My Life in Pieces

by Simon Callow

  Shellac was out, now. I put together a gramophone from various spare pieces; then began my love affair with vinyl as I discovered not golden gobbets but whole operas. The sequence, I found, was everything. When I first heard the chain of two arias and a duet at the end of the first act of La Bohème together instead of separately, I thought I’d explode (as I must say I have thought I’d explode on every subsequent hearing). There was no end it seemed to the territories in this new universe. With Stephen Williams’s masterful Come to the Opera as my vade mecum, I more or less moved in to Sadler’s Wells, where the entire repertory crammed itself onto that unaccommodating stage: operettas, early Verdi, Britten, Kurt Weill, Janáček, Thea Musgrave. I could see that the productions were somewhat hastily put together, that the chorus were barely numerous enough to do what was called of them – in The Flying Dutchman the sailors were unmistakably running round the back of the stage to take their place at the end of the rope again. But what the hell. Norman Bailey was singing Daland, for goodness’ sake, Rita Hunter was Senta. Then after some years came the staggering culmination of everything everyone – Lilian Baylis, Tyrone Guthrie, Constant Lambert, Colin Davis and indeed the audience, because we felt ourselves part of the Wells – had worked for, the monumental evening when the Sadler’s Company and the Wells Company joined forces to mount The Mastersingers of Nuremberg on that impossibly tiny stage, Reginald Goodall weaving his immense gold-threaded tapestry in the pit, every strand clear, the whole picture radiant, while all those singers whom we had watched and relished, who had grown in artistic stature from performance to performance as we watched them, were now constituted into the noblest thing the theatre has to offer: a great ensemble, integrated yet individuated, a living organism, a huge celebration of human life.

  In fact, opera was rather closer to home than theatre. This is the first part of Opera and Me.

  Opera was in the air from the very beginning. My grandmother had been a singer. Never fully professional, she was a member of that substantial army of part-timers who, before and after the First World War, sang for private gatherings, above all for those mysterious events, Masonics. The zenith of her career had been public, however: at the great Peace Concert at the Albert Hall in 1919, she had sung ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, under the shamelessly allusive name of Vera Melbourne, with such unbridled fervour that the acoustical apparatuses had shattered. Even in her sixties when I first knew her, the voice was huge and rich, almost uncomfortably so at close quarters, as she crooned for my personal pleasure those Masonic favourites ‘Down in the Forest’ by Sir Landon Ronald, or Teresa del Riego’s ‘Homecoming’. Droopy pieces, they seemed to me; better by far was her pièce de résistance, ‘Softly Awakes My Heart’ from Samson et Dalila, produced at the climax of the Friday evenings at my grandmother’s house which, awash with booze and racy talk, were such a feature of my childhood. Slowly (good living and phlebitis having taken their toll over the years) she would make her way around the room, inhabiting the sinuous curve of the melody, pausing to address each male in her path, boldly locking her eyes with his. She sang it quite wonderfully, sexily, dangerously. All her bulk and all her years disappeared and we all of us, her silent partners, felt a little hotter under our collars as she sang to us, us alone, excluding all the others.

  This, I suppose, was my first experience of opera, of the medium where, pre-eminently, physical circumstances are triumphantly transcended to reach a different kind of truth.

  By now – 1966, when I was seventeen or so – I had seen a good deal of theatre, both lyric and dramatic. Unlike almost all my contemporaries, I was largely ignorant of films: it was not a family pastime. Grandma Toto, whose christened name, incidentally, was Marie Élisabeth Eugénie Lénore, had introduced me to Chaplin on faintly illicit visits to the Movietone Theatre in Waterloo Station after seeing Julius Caesar or The Merchant of Venice at the Vic. We’d watch the whole programme, and sometimes stay and watch it all over again. I wrote this piece for the booklet of a London Philharmonic Orchestra concert in which Carl Davis conducted his own newly composed score for The Circus.

