by John Calder
One day she approached me with a proposition; a Milanese lawyer called Roberto Pozzi, had had a daughter, Antonia, who was a poet – although he had only found out after her suicide. Signor Pozzi, remorsefully, having discovered the poems in her room, decided to spend the money he might have given her for a dowry on the publication of a volume, which in the event was favourably reviewed and sold well in Italy. He now wished to pay for translations to appear in other languages. Nora had translated the poems into English, and we arranged to bring out a small deluxe edition and a larger, one-thousand-copy trade edition. This came out in 1955 to a few reviews and very small sales. The disappointed Signor Pozzi, denying me the time to carry on offering the collection to bookshops, insisted on taking back the books he had paid for, and they were sent to him in Italy. When, years later, I put a few of the poems (including the very poignant one she had written before drowning herself) in a series, New Writing and Writers (No. 13), it was picked out by the reviewers and highly lauded. Nora Wydenbruck also brought me a biography of Titian, which she translated from the Italian, and other books.
By the late Fifties I was in touch with many who had belonged to the old Merlin group in Paris. Alister Kershaw wrote an elegant, if often macabre History of the Guillotine for me; Patrick Bowles, who had translated Beckett’s Molloy, was willing to translate anything we gave him. I was now extending my series of European classics with Goethe, Storm, Keller, Mörike, Eichendorff, Chamisso, Droste-Hülshoff and Gotthelf from German literature – usually with covers designed by Helmut Weissenborn containing apt little drawings in the period style of the book – and with Stendhal, Zola and others from nineteenth-century French literature, while some other titles came from Spain, Italy and Russia. April FitzLyon persuaded me to let her translate the Memoirs of Princess Dashkova, the friend and confidante who had greatly influenced Catherine the Great, and I produced an elegant edition with a full-colour cover, a rare occasion for us. She had earlier written a biography of Lorenzo da Ponte for me. Da Ponte, the librettist of Mozart’s best operas, was a colourful character: a revolutionary, a rascal in most of his dealings and a formidable seducer of women. The title I gave the book, The Libertine Librettist, came to me in a dream. April did not like it, but assented. It was retitled Lorenzo da Ponte in subsequent editions.
Da Ponte’s life was so interesting that the book received major reviews. Born of a Jewish family in a suburb of Venice, he was converted to Catholicism, took minor orders, but was arrested by the Inquisition for sedition and revolutionary activities. Rescued by his friend Casanova, he arrived in Vienna just as the court poet, Metastasio, died, took his place and wrote opera texts for several composers in addition to Mozart. Poisoned by a jealous husband, he left Vienna in a hurry, ran the Haymarket Theatre in London into bankruptcy and then started a new career in America, becoming Columbia’s first professor of Italian. I never failed, in later visits to the Columbia University bookshop, to tell this story, and so get them to stock the title. The book required April FitzLyon to undertake a great deal of research, and was much plagiarized by biographers in other countries, but at least it served as a useful antidote to Da Ponte’s own boastful and unreliable memoirs.
Meanwhile, at Calders Ltd, things went from bad to worse. My uncle had not the will to resist an issue of new shares, and I was in debt to the banks and in serious jeopardy. I went to see a firm of big city solicitors – Clifford-Turner, where I dealt with one of the partners, a Mr Batchelor. We decided that, as my days with the company were in any case numbered and my uncle had agreed to open the door to Wolfson, my only option was to get a good price for my shares, and that meant inviting a third party to make a takeover bid. Clifford-Turner then wrote to Montague Meyer, our principal competitor in the pole-and-sleeper side of the business, and they responded, finally putting up a bid at forty-five shillings a share on the understanding that they would get over thirty per cent of the shares from me, which included the block on which I had an option from the two Robertson sisters in Polmont.
