Wicked Little Joe

by Joseph Hone

  He has, of course, no notion yet about saving money and if we were able to leave him anything we would tie it up well so that he could not touch the capital; he is getting a good deal more sensible, but he is obviously finding it pretty hard to cope with the fatal gift of charm, which he shares with most of his family. Those who are fascinated by him have allowed him to get away with far too much and he seldom seems to leave a place for the next without a great many loose ends and an atmosphere of spiritual untidiness. But many of his faults may be due to his lack of a secure background. So don’t let him irritate you …

  So there we have it – that fatal charm again, harped on like the words of a Cole Porter song. I certainly wasn’t aware at the time that I had any fatal charm. But I knew very well that if I was to get into pictures I would have to summon up a good deal of front and brashness.

  Finally, of course, there is the money business again between Hubert and my grandfather. It was good of Hubert to put his cards on the table about this, in saying he couldn’t leave me anything – which as well as this information was also clearly an indirect way of saying to Old Joe that he should leave me something: which Old Joe must indeed have been irritated by, for he didn’t leave me a penny. Probably just as well. With that fatal charm I’d likely have blown it all in a month with call girls and pink Champagne.

  TWELVE

  When Ford’s travelling circus finally packed up in Kilkee I was at another loose end. Of course I wanted to go on working in the picture business in London; but one of the British technicians in Galway had confirmed what I’d been told before, that without an ACT union card I’d never get any film work in England, that I’d only been employed with Ford in Ireland as a special concession because I was a friend of Lord Killanin, the producer.

  This was bad news. So before the unit disbanded I plucked up courage and asked Ford what I might do to further my career as a mechanic behind the silver screen. He raised his eye patch and looked at me doubtfully. Then he smiled. ‘I’ll tell you what, Hone. Go see an old friend of mine in London, the Irish director Brian Hurst. He’ll probably have some ideas for someone like you …’ He rolled the wet cigar about his lips some more and smiled again. I couldn’t see what he was smiling about, I’d never heard of this director Hurst. Ford gave me his phone number.

  So it was back to London, staying with my aunt and uncle Sally and Stanley, up in Hampstead. On a morning a few days later I called Mr Hurst. ‘Hullo-o-o …’ a deep seductive voice with a touch of Irish brogue answered. But then the tone changed. ‘Who dat? Who dat there?’ he went on. The accent was bright West Indian now. ‘Ah … I’m Joe Hone. A friend of John Ford’s. I’ve been working on a picture with him in Galway, and he gave me your name and said I should call you, that you might have some ideas about how I could get into pictures over here, and …’ ‘Come right on round, Joe Hone. Have a drink. I’m about to have a glass of the Old Widow – Champagne to you.’ ‘Come over now?’ It was ten in the morning. ‘Of course, if you want to get into pictures, no time to waste. 24 Grosvenor Crescent Mews, Belgravia.’ He emphasized the ‘Belgravia’ in a mock-posh voice.

  All this was a bit strange. An Irishman, mimicking a West Indian, drinking Champagne at ten in the morning? But I went right round. I now had to make another break into pictures, and this sounded an easier way than having to climb over a high wall.

  The small mews house was at the end of a cul-de-sac behind St George’s Hospital, with an alleyway leading off at the end to the Grenadier pub and Knightsbridge. An athletic young man in a striped matelot T-shirt, holding a dishcloth, opened the door. ‘Mr Hurst – be with you in a minute,’ he said abruptly, leaving me, clearly annoyed at something. I went inside, straight into a large gloomy living room, lit only by a big front window and a sunlit skylight far above, giving a spotlight effect on the floor beneath.

  I wandered round hesitantly. There were some very good pictures on the wall – I recognised a blue period Picasso and what looked like a Monet, and a Russian icon above the empty fireplace. A long scruffy sofa, a big record player, some books and Modigliani-like sculptures. But the room was dominated by a huge Elizabethan-style high-backed armchair, covered in a Turkish kilim, set next an ancient electric fire. A rather decrepit, threadbare air to everything.

