Bicycles glided by on treadless tyres, their riders’ drab cotton clothes all the same, whether men or women. No colour to be seen. Michael handed me a long box of State Express 555 cigarettes, ten packets of twenty. He said they were used as a sort of currency, but only that particular brand. Ten cigarettes could be worth a week’s minimum wage. He advised me how and to whom I should dispense them.
Off the car went, heading north. We passed Haiphong Harbour. There the bomb damage was absolute. The steel girders of the bridge were twisted into spaghetti shapes under an iron grey sky, the wharves barely recovered from the multiple hits year after year. Every ten miles or so we had to cross rivers by barge, pulled doggedly by old tugboats. We were crowded round by men and women, many of them clutching bicycles stacked high with kindling twigs and old boxes. Their faces were expressionless, my crew did not speak to them, nor make any gesture of recognition. The war years of extreme sacrifice, killing off their future hopes, the deaths of so many of their family members and the unfair and never-ending pummelling from the sky had crushed all but their grim determination to survive.
Ha Long overlooked a beautiful bay, and beyond were towering limestone islets, thousands of them stretching out to the horizon, like the ones in southern Thailand near Phuket, which featured in a James Bond film. They had an air of being petrified into knotted shapes, the rock escarpments gripped by tumbling greenery. Nearer the shore was an image of timelessness. There were some junks under sail. They were trawling for fish, barely moving.
The Ha Long residential blocks were G-plan and featureless, four storeys high. My crew led me through the eating hall, stuffed with over-weight Soviets at dinner in sweat shirts with stained armpits. I supposed this was their final monopoly as foreigners, now that the West had started to return. I asked, through the interpreter, what they thought of Russians, who had been allies. They conferred excitedly as I looked at that most unattractive crowd, munching noisily, mouths often ajar. The East German-trained economist lady had found my question difficult but eventually summarised what they thought: Russians were like Americans without money. I asked my team to dine with me because I did not want to be left alone in that dining hall, but they said it was not possible. So I had a quick supper and traipsed up to a dim but air-condi-tioned bedroom.
Next day we went down to the landing stage where there was a fifty-foot diesel-powered ship with a large flat deck. They said with pride that it was a gift from East Germany. It was to be mine for the whole day. I could do whatever I liked, on instructions from the Deputy Governor. This impressed them because they had never had to convey such a generous offer. As we stepped on board several dozen school-children walked by in a group, pre-teen boys and girls in uniform, chat-ting away sing-song. I asked the interpreter what they were studying. Their teacher spoke up. ‘English’ came his reply, a nice-looking young man. Wonderful, I said, so they can all come on my boat for an hour and I can talk to them in English. I was a writer and spoke it well. He blanched, avoided my glance and only replied via the interpreter.
It was not allowed.
At the start of my final morning in Hanoi the Deputy Governor came to pay his respects. He said that as a rare privilege the Governor himself wanted to shake me by the hand, five minutes at most. The Governor was dignified and forthcoming. He had studied the twenty or thirty pages of neatly typed notes. He explained that certain things did not appear to be consistent. I said that did not surprise me because we had covered a great deal of ground. For two whole weeks I had been talking my head off. He put his questions one by one, through the interpreter. I was able to resolve everything. It took an hour. He made us feel we had all done a good job and shook our hands. The Deputy Governor was amazed. He said that in their constitution the Governor was an executive member of the national Cabinet. A whole hour with him was exceptional.
Twenty-two
Larry rang to say it was years since we had had an outing together, so I suggested we go to Henley Regatta. I put on the requisite uniform: Leander socks, white flannels, blazer and Christ Church Boat Club tie. He and Joan were now living on the corner of St Leonard’s Terrace, overlooking Burton Court. He looked dapper coming out in his summer suit. He liked the two guest badges I pinned on his lapel, one for Stewards’ Enclosure, one for Leander. We had a glorious sunny day by the river, even though Eton and Christ Church were knocked out of their races. Everyone in Stewards was dressed according to the rules. A whole day without seeing any horrible jeans and trainers, making the wearers look like refugee rejects. There were many young people look-ing lovely. Summer dresses and high heels. We lunched in the Stewards’ tent and had tea in Leander garden. We then drove to Steyning and he slept in the car for much of the journey.
