Maggie Smith: A Biography (17 page)

An attempt to repeat the success of
Jean Brodie
in George Cukor’s film of
Travels with My Aunt
, though not without its admirers, was a considerable failure, and further evidence that Maggie’s career had peaked and not yet found a new direction. Robert Fryer had set it up with Maggie and the
Brodie
screenwriter Jay Presson Allen (with contributions from Hugh Wheeler) two years previously, but Maggie had rejected the idea. The property then went the way of Cukor and Katharine Hepburn, and Alec McCowen was hired to play Henry Pulling. McCowen had done a read-through thinking he was being auditioned, and at the end of it, Hepburn turned to him and said, ‘How was I?’ He was at first expected to address his Aunt Augusta as ‘Mumsy’, Hollywood’s notion of how English boys spoke to their mothers. Hepburn was never happy with the script and started re-writing it herself. She was eventually fired by MGM for insisting on a longer schedule than the allotted fourteen weeks.

Robert Fryer persuaded Maggie, against her will, to take over, and Robert was cast as Visconti, the only man who ever really cared for Aunt Augusta and the first and only love of her life. The film took as long to shoot as Hepburn had forecast, chiefly because of Maggie’s laborious make-up each day. Alec McCowen recognised that she was not in the best of spirits, because of the problems with Robert: ‘She was only eating one meal a week, and that was a little smoked salmon or consommé or something. She fainted on the set one day, and yet this extraordinary energy came out. Cukor should have been a little more controlled, but he simply fell in love with her. Every time she did something, he loved it.’ McCowen has no idea where Maggie’s performance came from in these conditions. It was George Cukor’s forty-ninth film. Aged seventy-two, he instantly admitted Maggie to his private pantheon of great stars he had directed – Garbo in
Camille
, Audrey Hepburn in
My Fair Lady
, Judy Garland in
A Star Is Born
and Katharine Hepburn passim: ‘She is resourceful, inventive, and she has mystery and power. Mystery in a woman is terribly important,’ he told David Lewin in the
Daily Mail
.

One mystery was how Maggie, her face lined for the role like an old map of the Indies, managed to evoke comparisons with a Modigliani drawing, La Goulue in Toulouse-Lautrec’s poster, and, as George Melly said in the
Observer
, ‘a Beardsley lady or one of those wicked old trouts in the novels of Ronald Firbank’. Like some bizarre preparation for the other Aunt Augusta, Wilde’s Lady Bracknell, Maggie sweeps through a survey of her own colourful past, dragging her impressionable ‘nephew’ in tow and reliving her affair with Visconti in some glutinous flashback scenes (in which Maggie, her flowing ginger hair restored, eyes sparkling, manages to resemble an attractive pubescent schoolgirl). Graham Greene’s storyline, to say nothing of his superb comic dialogue, is entirely traduced and de-energised, and the unresolved ending, in which a future way of life is to be decided on the slow-motion toss of a coin which freezes in the last frame, is both idiotic and insensitive. The script, it now turns out, was mostly what Katharine Hepburn had written while holding everybody up. Jay Presson Allen told Cukor’s biographer that only one big speech was hers, and that there was nothing of Hugh Wheeler’s: ‘It was Kate’s script.’ There are handsome location shots, especially in Paris in the George V Hotel and the buffet of the Gare de Lyon. And McCowen as Henry is superb, crusty and dry as an old biscuit. But, as George Melly said, the central quality of Greene’s heroine, her irresistible charm, is missing. Maggie manages a few shafts of sudden emotion, but this is very much a performance most memorable for its make-up. And even that has the occasional, unfortunate effect of making Maggie resemble a male drag artist.

