Boyfriend – Oct 15th 1960
“I don’t bitterly regret not having a family, but I would have liked one. I have a huge family of loving nieces and nephews, and brother and sister and that’ll do. It has to.”
Dirk Bogarde by Lee Langley
The Bogarde image as the romantic star of countless popular films was shattered when he played the greying, unglamorous lead in Victim, a film about homosexuality. It was a courageous step, and it marked a turning point in his career, the end of his pin-up days, a change in his way of life. Yet he survived and went on to win Academy Awards and critical acclaim as a talented, serious actor.
A year ago Dirk Bogarde sold up virtually everything he possessed – magnificent home, furniture, paintings, 3,000 books – and moved into a five-roomed, 16th century farmhouse in Sussex with a few personal belongings, and just 50 books. It was a turning point, and it signalled a fundamental change in his way of life.
“It had all become over civilised and over-burdened. I was working to support an entourage … 40-roomed house, four people working for me, and five gardeners! I had a butler in a white jacket, and the silver took a whole day to clean. All that went. Now there’s just this one main living-room – I’ve stopped formal entertaining completely.”
The changed attitude to Dirk Bogarde’s life is a reflection of the astonishing change that has gradually taken place in his career. Today one of Britain’s most respected screen actors, Dirk Bogarde ten years ago was suffering the sort of pop-idol pressures that are the present lot of the Beatles or the Stones. He was named the number one British money- making star for four years, and made over £100,000 a year.
But it was a life that brought agony to a man who needs quiet, solitude, the peace of the countryside, as others need air to breathe. “I remember when I was just out of the Army going to the theatre with a girl friend, looking round and thinking, gosh! Wouldn’t it be marvellous if everyone here knew me and was pointing me out. Well, it happened just one year later. And it was appalling.”
He describes himself as “shy to the point of idiocy”. A lot of actors are, yet oddly they do the job which forces them to appear among people. Dirk’s shyness is heightened by a hatred of crowds- “Even 20 is a crowd to me, I’ve never in my life gone into a restaurant alone. I can’t. Not even when I was practically starving and out of work could I go into a cafe: I’d buy myself a bar of chocolate or a bottle of milk and go and sit in the park.” He has learnt to go into the studio canteen alone when he’s filming, but only when he knows he has a table booked. “I don’t dislike people. I rather like them- but not too near me.”
His star status proved useful for getting a good table at a popular restaurant: for being the first one on to planes, for whisking through Customs: “the snobbery was incalculable. Now I take my place in a queue and things are more reasonable. “But at that time I’d find myself brought to the head of the queue even when buying fish in my village-awful-so I stopped doing even that.”
In the end it inhibited him almost totally; there was no privacy anywhere except in his own home. And even there be could not always relax-people used to get into the grounds, into the house.
The glare of the white light of publicity also cast some darker shadows over Dirk’s life: he feels that the combination of publicity and press interference is partly to blame for more than one private disaster-his romance with Jean Simmons, for example.
“I was absolutely besotted by her- though of course she had been in love with Stewart Granger all her life. The studio tried to stop that, and rather pushed Jean and me together, though we were going that way ourselves very nicely. But of course every time we went anywhere the press was there. It became impossible…”
Another casualty was his relationship with Capucine, probably the most important of his life.
“I did fall tremendously in love with Cap, and I think she did with me, and I asked her to marry me-actually my father proposed for me, because Cap wouldn’t take me seriously. So my father knelt down and said ‘Will you please answer?’ We were all spending Christmas together, 1960 I suppose it was.”
They met when they co-starred in Song Without End and worked together for nine months. Dirk says emphatically, and a little sombrely, that he worshipped her, bought a house “Drummer’s Yard”, to be their home. But, and it was a big but, Capucine would not give up her career. He was nearly 40 and felt strongly that it was time to settle and have a family. The idol worship was slackening off, and he felt he might be able to take on more worthwhile work. But Capucine had a seven-year contract in Hollywood. She was ambitious-and she had a debt of loyalty to someone else. The pull was too strong.
Admittedly both Dirk and Capucine were strongly tied to their careers- but outside pressures certainly helped to end the affair. Columbia Pictures in London sent out a press introduction to Capucine which to journaUsts at the time apparently read like an engagement announcement.