  During my lifetime, Charlie Chaplin, that multifaceted genius, more famous in his day than Jesus or the Buddha, has been consistently underrated, not least by actors, who for the most part profess themselves scornful of the ostentatiousness of his technical skills, nauseated by his sentimentality, and unamused by his comedy. I have always been bewildered by this view. I was introduced to his work by a grandmother who was addicted to it. In those pre-NFT, pre-video, prehistoric days, we would go all over London to catch them. Sometimes the tiny Clifton cinema on Brixton Hill would be showing a three-reeler alongside a Tarzan movie, and the cinema in Waterloo Station was a pretty good bet, too, though you never knew what you might get. Of the feature films, especially the ones in sound, there was very little sight. My dear old grandma, a woman who otherwise betrayed very little sense of humour, would shake with laughter, tears rolling down her cheeks, as she re-enacted the scene in The Gold Rush where Chaplin eats his boot. She had no particular mimetic gifts, but somehow she managed to suggest the incongruous delicacy with which the little tramp addresses his task. When I finally saw the film, it was remarkable how much of it she had been able to convey, which I take to be a great tribute to him: it had made such an extraordinary impact on her. His absolute mastery of his own physical instrument is phenomenal, his expressiveness unparalleled. When, as a very young man, he was appearing with Fred Karno in a theatre in Paris, playing the drunken toff which was his most famous role before he created The Tramp, he was summoned at the interval to a box where he was gravely informed by a stocky bearded man with peculiarly penetrating eyes, ‘Monsieur Chaplin, vous êtes un artiste.’ It was Debussy.

  Both in conception and execution, Chaplin was in a league of his own. The character of The Tramp is a creation of the highest brilliance. In his great book Chaplin: Last of the Clowns, the American critic Parker Tyler identifies the elements – the hat, the walk, the moustache – showing where they came from and how Chaplin assembled them; what is harder to explain is why the strange child–man with his tottering, oscillating walk, his bowler hat and his bendy cane is at the same time so funny and so affecting, or how Chaplin makes of him a universal image of humankind, indestructibly optimistic regardless of the setbacks inflicted on him by a capricious destiny. Where is he from, who is he? He has no name, being known only as The Tramp, though he is scarcely what we think of today as a street person. He has distinct sartorial and social aspirations; he is gallant and fastidious, and is a defenceless victim of Cupid’s dart, endlessly falling unsuitably in love at first sight. But he comprehends nothing of the world. He fails to understand that his adorable moues and dazzling smiles hold no sway against the musclemen and plutocrats to whom the women for whom he falls are attached, nor has he the confidence to assert himself against bullies and figures of authority, or the skills to hold down a job. In love and in work, he is unceremoniously shown the door, ending up over and over again in the gutter. But he always picks himself up, brushing himself down with some elegance, as if he were his own valet, proceeding, generally in the company of someone equally ill-favoured, to the next rejection, the next infatuation, the next dashed dream. Hope springs eternal. It is the inevitable repetition of failure, and the constant witty assertion of dignity, that speaks so deeply to us.

  From the beginning, even before the arrival of The Tramp, Chaplin the writer and director was ceaselessly inventive, and his increasingly ambitious structures take the modern world on board with growing complexity. In City Lights, The Tramp is nearly overwhelmed by the sprawling vastness of the metropolis; in Modern Times, he is literally chewed up and spat out by the great heartless machines he is called on to operate. He scarcely belongs to the world in which he finds himself, but, like a cat or a drunk, he negotiates it with crazy grace, dancing away from danger as the structure disintegrates around him. Politically speaking, Chaplin was a radical populist in the mould of Dickens: instincti
vely identifying with the disadvantaged, naturally suspicious of the establishment, acutely conscious of the dehumanising effect of organised capital. In the America of the Fifties, this meant that he was a de facto Communist, though he was no such thing.

