Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool (17 page)

The small airport was empty. The other travellers had boarded the flight; the plane was waiting for its last three passengers. It was strange that no questions were asked about Gloria, but a few
of the airport workers gathered around, curious to find out why a woman in a wheelchair, dressed up in a glamorous fur coat, was leaving in such a hurry.

Suddenly it was time for her to leave. Joe and Jessie kissed her and then they moved away. I kissed her cheek and held her hand. She winked at me and smiled. We didn’t say goodbye.

I watched her being wheeled away. I waited by the gate looking after her until she was out of sight.

Then somebody grabbed my arm: an airport worker, a man in his forties. It took me a few seconds to work out what he was saying.

‘Was that Gloria Grahame? Was that the film star?’

Later that day, a few hours after being admitted to St Vincent’s Hospital, New York, Gloria died.

* * *

My mother and father did get to Australia.

Three days later I was at the same airport, at the same time. They were taking the same flight as Gloria had taken; the 6.20 a.m. to London’s Heathrow.

My father, wearing his cap, was nervously pacing about, and my mother wearing her headscarf, but dolled up to the eyeballs, was giving me instructions as to how I was to look after the
house.

‘Make sure that Candy has water in her bowl on the floor by the kitchen sink, and remember that the milkman gets paid on a Saturday.’

I shook hands with my father and gave my mother a big kiss. Then I left them to board the flight which was to take them off on their long-awaited holiday.

As I walked away from the gate I was pulled by the shoulder, my arm was almost wrenched from my body. It was the same airport worker who had stopped me three days earlier to ask if Gloria was a
film star.

‘And who was that one?’ he shouted. ‘Tell me, who was she?’

I turned round and my mother was still waving at the gate. ‘It’s another one,’ he cried. ‘I recognize the face. Tell me who she is.’

This time I smiled.

‘That one,’ I said, ‘was Hedy Lamarr.’

Reading my book thirty years after it was first published, what struck me most was how much more I know now about Gloria Grahame’s achievements as an actress than I did
then, and also how exciting it has been for me to see her stature grow. Yes, in the 1950s she did achieve Hollywood stardom, and indeed she does have her very own star cemented into Hollywood
Boulevard (I’ve now seen it), but when we first met in the late 1970s she hadn’t been in films for many years and so, in England, she wasn’t generally known. If people did
recognize her name it was only vaguely and there was a struggle to place her except as a B-movie actress who mostly played a floozy or a gangster’s moll – ‘Did her face get
scarred by a pot of scalding coffee? ‘Yes, that was in
The Big Heat
with Lee Marvin’ – but that perception of her was wrong. It didn’t quite sum her up.

Thirty years ago we didn’t have DVDs, we didn’t have the internet, film blogs, and we didn’t have YouTube. Thanks to all that, I’ve now seen most of her films. When I
first met her I couldn’t tell her that I’d seen her in any; except the one about a train crash and a circus and an elephant, which was wedged somewhere in the back of my memory from a
rainy Sunday afternoon watching the telly. Of course, now I know that film to be
The Greatest Show on Earth
, directed by Cecil B DeMille and which was nominated for five Oscars and won Best
Picture. A wonderful film, and Gloria’s performance in it playing Angel was stand-out. Her acting style was different, even alternative, and there was definitely something of the mystery
about her. Looking at her performances, what sets her apart from most other actors on the screen is that she seems to be the only one who’s thinking her character’s private thoughts.
She may be about to say something but, then thinking about it, she may change her mind and decide to say nothing. She’ll just look, think, and leave us to figure her out. Francois Truffaut
said of her that she was the only American actress who was a real person on the screen. The film critic Roger Ebert said that there was ‘something fresh and modern about her’, and in a
2015 article about her in the New York
Village Voice
to coincide with a retrospective of her films shown at the Lincoln Centre, Graham Fuller wrote that she ‘was one of the greatest
actresses of mid-twentieth-century Hollywood’.

