Going Up

by Frederic Raphael

  I met Tony Newley only once. During the run of Stop the World – I Want to Get Off, he and Leslie dropped in when I was visiting Vivian Cox. On their way out of the garçonnière, Newley offered me his hand and said, ‘Good luck in whatever you choose to do in life.’ A few years later, when I had won the Oscar for writing Darling, Leslie was the first person to call from California to congratulate me; he was followed by Yvonne and, after that, by his chum Tony Newley and his then wife Joan Collins.

  XVIII

  IN MAY 1956, we gave a publication party for Obbligato at Chelsea Embankment. I decorated the blank hall wall with a large pastel mural that recalled the bucolic San Gemignano. Alan Maclean was not of the company. Nevertheless, we seemed to know a lot of people. Ken Tynan brought the gauntly beautiful, long-haired Elizabeth Jane Howard. She posed at the head of the short stairs into our basement as if she was likely to be photographed. She had already published a couple of elegant novels and had had a famous liaison with Arthur Koestler. She would put it to fictional use in After Julius. Ken embraced Dotty Tutin as the reassuring evidence that the company did not lack class.

  Obbligato was reviewed amiably, if patronisingly, by a double-barrelled Marie in the Sunday Times. Her weekly batch, in which I came last, was headed by a fanfare for Tunes of Glory by James Kennaway, who had been at Oxford with Tony Becher’s new wife, Anne. Guy Ramsey assured me that to be reviewed at all, and at decent length, was quite something. Vanity and a certain shame, at the levity of my first book, impelled me to feel that it was not enough. The Suez crisis was brewing. Obbligato was a nugatory squib published just as the illusion of Britain’s hegemony was about to be fractured and the Angry Young Men taken to be the harbingers of a new society.

  On a grey Sunday afternoon in late October, Beetle and I were in the loud crowd in Whitehall. Banners and voices were raised against Eden’s war. Wedged among the synchronised yells of the committed, I was uneasy when people started rolling marbles under the hooves of the police horses (‘Eden’s cavalry’); it did not seem sporting. Although I thought the attack on Egypt was ill-conceived and worse managed, I remember thinking, as we surged towards Downing Street, that we were doing Britain’s cause, whatever it was, no good by baying at the Prime Minister’s door. Even cynics did not yet realise to what extent the whole operation was rigged, with Israel as the patsy, to lend virtuous allure to the Franco-British ‘intervention’.

  We met Poznan Mirosevic-Sorgo and another old Jordan’s Yard habitué, Stefan Danieff, coming, solemn-faced, down Whitehall against the current. They had just heard Imre Nagy’s desperate appeal to the West not to allow Khrushchev and his friends to crush the Hungarian revolt. Poznan feared, and perhaps slightly hoped, that the West was about to go to war with the Soviet Union. Eden’s post-imperial paroxysm had created a rupture between Europe and the US at the worst possible moment. I was ashamed of the West’s politic indifference to the repression of the Hungarian revolt and, later, the execution of Imre Nagy; but I was relieved that the crises were followed by peace with dishonour. If anyone else recalled Jean Cocteau’s remark, after the French surrender in June 1940, ‘Vive cette paix honteuse!’, no one was tactless enough to cite it.

  Eden fell. After Randolph Churchill had gloated in the Evening Standard, ‘Rab Butler has had it’, Harold Macmillan, who had panicked when his displeased old colleague Eisenhower threatened to scupper the pound, entered 10 Downing Street. Rab’s disappointment was the ultimate revenge of the Churchills on the most durable of pre-war appeasers. In the 1970s, as President of the Royal Society of Literature, Butler told an after-dinner story about two ‘Jewboys’. I took it upon myself to write to him in reproachful terms. He responded with appeasing hauteur. My life has been littered with mutations of the Provost of Guildford. I rather wish I had once struck one of them, instead of writing reproachful letters. Sometimes, like the late Sir Ian Gilmour, when met in person, they turn out to have disappointing charm.

  Beetle wanted daylight and she wanted a baby. I was reluctant both to leave Chelsea, where we could not afford anything above ground, and to bring another Jew into the world. Beetle was not about to have Mr Hitler determine our lives. It was not long before she was pregnant. We discovered that Celia Ramsey’s friend Marion Slater wanted to sell the lease of her cottage in Rutland Street, not far from Harrods, where she may well have acquired her elegant accent. Her husband, from whom she was separated, was a handsome society portraitist. If the young Celia had not had an affair with him, she was not disposed to deny it.

