Going Up

by Frederic Raphael

  I had a quick call from Wolf Mankowitz: if I was going to be some kind of a success, we should talk again. I was vain and subservient enough to honour his summons. He gave me the job, preceded by a few hints on what he and Peter wanted. The Memoirs of a Cross-Eyed Man began with its hero on the Rock of Gibraltar. Wolf had the idea he should throw a banana to one of the Barbary apes. ‘The ape catches it, looks at it and throws it back. You take it from there.’ And so I did, for fifteen hundred quid.

  By the time I delivered the first draft of the screenplay, Wolf’s association with Peter Sellers had broken up. There was no point in going any further with the script. I was paid off and went back to working for Stella Richman on an original idea of mine entitled A Well-Dressed Man. Three or four years later, I bumped into Wolf at the bar of the White Elephant Club in Curzon Street. Then the smartest showbiz hang-out in the West End, it was run by Stella Richman and her husband Victor Brusa. Wolf told me that he had just signed a three-picture deal to write and produce for Columbia Pictures, whose executives were not the smartest people he had ever met. He had found in his files this old screenplay that he had paid some donkey or other pennies to write for Peter Sellers. He had just sold the whole idea to Columbia and he was getting $150,000 for what amounted to some nipping and tucking on this old piece of junk, which was not actually as bad as he remembered.

  Since I was busy with other things, I contrived to look impressed at the way in which he had fooled the fools. Something in my expression must have given Wolf pause. He looked at me and said, ‘Freddie, listen, when you’re free, if ever, I’ve got a project I’d like to talk to you about. For proper money this time.’

  Wolf ’s shamelessness led me to assume that he must have an accountant capable of the kind of legitimate cunning that would enable one to circumvent the current punitive rates of income tax. He recommended a man called Cyril Glass. He took me on as if he were doing me a favour and seemed to have clever ideas about offshore tax havens and all the rest of the devices that, in the 1960s, were not deemed disreputable. A learned judge had ruled that honest citizens had a perfect right to avoid tax, but not to evade it. The implication was that, as in the case of death duties, one was either a fool or a saint if one did not take evasive action. Cyril put me into various schemes, commonplace for big earners in showbiz, and I made no objection. Later, one of them was adjudged to be more like evasion than avoidance, but I escaped public whipping by paying up. Cyril told me that he had a girlfriend, of the venal kind, who liked him to fuck her from behind. It was not that she enjoyed it more that way, but it allowed her to smoke a cigarette and look at a magazine while Cyril did his stuff.

  A Well-Dressed Man told the story of a lonely man who hears an appeal for a witness to come forward to save a man accused of murder from being hanged. My Little Guy cannot resist being the Alibi Ike to whom, he imagines, an innocent man will be eternally grateful. He commits generous perjury by vouching for the guilty man’s presence far from the scene of the crime, just for the grace of really mattering to someone. He then goes home, to resume playing chess by correspondence with a pen pal in Australia. Then the door bell goes and there is Mr Tattooed, shaven-headed Beefy who says, ‘Hullo, friend.’ End of Part One. In Part Two, the little man is so cruelly used by his parasitic tenant that he does him in. When I attended the first rehearsal, the two actors – one Peter Sallis, an old pro still at the receipt of custom, and big, bald Kenneth J. Warren, who died several years ago – were so hilariously straight-faced that their author literally fell off his chair and took several seconds to compose himself.

  In time, the piece was sold to a number of foreign countries. One day, I was telephoned by a French producer lady, who wanted to tell me how well it had played. I asked her how long it had run in translation. ‘We did it in three half-hour episodes,’ she said. I said, ‘That’s twice as long as when we did it.’ ‘We had a very imaginative translator,’ she said. ‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘did people laugh at all?’ ‘Excuse me?’ ‘Did it get some laughs, quelques rires, the play?’ ‘Rires? Mais pas du tout. Mr Raphael, you need not worry. We took your work as seriously as it deserves.’ ‘If not more so,’ I said.

