Ever, Dirk: The Bogarde Letters
Page 66
‘The one thing you have to remember about Americans in Business is that they only call you when they want you. Otherwise your dead.’ (to David Frankham 19/8/81)
‘I write because I have the time and it gives me pleasure to reach you. For no other reason.’ (to Norah Smallwood 29/8/81)
‘It’s a rum world, Publishing … almost as silly, I sometimes feel, as the Cinema.’ (to Norah Smallwood 29/8/81)
‘We are moths; we actors.’ (to Norah Smallwood 29/8/81)
‘I have a very unfair advantage over more brilliant and experienced writers: my Film Name. But I do try to sort that one out … it’s something I cant help anymore than I can help the fact that I’m getting badly thin on top!’ (to Norah Smallwood 12/9/81)
‘… divorced from my Film work, I am really not at all an interesting creature. Not even, alas! to myself …’ (to Norah Smallwood 3/12/81)
On a visit to Clermont by John Fowles: ‘We spent a good deal of it crawling about on hands and knees seeking Orchis. He found, to my relief, a patch of Fly, a second patch of Bee, and a whole orchard, one could say, of a pink orchis with a deeply unpleasing smell. He was overcome with delight …. sniffing away like a truffle-hound. More a Botanist than a Master writer. But enormously warm, shaggy, kind and humble. I like him very much.’ (to Norah Smallwood 12/3/82)
‘I should have been educated, really. I might have done awfully well …’ (to Norah Smallwood 20/5/82)
On the problems of leaving Clermont to make a film: ‘One really is caught in a web here: a web I love very much, but a web for all that.’ (to Norah Smallwood 20/5/82)
‘I spend more time at this machine than I do in bed!’ (to Nerine Selwood 16/8/82)
On Tony’s convalescence: ‘We have up days and down days and I am as attentive as a wheeling hawk.’ (to Norah Smallwood 20/4/83)
On his white hydrangea: ‘ … a vision of enormous blooms, fat as a housekeepers cat and twice as pretty …’ (to Norah Smallwood 20/7/83)
‘I made my money out of the houses I bought, did up, and sold rather than from the Movies!’ (to David Frankham 18/9/83)
On his grown-up young relatives: ‘I was NEVER like that at twenty five! Green as a frog was I, and still am.’ (to Kathleeen Tynan 15/10/83)
On the translation of Voices in the Garden: ‘Why does French read so ravishingly I wonder? It seems to me a far better book than my original!’ (to Kathleen Tynan 15/10/83)
On his 1983 Christmas card: ‘ … it is as un-festive as a foaling mare.’ (to Norah Smallwood 8/12/83)
On being described by his new publisher as ‘An author at the height of his powers’: ‘When I read this out to Forwood he only asked if I’d prefer mashed or plain boiled potatoes with the tripe a la mode … which goes to show how seriously I am taken in this house.’ (to Norah Smallwood 8/12/83)
On his dog, Labo: ‘He really was an Italian-Fellow all the way through: which is probably why Visconti so loved him. A shaggy twin. Arrogant, selfish, glorious. And most ungrateful.’ (to Norah Smallwood 29/2/84)
On his movies being rerun by television: ‘ … in the days when we made those films we really did’nt believe that TV was anything but a Rich Mans Toy … we never expected it to crush us!’ (to Susan Owens 4/2/84)
‘… I dont look like the bloody “Spanish Gardner” any more …’ (to Susan Owens 4/2/84)
‘I have always thought that good dialogue can DESCRIBE A PLACE far better than a writer.’ (to Mary Dodd 7/6/84)
On the exhibits in the Musée Picasso, Antibes: ‘I find that they interest me as much as the paintings on the side of a childs cot.’ (to Norah Smallwood 21/6/84)
‘[America] is more surprising and odd than Europe, and yet it is Europe displaced.’ (to David Frankham 27/6/84)
‘Books dont make your fortune, and I have’nt made a Fillum since Adam was a boy!’ (to Susan Owens 9/8/84)
On productions in England of The Cherry Orchard: ‘… while it has always been “worthy”, and very often beautifully played, it is about as Russian and volatile as a Mars Bar!’ (to Humphrey Jenkins 20/8/84)
‘Comedy is FAR harder to play than tragedy: if you can master comedy correctly you can literally play anything you like.’ (to Humphrey Jenkins 20/8/84)
‘… you are one of those rare people who can move mountains and divert rivers.’ (to Susan Owens 9/9/84)
‘The main trouble with me is that I have a very limited intellect and not a great deal of experience. Well: a limited (again) experience of a limited existance, if that makes any sense. It does to me, which is very depressing!’ (to Pat Kavanagh, 29/10/84)
