Going Up (30 page)

Our director was Wolf Rilla. His half-Jewish father, the actor Walter Rilla, had quit Germany in 1934, when Wolf was fourteen. He had no problem working with Hardy Kruger, but he was a rather solemn film-maker, not wholly suited to Leslie’s and my larky screenplay (based, with all but slipshod looseness, on
As You Like It
). Wolf had been at school at Frensham Heights and then went up to Cambridge, but he remained irredeemably foreign in manner and dress (his scripts were holstered in a Mitteleuropan leather music-case).

During the making of
Bachelor of Hearts
, Wolf lived near Rutland Street with the actress Valerie Hanson. When they came to dinner, he told the first story about drugs that I ever heard: two potheads are walking down a long steep hill. A man comes running at full tilt from the top of the hill and with a yell of ‘excuse me’ passes clean between them and runs on down to the bottom. After a long moment, one pothead looks at the other and says, ‘I thought he’d never go.’ Wolf had high ambitions as an
auteur
but lacked the force or luck to fulfil them. A few years later, after the failure of his own solemn production
The World Ten Times Over
, which Beetle and I applauded as long and as loudly as we dared, Wolf’s career folded. He married an English woman and went to run a hotel in Provence.

Vivian Cox had been an associate producer on
Trio
and
Quartet
, in which Somerset Maugham had introduced clutches of his own short stories
transposed to the screen. The presence of the renowned Old Party, and his shyness, had intimidated the unit. During an afternoon break, one of the sparks broke the ice by going up to the great man and saying, ‘’ave a cuppa tea, Somerset’. Vivian gave us to understand that he and Willie had been on quite close terms. When I told him that Maugham was in town and that Alan Searle had asked me to arrange a bridge game for him at Crockford’s, Vivian told me to be sure to give Willie his regards.

At dinner, with Guy Ramsey, Edward Meyer (the
Times
bridge correspondent) and Kenneth Konstam, the Old Party recalled that I had been on my way to Spain when he last saw me. I told him how much I enjoyed it, but not that I had lost his ‘Open Sesame’ letter. When I found occasion to deliver Vivian Cox’s message, Maugham did not recall the name. ‘Ah well,’ he said, ‘more people know Tom Fool than Tom Fool knows.’ He was courteous enough to ask about my musical comedy. On learning that the production date seemed regularly to recede, he was not at all surprised. When we went upstairs to the two-shilling room, Maugham clenched his cigarette-holder in his prognathous jaw and addressed himself, with unnecessarily apologetic modesty, to the matter in hand.

Leslie and I were contacted about a musical that was already on tour and needed expert attention before it could be exposed to Ken Tynan and his unkind cuts. It had been written by two doctors, Al Kaplan and Robin Fordyce. Al was in his early thirties, a sleek, handsome, rich, bisexual Canadian, married to Susie Sieff, of the Marks & Spencer’s dynasty. By the time our deal was confirmed, Leslie had already driven himself, in his new ‘wagon’, down to Plymouth where the show was being tried out in front of dwindling audiences. Al offered me a lift in his grey Rolls Bentley convertible. It had a diminutive, clitoridal gear lever empanelled between the seats. He had meant to use his other, sporty car, but its transmission made unhealthy noises. ‘Take my advice, Frederic: never buy one of those tinny Lagondas.’ When we were crossing Salisbury Plain, Al asked if I had ever driven a Rolls. I really should; it was so easy.

‘One day,’ I said.

Al said, ‘And why not today?’ He pulled in and invited me to take his place. It was true: the car was smooth and almost silent (David Ogilvy had recently advertised the Rolls-Royce to America by claiming that ‘at 60 miles an hour the loudest sound is the ticking of the dashboard clock’). I drove with proper wariness. Al became impatient. ‘Put your foot down, it’d be good to get there today.’

When I accelerated, the smoothness of the ride made it seem that we were not going very fast. The Great West Road was only one lane in each direction. I was enjoying the silent speed and Al’s approval when, in the straight distance ahead of us, I saw one big lorry pull out to overtake another. They rolled towards us, side by side. The inside driver was reluctant to give way. In a strange conjunction of the slow and the sudden, I was aware that the overtaking lorry was heading straight at us. I pressed the brake pedal, but the Rolls was much, much heavier than anything I had ever driven and it did not have power-assisted brakes. I pressed down with panicky weight and the car slowed, slowly. So did the lorry on our side of the road. We stopped, almost bumper to bumper, while the other, unyielding, lorry driver thundered past Al’s window. I was afraid that he would reproach me for our close-run thing. When I looked at him, he was smiling.

