Murderers and Other Friends (16 page)

It was also hard to explain the state of mind of the audience. The courts seemed to assume that if the readers or viewers were submitted to some description of villainy, sexual indulgence or violent cruelty they would immediately rush out and try it for themselves. Yet millions of unadventurous men on commuter trains read the James Bond stories without feeling licensed to kill or sleep with sultry mistresses on Caribbean islands; even more millions of law-abiding citizens read Agatha Christie without the slightest temptation to stab the heiress in the library.

‘Art is not life,' Auden wrote, ‘and cannot be / A midwife to society.' The blurred connections between art and life, their effect on each other, and the distinction between truthful art and mere pretence, were the subjects of discussion in a number of legal cases. The argument became even more complicated when the works themselves were calculated to deceive. The tricks in art that come off appear magical, the failures vulgar frauds. No one in their senses confuses art with reality or thinks they enter a gallery to look at actual sunflowers or live, naked women picnicking on the grass; what they are seeing is an idea of the world presented by a conjuror. But when artists borrow other people's ideas, or pinch their brand of trickery, they get branded as forgers and are occasionally prosecuted. The concept of forgery would be impossible had not money, in considerable sums, become inappropriately mixed up with the world of art.

There's no doubt that the art world welcomes forgeries. The wisest practitioners don't simply produce a drawing and call it a Rembrandt; they take a suitable drawing they have done to an art expert and ask for his informed opinion. Everyone likes to be present at an important discovery and the expert will no doubt say, ‘Blow me down! I think this is a Rembrandt!' or words to like effect. The drawing then goes off and takes on a life of its own and art houses and museums will often protest that it's genuine however often, or however convincingly, the forger confesses. And yet how harmful is this delusion? The flattered lover may be genuinely delighted by his mistress's faked orgasm and the actor by insincere praise of his performance. The art lover may be deeply moved by a drawing, beautifully executed, in authentic ink on period paper, by a talented art student in Camden Town, which he has every reason to believe is by Rubens.

This line of thought is not easy to follow, and pursuing it is like walking down an endless passageway lined with mirrors which reflect and often distort each other's images. The argument is a difficult one to conduct before an Old Bailey judge who learns, to his apparent distress, that Marcel Duchamp, by the simple act of signing a urinal R. Mutt, sold it for more money than the judge was likely to earn from a year of toil at murder, robbery and grievous bodily harm.

It all started when the National Portrait Gallery mounted an exhibition of work by a hitherto unknown nineteenth-century photographer named Francis Hetling. The pictures, which were mainly of Victorian beggar children and street waifs, were described as ravishing; the exhibition was an undoubted success and a set of ten prints was later sold to an art dealer who seemed well pleased with his purchase. Unhappily, the National Portait Gallery was visited by a mother who recognized a pool-eyed child, who stood dirty, barefoot and shivering, clutching a shawl around her in the doorway of some Victorian slum dwelling, as the daughter she had driven that morning to school in Battersea.

Francis Hetling, although posthumously recognized by the National Portrait Gallery, turned out never to have been born. The ‘ravishing' pictures were the work of Howard Grey, a photographer of Clapham, and Graham Ovenden, a painter of the ruralist movement, a sect devoted to living in the countryside and listening to the works of Sir Edward Elgar. Graham Ovenden was far the more interesting of the two. He was a brilliant artist whose genius was rated by none more highly than himself. One of the questioned photographs turned out not to be a photograph at all but a super-realistic drawing by Ovenden himself, thus adding bewilderingly to the layers of deception. When the judge looked predictably incredulous on being told this, Ovenden dashed off another convincing photographic drawing to add to his bewilderment.

