Memoirs of a Private Man (14 page)

But when we got back to England Earl St John, chief executive director of Rank, under John Davis, would have none of it. Who was this Maria Mauban? Never heard of her. All very well for Tony to fancy her, but a ‘ name' was what was needed. In the end, after a lot of bitter argument, Nadia Gray was chosen, who was later to make a hit in
La Dolce Vita.
I remember a month or two later joining Anthony in Claridges where we were to meet Nadia Gray for the first time. We sat in the hall and she, disdaining the lift, which would have given her no ‘ entry', came lightly but slowly down the curved marble staircase, her skirt billowing round her matchless legs. I personally was disappointed – she was too sophisticated for my Alix – much better Nadine Alari – also she had freckled arms, which I have never cared for. However, I could see Anthony was prepared to make the best of it; and before the end of the film make the best of her he certainly did.

There were many suggestions as to who should play the half-blind Giles Gordon. Hugh Stewart's suggestion was David Niven, but this was vetoed by Earl St John. Niven was finished, he said. ‘Box office poison.' (This in 1950, on the eve of the greatest successes of his career!) Then I made a daring suggestion. While
Take My Life
was being filmed I had gone up to Stratford to see Valerie Taylor play the lead in
Cymbeline
and to tell her how things were going in the studio, and I had been absolutely mesmerized by the performance – in quite a small role – of an unknown young actor. When he was on stage there was, to me, simply no one else there. His name was Paul Scofield.

This suggestion was not greeted with any enthusiasm at all by the Rank studios. They knew
of
him, of course, but he had done
nothing
in the film world, and in any case was a crazy mixed-up kid. No, they had to look elsewhere. In the end they chose David Farrar, who had made a fair success in a number of English films and wasn't bad in the part. But he had not a tenth of the elfin appeal of David Niven, and as an actor was simply not to be spoken of in the same breath as Paul Scofield.

Well, I wrote the script, and producer and director both said they were very happy with it. Pleased at this, I did not stay to watch the film being made but went to America with Jean, our first of many trips, to meet the rest of the Double-day board, who entertained us most royally and yet most tactfully, for three weeks, so that we enjoyed everything but were never pressurized. After this we took off for New Orleans, Jamaica and the Bahamas for another three weeks. During this wonderful trip my stomach, conditioned as it was to wartime rationing, gave out with a bad attack of gastritis in New Orleans, and for the rest of the trip and for a year afterwards I would get repeat performances. In the Bahamas Jean had her worst attack of asthma ever and looked as if she was going to die. One doctor who was called in gave her some pills which made the asthma worse. We told him this and he said: ‘They can't do. Look at what it says on the bottle.' Eventually another doctor with the splendid name of Quackenbush was called; he came, very unsteady, from a cocktail party and broke the needle in her arm.

It was a pretty grim time, with constant visits from the doctor, great heat, no air conditioning in the hotel and only a lazy fan stirring the air, me with a bad stomach and damaged eardrums from flying from New Orleans to Miami in an unpressurized plane, the intense darkness of the nights and the hum of the mosquitoes. The doctor told me not to fly again for a year, so while we waited for a ship – they were scarce even in those days – we took a trip to Eleuthera. How it has been developed since those days I don't know, but it was then primitive in the extreme. The only vessel on which we could travel was the coastguard cutter because of the narrowness of the harbour. Jungle almost overgrew the few bumpy tracks, giant waves broke on white sandy beaches, with land crabs scuttering everywhere and, of course, the ubiquitous mosquito. We stayed at the solitary hotel, called French Leave, which – an innovation, I thought, in those days – had a central reception hall, lounge and dining room, and accommodation in small bungalows separate from the hotel. When we stepped out of our bungalow after dark to go to the main building, or vice versa, the mosquitoes fell on us like a cloud of MiGs. The hotel was run by a middle-aged well-educated Englishman and his wife. He had been a gunrunner for the Mexicans until a few years before.

