Snakes and Ladders

by Dirk Bogarde

  “Sure you do … she’s me. You know that, don’t you? She’s really me. And you know me all right, Buster. That line you wrote that you say to the kid … remember? ‘Jenny gives more love than anyone but takes more love than anyone can possibly give.’ Remember that?” she chuckled happily, wickedly. “I reckon you know; and I’ll always help you out with a real Garland-line when you get stuck. I’m full of goodies!”

  But the good times grew fewer and fewer as Judy got later and later, or sometimes didn’t even arrive at all for work. We used to sit about from eight-thirty, in dull, depressed heaps; the crew played cards and drank endless cups of tea; the guts were slipping out of the production. We were losing so many work days that I realised that the film I wanted so much to make with Dearden, and to which I had wholeheartedly committed myself, was in jeopardy. I would never, at this rate, make the Start Date and they would probably have to recast.

  “Judy … you know I have to start another film in July?”

  “So?”

  “Well with all these delays …”

  “Don’t you start blaming me! I’ve been sick …”

  “I know, but just remember that I only have seven weeks’ work on this … you have ten, if I can’t finish my part in that time I’ll just have to leave.”

  “You can’t.”

  “I have a contract with the other people. Signed.”

  “Break it.”

  “I don’t want to. I want to do the film desperately.”

  She turned from the mirror, we always seemed to have these discussions in her portable dressing room on the set, and looked me straight in the eye.

  “When you leave, lover, I leave. Finish. Right?”

  “But you can’t … for God’s sake …”

  “Don’t tell me what I can’t do! Everyone tells me what I can and can’t do … I do what I want to do … and I don’t want to shoot one bloody frame on this stinking mess after you have gone. When you leave for your oh-so-marvellous movie, I leave on the first flight for L.A …. don’t you forget it!”

  “I’ve always promised I’d never ever lie to you, right?”

  “Right.”

  “But I’m leaving at the end of my seven weeks.”

  “Then we won’t have a movie, will we?” She pulled off her ear-rings slowly and put each one carefully on the tray before her.

  “You won’t have a movie. This is your movie, no one else’s. We’ve got the big scene to do; you want to do it, you know that, so far this is the best work you have ever done, better perhaps than ‘Star’. It’s your time; your career, I promise you I’ll never fail you, but you must promise me to not fail yourself … please? Darling, be a good girl and come back again … please.”

  “Don’t you good girl me, for godssake! They hate me out there. Have you seen those loving Cockney faces full of ‘good girl’; they hate me. I feel the hate.”

  “They don’t, they don’t; they’re working for you all the way … you know that.”

  She swivelled round on her chair and took my hands suddenly. “You really, really want to do this damned movie of yours?”

  “I do.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “Deprivation of the senses.”

  “In English?”

  “Brainwashing. It’s a new, terrible weapon.”

  “Someone used it on me.”

  “They used it on the American troops in Korea. No one knows much about it yet.”

  “I do, all about it. I invented it; Louis B. Mayer invented it. My loving damn agents ‘Frick’ and ‘Frack’ invented it. There is nothing I don’t know about it, do you hear? Nothing I don’t know about your terrible new weapon. I’ve been so brainwashed I’m Persil White all through.” She burst into tears and I held her very tightly. Above her shoulder I saw my own face reflected in the mirror; it was Persil White as well.

  * * *

  At Canterbury; a one-day location at the cathedral started well. She met the Red Dean and made him laugh, posed for the Press. At the lunch break an ashen faced wardrobe-mistress hurried from her caravan, her costume bundled in one arm, shoes in the other. “She’s not working any more; you never heard such language.” Grim-faced producers, the director, a covey of assistants; one or two blazered choir-boys hoping for an autograph. Despair wafting like smoke from a dying bonfire.

  In her caravan, curtains drawn, light filtered, a litter of clothes, papers, a fallen vase of carnations, water dripping on the cheap linoleum. Judy hunched at her dressing table in a green silk kimono; hair a ruin, make-up wiped roughly off a white, anguished face. In front of her a tin tray with a wrecked salmon mayonnaise.

