by Simon Callow
Well, I didn’t know the half of it. Our friendship arrives on p. 120 of Red Carpets, by which time he has already played Titania and Elvira, walked out of his public school aged sixteen, become a regular on the Earls Court gay scene, received the reasonably well-paid sexual favours of various kerb-crawlers, developed a nice little heroin habit, decamped to Paris where he has become best friends with Delphine the Brazilian transexual ruler of the Bois (‘hers was a famous erection’), bopped with Nureyev, shagged Ian McKellen, been thrown out of Central School of Speech and Drama and found his true theatrical home at the Citizens’ Theatre in Glasgow. I knew some of this, as much as he chose to vouchsafe, but Ru was not one for dwelling in the past: it was the future he was focused on – fame, fortune (up to a point), fucking and fun. Above all fun. Laughter was and is the music of his life, even more than applause or the whisk and thud of paparazzi bulbs; he has an almost fanatical loyalty to the concept of enjoyment, to the detriment, it might be argued, of his art, though to the great enrichment of his being; and for Rupert, as he makes clear in this continuously brilliant memoir, the best theatrical autobiography since Noël Coward’s Present Indicative, acting is being.
It is a startling self-portrait – unapologetic but not in the least confessional, not analytical but in-depth – of a man, now middle-aged, who has done exactly what he has wanted when he has wanted to, and to hell with the cost. He asks neither for admiration nor condemnation; he did it his way. In the end, no doubt, it was that that doomed our friendship, his and mine. He did behave so very badly. Up to a point, bad behaviour is exhilarating, though I used to wince when he cast the unwanted cream from the chilli con carne we used regularly to have on matinee days onto the St Martin’s Lane pavement, causing pedestrians to swerve and slip; it is when the bad behaviour is turned against oneself that it becomes righteously unacceptable: after him begging me to come for breakfast after a long and very late dinner, and as I sat bleary-eyed in his front room at eight in the morning, it was something of a slap in the face to hear him answer the phone ‘No, nothing at all – there’s no one here and I’m bored to death.’ His behaviour brought to mind the admiring comment about Alfred Douglas made to André Gide by Oscar Wilde: ‘Aoa! Comme il est terrible!’ He has brought the same personal ruthlessness to his professional life – ‘I was a terrible monster’, ‘I behaved like a cunt’, ‘I was impossible’ – but he is unrepentant: the film or play in question was no longer fun, or never was fun, and what is the point if it isn’t fun?
Us goody-goodies are inclined to believe that it is the audience’s fun that matters more than the performer’s, but Rupert’s commitment to his position is absolute and principled: in the end, for him, all that matters is that the actor should blaze with unfettered charisma. The moment he saw the film of Mary Poppins, a ‘giant and deranged ego was born’, and he knew, he says, that he must find a new personality to express it. Actually, it seems that his personality was fully present at least from the font; his grandmother pronounced him, from her deathbed, to be ‘musical’. Whatever measures his hapless mother might take to counteract his latent tendencies only confirmed them: the Catholic Abbey of Ampleforth introduced him to drugs, sex and acting; a spell in Paris to learn the language led him to Delphine and the delights of the Bois, where he picked up, he says, only a rudimentary French sex vocabulary. Bent on ‘world domination’, he then took himself to the Central School of Speech and Drama, hoping that they would teach him to act like Garbo; finding that he already knew how to do that, he left, and soon found his spiritual home at the Citizens’ Theatre in Glasgow, where Philip Prowse conjured up Fellini-like visions in the Gorbals. The screen, however, was where he was inevitably headed, and much of Red Carpets is taken up by his adventures in Hollywoodland. But here too, he is ruthlessly uncompromising, refusing to make any of the concessions upon which that place is founded. By the time he came to make the British film Dance with a Stranger he had become ‘a fully fledged diva in a frosty land where that crazy bird had become extinct’. He proceeded as if he were Elizabeth Taylor or Bette Davis. ‘These people,’ he says of a Hollywood funeral, ‘were the symbols I adored, everything I loved about my job.’ He immersed himself in their world and those who created the enchanted spaces in which they could move. For him Andy Warhol embodied ‘the very essence of his time’. So it must have seemed as one bobbed along on the waves of excitement engendered by crystal meth and disco beat.
