Must You Go?: My Life With Harold Pinter Page 6

  19–23 April

  At Eilean Aigas. I managed to swim in Yugoslavia and Scotland on the same day.

  24 April

  Harold’s Beckett reading. His voice started to go. Michael Foot was a VIP guest and I asked him what he, as a politician, did for the voice. ‘I ask for the actor’s remedy,’ he said. So Harold the actor took the MP’s advice and gargled with port.

  26 April

  Harold flew to New York for four days to cast two plays he would direct in the autumn. Took Natasha back to St Mary’s Ascot. Sister Bridget tackled me about the situation, so I told her: ‘No question of marriage for the time being.’ Sister Bridget: ‘Well, that’s honest. You were always honest.’

  4 May

  The filming of The Collection for TV in Manchester. Laurence Olivier, Alan Bates, Malcolm McDowell and Helen Mirren. ‘Not a bad cast,’ says Harold modestly. Indeed, not. The most striking thing about these great stars and their recording is the abominable way they are treated by the system or the technicians or both. These long, long takes and then the boom in the way, a flare, a tea break. All are extremely patient, including Olivier who is quite frail and having difficulty manipulating a bottle top of whisky which is never replaced properly; he remains admirably courteous with an occasional dramatic wince. He is even more courteous at the dinner after the recording given by the producer Derek Granger. Although Derek actually pays, Olivier behaves as the genial host, ordering lots and lots of expensive drink.

  Olivier to Harold: ‘Is it true that if I hadn’t been ill, I would have played Hirst in No Man’s Land?’ Harold smiles enigmatically. Actually, it is not true. Oddly enough, Gielgud also believed another version of it, as he said to us once: ‘I only got the part of Spooner because Larry was dead, I mean ill.’ The personal spell cast by Olivier over his contemporaries! Helen Mirren wears a white voile skirt, tatty high-heeled shoes, a white cricket shirt, a black leather jacket and looks fabulous. She is a card. The contrast between her image as the svelte Stella of TV, stroking her white cat in an elegant royal blue evening dress, could hardly be greater.

  6 May

  Harold had a drink with Beckett at lunchtime, before we went to the first night of Endgame. They discussed Harold’s situation; Harold told me it was the closest he had ever felt to Sam, whom he reveres. Later: to Jocelyn Herbert’s for a supper party for Beckett. I was knocked sideways by Beckett’s physical appearance, the elegant severity of his tall, spare figure; thick grey-white hair and aquamarine eyes. Later I dreamed about him leading us through streets of blossom – not quite what you expect after Endgame! That night, Beckett played the piano; Haydn, I think. Something so lively and vigorous there, that you could not detect in his personality the anguish of his play.

  Somehow during that long, hot summer, I got back to working on King Charles II and even re-entered the British Library.

  24 May

  Harold continues to face a barrage of attacks from Vivien.

  30 May

  Dinner with Tom and Miriam Stoppard. The latter tackles Harold about the swearing in No Man’s Land: ‘This must be something in you, Harold, waiting to get out.’ Harold: ‘But I don’t plan my characters’ lives.’ Then to Tom: ‘Don’t you find they take over sometimes?’ Tom: ‘No.’

  My first proper expedition to watch cricket. As usual, triumph and tragedy, or just drama, attends Harold in all he does. I took along Alison Lurie and her friend Edward for company. Alison showed a few American tendencies like ringing up on a clear if grey day to know if we were venturing to go in view of the weather … Picnic at Roehampton. Harold posed with his bat as W.G. Grace for Alison’s camera but laid it down hastily when his team came out from the tent. Instead of his usual eight, Harold had got to thirty-seven, and was apparently preparing to declare when he took a tremendous swipe at the ball. Not knowing he had hit a four, he started haring down the pitch. Then there was a scream. His leg gave way. Harold was born off by a ring of white-clad cricketers. ‘I knew it would be eventful,’ said Alison with satisfaction (I had warned her that cricket generally wasn’t).

  20 June

  Drove Flora to her new tutor, a grand old lady in the great tradition of female dons. ‘I thought your Mary Stuart was charming,’ she told me, ‘But your Cromwell was very stiff. I couldn’t get through it.’ Me: ‘It was so stiff I could hardly write it.’ Take a B minus, Miss Pakenham.

