THE LIGHT’S ON
AT SIGNPOST

GEORGE MACDONALD FRASER

COPYRIGHT

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2002 Copyright © George MacDonald Fraser 2002 Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019 Cover photograph © Getty Images George MacDonald Fraser asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780007136476

Ebook Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN: 9780007325634

Version: 2019-06-11

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Foreword

Shooting Script 1

“One for All, and All for Fun”

Angry Old Man 1

Fourth Afghan

Interlude

Law for Sale?

Shooting Script 2

With the Tudors in Hungary

Angry Old Man 2

The Westminster Farce

Interlude

Orcs and Goblins

Shooting Script 3

Gene Hackman Should Have Blown up Vesuvius

Angry Old Man 3

The Europe Fiasco

Interlude

Act of Settlement

Shooting Script 4

“Not a Bad Bismarck, Was I?”

Angry Old Man 4

The Day of the Pygmies

Interlude

A Writer, a Soldier, a Comedian, a Football Hero, a Beverly Hillbilly

Angry Old Man 5

The Truth that Dare not Speak its Name

Interlude

To Scotland, with Love

Shooting Script 5

“Phlam with Cheese” for the Stars

Angry Old Man 6

Crime and Punishment

Interlude

No One Did it Better

Shooting Script 6

“Thirty Years in Hollywood and You can still Learn Something New”

Interlude

Pictures of Russia

Angry Old Man 7

The Defeat of the British Army

Interlude

Special Relationship

Shooting Script 7

Everywhere but Hong Kong

Angry Old Man 8

How to Encourage Race Hatred

Interlude

Not According to Lady Bracknell

Shooting Script 8

“You Want to Put Bond in a Gorilla Suit?”

Angry Old Man 9

Dumbing Down, Down, Down …

Interlude

The Perfect Premier

Shooting Script 9

“Forget Fellini!”

Angry Old Man 10

This Unsporting Life

Shooting Script 10

The Ones that Got Away

For the Record

Conclusion

Keep Reading

Index

About the Author

Other Works

About the Publisher

FOREWORD

On the Isle of Man, where I am lucky enough to live, we have a saying: “The Light’s on at Signpost”. I’ll explain it presently; sufficient for the moment to say that it’s a catchphrase about the island’s famous TT (Tourist Trophy) race, the blue riband of world motor-cycling, and the nearest thing to the Roman circus since the hermit Telemachus got the shutters put up at the Colosseum. Riders come from the ends of the earth every June to compete on the thirty-seven-mile course, hurtling their machines over mountain, through town and village, round hairpin bends, along narrow, twisting stone-walled roads where the slightest misjudgment means death at 150 m.p.h., and on straights where they dice for position with each other and the Grim Reaper.

Inevitably there are deaths. Never a year passes but the TT or its companion races claim their victims, but still they keep coming, for it is the ultimate test of the road racer’s skill and daring, and the man who wins it, be he an Italian six-times victor with a mighty organisation behind him, or a humble garage mechanic, has nothing more to prove. He is the best in the world, and needs his head examined. But there it is: the TT will last as long as there are crazy men on machines – Germans, Italians, Irish, Swedes, Japanese, and every variety of Briton, including of course the Manx themselves.

That the race was world famous I had always known, but I was astonished when the late Steve McQueen, of Hollywood fame, who had never been to the island, talked of the TT course with the familiarity of old acquaintance. He was motor-cycle daft, to be sure, and even kept a bike, an old Indian, in the living-room of his penthouse in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, and at some time, somehow, he had plainly informed himself about the course and its more celebrated features and hazards – the Verandah, Ramsey hairpin, Creg-ny-Baa, the Highlander where the bikes touch 190 m.p.h., and the rest – and I was properly impressed. He must come to the island, I said, and ride the course for himself: thirty-seven miles in less than twenty minutes.

He considered this in that calculating blue-eyed silence which captivated audiences round the world, smiled his famous tightlipped smile, and shook his head. “I’m forty-eight, remember. You can drive me round.”

I never had the chance. The light was already on for him at Signpost – and it is time to explain the saying. The TT is six circuits of the course, and each time a rider passes Signpost Corner, about a mile from the end of the circuit, a light flashes on at his slot on the grandstand scoreboard, to let spectators know he has almost finished a lap; when it lights up on his last lap, they know he is nearly home, the end is in sight, as it was for McQueen that afternoon when I said good-bye to him in Beverly Hills. Not long after, he was dead, and the movie in which he was to star, and which I had written, was never made. But whenever I hear that saying, which the Manx, with their Viking sense of humour, apply to life as well as to the TT, I think of him, chewing tobacco and spitting neatly into a china mug, making notes in his small, precise writing as we went through the script.

But that’s by the way for the moment, and I have dropped McQueen’s name at this point because I know that nothing grips the public, reading or viewing, like a film star – and we shall meet him again, and many others, later on. And another reason for introducing that fine Manx saying is that it applies to me, too; at seventy-seven, my light is on at Signpost – mind you, I hope to take my time over the last mile, metaphorically pushing my bike like those riders who run out of fuel within sight of the finish.

So I’m turning aside from the stories with which I’ve been earning a living for more than thirty years, to tell something of my own. In itself it may not interest more than a few people (those kind readers of my books and viewers of my screenplays who have written to me, perhaps), but apart from telling a bit of my own tale there is something else I want to do, not just for myself, but for all those others whose lights are on at Signpost, that huge majority of a generation who think as I do, but whose voices, on the rare occasions when they are raised, are lost in the clamour of the new millennium.

We are the old people (not the senior citizens or the timeously challenged, but the old people), and if I am accused of lunatic delusions of grandeur for presuming to speak for a generation, I can only retort that someone’s got to, because nobody has yet, not in full, and if we’re not careful we’ll all have gone down the pipe without today’s generation (or any other) getting a chance not just to hear our point of view, but perhaps to understand how and why we came to hold it. (Very well, my point of view, but I know that countless older people, and not a few younger ones, share it, for whenever I’ve had the chance to express it, in has come the tide of letters*, their purport being: Thank God somebody’s said it at last!)

It’s not a view that will find much favour with what are called the chattering classes, or the politically correct, or the self-appointed leaders of fashionable opinion, or so-called progressives, or liberals in general. (Actually, I’m a liberal myself, as well as a reactionary. I’m often surprised at just how liberal I can be; I’ll have to watch it.) It is a view that would have seemed perfectly normal and middle-of-the-road in my childhood, which makes it anathema today, when mis-called “Victorian values” are derided, and the permissive society has turned a scornful back on so many things that my generation respected and even venerated.

Such elderly hand-wringing is not new. Old folk in every generation since the Stone Age have seen huge changes, for better or worse, but none in Britain has seen the country so altered, so turned upside down, as we children born in the twenty years between the great world wars. In our adult lives Britain’s entire national spirit, its philosophy, its values and standards, have changed beyond belief, and probably no country on earth has experienced such a revolution in thought and outlook and behaviour in so short a space. Other lands have known what might seem to be greater upheavals, the result of wars and revolutions and invasions, but these do not compare with the experience of a country which passes in less than a lifetime from being the mightiest empire in history, governing a quarter of mankind, to being a feeble little offshore island whose so-called leaders have lost the will and the courage, indeed the ability, to govern at all.

This is not a lament for past imperial glory, although I can regret its inevitable passing, nor is it the raging of a die-hard Conservative. I loathe all political parties, which I regard as inventions of the devil, and if I inclined to vote Tory thirty years ago it was out of no admiration for them but simply to keep the incompetent wreckers out. We have no real political parties in the Isle of Man, thank heaven. Having had a parliament from a time when Westminster was a mere geographical swamp and had not yet become a moral one, we know what democracy is, which unfortunates in mainland Britain and the United States most certainly do not. It follows that we regard Westminster and Washington politics with revulsion and contempt.

But I am deeply concerned for the United Kingdom and its future. I can view the Signpost light with fair equanimity, I’ve looked death in the eye before, and now I have only a past, a little future, and no great care on my own account. But England and Scotland are my countries still, they are the lands where my children and grandchildren live, and I care most damnably about what lies ahead for them.

I look at the old country as it was in my youth, and as it is today, and frankly, to use a fine Scots word, I’m scunnered. I don’t despair altogether, because I have studied enough history to know that nothing is forever, but I and my generation have to shake our heads in disbelief, ask ourselves how it happened, and wonder if it can ever be repaired.

Who would have believed, fifty years ago, that by the end of the century it would have been deemed permissible, by the BBC of all people, to call the Queen “a bitch”, or that the foulest language and vilest pornography would be commonplace on television, or that we would have a government legislating to break up the United Kingdom, barely bothering to conceal their republican bent, guilty of atrocious war crimes, rashly declaring war on Muslim terrorism which did not threaten us, while crawling abjectly to the IRA and even assisting it by releasing murderers from prison, making a criminal out of an honest shopkeeper because he sold in pounds and ounces, and jailing for life a decent householder who dared to defend his home by shooting a burglar, refusing to take any effective action against violent crime, encouraging sexual perversion by lowering the age of consent and drug abuse by relaxing the law on cannabis, legislating for women to serve in the front line (while the gallant warriors of Westminster sit snug and safe), showing themselves dead to any notion of patriotism and even discouraging the use of the word “British”, falling over themselves to destroy our institutions simply because they are frightened of offending hostile aliens, seeking to deny the right of habeas corpus, pandering to the bigotry of black racists and encouraging racial strife by their timid stupidity, letting foreign interests wreck our farming and fishing industries, and allowing the children of those wonderful people who gave us Belsen and Dachau a vital say in making our law and undermining our constitution …

That’s what we fought two world wars for? What millions of precious British lives were lost for? That’s a land fit for heroes and their families?

This, of course, can all be patronisingly dismissed as the raving of a blimpish Right-wing* dinosaur. Not denied, though, because it is all patently true, and therefore poison to the politically correct. The very core of their philosophy is a refusal to accept truth, to look it squarely in the face, unpalatable as it may be. Political correctness is about denial, usually in the weasel circumlocutory jargon which distorts and evades and seldom stands up to honest analysis.

You conclude that I do not care for political correctness, but before they bury me under a tide of enlightened derision, there is a question which even a Liberal Democrat or Guardian reader might care to consider. It is this: why do I, and millions of my contemporaries, think the way we do? It doesn’t profit us. If all the wrongs that I have listed were righted tomorrow, it would bring us no material advantage, put nothing in our pockets, serve no ulterior purpose. Setting aside our care for our descendants, we are as disinterested as it is possible for people to be: we don’t seek election, or power, or wealth, we have no great personal ambitions left to realise or any compulsion to trample on our fellows’ fingers in a mad scramble up the ladder. For we are yesterday’s people, the over-the-hill gang, the light is really blazing for us at Signpost, and we seek no more than what we believe to be our country’s good.

Perhaps we have it closer to heart than younger folk do. Perhaps we value Britain more because we had to fight for it tooth and nail, and saved it and the world from evil and slavery and a new Dark Age, whereas later generations have had it handed to them on a plate, welfare-insulated and (sorry to have to say it) rather spoiled and not knowing how well off they are. But whatever of that, please believe that our motives are respectable, and our convictions honestly held. We are not without understanding; we know, from hard experience, that every generation thinks itself the repository of all wisdom, and imagines that the progress of mankind is one of continuous improvement, and that whatever may be wrong with today, things are still a hell of a lot better than they were.

They are not. They are worse, and like to get worse still. Some things, indeed, are wonderfully better: the new miracles of surgery (which have kept me alive who would otherwise have handed in my dinner-pail), public attitudes to the disabled, the health and wellbeing of children (how wonderful they look), intelligent concern for the environment (hideous word, but necessary), the massive strides in science and technology (though I hate to think what Thomas Carlyle would have made of the internet and the mobile phone). Yes, there are material blessings and benefits innumerable which were unknown in our youth.

But much has deteriorated. To one of my generation, who remembers pre-war, war-time, and post-war (as most of the present population and their governors do not) and who has travelled widely and now lives, in a real sense, overseas, the United Kingdom begins to look more and more like a Third World country, shabby, littered, ugly, running down, without purpose or direction, misruled by a typical Third World government, corrupt, incompetent and undemocratic. My generation has seen the decay of ordinary morality, standards of decency, sportsmanship, politeness, respect for the law, the law itself, family values, politics and education and religion, the very character of the British – oh, how blimpish this must sound to modern ears, how out of date, how blind to the “need for change” in the new millennium!

Well, perhaps it is. We elderly pessimists may be wrong. God knows, if we had a pound for every mistake we’ve made, you could keep the pension. But, if we are old, we are experienced, we have been about, and seen things, and perhaps learned lessons that our juniors do not know … yet. In comparing past and present we have an advantage denied the young: we were there then, and we are here now.

Certainly we tend to be resistant to change, on the whole, but that is because we have learned the hard way that change for its own sake is not a good idea,* and that if something works more or less satisfactorily, it is best not to alter it without long and careful thought. Above all, we have learned Cromwell’s wisdom:

“In the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”

Oh, we were young once, and just as cocksure and clueless as younger people today – but we were luckier then than they are now because the means of self-destruction in our time were much more limited, and we laboured under fewer disadvantages.

It follows that I am sorry for the present generation, with their permissive society, their anything-goes philosophy, and their generally laid-back, in-yer-face attitude (sorry, attichood). They regard themselves as a completely liberated society, when the fact is that they are less free than any generation before them since the Middle Ages. Indeed, there may never have been such an enslaved generation, in thrall to hang-ups, taboos, restrictions, and oppressions unknown to their ancestors. (To say nothing of being neck-deep in debt, thanks to a money-lenders’ economy.)

They won’t believe, of course, that they don’t know what freedom is, and that we were freer by far fifty years ago – yes, with conscription, censorship, direction of labour, rationing, and shortages of practically everything that nowadays is regarded as essential to enjoyment, we still had a liberty beyond modern understanding. How so? Because we had other freedoms, the really important ones, that are denied the youth of today.

We could say what we liked; they can’t. We were not subject to the aggressive pressure of special-interest minority groups; they are. We had no worries about race or sexual orientation; they have (boy, do they ever!) We could, and did, differ from fashionable opinion with impunity, and would have laughed political correctness to scorn (had our society been weak and stupid enough to let it exist); they daren’t. We had available to us an education system, public and private, which was the envy of the world; we had little reason to fear being mugged or raped (killed in war, maybe, but that was an acceptable hazard); our children could play in street and country in safety; we had not been brainwashed into displays of bogus grief in the face of tragedy, or into a compensation culture that insists on scapegoats and huge pay-outs for non-existent wrongs; we had few problems with bullies because society knew how to deal with bullying, and was not afraid to punish it in ways which would send today’s progressives into hysterics; we did not know the stifling tyranny of a liberal establishment determined to impose its views, and more and more beginning to resemble Orwell’s Ministry of Truth.

And we didn’t know what an Ecstasy tablet was. God, we were lucky. But above all, perhaps, we knew who we were, and we lived in the knowledge that certain values and standards held true, and that our country, with all its faults and need for reforms, was sound at heart.

