The Revolt of the Pendulum (45 page)

On a grand occasion, she had a way of looking unimpressed that could set the assembled company to wondering if they quite measured up. Actually her inscrutability might have had more to do with
shyness, but there was no telling for sure even when you knew her. Perhaps you had done something wrong. I once turned up for a book-launch in a flared-trouser all-denim suit that was very wrong
indeed, and couldn’t help thinking that my appearance might have had something to do with the way she looked into her glass of white wine as if a fly had drowned in it.

But she forgave us all, as long as we kept writing. Pat’s client list, always bung full for decade after decade, was a persuasive indicator that she was on the side of the creator. To be
effectively on the side of the creator, however, an agent must know the business. Pat did. I can well remember her first explanation to me of why it was better, on a book of memoirs, to have a
rising rate on later royalties (the ‘escalator’ clause) than to inflate the advance, especially if I also wanted the publisher to put out off-trail stuff such as collections of essays
and poetry. ‘The secret,’ she said, ‘is to be a long-term asset.’

I wish I could say that the idea had been all mine, but without her deep knowledge of the practical possibilities I would have been stymied. I am sure that there are many other clients who could
say the same about their careers. Every literary career is different but the same principles apply, or anyway they ought to. The first principle is to
have
principles. The writer should not
expect to have junk published; the publisher should not expect to get away with publishing junk; and the agent should not expect to be praised for extracting a huge advance from the publisher for a
piece of junk that will never get the advance back.

Pat saw all this nonsense coming a long way off and she could be very funny about it (she was never more delightful than when pouring on the scorn), but she profoundly disapproved. Everyone in
the business knew how honest she was and it must have made some of them uncomfortable. When PFD, of which she had been a stalwart, was taken over, it was an awkward situation for many of us because
the literary world in London is quite small and everyone knows everyone. But Pat’s clients went with her
en masse
to the new outfit, United Agents, and I doubt if even one of them
hesitated any more than I did. I would have gone with her even if I had known that she was soon to grow fatally ill. Every minute of knowing her was valuable. This week many voices will be heard
saying the same thing. Being literary voices, they will all say it differently, but there will be common themes: respect, admiration, love, and a racking grief at so cruel a blow, which had an
awful quickness for its only mercy.

Guardian
, October 21, 2008

Postscript

She died on a Monday morning, and in the afternoon the
Guardian
called me ten minutes before the
Times
did. I had already composed my first few paragraphs,
because I knew somebody would be asking, and it was something to do. One of the dubious privileges of sharing your life with famous people is that if you outlive them, you will be called upon to
help bury them. Pat was good at fame: disliking the attention intensely, she perfected a natural gift for public privacy. Her lifelong physical beauty announced itself always, but through no fault
of her own; and she flaunted nothing, not even her principles. But they were fiercely held, and one of the many things to regret about her unexpected death was that it came just a few days too
early for her to see a black man become President of the United States. In her youth, she had left South Africa because of apartheid. The renunciation cost her much regret, which she bore without
complaint. I tried to get some of that heroic quality into my piece. In all the pieces – and I suppose there will be more, unless I check out early to be summed up in my turn – I make
it my first and only task to catch the character. The standard obituary, with all the biographical details, is beyond me. What I write is what the obit editors call the additional feature.
It’s easier, but I still wish I didn’t have to. The only way out of it, however, would be if your loved ones lived forever: and we can’t have that.

MUSIC IN THE DARK

All set to go on stage at the Sydney Opera House and do some talking in between renditions of crime-movie music by the Symphony Orchestra, I’ll be able to rely on my
memory to a remarkable extent. I might have to look up the odd name and date, but mostly the stuff is already in my head. For most of my waking life, I’ve been seeing almost every notable
movie on its first release, and I formed the habit right here in Sydney. Near my home suburb of Kogarah in the late 1940s and the 1950s there were three movie houses (always known simply as
‘the pictures’) operating full blast. Early on, when I had barely cut my second teeth, my mother used to take me to every change of double bill at the Ramsgate Odeon.