  It was inevitably difficult for Chaplin to maintain the reckless improvisatory brilliance of his early movies. His projects took longer and longer to gestate and indeed to shoot, with a resultant loss of brio; his reluctant embrace of sound robbed them of some of their expressiveness, and led to his adoption of somewhat ponderous narrative procedures. There is scarcely a moment of his own performances within them, however, that is without some touch of genius: in The Great Dictator, Hynkel’s dance with the globe and the barber shaving a customer to Brahms’ Fifth Hungarian Dance, the murderous bigamist’s dazzling prestidigitation as he counts up his ill-gotten gains in Monsieur Verdoux. It is in such moments that the golden legacy of Chaplin’s Music Hall background is at its most evident. Elsewhere characterisation and even mise-en-scène tend to creak; the liberal humanitarian message of the films is spelt out rather too clearly, no doubt. The truth is that Chaplin’s art was perfectly suited to the early cinema, and he exploited it more brilliantly than anyone else had done: the medium and the man were made for each other. Then the medium changed, and nothing that he was able to do, despite all his wealth and power, could stop it in its evolution. The Music Hall, too, had died, leaving him stranded in a different world of expression, a point movingly made in Limelight, which should, by rights, have been his last film.

  No actor and no film-maker can fail to learn from the early, pre-sound films, which, especially when shown with live accompaniment as intended, achieve a kind of perfection and create a kind of exhilaration which later cinema has found hard to match.

  Toto’s other favourite was Danny Kaye, and we saw that master’s The Court Jester twice. I was rather keener on Tarzan, for reasons that I dimly began to understand: how bored she must have been by the acres of Gordon Scott’s scantily clad flesh of which I could never have enough, sitting in the dark, silently willing that loincloth to slip. When I came back from Africa, television – the early days of which I had completely missed – became something of an obsession. Grandma Toto never had a television, all the days of her life, but Grandma Vera did, and I immediately became an addict. To begin with it was Coronation Street I loved (my impersonations of Ena Sharples and Minnie Caldwell and Leonard Swindley were much sought after), but when my mother finally succumbed and got a set, around the time that BBC2 started, I saw the classic films they so regularly broadcast, and fell in love with the work above all of Jean Renoir and Ingmar Bergman. Film had its classics, I discovered, just as much as theatre. When I was seventeen, I abruptly stopped watching television – my mother had now become the addict – and I continued my celluloid education in the art-house cinemas scattered around London and at the National Film Theatre under Waterloo Bridge. But though I had begun to grasp the role of the director, and in time was to be able to tell the work of one from another, it was always the actors that made my pulse beat faster. Peter Ustinov was, I knew, a distinguished actor–writer–director, but his fascination to me was as a personality. Indeed, for quite a time when people asked me what I wanted to be, I would answer, ‘A Personality,’ and it was always Peter Ustinov I had in mind. I got to know him a little, eventually: I wrote this review of John Miller’s biography of him in September 2002.

  Last year Peter Ustinov, that Puckish polyglot twinkler, that elegant cosmopolitan anarch, turned, improbably, eighty, and much credit he received in the land of his birth. The Germans went crazy; the French offered various hommages; the Italians were effusive; but the British could scarcely manage a newspaper interview. The present volume is celebratory in intent, but the great man deserves something more illuminating, and so do we. Mr Miller is a sympathetic and intelligent chronicler of thespian extravagance, having previously done solid service in the matter of Sir John Gielgud and Sir Ralph Richardson: but though his appreciation of Ustinov and his delight in him are not in doubt, he is unable to draw our attention to quite how astonishing a phenomenon he is.

