Snakes and Ladders

by Dirk Bogarde

  Mr Davis’s recipe for seaside rock, so lightly unfolded at a Dorchester luncheon, was speedily put into effect, and only his warning that stamina would be required caused me any great deal of surprise or worry. I needed the stamina of a vote-seeking politician coupled with that of an Everest Sherpa to survive, and to my astonishment, I had it. Film followed film, some even overlapping at times. Locations ranged from southern Spain to the Dolomites, from the Alps to Agra. I saw more of the Studios than I did of the raven-haunted house and tried, as often as was allowed, or demanded in these undemanding roles, to put all the learning I had had from the Dearden, Leacock, Losey and the Bob Thompson College of Arts and Crafts into practice. It was an exhausting if exhilarating time. My salary was increased, I celebrated my tenth year under contract, thereby allaying both my fears, and those of Freddy Joachim so long ago in the kitchen of Chester Row, and was given a private luncheon party at the Studio, a warm speech of congratulation from Mr Davis and a pair of Paul Storr sugar castors. I was almost undone.

  At the same time I was now coming in for a certain amount of attention from the critics. Dismissed by a number as light weight but accepted by others, including Dilys Powell, Clive Barnes, Margaret Hinxman, and Paul Dehn, I was actively encouraged. Their criticism was just exactly that; constructive, caring, and therefore strengthening. They loved the cinema, willed it to flourish, to try to be better, and their obvious love for their craft made them notable teachers.

  There was also, of course, even then the Sunday-Supplement, New-Yorker Group. Schoolboys in 1939, they now emerged as an elegant shoal of piranhas savaging, on principle, practically anything which was not sub-titled. To be fair they did nod in the direction of Ealing Studios from time to time, but by and large did very little to encourage the British Cinema of the day which, with all its faults, and God knows there were some, was at least trying to exist. They offered neither true nor constructive criticism but, leaning heavily on M. Roget, provided jolly bon mots and epigrams for each other to read, filled with witty, if cruel, and often personal, observations. I accepted these attacks grudgingly enough and did my best to profit from those who gave encouragement; which is as it should be. Although I did have ideas above my station, I was quite content to bide my time for a little longer. There was still a lot to learn.

  I now walked along the corridor of power (in reality a very ugly connecting link between the Admin. Block and the Executive Offices littered with junk furniture from a thousand sets, a sort of “Bridge of Sighs with a palace on one side and a prison on the other”) beside Mr Davis himself, while Earl St John walked, very delicately, just behind us. Not the sort of thing to turn one’s head, but the kind of thing for which a knife is turned eventually. Although I was now under the personal supervision and advice of the Big Chief, Earl St John was still very much a figure to be reckoned with, even from five paces behind in the corridor. He was still the Studio Boss: he had great influence on whether a film would, or would not, be made. He concealed his dislike, or dismay, I never knew which, but something, behind a very warm gentle, affectionate façade. Fresh red carnation, fresh-lit cigar, hidden feelings. Gently biding his time for a counter-attack.

  Seaside rock, as one knows, is a sticky, insubstantial, unnourishing piece of confectionery. Meant only to be enjoyed at the moment, digested and soon forgotten. As such I prospered very acceptably. I felt that nothing more was expected of me by Rank, or would even be allowed; therefore it was with some degree of astonishment that I learned, in a very warm and personal letter from Mr Davis, that I had reached the top of the Motion Picture Herald poll both for Britain, my country, and also for the International Market, beating Bing Crosby, Humphrey Bogart and James Stewart. I had been top of the British Polls for the last two years, but this news was a tremendous surprise. My delight was nothing compared to the dismay and disbelief of the British Press. The Daily Mirror took the trouble to telephone and ask me why I thought it could possibly be me who had reached such an elevated position? It was clear from the irritated, not to say scathing voice, at the other end, that such a result must have been rigged. Either I had bought it, or had cheated in some manner. It was apparently inconceivable that I could have just won it by hard labour.

