Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [72]
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,