What no one could possibly have imagined was that this witty, wicked waif apparently off his trolley was observing it all, and remembering everything; nor that when he came to write it all down he would prove to have a dazzling gift for evocation and a witheringly sharp perspective on those lives he so admired and emulated. His two novels revealed a brilliant writer, but there, as he says, he was in Capote mode: here he is in more elegiac vein, with an inexhaustible Proustian fascination with the monstrous minutiae of his chosen universe and a deep nostalgic sense of loss. In perfectly etched vignette after vignette, he conjures up the lives and deaths of those of all ages and persuasions (many of them ‘now forgotten’) to whom he has been drawn, monstres sacrés for the most part, whom he bathes in affection and approval. He writes with moving restraint about the great love of his life, his dog, Mo. He is only forty-seven but he writes of a disappearing world of character and classiness; one to which, by implication, he belongs and from which he is now dispossessed. He is an acute social commentator, though politically somewhat conventionally apocalyptic. His idiom is the conscious stylisation of a Firbank; the highest of high camp. As is his life, though he is quite capable of enduring a celibate and hard-working year filming in Russia, or of visiting Africa and seeing through the charity cant to the real horror of what is happening. He is like one of those queens – his word for himself, brandished defiantly – who astonish everyone by fighting fierce and gallant wars: like them, he has lived his life on the front line, albeit in his case a front line awash with poppers and irradiated with glamour. Red Carpets is his despatch; shot through with a sense of his own absurdity, it is a superb and unexpectedly inspiring achievement.
Another Country changed Rupert’s life; he and it were the toast of the town. Balthazar, which had its passionate devotees, had no such impact on my life or my career. It was utterly at odds with the temper of the times, both bawdy and beatific as the title suggests, as well as being anarchic and nostalgic, in a way that I fully see could be thought to be reactionary – an exaltation of aristocracy and wealth. It was nakedly sexist, full of buxom tarts and lurid fantasies. From a dramatic point of view, the play was unquestionably imperfect, but the characters and the language were rich and joyous in a way that few characters and little language was in the early 1980s, and the deep and heartfelt vein of melancholy in the writing moved me greatly.
But I could hardly wait to go. For me Balthazar was the end of something. I had finally managed, after nine years of pretty well continuous acting, to exhaust my addiction to it. I simply had to stop. When I left the play in the summer of 1982, I felt liberated, not just from the eight shows a week – though I was beginning to go ever so slightly but quite seriously demented as we played night after night to a hundred or so desperately self-conscious individuals huddled in the stalls – but from my driven need to create another part, strut my stuff again, earn approval. There was, I knew, a life elsewhere. It seemed symbolic and right that to find it I should brush the dust of England off my feet, which I accordingly did.
Expanding
It was to America I went, with a small group of actors from the National Theatre, to be part of the initial season of the British American Theatre Institute (which lived with its rather silly acronym for a couple of years before becoming the British American Drama Academy, which still lives and thrives). We went to Santa Fe, still then an altogether uncommon place, not yet part of the extended mall which the American South West has now become. The light, the bald mountains, the mystical associations as well as the somewhat sinister proximit
y of Los Alamos, site of the first nuclear tests, took one as far away from the West End and the South Bank and the whole working world of the theatre as humanly possible. For the first time in my life I taught and directed, both of which activities forced me to stand outside of myself and think about what I had been up to for the last nine years. Greer Garson lived there, and all our work was done in the theatre named after her. (I had occasion while I was there to write to Gore Vidal, but got no reply; when I saw him later in London he apologised, saying that he couldn’t bring himself to write to the Mrs Miniver Theatre.) After I had been in Santa Fe for a week or so, I had a letter from Peggy Ramsay telling me that Nick Hern had commissioned me to write a book. I shook when I got the letter, and I admit that I wept a little, too, then ran round telling everybody to whom the information would mean anything at all, as well as a baffled few to whom it meant nothing. This, far more than anything that had happened to me in my acting career, was genuinely beyond my most unbridled fantasies. Hern was head of theatre books at Methuen, one of the best drama publishers in the country at the time. I celebrated by going up in a balloon at dawn in Albuquerque and hung in the air, at that eerie and soundless moment when they switch off the engine and two currents of air hold you suspended over the world, and reflected that life could hardly get any better.
