by Adam Sisman
In March 1969 Ronnie made a triumphant appearance at a dinner held to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Poole Round Table. As its founding chairman, he was an honoured guest. He brought with him good wishes from ‘Tablers’ across the Channel, having met the President of the French Round Table while travelling back from Vienna. His scintillating speech produced a standing ovation.30
David mentioned Ronnie in a letter to John Margetson that June. ‘Not long ago Father surfaced with a “this-is-it, seven-thousand-quid-or-I’m-in-the-workhouse” touch,’ he wrote, ‘and in the end we gave him a thousand in old ones and he promptly pushed off to Madrid and, so far as I can make out, blew it in a fortnight.’31
Ronnie was not above resorting to blackmail in between the pleading. When he heard about David’s involvement with a woman, he demanded payment of £1,000 as the price of his silence. On another occasion he threatened to sue David for failing to mention him in a television interview. One Christmas he telephoned David at Coxley, to say that he was just down the road, in Wells. Could he drive over to spend Christmas with his grandsons? David felt torn. It was a turbulent time in the marriage, and Ronnie was the last person in the world that Ann wanted as a visitor. With a heavy heart he told his father that he was not welcome at Coxley.
From time to time over the next few years Ronnie would turn up at Westminster, where Simon was now boarding, and take his eldest grandson out to lunch at Simpson’s or the Savoy. Such occasions were an ordeal for Simon, who found that he had very little to say to his grandfather.
Ronnie had taken the opportunity of his return to England to divorce his second wife, Jean, from whom he had been separated for almost a decade. His first wife, David’s mother Olive, was living in the cottage David had bought for her near Woodbridge. One day her daughter Alex, by now a young woman, answered the doorbell, to find herself facing a huge bunch of flowers. Ronnie’s large head appeared from one side. He seemed vexed to see her there, rather than her mother. ‘I’d like you to make yourself scarce,’ he said.
Some years later Ronnie would marry for a third time. His new wife was Joy Folland, a longstanding mistress of his, who had two children from a previous marriage. David had been billeted with her during the war. She wore twinset and pearls, and appeared to those who met her to be ‘county’. The day after the wedding, Ronnie took her to the Derby.
John Miller led David on a walk to Tregiffian, where he and Truscott had lived when they first came to Cornwall. Their house, which lacked electricity and running water, had been one of three clifftop cottages forming a terrace facing out to sea, down a long track from the nearest road. The original occupants had been cliff workers, producing crops from the meadows that descended the cliff in steps; in the mild Cornish climate flowers bloomed and vegetables ripened earlier than anywhere else in the kingdom. The opening of the London–Penzance railway had placed a big premium on early crops, until refrigeration crippled the market. Now the cottages were derelict, their roofs falling in. But the location was spectacular, facing south over a vast expanse of sea. Walks led across the clifftops in both directions along rugged paths. David was so taken by the place that he accosted the farmer who owned the cottages, then out ploughing his fields. He arranged to buy them, including nearly a mile of cliff, for £9,000: a substantial sum, almost twice the price of an average house, but maybe a small amount to pay for somewhere to settle. Once they were his, work started to convert the three cottages into a single dwelling.
By coincidence, another successful writer lived in a simple cottage only a short distance away. Derek Tangye wrote the ‘Minack Chronicles’, a series of books celebrating the pleasures of living in rural Cornwall, often featuring animals as characters; his books were all bestsellers, and it became a long-running joke between the two authors that his were more popular than David’s. Over the next thirty years Tangye’s admirers would often turn up at Tregiffian, roosting in the garden or lurking by the door, some mistaking David for Derek. ‘That way,’ David would explain patiently, ‘about a mile.’
