Must You Go?: My Life With Harold Pinter Page 21

  The other side of Harold’s character, which was perhaps less publicly appreciated than it should have been (because the political outbursts were, so to speak, much better copy) was his generosity: a young poet, an older lady living alone in bad health who had years ago been his valued patron, an actor in trouble, a radical magazine … these are only a few of those that come to mind. In particular Harold remembered the acts of generosity which had been shown to him at the start of his career and either consciously or unconsciously (probably the latter) decided to act similarly. He never forgot that the American producer, Roger Stevens, whom he had never met, came to his aid after the fiasco of the first Birthday Party; this was at a time when he had a young family and he had no work. Jimmy Wax, his first agent, arranged it: a thousand pounds in about 1959 (a huge sum then) which was like manna in a very desert.

  Then there were charities in favour of liberty and against torture, to say nothing of presents and entertainments for the family, or provision of comfortable transport for my parents, indomitable but frail in their nineties. Rather like his courage, Harold took his own generosity for granted, just as he took for granted what we might euphemistically call his outspokenness and could not quite see why other people sometimes objected.

  As to patriotism, it might surprise people who only knew of Harold’s criticisms of the government to learn that by his own standards Harold was extremely patriotic. I do not mean the sporting test – although naturally Harold had backed the English cricket team since youth. He also, for example, felt strongly that his manuscripts should go to the British Library, whatever the lure of well-endowed American universities which some of his contemporaries had felt. Thus he began by letting his papers go on loan, and ended by selling them not long before his death for a handsome price with which he was more than content. As for me, just as I wanted to lie one day in the next-door grave to Harold, I decided that our papers should lie together too. So I joined him.

  25 July 1994

  We decided to pay our manuscripts a visit. Harold’s were in the familiar, and efficient, green box-files. Mine were in a smart woman’s shopping bags: Jean Muir, Ferragamo, The White House, Christian Dior, stuffed with tacky and tatty proofs and papers. I couldn’t resist it: I took out my phial of Miss Dior perfume from my purse and sprayed my manuscripts. Harold looks up from his inspection of his early works, which he has quite forgotten about: ‘That is the most impressive thing I’ve ever seen in a library. I shall never forget it.’ I’m hoping the perfume will steal upon the sense of some researcher in a thousand years’ time.

  In the high summer of 1997 Harold’s father, living in a nursing home since Frances’ death in 1992, began to go downhill – health-wise, that is. He was ninety-five. Mentally he had remained astonishingly vigorous, one might even say combative, well into his nineties. One famous New Year’s Day when Frances was still alive we went down to Hove to see them both. ‘You’ll find my father rather frail,’ said Harold. Actually we’d hardly sat down in the restaurant before Jack was at it hammer and tongs about Harold’s visit to the Israeli Embassy to protest about the solitary confinement of Vanunu: they’d read about it in the Jewish Chronicle. ‘When are you going to do something to defend Israel?’ ‘I am defending the rights of an Israeli citizen.’ And so on and so forth, Jack getting visibly more forceful with every minute. In the end, I said placatingly to Frances: ‘They are so alike, aren’t they?’ Knowing this was a peace-making appeal that her loving mother’s heart could not resist.

  8 September 1997

  A message to say that Jack Pinter is fading fast. Harold saw him a few days ago and Jack said: ‘I just want to get into that bed and fall asleep.’ And that I suppose is what he is doing. In a strange re-run of Frances’ dying days in 1992, it is now the TUC Conference in Brighton, just as it had been the Tory Conference then. So we are surrounded by police at our hotel, due to the presence of Tony Blair, otherwise many big, burly trades unionists, mainly male, smoking cigars. But this time the Guardian is outside every door in the morning when I go to swim, not the Telegraph.

  When we saw Jack, he had a look of peaceful determination on his face. He died in the small hours. The next morning Harold had an encounter at the Town Hall trying to register the death, which, he said, put up his blood pressure. A maddening bureaucrat kept saying, ‘You need an appointment,’ as he sat idling behind his desk although there was no one else present. ‘But you’re free.’ Bureaucrat: ‘That’s because the next person will not arrive for half an hour.’ ‘Then you’re free.’ ‘But you do not have an appointment.’ Etc. etc. In the end Harold got his certificate and rushed back to the hotel.

