Woman’s Weekly – Oct 28th 1978
Snakes and Ladders
Further extracts from this autobiography by Dirk Bogarde – new films, new homes, and new horizons…
IF THE TELEPHONE rang constantly for Miss Garland it now hardly ever rang for me. Sitting slumped with a Guinness amidst my playing fountains and tossing rhododendrons I became very well aware of the sudden shift in my status. Rank had been a superb umbrella; however much I might have railed and complained against it. Now the elements hit me full on the head. No weekly cheque, no future plans, no capital. Apart from the tax reserves which I was steadily eating into like a termite.
One morning Hans and Agnes announced, in floods of tears, that The Palace was far too big for them to handle on their own and that after ten happy years in my service they now felt it was time to move elsewhere and in consequence had accepted the offer of a job with a millionaire in Florida. We were all suitably distressed… but Florida was Florida, and Beaconsfield and no capital was, to say the least of it, alarming. I was dragging my anchor; clearly The Palace had to go.
I made a brilliant decision on the third Guinness, staring into the night-scented-stock and bee-ridden lupins; I would sell up, and with the capital hopefully obtained, purchase a small farm and retire to work on the land for ever. No more cinema, no more theatre, peace and self-containment. I would, I thought, get Elizabeth [Dirk’s sister] and George (he was obviously good at land and farms and that sort of thing) to join me; give them a cottage, and together we would run the Elysian fields, and go to market, milk, collect eggs, plough, reap and sow, and lead the simple unrushed life of the land. I was immensely cheered by the idea of Elizabeth already in a gingham poke bonnet churning the butter; of the children, Mark and Sarah, on the hay wain, of ample teas and suppers round the scrubbed table in the lamplight: the simple family life.
I took up a bundle of old Country Lifes and started to thumb through them in a happily bucolic state, secure in having made a firm decision at last. And Dennis van Thai called, almost at that moment, to say that he had managed to get me a film, at a much reduced salary, and that I’d better grab it while I could. Poke bonnets and hay wains slid from my grasp and I was shortly bobbing about off the coast of Spain in a three-masted schooner, being beastly to my crew and ordering everyone in sight to submit to the cat-o’-nine-tails, while Alec Guinness slapped his thigh from time to time in a grey wig which looked remarkably like a tea-cosy.
It was not a very distinguished affair, and apart from the enormous pleasure of being with Alec, a patient and generous actor if ever there was one, it was nothing, I think, which either of us greatly enjoyed. But it brought in a little loot, and thus secured temporarily a breathing space which I spent trailing about Kent and Sussex searching for the farm which would provide me with my kind of Mary Webb Stella Gibbons-Thomas Hardy existence. Elizabeth in her poke bonnet simply would not leave my mind, although her immediate reaction to it had been less than exuberant.
“We are really very comfortable in Rustington, dear. I mean, what sort of farm, and where? It’s very flattering of you, I’m sure, but George has got quite a big firm now, he’s pretty busy; and I don’t know anything about butter or cows… and the children can’t ride about on hay wains all the year through, can they? Isn’t it only in June or something?”
However, I would not be daunted and found a farm in a perfect setting not far from Edenbridge, which was up for auction. It had a tumbled-down timbered house, five cottages and four hundred acres with a river running through, starred by marsh marigolds. I was determined to have it. All the money which I had spent on restoring The Palace, lagoons, fountains and smooth lawn walks, paid off, and I sold it privately, extremely well, and thus armed with a comforting cushion against immediate disaster sent poor Forwood off to the auction for the farm which he speedily obtained for me but without the five important cottages, which were all sold for enormous prices, singly, to stockbrokers and junior architects who would, in due time, smother them in high-gloss paint, William Morris papers, London lampposts and wishing wells and sell them at vast profit. I was left with a derelict farm-house, a huddle of barns, and four hundred acres. Ruin stared me in the face, and Elizabeth in gingham faded swiftly from sight for ever. I put it straight back on the market and sold it for the price I had paid to a neighbouring farmer and with a deep sigh of relief came sadly down to earth; homeless.
