Ever, Dirk: The Bogarde Letters

by Unknown

  2. OH-P’s daughter.

  3. Gareth and Lucilla’s son was seventeen and at school.

  1. For a friend of UVdB.

  1. He means mieux, of course.

  2. ‘Impressions in the Sand’ (14 February).

  3. Dirk laboured under the impression that they shared a birthday. NS was born four days before Dirk.

  1. SO’s husband had had a series of strokes and she was told he did not have long to live. He died in August 1989.

  1. Emphatically in that order.

  2. Elizabeth’s son and his fiancée had asked Dirk to their wedding.

  1. Elizabeth’s husband, George, had died on 15 February.

  1. The Princess Royal, as President of BAFTA, was to present Dirk with its inaugural Tribute Award for his outstanding contribution to the Cinema.

  1. A novel by the director Michael Blakemore, first published in the UK in 1969 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

  2. Darling Ma: Letters to Her Mother, 1932–1944, edited by James Roose-Evans (Hodder & Stoughton).

  3. ‘A half-life in World’s End’ (The Independent, 19 September 1988).

  4. The BAFTA award ceremony was considered by most of those present to have been a disaster, with Dirk at his least gracious. Lord Attenborough – at the time Sir Richard and the Academy’s vice-president – would later remember the evening as ‘a nightmare’.

  1. Dirk had been on an extremely rare visit to the cinema, taken by PM to see her adaptation of Galsworthy’s A Summer Story, directed by Piers Haggard.

  1. Shakespeare – Literary Editor of the Daily Telegraph, who earlier in the year had ‘recruited’ Dirk as one of its book reviewers. The timing was impeccable, and Shakespeare was swiftly promoted from a mere branch-offerer to ‘Plank’, the second in Dirk’s life. The present assignment was a trio of books about the persecution by the Nazis of the Jews.

  2. Dirk had reviewed Edna O’Brien’s The High Road (Weidenfeld & Nicolson).

  3. PM had been asked to adapt Portrait of a Marriage (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973), Nigel Nicolson’s study of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West.

  1. Vita Sackville-West’s 1961 novel, published by Michael Joseph.

  2. On 3 July 1996 Viking Penguin would present Dirk with an inscribed pill-box to mark one million sales of his books under their imprints. He said: ‘I shall keep my suicide pills in it.’ His hosts were unsure whether or not he was joking.

  3. Dirk wrote the Introduction to The Golden Screen: Fifty Years of Films (Pavilion/Michael Joseph, 1989), a collection of DP’s reviews, edited by George Perry.

  1. Partridges of Sloane Street.

  1. BG had invited Dirk to a première.

  2. The General Trading Company, then in Sloane Street.

  3. A chance encounter with the presenter of the station’s lunchtime-music programme had resulted in Dirk standing in as ‘holiday relief’.

  4. The actress daughter of Ian Holm and his first wife, Lynne Shaw.

  1. The theatre in Guildford named after Dirk’s unofficial godmother, Yvonne Arnaud. He delivered a poem by Christopher Fry at its opening in 1965.

  2. Dorothy Gordon.

  1. The Van den Bogaerde family, whose name means ‘of, or from, the orchards’, have the motto ‘Semper viridis’.

  2. The de Pauws had sent an article by Christine’s journalist sister, with new photographs of Clermont.

  3. The Ruhl is now a casino.

  1. Dirk was to play the ‘title role’ in Bertrand Tavernier’s Daddy Nostalgie, written by the director’s ex-wife, Colo O’Hagan, and co-starring Jane Birkin and Odette Laure.

  2. Not exactly. Various departments in the Daily Telegraph, including Books, were fused with their counterparts in its Sunday sister. For the three years during which this ill-starred attempt to create a ‘seven-day newspaper’ was in operation Dirk and some of his fellow reviewers appeared in the pages of both titles.

  1. Having dealt with Lilly: Reminiscences of Lillian Hellman by Peter Feibleman (Chatto & Windus) and Capote: A Biography by Gerald Clarke (Cardinal paperback; Hamish Hamilton, 1988), Dirk was now tackling Goldwyn: A Biography by A. Scott Berg (Hamish Hamilton).

  2. Carrington: A Life of Dora Carrington 1893–1932 by Gretchen Gerzina (John Murray).

  3. No – but indisputably his love.

  4. Hollywood.

  1. Gerald Clarke (see p. 373), whose Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland would be published in 2000 by Little, Brown.

  2. The Andy Warhol Diaries edited by Pat Hackett (Simon & Schuster).

  3. Of Daddy Nostalgie.

  4. Played by Louis Ducreux.

  1. See note 1, p. 349.

  2. William Shepherd, who married EA in 1978.

  3. EA was on a pre-West End tour with Paul Scofield and Alec McCowen in Jeffrey Archer’s Exclusive, a so-called Fleet Street ‘drama’ and the theatrical equivalent of a traffic accident – disagreeable for participant and spectator alike.

