My Life in Pieces

by Simon Callow

  In the summer of 1984 I received a card from Guinness (how had he got my address?). He had, he said, read the just-published Being an Actor, and he wanted to thank me for writing it, because it had made him feel that it might after all be worth carrying on as an actor. This card did not, he said, require a reply. It got one, of course, and from then on until his death sixteen years later, we were in fairly regular correspondence, and I doubt whether a month went by during all that time when I didn’t get some communication or other in the unmistakable hand, each line shorter than the one before, like a surrealist poem, culminating in the final Alec (he unknighted himself for me at our very first meeting). My letters to him were on writing paper which was all the colours of the rainbow, which he seemed to find charming. Soon he came to see plays that I was in or which I had directed, and we had a number of meals, always at the Connaught (‘when I have a little money,’ he would say), generally in his room, though there was one alarming occasion when we dined in the Grill with Victor Bannerjee (Aziz in Lean’s A Passage to India) and his wife. Mrs Bannerjee was full of nervous energy and obviously determined not to be daunted by the wood-panelled hush of the famous restaurant, or by the gravity of her host, and talked her way loudly through the menu, advising on what would be wise to avoid because of the season. ‘I think you’ll find,’ said Alec, mildly, ‘that all the food at the Connaught is edible,’ but the atmosphere this remark created was anything but mild. Again, the Force was with us, and a locked, unbreakable silence of many minutes ensued until Bannerjee managed to find some item of small talk that got us going again, though the meal never fully recovered.

  Generally, though, supper was in his room. He alerted me to the delicious fact that the room-service waiter, a Spaniard, had never been able ‘properly to pronounce one’s name’ and that when he was entertaining guests, they would be surprised to hear the waiter ask ‘Eberytin to your sassisfaction, Sir Alice?’ At the first meal I had with Alec, the waiter obligingly asked this question, and as he did, Guinness caught my eye with a look of the deepest and most complicit hilarity. His smile was something extraordinary, a zygomatic manoeuvre of such perfect control that he was able to increase it continuously over minutes until he became all smile, a perfect mask of sublime amusement, in which his other features seemed to disappear. He was able to talk through this immense grin, which suggested that he had remarkable control of the muscles in his mouth. Control is the word that is unavoidable in speaking of Alec Guinness.

  These dorm bean-feasts at the Connaught were substantial, many-coursed affairs, and the amount of alcohol consumed was prodigious, starting with cocktails, proceeding to wine, several bottles of it, red and white, continuing with Armagnac, then resuming with more wine, and finally, at about three in the morning, he would pad over to the fridge to produce a bottle of beer for the road. Throughout, Alec would puff away at cigarettes and talk in his measured way about his life. He did so with unexpected freedom, revealing deep hatreds (of Laurence Olivier, for example, or his mother) and profound loves – of poetry, mostly. He never spoke to me directly of any of the celebrated crushes to which he was prey, though occasionally he would write to ask if I knew how to get in touch with X or Y whom he had just seen in a play; these were invariably the tough, straight guys to whom (it was common knowledge) he was always drawn. I never knew whether he got in touch with any of them; he never referred to them again.

  He spoke most beautifully and illuminatingly about other actors, in particular Charles Laughton; he knew from Being an Actor that I had an almost idolatrous admiration for Laughton which he shared. He told me details of their personal friendship in the Thirties, and then, when I told him a few things about Laughton’s sex life (I was beginning to research his life for a biography I was writing) he astonished me by quite casually telling me that he, too, had engaged in sexual relations with men, but ‘then one married and gave up all that sort of thing’. He received information about my emotional life, elicited by his polite enquiries, with interest but without comment, though now and then he allowed his eyebrows to rise a highly expressive millimetre or two. He liked to talk about people’s sex lives, not in a salacious way, but more in a spirit of gossip, though there was never any suggestion that he himself any longer had anything to do with sex. Nor was there ever the tiniest suggestion that he might have found me attractive; it was my vitality and my idealism about the theatre that he liked, which brought out a certain tenderness in him, as if anxious that I might be hurt and disappointed. But sex was definitely not in the air.

