Maggie Smith: A Biography (10 page)

Shaffer, of course, wrote the two triangular pieces with a view to the same three actors appearing in each. Instead, Williams made a mark as the strange detective and Maggie increased her reputation for versatility. Many critics expressed disappointment in the quality of the plays, but Shaffer only offered them as
jeux d’esprit
. Both Shaffer and Wood took every opportunity to observe the extraordinary rapport between the two young stars. Shaffer remembers a Sunday lunch at the Bear Inn, Woodstock, en route to the pre-West End touring date in Oxford. He asked Maggie if she liked salmon and she replied that she did if it was good; if it wasn’t, it tasted like old blankets. The phrase lodged. The small restaurant was full of sober, respectable families. The situation acted as a spur, says Shaffer, to Williams, ‘who invented an invisible man standing at the table exposing himself, with Kenny in that very loud fruity voice protesting “I’ve had just about enough of this, I’m not interested in your dick, do you understand that?” and so on. Maggie was in part delighted, but really rather disapproving. She hardly ever performs like that in private, let alone in public.’

As for their work together, Wood says it was simply dazzling. ‘They were like greyhounds, the speed at which they could bat and ball it.’ Wood dismisses as ‘facile rubbish’ the common accusation that Maggie picked up her exaggerated campy nasal twanging from Williams:

Maggie’s great moment in
The Private Ear
arrived when the hapless would-be seducer fed his behemoth of a sound system the love duet from
Madame Butterfly
. Wood devised a six-minute mime, each move of which was timed ‘not to the bar, but to the note’ and, at the point of seductive would-be resolution, Maggie slapped Scully’s face. Shaffer recalls Maggie not doing a sketch, but suggesting a woman in a terrible situation in a fake ocelot coat, entangling herself in that coat, taking a cigarette, burning the coat out of nervousness. His climactic stage direction in the published text describes exactly what she did: ‘Doreen slaps the boy’s face – then, horrified, takes it between her hands, trying to recall the blow.’

These were happy days, symbolised by the fact that Beverley, Maggie and Beverley’s stepfather, George Cross, were working in adjacent theatres on Shaftesbury Avenue: the Apollo, the Globe and the Queen’s. Beverley had a great commercial success with his English adaptation of the French farce
Boeing-Boeing
, starring David Tomlinson; Maggie was working with the actor she liked above all others, Kenneth Williams, while Richard Pearson, who played the jealous accountant, became a good friend to both; and George Cross was managing the Queen’s and playing host to Anthony Newley’s hit musical
Stop the World – I Want to Get Off
. Williams said in his autobiography that the warm summer ‘seemed never ending’ and he would spend weekends blackberrying in the Hertfordshire fields and chasing the dog around the gardens at Beaumont and nearby Broxbourne with Maggie and Beverley. One blazing Sunday morning, Maggie drove Williams to Beckenham in Kent for a day with Richard Pearson and his family. She wore a pink dress with a matching hatband round a straw boater: ‘It was an open car and, at every traffic light, motorists and lorry drivers looked twice at this elegant lady motorist. I felt very proud sitting beside her.’

Feature articles about Maggie began to appear more regularly, and she covered her embarrassment with giggles. She told the
Daily Express
that she had no idea where she was going: ‘I just drift into things and I’ve been lucky. I live for today. I’m restless. I put off everything,’ adding with a nice touch of mysteriousness, ‘I’m always living behind myself.’ Evasive tactics were momentarily dropped when she told
Woman’s Own
magazine that she would not return to revue: ‘To go back to anything is bad. In revue you have to make your impact in three minutes flat. It’s agony …’ Nor was she brimming with fashion tips for the readers: ‘I can’t wear any kind of jewellery, and hats look ghastly on me.’

Her performance in the Shaffer plays secured her the first of her many major awards: best actress in the
Evening Standard
drama awards for 1962. Maggie had beaten off challenges from Brenda Bruce, Geraldine McEwan, Dorothy Tutin, Siobhán McKenna and Sheila Hancock. That year’s best actor was Paul Scofield in Peter Brook’s great production of
King Lear
. Maggie accepted the prize on 28 January 1963 with the words, ‘I did seem to get through at O-Level. I do promise you I’ll try very hard next term.’ She was escorted to the dinner at the Savoy by Beverley, and wore a long black skirt and a bronze-coloured top which, said the
Express
, reflected ‘the deep glow of her lovely auburn hair’.

She had left the Shaffer plays and taken a three-week holiday with Beverley in the winter sun on Tobago. ‘Next term’ would bring a fateful invitation to join the National Theatre. But she was concentrating for the moment on her third big West End role for Binkie and H. M. Tennent, Mary McKellaway, in Jean Kerr’s
Mary, Mary
, which opened at the Queen’s at the end of February (
Stop the World
had completed a run of just over a year). Jean Kerr was the wife of the prominent American drama critic Walter Kerr. She never saw Maggie in her play because she refused to board an aeroplane. The Canadian actor Don Harron was the trusted repository of her views on how the play should be produced. Mary in the play is a journalist, precariously married to the publisher Bob McKellaway (Harron). Within a fortnight of their divorce, a question of income tax reunites them. A flirtation with a film star enlivens Mary and rekindles her marriage. The rows were redolent of Coward’s
Private Lives
. But Mary’s barrage of wisecracks – ‘By the time she is thirty, a starlet has been carefully taught to smile like a dead halibut’; ‘This man writes like a sick elf’ – was insufficient to save a piece most critics deemed second-rate. Levin, who had moved to the
Daily Mail
, said it was constructed on ‘the washing-line principle’, with funny lines hung out to dry between the posts holding up the plot. But the comments on Maggie’s performance were uniformly complimentary.

