by Unknown
3. L’histoire d’O, directed by Just Jaeckin and now regarded as an erotic classic.
4. Not bad: Max von Sydow.
1. Freddie Young, multiple-Oscar-winning cinematographer.
1. A compilation of scenes from MGM musicals, including Singing in the Rain.
2. Peter Bogdanovich’s At Long Last Love.
3. Galileo and The Romantic Englishwoman.
4. In DP’s Sunday Times review it was printed as Galielo.
5. Leonard Russell, DP’s second husband, had asked her to give some of his pictures to friends.
1. The Day of the Locust – like the two Loseys, shown ‘out of competition’.
2. Galileo.
3. From a script by David Mercer.
4. Ellen Burstyn, who was starring in the Broadway hit Same Time, Next Year.
1. KT’s novel, The Summer Aeroplane, was published in April. She sought Dirk’s advice on casting the character of Marina for a projected film adaptation. Dirk’s previous letter has not survived.
2. Evidently a confusion with the Long Man of Wilmington, the Downland figure in chalk near the Van den Bogaerdes’ holiday cottage at Lullington.
3. A reference to KT’s Vogue article on Death in Venice and Visconti’s reaction.
4. Jean Anouilh’s Point of Departure. The Swedish actress was involved in an unrealised project with Kenneth Tynan.
5. Vincent the Dutchman (Omnibus, BBC, 1972).
6. Visions of Eight – The Strongest.
1. In the event Steve McQueen and Paul Newman said no; Sean Connery and Robert Redford, yes.
2. Donald Sutherland starred in The Day of the Locust.
1. An inquest was determining how the nanny to the family of the 7th Earl and the Countess of Lucan had died. Portugal was in political turmoil.
2. PM had sustained a back injury from a motoring accident in April.
1. Resnais’ wife, Florence Malraux.
2. David Mercer, writer of Morgan – A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966), had created the original screenplay for Providence.
1. An odd conflation of the Prime Minister’s wife, Mary Wilson, with his Private and Political Secretary, Marcia Falkender.
1. Ellen Searle (later, Holt), the redoubtable ‘Lally’, who would be the star of the first half of Dirk’s book, to be titled A Postillion Struck by Lightning.
1. Evidently a reference to JJ’s increasingly poor health – the legacy of serious war wounds.
2. JJ’s former home in Suffolk.
3. JJ was popular with the Van den Bogaerde family during his brief but intense relationship with Dirk.
4. A non-historian’s reference to the Six-Day War (1967).
1. Permission to Kill was made under the auspices of Austria’s Wien Film.
1. ‘Trick or Treat’ – a project duly abandoned after shooting had started.
1. Frances Donaldson’s Edward VIII (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974).
2. Sally Betts, who would (re)type all but the last of Dirk’s fifteen books.
1. On location for Providence. New Hampshire had been abandoned.
1. Their mother.
2. Not quite: Ellen Burstyn’s companion was Blossom Plumb.
3. Oradour-sur-Glane, the village preserved as the Nazis left it following their massacre of the inhabitants on 10 June 1944.
1. One of the cars Ulric owned during Dirk’s childhood.
2. The domestic help at Clermont.
1. Le Château de Mont-Méry at Ambazac.
2. For the filming of Richard Attenborough’s A Bridge Too Far.
3. Léon Loschetter.
1. John Mills and Stanley Baker were among those knighted in the controversial Resignation Honours dispensed by the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, the names for which were drawn up on the erroneously nicknamed ‘Lavender List’.
2. Mark Goodings, at twenty-three, sported a coiffure redolent of the mid-1970s-aspirant-rock-star.
1. PM had been commissioned to write the screenplay for a remake of Rebecca. Dirk had been considered in the past for the role of Max de Winter; most recently, with the action transferred from the West Country of Daphne du Maurier’s novel to Venice.
2. Nicolas Roeg’s acclaimed version of du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now, starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie.
3. Rebecca’s producer had told PM that Jack Clayton, director of Our Mother’s House and The Innocents, was ‘unbankable’ following the failure of The Great Gatsby, starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow.
