Going Up

by Frederic Raphael

  Over one of our irregular three-and-sixpenny lunches at Schmidt’s in Charlotte Street, I told my new friend Tom Maschler how pleased I was. He looked unimpressed: no one who mattered was published by Cassell’s. ‘No? What about Robert Graves?’ Tom said, ‘What about him?’ Maschler had had the alert wit to commission, and was about to publish, a collection of polemic essays entitled Declaration, to which he supplied a modest introduction. I had got to know him too late to be a candidate for inclusion. The collection was loudly bruited as the manifesto of the Angry Young Men. Doris Lessing was an honorary member of their fraternity. For politic publicity purposes, the contributors were taken to share some coherent sense of outrage and purpose. The watchword of their parade was ‘By the left, quick march’. What they did undoubtedly have in common was militant self-righteousness. Legend insists that Kingsley Amis was a contributor; in fact, showy Oxonian self-deprecation disposed him to decline Maschler’s solicitation to join the dance.

  Ken Tynan, Lindsay Anderson, John Wain, Stuart Holroyd and Colin Wilson rallied to Tom’s 5,000-word call. Lindsay Anderson’s essay was entitled ‘Get Out and Push’; but what he, and the others, pushed was mainly their own bandwagon. John Osborne’s was already rolling, thanks largely to Ken Tynan. Osborne had given resentment emblematic form in Jimmy Porter, the anti-hero of Look Back in Anger. The play, starring Kenneth Haigh and Mary Ure, owed its delayed triumph and abiding mythological status to Ken’s advocacy. As it was about to close, he announced that he could never love anybody who did not think it a masterpiece. Osborne’s fame was established. By the 1970s, he and Tynan had become rancorous enemies. They exchanged regular, well-publicised paper punches in available publications.

  While impersonating Jimmy Porter, Ken Haigh seemed bound for stardom; but he never achieved it. Failure to find sustained favour sat heavily on him. Some time later, Nigel Stock, a mild character actor, never out of work, had a small part in a film I wrote. He told me that he used to go to Lord’s in the afternoon; the Large Mound stand was a nice quiet place to smoke his pipe and learn lines. One day, he was aware of Ken Haigh sitting behind him. Between overs, Ken leaned forward, heavy hands on the white slats of Nigel’s seat. ‘Tell me something, Nige, honestly: why is it people don’t like me?’ Stock put his script on his knee, took his pipe from his mouth, and said, ‘Probably because you’re such a cunt, Ken.’

  Tom Maschler was now the non-playing captain of those who advocated a menu of new Jerusalems. Colin Wilson was the manifestly prodigious genius. He had come to public attention in corduroys and a roll-topped orange sweater, straight from sharing a sleeping bag with a woman called Valerie (many girls were in those days) on Hampstead Heath. Her father was widely reported to be looking for Colin with a horsewhip. The Outsider was acclaimed by both grand masters of the Sunday press, Philip Toynbee and Cyril Connolly.

  Colin’s autodidacticism was primed by the literary savvy of his namesake. Angus Wilson, then a librarian at the British Museum, armed the young unknown to amaze the pundits by his cull of Continental sources, from Herman Hesse, whose Steppenwolf was the archetypal outsider, to Nietzsche, Camus and Sartre. At the height of Colin’s fame, I interviewed him, not without a trace of Cambridge philosophical condescension, for BBC radio. He was more bemused than besotted by the publicity. I envied him his orange cable-stitched, roll-top sweater more urgently than the feathers in his cap. Beetle knitted me a duplicate for my birthday. The author of The Outsider flamed briefly in the forehead of the morning sky and then, after the publication of his second, clumsier collage, was reduced to the ranks of has-beens.

  Deserted by the smart critics whose want of cosmopolitan literacy he had exposed (they would not otherwise have saluted the originality of his notion of outsiderdom), Colin fell as summarily as he had risen. He accepted relegation from genius to crank with such good grace that it doubled for eminence. As if stalled almost at the peak of his Icarian ascendancy-cum-fall, he scarcely changed, in appearance or wardrobe, over the years. Living in Cornish seclusion, he wrote many more books, about violent crime, sexual aberration and the supernatural, some enjoyable, some scabrous, all artlessly dotty. In the late 1980s, after I had congratulated him on something he had written, he took me to a meeting of the Savage Club where ‘Brother Savages’ sang salty songs.

