by Unknown
2. Suspected cancer.
1. Dirk had put the third volume of non-fiction aside for the time being.
2. Simone Signoret’s memoirs, La nostalgie n’est plus ce qu’elle était (Editions du Seuil, 1976).
3. Ina ‘fan note’ to Dirk, Peter Hall, who had directed him in Summertime and was now running the National Theatre, wrote that Postillion and Snakes had ‘made Christmas for me. Beautifully written, extraordinarily observed. They are not only about being an actor: I’ll wager they will stand for ever as an important record of what has happened to this country in this sad century.’
1. By William Wharton (Random House NY).
2. Three of the characters from Dirk’s novel-in-progress.
3. Façades: Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell by John Pearson (Macmillan).
4. The French edition of Snakes and Ladders.
1. BF’s latest novel, Familiar Strangers (Hodder & Stoughton), based on the then rife speculation about the Philby, Burgess and Maclean affair and the identity of a ‘Fourth Man’, later revealed to be Anthony Blunt.
1. The Attenboroughs. BF and Richard Attenborough had founded the successful and provocative Beaver Films in 1959.
2. Nanette Newman had become a successful author.
1. The bulbs were supplied by Lanning Roper.
2. 28 March and 2 April respectively.
3. Bendo – after their first house in Buckinghamshire.
1. Another character from the novel.
2. In late 1961 Laurence Olivier had invited Dirk to join his company for the first season of the Chichester Festival Theatre the following summer. After much deliberation, Dirk finally declined.
3. The opening volume in a First World War trilogy by Phillip Rock, published in the UK by Hodder & Stoughton.
1. Of Sweden.
1. John Charlton’s suggestion for the novel.
1. Peter Cochrane, DSO, MC, was ‘vetting’ the typescript of A Gentle Occupation for military accuracy.
1. Eventually published as ‘The Bay of the Little Lost Sheep’ (The Guardian, 18 August 1979). Anthony Burgess and Paul Theroux were among the other writers commissioned for the series.
2. Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.
3. The brothers Lord (Lew) Grade and Lord (Bernard) Delfont.
4. A news story headlined ‘I’m quitting films because I’m fed up with acting’.
1. Richard Attenborough was about to realise his long-held ambition to film a life of Gandhi.
2. Jack Kroll in Newsweek (12 March) described Dirk as ‘one of the best movie actors ever, at the peak of his talent’.
3. A double-cassette of Dirk reading from Snakes and Ladders, adapted by Evangeline Banks and released by WEA. Many others would follow.
1. The designer; wife of Somerset Maugham for some ten tempestuous years.
1. ‘The Bay of the Little Lost Sheep’, op. cit.
1. An on–off enterprise, eventually abandoned – alas, for Tony was an engaging writer.
2. NS had sent a Graham Greene cutting, marked-up for Dirk’s attention.
1. The working title of Dirk’s new novel was ‘Thunder at a Picnic’.
2. The first half of the first book. The second half was headed ‘Winter’.
1. Jacques Henri Lartigue and his wife Florette lived in the next village.
2. In its conventional, un-hijacked meaning. Dirk never used the word otherwise.
3. Henri and Marie Danjoux.
1. Penguin had published a revised edition of Evelyn Waugh: Diaries 1911–1965, edited by Michael Davie.
2. Road to Resistance by George Millar (The Bodley Head).
3. Not For Reply; a variant of NTBRT (Not To Be Replied To).
1. Of A Gentle Occupation.
2. Of the new novel.
1. Blade on the Feather, eventually made by Richard Loncraine for London Weekend Television, with Donald Pleasence and Denholm Elliott. Losey was also in negotiation with Graham Greene over his new novel, Dr Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party.
2. Diana Cooper’s Autobiography, comprising reissues of The Rainbow Comes and Goes, The Light of Common Day and Trumpets from the Steep, was published by Michael Russell in 1978.
3. Jean Lion and her husband Jacques, the then owners of Nore, had sent photographs of the house which Dirk loved best of all his homes in England and which he and Tony had left in 1966 for Adam’s Farm. A brief account of its previous occupants, including Brian Howard and Robert Godwin-Austen, is given – with references – in Dirk Bogarde: The Authorised Biography.