  27 June

  Enormous heat continues. Images: Harold, Daniel and Orlando playing night cricket in the garden about 10 p.m. Sleeping out: Harold and me on separate mattresses; Harold slept till 9 a.m.; I woke at dawn.

  4 July

  New York: the two hundredth anniversary. But the real news of the day was the rescue of the Israeli hostages at Entebbe in a James Bond-like operation. My first words to Harold were to recall our argument in Dubrovnik where Harold maintained the militaristic spirit of Israel was no longer necessary although it had been once, and I disagreed due to the marauders surrounding Israel. Now Harold, I noticed, unqualifiedly thrilled by the rescue.

  5 July

  Said to Harold on the morning: ‘You know, I’d really like to go down and see the Tall Ships.’ Alas, Harold put up the minimum resistance to this wild plan. So off we went. First an hour’s ride in an uncooled taxi. Then debouched and walking in intense heat – I didn’t even have a hat. Propelled by police of exceptional unpleasantness. All we could see occasionally were the flags on the masts. Occasionally I began to laugh, thinking what on earth were we doing there and looking at Harold’s face.

  7 July

  Had a ghastly experience at a musical called A Chorus Line which is the hit of New York. We walked out and the attendants couldn’t believe it: ‘Is she sick or something?’ But Harold’s casting of Otherwise Engaged is going well.

  8 July

  Harold reading children for Miles and Flora in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, adapted for a stage play. A crowd of eager tots and chaperones inside the stage door. In the course of the morning I completely reversed my opinion of the children. My original candidate for Miles was too knowing altogether. A minute flaxen-haired doll called Sarah, so small she could hardly read the script, proved to be the most brilliant actress. (Years later I was amused to realize that the minute flaxen-haired doll had become famous as Sarah Jessica Parker.) Went to our one New York party. Jackie Kennedy was there. In her soft, wondering voice: ‘Why, Antonia, are you here for the Democratic Convention?’ Me: ‘Not exactly.’

  9 July

  Dinner at the discreet upper west side Carlyle Hotel with Steve McQueen to discuss Old Times as a film. What an erotic play it is! I read scenes in the hotel. Steve McQueen started quoting the most suggestive bits. ‘I’m fearfully decadent,’ he said, pronouncing it ‘decayed-ent’. ‘I love decayed-ent things.’ He was a strange sight, having grown a true lion’s mane of hair to his shoulders plus beard in order to walk about unrecognized. Only when he takes off his tinted glasses do you see the amazing blue eyes. And when he walks across the restaurant to take one of his many phone calls. Then you see the inimitable McQueen walk.

  17 July

  Dinner with the producer Michael Codron and his partner David Sutton in Chester Terrace. Many ghosts because Jack and Valerie Profumo lived there, and this was the garden Jack tended when he could not go out for fear of verbal and even physical abuse. Opposite were the wide doors of Chester Gate where after a party as a teenager I used to stay with Tony and Violet Powell because nobody would take me to my parents’ home in Hampstead Garden Suburb (it was too expensive: thus I considered my romantic prospects blighted). The lights were on and no curtains drawn on the summer night; squatters are living there. I saw into the room where I lay aged sixteen, often in Mummy’s ‘borrowed’ Victorian gold necklace, spilling my scarlet nail polish on poor Violet’s white cloth. In the dining room where Tony began writing Dance to the Music of Time I saw dingy bicycles. Tony used to ask me about my young men and I used to invent improbable associations to amuse hi
m, so long as he could place their parents somewhere in his extensive imaginative galaxy of relationships.

  Dorset in the high summer; the heat so great that the fields were white. We rented a cottage from the hospitable Warners at Laverstock, a magical valley in a countryside of narrow lanes, Mabey’s Farm Kitchen, hills, and just over the hills, THE SEA. Picnics of wasps and sand by the sea. The children very happy being driven about in Harold’s Mercedes and eating chicken’n’ chips in pub gardens. Thrilled when Harold ate three helpings of cherry pie. Harold spent a lot of time in what he calls ‘the creative activity of swatting flies’. Boys join in with enthusiasm, I suspect because they know it annoys me. Natasha re Harold on the beach at West Bay: ‘He looks quite different from everyone else. He’s obviously deep in thought.’ Meanwhile the children buried each other in the sand and Figaro tried to keep the sea away by barking.

