Try to Tell the Story

by David Thomson

  But in the theater at Stratford, I could feel the excitement of being onstage with a great story to tell and Hamlet's father as my Sally. I wanted to be there, and I was hot with regret sometimes. It all worked out very strangely. More than ten years later, by chance, I came to know Badel socially—him, his wife, Yvonne, and their daughter, Sarah. And it was in that later period that Badel put on a production of Jean-Paul Sartre's Kean, about the great English actor who died in 1833. It is a very clever, funny play about the overlap of life and stage, and it was perfectly suited to Badel's wit and panache. He was dazzling, though I think it was clear by then that he had missed his moment; a young generation of painfully sincere actors had come along. He was sometimes said to be “difficult.” I don't know the details or the truth of it, but he could have had a temper and austere moods that might chill the air. But his brilliance in Kean inspired one of the first things I ever wrote, in which Keanery rather invaded Badel's own life. It was a desperate comic dance in which actors lost their own selves. I never dared tell him what he had meant to me, though he had a look so darkened by glory he probably guessed the imprint he had left. He was the first actor I ever knew personally, and he was plainly troubled and bitter beneath all the charm. I could see that a season as Hamlet might sustain or warp a life.

  The season at Stratford prompted me to start going to the theater in London. I had been a movie snob, but why restrict myself? As a young teenager I went to see the first London production of The Iceman Cometh. It was so long, I think it started at six o'clock in the evening, and the cast included Ian Bannen, Patrick Magee, Michael Bryant, Jack MacGowran, and Lee Montague. I saw Vivien Leigh and Claire Bloom in Duel of Angels—I don't know why, except for their starriness. I saw Olivier in The Entertainer and in his bloody Titus Andronicus, and Ralph Richardson in Robert Bolt's Flowering Cherry. I went to see John Neville doing Shakespeare at the Old Vic, with the young Judi Dench when she was a sexpot. I think this was as late as 1959, but I have never seen anything as stunning as Patrick McGoohan in Ibsen's Brand, in that intimate theater, the Lyric Hammersmith, where you could see spittle in the air and grab it.

  Yet absence—which is acting on the screen—meant the most. I had been pursuing films as best I could. I went all the time, with no more program than what my local theaters chose week by week. I was interested enough to ask at the library whether there were any books on film. One was offered, The Film and the Public, by Roger Manvell. I knew his name, in that he was sometimes on The Critics, a radio program I loved and trusted. His book was as odd as its title, I thought then. Still, it had lists of films to see and useful commentary on a select band of pictures.

  Moreover, you must understand that in 1955 I had no way of seeing “old” pictures. The cinemas showed only new things. We had no television, but that new medium had hardly touched old movies yet. Movies in history were gone, which is one reason why so many are lost forever. But there was one film above all in Manvell's account that attracted my attention: Citizen Kane, by Orson Welles.

  London in 1955 was a home for Orson. It was there that he took over the Duke of York's Theater and put on an improbable production of Moby Dick Rehearsed, his own play about a traveling theatrical company performing the Herman Melville classic. It ran only a few weeks, with a handpicked cast that included Gordon Jackson, Kenneth Williams, Joan Plowright, and Patrick McGoohan. It is famous for all its low-budget intimations of being at sea, or face to face with a great white whale. That same summer, Orson was married (for the third time), to Paola Mori, at Caxton Hall in London.

  So he was out and about in London, and that's how, I assume, someone said, “Well, I wonder what Citizen Kane would look like now?” It had not been seen for fourteen years. It was famous, but it had been a flop. At any event, in the summer of 1955 I saw in our local paper—the Streatham News—that the Classic, Tooting (the nearest we had to a repertory theater), proposed to play Citizen Kane for three days. My natural reaction was that a large part of the world had been waiting—like Reg Harris coiled at the top of a bend—for just this moment. So I got to the Classic very early on the first day of the run. It was a nice summer day, and the world was careless. I was the only person there for that first screening.

