by David Hare
My excitement at encountering Williams’s ideas turned into a practical plan. I noticed on the first page of his books that he taught at somewhere called Jesus College, Cambridge. For that reason, helped by Donald Bancroft who always admired enterprise, I immediately applied for admission, without knowing very much about where it was or what it would be like. In a rare lapse of faith from her governing beliefs, my mother had wanted me to leave school at fifteen because she had secured me a promising position training to be an accountant in one of Bexhill’s leading firms, just a few hundred yards from Pendragon. When she got her annual report from Marks and Spencer, dispatched to her by right as the owner of several hundred shares, she had noticed that almost everyone on its distinguished board had accountants’ letters after their names. So it was at my own insistence I had forgone the chance one day perhaps to sit in the Marks and Spencer boardroom in Baker Street. Now at least I had a counter-proposal. I would go to Britain’s coldest, wettest, flattest university and sit at the feet of a clever man.
Once I had stumbled onto a potential path, my interest in Lancing fell away. I enjoyed an eye-opening month in Paris studying an external course at the Sorbonne in preparation for my French A level. I shared a room for seven francs a night in a hotel in the Rue de Verneuil, tuning in to the very last days of a vanishing Left Bank where ouvriers still stood in blue uniforms, leaning on zinc bars at seven in the morning, already drinking white wine and marc. Lunches of savoury sheep’s brains meunière, or slabs of pork with beans, were two francs fifty. I edited the school magazine without distinction. I stood as the school’s Labour candidate in the 1964 mock election and was roundly defeated. This last experience proved to me for all time that standing for public office was yet another on the long list of things, including tennis, debating and carpentry, which I turned out to be useless at.
In previous years Patrick Halsey had invited us down from our dormitories on Saturday nights to sip cocoa in his sitting room in our pyjamas and slippers and to watch That Was the Week that Was. It was one of those unmissable shows, common to decisive shifts in public taste, which are more exciting in prospect and in commentary than they are in reality. Sketches about open fly buttons didn’t seem very radical to me. But somehow on the night of 15 October, in adjacent floral armchairs, it was only Patrick and I who stayed up late into the night to see Alec Douglas-Home, the most delicate flower of English nobility, thrown out of Downing Street. Harold Wilson, talking about the white heat of technology which significantly did arrive, but not, for most people, for another thirty years, was due to take office by a tiny majority. Labour was back in at last. While the one-time Lord Home prepared to concede defeat with aristocratic courtesy, Patrick sank deeper in his chair, endlessly reapplying fresh flame to his pipe which seemed to dampen and die as the evening went on. Patrick sipped from his whisky glass and asked me, ‘Aren’t you moved by him?’ – but in the tone of a man who anticipated the answer ‘No’.
4
The Mercedes Symbol
I did what was required and got myself an open scholarship to Jesus. Christopher Hampton was a year above me at Lancing but before he had left for Oxford, he had introduced me to a couple of friends in his house. In future years people would find it remarkable that Christopher, Tim Rice and I, all later known as writers for the theatre, were at school together. But the high cultural tone of the place – Peter Pears would come down with Benjamin Britten and stage concerts always with that weird screeching noise which still gives me the shivers – at least provided us with examples, if not ability. Although soft-spoken, wry and sweetly modest, Christopher had always been distinguished in my eyes with a precocious inner certainty. For all his monologues of comic misfortune, girls who said no and so on – he was as keen on Tony Hancock as I was – he was, ultimately, like a top that couldn’t be knocked off its axis. Tim also looked into the future with a degree of justifiable confidence. He was already an expert theologian of the pop charts and scholar of obscurer texts in Melody Maker and the New Musical Express. He had a pop band called the Aardvarks who played at school concerts. They were strongly in debt to Cliff Richard and the Everly Brothers, who were to remain Tim’s lifelong heroes. But the second close friend of Christopher’s was Roger Dancey, a handsome, genial fellow with an informed love of cricket and in proud possession of what he claimed was the Sagittarian’s gift for getting on with everyone. Those born under this sign, he told me, could call themselves playboys of the universe. I told him I was Gemini. Gemini? Hmm, not so good.
