Liberation (56 page)

David Hockney, at a party given in his honor by Ron Davis, an abstract artist: “I dislike abstract art more and more.”

We have seen Jim Bridges' film,
The Paper Chase
, and are both much worried; it doesn't seem to add up. The photography is beautiful, though Jack was quite right when he feared it would be too dark. And John Houseman gives what is maybe the best amateur performance ever. He could play Julius Caesar, easily.

Yesterday we went to say goodbye to Swami. We talked for five minutes about the fact that he hates prune juice and that it disagrees with him and that nevertheless they had made him drink it, with the result that his stomach became bloated. He seems much better. When Don and I bowed down and he gave us his blessing, I felt that his love is the strongest of all the bonds that bind us together. We didn't comment on this, but, when we got into the car, Don smiled at me so sweetly and took my hand.

 

As usual, I failed to keep a diary during our trip. So what follows is written retrospectively
:

 

We took off at noon on January 22. The fact that we were travelling first class gave our journey a honeymoon atmosphere. We sat right up forward in the nose of the plane, and it felt as if we were all alone there. (Actually there were very few first-class passengers.) The hostesses seemed eager to unload their entire allowance of drinks on us. They kept bringing Campari, and later wine. We got drunk and giggly over the pretentious Frog menu, wondering what a “cascade of shrimp” would be like—it was just a few of them on a plate. We held hands and kissed and Don said it was fate that we had met and that he adored me for being so lucky. I felt an intense bliss of togetherness—a distillation of my combined feelings when I'm sitting beside him in a movie, eating a snug meal alone with him, lying beside him in bed—and indeed we were more or less doing all these things at once. The bliss of being where you would most like to be, at this moment and always. . . . However, when we did get sleepy, we found that the partitions can't be removed from first-class seats. So Don lay down on the floor. So much for luxury travel!

In the morning—or rather, in the latter part of that immensely long night—we found ourselves walking miles and miles and miles along the uncannily clean deserted corridors of London Airport
³⁷
—to be met by our production manager, Brian Burgess, with two envelopes full of pound notes, the first installment of our expense money. And then a studio-provided limousine drove us into London. We were well aware that our driver was shocked by the squalor of Powis Terrace—even the residents agree that it is a bad neighborhood—and besides, what were
we
doing there, when that bulging envelope of notes entitled us to stay at the Connaught or the Dorchester?

(On closer acquaintance, Powis Terrace seemed to be squalid rather than “bad.” No doubt one could get mugged there—where
can't
you get mugged, these days?—but the atmosphere is unalarming, peeling houses, trash cans spilling over the sidewalks, seedy shops run by thin pop-eyed Pakistanis who appeared to be far more afraid of you than you could be of them. You see racist slogans written up against them on walls: “Kill Asian shit,” for example.)

David's flat—which opens improbably off a dingy slummy staircase—is all elegance, much larger and grander than when we last saw it in 1970. Indirect lighting controlled by rheostats, a shower with horizontal jets of water, a dining room big enough for a banquet, a library, a streamlined kitchen. We were given a snug little nest of a bedroom with a bed almost as inviting as our own basket. It was only when you opened the Moorish shutters that you discovered you were looking out into an airshaft across which washing hung on wires; slumland was all around you, with its uninhibited noises. A blaring radio woke us regularly at 7:15, except on the one morning when we had wanted to get up and had counted on it; then it was silent.

Mo McDermott and his friend Mick Sid[a]
³⁸
were looking after the flat. Mo was at art school with David and has been a close friend of his ever since, but I hadn't met him before.
³⁹
He is small and squarely built, a blond with a very white skin, going a little bald on top, but still cute and sexy. Indeed, it is easy to imagine that someone could fall in love with him, because of his warmth and anxious intensity and a peculiarly British kind of sturdiness. He is the faithful-unto-death type of retainer; you feel that, if the flat were burgled, his corpse would be found stretched across the threshold. He speaks with quiet fury against people who take advantage of David's generosity. He had recently had a scene with Ossie Clark, after demanding that Ossie should give up a doorkey which he had taken away with him. And we both felt that Mo resents the casualness with which Peter Schlesinger shows up and entertains us there, offering us David's wine.