One isolated modern colonial-style house belonged to a Colonel McGrath and his wife, the writer Rosita Forbes. They had been permanently settled there for years, but she told me that in early 1940 she felt she must return to England to do what work she could to help in the war effort. She arrived at Liverpool just after Dunkirk and the collapse of France.

While the customs officer was examining her baggage she said to him, ‘ Isn't it awful! Could it possibly be worse?'

He looked up and said: ‘What? Oh, well, yes. It's been raining like this for days.'

While in Nassau we were able to attend a famous trial in which a man was accused of blackmail, following the murder of Sir Harry Oakes. We also got to know a fortune teller called Madame Grenadine who for some reason not made explicit had had to leave her rooms in Half Moon Street, Mayfair, in a hurry, and came to live in a distant British colony, where she had established a thriving practice. She told us that both the prosecuting and the defending barristers in this notorious court case had come to her for advice and for her to prophesy the outcome.

Leaving her rooms one day, where we had been to take tea with her, not advice, I spotted a peculiar thing like a little wrapped mummy hanging on a tree. I pointed it out. She said casually, ‘Oh, someone has put an obeah on me.'

In retrospect it may seem nothing; but seen in the brief twilight before the sudden fall of night, with palms rustling and the oversweet smell of dying blossoms, it was ominous and nasty.

On another occasion when we called in, a white man and woman were leaving with their son of about sixteen. When they had gone Madame Grenadine said: ‘They came to see if I could help their son. But I can't. He's got leprosy.'

I always intended to write a novel – but never did – about the Bahamas, which seemed to me in those days to combine the worst features of British Colonialism and American Big Business. They also had the fascinating problem of the ‘poor whites', the original white settlers who kept strictly to themselves over the generations and interbred so constantly that all sorts of lovely complaints seemed to be endemic, such as mental deficiency and susceptibility to leprosy. I was advised by my crystal-gazing lady friend to read a book called
Pink Pearl, A Study of Bahamanian Degeneracy
, but, again, never did.

We returned to England on the
Reina del Pacifico
, a fine ship but returning in ballast; and a force-8 gale made the eight-day crossing very uncomfortable. Particularly for Jean with her recurrent asthma.

After a few days at home to re-meet our children and to recuperate, and with Jean due for her next visit to Harley Street, we went up to London together and I took a look at the finished movie, made during my absence, of
Night Without Stars
. I could not follow the story.

It seemed that after I had gone Tony Pelissier had decided he didn't like my screenplay and had rewritten it as he thought best.

In fact the whole film was an example of the road to hell being paved with good intentions. Everybody had worked very hard to make it a success, and neither the producer, the director nor the writer was without talent, but it turned out a disaster. These things, as we know, can happen so easily either on stage or screen, and it is virtually impossible to point a finger at the cause.

Of my six films made, four are constantly repeated on TV. The two which are seldom shown are
Night Without Stars
and
The Sleeping Partner
– which was another even damper squib, though since this was taken wholly out of my hands and made in America I feel no responsibility for it. (The novel was also later made into a successful one-hour TV film by John Jacobs for Anglia.)

Although
Night Without Stars
was such a failure, my friendship with Hugh Stewart and Anthony Pelissier was unimpaired. I never, of course, in all my life ever had any friction with Hugh, but it is probably a testimony to us both that Anthony and I used to enjoy each other's company until he died.

The other formative influence in 1950, one that I have already briefly mentioned, was that I became a member of the Savile Club. In early 1945 Peter Latham had suggested it, and when I was in London invited me to dine there to see how it appealed to me. In fact, having always been so much a loner, club life did not appeal at all; and at that first dinner I sat with the eminent zoologist Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell on my right and H. G. Wells opposite me. Wells must have been about eighty at the time. I remember he wore a grey herringbone suit with a dark red tie and shirt with the wings of the collar in disarray. He was polite but uncommunicative. He had just published his last book, called
Mind at the End of its Tether
. Neither he nor Chalmers Mitchell at that late time in their lives were exactly apostles of lightness and joy, and I thanked Peter very much and asked to be excused. At about the same time I had also seen a fair amount of the Savage Club as Benno Moiseiwitsch's guest, and he had similarly put the suggestion that he would like to propose me for membership of the Savage. Again, I thanked him and pleaded the excuse that I lived in Cornwall and wasn't really the clubbable type.

