Maggie Smith: A Biography (18 page)

Maggie’s husband in
Snap
was played by Barrie Ingham, who had appeared with her in Beverley’s
Strip the Willow
. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that Beverley should re-enter Maggie’s life at this point. He had tracked Maggie from a distance and had often spoken to her parents in Oxford. Nat was always convinced that Maggie would one day end up married to Beverley. Beverley had also kept in touch through the proxy of Kenneth Williams. He certainly knew that the marriage was in trouble. Early in 1972 he had rented a converted farmhouse at Seillans in the Var, in the South of France, and Williams had travelled across to stay in a nearby
pension
for a few days, to talk over old times and have dinner in St Tropez.

Beverley returned to London in 1973 to work on the Tommy Steele musical,
Hans Andersen
. He sensed that now was the time Maggie needed him most of all. He called backstage at the Vaudeville, ostensibly to greet Ingham, but really to catch up with Maggie. Over a period of several days, Maggie told him the whole saga of her marriage to Robert, the children and how her silently enraged parents were sitting at home in Oxford muttering ‘I told you so’ to each other, and to her. With the failure of
Snap
, there was renewed talk of taking
Private Lives
to Los Angeles, Toronto and New York, though not with Robert. Audiences would have to make do with just one of the ‘New Lunts’; John Standing, who had taken over from Robert at the Queen’s (playing opposite Jill Bennett, who had replaced Maggie), would be hired to play Elyot. Beverley convinced Maggie that this was the right thing to do, just as he had persuaded her in 1963 to accept Olivier’s invitation to join the National.

Maggie, much to John Gielgud’s amazement, insisted on three weeks’ re-rehearsal before going to America, and the company moved into the vast expanse of Drury Lane, rattling out Coward’s brittle prose in the incongruous shadow of the set for the Billy Liar musical,
Billy
, in which Michael Crawford was enjoying a huge success. Gielgud, an inveterate film-goer, had of course been to see
Travels with My Aunt
since he had last crossed swords with Maggie at the Queen’s. One day in rehearsal he dropped one of his celebrated bricks when he interrupted a scene to give an impulsive note: ‘Oh, don’t do it like that, Maggie, don’t screw your face up. You look like that terrible old woman you played in that dreadful film … Oh no, I didn’t mean
Travels with My Aunt
.’ Gielgud remembers her working furiously even after he had left Drury Lane at about tea-time to prepare for his own nightly stage performance as Shakespeare in Edward Bond’s
Bingo
at the Royal Court. It was odd that, once again, Maggie should be playing a comedy about returning to a first love.

Beverley was far from boring, but he had more of Victor’s solidity than of Elyot’s raffishness, though he certainly shared Elyot’s enthusiasm for travel.
Private Lives
, a crucially symbolic play in Maggie’s life and career, was now an almost inverted paradigm of her situation. She had lived through the rough and tumble of life with Elyot (Robert Stephens), but was returning to the calm and safety of her sensible Victor character (Beverley Cross).

Maggie set off on her American tour with her sons. Christopher was now seven, Toby five. Divorce papers were issued between Maggie and Robert, and between Beverley and his second wife, Gayden Collins. The minute she arrived at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles, where
Private Lives
played from the second week of October 1974, Maggie started experimenting with Coward and Amanda Prynne. Shutting out the pain of the break-up went hand in hand with stripping down the engine of her comedy technique. She admitted privately that the harsher critics had been right about her performance in London. She had settled into automatic and then shot into overdrive when seduced by the audience. That was always the most dangerous seduction. John Gielgud had written to B. A. Young, in comparing her with Gertrude Lawrence, whom he had seen in the original production, that ‘her main trouble lies in her inexhaustible vitality and invention (much like Miss Lawrence) and a good (or bad) audience is inclined to go to her head’. The only real corruption Maggie has ever suffered is that meted out by an enthusiastic crowd in the stalls.

