Memoirs of a Private Man (20 page)

Although I cannot judge this objectively, the success of the book, and particularly the success of the characters, does give me the impression that possibly this preliminary experimentation, this lighting up of the characters, so to speak, from different angles, helped to give them extra solidity and shape.

It was an interesting experiment, but I commend it only to those with ample time and endurance.

In between
The Grove of Eagles
and
Angell, Pearl and Little God
I had written two other novels. One,
After the Act
, based a good bit on my own experiences in France, got marvellous reviews but failed to attract the mass market except in Italy, where it was the choice of Club degli Editore. It did get a specially good press reception in the United States, which attracted an American film-maker called George W. George, who took an option on the film rights, and then a second and then a third but could not get it off the ground. Later a French film company took up two expensive options. When George W. George heard he said, ‘Perhaps only the French can make it.' But in the end they too gave it up. The other book was
The Walking Stick
, which was, if one judges solely by financial criteria, the most successful novel I have ever written.

Long before I was married, a family came to live in Cornwall with a polio-crippled daughter who had the most beautiful face and such a charming manner that I half fell in love with her. Thereafter, as if purging my feelings, lame girls have repeatedly appeared in my novels; Holly in
The Merciless Ladies
, Rosina Hoblyn in the
Poldark
books.
The Walking Stick
finally channelled this vein to its limits, and possibly for that reason had a poignancy that moved readers too. Apart from the two book club choices it got in America and one in Germany, Hollywood took a great fancy to it. When more than one producer wants a novel there is competitive bidding, to the author's great advantage. Eventually Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer went off with it in triumph. The film they made of it was a failure, but in retrospect this may have been because the way the film was made was ahead of its time. It is now repeatedly shown on television and seems to please viewers. When the book was first published, someone described it as ‘a love story with a “Rififi” middle', referring to a widely successful French film about a jewel robbery. Eric Till, the director, was, I believe, much more influenced by a Swedish film called
Elvira Madigan
, and when it came to the robbery in the middle of the film he chose to use the robbery scenes as an explosion of noise and violence instead of the silent and nailbiting tension of the scenes in the novel.

David Hemmings played the lead and played it very well. In the all-important part of the girl with the walking stick, Till wanted Judi Dench. MGM, typically, insisted on an international name and chose Samantha Eggar. She too did very well, but Judi Dench would have given it an extra dimension.

A sad postscript here is that when the novel was nearly finished I could not find a title for it. My wife suggested
The Walking Stick
. Within six months of its publication she needed one herself.

After the film had been made, MGM gave Jean the walking stick that Samantha Eggar had used. It was a handsome ebony-black stick, but after six months it broke, being made of some composition and varnished over. Like so much in the film world, it was not as real as it seemed.

The Walking Stick
is the novel with which I again changed publishers.

I had become somewhat disillusioned with Hodder, partly because of their failure to market
Marnie
while the Grace Kelly sensation was at its height, but there were other reasons too. When it became known in the publishing world that I was thinking of making a move, four publishers were quick to make approaches. I ended up by moving to Collins, who were not the highest bidder but had a great reputation. I had known Billy (later Sir William) Collins, though casually, for twenty years, and liked him and felt he liked me. I had met him once in New York on the dance floor of a hotel, with one of the new young women writers he was promoting, and he had said to me: ‘I see you've moved publishers. If you ever think of doing it again, why not get in touch with me?' Also I had become friendly with Lord Hardinge, who was then working editorially for Collins, and George, who greatly liked the Poldark novels, took one of them to Billy to read, with the remark that they were, in the popular phrase of those days, ‘ a licence to print money'. Even so, I was on terms of closer friendship with Charles Pick, the head of Heinemann, who had put in the highest bid, and I was far more deeply committed to the thirdbidder, the Bodley Head, whose owner was my closest friend, Max Reinhardt.

There was no question in the minds of my wife and our two children: ‘Oh, you must go to Max.'