On appearing on television chat shows: ‘I am not a rich man, and although it is a form of simple prostitution it does allow me to join kith and kin for free.’ (to Humphrey Jenkins 27/3/85)
On being awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters at St Andrews University: ‘ … anything is possible to achieve if you are determined … even if you cant spell, punctuate, add up or have ANY educational benifits whatever: like me. I was the despair of countless headmasters, apart from my poor father and mother, and now I cant tell any of them that it was alright in the end. Fate!’ (to Susan Owens 29/3/85)
‘Life is not all rose and gold, I can assure you!’ (to Jack Jones 2/4/85)
‘… I have always tried to bring good-taste and some degree of elegance, if possible, to the written words I have set down.’ (to Hélène Bordes 10/5/85)
On Norah Smallwood: ‘She was a titan! Nothing could escape her brilliant eye or the furious correcting of her right hand and pencil!’ (to Hélène Bordes 10/5/85)
On receiving his Hon. D.Litt at St Andrews University: ‘It was, without question, the most important day of my adult life I suppose .. apart from war, that is.’ (to Hélène Bordes 9/7/85)
On the first draft of his script for May We Borrow Your Husband?: ‘As you will see: I dont quite know how to type a TV (or a film) script, even though I have read millions.’ (to Bob Mahoney 9/8/85)
On completing Backcloth: ‘The void is terrible .. as if I had had twins!’ (to Hélène Bordes 23/9/85)
On France: ‘ … for some of us it is “under our skin” just as we are “in our skins” when we live here.’ (to Hélène Bordes 23/9/85)
On not being disturbed while watching films on television: ‘Fact is that I get so damned hooked on a Movie that I dont come out of the trance until the final credits!’ (to Brock and Kim Van den Bogaerde 13/7/86)
‘It is much too difficult to deal with illness in a foreign-language …’. (to Hélène Bordes (7/8/86)
On being unable to drive: ‘I never knew such a little thing would alter my life!’ (to Hélène Bordes 7/8/86)
On his co-star in May We Borrow Your Husband?: ‘She’s quite marvellous, works brilliantly, had never seen a camera in her life and comes off the screen like a bomb. Her name is Charlotte Attenborough!’ (to David Frankham 23/8/86)
‘I have no wish to surrender my French residency and I love France far too much to abandon her.’ (to Hélène Bordes 13/10/86)
On life at the Hotel Lancaster: ‘ … shareing two rooms with Forwood is a little like having a Hippopotamus in the house.’ (to Olive Dodds 9/12/86)
On returning to the bestseller chart: ‘I am cheered, a little, to see that I am back on the BS List today even though I’mNo. 10 … but better than a slap in the belly with a dead cod.’ (to Pat Kavanagh 6/9/87)
On his sister’s loss of her husband: ‘We never had an idea, did we, in the careless summer days of our childhood that we would, both of us, be called on to answer for all the joy we were getting then.’ (to Elizabeth Goodings 21/2/88)
‘… after all my reading public like to “pry”.’ (to Pat Kavanagh 22/8/88)
‘I begin to sound like Jeffrey Archer. I only wish I could write his tripe.’ (to Pat Kavanagh 22/8/88)
On life after the loss of Tony: ‘At least I do now know the difference between ‘Alone’ and “Lonely” which I had’nt fully understood before!’ (to Dilys Powell 27/9/88)
On not attending the funeral of a friend: ‘I declined to go, because I prefer to aid the living rather than the dead.’ (to Hélène Bordes 12/10/90)
On the perception of him by the tabloid press: ‘I am supposed to live in a basement flat, in the dark, drinking whisky all day because I am forgotten and alone and broke. I ask you! I feel a frightful fraud at the Connaught!’ (to Dilys Powell 14/4/91)
On These Foolish Things: ‘It’s taken me years to get the art of concealing art properly adjusted to my work. Now I think, think, I have done it .. and I can pack it in and get on with my books.’ (to Dilys Powell 27/5/91)
‘I am a good listner. When I allow anyone else to speak.’ (to Penelope Mortimer 29/8/91)
‘Everyone seems to be into Lesbians today .. and very odd fellers.’ (to Penelope Mortimer 29/8/91)
‘I am not a raging-bull type actor. I might have different sorts of rage but not giant. I am wispier .. not a toughie.’ (to Penelope Mortimer 9/9/91)
On the Holocaust and the prospect of it happening again: ‘We are evil essentially. It is a dreadful thought but tragically true.’ (to Graeme Wright, editor of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack 20/9/91)
