Chapter Four

Sixties Chic

I remember talking with a friend about whether she should buy a silver fox fur coat or do an acid trip with R D Laing. It was 1967 and we were at the epicentre of a movement that was sweeping the Western world. For a minute or six, love was there on the streets. It was tangible, it was vibrant and I was living in the front seat of a radical social experiment we were creating from one moment to the next. The whole of youth seemed to be involved in an expansion of consciousness. Our mentors and guides were magicians and wondrous folk.

R D Laing typified the time. A psychiatrist and psychotherapist, his approach to mental disorders drew as much on philosophy and real-life experience as it did on medical theory. Rather than individual people being mad, he thought it was society, and the institutions that control our lives, that were insane. In harmony with a spirit of the time, his approach was based on compassion and humane understanding. Though he was totally against the use of anti-psychotic drugs in the treatment of mental illness, he thought that mind-expanding drugs – like LSD and mescaline – had the potential to unlock the unlimited reservoir of our imaginations and give us insight into the wonders and mysteries of the universe. He was also an advocate of communal living. At Kingsley Hall, in East London, patients and therapists lived together; an experimental alternative, challenging what Laing thought was the inhuman system to which people with mental illnesses were usually subjected.

We were pushing against the world of our parents in order to gain momentum and move forwards. We wanted to do things our way – to smash the mental manacles that we felt had limited our parents’ lives. We were fearlessly forging our way towards a brave new world. There were a lot of us, we were the post-war babies, and we were well educated. We could study whatever we wanted and get a grant for anything. You’d ask a friend what they were studying and they’d tell you Egyptology at Balliol or Theoretical Physics at Imperial. We wanted to learn. We wanted to know. We were changing the world.

The mores and hypocritical suburban attitudes that had underpinned our parents’ lives were being challenged. We were bored by that suburban outlook. We wanted more. We wanted better. But we weren’t prepared to have more war. The anti-Vietnam movement was huge. My American friends at RADA were either saying they were gay, attempting to get ulcers by eating toothpaste or going to Canada to avoid the draft. We all knew that Vietnam was a useless war and that the West had no right to be there. We were agents of love and we were absolute – and, mirroring the lack of compassion shown to returning GIs in the US, not particularly respectful of people who had fought in the Second World War.

The Commune

Soon after my rooftop experience I saw a note on the RADA noticeboard:

ACTRESS WANTED IN COMMUNE…
PHONE THIS NUMBER…

I did, and became one of eight people living together in a planned and conscious model of communal living. Unlike our parents, we weren’t interested in getting married and settling into a predetermined order. People like R D Laing were saying that the nuclear family was a source of neurosis and dysfunction. We wanted to explore alternatives to the norm; different kinds of ‘family’.

True communal living is about a lot more than simply sharing a house with other people. It takes work and effort. It demands structure, principles and rules. We wanted to be able to live in a family in which people didn’t take each other for granted or disrespect one another. Learning not to be selfish, to be able to listen to others and share, took thought and practice. As members of a commune we had to be ready to put in the time to make it work. We were.

It wasn’t that easy. If you’re hung up about what you think is yours, and only yours, it’s going to be a challenge. It was also about sharing your skills and labour and contributing to household maintenance; the mundane and routine and the fun and interesting. I learned so much from the people I was living with.

Our commune consisted of a sculptor and a silk-screen printing artist, both students at the Royal Academy of Arts, three architects studying at the Royal Institute of Architecture, Annie, who worked in publishing, and Judy, who partnered up with one of the architects and gave us Yossarian Yggdrasil, a gorgeous baby boy known as Yggy. There was also a cat, a hamster, and me.

Even the make-up of the commune’s members was consciously worked out in order to try to create a balance of personalities and professions. Sharing our skills and professional expertise, debating philosophy and ideology, we created a rich and rewarding habitat in which to live and grow.

Communal living is a mini-society. If it’s going to work, there’s no room for ego. Unlike the hierarchical model of the family, with dad – or mum – at the top, followed by the older siblings and on down, the commune’s field is level: no one’s boss. Everything was done by consensus. You needed to make lots of compromises. Everything we did was discussed at length. We’d have long philosophical debates about the domestic rules of the house. Should we wash up before or after we’d eaten? If you were going to turn on the oven to bake a potato, should you let everyone else know so they’d have the chance to cook something as well, so the commune could save on fuel bills?

