by Adam Sisman
David had arranged to spend a weekend with the Kennaways at their house in Highgate before going back to Vienna.18 On his first evening they were due to go out to a formal dinner and pressed him to come too. David was reluctant, saying that he had nothing suitable to wear; but James devised two outfits from one, lending David his dress trousers and a velvet jacket, while he wore the dinner jacket and a pair of worn blue trousers. The pair of them spent the evening joking and privately sending up their stuffy hosts.
The three went on to a nightclub, where they found some friends in celebratory mood. James invited a couple of girls from the club to join them. In the smoky gloom the group could not find a table large enough to seat them all; David gripped Susan by the hand and steered her to a separate table some distance away from the others, where they sat talking. While James was out of earshot, she confided that she wanted a ‘small revenge’ on her husband for his womanising.19 She had never taken a lover, she said, though James had often suggested that she should do so. ‘What about me?’ asked David. Until that moment it had not occurred to Susan that he might be interested in her; she assumed that she was merely confiding in a friend. But the look in his eye, and the way he clutched her when they stood up for a last dance, caused her to feel a sudden thump of excitement.
Eventually the three of them left. Though by now quite drunk, James took the wheel of the car to drive home; David and Susan sat in the back seat, holding hands in the darkness. When they arrived at the house James was tired, so he went straight to bed. David and Susan stayed up talking for a while before saying goodnight. She found it difficult to sleep and rose early, to find David awake too. At dawn they stood by a window together, watching the sun come up over London. By now they were impatient to be alone. David was about to leave for Vienna, but he promised to return soon. In the meantime they would write to each other poste restante; David would send his letters to the post office in Curzon Street, just along the road from MI5. Susan stumbled through the rest of the day in a daze. That evening the three of them went to see Truffaut’s 1962 film Jules et Jim – perhaps because Oskar Werner, the actor who played Jules, had been cast to play the part of Fiedler in The Spy who Came in from the Cold. The film tells the story of two men determined to preserve their friendship despite being in love with the same woman. Susan sat between James and David in the darkened cinema, each clasping her nearer hand.20
From Vienna, David wrote to thank James for a ‘glorious’ and ‘splendid’ weekend:
How super it all was; and – can I say it? – what a lease of life you’ve given me. How much more difficult you make writing for me, which must be a good thing; how much more worth while … I’d take your talent for my success any day – because your prose has the tension of someone really at the edge – glimpses of the unbound – and I know, if I know anything, that there will be more … I don’t think I can give you anything like all this in return … while I don’t think I can offer you much more than admiration for your own work, I think I can still be trusted to pick you off the street if ever you need it …
Your mate Corncrake21
David returned to London early in December, and met Susan at a smart hotel near Oxford Street. He was very nervous, terrified of exposure, divorce and scandal. At lunchtime they drove out to Heathrow Airport and drank cocktails. Almost fifty years later Susan remembered David telling her how unhappy he was with Ann, complaining that she was glum and moody; according to him, she would sit for hours listening to music, neglecting the children and the housework. He said that he had married her only because instructed to do so by MI5, as an entrée into left-wing circles. This, of course, was untrue.
When Susan arrived home that evening, James told her that David had just telephoned ‘from the airport’ and was coming to dinner. Susan could not face seeing her husband and her secret lover comfortable in each other’s company and began drinking again to calm her nerves. She downed so many martinis that she was forced to take to her bed early.
Over the next few days she and David saw each other whenever they could. London was crowded with Christmas shoppers. ‘I remember you best in your black coat and boots – they were new then,’ David would write afterwards: ‘a little, perfect aristocrat, indignant with the mob that had roughed you in Selfridges’.22 They spent whole days together, driving about London in Susan’s green Morris Traveller, walking round the Tower of London hand in hand and drinking tea at the Ritz. Once David pointed out an old-fashioned shopfront which, he said, reminded him of the shop from which he had taken the name le Carré.
Before Christmas he returned to Vienna, but soon after Christmas he was back in London, to spend more time with Susan while James was away in Paris. By now they were talking about running off together and marrying. They spoke about James incessantly; their shared love for him was a chain that bound them together.
After returning again to Vienna David tried to end the affair. ‘Still drunk with love and still deeply hurt with the pain,’ he wrote to Susan.
Your marriage is sane and real; I love your marriage and James almost as much as I love you, because I love your way of living and understanding, I despise what you despise … I don’t want to take or destroy, I want to give. If you can see any other way, if you can honestly see any other hope, tell me. But I will not destroy what you have.23
James had come back from Paris in good spirits, just in time to set off for the Alps. For the past few years the Kennaways had taken a chalet for several months each winter; James would spend the morning skiing and the afternoon working. This time they had rented the Haus am Berg, a lodge above the Austrian ski resort of Zell am See. Oblivious to what had been happening between his wife and his friend, James invited the Cornwells to join them for a few days. In theory there was something to be said for this arrangement, as the two families had boys the same age.
