In addition, probably through the agency of a private detective, Margot’s lawyers had learned that Brickhill had surreptitiously drunk whisky during recent hospital stays. He would counter that he’d done so with the knowledge and permission of his doctor and hospital staff, which is likely to have been only partly true. These latest rounds of legal back and forth succeeded in souring what should have been one of the most exciting times in Brickhill’s life. Ahead lay the publication of his first novel. And filming of John Sturges’ movie version of The Great Escape would soon get underway.
24.
John Sturges’ Great Escape
AS WALTER MIRISCH struggled to raise the finance, the northern summer of 1961 had slipped by without production beginning on The Great Escape. An escape movie where only three out of 220 escapers actually escaped didn’t excite investor interest. Then there was the lack of a female romantic interest that Fred Coe had tried to overcome by writing a female character into his 1951 television production. In all, there would be eleven screenplay drafts, produced by six screenwriters – four more were used by Sturges after Newman and Roberts. Only two would be credited. One was prolific novelist and screenwriter W. R. (William Riley) Burnett, who made his name in the 1930s with screenplays for hit gangster movies Little Caesar and the original Scarface. James Clavell was the other. A British novelist, famous for King Rat and novels set in the Orient, Sydney-born Clavell had himself been a POW of the Japanese during World War Two.
By casting bankable stars, Mirisch and Sturges eventually secured their $4 million budget. In addition to McQueen, they brought in two more names from The Magnificent Seven¸ Charles Bronson and James Coburn, added Maverick TV star James Garner, and teamed them with classically trained British star Richard Attenborough and genuine former POW Donald Pleasence, plus solid British supporting actors including David McCallum and Gordon Jackson. The final screenplay would change the names of all the real characters, creating mirrors of some who’d been involved in the escape, inventing composite characters based on others.
Roger Bushell became Roger Bartlett, complete with sagging right eye. The character of SBO Ramsey was created to amalgamate SBO Massey and Wings Day, with Massey’s limp and walking stick. American Harsh morphed into Hendley, the American scrounger. Von Lindeiner became Von Luger, and Glemnitz was turned into Strachwitz. Tailor Tommy Guest became Griffith. Escape controller Torrens was turned into security chief Sorren. Dispersal’s Fanshawe was renamed Ashley-Pitt. Canadian tunnel king Wally Floody became Englishman Willie Dickes.
‘Conk’ Canton and ‘Crump’ Ker-Ramsey became Cavendish and ‘Mac’ MacDonald. Johnny Dodge was a loose inspiration for third American character Goff, played by Jud Taylor. The fact that all six Polish Great Escapers were executed guided the creation of Danny, Charles Bronson’s Polish character. Based on real Polish escaper Stanislaw ‘Danny’ Krol, who’d also tunnelled from Oflag VI-B at Warburg and Schubin’s Oflag XXI-B, Bronson’s character was given Paul Brickhill’s debilitating claustrophobia. Diminutive tunneller Ives was modelled on Henry ‘Piglet’ Lamond, with his nationality changed from New Zealander to Scot.
Steve McQueen’s American character, ‘Cooler King’ Virgil Hilts, was a composite of Americans in Stalag Luft 3, most particularly Jerry Sage. Known as the Cooler King when in South Compound, Sage was, like Hilts, a baseball player. William ‘Bill’ Ash, a Texan in the East Compound Cooler during the Great Escape and a leading Schubin tunneller, may have influenced the character of Hilts, although Brickhill, key source for the filmmakers, had not known Ash.
Nigel Stock, the British actor who played Cavendish, had been in The Dam Busters, playing Guy Gibson’s Australian bomb-aimer Spam Spafford with a bad Australian accent. Now it was James Coburn’s turn to make a sad attempt at Strine, as he played the part of The Great Escape’s Australian tinkerer Sedgwick, modelled on Al Hake. This Aussie character seems also to have been a salute by Sturges to Paul Brickhill. For, in the film, Sedgwick would succeed in escaping solo, via France and Spain, as Bob van der Stock had done. Perhaps Sturges thought that portraying a successful escape by an Australian, and via Brickhill’s intended escape route, would please the author and compensate for his wholesale character changes.
