Maggie Smith: A Biography (20 page)

At the same time, Nicholas Pennell, who played Victor, felt that Maggie allowed for enough resonance in their relationship to suggest there might have been something in it in the first place. And the second-act quarrel is preceded by the hilarious sequence of Maggie trying to get comfortable on the sofa, adjusting her limbs, jostling, lying down and moving agitatedly about for a full two minutes. ‘To use a Maggie phrase,’ says Bedford, ‘there is nothing to discuss about those arms. There is nothing like them and I don’t think there ever has been.’

Bedford’s Elyot was hailed by Jay Carr in the
Detroit News
as a brilliant black diamond of a performance, generous and solidly motivated. The emotional undertow was not as pronounced as it was with Robert Stephens, but the style combined truth with polish. Maggie was good for Bedford because of the demands she made on him: ‘In
Private Lives
, I always used to go into her dressing room during the half and she was usually very low. One day she was sitting with the mascara brush just gazing into the mirror. “How are you, darling?” I said. “Oh, darling,” she replied, “one is nothing, off!” And of course the phrase has entered our repertoire.’ Along with ‘ghastly’, ‘richocheting around’, and ‘deranged’.

Back in Oxford, just as
The Guardsman
was about to open in Los Angeles, Meg suffered a cerebral haemorrhage in the front room of 55 Church Hill Road: she had always enjoyed good health, apart from the recurrent minor affliction of sinusitis. Nat had gone upstairs to write a letter and she called him down to the front sitting room, said she was tired, put her arms around his neck and collapsed. She lay for seven weeks in a coma in the Radcliffe Infirmary before passing on, in a freezing cold January, at the age of eighty. Nat was grateful that Meg never recovered from the stroke. She would have been a helpless invalid, a vegetable. But he was devastated. A month before he died himself, fifteen years later, he tearfully pointed out that nothing much had changed in the house since that day: ‘I’ve kept up the repairs. But the furnishings and the photographs of Margaret, all of that, has never been changed. And I never will. If I changed that, I’m going to change the vision that’s been built up over the years. It would have been lovely for Meg to know that Margaret had become a Dame.’

Maggie was by no means indifferent to her mother’s collapse, but having been assured by Nat that there was nothing to be done while she was in the coma, and that obviously she could not communicate with anyone, she felt obliged to continue in
The Guardsman
at the Ahmanson. During this period, she had taken serious stock of her own health and had been to a Chinese hypnotist in Stratford in order to give up smoking between the first two Stratford seasons. In California, where she was filming, she visited a psychic nutritionist whom Bedford had recommended to her. She spent a lot of time ‘shrinking into elevators’ to avoid guests who mistook her for Vanessa Redgrave. She also spent more time not explaining herself than was her wont. She told Gina Mallett, the sharp critic on the
Toronto Star
, who monitored the Phillips regime as carefully as anyone, that she only felt real on stage: ‘I don’t like myself very much. I’d much rather be someone else.’

When Meg had eventually died, Maggie had been unable to return to England for the funeral, unwilling to break her overriding commitment to the public and the management at the Ahmanson.
The Way of the World
from the 1975 season had initially been booked to cover her release, but the expense of such a large-cast show was prohibitive. Phillips, Maggie and Brian Bedford had agreed to fill the schedule with the Molnár. ‘What could I do?’ exclaimed Maggie to Gina Mallett. ‘One can’t just chuck a show.’ Even as a girl, Maggie had never been close to her mother. In adult life, she remained even more distant. And no one – Robert, the boys, Beverley, her parents, dead or alive – took precedence over her professional duties, as she saw them. This was never a matter of choice or decision as far as she was concerned, but of simple fact. She did feel the loss endured by Nat but she did not return to Oxford for a good few years.

After two years in Los Angeles and two years in Canada, Chris and Toby now returned to Surrey and Tigbourne Court, where Alistair and Shân Smith took charge. They were enrolled at a local prep school and spent most of their time at home in their aunt and uncle’s side of the house. Years later, Christopher said that, while he enjoyed ‘the brilliant gardens’ of Tigbourne, he was ‘freaked out’ by spending most of his time living in one half of the ‘Gothic pile’ and looking through the windows into his own house. Toby, too, found this ‘quite unpleasant’. The prep school had an ‘incredibly religious headmaster’, and the boys found themselves seriously behind the rest of the school because they had not learned any Latin or French in Canada. Christine Miller had outlived her usefulness, though not her capacity for friendship. Beverley had more time to deal with the domestic arrangements as well as his own writing and paperwork, and the boys had gone. Maggie was in the middle of some of the most taxing roles of her career. Christine slipped away to work as a secretary and house-minder for members of the
Monty Python
team.

