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Chapter One
The time will come in your life, it will almost certainly come, when the voice of God will thunder at you from a cloud, "From this day forth thou shalt not be able to put on thine own socks."
To the young, to the middle-aged, even, this may seem a remote and improbable accident that only happens to other people. It has to be said, however, that the day will most probably dawn when your pale foot will wander through the air, incapable of hitting the narrow opening of a suspended sock. Those fortunate enough to live with families will call out for help. The situation is, in minor ways, humiliating and comical.
It's a law of script writing that scenes get shorter and the action speeds up towards the end. In childhood, the afternoons spread out for years. For the old, the years flicker past like the briefest of afternoons. The playwright Christopher Fry, now ninety-three, told me that after the age of eighty you seem to be having breakfast every five minutes. These film scenes, building to an inevitable climax, tend less to tragedy than farce. Dying is a matter of slapstick and prat falls. The ageing process is not gradual or gentle. It rushes up, pushes you over and runs off laughing. No one should grow old who isn't ready to appear ridiculous.
* * *
Flowers, sex and my father have been responsible for my disabilities.
So far as the sex was concerned, it, or rather the lack of it, was not my immediate concern. A close friend rang at the door of my flat in London, her purpose being to come in and discuss the mysterious failure of the man she lived with to make love to her on anything like a regular basis. Skipping eagerly down a steep flight of stairs to open the door to this tale of distress, I had my first fall, causing me to have to defend a footman, who had assisted a multimurdering butler in the killing of yet another of his employers, with my leg in a plaster cast. Then an Achilles tendon failed me, not snapping dramatically in a hard game of tennis (when the doctor asked me if I became breathless when taking exercise I had to plead ignorance, as I have never taken exercise), but simply sagging and giving up in despair. As a result of an operation to rejuvenate it my other leg swelled up like a balloon, contracting a thrombosis.
Then the flowers took over. I fell from the top of a terrace in the garden whilst cutting dead heads off the dahlias, causing an ulcerated leg which hasn't healed for two years. Later, buying red-hot pokers in a Maida Vale garden centre, I crashed down the lavatory steps and ripped knee muscles. All over the world, men and women who have experienced a reasonable quantity of life are toppling over, collapsing in kitchens or hurtling down stairs.
From my father I inherited bronchial asthma, glaucoma and a tendency for my retinas to become displaced. He also left me, in the house he built, a number of walking sticks. Although he was blind these were never white; that would have been a demand for sympathy. They are solid sticks of clouded malacca, with crooked handles and large rubber tips which cling reassuringly to the ground, and when wedged between bricks or paving stones they provide solid support. These sticks dangle from door handles, cupboard tops and windowsills, frequently forgotten. I grab one and hobble out into the garden. The red-hot pokers, I'm glad to see, are not doing particularly well.
* * *
Partial immobility, clearly a disadvantage for mountaineers, professional runners or stars of the ballet, has fewer terrors for writers. The writer lives in a sedentary state, his blood freezing, his hands and feet growing as cold in the hottest summer as in winter time, turning up the heating so that active, nonwriting companions complain, tear off their clothes and swelter.
The writer also lives in a world free of time, able to dive back into the past, foretell the future or capture the single moment of composition. Hemingway, in A Moveable Feast , describes the thin sliver of wood emerging from the pencil sharpener as he prepares to construct a sentence over a glass of cold beer in a Paris cafe. He sits and awaits events. In time they are bound to come to him.
* * *
I'm at home in the country when I'm summoned to meet Franco Zeffirelli at the Athenaeum Hotel. Ever available, I make a date.
"Darling, I rely on you. You are my last and only hope. I ask you to save my life, the life that is precious to me. Only you can do it. I feel that most strongly. Only you in the whole world!"
Franco Zeffirelli began life as a handsome young actor, a talented artist and set designer in the Italian theatre. He found favour with Luchino Visconti, an Italian count, descendant of a famous Renaissance family, a noted opera producer and director of such classic films as The Leopard and Death in Venice . Encouraged by Visconti, Franco took on the movies and made a memorable Romeo and Juliet and The Taming of the Shrew with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. I had met him from time to time at parties and once in Paris. We had mild flirtations about work; he once discussed us doing Jane Eyre as a film together, but they came, like unsatisfactory love affairs, to nothing.
This time it is the full seduction. Franco has grown paler, plumper, and the good looks which made him a beautiful young man, discovered by Visconti, have somewhat disintegrated, but his charm is undimmed. He is exhausted by an overnight flight from the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and he has stopped off on his way home to Rome.
He has designed the sets for and is about to direct a production of Aida which will open a great new opera house in Tokyo. He is the greatest living opera director--ask him where Tosca should set the candles by Scarpia's corpse and he will tell you that the exact position has been decided by Puccini's music. He is wearing a blouson and the thick woollen tights favoured by ballet dancers. One pale hand holds a tumbler of whiskey, qualified by lumps of ice, and the other a long, thin cigarette. Chain-smoking these fags, he tells me, would be an infallible cure for the asthma which plagues me. He orders coffee and toast, flirts a little with the Italian waiter and explains his film to me. It is, in the loosest possible way, a fragment of his autobiography.
I have become fond of Franco and feel a sort of affinity with him as we were born in the same year, five years after the end of the First World War and sixteen years before the start of the Second. I entered the world in Hampstead, the only child of a divorce barrister and a one-time art teacher. Franco was the single, illegitimate child of a dressmaker in Florence. His absentee father had amassed, during the 1914 war when most husbands were away fighting, a huge number of mistresses. I think the reason why Franco, as an Italian Senator, is so opposed to abortion, is that if his mother had taken that course, the world would have been deprived of the best production of Tosca .