The star of
Jubilee Girl
was Lizbeth Webb. I had seen her in
Bless the Bride
when I was first going out with Hilary Phillips. Now a big star, Miss Webb was gallant enough not to desert a sinking enterprise. She wore ‘me mink’ as proof of her buoyant stardom. With blithe Cambridge ruthlessness, Leslie and I decided to change her leading man and also to dispense with the services of Irene Handl, who had been memorable, although uncredited, in
Brief Encounter
, in which she doubled as cinema organist and a Kardomah waitress. She accepted my Judas kiss on her abrasive cheek and probably considered herself well out of the show. She later wrote a singular novel entitled
The Sioux
. She was replaced, to no marked effect, by an
actress whose claim to fame was that, for many years, she had been the musical comedy star Cicely Courtneidge’s understudy.

I rewrote many of the scenes in
Jubilee Girl
and directed the actors in their new lines and moves in the mornings and afternoons. In the evening they had to go on and honour the script we were in the process of dismantling. The
doyenne
of the cast was Marie Lohr, the star, in 1930, of Maugham’s
The Breadwinner
. In her mid-sixties, she was, in my eyes, a venerable old lady. I was touched by her punctuality – she was always the first to arrive, with her knitting, at rehearsal – and heartened by small nods at my directorial suggestions.

Marie had one wistful song in the show, ‘Style, Form and Grace’, which she impersonated perfectly. We stood with her on the foreshore at South-sea when Khrushchev and Bulganin sailed out of Portsmouth harbour on their way home to Russia after their double act had completed its brief British tour (leaving the secret service’s frogman ‘Buster’ Crabbe dead in Portsmouth harbour after venturing too near the Russians’ ship). Should we wave or should we not? Marie thought it would be polite, so we did. She had stood in the same place when the Grand Fleet passed in review before the king-emperor in the summer of 1914.

The choreographer John Cranko came down, at Al’s invitation, to inspect how we were doing. He had just directed the innovatory revue
Cranks
, in which the young Anthony Newley was conspicuously brilliant. Cranko’s verdict was that we had replaced bad direction with what was no better. Leslie allowed it to be thought that the direction had largely been my work. He may have had Cranko to thank for his introduction to Tony Newley, with whom he later had a successful collaboration, most notably in creating the hit musical
Stop the World – I Want to Get Off
. Getting on was much more Leslie’s wish; and it was thoroughly fulfilled. He wrote some lyrics for Hank Mancini’s theme music for
Two for the Road
. I was not eager that his words should feature on the soundtrack of what Stanley Donen told
me was my film. They were heard elsewhere and still adhere to the movie’s credits on the DVD.

Jubilee
Girl
had another director or two before it opened at the Victoria Palace, where it did not last long. In 1969, Al Kaplan telephoned me from Italy to say that he wanted to produce the script of Iris Murdoch’s
A Severed Head
, which I had written originally for John Schlesinger. John refused to accept the casting of Larry Harvey (or Dirk Bogarde) as Martin Lynch-Gibbon and the project was dropped until Elliott Kastner acquired the rights. Al told me that he knew that I had a controlling interest. If I did not consign the rights to him he would have me killed. He then rang off. He died shortly afterwards, of an overdose of the drugs he was said to have supplied to the higher echelons of Italian showbiz. I sometimes wonder how nice Dr Jekyll really was.

I met Tony Newley only once. During the run of
Stop the World – I
Want to Get Off
, he and Leslie dropped in when I was visiting Vivian Cox. On their way out of the
garçonnière
, Newley offered me his hand and said, ‘Good luck in whatever you choose to do in life.’ A few years later, when I had won the Oscar for writing
Darling
, Leslie was the first person to call from California to congratulate me; he was followed by Yvonne and, after that, by his chum Tony Newley and his then wife Joan Collins.

