Ever, Dirk: The Bogarde Letters

by Unknown

  1. Ian Todd, the surgeon who had operated on Tony in March.

  2. Le Palais des Festivals et des Congrès was designed by Bennett & Druet; the Barbican Centre for the Arts, by Chamberlin, Powell & Bon.

  3. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (Jonathan Cape) won the Booker Prize in 1981. The author had criticised Richard Attenborough’s film, Gandhi.

  1. Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, starring David Bowie; directed by Nagisa Oshima and based on Laurens van der Post’s The Seed and the Sower (Hogarth Press, 1963).

  2. Doubtless Dirk meant androgynous.

  1. Which would evolve into Backcloth.

  2. SO’s husband had had a stroke.

  1. The televised recording of a Guardian Lecture – more accurately, an interview with Tony Bilbow, followed by audience questions – which Dirk had given at the National Film Theatre during the visit to London in February.

  1. JL had taken part in a BBC2 programme hosted by Maria Aitken called Private Lives. In her memoirs, No Room for Secrets (Michael Joseph, 2004), JL describes Dirk as ‘my hero’, adding: ‘I’d only become an actor because I admired Dirk Bogarde so and felt I looked like him. In interviews I always said I thought he was the bee’s knees.’

  2. NS had been to the United States.

  1. In 1972.

  1. Not for themselves alone: Dirk and Tony had guests.

  1. Thomas Keneally’s novel, published by Hodder & Stoughton, won the 1982 Booker Prize.

  2. Shirley Conran’s novel, published by Sidgwick & Jackson in 1982, was not a contender for the Booker Prize.

  1. Luchino Visconti: A Biography (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981). Evidently Dirk assumed that because Visconti had died in 1976 the author and her subject could not have met.

  2. The book did not materialise.

  1. Where Dirk, Charlotte Rampling and others contributed to the Franco-Japanese documentary, Le plus grand musée du monde.

  2. Fouquet’s, on the Champs-Elysées.

  1. John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield.

  2. Since her retirement as film critic, DP had continued to work for The Sunday Times, previewing movies to be shown on television.

  1. PK and her husband Julian Barnes, then television critic of The Observer, had watched So Long at the Fair.

  2. Anthony Thorne adapted his own novel, published by Heinemann in 1947.

  3. Joseph Breen, who as administrator of the Production Code in the USA was chief censor from 1934 to 1954.

  1. PK was brought up in South Africa.

  2. An allusion to Julian Barnes’s first novel, Metroland (Jonathan Cape, 1980).

  3. A reference to Public Lending Right.

  4. A new novel which would eventually see the light of day in 1997.

  5. Fanny Blake, Dirk’s editor at Penguin.

  1. Having an operation on her knee.

  2. And the promotion of West of Sunset.

  1. James Lees-Milne’s Harold Nicolson, op. cit.

  2. The Rules of the Game: Sir Oswald and Lady Cynthia Mosley 1896–1933 and Beyond the Pale: Sir Oswald Mosley and Family 1933–1980 (Secker & Warburg, 1982, 1983).

  1. Edwina by Richard Hough (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1983).

  2. The Granada Television adaptation of Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet. Directed by Christopher Morahan, it starred Art Malik, Tim Pigott-Smith, Susan Wooldridge, Charles Dance and Peggy Ashcroft.

  3. A Foyles Luncheon, his second, was to be held in Dirk’s honour under the chairmanship of Peter Hall.

  1. In a note to Joanna Lumley, Dirk described the Foyles Luncheon as ‘Perhaps the most important, & certainly the most moving, 3 hours in my entire career.’

  2. More hyperbole from Dirk. Of Edward Fox’s two brothers only James was an actor. Robert was already a successful producer. The previous year James Fox had published his autobiography, Comeback (Hodder & Stoughton), recording his return to the screen after ten years’ work with a Christian organisation, the Navigators. Of his brother Edward he wrote: ‘Whenever we are together we have a huge laugh, although people like to make something of our rivalry. There isn’t much to it. I rather envy his range, and he may have been jealous of my success, but we get on rather well.’

  1. A portrait of Greece by DP, originally published in 1958 by Hodder & Stoughton.

  2. Autobiography (Heinemann, 1969).

  1. Sir Compton Mackenzie, whose My Life and Times, published by Chatto & Windus between 1963 and 1971, ran to ten volumes, or ‘Octaves’.

