Going Up (26 page)

I was told, through George Greenfield, that Hilary Rubinstein was not entertained by
Obbligato
; whether V. G. himself ever read it, who knows? George sent the manuscript to Macmillan’s, where it evoked enthusiasm from, among others, Jack Squire, a literary sportsman left over from the 1930s. ‘This man has twenty more funny books in him,’ he said. ‘Grapple him to you!’ Another Macmillan reader queried my assertion that a ‘wing three-quarter’ would have a rare turn of speed. Squire endorsed my simile: I was evidently someone who knew his rugger. The only time I had played the game, or something like it, was at Charterhouse, when we used a soccer ball and goalposts.

My editor at Macmillan was Alan Maclean. His brother Donald had decamped to Moscow in 1951. Although never suspected of treason, Alan had to leave the Foreign Office. He was relegated to easy internal exile in the panelled offices of Macmillan’s in Sparrow Street, behind the Haymarket. His nervous chortle may have been a consequence of his brother’s misconduct, but Donald’s name was never mentioned. Alan had a flat in Oakley Street and two season tickets for Chelsea. When I went to games with him, he always carried a silver flask of whisky. The plan was to publish
Obbligato
in May 1956. I had my photograph taken by Mark Gerson. I wore my Adamson’s suit and smoked a sophisticated cigarette. The smoke made me narrow my eyes.

Whenever Leslie and I went to the MCA offices, Jock Jacobsen would say ‘Hullo there, Leslie, and … heh heh heh.’ I seemed powerless to evade Leslie’s company. Dreading the places that he promised we were going, I was unable to resist going with him. He took me to Binkie Beaumount’s office above the Globe Theatre. We went up, slowly, squeezed together in a tiny lift that resembled the one of which Robert Benchley said, ‘One more person in there and it would’ve been adultery.’ We were joined by Billy Chappell, whom Leslie had recruited to direct the professional production of
Lady at the Wheel
. Billy was dressed like a juvenile lead in an Edwardian musical: check tweed suit, waistcoat with little lapels, its buttons covered, like those on the jacket, in the same tweed. His clipped, nasal voice emphasised the drollery of
absolutely every word
he said.

Binkie was fleshy and sleek, with whitening abundant hair, cool, damp hands. Through the window behind his desk, I could see the backside of the letters EILLIL ECIRTAEB on a rack around the front of the theatre. He smiled with seasoned charm, forcing bonhomie into grey-brown eyes. The mask never slipped; that was how you knew it to be a mask. No one could have looked more imperiously impartial; thumbs up or thumbs down, the expression would never change. Little Billy sat in a green wing chair, high-backed and so deep that he had to perch on the edge for his feet almost to reach the ground. His exchanges with Binkie had a coded innocence, like the pre-arranged passwords of seasoned spies. Leslie had told me that if he were ever invited to Binkie’s place in the country, known to insiders as ‘Pinching Bums’, and anyone tried anything, he would immediately get married to Julie Hamilton.

One afternoon, on some futile, show business-like mission, Bea Lillie and Leslie and I drove out in a taxi to Borehamwood Studios, where Leslie had
some appointment to which I was not privy. He left me in the ticking cab to look after Bea. Bundled like a fleshless bird in a fur coat, she said, suddenly and sadly, ‘Is there an afterlife, do you know?’

Aware that she had lost her husband and her only son in the war, I said, ‘Oh Bea, I wish I could say that I thought so. I truly don’t know.’

She said, ‘Well, if you don’t know, does Hannen Swaffer know?’

Hannen Swaffer was a
News Chronicle
journalist with a frequently pronounced belief in spiritualism. Bea’s perky change of register implied that she had little faith in the advocate of what she so much wanted to believe. I recalled that it was said a pigeon had once flown into her room in a New York hotel. She looked up and said, ‘Any messages?’ I was sorry not to play the happy pigeon for her. I also wished I was not wasting my day.

Thanks to Leslie, who was celebrating his last night at the Globe Theatre, Beetle and I were invited to another of Ken Tynan’s late-night parties. A master in the art of taking while seeming to give, Ken had borrowed Larry Adler’s house in Norfolk Street, St John’s Wood. A maid let us into a hallway where there was an electric xylophone. Flattened geraniums figured in the wallpaper; there was red paintwork on the stairs and on the frames of the glass doors to the kitchen. Tall and languorous, Ken saluted us and dangled a white hand. It was as if you were being dared to reach and touch something fishy in a penny arcade. He had a pale, pendulous face, loose lips, half-closed eyes. In his grey suit with a white shirt, his torero’s string tie throttled in a leather toggle, he might have been a dissolute scoutmaster.

