Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings (25 page)

For a few minutes, the three of them – the philosopher and the actress and the dog – let their minds drift through the mellowness of the Indian summer. ‘Care to come over one afternoon for tea?’ asks Russell.

‘I’d love to.’

‘When?’

‘At the moment, I’m here most of the time.’

‘Good, tomorrow afternoon. Five o’clock.’

He says goodbye to Addo, rises and crosses the street without looking back; but Sarah can feel his mischief brewing. The next day, she knocks on the door of number 43 sharply at five.

‘Right on the dot. I am impressed. Come on in and make yourself at home.’

For Sarah, ‘his eyes dazzled with a friendly foxiness’. She is captivated by his house, its dusty old furniture and fraying carpets. She sits down on a wobbly chair that topples over.

‘Sorry. We’re all a bit dilapidated in here.’

He goes into the kitchen, and bids her follow him. ‘Don’t leave me to make tea all on my own!’

The sunlight spotlights his silky silvery hair. ‘Holding his head sideways, he reminded me of a remarkably alert mottled hawk, scrutinising my every move.’

‘I trust you’ll take cucumber sandwiches with your tea?’ He starts cutting a loaf of brown bread. ‘Each slice has to be paper thin, enough to see daylight through.’ He places his hand between a slice of bread and the
window. ‘Hopeless,’ he says, throwing it in the bin. He cuts another; it too fails the test, so he chucks it in the bin too. And another.

Sarah realises they have not introduced themselves.
¹⁰²
‘What’s your name?’ she asks.

‘Someone told me you were a film star,’ he replies, ‘yet I don’t need to know your name.’

By now, he has assembled six acceptably thin slices of bread from a whole loaf. They are ready to be buttered. Sarah tells him that she has never been able to butter bread without tearing it.

‘Ha! It’s all in the butter texture. Easy when you know how.’

He beckons her over to watch. ‘No fun to be had in a mean sandwich.’

He gives her a funny look, as if they are talking about much more private things. Dirty old man, thinks Sarah, who then catches him peering up at her breasts.

‘Essential that everything be paper thin except the quantity. Now for the cucumber. Here again, there must be plenty of daylight.’

Again, he raises his hand between the slice of bread and the sunlight. ‘Ample,’ says Sarah. ‘Three sandwiches each.’

‘Incorrect.’ Obviously no mathematician, thinks Sarah. But he piles them on top of one another and slices them diagonally down the middle. ‘Six each.’

They sit down to eat the cucumber sandwiches off Russell’s porcelain peacock tea-set. As they eat, he keeps squeezing her knee under the table, ‘not half-heartedly, either’. Sarah is thankful Addo is nearby, asleep beneath the table. Russell asks all the questions, so she leaves his house knowing nothing about him at all.

A week later, he invites her back. Again, he asks all the questions. She thinks it is a way of distracting her attention from the tweaks he is giving her knees. She doesn’t know how to tell him to stop, so lets him carry on.

‘You didn’t tell me you were Bertrand Russell.’

‘You never asked.’

She might have to leave the street, she says, because of their neighbours’ attitude to Addo.

‘What utter nonsense. Addo wouldn’t hurt a fly.’

‘Tell them that, will you?’

By now, his hand has moved from her knee to her thigh.

‘Worry not. Consider it done.’

From that moment on, Sarah Miles doesn’t hear another peep from the other residents of Hasker Street.

FAILS TO BE EXCITED BY

Bray, the Republic of Ireland

January 1961

Aged nineteen and fresh out of RADA, Sarah Miles has landed a part in a film,
Term of Trial
, opposite the fifty-three-year-old Laurence Olivier. She has had a crush on him ever since she was eleven years old and on a rainy Sunday-afternoon outing from Roedean School saw him as Heathcliff in
Wuthering Heights
. ‘The moment he stood at the window, looking out across the misty moor, searching for his soulmate and crying, “Cathy! Cathy! Cathy!” I was a goner.’

From then on, she kept his photograph under her dormitory pillow, ‘sometimes dreaming he would come galloping towards me on his white charger, scoop me up into his arms and carry me off. He had brought my first glimmer of sexual awakening, and here I was about to star opposite him.’

As her plane descends into Dublin, where the film is to be shot, she hums the song ‘Once I had a secret love, that lived within the heart of me’, and wonders whether her love for Olivier will blossom, though he is, she estimates, ‘almost old enough to be my grandfather ...’

Terence Stamp is twenty-two, and bound for stardom. He has just finished shooting his first major feature film,
Billy Budd
, and has already spent the £900 fee. His agent phones to tell him that he has been offered an audition for a role in a new film,
Term of Trial
. He reads through the script with mounting disappointment: his role is so small that he can barely find it.

‘Blimey,’ he says to his agent. ‘It’s about as big as No Smoking in the Auditorium.’

‘I know, but it will be distinguished.’

‘Yeah, maybe, but I won’t. The part is a yobbo schoolboy, strictly one-dimensional stuff.’

‘Just go and see them, all right?’

Grudgingly, he agrees. At the audition, the director wants him to put on a Northern accent. He has recently watched Albert Finney in an interview, so he mimics him saying ‘I can read, but I’m not an avid reader,’ in a broad Mancunian accent. With no intention of taking the part, he plays it for laughs, ‘clenching my teeth and rolling my eyes like an Albert’s brother who was completely off his rocker’. He is immediately given the job. ‘You’d better speak to my agent,’ he says.

They offer £2,000 for ten days’ work, but Stamp turns them down. Peter Ustinov has advised him only to take on good work, and he doesn’t think
Term of Trial
falls into that category. They raise the fee to £4,000. Reluctantly, he agrees.

It takes a whole day to film the scene in which Terence Stamp gets his gang to hold Sarah Miles down as he attempts to rape her and fails. He doesn’t enjoy it, and neither does Sarah, who is wishing fervently that it was Laurence Olivier who was attempting to rape her.

Both Stamp and Sarah Miles are having second thoughts about the film. Sarah has already lost confidence in the director, Peter Glenville. She thinks him too cultured and ‘soft’ to capture the true horror of the action: what should be a violent gang rape is, she thinks, going to end up as a polite, late-fifties-style simulation. ‘It was cold and uncomfortable lying there in the unyielding schoolyard hour after hour, knowing none of it tasted of truth ... Although this was my first film, I realised, lying there with my skirt up, that
Term of Trial
wasn’t going to turn out the winner that I felt it could have.’

Whenever she lifts her performance so as to capture the true terror of rape, Glenville says, ‘Cut! That’s too much, Sarah – we’ll have them fleeing the cinema scared to death.’ Eventually, with more experience, she will be able to judge within the first two days of any shoot whether or not the film will be a success.

She is also put out by the figure of Terence Stamp. For most people he is, she can quite understand, a tremendous sex symbol, ‘a startling creature: dark brown glossy locks and piercing bue eyes, with a virgin complexion and rosebud lips. So striking were his features, within such a pale and sullen countenance, that any healthy young maiden would have been struck right between the eyes – before being quickly struck somewhere else. But not me.’

All day, Stamp simulates raping her, and she simulates being raped; but, in truth, their minds are elsewhere. Stamp is regretting taking the money for an unsuitable part in a film in which he has no interest; Sarah is thinking of her boyfriend back home, James Fox, and, more especially, her leading man here, Laurence Olivier, with whom she has already started to flirt, and is shortly to embark on an affair.
¹⁰³

And what of Olivier?

He, too, is preoccupied by other things. He is already sleeping with Simone Signoret, who is playing his on-screen wife, but Signoret is distracted by the fact that her husband, Yves Montand, is sleeping with Marilyn Monroe. On top of all this, Olivier’s new wife, Joan Plowright, has recently given birth to a baby boy. To complicate matters still further, Olivier has suggested to Sarah Miles that ‘you should make a play for Simone. She has lovely breasts.’

Later on in the film, Sarah Miles attempts to seduce her alcoholic schoolteacher, played by Olivier, but he rejects her. ‘Listen,’ says Olivier’s character, ‘think how young you are. I’m more than twice your age. I have a wife. I love her ... You’re a beautiful young creature, but I can’t allow myself to think of you like that.’ These eerie cross-currents between real life and the drama make everything terribly complicated, particularly as real life seems so much the more dramatic.

Having finally completed his filming, Terence Stamp leaves them all to it. On his return to London, ‘to celebrate my release from bondage’, he buys himself a lovat-green Mercedes 220SE convertible with antique red leather seats, and rides around in it with the top down, freezing to death.

