Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  As a teenager she had been able to get a job in New York in one of the women’s clothing boutiques of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where the woman owner found that male customers would buy clothes she modelled and then take her out, giving her the clothes. One such was Billy Rose, a cabaret showman and producer of musicals, and he hired her to join his chorus line. She took dancing lessons and became a “Billy Rose Showgirl”. Then she met Red Skelton, a Hollywood comic actor, who took her to the West Coast and introduced her to producers, and she had a contract with Selznick before MGM. Her big opportunity came from Charles Chaplin, who wanted her to play the lead role in his film Limelight. Her stories were always a blend of truth and make-believe, so I learnt never to wholly believe what she told me, but that story seemed to have some credence. Chaplin was under fire at the time for his leftist sympathies, and she was told very strongly that if she worked with Chaplin she would never work again in Hollywood, so she turned him down and Claire Bloom got the part. The truth may of course have been very different, and I was never wholly convinced either that her life had really been under threat from Louis B. Mayer. However, she had earned money in Hollywood, been under contract, made screen tests and toured with a starry cast in Ghosts. One of her letters of introduction was to a certain Bob Wolf of RKO Pictures.

  John Barnard and my mother were in Paris, and eventually, almost certainly because I needed money, I went to see them and introduced them to Christya. That changed things very quickly. I was given enough to get me back to Zurich, and with a one-way train ticket and a sleeper was seen off at the station by the two of them, Christya having gone back to the hotel. I disembarked at the first station stop, which was Troyes, had a long cold wait and took a train back some hours later, arriving at dawn. I then spent another two or three days in Paris, caring about nothing other than my passion, and was quite ready to end my young life for the sake of a few more days or hours of sexual bliss. Then she set off for London and I went back to Zurich and took my exams, which I somehow managed to pass.

  Then I took a train to London. I remember sitting up all night in a railway carriage, reading Joyce’s Ulysses for the first time. Christya was staying at the Savoy Hotel, and for two days I moved into her room. She was now seeing Bob Wolf, who had become very interested in her. He was a typical American film producer – I think about fifty – but I did not meet him until some weeks later. I then moved into what was basically a maid’s room, high up under the roof of the Savoy, but overlooking the river. I wrote some of my best poems there – one of which, ‘Swedish Rose’, at least survives, because it appeared later in a little magazine called The Glass. Bob Wolf was probably paying for her room, but whether she was sharing her sexual favours with him or not I never found out. She was wily enough to know that it was better to keep him waiting. I bothered her endlessly to marry me, and I think she was in love herself, but she was always confused, knowing well her powers of attraction, although full of insecurities. Eventually I obtained a special licence, and took her to the Westminster Registry Office, where I married her, going back to Zurich the next day to take my oral examinations.

  She followed me ten days later. She told me that Bob Wolf had proposed to her and that she wanted to get a quick divorce in order to marry him and continue her career, but that whatever happened she would still see me because she loved me. Within twenty-four hours I had talked her out of that and then made preparations to leave Zurich. I had all my things sent to London, and we went on honeymoon to Italy, spending a few days at the Villa d’Este in Como. It was idyllic, lovely weather, with a beautiful lake to swim in and wonderful local white wine to drink, so light that it could not travel. I seem to remember getting through three bottles on my own, since Christya was unused to alcohol, without succumbing to sleep or the diminishing of sexual desire. The days in Como were undoubtedly expensive, but when in London I had been able to procure some money from my father’s estate, which was held for me by lawyers, and this had enabled me to pay most of my way until now, although Christya was also using her own money. From Italy, we moved to Cannes. There was no time on the beach now: what I remember best is always being sent on errands to get things for her, from the chemist or some special food shop. She was very dependent on sleeping pills, stimulants and sedatives. She was also very faddy about foods and almost lived on yoghurt. I had swum in Como and no doubt I did so occasionally in the Mediterranean, and I may have read a little, but other than fetching and carrying, the end of the honeymoon is a vague blur. I then saw my mother and John Barnard, who had arrived on the Côte. They had to accept that I had crossed the Rubicon, but took it with an ill will. There would be little more help from that source.

  I was now on my own and had to earn a living. My formal education was over, and I went with Christya to London to start a new life.

  Chapter 3

  London

  I was twenty-two years old, in London, and married. I was in love, and the poet who had always been present in me emerged as I found my own voice, expressing my feelings and interests, having escaped the influences of the favourite poets of my teenage and university years. I was prolific now, and the lines poured daily out of me. A growing pile of poems was building up, and I would send two or three at a time to Poetry Review, Poetry Quarterly, Horizon (then in its last year), Poetry Manchester and a number of other magazines, sometimes quite new little publications, usually only producing a few issues before closing. One I particularly remember fondly was The Glass, set by hand and printed on a hand-press by its eccentric editor, Anthony Borrow, who was by profession a chemist but had a real enthusiasm for new literature, a penchant for the arcane, the occult and the mythical, and who also wrote verse plays. He liked my poems and published at least two; I cannot remember how many appeared elsewhere: there may have been one or two dozen. Sex, love and poetry went hand in hand and fed each other. Christya, both source and subject of many of the poems, was flattered, but did not quite know what to make of it all. Her preoccupation was with money, getting and spending it, with fame and frequenting the places where the richest and most important people were.

