The Blue Touch Paper

by David Hare

  It was certainly a different way of life from the one we were used to. We were by the ocean, but that was the best you could say. From time to time at dusk we would go down to the communal Jacuzzi, where all our neighbours were preparing for a night of action. Nobody minded Joe’s presence. Oddly, they rather welcomed him. But by eight thirty Margaret and I would be the only pucker-skinned couple heading back upstairs in the formation in which we’d arrived. After a week or two, it became melancholic. Los Angeles was not prising itself open to us, and we both had a strong sense that this was not where we wanted our children to be born. So in the middle of September we got back in the car and headed up to stay at the El Cortez Hotel in San Francisco. We had dinner with Jessica Mitford, whose ignorance of the basics of tea-making had once so inspired me. Then we set off east, this time going as fast as possible. By chance our first night’s stop was in Reno, where my aspiring producer Shirley MacLaine was in solo cabaret at one of the casinos. Afterwards she told us that no one had been round to see her for weeks, and asked would I please give her notes? I refused, saying that I knew nothing about song and dance, it was not my field, and, really, we’d both had a lovely time and the show was perfect. At this, Shirley became so insistent that, mistaking her vehemence for sincerity, and being myself at the time more than slightly unhinged, I remarked that if I had a single problem it was perhaps with that speech from Some Came Running where a woman complains: ‘You’ve got no right to talk to me the way you did, Dave. I am a human being and I’ve got as many rights and feelings as anybody else.’ Shirley asked me what exactly was wrong with that speech. It was one of her fans’ favourites. It was one of the highlights of the show. People loved it. ‘Yes, of course, I can see that, Shirley, but isn’t it just a touch, well, sentimental?’

  Next day, getting out of Nevada as fast as our wheels could carry us, Margaret and I speculated freely as to whether Shirley would ever speak to us again. When we got to New York we hit a more serious problem. There was a newspaper strike. Usually you could rent an apartment by buying the New York Times, but in September 1978 it was not publishing. The sole source of news about rentals had become the Village Voice, which, in the mad rush of the homeless, was now selling tens of thousands of extra copies. There was, however, we were told, one stand on Christopher Street where the Voice was available the night before publication. We duly stood there among a bunch of desperate people wise to the same dodge, and grabbed the first copies as soon as they were thrown off the truck. But by the time we went to see Jerry Gretzinger, the landlord of what seemed to be an absolutely perfect tenth-floor loft on Broadway between Broome and Grand, right in the heart of SoHo, he had already half-promised it to someone else.

  It was the sight of Margaret’s stomach beneath her winter coat which changed Jerry’s mind. A deeply considerate and friendly man, who ran a handbag factory in one third of the loft and lived in another third, he could not allow a pregnant woman to leave the premises without knowing that the last third of the loft was hers for as long as she wanted it. He was not going to be the person who turned her out onto the street. By the following week we had left the thirty-ninth motel of our trip and were installed, Little Italy glowing like a Vincente Minnelli musical at one window and the ever-changing colours of the Empire State Building visible from another. The news I was getting from London had turned from being good to being incredible. Peter’s strategy had worked better than even he could have imagined. The first indication of a change in mood had come earlier that summer when Fred Zinnemann sent me a letter to tell me that Plenty was the best thing he’d ever seen at the National. The second indication was when, in July, Mike Nichols had invited me to his house in Connecticut to discuss making a film of Plenty. He had been watching an Ibsen play in the Olivier, got bored and wandered instead into the Lyttelton to see a play of which he’d never heard, but by which he was now possessed. Even Peggy wrote: ‘It’s taken you a long time to become the Darling of Gods, so caution, caution. You’ve another thirty years of writing, so there’s plenty of time.’ But most certain evidence of a reversal of fortune came in a string of increasingly excited letters from Kate. ‘I can’t begin to tell you what’s happening here.’