Middle-class children developing a new set of life values, we were making up the rules as we went along. We had a large noticeboard, which we called The Interpolation Board, where we jotted down anything we had bought. When we came to do the tally, if we thought one person wasn’t as well off as another we’d ‘interpolate’ so they didn’t have to pay as much as others who were better off. We had an extraordinary sense of commune. We had detailed conversations. If I break this Minton china teacup, can I replace it with another vessel that holds liquid? What are we dealing with? Is it a vessel for holding liquid or is it the aesthetic of bone china? Our conclusion was that beauty was where you saw it, and manufactured beauty wasn’t of that much interest – a vessel was just a vessel. So, if you broke someone’s Minton cup it could be replaced with a mug from Woolworths.

We were far from unique – back then there were a lot of people living in the same way; some similar to the way we were doing it and some more experimentally, like R D Laing’s community at Kingsley Hall. We were learning how to live with others – and be laid back. You’d hope people would try to use their own toothbrush, but if someone used your toothpaste, it wasn’t important. What was important was that we were all just people trying to survive and share.

We shared all the influences of that era. Dylan, the Mothers of Invention, The Beatles – we actually had a party the day Sgt. Pepper’s was released. Our reading list included Gurdjieff, Castaneda, the I Ching, the underground newspaper International Times, Rolling Stone magazine and, of course, Private Eye. We laughed a lot, we learned a lot, and had a really good time.

Gradually, though, I found myself putting my individual needs above the communal needs and it was time to move on. My career had started and I needed a different way of living. I wasn’t a student any more. I had to go to bed at 9 p.m. if I was going to get up at 5 a.m. to be on a film set. For a lot of people at that time, living was a career. I was no longer prepared to see a drinking vessel simply as a drinking vessel. I wanted to have nice things from Heals that wouldn’t be replaced from Woolworths if they got broken. I was developing taste as well as philosophy.

Mescaline

In the end my girlfriend decided on R D Laing, not the fox fur coat. Drugs like LSD and mescaline were not taken recreationally. People approached them with a sense of purity and purpose. They were treated with respect, and the potential consequences of what might happen if they weren’t used responsibly were not taken lightly. We took it for granted that your mind, your soul and your spirit could be accessed through very carefully monitored psychedelic trips. If you were deciding to take a trip, it was done responsibly. You’d find a safe, beautiful place; you’d get your toys out, paints, good food, and the right people. LSD and mescaline were used to experience a higher level of consciousness, and were completely in line with anyone who was spiritually seeking. Taking these drugs responsibly involved having a friend with you who hadn’t taken anything to act as a guide, facilitating you to use the trip most effectively.

I took mescaline once and had an extraordinarily powerful experience. I encountered a previous incarnation in a mirror. He was a South American Indian. It was completely riveting. Well, I thought it was; I stayed in front of that mirror for about an hour. Then I went outside into a field and saw my own funeral pyre. At first I was terrified, but then I gently started kicking at my skeleton and it turned to dust. I experienced the phrase ‘ashes to ashes and dust to dust’ as a totally lucid and vivid reality. I experienced the truth that matter is never destroyed – merely changed.

I came back from the experience with the knowledge that death is inevitable and nothing to be afraid of; that it’s part of a circle and a cycle – the circle of life and the cycle of death and rebirth.

Transcendental Meditation

London in the 1960s – there were so many things happening. You couldn’t help but get caught up. My first introduction to meditation came through Guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s technique of Transcendental Meditation. He got a huge profile in the UK after The Beatles adopted him as their guru. We were all investigating, searching, exploring. I went along, too, in my Afghan coat, with a flower and an offering of some money and was given a word to chant.

It was very Barefoot in the Park – delightful but not particularly deep. We all sat there, breathing and meditating. It didn’t feel like an internal experience but was wonderful fun. I’m glad I did it. I didn’t have to use it again until many years later when I had to lie still in a hospital room for three weeks with my second daughter Chloe inside me, to prevent her from being born prematurely after my waters broke too soon.

At any time a situation can arise and you pull out what’s already inside you. Suddenly it comes to the fore. During the 1960s I was having a good time. I wasn’t doing things for my survival. I was playing and also hoping for more experiences that come out of nowhere – like Versailles and the RADA rooftop.

I was experimenting for experimentation’s sake and there were so many opportunities to do just that.

Synergy and Synchronicity

I was eager and hungry to learn. At a lecture given by Buckminster Fuller, the American engineer, theorist and futurist, I was completely blown away. It was the first time I’d come across the concepts ‘synergy’ and ‘synchronicity’.

