Snakes and Ladders

by Dirk Bogarde

  Every film which I had made before this, with very few exceptions, was timed by a stop-watch. That is to say, every look, every move, every gesture even, every speech and even a run-along-a-busy-street was ruled by the vicious, staggering move of the stop-watch hand. Films cost money. Time is money. Waste, even intelligent waste, was not tolerated. I remember being politely taken to task by a producer because I had made a move (crossing a room and looking from a window, merely that) last one minute four seconds instead of the laid-down time of thirty-six seconds which had been allotted me. I had overrun time … if I continued to play in this manner, he explained kindly enough, the film would run another fifteen minutes, which would mean serious editing problems, something else would have to be cut, otherwise the film would run too long and not fit its time-slot which had all been carefully worked out, I gathered, by a lady called Barbara-Jo in an office in Hollywood, California, some months before. Barbara-Jo, sitting at her desk, reading her script, decided with a press of her steel button, just exactly how long a totally unknown person would take to do the things required of him or her set down by the script. There was no time for human error, for a developing emotion, for inspiration. It was all set down and sealed. Timed to the last split-second. Pre-packaged behaviour. So we speeded things up a little, and any time required for thought was neatly erased. One developed the habit and tried to accommodate to it as best one could, playing against the text sometimes, walking with the lines, to save time, and so on. It was a soulless piece of machinery, but it fitted the film into its slot in the programme and allowed the audiences to catch the last bus home.

  With Losey there was none of this. No frantic cry from the Script Girl that a scene, a speech, a move even, had overrun its time; it was a sublime luxury. Not a form of self-indulgence (that is to be avoided at all costs, it is both false and ugly to watch) but an exhilarating form of developing someone else, of letting another person, so to speak, inhabit the empty vessels of one’s body and mind. Under Losey’s shrewd, watching eye, and with Bumble Dawson’s simple, brilliant, designs for the clothes he would wear and live in, we started together to build the character of Barrett.

  It is important to make it clear at this juncture that a brilliant designer, and Bumble was one of the very best, has a great deal to do with an actor’s performance. I am an actor who works from the outside in, rather than the reverse. Once I can wear the clothes which my alter-ego has chosen to wear, I then begin the process of his development from inside the layers. Each item selected by her was carefully chosen by Losey, down to the tiepin: a tight, shiny, blue serge suit, black shoes which squeaked a little, lending a disturbing sense of secret arrival, pork-pie hat with a jay’s feather, a Fair Isle sweater, shrunken, darned at the elbows, a nylon scarf with horses’ heads and stirrups. A mean, shabby outfit for a mean and shabby man.

  For me the most important element of the wardrobe are always the shoes. From the shoes I can find the walk I must use; from the walk comes the stance, since naturally the spine is balanced on the feet. From the stance the shoulders may sag or become hunched, the neck might be thinly erect, or slip suggestively to one side or the other, the arms hang or are braced. In the chosen clothes one’s body starts to form another’s; another person walks and breathes in the shabby, serge suit. The whole is carried by the softly squeaking shoes. Thus the shape is arrived at; the physical frame.

  Next the detail. Brylcreemed hair, flat to the head, a little scurfy round the back and in the parting, white puddingy face, damp hands (arms which hang loosely often have damp hands at their extremities, I don’t know why). Glazed, aggrieved eyes, and then the walk to blend the assembly together. These details are always obtained from observing other people; an extension of my father’s childhood game of “Pots and Pans”. Always examine, question, the little things which go to make up human behaviour. The nervous ticks, the throbbing vein, the sudden flush of pleasure or anger, the unaware habits under stress. Ask what makes a man use this behaviour, analyse why he does, try to trace it back to a source. A complicated game; but one which has proved invaluable. Barrett’s hair came from poor Philpot who ransacked Bendrose and went to clink. His walk I took from an ingratiating Welsh waiter who attended me in an hotel in Liverpool. The glazed and pouched eyes were those of a carsalesman lounging against a Buick in the Euston Road, aggrieved, antagonistic, resentful, sharp; filing his nails. No make-up, ever.