I
N MAY 1956, we gave a publication party for
Obbligato
at Chelsea Embankment. I decorated the blank hall wall with a large pastel mural that recalled the bucolic San Gemignano. Alan Maclean was not of the company. Nevertheless, we seemed to know a lot of people. Ken Tynan brought the gauntly beautiful, long-haired Elizabeth Jane Howard. She posed at the head of the short stairs into our basement as if she was likely to be photographed. She had already published a couple of elegant novels and had had a famous liaison with Arthur Koestler. She would put it to fictional use in
After Julius
. Ken embraced Dotty Tutin as the reassuring evidence that the company did not lack class.

Obbligato
was reviewed amiably, if patronisingly, by a double-barrelled Marie in the
Sunday Times
. Her weekly batch, in which I came last, was headed by a fanfare for
Tunes of Glory
by James Kennaway, who had been at Oxford with Tony Becher’s new wife, Anne. Guy Ramsey assured me that to be reviewed at all, and at decent length, was quite something. Vanity and a certain shame, at the levity of my first book, impelled me to feel that it was not enough. The Suez crisis was brewing.
Obbligato
was a nugatory squib published just as the illusion of Britain’s hegemony was about to be fractured and the Angry Young Men taken to be the harbingers of a new society.

On a grey Sunday afternoon in late October, Beetle and I were in the loud crowd in Whitehall. Banners and voices were raised against Eden’s war. Wedged among the synchronised yells of the committed, I was uneasy when people started rolling marbles under the hooves of the police horses (‘Eden’s cavalry’); it did not seem sporting. Although I thought the attack on Egypt was ill-conceived and worse managed, I remember thinking, as we surged towards Downing Street, that we were doing Britain’s cause, whatever it was, no good by baying at the Prime Minister’s door. Even cynics did not yet realise to what extent the whole operation was rigged, with Israel as the patsy, to lend virtuous allure to the Franco-British ‘intervention’.

We met Poznan Mirosevic-Sorgo and another old Jordan’s Yard
habitué
, Stefan Danieff, coming, solemn-faced, down Whitehall against the current. They had just heard Imre Nagy’s desperate appeal to the West not to allow Khrushchev and his friends to crush the Hungarian revolt. Poznan feared, and perhaps slightly hoped, that the West was about to go to war with the Soviet Union. Eden’s post-imperial paroxysm had created a rupture between Europe and the US at the worst possible moment. I was ashamed of the West’s politic indifference to the repression of the Hungarian revolt and, later, the execution of Imre Nagy; but I was relieved that the crises were followed by peace with dishonour. If anyone else recalled Jean Cocteau’s remark, after the French surrender in June 1940, ‘
Vive cette paix honteuse!
’, no one was tactless enough to cite it.

Eden fell. After Randolph Churchill had gloated in the
Evening Standard,
‘Rab Butler has had it’, Harold Macmillan, who had panicked when his displeased old colleague Eisenhower threatened to scupper the pound, entered 10 Downing Street. Rab’s disappointment was the ultimate revenge of the Churchills on the most durable of pre-war appeasers. In the 1970s, as President of the Royal Society of Literature, Butler told an after-dinner story about two ‘Jewboys’. I took it upon myself to write to him in reproachful terms. He responded with appeasing hauteur. My life has been littered with
mutations of the Provost of Guildford. I rather wish I had once struck one of them, instead of writing reproachful letters. Sometimes, like the late Sir Ian Gilmour, when met in person, they turn out to have disappointing charm.

Beetle wanted daylight and she wanted a baby. I was reluctant both to leave Chelsea, where we could not afford anything above ground, and to bring another Jew into the world. Beetle was not about to have Mr Hitler determine our lives. It was not long before she was pregnant. We discovered that Celia Ramsey’s friend Marion Slater wanted to sell the lease of her cottage in Rutland Street, not far from Harrods, where she may well have acquired her elegant accent. Her husband, from whom she was separated, was a handsome society portraitist. If the young Celia had not had an affair with him, she was not disposed to deny it.

Before the lease could be ceded, I had to be approved by the landlord, a Greek gentleman called Tachmindji. He had a City office with a humpbacked roll-top desk. I had never before met a Greek, of whatever confused Levantine lineage. I passed his exam without difficulty and we moved into 14 Rutland Street. The rent was £6 a week. In the usual way in those days, we had to buy most of Marion Slater’s furniture. The double bed had a gammy leg; after it gave way, we splinted it with disused historical and philosophical volumes.

