Snakes and Ladders

by Dirk Bogarde

  “What chances do you think it’s got outside London?” I asked Theo Cowan, who, as always throughout my long career with Rank, had never left my side at receptions of this kind. He was Head of Publicity when I had started off with “Esther Waters” and had steered me through the early days of Image Building, skilfully getting me through the inanities of judging Beauty Queens, opening swimming pools in civic centres, giving bouquets to the Most Glamorous Grannies of Hull or Gipsy Hill and helping me to deal with the not-always-enthusiastic Press at innumerable press-shows after innumerable near misses. Always genial, always alert, always the kindest of men and the shrewdest, he had finally left Rank when I did and started out on his own. “The Servant” was his first assignment, so he too was in at his own form of baptism. His opinions, when sought, were always honest, usually devastating in their accuracy. Losey trusted his judgement implicitly.

  “Slender, I’d say.” He had almost finished an entire plate of smoked salmon sandwiches.

  “That’s what worries me, and worries Joe. If this fails outside we won’t ever get another penny to do anything again,” I said.

  “Well, it’s difficult to say, you know; audiences are changing quickly now … it’s exciting, the film, sexy enough, good exploitation stuff there; but it’s a fickle world, what pleases the critics usually bores the provincial audience stiff. Just have to keep our fingers crossed; at least we did it, didn’t we?”

  I embraced my parents and took them across to meet Losey. His glass was empty. I refilled it and he took it automatically raising it only for a moment towards me in a silent toast just as Basil Dearden slowly, and gracefully, knelt at his feet.

  “I am kneeling,” said Dearden, “as you will note, in respect and homage to you.”

  Losey looked slightly embarrassed and smiled his gentle smile. “I really wish you wouldn’t, Basil, you are too far away …”

  “Just tell me, I ask in all sincerity, how can I make a film like this?”

  “Oh for God’s sake! You could …”

  “How would I go about it? How should I even start?”

  Losey took a slow sip of his vodka. “I can’t answer while you are down there.”

  Basil rose and faced him squarely. “Well, how would I? How should I start … you must know?”

  Losey grinned happily. “Sure I know. Shall I tell you? Well; first of all you take your son away from Eton, sell all Melissa’s furs, get rid of the house and the pool, get rid of the cars, pack a couple of suitcases and move into a small flat and think things over. That’s the only way I know, Basil … no overheads; just the film.”

  “Uncompromising chap,” said my father as we went across to the bar-table. “I suppose that’s right; takes a lot of courage, I should think.”

  “Too much for me all at once. Elizabeth said the same thing … I know they are right, of course …”

  “You told me, my dear, that Christmas in Rome, that you wanted to be more than just a film star, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, isn’t this the chance you wanted? You said something about catching a tram-car or something, I didn’t really understand.”

  “No, Pa, trolley.”

  “Oh well; whatever it was, it seems to me that you have caught it now, surely?”

  “Not surely, no.”

  “What’s the difficulty?”

  “Staying on,” I said.

  * * *

  Hanging on would have been more accurate, for hanging on it was. Although we were swamped with awards and prizes and an enormous amount of Press coverage on both sides of the Atlantic and in Europe too, the film was, eventually, only a satisfactory success commercially, and the struggle to make the kind of films we both wanted to grew harder than easier. “King and Country” was made in eighteen days for a total sum of £85,000. This Daniel Angel, who had been responsible for the telephone call from Rome with Losey which had sparked the whole thing off, guaranteed us and, presumably lost, for although we once again reaped a generous harvest of accolades and awards galore everywhere, and even sold it to television all over the world, it never made a profit and the film is, to this day, apparently still in the red.

  Prestige doesn’t pay the rent; not even on a small flat.

  “This is not going to be a prestige picture,” said John Schlesinger at lunch the first time we ever met. “By that I mean there is no money, and really no one wants to make it much except me and the girl and Joe Janni. We’re calling it ‘Darling’ …”

  “Who is the girl?”

  “Oh, you wouldn’t know her, just starting; brilliant, that’s been the problem. We can’t find a man to play the second role. Gregory Peck’s turned it down already. They all have. Everyone we wanted.”

  It was almost a repetition of the conversation I had had three years ago with Dearden about “Victim”. I was to be last chance again.

  “But who is the girl?”

  “Called Julie Christie, she’s marvellous; huge future.”

  “Well, do you want me to do it or not?”

  He looked at me thoughtfully across his vichyssoise, spoon poised. “You’re so frightfully soigné … you know …” He waved the spoon worriedly, not very much liking what he saw.

  “Well, it’s only because I’m wearing a suit, for God’s sake. And I’ve brushed my hair. I can be quite un-soigné, or whatever you call it.”

  “But this character is a telly interviewer; rather intellectual; Hampstead, baggy flannels, a couple of kids. Shaggy, brilliant. A sort of Robert Kee; he’s also supposed to be Jewish but we can give that a miss.”

  “Well, I’ll do it. I want to work with you and I want to work with Christie.”

  “Have you ever seen her?”

  “On telly, in a space fiction thing. But she’s The Young. I want to be with the young.” He looked mollified and took the compliment for himself. “Well, thank you … we’d just have to tweed you up a bit. We’ve got to have someone.”

  “I like the script and I’ll do it; what more do you want, if I’m last chance?”

  He shrugged sadly and went on with his soup. “We really did need a big name to bolster hers at the box office. Unknown, you see. An American name would be perfect. If you do it we won’t, of course, get the backing we’d need. Never mind. If you want to we could do some tests next week.”

  “Not acting tests? For God’s sake! Surely I’ve done enough.”

  He waved his spoon across the table again. “No. No. Not acting … we’ll manage that somehow. Tweedy tests. Try to make you look …” He paused and took a sip of his wine. “Well … un-soigné, I suppose, dear.”

  In the final event I wore my old gardening clothes, washed my hair, and bought a lot of knitted ties from the Stonehenge Woollen Industries shop. And got the part. Julie was glorious. A gift. We were joined immediately. She lived in a noisy flat in Earl’s Court and slept on a lilo mattress. One morning (we were working in Paddington Station) she confessed that, during the night, it had sprung a leak and she was sleeping on the floor with a tribe of stray cats which she had rescued. She might therefore be rather tired. She had seen a proper bed, very expensive, she explained, but it was a big brass one with bobbles and bars in a junk shop in the King’s Road, and as soon as she could, she’d save enough to buy it. Meanwhile she had asked someone to go and get her some puncture patches from a garage near the station. While she went off to have a pee in the Ladies, Forwood wrote out a modest cheque for the bedstead, and I did one for the mattress with a little left over for the blankets, always supposing that she needed them. Which seemed more than possible. We put them in her handgrip and she was surprised to find them rummaging through later for an apple.

  “What’s this then?”

  “For the bed and the mattress.”

  She smiled happily and bit her apple. “Ta,” she said. She was absolutely adorable, and taught me more about ad-libbing than anyone else in the business; she could ad-lib and overlap endlessly, so I had to learn; self-pro
tection. It was a very happy film although, predictably, we ran out of money halfway through and no one really believed in it except for the people who were actually involved in it. Joseph Janni, our producer, came sadly into my room one evening at the end of work. Face putty, his eyes hooped with fatigue. “Disaster,” he murmured sitting dejectedly on the arm of a chair. “I’ve mortgaged everything; car, flat, stocks and shares, everything except Stella, my wife. Can you help us? Will you accept a cut in salary and defer your deferments?” The reluctant backers sat glumly through the daily rushes; no big American name, an unknown girl and an, almost, unknown director. They also thought the story was, in the good old Wardour Street word, downbeat. Anything that didn’t have a happy ending had to be downbeat.

