Left alone in the Hallam Street flat when Jean went home, I struggled with the script of Pleasure Beach, going down to Denham every other day. But eventually nothing came of it. I had had one or two original cinematic ideas in Take My Life, but neither I nor anyone else seemed able to get our creative teeth into the Frank Tylsley story.
After the non-event of this film I was directed to the development of the script of Take My Life, a much happier field. Valerie Taylor had accepted an invitation to play two key Shakespearian roles at Stratford, so I was left to do this on my own.
These were all essentially young men I was working with – or young in my terms. I was the youngest, but all three directors of the Mann office were under forty, and so was almost everyone connected with the film. It was an exciting, nerve-straining, exacting, stimulating, exhausting summer. I met a lot of stars and had a lot of fun, but have always been glad that I had a hard North Country head which wasn’t easily turned.
The heroine of our film was a concert artist. Mainly because I have always loved piano concertos, I made her a pianist. But Cineguild felt that because of the recent success of Brief Encounter, where the background music is piano music by Rachmaninov, they should change the instrument. So after long discussion they made Phillipa an opera singer. We spent a whole day (or it may have been two) at Denham with a pianist, specially engaged from Covent Garden, sitting at the piano, going through the operas with us, trying to choose which would be most suitable. One opera after another did not suit because the clothes were unbecoming or unsuitable, or for a variety of other reasons. In despair at the end I suggested sarcastically that the best thing would be to write our own opera. This they seized on as a brilliant idea and William Alwyn, who had been commissioned to write the music, was commissioned to write an opera called Take My Life, or as much of it as was necessary for the purposes of the story.
In the meantime Demelza was finished lovingly in May and June, and was published in December 1946, with acclaim and sales similar to its predecessor. Also the Rank Organisation had been going through my backlist and through its daughter company, Gainsborough Pictures, bought the rights of The Forgotten Story and another novel, The Merciless Ladies. Neither of these films was eventually made because as they were being set up the economic blizzard hit the industry.
The government was a good deal responsible for this blizzard – at least it was responsible, if one may vary the metaphor, for the spectacular boom and the catastrophic fall. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hugh Dalton, in order to aid the British film industry, had clapped a quota on American films being shown in this country and had relied on British films to fill the gap. It was an impossible task suddenly to make sixty films a year instead of twenty; quality suffered badly in those that were made, and the distributors had the prospect of offering the exhibitors repeats of old films to keep their cinemas open. Also, the Americans threatened retaliatory action by refusing even to fill the quota. Thereupon Mr Harold Wilson, by now President of the Board of Trade, without even consulting the British film industry, rescinded the whole quota system and allowed the Americans free and full access as before. The result was that the British industry, producing a few good but many inferior films, was squeezed to death. Nor would the Americans in any way reciprocate by allowing the few good British films access to their markets.
Tommy Trinder starred in a film called The Foreman Went to France. A friend congratulated him on the fact that it had been released in America. Trinder said: ‘It wasn’t released, it escaped.’
The Rank Organisation lost millions during this period, and subsidiary companies like Gainsborough Pictures closed down altogether. Great numbers of technicians and tradesmen were thrown out of work for ever.
But when Take My Life was made, all this fortunately was in the unforeseeable future. During long periods while the film was in production I stayed in London and so saw a lot of the filming from the studio floor and came to know everyone concerned with the production very well. Tony Havelock-Allan, who produced the film, badly wanted his then wife, Valerie Hobson, to play the lead, but Ronald Neame, whose first picture this was as director, was much against this, and I was in the invidious position of being in the middle. I would certainly have greatly preferred Valerie Hobson, whom by this time I knew and admired very much, to the girl who was eventually chosen, Greta Gynt. But in fact, carefully dressed and well directed, she was very good in the part.
The premiere was on the 24th of May at the Empire, Leicester Square. In those days, a premiere was like a charity premiere today, merely lacking the royalty. Police held back the sightseers who crowded to see all the celebrities. Reporters dodged in and out, flashbulbs flickered, a thirty-strong band played us to our seats. My wife, looking marvellous in a new white Grecian dress, took her seat beside me and the lights went down.