This caused consternation in the company, and Vogel got to work. I was summoned to a meeting with Isaac Wolfson, the first really high-powered negotiation of my young life. For two weeks I went every morning to his headquarters overlooking Oxford Circus. Batchelor and I would sit in one office while Wolfson went round a circle of five or six connecting rooms. He had a different negotiation going on in each. In those days Great Universal Stores was rapidly expanding and buying other companies to add to the Wolfson empire. He would bargain for five or ten minutes, leave you to think about his latest proposition, then go on to another negotiation in the next room and be back in about half an hour. He used every form of flattery, both on Batchelor and myself: his voice would sometimes threaten, sometimes cajole. I found that I had to decide what I wanted to get and accept nothing less, or I would have no chance against this master negotiator. After all, the Montague Meyer offer was on the table – but it would not stay there for long once the rival timber company realized that they were in an auction.
In the end we reached a deal, forty-seven and sixpence a share for my own block and options. This was nearly double the stock-market quotation, but only slightly above the Montague Meyer offer, which was also hedged with difficult conditions. I then insisted that all the family relatives should receive the same, but finally backed down to agree that Wolfson should offer them forty-five shillings – still about a pound over the market price.
Part of the deal was that I would retain my seat on the board and my uncle would remain the chairman. I had nothing to do for the company after that. Some of the customers I had been dealing with personally continued to ask for me, and I still went to see some of them, although unofficially. Wolfson ended with a majority of the shares, but he had had to pay a high price for them. After a while, impatient because my uncle showed no sign of weakening physically, he was asked to step down, and a new chairman, picked by Wolfson, was installed. He was a retired civil servant to whom Wolfson no doubt owed some favour, a self-satisfied and pompous individual whom the directors all tried to flatter and kow-tow to, but he was little seen, only attending the board meetings and the annual general meeting.
“He’s not my sort of man, but no doubt he’ll do the job all right,” my uncle told me, and he gradually withdrew from London and stayed at Ledlanet.
At the last annual general meeting I attended, with my uncle still chairman, my relatives, whose interests I had protected in my dealings with Wolfson, tried to raise a motion to have me removed from the board, but a proxy was present to vote Wolfson’s shares, and it was rejected with a comfortable majority. I did not feel happy, however. I was of course now quite well-off, with a large deposit in the bank and not quite sure what to do with it. All this happened in the spring of 1955.
* * *
At the time of the Calder’s Ltd takeover, Christya and I were not getting on at all well. We belonged increasingly to different worlds, and our tastes were very different. I have no diary from those years, but I do have a record of the opera performances I attended (fifty-two in 1955), which serves largely as a diary would to bring events back to mind. We both knew an ex-actor called Lesley Linder, who had a background in films, had become a film agent and would, just a little later, open a very fashionable restaurant in Mayfair called The White Elephant.
One day Lesley telephoned me with a proposition. There was a need and a market just then for short films that had some of the characteristics of a feature film. Most of those being made were concerned with travel to exotic places, but some kind of a plot was desirable. One such project he knew about needed some end-financing, and if I could raise the money he would see that Christya got the part of the female star. She was always reproaching me for having ruined her promising film career by marrying her, and I thought that this might be the way to give her a second (or more accurately a third or fourth) chance. I could then launch her back into her own world: it was obvious we were not designed to
stay long together.
The director was to be Paul Dickson, who had recently been assistant director to Anatole Litvak on the film version of Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea. Some time during the next few months, the following, totally illogical events occurred. The original script was scrapped as dull: it was in any case highly unsuitable as a vehicle for Christya, who was far too temperamental to play the rather bland heroine walking on some tropical island. I then acquired the film rights to an atmospheric short story by Olive Schreiner called The Pool, a kind of ghost story. Then we found a well-known Canadian actor, Arthur Hill, who was soon to star in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in New York and London opposite Uta Hagen. Our original cameraman, whose name was Cedric Williams, left halfway through the film and was replaced by Shushitski, Dickson’s choice. Paul Dickson spent two weeks with me looking for suitable sights in Bavaria and Northern Italy, during which time we became friends, although not for long. I decided to become business manager myself to save money. I did not do the job particularly well, but I knew when to say no to unnecessary expenditure, and I could deal with Christya’s tantrums, which no one else could, so I at least made some savings. Initially I was meant to put up the last twenty-five per cent of the money, but with all the changes, especially those demanded by the leading actress, everyone else had withdrawn, and I was left with two leading actors, one or two walk-ons, an ambitious director, an artistic European cameraman who had replaced a rather straightforward English one, an intellectual young assistant who actually handled the camera and framed the picture, a lens focus-puller and about three others, who soon included Heinrich Falk, a German who ended up doing most of the production management.