Not any more, and we wonder where it went wrong. Speaking from a fairish knowledge of British history and governance, I find it difficult to identify a time when the country was as badly governed as it has been in the last fifty years. I know about Addington and the Cabal and Aberdeen and North but they really look a pretty decent and competent lot when compared with the trash that has infested Westminster since 1945. Of course there have been honourable exceptions; I speak of the generality, and I am almost as disenchanted with Conservative as I am with Labour. Between them they have produced the two worst Prime Ministers in our history (and what bad luck it has been that they have both fallen within the last thirty years). They are, of course, Heath and Blair. The harm that these two have done to Britain is incalculable, and almost certainly irreparable.

Whether the public can be blamed for letting them pursue their ruinous policies is debatable; short of assassination there is little that people can do when their political masters have forgotten the true meaning of the democracy of which they are forever prating, are determined to have their way at all costs, and hold public opinion in contempt.

Does it matter whether today’s and future generations know what the overwhelming majority of their parents and grandparents believed and valued? Probably not; it is a fact of life that after a certain age no one is taken seriously, and an era in which the official wisdom is that history is bunk is not going to pay much heed to a reactionary eccentric like me. But I’ve written it anyway, for the reason that I’ve written all my books: simply because I want to. It’s the best of reasons. Dr Johnson, who said many wise things, could talk tripe with the best of them on occasion, as when he said that no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.

What follows is not one long die-hard bellyache, however. It contains some autobiography of one who has been a newspaperman, soldier, encyclopedia salesman (briefly), novelist, and historian, and because, as I said earlier, I know the fascination the film world exerts, my reminiscences of almost thirty years, on and off, as a writer in the movie business. These last will not be sensational or denigratory; I liked, almost without exception, the great ones of the cinema whom I met and worked with, actors, actresses, directors, producers, moguls, and that great legion of technicians, experts, and fixers without whom films wouldn’t get made.

But if I have no exposés, no juicy scandals, it may be that film buffs will still find some interest in Rex Harrison’s enthusiasm for lemonade, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s technique with head-waiters, Federico Fellini’s inability to master his office burglar alarm, Burt Lancaster’s knack of losing car keys (and his possible descent from John of Gaunt), Guy Hamilton’s system for assessing the rough-cut of a picture, Alex Salkind’s consideration of Muhammad Ali for the role of Superman (it’s a fact, I was there), and Oliver Reed’s unique method of crossing the Danube – as well as his thoughts on Steve McQueen, and vice versa.

And other phenomena and personalities. Looking back on Hollywood, Pinewood, Cinecittà, and various other studios and locations from Culver City to the mountaintops of Yugoslavia, I find some of it hard to believe, but I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.

That, then, is the purport of this book, some of which was written as long as twenty-odd years ago, and has been waiting until I had time to finish it and arrange it in some sort of order; it’s fairly random and haphazard, but at least it’s true. It won’t please everyone, I know, but those of ultra-liberal views can console themselves with the thought that my kind won’t be around much longer, and then they can get on with wrecking civilisation in peace; in the meantime (assuming they’ve read this far) they should stick this volume back on the bookshop shelves and turn to recipes about aubergines or shrub cultivation or political memoirs.

For the rest of you, I hope I strike a chord, and that you find the movie stuff as much fun as I did.

* I am taking this opportunity to thank any readers who may be kind enough to write to me about this book, whether in approval or deep damnation, because I doubt if I’ll have the energy to reply to their letters. I’m not being churlish, but life’s too short, honestly, and the postage costs a fortune.

*Just for interest, there is a mistaken belief that the terms Left and Right in politics originated in the French National Assembly during the Revolution. In fact, Edward Gibbon, writing before the Revolution, used the words to indicate the radical and conservative sides in Church politics, as the following quotation from his Decline and Fall makes clear: “The bishops … were attached to the faith of Cyril, but in the face of the synod, in the heat of the battle, the leaders … passed from the right to the left wing, and decided the victory by this seasonable desertion.”

* To quote the wise old judge: “Reform? Reform? Are things not bad enough as they are?”

EPIGRAPH

What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.

LORD MELBOURNE

It is most expedient for the preservation of the state that the rights of sovereignty should never be granted out to a subject, still less to a foreigner, for to do so is to provide a stepping-stone whereby the grantee becomes himself the sovereign.

JEAN BODIN, Six Books of the Commonwealth, 1576

Any writer or journalist who wants to retain his integrity finds himself thwarted by the general drift of society rather than by active persecution.

GEORGE ORWELL

Oh, I’ll keep it to myself – until the water reaches my lower lip, and then I’m going to mention it to somebody!

Jack Lemmon as Professor Fate in

The Great Race, screenplay by Arthur Ross

SHOOTING SCRIPT 1

“One For All, and All for Fun”

MY CAR, an ageing Vauxhall Cresta, broke down within a few yards of the Sizzler Restaurant, Onchan, Isle of Man, where Richard Lester and I had been discussing my possible participation in a new film version of The Three Musketeers, which left us facing a walk of about a mile along Douglas Promenade to his hotel. No way to treat an eminent film director, and I wondered if he might be offended to the extent of getting another writer – I didn’t know him in those days, or realise that to a man who’d made two movies with the Beatles, a mile walk along a surf-lashed coast in the middle of the night in late December was a mere bagatelle.

All I could suggest was that we push the rotten vehicle to the top of a nearby slope, and then leap in, free-wheeling downhill to a point reasonably close to his destination; he sportingly agreed, we heaved and strained and sprang aboard at the psychological moment, coasting down and fetching up, with Richard sitting patiently and me crying: “Roll, you bastard!” not far from home.

That was when I asked him (eager to know if he was still talking to me): “How d’you want the Musketeers – straight, or sent up?” I knew his reputation for offbeat comedy, and was by no means sure that I could give him what he wanted. He responded with perhaps the nicest reply a screenwriter ever received: “I want it written by the man who wrote Flashman.”

I didn’t know, then, just how astonishingly lucky I was. It was the week between Christmas and New Year, 1972, I had three novels, a history, and a short-story collection to my name, but my only experience of film writing was a script which I’d done from my short stories at the request of a rather eccentric Scots-American entrepreneur; like so many projects, it had died some distance short of pre-production.

Then Lester’s offer came out of the blue. I knew him not only by reputation but because he had been engaged to direct a movie of my first novel, Flashman, but that, too, had been stillborn. I hadn’t been involved in the script, so Lester’s fastening on me, on the strength of my fiction alone, to write what promised to be a mammoth star-studded blockbuster, was a considerable leap of faith. I thought he was crazy; when I think of the chance he was taking, I still do, but I thank God he took it.

He flew across to the Isle of Man, we talked for about four hours, and while I can’t remember anything of our discussion, I know that one thing, the vital thing, became clear: we were on the same wavelength, and that, from a writer’s point of view, is something beyond price.

My first thought on meeting him was “Pied Piper”, for he was tall and slim and restless and mercurial and

his sharp eyes twinkled

like a candle flame where salt is sprinkled.

I was to discover in the ensuing weeks that he thought like lightning, always questing for the joke, jumping from idea to idea at speed, imagining, improvising, full of enthusiasm, listening eagerly; eventually it would become like a game of ping-pong in which we batted notions to and fro, many of them well over the top – but it’s a great truth of the film business that if you never go over the top you never get anywhere.

There are limits, of course. The original notion of a remake of the Musketeers had come, I believe, from Ilya Salkind, son of the great Alex, and one of the shrewdest ideas men in the business; he later came up with Superman, and frankly, if Ilya suggested a movie based on the Book of Job I’d think hard about it. Whether it was he who floated the notion of the Beatles as Dumas’s band of adventurers, I can’t say, but I imagine that was how Lester, as the Beatles’ director, had come to be involved in the project. Fortunately (at least from my point of view) the casting of John, George, Paul, and Ringo went no further, and Lester was commissioned to come up with a more orthodox version.

At all events, he left me on the Isle of Man with a remit like a pipe-dream: one of the great classic adventures to adapt into four hours of film, the assurance that it was going to be a big-budget spectacular, a free hand to write as I wanted, and one hint about the quality of cast he was looking for: he wanted Richard Chamberlain for Aramis. That told me a lot; in most Musketeer movies the trio tend to blend into each other, three jolly swordsmen all for one and one for all, but Richard had hit on a man who was ideal for Dumas’s priestly killer, cold, urbane, supercilious, and cruel. In doing the script I wrote little separate character studies for the actors, and I remember describing Aramis as quite the least likeable of the Musketeers.

The first half of the script, up to the Intermission, took me three weeks; Richard was enthusiastic, and then we went into heavy sessions in his office at Twickenham Studios, changing, editing, discarding, re-casting, and going through that long, painful and ultimately rewarding process which eventually transforms the first draft into the finished article. (But always, said Billy Wilder, keep that original draft by you, because you’re sure as hell going to go back to it.)

There were occasions when our drama became a crisis: at one stage another writer, a household name, was asked to rewrite an early scene, but to my delight Lester flung it into the bin. Again, when my suggestions seemed to be falling on stony ground, I lost patience and offered to quit, at which he sighed and said: “You’re being hysterical, George, in your own quiet way.” Looking back, I’d say he was the ideal director for a novice screenwriter to work with, always encouraging, always optimistic, convincing me that I, and only I, could do his script for him.

We gradually developed a close harmony, with a kind of shorthand in which one had to speak only a few words for the other to latch on and elaborate; some scenes we had to discuss in detail, others hardly needed more than a few words. It’s a strange process of cross-fertilisation, and I can only describe it by examples.

Dick wanted the Musketeers to be rather less stainless than they are usually portrayed; could they be seen stealing, say, in some novel way which would take the hard edge off the crime, perhaps diverting wine along a gutter by some ingenious device? I suggested a tavern fight in which their brawling would hide the fact that they were lifting all the food in sight – that was enough; we kicked around various ways of pinching comestibles, I sketched the scene out in script form, and Dick arranged and choreographed the whole thing as only he could.

The same thing happened when we were looking for a new way to stage a sword fight which would give opportunity for some knockabout action; I suggested staging it on a frozen pond, and Dick gave what I can only call a hungry grin and said: “Say no more!” And beyond writing a line or two for Porthos to bellow, and devising a piece of sadism for Aramis, I didn’t need to.

It was fascinating, in writing a scene, to see what he would do with it. I had a perfectly tranquil meeting between the Queen of France and Buckingham which, for sheer novelty’s sake, I set in the palace laundry – Lester doesn’t miss chances like that, and concluded the lovers’ meeting with the most colossal turn-up among the soap suds between the Musketeers and the palace guards. I had what I thought was another cute idea, with the King and Cardinal Richelieu eating canapés from a line of gold plates; pull back, and lo! each plate is on the head of a dwarf. A nice little visual effect, which Dick embellished by having the little buggers talking.

My technique then, and I followed it in later films, was to describe every shot in detail, the idea being to let the director and actors know exactly how I saw the thing. If they liked it, fine; if they didn’t, it could be done another way. Some directors regard this as an intrusion on their territory; the best ones, the Lesters and the Fleischers and the Hamiltons, are all for it, because as experienced professionals they are always open to suggestions – which is not to say that they will always follow them. They have forgotten more about composition and camera angles and various kinds of shot than I will ever know, but there’s no harm in giving them your ideas.

It could be very rewarding with Lester, because when the movie was shot and I saw the rough-cut, I realised a strange thing – he and I had very much the same visual sense, in that we saw things the same way. Time after time I would have envisaged a scene in my head – and there it was on the screen, “realised”, as the French say, by Lester. One instance sticks in my mind: when D’Artagnan arrives at the Hotel Treville and becomes embroiled with one Musketeer after another, the overall scene is one of tremendous bustle and activity, with people jostling and hurrying and a fine confusion reigning. Dick approved my final draft (probably my fifth or sixth) and then suddenly asked: “What does it look like?” Off the top of my head I said: “Like a Breughel painted by Rembrandt.” He smiled, nodded, said nothing – and shot it gloriously.

I can’t be sure how long it took before the four-hour script was finished, but I know that Kathy and I were on holiday in Borneo in March, and Dick was phoning via Australia about something or other – I rather think it was to do with the scene in which the Musketeers rescue Christopher Lee from a firing squad commanded by Bob Todd, but I’m not sure. By that time the casting was coming together, and I was going about in a state of euphoric disbelief that I had written a movie for Heston, Dunaway, Welch, Reed, Finlay, Chamberlain, Lee, York, and a supporting cast which included the likes of Roy Kinnear, Geraldine Chaplin, Simon Ward, and Spike Milligan. (Someone remarked to me that I had managed to get Spike into bed with Raquel Welch, to which Spike retorted: “It’s in the script, mate, not in my contract.”)

I was at home working on a novel while Dick shot the picture, mostly in Spain, and did it in some incredibly short time – I’m not sure how long, but I know that as the weeks went by and his schedule shortened he was going at high speed, for he told me afterwards that with the second half he was “shooting the script”, which I took to mean that he was not hanging about worrying about different ways of doing things.

The rough-cut of the first half was shown at Twickenham Studios on a bleak morning of early autumn, and I found myself sitting in the front row of the little viewing theatre with Michel Legrand, who was to do the music, while Dick and Ilya and Pierre Spengler, that prince of executive producers, sat behind. Michel had the devil of a cold, and made frequent forays into his attaché case, which contained, as he explained to me apologetically, “les medications”.

He was plainly feeling awful, poor soul, and from time to time would give a deep groan, which was disconcerting at first because I wasn’t sure whether it arose from his condition or what he was seeing on the screen. It didn’t worry me long; I got lost in the magic.

Seeing a film that you’ve written is a weird experience, and one of the most thrilling I know. I’d hate to have to choose between it and holding the first copy of your first novel in your hand. I think the film probably has it by a nose – there they are, up there, the biggest names in the business, speaking the lines you’ve written, enacting the scenes you’ve constructed, and doing it far, far better than you’d imagined it could be done. You sit lost in admiration of Olly Reed’s first glowering look and rasping opening line, of Faye Dunaway’s gorgeous languor, of Christopher Lee’s splendid nonchalance, and of Michael York’s bumbling heroics … and that’s only the start. Forgive me if I warm still at the thought of them, and of the superb director who made it all happen.

You can even forgive the occasional lines changed or added during shooting, or the recast scenes, or the total surprise of something you just don’t recognise, like the laundry fight, or those voice-over ad-libs which Dick so dearly loves (talking dwarves yet!) – if it’s for the good of the movie, your only regret is that you didn’t think of it yourself. From what I’ve heard, I’ve been lucky in having my stuff left pretty well alone, especially in the Musketeer movies; before that first screening Dick told me: “It’s 85–90 per cent you,” which in view of some of the horror stories about writers finding themselves entirely rewritten, was vastly reassuring.

I learned for the first time that morning that we might have not one movie with an intermission, but two separate films. My contract, when I came to look at it (I didn’t sign until the job was half-done, which happens more often than you’d imagine, or used to) specified a film “or films”. I had written the thing as one complete picture with an interval, and the entire script was there, all four hours of it, before shooting began.

