by Unknown
D.
To Penelope Mortimer Clermont
18 April 1972
If I have not written it is because there really has been practically no time to do so .... I had both your letters, and was tremendously happy that you liked Regina2 so well.
She really seems to resemble that lady in ‘All About Eve’ … and perhaps your original idea, of saving her from crap-pictures, will bear fruit and was as wise as one (sorry) thought it to be ..... so get on with your ‘touching job’ … what does she really mean by a ‘changed woman.’ It seems sad to settle for the obvious ..... but it would probably be more commercial. And that we need. Or rather she needs. We need. I dont know .... Losey needs too, having just sat stunned through the boredom of ‘Trotsky’ in the local flics last week. However enough of that.
I have not written on account of my aged parents arrived for Easter, against all the family warnings .. (Too old to travel alone … past the age .. you’ll be sorry .. they will be much happier left to stay where they are in Sussex … etc.) Pappa is 80 … she is 75 .... he has a blazing desire to paint the ‘light of Bonnard and Renoir’ she has no ambition of any sort apart from telling long, long stories of the past. [ … ] Anyway; they arrived late at Nice having had to stand for an hour and a half in a corridor at Heathrow being frisked in the privates for grenades! I ask you! Our darling Irish at it again apparently … so exhausted they arrived an hour late and we drove to the little pub … not the one you stayed in … the smaller one with a little loo and bidet in the room actual! And happy they were … a super view .. sun .. and dinner ahead. I said I’d call back to pick them up in an hour. And I did. To find my Mamma in a heap on the floor of the lobby surrounded by guests and a white faced Pappa and the owner with bandaids and scissors … she had crashed the flight of marble stairs and cut her self and shocked herself … and also had broken her shoulder.
Oh la la! Pain .. doctors .. pain killers .. a ghastly ride in a taxi in the night to a clinic miles away in the hills above bloody Nice.… x rays … and the serious pronouncement of an immediate operation in the morning. Oh! Shit. However … to cut it all short .. she stayed in the clinic for a few days … the operation was not needed, a quite marvellous specialist managed to [manipulate] the bones together … and for two long weeks we ferried them about from the local clinic here in the village … before she was strong enough to go home last Tuesday. The miseries of one false move on a dark step swerved the entire pattern of their lives for ever. For she will never really be able to manage with it again even though it has started to heal and she is safe back in the Sussex, I suppose, she should never have left. Pappa painted a bit .. she sat and moaned a bit .. strapped up like a maniac in a sort of straight jacket … but was really awfully brave. So there was little time to write, nor was there any inclination … after I put them on the plane I felt wretched .. when to see them again? And would he, who I adore, ever see Bonnards Light again? So off I went into the Rex and sat through ‘Trotsky’ .. and wondered at the awfulness of it … of the performances not much to be said .. Burton plays the whole thing with the charm of a dead baby and the unctiousness of a Used Car Salesman .. Delon bites his nails and rolls on beds in an agony, I presume, of doubt … and Miss Schnieder comes up with your original Irma Greese1 Role … with a scrubbed face and rimless glasses.
The audience .. there were eight of us present … laughed a little here and there, and shuddered at the bullfight, which is ugly and badly shot with five bulls playing one … and I breathed a sigh of relief that I had NOT changed my mind and done the thing … I would have been better I feel … but not better enough to save a foundering bit of Jo pretension … if I counted ten mirror shots I counted ten hundred … and the dialogue has to be heard to be disbelieved. End of page. End of letter. Hope the trip was fun.
Love Dirk –
Following a conversation in Cannes with Losey and lunch at Clermont with Dirk, Alexander Walker, film critic of the Evening Standard, commented on the partial estrangement between actor and director who then exchanged letters. Dirk described the piece as ‘Quite dotty’; Losey, ‘unforgivable’.
To Joseph Losey Clermont
10 June 1972
Joe:
Your letter of the sixth arrived with another little note from a Well Wisher enclosing the ‘Standard’ clipping … which made me sort of throw up, inspite of many years of that sort of rage and disappointment. What a stupid old faggot. Yet another Press Chum off the list … and another proof that even the nicest and most intilligent and helpful are at heart decietful and vain and inaccurate! Except Dilys?
