Must You Go?: My Life With Harold Pinter

by Antonia Fraser

  On 8 January 1980 we had known each other for five years and Harold was coming up for the fifth anniversary of his departure from the former marital home. He would thus shortly be entitled to seek a divorce unilaterally on these grounds.

  7 February

  Harold very exercised over Chile: the Foreign Office now apparently denying that Dr Sheila Cassidy was tortured. I feel exercised over the whole world – not that there’s much point in that.

  23 February

  After the most horrific delays, The French Lieutenant’s Woman the movie is at last on as of Thursday night. Hear Harold’s voice about midnight. ‘Oh, my God’ very loud. Thought it was off. But it’s on. Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons. Delighted to think that the wonderful Meryl will be in my life if only a tiny bit: I fell in love with her in the TV series Holocaust, affection continued when I met her in person at Karel Reisz’s: she was so extraordinarily jolly and sensible, despite the porcelain beauty. As for Jeremy Irons, Betsy Reisz and I had constantly pointed out to Karel that he was deeply attractive to women: take it from us.

  Flora aged twenty-one and Robert Powell-Jones, a Chancery barrister, got engaged on 29 February and married almost immediately afterwards – for the good old-fashioned reason of being deeply in love; this, despite the fact that Flora was still at Oxford. Although the marriage did not last, and Robert died sadly young, I shall always treasure the memory of that happy time including the years when they came on the FamHol with us, Robert, the polymath, learning local languages with engaging facility and stunning us with the erudition he took for granted.

  12 March

  In Barbados. At night we discuss biography (prompted by Charles Osborne’s life of Auden) and the question of Harold’s biography, if any. ‘What a morbid subject,’ he says. I don’t find it so. On the one hand, I never believe anyone I know will die; on the other hand, to me biography (of the dead) is a professional subject, not an emotive one, something to do well if done at all. After much talk it is established that Harold would want a reference to Joan and the off-and-on Seven Years, but his alluring American friend who overlapped should be mentioned under the name of Cleopatra. (I have since met ‘Cleopatra’ and found her fascinating.) Harold: ‘I’ve had girlfriends since I was thirteen. What about all the others? What about Pauline Flanagan, the Catholic girl I nearly married in Ireland when I was twenty-one?’ We agree that if Harold chokes on his local fish tonight, Ronnie Harwood would be the person, because he really understands both the theatre and biography.

  Every time I swim out from the villa where the water is deep and turquoise, I think of Eliot’s lines: ‘I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.’ Harold in horror: ‘You don’t mean you saw a pair of claws?’ He doesn’t think it much better to want to be a pair of claws, despite his love of Eliot.

  6 April

  First meeting of the Pinters and the Longfords; they come over from Hove to Bernhurst. Jack was in splendid form: ‘All politicians are villains, Lord Longford,’ he said. ‘Take it from me.’ And he made his jokes; Harold looked black and everyone else loved them. Frances in her usual sweet way was absolutely out to enjoy herself.

  Went to a lecture given by the great Barbara Tuchman, my role model, at the Guildhall. At dinner thereafter, a handsome blond American businessman tries to pick me up then desists, at the sight of my place card. (‘I thought you were the sort of girl I could ask to lunch at Bray and now I see you’re Lady Antonia Fraser.’) Surely a non sequitur?

  20 May

  Seckford Hall, Suffolk. We are here having one of our breakaways, what Damian calls a PinHol (which is extremely luxurious and à deux) as opposed to a FamHol. Damian says that one day when he receives one of my traditional postcards of some idyllic spot with the message ‘Wish you were here!’ he will just leave school and turn up to gratify my wish. There was something strange and dream-like about our journeyings in East Anglia, in between reading Flaubert’s letters, recommended by everyone I know.

  26 May

  Now it’s work – for Harold. We’re in Dorset and visiting the sets of The French Lieutenant’s Woman. The Reiszes are staying in the Dairy House where John Fowles actually wrote the book plus Jeremy Irons plus Master Sam Irons aged eighteen months. The next day is the first day of shooting and later we have dinner with John Fowles. He and I discuss fans’ letters which ask for advice. His is, briefly: ‘Those who need to ask how to be a writer will never make it.’ Mine, to married women wanting to be ‘a writer like you’: ‘You need to be a very, very selfish person.’ No doubt households, hitherto peaceful, are being widely disrupted where the wife has taken my advice.

