Going Up (17 page)

I first met Brian Marber, who came up to St John’s in my third year, when he was sitting in Leslie’s rooms, seeking entry into the Footlights. Brian was short, light brown-haired, thick-chested and wore high-sided (handmade) black boots. He made no secret of being a Jew and had no reticence when he detected another. He was unimpressed by my notion that philosophy would be a cure for anti-Semitism and, at the same time, dissolve the peculiarity that set Jews apart. He had been in the Jewish house at Clifton, lived in Abbey Lodge, adjacent to Regent’s Park, owned a great many suits and knew how to drive. An unlikely athlete, he was a very able fencer and was soon in the university squad, later its president. It was traditional for presidents of half-blue sports to be admitted on the nod to the Hawks’ Club. Although he was clean in his habits, the committee chose not to nod at Brian.

He had in common with another Johnian of his year, Jonathan Miller,
the supposedly typical Jewish talent for solo mimicry and clowning. Even as a freshman medical student, Jonathan contrived to have a full waiting room. I saw him first in his first-floor ‘set’ in the Wedding Cake. I was in a deputation of the Gaiety that sought to enrol him in the cast for a ‘college revue’ which, when it happened, included prolonged imitations of
The Goon Show
’s ‘Bluebottle’, as played by Peter Sellers. He was sitting on the floor, aflame with ruddy curls, barefoot, in blue jeans and a circle of admirers.

Already vested with a reputation for precocious polyvalence, Jonathan was known to have appeared on comic radio broadcasts for which he wrote and performed monologues in a variety of accents, most memorably those of the poetic cricket commentator John Arlott and the naturalist Brian Vesey Fitzgerald. His father, Emanuel Miller, was a psychoanalyst; his mother, Betty, an authority on Keats. Jonathan seemed not to need friends, but was readily accessible to admirers. His hermetic habits never inhibited him from retreating into any available limelight.

Marber was a north London Jew of a thicker stripe. His father was a wholesale clothier, of Belgian provenance. He devised a routine in which an anglepoise lamp, bent and held in a variety of postures, was his only, versatile prop. There was something unnerving in his acceptance of and pleasure in being a Jew. That he was reading economics seemed to announce mercenary interests with unnecessary loudness. His friend Trevor Chinn had been with Brian in the Jewish house at Clifton. They lacked the wariness, hardly distinct from cowardice, with which Charterhouse had saddled me. They had no apprehension of being thought crude, even when they told low jokes. One of Brian’s was about the mouse whose obsessive ambition was to make love to an elephant. When, at last, he succeeds in mounting her, the elephant twitches at some vexatious bird. The mouse says, ‘Not hurting you, am I, darling?’ I winced at the Cliftonians’ brashness, and envied it. Chinn’s father owned Lex Garages. Trevor was so eager to be done with academic life that he abandoned King’s without taking a degree in order
to hasten his entry into the real, lucrative world. Trevor was at the helm of Lex Garages when, in the financial crisis of 1974, the shares fell to 17p. If I had had the mercantile wit that is supposedly the badge of all our race, I should have ventured a modest sum on them and been able to, as Guy Ramsey used to say, ‘clip coupons’ for the rest of my life.

My final bow in college theatricals was in December 1952, when I was persuaded by Joe Bain to play Samson in
Samson Agonistes
in St John’s college chapel. Vanity was the spur that prompted me to learn the hundreds of magniloquent lines in which Milton dressed his heroic alter ego. I learned them during one weekend in Jordan’s Yard, with Beetle ‘hearing’ me, over and over again. Giles Gilbert Scott’s chapel was a tall and heavy example of Victorian Gothic revival architecture. The college’s celebrated choir had to contend with the worst acoustics in Cambridge. When I started to rehearse, Milton’s words recoiled to muffle the next lines I had to say. To increase the volume served only to augment the echo.

Joe Bain supplied the solution: spoken softly, but with distinct clarity, the consonants winged the words. The key was to give each syllable distinct weight, bite and emphasis. Emotion and credibility depended less on how the actor felt inside than on getting the stresses right. Make the consonants as punctual and pointed as possible: get the words right, enunciate them cleanly, and keep the voice
up
at the end of the line and you could dispense with Stanislavskyan ‘preparation’. Charlie Chaplin always insisted that precision and economy of gesture conveyed emotion without any need for an actor actually to be emotional. Art follows accuracy.

