by Brendan King
In January 1978 she had written to tell Colin: ‘I am battling away at Adolf and its alright as far as it goes. I hope to let you have it in about two weeks time and I’m sorry I’m late on delivery. Its been tough this time – I don’t seem to know any sentances.’27 In fact it would be another six months before the book was completed, by which time she was feeling exhausted and ill: ‘All today and yesterday I was trying desperately to finish Young Adolf. I have conjunctivitis & laringitis and feel lousey.’28 When she handed in the manuscript she was still slightly uncertain about it and included a hesitant covering note to Anna: ‘Hope you like it. Please ring when you’ve read it. I won’t ring you in case you don’t like it.’29
Another sign of Beryl’s success as a writer was the increasing number of commissions for television work she received. The first of these, in June 1974, was for a sixty-minute television play to be entitled ‘These Foolish Things’, as part of the BBC’s ‘Play for Today’ series. Beryl couldn’t meet the intended September deadline, but as she had already been paid the £850 fee, she was given an extension. She delivered the script the following year, by which time she had given it a new title, Tiptoe Through the Tulips.
Directed by Claude Whatham, and featuring Rosemary Leach and Michael Gambon as its two principals, Tiptoe Through the Tulips was broadcast on 16 March 1976. In many ways it is a precursor to Injury Time, featuring a similar set of characters and a similar backdrop, that of an evening dinner party. One of the striking features of the play is the extraordinary performance by Rosemary Leach as Rita, the contrarian divorcée with a tendency to drink. Rita is perhaps a more accurate self-portrait of Beryl in middle age than any contained in her novels, and Leach perfectly captures the complex and often contradictory elements of her personality – her flirtatiousness when tipsy, her vulnerability, and the devil-may-care, unconventional front she presented to the world, behind which lay a mass of anxieties and an inner sense of desperation and loneliness.
Following the success of Tiptoe Through the Tulips the BBC contacted Beryl when they were planning The Velvet Glove, a series of six dramas exploring the lives of influential women. Through her talks with Michael Holroyd and his work on Shaw, Beryl had become interested in Annie Besant, the social reformer turned Theosophist and Indian activist, and chose her as the subject of the fifth play in the series. The resulting script, The Warrior’s Return, which aired on 23 February 1977, was directed by Philip Saville (who had also directed Alan Sharp’s ‘Play for Today’, The Long Distance Piano Player in 1970) and starred Rosemary Leach as Besant, Denholm Elliott as Charles W. Leadbetter, an adherent of Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society, and Ben Kingsley as Gyanendra Chakravarti, the Hindu nationalist and mystic. Saville was very taken with the play when Beryl showed it to him: ‘I loved the script, because it was all about social injustice, about Besant’s dabbling in politics and her subsequent slither into metaphysics and the mystic world of the East. I was thrilled at the casting; Rosemary Leach was absolutely amazing. I must admit it’s one of the best things I ever did. This was such a beautiful piece.’30
Shortly afterwards they met up again and Beryl happened to mention she had just read Payne’s book about Hitler and the alleged visit to Liverpool. Saville in his turn mentioned the idea to Anne Head, the producer of The Velvet Glove, and she commissioned the two of them to write a dramatized version of events. To work on the script, Saville would go round to Albert Street: ‘We’d meet regularly and have a mug of tea, she’d make a nice piece of toast and jam. Then she’d say, “I’ll just write this down . . .” We worked like that for about 10 days.’
But it was in the shooting of The Journal of Bridget Hitler that things started to get really interesting and the result was unlike anything the BBC had produced before. In a dramatic spectacle just short of two hours long and broadcast on 6 February 1981, Saville employed Brechtian alienation techniques, the latest Quantel videographic technology, Chroma key or ‘green screen’-type special effects, projections of archival footage, and dramatic reconstructions that featured live actors. Perhaps the most famous scene was that in which a group of skinheads come into the BBC canteen where actors in costume and members of the crew, including Philip and Beryl, are eating, and start to smash the place up, as a kind of simulation of, or allusion to, the violence of the Brownshirts. ‘I had about 30 or 40 people,’ Saville recalled, ‘and Anne Head said, “I hope you won’t do anything too mad.” I told the floor manager to tell them to go for it, to throw things at each other – not bottles – and that they could smash things. Anyway they went for it.’ It was certainly dramatically effective, though it didn’t go down too well at the BBC: ‘I was told not to show my face around the place for weeks afterwards.’