1. One of Dirk’s and Tony’s corgis; companion to Bogie.
2. In Sussex.
1. JL had heard his first, abridged, recording on cassette (WEA).
1. Lewis’s novel, published first in The Egoist in 1918, then by Chatto & Windus in 1928.
2. Terre de bruyère (peat).
1. Three of the characters from Dirk’s novel-in-progress.
1. John le Carré’s Smiley’s People (Hodder & Stoughton) and Graham Greene’s Dr Fischer of Geneva.
1. On 4 May 1945 Dirk’s unit was some miles away, at Reinsehlen, near Soltau.
2. Alice Lee Boatwright, agent and friend of long standing.
1. Mon Oncle d’Amérique.
2. Fosse and Akira Kurosawa shared the Palme d’Or for All That Jazz and Kagemusha respectively.
3. Mart Crowley; Richard Polo, manager of Joe Allen in Covent Garden.
1. Daheny Drive, Hollywood.
2. Dirk had been invited to go on a promotional tour to Australia.
1. A suggestion that Dirk write about Provence, in the vein of Lawrence Durrell.
1. Joan Plowright, Lady Olivier.
1. Southern Italy had been devastated by an earthquake; Florence, by flooding.
2. This correspondent, one of a few fans who carried their worship to the point of direct action, had been labelled ‘Barmy Bromley’ and seemed undeterred even by the rigour of Dirk’s lawyer, Laurence Harbottle, who diagnosed her as suffering from ‘Moon Troubles’.
1. Undoubtedly ‘Barmy Bromley’.
2. Dirk’s interview with Elaine Grand on After Noon Plus (Thames Television, 4 December).
1. Probably Self Portrait with Friends, a composite edition of Cecil Beaton’s diaries edited by Richard Buckle (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979).
1. A CBS production of The Patricia Neal Story, to be directed by Anthony Harvey. Dirk was being enticed to play Roald Dahl. In their Buckinghamshire days, Dirk and Tony lived not far from the Dahls’ home, Gipsy House, and knew them socially.
2. In March, for A Gentle Occupation.
1. A new work-in-progress, which would be published twelve years later as Great Meadow.
2. The Patricia Neal Story told of RD’s battle to keep his wife alive and motivated after her devastating stroke.
1. A climbing white rose famed for its vigour, stamina and fragrance. Dirk and RD shared a passion for gardening.
2. DF had a part in Wrong Is Right, starring Sean Connery and directed by Richard Brooks, who was married to Jean Simmons from 1960 to 1977.
3. Peter Yates’s Bullitt (yes, two ‘t’s), starring Steve McQueen and Jacqueline Bissett, was released in 1968.
4. Work in Hollywood on The Patricia Neal Story had been completed amid no little turmoil. The remainder of the film was to be shot elsewhere.
1. Lawrence (Larry) Schiller. Dirk would in due course revise his opinion.
2. Reynaldo Villalobos.
1. No Reply Needed.
1. The stroke.
1. Andrew Davies’s Rose at the Cort Theatre in New York.
1. The BAFTA Awards, at which Dirk presented the prize for Best Film.
2. Kenneth Tynan wrote a now-famous profile, ‘The Girl in the Black Helmet’, for The New Yorker in 1979.
1. Screenwriter, brother of Jane Birkin; by then involved with Bee Gilbert.
2. Rosalind Bell, of Chatto & Windus, who handled the publicity for Dirk’s books.
1. Of what woul
d be An Orderly Man.
2. Harold Nicolson: A Biography by James Lees-Milne, published by Chatto & Windus in two volumes (1980 and 1981).
3. Isabel Colegate’s novel, published by Hamish Hamilton (1980).
4. NS’s cat, not her colleagues.
5. Tina Tollitt, who was now eighteen.
1. In which Eric Hiscock previewed Voices in the Garden, describing the novel as ‘lovely’.
1. RD had sent a copy of Danny the Champion of the World. After what he called the ‘cock-up’ with the screen version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, he had turned down many requests from potential producers of Danny, but thought that Dirk might consider it if he ever wanted to make a ‘little’ film. RD predicted they would have fun – and money.
1. The marriage of Charles, Prince of Wales, to Lady Diana Spencer.
1. And is, even today, although no longer independent.
2. Tony (Anthony Wedgwood) Benn, formerly Viscount Stansgate.
1. Michael, by now leader of the Labour Party in opposition.
2. The 1931 musical comedy which ran at the London Coliseum for 651 performances.
3. Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers (Hutchinson).
4. Muriel Spark’s Loitering with Intent (The Bodley Head).
5. As industrial relations worsened after Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition earlier in the year of The Times and the Sunday Times, both newspapers had failed to appear in the previous two days.
1. François Mitterrand had been elected President of France in May.
2. RD had reported a suggestion from Procter & Gamble, who were backing the film, that Dirk would combine an appearance at the proposed Kennedy Center screening with promotion for Voices in the Garden.
