Maggie Smith: A Biography (21 page)

The Canadian adventure was to a large extent subsidised by three Hollywood movies Maggie made, none of them masterpieces, but all guaranteed to maintain her international profile and keep her in good screen company. As she restored herself as a stage actress, so she underpinned her screen status. Two of the three films involved Neil Simon, whose revue sketch Maggie had performed in
New Faces
at the start of her career. Two featured David Niven, who became a good friend of Maggie and Beverley, and one of them won Maggie her second Oscar.

The wackiest was
Murder by Death
, which was Neil Simon’s first original script for the cinema (most of his screenplays are adapted from his own stage hits). The director, another débutant, was Robert Moore, responsible for Broadway’s first commercial gay play, Mart Crowley’s
The Boys in the Band
, and for Simon’s musical (with a score by Burt Bacharach)
Promises, Promises
, itself adapted from an earlier movie,
The Apartment
.
Murder by Death
is a witty attempt at a parody of a murder mystery in which send-ups of fictional detectives, each with a motive, are summoned to ‘a dinner and a murder’ at a fog-bound manor in California. The host is Truman Capote, making his acting début as the sinister connoisseur, Lionel Twain, abetted by a deaf- and-dumb cook (Nancy Walker) and by a blind, inscrutable butler (Alec Guinness). The butler’s name is Bensonmum, confusedly thought to be Benson by the ma’am who enquires after it. Guinness can then say that, no ma’am, the name is not Benson, ma’am, but Bensonmum, ma’am.

Peter Sellers as Sidney Wang is a glorious steal of Charlie Chan, and also Lionel’s resentful stepson; the other detectives are near misses for Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple and Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade. And David Niven and Maggie are Dick and Dora Charleston (as opposed to Nick and Nora Charles in Hammett’s
The Thin Man
), heavily in debt to the old rogue. The delicious barminess of the script and the expertise of the acting from such a blissfully ideal group of performers never quite coagulate into screen magic. Maggie has her moments, as do they all, and she looks ravishing in a low-cut white dinner gown. She and Niven are billeted in Wang’s wing of the manor and, darting an appalled look at the blind butler, Maggie half-mutters to Niven, ‘Don’t let him park the car, Dickie.’

Similarly, Capote, who propels himself around the dining room in a wheelchair and at one point whizzes rapidly backwards out of sight, prompts Maggie to comment, half-interestedly, ‘I hope he knows how to stop that thing.’ The dénouement hinges on the removal of a face-mask and a riddle of double identity, after the detectives, with the exception of Peter Sellers, appear to have been bumped off.

The ‘real’ Poirot appears in the pear-shape of Peter Ustinov in
Death on the Nile
, where Maggie picks up the thread not only with her old sparring partner in
Hot Millions
, but also with Niven, the costume designer Anthony Powell, who deservedly won an Oscar for his work on this film, and Jack Cardiff, whose superb cinematography is one of the best elements of John Guillermin’s somewhat leisurely overall direction. The movie was a sequel to the hugely successful
Murder on the Orient Express
, in which Albert Finney had concocted his version of Poirot – strenuously bizarre, less urbane than Ustinov, at least as memorable – for Sidney Lumet. It had a screenplay by Anthony Shaffer, Peter’s twin brother, author of
Sleuth
and the unhappy Robert Stephens vehicle,
Murderer
, with music by Fellini’s regular composer, Nino (‘The Glass Mountain’) Rota; sumptuous Egyptian locations in the first half; lush on-board period interiors (the year was 1937) in the second; and a cast list including Mia Farrow, Angela Lansbury, Jane Birkin, Jon Finch as an incongruous Marxist in a beret, and a hopeful new heart-throb, soon to become a fixture in American television soaps, Simon MacCorkindale.

Whereas in Stratford, Ontario, Maggie was an inspirational cog in the wheel, here she was merely one of several extraordinary spokes. The film spooled round and she did her stuff. She played Miss Bowers, a severe travelling companion, masseuse and secretary to a rich widow, Mrs van Schuyler. This would not be all that significant had Mrs van Schuyler not been played by Bette Davis, enshrined in a series of exotic costumes and complicated headpieces like a glittering lizard encased in a mummy’s tomb. Within the limitations of the film’s dramatic potential, this double act, played almost as a shadow duel to the chummily conspiratorial ‘old pals’ act of Ustinov and Niven, looks like one of the great cinematic liaisons of the day. In their scenes together, you sit watching an old legend slugging it out with a new pretender. And one leaves the film rather regretting that we do not follow Maggie and Miss Davis on their next expedition to the Gobi desert; Maggie receives news of this plan with all the enthusiasm of someone being sentenced to death.

