My Life in Pieces

by Simon Callow

  Nor is this raging sense of appetite for life confined to actors. Eyre writes admiringly and a little wistfully of Peter Hall (who haunts the early part of the book) as possessing ‘a prodigious energy, a kind of devouring greed and an edge of madness’. At the beginning of his tenure, Eyre and Hare rather soberly agree that it is necessary to ‘to introduce a note of anarchy to the theatre’, but then he adds, ‘It’s hard to make an anarchistic gesture now that isn’t immediately assimilated,’ not a thought, perhaps, that would occur to any self-respecting anarchist. The riot that is at the theatre’s heart – the gaudy assertion of carnival values, upturning everything, embracing everything, roaring its pain and its bliss to the skies – cannot be reduced to a note, or a gesture. It springs from the primitive act of theatre – an actor and an audience – fuelled by an all-consuming, raging need on both parts of the equation, which is why a theatre that doesn’t have a company at its centre will always, by one means or another, end up cerebral, and that spells death to the theatre.

  Richard Eyre’s book is a superlative record of a theatre, a man, and a time. There is unconscious comedy, as, desperately overburdened, he accepts more and more additional work, lecturing incessantly, becoming a Governor of the BBC. He wanted, at the beginning of his tenure, ‘to live a bit’. Not too far along the line, he is crying ‘I want my life back’ and later, more poignantly, ‘An unexamined life is not worth living (the unlived life isn’t worth examining).’ But responsibility will always come first. He is a natural member of the Great and the Good, being himself both good and great, and he has sat at life’s High Table as of right. The book is filled with many wonderful conversations heard there; he has heard the inside riff and has transcribed it wonderfully. Not a page is without some fascinating and unexpected shaft; when he says something to somebody, as often as not, they reply with a quote from Cato the Elder. And some magnificent monsters stride across his pages – John Osborne, Maria St Just, Georg Solti, his father. Come to think of it, Eyre Senior (‘Shakespeare is balls!’) might have made a wonderful director of the National Theatre – carnival-style.

  Single Spies was one of the great successes of Eyre’s regime. The scene in Buckingham Palace, in Question of Attribution, was, with impeccably credible canvases, the smash hit of the evening, all the more electric because it broke a centuries-long taboo prohibiting the representation of the monarch on stage. After the show, as Alan made his getaway by bike, all the famous people who came to see the show were ushered into my dressing room, where I filled their glasses with champagne and chatted urbanely about the play. I suspect that many of them thought I’d written it. I did nothing to disabuse my new best friends Shirley, Liza or Dustin, of their error.

  I left the play after three months in the West End because – why? – oh, yes – yawn – I had to direct Shirley Valentine on Broadway – triumph (yawn) – and then I went to Hollywood to act in Postcards from the Edge with Meryl Streep, Gene Hackman and Shirley MacLaine (yawn, yawn) for Mike Nichols (no yawn, even as a joke). I wrote a sort of diary piece about the film for the Independent.

  Mike Nichols, whom I had never met, called me in my dressing room during the interval of Single Spies. Alan Bennett was in the room at the time, and groaned when I voicelessly told him who it was. ‘Nothing like that ever happens to me,’ Alan moaned. ‘It’s the first time it’s ever happened to me,’ I mouthed back. Nichols had just seen the play, and on the strength of it wanted me for a part in his new film. It might, he said, amuse me: an English director named Simon, directing his first film in America. It did amuse me; more than he could guess. Unknown to him, I, Simon, and English, was about to direct my first movie, in America. Beyond this astonishing and yet somehow completely meaningless coincidence, there was every reason to accept the part. The script, adapted by Carrie Fisher from her novel Postcards from the Edge, was as funny as the book, though in an entirely different way, being an extrapolation of only one of the characters’ stories, that – presumably autobiographical – of Suzanne Vale, actress, drug addict, wit. This character was to be played by Meryl Streep, and it was she whom I would direct in the movie within the movie. I called Nichols back to tell him that yes, indeed, I’d do the part. ‘Oh that’s good,’ he said, ‘because when I saw you in Single Spies, I made a resolve never to make another movie without you in it.’ ‘That’s quite a commitment, Mr Nichols,’ I said. ‘One I am happy,’ he replied, ‘to make.’ Deals were struck, contracts signed. Three months later, I was summoned for a read-through in Hollywood, at the Burbank Studios.

