by Unknown
Of course I was pleased. And when I got home here I called Dahl on the telephone and told him, not braggingly .. just to possibly put him at ease. After all if someone he knew so well and admired so deeply, had been impressed at all, it was something. Dahl’s reply was very typical.
‘Of course you’d behave like me’ he said. ‘We are both English and we are both Gentlemen. Something the Yanks dont understand yet.’
Oh well …
There was a devine actress, Mildred Dunnock, who was also playing herself in the film. She had been, still is, Patricia’s surrogate ‘mother’ and adores her. She agreed to play herself because the script was ‘accurate’, and she loved Pat so much she wanted to support her in some way. She is now eighty. Then, when it1 happened, she was fifteen years younger … after she had finished her work and was going back to N.Y where she lives, she said, in her very quiet voice, ‘You know Dirk, it’s a strange thing. I have hated Roald for fifteen years because I did’nt understand what he was doing to Pat: why he was being so abominably cruel, so heartless .... apparently. But now I know why. And now I know how magnificent he was. I am deeply shamed.’
So that was good. And the odd thing is that I had no idea, at all, of his behaviour .. at that time. Or what he did. I only did what I would have hoped to do given the same set of appalling circumstances.
So you see: acting is a very different matter for a great many people. What is important to know about cinema-acting, mine anyway, is that it must NEVER BE ACTING. And I cant really explain that. Miss Jackson, surely a plain girl, with feet like a goat-herd, hands like a bricklayer, bad teeth; has an inner magnificence I have only ever seen matched by Edith Evans. Her transformation, before ones eyes, to a really glorious, vibrant, living creature like Patricia Neal was absolutely staggering. And Pats own daughter [Tessa], now aged 23, who saw a good deal of the stuff we shot was literally overwhelmed, as she said, by seeing ‘my own mother on the screen’. And she is a young woman not given to kindness or compliments I gather.
So … I dont know how it is done. Soul? Or magic? Very certainly NOT tricks.
A long letter this. Sorry. Your fault. And it answers nothing you asked! [ … ] but you do see it merits no reply as I shall call you tomorrow, Monday, anyway.
Much love
Dirk
Dirk was awaiting the resumption of shooting on The Patricia Neal Story. To add to the uncertainty, labour disputes involving both the directors’ and writers’ guilds had hit Hollywood.
To Kathleen Tynan Clermont
20 April 1981
Kathleen –
It’s been Easter. Or rather, it still is I think. I sit here, the housework done; Lady is off genuflecting somewhere as a true Catholic, and await the rain, which threatens, and four guests from Up the Hill who are coming in for a pre-lunch drink. Which means pissed washer-up and ‘caught’ spring greens. And so this is haitus-period.
What better way of filling the time until they arrive for their bloody Dry Martini’s than writing to you?
Did you know that they were invented in the Savoy Bar? Martini’s?
Like Peach Melba and etcetera .. marvellous: my store of useless information.
Do be impressed.
[ … ] Our Epic staggers from the improbable to the impossible. Telephone calls every two days, from one side of the Camp or the other. Lies, half lies, mucky-truths. Which are worse to deal with than the rest. I dont know where to start believeing. And DREAD the idea of shooting Amersham High Street in Vancouver. The newest idea. Glenda, after a sticky start in her play,1 has licked them into shape and is a success. So that’s sad. I mean lovely for her but sad for me .. because if she had ‘come on over’ sooner we might have had a bit more time to work. As it is we must finish it all by midnight June 30th. So that the Directors can have their strike. Your lot are wallowing in one right now. What’s to become of us all, I ask? Anyway: from the moment that Miss Jacksons final curtain falls at The Court, she has just eight days to get her ass to wherever it is and shoot the final third.
No way, you say? Ah ha! You dont know how fast we work. At fourteen hours per day we might manage. Might.