Sure I adore Visconti … I always will … and I love you too … even inspite of your small treacheries .... if one has worked ‘soul to soul’ as it were with a Director as I have with you and Luchino you just dont fall off the tree like dead fruit. But that would be too hard for Walker to understand. Although, I suppose to be fair, he was trying to ‘bring us together’ … which was a wast of time and not his function. We’ll get together under our own time. And not before. When I said to Patricia that ‘I did’nt want to meet you’ it was not that at all. I dont in the least mind meeting you .. (the wound has healed somewhat anyway now) .. but I just did’nt want, or could not face, rather, getting cosy and jolly over a meal … or jammed in the Bar with Pierots Super Elixier .... time will take care of it … so it was not as violent as it may have sounded. Naturally it would not be reported as slightly as this, second hand.
However. Glad about Proust.1 Another tiresome rumour … people delight in handing on. There is such pleasure in pain these days. Odd. Good about Galielo1 if it happens, I know that you have long wanted this. Saw a ghastly film with Cusack on the Telly and words failed me. Marvellously shot. Thats all. Also saw ‘Fellini Roma’ on Tuesday which sent me reeling with delight. Not a complete film perhaps, but what a marvellous eye. Eye. I should say. And clever little Rotourno2. I do believe, as I always have, that the Italians are the master movie makers and have been since the first Ben Hur in 1910!3 Fellini’s Rome is the one that I know sure as hell … even to include, wickedly, M. [Gore] Vidal! Clever old thing … F. not V. you gather.
[ … ] I am reading terrible scripts still. Oh dear … the last an adaptation of Garnets4 ‘Lady Into Fox’ which I have long adored and wanted to make with Asquith5 years ago … this has been ‘up dated’ and reads like Disneys version of ‘Rebecca’ .. or a sort of Carl Forman6 ‘Born Free With Foxes.’ When, if ever, will they learn …
Good about ‘Accident’.7 You have not bettered it … still. Bugger the pace. It is a masterpiece.
Love
Dirk –
In October and November Dirk had made The Serpent in Paris with the director Henri Verneuil. His co-stars were Henry Fonda and Yul Brynner. The character, Philip Boyle, he likened to Kim Philby.
On 5 November Dirk’s father died.
At the time of this letter, Dirk was preparing for the filming in Rome and Vienna of The Night Porter, to be directed by Liliana Cavani with Charlotte Rampling his co-star.
To Penelope Mortimer Clermont
7 January 1973
Pennylopey —
There is a fearfully boring mail strike here, so this may never get to you .. or else terribly late. It is the Sunday letter I promised you in a hastily scrawled P.C the other day. A sort of catalogue letter; there is so much to say and so much to catch up on.
The film in Paris was okish. Jokey a bit … lots of spies and car crashes and so on … founded on fact. Me as Kilby … Fonda the head of the CIA and Brunner being a crashing bore both on and off the screen … and one way and another it all seemed to work out alright finally. In the middle of all this, one Sunday morning bleary from the Blue Train, I staggered into the Lancaster at eight in the morning ordered some coffee and started to shave. Telephone. Pa was dead at six that morning and the family had frantically been trying to get me .... I was on the fucking train. What to do. Apart from the terrific shock (I absolutely worshipped him and he
me.) I could’nt leave Paris. Could contact no one there on a Sunday … and had the first of the ‘set pieces’ to start the next morning. Fortunatly, oddly, I had a very important business luncheon at Lipp that day which I attended in a sort of numb way … drank a lot and was amusing and ‘on’. Business was excellent. Back at the hotel … walking slowly back through the silent Sunday streets … the tears came finally, in the loo where it was sort of private … and I sat on the bidet and blubbed like a five year old instead of a fiftyone year old. Next day they all were deeply sympathetic but there was no possible way to England until the next Saturday which was a ‘day off’ with location shooting at the Travellers Club on the Champs on the Sunday at eight o clock am. So Pa was shoved into the deep freeze and I finally, after a nightmare journey by boat, car, train, got to the Funeral and sang those dotty hymns and watched them bung him into a hole. Then back to the house for a vast reception for all the super people who had come to be there. He was tremendously loved. Anyhow there it was … and for the next two weeks I had to commute between Paris and Haywards Heath and here .... burning [ … ] papers diaries and private papers … sending batches of stuff to ‘The Times’ where he was for forty years … batches to the Royal Photographic Society1 … oh. The weariness and sadness of it all. My sister did the burning of clothes and personal gear, his shaving brush and tooth brush … silly things. Mother sat in black; mute, brave, and sipping white wine while her family ransacked her house. Ghastly. But inevitable. And then finally all over and back to Paris for the final scenes (in French, which terrified me more than I can tell you) and eventually home here to the comparative calm of the terrace and the hills … now slightly dusted with the first snow.
