by Dirk Bogarde
“Can’t understand it at all, my dear,” he had said, his eyes bright with amusement. “They must all be bonkers!” Some of them were. But by the time I had really discovered that, I had succumbed to being bonkers, as he put it, myself.
Audiences, one gathered, liked the performances I gave, even if they left me dissatisfied and keenly aware that I should do better, and so I was a success. Rank were pleased because I made money with the films, most of them, and that was their yardstick to everything; the cinema was big business. So. If this success secretly caused me distress, despair and disillusion at times, the reaction of my family had been comforting, for they simply didn’t believe it and, apart from being slightly bewildered and amused, accepted it calmly with a vague sense of disbelief. Which had a very stabilising effect on me. My family life, which I cherished above all things, was never in any way altered; they and it were the ballast which had helped to carry me on a pretty long journey. We all went on much as we had done before my gentle climb upwards, except that I had made something out of my life and this gave them all the greatest pleasure. But my father was too wise a creature to come to terms with it seriously. It in no way diminished the pleasure he took in the modest perks, as he used to call them, which came his way. Trips to Venice or Malaga, St Moritz or New York; lazy afternoons sketching on Long Island, or surfing at Biarritz; choosing the best clarets and burgundies he could find in hotels and restaurants all over Europe, and even tonight he had made his toast to the Queen in Rome. But he simply brushed aside the reasons for these pleasures. As far as he was concerned it was all really nothing but a bit of a lark.
My mother, on the other hand, had taken it rather more in her stride, as she takes most things, eagerly and unthinkingly. After all, she pointed out, it was all perfectly natural since I took after her, and had she not married so young and decided to have me, she herself would have been a famous star, for had she not been on the point of going to Hollywood when my father shattered her dream for ever by explaining that she had made a contract with him, and not Mr Lasky? Wistfully she languished in England bringing up her family, doing her best to hide the disappointment. Not altogether successfully. So when the time came she delighted in fluttering about like an elegant dragonfly, in the warm periphery of my spotlight; it was as near as she ever got to the silver screen which she had so coveted.
Elizabeth, now married to George and a mother of two, was altogether less sure. We had grown up so closely together, shared so much of life, that she could not be so easily swayed by screaming fans in the streets, police escorts, and the curious fact that on some occasions during public appearances it had been deemed necessary at times for me to have my flies sewn up as a protection from my more ardent followers.
“My dear, I just can’t take it seriously, that’s all. I’m awfully sorry if it sounds rude or something … you know … but it’s all so dotty, isn’t it? I mean why you of all people? Really! It doesn’t make sense to me at all. It’s really rather disgusting, in a way, I mean when you think of it.”
“You mean like being sick on a bus?”
“Well … not as awful as all that … but pretty vile really. It isn’t even as if it was a very important thing to be, is it? A film star?”
“It isn’t.”
“Well then; like a surgeon, or scientist, a composer even, you know. Goodness; you must feel awful really.”
But generally we had managed, over the years, to weather this strange metamorphosis together, although I could only guess at the silent stresses and strains they must have endured; for it is no great pleasure to be on the fringe of the famous; and their privacy and anonymity were constantly invaded by idle chatter and envious gossip which inevitably, it seems, surrounds what is euphemistically called today a celebrity.
To a closely-knit, loving family who wished and indeed expected to keep their lives quite undisturbed and above all private, it sometimes came as a bit of a jolt. But I was never reproached. Lally, however, with her usual excellent sense and awareness of what was what, kept out of it all entirely; she was delighted for me, if what I had was what I wanted, but she wished no part of it herself. She preferred to carry on with her own life, her own family, and her own affairs, and as always kept herself to herself. Very wisely.
I envied her her wisdom and tidiness of mind. How could I be wise? Know when and how to make the jump. To have less, like my father, but to have more, as he had in self-fulfilment and pride in his work. I knew that he was right. I had been very, very lucky in the twelve years. It had been a totally unexpected achievement, if achievement it could be called, it had even started off with a mistake that cold, snowy day in the Aeolian Hall, but I couldn’t kick against that. Here I was, thirty films behind me, popular, highly paid, and constantly in work, something most actors would willingly give up everything in life to have. And yet I was deeply unsatisfied under all the glitter and gloss, unfulfilled, and almost, it had to be faced, ashamed of the position I had reached.
