Snakes and Ladders

by Dirk Bogarde

  “ … What you have given me is something I will never be able to explain to you, ever. I honestly don’t know what I would have done without you. You always give me pride in myself and belief in myself … and that’s the loveliest gift of all. How I will ever repay you, Heaven knows!

  Thank you for my shining new life. I won’t fail you, and you have made it impossible for me to fail myself. God bless you.

  for ever,

  Judy.”

  Alas.

  * * *

  If the telephone rang constantly for Miss Garland it now hardly ever rang for me. Sitting slumped with a Guinness amidst my playing fountains and tossing rhododendrons I became very well aware of the sudden shift in my status. Rank had been a superb umbrella; however much I might have railed and complained against it. Now the elements hit me full on the head. No weekly cheque, no future plans, no capital. Apart from the tax reserves which I was steadily eating into like a termite.

  One morning Hans and Agnes announced, in floods of tears, that The Palace was far too big for them to handle on their own and that after ten happy years in my service they now felt it was time to move elsewhere and in consequence had accepted the offer of a job with a millionaire in Florida. We were all suitably distressed … but Florida was Florida, and Beaconsfield and no capital was, to say the least of it, alarming. I was dragging my anchor; clearly The Palace had to go.

  I made a brilliant decision on the third Guinness, staring into the night-scented-stock and bee-ridden lupins; I would sell up, and with the capital hopefully obtained, purchase a small farm and retire to work on the land for ever. No more cinema, no more theatre, peace and self-containment. I would, I thought, get Elizabeth and George (he was obviously good at land and farms and that sort of thing) to join me; give them a cottage, and together we would run the Elysian fields, and go to market, milk, collect eggs, plough, reap and sow, and lead the simple unrushed life of the land. I was immensely cheered by the idea of Elizabeth already in a gingham poke bonnet churning the butter; of the children, Mark and Sarah, on the hay wain, of ample teas and suppers round the scrubbed table in the lamp-light: the simple family life.

  I took up a bundle of old Country Life’s and started to thumb through them in a happily bucolic state, secure in having made a firm decision at last. And Dennis van Thal called, almost at that moment, to say that he had managed to get me a film, at a much reduced salary, and that I’d better grab it while I could. Poke bonnets and hay wains slid from my grasp and I was shortly bobbing about off the coast of Spain in a three-masted schooner, being beastly to my crew and ordering everyone in sight to submit to the cat-o’-nine-tails, while Alec Guinness slapped his thigh from time to time in a grey wig which looked remarkably like a tea-cosy.

  It was not a very distinguished affair, and apart from the enormous pleasure of being with Alec, a patient and generous actor if ever there was one, it was nothing, I think, which either of us greatly enjoyed. But it brought in a little loot, and thus, secured temporarily, a breathing space which I spent trailing about Kent and Sussex searching for the farm which would provide me with my kind of Mary Webb-Stella Gibbons-Thomas Hardy existence. Elizabeth in her poke bonnet simply would not leave my mind, although her immediate reaction to it had been less than exuberant.

  “We are really very comfortable in Rustington, dear. I mean, what sort of farm, and where? It’s very flattering of you, I’m sure, but George has got quite a big firm now, he’s pretty busy; and I don’t know anything about butter or cows … and the children can’t ride about on hay wains all the year through, can they? Isn’t it only in June or something?”

  However, I would not be daunted and found a farm in a perfect setting not far from Edenbridge, which was up for auction. It had a tumbled-down timbered house, five cottages and four hundred acres with a river running through, starred by marsh-marigolds. I was determined to have it. All the money which I had spent on restoring The Palace, lagoons, fountains and smooth lawn walks, paid off, and I sold it privately, extremely well, and thus armed with a comforting cushion against immediate disaster sent poor Forwood off to the auction for the farm which he speedily obtained for me but without the five important cottages, which were all sold for enormous prices, singly, to stockbrokers and junior architects who would, in due time, smother them in high-gloss paint, William Morris papers, London lampposts and wishing wells and sell them at vast profit. I was left with a derelict farm-house, a huddle of barns, and four hundred acres. Ruin stared me in the face, and Elizabeth in gingham faded swiftly from sight for ever. I put it straight back on the market and sold it for the price I had paid to a neighbouring farmer and with a deep sigh of relief came sadly down to earth; homeless.

