Untold Stories (39 page)

26
April, New York
. A middle-aged woman on the bus; a man sitting behind her opens his paper rather noisily and the woman turns round.

At this point the bus passes an anti-Castro demonstration on behalf of Elian Gonzalez and an argument breaks out in which the whole bus takes
part, the (quite sensible) conclusion being that there wouldn't have been any fuss at all if it had been his mother claiming the boy not his father.

7
May
. I'm coming to the end of
Ravelstein
, Saul Bellow's novel supposedly based on his friend and associate Allan Bloom. I'm never entirely comfortable with (and never unaware of) Bellow's style, which puts an almost treacly patina on the prose – designer prose it is, good, tasteful and self-evidently rich. In this book he writes about the rich too, Ravelstein suddenly a multi-millionaire from the success of his book (Bloom's original book called
The Closing of the American Mind
). I'm perhaps behind the times here but I would have thought it unlikely for such a book (even when widely translated) to make its author a multi-millionaire (and certainly not if he or she is with Faber and Faber).

Bellow has a good time detailing the evidence for and display of this newly gotten wealth – a suite at the Crillon in Paris, neckties from Hermès, shirts from Turnbull and Asser and a mink thrown on the bed. Though Chick, the teller of the tale, is in a more modest way of things, I'm not sure these evidences are volunteered with an eye to their vulgarity, and there is an Ian Fleming-like knowingness about him – the best place to stay, the shop to buy shirts, etc. Bellow's presentation of vulgarity itself vulgar. But maybe I'm missing something here and it's all part of Bellow's take on Bloom.

In the past it's Bellow's women I've found trying, generally heavy-breasted, a touch exotic and very much in control. The woman most closely scrutinised in
Ravelstein
is rather different. This is Vela, Chick's Serbian first wife – slim, fastidious and over-discriminating. To viewers of
Cheers
or
Frasier
she will not be unfamiliar, as she sounds very like Frasier's ex-wife Lilith, and Niles's ex-wife, Maris.

14
May
. A group of women, care-workers or probation officers, white and black, are coming out of the resettlement centre on the corner of Arlington Road. ‘Hello!' says one to a new arrival whom she kisses. ‘Hello, you motherfucker.' This is said in such lazy affectionate tones,
with ‘Hello, you old cunt' I suppose once the equivalent but these days not permitted.

20
May
. Nick Hytner is in the second week of rehearsals of Tennessee Williams's
Orpheus Descending
at the Donmar. We chat in Maggie Smith's dressing-room in the interval of
The Lady in the Van
, Maggie saying that Tennessee Williams had a distinctive laugh and when she was playing Hedda Gabler at the Old Vic she kept hearing him chuckling in the stalls at wholly inappropriate moments, Hedda's predicament seeming to him a huge joke. Similarly footage of thousands made homeless by typhoons could reduce him to helpless laughter.

21
May
. Gielgud dies. Asked to appear on various programmes, including the Nine O'Clock News, but say no. Reluctant to jump on the bandwagon, particularly when the bandwagon is a hearse. Some notes:

Despite the umpteen programmes of reminiscence Gielgud did on both radio and television there was always more and I never felt he had been sufficiently debriefed. Anyone of any distinction at all should, on reaching a certain age, be taken away for a weekend at the state's expense, formally interviewed and stripped of all their recollections.

It was hard to tell if he liked someone, only that he didn't dislike them. I think I came in the latter category. I went round to see him after
Home
and he said how much he liked David Storey. ‘He's the ideal author … never says a word!'

In
Chariots of Fir
e
he shared a scene with Lindsay Anderson, both of them playing Cambridge dons. Lindsay was uncharacteristically nervous but having directed John G. in
Home
felt able to ask his help, saying that if he felt Lindsay was doing too much or had any other tips he was to tell him. Gielgud was appalled: ‘Oh no, no. I can't do that. I shall be far too busy thinking about myself!'

