Maggie Smith: A Biography (40 page)

When called to the stage as a guest presenter by host Damian Lewis, basking in the first flush of his
Homeland
fame, the absurdly over-dressed Dame Edna Everage, aka Barry Humphries, kept things simple in giving the oddly named award for comedy to David Walliams for his Bottom in a fairly modest West End revival of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
and by clarifying why Lord Fellowes wasn’t to be lured away from writing
Downton Abbey
: ‘Maggie needs the work.’ Maggie managed a wry, self-deprecatory smile before taking the stage herself to modestly accept the even more oddly titled Theatre Icon award, yet another discretionary gong, one of several that now seem to be an add-on to the core judicial procedure. But how touchingly she accepted it: ‘I’ve done nothing in the theatre to justify this,’ she said, astonishingly, adding that the pleasure of appearing in the National Theatre’s gala had made her want to do more. But what? she wondered. Did anyone have any suggestions? Would someone write something for her to do on the stage? She recalled that when she received her first
Evening Standard
award as best actress in Peter Shaffer’s
The Private Ear
and
The Public Eye
(in 1961, starring with Kenneth Williams), she promised ‘to do better next term’. Perhaps this was the moment to reflect that the one thing lacking from her CV in the past twenty years is any sign of classic roles on the stage. What could she have done, what might she still do? The Countess of Roussillon in
All’s Well That Ends Well
, perhaps, or Constance in
King John
, Lady Wishfort, that old peeled wall, in
The Way of the World
? One can hardly see her scurrying off to Stratford-upon-Avon, at this late stage, to play, as Eileen Atkins did in 2014, the wonderful and not too demanding title role of the Jacobean tragedy
The Witch of Edmonton
.

A year later she went as high as she could go (barring the Order of Merit) when, on 17 October 2014, she was made a Companion of Honour by the Queen at Windsor Castle, joining her select contemporaries Peter Brook, Judi Dench and Ian McKellen, who were inducted, respectively, in 1998, 2005 and 2007. It’s a discretionary honour, numbers limited to sixty-five, including the Queen, but standing today at about four dozen. The Order of Merit, restricted to twenty-four members, includes Tom Stoppard as sole theatrical representative (painters and composers do better among all the Tory grandees), but Maggie should feel reasonably at home on a list of past CHs who include such pioneering forebears as Lilian Baylis (who founded the Old Vic), Annie Horniman (who founded the Abbey in Dublin and the first regional theatre in Great Britain, the Gaiety in Manchester), Sybil Thorndike, Alec Guinness, Paul Scofield and Harold Pinter. Lady Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham, would never countenance such company, nor approve so rackety and bohemian an upstart mob. But this, insofar as awards mean anything at all, was the pinnacle.

Maggie’s older brother, Ian, the surviving twin, is long retired and settled in France, with his wife. Toby and his family live in a newly fashionable
quartier
in the East End of London, and they all spend half the year, at the moment, on location in South Africa, where Toby is filming a cable channel series
Black Sails
, a kind of prequel to
Treasure Island
; Toby plays Captain Flint, and Long John Silver is still a biped. Chris says he ‘chugs along’, having opened at Hampstead Theatre in March 2015 in a charming revival of Hugh Whitemore’s
Stevie
, alongside Zoë Wanamaker as the poet Stevie Smith, author of ‘Not Waving but Drowning’.

For Maggie, the recent television fame has been a mixed blessing. When filming in Paris on
My Old Lady
she was mobbed by
Downton Abbey
fans, something that has never happened to her. She found the experience as disturbing as being told, two or three years ago, that there were seven million worldwide tweets on her birthday. She is not new-media, or social-media, savvy and is one of that generation, says Chris, who will have no truck with any of it. She is distressed by the fact that she now feels she cannot go out without being accosted by tourists, but her natural instinct for camouflage is not completely defunct. She still shops in the local Waitrose. One day, she was looking at prawns and a child said, ‘I’ve seen you somewhere before.’ His mother said, ‘Don’t be rude, she’s just a lady in the supermarket.’ She couldn’t have been more pleased. A lady in the supermarket. A lady in the van. A lady in lavender.

My quest – ‘pursuit’ sounds far too dramatic and slightly perverse – for Maggie Smith began in November 1990, in preparation for an earlier edition of this book, when she was coming towards the end of the Broadway run of Peter Shaffer’s
Lettice and Lovage
at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. I wrote to her, saying that I was coming to New York and asking if, although we had never met, she could spare me a few minutes to discuss something that had arisen, the matter of a biography. There was none. I had been asked by a publisher to see if I could supply one. I added that I had been raised in the place of her birth, Ilford in Essex, before removing, like her, but as an undergraduate, to the more amenable environment of Oxford, though why I should have thought that would have any bearing on the matter I’ve no idea.

