My Life in Pieces

by Simon Callow

  It seemed to prepare him for the great leap which he took two years later, when he appeared at the Royal Court Theatre as Archie Rice in John Osborne’s The Entertainer. The first actor of his generation or stature to associate himself with the new wave of playwrights, he scored an enormous personal success and boosted the new movement. His straddling of the old and the new, added to his managerial experience and personal authority, made him the inevitable and only choice for the directorship of the National Theatre when in 1962 it was finally voted by Parliament. Drawing together the best talents from the various theatrical worlds he had inhabited – the Royal Court, the West End and the Classical theatre – he created an organisation which for some years set new standards of excellence. Directing, acting (his Othello, Shylock, Edgar in Dance of Death, James Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey Into Night and Tagg in The Party were among the outstanding creations of those years) and leading very much from the front, he brought the century-old dream of a National Theatre to life in a way that no one else could have done. Towards the end of his tenure, tiredness and ill-health led to a slight decline in the vigour of the work, but he laid the foundations for a flourishing organisation. After retiring from the National Theatre in 1973 he never appeared on stage again, though he continued and continues to make film appearances. Since the war, in fact, he has acted in over twenty films, often with great distinction, but without ever quite seeming to belong in the medium. It is his work on the stage that has brought him the immortality he so fervently sought, and from the early Fifties it has been a commonplace for English-speaking actors (Americans as well as British) to refer to him as the greatest living actor. Certainly no one in our century has challenged himself more. Transforming himself vocally and physically for every part, he has left an indelible stamp on a number of the greatest roles in the repertory. He always sought a realistic core to his characterisations which sometimes robbed them of their poetry or their grandeur; but in compensation he brought comedy verging on the vulgar, physical audacity bordering on the reckless and an emotional intensity that could be terrifying. Olivier never concealed his virtuosity: he wanted his audiences to be as interested in the mechanics of acting as he was. His ambition was so huge, his achievement so great, that his disappearance from the stage has left something of a vacuum. This was to some extent deliberate. Asked who would inherit Kean’s sword (given to Olivier by John Gielgud after a performance of Richard III) he replied: ‘No one: it’s mine.’ A question mark thus hangs over the very idea of great acting in our age.

  It was often said of him that Olivier ruthlessly eliminated the competition, and this was no doubt true of his peers in his own generation, with whom he rarely appeared on stage after his wartime seasons at the Old Vic. But at the National Theatre, his ideal, like that of Peter Hall at the Royal Shakespeare Company, was an ensemble, a group of people who stay together, committed to each other and to an idea. Olivier surrounded himself with the very best of the younger generation; he carefully modelled their careers, noting what challenges would most benefit them, giving advice and encouragement, teaching by example, leading from the front. They adored him, these young actors. ‘Captain, my Captain,’ they might have cried, and they would have followed him, at the beginning at least, to the ends of the earth. I wrote this piece about companies for The Times in the late 1980s at a time when arts organisations were severely threatened by cutbacks – a cyclical phenomenon of which we can no doubt expect a great deal more in the near future.

  The creation of any artistic company or organisation – an orchestra or a theatre group, an art gallery or a drama school – is a slow and arduous business, dependent on vision, determination, cunning and skill. It generally starts small and poverty-stricken, its beginnings modest and uncertain; then, thanks to blind faith, hard work and an unwavering commitment to standards, the growing organism begins to get stronger, to expand, to flourish. At this point the judicious application of extra funds can have a transformative effect; the solid struggling work of the earliest days begins to pay off in gorgeous blooms. From the beginning, too, the company will have been cultivating its audience, exciting and involving them with the nature of the work, charming and challenging them, giving them something of what they know they like along with some of what they’re not really sure about. Carefully but purposefully, the company creates a loyalty and a trust in its audience; they adventure into the unknown together.

  Somewhere about this point, the critics discover it, and heap trowels of praise on the work in rather indiscriminate manner, till suddenly the company is fashionable, and the world rushes to see it. The company grows still more; it becomes an institution; the board is stuffed with the great and the good; costs spiral. Then the critics reach for their shovels again and start to heap the opposite of praise on it. Then questions are asked in Parliament, and people get weary of the whole thing and the bully-boy phrases ‘pulling the plug’ and ‘starting from scratch’ are bandied about. And sometimes, after an episode of mismanagement or scandal, the company/school/museum is shut down. And then it’s gone, gone for ever.

  Because make no mistake, the tree thus felled will not grow again overnight. The process has to start all over again, but the skills and the confidence and the trust and the continuity have been destroyed for good and all. An arts organisation is not a Millennium Dome, some gaudy palace thrown up ostentatiously to celebrate the awful emptiness of the age; it is a growing, living thing, which exists to enrich and sustain the whole of society. This is not brainwashing, nor is it an imposed discipline: it’s about building some sort of inner resource within individuals so they don’t have to keep looking to superficial stimulation to feel alive, but are able to build their understanding and experience, to develop what’s naturally within them.