‘Jealousy has ten heads.’ (to John Osborne 14/11/91)
On seeing in the Daily Telegraph a photograph of himself and Elizabeth, taken immediately before his Investiture at Buckingham Palace: ‘Christ. It’s bad enough being like a turtle without having to see it all in vivid Technicolour, Panavision, and, almost, Steriophonic Sound!’ (to John Coldstream 20/2/92)
‘[N]ever intrude. Never be rude.’ (to Penelope Mortimer 7/9/92)
On a signing session in Chester: ‘Lots of jolly chat, lots of books sold, kindness spilling like sunlight.’ (to Penelope Mortimer 6/10/92)
‘As Colette said .. to grow old is to cease to be amazed! I am constantly amazed!’ (to Hélène Bordes 8/10/92)
On Alexis Smith: ‘Mind you, she’d go to the opening of an eye …’. (to David Frankham 8/6/93)
On being guest of honour at the annual dinner of the British Society of Cinematographers: ‘It seems that photographers age, get fat, get bald, get thin, quicker than the rest of us! Difficult, because I have not yet, touch wood gone white.’ (to Brian McFarlane 2/4/94)
‘I know that I appear to be a bit too direct sometimes. It has been known to seriously distress some people: but I CAN be tactful when I feel, and know, that tact is needed. I would’nt have got this far unless I had.’ (to Rupert Van den Bogaerde 18/8/94)
‘Life is a fucker sometimes, and if you try to hide it all, the wounds and cuts and bruises, something else will give and we-all-fall-down.’ (to Rupert Van den Bogaerde 18/8/94)
‘There are more tacky little Knights stuttering about than midges in summer.’ (to David Frankham 11/1/95)
On giving up his Platform performances, or ‘concerts’: ‘Being all alone on a vast stage with just four or five books for two hours is too much of a strain now. I used to love the love!’ (to Olga Horstig-Primuz 19/7/95)
‘After all I only started to write to fill in those long evenings after the lamps were lit. Provence gets dark about 3.30 up in the hills. I felt that pulling a rug was indecent somehow. So wrote instead. Funny how life can alter things …’. (to Helen Osborne, 23/5/96)
... and his direct answer to a direct question:
‘“Tell me,” you ask “How many things do you hate?”
Oh! How difficult … really not so many. Certainly mimosa, an ugly flower which comes from an ugly country, vipers because they bite, Germans because they kill, the Japanese because I knew them in ’45 and they are worse than vipers and Germans put together … I hate frelons [hornets], for the same reason that I hate vipers, I hate tinned spaghetti; chlorine in the drinking water; bigotry (although I think that I must be one myself!); the mistral, because it destroys my plants and trees and weeks of back-breaking work in moments, snow and ice; a broken finger nail in wool; the slaughter of cattle and sheep, chickens in battery farms, tea without sugar, English boiled cabbage (they put one cabbage into a barrel of water with soda, to make it green, and boil it for a week!) flying; going to America, stupidity in people, (so much about!) damp bread, walking with bare feet in muddy, or sandy water (I once trod on a broken bottle as a child at the seaside and have never forgotten that!), being TOO happy: because unhappiness is almost certain to follow! And so on … trivia … I can tell you better what I LOVE! Boudin blanc! Boudin noir! Tripes a la mode de Caen … ALL Chinese food and oysters, caviar and champagne, Concorde, elegance, good manners, kindness, effort, and the local lady who keeps the goat herd down the lane! And much, much more! Including long letters .... ’. (to Hélène Bordes 5/10/85)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
‘Vol 2 is horridly difficult,’ Dirk wrote to Dilys Powell when he was completing Snakes and Ladders; ‘… it is the leaving out of people which I find so difficult … selection is frightfully tiresome and hurtful, of course, to people who tear out to read the index and find, angrily, that they are not included when they all “did so much” for me. Oh bugger! Perhaps I’d be better employed with a novel.’ The present book is, in its way, ‘Vol 2’ of what has come to be known as The Dirk Bogarde Project and while I hope the selection is neither tiresome nor hurtful, it has been at times agonising. The salon des refusés, as is clear from the long list of names below, has become a crowded space. But this is the inevitable consequence of the decision to treat Dirk’s correspondence from the second half of his adult life as a complement to, and quite often variant on, his memoirs.
Many of these names are common to the equivalent roll-call in the biography. Most who helped with my research extended their generosity to the loan of any letters and cards from Dirk that they had kept. In one or two cases – and despite extensive searches in attics, on bookshelves and among other secreted treasures – the quarry eluded their owners. However, there was compensation, for me at least, in the emergence of important items from sources that I had not previously tapped.
My principal debt, as always, is to the Van den Bogaerde family, who for the best part of eight years have continued to give their unqualified support, even though there has been the potential for their privacy to be placed in jeopardy, and even when the resolution of individual members has been tested. Their names are given individually at the front of this book. The Forwood family, too, has shown further kindness and understanding to the author-as-editor. Others to whom I am especially grateful for substantial and significant loans are: Dame Eileen Atkins, John Beech, Hélène Bordes, Véra de Ladoucette, Alain and Christine de Pauw, Mary Dodd, David Frankham, Bee Gilbert and Sir Ian Holm, Dominique Lambilliotte, Charles Lind, Patricia Losey, Brian McFarlane, Susan Owens, Ivor Powell, Ann Skinner, Bertrand Tavernier, Roxana and Matthew Tynan, the late Helen Osborne, and the late Nerine Selwood.
As with the biography, this volume would not have progressed beyond the initial glimmer of hope without the authorisation of Dirk’s estate, in the person of his nephew Brock; the commitment of my publisher and editor Ion Trewin, with his assistant Bea Hemming; and the encouragement of Dirk’s – and my – agent Pat Kavanagh. Constantly in the background, with his sagacity and valued friendship, has been Laurence Harbottle. So, too, with his mastery of Dirk’s on-line archive, has Christian Sandino-Taylor. In the final stages of what the film world knows as ‘pre-production’ I was once again fortunate enough to be guided, first, by Maddie Mogford of Reynolds Porter Chamberlain; then by Linden Lawson, nonpareil among copy editors; and by Jane Birkett, who faced a uniquely daunting set of proofs. If there are inadvertent omissions from these final pages, they are the fault of the editor and certainly not of Douglas Matthews, indexer extraordinary. In its look and feel I count this book as a true companion to the biography, and for that I thank Helen Ewing, Georgie Widdrington and Natasha Webber, as well as others at Weidenfeld and Nicolson who, when faced with a second mig
hty typescript from the same source, did not insist on a reduction in production values.
And finally … Since the summer of 2000, when I was commissioned to write Dirk’s Life, my wife Sue could be excused for thinking that ‘there are three of us in this marriage’. Fortunately, she too knew him – and has been the essence of forgiveness.
* * *
Access to letters held in public collections was granted by kind permission of the following:
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills – for correspondence to George Cukor
The British Film Institute, Special Collections – Joseph and Patricia Losey
The British Library – Dilys Powell; Harold Pinter
The Brotherton Library, University of Leeds – Norah Smallwood
Fondazione Istituto Gramsci, Rome – Luchino Visconti
The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin – Tom Stoppard; Julian Barnes and Patricia Kavanagh
The Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, University of Boston – Penelope Mortimer; Peters Fraser and Dunlop (pfd); and the sole surviving letter to Dorothy Gordon
The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre – Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal
The University of Reading, Special Collections – Random House, including letters to Norah Smallwood and John Charlton
For further personal loans (identified in bold), for granting permission as the executors of an estate, for opening doors and drawers at institutions, for wizardry with digital scanners, and for general enthusiasm I am also indebted to:
Judith Aller, Jonathan Altaras, Jamie Andrews, Verity Andrews, Jenny Arthur, Lady Annunziata Asquith, Lord and Lady Attenborough, Julian Barnes, Phillippa Bassett, Neville Beale, Kathy Beilby, Fanny Blake, Ronald Blythe, Helena Bonham Carter, Giovanna Bosman, Michael Bott, Penny Breia, David Bristow, Natasha Brook, Ian Buruma, John Byrne, James Cairncross, Kate Calloway, Sandra Caron, Audrey Carr, Chichester Reference Library, Anne Clarke, Paddie Collyer, Mark Daniel, Lady Daubeny, Caterina d’Amico, Christiaan De Forche, Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, Jonathan Diamond, Bryan Forbes, Joan Foster, Sarah Fowles, Carol Gordon, Sue Grantley, Tom Graves, John Greaves, Stacey Greenfield, Dominic Gregory;