The last time I saw him was when we were filming an episode of the TV adaptation of
A Dance to the Music of Time
. We were supposedly talking to one another but the speeches were separately recorded and intercut. His
speech was haltingly delivered (but then so had mine been) and we did several takes. At the end he was given a round of applause by cast and crew, which I felt had not much to do with the quality of the speech itself so much as his having stayed alive long enough to deliver it. I imagine this kind of thing happened on most of the jobs he did (and he did a good many) in his nineties, and it was probably one of the things he hated about being old as there was inevitably some condescension to the applause. But he would just smile, do his funny snuffle and say that people were awfully kind.

23
May
. Watch the
Omnibus
tribute to John G. in which
Oedipus
and
Forty Years
On
, which came after it, both go unmentioned, though much is made of
Prospero's
Books
, largely because he took his clothes off in it (not, incidentally, for the first time, as he did so in Bob Guccione's
Caligula
; this too goes unmentioned, though more out of kindness, I would have thought). To some extent the omissions simply reflect the material that is available – the programme is archive-led. The BBC did have film of
Forty Years On
but lost it or wiped it or certainly made no effort to preserve it, though I would have thought that even in 1968 it was plain that any film or tape of Gielgud needed to be set aside. Thirty years and more later, I doubt the situation has improved much and it remains a scandal that a public corporation should still have no foolproof archive system.
*

Letters from Gielgud were always unmistakable because of the one-in-five slope of his handwriting, the text sliding off the page. I always felt it was slightly unfriendly that I'd never been invited down to Buckinghamshire but then I reread a letter he wrote me after I'd reviewed one of his books and in it I find an open invitation to lunch any time, with telephone number, directions, and how to get from the station. So now, of course, I feel mortified.

31
May
. Carnations are an unregarded flower nowadays, on sale at garages and supermarkets, packaged and mass-produced and utterly without scent. A young man, a boy still really, going into Cambridge on Saturday afternoons and fancying himself a bit of a dandy, I used to buy a carnation for my buttonhole and it would scent the day – musty, rich and, as I thought, sophisticated. I buy them still in Yorkshire because the garden is over-supplied with lady's mantle,
Alchemilla mollis
, and in early summer particularly the red carnations and the sharp fresh green of the alchemilla light up the room.

13
June
. At supper Alec Guinness tells a curious story apropos a BBC documentary on Anthony Eden last night. In pre-war days Eden used to see a good deal of the theatre director Glen Byam Shaw and when he was contemplating resignation over Abyssinia in 1938 he sought Byam Shaw's advice. Byam Shaw said that his advice wasn't worth having as he knew nothing of politics, but Eden said that wasn't what he wanted. He needed to know how ordinary people would react: who would know that? Whereupon Byam Shaw took him round to Lord North Street, where the impresario Binkie Beaumont lived, and they put the question to him. ‘Resign,' said Binkie promptly. And so he did. Binkie Beaumont as voice of the people sounds odd and indeed alarming and A.G. isn't always a reliable witness or when he's been told a story will often get it wrong. But this one is so peculiar as to seem not unlikely.

Whenever I see anyone with a shaven head, a boy particularly, I still think of them as poor, as such boys generally were when I was young. I even thought it of Beckham yesterday, sullenly leaving the pitch in Eindhoven.

17
June, Yorkshire
. In the morning I find a bee trapped under a cloth in the house and revive it by giving it a blob of honey into which it sticks its tongue or nozzle or whatever, greedily sucking it up so that it soon gets back its buzz and flies away. Contrast this with the evening when I go out with my salt pot and ruthlessly track down slugs and snails, the awful cocktail of salt and slime now waiting by the garden window to be emptied.

18
June
. Halted at Doncaster this evening by an electrical fault, we are eventually turned out onto the platform to wait for the next train. It's a blessing, though, as it's around 7 o'clock and the platform bathed in sunshine still. Fifty years later, and still a sucker for summer evenings, I remember the hours spent waiting on country platforms in 1948 or 1949 when I had a Runabout ticket and went all over the North and East Ridings. The mood persists when we get back on the train so that the landscape seems taken back in time: the fields as plush and waist-deep in corn as they ever were, embankments thick with blossom-laden elders and in the hedgerows even, it seems, elms still – all suspended in amber evening light.

