by Peter Turner
The passing of years has also given me more time to appreciate Gloria the woman herself rather than Gloria the film star, and to realize the privilege I was handed to have journeyed with her through several years of her life. Thinking back on the relationship we shared, I’ve laughed out loud at her knowing sense of humour and sighed at the memory of her blank and immovable stubbornness. And, oh yes indeed, I remember her irresistible vulnerability. But, above all, what has become so apparent to me now, which wasn’t to me then, is how misunderstood Gloria was, and how brave she had been in dealing with the barrage of falsehoods and inaccuracies about her from her turbulent days in Hollywood, where she was the victim, certainly by today’s standards, of psychological and physical abuse. No matter what had happened to Gloria in life, or would happen, she always found the courage to carry on.
Turning over the pages of my book has turned over memories and thoughts about Gloria which had been lying dormant for years; words, images, truths about her life and also my own, which can only be realized with time.
Gloria came to England in the spring of 1978 to play the role of Sadie Thompson in the Somerset Maugham play Rain, which was to have a three-week run at the Watford Palace Theatre just on the outskirts of London. It was fitting, and I was amused, that on the day she arrived she was greeted by a full-blown rain-bashed day. I wondered why this Oscar-winning actress I’d never heard of was not staying at the Ritz hotel or somewhere else fancy. Instead, she was renting a ground-floor room, albeit one with a kitchen, in a house near Primrose Hill which let rooms to actors, and where I, one of those actors, rented the room at the top. I didn’t know then that she didn’t have money to spare.
I was drawn to her soon after we first met when she asked if she could borrow a shirt because her own was in the laundry. Then, a day or so later, when she asked if I could lend her five pounds until she could get to a bank, we became friends.
In those early days, on my way to my ‘between acting jobs’, I’d notice her as I was either entering or leaving the house and she’d ask questions if we met in the hall. Where could she mail a letter? Where could she catch a bus to Huston station (she meant Euston station but she never did get that one sorted out). Where did I buy my kebab?
Within a week we were eating kebabs together at Andy’s Kebab House or having dinner at Mustoe Bistro in Regents Park Road. Nobody paid her any attention. She didn’t dress up or look glamorous. It didn’t feel like I was hanging out with a film star at all.
On one of her days off from rehearsal, when I offered to show her the neighbourhood, we walked together over Primrose Hill and then on to Camden Town and I plucked up the courage to ask her about Hollywood. No go. Gloria would say very little. She wanted to know more about me. How come I started acting ten years ago? How long had I spent at drama school? What character was I playing in the television series Spearhead, which was about to be aired on British TV?
Watching Gloria figure out cooking one night down in her rooms I saw that she had a copy of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare on her desk, which seemed a bit surprising, and so I just mentioned, because I thought she’d be interested, that three years earlier I’d played Romeo in Romeo and Juliet at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield.
Gloria instantly gave up on her cooking. She turned off the grill. She left the bread in the toaster. She put the cheese aside.
Then, sitting down beside me, knowing it by heart, the role she’d always wished she’d played, Gloria recited whole Juliet speeches without fluffing a line.
That long and special night, Gloria told stories about her early stage-work before she went to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and about her lifelong acting teacher – her Scottish mother, Jeannie McDougall – who’d encouraged her passion. Of how Jeannie had been an actress in London in the 1910s and had trained at the prestigious Sir Frank Benson theatre company, an early training ground for actors, which was dedicated to the plays of William Shakespeare and the importance of clear diction and speech. And of how, years later, after Jeannie had married Michael Hallward and they’d left England for America, where Gloria was born, Jeannie subsequently (after divorcing Michael) started her own acting school in California, based entirely on Sir Frank Benson’s principles – Shakespeare, diction, speech – and so, in time, Gloria became her pupil.
Knowing so much about Shakespeare’s heroines, from Juliet to Rosalind, Gloria told me that when she’d be working on film roles, she and her mother would look for similarities in the character she was playing with some of those heroines from Shakespeare’s plays. Is there a hint of Hermia in Oklahoma’s Ado Annie, perhaps? Or a layer of Lady Macbeth in Vicki Crawford in Human Desire, I’ve since wondered?
And watching Gloria’s films again now, I can detect her mother’s insistence in the production of clear diction and speech, particularly in The Bad and the Beautiful, where in the first scenes Gloria invests Rosemary Bartlett with perfect enunciation until, in the later scenes, Gloria seems to forget about it and relaxes into her regular, more comfortable speech patterns.
