The Light’s on at Signpost

by George MacDonald Fraser

  And then, out of a blue sky, he came up with Steve McQueen, for $10 million, the highest price in cinema history up to that time.

  All this took some months, and while my memory of events is sharp enough, it isn’t coherent. No reason why it should be, since with the script complete I was involved only intermittently. We made at least two visits to the Villa Nelleric, Kathy and I and the Fleischers, conferring with Georges-Alain and generally living the Riviera life, eating at the Eden Roc and having tea at the Hotel du Cap, which was so damned exclusive that guests were expected to pay in raw cash, to the chagrin of wealthy Americans. The Cannes Film Festival was on during one of our visits, and Georges-Alain improved the shining hour with an enormous banner proclaiming “Taipan” to the lobby of the Carlton Hotel, where he kept an office full of telephones for shouting into. He dragged me to a lunch on the beach, where we ate at long trestle tables under awnings, up to our calves in the powder that passes for sand at Cannes; like everything to do with the Festival, it was noisy, frenzied, tacky, and generally hell on earth, a view shared by a tall, weary-looking man opposite me who looked familiar and turned out to be Yves Montand.

  I suppose Kathy and I and the Fleischers weren’t really what you’d call Cannes Festival people; no one in his right mind could be. We avoided the hysterics of the Croisette, keeping together for protection, lazing in the villa garden, teaching Georges-Alain’s delightful little son, Jonathan, to recite “This little piggy went to market” in French, cruising gently to the shops, and dining quietly together at a respectable hour—unlike Georges-Alain and his lady who seemed to like dinner at midnight, followed, in spite of Georges-Alain’s protests, by (guess what?) flamenco dancing.

  How out of step I was, I realised when an American journalist, brimming with Riviera joie de vivre, asked what I was doing that evening; I said, “Reading Macaulay’s History of England”, at which he stared, before scribbling in his notebook, muttering: “Jesus, that’s gotta be a first for the Cannes Festival!”

  At this time Vuille had another film in production, Ashanti, about a black American woman doctor, wife to Michael Caine, who is kidnapped by slave-trader Peter Ustinov and carried across Africa to be sold to an Arab prince, with Caine and Kabir Bedi in pursuit—this was the movie for which Georges-Alain’s telephone heroics had secured the services of Rex Harrison and William Holden. Late in the day Omar Sharif was cast as the Arab prince, and since they wanted his part expanded without delay, and I was convenient, they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.

  Georges-Alain had shifted his base of operations to Gstaad, so I found myself bucketing over the Alps in a plane so tiny it must have been made from a kit; I was slightly reassured by the phlegmatic calm of the only other passenger, Georges-Alain’s brother John, a large, quiet young man who was the temperamental opposite of his sibling, although he evidently had his share of the family’s eccentricity—later that year I received a Christmas card from him, from beyond the Arctic Circle in the Canadian north, where he had moved house; the following year his card came from Central Africa, where he was doing relief work. I regret not hearing from him since, from wherever.

  I’ve no idea what I was meant to be doing in Gstaad. I certainly did no work, and my only memories are of spending two nights of extreme discomfort at Georges-Alain’s chalet, in a wooden bed designed for a dwarf, and being introduced, at dinner in the Palace Hotel, to Turtle Soup Lady Curzon, one of those gastronomic treats which linger in the memory, like Toast Rothschild in the Normandie Grill in Bangkok, or game pie at the Castletown Golf Links Hotel, Isle of Man.

  In Palermo it was raw beef, ordered at the suggestion of Peter Ustinov, and I’ve tasted worse. Fleischer, Vuille and I had flown there because that was where the next lot of shooting was to happen; Omar Sharif was expected, so I pounded the typewriter into the small hours; whether it got into the film I don’t know. But no trip is wasted if it includes Mr Ustinov; he won my heart at our first meeting by impersonating the Isle of Man—this is done by sitting in a chair and using your limbs to represent the Manx three-legged symbol, and probably only Ustinov can do it. We talked tennis and old movies and our Army service, and he reminisced about Stewart Granger’s caravan, where the seats were covered with the skins of Granger’s big-game trophies, and Ustinov sat on a settee and rose again with fur all over him and bald hide where he had been sitting.

  Around this time we went to Madrid, for no good reason that I can remember; it must have been to do with Ashanti, for I recall the leading lady, Beverly Johnson, and Kabir Bedi being relentlessly photographed by yelling paparazzi, and I should remember the works of Velasquez at the Prado also, but philistine that I am what sticks in my mind is that the Villa Magna was one of the best hotels Kathy and I had ever struck.

  All this time, pre-production of Taipan was apparently going ahead, and Georges-Alain was so bullish that he demanded I write a sequel without delay. I thought it would be a good idea to get the first film into production at least, but it was another offer I couldn’t refuse, and a few weeks later I had finished Taipan II. And then—this is true, and Fleischer and others will bear me out—damned if Vuille didn’t ask for a third script, a prequel to the original.

  It was my fault for inventing, in Taipan I, a reference to Struan and Brock having served together at Trafalgar, where I suggested their rivalry had begun. This grabbed Vuille, and if I had been a scoundrel I would have accepted a contract (and, to me, an enormous fee) for a third movie. But fair’s fair; I assumed that Taipan I would get made, and with McQueen in the lead it would probably be a smash—but you never know, and I wasn’t going to take his money for a third movie when he still hadn’t shot a foot of the first one. I don’t regret it; some things you can’t do.

  Presbyterian conscience is a hell of a note; it cost me that commission, and the chance to work with David Lean, who at that time was preparing The Bounty, and asked me, through his producer, my friend Eddie Fowlie, who had worked on Prince and Pauper, if I was interested in doing a script. I’d have given my right arm to accept; apart from the privilege of working with Lean, I’d been defending Bligh in print for years—but although I had legally fulfilled my contract to Vuille, I had said (as I always do) that I was with the movie to the finish, and since I knew it would need more work eventually, I had to pass The Bounty, not without some gnashing of teeth.

  Lean sent me his outline notes, and we talked at length on the phone. God, that man was a genius. He described shots and set-ups that I can see in my mind’s eye yet; it was all visual stuff, little plot or dialogue, although we touched on the great mystery: why did the mutiny take place? What got into Christian? Bligh was no tyrant, but he had a vicious tongue—was it just that? And so forth. We agreed firmly on one point, which I offer for Bounty historians to consider: the joker in the pack was Midshipman Young.

  I can’t regret that job, either, since the script was finally done by Robert Bolt, and I know when I’m outclassed.

  And the Taipan story was entering its final phase. Kathy and I flew again to LA, and Fleischer, Vuille and I took the elevator to the top floor of the Beverly Wilshire, where Steve McQueen had a penthouse. He opened the door to us, a slighter figure than I’d expected, neatly bearded, but looking rather tired. I knew he hadn’t been well, and that it was more than two years since he’d made a picture, the last being Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, which had flopped, although he had acquitted himself well, holding his own with the likes of Charles Durning.

  He surveyed us closely, not unlike a sentry, and then invited us into the kitchen where he was brewing coffee—the best I’ve ever tasted outside Turkey, very black and sweetened with honey. He explained that his girl-friend (whom he didn’t name) had forbidden him sugar, but he had successfully concealed the honey jar. It didn’t quite fit with Thomas Crown and Bullitt, nor did his slightly defensive reference to Ravel’s Bolero which he was playing “to put me in the mood for an action movie”. He would have preferred some rousing sea music; I sugg
ested Korngold’s Sea-Hawk or Captain Blood, and he scribbled a note on his kitchen pad.

  He had set four chairs round a small table in the living-room, on which there were scripts and pencils, and I realised that this was a methodical man. He put on a pair of glasses (rimless, I think), flipped open a script, and looked inquiringly at me.

  Now, usually, an actor on first acquaintance will say something complimentary about your work: Malcolm McDowell, Rex Harrison, Roger Moore, Heston, York, Badel, Fox, Lee, and others were meticulous about this. McQueen looked in silence, and it struck me that while he’d been courteous, he hadn’t given us any glad hand in welcome. But it was up to me, and I was making some explanatory remark or other about the story when he interrupted.