Colin Blythe, the movie’s gentle forger losing his eyesight, played by Donald Pleasence and helped by James Garner’s character Hendley, was modelled on Henry Stockings, the ‘code user’. Stockings’ eyesight progressively failed him as he toiled long hours in candlelight on secret codes. Hoping the Germans would repatriate him, he begged for eye tests. As it’s easy to fake eye-test results, his requests were denied. Despite his appalling vision, Stockings stumbled through the march to Westertimke with Brickhill and his group, survived, and became a pig farmer in Norfolk after the war. He lived to the age of ninety-eight, only passing away in 2015.
In the film, Hendley and Blythe steal a Luftwaffe training aircraft but are forced to land after running out of fuel. This incident was based on a break prior to the Great Escape by Walt Morison and Lorne Welch, members of a kriegie party that had marched out the compound gate disguised as workmen and their guards. Morison and Welch almost succeeded in stealing a Junkers trainer from a Luftwaffe airfield before being caught. Both were subsequently sent to Colditz Castle.
Just as the escapees in 1944 had frequently gone out in pairs, the film’s final script would cleverly partner actors in pairings of opposites: Garner with Pleasence, Attenborough with Jackson, Bronson with English actor and singing star John Leyton, and McQueen with Scotsman Angus Lennie. Lennie was always convinced he was cast to make McQueen look taller. In the film, Lennie’s character says he’s five feet four tall. In reality, Lennie was only five feet one, and five-feet-nine McQueen towers over him on screen. Meanwhile, SBO Ramsey had to be a loner by the nature of his position, as did successful solo escapee Sedgwick.
The film was originally to be shot in California, but outdoor locations there didn’t look right. In March 1962, a year behind schedule, it was announced that the shoot was being transferred to Bavaria Film Studios at Geiselgasteig, outside Munich, after German authorities offered incentives to attract filming there. All interior sets of huts, offices, the Cooler, police cells and the tunnels were built there, mostly by Germans.
When the studio’s back lot proved too small for the POW camp set, permission was gained from German authorities to shoot in a nearby national forest. One thousand trees were cut down to create a clearing where the Stalag Luft 3 exterior was built. After filming ended, 2000 pine seedlings were planted by the production company to regenerate the cleared area. The exterior set only represented one compound, and gave no hint of the fact that the real camp involved five compounds containing 11,000 prisoners.
World War Two vintage vehicles were found in Munich junk yards and restored. A 1937 German aircraft was reconditioned. A steam locomotive was rented, and condemned 1940s rail carriages renovated. The railway scenes would be shot on the Munich–Hamburg line between regular train services. At Brickhill’s stipulation, Wally Floody was flown in by Sturges to be the film’s technical adviser. Floody ensured that the camp buildings and layout looked authentic, and spent long hours with the set builders to ensure the tunnel set and its fittings were exact. Even though one side of the tunnel was cut away to allow filming, and it was built above ground on the studio floor, it was too realistic for Floody, who began having nightmares.
To play both German soldiers and Allied airmen, Sturges cast hundreds of Munich university students as extras. When their number was insufficient for some scenes, Sturges put grips, wardrobe assistants and even his script assistant in uniform. But it was the stars who caused him most trouble. James Garner rented a Bavarian chalet near Sturges’, and bought himself a Porsche sports car, but was soon bored, complaining to the American press that there was no night-life in Munich, and telling reporters he wanted to go home.
Garner was a pussycat compared to Steve McQueen, who constantly made petty demands, or went AWOL
, driving Sturges mad. At one point, McQueen demanded the rollneck sweater being worn on screen by Garner. He didn’t get it. Another time, Sturges had to send Garner to placate McQueen. Then, once shooting began, McQueen decided his role wasn’t big enough and demanded that a motorcycle chase be written in for him. There was no motorcycle chase in the true story, but to keep McQueen happy Sturges had the episode created. It would, of course, provide some of the most iconic and memorable images from the film. In several of the chase scenes, McQueen even played one of the helmeted German riders pursuing his character.
