The Light’s on at Signpost

by George MacDonald Fraser

  SHOOTING SCRIPT 2

  With the Tudors in Hungary

  Sensible people do their memoirs by taking daily notes, like Alec Guinness and Alan Clark, which gives the published work an immediacy and excitement lacking in those recollections which begin: “It was in the summer of 1977…” Being idle, and having no great ambition, until quite recently, to write my autobiography, I haven’t taken daily notes, but on one occasion I did write up my doings on a weekly basis. That was during the making of The Prince and the Pauper, and for the sake of variety, and because it contains trivia which may be of interest, I am including that account as I wrote it, with only a little editing. Since I didn’t start my note-taking until some time into the production, I shall have to set the scene with a brief introduction. So…it was in the summer of 1977 that Alex Salkind invited me to do a screenplay of Mark Twain’s novel, to be directed by Richard Fleischer. A screenplay had already been done, and I was to adjust, or, if necessary, do a complete rewrite. I read it, and decided to start from scratch.

  Accordingly I flew to Paris and met Fleischer, and so began a most happy collaboration with one who was to become my closest friend in the movie business—indeed, Kathy and I have no closer friends anywhere outside our family than Dick and his delightful wife Mickey. We see them only at long intervals, but they have been great fun in London, Los Angeles, the Riviera, Spain, Budapest, Rome, Dublin, and elsewhere, and as David Balfour said of Alan Breck, they can burn down my barn any time.

  Dick, whose father, Max Fleischer, was one of the great animators and the creator of Popeye, is a pro from way back, one of the masters of Hollywood’s golden age and a meticulous artist of immense versatility. You name it, Fleischer has directed it, from newsreels to such celebrated films noirs as The Narrow Margin; massive spectaculars including The Vikings, Barabbas, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and Tora! Tora! Tora!; musical comedy (Dr Dolittle), science fiction (Fantastic Voyage), fantasy (Conan the Destroyer and Red Sonja) and a host of outstanding films which defy classification, among them Soylent Green, 10 Rillington Place and The Boston Strangler. I’ve been lucky enough to write for him on three productions, and can only echo what Cary Grant said of Hitchcock: “I whistled all the way to work.”

  We agreed that Prince and Pauper would need a complete rewrite, talked it over with Alex Salkind and Pierre Spengler, and that was that. I flew home, discarded the original screenplay, and did a new version of Twain’s charming story (he saw it in fairly dark terms, but I liked it for its excitement, humour, and ingenuity). It’s an historical fantasy based on the premise that the boy prince, Edward, heir to Henry VIII, and his double, a young thief named Tom, changed places and found themselves having bewildering adventures in their unaccustomed roles. It had been an Errol Flynn swashbuckler forty years earlier, with the title roles being played by twins; Salkind and Fleischer were to give it blockbuster treatment with a cast which would eventually include Oliver Reed, Charlton Heston, and Raquel Welch (all Musketeer veterans), as well as George C. Scott, Rex Harrison, Ernest Borgnine, and David Hemmings, with young Mark Lester, the angelic hero of Oliver!, in the two lead parts—a huge challenge for an actor of eighteen, since it is really four parts, the Prince, the Pauper, the Prince-as-Pauper, and the Pauper-as-Prince.

  I did the first draft, following Twain as closely as possible, and Fleischer liked it. Kathy and I flew to Hollywood, where Dick and I went over the script, and agreed revisions. I flew home and did them, Dick approved…and now I break into my notes, written at the time, when I was waiting for the production to get under way…

  Fleischer phones, with the splendid news that Rex Harrison is to play the Duke of Norfolk—can I beef up his part? You bet I can.

  Down to Penshurst Place, Kent, for the first day’s shooting. Ancient house, beautiful grounds, Olde England to the life, with Fleischer setting up his stuff with Jack Cardiff, and yeoman warders lying on the grass looking harmless. Why don’t they get great big burly thugs for these parts nowadays? This lot of minions wouldn’t frighten anyone. Where are you Harry Cording, Ray Teal, Dennis Wyndham, et al.…?

  Through a Tudor arch strides Henry VIII—Heston, in full fig, looking terrific in the true sense of the word, extending a regal hand for Fleischer to kiss (he doesn’t).

  I’d met Heston in Paris in the production office at the Georges V before the M3 premiere—he had heard me give my name at the desk, and loomed up beside me saying: “I’m Charlton Heston.” Taken all unawares at the sudden appearance of a living legend, I had been startled into saying: “By God, so you are!”, at which he had taken no offence, handing me a whisky and starting to talk Scottish history (he is part Fraser and immensely proud of it—aren’t we all?) He had also confessed to a wish to play Flashman at Little Big Horn, an episode I had yet to write.

  F. and H. go into a huddle over the script, and call me in. H. suggests rewording one of my lines to read: “You failed me in Scotland, Norfolk, and you know it well.” It sounds a wee bit corny to me, but I’m not fussy—maybe he knows better what will sound right. I stick my heels in on another point, the line where Henry says he’s been on the throne five and thirty years. H points out, correctly, that at the time Henry had been on the throne thirty-seven years; I plead poetic licence, claiming that five and thirty sounds better, and he yields. He looks horribly like Henry VIII, which is disturbing when you’re sitting on a garden bench with him arguing about what he should say, and expecting to be consigned to the Tower at any moment.

  Meet Mark Lester, a tall, ethereal-looking, nervous lad who smokes Marlboro as if they were going to stop making them. He writhes convincingly in a muddy flower-bed while Heston stands on him, and Graham Stark, in jester’s motley, flings himself prone, crying “Break away, old Hal!” in a variety of accents. Rex Harrison stands by registering polite concern.

  Time out, and Graham Stark is busy snapping away with his camera, something which he does, he tells me, on all his films—his collection should be worth a fortune one of these days. He is telling me what I suspect will be a scandalous story about Michael Curtiz, when Rex Harrison, who has been rehearsing with Heston and Harry Andrews, strolls over—and who can stroll like him?—and murmurs to me that now that Henry’s line to Norfolk has been changed, he feels that he’d like something stronger to say in reply. Could I possibly…? Sensing a slight needle here, I do a quick think, and give him a line off the top of my head which pleases him inordinately. I’d say it was passable, no more, but he writes it carefully into his script (left-handed), crinkling happily and repeating it with obvious enjoyment. When they come to rehearse the scene again, he drawls it out, Heston’s head jerks up in what may be well-acted royal displeasure or sudden suspicion that he is being upstaged (either way, it’s a perfect reaction), and Harrison opens his mouth and laughs silently.

  The word is that he is notoriously a bastard to work with, and I have heard horror stories about his temperament, but I can only say he seems extremely easy and reasonable to me—of course, I don’t have to photograph, produce, direct, record, attire, or act with him, and in my experience actors tend to be more friendly with writers than with anyone else, possibly because they have to depend on them. I’d given him a line, and he’d been happy with it; when I ask him if he has any thoughts about the rest of his part he leafs through the script and delights me by giving a sudden guffaw and exclaiming: “I like this!” It proves to be an exchange between him and Hertford (Harry Andrews) who has been sent to arrest him.

  Hertford: In the king’s name!

  Norfolk (pretending to be taken unawares): Henry, I believe.

  It looks nothing on the page; as said by Harrison, with his perfect timing and expression of feigned surprise, it worked beautifully.

  We talk about Arthur Barbosa,* and I ask Harrison if he saw French Without Tears on TV last night. He frowns and says he did, recalling his own appearance in the original play forty years ago. “I don’t know—these chaps nowadays, they seem so bloody young.”
Sigh. “I suppose we were bloody young, too.” He reminisces affectionately about Roland Culver, Guy Middleton, and Trevor Howard; in the background Henry VIII is hauling an enormous mattress onto the grass and collapsing on it, robes, staff, and all.

  Lemonade is served from a large urn; Harrison, whom one naturally associates with wines of rare vintage, looks doubtful, but exclaims after an appraising sip, “Not bad, really.” He tries for a refill, but the tap yields nothing, so between us we up-end the urn to get the dregs and manage to extract two paper cups-full. Harrison sighs contentedly, savouring the bouquet, and wonders when lunch is.

  A buffet has been set up in a tent, and Fleischer, Heston, Harrison, Stark, Mark Lester, and I help ourselves, Heston unbelievable without his robe; he is clad in long johns with an artificial potbelly strapped on. Graham Stark is worried about his lines: is his accent right, is he doing them well? I assure him that not since Barrymore’s Hamlet…and he cheers up sufficiently to ask Fleischer if his Shropshire accent is acceptable (I gather he has been researching Will Somers, Henry VIII’s jester). Fleischer, who wouldn’t know a Shropshire accent from Cantonese, says so long as he’s comprehensible, that’s fine. Mark Lester’s nervousness is wearing off.

  After lunch discuss children with Heston, and the question of which other monarchs he might possibly play. Since he is a dead ringer for Edward I—bone structure, height, and presence—I suggest that he’d make a fine Hammer of the Scots, but have a feeling he’d rather play Robert the Bruce.

  Meet Harry Andrews, whose father, it transpires, was from Scotland, and who glows when I praise his performance as a Scots RSM in The Red Beret. Watch him and Julian Orchard shooting with Heston and Harrison. Fascinated by Fleischer’s directing technique: after one rehearsal he says quietly: “You’re trying too hard, Chuck.” Heston nods gravely and moderates his style. “Very good, Chuck; that’s it.” Fleischer is very neat and precise as he moves quietly round the set, relaxed, amiable, and taking every opportunity to praise, especially young Mark. “That’s good, Mark, that’s very good.”

  As the afternoon wears on and the shadows cast by the sun change, Jack Cardiff makes mysterious adjustments to his equipment so that no passage of time will be visible in a scene lasting no more than a minute or so. This is a vastly more technical business than I had realised.

  Heston has got shot of his make-up and is pacing in a track-suit, looking like a decathlon winner. He is one year older than I am, God help us. We adjourn to a Tudor archway, through which young Mark has to be pursued by angry citizens. Endless rehearsals, as Mark practises barging into people, but the star of the show is a stout extra, whose job it is to be jostled and register astonishment. As the rehearsals progress, he expands his moment of mild surprise into something resembling Tod Slaughter going into overdrive in Murder in the Red Barn, with clutching of brows, staggering, rolling of eyes and cries of “What the hell?” Mark runs himself silly, Fleischer advises patiently, Nigel Wooll (assistant director), keeps crying, with eternal optimism: “All right, here we go, this time. Quiet, please, everyone, here we go…oh, quiet, for God’s sake!” Finally we do go, Mark hurtles past the stout extra who is going to win a supporting Oscar or die in the attempt, and B. H. Barry, the sword expert, tells me how he is working out the fight sequences, giving a different theme to each one.

  Part of the production was to take place in Hungary, which necessitated two visits.

  To Budapest to go location-hunting with Fleischer, Spengler, and crew members. Our principal quest is for a church interior which can pass for Westminster Abbey in the coronation scene—not easy, since Hungarian churches have a rather Byzantine look, being decorated with splendid colours over walls and ceiling. Eddie Fowlie stands in one vast cathedral nave surveying the rainbow riot which covers the echoing interior, and remarks: “We could spray this lot with plastic, easy. Peel it off after, no bother.” There is no end to the enterprise of the British film technician, but I doubt if the local Dean and Chapter would take kindly to having their church repainted, even temporarily.

  Scour the countryside for anything, architectural or natural, which might bear a resemblance to sixteenth-century England, and are rewarded in Sopron, a town up near the Czech border, which has some Tudorish-looking streets and frontages. Further exploration of the area is called off when we find ourselves being sternly regarded over the hedge by Czech frontier guards armed with tommy-guns. The team go back to Budapest, while I am driven to Vienna to catch a plane home, waiting patiently at the Austro-Hungarian border crossing while the guards take my passport away for three-quarters of an hour. Later, when I mention this to Nigel Wooll and speculate on what takes them such an unconscionably long time to deal with passports, he says: “I think they just read them.”

  This sounds plausible; I suppose time hangs heavy at East European frontier posts.

  Stay one night in Vienna, and am disappointed to see that the Danube is not in the least blue, but insanitary grey.