When I arrived in New York on a Wednesday, I checked into the Algonquin Hotel and, on an impulse, before I had even unpacked, wrote her a note announcing my arrival and apologising for pestering her. I remembered to add that if by any chance she had not received my first letter this second communication would appear both puzzling and impertinent. I walked three or four blocks across the theatre district to the Ethel Barrymore and left the note at the stage door. I returned to the Algonquin and was deep in that strange process of acclimatisation to a new hotel bedroom, slowly unpacking my suitcase, when the telephone rang. Alarmingly, it was Maggie Smith. She must have literally just come off the stage. My heart was in my mouth, my underpants in my hands.

I stumbled out something grotesquely crass about writing a book. ‘Ooh, how absolutely ghastly. How absolutely awful. I can’t think of anything worse.’ The voice twanged and gurgled, rich with the strain of a demanding performance. I thought of a glass of madeira. ‘Ooh, but there’s nothing to write about.’ Your career. ‘But I haven’t done anything. I don’t know what it is I do.’ I was flummoxed. I said something to the effect that she must be relieved she was coming to the end of an exhausting run, during which she had suffered the aftermath of a painful back injury and other assorted physical misfortunes. ‘Six hundred performances is quite enough. I’ve told them I can’t do the American tour next year. Vanessa’s going to do it.’ Vanessa? ‘Vanessa Redgrave.’ Of course; as opposed to all the other Vanessas, dumbo. (Vanessa never did do the tour of
Lettice and Lovage
; she fell out with the management after remarks she made about America’s involvement in the Gulf War of 1991.) The conversation suddenly, and still alarmingly, became relaxed. ‘How do you like the Algonquin?’ Very much, I said, except that I didn’t think they had dusted much since the last time I was here. ‘Yes, Michael Blakemore [the director of
Lettice and Lovage
] said something like that.’ How is your hotel? ‘Ooh, it’s just like a glorified bed and breakfast really.’ It wasn’t. ‘I can’t wait to get home.’ Was there any chance I could call backstage to see her between the shows on Saturday? ‘No, I can’t do that. Ring me on Friday morning at about eleven o’clock.’ Fine, but I had a ticket for the Saturday matinée. ‘Ooh, no, you mustn’t do that. It’ll be awful at the matinée. Well, do come back. I only said not to because Joe Mankiewicz’s maid – do you know Joe?’ I didn’t, but knew that this distinguished Hollywood writer and director, creator of the best backstage movie ever,
All About Eve
, had directed her with Rex Harrison in the 1967 remake of Ben Jonson’s
Volpone
,
The Honeypot
, and was now very, very old. ‘… I spend the weekends here with Joe and his wife – their maid, Dolores, is coming to see the matinée. Do you mind sharing with a Spanish maid?’

Almost capriciously, she then added, ‘But ring me anyway on Friday morning. I’d better go now because they’re all giving me funny looks here.’ I put down the receiver, intrigued by the pictorial notion of Maggie Smith in her dressing room surrounded by a seething mass of disgruntled backstage staff pulling faces at her, wanting to go home. I rang at the appointed time on Friday morning and she answered instantly. If anything, she sounded even huskier than on Wednesday night. The glass of madeira would no longer suffice. It had to be port, or a fine old cognac. She had been thinking about my suggestion. ‘I really don’t think it’s a very good idea. I still can’t think of anything worse. But please come back after the matinée.’ I was now convinced she would have nothing to do with me, but the more she protested, the more I was determined not to be too downcast. We had another, though necessarily shorter, fairly buoyant telephone conversation. As its temperature rose, I emitted several involuntary cackles of laughter; as I was sitting in a crowded newspaper office at the time, it was my turn to feel funny looks in the back of my neck. I now realised that you could not have a half-cocked, tentative conversation with Maggie Smith. It was all or nothing: usually, nothing.

