Maggie Smith: A Biography (7 page)

Equity, the actors’ union, had informed her that there was already a Margaret Smith on their books and would she mind changing her name. In September 1955, the programme for her second New Watergate revue,
Oxford Eight
, reveals that she was now Maggie Smith. Peter Dunlop’s partner, Jimmy Fraser, who handled the film side of the business, went along one evening with Leonard Sillman, the New York producer, who was planning a Broadway presentation of
New Faces
. Maggie’s reviews were good: she was described as ‘a rich comic talent’ and ‘a comedienne of some versatility’. Sillman was impressed and invited her to meet him in his hotel suite. Her initial reaction was sceptical. She had no intention of falling for that old trick, the one where a slick American producer with a suite at the Savoy fancies a girl in the revue and asks her over to challenge her defences. She stood him up. The next day a colleague told her she was mad, did she not realise that this man presented new talent on Broadway? She agreed, reluctantly, to go and see him. She had very nearly blown her big chance. Leonard Sillman assembled his cast for
New Faces 1956
with an opening date of 14 June at the Ethel Barrymore on Broadway, and one of the unknowns he engaged was Maggie Smith.

Maggie Smith, the new comedienne of Broadway, was twenty-one years old, five feet and five inches tall, with blue eyes, red hair and a bright, occasional smile. She lived in Greenwich Village and she was paid $350 a week by Leonard Sillman, of which 10 per cent went to her agent, Milton Goldman, who acted in New York for Fraser and Dunlop. She was not happy. She sent Meg a magazine cutting in which she was photographed wearing a silk evening gown and a forlorn expression. Across the bottom she wrote: ‘I look very sad! Mummy, I’m not as sad as I look.’ Working for Leonard Sillman, a pushy hoofer from Detroit who had once employed Tyrone Power as his chauffeur, was not a barrel of laughs. Maggie was required to play several old ladies when
New Faces 1956
opened in Boston, but she put her foot down and had them deleted before New York. Sillman was a devious and unpleasant character by all accounts, but he did have a nose for talent. Typically, he thought great acting was to do with being stingy. There is, however, something in his theory of the hoarding of gifts, holding back, teasing an audience. ‘The young English actress, Maggie Smith, who appeared in the last
New Faces
, has it,’ he observed in his 1959 autobiography, ‘and it will make her a star.’

The title ‘New Faces’ had been suggested to Sillman by the financier Otto Kahn, as a contrast to Ziegfeld’s expensive
Follies
. The first show was in 1934. Henry Fonda sang, and Imogene Coca did a striptease. Tallulah Bankhead, according to Sillman, smoked like a furnace throughout the opening night’s performance. In 1936, Gypsy Rose Lee nearly appeared alongside Van Johnson but withdrew at the last minute. Sonny Tufts was in the 1938 version, but 1943 was a non-vintage year. Sillman’s reputation took a dive. After the war, Maxwell House Coffee (with whom, ironically, Maggie was to make her only television advertisement, during the run of
Lettice and Lovage
) sponsored
New Faces
on the radio, and CBS TV gave their new revue show not to Sillman but to Ed Sullivan.

But in 1952 Sillman had bounced back with his fourth
New Faces
in which a comic actress called Alice Ghostley was an overnight sensation and young Eartha Kitt stopped the show with ‘Monotonous’. It ran for a year, and then went on tour. In 1956 Sillman was ready to fire once again with a new assemblage of hopefuls. They came from all over: India, Sweden, the Virgin Islands, Italy, France and Puerto Rico. The star, however, proved to be T. C. Jones (long since forgotten and dead), a drag artist from San Francisco who opened the show as the husky Tallulah with a throaty, mannish laugh and a series of insults aimed at the serious theatre of Stanislavsky and Elia Kazan. The critics were sold on T. C. Jones. Walter Winchell devoted a column to him. In their reviews, neither Brooks Atkinson in the
New York Times
nor Walter Kerr (later an admiring fan) in the
Herald Tribune
mentioned Maggie Smith, though the cast album and production photographs suggest there was something worth noting. A cod Ziegfeld tribute to the all-American girl closed the first half. Following ‘Miss Jungle Madness’ and ‘Miss Fisherman’s Tail’, Maggie jerkily descended the staircase as ‘Miss Bowls of Sunshine’, covered in dozens of oranges, and sang, to a slow foxtrot rhythm, in a voice of adenoidal, strangulated lack of conviction: ‘I’m a vision of beauty, and the beauty part, is the beautiful feeling, I feel in my heart.’

