Maggie Smith: A Biography (6 page)

In Peter Hall’s version of Gogol’s
The Government Inspector
, Margaret played the wife of the schools’ superintendent in a company which included Billie Whitelaw, Derek Francis, Tony Church, Peter Jeffrey, Frank Windsor, Michael Bates, Toby Robertson, Ronald Barker and Clifford Rose. Philip French, the film critic who was then an undergraduate, vividly remembers her singing ‘The Boy I Love is Up in the Gallery’ in a music-hall compilation supervised from the piano by Peter Hall in a moustache. ‘She was absolutely wonderful,’ says Hall. ‘She sang that song with such wit and pathos, it was simply spectacular. The ironic side to her means she can be pathetic without ever being self-indulgent. I didn’t think she would develop the range that she subsequently has, but I did think she had star quality.’ Hall also directed her as the West Wind ‘in a lot of green make-up’ in the 1954 Christmas musical by Vivian Ellis,
Listen to the Wind
. By 1955, Hall had taken over the Arts and hit the West End with
Summertime
, Ugo Betti’s play starring Dirk Bogarde, at the Apollo. Peter Wood took over in Oxford, and Margaret appeared in his productions of Pinero’s
The Magistrate
and Sheridan’s
The School for Scandal
.

She therefore brushed with the past and the future of the British theatre. Maggie Smith became a star in her own right, but she was also one of the last generation of beneficiaries of the regional repertory system. Peter Hall would go on from Oxford to produce the key new modernists, Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, in London, and to found the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1960. Peter Wood, who later followed Peter Hall to the Arts, directed Pinter’s first play,
The Birthday Party
, in 1958. Wood’s busy parallel career in television embraced Maggie Smith in her first major small-screen role, also in 1958, and he would work with her many times in the West End, in Los Angeles, on Broadway and at the new National Theatre, of which she was a founder member in 1963.

Even more immediately important than her Playhouse connections was Margaret’s involvement in student revues. These were bright days for the University theatre, which had been galvanised in the postwar years by the activities of Kenneth Tynan, John Schlesinger, Sandy Wilson, Tony Richardson, William Gaskill and Lindsay Anderson. The early professional success of such people prompted a rush of energetic talent towards the stage and the rapidly expanding new world of television. The Oxford Theatre Group was formed in 1953 to take plays and a revue to the fringe of the Edinburgh Festival. It hired professional directors, Casper Wrede and Frank Dunlop, to direct Strindberg’s
Miss Julie
and Molière’s
Tricks of Scapin
. In the revue,
Cakes and Ale
, Margaret Smith performed three solo items: a song about a cinema usherette, ‘Première’, for which lyrics had been written by Ned Sherrin and music by Andrew Johnston (‘It’s my première tonight, and I’m scared as scared can be …’); a marionette musical number by Johnston, ‘Invisible Strings’, which became her party turn; and a sketch about bedtime drinks by Leonard Webb called ‘Somnos’ (Webb as a fireman fell asleep on the job while his wife, Maggie, is incinerated at home: ‘It’s getting very close, this fire unkind; the margarine is basting my behind’).

The professional highlight of the 1953 Edinburgh Festival was the Old Vic production of
Hamlet
starring Richard Burton and Claire Bloom. The actor playing Bernardo (‘Who’s there?’) was Jeremy Geidt, and his visit to the damp attic in Riddle’s Court off the Lawnmarket, where the OTG performed, was particularly significant. His brother-in-law, Peter Dunlop, was to become Margaret’s long-term agent and confidant as a direct result of this encounter. Geidt, who later worked in Boston as a senior actor with Robert Brustein’s American Repertory Theatre, recalled that the audience at
Cakes and Ale
was pretty sparse. But he was totally smitten by ‘this Titian-haired beauty, sitting on a stool in a haze of cigarette smoke’. With a mutual friend, Margaret later visited Geidt in his dressing room at the Assembly Hall and said, ‘I hear you think I’m good; what do I do now?’ Geidt said he would arrange an introduction to Peter Dunlop of Fraser and Dunlop in London. And he did.