  Read-throughs are not all that common on movies, particularly not if, as on this one, the cast is spread around the globe. But there we all, or almost all, were, in one of the huge hangar-studios of Columbia Pictures, in the centre of which had been placed eight trestle tables piled high with scripts. Behind the trestle tables, there were other tables, sagging under the weight of a great deal of food: hot kippers and omelettes and steaks, served on silver platters. We all rapidly made our way to this feast, piling our plates high. There were Meryl Streep and Richard Dreyfus and Shirley MacLaine and Dennis Quaid and twenty others of us, passionately scoffing away at ten in the morning, as if eating were the reason we had come here from the four corners of the earth. Mike Nichols was not eating, preferring to smoke. He did this somehow tentatively, as if cigarettes were a novelty he was pioneering. He was the host of this teetotal party, and alone seemed impervious to the mania that seized the room, affably introducing his actors to each other. Meryl Streep, plucking at her hair as if there were wasps in it, teetered over, uttered some charming compliments, and then tottered off. ‘Don’t expect any sense out of Meryl,’ Mike said, ‘she has to sing.’

  *

  I remembered the last time I had been at Columbia Studios. It was 1980, I was in America for the first time, and my then agent thought it would be a good idea for me to show my face around the various studios. She arranged meetings with six casting directors. Los Angeles being Los Angeles, that took the whole day, and Los Angeles taxis being Los Angeles taxis, cost something over $300. My rounds were not encouraging. Nobody had the slightest idea who I was. I had acted in no movies, and though Amadeus was news in New York, it had as yet created no ripples on the West Coast, where the theatre is in any case regarded as a harmless hobby indulged in by actors who can’t get serious work. ‘Amadeus,’ said one of the casting ladies, ‘what is that?’ ‘It’s a play about the death of Mozart,’ I said. ‘The death of Moss Hart?’ she replied, wide-eyed. No one was less than polite, but the lady at Columbia spoke for all her colleagues when, after a little polite chat about the art of acting (‘Which do you prefer, Simon: comedy or drama?’) she reached over to me, placed a hand on top of mine, and said, gently, ‘What are you doing here, Simon? Go home. I beg you. Go home.’ I did, and decided that the only way to come to Hollywood was in triumph.

  *

  By the time we sat down to read the script, sound recordists with their equipment were installed at the trestle tables. Our first stumbling efforts were thus immortalised. Actually, nobody stumbled much at all. Mike, still smoking in an experimental sort of way, made a charming speech of thanks to us all for coming to help them, him and Carrie, with the script, and we plunged in. Mary Wickes, playing Meryl’s grandmother, eighty years old with Now Voyager and White Christmas among her credits, spoke her lines from memory, which is unusual in this situation, almost bad form, showing off. She apologised: two weeks before she had been struck temporarily blind; it would be a month before she could see again and so she’d been obliged to learn her lines from a tape recording. She was in an emotional state anyway, she confessed. The man at the gate had greeted her with ‘Nice to have you back again, Miss Wickes’; it was thirty years since she had worked at Burbank.

  The Misses Streep and MacLaine were magnificently certain, especially in their musical duel. Meryl, admittedly, started singing tentatively, but so did her character. Shirley brazenly eclipsed her; so did her character. Stephen Sondheim had
revised his lyrics for ‘I’m Still Here’ specifically for her – ‘In the Sixties / I burned my brassiere / And I’m still here’ – and as she sang them, she worked her way round the table, ruffling hair, slipping her hand inside a jacket, finally flinging her legs over some happy man’s shoulder. We cheered. The actor next to me said, ‘This is magic. It’s magic. It’s like the great days. This one has that something, believe me. It’s great.’