I anticipated the matinée with relish. These were the best sort of days in New York: bright and sharp, sunny and cold. But on Saturday the weather turned foul and the heavens opened. The Ethel Barrymore was heaving with damp mink and fur. A well-heeled, vulgar quartet from Texas pondered the forthcoming entertainment in the bar, one of the men drooling over a semi-clad model in the
Playbill
programme’s advertising pages: ‘Too darned bad she’s not in the show,’ he cracked, pleased with himself. The performance was a riot, better than in London. I went backstage as bidden, but when I was ushered into the dressing room, there was no sign of Dolores the Spanish maid. Dame Maggie was wrapped in a grey dressing gown, shaking out her luxuriant ginger mane, having given it a quick wash, and sipping half a glass of something red. Perhaps, after all, it was madeira. I stood about awkwardly, blurting out a few comments which she received graciously, curtsying deeply in a very Lettice-like mock-Elizabethan style, one hand clasping both woolly lapels over her chest. She was ticking off each performance and dying to get home. I said she was certain to need a rest before the evening show as I backed towards the door. This tiny, frail and bird-like creature had to be popped back in its cage for a couple of hours. Had she thought any further on the book? She really did think it was a very bad idea.

Before she finally closed the door on me, should I not speak to her husband, the film and theatre writer Beverley Cross? She immediately wrote out the home telephone number in Sussex and told me to ring him. She said that she would ‘warn’ him of my approaches. That was it, as far as she was concerned and probably as far as I was concerned, too. On returning to London, I immediately rang Beverley Cross. He was keen that I should proceed. He confirmed the existence of the archive kept by Maggie’s father in Oxford and promised that it would be made available to me. Other proposed studies of the actress – a
New Yorker
profile by Kenneth Tynan and authorised books by critics Penelope Gilliatt (one of John Osborne’s wives) and B. A. Young (my mentor and first arts editor on the
Financial Times
) – had all come to naught. It was high time a book was written, he said, and both he and Dame Maggie would extend their cooperation to me as far as was reasonably possible.

A few months later, I accompanied Maggie and Beverley to Hamburg, where she was to receive one of Europe’s most prestigious awards, the Shakespeare Prize. At dinner, on the night before the ceremony, she disconsolately pushed a piece of fish around her plate and sipped modestly from a glass of mineral water. She was tense almost to snapping point: ‘You get involved in these things and wonder why on earth you did.’ At the adjoining table, a couple were eating their way doggedly through one course after another as if their lives depended on it. Maggie shot them an acid glance and wondered, sotto voce, if they, too, had won a prize for something.

She opened her address in Hamburg with an almost stuttering disclaimer: ‘It might be a relief to us all today if I were to be as brief as the evil Don John in
Much Ado About Nothing
… “I thank you. I am not of many words, but I thank you!” ’ We were sitting in the great Gothic town hall, the Hamburg Rathaus (‘Where the rats come from,’ Maggie had whispered), bright May sunshine streaming through the windows. Suddenly, with that opening shot, it appeared to be all over. But Maggie, simply dressed yet again in black with a single rope of pearls, pushed her reading glasses further up her nose and glided smoothly into a résumé of her life among the Shakespearean comic heroines and ‘any number of queens’. After the academic encomium intoned by a local professor, Maggie’s aperçus had the merit of both practicality and concision. Beatrice, she said, was ‘a very pleasant evening’ because the lady doesn’t have all that much to say and most of it is in prose: ‘The secret is that everybody else is always talking about her.’ Rosalind, on the other hand, had a very great deal to say, and to do. ‘Where a sentence will serve for Beatrice, Rosalind prefers paragraphs. If Beatrice has something of Noël Coward’s Amanda, then Rosalind shares Mr Stoppard’s or Mr Shaffer’s enthusiasm for verbosity.’

This identification of the witty, independent heroine in English drama from Shakespeare, through the Restoration to modern theatre, was as much a point worth making as a revelation of her character. As teasingly playful as Beatrice, as wilful, androgynous and enigmatic as Viola – ‘I am all the daughters of my father’s house; and all the brothers, too’ – Maggie’s comic, romantic stage persona embraces the trenchant, dignified wit of Millamant and the melting, resourceful passion of Rosalind. She pinned us to our seats with Millamant’s great proviso speech – ‘These articles subscribed, if I continue to endure you a little longer, I may by degrees dwindle into a wife’ – and moved us to tears with Rosalind’s adieu: ‘If I were a woman, I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me, complexions that liked me and breaths that I defied not. And I am sure as many as have good beards, or good faces, or sweet breaths, will for my kind offer, when I make curtsy, bid me farewell.’