Beryl had the luck to fall in with another director sensitive to her work, Tristram Powell, when it came to making Words Fail Me, a dramatized version of scenes from A Quiet Life in which interviews with Beryl talking about her family were interspersed with dramatized recreations. Words Fail Me was broadcast on 22 February 1979 as part of BBC2’s Omnibus series. With a script by Powell, and helped by strong central performances by Joanne Whalley in the role of the young Beryl, and Peter Jeffrey as her father Richard, the film presented a more tender and nuanced portrait of family life than that which Beryl would recount in later interviews. Here her father’s temper is given a partial justification in the provocation offered by Beryl’s precocious behaviour and her frustrating habit of lying. As her fictional brother Alan puts it: ‘She was always making things out to be different than they were. She called the tree in the back garden a willow, when everyone could see it was a sycamore. She needed a blithering good hiding.’ In this view of family life, Beryl’s, or at least Madge’s, habitual lies and deceptions are as much a factor in the family dynamic as her father’s moods and her mother’s snobbery.
Some of the exterior scenes were filmed on the Formby dunes, and it was during one of her visits to Liverpool for these location shoots that Beryl acquired what would become a literally lifesize expression of her eccentricity in the public mind: the stuffed water buffalo she would call Eric: ‘We happened to pass the Rialto cinema . . . and there was Eric.’ Tristram jokingly said to her, ‘I wonder how you’ve managed to live without him . . .’, and the sheer ludicrousness and impracticality of the idea appealed to her. The next day she went back and bought him. When he was delivered to Albert Street it became immediately apparent that his seven-foot-long body, mounted on a wooden plinth, not to mention horns that spanned almost three feet, presented a logistical problem: ‘He came up on a van with only one driver, nobody to get him in. Originally I wanted him in my sitting room. I was going to put him on rockers – he was going to be a rocking buffalo. But you couldn’t move him. We had to go to the local Irish pub, and get a whole pile of Irishmen. We got him into the hall, but we couldn’t get him into the kitchen. So he stayed there.’31
The only exception to the string of critical successes was Blue Skies From Now On, which was broadcast on 20 November 1977 as part of ITV’s Sunday Night Drama season. The play was an adaptation of Another Part of the Wood, but in transferring it to the small screen much of the book’s subtlety was lost, and its bleakly depressing ending seemed too arbitrary for an hour-long drama. The Observer was damning in its summing up: ‘Old-fashioned and over-written, it’s further over-directed by Graham Evans, changing shot every two seconds, rushing his cameras about like things possessed.’32 Richard Ingrams, then television critic for The Spectator, also picked out Blue Skies From Now On for special abuse, naming it one of the runners-up in his ‘Worst Play of 1977 Competition’.33
In April 1977, Kendon Films took out an option on Sweet William, and offered a deal that involved £2,000 for Beryl to write the screenplay, with a further £5,000 due on the first day of shooting. The film featured a high-profile cast, with Jenny Agutter taking the role of Ann and Sam Waterston as William, and there was strong support from Arthur Lowe as Ann’s father, Anna Massey as William
’s wife, and Geraldine James as Pamela. Melvyn Bragg played himself as an arts presenter.
Sweet William turned out to be ‘a tight little gem’, as a review in Films & Filming put it, partly due to director Claude Whatham, who was sensitive to the script’s tragi-comic subtleties having previously worked on Tiptoe Through the Tulips. (In fact Beryl would be fortunate in her dealings with the film business, and the two subsequent adaptations of her novels, The Dressmaker in 1988, with Joan Plowright as Nellie and Billie Whitelaw as Margo, and An Awfully Big Adventure in 1995, with Hugh Grant as Meredith Potter and Georgina Cates as Stella, were both remarkably faithful to the originals.)