I emphasise this because all kinds of garbled rumours get about in the film industry, and one of these was enshrined in Alex Salkind’s obituary in a quality newspaper in 1997. It said, without qualification, that

halfway through the filming, Salkind realised that the director Richard Lester had shot twice as much film as he needed. Without telling the actors, he asked the writer George MacDonald Fraser to string together the spare scenes, with a few new ones thrown in, and so make a sequel.

Twaddle. Likewise tripe. As I said in a letter to the editor, I never discussed the screenplay with Alex at all, and certainly never strung together “spare scenes with a few new ones thrown in, to make a sequel.” The decision to split the picture into two, The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers (or, as they became known to the production team, the M3 and M4) was taken long after the script had been written, and for all I know, possibly after the whole thing was shot.

That not all the actors knew about this I didn’t discover until the Paris premiere, which began with a dinner for the company at Fouquet’s and concluded in the small hours with a deafening concert in what appeared to be the cellar of some ancient Parisian structure (the Hotel de Ville, I think). Charlton Heston knew, for when we discussed it before the dinner he shrugged philosophically and remarked: “Two for the price of one.” Roy Kinnear did not, for Kathy and I shared a table with him and his wife, and Roy, a hearty trencherman, said earnestly that we had best get something inside us, as the film lasted four hours.

I assured him that only the first half was being shown, and he shook his head in admiration and said: “They don’t care, do they?”

Alex’s obituary was marginally nearer the truth when it said that a host of law suits had been brought against him by the actors, but that he had easily been able to settle out of the films’ profits. In fact, I was told that only four of the cast complained, and that a settlement was reached; if there were more than four, then I was misinformed.

What was never in doubt was that the profits would be substantial. We knew we had a hit when the Paris audience gave a great roar of delight as the end titles came up with a caption reading: “Soon – The Four Musketeers” over a montage of shots from the second half, and they realised that they were going to get a sequel, the same show all over again, only different – which is what the ideal sequel should be. Time magazine called the M3 “a truly terrific movie”, and this was confirmed when it was chosen as the Royal Command Film, with the Queen Mother attending the London premiere.

Kathy and I must have arrived early, for the only people in the reception room were Spike and Mrs Milligan, he visibly chafing at the wait ahead. “This,” he cried, “is living! Let’s go to Kettner’s.” We didn’t, and presently he cheered up and was soon autographing waiters’ jackets, to their immense delight. We stood in a great horseshoe to be presented to the Queen Mother, and the show was stolen spectacularly by Raquel Welch. I had met her for the first time at a press reception in the morning, and had been taken aback to be confronted by a small lady neatly attired in a sensible skirt and jacket and flat shoes, her hair severely dressed, who conversed soberly about the script; for the premiere she was transformed in a gown that appeared to have been sprayed on her, last in the presentation line and performing the most astonishing curtsey in the history of obeisance, sinking all the way down to floor level before the Queen Mother, and up again in one graceful movement. How that dress stood the strain, only her couturier knows.

It was a night to remember, but as usual my memories are fleeting: dancing with Kathy to the music of Joe Loss and almost colliding with Les Dawson; Milligan singing “Viva España!” Christopher Lee complacently indicating a rave review in one of the papers; Michael York smiling contentedly and pushing his hair back in a characteristic gesture; having dinner at a table with Frank Finlay, Mr and Mrs Simon Ward (whose London garden had been invaded by foxes), and Mrs Bertha Salkind, Alex’s wife. You will gather that I have an erratic memory, and am incurably star struck, and always will be. Who isn’t?

A year later the M4 did good box-office, but less than the M3, and the pundits were correspondingly less enthusiastic. It was certainly a darker film than the M3, largely because I had stuck to Dumas in Milady’s murder of D’Artagnan’s mistress, and the subsequent execution of Milady at the hands of the Musketeers. The sight of Faye Dunaway in a nun’s habit strangling Raquel Welch with a rosary was strong stuff after the knockabout cheerfulness of the first film; so was her beheading, and whereas in the M3 the fights had been mostly light-hearted affairs, the final duel of the M4, fought in a church, and ending with Michael York transfixing Christopher Lee against a Bible open on a lectern, was stark and grim beyond the norm for a swashbuckler.

For what it’s worth, I still like it better than the M3, because I do love to jolt an audience, or a reader, and the direction was Dick at his inspired best – I did not take seriously his remark after we’d watched the rough-cut on the little Moviola machine at Twickenham: “One of these days you’re going to have to tell me what this film is about.” He knew, all right, but it wasn’t a conventional costume melodrama by any means. I value it for Oliver Reed’s superb Athos, and the splendid playing of Faye Dunaway against him and Heston and Michael Gothard – the sequence in which Michael is turned from Milady’s Puritan jailer into her lover is one of the best in the two pictures; it did in a few minutes what took Dumas a few chapters, thanks to the expertise of Faye and Michael and Dick. But they were all terrific, and as I once wrote in another book, no screenwriter was ever so fortunate, or more grateful.

One interesting exercise arose from the splitting of the production into two films: I had to write a prologue to the M4, for the benefit of anyone who hadn’t seen the M3. This was done by having a Musketeer voice the prologue over clips from the end of the first film, and worked very well. What intrigued me was that I had to do two prologues, worded slightly differently, one spoken by Porthos (Frank Finlay) for British audiences, the other by Aramis (Richard Chamberlain) for the American market. Don’t ask me why this was necessary, or why it was thought advisable to have Jean-Pierre Cassel’s excellent King Louis dubbed by another actor. There is much about the movie business that I still don’t understand – and that includes such controversial things as percentages which you think are going to accrue, but don’t. I’m not complaining; I was incredibly lucky to be asked to write the M3 and the M4, and I’d have done them for nothing. Well, almost nothing.

Time magazine, like the other journals, was less rhapsodic about the M4, but still complimentary, reflecting that it would be nice to see D’Artagnan and Co. “just one more time.” I thought privately that two Musketeer movies were about as much as the market would bear at the moment, but that it would be fun to do Twenty Years After, Dumas’s sequel to the first book, one of these days – perhaps twenty years after. In fact, it was only fifteen years later that Pierre Spengler, who had been executive in charge of production on the first two films, suggested that we get together again and continue the saga with the Musketeers coming out of retirement to rescue King Charles I from Cromwell’s executioners and face the wrath of Milady’s vengeful offspring.

In the intervening years I had worked with Dick on Royal Flash, with Pierre on Superman, and with both on various other projects which (like so many productions) hadn’t got the length of photography. I was elated at the thought of reprising all the fun of the first movies, and the three of us had the kind of good script meetings that you get only with old friends.

There were two hurdles to get over at the start, the first being that this was Pierre’s production, the Salkinds weren’t involved, and we weren’t going to be able to use any footage from the M3 and M4, which would have been useful for scene-setting, though not vital. I fell back on the old stand-by beloved by scriptwriters and directors in pre-war days: an extended caption on the screen giving the historical background, which is never a happy device, plus a voice-over commentary from Michael York, which helped considerably.

The other problem was a blessing in disguise. Dumas having inconsiderately disposed of heroine and villainess in the first book, there is a decided shortage of interesting femininity in Twenty Years After. I solved this by turning Milady’s avenging son into a daughter, a blonde and beautiful seductress who would also be a dab hand with rapiers, explosives, and miniature crossbows. That done, Dumas’s main plot was straightforward, and needed only the usual cutting and embroidery.

It was fascinating to see the original cast in musketeer uniform again. Oliver Reed and Frank Finlay were showing grey, but Chamberlain was Chamberlain still, and Michael York looked so ridiculously young that a rumour arose suggesting that somewhere in an attic there was a Dorian Grey portrait of him showing the ageing process. Roy Kinnear was as portly a Planchet as ever, Christopher Lee stalked the screen as a formidable Rochefort, and Jean-Pierre Cassel ranted splendidly as Cyrano de Bergerac (with his own voice this time).

In addition to the old hands, Pierre had assembled a first-rate cast of newcomers to the musketeer canon: Bill Paterson was a fine lookalike King Charles and Alan Howard an imposing Cromwell, Kim Cattrall sneered and swaggered it up a storm as the lovely villainess, Philippe Noiret was an urbane, devious Cardinal Mazarin, and C. Thomas Howell a properly stiff-necked and explosive son of Athos. Bill Hobbs was again the fight arranger, and the production wouldn’t have been complete without Eddie Fowlie in charge of props. This was the team that set off for Spain with such high hopes.

It is an excellent rule, and one which I’ve tried to follow with only moderate success, that the farther a scriptwriter can stay away from the actual shooting, the better. For one thing, they’ll just make you work; for another, you have to restrain a mad impulse to get into the act and show them how it should be done. Fortunately, I’ve always been able to master it, and watch the proceedings deadpan – so much so that Lester was once heard to exclaim: “Look at him, standing there in his steel-rimmed spectacles – he’s hating it!” In fact, I wasn’t; it’s just my normal expression.

However, I broke my rule this time. I wanted to watch the old gang at work again, and also to see one particular scene being shot. King Charles I, like most of the Stuarts, was a golfer, and I’d decided it would be nice to see him slashing away in the rough, and wrote a scene to that effect. Dick had the inspired idea of getting Billy Connolly to play the caddy, and the result was quite my favourite sequence in the movie – so, naturally, most of it ended up on the cutting-room floor; there’s a malign destiny that causes that sort of thing to happen. But at least I saw it, and have the whole thing on tape.

I flew home again full of optimism. It was a happy shoot, they were plainly enjoying it, and everything was looking good.

Then the blow fell. Pierre phoned me at home one night, and I remember exactly what he said: “Our old friend Roy Kinnear passed away today.” I couldn’t believe it; when I’d last seen Roy he’d been in splendid form, lying contentedly under a Spanish oak making remarks as Oliver Reed and Bill Paterson rehearsed a scene; now suddenly that jolly, witty, lively man whom everyone had loved, was dead, literally in the prime of life.

It had been a ghastly accident, a fall from a horse in which he suffered internal injuries which proved fatal. It put the production into shock from which it never recovered.

My first reaction was the human one: shocked misery. My second was the professional: what happens to the picture? How much of Roy’s part is in the can? Can the remainder be fixed somehow? Pierre answered these questions: the production would continue, and I was needed immediately in Spain to doctor the script; would I fly out next morning?*

In this kind of crisis there’s only one thing to do: get on with it. Shooting had been suspended for one day, then it continued while I scrounged a typewriter and paper and a copy of the script and retired first to a corner of the production office and then to a trailer beside the outdoor set where I could get at Dick or Pierre or whoever else I might want to consult. Then I read through to see what remained to do.

It could have been worse. Roy’s final scene, fortunately, was done – the grand finale, in which virtually the whole cast rode past in parade. Most of the other scenes could be fixed by using Roy’s double, judiciously shot, and voicing over his lines. “We might get Rory Bremner,” said Dick. I don’t know if he did, but whoever voiced in the lines did a perfect impersonation.

One scene looked impossible – the meeting between Planchet and D’Artagnan near the start of the film, which was absolutely necessary, and just too long to be played with the double’s back to camera. But, think hard enough and it comes: Planchet was in flight from an angry pursuer when he encountered D’Artagnan, who was having his boots polished in the street – so let D’Artagnan hide him under a cloak and use him as a foot-rest while the polishing continues, the pursuer is foiled, and D’Artagnan and the concealed Planchet can exchange their chat in peace. It worked, I typed it up, and spent the rest of the day talking with Christopher Lee on the battlements of the castle where the daring escape of the Duc de Somewhere-which-escapes-me was taking place.

Christopher was in full seventeenth-century fig, rapier, eye-patch, and all, and in no time a crowd of tourists, and sightseers who had come to watch the shooting, were clustering around to stare at him. It struck me then (and still does) that this man was the ultimate film star; he must have made more pictures than John Wayne, even, and the whole world knows him. Beauties and matinee idols may come and go unrecognised, but Christopher Lee is familiar from Indian village to Eskimo igloo, an instant magnet to admiring fans, and it couldn’t happen to a nicer man. When a Spanish lady approached and asked timidly if she might have a picture taken with him, he consented at once, and was immediately surrounded by her family, all beaming for the camera, with Christopher towering over them.

“I never know quite what to do on occasions like this,” he said, while the lady sidled closer, preening. Tactful Fraser suggested he bite her on the neck, at which he sighed heavily and said: “Don’t you start – I gave that up long ago.” Which was true. The camera clicked, he swept the delighted senora a bow, and off they all went, fans for life.

Guy Hamilton told me a story which illustrates the kind of admiration which Christopher attracts. Guy was directing him in the Bond movie, The Man with the Golden Gun, and the set was visited by Muhammad Ali, professing himself a devoted Lee fan, and requesting an audience. They were introduced, Ali assuring Christopher that he was his favourite movie star, and then he had added: “And I’m gonna dedicate my next fight to you, too!”

This was taken as an extravagant compliment, no more – but sure enough, when Ali won his next fight (I’ve an idea it was the Rumble in the Jungle) and the ring was awash with fans, handlers, and journalists, the champion fought his way to the nearest TV camera and roared into the lens: “I won that fight for Christopher Lee!” Which, as Guy remarked, was not only a tribute to Christopher, but proved Ali a man of his word.

I didn’t stay in Spain, since my job was done, and despite the professionalism with which everyone carried on, you could feel the cloud over the proceedings. My next contact with the film was a press screening in Salford for French journalists (so help me, it’s true), and then there was the London premiere, attended by the Duke and Duchess of York, and the reviews, which were pretty unanimously unfavourable.

I wasn’t surprised. Roy’s death had overshadowed the making of the picture, and the aftermath of recrimination and litigation was no encouragement to the viewing public. But there were other reasons why the film wasn’t a success. Dick had fallen seriously ill before shooting began, and while he made an excellent recovery, the pre-production had been affected, not least because he and I had not been able to go over the script as meticulously as we’d done with the earlier films, and I’m sure the picture suffered in consequence; we never got our usual happy ping-pong of ideas. Talking it over years later we agreed that we could have done better – with hindsight, I should have strengthened Christopher Lee’s part and put more venom into his father – daughter relationship with Kim Cattrall; that would have worked well. And there were other areas I could have improved, too.

Yet I wonder if the concept itself wasn’t the chief flaw. Do people want to see heroes grown old? One can be sentimental about comebacks, but they’re seldom joyous affairs; the contrast with the youthful zest of the past is all too evident, and it could not be said of the third movie, as it was of the M3 and the M4, that they were “one for all, and all for fun.”

Well, you can’t win ’em all, and it’s enough to have done what I believe we did, and make the definitive version of Dumas’s story with the first two pictures. I’m probably biased, but they seem to me to be the last of the swashbucklers in the old Fairbanks – Flynn tradition, and I’d sooner have my credit on them than on Citizen Kane.