  The Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square was the centre of Ken Tynan’s smart hopes for a new kind of drama that involved socialism, sexual liberation and his own bandmasterly supervision. George Devine, an earnest, plain, middle-aged actor of small charisma, was the Royal Court’s presiding dramaturge. He was seconded, in the back office, by Oscar Lowenstein, a small, anxious person whose knees literally knocked together when I went to see him about a play of mine for which he expressed impotent enthusiasm: in the new, no longer oligarchic theatre, George made all the creative decisions.

  Aspirant writers were encouraged to attend rehearsals at the Royal Court. I dropped in one day to see Tony Richardson directing George Devine, who was on his knees, in a canine position. Tony Richardson, the Oxonian equivalent of Peter Hall, though in a higher social register, was standing over the temporarily four-footed actor, chin in one hand. He considered the matter and then he said, ‘You don’t feel like growling at all, do you, George?’ I walked out into Sloane Square and along the King’s Road to Ward’s Bookshop.

  In the 1970s, we rented a house from Tony Richardson in King’s Road, off Sunset Boulevard. It had a good many David Hockney paintings, of swimming pools, with and without boys. They hung high in the lee of the advertised ‘cathedral ceiling’. Tony Richardson’s last film job, in 1989, was to direct a version of Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants, one of a trio of ‘Tales of Seduction’. In the same triad, I directed Elizabeth McGovern and Beau Bridges in my adaptation of Mary McCarthy’s The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt, which won the Ace Award for the Best Film on Cable TV. I never had occasion to speak to Tony Richardson, who was dying of Aids at the time. My award was lost in the mail.

  Almost immediately after Leslie and I collected our last monthly stipend from the Rank Organisation, we were approached by a Pinewood producer, Vivian Cox, who proposed that we write a movie about Cambridge. His idea was that it should be like The Guinea Pig, in which the juvenile Dickie Attenborough had made his name as an oikish outsider given a place at a posh public school. Vivian had been a hockey Blue (and international), played rugger for Wasps, and drove a white Aston Martin. During the war he had gone into action, as Flag Lieutenant to Vice-Admiral Bruce Fraser on HMS Duke of York, during the sinking of the German battle-cruiser Scharnhorst. A connoisseur of good wines, Vivian was a hard-working bon vivant (he told me that ‘bon viveur’ was not a genuine locution française) and an eager patron of Michelin-starred restaurants, especially his friend Raymond Thuillier’s Baumanière at Les Baux-de-Provence. Thuillier had not become a chef until he was over fifty and now had three stars.

  Since Leslie’s and my two-picture contract had just lapsed, Jock Jacobsen had to negotiate a new deal, for another nice fee, for us to write Bachelor of Hearts. The cinema was, it appeared, an indulgent Maecenas. In due time, our original working-class ‘guinea pig’ was transformed to accommodate Hardy Kruger, the young German star of a recent hit, The One That Got Away. Sylvia Syms, the English cinema’s principal jeune première after Jean Simmons, had defected unpatriotically to Hollywood with Stewart Granger, was cast as a rather better-looking Girton girl than any I had seen pedalling along the Cambridge streets. When Vivian took us to meet her, Leslie kissed her hullo with West End ease. Lacking his smooth cheek, I held out my hand.

  Some thirty years later, I wrote a play, From the Greek, a modern version of Oedipus Rex, set in New Mexico, which Jonathan Lynn commissioned and was to direct. He approached the mature Miss Syms to play the part of my Jocasta. She did not refuse him; but said that she would like to meet me, again. As I leaned towards her, I was greeted with an outstretched hand. ‘I remember the last time we met,’ she said, ‘and you refuse
d to kiss me.’ I suspect that she took some pleasure in declining the part that went to Maxine Audley, who had also been a great beauty. She told me that, in her youth, if she saw a man she fancied, she would say to herself, ‘I’ll have a bit of that’ and was rarely denied.

  When, at length, Bachelor of Hearts was greenlighted, Vivian gave a dinner party for Leslie and me in his Curzon Street garçonnière. As he opened a celebratory bottle of 1945 Château Margaux, he told us how, during the Great War, an Englishman and a Frenchman shared a dug-out. They had one bottle of a rare and delicious vintage, which they swore that they would not open until victory came. On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, the Englishman reached for his corkscrew. The Frenchman took the bottle from him as he prepared to pour it. ‘Non, non, mon cher ami! Pas si vite! D’abord on en parle un peu.’