  30 July

  Harold gave a performance of Old Times in the Warner kitchen. Said he had always wanted to play Deeley, ‘the man defeated by women’. Simone Warner sang the snatches of the songs (as Anna) just as Harold wanted them.

  31 July

  The proofs of Love Letters, my anthology, arrived. Gave Harold a copy. Pointed out: ‘For Harold’ in the dedication. Harold: ‘My heart gave a great leap.’

  5 August

  Harold and I went on a pilgrimage to East Coker where Harold recited the speech from Four Quartets he loved, ending ‘Now and in England’ (which actually turned out to be from ‘Little Gidding’). We were reverential towards the plaque inside the church commemorating Thomas Stearns Eliot.

  17 August

  The anniversary of the day I flew down from Scotland and joined Harold in Launceston Place to find it full of flowers. We tried to celebrate but things are really unhappy and unresolved (with Harold and Vivien, not me and Hugh, who is merrily grouse-shooting). Two of Harold’s old friends who wish Vivien well, chose to tell me separately that Harold is not actually doing her any favours by enabling her to stay in vast and now apparently mouldering Hanover Terrace, nearly eighteen months after he has departed. Naturally, he will buy her any house she wants. Perhaps they are right. It is of course Harold’s guilt. But I am obviously the last person who can or should comment on this.

  Chapter Five

  OUR NEWFOUNDLAND

  21 August 1976

  Eilean Aigas. Listening to Radio 3. Heard a man’s voice saying very clearly, tenderly and firmly, as though directly to me: ‘It is a beauteous evening, calm and free / The holy time is quiet as a nun.’ (Wordsworth’s sonnet.) Quiet as a nun! This is the title of my projected mystery story which I tinkered with in Dorset, when it was too hot to work on the state papers of Charles II. I am inspired to write and write and write. In the end it takes me about six weeks altogether: a first and a last where I was concerned.

  27 August

  My forty-fourth birthday. Flew back from Scotland to Launceston Place. Went to dinner at Walton’s with Claire Bloom, who will star in The Innocents in the autumn. Her companion Philip Roth is a wry man: I really liked him.

  31 August

  Vivien now says her doctor has told her she is an alcoholic. It would of course explain a lot. Harold, beyond repeating her statement, doesn’t discuss it further. I don’t wish to.

  Harold goes to New York. Hugh and I manage to have a good talk about school fees, money and all the rest of it. He is in a very cheerful mood. ‘Although I can of course never be happy again,’ he tells me with a laugh, ‘I am in fact extremely content.’

  18 September

  Certainly writing Nun has brought me great happiness, and because of my birthday, I have always begun my year in September. Then, very worrying news from Harold in Boston, where he was directing Claire Bloom in The Innocents before the transfer to Broadway. He has a temperature of 102. He’s alone in a hotel. I long to bathe his fevered brow.

  22 September

  Harold diagnosed as having both glandular fever and hepatitis. He must have felt so weak for so long.

  26 September

  Off to Boston. Harold very pale when I arrived, looked young and poetic. One can see his faintness rising in his face. Woke at dawn and began to write a new mystery set in the Highlands: The Wild Island (which became Tartan Tragedy). Gradually Harold’s strength returns and his pink-olive complexion re-establishes itself. The Ritz-Carlton is immensely of another age: Claire Bloom ejected for wearing trousers!

  28 September

  Saw The Innocents. Music by Harrison Birtwistle appropriately spooky. Claire Bloom said she had an off night but I thought she was brilliant.

  30 September for a few days

  Provincetown, Cape Cod for Harold to recover. Harold writing – I don’t know what. He shouted at Steve McQueen down the long distance, which must be a good sign as he has been totally wan. Steve McQueen: ‘Don’t shout at me, Harold, I’m not your butler.’ Harold: ‘I don’t shout at my butler.’

