Maggie Smith: A Biography (12 page)

Olivier’s daring interpretation, certainly unrivalled by any white or black actor since, was probably the last great romantic tragic performance of our theatre. The epileptic fit was amazing, terrifying, and the final deathbed aria over Desdemona’s corpse – ‘Wash me in steep down gulfs of liquid fire’, arms supplicating with the elements – before slashing his throat with the concealed stiletto, one of the most animal feats of acting I have seen. Zeffirelli told Tynan: ‘It’s an anthology of everything that has been discovered about acting in the last three centuries. It’s grand and majestic, but it’s also modern and realistic. I would call it a lesson for us all.’ Maggie herself was quietly touching, though
The Times
felt she was on distant terms with the part: ‘Obviously a mettlesome girl who would not for an instance have endured domestic tyranny, she introduces facetious modern inflections (for instance her giggling reference to “these men” in the bedchamber scene) which clash destructively with the character.’

In July, the production moved down to Chichester for just sixteen highly applauded performances. Robert Stephens was already embarked on
The Royal Hunt of the Sun
on the open festival stage. John Dexter, directing, had been attracted to the play by the challenge of a single stage direction: ‘They cross the Andes.’ Robert’s primitive icon was in part homage to Olivier’s Othello, but mostly an extraordinarily vivid and powerful performance in its own right. No one knew what an Inca god might have sounded like, so Robert created an entirely new world of vocal sound based on bird cries, throat clickings and glottal stops. He also became a burnished figure of sensual athleticism. Shaffer recalls Maggie sitting in on rehearsal and giving them both a lift back to the house in Bosham which Maggie shared for the season with Derek Jacobi and Edward Hardwicke. She was flitting around between London and Dublin (where she was filming
Young Cassidy
) and Jacobi recalls how, at one point, she returned from Dublin and announced she was going to bed for two days. On the third day, he took a cup of tea upstairs and opened the door to find Robert there, too.

The Master Builder
, directed by Peter Wood, had opened at the Old Vic in June, and was promptly hailed by Bernard Levin as the National’s ‘first catastrophe’. Michael Redgrave as Solness appeared not to know his words, and people in the theatre, as well as in the audience, assumed he was drunk. In fact, he was suffering from the onset of Parkinson’s disease and would switch alarmingly from one scene to the middle of another in the next act. As Hilde, the reviving demon from the architect’s past, Maggie was in the firing line, desperately trying to keep the show on the road. Olivier was furious with Redgrave and made that fury quite clear. After the first-night performance on 9 June, he burst into Redgrave’s dressing room, dragging Peter Wood after him, and delivered an almost incoherent tirade, telling Redgrave in no uncertain terms that there was nothing wrong with ‘this boy’s’ (Wood’s) production and that he would play Solness himself. He did so, on tour in Oxford in November, prior to returning to London and dividing his Solness between two Hildes: Maggie and Joan Plowright.

When the press was invited to see Olivier’s Solness, one reviewer was bold enough to say that Maggie acted Olivier off the stage. On the second night, Robert was sitting in her dressing room when Olivier called by and said, en passant, ‘Oh, by the way, I understand that one of the critics says that you almost act me off the stage. If I may say so, darling angel, heart of my life, in the second act you almost bored me off the stage, you were so slow.’ Slowness was about the last accusation you could ever level at Maggie. Robert watched the performance that night and witnessed her rip through the play like a jet-propelled aeroplane.