So I cant really settle to do anything ‘proper’ like riting. You must know the impotence of that feeling very well. I am to bash off at Bio.3 I am now instructed by my Publishers, unless ‘there is some novel you’d like to write.’ I mean, God! Do they think I have a hundred stored away in my too-small head? So Bio 3 it is. First chapter okay. Title goodish I think, ‘An Orderly Man’ .... it is, you’ll guess, ironic. And a lot, a hell of a lot, has happened in the decade plus since we first rode bumpily up this old drive … it’s the losses which are so fearful. When you start counting. The faces which have gone. The faces which are lost to one. And laughter.
It was sickening, for me anyway, that one did not know you were in Londres when the razz-matazz was on for the Awards.1 A sorry affair indeed; the whole business. The British simply cant organise a sale at Harrods: so how they are expected to organise a vast Oscar Thing with 3.000 people and far too many boring prizes I dont know. And one loo MILES away, to which one was allowed to hurry in the Commercial Breaks. Standing clutching your private parts in a huddle of people including Maurice Denham, Denholm Elliot, David Attenborough and Tony Snowdon and so on is not, at the time, amusing.
I rather had a mild attack of Fan Lust when I found myself crushed, a bit later, against Miss Gloria Swanson while we waited to ‘present’ the pressies. She’s fairly formidable. The chic’est creature present: black and gold sequins, a long black glove on one hand holding a Baccarat rose. Calm, cool; Star. Eighty two. I thought of Ken and Louise Brooks.2 Knew the feeling of sheer admiration. The rest, from Zhandra Rhodes (sp?) dressed in magenta punk, hair and all, and swaying under a homemade Calder mobile, was pretty miss-able. And by ‘punk’ I dont mean pink.
Tony Snow was actually very pleasing. I embraced him, somewhat to his vague astonishement because he had’nt got his glasses on and we have’nt met as chums since [ … ] oh .. sixty two or so. And he had’nt changed. Older; but we all are, but a survivor. As we all are. Thank God.
[…] I did a Duty while I was at the Connaught. Tea with Kathleen Sutherland. She lives there now since Graham died. In vast comfort, with, as she said, ‘enough money, Dirk dear, to live out two lifetimes. And I dont even want what is left of this without G. I asked my devine Doctor what would happen if I took all my sleeping pills in one go with a bottle of Krug and he said I’d be hellishly sick, feel AWFUL, and that he’d never give me another pill ever again. So I sit here drinking champers, flirting with the waiters and waiting to die. Is’nt it boring of me?’
Small, vivid, black haired, extreme chic. Seventy something. Cucumber sandwiches and Earl Greys; lot of cigarette smoking and remembering G. at The Chelsea Poly where I was his student for some time and she taught Fashion. She was, at that time, Editor of London Vogue. And very intimidating. And totaly ignored me. Which she continued to do until she saw ‘Death In Venice’ and decided I’d made the Social Grade: for luncheons only.
But, because I worshipped Graham as a man, and because he gave me such deep awareness of colour and shape at a very early age, I was seventeen, I sort of feel I have to put up with this slightly silly, desperatly sad, widow.
And it IS a contact with a fantastic past. At the moment she is helping to prepare a gigantic retrospective, next year, of his work at the Tate. So at least the waiters are not so fussed. Most of them are squealing little fellows anyway, but I suppose that does’nt matter.
Apart from that, and two rather delicious, and wildely expensive, supper parties which I gave, nothing much more in a long week-end. But the supper parties were super because no one was over thirty one. And they all came dressed as if we were playing charades and had gone through the Dressing Up box. Andrew Birkin1 lost a whole tooth eating his asparagus and made a great tarrididdle, handing it round to us all to weight the thing, and Nicholas Bowlby, late of The Times, had just bought a fant
astic motor bike on which he and his lady2 are driving down here for a long hol. in July. We laughed, all of us, so much; argued, thumped tables, gobbled scotch salmon, and drank a good deal of a rather excellent wine … and Bridget Holm said was it alright to smoke a ‘ciggie’, and I wondered, happily, if the Connaught would ever be quite the same again. I think people thought there was a grass-fire in Hyde Park. Well: there was a grass fire alright. But at our table.
I have made a perfectly shocking decision. Out with the Old on with the New. It works, it is fun, expensive, and rotten for the Old. But I wont be bored any more. And nor, my darling girl, will you. I’m off … with kisses galore. Hiatus Letter Ends.