He gave a scientific explanation of synergy. It went something like this: if you know the prehensile strength of this metal and you know the prehensile strength of that metal, you’d imagine you understood the strength of these two metals joined together. But, in fact, these two metals joined together have an exponentially greater strength; so, too, when human beings join together. This is synergy – unexpected but scientifically true.

We are meant to join together. We have the potential to do so much more when joined than we ever could achieve alone. Team effort, the power of the group, the strength of the commune, a congregation of believers or the experience of good theatre are all synergetic experiences.

The term ‘synchronicity’ was first coined by Carl Jung – a Swiss psychiatrist and spiritual seeker. He used it to refer to the way seemingly unrelated and – on the surface – disconnected events come together in a deeply meaningful way: always with a message and sometimes with profound implications. Deepak Chopra calls it ‘synchrodestiny’. These events are like miracles; reminding us that all things are connected.

Synchronicity is like having the stage curtains pulled back to reveal a perfect scene that had been there all the time – you just couldn’t see it. It’s like having the lights go up on a pattern that’s somehow shaping your life. It’s definitely in the realm of fractals – those incredible self-replicating geometric shapes that were first created by mathematicians, then discovered to exist everywhere in Nature.

Sometimes things appear to come together in a moment; sometimes over a period of hours, weeks, months or even years.

Our lives join up; just like a good haircut.

The way I landed in The London Cuckolds at The Royal Court back in 1979 is a good example of how things often join up in unexpected ways.

I’d been in The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs with Susannah York at the New End Theatre, Hampstead. It was directed by Simone Benmussa, a tiny French visionary who used lighting and music in the production in a way I’d never experienced before. I wanted to introduce Simone to Stuart Burge, who was The Royal Court’s artistic director. Stuart had directed me in Ibsen’s The Doll’s House at the Nottingham Playhouse a few years earlier.

While we were having tea, Stuart asked me what I was doing the next day. I told him I didn’t know. Then he asked me what I was doing for the next couple of months. I told him that I wasn’t sure. I was entering a very difficult and dark period in my life. The way I replied characterized the uncertainty of that time. Stuart gave me a script that he had with him and told me to read it – it was The London Cuckolds. He called me later and said he was casting. He told me to come along. It just came out of the blue; I wasn’t looking to be cast, I was just looking to make the introduction. I wasn’t thinking of acting; I just wanted to bring together two people I thought would have synergy.

I find the way things work best is not to connive and contrive but to try to maintain a spirit of generosity; to be open to possibility and, rather than thinking ‘I want,’ to think ‘I’m ready and I’m willing.’

In 1996, when we were on Broadway in Sir Peter Hall’s production of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, Nicky Henson, who was playing Lord Goring, and I shared an apartment. One morning I went out to get a latte. When I got back Nicky was doing the washing up, whistling happily. He looked at me. ‘Did you go out like that?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ I replied, looking down at my Ugg boots and fur coat over my nightdress. ‘You’re a slut,’ he said, and merrily carried on washing up. ‘And you’re squeaky,’ I muttered. We looked at each other and burst out laughing. That’s what we’ve called each other ever since. The following year Peter took Slut and Squeaky to Australia when he was asked to do the play in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. While there we became good friends with John McCallum and Googie Withers. Married since 1948, they lived in Australia. Both were part of the cast for the play’s tour there.

In 2000 John and Googie came to Bristol to do a play called A Busy Day written by the 18th-century novelist, playwright and diarist, Fanny Burney. I went to see them on the opening night. My daughter Phoebe was living in Bristol and her son Jude had just been born, so it was all perfect. But Googie was ill and her understudy was on. John told me he thought the play was going to transfer to the West End. People often say that about plays in the provinces, and it usually doesn’t happen. Then he asked me if I’d play Googie’s part if it went to the West End. I told him I’d be delighted, not for a minute thinking it would transfer. I saw the play, didn’t think any more about it, and got on with being Granny.

The run took its course, then the day before the play was being taken off they suddenly got a West End contract. We were opening in ten days and I had to learn the most difficult script you could imagine. It wasn’t easy like Shakespeare, where you’ve got your metrical feet and your iambic pentameter and you know what you’re meant to be doing. This was impossible, it was Regency English: it was a skating rink. And I was taking over from an 84 year old. I was taking over from Googie – a wonderful, big, elderly woman. I suddenly had to fabricate a character out of nowhere. Working alongside the designer Rory Murchison, we came up with all these concepts and fun ideas about how I’d do it and what should happen. That’s when I met Jonathan Church, the play’s director.

