The Two of Us

by Sheila Hancock

  Few people outside the family knew what was going on. On the set of Morse they were puzzled by John’s moods. Sometimes he would emerge from his Winnebago and want to chat. At other times he made it obvious he wanted to be left alone. He was usually kind to small-part actors but once when one was pestering him for advice he snapped, ‘Listen, sunshine, all you have to do is hit the Duke of York [chalk mark] and get the dickies [birds – words] right.’

  He complained about directors ‘shooting the arse off the scene’ with shots that he knew would be edited out. ‘I’m giving you a week’s work for nothing.’

  ‘Well, come on, shoot it before it shoots us,’ would be his grumble at long delays, or, ‘Now listen, I’ve got a nice house by the river, I’d like to see it before it gets dark.’

  He could still laugh on occasion. Filming in Oxford, a sweating electrician with his belly hanging over his trousers heaved a lamp past an elegant woman who was watching. John was delighted to hear her say to her friend in a pained voice, ‘Who would’ve thought such a wonderful programme could be made by such a bunch of thugs?’ ‘Morning, thuggies,’ was John’s daily greeting from that day forth.

  John relished a repetitive gag. His ‘Help me, help me’ cries could be adapted to any situation. In the bedroom, ‘Help me, help me, I’m trapped in this house with a sex maniac’; when learning lines, ‘Help me, help me, my brain hurts’; in France, ‘Au secours me, au secours me, I’m surrounded by foreigners.’ A loud, preferably indistinct ‘Cut!’ always demanded, ‘Is he talking about me?’ After his CBE in 1993, if he had difficulty with some lines, he would complain haughtily, ‘I can’t say this rubbish – I’m a Commander of the British Empire, I tell you.’

  He had round him in all his shows a team of supporters with whom he felt safe and at home. More at home than in his home. They made no emotional demands on him and over the years they were his bulwark against interference. Micky his driver, Tony his dresser, Barry his stand-in and Pauline continuity, as well as regular make-up girls and a designer, Sue Yelland, nicknamed the Rottweiler. He called them his Scallywags and when away on location it was with them he would go out rather than actors or directors. They knew how to jolt him out of a mood, usually by having a funny conversation within earshot until he shouted, ‘Fuck off, you’re driving me mad. I’ll swing for you lot.’ He joined in one of their japes. Pauline’s daughter Katie was having a smart twenty-first birthday party and Pauline told John she wished to leave the set in time to attend it. On wrap of filming for the day Pauline returned to the unit base to find the dining bus done up with balloons and streamers and the Scallywags and John wearing paper hats and excitedly blowing squeakers ready to embark on a trip to join the celebration.

  Despite being the fall guy or doll for many of his jokes, Pauline was devoted to John and he to her. On set she learned to prompt him with a gentle ‘Did you mean to say that?’ rather than ‘You got that line wrong.’ If he had no faith in the current director, after a scene he would look at Pauline for a nod of approval or a signal that ‘No, you could do better.’ He trusted all of them implicitly.

  Beneath the surface jollity, the people closest to him suspected he was in a bad way. John Madden reckoned that John only felt safe when acting. He could control emotions when he acted them. Real ones were messy. Madden directed an episode of Morse set in Australia. John asked me to go with him but I refused while he was still drinking. I was frightened of being isolated with him away from home while his attitude towards me was so volatile. He was distraught at my refusal and his misery was converted into one of the most effective scenes ever shot in Morse. As John Madden, not aware of the personal relevance of the scene, described it in his obituary:

  My most poignant memory of him is at the end of Julian Mitchell’s episode, ‘The Promised Land’, which we spent four months shooting in New South Wales, when Morse travels to Australia in search of a supergrass. It all goes wrong and it is all Morse’s fault. In the final scene he stands at the foot of the Sydney Opera House steps.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ he asks Lewis.

  Lewis plans to meet his family. Morse wishes him well, looks after him as he goes and then turns to mount the endless steps, carrying in every agonised step the loneliness and pain of mankind. Is this an exaggeration? For me it was great acting. Every actor creates his part with the audience. John had built this character with all of us, we all knew him. We didn’t want him to walk away.

  7 April

  Not besotted with Barcelona. Too noisy, too much traffic. Hotel pretentious. But then I’m not in the right frame of mind. Abs has summed it up in a poem, which I want her to do at the memorial service if she can face it:

  Last week we went to Barcelona.

  A beautiful city; the kids had fun.

  He really should have come too – I missed him.

  Mum thought it would be a good thing too.

  He had wanted to go for twenty years.

  So last week we went to Barcelona.

  So excited when he opened the card:

  First class tickets and a suite at the Ritz.

  He really should have come too – I missed him.

  We held a simple funeral at home;

  Sorted through his clothes and belongings

  And last week we went to Barcelona.

  When the cancer came back we’d changed the dates

  Something to look forward to, the doctors had said.

  He really should have come too – I missed him.

  ‘He would have liked this’ became our mantra.

  Endless booze-soaked toasts, ‘Happy birthday, Dad’.

  Last week we went to Barcelona.

  He should have come too – I missed him.

