John le Carré

by Adam Sisman

  David hastened to allay the concerns of the distinguished actor. At sixty-four Guinness was the ‘ideal’ age, he wrote. ‘Smiley can’t be less, arithmetically, and I fear that he may be more, though I deliberately arrested the passage of time in the later books!’* David acknowledged that Guinness was neither rotund nor double chinned, ‘though I think I have seen you in roles where you have, almost as an act of will, acquired a sort of cherubic look!’ But, apart from plumpness, Guinness had all the other necessary physical qualities: ‘a mildness of manner, stretched taut, when you wish it, by an unearthly stillness and an electrifying watchfulness. In the best sense you are uncomfortable company, as I expect Smiley is.’

  An audience wishes – when you wish it – to take you into its protection. It feels responsible for you, it worries about you. I don’t know what you call that kind of empathy but it is very rare, & Smiley & Guinness have it: when either of you gets his feet wet, I can’t help shivering. So it is the double standard – to be unobtrusive, yet to command – which your physique perfectly satisfies …

  Smiley is an Abbey, made up of different periods, fashions, and even different religions, not all of them necessarily harmonious. His authority springs from experience, ages of it, compassion, and at root an inconsolable pessimism which gives a certain fatalism to much that he does … If I may say so, you communicate to me many of his pains, and the almost archaeological authority of so many lives and identities. He is also a guilty man, as are all men who do, who insist on action. To this, you add another, more practical sort of authority terribly important in the several interrogations, in the research, and in the dénouement of Tinker Tailor: the authority of plain intellect. We shall believe Guinness when he tells us things from the past, when he theorises, when he acts in accordance with unstated predictions – because, simply, the intellect is patent, and commanding, yours and Smiley’s both.

  Guinness’s intelligence, David argued, was ‘pure gold, because it gives such base to the other things – the solicitude, the moral concern, the humanity of Smiley – all, because of the intelligence of his perceptions, grow under our eyes and in your care’.

  David assured Guinness that he would be given plenty of time to memorise the scripts. Powell had promised him over the telephone that they could be ready well in advance.5

  Guinness agreed to meet them a few days later to discuss the project. He suggested lunch at the Mirabelle, a long-established restaurant near Berkeley Square favoured by film stars. When an excited Powell told his boss of this coup, MacDonald warned him that he could not take anybody, not even the most distinguished actor of his generation, to lunch at the Mirabelle on licence-fee payers’ money. Instead they went to L’Etoile in Charlotte Street instead, another classic but less expensive French restaurant.6 By the end of the meal, it was clear that Guinness would accept the part.* ‘We sat bemused after you left, savouring the pleasure of lunching with George Smiley – an absolute conquest,’ David wrote to Guinness afterwards.7

  A friendship began between the two men, carefully delineated. ‘If you are incurably fond of him, as I am, you do your best to keep your feelings to yourself,’ David would write after he had known Guinness for almost twenty years. He acknowledged Guinness’s kindliness, but stressed too his punctuality, self-discipline and professionalism. ‘Form is desperately important to him,’ David would write; ‘he treasures good manners and good order.’ Nevertheless they did exchange ‘horror stories’ about their families at an early stage, which perhaps helped to cement their friendship. Guinness never knew his father, and felt nothing but contempt for his mother, whom he described as a prostitute. David identified in Guinness a trait he recognised from his own childhood, the need to take centre stage and to entertain the adults around him.8

