Maggie Smith: A Biography (13 page)

Having made her mark at the National in two demanding tragic roles, Desdemona and Hilde Wangel, which altered the public’s perception of her, Maggie renewed her comedy career with especial relish. In the middle years of the 1960s she and Robert enjoyed the razzmatazz of being ‘the new Lunts’. They were married in 1967, shortly after the birth of their first son, moved house, acquired a country property, had another son, and were cast in leading roles in major films: Maggie as Miss Jean Brodie, Robert as Billy Wilder’s Sherlock Holmes. Maggie’s film would make her an international star. Robert’s failed to do the same for him and married life became much trickier. The time arrived when they could no longer share equal billing. These tensions were disguised for some years within the apparent democracy of a theatre company.

Maggie and Robert were cast in
Hay Fever
, which, in spite of the problems with Edith Evans as Judith Bliss, became one of the National’s greatest hits. On the first day of rehearsals, Noël Coward addressed the cast: ‘I’m thrilled and flattered and frankly a little flabbergasted that the National Theatre should have had the curious perceptiveness to choose a very early play of mine, and to give it a cast that could play the Albanian telephone directory.’ Although about ten years too young for the part, Maggie always saw herself as Judith Bliss, and her sights on it must have been sharpened now. She ‘covered’ the role and very nearly took it over. As things turned out, she made a fantastic comic creation of the vamp Myra Arundel, and will forever be associated with the show-stopping delivery in Act Three of the previously unremarked line ‘This haddock is disgusting.’ (The haddock was not really that bad; stage management provided mashed bananas.)

Derek Jacobi, who played Judith’s son Simon Bliss, recalls how battle lines were drawn between Dame Edith and Maggie at the first dress parade:

Dame Edith was far too old for Judith, but Coward, who directed, was monumentally patient, a fact enshrined in Tynan’s account of one of the Master’s most renowned mots. Dame Edith insisted on saying in rehearsal, apropos of the weekend cottage’s Thames-side situation in Cookham, ‘On a very clear day you can see Marlow.’ Finally Coward could stand it no longer and yelled from the back of the stalls, ‘Edith, the line is “On a clear day you can see Marlow.” On a
very
clear day you can see Marlowe and Beaumont and Fletcher.’ The actress herself became suddenly aware of her predicament as she travelled up to Manchester for the out-of-town opening with her friend, Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies. She was going through her lines and came to the scene where she is defending her flirtatiousness to her own children: ‘Anyone would think I was eighty the way you go on.’ She stopped, stared at Ffrangcon-Davies and said, ‘But I
am
nearly eighty. I’m seventy-six. I can’t play this part.’ In Manchester, Dame Edith took to her hotel bedroom and refused to emerge until earnest representations had been made by Coward, Olivier and John Dexter. She told Coward, who found her moaning on her bed, that she had ‘a dry mouth and a dropped stomach’. She agreed finally to play the dress rehearsal, to which an audience had been invited, only after Coward had decided ‘to give the Dame hell’ and had berated her for being a disgrace to herself, the theatre and Christian Science. The audience was sent home.

When the play was run for a second time, the Dame was allowed back to the hotel, and Maggie stood in as Judith. Diana Boddington was stage-managing and remembers a riot: ‘Well, Maggie just sent up Edith’s performance something rotten. The mimicry was unbelievably funny. We were all – Noël, Larry, everyone – laughing so much we were lying around on the floor.’ No doubt hearing that Maggie, or ‘the little Smith girl’ as she called her, was more than capable of stealing her thunder as Judith, Dame Edith agreed to play the week in Manchester on the odd condition that Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies was allowed to sit in her dressing room, presumably as a last line of defence against any dreaded Maggie intrusions. But Maggie never allowed respect to swamp her adversarial instincts. She knew, and loved, the Dame’s reported comment on
Share My Lettuce
: ‘It is unprofessional, and cissy.’ Lynn Redgrave recalled that, later in the run, Dame Edith imperiously accosted Maggie backstage: ‘I understand that you are covering the role of Judith Bliss. I should like to tell you here and now that I shall not be off.’ Maggie, quick as a flash, replied, ‘Well, I sincerely hope not, because the costumes won’t fit.’

