Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (79 page)

We have a good session. There is no chance of getting the full amount we have asked for, but we come away with half and a few other promised benefits. I think he is straight and he’s certainly convivial enough today. We shall see if he can deliver.

At home brief time to talk with Angela. She seems very much more positive.

Lunch at Grimes in Garrick Street with Charles Sturridge, Michael Colgan and James Mitchell – the lawyer who I wrote to three years ago to express my interest in ‘Troubles’.

I put my point about dates and don’t get much sympathy back from the producers, but Charles is concerned and will try and do some readjustments to save perhaps a couple of days of my Mürren [family skiing] trip. I so much want to see Mürren again, but it seems unlikely.

The producers asked me, as a writer, if I was happy with the title. They are worried that the Americans will not understand it. But so far their only suggested alternative is ‘The Major and the Fisheater’!

Michael Colgan from ‘Troubles’ rings. He’s the amiable, artistic one of the production duo, I sense. Apologising for ‘being a bad producer by telling you this’, he goes on to say how delighted the three of them were after our lunch at Grimes yesterday. I
was
the Major, he says, and they were ‘walking on air’ after meeting me. Then he alludes to the unsavoury business of the contract and how they had asked LWT to go to the limit. Also bad news on the skiing holiday, which doesn’t seem negotiable.

Nothing is heard from ‘Troubles’, so I continue in this limbo-land, unable to confirm, cancel or plan anything from March to May.

Clear my room and spend an excellent evening with Angela at the Caravanserai Afghan restaurant in Marylebone and then at the screen on Baker Street seeing
Heavenly Pursuits
. Angela is well disposed to her Maudsley lady and prefers her technique of P and M to a full-blooded Freudian analysis. P is for pleasure and M for something not necessarily pleasurable but achieved – hence the M for mastery. Angela has to keep a weekly record of P and M moments.

This evening definitely P.

Angela leaves at five. Her two weeks’ stay with us is over and I’m quite sad in a way. When on form she’s very good company. I know she depended on us and was warm in her appreciation of what we did for her. I hope she’ll be able to continue moving forward as she has done over the last few days.

About half past five Anne rings with the final terms of ‘Troubles’. They’re acceptable. Now I have no longer any reason not to do it. The die is cast. I’m spoken for until the end of May.

Michael Colgan rings. He assures me that he will try his best to make sure the little things are provided for me – such as somewhere to write. Then Charles rings. It’s been a long week since our talk in the gathering twilight last Sunday when my destiny began to be firmly linked to his.

So by seven o’clock all is done. Barring some dreadful accident I am to embark on the longest and largest single acting job I’ve ever done.

Start the day with a reassuringly approving bunch of letters re
East of Ipswich
, sent over from the BBC. Tristram rings to say that we had a viewing figure of 6.5 million and were top of BBC2 for the week. For a programme starting after ten on a Sunday evening this is considered good.

Talk with Anne over contract details on ‘Troubles’. LWT are not being helpful. Their contracts lady prefaces most of her calls to Anne with the advice that she’s worked there 23 years.

But there are certain specific conditions which will make my life more pleasant over the next 14 weeks, like sole use of room or caravan to work in, a car in the morning which doesn’t cruise the whole neighbourhood picking up the rest of the cast, and some policy on stand-ins. The more I think of them during the day, the more I’m convinced they’re not petty details.

Up by nine. The rain from the west hangs low and mistily over the Common. An odd ‘friend’ of Ma’s rings to say how much she hated
East of Ipswich
. She tells her that she loved God, she loved her (my mother) and she (had) loved my father, but she hated the film. It was the sex again that was the problem. And this from someone who has had five husbands! Ma takes it all very well, but is clearly quite shaken. Fortunately I have brought up a sheaf of letters and reviews from people who thought otherwise.

Mr Hurran (Ma’s protector) comes in as I’m reading a story in the
Daily Telegraph
about a cricket team which is destroying all its boxes because of fear of AIDS. He takes the Sierra and has the cassette-player mended.