In that spring and summer of 1978, Gloria enjoyed living the kind of life I usually led. We went on walks around London, saw plays at fringe theatres, and, even though Gloria rarely drank alcohol, her favourite tipple being cold milk, she liked to spend evenings together in the local pubs.
Gloria was fascinated by the Plantagenet and Tudor English kings – an American-in-London kind of thing, I supposed then – and so I trooped with her to see Hampton Court Palace and the Tower of London. How excited she would have been if she’d have known then what I learnt, six years after she had died, when I received a letter from Charles Kidd, editor of Debrett’s Peerage, telling me that while researching his book, Debrett’s Goes to Hollywood, he’d discovered that Gloria Grahame was a descendent of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, the son of King Edward the Third.
The place she wanted to visit most though was my hometown of Liverpool. She loved stories about my growing-up there with my eight older brothers and sisters. Her favourite story was one about the Pivvy, an old variety theatre near to where we lived, where my mother was a cleaner. Aged seven, I would accompany her there when she went to do the ‘pick up’, which involved picking up discarded theatre tickets and sweet wrappers off the floor between shows, and I would go onto the stage as it was being brushed and imagine I was an actor in a play. The first time Gloria did visit my family there, she claimed that Liverpool was the most romantic place on earth. Liverpool? Was she kidding? No. Living back in the city now, thirty years later, I think that Gloria was right.
Having been probed about the relationship over the years, it’s even plainer to me now why Gloria and I made the transition from friends to lovers. It happened because we had become intriguingly attracted to each other and had grown increasingly close. There was no song or dance about it. Yes, Gloria was almost thirty years older than me but I’d grown up around sisters twenty years my senior and so I was comfortable around women much older than myself. Yes, my sexuality was fluid, but there were no heavy ‘gay or straight’ conversations because there was no need. To Gloria and myself, there were no obstacles. It was only as far as other people were concerned that the relationship we shared didn’t fit into a box. There were cynics. It was 1978. Eyebrows were raised in a way that perhaps they would not be now. Since then, attitudes towards sexual identity, as well as attitudes towards women, particularly over the age of fifty, have changed enormously. I’m very glad about that.
Having re-read Film Stars I’m reminded of how the late 1970s were interesting years for my acting career too. Since being noticed at The National Youth Theatre and then leaving drama school, I’d worked with theatre companies in Glasgow, Sheffield, and London. I’d played Harry in the film The Comeback, the lead role in a John Bowen play and the lead role in a three-part series, both for the BBC. Then from July 1978 until July 1981, throughout the entire course of my relationship with Gloria, I was playing Terry Adams in the television drama series Spearhead, appearing in
sixteen hour-long episodes in all. Gloria was delighted to learn that I was soon to play Trinculo in Derek Jarman’s film version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and even more excited to be able to pass on the news to ‘Mother’.
When the play Rain finished at Watford, Gloria stayed on in London after being offered the role of Lily in the play A Tribute to Lily Lamont, which was to be presented at The New End Theatre in Hampstead. She played parts on British television in the autumn of that year and, taking her by surprise, there was renewed film interest in her from both sides of the Atlantic. Gloria was interviewed on radio and there were articles about her in the London press. The British film and theatre world responded and, although Gloria preferred to keep herself out of any limelight, there were invitations for her to give talks at film schools, and to go to film festivals as well as being invited to other special events. Her career was in new bloom. Our personal and private relationship gave confidence to us both. There seemed to be an exciting future ahead.
Over the following two years there were weekends together in Brighton, Glasgow, and Wales. We holidayed on a Greek island where we rented a room from a local who met tourists at the port. Between gaps in recording each season of my television series, and Gloria’s shooting schedules for the films Chilly Scenes in Winter and Melvin and Howard, which took her back to the United States, I visited her at the caravan she owned near a beach in Los Angeles, and I also stayed with her several times at her rented apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, New York.
Thinking back now on the course of our relationship I can see clearly when, but not knowing at the time why, it started to change.
It was 1980. It was summer. The telephone woke me at five a.m. It was Gloria calling me from America. The conversation, as usual, was chatty and close and by the end of it we’d worked out that I would travel to see her. Excited by the spur of the moment arrangement, I bought a cheap standby ticket and flew out of London the following day. A scary lightning storm, flashing across a black sky, thundered the sides of my plane as it descended over New York.