A day after our arrival, I drove up to find the space directly in front of our house taken by another vehicle. I parked in an adjacent void. That evening, a card came through our letter box, headed ‘From Mr Justice Hinchcliffe’. It read: ‘Please refrain from parking your car in front of number 12. It blocks the light and air from the basement room and causes great inconvenience to all.’ We never had another neighbourly communication from his lordship. He later presided over the libel action brought by Brian Glanville against the actor David Kossoff, whose speciality it was to play endearing, folkloric Jews. Brian was accused of commercially motivated ‘anti-Semitism’ when writing his 1958 novel,
The Bankrupts
. In it, he anticipated Philip Roth’s
Goodbye, Columbus
in taking a scathing, ‘disloyal’ view of middle-class Jewish society; in Brian’s case, the Golders Green community among whom his father had his dental practice. Mr Justice Hinchcliffe directed the jury decisively, and rightly, in favour of the plaintiff. Kossoff had to pay suitable damages and costs.

1950s London did not lack people of a certain age who made a habit of standing on their dignity. One afternoon, I happened to cut a retired, no doubt gallant, brigadier as a partner in the Crockford’s two-shilling room. I made a rather bold opening bid, of ‘one spade’ with only three of that suit in my hand. As a result, the opposition was bluffed out of making a cold game. The brigadier considered himself to have been misled, albeit to his own side’s advantage. As the cards were being reshuffled for the next hand, he said, ‘Do you mind if I say something to you rather frankly?’ ‘Not at all, sir,’ I said, ‘as long as you don’t mind my saying something equally frank in response.’ The brigadier said, ‘I’ve never been spoken to like that before in my entire life.’

Our life in Rutland Street was well-lit, constricted and genteel. The woman who lived across from us had a dog named Bertie, when she was pleased with him, Bert
ram
when she was not. I had worked well in our murky but romantic Chelsea basement; in Knightsbridge I did many things, but almost all were incidental, although sometimes lucrative. Thanks to the initiative of a young singer called Jim Dale, I composed a radio version of
Obbligato
, in which he starred as the improvising natural, Frank Smith (‘It’s all false and fake / Yes, every move I make’). Once the youngest professional comic on the variety stage, Jim Dale went on to have a long career as a versatile performer (he was in many of the
Carry On
movies) and lyricist: he wrote the hit song
Georgy Girl
. He was frequently nominated for Tony Awards for his performances on Broadway.

Toting a heavy army surplus wireless, I continued to do a number of BBC radio interviews. Several were with Caribbean writers who were establishing
themselves in London: George Lamming, Samuel Selvon and others. There were few black people in Knightsbridge and none in our social life. Johnny Quashie-Idun had been in
Out of the Blue
, in which he sang to a guitar and took part in a number entitled ‘No Room at the Inn’. Based on a news story that some visiting black celebrity had been denied a room at the Ritz, it scarcely raised the colour question in any pressing form; but we imagined ourselves taboo-breakingly bold.

Bernard Sheridan – an articled clerk during Beetle’s time at the legal partnership Aukin, Courts – was now a qualified solicitor. He invited me to attend one of his
pro bono
surgeries at a legal aid centre off the Holloway Road, where I posed as an intern. A white couple sought Bernard’s advice because their landlady was trying to chase them out of a flat they had occupied for fifteen years. She wanted to put ‘Negroes’ into it. Why would anyone want to do that? Simple: they could be racked for much higher rents.

I longed to be taken for a writer of the kind applauded by Cyril Connolly or Jack Davenport; but I was particularly pleased when George Greenfield sold one of my short stories to the down-market
Everybody’s
, for £40. It was based on my adventures in Morocco and my encounter with Mr Tree on the ferry to Gibraltar. Big, floppy, vulgar
Everybody’s
was not a magazine that any Leavisite would deign to read, but I could be sure that it had bought my story for no snobbish reason. I continued to review the odd book for the
Cambridge Review
, but I made no prudent contacts in London literary circles. Karl Miller had resigned from the Treasury as a protest against the Suez operation and became literary editor of
The Spectator
. I did not hear from him.

The irksome local effect of Suez was petrol rationing; its surtaxed price soared to six shillings a gallon. Leslie Bricusse bought a blister-shaped, three-wheeled bubble car, big enough for two. Its hatch opened upwards and outwards at the front and it did 100 miles to the gallon. I dreaded its puttering arrival in Rutland Street. It was, however, easy to park without
vexing Mr Justice Hinchcliffe. Nothing that Leslie wanted to do answered any of my genuine ambitions, least of all his repeated request that I take yet another look at the book of
Lady at the Wheel
.