At some point over the next year, Margaret visited Peter Dunlop’s office, situated at the wrong end of Wardour Street over a tailor’s shop. On his desk, Dunlop kept a heavy Venetian glass stone. In the course of the interview, Margaret fiddled with it, picking it up and putting it down. Dunlop eventually said, ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, leave that alone,’ and you can imagine now the electrified reaction of hurt dignity that was flashed by the girl across the desk, the pained, piercing look of ‘Well, if that’s how you feel about it …’ Despite this incident, the agent and the actress took to each other immediately. Dunlop, who had acted through Charterhouse and Cambridge and on the London stage, was not remotely theatrical. He much preferred country life and spending time with his family circle. He was Margaret’s type of agent and they remained together for nearly thirty years, although she never signed a contract. ‘She couldn’t be bothered,’ says Dunlop with a chuckle.

She went back to Oxford and waited for something to turn up. Even without professional work, she was in demand. According to Ned Sherrin, if you wanted success with a University show, you tried to get Margaret Smith in the cast. And, on a personal level, there were countless admirers of this waif-like, clownish chanteuse whose timing and stillness on a stage marked her out from the crowd.

One of the most fervent was John Beary, a young actor four years her senior who was smitten during a six-month attachment to the Playhouse as an assistant stage manager and bit player: ‘We were both innocent, and both romantics. We walked into the night along the Oxford rivers, and cuddled in punts moored under bridges.’ Beary, who became a writer and director in America, remained devoted, though he did concede that he lost her when she was ‘taken up’ by the undergraduates. One such was Michael Murray, in later life a professional actor, who became Margaret’s favoured ‘boyfriend’ after Beary, and another keen admirer was Andrew Johnston, who wrote much of the University revue material and, on graduating, pursued a notable career in advertising. Both, along with the rest, were kept at arm’s length. Margaret was a properly brought-up young girl and was in no great hurry to yield her mysteries. She soon learned to protect herself from regular exclamations of sexual adoration. The physical side of life was fairly unimportant to her, and her upbringing certainly pre-empted any idea of dalliance, let alone promiscuity.

In December 1953, yet another undergraduate was entranced by the vivacious redhead, and his long-term campaign was ultimately to prove successful. Beverley Cross came up to the University, to read history at Balliol College, in the Michaelmas term of 1952. He therefore missed Margaret’s Viola, but he was aware of her reputation when he met her for the first time during rehearsals for a charity gala organised by Ned Sherrin in aid of the Greek earthquake victims. Margaret did several of her increasingly renowned sketches, including her Joan Greenwood impersonation (as Gwendolen in the just-released Anthony Asquith film of
The Importance of Being Earnest
), and Beverley played his guitar. Beverley joined the queue of unappeased Oxford suitors, tucked in just behind Michael Murray and Andrew Johnston. The friendship simmered on the back burner for a few years before it became serious at the end of the decade.

Margaret was far more interested in reading than she was in ca-noodling. Having grown out of the runaway adventures of the Blue Door Company, she came across a more acidic, more sophisticated and deeply sympathetic literary rebel: Holden Caulfield in J. D. Salinger’s
The Catcher in the Rye
. If there is one literary example for Maggie’s acute allergy to phoniness, it is Salinger’s young hero, the world-weary urban cousin to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. She was deeply impressed by Salinger’s book about a boy who ran away from school and had harsh words for everyone, including Laurence Olivier and the Lunts.

She had been given some Salinger stories to read by John Beary, who had laid his hands on copies of the
New Yorker
, where they were published, through the Ford Foundation. The whole Playhouse company was badgered into reading Salinger by his new champions, Beary and Margaret Smith. Beary then wrote to Salinger, telling him about Maggie, his ‘comrade-in-arms’, and asking for his advice. Salinger replied to them both, telling Maggie that she had better get a move on and marry this boy who doted on her. Beary, who formally proposed marriage to Margaret in 1953, says that Salinger told him to make up his mind one way or the other. The correspondence must have been one of the very few Salinger entered into in Britain, apart from that with his publishers, before becoming almost entirely reclusive in 1965, ‘the Greta Garbo of American letters’. As the poet Ian Hamilton recounts in his
In Search of J. D. Salinger
, the author gave his last interview to a couple of American schoolgirls in 1953, at just about the same time as John Beary was writing to him.
The Catcher in the Rye
was not yet the cult manual of adolescent outsiderism it became in the 1960s, and was not all that widely read. The paperback only became available in 1956. Although it prefigured the ‘youth quake’ whose icons were James Dean and Elvis Presley, the appeal to Margaret, and to the teenage Hamilton in Darlington, County Durham, lay in its gloriously impatient tone of voice and in Holden’s coruscating contempt for cant, pretension and phoniness.