As for the movie’s storyline, it kept close to the facts when depicting preparations for the breakout. Only when it came to the escape itself did it lurch into runaway fiction. The bitter, snowy weather, which had defeated so many real escapees, was overlooked. The motorbike and aircraft-stealing scenes were pure Hollywood. The nationalities of the three successful escapees were changed to Australian, English and Polish. But it would all make for good box office. And Sturges would dedicate it to the Fifty.
Brickhill didn’t go to Germany to visit the set or the shoot. In the depths of a bitter divorce wrangle with Margot, he was fearful that if he were to leave the country, if only briefly, her lawyers might use his absence against him and he would lose access to his children. As it was, his lawyers had to battle for months before Margot agreed to allow him access for more than a day at a time – Tim and Tempe would spend the May school holidays with their father.
For the two weeks of the holidays, Brickhill had intended that the children share his mother’s bedroom with him at 41 George Street, having rented out ‘Craig Rossie’. But Margot’s lawyers specified that he could not sleep in the same bedroom as the children. The implication was that the heavy drinking and bashing that Margot accused him of might cause him to harm the children if he slept in the same room. To meet this requirement, Brickhill put the pair in his double bed, and he slept on a couch outside the door. After four-year-old Tempe pleaded with her father to sleep in the same room as them, Brickhill explained that he wasn’t allowed. Tim, meanwhile, had taken to calling him ‘Bardo’, a nickname which apparently originated with Tim’s schoolmates, who knew his father was famous for making Douglas Bader famous.
Brickhill felt especially guilty that his mother Dot had given up her bedroom for him. So that month of May, via a company he’d recently set up in Canberra, he purchased a £20,000 block of six flats at 54–56 Blues Point Road on McMahons Point. A stroll from the North Sydney business precinct, it was less than ten minutes from his parents’ house by car. It had been recommended to him by his father-in-law, Edric Slater, who knew it well.
Renting out five of the flats, Brickhill retained one on the first floor for himself. His new home had a single bedroom, a bathroom, a living-dining area and small kitchen, and a harbour view to the west. It was a comedown from ‘Craig Rossie’, but as far as Brickhill was concerned it would only be temporary. His own needs were always only minimal. His past grand accommodation choices had been made to please Margot. Besides, he firmly believed that his family would be reunited and they all would return to his Palm Beach dream house.
Margot had by this time enrolled nine-year-old Tim in a private boarding school, Tudor House, at Moss Vale in the Southern Highlands. Over the winter Brickhill stayed ten days at Moss Vale to spend time with Tim over two successive weekends; the school wouldn’t let Tim out during the week. Throughout this period, papers from Margot’s lawyers continued to land in Brickhill’s letterbox. They contained counterclaims to his counterclaims, and, now too, financial claims. According to Margot, Brickhill had a large property portfolio in New South Wales and England, and her claim listed 41 George Street among his Australian investment properties. This incensed Brickhill, who, in his response, pointed out that the George Street house was his parents’ home, and it was owned by a trust of which Tim and Tempe were the beneficiaries.
When Brickhill’s lawyers urged him to arm them with accusations to lob back at Margot, he steadfastly refused to allow them to bring up her 1952 affair at St-Paul-de-Vence. But he was coming around to the view that, out of spite, Margot had held back Mark Bonham Carter’s Reach for the Sky report in 1953. Needing proof, in June and July he wrote increasingly fraught letters to Bonham Carter, asking him to search the Collins records to establish who received the report, where, and when.
Bonham Carter wrote back that, according to the firm’s records, his report had been delivered by hand to Margot at Rodney House, Dolphin Square, on 16 July, the day before she left for Southampton. Brickhill begged proof for use in court; a receipt signed by Margot, perhaps. He remarked, in a 10 July letter, ‘Things are a bit bloody at the moment. I wouldn’t mind if the childer [sic] weren’t also involved.’306 Bonham Carter was unable to provide proof of delivery.
Brickhill became gripped with the fear that, in a quest for a fat divorce settlement, Margot’s lawyers would tip his ailing parents out of their home. By August, while John Sturges’ filming of his version of World War Two in Germany was going over time and over budget, in Australia the strains of the divorce war proved too much for Brickhill. He collapsed, suffering another breakdown. On 4 August, psychiatrist Dr John Kerridge admitted Brickhill to Cabarisha Private Hospital at Castlecrag on the North Shore. There, Kerridge proposed that Brickhill undergo electroconvulsive treatment.
