‘Ah, you young men. You throw the ball of narrative against the wall of literary truth and it rebounds effortlessly into your hands. I … I, on the other hand, throw the ball of narrative against the wall, and it rebounds here and there, hither and thither, this way and that, until, my old bones creaking in every joint, I must stoop laboriously to pick it up again.’
Anyone, I think, starting a Henry James for the first time will understand exactly what he meant.
It was at the Savile that I came to draw a line between the anecdote and the funny story. In the club – and I suppose it may be true of most of the great clubs – anecdotes are all; the invented funny stories virtually never told. I don’t think I have heard a half-dozen dirty stories told at the Savile in fifty years. Nor is swearing indulged in. There is nothing censorious about this; simply that it is looked on as immature and childish.
I sometimes wonder in fact where all the cursing exists, except on the stage and in novels. Are writers immature and childish or simply hoping to shock? Like a schoolboy of eight coming home triumphantly as I did with his first four-letter word? Maybe I have lived a sheltered life. No swearing was ever used in our home, not even by my brother when he returned from two years of war. It didn’t seem to occur to any of us. At school there were a number of foulmouthed characters, understandably enough, but that was where the immaturity came in. During the Second World War I mixed with a fair number of sailors, and I remember nothing very untoward. After the war I was pitchforked into the film industry, and neither among actors nor among technicians did it seem substantially to exist. I heard nothing in the Poldark series. Similarly in the play I wrote, which was produced twice with different casts. Of course F-ing goes on with boring regularity among groups of working men, in the army, and in what George Gissing called ‘the mean streets’. And of course there are exceptions among the educated, and the half-educated. One gravely afflicted with the complaint was Laurence Harvey. If there were an Olympic prize for obscenity, he would have taken a lot of beating.
Having said this much, I have to admit that since coming to live alone I have fallen into the habit of cursing vehemently – chiefly under my breath – at every minor hindrance or annoyance. In my youth I coined the phrase ‘Swearing is the first resort of the vulgar and the last resort of the weak’. I’m not sure where that leaves me now.
Charles Chaplin, Alastair Cooke, Graham Greene, Ralph Richardson I came to know as a result of my friendship with Max Reinhardt and his delightful and distinguished second wife, Joan. They invited me to be godfather to their youngest daughter, Veronica, and Charlie Chaplin was to be the other. When we met at the christening I told him that as a child, and ever since, I had loved his films, but it had never occurred to me in my wildest dreams that one day I should become his godbrother. He replied with an absent smile. Genuine laughter seemed by then to have left the great man.
I met him a few months later when he had just been to the film of Marnie, chiefly with the intention of looking at Tippi Hedren for a part in his next film, A King in New York. He was very much technically on the ball in respect of the way Hitchcock had made the film. And Tippi was engaged. There was another occasion when we had dinner at the Reinhardts’ and after dinner Max showed The Gold Rush on his private projector. Charlie was visibly entertained for the first ten minutes, and then slept through the rest of it.
The last time I saw him was at the Venice Film Festival when there was a retrospective showing of some of his more famous comedies, and Sir Charles Chaplin was invited to be present at the showing of City Lights projected onto a huge screen in St Mark’s Square. After it was over, the diminutive figure appeared on one of the balconies and acknowledged the massive applause of the crowd. I think it was the balcony on which Mussolini had once stood to harangue the people and to receive his acclaim. This time the people were acclaiming ‘ Il Duce’ of the cinema.
Of the other three, Ralph Richardson was the only one I came to know well. He was a member of the Savile, but it was in Cap Ferrat that we really got well acquainted. He had rented Max’s cabin cruiser, which I had had the year before, and he was having trouble in making his wishes known to Jeannot, the difficult, tetchy, unagreeable custodian of the boat. I, having suffered the year before, went across to see if I could help, but my French was scarcely better than Ralph’s, and if a Frenchman wishes to be misunderstood it’s hard to get your message across. However, the struggle enhanced our friendship, and we dined together as a quartet several times during his stay, and in subsequent years I used to go to see him at home, or after lunch at the Savile we would play snooker or go to the cinema together.
