For the Time Being (16 page)

Her father remarried two years later, which was very bad luck for his bride. Dorothy loathed her deeply. She was only ever known as ‘Mrs Rothschild' and died two years later of a cerebral
haemorrhage; this was hardly surprising since Dorothy spent hours staring at her in sullen silence.

From this supposedly ‘guilty' background the sharp, poisonous wit of Mrs Parker developed. There is no doubt at all that she
was
a witty woman, if not particularly in her writing. But it was the sharp, cruel wit of the New York Jewish cut-and-thrust sort which scarred and wounded deeply and at which observers laughed and rubbed their hands, as long as they were not the targets.

In 1925 she was one of a group of young writers (she had started writing captions for
Vogue)
who gathered at a round table in the Algonquin Hotel every day to say amusing things to, and about, each other. With them she started the
New Yorker
magazine. She became its drama critic in 1927, writing stinging and slighting reviews and advising her readers to bring either a book or their knitting.

She also wrote woeful poems about sadness, loneliness, hopelessness and suicide, all of which added to her power but did little to increase her belief in herself. She said of her verse at one time that she was ‘always chasing Rimbauds'.

Much of her wit, as I say, was verbal: much of it she never uttered at all, and some was quite wrongly accredited to others. She
did
say ‘Where does she find them?' when someone said that a certain hostess was always kind to her inferiors, but I still can't discover from Marion Meade's probing inquiry
why
the woman was so unpleasing.

She remarried an actor-cum-writer, Alan Campbell, eleven years her junior, with suppressed homosexual tendencies. In Hollywood they became a writing team and turned out a number of scripts, mostly unremarkable, and consumed quantities of alcohol.

In 1947 they divorced. Mrs Parker had become heavily involved in radical politics. She had already been to Spain during the Civil War and had behaved there rather well, unlike her bosom friend, Lillian Hellman, who, so it is said, spent all her time in a Madrid hotel bar, dry-mouthed with terror.

And then, predictably, Mrs P became involved with the Communist Party in Hollywood and New York and got herself into trouble during the hideous decade of McCarthyism.

By now drink, pills and suicide were the norm. Having fun for Mrs P meant merely being drunk: having
lots
of fun meant being stinking to the point of incapacity and grossness. She missed deadlines, lived in hotels with a series of wretched dogs, smoked incessantly and tragically outlived her fame.

She died alone in a hotel room in New York in 1967, having very unwisely made Lillian Hellman her literary executor: unwise because Lillian, who actually disliked Dorothy very much, refused ever to release anything to writers working on the subject of Mrs Parker.

Lillian Hellman took charge and had her ‘friend' cremated, neglecting to inform her family, who only read about it in the newspapers. Dorothy's ashes ended up, neatly boxed, in the offices of a legal firm on Wall Street. Pending instructions from Miss Hellman, they were placed in a filing cabinet.

After more than twenty years they are still there. The twopenny sparkler at the firework show had burned out.

Daily Telegraph,
30 April 1988

The Salad Days
by Douglas Fairbanks Jnr (Collins)
A Life
by Elia Kazan (Deutsch)
The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography
by Ingmar Bergman.
Translated by Joan Tate (Hamish Hamilton)

‘Selectivity! Selectivity. Hone to the bone. That's the secret of good autobiography.' The advice of my first publisher and editor, Norah Smallwood, might have been useful to a couple of the fellows under cramped review here. Ingmar Bergman, of course, knew it, but the other two gambol away like spring lambs in a meadow. Douglas Fairbanks Jnr, or Fayrebanks as he likes us to know him, is slightly more reserved than the Anatolian billy-goat Elia Kazan, who knows no bounds of reticence or selectivity or even, it appears,
decency.

Fairbanks is a glossy, smooth, Man-Tanned, red-carnationed, ever-decent chap, who never uses a sour adjective in his 400 pages. Everyone is delicious, lovely, adorable, divine, glorious and alluring or ravishing. He slides in and out of his ladies' beds as smoothly and as coolly as an onyx lizard.

