Maggie Smith: A Biography (14 page)

Although some critics were mean and sniffy about
Black Comedy
, the piece was a riotously funny addition to the repertoire and one of the most expertly played farces London had ever seen.
Black Comedy
opens, in complete darkness, with an effete sculptor, Brindsley Miller (Derek Jacobi), showing his debby, squeaky-voiced fiancée, Carol (Louise Purnell), into a flat he has furnished with antiques ‘borrowed’ from a neighbour, Harold Gorringe, in order to impress her father, who is about to arrive. A motley crew of unwanted visitors included Maggie as the irate ex-mistress queering Brindsley’s romantic pitch. So this, she haughtily declared, was what he meant by a blind date. Shaffer arranged a delayed entrance for Maggie in order to allow her to wind down from Miss Julie, and she came on and topped everyone with a classic display of mischievous outrage culminating in her impersonation of Brindsley’s ancient Cockney cleaning woman, Mrs Punnet. Maggie spilt the beans from a great height dressed only in a borrowed pyjama top: ‘Water? Good ’eavens, I must have upset something. It’s as black as Newgate’s knocker up ’ere. Are you playing one of your saucy games, Mr Miller?’ The point about the performance, though, apart from its surface brilliance, was the element of desperation in Clea’s attempt to hang on to Brindsley. She had walked out on him after four years and had thought of nothing else for six weeks. Her affection was riddled with guilt, and her revenge tempered with pathos and the threat of loneliness.

It would be crass to suggest that Maggie’s coruscating Clea fed off the confusion in her personal life, but by the time Robert and Maggie were back in London in 1966, Beverley was rumly contemplating the four or five years he had spent as Maggie’s unofficial fiancé. He had divorced his first wife and left his two daughters to be with her, and now Robert was about to be divorced by Tarn Bassett. Things were coming to a head.

The National visited Oxford in April with the double bill and also Pinero’s affecting backstage comedy
Trelawny of the Wells
, in which Maggie had taken over as Avonia Bunn, a part which, like Clea, allowed her to parade a splendid pair of legs. John Higgins told
Financial Times
readers that she played Avonia as ‘a fourth-rate trouper with a heart as high as the Post Office Tower and a turmoil of emotions that run from jubilation to despair in a matter of seconds’. Robert Stephens gave a marvellous, heart-rending performance as the budding new playwright of the future, Tom Wrench, a companion portrait to his George Dillon and a roseate premonition of Chekhov’s cynical poet Trigorin, one of Robert’s outstanding performances ten years later.

By June, Robert had taken over from Finney as Harold Gorringe in
Black Comedy
, and the farce was paired with a new John Osborne script,
A Bond Honoured
, directed by Dexter, in which Maggie and Robert played an incestuous sister and brother. The text was derived from Lope de Vega’s
La Fianza Satisfecha
. It was a strict and very classical, rather Oriental, production. Maggie wore a not very becoming black wig and black contact lenses, and when she died, she made a turn and pulled red ribbons out of her belt to indicate the blood. She was again disciplined by Dexter to control her natural gestural brio. Dexter was renowned for the abrasiveness of his tongue and the total demands he made on actors. A side effect of his obsessive style was that he could be deeply unpleasant to them. Maggie never worked with Dexter again. Riggs O’Hara recalls meeting Maggie years later at one of Olivier’s Christmas parties. She was moaning about some director or other. He asked her why, in that case, did she never ask for John? ‘And she said she could no longer stand being shouted at.’ O’Hara coldly enquired whether she wanted a director, or a friend.