  Back to Budapest, with Kathy, to see some shooting and do possible rewrites. Fleischer tells us over lunch that they have had considerable trouble with Olly Reed. It seems he got into a fight and finished up in a police cell; talk of deportation, but he was released on a promise of good behaviour. Then he had annoyed Fleischer by making a nuisance of himself at Mark Lester’s eighteenth birthday party, and had provoked a new crisis by breaking the nose of a rugby-playing friend. The Gellert Hotel, on the Buda side of the Danube, refused to have him back, so he is now in our hotel, the Intercontinental, which is on the Pest bank. Apparently he changed hotels not by taking a taxi across one of the bridges, but by wading and swimming the river in the middle of the night, arriving in the Intercontinental lobby clad only in mud and waterweed. It says much for his persuasive powers that the management allowed him to stay instead of throwing him back. Possibly they were impressed by his line that his behaviour was nothing out of the way, and in England no one would have thought twice about it.

  The Salkinds throw a big party for the unit in the Intercontinental ballroom. Kathy looks smashing in green silk, and I feel terribly conventional in my best suit among all these glamorous bohemians, but feel better when Oliver arrives in what is plainly his best suit, blue serge with waistcoat and club tie (black with thin orange stripes; who’s that?) He is only slightly canned, accompanied by his wife and daughter, and carrying a bunch of bulrushes—possibly a souvenir of his Danube crossing—which he distributes (“reeds”, get it?) Raquel Welch receives one graciously (so much for the tales that she and Oliver don’t get on; mind you, I can’t see them as close friends). As before, she struck me as being a nice, sensible woman, by no means a sex goddess. She is tired, after a day of interviews, and demands wearily: what do the press want of her? She doesn’t like being photographed or questioned on set, which is hardly surprising, and obviously believes (not without justice, I dare say) that the newspapers hope to be able to report her as difficult and temperamental.

  Mark Lester is a nice lad, prattling to us about his part (both of them) and assuring Kathy that the film will have to be the next Royal Command production. He is only slightly tight, which for an eighteen-year-old is pretty creditable in the circumstances; his parents have been out once, for a week, and I wonder who keeps an eye on him. To my surprise he has about fifteen films behind him; another overnight sensation.

  Kathy, as usual with her reporter’s instinct, has found the most interesting person at the party—a delightful, very old lady who speaks only French and turns out to be Pierre Spengler’s grandmother. We converse with difficulty, but gather that in her opinion Pierre does all the work (“beaucoup de travail”) which I think is probably true on the production side. She cannot take alcohol or chocolate, but she and Kathy share a plate of ice cream.

  Fleischer introduces Lalla Ward (Princess Elizabeth) and Felicity Dean, a stunningly pretty blonde who is Mark’s sweetheart on screen; you could, as Dick says, eat her with a spoon. She confides to Kathy that she is st
ill too young to get into RADA, and I think this may be her first part.

  To the Hungarofilm studio to see rushes. The film looks beautiful, and the thrill of hearing George C. Scott speak my lines is delightful. Some of them he has decided to chant, which is appropriate to his part, the “Ruffler”, a monk-turned-bandit, and it works perfectly. I have nothing but admiration for Anthony Quinn and James Coburn, both of whom were mentioned as possible Rufflers, but I wouldn’t swap Scott for anyone. Heston, as Henry VIII, is better than I’ve ever seen him, Borgnine and Harrison are excellent, Lalla Ward gets every inch out of her raging scene as Young Bess, and there’s a nice little love-scene between Mark and Felicity Dean (that boy’s heart is in his work, no error; he doesn’t need a spoon). Olly is A1 as always, and I’m told steals the movie. It could be a smasher, but I’ll have to see it all.

  Dinner with Fleischer at the 100 Years, to the deafening accompaniment of a gypsy violinist, whom I summoned accidentally while trying to get a waiter; thereafter he haunts us all bloody night. I complete my Edgar Kennedy act by grabbing for the bill ahead of Fleischer, and succeed in scooping up the check belonging to the next table. Fleischer wants another fight, this time in Westminster Abbey; no problem for me, but they’ll have to rebuild Westminster. However, Alex Salkind wants to keep the action going, and says spare no expense. They also want little end-pieces to be voiced over by Harrison, which I’ll attend to.