumble when he felt like it .. and eventually the smell was so vile that we were reaching and hacking away without any change to the sodding dog.

  Anyway, ’spect you have sorted that out by now. Buy an Angora Cat.

  HRH1 has had some rum notices for his Epic. Some were really jolly funny. Anyway no one BLAMES the lad. His reputation is still intact. After all everyone knows that sometimes an [actor] does need the lolly. The only thing which sickens me is the Great Unwashed who CARE for that more than ‘Homecoming’ or ‘Richard 111’ .... its really chips with everything. I sometimes feel that we should’nt indulge their silly little brains … and force them to watch proper things, properly done. However thats another argument. I do LOATH their silly faces and their sillier minds. They deserve a twenty quid or pence loaf … and Wlsion2 too.

  We are just back, almost intact, from Parige after a three day stint there for ‘Night Porter’. A rather exhausting trip as I had eight to ten sessions with the Press every day, plus the Telly and Radio, and all in Frog. Trying … but they were dreadfully polite and kind and terribly interested. Unlike our lot, who only want to know who you are fucking, if you are, and wheather it is true that you really make your own lampshades and breed tropical fish … in Paris one had to compare Molier with Albee … Renoir with Hockney, Guilt with Innocense … lust with love … Losey with Visconti or Clayton and that sort of thing. Stimulating and interesting for both questioner and Victim. All a bit Cahi[e]rs du Cinema … but whats wrong with that? Better than Roderick Mann in the Express .. which is generally about our level in England. The film itself seems to have both shocked, as we hoped, and moved and excited, also as we hoped. People are either smashed completely or sent mad with rage … anti-jewish (we did’nt know!) or pro-Facist .. (I had a faint feeling that I knew THAT one.) And because the film was made by a Communist everyone got
very Political. No one found it vulgar or obscene … like the Italians who have swiftly banned it because of a scene with Charlotte ontop of me, instead of the tother way round!

  Anyway we open on the 3rd in Paris … in ten movie houses … and then we shall know. There seems still no chance of it reaching England. And I suppose that if it did that Whitehouse3 lot would have screaming fits and we’d all be arrested. It is odd. Nothing happens that does’nt happen between an ordinary man and woman in love … and who enjoy sex … but there you go. There is one shot of two soldiers buggering each other, very very graphically … and to which the Italian censors have’nt even turned a hair … yet because Charlotte straddles me ...... I give up.

  Busy preparing for the summer here. Steps to the swimming pool .. all by my own little hands. And rather good. And a new path to the port d’entre … and the terrace on the North is super and finished, covered in Dorothy Perkins and honeysuckle … and the kitchen is stripped and ready for tiling and the fitted things … we should be shipshape in a couple of weeks. At the moment it is sheer hell because Tote is cooking in the corridor outside your room .. and I am washing up down in the washhouse .... a bit bizaar. We have’nt a grill or an oven so everything has to be boiled or steamed … and we cant fry anything on account of the stink in the corridor and all the fat getting into your new curtains and so on .... ah well! By the time we HAVE the bloody new kitchen I reckon we shall have decided to live on pills and save the fucking washing up.

  So dont come for your ‘spring’ holiday until after the middle of April .. then we can do a bit of boasting I hope. It has been a tough, wet winter here … and a very wet spring. First medium day today. Everything wondrous green. Blossom in cascades … peach apple, plum and quince .. and the grass is starred with scillas and buttercups and pale anenomies and great spreads of wild narcissi and bee-orchis. The frogs are screaming away preparing for the Big Fuck … and the Toads have already had theirs and littered the pond with ropes and ropes of jet beading! All very pretty and promising. And this arvo we have six dozen petunias to pose, as they say in France, and masses of others as well .. a blue and white garden we plan, with no reds or purples or suburban colours … otherwise, apart from the washing up, there is nothing to tell you … save that you are loved and missed. Beware of that Snap-Fetish. I started with a Brownie. Ended with a Hasslebladt and a VAST dark room, brown staind fingers and a humped back .. and huge enlargements, 20 X 16 and a quite incredible overdraft. So watch it Sno Beaton.