  Although The Palace was technically sold, I did not have to give possession until April, and by the grace of God and Irene Howard, who was then casting at MGM, I found myself in a modest little Army-Comedy-Drama and stamped through the coldest winter for years with army boots and a cockney accent. It was a fortuitous move. The film was made entirely on location all over Essex, Surrey and Kent; each time we reached an area it was desperately combed for an alternative to The Palace. Day after day, as I slid and shivered through snow drifts rallying my brave soldiery, Forwood trailed wanly about with Estate Agents and too-eulogistic catalogues of Home Counties Tudor, until one morning he found me lying, frozen, in a barn near Ewhurst buried in straw eating a hard-boiled egg at the lunch break.

  “It’s not a farm; but it’s pretty marvellous.”

  “Where is it?” I was numb with cold and past caring.

  “Just up the hill there, staggering view. I can run you up in the car now.”

  “I can’t come and see a house like this, covered in mud and plastic blood … this filthy uniform …”

  “I think you should. It’s exactly what you want …”

  It was. And I moved into Nore six weeks later.

  * * *

  Judy had been in a cinematic limbo, so to speak, since “A Star Is Born” which she made in 1954 with George Cukor. Apart from a small role in “Judgement at Nuremberg”, and the recent film with Kramer, she had not faced a camera for seven years. Now, with her shining new life, the stresses and strains were once more appearing like cracks in a patched-up wall. She was finding life difficult to handle and telephoned three or four times a week from New York, always about four or five in the morning my time. She couldn’t sleep, and feared the dark; she wanted, and often got, constant reassurance, although I can’t believe I ever made a great deal of sense blurred with sleep as I was. Sometimes she was on form and happy, but mostly she was depressed, worried, or planning wild All-Star-Concerts for the Kennedys, whom she much admired, or earthquake victims in Peru or Persia; these problems were harder to deal with at four in the morning.

  “What time is it with you?” her voice careful, worried.

  “Five am, you beastly woman.”

  “Oh! I waked you!”

  “Doesn’t matter … I have to get up soon anyway, it’s a Studio day.”

  “Have you ever heard about a script called ‘The Lonely Stage’?”

  “No … why?”

  “Well there is one and they want me to do it; in London.”

  “I heard rumours, didn’t know the title. So?”

  “It stinks.”

  “Well, say ‘no’ then.”

  “But it’s a good idea. The idea is good. The dialogue is just yuccky.”

  “What’s it about if it’s so good?”

  There was a pause, she laughed ruefully.

  “This big, big Star goes to London to do a concert at the Palladium and finds the man who got away … It’s about me; I guess someone has read my lyrics.”

  “Well, get a new writer and see how you feel then.”

  “Would you do it with me?”

  “Play the one who got away?”

  “Sure.”

  “Of course I would. You know that. But I know they want an American star.”

  “W
hy for chrissakes! He’s supposed to be British.”

  “Box Office.”

  “Don’t give me that. I’ll do it if you say yes. Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  There was a pause again, crackle noises: “I love you very much,” she said. And hung up.

  She got to work pretty quickly, for a very few days later I was asked if I would care to do a film with Miss Garland. Although there was no script ready yet, would I take it on trust? I agreed, providing that it did not interfere with a film I was discussing with Dearden for July, “The Mind Benders”. The spokesman assured me warmly that the Garland film would commence in early May and that I would be well finished by June, since my role was not long. Miss Garland was the star. I would have plenty of time. Little did he know.

