Maggie Smith: A Biography (16 page)

For others, myself included, the performance, given without an interval, was revelatory, a long rehearsal for the suicide Hedda executed in full view of both herself and the audience (the actress usually leaves the stage). When the producer Michael Codron went to see it, a woman seated behind him turned to her companion as Maggie picked up the gun and whispered, ‘Now does she do it, or does she chicken out?’ The issue was in the balance while Maggie’s Hedda turned again and again to the mirror, vainly seeking to unlock the puzzle of her existence by contemplating her troublesome physical reality. Finally she peered accusingly into the glass for the last time and continued peering as she pulled the trigger. Bergman’s opinion of Hedda was that she was a creature of complete vanity. He told Robert of a lady critic in Stockholm who was madly in love with a theatre director and who, when the director ran off with another woman, was found lying in bed having cut her throat, with an open razor in one hand and a mirror in the other.

The first night was distinguished by the presence of Tennessee Williams sitting in a box, pretty far gone, laughing loudly at all the wrong moments. He alone seemed oblivious to the fact that the play, as
Time
magazine put it, had been removed from the sitting room into the psyche. It was clear that Judge Brack’s fondness for the back entrance in Tesman’s house was an unconscious reference to sodomy. The emasculation of Loevborg was underlined in the account of the bullet lodging in his pelvic region. Olivier’s original casting idea was for Robert to play Tesman, and Jeremy Brett Loevborg. But Robert persuaded him to reverse the roles. Instead of a beautiful Byronic wreck, Robert’s Loevborg was a convincingly passionate creation, a memorable addition to the Stephens gallery of plausibly flawed writers. As Anthony Curtis noted in the
Financial Times
, he was not the usual weak intellectual, ‘but a man of coarse and brutal strength and strong sexuality, out of D. H. Lawrence rather than Gissing. One really does believe that he might have a great prophetic book in him.’

There was a deliberate contrast between the predominant public image of Hedda and her pre-play manifestation in a white shift, shoulders bared, smoking a cigarette and shuddering with disgust, her thin, blanched face subject to spasms of tearing torture. With her severe centre parting, high forehead, tapering fingers and heavily corseted costume, Maggie’s stark physical appearance was a puritanical complement to her Jean Brodie disguise. She was so highly charged and pent-up, you felt she might explode if touched, and only the slightest facial movement betrayed the intensity of Hedda’s welling emotion. Harold Hobson concluded that Hedda had been profitably deprived of sympathy and that her performance was so generally terrifying that, when she nearly ripped out Mrs Elvsted’s hair, he jumped out of his seat. Considering that Hobson was severely crippled and had to be hoisted between chromium-plated wheelchair and plush velvet fauteuils for most of his working life, the accolade was great indeed. We must assume that Maggie’s Hedda, as far as he was concerned, was truly miraculous.

The
Evening Standard
drama panel agreed: on 25 January 1971, Maggie received the best actress award for the second time. It was handed over by Bergman, but not Ingmar – Ingrid. John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson were jointly voted best actor for their performances in David Storey’s
Home
. Whenever leading actors of the day were discussed, Maggie and Robert, but especially Maggie, were now mentioned. The great director Tyrone Guthrie, in a book on acting published at this time, said, ‘I certainly do not expect to coach or teach actors to play their parts. It would obviously be wild if I were to give lessons to Maggie Smith on how to make a line sound witty, or to suggest inflections to Sir John Gielgud.’ The film mogul Daryl F. Zanuck, thinking of teaming Maggie with George C. Scott, termed them ‘the greatest living actress and actor in the world’.

A week after Alice Ghostley had collected the
Jean Brodie
Oscar on her behalf, Maggie had a couple of days free to attend the Tony Awards ceremony in New York. She and Robert flew the Atlantic and presented a special award to Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. A direct succession was implied. But the next few years saw the alliance crumble and Maggie’s career take a few wrong turnings. She was moving past Jean Brodie’s prime, and well into her own as Mrs Sullen and Hedda Gabler.