Maggie’s Englishness was also exploited. In one sporting sketch where cricket was derided, she responded, aghast, ‘Anybody who’d say that would strike the Queen!’ Although the Broadway list of that season included such archetypal American hits as Paul Muni in
Inherit the Wind
, Sammy Davis Jr in
Mr Wonderful
, and
The Pajama Game
, New York was in the grip of one of its periodic bouts of showbiz Anglophilia. Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews, who had opened in March in
My Fair Lady
, were the toasts of the town, and Maggie was soon taken up. She became good friends with Julie Andrews and her husband, the designer Tony Walton, and through them met the agent Lou Wilson, who rescued her from the shark-like attentions of Milton Goldman. Alice Ghostley, too, became a lifelong friend and would collect Maggie’s first Oscar for her in 1970. She joined in the celebrations for Eliza Doolittle’s twenty-first birthday (Julie Andrews was twenty-two, the same age as Maggie) at the 21 Club on 1 October. In November, the artist Feliks Topolski invited her to a party with Rex Harrison, Harrison’s lover Kay Kendall (he was still married to Lilli Palmer, but later married Kendall, who died of leukaemia in 1959), and the distinguished Scottish-born actress Eileen Herlie. Lou Wilson took her on a trip to Puerto Rico. Maggie liked New York, up to a point. But the showbiz social whirligig was never her scene and she was relieved when
New Faces
closed after a seven-month run. She returned to England, and the boys’ Belsize Park apartment, to capitalise on her Broadway status.

The obvious next step was to establish her revue credentials on British soil, and Maggie was signed up by the ambitious and stylish young impresario Michael Codron for the London première of
Share My Lettuce
, ‘a diversion with music’ by Bamber Gascoigne, which featured an offbeat, quirky score by Keith Statham and Patrick Gowers, and one lyric by Michael Frayn. More importantly, Codron teamed Maggie Smith with Kenneth Williams, another rising star who had made his name as the Dauphin in a 1954 revival of Shaw’s
Saint Joan
and in Sandy Wilson’s exuberant musical
The Buccaneer
. Gascoigne had launched
Share My Lettuce
at Cambridge University, where he was an undergraduate. It caught something of a new surrealism in revue pioneered by the choreographer John Cranko’s
Cranks
. It was bright and bubbly, slightly bizarre, with no hint of the ‘satire boom’ inaugurated by
Beyond the Fringe
three years later. Gascoigne says he ‘sat and stared in fascinated amazement at all that went on’ and recalls the wonderfully snide verbal wit of Williams in rehearsal and the fun and vitality of Maggie Smith. He thinks she was a little plumper round the shoulders in those days.

After a couple of flops, Codron needed a hit.
Share My Lettuce
proved a lifeline leading to innovative West End presentations of Harold Pinter, John Mortimer, Sandy Wilson, more revue, and something like solvency in the mid-1960s with Terence Frisby’s
There’s a Girl in My Soup
.

Kenneth Williams shared his lettuce with a white rabbit which he kept in a box. There were eight colour-coded performers – Williams was ‘lettuce green’, Maggie ‘orange’ – who were heralded by a bebopish overture in the early style of Leonard Bernstein. The sketches included a Pinteresquely menacing encounter in a railway compartment and an almost mathematically precise party scene in an army mess where all the officers were called Michael and all their girlfriends Susan. In ‘Party Games’, Maggie played the rapidly articulating hostess: ‘Here’s a pencil and pad and you won’t find it bad these are games that we all of us know; pass ’em on as you write ’em and ad infinitum it’s just party games that make a good party go.’ Kenneth Williams said that Maggie sang this number while fiddling with a rope of beads, twirling them round her neck and then, amazingly, around her waist. ‘Just as they seemed to be heading for her ankles, she deftly altered their course and the beads ended up round her neck again. She finished the song looking as immaculate as when she started.’

The show opened on 21 August at the old Lyric in Hammersmith. Williams, said Milton Shulman in the
Evening Standard
, ‘capers across the stage like a tipsy pixie getting sloshed on champagne bubbles’, while Richard Findlater in the
Observer
lauded this ‘elegant, faintly macabre, and immensely funny’ new talent. Williams had been around a little while. Nearly nine years older than Maggie, he came from an ordinary London Cockney background (his father was a gentlemen’s hairdresser in King’s Cross) and had found his show business feet towards the end of the war, and just after it, entertaining the troops while based in Singapore. On being demobbed, Williams worked around the country in repertory theatres and made his first real impression in
Hancock’s Half Hour
, a BBC radio series starring the melancholy Tony Hancock, in which his fruitily intoned camp persona, unprecedented in public broadcasting, delighted the listening multitude. Williams was outrageous, but brilliantly fast and funny. His acting had a brutal, Japanese style to it, and his mask-like pixie face was likened by Kenneth Tynan to that of Jean-Louis Barrault in a farce. He had first seen Maggie in that Oxford revue at the New Watergate. He told Tynan that he had gone along with John Schlesinger and had been immediately struck by her magnetic quality:

It is the lot of all gifted performers to be ‘discovered’ in their early years with the regularity of a cuckoo emerging from its clock. But Maggie’s comic personality, the essence that was to make her a star, was already apparent. Codron knew she was special: ‘She was always extraordinary, even at the very beginning. She came down to Hammersmith and took one look at a set that was on the stage for another show and said, “I didn’t know they still designed sets like that!” I was flabbergasted. But her assurance had nothing to do with pomposity or silliness; she was completely herself, and very funny.’