  Once, though, he described an occasion when as a very young actor he had gone to stay with John Gielgud for the weekend; Olivier and his first wife, Jill Esmond, were the other house guests, and the Oliviers had decided to go back to London on the Sunday night. They offered Alec a lift which, since he was not working till the following night, he declined, and he saw a look pass between the Oliviers which meant only one thing, which outraged him because, as he said, ‘even when one was very young and sort of pretty, John never so much as put a finger on one’s knee.’ After the Oliviers had gone, Gielgud and he had another bottle of wine, and went to their separate beds. The following night, Alec was standing in the wings as Osric, and Olivier – Hamlet – sidled up behind him and whispered into his ear ‘So did Johnny put his thing up you or did you put yours up him?’ As he told me this, his rage, nurtured over fifty years, almost shook him physically. ‘He was vulgar beyond belief,’ he said. He didn’t have much time for Olivier’s acting, either: after any of his performances, ‘one would rush back to the text because some line, some perfectly unimportant line that one had never really been aware of, had been given such prominence that one doubted one’s ears. It was meaningless.’ Interestingly, when he delivered the oration at Olivier’s Memorial Service, he cited that habit as characteristic of Olivier’s genius.

  Over our meals he gave me advice about film-acting (‘When one briefly had a certain power, one would always insist on a full-length shot in one’s first scene to establish the general statement one was making, and then one could focus on detail’) and toyed with thoughts of roles that he might yet play on stage. There was a kind of part that he longed to play but which seemed not to exist: fantastical creations, like the Abel Drugger with which he had had such a success at the Vic in the Thirties, but also poetic, moonstruck. ‘One had a sort of gift, a rather small gift, for clownish parts, for innocents. There haven’t been any possibilities in that line lately.’ It was hard to envisage the seriously stout gentleman opposite me, brimful of alcohol with a fag hanging from his lips, undertaking any such light-footed role, but then he would make a moment’s mental contact with the image in his mind and there it would be, on his face, in his body, in the room with us – his harlequin, an exquisite creation as light as a dragonfly’s wing. But then he would lose contact and the vision was gone, and he and his body sank heavily back to earth. On several occasions I tried to interest him in roles – Tiresias in La Machine Infernale, Dr Knock, the crazy old drama teacher – female – in Penelope Fitzgerald’s At Freddie’s – but he gracefully deflected them all. Then one day he left a message on the answer machine asking me to direct him in A Walk in the Woods but I didn’t get back to him till twenty-four hours later, when he told me rather airily that he’d got someone else. This, as may be imagined, is fairly high on a list of regrets of a lifetime; but the swiftness of his withdrawal of the proffered possibility was absolute.

  That was one of the occasions on which a silence fell between us – that dreaded silence known to everyone who ever had any dealings with Alec. Letters went unanswered; one could never get him on the phone. The silence was broken, typically, by the completely unconnected gift of something – on this occasion, an original cartoon done by Gary Cooper when he was in the trenches during the First World War. Or it might be a confidence suddenly vouchsafed, as when he wrote to me to tell me that he had just seen A Passage to India, and that as the lights had come up he had vomited in shame at his own p
erformance as Professor Godbole. There were two seriously difficult moments in our relationship: once, in a moment of emotional and physical exhaustion, I wrote asking him to recommend a retreat. He wrote back a twenty-page letter, a sort of Good Monk Guide, with detailed and witty observations about the sort of spiritual service one could expect in each establishment, which monks liked to talk too much, where the food was excessively spartan. It was a positively Epicurean approach to the spiritual life, which gave perhaps a small clue to that side of Alec’s existence. Needless to say, I did nothing about it, emotional and physical circumstances having changed, and there was another long silence. The other problem was when he invited me down to Petersfield to write the book I was about to embark on. I would never see him or Merula, he said, there was a little cabin at the bottom of the garden where I could write, meals would appear invisibly on the doorstep and only if I should ever feel in need of companionship would I ever meet them at all.