  With my paraphernalia assembled under Losey’s approving eye, with a superb text from Pinter handed to me as a gift, Barrett was ready to exist, there was almost nothing left to do but wind him up and set him off to work.

  Like all the greatest directors, Losey never tells one what to do, or how to do it. Ever. Only what not to do. Which is very different. You give him your character and he will watch it develop, encouraging or modifying, always taking what is offered and using it deftly. You only know that you have done it to his ultimate satisfaction when he says, “Print!” at the end of a take. There is no waste of chatter, no great in-depth discussions about motivation, no mumbo-jumbo about identification, soul, or truth. You get on with it. Coward’s famous advice years ago to an actor still holds good. “Just learn your lines, dear,” he said, “and don’t bump into the furniture.”

  With Pinter the same applies. We never, at any time either on “The Servant” or on the later, and far more complicated “Accident”, sat in huddled readings of the text having it explained or trying to find what was “meaningful”. Pinter’s scripts are honed and polished long before they reach the actor’s hand, and what he intends, or doesn’t intend, becomes abundantly clear and lucid the instant one starts to work. His writing, at least as far as I have personally been privileged to experience it, reminds me of a beautifully laid-out scenic model railway. A start and an end. Tunnels and level-crossings, gradients, cuttings, little stations and smaller halts, signals all the way. The whole track laid and set out with the precision of a master jeweller. Pinter doesn’t give you instructions like a packet of instant minestrone. The instructions are implicit in the words he offers so sparingly for his characters to speak. There is a popular and far too widely-held belief among many actors, and directors too (not to mention critics) that Pinter writes pauses. I don’t think that he does. But I do think that he is one of the few writers who are brilliant in the text they don’t write. His pauses are merely the time-phases which he gives you so that you may develop the thought behind the line he has written, and to alert your mind itself to the dangerous simplicities of the lines to come; it is an exhilarating experience, and given all these factors it is almost, and I repeat carefully, almost, impossible to go wrong.

  As well as discovering the time for thinking or thought, with Losey one also discovered the values of texture. The textures of things; of wood, of metal, of glass, of the petals of a flower, the paper of a simple playing card, of snow even, and fabric. Plaster wood, however well combed does not feel like wood, neither does it photograph like wood; nylon is not silk, fibre glass is not steel, a canvas door does not close with the satisfying sound or weight of mahogany. All these apparently trivial items, or obvious if you like, add up to an enormous whole. Even if the audience is not immediately aware, it is subliminally aroused and its emotions feel the truth. It is real. And the actor feels the reality. It is, of course, totally cinematic not theatrical. In the theatre almost nothing must be real. It is reality extended; an actor must act the weight of mahogany when he closes his canvas door, his style is larger than life and must be of necessity, for he has to reach both the man in the Stall seat as well as the man in the back of the Gallery.

  Because of the distance between himself and his audience the stage actor must project reality. Reality itself seldom reaches beyond the Orchestra Pit. The camera is a magnifying glass, and it betrays the theatre technique cruelly; a number of theatre actors, either out of fear or ignorance, despise the cinema and all its technicalities. And it very often shows. I committed the same error all those years ago when I got
that one day’s work on a film with the Attenboroughs, and derided a job which earned me three times the amount I was paid in the theatre for just sitting about looking like a policeman. Nothing to it, I thought cheerfully, any fool can do it. Any fool can. But not any fool can make it work. One just has to go on trying and proving, sometimes for years. For the intense love of it.

  It was the intensity of this love which started us all off on the battle to get “The Servant” off the ground. And we managed. It was, however, quite another thing to get it shown when we finally finished. No one wanted this effort, no one was even prepared to give it a single showing. Obscure, obscene, too complicated, too dark, too slow, and naturally too uncommercial. Even the slight of obscenity didn’t help it; it was removed from our hands and placed on the Distributors’ shelves to gather dust like a poor wine. It seemed that the whole endeavour had not paid off, the courage had been in vain, the money, such as there had been, was lost, written off as a company loss. We set it aside as experience. It was to be the first example only.