We saw the film again. Gordon Wellesley, when he saw me in the foyer beforehand, said I looked ‘ very cher-u-bic’. If I did, I didn’t feel it. I just felt sick.
After it was all over we drove back to Hallam Street and fell into bed in a happy stupor, for all the auguries were now good.
But still we were not prepared for the rest of the reviews. On the Sunday we drove home together to Cornwall, stopped in Mere to buy all the Sunday papers, which echoed the opinion of the dailies. ‘ How I enjoyed it!’ one wrote. And another: ‘Nobody had told me how good it was going to be.’ Even C. A. Lejeune, the doyenne among the more austere critics, headed her article in the Observer ‘ Ice on theSpine’ and said she wouldn’t swap Take My Life ‘and a couple of marbles’ for the two expensively advertised American films released that week. Jimpson Harman of the Evening News said it bucked him up for the rest of the day. The Spectator and the New Statesman carried long columns about the film.
It was a wonderful time for me, for along with this success had gone the recent publication of The Forgotten Story, Ross Poldark and Demelza, which made my name known throughout the West Country.
During 1947 I kept my flat in Hallam Street, working intermittently on one film and another; then I wrote the script for the film of The Forgotten Story. But I was growing disillusioned. I have never had a very strong literary ego, and to spend a week writing something to order and then going to a script conference to hear your work discussed, and most often pulled to pieces, was destructive to my creative confidence. In the light of other people’s stronger opinions I found myself doubting my own judgement. I also felt I was beginning to think in the form of visual scenes. (I have always written very visually, but not in bits of boiled-down action and dialogue.) So I decided it was time to make a move. I gave up my flat in London, ended my flirtation with the film industry, and returned to Cornwall absolutely determined that now I would sit down and write a novel that no one would ever film. I succeeded.
Wandering through the local parish churchyard of Perranzabuloe a few years before, I had seen a weather-beaten tombstone, on which one could only discern the name and the date. ‘Cordelia, 1869.’ The name was in large letters, which stretched from one side of the stone to the other, and standing there in the misty afternoon light I began to wonder what sort of a person this woman had been, how old she was when she died, how she had come by this attractive but romantic name, what her life story was, if only she could have told it to me.
During the last years of my mother’s life, I listened, as with a sense of something soon to be lost, to her reminiscences as a young girl in the Manchester of the 80s and 90s. She had a brilliant memory, and through them I can trace my own family – her family anyway – in endless ramifications back to 1800. It was not just the main stems she remembered, but all the branches. Among them was an uncle, a rich dyer, who built Acacia Hall in Burnage, and something of his life story is reflected in the life of Mr Ferguson in the novel (Cordelia) I then wrote. Some of the characters and much of the background reflected things that my mother had told me, including the character of Mr Slaney-Smith, the atheist, who was based on Jack Slaney, whom I have
referred to before, and who was a great friend of my grandfather.
So most of 1948 was taken with writing this long book, peering into my own and my mother’s past. It was published in 1949, which meant that apart from a novelized version of Take My Life, which in my view was not nearly as good as the film, I hadn’t published a book for nearly three years. Nor for the last two had I earned anything at all from the film industry, so that, with exceptionally high earnings in 1946, I found myself in 1948 paying more tax than my total earnings for that year.
In 1949 my mother died. She had been able to read and appreciate Cordelia in typescript. During the explosive success that hit me from 1945 onwards, she had seen her ewe lamb make good in a way she probably never quite expected. She had enjoyed all the successes at one remove but had been too frail to go to London to see any of the excitements for herself. However, such was the acclaim for Take My Life that the Odeon Cinema, Falmouth decided to put on their own premiere, at which Valerie Taylor and I were presented on the stage, and my mother was able to go to that. She said it was only then, observing the deference with which we were treated, that she realized what a success the film had been.