‘It can do no harm,’ Kerridge assured Brickhill.307
After considering the idea for a while, Brickhill agreed, and over two-and-a-half weeks he underwent a course of electric shocks to the brain. Following this, he was moved to Kirribilli Hospital on the lower North Shore to convalesce. On a cocktail of prescribed drugs, Brickhill left hospital and re-emerged into the real world in early November after being hospitalised for three months. Fearful of losing his children, Brickhill would deny he’d had treatment for a mental condition, claiming that he’d been suffering from a virus all this time.
Through his lawyers, the now-recovered Brickhill sought to have Tim and Tempe stay with him over the Christmas-New Year holidays. Margot agreed, but her lawyers stipulated that he sleep apart from the children and on the day of their return he must drop them off at 5.30 in the morning. To see his children, Brickhill agreed to all conditions.
On the day of their return, after their stay at McMahons Point, Brickhill had to rouse the children well before dawn.
‘I hate being bundled off,’ complained bleary-eyed Tim.
As they drove up the highway to Turramurra in the early morning darkness, both children told their father how much they loved and missed ‘Craig Rossie’, their house beside the water at Palm Beach.
‘Don’t worry, kiddies,’ Brickhill responded, trying to remain upbeat, for his sake as much as for theirs, ‘we will be alright, and back in the house with Mama.’
Tim seemed unconvinced. ‘Bardo, why did you marry her?’ Brickhill attempted to steer the subject away from their mother.
But Tim would not be distracted. ‘Mama says that a divorce is going.’
‘Don’t worry, Tim,’ Brickhill replied, ‘I don’t think there is going to be a divorce.’ At that time, he seems to have genuinely believed this would be the case, and that, as they had in the past, he and Margot would get back together. When Tim said that he would ask his mother whether or not she would divorce his father, Brickhill responded, ‘Oh, you had better not talk about these things with Mama.’
He duly dropped the pair off at Turramurra at 5.30 am. As they parted, Tim informed his father that, when he was thirteen or fourteen, he would come to live with him.308
While Brickhill continued to be embroiled in family dramas, The Deadline was published in the UK. Some reviews were excellent. ‘Breathtaking,’ said London’s Evening News. ‘A winner,’ said Books and Bookmen. ‘Highly topical,’ a more muted Guardian would say – for, that same year, there had been another attempt to assassinate President Charles De Gaulle in Paris.309
When Morrow published the book in the US in 1963, they woul
d unaccountably fail to mention that Brickhill was the author of The Great Escape, which would burst onto movie-theatre screens just months after the novel’s release. Nonetheless, War of Nerves would quickly sell out its first edition and be reprinted. In the UK, The Deadline would do well enough to go into Fontana paperback. Unfortunately, neither his first novel’s writing nor its reception compared with that of his war books. Margot’s assessment of Brickhill’s hero Robert Mackay proved accurate. We never know Mackay well enough to either love or loathe him. The villain, meanwhile, is a shadowy, one-dimensional figure. And the book lacks Brickhill’s earlier wit.
The plot, hinged on bio-terrorism, was clever, but decades ahead of its time. Brickhill’s denouement was gripping, but a tale of political assassination in Paris didn’t then attract mass British or American readership. In 1962, British readers were devouring spy novels. Ian Fleming’s The Spy Who Loved Me, the latest and most sexually explicit James Bond novel, came out this year. So too did Len Deighton’s first spy caper, The IPCRESS File, and John Le Carré’s second, A Murder of Quality. Brickhill’s hero, a sexually timid Australian mechanic who was the victim of events, not the master of them, stood no chance in such company.
Times, and tastes, would change. Nine years later, Frederick Forsyth, another ex-journalist, would publish a novel whose plot revolved around an attempt to assassinate the French president. As it happened, Forsyth’s plot was inspired by the 1962 attempt on Charles De Gaulle’s life that had coincided with the release of Brickhill’s novel. Forsyth’s Day of the Jackal would sell millions and be made into an equally successful movie in 1973.
The Hero Maker Page 28