Memoirs of a Private Man (35 page)

He looked up at me, screwing up small keen eyes in a small keen face, and said: ‘It seems to me you have been tr-tr-trying to avoid me.'

The last time I saw Maugham was when Denys Kilham Roberts, then Secretary-General of the Society of Authors, invited him and Compton Mackenzie to lunch at the Savile, and asked me to make up the four. With a mischievous chuckle he said he thought we should have a rich entertainment. He was wrong. These two men, roughly contemporaries, Maugham nine years the elder, had seen and experienced so much of the writer's world as companions, as rivals, as overseers of the literary scene, that they must have had a hundred things to talk about and discuss. Not so. For some reason they were suspicious; they eyed each other like unacquainted cats, Maugham monosyllabic, Monty talking to Denys or me; even
silences
occurred now and then. Of course it was fairly friendly, but it was a guarded courtesy more than anything else.

I was at Mackenzie's seventieth birthday party and his eightieth. After the first he went off to a night club with Eric Linklater where, legend has it, Eric was heard to be calling for black women. At 10.30 the next morning Monty was in his favourite seat at the Savile, dark blue pinstripe suit, crimson bow tie, clean, well-shaven, spruce, having already done a broadcast that morning at the BBC, and was now giving us his verbal plans for what he would write in the next ten years. The morning after his eightieth birthday party, having in the previous decade completed his schedule, he was in precisely the same spot making plans for the next ten years. He completed nine of them.

Monty Mackenzie was a great talker, a great raconteur – sometimes one dared to harbour the heresy that he was a better talker than he was a writer – but of all his reminiscences only one sticks in my mind, and that is an account he gave me of a visit to Henry James at Rye. James had known Monty as a child, and after lunch they talked for a while about the technique of the novel. James said:

‘Ah, you young men. You throw the ball of narrative against the wall of literary truth and it rebounds effortlessly into your hands. I … I, on the other hand, throw the ball of narrative against the wall, and it rebounds here and there, hither and thither, this way and that, until, my old bones creaking in every joint, I must stoop laboriously to pick it up again.'

Anyone, I think, starting a Henry James for the first time will understand exactly what he meant.

It was at the Savile that I came to draw a line between the anecdote and the funny story. In the club – and I suppose it may be true of most of the great clubs – anecdotes are all; the invented funny stories virtually never told. I don't think I have heard a half-dozen dirty stories told at the Savile in fifty years. Nor is swearing indulged in. There is nothing censorious about this; simply that it is looked on as immature and childish.

I sometimes wonder in fact where all the cursing exists, except on the stage and in novels.
Are
writers immature and childish or simply hoping to shock? Like a schoolboy of eight coming home triumphantly as I did with his first four-letter word? Maybe I have lived a sheltered life. No swearing was ever used in our home, not even by my brother when he returned from two years of war. It didn't seem to occur to any of us. At school there were a number of foulmouthed characters, understandably enough, but that was where the immaturity came in. During the Second World War I mixed with a fair number of sailors, and I remember nothing very untoward. After the war I was pitchforked into the film industry, and neither among actors nor among technicians did it seem substantially to exist. I heard nothing in the
Poldark
series. Similarly in the play I wrote, which was produced twice with different casts. Of course F-ing goes on with boring regularity among groups of working men, in the army, and in what George Gissing called ‘the mean streets'. And of course there are exceptions among the educated, and the half-educated. One gravely afflicted with the complaint was Laurence Harvey. If there were an Olympic prize for obscenity, he would have taken a lot of beating.

Having said this much, I have to admit that since coming to live alone I have fallen into the habit of cursing vehemently – chiefly under my breath – at every minor hindrance or annoyance. In my youth I coined the phrase ‘Swearing is the first resort of the vulgar and the last resort of the weak'. I'm not sure where that leaves me now.