  I was a bit cast down, I confess. However, a Sunday newspaper, a day or so later, left no doubt at all in anyone’s mind. Milton Shulman took a whole page to express his. Referring to the 4,000 distributors who had taken part in the yearly poll he writes, or wrote: “These experts have seriously voted Dirk Bogarde as the man who brings more money into British Box Offices than any other Star in the world (his italics) … If this poll really reflects the thinking of either the Cinema Managers or the British Public then few will mourn that cinemas have been closing at the rate of some 200 a year …”, which seemed to place rather an excessive responsibility on my narrow shoulders. Forwood’s wry comment that “today’s reviews are tomorrow’s wrapping at the fishmongers” gave me little comfort, even though I knew it to be true. I suppose that I had rather hoped that someone would have said, “Well done!” After all, they were all extremely busy flogging “British is Best” in relation to motor cars, woollens, whisky, tweeds and sundry pieces of hardware. But not, apparently, seaside rock.

  I suppose, to be truthful, it was a matter of Quantity over Quality; nevertheless it had been a long hop from the hopeless, jobless vacuum of my demobilisation leave just ten years, almost to the month, ago.

  It is only fair to say at this point that during all these years Rank had always honoured my contract and permitted me to return to the theatre from time to time.

  I made these sorties in order to stretch myself and to make contact again with a living audience; they proved to be rather a mistake and they were not altogether happy experiences.

  The plays I chose to do were not simple ones, being written by master writers like Anouilh, Coward, Betti, Boussicault, but they provided exhilarating escapes from the platitudes of so many of the film scripts of the day. The audiences, in the main, however, came to see the Film Star and not the Play, something which had never remotely occurred to me, and each performance became an exhausting, and extended, Personal Appearance, during which every entrance and exit was greeted by the hysterical screams and moans reserved today for pop singers; and the alarming chants, during the performance, of “We love you, Dirk!” or, if I was unwise enough to let exasperation show, even more threateningly, “We put you where you are!”, destroyed the play, dismayed my fellow actors, and distressed me to such an unforeseen extent that every theatrical appearance became an ordeal.

  Things finally reached a head during a matinee in Cardiff when the Scene Dock doors eventually gave way and cascaded a dishevelled, screaming, horde of young women across the stage hotly pursued, it appeared, by half the City Police Force. Helmetless.

  In 1956 I lost my nerve and reluctantly abandoned the theatre for good. So deep was my fear of ridicule that later, in the summer of ’61 when Laurence Olivier asked me to join him in the opening season at Chichester Theatre, suggesting that I might “do Hamlet or some such thing”, I funked the honour and probably the greatest chance I had ever been offered really to learn my craft. Hoist by my own petard. So that to reach the top in the cinema did do something at least to alleviate my loss of the theatre.

  I wondered if Gooley knew and was amused in his bar in Cork. If Kitty, Worms, or smug Tilly, cared. The only thing I knew with certainty was that Palmers Green, had he not decided to leave the scene so early, would have been very chuffed, as he would have called it; and that rather cheered me up. I was to stay there for the next four or five years, and in the Top Ten until 1964, presumably closing a further 2,000 cinemas in the process.

  Mr Davis’s recipe became ever more ambitious; a spectacular adventure story in the Canadian Rockies, a costly remake of “A Tale of Two Cities”, later to be advertised in America as “Two Men and a Girl in Turbulent Paris”, and a tragic love story all set in exotic India—all of them happily to be made with
Miss Box and Mr Thomas. It was all very encouraging, and after them we would look even further afield. Any script I cared to do they would be willing to consider.

  “You can have any Star you want to play opposite you from anywhere in the world,” he announced one evening at dinner, “anyone you like. We’ll bring them over.”

  I suggested Judy Garland.

  “I meant a Star,” he said kindly. She hadn’t made money since “Summer Stock”, in 1950 … too long.