  “She’s got a face like the back of a bus,” said one of them unhappily at a screening of the first week’s work. “She looks just like a feller! Look at that jaw … she could play bloody football.” He swivelled round in his seat, and appealed miserably to Forwood, “Don’t you agree? She’s dead ugly.”

  “I think she’s the nearest thing I’ve seen to Brigitte Bardot,” said Forwood.

  The anxious monkey face before us was blank. “You think she’s sexy!”

  “Very. She’ll be a big, big star.”

  The monkey face looked in bewilderment at its partner who removed his cigar and blew a smoke ring into the dead air of the projection theatre.

  “You heard what the gentleman said.” He dispersed the ring with a polite cough. “I must be losing my wits. Sexy? It’s all going mad.”

  But the news had spread that something remarkable was happening on “Darling”. David Lean, at that time casting his epic of Pasternak’s “Dr Zhivago” asked to see film on both Julie and myself. Losey allowed me to send a reel of “King and Country” and Julie got Schlesinger to send a bit of her best work. We waited, naturally curious, to hear the results of our exam. Julie heard that she was hired, on the lawns of Skindles in Maidenhead where we were doing some location work. She was sitting in a tweed suit and pearls, for her role, and reading Karl Marx in paperback. She came from the telephone quietly and serene.

  “What happened?”

  She opened Karl Marx and smoothed the pages. “I’ve got Lara. Rather good. But they want me to get out of this little picture … said it wasn’t important and that I should get to Madrid as soon as possible and start working on the part; they say,” and she closed her book and slammed it on to the grass, “I could get an Oscar for it; that I should leave John and all this …”

  “And so …”

  “And so what?” Her eyes were filled with tears of outrage. “I told them to stuff Lara or wait.” She pushed a hairpin which had slipped loose back into her bun. “They’ll bloody have to wait. Leave this? Leave John, all this? What kind of a business is this?”

  “Not lovely.”

  “Did you hear anything?” She was cautious, gentle, knowing anyway.

  “No. Nothing.”

  In the event she won the Oscar. For “Darling”, the little film, and rocketed to stardom in Hollywood. All she ever got out of “Zhivago”, as far as I know, was a theme song.

  Losey and I worked together again on two more films in succession, “Modesty Blaise” which was nearly a compromise between commercialism and intellect and which, to my mind, but not to his, never quite succeeded, and finally in 1966 the most exhausting, exciting and valuable work we ever did together, Pinter’s “Accident”. A perfectly hand-crafted piece of work from the first shot to the last and quite the most exacting work I had ever had to do on a screen. Once again the part had not been intended for me, but for another actor, and once again by some strange fluke I got the chance; and took it.

  The work in those years with Losey gave me the self-respect in my work which I had never dared even hope for and strengthened my somewhat shaky belief that I must never again compromise no matter what the cost. But although my belief had been strengthened all right, it did not mean, sadly, that other forces far beyond one’s control, would not cause it to bend; it is unrealistic to try and make films for a minority audience in a business which is geared above all things towards a mass audience. After we had finished “Accident”, the most difficult and perhaps the most successful of our endeavours together, Losey and I found, regretfully, that the boucle était bouclée: we had used ourselves up; there was nothing more for us to say together; weary, drained almost, and to some extent disillusioned, we realised that we must separate for a time and go our own ways; even the Press was finally beginning to hint that our work together was becoming incestuous. We both of us, in our very different ways, knew also, for all our high intentions, that we should eventually be forced to have to bend a little in order to survive, but in the bending, I think we believed that we should be able to bring the same integrity to the commercial-compromises, should they arise, which we had brought to our own high endeavours in the past. I think that we did, as it happened; but the emotional cost was high.

  On the last morning of shooting on “Accident”, Arnold brought me my usual egg-and-bacon sandwich for breakfast. He tidied round the room a bit, laid out The Times and The Guardian and poured me a mug of coffee from his always-steaming coffee pot.

  “Sad day today,” he said.

  “Yes; sad day.”

  “But I’ve just had some interesting news.”