Maggie was affected not only by
The Catcher in the Rye
, but also by the short story ‘For Esmé – with Love and Squalor’, whose war-damaged American hero is offered succour by a precocious young girl he meets while stationed in Britain towards the end of the Second World War. It is unfortunate that Meg, incensed by her daughter’s literary adventurism and certain that such carryings-on would lead to immoral contamination of some kind, destroyed the letter Maggie received from the American author. This bitter experience probably put Margaret off letter-writing for good (she is a lax correspondent to this day, and no great emailer, either) and did nothing to improve her relationship with her mother. It must have steeled her, too, in her determination finally to escape the asphyxiating intimacy of the semi-detached house in Cowley.

Material from the 1953 Edinburgh revue, and the gala, was incorporated in a BBC television programme,
Oxford Accents
, transmitted on 26 February 1954 as part of a series on Oxford. The linking commentary was delivered by Brian Johnston, the cricket correspondent, and the event marked the television débuts of both Maggie Smith and Ned Sherrin, who was given a ‘producer’ credit. In the summer term, Margaret was photographed in the press with the twenty-one-year-old President of the Oxford Union and future Cabinet Minister, Michael Heseltine. They were discussing details of a cabaret for the presidential ball. In later life, Maggie Smith and Michael Heseltine, nicknamed ‘Tarzan’ or ‘Goldilocks’ on account of his flowing mane of blond hair, would share the same hairdresser, Patricia Millbourn.

The OTG’s revue for Edinburgh in September 1954 was
On the Mile
, presented in the late-night spot in Riddle’s Court after a production of
The Dog Beneath the Skin
by W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood. Philip Purser of the
Daily Mail
confessed that he fell ‘swiftly, completely in love’ with the ‘infinitely talented’ young actress and invited her to accompany him to see Ruth Gordon in
The Matchmaker
, the international Festival’s main attraction. Years later, Maggie would remind Purser that he had started her off: ‘That’s when I realised you can be a comic and yet be an actress. If she [Ruth Gordon] can do it, I thought, so can I.’ An amalgam of the best recent Oxford revue material, with Margaret Smith in the cast, was presented in London in October 1954 at the New Watergate Theatre Club in Buckingham Street, off the Strand.

Ian and Alistair began to appreciate the company of their sister, whose visits to London were increasingly frequent. The boys were working as dogsbody assistants in an architectural firm and decided that they would separate to acquire experience and later form a joint practice (they never did). In 1951, Alistair had worked with a company designing the gardens in Battersea Park for the Festival of Britain before starting his two years of National Service with the Royal Engineers (Ian was rejected on health grounds). The brothers had moved from Peel Street to another flat in Kensington, and by 1954 had moved again into a large top-floor flat in Belsize Park, Hampstead, with two other professional colleagues. The friends soon disappeared and the apartment began filling up with Margaret and other aspiring young actresses. Ian remembers this as a ‘very jokey’ establishment: ‘And also very proper, I might say. Margaret had really blossomed, but the Swinging Sixties weren’t remotely in sight. Margaret was buzzing around, almost waiting for something to happen.’

Peter Dunlop found her little bits of television work. She was a hostess on ITV’s quiz game
Double Your Money
, which required her to look decorative and to introduce the show’s star, Hughie Green, thus: ‘We’d like you to meet the man with the biggest head in television, the man with the greenest hue … Hughie Green!’ With Jeremy Geidt, she ‘walked on’ in the first BBC television version of John Galsworthy’s
The Forsyte Saga
. Geidt recalls that he and Margaret, playing a young couple at a party, asked the director, Tony Richardson, if they should chatter only when the microphone boom materialised above them. Richardson launched into a long Stanislavskyan lecture on how really good actors never stop acting. When the scene restarted, Smith and Geidt danced meaningfully around the studio and, oblivious to the action on the set, carried on acting, and dancing, down the stairs, out of the building and into the car park, while Richardson was reduced to a state of white-knuckled fury on the balcony. As he recounts the incident, Geidt has a memory flash of bright eyes, smiles, irreverence and high spirits: ‘Magical moments, like a diamond shining, giggles while strap-hanging on the underground.’ But, he added, this same Margaret Smith was ‘incredibly self-anchored; she had what the Georgians called “bottom”. She knew who she was, and she had this absolutely fearless quality.’ The wide world beckoned.