Tangye and his wife Jean (known as ‘Jeannie’) were unlikely neighbours in that remote part of West Cornwall. Before they had settled there in the early 1950s he had worked in Fleet Street as a gossip columnist on the Daily Express and elsewhere, while she had been an agony aunt on the Daily Mirror, and before that press officer for the Savoy Hotel Group. Their friends, who included Danny Kaye, Beverley Nichols, A. P. Herbert, Noël Coward, Bing Crosby and Tyrone Power, had been amazed when this good-looking and sophisticated couple chose to exile themselves to a simple cottage in such an isolated place. Tangye had served in MI5 during the war, in a press section set up by John Bingham, and had worked closely with Bingham on the deception plan surrounding Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa. It has been alleged that he continued to work for MI5 secretly after the war, and even that he was a Soviet agent, though the case has not been proven beyond doubt.32
He was a small man, touchy and jealous, a rogue and a troublemaker; he and David would develop what David would call ‘an adversarial friendship’, lubricated by often refilled glasses of whisky. Though David was sceptical at first about the sincerity of Tangye’s pose as the plain man’s philosopher, and shuddered at his purple prose, he came to accept that Tangye’s books were written from the heart, and that ‘you could never quite deny the magic’. Despite his execrable style, Tangye ‘gave more comfort and joy to more readers in his lifetime than most writers dream of’. David would sometimes visit Tangye when his own writing was not going well, and found that ‘within an hour his strength, heart and energy had bounced me back to life’. As David would reflect after Tangye’s death, they had ‘an almost ridiculous amount in common’: the same love of Cornwall; the same ‘places and faces from the secret world of the post-war years’; the same need for solitude, ‘interspersed with bouts of random, crazy conversation’; even the same drinking habits. Perhaps Tangye was a foil to David, reflecting back at him his fraudulent self, or the self that he feared becoming. Tangye was libidinous, sometimes drunken and not always clean; Jane did not enjoy his company, but David described him as ‘a wicked, adorable man’. In 1996 David would deliver the eulogy at Tangye’s funeral, surveying a friendship that had lasted more than a quarter of a century: he concluded that he had ‘loved him greatly’, despite the fact that Tangye’s final words to him were ‘bugger off’.33
Miller introduced David to a fellow artist, Karl Weschke, who would become another lifelong friend. Indeed David was an important patron to Weschke, who would have to wait until the 1990s before he began to get the wider recognition he deserved. A small man with piercing eyes and more than a passing resemblance to Picasso, Weschke seemed haunted by the past; indeed his disturbing work appeared to draw on the terrible things he had witnessed in his youth. ‘The artist’s eye must shrink from nothing,’ he would say. He lived on a cliff overlooking the sea at Cape Cornwall, an idyllic spot in complete contrast to his home-town of Gera, an ugly industrial city in what was now East Germany. Weschke’s childhood had been scarred by poverty and degradation. The son of a prostitute, he had embraced the ideology of National Socialism and served in the Luftwaffe. He had been brought to England as a prisoner-of-war and had lived there ever since, with a succession of wives and partners (several of them Jewish), though he would remain a German citizen to the end; indeed he remained aggressively himself. This was a characteristic that David relished about him: ‘the Karl who from Year Zero set out to build a brain and a heart and a talent; the Karl who stuck to his Germanness, and built on it through thick and thin …’34 Most of all he valued his dedication to his calling. ‘Like many artists, and like many of the world’s strivers, Karl readily identified with Goethe’s Faust, whose mission was to find out what the world contains at its inmost point,’ David would write in drafting a eulogy for Weschke after his death in 2005, ‘and everyone knows that means there will be bodies along the path.’35 For David, Weschke was a slice of Germany on his doors
tep in Cornwall, a man still raw from his early experiences: combative and sometimes difficult, but also warm and often charming.
Around the same time as he bought the cottages at Tregiffian, David bought a piece of land in Wengen and built a chalet, fulfilling a childhood dream. His purchase was made possible by his old friend Kaspar von Almen, at that time chairman of the local parish council. The chalet would be ready to inhabit by the autumn of 1969. Some time afterwards David invited Robin Cooke to a party there, but Cooke declined, explaining that he could not afford to come. ‘I suppose that the super-rich are different from other people,’ David commented apologetically.