* Inevitably there was a third reaction, but not until much later, when I found myself wondering if the scene in which Roy had been killed (a link in which he and the Musketeers had to ride through an archway) had been strictly necessary. Could I have omitted it from the script, or done it a different way? Yes, probably; on the other hand, it had been a perfectly proper scene to write, and the script called for it. Heart-searchings of the “if only” kind are pointless – which doesn’t stop them from crossing your mind, of course.

ANGRY OLD MAN 1

Fourth Afghan

THE ATTACK ON THE WORLD TRADE CENTER on September 11 was a hideous atrocity, but once the first stunned horror had receded, I confess I was puzzled, dismayed, and at last appalled by some of the reactions to it. These have been discussed and analysed ad nauseam over the past months, and many of the points I made and the questions I raised in a public address before the Fourth Afghan War had been declared, somewhat rashly, by Mr Bush, have since come to be taken for granted, although they were far from being accepted at the time. My views may still be out of step with majority opinion, but since I’m writing for a personal record I don’t hesitate to repeat them, somewhat at random, as they struck me at the time, and still do.

Was I alone, shortly after the tragedy, in finding something tasteless about a three-minute silence which seemed to imply that the victims of a mere terrorist crime, however horrific, were worth more respect and mourning than the dead of two world wars? A trivial point, no doubt, yet it offended me almost as much as the hypocrisy of Bush and Blair in their refusal to explain why the Taliban, for shielding Bin Laden, could be treated as an enemy and targeted with the utmost ferocity, while the Irish Republic, which has given refuge and sympathy to the IRA, could not. We know why, of course: Bush presumably wants to get re-elected some day, and Blair wouldn’t dream of disturbing his ill-named peace process, but the fact remains that the intent of those maniacs who flew the aircraft into the twin towers was no more evil than the intent of the heroes who planted the bombs at Enniskillen and Omagh and tried to butcher the British Government at Brighton. Only the scale of atrocity was different, and scale matters nothing to the dead.

I am not suggesting that Dublin should have been treated like Kabul, merely noting the double standard, which has its roots partly in naked racism – just like the dropping on Japan of the atomic bombs, weapons which by no stretch of the imagination could have been used on Berlin or Vienna.

I was certainly not alone in noting that while a generation of terrorism in Britain (a terrorism largely financed from the United States which expected our help last September), and other terrorisms in Spain and Ceylon and elsewhere, barely merited a mention in the American press, it was a very different story when the US was hit by terrorism – suddenly it was an attack on the whole world, on freedom, on “demaahcracy”, etc., etc., and everyone was expected to fall in loyally behind American leadership.

It was not, of course, an attack on the world, or on anyone except America, and whatever the wisdom of Mr Bush’s war, Britain should have had no part in it. It was simply no affair of ours; we had not been attacked, nor was there any likelihood of an attack until Blair, with extraordinary impudence and stupidity, thrust us willy-nilly into the firing-line, with the patently irrational claim that action was less dangerous than inaction. The propaganda that it was everyone’s fight, trumpeted in Washington and echoed in London, was a necessary lie to coerce Europeans, especially the British, into America’s quarrel – and to give Blair the chance to strut the world stage in a parody of statesmanship, bask in ludicrous comparisons with Churchill while acting as Bush’s gofer, and distract attention from the mess New Labour had made at home.

Why Blair rushed with such indecent haste to stand shoulder to shoulder with America may be obvious; what was incredible was that a spineless Parliament let him get away with it, abusing his position and betraying his trust by railroading us into armed conflict without seeking a mandate from the nation’s elected representatives. What, one may ask, is Parliament for?

Wrong though he was, it was not surprising that Blair’s rash and unconstitutional behaviour was widely if thoughtlessly approved. The British are a loyal, belligerent, and rather sentimental people, and it was pointed out that America was a staunch friend and ally who had stood by us in the Second World War, so were we not bound to support her now? By all means, and it would have been right and proper to stand by America in 2001 exactly as she stood by us from 1939 to 1942: with moral support, intelligence assistance, boundless good will, and all the material aid we could muster – at a price – but stopping short of joining the fight. God knows the threat to the world now does not compare to that posed by Hitler in 1940; talk of how “the world changed forever” on September 11 is so much twaddle, and Bush’s bone-headed claim that whoever was not with America was against her was simply contemptible, as though he had the right to deny the option of neutrality to anyone who chose it.

The dictatorial dragooning of my country into war seemed to me to be quite as important as the moral question of blitzing hapless Afghans; British constitutional liberties were my first concern, not the follies and heedless brutalities of America’s present leaders. I might deplore the apparent mistreatment of prisoners of war and the continued killing of Afghan civilians by unnecessary bombing, but I consoled myself that this lapse from the standards of civilised behaviour was a temporary thing resulting from the unprecedented shock of September 11, when it was brought home to the American people that their country was no longer the impregnable fortress of their imagination. They were stunned, and infuriated into an understandable thirst for revenge – never mind silly excuses about self-defence, they wanted to “kick ass”, and since Bin Laden’s was not available, and the world’s greatest superpower was incapable of finding and seizing him, which would have been the sensible and proper course, the bemused Bush had to find another ass to kick, and homed in on Afghanistan’s Taliban government with demented slogans about crusades and just causes.

Meanwhile Blair was alarming Britons with deranged rhetoric about British leadership, and “sorting out” various parts of Africa, and generally creating a new heaven and a new earth, in a speech reminiscent of Palmerston’s fictitious comic address to the Improvement Club.* This, when everyone knew that Britain hadn’t the muscle for even another Falklands campaign.

Now, after all this – my disgust and anger at the risking of British lives in Bush’s war; my indignation that millions urgently needed at home should be squandered in rebuilding the country which America had devastated; my conviction that the end being sought in Afghanistan (whatever it was) did not justify the means; my despair at the sheer ignorance of Islam displayed by Western leaders;† my doubt whether disposing of the Taliban and Bin Laden would advance the campaign against terrorism very far; my fear that America’s blind belligerence might really let the terrorist genie out of the bottle; my impatience at their inability to understand (not just in Washington but in Little Rock and Shaker Heights) that by ill-treating captives and committing the crowning folly of photographing their cruelty for all the world to see,‡ they were creating a public relations disaster, reinforcing their enemies’ hatred, and setting an example for other ruthless regimes to follow; my total lack of confidence in the leadership of the US and Britain – after all this, it will surely be concluded that I am disloyal, unpatriotic, and above all anti-American, and deserving of the wrath and scorn (often quite venomous) poured on any who dare to oppose or even to criticise Anglo-American policies. Some writers in the British press whom I normally respect waxed almost hysterical about this, damning me and my like as doves if not traitors, and crying a rousing “Gung-ho!” from their armchairs.

Well, I am not anti-American. I’m pro-American to my backbone, and I share their grief and rage at the horror of Manhattan – but I am not prepared to stand shoulder to shoulder with them or anyone else unconditionally, I am not prepared to accept their leadership when they are manifestly unfit to provide it, I am not prepared (unlike Blair) to put our soldiers’ precious lives at Bush’s disposal, and most of all, I am not prepared to regard US policies and decisions as infallible and beyond criticism. In spite of Bush’s inanities, it is possible to be a true friend without giving slavish allegiance, to recognise that the special relationship is not a bed of roses, to be eternally grateful for support in the Falklands while not forgetting Eisenhower’s despicable stab in the back at the time of Suez, and to reserve the right to disagree. It’s called democracy, but truthfully I would not expect either Bush or Blair to have much notion of it; they’ve shown none so far.

But nobody seemed to mind that; both men stood high in the opinion polls, and there was general support for Bush’s war, except among a small minority who included seventeen very old men with whom I attended a reunion shortly after the crisis began: we were the remnants of the 9th Battalion Border Regiment, part of the 17th Indian Division, the “Black Cats”, who fought through the Burma war, spearheaded the last great drive south behind the enemy lines and, in General Slim’s words, tore the Japanese Army apart. If there were seventeen good men and ready soldiers in Britain, with nothing to learn about what are called the horrors of war, and never a moment’s hesitation in going to battle in a good cause, those were they. Without exception they were against an Afghan war – not only because as one elderly Cumbrian said: “They’ll ’ev a bloody rough shift if they ga intil Afghanistan”, but because like all old soldiers who have been there and done it, they were pacifists to a man, knowing the wisdom of patience and diplomacy and only fighting when no other honourable course is open. It would have taken a very big man, a real leader, to stay America’s hand after September 11, resist the perfectly natural demand of his countrymen for vengeance, and look for a peaceful way.

Also, those seventeen old trained killers (for that is what they once were) felt a distaste at the prospect of the world’s most powerful superpower bombing one of the most primitive nations on earth into a bloody rubble; perhaps some of them remembered that the grandfathers of those Pathans and Baluch and Afghans of the Taliban had been comrades in XIVth Army.

I heard one reflecting caustically – and no doubt unfairly – that it struck a jarring note when a prime minister cocooned by the tightest security with armed police and bodyguards, talked of soldiers laying their lives on the line; that is a view straight from the slit-trench, and I was reminded of Dennis Wheatley’s “Pills of Honour” – the suicide pills to be taken by any Cabinet declaring war and so inevitably sending others to certain death. Not an option that would appeal to politicians. One would have to go back to Regulus for that kind of honour.

Of course time may prove me absolutely wrong. Perhaps posterity will acclaim Bush’s and Blair’s behaviour as courageous and statesmanlike. But I doubt it, just as I doubt (whatever the course of events in Afghanistan, whatever terrorist leaders are killed or captured, whatever so-called government exists in Kabul) whether it will be possible to talk of victory until the Palestine question, which is at the heart of the matter, has been resolved. Everyone knows that this is crucial, and that while it remains unsettled, terrorism will continue. Western leaders talk of an indefinite campaign which, although they can never admit it, is an admission that terrorism can’t be beaten. It always wins, as we have seen in Northern Ireland and elsewhere, and in the end it has to be looked at across a table, with talk of jihads and just causes forgotten, and reality faced by both sides. Easier said than done, but that’s the truth of it, and perhaps when the guns of Gaza and the West Bank are silent, as they have seldom been since I heard them as a young subaltern more than fifty years ago, it will be possible to say that the world has changed indeed.

* Lord Palmerston’s address to the Reform Club on March 7, 1854, on the eve of the Crimean War, was memorably lampooned in Punch.

† And sections of the Western media, like the American news magazine which under the heading why they hate america, told its readers that “Bin Laden’s fanatics are the offspring of failed societies”, adding that “We stand for freedom and they hate it. We are rich and they envy us. We are strong and they resent this.” God help us.

‡ Mr Rumsfeld’s contention that the Afghan captives were not prisoners of war prompted an interesting question: would he define the civilian farmers of Lexington and Concord who fired the first shots in the American Revolution as “unlawful combatants”, and would he have regarded as “appropriate” the hooding, blindfolding, caging, and sensory deprivation of any taken prisoner?

INTERLUDE

Law for Sale?

NEVER MIND PEERAGES, can law-making be bought? If an animal rights organisation were to contribute to a governing party’s funds, would this assist the passage of a bill against parrot-kicking or butterfly-baiting or some similar blood sport? And if the Fruit of the Month Society made a similar donation, would this win government support for lowering the age of consent for homosexuals? I ask these questions in all innocence, and am ready to be told that it is disgraceful even to mention them – which usually means that the question has hit uncomfortably close to home.

On this head, I was an interested observer of the campaign to ban fox-hunting, deer-hunting, coursing, etc., and found myself wondering whether the proposed bill was the result of judicious investment or just mental derangement. I have never hunted, and never would, but I have a foolishly sentimental affection for it which comes of reading Surtees and Trollope and singing at school hearty songs like “Drink, Puppy, Drink”, and “A-Hunting We Will Go”, and of course “John Peel”, and I should be sorry to learn that they were no longer sung in this politically correct age.

This is very wrong of me, but there it is. I haven’t shot an animal since I was nine, when I nailed a rabbit and promptly burst into tears. And once I had my copy ruthlessly spiked when I was sent to write an article celebrating the Waterloo Cup, and turned in a passionate denunciation of coursing.

So I understand the position of the anti-blood-sports people (and would gladly shoot those of them who commit evil acts of terrorism, but that’s not germane to the argument). I’m neutral to the extent that I don’t give a dam about the morality of hunting, but as a country lover I have to defend rural traditions and the right of people to make a living from them. But my real interest, I confess, would be to watch the attempted enforcement of a hunting ban, something which I suspect the banners haven’t really thought about. I’m not sure how the police are going to proceed against law-breaking huntsmen – when they assemble, when they set off, when they first get on the trail of a fox, or when they kill it? Assuming they do. I would truly enjoy the sight of PC Plod in pursuit of the Blencathra, running up and down the fells crying: “Stop, in the name of Blair!”

I mustn’t be cynical, or wonder why the government debated fox-hunting while the countryside was dying from foot and mouth disease; whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. But I would like to know why the ban-the-hunt brigade don’t demand the outlawing of angling, which is horribly cruel, consisting as it does of the slow torturing to death of a fish with a barbed hook in its jaws. Could it be that while they inveigh against people who chase foxes and deer and blow the hell out of grouse and pheasants, on the erroneous assumption that they are all “toffs” and fair game, the antis are scared to tackle the anglers, vast numbers of whom are working-class? Of course it is. They know, too, that a bill against angling wouldn’t stand a chance – but being men and women of stainless principle, shouldn’t they try for one, or at least state boldly where they stand? Or don’t they care about fish?

SHOOTING SCRIPT 2

With the Tudors in Hungary

SENSIBLE PEOPLE do their memoirs by taking daily notes, like Alec Guinness and Alan Clark, which gives the published work an immediacy and excitement lacking in those recollections which begin: “It was in the summer of 1977 …” Being idle, and having no great ambition, until quite recently, to write my autobiography, I haven’t taken daily notes, but on one occasion I did write up my doings on a weekly basis. That was during the making of The Prince and the Pauper, and for the sake of variety, and because it contains trivia which may be of interest, I am including that account as I wrote it, with only a little editing. Since I didn’t start my note-taking until some time into the production, I shall have to set the scene with a brief introduction. So … it was in the summer of 1977 that Alex Salkind invited me to do a screenplay of Mark Twain’s novel, to be directed by Richard Fleischer. A screenplay had already been done, and I was to adjust, or, if necessary, do a complete rewrite. I read it, and decided to start from scratch.

Accordingly I flew to Paris and met Fleischer, and so began a most happy collaboration with one who was to become my closest friend in the movie business – indeed, Kathy and I have no closer friends anywhere outside our family than Dick and his delightful wife Mickey. We see them only at long intervals, but they have been great fun in London, Los Angeles, the Riviera, Spain, Budapest, Rome, Dublin, and elsewhere, and as David Balfour said of Alan Breck, they can burn down my barn any time.