  “What’s wrong, pussy cat?”

  “Get out … get right out.”

  “You were so happy this morning.”

  “Now I’m not.”

  “My fault?”

  “You know damned well …”

  “I don’t … what is it?”

  “I wanted you to stay tonight in Folkestone … I booked you a room; Liza, Lorna, Joey, all of us together. Just one night, one happy, lovely night …”

  “I can’t, darling, I told you. I have to get back by eight.”

  “You told me. The only thing I have ever asked of you.” She started to weep silently. “Tonight, there’s a full moon, did you know? A full moon, we could have all gone along the beach together, along the shore, in the moonlight, peaceful, calm, I need calm. The kids want to go. I want to go. Just one time and you refuse.”

  “I told you why.”

  “They were all looking forward to it …” she suddenly took her knife from the tray and stabbed me in the arm. I grabbed her wrist and we fell, in a sprawling heap together among the sodden carnations and the tumbled tray of salmon mayonnaise. “I hate you! I hate you!” She struggled and heaved, the knife still tight in her fist, I twisted her wrist and she cried out suddenly. Somewhere the knife clattered. I was across her, heavy; she fought for breath.

  “Say you hate me … say you hate me.”

  “I don’t.” I still held her twisted wrist firmly. She moved under me, her free hand scrabbling in the debris. A fork suddenly thrust against my cheek, under the right eye.

  She stared up in the gloom. “This can do as much damage. Say you hate me, I know you hate me, they all do, hate me …”

  Gently I leant down and kissed her face; she crumpled, sobbing uncontrollably, her arms around me, clutching like a drowning child. I helped her up and we stood in the ruins of her lunch and the water from the fallen flowers, standing together until the pain had eased, then I gently put her from me, smoothing her straggling hair, wiping her nose with my finger.

  “You are all snotty … disgusting.”

  She half laughed, pushed the hair from her face, her eyes wide, streaming, filled with pain.

  “How long will it take to make you presentable; an hour?” She wiped her mouth with the back of a hand, shrugged the kimono over her shoulders. “About; wheel them in.”

  Outside the sun was so brilliant that I could only just see the anxious huddle, a few discreet paces from the caravan; Neame was twisting and untwisting a white plastic spoon.

  “She’ll work,” I said. I suddenly realised that I was still wearing my hat, that there was a splatter of mayonnaise on my tie. Wisely they stood aside and no one followed me, blindly I walked into a tree; and knocked myself out.

  * * *

  We had one week, one final week which she did for me, of complete, unforgettable magic. She was on time every day, her work was brilliant, we tore into the scenes and she blasted off the screen. My final day was our big scene. We started together rehearsing in her dressing room at eight-thirty. No one came near us. She had wanted to play it sitting down, not to move; I wrote it so that she had sprained an ankle and was carted, drunk, to St George’s Hospital. She sat in a chair, I knelt at her feet. We rehearsed for six hours, with half an hour for a sandwich, in the cramped little caravan. At four-thirty we went on to the floor and shot
the entire scene just once. It lasted eight minutes and was one of the most perfect moments of supreme screen-acting I have ever witnessed. I shall never see its like again. She never put a foot wrong, not an effect was missed, the overlaps, the stumbling, the range, above all the brilliance of her range. The range was amazing; from black farce right through to black tragedy, a cadenza of pain and suffering, of bald, unvarnished truth. It had taken us three days to write; she passed every line as I set it down, “warts,” she said, “and all”; it took six hours to rehearse, eight minutes to shoot, and when it was over one of the crew walking across from the stage was stopped by one of his fellows.

  “What,” said the man, “happened on your stage today?”

  “A miracle,” said Bob.

