Ever, Dirk: The Bogarde Letters Read online

  ‘Don’t think that this is a letter. It is only a small eruption of a disease called friendship.’

  (Jean Renoir to Janine Bazin, 12/6/74)

  ‘Letters, I think, unless they are brilliant, can be a bit of a bore. And mine are not brilliant. Amusing, perhaps, light, and loving but they aint Intellectual!’

  (Dirk Bogarde to Dilys Powell, 25/3/89)

  ‘Good correspondence, like music, does nice things for the spirit, as you obviously discovered long ago.’

  (Robert L. Palmer to Dirk Bogarde, 23/5/91)

  ‘Letters are, after all, fragments of autobiography.’

  (Richard Mangan, Introduction to Gielgud’s Letters, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004)

  EVER, DIRK

  THE BOGARDE LETTERS

  SELECTED AND EDITED BY

  JOHN COLDSTREAM

  Weidenfeld & Nicolson

  LONDON

  To the Van den Bogaerdes –

  for their trust, encouragement

  and laughter

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Introduction

  Dramatis Personae

  Nicknames

  Selected References

  Chronology

  Editor’s Note

  PART ONE:

  THE CONTINENTAL YEARS

  PART TWO:

  THE LONDON YEARS

  Dirk’s Out-takes

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  Section One

  With Kathleen Tynan and Tony2. With Jack (‘Tony’) Jones1. ‘Mrs X’ – Dorothy Gordon3. Jill Melford at Villa Berti1. With Eduardo and Antonia Boluda1. Joseph and Patricia Losey4. With Ian Holm and Bee Gilbert1. With Ann Skinner and Arnold Schulkes5. With Visconti6. At the NFT7. Dilys Powell8. With Penelope Mortimer1. With Ava Gardner1. With Margaret Van den Bogaerde1. The house on the hill1. Clermont by Tony Forwood1. The drawing-room1. The ‘cockpit’1. The terraces1. With Daphne Fielding1. With Norah Smallwood1. Julie Harris and Julie Harris9

  Section Two

  On the set of Providence with Gielgud, Burstyn and Warner10. With Fassbinder1. Tom Stoppard1. With Elton John1. On location for The Patricia Neal Story1. With Natalie Wood1. Charlotte Rampling and Jean-Michel Jarre1. Painting the ‘Hippo-Pool’1. The pool and the Drummer1. Glenda Jackson with Tony1. With John Huston and Isabelle Huppert at Cannes11. Dirk’s Presidential notes1. Jacques Henri Lartigue1. At St Andrews University12. Olga Horstig-Primuz and her clients13. Patricia Kavanagh and Julian Barnes14. Brian McFarlane17. Susan Owens16. David Frankham15. With Daisy and Labo1. With Bendo1. Mowing the terraces and making piccalilli1. Patrolling his acres1

  Section Three

  With Princess Anne18. On stage in the early 1990s1. With Bertrand Tavernier and Jane Birkin19. Hélène Bordes21. With Peter Ustinov and Jacques Chirac20. Christine and Alain de Pauw22. Dominique Lambilliotte20. John Osborne23. With Eileen Atkins24. Bacchus1. At King’s School, Rochester25. Carte de séjour1. Filming Dirk Bogarde – By Myself26. The portrait: David Tindle’s pencil drawing27, pre-study28 and finished canvas29. As Sydney Carton, by Ulric Van den Bogaerde30, 31. Tableau for Sybil Burton32. With Tony1

  Endpapers

  (front) At work in the Studio, Clermont, July 1978, by David Steen33

  (back) Dirk, by his near-neighbour, Jacques Henri Lartigue34

  The line-drawings in the text are by Dirk Bogarde.

