Unity (36 page)

Dear Carole,

For very worried read very relieved.

Thank you.

Yours, with best wishes,

Michael

Finally a gap in the schedule!

The big, champagne-cork-popping news this end is that Liam Finch is on board. As the song says ‘There may be trouble ahead …’ But, in the meantime,
The Leningrad Affair
has been given the green light. My life is now mapped out for the next eighteen months. It’s with mixed emotions that I’ve been dipping into the past. My memories of Munich are surprisingly vivid – which is not to say that they’re accurate. Feel free to use them in any way that you choose. I would, however, appreciate a copy before anything appears in print.

Here goes!

Questions:

Of course I had no idea what she was going to do or I’d have tried to stop her. We weren’t however what you would call close. She’d thrown in her lot with Geraldine, which meant shunning me.

I couldn’t say what she was trying to achieve, beyond the obvious: a recognition of the plight of the Palestinians. But, as we all know, such attacks do nothing but generate further repression which, indeed, occurred when Israel launched retaliatory raids on Southern Lebanon and Gaza.

I did wonder whether she might have been influenced by a
particular
scene that we played together as Unity and Jessica. I (Jessica) was in Munich and within arm’s reach of Hitler. I had a line to the effect that ‘If only I had a gun, I could kill him.’ And it wasn’t wholly fanciful, as Jessica proved the following year when she signed up for the Spanish Civil War. That a young aristocratic woman might have changed the course of history struck a deep chord with Felicity. She kept asking me whether I thought that such actions could be justified.

Whatever else she intended, I very much doubt that she meant to commit suicide. She gave no impression of a woman who had shaken hands with death. On the contrary, only the previous day we’d been filming a scene set in Swinbrook and she’d been
unusually
light-hearted. No, I’m convinced that the explosion was an accident. Have you ever handled a bomb? I have (don’t worry, it was in my BBC, not my IWP, days). You detonate it by pulling out the pin. But forget the old-fashioned pineapple grenades you’ve seen in the movies. Removing the pin is actually quite hard – and well-nigh impossible without attracting attention. So what you do – I speak as an actress not a terrorist – is ease it out in advance
while keeping the depression handle firmly locked in your hand. Then you put it back, but only half-way, and with the end bent for easy access. Felicity must either have put it back so carelessly that it snapped or else have failed to put it back securely. So it went off too soon.

My immediate response is an emphatic ‘no’. Any correspondence is quite coincidental. But, delving deeper, I feel less sure. The key to both Felicity and Unity can be found in their sister: Geraldine– Diana (I collate the two). Although they stood at opposite ends of the political spectrum, there was little to distinguish them. Just as fascism is contained by fanaticism as a word, so fanaticism is contained by fascism as a concept.

Unity clearly suffered from growing up in such a large family. She felt the need to assert her individuality and not be subsumed in that amorphous mass, the Mitford girls. Ironically, the sister with whom she was most competitive was the one with whose views she was most in sympathy.

Felicity was likewise dominated by her relationship with her screen sister. For all the claims of her devotion to Meier or her attraction to Ahmet Samif, I’m convinced that it was Geraldine who truly fascinated her. And no one knows better than I do how compelling she could be. Felicity began – unconsciously, I’ve no doubt – both to mimic her mannerisms and to echo her views. I’ll give you an example. We were shooting a scene at a Swinbrook party which showed Unity and Jessica playing at politics. They had adopted antithetical positions and expected everyone else to incline towards one or other extreme. They asked a neighbour if he were a fascist or a communist. He replied that he was neither,
but a democrat. At which they both expressed contempt – an
attitude
I remember Felicity sharing, saying that it showed a typically English lack of passion. I replied that a person might have a passion for Parliamentary democracy: a comfortable,
companionable
passion, as between two people who’d been married for forty years – or, in England’s case, seven hundred. She never discussed politics with me again.

If the atmosphere during filming was unusually political, I certainly didn’t notice it. Reading Geraldine’s journal, I feel like one of those women who spent the sixties up to their elbows in the washing-up.

It would be fair to say that the German actors were more
politically
aware than their British counterparts who were, by and large, older. There’d been links between some of Meier’s group and the terrorists (including, if I remember rightly, Baader himself). Don’t quote me on this, but I think that someone from the Munich theatre company was implicated in the very first Red Army Faction atrocity. They firebombed a department store in order to give the German public a taste of Hanoi. It was the occasion for Meinhof’s notorious claim that it showed more decency to bomb a department store than to work in one.

The terrorists even sounded like actors!

See the answer to 2 above.

We’re entering ‘how long is a piece of string’ territory. I first met – came across would be more accurate, since meeting suggests some interchange – Geraldine, while appearing in a lunchtime play at a little theatre – it may even have been called The Little Theatre. It was her practice to target fringe companies. She would harangue them about the right of every theatre-worker to earn a living wage, which was all to the good except that she wasn’t the one who was performing for nothing. Her name ensured that even the most apolitical actor gave her a hearing. One of our cast was so
star-struck
that she was late back for her day job and given the sack. In time, I came to see that as a metaphor.

Remember, Britain in the early 1970s was not the bland,
watered-down
version of the US that it is today. It was an era of great industrial unrest and social upheaval. There was a genuine
revolutionary
mood in the air. I’d recently left drama school brimming with idealism. It’s easy to laugh now when imitation and irony have made the attitude as self-conscious as an aphorism in a Noël Coward play, but we truly believed that art could change the way people thought. Ah, the innocence of youth!

