Memoirs of a Private Man (12 page)

It was my misfortune to be with him on the morning that he received word from the surgeon that his beautiful forty-five-yearold second wife, Annie, had inoperable cancer.

A second meeting was even more formative for me, and again it was with a musician. I cannot remember at all how it came about that a Lieutenant Peter Latham, stationed at Penhale, wanted his wife and daughter to spend a few weeks in Perranporth so that he could see more of them. I suppose someone recommended us, and presently I met this tall, thin, gangling middle-aged man who had the utmost charm in the world.

He worked at the Royal Academy, teaching and examining, and was later to become Gresham Professor of Music. He had served in the First World War, and had been severely wounded, with the result that he shambled as he walked, and had a deformed shoulder. Being intensely patriotic, he had at once applied to rejoin his regiment when the Second World War broke out, and the War Office, with its usual perception, appointed him to be a gunnery instructor, a subject about which he knew virtually nothing. So he had been sent to Penhale Camp where morning gunnery practice took place, shooting at a target being towed at a (fairly) safe distance by a slowmoving biplane.

This was the beginning of another friendship, which lasted until Peter's death, and then Angela's death many years later. They became close friends – even closer than Benno and Annie. We again had the piano moved into the bedroom, and Peter, when off duty, would come along and play there. Though clearly he could not begin to match Moiseiwitsch's brilliance, he was a fine pianist and an immense musicologist, with a fund of reminiscence and anecdote and funny stories and limericks, many of them scabrous – the jolliest and most lovable of men. His wife, a pretty, eccentric, intellectual, sparkling woman, was by profession a fresco artist, and when
The Last Supper
in Milan was showing uncheckable signs of deterioration she was invited by the Italian government to go to see it and advise on its preservation and restoration. After the war we saw them many times at their home in Hampstead, and they came, like Benno, to stay with us as our non-paying guests in Cornwall when Treberran had become a private house again.

Peter and Benno opened up to me a world that before I had only been groping to find – a world in which conversation was no longer chatter, in which anecdote was not gossip, in which wit and fun and intellectual debate were all.

But the strongest influence Peter Latham had on my life was to put me up for membership of the Savile Club – of which much more later.

I remember another guest at Treberran, a Dr Dancy – whose elder son later became headmaster of Marlborough – saying to me one day towards the end of the war: ‘ When this war is over it will be the beginning of a new life for you.' He spoke even more truly than he knew.

During the war I had become friendly with the actress Valerie Taylor, who was then married to Hugh Sinclair. They owned a bungalow in Perranporth, and between intervals of work we visited each other's houses and had suppers together. She was a highly strung, highly articulate, highly intelligent, beautiful but rather overpowering young woman, who was full of ideas, and one evening she told me what she thought was a brilliant opening for a film. I in my downto-earth style agreed that it was an interesting idea. Of course it was no more than an idea at this stage: it lacked a story, as almost all ideas do (people often confuse the two), but a month or so later I said to her: ‘I've been thinking of your opening, Valerie, and it's certainly an interesting one. If I were writing it, I would, I think, tend to develop it this way …' She immediately lit up, and henceforward rang me up persistently, full of suggestions and wanting to know if I was making progress.

In short, in between finishing
Ross Poldark
and beginning
Demelza
and celebrating the end of the war and completing our last ‘season' at Treberran and getting demobilized from the Coastguard Service and looking after my mother, who was ill, and Jean's mother, who was ill, and Jean, who was intermittently ill but most of the time doing her usual ball-of-fire act, and awaiting the birth of our second child, I was working on a screenplay with Valerie Taylor which eventually became
Take My Life
. When it was finished – finally, finally finished – she took it up to London and tried to interest various film friends in it. Some of them liked it but all said it was far too expensive to be put on.

The screenplay as it finally evolved concerned a young British opera singer, Phillipa, who comes with an Italian company to Covent Garden. On the first night, on which she plays the lead, her husband, Nicholas, an ex-army officer, is there and encounters Elizabeth, an old lover of his who is playing in the orchestra, and Phillipa sees them together. In their flat after the opera her tension after a night's success causes her to challenge him about his old affair, and in the quarrel which follows she throws a scent bottle, which hits him on the forehead. He walks angrily out.

