Liberation (16 page)

Then we went to eat at Odin's and were joined by Patrick Procktor, who was so irritating that I spoke to him quite angrily, which delighted him. He is a really malicious bitch. This morning I ran into him at Ron Kitaj's show.
^*
Patrick had brought his dog with him into the gallery, and Ron came out, quite annoyed, and said, “I gave orders that no dogs were to be let in,” to which Patrick replied, “I felt sure you couldn't be serious.” Later, I'm almost certain I heard him running down Ron's painting to a young man, on the street, near the gallery entrance, as I was coming out.

Then I went hunting for a gold chain for Don, along Bond Street and in the jewellers' shops of the Burlington Arcade. Nothing even remotely suitable. The jewellers here say that the chain Truman Capote had from Bulgari's in Rome must have been copied from an antique one.

Then I had lunch with Jean Cockburn
⁷⁴
and her daughter Sarah and three of their friends at a little restaurant in Chancery Lane. Jean looks old but still rather beautiful and she is very lively and active and mentally on the spot—and as political as ever. Sarah is a barrister and, according to Jean, hasn't cared to marry because “since she took to the law, she has seen so much of what marriage lets you in for.” Sarah is rather plump but quite nice looking.

Seeing Jean made me happy;
^†
I think if I lived here I'd see a lot of her—that is, if I could do so without being involved in her communism. Her devotion to Sarah doesn't seem repulsive, either. Peggy [Ross] is an invalid most of the time, because of her arthritis, and their mother has had a stroke. So Jean is kept very busy.

This afternoon I worked with Bob Chetwyn on the play. Again I liked him very much and found him really intelligent in his comments and suggestions. It worries me a bit, though, that he now says that he doesn't think he
will
do the other play—they are making too many conditions—and so he is now determined to push on with the casting of ours. Also, he added that he wished Don could be here when he hires an art director. So, suddenly, I begin to wonder if I
shall
leave on Wednesday, after all! Suppose Tom Courtenay unexpectedly says yes? And, even if I do go, how long will it be before Don and I have to come back here again?

 

April 25.
More chilly rainstorms, and just now some thunder.

Supper with Tony Richardson last night was not a success. Tony was glum, and we courtiers—David, Peter, Neil, Bob and me— were too familiar and perhaps too attentive for his taste. I should never have let David persuade me to push myself in, especially as I am to go there tonight as well. I wouldn't drink (which displeased Tony but has already got me back down to 154 pounds), and I felt dull. We went to an Indian restaurant (the Tandoori) and ate Tandoori chicken. Tony quite casually admitted that he has heard nothing from Albee yet and that Edward Bond's Nijinsky script is useless.
⁷⁵
I couldn't help hinting, very very discreetly, that I'd be happy to take a shot at it.

Afterwards we went to a queer pub, the Coleherne Arms, and obediently waited around in the huge pre-closing-time crowd, until our Leader, who was wearing a fringed leather jacket, decided that he would stick around for a while and perhaps collect another recruit. I was somewhat favorably impressed by the clients—nobody smashing, but lots of possibles. David was unwell; “I have a
rotten
headache,” he kept repeating, in dismay. Peter would have liked to go on the town.

Today I had lunch with [Marguerite and her companion] and with “Spider” Quennell
⁷⁶
(whom I quite like) at a little restaurant called Parkes on Beauchamp Place which Marguerite says has five stars and is one of the best in London—a place run by (I guess) queens. The food was certainly okay—but we merely had steak sandwiches. Marguerite says Ivan is back, and is off with Kate at some country house party; but she doesn't believe there is a real reconciliation. Ivan looks very well and enjoyed himself in Spain and is inclined to think marriage is merely a habit and that maybe he has just broken himself of it. There was some discussion of his financial state; can he
afford
to leave Kate and just play around?