The story’s murder victim is a grotesquely rich honeymoon girl, Linnet Ridgeway, played by the beautiful Lois Chiles, whose father ruined Miss Bowers’s family on his ascent to the financial summit and thereby doomed Maggie to a life of grumbling servitude. Mrs van Schuyler’s holiday on the Nile is rife with the possibility of fall-out. Davis slaps Maggie down with a warning to keep a civil tongue in her head or she’ll be out of a job, to which Maggie scathingly replies: ‘This town is filled with rich old widows willing to pay for a little grovelling and a body massage … You go ahead and fire me!’ By the time they clamber aboard the steamer in Alexandria, the double act is bristling with an air of uneasy truce. Maggie confides to the captain that ‘the roasting afternoon sun will do wonders for those jaundiced jowls of hers’, while Davis acidly apologises for Maggie ‘accidentally’ barging into Lois Chiles with the excuse that she once went fifteen rounds with Jack Dempsey. Shaffer’s script glints and ripples along like this for well over two hours, but the second half of the film is fatally devoted to awkward flashbacks following up each possible enactment of the murder and an extended resolution, again using flashbacks, of what actually happened. Maggie and Bette Davis slip tantalisingly away, but not before Maggie makes the most of one heavily inflected hint at her spiritual condition. Consoling Mia Farrow after yet another surprise revelation, she conveys the whole history of her character by confessing that ‘It’s been my experience that men are least attracted to women who treat them well.’

This sexual defensiveness, compounded with a deep sense of injury, is a common trait in many of Maggie’s performances. The prickliness, combined with vulnerability, is a distinctive element in a great many of her heroines, and is rather obviously exploited in
California Suite
, where Maggie plays the actress Diana Barrie, vaguely anticipating the receipt of an Oscar for her performance in a movie she thoroughly despises. That Maggie herself went on to win an Oscar, as best supporting actress, is an irony that was never lost on her. Nor, indeed, was it lost on her loyal father. Nat was reported in the
Oxford Mail
as saying that he was delighted, but surprised, as ‘the film itself was somewhat bitty’.

As with the murder films,
California Suite
was constructed on the ‘
Grand Hotel
and fill the screen with stars’ principle. Simon adapted his four short 1976 Broadway plays to show five couples simultaneously checking into the Beverly Hills Hotel for different reasons. Jane Fonda is a divorced career journalist locked in a child-custody battle with Alan Alda. Walter Matthau has arrived ahead of Elaine May for his nephew’s barmitzvah and is assigned a prostitute as a gift for the night by his brother. Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor as a couple of accident-prone doctors are on vacation from Chicago with their wives (they crash the car en route to a Japanese restaurant). And Maggie is in town for the Oscars with her wayward bisexual husband, Michael Caine, who sells antiques and purchases young men.

Michael Caine, one year older than Maggie and busy in movies since 1956, remembers
California Suite
as ‘a very enjoyable film’. But director Herbert Ross continually badgered Maggie for not, in his opinion, doing enough. ‘I thought you were supposed to be funny,’ he would yell at her, an approach which did not go down all that well, especially as Maggie was determined not to make a meal of a script heaving with quite enough coarseness already. ‘As a result,’ says Caine, ‘she spent a lot of time on the set in floods of tears.’

Caine could have worked with Maggie on
The Private Ear
and
The Public Eye
, but he denies any knowledge of having been first-choice casting as the besotted music-lover in the first play. Their chemistry in
California Suite
is just right, in spite of the mawkish romanticism of a script which requires Maggie to pull her errant husband down on top of her in bed and, in what Kael describes as ‘one of the most degrading of all scenes: a woman pleading with a man – who does not desire her – to make love to her’, request servicing: ‘Screw the Academy Awards, screw the Oscars, screw me, Sidney, please …’ Caine wears his role of an automatic filling station with dignified levity. Maggie despises him because he has used her celebrity to mark his dance card. She finds him doing this at the end of the tawdry ceremony and, after an evening of ups and downs, crunchingly invites him to continue the motion.