Gloria worked for some of the great film directors like Edward Dmytryk, Vincent Minnelli, Frank Capra, Elia Kazan, Fritz Lang, and the impressive list goes on. She made over forty films
including
It’s a Wonderful Life
– in which she played Violet Bick;
Crossfire
– which she told me was her favourite and for which she was nominated for her first
Academy Award;
A Woman’s Secret
,
In a Lonely Place
,
Sudden Fear
,
The Bad and the Beautiful
– for which she won an Academy Award;
The Big Heat
,
Human Desire
,
Naked Alibi
,
The Cobweb
,
Not as a Stranger
, and
Oklahoma!
– which she told me she just hated because she couldn’t sing, she
couldn’t dance, and she couldn’t stand wearing ‘that bonnet’. Gloria worked in films alongside some of Hollywood’s legendary stars; Katherine Hepburn, James Stewart,
Lucille Ball, Frank Sinatra, Humphrey Bogart, Charlton Heston, Lana Turner, Joan Crawford; and now, over a thirty-year timespan, I’ve witnessed her take her rightful place among them.

The passing of years has also given me more time to appreciate Gloria the woman herself rather than Gloria the film star, and to realize the privilege I was handed to have journeyed with her
through several years of her life. Thinking back on the relationship we shared, I’ve laughed out loud at her knowing sense of humour and sighed at the memory of her blank and immovable
stubbornness. And, oh yes indeed, I remember her irresistible vulnerability. But, above all, what has become so apparent to me now, which wasn’t to me then, is how misunderstood Gloria was,
and how brave she had been in dealing with the barrage of falsehoods and inaccuracies about her from her turbulent days in Hollywood, where she was the victim, certainly by today’s standards,
of psychological and physical abuse. No matter what had happened to Gloria in life, or would happen, she always found the courage to carry on.

Turning over the pages of my book has turned over memories and thoughts about Gloria which had been lying dormant for years; words, images, truths about her life and also my own, which can only
be realized with time.

Gloria came to England in the spring of 1978 to play the role of Sadie Thompson in the Somerset Maugham play
Rain
, which was to have a three-week run at the Watford
Palace Theatre just on the outskirts of London. It was fitting, and I was amused, that on the day she arrived she was greeted by a full-blown rain-bashed day. I wondered why this Oscar-winning
actress I’d never heard of was not staying at the Ritz hotel or somewhere else fancy. Instead, she was renting a ground-floor room, albeit one with a kitchen, in a house near Primrose Hill
which let rooms to actors, and where I, one of those actors, rented the room at the top. I didn’t know then that she didn’t have money to spare.

I was drawn to her soon after we first met when she asked if she could borrow a shirt because her own was in the laundry. Then, a day or so later, when she asked if I could lend her five pounds
until she could get to a bank, we became friends.

In those early days, on my way to my ‘between acting jobs’, I’d notice her as I was either entering or leaving the house and she’d ask questions if we met in the hall.
Where could she mail a letter? Where could she catch a bus to Huston station (she meant Euston station but she never did get that one sorted out). Where did I buy my kebab?

Within a week we were eating kebabs together at Andy’s Kebab House or having dinner at Mustoe Bistro in Regents Park Road. Nobody paid her any attention. She didn’t dress up or look
glamorous. It didn’t feel like I was hanging out with a film star at all.

On one of her days off from rehearsal, when I offered to show her the neighbourhood, we walked together over Primrose Hill and then on to Camden Town and I plucked up the courage to ask her
about Hollywood. No go. Gloria would say very little. She wanted to know more about me. How come I started acting ten years ago? How long had I spent at drama school? What character was I playing
in the television series
Spearhead
, which was about to be aired on British TV?

Watching Gloria figure out cooking one night down in her rooms I saw that she had a copy of
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
on her desk, which seemed a bit surprising, and so I
just mentioned, because I thought she’d be interested, that three years earlier I’d played Romeo in
Romeo and Juliet
at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield.

Gloria instantly gave up on her cooking. She turned off the grill. She left the bread in the toaster. She put the cheese aside.

Then, sitting down beside me, knowing it by heart, the role she’d always wished she’d played, Gloria recited whole Juliet speeches without fluffing a line.

