Curtain Up (74 page)

The ‘Mr Sekers' referred to would have been ‘Miki' (later Sir) Nicholas Sekers, a Jewish-Hungarian immigrant silk tycoon and one of the leading arts philanthropists of the day. A board member of Glyndebourne and the Royal Opera House, in 1959 he had opened the Rosehill Theatre on his Cumbrian estate, a few miles from Britain's first nuclear power station at Windscale. Peggy Ashcroft performed the opening ceremony, Emlyn Williams and John Gielgud were booked to give entertainments in the opening season, and
The Stage
had heralded the new theatre as ‘The Glyndebourne of the North' and ‘one of the most luxurious theatres of its size and type in Europe'.
¹¹³

We hear nothing more either of the meeting with Lockwood or of Miki Sekers' interest in a musical of
Miss Perry
, but the proximity of these two letters from Cork offer the intriguing prospect of Agatha Christie involving herself in the development
of a musical for Margaret Lockwood; although it has to be said that a whimsical comedy about a village pageant would hardly seem to be the stuff of musical theatre.

It is clear, though, that by the beginning of 1962, with the West End opening of
Rule of Three
delayed, Christie was taking steps to develop her own theatrical agenda, independently of Saunders. The following year there was to be some discussion about a third-party musical adaptation of Christie's 1955 Poirot novel,
Hickory Dickory Dock
. The rights for the book had been assigned to a trust set up to pay for the schooling of Max's nephews, Peter and John Mallowan, and Cork expressed some hope that the project might swell the trust's coffers.
¹¹⁴
But, again (and, perhaps, thankfully), nothing came of it.

Sekers may not have pursued his Agatha Christie project, but his firm was to provide the silk that formed part of the décor when Peter Saunders refurbished the Vaudeville Theatre, which he bought in 1969. Two years later, Saunders' latest acquisition would become the home of Ray Cooney and John Chapman's successful comedy,
Move Over Mrs Markham
, which Saunders co-produced with Cooney. Master farceur Cooney, who had performed with Brian Rix at the Whitehall, played Detective Sergeant Trotter in
The Mousetrap
in 1964, joining the company just as the production celebrated its 5,000th performance. Christie's own aspirations to pen a new stage comedy remained undiminished, and she saw and admired
Move Over Mrs Markham
on its pre-West End tour, although Max evidently did not share her enthusiasm for farce.

Oddly for someone who achieved Christie's huge commercial success, much of her life was dogged by financial uncertainty. Her father's premature death and her separation and divorce from Archie had made matters difficult in the early years and, like many successful writers of the day, she was involved in frequent disputes with the tax authorities in both the UK and the USA. Much of the correspondence between Edmund Cork, Harold Ober and Ober's lawyer Howard Reinheimer deals with
these issues in considerable detail, and many of the problems they encountered regarding the taxation of income generated through the exploitation of intellectual property were unique to the period in which Christie was writing. This was particularly bad luck for Christie, but it also meant that, in terms of finding solutions to the numerous issues created by the punitive taxation policies of the era, her advisors frequently found themselves to a certain extent improvising. In retrospect, some of their advice and decisions may appear to have been slightly ill-judged: Cork, in particular, was clearly no expert in these matters, although he tried his very best to be so.

In later years, Christie was particularly fortunate to benefit from the direct involvement of her legally trained son-in-law, Anthony Hicks, in the conduct of her business affairs. Rosalind and he moved into a cottage on the Greenway estate in 1968, and the tactful and perceptive guidance that he provided to Cork and others on numerous occasions was invaluable. Despite the constant assistance of her professional advisors and her family, Agatha's seemingly endless battles with the tax authorities were distressing and time-consuming for her, and although she generally dealt with them with good humour they were the cause of considerable anxiety throughout her life.

