Ever, Dirk: The Bogarde Letters

by Unknown

  Another reason for chucking it all in very soon … I feel, in my heart, that I have nothing new, vital, or exciting to do in my work. I am stale. So stop now. As I shall stop this over long note.

  Glad about the flowers .. gladder about the cat1 .. I bet it is a Siamese. And if I am right that barking hound will have his tail between his legs the next time you allow me to visit you …

  Dont reply, my dear .. we’ll get into a ‘thing’ … and thats exactly what we are not supposed to do.

  Always my love

  Dirk.

  To Tom Stoppard Clermont

  8 July 1977

  My dear Tom –

  I am suddenly out of the haze … two weeks home here, or a little over, and the world does’nt seem quite so frantic and awful as recently it did. I’m really writing to say how smashing it was to read all the splendid things about your last ‘effort’1 .... all that squeaking from the Dreadful Levin. That was magic … and so were the others which I read. I had a bash, last Sunday, at trying to call you .... but after twelve duff tries I settled for another beer instead. But I did send loving thoughts, or whatever they are called, and dont suppose for one moment that they did the least bit of good.

  I may be coming out of a haze … but it appears that I have not yet re-mastered this sodding machine. Excuses upon excuses .... I am also writing to say that I am so tremendously grateful to you for the chance of doing ‘Despair’ ..... I hasten to add that while I would not have NOT done it … and I mean that very sincerely … I am not over anxious to repeat the trip again under the umbrella of Bavaria Films! A very unorganized lot, which amazed me slightly since we were always told the Krauts were so very organized in every form. Not true with Bavaria. And half the exhaustion and frustration on ‘Despair’ was due to them … not to Fassbinder who was all I could have possibly wanted as a Director, and brilliant to boot. And nice. [R]eally nice. Under all the chains, leather, thigh boots and grannie-glasses a soft-center lies snuggled. And I found it and liked it enormously. Sadly the people who surround him are the most awful lot of scrubby, pot smoking, squealing little Leather Boys … pretty tiresome; and dangerous too for I do think that they have a tremendous effect on Reiner who desperatly needs love, as he calls it, and insists on rejecting it at the same time. Equally boring. However he is still pretty young .. and things can change rapidly. I hope that they will. Andrea Ferreol and I were really, when all is said and done, the only two really professional people on his Team of actors. The rest were hellish .... full of ‘Method’ .. full of ‘pot’ … late, forgetting their lines, crying, sulking .. (lots of that went on … ) and generally behaving like a set of moronic infants in an Acting School. There really was’nt time, as I once did point out to Reiner, to learn all your splendid words, leap about the set like a mad Stag, progress towards madness in fifty different levals, AND teach his fucking Gang how to act. He was very concilatory about this … and knew that it was damned tough for glorious Andrea and I .... and now that he really has, for the first time it appears, made a Professional Film with a large budget … 2 million five hundredthou, I was told … instead of shooting all Sunday Night in some celler with his mates … which is how he made all the others (he only really comes to life at night) I think that he will want to go on .... he did re-act marvellously to the work we did for him … and was bug eyed every day at Rushes … and wrote a smashing letter at the end to thank one for all the things he had learned. The most important one seemed to be ‘Authority without Fear’ ..... I’m happy if I was able to show him that. For it is exactly the one thing which he lacks himself! He has Authority WITH fear. They were all shit scared of him from the head Dr Krapp to the smallest fag in the make-up rooms … and no one, but no one, would say no to him. Except me. And he liked me for that.

  Andrea and I never, ever, argued with him, or ever remotely let him feel that he was not absolutely right … which he was most of the time. And whereas the rest of his Actors, so called, screamed, argued, insisted, stamped dear little booted feet, or got huffy, he sailed away with Lydia and Herman .. as he should. And we really were tremendously happy together. She is quite devine. Her Lydia is so moving, funny, and dreadfully sad … her final crack-up is very tough to take … You know all the time that Lydia and Herman desperatly need each other .. even though they are ‘wrong’ for each other … and everything he does, really, is for her, or for their life together in ‘the mountains.’

