The Pigeon Tunnel (25 page)

I hope I got that line into the novel, but it's a long time since I read it. The East Congo was my last excursion into the killing fields. Does the novel do justice to the experience? Of course it doesn't. But the education I received was unputdownable.

28

Richard Burton needs me

Whenever I allow myself to remember my first encounter with Martin Ritt, the veteran American director of
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
, I blush to think of the idiotic clothes I was wearing.

It was 1963. My novel had not yet been published. Ritt had bought the film rights to it on the strength of a rogue typescript slipped to him by my literary agent or publisher, or maybe some bright soul in a duplicating office who had a pal in the studio, which was Paramount. Ritt would later boast that he stole the rights. I would later agree with him. At the time I saw him as a man of unlimited generosity who had taken the trouble to fly all the way from Los Angeles with some like-minded friends in order to give me lunch at that altar to Edwardian luxury, the Connaught Hotel, and talk flatteringly about my book.

And I had flown all the way from Bonn, capital of West Germany, at the expense of Her Majesty the Queen. I was a serving diplomat of thirty-two and had never met movie people before. In childhood, like all boys of my time, I had fallen in love with Deanna Durbin, and rolled in the aisles over the Three Stooges. In wartime cinemas, I had shot down German aeroplanes piloted by Eric Portman, and triumphed over the Gestapo with Leslie Howard. (My father was so persuaded that Portman was a Nazi that he said he should be interned.) But, what with early marriage, small children and very little money, not a lot of films since. I had a charming London-based literary agent whose life's ambition, had he allowed himself to pursue it, was to play the drums in a jazz band. His
knowledge of the film world must have been greater than mine, but not, I suspect, by much. Nevertheless, it was he who had arranged the film deal, and I who, after a convivial lunch with him, had signed it.

As I have reported elsewhere, part of my job as a Second Secretary at the British Embassy in Bonn was to escort invited German dignitaries on their rounds of the British government and its parliamentary opposition, which was what had brought me to London. This explains why, when I stole away from my official duties to have lunch with Martin Ritt at the Connaught, I was wearing a tight black jacket, black waistcoat, silver tie and striped grey-and-black trousers, an outfit that the Germans call
Stresemann
after a Prussian statesman who had the brief misfortune to preside over the Weimar Republic. It also explains why Ritt enquired of me, with raucous cordiality as we shook hands, what the hell had possessed me to dress like a maître d'.

And what was Ritt himself wearing, that he felt free to ask me this challenging question? In the Connaught's dining room, a strict dress code ruled. But in the Grill they had learned by 1963, somewhat grudgingly, to stretch a point. Hunched in a corner of the grill room and flanked by four hoary cohorts from the film industry, Martin Ritt, seventeen years and several centuries my senior, wore a revolutionist's black shirt buttoned to the neck and a pair of baggy pants held up by elastic and nipped at the ankles. And of all extraordinary things, to my eye, an artisan's flat cap with the peak turned up where it should have been turned down. But
worn indoors
, you understand, which in my diplomatic England of those days was about as acceptable as eating peas off a knife. And all this on the bearish frame of an old footballer run to fat, with a broad, bronzed, mid-European face etched with the pain of ages, and thick, swept-back greying hair, and shadowed, watchful eyes framed by black-rimmed spectacles.

‘Didn't I tell you he was going to be young?' he demanded proudly of his cohorts while I struggled to explain why the hell I was dressed like a maître d'.

You did, Marty, you did, they agreed, because film directors, as I now know, are always right.

And Marty Ritt was more right than most of them. He was an accomplished film director of great heart and daunting life experience. He had served in the
US
forces in the Second World War. He had been, if not a member of the Communist Party, one of its more devoted fellow-travellers. His unabashed admiration for Karl Marx had got him blacklisted by the television industry in which he had acted and directed with distinction. He had directed any amount of theatre, much of it leftist, including a show for Russian War Relief in Madison Square Garden. He had directed ten feature films back to back, notably
Hud
with Paul Newman a year previously. And he made no secret of the fact, from the moment we sat down, that he saw in my novel some kind of crossing-point from his earlier convictions to his present state of impotent disgust at McCarthyism, the cowardice of too many of his peers and comrades in the witness box, the failure of communism and the sickening sterility of the Cold War.

And Ritt, as he was quick to tell you, was Jewish to the core. If his family hadn't suffered directly in the Holocaust – though I believe it had – he personally had suffered, and continued to suffer, for his entire race. Ardently and articulately, his Jewish identity was a constant theme with him. And this became all the more relevant once we started talking about the movie he intended to make of my novel. In
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
, two idealistic communists, one an innocent woman librarian from London, the other a member of East German Intelligence, are callously sacrificed for the greater good of the Western (capitalist) cause. Both are Jews.

