Untold Stories (25 page)

Claude Rains was another puzzle. He was determinedly silky and seldom unsmiling, sure signs that he was a baddy, though not always. There was the analyst in
Now
,
Voyager
or, more ambiguously, the Vichy police chief in Casablanca, ironic, twinkling and an advert for pragmatism. I wish the lesson I derived from these divergences from what I saw as the norm had been that people weren't always what they seemed, but probably I just wished they'd make their minds up.

Old Mother Riley apart, there weren't many funny women. I didn't go for Gracie Fields, nor did I understand why when she appeared everybody suddenly burst out singing – songs in films always something to be
endured rather than enjoyed. Still, Gracie Fields in her Northern Mill epics and excursions to Blackpool was preferable to those gloomy, haunted heroines racked by passion and driven by concerns I didn't understand and who cropped up far too often for my taste. There was Ida Lupino, who always seemed to be either blind or confined to a wheelchair; Barbara Stanwyck, who seemed to want to be a man and certainly behaved like one; and the wholesome but plain Jane Wyman, who, on account of the plainness and wholesomeness, could be relied on in the end to get her man, homespun values always winning out against brittle sophistication.

The supreme exponent of brittle sophistication was Bette Davis, and for my aunties in particular she was someone to emulate. With her clipped tones, raised eyebrow and mocking smile Bette was a standard-bearer for shop assistants everywhere and in the 1940s you could find her presiding over the counters of the smarter shops – Marshall and Snelgrove, Matthias Robinson or, in my aunties' case, Manfield's shoe shop and White's Ladies' Mantles. The Davis manner, bored, sceptical, sarcastic, was particularly effective when ‘chalking people off', as Mam called it. It was something she never had enough self-confidence to do herself but which her worldlier sisters saw as their professional duty, some sheepish Hunslet housewife trying to force her bunioned feet into a narrow 7 finding herself hardly helped by Aunty Kathleen doing her Manfield version of Bette Davis as Mrs Skeffington. When Aunty Myra joined the WAAF and went off to India she was Bette Davis too, a Leeds version of
Now
,
Voyager
, though I doubt that Aunty Myra ever had her Craven A lit by someone as refined at Paul Henreid, Australian lance corporals more her line of thing.

If not quite on the same footing as Davis or Crawford, there were a whole string of tall, elegant ‘professional women' who were stars in their own right: Alexis Smith, Rosalind Russell, Eve Arden – women who could perch casually on the edge of an editorial desk, toss one long silk-stockinged leg over the other while lighting a cigarette or consulting a powder compact. Graceful and expensive as racehorses, they were amused, ironic and sceptical; they wrote newspaper columns in papers,
edited magazines and were funny about love and romance with men just their playthings.

Mam can scarcely have thought she inhabited the same universe as these seen-twice-weekly stars and that any of us would ever come across them in the flesh was as unlikely as coming across Gulliver pegged out in Gott's Park or Horatio keeping the bridge over the Leeds–Liverpool canal. When, years later, I was playing in
Beyond the Fringe
on Broadway and wrote home to say I had actually met Rosalind Russell and Alexis Smith and a host of others besides, my weekly letters listing these occasions must have seemed like a reprise of those dark, wet wartime nights twenty years before when we all used to go to the pictures together.

Sometimes the setting of these encounters was backstage at the Golden Theatre on 45th Street, where
Beyond the Fringe
was lodged for its Broadway run, but more often than not it was the Central Park West apartment of Arnold Weissberger, partner in the firm of Weissberger and Frosch, showbiz lawyers and accountants. Aaron Frosch was the muscle in the firm (and looked it) whereas Arnold seemed to do nothing except throw parties, to which would be invited everybody currently appearing on Broadway or visiting New York from London or Hollywood. The cast was therefore staggering and I have never since been in rooms so stiff with celebrity.

What did one say to Henry Fonda or Joan Fontaine? How do you start a conversation with Judy Holliday and not mention
Born Yesterday
(an error I fell into)? How be casual with Katharine Hepburn or do anything but gaze at Steve McQueen?

