by Adam Sisman
MGM had bought the film rights in The Russia House early, and the movie had gone into development while the novel was still in manuscript form. This would be the first major film production from the West to be filmed substantially in the Soviet Union with full permission from the Russian government. Early in October the crew began shooting scenes in Leningrad.
The movie was produced and directed by the Australian Fred Schepisi, best known for A Cry in the Dark, Six Degrees of Separation and Last Orders. The cast included Sean Connery as Barley Blair and Michelle Pfeiffer as his leading lady, Katya Orlova, despite the fact that she was almost thirty years younger. Pfeiffer’s performance would earn her a Golden Globe Best Actress nomination, though she would lose out to Kathy Bates for her performance in Misery.
Connery had been attached to the movie from an early stage, and his participation was considered crucial to its prospects. His contract gave him casting approval for the other parts. He had become a major movie star from playing James Bond; to those who noticed such things, it was amusing that he should play the leading role in a movie derived from a le Carré, given that his novels were so often contrasted with Ian Fleming’s. Other members of the cast included Roy Scheider, James Fox, Michael Kitchen, Martin Clunes and Ken Russell, with Klaus Maria Brandauer as Yakov.* Connery and Brandauer had previously worked together on the 1983 James Bond film Never Say Never Again.
Tom Stoppard was hired to write the screenplay. When David met Stoppard to discuss the project, he found him ‘enchanting’ and ‘extremely intelligent’, as he told Alec Guinness. The two of them went together to the Park Lane Hotel, to go through the script with Sean Connery. The film star had a suite on the top floor. On the way up Stoppard warned David to expect some tension between the two of them, arising from Connery’s withdrawal from the film version of Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.* ‘You must be young Mister David,’ Connery said as he met them at the lift.† He was noticeably cooler towards Stoppard. He led them into his luxurious suite. ‘A hundred pounds a night is the negotiated sum,’ he told them proudly, ‘and free minibar.’ As soon as they began talking Connery tore into the script, alleging that it was overwritten and too long. ‘If anyone said that to me,’ the star said of one line, ‘I’d kick them in the balls.’ The meeting ended abruptly. Connery walked them back to the lift; just as the door was closing, while Connery was still within earshot, Stoppard turned to David and said, ‘I think that I need to invent a new typeface for irony.’
Stoppard’s response to the criticism that his script was too long was to print it out in smaller type. In fact his script was largely faithful to the original, so that many of the best lines in the film are versions of lines in the book. Perhaps predictably, the end was altered. While the novel ends with Barley waiting in Lisbon in the hope that Katya will come, the movie shows her arrival, in a scene that provides the big emotional pay-off so beloved by Hollywood.
Early in 1990 Michael Attenborough reported to his colleagues on an idea for ‘a new le Carré’. David had written the Maugham-like tale of ‘Jungle Hansen’, a British agent held in captivity by the Khmer Rouge, drawing on the experience of François Bizot – though David would be at pains to stress that Bizot had never been a spy, and that he had been ‘nobody’s creature but his own’. David proposed to publish this short story as a novella; but after some discussion with Ion Trewin and a review of discarded material from previous books, he devised a new formula, a volume of loosely linked short stories in the manner of Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden.34 His provisional title was ‘Plain Tales from the Circus’.*
The stories would be narrated by Ned, former head of the Russia House, who has been sidelined after the failure of Operation Bluebird and is now running Sarratt, the Circus’s training centre in Hertfordshire. David identified himself with Ned: he imagined what might have happened to him had he remained within MI6, ‘life’s mystery left somehow untouched’.35 Ned has invited Smiley to address the passing-out class on the closing evening of their new-entry course. In his talk Smiley scoffs at the idea that spying is a dying profession, now that the Cold War is over. The occasion is portrayed like a college feast, with those present dining in evening dress, in a candle-lit room lined with old photographs; as guest of honour Smiley is seated at high table. After the meal the diners gather in a panelled library around a blazing log fire, smoking cigars and cradling balloons of brandy, the older ones reclining in cracked leather armchairs, while the students lounge at their feet. Smiley’s appearance reminds Ned of scenes from his past, which form the short stories. At various points in this sequence of memories Smiley interjects a few sagacious comments. ‘It’s over, and so am I,’ he says at the close of the evening, as he swirls the last of his brandy. ‘Time you ran down the curtain on yesterday’s cold warrior. And please don’t ask me back, ever again. The new time needs new people.’36
In the final story, which takes place outside the envelope of the Sarratt evening, Ned is sent to confront Sir Anthony Bradshaw, a cynical, amoral arms dealer, living like a country squire on a sumptuous estate. His unrepentant attitude stimulates Ned to an epiphany: ‘For a moment it was as if my whole life had been fought against the wrong enemy … I remembered Smiley’s aphorism about the right people losing the Cold War, and the wrong people winning it … I thought of telling him that now we had defeated Communism, we were going to have to set about defeating capitalism.’37 The book ends with Ned’s retirement.