  30 May

  The film of Betrayal is going ahead with Mike Nichols as director. The divorce also really seems to be going ahead; although Vivien once again changes her mind at the last moment and says she must be the one to divorce Harold; it must not after all be of his petition as has been arranged – ‘Not fair.’ ‘That’s reasonable,’ I say to Harold, thinking his dark mutterings on the subject for once unjustified. In a hot week in London – most meals in our garden – I fall platonically in love with Mike Nichols and so, I think, does Harold. We feel in his company that we have become not only more intelligent and even witty (no one is funnier than Mike) but somehow more glamorous.

  The marvellous friendship lasted although Mike did not in the end direct Betrayal. Other projects fell through but Harold did at least act in a cameo role in Wit, directed by Mike Nichols, as the father of the star, his civil rights campaigning friend Emma Thompson. We once stayed with Mike and Diane Sawyer at their house on the Hudson River, where a freshly baked loaf of bread was delivered to our door every morning: although neither Harold nor I ate bread, we agreed it was the acme of luxury.

  9 June

  Harold criticizes Jonathan Pryce’s delivery of ‘To Be or Not To Be’ at the Royal Court. He spoke the immortal lines directly and burningly to Ophelia, although she is supposed to be off stage, according to Shakespeare’s text, in order for Hamlet to greet her entry at the end of the speech: ‘Soft you now! The fair Ophelia …’ Harold: ‘When Ophelia says to Hamlet at the end: “Good my Lord, how does your honour?”, this Hamlet should have exclaimed: “But I’ve just been telling you in one of the most famous speeches in history.” ’ In short, he admires Jonathan enormously as an actor but not this production: anti-textual interpretations always get his goat. (Later Jonathan did a brilliant Mick in The Caretaker at the National Theatre in which there were absolutely no anti-textual interpretations.)

  11 June

  Dame Peggy Ashcroft came to lunch, having indicated that she would like to do so. So I am FORGIVEN! (She had feared that my arrival as the first person in Harold’s life would disrupt the amitié amoureuse both treasured: which of course it didn’t.) She discusses the question of her biographer. Me: ‘Why not have a treat and choose someone really young?’ Peggy, little laugh: ‘But one might prefer, you know, someone who had seen one in one’s prime.’ That’s the trouble. Of all the people I know Peggy is the only one who treats old age with absolute astonishment and outrage. It’s because she really is so young inside that she cannot be reconciled to it.

  12 June

  Dinner with Teresa Gatacre and John Wells who praise us as an example of domestic bliss because we don’t quarrel. Well, not in public! Me: ‘The thing is, we all have to learn how to quarrel, without quarrelling about it.’

  14 June

  Official announcement that Hugh is to be knighted: the Wild Knight we call him. General delight throughout family and friends. ‘I hope they don’t think they can muzzle me,’ he harrumphs, referring to his eternally and admirably independent political views. Everyone assures him this is impossible.

  3 July

  Harold played in the fathers’ match at Colet Court (where Orlando was just concluding his time). He was evidently chuffed to do so.

  6 July

  With Isaiah Berlin at Jacob Rothschild’s Londo
n palace in Maida Vale, after a Brahms concert in the Festival Hall. Me: ‘Did Ann Fleming sleep with Hugh Gaitskell?’ Isaiah: ‘That is a factual question to which there must be an answer: Yes or No.’ But we never, in the course of a long and very enjoyable conversation, actually get to it.

  9 July

  Ann Fleming’s party for Angus Wilson’s knighthood. A.W. is delighted despite squalid behaviour of newspapers, one daring to call his magnificent, loyal partner Tony Garrett, ‘Lady Wilson’. Angus: ‘At last I understand what you and Harold went through.’ Long talk with Stuart Hampshire about his wife’s death: ‘I concentrated totally on one individual.’ At the end he presses my hand and tells me: ‘You mention Harold’s name in every sentence. That moves me and cheers me.’