The Victor and Sibyl in London, James Villiers and Polly Adams, were replaced by the Americans Remak Ramsay and Niki Flacks. The set designer Anthony Powell travelled to Los Angeles where, at one of the previews, Powell says, the play suddenly leapt to life:

At the same time, according to Powell, she refined some of the London performance and knitted the two versions together. But on the first night in the Ahmanson she chickened out and reverted to the old trickery, settling for the easy laughs. ‘I went round in the interval and she just burst into tears and said, “Don’t say a word. This is one of the most horrible moments of my life; I know what I should be doing and I can’t do it.” But within a week or so she was back on track, working at the role as she had been before.’

Dan Sullivan of the
Los Angeles Times
had given the first-night performance a polite, respectable review, but heard from a friend of the subsequent transformation. He returned to the Ahmanson in the last week of the run and delivered an unequivocal rave, saying that Maggie’s Amanda was now more human, more genuinely mixed up and not at all the study in external flamboyance he had first seen. The production moved on to Chicago, Boston and Denver, and then visited the huge Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto just prior to the five-week engagement in New York. Gielgud was at last free to see what she was up to. He arrived from London for a matinée in Toronto and thought her acting was ‘absolutely perfect’. The critic of the
Toronto Star
, Urjo Kareda, who had seen the performance in London, said that Maggie had now found something else, a new, faintly perceptible murmur of apprehension.

Maggie returned to New York for the first time since
New Faces
and was applauded as a more than worthy Broadway successor to the Amandas of Gertrude Lawrence, Tallulah Bankhead and Tammy Grimes. Clive Barnes in the
New York Times
declared that either the London reviews had been libellous or Maggie had transformed herself. The outrageous triple take she executed on seeing Elyot unexpectedly materialise on the balcony had been retained, followed by the hilarious crumbling spin across the stage. But, as Jack Kroll said in
Newsweek
, you also got a sense of heartbreak in this first act for which the four-square reliability of Victor was real compensation. In Coward’s play, Amanda and Elyot have been married for three years and divorced for five. Maggie and Robert had been married for the same total of eight years, with an almost identical period of separation within the marriage. Their divorce went through in April 1975, just after Maggie returned from New York. And on 23 June she and Beverley were at last married in Guildford registry office. The guests were Alistair and Shân, their son Angus, and Christopher and Toby. Maggie wore a beige trouser-suit.

Important plans for a new life had been laid one fateful day in Toronto when Robin Phillips, newly appointed as artistic director of the Stratford Festival in Ontario, sent Maggie a telegram which read simply, ‘If you want to escape for a weekend I’ll come and collect you.’ Beverley had flown out to Chicago to join Maggie and the boys after the opening of
Hans Andersen
in London. They said they would love a weekend away from the touring grind, so Phillips asked one of his board members at Stratford if they could borrow her holiday cabin on Lake Huron for the weekend. Joe Mandel, Phillips’s friend and partner, collected Maggie and Beverley in Toronto and drove to Stratford to collect Phillips. The party drove on for another hour to the cabin. Robin Phillips recalls that Maggie was wrapped in mink, delighted to be free and ‘absolutely hysterical’. After a good night’s sleep, they all went for a long walk. It was an exceptionally cold winter. Only when the ice melted in the following spring did Phillips realise that Maggie had in fact been walking on the lake. Over the weekend, Phillips drove Maggie and Beverley back into Stratford and showed them over the theatre and around the town. They looked in on a rehearsal. At some point on the second or third day, Beverley said to Phillips, ‘You know, I think if you asked Maggie, she would be quite interested in coming here to do something.’ The conversation turned to Cleopatra and Millamant. And the next stage in Maggie’s professional life was agreed on the spot. She would return to Canada in a year’s time and join Robin Phillips in his second season at Stratford. By then she would be married to Beverley and she could start over, with a clean sheet.