The idea for the novel, if it was a novel, had been inspired by Smiley himself. Back in 1982 Alec Guinness had proposed to David that they might devise a one-man show, in which he would play Smiley lecturing at Sarratt. The two men had discussed the concept over a period of months without reaching a resolution. ‘Smiley’s lecture remains a wonderful idea and I should write it,’ David had written to Guinness in 1983. ‘But then again, I’m not sure. I think we maybe really should just hang up his boots.’ When he returned to the idea seven years later he acknowledged its paternity in a letter to Guinness. ‘I set to work on Smiley’s speech to the passing-out at Sarratt and it ran away with me and became a novel,’ he wrote.38 The book was dedicated to Guinness, ‘with affection and thanks’.
Once David had settled on this formula, he wrote the book very fast. Much of it was written by hand and faxed to a typist from Wengen, or wherever else he happened to be at the time. This was the first of his books to be typed on a word processor. By May 1990 he had a first draft of the whole.* Originally the stories had separate titles, which were replaced by numbered chapters, an indication of how the separate stories became unified into a single novel. At least two of the stories included in early drafts were later omitted. After abandoning the working title of ‘Plain Tales from the Circus’, David contempleted calling the book ‘Agent Running in the Field’ (a title he had considered for previous novels) and ‘The Interrogators’ Poll’, before choosing ‘The Case Officer’. At a late stage this was changed to ‘The Silent Pilgrim’, before he fixed on the title The Secret Pilgrim.
In America The Secret Pilgrim went straight to no. 1, le Carré’s fourth consecutive book to reach the top of the US bestseller list. The English novelist William Boyd praised it in the New York Times. ‘The many ingredients are skillfully marshalled: story elides into story; flashback and flash-forward, reminiscence, analysis and prognosis are lucidly and elegantly controlled,’ wrote Boyd. ‘Indeed, “The Secret Pilgrim” is, technically, Mr le Carré’s most magisterial accomplishment.’39 The Anglo-Dutch writer Ian Buruma, reviewing The Secret Pilgrim for the New York Review of Books, deplored what he saw as the ‘crude anti-Americanism’ in le Carré’s work. Like Boyd, he reflected on what le Carré would write, ‘now that the cold war is apparently over’.
Much is made in interviews with le Carré and reviews of his last two books of the supposed end of the cold war. Can he still go on writing his spy novels? Must he look for another enemy, another subject? In fact, I think too much is made of this. The cold w
ar was never more than a frame for his stories anyway. His real subject is rather like Graham Greene’s: man’s, especially Englishman’s, struggle with his soul. But, if not the cold war, le Carré does need some kind of model for his stories. Like Raymond Chandler, he is at his best when he expands the limits of his chosen genre. But without the genre he is at sea. In his latest book, the frame is barely there; instead we have a series of episodes, knitted together by Smiley’s speech. It is little more than a loose bit of string to tie up various good ideas for stories that never made it into his other books.40
In the spring of 1991, David published a long essay in the magazine Granta, about Brigadier Jean-Louis Jeanmaire, a Swiss army officer who in 1977 had been sentenced to eighteen years’ imprisonment for passing military secrets to the Russians. The outside world had paid little attention to the case. Jeanmaire was just another KGB mole, and not a very interesting one at that. Why would one spy on the neutral Swiss? Did they have any secrets worth stealing?
