Must You Go?: My Life With Harold Pinter

  Later: Harold thinks he has an ulcer or an ulcerette and again talks about money. Then – miraculous to behold! The first night of Sweet Bird of Youth starring Lauren Bacall is a triumphant success and the pain has completely disappeared. Nor is money further discussed. At the first-night party Betty Bacall glitters in a white top, tight white satin trousers, showing off her superb figure; she dances away. Harold too dances away extremely energetically, Hackney style, he says, as usual. I dance away – South Kensington style is probably the right description.

  Directing Betty Bacall in Tennessee Williams’ masterpiece was both a rewarding and an entertaining experience despite gloomy prognostications to the contrary. I record that Harold adores Betty and rejects stories of her being difficult with scorn. ‘She’s just professional’ – that’s always a term of praise with Harold where actors are concerned. Bob Gottlieb was the one who got the future of their relationship right, the less talented doom-mongers wrong. Bob had edited her autobiography: Bacall by Bacall. ‘Betty’ he said ‘is a good pal.’ And indeed we formed an enduring friendship with Betty thereafter. When directing I always thought that Harold felt himself to be on the actors’ side because he identified with them; where there were differences it was to do with his perfectionism, his attention to the text, rather than to something more aggressive like natural impatience. Throughout his long career in that sphere, I got used to tributes from those concerned, often said in a slightly surprised voice, to be honest: ‘Harold is so sweet as a director.’

  Harold’s decision to take on the part of Deeley in Old Times in the US led to a considerable change in our way of life ten years into our relationship. There had, he said, been a gap of seventeen years since his last foray on to the stage. It arose because Michael Gambon, who had been so wonderful in it – a mixture of bear and big cat with his rugged appearance and extraordinary grace of movement – wasn’t able to go to the States. Throughout rehearsals in the early autumn of 1985 Harold was, I noted, in a remarkably sunny mood, despite the world being in its usual parlous state. He worked with the director David Jones, and the actresses Liv Ullmann and Nicola Pagett, who are Snow White and Rose Red, respectively blonde and dark.

  3 October

  Harold: ‘The sexual attraction between Deeley and Anna is now very strong. One possibility at the end of the play is for Deeley to go off with Anna, which we’ll explore.’ Yes, I bet, given the magnetic beauty of Liv! (She’s all the more attractive for being very active over human rights as well.)

  5 October

  Harold: ‘I’m doing my violence in Deeley quite coldly and quietly.’ (Mike used to roar.) He talked of the frightening feeling of seeing the two women’s faces turned towards him, blank, close together, when he comes back from giving himself a whisky. He’s happily having singing lessons for those snatches of song. But where text is concerned, Harold always stumbles in the same places as Mike Gambon did, according to the ladies. When I tell this to Claire Bloom, she wrinkles her lovely face just slightly – except it has no wrinkles – and says: ‘Perhaps that’s where the author didn’t get it quite right.’ Harold loves this.

  10 October 1985

  Harold’s fifty-fifth birthday. I give him a black kimono lined in red for his theatrical tour: he looks like something in a Japanese print, or perhaps a Kabuki actor. Everybody spontaneously says to him: ‘You look ten years younger.’ It’s true that there has been no nicotine in his system for eighteen months (he could never have taken this on without that abstention) and there is all the new exercise thanks to tennis at the beloved Vanderbilt Club. But fundamentally it’s the acting. After all, that’s the profession he chose, as I used to remind myself, whereas poetry and writing plays had, as it were, chosen him. And he loved it. For the rest of his life there would be many such forays on the stage, as well as acting on radio and cameo roles in film.

  Old Times opened in St Louis, as a try-out before Los Angeles and San Francisco. Unfortunately Harold trod the boards officially for the first time in seventeen years on the night of the World Series in which the St Louis Cardinals were featured. Unhappy husbands listened to the results on headphones during the performance, having been dragged to the show by culture-conscious wives. While these same wives put on expressions thought suitable for Pinter: wistful ennui just about sums it up. There were sudden eruptions of violent unlawful sounds from the headphones.