  I might have been deflated at first, but had I been alone for two hours with Grace Kelly—the only thing I can think of that meant as much as this film—I could not have been better treated. To see Kane in a theater on your own is the natural way. It brings out the megalomania.

  No, I couldn't exactly follow the convoluted narrative. But it must have been a freshly struck print and I knew I had never noticed such emotional texture in a film image before. Later on, I would learn that some people felt Kane was too clever or tricky or technical for its own good. For me, it was always a film seeping like a wound in Kane's mind. I felt Kane breathing, sighing—there were wells of sound never attempted before in movies. I loved the man, and I was pained at his solitariness. I knew Welles just a little from The Third Man and a few other films (like The Black Rose) where he acted, or overacted, but this was clearly him. And this was of his own making and dreaming. I am far from the only movie person who was marked forever by this loss of virginity. But I felt shock at discovering such power, and I wanted to be involved in it somehow.

  I told everyone to see the picture.

  “Never heard of it,” said Sally.

  “It's terrific,” I said.

  “Who's in it?” she asked.

  “Orson Welles!”

  She smiled. “Oh, him!” she said. “I heard about him.” In her very sly, knowing way.

  “What did you hear?”

  “There, but for the grace of God, goes God,” she said. “What does that mean?” “I don't know. He looks like you, though.” “Does not! “I said proudly.

  “Same baby face,” she said. “Could be your dad.” “If you don't stop,” I said, exultant, “I'll hit you.” “Well, fuck me!” she said, and there was another of life's mysteries opening up.

  20

  STAMMERING IS A SILLY little thing. It won't kill you, but it'll change the course of your life. The cures are as many and as helpless as the explanations for it. I am still haunted by the memory of a movie never made in which a group of stammerers come together and employ their “handicap” to rob a great casino. The small and taciturn gang has one female accomplice, a suitably beautiful babe who would sooner do her nails than talk. Her otherwise undetected progress among the guys is marked by the fact that for a half an hour or so after being with her every former stammerer is made as chatty as Oscar Wilde.

  One teacher at Dulwich, having observed my efforts to speak, called me aside at the end of a class and addressed me as the Great White Doctor might have done a savage in Africa. “Very aggravating condition, old chap. Fortunately, I picked up the remedy in my own school days.” And so he instructed me. At the first hesitation, I was to stamp my foot on the floor where I was sitting. “Just the ticket,” he said. Percussion freed the strangled process. It worked—for twenty minutes. I actually bruised my foot on the stone floor of the classroom, but a few words spilled out. Then, after twenty minutes, I had to stamp several times more. By which time the mischievous wits of my classmates had perceived the outline of a rag, and they became an impromptu of orchestral percussions. (Have you seen that Irish show where everyone stamps all the time?) Desks were banged, books dropped, hands clapped together, the odd paper bag was blown up. To cut a romp short, I was finally smacked in the face by the same teacher for having set off a near riot of small explosions. I daresay the teacher involved was now convinced that his own benevolence was wrongheaded when it came to the vermin of these boys.

  And he was right. The boys at Dulwich—so many of them newcomers to privilege, or unaccustomed to intellectual devotion—responded to the school with all manner of plans for ragging the teacher. It seemed to be the one thing we had learned in primary school. There were tyrants—a Mr. Treadgold, for instance, genuinely feared throughout the
school for his cruelty when keeping order. There were also good blokes who enjoyed some fun and reckoned to be honest fellows but still the boss. Then there were teachers whose academic brilliance was daily shadowed by incompetence in the matter of controlling twenty-five boys with insurrection in mind. There was one teacher, a gentle soul—I will not name him—whom I saw reduced to tears by one class. Goaded and tortured, at the crisis of crises he declared that he was going to report us to the Master. So he stormed out of the room and slammed the door. The class then passed the time of day for fifteen minutes or so, whereupon one daredevil opened the door and enquired of the cowering teacher, “Wouldn't you like to come back in, sir?” It was a formal requirement—and not just malice— that boys always addressed teachers as “sir.”