All this is much better put in John Cheever's
The Wapshot Scandal
:

12
July
. I don't hear many sermons nowadays but they don't seem to have changed much – viz. the Archbishop of Canterbury at yesterday's service for the Queen Mother: ‘She is someone who can help us to travel that country we call life.'

24
July
. The
News of the World
publishes photographs of dozens of paedophiles whom it labels beasts and wants ‘nailing'. I wonder if in the seminar room of Oxford's Rupert Murdoch Professor of Communications such tactics are the subject of academic discussion: ‘Naming and Shaming: Rebekah Wade on Circulation Boosting, Its Postures and Properties'.

5
August
. I saw Alec Guinness two days before he died. Though the papers say he had been ill for some time he had not been seriously incommoded until the last few weeks and had no notion that he was dying.
Almost the last thing he said to me as I was going was to ask where I was getting the train.

‘Petersfield.'

‘Liss is better. It takes ten minutes off the journey.'

This bending you to his will, gently though he did it, was entirely characteristic and the way he had always been, particularly on the hundreds of occasions he took me out to supper.

‘What are you having?' he would ask.

‘I thought I'd try the bream.'

‘Oh, the bream? Are you sure?'

‘Yes, I rather fancied some fish.'

‘Sure you don't want the lamb? It's very good here.'

I hesitate.

‘No, I think I'd prefer the bream.'

‘Would you? Oh.'

He seemed disappointed so I would relent.

‘Oh, all right. I'll have the lamb.'

‘You don't have to. Have the bream by all means.'

And so we would go on in a ritual with which all his dining companions were familiar: part of a procedure designed to make sure you weren't just choosing something because it was cheap (this, except at the Connaught, seldom entering my head) or to please him, though pleasing him and endorsing his choice were often the quickest way of terminating the discussion. So on this last occasion I should have said I'll go via Liss but don't, and this time he is too weak to argue.

His bed has been brought down to the corner of the living room so that when he lies down, a handkerchief over his head against the sun, he is effectively turning his face to the wall. Still I come away with no notion that this is the last time I shall see him. People keep ringing up to console me. It's like being consoled for the destruction of a view or the disappearance of a part of the landscape.

8
August
. To the Cottesloe in the evening to talk to Humphrey Carpenter
about his book
That Was Satire That Was
and answer questions from the audience. It goes well enough though I feel only slightly less inarticulate than I was in the period we are discussing. At one point Humphrey asks me about the end of satire and what I feel about it now. It's another question I don't satisfactorily answer and wake in the night wishing I'd thought to recall my last satirical fling, sometime in the early 1980s at Drury Lane in an Amnesty concert,
The Secret
Policeman's
Other Ball
, and a sketch I did with John Fortune.

Two upper-class figures are comparing notes about sex, one of them picking up lorry drivers (or what he fondly imagines to be lorry drivers) in the lavatories of Notting Hill, the other claiming to have exuberant sex with his wife. The best line comes when the gay one asks, re some straight-sex marathon:

‘How long did it go on?'

‘Well, if you include the foreplay and the wind-down afterwards, I don't suppose we had much change from three hours.'

‘
Three hours?
Good God! you could be in Leeds in that time!'

The audience, which had come expecting to chant the
Python
parrot sketch, didn't like all this talk of sex one bit (didn't like anything, I suspect, that they hadn't heard fourteen times before) and we came off to virtual silence, the other performers, as is usual on such occasions, gathered in the wings to watch, now drawing back from us in a very New York fashion lest our lack of success be somehow infectious. That was the end of satire for me and also, I'm happy to say, the end of appearing in those mammoth charity shows which always turn out overlong, slyly competitive and never the least bit heart-warming.