For Marty Ritt, this movie was going to be personal.

And I? What qualifications from the great university of life had I to offer in return? My
Stresemann?
A British public school
education, albeit truncated? A novel I had dreamed up from scraps of vicarious experience? Or the unnerving fact, which thank God I could not reveal to him, that I had spent a large chunk of my recent life toiling in the sheltered vineyards of British Intelligence, fighting the very cause to which he, by his own frank admission, had enthusiastically subscribed?

But that's something else I've picked up along the way. Never mind that I too was beginning to question the easy loyalties of my youth. Movie-making is the enforced bonding of irreconcilable opposites. And this was never more evident than when Richard Burton stepped into the leading role of Alec Leamas.

I forget at what point I learned that Burton had got the part. Over our lunch in the Connaught Grill, Marty Ritt had asked me who I thought should play Leamas and I had suggested Trevor Howard; or Peter Finch, but only with the proviso that Finch was willing to play English rather than Australian, because I felt strongly that this was a very British story about very British secret manners. Ritt, a good listener, said he took my point, liked both actors but feared neither was big enough to carry the budget. A few weeks later, when I again flew to London, this time on Paramount's tab to take part in a tour of locations, he told me that he had offered the role to Burt Lancaster.

To play an
Englishman
, Marty?

Canadian. Burt's a great actor. Burt will play it Canadian, David.

To which there was no useful reply. Lancaster was indeed a great actor, but my Leamas was not a great Canadian. But by then the Big Unexplained Silence had kicked in.

In the making of every film of my work – or in the non-making – there has been the First Flush, followed by the Big Unexplained Silence. This can last anything from a few months to several years, or for ever. Is the project dead in the water, or is it steaming forward
and nobody's told me? Safe from the gaze of the unwashed, huge sums of money are being bandied about, scripts commissioned, written and rejected, agents joust and lie. In sealed rooms, beardless boys in ties strive to outshine each other with gems of youthful creativity. But outside the walls of Camp Hollywood hard intelligence is impossible to come by: for the good reason that, in the immortal words of William Goldman, nobody knows anything.

Richard Burton
emerged
, that's all I can say from here. No thousand violins announced his arrival, just an awe-struck: ‘David, I have news for you. Richard Burton has signed to play Leamas.' And that wasn't Marty Ritt speaking to me on the phone, but my American publisher Jack Geoghegan in a ferment of religious ecstasy. ‘And what's more, David, you're about to meet him!' Geoghegan was a veteran of gritty bookselling. He had started out as a shoe-leather sales rep and risen to be Head of Sales at Doubleday. Close to retirement, he had acquired his own small publishing house, Coward McCann. The improbable success of my novel and the addition of Richard Burton were a dream come true for him.

We must be looking at late 1964 by now because I had left government service and set up, first in Greece and later in Vienna, as a full-time writer. I was shaping to visit the United States for the first time, and Burton as it happened was playing Hamlet on Broadway with Gielgud co-directing and speaking the part of the Ghost. The production was described as a dress rehearsal, to be screened in movie theatres. Geoghegan would take me to see it, and afterwards he would introduce me to Burton in his dressing room. If we were about to have an audience with the Pope, he could not have been more excited.

And Burton's performance was epic. And we had the best seats. And in his dressing room he was very charming and said my book was the best thing since I don't know what. And I said his Hamlet was better than Olivier's – better even than Gielgud's, I went on recklessly, though for all I know he was in the room –  better than anyone else's I could think of. But what I was secretly wondering
amid this torrent of mutual compliments was: how on earth will this beautiful, thunderous, baritone Welsh voice and this overpowering Triple Alpha Male talent fit inside the character of a washed-up, middle-aged British spy not noted for his charisma, his classic articulation or the looks of a pockmarked Greek god?

And though I didn't know it at the time, the same question must have been nagging at Ritt, because one of the first of their many battles in the war that was to follow was about how to get Burton's voice back into its box, something Burton wasn't keen to do.

By now we are in 1965 and I have heard by chance – I still had no film agent so I must have had a spy somewhere – that in the latest film script of my novel, Alec Leamas, the part that Burton was slated to play, instead of punching a grocer and going to jail for it, was to be confined in a psychiatric hospital and escape by way of a first-floor bedroom window. The Leamas of my novel wouldn't have gone near a psychiatric hospital to save his life, so what was he doing in one? The answer seemed to be that in Hollywood's eyes psychiatry was sexier than jail.

A few weeks later, news trickled through the lines that the script's writer, who like Ritt had been blacklisted in his time, had been taken ill and the mantle had passed to Paul Dehn. I was sad for the writer, but relieved. Dehn was a fellow Brit. He had written his own film called
Orders to Kill
, which I admired. Also, he was family. During the war, he had trained Allied agents in silent killing and taken part in covert missions to France and Norway.