  8 October – Full moon. Thought it might mean something

  London. Saturday morning. Telephone rings at 8 a.m. (I am still on American hours). Hugh: ‘Come round at once. I think we should get divorced as soon as possible.’ Me, utterly gaga: ‘Ugh, yes, yes. But won’t next week do?’ Hugh: ‘No, now.’ So I go round, visiting Mummy on the way at Chesil Court and preventing her having her hair done before Any Questions?, saying cruelly: ‘You look fine and anyway it’s radio.’ She is a mine of good sense. Thinks it is a good thing. Says: ‘Dada thinks you should live alone and be a femme de lettres.’ Me: ‘Femmes de lettres don’t live alone. They have exciting love lives. Tell Dada he knows nothing about the subject.’ Really good talk with Hugh. He is positively enthusiastic about the idea of the divorce.

  We worked out a house swap: Hugh to get Eilean Aigas and me to get Campden Hill Square. Although the greater presumed value of Campden Hill Square meant that I had to hand over to Hugh my surviving capital, it still seemed the right thing to do. The gap in 1976 was not all that great as London property prices had not risen dramatically, especially in Notting Hill which was not yet fashionable, and our house had twice been badly damaged by bombs, in the war and 1975. Eilean Aigas, much as I had loved transforming it with the Mary Queen of Scots money, and queening it myself there ever after, was morally Hugh’s because it was within his family estate. Campden Hill Square on the other hand he had strongly resisted buying in 1959 – too far from the House of Commons, halfway to Portsmouth, etc. etc., egged on by his powerful mother Laura, Lady Lovat who accused me of ruining her son. Whereas I had walked into the house, tipped off by the neighbour Billa Harrod that an old lady had died and there would be a sale. It was all dark brown, untouched for sixty years, one old bathroom, no French windows, thus no drawing-room access to garden. ‘I have to have it,’ I said. After a while Hugh reluctantly agreed.

  10 October

  As the I Ching said, after Stagnation, Progress. Good old I Ching. Harold’s forty-sixth birthday. Poetry reading at Launceston Place to celebrate. I read Henry Vaughan. Simon Gray read Wordsworth’s Lucy poems including my favourite lines about death and burial: ‘Rolled around in earth’s diurnal course / With rocks and stones and trees’.

  An extremely exhausting time followed. But on the telephone Dada actually asked after Harold’s health. Mummy: ‘Of course Harold is exactly the sort of serious person Dada would like. Maybe we could all meet out of doors; like quarrelling dogs, it’s better out of doors.’ I think: ‘Aha, cricket!’

  20 October

  I have a ridiculous anxiety dream in which the exquisite, slender Claire Bloom, playing the Governess, gets pregnant and has to play every scene in a shawl.

  22 October

  Well, I wouldn’t have believed it! One moment Harold was nudging me to look at the lights as we entered W. 45th Street: ‘Claire Bloom in The Innocents. Directed by Harold Pinter.’ ‘You may not see it again,’ he said jokingly, referring to the kind of speedy Broadway closing for which this town is notorious and which Simon Gray, for examp
le, experienced with an earlier play. And now it seems it has happened. Will happen. And I never even noticed! Thought the reviews were really rather good, and the play, of course, marvellous.

  28 October

  Wonderful news. Harold has heard that he has got his liver back to normal after six weeks of not drinking. And what a six weeks: the New York failure, the nightmare of the first night. All drinkless.

  4 November

  Delighted that Jimmy Carter won the election. I like anyone who comes from nowhere, i.e. Cromwell (admittedly he is not much like Cromwell). I cannot see that his attention to God is any worse than other people’s concentration on making money.

  10 November

  George Weidenfeld’s party which has been designated Longford Reconciliation Night. I am standing chatting when Dada comes up pettishly and says: ‘Where is Harold? I want to shake his hand.’ Harold is in the Gents, but when Dada is determined on A Good Deed, there is no putting him off. Eventually poor Harold is winkled out of the Gents. His hand is solemnly shaken. Dada goes away, satisfied. Harold is then really happy at having a long talk with Mummy about poetry.

  13 November

  Suddenly wrote a jape in the hairdresser’s called No Man’s Homecoming in which all Harold’s characters from various plays got together and started chatting. Harold loves it and wants to circulate it to ‘those interested in his work’.

  15 November

  Back in New York at the Carlyle in 11B. Yellow freesias from charming maître d’hotel Mr Goldenberg, Dom Pérignon from Peter Sharp the owner. ‘Welcome back,’ say the lift man and even the telephone operator.