Robert’s divorce from Maggie was much more of a defeat for him than it was for her. He had envisaged a royal progress through the National, the West End, Broadway and Hollywood. He wanted to be a star very much more than she did, and she was one anyway. He was merely a very fine actor, one of the finest. After the London run of
Private Lives
, it was his turn to retreat to Tigbourne, which he now said he always hated, and to play a season at Chichester as Trigorin in
The Seagull
, directed by Jonathan Miller. The production was revived in 1974 in an interrelated Freudian season at Greenwich, the Chekhov presented alongside Ibsen’s
Ghosts
(Robert as Pastor Manders) and
Hamlet
(Robert as Claudius). It was excellent work, but it was not the Big Time. All hopes were now pinned on a 1975 Anthony Shaffer commercial thriller,
Murderer
. Unhappily, this proved to be yet another disaster and not, as intended, the new
Sleuth
. This, after the failure of
Sherlock Holmes
, was a second body blow of ferocious impact. Robert was sent reeling around the ring, having lost his wife, his foothold at the National, his chance of film stardom and now his promise of a compensatory financial windfall in the West End theatre.

He reacted with a terrible wildness and for a short time became socially impossible and virtually unemployable. Luckily, during
Murderer
, Robert had fallen in love with the talented actress Patricia Quinn (best known for her appearance in the stage and film versions of
The Rocky Horror Show
). They forged a relatively secure domestic relationship which lasted right through to Robert’s death and proved his partial salvation. In the post-Maggie years, Robert had his professional ups and downs, with some good seasons at the National Theatre under Peter Hall and several notable television and film appearances. But his unrivalled gift for projecting a sense of tragic waste would never encompass the greatest heights of Macbeth or Antony. However, in 1991, just turned sixty, he made a remarkable return to the top Shakespearean flight at Stratford-upon-Avon as both Falstaff and Julius Caesar. He had been invited to join the RSC by that company’s new artistic director, Adrian Noble, who, as a schoolboy in Chichester, had undergone a Pauline conversion to the idea of a career in the theatre thanks to Robert’s performance in
The Royal Hunt of the Sun
. And then, in 1993, he scored an ultimate triumph as an immensely moving King Lear, again directed by Noble, at Stratford-upon-Avon.

Lovable, unpredictable, noisy and in many ways reprehensible, Robert remained a true vagabond of the British stage to the end, but one whose real glory was in a distant Camelot, first at the early Royal Court and later at the Olivier National, in harness with the woman he could neither live with for ever nor quite stop loving. He was out of the hunt, but he would always be Elyot Chase:

That weekend discussion at Lake Huron with Robin Phillips did indeed prove the basis of Maggie’s first season at the Stratford Festival, Ontario. She signed up to play Millamant and Cleopatra, and she added her second look at Masha in
Three Sisters
and a vignette as Mistress Overdone, the noisy bawd in
Measure for Measure
.

She arrived to join rehearsals in the trim, quiet and prosperous festival town on 1 March 1976 in the middle of a violent storm. She would return for three more seasons, avoiding the worst winter weather by making films in Hollywood, to complete what many colleagues and critics would hail as her regeneration. A qualifying opinion often expressed of this supposed exile was that nobody saw her work there except a few London critics and a lot of lucky Canadians. But London is often less of a theatrical world centre than its practitioners and critics allow. The greatest summer theatre festival in North America is not just a magnet for visitors from all over Canada. It attracts, at its best, keen attention in New York and sends reverberations right through the continent. This was certainly the case in the Phillips years of 1975 to 1980. Maggie was Queen Guinevere in her second Camelot, a golden era indeed comparable in some ways to the Olivier years at the Old Vic, though without the acting in depth or the intellectual spine provided by Tynan. In Brian Bedford, the company’s outstanding actor, Maggie linked up with one of her most trusted leading men, her Lancelot. And in Robin Phillips, King Arthur, she had found one of her most crucially influential and sympathetic directors.