  A Pinewood producer called Leslie Parkyn had seen Peter Forster’s review and my name on the bestseller list. He and his partner, Julian Wintle, would appreciate it if I would come to Pinewood and talk over an idea they had. I hoped that they wanted to do a realistic movie based on The Limits of Love, although I guessed that they were attracted more by the title than the content. The project for which they thought me suitable was to be a vehicle for Cliff Richard, about a Butlin’s camp. They were planning to have about sixteen songs in the show and they needed a storyline that would link them together. I went back to writing plays for Stella Richman.

  Sarah was being born while I wheeled Paul around East Bergholt. After a longish labour, Nurse Bray panicked calmly and called in Doctor Mac-Bride. I did not go upstairs until I heard Sarah cry. Then I cooked green beans for lunch. Before she left the Old Mill House, Nurse Bray handed me a brown-paper parcel, doubled knotted with strong string. ‘The afterbirth. You might like to bury it in the garden.’ I dug a deep hole at the back of the now overgrown asparagus bed and put the package into it, as if it contained contraband. We had bought Paul a scooter, which was now revealed. When he spoke to my mother, he said, ‘Got a sister, got a cooter.’

  I often took Paul shopping with me in the Ensign. There was a wide red leather divider between the front seats, on which he sat to be able to look through the windscreen. One evening, coming back from Dedham, a cat ran suddenly in front of the car. Like a good BSM graduate, I emergency-braked and avoided hitting it. I looked across and Paul was not sitting next to me. The car seemed empty, except for me. Paul was under the dashboard, in an unhurt huddle. I put him back on the divider and we drove home. From that day on, whenever I braked whatever car I was driving, until we became accustomed to seat-belts, I tended to put my outstretched arm across in front of the passenger.

  The S Man was reviewed in the Daily Telegraph by Peter Green. Having no idea that I was any part of the pseudonymous author, he denounced its endorsement of opportunism and took it as a symptom of the sickness of Harold Macmillan’s materialistic England. In her review, in some glossy print, Elizabeth Jane Howard perceived the glittering lineaments of Laclos’s Liaisons Dangereuses. One of my naughtinesses was to advise the S Man to take care to hang his school cap in the hall when he was in bed with his boss’s wife. Despite the limited experience to which Celia Ramsey had drawn attention, I have never found it difficult to imagine a life unlike the one I have lived or to anatomise the kind of careerism on which I was too fine, or too squeamish, to embark.

  A Spanish girl came to live with us in the Old Mill House as an au pair girl. Cristina Baselga came from a comfortable family in Zaragossa; she had never had to do any domestic work. We suffered her indolence for a while and then I did what had worked with my house platoon: I told her that we all had our parts to play in the house and, although I knew she was principally concerned to learn English, she had to pretend to be of help or she would have to go home. She took direction without complaint. When the Tonight programme came on the television set that Beetle’s mother had passed on to us (it had decorous doors that could be closed over the screen), Cristina watched and listened to Fyfe Robertson and Cliff Michelmore before he moved on with Derek Hart and she went to give Paul his supper. Cristina and my fat brown volume of Lorca reminded me of how much I missed Spain.

  Mrs Jenkins brought us pheasants for two and sixpence each. We were instructed to hang them by the claws until they fell to the ground. We were too squeamish to wait that long. People sometimes drove down at the weekend, Tom Maschler more often than most, with a succession of girls. My old headmonitor, Jeremy Atkinson, wrote to ask if he and Janet and their two children might come by and stay the night. Somehow we accommodated them. When Beetle proposed the same menu for her children as she was giving Paul, Janet said, ‘
That would be all right.’ We were not asked if we ever came north (they were living in Harrowgate, where Jeremy worked for ICI) and should not, in any case, have imposed ourselves on them. In principle, we drive for pleasure only in a southward direction.

  Beetle relished our rustic seclusion. She had the children and she had the garden. Country life was without stress and without loud incident. I worked all week, went to London to rehearse, when I was needed. I was glad to take the opportunity to play a few rubbers of bridge before driving home. There was no speed limit, except in built-up areas. After rush hour, I could drive the 70 miles back to ‘dear old Bergholt’, as Constable called it, in under two hours. There was only one thing wrong, from my point of view, in living in an English arcadia: during all the time that we lived at the Old Mill House, I produced many pages of script, but never a line of fiction.