  It was fascinating to observe a great actor feeling his way into a role. ‘Watching him putting on an identity is like watching a man set out on a mission into enemy territory,’ David observed.9 Guinness took meticulous care with the details, trying on one pair of spectacles after another from trays of samples provided by Curry & Paxton† until he found one that he felt was appropriate for the part. David described what Guinness did as a process of ‘self-enchantment … a kind of controlled schizophrenia’, and likened it to his own method of devising a character, trying on his clothes and experimenting with his accent. Of course David was something of an actor himself. ‘He really is an actor, in my opinion,’ Guinness would say of him, after they had come to know each other, ‘he has an actor’s instinct, and his imitations of people are extremely good.’ Indeed David’s imitation of Guinness himself would become one of his party pieces.10 He had shown his quality as an actor by reading The Spy who Came in from the Cold on Radio 4, broadcast in January 1978 on the ‘Book at Bedtime’ slot in fourteen-minute episodes, to a highly enthusiastic reception. The actors’ union Equity had raised the matter with the BBC, asking why the task had not been given to a professional. The producer, Maurice Leitch, defended his choice on two grounds: first, because David was able to convey the sense of his own material better than anybody else, and second, because he was a better reader in this genre than 90 per cent of available actors.11 Following this success, David’s readings of many of his novels would be recorded and sold as audiobooks.

  Three months after they had first met, Guinness and his wife contrived to borrow the house at Tregiffian for a holiday. They were supposed to stay a fortnight; but after only two or three days Guinness telephoned with an unconvincing excuse to say that they were cutting short their stay. ‘We adore it here, but a very dear friend of ours is ill in London and we have to go back to look after him.’ Later David learned what had caused Guinness to leave so prematurely. Soon after he arrived, he had taken a call from the British Embassy in Bonn, to say that the Ambassador wished to speak to John le Carré. Guinness was already in the process of becoming Smiley, so this call seemed to him somehow significant. Then there was another semi-official call that aroused his suspicions further. Walking along the clifftop paths he happened to meet Derek Tangye. Guinness confessed to feeling uneasy about the amount of electronic equipment at Tregiffian. Tangye convinced him that the house was bugged.

  Once Guinness had agreed to take the part, the rest of the casting was easy; other actors jumped at the chance to work with him. ‘The moment we had Guinness, we could empty the National Theatre for Tinker, Tailor,’ David would say later. The outstanding cast would include Hywel Bennett as Tarr, Ian Richardson as Haydon, Siân Phillips as Ann, and Michael Jayston as Guillam. Lacon was played by Anthony Bate, who had played Kim Philby in a 1977 ITV drama about the Cambridge spy ring. One of Irvin’s boldest decisions was to cast Ian Bannen as Jim Prideaux, as Bannen’s career had been almost ruined by drink. This choice was vindicated: Bannen would give an outstanding performance, perhaps bringing to the role some of the damage from his own past. Another controversial decision was to give the part of Connie Sachs to Beryl Reid, best known as a music-hall comedienne.* Guinness detested acting with her, fearing that he would be upstaged; ‘Nobody can act with a clown,’ he said. But the scene between the two of them, when he visits her in Oxford, is one of the most effective and moving in the whole series.

  Guinness took a close interest in the scripts, comparing notes with David, who passed on the results to Powell. At first this caused a degree of frostiness with Arthur Hopcraft, a well-organised writer, known to turn in highly polished scripts. Guinness expressed admiration for Hopcraft’s work, and offered what he hoped were merely constructive suggestions. To take one small example, he was anxious that Smiley was introduced ‘far too weakly and too passively’ in the first episode of the series, when he is waylaid in a bookshop by the appalling Roddy Martindale (an old Foreign Office hand) and reluctantly agrees to have dinner with him. To deal with this concern, David suggested that Smiley should make a mild protest as he buys a book – ‘Barabbas was a publisher,’ a phrase of Byron’s, one of George Greenfield’s favourites.† This minor change sati
sfied Guinness.

  Hopcraft made two significant changes for the final episode of the series. He wrote a new scene at the very end to show Prideaux’s recovery and reintegration into the life of Thursgood’s Academy through the eyes of the schoolboy Roach, a process that David had described but not dramatised. The preceding scene in the book has Smiley travelling by train for a reconciliation with his wife, and ends with his first glimpse of her as she waits for him at the station. Hopcraft shows their subsequent conversation, as they stroll together through the countryside. Smiley appears surprised when Ann denies ever having been in love with Haydon. ‘Poor George,’ she says. ‘Life’s such a puzzle to you, isn’t it?’

