The Happy Years (1944-48)

by Cecil Beaton

  In fact Duvivier does not get the best out of his helpers: he is said to be unkind to the under-dog. He snaps off heads when his minions speak up and make criticisms or interruptions that are part of their job.

  Eventually the unit revolts. Union meeting. An uproar is abated by Duvivier’s offer to give a dinner and film-showing to the entire unit. Another union meeting to decide if the invitation should be accepted: grudgingly it is. The company decides it will get as much out of the unpopular director as possible. There is no love lost anywhere. A double horseshoe table is set up, a good dinner provided with a great supply of wines and spirits, but the drink only increases the ill-humour. Speeches are made with very unfortunate references to the troubles that have existed earlier in the week. Cheers for other members of the unit, half-hearted for the director. Duvivier wisecracks bitterly. An impasse of drunken embarrassment.

  An earlier film directed by Duvivier is shown after dinner. Many refrain from seeing it: others are too drunk. The evening is interrupted by the noise of men falling from their seats.

  Work next day is worse. Half the wardrobe staff are away with hangovers. The director’s temper is fierier than ever.

  Later: The ‘wardrobe master’ is in hospital. His condition is serious. He is on the danger list. He is dead.

  Saturday afternoon: ‘The boss is arriving! Any minute now! He’s at the gate! He’s here!’ Korda has been met at the airport and driven forthwith to the studio. About a dozen different ‘units’ try to get his attention.

  Momentous decisions must be made immediately. In the face of the I.H. and A.K. representatives the Bonnie Prince Charlie set have nabbed him. It seems as if they have received a shock. The rumour has it that after weeks spent on location in Scotland the film will not be made.[25]

  The publicity men now have hold of Korda. The war leader is with his chiefs-of-staff. When the leader turns to one of his entourage the rest fall back. As the honour is conferred for the brief moment it is up to the lesser light to make the most of the occasion — also to prolong it as long as possible. The leader is taken to inspect a new set. ‘No — it has no atmosphere and it’s too big. It must be rebuilt by Monday morning.’

  On the Ideal Husband exterior set we are waiting for a big cloud to pass: for days now we have been watching the grey skies. Each hour costs Korda an astronomical figure for the time of so many people, animals, and period carriages. The women’s clothes are crushed and dirty, and their trains have trailed in the mud and the horse dung. By now, everything that was once sparkling and elegant looks sordid and drab. The spirit seems to be knocked out of all but the principal actors; they have enjoyed a rest and have only some comparatively easy scenes to do.

  Everyone — society-pedestrians, coachmen, bicyclists, brass bands, platoon of guards, etc. — is ready at last, except Paulette Goddard. Her make-up girl explains the delay: ‘I’ve been cutting an eyelash for her.’

  At last the sun! A frenzied rush for the golden seconds to be used to their best advantage. Suddenly the scenes are ‘in the can’. The ghost of Korda smiles. Only one more day’s work inside the studio and shooting will be finished on Ideal Husband. Then Korda can give his attention to the troubles of Anna Karenina and Bonnie Prince Charlie.

  WEEKEND WITH LAURENCE OLIVIER

  Spring, 1947: Notley Priory

  Vivien is away visiting her former husband: Larry was busy all Saturday with business plans for his Australian tour, but intended to devote Sunday to going over the details of my School for Scandal designs. Larry would have preferred my production to be rich and realistic with mahogany doors and built fireplaces, but, since the scenery will have to travel throughout Australia and New Zealand before coming to London, it is more expedient to use trompe l’oeil. This gives me much more scope for invention, and I am delighted at the prospect of doing all the sets as if they were eighteenth-century engravings, even introducing the hatching strokes into the costumes.

  Meanwhile, I listen to Larry and his accountant. ‘We’re banking on every performance playing to capacity. Now, how many are we?’

  ‘Forty-one — that’s one too many.’

  ‘Can’t we take one extra?’

  ‘That extra fare will cost £1,000 by the end of the tour.’

  ‘Then suppose Vivien and I don’t go?’

