Ever, Dirk: The Bogarde Letters

by Unknown

  1. Jessica Mitford’s autobiography (Gollancz, 1960).

  2. An adaptation for Thames Television by John Mortimer of his own novel, Titmuss Regained.

  1. PM had given Dirk a melianthus for his balcony.

  1. Truly, Madly, Deeply, written and directed by Anthony Minghella, starring Juliet Stevenson and Alan Rickman.

  1. Now Cancerbackup.

  2. Thomas Forwood.

  3. Romilly Bowlby.

  4. Anton Troxler.

  1. He had, but seldom.

  2. Probus – the clubs for retired businessmen and professionals.

  1. See 4 August 1985, note 5.

  1. A BBC series with a racing background.

  2. Redemption (BBC).

  1. An adaptation by PM of Irene Handl’s 1965 novel, The Sioux (Longman).

  2. Natasha Richardson.

  3. PM had taken a ten-year-old to the Science Museum and lost him momentarily in the throng around Japanese Robots.

  4. Dirk had taken part in a This Week programme (ITV) on euthanasia.

  1. He was recording Backcloth for the RNIB.

  2. The melianthus PM had given him, not the then Prime Minister.

  3. Almost a Gentleman: An Autobiography – Volume II 1955–1966 (Faber & Faber).

  4. Choosing Almost a Gentleman as his Book of the Year (Daily Telegraph, 23 November), Dirk described it as a ‘towering, magisterial, epic hurricane of a book’ and ‘A complete triumph’.

  5. Right first time.

  1. At the Cadogan Hotel (‘Oscar’s’).

  1. Tony Bland, an eighteen-year-old supporter of Liverpool FC, had been in a persistent vegetative state since the disaster at Hillsborough football ground on 15 April 1989. In March 1993 he would become the first patient to have his life-support system withdrawn under legal sanction.

  2. PH was researching his Noël Coward: A Biography (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995).

  1. Not entirely accurate, but a fair indication of Coward’s enthusiasm for Power Without Glory and its young company.

  2. Dirk played Nicky Lancaster – the part in which Coward had made his name – at the Lyric Hammersmith in 1952.

  1. A further reference to the 1966 NBC production with Ruth Gordon, Rosemary Harris and Rachel Roberts.

  2. Suite in Three Keys: A Trilogy (1966).

  1. A knowledgeable insider says: ‘There is more romance in this letter than in Peter Pan.’

  1. ‘Puddings and presents but no Santa Claus’ (The Daily Telegraph, 21 December), an extract from his work-in-progress, Great Meadow. The drawing, a remembrance of Lullington, was one of Dirk’s extremely rare commissions. His renewed interest in what was originally titled ‘Lally’– a further ‘evocation’ of the childhood recalled in the first part of Postillion – had been prompted in late 1990 by a request from the Telegraph Magazine for a Christmas short story of 7–8,000 words, for which they would pay £15,000. ‘I mean,’ he told Pat Kavanagh, ‘who would not be interested in £15.000?’ The abandoned piece from his bottom-drawer was not quite what the newspaper had in mind, but its re-emergence encouraged him towards working it up to book length.

  2. Reduced to a pair: They Tied a Label on My Coat by Hilda Hollingsworth (Virago) and A Time for Love by Shirley Anne Field (Bantam Press).

  3. Dirk had been created Knight Bachelor in the New Year Honours.

  4. Browning had been a member of the Royal Household.

  5. There is no corroboration of this.

  1. PM was working on a second volume of autobiography.

  1. Dirk evidently meant Knight of the Screen – and on it, rather than (a) behind it like Lean, Hitchcock, Balcon and Korda; and (b) both on and behind, like Chaplin and Attenborough – although the last was honoured for much more than merely his work in the Cinema. Even so Dirk overlooked Stanley Baker, who likewise worked mainly in films.

  1. The disaster on 29 May 1985 at the Heysel stadium in Brussels, when hooliganism by supporters of Liverpool Football Club resulted in thirty-nine deaths, mainly fans of the Italian club Juventus.

  2. Under its original working title of ‘Lally’ or ‘Lallie’.

  3. A reminiscence of concerts during the winter of 1944–5 (Sunday Telegraph, 12 January 1992).

  1. Of HP’s No Man’s Land for Radio 3. Dirk played Spooner, the character created by Gielgud for the National Theatre. Michael Hordern took the role of Hirst, played originally by Ralph Richardson.

  2. HP’s agent from 1946 to 1983, and dedicatee of No Man’s Land. Dirk’s account of their passing-out is extravagantly elaborated.