  In November I sold the car for $1200 – a $300 hit for fifteen thousand miles – and I flew back to London to see Plenty for the last time. It was not just that the place was packed to the rafters, with long queues waiting all day for returns. More importantly, there was a quality of anticipation in the house when the play started which was completely new. I had always believed that expectation was four fifths of the battle. Well, here it was, tangible. Plenty had turned into one of those ideal theatre evenings in which not a word, not a thought, not an image is lost. Kate stepped forward at the end and there followed the kind of ovation I had hitherto heard only in the movies. I was reminded afresh how lucky I’d been to have a bona fide great actress around when I’d been writing these roles. The Portable dream was in some way fulfilled: a play could be made by its audience and no one else.

  I was not there on the last night, but someone told me of the impromptu curtain speech Kate made in response to an audience who would not let her go. It was curiously phrased and so, for me, deeply moving. Kate thanked everyone who had supported the play and also everyone who had supported the author, who, she said, ‘has come from among you’. When I heard that phrase, I knew exactly what she was saying. She was saying goodbye.

  14

  Like Everyone’s a Writer

  The last nine months of my marriage were spent mostly in New York. I would do my best to work uptown in Rosi’s apartment, then at four o’clock in the afternoon I would give up and walk the more than ninety blocks down to our home in SoHo. In defiance of Nietzsche, no great thoughts were conceived. Instead I would take in the minute racial variations from block to block, drinking in the life of each immigrant group, their shops, their houses, their conversation on the sidewalk. I knew to within three feet exactly where the Czech quarter turned German. Bill Gaskill had asked me to adapt Tolstoy’s novel Resurrection for the Olivier Theatre, but I was refusing to accept all the wise counsel I had received from everyone that Stella was a dud. My work wasn’t impressing me. Why should it impress anyone else? From time to time I would go and see Joe Papp, who seemed to be pleased that I was living in New York. He behaved in a proprietorial way, as if my being in the city meant he were somehow my host. Anything I wanted, he said. But after a ninety-minute tour d’horizon on any subject but Plenty, Joe would tell me the reasons why he wasn’t, at the moment, going to do it.

  Our life in SoHo was effectively communal. Upstairs, on the top floor, Dave Brubeck had his studio, and from time to time we’d see him in the elevator. Jerry Gretzinger’s door was open most of the day, and so was ours. His children, Nell and Aaron, would run through to see us, and Joe would run through to see them. There was still enough of old artistic SoHo left to make it feel interesting, although people were beginning to talk more frequently about property prices. We were just on the cusp of change. At a time when private life in the UK was still often furtive and repressed, English friends would come over to the US because they could be themselves. We had a gay friend who went to the bathhouses every Friday and Saturday night and he would come in for coffee in the morning to report on the previous night’s Saturnalia. But the heterosexual opportunities in the late 1970s weren’t significantly fewer, if that’s what you wanted. Studio 54, the nightclub adored by people who wanted to be celebrities, was represented in the newspapers as being the city’s keynote institution. More properly, that honour should have gone to Plato’s Retreat, one of several places anyone could go for a nice middle-class commercial orgy. The likely drawback was that the first person you would meet there would be a British theatre director.

  Feelings of decadence were reinforced by a growing friendship with Tennessee Williams, which would continue well into the next decade. We had met at a cocktail party where Myrna Loy, the world’s most attractive seventy-five-
year old, had charmed me rotten. Margaret and Lynn Redgrave had carried the party on to dinner, and Tennessee and I had hit it off straight away. Tennessee was never happier than when enjoying his own often incomprehensible jokes. Every day he got up early to write, then began drinking white wine before lunchtime. By the time I got to him he was more than half cut, but determined every night to keep going as long as possible, preferably until a final drink at 3 a.m. ‘How are you doing, Tennessee?’ I would ask around midnight, when conversation had slurred to a halt. Like a Southern belle, he would curl his pinkie, throw back his head and reply, ‘Why thank you, David, I’m doing just as well as I possibly can.’ He would then peal with cheerful laughter. When we got to know each other better, he would insist on dining at Sardi’s, a theatrical restaurant in midtown where the food was appalling. He ordered cannelloni, which he left untouched. But he felt Sardi’s was the last place where he was properly treated. Tennessee liked eating there because they made a fuss. Waiters stood in a line while he passed. And quite right too. The larger part of his conversation was about how completely he’d fallen out of fashion. He felt it so keenly that he was inconsolable, however hard you tried. He ignored praise. Once Tennessee got into his riff about how his plays could no longer be mounted in New York because the critics hated him so much, it was impossible to get him out. I didn’t mind. The reliable grievances of one of America’s greatest dramatists shut out of the city where he had made his name reinforced my own feelings of companionable gloom. Later my junior friendship with John Osborne was played out to the same harsh melody: ‘I knew it would end badly, but not this badly.’

