The Light's on at Signpost (24 page)

I suppose Kathy and I and the Fleischers weren’t really what you’d call Cannes Festival people; no one in his right mind could be. We avoided the hysterics of the Croisette, keeping together for protection, lazing in the villa garden, teaching Georges-Alain’s delightful little son, Jonathan, to recite “This little piggy went to market” in French, cruising gently to the shops, and dining quietly together at a respectable hour—unlike Georges-Alain and his lady who seemed to like dinner at midnight, followed, in spite of Georges-Alain’s protests, by (guess what?) flamenco dancing.

How out of step I was, I realised when an American journalist, brimming with Riviera
joie de vivre
, asked what I was doing that evening; I said, “Reading Macaulay’s
History of England
”, at which he stared, before scribbling in his notebook, muttering: “Jesus, that’s gotta be a first for the Cannes Festival!”

At this time Vuille had another film in production,
Ashanti
, about a black American woman doctor, wife to Michael Caine, who is kidnapped by slave-trader Peter Ustinov and carried across Africa to be sold to an Arab prince, with Caine and Kabir Bedi in pursuit—this was the movie for which Georges-Alain’s telephone heroics had secured the services of Rex Harrison and William Holden. Late in the day Omar Sharif was cast as the Arab prince, and since they wanted his part expanded without delay, and I was convenient, they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.

Georges-Alain had shifted his base of operations to Gstaad, so I found myself bucketing over the Alps in a plane so tiny it must have been made from a kit; I was slightly reassured by the phlegmatic calm of the only other passenger, Georges-Alain’s brother John, a large, quiet young man who was the temperamental opposite of his sibling, although he evidently had his share of the family’s eccentricity—later that year I received a Christmas card from him, from beyond the Arctic Circle in the Canadian north, where he
had moved house; the following year his card came from Central Africa, where he was doing relief work. I regret not hearing from him since, from wherever.

I’ve no idea what I was meant to be doing in Gstaad. I certainly did no work, and my only memories are of spending two nights of extreme discomfort at Georges-Alain’s chalet, in a wooden bed designed for a dwarf, and being introduced, at dinner in the Palace Hotel, to Turtle Soup Lady Curzon, one of those gastronomic treats which linger in the memory, like Toast Rothschild in the Normandie Grill in Bangkok, or game pie at the Castletown Golf Links Hotel, Isle of Man.

In Palermo it was raw beef, ordered at the suggestion of Peter Ustinov, and I’ve tasted worse. Fleischer, Vuille and I had flown there because that was where the next lot of shooting was to happen; Omar Sharif was expected, so I pounded the typewriter into the small hours; whether it got into the film I don’t know. But no trip is wasted if it includes Mr Ustinov; he won my heart at our first meeting by impersonating the Isle of Man—this is done by sitting in a chair and using your limbs to represent the Manx three-legged symbol, and probably only Ustinov can do it. We talked tennis and old movies and our Army service, and he reminisced about Stewart Granger’s caravan, where the seats were covered with the skins of Granger’s big-game trophies, and Ustinov sat on a settee and rose again with fur all over him and bald hide where he had been sitting.

Around this time we went to Madrid, for no good reason that I can remember; it must have been to do with
Ashanti
, for I recall the leading lady, Beverly Johnson, and Kabir Bedi being relentlessly photographed by yelling paparazzi, and I should remember the works of Velasquez at the Prado also, but philistine that I am what sticks in my mind is that the Villa Magna was one of the best hotels Kathy and I had ever struck.

All this time, pre-production of
Taipan
was apparently going
ahead, and Georges-Alain was so bullish that he demanded I write a sequel without delay. I thought it would be a good idea to get the first film into production at least, but it was another offer I couldn’t refuse, and a few weeks later I had finished
Taipan II
. And then—this is true, and Fleischer and others will bear me out—damned if Vuille didn’t ask for a
third
script, a prequel to the original.

It was my fault for inventing, in
Taipan I
, a reference to Struan and Brock having served together at Trafalgar, where I suggested their rivalry had begun. This grabbed Vuille, and if I had been a scoundrel I would have accepted a contract (and, to me, an enormous fee) for a third movie. But fair’s fair; I assumed that
Taipan
I
would get made, and with McQueen in the lead it would probably be a smash—but you never know, and I wasn’t going to take his money for a third movie when he still hadn’t shot a foot of the first one. I don’t regret it; some things you can’t do.