  * * *

  A miracle it was indeed; in that last week of June, we shot twenty minutes of screen time and, more or less, finished off the main bulk of our work together. Judy was quite aware of what she was doing. She gave me the week in order that I could go off to do my “damned movie” as she called it, knowing full well that she would then be on her own to finish off the film which she so detested. The following week only a few seconds were shot, and she behaved unkindly and uncontrolledly, falling, in one instance, in a bathroom, cracking her head badly, necessitating, yet again, hospital treatment. Once more she tried to fire the patient, unhappy Neame, and finally, on Black Friday the 13th of July she walked off the film and that was that. I still had one or two small pick-up shots to do with her, and was forced to do them with a double, wigged, and dressed in her clothes. The miracle, though gigantic, was finally over. With my completion of the seven weeks’ work, in my acceptance of the film with Dearden to which I had been fully committed, I could no longer stay at her side and she felt completely rejected. In a hostile atmosphere, untrusting and by now quite unloved, she was unable to contain her terror and her unhappiness; her private life lay about her like a pillaged room, there were court cases, and a bitter struggle to retain her children whom she adored above all things, but I could no longer heed the urgent summonses by telephone, nor could I make her understand that my duty, if one dared use such a word, now lay with Dearden and a new, extremely involving film.

  “You are walking away from me,” she cried in anguish, “you are walking away, like they all do … walking away backwards, smiling.”

  Useless to try to explain; there was no way now that I knew to help her. All I did know was that being with her, working with her, loving her as I did, had made me the most privileged of men.

  * * *

  And later, when one had added up the total of this unhappy summer’s sum, the result was, tragically, a loss. “The Mind Benders”, the film with Dearden, was too far ahead of its time. No one knew very much about brainwashing; no one really believed that it was possible, nor, apparently, did they wish to. If they had ever heard of Gary Powers, or had known the appalling effects on the GI prisoners in Korea, if they had known then, what they know today, about psychiatric treatment of political dissidents, maybe we might have fared a little better; but they didn’t, alas, and one headline which blared, “Bogarde Thriller Is Shabby and Nasty” summed up the general reaction. Another thumping failure in my brave new effort to disturb, illuminate and educate. Someone was on the wrong track; it depressed me deeply that all the signs pointed towards myself.

  And when finally the stuck-together, patched-up version of “The Lonely Stage” opened it was, in the main, received with superlatives by a loyal, loving, Garland Press. Although they all disliked the woman’s-magazine story, which we had always known it to be, they praised Judy unstintingly, deservedly. One of the, at the time, leading critics, awash with what Judy called “spastic Garland mania” overstepped himself slightly: “There is one drunk scene,” he wrote, “with Bogarde which mixes laughs with tears with such expert timing that I felt like raising my hat to the script-writer. I am told, in fact, that this was one scene which did not go according to the script. Halfway through it Judy suddenly realised that this might well be a moment from her own life. The real Judy took over from the cinema heroine. She started to make up her own lines. Just you listen to them,” he sagely counsels his readers, “they are spoken from unhappy memories. Bogarde could only lean back, feed in a word here and there and let the camera move in on someone re-enacting an experience of her very, very own.” Three days writing, six hours rehearsal.

  “Golly!” she said, laughing with pleasure at the idiocy. “It only goes to show they don’t really know … but we must have been very, very good.” She had flown in from New York with a vast entourage of hangers-on, American Press and our now ebullient producers. It was the most amazing First Night I have ever witnessed. I picked her up at the Savoy, pushed her into the car, leaving her Empty Suits and Frilly Shirts aghast on the pavement, and together, quite alone, we drove slowly round London, all pain forgotten; all happiness ahead. At the cinema the crowds were dense, shouting, cheering, loving her, rocking the car with wild abandon, grabbing to touch her, tears streaming, voices screaming, hands outstretched as if to heal … to touch … to be healed. She was radiant, moved deeply, in tears herself. Afterwards we danced together at the reception; “We were good, you know that? Really good … we are a team.”

  “Gaynor and Farrel.”

  “Garland and Bogarde.” She laughed and hugged me.

  “Do you mind if I take first billing?”

  “No … your privilege, ladies first.”

  “G is before B, isn’t it?”

  “Now it is.”

  “Oh! I’m so happy … and you were such a bastard to me all the time … so mean! How could you have been so mean when I love you so much; you better be sweet to me the next time around, Buster!”

