It is always nice to be asked but I had already resolved that I would not stay at Broughton itself. I could foresee a certain amount of awkwardness being generated by my being friendly with the family as it was. Had I stayed with them, in a short time I would have separated myself from the actual 'making' of the film entirely.
'You are kind. I don't think you could stand me for six weeks.'
'Don't be silly. Of course we could.'
'I shan't be so unreasonable as to put you to the test.'
Edith understood this kind of talk well enough to know that she had been turned down and the invitation was not repeated.
I told her that I would be at the unit hotel, a converted country house just outside Uckfield, but that we would obviously be seeing a lot of each other. I must confess that after my little taster at the shooting party, I felt a slightly ghoulish curiosity to see her and Charles on their home ground. Perhaps at the back of my mind was a faint glimmering of
Two or three weeks passed. I went for my fittings at Bermans and Wig Creations, occasionally bumping into others in the cast. The Gunnings themselves were to be played by a couple of American blondes on 'hiatus' from a Hollywood cop series.
The product was consequently doomed from the start so far as any artistic standards were concerned. I do not wish to sound snobbish here. There are many roles that should unquestionably be filled by American blondes. I only mean to imply that the casting of Louanne Peters and Jane Darnell meant that the producers had entirely abandoned the idea of trying for any kind of truthful representation of eighteenth-century London in favour of viewing figures. One cannot blame them, I suppose, or at least one would not if only they would ever admit what they have done. As it is, the rest of the cast has to sit in endless restaurants on location hearing how hard they've tried to get the right candlesticks or mob-caps when they know as well as you do that the central characters do not and will not bear the slightest semblance of reality. Actors laugh together as they
'take the money and run' but it is disheartening all the same. At any rate I was glad to learn that the sisters' mother, Mrs Gunning, was to be played by an actress called Bella Stevens with whom I had once shared a cottage in Northampton during early rep days after leaving drama school, and it was pleasant to renew a friendship that we had made no effort to maintain during the interim.
A strange and perhaps unique feature of theatrical lives is the depth of involvement one forms with people when working together, only to return home and literally never bother to pick up the telephone to contact them again. Weeks of tearful intimacies, to say nothing of sexual liaisons, are lightly discarded without a backward glance. It is inevitable in that the nature of the work generates intimacy and the number of jobs makes the support of all such relationships impossible. But it is strange nevertheless to contemplate how many people are walking the streets of London who know a great deal more about you than anyone in your immediate family.
Conversely, nothing is more agreeable than the renewal of such a friendship after several years' interlude, as there is no need for the preamble to intimacy. It is already in place. One may immediately pick it up, like a piece of unfinished tapestry, where one left off ten years before. So it was with Bella. She was a ferociously strong personality, with a dark, almost satanic face, a cross between Joan Crawford and the
Soon after I had arrived in my hotel room, while I was still reeling from the obligatory brown and orange colour scheme, the telephone rang. It was Bella. I agreed to meet her in the bar in an hour. She was sitting at a table with a companion she introduced to me as Simon Russell, an actor of whom I had more or less heard, who had landed the good part (if any parts in these epics may be defined in such terms) of Colonel John Campbell, faithful lover of our principal heroine and eventually, in the last five minutes of the film, Duke of Argyll.
Physical beauty is a subject that many skirt around and almost everyone attempts to down-play thereby demonstrating some sound moral stance, but it remains one of the glories of human existence. Of course, there are many people who are attractive without being beautiful just as there are beauties who bore, and the danger of beauty in the very young is that it can make the business of life seem deceptively easy. All this I am fully aware of. I know too, however, that of the four great gifts that the fairies may or may not bring to the christening — Brains, Birth, Beauty and Money — it is Beauty that makes locked doors spring open at a touch. Whether it is for a job interview, a place at a dining table, a brilliant promotion or a lift on the motorway, everyone, regardless of their sex or their sexual proclivity, would always rather deal with a good-looking face. And no one is more aware of this than the Beauties themselves. They have a power they simultaneously respect and take for granted. Despite the moralists who tut about its transience, it is generally a power that is never completely lost. One can usually trace in the wrinkled lines of a nonagenarian, stooped and leaning on a stick, the style and confidence that turned heads in a ballroom in 1929. Simon Russell was without question the most beautiful man I have ever seen. I do not call him handsome for the word implies some kind of masculine confining of the concept of beauty, a rugged state of alluring imperfection. Russell's face had none of this. It was quite simply perfect. Thick waving blond locks fell forward, half shading large, startlingly blue eyes. A chiselled, statue's nose (I have always disliked my nose, and so am rather nose-conscious), and a modelled, girlish mouth framing even, if marginally sharp, teeth completed the picture. Nor did the perfection end there.
Instead of the weedy build that one associates with the Blond Toff school of actors, Russell was possessed of an athlete's body, muscular and trim. He was in short a magnificent specimen. Sometimes it seems the Gods grow bored with marring their handiwork and allow someone through without a hitch and Russell was such a one. If he had a fault, and really one had to search for it, I suppose his legs were a little too short for his size. I later learned that this tiny detail, this fleck of dust against the rainbow, caused him hours of mental anguish daily, revealing the paranoia and ingratitude of the human race.
The three of us, having decided to avoid both the director and the hotel dining room, found ourselves some time later ensconced in the booth table of a curious restaurant in Uckfield decorated with, of all odd choices, a Wild West motif. It was a pleasant evening and a heartening start to the job. Simon was good company, one of the lovely things about the lucky being that they are so easy to be with. He was married with three children, a boy and two girls, about whom we heard (and would continue to hear) a great deal, and he talked of himself and his triumphs in that relaxed unselfconscious way that only the deeply egocentric can manage. Still, he was funny and pleasant and charming, and he toned well with Bella's more frenetic volubility. He was also patently a colossal flirt. No interchange with another mortal, from our waitress to a man we stopped to ask for directions, escaped the beam of his arc lamp smile. Everyone, no matter how mean or meagre, had to be roped to his chariot. I enjoyed watching him at work enormously.