Earlier in the year he had taken the boys for a skiing holiday in Zermatt, staying with Alan Clark and his wife Jane. ‘They don’t go out at all, are fundamentally anti-social & terrifically rich,’ David wrote to Ann. Clark’s friends were ‘ghastly’. He had endured an evening with an earl and his wife, ‘louche, thick and arrogant’. The Earl had offended him by praising the ‘benevolent dictatorship’ in Argentina.36 David was startled to receive a bill afterwards. It seemed outrageous for Clark to charge him for staying at his chalet when he had so often borrowed David’s penthouse flat. Clark himself seemed to realise this, because he rang up and apologised. ‘I shouldn’t have sent you that bill,’ he said. ‘Jane is furious with me.’
‘I eventually found him too rich for my blood,’ David would tell Clark’s biographer. ‘He offended the last of the Puritan in me.’ The final straw came when Clark had once again borrowed the penthouse while David was away. Afterwards his charwoman handed in her notice. Investigating on his return, he discovered that when she had gone in there to clean up, she had found blood on the wall. She had consulted the concierge, a former Scottish policeman; together they had decided to have the flat redecorated before he returned. The concierge was entirely silent about it. David never asked for details. In retrospect he thought that the girls were much younger than he had realised: ‘there was some very dark stuff going on’.
So far as David was concerned, that was the end: he broke contact. By this time he was living in Cornwall. Clark drove down there and put a note through the letterbox, but David did not reply.
The film of The Looking Glass War was released in September 1969. It was written and directed by Frank Pierson, who had taken on the project after it had been abandoned by Jack Clayton. This was Pierson’s first feature film; previously he had worked in television, and written screenplays for such films as Cat Ballou and Cool Hand Luke. Unfortunately his script missed much of what the book was about. He showed the East German rockets as real, whereas the book had suggested that they were a fantasy, a piece of wishful thinking on the part of Leclerc, head of the Department. The script downplayed the rivalry between the Department and the Circus, thus making Leclerc’s longing for an intelligence coup difficult to understand. The character of Smiley did not appear at all, perhaps for contractual reasons. Pierson had assembled a strong cast, including Ralph Richardson, Timothy West, Susan George, Ray McAnally and Anthony Hopkins, playing Avery. The part of Leiser was taken by the American actor Christopher Jones, whose voice had to be dubbed to make him sound convincing as a Pole living in England; even so, his long hair and rock-star good looks made him an implausible choice for an undercover agent in 1960s East Germany. The jazzy score seemed more suited to a summer-holiday idyll than to a doomed operation behind the lines.
Once Clayton had rejected his script, David had no further involvement in the movie, which he would rate in a retrospective interview given at the National Film Theatre in 2002 as ‘truly bad’.
The film had taken a long time to reach the screen. Before it appeared there had already been discussions about a film version of David’s next book, A Small Town in Germany. Robert Shaw’s menacing demeanour and intimidating physical presence made him an obvious casting as the hardbitten security man, Alan Turner; Shaw himself was so keen to play the part that he offered to write a script himself. As well as being an actor Shaw was a novelist, who had already adapted two of his own works for the screen; but he led an undisciplined life, with competing demands on his attention. After a succession of delays he promised to finish the script while on location in Spain, where he had rented a villa belonging to Orson Welles. Unfortunately the villa was destroyed by fire while he was staying there, and with it his script.*
After this setback David decided to undertake the job himself. His failure with The Looking-Glass War increased his motivation to succeed next time around. His treatment for A Small Town in Germany was intended to show how the essentially intellectual chase of the book could be translated into a physical chase more suitable for film. In particular the treatment incorporated an important structural change: the physical presence, for a substantial portion of the film, of Leo Harting himself. In the book he appears only as an unnamed figure in the prologue and then is absent from the rest of the narrative until glimpsed from a distance on the final page. David produced a first draft of the script in March 1969. The plan was to shoot the film in the autumn, but by June there was still no director attached to the project. Karel Reisz had shown initial interest, but then told David that he thought that the script debased the book; another director branded it ‘professional suicide’. Eventually Sydney Pollack came on board. Pollack was a young director, whose first big feature film They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? would be released later that year, winning five Academy Awards. David worked closely with him on the script, at Coxley, in the Swiss chalet and at a beach house in Malibu, and completed a second draft in November.