  25 October

  St Louis. Paid a visit of respect together to Tennessee Williams’ grave as a tribute to Sweet Bird of Youth. The Catholic cemetery has the penitential name of Calvary, but the day was so incredibly beautiful that the green swards rather resembled a Hollywood version of eternal glades of happiness. Having recently read the Donald Spoto biography of Tennessee, I uttered the sincere prayer: ‘If he’s anywhere, O God, let him be at peace.’ On the way home Harold shows me one of his cards, written at the graveside while I was praying: he’s had an idea for a piece using a sudden ending to a young man’s life: a fierce white light. (This was the first intimation of the play called Party Time.)

  We both liked writers’ graves. Once when we were in Zurich, visiting a performance of One for the Road, we went on a pilgrimage to find the grave of Harold’s hero James Joyce. First we were informed by the poetry-lovers Geoffrey Godbert and Tony Astbury exactly which restaurants Joyce liked, and what he liked to drink: we followed instructions. Harold sipping white wine and overlooking the water: ‘Joyce liked his bourgeois comforts.’ Now we toiled high, high above the city to the cemetery, where Joyce was reported to lie. We arrived, we stumbled up icy stone steps, white frost everywhere amid heaths and heathers still flowering and carefully chosen trees, all Zurich laid out before us. I bent my nose towards the various frosty plaques on the ground. Suddenly a cry from Harold: ‘Here he is!’

  And there he was, Jimmy Joyce, modelled in bronze, life-size but only three-quarters of him. I imagine him with his specs, his open book, his ash plant and his cigarette … looking towards us. I had actually seen this figure in the grass but somehow thought he was a real man encouraging us forward. Back at the hotel I checked in Ellmann’s biography and learned that Nora said about the cemetery’s proximity to the Zurich Zoo: ‘Jim can hear the lions roaring, he always liked lions.’

  27 October 1985

  Los Angeles. Bel-Air Hotel (where Betty Bacall insisted we stay, which was a mistake because I felt isolated). The real thrill was seeing my youngest daughter Natasha, who was aged twenty-two, living and working in LA. She looked like a Stuart beauty with her lustrous black hair, white skin and huge blue eyes: Charles II would have gone mad for her.

  30 October

  Harold went for broke, no, went for bankrupt. David Jones told him in the interval, ‘Be wicked’ – and he was. His humour, his confidence, apparent or real, made Deeley’s sobbing at the end of the play extraordinarily compelling: as a result Liv was even more incandescent than she had been with Gambon, performing amazing gyrations with her black sheeny legs and Nicola found full authority, especially in her last speech. Afterwards Duncan Weldon, the producer, asks Harold what other parts he wants to play. We got into jealous males such as Robert in Betrayal and James in The Collection. Harold kept saying: ‘I am too old’, but at this moment he could play anything. First-night party at the Polo Lounge. Waiter to Harold: ‘So you are in a play? Claudette Colbert is in a play.’ Harold: ‘Well, I’m not Claudette Colbert, in case you think I am.’ Later the waiter is brought back by head-waiter. He apologizes gravely for mistaking Harold for Claudette Colbert.

  31 October

  Hollywood! Went with Duncan Weldon to a performance of Aren’t We All? with Rex Harrison and, guess who, Claudette Colbert. Backstage before the performance there was a party of Mr and Mrs Frank Sinatra, Mr and Mrs Kirk Douglas, Mr and Mrs Gregory Peck and Mr and Mrs Roger Moore. Then they were joined by the stars who were supposed to be performing in the play. It was by now 7.55 p.m. Thanked God Harold was on a stage elsewhere, not directing these insouciant creatures. r />
  I couldn’t really enjoy Los Angeles, despite meeting the famous as above, until I started to work on my new book on Warrior Queens in the library of UCLA. I simply wasn’t used to a life of doing nothing in a hotel and it produced melancholy, even though Natasha was there as a solace and drove me about in a stately fashion in her large dusty, second- (or third-) hand Mercedes. It was a city, we found, where people worked hard on films and went to bed early; it didn’t suit our way of life of roistering and relaxing after the theatre. In fact the tour was cut short, thanks to the illness of one of the cast. Harold, having proved to himself that he could act again, said that he was happy to return home.