  Klaus [Löwitsch], who plays Felix, was the other REAL pro. And was superbe. OH! I DO hope you will approve. Did I tell you that Nabakovs son came to see us? Very impressed by the ‘seriousness’ of it all … and by the ‘feeling for my fathers work’ which seemed to emenate from the Set. I hope it did. We had a super script to start with … and I DO think it is the essence of the book … though it varies … Fassbinder-wise … a good deal. But I feel sure that he knew what you wanted to say, and what Nabakov wanted to say … and I think that comes out clearly. It is not a cheap movie. I think it is a very important one indeed. And thank you dear Tom, for your patience and belief … I shall long remember that evening at the Colombe d’Or when you discovered that there were two actors for Felix and Herman! And it is right, you know … it really works so much better that way.

  I heard today from Munich that there have already been two long runnings of the film, and another takes place next week … to see if they can ‘shorten’ it … he did, I regret to say, over-shoot dreadfully. Alas! Something will have to go … one sits nibbling finger nails wondering just what they will be. Perhaps you’ll be able to see it soon? Do call me if and when you do … Andrea is ill with worry that you will be bewildered and not fully like what you see, but I really dont think that you will. I think, and I can be most horribly wrong, that you will be as proud of your first Real Film Script as we are proud of the film. But I did promise that the least word from you would be sent by telephone, Dove, airplane or courier to Andrea where ever she may be at the time. She really BECAME Lydia … as I rather exhaustedly became her husband. It was a very strange, exciting, bond. Oh! the fun we all had with Chocky-Wocks and Goggle Moggle.…

  One thing though, after ‘Despair’ I never want to LOOK at a box of fucking chocolates ever again! Days we spent in factories, filled with the rancid stink of margerine, peppermint substitute, violet creams, vast vats of peled hazle, wall, and other nuts .... it was in our hair, in our clothes, stuck to us like the smell of death does … so, next time, dear Tom, set the story in an open field! And we had a hell of a lot of THEM too! And bloody lakes!

  No really: I did love it all .... it was just tiring at the time … now I’d happily leap into one of my fifteen suits, slip my rings on my fingers, and swagger out into the ‘Berlin streets’ .... to meet Orlovious …

  Nicer to meet you … and your scrumptious Doctor1 .. will you give her a kiss from me?

  and a huge hug .. and once more,

  congratulations … and love ..

  Dirk

  P.S. As a slight sample of how things were altered. Remember the final scene in the village square, calling from the window to the crowds and the police? Reiner thought it was all a bit too Richard Tauber … so now the whole scene is played as a whispered soliliqy (cant spell it) from Herman, crouched in the snow, surrounded by police. And it works too. Bavaria had hysterics … the crowd cost a fortune, and all got sent away without ever seeing the Camera! But I think you’ll approve … D.

  To Jeremy Hutchinson2 Clermont

  14 July 1977

  Dear Mr Hutchinson –

  I got back from my over-long trip to Germany, and have not forgotten that I promised to write to you as soon as I was rested and at ‘peace’ .... which, if you dont count hay-making, weeding, watering, raking and making enormous haystacks … I have twelve acres of hillside … I suppose I am!

  Really I was to write to tell you how happy your letter of May 15th made me, and to see if I could find any more ‘stuff’ relating to the Cottage during the late twenties early thir
ties.

  There really is’nt much … an early picture postcard of the house itself … as we first found it .... looking pretty scruffy … and what you know as ‘the end Papers’ … a photograph which my father took from a very small, and decidedly dangerous, airplane about ’30 or ’31. Nothing else remains much except snapshots of people sitting under trees … and they would in no way interest you .. regrettably, I cant think why, no ‘snaps’ seem to have been taken of the Cottage itself. Which is why I had to do the small sketches, mostly from memory, some from ones my father did for me ‘on the spot’ so to speak some years before he died. They were not awfully good, so I sort of re-did them, using memory mostly.

  In our day the cottage was very primitive indeed. As you have gathered. Lamps, privvy, pump … the road from Lullington Court was a chalk road .. the path up to the cottage just a chalky track. Very slippery in the rain and dangerous with heavy baskets! Inside it was a warren of rooms each leading out of the other, as far as I remember .. and the North End was fearfully damp and rather gloomy … we spent most of our time in the big room on the south looking down to Lullington Court and Littlington.

