Ever, Dirk: The Bogarde Letters

by Unknown

  [ … ] Anyway … now I sort of know. But did’nt. And I am writing terribly badly only because it is after luncheon and I had a good half bottle of champagne before. So.

  Cool today. October reaches as far down south as here, and I rather hate it. All those bloody Fall colours and mist in the valley and the grapes going bad and the wasps drunk from the juices and lighting fires again. End of season. Loath it. Long for winter and the real cold and no nonsense about bare twigs and frost on the grass and the thin cold line of snow on the hill above me. That bit I dont mind. I hate this lingering farewell to Summer.

  Like streamers and confetti at a sailing .... the ship slowly moving away and the pink and green and yellow paper ribbons parting slowly and swirling into the black water of the docks. Farewells prolonged are like death without euthenasia.

  Before the hated Autumn arrived Alain arrived with Florence.1 They came for a day from Garde Frenet where they were slumming away in [Jeanne] Moreau’s house. He was looking very pale and terribly thin. Too thin .... I did’nt say anything. He spent the day eating peaches and wincing in pain from something he had ‘done’ to his leg by falling into a three meter ditch in the dark a few days before. Florence was in good form and pretty and eager. They brought lots of stills of perfectly hideous places which he has discovered in New Hampshire and Connecticut for the locations. He emphasised that he wanted a ‘nowhere place’ and by god, thats what he has found. I do see what he means, now, by having to trail all across the Atlantic instead of doing it all comfortably in Burgandy or East Grinstead or the Massif Central. New Hampshire is another world indeed. Half Arabic, half Burford, half nothing at all. So off we trail. Apparently not until the snows have melted … April? It grows longer each time we speak. No script yet from Mercer2 … he is due to deliver this week. As I did not comprehend one single word of the Full Treatment do you think I’ll understand a word of the written script? Is he so obtuse?

  Or is it me? Me. Most likely.

  What of the rest of the summer [ … ] Well … a sort of hotel for lost Brits and vague Americans … and without staff a bore. But in some ways fun … A mass of chums all the season, food and drink to get, beds to make and tables to lay. House And Gardens did the house from cellar to attic … quite pretty [ … ] Then Vogue (Hommes) did me … cover and five pages … and one begins to wonder what else lovely age has in store? I did’nt do Histoir D’O, and lost three hundred thousand dollars for twelve days work … but really got so up-tight with the script that I had to be grand. And cant afford not having that kind of loot … but really: after ‘Porter’ enough is enough … and I wont wag my private parts on anyones screen. Why should I?

  Nursed the [Rex] Harrison Break Up. Never jolly. Always sad at that age too … Nearly had Miss Davis for a week end .. remember thats where we came in? … but she went to Spain instead .. opens tonight at Croydon and later at the Palladium in her Show. All Sold Right Out since June. Lovely, lovely, for her .... and she looks postivly smashing in the press. Even the English Press cant make her ordinary like Marcia Wilson;1 the Lady is bigger than life.

  Went to stay, well to have lunch with, some rich Texans I dont know but who do know a Cousin in San Fransisco, at their rented house on Cap Ferrat. Dom Perignon and Orange Juice for breakfast and Boarsin cheese on hamburgers. Three refrigerators making nothing but ice cubes all day, and each child, there were ten, had a car to itself and a large bus to take them to La Reserve where they dined nightly in sneakers and tea shirts with ‘Fuck Me I’mGay’ written on the backs … and ‘Fuck Me I’m Straight’. On the fronts. One wonders.

  A nephew I had never met [ … Brock] arrived with […] a tent and a water bottle, running shoes, hair down to his hips and a heavy accent from Wandsworth Comprehensive. Sixteen. Six foot three. With a copy of ‘Private Lives’ in his bum pocket. Idea being to erect the tent for two days and borrow the loo. Idea never materialised. He stayed three weeks .... and we had a ball. I had no idea that youth was so much fun, so bright, so clever and so far in advance of what I ever was at that age! I learned pretty quickly.

  The ‘Private Lives’ bit was no bait to catch Uncle. He just adores Gerties Voice and Noels and knew the record off by heart. So we set to with ‘Hay Feaver’ and the rest and lots of records and he got totaly smashed on ‘A Chorous Line’ and ‘Chicago’ and was last seen tap dancing with Danny La Rue who has a house in the next village. And who is, not surprisingly, a smashing gentleman […]

  I fear, and my poor brother fears, that RADA is probably the next step … after he had got his O’s and A’s and been to Poland on a Windjammer, which chore he starts today I gather. But it was fun … and took care of three long weeks. Took him one day to luncheon at Oonagh Oranmores at Cap D’Antibe .... ‘We’ll be just the family ..’ she cried on the phone, ‘Do come and just as you are.’ In jeans and boots (It was pissing with rain) we set off.