  * * *

  Elizabeth was no fool; what was the point in making films which no one would show and to which very few people would come if they did? This was a form of self-indulgence which I could ill-afford. Surely, if my dedication was so intense, I should behave like a novice Buddhist, crop my hair, clothe myself in saffron and sandals and offer my begging bowl for physical sustenance. Or, less romantically, clear out of Nore, take a small flat and move in with a couple of suitcases. In that way I could just about manage to sit it out and wait for the Art Film of my heart to arrive, if it ever did again, instead of facing ruin sitting amidst a splendour of exposed oak beams, Meissen china and the best collection of dud eighteenth-century paintings the man from Christie’s said he’d ever seen. But I had, I discovered to my shame, become very attached to the better things of life. The distance between Chester Row and Nore was an ocean. I liked my exposed oak beams and dud collection; I liked the life I lived. I liked travelling first class; and what was more, both my friends and my family liked it too.

  The same old group from Bendrose had now come deeper into Sussex, bringing with them the same sense of security and affection. I had lost no one on the way and had gained many. Irene and Glynis, Margaret Leighton, David Oxley, the Goughs, and Gareth Forwood who rightly considered every house as his home in between terms at Ludgrove or Millfield, Daphne and Xan Fielding, Moura Budberg and Bumble Dawson, who were were now joined by a younger, newer group who joined the team on Sundays. John Standing and his wife Jill Melford, Sarah and Noel Harrison and all their children, James Fox and Sarah Miles, Sybil and Jordan Christopher, Boaty Boatwright and others. No one tremendously grand; real friends to provide real stability.

  Every month, for two or three days, I moved into the Connaught where I had a more or less permanent suite, and from there the business and the more social life was conducted. It was altogether a more elegant, and convenient setting for the other side of the life I chose to live. Here the deals were made, here the contracts were argued, here the Americans were feted as they preferred. Here status was symbolised. At Nore we sat around the fire, ran movies in the cinema at nights, read the papers, talked endlessly and walked miles across the fields with dogs and raincoats and a varied assortment of boots and stout sticks. At the Connaught it was dark suits and head waiters; duty in an elegant form.

  This, if I altered my life to accommodate the Art Cinema, would all have to go. So too would the travelling which both I and my family had now grown to enjoy so well: Venice, Rome, New York, Vienna, Athens, Paris—they came with me to all points—and even Elizabeth willingly left her sink, family and the Hoover for the wistful pleasures of Budapest or the more obvious ones of Cannes, and my brother Gareth, the late arrival in the family, presently a trainee cutter at Pinewood, joined us for holidays. In those days we drove many thousands of miles across Europe, flew and sailed across oceans, and forged a pattern of discreet, one hopes, luxury all the way. The Gritti in Venice, Hassler in Rome, the Lancaster in Paris, the Bristol in Vienna, the Plaza in New York, car to the gangplank of the Elizabeth, flowers in the State Rooms, the one particular table reserved always in the corner of the Verandah Grill. It was the Grand Life and I enjoyed every moment of it. The only problem was having to earn the money which this sybaritic life demanded. And it demanded a lot.

  So I compromised. Reluctant to let slip these undoubted pleasures, I decided on a sort of sandwich existence: Commercial Products which would provide the money to enable me to make the uncommercial Art film if and when it arrived. I saw no other way out, for the pickings, on both sides, were now getting thin on the ground.

  In accepting this deadly weapon, compromise, I knew that I had once again broken one of the rules which Noël Coward had brandished at me like a stick, sitting in the Oak Room at Bendrose, just when the first flickers of success were beginning to kindle my wood. He had waved his finger angrily across the room and said, “Whatever you do, theatre or cinema, never, never, never compromise!” But there was no other way that I could see. “The Servant” lay in its dust. Surely therefore it was wiser to accept the chances which were being offered here and there to raise yet another eyebrow, a trademark with which I seemed to have saddled myself, as the cheerful, commercially acceptable “Doctor” … and a long line of semi-romantic heroes which I knew I could play on the top of my un-Brylcreemed head? In any case I was existing at that time in a compromise world in the cinema. No one knew which way to jump. Aware of those pipers in Hamelin, frightened by declining box-office receipts, the directors and producers themselves were compromising. Trying to add serious undertones to perfectly ordinary subjects and nervously congratulating themselves that they were keeping abreast of the new trend. Although their roots were far too deep down to alter anything; they knew almost nothing of the new trend, and were unable to implement it even if they did. Wallowing in compromise we steered a desperate course for the rocks. I was unhappily a passenger; I could not complain since I had purchased my own ticket.