To tie in with the release of the Sweet William film, Fontana produced a new cover for the paperback edition featuring a naked Jenny Agutter draping herself over the naked torso of Sam Waterston. Underneath, a strap line read: ‘No one can say no to the bastard!’ Colin was appalled and wrote back to Simon King at Fontana who had solicited his opinion on the design: ‘What an awful jacket. I thought you’d improved with the jacket for A Quiet Life, but this in my view is very retrograde! And what a silly subtitle!’34
There was one insidious downside to Beryl’s newly acquired success, one that would have an increasing impact on her personal and professional life as the years passed: drink, or more specifically in Beryl’s case, whisky. During the 1960s Beryl had drunk and sometimes been drunk, but her limited financial means meant that on the whole drinking tended to be kept within moderate bounds. Now, for the first time, she was in a situation where she not only had the money to buy alcohol whenever she wanted, she also had open entry to a world that actively encouraged drinking and where alcohol was in plentiful supply. Consequently, the number of occasions when Beryl passed out – euphemistically described as being ‘under the table’ – and the number of times this would lead to potentially dangerous or socially humiliating experiences increased as Beryl’s resistance to alcohol, both psychologically and physiologically, decreased.
Literary parties and book launches were just one manifestation of this. Events at Duckworth were renowned for what became known as ‘Colin’s Killers’ – a sugar cube covered by a shot of Cointreau topped up with sparkling wine and a maraschino cherry – a heady mix that loosened tongues and lowered inhibitions. After one such party, Beryl had gone on to the opening of an exhibition of photographs by Augustus John at the National Portrait Gallery. Once there, the effects of the drink took hold and she passed out: ‘I woke on a woolsak . . . at the time I did not know it was a portrait gallery. I did note the photos of a bearded gent but I was a bit sleepy. I also remember someone wanting to examine my bag – at the precise moment I thought it a bit cheeky – I tipped me bag out. The next morning my bag was half empty, and my address book had gone.’35
Drink was also de rigueur during the evenings at Gloucester Crescent. As Anna told a reporter from the Guardian, she and Beryl ‘got drunk all the time, but a lot of drinking went on in those days . . . Beryl was very shy and I think that’s why she got so drunk. I’d got this teddy bear and she’d go to sleep with it under the table. But she’s so skinny I’ve seen a glass of wine go straight to her head.’36
The stories of Beryl’s whisky-drinking exploits, regaled as they were as amusing expressions of her high spirits, created a myth of her as a drinker impervious to alcohol’s downsides. But what such public myths often hide is a private world of feelings of shame and humiliation, of depression and inadequacy, not to mention the tensions and arguments within the family that a reliance on alcohol can cause.
Beryl was aware of the effect that alcohol was having on her life. She admitted to one journalist that getting drunk all the time interfered with her writing,37 and the self-portrait she painted of herself as Rita in Tiptoe Through the Tulips gives some indication of the way drink was affecting her personal life, its pervasiveness in her social interactions. Part of the problem was that she found it hard to resist both the social pressure, and her own desire, to drink – and once she began drinking it became difficult, if not impossible, to stop. As she said herself, if her parents had been rich and she had inherited money when they died, she would have become an alcoholic at an early age: ‘It’s like leaving a bomb behind.’38
In March 1979 Beryl travelled to America again, this time on a more extended tour, taking in New York, where she had tea with Robert Payne in the Algonquin (‘He was lovely . . .’); Pennsylvania, where people were still being evacuated after the accident at Three Mile Island (‘apart from clouds of smoke at Harrisburg, felt nothing . . .’); Boston, where she went to Harvard University (‘a fair amount of drink and everyone looking like Auden with dandruff . . .’); Los Angeles, where she gave a reading at UCLA; and San Francisco: ‘I am so exhausted that I can’t write this letter properly . . . If I get home I’ll never do this again. Went on a phone-in show. Somewhat alarming as a lady said she was going to kill herself and another man asked me if Mrs Thatcher was religious. The same day, I was on Tele with a man called the Chip Cookie King, and he threw biscuits all round the room and a sign came on to say laugh and scream and people did. I suppose it was a more light-hearted book show and the South Bank could learn from it.’39