The Haus am Berg turned out to be a gloomy lodge on the mountainside, about half an hour’s walk from Zell am See. David was uncertain what to expect, not knowing how he and Susan would cope with the strain, but hoping that Ann might find some of the same delight that he found in the Kennaways’ company. Susan was welcoming towards Ann; perhaps predictably, James made a pass at her. Afterwards he took David to one side and told him that he thought she was awful. The lovers managed to snatch only a few brief moments alone and the odd furtive kiss. One evening, as the four of them sat around the fire and talked, David took hold of a locket around Susan’s neck and asked her about it in a way that aroused Ann’s suspicions. That night in bed she asked him if anything was wrong. He told her not to be silly, that she was imagining things.
David presented his hosts with a copy of The Spy who Came in from the Cold, in which he scrawled a schoolboyish inscription, in large lettering:
CORNGuilt hiz Book
CORNGuilt luvs KennawayS and is called le CarRé
January 1965
A few nights after the Cornwells had returned to Vienna, Martin Ritt telephoned from Ardmore Studios in Ireland, where The Spy who Came in from the Cold was supposed to have started shooting. His voice had the strangled throb of a man taken hostage.24
‘Richard needs you, David. Richard needs you so bad he won’t speak his lines till you’ve rewritten them.’
‘But what’s wrong with Richard’s lines, Marty, they seemed fine to me?’
‘That’s not the point, David. Richard needs you and he’s holding up the production till he gets you. We’ll pay your fare first class and give you your own suite. What more can you ask?’
David flew to Dublin, taking Ann with him. On the set it quickly became obvious that the director and the star were barely speaking. Ritt had come to despise Burton, whom he saw as a spoiled and self-indulgent actor dissipating his talent. After it was all over, when Ritt called ‘wrap’ on the last day of shooting, he would turn to Burton and say bitterly, ‘Richard, I’ve had the last good lay in an old whore, and it had to be in front of the mirror.’
One further factor compl
icating their relations was that Ritt had cast Claire Bloom as the female lead, rejecting Burton’s suggestion that his wife might play the part instead. (The thought of Elizabeth Taylor in the role of a serious young Communist was perhaps too much for him.) More than fifteen years earlier, while still a teenager, Bloom had acted opposite Burton, himself then only twenty-four, in Christopher Fry’s stage play The Lady’s Not for Burning, and the two had become lovers. She had then played Ophelia opposite Burton’s Hamlet. A decade later their affair had resumed during filming of Look Back in Anger, until Bloom had broken it off. Now she was once again playing opposite Burton, as Leamas’s girlfriend. It was scarcely surprising that Elizabeth Taylor, to whom he had been married less than a year, should be jealous of her. This is said to have been the reason why the name of Bloom’s character was changed from Liz Gold to Nan Perry for the film. Calling the leading lady Liz was not an option.
‘I can’t go to a pub any more,’ Burton complained to David: ‘Elizabeth is more famous than the Queen. I wish none of it had ever happened.’ Perhaps to find his way into the role of Leamas, Burton was drinking a lot, though (unlike the character he was playing) he had a comparatively weak head for alcohol; as Bloom recalled, ‘sometimes he was drunk, yes; sometimes he wasn’t’. Taylor had insisted on accompanying her husband to Dublin for the filming, bringing an entourage reputed to be seventeen strong: composed, as David understood it, of children by different marriages, tutors for these children, hairdressers, secretaries and, in the words of one waggish member of the unit, the fellow who clipped their parrot’s claws. These occupied one whole floor of the Shelbourne, Dublin’s grandest hotel.
In the final sequence of The Spy who Came in from the Cold, Leamas and his girlfriend attempt to escape from the East over the Berlin Wall. A grim likeness of the Wall had been mocked up in breezeblock and barbed wire in a floodlit Dublin Square, attended by a crowd of Irish onlookers craning for a glimpse of the stars.* Burton was not supposed to emerge until it was fully dark, so, at Ritt’s request, David kept him company in a basement room, sharing a half-bottle of whisky. To stop Burton from becoming so drunk that he would not be able to climb the Wall, David tried to consume most of it himself, but he wasn’t sure that he had succeeded. Outside, set designers and technicians were having a last fidget. There was a point where iron bolts formed a crude, barely visible ladder. The director and the cinematographer were studying it together.
Suddenly, to delighted cheers from the assembled crowd, a white Rolls-Royce appeared, driven by a chauffeur, bearing the most famous film star on the planet on to the set of a film in which she played no part. Roused by the clamour outside, Burton bounded up the basement steps into the square, roaring ‘Oh Christ! Elizabeth, you fool,’ and raging at the French chauffeur, who threw the Rolls into reverse and drove away. Furious, Marty Ritt called off the shoot.
That night Burton came out for dinner with the Cornwells on his own. Back at the hotel, David was already in his pyjamas when the telephone rang. It was Burton. ‘Come up for a drink,’ he said. ‘Elizabeth wants to meet you.’ So David and Ann dressed again and went up to the fourth floor. They found him, sitting alone in a vast sitting room. Suddenly they heard a seductive, disembodied voice, speaking through an intercom: ‘Richard?’
‘Yes, darling?’ he answered.
‘Who’s all there?’
‘The writer.’