It was difficult to comprehend Jeanmaire’s motives. He had not done it for money, because in fourteen years of spying he had received only occasional gifts, worth in total a couple of thousand dollars at most. Nor had it been for ideological reasons: Jeanmaire was a traditionalist, profoundly conservative in his politics. He was above all a proud soldier, to whom the army mattered more than anything. So why had this deeply patriotic man betrayed his country?
After Jeanmaire’s release, David visited the eighty-year-old widower in his tiny flat on the outskirts of Bern. They passed an evening together. Over whisky and schnapps and a simple meal of cheese fondue that the old man had himself made for his English guest, he told his story. ‘It is a journalistic conceit to pretend you are unmoved by people,’ David wrote afterwards. ‘But I am not a journalist and I am not superior to this encounter. Jean-Louis Jeanmaire moves me, deeply, with a fascination that I can’t escape.’
David showed a Smiley-like ability to empathise with this damaged and vulnerable man. His interview with Jeanmaire would be as compelling as any of the fictional stories in The Secret Pilgrim. In his hands Jeanmaire’s case became a touching psychological study, revealing the naïvety and even the innocence of the spy.
Jeanmaire denied that he had ever passed information to the other side that could harm his country. ‘All I ever did was give the Russians harmless bits of proof that Switzerland was a dangerous country to attack!’ he insisted angrily. ‘C’était la dissuasion,’ he bellowed. His case officer, the Soviet Military Attaché and GRU intelligence officer Vassily Denissenko, had understood that. ‘We were working together against the Bolsheviks!’ He had convinced himself that his friend ‘Deni’ was a man like himself, with similar values. Deni was cultivated, charming, honourable, a gentleman! Deni was a hero of Stalingrad, with medals for gallantry! Deni was a horseman, a Tsarist, an officer of the old school! Far from resenting it when Denissenko had seduced his wife, Jeanmaire had been indulgent, indeed understanding. ‘But Deni was an attractive man!’ he protested. ‘If I’d been a woman I’d have slept with him myself!’ He spoke lovingly of Marie Louise herself, who had died while Jeanmaire was still serving his prison sentence: ‘she was a good, sweet, dear comrade’. She had girlishly displayed to him the ‘beautiful bracelet that Denissenko had given her’. Jeanmaire had taken this as ‘a gift of love’, ‘a beautiful gesture’.
He had been reluctant to offend his Russian friend. When Denissenko offered him an envelope stuffed with banknotes, he had flung it to the floor in indignation. He spurned what he saw as a bribe. But afterwards Jeanmaire had given Denissenko the Swiss order of battle, to show him that there were no hard feelings.
David sensed that Jeanmaire’s relationship with Denissenko had become compulsive. ‘Again and again you sense that it is Jeanmaire, not Denissenko, who is forcing the pace,’ he wrote. ‘Jeanmaire, you feel, needed Denissenko a good deal more than Denissenko needed him.’
In David’s sympathetic account, Jeanmaire emerges as a tragic figure, a ‘flawed, latter-day Dreyfus’, more deserving of pity than of punishment.41
Though Smiley had left the stage, he would return for one last bow. In April 1991 ITV screened an adaptation of David’s early novel A Murder of Quality, made by Portobello Films for Thames Television and directed by Gavin Millar. This was a prestigious production, shown at prime time, between 8.00 and 10.00 p.m. on a Wednesday evening. Six months later it would be shown in America, on Channel 9’s ‘Masterpiece Theatre’, in two parts, introduced by Alistair Cooke. Much of it was shot on location at Sherborne – an ironic choice, given how David had been at pains to distance the fictional school of the story from his own alma mater. It featured a fine cast, including Glenda Jackson as Smiley’s friend Ailsa Brimley; Billie Whitelaw as the madwoman Janie who is initially suspected of the murder; Joss Ackland as the real murderer, the schoolmaster Terence Fielding; Ronald Pickup as his snobbish colleague Felix D’Arcy; David Threlfall (who had played a small part in The Russia House) as the bereaved husband Stanley Rode; and the young Christian Bale, in one of his first parts, as the schoolboy Perkins, Fielding’s favourite. Another newcomer was Samantha Janus, who plays D’Arcy’s young mistress.