Why? I had been manufactured to entertain people, that was all, and apparently I had done just that. I should have no pretensions. That was my function. So why go on trying to prove things? Was there anything left to prove really? Only the one nagging doubt that I could act. But since no one really cared much about that except myself, what did it matter? And if I cared all that much, all I had to do was to get my release from Rank, clear off back to the theatre, and start all over again if I could.
All I wanted, I supposed, was respect in my work, but how could I possibly achieve that by playing spaniel-eyed priests or Liszt in a fright-wig? The theatre, I knew, terrified me and could not satisfy me now; I had fallen completely under the spell of the cinema, the technical work. The camera excited me by its apparent awareness of anything which I wished to impart to an audience mentally; it was my friend never my enemy, for some unexplained reason; there was a rapport between us which exhilarated me. Dearden had seen this, Losey and Asquith, so too had Cukor, and I revelled in the intensity of concentration which it demanded and I gave it until I was almost ill with exhaustion; and because I very often fell desperately short of what I had hoped I was doing, I wanted to go on and on until one day I would be able to sit down and say, “Ah! That’s it! That’s what I meant it to be.”
But how long would my opportunities hold out? Where could I find the subject which would really allow me to apply everything I had so far learned? I leaned my head against the cold glass of the window watching the light rise on Rome. St Peter’s, a tin jelly mould shimmering in the first glow of day. A sudden flight of starlings swirling into the grey sky, a soaring comma … below me the day staff were beginning to arrive, prego-ing themselves cheerfully up the hotel steps. I pulled the shutters to and went to bed. Next week a new decade would begin; perhaps things would change.
* * *
But they didn’t; at first. I was sent off to Spain to play a Mexican bandit sheathed in black leather, riding a white horse, carrying a white cat, and belting everyone in sight with a silver-topped riding crop. It wasn’t much fun; it was the last picture in Mr Davis’s recipe, and the last I was to make for Rank under his protection.
Shortly afterwards the Liszt Bio opened in America and, after seven excellent weeks in New York, died the death everywhere else. The same thing happened in London, and in spite of a great publicity campaign in which Columbia discreetly suggested that Capucine and I would announce our engagement at the Press Reception, of all unlikely places, it floated down the river of no return. The Spanish Priest and Tart With Heart film, as I said, never even got shown on television. One way or another a depressing start. What it all proved, without much doubt, was that I had failed in America. My work, or personality, or whatever you care to call it, was unacceptable to American audiences. The American audiences like meat and potatoes, one lady critic told me in New York, which, unhappily for me, I was not. A piano was not, obviously, quite enough. The blame was neatly laid on my shoulders. But never, at any time, by my producer Bill Goetz, wh
o with his enchanting wife, Eadie, remained staunchly loyal and undismayed. A rare and heart-warming event in Tinsel Town.
But everything which Dolly Rubin had warned me about during a supper at Sardi’s in New York, months before, came to pass.
The telephone, which had rung almost daily from California asking me how it felt “to be a Star” after the first seven weeks at Radio City, stopped abruptly. Columbia, who had eagerly been negotiating to buy out my contract from a delighted Rank Organisation, just faded gently away like a dispersing morningfog. And two producers of repute, to whose children I had very happily become god-father, were suddenly no longer available when I called.
Dolly was a tough, bright, rather short Estonian with an accent which could crush rocks. She was something important to do with Publicity for the Liszt film. After a hellish day of interviews with the Press, which was known as “Total Exposure”, we had gone for Eggs Benedict to Sardi’s.
“How do you think we’re doing?” I was really too tired to care.