  Before the lease could be ceded, I had to be approved by the landlord, a Greek gentleman called Tachmindji. He had a City office with a humpbacked roll-top desk. I had never before met a Greek, of whatever confused Levantine lineage. I passed his exam without difficulty and we moved into 14 Rutland Street. The rent was £6 a week. In the usual way in those days, we had to buy most of Marion Slater’s furniture. The double bed had a gammy leg; after it gave way, we splinted it with disused historical and philosophical volumes.

  A day after our arrival, I drove up to find the space directly in front of our house taken by another vehicle. I parked in an adjacent void. That evening, a card came through our letter box, headed ‘From Mr Justice Hinchcliffe’. It read: ‘Please refrain from parking your car in front of number 12. It blocks the light and air from the basement room and causes great inconvenience to all.’ We never had another neighbourly communication from his lordship. He later presided over the libel action brought by Brian Glanville against the actor David Kossoff, whose speciality it was to play endearing, folkloric Jews. Brian was accused of commercially motivated ‘anti-Semitism’ when writing his 1958 novel, The Bankrupts. In it, he anticipated Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus in taking a scathing, ‘disloyal’ view of middle-class Jewish society; in Brian’s case, the Golders Green community among whom his father had his dental practice. Mr Justice Hinchcliffe directed the jury decisively, and rightly, in favour of the plaintiff. Kossoff had to pay suitable damages and costs.

  1950s London did not lack people of a certain age who made a habit of standing on their dignity. One afternoon, I happened to cut a retired, no doubt gallant, brigadier as a partner in the Crockford’s two-shilling room. I made a rather bold opening bid, of ‘one spade’ with only three of that suit in my hand. As a result, the opposition was bluffed out of making a cold game. The brigadier considered himself to have been misled, albeit to his own side’s advantage. As the cards were being reshuffled for the next hand, he said, ‘Do you mind if I say something to you rather frankly?’ ‘Not at all, sir,’ I said, ‘as long as you don’t mind my saying something equally frank in response.’ The brigadier said, ‘I’ve never been spoken to like that before in my entire life.’

  Our life in Rutland Street was well-lit, constricted and genteel. The woman who lived across from us had a dog named Bertie, when she was pleased with him, Bertram when she was not. I had worked well in our murky but romantic Chelsea basement; in Knightsbridge I did many things, but almost all were incidental, although sometimes lucrative. Thanks to the initiative of a young singer called Jim Dale, I composed a radio version of Obbligato, in which he starred as the improvising natural, Frank Smith (‘It’s all false and fake / Yes, every move I make’). Once the youngest professional comic on the variety stage, Jim Dale went on to have a long career as a versatile performer (he was in many of the Carry On movies) and lyricist: he wrote the hit song Georgy Girl. He was frequently nominated for Tony Awards for his performances on Broadway.

  Toting a heavy army surplus wireless, I continued to do a number of BBC radio interviews. Several were with Caribbean writers who were establishing themselves in London: George Lamming, Samuel Selvon and others. There were few black people in Knightsbridge and none in our social life. Johnny Quashie-Idun had been in Out of the Blue, in which he sang to a guitar and took part in a number entitled ‘No Room at the Inn’. Based on a news story that some visiting black celebrity had been denied a room at the Ritz, it scarcely rais
ed the colour question in any pressing form; but we imagined ourselves taboo-breakingly bold.

  Bernard Sheridan – an articled clerk during Beetle’s time at the legal partnership Aukin, Courts – was now a qualified solicitor. He invited me to attend one of his pro bono surgeries at a legal aid centre off the Holloway Road, where I posed as an intern. A white couple sought Bernard’s advice because their landlady was trying to chase them out of a flat they had occupied for fifteen years. She wanted to put ‘Negroes’ into it. Why would anyone want to do that? Simple: they could be racked for much higher rents.