To wait calmly for the film in Rome … fittings started almost at once and again it was a matter of bashing down to Rome and standing for hours while they stuck pins everywhere and shoved me into boots and shirts and hats … and then back, home for a breather and off to Rome again for the Makeup … two days before Xmas .. with an entire family of eight arriving for the week! Had to. What do you do with a new widow on her first Christmas alone? So they all arrived … nieces and nephews sisters and brothers. Mother in a rather nasty hat and a set smile .... beds slung into odd corners … Staff sent away so we could use their rooms … ‘We’ll all Give A Hand’ ringing out … clattering about … sharing the two loos … Tonys son1 arriving in the middle of it all [ … W]e got through it all without once mentioning Pa or NOT mentioning him … all was smooth until Christmas night when there was a call from London from the nephew who stayed behind to say that he was in St Georges with a seven inch stab wound four inches below the heart. Jolly. He had got into some awful party in Islington and it broke up into a fight with some yobs who tried to gatecrash the thing. In the scuffel a knife flashed. Mark2 in the hospital. So. Happy. Happy Christmas. However everyone kept their cool and we went on with the celebration including boxing day tea for seven children. Shit. Thats all for this time … I move off to Rome or Vienna in two weeks to start the film there with Cavani .... until April. I’ll let you know where I am when I know … but as usual it is an Italian Epic … I mean not an Epic but an Italian Film and there seems to never be anysense in them. I wish I were’nt going. I have suddenly found that I simply LOATH the acting bit .... after three years away .... its such balls … and I want out. I think after the Cavani that’ll be it as far as I am concerned.
Golden and glorious here today … frost on the back paddock … snow on the higher hills .... sun striking off the terrace and the bare vine .. Mistral stripped and spare.
I’ll go to the airport and try and find a post box .... and send you an ocean of love as ever. Do write back sometimes.… I miss you too you see. Funny.
Incidentally, a great box arrived from Connecticut some time ago with ALL the letters I ever sent to my LADIE. Over 2,000 .... they are FRIGHTFUL … and off they go to the fire. After the shock of reading a randome few written between 603 and 72 I decided I was not much cop at the writing … and the person who emerged from the typed pages was a mixture of Shirley Temple, Doopey,4 and Oswald Mosely ..... so off with their heads.
[…] Love terrifically
Dirk
To Bee Gilbert Clermont
20 July 1973
Snow darling –
Gosh! We have been busy one way and another … and it seems to me that I, or one of us, owes you a hundred letters and things. It is just not possible to get the time now that we run the house entirely on our own .. we sacked those two old farts the moment I got back, a day too soon, from Vienna and found the house looking like Miss Havershams. They had obviously been sitting on their bums watching telly for three months … and apart from feeding the dogs .. had done nothing else. Not even watered £500 worth of new trees which we have had to plant on the East boundrey, under Brown Titty Hill, because the Gobbies next door are building a cathedral. Anyway. They went. And a nice daily lady from up the lane comes two hours a day with swift washing and sweeping strokes, and frightful varicose veins. And we manage marvellously. Eat when we want to .. play records ALL night … and have a splendid new guest suite. Naturally … which has been almost constantly in use since the Festival in May. Which, for a bit of a change, was fun. Everyone seemed to come and eat with us, or swim, it was blistering hot for the two weeks, and we had lovely days with Ingrid B[ergman] and Rex and his new wife1 (bought a new house on the coast ..) Malcolm McDowell and his gang from O Lucky Man2 … and countless Americans who seemed to be here for some vast junket for Warner Bros. I think, accuratly, we had a luncheon every single day for at least four or six … but as it was so smashing and hot we just had vast picnics with bottles and bottles of chilled wine. It was tiring washing up .... but usually I was so pissed that I did’nt realise it much at the time … after two weeks, however, I had RATHER a LIVER. And suckled myself on bottles of Vichey .... well, anyway … these are some of the excuses for not having put pen to paper for so long. Incidentally we did not see [ … ] Frankenheimer .. who was here [ … ] and who got a GHASTLY reception and Press. Ho Ho. What Glee.