  It was impossibly daunting. I should never for a second have been able to forget that mighty presence at the other end of the garden path, and I declined, feeling rather feeble. I had a sense of having been tested, and having failed. From that moment on there was a diminution of our friendship, though he never ceased to come to see my performances and occasionally dropped me a card. I sent him a present for his eightieth birthday, which he acknowledged, but not too warmly. (That was partly, too, because he loathed receiving anything.) But I had failed him; I was alarmed at the thought of taking our relationship deeper, of coming too close to his orbit, of being under his control. Another bar to its development was my general horror of the telephone, a medium of which he was a supreme master. He intensely disliked the answer machine, and mine was never off, and that was against the rules. At an early age, it seems, he had created an elaborate code of conduct by which he led his life, as arcane as the rules of Versailles or the sixteenth-century Spanish code of honour; its provisions were known only to him, but woe betide anyone who unknowingly transgressed them.

  One card from him contained a request not to cooperate in any way with Garry O’Connor when he came to write his first biography of Alec. I obeyed. The book, when it appeared, was a broken-backed affair, but one could see why. O’Connor is the author of one of the very best theatrical biographies ever written – that of Ralph Richardson – but here his hands were tied; his heart seemed not to be in it. When he came back for a second attempt, I talked to him, as did many other people who had not been helpful while Alec was alive. He has woven these oral testimonies together in a way that lends the book a very interesting texture: he is in constant dialogue with others, with the facts, with theories, trying to make sense of this peculiarly elusive phenomenon, both as man and as artist. As in his Richardson book, though without the personal encounters with his subject which made that book so electrifying, he has let his quest dictate the form of the book. He is in a constant state of discovery, Det Supt O’Connor, Head of the Theatrical Unsolved Crimes Division, in pursuit of the thespian Moriarty, whose diabolic (or in this case, perhaps, divine) cunning makes him so hard to pin down. He has uncovered some fascinating new material – particularly about Guinness’s war, in which he fought under his mother’s maiden name, assuming, as O’Connor would have it, yet another new persona – but the thrust of his inquiry centres on two matters which are in fact one: sex and identity. He is determined to prove that Guinness was actively gay, and that he was not what he appeared to be.

  As far as the sex is concerned, it is perfectly reasonable to assume – as he told me – that he was homosexually orientated, but that he decided not to live his life that way. There were probably lapses, and his feelings found other forms of expression, sometimes rather foolish ones: supper à deux as a substitute for, or a sublimation of, sex. It is the readily recognisable situation of a repressed gay man of a certain epoch. But O’Connor’s problem is that there is no evidence whatever of any actual sexual activity. There is a rumour about an arrest in the 1940s, when Guinness allegedly gave his name to the Police as Herbert Pocket; and Angela Fox reports her husband Robin having got Alec off the hook some time in the 1950s. Neither is authenticated. Otherwise, nothing whatever. O’Connor talks a great deal about Alec’s double life, but since he knows nothing about the hidden side of it, it becomes both repetitive and unenlightening to bang on about it. It would indeed be fascinating to know what Alec did and with whom, but we don’t, and there’s an end to it. Except there is no end to it in the book. (I am inclined to think Christopher Good is quite right when he says, in the book, that Alec enjoyed being speculated about sexually; perhaps it gave him a sort of vicarious sex life.) The issue of personality, which is of great interest in any biography, but inevitably central in that of an actor, especially one so multiphrenic as Guinness, is pursued with equal doggedness, as if to have a public face were a lie, as if we didn’t all conceal our innermost desires and impulses behind the carapace – consciously fashioned or not – of personality. ‘Constructive deceits,’ O’Connor calls Guinness’s manoeuvres, feeling that he has somehow found him out.