Now, in 1950, I was invited to spend a night or two with Hugh Stewart and his wife Frances in order to discuss the film of
Night Without Stars
, and almost immediately Hugh asked me why I didn't become a member of the Savile Club. By then I was a little more inured to the prospect, and I told him that a chap called Peter Latham had suggested this five years ago, that I had said no, but now, having seen so much more of London in the interim, I might think of it more seriously.

‘I'll see Peter,' he said. ‘You must come to lunch there with him and we'll talk it over.'

I did. We did. My name went down in the book, and in the July I was elected a member. And shortly, within a year, I began to feel that, in addition to Cornwall, I had another home.

The Savile Club in those days was an extraordinary institution, like no other club, I believe, in the world. It is not now quite what it was but is still very good.

When William Golding was made a Nobel Prize winner a few years ago, the Savile put up a small notice on the board congratulating him, and listing the seven previous Nobel Prize winners who had been members of the club. (In fact it is seventeen, as the historian of the Savile Club, Anthony Garrett Anderson, has established.) The other literary names were W. B. Yeats and Rudyard Kipling, the rest being scientists, astronomists, physicists. The club coruscated with great names: Hardy, Stevenson, Elgar, Priestley, Wells, Walton, Vaughan Williams, Cockcroft, Rutherford, Chadwick, J. J. Thompson. It was a place where the great went to relax; it could be as unceremonious as a public school, as intellectual as the best university, as Bohemian as a Soho restaurant.

When I first joined, the place seemed to be full of eccentrics and intellectuals, of raconteurs, wits and half-wits. Looking back, I suppose most of the members of the club were fairly ordinary chaps by temperament who had distinguished themselves in some walk of life. But the men I met and came to know by staying in the club, not just using it for occasional meals, were the nucleus, the hard core of regular attenders who got the most out of the club by putting the most in; and it was these men whose ranks I intermittently joined and by whom I was accepted. I remember Sir David Milne, the then head of the Scottish Office, saying to me in the billiard room one night: ‘You'll do. I thought you were too quiet, but I see you're going to be one of us.'

When Benno Moiseiwitsch heard I was thinking of joining the Savile he said it was ‘ the snob's club'. He could hardly have been more wrong, unless one included intellectual snobbery, of which there was a reasonable amount. So far as class was concerned the sign over every Toc H meeting place, ‘All Rank Abandon Ye Who Enter Here', would equally have applied to the Savile.

I came to look forward to my visits: they were a tremendous mental stimulus. While remaining dedicated to Cornwall, I found this the first break in the total commitment of earlier years.

One thing that concerned me a little about my evenings at the club was the amount of hard drinking that went on. By some extraordinary piece of good fortune, excessive drink never appealed to me – though I could always take a modest amount and love it – but it startled me to see how much some of my new friends put away. Many of them were very famous men – and all were pretty well at the top of whatever particular tree they had chosen to climb – it seemed wasteful of talent and good health to pour so much down their throats. God knows, I was not censorious, or they would soon have detected it; and I was able to get along on my limited intake without its being noticeable. But I couldn't help but think, ‘If you become President of this or Chairman of that, or the leading authority on some aspect of astronomy or architecture or disease or whatever, there must have been a lot of dedicated striving – whatever the talent – to reach such eminence; is this excess really the best way to celebrate it?'

As a committed heterosexual I have never paid much attention to homosexuality. I have never felt strongly on the subject at all – except some resentment at the purloining of that lovely old threeletter word of twelfth-century French, used to describe a happy condition, now turned into a word to describe a sexual preference. But aside from that …

Two of my closest friends when I first went to live in Cornwall were (a) a bachelor Scout master and (b) a widowed curate. As a schoolboy I knew the facts of life, but little more, but I knew precisely where my own instincts lay.