Losey was in saddish form because of ‘Dolls House’3 .. but looked rather beautiful with very long white hair and a brown face … rather like a Sioux Chief dressed by Cardin .... Malcolm M. I liked enormously but was not so terribly taken with his wife4 who suddenly appeared on the terrace, as we were all greeting each other, and to my consternation I realised she was once called Mrs Someonelse … so it was a bit confusing. However shortly after luncheon, about five o clock she pissed off with a migraine and we all relaxed. Ian is TERRIBLY lucky that you dont have the same effect on people! Tell him that from me please … also it is awfully good that you are not an American Intellectual On The Cinema. She practically killed everything each time she opened her mouth under those silly granny glasses they WILL wear to be Hep.
Anyway, that does’nt matter. It was all fun generally … I’m busy saying NO to everything that might start before the winter. Most of it is shitty anyway .. and I have played them all before … which is never tempting. Got one today which is a sort of Moscow-Darling. I suggested that what they really needed was Michael York and a good Score. It does’nt exactly make friends, that sort of line, but makes me laugh anyway. And apart from the fact that Forwood wears a worried Frown all is well. My lovely Swiss Gnome says that I am ‘alright’. So why should I bother when I HATE the work now. Honestly … during my fifth simulated orgasm on the film with Cavani in Rome … I suddenly wondered what the hell I was doing at 53 with my back on the floor, my flies undone, being straddled by beloved Miss Rampling .. with an entire Italian Crew watching and eating pizza. Nothing I had ever done in Rank prepared me for that … and it also hurt my elbows most damnably. So I have decided not to do anything else until I REALLY feel so dotty about it I cant resist. But the shit of it all … the hotel rooms, early calls, hanging about, arguing about continuity, avoiding Press … faking Fucks .. BASTA! We have apparently out Tangoed ‘Tango’ … I cant say that ma
kes me happy … but it might make some lolly. I ADORED Miss Cavani … I used to hit her so that she would cry .. so that I could cuddle her. Kinky? Betcha … Love. end of page. D.
OOOO (Hugs for Ian.) For you XXXXXXXXXXXXXX and two OO’s
To Penelope Mortimer Clermont
14 October 1973
A Patriotic Letter. Christ knows what has gone wrong with this silly Ribbon. Me, most likely. Rather exhausted from recording, here at the house, some of the 12 Record Shows I have agreed to do for R. Attenborough.1 God knows why. Except it is super Lollipops and I was able to go and buy a wonderful great set of Gramaphone, disc recorder, mikes and speakers .... the studio looks rather like the bowels of a space-craft … covered in wires mixed up with disgruntled dogs and worried Daily Ladie who is Not Allowed To Dust. Done three of the sods … it IS hard work .. and they seem happy in London and have put in an order for more and more. Fun sometimes … especially to hear old records played beautifully on this new, and wildely expensive, machine … hearing K. Kendall’s voice again .. my God Mum, Yvonne Arnaud playing the piano … Karajan and all Mahler … however we will see what happens on the 4th. K. Tynan said the title .. ‘Do I Hear A Waltz ..’ was ‘too dreadfully, and relentlessly, nostalgic.’ … well that is maybe. It is geared for late afternoon listning for sort-ofish Mrs B’s1 and nice Students Studying High Maths ..
What AM I saying?
Rain yesterday. Terrific. Garden sodden and the vine dropping leaves like used kleenex. Dogs feet scattering the tiled floor like those neolithic cave paintings … splats of personality etched in mud. Labbos delicate and graceful … a prince of Dogs … Daisy a sort of wild splodge … a bull-dyke of a dog. And me swabbing up all the time where they have missed Nice Matin and three week old copies of The Observer.