Much better, but less widely recognised, is her performance in the film she made just before
Travels
, Alan J. Pakula’s
Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing
. This curious project, scripted by Alvin Sargent, was one of many follow-ups to the 1970 weepie
Love Story
, which portrayed romance vitiated by the fatal cancer of Ali MacGraw. In
Love and Pain
, Maggie plays Lila Fisher, a lonely spinster from Bournemouth who is dying of an unspecified incurable disease and who discovers passion on a Spanish holiday with the much younger Timothy Bottoms. Bottoms, following up a notable début in Peter Bogdanovich’s
The Last Picture Show
, was also ‘crippled’ in his role – by parental expectations, asthma and his own innate sensitivity. And Pakula was hot stuff after providing quirkily enjoyable vehicles for Liza Minnelli in
The Sterile Cuckoo
and Jane Fonda in
Klute
. The result was not a smash, nothing like, but here at least are the first outlines of Maggie’s mature studies in emotional disintegration of the 1980s. One scene in particular prefigures
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne
in its glum, suicidal alone-in-a-hotel-bedroom despair. Maggie has collapsed again with her mystery illness, scrawled ‘Adios’ on the mirror and finished off the brandy, no doubt with a whispered toast of ‘Bottoms up’. Earlier, Maggie has managed to shake off a few inhibitions at a flamenco club. Bottoms misreads the signals and jumps on her lustily when they return to the hotel. Rejected, he goes next door and tearfully smashes his fist through the partition. Maggie goes into his room, cleans up his hand and starts thawing out a little herself. However unlikely this situation seems at first, the playing of it is beautiful, funny and tender. When she gets out of bed, Maggie executes what the
New Yorker
described as the first sexual pratfall by a girl in a movie. She trips over her own panties. Vincent Canby of the
New York Times
, who had disliked her intensely in
Travels
, thought she was ‘magnificently funny’, while Dilys Powell in the
Sunday Times
said Maggie presented ‘passion, shame, hysteria and a momentary disintegration which are the more telling for being muted, almost miniature’.

With her marriage under threat, there suddenly seemed a danger that aimlessness would overtake her career. She unexpectedly agreed to play Peter Pan at the Coliseum for the 1973 Christmas season. Captain Hook was not played by Robert – who would have been ideal – but by the Irish TV comedian Dave Allen, whose vocal projection over the orchestra pit left something to be desired. Allen was an old friend of both Robert and Maggie, and was at that time still married to the actress Judith Stott, Maggie’s example at the Oxford High School.

Accounts of Robert Helpmann’s production vary a great deal, but Christopher Downes, who was dressing Maggie, recalls one matinée she played barefoot, with a dreadful hangover, and the special silence she won with her query to the audience on the subject of their faith in fairies. Lauren Bacall was in the stalls with her child, and so was Peter Eyre, the actor. Of that one performance, Eyre said to Downes, ‘I think this is not the performance of the year, but the performance of the decade.’ Michael Billington was impressed by Maggie’s Peter:

The weather had changed. Peter Hall had taken over from Olivier at the National Theatre, and the Old Vic company had been altered and overhauled in the new master’s likeness in preparation for the move to the South Bank in the mid-1970s. Binkie Beaumont and Noël Coward had died. But Maggie herself was no back number. In a
Times
survey of the ‘top of the pops’ people of 1973, the British high-profile élite of sixty men and sixty women included, on the distaff side, Edith Evans at number fourteen and Maggie ‘when playing the Master’ at number thirty-one. Vanessa Redgrave just scraped in at number fifty-seven.

Maggie needed a new West End break. A play was commissioned from Charles Laurence, whose play for Kenneth Williams had been a big hit. The result was
Snap
(originally ‘Clap’, the slang word for gonorrhoea), a loose reworking of Schnitzler’s
La Ronde
in which everyone received sexual infection thanks to Maggie’s character, Connie Hudson. It was awful. Peter Dunlop was informed by his wife that he was so drunk on the first night that he was incapable of speaking to anyone. Clever ploy. Christopher Downes maintains that audiences howled with laughter during the previews, but the critics descended like a ton of bricks and killed off all expectations. The producer, Michael White, is reputed to have asked Maggie whom she would like as a director, to which she languidly replied, ‘I dunno, Ingmar Bergman or Bill Gaskill.’ Gaskill she got, and he always maintained that
Snap
was the one piece of work in his long career of which he was thoroughly ashamed. It opened at the Vaudeville in March 1974. In the programme biography, Maggie listed her favourite role as Mrs Sullen, her favourite food as oysters, her favourite music as applause and Bach, her favourite sport as watching Wimbledon and her ambition ‘to dance and sing and keep on working’. General critical uproar ensued over cheap tricks, mannerisms, prostitution of her high-class skills and an alleged inability to distinguish between rubbish and true comedy. Maggie gave it the works, jumbling her knees and elbows, falling over her own ankles as readily, said Alan Brien in
Plays and Players
, as she collided with her own syntax. But the effort was unworthy of the play, which sank like a stone the more frenetically Maggie tried to administer the kiss of life.