‘I think very few people are completely normal really, deep down in their private lives. It all depends on a combination of circumstances. If all the various cosmic thingummys fuse at the same moment, and the right spark is struck, there’s no knowing what one mightn’t do. That was the trouble with Elyot and me, we were like two violent acids bubbling about in a nasty little matrimonial bottle.’

Thus Amanda sums up the situation in Noël Coward’s
Private Lives
, the last play in which Maggie and Robert appeared as a partnership. The tragic dilemma of two people who love each other too much to be able to live together was horribly appropriate. In real life, the simulacrum of their on-stage liaison, Maggie and Robert just ran out of steam. But ‘deep down’ there was always a scar left by the sparks of the fusion. After
Jean Brodie
, Robert was keen to press home the advantages of working with the film’s producer, Robert Fryer, who was in charge of the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles and host to the National on their successful visit with
Three Sisters
and
The Beaux’ Stratagem
. A producing company was formed of Bobby, Maggie and Bobby – BMB – but the only fruit was a production in Los Angeles of Coward’s
Design for Living
, in which the Lunts and Noël Coward had originally made up what the play’s standard prig calls ‘a disgusting three-sided erotic hotch-potch’. The idea had been hatched during
Hedda Gabler
at the Cambridge, where it had been decided that John Moffatt, who was Judge Brack, would play Leo to Maggie’s Gilda and Robert’s Otto. American Equity kicked up a fuss and, in spite of receiving a three-page cable from Coward himself on the matter, denied Moffatt permission. Denholm Elliott, who already had a green card, played Leo instead. Also in the cast, as the prig, Ernest, was Roderick Cook, who had known Maggie since Oxford revue days and appeared with her and Kenneth Williams in
Share My Lettuce
. The director was the ever-faithful Peter Wood, whom Robert usually translated as ‘Pierre Bois’.

Once again Maggie and Robert rented a house on the beach front at Malibu, a forty-five-minute drive from the Ahmanson. Wood stayed out there after dinner one night and travelled into rehearsal with them the following morning in the Rolls which Fryer sent each day to collect them. It was driven by Fryer’s assistant, an orphan from Bristol, whom the director, himself a West Countryman, knew very well. Wood sat up front making animated conversation. Suddenly, in a voice Wood had never heard before, Maggie said, ‘Would you mind not talking.’ The process of concentration had already begun. Wood cites this not as an instance of grandeur or pretension, but of a perfectly simple, professional request. Silence was mandatory.

The production broke all box-office records during its seven-week run, and Maggie’s ‘ankle work’ was widely approved: she wore an ivory-white satin sheath, cut on the cross, and sat on an enormous sofa, facing the front, sending semaphore signals with one leg dangled over the other. Robert made an impressive second-act entrance in a white camel-hair coat. But the reports were mixed on the impact made by the central trio, ‘the three amoral, glib and over-articulate creatures, who cannot help themselves’, as Coward called them. The unease in the off-stage marriage was unwittingly touched on by a Californian admirer, Mrs Jeannette Warnken, who wrote a letter which Maggie found hilarious and had posted on the noticeboard of the Ahmanson:

The two Bobbies wanted to take
Design for Living
to Broadway, but Maggie insisted on coming to London and playing in repertory with another production, to be directed by Zeffirelli. The proposed play was Goldoni’s
The Housekeeper
and the producer was going to be Eddie Kulukundis, the vast and genial scion of a Greek shipping family whose enthusiasm for theatre was never quite matched by his artistic acumen. Zeffirelli planned to infest the stage with crowds of villagers and donkey-drawn carts. The air would be heavy with cod Venetian accents, garlic and horse manure. Not surprisingly, Robert went slightly off his rocker at this stage, and the entire BMB project was abandoned. Binkie Beaumont was miffed that Robert and Maggie had gone to Kulukundis and not to him. His career as top dog on the Avenue had been in serious decline since the middle 1960s. The new boys there, notably Peter Bridge and Michael Codron, had taken over.