Pollack’s upbringing in a small town in the mid-west had been hard: his father left the family home while he was still an infant and he had been raised by his alcoholic mother, who had died when he was only sixteen. Unsurprisingly his schooling had been rudimentary, but he made a virtue out of his unsophisticated background. ‘I’m from South Bend, Indiana,’ he would say. ‘If I get it, everyone gets it.’ David took him to Bonn, where the novel was set, and showed him the hotel where Chamberlain had stayed when he came to confer with Hitler. Pollack was puzzled. ‘I know who Hitler was, of course,’ he said: ‘but who’s this Chamberlain cat? The only Chamberlain I know is Wilt “The Stilt” Chamberlain.’†
Frustratingly, the plan to make a film of A Small Town in Germany came to nothing.† More than twenty years later Pollack had a reason to re-read the script. ‘Jesus, there’s some good stuff in those pages,’ he wrote to David afterwards. ‘With all the groaning I think we came very, very close.’37
In Malibu, just before Christmas, David received a curt telegram: ‘James Kennaway is dead. Ann.’
The full details of what had happened would not be known until later. Kennaway had gone to London to see Peter O’Toole, who had been cast in the lead role of ‘Pink’ in Country Dance, the film based on his novel Household Ghosts. After lunching with O’Toole, Kennaway had left London in the early evening to drive to Gloucestershire. He was due back in time for a dinner with Susan and friends to discuss setting up a restaurant in Fairford. On the newly built M4 motorway his Volvo had spun out of control, veering across the lanes before breaching the central reservation into the paths of oncoming cars. According to the coroner’s report, he had suffered a massive coronary: he was probably already dead by the time his car collided with the others.
As Kennaway himself had so often predicted, he had died young. His death lent a grim irony to the title of his most recent novel, Some Gorgeous Accident. Published in the year before he died and set in Swinging London, the book had explored a triangular relationship. Two men love each other like brothers, but one (ironically named ‘Fiddes’, suggesting faithfulness) betrays the other by seducing his woman, ‘a smooth-walking, cool-talking, coon-meeting, all-happening chick’ – named Susie, though the character, an American photographer, was based on another woman. There were numerous echoes of what had happened two years earlier between David, Susan and James, including a confrontation at a railway station in which both m
en take Susie by an arm and try to pull her in different directions. David said that he had not read the book, but even if this were so, it seems likely that he had a notion of its content, if only from the reviews. So his horror and distress at the death of his friend was mingled with feelings of confusion and, perhaps, resentment.
His new novel could be interpreted as a response to Some Gorgeous Accident. It seems that he may have started writing it before Kennaway’s death; he had told Ann some six months later that he had begun ‘a long novel quite unlike the one I meant to write and no sort of suspense’.38
Susan hoped that David might invest in her new restaurant, which she planned to name Pinks as a tribute to her husband’s memory. They arranged to meet a few weeks after the funeral, but David pulled out at the last moment when he had to go abroad at short notice. Instead they spoke on the telephone. ‘I have felt very little but anger since our telephone conversation,’ he wrote to her afterwards:
I have thought long and deep about what you said, and I know that I don’t want to put money into your restaurant … there is just too much in me that objects: the knowledge, perhaps, that I have been laughed at a little too much in the last four years … the whole three-cornered game, as I remember it, still sings in my ears. To give you money is to dance again to the same music …39
Susan seems to have written him a letter of remonstrance, if not rebuke, because in his next letter he acknowledged that ‘everything you wrote was true’.
I was mad to write as I did – God knows what lunatic notions were going round my head. Please try to forgive me – put it down to a momentary madness in my own kind of bereavement which I know, I do know, is absolutely nothing beside yours. I shall keep your letter because I deserved it. Please try to get rid of mine and try to forget it. Forgive me.40