When you come down from the balloon ride, you end up in the town dog dump (DUMP DEAD DOGS HERE, a sign says). They then baptise you in champagne, a symbolism I greatly liked. For a while it seemed that I might stay in Santa Fe and form a company based on some of my very talented students. A millionaire was found to pay for it, but his enthusiasm drifted, our season ended, and no more was ever said about it. Back in Britain, I set to work on the first series of a deliciously original television sitcom, Chance in a Million, in which I appeared with Brenda Blethyn. Then I wrote the book, in a frenzy, in three separate weeks, one in France, one in Switzerland and one in Brighton, and gave it to Nick Hern, who encouraged me to cut the first three pages (imperishable prose about my family) so that it opened with the words, ‘When I was eighteen I wrote a letter to Laurence Olivier’, and then printed the book pretty well unchanged. When Being an Actor appeared, it caused a small scandal by opposing, in its last pages, the stranglehold of directors over the theatre. I knew that I was taking a risk when I wrote the book, first by making no secret of my homosexuality, and secondly by challenging what I called the ‘directocracy’. No one even blinked at my coming out, but my polemic against directocracy caused a bit of a sensation. Michael Billington, in the Guardian, thought the supposed attack on directors was ‘tragically misguided’; but the following day, in the same newspaper, Ian McKellen rode up like a knight in shining armour, to defend me and the book. The actor Dinsdale Lansden wrote a review in Plays and Players which feared for my future; and I got hundreds, literally hundreds, of letters from actors who felt that I had, as I hoped I would, spoken for them. The idea of actors reclaiming some autonomy was in the air; very soon afterwards, Kenneth Branagh started up a company of his own, as did Mark Rylance. As it happens, my purpose had never been to denounce directors. It was to remind actors that they were not just pawns in the hands of the grandmasters of the theatre, but artists in their own right, whose contribution – imaginatively, emotionally, intellectually – was essential to the process. They were the ones, after all, who made the word flesh, up there on the stage, or in front of the camera: their bodies, their hearts, their brains, their creative energies were the heart and soul of the enterprise. My war cry was not about doing down directors: it was to encourage actors to raise their own game, be ambitious for their art, and not allow anyone tell them to shut up, as many directors, in those dark days, quite literally did.
Publication of the book had many unforeseen outcomes. One day, I came home late at night to find a letter on my mat whose envelope was written in a highly distinctive semi-italic hand. It was from Sir Alec Guinness. I reviewed Garry O’Connor’s biography of him, The Unknown Alec Guinness, in 2002, in the Guardian.
Knowing Alec Guinness – I have to stop right there. I didn’t know Alec Guinness. We had a sustained and very rewarding acquaintance which was curiously complex and in some ways surprisingly intimate, but I would never dream of claiming that I knew him. Garry O’Connor’s new account of his life implies that no one ever did, least of all his biographer, now making his second attempt to wrestle the old shape-shifter to the ground. The title of the book is exact – Guinness is and remains unknown; any suggestion that this book reveals him for what he was is misleading. But O’Connor’s biographical inquiry is nonetheless deeply rewarding and entertaining for all that.
