Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (91 page)

Wild, wet weather for most of the morning. No temptation to do much outside. Clear my room in preparation for a re-start on ‘
AF
’ tomorrow. Write to Sepha and Chris and Carys Bell to invite them to some sort of get-together, because I feel Angela is in danger of becoming a non-person, the memory of the good times in her life trapped by the nature of her death.

Violet, Jonas’s wife, is round from next door to ask Helen’s advice on schools. She doesn’t think she can go back to her home in Botswana, let alone South Africa. I cannot conceive of what threat someone like Violet poses to prompt the South Africans to bomb her house, which they did in Botswana, sending bits of Jonas’s piano flying everywhere.

I ask her if they feel safe here. Violet nods her head emphatically … ‘Oh, yes …’

Carys Bell responds immediately to my letter about Angela. She’s also at her writing desk, putting finishing touches to her second Welsh-language novel. Even on the phone the memories spill out. Angela was very practical. Yes, I’d forgotten that.

Ring Alan [Bennett], whom I feel I must now approach head-on over
The Weekend
. Just before Christmas Brough called to say he had had a rejection from Scofield. His second preference is to approach Alan B as director. I don’t think Alan would be interested. The play isn’t delicate or oblique enough, too clumsy I think he’ll think. Arrange to go and see him on Friday. For tea. He’s not a lunch person. Quite ascetic that way.

Lunch with Peter Luff.
¹⁶⁸
He is an enthusiastic European. I didn’t know his mother was Belgian. He sees 1992, the end of customs barriers in Europe, as a Great Day, and is working for a movement to raise the awareness of the Brits in advance of the changes in ’92. Thatcher is aggressively anti-Europe, which doesn’t help.

Watch a 100-minute tape assembly of material for [a documentary called]
From Fringe to Flying Circus
. There is a revealing moment in an interview with Jonathan [Miller] and Alan [Bennett] in which they’re asked about satire.

Jonathan feels that, apart from Alan, none of them were particularly concerned about attacking anything.

In the afternoon begin work transcribing Edward Palin’s diaries. Much of it is slow and lacking in great eventfulness, but I find his handwritten, notebook descriptions very compelling, even when he’s off on one of his obsessions, such as the state of Catholic churches.

Perhaps because I know so few people have ever seen these notes, perhaps because I feel close to the spirit of them, being a notebook-er myself, the words seem very direct, the communication immediate, as if he’d been in Ragaz only last week and, what’s more, that I’d been with him. He does sound a cheery, uncomplicated, gregarious character. This slightly complicates my decision on how to present him in the film.

Using the breakdown of scenes I worked out late last night, I transfer
American Friends
to cards,
Saturday Night Live
/Lorne Michaels style, which I pin up on the board in my room beneath the framed brass title-plate of
The Missionary
.

Phone off the hook, I sit and talk myself through the scenes, making adjustments here and there and scribbling thoughts in a notebook. A
growing feeling of exhilaration as the storyline becomes clearer and the characters sharper.

The odd tension I’ve felt all week lifts and, although I would like to sit down and write my way through the whole film here and now, I am due at Alan Bennett’s for tea.

Alan makes a mug of Earl Grey. ‘I write all the time,’ he confesses, waving his hand helplessly towards a pile of papers … ‘I’m like Tolstoy, but I just don’t know what to do with it all.’

Alan, as ever, gives the air of being unambitious, unplanned, unstructured, but of course that’s not the reality. He’s clearly quite buoyed by his appearance in
Fortunes of War
¹⁶⁹
and admits he’d like to do more acting.

I explain to Alan about
The Weekend
. When I tell him about Paul Scofield, he laughs – ‘Every one of my plays has been sent to Paul Scofield.’

Alan gives me the latest bulletin on his van-lady. ‘If you see a red light on, don’t worry … it’s her rheumatism light.’ I ask what a rheumatism light is. ‘I don’t know … she exposes herself to it.’

An hour’s drive out to Twickenham Studios for some more
Wanda
post-synching, much of it in an attempt to make my reactions in the fish-torturing scene less pained and more aggressive.

