For the Time Being (9 page)

People may, as I have, sign an advance declaration or ‘living will' to the effect that they do not want life-prolonging treatment if there is no chance of recovery from severe illness or they are incapable of rational existence. They also have a right to expect sufficient doses of pain-killers to relieve intolerable distress.

Even so, a doctor may only ease the path to the end. He cannot lawfully assist or deliberately speed up death with lethal doses of pain-killers. That is the grey area where death may be either eased or appallingly prolonged. And it is where there is a great deal of hypocrisy, particularly by doctors, many of whom are critical of me.

That is precisely what we must discuss more openly, and I hope that the new committee will set the ball rolling. One poll shows that nearly half of GPs would be prepared to assist death in appropriate circumstances if it were legal.

Of course there are ‘good' doctors; kind and thoughtful people. One such helped the aunt of a friend. This gentle, religious woman was dying hideously with cancer and in such pain she pleaded with us over and over to be let go. We sat in her kitchen with the gramophone on trying to cover the noise of her deep anguish. Eventually the Roman Catholic nurse was instructed to give her a larger dose of pain-killer, followed by another larger dose.

It is not self-aggrandisement that has led me to take a public stance. If I was not also able to say: ‘I have seen screaming pain', if I had not nursed it, seen the utter ruination it can cause both to the patients and those who care for them, or if I had not been asked to terminate a life, I would not be so vehement about the need to help people who are begging for death.

I experienced the despair when my manager and companion of fifty years lay dying in London, totally paralysed with Parkinson's disease and terminal cancer and virtually speechless. He was not shrieking, but was in deep, dire distress. When we lived in France I
had promised that I would help him, but he had not put his request in writing, and we did not know about signing a ‘living will'.

I would have done something – though I could not have stood in a court and proved that was what he wanted – but eventually he slipped into a coma. Almost his last words as his night nurse and I turned him were: ‘If you did this to a dog they'd arrest you.'

My views were formulated as a 24-year-old officer in Normandy. The jeep in front of us went up and we flung ourselves down a bank. There was this chap in the long grass beside me and all I could make out were the words, ‘Help, kill me.' He had no arms, face or legs. I took out my revolver, but as I did so he was taken away and somebody else dealt with him – I heard the noise.

As the war went on, I saw more people taking the law into their own hands and I was convinced by this and later natural selections that there is no sanctity of life in existing in great pain if you are never going to get better, or will be on a life support machine for ever, if your choice is to go. People in that state who say ‘let me go' are not afraid. One friend was so paralysed by a stroke that the only evidence of any movement was a tear. Perhaps without modern medicine she could not have been kept alive.

We are told that no one need put up with or die in intolerable pain. That is absolute bunk. People do die in pain and you can't imagine the hideousness of it. Hospices are admirable in helping terminally ill people to a peaceful death, but they are not available for all, and pain relief at home can be appallingly ineffective.

I know that some people find the idea of active voluntary euthanasia morally reprehensible. Nor do I deny that there are different approaches to dying. For instance, Lee Remick, my friend of nearly thirty-five years, who died bitterly of cancer recently, would never have asked anyone to hasten her end. She was that kind of woman and fought to hang on.

But there are changing views about the current way of death and it is time to talk about them. If we continue bringing people before the courts and exonerate – or convict – when they have carried out a ‘mercy killing', we will simply bumble on as before and brush the whole issue under the carpet.

I hope the new committee will trigger some fresh thinking among politicians. Many are terrified in case showing support for voluntary euthanasia makes them unpopular with their voters. Yet polls show that most people are in favour. Of course abuse is possible. Thus any change in the law must be accompanied by proper protection, as in Holland. It is also important to state that nowhere does the Voluntary Euthanasia Society advocate getting rid of handicapped babies or the elderly and infirm.

When it comes to it, I believe we are all quite capable of being trusted with making decisions about our own lives. We did not choose to be born, but it is our privilege, I believe, to decide how we enjoy, endure and finally end our lives.