  I heard a lavatory flush, turned, and there was Mr Hurst, doing up his flies, moving from the shadows, pausing in the skylight spotlight, so that I saw him clearly now. In his late fifties, I thought, a big man, robust, a flow of white hair over a well-fleshed face, intense twinkly blue eyes, a wry smile. He was wearing an Aran-knit cardigan with well-cut slacks. He came across the room, a gliding walk, looking at me, very relaxed. We shook hands. A graceful gesture. He had fine hands. Then he made for the big armchair, collapsed, took out an asthma inhaler, and drew on it deeply.

  When he had recovered, he said: ‘Get him, that one …’, speaking of the athletic youth who had let me in. ‘Doing his Bette Davis act. Getting above his station. Supposed to cook and clean for me. Now he thinks he’s my live-in lover. Not that I don’t fancy him. But there’s a limit with servants.’

  I perched on the sofa. ‘Yes. Yes, of course.’ I was rather nervous. I hadn’t expected this sort of talk. Hurst took another go at his inhaler, put it down. ‘Not a lot of good.’ Then he spoke up loudly in an imperious voice. ‘Charles!’ he shouted. Then he turned to me, sotto voce. ‘He likes to be called Charles … Charles! If you’ve got over your pet, bring in that Champagne. And the Guinness. Did you hear me, Charles? We have a visitor from Ireland, Mr Hone.’ ‘Yes, I heard you … coming.’ Petulant.

  He came in with two large fluted glasses, a bottle of iced Veuve Clicquot and one of Guinness. He popped the Champagne and the Guinness, mixed the foaming drinks together in the glasses, then handed me one. Hurst raised his glass, tasted it with relish. ‘See, I’ve gone native this morning, with my Aran knit and the Guinness. But with the Old Widow to go with it. Eases the start of the day, don’t you find?’ ‘Well, yes. Yes …’ I sipped my black velvet. ‘It’s not the alcohol I like – just the taste. So,’ he went on. ‘You were working with Jack Ford in Galway?’ ‘Yes.’ He raised his glass again, speaking softly now, the Irish burr more pronounced. ‘Well, here’s to you, Jack. “May the road rise to meet you, and your shadow never get longer.”’ Another go at his drink. ‘Jack Ford likes this. Pretends he’s only a hard liquor man, knows nothing about wine. In fact he knows plenty about wine.’ ‘Yes, I know.’ And I told Mr Hurst about our last night at the hotel in Kilkee and how I’d gone down to the cellar with Ford and how he’d looked at all the bottles and labels like an expert. ‘That’s Jack all right. Expert on drink, till it comes out his ears.’ ‘Of course not when he’s filming,’ I said, the puritan know-all about Mr Ford now. ‘No, not when he’s shooting … And he doesn’t go whoring then either.’ ‘Whoring?’ I was surprised.

  ‘You thought he was an innocent that way, did you?’ ‘Well, yes. I mean no. I …’ ‘You were right first time. He is an innocent, and makes sure he keeps it that way, and he’s made some great pictures that way, too. But he can’t handle real life – has to play the tough guy there, all those locker-room jokes. Backslapping, booze and fearful of women. I tried to wean him off that. In the thirties he was over here preparing The Informer, we went to Paris one weekend. I’d lived there, learning to paint in the old days. I took him to a brothel I knew. Nice girls but rather cramped accommodation. We had to share a room. I looked round after a bit, and there he was happily sawing away like a lumberjack. He turned and said “Pleasant, isn’t it?”’

  ‘I see. I rather got the impression he was very much the good Catholic Irishman.’ ‘He is, but only when he goes to Mass – and confession.’ Hurst gave a wicked smile then, so, encouraged, I went into my movie-buff mode. ‘Whoring, yes,’ I said, and continued sagely, ‘and of course he does treat women badly in his pictures. That long scene in The Quiet Man, when John Wayne manhandles Maureen O’Hara for about five minutes, draggin
g her across that field. And I saw him do just the same sort of thing with a young actress out at Kilkee station. Punishing the woman.’ ‘You’re right, Jack puts himself across very much as a man’s man. And he is – he fancies men and fears women. Only feels safe with them when he’s ‘blooding’ them on the set – or screwing them.’

