The Light's on at Signpost (20 page)

I never discovered whether Burt liked the
Musketeers
or not, for he watched with his customary silent concentration, and had only one comment to make afterwards. “You know your best line in that movie? It’s when D’Artagnan won’t accept Buckingham’s friendship, and Buckingham presents him with a sword and holds out his hand and says: ‘Will you take this—and this—from an enemy?’ That’s a great line.”

I made a note that Burt Lancaster was not averse to a little manly sentiment.

We went to see one other movie, a cloak-and-sworder made not long before. I wasn’t keen—the last thing you need before starting a script is to see something similar—but Burt had arranged a special screening; he didn’t come himself, having seen it, and Nick slept soundly until halfway through, when I woke him up and said I’d seen enough. When we got back to the office, Burt asked me what I’d thought of it.

“Possibly it could have been worse,” I said, “but I doubt it.” He nodded judicially. “That’s what I thought. Now you know what we don’t want.”

Our working routine was simple. In the morning we conferred at the office, Burt, Hill, and I, and occasionally Harold; in the afternoon I would write up what we had talked over, sketching scenes, trying out dialogue, mulling over possible plot-lines and variations for next day. It went well at first, and a plot-line emerged;
the Crimson Pirate, grown old, becomes curator of a pirate museum in retirement (the museum would feature memorabilia of such “pirates” as Fairbanks Senior, Flynn, Power, Sanders, Rathbone, and others) but has to take up arms again to assist his son, who, thanks to the care father has lavished on his education, has become something big and respectable in the outposts of empire and got himself into trouble as yet unspecified.

The bare bones of the beginning, you understand; there would be father-son bother, with the lad despising the old fellow, and a corrupt Viceroy or Governor-General or whatever, to be played by Rex Harrison. The son would probably be Michael York, with whom we had both worked, I on the Musketeers, Burt on
The Island of
Dr Moreau
, and I pushed hard for Christopher Lee as principal villain; not only was he the best heavy in the business, he had also appeared as a minor supporting villain in the original
Crimson
Pirate
, a most exploitable point. For love interest we provided father with a buxom wealthy widow who would be forever pestering him to settle down, while York would be given a wilting young lady of fashion.

I seem to recall that we kicked around the idea of a kind of romantic chiasmus, the son becoming infatuated with the widow, and the languid little aristocrat setting her cap at the old man. I know I suggested a beautiful black female pirate (a character I used later in a novel,
The Pyrates
), and that Burt countered with a smouldering Latin villainess to partner Rex Harrison, someone like Katy Jurado.

If all this sounds random, inconclusive, and corny, well, to quote Munro Stahr: “I’m just making movies.” That’s how it’s done, by chasing false trails, exchanging wild ideas, and gradually moving towards a coherent story-line. Well, fairly coherent.

We had got about halfway (and had our momentary tiff) when it dawned on me that this was as far as I wanted to go. It’s a strange thing: on the face of it you’re making good progress, the ideas are
taking shape, your associates are cautiously enthusiastic, one part of you is eager to see the thing take off—and at the same time you know that it’s not going to happen. I liked the project as well as ever; if we could have agreed a final rough outline, and I could have gone home and written it quietly and delivered it in the recommended Hemingway style (change down as you reach the studio gates, hurl your manuscript through them, and accelerate away) and never seen Pico Boulevard again, that would have been fine. But I knew when it came to contract that they’d want me there for the shoot and, as I said earlier, life was too short.

And yet…while your mind’s made up, there is still a small voice saying, “Don’t be too hasty. You may feel different in a week or two.”

But you must play fair. I told Burt I thought we’d gone as far as we could for the moment; I’d like to go home and think about it for a day or two. I added that I wasn’t sure that I wanted to go on with it. Naturally, he wanted to know why; I told him I wasn’t keen on three months’ filming in the Mediterranean or wherever, and he asked would I at least go ahead with the synopsis; Jim Hill would come across to the Isle of Man to work with me, if that would help…I am as persuadable as the next man, Lancaster when he turned on the charm was a difficult man to refuse, Hill seemed genuinely eager to continue, and Harold Hecht almost tipped the scale when he said: “We’d really like you to go on, but if you decide not to…well, I can say we’ve had our money’s worth.”