  I myself was less conscious of the extraordinariness of the event than of the bruises on my right arm. They had been put there by Carrie Fisher, who, as her first line was read, sank her talons into my flesh, and left them there. Every laugh, every sob – and there were many of both – produced another steel spasm. After it was all over, she thanked me sweetly for the use of my body. The actors parted to their respective corners of the globe, to be pursued there by rewrites on pages of many colours. I went to various places in America before returning to England, and wherever I went, there would be a FedEx package waiting for me with the new stuff. Scenes were contracted, scenes were expanded; characters were sharpened, characters were softened. One page contained the pleasing information that my first entrance would now be made on a crane, murmuring the phrase, ‘Hello darling. You look wonderful. Big Kiss.’ The scene had been added in the light, I imagine, of my sly impersonation of A Certain English Director, which had produced laughter round the table as I drawled my Actions and my Cuts. This estimable gentleman likes to give the impression that directing is the least of his interests, a slightly vexing interruption of his elegant social life. Actually, he’s a rather good director.

  *

  All the scenes I was involved in take place on a movie set, so naturally they were shot at Burbank. Any movie location is a little confusing – you can never be sure what’s real and what was put there by the designer – but films about film-making are severely disorientating. Is that a grip or an actor playing a grip? Am I on the backlot of Burbank or the backlot of Burbank-within-the-movie? In the film I, Simon, was playing a director, Simon, directing Meryl Streep, who was playing an actress, based on the actress who wrote the script, who was standing behind the camera watching us. Meryl and I were being directed by Mike Nichols, himself a well-known performer. The confusion continued at all levels. As I stood at the refreshments table, a gaffer (a real gaffer) who was standing next to me said: ‘It’s okay, Simon, you’re among friends, you can drop the accent.’

  *

  On American films, there is a never-ending supply of food at all times. This is not so on English films. We have tea breaks instead. Here we are sustained by a strange assortment of foodstuffs laid out on a trestle table: there are cupcakes, breakfast cereals all day long, jelly babies, M&Ms. What kind of food is this? I puzzled over it for a long time, and then I realised: it’s food for a children’s party. I suppose that must be somebody’s – somebody UP THERE’s – idea of what filming is.

  *

  Meryl was Suzanne Vale, or rather, she was Carrie. She had become Carrie. She was extrovert, outrageous, garrulous; things which I believe she, on the whole, is not. Carrie, meanwhile, was still Carrie, only rather more so. Dressed in a perfectly simple little black Azzedine Alaia number which should have been a crumpled mess as a result of her hyperactivity but wasn’t, she presented a surprising combination of Dorothy Parker, Groucho Marx and the Princess Leia. An ebullient figure at the edge of things, she was rarely silent and never still. Once, I walked out of the studio where we were filming, to find Carrie – the real Carrie – the one not played by Meryl, that is to say – still in her Alaia outfit, lying on her back on the tarmac, with a puzzled expression on her face. She called me over and asked me a complicated question about Charles Laughton’s sex life. I was unable to answer it to her satisfaction, so I left her, still puzzled, apparently oblivious to the danger of being run over by a passing lorry.

  Meryl and Carrie were always together on the set. They were forever engaged in a curious duet, or maybe duel. Not that there was the slightest tension between them – on the contrary. They were like schoolgirl twins, whispering and shrieking together, spurring each other on. It was like seeing someone with a fantasised version of themselves: Carrie and super-Carrie – except that the fantasy version was the real person.

  *

  Mike Nichols had the air of a genial master of ceremonies. He had cast his actors and fixed his script, and he trusted both. Once, only once, I saw him slightly agitated. A prop man had set the wrong prop. ‘Why is that chair there?’ Mike demanded to know. ‘Well,’ said the guy, ‘they said…’ ‘They?’ said Mike. ‘They? Who are they? I am they.’ For the most part, he operated by wit and irresistible intelligence, and was unusually available to all comers. He spent, he said, a great deal of his time on a film just being pleasant to people. He needed to do this in order to remain human. ‘Everything is geared to your becoming inhuman. You suddenly find you’ve turned into stone or Streisand.’ Why do so many directors scream, he had asked himself? Because, like the President of the United States, they feel that they’re at the very top of the pile, and yet still things don’t happen they way they want them to. So, says Mike, he no longer screams. He prepares, to the last degree; but once he comes to shoot the scene, he arrives with a perfectly empty mind, and is generally delighted by what he sees. Even his trailer is called Komfort.