  The editor and the publishers are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce the photographs listed above:

  1 Dirk Bogarde Estate

  2 Lichfield Studios

  3 Carol Gordon

  4 Patricia Losey

  5 Ann Skinner

  6 Mario Tursi

  7 Brian Baxter/BFI

  8 Ivor Powell/Colin Thomas/BFI

  9 Julie Harris/Impact Photos Inc

  10 Action Films

  11 Festival du Film, Cannes

  12 University of St Andrews Gallery

  13 Véra de Ladoucette

  14 Patricia Kavanagh

  15 David Frankham

  16 Susan Owens

  17 Brian McFarlane

  18 Doug McKenzie/Professional Photo-graphic Services

  19 UGC Cinemas

  20 Dominique Lambilliotte

  21 Hélène Bordes

  22 Christine de Pauw

  23 Jane Bown/National Portrait Gallery

  24 BBC

  25 Vernon Stratford/Chatham Standard

  26 Paul Joyce/Lucida Productions

  27 David Tindle/Jenny Arthur

  28 David Tindle/Redfern Gallery

  29 David Tindle/National Portrait Gallery

  30 Audrey Carr

  31 Kenneth J. Westwood Collection

  32 Jean Selfe

  33 Alpha Photographic Press Agency

  34 J.H. Lartigue/Ministère de la Culture, France/AAJHL

  While every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be happy to acknowledge them in future editions.

  INTRODUCTION

  ‘It is an astonishing thing to me to find that I am really not a bit

  happy unless I am writing. Even a letter will do.’ – Dirk Bogarde

  to Norah Smallwood

  In the last of his passports Derek Van den Bogaerde, otherwise Dirk Bogarde, described himself simply as ‘Actor’. Which is odd, because from the late 1970s his success in a second, parallel, profession – that of Writer – gave him just as much pride and fulfilment, if not more. Novelist, poet, essayist, reporter, editor, scriptwriter, critic, autobiographer – in his time Dirk was all of these, and a diarist too. In 1986 he put his own early journals, along with much else, to the torch. However, for the best part of his forty-year companionship with Anthony Forwood the latter kept for them both a Diary, which began as little more than a patchy record of visitors and appointments, but became a daily rumination. On the few occasions when misfortune befell Tony in the form of hospitalisation, or digital damage in a gardening accident, Dirk would take over. The evident commitment and relish with which he did so was all the more remarkable considering that he would have already spent much of the day crouched at his desk, releasing through one of successive hard-pressed typewriters a torrent of words.

  Some who write for publication – nowadays especially – are not necessarily driven by an inexplicable interior force. Dirk was. It would be safe to say that he satisfied more than most the definition of the ‘born writer’. This much-used, and often misused, expression applies in truth only to those continuously in the grip of a compulsion. Those such as the 2007 Nobel Laureate, Doris Lessing, for whom writing is ‘a bloody neurosis’; and John Updike and the late Anthony Burgess, whose affliction has been diagnosed by their fellow-novelist Martin Amis as ‘pressure on the cortex, facility in the best sense’. No one would ever have described Dirk’s written work, least of all in the original, as that of the conscious belletrist. However, with the simplicity of his language, his directness, his vigour, his skill at making ‘a connection’ – as he did so effectively in the Cinema – he more than compensated for what one might call politely his lapses in literary convention. In every one of the forms where he put words on paper he displayed the priceless gift of the compelling conversationalist. With no effort he made his reader – whether of a 250-page novel, a twenty-seven-line poem or a five-line scribbled note – his confidant.

  Perhaps the most convincing symptom of the need to write, rather than merely to record, to reply, or to fulfil a commission, is found in the unsolicited, unprompted letter. Dirk was a prolific correspondent – not only in the a
stonishing quantity of notepaper and card that he consigned over the years to postboxes in various countries, but also in the length at which he wrote. Misspelt, eccentrically punctuated and paragraphed, his letters became essays. Yes, his hand was all over the place and often indecipherable: he admitted as much, often enough. But that was not the main reason why he typed even many of his postcards. More urgent was the need to cram the maximum number of words on to every available surface because he had so much to say. It was not uncommon for one of his letters to fill three sides of A4 paper, the typing single-spaced, the margins and paragraphing almost non-existent; and even then a fourth side might be invaded by that unruly script, offering a piece of unfinished or overlooked business as a P.S. There is a real likelihood, too, that such an epistle would be rattled off on a day when progress was being made with a novel or a new volume of autobiography. Sometimes when that progress was stumbling, and the wastepaper basket beginning to fill with crumpled drafts, he would pause and hammer out an 800-word letter in the same way that other writers might drift to the kitchen, make a cup of coffee and listen absent-mindedly to the news from the outside world or from the hearth. Dirk, by contrast, had to ‘talk’. When he wrote, the shyness which beset him in public – and in overcoming which he could sometimes appear almost unrecognisable to those who knew him privately – lay dormant. In the safety and sanctuary of any room that he commandeered as an office, and above all in the studio he made from a former olive store at his farmhouse in Provence, he felt ultimately free to speak as he wished. ‘I have done quite enough talking,’ he says as he reaches the foot of a tightly packed second page; but you can sense the reluctance to stop. And fortunately the other parties to these conversations recognised the quality of what he had to say, and the way he said it, to the extent that they kept his side of the exchange. It is thanks first to the foresight and then to the generosity of some of those confidants that his circle of ‘listeners’ can now be widened.