  A ninteen twenties luncheon party for thirty. On ‘our own’ my arse. Butlers and maids, five courses; an ex-lover (queer) of Barbara Huttons, his lover; Daphne Fielding in a chiffon poncho with sequin eye lids, all the Kindersleys from Lambourne dressed by Herbet Johnston, an Indian Lady who wrote poetry and wore a sari and whome we all, privatly hated and called Miss Bengaladash, and an Irish M.P who hated the British and his wife who was so pissed at the Duck a l’Orange Part, that she fell out of her chippendale onto the marble floor and lay helpless while the footmen served the rest of the guests. It went on until four, when everyone retired to the Saloon for coffee in silver cups, and the Young Ones went and swam, in the rain, off the rocks, dressed in lilac and yellow dressingowns. Brock … from Wandsworth, was struck dead with silence .... and realised that Coward still lived on in some of the wilder parts of the world!

  And so the summer faded into the mellowness of todays October. I am busy on ‘my book’ … Chatto and Thing want it … but seem to become more and more silent with every new chapter. It’s not about the Cinema. About me and my sister in Sussex in 1930 … which makes nostalgic reading for me but must make pretty icky reading for Chatto who REALLY want another David Niven. Thankfully I am not he. Him? So I expect the Slip any day now … however 70.000 words is quite good, is’nt it? Good for discipline anyway. When I wrote to my old Nanny1 and said that she was to be the star of the story and that I was going to change all the names except her ‘pet’ name, she wrote back from her Caravan at Steeple, and said that she was very happy to hear the news, that it was about time I got away from That Acting Business, and what else could I possibly call her except her real name? ‘I’m who I am, dear, whatever you do to change me, I’m sure I’ll come through all your fiction no matter what. So you MUST use my name because I should’nt like to be fictionalised at all after all those happy years: and after all I shall know.’ So she’s herself. And that does’nt matter a whit to you … but it is fun for me … mind you she may not be all that keen to be reminded that when she secretly took us to see ‘Rio Rita’ at a Cinema (forbidden!) she threat[en]ed to hit us on the head until we got a mastoid if we told anyone. No. She might not care for that. But she said it. And it was not fictionalised at all.

  I have written too much bunk to you … you’ll be reeling if you have got this far .... I must go and do dogs dinners and logs and so on .... this is a luxury for me .. a bore for you … Oh! Before I go. Losey called the other night from Paris. New Hampshire was Hell. Politically America had changed. He was lonely and misplaced. The kids did’nt know who he was and wanted to know how they did the effects in ‘Jaws’. He has left London and is now in Paris … could I find him a flat, house, villa? He was staying in Jean Marais apartment and it was purple velvet from wall to wall and ceiling to ceiling and he had a bad taste in paintings. Nothing changes, does it?

  Have you seen the dreadful ‘Romantic Englishwoman’ with Glenda Sludge and Mike Myopic? Oh lor! .... nothing changes.

  Dont write back. Just get well. And I’ll come and see you with a Brie or pot of Paté or something.… I think you ought to
come back to Europe.

  I never really thought that you should have left.…

  Love

  Dirk

  A second appearance by Dirk on The Russell Harty Show, to promote Permission to Kill, prompted Jack (‘Tony’) Jones to renew contact after many years. In a letter to a family member Dirk described the response printed here as ‘cool’. He had, in today’s jargon, moved on. With the exception of a single brief entry by Tony Forwood in the joint Diary, there is no trace of Jack Jones in Dirk’s own archive.

  To Jack Jones Clermont

  17 November 1975

  Dear Jack —

  I am terribly sorry that I was unable to call you while I was in London. Everything was tremendously hectic, as you can imagine, and I did not go down to see the family until the day before I returned, last Wednesday.

  Your Telegram shocked me very much.1 I had no idea, naturally, what had happened to you over these many years, but assumed that you were still comfortably installed at the Maltings2 and that time had taken care of things generally.

