Going Up (38 page)

Richard Gregson sent me to meet Stella Richman, who had been put in charge of drama for Lew Grade’s Associated Television. The best TV plays were generally agreed to come from the stable of writers put together for ABC TV’s ‘Armchair Theatre’ by Sidney Newman, a Canadian dramaturge with modish left-wing connections and ambitions. Expecting sceptical interrogation, I was greeted with immediate enthusiasm by a small, dark-haired woman. At once confident and unassuming, she was sure that
The Limits of Love
was going to be a big success, although she cannot have seen a word of it.

The ex-wife of Alec Clunes, Stella had been an actress and was alert to the prime importance of dialogue. She had a weekly drama slot to fill, directly after
Sunday Night at the London Palladium
. Lew had left the choice of material to her; we could do whatever we chose, as long as the ratings didn’t dive. The first thing she offered me was a treatment by Truman Capote, entitled
Answered Prayers
(he later applied it to another work altogether). Set in New York, its plot featured a prototypical S Man who gets his comeuppance from a woman who, when we went into production, was played by Maggie Tyzack.

To be in at the creation of TV drama and to have Stella for impresario was to join the happiest school I ever attended. She commissioned one play after another and they were usually in rehearsal no more than a few weeks after delivery. Since those early pieces were performed live, in the studio, in front of cumbrous cameras, the stories depended on the words and on expert playing. It became my habit to start a new 48-minute play on Monday morning and finish it by Wednesday afternoon. I revised it on Thursday and posted it to Stella on the Friday. She or her script editor, Lew Griefer, whom it took no great wit to label ‘the script-griefer’, made brief comments, to which I responded promptly and I then had the fun of going to rehearsal. Lew was an ex-Communist, now in analysis; either Marx or Freud supplied the maquettes on which all his proposed emendations were based. Stella did not insist that I bend with his predictable wind. There was, I soon discovered, nothing so educational as hearing actors saying one’s lines. It made me instantly alert to false quantities in the text and often able to interpose solutions before there was a problem. Rehearsal was, as Americans used to say, the best fun you could have with your clothes on.

One day, a youngish actor came up to me, as we were having a break, and asked whether I would mind if he asked me something. I imagined that he wanted a cut line restored or another added, but his question was ‘Do you seriously think that thermonuclear war is likely to break out in the near future?’ Not displeased to be taken for a pundit, I delivered a reasonable account, on the one hand and on the other, of why I thought that neither we nor the Russians had anything to gain and hence … etcetera. He attended to my lecture with the blinks and nods of a serious pupil and thanked me very much. As I finished my cold coffee, young Carmen Silvera touched me on the shoulder and said, ‘Darling, do you mind if I tell you something?’

‘Of course not.’

‘When an actor comes up to you and asks you if you think that humanity can survive or whether strontium 90 is poisoning the water supply or the
dictatorship of the proletariat will be good for the arts, there is one answer and only one: you put your hand on his arm and say, “Before I say anything else, let me tell you that you are giving a
fantastic
performance.”’

The Limits of Love
was published at the beginning of the summer. I woke up and found myself very well noticed. Peter Forster, in the
Daily Express,
devoted most of a broadsheet page to proclaim me ‘a really remarkable new talent’. The characters in my book were said, in Graham Greene’s words, to ‘walk off the page into life’. Desmond Flower announced a reprint of my ‘considerable achievement’ almost as quickly as Victor Gollancz.

My feeling was more of relief than of exhilaration. In my callous innocence, I had no apprehension that any of the people on whom my lively characters were based might take offence. In fact, Beetle’s sisters were dismayed by what I took the liberty of saying about quite recognisable versions of their marriages. I was embarrassed but, in truth, indifferent. Graham Greene had written of the sliver of ice in every genuine novelist’s heart; if I must choose between a telling portrait and its subject’s good humour, I seldom hesitate.

I had dedicated the novel both to Beetle and to Paul (
absit omen
, since my leading character bore his name) and I thanked St John’s College for the money which the reverend Harper Wood had allowed them to bestow on me. It did not occur to me that Renford Bambrough, who had been my benefactor, would read my book or that he would take the character of Thornton Ashworth to be his portrait, although in many regards it was. Renford never mentioned the book to me, which is the only way, apart from his cool courtesies, that I knew that I had hurt him. I had assumed, conveniently, that scholars were above petty resentment.