“Some of the EogUsb press were very vicious: as I bad been unmarried for so long, and they knew little about my life, they inferred that I was a queer, so that was thrown at me, and I had to live through it.” The day after the announcement, Dirk’s house was surrounded by the English and Continental press-with tents, primus stoves and cameras, all inside the grounds, telephoto lenses trained on any likely windows. And they announced, quite simply, that they were staying until they got an interview.
“After two days of siege, which was unspeakable, we let them in, all of them, so nobody had anything really. I said to Cap afterwards that I just couldn’t take it any more.
“When I saw her off at the airport there were about 120 members of the press there, screaming ‘kiss her!’ and things like that. And you know, I’m just not that much of a movie star. I sat there like a sort of zombie, frozen with horror. And Cap broke down and they printed that picture, and then one columnist wrote a filthy article saying it was all untrue, that it was a cover-up story set up by us … delightful. Cap went off in despair, and really that sort of broke it. We tried again, but it was no good.”
It was around this time that Dirk did Victim, a film about a man tortured by homosexual leanings, and with one stroke killed his established star-image stone dead. Oddly enough, it seems that what the fans disliked most was Dirk playing a 45-year-old married man with greying temples and wrinkles; it was the lack of glamour they objected to, not the controversial theme.
“But I got a lot of letters from women who thanked me for making the picture because they said, ‘I thought it was only my husband that was like this’. I got letters from women of 60 and girls of 21 which was heartbreaking, but at least they found out that this is a problem anyone can have. and lots of people do.”
That one film, Victim and that one part, un-glamorous, flawed, is now accepted as a turning point in Dirk’s career: the end of the pin-up days. But what tends to be forgotten is that it was also the beginning of something-it was the first step a safe star deliberately took into uncertain territory.
Killing a popular image can prove dangerous. There was a backlash of resentment from fans who felt betrayed; there was a nasty patch to be lived through when Dirk had to face the possibility that he might never make the transition to serious actor, and within the film industry there were many sceptics who lacked confidence in the ability of a light romantic actor ever to be more than just that. Slowly, though, with carefully chosen films, the new pattern emerged. And with The Servant, Dirk knew he had made it. ‘That morning, when I read The Times’ notice of The Servant I thought, that’s it. That’s what I always hoped to see written one day. It was the recognition of making an effort, to do something hard, to have one’s work understood.”
It has meant sacrifices: instead of £40,000 for a movie, Dirk now works for a fraction of that plus a share of possible profit, so that he can do the films he really wants to do. He recently turned down a huge Hollywood offer so that he could make Accident, which opens in January.
For his performance in The Servant, Dirk won the British Academy Award for the Best Actor: he won the Variety Club of Great Britain Awards for the Best Performance by an actor for Victim and The Servant, and he won another British Academy Award last year for Darling. He feels that Accident, directed by Joseph Losey who made The Servant and King And Country, is the best work he has ever done on the screen- and quite the hardest film he’s made. He finished it in a state of near collapse.
“When I’m working I exhaust myself so completely that I really can’t do anything else. But I’m bone lazy; it’s awful to waste your life between pictures as I do. In the year between Modesty Blaise and Accident did nothing whatever. It’s always the same: every day I tell myself I’ll start something – I’ll learn Russian, or paint the front of the house … I buy books. I buy a Linguaphone, but it never gets done.”
If he finishes a scene at the studio in the morning and is told he is not needed again that day, he still doesn’t go home: he stays on until everyone else is ready to leave. “I’ve nothing else to do with my life. Nothing else. It’s the entire being, and one of the basic reasons why I’ve no family, that I’m not married. There is nothing that consumes me more than the theatre or the cinema, and nothing I want more. And I am not alive without it, not really. I don’t turn into a brilliant person who paints brilliant pictures the minute I stop acting, like Peter Finch. I was quite a good painter at one time-bought all the easels, I had a studio with a window with north light, and I sat there and looked at it and nothing happened. I was a painter, sure, but it didn’t fulfil me, and I wasn’t any good, not really. As a painter I would always have been a supporting actor, if you know what I mean.”
Dirk knew at the age of four that acting was to be his life; he was writing plays at six and making everyone act in them. A school report, written when Dirk was 11, says that “he thinks life is just a bed of roses and forgets the thorns, but he is very good at acting.”