Hermione Gingold, a
grande dame
in a tattered, flowery blue garment offering glimpses of grey underwear, was at the receipt of custom on a prolonged brown sofa. ‘Is there room at your feet?’ the young men asked. ‘There is
always
room at my feet.’ Among the company was Diana Dors, whose ready-when-you-are bearing announced her to be the bargain basement Jayne Mansfield; and so, it was said, was Jayne Mansfield. The last job of Miss Dors’s pneumatic career would be to play the middle-aged,
overweight Helen of Troy in
Of Mycenae and Men
, a satirical substitute I wrote for Aeschylus’s lost Satyr play, as an appendage to the television production of my and Kenneth McLeish’s 1978 translation of the
Oresteia
. Dors seemed to be more difficult, and much later to rehearsal, than her talents justified. In fact, she was dying, bravely, of cancer.

The brightest star at Ken’s party was Pamela Brown. Her air of dangerous scorn had brought her great success in Christopher Fry’s
The Lady’s Not for Burning
. The eyes were brilliant and unseeing, like a drug addict’s; she moved with smoothly concealed lameness. When Ken’s diaries were published, with their almost touching mixture of vanity and self-incrimination, sentiment and heartlessness, wit and puerility, it was disclosed that one of his many fugitive affairs had been with the delicious ‘cripple’ who proved complicit with his spanking desires. His whole life, from Oxford onwards, was dedicated to making and breaking, in one way and another: fan and assassin, self-advancing and self-destructive, soloist and dramaturge, Ken was the theatre’s chief whip.

As we left Larry Adler’s house, Hermione was pecking at the xylophone in the hall, singing ‘Strangers in Paradise’ in a garlicked French accent. I saw her again not long afterwards, for professional reasons. Roy Speer had produced the radio version of
Out of the Blue
and was now preparing
Grande
Gingold
, a radio series for which he recruited me to supply material. Would I go and discuss ideas with her? Hermione was living in Capener’s Close, an enclave off Lowndes Square.

I climbed a long, straight internal staircase into the black-walled drawing room where Lady Eulick Brown, Hermione’s adjutant, greeted me expansively. Hermione arrived and said, ‘Hello!’ I noted later that she was ‘like emery paper trying to pass for chiffon’. She was wearing a blue dress with a pink rose at the throat and long pink gloves. It was as if
Fallen Angels
was still running.

Her counsellor, Lord Eulick Brown, was tall and disjointed, in a brown
suit; dirty brown hair; yellowy, lean face; prominent nose; long white hands, fingers held apart from each other as if they were drying. His wife wore bifocals, the smaller lens set like a bull’s-eye within the larger; at the centre, the black pin-head of her iris, as if an expert marksman had just plugged her. It was scandalous, she told me, how much publicity that dreadful Hermione Baddeley got from working with Gingold.

The latter’s slim, fair-haired boy, Miles-y, turned up as we were sipping Nescafé from Rosenthal china cups decorated with stripes and little lozenges, like cough sweets on the ends of fishing lines. He had just fetched her poodle from the vet’s; one good poodle deserved another. Hermione’s four-legged darling had had a swelling in a place he simply couldn’t mention. Because madam had never bothered to house-train it (it lifted its leg everywhere, but
everywhere
!), it was moored downstairs in the yard, where it could flirt beyond its means with the Browns’ tall terrier bitch. I left with a brief to supply a ten-minute monologue in which Hermione would deliver advice to her female listeners in something like the tones of Evelyn Home, the agony aunt who featured weekly in
Women’s Own
.

Thanks to Leslie’s zeal for networking, we had a meeting with Eric Maschwitz, who had been Hermione’s pre-war lover. Now head of light entertainment at BBC television, he wore a dark suit and had a shrivelled face, a bank manager’s flat, grizzled moustache, clubby tie and caution with funds. It was difficult to visualise him as the composer of
These Foolish Things
, which he had written in Hermione’s honour. ‘A cigarette that bears a lipstick’s traces / An airline ticket to romantic places / And still my heart has wings / These foolish things … A telephone that rings but who’s to answer / The winds of March that made my heart a dancer … / A fairground’s painted swings / These foolish things remind me of you.’ The potency of cheap music, and sophisticated lyrics, supplied the very stuff of romance
à deux
; oh, how the ghost of them clings! Now the once delectable Gingold and her rhymester lover were prosaic and raddled antiques. I was
reminded of two facing photographs in an old edition of
Lilliput
. On one page was the frozen beauty of Rodin’s
The Kiss
; facing it was the image of a creased old lady who, in her youth, had been his model.