Dick, whose father, Max Fleischer, was one of the great animators and the creator of Popeye, is a pro from way back, one of the masters of Hollywood’s golden age and a meticulous artist of immense versatility. You name it, Fleischer has directed it, from newsreels to such celebrated films noirs as The Narrow Margin; massive spectaculars including The Vikings, Barabbas, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and Tora! Tora! Tora!; musical comedy (Dr Dolittle), science fiction (Fantastic Voyage), fantasy (Conan the Destroyer and Red Sonja) and a host of outstanding films which defy classification, among them Soylent Green, 10 Rillington Place and The Boston Strangler. I’ve been lucky enough to write for him on three productions, and can only echo what Cary Grant said of Hitchcock: “I whistled all the way to work.”

We agreed that Prince and Pauper would need a complete rewrite, talked it over with Alex Salkind and Pierre Spengler, and that was that. I flew home, discarded the original screenplay, and did a new version of Twain’s charming story (he saw it in fairly dark terms, but I liked it for its excitement, humour, and ingenuity). It’s an historical fantasy based on the premise that the boy prince, Edward, heir to Henry VIII, and his double, a young thief named Tom, changed places and found themselves having bewildering adventures in their unaccustomed roles. It had been an Errol Flynn swashbuckler forty years earlier, with the title roles being played by twins; Salkind and Fleischer were to give it blockbuster treatment with a cast which would eventually include Oliver Reed, Charlton Heston, and Raquel Welch (all Musketeer veterans), as well as George C. Scott, Rex Harrison, Ernest Borgnine, and David Hemmings, with young Mark Lester, the angelic hero of Oliver!, in the two lead parts – a huge challenge for an actor of eighteen, since it is really four parts, the Prince, the Pauper, the Prince-as-Pauper, and the Pauper-as-Prince.

I did the first draft, following Twain as closely as possible, and Fleischer liked it. Kathy and I flew to Hollywood, where Dick and I went over the script, and agreed revisions. I flew home and did them, Dick approved … and now I break into my notes, written at the time, when I was waiting for the production to get under way …

Fleischer phones, with the splendid news that Rex Harrison is to play the Duke of Norfolk – can I beef up his part? You bet I can.

Down to Penshurst Place, Kent, for the first day’s shooting. Ancient house, beautiful grounds, Olde England to the life, with Fleischer setting up his stuff with Jack Cardiff, and yeoman warders lying on the grass looking harmless. Why don’t they get great big burly thugs for these parts nowadays? This lot of minions wouldn’t frighten anyone. Where are you Harry Cording, Ray Teal, Dennis Wyndham, et al. … ?

Through a Tudor arch strides Henry VIII – Heston, in full fig, looking terrific in the true sense of the word, extending a regal hand for Fleischer to kiss (he doesn’t).

I’d met Heston in Paris in the production office at the Georges V before the M3 premiere – he had heard me give my name at the desk, and loomed up beside me saying: “I’m Charlton Heston.” Taken all unawares at the sudden appearance of a living legend, I had been startled into saying: “By God, so you are!”, at which he had taken no offence, handing me a whisky and starting to talk Scottish history (he is part Fraser and immensely proud of it – aren’t we all?) He had also confessed to a wish to play Flashman at Little Big Horn, an episode I had yet to write.

F. and H. go into a huddle over the script, and call me in. H. suggests rewording one of my lines to read: “You failed me in Scotland, Norfolk, and you know it well.” It sounds a wee bit corny to me, but I’m not fussy – maybe he knows better what will sound right. I stick my heels in on another point, the line where Henry says he’s been on the throne five and thirty years. H points out, correctly, that at the time Henry had been on the throne thirty-seven years; I plead poetic licence, claiming that five and thirty sounds better, and he yields. He looks horribly like Henry VIII, which is disturbing when you’re sitting on a garden bench with him arguing about what he should say, and expecting to be consigned to the Tower at any moment.

Meet Mark Lester, a tall, ethereal-looking, nervous lad who smokes Marlboro as if they were going to stop making them. He writhes convincingly in a muddy flower-bed while Heston stands on him, and Graham Stark, in jester’s motley, flings himself prone, crying “Break away, old Hal!” in a variety of accents. Rex Harrison stands by registering polite concern.

Time out, and Graham Stark is busy snapping away with his camera, something which he does, he tells me, on all his films – his collection should be worth a fortune one of these days. He is telling me what I suspect will be a scandalous story about Michael Curtiz, when Rex Harrison, who has been rehearsing with Heston and Harry Andrews, strolls over – and who can stroll like him? – and murmurs to me that now that Henry’s line to Norfolk has been changed, he feels that he’d like something stronger to say in reply. Could I possibly … ? Sensing a slight needle here, I do a quick think, and give him a line off the top of my head which pleases him inordinately. I’d say it was passable, no more, but he writes it carefully into his script (left-handed), crinkling happily and repeating it with obvious enjoyment. When they come to rehearse the scene again, he drawls it out, Heston’s head jerks up in what may be well-acted royal displeasure or sudden suspicion that he is being upstaged (either way, it’s a perfect reaction), and Harrison opens his mouth and laughs silently.

The word is that he is notoriously a bastard to work with, and I have heard horror stories about his temperament, but I can only say he seems extremely easy and reasonable to me – of course, I don’t have to photograph, produce, direct, record, attire, or act with him, and in my experience actors tend to be more friendly with writers than with anyone else, possibly because they have to depend on them. I’d given him a line, and he’d been happy with it; when I ask him if he has any thoughts about the rest of his part he leafs through the script and delights me by giving a sudden guffaw and exclaiming: “I like this!” It proves to be an exchange between him and Hertford (Harry Andrews) who has been sent to arrest him.

Hertford: In the king’s name!

Norfolk (pretending to be taken unawares): Henry, I believe.

It looks nothing on the page; as said by Harrison, with his perfect timing and expression of feigned surprise, it worked beautifully.

We talk about Arthur Barbosa,* and I ask Harrison if he saw French Without Tears on TV last night. He frowns and says he did, recalling his own appearance in the original play forty years ago. “I don’t know – these chaps nowadays, they seem so bloody young.” Sigh. “I suppose we were bloody young, too.” He reminisces affectionately about Roland Culver, Guy Middleton, and Trevor Howard; in the background Henry VIII is hauling an enormous mattress onto the grass and collapsing on it, robes, staff, and all.

Lemonade is served from a large urn; Harrison, whom one naturally associates with wines of rare vintage, looks doubtful, but exclaims after an appraising sip, “Not bad, really.” He tries for a refill, but the tap yields nothing, so between us we up-end the urn to get the dregs and manage to extract two paper cups-full. Harrison sighs contentedly, savouring the bouquet, and wonders when lunch is.

A buffet has been set up in a tent, and Fleischer, Heston, Harrison, Stark, Mark Lester, and I help ourselves, Heston unbelievable without his robe; he is clad in long johns with an artificial potbelly strapped on. Graham Stark is worried about his lines: is his accent right, is he doing them well? I assure him that not since Barrymore’s Hamlet … and he cheers up sufficiently to ask Fleischer if his Shropshire accent is acceptable (I gather he has been researching Will Somers, Henry VIII’s jester). Fleischer, who wouldn’t know a Shropshire accent from Cantonese, says so long as he’s comprehensible, that’s fine. Mark Lester’s nervousness is wearing off.

After lunch discuss children with Heston, and the question of which other monarchs he might possibly play. Since he is a dead ringer for Edward I – bone structure, height, and presence – I suggest that he’d make a fine Hammer of the Scots, but have a feeling he’d rather play Robert the Bruce.

Meet Harry Andrews, whose father, it transpires, was from Scotland, and who glows when I praise his performance as a Scots RSM in The Red Beret. Watch him and Julian Orchard shooting with Heston and Harrison. Fascinated by Fleischer’s directing technique: after one rehearsal he says quietly: “You’re trying too hard, Chuck.” Heston nods gravely and moderates his style. “Very good, Chuck; that’s it.” Fleischer is very neat and precise as he moves quietly round the set, relaxed, amiable, and taking every opportunity to praise, especially young Mark. “That’s good, Mark, that’s very good.”

As the afternoon wears on and the shadows cast by the sun change, Jack Cardiff makes mysterious adjustments to his equipment so that no passage of time will be visible in a scene lasting no more than a minute or so. This is a vastly more technical business than I had realised.

Heston has got shot of his make-up and is pacing in a track-suit, looking like a decathlon winner. He is one year older than I am, God help us. We adjourn to a Tudor archway, through which young Mark has to be pursued by angry citizens. Endless rehearsals, as Mark practises barging into people, but the star of the show is a stout extra, whose job it is to be jostled and register astonishment. As the rehearsals progress, he expands his moment of mild surprise into something resembling Tod Slaughter going into overdrive in Murder in the Red Barn, with clutching of brows, staggering, rolling of eyes and cries of “What the hell?” Mark runs himself silly, Fleischer advises patiently, Nigel Wooll (assistant director), keeps crying, with eternal optimism: “All right, here we go, this time. Quiet, please, everyone, here we go … oh, quiet, for God’s sake!” Finally we do go, Mark hurtles past the stout extra who is going to win a supporting Oscar or die in the attempt, and B. H. Barry, the sword expert, tells me how he is working out the fight sequences, giving a different theme to each one.

Part of the production was to take place in Hungary, which necessitated two visits.

To Budapest to go location-hunting with Fleischer, Spengler, and crew members. Our principal quest is for a church interior which can pass for Westminster Abbey in the coronation scene – not easy, since Hungarian churches have a rather Byzantine look, being decorated with splendid colours over walls and ceiling. Eddie Fowlie stands in one vast cathedral nave surveying the rainbow riot which covers the echoing interior, and remarks: “We could spray this lot with plastic, easy. Peel it off after, no bother.” There is no end to the enterprise of the British film technician, but I doubt if the local Dean and Chapter would take kindly to having their church repainted, even temporarily.

Scour the countryside for anything, architectural or natural, which might bear a resemblance to sixteenth-century England, and are rewarded in Sopron, a town up near the Czech border, which has some Tudorish-looking streets and frontages. Further exploration of the area is called off when we find ourselves being sternly regarded over the hedge by Czech frontier guards armed with tommy-guns. The team go back to Budapest, while I am driven to Vienna to catch a plane home, waiting patiently at the Austro-Hungarian border crossing while the guards take my passport away for three-quarters of an hour. Later, when I mention this to Nigel Wooll and speculate on what takes them such an unconscionably long time to deal with passports, he says: “I think they just read them.”

This sounds plausible; I suppose time hangs heavy at East European frontier posts.

Stay one night in Vienna, and am disappointed to see that the Danube is not in the least blue, but insanitary grey.

Back to Budapest, with Kathy, to see some shooting and do possible rewrites. Fleischer tells us over lunch that they have had considerable trouble with Olly Reed. It seems he got into a fight and finished up in a police cell; talk of deportation, but he was released on a promise of good behaviour. Then he had annoyed Fleischer by making a nuisance of himself at Mark Lester’s eighteenth birthday party, and had provoked a new crisis by breaking the nose of a rugby-playing friend. The Gellert Hotel, on the Buda side of the Danube, refused to have him back, so he is now in our hotel, the Intercontinental, which is on the Pest bank. Apparently he changed hotels not by taking a taxi across one of the bridges, but by wading and swimming the river in the middle of the night, arriving in the Intercontinental lobby clad only in mud and waterweed. It says much for his persuasive powers that the management allowed him to stay instead of throwing him back. Possibly they were impressed by his line that his behaviour was nothing out of the way, and in England no one would have thought twice about it.

The Salkinds throw a big party for the unit in the Intercontinental ballroom. Kathy looks smashing in green silk, and I feel terribly conventional in my best suit among all these glamorous bohemians, but feel better when Oliver arrives in what is plainly his best suit, blue serge with waistcoat and club tie (black with thin orange stripes; who’s that?) He is only slightly canned, accompanied by his wife and daughter, and carrying a bunch of bulrushes – possibly a souvenir of his Danube crossing – which he distributes (“reeds”, get it?) Raquel Welch receives one graciously (so much for the tales that she and Oliver don’t get on; mind you, I can’t see them as close friends). As before, she struck me as being a nice, sensible woman, by no means a sex goddess. She is tired, after a day of interviews, and demands wearily: what do the press want of her? She doesn’t like being photographed or questioned on set, which is hardly surprising, and obviously believes (not without justice, I dare say) that the newspapers hope to be able to report her as difficult and temperamental.

Mark Lester is a nice lad, prattling to us about his part (both of them) and assuring Kathy that the film will have to be the next Royal Command production. He is only slightly tight, which for an eighteen-year-old is pretty creditable in the circumstances; his parents have been out once, for a week, and I wonder who keeps an eye on him. To my surprise he has about fifteen films behind him; another overnight sensation.

Kathy, as usual with her reporter’s instinct, has found the most interesting person at the party – a delightful, very old lady who speaks only French and turns out to be Pierre Spengler’s grandmother. We converse with difficulty, but gather that in her opinion Pierre does all the work (“beaucoup de travail”) which I think is probably true on the production side. She cannot take alcohol or chocolate, but she and Kathy share a plate of ice cream.

Fleischer introduces Lalla Ward (Princess Elizabeth) and Felicity Dean, a stunningly pretty blonde who is Mark’s sweetheart on screen; you could, as Dick says, eat her with a spoon. She confides to Kathy that she is still too young to get into RADA, and I think this may be her first part.

To the Hungarofilm studio to see rushes. The film looks beautiful, and the thrill of hearing George C. Scott speak my lines is delightful. Some of them he has decided to chant, which is appropriate to his part, the “Ruffler”, a monk-turned-bandit, and it works perfectly. I have nothing but admiration for Anthony Quinn and James Coburn, both of whom were mentioned as possible Rufflers, but I wouldn’t swap Scott for anyone. Heston, as Henry VIII, is better than I’ve ever seen him, Borgnine and Harrison are excellent, Lalla Ward gets every inch out of her raging scene as Young Bess, and there’s a nice little love-scene between Mark and Felicity Dean (that boy’s heart is in his work, no error; he doesn’t need a spoon). Olly is A1 as always, and I’m told steals the movie. It could be a smasher, but I’ll have to see it all.

Dinner with Fleischer at the 100 Years, to the deafening accompaniment of a gypsy violinist, whom I summoned accidentally while trying to get a waiter; thereafter he haunts us all bloody night. I complete my Edgar Kennedy act by grabbing for the bill ahead of Fleischer, and succeed in scooping up the check belonging to the next table. Fleischer wants another fight, this time in Westminster Abbey; no problem for me, but they’ll have to rebuild Westminster. However, Alex Salkind wants to keep the action going, and says spare no expense. They also want little end-pieces to be voiced over by Harrison, which I’ll attend to.

I mention tactfully to Pierre that since I’m having to do extra work, perhaps he should call my agent … he agrees. (I knew if I came to Hungary I’d finish up working.) Kathy suggests I get a typewriter from the hotel, but remembering the difficulty I had getting one in Hollywood, I suspect I’ll end up writing in longhand. But lo, when we try the concierge he produces typewriter, paper, and all the fixings; so much for capitalism’s supposed superior efficiency. I do the scene and end-pieces, and we go shopping – pictures, ash-trays, embroidered cloths which we find in the apartment of an old German woman; likewise wooden cooking spoons of a style and shape no longer to be found in the West. Kathy gets me a lovely glass and silver swan whose wings fold over a mustard-pot; he is Ferenc, and will live on my desk.