I have promised Angela I shall drop in at Chilton on the way back, even though it adds well over an hour to the journey. She and Veryan are there. Angela reading ‘Troubles’ with one of the cats pinning her down to the kitchen chair. She seems enormously better. At the edges there are glimpses of frustration and fear and sometimes she is almost too bright (as if making a great effort), but a transformation from the Angela who came to us at the end of January.

I sleep well and take a cold, early morning run before my car arrives at a quarter to ten to drive me to the read-through. My driver, John, is young and has a habit of blowing air out in a sort of silent laugh.

We cross the river and head ever further into the wastelands of Rotherhithe. It’s rather as if I’m being purposely disoriented. We could be in Novosibirsk. At an ill-converted, light industrial building we find one of LWT’s ‘colonies’ and I’m led through into a smoky room with protective grilles on all the windows, rather as I imagine border police stations in Ireland.

I’m taken round by Charles to meet the cast. Rosamund Greenwood, Rachel Kempson, with a glowing, handsome face and a bright slash of lipstick. Patience Collier, who has a special reclining chair and sits amidst us all most incongruously. Gwen Nelson, who’s 86 and reads her script, with a huge magnifying glass.

Ian Richardson, I note with some dismay, is a smoker. He looks surprisingly
rubicund, an agricultural tan. Colin Blakely is suffering the effects of some skin disease which has left him completely bald and his skin looks pale, exposed and very fragile. He smiles and shakes my hand with such open warmth that I know I shall like him. Same too for Tim Spall.

I’m introduced to Fiona Victory. High cheekbones, defiant eyes, long, dark hair – she was aptly described by Charles as an Irish Charlotte Rampling.

After all the introductions, Charles makes a short speech and the read-through begins. I suppose, to be honest, I am not quite comfortable; as my first line (which somehow seems the real psychological moment of commitment!) approaches, I feel my heart thumping more than it should and my body tensing up in preparation. But quite quickly the moment is over and I’ve not made a complete fool of myself.

The rest of the read-through is easier, though strange to be reading such intimate scenes in public with a Sarah I can’t even see beyond the cluster of heads. I think the scenes with Ian and myself will be fine. We read until after one o’clock. Tomorrow Charles will split us up for rehearsal.

Good phone chat with Eric I, who loved
East of Ipswich
and also has some very pithy remarks about
American Friends
. He says it reminded him of a Hardy story and when he read the script he felt that it must have been adapted from a novel! Both agree that speeches in Latin will be hard to sell to Hollywood.

Taxi to Grimes Restaurant, this time to meet with Ian R, Fiona and Charles. Warm to Ian. He is very Actorish in delivery and self-dramatising style, but regards it quite unashamedly as his trade. He says, without any immodesty, that he’s a very easy person to work with, but then catches my arm and adds ‘But I’m very easily hurt.’

Fiona and Charles and I are driven to London Weekend, here to rehearse in a long, narrow, un-cared-for office with an absolutely wonderful view out across the river.

Someone is editing
South Bank Show
theme music interminably from next door, which makes it difficult for us to maintain the intensity of concentration that listening to Charles demands.

About 5.30 Charles has to go to a production meeting. Both Mitchell
and Colgan look nervous. Clearly things are still in a very restless state.

I walk over Waterloo Bridge, because I like doing it, but a north-easterly wind makes the cold as intense and unbearable as any this winter. En-taxi for a private view of Virginia Powell’s paintings and pastels in Motcomb Street.

Introduced to Harold Pinter … ‘Do you know the population of China?’ he asks. (He has a suave blue coat and neat tie.) Evidently it’s over one billion now. But my evening is made when I at last manage to tell him that I did McCann in
The Birthday Party
at Oxford and it was the high point of my Oxford acting career! To which Pinter replies ‘Oh, I
know
all about that … I know all about your McCann.’

Off into the Belgravian night, fortified by a glass of white wine, feeling marvellously relaxed and comfortable. Home to a glass of champagne, some salmon and a steak. Watch a man having an artificial hip fitted (on TV).