  Around the late 1960s, Olivier became ill, there was dissension among the National Theatre Associates, and things began to fall apart. At exactly the point I arrived, there was a rather bad wobble – two ill-fated productions by an ailing Tyrone Guthrie (Volpone and Tartuffe), then an experimental Triple Bill which included an adaptation of John Lennon’s In His Own Write and which pleased no one, and finally a deeply shocking production of Seneca’s savage Oedipus by Peter Brook which turned the place upside down and culminated in a fierce row between Brook and Olivier (about whether ‘God save the Queen’ should be played at the end of the evening, of all absurd things), a row which Olivier bruisingly lost. A notice went up at the Stage Door officially abandoning the practice of playing the National Anthem. The old lion had been bested by a whelp. From my vantage point in the box office, I was privy to all this. News of each and every development swept through the building, even as it was happening – sometimes before it happened; there was a lot of tutting and long faces and sage head-wagging, as in any organisation. At the National, things were never quite the same again, people said, after Sir Laurence lost his battle with Peter Brook.

  Oedipus was nothing but trouble. It was the occasion of another, very public, battle, but of an entirely different kind: the unequal struggle of an actor with his role, or perhaps, more accurately, with his role in the production. Sir John Gielgud was palpably uncomfortable playing Seneca’s Oedipus in a brown polo-necked jumper, surrounded by sobbing, moaning, panting actors similarly attired, strapped to pillars, on a golden set dominated by a huge spike on which Irene Worth finally impaled her vagina. Rumours from the rehearsal room had suggested imminent catastrophe, and certainly the dress rehearsal (which, like all members of the company, I attended) was an unhappy affair, with Sir John wandering aimlessly about, his face contorted in a pained expression which seemed to have nothing to do with Oedipus’s dilemma and everything to do with his own. I made a point of watching all the previews and saw the production gain power, releasing the horror in a way that no conventional production could have done, while Gielgud, too, little by little, seemed to find his bearings, though not quite by the first night, when he still had the demeanour of a deer caught in headlights. I kept going
back, though, and was amazed and eventually deeply moved to see the actor start to become part of the production, then to lead it, and finally to create a performance of such economical anguish that it was almost unbearable to watch, in its disciplined pathos. I had to revise my opinion of Gielgud, whom I had just seen foundering as an absurdly miscast Orgon in Tartuffe and had dismissed, bewildered that he was considered, by shrewd judges, to be Olivier’s equal, if not, murmured some, his superior. Now I saw the point, and never missed any performance he gave thereafter. Later, I came to know him personally a bit, and understood something of the depth and brilliance of his talent. This is a review of Sheridan Morley’s 2001 authorised biography.

  It really did seem as if Gielgud would be with us for ever, the living embodiment of another time, another world. There was nothing old-fashioned or derrière-garde about him though: he seemed younger and more modern with every passing year, an elderly newborn baby, brimming over with curiosity and mischief, spontaneous and affirmative. Often he appeared in preposterous pieces of work, but however absurd or feeble the piece, it was always good to see him; sometimes, for a gala or a memorial, he would speak some verse, and then time would stand still, and one knew that he was not just charming and gracious and stylish and funny, but that he was one of the Immortals.

  He made the surprising provision in his will that there must be no memorial of any sort after his death – surprising, because he of all people must have known that no matter what the actor feels, the audience needs to applaud at the end of the show. In his case, the need was even more compelling than usual, since he commanded a unique degree of affection and admiration from both profession and public, quite different in kind from the feelings inspired by his great contemporaries Richardson and Olivier, both of whom predeceased him. Certainly, the pomp and more than slightly gaudy spectacle of Olivier’s state funeral at Westminster Abbey – all fanfares and fulsome farewells, the theatre on its knees, Joe Allen at prayer – would have been quite inappropriate for a man who throughout his long life had stood for a certain fastidiousness, an impeccability of taste and a precision of communication quite inimical to the grander gestures so easily commanded by the man who over the course of both their nearly overlapping careers had waged a unilateral war of rivalry against him. Gielgud in later years had even been reluctant to celebrate his important birthdays, not wishing to advertise his great antiquity. Nonetheless, from very near the start of his career, he had been celebrated, willy-nilly, in interviews, in articles and in books: in 1937, when he was thirty-four, the most brilliant of American theatre writers, Rosamond Gilder, had devoted an entire long and well-illustrated volume to his Broadway Hamlet. During the remaining sixty years of his life, many other books were devoted to his art; and he himself maintained a steady flow of vividly written reminiscences, mostly, and typically, centred on the extraordinary people he had worked with or simply admired. Inevitably, when he died, a couple of books immediately appeared, one, engagingly chatty, by Gyles Brandreth, the other scholarly and monumental, by Jonathan Croall. But the book that was most eagerly awaited was the one that Gielgud himself had commissioned, the authorised biography by Sheridan Morley. Perhaps this would be the memorial, the monument his will proscribed?