  18 November

  Met Faye Dunaway after the play because Harold hopes to direct her back in London in Donald Freed’s thrilling, menacing play Circe and Bravo. Quite lovely in the flesh: daffodil hair, masses of it, pale face, white mac, yellow jersey, slender legs and body. These stars! Nobody knows the stars I’ve seen. These ladies size me up at the first meeting with their shrewd (and beautiful) eyes and give me a character. After that I obediently stay in the character whenever I’m with them. Betty told me I was so funny (although she is really the funny one) so now I’m quite hilariously witty with her. Liv told me I was serene so naturally I compose my features into a tranquil blancmange whenever I’m near her. We shall see what character Faye gives me.

  The fact was, once I had got over – or rather coped with – my obsessional need to work, I found being the wife of an actor an exceptionally happy role. Although actors sleep late, writers (or me anyway) get up early. Writers then have a cheerful day working incredibly hard, at least in their own opinion, before joining the actor after the show for an invigorating supper.

  Sometimes I went to the theatre or the opera by myself before joining Harold. I loved this: the anticipation of meeting him; plus the pleasure of going to the show or opera without, to be honest, bothering about his reactions.

  1986

  24 January

  Lunch at Kensington Palace with the Prince and Princess of Wales for Shimon Peres, Prime Minister of Israel. Philip Roth in his waggish way: ‘Of course Harold hasn’t been invited: he’s Jewish.’ Like the child who goes to the panto, I was ready at an early hour – green suede dress, black patent shoes, pearl necklace. I was much too early and had to sit by Kensington Public Library for ten minutes, then realized I would be late. Felt very nervous, amid the immense security precautions (for the President, not the Royals). Inside, saw a tall crimson streak who proved to be the Princess of Wales. Gazed into the famous face. A perfect pale pink complexion, pale rose colour, not pink or white. Azure-blue eyes, even bigger than in her cartoons, ringed with what looked like kohl. Her voice has that light rather flat upper-class quality I have noted on TV, but what I hadn’t appreciated is that she’s extremely vivacious, eager to please, rattles on: ‘Are you writing a new book? Oh, I do hope so.’ And so on and so on. To Peres: ‘Yes I’d love to come to Israel. Anything for some sun.’

  Princess: ‘I always used to believe what I read in the media until I was in the media.’ She shook her beautiful head mystically. Peres: ‘I want to say what inspiration you have given to children all over the world.’ Princess: ‘They always expect me to have a crown on.’ (I guess that’s her stock remark.)

  Magic moment when Princes William and Harry rush in. The Israeli Ambassadress is enchanted: ‘Children break down all barriers.’ Prince William would certainly break down any barrier. He’s quite marvellous, tall, straight, thick glossy hair. Totally un-shy. Ran about. Then looked up at Noel Annan and pointed like the Duke of York at Richard III at the opening of the Olivier film: ‘You’ve got no hair.’ Intense pleasure of other guests. Princess collapses in giggles. Noel attempts to be good with children and drops artily to his knees: ‘The wind blew it away’ – said in an exquisite voice. Prince William: ‘Where to?’ Prince Charles, at the end: ‘Is your husband all right about not coming?’ Harold had not been asked because we were supposed to be historians, to please Shimon Peres. Prince Charles adds concernedly if not accurately: ‘I expect he is eating scrambled eggs at home?’

  A new vista was shortly to open up in my own work, thanks to a chance visit when I was in New York. In 1988 when The Warrior Queens was published, the third history book published during my twelve years with Harold, I see from my Diary that I was casting about for a subject for a new book. I contemplated writing about Madame de Maintenon, last mistress and maybe wife of Louis XIV. I thought I could sink myself in the court of Louis XIV and the fortunes of this odd woman, and do something interesting and original, if not particularly popular. To dig and not to count the cost, to adapt Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Harold always applauds non-commercial decisions, to his great credit, and applauded this one. Although he’s deeply proud of my commercial success, as and when it happens (from time to time, but not every book every time), he would have made a good husband to a reclusive lady scholar of impeccable integrity, indifferent to sales. The interesting thing about Harold and money is that every now and then he decides to worry about it, as part of a general cafard; but fundamentally he’s not interested in it. Certainly, in the years I have known him, he’s never taken on anything for money.