When my six-year-old son heard she was dead he put his head down on the dining-room table and cried. My daughter was perhaps too young to understand; but in the three years of their time together a tremendous rapport had grown up between the old woman and the little girl. Only when I saw my mother with Rosamund did I begin to understand how much, when I was born, she had wanted a daughter; how in early years she would have loved to dress me as a girl if she had dared; perhaps it explains some of the otherwise inexcusable pampering.
My mother’s and my daughter’s hair was identical, and even smelt the same. The last words my mother said to me about Rosamund were: ‘Take care of my little love.’
In my new notoriety I was re-approached by Hodder & Stoughton, who offered me a handsome contract if I would write more books in the general style of Take My Life and The Forgotten Story. They promised to publish me with the greatest possible enthusiasm, and put their whole publicity and sales force behind the books. On the other hand they did not appear too keen on long family novels of eighteenth-century Cornwall. They thought the two I had done were quite enough.
Until now I had remained with Ward, Lock, whose chairman, since Wilfred Lock had retired, was a Colonel Shipton, an ex-soldier with much greater charm and address than his uncle, but not a man in the literary swim; and a personal friendship had sprung up which made the move, together with my in-built loyalty, much more difficult. Also the Poldarks, though latent for three years, remained active in my subconscious mind. The deep, almost passionate involvement in these books remained as a stirring memory. I was certainly going to write one more, if not two. I put it to Hodder that they should contract for my next three modern novels and that any Poldark novel or historical novel I wrote in the foreseeable future should still go to Ward, Lock. They willingly agreed. This meant that I might get the best of both worlds: a modern aggressive publisher for my modern books, my old colleagues for two more Poldarks.
The arrangement worked pretty well. During the next few years I had Night Without Stars, Fortune is a Woman, and The Little Walls with Hodder (two of them filmed) and Jeremy Poldark and Warleggan with Ward, Lock.
Something else was happening in the meantime. In 1949 an American publisher, Ken McCormick, chief editor of Doubleday, was in London on one of his scouting trips and my newly acquired agent Audrey Heath gave him Cordelia to read; he bought it for publication in the United States, where it came out in 1950.
American publication, though it promises much, may produce little. In my case it kept its promise. Before the book was published Doubleday sold it to the Literary Guild, who printed half a million copies in hardback and sold considerably more. The trade edition did well – and it was well reviewed.
In the same year Hodder published the first of my new modern novels, Night Without Stars, and it was filmed the same year. In 1947 an emerging new French publishing firm, Éditions Begh, had bought The Forgotten Story, and they published it in 1949. They also bought the first two Poldark novels but by the time these were translated the firm was running into financial trouble; it went into liquidation, and the Poldark books did not come out until many years later, under another imprint. The partners of Éditions Begh were three: Marie-Louise Deschamps-Eyme (Ma Lou); Basil Holroyd, an Englishman, and father of the now well-known Michael Holroyd; and Marcel Brandin, a fifty-year-old, dissolute, palefaced, sophisticated, charming Frenchman with whom I maintained a fond friendship until he died. Basil was madly in love with the truly beautiful Ma Lou, who was herself mistress of the millionaire newspaper proprietor who financed the firm. How it all fell apart I never quite knew, but Marcel, who had been high in the ranks of the Maquis as a resistance fighter, and who was much disillusioned by the return of the old squabbling political parties to post-war France, deeply interested me, and I used him as the chief French character in Night Without Stars. In 1948 I met all three partners for the first time, then took the Train Bleu to the South of France.
Shortly before I left England I had met a man who, after a lifetime of partial blindness, had had an operation which enabled him to see everything properly for the first time. His account of his annus mirabilis made a great impression on me; and I felt I wanted in some way to write about it.
Then while in the South of France a number of minor experiences occurred and began to adhere to the story just growing in my mind. One day in a shoe shop in Nice I was served by a stunningly pretty French girl. I stood up and walked across the shop, trying out a new pair of shoes. Half-blinded by the sunlight flooding in from the street, I stumbled and fell over another box of shoes lying on the floor. Following this, two days later, there came a hair-raising trip by car over worm-narrow mountain roads beyond Grasse, when, as we were trying to squeeze past a workman’s lorry, one wheel of our car slipped into a shallow gully on the edge of a precipice and nearly overturned. Then I discovered that the street beside the Hôtel Bristol at Beaulieu, where we were staying, was about to be ceremoniouslyrenamed after a Résistance fighter who had been shot by the Germans. I could now see the novel very well. This was published as Night Without Stars.