Though not quite an intellectual, Ralph had a brilliant, if sometimes eccentric, artistic judgement. He read deeply and widely and had high standards which somehow he managed to assume existed equally among his friends. When he came into a room he had a faculty for raising the status of the occasion without ever attempting to impose himself on it.
One time he met me in the Savile and said: ‘Hello, Poet,’ (his usual greeting to me), ‘care to come a trip on my bike? I have it outside.’ I said, ‘ Fine,’ and we went out to his huge red Norton motorbike. ‘ You’d better have my crash helmet,’ he said, so we wobbled up Binney Street and out into the Oxford Street traffic, he with his scanty grey hair straying in the wind, I partly eclipsed under a large crash helmet. Once we were free of the worst traffic we jetted up Bayswater Road and then into the Park, where we roared around madly, eventually coming back via Hyde Park Corner and Piccadilly and so home. Later, in the Savile I was surprised to see strong men blanch at my recklessness.
It was hazardous but it was great fun, as all my contacts with him were. This was about the time when he appeared in the television series Blandings Castle, in which he played the Earl of Emsworth. He complained to me bitterly that he had played in the West End for thirty years and could walk the streets unrecognized, but ‘one TV series and every little girl I pass knows who I am’. His complaint was of the disproportion of the fame, not of the fame itself. He was not at all averse from being recognized.
He had a passion for unusual pets. He allowed his parrot out of its cage nightly, and one day when he took me back he told me that José was ‘in disgrace. He bit Mu last night.’ Mu was Lady Richardson. On another occasion he bought a hamster in New York and in due time smuggled it into England. As he left the shop in New York the assistant said: ‘Enjoy your hamster.’
‘ I wonder if the dear girl thought I was having it for breakfast,’ he said.
When we went behind to see him after a performance of No Man’s Land, he demonstrated in his dressing room the fall he had to make each evening on the stage, showing how easy it apparently was, once you had learned the way of it, to fall full length without hurting yourself. He was then seventy-five. I asked him what he thought Harold Pinter meant in a particularly obscure piece of dialogue in the first act.
‘ Old chap,’ he said, ‘I’ve no idea, and I’ve never dared to ask him.’
Anecdotes about Ralph abound. Donald Sinden told me that one day Ralph was crossing the concourse of Victoria Station when he saw someone he recognized and went up to him.
‘ David,’ he said. ‘ David Partridge! We haven’t met since that play in Birmingham; what is it? – ten, twelve years ago. You have changed. You’re much slimmer. And you’ve shaved off your moustache!’
The man looked at Ralph. ‘Sorry. But I’m not David Partridge.’
Ralph stared at him as only Ralph could stare. Then he said: ‘D’you mean to say you’ve changed your name as well?’
Peggy Ashcroft said once that she was invited to dine with the Richardsons at their home. This was a delightful Nash house overlooking Regent’s Park, but like most such houses it was tall and thin and the Richardsons had installed a lift. Ralph came down to open the door to Peggy, and they ascended in the somewhat creaky lift together.
Ralph looked at his guest and said: ‘Peggy, have I ever slept with you?’
He eyed her significantly and said: ‘Aa-ah.’
At this moment the lift reached the third floor and the door was opened by Mu.
Peggy said she never quite worked out what that ‘Aa-ah’ had implied.
Most people would say that, knowing Ralph so well, Peggy’s uncertainty was a little disingenuous.
The story reminds me of one night at Cap Ferrat when the four of us had been dining together and we walked home from the restaurant in double file, Mu and I in the lead. Halfway home Ralph and Jean, bringing up the rear, disappeared for about three minutes and then took up the trail again. When we had separated and were indoors Jean said: ‘Wow! What a kiss!’
I was furious, not because of the kiss but because I had fancied doing something the same to Mu, but, not being aware of the goings-on behind, I had funked it.
When my daughter had made plans to go to America she met Ralph’s son, Charles, and they took a liking to each other. Whether Charles was particularly smitten we shall never know, but Ralph certainly was attracted by Rosamund’s piquant blonde prettiness. So when Charles took her out he was provided with a large chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce to escort her to and from the theatre. By the time Rosamund came home from America she was engaged to marry a Californian.