  He has written, in fact, a very nice book about a jolly talented chap, a bit of a genius, perhaps, but frightfully nice with it. The books, the plays, the films, the documentaries, the stories, the epigrams, the languages simply roll out one after another as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

  But hold on just a second. This is a man who was an instant star in revue at the age of eighteen, appearing with serene confidence alongside such sainted gargoyles as Robert Helpmann and Edith Evans, and garnering rather better notices; whose first West End play was written when he was nineteen and performed two years later while he was still in the army, to be acclaimed as the Best Play of the War; whose first feature film, in which he also starred, was made when he was twenty-five; who thereafter produced play after play (twenty-one of them eventually), some of which he also directed, and in many of which he starred, not merely in the West End and on Broadway but also in Paris, in Berlin and in Rome, in the languages of their respective countries; who has in addition written admirable novels (one of them something of a masterpiece), short stories, history, political commentary; who created the trailblazing radio programme In All Directions, without which The Goons would scarcely have been possible; who has been a roving and highly effective ambassador for international organisations and a fiercely proactive rector of both Dundee and Durham Universities; who has toured the world making hard-hitting documentaries which often involved him in challenging interviews with the great statesmen and women of the day; and who has done all of this on a bubble of irrepressible and epidemically contagious mirth. He is utterly, magnificently unique, and Mr Miller is unable to convey this, nor to wonder how it came about.

  Part of the problem stems from his subject. For one thing, Ustinov has, in Dear Me, written one of the most deliriously funny and provocative theatrical autobiographies in the canon, original in form and beguiling in expression, and Miller is sadly doomed to retelling many of its best stories in leaden paraphrase; for another, his constant activity, both professionally and in the charitable and educational spheres, serves to obscure the man. There seem no moments of repose, of reflection, of doubt. Dear Me was more revealing in these areas, often, admittedly, in the things it refused to address and in the way they were deflected. There is a brief meditation in The Gift of Laughter on the probable melancholy at the heart of his preponderantly Slavic soul, but like so much else in the book, it turns out to be just one of those things – now and then a chap gets a bit blue, but he always rises above it.

  In Miller’s account, personal matters – parents, wives, children, all of whom, it would appear, have been not unproblematic – are discreetly touched on then swiftly passed by. An arresting fact occasionally appears but is allowed to scurry on, unexamined: his father’s flirtatiousness turned him as a youth, Ustinov says, into a puritan; he discovered ‘a lot of things’ too late; when you play King Lear ‘you’re going out to sea in a boat alone with Shakespeare’. These are tiny cracks in the otherwise unendingly polished and accomplished façade, but Mr M is too polite to let us see what might lie behind them. Billy Budd, he quite rightly asserts, is a fine film, but he does not enquire what it was that drew Ustinov to that disturbing story, nor why it should be so much the best of his films as a director. He never speculates on how Ustinov’s many skills were acquired. Make a film? Easy. Hold a thousand people rapt for two hours on your own? A doddle. The subject and the author are equally incurious about what it is actually like to be Peter Ustinov. Perhaps he would prefer not to go into awkward and possibly painful places, but if he is to be part of the human race we, the readers, need to.

  What Miller gets absolutely right, in his title and in his text, is the supremacy of humour in Ustinov’s life and work. His talent is indeed prodigious and prodigal, exploratory and innovative (his 1960 play Photo Finish, for example, anticipates and eclipses the formal
conceit of Edward Albee’s wildly over-praised Three Tall Women of thirty-five years later). But his genius, and that is what it is, is unquestionably for comedy. His recorded turns – the Mock Mozart opera, the Phoney Folk Songs (Russian: ‘the song of a peasant whose tractor has betrayed him’; Norwegian: ‘the lament of a young woman rejected by a dilatory troll’), his impersonation of the entire Gibraltar Grand Prix – are perfect works of art, and their present unavailability is a crime and a disgrace.

  He is funny enough on the page, on the air and on screen, but in the flesh he is discombobulatingly funny, as only the greatest comedians are: he engenders an air of surreal fantasy which turns the world into a madhouse peopled by meticulously observed loons, megalomaniacs and doubters. His incomparably brilliant ear, both for accent and for phrase, his facial and physical versatility, his emotional flexibility produce transformations so instant and so complete that he seems to be possessed, like a sort of droll shaman. This atmosphere of hilarity he commands is as potent as a powerful sexual attraction, and as hard to control.