‘The Dame, God rest her soul,’ says Jacobi, ‘was not the most generous of actresses. She was certainly hideous to us youngsters, giving us notes and summonses and tellings-off and I think to a certain extent Maggie was standing up to her for everyone else in the cast.’ Nothing, not even these peccadillos, could tarnish Dame Edith’s reputation or the profound respect in which she was held. But by this time in her career she was a sad and loveless old lady, and her example in private life was probably something Maggie was afraid of. One way of ensuring against complete emotional isolation would be to have children. Dame Edith had a few loyal friends, but no family; and not much peace at the Old Vic this time round. Jacobi remembers that Maggie and the Dame occupied adjoining dressing rooms and, between shows on matinée days, Maggie would play a favourite record, ‘Baby Love’ by the Supremes, at full blast ‘so that the Dame could not sleep and would be too tired to cause trouble in the evening performance’.

On the first night, 29 October 1964, Coward sat in the stalls next to Judy Garland, just behind Lena Horne and quite near Rudolf Nureyev. It was that sort of evening. In a programme note, Tynan reminded a generation for whom Pinter was the new master of elliptical style that ‘Coward took the fat off English comic dialogue; he was the Turkish bath in which it slimmed.’ Style apart, Herbert Kretzmer declared in the
Express
that
Hay Fever
was ‘one of the few plays I have seen that is about nothing at all’. Each member of the Bliss family invites a guest for the weekend. Charades are played after dinner. The guests leave in the morning before breakfast. A generally observed point was that the guests now seemed more eccentric than the hosts, whereas the reverse was true when Marie Tempest led the 1925 première. Certainly none was more eccentric than Maggie’s Myra Arundel in green cloche hat and matching shoes, looking, said Felix Barker in the
Evening News
, ‘like an Anita Loos heroine drawn by Aubrey Hammond’. Myra is described in the play as a girl who goes about using sex as a sort of shrimping-net. With her fluttering eyelashes and anaconda smile, Maggie was a picture of enamelled, nauseated horror as she stroked Derek Jacobi’s hair and found her fingers covered in grease, or scooped her train into position with the cigarette holder and faced yet another doomed assault upon her lethal defences.

If
Hay Fever
unleashed a comic genie from the National’s bottle, the Zeffirelli production of
Much Ado About Nothing
, so despised by Gaskill and some of the more high-minded critics, let slip the dogs of merry war. The costumes were coloured and padded out to resemble Sicilian confectionery dolls. Maggie looked at her most edibly beguiling in a red dress and blonde wig. Robert was a swarthy swaggerer with heavily pomaded hair and massive dark glasses. The contest between Beatrice and Benedick was that of two razor-sharp habitual antagonists who were in love with each other to start with. It opened on 16 February 1965 and stayed in the repertoire for several years. The audience loved it. Philip Hope-Wallace in the
Guardian
gave the most vivid overall picture of its free-wheeling opera buffa provenance:

Against this, the killjoys, led by Bernard Levin (who reported ‘one of the more excruciatingly tedious evenings at present obtainable this side of Hell’), booed from the cheaper seats as well as from the review pages. But however reprehensibly glib was Zeffirelli’s irreverent approach to the comedy, we can see it now as the first of a whole string of major Shakespearean knees-ups in the latter half of the century. Within two decades, the RSC would present other comedies by swimming pools, on motorbikes and as thinly disguised sub-Broadway musicals. One serious point at issue had been Tynan’s recruitment of the poet Robert Graves to ‘clarify’ some of the more recherché jokes and references. Over three hundred minor alterations were proposed and many adopted. But Maggie refused point blank to accept any alteration on ‘I had rather lie in the woollen’, and proceeded to show Tynan and Graves how to convey the meaning and gain the laugh. One key to Maggie’s greatness in Shakespeare is her genius for unlocking abstruse meanings with unerring perception and comic timing.

Albert Finney made his NT début as Don Pedro and played him, said Levin, ‘as though he had a red-hot poker stuck in his trousers, staggering about backwards and talking like an itinerant ice-cream pedlar with a cleft palate’. Another NT débutant was Ian McKellen, whom Maggie herself had recommended as Claudio on the basis of his touching performance in James Saunders’s
A Scent of Flowers
. Finney subsequently blossomed in
Miss Julie
and
Black Comedy
, both with Maggie, while McKellen did not find a congenial casting groove and postponed his passage to the top flight for a few years, building his reputation elsewhere.