We arrived with him refreshed and dying for his whisky: ‘Dada’s num-num’. We were alone there, everything laid ready on the dining table. We were caught up in a feeling of togetherness, nourished by the food and wine, even more so afterwards while we had our nightcaps. He took me round the garden in the twilight, and said the herbaceous borders were ‘almost as good as Jill’s’. His affection for her was endur-ing, though he did frequently refer to her as a dyke, which was wrong. She had not been bisexual until well after their marriage but I never corrected him. I thought he was trying to shield himself from the guilt he felt at the way he had deserted her.
Love for your parents becomes deeper when you can reach far into them, so far that they can share their sense of shame. Then the truths he spoke about himself were eclipsed by his railing against Joan. How could he have been so blind to her background; he was hurt by her lack of consideration and rudeness to him even in public. Few of his friends liked her. It was quite a jeremiad, capped with his assertion that she had set their children against him. All this was quite true. I had seen it. I reminded him of the years they had been so happy together, with their very young family.
We went inside, recharged our num-nums and sat in the tiny drawing room. He was curious about my love life. I said that I was on the look out for a mutual love sound enough for us to marry. He said: ‘Next time make sure it’s a good one.’
He asked what I was reading and I said it was a book about Christianity. ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘I thought you were over that one.’
I was. He wondered what I thought happened after death.
‘Finality,’ I replied. It was the absolute and complete end of con-sciousness, of any kind. Non-existence, just as non-existent as we were before being conceived by our parents. Birth throws us into life and death throws us out of it. There is no afterlife. Life itself is sacred. That’s all there is for us. Why should we be important enough to be ‘granted’ life everlasting as a reward? Besides, eternal anythingwould be insufferable. How old would you be, or your parents, or Shake-speare or whoever you wanted to meet? The only sorrow over death is with those remaining who loved you.
‘Yes, I like that,’ he said.
‘What do you think?’ I asked.
‘Oh, I’m sure the furies will get me.’
He had never even addressed such matters in so far as they touched himself. He really did not know or really attempt to know himself. He was quite right when he said that he knew the characters he played better than he knew himself. Whatever made him the world’s greatest actor, that was surely one key: observation and knowledge of others, at the sacrifice of his own self.
As we were finishing our nightcap he looked over at me in my Henley attire and said: ‘Age is descending on you with glamour. I’m sorry I’m only a life peer. You would have made a wonderful lord.’
Next morning after breakfast he swam twenty lengths in his little pool. At one end he marked each length up with beads on an abacus. This helped his heart and circulation, but his vigour was at a low ebb. Even so he could never really relax and dream away. Lin Yu Tang said that a man who can sit a few hours in a garden doing nothing must have learnt how to live. This was something Larry could never do, even at the end of life. His was a restless soul: cr
eativity finally deprived of a target.
Isis stayed with me one weekend and said I should stop looking for love. ‘It always breaks your heart, and it breaks ours to see you unhappy.’ I took her advice, while continuing to give dinner parties at home, going out all over London, and for the odd weekend in the country, but I was no longer on the hunt.
Within a few months in the summer of 1985 a Turkish girl moved in downstairs. I first saw her on a Saturday morning by the front door, collecting her mail. She was wearing a yellow tracksuit. Despite my not wearing glasses I saw her face in the sharpest possible focus, her intelli-gent and lovely eyes, fine Ottoman features, the shapeliest hands. She said her name was Zelfa. I realised I was stricken at first sight, for the third time ever. I had not been looking. I had taken Isis’s advice. I asked what she was doing. She said she was going for a picnic. That ruined my day.