  In the middle-age levels of the school, this disorder was common enough and so some violence was permitted to teachers. Moreover, ironic sarcasm was a feature of the school, so there were some teachers who believed my stammer was just a ploy to catch the gullible and softhearted. Gradually, teachers ignored me. They did not call upon me to stand up and continue translation of Caesar's Gallic Wars, or to list the industries of India. That may have been meanness to me, as well as a way to quell pandemonium or worse—and there were other cures suggested.

  The most terrible of these came from the Master of the school himself—Gilkes, if you remember. In my second year he returned from illness and taught a class that was called “Scripture.” This turned into Bible reading, at which I slowed the class's progress and could make a miracle seem dragged out and laborious. Mr. Gilkes rose to the challenge. The answer he had was very simple: I was to sing the words, and then, he said, “Surprisingly, you will find that you have no trouble at all.”

  I sighed. Like everyone at the school, I had auditioned for the choir—a notable institution—and been rejected as “a church with just one bell.” Couldn't sing. Mr. Gilkes would have none of it, and I was charged to carry on in the latest doings of Moses in what was still a bold treble voice. I was hushed, so the rest of the class laughed silently.

  Gilkes protested. A social experiment was conducted. And when I sang I could read. Gilkes beamed in vindication. Very soon, in geometry or whatever, a wiseacre voice would suggest, “‘E could sing it, sir. Really, a very sweet voice.”

  This was a sign, of course, to the other boys—many of whom were official choristers—to break into alternative or descant versions of my limited song. Tremulous monkeys of choral work were soon swinging in the air. Chaos is come again. (And who was most obviously available as the ringleader, if not instigator?)

  However, I was modestly impressed. The singing did work, even if it was not yet possible to imagine myself in a Jacques Demy-Michel Legrand picture, singing, “Pass the salt … Thanks … You're so pretty.” So I took singing home at night to the bathroom and experimented. The “song” may have been unrecognizable to others, but I was fluent, and I began to look for voices and lyrics that were more beguiling than the Moses story or the proofs of theorems. So began my relationship with Frank Sinatra.

  My mum helped. She loved Sinatra and was often listening to him on the radio. Moreover, my mum could sing and sometimes she joined in with Frank. I had seen Frank in From Here to Eternity (a major event in my life), and then in two other films, Suddenly and Young at Heart. I was riveted. In Young at Heart he was a sad songwriter who didn't really want to live (unless he could have Doris Day). In one scene he is driving in the snow and turns off the windshield wipers—as if to say, It's a gamble. I thought this was immensely cool—but not half as arresting as seeing Frank as a gunman in Suddenly who means to shoot the president.

  Shoot the president! I thought, That's pretty nasty. (Never doubt the quality of timing, for Frank's role in my story hangs on the arrival of long-playing records and the mood for shooting presidents.)

  Frank made his first long-playing album, Swing Easy!, in 1953. And then in 1954, 1955, and 1956, he came out with Songs for Young Lovers, In the Wee Small Hours, and Songs for Swingin’ Lovers. It seemed marvelous to me that so vivid an actor could sing so well and know such songs. I only noticed songs with Frank. Indeed, I think I went straight from nursery rhymes to “My Funny Valentine,” “I Get Along Without You Very Well,” and “I've Got You Under My Skin.”

  I was given a record player for the Sinatra albums and I played them all the time, doing Frank as I listened to them, holding a hairbrush as a microphone. I could not sing, but I could mime, and I was thrilled at the dream that the words were passing through me with the rhythm and the pacing and the sad magic of knowledge that Frank possessed—or was possessed by.

  A great event in this passion was a film called High Society. I had been told that it was a remake of The Philadelphia Story with Frank in the James Stewart part. But it also promised Grace Kelly (a steady infatuation) in what was her last job before the insane Monaco gig. (She's going to regret it, I told the world.) Bing Crosby was there too, and my mum engaged me in friendly arguments about whether Bing was a better singer than Frank. And there was Louis Armstrong, not for the first time. Two years before High Society, I had seen The Glenn Miller Story. In truth, I had seen it many times, because I cried and cried to it from love of the Miller music, which already had the glow of nostalgia to it. I was soft on Jimmy Stewart and the idea of Miller never being found, and I was entranced by a scene where Glenn learned how to arrange and play a tune to get his sound right. So the audience felt itself participating. There was also a moment when Glenn and his boys went to a basement club to see and hear Louis Armstrong. And it was as if Louis were the source of Glenn's music, albeit at a subterranean level.