It was Grey who had taken the photograph of the Victorian slum child. In fact she had been wearing an old T-shirt, was asked to rub dirt on her face and body, posed against a chimney-stack on the roof of his studio and was paid £35 for the session. Ovenden said that he had found Grey in a depressed mood, down on his luck, and wanted to encourage him and prove that his work was as good as that of any of the great Victorians. He put the photographs through various processes, in some cases drawing them and then photographing the drawings. He attributed the Hetlings as coming from the collection of Graham Ovenden and eventually agreed to give the art dealer some of the prints, but didn't take money for them directly. Instead he asked the dealer to buy some of his own works for the same value. Our defence, readily agreed to by Mr Ovenden, was that he was such a consummate artist that the photographs were far more valuable if he had had a hand in them than if they had been the work of Francis Hetling, an obscure Victorian, who had no real existence anyway. So, to debate questions which have puzzled art historians, confused connoisseurs and bedevilled critics down the centuries, we went down to discuss it all in front of an Old Bailey jury. ‘Works of art,' I remember suggesting, ‘can't be approached in the same way as frozen carrots,' and yet how should they be valued? Peter Blake, a friend of Ovenden's and, at that time, a fellow ruralist, sat in the public gallery throughout the trial. It further puzzled the judge to discover that Mr Blake only had to sign a postcard, say a sepia-tinted view of the promenade at Torquay, to increase its value astronomically.

Graham Ovenden, small, bearded, blessed with every talent except modesty, explained a letter of apparent apology he had written to the art dealer by saying, ‘Great men humble themselves,' and fended off other attacks by agreeing with a smile that, ‘Great men sometimes do things like that.' He did nothing to simplify life and art for the benefit of the court. Charles Lawson was a thoroughly decent judge with a ramrod straight back, a complexion the colour of vintage claret, a ready smile and a considerable amount of common sense. Given a charge of gross indecency in the Superloo at Euston Station he was in complete charge of the proceedings, saying, on one occasion, that my client, who was called Titus Brown, had ‘the best name for a bugger I've ever heard'. On questions of aesthetics he was far less happy. When the prosecuting counsel suggested to Ovenden that a Van Gogh would be a good picture whoever had painted it, my client said, correctly, that there he was on dangerous ground and went off into a long catalogue of the pictures that are ‘of the school of' or ‘in the manner of' or simply ‘after' great artists. The judge was clearly lost and the shorthand writer became too confused to continue her note of the evidence. The prosecutor then held up a photograph by Lewis Carroll, another specialist in portraits of young girls. Ovenden agreed that it was a valuable work of art. But when it was suggested that the Hetlings had no value, Ovenden was able to tell him that he was quite wrong. It seemed that once the Hetlings were known to be Ovendens they were worth more than the art dealer had paid for them.

The judge summed up the trial as ‘one of the most interesting and unusual in the whole of my judicial experience and in my career at the bar'. At the start of the proceedings he had offered the jury a fascinating and entertaining case, but by the end of it they must have been in a state of utter confusion. I don't know exactly how they reached their verdict but they acquitted both defendants of conspiracy to defraud. They couldn't agree if Ovenden had obtained money by deception and the prosecution accepted the judge's hint and offered no further evidence. Ovenden had successfully pulled the leg of the National Portrait Gallery, fooled the art experts who failed to recognize some of the Victorian photographs as contemporary drawings, and led an unsuspecting judge and jury far away from the simple facts of fraud and theft into the swamps of aesthetics. I remember one moment with particular joy. I presented an art expert with what was said to be a Victorian photograph, by Julia Margaret Cameron, of a nineteenth-century staging of King Arthur at dinner with his Knights of the Round Table. When I asked him to look very carefully at the little knight seated on Sir Lancelot's right, he
had
to admit, blushing modestly, that it was himself in fancy-dress. In the world of art nothing is entirely credible and the camera lies with considerable ingenuity.

Recently I wrote, and Jacquie and our company produced, a series of television plays about life in an art auction house. For the production we took over a huge, and no longer used, old people's home somewhere south of London airport, which smelled strongly of urine and was full of rusting Zimmer frames and cranking-up bathroom equipment. We redecorated it, hung it with dark red wallpaper and a man, delicately applying paint with feathers, made the convincing marble archways. On the walls hung paintings of dubious authenticity found in stores of prop-suppliers or hired from owners who made extravagant and unconvincing claims for them. The old people's home was disguised as a smart auction house named Klinsky's and fake catalogues advertised the sale of a so-called Raphael that was put together in the art department. Each story dealt with a work of art which might or might not be genuine. To tell these stories, we ordered up an allegory Bronzino never painted and had an alternative salt cellar, which might pass for the work of Benvenuto Cellini, created for us in the Silver Vaults. The end result was, I hope, an expensive but moderately successful con-trick about the everlastingly deceptive world of art.