  April 1988

  An exciting thing happened when I visited Bob Gottlieb, now editor of the New Yorker (office newly kitsched up, according to Bob’s taste, two lamps made of ballerina’s legs in pink tights and shoes). I was supposed to go to Philadelphia to be interviewed but the journalist broke her arm so I seized the opportunity to see Bob. Talked about my future plans for a book. Bob: ‘Well, I have an idea, but maybe it will sound stupid to you. It’s just come into my mind: THE SIX WIVES OF HENRY VIII. Me: ‘That is certainly not stupid, Bob, that is an idea of genius.’ And equally immediately, I saw how that might be really very interesting for me, the types of women, the period just before mine. I felt good about it. And I could complete it to be published for my sixtieth birthday in August 1992. Told Bob: ‘That fact wouldn’t sell one copy. But it would make me feel good.’

  Recently my books hadn’t sold particularly well, although I was extremely content with what I had done. But the fact is that any book on Henry and his six wives sells. As a young publicist said to me on the day of publication in England, on the way to a radio show, when I suggested that the book appeared to be subscribing well: ‘I think it’s the subject, isn’t it?’ Maybe she wasn’t destined for a life of diplomacy, but the fact is that she was right. Biography in my experience, however brilliant, rarely transcends its subject in terms of sales. The quality however soars or sinks with the writer.

  Whenever required, Harold entered enthusiastically into my expeditions on what I called ‘optical research’, the term invented for tax purposes, which could be put in another way as ‘Going to places and looking at them’. Even though I never quite cured myself of impulsive gestures such as ushering Harold on to turrets of perilous height or worse still, into claustrophobic dungeons … Sometimes his visits to what he called ‘your own world … the world of history which you love’ coincided harmoniously with his own film work. This happened when Harold was invited by Canadian director Patricia Rozema to play Sir Thomas Bertram in a version of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.

  It was set, for reasons which seemed good to the director, in an early Jacobean mansion in Northamptonshire. Even though one of the points of Jane Austen’s novel (hence the title) is that Sir Thomas has built his house himself with money he has earned. And he has earned it from the slave trade, as was certainly stressed in the film. If ever there was a case for the usual graceful Georgian mansion, this was it. But apparently ‘that had been done before’, as reported by Harold, presumably in Pride and Prejudice.

  Never having read the novel, Harold was tickled with the script because the part of Sir Thomas was such a good, meaty one. My historian’s yap about the date of the house did not bother an actor with a good part one whit. Like most actors in films, I imagine, Harold’s comp
laints were mainly about his stockings with garters not staying up. Nor did he mind the inevitable delays. He stayed in his caravan ‘thinking about cricket’, in his own words.

  So I went to Oundle where Harold was staying in order to be with him while he was filming. It was golden autumn weather. An amiable round of historical sight-seeing followed. We looked at four churches and one cathedral, Peterborough, where I was delighted to see that the tomb of Catherine of Aragon on which I had reverently placed flowers when I was working on her life, even now had a huge bouquet. Then I took Harold with me to Fotheringhay where Mary Queen of Scots had been executed in 1587. It was what Henry James called ‘the visitable past’. For although essentially the past of the tragic queen, it was also my past, thirty years ago at the time when I was working on my biography, in a different life before I met Harold. Fotheringhay looked of course exactly the same, the surviving lump of masonry more like an asteroid which had landed from space beside the River Nene, than the last remnant of a once great castle. The thistles on the mound were grown high. I remembered picking a huge bunch in the sixties; I also remembered the story I had picked up of a Highland piper who used to come and play a lament in memory of Queen Mary on the anniversary of her execution in February. No sign of a piper now, but I gathered another enormous bunch of thistles for remembrance. We both contemplated the mound in silence.

  After that we went on to the eighteenth/seventeenth-century Kirby Hall, and to Harold’s twentieth-century caravan. It was surrounded by trailers, sheep and a huge fire engine. He donned his full billowing shirt, his flowing brocade dressing-gown, his nightcap, and striped waistcoat and the famous unreliable white stockings. Looking suitably menacing, he strode off in the big black buckled shoes of Sir Thomas Bertram.