Christine always felt that Maggie was much closer to Nat than to Meg: ‘Meg wasn’t a very soft person and she had some strange, old-fashioned ideas about discipline. I once took the boys to Oxford and left them there for a few days. She seemed to me just like a very stern, staid old lady.’ Toby remembers Granny Meg as ‘always knitting. She terrified the life out of Nat, who liked his drop of whisky at night. He’d creep around the house avoiding her like the plague and pouring out his toddy.’ The boys thought of her as ‘quite warm, really’.

She had not seemed warm to Maggie, but at least she could no longer advise her daughter to complete a secretarial course as a safeguard against the possibility of failure in show business. But Maggie’s career had baffled Meg. She took little pride in it and probably never understood what she had done to deserve such a peculiar and unconventionally successful little girl.

With the boys tucked up safely in Surrey and Nat pottering around happily in Oxford, Maggie settled in at Stratford feeling reasonably content, or as near to that condition as she would ever be. Beverley told Gina Mallett that the only serious worry in life was luggage, and Maggie, flitting between England, Hollywood and Stratford added, ‘I don’t honestly know where home is. We’re nomadic. It is odd, but it doesn’t worry me very much. I guess I’ll go where the work is. It’s a marvellous new kind of life.’

Britain was denied not only some of her greatest performances, but also some of the best Shakespearean productions of the decade. Few critics had seen the equal, for instance, of Robin Phillips’s production of
Richard III
with Bedford as Crookback and Maggie as Queen Elizabeth. Ronald Bryden said that, on that evidence, Phillips was fit to join the inner ring of great directors – Peter Brook, Peter Hall, Ingmar Bergman, Roger Planchon and Jerzy Grotowski – capable of orchestrating a disparate group of actors into an entity. Margaret Tyzack had also joined the company, replacing Kate Reid, who was ill, to play the Countess in
All’s Well That Ends Well
, Queen Margaret in
Richard III
, and Mrs Alving in Ibsen’s
Ghosts
(in which she scored an unequivocal triumph).

Maggie’s high, light comedy was rightly seen within the proscenium Avon Theatre, but all the major Shakespearean work was on the Festival thrust stage. Phillips had concocted an imaginative and intuitive response to Maggie’s personality. He knew that Cleopatra was the first of the Ptolemies to bother to speak a variety of languages, as did Elizabeth I. He felt that, in Maggie, there was an extraordinary link with past times:

The 1977 season – Robin’s third, Maggie’s second, and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stratford Festival – coincided with the Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II. Phillips revived his 1976
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
with Maggie succeeding Jessica Tandy as both Hippolyta and Titania. She was, in fact, those characters as dreamed by Elizabeth I, and the production opened with Bottom’s Dream sung on tape by Hippolyta attired as Gloriana herself, in gold and black with a wig of startling crimson ringlets. Not so much Bottom’s Dream as Gloriana’s trip, mused Michael Billington: the queen saw herself not only as Titania and Hippolyta, but also as Helena, as played by Martha Henry. Maggie’s articulation of Titania’s ‘These are the forgeries of jealousy’ speech, delivered standing stock still, her arms extended, was reckoned magical by all; its devastating simplicity and masterful phrasing and control are apparent on the video. Referring to the Indian boy, the bone of contention between Titania and Oberon, she reveals that his mother, ‘being mortal’, of that boy did die. It is a moment lit with sudden pathos, similar to the moment in
Much Ado About Nothing
where Maggie’s Beatrice invoked the pain her mother endured in childbirth. Gloriana also commandeered the ‘lunatic, the lover and the poet’ speech of Theseus in Act Five as a sort of explanation of her intervention in such ‘shaping fantasies’. Robin confesses he was unable to have Maggie on the stage as Elizabeth-cum-Hippolyta and not allow her mind to encompass that speech: ‘She is in tune with Shakespeare, as she is with both sexes. Which is why I think of her as a creature. There are things which she hasn’t learned, but which she simply
knows
. She knows about the Elizabethans, and she knows how to speak Congreve, and lots of other things that you can’t possibly know from having gone to Cambridge,’ a sly dig at the Oxbridge directors who dominated the British subsidised theatre after Olivier, and certainly at the National; Peter Hall, Trevor Nunn, Richard Eyre and Nicholas Hytner were all Cambridge graduates.