Up on the screen, on relentless loops of film, are shards of my performance – a performance into which an enormous amount of pain, effort and energy was poured. Now, quite clinically, on a chilly January evening, we’re banging a few nails in, shoring it up there, making good here and leaving it to the sound mixer to paint over the cracks.

To an acting purist the process must look like sacrilege, but it’s all part of making a product, part of the composite mish-mash to which all individual egos and identities have to bow. Next month the TV version is to be recorded, a shaming little exercise in which all ‘rude’ words from ‘bastard’ upwards must be removed.

Woken by Rachel coming into our room to open her birthday presents. A mini-Christmas.

To work at nine and a very productive day follows – all sorts of surprises as I try to get Ashby, Brita (as I’ve decided to call her again) and Miss Hartley more involved with each other. They
all
have much more to say for each other now. They’re fuller characters and I like being with them.

I work through until five o’clock when it’s time to light the candles on Rachel’s cake and, with Helen [Guedalla] as her sole guest, sing ‘Happy Birthday’ at her party.

It’s raining persistently, but not heavily, as I park the Mini in Bedford Square at a quarter to seven and cross briskly, via Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street, to Wardour Street and another screening of
Wanda
.

John has asked along a ‘panel’ of friends, so we are going to have one of those ‘think-tank’ sessions afterwards. Charlie C abhors them, preferring to rely on professional instinct.

The trouble is we are being asked to judge why an imperfect film (the sound unmixed, lines and music missing) might offend certain Americans. It’s all wallowingly hypothetical and, though clever souls like Jonathan Benson and André slope off afterwards, I am lured into a session at a table at Groucho’s.

I experience a form of intellectual claustrophobia. My mental processes will not apply themselves to the problems of
Wanda
in the way John expects. John, as usually, dissects the film with the icy and impressive precision of a Mercedes mechanic stripping an engine. Fay Weldon comes across with an opinion which sounds confident and starts the ball rolling.

Michael Frayn has some good ‘farceurs’ ideas, but they involve bringing in another character at the end, which seems quite wrong to me. I think the best suggestion for beefing up the ending is that Otto should appear, cement-clad, at the window after the plane’s taken off. That’s my idea, so perhaps that’s why I like it.

Though tantalisingly close to the end of my rewrite, I shall do no more this week as I have agreed to go to Wakefield to ‘unveil’ a 130-foot-long sculpture on the station.

The taxi doesn’t turn up, so Helen, who is on her way to take Albert to
be castrated, gives me a lift on to King’s Cross. I end up running for the train.

We are about ten minutes late in Wakefield, having lost the southern fog somewhere north of Newark, and a crowd of photographers, reporters and at least two television crews converge on me as soon as I step off the train.

A defunct siding has been attractively converted to take the sculpture, which consists of five, fan-like constructions of painted timbers, arranged in a graceful rise and fall effect, which Susan Hoyle rather unfairly described as looking like a fence that had been recently blown over.

A short speech and I unveil a plaque, at the end of which is my name. For some reason seeing my name up there on a plaque fills me with intimations of mortality.

To the town hall for a reception. Speeches from the Chairman of Leisure Services – an unrepentant leftist. When he hears that Wakefield Station is to be restored in its old colours, he cannot resist some dire remark about hoping it isn’t blue, for Wakefield has always and
will
always be red! This flourish seems to embarrass most people.

Letter from JC with his various proposals for rewrites on
Wanda
.

Phone Sophie with my reactions, only to hear that the great man, far from hanging on the end of the line for my pearls of wisdom, is in Kent for three days shooting a 30-second commercial. ‘He’s being paid billions,’ says Sophie, reassuringly.

Outside the cloud is thick and the light dim, but it’s still not cold, as I put finishing touches to the fourth draft of ‘
AF
’. By eleven it’s done. The last two and a half weeks have been the fastest, most concentrated and most satisfying work I’ve done for a long time. If it is a good omen that the script has had a happy birth, then the chances of this one surviving are very high.