  But, in general, L. is very businesslike with a minimum of jokes and interruptions. Later he talked to me about acting. ‘In my opinion acting is a question of range and taste. Let me give you an example of what I mean. Margaret Leighton is a most brilliant actress: she can do anything: she does everything quite naturally. It took me two years to walk round a chair with ease: it took me another two years to laugh on the stage. I had to learn everything: what to do with my hands — how to cry. Leighton can do all those things automatically. When I was playing Buckingham I had a very short time for study. I gave a sketchy performance, and one place in particular, where I knew I was horribly banal, became quite obnoxious to me. I had to say: ‘Well done — give us another song’ — or something like that — and I had thought of nothing better to do than applaud. One evening I thought ‘I won’t do this again’, and I suddenly had the idea of seeing Margaret Leighton weeping and being jovial to hide her sadness, and saying: ‘Come, let’s have another song’ to cover up her misery. So as we sat listening to the first song I whispered: ‘Weep — weep as much as you can!’, and after a few moments great big tears were coursing down her cheeks. She couldn’t have done that unless her range was enormous, and I consider the question of taste made all the difference to that scene.

  Larry also told me of his early struggles on the stage. Wearing a discarded suit of his uncle’s cut down to fit him, with one pair of shoes and an old hat, he would go the rounds of the Managers’ Offices. For years it was a question of getting an extra ten shillings a week and an extra line. Then he got married and the situation was more acute, and he had to accept all sorts of parts that he knew were not suitable. Noël Coward told him to play in Private Lives, saying: ‘It’ll run for years and you need the money.’ Now it amused him so much to be lionized by ‘Society’. Last week Sibyl Colefax had taken Vivien and him on to a supper party after a Rubinstein concert. Olga Lynn had come up to him and said: ‘Do you know Maggie Teyte?’ ‘No.’ ‘Then stay right here and I’ll bring her up and present her to you.’ ‘And an old girl, “Lady Abercrombie”’ (Lady Aberconway, in fact) ‘cornered me and was being very sympathetic, and at one moment lowered her eyelids and said: “Oh, Sir Laurence! — Sir Laurence!”’

  He finds now that he can assume the responsibilities of a country squire and talk as man to man with the farmer next door about the water system, the costs of supplying neighbouring farms with drainage, etc. It is rare that one comes across an actor whose self-assurance doesn’t border on crass bumptiousness. Perhaps more by strength of character than natural ability he has succeeded even in developing his intellect. Now his problems are ones of how to sustain his success and how to save money for his old age. But the architecture of his professional life seems pretty solid.

  DÉGRINGOLADE OF GERALD BERNERS

  Gerald is fading fast. Once so full of fun and wit, given to all forms of unexpected eccentricity — even to practical jokes — he is now sad and morose. He does not seem to have the will to live. He leaves his house with its statues decked with artificial fernery, the cases of stuffed birds and the pigeons dyed all colours of the rainbow, and he goes to his London doctor. ‘I don’t want you to return to the country tomorrow,’ the doctor tells him. ‘I want you to agree to stay under my supervision at the Clinic for the next month. You’ve got to look after yourself: we received the cardiogram and it shows us quite distinctly that you’ve had a clot — a thrombosis — which has pressed near your heart. It’s dispersed now, but we must watch you very carefully as this is the thing that people die of — so it’s worth your while to give up the next four weeks to being quite quiet. Now you’ll come along tomorrow afternoon, won’t you? You’l
l get into a taxi, and you’ve got someone to lift your bag down, haven’t you? You’ll please me a lot by saying you’ll do this. Good. I’m very relieved to hear you’ve made the right decision.’

  Gerald comes blinking into my room. ‘It’s really quite serious: it’s the sort of thing that people die of. Oh well, it’s not worth getting upset about, but I might as well take a month off for, after all, health is everything, isn’t it? And it’s never quiet at Faringdon with Robert[26] about. I’ve been very worried there lately. I’ve had to bring a law case about two people who wouldn’t move out of one of the cottages on the estate, and it’s been difficult to keep calm. There’s always such a lot to do. The bore is I’m missing the spring there. Now, let me see — when I come out of the home it will be 1 June. The syringa will be coming out and the greenhouse peaches will be ripe.’