  The Graduate Wife

  XXIV

  WHEN SARAH WAS a few months old, Beetle and I left the children with my mother and went to Paris for a few days. Being alone together, and out of England, made us lovers again; but not the same lovers who lived in those cold rooms in Crimée. We hurried to retrieve what we did not quite admit to each other that we feared we were losing. In the list of films in the Semaine de Paris, I saw one which was synopsised as being about an engaged couple going, with a party of smart people, to an Aeolian island where the woman, Anna, disappears. L’Avventura was on, in version originale, in a small cinema off the Boul’ Mich’.

  Michelangelo Antonioni’s world, in which couples could be more remote in the light of the desire between them, was unnervingly evocative. Caressed by her director’s camera, Monica Vitti was a vulnerable goddess, tipped almost against her will into replacing her friend in the affection of a weak charmer whom she knows she would be, and then is, a fool to love. The uneasy and unhurried rhythm of the movie, Giovanni Fusco’s pulsing music, the story’s lack of resolution, gave the adventure an asymmetrical elegance that I had never before seen in a movie. Antonioni’s art was so different from, and so indifferent to, routine cinema that it was both more acute and more enigmatic than that of any other director. We both fell in love with the movie, though not in the same way. I recognised and I feared what I saw in common between me and Sandro, the one-time visionary architect who had settled for an easy life; I also feared that I could see something in Beetle’s beauty, not in anything she actually said or necessarily felt, that passed judgement on my facility.

  During supper at the Acropole (red linen napkins extra), just off the Boule’ Mich’, another look at the Semaine de Paris told me that L’Avventura was showing, in a French version, at a cinema near the Opéra; we went to see it again. A single viewing had sealed the piece into my mind. I noticed that a small scene, of no great consequence, had been cut in the French version. As we were leaving, I approached the manager in the foyer with the righteousness of the convert and said, ‘En coupant une scène clé, monsieur, vous avez mutilé un chef-d’oeuvre.’ He said, ‘Ecoutez, monsieur, le dernier métro va partir dans deux minutes. Mes clients préfèrent respecter leurs horaires quotidiens plutôt que de voir quelques moments de plus d’un film qui, pour pas mal d’entre eux, traîne considérablement.’ ‘C’est un crime contre l’art du cinéma.’ ‘Vous avez le droit, peut-être les moyens, de rester sentimental, monsieur. Moi, j’ai mon métier à faire. Bonne nuit.’

  L’Avventura was a talisman of a kind of creative cinema in which John Paddy Carstairs and his Pinewood peers had no place. Antonioni seemed to be an artist who knew precisely what he was doing, although what it meant was somewhat concealed from the audience; that, I was sure, was part of his magic. L’Avventura defeated expectation, turned each moment into some part of a whole that was never disclosed. Why did Anna disappear on that Aeolian island and what became of her? It was a thriller without thrills, a love story with a sorry ending, at once incomplete and completely satisfying.

  I should discover, in time, that Antonioni’s project had been blown off its original course by a series of accidents, the worst being that the company was stranded on that bleak island by lack of funds. Lea Massari, who played the elusive Anna, had caught pneumonia and could not return to do whatever Michelangelo and the screenwriter Tonino Guerra had planned for her to do. What seemed an impeccable and seamless innovation had been, in large part, improvised and patched together; but it was a patchwork contrived by a master.

  In the spring of 1961, Cristina Baselga went back to Spain. I envied her. She was replaced by a fair-haired Irish girl called Siobhan O’Malley. Anne Moore had set no term on our time in the Old Mill House, but she now wanted either to sell it or to let it on a long lease. I knew that Beetle was happier than I was, but I chose to think that she did not want forever to live in a Suffolk village with no life outside the house and the garden. Our trip to Paris had reminded me of what we were missing. I had corresponded with Harry Gordon. His regular script reminded me of a world elsewhere. One of his letters told me that there was a house to let for June and July, big enough for the four of us, and our new help, on the carretera opposite our football field. The Villa Antoñita (nominally reminiscent of the director whose film had rekindled my interest in cinema) had a large square tower with a secluded room where I could work.