  We all embarked, unwittingly, on a brakeless roller-coaster which, reaching its final peak, roared down ricketing and racketing, exploding us all into smithereens at the end.

  Although the script, when it arrived finally, was a professional workmanlike job, well constructed and not quite as bad as Judy had led me to believe, I knew from her present state of depression and indecision (for she now telephoned me nightly, filled with doubts and fears and an unreasoning dislike of her part as written) that something would have to be done quickly or we would all be in for a very bumpy ride. I implored the producers not to show it to her when she arrived in England.

  “But we have made a number of changes according to her wishes.”

  “If you show her that she’ll turn right round and go back to the States. I know Judy, and I know her present mood.”

  “Well, what do we do? This is the script she agreed.”

  “I think she agreed only the story line. If you let me have a day or two I could try and re-write some of the stuff she has to say; but don’t show it to her until I have talked with her.”

  They agreed, worriedly. Her present mood was frantic. Panicked by marital trouble in New York, she was in terror that the children, Liza, Lorna and Joe, would be forcibly removed from her, so she shoved them on to a flight in such haste that Liza arrived in London in slacks and a shirt with a bundle of odd garments clutched in her arms and Judy immediately sought to have them all made wards of the British Court. It was not the calmest way to start a very difficult assignment. To compound the problems which she had to face she was hurried to a foul little house in Sunningdale which the Company had rented for her for the duration of the film, adjacent to the golf course, because they thought she liked to play golf. This was a grave error and only served to make her feel that they were amateur idiots, since her affection for golf at a time like this was nil to say the least.

  “Who do they think they’ve hired? Babe Zaharias?”

  She eventually found a house in Hyde Park Gardens and moved in just before we started work. She was tired, frightened, and quite alone. Now at the top of her career again, after years in a limbo of illness and despair, and box office failure, she was unsure and unequipped to handle things for herself; van Thal willingly took over her domestic problems which were many, while I tried to assist her with the professional ones. The script was the first. Someone, idiotically, had already shown it to her and it caused immense distress. She was trusting no one from now on in. The storm was in the wind.

  The first day at the Studio, make-up tests only, was not so bad. The crew, handpicked for such an august Star, were delighted and proud to be working with her. She was charming, funny, easy, and almost gay. It all seemed, on the surface, as if things would settle down. In her dressing room, later, massed with flowers and crates of Blue Nun, cards of good wishes and boxes of Bendicks chocolates, she shut the door firmly and announced that she was leaving … immediately … and slammed into the bathroom.

  “You can’t leave. You have a contract, darling. We’re in.”

  “I’m not in … it won’t be the first contract I’ve broken. I can t play this crap. They promised changes: they failed.”

  She was sitting on the closed lavatory seat, always her place of refuge in moments of shattering panic, a glass of Blue Nun clinking in her hands, her face pale, drawn, body shaking, looking small, ill and hopeless. For an hour I sat on the edge of the bath and reasoned with her; she wouldn’t budge. Just shook her head slowly at every suggestion, at every gentle argument I brought forward. Finally, in desperation, I read her the first scene which we were to play and which I had entirely re-written. She stopped her head-shaking and sat listening; then reached out and took the pages and started to read them aloud with me. She laughed a couple of times, put down the Blue Nun; we went over it two or three times … she was suddenly, immediately, worryingly, happy.

  “Hey! It’s good … did you do all this?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s really funny … don’t you think Atlantic City would be funnier than Wilmette? They’re both awful, but Atlantic City … I can make that funny … let’s do it again. With Atlantic City instead.”

  We started shooting a day later at the Palladium. She was happy, in marvellous voice, nervous, excited; it was her first big number in the film, “Hello, Blue Bird”. I had given her a blue bird brooch in sapphires; she was in her familiar dressing room, surrounded by an adoring company of Make-Up and Hair people; she was literally, at eight in the morning, bubbling with pleasure. She held the brooch tightly in a small closed fist.

  “We’ll be a new team, you and I. Won’t it be great!” She was sparkling.