I had bought, now that I had some money in the bank, a second-hand Bentley (and I can even remember the price: £2,200) from Jack Barclay in Berkeley Square. With this I toured Europe with Paul Dickson, looking at mountain locations in perpetually wet weather. We finally settled on a hill village called Castelrotto in the Dolomites, part of the old South Tyrol, where they still spoke German. Here, in continuing bad weather, the film was made.
I had hired a camera in Munich from a local film studio. The adaptations that Williams made to it so upset the owner that he would only let the camera go if his own technician came with it to protect it, thus making the crew even bigger. During the ten days in Munich, deeply troubled, I escaped to the Prinzregenten and the Gärtnerplatz theatres to see operas including Pfitzner’s Palestrina, Handel’s Julius Caesar and other operas by Mozart, Wagner and Strauss, which somewhat relieved my tension. At the hotel I met a very attractive Austrian bombshell and took her to Così fan tutte. She was willing to flirt, but I was too worried about the film to think about sex just then: the crew were all in Castelrotto, where I had myself been a few days before. What we did need was an open sports car for the film, and we had been unable to find one anywhere near the village. I persuaded Inge (I think that was her name) to drive south, to meet me at Castelrotto and be around while we made the film. I, in the meantime, had to return to London to settle details and buy more film stock, which I then smuggled past Italian customs in the Bentley. I remember my annoyance when, after stopping for the night at Innsbruck and arriving at the Brenner Pass border point the next morning, I found I had left my passport at the hotel. They had kept it overnight and, leaving early, I had forgotten it. This meant that I had to brave possible detection and arrest twice within four hours. The film had to be smuggled because of Italian red tape, which would have held us up for weeks, especially in summer. But I was not stopped, and arrived at Castelrotto in the afternoon. And there was already trouble.
Inge, if that is her right name, had arrived the day before, and Williams had taken her out to dinner. He insisted on driving her car, had obviously drunk too much and badly damaged one side of it. First I had to calm down Inge. Then I had to see what was happening with the film. It was not going well, and Williams was quarrelling with the director. Christya, who ever since I had first known her, had taken pills to sleep and amphetamines to get up, had overdone it and had slept through the only two days when the weather had been suitable for filming, sitting around with nothing to do when it rained. This was, after all, in the mountains, and typically it rained in late summer and early autumn. It was decided that the sports car could be used if only one side was filmed. I promised to repair the damage and if need be replace the car. We all had an acrimonious dinner that night. However, Christya wasn’t with us. She was staying on her own at a different and better hotel and never mixed with the crew or, at that point in our relationship, with me.
Before dinner Inge and I got into bed together, but we were interrupted and never had proper sex. Later, it must have been about eleven, I went to bed on my own, dead-tired, and fell asleep. Inge came into my room, woke me, and we made love all night. The next day, Christya, driving past us in Inge’s car for her next scene, driven by Arthur Hill, saw us together in the Bentley and gave us a long cold stare. Inge left later that day and I never saw her again. She drove her battered car away, never made a claim and never got in touch again. I hope she got as much out of our one night as I did, because once awake I was much roused: she was a wonderful sex partner.
On the last day of filming, (by now Williams had long left and had been replaced by Shushitski), Paul Dickson and I had a public fist fight in the main square of Castelrotto, which was witnessed by the entire village, because it was the evening hour when the whole community takes its passeggiata before dark finally turns to night. I forget what sparked it off: tension was high; he was not popular with the crew, and when I knocked him down and almost out, I was applauded. He left on his own the next morning. We had the film in the can, more or less. It was bad, messy and uninteresting.