The friendship with Robert was overpowering her loyalty to Beverley. For a time, the domestic equilibrium was maintained. In June 1965, with Maggie tied up at the National, Beverley and Kenneth Williams departed on another holiday together. This time it was a month-long jaunt to Crete and Turkey, and Beverley worked out the itinerary: London to Athens, boat to Istanbul, then Heraklion, then boat to Naples, and home. Once again Beverley went off in search of the sites of classical legend, including the palace of Agamemnon, Knossos, Phaestos and Sitea. At home, the crunch finally came in the summer of 1966, when Maggie disappeared to Rome for a few weeks to make a film with Rex Harrison called
The Honeypot
, an amazingly cumbersome rewrite by Frederick Knott and the director Joe Mankiewicz of Ben Jonson’s
Volpone
. Robert followed her there, and Maggie finally wrote to Beverley with the bad news. He had been aware of the developing romance with Robert since his return from Australia, where he had spent three months directing
Boeing-Boeing
. ‘I was more than hurt, I was murderous. So in order not to murder anyone, I got married again quickly and went to Greece and France to keep out of their way.’ His second wife was Gayden Collins, a model, and Beverley kept travelling, and working on his screenplays and libretti, for the next six or seven years. He had waited for Maggie before and he would wait for her again.

By the end of the year, with Beverley gone, Robert had moved into Eldon Road. Maggie continued playing Myra Arundel, Beatrice, Desdemona and the double bill in the Old Vic repertoire. She started to do less when she realised that, at the age of thirty-two, she was pregnant. Joan Plowright took over, not all that happily, in
Much Ado
, which Robert redirected on behalf of Zeffirelli (Robert was shortly afterwards appointed an associate director of the NT), and Desdemona was passed to Billie Whitelaw. Maggie was named in Robert’s divorce from Tarn Bassett and the baby arrived in the Middlesex Hospital on 19 June 1967.
The Honeypot
had overshot its schedule by many weeks, and Maggie had not seen a gynaecologist in Italy. The baby was upside down and had to be delivered by caesarean operation. Maggie said later that this made her feel as though she had just popped out to Harrods for it. The boy was named Christopher, after his godfather Christopher Downes. Everyone had expected a girl, including Zeffirelli, who had pre-christened the baby ‘Daisy’. Maggie received a telegram from Zeffirelli in Italy which read: ‘Congratulations on Christopher. I shall spend all my life trying to turn him into Daisy.’

Ten days later, Maggie and Robert were married in Greenwich registry office. This was arranged by the National’s press officer, Virginia Fairweather, who wanted to keep the wedding private and well clear of the inevitable media glare at Caxton Hall. Fairweather explained to the Greenwich officials that Maggie’s brother, Alistair, lived in nearby Blackheath (true) and that Maggie had been staying there for several weeks (less true). Virginia and Christopher Downes were the witnesses, and the quartet was in and out of the Greenwich back door and sipping celebratory champagne in Eldon Road by midday. The sipping stopped while Robert went off to perform a
Royal Hunt
matinée. In the evening, the party decamped to a favourite Italian restaurant in Beauchamp Place known privately as the ‘Trattoria Hysteria’, and a few other friends arrived. Albert Finney’s nativity present was the recently released Beatles’
Sergeant Pepper
album. The first the public knew of all this – indeed, the first official announcement of any sort on the subject – was an article written by Barry Norman, then showbiz correspondent of the
Daily Mail
, on 20 August 1967. The ginger baby was two months old, and Robert said that his arrival had slowed Maggie down: ‘She isn’t so frantic to be working.’

The whole business had confused Maggie’s parents, though of course they took delight in their new grandson. On the day of the wedding, 55 Church Hill Road was besieged by reporters, who parked out in the public house across the road. Nat was convinced that Maggie only married Robert because she was pregnant by him. Nat retired in the same year and offered his life’s work of jottings, pamphlets, papers and sundry little publications to the Bodleian Library. He was so upset when they rejected his offer outright that he took all the papers down to the bottom of the garden and burned them. He resolved on the spot to renounce his medical and scientific interests and to devote the rest of his life not only to keeping the archive of his daughter’s career, but also to catching up with her world of literature and the theatre. He went down to Blackwell’s bookshop in Broad Street and stocked up on Penguin classics and Elizabethan poetry.

Maggie’s maternal purdah didn’t last long. Almost immediately, she and Robert made television versions of two cut-glass old English comedies: Somerset Maugham’s
Home and Beauty
and Frederick Lonsdale’s
On Approval
. The latter also starred Judi Dench, who remembers that they all ‘corpsed’ terribly and were threatened with the sack. Dench then came down the stairs wearing a tartan cloche hat, which was ‘too much’ for the fourth member of the cast, Moray Watson, who promptly ‘collapsed all over again’.