One day, I ran into Richard Bird, my old bridge partner. We began to have irregular lunches at L’Escargot in Greek Street. In decorous style, we chose to pay the bill alternately. Whoever’s turn it was to pay next would call the other to fix a date. Richard had joined the Ministry of Transport and had amusing stories to tell about the vanity of little Ernest Marples, the man who drilled the often flooded tunnel under Hyde Park Corner. We played bridge again and seemed to have become the kind of grown-up friends one was supposed to make at Cambridge. One lunchtime, as he paid the bill, I remarked that it was a shame that he had not met Beetle. Would he come and dine with us sometime? An evening was fixed; Beetle took great care with the food and I with the bottle; Richard left with expressions of warm gratitude. I assumed that the dinner party was the equivalent of a lunch and left it to him to call me to fix our next date. I have never seen or heard from him since.

When commercial television started, Jock Jacobsen arranged for Leslie and me to go, with a Granada TV producer, Kenneth Hurren (‘Call me Kenneth; or Ken, obviously’), to see (Sir) Douglas Fairbanks in his office overlooking Hyde Park. Our mission was to suggest a way for him to do his projected television show, which would be ‘different’ and colourful; someone had recently described the star, a legendary figure, not yet fifty, as ‘grey all over’.

His door was badged with plaques declaring various Fairbanks enterprises. ‘We have to have them for tax reasons,’ one of his sidekicks told us.

Inside, we were greeted by the trademark smile, inherited from his daredevil and acrobatic Hollywood father. ‘The sun is over the yard-arm, gentlemen. I’m afraid I haven’t any gin. I can offer you whisky, vodka and tonic…’ Below the winning eyes, the face was triangular; there was just
room for a brief nose, a scimitar of moustache and the irresistible grin. He sat down behind the wide, vacant shelf of his desk. ‘I’m unique,’ he said, ‘unique good or unique bad, depending on how you look at it.’ He spoke of himself as he might about a very old and dear friend. ‘If I do what everyone does, I might as well not be on the programme.’

‘What did you feel about last week’s show?’ I asked him.

‘Here’s the consensus. This is of friends, you know. They thought I was nervous. That’s ridiculous. I was not nervous. Then they thought I was condescending. Of course, I’m
not
condescending, but that’s what they thought. And gushing…’

‘That’s ridiculous,’ one of his aides said. ‘You’re not gushing at all.’

‘How’s the billing going to read?’ Fairbanks said. ‘Can we get a lead there? “Granada TV and Douglas Fairbanks present…”’

‘Can’t have that,’ Kenneth said. ‘Granada have to be the programme contractors. That’s under the Act.’

The telephone rang. It was Selwyn Lloyd, the Foreign Secretary, to say that, yes, he could come for cocktails on Saturday. Mrs Fairbanks had to be informed right away. It seemed that Selwyn Lloyd was subbing for some brighter light who was not able to make it.

‘Now, gentlemen, a refill?’

‘What if we put you in an office?’ Leslie said.

‘Too formal.’

‘Or with a —’

‘No props.’

‘Perhaps you should start by doing something funny. To put people —’

‘I’m not a gag man.’

‘What about a backstage approach?’ Leslie said.

‘A knock on the door, you mean, “You’re on, Mr Fairbanks”, that kind of thing?’

Kenneth said, ‘How about the Garroway approach?’

Even Leslie could not pretend to know what that was.

‘This guy did this show on TV in Chicago. Dave Garroway. It’s the Chicago version I’m talking about here, not the New York one. He just sort of ambled on and announced the next act, very casual – he had this manner, it got to be so famous that they called it “the Garroway approach”.’

‘Casual?’

‘Totally. Totally casual. The Chicago show, this was.’ Kenneth looked at his watch, took his hat. ‘I’ve got to go. That’s just a suggestion. You people carry on.’

‘Of course,’ Dougie said. ‘That’s the way we do things here. We just bounce an idea off the wall and … see where we get.’

Two hours later, we accompanied Fairbanks and his entourage to the street, where he got into his Rolls Bentley and sat democratically next to the chauffeur.