  Losey, on the other hand, was not prepared to let his work lie on shelves, or to compromise. From time to time he rescued his stack of tins and we had showings of the film for selected people in private screening theatres for which he, or we, paid the rent. Afterwards the reaction from these groups gave him so much confidence that he grew bolder and carried his packages to Paris where Florence Malraux set up screenings for influential people, and people began to talk; favourably. Eventually, after eight months of battle and trailing about like commercial travellers selling a brand of soap which nobody, including the owners, believed in, fortune came in the shape of Arthur Abeles, then head of Warner Bros in Europe. With a spare week to fill at his vast theatre in Leicester Square he ran a pile of rejected films to try and fill the gap. “The Servant” was the one he chose. A gentle man, more like a writer or an artist than a hard-headed American film tycoon, we could not have fallen into more sensitive hands. Amazed at the stupidity of his fellows, passionate about the film, he announced that we were to open after all. It was an unbelievably lucky chance.

  I was in my Dressing Room, changing out of my costume to go and lunch, when Arnold Schulkes, my Stand-in for many years, banged at the door with the entire London Press in his arms.

  “Brought you these; the first reviews.” He never gave anything away.

  “All right? A slating or what?”

  “Not a slating, no. Bloody fantastic.”

  “All of them?”

  “All … every one. Good, isn’t it? After all this time? The Times is on top, read it first I would. After all you are family-connected, you might say; right?”

  They lay before me, the verdicts on our work. A jury returned. I locked the door and leant against it with The Times and read slowly and carefully all the way through, slowly sliding down until I was squatting on my haunches, my back hard against the primrose paint. The last two paragraphs of John Russell Taylor’s review were difficult to read because of tears. But I got
the point. The moment which I had never thought would come had come at last. The moment when, sitting down, albeit squatting on Mr Rank’s brown Wilton, I would be able to say, “Ah! That’s it! That’s what I meant it to be.” And I said it aloud to relish the sounds of the thought-of words; not only for myself, indeed not that, but for all of us. Blearily I got to my feet and clumped across to the dressing table where Arnold had left the rest of the papers. The large lamp-framed mirror reflected a woeful image. Tall boots, green tights, frilly shirt, pink-smeary face, neatly waved hair on top of which coyly rested, at a jaunty angle, a Robin Hood hat stuck with a fistful of black cockerel’s tails. What the hell did I look like? What was I doing? Compromising, said the reflection. “Right!” I said aloud. “Compromise comes to a full stop. Whatever happens. From now on.”

  Brave words. And they were brave words which blazed, in scarlet neon, from the façade of Warner’s Cinema that night. Finally we had all made it; it remained to be seen how long we would stay, but at least we had got there. A far cry from the times when I had waited for Vida, or she had waited for me, outside this very same building, during the blitz when we would march off together through the crumping bombs to toast and beans at Lyons Corner House or, if we were better off that night, to the Café Royal for unrationed venison and steamed cauliflower. An equally far cry from “Rope” in Catterick and thimble-gins-and-limes in the officers’ messes; I had pushed open a great many doors along the way since then. But time, as they say, is all relative and this was only one battle won.

  At the big party later which I gave in the Connaught drawing room, the air was splendid with the scents of success. The Press had hailed the film as nothing other than a masterpiece, James Fox as the star of the future, and Losey no more nor less than a master. Standing watching him across the crowded room he looked, I thought, more like a weary don at a Speech Day. Surrounded by congratulating students, glass tightly in both hands, head bowed to listen to constant questions and praise, flushed with the pleasure he was so good at concealing. My heart rose with delight at his quiet triumph.