  1. A reference in A Particular Friendship to Christopher Thynne had been thought, incorrectly, by his mother, Daphne Fielding, to be libellous.

  2. Angela Fox, widow of Robin, whose second volume of autobiography, Completely Foxed, had just been published by HarperCollins.

  3. Exclusive had expired. EA had triumphed earlier in a one-woman show adapted by its director Patrick Garland from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.

  1. The ‘Saumur Windmill’ (see 17 July 1986) had again been pestering HB.

  2. An attempt at équipe (crew).

  1. With flu.

  2. Dirk had written an additional scene for Daddy Nostalgie, which had been shot at a studio in Paris.

  1. No, husband.

  2. ‘Take three, in splendid CinemaScope’ (Independent on Sunday, 28 January 1990).

  3. BBC Radio 4.

  4. Tavernier would change his mind.

  1. Desert Island Discs (Radio 4, 31 December 1989).

  2. SP, Dirk’s physiotherapist, had administered further treatment on the leg weakened by his stroke. His card is reproduced overleaf.

  1. H. A. R. (Bob) Thomson, camera operator on several of Dirk’s films for Box and Thomas, confirmed that he did explain the tools and tricks of his trade, but would never have spoken in that way to someone of Dirk’s eminence.

  1. BT dedicated Daddy Nostalgie to Michael Powell – Dirk’s director on Ill Met by Moonlight – who had recently died.

  2. A report from the Cannes Festival by David Robinson.

  1. Altaras, who in the mid-1980s had taken over Dirk’s representation for theatrical work.

  2. Robinson.

  3. i.e. to have a press conference at such length.

  4. An accurate prediction.

  1. Nunnally Johnson, a friend of Losey and fellow-refugee from the McCarthy witch-hunt, directed The Angel Wore Red (1961). The film did receive a theatrical release in the UK.

  1. BT had the idea of making a film about Robert Hamer, writer and director of the Ealing classic Kind Hearts and Coronets, who died in 1963 at the age of fifty-two.

  2. Apart, of course, from an abandoned 1958 project in which he was to play T. E. Lawrence.

  3. BT was a great admirer of this early (1952) film of Dirk’s.

  1. PK had written a sinew-stiffening letter after Dirk told her he was, creatively, like a frog in mud.

  2. Then Penguin’s headquarters.

  1. Garbo: Her Story by Antoni Gronowicz (Viking) and The Legend of Greta Garbo by Peter Haining (W. H. Allen).

  2. A projected volume of autobiography, set aside in favour of the novel, Jericho.

  3. Since the launching of Postillion, the bookshop had championed vigorously all Dirk’s books.

  4. Rupert Van den Bogaerde’s baby son was christened Moses. Ulric, who was working in Le Boulou, near Perpignan, had enclosed photographs of the new arrival.

  5. Not quite.

  1. CW had shared the last years of Jack Jones’s life.

  2. Mary Ure, JO’s then wife.

  3. JO’s
first volume of memoirs, A Better Class of Person: An Autobiography 1929–1956 (Faber & Faber, 1981).

  1. JO had written to congratulate Dirk on his article, ‘A Short Walk from Harrods’ (Independent on Sunday, 30 September).

  2. Dirk had observed: ‘The telephone hardly ever rings. Sometimes it doesn’t make a sound for days. And never between Friday afternoon and Monday afternoon.’

  3. A 1989 revival of Look Back in Anger, starring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson, at the Lyric.

  4. When in London, JO stayed at the Cadogan Hotel, where Wilde was arrested in 1895.

  1. JO said that Dirk should not feel constrained to reply to his letter: ‘I may nudge you with my basket in Partridges one day …’

  2. Vivian Ellis, composer of the recently revived Mr Cinders and its featured song, ‘Spread a Little Happiness’.

  3. Anne Leon – the ‘Annie’ after whom Dirk had named his parrot.

  1. JH, Oscar-winning costume designer for Darling, was born the day before Dirk.

  2. Muriel Pavlow, Dirk’s co-star in Doctor in the House.

  3. The London Evening Standard Awards, at which she was honoured as Best Actress for The Comfort of Strangers.

  4. Instead he sent JH an immense bunch of roses.

  1. Michael French, then Director of Planning Services at the Council. McDonald’s were opening a branch on the site of what had once been the White Hart pub, later the Chelsea Drug Store, and had applied to make several additions, including a large canopy bearing its yellow logo.

  2. Although it was one of many from local residents, including Patricia Losey, Dirk’s appeal was to no avail. On his archive copy of the letter, he added: ‘Macdonalds won.’