Married at nineteen to Joan Crawford, always only ‘the second man', never quite the Star, he clambers on and up beyond the dismay and the shadow of an impossible father, and two pretty tiresome stepmothers, to make his way in the world. Does it well, too. Unkindly known as ‘the Hillary of Social Climbers', he is still at it by the time this book ends in 1941 with the promise of another breathless saga.

From the many assorted ladies of Hollywood, a sort of Dairy Milk Selection, he eventually reaches his peak of splendour by nibbling at the fringes of British royalty, even managing to beard Churchill at the Savoy Grill with a letter from or to Roosevelt, I fear I have forgotten exactly which.

Golly! Years ago on wet Sundays in Scotland my grandmother, wearying of her patience cards, would send me off to the kitchens to ‘See what Cook and Mollie have today. Perhaps a
News of the World
or an
Express.
All trivial tosh, but it whiles away an afternoon.' Cook and Mollie would have enjoyed
The Salad Days.
If they could have afforded it.

They'd have detested
A Life,
Kazan's extravagant epic, 800 pages of manic ego. Somewhere in this welter of self-congratulation, sexual bragging and cruel anecdotes about practically everyone he knew – among them Lee Strasberg and his odious wife Paula, Clifford Odets, James Dean, even Brando – and almost every woman he bedded, he does have the grace to suggest that'… from time to time you've thought my book unfair, ugly and hateful. Here and there it is vulgar, too, but that is a word from which I do not shrink.' Nor does he.

This son of a crafty Turkish carpet-dealer barges and weaves his way through the market place as to the manner born, fawning, stabbing, and dealing. I know he was responsible for
On the Waterfront,
for amazing performances of
A Streetcar Named Desire
and others, but he was equally responsible for the destruction of a number of good and honourable people whom he named as ‘a friendly witness' before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, guaranteeing that they would be totally unemployable as long as the McCarthy Hunt was on, and long after.

I knew a number of them and worked with them. I knew their despisal of the man. In Paris at the première of a film I had made with Joseph Losey, for example, the theatre was packed; seats were set up in the aisles. ‘So full! Amazing! Even Elia Kazan has to sit on a wooden chair!' said some idiot press woman. Losey suddenly dragged me from my seat and bustled me through the crowd into the street and down to Fouquet's where we dined. ‘I'll be damned,' he said, ‘if I let you sit with an informer.'

But Mr Kazan is not in the least concerned in his book about betrayal or informing; he is as happy as a boxer dog rolling in a cow-pat; covered in muck, he comes lolloping towards one, a trifle sheepishly, but, after all, he had only done it all to save Democracy.

And bedding actresses, especially married ones, is all part of the big fun too.

So. If you like this sort of tittle-tattle, this kissing-and-telling absolutely all, and if you have eighteen quid to spare for the thrill, then go ahead. Otherwise leave it strictly where it belongs. On the shelf.

Mr Bergman, on the other hand, has written a
real
autobiography. We have selectivity here, we have construction, we have grace and prose and a genius film-maker at work. Born of two hideously ill-matched parents into a dire Lutheran existence, bullied and beaten, scorned and constantly ill (and no wonder!) he somehow managed to survive the rigours of a Swedish upbringing and channelled all his pain and despair into the works which were to follow and which have so influenced lesser directors. Like the others, but in a more delicate manner, he too bedded his leading ladies and they all seemed to enjoy it very much: it was all done for the love of the ‘art', you understand: and ‘art' was supreme.

The Magic Lantern
moves backwards and forwards in time, focusing here and there, pulling back, going in close, obeying all the movements of a camera, and he observes with an eye like a scalpel. There are sharp and perfect portraits of his mother, of his various affairs, of his children, of his intense horror at the ‘filthy mess' of London and practically everything in that city, and he is unsparing, and funny for a Swede, about his relationship with the Oliviers during his rehearsals for
Hedda Gabler
at the ‘being built' National.

In their flat he found shelter from a dirty hotel, and it proved to be a disaster: ‘… sofas grubby, the wallpaper torn, interesting damp formations on the ceilings … breakfast cups were not washed up, glasses had lip marks on them …' and so on. The Swedes, we know, are clean as hell. Tired old London did not suit and he left, hating it with ‘every fibre of my body'. Which is a pity.