Mick is a fuzzy-haired skinny freak with an awful complexion; he is shy or rather standoffish, like an animal. He helps Mo make the cutout wooden trees which are now becoming a successful business venture; they are selling them to the States. Mo tells us that Mick never gets home until 4 a.m. We don't quite like to ask if this is because of a job or because he prowls the clubs. In the mornings, when we peep into the big bedroom, they are both in bed. But it is always Mo who gets out to answer the phone or cope with any emergency.

Mo has a very beautiful white cat who is also standoffish. He isn't used to living in David's flat, so he won't use his box and shits on the floor every day, on exactly the same spot.

That first morning, the 23rd, we had a meeting with Hunt Stromberg, who is installed in an office on Piccadilly, quite near Hyde Park Corner. I suppose these houses all used to be family homes. Their vast rooms have now been partitioned off, with a crudity which creates a sort of war-emergency atmosphere; you can't believe that these cheap plywood walls can be anything but temporary. Two or three doors down the street the ground floor of another house has been converted into a hippie restaurant, The Hard Rock Café. The noise is terrific, which excuses you from talking. They serve you sandwiches so huge that you can hardly bite into them. The customers are mostly long-haired and there seem to be many Americans—yet again you feel the essentially British grin-and-bear-it air of emergency.

We found Hunt interviewing actors. His manner with them is timid, flattering and yet rude. He seems vulgar, insecure. Dick Shasta is playing the role of co-producer. While we had supper with them and Dick's mother that evening, at the flat they have rented on Grosvenor Square, Hunt and Dick brought forth their suggestions for rewrites. The chief one was that the Creature shouldn't be created by means of light[n]ing, with a kite used for a conductor, because that is in the original Frankenstein film. Hunt and Dick suggested solar energy. This seemed an idiotic notion for England, where the weather is so unreliable, but we said, Sure, sure. Then Dick said that the Creature couldn't carry Polidori right up the mast; no actor could manage such a feat. Therefore, he should be hoisted up on a hook, which happens to be hanging down from the mast at the end of a rope. Okay, okay. Then Hunt said that the Creature shouldn't throw Elizabeth's clothes all over the road, otherwise she wouldn't have anything to wear on the voyage. We agreed to this but privately decided to get around it, because cinematically a monster throwing beautiful female clothes all over a road at night is better than throwing pots and pans or anything else.

We spent most of January 24 at Pinewood Studios. Hunt and Dick were there and we met and had lunch with Ian Lewis, who is the production head of the studio, and a couple of his assistants. It is much grander than Hollywood; the dining room has quite a baronial air and they have actually used it for a set in a costume picture. But Lewis and the others were much less grand and much much less full of shit than our bogus Hollywood executives; they actually seemed to know the business and had been cameramen, cutters, directors themselves. In the afternoon we talked to Wilfred Shingleton, the art director, and—such is the power of misplaced ingenuity—at the end of two hours we had recklessly and shamelessly invented the whole process of conveying solar energy to storage batteries by means of mirrors, and also the accident which causes the mirrors to burn each other up and crash down upon Frankenstein and the Creature. After which Mr. Shingleton said he would produce sketches of all this—we never saw these—and we parted with the utmost politeness.

Later we saw Peter Schlesinger and went with him to have supper with Tony Richardson. Tony seemed very much as usual. We talked a lot about his latest film project, [H. G.] Wells's
Tono-Bungay
. But all this was just table conversation; nothing intimate was said. Later we found out that the situation in the house has its depths, or heights—that is to say, Will Chandlee(?) the boyfriend I met at Tony's place in the South of France in 1970, is living upstairs, while Grizelda [Grimond], the girl who has just had a child by Tony, is living in the basement. We saw Will that evening but not Grizelda.

January the 25th was the first of our stay-at-home working days on the rewriting of the script. Luckily, David has a Smith Corona electric typewriter of the same model as ours, so Don felt at home with it. We had supper at Patrick Woodcock's house. Hal Buckley's brother Peter was there with his friend Kevin McKormick.
⁴⁰
Patrick described them as “dishy.” He seemed older and stiffer—he had had an operation on his knee—but looked very healthy. He is planning to retire soon to the South of France and build a house there, to which he will invite his elderly wom[e]n friends to stay—his “White Queens” he calls them. They are Rosamond Lehmann, Hester Chapman and Gladys Calthrop.

