ONE SHOULD NEVER underestimate the appeal that make-believe holds out for the imaginative mind. Many of Father’s friends had difficulty comprehending how a man who sat up with eminent philosophers and theologians could derive equal satisfaction from squatting in front of the television to watch some such Hollywood confection as The Prisoner of Zenda, or a grainy reprise of Fred Astaire dancing dervish-style across shiny floors.
But even Socrates, who spent most of his days living quietly with Xanthippe, found pleasure in the occasional decadent banquet. And Father was no Socrates. We may, in the late twentieth century, be less bored than our ancestors were, but we are more afraid of boredom. Father lived in positive terror of it.
After books, women and cigars, celluloid seemed to offer a promising divertissement. Most of Father’s chosen pursuits were sedentary. Thus the enjoyment of the cinema was perfectly suited to his semi-recumbent life. Besides, a childlike delight in adventure and romance encompassed his outlook: black-and-white films featuring Ronald Colman, David Niven, Kenneth More and later Audrey Hepburn and Claire Bloom, in which honour was always vindicated and the British behaved with probity as well as panache.
By the 1960s Father’s vicarious position as one who merely watched films transmuted into that of a participant in their making. In those days the family lived near Regent’s Park in an establishment called Tower House. Built to a design by Nash, its glory was a miniature classical turret decorated on the outside with a blue-and-white Wedgwood fresco that gave it the glittering aspect of some Grecian place of homage.
When, in 1960, Peter Finch agreed to star in a film about Oscar Wilde, Tower House was chosen as one of the locations. In the film, called The Trials of Oscar Wilde, it is the setting for one of the writer’s forbidden trysts with Lord Alfred Douglas.
Father and Finch hit it off at once. Each human being has inside themself an animus that responds to another possessing the qualities its own lacks. Finch was then at the height of his amatory powers, having recently seduced both Vivien Leigh and Elizabeth Taylor.
This impressed Father inordinately. He said he would teach Finch about politics if he would instruct him in some of the more arcane secrets of love. The actor claimed to have learnt part of his technique from Errol Flynn.
‘But Flynn was past it in his last years,’ he related. ‘He had to put a pinch of cocaine on the end of his penis to create any movement at all.’
One evening Father asked Finch to dine à deux. It was a hot summer that year and they drank Pimms and champagne from silver tankards. Regent’s Park in all its delicate flower could be seen from the windows. It was a night made for delicious delights, for salivating sin.
‘Woodrow,’ remarked Finch easily after some hours had been pleasantly passed. ‘I have a suggestion.’
He paused.
‘Maybe we should do a wife swap.’
The actor’s wife at that time was a porcelain-faced beauty; a swan among swans.
Father looked wistful, like a donkey peering over a gate. He scratched his chin.
‘That’s a splendid wheeze, old fellow, but I’m afraid I’m too frightened of mine to ask her.’
His appetite was whetted for the thrill of celluloid. Shortly afterwards Father met a director called John Schlesinger. He wanted a girl for a picture he was making of Keith Waterhouse’s novel Billy Liar. One evening Father and he went to a play which featured an opulent young actress in whom he was professionally interested.
‘What do you think?’ asked Schlesinger.
‘Not bad at all,’ returned Father, surveying those soon-to-be-celebrated contours.
‘Good enough for the leading female role?’
‘Ah, absolutely.’
Thus Father was only half exaggerating when he claimed to have discovered Julie Christie.
Another film producer who became a close friend was the Italian maestro Joe Janni. He had been an acquaintance of Moorea’s uncle Count Camillo Casati. Camillo was an oddity. He was brought up sans discipline and without any work ethic; he occasionally dabbled in films. In Rome he had the most comprehensive and valuable collection of captive birds ever assembled under a single roof. His first wife Lydia was a beautiful cabaret singer. When he tired of her, he bought a divorce from the Vatican, which declared his marriage void on the grounds that he never genuinely intended to marry her. Father’s question, ‘What does that make the daughter of your marriage?’ was not popular. Camillo then wed another beauty, Anna, a doctor’s wife, the Vatican obliging with a second expensive divorce.
Camillo assumed that, as a Labour MP, Father must be irredeemably respectable. He never asked him to any of the wild Fellini-esque parties that after his death it emerged that he was fond of giving. He progressed through them to more exotic entertainment. He would persuade Anna to pick up students and bring them back to their apartment, where he would watch and photograph them making love. Anna, it seemed, warned him of the danger that she might fall in love with one of these boys.
This came to pass. Instead of photographing Anna and the student with whom she had fallen in love, during the next session, Camillo shot the student dead, murdered his wife and then turned the gun on himself. It was a sordid end for the heir to such a graceful, noble family.