With work at De La Rue on a downward slope I did not feel that my peacock plumage was all it should have been. I lacked confidence and held off from getting better acquainted with her. I was seeing an out-placement adviser to identify a suitable new job. I was offered a City job in the platinum business, a new market being exhaust catalysts to neutralise carbon fumes. Another was in Sheffield. but I could not bear the thought of living there. Some ugly headhunter said that with my connections I should be an arms dealer. I lividly stormed out of his office. Two headhunting firms asked me to join them but as I hate the telephone I would not have been suitable. A public relations boss offered me a job but those who would have been my colleagues did not like me. He said this might have been because I knew more key people than they did and they were jealous. De La Rue Giori offered me a job selling their printing machines, worldwide, based in Lausanne, but I had done travelling, and Switzerland. Eventually my adviser said that I should go into film production. I had connections, understood enough about finance, could write and should set up a company.
In 1987 I was made redundant, within weeks of Peter Orchard taking over from Gerry Norman as chairman of De La Rue. I went to his London office to say goodbye. It was as if his conscience prevented him from looking me in the face. So he really was a moral coward as well as being a control freak. Within a short space of time of his being chairman the company was bankrupt, its share price dropping from ten pounds to two. He died in shock and his favourite and inappropriate chief executive officer had a nervous breakdown. The company was patched up by Sir Patrick Pickering, new to the business but a miracle worker who was easy to talk to.
I started working at home and set up a little company with Jeremy Saunders, an experienced film executive, as my co-director. One weekday morning, while still in a dressing gown I was by the front door collecting the post. Zelfa came out of her flat.
‘Why aren’t you at work?’ she asked.
I said that I was. I had set up a film company to finance films in Third World countries.
‘What about Ataturk?’ she said.
That has been my career signal beyond all others, ever since. I have written a book about the ups and downs suffered so far trying to get together an epic feature film on that most fascinating of men, the founder of modern Turkey. Its publication must wait for the movie. The whole rhythm of my life changed. Zelfa and I lived together for two years, our weekdays downstairs with her, weekends upstairs with me. My children took to her immediately. So did my mother and Joy. There were a few displeased lady friends. Marrying a Turk, they asked, what doesshe look like? Turkish I said. And now her circle of friends is even wider than mine. We have been married for twenty-two years,
I took her down to Steyning for lunch. We sat at the end of the table with Larry, while at the far end sat Joan, the children and daughter-in-law. Zelfa was the second girlfriend I had taken there, Julie being the first, with modest success. Zelfa’s exotic beauty bowled him over, and her ease of conversation. Larry was as enchanted with her as I was. At the end of lunch we told him we were trying to put together an epic feature film on Ataturk. He was an admirer of Turkey’s Gallipoli hero. We were wondering which actor could play such a role.
He punched his chest and cried like a whiplash: ‘ME!!!’
He started introducing Zelfa to his friends as my fiancée, before I had proposed to her. Once I had, and been accepted, and announced our engagement in The Times, he introduced her as his daughter-in-law, even before we were married.
Then he died.
For the sake of continuity I will repeat the page about his funeral which I wrote in the memoir My Father Laurence Olivier.
He tried everybody’s patience. The family had continually to leave him to the long-suffering nurse to answer his demands. There was a long time of pain and anguish, years in fact, yet even then he reassembled his energies to do ‘Lear’ on television.
My mother wrote to me in March 1978:
‘I hear Daddy is not well, but still about, and talked to Donald Sinden at the Garrick till 2.30 a.m., which fascinated Donald and Diana – he had his taxi waiting. I hear of him from Mu Richard-son. He has spent hours with Ralphie [Richardson], frail but full of humour, stayed so late he had to be turned out,
‘I don’t think he will be with us much longer. I haven’t seen him much in the last forty years. It’s funny after all that time how I can still love him so much.’
The ex-Chairman of De La Rue, Sir Arthur Norman, sent me a wonderful photograph of Larry he had used to promote the World Wildlife Fund. I showed it to her and she burst into tears. ‘How beautiful, how old. He has become a beautiful old old man.’
I last saw Larry two days before he died, on Sunday in a room as tiny as the one he was born in. He was lying shrunken, unshaven, face to the wall hardly breathing, his nose ‘as sharp as a pen’. I was told he could be peppery so I refrained from touching him, only called him softly: ‘Daddy?’ He turned and opened his eyes, glanced at me sideways, eyebrows arched to carry his eyelids outwards, a gleam of defiance, rejection and welcome at once, laughter longed for, rage at the fading of the light.