Car to Sopron, where Olly sits smoking in the stocks waiting to be flogged, while Raquel Welch and David Hemmings, on horseback, rehearse with Olly cueing them. All do well, although she doesn’t look at her best; I gather her father died recently and she has had distressing problems with hospital authorities.

Lunch with Kathy, Fleischer and Jack Cardiff. Chicken, caviare, cheese, grapes, peaches, vacuum flask of coffee which comes out stone cold, and wasps everywhere. Jack and Dick laugh at the tailpieces and approve the new Abbey fight scene; Pierre objects that they can’t re-dress the warehouse as Westminster because the owners have got 70 tons of cotton and 56 tons of beetroot which must be stored. Well, that’s show business.

Back to the stocks, where Hungarian extras dressed as Tudor peasants stand sipping from Coke bottles while Nigel Wooll, ever the optimist, shouts: “Quiet, please! Okay, everyone, here we go! Start pelting!” A technician translates for the benefit of the mob, who hurl eggs, vegetables, etc. enthusiastically at the stocks-bound Olly. He bears it patiently, wincing nicely when they rehearse the flogging with a velvet whip, while Mark, protesting violently, is dragged away by constables. Small crisis when flogger hits Olly before Fleischer has given the signal, and is severely rebuked. Meanwhile Mark is being pursued by wasps, and vanishes, flapping and cursing.

To burn the witch or not? Much debate. I’m all for dropping it – if we want a U certificate and a Royal Command we’ll have to. Fleischer happy to ditch it, fair enough.

B. H. Barry, the fight arranger, suggests a Mel Brooksish touch for the Abbey fight: Olly seizing Raquel, menacing her with dagger to hold guards at bay. I shoot it down gently, and cheer him up by telling him that two-handed swords are to be used in the scene, which delights him, and he is soon lost in two-handed sword dreams.

Kathy and I take Fleischer and Cardiff to dinner, meeting Olly on the way. He is fresh after his ordeal, and when someone remarks that a scene which took me a moment’s typing gave him several long hours in the sun, trussed up, belaboured, and plastered with filth, he says happily: “Bing sings.”*

Discussion at dinner about a remarkable piece of photography achieved by Cardiff, in a scene in which Mark, as the Prince, is seen walking completely round Mark as the Pauper. I’ve never seen anything like it, and when I ask how it was done I’m informed that when Sabu was asked by what miracle of special effects he had been shown flying on a genie’s back in The Thief of Baghdad, he replied deadpan: “He just picked me up and flew me.” Fleischer’s comment: “Good for Sabu.” I agree; I’ve no time for those who explain how screen miracles are achieved, and I shouldn’t have asked. Mark walked round Mark, and I don’t mind not knowing how it was done.

Cardiff has the rights to Jeffery Farnol’s Jade of Destiny, and wants me to write it for Olly in some kind of co-production deal. I make non-committal noises. It could be fun to write, and might make a good swashbuckler, but I wonder if the market will bear another Tudor adventure so soon after Prince and Pauper. Also, production isn’t my style. I’m a hired typewriter.

Back to the I.o.M., and a call from one Harold Hecht: am I interested in writing a sequel to The Crimson Pirate for Burt Lancaster, and will I go to a screening of the original movie (which I haven’t seen) in London with Lancaster, who is coming to England shortly? I’m taken with the idea of working with Lancaster, who has the reputation of being an unusually intelligent actor, but I’m not sure about the job. Without knowing what The Crimson Pirate was like, I doubt if there’s much chancing of doing an M3 (or a P and P) with a sequel. But who knows?*

To Pinewood with Fleischer to see the rough-cut. It seems that Olly took to turning up legless during the last two weeks in Budapest; once he had roared at Fleischer, explaining how he was going to do a fight scene, stabbing the air, flinging himself on the ground, and simply failing to register when Dick said: “But, Olly, we’ve shot that fight, remember?” Olly didn’t, no doubt because he had been entirely gassed when he did it, plunging about and trying to kill everybody. Barry had had to scrap his carefully choreographed fight and ad-lib the whole thing, which looked suitably shambolic on screen.

Plainly booze is going to be the ruin of a fine but undisciplined actor. What makes it so painful is that Dick had golden opinions of Olly the actor before he saw Olly the drunk.

At lunch in the Pinewood restaurant (Table One, whee-whew! that’s what directorial giants get) I learn to my horror that most of Rex Harrison has been removed from the film. The logic is that Rex’s part was artificially built up (which I did on instruction because he is who he is) and that this unbalances the film as a whole; the built-up part is judged to be “obtrusive”. My feeling is that Rex can never be obtrusive – and, dammit, I wrote the part specially for him, he liked it and does it beautifully, and for my money it’s the best dialogue in the film. So I say, the hell with whether it’s obtrusive or not – if you’re lucky enough to have Harrison doing his thing as only he can, use him, and who cares if the picture runs ten minutes over?

Pierre arrives with his sister, a pretty, quiet girl. Alex and Ilya are at the Dorchester, cooking up big deals, but will arrive by executive transport, air-conditioned chauffeur, etc., in time for the showing at 3 p.m. We go to the viewing theatre – no Salkinds at three. Pierre phones in all directions, the chauffeur is still outside the Dorchester, but Alex and Ilya have vanished. Dick contains what must be white-hot fury under a bright-eyed calm. We continue to wait … and wait. Dick says if they don’t arrive by three thirty, forget it, because he won’t try to crowd the showing into the time available before the theatre is booked for another film.

We wait some more, Pierre’s sister brings coffee, we drink it in silence, I deliver a brief lecture on the manners of film producers, and Dick nods with gritted teeth – much more delay and he’ll burst.

At the last minute Alex and Ilya arrive, in trench coats, Alex apologising profusely and Ilya shaking his head. Coffee finished, Dick cocks an eye and asks: “Are we all … reddee?”, and we take our seats, myself at the end of the back row, well away from massed Salkinds with Dick in their midst. He must be a masochist; sitting beside Michel le Grand with a heavy cold is bad enough, but how he’s going to cope with Alex’s stertorous breathing and muttered translations of English into French via Russian, I hate to think.

Dick, using what I imagine is an age-old Hollywood formula, makes a nice little set speech from his seat, telling us the form: we’ll see the movie, and think a while, and then exchange views, right? Enthusiastic grunts from Alex, frowning malignantly from the depths of his trench coat (this is his “concentration” expression) and the film rolls.

Well, my first reaction is one of disappointment.* The overall direction is vintage Fleischer, and Jack Cardiff’s photography is immaculate as always, but some of the acting isn’t that good, and I’m not all that struck with some of my screenplay, either – but in self-defence there are lines I’d have played differently. But the main fault, dwarfing any others, is in the casting: Mark just isn’t right for the parts. Now and then he sounds like a school-play rehearsal – and yet sometimes that crack-voiced boyish intensity hits exactly the right note. It’s not his fault; it’s simply not his role – for one thing, he’s far too tall, six feet if he’s an inch.

Harrison’s reduction aside, I’m annoyed that the editor has dropped the long shot of Henry dying, which I liked because it was historically accurate and rather moving, with the whispered “Monks, monks, monks!” and the haunting music of “The Hunt is Up” coming in softly, and substituted a jarring close shot in which Charlton’s head drops alarmingly, and he does a great slump.†

Borgnine is excellent … I think – is he too much, with that mad glint? – Olly as good as always, Heston v. good, and the most believable Henry I’ve ever seen, Raleigh’s tyrant to the life; he manages something which I wouldn’t have thought Heston could have done, namely, make my eyes moist. Lalla Ward gives Young Bess the message, on all cylinders. George Scott looks even better the second time.

Surprisingly, the scene at the stocks between Olly and Raquel plays well, possibly helped by Korngold’s music, which Dick has used for the nonce. I rewrote the scene, on request, but the principals liked the original better. Mark’s finest hour is his “They shall have right” speech, which he does superbly, with Olly reacting perfectly – that whole sequence, beside a dreary river in half-light, is Jack Cardiff photography at its wondrous best.

Westminster Abbey has got out of control – long pauses, Mark looking serene, Raquel doing her damnedest with that bloody Great Seal – I hate the sequence, always did, gave them what they asked for against my better judgment, and it doesn’t work.

They haven’t shot the last fight, by the way, which is as well; I had doubts at the time, and we’re better without it. So Dick won his battle with the producers, the Abbey set wasn’t rebuilt, tons of cotton and beetroot found a happy home, and Eddie Fowlie and his workers were spared a maddening job.

Lovely finish to the film, with Rex speaking the end pieces and Lalla Ward sweeping off to take care of England, and looking as though she’s just the girl to do it, too.

Worst mistake – taking most of Harrison out. He could give the thing just the lift it needs. My overall judgment: it could go either way, good or bad, probably on the bad side. I’m a harsh critic, and it may be better than I think. But I doubt if we’ll have a hit. Respectable at the box office, perhaps, but no better. And yet, who knows? I had serious doubts about the M3, and how wrong I was.

Dead silence when the lights go up. Salkind murmurings, comments like “Yes … very good … Yes …” (At least no one gives the ultimate thumbs down of “Great locations”.*) I move behind Dick and say “Well done”, and he says thanks. He’s disappointed at their reaction, but he probably expected to be. Talk of restoring Harrison, which will mean cuts. I make the case for keeping Scott and Young Bess intact, and Dick agrees.

Some time later, in Paris, I hear that Harrison is to be restored, thank God. Ilya tells me the feeling is that Rex put bags of pathos and oomph into the thing, and that his removal would cut out all the good emotion. He then horrifies me by wanting to remove Lalla Ward’s final magnificent exit, his reasoning being who the hell knows about Queen Elizabeth I anyway, and look at the state of the pound, for Christ’s sake. They want to fake in some appalling nonsense of two hands shaking, indicating friendship and love or something equally bizarre and meaningless. I suspect Ilya of froggy prejudice against English history. I tell him he’s mad – that America at least knows about Good Queen Bess, even if the garlic-eaters don’t, and the final shot will not be lost on them. But he insists.

Fleischer says that over his dead body will they cut the Bess finale, and even Ilya agrees that it should stay for the British version. Fair enough, I don’t really mind what they show in Venezuela, although I think it’s a damned shame if it isn’t kept for the US version too.

The Bess finale was retained, and a curious medallion-like decoration was also inserted, showing two hands shaking, which did no harm if it did no good. The film took a critical pasting in Britain, one reviewer apparently taking offence at the Ruffler’s attitude to religion. I’ve heard of weird, but that’s ridiculous. However, it was better received in the United States, where it was called Crossed Swords, God alone knows why. Mark Twain’s title wasn’t deemed right for American audiences? But the change of title didn’t keep the audiences away, and the film achieved a rare distinction. Radio City Music Hall was to close, and for the final week Crossed Swords was chosen as being a good family film. Result: it ran for six weeks, and Radio City Music Hall stayed open.

The screenwriting credit on the picture was unique in my experience. The authors of the first script, none of which was used, were credited with “original screenplay”, and I with “final screenplay”.

* The talented artist who painted jackets for all the Flashman novels, using himself as a model. For Flashman at the Charge , where our hero was seen in fur hat brandishing a sabre, Arthur had got his wife to photograph him flourishing a walking-stick with a tea-cosy on his head. He and Rex Harrison were lifelong friends, both being Liverpudlians and fellow-students.

* For those who may wonder what this means, in Bing Crosby musicals the scripts simply noted “Bing sings” – two words representing several minutes of screen time.

* The meeting with Lancaster, and discussion of Crimson Pirate II, eventually took place in Hollywood, and is described in a subsequent chapter.

* Leslie Halliwell’s verdict: “Moderately well-made swashbuckler with an old-fashioned air, not really helped by stars in cameo roles or by the poor playing of the title roles.” I’d say its strength is the stars in cameo roles, but otherwise I can’t disagree.

† The original shot was restored in the finished film.

* This is the stock comment if you want to say something nice about someone’s film when there’s really nothing nice to say.

ANGRY OLD MAN 2

The Westminster Farce

TO CALL MEMBERS OF PARLIAMENT the dregs of society is the kind of hasty judgment one makes at every new revelation of folly or corruption at Westminster, but the sober truth is that no group except criminals and illegal immigrants ranks lower in public esteem. Journalists, lawyers, and even chat-show hosts attract less odium. The reasons are plain: parliament has become increasingly untrustworthy and incompetent, and there is a natural instinct that anyone with the brazen cheek and monumental conceit to say: “Vote for me, for I am fit to govern you, decide your destiny, set your taxes, and make your laws” is patently unfit for election, and in an ideal world would be pelted in the street. People know this, and hold MPs in contempt, but thanks to the inevitable evil of the party system have no option but to vote for them or effectively disenfranchise themselves by abstention.

That is not to say that there are not worthy men and women in the Commons, but it would be rash to think they are a majority. The remainder you would, at best, hesitate to rely on for their ability, courage, and probity, and, at worst, be unwilling to trust with doing more than sweep your steps or, in an emergency, remove your refuse.

Conspicuous among the honourable exceptions, imbued by the old ideals of service to country and constituents, and (don’t laugh, there are such folk) putting party second and self a distant third, are those admirable Left-wingers with an independent streak born sometimes of wealth, but also of their personal reputation which puts them beyond deselection. Some may be more noteworthy for their integrity than for their intellect – indeed, some may be described as eccentric to say the least. You know who they are; be thankful for them, and for those others who know that to be a good MP it is first necessary to be a lady or a gentleman.*

But they are well outnumbered by the lobby fodder of all parties whose first loyalty is to themselves, their positions, and their purses, which means in effect loyalty to the party until the time seems right to defect or stab the leader in the back. There is little to choose between the sides, but one remembers with particular distaste the rat-like behaviour of Conservative members when Mrs Thatcher was brought down. For those who still retain any illusions about Parliament as a whole, study of the diaries of the late Alan Clark will prove instructive and disgusting.

But it is not to be wondered at, when one considers the muddy path that aspiring politicians must follow to reach Westminster. To win selection as candidates they must be able convincingly to dissemble, to toady, to cozen, and, when necessary, to lie outright; given these essential defects of character, and a sufficient supply of platitudinous wind to deceive the voters, all they need is luck and grovelling loyalty to the leader, obedience to the Whips, and an ability to suppress conscience, common sense, and decency as the need arises.

It was not always so. As recently as fifty years ago, Members of Parliament at least presented a more dignified and worthy appearance. They were, to a fair extent, respected and not entirely distrusted; they were thought of as sound, largely decent, dependable people, a cut above the ordinary. Tories might be a bit pompous, Labour passionate, and Liberals rather quaint, but no one doubted, really, that they were men (and very occasionally women) of bottom and common sense. They were the subject of jokes, lampoons, and caricatures, and their worthlessness was taken for granted by comedians, but it was a fairly kindly humour; if Parliament was regarded with cynicism, it was of a tolerant kind. It might be derided, but not despised, and it was expected, by and large, to do right.