When Ralph was eighty he was taken ill while on tour and went into hospital and quietly died. Mu, writing to me afterwards, said: ‘ He just folded his wings and refused to fly.’
I cannot end this section without writing a few more words about Max Reinhardt. Part French, part Austrian, and educated in Istanbul, Paris and London, he was a true cosmopolitan. When we went to Florence to the Publishers’ Conference I knew about forty words of Italian; Max, in spite of his father having Italian nationality, knew no Italian at all. At the end of a week I still knew my forty words of Italian: he was speaking it – very badly and rousing companionate laughter, but being understood just the same. A very sophisticated man, easily bored, impatient of indifferent service, especially in restaurants and hotels, quick with his likes and dislikes, but in most other ways tolerant and easygoing, he was a man with a tremendous warmth of personality. Above all he had a supreme gift of friendship. It is one of the higher gifts in man, and I know no one who possessed it in such a degree.
Gilbert Harding, almost a forgotten man, I also came to know well. He used to hold court in the Savile, surrounded by a group of his friends, telling them a quite extraordinary selection of funny and revealing anecdotes about all manner of people he had known, from the lowly to the famous. His memory was brilliant, and his ability to tell a story to its best advantage was brilliant. He would talk for an hour. Andthen another hour. The first time I met him I came to sit somewhat tentatively on the outer orbit of his circle, one of the listening group. Presently his choleric eyes focused on me.
‘ Who are you?’ he demanded. ‘ You look an arrogant fellow.’
I had been accused of a lot of things in my time, but arrogance was not one of them.
I gave him my name and my profession, and he grunted noncommitally and turned to his friends with another story, this one about Dickie Mountbatten, I remember, whom he greatly disliked.
I was staying in the club, and presently went up to dinner and afterwards played snooker. About eleven I went into the lavatory and found Gilbert on his own. His friends had gone and so had the drink, and he was swaying like a large building awaiting demolition. But he remembered me.
‘You!’ he boomed. ‘You say you’re an author. What have you written?’
‘Well … one called Take My Life. That was written first as a screenplay but afterwards it was published as a novel.’
‘Never seen it. Never heard of it.’
‘And then there was Night Without Stars,’ I hastened on. ‘That was a fairly successful novel, and it was filmed.’
‘Never seen it, never heard of it,’ he said.
‘And there was Fortune is a Woman. That was a book club choice in America, and it was also filmed, by Columbia.’
‘Never seen it, never heard of it,’ he said, finally consigning me to literary oblivion.
At this stage Kean, the porter, appeared on the scene. ‘Got a taxi for you now, Mr Harding. Sorry for the delay.’
He helped Gilbert into the hall, and as the big man was so unsteady I took his other arm.
We got him to the taxi, and I was helping him in when he grasped my arm and pulled me in after him.
‘Come home with me. I want to talk to you.’
Glass in hand, I went with him.
I did not suppose he was specially interested in me, but he desperately wanted not to be left alone; and later friendly meetings confirmed this. So long as he was projecting this personality he had built up, and he had people to listen to him and to accept it, he could believe in it himself. Under all his bombast was a searing selfcontempt, both for what he was and for his way of earning a living. Such self-contempt was undeserved, but you couldn’t reason with him about it.
He was in fact a very clever man, and in some ways a very worthy one. Always rebellious, but often rebellious on behalf of people he felt were not getting treated properly, his Vesuvius-like exterior deceived others into supposing he was always looking for trouble. When the drink was in him this was largely true; it was the characteristic that made him famous. But there were those at the Savile who deliberately tried to get a rise out of him and provoke the row they thought it clever to incite. I remember Tony Halsbury (the third Earl) coming into the club one day and, seeing Gilbert sitting by himself, he went up and said:
‘ Gilbert, you’re a Catholic.’ (Knowing him very well to be a fairly recent and zealous convert.) ‘Tell me, did the Virgin Mary in your opinion use contraceptives? Otherwise, why did Jesus not have a clutch of little brothers and sisters?’