  Hardy Kruger had been fourteen years old when the war ended. Like other young Germans of his age, he had already been recruited into the Hitler Youth. That he was cast in our movie excited little indignation. Tom Wiseman, the much feared Evening Standard showbiz columnist, was an exception. As a small boy, he had fled Vienna with his mother in 1938; his father remained behind. After living dangerously, and profitably for a while, Wiseman senior was arrested and murdered. As our movie was about to come out, Tom went to interview Hardy in his hotel suite and grilled him on his service to the Nazis. Hardy defended himself on the plausible grounds that few young persons in his position could have resisted the patriotic call. Tom was not easily mollified, but had to concede that Hardy was no sort of impenitent ex-Nazi. As the meeting ended, quite amicably, Hardy’s wife, who had overheard their long conversation, said to Tom, ‘Mr Viseman, so far as ze Germans and ze Jews vere concerned, vy don’t we ve just agree zat zere were mistakes on both sides?’

  Our director was Wolf Rilla. His half-Jewish father, the actor Walter Rilla, had quit Germany in 1934, when Wolf was fourteen. He had no problem working with Hardy Kruger, but he was a rather solemn film-maker, not wholly suited to Leslie’s and my larky screenplay (based, with all but slipshod looseness, on As You Like It). Wolf had been at school at Frensham Heights and then went up to Cambridge, but he remained irredeemably foreign in manner and dress (his scripts were holstered in a Mitteleuropan leather music-case).

  During the making of Bachelor of Hearts, Wolf lived near Rutland Street with the actress Valerie Hanson. When they came to dinner, he told the first story about drugs that I ever heard: two potheads are walking down a long steep hill. A man comes running at full tilt from the top of the hill and with a yell of ‘excuse me’ passes clean between them and runs on down to the bottom. After a long moment, one pothead looks at the other and says, ‘I thought he’d never go.’ Wolf had high ambitions as an auteur but lacked the force or luck to fulfil them. A few years later, after the failure of his own solemn production The World Ten Times Over, which Beetle and I applauded as long and as loudly as we dared, Wolf’s career folded. He married an English woman and went to run a hotel in Provence.

  Vivian Cox had been an associate producer on Trio and Quartet, in which Somerset Maugham had introduced clutches of his own short stories transposed to the screen. The presence of the renowned Old Party, and his shyness, had intimidated the unit. During an afternoon break, one of the sparks broke the ice by going up to the great man and saying, ‘’ave a cuppa tea, Somerset’. Vivian gave us to understand that he and Willie had been on quite close terms. When I told him that Maugham was in town and that Alan Searle had asked me to arrange a bridge game for him at Crockford’s, Vivian told me to be sure to give Willie his regards.

  At dinner, with Guy Ramsey, Edward Meyer (the Times bridge correspondent) and Kenneth Konstam, the Old Party recalled that I had been on my way to Spain when he last saw me. I told him how much I enjoyed it, but not that I had lost his ‘Open Sesame’ letter. When I found occasion to deliver Vivian Cox’s message, Maugham did not recall the name. ‘Ah well,’ he said, ‘more people know Tom Fool than Tom Fool knows.’ He was courteous enough to ask about my musical comedy. On learning that the production date seemed regularly to recede, he was not at all surprised. When we went upstairs to the two-shilling room, Maugham clenched his cigarette-holder in his prognathous jaw and addressed himself, with unnecessarily apologetic modesty, to the matter in hand.

  Leslie and I were contacted about a musical that was already on tour and needed expert attention before it could be exposed to Ken Tynan and his unkind cuts. It had been written by two doctors, Al Kaplan and Robin Fordyce. Al was in his early thirties, a sleek, handsome, rich, bisexual Canadian, married to Susie Sieff, of the Marks & Spencer’s dynasty. By the time our deal was confirmed, Leslie had already driven himself, in his new ‘wagon’, down to Plymouth where the show was being tried out in front of dwindling audiences. Al offered me a lift in his grey Rolls Bentley convertible. It had a diminutive, clitoridal gear lever empanelled between the seats. He had meant to use his other, sporty car, but its transmission made unhealthy noises. ‘Take my advice, Frederic: never buy one of those tinny Lagondas.’ When we were crossing Salisbury Plain, Al asked if I had ever driven a Rolls. I really should; it was so easy.

  ‘One day,’ I said.