A little later, but while still in short pants, I took myself to the Saturday afternoon matinee at Rockdale Odeon for a couple of action movies, four episodes from different serials, and sixteen
cartoons. Long pants having been acquired, I went solo to the Ramsgate double bill in the evening at least once a week, and, on another evening in the same week, to the double bill at the Rockdale
Odeon. If the movie had Grace Kelly in it, I could see it repeatedly by chasing it from Ramsgate to Rockdale and back to Kogarah. I saw
Dial M for Murder
five times that way. When the
Symphony Orchestra plays the soundtrack music in the Opera House, they’ll have to hose me down to stop me singing along.

Is there anything more ridiculous than a young man in love? No, but there is nothing more dedicated either. Time after time in
Dial M for Murder
I was sending thought waves to the screen,
warning Grace Kelly that her life was in danger. (Many years later, when I heard the news of her death in a car-crash, I immediately had the guilty thought that I had not sent her a sufficiently
powerful message when we were spiritually united in the thrilling darkness of the Ramsgate Odeon.) I even remembered the names on the credits, and so knew from an early age that the spine-tingling
score had been composed by Dmitri Tiomkin – two words that I could not pronounce, but they were engraved in my mind as if with a stylus.

My golden-haired beloved was also in
Rear Window
, and once again I sent messages of warning as the music cranked up the tension. She’s searching Raymond Burr’s apartment for
the missing wedding ring! She’s found the ring! She’s signalling James Stewart but he doesn’t know how to tell her that Raymond Burr has come home early! Luckily my own signals
reached her in time and she managed to bluff her way out of certain death. The music was by Franz Waxman. I assumed, of course, that he knew Grace Kelly personally.

I had no idea of how movies were made. All I knew was that I couldn’t do without a regular supply of them. The experience of watching was closely allied with the experience of eating. In
those days I existed on an exclusive diet of sweets and I graded them according to the type of movie on show. At the Rockdale Odeon, when the action films and serials and cartoons were running, I
existed mainly on Jaffas and Hoadley’s Violet Crumble Bars. Jaffas were ideal for popping like pills during an Eastern Western like
The Golden Blade
in which George Macready threatened
Piper Laurie’s virtue. Crumble Bars, which imposed a much slower chewing rate, were appropriate when enduring the tension of the latest episode of
Lost City of the Jungle
. In reality,
the actors were in no danger except from the set falling down, but I had no idea what the term ‘low-budget’ meant. For any item on the endless matinee programme, the music could have
been by Alfred Newman, who, during a long career, composed for every kind of movie there was. He also composed the Twentieth Century Fox logo theme. ‘Da-da-dah, da-da-dah, da-da-DAH!’ I
could sing it. They’ll be playing it at the Opera House to start the show and I’ll be singing it right along with them unless they can stop me.

For a high-end romantic movie at Ramsgate, I moved my sweet-eating choices upmarket, culminating in the luxurious Cherry Ripe, still the all-time most sensuous Australian gustatory experience.
Either out of lust for Grace Kelly or loathing for Stewart Granger I choked on a Cherry Ripe while watching
Green Fire
. But sophistication was soon to arrive. In the late fifties I expanded
my movie-going range. Sydney University had a Film Society whose operating members were drunk at all times. The movies were screened in the old Union Hall (gone now, alas, with all its atmosphere
of girls longed for and time wasted) and the screening was always preceded, just before the lights went down, by Bunk Johnson playing ‘The Saints Go Marching In’.

Owing to the inebriation of the personnel in the projection box, the reels did not always come on in the right order. Thus my fourth viewing of
The Sound Barrier
was lent a unique
dimension. I had already seen it several years before, two nights running at the Ramsgate Odeon and then again at the Kogarah Odeon. I had seen it three times because Ann Todd was in it. She was
the British Grace Kelly and in some ways even more attractive, because she made tea for her guests, like my mother. In the movie she falls in love with a handsome test pilot (Nigel Patrick, whose
suave sneer was much imitated by me) but he dies in a crash. In the Film Society version, he died in a crash and then she fell in love with him.