  Lullington Court was a working Farm. Vast dairies with bowls of cream, and all kinds of milk, plus great blocks of yellow butter standing on slate slabs. It was very cool, covered in ivy, and sweet smelling. After the pig-sty, our favourite place … apart from the great barn where the Stallion lived … at the far corner of Great Meadow which was, I believe, converted into a chic house sometime just before the war. There was no one living nearer than the Axfords (as they were really called) at the Court .... I believe there are two cottages down at the bottom of the road now .. but they were not there in our time. Mrs Fluke lived in the pair of Victorian cottages at the bottom of Great Meadow opposite the Court, and Mrs Diplock, who sometimes came and ‘did’ for us, lived at the end of the garden behind the hedge where the pump was.

  So we were pretty isolated … there was, I remember, a bit of a ruined windmill up the lane towards Wilmington .. and a small quarry with some very creepy caves alongside. I was once told that ammunition was stored there during the ’14, 18 war. But dont know if it was so.

  The hole, through which my unfortunate mother fell, led to a strange tunnel, as I said in the book, and which is very likely still there today … it was under the floor boards of what we called the ‘hall’ which led into the big room with the inglenook with it’s two big built-in settles. Are they still there I wonder?

  Did you know, I am sure that you do, that what is now called the Market Cross, or square, was originally called Waterloo Place? Because the cottages opposite the cross, at right angles to the Smugglers Inn, were used to station the miserable Troops who were later to fight in Waterloo … the Market Cross was in a slightly different position, nearer to the Chestnut tree … and rebuilt at least twice in our time because the Village Boys used to get a bit ‘lit up’ at Fair-time and tried, stupidly, to climb it. We were told of one who fell with the entire cross, and got a large piece through his lung … but I expect that was just Mrs Fluke .... the Star was a family Inn .. not a lick of paint on The Dragon or the carvings along the facade. I remember the shock and horror everyone felt when it got ‘taken over’ and painted with bright cheap colours … just down from the Star was an Ale Bar called ‘The Steamer’ … it was closed just after we got there, I seem to recall … and turned into cottages now called Steamer Cottages. There was not a tea shoppee or a gift shoppee for miles! And the only garage, well, there was’nt one really; just a big Shell Petrol Pump on the pavement outside Barkers .... Miss Barker once blew herself, and most of the shop, into the street one afternoon because she filled herself a can of petrol and took it into the kitchen to ‘sponge down’ some soiled clothing. By the open Range. We were very awed by the debris and the smell and the smoking timbers .. and poor Miss Barker (Baker?) being carted away to Seaford, in an ambulance.

  None of this is in the least bit interesting … I am being a bore; but oh goodness! I did so adore it all … as I think I said in my card from somewhere, I never really ever went back. Once … in the fifties … for a brief, sad, trip around … nothing was much as I remembered it. It was all so damned neat and tidy! The Court was very Homes And Gardens and Converted … the Barn had great lawns around it … many of the elms had vanished round the gully … and round the church which was all neat too .. and the smother of trippers in the village saddened me more than anything. I did’nt come right up to the cottage … peered over the hedge down by the Diplocks ex-cottage .. and it looked pretty and tended … but I missed the rows of potatoes in the front beds! The currents … the damson tree at the corner … the rhubarb patch … so I went away.

  You must NEVER go back, must you?

  [ … ] Forgive this ‘book’ of ill typed (and spelled) nonsense ..

  and thank you once again so much for such a very delightful letter.

  Yours sincerely

  Dirk Bogarde.

  To Norah Smallwood Clermont

  23 July 1977

  Norah dear –

  Goodness! You DO know how to make a chaps’ heart thud! With pleasure I hasten to add, not fear. Your telephone call was cherished because I know that you dont really make long-distance ones if you can send off a P.C of a Cream Puff … and that evening a P.C of a cream Puff would not have served to lift me from a spell of gloom and despair … (Nabakov clearly made an impact on me … ) However I set too with a stronger back next morning very early, and bashed away and away, re-writing, re-forming, re-phrasing and screwing up a great deal of the village typing paper. The result of my labours is in your hands, or on your desk, now. Chapter 5. The Clincher, really … from this it must all truthfully ‘stem’. I mean the rest of the oeuvre.

