Murderers and Other Friends (8 page)

‘Play one of the scenes in a conservatory,' the American producer said, breathless with enthusiasm. ‘And consider the lighting, Rex. Can't you just see the lighting possibilities?' ‘Oh, my God. Yes!' The Harrison voice went up an octave and he massaged his forehead in a light comedy version of amazement. My father never owned a conservatory but one was constructed, an elegant octagonal building set against a wall of the house, where it remained for many years, acting, for as long as it could, as a genuine plant house though now, as if reconciled to the fact that it had only been run up for a movie, it has gently collapsed.

Apart from the brilliantly nervous acting and the determination not to disappoint his admirers by playing the handicapped, there was a ruthless side to Rex. When a film was to be made of
My Fair Lady,
in which he had enjoyed an enormous success in the theatre, the producers, so the story goes, wanted another star to play Professor Higgins. The director, George Cukor, with commendable good sense and loyalty, battled for months against that decision and finally said that he would refuse to make the film if the leading role were not offered to Rex. The day of decision came and Rex Harrison, who knew exactly what was going on, was pacing up and down in his villa in Portofino, chain-smoking and waiting for a call from the producers. Then the telephone rang and a deep and distant Hollywood voice growled, ‘Well, Rex. We've taken George's advice and we want to ask you to repeat your great stage performance in
My Fair Lady.'
It is rumoured that Rex was silent for a moment and then said, no doubt in his voice of comic bewilderment, ‘Are you sure that George Cukor is quite the right director for us?' In the discussions before we started our filming, he was similarly disconcerting. The director, Alvin Rakoff, a Canadian, suggested we might profitably ‘investigate the character of the mother'. ‘That's the trouble with you bloody Americans,' Rex said with no touch of light comedy. ‘You want to investigate everything. That's what's got you into all this trouble over Watergate.' This conversation occurred, if I remember, during dinner in a restaurant where he had ordered the most expensive wines, two bottles of Pichon Longueville. When the bill came, light comedy returned as he slapped his pockets, smiled helplessly and discovered that he had left all means of paying at home.

Rex Harrison was a man of many wives and lovers; my father, determinedly monogamous, said that ‘Sex has been greatly overrated by the poets.' Rex Harrison sang ‘I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face' and my father stayed with ‘Pretty Little Polly Perkins of Paddington Green', and yet the actor's talent was enormous and the two might have merged into a convincing, even a moving, character. Fate and the harsh realities of show business decided otherwise. The producer, who had been speaking hopefully of ‘lines of credit' and a ‘garbled telex' from an American bank, suddenly discovered that he had no money. Rex Harrison never played his first scene as my father; the crew evacuated our house and garden and no signs of them were left, except the fragile conservatory, the paper cups and an unlikely tulip, blooming in the autumn, which turned out to be made of plastic.

In my childhood the theatre was dominated by actors who seemed to me twin gods, Gielgud and Olivier. John Gielgud was a perfect Hamlet: a handsome, sensitive, princely intellectual, cruel and gentle, witty and profound. I wrote up for his photograph and got back one of him wearing a hat at a rakish angle which I pinned to my wall beside those of Annabella and Greta Garbo. Olivier was always the most dangerous and physical of actors. His Hamlet was an Olympic athlete, leaping from a great height, sword in hand, to fall upon the king, like the angel of death, to avenge his father's murder. When he died, as Coriolanus, he rolled down an interminable flight of steps and almost into our laps as my father, mother and I sat amazed in our front-row stalls at the Old Vic. When he played the same part at Stratford after the war, he fell from a rostrum, spear carriers caught his ankles and he died swinging upside down in the manner of Mussolini. Olivier's clipped, staccato way of speaking the verse was then thought by critics to be greatly inferior to Gielgud's mellifluous tones, which I also preferred. Many years later traces of my Gielgud voice, my attempt at beautifully orchestrated pathos, would return when I was addressing the jury on behalf of some car thief or bank robber, although I doubt if it had much effect on the verdict.