ADVISES

F2, Albany, Piccadilly, London W1

February 1968

Albany is the grandest apartment block in London. It is sometimes called The Albany by those not in the know. In another of those linguistic booby-traps employed by the upper classes to keep outsiders at bay, the flats in Albany are referred to not as flats or apartments but as ‘sets’. There are sixty-nine sets in Albany.

As a teenage messenger boy, Terence Stamp peeked through the back entrance in Burlington Street and looked in awe at the arcade entrance, lined with rhododendrons. Ever since then, he has dreamed of living there; now, with the success of
Billy Budd
and
The Collector
, he can afford to. He sees himself as ‘a new kind of Englishman ... very swinging, very aware, well-dressed and all that but with great phsyical and mental strength ... the working-class boy with a few bob as opposed to the chinless wonder’.

The interior decorator Geoffrey Bennison is the first person to take Stamp inside, having invited the actor and his famous girlfriend, the model Jean Shrimpton, to tea with the art critic John Richardson, whose set is on the ground floor. ‘I took in the high ceilings, the walls festooned with paintings and prints, all surfaces scattered with objets d’art ... I was under a spell.’

Richardson informs him that, until recently, residents were obliged to sign a covenant declaring that they won’t ‘behave in an unacceptable manner, keep pets, or entertain ladies overnight in their chambers’.

‘Ladies?’ replies Stamp, addressing Richardson and Bennison. ‘D’you mean I’d have to dress the lovely Shrimpton up as a chap?’

Richardson explains that the rule has now been repealed.

‘So girls live here now?’

‘Oh, yes, thin end of the wedge. Changed the whole tone. Chaps moved out, wasn’t top drawer any more.’

But Stamp is reassured, and asks Bennison to let him know if ever he hears of a set coming onto the market. Sure enough, a month later Bennison passes on the news that a Mr Timewell, who leases D1, is moving to Morocco, and wants to sell.

‘He knows it’s me?’ Stamp asks Bennison.

‘Oh, yes, dear, he knows it’s you. He’s seen that butch photo in the supplement. Quite curious to meet you in the flesh, he is.’

Stamp snaps it up. Bennison takes on the decoration, stripping D1 to its bare bones, painting the floorboards of the two main rooms white, and placing a fashionable polar-bear skin in front of the specially widened Empire bed. He covers the bed with a black, biscuit and cream overlay, with matching sausage bolsters at each end. A Goan ebony chest inlaid with flowers and clouds completes the picture. Stamp is delighted. ‘That first afternoon I rolled around on the carpet in front of the fireplace, hugging myself in reassurance it was true.’

Before long, he has developed a daily routine around Piccadilly: morning coffee at Fortnum’s, tea at the Ritz, dinner at Wilton’s. A pivotal figure in Swinging London, he lives the life of a Regency dandy. ‘There’s a timelessness here,’ he says. ‘It wouldn’t really surprise me to find the streets crowded with carriages.’

Albany has long possessed an almost collegiate feel, standoffish yet distantly familiar, with a suggestion of louche goings-on behind closed doors. Lord Byron once lived here, and so too did Edgar Lustgarten.
¹⁰⁴
The first act of Oscar Wilde’s
The Importance of Being Earnest
is thought to be based in B1, while the fictitious gentleman burglar Raffles also lives in Albany. Marmion Savage in
The Bachelor of the Albany
(1848) describes it, not inaccurately, as ‘the hospital for incurable oddities, the home of homeless gentlemen’.

When Stamp moves in, he finds that another set is occupied by the
leader of the Conservative Party, Edward Heath, a solitary bachelor, guarded and prickly, the complete opposite of swinging.

Heath took over F2 in 1963, on a seven-year lease at £670 a year, following the death of Clifford Bax, the brother of the composer Arnold. He was then aged forty-seven. Employing the interior designer Jo Pattrick, he set about redecorating it in a style described by his official biographer as ‘assertively modern yet classically restrained’, with cream walls, orange curtains, a chocolate carpet, and black leather Scandinavian armchairs. The walls are decorated with prints of uniformed soldiers, two landscapes by Winston Churchill (presented to him by the artist) and a lithograph by Picasso. On the mantelpiece stands a variety of white porcelain horses from the Spanish Riding School. Photographs of Heath with the Queen, Khrushchev and the Pope are on display on a special shelf. A Steinway grand piano
¹⁰⁵
dominates the drawing room.