The problems had started in the late 1930s, when, following a test case in the USA, the authorities there started to tax Christie's American earnings although she was non-resident and was already paying tax on them in the UK. A claim for back payments was made, and her American earnings (her most important source of income at the time) were frozen in the USA pending the outcome of lengthy legal wranglings.
¹¹⁵
Matters were eventually resolved following the 1945 double taxation treaty between Britain and the USA, which at least clarified matters for the future; a substantial settlement, however, still had to be negotiated regarding back payments, and arguments about this dragged on until 1954, further complicating the already labyrinthine business dealings with the Shuberts. Meanwhile, the post-war taxation regime in the UK had become notoriously punitive, with particularly high
earners also facing substantial ‘surtax' liabilities, as the public purse took on responsibility for funding the new Welfare State alongside a robust defence budget.
¹¹⁶

The easiest way to avoid this was to become a tax exile but, unlike Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan, that was an option which Christie always refused to take. Instead, arrangements were made for her to become the salaried employee of a company (a solution also adopted by Enid Blyton). Agatha Christie Ltd was set up in 1955, and would own the copyrights on all work of hers produced thereafter; licences for plays written after this date were thus with the company rather than with Christie herself. The issue then became one of share ownerships and corporation tax on the profits from the exploitation of Christie's work, rather than of tax on her personal income.

At his death, Bernard Shaw's estate had been valued by the Inland Revenue based on the income generated by his most successful work multiplied by the number of his works, although in doing so they failed of course to include income from
My Fair Lady
, which was to premiere six years after his death. On a similar basis Cork estimated that Christie's death duties bill, based on
Witness for the Prosecution
, could amount to £20 million.
¹¹⁷
When the Christie Copyrights Trust was established in 1957, taking ownership of the rights in most of her work that pre-dated the establishment of the company, and a number of smaller trusts were also created to hold individual copyrights to the benefit of certain individuals and organisations, the issue of punitive death duties was avoided, and Christie was given the pleasure of seeing charities, friends and family members, including Max's two nephews, benefit from her work.
¹¹⁸

Christie herself continued to receive problematic tax demands relating to the small number of copyrights that she personally retained, and was distressed to find that she was still being heavily taxed on her salary from Agatha Christie Ltd. But, throughout, she was always at pains to ensure that the numerous and complicated tax avoidance schemes dili
gently concocted by her advisors were both legal and ethical, and expressed her ‘complete trust' in her team.
¹¹⁹
There were later to be issues for some of Agatha's beneficiaries regarding the reversion of assigned copyrights but, under the circumstances, the work put in by Cork, Ober, Reinheimer and Hicks made the best of a wearisome and very complicated scenario. In March 1957 Agatha wrote to Cork, ‘How are all my tax affairs, companies and trusts? Don't let them get you down! And don't tell me about them unless it's absolutely necessary!'
¹²⁰
and in another letter, she noted that ‘in tax, the dice are always loaded against one.'
¹²¹
Cork in turn lamented that the more successful an agent was in their client's lifetime, the worse were the problems created by their client's death. At Christie's death, the estate of the best-selling novelist, and best-selling female playwright, of all time was valued at £106,000.
¹²²
Cork and his colleagues had certainly done their job.

To a certain extent, we perhaps owe the sudden blossoming of Agatha Christie, playwright, in the 1950s to the tax regime. At she notes in her autobiography, ‘Seeing the point to which taxation has now risen, I was pleased to think it was no longer really worth-while for me to work so hard: one book a year would be ample. If I wrote two books a year, I should hardly earn more than by writing one, and only give myself a great deal of extra work. Certainly, there was no longer the old incentive. If there was something out of the ordinary that I really
wanted
to do, that would be different.'
¹²³
What she really wanted to do, of course, was write plays, and given that she had nothing to lose by switching her focus as a writer to the stage, that is exactly what she did. ‘Why not write a play instead of a book? Much more fun. One book a year would take care of finances, so I could now enjoy myself in an entirely different medium.'

Not surprisingly, Christie saw dramatic potential in her tax problems, and she was particularly tickled by the idea that, in order to avoid death duties on the assets she had gifted to various trusts, it was necessary for her to live for another five
years. ‘The doll will do her best to live another five years,' she would write to Cork,
¹²⁴
and in her autobiography she wrote, ‘As far as I could make out from what lawyers and tax people told me about death duties – very little of which I ever understood – my demise was going to be an unparalleled disaster for all my relations, and their only hope was to keep me alive as long as possible!'
¹²⁵
Christie now set about combining the idea of a play about death duties with her other pet project of a comedy for Margaret and Julia Lockwood.

In Notebook 15, under the heading ‘Oct 1958', Christie wrote:

Projects

A play – light-hearted (a Spider's Web type) Where? – girl's school?

Or Cheating Death Duties? Pretending a death? Or smuggling away a natural death – devoted fluffy secretary?

Then, in Notebook 39 under the heading ‘M and J play', there are two outline plots for a ‘death duties' play, one of which developed into a full-length script called
This Mortal Coil
, the second Christie play to take its title from a line in
Hamlet
. We hear nothing more of the ‘girls' school' idea, but it is clear from the notebooks that
Miss Perry
, the ‘Spy' play and
This Mortal Coil
were being developed in parallel as alternative comedy vehicles for the Lockwoods. Alongside these, Christie was also making notes for an altogether different play, unaccountably given the working title ‘Mousetrap II', which centres on a party in Soho and a poisoning scenario that sounds not dissimilar to that in her 1937 short story and radio play
The Yellow Iris
.

‘Mousetrap II' never got as far as a draft script, but the Agatha Christie archive contains a number of drafts for the ‘death duties' play
This Mortal Coil
, along with extensive typed and handwritten notes. Christie's notoriously illegible writing became clearer as she grew older, and her struggle to get this play written and staged, despite resistance from her family, her agent and her regular producer, took up much
time and fills several files. The earliest copy, with each act bound separately, appears to have been typed by Christie herself at around the same time that she typed the first draft of
Miss Perry
, and includes numerous handwritten corrections and amendments. The dramatis personae of eleven includes Sally (next to which name Christie has written ‘ML') and Gina (next to which she has written ‘JL'). Three alternative titles are suggested on the front page: ‘FIDDLE DE DEE', ‘SIXPENCE OFF' and ‘FIDDLERS ALL'. The issues surrounding death duties are explained by the lawyer Truscott:

       
TRUSCOTT: Your father is a very rich man. Death duties on his estate will, of course, be high, but his various trusts and dispositions will do much to mitigate that. He was wise enough to make them some time ago. He has taken fullest advantage of everything the law allows . . . Your deed of gift was the last of the various arrangements, and I believe I am correct in saying that the necessary five year period of survival expires tomorrow. It was quite an obsession with him. He regarded it as a kind of game. I shouldn't be surprised if he's saying to the doctor now: ‘Only one day to go.' It would be like him.
¹²⁶

Although the details of the storyline were to undergo many revisions, the central premise of a man whose inheritance depends on his father living to a certain date remained the central plot point; the titular ‘fiddlers', whose business schemes depend on the inheritance coming through, find their plans compromised when the father (inevitably) dies before the date in question. A sometimes farcical comedy about business and finance, with a strong undercurrent of criminal activity, it rejoices in characters with names like Bogusian (conveniently shortened to ‘Bogus' in one of the typescripts) and Panhacker (three letters away from ‘Panhandler'). It's not a bad idea for a comedy, and corporate tax avoidance scandals are never far from the headlines, but Christie was in her late sixties when she started working on the idea and in her eighties when it
was finally performed, so if the comic dialogue lacks her usual sparkle it is perhaps not surprising.

This Mortal Coil
may well have been on the agenda at Agatha's 1962 lunch with Lockwood, but seems, like
Miss Perry
, to have disappeared from the radar shortly thereafter. It was a letter from Hubert Gregg eight years later, congratulating Christie on her eightieth birthday, that was to get the ball rolling again. On 8 September 1970, a week before her birthday and in the midst of the media circus surrounding it, she replied to him from Greenway: