Snakes and Ladders

by Dirk Bogarde

  Since I could not speak, let alone breathe (it is exhausting to breathe only through one’s nose for any length of time) for fear of cracking the scalding mask, I was able simply to reply by hand movements and when Albino asked me in a deferential whisper, a priest giving the last rites, if I was ready, I drew the figure 5 with one finger on my knee. This he interpreted as five minutes, correctly, so that I could prepare. The silence was intense. The visitors were stiff now with apprehension. I could hear the hot wind flipping the little frills of the sheltering umbrellas; somewhere miles away a child laughed. I looked at the three markers, felt the heat rising within my body, my heart racing, the blood surging, and raised my hand for the cameras. We had three to cover this supreme moment and I never even heard Visconti’s accustomed cry of “Actione!”

  Back in the make-up room Mauro was beside himself with joy, slapping his thighs, hitting the walls with the flat of his hand, brushing tears of happiness and triumph from his glowing eyes. Everything, as far as he was concerned, had worked. The hair dye had run perfectly, the face had cracked, the strawberry red lipstick had smeared, my tears had coursed through the wreckage; it had been splendid. Apparently the dying bit had been all right too.

  We worked for an hour with soap and water, a palette knife, cold cream, petrol, and a pair of blunt scissors to remove the white make-up. My face, when parts of it emerged, was crimson and blistered, burned like a severe scalding.

  “Tomorrow will be better; you see. We put some pommade on; you will sleep, all finished by tomorrow morning. Is sure.” Mauro was highly encouraging.

  “What was it?”

  He picked up one of the many squashed tubes which littered the table before me. “Is the idea of me, Mauro! Is English preparation, very safe, is English, made in England, must be safe for you.”

  I took the flattened tube from his hand. He had carefully scraped off most of the label. All that remained were the words “—ghly Inflammable. Keep away from eyes and skin”. It was a preparation used for removing oil stains from fabric.

  * * *

  We finished shooting on August 1st in a plum orchard high up a mountain outside Bolzano, precisely at lunch time. There was no celebration; after five months of work, six days a week and mostly between the hours of two am and seven am, in order to catch the dawn light, a substitute for the overcast light of the sirocco, and also to avoid the traffic and tourists of day-time Venice, we were all far too exhausted even to think of celebrating anything except the fact that we had actually, amazingly, finished the project. Visconti and I shook hands in silence; I had my hair cut, changed into jeans and a shirt and went to take my leave of him in the local village Pensione, where, in spite of everything, he was starting his lunch.

  “You eat nothing, Bogarde?”

  “No, thank you. I’m all packed now. Cars ready.”

  “You drive to Provence now? Is long, no?”

  “Twelve hours about … we’ll stop in Cremona …”

  “And you have Poverino, certo …”

  “Sure. He’s very happy. Hated Venice.”

  “You take him from his country, poor Poverino …”

  “He’ll like France. There are twelve acres.”

  Deliberately he cut himself a thin slice of sausage and removed the skin. “So now you both become Frenchmen. One English, one Italian. Avventuroso!” He pulled out a chair beside him and patted the rush seat. “Sit down, one little moment. Good. Now.”

  He closed his eyes for a moment. “I am thinking to make the Proust, La Recherche. You know this?”

  “Yes. A long time ago.”

  “But you like?”

  “Of course.”

  “I am thinking in my head of Olivier for Charlus, good eh? You must think of Swann perhaps, yes?”

  “But not for a long time surely?”

  “Ah no, maybe two years. Who can tell, there is much work to do first.”

  “Because I want to stop acting now for a few years.”

  His eyebrows rose in chevrons of polite surprise.

  “To stop? How so?”

  “Had enough. I’m nearly fifty. I’ve done fifty-five films. Basta.”

  “But you came to Europe to work, you told me.”

  “I know. But during this film I came to a decision. I don’t know if I am good in it, or if it is good, how can I? But I do know that whatever happens it marked the peak for me in work. The summit. Where do you go from the summit but down?”

  He laughed suddenly and punched my arm. “I am on a summit too, Bogarde. I go on to another one; I do not descend! To do Proust maybe … or The Magic Mountain, you would like this? Another Mann, I go on, I have many summits to reach and I am sixty; we have much we can do together, more to say, eh?”

  “Yes; but today I know I finished one part of my life, in a few moments I will start off to begin a new part in a new country. It is not easy. I want time to settle, to think, to rest. Maybe two or three years. I am now out of the competition, I don’t want to fight any more. Resnais has brought me a beautiful script, the Marquis de Sade in the Bastille. Poetry, beauty, but he will never get the finance, it will be the old battles all over again; one man in a cell! Who will care? If it was one man in a cell with two naked women and whips then they will care. But the fight we have had with the Americans to make our film has made me revolted. No more. I stop. It was the finish for me. I know what their Press will do to us; you remember the man from Chicago?”

  He brushed the wooden table thoughtfully, cupping a pile of crumbs into his hand and spilling them into his plate.

