The Independent – Dec 9th 2001

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Private Life on Parade

It is 1941 and bombs are falling on London. In his dressing room, a young actor called Dirk Bogarde sits with a sketchbook recording the horror but also taking time to draw exquisite pictures of women in Paris fashions. Now, 60 years on, the book has been rediscovered and, says Philip Hoare, it reveals the torments, fetishes and dreams of a very elusive man

At Batsford’s gallery in May 1945, Dirk Bogarde and his wartime friend Christopher Greaves exhibited watercolours they had made during the Allied advance in Europe. Titled With the BLA (British Liberation Army), the Times reviewing this show of “men-at-arms and men-of-arts”, remarked that Captain Derek Niven van den Bogaerde – as he was then – “seems to think principally in watercolour, which he uses very effectively.” Every painting was sold and vanished into private hands.

For years it was presumed that little else had survived of Bogarde’s art – until director Adam Low and writer Nicholas Shakespeare began work on a two-part Arena documentary on Bogarde to be shown this month. When they contacted John Coldstream, at work on an official biography of the artist, he produced a small green book. In it were pen-and-ink sketches made by Bogarde in 1941 two years after he left art school. Reproduced here for the first time, these pictures are evidence of an extraordinary talent.

Born in London in 1921, Bogarde would inherit his sense of the theatre from his beautiful mother, Margaret. She had been an actress during the First World War and in 1920 turned down a Hollywood contract when her artist boyfriend delivered an ultimatum: the movies or him. The Belgian-born Ulric van den Bogaerde – son of an art faker – had served at the Somme and Passchendaele, during which he had seen his best friend blown to pieces; he suffered the after-effects of shell-shock for the rest of his life. Seeking a quiet life, the family retreated to rural Sussex where Margaret became a “gentle alcoholic” while Ulric became the art editor of the Times (hence, perhaps, the good notices his son’s exhibition got in the paper).

Bogarde’s early childhood with his sister Elizabeth was idyllic – until the arrival of his brother, Gareth, born when Bogarde was 12. In one of the those weird 1920s family arrangements, it was agreed that their eldest son would be sent to Scotland to live with his aunt and uncle. After an uncomfortable adolescence, he finally returned to London to attend the Chelsea Polytechnic (later the Chelsea School of Art and Design) from late 1938 to summer 1939. As Bogarde wrote in the first volume of his memoirs, A Postillion Struck By Lightning, there he was taught by Graham Sutherland and Henry Moore.

Coldstream sees Bogarde as a tentative presence at Chelsea. For his biography, Coldstream found a former student who remembers Bogarde “vanishing every evening”. It seems he did not want to connect with other people. “He had already experienced a period of blackness,” says Coldstream, “what he called the ‘anthracite years’ in Glasgow – and he’d established a sort of shell around himself.” As Adam Low says, after his Scottish exile, he understood the nature of rejection. (There had also been an incident in which Bogarde had been taken home from the cinema by an older man, who had wrapped him up in clothes like a mummy and abused him.)

During his time at Chelsea, Bogarde became artistically obsessed with the First World War, reading All Quiet on the Western Front and Seven Pillars of Wisdom and idolising William Orpen and Paul Nash. “I was quite convinced that I was painting in this fury because I was the reincarnation of a young soldier who had been killed in 1917.” His output was prodigious, “leading Sutherland to say it was probably better to ‘get it out of my system’ and exercise my imagination … [he] knew full well that no reincarnation was taking place, simply a release from too much emotionalism.” Yet it was a fantasy which would stay with him.

Bogarde left Chelsea in a “welter of second-hand grief, anxiety, and something which was rapidly approaching self-pity” and returned home to Sussex. Although HS Williamson, his headmaster at Chelsea, wrote to his father of “the promise of your son’s work, and his unusual facility of invention”, Bogarde realised. “I would never be a successful painter, for the simple reason that I did not want to be. I had no dedication but a totally God-given talent which I truthfully wished could be directed towards the main love of my life: the Theatre.” The debate was not all that serious – the theatre had already got to him.

The sketchbook is evidence that he had not exercised his obsession with the first world war

With the outbreak of war, Bogarde came back to London again, this time to pursue his theatrical career, and in the process met Lt. Anthony Forwood, RA, “tall, blond, in full regalia”, the man who was to be his companion for the next 40 years. It is telling that this vision of his future should appear in military uniform, almost fetishised by the young actor who later that year would pose in an amalgamation of his father’s First World War boots and breeches and his own Army tunic and cap; and who, even later, would appear in similar garb in films such as the anti-war King and Country and the more perverse fantasy of The Night Porter.

In his role as theatrical agent, Forwood secured Bogarde a part in Diversion, a revue at Wyndham’s Theatre. It was during the longeurs of rehearsal there that he returned to his art. Bogarde’s sketchbook, begun in February 1941, not only exhibits the influence of his tutors but is evidence that he had not yet exorcised his obsession with the First World War. His scenes of blitzed London recall Moore’s wartime work in the city’s Underground shelters, while his dark landscapes hint at Sutherland’s Gothic renderings of rural England. But many are images from an earlier war – his father’s. One picture shows a group of soldiers in an exploding shell-hole, as though literally in hell; another depicts what he calls a “set for Carnage, an imaginary ballet”; another is entitled simply Ypres, 1918.