Maggie was at last married to the man she began to say she should have married in the first place: ‘My Bev. Nice, my Bev, isn’t he?’ The house in Fulham was kept on but rented out, and would remain so until 1986 when the boys were old enough, and only too eager, to colonise it. For now, Christopher and Toby, aged nine and seven, were enrolled in a Stratford school. The traumatic accumulation of Maggie’s unhappy London experiences – marital collapse, rejection by the National, strain and controversy in
Private Lives
, critical disaster in
Snap
– would be cleansed by the concentrated process of work in a permanent ensemble on challenging roles no one had offered her at home. In Canada, Phillips says, Maggie felt relieved of ‘the demons and pressures that haunt and taunt’.

Bedford, a perceptive Yorkshireman of working-class background who had made his career mostly on the other side of the Atlantic since going to New York in John Gielgud’s production of Peter Shaffer’s
Five Finger Exercise
in 1959, offers one of the most striking diagnoses of the ‘Maggie’ condition. He says that, for her, just the journey from breakfast-time to lights out each day is very difficult and fraught with problems: ‘She’s not at all affected, you know. I often think that her blood is of a different temperature to the rest of us. And that must be the Scottish side. I’ve always suspected that the chilliness, the rather bleak “Highlands of Scotland” element in Maggie comes from her mother.’

Maggie’s parents were relieved that she was reunited with Beverley. They understood him in a way they did not understand Robert. Beverley had a bona fide association with the University and often mulled over the old days in Balliol with Nat, much to the old man’s delight. Nat liked nothing more than to relish his association with the medical and academic life of the city, and Beverley knew how to show a lively interest. Throughout what became known as the period of separation from Maggie, Beverley had kept in touch with her parents. Robert was not someone to whom they felt they could safely entrust their daughter. He didn’t fuss and guard her in the way they knew Beverley had, would and wanted to. From the moment Beverley achieved his life’s aim of marrying Maggie, he exchanged his former domestic life completely for hers. For Nat, especially, Beverley was another son. Beverley returned the compliment: he saw much less of his own two daughters and committed himself wholeheartedly, and without a moment’s hesitation, to becoming ‘Dad’ for Christopher and Toby.

Maggie asked Christine Miller, who had left Penelope Gilliatt’s employ in 1975 and had been working in New York, to join them as child-minder, shopping companion, cook and general helpmate. She got on well with Beverley. She stayed for two and a half years and laughed a great deal for most of them. And she adored the boys: ‘Toby was a bit more what I’d call ballsy; he was wonderful when he was little, a real boy, very naughty. He got stuck in there straight away, went fishing with his mates and did all the “boy things”. Chris was a little more ethereal, more reflective, more stay-at-home.’ When Maggie went on tour with
Private Lives
, the boys had been sent to a school in Los Angeles where most of the children were ‘kids of posh lawyers’. They hated it. The fresh air, lack of pressure and informality of Stratford were as welcome to them as was the whole change of pace and climate to their mother.

The new family was billeted in a rambling 1894 three-storey house on Cambria Street. Built in red brick and Queen Anne style, with an odd little decorative black spire, the house was the work of Thomas Trow, a well-known local architect whose granddaughter, Eva McCutcheon, rented it out to the festival. Maggie and Beverley liked the house – it had a very large kitchen and dining area and a beautiful sitting room – but it was slightly too big for their purposes. In subsequent seasons they rented a more compact and practicable white clapboard house on Norman Street, previously occupied by Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn.