  Gielgud himself was hilariously ambivalent about the book, which he invariably referred to as The Book. Whenever one met him over the last ten years of his life, the conversation would quickly advert to it. ‘Sheridan’s been writing The Book for ever. I wish he’d hurry up. I think he’s waiting for me to die. Perhaps it would be better if I did. I rather dread him writing about all the queer stuff. I suppose it has to be done, but I don’t want to be here to read the reviews. Perhaps I should stop him. Oh dear, I wish he’d get on with it.’ It was, of course, the queer stuff that he had had in mind when he had proposed the book to Morley, specifically his arrest in 1953 for soliciting in a public lavatory, which, after a brief furore in the press at the time, and despite its being fairly common knowledge thereafter, had scarcely been alluded to in public since. It is indeed good to have the story told in precise detail, not least from a sociological point of view. Morley carefully creates the background of repression and hysteria against which the incident took place, relating the details which though nightmarish at the time now have an Alice in Wonderland quality to them – Gielgud, giving his name as Arthur, told the police in that inimitable voice that he was a clerk earning £1,000 a year, living in Cowley Street (then as now one of the most expensive parts of town) – and recording the panic and anger of other homosexuals, like Noël Coward and Frederick Ashton and the all-powerful West End producer Binkie Beaumont, his principal employer, who felt that Gielgud had acted selfishly and thoughtlessly. Morley quotes the interview Gielgud gave him (the only time he ever spoke about the incident on the record) to moving effect: ‘Why didn’t I call on Binkie’s help…? I was thoroughly ashamed, not of what I had done but of being caught, and I couldn’t bear to hear the anger and disappointment in Binkie’s voice. Then again, I had some vague Westminster-schoolboy idea that when you were in trouble you had to stand on your own two feet, and “take it like a man”.’ Morley gives us the astonishing scene of the council of war summoned by Binkie to determine how to handle the crisis. For sheer horror, the arrest and subsequent fine pale by comparison with the prospect of being advised in such a delicate matter by a committee consisting of Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, the extremely homophobic Ralph Richardson and his wife, Glen Byam Shaw (then running Stratford) and his wife. All of them, except for – perhaps predictably – Olivier, urged him to carry on regardless with the production of A Day by the Sea in which he was about to open as star and director. Most touchingly of all, Morley describes in loving detail, the courage and heroic professionalism this course of action called for, and the wonderful generosity of fellow actors (above all, the doyenne of them all, Sybil Thorndike, who greeted him when he returned to rehearsals with the incomparable remark, ‘Well, John, what a very silly bugger you have been,’ and then gently and lovingly steered him through the subsequent storm). He was nobly supported by the public, too, who gave him a huge ovation on his first appearance in the play, capped by an even greater one when he uttered his first line: ‘Oh dear, I’d forgotten we had all those azaleas’ – a response which suggests what, contrary to received opinion, some of us have believed for a long time: that Britain is rather fond of its homosexuals.

  This chapter of the book is very fine, and almost self-contained, as was the episode itself in Gielgud’s life, despite the lifelong reluctance it inspired in him ever to raise the matter in public. Throughout the book, Morley heroically strives to give due weight to his subject’s sex life, but it is something of a losing battle, because sex – though pleasurable – genuinely seems to have been of peripheral importance for him; certainly here you will find none of the ‘filthy details’ that Gielgud confessed to so relishing in the novels of Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann. It is hard to deduce from Morley’s pages what Gielgud’s feelings were for his two longest-serving partners, the glamorous, hedonistic John Perry, who left him for Binkie, and the acidulous Hungarian, Martin Hensler, with whom for the last forty years of his life he was locked in a relationship that seemed hellish to most outsiders but was clearly sustaining and profound for him. The absence of photographs of either doesn’t help. When Hensler (twenty years younger) died, Gielgud, like any spouse bereft of the central feature of his domestic landscape, was bewildered and soon started to allow himself to slip away – in harness, as he would have wished, on his ninety-sixth birthday filming a Samuel Beckett script, which, to his chagrin, was wordless: a poignant prediction of the imminent silencing of the most beautiful speaking voice of the twentieth century, which finally occurred a few weeks later.