1. Lt-Gen. Sir Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning was Daphne du Maurier’s late, not ex-, husband.
2. Silvana Mangano, Dirk’s beautiful co-star from Death in Venice, who was married to Dino De Laurentiis.
1. Providence, post-production on which was done at the Studios de Billancourt.
2. Schulkes, who was first assistant director.
3. William – Oscar-winning screenwriter of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President’s Men.
4. Connery, who was playing Major-General Robert Urquhart, commander of 1st (British) Airborne Division at Arnhem.
5. Ryan O’Neal played Brigadier-General James Gavin.
1. Robert Stephens, who had been cast opposite Elizabeth Taylor in the screen adaptation of Sondheim’s musical, directed by Hal Prince. Fired shortly after filming began because he and his co-star did not have ‘the right chemistry’, Stephens said: ‘We’re actors, not pharmacists.’ Len Cariou stepped in.
2. A working title for Snakes and Ladders.
1. DP was succeeded by Alan Brien.
2. Harold Hobson, theatre critic of The Sunday Times from 1947 to 1976.
1. He means ‘and all’, of course.
2. Work opportunities had taken Dirk’s brother and his family to Illinois for an indefinite period.
1. A prophecy robustly unfulfilled.
2. Lucilla Van den Bogaerde was, and is, a gilder and restorer.
1. Dirk’s interest in a film of the Malcolm Lowry novel had been revived.
2. Denis Healey, Chancellor of the Exchequer.
1. The family took holidays at Wimereux in the early 1920s.
1. Friends and colleagues of Ulric and Margaret.
2. Margaret’s family.
3. Sarah Niven, second of Margaret’s three elder sisters, who with her husband William Murray gave lodgings to Derek for the first two of his ‘Anthracite Years’ in Glasgow (1934–7).
4. Neil Munro Niven, third eldest of Margaret’s four brothers.
1. A friend from Dirk’s early Army days, now teaching at Woodcote House.
1. Vincent Canby (The New York Times), Pauline Kael (The New Yorker), John Simon (The New Leader).
2. Lord (Bernard) Delfont and Nat Cohen, who ran the film division of EMI.
1. Not that it would have been much of a model. Dirk owned a Schiele drawing in pencil and watercolour: ‘Mann am Bauch liegend, bekleidet’ (‘Man lying face down’).
2. The Archbishop’s Ceiling. A more or less unholy disaster.
1. Gareth and Lucilla’s six-year-old son.
2. Notepaper from Résidence Roosendael, Arnhem – a souvenir of A Bridge Too Far.
3. TS had given Dirk a copy of his play Travesties.
1. ‘Starting with Exits’ was the latest working title for Snakes and Ladders.
1. With Dirk’s encouragement, Brock had enrolled at the Dance Centre in London, where he worked with the choreographer Arlene Phillips.
1. Roy Dotrice is, and Emlyn Williams and Max Wall were, famed for their solo performances.
2. Two important sequences in Despair. Nabokov’s protagonist, Hermann Hermann, owned a chocolate factory.
1. Dieter Minx, production supervisor.
1. DP had asked Dirk to tell her about his typewriter – ‘if it is a typewriter and not a form of magic’.
2. A received terror, of course; Dirk never fought in the jungles of Japanese-occupied territory. He consistently romanticised his military career and used others’ e
xperiences as his own.
1. Dirk had sent a sheaf of flowers; DP had bought a cat.
1. TS’s new play, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, performed, with full orchestra, at the Royal Festival Hall.
1. TS’s wife, Miriam.
2. Jeremy (later Lord) Hutchinson QC, had read Postillion and written – with considerable local knowledge – to congratulate Dirk, who replied briefly from Munich. This more detailed letter is enjoyed to the fullest if copies of both Postillion and Great Meadow are to hand.
1. AS had been unable to find a suitable postcard of the Heir to the Throne.
2. In charge of continuity on A Bridge Too Far.
1. A full account of this painful episode, which involved hostile letters in The Times, and of its repercussions – not least on the long friendship with Richard Attenborough – is given in Chapter 19 of Dirk Bogarde: The Authorised Biography.
2. Richard Attenborough’s current project, starring Anthony Hopkins, on which AS was to be script consultant.
1. On Esther Waters.
2. JC confessed ‘it is, alas! the kind of thing I might well have said in the old days’; however, the utterance is attributed firmly to another actor, Alfred Burke.
3. JC had referred to ‘the deep hurts to the mind and spirit, which seem to have to go towards the making of an actor’.
1. The Guinnesses’ son.
2. The actor John Standing, otherwise Sir John Leon.
3. JC had sent Dirk a Guardian article by Hugh Lavery which prompted (in JC) the thought that ‘we natural solitaries should get together from time to time’.