  Finding the scripts was bad enough; they had to conform to Family Entertainment which made choice limited. When a very young John Osborne shyly brought me a copy of his play “Look Back in Anger” down to Beel one wet Sunday afternoon to see if there was a possible film in it, the Studio returned it a week later with a polite, if strained note, stating that I should try to remember that the cinema was a Visual Art and that there was altogether too much dense dialogue in the enclosed manuscript. When I hopelessly submitted a book called Saturday Night Sunday Morning, Earl St John gave me a splendid lunch in his private, pine-panelled office, and, after he had lighted his cigar, asked me, gently, how I imagined that anyone could consider making a film which began with a forty-year-old woman inducing an abortion in a hot bath?

  So off we all went to India and made a “never the twain shall meet” kind of film during which I broke my foot and fought a long and bitter battle to prevent the Studio tacking on a happy ending. Eventually after a good deal of strained politeness, a play-safe compromise was reached. It made a great deal of money and suddenly, out of the blue, Anthony Asquith arrived with a beautiful script by Rattigan on Lawrence of Arabia.

  Although this could, under no circumstances, be termed Family Fun, to my delighted astonishment the Studio agreed. (Looking back from this distance it might just have been a ploy to shut me up.) This was to be no monumental epic, rather the straightforward, if there could be such a term applied to such a man, story about Lawrence, starting in Uxbridge and ending with his still-unexplained death on the lonely country road to Clouds Hill. I had never, in my life, wanted a part, or script, so much. Asquith spent a lot of time helping me to put aside my very serious doubts about my ability, my physical resemblance (nil) and my acceptability in such a role. Locations were found and King Feisal offered us his entire army.

  Mr Davis insisted that an hour should be cut from the three-hour running time; this was reluctantly agreed to, and Script Conferences started daily, almost hourly. Wig fittings, costume fittings and intensive research now occupied my time entirely. I thought of nothing else but the man I was to represent, which was a word that Puffin Asquith and I agreed on mutually rather than the word “be”. I could never “be” Lawrence, but we both felt that it could be possible to offer a portrait of the man to a public generally in ignorance of his stature. I read every book available on his work and life, wrote to his friends, received warm and encouraging letters in return, especially from Geoffrey Woolley who even sent me unpublished letters and a mass of deeply considered information, and quite lost my own identity in what the Americans call a period of total immersion.

  So lost was I in preparation and absorption that I took little, if any, notice of what was going on around me: all I could think of was the strange blond wig which was slowly, and carefully, taking shape in Make-Up, and the probable starting date in the desert of April 7th. I didn’t take any notice at all of what was happening about the Studios, which is why I was so completely unprepared for Olive Dodds’s cool, impersonal, business-voice on the telephone on Friday, March the 14th at six-thirty precisely to announce that “Lawrence” was now off. And please would I report to Mr St John’s office at the Studios on the following Monday morning at eleven am promptly. She could say no more, she regretted; the Office was closing for the week-end.

  Puffin and his producer, de Grunwald, and all the production team were still, at this moment in the Middle East with the King. They returned the next morning, happily unaware of catastrophe until they met it physically in the form of Earl St John himself at the airport as they arrived in and he was busy meeting a flight from New York. Across the crowded hall he told them casually that the film was no longer operative and would they come to his office on the Monday morning at ten o’clock.

  At the meeting they were each accorded half an hour, told it was definitely off but, as far as I know, were never ever given a reason. When my turn came, just as de Grunwald had hurried out past me with an ashen face and without a greeting, Earl St John, beaming pleasantly, offered me a chair and a book which he placed in my unresponsive hands and asked me, earnestly, to consider as an alternative to “Lawrence”. He gave no reason for the cancellation whatsoever. I looked at the book. It was a jolly comedy set on board a Cruise Liner.

  “But, Earl … we turned this down a year ago.”

  “I’m aware of that. But we still own the rights. You could change your mind.”

