Michael Hamilton was unaware of my obstinate virginity. When we returned to do a season in Bournemouth, one night after the show he threw a tantrum about my relationship with Alec, ending with him trumpeting to everyone in the crowded theatre bar that I was an adequate actress – he could hardly deny that in front of the paying public – but I would never get anywhere with a nose like that. I was devastated and perplexed at the viciousness of his attack. Alec stood up for me, which made Michael bounce about with even more apoplectic rage. After he had stalked out, Alec comforted me but did not explain what was behind this unpleasant scene.
19 July
Greeted by a copper at Victoria who told us I had created a stir on EastEnders. Shock, horror, incest. Oh, the English obsession with sex. Or rather the press. It was one drunken kiss from a rather sad old biddy, for heaven’s sake. They seem not to have heard the much more shocking stuff about me beating my children with a stick. John exhausted after the journey. He didn’t say a word about it on the way. He only tells me after the event – too late to help him.
As a young actor with radiant good looks Alec had been languished over by Michael and the gay community, particularly at the BBC where he worked a lot. For a lad from Tottenham, the glamour of their social lives was beguiling. Unfortunately a young man called Kenneth Morgan, who was a lover of Terence Rattigan, became enamoured of Alec. He left Rattigan and moved into Alec’s flat. What exactly was the nature of their relationship no one knows but it was fated to be unsatisfactory for Morgan. Always a disturbed young man, he killed himself when Alec was out one evening. Rattigan and many of his cronies blamed his death on Alec’s attempts to befriend the youth. The Deep Blue Sea was written about this story, and it is said that the character of Freddie is based on what Rattigan knew or heard about Alec. In many ways it is an accurate portrait of a fatally attractive but feckless man who unwittingly commands devotion that cannot be as fervently returned.
Like Rattigan’s Freddie, Alec was in the RAF during the war. Many young men who went through the ordeal of wartime service came out unable to cope with ordinary life. Six years of not knowing if they had a future, doing as they were ordered, and being regarded as heroes, was confusing for such young men. At eighteen Alec was a volunteer, as were all air crew, but he can have had no idea of what he was letting himself in for. He was a bomb aimer who could not bear bombing people. Lying flat in the nose of the plane watching the flak from gunfire coming towards him, he had to map-read and lead the pilot to the target and then release the bombs, often having to jump on them if the bomb doors got stuck. If the plane was attacked he also had to man a gun, something else he hated because you could see the whites of the eyes of the people you were trying to kill. He served in Africa, Italy and Egypt, covering hundreds of miles of hostile territory on each sortie, from which it was lucky if 50 per cent returned. Several times he crash-landed with bits of the plane missing, once in enemy territory. On one occasion a member of his crew caught fire in the plane and Alec cradled his smouldering body as he died on the flight back to base.
For two years he wooed me spasmodically. Sometimes in frustration he tried to break away by having a fling with someone else. The fearful rage these dalliances put me in started me on my career as a petition obsessive. In 1955 Ruth Ellis was condemned to death for shooting her lover who taunted her with his other affairs. Alec never did that, but I lusted after him to such an extent that he only had to look at another woman and I was consumed with jealousy. So when it was judged that for a woman jealousy was no grounds for murder, although it was often accepted as a reasonable motive for a man, and Ruth was ordered to be taken to a place of execution and there be hanged by the neck until she be dead, I was beside myself. I rushed around everywhere, stood on street corners collecting signatures for clemency and staggered up to the door of Number 10 Downing Street, as you could in those days, with the first of many petitions on various issues. Alas, I was ignored on this occasion, but her shocking hanging hastened the end of the death penalty.
Eventually poor Alec yielded to my conformist ideas and in 1955 he married me. My parents spent their savings on a nice wedding with a sit-down tea at the Embassy Ballroom in Welling near Bexleyheath. My father cried a lot in his speech and later our theatrical friends whooped it up with relatives from both sides. Alec was loath to leave such a good party, especially as he confessed he had done nothing about his side of the wedding arrangements – a honeymoon. We ended up traipsing around London looking for somewhere to stay. I lost my virginity in a gloomy room overlooking the dustbins in the back of the Strand Palace Hotel.