Love Dirk – XXX
To Norah Smallwood Clermont
25 April 1981
Norah dearest –
I’ve just mucked up the big mower: hit a huge olive root hidden in the grass. Angry and hot I have pushed the damned thing into the garage. Done most of the big field behind the house: but hate leaving a job half done. Although the buttercups and thingummies are prettier than the close cropped field I have now left to dry in the sun. Rain for days .. a wind today .. spring. They say.
I loved your letter, as I always do, and this one even more because it was clearly written with a split twig dipped in your patrician blood. Or, to be more honest, a running-out felt pen. That made it MUCH more fun to read. The last few lines, in a clearly borrowed pen, were almost dull they were so clear.
[…] I am back at reading up diaries and letters for ’70 … in process of starting to get the shape of Chapter 21 roughed. a tedious business. Irritating too .. rereading stuff written when ‘younger’. I was 49.
That irritates me now.
I’m doing my best not to strangle Vita and Violet and hit Harold on anything possible with something hard.2 I cant, simply cant, reconcile them with the two people who gave me such enchantment! She with her delicious bits on Gardening in the Sunday paper, he with his wit and care of words, and his creation, with her, of the now rather over-trodden Sissinghurst. And how on earth did I revel in Violets clever, funny, book? I hate them all at present!
So ‘The Shooting Party’3 is a glorious escape. And HOW good! How clean and spare. How many layers in that simple, deceptivly so, writing.
What a lot to learn.
Which brings me to the odd enclosure which I thought might, perhaps, just interest you. In between chatter to Chatto4 and dropping stitches. I dont know the child.5 Never set eyes on her. She wrote first, I think, when she was about 14. Obviously from a working-class family: north. Her handwriting, then, was tiny and scribbled. But it electrified me for one reason. She clearly loved, and cared for, words .. knew how to use them, and wrote to me simply to tell me of her daily life.
I cant think why. No Film Fan gush. Nothing of that sort.
From a child of that age, living in a council house in Bury, with not much more than a loving family who all worked to support her, she has always seemed absolutely determined to ‘get out’. But how I wonder. At first I set her off on a programme of books to read .. she did’nt know any. So we started off gently .. and then she progressed towards, and into, Austen, Brontë and so on. Predictable; but not bad thinking.
And twice a year a letter came: with comments, a chunk of Journal, often very funny and recorded perfectly calmly. The handwriting got better, the spelling, and so on .. and gradually a ‘form’ started to take shape in her.
I shall now have to write to her, after a silence of about a year, and make more comments. But I am foxed as to know how to budge her on a bit further … it seems such a waste to me. I feel that there is a potential there [ … ]
Monday. 27th.
A pause. Rain and guests are a poor combination. And now a bitter mistral blows from the snow fields […]
Funny letter from Debbo Devonshire to whome I wrote a Fan Letter having caught, quite by accident, a ‘re-peat’ or whatever they call them of a programme she and her sisters did about Nancy M[itford] when in London last. She, I thought, was vastly moving and her voice filled me with magic. So I wrote. And she says now she feels a ‘proper person’ having had a real Fan Letter from me. She’s a dreadful fibber, but I do like her greatly. She once swore to me that she had NEVER dined in a private suite in an hotel in her life after supper once at the Connaught: she even went as far as to suggest that she had never even set foot in such a rakish thing as .. an hotel! Come on now! But she did rather long to meet Judy Garland, it was years ago, and did. And came with Lucien Froyd or Freude or however the man spells it … and they sat in a sort of stupified silence, adoring Judy. She was in full evening dress. V. grubby slipper satin, with the Devonshire emerald clasp on her pearls held in place by a bit of twisty elastic. Great fun, and ravishingly pretty … oh well ..
Our Elections yesterday. First part. Torrential rain and a moderate vote. Maddening how people fear wet feet but not the Communists.
Neck and neck result this morning. And the run-off in ten days time [ … ]
Now I must write to Miss Tollitt and encourage. Perhaps there is a very modest, but established Publishing Firm in Manchester who would give her a chance? I could suggest that … it is so wretched to offer no hope. Or concrete suggestion ..