Daily Telegraph,
16 July 1991

To the Editor of the
Daily Telegraph

Sir: Do we really need a Centre For Policy on Ageing? What on earth is it doing? Who invented it and for what reason? Dr Eric Midwinter (an appropriate name one would think) feels that a whole new problem has arisen in society (report, 8 Nov.).

A twelve-million strong ‘forgotten army' are, he suggests, creeping around in the shadows, being made abject fun of by the media.

Well, the media have always favoured stereotypes, and so indeed do most of the people who watch television. They feel uneasy if they are asked to watch anyone behaving in an unfamiliar manner. They don't care for elderly people who keep abreast of youth. Those people are considered with great scorn – ‘mutton dressed as lamb'.

But if someone of my age, for instance, recommends a brand of beer or type of bread, it is generally felt, because of our vast experience and age, that we tortoise-people know what we're talking about. The viewer will nod in happy agreement and buy a bottle and the bread.

Dr Midwinter would have us believe that this ‘forgotten army' is ‘the most dramatic realignment… since the Industrial Revolution', which is, begging his pardon, a bit silly. The most dramatic realignment since the Industrial Revolution is that today hundreds of people can fly off to Tenerife, rent a timeshare in Alicante or just retire, out of the shadows, to the sun of Marbella – or nearly everyone who can afford to, and there is a vast group of tortoise-age who can. So he had better consider
that
happy band before he lumps us all together as the tired, lonely and forgotten.

Why on earth should ‘the man with the chocolates who goes through hell and high water' deliver them to his mother-in-law
rather than his girlfriend? What sort of terrible aberration can this be? Who would believe it? Who would buy the violet creams?

Older people are much funnier and wiser than the young; we have learned not to take ourselves so seriously, got over most of the uncertainty, the intensity and the desperation of youth, and have settled back.

Dr Midwinter confuses ‘laughing at' with ‘laughing with' – an important difference. ‘Older people', he says, ‘are deployed as the counterparts, the hollow husks of existence.'

Not in this house they aren't. We have a lot of mileage still left.

DIRK BOGARDE

London

Daily Telegraph,
9 November 1991

A portrait of Bertrand Tavernier, who directed my final film,
Daddy Nostalgie (These Foolish Things)

We did the last shot on
Death in Venice
at noon one hot August day in a plum orchard high in the mountains above Bolzano. And that, after six months of exhausting work, was that. As far as I was concerned it was the temporary end to my acting career. After more than twenty years' effort I wanted a very long rest, and drove, that morning, down to France and the peasants' house which I had bought and to which I was determined to retreat. Not, as most British journalists insist, to ‘retire'. Merely retreat for a breather, and perhaps, one day, to kick-start my acting life again. Meanwhile, I would concentrate on rest and, with any luck, writing.

There was no work for me in the UK. That was certain, and I no longer enjoyed the kind of work that was done there in the cinema. In Europe the whole thing was very different, very alive, very innovative, very exciting. But for the time being I was unworried.

I had started out in 1947 when our directors always wore blue suits and red carnations, and hurried us all off to the studio bar as soon as the lunch-break came up to have a pink gin or two. It was very much a social affair: hardly work at all. And deeply unsatisfying. After a raft of mainly tedious films, broken only by the magical arrival on my scene of Joseph Losey, with whom I worked with a passionate but ill-founded belief that we could together buck the system, I decided to pack up in England and try my luck abroad. Losey and I failed at the box-office but gained critically. Not at all the same thing, alas.

In Europe they took greater risks, and my first offer from that direction came from Jean Renoir in Paris. This failed, sadly, but
other directors beckoned, and I heeded their calls happily. Visconti, Resnais, Cavani and Verneuil among others.

A whole new life emerged for me as far as the cinema was concerned, a new breath was taken, culminating, I suppose, with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a maverick genius, who made a wonderful film from a novel by Nabokov and then, deliberately, for reasons best known to himself, cut it to shreds and destroyed perhaps the best film work I had ever done. In despair – which happened also to be the unhappy title of the film – I decided to lick my wounds and pull out again. It was a long haul this time: twelve years. But, quite suddenly, fate took a hand and altered my tracks.