Although The Palace was technically sold, I did not have to give possession until April, and by the grace of God and Irene Howard, who was then casting at MGM, I found myself in a modest little Army Comedy- Drama and stamped through the coldest winter for years with army boots and a cockney accent. It was a fortuitous move. The film was made entirely on location all over Essex, Surrey and Kent; each time we reached an area it was desperately combed for an alternative to The Palace. Day after day, as I slid and shivered through snow drifts rallying my brave soldiery, Forwood trailed wanly about with Estate Agents and too-eulogistic catalogues of Home Counties Tudor, until one morning he found me lying, frozen, in a barn near Ewehurst buried in straw eating a hard-boiled egg at the lunch break.
“It’s not a farm; but it’s pretty marvellous.”
“Where is it?” I was numb with cold and past caring.
“Just up the hill there, staggering view. I can run you up in the car now.”
“I can’t come and see a house like this, covered in mud and plastic blood… this filthy uniform… “
“I think you should. It’s exactly what you want… “
It was. And I moved into “Nore” six weeks later.
FILMING “I COULD GO ON SINGING”
WE HAD one week, one final week… of complete, unforgettable magic. She (Judy Garland] was on time every day, her work was brilliant, we tore into the scenes and she blasted off the screen. My final day was our big scene. We started together rehearsing in her dressing-room at eight-thirty. No one came near us. She had wanted to play it sitting down, not to move; I wrote it so that she had sprained an ankle and was carted, drunk, to St. George’s Hospital. She sat in a chair, I knelt at her feet. We rehearsed for six hours, with half an hour for a sandwich, in the cramped little caravan. At four-thirty we went on to the floor and shot the entire scene just once. It lasted eight minutes and was one of the most perfect moments of supreme screen-acting I have ever witnessed. I shall never see its like again. She never put a foot wrong, not an effect was missed, the overlaps, the stumbling, the range, above all the brilliance of her range. The range was amazing; from black farce right through to black tragedy, a cadenza of pain and suffering, of bald, unvarnished truth. It had taken us three days to write; she passed every line as I set it down, “warts,” she said, “and all”; it took six hours to rehearse, eight minutes to shoot, and when it was over one of the crew walking across from the stage was stopped by one of his fellows.
“What,” said the man, “happened on your stage today?”
“A miracle,” said Bob.
And when finally the stuck-together, patched-up version of The Lonely Stage [re-titled I Could Go On Singing] opened it was, in the main, received with superlatives by a loyal, loving, Garland Press. One of the, at the time, leading critics, awash with what Judy called “spastic Garland mania” overstepped himself slightly: “There is one drunk scene,” he wrote, “with Bogarde which mixes laughs with tears with such expert timing that I felt like raising my hat to the script-writer. I am told, in fact, that this was one scene which did not go according to the script. Halfway through it Judy suddenly realised that this might well be a moment from her own life. The real Judy took over from the cinema heroine. She started to make up her own lines. Just you listen to them;” he sagely counsels his readers, “they are spoken from unhappy memories. Bogarde could only lean back, feed in a word here and there and let the camera move in on someone re-enacting an experience of her very, very own.” Three days writing, six hours rehearsal.
“The Servant”
UNDER Losey’s shrewd, watching eye, and with Bumble Dawson’s simple, brilliant designs for the clothes he would wear and live in, we started together to build the character of Barrett.
It is important to make it clear at this juncture that a brilliant designer, and Bumble was one of the very best, has a great deal to do with an actor’s performance. I am an actor who works from the outside in, rather than the reverse. Once I can wear the clothes which my alter-ego has chosen to wear, I then begin the process of his development from inside the layers. Each item selected by her was carefully chosen by Losey, down to the tiepin: a tight, shiny, blue serge suit, black shoes which squeaked a little, lending a disturbing sense of secret arrival, pork-pie hat with a jay’s feather, a Fair Isle sweater, shrunken, darned at the elbows, a nylon scarf with horses’ heads and stirrups. A mean, shabby outfit for a mean, shabby man.