Mrs McCutcheon kept one cupboard in the attic of 220 Cambria Street locked, saying it contained precious mementos for her grandchildren. This attic was a large room, ideal for the boys to romp and run around in with their friends. Late one night, after a certain amount of running and romping had been perpetrated, Maggie and Christine returned from the theatre to find the lights on and the forbidden cupboard half-open on its chain. Curious to see what treasures the cupboard contained, Maggie got down on her knees and rummaged around with her long spindly arms. She brought out first a tiny toy house covered in pebbles, looked at Christine and said, ‘Ooo-er,’ then produced a set of tiny gardening tools, a little window box and a mangled shoe. The accidental discovery of these worthless signs of dwarfish domesticity – not at all the silverware or jewellery they expected to find – caused the two women to collapse in gales of uncontrollable laughter. They were only subdued by an angry, Malvolio-like intervention by Beverley in his dressing gown.

In Stratford, such an event counts as a dramatic highlight. Compared to Stratford, Ontario, sleepy old Stratford-upon-Avon is a seething metropolitan centre. Both Stratfords are dedicated in the summer months, and increasingly the early winter ones, to a festival of drama based on the works of Shakespeare. In the middle of the prosperous south-western Ontario farmlands, in a town most renowned for being a glorified railway junction, this is more unexpected, obviously, than in the town of Shakespeare’s birth. The idea of following the English example, but using that example to forge a national classical theatre of Canada, was hatched by a remarkably imaginative and persistent Stratford-born journalist called Tom Patterson.

The quiet, determined, bespectacled and altogether unlikely man who inspired Canada’s most prestigious cultural institution was, according to the Canadian critic and Stratford historian Martin Knelman, ‘less interested in the aesthetics of Elizabethan theatre than in finding economic salvation for a town that was losing its chief industry – a repair centre for railway steam engines’. Patterson’s ‘impossible dream’ was launched in the spring of 1952, when he wrote to the Irish director Tyrone Guthrie, who had worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Company in his youth, inviting him to supervise a festival in 1953. The standing joke was that Patterson, who had only seen one play in his entire life, knew he wanted Guthrie but did not really know who he was until he looked him up in the local library’s
Who’s Who
. He was instantly less of a joke when he caught his big fish and pulled the entire financial and political community of Stratford behind him. On 13 July 1953, the venture took off, locally and internationally, with Alec Guinness and Irene Worth leading the new festival company in
Richard III
.

They performed in a large canvas tent on the riverside site where the theatre, designed at Guthrie’s insistence on a thrust-stage principle by Tanya Moiseiwitsch, would open four years later. All the money was raised on subscription, appeal and donation. The Festival Theatre combined the thrust stage with a wrap-around auditorium similar to that of a Greek amphitheatre, with seating for 1,800 people. A second festival venue was acquired and refurbished during the 1960s: the downtown Avon Theatre, an imposing vaudeville house seating 1,100 people. A third, smaller arena was added in 1971.

By the time the actors occupied the pillared and porticoed thrust stage in 1957, Guthrie had moved on and the artistic directorship was in the hands of the British director Michael Langham, who consolidated the festival’s reputation and nurtured many important native careers. He was succeeded in 1968 by the more controversial, and less successful, Jean Gascon, a French Canadian who started his regime in harness with a Canadian administrator, William Wylie, who died, and a fellow Canadian director, John Hirsch, with whom he rapidly fell out. The general impression was that the exciting, heady days of the festival’s birth had been lost in a routine and slightly predictable repertory, and that Gascon’s stilted efforts at more adventurous productions inevitably proved disastrous.

When Robin Phillips arrived in 1975, a new impetus was sought and soon found. The 1953 festival was a six-week season of forty-two performances playing to 68,000 people and grossing $206,000 Canadian at the box office. In Phillips’s first season in 1975, a twenty-one-week season of 362 performances played to 437,000 people and took $2.6 million. Maggie’s impact in 1976 was immediate: in a twenty-two-week season of 338 performances, the overall attendance jumped to 518,000 and the box office gross to $3.7 million. In 1975, the government grants amounted to about 20 per cent of the total income of $3.7 million Canadian. Five years later, when Phillips left an operation which had more than doubled its income to $8.3 million, those government grants, an almost standstill figure, constituted just 10 per cent.