I had a quick call from Wolf Mankowitz: if I was going to be some kind of a success, we should talk again. I was vain and subservient enough to honour his summons. He gave me the job, preceded by a few hints on what he and Peter wanted. The
Memoirs of a Cross-Eyed Man
began with its hero
on the Rock of Gibraltar. Wolf had the idea he should throw a banana to one of the Barbary apes. ‘The ape catches it, looks at it and throws it back. You take it from there.’ And so I did, for fifteen hundred quid.

By the time I delivered the first draft of the screenplay, Wolf’s association with Peter Sellers had broken up. There was no point in going any further with the script. I was paid off and went back to working for Stella Richman on an original idea of mine entitled
A Well-Dressed Man
. Three or four years later, I bumped into Wolf at the bar of the White Elephant Club in Curzon Street. Then the smartest showbiz hang-out in the West End, it was run by Stella Richman and her husband Victor Brusa. Wolf told me that he had just signed a three-picture deal to write and produce for Columbia Pictures, whose executives were not the smartest people he had ever met. He had found in his files this old screenplay that he had paid some donkey or other pennies to write for Peter Sellers. He had just sold the whole idea to Columbia and he was getting $150,000 for what amounted to some nipping and tucking on this old piece of junk, which was not actually as bad as he remembered.

Since I was busy with other things, I contrived to look impressed at the way in which he had fooled the fools. Something in my expression must have given Wolf pause. He looked at me and said, ‘Freddie, listen, when you’re free, if ever, I’ve got a project I’d like to talk to you about. For proper money this time.’

Wolf ’s shamelessness led me to assume that he must have an accountant capable of the kind of legitimate cunning that would enable one to circumvent the current punitive rates of income tax. He recommended a man called Cyril Glass. He took me on as if he were doing me a favour and seemed to have clever ideas about offshore tax havens and all the rest of the devices that, in the 1960s, were not deemed disreputable. A learned judge had ruled that honest citizens had a perfect right to avoid tax, but not to evade it. The implication was that, as in the case of death duties, one was
either a fool or a saint if one did not take evasive action. Cyril put me into various schemes, commonplace for big earners in showbiz, and I made no objection. Later, one of them was adjudged to be more like evasion than avoidance, but I escaped public whipping by paying up. Cyril told me that he had a girlfriend, of the venal kind, who liked him to fuck her from behind. It was not that she enjoyed it more that way, but it allowed her to smoke a cigarette and look at a magazine while Cyril did his stuff.

A Well-Dressed Man
told the story of a lonely man who hears an appeal for a witness to come forward to save a man accused of murder from being hanged. My Little Guy cannot resist being the Alibi Ike to whom, he imagines, an innocent man will be eternally grateful. He commits generous perjury by vouching for the guilty man’s presence far from the scene of the crime, just for the grace of really mattering to someone. He then goes home, to resume playing chess by correspondence with a pen pal in Australia. Then the door bell goes and there is Mr Tattooed, shaven-headed Beefy who says, ‘Hullo, friend.’ End of Part One. In Part Two, the little man is so cruelly used by his parasitic tenant that he does him in. When I attended the first rehearsal, the two actors – one Peter Sallis, an old pro still at the receipt of custom, and big, bald Kenneth J. Warren, who died several years ago – were so hilariously straight-faced that their author literally fell off his chair and took several seconds to compose himself.

In time, the piece was sold to a number of foreign countries. One day, I was telephoned by a French producer lady, who wanted to tell me how well it had played. I asked her how long it had run in translation. ‘We did it in three half-hour episodes,’ she said. I said, ‘That’s twice as long as when we did it.’ ‘We had a very imaginative translator,’ she said. ‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘did people laugh at all?’ ‘Excuse me?’ ‘Did it get some laughs,
quelques
rires
, the play?’ ‘
Rires? Mais pas du tout
. Mr Raphael, you need not worry. We took your work as seriously as it deserves.’ ‘If not more so,’ I said.