  But it set him off, and he has written a poem, one of his best, I think. It was odd seeing him sit in the hotel amid the suitcases and the trades unionists with his pen and yellow pad, earnestly writing: the best example of art not being part of life but working through it. At the end of writing it, all Harold’s agitation with the bureaucrat had disappeared, forgotten; thus you might say the bureaucrat had been the opposite of the person from Porlock who interrupted ‘Kubla Khan’ forever. Harold’s grief for his father remained but had been subsumed.

  I have since come to treasure this poem more than any other of Harold’s poems with the exception of those he wrote to me. He incorporated it into his Nobel Speech, and I had it read, the very last words of the brief ceremony to mark his burial.

  DEATH

  (Births and Deaths Registration Act 1953)

  Where was the dead body found?

  Who found the dead body?

  Was the dead body dead when found?

  How was the dead body found?

  Who was the dead body?

  Who was the father or daughter or brother

  Or uncle or sister or mother or son

  Of the dead and abandoned body?

  Was the body dead when abandoned?

  Was the body abandoned?

  By whom had it been abandoned?

  Was the dead body naked or dressed for a journey?

  What made you declare the dead body dead?

  Did you declare the dead body dead?

  How well did you know the dead body?

  How did you know the dead body was dead?

  Did you wash the dead body

  Did you close both its eyes

  Did you bury the body

  Did you leave it abandoned

  Did you kiss the dead body

  Chapter Fifteen

  FRANCE: CELEBRATION

  I can pinpoint the exact moment in 1995 when I decided to take Marie Antoinette as my new subject, thus impelling me towards what would turn out to be ten years of French research, first on the eighteenth century and then a hundred years earlier for Louis XIV. I was in a taxi on my way to give lunch to my goddaughter Helen Falkus in order to dispense sage advice about A-levels, as godmothers are traditionally supposed to do. The moment I arrived at the restaurant in Portland Road, I brushed aside all questions about A-levels, saying in a rush of excitement: ‘Helen, you’ve just got to listen to me, I’ve suddenly had the inspiration that I’m going to write about Marie Antoinette and I have to talk to you about it.’ When I got home I marked the date in my Diary: it was 16 October, the anniversary of the Queen’s execution in 1793, which I subsequently came to mark with Masses offered in many places in the world.

  So this, which became the most personal of all my books with the exception of Mary Queen of Scots, my first love, began with an expedition-that-failed to give advice to a young girl; there was a certain synchronicity here, since the most touching aspect of Marie Antoinette’s life (one that was subsequently stressed by Sofia Coppola in her poignant film based on my book) is her need for advice on arrival in France aged fourteen – and her failure to receive it.

  On the whole the press now left us alone except over matters of legitimate comment such as Harold’s publicly expressed political views. The publication of Michael Billington’s authorized biography (for which we had both con
tributed interviews and which we both liked) did however provide a brief flurry of the old kind of interest, not really experienced for many years.

  21 September 1996

  Michael Billington biography: press are in a tizzy about the revelation of Harold’s affair with Joan Bakewell in the sixties. ‘Family and friends’ as the saying is, think that Joan has made rather a meal of the whole thing in the book … Whereas I know that Harold had a more intimate relationship at the same time, with the woman he called Cleopatra. Harold indifferent to the whole thing: ‘It’s all a long time ago.’

  Seven years later – in 2003 – he was not indifferent to the whole thing when Joan published her own memoirs which, following the failure of her second marriage, she called descriptively The Centre of the Bed. In a draft which she sent to him, Joan interleaved her own account of the affair with pages of dialogue from Harold’s play Betrayal. Harold was furious at what he termed to me the ‘claiming’. I pointed out that, however unpleasant it was for him, Joan had a right to tell her own story: ‘In her words, however, not yours.’ So the unauthorized Pinter pages were duly removed and there was a truce. It was endangered, however, according to Harold, when Joan quoted to him the comment a woman journalist friend made on the book: ‘You managed to humanize Harold Pinter: I always thought he was just an angry and aggressive man …’

  I myself had found Joan’s original reaction in 1975 – sensitivity on the exposure of her private life however great the work of art – very sympathetic. And she had been completely honest with Michael Billington in 1997, the first the world knew of the relationship. Now I felt she was distracting attention from her own remarkable achievements by too great an emphasis on a long-ago affair: when there was after all so much more to be said about her career.