  I seldome come to England now … about three resentful times in ten years and so it is very easy to get completely out of touch. My father died three years ago, leaving a dreadful gap in our lives … and then it was a matter of dealing with Mamma who is now happily, well .... happily enough … installed in an hotel for Elderly people. The house now belongs to my brother in law .... and generally life has found itself quite altered.3

  I am sad that you did not let me know what had happened to you, but then of course it was pretty hard for you to do so not knowing where I had got to. To be truthfull I did’nt know where I was until about 1969 … travelling a good deal from one land to another and finally settling, very happily, in this old cottage high in the hills and a very long way from anyone else. I have practically severed all the old relationships with the Cinema in England, and work as seldome as I am able .... or as the French Tax Man allows.

  I had had a cheering idea that I had saved enough to keep me going for a few years … but like everyone else, the moment the bloody old Wogs crossed the canal4 my slender savings dwindled to a very thin skin! And the death of Pappa caused a bit of a blow for he left nothing whatever to my Mother or, indeed, any of us! I cant imagine how he managed to keep himself and her for so long … he was practically skint when he died, but had always told the children that he was ‘perfectly alright!’. Which he jolly well was not.

  So Mamma costs a bomb per week … and I have now to go back to work again. I dislike it … and am getting older and dont much care for the ‘new face’ I am forced to see on the screen … however pride never gets anyone anywhere. So I better shut up. I’m off now to work in Italy until Febuary … and then to America until June or July, which saddens me for I shall have to leave the land here to take care of its self .... and that it cannot do.

  As I no longer have servants and gardeners and all that, it means just shutting the door and clearing off. The best laid plans of mice and men, they say.…

  I have been back a week now from the hellish publicity business … and the annual visit to the family. Which was pleasant but also astonishing to see vast nephews and Neices and all kinds of stray kids littered about who seem, somehow, to belong to the family!

  Do, if you can, let me know how things are. I am glad anyway that you are, as they say, happy.

  I am sorry once again not to have called … but there was not the time, and I am only now sorting out the log of unanswered letters and telegrams.

  As ever

  Dirk

  To Dilys Powell Clermont

  26 November 1975

  Dilys my dear –

  How dear and kind of you. And HOW you reward me. I blush. But I am satisfied that you could see that I did try at least! Films like that, which are really efforts to assist, as in this case with Wein1 Film, can be pretty groggy to do. The only thing one has to try is to give it every ounce of work and experience and try to make the obvious a little less obvious.… I always remember, years ago in Hollywood, on a film with the super Mr Cukor, leaving a room through two double doors … all I had to do in the last shot before the lunch break. Cheerfully I crossed the great gilded room, opened the roccoco doors, and went into the ‘hall’, carefully closing the doors behind me.

  Before anyone shouted ‘cut’ an hysterical voice shrieked ‘What The Fuck Do You Think You Are Doing!’. Horrified I stuck my head into the room, camera still running, and faced an enraged, silent, glaring Cukor. I told him, humbly, what I was doing … ‘going out of the room, Mr Cukor.’

  ‘Well for fucks sake make it INTERESTING!’ … he roared. And we re-shot. I never forgot. As I never forgot, in the early fifties, your perfectly valid complaint that I had never learned to ‘command.’ .... for both of you I have the greatest gratitude.

  I stayed away from you, as you might realise, while I was in London recently to ‘do’ the publicity for this sad film … and did ‘chat’ shows desperatly instead. But after Resnais … an amazing, staggering, fearsome (for me) script by Mercer … after Resnais I shall come and see you, if I may .... we start shooting in Feb or March in nightmare-land which he has found in New Hampshire … and I hope we shall be finished at the end of May.

  Just off to the dentist, oh dear! I do so dislike lying flat on my back and having things ‘done to me’ .... and paying the bill afterwards!

  Thank you my very dear, once again …

  With an ocean of love

  Dirk

  To Kathleen Tynan Clermont

  28 December 1975

  Dearest Kathleen –

  I rushed you off a pretty predictable Impressionist Chrissy Card simply to say How Lovely about the film.1 And now that the dust of this foul holiday session has somewhat settled, I want only to re-ieterate my pleasure. Unless, that is, it has folded, like so many others! Or unless, as is likely, you are a pale wraith lying in a darkened room after a shattering experience. Certainly the Set Up sounds rocky … not to say bumpy … but it would be glorious if you arrived at the end of it all as a sort of Lady Director! That really WOULD give me the greatest pleasure!

  Actually, it is what you ought to be doing really … with your beady eye and your swift assessment. And taste. However: it is a sodding job … I would’nt do it for Brando’s salary doubled.