For me the most important element of the wardrobe is always the shoes. From the shoes I can find the walk I must use; from the walk comes the stance, since naturally the spine is balanced on the feet. From the stance the shoulders may sag or become hunched, the neck might be thinly erect, or slip suggestively to one side or the other, the arms hang or are braced. In the chosen clothes one’s body starts to form another’s; another person walks and breathes in the shabby, serge suit. The whole is carried by the softly squeaking shoes. Thus the shape is arrived at; the physical frame.
Next the detail. Brylcreemed hair, flat to the head, a little scurfy round the back and in the parting, white puddingy face, damp hands (arms which hang loosely often have damp hands at their extremities, I don’t know why). Glazed, aggrieved eyes, and then the walk to blend the assembly together. These details are always obtained from observing other people; an extension of my father’s childhood game of “Pots and Pans”. Always examine, question, the little things which go to make up human behaviour. The nervous ticks, the throbbing vein, the sudden flush of pleasure or anger, the unaware habits under stress. Ask what makes a man use this behaviour, analyse why he does, try to trace it back to a source. A complicated game; but one which has proved invaluable. Barrett’s hair came from poor Philpot who ransacked Bendrose and went to clink. His walk I took from an ingratiating Welsh waiter who attended me in an hotel in Liverpool. The glazed and pouched eyes were those of a car salesman lounging against a Buick in the Euston Road, aggrieved, antagonistic, resentful, sharp; filing his nails.
With my paraphernalia assembled under Losey’s approving eye, with a superb text from Pinter handed to me as a gift, Barrett was ready to exist, there was almost nothing left to do but wind him up and set him off to work.
Like all the greatest directors, Losey never tells one what to do, or how to do it. Ever. Only what not to do. Which is very different. You give him your character and he will watch it develop, encouraging or modifying, always taking what is offered and using it deftly. You only know that you have done it to his ultimate satisfaction when he says, “Print!” at the end of a take. There is no waste of chatter, no great in-depth discussions about motivation, no mumbo-jumbo about identification, soul, or truth. You get on with it. Coward’s famous advice years ago to an actor still holds good. “Just learn your lines, dear,” he said, “and don’t bump into the furniture.”
With Pinter the same applies. We never, at any time either on The Servant or on the later, and far more complicated, Accident sat in huddled readings of the text having it explained or trying to find what was meaningful. Pinter’s scripts are honed and polished long before they reach the actor’s hand, and what he intends, or doesn’t intend, becomes abundantly clear and lucid the instant one starts to work. His writing, at least as far as I have personally been privileged to experience it, reminds me of a beautifully laid-out scenic model railway. A start and an end. Tunnels and level-crossings, gradients, cuttings, little stations and smaller halts, signals all the way. The whole track laid and set out with the precision of a master jeweller.
I EMBRACED my parents and took them across to meet Losey. His glass was empty. I refilled it and he took it automatically raising it only for a moment towards me in a silent toast just as Basil Dearden slowly, and gracefully, knelt at his feet.
“I am kneeling,” said Dearden, “as you will note, in respect and homage to you.”
Losey looked slightly embarrassed and smiled his gentle smile. “I really wish you wouldn’t, Basil, you are too far away . . .”
“Just tell me, I ask in all sincerity, how can I make a film like this?”
“Oh for God’s sake! You could…”
“How would I go about it? How should I even start?”
Losey took a slow sip of his vodka. “I can’t answer while you are down there.”
Basil rose and faced him squarely. “Well, how would I? How should I start… you must know?”