  1 August

  Harold’s divorce actually went through. No fuss, not withdrawn at the last minute, etc. etc. (Vivien believed to be in a caravan in Scotland with her carpenter admirer – good move as it removed her from the clutches of the press). Harold, lying in bed with bronchitis and croaking: ‘I’m divorced.’ He takes me to the Belvedere Restaurant where he originally proposed. And proposed again. Silence. I thought it over. Then I said yes. Harold: ‘My God, I thought you were going to say No.’

  14 August

  FamHol in the Algarve. Bridge continues to be a feature as we are by now a four and we change partners every rubber. Damian aged fifteen is undoubtedly the best player (plays for Ampleforth), but he feels the necessity for a critical analysis of his partner’s play in a way that does not go down well with Harold – or me. It’s especially annoying for Damian that a) we are not very responsive to the opportunities he gives us for self-improvement, and b) he’s getting lousy cards. So Orlando on points, is consistently the overall winner. Later we go to a Fado-on-the-shore, an exceptionally noisy dance party, since our guidebook says of Fado, ‘if you can’t beat it join it’, and we’ve already endured one sleepless night. The high point is a sexy Dutchwoman lugging an apparently reluctant Harold on to the floor. She soon regrets her predatory approach when Harold flings himself about, giving it all he’s got in true Hackney style (he says), the Baryshnikov of East London now living again in Praia de Luz.

  21 September

  Harold wrote a radio play Family Voices while we were in Praia, and Dame Peg received it with rapture. She will play in it, Peter Hall will direct, also as a Platform at the National. I found a lot of my wistful middle-of-the-night thoughts about Benjie (who spent nine months away as a jackeroo in Australia) mysteriously echoed; yet I had never discussed the subject with Harold.

  We had a merry time planning our wedding party at Campden Hill Square: it was to take place on the eve of Harold’s fiftieth birthday on 10 October.

  26 September

  Went to Jean Muir’s salon in Bruton Street and had a fitting for my ‘wedding dress’ – actually a swirling white crepe number, high neck, scattered crystal new moons and stars, which I will wear at the party. I shall feel like Titania.

  It was just as well we planned both the wedding and Harold’s birthday together because in the event, there was a final flick of the serpent’s tail from Vivien, who refused to sign the decree absolute at the last minute. Even her lawyer was appalled, Harold told me. The cat-and-mouse game was very wearing on all our nerves. But we were able to have a good party all the same, at which most people thought we had actually got married. It was especially pleasing that both sets of parents came: Jack and Frances sat with the latter’s brother, Uncle Lou, who assiduously wrote down the names of the guests ‘in case I forget’.

  Although we did not manage to get married, we went on a not-the-honeymoon to Venice and Palermo where there was a conference about Haroldo Pinter. On the eve of the conference there was an awkward moment when Harold announced he would not attend the discussion about his works due the next morning: ‘I can’t just sit there, listening to “And you, Harold Pinter …” ’ Seeing crestfallen faces, I volunteered cheerfully to attend: after all I hadn’t written all the plays … All went well, except for an annoying English don based in Palermo who insisted on translating for me what I could perfectly well understand, such was the perfection of the academic diction, the rotund flourishes. I asked him to stop translating. That is to say, all went well until the professor reached his peroration. He referred to Pinter’s modesty at not being present, and then something I couldn’t quite catch. But I was the foremost to clap at the end, clapping ever longer and stronger despite TV camera zooming about (they did seem to be getting very close as I clapped). ‘I don’t think you quite realize,’ hissed my companion, ‘that you are clapping yourself. The professor’s last words were to say that although we don’t have Pinter, we have sua moglie – his wife.’ Hence the cameras. Of course the irony was that I wasn’t actually his moglie at this point, but we had drawn a discreet veil over that, due to the general confusion in the newspapers about what did or did not happen on 19 October.