But he has written a splendid book, and even though the names we read are hardly familiar to us, one reads on eagerly. There is one excruciating, and accurate, portrait of Ingrid Bergman, dying of cancer but fighting on and fighting
him.
He wins. Her performance in
Autumn Sonata
was one of the finest things she has ever
done, and she knew this to be so in a letter to me. ‘At
last!'
she wrote. ‘I have done something I can be proud of after all these years. I have worked with Bergman. I never thought I'd get the chance.'

She did, finally, when it was almost too late. But she had worked with greatness, and that Ingmar Bergman certainly has. This is a passionate, caring book about a very particular man. I urge you to read it.

Daily Telegraph,
11 June 1988

Middlepost
by Antony Sher (Chatto)
A Twist in the Tale: Twelve Short Stories
by Jeffrey Archer (Hodder)

I have a nagging feeling that I have, somewhere along the line, missed the point of this book by the multi-talented Antony Sher. And I don't for the life of me know why.

Middlepost
is excellently written, deeply researched, as dense and patterned as an Axminster rug. It has one or two very evocative and economical drawings by the author, and it has a beginning, a middle – more or less – and an end. So where have I gone wrong? I wish that I could like it all a great deal more.

Let's start at the beginning. The cover, again by the author, is pretty daunting. A group of ostrich-necked grotesques weave about in a strange seaweed-like manner. And all in the most hideous shades of baby-lotion brown-beige. Someone should have advised Mr Sher that brown is a brute for a cover, and doesn't look so good on bookstalls: at least that is what Graham Sutherland, who used to try to teach me illustration many years ago, used to say. Red, blue, greens (white and black are not strictly colours) – but on no account use brown.

Perhaps what I dislike about it so much are the ‘grotesques' themselves. They are, I presume, portraits of the characters we shall meet within these ugly covers, and pretty they ain't.

Storyline? Well, it is familiar to anyone who has read his Malamud. Little Jew, with straggly beard, ‘matted hair' and an unpronounceable name, peels off from Middle Europe – and the ‘rising tide' of anti-Semitism – with a suitcase and not one word of English. Which might not matter except that he makes for South Africa, a change from America or Australia, but as far as the people and topography are concerned, not that much different. And English he will need.

He manages to get through the whole book with a few words – ‘Bye-bye', ‘Bokswater', ‘Gooood' and a couple of others – while all around him people chatter away in a Babel of Languages. But he manages all right, which is jolly clever, both of him and his writer, who almost convinces us it would be possible.

It is 1902, the British have savaged the Boers, the war is over and everyone has to begin again. Under these circumstances we also get, naturally, a ‘cast of thousands': British thugs, Boer bigots, bushmen and bushwomen of lustreless hue. We even get a couple of comic Italians, fat and hysterical, and a black servant, male, called, oh dear yes, April, who spouts gobs of Shakespeare like bubble-gum. But it all hangs together and I bet I am the only one who doesn't quite see what it's all about.

I'm much too delicate, of course. I dislike reading about people who ‘defecate', are ‘constipated' or, even more, sit stuck ‘in their own dung'; we get our fair share of this, plus the birth under a tree of a baby which is instantly buried in a small pit and walloped with a stick. Apparently that is the best way of disposal in Seth Efrica – anyway it was at that time – and if it was black …

We get a sort of homosexual advance which is made and, properly, resisted by our straggly beardedJew, and we even have the obligatory ‘pearl' of semen held, quiveringly, in the astonished hero's hand after a fairly close encounter with a black lady who, I gathered, resents his desire.

But basically the story is about a new start, a new world, a second chance. Hope is there, the sky is starred with millions of tiny lights, the great veld stretches out apparently for ever, empty, ready, waiting.

Our hero watches the stars in wonder: ‘… giant swarms shifting the heavens. He gasped, for now there was no doubt: the world was leaning into its tumbling, twisting fall … he kept his balance, treading, hopping, dancing, as oceans and continents swept beneath him …' – and that's about it.

The book ends on this note of high hope; the hero realizes that life can start again, that the universe is filled with treasures, scent and light and that he is at the centre of it all and it is all within his
grasp. In fact, dear reader, you'll probably enjoy every word.