Ever, Dirk: The Bogarde Letters
Page 72
1. Producer of Anne of the Thousand Days, for which Burton had been nominated as Best Actor. And the Oscar went to … John Wayne.
2. Visconti’s Lo straniero from Albert Camus’s l’Etranger, with Marcello Mastroianni.
1. Figures in a Landscape, an unhappy Losey project, starring Robert Shaw and Malcolm McDowell.
2. The actor José Ferrer and the producer Joseph Besch had bought the rights in 1963 from Thomas Mann’s estate.
1. Morley’s novel was published by Doubleday, Page & Co. in 1925.
2. Victor Lyndon, associate producer of Darling and occasional screenwriter.
3. James (christened William) Fox and Vanessa Redgrave.
1. On 4 May National Guardsmen had killed four and wounded nine during a student demonstration at Kent State University.
2. At the beginning of his career Dirk had acted in two works by J. B. Priestley, master of the ‘time play’.
3. Vilja – the forest fairy in The Merry Widow.
1. Norman Katz, a vice-president of Warner Bros.
2. The nickname Dirk shared with Visconti for Labo.
1. For Fellini Satyricon.
2. The Loseys were on location in Norfolk for The Go-Between.
1. Presumably perché (because).
1. Daniel M. (Danny) Angel, producer of King and Country.
2. Björn Andresen.
3. Dominic Guard, playing the eponymous go-between.
4. This swipe at one of the leading players from The Servant might owe something to the fact that at the time the film was shot, she was living with Dirk’s co-star, the twenty-three-year-old James Fox. It seems especially vindictive given that in her own memoirs Miss Miles would record that ‘Dirk, being an absolute professional, was good fun to work with and I learned a lot from him.’ (Serves Me Right, Macmillan, 1994)
1. Nicholas Mosley, author of the novel Accident, was writing the screenplay for The Assassination of Trotsky.
2. Mike Frankovich, whom Dirk would have encountered in the 1950s, when the former was head of Columbia’s British operation.
1. LV had taken exception to Kathleen Tynan’s report from the Death in Venice location, published in the December issue of American Vogue.
2. Friedrich Bruckmann, Dirk’s character in The Damned.
1. John Bodkin Adams, Eastbourne doctor and murderer.
2. Dirk was interviewed by Margaret Hinxman as part of the John Player Lecture series.
3. John Frankenheimer, director of The Fixer.
1. He was appearing in Terence Rattigan’s A Bequest to the Nation at the Haymarket.
2. Dirk’s role in The Fixer.
1. Frederick the Great (Hamish Hamilton).
2. Inside the Third Reich by Albert Speer (Weidenfeld & Nicolson).
3. An adaptation of Gore Vidal’s novel Myra Breckinridge, written and directed by Mike Sarne.
4. Alan Bates, who co-starred with Dirk and IH in The Fixer, was playing the princely Dane in Nottingham and had indeed fathered twins.
1. A reference to their spare time on location for The Fixer.
2. The actress Melissa Stribling, whose husband Basil directed four of Dirk’s films, including The Blue Lamp and Victim, and bought Beel House from him. Dearden had died in a car crash two days earlier.
1. With The Go-Between.
2. Le Chat, with Jean Gabin.
1. Acton’s More Memoirs of an Aesthete had recently been published by Methuen.
2. A Soldier Erect by Brian Aldiss (Weidenfeld & Nicolson).
3. Cocteau by Francis Steegmuller (Macmillan, 1970).
4. Romy Schneider presented Losey with the Palme d’Or at Cannes for The Go-Between. Visconti was given a special prize marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Festival, for Death in Venice and for the rest of his oeuvre.
1. Jacqueline Sassard, whom Losey cast in Accident.
2. Alan Bates, star of Losey’s The Go-Between.
3. Dominic Guard and Margaret Leighton.
4. Dillon, set designer.
5. Ian Holm had bought a 300-year-old house in Kent.
1. Torquemada.
2. Tony.
1. Presumably cicadas.
2. Schlesinger’s Sunday, Bloody Sunday, starring Peter Finch and Glenda Jackson.
1. In Ken Russell’s The Music Lovers Glenda Jackson had been obliged to appear in sequences of intimacy with Richard Chamberlain.
2. Another Russell extravaganza, starring Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave.
1. AS was on location in Africa for Young Winston.
2. Suppositoires.
3. Relations between JL and Dirk had become strained, mainly over the uncertainties in casting the title role for The Assassination of Trotsky.
4. Peter Witt, agent.
5. Rosalind Chatto, agent to Losey.
6. Richard Burton, who duly played the role opposite Romy Schneider, with Alain Delon.
1. John Gielgud, whose Stage Directions (Heinemann, 1963) had been sent to Dirk by ET.
1. Sybil Thorndike Casson by Elizabeth Sprigge (Victor Gollancz); The Gift Horse by Hildegard Knef (André Deutsch).
2. Grigori Kozintsev, Russian director of Hamlet and King Lear in the 1960s.
1. James Woolf, producer of The Pumpkin Eater, adapted by Pinter from PM’s novel (Hutchinson, 1962).
2. Two Trees, One Crooked Mile, Westport.
1. PM’s third novel, published in 1958 by Michael Joseph, under her first married name, Dimont.
1. Danjoux, who had succeeded the Boludas as live-in help.
2. .. PM had asked Dirk how Losey might react to directing Bette Davis.
1. The son of Léon Loschetter, architect at Clermont.
2. Saturday was, in fact, the 18th.
3. Evidently souvenirs of IH’s last stay at Clermont and sun-seeking on the slope above the house, christened ‘Titty-Brown Hill’ and occasionally ‘Brown Titty Hill’, because its seclusion allowed naturism to thrive.
1. Nicholas and Alexandra, directed by Franklin Schaffner, with Michael Jayston and Janet Suzman in the title roles.
2. An offer of work for IH, declined.
3. Arthur Murray.
4. A BBC adaptation of the Thomas Hughes novel.
1. I Could Go On Singing, with Judy Garland, directed by Ronald Neame.
1. PM had offered to bring some records, including one by Layton and Johnston.
2. Dorothy Gordon.
3. Michael Anderson’s 1955 film of the assault by 617 Squadron RAF on the Möhne and Eder dams in the Ruhr, using the ‘bouncing-bomb’ invented by Barnes Wallis. It starred Michael Redgrave, with whom Dirk had made The Sea Shall Not Have Them (1954), and Richard Todd, with whom Dirk never acted.
1. Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre), author of The Last Days of Hitler (Macmillan, 1947).
2. Dirk had described himself in an earlier letter as Dreadfully Dull.
3. PM (and her dog Chloe) had heard on the car radio a track from Dirk’s regrettable LP, Lyrics for Lovers, released by Decca in 1960.
4. Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, eventually made by John Huston with Albert Finney.
1. Philip de László, the Hungarian-born portraitist.
2. PM’s latest novel, The Home (Hutchinson).
1. Tom Courtenay, who co-starred with Dirk in King and Country.
2. Dirk’s co-star in Point of Departure and two of his early films.
3. The novelist David Hughes.
1. Himself and Bette Davis respectively.
2. Bette Davis.
1. Irma Griese, infamous guard at Auschwitz.
1. Losey was still hoping to direct A la recherche du temps perdu.
1. A possible stage production of Brecht’s Galileo in Germany.
2. Giuseppe Rotunno, director of photography on Fellini’s Roma.
3. The silent classic, directed by Fred Niblo and shot partly in Italy, had its première in 1925.
4. David Garnett.
5. Anthony Asquith, who directed Dirk in
The Woman in Question, The Doctor’s Dilemma and Libel.
6. Carl Foreman, producer of The Guns of Navarone and indeed Born Free.
7. Losey had seen Accident on television and, although critical of his own work – mainly in pacing – had found it ‘more than good’.
1. Ulric was a Fellow of the RPS.
1. Gareth (1945–2007), whose mother was Glynis Johns.
2. Goodings, Elizabeth’s son.
3. The correspondence began in 1967.
4. Dopey, from Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
1. Rex Harrison had married Elizabeth Harris, his fifth wife, in August 1971.
2. Directed by Lindsay Anderson.
3. Losey’s A Doll’s House, with Jane Fonda as Nora, was sold to television and suffered from poor distribution; it was released three months after another version, by Patrick Garland, starring Claire Bloom.
4. Margot Bennett, formerly married to the actor Keir Dullea.
1. Richard Attenborough, as chairman of Capital Radio, had prompted Dirk to make a series of programmes playing his favourite music.
1. His mother and/or a character in one of PM’s novels.
2. The Yom Kippur War.
1. The Van den Bogaerdes were married in 1920.
2. Dirk’s penchant for exaggeration extends here even to the size of his own family: Ulric and Margaret had three children.
1. Sam Peckinpah – director of The Wild Bunch and, more recently, Straw Dogs which in its violence made DP for the first time in her life feel ‘concern for the future of the cinema’.
1. DP was married to the archaeologist Humfry Payne from 1926 until his death in 1936, and had a considerable knowledge of the Middle East.
2. Yes, the tramontane is notorious; the Föhn, a warm and dry wind from the northern Alps, less so.
1. Sequel to Percy, an alleged comedy from – alas – the Box/Thomas team, about a penis transplant.
1. Ian Holm had made Juggernaut, a thriller directed by Richard Lester.
2. An attempt at the Prime Minister (Harold) Wilson, who was presiding in inflationary times.
3. Mary Whitehouse, president of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association.
1. Dirk had been told that Losey now insisted on being addressed as ‘Joseph’.
2. Be dominant, rather than direct films.
1. Conversation Piece (Gruppo di famiglia in un interno), starring Burt Lancaster and Helmut Berger.
2. Dirk’s co-star in The Sleeping Tiger.
3. Lots Road, Chelsea, and Battersea power stations.
4. The Roux family, owners of La Colombe d’Or.
5. Dirk had starred in television productions of Little Moon of Alban and Blithe Spirit.
6. The Romantic Englishwoman, based by Thomas Wiseman on his own novel.
7. Pinter’s Old Times, as a film.
1. Cavani’s current project was a film about Friedrich Nietzsche, eventually released as Beyond Good and Evil (Al di là del bene e del male).
2. William Goetz, the independent Hollywood producer behind Song Without End, and his wife Edith; they were famed for the opulence of their lifestyle and lavish entertaining.
1. Michael Caine would play Lewis Fielding, opposite Glenda Jackson.
1. Pinter’s adaptation of A la recherche du temps perdu.
2. William Sansom’s pictorial biography, Proust and His World (Thames & Hudson, 1973).
1. See p. 107, note 3.
2. André Gide’s novel was first published in 1902 and in English in 1930.
3. PM was teaching and writing at Yaddo, New York State.
4. Richard Nixon had resigned as President of the United States.
1. Dorothy Gordon.
2. PM had sent Dirk a copy of her new, highly autobiographical, novel – Long Distance (Allen Lane).
1. J. R. Ackerley’s 1968 memoir, published by The Bodley Head.
2. The barrister and playwright John Mortimer, PM’s second husband.
3. Annie Girardot, Brigitte Bardot, Monica Vitti.
1. The residue of young visitors.
2. PM’s ‘A Love Story’ had been published by The New Yorker on 15 July.
3. Evel Knievel, the daredevil motorcyclist.
1. An earlier letter, not printed here, referred to Dirk’s departure from Britain in 1969 without mentioning Tony.
2. Candy was not a Great Dane, but a mastiff. She never left England.
1. Dirk had been to London to promote The Night Porter, which had finally secured a UK release.
2. It was, but not in the way he imagined. The interview with Russell Harty broadcast on 25 October opened the door to Dirk’s new life as an author.
3. The Investigation, which was to have been directed by Valerio Zurlini.
4. Permission to Kill (working title Kickback), to be directed by Cyril Frankel, with Ava Gardner.
5. Dirk’s high-camp character in Modesty Blaise.
6. The Yom Kippur War.
1. Losey would be on location in Villefranche for The Romantic Englishwoman.
2. Pamela Davies, responsible for continuity on many Losey films.
1. The Delhi Festival; Derek Prouse had reviewed the films for The Sunday Times in her absence.
2. In truth, four months.
3. Tony’s son, Gareth, with his wife Véronique and the infant Thomas Forwood.
1. In her review of The Serpent, DP had noted: ‘ … that fine actor Dirk Bogarde, given too little to do, is understandably inclined to do too much with it.’
2. Cuore di cane, directed by Alberto Lattuada.