Imitating the male stars was a feature of my youth. Though I had no natural gifts as a mimic, I could get closer to a passable impression by seeing the movie several times in a row. Variously
rehearsed at both Ramsgate and Rockdale after multiple viewings of
The Wild One
, my Marlon Brando had a startling effect on my mother. When she said that she was getting sick of asking me to
mow the lawn, I told her that I would mowmduh lawm domorrow. On the other hand, Brando’s Mark Antony in
Julius Caesar
got me speaking in blank verse whatever the occasion. (‘Have
I not said the lawn will soon be mowed?’)

Australia in those years is often accused of provincialism but the truth is that the movies connected us to a wider world. They always had. In the thirties, my mother and father, during those
onerous depression years when they could not yet afford to have the child that would grow up to be me, would watch Myrna Loy and William Powell in the ‘Thin Man’ movies and get a
lasting idea of what men and women could be like when they treated each other as equals. And it wasn’t just the standard Hollywood and British product that reached us. By the time I was ready
to sail, I had seen all the Italian neo-realist movies at Sydney cinemas. But it was an off-trail British movie that knocked me sideways. You couldn’t see it in Ramsgate or Kogarah or
Rockdale. You had to go ‘into town’, as we used to say. It was
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
, and for three nights on the trot I absorbed the chemicals that transformed me
into Albert Finney. By the third night I was talking with a Nottinghamshire accent and humming the themes of the score by Johnny Dankworth. I was ready for England.

Time Out Sydney
, September 10–16, 2008

Postscript

Some of the details of my early movie-going in Sydney I put into my book
Unreliable Memoirs
, first published almost thirty years ago and still in print. But I never
mind revisiting a theme if there is a new angle demanding to be taken, and here the angle was soundtrack music. There was also the chance to go public with the long-kept secret of my adoration for
Grace Kelly, one of the great love affairs of my life, although she never heard about it. The venue for the show, the Sydney Opera House, can be daunting if you are going on alone. On this occasion
I had the Sydney Symphony Orchestra with me on stage but I was still the only one speaking. The place, though vast, has a wraparound auditorium and feels, from the performer’s viewpoint,
quite intimate, but there are so many people looking at you that only a fool would not be scared. Even scarier than a full house, however, is a half-empty one. Unless you can pull in a few hundred
people on top of the subscribers, there will be vacant seats, and it takes only a few of those to give the vulture element of the local press a cue to start evoking the spectacle of a lonely old
man trembling on the brink of the void. Hence the importance of getting a handbill out to the general public. Luckily the Sydney edition of
Time Out
asked me to be guest editor at just the
right moment. Before I caught my flight from London, I wrote about half the magazine just for the chance to get the above article printed. Upon arrival in Sydney, I also appeared on every radio and
television show I was asked to do, mentioning my upcoming concert dates in the answer to every question, even if it was about global warming. The combined publicity worked and the hall was full by
the third night, but it was a near-run thing. In a subscription house that offers a guarantee, you don’t necessarily have to fill the joint to get paid, but Sydney is the town where I made my
start, and when I go back I like to get the crowd out if I can, just to prove to them that the runaway made something of himself. It’s a primitive urge, which Gore Vidal once defined
beautifully when he was asked why he worked so hard to pull an audience for his books: ‘None must escape.’

STARTING WITH SLUDGE

It was my third year at Sydney Technical High School, and our English class was being taken by a history teacher while our regular teacher was away ill. Though he conspicuously
wore the first Hush Puppies I had ever seen, I can’t remember the history teacher’s name. But I can still remember everything he said. To keep us in order, he had been asking us what we
read at home. I said that I had been reading the collected works of Erle Stanley Gardner. He said there was nothing wrong with that, but that the whole secret with what he called sludge fiction was
to enjoy it while you built up the habit of reading, and then move on to something hard. The very idea that there might be something interesting further up the road had not occurred to me before
that day. Many years later, I realised that he had chosen his words with care, so as not to crush.