How far this tolerant-cynical view was justified it is hard to say. MPs were not under the intense spotlight they endure today; their faults were not seen in close-up, and they had the sense to limit their public utterances to political meetings, and not run off at the mouth as politicians nowadays seem to feel obliged to do, God knows why. Possibly we were less critical of them than we should have been; there were rogues among them, but not that many so far as the public could see, and their conduct was generally thought to be above the national average. They were certainly not at the bottom of the league table of the despised.

All that has changed. It is no longer taken for granted that a politician will bear a level dish. There used to be occasional scandals; now one follows hard on another, with shady deals and loans and honours for the boys and brown envelopes and cash for questions and favours in return for party contributions and blatant buying of influence and feverish attempts to hide personal interests.

It is a sorry tale, made worse by the contempt which the Commons plainly feel for the electorate, as we see when a married MP, detected in infidelity, protests indignantly that it is none of his constituents’ business what he does in his private life – and in this arrogance he does not lack support among his parliamentary colleagues. What turns the stomach is not the adultery, which is usually good for a laugh, but the lofty assumption that the voters have no right to know that he is not a man to be trusted; he has broken the most solemn promise a man ever makes, but when it is asked “If his wife couldn’t trust him, who can?” there comes the inevitable whine about privacy, and the childish attempt at justification: “Everybody does it,” which is a lie. Everybody doesn’t. Without being unduly sanctimonious, one may remark that time was when unsavoury personal character, like poor performance, was a matter for resignation, but no longer. We have government from the gutter, and neither the detected transgressor nor the incompetent minister feels it incumbent on himself to do the honourable thing. They seldom jump; they have to be shoved. No wonder Parliament has fallen into disrepute.

The tragedy is that not Parliament alone, but the very matter of government, has been besmirched. God knows democracy, that much-trumpeted and venerated myth, has faults enough; the notion of government of the people, by the people, and for the people, was silly enough when Lincoln said it, but later generations of politicians have turned it into an obscene farce. It is worth defining democracy, not in its literal* sense or in the swollen meaningless terms beloved of demagogues, but as it exists in fact: the opportunity, every four or five years, to choose among a few party hacks of doubtful character and ability in whose selection the voter has had no say. That is democracy, Western style.

None of Lincoln’s conditions for government exists in fact. There is government of the people only in the sense that they are governed, but not in the sense that government comes of the people, and only a crook or a madman would say we have government by the people, when the truth is that it is in the hands of a dishonest, self-serving clique under unbreakable party control. As for government for the people, don’t make me laugh: the people’s will is flouted at every turn, on Europe, capital punishment, and the promotion of sexual perversion by government, to take only three issues. The politicians’ attitude is, bluntly, that the public are sheep who don’t know what’s good for them, and need to be led by a pack of second-rate lawyers, trade union activists, career opportunists, student agitators, and crazed feminists. That is democracy, British style.

A striking illustration of this was given by one MP, a former minister, speaking on television, when he made clear his contempt for “grass roots opinion”, dismissing it as an unsound basis for decision-making; it was, he declared, a negation of political leadership.

The arrogance of this, coming from a failed politician whose judgment one would not have trusted to buy a jar of marmalade, was almost stupefying. He actually saw himself as a leader, fit to take decisions, in defiance of the public will if necessary. I had the same kind of pompous claptrap trotted out to me on a radio chat-show by another MP when I taxed him with refusing to meet the public wish on capital punishment; it was for him and his fellows, he assured me earnestly, to supply a lead, not to follow popular opinion.

Now, this kind of haughty pretension may have been well enough in the days of Burke and the Pitts, when there was genuine force to the argument that the country was best governed by an educated elite, trained and fit to lead and make the many-headed’s decisions for them. Many MPs then looked on public service as something to which they were devoted by tradition; they could also, with some justice, consider themselves the intellectual as well as the social superiors of their constituents and the unenfranchised masses. Those days are long dead. No one in his right mind would suggest that today’s MPs are superior in intellect, morality, education, or judgment, to the people they represent; many of them are plainly inferior on all four counts. Some cannot even talk grammatically, and by their speech shall ye know them – assuming you can interpret the half-educated proletarian noises they make.

I have mentioned Burke, and those who defend the practice of MPs following their own judgment against the voters’ wishes can quote, if they are familiar with his works or have even heard of him, his warning to the people of Bristol that their MP owed them his judgment, “and betrays … you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.” Fair enough for the eighteenth century, no doubt, but it was also this same Burke who said: “In all forms of government the people is the true legislator”, and, most tellingly: “I am not one of those who think that the people are never wrong … but I do say that in all disputes between them and their rulers, the presumption is … in favour of the people.”

It appears that the great Parliamentarian was no more consistent than any other politician, but he would repay study by those who, in their complacent self-admiration, have so little regard for the wishes of those whose judgment they were only too delighted to accept when it sent them to Westminster.

An excellent way of demonstrating the unfitness of MPs is to compare them to ourselves. I think I know my capacity and limitations, and I doubt if I have ever been competent to run a department of state, but I led an infantry section in war when I was nineteen, commanded a platoon when I was twenty-one, and in middle age edited a great daily newspaper. Now all these jobs required some degree of what is called leadership – a gift which people like Blair seem to think is automatically conferred by election. I hold no very high opinion of myself as a leader, but can it be contended that the sorry collection of placemen and party hacks and p.c. women and semi-literate nonentities who have crawled and toadied and lied their way to Westminster are fit to lead me and millions like me – educated professionals and workers and artisans and craftsmen who have made their way in the world by real skill and perseverance, not by blathering and caballing?

If I weren’t so outraged at the idea, I’d be helpless with laughter. Blair, a junior barrister who has never done a real job in the real world, to lead me? I wouldn’t follow him round the corner. Or any of his Cabinet of freaks and oddballs. Or the sorry parcel of yuppies and businessmen opposite.

It may be asked, what’s the alternative, and the answer is that there isn’t one. The British political system has been defended as the least bad polity yet invented, and there is something in it – but only so long as the people who operate it play the game. I don’t apologise for using an old, perhaps outworn, expression; what I am saying is that our “democracy” is acceptable only if our elected rulers are honest, tell the truth, behave with decency, and strive to remember that they are there to serve the people as the people wish to be served.

That is not what we have, or have had for thirty years, or look like having for a long time to come. Politics has become the preserve of the second-rate, a career primarily seen as a means of advancing personal ambition and lining the pocket; service is the last thing an aspiring parliamentarian has in mind. I must say again that I speak of the majority, not of the handful who have not forgotten what honour means.

Occasionally, and more often since we became involved in the European folly, it is suggested that we need a constitution. This is puerile. There is not, and never has been, a written constitution worth powder to blow it to hell, including the collection of platitudes and wishful thinking by which Americans set such misguided store. Why it should be supposed that a document drawn up by a group of eighteenth-century English squires and merchants for a largely agricultural country should be thought suitable for the governance of a modern, highly industrialised, multi-national state, has never been clear to me, but then I have always been mistrustful of vague, high-sounding, and sometimes downright daffy pontifications, and uncomfortably aware that a constitution means what you want it to mean. We have seen the US Constitution twisted and distorted and turned inside out by slick lawyers to a degree which Jefferson and Co. wouldn’t believe; to take one small example, they wouldn’t have equated pornography with freedom of speech.

We must remember also that any constitution endures only until someone comes along who is powerful enough to tear it up, as the history of Germany, and others, bears witness.

That, of course, is the ever-present danger, and it applies regardless of whether a country has a constitution or not. Any democracy which plays its people false is liable to find itself displaced by tyranny, and don’t think it couldn’t happen in dear, sane, sensible old Britain. All it takes is enough betrayal by dishonest government, and enough public disillusion, and suddenly Wodehouse’s wonderful fun about “Spode swanking about in his footer bags” is funny no longer.

We can only hope for the best, reminding ourselves that our creaky old “democracy” can work, given integrity and courage in those charged with operating it; even the ghastly party system needn’t be an insuperable obstacle to good government. It’s a bloody awful manifestation of the worst in human and political nature, but it’s inevitable, as is the lure of politics to the corrupt and venal personality. The days when Cincinnatus could be called from the plough are long gone – and if he could be called he would be derided as a comic figure at Westminster.

In closing, I must cite a prime example of hypocrisy in the so-called mother of Parliaments: the clamour from the Liberal Democrat benches for proportional representation. They demand it as the only fair, equitable, sensible, honourable, etc., etc., system. In fact, fairness, equity, sense, and most of all honour, have nothing to do with it; the Liberals want it because it’s the only possible way by which their clapped-out party can ever hope to get a share of power. Strange that their cry was never heard in the days (now some time ago, fortunately) when the Liberal Party meant something; was it not fair and equitable then? The truth is that today’s Liberal Democrats are like a football team fed up and resentful at languishing permanently at the bottom of the league, crying: “The rules must be changed, so that we can win.” It is a pathetic, typically dishonest plea.

Quite apart from the moral one, there are many reasons why proportional representation, in any form, would be an extremely bad thing. One is that in Britain we traditionally vote for people, not parties, and the notion of party lists of candidates, chosen by the party hierarchy, is totally odious to any serious democrat. Not only is it wrong in principle; in fact it would mean that you could never get rid of those parliamentary disasters who so often rise to the top in their parties; p.r. would guarantee them permanent seats.

On that last ground alone p.r. is abominable, but we may add the equally convincing objection, namely that it doesn’t work, as consideration of the havoc it has wreaked in various continental countries shows all too clearly. Fortunately, thus far New Labour has resisted the Liberal Democrat demand; the danger is that if ever they suffer a reduced majority they may bring it in to ensure the survival of Left-wing government – and its probable continuance until the day when Scotland becomes fully independent, and England, spared the presence of the Clydeside rabble at Westminster, will get the conservative (I emphasise the small “c”) English government it wants.

* Admittedly, Commons tradition militates against this. Bad manners is deeply ingrained, as we see from the constant heckling, childish braying, waving of papers, and general kindergarten behaviour for which the Chamber is noted. If anything, M.P.s seem to be quite proud of this, and defend it as part of the parliamentary system. Indeed it is nothing new, but what was an unwelcome novelty was the playground “nyah-nyah-nyah” technique lately employed by party leaders who mistook stridence for oratory and insult for wit.

* The much vaunted “democracy” of ancient Greece was not a democracy in any sense. About 5 per cent only of the population were entitled to vote, and women were excluded altogether. More than 60 per cent of the population were slaves.

INTERLUDE

Orcs and Goblins

WITH THE FIRST FILM OF The Lord of the Rings trilogy having rekindled the controversies about allegories and symbolism which broke out after the books’ publication more than forty years ago, and new disputes about where Tolkein got his inspiration (the Warwickshire countryside? the Ribble Valley? the Western Front?) it is highly satisfactory to be able to settle absolutely one minor question in the great panorama of Tolkeinery. Namely, are the goblins of The Hobbit the same creatures as the orcs of the Ring stories, or are they of different species?

This debate divided the canteen of The Glasgow Herald in the 1960s, so I wrote to Tolkein for a ruling and received a courteous and detailed reply, written in the famous spidery hand so familiar to students of his works. Yes, orcs and goblins were identical, and he added the fascinating information that they had been inspired by his childhood reading of The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie, eerie spellbinders which had helped to freshen my own infant nightmares. Their author was a Scottish minister named George MacDonald (I was about to say “no relation” until I discovered that he was descended from a survivor of the Massacre of Glencoe, and therefore kin to my paternal grandmother).

That is my tiny contribution to Tolkein scholarship. His orcs and goblins are George MacDonald’s, but as to other inspirations, who knows? It is a common mistake to think that one can spot with certainty the wellsprings of an author’s imagination, as I know only too well, having had a critic state flatly that I was plainly much influenced by Conrad – of whom I had not read a single word at that time. I will not enrage Tolkein admirers by noting that Conan the Barbarian preceded the Ring books by many years in the field of sword-and-sorcery, since I would bet heavily that Tolkein never even heard of Conan, but I have wondered if he ever encountered that remarkable fantasy of E. R. Eddison’s, The Worm Ouroboros, which has been casting its spell for more than seventy years. Probably not, but I’m fairly certain that Tolkein enthusiasts would find Eddison to their taste.

SHOOTING SCRIPT 3

Gene Hackman Should Have Blown up Vesuvius

SOMETIME AFTER the Musketeer movies had been released, Pierre Spengler asked if I was interested in doing Superman, which Ilya Salkind was determined to bring to the screen. I had my doubts but said ‘yes’ on principle; however, later Pierre phoned me to say that they thought an American writer would be more appropriate, and I couldn’t argue with that; in fact, I was rather relieved.

After that nothing happened until the scripts of Superman I and II were written by David and Leslie Newman, and Robert Benton. Pierre told me they had some slight problems with the script; would I go to Rome to meet Guy Hamilton, who was to direct? So I went, staying at the Cavalieri Hilton, outside Rome (notable for excellent ball-point pens which wrote very finely). Guy and his wife (formerly the actress Kerima, in Outcast of the Islands) were staying at a palazzo (Lanzerotti?) in the middle of Rome, one of those magnificent marble interiors which looks like a slum from the outside. We had dinner, and I quickly realised that this was a director I could get on with splendidly; a tall, genial, educated Anglo-Scot who had learned his trade sweeping the studio floor for René Clair.* He was slightly older than I; Kerima, who was about my age (early fifties) he referred to as “my child-bride”.

The production at that time was planned for Cinecittà, and there I was given the two scripts – really one long script, split in the middle à la Musketeers. Guy said: “I want twenty-five minutes out of the first one, eighteen out of the other, and any improvements will be gratefully received.”

In fact they were splendid scripts – fast, inventive, and thoroughly well-written, and I hated the idea of cutting them at all. But I did, in consultation with Guy – which means that I explained where I would abbreviate and connect up, got his agreement, and made my notes for the actual work, which I would do at home. There was no question of improving them; I just had to cut and rework so that no one could see the joins.

I had previously been sent Mario Puzo’s script, which is still in my attic somewhere. It was enormous, with very long speeches, and I didn’t refer to it again: my impression is that if its storyline bore any resemblance to the Newmans – Benton job, the actual treatment and dialogue didn’t, but I never read it closely. Puzo got the principal credit on the first two movies, but for my money the moral credit belongs to the N – B version. At this stage I doubt if I contributed much new material at all – maybe a rephrasing of dialogue to accommodate a cut, maybe a different ending-opening of scenes for the same reason, but nothing original. Anyway, I did the work, getting the scripts down to size, and that, I thought, would be that.

At this stage, incidentally, there were four super-villains in the movies, to be played, it was hoped, by Christopher Lee (as Zod), Ursula Andress, Charles Bronson (as the goon) and Mickey Rooney as a sort of evil jester, Jakel. The Rooney character had to go, alas, and in the end the villains were played by Terence Stamp, Sarah Douglas, and Jack O’Halloran.