  Pathetic Gerald! When he returned to Faringdon life was made no easier for him. He was not even allowed his breakfast in bed. It was not long before, in desperation, he turned his face to the wall.[27]

  LOOKING FOR A NEW HOUSE

  October, 1947

  Since I was thrown out of Ashcombe I have been somewhat forlornly looking for a small house in the country to take its place. But where on the entire earth could I find such another remote and beautiful a treasure as Ashcombe? ‘Particulars’ came from estate-agents by every post: ‘Imposing Georgian-style mansion only thirty-seven minutes from Piccadilly Circus…’ ‘Tudor gem — oak porch — all mod. cons. — billiard-room and solarium...’ ‘Converted Gothic lodge with indoor fives court...’

  I went, by expensive hire-car service, to Sussex to see deserted, pebble-dash haciendas decorated indoors with wrought-iron work, and to Surrey to admire slate-turreted maisonettes with cinder paths curving among the sparse beds of pampas grass and montbretia. I determined to remain faithful to Wiltshire. ‘No, Messrs Rawlence and Squarey, I did not fall in love yesterday afternoon with the mustard-and-pepper brick house at Quidhampton. Why? Because — well — to begin with — it’s too near the railway, and those pylons make a beeline for the garden.’ Eventually I became embarrassed at having to refuse so many of these ‘unique offers’.

  But even more embarrassing were the visits, recommended by my relations and closest friends, to the houses of people they knew, who were either ‘feeling the pinch’, wishing to ‘make a change’, or settling into something more ‘in keeping with the times’. In spite of its much vaunted monkey-puzzle tree I loathed ‘Redlands’ and wished so desperately that its occupants, still in residence, were not so obviously avid to sell to me. I felt trapped. I felt obliged to admire the gnarled beams, the granite chimney-piece and the stained-glass lattices, and the rockery and ponticums beyond, yet the praise must not be laid on too thick for then my eventual escape would be made all the harder. No matter what I said, there was nothing to be done: when I tried to leave ‘Redlands’ without a promise of ‘something down on account’ the owner’s son-in-law tried to set the dogs on me.

  After a while, in a recurrent nightmare I dreamt I was being blackmailed into buying some such overwhelming monstrosity as Royal Holloway College or a sinister Victorian workhouse.

  However, Edith Olivier, who eighteen years ago had found Ashcombe for me, now wrote to me of a small Wren house, not far from her in Wilton, belonging to the National Trust, and which she had heard was available for rental. Perhaps Edith could mark up a double...

  The aftermath of the war has brought with it our relief and gratitude, yet few joys. We, in England, have all endured what must be one of the most uncomfortable phases in recent history. People are undernourished, yet the food prospect is dark. The financial crisis is appalling and our debt to America increasing, yet under the Labour Government money is racketed away. According to Churchill, the Socialist policy, apart from ‘scuttling’, is to spread class warfare and to reduce us all to one vast ‘Wormwood Scrubbery’. We are in trouble in Palestine and Greece, and already the Germans are cutting up rough so that our troops must remain in vast quantities and at crippling expense. Continual crises hit hard our export trade. Each month brings further humiliations: these are our last days in Burma; we have left Cairo and lost India. Mr Attlee’s gang has brought disaster in practically all forms upon us, and a White Paper, just issued, prescribes no remedy for present ills. The excuses advanced for the Government’s chronic mistakes are blamed on years of Tory misrule, and the only consolation offered is that we must all work harder.

  To add to our winter of discontent the whole land has been suffering from a plague of cold — another ice age. Under the auspices of Mr Emanuel Shinwell the coal supply has almost completely given out: gas flickers weakly — even hospitals are without hot water. Edith Olivier and other elderly ladies have not been permitted to switch on their electric blankets, and the death rate from pneumonia has rocketed.

  Not surprisingly the train from Waterloo to Salisbury on the Saturday morning was unheated. Edith had to knock the icicles off me when I arrived to find that she had still a supply of logs for her small, but hospitable, hearth. Fortunately Edith’s cheerful spirits and courage were in contrast to my mood, and her rabbit-pie warmed me and gave me enough strength to set off with her on a polar expedition through the iced snow before dark enveloped us.