  I longed to be taken for a writer of the kind applauded by Cyril Connolly or Jack Davenport; but I was particularly pleased when George Greenfield sold one of my short stories to the down-market Everybody’s, for £40. It was based on my adventures in Morocco and my encounter with Mr Tree on the ferry to Gibraltar. Big, floppy, vulgar Everybody’s was not a magazine that any Leavisite would deign to read, but I could be sure that it had bought my story for no snobbish reason. I continued to review the odd book for the Cambridge Review, but I made no prudent contacts in London literary circles. Karl Miller had resigned from the Treasury as a protest against the Suez operation and became literary editor of The Spectator. I did not hear from him.

  The irksome local effect of Suez was petrol rationing; its surtaxed price soared to six shillings a gallon. Leslie Bricusse bought a blister-shaped, three-wheeled bubble car, big enough for two. Its hatch opened upwards and outwards at the front and it did 100 miles to the gallon. I dreaded its puttering arrival in Rutland Street. It was, however, easy to park without vexing Mr Justice Hinchcliffe. Nothing that Leslie wanted to do answered any of my genuine ambitions, least of all his repeated request that I take yet another look at the book of Lady at the Wheel.

  One day, I ran into Richard Bird, my old bridge partner. We began to have irregular lunches at L’Escargot in Greek Street. In decorous style, we chose to pay the bill alternately. Whoever’s turn it was to pay next would call the other to fix a date. Richard had joined the Ministry of Transport and had amusing stories to tell about the vanity of little Ernest Marples, the man who drilled the often flooded tunnel under Hyde Park Corner. We played bridge again and seemed to have become the kind of grown-up friends one was supposed to make at Cambridge. One lunchtime, as he paid the bill, I remarked that it was a shame that he had not met Beetle. Would he come and dine with us sometime? An evening was fixed; Beetle took great care with the food and I with the bottle; Richard left with expressions of warm gratitude. I assumed that the dinner party was the equivalent of a lunch and left it to him to call me to fix our next date. I have never seen or heard from him since.

  When commercial television started, Jock Jacobsen arranged for Leslie and me to go, with a Granada TV producer, Kenneth Hurren (‘Call me Kenneth; or Ken, obviously’), to see (Sir) Douglas Fairbanks in his office overlooking Hyde Park. Our mission was to suggest a way for him to do his projected television show, which would be ‘different’ and colourful; someone had recently described the star, a legendary figure, not yet fifty, as ‘grey all over’.

  His door was badged with plaques declaring various Fairbanks enterprises. ‘We have to have them for tax reasons,’ one of his sidekicks told us.

  Inside, we were greeted by the trademark smile, inherited from his daredevil and acrobatic Hollywood father. ‘The sun is over the yard-arm, gentlemen. I’m afraid I haven’t any gin. I can offer you whisky, vodka and tonic…’ Below the winning eyes, the face was triangular; there was just room for a brief nose, a scimitar of moustache and the irresistible grin. He sat down behind the wide, vacant shelf of his desk. ‘I’m unique,’ he said, ‘unique good or unique bad, depending on how you look at it.’ He spoke of himself as he might about a very old and dear friend. ‘If I do what everyone does, I might as well not be on the programme.’

  ‘What did you feel about last week’s show?’ I asked him.

  ‘Here’s the consensus. This is of friends, you know. They thought I was nervous. That’s ridiculous. I was not nervous. Then they thought I was condescending. Of course, I’m not condescending, but that’s what they thought. And gushing…’

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ one of his aides said. ‘You’re not gushing at all.’

  ‘How’s the billing going to read?’ Fairbanks said. ‘Can we get a lead there? “Granada TV and Douglas Fairbanks present…”’

  ‘Can’t have that,’ Kenneth said. ‘Granada have to be the programme contractors. That’s under the Act.’

  The telephone rang. It was Selwyn Lloyd, the Foreign Secretary, to say that, yes, he could come for cocktails on Saturday. Mrs Fairbanks had to be informed right away. It seemed that Selwyn Lloyd was subbing for some brighter light who was not able to make it.

  ‘Now, gentlemen, a refill?’

  ‘What if we put you in an office?’ Leslie said.

  ‘Too formal.’

  ‘Or with a —’

  ‘No props.’

  ‘Perhaps you should start by doing something funny. To put people —’

  ‘I’m not a gag man.’

  ‘What about a backstage approach?’ Leslie said.

  ‘A knock on the door, you mean, “You’re on, Mr Fairbanks”, that kind of thing?’

  Kenneth said, ‘How about the Garroway approach?’

  Even Leslie could not pretend to know what that was.