It wasn’t a surprise to me that Gloria was feeling so tired. From the beginning of the year she’d been determined to do as much work in the theatre as she possibly could and stubbornly pursued roles she’d always wanted to play. Learning and preparing some hefty parts such as Amanda in Private Lives and, achieving one of her ambitions, the role of Lady Macbeth; she’d travelled to little-known theatres in faraway places to act in small-scale productions which played for little more than a week. In between plays she’d flown to London and back again twice and she’d been on location in Georgia to film Mr Griffin and Me. And it was only the month of July!
The city was humid and hot. Gloria was restless and contrary. She didn’t want to stay in and she didn’t want to go out. It was only when she was contacted by the Inland Revenue Service to question her over expenses for theatre tickets she’d sent them without providing receipts that she found a renewed energy. Her contrariness turned into crusade.
Over the following days, every evening after dark, I walked with her through the theatre district to pick discarded ticket stubs up from the gutter, as well as any other receipt she thought might satisfy the IRS. How was I to know, twenty-two years earlier, aged seven, and following after my mother picking theatre tickets up from the floor at the theatre in Liverpool, that one day I would be doing exactly the same thing with a film star on the streets of New York?
Hot July turned into hotter August. Gloria became increasingly unsettled. She didn’t like her hair or she didn’t like her clothes. There were telephone calls. She spent time alone in her room. She dismissed all my concerns. She’d be snappy or short. We’d argue. I took myself walking through the city. There was something not being said. Maybe the relationship was over. There was a secret Gloria was keeping from me. I knew it was time to go home.
I didn’t know then that the secret was the sudden return of a cancer she’d never told me about and which she would die from the following year.
My Spearhead job took me away filming to Hong Kong at the end of that year and I didn’t see Gloria again until those last days in Liverpool. There was a letter she’d sent in which a particular line stood out:
Both Sartre and Camus wrote, that in this life, when we die, it’s only love that is important.
Maybe the fact that my relationship with Gloria was not considered to be legitimate while she was alive was the reason it was hardly acknowledged after she had died. It was only many years later, when I returned to California, that I went with friends to Oakwood Cemetery and I stood at Gloria’s grave.
I disengaged from my acting career at about the same time that it disengaged from me. It didn’t matter. I went to work in a junk shop at the far end of the Portobello Road. One day a 1950s desk I liked the look of was brought in to be put up for sale, so I bought it for myself. Months later I found an old Hermes typewriter to put on it. Waking up too early one morning, I looked at the typewriter, sat at the desk, and started to write my book.
Not having written anything previously, I didn’t have high expectations for the book and thought of it as just my very own story, but when Michael Billington, an actor friend from my Spearhead days, read it, he encouraged me to think of it as something more. I sent it to several literary agents but one by one they sent the manuscript back. In a last-ditch attempt, not realizing I’d kept the best till the last, I sent it to Deborah Rogers. Months later, Deborah telephoned to say that she liked it and that she’d given it to Carmen Callil, the managing director of the publishers Chatto and Windus. Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool was published eleven months later, in 1986.
When the book was published it gathered interest from the film world and, after many challenges and a walk down a very long road, it now looks as if a film is to be made by producers Barbara Broccoli and Colin Vaines for Eon Productions, with a screenplay by Matt Greenhalgh and with Paul McGuigan to direct.
I’m indebted to Mathew Turner (no relation) at Rogers, Coleridge and White for taking Film Stars up again after all these years, and I’m especially grateful to Georgina Morley at Pan Macmillan for taking a chance on me by re-publishing it.
FILM STARS DON’T DIE
IN LIVERPOOL
PETER TURNER is a Liverpool-born actor, writer and director. He joined the National Youth Theatre aged sixteen, working extensively in theatre, film and television. Known for his parts in The Krays, The Comeback and Spearhead, he was selected for the Carlton’s Screenwriters’ Course in 1993.
First published 1986 by Chatto and Windus
Published in 1988 by Penguin Books
This electronic edition published 2016 by Pan Books
an imprint of Pan Macmillan
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ISBN 978-1-5098-1822-8
Copyright © Peter Turner 1986
‘Since Then’ © Peter Turner 2016
Cover Image © Moviepix / Getty Images
The right of Peter Turner to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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