Stories abound about the differences between these giants, but Gielgud seems to have produced nothing but devotion among all those who worked with him. Later, when he was no longer a prince but an elegant, witty, chain-smoking, wonderfully tactless old man, he played some parts I had written and I found him to be the only actor you'd wish to take to a desert island. Olivier had some reputation for ruthlessness. Alec Guinness played the Fool in his
Lear
and was surprised that he was the only one of the supporting cast to receive any attention from the critics. Wondering at this, he remembered that the Fool only enters with Lear and leaves the stage when the King does. Then he noticed that the lights went up a good many points every time Olivier came on to the stage and dimmed to a similar extent as he departed. The Fool was therefore the only character to share in the star's illumination, whereas Goneril, Regan, Edmund and Gloucester were left to stumble around in the dark.

I don't think that Olivier is to be blamed for these tricks; no doubt they've been part of the armoury of all the great actor-managers of the past. He has traced the secret of Shakespearian acting as whispers passed on from Burbage to Betterton, from Betterton to Garrick, from Garrick to Kean and Kean to Irving, on whose memory Olivier's generation was raised. His well-justified claim to be part of this great chain was mixed with a very theatrical humility, a good deal of laying of the hand on the heart and the announcement that he was, indeed, a miserable sinner and altogether unworthy of the honours and praises bestowed on him. He used to address the National Theatre board in the obsequious tones of Othello before the Senate, scarcely forbearing to call us, with a great deal of mock humility, ‘my very noble and approved good masters'. He said that he got his timing, essential in playing tragedy, from great comics like Jack Benny and Bob Hope. He also admitted that when he played ‘the Black One' (‘by far the most exhausting, dear boy'), he thought of the pompous way in which Charlie Chaplin used long words and convoluted phrases – so his addresses to the board came from Othello by way of Chaplin. In spite of these moments of dramatic self-abnegation, he was a genuine old actor laddie at heart and his favourite stories were those that elderly pros might tell in the Last Gulp, the bar in the wings of the old Brighton Theatre Royal. He loved to remember the Gloucester who staggered on to the stage to be greeted by a cry of ‘You're drunk!' from the gallery. ‘You think
I'm
drunk?' the actor went down to the footlights and asked with great dignity. ‘Just wait till you've seen the Duke of Buckingham!' He liked, even more, the story of the bankrupt touring company which was performing
Macbeth
when a man from the Electricity Board came to cut off the supply. Understanding that the matter was urgent, the stage-door keeper swathed himself in a cloak, put on a broad-brimmed hat and, coming on in the banquet scene, marched up to the unhappy king, who was about to see Banquo's ghost, and said, ‘My Lord, an't please you. There is one without that, but for us placing upon his palm certain gold pieces within the instant, threateneth to douse yon glim!' The story, no doubt, went back to the dawn of the century, but Laurence Olivier loved it no less for that.

He was an instinctive actor and you could no more ask him to describe his performances than you could expect Picasso to let you in on the secret of how he painted a picture. They were not entirely unconsidered, however. In thinking of the way Oedipus screamed when he was blinded, he remembered reading about the way they trap ermine. Salt is put down on the ice, he said, and the small animal tries to lick it off so its tongue becomes frozen to the ground. He imagined the agony of being pinioned in that way and the result was Oedipus's terrible cry of pain, which rent the theatre. Unlike Gielgud, who retains much of himself, Olivier only became an actor when he put on a nose, a wig or an accent which was so carefully chosen that he could tell which side of Chicago it came from. During the production of
A Flea in Her Ear
at the National Theatre, he played the smallest part, the butler, and, although the lights didn't brighten at his entrances and dim at his exits, it was a similar exercise in attention grabbing, because, when he was on the stage, the audience couldn't look at anyone else. The great quality of Olivier's acting was danger and no one could be sure what the butler was going to get up to next.

He had battled against illness and scared away death. When the cures became even more dangerous than the disease, he went to Italy, dived off high rocks and swam great distances. The dark beauty of Romeo and Heathcliff had long gone when he came to do another film of
A Voyage Round My Father.
His features had become pinched, his hair thin and, with spectacles and a grey moustache, he looked like an ageing military man who had suffered severe fever in the tropics. But his eyes were still as magnetic as ever and his consonants still cut the dialogue like a knife. When he agreed to play the part, he asked me to read the entire script to him one evening in his house in Chelsea. I used to read aloud every night to my blind father: Browning, Wordsworth, Evelyn Waugh, the Sherlock Holmes stories, and even, as the time went on, chapters of a novel I was writing. I had never contemplated reading to the actor who was going to play my father's part. I suppose I did my best and when I had finished he said, with that fatal clarity, ‘That was a bloody awful reading, dear boy, but never mind!'