After his mother's early death, he was looked after by an Irish secretary who worked in his father's office. She taught him about Shakespeare and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Interest was also taken in him by his mother's ex-customers, the English ladies, nicknamed the " Scorpione " by the local inhabitants, who lived in Florence for the culture, or because it was cheaper than England, or because no one wanted them at home. In the 1930s these ladies admired Mussolini, who made the trains run on time and who, it seems, had offered them protection when and if Italy entered the war. So his film is called Tea with Mussolini .
Franco was pressed into a Young Fascist organization, but when the war started he avoided the army and joined the Resistance. One of the best scenes in his story, later cut because it would all have had to be played in Italian, concerns his capture by the Fascists. A Young Fascist puts a gun down Franco's trousers and offers to shoot off his virility if he doesn't betray members of the Italian Underground. He also asks for Franco's address and the name of his father. When these particulars are given the Fascist looks severely shaken and withdraws the threatening gun. It turns out that he, also, is a bastard son of the same promiscuous father: so he sets his half brother free. Later Franco's father says, "You blame me for having had so many mistresses; but if I hadn't you'd be dead now, or at least impotent." I don't know how true the story is, but the film sadly misses it.
What is certainly true is that Franco met up with the Scots Greys as they fought their way up Italy, and joined them as a young interpreter. He went recently to a reunion dinner in Aberdeen, where elderly sergeants called out, "How are you, Franco?" and greeted him like a long lost friend.
As this is his story, Franco feels particularly sensitive and protective about it. The table in his suite is piled high with scripts, the work of talented and well-known writers who have failed to meet the requirements of Franco's memory. The film must, to some extent, mirror his past, although it seems to include fictional variations. Luca, the film version of Franco as a child and teenager, is, for instance, to show marked heterosexual tendencies. I will also be allowed to invent the English ladies and create a new band of scorpione , but Franco as a child has to remain irresistibly virtuous.
After I have promised to think it over and write a short treatment, we go down to lunch with the Italian producers. Signora Zanoni is small, energetic and unfailingly optimistic. Doctor Tosti is elegant and world weary, as befits a man accustomed to dealing with the inner workings of Italian television. Franco, his whisky glass refilled, says he rarely eats lunch, and then tucks into a large plate of pasta. We raise our glasses to "a beautiful film, darling," coupled with success to the scorpione and the child Luca.
* * *
I have sent off a treatment to Franco and I am waiting for his reaction. I am at home once again, with the producer Adrian Bate, discussing the filming of Cider with Rosie in Laurie Lee's Gloucestershire countryside. Our three dogs are barking at intruders and when I look through the window of my writing room I see a blonde woman leaning over the gate. I call, telling her the dogs aren't nearly as vicious as they sound. She turns out to be Pat York, a good photographer, over from Los Angeles. When I let her in, she has an immediate request. "Would you mind taking off all your clothes?"
It's eleven o'clock in the morning. Adrian and I are drinking coffee, discussing casting and harming nobody. What, I wonder, is Mrs. York after? "I'm not very keen on the idea," I say. "I mean, why exactly?"
"I'm going to have an exhibition. Photographs of naked people and corpses. It will only be seen in Saint Petersburg, so you needn't worry. You'll find it a truly significant experience. Just take a look at these!"
She shows me a large photograph of her plumber, stark naked as he mends the waste-disposal unit in the kitchen of the Yorks' Los Angeles home. The man is in a curious attitude, bent backwards to expose a full frontal view, with only his head concealed beneath the sink. This picture is accompanied by a letter from the plumber testifying to the fact that being photographed naked under the kitchen sink by Mrs. York was undoubtedly the most profound and moving moment of his life. There is another photograph, this time of her husband's unclothed agent answering the telephone and apparently enjoying an equally liberating experience.
"I'll do almost anything for you," I tell her, "except be photographed with my clothes off. Who, anyway, would want a naked septuagenarian with an unhealed leg in an exhibition, even if it will only be shown in Saint Petersburg? And I don't want to be included among the corpses."
Mrs. York shrugs, admits defeat, and asks Adrian Bate if he has any objection to taking off his clothes. She gets an equally firm refusal. Then my wife comes in. Penny is a woman who apparently knows no fear. She has hunted in Ireland, where the horses jump over barbed wire or scramble up walls and land on piles of rocks. She has swum with sharks and laughed at death threats from hunt saboteurs. Brought up on a pig farm, she knows many animals are born to be eaten, and that most people will naturally end up with their clothes off. She sees no objection to being photographed undressed and is reassured when she hears she will only be on view in Saint Petersburg. The remaining question is where the picture should be set. I suggest some suitably rural scene, such as her feeding the chickens.
So, dressed only in a pair of wellington boots and carrying a bucketful of scraps, Penny enters the chicken run. When Mrs. York has finished snapping she goes down the hill to the house of a fearless interviewer of celebrities and scourge of political humbugs. The star who asked the then Home Secretary the same question fourteen times, in a bruising attempt to get a simple answer, refuses to take off a stitch of clothing. Elizabeth, the mother of his children, has no such inhibitions and strips for the camera as readily as Penny, to be beautifully photographed with a twin baby on each elegant tit. I don't know what any of this proves, except that when it comes to courage, women win over men every time.
The next morning my agent Anthony Jones, well known for his brief and often ironic telephone calls, rings and says, "Bad news, I'm afraid. Franco wants you to write the script. He also invites you to stay at his house in Rome."
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