by Peter Rankin
They Might be Giants, clever as it was, did not catch on here, nor back in America, and neither did the film with George C. Scott playing the Sherlock Holmes part. The day after the play closed in London, a month after it had opened, something in Joan snapped. She was with Gerry and Tom Driberg at the time and it was nothing more than a casual remark, a bit snide perhaps, that did it. She walked out into the night, away from Theatre Workshop, which she had long thought dead anyway, away from the Theatre Royal, and away from Gerry. For anyone who had put a lot of themself into Joan, watching helplessly as she walked away, would have been terrifying. They’d be watching their own life walk away with her. In letters as a young man to Joan, Gerry said that all his energy came from her. If he knew that she was at hand, he could do anything. The opposite was happening now and, only two weeks after the papers were signed making him owner of the Theatre Royal.
If there were moments when Joan came near to her idea of autism – cutting oneself off from the outside world – this was one of them. Otherwise, the cruelty of it is hard to understand. As with her going off people, it was as if she had never known the person at all. Over the years, she continuously chastised herself for her actions but she didn’t stop doing them.
She went to the block of service flats where Jim Goldman had been staying and moved into his empty room. Tom Driberg found her, told Sidney Bernstein, boss of Granada TV, and suddenly Malcolm Muggeridge, the journalist and TV personality, had cut short his holiday in order to interview Joan on television. It indicates how extraordinarily famous she was by then. Her departure from Theatre Workshop had already been an item on the television evening news. Other theatre directors did not receive that kind of attention. On the Muggeridge show, she clowned around as if nothing was really wrong, sticking her bottom out towards the camera as she turned to retrieve her lost woolly hat.
She received a hundred pounds for the interview and that was how she was able to buy an air ticket to Nigeria. She had plans to film Wole Soyinka’s play, The Lion and the Jewel.
Because of her fame, many film producers wanted her to direct for them, Harry Saltzman being one. He was co-founder of Woodfall, the Royal Court’s film arm, and the producer of Look Back in Anger. He thought The Lion and the Jewel would be great.
She went to say goodbye to Gerry. He cried. She couldn’t wait to be off. A few days later – a visa was needed – she went to look at a grand old house that had been opened to the public for a day. Tom took her. A young man with long dark hair falling over a stiff white collar walked round with them. He didn’t go away. This was the 26-year-old architect, Cedric Price.
In one evening, he became the symbol of what would immediately happen to Joan, a rackety way of living, and of a dream that would run through the rest of her life. It would fly in the face of all Gerry’s aims.
They started an affair at once. Joan was so taken aback that she cautiously referred to Cedric in her diaries as Z. For the rest of that month, the two pinballed around London, then Paris, Turin, and Rome. She was so unused to paying for anything herself that she took to writing out all her expenses, right down to a cup of coffee. Next to these lists would be: ‘Feel terribly lonely – alone and depressed’; ‘JL VERY depressed’; and ‘VERY MISERABLE.’
Nigeria didn’t suit her at all. Although she found the people she met entertaining – ‘black Irish,’ she called them – the heat dragged her down and her hair started to fall out. Even in the middle of nowhere, she only had to say the word ‘film’ and eyes lit up at the thought of Hollywood and dollars, two words in everyone’s vocabulary. She was supposed to be meeting Wole but he, as much of a butterfly as Joan, had made himself scarce. He was In Venice, wondering where Joan was.
Dreading her upcoming birthday – she would be 47 – she wrote: ‘IF ONLY I’D NOT SPLIT, IF ONLY I’D NOT MET SOMEONE ELSE AND SUCH A ONE! WE COULD HAVE LEFT STRATFORD TOGETHER, MADE FILMS together – ANYTHING TOGETHER.’ Well, possibly, but she didn’t, and the film idea was a bit optimistic anyway. She had no experience of making them and Gerry didn’t like the people who did. After a month of Nigeria getting her nowhere – Wole did turn up but only at the end – she came home, where she immediately complained of the cold, got toothache and learned that Gerry had been in a serious accident.
It was Harry Saltzman who told her, but only in passing. Here was another case of bad news being brought to her. Harry was actually in the middle of trying to push the The Lion and the Jewel along, though with Joan and Wole it wouldn’t have been easy.