  *

  In Hollywood, they pay you better, the costumes are better, there are better facilities. Communications are better, and there are more people concerned for your welfare. But it is a factory, where the film you are making is one of many, past, present, to come. An independent film, or a film made on location, is, by contrast, a corporation convened uniquely for the object of making THIS film, a temporary empire whose end is contained in its beginning. That gives it a brave, adventurous feeling, however tough or hectic it may be. But Hollywood has seen it all before, is ready for everything. The machine works. Nichols & co. did their considerable most to make Postcards feel like a group of people who had a great idea for a movie and got together to make it. Nichols talks to you; he really talks. So does John Calley, the associate producer. They come to your caravan, and they talk. And when my scenes were over, the entire company, led by a lusty Streep and a finger-clicking Carrie, sang a song of farewell to me. Two hundred people looking into your eyes and singing a song of farewell is tough on the Anglo-Saxon temperament while it’s actually happening, but it becomes heart-warming, a little tear-jerkingly so, only moments afterwards.

  The real movie that I, the real Simon, was about to direct was The Ballad of the Sad Café, some of the madness of which I described in a piece for the Sunday Telegraph magazine at the time of its release, 1991.

  Among the messages on the answer machine is one in the unmistakable voice, imperious and exotic, of Ismail Merchant. ‘Simon. We think it’s time you made your first film. Come to the apartment tomorrow morning to have breakfast with the screenwriter.’ I phone Ismail at his office and discover a) that this is not a hoax and b) that the book in question is The Ballad of the Sad Café. It’s taken him, he says, twenty-five years to acquire the rights, and now he wants me to direct it. I find a late-opening bookshop and buy this, the only Carson McCullers novel I haven’t read. I find it moving in a primitive way, quite different from anything else she wrote. ‘Southern Gothic’ the back cover calls it, but the story seems to me more like Racine or Sophocles, a love trap devised by cruel gods to humiliate proud and pitiful mortals. The tone of the book, despite her singing cadences and steady rhythms, has the quality of a folk tale. It reads like a tribal myth, as if it were something brought back by an anthropologist from a forgotten people, a record of some ancient outrage.

  At breakfast the next morning I meet the screenwriter, Michael Hirst, lean and intense, given to spasms of laughter which shake his whole frame and make him cough so much he has to light up another cigarette to calm it down. Urged on by enthusiastic cries from Ismail, we start talking about the story immediately, as if we were old
collaborators. As we talk, the phone rings; it’s Vanessa Redgrave. She’s brought a group of Russian Jewish actors to London from Moscow to do a season at the Lyric Hammersmith, and she wants Ismail to take them all out to supper. He accedes immediately. The dinner, to be held at the Red Fort in Dean Street, is fixed for the following week. We must come too. He has suggested to Vanessa that she should play Miss Amelia in the film. She’s wildly enthusiastic, but wants to meet me. Understandably. We know each other slightly from social gatherings and the odd benefit, but nothing in our previous acquaintance would give her any reason to believe that she should trust her talent to my uninitiated hands.

  Why indeed should Ismail trust this project about which he cares so deeply to my uninitiated hands? I never asked him; he just did. I had never mentioned any desire to direct a film, though in fact I felt it quite strongly, ever since writing a book about Charles Laughton, in the course of which I saw over seventy films, and learned something of what he went through in making his only film as a director, The Night of the Hunter. I discovered that he had finally found his perfect métier. His strong visual instincts, his poetic temperament, above all his desire to collaborate with writer, cinematographer, designer and composer, had all reached their fulfilment. Being similarly inclined, I felt that maybe this was the métier I’d been looking for, too. Who on earth would ask me to direct a film, though? Mr Merchant, that’s who. He’d intervened in my life once before when in 1985 he asked me to be appear in the film of A Room with a View, at a time when no other film-maker seemed to think that I could be contained on celluloid. He had seen and liked my work as a stage director, I knew. But this was a gamble even by his standards.