The most interesting and sustained appreciation came from Bamber Gascoigne, who had recovered from the agreeable shock of seeing Maggie in his own revue and taken up a column in the
Spectator
.

The breakthrough was now fully accomplished. She was working with the élite, and the future élite, of her profession, but I was surprised to learn that she was also, in these first couple of years of the 1960s, participating in some informal workshops with the directors Lindsay Anderson and Anthony Page (years later she would work with Page on three of her finest mature stage performances in plays by the American playwright Edward Albee). Page, after graduating from Oxford, where he had seen Maggie in the student revues, had studied at the Neighbourhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in New York, an offshoot of the Stanislavsky-influenced Group Theatre of the 1930s and the Actors Studio founded in 1947 by Elia Kazan and Robert Lewis. It was a form of Method acting that, in the system developed by the director Sanford Meisner, replaced the Stanislavskyan use of affective memory with an emphasis on ‘the reality of doing’; in other words, it was a performing technique devised to find a new, or fresher, way of an actor speaking the truth. Anderson and Page ran these sessions of improvisatory scenes in different locations around town – Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in Soho, various houses in Chelsea – and invited actors to do exercises, and improvise scenes, outside of the performances they were already giving in London theatres.

Maggie went along several times, in company with such budding young actors of the day as Albert Finney, Daniel Massey, Georgia Brown (who had scored a hit singing ‘As Long as He Needs Me’ in Lionel Bart’s
Oliver!
), Donal Donnelly and Alfred Lynch. Page recalls:

In movies, too, Maggie was on the brink of stardom. Her seven-year film contract suddenly yielded a sprightly role in an eminently watchable crime comedy,
Go to Blazes
, for which the Irish wit and raconteur Patrick Campbell co-wrote the screenplay. Maggie played Chantal, a French shop girl in a Berkeley Square fashion house run by a queenly couturier majestically played by Coral Browne. They become involved in the escapades of three amiable crooks – Daniel Massey, Norman Rossington and Dave King – a pyromaniac ‘Mr Big’ played by Robert Morley, and a struck-off fire chief, played by Dennis Price, who educates the gang in fast getaway techniques by appropriating an old fire engine and securing immunity against red lights, traffic police and other civil obstructions. The film suffers an almost fatal attack of lethargy during an overextended farcical interlude with Derek Nimmo as a domestic flood victim but the rest is bright and charming, with lovely vignettes from dear old Miles Malleson as an excitable antique fire-engine curator and the legendary Wilfrid Lawson as a junk-yard manager.

Maggie appears at her most lushly glamorous in this film and she knocks Daniel Massey for six at their first encounter. Her figure is sensuously outlined in a stylish olive-green dress when Massey, on the run, backs into a roomful of models and disrupts a fashion show. He passes himself off as an aristocrat from the Foreign Office. Their romance founders when their cover is blown. For not only is the Massey character a fraud, so is Chantal: when Coral Browne tells Maggie the firm is going bust, her French accent evaporates in a Cockney howl of ‘Blimey, can’t we ’ave a lovely little bonfire, and collect?’ Coral Browne’s shop eventually goes up in flames as Massey and Co. raid the next-door bank. But the getaway is interrupted by a real forest fire and, in their efforts to act responsibly for once, the crooks forfeit their booty. Sackfuls of banknotes are blown into the sky. Prison looms once again.

Nowhere to Go
had been made in a spirit of antagonism towards the Ealing comedies but, in the positive destination of
Blazes
, Maggie relished just as readily the genuine, slightly quaint and old-fashioned article. The contrast is a clear demonstration that she would never distinguish conclusively between the serious and the trivial in her work; she respected both and was unhampered by too many artistic pretensions. She knew as clearly as anyone, and better than most, the difference, say, between Congreve and Peter Shaffer. But both could supply appropriate raw material for the exercise of her artistry.

Finally, it was in
The VIPs
that Maggie created an international stir. MGM’s two-hour blockbuster, scripted by Terence Rattigan and directed by Anthony Asquith, was in part devised as the second film after
Cleopatra
to enhance the romantic fairy-tale legend of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the biggest gift to showbiz gossip writers since the heyday of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. A sort of
Grand Hotel
of the airport lounge, the film crams an array of star actors – among them Orson Welles and Margaret Rutherford – into a fog-bound Heathrow, where they await a delayed flight to Miami. Elizabeth Taylor is on the point of leaving her shipping-millionaire husband (Burton) for a fling with Louis Jourdan. Maggie appears as Miss Mead, a loyally inventive and romantically disposed secretary to a brash Australian tycoon played by Rod Taylor (the same sort of relationship was repeated opposite Rex Harrison in
The Honeypot
). She fidgets effectively in a sensible coat and beret while Rod Taylor receives bad news; he has one last chance to beat off a corporate challenge in America, but no cash. Meanwhile, Burton goes grovelling to Elizabeth Taylor with apologies and new intentions, but an almighty row ensues.

At this point, Maggie has her big scene, requesting help for her boss from the wealthy Burton. She plays it on the edge of tears, while Burton, boiling inside with his own frustrated devotion, recognises her advocacy as an expression of unrequited love for Rod Taylor and signs a blank cheque. It is a beautiful encounter, expertly and tenderly played on both sides. Burton certainly recognised Maggie’s quality. He later said that she didn’t just steal the scene; she committed ‘grand larceny’. He never worked with her again.