  2. Laurens van der Post.

  3. The D-Day anniversary.

  4. The then leader of the National Union of Mineworkers and implacable foe of Margaret Thatcher.

  5. Coverage of the Cannes Film Festival.

  1. To which Dirk’s jury gave the Palme d’Or.

  2. Directed by Marek Kanievska, and adapted by Julian Mitchell from his own stage play; with Rupert Everett and Colin Firth.

  1. Directed by Pat O’Connor, co-starring John Lynch.

  2. The cinematographer Istvan Dosai and his interpreter.

  3. The protagonist, Geoffrey Firmin, was played by Albert Finney.

  4. Alfredo Landa and Francisco Rabal, who shared the award as Best Actor for Los Santos Inocentes (The Holy Innocents).

  5. Directed by Roger Donaldson from a script by Robert Bolt; with Anthony Hopkins.

  1. The gardeners were comparing notes; JB had sent a fastidiously annotated photograph of his potager in north London.

  1. Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude at the Duke of York’s Theatre.

  2. Secrets of a Woman’s Heart: The Later Life of I. Compton-Burnett 1920–1969 by Hilary Spurling (Hodder & Stoughton).

  3. Dirk had been commissioned by The Times to write an article about Ulric for its Bicentennial in 1985.

  1. Losey did not write his memoirs, so Dirk probably refers here to Le Livre de Losey by Michel Ciment, originally published in Paris in 1979 then revised as Conversations with Losey for publication by Methuen – but in 1985.

  1. The cat.

  1. Hughes’s novel, published by Constable, was based on the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane.

  2. Published the following January as ‘The Picture Man’ in The Times: Past Present Future.

  1. Esmond Knight was indeed seventy-eight when he played in John Whiting’s The Devils, directed by Matthew Warchus, at the Barbican Pit.

  1. The paperback edition.

  1. Ghigo Tolusso, PL’s son by her previous husband.

  2. Victoria Bacon, Losey’s last secretary.

  3. Theo Cowan, for many years the trusted press agent to both Dirk and Losey.

  1. The lack of clarity in Dirk’s handwritten address to HB indicated that he was unsure whether she should be ‘Cher’ or ‘Chere’; it is standardised here as the latter. The accent on the correct form, Chère, would always be a mystery to him.

  1. Une Enfance rêvée.

  1. Diana Hammond and companion.

  2. Anton Troxler, also known for fiscal reasons – and with affection – as ‘Elsewhere’.

  3. David Puttnam and Sandy Lieberson had asked Dirk if he would co-star with de Niro in Roland Joffé’s The Mission, with a script by Robert Bolt, to be shot on location in South America. The part, rewritten for a younger actor, was eventually played by Jeremy Irons.

  1. A reference to Visconti’s The Leopard.

  1. Apostrophes, the hugely influential books programme presented on Antenne 2 by Bernard Pivot.

  1. Dirk had told HB only that he was to be honoured by ‘the third oldest university in G.B.’.

  2. In the UK, of course.

  1. In recent storms.

  2. Tony Richardson, director and former husband of Vanessa Redgrave; he had a house in the hills behind St Tropez.

  3. Lady Antonia Fraser.

  1. Lord (Emanuel) Shinwell, pugnacious Labour politician.

  2. Colette was elected to Belgium’s Académie Royale de Langue et de Littérature Française, as its ‘foreign literary member’, on 9 Mar
ch 1935.

  3. Anita Brookner and Umberto (The Name of the Rose) Eco.

  1. During the filming of Providence.

  1. PC was working on an MA thesis, and sought Dirk’s help for information about Allied Film Makers, producers of Victim. He had replied, telling her as much he could remember and accepting that the film had been a turning point in his career insofar as ‘after it I was able to get away from the jolly Doctors and Brave Soldiers … but not for a long time after’. The Servant was a mere two years away.

  2. Michael Relph, producer of Victim, which was directed by Basil Dearden.

  3. Not only by an ‘X’ Certificate from the British Board of Film Censors.

  1. In fact Lord Arran saw the film many years after Lord Wolfenden’s Committee had reported, and only after the Sexual Offences Bill became law in 1967; but he knew of its impact and, to a lesser extent, that of The Servant.

  2. Reproduced on the following page.

  1. Rupert Van den Bogaerde’s first wife.

  2. The art historian Dr Holt was also awarded an Hon. D.Litt.; the pharmacologist Sir James Black, an Hon. D.Sc.

  1. Formerly of Chatto & Windus.

  1. Audrey Carr wrote to Dirk about a pencil portrait which had hung in the hall of her mother-in-law Christine Carr’s house at Lewes. Confusion attaches to this picture. The study shown at the Academy in May 1958 was bought for 10s 6d and only resurfaced in 2005 when it was sold at auction for £165. The portrait acquired by Christine Carr was almost certainly drawn to improve the likeness, and exhibited by Ulric in August that year at the show he held jointly with Dirk at the Rose and Crown, Fletching.