Whether it was the old Hollywood treatment or not, I don’t know; I like to think not. One thing I did know: if I did agree to an extension of my services, and completed the synopsis, there was no way I could turn my back on the movie after that. I was going to have to make a clean break or carry on.

The time they had already paid for was up anyway, and it was arranged that Burt and I would fly together to Heathrow—he was
going on to Rome (to see his daughter, I think), and then to Russia to make some programme about battlefields. On the eve of our flight we were in the office when it occurred to me that I still had five hundred dollars remaining of the expenses they had given me on my arrival; I said since I hadn’t spent it, they should have it back.

“No, it’s yours,” said Burt. “We agreed a figure; whether you’ve spent it or not doesn’t matter.”

I told him it did. If I hadn’t had to use it, I wasn’t entitled to it. He demurred, I insisted, Hecht and Hill watched with interest, and I finally settled the matter by laying the greenbacks on Burt’s desk. (I would guess that Hecht concluded then and there that I would not be going on with the project, but he was wrong. I wasn’t making a gesture, or a signal; it was just pure Presbyterianism.)

Burt began to laugh, something he rarely did. Then he shrugged, dropped the bills in his desk drawer, and shook his head, regarding me with what I can only call interested amusement.

“Thirty years in Hollywood,” he said, “and you can still learn something new.”

We flew out of LA next day—the only time in my life that I’ve been in a VIP lounge, unless you count the fuss they used to make over Westerners at Russian airports. I arrived first and checked in. “You’re the Mr Frayzhur travelling with Mr Lancaster?” the hostess asked with bated breath, and thereafter I was practically carried through to a luxurious lounge and plied with canapés, soft drinks, coffee, and the daily papers—I had the feeling that if I’d asked to have my toe-nails buffed they’d have drummed up a manicurist. That, presumably is what major stars and their companions get all the time, and I’m not sure that it’s always welcome. Burt gave the impression that he’d rather have been anonymous; he arrived at the last minute before boarding-time, wearing a cloth cap, blue glasses, a curious fleecy sleeveless jacket, and carrying his best suit in a portable hanger. Once we were installed at the back of first
class, where he asked apologetically if I would mind taking the aisle seat (I learned why presently), he drew my attention to the price of our tickets—several thousand dollars apiece, even in those days.

“Look at that! You’d think you could buy the goddam airplane for that kind of money.” He looked about him and sighed. “You know, Frankie Sinatra would reserve this whole cabin, the whole of first class.”

I said that presumably Sinatra could afford it.

“Yeah…they think we all can, movie stars making fortunes. What d’you think I’m worth? Four million bucks. Okay, I’m not complaining, it beats the hell out of circus work, but it’s no big deal by Hollywood standards.” He paused. “It’ll do, though.”

It was my opening to start interviewing again, and since Sinatra had been mentioned I asked about
From Here to Eternity
, and learned that Sinatra, the untrained actor, had a talent for getting the speech or the move right first time. “He was a natural; it seemed to come easy, spontaneously. Now Monty Clift thought about it.” He recalled an emotional scene with Clift in which it had been suggested that Lancaster should kiss him. “Monty was all for it—he would be.” Sardonic snort. “I said, ‘No thanks, I pass.’”
*
Deborah Kerr? “Great actress, great lady.”

He had chosen the window seat, I discovered, to avoid the attentions of admirers. “I can walk around Hollywood, hardly be noticed, maybe one or two people calling, ‘Hi, Burt Lancaster!’ but anywhere else they want to talk to you. In Europe especially. Old German women out in the country even, no kidding!”

As it turned out, having me on the aisle was only a partial protection; in the first hour of the flight at least four people approached him for his autograph, which he gave with great good humour, listening politely to one California matron who wanted to tell him how terrific he’d been in…here there followed a fairly full list of his pictures, “and, oh my goodness, that Italian one…you know,
The Lion
…no, no,
The Leopard
, you were marvellous. Of course, you are Italian, aren’t you? Oh, you’re not? I thought you were.” She seemed disappointed, but settled down in a kneeling position in the aisle to continue her monologue until Burt took advantage of a pause to say: “I haven’t introduced my friend here. He writes novels. You’ve heard of Flashman, of course.”