Before he died Camillo introduced Father to Joe. Janni was one of those Italians whose features appear to have been lifted from the ceilings of the Sistine Chapel: gaunt, and redolent of echoing, dusty laughter. By the time Father met him he had already produced, to acclaim, A Town Like Alice and A Kind of Loving, which John Schlesinger had directed. Janni was to go on to produce Darling, Modesty Blaise with Monica Vitti, Far from the Madding Crowd (with Christie) and Sunday Bloody Sunday.
After films, Janni’s chief interest was sex. He had a crush on Julie Christie that was never reciprocated. Long into the night he would pour out to Father his intense feelings for the British actress. When Alan Bates was cast as Gabriel Oak opposite Christie in Far From the Madding Crowd, Janni bemoaned his comparatively slight physique. For a few weeks he took up weightlifting to expand his pectorals, but Father talked him out of it, saying,
‘It’s not your muscles women like you for, it’s your brain and your success.’
Janni persuaded Father to make a financial investment in the film. The screenplay involved the recreation of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex. As Wessex had not existed since the nineteenth century this posed problems. Finally Father suggested they film around his house in Wiltshire. Conock Manor was set in acres of empty land on which not a single modern structure had been built. The ancient market town of Devizes, five miles away, might also serve as a location for the crowd scenes. Father’s offer was enthusiastically accepted; so it was that cast and crew spent many sybaritic days in the grounds of Conock Manor.
Father was mesmerised by actresses. A decade before, he had visited Hollywood and had been introduced to Doris Day. He asked her out for dinner but she seemed to prefer the hollow gaudiness of her male colleagues and rebuffed him. Father also met Kirk Douglas, whom he afterwards described bafflingly as ‘Apollo with the ague’.
Not such a success was the British actor Anthony Quayle, whom Father once asked to dinner in London hoping he would divert the other guests with tales of iridescent glitter. The invitation was later regretted.
‘He was the most boring man who ever came to the house,’ Father complained crossly. ‘He talked continually to his neighbours about how many baths he took a day.’
A British actor for whom Father had a higher regard was Richard Burton. He had met the Welshman through a mutual friend and found him cultivated and amusing. Burton like reading poetry and Father liked listening to him recite it, though he preferred Tennyson to the strange cadences of Dylan Thomas.
At the time Burton was in the middle of his first marriage to Elizabeth Taylor. Father thought that Elizabeth Taylor was charming, but that Burton often treated her disrespectfully. He was perhaps envious of her film success and accordingly enjoyed belittling her position as a serious actress.
One evening Burton was expounding on poetry, using lengthy academic terms designed to flummox and impress. Father interjected with a comment about limericks, which he thought underrated as a literary form. He proceeded to recite one.
‘There was a young man of Devizes/ Whose balls were of different sizes./ One was so small/ It was no ball at all,/ while the other had won several prizes.’
Burton roared his appreciation. He turned to his wife and said in a sneering voice, ‘And do you know any poetry luv?’
As Taylor looked stricken, Father interrupted with, ‘I’ll bet she does. Your wife is a bloody intelligent woman. Go on, recite something.’ Thus encouraged, the lady rallied. She opened her eyes, the colour of cyclamen-stained waters, and said, ‘Well I do know a poem.’ There was a pregnant silence and then she began.
‘What will you have? the waiter said
as he stood there picking his nose.
Two hard-boiled eggs you son of a bitch,
and you can’t stick your fingers in those.’
Father’s ears perked, but Burton was cruel and derisive. When Taylor was out of the room, Father berated him.
‘You shouldn’t undermine your wife like that. What was wrong with that poem? It was more respectable than my limerick.’
Burton became very belligerent when he was drunk and he had often taken swings at his conversationalist assailants for less. It was not an affectation; more like a moral defect. Now he was roused to a challenge.
‘We could have a fight about it bloody now.’
Father was terrified. He hadn’t fought since the War and then he hadn’t seen any actual action. An evasive manoeuvre was called for.
‘I don’t think a fist fight is worthy of us. Why don’t we behave like gentlemen and have a duel instead?’
Burton leapt at this; he had learnt how to handle a sword for Hamlet.
‘Let’s use pistols then,’ said Father nervously. Burton would not relent.
‘No, swords. Hyde Park, by the bridge. Tomorrow morning at seven.’
This would have been Father’s Götterdämmerung. Luckily, once he had emerged from his liquid haze Burton forgot about it. At least, if he had remembered he never mentioned it. Despite the anticlimactic outcome, Father was very chuffed by the episode. He couldn’t resist saying to friends that he had saved Elizabeth Taylor’s honour.