Time passed, in which I wrote books and worked on various other films – Royal Flash (with Dick Lester), Prince and Pauper (Fleischer), Force Ten from Navarone (Hamilton, of which more anon), and at least as many others which never got made, such being the way of this crazy industry. Five films written and actually screened in five years was unusually good going, but in my novice ignorance I didn’t appreciate this.

And then, Superman re-surfaced and I was invited to Paris, but exactly why I can’t remember – presumably to consult with Guy on the edited scripts, although I don’t recall our doing so. What I do remember vividly is a series of long meetings with Alex and Ilya Salkind and Pierre in the Hotel Lancaster, where the great question was: who would play Superman? Christopher Reeve wasn’t heard of at this point, and one of the names that came up was Muhammad Ali, the boxer. I’m not sure who suggested him – Alex, I think, but not I, anyway. He got a brief canvass, God alone knows why, because even in that black-is-beautiful era, the idea of a black Superman was, on the face of it, crazy. Fans of the comics would have been outraged, and there was no evidence that Ali, fine showman though he was, could act his way out of a paper bag.*

If this kind of discussion sounds lunatic, it isn’t; indeed, it’s par for the course. The front runner for the part at that time was, believe it or not, a New York dentist who was said to be physically perfect, but I never saw him. Paul Newman was mentioned, and I think Redford also, but it was agreed that the hunt would be a long one. They eventually landed right on their feet with Reeve, who could not have been bettered.

I don’t know how many times I was in Paris for conferences with the Salkinds, but it was at one of them that Brando came into the picture, at a reported $3 million, which was thought excessive at the time, although when I think of the $10 million contracted for but never paid to Steve McQueen for Taipan a couple of years later, it seems quite modest. Since then, of course, fees for the top names have become astronomical, if you believe the figures, which frankly I don’t, knowing the press agents’ talent for hyperbole. But if some of them are true, I doubt if they turn out to be justified at the box office.

Anyway, Brando was coming aboard, and his part, that of Superman’s father, was going to have to be expanded, said Alex, looking at me meaningly. How could we make the most of his remarkable talent? As it stood, Superman senior, Jor-El, wasn’t much of a part; he was out of the movie for long stretches, and what he had to do was nothing out of the ordinary, looking solemn in a toga, mostly. No one wanted to alter the structure of the pictures just to accommodate Brando, so it was a question of improving the scenes Jor-El had already, and beefing up his dialogue accordingly.

Could Brando, Alex wondered, play Jor-El in different guises? I said Brando was good at accents … and the next thing I remember Alex saying (this is God’s truth) was: “You know, maybe we could see him coming in from golf.” Golf? On the planet Krypton? How the talk went after that I don’t recall, but I came away from that meeting with a vision of Brando in a kilt with a set of clubs slung over his shoulder. Quite seriously, I know that various possible changes of costume for Jor-El were mentioned – Roman tunic, Louis Quattorze, armour, just about every dam’ thing except paint and feathers. But that is how such conferences sometimes go, to the lunatic fringe and back.

In any event, I expanded Jor-El’s part – and when I saw the movie his role was, indeed, larger than it had been, but did not include a philosophic moment in which I had him quoting from Wordsworth’s “Daffodils”, I can’t think why. I can’t lay claim to any of his other dialogue because what I wrote has simply faded from my mind – it wasn’t memorable, that’s for sure, but neither were the words which came out of Brando on screen, so it may have been my stuff, for all I know. Or the tea-lady’s.

A curious and rather worrying thing resulted from one of our talks. Alex wondered how the trial of the super-villains would be shown on screen. Possibly with a sub-conscious memory of A Matter of Life and Death, I said it would have to take place in a huge stadium in outer space – bags of milky way and wide blue yonder, with this tribunal blending into the vastness of the firmament, blah-blah. Alex asked what it would look like, and I had a vision of a pale blue bowl in the great up-yonder, its upper rim fading vaguely into nothing, and the judges seated in soft dimple-niches in its sides, with the Super-villains down in the bottom of the bowl in a solid glass cube, or cubes. There were to be millions of eyes, too.

Alex got very excited, and asked me to say it again.

“An enormous bowl,” I said.

“A bowel!” cried Alex, enthusiastic, and sounding very Russian. “Great idea! A great big bowel in the sky!”

I elaborated, and thought no more about it, but Alex must have passed it on, and somewhere along the way his “bowel” was picked up by some unfortunate as “ball”. Whether they actually began to build an enormous ball at Pinewood, I can’t say, but I was told that it at least got to the drawing-board stage. In the end the Super-villains finished up trapped in a one-dimensional piece of glass, which was very effective, and the judges (Harry Andrews, Trevor Howard, et al.) appeared in a disembodied way, but I don’t recall whether they were seated in a bowl or not.

Somewhere along the line Guy Hamilton dropped out, and various directors were discussed – Lester, Fleischer, Donner, and several others. This, of course, was not my business, but when you find yourself at one of these discussions you just sit back and listen, making what observations seem appropriate. I supported the idea of Lester and Fleischer both, they being buddies with whom I’d worked happily – I was thinking all the time of the script, of which I had come to think of myself as the guardian, although I hadn’t written it. I wanted to see the Newmans – Benton screenplay faithfully translated to the screen, because it was first-rate as it stood, and I knew that either Richard could be relied on to do that.

My doubt was whether Lester would take the job. I’d gathered that he’d not been altogether happy with the way his deal on the Musketeers had worked out. I’d had my own much smaller disappointment, but I’m not sure that legally speaking I was entitled to anything beyond my fee except in special circumstances – if the films were shown on the planet Jupiter, probably. As everyone knows, getting a cut of the profits (to which you may be entitled if your agent is sharp enough) is next to impossible if the producers are determined to freeze you out; heart-rending stories are told of creative accounting denying worthy actors, writers, and directors their just deserts. My own policy has always been: get it up front, and the only regular residuals I’ve ever collected have been from Red Sonja, a Schwarzenegger sword-and-sorcery epic, which continues to provide small dollar cheques now and then, thank you, Dino De Laurentiis.

It soon became evident that whoever was going to direct, the Salkinds wanted Dick on the picture in some capacity, and I can only assume that they made him an offer he couldn’t refuse, and he finished up on the picture with some kind of production title, I think.

Richard Donner is the credited director on Superman I, and Lester on Superman II, and it was Lester who phoned me after the completion of I, inviting me to meet him at Pinewood to discuss what remained to be done for Superman II. As in the Musketeers, where the two films were shot as one, so on Superman much of II had already been shot when I was completed.

“I’ve used the ending of Superman II, on Superman I,” he told me.

“You mean Superman flying through the earth’s core, etc?” I said. “What the hell did you do that for?”

He said it had seemed like a good way to finish I, and I asked how did he now propose to end II.

“I was hoping,” said he blithely, “that you could tell me.”

This is why I love the film business, incidentally. Ex Hollywood (or Pinewood) semper aliquid novi. I was rather excited at the prospect – not that I supposed I could tell him anything. We would talk about it, and I would make suggestions, and he would make other suggestions, and by God’s grace something would emerge, and I would go away and write it. In this case, it didn’t quite work out that way, because there were other factors that we knew not of (at least I didn’t).

I asked what had happened to the volcano scene which had been at the end of I in the script. He said they hadn’t done it; changes had been made to the script. I cursed a bit, because that volcano scene had been the Newmans and Benton on top form – Gene Hackman at the bottom of the Vesuvius crater with some Heath Robinson machine which would fake an eruption (in furtherance of some dastardly Lex Luthor ploy to blackmail the Italian Government, if I remember rightly). Anyway, the point was that in the middle of all this, Vesuvius would erupt in fact, and Luthor would be embarrassed. Well, that was out – and so, if I remember rightly, was a sequence in which Superman penetrated a vault which was guarded by 1) a zone a jillion degrees below zero, 2) a zone a jillion degrees above zero, and 3) a belt of super-radioactivity, through all of which the Man of Steel would pass unscathed. There was another sequence in which Superman lost his power, and went out and bought a Superman suit at a pawnshop, trying to kid Luthor that he still had his power intact, but it was changed, to remove the comic element.

Which reminds me, I did contribute a scene, adapted from the N – B script, in which Luthor stole Kryptonite from a museum; I had him, the ultra-technological villain, smashing a glass case with a brick, brown paper, and treacle, but it vanished along the way.

Incidentally, while I and II were exceptionally successful films, on every level, I maintain they would have been better still if the N – B script had been left entirely alone. That’s a personal opinion, and an objective one, since my contribution was minimal, and wasn’t affected by the changes.

Anyway, I set off for Pinewood, and encountered a hazard that we have to face on the Isle of Man occasionally: fog had descended, the aircraft that would have taken me to Heathrow couldn’t get in, and all that was available was the flight to Blackpool, which I shared with an eccentric peer who had to get to the House of Lords for some vital vote or other. We got a taxi at Blackpool and drove at speed to Runcorn, where my companion, who I think had been a big wheel in the LMS or something in the old days, used his influence to get a southbound train halted, and we climbed aboard. There wasn’t a taxi to be had at Euston, and his lordship was in despair, but fortunately I was being met by a studio car, and got him to Westminster in the nick of time. So not only did he manage to vote; he excited the admiration and envy of his fellow peers by drawing up at the Lords entrance in a limousine emblazoned in psychedelic colours with the legend: SUPERMAN! and the Man of Steel hurtling across the windscreen.

It was a bit of an anti-climax to get to Pinewood, where Dick and I sat in the viewing theatre watching a good two hours of material which had either already been shot for Superman II or left over from Superman I. I have no coherent memory of it, but I know there seemed to be endless shots of Gene Hackman and Valerie Perrine floating around in a hot-air balloon, and Reeve jumping off boxes, and the whole escape sequence which I remember only because it featured Angus MacInnes, with whom I’d worked on Force Ten from Navarone. My one thought as we left the theatre was: how the hell do we make sense out of that lot?

We conferred with the Salkinds and Pierre, and my first questions were: can you get Brando and Hackman back for the remainder of the shooting? They couldn’t, of course, which caused me some concern, since I couldn’t see how they were going to complete II without Hackman; Brando could be got round by using, in place of one Jor-El, a group of starry Kryptonian elders (Andrews, Howard, Susannah York, et al.). Dick was fairly quiet at our little conference, which took place in the lobby outside the theatre; when I asked him privately what he thought he sighed and spoke with feeling about discouraging shots of E. G. Marshall kneeling in the ruins of the Oval Office – I don’t know what he didn’t like about them; they were used in the film. Mind you, all that we had seen was fairly discouraging; I had a list of all the takes, and it struck me that an awful lot of it was going to prove superfluous.

Alex obviously assumed that we would now start sorting it all out; Dick was non-committal, and said he would phone me next day. What else was said, I don’t remember, but I have a memory of Dick standing, saying very little, looking extremely formal in a very nice tweed suit (which wasn’t like his usual casual style at all), and for some reason I thought, this is as far as we go.

Which proved to be true, in a way. Dick rang me next day and said he wasn’t going on with the project. So that was that, and I prepared to turn my attention to whatever other work I was doing at the time. I wasn’t all that interested in the project myself by this time, and when Pierre called me and asked if I would go to Paris to confer with Guy Hamilton, who was to come back on to the picture, I wasn’t enthusiastic, and if it had been anyone but Guy I think I might have bowed out.

But, let’s face it, I would be getting paid, and I can stand a couple of nights in the George V or Prince de Galles any time. I met Guy and his wife in London and we flew over. Come to think of it, I don’t recall why we were working in Paris; possibly because we had to confer with Alex. Anyway, for two days we worked on the thing employing 1) my list of the material already shot; 2) the unshot material from the script of II; 3) our own ideas. These last we kept to a minimum, because the less new material, the better; the job was to link what was shot with what was unshot into a coherent story with as little fuss as possible. New stuff obviously had to go in for the Kryptonian elders, but Hackman’s part was a real problem, since at first sight it didn’t seem to be complete, and would take careful rearrangement.

I covered sheets of foolscap with notes in red, green, blue, and various other colours, denoting filmed material, unshot material, possible plot links, new material, etc., etc.; we cut and spliced and arranged and rearranged and somehow arrived at a synopsis which satisfied us both. Neither of us got a credit on the finished film, but we didn’t expect it – there is no such credit as “script cobbler” or “script fixer” or “plot arranger”, and the writing credit went to Puzo and the Newmans – why Benton was left off, I’ve no idea. By this time I just wanted to get home, and insisted on catching an early plane; I packed in haste, with Pierre helping, and as I was about to close my case he suddenly produced a book and asked me to read it on the flight. It was called The Ice People, of which more anon.

That was the end of my connection with Superman. Dick came back on to the picture, and although I was summoned in haste to Pinewood during the shooting, it was simply to do a very minor tinker on one part of the plot which could easily have been accomplished without me. I watched one daytime scene being shot – an announcer talking to camera, and a couple of cars being wrecked – and one night scene involving the enormous New York street which had been built on the back-lot – life-size at one end, and dwindling down in size at the other to give a sense of perspective. It was a smashing set; I heard it was eventually demolished by a high wind, much to the annoyance of a later production which had hoped to use it. Pierre and I stood in the dark eating endless hot dogs and watching them rehearse and then shoot the bit in which a woman with a pram doesn’t get hit by a falling girder.

There was a royal premiere attended by the Queen, followed by a dinner, but I confess that my chief interest was in recognising little bits and thinking “I did that” or “I was responsible for that,” or “Well, I sort of influenced that”, which is the only personal satisfaction you can get from a movie in which your participation has been limited to tinkering little things, script-snipping and arranging and so on. Critical opinion of it has changed; at the time, the flying sequences were regarded as terrific, there was much praise for the music and the opening credits, and the end titles provoked mirth for being of such length that they even included the breakfast cereal used by Clark Kent’s earthly parents. The early “earth” scenes were interminable, and I came out asking myself why the hell they hadn’t just been content to shoot the original N – B scripts, instead of padding it out with unnecessary junk. But it was obviously going to gross a jillion, which it did.

Superman II was the better movie, probably because Dick had the direction all to himself. But I like to think back to that Paris hotel room, with Hamilton and me up to our ankles in coloured paper, and tell myself that our labours were not in vain.

* The Macmillan Film Encyclopedia describes Guy as “among England’s most technically proficient craftsmen”, which is an understatement. After his apprenticeship with Rene Clair he graduated to assistant director with Carol Reed and John Huston, and worked on such prestigious films as The Third Man and The African Queen before going on to direct a string of major pictures, including four James Bonds – one of which, Goldfinger, I regard as the best in the series.

* But we may have underestimated his talent; many professional boxers have acted, and acted well, since James J. Corbett and his fellow-champion John L. Sullivan trod the boards a century ago. Rocky Graziano, Max Baer, and Maxie Rosenbloom were all good comic actors, and more recently Jersey Joe Walcott, Tony Galento, and Henry Cooper have acquitted themselves well in supporting parts.

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