Alec and I started married life in a dark, two-roomed basement in Pimlico, which we shared with my girlfriend Jeanne to help out with the rent. The bathroom was also the kitchen, in which the bath became a table when covered with an old door. The colour and vivacity of the design in the Festival of Britain Exhibition in 1951 had made us aware of the drabness of the utility furniture and dull paints and wallpapers that we had grown up with. It took until the sixties for the new approach to filter through to the high street with the arrival of Habitat, but I did my best to be with it. I slapped on to the walls a very bright pink paint that I’d mixed myself with the help of red ink, and varnished the lino white to reflect what little light there was in our basement. An interesting texture was added by the dust and stray insects that landed on it during the drying process. My mother helped me to make covers to turn our bed into a sofa by day, with purple and mauve satin cases for the pillows. We were kept warm by a smelly paraffin stove.
The fifties were a strange interim decade. You could feel things changing, certainly amongst the young, but we did not quite have the courage to go with it. The reforming post-war Labour Government destroyed itself by the usual socialist infighting. The British public got nervous, and despite the huge benefits they had received from the changes brought about by Labour, put the toffs back in charge again. They had always felt bad about their treatment of Churchill, so back he came, aged seventy-seven, in 1951. When he resigned, aged eighty, Anthony Eden took over, followed by Macmillan. Members of the old school with a vengeance.
20 July
Poor old Jeffrey Archer, jailed for four years. Why are people taken in by these phonies? After I did Any Questions with him years ago he sent me flowers and messages and I knew he was an upstart but he got a peerage and all sorts. The same as when I met Robert Maxwell. Everyone was kow-towing to him but with his dyed hair and silly eyebrows he was obviously a figure of fun. Why did anyone trust him? How do all these second-rate men pull the wool over people’s eyes? But Archer didn’t deserve four years in a hellhole for being a fantasist. It’s society’s revenge for being taken in.
As the decade progressed our lives were getting brighter. I had learned to make a mean salad dressing in France, but was hampered in England by having to use a medicinal yellow olive oil from Boots. Then Cullens opened in Pimlico and stocked a beautiful French version. Only one brand and it sold out very quickly, but it was a sign of things to come.
I enjoyed the domesticity of caring for my home and husband. We acquired a kitten called Tarquin which I took on a lead to the nearest square, there being no earth in Claverton Street for feline toilet facilities. I took him to parties as well, affecting black velvet trousers and waistcoat to match his fur, worn with the new crippling stiletto heels. There were not many parties for us. When we were out of work, living on the dole, we could not afford the obligatory bottle to take with us, or to return the hospitality. Rationing had ended in 1954 but we hadn’t the money for much food anyway. In 1957 Macmillan said that we had never had it so good, but it didn’t apply to impecunious actors. In the same year I had a spell in hospital suffering from malnutrition.
When we were working we had no time for a social life except in digs with our fellow actors. This made for complicated love lives. Passionate affairs lasted the season and then everyone moved on. Propinquity, Alec and I put it down to. ‘I think Bob’s having a bit of pro
pinquity with Sarah.’ We were thrown together in an alien world. People were very suspicious of actors. We really were outsiders then. In a place like the Isle of Wight, where Alec and I did several summer seasons, the company’s goings-on were legendary. Most towns had a Watch Committee composed of local dignitaries keeping an eye on people’s behaviour. In Shanklin they kept constant vigil lest our embraces on stage became too explicit. The management had a letter of complaint that my shorts were too short for walking down the High Street. Husbands clutched their wives tighter when we went to social gatherings and our actors eyed up the local talent. One or two local husbands sent me naughty notes and surreptitious bunches of flowers. The son of a prominent local tradesman became flamboyantly gay, egged on by our juvenile character actor. A sombre note was struck when our dapper leading character man was arrested in a public lavatory in Portsmouth and committed suicide rather than face the inevitable sacking and disgrace. You had to be a star like John Gielgud to get away with it. When Sir John was expected back at rehearsal after his court appearance for a similar so-called crime, the indomitable Dame Sybil Thorndike rallied the company to keep silent and not mention a word about his case. When he walked in she was overcome with emotion and threw herself at him saying, ‘Oh Johnny, you silly bugger.’
