8. STAR ENCOUNTERS OF THE FIRST KIND
That a million other people would see it too was a datum whose full impact was slow to sink in. After all, the paper was full of good writers. But I had the best subject. When Edward Crankshaw reviewed a book about Stalin, he had to spend the opening paragraph giving the readers a potted history of the Soviet Union. My readers already knew what I was talking about. By that stage, television was a household experience, the first frame of reference in everybody’s mind. So I could spend my whole time being as allusive as I liked. In the long term, this privilege was to make all the difference. Because TV took in everything, I could take in everything too. It was the ideal set-up for a cracker-barrel philosopher. The possibilities, however, were slow to dawn, and for the moment my Observer column felt like a holiday from Cinema, which was the job that counted. For one thing, the job was growing, like the spaceman’s hand in The Quatermass Experiment. I was still recording the two shows back to back in Manchester every second Wednesday, and preparing for them in London every week, but there was a new policy to supplement the regular shows with irregular specials, which would add up to a series all on their own: a string (not yet called ‘a strand’) of interviews with the movie stars. Some of the movie stars were quite big, but even the small ones were hard to lure up to Manchester. The first star was very small indeed, although in my own eyes he loomed larger than Betelgeuse. He was the veteran lyricist Johnny Mercer, the very man who wrote ‘The Summer Wind’ and ‘One For My Baby’, which today still sets my standards for the way a colloquial phrase can be multiplied in its energy by how it sits on a row of musical notes. But to Cinema’s audience he was known only, if at all, as the author of ‘Moon River’, which everyone knew from the charming way Audrey Hepburn almost managed to sing it in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Mercer had prominence, but scarcely stardom.
Mercer’s relative obscurity was a lucky break for me, because there were few repercussions after I stuffed up the interview so badly that it couldn’t be transmitted. Knowing a lot about him, I spent far too much time proving to him that I knew it. An interviewer should certainly be well prepared, but only so that the answers won’t catch him flat-footed. I made the beginner’s classic mistake of including the answer in the question. This left my puzzled guest with little to say beyond ‘yes’ and ‘no’. The interview was done on film in a specially rented room of the London hotel where Mercer was staying. When Mercer had gone back to his own room, no doubt wondering why he had bothered, Arthur sat down in the guest’s vacated chair and read me the news. ‘We can’t use this.’ I sat there on the verge of tears while he gave me a quiet but unforgettable lesson in the necessity of asking a plain question so as to make the guest look like the interesting one, and not the host.
Well aware that I had made an expensive mess of things, I took the news in, and it formed the basis of my modus operandi from then on. Though I have always choked on such standard questions as ‘How did you feel when … ?’ and ‘What was it like to work with … ?’, it is better to ask them, or something like them, than to load a question with the very information that it is designed to elicit. I tried to overcome my squeamishness about appearing ignorant to the instructed viewer. The instructed viewer is rarely watching. It’s the uninstructed viewer that you’re after. Another basic interviewing skill was even more elementary but harder to master: listening to the answer. If you ask someone ‘What did you do when you left school?’ and he answers ‘I murdered my mother and buried her under the patio,’ the next thing you say should not be ‘And then I suppose you went to university?’ Eventually I got better at that one, but luckily I got better straight away at not upstaging the client. The Mercer debacle, plus the subsequent tongue-lashing from my producer, threw a real scare into me. It seemed logical to conclude that I should try to learn from the humiliation. Much, much later, I learned to count this ability to recover from catastrophe as one of my most useful qualities. I could put it down to sensitivity, but it is more likely to depend on the opposite. I have seen some highly talented people put out of action by a failure. They take it for a just estimation of their abilities. I never questioned that I had a right to be there, even when the people who thought I hadn’t might seem to have a good case, handed to them by me. No matter what disasters had driven me out of it, I always returned to the centre of attention. The spotlight healed my wounds. I had a thin skin, but a brass neck.
An interview with Richard Burton went better: well enough, in fact, to reach the screen. Burton had a stiff movie to push and was therefore available. Even in those days, you could get the stellar names only when they were flogging a dog. Burton’s movie, called Hammersmith is Out, barked and chewed bones. I don’t think even he ever sat through it. I did, as part of my preparation. Something had gone wrong with every part of the movie. The action never started. On the other hand, it never ended. As a token that the plot was going nowhere, Burton spent the whole movie standing around. When he walked, it was so that he could stand around somewhere else. Nobody would give a toss. But he was still a star. When Granada proposed to Burton’s people that he should be interviewed in Manchester, they proposed Monte Carlo. London was the compromise, but at least we were in a studio. I can’t remember which one it was – they all look the same from inside – but I can remember exactly my first impression of Burton. In the press profiles he had always been called stocky, and as his career declined, the journalists took to calling him short. Later on I realized that journalistic estimates of physical stature are always relative to perceived status, but I was still at the stage of believing what I read, so it was a shock to find that Burton was quite tall. What made him look less so, especially on screen, was the size of his head. It was as big as a tea chest. You had to lean sideways to look past him. On the front of that vast expanse of cranium, the features were arranged like a caricature of Richard Burton. I was still getting used to the fact that the stars look so like themselves: it is the first, and sometimes the only, characteristic they have. Burton seemed quite tolerant of my beard. He would probably have been tolerant if I had been dressed as a Maori chieftain. Though upright, with his bulky shoulders squared, he was barely awake. He was sober that afternoon, but the previous day had taken its toll, along with the previous half century.