Back at the hotel, Maggie cleans her teeth in the nude. As she slips on her nightgown, we catch a fleeting glimpse of her full left bosom in profile. ‘Never again,’ exclaims Walter Matthau after the prostitute passes out on him after consuming a bottle of tequila. You can imagine Maggie muttering the same phrase through clenched teeth along the corridor as Ross bullies her through the bedroom scene with Caine. The final straw for Diana Barrie is that the film with which she has failed to win an Oscar is being shown on the flight back to London after the junket. Caine says that Ray Stark, the film’s producer, was so taken with the characters he and Maggie played that he promised to get Neil Simon to write a sequel for them alone. This never materialised, though the dream partnership was belatedly renewed twenty years later in Peter Yates’s misfired
It All Came True
.

Caine and Maggie liked each other a lot. Both hail from the wrong side of the tracks, both have a devastating sense of humour and neither tolerates very much of the bullshitting hyperbole and self-importance that surround their industry. Caine, the ultimate screen professional, plays every scene knowing exactly where the director has placed his cameras. He was enthralled by Maggie’s indifference to such technical niceties, noting how all her concentration was channelled into the details of the performance itself. The rest she left entirely in the lap of a director who, for some reason, had decided that the best way of handling her was to reduce her to tears. Caine jovially offered Maggie cold comfort: ‘As long as they’re on your back, that’s all right because they’re not on mine.’ Caine had a good time. He said that acting with Maggie was like attending a one-woman masterclass on comic technique, adding that he would gladly enrol again – ‘as long as they provide plenty of handkerchiefs’.

Pauline Kael said that Maggie performs in this movie like a professional who is used to doing the dramatist’s job for him. Frank Rich, writing in
Time
magazine, thought that Maggie gave her best screen performance to date:

The critical reception was generally more enthusiastic in America than in Britain. Maybe this was because Diana Barrie had triumphed in triviality, bitten the bullet and sold out to Yankee showbiz; she had spent eight years with the National and had finally been nominated for an Oscar because of her work on ‘a nauseating little comedy’. America staked its final claim on British talent in the bestowal of its ultimate accolade. In
California Suite
, Maggie articulates the dilemma of the great actress in search of a proper reward in the face of personal disappointments. For all its faults, the film memorably recounts the price of that struggle in the partnership of arguably our greatest post-war British screen stars, Maggie Smith and Michael Caine.

When she was nominated for the Oscar as best supporting actress in
California Suite
, Maggie stayed in the Beverly Hills Hotel, where the film itself was set, with her friend and hairdresser Patricia Millbourn. In the film, the Jane Fonda character describes Hollywood as ‘like Paradise with a lobotomy’. Diana Barrie (Maggie) doesn’t understand why she’s attending the Oscars ceremony: ‘Glenda Jackson never comes, and she’s nominated every goddamn year!’ The spooky reality of her and Patricia’s experience was echoed in its celluloid representation. On screen, Diana Barrie says, ‘No woman can look good at five in the afternoon – except possibly Tatum O’Neal!’ Maggie and Patricia did indeed have to be ready and all dressed up in the middle of the afternoon. And, as in the film, champagne and caviar had been sent up to the room. Or rather, round to their allotted cottage in the hotel grounds, well away from the central brouhaha. They stood under a lamp-post waiting for their lift; in the film, Maggie sweeps imperiously through the front entrance through a riot of fans and photographers (‘Christ, the royal treatment!’).

Patricia Millbourn recalls that Maggie had prepared nothing to say in the event of winning the Oscar and that, when she won, she duly said it: ‘I didn’t think I had a hope in hell.’ She was only the third actress ever to win in both the best actress and the best supporting actress categories, following the fine examples of Ingrid Bergman and Helen Hayes.

California Suite
is in part about not winning an Oscar, but the ceremony is not depicted. Instead, Maggie’s actress acidly remarks on the general decline in the standard of face-lifts and hair-transplants, and the fact that a prize has duly gone to ‘Miss Teeth and No Talent’. The words could have been taken out of her own mouth. After the real-life ceremony, a big, informal party was thrown as usual by the agent Swifty Lazar and theatre producer Irene Selznick, but Maggie found herself herded towards the official reception for the winners. She was terrified of not knowing anyone there, so she slipped away to find friends, including Patricia, at the alternative bash. ‘I hope you don’t mind me coming to this one instead,’ she said to Miss Selznik. ‘Oh no,’ replied the hostess, ‘it’s perfectly all right, because you won!’