  And this morning. (NEVER begin a sentence with AND) your splendid follow up letter arrived which, since I had just finished the last corrections [ … ] came at an awfully good time. You are kind, and generous to me. I am such a lucky fellow .. but it wont get in my way … I shall be very firm with myself and still re-rite (!) and all the rest of it.

  The Selection bit, you guessed, is MONSTROUS hard. A life of some fifty six–seven years, pretty packed with things and people, is frightfully difficult to ‘Essence’ without a faint odour of Cheating coming in with the fabric. I shall have to leave so many people out: so many things which happened, simply because there is either not the time or the place, or because they would distress people … even those who did not know the facts about which I might write. This is hellish. Yesterday, for example, I trailed miles in the blistering heat to lunch with Rex Harrison and took with me a photo copy of a letter which he wrote to me the day after Kay Kendall, who was my most beloved friend ever perhaps, and certainly most missed, died of Lukemia. It is a letter of such startling beauty, of such love, of such pain, of such generosity and joy, of so very much that made his adoration for Kate the triumph it was .... I wanted him to read it and see if I could use, at least a fragment of it, in a forthcoming chapter. She and he were so much a part of my life for over five years that it would be totaly impossible NOT to use their story. But. Can I? How much pain might it cause all the ladies who followed Kate, albeit after a decent interval?

  I think the letter will distress him. He was to read it alone last night .. (there is yet another lady now ..) and would ‘write to you old boy’ but I dont think he will … and if he does it’ll be to say ‘no’. So. I have to find another way around that. However that is only one example of the worries which face me …

  [ … ] I want, I feel, to back track, and go forward, like a Weaver in a way, so that past and present and the immediate moment are woven into a, possibly confusing, Jacobs Coat? Might this be wrong? Ah! You’ll have to catch this feeling, and I think you only can, from this Clincher Chapter. But if you do hate it, stop me as soon as maybe with a telegram and say ‘No!’ .... I’ll understand and try another form of ‘style’ … but I have a secret feeling it MIGHT work .....

  [ �
� ] I want to try and Investigate my theory of Acting … to show, if I can, what the loss of privacy and annonimity meant to me and how much pain it caused. To re-call my Father and Elizabeth and Forwood as often as I can … because they were always, and thank goodness in two instances still are, the keel to my boat.

  Sometimes the sails as well! And I want to slip into the bits of the war which shocked me, or amused me, or altered me … for the Growing Up Process is still taking place, and I think it is important to let it drift through the work.

  And I have done quite enough talking. [ … ] So .... ‘have a read’ .. and tell me, if you can bear to, what you think … because from now on in, that is to say from Chapter 6, I strike out on this route ..... I dont want to break all our necks at a crossroads!

  With gratitude

  & much love

  Dirk.

  To Ann Skinner Clermont

  31 July 1977

  Annie love –

  What a super letter: at last. I thought you was dead, or something. Nearly are, working in Devon .. never mind. I am not too distressed about No Go With Prince Charles1 .. he’s really got awful little eyes .. I’ll start collecting Views of Princess Risborough instead. Thanks for trying anyway.

  […] the Fassbinder Project [ … ] took me away for three long, facinating, but exhausting, months. I’m mad about Fassbinder. Very odd creature, simply brilliant; marvellous to work for and with, difficult; strange; granny glasses [ … ] caps with chains on them … fast cars and ‘Clock Work Orange Theme’ on radio, cassette thing, every day, all day if it was’nt Callas in ‘Tosca’ or ‘Norma’. At full blast. Wearying. But then he is awfully young too … thirty in Berlin. We had a great party off the Kufurstendamm … Tony was amazed at the beauty of the waitresses, ‘the only really chic women I’v seen in Berlin .. or even Germany’ he said confidentally. Save they were all fellows. Oh well .... But the film(Stoppard from Nabakovs novel Despair) was terrific, sets, costumes (mine was the biggest wardrobe since that God Awful ‘Listz’ and cost more!) and a devine leading Lady called Andrea Ferreol who was the Fat Lady in La Grande Bouffe … but you probably never saw it. Anyway we were Hubby and Wife and made an astonishing pair. Funny, but I hope sad too … I think I might have done some good work here. Perhaps some of my best. It remains to be seen naturally! I had to play with a German accent since I was the only Inglise in the film … and it made us all a bit more harmonious. We made it in English, naturally … he is breaking into the American Market.