I was in those days doing very well out of my writing, able to live well and to maintain my family in the style to which I felt they had become accustomed; but I was often ailing, and who was to know if some illness should put me off working for a year or two?

So I consulted three people: Cyrus Brooks, my agent, Arthur Coleridge, the head of
Reader's Digest
in England, and Edmond Segrave, the editor of the
Bookseller
. At least two of these were totally unbiased. All three were unequivocal: I
must
go to Collins.

When I told my children of my decision, they would hardly speak to me for a couple of days. It was in their eyes morally obligatory to go to Max. I agreed with them, which made it worse. I could only tell them I was doing it for their sake as well as my own.

The move paid off – financially and in other ways. Max took my decision like a true friend, as did Charles. (I was able to offer some other books to Max later.)

I remained on good terms with Billy and Pier Collins until they died, and similarly with George Hardinge. But in the next twenty years I never got to know Billy any better. He was cheerful, jolly, enthusiastic, just as when I had met him on the dance floor of the New York hotel. Very likeable but slightly unknowable. And soon after I joined Collins, George Hardinge moved to Macmillan.

But there was an unexpected bonus. I met the Managing Director of Collins, one Ian Chapman, who was among the most distinguished publishers of his generation, and, a few months later, Marjory, his charming wife. We became personal friends and have remained so ever since. I look on them now as my most valued and loving of friends.

Companioning Jean and me on about three-quarters of our trips to Europe were our two children. Living where we did in a small Cornish village with a cinema, nine excellent tennis courts and a golf course, and limitless cliffs and bathing beaches nearby, to say nothing of their friends, it might have seemed to them that what they left behind could hardly be bettered by what we were taking them to see, but they usually seemed ready for adventure. (Surprise, surprise, they might have taken after their mother.) True, Rosamund looked on foreign food with grave suspicion, and I learned to be able to ask for ham omelette in five languages. So off we went in our big open Alvis, in search of better weather and warmer seas than what we were leaving behind.

For some reason I cannot now explain to myself, I had a fixation on mountain passes, and up and down and round endless hairpin bends we went, ears cracking, to this col or that in the French and Italian and Austrian Alps or in the Pyrenees. Pleasure was gulped at, culture was more slowly and haphazardly imbibed. Our way of life in Venice must seem vulgar in the extreme: year after year we stayed at the Danieli, and in the morning the children would dash out to buy the ingredients for a picnic, then we would all take the CIGA launch to the Lido, where we had a cabin booked on the Excelsior Palace beach. We would return to Venice about four and take tea in St Mark's Square. By the time that was finished, most of the museums and churches would be closed or closing. In the fifteen times we visited Venice, its beauties were only partly explored. What is more deplorable is that because Jean and I had been to Venice before the children came, we had ourselves done much of the sightseeing that should have been reserved for them. However, they have seen most of the indoor treasures of the city in their own time. And I have never heard a word of complaint from either of them about the routine we followed when we were all there together.

The timing of our visit each year to coincide with the Venice Film Festival was not without a serious purpose, and I met a fair number of film stars and producers on the beach of the Lido, and we attended various film premieres. I remember one day on the Lido meeting Dustin Hoffman, and his being very enthusiastic about my novel
Angell, Pearl and Little God
, which had just been bought by Paramount. ‘I really
want
to play Little God,' he said. ‘I've never done any boxing, but I'll gladly learn enough of it to play the part. I don't know any cockney dialect, but I'll mug up on that too. But I won't play with a lousy script.'

At great expense, Paramount got three scripts, all equally lousy, so the film was never made. It still lies as an asset (so called) in the books of Paramount Pictures.

One of the scripts was sent to Marlon Brando, with the offer of a million dollars if he would play Angell. He did not bother to reply.