Even at loggerheads, Maggie and Olivier struck great sparks off each other. Peter Wood says that one morning of rehearsal for
The Master Builder
, the scene of their first encounter, was ‘the greatest moment in the theatre I have ever known’. Gaskill saw one performance ‘at which they were electric. I shall never forget it; it was as good as anything I’ve ever seen, a kind of excitement had taken over.’ Irving Wardle summarised the transformation:

Internal relations were not made any easier by the fact that Joan Plowright scored less of a success in the role of Hilde than did Maggie. She had also been ill, suffering a miscarriage which prevented her from opening opposite Olivier as planned. But when she did face the critics, Clive Barnes in the
Daily Express
said that the play sagged with Plowright and that Olivier could not strike the sparks that flared up with Maggie’s Hilde, a creature of ‘fire and ice’. Maggie herself was too busy to take much notice of Olivier’s anguish. She probably enjoyed the fact that he needed her lustre in the company but resented its shine. Younger company members appreciated her industry and example. Lynn Redgrave found both her and Robert endlessly helpful and encouraging. ‘I loved watching Maggie, and learned an awful lot. It must have been hell for her rehearsing at first with my father, but she was extraordinarily sympathetic to him. He, I know, thought she was brilliant.’

Her stock continued to rise in the film world. It is an odd coincidence that just as the erotic fulfilment Tynan noted in Desdemona and Hilde must have been fuelled by the affair with Robert, so she played crucially catalytic girlfriends in her next two movies at a time when three men – Beverley, Robert and Rod Taylor – were competing for her decisive favours. In Jack Clayton’s exceptionally frank
The Pumpkin Eater
, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter adapted from Penelope Mortimer’s novel, Maggie plays the relatively small role of Philpot, a children’s nanny in the household of Peter Finch and Anne Bancroft. The latter is excessively philoprogenitive, that is to say, cannot contemplate sex without parturition. She has eight children by three marriages. Maggie is a fecklessly destructive foil to Bancroft’s invincibly productive wife and she is easy pickings for Peter Finch, though the affair is cloaked in secrecy and never explicit. We first see Maggie in the kitchen, sitting skittishly on the sink with legs and arms akimbo, informing Bancroft that she (Philpot) is frigid. Finch is a scriptwriter; Maggie, lolling mischievously in her bedroom, opines to Bancroft that ‘it must be wonderful to have a man working in the house’. An indelible comic mark is made on a deeply depressing, sometimes slow, but fascinating black-and-white film, with Bancroft sinking further into decline and despair, breaking down in Harrods and failing to rescue the marriage after visits to an abortionist, a doctor, a psychoanalyst and even her first husband (played by Richard Johnson). Dilys Powell in the
Sunday Times
, detecting the influence of Antonioni, applauded a ‘beautifully devised’ film which, for once, looked with women instead of at them. Years later, Clayton pulled off a similar feat with Maggie in the central role of another piece about tragic disintegration,
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne
.

Maggie’s Dublin sojourn yielded a piece of work which would provide good material for a specialist film buff’s interrogation on television’s
Mastermind
. Which film did John Ford abandon after shooting just twenty minutes? In which film does Rod Taylor, as an Irish playwright built like an Irish navvy, say ‘All the world’s a stage, Mick, but some of us are desperately under-rehearsed’? And in which film does Michael Redgrave as W. B. Yeats walk on a stage and shout at a rioting audience, ‘You have disgraced yourselves again’? The answer to all three questions is
Young Cassidy
, which must be classified as compellingly bad. It tells the story of playwright Sean O’Casey, ‘John Cassidy’, his life and his loves, and his association with the Irish Citizens Army and the Abbey Theatre during and after the Easter Rising. It ends with him boarding a ship for England. Tynan, who was writing film reviews in the
Observer
while working at the National, sneered, ‘This is O’Casey spruced up for export and audience identification.’

The project was beset with bad luck. Sean O’Casey, who vetted the use made of his volumes of autobiography, died during the shooting. John Whiting, who had been commissioned to write the screenplay, died a few months before shooting started. And John Ford, whose career was winding down, took to his bed with illness after getting only a few reels of film in the can. Lindsay Anderson had first been approached, and had thought of Richard Harris as the roistering O’Casey the producers had in mind. But, by the time Ford became involved, the MGM executives forced him to have Rod Taylor. Ford supervised a few scenes between Taylor and Julie Christie, who played the first of Cassidy’s three girlfriends (the others were Pauline Delaney and Maggie), and also the funeral of Cassidy’s mother. Although
Young Cassidy
is still labelled ‘a John Ford film’, the bulk of the work was taken over by Jack Cardiff.