We performed
Samson Agonistes
only three times, but the production attracted large audiences. I was flatteringly reviewed, in a pretentious fly-sheet, by a visiting pundit from the ranks of Tuscany. Thanks to Bain, Milton’s words did the work of conveying tragic pathos. At one performance I had an experience not uncommon, I have discovered, even among experienced professionals. Running smoothly along Samson’s sonorous lines,
I became conscious that much further up ahead, but coming closer, was a black hole into which a set of verses had fallen, as if in the Tay Bridge disaster. I continued fluently, and with no loss of pace or confidence, towards the abyss, hoping that as I got closer to it, I might retrieve the lost passage. I did not. When, however, I reached the lapsed segment, I managed, with scant hesitation, to accelerate, leap across the rupture and resume the words that lay on the far side.

The only other person with me on the altar steps was Harold Cannon, a stolid Philistine, who had to interject a line or two, leaning on his spear, in the section that had slided into Avernus. When I gave him his next cue, he came up with the few words that he would have spoken in the middle of the section that I had elided. I had to retreat, and repeat myself, with furious emphasis. With a Punic frown, he gave me the subsequent cue and on we went to the end, which coincided with the conclusion of my career in the straight theatre.

I wrote the ‘book’ of
Lady at the Wheel
in the Easter vacation. It was a relief from communing with great minds to create trivial characters whose principal purpose was to ease the way from one of Leslie’s numbers to the next. The plan was to stage the musical near the beginning of the following academic year. Meanwhile, in his role as secretary of the Footlights, Leslie’s business was to select a cast and material for the 1953 May Week revue. As his adviser, I found myself by chance promoted, as I had been in the corps at Charterhouse. Like the House Platoon, the Footlights had its ‘O Group’ and I was a member. It so happened, though we never cared enough to guess it, that Peter Firth, the president, was undergoing a spiritual crisis and did not regard the selection of material for the revue as a
summum bonum
. My abiding ambition was to be a published novelist. I might have chosen a more subtle model than Mr Maugham, hardly a more instructive one. The writer’s business, he said, was to build up an
oeuvre
: you spied on the world and compiled your reports without embroidery.
In my notebooks, I concentrated on noticing what was done and said by those around me rather than indulge in introspection. Why people did things was better discovered by close observation of language and gesture than by seeking to detect the ghost in their machinery. Writing things down induced clarity. Fingers had their own way of thinking. Inspiration did not prime but follow practice:
solvitur sedendo
.

As austerity lost its hold on post-war Britain, Leslie Bricusse knew just the kind of things he wanted to have when success could procure them: three white telephones on his desk and a white convertible at the door. He personified charm without egotism, salesmanship without vanity. His spruce appearance recruited a cast of good-looking females, locally and in London, on whom he made no seigneurial demands. One of our imminent chorus was Julie Hamilton, the shapely blonde daughter of Jill Craigie, a prominent Pinewood screenwriter, the wife of Michael Foot MP. Leslie told me that ‘Michael’ used to make sure that his red tie was
not
on straight when he left for what he called ‘the boys’ club’, otherwise known as the House of Commons. All the world was a stage.

During my third year, the ADC had a tributary influx of American graduate students, sponsored by beneficent foundations. Bob Gottlieb moved smartly into a directorial role by claiming to be an experienced exponent of the Method. Whether or not he ever attended Lee Strasberg’s Actors’ Studio, he had certainly acquired its jargon. His assumption of maturity was certified by his already being married. At Cambridge, Gottlieb and his then wife both wore spectacles of the same circular, horn-rimmed style. Joe Bain put it about that the reason that they were rarely seen in public together was that they shared one pair of eyes, affixed to the back of their sole pair of horn-rimmed glasses. When one Gottlieb was out and about, the other had to sit in the dark. Joe was, I am sure, motivated neither by anti-Semitic nor by anti-American malice; it amused him to compose flights of fancy. Gottlieb’s access to the ADC was eased by another American, Gordon Gould,
who was already its president. Gordon too seemed older than his English colleagues, and certainly more mature. As an actor, he had a delivery slow enough to appear modishly Methodical. If he is the same Gordon Gould who appeared in Woody Allen’s
Zelig
, he was born in Chicago only a year before I was.

