The Two of Us (9 page)

Michael Hamilton was unaware of my obstinate virginity. When we returned to do a season in Bournemouth, one night after the
show he threw a tantrum about my relationship with Alec, ending with him trumpeting to everyone in the crowded theatre bar
that I was an adequate actress – he could hardly deny that in front of the paying public – but I would never get anywhere
with a nose like that. I was devastated and perplexed at the viciousness of his attack. Alec stood up for me, which made Michael
bounce about with even more apoplectic rage. After he had stalked out, Alec comforted me but did not explain what was behind
this unpleasant scene.

19 July

Greeted by a copper at Victoria who told us I had created
a stir on
EastEnders
. Shock, horror, incest. Oh, the English
obsession with sex. Or rather the press. It was one drunken
kiss from a rather sad old biddy, for heaven’s sake. They
seem not to have heard the much more shocking stuff about
me beating my children with a stick. John exhausted after
the journey. He didn’t say a word about it on the way. He
only tells me after the event – too late to help him.

As a young actor with radiant good looks Alec had been languished over by Michael and the gay community, particularly at the
BBC where he worked a lot. For a lad from Tottenham, the glamour of their social lives was beguiling. Unfortunately a young
man called Kenneth Morgan, who was a lover of Terence Rattigan, became enamoured of Alec. He left Rattigan and moved into
Alec’s flat. What exactly was the nature of their relationship no one knows but it was fated to be unsatisfactory for Morgan.
Always a disturbed young man, he killed himself when Alec was out one evening. Rattigan and many of his cronies blamed his
death on Alec’s attempts to befriend the youth.
The Deep Blue Sea
was written about this story, and it is said that the character of Freddie is based on what Rattigan knew or heard about Alec.
In many ways it is an accurate portrait of a fatally attractive but feckless man who unwittingly commands devotion that cannot
be as fervently returned.

Like Rattigan’s Freddie, Alec was in the RAF during the war. Many young men who went through the ordeal of wartime service
came out unable to cope with ordinary life. Six years of not knowing if they had a future, doing as they were ordered, and
being regarded as heroes, was confusing for such young men. At eighteen Alec was a volunteer, as were all air crew, but he
can have had no idea of what he was letting himself in for. He was a bomb aimer who could not bear bombing people. Lying flat
in the nose of the plane watching the flak from gunfire coming towards him, he had to map-read and lead the pilot to the target
and then release the bombs, often having to jump on them if the bomb doors got stuck. If the plane was attacked he also had
to man a gun, something else he hated because you could see the whites of the eyes of the people you were trying to kill.
He served in Africa, Italy and Egypt, covering hundreds of miles of hostile territory on each sortie, from which it was lucky
if 50 per cent returned. Several times he crash-landed with bits of the plane missing, once in enemy territory. On one occasion
a member of his crew caught fire in the plane and Alec cradled his smouldering body as he died on the flight back to base.

For two years he wooed me spasmodically. Sometimes in frustration he tried to break away by having a fling with someone else.
The fearful rage these dalliances put me in started me on my career as a petition obsessive. In 1955 Ruth Ellis was condemned
to death for shooting her lover who taunted her with his other affairs. Alec never did that, but I lusted after him to such
an extent that he only had to look at another woman and I was consumed with jealousy. So when it was judged that for a woman
jealousy was no grounds for murder, although it was often accepted as a reasonable motive for a man, and Ruth was ordered
to be taken to a place of execution and there be hanged by the neck until she be dead, I was beside myself. I rushed around
everywhere, stood on street corners collecting signatures for clemency and staggered up to the door of Number 10 Downing Street,
as you could in those days, with the first of many petitions on various issues. Alas, I was ignored on this occasion, but
her shocking hanging hastened the end of the death penalty.

Eventually poor Alec yielded to my conformist ideas and in 1955 he married me. My parents spent their savings on a nice wedding
with a sit-down tea at the Embassy Ballroom in Welling near Bexleyheath. My father cried a lot in his speech and later our
theatrical friends whooped it up with relatives from both sides. Alec was loath to leave such a good party, especially as
he confessed he had done nothing about his side of the wedding arrangements – a honeymoon. We ended up traipsing around London
looking for somewhere to stay. I lost my virginity in a gloomy room overlooking the dustbins in the back of the Strand Palace
Hotel.

Alec and I started married life in a dark, two-roomed basement in Pimlico, which we shared with my girlfriend Jeanne to help
out with the rent. The bathroom was also the kitchen, in which the bath became a table when covered with an old door. The
colour and vivacity of the design in the Festival of Britain Exhibition in 1951 had made us aware of the drabness of the utility
furniture and dull paints and wallpapers that we had grown up with. It took until the sixties for the new approach to filter
through to the high street with the arrival of Habitat, but I did my best to be with it. I slapped on to the walls a very
bright pink paint that I’d mixed myself with the help of red ink, and varnished the lino white to reflect what little light
there was in our basement. An interesting texture was added by the dust and stray insects that landed on it during the drying
process. My mother helped me to make covers to turn our bed into a sofa by day, with purple and mauve satin cases for the
pillows. We were kept warm by a smelly paraffin stove.

The fifties were a strange interim decade. You could feel things changing, certainly amongst the young, but we did not quite
have the courage to go with it. The reforming post-war Labour Government destroyed itself by the usual socialist infighting.
The British public got nervous, and despite the huge benefits they had received from the changes brought about by Labour,
put the toffs back in charge again. They had always felt bad about their treatment of Churchill, so back he came, aged seventy-seven,
in 1951. When he resigned, aged eighty, Anthony Eden took over, followed by Macmillan. Members of the old school with a vengeance.