Alan B rings, he sounds to have ’flu … ‘I’m in bed … I’m reduced to watching a programme on the beaches of Rimini.’ We agree to put off our
Weekend
meeting this evening.

A friendly-sounding man rings from LA. He is producing David Leland’s film and wants to give him a surprise on first day of shooting by having the entire crew turn up in long shorts of the sort worn by David in [the
Ripping Yarn
] ‘Golden Gordon’. Wants to know a bit of dialogue
to have embroidered on the shorts. Suggest ‘Shorts don’t matter, it’s what’s inside them that counts.’ I feel a warm breeze from the past.

Prepare for Chris and Carys Bell, who are coming to dinner in response to my letter about Angela, and keeping memories of her alive, as it were.

Talking to them, I become aware of how little I knew about Angela’s history of depression and how far back it stretched. Chris says that Veryan virtually brought up Jeremy for the first few months.

Carys goes back even further, to when Angela was in Brownies, and tells of a friend who knew Angela then and who said that when she took over from someone in a Brownies play, having understudied her proudly, she ‘went to bits’, as Carys put it.

I’ve a lot to learn about my family. It seems that they have to die before I can really find anything out.

Drive to Gloucester Crescent around five. The ‘rheumatism light’ is on in the caravan as I open the gate, but is switched off by the time I’m at the front door.

We fall to talking of
The Weekend
. Alan seems very positive. He read it three times. He has some helpful thoughts about the end and we laugh a lot. Halfway through our chat the phone rings. ‘Oh, how nice of you … oh … well, writers don’t usually get noticed … ’ and so on. He is clearly being praised.

Muttering that he’ll get a pencil, he mouths to me in mock horror ‘Ian
McKellen
!’ McKellen has heard that Alan is to be given an award for
Prick Up Your Ears
at the
Evening Standard
bash tomorrow and wants Alan to mention the ‘homosexual’ Clause 28 which the government are trying to introduce in the Local Government Bill, making it illegal to ‘promote homosexuality … in a pretended family relationship’. Terry J wrote a good, outraged piece in the
Guardian
on Wednesday.

He advises me to send the play to Ron Eyre.

To the
Evening Standard
Awards at the Savoy.

There is a royal in attendance – the Duchess of Kent – and Helen and I are taken from anonymity in a jolly throng of film celebs to a brightly-lit corner of the room, where we stand rather awkwardly with other ‘royal fodder’, such as Bob Hoskins and wife and Jane Asher and Gerald Scarfe and Deborah Kerr. The latter seems frail and rather confused by the whole thing. A crush of cameramen accompany the royal personage, elbowing anyone else out of the way.

At last it’s our turn and the whole circus focusses on the three of us – Helen, me and the Duchess of Kent. The Duchess (and, as with Princess Anne, I can’t help noticing how enviably cool and unflustered she remains) goes immediately into a soothing routine which does not betray for a moment whether she likes my work or not, whether she’s actually seen it or not, or indeed if she knows who I am or not. After a warm wash with the royal lather, I throw in a few observations of my own on life, work and writing comedy and immediately wish I hadn’t.

Then the camera crowd and their royal leader move on and we are left in the no-man’s land of après royalty.

The awards go smoothly. Alan B very effectively alludes to Clause 28 as requested – he talks of the thin line between ‘promoting’ and portraying homosexuality.

A day largely taken up with writing a piece on ‘something I feel strongly about’ for
Family Circle
magazine. Try to marshal all my indignation about poor transport provision into a cogent argument and bore myself stiff in the process.

Terry G calls me in the evening to offer me the part of the King of the Moon. The
Sunday Times
was right yesterday – Connery has turned the part down.

The dates on which TG would like me are the 22nd to 26th February. Exactly the weeks of our skiing holiday. It seems I’m doomed never to ski at Mürren. But I tell him categorically that I have to take the holiday, especially as it may well be my last chance for a while, if ‘
AF
’ goes ahead. He’ll make sure the script is sent to me tomorrow.