“Fine. Just great.” She snapped a pretzel. “Wanna know what I really think. Off the rekord? It’s old fashioned. The movie. I don’t think the kids’ll go for it. It’s pre-war, for God’s sake. Know what I mean?”
“And if it fails at the box office?”
“You’ll fail too. Remember this, honey; it isn’t great acting that gets you up there as a Star, it’s great grosses. Nothing more and nothing less. That old chestnut about being only as good as your last movie is absolutely true.” She leant across the table and tapped my hand. “Absolutely. If this movie makes it you’ll be offered every role from Mary Magdalene to Stalin … never mind you don’t look like them, they’ll fix it so you do because you’ll be bankable, they can sell you. This is a Consumers’ Market. When you don’t sell they don’t buy, not the Prodoocers, not the Exhibitors, not the goddamned audiences. Maybe one near-miss is allowable, but two is curtains. You can be the greatest goddamned ‘King Lear’ Broadway ever saw, but if you don’t come off the screen and bring in the shekels they can’t give you away with a packet of Mary Baker Cake-Mix. I bin here a long, long time, sweetie; I know. It is a mathematical formula you could remember from Aunt Dolly, and it all starts with the letter B. Box Office equals Big Name equals Bankability, anything else equals Brankrupt.” She forked her frozen spinach into a neat green hillock.
“Get it? The facts of life.”
So, to be fair, I had been expecting this all to happen, but when it did it was not the most agreeable of feelings. However, as George Cukor said, when a thing doesn’t go, then the hell with it: just say, “Well; it didn’t go” and get on with life. Much easier said than done. A door had closed for me rather firmly. I had made my exit from the Hollywood scene with as much dignity as possible, and I was comforted by the fact that every exit has to have an entrance, although I was not absolutely sure now where this might be. Well aware of Mr Presley, of James Dean with his sullen youth-identification, of Brando with his power and force, of the new generation who were now following a different piper in Hamelin, I was supremely aware that the kind of work I did, and the kind of actor I was, was doomed. I had to take action pretty soon, and drastically.
To this end I sold Beel House, which I had come to dislike more and more since Kate’s death, to my other catalyst, Basil Dearden, and moved into a vast stone and marble edifice near Beaconsfield which I got cheap since it had been a Children’s Home for years and no one knew what to do with all the partitioning, frosted glass, and red crosses everywhere.
But just before I left Beel for ever, Kate’s bedroom had its final guest. Judy Garland arrived unexpectedly, slightly amazed herself at her own daring, since she had come from Los Angeles quite alone for the first time in her life, with, as she said, “a real purse with real money in it! I’m so excited.” The last time we had met was in my house in Hollywood; then she was fat, ill, moved in a trance, and those wide brown eyes were almost buried in a white puffy face. But now here she was eating a vast breakfast, laughing and giggling, pretty, plump I suppose, but no longer fat, and back on form and ready to go.
“I’m planning a concert, just two nights, at the Palladium, and you’d better be there, but first of all I’m going to Rome … can you imagine? All alone, no Sid, no family. I’m having such a ball! And I’m going to look about for a house in London to live in for ever. We are all coming over; no more Hollywood, no more Hell. I’m better now, cured by a wonderful doctor, and I know just where I’m at.”
It was a wonderfully happy time. We went for long drives into the country, Chipping Campden, Burford, Lechlade, King’s Stanton, Oxford, places she had never seen and most times had never heard of. We walked with the dogs; sat in the sun; talked and laughed. She was without doubt, I suppose, the funniest woman I have ever met. We seemed, in that July, to laugh endlessly.
“Oh! I’m so happy, you know that?” She put her arms round my neck.
“You sound happy, I know it.”
“You want to know why?”
“Why?”
“Because you are my new friend, Kate brought you to me, that night ages ago … you made me a promise, remember? You’d not leave me, remember that promise?”
“I do.”
“And I trust you.”
“That’s a very serious statement.”
“It’s supposed to be goddamned serious, trust is. I don’t have too much of it in my life, you know that. I spend most of my time groping about in the dark like Helen Keller, feeling faces to find someone to trust, to be safe with.”