He was born in Hampstead, in a street near the Heath- “my earliest memory is of being held by my mother to see a snowstorm that was falling in a fog. She had on a black hat with black cock- feathers, and I was about two and a half. I remember the snowflakes seemed to be falling through green light . . . “
The children were brought up in a tight and loving family group with a nanny in the country. There was no electric light, no mains water, no telephone, and it was country; none of todays commutor compromise. The children had chores to do from the very beginning: they did the stoves and cleaned the lamps, pumped the water, gathered wood for winter. He is writing a book now about his childhood with his brother and sister, I’m calling it The Canary Cage because that’s what life was, in a way. We were little yellow singing birds very happily surrounded by gilt bars in sunlight, and then we all flew away.”
It was a childhood of fantasy and dreams, imagination running like a strong, subterranean river through everyday events, bubbling up at unexpected moments. On one occasion, reproved for being late for a meal, Dirk explained indignantly.
“You don’t understand, I’ve been on the Titanic all afternoon!” Playing at going down with the Titanic was a favourite game, played in a nearby barn. “I always used to push my sister off into the sea and go down with the ship alone. I wasn’t going to share that scene, and she was only a bit player, an extra, after all. People have always been extras in my life, I’m afraid . . ,” He murmurs the last words apologetically, perhaps regretfully.
When Dirk was about 12-“I was fearfully bad at school”- his father. Ulric Van Den Bogaerde, decided to do something about his lack of concentration, and gave the boy a book on Pelmanism, and a programme of tests. His theory worked so well that in World War II Dirk found himself with an enviable job in Air-Photographic Reconaissance, because of his extraordinary retention of detail. He served with the British Army from 1940 to 1946, through the European campaign from D-Day onwards; he had an exhibition of war paintings in London, and served in India and Indonesia. He worked in Military Intelligence, and was one of the youngest majors in the British Army. “I adored the Army. It was probably the happiest time of my life. It was like-scouting in a very grand manner.”
He is understandably proud of the Army career, and equally understandably nostalgic for a time which embraced poetry readings by lamplight under canvas, and a dream house in the hills of Java with “a plate-glass floor in the drawing room, and a waterfall under that!“
“In a way,” he muses, “part of the reason for my withdrawal is, I suppose, that I did everything I wanted to do as a young man, correctly, and in its time, in that supreme period from 1940 to 1947, when every wild oat was sown and every degree of anything one wanted to experience emotionally was done. He feels that proving himself, as a soldier and as a man, was vital. “It’s the one thing you wonder about, specially if you haven’t any children. This is the basic thing of human life. But I have nothing to prove. Except that I’m as good as I think I can be, as an actor.
The war decided something for him in another area of his life: “I had brought myself up as a sort of Roman Catholic, thought I’d be a priest at one point, as I think most boys do at some stage. But the war stopped all that; it straightened me out about God, I’m afraid. I didn’t believe in Him any more, and haven’t since Belsen. I looked at all that horror and thought, God must be awfully busy. I wonder who he’s looking after…”
But habit dies hard, and Dirk still finds himself saying his prayers every night. Also he tends to revert to the early Catholicism and light a candle to St. Theresa in time of trouble.
Before going into the Army, he had already broken into the theatre, albeit in a fairly unspectacular way. His father, then picture editor of The Times, hearing of the boy’s ambitions, told him to go away and earn his living as an actor for two years; if he managed it, family blessing was his: if he failed, there was a strong suggestion that The Times would be seeing more of him.
In the Army, between the regulation activities, Dirk managed to write a good deal of poetry, (some of which was published recently in an anthology of war poems); he edited a Forces’ newspaper for a year, for which he wrote a short story every day. And he fell in love.
“She’s never been mentioned before, but she’s dead now, so it doesn’t matter. I met her in 1945. We were both in the Services and for two years we lived together, and I absolutely adored her. She was about 30 then, and I was 26. She was a truly marvellous woman.
“Of course, talking about it now is like revisiting another world: words like ‘demobbed’ sound silly to us now.
“When we came back to London she came and lived with me and looked after me, and we had two and a half years of unbridled hell. Hell. Not her fault, mine.”
What happened was that a youth who had left the theatre as a promising young actor of 19, and gone through a war, suddenly found himself a star overnight. True there was a spell of pavement-pounding and audition hunting; cheese and biscuits as staple diet and teabags used till the water was colourless. “Then I appeared in one play, and everything seemed to happen at once.”
So he went into the star business, and began to move rapidly away from the woman in his life. Hard enough for him to adjust to a fantastic salary, a house with five floors, all within a week. For a woman who knew nothing of show-business, it was impossible.