Charles Chaplin, Alastair Cooke, Graham Greene, Ralph Richardson I came to know as a result of my friendship with Max Reinhardt and his delightful and distinguished second wife, Joan. They invited me to be godfather to their youngest daughter, Veronica, and Charlie Chaplin was to be the other. When we met at the christening I told him that as a child, and ever since, I had loved his films, but it had never occurred to me in my wildest dreams that one day I should become his godbrother. He replied with an absent smile. Genuine laughter seemed by then to have left the great man.

I met him a few months later when he had just been to the film of
Marnie
, chiefly with the intention of looking at Tippi Hedren for a part in his next film,
A King in New York
. He was very much technically on the ball in respect of the way Hitchcock had made the film. And Tippi was engaged. There was another occasion when we had dinner at the Reinhardts' and after dinner Max showed
The Gold Rush
on his private projector. Charlie was visibly entertained for the first ten minutes, and then slept through the rest of it.

The last time I saw him was at the Venice Film Festival when there was a retrospective showing of some of his more famous comedies, and Sir Charles Chaplin was invited to be present at the showing of
City Lights
projected onto a huge screen in St Mark's Square. After it was over, the diminutive figure appeared on one of the balconies and acknowledged the massive applause of the crowd. I think it was the balcony on which Mussolini had once stood to harangue the people and to receive his acclaim. This time the people were acclaiming ‘ Il Duce' of the cinema.

Of the other three, Ralph Richardson was the only one I came to know well. He was a member of the Savile, but it was in Cap Ferrat that we really got well acquainted. He had rented Max's cabin cruiser, which I had had the year before, and he was having trouble in making his wishes known to Jeannot, the difficult, tetchy, unagreeable custodian of the boat. I, having suffered the year before, went across to see if I could help, but my French was scarcely better than Ralph's, and if a Frenchman wishes to be misunderstood it's hard to get your message across. However, the struggle enhanced our friendship, and we dined together as a quartet several times during his stay, and in subsequent years I used to go to see him at home, or after lunch at the Savile we would play snooker or go to the cinema together.

Though not quite an intellectual, Ralph had a brilliant, if sometimes eccentric, artistic judgement. He read deeply and widely and had high standards which somehow he managed to assume existed equally among his friends. When he came into a room he had a faculty for raising the status of the occasion without ever attempting to impose himself on it.

One time he met me in the Savile and said: ‘Hello, Poet,' (his usual greeting to me), ‘care to come a trip on my bike? I have it outside.' I said, ‘ Fine,' and we went out to his huge red Norton motorbike. ‘ You'd better have my crash helmet,' he said, so we wobbled up Binney Street and out into the Oxford Street traffic, he with his scanty grey hair straying in the wind, I partly eclipsed under a large crash helmet. Once we were free of the worst traffic we jetted up Bayswater Road and then into the Park, where we roared around madly, eventually coming back via Hyde Park Corner and Piccadilly and so home. Later, in the Savile I was surprised to see strong men blanch at my recklessness.

It was hazardous but it was great fun, as all my contacts with him were. This was about the time when he appeared in the television series
Blandings Castle
, in which he played the Earl of Emsworth. He complained to me bitterly that he had played in the West End for thirty years and could walk the streets unrecognized, but ‘one TV series and every little girl I pass knows who I am'. His complaint was of the disproportion of the fame, not of the fame itself. He was not at all averse from being recognized.

He had a passion for unusual pets. He allowed his parrot out of its cage nightly, and one day when he took me back he told me that José was ‘in disgrace. He bit Mu last night.' Mu was Lady Richardson. On another occasion he bought a hamster in New York and in due time smuggled it into England. As he left the shop in New York the assistant said: ‘Enjoy your hamster.'

‘ I wonder if the dear girl thought I was having it for breakfast,' he said.

When we went behind to see him after a performance of
No Man's Land
, he demonstrated in his dressing room the fall he had to make each evening on the stage, showing how easy it apparently was, once you had learned the way of it, to fall full length without hurting yourself. He was then seventy-five. I asked him what he thought Harold Pinter meant in a particularly obscure piece of dialogue in the first act.

‘ Old chap,' he said, ‘I've no idea, and I've never dared to ask him.'