  3. A section of PM’s memoirs-in-progress, relating to The Pumpkin Eater.See 1 December 1971, note 1.

  1. Knight Bachelor.

  1. Dirk and JO had taken to addressing each other by an Army serial number – in JO’s case, mischievously, as he never served in the Forces. Noël Coward began a 1930 letter to T. E. Lawrence, otherwise 338171 Aircraftsman Shaw: ‘Dear 338171, (May I call you 338?)’. An amused Lawrence obliged.

  2. JO’s Déjàvu had opened at the Comedy Theatre to supportive, if unenthusiastic, reviews. A heatwave was no help to the box office, and the play, his first for sixteen years, would close in seven weeks. In a diary for The Spectator (20 June) he lamented his error on submitting to interviews, and wrote: ‘No more plays, no more journalism for me.’

  3. Evidently a reference to the appearance of his name, misspelled or otherwise, in print.

  1. Dirk had his own number wrong: it was 269237.

  2. FM had sent a copy of his privately published set of family vignettes, Some of My Aunts and Uncles.

  3. For his first two years at Allan Glen’s School, Dirk stayed with his mother’s eldest surviving sister, Sarah (Sadie), and her husband William Murray at 42 Springfield Square – the period captured with spectacular harshness in Postillion.

  1. Hilda, wife of Margaret’s third brother, Neil Munro ‘Roey’ Niven.

  2. Ulric broke that vow when he took Dirk to Glasgow in 1934.

  3. James Steel, headmaster of Allan Glen’s.

  1. Youngest of Margaret’s four brothers, who worked for a time as a salesman for an engineering firm.

  2. The eldest brother.

  1. JC, Nicholas Shakespeare’s successor as Literary Editor of the Daily Telegraph, had sent Michael Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient (Bloomsbury) for possible review.

  2. Dirk was prescient. It shared the 1992 Booker Prize with Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger (Hamish Hamilton).

  3. Ondaatje, born in Sri Lanka, lived in Toronto.

  4. A Sikh sapper.

  1. About Time Too (see DB to Daphne Fielding, p. 453).

  2. The plant PM gave Dirk had been supplied by the celebrated gardener.

  3. Dirk had sent MD a proof of A Short Walk from Harrods, saying: ‘I do rather feel like those ladies who quite firmly reject the child they have been nourishing within for nine months! I dont want it published. I feel it is a fearful infringement of my life .. and, indeed, Tote’s.’

  1. Peter, author of A Year in Provence and Toujours Provence.

  1. Jericho was dedicated to MD ‘with endless love for Thursday teas’.

  1. Nicki Kennedy, of the Intercontinental Literary Agency.

  2. Principe di Savoia.

  1. Dal Bolognese, in the Piazza del Popolo.

  2. Another Dirkism: he means ‘on commercial sale to the public’.

  3. Dirk responds empathetically to DF’s account of difficulties in her family.

  1. The stone figure given many years earlier to Dirk and Tony by DF and her husband Xan.

  2. Yaddo, the writers’ colony.

  1. The nearby boys’ private school.

  2. The Literary Festival.

  1. Mark Handsley

  1. The full story is told by Rupert Van den Bogaerde, writing as Rupert Bogarde, in Daybreak into Darkness (Macmillan, 2002).

  2. Other People: Diaries 1963–66 by Frances Partridge (HarperCollins).

  3. Love from Nancy: The Letters of Nancy
Mitford, edited by Charlotte Mosley (Hodder & Stoughton)

  1. The Downing Street Years 1979–90 (HarperCollins).

  2. Terry Waite’s Taken on Trust (Hodder & Stoughton) had been published the previous month.

  1. The recommended retail price of A Short Walk from Harrods was £15.99.

  2. About Time Too: 1940–1978, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson simultaneously with a reissue of About Time: Autobiography 1918–1939 (Allen Lane, 1979).

  1. Sic! Dirk made a desultory eleven amendments.

  2. BM had interviewed Dirk for Sixty Voices (British Film Institute, 1992; revised in 1997 as An Autobiography of British Cinema, published by Methuen).

  3. But not the first: Anthony Asquith’s production of The Doctor’s Dilemma started shooting in May 1958, about six weeks after his Lawrence project was abandoned. He and Dirk began work on Libel in February 1959.

  1. ‘Number Fifteen’, the third of Dirk’s roles in a plot that defies brief summary.

  2. Edward Wooll’s play was first performed in 1935.

  3. John Mills and Mylène Demongeot, Dirk’s co-stars in The Singer Not the Song.

  4. As BM records in The Encyclopedia of British Film (Methuen, 2003; revised 2005), the Company of Youth was established by Sydney Box to groom young actors and actresses for stardom. When he joined the Rank Organisation in 1947 ‘he took the Company with him and it metamorphosed into the derided Rank Charm School’.

  1. Following a Platform performance at the National Theatre, Dirk had dined with Pat Kavanagh and her husband Julian Barnes at SH’s renowned restaurant, Bibendum.