I found myself in the cast for the summer Footlights revue, thanks largely to Leslie, but also to a sketch that I wrote satirising the weekly
Free Speech
television programme, in which Bob Boothby, W. J. Brown, A. J. P. Taylor and someone else (never a woman, often Michael Foot) discussed politics in a heated, yet mutually enhancing, manner. After supporting Churchill during the latter’s wilderness years, Boothby was dumped by Winston for alleged financial irregularities. As an Old Etonian Scottish MP, he became a maverick toff with a taste for louche company, such as that of the East End’s gangster twins the Kray Brothers and, on a pre-war occasion, Adolf Hitler. Never short of chutzpah, he had the nerve to respond to the latter’s greeting, ‘Heil Hitler!’ with ‘Heil Boothby!’

Impersonating Michael Foot’s man-of-the-people braggadocio, I allowed the desire to get a laugh to trump my solemn conviction that socialism was indeed the medicine for all social maladies. On the first night, when I delivered my line ‘We in the Labour Party will do everything in our power [pause, frown] to get everything in its power’, I was amazed, if not shocked, by the volume of laughter, then applause, that greeted my on-the-nose crack. As we sat there, probably for no longer than ten seconds, the realisation broke, two years after Winston Churchill had been returned to Downing Street, that the resurgent bourgeoisie was now in a triumphant majority, at least in Cambridge.

Cabbages and Kings
was an unlikely success. Its solitary star was Peter Townsend, a short, very fair, large-nosed harlequin whose bloodless complexion needed no blanching. He played no part in anyone else’s sketches and said scarcely a word in his own; it involved only one prop, a brown
paper parcel on which he somehow conferred a life of its own. If success gave him any pleasure, he scarcely showed it. He walked by himself. He got a First in English; had a brief, joyless excursion in show business; then vanished into J. Walter Thompson as a copywriter. He wanted to be a novelist, but never published a book; perhaps undue cultivation in Frank Leavis’s nursery had dried his sap. I saw him thirty years later when I gave a paper (
Some Philosophers I Have Not Known
) at a colloquium in London University. He still wore that bleak, boyish air of deferential superiority. He had had a brief marriage with the musical comedy star Elizabeth Seal.

After the last night of
Cabbages and Kings
and before the cast disassembled, the outgoing committee was due to elect the ‘officers’ who would lead the club in the following academic year. Leslie proposed that I should be in charge of ‘press relations’, either because I had told him of my father’s role in Shell or because I knew Guy Ramsey. Leslie himself was a shoo-in to rise from secretary to the presidency. Since I was on his ‘ticket’, my selection was, he promised, a formality. Tony Becher went on back to college while I waited, literally in the wings, for Leslie to come out of the long meeting. He did so tight-lipped. Some people on the committee – Dermot Hoare and Peter Stephens and Kennedy Thom, the vice-president – were of the opinion that a Jew should never be an officer of the club. These three, a freckled Hibernian rugger player, a moustachioed clerk and a cadaverous apprentice divine, held the accursed shears over the thread on which my silly future depended. As outgoing president, Peter Firth did not have a vote nor did he interject any elder statesmanlike objection to my ostracism. Years later, after he had become head of religious broadcasting at the BBC, he sought to persuade me to do a radio ‘feature’ about the Wandering Jew. He went so far in his solicitations as to accompany me in my taxi to London Airport on my way to California. I did not feel the vocation.

Standing in the wings of the Arts Theatre, I hope I laughed or at least
shrugged. There was, I assumed, nothing further to be said or done. Leslie was not of that view; he was my friend and he would not allow the outgoing committee’s decision to stand. Peter Stephens had been elected secretary for the coming year, but Leslie, as the new president, intended to find a way to unseat him. Meanwhile, he had a few ideas about how I might ‘tickle up the book’ of
Lady at the Wheel
during the long vac. He could not, if he had planned it, have devised a better way of securing my loyalty.

I stayed in Cambridge only for the few days needed to see the Tripos results framed on the Senate House railings. Both Tony Becher and I were given 2.2s in ‘prelims’ to Part Two. There was a very small number of candidates in that category; none had done any better. To no one’s surprise, including his own, John Sullivan was given a starred First in the second part of the Classical Tripos. Brian Moore, to whom I cannot remember saying goodbye, had got also a First in Classics, starless, I think. He became a long-serving schoolmaster in Bristol.