Share My Lettuce
transferred to the Comedy Theatre in the West End in September and moved on to the Garrick in the New Year. Maggie groaned, ‘This must be the longest tour in town.’ More substantial television work began to be offered. The first major role Maggie played on British television was that of Susie, a dumb blonde waitress, in
Boy Meets Girl
, a Hollywood comedy by Bella and Sam Spewack which Independent Television broadcast in its ‘Play of the Week’ slot in June 1957.

One consequence of West End exposure was being spotted for the movies. Dennis van Thal, Michael Balcon’s chief talent scout at Associated British Studios, Elstree, signed her on a seven-year contract at the same time as Shirley Anne Field and Ann Firbank; they joined a stable which included Richard Todd, Sylvia Syms and Janette Scott. Very little was subsequently found for Maggie to do. She always rejoiced in the first monthly fan-mail report she received. It consisted of one word: ‘Nil.’ However, during the run of
Share My Lettuce
, she did make her first feature film,
Nowhere to Go
, written by Seth Holt (who also directed) and Kenneth Tynan. She had only crossed Tynan’s path once before. As an Oxford schoolgirl, she claims to have knocked him over with her hockey stick in the High while jumping off a speeding bus. She had no idea who he was, but told her brothers that she had felled a man in a purple suit. They knew that only one man wore a purple suit in postwar Oxford: the already famous undergraduate Tynan, whose middle name was not Peacock for nothing.

Tynan was now working as both a drama critic on the
Observer
and a script editor at Ealing Studios. Maggie was cast as Bridget Howard, a rich, lonely, slightly snooty but inquisitive girl who has run away from five schools and who now befriends an unsuitable confidence trickster, played by the well-built Canadian actor George Nader. One of only two black-and-white movies she made (the other was
The Pumpkin Eater
),
Nowhere to Go
was Seth Holt’s first film in a career which, unlike Maggie’s, never fulfilled its promise.

The opening prison break-out in
Nowhere to Go
is a rightly renowned sequence of great excitement, and a fine cast includes the silent-screen star Bessie Love as a wealthy widow, Bernard Lee as a dangerously smiling ‘Mr Big’, Harry H. Corbett as an obstreperous crook and Andrée Melly as an Irish night-club girl. It is a flinty, technically assured film, full of shadows and twists, with a good jazz soundtrack by Dizzy Reece. Bridget stays loyal to conman ‘Greg’ (Nader), takes him home for Christmas in the family cottage in Brecon and ends up being arrested herself. Under that cover, Greg tries to steal a getaway bike, is surprised by a farmer and fatally wounded. As he lies dying in the road, Bridget returns from the police station to find his last message – ‘Tell your friends to look somewhere else’ – and walks away over the fields into the middle distance, sad and alone once more, a prisoner of her own background and the British class system. Maggie was a different kind of young film heroine, edgy, sensitive and intelligent. One popular newspaper declared that she made ‘bosomy blondes old-fashioned’, while the more sedate C. A. Lejeune in the
Observer
looked forward to seeing her again: ‘She looks as crisp as a celery stick and speaks like a girl who has a good mind of her own,’ she wrote.

Since working with her at the Oxford Playhouse, Peter Wood had developed a parallel career in television. The West End producing company, H. M. Tennent, run by Hugh ‘Binkie’ Beaumont, had an arrangement with ITV to present new work, and one of Wood’s 1958 projects – the year in which he also directed Pinter’s
The Birthday Party
– was
Sunday out of Season
, ‘a gentle, sensible little play’, according to one critic, by a West Country potter called Peter Draper. For ‘Binkie-vision’, as the set-up was known, Wood wanted to cast the girl he remembered from Oxford as a defensive student from London University who goes to a small Welsh seaside resort to recover from an unhappy love affair. She embarks on a tentative new friendship with a local boy whose father is suffering from silicosis and who is also in flight from emotional turmoil. This role was taken by Alec McCowen, who had worked with Wood at the Arts and who had already made a West End reputation in several plays, including that same production of
The Matchmaker
(opposite Ruth Gordon) Maggie had seen in Edinburgh.