[Marguerite's companion] seemed very pleased to see me, sorry I'm leaving England and altogether affectionate. He told a very curious story—how he heard two middle-aged Jewish business men (“They were
Jewish
,” [he] said, looking me in the eye and slightly underlining the word) in Fortnum and Mason's, discussing the best way of travelling from Calais to Switzerland. This seemed ordinary enough, although they did it in great detail, showing off a lot of information about roads, hotels, etc. But
then
they discussed how best to travel from London to Eastbourne—disagreeing with each other in both cases. And
then
—one of them asked the other, “How would you get from here” (meaning their table in the tea room) “to your car?” and they discussed
that
!

 

April 26.
More greyness and rain. I
know
that I shall have to leave before they have any spring here—so I'll be doing the British a real service on Wednesday next.

Yesterday afternoon I went round to see Alexis Rassine. I'd resisted calling him simply because that infuriating old John [Lehmann] told me to, but really he is very pleasant to be with and I'm fond of him. A bald star of yesteryear in gracious and dignified retirement, with his old man's face and his youthful well-made body, he is still sexy and by no means on the shelf—indeed he is planning to open a dance school of his own and already has backers to form a company which will take care of it as a business operation. He sipped bourbon and repeatedly tried to get me to join him. I stuffily refused, because of my efforts to lose those sinful pounds. (Was
just
below eleven stone this morning!) Alexis likes to talk about actresses, what was Garbo like when I knew her, etc. He had seen some beautiful legs from behind in a shop—and the lady turned and
it was Marlene
[
Dietrich
]! He had met Ava Gardner too, she looked “glamorous” but she drank a lot and her language was terrible. (He pronounced the name as “Arva” and, like nearly all the English, called Houston “Hooston.”) A big dog, referred to as “the Monster,” kept trotting in and out, wanting to be played with and fetching articles of clothing. Alexis brushed me up the right way by saying he thought
A Meeting
was one of the best of my books. I answered that John doesn't think so; he much prefers the prewar ones, he once told me. Alexis protested. He also told me, “You never change—I always tell John you're one of the indestructibles.” When we said goodbye, he kissed me warmly and I even think that, if I'd had that drink, a dissolve of ten minutes might have discovered us rolling naked on John's double bed. It would have been sort of suitable and maybe a barrel of fun.

I went on to Tony Richardson's, where I found Patrick Woodcock. We had had a little conspiracy about this, Patrick was to ask if he could come by for a drink—because there seemed no other chance of our meeting—and hope he would be asked to stay to supper. But he had never had the chance of talking to Tony, who was now upstairs resting.

Patrick was in a rather naughty-boy mood, rarin' to get drunk because he wasn't on call that evening. We immediately got onto the subject of dieting because
I
wouldn't drink, and exchanged confessions of our gluttony. Patrick doesn't eat
any
breakfast, but then he's apt to break down and stuff himself with cakes and candy. Tony came in and found us giggling and, I think, suspected some conspiracy against his dictatorship, but he became gracious and held forth to Patrick about a theory he had formed last night in the Indian restaurant—after looking through David Hockney's glasses he decided that they filter out color, and that this is why David's colors are so “cool.” Tony also talked of his terror of blindness. And of his untidiness; he simply
refuses
to put his clothes away, just throws them on the floor, because “life is too full of things to do.”

Then the two other guests came in, [. . .] Billy McCarty [and a friend]. They both seemed to know me or Don or both, I couldn't quite be sure. [The friend] is a very good-looking oldish youngish man with a slim strong figure, conservatively dressed. Billy McCarty is a decorator, pretty but not very, extremely tall, with a messy physique, skinny with a belly on him, hips too wide, wretched arms, no torso—dressed in a white sweater with a big fancy belt. However he melted me by praising Don's show—he had been out there when it opened, visiting the Duquettes. And he was jetting over to New York tomorrow to take on some extremely chic job; he's an American who lives in London but earns his money in the States.
⁷⁷

Tony talked amusingly of his awful experiences, years ago, when they took
Look Back in Anger
to Moscow and were at first treated like mud, given no transportation and almost nothing to eat—with the food served hours after it had been ordered—and then, much too late, when the bureaucratic machine had at last registered the fact they were VIPs, given the red carpet and the grandest suite in the biggest hotel and “the best table” in the restaurant—which was right under a blaring band!