By the end of the year, Maggie was back on a film set, starring opposite yet another distinguished old bear of English comedy, only slightly less grizzled than Rex Harrison, Peter Ustinov. Ironically, Maggie was offered the part of Patty Terwilliger in
Hot Millions
because the shooting had been delayed and Lynn Redgrave, the original casting, had become too heavily pregnant to continue. On the parturition front, Maggie came full circle by introducing Christopher, aged eight months, to show business in this film.

Christopher’s screen début comes in the scene where the apparently incompetent Maggie has taken a job as a bus conductress. She helps a mother and child off the bus and lingers on the pavement to admire the swaddled infant. The bus moves off and Maggie turns in panic to chase it down the street.

Maggie starts the film as a failed traffic warden who has a room in the same lodging house as Ustinov, alias Marcus Pendleton, a.k.a. Caesar Smith, an embezzler turned criminal computer programmer. Overstressing her character’s inclinations towards flirtatious scattiness, Maggie inveigles herself into Ustinov’s firm as his new secretary. She is brittle, funny and defensive, somewhat frozen, with long false eyelashes which reinforce a strange resemblance to the puppet Lady Penelope in
Thunderbirds
. But she melts in the touching scene where she and Ustinov eat an improvised sausage supper and discover a shared love of music. They are, of course, a pair of lonely misfits. Ustinov’s cosy, reassuring manner elicits a sudden, moving declaration: ‘I’m so lonely I could scream it from the roof-tops.’

In their next scene together, Maggie proposes marriage. Soon, she is sitting at home, pregnant, while Ustinov disappears, mysteriously, to one of his various European ‘offices’. Through the London contact of a deliciously nasty and lubricious executive played by Bob Newhart (‘ ’Ere, what we doing in the park?’ asks a mini-skirted Maggie when Newhart offers her a lift home), she ingeniously uncovers the criminal operation. She then quietly outmanoeuvres them all. She has been embezzling funds from Ustinov – whose businessman alter ego, Caesar Smith, is really Robert Morley – and reinvesting them with spectacular financial results. She is offered a place on the board, but declines it with the imperishable line, ‘A woman’s place is in the ’ome, innit, making money!’ The film ends with Maggie playing the flute in a Haydn concerto conducted by Ustinov in a sequence recorded in Watford Town Hall.
Hot Millions
, scripted by Ustinov and Ira Wallach, and directed by the Canadian Eric Till, is in some ways a feminist comedy. It is not a great film, but it is entertaining and it did give Maggie plenty of scope to combine comedy with pathos. There is also an implied paradigm of her own career at this stage in its assertion that you can both have a successful home life and shoot to the top of the professional tree.

Maggie must have taken some assurance from this, though she soon found out how difficult it was to balance the private life with the public demands of her talent. For her, the career always came first, not out of cunning or strategic necessity, but out of her incurably obsessive drive to be working. And she had a sure instinct about what work to do.

To start with, she and Robert were equal married partners. The liberating physical relationship with Robert and the birth of the first of her two sons had enriched Maggie’s womanhood, with incalculable benefits to her acting. But neither she nor Robert yet knew how very difficult it would be to sustain such an exhilarating partnership.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
, released in 1969, eight years after the publication of Muriel Spark’s novel, remains the film most readily associated with Maggie Smith. It certainly symbolises the period of her working life in which she first achieved her greatest fame. It is a good film, not a brilliant one, and Maggie becomes camp although, as Peter Hall says, Maggie only really resides on the cusp of camp. She does not go the whole hog; there’s too much going on inside. But Maggie had certainly commanded a camp following in
Share My Lettuce
and
Mary, Mary
. As Jean Brodie, the Edinburgh schoolmistress of the 1930s whose pupils were the ‘crème de la crème’, she had a much wider audience and a proportionately larger camp following. For the first time, her stardom was totally secure. She had, as Peter Wood describes it, ‘a telepathic ray’ with an audience in the theatre; on screen, the same thing happened. Maggie won her first Oscar and entered the international arena on her own terms. As Cecil Wilson said in the
Daily Mail
, ‘After repeatedly stealing other people’s pictures, she now becomes a star in her own right.’ And
Jean Brodie
was the first X-rated movie to be chosen for the annual Royal Film Performance.