On behalf of the production company David had written to Alec Guinness to ask if he would like to reprise his role as George Smiley. At first he showed interest in the idea, but after some months of wavering he withdrew. ‘In my bones (or gut, as everyone now says) I feel I am right,’ he wrote to David. ‘All along, I must confess, I have felt there would be huge difficulties with scripting the book. I am sorry. Anyway there should be two or three or six acceptable Smileys to be found. I shall have a twinge of jealousy, of course, but no envy.’42
A year later, as shooting drew near, Guinness’s prediction that the book would be difficult to adapt seemed to be coming true. The original writer, the experienced Hugh Whitemore, asked for his name to be expunged from the credits after David had rewritten his screenplay. David Elstein, Thames’s director of programmes, admitted that there had been problems with the script because, he said, the novel’s plot did not translate naturally to television.43
Anthony Hopkins, who had been cast to play Smiley, pulled out of the project only a week before shooting was due to begin, reportedly because he was unhappy that his role had been diminished by the rewrite. With nobody to play the lead, the project was in jeopardy; the programmemakers were desperate to find a replacement. Then the producer, Eric Abraham, had an idea. He had heard an audiocassette of David reading one of his novels, doing the voices of all his characters, and thought, ‘This man can act.’ After discussing it with the director, Abraham proposed to David that he should play Smiley himself. For a brief moment there was the enticing possibility that le Carré might take the part of his most famous character. But David decided not to accept the role, remembering his humiliating experience of playing a cameo in the film of The Little Drummer Girl. With just three days until production was due to start, the producers approached Denholm Elliott, a much loved character actor best known for playing Marcus Brody in the Indiana Jones films. Elliott, who was living in Spain, turned down the part initially, but accepted when offered a larger fee. He claimed not to be intimidated by taking the part of a character so much identified with Alec Guinness. The great actor had been ‘brilliant’ as Smiley, he was quoted as saying, ‘but I wanted to play him with more comedy, something that was missing from Guinness’s portrayal’.
Elliott had no time to prepare before filming commenced. On his arrival at Sherborne, he was introduced to someone called Cornwell, whom he failed to connect with John le Carré. ‘I though he might be the headmaster of the school we were filming in,’ Elliott admitted afterwards. ‘When he started giving me notes about playing Smiley, I thought, “Who is this geezer?” ’44
The New York Times bestseller list, 23 August 1964. The Spy who Came in from the Cold remained at number 1 for thirty-five weeks, becoming the bestselling novel of the year.
David and Ann on
the set of The Spy who Came in from the Cold in Dublin, February 1965; he confessed to her there that he was having an affair with Susan Kennaway.
Susan Kennaway and her husband, the novelist and screenwriter James Kennaway.
The Kennaways pose on the balcony of their house in Highgate for American friends.
MI5 agent-runner John Bingham, who shared an office with David for a while; he was the physical model for George Smiley.
Four screen Smileys: (clockwise from top left) James Mason, Rupert Davies, Denholm Elliott and Gary Oldman.
David and his second wife, Jane, with their son, Nick, mid 1970s.
Tregiffian, c. 1980.
David with his American publisher, Jack Geoghegan, in an English field. Geoghegan kept this picture on his desk for the rest of his career.
‘Why would anyone want to leave a West End Jew for an East End Jew?’ After the success of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, David left his British publisher, Victor Gollancz (left), for Charles Pick of Heinemann (right).