In the towns we played on tour, everything was closed by the time the curtain came down. If you speeded up the last act you might just manage a rushed drink before time was called in the nearest pub, but there was no hope of a meal except in the big cities where there might be an Indian restaurant open. Nightlife was non-existent. Crewe station on a Sunday was a bit of a treat. Only actors and fish travelled on Sundays and all our routes seemed to cross at Crewe. The buffet was kept open and stars mingled with the riff-raff. We exchanged gossip and crossword clues and laughed over Tynan’s latest vicious review. It was a hand-to-mouth existence but we had great fun. I enjoyed my work and the company of my fellow actors. Above all, I felt secure with my new husband. Even Michael Hamilton was pleased – he got us cheaper as a package than individually.
22 July
Tory leadership battle a joke. I long for them to produce someone I can hate like Thatcher. We need an opposition to fear. A new entry for the Rough Guide – Harley Street Clinic for radiotherapy on top of his chemo. Lovely nurses, great oncologist Dr Leslie. John utterly stoic about it all. I filled him in on what to expect. He seemed not to turn a hair but after the session gripped my hand and said, ‘I don’t know how you managed this all on your own. I’m so sorry for that, my love.’ I love him so.
Another couple fell in love during a Barry O’Brien season. Vivien Merchant, a withdrawn, sensitively beautiful actress, became my rival for parts in the company. She had an enigmatic quality that oozed sex appeal, so I got a lot of dreary plain parts when we worked together. When David Barron joined us the two were soon an item. He was a brooding presence and supercilious about the plays we did. It must have been torture to him to utter that crass rubbish when his head was full of ideas very soon to be performed under his own name of Harold Pinter. In the Torquay season when we all went to the pub he was locked away, writing in his digs. I thought he was a bit of a poseur and nowhere near good enough for Vivien. When I saw The Birthday Party in 1958 I was staggered by its rich originality. Even though it was a flop, to my astonishment I discovered that our mysterious friend was a great writer.
At the start of his career Harold’s plays had more success on TV and radio. The theatre was slower to accept him than the growing TV audience. TV was now a significant element of public life. The size of the audience had leaped ahead with the broadcast of the Queen’s Coronation in 1953. Two million people had sets at the time. Then, in pubs, halls and other people’s homes, twenty million more saw the Coronation and presumably rushed out to buy sets of their own. It was a major event. Watching in a pub in Bournemouth, my favourite moment was seeing the huge Queen Salote of Tonga waving from an open carriage in the pouring rain. Seated opposite her was a tiny man in uniform. Apparently, when asked who he was, Noël Coward said, ‘Her lunch.’
My mother’s injunctions were now about taking care of my husband rather than being artistic or ambitious. We kept our Pimlico base but theatrical digs were our nomadic home. Signs stating ‘No blacks, no Irish, no dogs’ would sometimes add ‘no actors’ to their list. In 1955 many West Indians disembarked from their boats dressed in their Sunday best in response to the British request to fill gaps in the labour market. They were greeted by many with the xenophobia that seems to afflict our country. The Freedom Movement starting in America was beginning to enlighten and change us. Rosa Parks sitting in the white section of a segregated bus and Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech were an inspiration. My mild protest was to tear down all the ‘no blacks’ signs that I could in the towns that we visited. We visited dozens. It always seemed to be winter when we toured. My sister gave me a cast-off beaver-lamb coat which Alec and I slept under in the freezing digs, spending all our spare daytime in the Turkish baths if the town had one. I felt as though I was caught on a treadmill, destined to remain in second-rate repertory and touring companies all my life.