My idealism had survived the three years of my course, during which I was trained for a rigidly backward-looking theatre. The prevailing creed was that acting was about being active. We were taught to play up the objective in every speech, relentlessly pursuing our character’s interests. I was appalled. Far from my dream of collective effort, this seemed to reflect the principles of capitalism, promoting selfishness and competition. It was a view of human nature that I rejected. Of course, now that I operate in Hollywood, where that view can be seen at its most unabashed, I realise that it lies behind the kind of acting that the public wants to see.

My professional career was equally compromised. After a season walking on at the Royal Shakespeare Company which, for all its egalitarian principles, proved to be as hierarchical as a hospital (a cat may look at a king but God forbid a courtier should chat to Richard III), I joined the Bed-Pan Company, an agit-prop group which toured anti-government-health-cuts plays throughout the Midlands and North East, until it collapsed from a combination of factionalism and under-funding. I made a couple of lucrative adverts and joined the 90% of my colleagues in weekly rep at the Dole Office. So, like many other over-trained, under-employed actors, I was ripe for Geraldine’s recruitment drive. If you asked me now, I’d have to say that my predominant aim had been to create a society where an accomplished actress would not be reduced to playing a piece of confectionery. At the time, we believed that we pursued a more elevated goal, standing in the vanguard, poised to bring about the historic union between the oppressed masses and the revolutionary elite. The trouble was that the oppressed masses treated us with contempt.

Geraldine was the Party’s star – in every sense of the word. I myself was totally in awe of her. I may even have been a little in love with her. Which is how I’m able to understand Felicity. She never laughed, as though she saw it as a sign of weakness to acknowledge anyone’s jokes but her own. She was forever changing her clothes (I’m told that Dermot Macaulay had to remind her that haute couture did not feature in the Party’s programme). She washed her hands as often as Lady Macbeth. In Hoxton Square, she had a private cloakroom which no one – repeat, no one – else was permitted to use. At first, I attributed it to Hollywood. Later, I learnt that it was the Priory.
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Even then, she couldn’t just have a breakdown like anyone else, she had to be suffering from angst.

What’s angst but depression with an accent?

Her politics were culpably naive. She viewed the world as if it conformed to the rules of a Hollywood thriller. It’s ironic that the most anti-American of women should have subscribed to such a frontiersman view of life. She thought that she could make
everything
good by her dint of her own good faith. We travelled around US bases in Britain circulating leaflets urging the troops to desert. She still felt bitter at having been deported from the States for campaigning against the draft: an offence for which she was lucky not to have been jailed. At the same time she expected to return to Hollywood and resume her career.

I wanted to ask her why she was so keen to go back when she appeared to have hated it so much the first time, let alone when she believed it to be dominated by the Jewish interests that she so abhorred. It was then that I began to take issue with her. She insisted that her position on the Middle East was not anti-Semitic but anti-Zionist. I was increasingly of the view that the one was merely a legitimate form of the other. She declared peremptorily that the Palestinians were the new Jews, which rather begged the question of what had happened to the old ones. With several other Party members, she made regular visits to Tripoli to meet Colonel Gadaffi. I was horrified to discover that the IWP was part of the labyrinthine network of left-wing groups that he bankrolled (alongside the Baader-Meinhof and the IRA). She spent weeks at a terrorist training camp in Lebanon, where she learnt the skills essential to the urban guerrilla, from shooting at a moving target to falling out of a speeding car … which was how she later met her death. According to one party member, who came to share my disenchantment, she made no concession to Arab sensibilities. She complained about the quality of the food and the lack of alcohol. She flouted the local dress code, inflaming her young hosts to the point of mutiny by her practice of sunbathing nude. The longer I spent in the Party, the greater my disillusion. I
gradually 
realised that the official line was not the full picture. The Middle East was not just an imperialist exercise any more than Northern Ireland was simply a colonial struggle. But the primary cause of my defection was the treatment of women. The general secretary was a poisonous ex-railwayman, Dermot Macaulay (happily now dead), who had a medieval view of women – and I don’t mean courtly love. He believed that his position gave him droit du seigneur over all the female members. When I objected to his harassment, Geraldine accused me of lack of revolutionary fervour. In an allusion which will be clear from a reading of her diary, she called me a ‘bad egg’ and said that I should be proud to make any contribution to the cause. She declared that exceptional men had exceptional appetites, comparing Macaulay to Mao – the ultimate idol – who also had a penchant for young actresses. I now prefer the comparison with Goebbels.

Resignation proved to be harder than I’d anticipated. The Party operated like a cult. Two days after I sent off my letter, I was abducted on the street by a pair of heavies and taken to a house in South London, where I was locked up and subjected to a variety of threats and torments. I was terrified. Remember that these people had links to the IRA! I escaped by attracting the attention of a milkman. He called the police and the subsequent raid on the house became front-page news. The IWP leadership succeeded in dissociating itself from the activities of its ‘rogue element’ but, for a while, the movement went very quiet. I, on the other hand, was suddenly in demand. As the BBC made offers – small parts but in smart projects – my agent declared that the kidnapping had raised my profile higher than any victim’s since Patty Hearst.
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