Robert was also in
Jean Brodie
, and indeed gave a fine performance as Teddy Lloyd, the raffish art master who paints a nubile schoolgirl (Pamela Franklin) in the nude, has an affair with her, yet desires the spinsterish Miss Brodie all along. The director was Ronald Neame; his grandson, Gareth Neame, who would grow up to be the executive director of
Downton Abbey
, features here, too, as a little boy painted on his potty in one of the art works strewn about Teddy’s studio scene of seduction. But from the moment we see Maggie stiffly cycling through Edinburgh in her sensible coat and hat, signalling a right turn into the Marcia Blaine School for Girls with the grim determination of a comically blinkered road menace, the movie belongs to one person. Muriel Spark’s novel had been adapted for the London stage in 1966 by Jay Presson Allen, and the title role taken by Vanessa Redgrave, succeeded by Anna Massey. Presson Allen did the screenplay for the producer Robert Fryer, who was adamant that Maggie should play the role. Executives at Twentieth Century Fox were much keener on the idea of Deborah Kerr.

It is tempting to see Maggie’s creation as a subtle revenge on her Scottish puritanical mother and indeed on the Oxford High School, which had, as Maggie admitted in an interview, more than a touch of Marcia Blaine. In her gingery blonde, glistening Marcel-waved wig and no-nonsense, shoulder-shuffling walk, Maggie was a comic totem of unbending rectitude. Her dictatorial aphorisms in the classroom – ‘Prop up your books in case of intruders,’ ‘Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life’ – were cloaking something more sinister, a seditious intent to inculcate enthusiasm among her charges for the men she most admired, Mussolini and General Franco. This darker side of Jean Brodie’s fanaticism escapes Maggie. You do not really feel that the performance acknowledges the mixture of bland academic exhortation and dangerous brainwashing in Spark’s heroine. (Her declared motto of ‘Lift, enliven, stimulate!’ was reworked for Lettice Douffet by Peter Shaffer as ‘Enlarge, enliven, enlighten!’) Her ‘gels’ must be prepared, she says, ‘to serve, suffer and sacrifice’. And she precipitates the death of one of them (played by a young Jane Carr), who rushes off to Spain and inadvertently joins the Fascists while her brother is fighting for the Republicans. Maggie plays a Brodie who lives immune to the world and even her own beliefs. But she also presents a chilling portrait of bottled-up sexuality and dazzling irony. Walk with your head up, she instructs the gels, ‘like Sybil Thorndike, a woman of notable mien’. The joke here, of course, and one of which Brodie is unaware, is that Sybil Thorndike was also a woman of notable left-wing spirit. Maggie’s laugh is gained on the glacial camp delivery of the line, without a trace of sarcasm. Miss Brodie is betrayed finally by the girl who is her sexual substitute in the life of Robert’s infatuated married art master. Maggie’s anguished cry of ‘Assassin!’ is not as blood-curdling as it might be. The nastiness of her character has been swamped in the enamelled perfection of her comedy performance.

The film opened almost simultaneously in New York, where the critical response was tumultuous. In the
New York Times
, Vincent Canby said there had not been such a display of controlled, funny, elegant theatricality since Laurence Olivier soft-shoed his way through
The Entertainer
nine years previously, and was one of many to comment on Maggie’s complicated and judiciously executed array of counterpointed moods, switches in voice levels and obliquely stated emotions. The cultish impact, and this is the first evidence of an intensely camp admiration that has attached to Maggie ever since, was registered by the influential columnist Rex Reed, who said that Maggie had made the profoundest effect on him of any actress since Kim Stanley in
The Goddess
in 1957. He drooled on prophetically in
Holiday
magazine about ‘one of the most magnificent screen performances in the history of the medium by Maggie Smith who takes the film into the realms of immortality. Words could never do justice to her work, to the skill and wit and sureness. If critics could give Oscars, she would already have one from me.’ Whatever the quibbles, Maggie’s Miss Brodie, far more severely and accurately Scottish than Vanessa Redgrave’s admirable stage performance, would enter a pantheon of flawed, inflamed schoolteachers on celluloid: Robert Donat in
Goodbye Mr Chips
, Bette Davis in
The Corn is Green
, Michael Redgrave in
The Browning Version
, Sidney Poitier in
To Sir, With Love
, Sandy Dennis in
Up the Down Staircase
, and Robin Williams in
Dead Poets Society
.