At 5.30 I’m taken to Penge to the Peggy Spencer Dance School [for ‘Troubles’] to relive the horrors of dancing class which I had tried to exorcise in
East of Ipswich
. I have to learn the rudiments of a foxtrot with the twins.

Peggy Spencer is a tall, erect, but kindly lady. I jab her once or twice with my feet, which she says do stick out. But the hour-long session, watched with irreverent amusement by the drivers, is not as hair-raising as I expected, in fact it’s quite successful. The twins are wonderful. Very natural and un-actorish.

To Morris Angel by ten for fittings. These take an hour and a half and the suit looks very dapper. Then, clutching two pairs of leather shoes which I have to ‘break-in’ by Monday, I find a cab.

To the Great Nepalese for a lunch with Susan. Amongst our general chat we touch on (or rather, I force into the conversation!) my worries about the future of my chairmanship. Even before ‘Troubles’ the prospect of JC’s film and my own seemed to preclude my continuing; now I shall have to miss the next two or three meetings.

I suggest some sort of honorary or presidential (how the word jars)
role and by the time we finish our mughlais I realise I’ve as good as resigned.

From the Great Nepalese I’m swept away in [my driver] Billy’s Mercedes for a haircut. Christine, a close-cropped peroxide-blonde Scot who will be ‘looking after me’, does the job well and without fuss. The process of Majoring goes on, and I’m taken to an upper room to practise playing, or looking convincingly as if I
am
playing, ‘Eine Kleine Nacht Musik’ with Fiona.

Meet Tristram for lunch. Have chosen La Bastide in Greek Street. Its chintzy, bourgeois, salon-style interior is at first disturbingly, then refreshingly un-designed. Naff in fact. But the food is excellent. I have boudin and apple and it tastes authentically Froggie.

Tristram helps the atmosphere with a marvellously positive reaction to
American Friends
.

If I don’t direct
American Friends
, I promise Tristram (on the corner of Greek and Old Compton) that he shall be top of my list. Definitely the best reaction thus far. The only one that made me want to rush straight back and read the thing.

Steve has positive news of the JC film. It looks like a July 13th start and some ridiculous amount like 300,000 dollars in the kitty – per person. None of the stars to get more than any other (which is kind to me, I think).

Home by 11.30. If I had wanted just one restful day this last week of ‘freedom’, this wasn’t it.

Helen packing and preparing for Switzerland [the family skiing holiday I’m missing because of ‘Troubles’] means we don’t get to sleep until half past one.

The withdrawal of all the human sights and sounds and feelings seems to strip the house bare for a moment. It’s as if the carpets had gone or the water had been cut off. Something essential has disappeared. Despite a shortage of sleep, I don my tracksuit and head for Parliament Hill and Kenwood. My solution to everything!

Back at nine and breakfast and organise myself for an overnight to
Southwold. Thank goodness for my mother and for a lovely and appreciative card re
East of Ipswich
from Maggie Smith.

Have just relaxed pleasantly by the time I reach Sunset House, when Ma imparts the news that Angela has rung only an hour before to say that things are ‘so dreary’ at Chilton that she’s coming over to stay the night.

Lunch together then time to go. Angela tests me on my lines.

I head back to all the whopping challenges of the next 14 weeks at a quarter to three. Home by five. It’s cold and empty and darkness is falling at 4 Julia Street and Denis is waiting for me.

So is another Denis – for within ten minutes of my arrival the telephone rings and the cheery voice of Denis’s namesake resounds. DO’B has, he claims, been trying to contact me all weekend to say how much he liked
American Friends
. His reaction even caps that of Tristram. DO’B gives a complete, unqualified rave and concludes that there may be two weeks of rewriting, but that’s all. Wary of his praise as of his criticism, but there is no doubt that this is heartfelt and what is more exciting is that he can and will finance it next year. He says as much.

Practise piano and tying ties and putting on collars.