One of the masters, Norman Holmes, had recently hosted the visit to England of an American couple, driving them round to Windsor and Stratford. It had been part of an exchange. Now, in reply to a speculative letter from Roger, this couple were happy to take two schoolboys at a loose end who might be willing to go out and paint their house on Manhattan Beach in Los Angeles in return for food and lodging. Since we both had a spare nine months before going to university, it sounded like an ideal way of passing the time. The only obstacle was that I had no money to get across the Atlantic. So I went along, like thousands before me, to the educational headhunters Gabbitas and Thring. My hope was that some menial posting would become available in a prep school. They had nothing. Then, out of the blue, in the New Year, just when I was about to give up, the agency rang to report that a teacher at Cranleigh School, Lance Marshall, had broken his leg. There was an unexpected vacancy for one term only, starting in just five days’ time. I met the head of English, Pat Maguire. He told me that among my other jobs I would be required to teach A level. I pointed out that I would still be seventeen for another six months, and that I myself had only sat the A level the previous summer. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘That means you’ll be ahead of the boys.’
Cranleigh was not a great spot for someone without a car. A Victorian red-brick monstrosity, the school sat in the middle of a Surrey village, which itself seemed to sit in the middle of a fair-sized depression, with little ruffling the surface of its wealthy commuter self-satisfaction. This was Lancing without the seasoning, without the challenge. Lodging as I did with the pleasant Mr Maguire in his family home just across from the school in Edgefield Close, I had little chance to do anything at night except drink moodily in the masters’ common room, a sort of elevated Portakabin round the back of the building. I tried to play billiards with anyone as lonely as I was on the table which dominated it. Since I still looked and sounded pretty much like most of the pupils they spent all day teaching, few masters cared to oblige me with a game. Anyway, they had lives.
There was a paradox here. I had finally escaped a median English public school to set forth into the world, and yet here I was dumped down for eight weeks in another, only this time on the other side of the electric fence. Cranleigh was in the grip of a boring sort of muscular Christianity, with a rugby-playing headmaster, David Emms, whose knuckles scraped along the ground as he walked. I once heard him address the assembled school on the equal dangers of masturbation and borrowing other boys’ bicycles without permission. He had me removed from teaching Divinity when he learned that my notion of how to address the subject included some rudimentary laying out of the principal arguments for and against the existence of God. For him religion was worship, not thought. The state funeral of Winston Churchill at St Paul’s Cathedral, happening within a few weeks of my arrival at Cranleigh, brought the school to a stately, deferential halt. The war leader had taken ten days to die. On 30 January Mr Maguire’s living room filled to capacity as everyone assuaged their grief with Twiglets and industrial quantities of gin and tonic. The spontaneous lowering of the cranes to half-mast on both sides of the Thames as Churchill’s coffin sailed by remains the most indelible public image of my life. Twenty-five million of us were back in front of our black-and-white TVs, tapping for the last time into unifying notions of service and patriotism which, after the duplicity of Suez, already sounded a touch out of date. People were moved, but moved at the passing of value, not at its ascendancy. Appeals to C
hurchill’s memory were from that day on to ring national alarm bells of hypocrisy and manipulation when invoked by the far seedier leaders who saw Britain through to the end of the twentieth century.