Anecdotes about Ralph abound. Donald Sinden told me that one day Ralph was crossing the concourse of Victoria Station when he saw someone he recognized and went up to him.

‘ David,' he said. ‘ David Partridge! We haven't met since that play in Birmingham; what is it? – ten, twelve years ago. You
have
changed. You're much slimmer. And you've shaved off your moustache!'

The man looked at Ralph. ‘Sorry. But I'm not David Partridge.'

Ralph stared at him as only Ralph could stare. Then he said: ‘D'you mean to say you've changed your name as well?'

Peggy Ashcroft said once that she was invited to dine with the Richardsons at their home. This was a delightful Nash house overlooking Regent's Park, but like most such houses it was tall and thin and the Richardsons had installed a lift. Ralph came down to open the door to Peggy, and they ascended in the somewhat creaky lift together.

Ralph looked at his guest and said: ‘Peggy, have I ever slept with you?'

‘No,' she said.

He eyed her significantly and said: ‘Aa-ah.'

At this moment the lift reached the third floor and the door was opened by Mu.

Peggy said she never quite worked out what that ‘Aa-ah' had implied.

Most people would say that, knowing Ralph so well, Peggy's uncertainty was a little disingenuous.

The story reminds me of one night at Cap Ferrat when the four of us had been dining together and we walked home from the restaurant in double file, Mu and I in the lead. Halfway home Ralph and Jean, bringing up the rear, disappeared for about three minutes and then took up the trail again. When we had separated and were indoors Jean said: ‘Wow! What a kiss!'

I was furious, not because of the kiss but because I had fancied doing something the same to Mu, but, not being aware of the goings-on behind, I had funked it.

When my daughter had made plans to go to America she met Ralph's son, Charles, and they took a liking to each other. Whether Charles was particularly smitten we shall never know, but Ralph certainly was attracted by Rosamund's piquant blonde prettiness. So when Charles took her out he was provided with a large chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce to escort her to and from the theatre. By the time Rosamund came home from America she was engaged to marry a Californian.

When Ralph was eighty he was taken ill while on tour and went into hospital and quietly died. Mu, writing to me afterwards, said: ‘ He just folded his wings and refused to fly.'

I cannot end this section without writing a few more words about Max Reinhardt. Part French, part Austrian, and educated in Istanbul, Paris and London, he was a true cosmopolitan. When we went to Florence to the Publishers' Conference I knew about forty words of Italian; Max, in spite of his father having Italian nationality, knew no Italian at all. At the end of a week I still knew my forty words of Italian: he was speaking it – very badly and rousing companionate laughter, but being understood just the same. A very sophisticated man, easily bored, impatient of indifferent service, especially in restaurants and hotels, quick with his likes and dislikes, but in most other ways tolerant and easygoing, he was a man with a tremendous warmth of personality. Above all he had a supreme gift of friendship. It is one of the higher gifts in man, and I know no one who possessed it in such a degree.

Gilbert Harding, almost a forgotten man, I also came to know well. He used to hold court in the Savile, surrounded by a group of his friends, telling them a quite extraordinary selection of funny and revealing anecdotes about all manner of people he had known, from the lowly to the famous. His memory was brilliant, and his ability to tell a story to its best advantage was brilliant. He would talk for an hour. Andthen another hour. The first time I met him I came to sit somewhat tentatively on the outer orbit of his circle, one of the listening group. Presently his choleric eyes focused on me.

‘ Who are
you
?' he demanded. ‘ You look an arrogant fellow.'

I had been accused of a lot of things in my time, but arrogance was not one of them.

I gave him my name and my profession, and he grunted noncommitally and turned to his friends with another story, this one about Dickie Mountbatten, I remember, whom he greatly disliked.

I was staying in the club, and presently went up to dinner and afterwards played snooker. About eleven I went into the lavatory and found Gilbert on his own. His friends had gone and so had the drink, and he was swaying like a large building awaiting demolition. But he remembered me.

‘You!' he boomed. ‘You say you're an author. What have you written?'

‘Well … one called
Take My Life
. That was written first as a screenplay but afterwards it was published as a novel.'