  At first Edith’s small motor-car would not start; our breath made clouds of steam as, in turn, we cranked the ineffectual handle. By degrees the frozen tubes thawed; eventually we jerked and skidded over the ice towards the village of Dinton. A noble edifice, somewhat Palladian, with a magnolia pinioned to its yellow stone walls, presented itself. On closer inspection the property was altogether too grand for my taste or my pocket.

  The light weakened and the thermometer dropped. On the somewhat dejected return to Wilton we passed through the village of Broadchalke. Here lived John Aubrey, the seventeenth-century antiquarian and historian. Aubrey wrote that the village possesses ‘one of the tunablest ring of bells in Wiltshire which hang advantageously, the river running near the churchyard, which meliorates the sound’. Edith’s car grinded to an abrupt halt in front of a miniature palace which I had often admired when living ten miles away. In fact, each time I came upon this Charles II rose-brick frontage I stopped, with screeching brakes, to admire the design of what must have been originally built for a king’s nid d’amour or hunting lodge. Apart from its quite exceptional facade, with its elegant stone pilasters and the bust of an unknown poet in the broken pediment over the door, the house had always had added interest because of Mrs Wood, its owner and the mother of the remarkable painter Christopher Wood. Although Mrs Wood was wary of snoopers, and had an unwelcoming manner with visitors, she retained in the attic a huge collection of her late son’s canvases.

  Mrs Wood had recently died, and it was rumoured that the house was about to be sold. It was, therefore, with a feeling of adventure that on this cold late-afternoon Edith boldly rang the front door bell and, after a moment of pourparler with an unfriendly servant, was bidden to enter.

  At first, in the last light of day, the interior of the house disappointed us. The hall was cut up into several partitions comprising a gun-room, corridor, and a minute enclosure with a gate-legged dining-table. Oak beams warred with the classic lines of the exterior, and a clumsy mock-Elizabethan chimneypiece of modern red brick protruded out of all proportion. We could not understand why, in such a rambling way, rooms were placed on different levels. We shivered as we went from one disused parlour to another, then up to the dark and sinister attic where cockfighting took place in the eighteenth century. We peered in the gloom at the pens where the prize birds were kept before being let out into the blinding light of candles to fight for their survival.

  Then again we braced ourselves for the Alaskan elements in order to view the garden and terrace. The dark sky made everything appear bleak and cheerless: a dirty snow-covered hill seemed to avalanche precariously close to the house. Edith, purple-nosed, did not wax enthusiastic; neither was I, as I had been at Ashc
ombe, a victim of love at first sight. Nevertheless, when we had returned to Edith’s hearth and were huddling over hot drinks, enough enthusiasm was kindled to suggest summoning my mother to give her opinion on the place.

  On the Monday morning, for the first time in many months, the sun shone on England. Everyone’s spirits soared: even one’s hatred for Mr Shinwell turned to mere contempt. On the second visit to Reddish House I was elated — and my mother too. Her heart went out to the house of warm lilac-coloured brick and she loved the way it lay with the garden rising to a paddock, the long vistas of lawn sheltered by a double row of limes and elms, with the kitchen-garden enclosed with a typical Wiltshire wall of chalk topped with thatch roof. From across the village street the property continued across a meadow to a stretch of poplars and willows bordering the river Ebble, once stocked with crayfish by Aubrey and where the trout, two feet long, were considered by Charles II to be the best flavoured in England. My mother also enthused over the vast yews cut to look like plum puddings, the topiary trees shaped like chessmen, the well-established nut walk, and the clumps of beeches. Two adjoining thatched cottages, surprisingly like Ann Hathaway’s with their own gardens, were also part of the property. My mother saw the possibilities of making the terrace, with its southern aspect and old-fashioned roses growing over a balustrade, into a sheltered spot for outdoor lunch or tea. In fact, we both considered that the loss of Ashcombe from which we were both so acutely suffering might be partially compensated for by this new acquisition.