Gerry, Joan discovered, had just returned from travelling the waterways of France on a motor boat he’d bought, when, berthed near Beaulieu, he had lit a match in the galley and nearly sent himself to kingdom come. Cookers on boats are often fuelled by Calor gas, and Calor gas has no smell.
Joan went to Salisbury where Gerry was lying, badly burned, in hospital. Sitting by his bed, she did what she usually did in awkward circumstances. She rattled on about everything that was of no interest to the person she was talking to at all. Weeks later, when Gerry was well enough to go home, she installed him at Blackheath with a housekeeper, sat with him for a while, which made him happy, and then went off to see Cedric, which made Gerry unhappy. Cedric was ill too, very ill, but he got better. In the weeks to come, the mere word ‘architecture’ would infuriate Gerry, while Cedric said to Joan: ‘If you leave me, I’ll kill you.’
The pinballing carried on. Avis Bunnage referred to it as, ‘That time when Joan was drinking brandy.’ Normally Joan hated spirits. Her diary took on a different tone. Crammed together, suggesting a certain buzz but little more were lots of names: Shirley Bassey, Bernard Levin, Lionel Bart, Victor Spinetti, Sidney Bernstein, Dan Farson, Henri Cartier Bresson, Peter Brook, Peter Hall, Alun Owen, Peter Shaffer, Peter O’Toole and Orson Welles. Along with these were restaurants, Scott’s, Leoni’s, The White Elephant and many others, plus entries like ‘Drinks at the Ritz with Ken Tynan,’ or ‘Muriel’s horrid club.’ This was the Colony Room in Soho where members would go for a drink in the afternoon. If there was one thing Cedric had in common with Gerry, it was a knowledge of restaurants and booze. Outside one pub, Joan sat on the kerb and thought: ‘I have gone mad.’
She kept saying to herself that she had to drop Cedric. It wasn’t as if he was thoughtful or attentive like Gerry. If anything, he was rather unpleasant. Sitting in the front of a car, knowing that he was snogging Shelagh Delaney in the back, hurt her in a way that she was quite unused to. This pain, however, made no difference. She was amazed at the number of times she went back to him but then, he listened to her dream, and that would last long after the affair was over.
The dream went right back to her hatred of family squabbles as a child and the scabbing Oxbridge students of the National Strike in 1926. ‘A place where all knowledge would be available . . . a place to play and learn . . . The hate and aggression that are part of us, even our petty feelings can be transformed by creativity.’ Those thoughts that Joan imparted to her art mistress, Nick, when they were in Paris together, the ones that came across in her book as an Ibsen-like plant, they were what she imparted to Cedric.
Without telling Joan, Cedric went away, set to work and came up with that kit of parts known as the Fun Palace, which would influence, among others, the architects, Piano and Rogers, when they settled down to design the Beaubourg Centre in Paris.
Cedric, however, was young and unmindful of practicalities like money. Joan, just by talking, could create the Palace before your eyes but soon she would be talking to people who would go away thinking: ‘What was that all about?’; and those were the people who would be giving planning permission and providing money. What Joan was actually on about was more akin to a university, one that anyone could go to. Unfortunately, Jennie Lee, arts minister of the time, said: ‘What people want now is fun.’ It inspired Joan to come up with the name Fun Palace, but it caused confusion.
This is reminiscent of Gerry and the David Lewis Centre in Liverpool shortly afte
r the war. It was no good being vague, he had learned. Maybe, with the experience he had gained since that time, her could have helped Joan out. He didn’t. The idea of the Fun Palace was anathema to him. As far as he was concerned, it was a whim, a waste of Joan’s time and talent. In public he said nothing but, occasionally, he would let slip the odd giveaway remark. ‘Off with your pooves and punks?’ he said to Joan, watching her prepare for one of her disappearing acts. Even that was a coverall. Joan had lots of pooves and punks as friends.
Designing the Fun Palace, finding patrons, finding a place to put it and meetings with authorities happened over a period of years, so it had to come in between Joan doing other work.