Maggie was unhappy before the opening. She told Christopher Downes that she was going to put on a wig and dark glasses and go to the Isle of Man. But anyone who saw this deliciously irresponsible and joyous production has memories of two particular Maggie moments. When Don Pedro concluded that, out of question, she was born in a merry hour, Maggie stopped the scene for just one half-line of piercing pathos with ‘No, sure, my lord, my mother cried …’ and immediately revived the antic mood on ‘But there was a star danced, and under that was I born.’ The pain of childbirth was the price of her jocund animation, and Maggie turned the scene right round on the proverbial sixpence. Later, in the church, she is asked by Benedick what he might do to soften Hero’s agony at her supposed betrayal. Zeffirelli had wanted her to play for another big laugh. Instead, she yelled ‘Kill Claudio’ with unexpected savagery. This outburst of towering, disinterested rage stunned the audience to silence and so petrified the scene that you felt the entire production might have to be abandoned, like an unruly football match suddenly blanketed in freezing fog. Robert held a very long pause and whispered, almost under his breath, ‘Not for the world.’

Two weeks after the opening of
Much Ado
, Maggie took part in a Sunday night Bach–Handel concert at the Royal Festival Hall to raise money for the Save the Children Fund. She admitted to Sydney Edwards in the
Evening Standard
that she could play Bach’s easy pieces for the piano, but confined herself to the recitation of a script based on a play by Colly Cibber and a contemporary account of a temperamental clash between two of Handel’s sopranos. She was asked about her NT touring schedule: ‘I’m going on tour – to Glasgow, Nottingham and Manchester. It always happens to me. I make a film and get sent to Cricklewood and everybody else goes to Tahiti.’ In addition to gadding around the industrial north, the National maintained its connection with Chichester on the softer South Downs, where they presented a fourth summer season in 1965. Maggie opened in July in a double bill of Strindberg’s
Miss Julie
and a new farce by Peter Shaffer,
Black Comedy
.

Miss Julie
was cast first and Tynan approached Shaffer with a commission to write something to go with it. Shaffer revealed that, ever since he had seen the Peking Opera, he had wanted to write a farce involving the ‘black theatre’ of one of their most famous sketches, where battle is joined on a fully lit stage by combatants plunged into total darkness. Although late with a film script, Shaffer was told to get on with it by Olivier who, Shaffer recalls, as a result of Tynan’s enthusiasm, simply looked straight through him and said, ‘It’s all going to be thrilling.’ Shaffer immediately developed a writer’s block because he’d agreed to do it before working out a plot. Olivier’s only suggestion was that Maggie’s part shouldn’t be too long as she was working very hard and seemed to be frail.

The plays went into rehearsal in Chichester and although the Strindberg, translated by Michael Meyer and directed by Michael Elliott, was relatively straightforward, John Dexter was directing the Shaffer from a script that seemed to change every day. Maggie’s role as Clea, the jilted mistress, was an unresolved hotchpotch. One day, according to Riggs O’Hara, she stood up and said she had the perfect answer: ‘As I slit my wrists in the first play, why don’t I cut my throat in the second?’

Both productions were seen to better advantage, however, when they arrived at the Old Vic in the following March. You could sense more of Miss Julie’s gathering horror and there was clearer delineation of both her social superiority and her sexual desire. Ronald Bryden in the
New Statesman
took a well-timed and perceptive long view of Maggie’s career. Over her performance as Miss Julie, he said, hung the burning question of whether she could go on to become the National’s tragedienne: whether she might some day tackle Hedda, Phèdre and Cleopatra, or continue on her present course towards Rosalind, Millamant and Wilde’s Gwendolen. As it turned out she would have to go to Canada to play Cleopatra, Millamant and Rosalind. Hedda was a few years off. Phèdre beckoned but never materialised, and Gwendolen was submerged in Lady Bracknell. In 1965, the issue of her tragic aspirations remained, for Bryden, in the balance. She was much less a seductress, he felt, than a hypnotised victim, although she managed a momentary comeback in the second half with her long history of a twisted upbringing. Although one or two critics acclaimed this Miss Julie as a great performance, Bryden was nearer the mark in alleging that the bloodthirsty diatribe against men, as well as the desperate lesbian appeal to Christine, was beyond her range. It was a pointer to what she might achieve, rather than a fully accomplished tragic portrayal. The play’s impact was softened, muted.