In the meantime Elizabeth returns to her flat and is followed by a man who knows her and forces his way into her flat and murders her, but not before he has sustained a wound on his forehead similar to Nick's.

Nick is accused of her murder. He claims that he has never been near the murdered woman's flat, until a witness identifies him.

It was too expensive to produce, everyone said, until Valerie asked the advice of Clive Brook, and he recommended his agent, Christopher Mann Ltd.

The Mann office was then at the height of its prestige; the most powerful agent in London. If it took you up, you were on the ladder. It succeeded in selling
Take My Life
to the Rank Organisation, and the film was eventually made by Cineguild, one of its most distinguished subsidiaries, the company which had made the then famous film
Brief Encounter
.

At the time we were writing this script Valerie was engaged in a passionate love affair with a mining engineer called William Saunders, whom, after divorcing Hugh, she eventually married. As she was always quite incapable of getting names right, William often became Winston, and Winston, William. As a result the rumour spread around that
I
was having an affair with the lady. Indeed perhaps her husband was himself not too sure, for when a couple of years later I wrote the film as a novel and sent him a copy he replied to thank me and to say that perhaps the book should have been called ‘ Take My Wife'.

My daughter, Rosamund, was born during a brief and significant snowstorm on the 1st of March 1946, just after the film had been bought and when I was about halfway through
Demelza
. She brought us extra luck. Only a few weeks after this the Rank Organisation, in the guise of Cineguild, decided that
Take My Life
was just the sort of film that the burgeoning British film industry wanted and that Valerie and I must be encouraged – indeed drawn into the industry full-time as a special pair of writers capable of turning out more films of the same kind and quality. After a few brief interviews with Valerie on her own, she being in London, they decided that I must be the guiding, inspiring light in the partnership, so they telephoned me, inviting me to London to consult on the making of
Take My Life
and other possible films. I said I was sorry but I was just finishing a novel but I'd be glad to come up in two or three months' time. This shocked them and they telephoned back that if I would come up in two days' time they would pay me £80 a week (for today's equivalent, multiply by at least twenty) and provide me with a free flat in Hallam Street and a secretary to take down my lightest word. This, when I accepted, they did; also I had a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce to take me down to Denham every day. I must say, although a new boy, that I was treated with the utmost respect and kindness by everyone in the industry.

Rosamund was only six weeks old when I went to London, but Jean came with me, leaving our two children in the fairly safe hands of a nurse called Christine and two grandmothers.

I knew London moderately well from regular if impecunious visits before the war and hectic short feverish breaks during the war to brave the bombs and see the latest plays; but I knew nothing of the opulent vistas of the film world. Encouraged by the government, Rank was pouring in his millions and trying to double the output of the British film industry. It was a time of a sudden wild prosperity, when the films being made seemed to justify the expansion. Productions like
Great Expectations, The Seventh Veil, The Wicked Lady, This Happy Breed
were pouring out, showing both quality and popular appeal. Mr Rank's Young Ladies were being brought in and groomed for stardom. (Some achieved it, most are long forgotten.) But what apparently was not foreseen was that you cannot suddenly quadruple the production of an artistic industry and rely on the talent to be there instantly in ample supply.

The Mann office in those days had three partners: Christopher Mann himself was a small, dapper, seemingly modest and insignificant figure, who would slip unobtrusively in and out of the office, with a stub of cigarette endlessly between his lips, and who wielded great power in the industry by packaging films, i.e. bringing together a subject, a star, a producer, a director and a writer and arranging the finance. (He did none of these things for
Take My Life
, but much for me later.) Chris had a passion for Madeleine Carrol and had been responsible for putting her into most of her starring roles; when she went to America their affair (apparently always unconsummated) fell through and he married Eileen Joyce, the fine Australian pianist.