A Pinewood producer called Leslie Parkyn had seen Peter Forster’s
review and my name on the bestseller list. He and his partner, Julian Wintle, would appreciate it if I would come to Pinewood and talk over an idea they had. I hoped that they wanted to do a realistic movie based on
The Limits of Love
, although I guessed that they were attracted more by the title than the content. The project for which they thought me suitable was to be a vehicle for Cliff Richard, about a Butlin’s camp. They were planning to have about sixteen songs in the show and they needed a storyline that would link them together. I went back to writing plays for Stella Richman.

Sarah was being born while I wheeled Paul around East Bergholt. After a longish labour, Nurse Bray panicked calmly and called in Doctor Mac-Bride. I did not go upstairs until I heard Sarah cry. Then I cooked green beans for lunch. Before she left the Old Mill House, Nurse Bray handed me a brown-paper parcel, doubled knotted with strong string. ‘The afterbirth. You might like to bury it in the garden.’ I dug a deep hole at the back of the now overgrown asparagus bed and put the package into it, as if it contained contraband. We had bought Paul a scooter, which was now revealed. When he spoke to my mother, he said, ‘Got a sister, got a cooter.’

I often took Paul shopping with me in the Ensign. There was a wide red leather divider between the front seats, on which he sat to be able to look through the windscreen. One evening, coming back from Dedham, a cat ran suddenly in front of the car. Like a good BSM graduate, I emergency-braked and avoided hitting it. I looked across and Paul was not sitting next to me. The car seemed empty, except for me. Paul was under the dashboard, in an unhurt huddle. I put him back on the divider and we drove home. From that day on, whenever I braked whatever car I was driving, until we became accustomed to seat-belts, I tended to put my outstretched arm across in front of the passenger.

The S Man
was reviewed in the
Daily Telegraph
by Peter Green. Having no idea that I was any part of the pseudonymous author, he denounced its endorsement of opportunism and took it as a symptom of the sickness of
Harold Macmillan’s materialistic England. In her review, in some glossy print, Elizabeth Jane Howard perceived the glittering lineaments of Laclos’s
Liaisons Dangereuses
. One of my naughtinesses was to advise the S Man to take care to hang his school cap in the hall when he was in bed with his boss’s wife. Despite the limited experience to which Celia Ramsey had drawn attention, I have never found it difficult to imagine a life unlike the one I have lived or to anatomise the kind of careerism on which I was too fine, or too squeamish, to embark.

A Spanish girl came to live with us in the Old Mill House as an
au pair
girl. Cristina Baselga came from a comfortable family in Zaragossa; she had never had to do any domestic work. We suffered her indolence for a while and then I did what had worked with my house platoon: I told her that we all had our parts to play in the house and, although I knew she was principally concerned to learn English, she had to pretend to be of help or she would have to go home. She took direction without complaint. When the
Tonight
programme came on the television set that Beetle’s mother had passed on to us (it had decorous doors that could be closed over the screen), Cristina watched and listened to Fyfe Robertson and Cliff Michelmore before he moved on with Derek Hart and she went to give Paul his supper. Cristina and my fat brown volume of Lorca reminded me of how much I missed Spain.

Mrs Jenkins brought us pheasants for two and sixpence each. We were instructed to hang them by the claws until they fell to the ground. We were too squeamish to wait that long. People sometimes drove down at the weekend, Tom Maschler more often than most, with a succession of girls. My old headmonitor, Jeremy Atkinson, wrote to ask if he and Janet and their two children might come by and stay the night. Somehow we accommodated them. When Beetle proposed the same menu for her children as she was giving Paul, Janet said, ‘That would be all right.’ We were not asked if we ever came north (they were living in Harrowgate, where Jeremy worked
for ICI) and should not, in any case, have imposed ourselves on them. In principle, we drive for pleasure only in a southward direction.

Beetle relished our rustic seclusion. She had the children and she had the garden. Country life was without stress and without loud incident. I worked all week, went to London to rehearse, when I was needed. I was glad to take the opportunity to play a few rubbers of bridge before driving home. There was no speed limit, except in built-up areas. After rush hour, I could drive the 70 miles back to ‘dear old Bergholt’, as Constable called it, in under two hours. There was only one thing wrong, from my point of view, in living in an English arcadia: during all the time that we lived at the Old Mill House, I produced many pages of script, but never a line of fiction.