  We had put Joe into a friendly kindergarten in Washington Square. I liked walking west for a change and it was a pleasure to take him across in the sunshine before I rode the subway uptown. But one morning in December I returned to our loft to find Margaret in labour. She was only eight months gone. I took her downstairs and helped her into the back of a cab. It was still rush hour and St Luke’s Hospital, where she was being looked after, was right up by Columbia University at the other end of the city. Margaret was stretched out on the back seat of the taxi about to give birth, while the driver, oblivious, played his radio so loud that he didn’t hear her screams. When after forty minutes we reached our destination, Margaret was in too much pain to get out. The moment the driver finally realised what was holding her up, he immediately started defending his route. ‘I came through the park. It’s the quickest way.’

  Within fifteen minutes our second son, Lewis, was born and within ten more our daughter, Darcy, followed. Premature, neither was in the best shape. Darcy weighed four pounds fourteen ounces, her hip was broken and she was having trouble breathing. When, after a few days, Lewis was able to keep his temperature up in the open air and therefore no longer strictly in need of intensive care, we explained, embarrassed, that because Margaret had come to the States already pregnant, we had only been able to secure insurance for emergencies. Time in a regular ward would cost us. ‘Oh, OK,’ the doctors said at once. ‘We’ll keep him in emergency.’

  Margaret’s sister Sarah flew out to join us, and we became a family of six. There was thick snow that Christmas as the babies gained weight and came home, Darcy wearing a Pavlik harness for four months while her damaged hips healed. The first flakes of a snowstorm would usually arrive in the afternoon, and there was no more gorgeous prospect in Manhattan than to stand at a tenth-floor window looking down to a daffodil-yellow stream of taxis making their way out of town before the snow got too thick for them to work. I found the spectacle of the city brought to a silent halt by nature overwhelming. That month, in a frenzy of determined domesticity, I even started going to pastry class, so that I could practise millefeuille, folding the butter and the flour together in layers on a cold slab. Everyone would be waiting at home for the resulting croissants. But when the turn of the year came, I found the resources finally to face the failure of my novice screenwriting. A fellow playwright, Mike Weller, read Stella and told me that the purpose of writing was to get things out. He didn’t know what had motivated me to write the film, but whatever it was, it showed every sign of staying in. He was right. I’d wasted the greater part of the year. Very well. On the train to Nottingham in 1974, I had made a promise not to burden the public when I had nothing to say. It was time to make good on that promise.

  The week after I threw Stella away, Bill Gaskill appeared in New York to tell me that my adaptation of Resurrection – I had done only half the first act – was never going to work. It had been a bad idea. Whatever had attracted him to the book was not in the play. Bill was one of a flock of friends that winter who passed through our apartment, using our residence in Manhattan as a welcome chance to visit. Peter Hall came by, observing that he had never seen such small children in such a large space. He was in town because Peter Shaffer, who lived in New York, had finished a play about Salieri’s jealousy of Mozart. It was entitled Amadeus. But Peter used the chance now to offer me the artistic directorship of the Olivier Theatre. He wanted to hive off his twelve-hundred-seat open stage and have just one person run it. But this time Mephistopheles had targeted the wrong Faust. Would I direct John Gielgud in King Lear? No. I had already resolved I would rather be a blocked writer for the rest of my life than not be a writer at all. By chance, a few days later, an article appeared about the future of the British theatre in the New York Times, with half a page of photographs. Jerry came running in excitedly. ‘Have you seen this? The Times says you’re a playwright.’ I looked at him, not understanding. ‘But Jerry, I told you that’s what I did. What do you think I do every day?’ Jerry shook his head. ‘Yeah, but I thought you were a writer like everyone’s a writer. It never occurred to me you were really a writer.’