What Olivier brought to the memory of my father was the danger, the genuine fear produced by an often sentimental man who could weep with laughter at absurd stories or happy endings but, left to wait for five minutes on the platform at Henley-on-Thames, could give a convincing imitation of King Lear abandoned to the storm.

So, for the second time, the lorries and the catering vans, the honey wagon (which contained the lavatories), the false flowers, the paper cups and the camera crew, the sound man (whom nobody consulted), the wardrobe and make-up caravans, came back to the house in the country. The books were again walled up and the conservatory repaired and repainted. Looking out of a window I saw myself as a small boy, carrying a bucket, and Olivier, wearing my father's clothes and my father's straw hat, going towards the border to drown the earwigs, which they would pretend had infested the artificial dahlias, a curious form of blood sport which I had long ago abandoned.

In the big bedroom, with the balcony that overlooks the garden, I had watched my father die in a bed which I now shared with a new wife. I stood among trailing cables, dazzled by lights, squashed in the doorway behind make-up girls and electricians, watching an actor perform my father's death. He stirred and said the line which I think my father had also prepared carefully: ‘I'm always angry when I'm dying.' Then he stopped breathing, watched by me, sitting at his bedside in the handsome person of Alan Bates. It seemed to me then, it seems to me now, a metaphor of a writer's life. You live through a terrible and private experience which you reinvent for artificial lights and actors and then give it away in public. I don't know if I did justice to my father's memory when all that happened or whether I diminished it. I really do not know.

The humdrum nature of much crime is a disappointment to judges, crime reporters and politicians, who like to give the impression that we are living in a world lit by the flames of Hell, where good and evil do battle for our souls and where we are bowed down by the weight of original sin. England, in truth, has a lower murder rate than many, indeed most, countries in the world, including peace-loving Canada. The great majority of crimes in this country are committed without violence; when it comes to murder, however, judges often let their imaginations run away with them and take refuge in great literature. In those early days of crime, I had to defend a dwarf who had stood on an empty packing-case for the purpose of striking his tall, Irish landlord across the head with a length of lead piping. I should not, in this age of enlightenment, refer to my client as a dwarf; he was, of course, ‘a vertically challenged person'. He was also one of my less successful cases. In sentencing him the judge, determined to be dramatic, said something I found extraordinary and my client deeply wounding. ‘You, vertically challenged person,' he said. Well, as a matter of fact, being a judge of the politically unreconstructed sort, he said, ‘You, dwarf, are a mixture between Clytemnestra and Lady Macbeth.' To a vertically challenged male person these harsh words seemed almost more painful than the mandatory sentence of life imprisonment.

Much has been written about the theatrical nature of trials but the parallel is not exact. Boredom is a weapon you can use in court; given sufficient endurance you can bore a judge into submission by going on until he's in real danger of missing his train to Hayward's Heath and is ready to submit. You can't, in any other form of drama, win over an audience with relentless tedium. Legal dialogue, however, is often as artificial as anything in Restoration comedy. Addressing judges, a barrister says: ‘in my humble submission', ‘with the very greatest respect', ‘if I might be allowed to bring to your Lordship's attention an argument with which your Lordship, with your Lordship's great experience, will be entirely familiar'. What these ornate phrases mean is ‘Keep quiet, you boring old fart, and listen to what I've got to say.' Judges not only make judge-like remarks, such as, ‘Who is Kylie Minogue?' and ‘What is a T-shirt?', they sum up to juries as though they believe that the twelve random citizens are commonsensical, worldly-wise members of the Garrick Club who got their moral code from a rather decent housemaster at Winchester. And the criminal (as well as the sentencing) classes take part in the performance and adopt the role of cheerful Cockney characters which they hope will entertain the jury.