Presbyterian conscience is a hell of a note; it cost me that commission, and the chance to work with David Lean, who at that time was preparing
The Bounty
, and asked me, through his producer, my friend Eddie Fowlie, who had worked on
Prince and Pauper
, if I was interested in doing a script. I’d have given my right arm to accept; apart from the privilege of working with Lean, I’d been defending Bligh in print for years—but although I had legally fulfilled my contract to Vuille, I had said (as I always do) that I was with the movie to the finish, and since I knew it would need more work eventually, I had to pass
The Bounty
, not without some gnashing of teeth.

Lean sent me his outline notes, and we talked at length on the phone. God, that man was a genius. He described shots and set-ups that I can see in my mind’s eye yet; it was all visual stuff, little plot or dialogue, although we touched on the great mystery: why did the mutiny take place? What got into Christian? Bligh was no tyrant, but he had a vicious tongue—was it just that? And so forth. We
agreed firmly on one point, which I offer for
Bounty
historians to consider: the joker in the pack was Midshipman Young.

I can’t regret that job, either, since the script was finally done by Robert Bolt, and I know when I’m outclassed.

And the Taipan story was entering its final phase. Kathy and I flew again to LA, and Fleischer, Vuille and I took the elevator to the top floor of the Beverly Wilshire, where Steve McQueen had a penthouse. He opened the door to us, a slighter figure than I’d expected, neatly bearded, but looking rather tired. I knew he hadn’t been well, and that it was more than two years since he’d made a picture, the last being Ibsen’s
An Enemy of the People
, which had flopped, although he had acquitted himself well, holding his own with the likes of Charles Durning.

He surveyed us closely, not unlike a sentry, and then invited us into the kitchen where he was brewing coffee—the best I’ve ever tasted outside Turkey, very black and sweetened with honey. He explained that his girl-friend (whom he didn’t name) had forbidden him sugar, but he had successfully concealed the honey jar. It didn’t quite fit with Thomas Crown and Bullitt, nor did his slightly defensive reference to Ravel’s
Bolero
which he was playing “to put me in the mood for an action movie”. He would have preferred some rousing sea music; I suggested Korngold’s
Sea-Hawk
or
Captain
Blood
, and he scribbled a note on his kitchen pad.

He had set four chairs round a small table in the living-room, on which there were scripts and pencils, and I realised that this was a methodical man. He put on a pair of glasses (rimless, I think), flipped open a script, and looked inquiringly at me.

Now, usually, an actor on first acquaintance will say something complimentary about your work: Malcolm McDowell, Rex Harrison, Roger Moore, Heston, York, Badel, Fox, Lee, and others were meticulous about this. McQueen looked in silence, and it struck me that while he’d been courteous, he hadn’t given us any glad hand in welcome. But it was up to me, and I was making some
explanatory remark or other about the story when he interrupted.

“You’re from Scotland, aren’t you?”

I said I was—and I wish I had a picture of him as he smiled for the first time, with a tilt of his chin, and said with supreme satisfaction: “I’m Scotch.”

I might have known it, from his appearance and manner; I asked when his people had come over, but he didn’t know; several generations back, according to his grandmother. But the ice was broken from that moment, and I blessed the Scottish mafia of Hollywood; it isn’t as vocal as the Irish or as evident as the Jewish, but it’s there all right.

It took us two days, word by word and look by look, to go through the script, and I don’t remember any actor as intent and painstaking as he was. He wanted to know the why and wherefore of every detail; for instance, the script opened with two tall ships racing, then cut to Brock and his son on their deck, then cut to Struan’s officers—but no sign of Struan. It was a tense sequence, both sides determined to win; McQueen wondered why he wasn’t to be visible. I explained that I’d been inspired by
The Sea Hawk
, in which Errol Flynn is not seen but his voice is heard while a group of officers register his presence. It doesn’t read particularly effectively, but McQueen saw at once how well it could work on screen, with his voice quiet and assured amid all the hubbub, and his first appearance in a moment of crisis an almost casual drifting into shot, authoritative and calm.