  However by then, working on Marie Antoinette as I had been doing, gave me quite a different perspective on press scandal and satire. The pamphlets attacking her in the Bibliothèque Nationale were so gruesome in their (invented) salacious detail that one could only sigh with horror: and then grapple with the biographer’s problem of how to quote them in sufficient detail to make the point of what Marie Antoinette had endured, and not so much as to coarsen the whole tone of the book. Compared to this vitriolic campaign, the serialization of Joan’s harmless memoirs in the papers seemed very small beer. Harold wrote her a letter expressing his unhappiness: ‘You should register the fact and take it on board.’ And there the matter rested. There were, as there had always been on this subject, two fundamentally different points of view, that of the artist using some elements (not all) from real life to create fiction, and that of the actual person, some of whose life was used.

  16 October 1998

  Vienna. Anniversary of the execution of Marie Antoinette. It seemed an appropriate day to visit the Imperial Crypt. (The Blue Guide inaccurately says La Reine is buried where she was executed, whereas in fact she was moved to Saint-Denis after the Revolution was over.) Took Harold. 143 Habsburgs and one commoner: Maria Theresa’s governess who died in 1750. Harold was impressed by this respect accorded to a governess. I was struck by how much life, as it were, there was in the Habsburg crypt, flowers, messages, compared to the crypt of Saint-Denis where the Bourbons lie, frozen and apparently unvisited (I was certainly the sole visitor all three times I went there).

  Here people throng reverently. Instructions are reverent too: ‘Please take off your hat. No Photos. No young children.’ Masses and masses of dried flowers in bouquets with ribbons of the imperial colours and also some fresh flowers. White carnations for Maria Theresa by her vast connubial tomb, roses and piles of bouquets à la Princess Diana for the Empress Elizabeth, lots of flowers for Franz Josef, lots for Archduke Rudolf. Crowned figures of death, skulls grinning under their diadems, remind me of Mexico. But outside the magic circle of royalty, there is a great deal of appropriate dust and darkness. Harold very thoughtful. He sees the light of ‘walking around a bit’ in my eye – this is my euphemism for sight-seeing, a word which causes him to shy like a nervous horse – and quickly says: ‘I’m going back to the hotel to read Mary Queen of Scots.’

  He’d never read this, my first historical biography, published six years before we met and took this opportunity of leisure in Vienna to do so. It made for odd conversations in the evenings when I tried to tell him my discoveries about Marie Antoinette and he tried to tell me his discoveries about Mary Queen of Scots …

  I would like to report our foreign travels to be one continuing progress of triumph and acclamation but honesty compels me to admit that it was by no means the case.

  October 1998

  Vienna. Visit to Shakespeare and Co. bookshop. My researcher, Jessica Beer, admirably efficient and intelligent, who helped me cope in German, said: ‘They will certainly be delighted to see you.’ We found a very pleasant shop in the old quarter of the town, small, absolutely crammed with English books. However in the large theatrical section there was only one copy of Harold’s work, a dusty little edition of A Slight Ache, obviously left over from the theatrical season of ten years earlier. To make sure, I enquired of the assistant if there was anything more. I added: ‘This is Harold Pinter.’ But there was nothing else. Then the proprietor, a large blonde lady, appeared and freaked out: ‘I am nearly sixty and this is the happiest moment I have ever had.’ She even added: ‘And you are certainly Antonia Fraser.’ Joy, joy, ecstasy, ecstasy. But – she didn’t have any of our books for all this, and capped it all by praising Harold’s Proust Screenplay to the skies, how wonderful, how absolutely brilliant: ‘Yes, yes, after a while I had to put it in the remainder tray, someone got that really cheaply, I can tell you.’

