The countries in the Eurozone have none of that, and with the addi-tion of every new member less well off than the original six the inevitable implosion comes closer. I ended by saying that England should never join the euro. We had always been islanders, and had never been continentals. Margaret Thatcher’s face radiated goodwill for a full few seconds. Ours was a reverse position. Although it was I who was speaking she bound me with the strength of her absorption rather than me her with my delivery.
For several summers Zelfa and I were invited by Haldun and Çigdem Simavi for a week aboard their boat Halas on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey. Haldun had been a leading newspaper proprietor and she, with her many cultural and charitable deeds, was in all but name the country’s First Lady. The boat was a sixty-metre long old ferry with walls of mahogany, and plenty of deck space above all the cabins. If she had had a paddle wheel she would have looked at home on the Missis-sippi a century before.
We joined the boat when she was moored at one of the many fir-forested islands near Göçek. As we climbed on board Çigdem intro-duced us to Princess Margaret and her two ladies-in-waiting. They were regular summer guests on board. As I gave a courteous little bow to Princess Margaret I sensed her frisson on seeing me, perhaps remem-bering our last encounter.
During the daytime she sunbathed on deck, reading Dante’s Inferno. I ventured: ‘Isn’t it marvellous.’ ‘What’s marvellous?’ she asked. ‘That there’s no music being played.’ ‘Oh,’ she said with relief in her voice, ‘you’re so right!’
She took a great shine to Zelfa and was constantly asking her to swim with her; rather too constantly but Zelfa always did. After a few days as they swam towards the shore she said how she had worshipped Larry and Vivien. In 1951 she had seats to see them together in Caesar and Cleopatra and the following evening in Antony and Cleopatra. Unfortunately she had to go to the London Clinic for an operation. She was heartbroken and sent a devastated message of regret. Next day when she was being visited by the Queen Mother and the Queen two large bouquets of roses were brought in to her. One had an enchanting hand-written note from Larry and the other an even more enchanting one from Vivien. She said their being delivered while ‘my mother and my sister’ were with her made the pleasure even more exquisite. Larry and Vivien’s thoughts were for her.
She was friendly and a good storyteller. She enjoyed talking about the Queen, whom she always referred to as her sister; which the rest of us knew we should never do. The only real constraint was that we had to keep hidden any newspapers we bought. The red-top press was lick-ing its chops over the affair Princess Diana was having with Dodi Fayed on his father’s yacht.
The only time I had met Princess Diana was at the Goldsmiths’ Hall when she appeared at her first public function with Prince Charles. Her glorious body was flattering a low-cut black taffeta evening dress, which one tabloid justifiably referred to as a ‘Di-version’. She looked wonderful, tall and with brilliant good-humoured blue eyes.
When I next saw her it was at the British Museum for a gala opening of the Suleyman the Magnificent Exhibition. The money for this had been raised by Zelfa, who also arranged the finance and the production of BBC2’s excellent documentary. For the occasion the Turkish Prime Minister’s wife, Semra Özal, gave a speech in English. She delivered it well. Meanwhile Princess Diana was whispering to her friends and let out a giggle. This was mortifying for Semra Özal who thought she was being laughed at for her English. It was reprehensible bad manners.
Thereafter we had Princess Diana going public on television, a long one-to-one interview at her instigation, and we read about her affair with James Hewitt, who collaborated in a book about it, tried to sell her love letters, then produced his own memoir. I wrote to The Times:
Sir, Now that they are breeding more rapidly than ever, and in both sexes, we should sub-divide the word ‘bimbo’ into the component parts of ‘bimbeau’ and ‘bimbelle’.
I was commissioned by the Turkish Prime Minister to make a TV documentary on Kemal Ataturk. They knew of my serious and years-long involvement in the subject for a feature film which was killed off temporarily by the Greek and Armenian diaspora in New York. Those objectors had written angry letters, none too threatening, all signed and on headed paper, to the director Bruce Beresford, who quite rightly ignored them, and to the star. His agent withdrew him and the finance so far contrived fell apart. As I had no experience of mak-ing documentaries I was advised in London to use a company spe-cialising in the genre. They did a terrible job and I had at my own expense to redo the whole thing before it was accepted. It was broad-cast on Turkish Radio Television and in England on the History Channel.