There was an inevitable blow-out, but it was not of Gilbert’s seeking.
After that first meeting, he was always particularly courteous to me – and I use the word intentionally, for that was what he was. He admired creative people and despised critics, and this may have been the reason – apart from the fact that he recognized I liked him and took no notice of his brusqueries. Only once or twice, as he was much sharper than most people in the club, I saw him look at me resentfully when I refused another drink. He was conscious that I wasn’t going along with him. But he never said anything.
I always found it rather fun to be with him; it was like being with an explosive uncle.
I wish I could say the same about Malcolm Arnold, a true creator in the way Gilbert never was. As a young man Malcolm was delightful, brimfull of talent, laughter, clownish jokes, a musician to his fingertips, unique. But that alas in his later years has all changed. I try to avoid him.
Thinking of Malcolm Arnold, I recall a splendid summer evening at the Savile organized by Gavin Henderson, in which a brass ensemble played wonderful music on the raised terrace behind the club. Malcolm played the trumpet, Jimmy Edwards the tuba.
It was a quiet warm London evening, the sun just setting, and as the music began one window after another slid or screeched open as people in the back rooms of the surrounding houses put their heads out to listen. It was like a film by René Clair.
Apart from schizoids, my allergy for people of unpredictable moods is deep-rooted. My Uncle Tom, as has already been said, was one such. There have been others. My own temper, which can be volatile, rises sharply when I encounter someone who, either by accident or design, is imposing his gloom upon a company or a household. Life to me is too short, and people who spoil it unnecessarily for others are despicable. Even people who, while blameless during the rest of the day, are morose at breakfast irritate me. One does not need to be the life and soul of the party. It’s just another day to be lived, and if one is not ill or deeply worried by some outside circumstance, to be savoured from the start.
There are people too whom I describe as psychological bedwetters, who are for ever making little puddle
s of trouble that they think they can’t help.
Life is too short to waste
In critic peep,
Quarrel or reprimand, or cynic bark,
Twill soon be dark.
One of the more prominent members of the Savile when I first joined was Richard Graves. A tall, good-looking, austere man with a long and distinguished career behind him – he had been the last British mayor of Jerusalem – he would sit in his favourite corner of the Sandpit, as the ‘core’ room of the club is called, and regard new members who passed by – and old ones as well – with a cool and dispassionate eye, sometimes of approval, frequently not. He was known to the wits as ‘Graves Supérieure’.
For some reason he came to approve of me fairly quickly, and when he heard we were going to Majorca to help Jean recover from a bout of pneumonia he said: ‘You must meet my brother, Robert. I’ll write to him and tell him about you.’
It was March 1st when we flew over, and all the French countryside was spattered with snow. In Palma the policemen wore greatcoats, white helmets and gloves; our excellent small hotel overlooking the sea, in what now I suppose is called Palma Nova, was run by a Belgian couple who fed us well but failed to cope with the heating of a house built primarily to keep out the sun. We shivered among the white stone pillars and walls, and presently went to see the Poet, who was staying in a four-storey house in the town. He put his head out from a third-floor window, looking exactly like the Emperor Vespasian, and trumpeted to us to come up.
We had a merry meeting, in the middle of which Beryl, his wife, abruptly took Jean off to a ballet class that her daughter was attending – though remarking in passing that there was little chance of her daughter succeeding, as under Franco the tutu was forbidden in Spain. (Shades of yesterday!) I was left to bear the brunt of Robert’s erudite conversation, which dealt chiefly with two books he had just written called Greek Myths and Homer’s Daughter. Knowing little about Greek mythology or history, except for some detailed amateur delving into the Trojan Wars, I appropriately floundered. However, this did not seem to matter, and we parted good friends. We met then at irregular intervals through the years when he was at the Savile – not as a member but as the guest of Selwyn Jepson – but much later I heard he had come to England for a prostate operation, so I went to Hampstead to call on him at the house where he was recuperating.
Memoirs of a Private Man Page 27