  “Ah, the Press,” he snapped his fingers, “you live by the Press, you will die by the Press. They say I am losing touch … that I shoot only the surface of the emotions, that I am degenerate, that I am operatic! They say so stupid things. They have only theory not practice, they cannot construct only criticise, and if they find something they do not comprehend they get angry and destroy like children! Pouf! You must think nothing of them. They do not risk, nothing ever. How can they know, eh? Callas risks. Stravinsky, Seurat, Diaghilev all risked; even we risk. All true creators must. Think only of the people for whom we work. The audiences. They understand, they know, they encourage. You see.”

  “Well, for the moment I have had enough; today I finish. I’m not ‘retiring’ exactly, but I will no longer seek employment from now on.”

  “You are just tired old horse, eh? No more race.”

  “Exactly. No more racing. I don’t want to try to win anything any more.”

  “So you go out to grass; excellent. But you will come to me if I call you, for a little lump of sugar?”

  “Of course I will, in time …”

  “Ah yes, in time. There is much to think about. Maybe, you know, we even do the life of Puccini. Opera! Really Opera. The Press will comprehend that at least. You think of Puccini too in your shepherd’s house. We have many possibilities together, I think. But we have not finished yet with Mr Mann, you know, there is still work to do. Looping for the sound, I think. Not much, some.”

  “Of course. When will you know? How soon will you see all the work, the first assembly of ‘Death in Venice’?”

  He broke a piece of bread and kneaded it thoughtfully. He never, ever, saw the daily work on the film, relying only on the great de Santis, his cameraman, who did, for assurance that everything was as it should be; with five months work to look at I was sure it would be an age before he could give me a verdict on our joint effort which had started in such turmoil and which had ended so peacefully just now under the plum trees. He took a sip of his wine, wiped his lips carefully and smiled suddenly at me.

  “Ah! You do not know; but I have already seen nearly all, nearly all, just not the last three or four days is all. You did not know, hey?”

  “No. And … I mean … is it all right, Luchino?”

  He folded his hands carefully before him on the wooden table. “You look for compliments, that is it?”

  “No, Christ no …”
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br />   “Your work transcends anything that I even remotely dreamed of.” He suddenly took my head and kissed me roughly on both cheeks. “Go away!” he commanded and turned back to his lunch.

  * * *

  It was a long, and silent, journey down the valley to Brescia and Cremona in the blistering afternoon sun. The dog slept trustingly in the small space available to him left by a junk-shop of coats, books, typewriters, plastic bags and an ornate silver-plated salver, a gift from the troupe on parting. Forwood doubtless had his own problems; the furniture vans from England would arrive within thirty-six hours, Antonia and Eduardo would be arriving shortly at Nice airport after their brief holiday in Spain to join us, for six months only, in order to settle us into the new house. He was also probably mourning the loss, months before when we left Villa Fratelli, of the Rolls which had been shipped back to England and sold, since the tax on such a car in France would have been prohibitive; and, anyway, who could use a Rolls up and down a goat-track? The big cut-down had started. And although it was far away from the two-suitcase small-flat syndrome, it was a determined start on a different way of life, and one to which, under the waves of fatigue, I was eagerly looking forward. Fatigue had smothered reaction so far. I was not yet in the desperate state which the ending of “Accident” had induced; no tears on this journey for the departed von Aschenbach, for he had not lingered long. His hair had tumbled greyly about my heels under Mauro’s ruthless scissors, his buttoned boots I had seen being tied together, labelled and thrown into a vast wicker hamper by Maria in the wardrobe room; she had bundled up his white suit and battered panama hat, tied them roughly with string, and sent them to follow, reserving only, at the last moment, with gentle Italian insight, the pair of steel-rimmed spectacles which, wordlessly, she had slipped into the pocket of my jeans jacket. When the last dyed lock of hair had fallen, when Maria slammed shut the lid of the hamper and wrestled with the padlock, I knew, for certain that he had gone. It was not so much a hamper which had closed but another door. And how nearly I had turned my back on that door in the gardens by the aviary of blue macaws so long ago in Salzburg. Notarianni loping anxiously across the evening lawns buttoning up his jacket: “Buona sera …” Just in time.

  I knew, clearly, that “Death in Venice” was, for me at any rate, the culmination of years of work and training, of learning from and striving under such teachers as Dearden, Leacock, Ralph Thomas, Asquith, Cukor, Milestone, Losey, Clayton and Schlesinger, a not inconsiderable fraternity, which had prepared me for the hardest job I had ever had to do. Apparently I had satisfied Visconti and since he appeared to me to be the Emperor of my profession I was content.

  I had not seen even a millimetre of the work we had done together; I must rely on his word. Perhaps eventually we should be savaged by the Press, for we had attempted to film an unfilmable, it was said, minor masterpiece, and that was always a dangerous, precocious, thing to do. The slightest degree of failure would mean disaster. But my instinct told me that whatever happened to it finally, it could have a deep and lasting effect upon the audiences who might come to see it … at least in Europe. In America one could not be sure; generally their culture is so very different from ours, the barrier of the common-tongue so firmly in place, the nuance, diplomatically, intellectually and above all conversationally, so despairingly extinct, the dislike and fear of degenerate Europe so strongly imbedded, that there we might easily be destroyed.