In 2005 the so-called ‘Authorised Biography’ of Larry, by Terry Cole-man, was published. Joan authorised it before a word had been writ-ten, without insisting on a treatment. When I read it in typescript I was horrified. Coleman seemed determined to provide new evidence, unearthed from Larry’s compendious archives in the British Library, to support his thesis that Larry was, shock horror, gay. He quotes extravagantly camp letters to Larry from an old one-time star actor Henry Ainley, so indulging in senile infatuation that it is difficult to see how anyone could have taken them seriously. But Coleman did, and twisted the idiotic non-evidence by leaving out key matters. The facts are these.
Coleman omits to point out that in 1928 Ainley took to drink. He was out of work until 1930. Then there was an all-star production to re-launch his career as Hamlet, selected for a Royal Command Perfor-mance at the Haymarket Theatre. On the first night he was so drunk he was sacked.
He became broke. We turn to the minutes of the Garrick Club, where the Secretary reported in October 1933 that he owed £27.17.9. This was left in abeyance. A year later the staff were instructed not to serve him until the account was settled. A month or so after that it was decided by the General Committee that his name be erased from the books of the club. In early 1936 he did play in the film As You Like It with Elizabeth Bergner and Larry, in the role of the banished Duke. He was terrible.
Coleman fails to describe any of this and takes up the story from 1936, when Ainley was broke, unemployable, washed up and living in exile in Broadstairs, Kent. Fifteen of his louche letters survive in Larry’s archive, all with Broadstairs on the letterhead. The first, quoted in Coleman’s account, was undated, probably at the end of 1936. Really they are worth no more than a snigger. Larry darling,
My pretty. Please. This is very serious – who ever told you I was one of those? Have you seen my Osric? Haven’t you? … I have been tossing (now now) about at night thinking about you. No dammit, really, I am serious. I would like to hear from you if you are well and happy. How Jill must hate me taking you away from her.
The second quoted letter is dated 11 January 1937, also from Broad-stairs:
Darling, Christ!
You are a lousy pansy. Don’t you ever dare write to me again.
This surely indicates to any reader that Larry had told Ainley to get lost. Coleman does not point this out. Ainley goes on:
You are playing Hamlet therefore you are a king. … You now rank among the greatest. I am proud of you and so is Jill.
Had Ainley seen Larry’s Hamlet he would, as an actor, have appraised it, compared it to other performances including his own, and discussed the production. Any biographer of an actor should know that much about theatre people. And it is clear that Ainley knew nothing about Larry’s marriage to my mother being at an end, nor of his burgeoning affair with Vivien, all too well known by their associates nearer home in London.
It is easier to prove that something happened, if indeed it did, than to prove that something did not happen, even if it didn’t. I will do my best. Ainley was a drunken exiled wreck hiding in Broadstairs. Larry was at the time head over heels in love with Vivien. Their affair had started in August 1936, two weeks before I was born. He visited her in Stan-hope Street W1 when ever he could, while her husband Leigh was at work. He still lived with my mother in Cheyne
Walk. At the end of 1936, with her help, he learnt the full-length Hamlet and rehearsed for it. It ran from 5 January 1937 to 20 February. Vivien went to fourteen performances. Then from 23 February he played Sir Toby Belch, with my mother as Olivia, in Twelfth Night, until 3 April. From 6 April to 22 May (his birthday) he played Henry V.
These dates are in Coleman’s chronology and overlap the letters Ainley wrote from exile. How could Larry have had contact with him? So much for any affair or homosexual orgies occurring, as Coleman indicates, either in late 1936 or early 1937.
Coleman excludes the letter Ainley wrote on 29 August:
Darling Larry,
… no gentleman uses the word ‘Balls’ when writing to a friend as you do in your letters to me.