The movie opens with a slightly work-soiled but mostly glistening Rod Taylor digging in a sewer. At home, Flora Robson makes stew and Jack McGowran dresses up as Richard III. The tram strike looms, Rod writes a pamphlet. Suntanned, fleshy, square-jawed and large, Rod declares that ‘there is too much in this country going to waste’ and starts filching books from a bookshop where Maggie Smith slaps his wrists and charges him sixpence. Maggie’s character, Nora Creena, appears, respectfully portrayed, in one of O’Casey’s plays,
Red Roses for Me
, and also in one short chapter of his autobiography. She was far too religious for O’Casey to bear and he wrote, ‘Free thought to her would be but blasphemy and ruin eternal.’ Instead, Maggie plays a sturdy slip of a girl, her long ginger hair tied in a black bow at the back, in whose eyes O’Casey sought ‘a soft, shy shelter’, as a sensible, sensuous support system to his ambition. Their courtship is the central theme of the film, pushing aside all other political and cultural developments. On a spree in the countryside, Rod pulls Maggie down on top of him and the camera cuts to a bubbling, picturesque river. There follows a sweet and sickly sequence of post-coital languor, with a certain amount of kissing, cuddling and singing. Maggie, it must be said, looks positively radiant and old hot Rod pretty pleased with himself.

When Cassidy and Nora visit Lady Gregory at Coole Park, we are treated to the sight of an imperious Edith Evans waited on by a skivvy played by O’Casey’s real-life daughter, the actress and director Shivaun O’Casey. Rod carves his initials on the tree alongside those of Yeats, Shaw and Augustus John, and is told by Michael Redgrave’s monocled poet that he, John Cassidy, is the Irish Dostoevsky and that he must be prepared to be inspired by the Arctic waste, not the warmth of his girl’s body. The uproar at the first night of
The Plough and the Stars
is summarised by the brother who accuses Cassidy of showing his countrymen to be knaves and fools, and of ‘putting our room on the stage and me in it’. Redgrave’s Yeats, however, tells Cassidy that the world and its playhouses belong to him. Encouraged, Rod asks Maggie to marry him in the dark of an empty Abbey auditorium. ‘No, Johnny,’ she says, abandoning him to the world; she needs a simple life, not his terrible dreams and anger, and she backs away up the aisle and out of the theatre. Rod boards a ship and the credits roll.

In her personal life, Maggie made a similar decision. The hurly-burly of life with a Hollywood star was not something she ever seriously contemplated. Beverley’s quiet loyalty was taken for granted, but he was beginning to lose touch. His first wife was still being difficult about a divorce and while Maggie had become embroiled at the National, he had spent time in Australia directing the première there of
Boeing-Boeing
. Maggie, thanks to Beverley’s encouragement, had discovered a new life at the Old Vic, and her creative partnership with Olivier and, especially, Robert Stephens, held promise of unlimited excitement and glory. Most importantly, the work was challenging and adventurous, though the inscrutable, demanding William Gaskill thought that the bloom had already gone off the National’s ensemble pretensions: ‘In the second season at the Vic we had Noël Coward trying to get Dame Edith to remember her lines in
Hay Fever
, Franco Zeffirelli camping it up in
Much Ado
and a set for
The Crucible
that looked like a gnome’s tea-party. I could see the socialist ensemble was not going to happen.’

Another way of looking at it was that the National Theatre was entering a richly popular phase and that the ideals of a committed company formed along the lines of the Berliner Ensemble were an impracticable option, anyway. They probably always were with Olivier at the helm and the flamboyant, eclectic Tynan, the archetypal champagne socialist, at his side. The actors themselves knew they were part of something exciting, whatever its intellectual pedigree, and they worked harder than ever. At the centre of the company, Maggie and Robert became box-office magic, attractions second only to Olivier himself, and a couple living out their supposedly private bliss in the glare of public adulation.