As so often before, Patrick held forth on the advantages of dying of lung cancer; he has become quite aggressive about this. It was
the only
way to die. It didn't hurt a bit and you had a whole six months in which to put your affairs in order.

On January 26, we went to see Peter Schlesinger. He has a large front upstair room in a house which is only a minute's walk from David's. Peter's bed—or rather, mattress—lies on a wooden platform which you reach by a ladder. His paintings stand stacked against the wall. He cooks on a hot plate and shares a bathroom with another lodger. The room overlooks the street and is much lighter and less shut in than the Hockney flat. And Peter himself seems different in this setting—freer, more individual, more cheerful, more admirable—no longer a spoilt little boy, nested in luxury. He keeps repeating how much he likes living alone.

After lunch we went to the Universal office and met Nicola Pagett, whom Hunt and Jack Smight fancy to play either Elizabeth or Prima. She is impressive and not, thank God, very nice. Then I realized that she is the actress I so much admired in 1970 as Blanche in
Widowers' Houses
.

We spent the rest of the afternoon working with Jack Smight at his flat in a mews in the Sloane Square neighborhood. This was furnished just as you would expect a shrewd decorator-landlord to furnish a flat which he wanted to rent to Americans. The accent was heavily on British tradition; to intimidate them. “Good” furniture, coats of arms, engravings of eighteenth century fighting ships, etc.

We had firmly made up our minds to be as agreeable to Jack as we knew how, and I think we succeeded. Actually, he is very easy to get along with. Indeed he accepts our ideas and objections with a readiness which is alarming. It suggests that he has no opinions of his own. His wife kept popping in and disturbing us; she is one of those women who hate to see her man busy with other men. And there is a slobbish but agreeable teenage son who was going through the ordeal of adjusting to a London school for the sons of Americans working in England.

In the evening, we saw
I and Albert
, a musical directed by John Schlesinger. It has failed and is soon coming off; and the first act is certainly rather dull. But, in the second act, Lewis Fiander as Disraeli does a number with Victoria which is one of the best things of its kind I have ever seen on the stage. Disraeli plays the scene as a conjurer who is trying to keep Victoria amused and at the same time singing a song to the audience about the best way to handle old ladies. He produces coins out of the air and drops them into her empty treasure box, he fishes the Suez Canal out of a top hat—it is a long blue ribbon, he turns his handkerchief into a Union Jack and then discovers an earl's coronet in it for himself. It was like a series of political cartoons from
Punch
brought to life. The effect was both surrealistic and realistic, because it gave you such a vivid impression of what Disraeli must actually have been like.

After the show we had supper with Bob Regester at Wheeler's Braganza. A supper at Wheeler's was one of the treats we had looked forward to when thinking of this trip. But, in actual fact, we only really like the Wheeler's in Old Compton Street. The Braganza is too grand and the one off Jermyn Street is so uncomfortable. After supper, we went back to the house with Bob to see Neil. He seemed lonely and depressed and sick. Bob says he gets pneumonia every year. But Bob is nevertheless going back to the States in a short while. The two of them have more or less separated.

January 27 was another day of indoor work—until Stephen Spender came around to pick us up in his car and drive us back to his house for supper. To my surprise, he wasn't nearly as bitchy as usual. When I asked him about Wystan, he was positively reticent. Lizzie Spender was there and, on an impulse, I told her I would try to get her a part in “Frankenstein”; she belongs to Equity and she really is very good-looking. Then Francis Bacon arrived—that powerful star—and we were at once drawn into his orbit and scarcely talked to anyone else all evening. He was most affectionate and kissy. He had dim sour Luci[a]n Freud with him and also a nephew from South Africa, a farmer, named Harley Knott. Knott was quite young—not unattractive but seemingly dead square. He kept addressing Francis as “Uncle Francis.” I couldn't make out what his attitude was to Francis's flamboyant behavior; sometimes he seemed disapproving, sometimes impressed. He didn't even seem convinced that Francis was really an important figure in the art world; maybe he thought that the rest of us were merely flattering him and putting him on. I solemnly assured Harley that Francis was every bit as great as Van Gogh. We were all of us pretty drunk.