  I had remembered the man from a big Chicago newspaper eventually managing to corner Visconti in a stinking alley while we were setting up a shot. Hot, sweating, furious at having been avoided, he attacked like an Evangelist, his pencil and pad shaking with righteous anger. “Look, I came all this way … I even passed up the really big picture they’re doing in Padua with Loren and Mastroianni just to try and give you a break … and what is this? You say you don’t care about publicity! You refuse to see me … I came from Chicago … we can do you a lot of good in our columns … you be careful … this is a very, very dangerous subject you are making, I understand … just who the hell are you making it for, Mister Visconti?” He sat back in his canvas chair fanning himself with his note pad, a hot toad.

  Visconti raised his eyes slowly, looked at me with a little smile, deliberately patted my hand, “For Bogarde and myself,” he said pleasantly.

  Chicago left shortly after, and wrote nothing. I had laughed aloud at the splendid conceit. But now it was all over, and I, sitting speeding towards my brave new life, was too tired, drained and, it had to be admitted, apprehensive for the future which lay ahead. However, of one thing I was now very certain; I would never go back into competition again. The doors along the corridor could all remain closed as far as I was concerned, I would not push one, nor venture again towards them, however tempting they might seem. I would wait until they were opened for me; until someone came out and literally dragged me protestingly in. I was no longer curious, anxious to prove, seeking; I had, it seemed to me, reached a point beyond which I now no longer wished to explore. What I had been taught, what I had done eventually with that teaching, what I had worked for had, as far anyway as I was concerned, at last been achieved; I did not think that I could better myself. I would happily go out to grass now, as Visconti had said. But if one day he, or Resnais or some other magic piper as yet unknown to me called, I should, most likely, follow. For me now the game, for such is what it had all been really, was almost over. But not quite.

  Forty years ago, in her little parlour in Twickenham while Elizabeth and I had placed the cups and saucers after supper tidily back on the dresser, Lally would take down the box of games from the mantelshelf. “One last game of snakes and ladders before we go up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire!” she would say. The board would be laid out on the bamboo table before the glowing range, the counters and dice scattered, and in the honey-glow of the hanging lamp we would be off. Up the ladders and down the dreadful snakes we would go, tongues hanging out with the intense concentration of willing the dice to tumble with the numbers which we needed; and then one of us would hit the base of the tallest ladder and whizz right up to the top of the board a few squares only away from the one marked WIN. And this was the most dangerous part. For lying-in-wait was the tip of the tail of the longest snake who would lead you terrifyingly all the way down to START again. A three and a one, or a double two, and you were lost.

  It seemed to me that afternoon on the road to Cremona, Genoa, the frontier and France that this was just exactly where I had now got to in this dangerous game of ups and downs and that the next throw of the dice would be decisive. It was a game of chance, not skill, and although I might close my eyes, cross my fingers or murmur a couple of Hail Mary’s, only fate could possibly decide on which square I should land eventually … the one with the snake’s tail or the other marked WIN. I tried to comfort myself with the thought that it was no good worrying, there was nothing much I could do about it anyway; Judy’s song from long ago came back to me:

  But it’s all in the game,

  and the way you play it,

  and you’ve gotta play the game ….

  you know …

  A Note on the Sources

  My principal sources have been my note-books, diaries and letters written to my parents, during the period 1941–1947. I have also drawn on a daily journal which I have kept from 1950 to the present day, as well as scrap-books, many personal letters, and in particular a collection of about 650 letters written between 1965 and 1973 to a friend in America, and which were returned to me in accordance with her will after her death. The Films of Dirk Bogarde by Margaret Hinxman and Susan d’Arcy (Literary Services and Production, 1974) has also been invaluable.

  Acknowledgements

  I am indebted, first and foremost, to George Courtney Ward who was my personal photographer at Rank for many years. Also to Mario Tursi, for allowing me to reproduce his stills from “Death in Venice”, and to the owners of individual photographs, by whose courtesy I have reproduced many of
the pictures. My gratitude to E. L. L. Forwood for taking on the Index with such care and patience, and also to Søren Fischer who traced and secured the scene written for Judy Garland. I am grateful to Miss Rosalind Toland who has waded through years of newspapers in search of information and headlines etcetera; and above all to Mrs Sally Betts, who once again, has managed to cope with my incomprehensible typescript, spelling and punctuation.

  In order to save any embarrassment I have, very occasionally, used pseudonyms.

  Man in the Bush

  I saw him move

  his head

  behind that green

  bush.

  I must wait until

  he moves again.

  The mist is rising,

  soon the sun will

  come, the cautious sun,

  and probe with tentative

  fingers into this sombre

  undergrowth.

  My gun is heavy to

  hold,

  and my arm is aching.

  Man in the Bush,

  does your arm ache

  as you watch me?

  These nettles here are

  bejewelled with the

  night dew,

  And here brambles,

  all strung with

  liquid diamonds,

  clutch at every move

  I make.