  But there was not to be a next time. If the film was a critical success, it was a public disaster, crumbling away like a piece of old lace. In Guildford, three days after it opened, they ripped down the posters and announced the revival of a well-tried British comedy about vintage cars. We were off. It is hard to tell why. Maybe the story was too sickly, maybe the new awful title, “I Could Go On Singing”, which the producers changed in a fit of panic on the day of the Press Show itself, misled audiences into thinking that it was a straight Garland musical which it obviously was not. Maybe Judy, playing so close to the truth of herself, distressed her fans. Whatever it was, it sank without trace. But she, happily, was unaware of this at the time. She flew back to America after the premiere to be present as her daughter, Liza, set her own course towards the dizzying roller-coaster of the lonely stage.

  * * *

  It is almost extraordinary to discover that a great many other things were taking place in 1962, one was so hermetically sealed in a globe of self-absorption that they passed almost unnoticed or not even noticed at all. Algeria and Uganda became independent, the Russians sent arms to Cuba, Charles Laughton died, someone tried to assassinate President de Gaulle, they built a Hilton Hotel in Park Lane, France and England decided to build Concorde and, somewhere in April a much-loved and respected friend from many years, Daniel Angel, telephoned from Rome. It was a pleasant surprise, but so apparently ordinary that, like the rest of events, it too almost might have gone unnoticed. Almost.

  “Enjoying your new house then?” He was laughing.

  “Only been in a week or two. It seems fine.”

  “You move about more than fleas on a dog … who are you dodging? Creditors?”

  “Any time now. Where are you, Danny?”

  “Rome … trying to set up a deal, usual thing, know what I mean? Got a very old friend of yours here, wants to say hello. Hang on …” There was a pause, then a weary, well-remembered voice.

  “Hulloo … how are you?” No interest in the question really, barest good manners.

  “You don’t sound very happy, anything wrong?”

  “No. Just bored. Bored and tired and not working. It’s been a long time since we worked; about ten years?”

  I had first met Joseph Lo
sey ten years before, on a bitter winter afternoon at the Studio. I knew nothing about him save that he was an American refugee from McCarthy, a director of talent, that his assumed name, for security reasons was Victor Hanbury, and that he was setting up a small budget film and was hopeful that I could be interested to play in it; my presence, it was explained, would help him to increase, if not double, his budget. I was not truthfully interested. Tired after making three films in a row, uncertain of this director with an assumed name and a not very good script I agreed, at least, to let him show me some of the last film he had made before he had had to leave Hollywood and the witch-hunt. I hope that I was not patronising; I know that I was not enthusiastic at the time.

  It was freezing in the small theatre where the film was projected. I was alone, since he preferred to walk about outside in the slush like an expectant father, and quite unaware of the importance for him, then, of my acceptance or not of his work. After twenty minutes I knew, without any doubt whatsoever, that the one person I wanted to work with most was kicking his heels in the car-park in a long blue overcoat waiting for my verdict. We watched the rest of the film together in silence—it was called “The Prowler”—and after, in the Studio Bar, he started to outline for me the ideas he had for the hackneyed little thriller which neither of us liked but which he knew we could use as a base to move from. Alexis Smith willingly agreed to join us, taking an incredible risk for an American actress in those days of McCarthy, and so became my first Hollywood leading lady. The modest budget was therefore, predictably, doubled, and in high heart we all set off.

  The result, after weeks of uncomfortable work in a run-down little studio where we had to fire a gun to frighten away the sparrows from the Sound Stage before every Take, was not, perhaps the greatest of our careers, but it had served to form a bond of respect and affection which was to last a lifetime. And it taught me, very early on, in line with Dearden and Leacock, that there was a magical, untapped, untrodden world awaiting in the cinema. I had managed in my Corridor of Power years, and with the willing assistance of Olive Dodds, to get him a contract with Rank; for which he eventually forgave me; his stay there not being of the happiest or most successful, although it did help a little to settle some problems for him, we unhappily had never worked together again. His weary, flat, affectionate voice, that morning from Rome, was sunlight through fog.