She knew, too, how to stand still and not move her hands. For all its imperfections, the video of
Macbeth
shows Maggie in her long black wig and floor-length black dress standing centre stage, pencil-thin and sleek, hands by her sides, calling on spirits to unsex her here and take her milk for gall. As Bryden says, she, not Macbeth, was ‘the great imaginer’ in this production – ‘I feel the future in the instant’ – rhapsodically ahead of the game and in for a penny, in for a pound. She moves her right hand to her left breast on ‘I have given suck and know how tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me.’ (Maggie always considered it cruelly ironic that she, who has splendid breasts, had experienced difficulty producing milk for her own sons.) The hand scythes down again on ‘dash’d the brains out’.

Maggie had arrived late from Hollywood for rehearsals (
California Suite
was overrunning), so her Macbeth, Douglas Rain, had rehearsed for several weeks, and worked out his own performance, with a stand-in. The result was unevenness and uncertainty all round, but Maggie made sure she took care of herself. She had asked Coral Browne for advice. ‘It’s a fucker, darling,’ Miss Browne had soothingly replied, ‘and all I can say is keep your eyes open in the sleepwalking scene. For some reason, it rivets the fuckers.’ Thus reassured, Maggie did precisely that, gliding hauntingly through the scene in a long white nightgown, reaching out for only the second time in her performance (the first is on ‘Full of scorpions is your mind’) on her quadruple ‘Come’ when she hears the echo of the knocking at the gate.

Richard Eder of the
New York Times
thought that this final wandering speech, ‘rubbing her hands, recalling her action in a broken voice and reaching for the husband who has moved into a separate nightmare’, was ‘pure grief’. But the production divided critics and audiences alike. Ronald Bryden was more enthusiastic than most: ‘It is hard and dark as onyx, austerely unfamiliar, jumping over time and expectation like a bad dream. But few Macbeths can have looked deeper into Shakespeare’s inferno.’ After the dead-of-night murder of Banquo and the escape of Fleance, there was delivered one of Phillips’s most spectacular coups, Bernard Levin recalls, as the lights came up almost immediately on the banquet – ‘tables, glasses, everything. They must have done it in fifteen seconds and there was no noise at all. It was astounding, and a complete gasp went up from the audience.’ Maggie told Levin later that she knew nothing of how it was done, was totally in the dark and had to be led to her place for the scene.

No such guesswork attended her Rosalind, one of the roles about which Maggie had rightly felt proprietorial for many years. It seemed absurd that she should have had to wait until the age of forty-three to play it, older even than was Edith Evans, the other most famous ‘over-age’ Rosalind (Dame Edith played the part aged thirty-eight, and then again aged forty-nine). Phillips set the comedy in the late eighteenth century, the period of George III, and Robin Fraser Paye’s design was of a single large gnarled oak tree on a grassy knoll, the actors dressed in big hats, flowered skirts, bustles and riding breeches. The stage shimmered like a watercolour painting by Thomas Rowlandson.

As You Like It
opened in August 1977, but most of the critical approval was clustered around the revival in June 1978. Watching the video, you can hear the audience falling in love with Rosalind, just as she had fallen in love with a younger man. As with her Millamant, the performance is perfectly balanced on that razor’s edge between tears and laughter, with the underlying urgency of a woman energetically seizing her last chance for love. And of course the speed and wittiness of Rosalind’s interventions in the forest were exactly matched by Maggie’s qualities as an actress, and her physical beauty was compounded by a strange, ethereal sadness.