While filming continued on Jean Brodie, the ever-solicitous Christopher Downes was helping Maggie and Robert to house-hunt. Maggie’s agent Peter Dunlop also gave advice and extended his range of interests in Maggie’s life from contracts and tax demands to domestic requirements, especially nannies. Something larger than Eldon Road was now needed, and a 1902 villa on four floors near the Fulham Road seemed just the job. It remains in Maggie’s possession to this day. While the move was in hand, Maggie, Robert and baby Christopher stayed in Penelope Gilliatt’s house in Chelsea. Gilliatt’s marriage to John Osborne had just broken up, and their daughter, Nolan, was brought back to England by the nanny, Christine Miller, to visit her father. ‘Big Chris’, as she was affectionately known by the boys when older, immediately hit it off with Maggie and helped out with the baby because Christopher’s own nanny had suddenly left. She stayed with Penelope Gilliatt and Nolan for over ten years and later worked for Maggie and Beverley in Canada.

It began to make economic sense to think of a second home, a place in the country, and Maggie turned to her architect brothers for advice. Or rather, she turned to one of them. Ian had gone to America in 1959 and stayed there, building up a successful practice in civic architecture and specialising in big stores and university developments. Ian married in 1965, was divorced four years later, and remarried, acquiring a stepdaughter in the process. Alistair had married in 1963 and settled with Shân and their son, Angus, in Blackheath, where they became friends and neighbours of the actress Margaret Tyzack and her husband, years before the two Maggies won their Tonys in
Lettice and Lovage
. Prior to that, they had lived round the corner from Eldon Road. Shân had done a lot of Beverley’s typing for him. Alistair’s firm, Norman and Dawbarn, which specialised in designing hospitals and aerodromes overseas, was based in Guildford, Surrey. In 1968 he and Shân decided to move nearer the office. The plan was to find a big house suitable for dividing in half and sharing with Maggie and Robert. Guildford was only about thirty miles from London and easily reached at weekends. The first place Alistair saw was Tigbourne Court, an 1899 house designed by Edwin Lutyens, probably the most gifted and influential of British architects since Sir John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor. Lutyens was active in this part of Surrey at the turn of the century, and Tigbourne Court at Witley, one and a half miles from Chiddingfold and a few more from Guildford, was one of his most original and unusual inventions.

The main gate loomed suddenly on a busy road: a symmetrical entrance screen disguised an unusually asymmetrical house. The loggia of the main entrance had a three-gabled wall above, and each of the other entrances an independent forecourt formed by the shape of the building and the use of different paving. The walls were made of Bargate stone, drilled with lead, and there were red bricks in the chimney stacks and window surrounds. A pergola led to a garden of four acres, landscaped by Gertrude Jekyll, and a well. This was a very far cry from the cramped living conditions of Maggie’s childhood. But there was no intention of turning the address into a fashionable weekend bolthole for favoured showbiz chums as, for instance, Olivier and Vivien Leigh had done with Notley Abbey. Maggie has never been a great party-goer, let alone anything at all of a party-thrower. At first, the two families occupied one half of the house while the other half was redecorated, and then Maggie and Robert moved into the main suite of rooms. Alistair and Shân stayed in the servants’ quarters, which nonetheless had six bedrooms. Shân supervised the gardening and developed all the local contacts needed to run such an establishment. When Maggie and Robert appeared at weekends, usually late on Saturday nights, the two families could be as intimate or as separate as they wished. The arrangement worked very well.