So the only indication of Larry paying any attention is a reprimand such as this, rejecting Ainley’s frustrated perversion.
Given this evidence how could anybody deduce an affair between the two men? Joan authorised this biographer on the disastrous advice she received from Larry’s associates. She was tied by the contract handed to her by Coleman’s agent. It is inconceivable that she would have authorised Coleman’s work after reading it. When asked by an inter-viewer on the radio whether Larry was gay she understandably fluffed her lines in shock. As soon as I received Coleman’s typescript I wrote on the above lines: to him, his agent, his publisher, Joan, her lawyer and my half-brother Richard. Nothing in the book was changed.
On 5 October 2005 Joan wrote to me:
Darling Tarquin,
I have not commented publicly on the biography as I had no wish to increase the publicity it would inevitably attract. Like you, I believe Ainley’s letters could equally well be the work of a fanta-sist but the author Coleman was unwilling to entertain that possi-bility. Derek Granger (the original biographer) read the letters when he assembled the archives and dismissed them as ‘high camp’ – the kind of jokey flirtatiousness that was prevalent in theatre circles at that time. I have since learned that he wrote that kind of letter to a number of other people he fancied. There are no letters [surviving] from LO to Ainley and no proof whatsoever that anything took place between them except in Ainley’s imagi-nation. However, I was not around at that time in LO’s life and the letters are in his files. But I do know that during our thirty years together his needs were exclusively heterosexual. And I believe all the people, gay and straight, with whom we worked at the National Theatre would confirm that opinion.
Coleman’s book is not, as its publishers claim, a definitive portrait. It ignores the testimony available of friends who recall the sheer fun of being with LO. And it fails to capture his huge capacity for enjoyment of the moment despite trouble and suffer-ing – and his utter relish of the work however hard and taxing. Missing too is any sense of the wit, charm and warmth which inspired such deep affection in so many people.
‘Oh, I do miss him, he made me laugh so’ is a sentiment I’ve often heard expressed. And oh yes, he made me laugh so much too.
With love
Joan
Larry was true, as I set out in my speech at the unveiling of his statue: sometimes without thought for consequences. He vehemently stated to me: ‘Christ no. I have never been queer.’ His has to be the ultimate authority.
Articles and books will persist in stating that Larry was homosexual and they really shouldn’t be taken seriously. It is a load of baloney. He was more heterosexual than most heterosexuals. He adored women. In these days when being gay is no longer something to hide, saying that he ‘was one’ would not matter in any other profession than his. Acting is different. He never played gay roles such as Shakespeare’s Richard II or Prospero. He could not imagine transmuting characters such as theirs within himself. While many of his friends were gay and he adored their company and their talent, many of them being more talented than the rest of us, he hated the whole idea of homosexuality.
Twenty-four
22 May 2007 was the centenary of Larry’s birth. Two years before then I contacted institutions which I thought were sure to realise or at least sponsor a suitable project to commemorate him. The National Theatre liked my idea for a bronze statue, life size, of him as Hamlet, climbing the steps of Elsinore Castle to meet the ghost of his father’s spirit, hold-ing his sword in front of him like a crucifix. They also suggested a site for it. Beyond that, no organisation would step up to start the project, even though 2005 was a year of continuing prosperity. I had to take responsibility for the whole thing.
Lord Attenborough, universally referred to as ‘Dickie’, agreed to unveil the statue. With this prestigious information I wrote the first of four hundred letters to people and institutions. Some I wrote to two or three times so as to shame them. Eventually two hundred did reply with a donation made out to the National Theatre Statue Account. Dickie Attenborough’s input, with his close relationship with the National’s Chairman Sir Hayden Phillips, opened up a way of avoid-ing payment of VAT because the National was a charity, which saved £25,000.
I had to commission the sculptor long before I had raised sufficient money, so I was personally liable to meet any shortfall. I wondered about the worst case, of my having to sell my flat. If Zelfa had been worried she hid it well. At the end I raised the capital required, plus just more than £5,000 which I gave to the National for upkeep and so forth.