  “We’ve made it already, it’s the same formula as ‘Doctor at Sea’.”

  “And that made a tidy fortune; you can’t beat a well-tried formula, kid. Girls, lovely locations in the Mediterranean, a comic cook, there’s a Dowager too. Can you imagine Maggie Rutherford in a lifeboat with a tiara?”

  No one ever mentioned “Lawrence” again. I never knew, and still do not know, what stopped the plans so suddenly a few weeks before shooting. Neither, if I remember, did Puffin or anyone else connected with the production. Was it a matter of politics? Did someone somewhere object to the exposing of a very private man? Was the strange, still unexplained, ending to his life a forbidden area? The lonely road, a black car, two school boys, skid marks … was this a silence to be kept for ever? Or did someone know that the situation in the Middle East at that moment was to lead to the assassination of King Feisal, his heir and his Prime Minister in the middle of July? Or, simply, did the Studio go cold, fearing the high cost? Mr Davis kept firmly out of it all and only in a letter, months later, confided that he himself had been too distressed to even speak of it at the time. Whatever happened, “Lawrence” did not go as a film, although Rank, who still owned the copyright, permitted Rattigan to re-work it as a play, which opened subsequently under the title of “Ross” with Alec Guinness giving a moving performance. But my door, pushed at, closed sharply. It was my bitterest disappointment. However, Puffin was not one to be downcast for long. We had worked so hard and so long together on the project that the idea of full abandonment was unthinkable, and he set his mind towards another objective which could serve us well enough, Shaw’s “The Doctor’s Dilemma”, which an American Studio, MGM, offered to finance and distribute.

  Mr Davis gave me the necessary permissions, and the saddened team who had fought so long to bring “Lawrence” to the screen swung back into business on a very different level. It was not, however, thankfully, a jolly romp on a Cruise Liner; someone else did that while I steered myself, with Puffin’s help, towards the despised Art Cinema circuit, much to Earl St John’s amusement.

  “The public,” he said one evening at dinner in my house, “will confuse it with one of the real ‘Doctor’ films you made for us, kid. They’ll feel cheated, you wait and see. They don’t want to pay good money to watch you croaking about with TB in an attic! Who does, for chrissakes? And once they find you’ve cheated them it’ll be downhill all the way.”

  Later on, just as Hans brought in the coffee, he rose a little unsteadily to his feet and turned towards the fireplace.

  “Earl, dear!” cried his pretty wife helplessly. “Whatever are you doing?”

  He rolled his cigar slowly and deliberately to the other side of his mouth. “Trying to put my host’s goddamned fire out, that’s what,” he said.

  * * *

  But he was right. The British public did feel cheated, and as soon as they found out that I was not playing the adorable, twinkling Dr Simon Sparrow, they stayed firmly away from Shaw, and apart from some kind comments from a few of the critics, the film slid into obscurity. Not, however, in America, where they we
re ready for the Art Theatre Snob Stuff, and MGM, delighted with their modest investment, financed us all again to do another subject together. I was invited to go and work in Hollywood, which this time, after many refusals in the past, I accepted. I realised, almost subconsciously, that the recipe for the manufacturing of seaside rock after two or three years was wearing thin unless I agreed to continue in the old formulas which, as Earl had pointed out, were well tried and seldom failed. It seemed the right time to make a change. I was nearly forty.

  * * *

  “The one thing that you simply have to remember all the time that you are there,” said Olivia de Havilland just before I left, “is that Hollywood is an Oriental city. As long as you do that you might survive. If you try to equate it with anything else you’ll perish.”

  There was a scatter of photographers wearily popping flashlights at the airport, the smog, through diluted white sun, stung my eyes, a girl with red plastic boots, a tall hat with a plume, a braided satin jacket tight across her enormous breasts and a smile like a silent scream, offered me a cellophane-wrapped basket of oranges and said, “Hi, Dirk! I’m Mary-Paul-Jayne, welcome to California!”