  The Mercer script is superb. Amazing, moving and totally, to me, incomprehensible! That is, I gather, what it is supposed to be .... it is a five-hander, Burstyn, Warner, Guilguid, Stritch and me. We start shooting, I hope to God, in New Hampshire on March 28th … No! I lie! We WERE starting there but now we do the Paris Studio stuff first and New Thingummy in mid May. It is all so confusing I hardly know where I am. If you know what I mean. Ass from elbow sort of stuff [ … ] I ADORED Mr Mercer that day we met … and find him as dear and warming and rich as a Teddy Bear. Which might seem odd to you but feels great to me. I mean I have to be frank with him and tell him that I dont know what the hell it is all about .. and he rather likes that … because I dont think that HE really knows himself. It’s all about a middle aged pre occupation with Death. As David is all of 44 I rather feel he is a bit ahead of Middle Age … but there you are. I’m still struggling through lifes stormy waters at 55 looking for a raft or an Island.

  Have’nt time for the Death pre occupation .... much too worried about the possibilities of a Change Of Life Saga which is supposed to smash one at this age of mine! After that … Resnais and Mercer .. off, for a great deal of loot, to do a bit in Levine’s Epic of Bang! Bang! Spot The Stars! about Arnhem … a goodly company including Redford, Connery, Caine, [Gene] Hackman, Olivier, [Alan] Arkin, [Charles] Bronson … well you KNOW the rest … so it should be interesting if dull. And pay for the Resnais film as well!

  We had a very solid middle-aged Christmas. I had a cold and washed out some sheets in the morning (Daily Lady on holiday for a month in Granada!) split logs in the afternoon, prepared the broccoli and potatoes for a small turkey T. insisted on buying for our Supper.
It was more of a Moorhen than a Bird … however it got stuffed and we ate it with me gasping and groaning and wallowing in Kleenex Man Size.

  After that the fire, some Bendicks Mints, and Jean Renoir on the Telly and an early bed with Francis Donaldson.1 How middle aged can one be? One wryly remembered together the staggering Christmases of Long Ago … when eight servants flew about in white coats and Turkeys got carved for fifteen guests and trees were ladened with goodies from GTS, Peter Jones, Harrods, Halcyon Days and Orchids from Moyse[s] Stevens.

  Fortunatly those days were had. Good they have gone!

  I am staggering through My Book. 50.000 words at half time. New Part starting almost now […] I had it all typed and corrected and that while I was in London by a nice lady in Hitchen2 who said that she thought it was Very Good and Not Boring. She liked the last two chapters of the first half best. Perhaps I’m improving? But Shit! NOW I know what you went through … research is lovely .. all those old books and maggers about 1931–32 .... names blazing into the present from the dusty pages of the past .... Ardath Cigarettes … Binnie Hale … Debenham And Freebodys … Taxies with wire wheels … Ralph Lynn … Gunters … and my first long pants from .. Burtons! Ah well … that part is fun, it’s the putting it down on this sodding machine I find the chore.

  But I go on … idiotically I suppose.

  I must go and do something about lunch … table to lay, potatoes to peel … that sort of thing. It does get in the way of 1931 terribly …

  Much, much love to you .. and great good fortune and happiness in this next, curiously interesting, year!

  Always my love

  Dirk

  To Dilys Powell

  (Postcard) Limoges1

  13 May 1976

  WELL – THE RESNAIS HAS STARTED. AND WITH IT THE MAGIC, BECAUSE IT IS MAGIC: BACK, VERY MUCH, TO THE ‘MARIENBAD’ STYLE. FRIGHTFULLY DEMANDING INTELLECTUALLY AND PHYSICALLY! AND I HAVE LITTLE OF EITHER THESE DAYS. BURSTYN DULL, EXCELLENT, VERY ‘METHOD’ WHICH I FIND A LITTLE TIRESOME – THE MOTIVATIONS OF RESNAIS DO NOT BEAR DISCUSSIONS – AND MERCERS SCRIPT IS AS COMPLEX AS ‘THE TIMES’ X-WORD. WITTIER POSSIBLY. JOHN G GLORIOUS – WARM, FUNNY, AND THRILLED TO HAVE, AT LAST, HIS MOMENT-SUPREME IN THE CINEMA. NO CAMEO, THIS! I ADORE RESNAIS – A LITTLE SHADE OF MY ADORED MONSTER VISCONTI – BUT ENTIRELY HIMSELF. STUBBORN, FIRM, JOYFUL, PATIENT, BRILLIANT. IT COULD BE, MAY BE, PRETENTIOUS CRAP – OTHERWISE SIMPLY HIS MASTERPIECE. NOT BAD, REALLY. AS EVER, AS YOU KNOW, MY LOVE. DIRK. XX.