3. John Higgins, Arts Editor.
1. RD had encouraged Dirk by saying that the more one writes the more self-critical one becomes. It is, he added, a fearsomely difficult occupation for a good writer and ‘a piece of cake’ for a bad one.
2. Seemingly prompted by the submission of Voices in the Garden for the 1981 Booker Prize, Private Eye carried a story in its issue of 20 November about the wind of change blowing through Chatto & Windus. Carmen Callil, founder of Virago, was, the magazine alleged, waiting in the wings to replace NS whom it described as ‘an aggressive old battleaxe, more noted for reducing her secretaries and staff to tears than caring for her authors’. Ironically, Dirk had been a shareholder in the satirical organ since the 1960s.
1. The renovated Théâtre des Beaux-Arts, reopened on 17 December at a gala ‘starring’ Edwige Feuillère, Valentina Cortese and Dirk.
2. Natalie Wood had drowned in suspicious circumstances while on a yacht off the coast of California.
1. Tom Courtenay, a good friend of MD and Dirk’s co-star in King and Country, was appearing to acclaim in Ronald Harwood’s The Dresser.
1. Marie-Christine, daughter of Marc Isoardi, the stonemason, and his wife Bruna, who grappled weekly with the Clermont washing. She (M-C) had dog-and-house-sat while Dirk and Tony were away.
2. NS had been ‘sidelined’.
1. Clinging to the Wreckage (Weidenfeld & Nicolson).
2. The IRA had murdered four members of the Household Cavalry, and seven of their horses, in Hyde Park.
3. Lord Glenavy, the Irish peer and humorist.
1. Dorothy Gordon, whom Dirk was acknowledging fully in An Orderly Man as an ‘incredible influence’ on his writing, while keeping her identity secret.
2. A photograph by Sheila Attenborough of Dirk’s retreating form was used on the jacket of An Orderly Man.
3. The Attenboroughs had been burgled.
4. Spot on.
1. John Charlton had suggested something of the sort when Dirk was seeking a title for the new book.
2. A new novel-in-progress.
1. Charlotte Rampling and her husband Jean-Michel Jarre.
2. Tony had undergone more tests.
3. On 17 September Dirk had received by post from Jack Lang, the French Minister of Culture, the document confirming his appointment as Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He had been asked two years earlier whether he would be ‘minded’ to accept such an honour, had replied in the affirmative, but heard no more until now.
1. A reminiscence of Dirk’s time with the Newick Amateur Dramatic Society, which NS duly read from the stage at the fiftieth anniversary of its headquarters, the Derek Hall – built by her father Lionel Cox and named not after Dirk but after her brother. Humphrey Jenkins, a pillar of the NADS as both director and actor, had invited Dirk to be its president. He accepted diffidently, feeling that, although when he lived in Britain he had ‘been President of a hundred things, from the Essex University Film Club to a Charity for ageing ponies!’, the thousand-mile distance meant he could nowadays be no more than ‘just a name on the letter-paper’. He did better than that.
1. Finding Voices in the Garden while replacing a book on her shelves, BG had written nostalgically about the early days of her friendship with Dirk and Tony, formed when she and Ian Holm (I.) joined them on location for The Fixer in Budapest.
2. Dirk and Glenda Jackson had agreed to appear in a Granada Television adaptation of Arnold Bennett’s Buried Alive, to be directed by Mike Hodges.
1. Andrew Birkin wrote and directed an adaptation of Ian McEwan’s 1978 novel, The Cement Garden (Jonathan Cape).
2. Another Andrew Birkin project – this time unrealised.
3. BG was trying to set up a Sylvia Plath play in Paris, with Delphine Seyrig.
1. PM had kept Dirk’s letters in a box from the sporting-goods store.
2. Dorothy Gordon.
3. John Bennett and PM’s daughter Caroline.
1. PM’s present address was The Old Post Office in a Gloucestershire village.
1. In the event it was a no-week shoot; Buried Alive was cancelled at a late stage.
1. Dirk and Tony had spent February and March in London while the latter underwent an operation for bowel cancer.
2. Ian Holm’s new London ‘pad’.
1. Andrew Birkin had written, produced and directed the live-action short film, Sredni Vashtar.
2. Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi had won eight Academy Awards.
3. Directed by Steven Spielberg and (Heat and Dust) by James Ivory respectively.
4. More precisely: Sophia Loren, Liza Minnelli, Michèle Morgan, Vittorio Gassman.