By the end of 1973, both Binkie Beaumont and Noël Coward would be dead. So the plan to revive
Private Lives
, directed by John Gielgud, starring Maggie and Robert, would be seen in retrospect as Binkie’s last West End throw. It opened at the Queen’s on 21 September 1972, and, according to close friends, was part of a desperate final attempt by Maggie to keep her marriage, and Robert himself, on the rails. Ten years later, John Gielgud wrote to B. A. Young confessing that he had heard rumours that Maggie was ‘difficult’, but that he found the experience a pleasure. She was, he said, ‘a dream girl to rehearse. I never thought Robert at all rightly cast, and their marriage was running down in a big way, though neither of them showed when they were working that they were in the middle of emotional problems. She is a fanatic about rehearsals, always so full of new touches of invention that I found it difficult to decide which were the best to keep in.’

Gielgud’s misgivings over Robert as Elyot were largely dispelled in a performance which dug deeper into the part than anyone thought possible. The overall effect was that he seemed not to be playing against Coward, but mining the text for even more intimations of mortality than are already there. A blasted intruder in the salon, rather like his Loevborg, Robert’s Elyot caught both the savage hedonism of the character’s proposals, and also the last-gasp quality of his life with Maggie: ‘Let’s blow trumpets and squeakers, and enjoy the party as much as we can, like very small, quite idiotic schoolchildren. Let’s savour the delight of the moment. Come and kiss me, darling, before your body rots, and worms pop in and out of your eye sockets.’ Confronted with the bullish, unpredictable quality of this performance, it was little wonder that Maggie’s Amanda stiffened into a frantic bundle of signals. The wide divergence of reaction – among audiences as well as critics – demonstrated the thinness of the line to be trod between style and caricature. Nonetheless, she looked stunning as an auburn-wigged, Marcel-waved Amanda, dressed first in flared pencil skirt and later in floral red pyjamas. The clothes were designed by another Shaftesbury Avenue legend, Beatrice Dawson, and the elegant curvilinear setting was the work of Anthony Powell, a quondam protégé of Gielgud who became one of Maggie’s closest allies in this awkward period of her life.

Elyot is defined in the play as Amanda’s first real love, a man who drinks and knocks her about and to whom only the worst part of her is attracted. Rarely can the pain of a disintegrating relationship have found such a poignant and direct artistic expression. ‘Snap, snap, snap, like a little adder,’ jeers Elyot; ‘Adders don’t snap; they sting,’ scoffs Amanda. Robert snapped and Maggie stung. The strain of the private life finally took its toll on
Private Lives
, and the reviews, though for the most part highly favourable (the idea that the whole shebang was a critical disaster is entirely mythical), contained two attacks, by Jack Tinker, who had recently joined the
Daily Mail
, and Harold Hobson, of such concentrated vitriol that they were later said to account for Maggie’s subsequent departure to Canada. There is only a partial element of truth in this. Tinker accused Gielgud of allowing Maggie her head, or worse, her hands. She had, he averred, hands of sand which got into everything. Hobson was even more destructive, suggesting that the youthful promise he had spotted in Michael Meyer’s
The Ortolan
eighteen years earlier had been entirely traduced by experience: ‘There was once a time, at the Old Hall in Marston, near Oxford, when Margaret Smith could make the heart stop for a moment with a forlorn word, a crushed gesture. In
Private Lives
she is merely a compendium of grimaces, an anthology of little squeaks, a catalogue of double-takes.’

The problem with Maggie had come to a head: you either found her weaponry of gestures and reactions wildly funny, a comprehensive guide to the nervous system which fuelled them, or you did not. And you did not even have to be for or against. You could be for one day, against the next, as critics whimsically proved down the years. The general rule, though, is that the mechanics of Maggie’s acting, which are spontaneous and unrivalled, work best when she is relaxed and connecting fully with her emotional interior. This was certainly not the case in
Private Lives
, though the production as a whole had the considerable merit of confounding cosy Cowardian expectations and Gielgud’s gentlemanly attempts to impose order. It was a bit of a riot, and swung around enormously during the run. After the first night, Coward went backstage and wagged his finger at Maggie, telling her off for overdoing it: ‘You’ve got very common indeed. You’re almost as common as Gertie.’ Maggie told Alan Bennett that to be compared with Gertrude Lawrence, if only for overdoing it, seemed such a compliment that she instantly mended her ways.