She read the script of Blitz, Lionel Bart’s new musical, and even said that she would direct it, knowing full well that she wouldn’t. Peter Hall asked her to direct Henry IV, Parts One and Two. This went as far as auditions. Joan told a story about sabotaging them by sending the actors to the pub opposite, while Peter Hall and Peter Brook sat waiting in the dress circle. It ended with her sailing off into the street with Zero Mostel, her Falstaff, whom the two Peters had attempted to audition. This story is slightly spoiled by Joan later excusing herself graciously in a letter to Peter Brook, explaining that she didn’t just do shows. Everything she did had to have an arrière-pensée. Peter then put Zero into a short comedy film he directed about an opera singer coming to London as a last-minute replacement. He had to rehearse in the car travelling from the airport. Joan didn’t know about that.
In 1962, Peter Hall tried again, this time with John Gay’s The Beggars’ Opera, to be performed at the Aldwych Theatre. The letter he wrote was casual and jolly, but it casually and jollily included the casting; with Derek Godfrey, Doris Hare and Patience Collier among the names. Patience and Joan went back to RADA days but the others suggested that Peter Hall was insuring himself with the thought of solid performances, whatever Joan got up to. In the end, those actors did appear in it but with Peter Wood directing. Sean Kenny designed it. Sean had been discovered by Joan for The Hostage. In the case of the John Gay, he was the only one the critics admired unreservedly. The Two Henrys were supposed to have been designed by John Bury and, though that particular project foundered, he became Peter Hall’s designer at Stratford-upon-Avon, the Aldwych and Glyndebourne, ending up head of design at the National Theatre when it moved in 1976 to its current home on the South Bank. This didn’t please Joan one bit.
The Lion and the Jewel slid informally to the back burner. Casting actors in another country, setting up the right team for filming in a difficult terrain and Joan’s inexperience at everything to do with film was nagging at her, not that she let on just yet. When Joan didn’t know what she was doing, the front she put up was so convincing that no one spotted a problem. If anyone could, it was Gerry, and Harry Saltzman suggested that he be some kind of producer, but another project took over.
Together with Stephen Lewis, Joan wrote a screenplay entitled Sparrers Can’t Sing. It wasn’t really Steve’s stage play. It was the story of a character who, in the play, was only talked about. This was a film that would be much easier to make and Harry Saltzman was still interested. He didn’t do it, though, and Joan found herself working with a producer called Donald Taylor based at Elstree Studios, home of the Cliff Richard musicals and some tired old triffids lying around on the back lot.
She had the cast she wanted, all Theatre Workshop actors, including its stars, James Booth and Barbara Windsor, and it was all going to be great fun. Joan’s mood was light-hearted. ‘I always thought of film as peripheral,’ she said, her idols being Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, whom she saw at a time when people went to the flicks and, as like as not, sloped in halfway through. However, the fun soon ended.
Before the war, with unemployment all around, film technicians had to put up with working all hours. After the war, they didn’t. Hours became strict. Tea breaks were on the dot. Overtime was costly. Demarcation was precise: Hair had nothing to do with Make-up and neither had anything to do with Wardrobe. The camera had four people working on it. Sound had four too, even when little Nagra tape recorders came in. Imagine Joan coming in on this set-up. With those sorts of rules and regs, Theatre Workshop would not have lasted a day.
Even before filming, things were not going well. Donald Taylor sent Joan out with the cameraman, David Watkin, to shoot tests. Joan, with Chaplin in mind, asked him to shoot no close-ups. Donald Taylor used this as an excuse to sack David who went on to light The Knack, Help!, Charge of the Light Brigade, Catch-22 and Out of Africa. Happily, he did get to work with Joan but not on this film. The cameraman Joan had to cope with was Max Greene, known to his colleagues as Mutzi Grünbaum. If you wanted a creamy close-up of Anna Neagle with sparkling earrings, there was no one better, though it took him ages to achieve it. For Joan he was hopeless. Along with most of the crew, he had no interest in her way of working, which was assembling the entire cast each morning, instead of scheduling them, rehearsing for quite some time, not choosing angles, and only then shooting. It cost a fortune.
Bringing in John Bury and Una Collins as consultants only elicited angry letters from the ACTT union, while Equity, the actors’ union, got het up because Joan wanted to use May Scagnelli of Bert and May’s to play a stallholder.