My own encounter with Guinness is a fairly typical one, but it shows some of what O’Connor has been up against. Like everyone else, I had been enchanted and astonished by his film performances, from Great Expectations and Oliver Twist on to the Ealing comedies and The Bridge on the River Kwai and Tunes of Glory, awed by his transformations and conscious of a curious intensity, an interior quality irradiating his work. From the late Sixties, I saw his work in the theatre – Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly in The Cocktail Party, an Ivy Compton-Burnett curiosity called A House and its Heritage, and two plays by Alan Bennett – and here I was surprised, a little baffled, by his impact. A militant fan of Laurence Olivier, I was initially disappointed by the absence of visceral energy in Guinness’s work; having recently discovered John Gielgud for myself, missed that great actor’s mercurial thought processes. But I soon succumbed. The measured gravity, the detachment, the faint air of whimsicality should all have produced a muted impression, but they were, on the contrary, curiously compelling. The physical transformations in every case were complete, but not conspicuous: they did not draw attention to themselves, which had seemed to me to be the whole fun of the thing when Olivier did it – Guinness seemed to change alchemically, his metal altered in the crucible of his imagination rather than painted from a make-up box.
Vocally, too, there was an evenness of production, a careful turning of phrases, an ability to let thoughts hang in the air, which compelled in a very different way both from the great Romantic orchestral effects of Olivier – the trumpets, the violins, the cymbal crashes with which he coloured his voice – and the Mozartian babbling brook of Gielgud. There was nothing to excite the ear, but one found oneself listening very deeply. And then, most surprising of all, he would take you to some very strange place, a zone of the soul rather than any emotional or sensual or even mental place, and on these occasions the temperature in the auditorium would change palpably. In Bennett’s The Old Country, a civilised meditation on loyalty and national identity, Guinness as a Philby-like defector to Moscow purred his way intelligently and interestingly, if a little soporifically, through the play, assessing the unexpected and unsought offer of a pardon and repatriation. Finally understanding that he had no choice, that he was being used as a bargaining coin in a diplomatic manoeuvre and that he must go home, he was left alone for a moment on stage, opened a drawer, took out a gun, looked at it, put it back in the drawer and left the stage. That’s all. But the moment the gun was produced, something impossible to explain happened. The theatre was suddenly engulfed with dark energy, as if the wings of the Angel of Death had passed over us all. It became for a moment hard to breathe; one’s stomach muscles tightened; the heart beat uncomfortably rapidly. Then Guinness put the gun back and left the stage, and everything went back to normal. (I know that this was not merely an overexcited extrapolation of my own because a couple of years later, when I first met that least mystical of men, John Dexter, we talked of Guinness and I mentioned The Old Country and before I said another word Dexter said ‘I know what you’re going to say: the moment with the gun. Terrifying.’)
This sort of juju happened in Habeas Corpus, too, in Dr Arthur Wick-steed’s final dance, a moment created entirely by the actor, against the express wishes, O’Connor tells us, of the author. It was a kind of Dance of Death, an odd deconstructed death-haunted music-hall shu
ffle which rounded off Bennett’s brilliant play on a note of almost Expressionist ghoulishness that took the evening to a different level of theatrical poetry. Here was a formidable operator, attempting things that no other actor I had seen seemed capable of, or interested in; and yet he seemed outside the mainstream, unlike his friend Ralph Richardson, who also seemed to function on a somewhat mystical plane but who was more recognisably actorly. Beneath his demure exterior, Guinness seemed to be involved in the black arts; there was something priestly about his procedure, as if he were practising a ritual which would result in a moment of contact with strange powers. This was even true in the Compton-Burnett, where the affable character he played seemed to carry with him, behind the seraphic smiles and jaunty Edwardian manners, a curious and in some ways an inappropriate force. By now, of course, he was Obi-Wan Kenobi, though nothing that George Lucas’s special-effects division could conjure up came within a mile of what the actor could manage by his own efforts on a stage.