Beryl had also brought Rudi, now fourteen, with her. The reason for this was that Alan, who hadn’t seen Rudi since his departure for America several years before, had asked Beryl to be allowed to see her. Beryl was reluctant but had agreed to meet up in Los Angeles where Alan worked as a screenwriter. In a letter of thanks after the visit, Alan regretted he hadn’t spoken to Beryl more, ‘but on reflection that was probably not on the cards nor really advisable’.40 Despite the fact it had been over ten years since they had split up, she still found the meeting unsettling, not least because she discovered that even her wildest suspicions and jealousies about Alan during their relationship had fallen short of reality. Beryl now found out that Alan also had a son by a woman she had never heard of before – and as he was the same age as Liz’s first child, he must have been conceived at the same time Alan was urging Beryl to marry him: ‘A farce going on here,’ she wrote to Don McKinlay, ‘met Alan Sharp plus his wife and 2 kids, plus a woman from Scotland and her son, plus me and Ru. Some of the children are the same age. Its all most odd, and in an odd way, upsetting.’41
Six months later, Beryl embarked on a literary tour of the USSR alongside the veteran novelist Harry Hoff, more popularly known as William Cooper. Harry found her a congenial travelling companion: ‘She’s irrepressible. She sees things differently to me. She transmogrifies events in her own way.’42 The trip had been organized by John Roberts, under the auspices of the British Council, and included talks, meetings with other writers and artists, and visits to sites of cultural – or political – interest, such as Stalin’s birthplace in Gori: ‘There was a mud hut arrangement comprising one room and a cellar, the whole obviously reinforced with something stronger than mud because they’d built a Greek temple on top of it. There was a stove pipe coming out of the roof, and a photograph of Stalin, when young, looking like Omar Sharif without the moustache.’43
To begin with, Beryl and Harry would alternate the toasts they were required to give at official functions, so that the other could drink the vodka that was invariably provided, but after a while she couldn’t think of anything to say and made him do them all. Hoff’s orations were often tongue-in-cheek, playing up to the stereotype of the romantic Russian sensibility: ‘How nice it would be if our voices still existed floating around somewhere after we were dead and that perhaps the echo of Pushkin’s voice is still in this room . . .’44
Although they met few fellow novelists, they did meet a number of Soviet poets, including Yevgeny Yevtushenko, to whom they talked about literature and art. Beryl would later recall that he would ring her up at the hotel, late at night, shouting down the phone, ‘I am your brother!’45
Beryl was fascinated by the bizarre manifestations of Russian officiousness. On one occasion, as they were being chauffeur-driven to an official f
unction, they passed a shop in the window of which was a dress that Beryl liked the look of. She casually said, ‘Ooh that’s nice’, whereupon the car stopped, policemen appeared, wooden barriers were set up and the shop was cleared. Beryl and Harry were then led into the now-empty shop to look around.
After Beryl’s return home she set about turning her experiences into a novel. The idea behind it came from an incident in Moscow that occurred when she was taken to the house of an illustrator of children’s books: ‘It was a two roomed flat with parquet floors,’ Beryl recalled a few years later. ‘By the door was a fluffy white rug. When I entered I scuffed the rug and there was an irregular piece of flooring. I asked what it was, and after a lot of dithering, was told that someone had been murdered in the flat 3 years ago. The pieces of flooring had been taken away for examination.’46 This chance discovery of a death in mysterious circumstances, one that seemed to have been officially covered up in such a slipshod manner, inspired a plot in which the boundaries between reality and paranoia about Russian state bureaucracy seem blurred.
Winter Garden, unlike Young Adolf, ‘just wrote itself. I kept a small diary with me. But the whole thing was so vivid, like a dream, all I had to do was just write it down.’ Part of the reason for the hallucinatory quality of her recollections, apart from the vodka – ‘the Russians give you so much to drink, so we were very tired and very disorientated . . .’47 – was that during the visit she had fallen ill. The weather in October had been colder than average – at one point it spiked to minus 14°C – and Beryl arrived ill-prepared: ‘I had no socks, because l never wear socks, but I also hadn’t got a hat or anything. Someone had lent me a fur-coat, but they kept on saying: “You’ll be really ill, it’s terribly cold.” I literally didn’t notice it. I thought they were fussing.’ However, while she was in Tbilisi she came down with what she later described as ‘pleurisy’ and went to a doctor, who gave her a pill, ‘just one . . .’, which made her high for about six hours. ‘I was walking on air. I saw Rasputin looking over a hedge, among other things.’48 The fact that the surgery was on the roof of the building – she could see the official car below her – and there was a goat tethered to the wall, only added to the dreamlike impression.