  Perhaps appealing to Guinness’s religious sensibilities, David had stressed Smiley’s role as a confessor, ‘as sort of Father Brown figure’. In fact this side of Smiley would be more evident in Smiley’s People than it was in its predecessor. As David reported to Powell, Guinness was anxious that ‘Smiley’s passivity, or weakness, reaches a low point at the end of the Karla sequence where he confesses that he was not equal to the confrontation, that he shed his professionalism, and at a crucial point in his career, started maundering on about his own wife, and staged a sort of psychological breakdown.’ Guinness was ‘very uncomfortable having Smiley talking and thinking Ann’, and felt that ‘he is much too confessive towards Guillam’.12

  Eventually it was decided that all seven scripts should be discussed at length between producer, director, writer and star, with David also present. They spent a week together in a room at the BBC’s Lime Grove studios in Shepherd’s Bush, revising the script as Guinness acted out the lines. ‘Guinness was extraordinary,’ Powell recalled, ‘inhabiting the rooms and corridors of the script in his mind.’ It was obvious that he was keenly aware of every aspect of every scene. ‘No film director, producer or screenwriter of my acquaintance has a better eye for structure or dialogue,’ David would write of Guinness. ‘Working on scripts with him is what Americans call a learning experience. One scene may go through a dozen revisions before he is persuaded by it. Another … is nodded through without debate.’ Guinness was ruthless in eliminating lines that he felt he did not need; he cut so many that the episodes became too short, which is one reason why the opening credits are so protracted. These depict a succession of Russian dolls, one inside the other, an image taken from the novel itself. The last doll has a blank face, to reflect Smiley’s belief that only Karla could perceive the real Haydon.

  To win approval for the series, Powell had said it would be made in the studio in the conventional way; but as the project gained momentum he was able to gain the extra funding to make it on location, though they did economise by relocating the scenes between Tarr and Irina to Portugal rather than Hong Kong. Irvin decided that he wanted to film in winter, which was more expensive, as shorter days allowed less time for shooting. Guinness was encouraged to say that he could only really work in the fluid (but expensive) medium of film, rather than on videotape like most other TV drama at the time.13

  In researching locations, Powell asked David what the Circus looked like. Irvin, who was always concerned about authenticity, wondered if it would be possible to arrange for him to be shown round the offices of MI5 or MI6. There was no need, David said, looking about him: the Circus, with its dusty rooms, long corridors, shabby paintwork, decrepit furniture and even the cranking lifts, was just like the BBC. As it turned out, and by pure chance, the Circus interiors would be shot on location in a building in Cork Street formerly occupied by MI5, the very house where David had undergone his training. He was delighted by this coincidence.

  David helped the series designer, Austen Spriggs, to ensure that everything looked as it should. For example, he explained that ‘Top Secret’ material was usually handwritten because it was too sensitive to be entrusted to a typist; and that the word ‘GUARD’ on a file was Whitehall code for ‘Do Not Show to the Americans’. He described files, code-books, ‘one time’ encryption pads and the other paraphernalia of spying, so that Spriggs could depict these realistically.

  ‘When he is composing characters, he steals shamelessly from those around him,’ David wrote of Guinness. In due course he would be amused to note that the actor had appropriated his own habit of kneading his brows with his knuckles. To help him assume the role of Smiley, Guinness asked if he could meet a real spy. David arranged a lunch with Sir Maurice Oldfield, the recently retired ‘C’. When serving with MI6 David had had a brief operational connection with Oldfield, and since then they had met a few times for drinks, though they had never discussed anything secret. Recently he had received ‘a furious ticking-off’ from Oldfield for publishing ‘distorted versions’ of the Firm.14

  Oldfield was a small, tubby man with spectacles, who carried an umbrella; his superficial resemblance to Smiley would lead to repeated speculation that he was the original for the character. In fact there was nothing in this: David had not met Oldfield when he invented Smiley.* Guinness would add to the confusion by claiming to have met ‘the real Smiley’ for lunch, as well as incorporating aspects of Oldfield into his portrayal of the part.15