4. Most probably Mary Curzon by Nigel Nicolson (Weidenfeld & Nicolson).
5. Dirk had seen Despair at a dubbing theatre in Paris.
1. Reginald Beck, veteran film editor, noted for his long collaboration with Joseph Losey.
2. Dirk had enrolled Brock at the Berlitz language school in Cannes.
1. I Was a Stranger, by Gen. Sir John Hackett (Chatto & Windus), who in The Times had condemned Dirk’s portrayal of Browning in A Bridge Too Far.
2. Postillion.
1. Kamala Markandaya’s The Golden Honeycomb, published by Chatto earlier in the year.
2. From October to Christmas Dirk sent bulletins to his brother and sister-in-law, monitoring Brock’s progress at the Berlitz School.
1. William and Sarah Murray (‘Uncle Murray’ and ‘Aunt Sadie’).
1. Dirk had requested an image for inclusion in Snakes and Ladders. GC obliged, explaining that in the photograph he was doing his controlled best to teach the very rudiments of acting to a sulky and resisting Dirk. He added that Dirk had written ‘a beautiful book’.
2. On Cukor by Gavin Lambert (W. H. Allen, 1972).
3. Cathleen Nesbitt had been made CBE.
1. The soprano was made a Dame in the New Year Honours.
2. On their two collaborations, Song Without End and Justine, GC had been brought in to replace Charles Vidor (died) and Joseph Strick (fired).
3. TS had relayed to Dirk the then current story of an encounter between Miss Ekberg and a dwarf, who said: ‘I really would love to fuck you.’ To which the statuesque actress replied: ‘All right. But if I ever get to hear about it …’.
1. TS had written in December to say that he had seen the finished film of Despair and that they had a ‘turkey’ or ‘lemon’ on their hands.
1. DP had written to say Providence was to play at the Academy Cinema in London.
1. Or rather, the French equivalent, Césars, including those for best film and best director.
2. KT’s Agatha, based on her screenplay, would be published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 1979.
3. Edith Holden’s ‘Nature Notes’ for 1906 were published in 1977 by Michael Joseph as The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady.
1. KT was renowned for her luxuriant and entirely natural head of hair.
2. Farrah Fawcett-Majors (later, following divorce from the actor Lee Majors, trimmed to Farah Fawcett) – star of Charlie’s Angels and, with Michael York, of Logan’s Run.
1. Legislative elections, in which the Right would be returned with a much reduced majority.
2. See above, to Dilys Powell.
1. James Lees-Milne, a fellow Chatto author, had recently published two volumes of wartime diaries, Ancestral Voices (1975) and Prophesying Peace (1977), and the previous month a novel, Round the Clock. He was now engaged on a two-volume biography of Harold Nicolson.
2. Victims of Yalta by Nikolai Tolstoy (Hodder & Stoughton).
1. It would eventually be A Particular Friendship.
2. This letter has, alas, not survived.
3. Dorothy Gordon.
1. Of Agatha.
2. Starring Oliver Tobias and Joan Collins.
3. Edy Williams, formerly married to Russ Meyer and star of his Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, was renowned for her exploits at successive Cannes Festivals. The reference to an assault by axe is evidently an instance of Dirk confusing art with life.
4. Not exactly, unless Dirk was moonlighting as a sub-editor; but we follow his drift.
1. A Private Battle was published by Simon & Schuster under the joint authorship of Cornelius Ryan (who wrote A Bridge Too Far) and Kathryn Morgan Ryan.
2. Jerzy Skolimowski, director of The Shout, starring Alan Bates.
3. Andrei Mikhalkov-Kontchalovski, a member of the 1978 Festival jury.
1. Jean-Pierre Aubert, who with Anton Troxler advised Dirk and Tony on their financial affairs.
2. Dirk bought Leonard Rosoman’s ‘The Wave, Amagansett’ at the Fine Art Society for £1,400.
3. Zelda Barron, in charge of continuity on Our Mother’s House.
1. Publication of More or Less (Hodder & Stoughton) coincided with that of Snakes and Ladders.
2. One of the questions asked by Dirk’s character, the television presenter Robert Gold, on a real-life ‘vox pop’ in Bristol for Darling.
1. Simon MacCorkindale.
1. The composer J-MJ, then married to Charlotte Rampling, had given Dirk a copy of his new LP, Equinoxe.
1. If Dirk and PM had corresponded since December 1976, none of his letters from that period survives.