We met up again soon afterwards in Sussex. She had just given up smoking, for the second time in her life. I asked if there was any chance of her going back to the National Theatre: ‘I just wish the building wasn’t such an unfriendly place to work.’ No more Cleopatras? ‘Oooh, no. I’m glad I had a go.’ Do you wish someone would write a new play for you? ‘Yes, but I never know what to wear in new plays. I spend most of my time on stage and on film, come to that, dressed in costumes, I’m baffled by what to wear in modern dress on stage.’ You have done so many different things in your career. ‘That’s because people didn’t know where to put me. They thought of me in revue, but I did want to act. And the age thing was easier then. Nobody minded if you were too old for a part. I’m too old for most things now.’

As we leave for lunch in a nearby pub, we spy a man we take to be acting suspiciously standing by the next field. A mile or so down the road, the general feeling is that we should return. As we re-enter the drive, the man is still standing by the field, looking at another man who is shooting at birds. ‘Won’t he think we’re a bit odd, going out and coming back straight away?’ asks Maggie. Undaunted, Beverley strides manfully over to the potential felon, hands on his hips, putting on his best jolly country manner. He comes back to the car, appeased. ‘Got the password,’ he says, relieved and beaming. The two chaps have been given permission by a neighbouring farmer they all know to feel free in the field and take a few pot shots. ‘Well, he definitely must have thought we were a bit odd,’ concludes Maggie, finally.

Two hours later, driving me back to the station, Maggie acknowledges for the first time in my hearing that I am writing this book and thanks me for bothering, as though it were the most unbearable drudgery. I say that all her friends and colleagues have taken pleasure in talking about her. Silence. ‘I can’t imagine what anyone would say. I wouldn’t say anything.’ She drives very fast and very securely. I remember that she once berated Simon Callow for not driving. How could he not drive? she wanted to know. Having a car was like having an extra cupboard. Another place to hide. She is playing a soothing baroque motet as we speed through the leafy lanes.

When the BFI asked me to curate a season of Maggie’s films in December 2014 to celebrate her eightieth birthday, they asked if they could sell the biography in their shop. I said it was out of print and out of date, and this was the spur to revisit, rewrite and replenish the original. In the intervening years I’d met Maggie briefly on several occasions, but not for much of a chat, or another lunch. But when she was rehearsing
The Lady from Dubuque
in a church hall on the Tottenham Court Road in 2007, the
Evening Standard
asked if I could arrange an interview with her. When reluctantly dragged into such parlous and (for her) unwanted situations, she’s resigned to operate on the principle that the devil you know is preferable to the devil you don’t. I booked a table in Heal’s, right across the road from the church.

Once inside the department store, we manage somehow to get lost in the bedding department. ‘You have booked a table, haven’t you,’ she mutters loudly, ‘or is it a room?’ We pass through several other departments – glassware, kitchen utensils, and so on. ‘Where exactly are we going?’ she cries, her voice rising, and my sense of direction (non-existent) shrivelling. And why Heal’s, anyway? Maggie had not been in the place for decades but suddenly recognises an old wooden staircase as we try our luck round another corner. ‘Oh, I remember that,’ she exclaims. ‘I had no idea about the rest of it, though. Are you sure there’s a restaurant here?’ After asking ten members of staff for contradictory directions, we find the restaurant and hide in a corner. Maggie orders a glass of water. That’s it. I go mad and call up a coffee. The dame does not do interviews, on the whole, and she certainly doesn’t do them to have fun at a lunch table.

As usual, she is fraught with anxiety. And she has been ill with ’flu. ‘I think they all think I’m going to die. And I might. I’m very scared about the stage at the moment. I’ve always been scared, actually, but I didn’t know I’d be this scared. Perhaps it will be all right on the night. Well, it won’t be on the first night, but afterwards, perhaps, I don’t know …’ I think it’s being so cheerful that keeps her going. She trails off, suddenly noticing my tiny Olympus tape-recorder. ‘What’s that?’ she snaps, recoiling into her scarf and coat as if surprised by a slug on a lettuce leaf. The horror of talking about herself is fully alive. She reacts sharply to my reporting of Edward Albee’s view that there is no such thing as naturalism in the theatre, merely degrees of stylisation. ‘Did he really say that? How odd. I suppose he’s right, only you try and make everything natural, like Gerald du Maurier.’ Du Maurier (father of Daphne) was the godfather of light comic acting, school of Wilfrid Hyde-White and Rex Harrison. We’re not really allowed to talk about dead people any more in arts journalism, I remind her. ‘Aren’t we? Well, I’m sorry, then I’ve got no conversation. I do find I’m talking about the dead most of the time.’