“She was absolutely sweet, but it just got worse and worse between us, until slowly, slowly, slowly I relegated her to a sort of secretary-housekeeper. And that really was terrible. People sometimes say to me you’ve got a secret sorrow in your eyes… Well, if there is a guilt or secret sorrow, it’s that, because finally she died a few years ago. I helped to see her through it, but altogether it was the worst thing one could ever do.”
For the past 25 years Dirk has been represented professionally by one man: his business manager, Tony Forwood.
It is Tony (at one time married to Glynis Johns) who does all the negotiating, arranging, telephoning, letter-writing, document-checking, troubleshooting and ruffled feather-smoothing that goes with this sort of life.
That the two men are firmly linked by friendship as well as work is obvious. Perhaps this tolerant, undemanding affection, flourishing in the rich common ground of enthusiasm for Dirk’s career, is in truth the best answer for someone so emotionally consumed by his profession-his art. As he himself says, there is little of him left over for private life, “I’m only fully dimensional and alive,” he admits, “when I start acting.”
More and more the quiet country home provides all that Dirk needs-outside his work. “I don’t bitterly regret not having a family, but I would have liked one. I have a huge family of loving nieces and nephews, and brother and sister and that’ll do. It has to.”
He draws enormous comfort from the countryside: when last year he moved for a few months to a charming Regency house in Ladbroke Grove, London, life became a nightmare. The animals were terrified of the traffic noise, Dirk himself fell ill with what the doctors at first thought was cancer of the lung, but turned out to be a burst blood vessel in his trachea.
“But apart from all that,” he says, “I have never been so bored or so lonely in my life. There was nothing to do. It was really awful, and I had this extraordinary inner weeping, the feeling that you’re weeping inside. Every single day I drove out to the nearest bit of green I could get to, just to smell air.
“I have to have a base. Even for those four months, I took my books, my pictures, my music, all my things, even some fish from the goldfish pond which I nursed along. I couldn’t do without the familiar things you see-that’s how sentimental I am. And when I’m here, all the pain goes away.”
He is driven 150 miles a day to and from the studio when he’s filming, to hold on to that peace; he never drives himself.
“I don’t drive-I killed some people once, in a car crash, and I’ll never drive again, not even on a film set.
“It was a long time ago, on VJ day, actually, in India, and they were all soldiers. I wrote to the mothers and one wrote back to me and said ‘We always knew he would come to a terrible end, please don’t take it on yourself, he was the wild one of the family, yours very sincerely.’
“That was enough for me for the rest of my life. I even hate being driven in a car, because I still feel that bump, bump, bump, four times, and wait for a head to come through the windscreen at me.”
Every actor is to some degree a vessel capable of holding the various personalities he assumes in his work. Many are pretty empty vessels at that-and blissfully unaware of their shortcomings. Dirk doesn’t exactly go into a hair-shirt routine over his faults.
“I’m not very bright,” he says reflectively, “I don’t have any profundities. I don’t think very much, and I have no political knowledge. I exaggerate too, which is a bad thing – I tend to say something must have happened at least ten years ago, when I know perfectly well it was five,” There is a glint of amusement. “I put it down to the fact that I could have been a writer, and my imagination is at work constantly.”
People often tell him how much he is missing, living out of London. So every now and then, after a winter snowed in, with no papers and very often no mail, he will spend a few days in London at his favourite hotel.
“Then I come home, and it’s been super and I’ve spent a fortune and worn a suit and a clean white shirt every day, and-almost always I find that I’ve missed nothing.”
The soft green lawns, the dovecote, the garden he looks after so skilfully, all seem a long way from the world of angst and telephoto lenses. But despite himself Dirk remains a star: his films have just reached Japan and Russia and once again he is inundated by fan mail.
Even in Britain the myth refuses to lie down and die. When making Accident, his latest film, shooting was going on quietly one day in Oxford, on a river bank, when suddenly a group of girls assembled on the opposite bank and began to call over. Finally, they sent over a representative, a boy who had to swim across, carrying their autograph books in a polythene bag. To Dirk it brought the old days back with a bang.
“And I hated those days. I know it was enthusiasm and well-meant, and indeed I have a number of loyal fans who have stayed with me right through and I’m very grateful for them, but by the time your flies have been ripped open a few times in a crowd, and scissors accidentally stuck in your eye by someone trying to cut off a lock of your hair, you’ve had it. What I’m doing now is valuable, enriching. . . and the point is, I have my self-respect.”