Fortune decreed, however, that he had his answers ready, whatever the question. I courted disaster only once, when I hesitated to join in with his estimation of Joseph Losey as some kind of genius. If Burton had been in, say, The Servant, this might have been a proposition that he could plausibly illustrate, but the Losey film he had been in was Boom, which I had once watched go by on the big screen like a stricken luxury liner limping home to port after its passengers all died in a mass outbreak of boredom. As a blacklisted Hollywood director who had gone into exile in Europe and made a string of literate films in conditions of great difficulty, Losey was much revered among British film people: to admire him was a mark of seriousness. But he was short of humour, as his occasional attempt at comedy proved, and his concomitant solemnity – general recognition of which would eventually deprive his back catalogue of its prestige – was perfectly apparent even at the time to anyone not blinded by his legend. My guardian angel stopped me from saying so, and Burton was free to burble on with detailed reminiscences about Losey which were all taken out in the editing, on the correct assumption that the audience wouldn’t have known what he was talking about. But I made sure that I dug out of him all the best stories about his more popular movies. Some of them, after all, were pretty good, especially The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, which I thought masterly. He was pleased to hear that, although he would have been less pleased to hear that I thought Oskar Werner attained a naturalness on screen which Burton had never dreamed of. Happily I didn’t say that either. Most of the opinions came from the client: a desirable imbalance, because the viewers, on the basis of their own experience, can decide for themselves whether the interviewee is talking nonsense or not, and even if they decide he
is, they still find him a lot more interesting than the interviewer. I even managed to look excited when discussing Hammersmith is Out, which is more than I can say for Burton. But although never more than half awake, he was also never less than intelligent and civilized. Discounting the occasional flash of his undying belief that his alliance with Elizabeth Taylor had raised him to new artistic heights unknown to the Stratford Memorial Playhouse or the Old Vic, Burton handled his end of the business pretty well, and I was almost as impressed by him as I was by his one-man entourage, a black heavyweight who drove the car and arranged the details. After the heavyweight loaded Burton into the back of the limousine so that he could finish waking up, I was glad to find that I had my producer’s favour. ‘We can use that.’
When I saw the trimmed version on screen, I could see that it was no triumph for either party. But it wasn’t bad. An interview with Robert Mitchum went better still, mainly because Mitchum was more interesting all round. Burton, to prove himself alert to the English language, had to quote Shakespeare or Dylan Thomas. Mitchum could quote himself. There are people you can’t take your ears off when they talk, even when they mumble. Mitchum was one of them. His mumble, however, was formidable. Operating through a spokesman in his retinue, he demanded to audition us over lunch at the Dorchester. Arthur and I were there early, and well dug in. Mitchum turned up on time to the minute but we couldn’t understand what he was saying. ‘I seem fine squaws rive earl.’ A trained simultaneous translator from Geneva would have told us that he had said, ‘I see my firing squad has arrived early.’
Theoretically Mitchum was on the wagon at the time, but he must have taken one look at my beard and changed his mind, because when the waiter asked him if he would like something to drink he made the waiter bend down and spent a long time whispering in his ear. The whispering was accompanied by illustrative movements of his hands, as if he were passing on arcane secrets in the art of flower arrangement. When the drink arrived it was about two feet tall, changed colour on the way up, and had foliage sprouting from the top, like a core sample from an Amazonian swamp. All it needed was a toucan perched on a branch. There was always the chance that this concoction had no alcohol in it, but it certainly had some kind of active ingredient, because after he had inhaled about half of it, Mitchum’s voice suddenly came into focus. It was still, however, pitched very low. It has always been a practice of the big male movie stars to pitch the voice low when off screen, so as to make the interlocutor lean forward. The angle of inclination is an index of prestige. For a movie star, being interviewed on television counts as being off screen, so the volume is duly screwed down, which duly increases the amplitude of the timbre. This can give a TV sound engineer unmanageable problems. I had seen an interview with Lee Marvin during which I had to lean my head against the TV set, which shook to the reverberation. Here was Mitchum doing the same thing in a restaurant. If he did the same thing in the studio, we were dead. Inspired by fear, I decided to play it deaf. Nowadays it would be no trick, but then I had to fake it. Mitchum took pity on a fellow actor and raised his volume into the range of the audible. Greatly daring, I offered not to ask him about his early stardom in the first-ever celebrity marijuana bust. ‘Go ahead.’ This answer cleared the air nicely, and the following conversation flowed without a hitch, except for his reluctance to expand on an anecdote after giving us its bare bones. Afterwards, Arthur told me this was a good sign: the client was saving his best stuff for the air.