20 July

Poor old Jeffrey Archer, jailed for four years. Why are
people taken in by these phonies? After I did
Any Questions
with him years ago he sent me flowers and messages and
I knew he was an upstart but he got a peerage and all sorts.
The same as when I met Robert Maxwell. Everyone was
kow-towing to him but with his dyed hair and silly
eyebrows he was obviously a figure of fun. Why did anyone
trust him? How do all these second-rate men pull the wool
over people’s eyes? But Archer didn’t deserve four years in
a hellhole for being a fantasist. It’s society’s revenge for
being taken in.

As the decade progressed our lives were getting brighter. I had learned to make a mean salad dressing in France, but was hampered
in England by having to use a medicinal yellow olive oil from Boots. Then Cullens opened in Pimlico and stocked a beautiful
French version. Only one brand and it sold out very quickly, but it was a sign of things to come.

I enjoyed the domesticity of caring for my home and husband. We acquired a kitten called Tarquin which I took on a lead to
the nearest square, there being no earth in Claverton Street for feline toilet facilities. I took him to parties as well,
affecting black velvet trousers and waistcoat to match his fur, worn with the new crippling stiletto heels. There were not
many parties for us. When we were out of work, living on the dole, we could not afford the obligatory bottle to take with
us, or to return the hospitality. Rationing had ended in 1954 but we hadn’t the money for much food anyway. In 1957 Macmillan
said that we had never had it so good, but it didn’t apply to impecunious actors. In the same year I had a spell in hospital
suffering from malnutrition.

When we were working we had no time for a social life except in digs with our fellow actors. This made for complicated love
lives. Passionate affairs lasted the season and then everyone moved on. Propinquity, Alec and I put it down to. ‘I think Bob’s
having a bit of propinquity with Sarah.’ We were thrown together in an alien world. People were very suspicious of actors.
We really were outsiders then. In a place like the Isle of Wight, where Alec and I did several summer seasons, the company’s
goings-on were legendary. Most towns had a Watch Committee composed of local dignitaries keeping an eye on people’s behaviour.
In Shanklin they kept constant vigil lest our embraces on stage became too explicit. The management had a letter of complaint
that my shorts were too short for walking down the High Street. Husbands clutched their wives tighter when we went to social
gatherings and our actors eyed up the local talent. One or two local husbands sent me naughty notes and surreptitious bunches
of flowers. The son of a prominent local tradesman became flamboyantly gay, egged on by our juvenile character actor. A sombre
note was struck when our dapper leading character man was arrested in a public lavatory in Portsmouth and committed suicide
rather than face the inevitable sacking and disgrace. You had to be a star like John Gielgud to get away with it. When Sir
John was expected back at rehearsal after his court appearance for a similar so-called crime, the indomitable Dame Sybil Thorndike
rallied the company to keep silent and not mention a word about his case. When he walked in she was overcome with emotion
and threw herself at him saying, ‘Oh Johnny, you silly bugger.’

In the towns we played on tour, everything was closed by the time the curtain came down. If you speeded up the last act you
might just manage a rushed drink before time was called in the nearest pub, but there was no hope of a meal except in the
big cities where there might be an Indian restaurant open. Nightlife was non-existent. Crewe station on a Sunday was a bit
of a treat. Only actors and fish travelled on Sundays and all our routes seemed to cross at Crewe. The buffet was kept open
and stars mingled with the riff-raff. We exchanged gossip and crossword clues and laughed over Tynan’s latest vicious review.
It was a hand-to-mouth existence but we had great fun. I enjoyed my work and the company of my fellow actors. Above all, I
felt secure with my new husband. Even Michael Hamilton was pleased – he got us cheaper as a package than individually.

22 July

Tory leadership battle a joke. I long for them to produce
someone I can hate like Thatcher. We need an opposition
to fear. A new entry for the
Rough Guide
– Harley Street
Clinic for radiotherapy on top of his chemo. Lovely nurses,
great oncologist Dr Leslie. John utterly stoic about it all.
I filled him in on what to expect. He seemed not to turn
a hair but after the session gripped my hand and said, ‘I
don’t know how you managed this all on your own. I’m
so sorry for that, my love.’ I love him so.

Another couple fell in love during a Barry O’Brien season. Vivien Merchant, a withdrawn, sensitively beautiful actress, became
my rival for parts in the company. She had an enigmatic quality that oozed sex appeal, so I got a lot of dreary plain parts
when we worked together. When David Barron joined us the two were soon an item. He was a brooding presence and supercilious
about the plays we did. It must have been torture to him to utter that crass rubbish when his head was full of ideas very
soon to be performed under his own name of Harold Pinter. In the Torquay season when we all went to the pub he was locked
away, writing in his digs. I thought he was a bit of a poseur and nowhere near good enough for Vivien. When I saw
The
Birthday Party
in 1958 I was staggered by its rich originality. Even though it was a flop, to my astonishment I discovered that our mysterious
friend was a great writer.

At the start of his career Harold’s plays had more success on TV and radio. The theatre was slower to accept him than the
growing TV audience. TV was now a significant element of public life. The size of the audience had leaped ahead with the broadcast
of the Queen’s Coronation in 1953. Two million people had sets at the time. Then, in pubs, halls and other people’s homes,
twenty million more saw the Coronation and presumably rushed out to buy sets of their own. It was a major event. Watching
in a pub in Bournemouth, my favourite moment was seeing the huge Queen Salote of Tonga waving from an open carriage in the
pouring rain. Seated opposite her was a tiny man in uniform. Apparently, when asked who he was, Noël Coward said, ‘Her lunch.’