Maggie was mightily relieved when, at the end of the year, Kenneth Williams moved into the Globe next door, in
My Fat Friend
, a comedy written for him by Charles Laurence. In spite of a difficult rehearsal period, the play had gone well and Maggie, who read other people’s reviews even if she never read her own, left a note at the stage door: ‘I’ve never seen such a wonderful crop of good notices. You may have been away from the theatre for a long time but you’ve certainly come back with a bang!’ They had supper together again just before Christmas and harked back to their occupation of these same theatres ten years previously, when Williams was still in the Shaffer double bill and Maggie was in
Mary, Mary
. Williams said that God intended such things. It was ‘the divine nature of special affections’. This unusually sombre conversation continued with Maggie declaring: ‘It was all so carefree then, wasn’t it? But the awful thing about success is that it gets harder every time, not easier. When we were young, arrogance blinded us to the pitfalls.’

Because of Williams, Maggie agreed to make her one and only appearance to date on a mainstream British television chat show, hosted by Michael Parkinson on BBC TV on 17 February 1973. The other guests were the footballer George Best, the poet John Betjeman and Kenneth Williams. Maggie appears in elegant black from top to toe, looking drawn and nervous to start with but loosening up as the interview proceeds. She quotes Pamela Brown’s remark about the audience being stage-struck and how things get ‘more and more difficult’ the longer you go on. A couple of laboured clips from
Travels with My Aunt
do little to lighten the atmosphere. She answers the ‘who influenced you?’ question with Ingmar Bergman and William Gaskill, which completely silences the studio audience.

Maggie had done little television work altogether since the early days of her career: just two ‘Plays of the Month’ for the BBC which she recorded before
Private Lives
opened:
The Merchant of Venice
and Shaw’s
The Millionairess
. Portia was clearly not her role and Maggie found no way round the triumphal priggishness of the
Merchant
court scenes. She later told Alan Bennett that, at the time, Robert was having an affair with the make-up girl on
The Merchant
, so, as far as she was concerned, the quality of mercy was pretty strained. Her Portia submitted rather sulkily to her father’s conditions of marriage, mocked the suitors inordinately and was implacably cruel in driving home the letter of the law. You sense, though, that Maggie did not love Portia enough to play her very well.

She was far more temperamentally suited to Shaw’s Epifania Fitzfassenden who, like Portia, is bound by a parental rule: any suitor for this woman worth £30 million must succeed in converting £150 into £50,000 within six months. The comedy eventually leads her to an Egyptian doctor (played by Tom Baker in dark pancake and a red fez) who has kept a clinic for penniless Mohammedan refugees. Under the rush and silliness of this technically engrossing performance, Maggie shot a bolt of profound loneliness. The final effect is one of helter-skelter skittishness subdued in scenes of limpid radiance. Cedric Messina assembled a fine array of supporting talent: Peter Barkworth as the solicitor Sagamore, James Villiers as Epifania’s first husband (Villiers added distinction to the boring Victor in
Private Lives
) and Charles Gray as a barking city slicker.

Nancy Banks-Smith was seduced in the
Guardian
: ‘From the hurlyburly of Epifania’s entry, lashing her silver foxes like a tail, to the peace of the last scene when her doctor listened entranced to the slow sledgehammer of her pulse, it was mainly Maggie Smith singing Shaw. And that’s well worth an hour and a half of anybody’s life.’

‘Can one live with a volcano, an avalanche … a millionairess?’ cried Barkworth’s Sagamore. Maggie saves her climactic transfiguration to the final great speeches, and the one about marriage and a thousand little infidelities – ‘a wife is all women to one man … his comfort, his helper, at best his greatest treasure, at worst his troublesome but beloved child’ – was as great, in her performance, as the best of Congreve and Farquhar. You realise, watching this again many years later, that such theatrically inflamed and stylish acting and writing on television are almost entirely a thing of the past.