  ‘I’d no idea …’

  ‘Of course, as a wicked Protestant from the black north, it’s never been a problem for me – with men or women; though I’ve since taken a reserve position in the faith. I’m Catholic now. For my sins. Better chance of redemption there. “Be Prepared,” I say. I was a boy scout, up in the north. Scoutmaster had his way with me. I should have thanked him.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘And now you want to get into pictures?’ ‘Yes, but I can’t get a union card.’ He raised his glass. ‘We’ll see what we can do about that.’ And that was the start of a long and lucky, often funny and usually happy friendship with Brian Desmond Hurst.

  Brian was the most genial rogue I’ve ever met – a wit, joker, splendid raconteur, widely talented and generous, a storyteller, a fantasist. That was the key to him. He lived on a different plane to most of us. Waking up every morning he saw the day ahead as an exciting draft script that he would flesh out according to his whims, depending on who telephoned or who turned up. The day in any case would be lived from the commanding heights in his battle against the mundane, against the dull and the dreary who would be routed and victory celebrated in a dozen surprising ways, the script produced in full colour, with every kind of droll or saucy performance, and with no expense spared.

  But as in Ford, his best friend, there was a brutal streak in Brian – partly his nature and partly because he was a movie director of the old school. This brutality could suddenly explode in work or play, with producers, actors, his boyfriends or with others, high or low, for Brian was a real ‘dukes to dustmen’ man. He could be cruelly rude and dismissive with anyone, just as he could charm them off the trees with a flow of Celtic poetry and blarney.

  He was gay of course, though not in the least effeminate. As he’d intimated to me at our first meeting, he liked – indeed, as I afterwards learnt, had loved – women as much as men, though latterly he’d concentrated on ‘the younger man’. He rarely flaunted his sexuality, but he never hid it. And this was risky at a time when you could be jailed as a practising homosexual, as his friend Lord Montagu had been just before I’d met Brian. Jailed or much more likely blackmailed, as some of his friends were then. To be clearly homosexual wasn’t the easiest way to get to make pictures at the time either, particularly with the puritan Lord Rank, nominally head of the Rank Organization out at Pinewood, for whom Brian made most of his last films. But Brian didn’t give a damn. As far as the police were concerned he led a charmed life in his excursions picking up guardsmen in Hyde Park and round at the Grenadier pub. Of course he fancied young policemen, too, and I imagine had come to arrangements with some of them in the Chelsea force, so that he wouldn’t be bothered by the law. He was part of the rich rough-trade gay London mafia of the time, with the difference that Brian was openly happy in that world while most of the others weren’t. ‘I am as God made me,’ he once told Lord Rank, when his Lordship had popped an awkward question to him about him ‘proclivities’.

  That was another big factor in Brian’s life – God, and most particularly St Teresa of Lisieux, whom he had made his patron saint. I used to wonder how, in all conscience, Brian could square his promiscuous gay sex life with his Catholic beliefs and his passionate veneration of this good woman. I think Brian knew that, if his conscience was bad, he would always be forgiven by the saint, through his prayers to her, and by big whacks of cash and confession when he went to her cathedral in Lisieux, as he often did. St Teresa watched over his future, his movie work and everything else, guiding him along all the right paths. ‘For He shall give His angels charge over thee to keep thee in all thy days …’ was one of his favourite quotes from the Psalms.

  Though I think the real reason for Brian’s happy-go-lucky, the hell-with-it attitude to life was that as an eighteen-year-old soldier with the Royal Irish Rifles at Gallipoli he had faced and suffered far more than most men, even in war, from the appalling carnage there and the terrible deaths of his comrades, so that any problems or setbacks – the dross of real life that might beset him afterwards – would be of no real consequence. He had survived the very worst at Gallipoli. So it was to be Champagne in the morning and a bottle or two of brown ale for the guardsmen at night. I was to learn later of his time in the army. In the meantime he took me under his wing and in the next ten years or so that I lived for a time in his mews house and went abroad with him, he never laid a finger on me.