  “Gaynor and Farrel!”

  “MacDonald and Eddy!”

  “I don’t sing …”

  “The Lunts!”

  We held each other laughing, promising each other our futures.

  At twelve-thirty she was on her way to hospital in an urgently clanging ambulance. We had started as we had, obviously, intended to go on.

  “But why? Why, darling? What did you do it for … it was such a good beginning.”

  “It was a lousy beginning.” Unrepentant, unashamed, pale, two days later.

  “What went wrong? Was it me? Something I did?”

  “No …” She twisted a spit-curl into place in the mirror and stuck it to her cheek. “Something he didn’t do.”

  “Who?”

  “Neame, our so darling director. He didn’t even say ‘thank you’ when I finished the number, he didn’t say anything. Just ‘Marvellous, Judy darling’.” She mocked a very British accent. “ ‘Marvellous, Judy darling’. Christ!”

  “That’s not so. He was thrilled by what you did, we all were, everyone was, you must know that, you must have felt it?”

  “I don’t ‘feel’ things. I need to be told; OK? Confidence. Who the hell does he think I am, Dorothy Adorable? I’m a goddamned star … I need help.”

  “Darling, you’ll have to get used to the way we all work here. It’s not the same as the States, we don’t use the exaggerations, great, greatest, the best. It’s all a bit cooler. If you don’t understand that you’ll get hurt; we don’t get hysterical very often.”

  She shrugged and pulled on a shoe angrily. “That damned British understatement, the stiff upper lip … well, it won’t do for Frances Gumm.”

  “Who the hell’s that?”

  For a moment she looked at me in the mirror with a face of white stone. Then it cracked, and she started to smile a little, she reached out her hand and took mine. Not facing me directly. Ashamed suddenly, aware of bad behaviour. In the wrong. I pressed her hand hard. She lowered her head.

  “It’s me. Frances Ethel. Isn’t it awful?”

  “Well, Frances Ethel, just remember that Neame had one hell of a day … he had to clear the Palladium by four-thirty for the evening show there … he was under pressure and first days shooting are frightening for everyone.”

  She withdrew her hand gently. “Just you tell Neame he’d better watch out for me. I get scared, he think he’s the only one? I need help and trust. I don’t trust him. I want him off the production.”

  She didn’t have him off; but she never tr
usted him again and the first serious crack was opened, never to be more than very temporarily repaired. It was a very uncomfortable situation for Ronnie Neame, and he behaved impeccably with the patience and care of a saint. He was helpful, enthusiastic, and agreeable to all the re-writes I did for our scenes together. He did everything possible to make her happy and secure and lavished her with praise, justified always, but she never quite bent towards him again, even though after our first few scenes together she was patently thrilled by her work and was giving a quite superb performance. For a little time we settled down; writing every evening and every week-end. Sometimes she came down to Nore and made brilliant suggestions, funny, real, moving, and although she never wrote a word herself, she sat in my office all the time, smoking, sleeping, keeping close, awaiting each page as it came off the machine, reading it aloud, rejecting some words or phrases, offering better alternatives. It was a marvellous, happy combination. We honed and polished and rehearsed continually, avidly, so that when we eventually got to the take it was smooth and precise, spinning along on ball bearings. Spirits everywhere rose; her work was proving to be the best she had ever done, and she knew it.

  “I’m good, aren’t I?” She was humble, happy, sure.

  “Gooder than you’ve ever been.”

  “You didn’t see ‘A Star is Born’ … not really, they hacked it to bits, George Cukor and I have never ever seen it … do you know that? They mutilated it. Do you remember that scene I did in the dressing room with Bickford, about a ten-minute monologue? Remember? Well … could you write me something like that for the end of this thing? A long scene, all about … all about … ” she fished slowly in the air seeking words, “all about what it means to be Jenny Bowman.” Her name in the film.

  “I’m not sure that I know all about what it means to be Jenny Bowman.”