  The act of clearing my desk liberated me. David Rose, with the soul of a great producer, had written me a timely letter to say that he had shooting dates for a Play for Today in July, and why didn’t I just write it? He couldn’t imagine anything better. All he cared about was that I should be working at Pebble Mill again, and he promised to do whatever I wrote, sight unseen. I sat down and began something new, a fable, a Rohmer-ish conte morale.The subject was a young man’s pursuit of an unattainable woman. A young journalist is unable ever to find out whether the object of his love is indeed as struck with him as she claims to be. Every time he sees her she seems to have a new job. First she’s working in an art gallery, then she’s teaching dance. Pretty soon she’s having a nervous breakdown. It’s impossible for our hero to be sure whether she’s ever told him the truth, or whether the curious circumstances that have repeatedly kept them apart were actually intentional. At the end he’s seen to be living out his days in a loveless marriage, discontent and dreaming of leaving. For whatever reason, within eight days of my starting work there were fifty pages. This one, like South Downs, was pain-free and from my subconscious. Perhaps I was finding it so easy to write because longing has always been my subject, or perhaps it was simply because it wasn’t Stella. David Rose read it the moment I finished it and told me how excited he was.

  All the time we’d been away, Kate had been living in our house in London, and when we returned at the beginning of April it was full of fresh flowers to welcome us home. The idea was that Margaret and I would now settle down to some kind of normality, a married couple with three children. Margaret, an outstanding feminist to her fingertips, had been in her element in Lower Manhattan. Americans had responded both to her directness and to her generosity, so that she had become the centre of a spontaneous, disparate community of warmth and laughter, of which she had taken memorable black-and-white photographs. Her many admirers in New York seemed to know and understand this Scot better than the English ever could. The plan now was that she should go back to work. A number of overdramatic but well-meaning people treated me as though I were the prince from over the water, asking what I was going to do to help save the British theatre, which was going through one of its periodic crises of confidence. I told ever
yone who asked that I had no plans for new initiatives or new structures. I had already played a part in founding two companies which had made waves in the small world of the theatre. But now I wanted to try and write plays which might reach out beyond that world. I had concluded that it was the most radical thing I could do.

  My relationship with Kate was clearly finished. She was living with another man. So that was that. But I could also sense that not only had Kate’s personal circumstances changed, her attitudes were shifting as well. She was stepping backwards from the folie à deux which had powered us both for so long. Firstly, she expressed regret that she had not taken her chances to become a film actress. When she had been at the age when Hollywood wanted her, the offers had come thick and fast. Now she was beginning to feel that turning them down had been a mistake. She had left it too late. She wasn’t English, she was Canadian and emotionally she had belonged all the time on the other side of the Atlantic, and in the cinema, not in the theatre. She felt she had lived too long in the wrong country and it had made her unhappy. In public, in the Sunday Times, she was quoted as saying, ‘Plenty has spoilt me for ever. I’ll never get a chance of that range again in British theatre.’ But in private she believed there was another downside. The formidable roles I’d cast her in had convinced people that was who she was. They had created an impression of coldness, of distance. People sometimes approached her gingerly, and in her view that was because the parts and the player had become mixed up. People were expecting Susan Traherne and were intimidated. Kate was far too sensible and too sensitive to blame me directly. She knew perfectly well that she’d already played three good parts and now that I was planning to make a new film, she was eager to play a fourth. She knew there were plenty of actresses who would have loved the chance. But she had also reached the point where she felt trapped in my idea of her. That had been the meaning of her curtain speech. I belonged in England. She didn’t. There was a side to her which the public wasn’t seeing.