Of course she had not, but she made a polite noise, Burt moved smoothly into his crossword puzzle, and I was left to make what conversation I could. It culminated with her asking in a dispirited way for my autograph, and I was aware of Lancaster smiling cynically over his rimless reading glasses.

When she had gone, with Burt bowing beautifully from a sitting position, we did our respective crosswords until he suggested we change papers—his was one of those huge American things consisting mostly of three and four-letter words—not as simple as you might think. Mine was the
Guardian
, not tough by British standards, but gibberish to an American; he stared at it in disgust, removed his glasses, and said “Okay, let’s talk.”

So we did, about everything except the project. He was what I can only call a liberal reactionary, or reactionary liberal, given to all the fashionable causes but with that deeply ingrained respect for traditional values typical of Americans of his race and generation. Obviously I don’t remember it as a coherent conversation, but isolated things stay in memory: he was thinking of investing in a soccer club—the game looked like taking off in the US at that time—and talked knowledgeably of “Georgie Best”; he never went to Hollywood parties, his idea of a happy evening being to have Nick Cravat and a few friends over to his modest apartment and eat spaghetti; he had given up smoking, but the sight of me puffing
away was too much for him, and he accounted for half my cigarettes on the flight.

As to his career, he was immensely proud of his performance in
The Leopard
, and of the praise it had received from Laurence Olivier when they met; he greatly admired Paul Scofield, with whom he’d appeared in
The Train
, and Mickey Rooney, whom we watched briefly in the in-flight movie (“Boy! what an actor!”); he had little to say of his best-known pictures, but dwelt rather on the lesser ones, like
Valdez is Coming
, and a violent prison drama early in his career,
Brute Force
, in which he had learned much from fellowactors Hume Cronyn and Charles Bickford, and from that underrated supporting player, John Hoyt, a notable Decius Brutus in Mankiewicz’s
Julius Caesar
.

Valdez is Coming
, in which he had played a downtrodden Mexican who eventually turns on his persecutors, he recalled for two reasons: one, it has no ending, the titles coming up with the final shoot-out not taking place, and two, because of an acting trick he had learned. The director had told him to keep his eyes lowered until the point in the film when the worm finally turned against his oppressor, and on the line: “Tell him Valdez is coming”, to look up into camera for the first time. It worked; I’ve seen it.

He confessed to an ambition to work on the West End stage, as James Stewart and Henry Fonda had done, and wondered how London audiences would react to a play in which he and Kirk Douglas played Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer grown old; he plainly had his doubts not only as to how it would be received, but whether he could get backing to put it on. I suggested he take it to the Edinburgh Festival, the “fringe” if necessary; all he need do, I assured him, was hire a hall and go to it; if it was a success, it would transfer to London without difficulty; if it flopped, well, they’d have lost nothing.

“Would the Edinburgh audiences come to see us?” He actually asked the question, frowning.

“For Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster?” I said. “Oh, I dare say you might get one or two…dear God, man, you’d be a sell-out!”

But he was not convinced, and the play never reached Edinburgh. What it was like, I don’t know, but unless it was one of the most frightful stinkers of all time I don’t see how it could have failed, with those two.

We reached Heathrow at some godless hour, and as we walked along the interminable corridors he returned to the
Crimson Pirate
sequel. He wanted me to go on; we’d reach a good contract, we could have a terrific picture. “I hope you’ll do it,” he said. “I really do.”

I was hugely flattered, as who wouldn’t be, and murmured something grateful and non-committal. At this point we were met by a young man who seemed to be some kind of official airport greeter, and who bade Burt welcome at considerable length without saying a single useful or relevant thing. Burt bore him with exemplary patience, got rid of him politely, and repeated his hope that I’d carry on. We shook hands and parted, I to go to Terminal One, he to catch his Rome connection, walking briskly away with that slightly splay-footed gait, his good suit hung on one finger. An unusual man, even by Hollywood standards; tough, talented, straightforward, courteously aggressive (or aggressively courteous), and a lot deeper than your average film actor. If there was a quality that came across it was seriousness; he was not a man who took life lightly.