It was a dry and sunny day, 23 September, selected by Nick Hytner the Director of the National. Zelfa was looking lovely, a red silk suit, black jacket with a diamond leaf spray brooch and large dark glasses. About five hundred people stood in Theatre Square including Riddelle and her daughter, facing the South Bank, the Olivier Fly Tower behind them, and Joan Plowright, nearly blind with macular degeneration, led devotedly by Maggie Smith. She recognised me only by my voice. Her three children and grandchildren were there, so were my three and at that stage eight grandchildren.
After Sir Hayden’s introduction I made a speech:
Larry was true, he was magnetic, gloriously funny, he is still a part of what makes life worth living, as is his creation the National Theatre. It took much more than a century for this to happen. The third time Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother laid the foundation stone, in yet another place, she said ‘You really ought to put some wheels on this thing.’ It took his leadership to bring it to fruition. Harold Wilson implored him to accept a life peerage but he refused until the entire cash commitment for the National was signed and sealed, the heroine in Cabinet being Jennie Lee, Minis-ter for the Arts.
I am not the first Tarquin to erect a statue of his father. But it is a rarity. The last one was two and a half thousand years ago, the last King of Rome, whose son Tarquinius Sextus caused the dynasty’s downfall with ‘his ravishing strides’, to use the lines in Macbeth, and what nowadays would be called his unfortunate involvement with Lucrece. A young Roman general, heir to the throne, in a scarlet toga. Irresistible. I am sure she was dying for it.
Together with the generosity of the many more than two hundred contributors, thankfully with so many of you here, we have brought about the creation of an iconic, romantic and most exciting image which is recognised around the world. Many of you wrote wonderful letters regaling me with stories of Larry. Many sent helpful lists of people I could approach for contribu-tions, here, and from the United States and Australia. Where there were no addresses I am most grateful to Anne McGuire of Equity for forwarding many dozens of letters to the addresses she had.
For the many who would have liked to contribute but were never asked I can only ask their forgiveness. All the contributions were entirely voluntary from individuals or independent institu-tions. They include not one penny from commercial sponsors nor any government-affiliated organisation. This statue is a gift to the National Theatre and future generations from us.
All contributors’ names are printed in the programme for this evening’s celebratory performance. All those who contributed a thousand pounds or more will have their names engraved on the brass plaque which will be pl
aced in front of the statue, once that list has been finalised.
I chose the image of Hamlet because it was one of the few great roles where Larry actually used his own face. In the reception area you can see his Romeo, painted by Marshall, with the first of many false noses; a facsimile of Salvador Dali’s Richard the Third personifying the irresistible charm of his brand of evil, and the Ruskin Spear sketch for the full-length portrait of Macbeth, at Stratford. I know of no greater portrayal of every unimaginable pain in any painting than that exhibited by this painting of Larry’s Macbeth, even in any Crucifixion.
These roles were recognised as great because they totally absorbed the world’s greatest actor into themselves, and trans-formed his body language, his speech, his mental physical and spiritual energy into becoming them. Obliterating himself. As a profession it demands more discipline and creates more exhaus-tion than any other kind of artistry. What supreme energy. He really was tapped into some source.
Hamlet, using his own face, is completely different. Of Hamlet he said it was set apart from any other play; it is unique, because with Hamlet you cannot cheat. You have to give your complete self, as your own self and no one else’s, no role-playing there, no defence: the difference between being a lover and a husband.
I went to tender to three extremely well-known sculptors with photographs from his film of Hamlet. The Garrick Club agreed with these images and my selection of Angela Conner’s offer. Hers was the only one which answered the terms I asked for: a full-length life-size statue and plinth, with the possibility of two complete copies and three busts of the head taken from the orig-inal. These would be made for any suitable institution or collec-tor. Her price, much reduced from her norm, meant that there was no real decision to be made. She was passionate about the subject.
So Who's Your Mother Page 38