My best plan, I found, was to make a mental note of who was there so that I could write home that night, then go and get some food at the vast buffet and gracefully retire. But it often turned out that the nicest people were at the buffet, or at any rate people who were more interested in eating than talking and who thus presented less of a social peril. Charles Boyer, for example, who was appearing next door to us on 45th Street in Rattigan's
Man and Boy
. With Leslie Howard he had been a particular heart-throb of Mam's. Now, napkin tucked under his chin and in that all
too imitable accent in which he'd said farewell to Ingrid Bergman in
Arch
of Triumph
, he pointed out which of the salads came up to scratch. Actually Ingrid Bergman was there, too, somewhere.

Such ancient icons, stars who might now be in decline but who had shone in the cinema of my childhood, were to me far more glamorous than their current counterparts. Here was Maureen O'Sullivan, whom I'd last seen as Tarzan's Jane in a skirt of palm leaves swinging through the jungly fronds in the arms of Johnny Weissmuller. Twenty years later, her star shone less brightly, though in reflected glory it would shortly rise again, for she was here with her daughter, a waif of extraordinary beauty wandering around the room as if somehow on offer; it was Mia Farrow, her mother therefore the mother-in-law to be of Frank Sinatra, and later still the tigerish adversary of Woody Allen.

Lauren Bacall, Gene Tierney, Laraine Day: here they all were in the un-cinematographic flesh, more worn perhaps than when we had first met in the ninepennies but still cool, still sceptical (and still smoking, very often), though they were grandmothers now as they piled their plates at the buffet table. How say I had last seen them aged eight at the Picturedrome on Wortley Road, though I fear I sometimes tried – to be met with a patient, practised smile.

Arnold Weissberger was a keen photographer, at any rate of celebrities. Indeed, he later published a book of photographs of the famous people in his life. You might hope to get away from the party unobserved but Arnold would have spotted you and followed you into the bedroom where the coats were left. Following him would come his tiny mother, who seldom left Arnold's side. And there, sometimes with his mother, he would snap you looking slightly startled and with the mountain of coats in the background. Thus it is I have a photograph of myself, just having put on my coat, and beside me is Joan Collins, though this was before she was Joan Collins and so not someone worth writing home about.

There were parties, too, when Arnold came to London, generally with his longtime partner Milton Goldman. They were held in the Savoy and were notorious for being graded according to reputation: the most famous
or the eminently successful were invited on the A night, the less so on the B night and on the C night one could practically wander in from the street. I only once made the A night, shortly after
Forty Years
On
had opened. The Burtons were there: it was not long after their marriage (or one of their marriages) and not seeing a chair handy Elizabeth Taylor, whom I had met in John Gielgud's dressing room at the theatre, perched briefly on my knee.

This was for me such an atypical situation that I find myself wondering whether I am recalling it correctly: did she sit on my knee or did I sit on hers? But this cannot have been (how would I have dared?), though I'm sure her knee would have been more comfortable than mine.

Oddly, this was not the first time I had figured in the Burton story and in a curiously similar capacity. When we had been in New York playing
Beyond the Fringe
we had got to know Burton's first (or at any rate current) wife, Sybil. She was jolly, domestic, very Welsh and living in a vast apartment on the West Side. One Sunday in 1963 she phoned and asked me if I would go with her to a film premiere at the 59th Street cinema.

Whatever partner she had been planning to go with must have cried off. I doubt it was Burton himself: he and Sybil were long past picture-going by this time. It would probably have been somebody Welsh, as the evening had a strong Celtic flavour, and in my memory the film was
The Criminal
with Stanley Baker. What I did not know, but presumably Sybil did, was that this was the day Burton had chosen to announce his divorce from Sybil. It followed that her companion had to be chosen with care, had not to be someone with whom Sybil could conceivably be thought of as conducting a liaison of her own.

Had I even the smallest liaison potential and certainly had I been something (or indeed anything) of a hunk, my presence would have been noted by the columnists who were in the audience and the photographers who were outside. As it was, nobody even noticed me: Sybil might have been there by herself. Nor was there any going on to supper or the party afterwards. I slipped away, leaving Sybil to Stanley Baker and other expatriate Celts.