Travelling abroad with Jean after her stroke (of which more later) was often an anxious business. For long I could not forget the suddenness with which the illness had struck her down in Crete. Who was to say it would not happen again? If she went down to our greenhouse to pick some tomatoes for supper and was five minutes late returning, I would keep an over-keen ear open for the sound of a footstep or awalking stick. If we were deep in the wilds of Brazil surrounded by forest and in downpours of rain, I could not help but keep fingers crossed.

At times she had an appalling cough – like someone tipping coals, I would say – remnant of her asthmatic days but, according to the best medical opinion, not significant of any illness. I told her that she would earn a fine lot of money dubbing for anyone in a film or TV drama who was supposed to be dying of TB. (Their thin affected little coughs were entirely unconvincing.)

I remember taking her to Madras and then on to Mahabalipuram. It was pitch dark when we arrived at Madras, and Jean was hustled from the plane in an unsprung wooden wheelchair, pushed by a cheerful careless child who thought that bumping along at speed over a broken roadway was fun. When we got in the old taxi and began to push our way through the ill-lit suburbs of Madras and started on the Stygian twenty-mile trip to our hotel, I said to myself, ‘Are you
mad
, bringing this ailing, delicate woman
all
this way to an unknown hotel in an unknown village in the depths of night,
miles
away from anything but the most unsophisticated medical treatment?'

(As it happened the hotel had forgotten our booking, and we could only be offered a boxroom for the first night, and the whole place was dirty, with fingerprints everywhere. That is by the way.)

But the answer to the question I asked myself in the taxi was answered in the next two weeks. She lost her cough. And the dynamics began to work. In two weeks we were in Kathmandu, and she was eager to take the two-day trip to Bokhara to see the sunrise over Annapurna. And when we got safely back, she jogged my arm until I took her on the dawn flight round Everest.

I have sometimes wondered how she brought herself to do so much. It was as if she would not
allow
herself to believe herself ill. She never
had
been. She never
would
be. Her favourite phrase, when I ventured to mention some new symptom or the recurrence of an old one, was: ‘Oh, it's nothing.
I'm
not worried.'

She was perhaps a little like her grandfather, Charles Alexander, the sailor. He lived well on into our married life, and whenever I met him and asked him how he was, his invariable reply was: ‘Capital, Winston, capital.' The difference is that he
was
‘capital' almost to the day of his death. She was not.

Whatever resources of optimism she drew on, it was a blessing for her, a blessing for me, and a blessing for the children.

As for the two children, this is my autobiography, not theirs, and it is quite possible that they will one day publish memoirs of their own.

It might be wrong to suppose that the four Poldark children and their relationship with Ross and Demelza bear a passing similarity to that in our household. I suppose I could claim a passing resemblance.

There has been a companionate friendship between us which has seldom been disturbed. They both seem to have been born at least partly civilized. A few standards which were not transgressed, otherwise an easygoing lack of any stern discipline, along with mutual respect.

What discipline existed most often came from Jean. She was loving but firm of purpose. I was loving but too easily persuaded. Unlike most fathers, I was often about the house, though not a little absent-minded. She built me up in their eyes. I sometimes think that perhaps she reflected to them her own opinion of me. (Largely unmerited, I fear.)

In the first half of our married life she ‘ looked after' me in every possible way she could. It was a source of sad satisfaction that in the second half I was able to do everything possible to repay the debt.

One autumn long ago The Most Noble the Marquess of Donegall (as he was called in his passport) bought a new Bentley Continental and invited me and Nigel Tangye, an old friend of us both, to join him on a trip round Europe to run the car in.

Don, the sixth Marquess, was then in his fifties. He had succeeded to the title when he was rather less than one year old. He never got along with his young widowed mother, who disapproved of his lifestyle and who when she died left all the disposable money to Canadian religious charities and none to her only son. Don, even when his mother was alive, was poor (by his standards) and for many years before the Second World War had written a weekly column – almost a page – for the
Sunday Dispatch
and had made his name as a first-rate gossip columnist and at times serious commentator on world affairs.