  In 1990 both Morse and Home to Roost were in the Top 10 of the ratings. John was at the height of his popularity but off screen he was fighting profound depression. During our eighteen-month separation I wrote to him: ‘I and the girls will do almost anything to make you happy. You are deeply loved and we long for you to discover how good life can be . . . it is terrible for me and the girls to watch you being so, so sad. You feel lonely and persecuted but you only have to ring one of your daughters and they would be there. They daren’t ring you, sadly.’

  We were still living apart, incapable of communicating, when John chose his eight records to take on a desert island in Desert Island Discs. They were all a coded message to me. One Easter at the start of our marriage, we were going to go to Handel’s Messiah at the Albert Hall. We couldn’t get in, so we rushed over to the Festival Hall where they were performing the Bach St Matthew Passion. I was not a great Bach fan then, saying, in my supreme ignorance, that he did not write nice tunes. I was horrified when I discovered that the concert was five hours long with a supper break. It turned out to be an evening of revelation and pure ecstasy. We were higher than any drug could send us. Another of his choices was me singing ‘Little Girls’ from Annie. The Sibelius was the music we had listened to in his car when on tour with So What About Love? The Schubert was one he had gone to a lot of trouble choosing as incidental music for a production of mine. The Elgar Cello Concerto was a favourite of us both. One of Strauss’s Four Last Songs was sung by Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, who, he quite truthfully told Sue Lawley, he often joked was the only woman he would leave me for. He was less truthful when, in parrying Sue’s questions about his drinking, he said he had stopped and found it as easy as giving up sugar in his tea.

  His denial of his problem should have sent out warning signals but the ploy was irresistible. All the reminders of why I loved him and the things we had in common touched me. He was filming an episode of Morse in Verona and I rushed out there to join him. Then he came to Los Angeles with me where I was filming Three Men and a Little Lady. We had a wonderful time, except on a visit to Disneyland, where it teemed with rain and Joanna persuaded us to wear absurd plastic hats.

  21 April

  A day from hell. The BAFTAs. Terrified getting ready. The indispensa
ble Martyn propped up my face with make-up and gave me a pep talk. Jo, Ellie and I gripped hands and walked the red carpet.

  Photographers and fans screamed, ‘Sheila, Sheila, this way, this way.’ Jo was terrified I had to collect an award for John. I was all right until they showed some clips of him. It was the first time I’d watched him. Thank God I had Dominique, the little girl from Buried Treasure with me, so I had to pull myself together so as not to upset her. Made a speech I think. Can’t remember what I said. Then had to wait to see if I had won Best Actress for Russian Bride. It was Julie Walters. Bit disappointed because I’ll never have such a good part again, and everyone was very hopeful. But there you go. The little fat one with the white hair got his. At the do afterwards colleagues were lovely. I do love actors. They are thoroughly nice people. Such a small community really. I mean proper actors not celebrities. After all these years, between us John and I seem to know everyone. They all seemed genuinely sad at his death.

  Over the next five years John and I behaved like characters in a cartoon, ricocheting in and out of each other’s arms. It became farcical. By the start of the nineties our two older girls had their own lives and loves; they were growing up, we were becoming infantile. In 1993 Joanna went off to Paris for a year. She could not keep up with our on-off relationship.

  Every time we got back together again we would buy a new home or do something to an existing house or garden. It was as if we were trying to strengthen the marriage by improving the setting, instead of getting down to the root cause of our problems. In 1991 we found a tumbledown stone house in a hameau in the Luberon in France. It was surrounded by a cherry orchard, vineyards and lavender fields. There were no English people so we were blissfully anonymous. We sat in cafés and looked in shops instead of tearing around with our heads down to escape attention. John visibly relaxed and only occasionally let out a faint, ‘Au secours moi, je want to reste ici.’

  But we couldn’t stay in France all the time. Back in England and back at Morse, it all fell apart again. The house by the river in Chiswick became associated with miserable silences and fierce rows. OK. Change it. How about a house in the country? In 1992 we acquired a Cotswold stone house by a stream with a field attached in Luckington, which became known, rather optimistically, as Lucky. That didn’t work. So we bought a flat in Chiswick as well. We re-created two gardens, redid a kitchen and two bathrooms. Each piece of property development marked a rupture and supposed fresh start. It was absurd, and our girls got very angry with us. They could not understand or bear the pain we seemed to be inflicting on each other. They came home less and less, saying it was like having an invalid in the house to tiptoe around John’s erratic moods and my distraught reaction to them.