  ‘This guy did this show on TV in Chicago. Dave Garroway. It’s the Chicago version I’m talking about here, not the New York one. He just sort of ambled on and announced the next act, very casual – he had this manner, it got to be so famous that they called it “the Garroway approach”.’

  ‘Casual?’

  ‘Totally. Totally casual. The Chicago show, this was.’ Kenneth looked at his watch, took his hat. ‘I’ve got to go. That’s just a suggestion. You people carry on.’

  ‘Of course,’ Dougie said. ‘That’s the way we do things here. We just bounce an idea off the wall and … see where we get.’

  Two hours later, we accompanied Fairbanks and his entourage to the street, where he got into his Rolls Bentley and sat democratically next to the chauffeur.

  I said to the chief sidekick, ‘How does he really see himself doing the show?’

  He said, ‘I’ll tell you. He sees himself doing it in the ambassador’s room in the American embassy, in front of the crossed flags of Britain and America and wearing the uniform of an Admiral of the Fleet.’

  One afternoon, when my parents were on holiday in Juan-les-Pins, Dr Cove-Smith telephoned to say, ‘I’m afraid we’ve lost Mrs Raphael.’ For a moment, I supposed that my grandmother had been mislaid and that I was being summoned to assist in the search. In fact, after many an autumn, Amelia Sophia had breathed her last. I went to Dorset House, where Winifred Stanley was dutifully determined to have me ‘see her’. She lay in the same bed under the same covers, much the same in death as in old age except that her jaw was parcelled in a knotted kerchief that was tied in a firm bow on top of her head.

  I met my parents with the news at London Airport and drove them to Manor Fields in PLD 75. My father was tight-lipped, ashamed of not having been with her at the end. The service took place in the chapel at the Willesden cemetery. Amy had not relished Jewish society in life; in death she could not avoid it. My late grandfather’s sister, my great-aunt Polly, was with us in the car as we passed through the cemetery gates. My mother sought to lighten the atmosphere by asking a standard, flattering question: ‘Did anyone ever tell you that you looked like Marie Tempest, Poll?’

  ‘Everyone did,’ Polly said. ‘She was an ugly old cat. But what a voice! I was going to be in the chorus of The Geisha with her. Had me photo taken in the costume.’ My father’s relatives, on each branch of the family tree, were nothing if not performers.

  Cedric went in alone before they nailed down the coffin. The rabbi arrived in a baby Austin, a dark, fleshy man with plummy eyes. After an abbreviated service, we followed a slow, long-hand
led, two-wheeled handcart to the graveside. As the coffin was lifted, the attendant linked his hand, for balance, with one of the labourer’s. Effort fattened them. After a few prayers, Cedric was handed a narrow shovel. ‘Three times, please.’ He dug three times into a pile of cinders heaped beside the heavy clay. I put my hand on his shoulder. He seemed so near the grave that I wanted to keep him this side of it. When we were back in the stiff shelter of the chapel, my father sat down for a while on a varnished bench. The rabbi shook hands with all of us and went.

  I took Polly back to her rooms in Oxford and Cambridge Gardens and then we all went to Rutland Street. Cedric lay down on our orange-skirted divan, but he could not sleep. He went down the road to Harrods for a haircut. He told our regular barber, Number Three, about his troubles.

  Number Three said, ‘See that bloke over there? His son came back from Cyprus with cancer of the throat. He died after a nine months’ illness. Nineteen years old.’

  XIX

  IN 1958, HUSBANDS were not encouraged to be present when their wives gave birth. At two in the morning, when Beetle’s contractions increased in frequency, we did the prescribed thing and called an ambulance to 14 Rutland Street. I followed it to the Middlesex Hospital and stayed with her for a while. She said I should go home and get some sleep. She would call me when she had some news. There was no point in coming back to the hospital earlier, because they would not let me see her. I suspect that I might have insisted with some success, but I was squeamish and docile. I went to have lunch with John and Dudy Nimmo in Upper Addison Gardens.

  I had scarcely known Dudy when she was the most famous actress in Cambridge. While I was on my travels, she had been cast as a young girl in The Duchess and the Smugs by Pamela Frankau, directed by John van Druten, an American dramatist and director best known for his hit play I Am a Camera, adapted from Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin stories about Sally Bowles. The New Yorker review had consisted of two words: ‘No Leica.’