It’s painful to read this list of misfortunes, because there were technicians around who would have been sympathetic to Joan’s way of working. All she needed was the right producer to assemble them, but she was out on her own and that was never a good thing.
This experience, which Joan relayed to Penelope Gilliatt in a huge Observer interview, put the tin lid on The Lion and the Jewel, as Joan explained in a letter to Harry Saltzman when turning it down. He, however, was on his way to the airport and the filming of Doctor No.
Gerry, to whom Joan had returned, and who used to say, ‘You think everything stops when you go away,’ had been busy.
CHAPTER TWENTY
OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR
Gerry was desolate at Joan’s departure but he didn’t let go of the Theatre Royal; after all, he did own the bricks and mortar. The flames in the galley explosion left his face intact, so he looked pretty much the same and wore pretty much the same too: chunky sweaters in the winter, open-necked shirts in the summer and trousers that were always falling off. He was big but his hips were straight. Next to his skin, though, from then on, had to be silk: it was all he could stand.
While Joan was making Sparrers Can’t Sing which led him to use the expression, ‘The dead hand of the British film industry,’ he listened one afternoon to a radio programme, The Long, Long Trail. It was a feature, the sort of programme Joan had made before and during the war at the BBC. The subject was the First World War and it had come about as a result of something that had happened to its producer, Charles Chilton.
While holidaying in France, he had gone looking for the grave of his father who’d been killed there in the war. He’d wanted to take a photograph but couldn’t. There was no grave. What he found was a wall with his father’s name on it, along with those of 35,942 other soldiers who fell in the battle of Arras and who had no known graves.
How had so many been killed in such a small area and in such a way that they could not be buried? This question led Charles to produce The Long, Long Trail. By means of First World War songs and a commentary, it told the story, not of the officers, but of the men. That was the hook that caught Gerry. A hunch came to him that a show could be made about the First World War, so, knowing he wanted to use those songs in this show, he contacted Charles Chilton. After that, he commissioned Gwyn Thomas to write the actual play. Thomas did, but it didn’t fit the bill. Gracefully, he bowed out. Gerry tried again. He commissioned the Canadian writer Ted Allen, and that, amazingly, brought him to the beginning of 1963. Amazingly, because what happened before the next three months were out, most people would have thought could only have happened over a much longer period.
As the year started, Joan and Gerry were
on what, even for them, was a remarkably rotten holiday. They were in North Africa. ‘Colours of Morocco, all repulsive,’ wrote Joan who had a bad cold, while Gerry was looking ill. His face was pale and there were shadows under his eyes. Excursions, with Gerry driving at top speed up mountains, only had Joan ‘stiff with fright,’ while one excursion with local hitchhikers on board nearly got both their throats cut. What started out as a pleasant walk through a market inspired Joan to suggest that Gerry adopt an Arab boy. This, at its best, was puzzling and, at its worst, cruel. Gerry knew Joan didn’t want children: ‘I’d rather stab my belly.’
Next, floods forced a huge detour which so tired Gerry that he ended up sprawled across the dinner table with his nose in the coffee and, that night, in their bedroom, Joan was either feverishly hot or freezing cold.
The flight home was delayed and, at Blackheath, there was thick snow. The next morning, Joan complained of a bad ankle and toothache. Having returned home after seeing the dentist, she wondered vaguely what she was going to do next and, once more, picked up The Lion and the Jewel but then wrote: ‘Wole, I have overrated. He overwrites.’
Ted Allen and his wife, Kate, came for lunch. Joan found Ted intelligent and the next day agreed to do ‘Ted’s war play.’ Gerry went off to book Avis Bunnage and Ann Beach. Ann had been with the company for some years. Joan wrote in her diary, ‘I am safe in theatre – yes, because Gerry protects me – and the work.’
Three days later, she actually read Ted Allen’s script and put this in her diary. ‘HE HAS NOT PULLED IT OFF!’ For the rest of that day she didn’t say anything. Gerry cooked Dover sole with a good dressing.
The next day, made filthy tempered by the play and with toothache again, Joan went on the attack, but it wasn’t Ted Allen she went for. It was Gerry of whom she had just written, ‘Gerry protects me.’