I was v. pleased [with] the clipping from The Bookseller1 [ … ] it warmed my chilling heart a little. A leaf fire to frozen hands!
Off .. and DONT reply. In split twigs or thin blood … blue, of course.
Devoted love.
Dirk.
Shooting on The Patricia Neal Story was finally completed in the Home Counties. Anthony Page had taken over direction from Anthony Harvey.
To Roald Dahl Clermont
5 July 1981
My dear Roald –
I seem to have spent the week since I got back from damp old Angleterre writing ‘thank you’ letters as well as carting hills of hay about, and trying to sort out the wreckage of the rose garden (a mistral and torrential rain while I was away) and cope with the dead heading!
I am certain you know the problems.
Anyhow: this is to thank you, very sincerely, for coming down to the locations and, most particularly, for the marvellous ‘stuff’ you gave Page to salt into the [Robert] Anderson Script. They have been of the very greatest use, and we have used them wherever possible.
Time, of course, was our enemy.
Schiller behaved, for all his odious gluttony! extremely well .. and the terrifying clash of personalities in the U.S was not repeated in England for one second.
At one moment I saw him on the top of a vast rostrum swinging the camera about like billyho.
‘You realise that Schiller is busy directing your shots?’ I said in a modest voice to Mr Page who was busily eating a fat sausage roll.
‘Oh yes!’ he said cheerfully, ‘You see he does so LOVE it!’
Which was a VERY different reaction to what would have happened in Hollywood where the whole thing would have ground to a halt while complaints of ‘interfearance’ were screamed at various Agents and the Screen Directors Guild!
All in all it was a happy time in England, and I do think that we have managed, at least, to honour both you and Pat … which was something I promised.
Naturally neither of us are ‘like’ you … and we do not seek to portray you, as you realised, but we did try to re-represent what you attempted: and suceeded in doing. I hope that you will think so too.
It was an enormous honour to be allowed to ‘play’ you; I hope, very much that I have not let you down.
With warmest wishes and thanks,
As ever
Dirk.
To Roald Dahl Clermont
29 July 1981
Dear Roald –
This is to await your arrival from the awful U.S.A.
And to thank you for sending me ‘DANNY’,1 which I have ‘gobbled’ almost as greedily as you your frais du bois and Schiller his cream and roast beef.
Shall we ever forget that sight?
Later, in the same day, I found him outside a shop in Aldbury with a vast twin-cornet ice-cream, PLUS a greasy cardboard box of sodden potato chips. French fries he called them. Hmmmm.
I found the book enormous fun, and moving and exciting .. but you know all that anyway! I honestly, hand on heart, cant see a movie there, however ‘little’, as you call it. But obviously, with the clang and clamour of people barking in your ears to make it, I have to be rong spells rong: as my Nanny said.
I shudder, I may add, at the thought of what the Movie People would do to all those ruddy pheasants … cant ALL be stuffed!
As you will note I cant type. Nor do I have such a luxuary as a Secretary. Handwriting absolutely nil. So please excuse errors as they come and merely say ‘Poor fellow ..’
Royal Wedding1 today and stuck I was watching on my titchy Soney. Very moving, very pretty, splendid as always those things are in England, with a splendour unmatched anywhere else on earth. The behaviour of the, incredibly vast, crowd was greatly heartlifting, proving, once again, that there is’nt much wrong with the people, but a very great deal with the idiots they have to elect to govern them.
Pleasant, so far, rumbles about our film from the dreadful desert City. But one has long since learned to take all that with the pinch of proverbial salt. And pepper.
I never thanked you, or if I did not enough, for the marvellous help you accorded me during the English Shoot. Cutting that Ivy Leagued gentlemans icy script, over blown and over written, was a joy. When you reduced one whole block of black letters, half a page about, to one succint, brilliant, word ‘Instinct!’ I hugged myself with glee, and laughed loud at the surprise on everyones faces as I scored my fat red pen through the rubbish! Thank you: thank you.