Such apocalyptic scenes contrasted vividly with the book’s haute-couture fashion-plates, sketches of Marlene Dietrich, poster designs and backstage still-lives that resemble nothing so as much as the work of pre-war designers like Cecil Beaton, and are evidence of Bogarde’s more fey, theatrical imagination. It is as if, in this one small sketchbook, were contained the almost schizophrenic images of his lives and his choices: the horror of war versus the glamour of fashion and the theatre. It was an accurate reflection of the bizarre quality of wartime London.

Sharing a Wyndham’s dressing room with Peter Ustinov, while bombs dropped outside making the house lights flicker, Bogarde and his friends would emerge from rehearsals into “an inferno in Charing Cross Road. The whole world seemed to be on fire, the sky crimson, dust and smoke like a thick fog, the glass canopy around the theatre shattered into inch-long splinters, rubble, broken branches and fire hoses everywhere. The Hippodrome was burning fiercely, people cursing, coughing and running, wires looped across the street and everywhere belching heat and smoke.” It was these scenes that he recorded in his sketchbook: figures slumped in Piccadilly tube, churches and theatres framed by broken and scorched timbers; it was as if the imagined wastelands of his First World War scenes had suddenly become reality.

Picking their way through the bombed West End, Bogarde, Forwood and Ustinov took refuge one afternoon in a drinking club in Orange Street, where they were greeted by the sight of “a pale young man in a blue angora sweater … playing ‘Our Love Affair'” who “looked up with polite surprise but went on, his identity bracelets gleaming softly.” All the while, bombs continued to fall, “shaking the room and making a glass tank of wax lilies jerk and wobble in the blast”. Diversion premiered to a packed house the next day, one of only two theatres open for business in London. But midway through the run Bogarde received his call-up papers.

Lieutenant, later Captain Derek Niven van den Bogaerde, spent the rest of the war working in “photographic interpretation” in General Staff Intelligence, serving at the liberation of France, Belgium and Holland. It was during this time that he produced the watercolours which were exhibited at the Batsford galley in 1945. They were the last serious flowering of his art.

Demobbed, he changed his name and resumed to the stage, aided by Forwood whom he met again in 1946; Forwood would subsequently leave his wife, the actress Glynis Johns, to live with Bogarde and manage his career. Theirs was an odd relationship: photographs the men took of each other in Berlin 10 years later seem more like stills from a movie, revealing none of their affection for each other.

In 1947, Bogarde’s performance in Power Without Glory aroused the interest of Noel Coward, who advised him “Never, ever, go near the cinema.” Ironically, it was because of the attention Coward stirred up that Bogarde was offered a lucrative contract with Rank, (his defection provided Coward with a memorable line: walking across Leicester Square with a friend, he passed a cinema advertising The Sea Shall Not Have Them starring Bogarde and Michael Redgrave. “I don’t see why not,” Coward said, “Everyone else has.”)

Photographs the men took of each other in bombed-out Berlin seem like stills from a movie

Rank turned Bogarde into a pop idol, mobbed at stage doors and escorted to his car by police officers. But by choosing the screen over the stage, just as he chose acting over art, Bogarde had presented himself with another dilemma: the expectations of commercial directors versus his personal desire to push himself in roles. His solution, it seems, was to retreat into his shell. Throughout his life as an actor, Bogarde would maintain a sense of distance, a repressed Englishness undercut by his own dark foreigness; a rictus gin of suavity betrayed by veiled sexuality and implied threat.

From Doctor in the House to The Damned, Bogarde would reinvent himself from English art school dandy to American pop star to European outsider, bridging pre-war decadence and post-war pop culture as a Savile Row teddy boy. Films such as Victim (1961), in which he was the subject of gay blackmail, and The Servant (1963), playing a creepily perverse butler, now seem both revelatory and concealing at the same time. Tellingly, Bogarde saw his refusal to play the game in military terms: “As soon as I stepped out of line to fight along with forward-looking directors … my general popularity waned and the box office receipts crashed accordingly.”

The result was another reinvention, self-exile in Europe, culminating in his role as von Ashenbach for Visconti’s Death in Venice (1970). He returned only when Forwood became terminally ill, swapping the South of France for another kind of exile in London, “a short walk from Harrods”, writing his memoirs and book reviews, yet still fiercely guarding his self-confessed obsessional privacy.

Although both Bogarde’s brother and sister bear testimony in the Arena films to their brother’s gay relationships during the war, when Shakespeare, his literary editor at the Telegraph, asked Bogarde about his sexuality “he told me he wasn’t gay, and until I’ve found a single person he slept with, I find it difficult to say otherwise.” “He was a mysterious, elusive character,” says Coldstream, Shakespeare’s successor at the Telegraph and a close friend of Bogarde’s in later years, “I don’t think he ever wanted to be pinned down. He was very unsure of himself – he kept his ‘lives’ in compartments.”

It is fitting that Bogarde’s last book, For the Time Being, a collection of journalism published in 1999 shortly before he died, should end with his tribute to Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. The scenes of war he graphically drew in his sketchbook still haunted him. And like their “second hand grief’, like the parts he played and costumes he wore, his public life was a vicarious performance. The true depth of his emotion is, even now, hidden.