The second partner was his brother-in-law, Alan Grogan, who had married Winifred Mann, Chris's sister. Alan was a much more imposing character, 6ft 3ins tall, well-built, dark, goodlooking, humorous, a man with a very astute sense of values and a keen musician. Winifred Grogan was a small delicate woman, as inscrutable, until you got to know her, as her brother. She and Alan were devoted to each other. She had borne one child, a son, but had shortly afterwards contracted tuberculosis and given it to her son. She survived but the child died, and she was too delicate to have more. I used to reckon that the ultimate in marital accord was achieved by them when they took a passenger into their twoseater E-type Jaguar. Winifred, a slight woman, would sit over the gear box and change gear for Alan, while he declutched. They even double-declutched successfully.

The third partner was Aubrey Blackburn, a charming, goodlooking middle-aged man who dealt chiefly with the acting side of the business and whom I saw quite rarely.

Jean and I travelled up that cold day in April by the Cornish Riviera Express, and went to the palatial offices of Christopher Mann Ltd. in Park Lane. It was on the seventh floor, lushly furnished, and commanded a fine view over the Park and Marble Arch. I cannot imagine any agent today being able to afford such grandeur.

I met Alan Grogan and Christopher Mann, and Jean was left in Winifred's charge while Alan took me off at once to meet the group who were going to make
Take My Life
: Anthony Havelock-Allan, heir to a baronetcy he later inherited, Ronald Neame, Gordon Wellesley, who was a story editor for Rank, and one or two others. They did not, however, want me immediately for
Take My Life
but to work for a couple of weeks on a film, already scripted, called
Pleasure Beach
, by Frank Tylsley. They were not happy with the script and wanted me to produce some new ideas. For this two weeks' work they offered me £150 over and above what they were offering me to come to London. (Remember, please, the discrepancy with today's figures. You could get a good single bedroom at a respectable Bloomsbury hotel for 8/6 a night, bed and breakfast. The Cumberland was 12/6. Claridges was £3. (Now it is £300.) You could buy a brand-new car for £125.) Ever willing to have a go at a new idea, I accepted, not knowing what on earth they were really looking for. I had never seen a film script before, except the one Valerie Taylor had produced as an example on which to model the technical side of our own story.

Right at the end of the war was a strange time to be suddenly rocketed into such an exotic and glamorous world. With clothing coupons limiting one's ideas, I hadn't bought a suit for eight years, and that was not a very good one at the outset. That first week, before she returned to our burgeoning family, Jean jetted off to Petticoat Lane and there was able not only to buy clothes for herself ‘off the ration' but also to buy clothing coupons for me so that within a week I had been able to get a reasonable jacket and trousers – from, I think, Jaeger – and also to go to a good tailor in Cork Street, who in the fullness of time and after numerous fittings produced the most beautiful suit I have ever had.

Left alone in the Hallam Street flat when Jean went home, I struggled with the script of
Pleasure Beach
, going down to Denham every other day. But eventually nothing came of it. I had had one or two original cinematic ideas in
Take My Life
, but neither I nor anyone else seemed able to get our creative teeth into the Frank Tylsley story.

After the non-event of this film I was directed to the development of the script of
Take My Life
, a much happier field. Valerie Taylor had accepted an invitation to play two key Shakespearian roles at Stratford, so I was left to do this on my own.

These were all essentially young men I was working with – or young in my terms. I was the youngest, but all three directors of the Mann office were under forty, and so was almost everyone connected with the film. It was an exciting, nerve-straining, exacting, stimulating, exhausting summer. I met a lot of stars and had a lot of fun, but have always been glad that I had a hard North Country head which wasn't easily turned.

The heroine of our film was a concert artist. Mainly because I have always loved piano concertos, I made her a pianist. But Cineguild felt that because of the recent success of
Brief Encounter
, where the background music is piano music by Rachmaninov, they should change the instrument. So after long discussion they made Phillipa an opera singer. We spent a whole day (or it may have been two) at Denham with a pianist, specially engaged from Covent Garden, sitting at the piano, going through the operas with us, trying to choose which would be most suitable. One opera after another did not suit because the clothes were unbecoming or unsuitable, or for a variety of other reasons. In despair at the end I suggested sarcastically that the best thing would be to write our own opera. This they seized on as a brilliant idea and William Alwyn, who had been commissioned to write the music, was commissioned to write an opera called
Take My Life
, or as much of it as was necessary for the purposes of the story.