  Few examples survive from Dirk’s early life, but scraps from the young teenager’s wretched exile in Glasgow indicated the strength of his prose, the vividness of his description and the fertility of his imagination. Some of his letters home were illustrated, flamboyantly so: to his sister Elizabeth (‘Lu’, ‘LuLu’) he sent pictorial puzzles for her to solve, and, at one point, a fairy tale painted on playing-card-sized pieces of art paper and posted episodically like a magazine serial. During his Army training in various parts of Britain he kept in contact by mail with a girlfriend, Nerine Cox – indeed he did so, on and off, for the rest of his life. When he joined the Allied Forces liberating Europe in 1944 he began the first of his several copious, extra-familial correspondences. This was with Jack (‘Tony’) Jones, the dashing Naval officer who had captured Dirk’s heart the previous year and who, I believe, was his only serious love until the relationship with Tony Forwood took hold after the war. It is evident from various asides that Dirk’s letters to Jack from Europe, India and Java were not only many in number but also explicit in their affection. Years later, Dirk sought his assurance that none survived and was told that all those before 1954 had been destroyed. The significance of the date is unclear, except for the fact that the Home Secretary had begun to crack down hard with prosecutions for breaches of the laws on homosexuality, especially by the prominent. It was the year of the Montagu/Wildeblood/Pitt-Rivers trial and of Alan Turing’s suicide. It was also the year in which Dirk became the most popular British screen actor, thanks to Doctor in the House. Then again, Dirk had by that time been living with Forwood – as he most often referred to him among friends and strangers alike; or ‘Tote’ among their closest familiars – for six years; and it is my further belief that Dirk was ‘monogamous’. So it is highly unlikely that there was much communication between him and Jack. Certainly, by 1949 they had gone their separate ways, and seldom, if ever, met again. The desultory correspondence which resumed when Dirk became a published author – a development that gave the extremely well-read Jones equal measures of satisfaction and amusement – is of little merit; it emits the unmistakable sound of Dirk’s teeth being gritted and ground while he responds as cordially as possible to someone who represented a period in his life which he both wanted and, because of his subsequent, almost immediate, celebrity, needed to bury. In the modest, but significant, archive left by Dirk there is no trace of Jack Jones’s existence; even a postcard liberated by the latter during his exploits in the D-Day landings, and pinned to the wall of Dirk’s studio, was safely unsigned.

  The bulk of Dirk’s wartime letters home does not survive. As with the childhood correspondence, the few exceptions were drawn upon heavily for Dirk Bogarde: The Authorised Biography and are not repeated here. Likewise, two long, self-analytical letters which he wrote from Java to Dorothy Fells, an Army wife who contributed to the 23rd Indian Division newspaper, have already been quoted in extenso. His own commitment to The Fighting Cock, which he edited for a few months in 1946, probably reduced his mail from that theatre; apart from snapshots, some ‘captioned’ on the reverse, there is nothing in his family’s papers. There is, too, a dearth of material from the immediate post-war years. This is explained, in part anyway, by the fact that Dirk’s working life took him over. It must be borne in mind that within a year of his demobilisation he was in front of the cameras for Esther Waters as its leading player – a status, ‘above the title’, which he would maintain in the industry for four decades. Under his obligations to the Rank Organisation he was preparing for, and making, three or more films a year. Such correspondence as he was producing emerged mainly via loyal secretaries – principally Val Geeves and, later, Peggy Croft. Inevitably, this filter, while helpful to formal presentation, led to a dulling of impact. However good he was at giving dictation, the result could never be as effective as if he had struck the keys himself.