  On coming to London, the first thing was to find a place to live. Philip Frere, an eminent solicitor, whom I went to as a result of enquiries by John Barnard, began to handle my affairs in terms of unlocking my father’s money (not a large amount) and obtaining the income from a trust which had been set up by my Scottish grandfather with the money left by my Uncle Ian, my father’s younger brother who had died intestate as a bachelor at the age of thirty-six shortly before the war; my father’s three children were the beneficiaries. There was enough to live on modestly. Philip Frere, himself tall, handsome, urbane, with the bearing of a self-confident English aristocrat, owned and invested in properties all over London. He would not normally have wasted any time on someone like me, but he was intrigued by the flamboyant Christya and found me a temporary flat in Lowndes Street until I finally rented another, only a few yards away at 6 Lowndes Street, a circular corner building, christened “the gasometer” by residents and taxi drivers. I was on the eighth floor, if I remember rightly, which had a view over much of south London, with the towers of Battersea Power Station prominent on the horizon. The flat was let to me by a man called Eric Turrell, who had recently been fired from the publishing company Hutchinson. Walter Hutchinson, it seemed, had a habit of inspecting his employees’ desks when they were out at lunch, and if he did not like what he saw he left a note to leave the firm immediately. Eric was one such victim, who now filled in time working for a friend in property, whose profitable specialization consisted of splitting up large flats into smaller ones and letting them on a rising market.

  “June 1949 was a very fine month”. With these words I was later to begin a theatrical chronicle in 1989 of forty years in publishing, and again in 1999 of fifty. It was a warm and sunny June, and London was just coming back into its own after the end of the war. A few visual memories are stuck in my mind from that busy ti
me. I remember an open Sunbeam-Talbot, a very fashionable sports car of the time, flashing past me in Belgrave Square, with a young man and his girl, her long blond locks streaming in the air behind her in brilliant sunshine. This image seemed to epitomize the post-war return of a jeunesse dorée without care. I remember The Antelope, a well-known pub near Sloane Square, where Sir John Squire, last of the Georgian poets, would hold court every Sunday morning from opening time, surrounded by young admiring acolytes, talking of village cricket and his detestation of “that charlatan” T.S. Eliot, who had recently won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I kept my mouth shut, bought and presented for signature his Collected Poems, which I found worthy but dull, and listened to the conversation, typical of the English university-educated middle-class. I met a sub-editor of the Daily Express there, who introduced me to his newspaper. The Express gave me occasional employment as a part-time junior reporter, and for about three months that autumn I was sent to report on fires and minor crimes such as burglaries, which were common.

  I saw my grandfather occasionally. He took the news of my marriage better than my parents had. When he first met Christya he had evaluated her hips for their child-bearing abilities, and apparently concluded that he would soon have good-looking grandchildren to carry on his name. He had a house in Cadogan Square, where my unmarried Aunt Muriel now lived, and he stayed there when in town, still going quite frequently to the Ind Coope and Allsopp offices in Southampton Place. He had insisted that we get remarried in the Catholic church in Cadogan Gardens, and I seem to remember Christya telling him she would be happy to become a Catholic. If it had been to her advantage to become a Sufi, she would as easily have done so. Of course it never went beyond words.

  He turned up at the Lowndes Street flat late one Sunday morning without warning, and was very incensed that I was still in bed and had not gone to Mass. He of course knew nothing of my rejection of the faith. I was always busy with something at that time, but do not remember exactly with what. Writing poetry and making love certainly took up much of my time. During the last months of 1949, I considered getting involved in business opportunities that were offered to me, one to do with property which meant spending a couple of weeks in an office near Sloane Square, but nothing materialized except for one venture in publishing, which was eventually to be my principal career in life. As the autumn advanced into winter, we came to know what a real London pea-souper fog was like. I remember days and evenings when I could not see my hand in front of my face and had to grope along the railings from corner to corner. Everyone had a coal fire in those days, and when they were banned eventually, the fogs, which led to many deaths, quickly stopped.

  My grandfather still saw me as his heir as far as his property was concerned, but he no longer wanted me in the brewery, from which he was in any case gradually retiring in favour of Sir John Gilmour. He expected me to eventually become a Scottish laird like himself, even if I opted for a different career. He gave me a sinecure, a directorship of Archibald Tower and Co., a company in Gateside, just outside Newcastle-on-Tyne, that bottled beer and mineral waters. I attended half a dozen board meetings of a company where my grandfather was chairman and indirectly the principal owner, but he was never present. The managing director, a Mr Avison, was a bluff unimaginative old Geordie. At one such meeting he told us, the three of four directors present, that the company had been offered a contract to bottle Pepsi-Cola for the whole North of Britain, but said that he had tasted the stuff, hated it and was certain that it would never catch on in Britain. I tried to persuade him to think again: it was a world name with unlimited advertising budgets, but he had made up his mind and turned it down. Not too surprisingly the company closed its doors a few years later.