  While we were away Harold talked interestingly about Vivien in a way that he had never done before. The resentment that developed in her at his success as early as 1963 onwards. How she scarcely spoke to him for two months because he accepted to act in Huis Clos (acting was her thing and in any case that particular director had treated her badly). And then when he himself came to direct! Horrors! Much trouble when he wrote Landscape in 1967 and asked Peggy Ashcroft to star instead of her – she thought it was her right. Once again she withdrew into a prolonged enigmatic silence ‘which played better on the stage than at home’. Harold spoke of her now – after five years, five very turbulent years – without guilt but with pity. Then he added honestly: ‘But she was a great actress, also a wonderful comic talent which people forgot when she was creating the mysterious, sexy Pinter Woman so unforgettably, the way no one could do better.’

  27 November – The Diary of Lady Antonia Pinter

  That is how I began the entry for our wedding day. Even the surname had a surprise element: I had not really intended to change my name. After twenty-four years Fraser remained of course my professional name despite being that of my first husband; at the time I took comfort from the fact that the great Agatha Christie found herself in exactly the same situation after Colonel Christie vanished and she married Max Mallowan. Later, owing to my great affection for Scotland and Scottish history – to say nothing of the name itself – I tacitly allowed it to be assumed, anyway in the US, that it was in some mysterious way an extra maiden name. On my passport, to avoid confusion over professional journeys and tickets in an age of security, I finally made it one of my forenames. But my witness Emma Tennant gave me a fountain pen with the name Antonia Pinter engraved on it. I took rather a fancy to it, and Harold even more so; quite touchingly, when I realized that both his wife and son had abandoned the name Pinter. So we became – at long last – the Pinters.

  The use of ‘Lady’ in the Diary entry refers to an amusing moment outside the Registry Office. The world’s press was in excited attendance, hoping for a dramatic last-minute cancellation as had happened in October. As we left, one optimistic journalist called out: ‘How does it feel to be plain Mrs Pinter?’ ‘She’s not,’ snapped Harold. The next day the Daily Mirror of all people explained the rules of the British peerage to its readers: how ‘Lady’ came from my father, an earl, not my previous husband, and being purely a ‘courtesy’ not a real title, I could carry it with me however many times I married. ‘Besides,’ added the Mirror sweetly, ‘Lady Antonia is not plain.’

  We had already had our honeymoon, which turned out to be not-the-honeymoon. Now we went down to the Bear at Woodstock; the snow had begun to fall all over England (to adapt the passage about Ireland at the end of Joyce’s story The Dead which Harold loved and was fond of quoting). In the morning, in piercing cold and bright sun, we strode out through Blenheim Park. Peasants, as they seemed to us to be, were gathering wood in the snow round the dark palace in a scene out of Brueghel, or come to think of it, Dr Zhivago. That night, I see that we talked about th
is Diary. I showed the long entry about our wedding to Harold; he applauded it.

  28 November

  My Diary: it’s not about great writing. It’s my friend, my record, and sometimes my consolation as in the bad years of 1975/6; while in the last few weeks it has recorded my celebration. Harold: ‘Well, it’s a great record of – us.’

  29 November

  Went to lunch with Isaiah and Aline Berlin in Headington. Aline greeted us with champagne: ‘We’re very much in favour of marriage. We too changed our lives in mid life.’ They had been forty-one and forty-seven, she told us; we were roughly the same, forty-two and forty-four when we met.

  2 December

  Dinner with Claire Bloom and Philip Roth. They presented us with a handsome jar of pot-pourri although Philip disapproves of marriage as he frequently lets the world know. Philip: ‘I was married once in 1959. Let me tell you about it. In fact I’ve written about it.’ Typical Roth humour: always very funny (he’s marvellous company) but never very far from the works of Roth.

  At the end of Long Day’s Journey into Night Mary says: ‘I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time’, a line that has always wrenched me. That was not true of us: we were extremely happy to have achieved at last what we had wanted for so long. And got happier. This is borne out by the stream of cards accompanying flowers, late-night messages, little Valentine boxes, the occasional letter (we were seldom apart) and above all the poems which I treasured. After Harold’s death, I found in his desk almost every note or message I had written him over twenty-eight years of married life. My favourite of all the poems he wrote me, ‘It Is Here’, written a few years later, sums it up: