Unique – Feb 1987
b o g a r d e
Following publication of the much-loved Dirk Bogarde’s “final” autobiography, Emma Dent Coad reviews the author’s life.
His face says it all. You are immediately drawn by his large brown eyes, submissive, questioning and trusting as an adoring Labrador. He has a full and sensual mouth, which he purses like a schoolmarm at moments of irritation. A very mobile brow gives away his strength and determination. He has honesty and kindness in his face, which together with his public school manners and reserve, add up to the type of man one would like to be stuck in a lift with. He moves elegantly, and is as handsome now as he ever was, though he wouldn’t think so himself. His self-description is rather basic: “I’m scrawny, with good eyes, a thin neck and a small head. I have a small mouth and looped hair. I have a quality, and that is what they call charm, and I flog it”.
That his charm is spiced with acidity is obvious to anyone who watched his telly interview with Russell Harty last October. Not to say that he made mincemeat out of Harty; he rather chewed him over slowly and spat bits out occasionally. “All interviewers dig elephant traps; I will go round them”, he responded to some clumsy Harty digging. “That is why I am a little defensive and spikey perhaps. I didn’t survive this far by being cuddly and dear.” Harty, sweating as usual, observed: “You will allow people to know so much and no more”. Replied Bogarde: “It is all in my books, you have to read between the lines of everything I write. I am in a shell and you haven’t cracked it yet, have you?”
Lacking the conceit and pushiness of many a Hollywood actor, Bogarde’s real talent was overlooked for years, and he was given a succession of rather dull dashing hero parts. But through them his good looks and sympathetic smile stirred many a female heart through the late forties, fifties and early sixties. He never wallowed in that kind of adulation, although as a young man he enjoyed the attention. He has a touching humility; his rise from that time to being a truly great actor and successful writer has surprised no one more than himself.
Bogarde was the elder of two children. The arrival of his little sister Elizabeth, accompanied by much old-fashioned secrecy, came as rather a shock. He was by then well used to being the centre of attention. His father was a writer, art editor of The Times for many years, and a painter. His grandfather was Baron van den Bogaerde, whose family came from the Dutch-Belgian borders. Mother was a former actress, a great beauty and daughter of actor and artist Forrest Niven. She gave up her budding career when she married, and took it out on the family forever after. His parents lived in Hampstead, in a large house always full of interesting lodgers. Little Dirk adopted them as aunts and uncles, and spent a lot of time with them. The most impressive was Aunt Kitty, a colourful bohemian lady who played records and danced around her room draped in shawls. Her décor was as eccentric as herself, with huge floor cushions, exotic fabrics flowing over lamps, and strange perfumes. She frequently disappeared overseas in pursuit of new and fateful love affairs. Little Dirk adored her, was greatly influenced by her lifestyle and her room, and was devastated when she left on a trip, never to return.
Little Dirk was a mischievous child, often getting into very bad scrapes, especially during holidays spent at a rambling rectory in Sussex. Once classified as a ‘problem’, Dirk was sent, at the tender age of 12, from the comfort of his home and the bohemian semi-rural life of Hampstead, to stay with a fierce aunt and uncle in gloomy Glasgow.
The change in his life was drastic to say the least. School was strictly disciplinarian; his Scottish relations believed that children should be seen and not heard.
Little Dirk became very introverted, spending hours alone drawing, which he proved to be very good at. If his parents hoped his experiences would be character-forming, they certainly were, but perhaps not in the way they would have wished. He later dubbed this period of his life, the Anthracite Years, because of their grey uniformity.
After school he came up to London and went to art college. The freedom that went with living in squalid digs, and being broke was paradise to him after his years of repression. He had his first experiences with booze, women and exotic student life there; he subsequently went on to Chelsea School of Art. On leaving, rather than following a career in art, to everyone’s surprise he took a lowly backroom job in a London theatre. A strange turn of circumstances saw him being offered a part in a play, in which he managed pretty well, and continued to be offered parts.
His years in the army, from 1941 to 1947, saw no combat but plenty of action. He served with the Air Photographic Interpretation section, so essentially ‘observed’ his way through the war, sketching as he went and writing poetry. He saw D-Day, went into Belsen, and spent a couple of years after the war in administrative posts in Burma and Java. What he saw of the war and its casualties affected him deeply and permanently. He had little to do in Java, so filled his time editing a forces’ newspaper, and being a radio news announcer.
On being demobbed, he tried hard to get back into acting. He was monumentally unsuccessful, until another quirk of fate landed him a major part in a new London play; both the play and Bogarde were overnight sensations.
In 1948 he signed with Rank and made his first film, the first of an eventual 57. Over the next ten years he was a screen idol, and earned more money than any other British film star. But he was never comfortable in the typecast roles of those days, playing the sensitive and sympathetic types with little substance, which his fans adored. So he took the biggest risk of his career in 1960, with a difficult role in “Victim”, after declaring that he wanted to make films that would, “Disturb, educate, illuminate”. Bogarde played a married man plagued with homosexual feelings, a part many actors would have considered suicidal. But he played masterfully, convinced directors that he was worthy of better parts, and won the Variety Club of Great Britain Best Performance Award.
“I have a quality, and that is what they call charm, and I flog it.”
His next big challenge was Joe Losey’s “The Servant”, with James Fox, for which he won the Variety Club Award once again, plus the British Film Academy Best Film Actor Award. Other triumphs, in his terms, in the mid to late sixties were John Schlesinger’s “Darling”, “Mr Sebastian”, and “The Damned”. His ability to subjugate his own character to that of his part was such that, in his moving performance in Visconti’s “Death in Venice”, in 1970, one of his closest friends failed to realise that Bogarde had been in it.
Around this time, he moved away from his clamouring fans and the clammy weather of England to Provence, in the sunny South of France. Of the six feature films which followed, his best known performances are probably those in “The Night Porter”, with Charlotte Rampling, and Fassbinder’s “Despair”. Both were concerned with unusual forms of eroticism, and in both he acquitted himself disquietingly well. Though pretending to despise television, he also starred as Roald Dahl in the tv story of his wife. “The Patricia Neal Story”, and did an episode of “The History of the Louvre”, with Charlotte Rampling, for French telly. We have seen how Bogarde wrote poetry when in the army, and had a bash at being a journalist when stationed in Java. Two of his poems have been published in an Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. He always showed great interest (and sometimes disgust) in his scripts, rewriting bits of them whenever he had the chance. But, as with his painting and acting, he never thought very highly of himself. He says: “I was very surprised when I turned out to be a good writer”, as indeed he was proved to be. He has written three novels, “A Gentle Occupation”, “Voices in the Garden”, and “West of Sunset”, all of which have hit the best-sellers lists, and would have done without the famous name. His autobiographies, “A Postillion Struck by Lightning”, “Snakes and Ladders”, and “An Orderly Man”, have also been great successes. In 1982, he was made a Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government, in recognition of his talents, a rare and great honour.
His “final” autobiography, as he calls it, is “Backcloth”, which came out last September. When he had written it, he burnt all his old letters, diaries and journals. “It was very necessary”, he says, “I didn’t want them to fall into someone’s hands some day and to have a book written about the books that were written”. “Backcloth” is a very intense and moving book, describing the early parts of his life in detail, which he had skimmed over before, up to the beginning of his acting career. It then flies forty years forward to resume with his peaceful life in Provence, where he lives in a 17th century shepherd’s cottage with his manager and companion, Tony Forwood, and his dog Bendo. (So absorbing was the book, that when it arrived in the early morning post, I didn’t put it down, let alone dress, until four that afternoon when I had read every word.)
His narrative is straightforward but evocative. For example, when describing how his belief in God was shattered during the war: “It is particularly hard to retain a shred of ‘belief’ standing in the middle of a battlefield, at the age of twenty-three, watching piles of dead, frequently mutilated, soldiers, their bellies bloated with the gases of decomposition, being bulldozed into a mass grave. I watched them tumble, spill, slither like old shirts in a spin-drier, and as I walked away, retching in the stench of death, I knew that, at last, I had come of age, and that I could never recover the happy platitudes of immortality and ‘Jesus Loves You’.” And about a deceased and much-mourned pet: “He was a street dog and hated the country. Smells were all. He really only liked filth… He was as sly and deceitful as a pickpocket, and I loved him with all my heart”.
“I didn’t survive this far by being cuddly and dear.”
The years of pursuit by the eyes of the curious have made him value his privacy and close friends above all else, as he says: “The almost desperate determination to avoid… the mundane, the dull, the envious and resentful, the unfilled and untalented (and they seem to me to be legion) – literally forces one to become what they choose to call a ‘recluse’ out of sheer self-preservation”. And the death of some dear friends, such as Norah Smallwood, his publisher, and his valued friend’s Forwood’s illness, has induced feelings of great melancholy in him.
His latest screen part was on telly, in his own adaptation of Graham Green’s “May We Borrow Your Husband?”, for Yorkshire Television. In his own words: “I’ve written myself the longest, dullest part that could be… cardies, pullies and sad looks”. The story is about a honeymooning couple in the South of France who meet up with “two old fags”, who seduce the young husband. The wife meets a 64-year-old writer (Bogarde) staying at the same hotel, and confides in him. The writer falls in love, but eventually helps her win back her husband. Despite Bogarde’s misgivings, he plays masterfully and with great feeling; it is far from “dull.”
Bogarde’s humility about his achievements probably hasn’t stood him in good stead. ‘Grander’ people are more often noticed. It seems incredible that the greatest honours he has ever received – the French one, and, in 1985, an Honorary degree of Letters from the 500-year-old St Andrews University – are for his writing. In these days of telly stars getting CBEs (though no doubt well deserved) for amusing the PM, why is Bogarde constantly overlooked for his acting skills? He probably doesn’t really mind, seeming to be refreshingly free of material ambitions, and enjoying the simple pleasures of life: “I have no sense of possession … as long as I have a little bit of money in my pocket, ciggies and a bit of booze, and someone to talk to…”