  Madness seemed to be in the air in the nineties, it wasn’t just us. We were urged to be entrepreneurial, to look after ourselves and our families and not rely on the state, although curiously Thatcher herself was quoted as saying that for her home was somewhere to go to if you had nothing better to do. The increase of individual acts of violence was a distortion of the Me Society. One man took it upon himself to kill gays and people from ethnic minorities with homemade nail bombs. Thomas Hamilton shot dead sixteen children and a teacher in Dunblane in revenge for personal grievances. Another man did the same in the streets of peaceful Hungerford. Some youths killed a black lad, Stephen Lawrence, and a later report concluded that not only were they racist but the police showed institutional racism in the way they handled the case. In the US, a right-wing ex-soldier killed over a hundred people with a bomb in front of a federal building in Oklahoma. Two youths shot thirteen schoolfriends in Denver. A bomb exploded in one of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, though it was not given much coverage. There were constant IRA atrocities, most notoriously in Omagh where twenty-nine people died, and in Manchester in 1996, when the Exchange Theatre and a lot of the city centre were destroyed. A more positive event in the nineties was that thanks to Thatcher, John Major and later Blair and Clinton, and some Irish politicians, the greatly improved situation in Ireland meant that terrorist acts on the mainland became rare. Clinton also looked on as Arafat and Rabin shook hands over the Palestinian problem. In 1995 Rabin was killed at a peace rally and they were back to square one.

  As the century drew to a close the atmosphere was tainted by disturbing murder cases. The squalor of the Wests’ sordid lives led to savage butchery for which the suicide of Fred West and his brother seemed a fitting end. The whole nation was appalled that two ten-year-old boys could kill the two-year-old James Bulger. With the murder of Sarah Payne, paedophilia became the decade’s evil of choice to get worked up about. We were forced to peer into lives that horrified us. Hidden lives.

  25 April

  Recording Bedtime again. Everyone was wonderful but last time I did it John was alive. Dreaded going home to empty house. He would have welcomed me, ‘How did it go, pet?’, cooked a meal, fussed over me. But the house was empty, I had no food in and no one to dissect the day with. I actually would rather be dead than live like this. I can’t do solitude.

  Keep thinking of what I was doing this time last year before this calamity. Today we were in France having a picnic up in the mountains of Silverque with Liz and David. We lay in the sun, ate, laughed and hadn’t a care in the world.

  In my childhood little was known about what went on behind the gates of Buckingham Palace. The Duke of Windsor’s affair with Wallis Simpson was kept secret from the hoi polloi. Now the Queen’s business was pried into by the scandal-obsessed press. She declared 1992 her annus horribilis. Windsor Castle had a major fire and all her sons and her daughter had relationship problems. Nothing more vividly illustrates the changes in society than the blank bewilderment on this good woman’s face. Everything she had been taught to believe in was disintegrating. My world too seemed to be crumbling. In 1992 I did a TV series aptly named Gone to Seed in which I played opposite Peter Cook. I had known him during and just after his university days. He wrote much of the material of the revue that I did with Kenneth Williams. He was at that time a hilariously funny, extremely beautiful young man. Now he was a shambling, sweating wreck. Alcohol had destroyed him. He died three years later, aged fifty-seven.

  It had begun to seep into our thick consciousness that our difficulties would never be sorted without confronting John’s drinking and my attitude to it, which in his opinion was more of a problem. John made several attempts to stop but always fell off the wagon as he tried to pull off the impossible feat of doing it on his own. He filled his mind with work, which was not, as yet, affected by his drinking. But the situation was not helped by him doing two projects that were not a great success. Stanley and the Women, adapted from the book by Kingsley Amis, could not hide its misogynist theme. John’s attempt to transform his appearance for the part, resulting in orange hair, did not improve it either.

  In 1993 John seized the opportunity to live in his beloved French house while filming A Year in Provence, but I did not go with him. I had originally been asked to play his wife but a new director decided I was too old for the role. It is the rule on TV, if not in life, that even old men have pretty young wives. Peter Mayle has always been unpopular with fellow journalists, probably because he hit on an idea, which made him a fortune, that any one of them could have written if they had only thought of it. The series was a flop, though not as big as the one I was involved in – a misconceived, badly directed English version of The Golden Girls called Brighton Belles, which was dropped after a few episodes. That deserved to bomb but the vitriol heaped on A Year in Provence was out of all proportion to the gravity of a rather trite little comedy not quite pulling it off. The Americans loved it, but the British did not. John’s confidence, still fragile despite his success in Morse, was shattered, plunging him further into depression. He decided to try the theatre.

  3 May

  One of the crew of Bedtime said, ‘Your tyres are worn out and dangerous, Sheila.’ I didn’t know what to do. John would have d
ealt with these things. But I got it sorted. I’ve bloody well got to learn to cope. Felt quite pleased with myself. Then had to do a shot looking in a mirror. Christ, I look old. Why does anyone employ such an ugly old hag?

  In 1993 an offer came from the National Theatre to play the lead in a new play by David Hare. Absence of War was the last of a trilogy about the state of the nation, covering the law, religion and, in John’s play, politics. It was about a passionate Labour man confronting the adaptation needed to make his party electable to the masses. Although not meant to be Neil Kinnock, many of the characteristics of the role were his. It certainly was the dilemma that he faced with a party that seemed doomed to stay in opposition unless it changed its image. In 1992 John and I had watched the TV in horror as any possibility of election victory was destroyed by a ludicrous American-style jamboree rally in Sheffield. The worst moment was when Kinnock, high on the orchestrated jubilation on his arrival, kept saying dementedly, ‘A’right, a’right, we’re a’right.’ He resigned soon afterwards and the more sedate, highly respected John Smith became leader until he tragically died. Blair steamed in and on to victory, and brought about the changes Kinnock had attempted.