This débâcle coincided exactly with the final, inevitable break-up with Robert. What had gone wrong between them? Their relationship, forged in the white heat of the National Theatre’s inception, had been sustained by physical attraction and common purpose at work. Maggie had gone to the National as a West End star, Robert as a leading representative of the new intellectual theatre. Maggie took artistic respectability from her association with Robert; he assumed that her stardom and glamour would rub off on him. This happened for a while, but the mistake Robert made was to assume that Hollywood stardom would automatically follow. Admittedly he was unlucky. But he never attained the eminence on screen of his wife, nor did he win an Oscar, and William Gaskill bluntly declares that, when the balance sheet is totted up, Maggie is the greater and more resilient performer.

Robert’s understandable inability to accept this was a major factor in driving the couple apart. Temperamentally, too, they were a mismatch. Maggie’s idea of fun is to shut the door against the world, immerse herself in a couple of good books, a hot bath and the bedroom comforts of an early night. Robert liked noise, people, flowing cups and piled-high plates, and as much social brouhaha as could be mustered.

In early 1969, Robert had been signed up by Billy Wilder to make
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
, a film that was going to do for Robert’s international career what
Jean Brodie
had done for Maggie’s. He was convinced that it was going to be his ‘great statement’, like Peter O’Toole’s in
Lawrence of Arabia
or Albert Finney’s in
Tom Jones
. Wilder assured him that the film would make him a star.

He was upset that, on the occasion of his ‘one big chance’, Maggie promptly moved down to Tigbourne Court for five months, with children and two nannies, leaving him to rattle around and fend for himself in the Fulham house during the six-month filming. He asked her to read the script, which Wilder had written with his regular and distinguished collaborator, I. A. L. Diamond. Robert complained that she couldn’t care less about it. To be fair to Maggie, she had plenty on her own plate at this time, organising her work on
The Country Wife
at Chichester, coping with the disappointment of Olivier’s rebuff and caring for the baby. And Tigbourne was only half an hour’s drive from Chichester. She and Robert were committed to return to the National for Gaskill’s production of
The Beaux’ Stratagem
, and Maggie regarded the Chichester jaunt as a means of limbering up.

Robert’s view of this period was understandably tarnished by the fact that
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
was a disaster; ironically, today it is something of a cult favourite, one of those films that gradually draw their audiences into the game of it. Still, the feeling at the time was that the script fell below expectations, the acting misfired and Wilder’s direction, for once, was wayward and cumbersome. Seeds of resentment were sown which yielded poisonous fruit. Robert took the failure of this film very badly and his behaviour became increasingly erratic. He was also prone to fits of violence. But only furniture was at risk with Robert around, never life or limb.

Design for Living
in Los Angeles was an attempt to sustain the great success Maggie and Robert enjoyed in
The Beaux’ Stratagem
and
Hedda Gabler
in 1970, but the writing was already on the wall. During this period, Peter Wood, who was directing them, reckons that Robert’s various little compensatory infidelities and peccadillos were becoming intolerable to Maggie. But his behaviour was not all that unreasonable given the pain of so many dreams evaporating. Robert always flirted and dallied, sometimes drank too much and was generally at his best, his most attractive and also his most dangerous, when he was having a good time. He was, in every way, as Wood says, ‘an adorable rogue’. The relationship became a trial of strength, and Maggie was never unduly bothered, at least on the surface, about showing how strong she could be. She felt deeply that marriage was for life, for children and for loyalty between the protagonists, however much the career took over. And so did her parents. Meg and Nat got wind of trouble brewing and began to suspect that their worst misgivings about Robert were likely to be fulfilled, especially when he exacerbated the situation beyond redemption by conducting his affairs with Antonia Fraser and Vanessa Redgrave in the full public glare of the gossip columns.