  Al said, ‘And why not today?’ He pulled in and invited me to take his place. It was true: the car was smooth and almost silent (David Ogilvy had recently advertised the Rolls-Royce to America by claiming that ‘at 60 miles an hour the loudest sound is the ticking of the dashboard clock’). I drove with proper wariness. Al became impatient. ‘Put your foot down, it’d be good to get there today.’

  When I accelerated, the smoothness of the ride made it seem that we were not going very fast. The Great West Road was only one lane in each direction. I was enjoying the silent speed and Al’s approval when, in the straight distance ahead of us, I saw one big lorry pull out to overtake another. They rolled towards us, side by side. The inside driver was reluctant to give way. In a strange conjunction of the slow and the sudden, I was aware that the overtaking lorry was heading straight at us. I pressed the brake pedal, but the Rolls was much, much heavier than anything I had ever driven and it did not have power-assisted brakes. I pressed down with panicky weight and the car slowed, slowly. So did the lorry on our side of the road. We stopped, almost bumper to bumper, while the other, unyielding, lorry driver thundered past Al’s window. I was afraid that he would reproach me for our close-run thing. When I looked at him, he was smiling.

  The star of Jubilee Girl was Lizbeth Webb. I had seen her in Bless the Bride when I was first going out with Hilary Phillips. Now a big star, Miss Webb was gallant enough not to desert a sinking enterprise. She wore ‘me mink’ as proof of her buoyant stardom. With blithe Cambridge ruthlessness, Leslie and I decided to change her leading man and also to dispense with the services of Irene Handl, who had been memorable, although uncredited, in Brief Encounter, in which she doubled as cinema organist and a Kardomah waitress. She accepted my Judas kiss on her abrasive cheek and probably considered herself well out of the show. She later wrote a singular novel entitled The Sioux. She was replaced, to no marked effect, by an actress whose claim to fame was that, for many years, she had been the musical comedy star Cicely Courtneidge’s understudy.

  I rewrote many of the scenes in Jubilee Girl and directed the actors in their new lines and moves in the mornings and afternoons. In the evening they had to go on and honour the script we were in the process of dismantling. The doyenne of the cast was Marie Lohr, the star, in 1930, of Maugham’s The Breadwinner. In her mid-sixties, she was, in my eyes, a venerable old lady. I was touched by her punctuality – she was always the first to arrive, with her knitting, at rehearsal – and heartened by small nods at my directorial suggestions.

  Marie had one wistful song in the show, ‘Style, Form and Grace’, which she impersonated perfectly. We stood with her on the foreshore at South-sea when Khrushchev and Bulganin sailed out of Portsmouth harbour on their way home to Russia after their double act had compl
eted its brief British tour (leaving the secret service’s frogman ‘Buster’ Crabbe dead in Portsmouth harbour after venturing too near the Russians’ ship). Should we wave or should we not? Marie thought it would be polite, so we did. She had stood in the same place when the Grand Fleet passed in review before the king-emperor in the summer of 1914.

  The choreographer John Cranko came down, at Al’s invitation, to inspect how we were doing. He had just directed the innovatory revue Cranks, in which the young Anthony Newley was conspicuously brilliant. Cranko’s verdict was that we had replaced bad direction with what was no better. Leslie allowed it to be thought that the direction had largely been my work. He may have had Cranko to thank for his introduction to Tony Newley, with whom he later had a successful collaboration, most notably in creating the hit musical Stop the World – I Want to Get Off. Getting on was much more Leslie’s wish; and it was thoroughly fulfilled. He wrote some lyrics for Hank Mancini’s theme music for Two for the Road. I was not eager that his words should feature on the soundtrack of what Stanley Donen told me was my film. They were heard elsewhere and still adhere to the movie’s credits on the DVD.

  Jubilee Girl had another director or two before it opened at the Victoria Palace, where it did not last long. In 1969, Al Kaplan telephoned me from Italy to say that he wanted to produce the script of Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head, which I had written originally for John Schlesinger. John refused to accept the casting of Larry Harvey (or Dirk Bogarde) as Martin Lynch-Gibbon and the project was dropped until Elliott Kastner acquired the rights. Al told me that he knew that I had a controlling interest. If I did not consign the rights to him he would have me killed. He then rang off. He died shortly afterwards, of an overdose of the drugs he was said to have supplied to the higher echelons of Italian showbiz. I sometimes wonder how nice Dr Jekyll really was.