Losey grinned happily. “Sure I know. Shall I tell you? Well; first of all you take your son away from Eton, sell all Melissa’s furs, get rid of the house and the pool, get rid of the cars, pack a couple of suitcases and move into a small flat and think things over. That’s the only way I know, Basil… – no overheads; just the film.”
❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖
ON THE LAST morning of shooting on Accident, Arnold brought me my usual egg-and-bacon sandwich for breakfast. He tidied round the room a bit, laid out The Times and The Guardian and poured me a mug of coffee from his always-steaming coffee pot.
“Sad day today,” he said.
“Yes; sad day.”
“But I’ve just had some interesting news.”
“Oh.”
“You know Zelda? Zelda Barron?”
“Of course.”
“She’s doing Production Secretary on the new Jack Clayton film.”
“So, good for her.”
“Good for us too.”
“What do you mean, Arnold? I’m tired.”
“She read the script last night, says it’s a real beauty. Our Mother’s House.”
“And?”
“And there’s a smashing part for you in it.”
“Does Jack Clayton know, by any chance?”
“No, Hasn’t a clue. Hasn’t cast it. We thought you’d be perfect.”
“You and Zelda?”
“Sure, she’s going to suggest you at lunchtime when she sees Jack. He’s lovely.”
“Maybe, but he might have his own ideas, Arnold, he’d have asked me if he’d wanted me.”
“Hasn’t thought of you! That’s the point. It’s our idea.”
“Arnold! For the love of God. You can’t go begging parts for me!”
“We’ve both got to live, Governor, and I’ve got a kid to think of.”
“Yes, but you can’t do this; it might be terribly embarrassing. He may hate the idea, he’s probably got someone in mind you two don’t know anything about.”
“Hasn’t got anyone in mind. Told Zelda. Dead worried. Super part too. Just what you want after all these neurotic blokes. Cockney dad with eight kids. Right up your street. All on location in a house in Croydon; you’ll love it.”
He was absolutely right; I did. Clayton was highly amused by this unethical approach, but we talked it over and he seemed to think that Arnold and Zelda might be right.
“Not a very attractive role… shifty, seedy, and you have to face a whole gang of kids all on your own, there is no one else in the film, and they are pretty tough, but if you’d like to have a try?”
On my first morning in the gloomy house in Croydon I was in a bit of a funk. Eight pairs of eyes, ranging from five to fourteen, gazed at me solemnly. Not a smile, no welcoming grin even. In the little caravan in the scrubby front garden which I had been given to change in there was a jam jar stuffed with privet and some wilting Michaelmas daisies. Under it a note. “Let’s hope you are as good as you’re cracked up to be. You’d better be. Sincerely; The Children.”
I loved every second of the film which was one of the happiest I have ever made. The children were fantastic, good actors, kind, funny, devoted and professional. Clayton was a demanding, challenging, exciting director. We were all locked into a make-believe world which I found hard to break away from even at the weekend.
Perhaps we all got too lost in our Croydon existence, too isolated, too immune. For although we had all passionately believed and loved what we had set out to make together, no one else did. And the film was a failure. A distinguished failure to be sure, but failure nonetheless; it doesn’t much matter about the adjective used. At the Venice Festival our hopes, reasonably high, were very soon damned by faint praise and light applause. Walking back from the cinema to the hotel the air was sweet, the night soft, the moon riding over a flat, silver Adriatic. And I hoped never to see Venice again. Clayton and I could not ease each other’s distress very much. It is hard indeed to laugh off the severing of a limb, and so acute was our sadness that that is what it felt like to us. Even on the third or fourth glass of champagne we still tasted ashes, surrounded as we were by the noisy, happy audience who had attended our funeral and now seemed intent on turning it into an Irish wake.
Full of brave self-pity it is hardly surprising that I paid scant attention to the people all around me laughing and talking; instead I immersed myself in a deep and useless conversation with Clayton trying to work out, far too late, just where we had all gone wrong; so immersed was I that I quite failed to notice my future standing at the bar watching me. Luchino Visconti.