In retrospect I see these two brushes with the Burtons as having a certain symmetry. One wife hitting on me as a suitably flavourless companion for the evening, the other sitting on me as a knee that would raise no eyebrows, both made me a prop in the drama of their lives far more interesting and celebrated than my own. I was, it should be said, an entirely willing prop, flattered to have had even such a small part to play in this legendary love story. Such brushes with the famous do have a name. That Elizabeth Taylor once sat on my knee is what in the Edwardian slang of the Baring family would have been called ‘a Shelley plain' (after Browning's ‘Ah, did you once see Shelley plain?'), an unlooked-for and even incongruous contact with the great.

However, that was not why the evening stuck in my memory, as I remember little of the film or of Sybil's mood or whether I even knew of the events in which I was playing a walk-on part. What made my heart beat faster was that while Sybil, the about to be ex-Mrs Burton, was sitting on my right, on my left was Myrna Loy.

I had no notion as a child that going to the pictures was a kind of education, or that I was absorbing a twice-weekly lesson in morality. The first film I remember being thought of as ‘improving' was
Henry V
, which, during our brief sojourn in Guildford, was playing permanently at Studio 1 at the Marble Arch end of Oxford Street. I saw it, though, with my primary school at the local Odeon in Guildford, and that it was meant to be educational did not stop it being, for me, magical, particularly the transition from the confines and painted scenery of the Globe to the realities of the siege and battlefield in France. The reverse process had the same effect so that the final cut back to the Globe and the actors lining up for their call still gives me a thrill.

Seeing films one also saw – always saw – the newsreels, though only one remains in my memory. It would have been sometime in 1945 and it was at the Playhouse, a cinema down Guildford High Street. Before the newsreel began there was an announcement that scenes in it were unsuitable for children and that they should be taken out. None were; having already waited long enough in the queue nobody was prepared to give up their
hard-won seat. It was, of course, the discovery of Belsen with the living corpses, the mass graves and the line-up of sullen guards. There were cries of horror in the cinema, though my recollection is that Mam and Dad were much more upset than my brother and me. Still, Belsen was not a name one ever forgot and became a place of horror long before Auschwitz.

The moral instruction to be had at the cinema was seldom as shocking as this: just a slow absorption of assumptions not so much about life as about lives, all of them far removed from one's own. There were cowboys' lives, for instance, where the dilemmas could be quite complex and moralities might compete: small-town morality v. the morality of the gunfighter with the latter more perilous and demanding of heroism, High Noon perhaps its ultimate demonstration. There was the lesson of standing up to the bully, a tale told in lots of guises: in westerns, obviously, but also in historical films –
Fire Over England, A Tale of Two Cities
and
The Young
Mr Pitt
all told the same story of gallant little England squaring up to the might of France or Spain, for which, of course, read Germany.

Then there were the unofficial heroes: dedicated doctors, single-minded schoolteachers, or saints convinced of their vision (I am thinking particularly of
The Song of Bernadette
, a film that had me utterly terrified). Always in such films it was the official wisdom v. the lone voice and one knew five minutes into the film what the hero or heroine (star anyway) was going to be up against. I suppose one of the reasons
Casablanca
and
Citizen
Kane
stand out above the rest is that their morality was less straightforward. William Empson never, I think, wrote about film but there are many the plot of which this describes:

It was a dilemma I was familiar with because it was always cropping up at the Picturedrome.

Banal though the general run of films was, I learned, as one learned in fairy stories, about good and evil and how to spot them: the good where one would expect only degradation and squalor, and treachery and cowardice to be traced in the haunts of respectability. I learned about the occasional kindness of villains and the regular intransigence of saints but the abiding lesson had to do with the perils of prominence. I came out into Wortley Road grateful that, unlike Charles Boyer, we were not called on to stand up against the Nazi oppressor or battle like Jennifer Jones against the small-mindedness of nuns or like Cornel Wilde cough blood over the piano keys in order to liberate our country from the foreign yoke. Films taught you to be happy that you were ordinary.