  He came to refer to me in company as his Irish ‘nephew’. This wasn’t so that I wouldn’t be embarrassed with him and his queer company. I think Brian needed a pretend nephew as a familial stay in his later life: all his own family, including his brothers and sisters from his youth in Belfast, having died or lost touch with him at that point, apart from his adored and very wealthy older sister Patricia who lived next to the Dorchester Hotel. I was a pretend nephew – or indeed a pretend son. I think he felt something of that for me, knowing, as he came to, of my own broken family background. However, some years later he told me he had a son, a married, very conventional and now middle-aged engineer in Canada, the product of an affair with a French-Canadian girl he had loved years before in Paris. Though the son visited Brian at long intervals, coming via Dublin with presents of Aran-knit cardigans and sides of smoked salmon, I never met him. But then again, this man, conventional and very distant, didn’t sound like Brian’s son. Was he actually his son? There was always room for doubt in anything Brian told you about himself. As with Ford, it was the story that counted, and the hell with the facts.

  But Brian was as good as his word about getting me into pictures in London. A week or so later he told me to report to a friend of his, the production manager on a movie being made out at Elstree, by the Associated British Picture Corporation. This was a Boulting brothers comedy with Ian Carmichael, Brothers in Law. So for the first time I walked into a movie studio – through the arched studio gates, towards the big sound stages, with an acidy smell of pear-drops and shaved pine in the air from the cutting rooms and carpenters’ shops. Brian had got me a job as a runner at six pounds a week, a sort of fourth assistant director in fact but non-union grade, most menial of studio jobs. Did that matter? Not a whit. I was in the picture business proper now.

  I’d come in at the tail end of Brothers in Law, and being nervous, and not knowing what might be required of me, I lurked in the shadows of the sound stage with the electricians, waiting for a call to work. There were few calls. I didn’t do much running. But the next picture I was assigned to at Elstree was very different, a big technicolour American movie, The Little Hut, directed by Mark Robson with Ava Gardner, Stewart Granger, David Niven and an Italian heart-throb of the time, Walter Chiari. This was an adaptation of a long-running French stage play, set on a desert island with Gardner and Granger as the two shipwrecked passengers and a third, their very British manservant, David Niven – and a fourth, lover-boy Chiari. The whole desert island and the palm-leafed huts were set up on the main sound stage, against a huge blue-sky backdrop, the set blazing with tropical sun under a great cluster of arc lights. Now I had more work to do, calling the actors on set when they were ready to shoot.

  Granger and Niven were easy to deal with, professionals. There were never any problems when I called them. But Chiari and Ava Gardner were usually difficult. Ava, one of the biggest Hollywood stars of the time, was tardy on call each time I went to knock on her caravan door. One day she was late in answering my knock. Finally she appeared, very scanty in her grass skirt and bodice – more scanty than usual.

  ‘Miss Gardner, Mr Robson is waiting on the set for you.’ Standing on the threshold she smiled, looking at me with her huge dark liquid eyes. ‘Don’t call
me “Miss Gardner” – call me honey …’ she said sweetly. I could just see inside the caravan. Walter Chiari, upgraded now to Ava’s toy-boy lover, was sitting on the sofabed, dishevelled and looking rather pleased with himself, a bottle of whiskey open on the table beside him. He was lighting a cigarette. It seemed clear to me it was a post-coitum cigarette. Cigarettes, whiskey, and wild, wild women. I was really in the picture business now.

  My next picture at Elstree, Interpol, directed by John Gilling, was even more engaging for me – an international thriller romp, with location shooting and starring two splendid heavies, the great biblical muscle man Victor Mature and Anita (La Dolce Vita) Ekberg – real blonde bomber class, with such a sensuously extended pair of bristols that she could have felt her way in the dark with them. And Trevor Howard, wry, dry, and weather-beaten. On this picture I had more to do, mostly ministering to Mature and Howard, both of whom were partial to the bottle, so that I had difficulty unsticking them from it when I went to call them. They were a sexy, genial and convivial trio.

  Miss Ekberg never called me honey but when I went to call her in her dressing room I usually got a good look at the fabulous body, often déshabillé, getting up the lacy scaffolding on her bosoms. She, with her attendants, took hours to get ready for each set-up, and to my pleasure I would have to go repeatedly to try and rootle her out of the dressing room. She could see me in the mirror when I came to call her, and would look up at my reflection. ‘Coming … I’m coming!’ she would call out with a petulant pout, giving a last bouncy test to the bosom scaffolding. What a thrill!