Something strange happened that proves not only the potency of the most spurious art but the reckless intoxication induced by auctions. At the end of shooting we gave a party for the unit in the Klinsky's set and decided to hold a sale of the props for charity. Admittedly a number of Harvey Wallbangers and Tequila Slammers had been consumed, but the bidding for what everyone knew perfectly well were complete fakes rose to dizzy heights. I can faintly remember paying a good deal of money for a pretended drawing by Juan Gris that I knew the young man who wore his gold-embroidered cap back to front had run up in the art department.

Then the work was finished. We left the old people's home and the local authority, who owned it, wanted us to restore it to the state in which we had found it. So we stripped off the damask paper, obliterated the marble and an elderly carpenter was strongly tempted to pee up against the walls.

My mother was always careful to mark the difference between her standards of what was acceptable and my less steadfast opinions. In the year the war ended, in the year of the great Labour landslide,
Brideshead Revisited
was published and I read it with admiration and misty-eyed nostalgia for an Oxford which, like the Drones Club, never existed on land or sea. I was twenty-three, pulling out Labour voters in my father's ancient Morris Oxford, but so intoxicated by
Brideshead
that I even suggested to my mother that there might be something romantic about the aristocracy, some magical charm surrounding the monarchy. ‘You don't mean,' my mother was laughing as she was to do when I told her I'd been made a part-time judge, ‘those people in Buckingham Palace? Really, do try not to be silly!' So she put on her veil and, carrying a device which pumped smoke into the hive to make the bees drowsy, went off to take the honey. Despite the veil, the gloves and the smoke, she was frequently stung, a fate about which she never complained at all.

More than thirty years later I was rung up by Derek Grainger at Granada Television and asked if I'd like to adapt
Brideshead.
Of course I would. Evelyn Waugh is one of the half-dozen writers to whom I owe most. His early books,
Decline and Fall
and
Vile Bodies,
seem perfect and
A Handful of Dust
a bitter masterpiece.
Brideshead
is perhaps too lush, too in awe of baroque architecture and the upper classes, to achieve the comic purity of his greatest work. But the fierceness of the religion gives the book its hard centre. I sat down to the job with great pleasure. Although Waugh was a true blue Tory and I'm a champagne Socialist, although he was a devout Catholic and I'm an atheist for Christ, I thought I could preserve the true spirit of his writing.

Only two things caused me embarrassment. One is the scene in which the narrator has dinner with the awful Rex Mottram in Paris. Waugh relishes Rex's failure to understand the correct way of eating caviare, or the proper manner of drinking brandy
(not
out of a great balloon-shaped glass, for God's sake!). This type of snobbery seems to me truly vulgar. The other difficult time for me came when Charles Ryder heroically helps to break the General Strike. Deeply shocked, I tried to keep him as far from the General Strike as possible. I enjoyed writing the religious scenes very much; anyone who is prepared to sacrifice their happiness for a belief deserves sympathy and respect, and the end of the book is genuinely moving.

A great danger in adapting books for film or television is that you lose the voice of the most important character, the author. Take Dickens out of
Bleak House
and you're left with little but dramatic scenes and eccentric characters. Remove P.G. Wodehouse from the Jeeves stories and you have only some rather thin farcical situations.
Brideshead
is narrated by Charles Ryder. Quite early on we decided to keep his narration and the director Charles Sturridge added a great deal more of it from the book. In that way Evelyn Waugh remained where he should have been, in the centre of the story. This and the length of a television series, which can be far more literary than a film, gave, I think, the audience the feeling of having lived through a book. Almost everything in the scripts came from
Brideshead
and I was careful to keep the dreadful passage in which Charles Ryder says he ‘made free of her [Lady Julia's] narrow loins' to show that Waugh could write as badly as any of us if he set his mind to it.