She ran her fingers lightly over my face. “I found you. Now don’t you go and leave me; all I have in all this world is Sid and my family, I love them and I trust them, but no one else in all this stinking world, except you.”
“That’s a heavy burden.”
“You can carry it. I’ll help you along.”
“All right; you promise me that. You’ll help me along.”
“And you be at the Palladium.”
“Same show? Hungarians with dogs and ventriloquists?”
“Oh you! Now just you stop that! I need the warm-up.”
“You don’t. And you don’t need those Dancing Gentlemen to spell out your name. They all know who you are.”
“I need the warm-up, I’ve always had a warm-up … I know this part better than you do, Buster.”
“How many songs do you know by heart?”
She looked vaguely round the Out-Patients Department, playing thoughtfully with a pearl ear-ring.
“Songs? You mean words of the songs, lyrics?”
“Yes … how many?”
“Oh … I dunno … maybe two hundred, could be. Why?”
“Just sing them all.”
She looked up in amazement and burst into laughter. “All of them! Are you out of your mind?”
“Just you and a whopping big orchestra and just go on singing.”
“Until the cows come home?”
“Until they let you go; as long as they ask for more.”
“You mean start cold? Cold! And just sing?”
“A tremendous overture, and just you in a spotlight. Cold.”
Her eyes were suddenly interested.
“Not a spotlight … a pin spot … maybe a follow spot crossing the stage …”
“Whatever kind of spot you want. And take a big place, a huge place, Madison Square Garden, a football stadium.”
“I know!” she was laughing now. “I’ll take the Metropolitan and be like the wife in ‘Citizen Kane’! You want to kill me for ever?
“You said that you trust me? Well, I tell you it would work.”
“Honey,” she poured out a small glass of Blue Nun, poked the ice cubes with her finger. “Honey, I played the Met. I played every goddamned Opera House in the U.S.A.; and I filled them, I am always a sell-out. But I’ve been terribly, terribly sick. That hepatitis nearly killed me and I have to go back to work and earn some money, I can’t take any kind of risk, believe me … I do the sho
w-I-know-how.”
“Then make a change, do it alone.”
“I’m not Samson, for God’s sake! I’m not that strong. I’m Fay Wray in ‘King Kong’, remember? I just holler. And I can’t holler for two long hours.”
“Try.”
“You are a shit. My best friend and you want to ruin me … I’m going to see Kay Thompson in Rome, I love her and I trust her too. I’ll maybe kick it around with her.”
She moved into a pretty house in Chelsea with the family, and started to settle down to what she called just being a housewife; and although she was often to be seen shopping for her groceries up and down the King’s Road, the food she served was mainly from Fortnum and Mason; if she was worried about anything as sordid and incomprehensible to her as money, she never showed it, and the time was happy.
At the Palladium at the end of August she did her show alone. For the first time. Halfway through she had a spot turned on me, to my misery, and forced me to go up on stage and sit at her feet while she sang a song which she knew I loved above all the others. “It Never Was You”. It was a calculated piece of show business … and she knew it. I sat humbly at her feet, she sang softly and sweetly, one arm round my shoulder, but when she finished, and while the crash of applause brought down the plaster, she kissed me and said: “You see, I can; thank you.”
That show and the second one she did were triumphs. She was radiant, reborn, sure. Once she said to me: “You know something? It’s so damned lonely up there. I’m so alone, so afraid. Just before it starts you have everyone around you, telling you you’re great, doing your hair, making up your face, mending your pants, kissing you, telling you they love you, touching you (I hate to be touched), building it all up for you, giving you wine, giving you pills, getting you on to your feet so you’ll be ready to go on … they take you right to the side of the stage, all touching, kissing, whispering, encouraging … they have the towel, the glass of water, the hair spray, all the goddamned paraphernalia, and they know the ‘Take’. And then you go out there and you are absolutely, absolutely, alone. Suddenly you are alone. It is the most awful feeling in the world. And that’s how it’s always been, and that’s how it always will be … alone.”