When a friend of mine suggested a change of course I jumped at it. Eric Lloyd was stage manager of Masquerade, a concert party on the Isle of Wight starring Cyril Fletcher. They needed a soubrette and Cyril rashly took me on. Alec was at Shanklin Town Hall in the rep, ploughing through the usual Agatha Christies and dire comedies, whilst I did five changes of programme on the pier at Sandown. I danced, I sang, I fed Cyril in his act and played in the sketches. Most of my energy went into working out which item came next and what I should be wearing for it. I once shimmied on to the stage in a Carmen Miranda outfit and found myself singing ‘My Old Man Said Follow the Van’ in a cockney scena. It was my first experience of working with a comic and it stood me in good stead when I went to Bromley next to play in Tons of Money with Frankie Howerd. I was thrilled to be so near London where someone might see me. I was playing quite a good role but whenever I was in danger of getting a laugh, Frank would intervene with, ‘No, don’t laugh – poor soul – she went to the RADA, you know’ (pronounced radar by Frank). ‘No, perlease, perlease have some respect.’ Nigel Hawthorne and I watched in awe as he jettisoned the script and went off into wild fantasies of his own. It was one of Frank’s frequent periods in the theatrical wilderness and no one important came near us, but supporting this anguished man gave us a friend for life.
Alec and I stayed in the company at the New Theatre, Bromley, a converted swimming pool, and when I played the dual role in Separate Tables I wrote to all the good agents asking them to come and see me, as Miriam had retired. It was a double bill. In the first half, playing an ex-model, I put on the hot black and skintight dress and in the second, playing a dowdy frump, I took off my make-up and wore flat shoes and a shapeless frock. I worked hard on the two characterisations, using a different voice and physicality for them. On the first night when I came on transformed after the interval, my mother heard a woman cluck, ‘Oh dear, hasn’t she let herself go.’
One agent was sufficiently impressed by my performance to summon me to see him. He was John Redway, one of the very top, later to be John’s agent. I was thrilled. At last. I walked into his sumptuous office and saw his face fall. He sat me under a lamp and moved my head from side to side. He said I would have to have plastic surgery. Obviously my prayer to look ‘all right from the front’ had worked, but close up I was a disappointment. I slunk back to Bromley and the comfort of Alec’s love and his faith in my future, which never wavered. I played principal boy in panto, slapping the now fishnetted best legs from the knees up with aplomb. For two shows a day plus two matinees the salary was a dizzy £19 per week and Alec earned similar as Baron Hardup, so we ate well that Christmas.
20 August
Beautiful weather at Luckington. We went for a drive and had a picnic in a field. Made love in the sun, slightly hampered by me squashing his chemo tube, then sat i
n the grounds of Badminton House having tea from a Thermos reading the papers. I suggested we buy a couple of fold-up camp chairs and start sitting in lay-bys with our picnic. We really are becoming a couple of old farts. And it’s lovely.
Tony Beckley dragged two of his friends down to see me in Dick Whittington. It was my first stroke of luck since leaving RADA nine years earlier. Disley Jones, a designer, and Eleanor Fazan, a director and choreographer, were producing a revue called One to Another with Beryl Reid. Known for her work in variety theatre, Beryl was taking a risk by doing a show with material by offbeat writers like N. F. Simpson, John Mortimer, and my acting colleague, Harold Pinter. Fiz and Dis took the risk of employing an unknown and I seized the opportunity to display the versatility I’d acquired during my arduous first years in the profession.
Harold’s sketch had Beryl and me playing two old lady tramps discussing bread and cheese and pausing a lot. In rehearsal, both of us, used to quickfire comedy work, had been appalled by Pinter’s insistence on the very long pauses being meticulously observed. In front of an audience he was proved right. They held their breath in the silence, then roared with laughter at the banality or repetition of the line that followed it. It was a huge success for Harold and a perfect sketch that still worked in 1997 when I played it with Dawn French.
The Two of Us Page 9