  “You’re from Scotland, aren’t you?”

  I said I was—and I wish I had a picture of him as he smiled for the first time, with a tilt of his chin, and said with supreme satisfaction: “I’m Scotch.”

  I might have known it, from his appearance and manner; I asked when his people had come over, but he didn’t know; several generations back, according to his grandmother. But the ice was broken from that moment, and I blessed the Scottish mafia of Hollywood; it isn’t as vocal as the Irish or as evident as the Jewish, but it’s there all right.

  It took us two days, word by word and look by look, to go through the script, and I don’t remember any actor as intent and painstaking as he was. He wanted to know the why and wherefore of every detail; for instance, the script opened with two tall ships racing, then cut to Brock and his son on their deck, then cut to Struan’s officers—but no sign of Struan. It was a tense sequence, both sides determined to win; McQueen wondered why he wasn’t to be visible. I explained that I’d been inspired by The Sea Hawk, in which Errol Flynn is not seen but his voice is heard while a group of officers register his presence. It doesn’t read particularly effectively, but McQueen saw at once how well it could work on screen, with his voice quiet and assured amid all the hubbub, and his first appearance in a moment of crisis an almost casual drifting into shot, authoritative and calm.

  “Okay,” he said. “That’s Struan.”

  From my point of view it was a good read-through; he had no major objections, and those he had were mainly technical, as when he asked me to change a scene in which he was up to the knees in water in a ship’s hold, shifting boxes of silver: could I fix it so that he didn’t get his feet wet? He was still recuperating, and didn’t want to take any chances.

  We had occasional brushes. I don’t remember why we disagreed, but I got rather testy and he gave me the blue-eyed stare and said bleakly: “Gee, you’re attractive when you’re mad.” Again, when I suggested Oliver Reed would be good as Brock’s son, he shook his head firmly. “No, sir. No way. Not him.”

  I didn’t know, then, the reason for their mutual dislike, which I’ve described earlier, but I could see there was no point in pushing for Oliver, so I let it drop.

  How good an actor he was he demonstrated on two occasions when he was unhappy with dialogue. He didn’t want to call someone a rascal (“Too European, George”), and when I assured him his grandmother wouldn’t have thought so, he shook his head. “Don’t have to say it. I can look it.” Which he did, very effectively, but later, when he suggested that he could go through a sequence of talk without saying a word, I had to protest. Struan’s Chinese mistress had to give him information, and Struan had to reply; there was no way round it. Steve sat silent, thinking. Then:

  “Go ahead, you say the girl’s lines.”

  So I did. She had three brief speeches, and to each one he simply responded with an appropriate look. I had to admit he was right, Fleischer smiled, and Vuille laughed in admiration.

  Steve worried a little about his accent (“I’m American. I can’t play British”) until I assured him that a Scots adventurer in the 1840s who had been footloose since childhood might well have acquired an American accent. Anyway, it was a state of mind as much as anything; we would have him saying “Aye” and “Uh-huh” and “Away!” occasionally, and that would do it.

  Our final difference came towards the finish, when Struan and Brock, preparing to fight it out, realise that they can’t because their children are going to marry each other, and you can’t kill someone’s father as a wedding present. So their angry confrontation gets nowhere, but it doesn’t matter since that’s when the typhoon strikes.

  That didn’t suit Steve. He wanted to beat the stuffing out of Brock. “Top o’ the hill!” he exclaimed, pointing to an imaginary duelling ground, so I said I’d work on it and see what could be done. He suggested that he run me in his pickup truck to his ranch in Idaho, where I could revise in peace, but I declined with thanks.

  Between sessions we talked at random, about motor-cycles and the Clan McQueen and his time in China when he had stayed with a Chinese of sinister reputation (“I guess he killed a few people”) and the potplants outside the door of his penthouse which he feared were deteriorating. “I think Lee Marvin’s peeing on them.” Whether Lee Marvin lived along the corridor, where there were potplants in profusion, I didn’t inquire.

  At last we were done. I had smoked several packets of cigarettes, Steve had chewed a plug of tobacco, Georges-Alain had said little, and Fleischer had presided in his avuncular way, targeting the essentials every time. McQueen showed him great respect, referring to him as “my director”.

  “Well, what does my director think?” he said as he closed the script. Fleischer said he thought we had a movie, a good movie, a big movie.

  “Know what I think?” Steve tapped the script and paid me the biggest compliment I’ve ever had as a screenwriter. “I think we’ve got Gone with the Wind here.” God bless him.

  It never happened, of course. What went wrong between Vuille and McQueen I never discovered, except that money, that astronomical fee, was involved. Not long after I was watching the Parkinson show, and was astonished to hear Roger Moore say that he was polishing up his Scots accent for Taipan; that too fell through, and Moore and I discussed Georges-Alain some months later. Fleischer left the project, and I lost interest, and then came the news that Steve McQueen had died in Mexico, and Taipan faded into the limbo of movies that never got made. A production did take place years later, but not with my script, and I never saw it.

  You get used to writing outlines and synopses and full screenplays for pictures that never reach the screen, usually because some optimist has run out of money. I regret Taipan more than most, but console myself with the belief that it got me Octopussy.

  ANGRY OLD MAN 8

  How to Encourage Race Hatred

  IT DEPENDS ENTIRELY what you mean by “racist”. The word is used indiscriminately, frequently as a term of abuse, and is highly emotive, often deliberately so. At worst it implies bitter hatred, a deep-seated rancour and active hostility towards those of a different colour or racial origin. At the top of the scale one can put Adolf Hitler, who showed his detestation of Jews by slaughtering millions of them. On a different level we have Simon Legree, who regarded black people as animals and treated them accordingly, but did not hate them in a Hitlerian way. He and Hitler may certainly be bracketed together as racists in the fullest sense, but one must recognise that they are racists in different degrees within their category.

  At quite the other end of the scale are those who are often called racists for no better reason than that they feel an instinctive preference for their own kind. They are not Hitlers or Legrees, they may not even voice or indicate their preference, and indeed to call them racists is all too often an attempt to confuse the swidespread, aituation, and to imply that the commuter who sits beside a white passenger rather than a black one is taking the first step towards the gas chamber. It isn’t true, and we know it, but this is what bedevils the whole race question—the attempt to tar all so-called “racists” with the same brush, and pretend that the man who simply likes his own folk best is a concentration camp guard in the making.

  Now, if t
his preference is a sin, it is nd to be found in areas where political correctness decrees that racism cannot exist. It cannot be denied that the preference is widely held in the black community; indeed, if what is called “institutionalised racism” exists in Britain, it is among blacks. They plainly feel a unity based on colour, a kinship and a sense of common experience—and there is absolutely nothing wrong with this provided it is not translated into discriminatory action against non-blacks. They are free to voice their sense of black unity, and frequently do—but white people do not have the same freedom. Let them give expression to their white identity, and they are condemned as racists. It comes down to this lamentable fact, that in our politically correct Western societies, only whites can be racist; black racism is an impossibility.

  To take a simple example which demonstrates this—there exists in the US an organisation called the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People; its existence is acceptable to the American public. But suppose someone proposed a similar association to promote the interest of white people—the screams of indignation would echo worldwide, and the proposer would be assailed with the most extreme abuse and probably end up in court, if not in jail. A leader of black opinion can say bluntly (and they usually do) that he puts black interest first, and plainly feels that he is entitled to discriminate against non-blacks; he will meet with no contradiction, and would be indignant if he did. But no white person would dare to speak as his black counterpart does.

  Many years ago a black tennis player, Arthur Ashe, won the men’s title at Wimbledon. A commentator (not Maskell, I hasten to say) announced afterwards that he was glad the black man had won. It passed unremarked. What would the harvest have been if Ashe’s opponent, Jimmy Connors, had won, and a commentator had expressed delight that the white man had triumphed? The commentator would have been hounded out of his job amid roars of condemnation.