[Billy's friend], who seemed to be an authority on such matters, told us that, for a tourist, Stockholm is the most expensive city in the world.

Billy then began bragging about his girlfriends, including a man who'd had a sex-change operation. “Has she a proper cunt?” Patrick asked. “Oh yes,” said Billy, “I
know
, because I've fucked her.” “Has she a clitoris?” I asked. “Well no—no, not exactly,” Billy admitted. “Thank you,” I said, “the case for the Crown rests.” Patrick, now quite fairly drunk, drove me home. He denounced [Billy and his friend]; they were ruthless spongers. Billy would latch on to anyone of either sex, if he or she was rich. They had both been living in Tony's house and had without doubt got money out of him. “Aren't I a shit?” said Patrick, repenting. “Tell Don I'm still a shit.” “He doesn't think you're a shit.” “Oh,” said Patrick, as we hugged each other goodbye, “Don knows me very well indeed.”

A talk with Jean Cockburn on the phone, this morning. She says it's quite untrue that the journalists got her to go to a performance of
Cabaret
and meet Judi Dench; she refused to do so. She thinks it was Claud Cockburn who gave her away. But she says that Claud's son (by his present wife) who is now in college is often asked if Sally Bowles is his mother!
⁷⁸
She told me that Sarah had liked me and said I was “very self-contained and quick on the uptake” and that she'd asked Jean, “Was he always like that?”

This morning, some facts of life. Norman Prouting came down to talk about the amount he calculates I owe for telephone, heating, gas. We decided on $200, to be adjusted later, if too much or too little. This seems to me conservative, considering all those phone calls. What I do begrudge are the $173 I shall have paid out for the largely unneeded services of Mrs. Gee. This means that the (not quite) eleven weeks I shall have spent in this apartment will have cost me about $34 a week. Well—and suppose I'd lived in a hotel? Don't be such a miser, Dub.

Also talked on the phone to Dodie. She told me that (as I already knew) she'd met [Don's friend] and had told him I'd told her he didn't like our play. He had denied this strongly—and had repeated this story about having been shown it by Don “in the middle of the night” (who but a born mischief-maker would say that?) and how he'd had no chance to consider it properly. But that didn't stop him writing me that idiot letter, suggesting that it should be given as a sort of dramatic reading. Dodie thinks that he was a bit shaken because she had praised it so much in his presence.

Nearly midnight.
Have spent the latter part of the afternoon talking to Bob Chetwyn about the staging of the play. Then I took him and Howard Schuman out to supper at The Hungry Horse, where we found ourselves next to Tom Courtenay, who recognized me at once; I didn't recognize him, he had a beard. So, at the end of the meal, Courtenay told me he'd heard his agents had a play of mine for him to read—this after we'd been told he'd been reading it for the past week! He vowed to get to it at once.

The relationship between Chetwyn and Howard is now clear. Howard giggled when offered treacle tart, saying Bob had told him to take off ten pounds. And, snooping along their bookshelves, I opened an edition of Donne and found it inscribed to Bob, “The reason for this is explained by the great Donne on page nine, H.” The poem on page 9 was, “For God's sake hold your tongue and let me love.”
⁷⁹

 

April 27.
This from Dicky Buckle's
Sunday Times
article on the Polish Mime theater's ballet program at Sadler's Wells: “There are four outstanding performers . . . Stefan Niedzialkowski, the blond shepherd boy, whose little nose might cause a Trojan war, and whom I should confess to being a little in love with if I were not afraid to embarrass my grandchildren.” I'm going to see them tomorrow night, if possible, with Bob Chetwyn and Howard.

A sad letter this morning from Harry Heckford. He really hasn't a chance of getting his book published, I fear—must call Cullen a bit later to find out about this—and now he needs money to take a degree at the University of Liverpool. Do I know of an American scholarship which could help him?

 

April 28.
Today it's a “beautiful” morning, but I don't trust it. This foul climate will probably assert itself as we drive to Cambridge. Bob [Regester] is coming to pick me up in about an hour, and we're to see Morgan and I hope Bob Buckingham, who wrote me he was coming down today.