The nearest equivalent in Britain to the Stratford Festival Theatre is the Chichester Festival Theatre, which was conceived partly in response to Tom Patterson’s adventure, with a similar mobilisation of private money and local involvement at business and management levels. Chichester’s theatre, which opened in 1962, and where Maggie had worked in Olivier’s National company, also has a thrust stage but one that is not nearly as effectively designed. The Stratford stage is surprisingly small and seems at first limited in its potential. In fact, its simplicity allows for endless variations in the actor’s relationship with the audience, which is clustered around the acting area – no spectator is more than sixty-five feet from the stage – in a much more intimate and successful way than at Chichester, even after the £22 million makeover finished in 2014.

The main attraction to the Stratford visitor at festival time is the predominant air of holiday high spirits emanating from the river and the theatre. There are delightful walks through the woods and along the bankside, and the richness and variety of the domestic architecture – streets of sturdy brick houses and clapboard villas set among perfectly manicured lawns – are considerable compensation for the somewhat deadening respectability and almost shocking cleanliness of the town. The Festival Theatre is just a few minutes’ walk from the centre, surrounded by greenery and adjacent to a public baseball pitch where theatre patrons can prepare for fictional heroic encounters by witnessing a few minutes of the real thing: a schoolboy match is in progress on most summer evenings. Flags are flown and a brass anthem played by musicians before each performance. There are crowded bars, hot-dog and sandwich counters, a bustling bookshop and a pleasant air of delight at the fact that anything cultural is happening at all in so seductively bland and untroubled a setting.

Phillips was surprised to find that Maggie was more ‘ready for escape’ than he had thought, and detected a determination to rethink not only her art, but also her life: ‘I don’t actually believe that England has ever seen that Maggie, the one we had for six years. She found new muscles and toughness. Her voice became an incredible cello, no longer a violin.’ At the same time, Phillips came under continual attack from the nationalist faction who resented the import of British stars, and indeed his own presence as a British director entrusted with the future of the Canadian classical theatre. The private salvation of Maggie’s acting career was bound up in a wider maelstrom of the debate about the festival’s identity. These tensions had been endemic to the enterprise from the very beginning. But Phillips was a charismatic personality who unwittingly fanned the flames of the dispute to a new level of intensity. There were orchestrated campaigns against him in the press, and private hate mail, too.

In London, Phillips had most recently presented a striking selection of productions at the Greenwich Theatre, with glossy, eye-catching designs by Daphne Dare (who came with him to Canada) and notable performances by a string of outstanding actresses: Elisabeth Bergner, Joan Plowright, Penelope Keith, Mia Farrow, Geraldine McEwan and Lynn Redgrave. He seized the biggest opportunity of his career so far with both hands, and his invitation to Maggie was a masterstroke. As a result of her coming to Stratford, Brian Bedford agreed to join the company for three years from 1977. Phillips’s work-rate was phenomenal, and his ability to generate extremes of loyalty and exasperation among colleagues and journalists almost unrivalled. In general, and on balance, he created a perfervid atmosphere of expectation and excitement.

In the mid-1960s, there were just two regional theatres apart from the Stratford Festival and the nearby Shaw Festival at Niagara-on-the-Lake (the latter was launched in 1962). In Toronto, outside of the main houses, there was no fringe or supplementary theatre venue at all; today, there are over fifty small theatres. As the critic Martin Knelman wrote, Canadian actors become stars by not staying in Canada, and he cited the careers of Donald Sutherland, Genevieve Bujold, Christopher Plummer and John Colicos. To them you could add Hume Cronyn (who, with his London-born wife Jessica Tandy, was a frequent festival star), Kate Reid and Colleen Dewhurst. In a rapidly changing theatrical environment, fraught as much with burgeoning patriotic pride as with its attendant parochial cringe, the commitment of the Stratford Festival to the idea of a classical company was important, and absolute.