Back in London I told Carl Foreman the whole story and asked his advice. He laughed, said I should write my own script about the whole adventure and he would film it. I never did, so he never had a chance to keep his promise, which I think was genuine. He also advised me to see Sam Wanamaker, an American actor in London whom I knew slightly, because he was trying to break into film in England, having made Christ in Concrete in New York – a commercial failure, but a success for him. He was then about to stage the Brecht-Weill Threepenny Opera at the Royal Court Theatre in the Marc Blitzstein version, which I had already seen in New York.
He saw the unedited The Pool and was interested in using part of it and filming new scenes in London, which would go towards making it into a short feature. I went along with the idea, because I saw no alternative. I assumed that Wanamaker was part of the American diaspora that had come to Europe because of McCarthy and the Un-American Activities Committee, but no: it was personal debt that had driven him overseas, as I was later to learn. He was happy enough for certain people to think he was in London for political reasons, but not everyone. On one occasion, I went to have Sunday lunch at his house in Hampstead, where other guests were present, as well as his wife and his small daughter Zoë. I was carrying the New Statesman, a left-wing but in no way extreme political journal, on arrival. “Do you mind if I take that from you?” he said, and hid it in a drawer.
I sat through several rehearsals with him at the Royal Court and met Brecht, who was present for a while, giving little pointers on details that had been altered in Blitzstein’s jazzy adaptation. On one occasion, he heard a sound and asked where it was coming from. Investigation discovered that an upstairs lavatory behind the stage-left boxes had been left open when someone flushed it. “You must do that every time,” said Brecht, “and at exactly that moment in the play.”
Sam took me several times to a Soho nightclub, where the current cabaret singer was the girl singing Jenny and rehearsing for Wanamaker’s production of The Threepenny Opera, and his current affair. My friend Jacques Chaix visited me just then, and with a little help from Wanamaker had a dalliance with one of the other singers in the show. Once The Threepenny Opera had opened, we moved into a studio and filmed
new scenes for The Pool. We had a famous film editor in Reggie Beck, but it still didn’t work. It gave Sam Wanamaker some film-directing experience, cost me more money, but never found a distributor.
* * *
1955 was a good year for me in opera. I went to the first performance of the newly formed Handel Opera Society, and saw Deidamia at St Pancras Town Hall with Marion Studholme, one of the most stylish and attractive soubrettes of the day, in the name role and Iris Kells as Achilles. I also heard a marvellous Figaro with Sena Jurinac and Elena Rizzieri at Glyndebourne, where Vittorio Gui, who was introducing Rossini to Christie’s private opera house, conducted an unforgettable Comte Ory with Sári Barabás, Juan Oncina and Ian Wallace, a perfect cast and one of the funniest performances I have ever seen. Wallace was later to become a friend. Tebaldi, Tagliavini and Gobbi sang the best Tosca I have ever heard that summer at Covent Garden. I have already mentioned Munich, where I saw ten operas during that year’s summer festival to help me deal with the trauma of the film. My book, documenting the operas I had seen now, recorded 188 performances of 91 operas, and the pace was soon to accelerate.
I was now living a busy double life. I was still a director of Calders Ltd, but had no responsibilities. The publishing company was growing: suitable books came my way, and I published them, although there were a few unfortunate experiences. I was approached one day by Anthony Blond, whose family were clothing manufacturers supplying Marks & Spencer, with a book of memoirs by Captain Peter Baker. Baker was the son of the managing director of Ealing Studios, where the Ealing comedies were made. Having left the army, he became a Member of Parliament, started a publishing company called Falcon Press and set out to be a tycoon. He acquired Grey Walls Press, a good little literary publisher, from its founder Charles Wrey Gardiner, who also edited Poetry Quarterly and wrote books of personal memoirs rather like the autobiographical novels of Henry Miller. Baker had started a new political party, the Commonwealth Party, which although short-lived made waves during the Fifties. At the time he was the youngest member of the House of Commons.