  David arrived at the restaurant in Chelsea to find his guests already seated in a private room, chosen by Guinness ‘for security reasons’. In his mind, David surmised, Alec had already joined the Secret Service. During the lunch the two older men did most of the talking. ‘I think young David here has gone a bit over the top about this spying stuff,’ Oldfield remarked at one point. ‘Oh, I do so agree,’ said Sir Alec. When Oldfield left at the end of the meal Guinness hastened out into the street to watch him waddle away, swinging his umbrella as he went. Then he turned to David, who had followed him out. ‘Could we do a quick brandy?’ Back in the restaurant, Guinness demonstrated how Oldfield had run his finger along the inside rim of his wine-glass. ‘Do you think that he was checking for the dregs of poison?’ he asked.

  ‘I liked him very much and had the impression of a good man,’ Guinness wrote to David afterwards.

  The dreadful necktie was beyond any wildest dreams. The ginger shoes, I felt, had been put on to shock quite deliberately. I see what you mean about his shirts. The cuff links were surprisingly flashy but I couldn’t see their design very well … The suit was good though – well, goodish.

  I shall not follow that footwear, or the mahogany dark nicotine stains on his fingers. The glasses I’ve got are very similar to what he was wearing. I must adapt my wig a bit.

  I don’t know yet what I absorbed from watching him or sensing him. A few gestures which I probably won’t use. But having met him, and noting I’m not desperately dissimilar physically, I feel more confidence than I have done in the past few days.16

  Guinness became very nervous as shooting drew near. David had to persuade him that it had not been a mistake to accept the part. He was a superstitious actor, who kissed the camera lens each time he arrived on set. He was especially self-conscious about the way he looked; he was too tall to play Smiley, and all his efforts to put on weight failed. To compensate for this he bulked out his figure by wearing heavy pullovers and extra coats. After about three weeks of shooting he again lost his nerve, and suggested to Irvin that he should withdraw in favour of Arthur Lowe. Irvin, who had seen the rushes by then, assured him that he had nothing to worry about.

  David and Jane went down to the ‘safe house’ in Camden Lock to watch the filming of the climax, when the identity of the mole is revealed. It was a cold night, and they found Guinness in his long johns, ‘making friends with the pistol’ that he would grip as he unmasked the traitor. To their astonishment, he was speculating on who the mole might be. David realised that he was working himself into the mode of believing that he didn’t know and was about to make a discovery – although, of course, Smiley had really known all along.

  A couple of months later David relayed a telephone message from Jonathan Powell, who had seen the rough cuts and said that they were ‘wonderful’. At last, in late June, David was abl
e to view the first episodes himself. ‘Smiley is marvellous,’ he wrote to Guinness. ‘You carry it all. What more can I say? Immense range, yet all within the difficult bounds of the character: heart; humour; occasional surprising fury. It’s amazing, and I’m sure that Smiley will be heralded as one of your great parts.’ A private screening was organised, to which 200 guests were invited, including publishers, agents and Hodder’s ‘travellers’. Afterwards David wrote to Guinness that ‘even such hard-boiled characters as Mort Leavy, and Jaffe, the head of Bantam Books,* used adjectives like “wonderful” ’. He reported on comments from the audience:

  he leaves Smiley alone … leaves his enigma intact, yet allows us to love him … allows Smiley to be defined by the characters who bounce off him, till gradually you realize he is sort of reluctant confessor of all their sins, a moderator … what a terrible limbo he lives in … makes the bleakness bearable but is part of it.

  In fact Guinness had subtly altered Smiley, as David acknowledged. ‘Somewhere in the middle air between myself and Smiley, you have interposed your own marvellous assimilation of the two of us, and added those delicate and illuminating brush-strokes.’ He outlined some general criticism of the production as a whole, though the reaction was overwhelmingly favourable. ‘I have to tell you,’ he wrote, ‘it really was, in all of our views, your day … Dear Alec, thank you again – forgive this slightly emotional letter, but finally, I am deeply moved, so why not?’17