  The following year, 1955, there was a similar film on Benny Goodman. It was not as good a film, but still I loved the way Goodman played his clarinet. That's “jazz,” said an older boy I was friendly with. “Is that like Frank Sinatra?” I asked. “Why not?” he replied. “Frank's a cool singer.”

  And so, almost exactly as rock and roll was beginning, with all the great damage that could do to music and other things, I had the huge good luck of discovering jazz (and I'm really not sure how easily anyone can do that anymore). A friend with a guitar was trying to play a song called “Rock Island Line” that had just been recorded as “skiffle” by a man named Lonnie Donegan, who was also the banjo player in Chris Barber's Jazz Band. (I saw him play live once, with Chris's wife, the singer Ottilie Patterson.)

  This was known as traditional or New Orleans jazz. There was another band—that of Ken Colyer—purer than the Barber band. And there was a suave, heroic figure, Humphrey Lyttelton (who died in 2008). He was Eton and the Guards and very wellborn, I heard, but he had that lazy-elegant English voice that might be American. It was correct but cool and reminded me of Alistair Cooke. Humph was also involved in a newspaper cartoon, Flook, in the Daily Mail, drawn by another musician, Wally Fawkes. Humph would talk about what anyone in jazz owed to Armstrong as if he had made the world listen.

  I became a record collector at the Swing Shop in Streatham and at Dobell's on the Charing Cross Road. I was given Armstrong's Hot Seven recordings for Christmas and was transformed by the soaring trumpet solos. In the space of a year I rescued myself from the monotony of “traditional” jazz, and first heard the racing downhill of Charlie Parker. I knew he was dead already, skiing in heroin, but Miles Davis had a series of departures: Birth of the Cool, Miles Ahead, Sketches of Spain, Porgy and Bess, Milestones, Kind of Blue.

  There were a few boys at Dulwich who led me to jazz. Again, the moment was friendly. The musicians union in Britain had forbidden tours by Americans since the end of the war. But in the mid-1950s its policies were relaxed, and the great figures began to tour. There was a New Orleans veteran, George Lewis. There was a band led by the Dixieland guitarist Eddie Condon. And then it began in earnest: Louis Armstrong and the All Stars; Jazz at the Philharmonic, arranged by Norman Granz; the Modern Jazz Quartet; the Basie Band; the Ellington Orchestra; Thelonious Monk; Miles Davis.

/>   I don't know what these groups thought of England (which was not very black or cool), because they played in strange places like old cinemas and variety halls. Miles Davis came on, squeezed out one bitter blue number, turned his back on the audience, and never played another note. Monk prowled round a dishonest piano. The MJQ seemed to be in a Stockholm chamber designed by Ingmar Bergman. Basie and Ellington blew the roofs off their halls and carried themselves like professional crowd-pleasers. Basie offered the sheer engine of his beat and the Duke teased us royally when he started to open up the old Ellington repertoire only to discover that kid Brits had the records. “Oh,” he said after something black and tan. “Oh, you know that? Well, we love you madly.” And that camp announcement was delicious in an age when we were all trying to tell someone “I love you” for real.

  Armstrong was the huge draw. As I recall, his South London concert was at the biggest venue available, the Davis Theater in Croydon. He had that all-star lineup with him—Trummy Young, Ed Hall, Billy Kyle, Arvell Shaw, Barrett Deems—and a singer, Velma Middleton. Louis then was past his best, so he was just intoxicating. He fronted the band in his fond and rascally way, but two or three times a night he would take off on a solo that was so shattering and pure that you knew how in 1927 this guy had had Stravinsky, Goodman, Scott Fitzgerald, and every white woman who heard him ready for the jungle. You could still hear the outrage.