  “Oh.”

  “You know Zelda? Zelda Barron?”

  “Of course.”

  “She’s doing Production Secretary on the new Jack Clayton film.”

  “So, good for her.”

  “Good for us too.”

  “What do you mean, Arnold, I’m tired.”

  “She read the script last night, says it’s a real beauty. ‘Our Mother’s House’.”

  “And?”

  “And there’s a smashing part for you in it.”

  “Does Jack Clayton know, by any chance?”

  “No. Hasn’t a clue. Hasn’t cast it. We thought you’d be perfect.”

  “You and Zelda?”

  “Sure, she’s going to suggest you at lunch time when she sees Jack. He’s lovely.”

  “Maybe, but he might have his own ideas, Arnold, he’d have asked me if he’d wanted me.”

  “Hasn’t thought of you! That’s the point. It’s our idea.”

  “Arnold! For the love of God. You can’t go begging parts for me!”

  “We’ve both got to live, Governor, and I’ve got a kid to think of.”

  “Yes, but you can’t do this; it might be terribly embarrassing. He may hate the idea, he’s probably got someone in mind you two don’t know anything about.”

  “Hasn’t got anyone in mind. Told Zelda. Dead worried. Super part too. Just what you want after all these neurotic blokes. Cockney dad with eight kids. Right up your street. All on location in a house in Croydon; you’ll love it.”

  He was absolutely right; I did. Clayton was highly amused by this unethical approach, but we talked it over and he seemed to think that Arnold and Zelda might be right.

  “Not a very attractive role … shifty, seedy, and you have to face a whole gang of kids all on your own, there is no one else in the film, and they are pretty tough, but if you’d like to have a try?”

  On my first morning in the gloomy house in Croydon I was in a bit of a funk. Eight pairs of eyes, ranging from five to fourteen, gazed at me solemnly. Not a smile, no welcoming grin even. In the little caravan in the scrubby front garden which I had been given to change in there was a jam jar stuffed with privet and some wilting Michaelmas daisies. Under it a note. “Let’s hope you are as good as you’re cracked up to be. You’d better be. Sincerely; The Children.”

  I loved every second of the film which was one of the happiest I have ever made. The children were fantastic, good actors, kind, funny, devoted and professional. Clayton was a demanding, challenging, exciting director. We were all locked into a make-believe world which I found hard to break away from even at the week-end.


  Perhaps we all got too lost in our Croydon existence, too isolated, too immune. For although we had all passionately believed and loved what we had set out to make together, no one else did. And the film was a failure. A distinguished failure to be sure, but failure none the less, it doesn’t much matter about the adjective used. At the Venice Festival our hopes, reasonably high, were very soon damned by faint praise and light applause. Walking back from the cinema to the hotel the air was sweet, the night soft, the moon riding over a flat, silver Adriatic. And I hoped never to see Venice again. Clayton and I could not ease each other’s distress very much. It is hard indeed to laugh off the severing of a limb, and so acute was our sadness that that is what it felt like to us. Even on the third or fourth glass of champagne we still tasted ashes, surrounded as we were by the noisy, happy audience who had attended our funeral and now seemed intent on turning it into an Irish wake.

  Full of brave self-pity it is hardly surprising that I paid scant attention to the people all around me laughing and talking; instead I immersed myself in a deep and useless conversation with Clayton trying to work out, far too late, just where we had all gone wrong; so immersed was I that I quite failed to notice my future standing at the bar watching me. Luchino Visconti.

  * * *

  The chestnut candles, I saw, were almost ready to flower, the leaves below like small spread hands. A ring dove cooed above our heads.

  “It hasn’t come to that, surely?” I said.

  “It surely has, it would appear.” Forwood pushed open the gate and we walked up to the house slowly.

  “Television commercials? Finally …” I was stiff with alarm.

  “There is nothing else, is there?”

  “Well, there are some scripts in the office …”

  “You refused them all.”

  “They are all dreadful, that’s why.”