  An old boyfriend of Christya suddenly showed up in London. His name was Charles Frank, and he imported cameras and similar goods from Germany to sell in the States. He had bought much of Christya’s wardrobe, including the sable coat, and had helped to keep her life luxurious in Hollywood (which he visited mainly to see her). He was perturbed by her unavailability, but made the best of it. We took him out for a day on the river in a rented boat one Sunday, and I looked him up once in New York, where he offered me a sandwich and a cup of coffee in his office. Bob Wolf had by now returned to the States.

  It was a year when the new Labour government was making itself very unpopular with the middle classes. Not only was it blamed for the continuation of shortages – although rationing was ending – but the taxes on even moderately high incomes went rapidly up the scale towards nineteen and sixpence in the pound (97.5%). This meant that no one had much spending money, and the standard of living that the average middle-class family or individual had taken for granted before the war had deteriorated. Many of the West End plays of the period were comedies about the plight of the bourgeoisie under socialism. But there was a health service for the first time ever, free education, including entry to universities for those bright enough to pass exams, and the arts were getting some government money. For many these were additional reasons for hating the government. Labour had encouraged the BBC to bring in the Third Programme, which a small minority, including myself, listened to avidly. It kept up a constant stream of serious music and interesting lectures and talk programmes. A new class was developing because of the 1947 Education Act, which filled the universities with young undergraduates from working-class backgrounds, and this was to populate the art scene of a decade later. Somerset Maugham was later to sum up what he thought of this new wave of state-educated intellectuals with a single word: “Scum”.

  I went frequently to the opera and to concerts. I thrilled to Ljuba Welitsch’s Salome in a notorious Peter Brook production with sets by Dalí; I heard singers I had known from Zurich like Franz Lechleitner in Wagner operas, I heard Boris Christoff as Boris Godunov and my first Peter Grimes with Richard Lewis and Joan Cross. I heard my idol, Kirsten Flagstad, again in London, both that year and later, and Elizabeth Schwarzkopf in The Magic Flute. I was now keeping a record of performances, and I’ve kept this up ever since. At the time of writing this, I have recorded over three thousand opera performances and getting on to nine hundred different operas. With advancing years I have put down much more detail and comment. I am often consulted over who sang what on certain occasions, to settle arguments or assist other memories, but perhaps the biggest benefit is that my opera records help me to date other events with some precision. In the London theatre there was a constant diet of the three mainstays – Rattigan, Coward and Maugham – but French plays by Anouilh, Sartre and André Roussin were frequently performed in English, and there were more experimental theatres like the Watergate under the arches at Charing Cross, run by Tondi Barr and her husband, the Arts Theatre near Leicester Square and the Bolton’s Theatre Club in Chelsea. The Festival Hall was not yet built, and most concerts were at the Albert Hall, where I was soon to hear Gigli for the last time in Verdi’s Requiem.

  Life was exciting, with constant new experiences, but also a constant turmoil, since my wife was a target for every male who came our way. She also had no notion of keeping within any budget.

  One such male suitor was Eric Turrell. Having let me a flat, he would hang around a great deal, mainly hoping to seduce Christya, but thankfully there was no incentive for her to yield to him. Eric Turrell now started to talk me into starting a publishing company, combining his experience and my money, and I eventually decided to risk five hundred pounds, quite a tidy sum in those days: most people lived on much less in a year. We started to plan a list and to look for manuscripts, but the company itself was not registered until the following year, nor did we have an office address until then. Manuscripts began to arrive, and I read them. The first one we accepted was called A Spy Has No Friends by Ronald Seth (writing under the pseudonym of Robert Chatham), who may or may not have been a real spy. I always had my doubts.

  I joined my father’s old club, the Caledonian, that year, but used it infrequently becau
se it was too close to home. It had a resident barber, and I went most often when I needed a haircut. My uncle Rupert Dawson was a member and frequently there when in London, but he paid me little notice until later, when I was publishing books of which he could disapprove. I had spent a few days in 1945 at Orchill, and noticed on one occasion a handsome set of George Bernard Shaw’s plays and writings locked in behind glass. I was not allowed the key because no one was allowed to read socialist literature in his house; unfortunately the books were a present, so he could not throw them out. In the club, like many of the other members, he cut a military figure, mixing principally with generals and other senior retired officers, and I found the atmosphere too blatantly right-wing for my taste. No subject that interested me ever came up in conversation, and my personal views would have gone down badly. I also joined the fashionable Les Ambassadeurs, a club that was really a restaurant with a dance band in the basement, because the film crowd went and Christya wanted to be seen there. I was beginning to realize, however, that her film career as such was probably over, and that perhaps she had little acting talent. What she did exude was glamour and sexiness, something very different.