That long and special night, Gloria told stories about her early stage-work before she went to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and about her lifelong acting teacher – her Scottish mother, Jeannie
McDougall – who’d encouraged her passion. Of how Jeannie had been an actress in London in the 1910s and had trained at the prestigious Sir Frank Benson theatre company, an early
training ground for actors, which was dedicated to the plays of William Shakespeare and the importance of clear diction and speech. And of how, years later, after Jeannie had married Michael
Hallward and they’d left England for America, where Gloria was born, Jeannie subsequently (after divorcing Michael) started her own acting school in California, based entirely on Sir Frank
Benson’s principles – Shakespeare, diction, speech – and so, in time, Gloria became her pupil.

Knowing so much about Shakespeare’s heroines, from Juliet to Rosalind, Gloria told me that when she’d be working on film roles, she and her mother would look for similarities in the
character she was playing with some of those heroines from Shakespeare’s plays. Is there a hint of Hermia in
Oklahoma
’s Ado Annie, perhaps? Or a layer of Lady Macbeth in Vicki
Crawford in
Human Desire
, I’ve since wondered?

And watching Gloria’s films again now, I can detect her mother’s insistence in the production of clear diction and speech, particularly in
The Bad and the Beautiful
, where in
the first scenes Gloria invests Rosemary Bartlett with perfect enunciation until, in the later scenes, Gloria seems to forget about it and relaxes into her regular, more comfortable speech
patterns.

In that spring and summer of 1978, Gloria enjoyed living the kind of life I usually led. We went on walks around London, saw plays at fringe theatres, and, even though Gloria
rarely drank alcohol, her favourite tipple being cold milk, she liked to spend evenings together in the local pubs.

Gloria was fascinated by the Plantagenet and Tudor English kings – an American-in-London kind of thing, I supposed then – and so I trooped with her to see Hampton Court Palace and
the Tower of London. How excited she would have been if she’d have known then what I learnt, six years after she had died, when I received a letter from Charles Kidd, editor of
Debrett’s Peerage
, telling me that while researching his book,
Debrett’s Goes to Hollywood
, he’d discovered that Gloria Grahame was a descendent of John of Gaunt,
Duke of Lancaster, the son of King Edward the Third.

The place she wanted to visit most though was my hometown of Liverpool. She loved stories about my growing-up there with my eight older brothers and sisters. Her favourite story was one about
the Pivvy, an old variety theatre near to where we lived, where my mother was a cleaner. Aged seven, I would accompany her there when she went to do the ‘pick up’, which involved
picking up discarded theatre tickets and sweet wrappers off the floor between shows, and I would go onto the stage as it was being brushed and imagine I was an actor in a play. The first time
Gloria did visit my family there, she claimed that Liverpool was the most romantic place on earth. Liverpool? Was she kidding? No. Living back in the city now, thirty years later, I think that
Gloria was right.

Having been probed about the relationship over the years, it’s even plainer to me now why Gloria and I made the transition from friends to lovers. It happened because we had become
intriguingly attracted to each other and had grown increasingly close. There was no song or dance about it. Yes, Gloria was almost thirty years older than me but I’d grown up around sisters
twenty years my senior and so I was comfortable around women much older than myself. Yes, my sexuality was fluid, but there were no heavy ‘gay or straight’ conversations because there
was no need. To Gloria and myself, there were no obstacles. It was only as far as other people were concerned that the relationship we shared didn’t fit into a box. There were cynics. It was
1978. Eyebrows were raised in a way that perhaps they would not be now. Since then, attitudes towards sexual identity, as well as attitudes towards women, particularly over the age of fifty, have
changed enormously. I’m very glad about that.

Having re-read
Film Stars
I’m reminded of how the late 1970s were interesting years for my acting career too. Since being noticed at The National Youth Theatre and then leaving
drama school, I’d worked with theatre companies in Glasgow, Sheffield, and London. I’d played Harry in the film
The Comeback
, the lead role in a John Bowen play and the lead role
in a three-part series, both for the BBC. Then from July 1978 until July 1981, throughout the entire course of my relationship with Gloria, I was playing Terry Adams in the television drama series
Spearhead
, appearing in sixteen hour-long episodes in all. Gloria was delighted to learn that I was soon to play Trinculo in Derek Jarman’s film version of Shakespeare’s
The
Tempest
, and even more excited to be able to pass on the news to ‘Mother’.