Immediately after doing A Busy Day, Jonathan took over as artistic director of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. One of the first plays he did there was Timothy Findley’s Elizabeth Rex. He asked me to play Elizabeth I. He’d seen the way I’d jumped into A Busy Day with more than two solid feet, playing an outrageous, elderly dowager duchess. In Elizabeth Rex I had to play the 62-year-old Queen Elizabeth I – older than I was at the time, but that wasn’t a problem. It was a joy.

One day in 2009, my friend Ronnie Roberts, who I’d met doing Tenko, told me she’d had a dream the night before in which I was channelling Maria Callas. Years earlier the film director Franco Zeffirelli had told me I was the spitting image of her. He was so shocked he actually fell back in the chair he was sitting on: ‘You are Maria Callas,’ he told me – as if I were her ghost. At the time Ronnie was working with Jonathan Church. She told him about her dream, too.

In 2010 my dear friend Christopher Cazenove died suddenly. It took Christopher dying to make me think, ‘If not now, when?’ I got on the phone and called Jonathan, asking him if he remembered Ronnie telling him about her dream. I told him Ronnie had told me, too. He said we should meet and talk about it.

Later that year I was playing Maria Callas, on stage in Master Class.

A Busy Day, Elizabeth Rex and Master Class are three of the strongest pieces of theatre I’ve done; none of them because I was lucky enough to know the head of casting at 20th Century Fox, or anything like that. All of them came out of loving friendships and the way separate paths crossed at specific points: opening the curtains for the miracle of synchronicity.

You’d be absolutely spot-on if you said, ‘What’s so unusual? That’s the way life is.’ You’d be right. It’s not unusual. Life is a miracle. Our existence is magic.

Ronnie was right, too. I did channel Maria. When I was doing the show in Edinburgh – on the same stage where she had performed – in the middle of a monologue, she came and had a word in my ear. Crazy woman!

Being Greedy

Soon after I left RADA in 1967 I worked at the Oxford Playhouse with the great director Frank Hauser.

One day I was late for rehearsals. I rushed into the theatre making my apologies.

‘How late are you?’ Frank asked me.

‘Two minutes…’ came my breathless reply.

‘And how many people are in the room?’

‘Thirty?’ I answered.

‘Well, in that case, I make it 60 minutes late, then.’

That was embarrassing. I was thoroughly ashamed. It was an invaluable lesson, though. Ever since, whether I’m on stage or set, I make it my business never to be late. I’d learned from professionals like Frank that having a thoroughly professional attitude is the foundation for success.

Another time he commented on how ‘greedy’ I was as an actor.

‘I mean that as a compliment,’ Frank reassured me, when I’d looked taken aback. ‘You know that lovely young actress Judi Dench?’ he asked. ‘She’s greedy, too.’

Personally, I prefer to call it ‘enthusiastic’. If I commit to something, I commit totally. What’s the point of doing otherwise?

Around the same time I was working with Frank I got a guest role in the television series The Saint.

The Saint was one of the most popular shows on television at the time and its lead actor, Roger Moore, was a household name. Waiting for our first scene together, I whispered to him: ‘It’s my birthday today!’ Raising that famous eyebrow he responded:

‘You don’t say that every time you work, do you?’

‘No, seriously – I’m 21 today,’ I replied.

‘It’s your 21st birthday? Well, that’s quite a thing.’

When we wrapped for the day, Roger presented me with a card. He’d drawn it himself. The set was closed down, a cake was brought in and we drank champagne.

The Last Waltz

Those times were joyous, alive, mind-opening and, for a short patch of time, the love was there on the streets. I am so grateful I was there to experience it. I wasn’t at the Stones’ free concert in Hyde Park when they released hundreds of butterflies to honour Brian Jones. At the time I was co-starring with Ava Gardner and Ian McShane in Tam Lin in Scotland.

With Ian McShane in Tam Lin

But I did get to the Isle of Wight to see Bob Dylan, and I found myself standing three feet away from Jimi Hendrix at the fundraising concert The 14 Hour Technicolour Dream at Alexandra Palace. It was a wonderful time to be young.

What happened to the hippie ideal? By the early 1970s too many people were dying from bad drugs. In the US too many people from unhappy backgrounds in the Midwest were moving to the West Coast. There were too many false gurus. The purity had gone. It had become dysfunctional.

I moved out of the commune just as the sun was going down.