Burton went into the bedroom to fetch her. The Cornwells tried not to listen to the sounds of an obvious altercation coming through the intercom. Eventually Taylor emerged, barefoot, dressed in a fluffy, wraparound dressing gown. Extending David a little-girl handshake, she managed a brief ‘How d’you do?’ before turning tail and going back to the bedroom. The Cornwells decided to leave. Burton, obviously embarrassed by his wife’s rudeness, walked his guests to the lift. As they said goodnight he told Ann that she was very pretty.
Taylor made her presence felt at Ardmore by bellowing ‘Richard!’ across the set. Claire Bloom tried to keep out of the way, staying in her caravan much of the time. One evening, however, she was persuaded to go out to dinner with her co-star and his wife, with David making up the four. The Burtons became very drunk and fractious with each other, she recalled almost half a century later. Though Burton was an excellent raconteur, ‘David was better,’ and ‘Liz didn’t like that at all.’ Bloom was so uncomfortable that she ducked out midway through the dinner.
David’s notional task was to rewrite Burton’s lines, which meant reworking scenes to make them play as the star wanted. But Burton’s way wasn’t always Ritt’s way, with the result that David became, for this brief period, their go-between: sitting down with Ritt and fixing a scene, then sitting down with Burton and fixing it again, then scurrying back to Ritt. This process lasted only a few days, until Ritt declared himself satisfied with the revisions and Burton stopped complaining. In fact, Burton’s lines remained largely unchanged. Some of the most significant new lines that David wrote were not for Burton at all, but for Oskar Werner in the part of Fiedler, when he turns on Leamas and angrily reminds him that he is a traitor, in no position to demand anything.
One evening the Cornwells dined with Claire Bloom in a private room in her hotel. During the meal David was called to the telephone; it was Susan from the Haus am Berg, in a panic. James knew everything. He had found a letter that she was writing to David, which had made it obvious that she and David were having an affair. Distraught, he had taken the car and driven south across the Italian border. From a progression of Italian hotels and bars he was bombarding her with letters and telegrams, one moment saying that he never wanted to see her again and the next begging her to come back to him. He had cancelled their joint bank account, instructed his solicitor to sell their Highgate house and written to his father-in-law, telling him that they no longer needed the house in Gloucestershire. Meanwhile he telephoned various friends for solace. The publisher Mark Longman warned him that, given his record with women, he didn’t ‘have a leg to stand on’ in complaining about Susan’s behaviour. But James was beyond reason. The discovery of his wife’s infidelity had unbalanced him. It seemed that James, who had taunted David for being ‘weak’ in his unwillingness to inflict pain on others, could not take it himself. One especially crazy letter to his wife referred to ‘a plot afoot, a plot of the gods whereby everybody in my life for nearly a year has been sent to destroy me’. He raved about knives and a gun, seeming to suggest that he planned to kill both his wife and her lover. It was this letter which had frightened Susan into telephoning David in Dublin.
The next morning David took Ann for a walk into the countryside surrounding the studio. Leaning on a five-bar gate, he confessed to being in love with Susan. He told her that he felt stifled in their marriage. Ann was shocked; though she had sensed that something was wrong at Zell am See, she had known nothing of the affair. He ducked admitting that he had slept with Susan, but warned that he was considering whether to run off with her.
Back in Vienna, David received a series of threatening telephone calls from James, now consoling himself in a Marseille brothel. Trying to calm his friend, David proposed that they should meet and talk.
Susan was due to travel back to Britain for her daughters’ half-term. She broke her journey in Vienna, for one last meeting with David. He drove her to the airport; both were tearful and shaky. David presented her with his fountain pen as a memento, but in her confusion she left it behind. When she arrived in England she found a telegram from him declaring his love for her, followed by a letter. ‘This place is full of you – oh Susie, love, dearest heart, I love you,’ he wrote: ‘I seem to miss you more with each day that passes.’
A week later she returned to Zell am See, accompanied by James’s Oxford friend Denys Hodson, who had been his best man at their wedding. Up at the lodge they found James, who had returned from France while she was away. A series of terrible rows followed. Susan had been a quiescent wife; now she was raving and shouting back at her husband. In
a ghastly way James seemed to find the confrontation stimulating. He insisted that David join them at Zell am See. In retrospect, Susan would conclude that her husband ‘didn’t want the drama to end just yet, and was setting in motion acts to complicate the plot still further, so that he could write a better script for us’.25
A series of minor misunderstandings followed. James had arranged to pick up David from the station by car, but returned to the lodge without him, bringing instead a case of wine that David had sent as a thank-you for the skiing holiday. Then he decided to drive back to the station. Meanwhile David had arrived in Zell am See, having missed his intended train and taken the next one. Finding nobody there to collect him, he had started up the mountain on foot. By now it was getting late in the afternoon and the snow was thick on the ground. Trying to take a short cut to the lodge, he found himself on the wrong side of a high wire fence. Susan spotted him through a window and dashed out into the snow in her slippers. The fence kept them apart: the lovers could only touch fingers through the wire mesh. Eventually, with Susan’s help, David managed to clamber over it, tumbling into the snow beside her. The two of them trudged back to the house.