  3. David Birkin, husband of Judy Campbell. Serge Gainsbourg, with whom Jane Birkin lived for twelve years, had died on 2 March.

  4. Jacques Doillon, with whom Jane Birkin now lived; her daughter by Gainsbourg; and her daughter by Doillon.

  1. Mr & Mrs Bridge, directed by James Ivory.

  2. As O H-P noted in the margin: ‘Bonne recette’.

  1. Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg had an international hit with his composition ‘Je t’aime … moi non plus’.

  2. NS had announced that he was standing down as Literary Editor of both the Daily and Sunday Telegraph.

  1. An account of how he first ‘threw a plank across the ravine’ was written by NS in The Daily Telegraph on 2 October 1993 and reprinted in For the Time Being.

  2. PM had forsaken the country for north-west London, to be near her family.

  3. PM’s discovery that Peter O’Toole was a neighbour proved a boon when friends asked: ‘Willesden?’

  1. PM had written to Dirk on an Apple Mac computer.

  2. This ’ere.

  3. PM’s adaptation for the BBC of Portrait of a Marriage, with Janet McTeer, David Haig and Cathryn Harrison.

  1. Wallace Steadman Watson, of Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, had written for permission to use Dirk’s correspondence with Fassbinder in a study of the latter’s life and work, and in a scholarly article. These duly appeared as Understanding Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Film as Private and Public Art (University of South Carolina Press, 1996) and ‘The Bitter Tears of RWF’ (Sight and Sound, July 1992).

  1. Untrue, as we have seen.

  2. Bernhard Wicki, who played Orlovius.

  3. Inevitably WW’s transcription contained many of them.

  4. Glum.

  1. The Paris Theater (cinema) in New York.

  2. EA was the toast of New York for her performance as Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own.

  3. The Ad Lib, in Leicester Place, London W1. The party took place on 18 September 1964.

  1. Dirk and Tony planned this extravagant social highlight with precision. It involved, on the previous day, the sitting for a portrait photograph by a group including Dirk, Tony, Stanley Baker, Noel Harrison and another of the party’s prime movers, the singer Alma Cogan.

  2. The Royal Ballet.

  3. Jean Marsh and EA created the television series Upstairs, Downstairs and The House of Eliott.

  4. Franco Zeffirelli’s film of Hamlet, starring Mel Gibson, with Glenn Close and, as Ophelia, Helena Bonham Carter.

  5. Thames, beside which EA and her husband lived.

  1. Joan Collins was leading the cast in a BBC production of Noël Coward’s sequence of six playlets, Tonight at 8.30. Dirk had earlier judged her performance in Hands Across the Sea as ‘very good’. Siân Phillips co-starred in one episode.

  2. Françoise Rosay, who appeared with Dirk in Quartet (1948).

  1. Capucine, the French actress and former model born Germaine Lefebvre, who co-starred with Dirk in Song Without End, had committed suicide in Lausanne on 17 March the previous year. Nicholas Phillips, a direct descendant of Pushkin, was a distant relative of the Duke of Edinburgh.

  1. Gareth and Lucilla’s daughter, then aged eighteen; sister to Ulric and half-sister to Brock and Rupert. She had been studying in Paris.

  1. A war of words between the English and the French had been launched the previous November by The Sun with a headline addressed to the President of the European Commission: ‘UP YOURS DELORS’. A recent salvo from the French Prime Minister, Edith Cresson, who was quoted variously as saying that all, most, or one in four Englishmen are homosexual, prompted Paris Match to publish a humorous article by Jean Cau, ‘Les Anglais “homos”’. This was illustrated with photographs of Boy George, Oscar Wilde, Somerset Maugham, Noël Coward, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, Jimmy Somerville, Lawrence of Arabia, Freddy (sic) Mercury, David Hockney and Dirk. As the last three were not even mentioned in the text, Dirk could feel justifiably aggrieved, if only at the magazine’s gratuitousness.

  2. Dirk Bogarde – By Myself, a Lucida Production, directed by Paul Joyce.

  1. ‘Pleading for the valley of the reaper’ (The Sunday Telegraph, 22 April) and ‘The right to die with dignity’ (The Daily Telegraph, 16 July).

  1. LL wrote the screenplay for the adaptation of Voices in the Garden, starring Joss Ackland, Anouk Aimée and Samuel West.

  2. A cow belonging to a Mrs O’Leary was reputed to have kicked over a lantern, thus starting the great Chicago fire of 9 October 1871.

  3. Samuel West.

  1. BBC Television’s then Head of Drama had rung to congratulate LL on her script.

  2. Dirk had reviewed four titles under the heading ‘How Could Such Hatred Exist?’ (Daily Telegraph, 10 August). Such was the response that he wrote a follow-up article, ‘No Answer to the Sorrow and the Pity’ (5 September). History teachers at independent schools had taken note.