He died on 11 July 1989 aged 82. Before his funeral, as friends of the family were gathering in the garden, I sought out the young male nurse who had been with him in the last stages. I explained how Larry had loved recounting the dying words of King George the Fifth – ‘What’s on at the Empire’ and ‘Bugger Bognor’. The nurse then recalled that a day before his death Larry had been lying speechless on his back. His parched mouth was open and the male nurse, to introduce some kind of fluid, cut an orange in half, held it over the parted lips, and squeezed. A few drops fell wide and trickled under his cheek and round to the temple. The eyes opened and the voice crackled: ‘This isn’t fucking Hamlet, you know. It’s not supposed to go in the ear.’
The private funeral was held in the nearby St James’s Church in Ashurst village. It was built of flint stone, twelfth century, and tucked under high trees, beside an overgrown graveyard. I sat in the car with Isis behind Joan. Tristan was ice climbing in Peru, and Clavelle was with Riddelle in Spain. My half-brother Richard and his wife Shelley were with their seventeen-month-old baby son, and behind them Richard’s sisters Tamsin and Julie-Kate. Zelfa was in the second car with the rest of the Plowrights. My mother was ill in a nursing home.
On arrival Joan and I and our children stood facing a tier of twenty photographers the other side of the road, with security men provided by Joan’s brother David Plowright of ATV. We waited for the coffin. It was lifted from the hearse and all the cameras flashed and whined. It was lowered to a trolley and a huge coronet of flowers placed on it. It was wheeled through the old church doorway. The address was given by Gawn Grainger, one of Larry’s closest friends in later life, who had helped him write the book Olivier on Acting. Tony Hopkins recited the last lines from King Lear. Richard and I read the lessons. He had the more difficult one with the emotional lines of ‘O Death where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory’, which he managed well.
I had Ecclesiasticus: ‘Let us now praise famous men and our fathers that b
egat us.’ It could not have been more appropriate. Until then I had never really understood the various ways I had heard it read. The clue was of course in the lines. In the middle, like a caesura, was the sentence: ‘And some there be who have no memorial, who are perished as though they had never been, and become as though they had never been born.’
I felt that I, unemployed and unemployable, was talking about myself. Over the lectern were faces I knew so well: John and Mary Mills, Susana Walton, Franco Zeffirelli, Tony Hopkins, Ronald Pickup, Alec Guinness, Maggie Smith and, all the way from New York, Douglas Fairbanks, Larry’s oldest living friend.
The lines of Ecclesiasticus then go on rather more kindly about nonentities: ‘But these were merciful men, whose righteousness hath not been forgotten.’ Every reference to ‘their seed’ or ‘these men’ should emphasise the ‘their’ and ‘these’, so as to differentiate ‘them’ from the great ones.
We traipsed out of the church behind the coffin. The little choir and comforting organ had done their best. In our car Joan turned to me and said she that never before had she understood the lesson I had read, and thought Larry would have been proud. She went on to say that for the memorial service they ought to have John Gielgud give the address. It was such a pity he could not be at the funeral. I said that would be risky because he was too emotional. At Vivien’s memo-rial service at St Martin-in-the-Fields he had been tearful, agony for everyone. My mention of Vivien and embarrassing delivery made her open to my suggestion of Alec Guinness. She liked the idea. She went on to say that St Paul’s would be better than Westminster Abbey because it had double the seating capacity, 5,000. I agreed that with Nelson and Wellington in the crypt, both played on screen by Larry, it had a certain appeal. But many more were his associations with Westminster Abbey: the kings he had played who had been crowned there, Poets’ Corner with his heroes David Garrick and Henry Irving; the ground-plaques with my godparents Sybil Thorndike and Noël Coward, and the restored image of Henry V on his tomb to the east of the High Altar, the hands modelled on Larry’s. This impressed her. She had not known about the hands. She asked me to organise the memorial service.
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