  Something prevents me from recalling clearly in what spirit, and after what discussion, we moved out of the Old Mill House. Beetle and I had unshared attitudes to leaving it. I had no regrets; she did. I was sure that, one way or another, I could make enough money, even when out of the country, to keep the family and I thought that that was all that could be expected of me. Beetle had her children; I wanted to be the writer I had been in Fuengirola and not since.

  Stella Richman promised that being abroad need not prevent me from writing more plays for her. The last piece of work I did before we left the Old Mill House was an adaptation of a very short story by Stanley Ellin, ‘The Best of Everything’. Set in New York, it featured a social climbing outsider who happens to share a table in a crowded diner with a disgraced playboy, to whom he offers a bed in return for instruction into how to pass for an Ivy League smart-ass. It took me the usual three days to transpose the plot to London, where Ellin’s Jimmy became a West End estate agent’s clerk and his tutor a remittance man called Charlie Prince.

  Siobhan seemed excited at the prospect of going to Spain. She went on a short holiday to Ireland to see her boyfriend, but came back, slightly against our expectations, with his blessing. We put the furniture from the Old Mill House into storage. The removals man, who had seen us into the house a few months before, said, ‘You’ve got itchy feet.’

  I should have known that we could not step in the same Fuengirola twice. Even in 1961, the summer months on the Costa del Sol were thick with tourists. Traffic and crowded beaches dispelled the timelessness of Juan Ramón’s ‘Catedral pobre, al sur, en el trigo de estío / cuando el sol puro es miel de los rosetones…’ We were richer, for the moment, not happier. I worked up in the tower, the door shut, in a big room, but I lacked the fluency that I had taken for granted in the Calle Tostón. Salvadora was busy and came only a few times to cook us a meal. We had a full-time muchacha called Maria, a big, good-looking, unsmiling girl who worked because she had to and who made no pretence of caring who we were. Unlike Salvadora, she was not particularly nice to Paul or to Sarah. At the smallest hint of reproach, she would say ‘Yo mi marcho a mi casa.’ We went into Málaga in the new car and, as before but not quite, we bought food and toys in the market before going to Antonio’s bar. He was older and, it seemed, more lame.

  I started a new novella, The Graduate Wife, to go in a twin-pack with The Trouble with England. It was set in a duplicate of the Old Mill House, but the couple whom I depicted as living there were based on the Atkinsons, whose condescending visit excited satirical accuracy. I imagined their doubles in a sardonic, very English tone which kept the author at a distance. I no longer had any inclination to self-portraiture in my work. I might be more sure of myself as a
writer, but I was less sure of what I was, or should be. The less I thought about myself, the more mature, and the more English, my work seemed to be, and the more distant from Beetle and from myself. I did not hurry to show her my daily pages; a symptom, perhaps of Antonioni’s ‘incommunicabilitá’, perhaps of a sense of no longer being as important to her as I was before we had children.

  It was too hot for football. Harry Gordon and I played tennis on the tiled court within the walls of El Alemán’s villa. After a sweaty hour, we could dive into its adjacent pool. Harry had digested the consequences of the death of hard-edge and concluded that he would have to go back to New York City and take a job in advertising. Our talks of the previous year had been full of the romance of the artistic life, remote and dedicated, but now the big city seemed nearer. Beetle had two babies and she wanted somewhere permanent to live.

  One afternoon, walking home, with my tennis racket, from the Casino Bar in the centre of Fuengirola, I met a large man in a tracksuit who was carrying a meshed sack full of tennis balls. He seemed to fill the pavement. He said, ‘You play tennis?’ ‘I play a little tennis.’ ‘I play with Jock Krommer on the West Coast. You want, I learn you. My name is Boris.’ ‘I don’t really…’ ‘You play doubles?’ ‘Can happen.’ ‘I play you with my son Sasha.’ Because he was in my way, I agreed that Beetle and I would meet Boris and his son on the German’s court the following afternoon. She had not played recently, but she had a strong forehand. Competition brought out the best in her game and character. It must be admitted that Sasha did not have the best possible footgear for the fast tiled court: he wore heavy rubber-soled boots. Boris produced several aces but was unduly ambitious at the net. When Beetle did not pass him, I produced lobs that left Sasha stranded. We won 6–4, 6–3. No arrangement was made for a return match. When we got back to the Villa Antoñita, Beetle said, ‘We learned them.’