  Our new shared French lives – because Harold decided to direct his own play Ashes to Ashes in Paris – got off to a flying start with Natasha’s marriage to Jean-Pierre Cavassoni in July 1997. Natasha had invited Harold to give her away and he accepted with much pleasure. He did not however bargain with Natasha’s French-acquired expertise where spectacle was concerned. In short when he found himself escorting Natasha across the bridge from the Crillon Hotel to the church of St Clothilde in a bright pink Cadillac, this was surely a dramatic experience for which nothing, no rich full life of acting, had prepared him. I asked Harold later if they had been cheered by the populace as they crossed the bridge. He gave me a look. It was my turn to quote his favourite phrase: ‘You have to take the rough with the smooth.’ Once in the church, in his black shades and his pale blue-grey morning suit, he looked more like the Godfather than the stepfather of the bride.

  Both my parents, aged ninety and ninety-one, actually made the journey to see off Natasha, my father with the lure of making a speech, my mother with the lure of having fun. I had emphasized to Harold that speeches must take place. He gave in and made a charming speech saying quite truthfully that Natasha was the most beautiful bride he had ever seen. He might with justice have added that Jean-Pierre was, with his film-star looks, the most handsome bridegroom. My father accepted his bribe of making a speech with equal grace: the only untoward moment came when the bridegroom Jean-Pierre in true French mode tried to embrace his new grandfather-in-law at the end. Dada ducked. ‘I may be old-fashioned,’ he said loudly, brushing himself, ‘but I don’t kiss men.’

  Unlike the wedding of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI at which large crowds were crushed to death in the mêlée surrounding the fireworks, Natasha and Jean-Pierre’s wedding was harmonious as well as picturesque at all times. I was reminded of the scene on the eighteenth-century fan Harold had given me for my birthday when I first decided on the project: it showed Montgolfier displaying the ascent of his famous azure and yellow balloon to the enraptured French court in 1783. We were all similarly enraptured by the dashing style of this thoroughly French wedding although the real star (apart from Natasha) was not French at all: Joan Collins. I met her in the ladies at the Cercle de l’Union Interalliée where the reception was given. She was in shades of cream including a cream straw hat, with matching crea
my face, quite perfect. Delicately, the brims of our huge hats touched as we tried to kiss. She told me her daughter had got married, courtesy of Hello! Magazine, three weeks before. Joan: ‘Oh, Antonia, your Hello! people were so much less intrusive than ours … I mean ours even came on the honeymoon.’

  All the time I worked on Marie Antoinette, it was strange to find that I was immensely helped by hostile French reactions to the French Queen from intelligent, cultured, sensitive people. For example the chic and essentially benevolent French producer who shrugged her shoulders: ‘Ouf! She has certainly not helped the monarchy very much.’ This scapegoating inspired me: I wanted to avenge it. In New York, for example, I was able to harangue my publisher Nan Talese about the sheer misogyny of the treatment meted out to Marie Antoinette. (Of course dislike of Marie Antoinette was not limited to the French. My father gave me lunch at the House of Lords with his new friend Ann Widdecombe. She had loved The Gunpowder Plot as a recent Catholic convert, but snorted when I mentioned Marie Antoinette: ‘That dreadful woman!’)

  Yet in general, proceeding round galleries, museums such as the Carnavalet, I was amazed at the total denigration of Marie Antoinette I heard from teachers with their flocks of children: ‘La reine méchante’ was about the best of them; ‘She was responsible for the whole Revolution,’ was quite commonly said. Because Marie Antoinette was after all Austrian, French people often added patriotically: ‘The King was not really to blame.’

  At the same time the months I spent in France gave me an insight into how these people had lived under the ancien régime, just because of the arts-and-fashion world in which Natasha moved. She passed on to me an invitation from Karl Lagerfeld to lunch at his house, an hôtel particulier on the Left Bank. Karl Lagerfeld was, I realized, a highly cultured eighteenth-century aristocrat in a twentieth-century disguise. Every single one of the gorgeous rooms had pillars of books, no other word will do. Karl: ‘I sometimes knock them over in the middle of the night.’ At first I didn’t believe him, then I saw more pillars by his bed: actually a wonderful French bed which had belonged to the Comte d’Artois, brother of Louis XVI. At least there would have been some eighteenth-century action in the Artois bed, I reflected, since the dashing Comte, unlike poor Louis XVI, was a ladies’ man.