One dull day a good friend telephoned me to ask for the private telephone number of an actor she was trying to contact in order to send him a script. She had an address, but felt that it was essential to speak to him as well. Naturally, even to a good friend, I could not divulge the actor's private number. Private, after all is said and done, is simply that. Private.

This caused a good deal of impatience. ‘Oh, come on! I won't flog it to the
Sun!
It's terribly important. Bertrand Tavernier is just about to start work on a script and he wants to talk to Xyz. Just his number? Be sweet.'

At the mention of Tavernier's name I was instantly alert. Bells rang, the day was suddenly no longer dull. The actor whose name she wished to secure was more or less my age. That is to say, anything he could reasonably be expected to play I probably could. From the point of view of age anyway. Curiosity pushed me to the edge of discretion. I paused on the brink. Fell. ‘What is the script? Do you know?'

‘It's one you turned down five years ago, actually. They want to go ahead now, with Xyz.'

‘And Tavernier?'

‘And Tavernier. He has already cast the other two roles, now he wants to talk to …'

Memory drifted back. Five years ago or so I had indeed read a rather whimsy-cutesy script about a dying man, his sullen wife and his mournful daughter. There was rather a lot of ‘Daddykins' and
‘Pussykins' in it, and it didn't in all truth seem a role for me. So I set it aside.

More to the point, five years ago there was no sign of Tavernier being in any way connected with the project. I had seen almost every film he had ever made and knew, perfectly well, that I would walk barefoot across Antarctica for the chance to work with him.

Was my friend absolutely certain about Tavernier? She was. And Jane Birkin, a huge star in France, was to play the daughter.

Heedless of shame, I put the situation into turn-around on the spot. Could my friend tell Tavernier that I would like, very much, the chance to reconsider my ill-judged decision of five years ago and would play the role under his direction whatever the script was like? If, however, it was too late, and he was absolutely set on Xyz, I would give them the agent's number.

‘Look, I'm just a friend of Jane Birkin's, I'm not a ruddy agent! She has asked me to get the number.'

‘Be sweet. Could you find out for me?'

She did; I was accepted. And spent the next three days in a state of terror and joy. Terror that I would have to go back to the cinema again after a happy twelve-year holiday; joy that Tavernier had agreed to me and not my rival.

Why, I wonder, did I expect him to be neat, simian, dark, intense? A kind of Truffaut or Malle? I suppose the extreme elegance and intellectualism of his work had given me this completely false image of him. The man who arrived for lunch was quite the opposite. A bear-like man, tall, a shock of white hair, laughing eyes behind thickish glasses, a bursting laugh, perfect English, quite immaculate in tweeds and lace-up brogues (these I would not see again once work started).

This was a Professor, albeit a young one, not a Movie Director. It seemed that we talked together endlessly about my role: he was sympathetic to my doubts about the script, but offered a new version which was, indeed, a great deal better.

The ‘Daddy' was far less aged and frail; I suggested that we try to make him rather more of a bourgeois fellow, a man who was not altogether lovable; ageing, lonely, afraid, and reaping the
rewards of his solitude, of his selfishness and years of neglect of both his wife and his daughter. Brought face to face with a bleak, not to say improbable, future, he was trying to adjust. Not very well.

I wanted him to be a bit of a fibber rather than a downright liar, a man not lacking in charm, not unaware of the good things of life, desperately trying to hold on to the drifting wreckage of his life.

To all this Tavernier agreed. I knew that it was up to me to demonstrate this creature we had decided on, when we got to France and down to work. This was a director who would improvise as one improvised; as the character of ‘Daddy' developed, so he would assist by adding or, perhaps, by subtracting. It was evident from the very beginning that it would be a joint venture. We would create together; I would not be left to wobble about alone. A merciful delight.