While Leslie was on tour with Bea, Tony Becher and I got together, in Chelsea Embankment, every weekend to compose Hermione’s monologue for
Grande Gingold
. Tony’s first-class degree had secured him a prestigious job at the Cambridge University Press. He now called Wisdom ‘John’ and was able to report the latest philosophical gossip from Oxford, where the caustic J. L. Austin was the current arbiter of sagacity. Best known for the term ‘performatives’ (utterances – such as ‘I apologise’ – which are also, allegedly, actions), Austin had a destructive dryness that withered his challengers, even the tart Freddie Ayer. His prose style was singularly desiccated: unlike almost any other writer I have known, he made a fetish of putting a comma after ‘a’, allowing for the insertion of some punctilious qualification of his main point. There seemed not to be a lot of fun in meta-Wittgensteinian philosophy; its wine was so dry that there might as well have been nothing in the glass.

Tony and I shared the £25 fee for our Gingold monologues, but not the happy chore of going to rehearsals, where I did last-minute cutting and stitching. My £12.10s covered the rent and our household bills. It had to: the weekly payment of £6.10s, for the numbers in
An Evening with Beatrice Little
I had written with Leslie, had stopped abruptly. When I called Tennant’s offices to ask why, I was advised to look at the contract. Close inspection would show that it stipulated that I was to be paid only so long as
An Evening with Beatrice Lillie
was running in the West End. Now that it was on tour, therefore, my stipend ceased; his payments did not. D. H. Lawrence said ‘business is no good’. I have never been good at it.

When Tony had gone to catch his train, I typed the final draft of our weekend’s work, delivered it to Capener’s Close and then waited in Chelsea Embankment for Hermione’s reaction. On the first occasion on which
she phoned, she said, ‘I’ve read the script, darling, and it’s
all wrong
. Will you come round first thing in the morning?’

‘When’s that exactly, Hermione? Eight-thirty? Nine?’

‘Eleven o’clock, darling. No later.’

Hermione was leading me towards a cushioned alcove when a man’s voice called out, ‘Let’s have a dekko at your latest then, Hermene.’ A British film director with a hyphenated name, more or less in pyjamas, and in need of a wash, was somewhat under a single grey sheet on the sofa in the drawing room. I stood there and he looked at me for a second or two. Then he said, ‘Never mind.’

As Hermione dissected the script, I thought her tactless and peremptory. In truth, she was patient and educative. The following week there were fewer ineptitudes.
Grande Gingold
was broadcast live, from the Playhouse Theatre on the Embankment. Miles Rudge wrote a segment in which subsidiary parts were played by Ken Connor and a genial, obese actor called Alexander Gauge, who had been Friar Tuck in a BBC TV series, starring Richard Todd as Robin Hood. In a
Take It From Here
sketch, Frank Muir and Denis Norden did a parody of
Destry Rides Again
, set in Sherwood Forest, in which the Marlene Dietrich
chanteuse
dared to sing, ‘See what the Boys in the Buckram will have, and tell them I died of the same!’ For our purposes, Gauge was now christened Gregory. Hermione had a regular line: ‘Tea, Gregor
ee
?’ Pause. ‘Millock?’ Who else could have got laughs from such tepid material?

I had the silly satisfaction of corpsing her, once, on mike. Our household hints included a recipe for whale meat, which had, until quite recently, been part of the nation’s austere diet. The script required Hermione to say, ‘When you ask your fishmonger for it, he may well respond, “Whale meat again, don’t know where, don’t know when.”’ She had sighed when first she read it, but declaiming it live,
à la
Vera Lynn, she was suddenly convulsed. She averted herself from the microphone, turned back, tried again and then
had to turn away again. The audience caught the contagion and covered the hiatus with laughter; there was no unprofessional breach of continuity.

David Gore-Lloyd was having radiation treatment for his testicular cancer. My father always visited sick friends when they were in hospital. I went several times to the Westminster Hospital and tried to amuse David. White as the sheet on which it had been written, he gave me his short philosophical paper, in Rylean style, on Intention. It seemed like proof of his determination to recover. He was confident that the treatment was making him feel rotten, not the disease, which was ‘under control’. I feared that he was dying and pretended I did not, which made my visit a performance; and easier to sustain. He never complained about the cruelty of his affliction. He was the only person I ever met who called a teaspoon a ‘winder’ (as if for winding things up). He insisted on withdrawing cash from the bank in pristine red-brown ten-shilling notes. He was forever supping on his fingernails, one after the other, as if mouthing some silent flute.