He did, too. In studio he was tremendous. He liked it that I knew about the off-trail movies as well as the mainstream ones. Build My Gallows High was a favourite film noir of mine and I could have proved it by reciting the dialogue from memory, but I had learned my lesson and let him recite it instead. I was a big fan of Thunder Road, the low-budget thriller about the best moonshine-liquor driver in the mountains. (‘He sets a pace that only a madman can match.’) So was Mitchum: the project had been his idea, and he was instantly off and running about the difficulties of getting a pet idea financed and filmed within the prevailing system. His rare intelligence was in every sentence he spoke, and for a wonder he spoke every sentence clearly, although he was still no louder than a mole in hiding. But compared to Lee Marvin, Mitchum was Cicero. It went so well that we asked him if we could keep rolling long enough to turn the footage into two programmes instead of one. He agreed on the spot. It was as if he didn’t want to go home. I didn’t either. Finally the electricians pulled the plugs, Mitchum wandered off into the gathering dusk, and I waited with some confidence for Arthur’s accolade. ‘We can certainly use that.’ Arthur went off to catch the train to Manchester, where he would have three whole weeks to edit the first of the two programmes.
Early the next day he was on the phone to Cambridge to break the bad news. Mitchum’s people had double-crossed us and made their star available for the Parkinson programme two weeks from now. Parkinson’s BBC talk show was still building up at that stage but it was already the thing for a visiting star to do, and the studios were already working on the principle that to turn down the exposure just because of a previous promise would be a quixotic price to pay for a little thing like integrity. It was no use complaining to Mitchum himself, who probably had no idea of what was going on. The only answer was to edit the first of our programmes immediately and get it on the air before Parkinson. A ticket awaited me at Euston. I was direly enjoined not to have too big a breakfast on the Pullman and to be sure to write my introduction on the way, because we would have to tape it as soon as I got there.
Drinking nothing but orange juice and water, I wrote the script on the train, taped it successfully when I arrived, and sat in on quite a lot of the editing, which was a revelation. We were cutting film, not splicing tape, so it took two moviolas and a pot of glue to accomplish in an hour what an Avid machine would later do in five minutes. The revelation lay in what you could cut out and still keep the sense. Next morning I left them to it and went back to London on the early train to write my TV column, feeling like a fighter-bomber pilot flying multiple missions to the Falaise Gap in 1944. This was the life.
Or to put it another way, this was madness. Military analogies are always the tip-off that a writer is dramatizing himself, but there could be no doubt that I was outrunning my supply lines even as I stormed forward. An example of what madness looked like was provided by Burt Lancaster, who suddenly became available after our first Mitchum programme was successfully screened. We managed to get it on the air a few days before the Parkinson interview, which duly undercut the impact of our second programme that followed later. But on any objective assessment I could say truly that Mitchum did better with us than with Parkinson. Like all people with a feel for language, Mitchum was reluctant to say the same thing again in the same words, so he gave Parkinson a more circumlocutory set of responses. It wasn’t Parkinson’s fault. But I had a subjective assessment going along with the objective one, and I preferred to think that it was his fault. I was a bit chippy about Parky’s having jumped our claim. Nevertheless, we had got our first programme into the leading spot, and Lancaster’s people were sufficiently impressed with what they saw to think that we might do the same for their man. For them, it would be good advance publicity for a Michael Winner movie called Scorpio, then in the last stages of filming at Shepperton. The deal was that I would interview Lancaster at an exterior location, somewhere not far from the studio but far enough to ensure that it would be difficult to control the sound. Open-air interviews are hard for just that reason. Unless you are using two cameras at once, noise in the background makes the footage hard to edit, so that you are always going for another take on an interchange that might not have gone very well already, but will be certain to go worse when you shoot it again. Arthur told me it would be good practice, and anyway, this was our only chance to get Lancaster, even though his career was in the doldrums by then. After personally revolutionizing the Hollywood production system so that actors acquired real creative power for the first time, he h
ad clung on too long to his status as the magnetic leading man. (Later on, when he allowed himself to be cast as the old timer, his career entered a second phase of glory, with movies like Local Hero and Atlantic City being built around his hulking but always gracefully moving presence, whose boundless vitality had at last mellowed towards the bearable: he became less of a ham as he lost vigour.) But if, at that stage, he was no longer what he was, he was still a huge name. We would have said yes if he had been in jail.