  For all the above reasons, therefore, this selection is confined to the second half of Dirk’s adult life. The years from 1969 to the mid-1990s yielded a crop of great, at times astonishing, abundance – much of it, unlike that from the earlier period, preserved.

  The main cause of Dirk’s increased productivity was simple. The opportunities for satisfying film work in England had been drying up, and on 1 March 1969 he and Tony set off for the Continent, where they would remain until 1987. In that time he made just nine films, two of them for television. For those eighteen years they were without a secretary, and even afterwards Dirk would employ one only on rare occasions, and briefly, to see him through a crisis. There was another persuasive factor. In those days the telephone in both Italy and France was primitive, unreliable and expensive. The call, either for business or for social purposes, was no longer quite the simple matter it had once been. However, armed with his typewriter and unbound by any of the strictures imposed by secretarial help, he was free to ‘talk’ whenever, and at whatever length, he wished. Quite apart from the cost and telephonic hazard of trying to converse with subscribers in Britain, he had by this time an obligation across the Atlantic which, were he to have pursued the traffic by any means other than mail, would have reduced him to near-penury.

  In the spring of 1967 he had received a letter, franked in America, from a total stranger, Dorothy Gordon. A friend of hers had sent a copy of a magazine containing a photograph of Dirk at his house, Adam’s Farm, on the Kent and Sussex border. Mrs Gordon had lived there before the war, and was curious to know how it had fared in the intervening thirty years. This was no fan letter; to those – except in cases where he guessed that the sender stalked the wilder shores of dottiness – he would reply with a crisp but polite note, or a signed photograph if one was requested. No, this was something way out of the ordinary, from a highly intelligent woman, a librarian at Yale University, who cared not a fig for Dirk’s fame. With his reply, from the house in which they had a common interest, a ‘conversation’ began which lasted, at a fierce intensity, for three years, then dwindled somewhat during a further two, until Dorothy Gordon’s death from cancer in 1
972. Dirk had guessed almost from the beginning that she was mortally ill. He wrote to keep her intellectually stimulated. She, in turn, recognised that his flair on the written page needed to be disciplined sufficiently to move him towards being considered for publication as either a memoirist or a novelist. The result, in her case, was much solace at a desperate time; in Dirk’s, five years later, it was A Postillion Struck by Lightning, the first of his fifteen books. ‘FORCE memory!’ she had exhorted him. And he did.

  Their correspondence, the origins and progress of which Dirk described in An Orderly Man, is believed to have amounted to somewhere between 600 and a thousand pieces. Sometimes Dirk’s cards would be held up by industrial trouble and would arrive together in a flock, to be dubbed by their recipient ‘starlings’. The letters, in their airmail envelopes, were known as ‘bluejays’. In quantity they humbled those between the American author Helene Hanff and the London bookseller Frank Doel. The latter correspondence was published in 84 Charing Cross Road (André Deutsch, 1971); Dirk’s, in 1989 by Chatto & Windus, as A Particular Friendship, with Dorothy Gordon disguised as ‘Mrs X’. But there were differences between the two books. For a start, the Hanff–Doel exchanges were a dialogue; Dirk printed only his own letters, greatly edited and revised, and often with the help of the Diary, so some of the words in his monologues are, in fact, Tony’s. Second, Hanff and Doel were in contact for almost twenty years, until the latter’s death in December 1968. Third, Hanff and Doel wrote to each other with greater brevity. More telling than the differences, however, was the factor common to both of these transatlantic relationships, in which the distance seemed to heighten the affection. Hanff and Doel never met. Neither did Dirk and Dorothy Gordon. In fact they spoke only once, when Dirk telephoned her from a hotel room in New York. It was a disappointment, compromising one element of their hitherto cement-hard bond: mystery. Nevertheless, a quarter of a century after the last ‘starling’ fluttered into Dorothy Gordon’s letter-box on the morning of her death, Dirk remembered their remarkable relationship as ‘a kind of love affair without the carnality – strange but true’.