  1. Brock was involved, as associate producer, on a dramatisation for Yorkshire Television of Graham Greene’s May We Borrow Your Husband?. Dirk was to write the screenplay and play the lead.

  2. Presumably a make of suppositoire.

  3. Brock’s wife, Kim.

  4. George Goodings had recently been diagnosed with cancer.

  5. Dirk claimed that he did not drive because of his involvement in a fatal accident in India during the war; however this has never been corroborated. It is thought more likely that he (a) was, when young, incompetent at the wheel; and (b) enjoyed being chauffeured. Tony, on the other hand, was an accomplished and enthusiastic motorist.

  6. Their doctor, Gilles Cabrol.

  1. His fourth volume of autobiography, Backcloth.

  1. Closing Ranks.

  2. Gareth’s third son.

  3. Elizabeth’s son and daughter.

  1. From Army service.

  1. Subtitled Autobiographies, by Dan Jacobson (André Deutsch).

  2. They did. The jacket was emblazoned with Tony’s snapshot of Dirk at work inside le bassin.

  3. A Chorus Line.

  1. Another of Dirk’s exaggerations: Cukor’s 1954 musical, starring Judy Garland and James Mason, runs for three hours.

  1. David Gladstone.

  2. He was soon to be appointed chairman of Columbia Pictures.

  3. The Royal Academician David Tindle.

  1. Jean-Pierre Aubert and his wife Brigitte.

  2. Tony Richardson’s house was in a hamlet called Le Nid du Duc. In her unsparing memoir, Slightly Foxed (Collins), Angela Fox spelled it correctly the first time, and on the next page Ni le Duc.

  1. On his prostate.

  2. Le plus grand musée du monde.

  3. In documentary work.

  4. At least, since 1947.

  1. They met at Amersham in 1939.

  2. To Glynis Johns.

  3. MD’s husband, James Dodd, had been appointed a non-stipendiary minister.

  1. Dirk had sent HB Patrick Leigh Fermor’s The Violins of Saint-Jacques, originally published in 1953 by John Murray and lately reissued as a Penguin Classic.

  1. Director and producer respectively at Yorkshire Television for May We Borrow Your Husband?.

  1. Attenborough, who co-starred.

  2. Dirk’s role.

  3. A ‘colourful’ scene in the film.

  4. The hapless bridegroom, played by Simon Shepherd.

  5. The character played by David Yelland.

  1. His sixty-fifth.

  1. The sorting office.

  2. Roland Joffé’s film took the Palme d’ Or.

  3. Ill Met by Moonlight was made in 1956 and released the next year.

  1. Dirk had been invited by David Puttnam to write a script based on Covenant with Death, a novel by John Harris about the First World War. When it was first published in 1961 by Hutchinson, Dirk, wearing his producer’s hat, had commissioned an adaptation from Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, but the project was abandoned.

  2. About fifteen miles north-east of Amiens.

  1. Tony would be seventy-one on 3 October.

  1. Two recent, low-budget British successes: My Beautiful Laundrette, directed by Stephen Frears, and Chris Bernard’s A Letter to Brezhnev.

  1. Nanny.

  2. A Fellowship. He would accept one in 1987.

  3. La Cinémathèque française.

  1. Another obsessive, this one French.

  2. After nine years of correspondence SO and Dirk had finally met, at a signing for Backcloth in Hatchards.

  1. He did, on an earlier card, in which he described HB as the book’s ‘“fairy” Godmother’.

  1. May We Borrow Your Husband?.

  1. PM’s Queen Elizabeth: A Life of the Queen Mother (Viking, 1986) had proved controversial.

  1. The Vision (see below, 21 March 1987).

  1. The funeral of the Duke of Windsor on 5 June 1972.

  1. In April Dirk went on location to Cardiff with Lee Remick, Eileen Atkins and Helena Bonham Carter for the BBC Television production of William Nicholson’s The Vision. Eileen Atkins played the wife; Helena Bonham Carter, their daughter. The story was so downbeat that they called themselves ‘The Glums’.

  1. Tony’s cancer had returned.

  1. OH-P, Dirk’s agent in Paris, had retired. While Dirk lived in France, they would speak by telephone on Sunday mornings. Only now did a correspondence develop.

  1. Bardot – Dirk’s co-star in Doctor at Sea – and her dog.