  However, despite this aggressive line of questioning, a good deal else is thrown up of great interest in which Guinness’s real originality is made manifest. His background, so powerfully described in his first volume of autobiography, Blessings in Disguise, is considered at length, in all its Dickensian detail – the terrifying stepfather, the solicitor dispensing the monthly allowance from an unnamed benefactor, the doubts as to the identity of the real father, the louche and drunken mother. The very particular nature of the young actor is well evoked (although analysis of performances tends to predominate over description or evocation, which pushes us a little in the direction of the semi-semiotic, where everything signifies something, and nothing ever simply is anything). But O’Connor is keenly aware of the nature of the acting enterprise that Guinness was slowly identifying for himself, his unusual sense of character, his uncommonly economical transformations (I was in the dressing room with him on the last night of his Merchant of Venice, which provoked one of his most remarkable physicalisations, and watched him dismantle his Shylock by removing two pieces of Blu-Tack from behind his ears – ‘Jumbo ears,’ he said – and wiping off a little eyeliner). Above all he identifies Guinness’s thrilling capacity to embody thought: to harness mental power.

  ‘An actor needs a slightly mystical approach to the stage,’ he said at a relatively early period in his career, ‘you can’t force yourself on the character.’ O’Connor very skilfully shows how his personal confidence grew and grew during the war when, as Commander Cuff, he had charge of a ship; at the same time, he was adapting The Brothers Karamazov, which reveals the depth of his literary enthusiasms, and indeed his aspirations as a writer himself. It was clear after the egregious disaster of his second, post-war Hamlet that ‘the specifically English challenge of being a classical stage actor’ was not going to be his path (though there were yet to come Richard III, Shylock, Macbeth); instead he was working towards a sense of character which, as O’Connor says, had more to do with being than with doing. In a wonderful phrase, Time magazine’s anonymous profile-writer said that Guinness’s ‘essential gift is not for creating characters but existences’. His characterisations seemed to transform him to the very marrow, altering his chemistry. Much later, George Lucas, watching rushes in which Guinness had been accidentally socked on the jaw, saw his face pass through a series of different characters, ‘all in a split second, starting with Obi-Wan Kenobi and ending with Alec, with about a half-dozen completely different characters in-between’. This is, to coin a paradox, assumption from within.

  His talent was perfectly suited to film and in an astonishingly short period of time, he was widely spoken of, by the mid-Fifties, as the most famous British actor in the world, and possibly the most famous actor in the world full stop. That cannot last of course; as with Laughton, star character actors always peak quickly. The more brilliant, the more diverse they are, the sooner they dwindle into sup
porting actors. By the mid-Sixties he seemed to have started the slow withdrawal from acting that lasted until his death in his early eighties; he increasingly took on roles because he thought he should, and then at the end he seemed relieved not to have to do it any more. He wrote to me crowingly about taking hols, and then more hols after the hols.

  Did he enjoy his life, one wonders? Can you enjoy life if your life’s task is one long working-out of the dilemma posed by your childhood, a process which demands a supreme and continual exercise of will? Alec certainly took pleasure in things and people, but the forces of rage and resentment and shame which were held bottled up inside him with the lid tightly screwed on must have constantly threatened his peace – hence the structure he created for himself with his wife Merula at its centre. It is a sad consequence of his self-denigration that he felt impelled to denigrate what was his, which meant that both Merula and his son Matthew were often publicly put down; but the extraordinarily tender note that he left for her to be read after his death is incontrovertible proof both of his love for her and his awareness of how heavily he had dealt with her. Her ache to join him as soon as possible after his death is eloquent testimony to her profound connection to him.

  Guinness’s very publicly affirmed religion has always been a source of fascination and some merriment – ‘a certain very holy person’, wags called him – with a suspicion of some faint hypocrisy somewhere. But it seems to me, and it seems to O’Connor, that he was fighting a lifelong struggle for mastery of his soul, and that Catholicism helped him in that struggle. Not many actors engage with that battle. Whether organised religion is a useful way of working on the inner spirit is not for me or for anyone to say, but at least Guinness acknowledged that his immortal soul was the very stuff of his acting. The translucency of so many of his performances is evidence of it, but his awareness of the dark, the engulfing dark within him, is equally responsible for the crushing power that he so often brought to his work. Garry O’Connor’s openness to this aspect of Guinness has resulted in a theatrical biography which goes far beyond the reach of most such books, and is his best book so far.