Maggie fitted in a quick guest appearance in Richard Attenborough’s posh, gargantuan but irresistible film-directing début, a version of Joan Littlewood’s
Oh, What A Lovely War!
She appeared, in Judith Crist’s phrase, ‘raucous and insidious as a Lilith of the music hall’, a bespangled coquette singing the recruiting song ‘I’ll Make a Man of Any One of You’. In a way, she expressed the soul of the film, which is about enlistment through seduction, and death as a payment for experience. The sudden close-up on the grotesquely made-up Maggie at the end of her song is one of the movie’s most indelibly vulgarian images.

With transatlantic stardom and two new homes came another major award and a second dose of maternity. In March 1969 Maggie received the Variety Club award for film actress of the year in
Hot Millions
(other recipients included Jill Bennett and John Gielgud for stage performances in plays by John Osborne and Alan Bennett, and a twenty-eight-year-old Tom Jones as show-business personality of the year). One month later, on 21 April, Toby was born. Like Christopher, he was delivered by caesarean in the Middlesex Hospital. He had been expected two days later, but Maggie was impatient to get it over with and remembers more or less pushing Tommy Steele’s wife out of a hospital bed so that she could jump into it. Within six weeks, Maggie was rehearsing for a Chichester Festival Theatre revival of Wycherley’s
The Country Wife
.

She had been stung into action by a major rebuff at the National Theatre, where Olivier had asked her to choose between Viola in
Twelfth Night
and Rosalind in
As You Like It
. When Maggie sought to take the matter further, Olivier, who was increasingly jealous of Maggie’s and Robert’s appeal to the public, tartly informed her that he was going to produce an all-male version of
As You Like It
(he did, with Ronald Pickup as Rosalind) and a revival of
The Way of the World
with Geraldine McEwan in the ‘Maggie role’ of Millamant. This news was hurtfully imparted by letter after a particularly convivial weekend Maggie and Robert had spent with the Oliviers in Brighton. The hurt was not lessened by the fact that Olivier had posted the letter before his guests arrived.

Meanwhile, Maggie told Catherine Stott in the
Guardian
that she found babies fascinating once ‘they stop being the wobbly turnips they are for so long … One has lived selfishly for so long that it is suddenly rather an appalling thought that you really need to think about so many people, small people who really need to be thought about.’ Robert needed to be ‘thought about’ too, perhaps. During the Chichester period he collapsed for the first time with one of his subsequently regular bouts of acute depression aggravated by heavy drinking and overwork.

Margery Pinchwife was Maggie’s first new stage role for three years. The Chichester season was no longer an extension of the National. John Clements had succeeded Olivier as artistic director, and his
Country Wife
production team reflected his sober West End pedigree: it was directed and designed by two ‘old school’ veterans of the Binkie Beaumont era on Shaftesbury Avenue, Robert Chetwyn and Hutchinson Scott. The plot revolves around the untrue declaration of an incorrigible rake, Horner, that he is impotent and therefore to be trusted with other men’s wives. Margery, like Lady Plyant in
The Double Dealer
, is married to a jealous old fool, and in her major scene she writes a letter of rebuttal to Horner, dictated by Pinchwife, through which she refracts her own lascivious invitations.

Maggie risked the bucolic accent of the country cousin but made it a specifically consistent one. In a prim cap and low-cut dress, sensuously wielding the fateful quill pen, she emanated a twinkling air of wistful sexuality. Ronald Bryden observed how, in trailing a nasal, farmyard drawl about the stage, she made Margery’s stifled talent for living seem like some monstrous escaping vegetable, burying the rest of the play knee-deep in eager, luxuriant greenery. She put the seal on her performance, as any great Margery must, in the letter scene where, panting and hanging her tongue almost to her chin, she climbed half onto the writing-table with anxiety, and caught the quill successively in her hair, her eye and her inkwell. Christopher Downes likened Maggie in this scene to Ethel Merman doing a big Cole Porter number. Its effect on the audience was galvanic. The night Downes went, the inkwell fell off the table and Maggie caught it just before it hit the floor. He thought this one of the most incredible pieces of ‘business’ he had ever seen, but Maggie assured him afterwards that it had never happened before. At the end of the scene, ‘poor old Gordon Gostelow’ as Pinchwife came on with the line, ‘What have you done?’ and of course, says Downes, ‘got a huge laugh; he was ever so pleased with himself’.