Orlando was played by a blond, fresh-faced and well-built Canadian actor called Jack Wetherall. Brian Bedford chipped in with a darkly confidential Jaques, punctuating his ‘Seven Ages of Man’ speech with some wonderful pauses. The rest of the performances look, frankly, a bit dodgy, but the balancing and pacing obviously carried the night and day. Levin was convinced that Maggie’s Rosalind was one of the definitive performances of his lifetime. He detected the fuller music of her marvellous voice and approvingly observed that, although she had rid herself of the old vocal mannerisms, she could still go knock-kneed at the slightest provocation. Levin was never outdone on the effect of Rosalind’s adieu: ‘She spoke the epilogue like a chime of golden bells. But what she looked like as she did so I cannot tell you; for I saw it through eyes curtained with tears of joy.’

Robin Phillips felt that the clown tendency in Maggie’s Rosalind had been exorcised in a particular morning of rehearsal when they were considering the Rosalind/Ganymede protestation of how turbulently she would be in love: ‘more jealous of thee than a Barbary cock-pigeon over his hen, more clamorous than a parrot against rain, more new-fangled than an ape, more giddy in my desires than a monkey’. Encouraging Maggie to be serious, Robin suggested that she should first of all make it as funny as possible. She improvised an entire menagerie and monkey-house, squawking and swinging around the tree that was the single feature of the set. The entire company was laid out on the floor with laughter and Robin recalled how remarkable had been the evocation of the tree where no tree stood:

On resuming rehearsal, Phillips took the scene in the other direction, towards the pain of the disguise and protection, and, because of what had gone before, ‘Maggie was able to do that in a remarkable and very moving way. And of course that was finally in the production.’

Maggie’s idea of social life was, and is, extremely limited, so she did not feel particularly deprived in Stratford. If a performance had not gone well, or even if it had, she would philosophically inform Brian Bedford that there was nothing for it but ‘to get untimely ripped’, and quantities of champagne or white wine were duly consumed. Cold meats and the occasional cooked goose were laid out for friends at home after the shows. Nicholas Pennell recalls one lively evening in the large kitchen in Cambria Street when Bernard Hopkins, an extrovert member of the acting company, was calling everyone ‘she’, and a conversation at one end of the table with Beverley was cut across by Maggie savagely intervening from the other, ‘Will you please not call my husband Mavis.’ The centre of social life was the Church restaurant, which Robin’s partner Joe Mandel had opened, retaining the spacious ecclesiastical open-plan interior, the Gothic windows and the stained glass, and painting the walls in a restful coffee colour. The food was excellent, the prices beyond the pay packets of the humbler company members. Maggie and Robin, Beverley and Joe would always sit at the first table on the left by the front door, and this area became known by other festival personnel as ‘bomb alley’. The assumption was that it was wired for sound and microphoned to pick up any passing gossip or unofficial information.

Robin says that he never really socialised with Maggie at all. He had dinner at Cambria Street just once, during the first year. ‘Our relationship through work is probably deeper and closer than any has ever been, but it is entirely work, work as we think of work, a very intimate relationship.’ After their time in Stratford, Maggie visited Robin and Joe on the farm they had bought in Ontario. She and Robin were looking through the window at the lakes and fields, the chipmunks and the squirrels in the feeder. And the birds. Talk had turned to yellowhammers and speckled tits. Suddenly Maggie said, ‘There’s a yellow screwdriver.’ Robin, an English country boy, knew rather less about Canadian bird varieties than about the robins and chaffinches in his native Haslemere, and had certainly never seen such a creature. He wanted to see it, looked hard, couldn’t, and became furious. Finally, he saw what Maggie was agitatedly pointing out: a workman’s tool for putting in screws, lying on the garden path. Phillips says that they could not speak for three hours afterwards and were so helpless with laughter that they had to go off on separate walks to relieve the agony. Soon afterwards, Robin came to England to direct a rock opera about Joan of Arc at the Birmingham Rep. He checked into his hotel room and went to the bathroom. On the towel rail, resting on the towel, was a tiny yellow screwdriver. It had somehow been pressed against the wall and had become stuck to the towel. At first, he believed Maggie had arranged for it to be left there. But she hadn’t.

During
As You Like It
, when she was off stage, Maggie used to walk through the park because Robin had suggested that it would be a good idea to remain in contact with the trees. People would sometimes stop and stare when they came across her in costume, apparently nowhere near the theatre. But she always was. And she walked, every Rosalind day, through the trees.