  2. The Harry’s Bar Cookbook: Recipes and Reminiscences from the World-famous Venice Restaurant and Bar by Arrigo Cipriani (Bantam, 1991).

  1. EA had written to say that A Short Walk from Harrods was ‘a gem and will be wonderfully cathartic for anyone who has lost someone close to them or indeed lost a way of life’.

  2. The filming of The Vision in 1987.

  1. In being distributed to Australia.

  1. David Caute’s Joseph Losey: A Revenge on Life (Faber & Faber).

  2. ‘A Genius in Love with Vulgarity’ (Daily Telegraph, 15 January 1994).

  3. The concert pianists Katia and Marielle Labèque had been living, with their twin grand pianos, on the first floor of Dirk’s block.

  4. An earthquake had struck California in January, killing sixty and making 25,000 homeless.

  1. Reviewing JO’s Damn You, England: Collected Prose (Faber & Faber) for the Daily Telegraph (16 April), Dirk wrote of their first meeting, when JO brought him a copy of Look Back in Anger for consideration by the Rank hierarchy.

  2. In Point of Departure.

  3. Mai Zetterling had died on 17 March.

  1. Postcards of thanks for Dirk’s review.

  2. Melvyn (now Lord) Bragg presented Start the Week on Radio 4. Dirk had more than once been a guest on the programme.

  3. Auberon Waugh, editor of Literary Review; famous for persuading the great and the good to write for a pittance.

  4. Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, whose film script of JO’s Epitaph for George Dillon was commissioned by Dirk in the early 1960s. An alternative version of the lunch at Drummer’s Yard, in the presence of Capucine, is given memorably by Hall in Dirk Bogarde: The Authorised Biography.

  1. Indecipherable – part of an insertion by hand.

  2. Four Weddings and a Funeral, directed by Mike Newell.

  3. The annual excursion to Epsom organised by the Garrick Club, of which JO was a member.

  4. It would become Cleared for Take-Off.

  1. Sundry landmarks near JO’s Shropshire home, as remembered from Dirk’s Army training; although the Lygon Arms is in Gloucestershire.

  1. Flt Lt Christopher Greaves.

  1. JO had been taken ill – or, as he told Dirk, ‘had one of my QUEER TURNS’ – at the Derby.

  2. JO’s wife, Helen.

  3. The Osbornes had been invited to a reception at Buckingham Palace.

  4. Howard Kissel’s David Merrick: The Abominable Showman (Applause, NY, 1993).

  5. Anita Brookner’s A Private View (Jonathan Cape); Hilary Mantel’s A Change of Climate (Viking); Julia Blackburn’s Daisy Bates in the Desert (Secker & Warburg); Andrew Sinclair’s In Love and Anger (Sinclair-Stevenson).

  1. Alan Clark, whose Diaries (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1993) had been a triumph.

  2. Joanna Trollope, whose work had been identified as pioneering a new genre, the ‘Aga Saga’.

  3. Channel 4 had screened an interview by Melvyn Bragg with Dennis Potter shortly after the dramatist had been diagnosed with cancer and given a few months to live.

  4. The other way round, but we take the point.

  5. JO had been visited at his house on the Welsh border by several MPs and journalists. Blue Remembered Hills was a 1979 Dennis Potter television play.

  6. Sir Tim Rice and Sir Derek Jacobi.

  1. The Royal Exchange Theatre.

  2. The fiftieth anniversary of D-Day.

  3. Sport was never Dirk’s strongest point – its locations even less so.

  1. Dirk’s latest housekeeper.

  2. Alexander Thynne, 7th Marquess of Bath, and DF’s eldest son.

  1. In July 1993 Dirk had given the narration, written by Tom Stoppard, at four concert performances of The Merry Widow by Glyndebourne Festival Opera in Birmingham and London. A recording had now been released as a double-CD (EMI 5 55152 2).

  2. Franz Welser-Möst, who conducted the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Glynde-bourne Chorus.

  3. Dame Felicity Lott.

  1. Since the early 1990s the National Theatre has kept in its Archive a recording of all Platform performances on its various stages.

  2. Dirk’s ‘concerts’ tended to last about ninety to a hundred minutes; the book-signings afterwards were known to exceed that.

  3. The National Power World Piano Competition.

  1. Those were the days!

  2. Dirk’s A Period of Adjustment faced competition from, among other new titles, Bennett’s Writing Home (Faber & Faber).

  1. Branagh directed Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in which he starred with his then inamorata, Helena Bonham Carter, and Robert de Niro.

  2. Presumably Enchanted April, directed by Mike Newell.

  3. The nineteen-year-old Yevgeny (Eugene) Mursky, from Uzbekistan.