When the book was filmed later that year Hugh Stewart was assigned as producer, and the director was to be Anthony Pelissier, the son of Fay Compton and the nephew of Compton Mackenzie. Naturally, with my reputation inflated over Take My Life, I was chosen to write the script.
In July 1950 Hugh Stewart and Anthony Pelissier went to Paris to try to find an actress to play the French girl heroine of the novel, so I went along. With a degree of austerity imposed by the now impoverished Rank Organisation, they stayed at the Scribe. I stayed at the Continentale, which had not then been bought by the Intercontinental Group. In the Scribe we spent a whole day interviewing French actresses for the part, among them a delightful young girl called Nadine Alari, whom Marcel Brandin had recommended. But I fear that, assuming all the recommended girls to be actresses of some degree of competence, Anthony Pelissier’s standard of judgement was not so much which girl would appeal to an audience as which girl appealed to him. His eye settled on an actress called Maria Mauban who, although watched over by a hawk-faced duenna of a mother, clearly returned some of his glances, and so it was settled – or so we all thought. Contracts between agents were about to be exchanged.
But when we got back to England Earl St John, chief executive director of Rank, under John Davis, would have none of it. Who was this Maria Mauban? Never heard of her. All very well for Tony to fancy her, but a ‘ name’ was what was needed. In the end, after a lot of bitter argument, Nadia Gray was chosen, who was later to make a hit in La Dolce Vita. I remember a month or two later joining Anthony in Claridges where we were to meet Nadia Gray for the first time. We sat in the hall and she, disdaining the lift, which would have given her no ‘ entry’, came lightly but slowly down the curved marble staircase, her sk
irt billowing round her matchless legs. I personally was disappointed – she was too sophisticated for my Alix – much better Nadine Alari – also she had freckled arms, which I have never cared for. However, I could see Anthony was prepared to make the best of it; and before the end of the film make the best of her he certainly did.
There were many suggestions as to who should play the half-blind Giles Gordon. Hugh Stewart’s suggestion was David Niven, but this was vetoed by Earl St John. Niven was finished, he said. ‘Box office poison.’ (This in 1950, on the eve of the greatest successes of his career!) Then I made a daring suggestion. While Take My Life was being filmed I had gone up to Stratford to see Valerie Taylor play the lead in Cymbeline and to tell her how things were going in the studio, and I had been absolutely mesmerized by the performance – in quite a small role – of an unknown young actor. When he was on stage there was, to me, simply no one else there. His name was Paul Scofield.
This suggestion was not greeted with any enthusiasm at all by the Rank studios. They knew of him, of course, but he had done nothing in the film world, and in any case was a crazy mixed-up kid. No, they had to look elsewhere. In the end they chose David Farrar, who had made a fair success in a number of English films and wasn’t bad in the part. But he had not a tenth of the elfin appeal of David Niven, and as an actor was simply not to be spoken of in the same breath as Paul Scofield.
Well, I wrote the script, and producer and director both said they were very happy with it. Pleased at this, I did not stay to watch the film being made but went to America with Jean, our first of many trips, to meet the rest of the Double-day board, who entertained us most royally and yet most tactfully, for three weeks, so that we enjoyed everything but were never pressurized. After this we took off for New Orleans, Jamaica and the Bahamas for another three weeks. During this wonderful trip my stomach, conditioned as it was to wartime rationing, gave out with a bad attack of gastritis in New Orleans, and for the rest of the trip and for a year afterwards I would get repeat performances. In the Bahamas Jean had her worst attack of asthma ever and looked as if she was going to die. One doctor who was called in gave her some pills which made the asthma worse. We told him this and he said: ‘They can’t do. Look at what it says on the bottle.’ Eventually another doctor with the splendid name of Quackenbush was called; he came, very unsteady, from a cocktail party and broke the needle in her arm.