I lucked into a couple of friends among the younger masters in the common room, one of whom took me to a few revealing parties, regularly enlivened by his delightful air-hostess girlfriend. And I was taken up by Edward Black, who was probably twenty-two and already a gifted linguist. He had graduated from reading French and Spanish at London University and he enjoyed showing a child-colleague the ropes. He had a Citroën 2CV, and it became our regular custom to go into Guildford at night to listen to jazz. Edward was an enthusiast, alive as only lovers of a disempowered art form can be to all the internal splits and divisions within the British history of the music. Edward’s carrier of the New Orleans grail was ‘The Guvnor’, Ken Colyer, who, unlike the better-known Chris Barber, Acker Bilk, Kenny Ball or Monty Sunshine, was held by purists to have resisted all the temptations of facile popularity. He alone was the real thing. When, red-faced, Colyer blew his uncompromising trumpet, he looked alarmingly as if the prominent boil on his forehead were going to burst. But of more significance to me than how he played was where. The little nightclub we heard him in was right by the bus station, opposite the larger Rikki Tik Club. It was called the Harvest Moon, and just like the Whisky-a-Go-Go which I had come upon next to the Opéra during my stay in Paris, it was full of flighty girls in tightly ribbed woollen pullovers and short skirts. Most were called Sarah or Fiona. In real life, the Harvest Moon was soon after taken over by mods, whose preferred music was the blues. Inevitably when mods arrived, drugs became a more important part of the scene. Jazz was kicked out, as jazz always is. But nine years later, in my 1974 play Knuckle, the club was reincarnated in dramatic imagination as the Shadow of the Moon. It became the fictional location for a piece of work which would one day turn my whole life upside down.
Procedure in the classroom presented its own pitfalls. I realised that teaching, like journalism, is something which is dangerously easy to do badly. Thomas Jefferson said you should never quarrel with a man who owns a barrel of ink. In the same way, you should never quarrel with the man or woman who is holding the chalk. They have an unfair advantage. Theirs will always be the last word. As in journalism, there is an imbalance in the power relationship which needs to be admitted if it is to be kept in check. Janet Malcolm’s resounding declaration in The Journalist and the Murderer that ‘Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible’ should also be pinned on every teacher’s blackboard. On the whole I acquitted myself decently. I had a few outstanding students in the sixth form whom I could approach as equals. They were almost my age, after all, and no less bright. For them, I was running something more like a seminar than a class. And I also had junior classes of thirteen-year-olds, full of promise, whose eager desire to express themselves I would never have dreamt of abusing. But once or twice I felt myself, on lazy days, tipping over into something less pleasant, of which I was deeply ashamed. I still hated myself, after all, and teaching played to a flaw in my character – an ability to dominate a situation by showing off. Worse, I was occasionally more concerned to press home and win an argument than I was to go after the truth.
These were ugly characteristics. I had known for some time that I had acquired a new role, and the role was that of a young man on the make. To be aware of this offered me no obvious way of dealing with it. Who was I? Julien Sorel? A scholarship boy, ascending through society? So it was a relief, after saving £80 from my eight weeks of teaching, to go and join Roger at Heathrow on 9 April 1965, before flying to Glasgow for the first hop to Reykjavik. There we deplaned from a shuddering prop jet at 3 a.m. to eat lukewarm fish and chips in the passenger lounge before continuing on the interminable journey to New York. Icelandic Air was known by everyone to offer the best bargains in the skies, if glimpses of the red-hot engine parts didn’t put you off. We had both been supplied with green cards at the American Embassy. In those days they were handed out like jelly beans. So we breezed effortlessly through the recently renamed John F. Kennedy airport before flying on to LA.
I had been abroad a few times – a desolate family holiday in Ostend and Bruges, the educational stint in St Germain, a trip once to eat paella and meet my father’s boat in Palma, Mallorca – but nothing in Europe had prepared me for this. The magnificent Californian light, the wide-open sky, the palm trees and, later, the dazzling surf hit me in an eye which was regulated only to English grey. My irises shrunk to pins. I arrived with no particular feeling for American culture. Yes, I read Kerouac and Ginsberg, but I was not one of those people who dreamed of diners and pony tails and barn dances. Europeans like Françoise Dorléac, Romy Schneider and Claudia Cardinale possessed my romantic imagination in a way Marilyn Monroe never could, accomplished comedienne as she was. Bitter Rice, with Silvana Mangano among rows of Italian women labouring up to their knees in water in the fields, was insanely sexier than Pillow Talk with Doris Day. Only the upward inflections of Martin Luther King’s aspirational voice had an American melody whose music touched me deeply. But even so, as Roger and I stood at the top of the aircraft steps, looking out at the bubbling tarmac, I did feel an uplift of spirits at visiting a world which was, in every aspect, so wholly different from the one I knew.
Virginia Johnson was there to meet us. A pioneering primal scream therapist and psychoanalyst in her mid-fifties, she was understandably touchy about so often being confused with the Virginia Johnson who was, with William Masters, all over the newspapers as a pioneer in the study of human sexual response. Our Virginia, considering her profession, was rather prim in that regard and, for someone regularly exploring the wilder shores of human depravity, lip-puckeringly right-wing in her social views. She was married to Ed Cornell, a short, silver-haired and tanned electrician who worked every day at Warner Brothers, humping lights and cables. Ed had a talent for chess which in better days had made him the regular on-set partner for Humphrey Bogart. His regular disquisitions, beer in hand, on the decline of the studios sounded pretty much like my father’s on the decline of the navy. A few years later, his son from a previous marriage was killed pointlessly on a training exercise in Vietnam. Ed would not be able to recover. Henceforth, a tiny glissade of pain would pass across his face whenever Ed Jr was recalled. We were soon to hear of many such bitter bereavements, bereavements which did so much to change America’s idea of itself. People who talk today about America losing its optimism in the new century have surely mislaid memories of the 1960s. Together, Ed and Virginia lived in a house in West Hollywood too small to accommodate us, so Virginia had arranged that, before we started work as house-painters, we should stay with a couple of her patients in Van Nuys, Knute and Phyllis Fritz.
It was to be a continuing problem of our first visit to the US that almost everyone who open-heartedly received us as guests all over the country was either a patient or an ex-patient of Virginia’s. Many had done primal therapy. They therefore believed that they had suffered serious trauma either at the time of their birth or soon after. Meeting a succession of such people may have given us a warped view of America, but it certainly gave us a distinctive one. Since, later, it had also fallen to us to reorganise Virginia’s extensive filing system, we had acquired rather intimate knowledge of their current problems. We had often read out loud to each other the lurid details, sometimes of the patients’ experiences, sometimes of their fantasies. Roger had a sense of humour no less callous than my own, so we would come to spend many of our vacant hours roaring with laughter at the neuroses of the people we were staying with. ‘Oh, so that’s the guy who can only ejaculate in a plastic bag!’ On our very first night in California, after a somewhat halting meal with the Fritzes, Roger and I were put up in bunk beds, where we spoke with misguided freedom about the social shortcomings of our hosts. ‘What a couple of weirdos!’ Next morning we
came down to a chilly reception and were asked to pack our bags. Knute, it turned out, was a technology freak and had wired our bedroom with microphones, no doubt in the hope of overhearing something rather more flattering.
The unexpected thing about this disastrous start to our trip was that it seemed to amuse Virginia rather than dismay her. We reported back, luggage in hand, thinking she would be furious. But much to our surprise, she took the whole incident in her stride, as though this were indeed one of the acknowledged problems faced by anyone who stayed with the Fritzes. They bugged your conversation. What could you do? But it was also as if it had never occurred to her that the American preoccupation with yourself and the unique problems of your own sexuality – at that time so sharply contrasting with British reserve – was, among other things, hilariously funny. Far from resenting two English schoolboys who were so quick to mock her work, she began to see it through our eyes and to take as much pleasure in laughing at it as we did. Her sense of the ridiculous was liberated. At various times when we were rationalising her paperwork, she would actually call us through to witness the drug-induced birth re-enactment which was at the centre of the treatment. ‘Come in, boys, see this!’ Virginia would roll her eyes at us as the adult ‘foetus’ was delivered, bawling and oblivious, onto the carpet. She loved recalling that her most damaged patient had been traumatised for life, he said, by the embedded memory of the obstetrician saying casually to a colleague as the baby emerged, ‘Hey, this one’s coming out like a pretzel.’ How the baby had absorbed sounds he could only four years later translate into language remained unexplained.