“Okay,” he said. “That’s Struan.”

From my point of view it was a good read-through; he had no major objections, and those he had were mainly technical, as when he asked me to change a scene in which he was up to the knees in water in a ship’s hold, shifting boxes of silver: could I fix it so that he didn’t get his feet wet? He was still recuperating, and didn’t want to take any chances.

We had occasional brushes. I don’t remember why we disagreed,
but I got rather testy and he gave me the blue-eyed stare and said bleakly: “Gee, you’re attractive when you’re mad.” Again, when I suggested Oliver Reed would be good as Brock’s son, he shook his head firmly. “No, sir. No way. Not him.”

I didn’t know, then, the reason for their mutual dislike, which I’ve described earlier, but I could see there was no point in pushing for Oliver, so I let it drop.

How good an actor he was he demonstrated on two occasions when he was unhappy with dialogue. He didn’t want to call someone a rascal (“Too European, George”), and when I assured him his grandmother wouldn’t have thought so, he shook his head. “Don’t have to say it. I can
look
it.” Which he did, very effectively, but later, when he suggested that he could go through a sequence of talk without saying a word, I had to protest. Struan’s Chinese mistress had to give him information, and Struan had to reply; there was no way round it. Steve sat silent, thinking. Then:

“Go ahead, you say the girl’s lines.”

So I did. She had three brief speeches, and to each one he simply responded with an appropriate look. I had to admit he was right, Fleischer smiled, and Vuille laughed in admiration.

Steve worried a little about his accent (“I’m American. I can’t play British”) until I assured him that a Scots adventurer in the 1840s who had been footloose since childhood might well have acquired an American accent. Anyway, it was a state of mind as much as anything; we would have him saying “Aye” and “Uh-huh” and “Away!” occasionally, and that would do it.

Our final difference came towards the finish, when Struan and Brock, preparing to fight it out, realise that they can’t because their children are going to marry each other, and you can’t kill someone’s father as a wedding present. So their angry confrontation gets nowhere, but it doesn’t matter since that’s when the typhoon strikes.

That didn’t suit Steve. He wanted to beat the stuffing out of
Brock. “Top o’ the hill!” he exclaimed, pointing to an imaginary duelling ground, so I said I’d work on it and see what could be done. He suggested that he run me in his pickup truck to his ranch in Idaho, where I could revise in peace, but I declined with thanks.

Between sessions we talked at random, about motor-cycles and the Clan McQueen and his time in China when he had stayed with a Chinese of sinister reputation (“I guess he killed a few people”) and the potplants outside the door of his penthouse which he feared were deteriorating. “I think Lee Marvin’s peeing on them.” Whether Lee Marvin lived along the corridor, where there were potplants in profusion, I didn’t inquire.

At last we were done. I had smoked several packets of cigarettes, Steve had chewed a plug of tobacco, Georges-Alain had said little, and Fleischer had presided in his avuncular way, targeting the essentials every time. McQueen showed him great respect, referring to him as “my director”.

“Well, what does my director think?” he said as he closed the script. Fleischer said he thought we had a movie, a good movie, a big movie.

“Know what I think?” Steve tapped the script and paid me the biggest compliment I’ve ever had as a screenwriter. “I think we’ve got
Gone with the Wind
here.” God bless him.

It never happened, of course. What went wrong between Vuille and McQueen I never discovered, except that money, that astronomical fee, was involved. Not long after I was watching the Parkinson show, and was astonished to hear Roger Moore say that he was polishing up his Scots accent for
Taipan;
that too fell through, and Moore and I discussed Georges-Alain some months later. Fleischer left the project, and I lost interest, and then came the news that Steve McQueen had died in Mexico, and
Taipan
faded into the limbo of movies that never got made. A production did take place years later, but not with my script, and I never saw it.

You get used to writing outlines and synopses and full screenplays for pictures that never reach the screen, usually because some optimist has run out of money. I regret
Taipan
more than most, but console myself with the belief that it got me
Octopussy
.

I
T DEPENDS ENTIRELY
what you mean by “racist”. The word is used indiscriminately, frequently as a term of abuse, and is highly emotive, often deliberately so. At worst it implies bitter hatred, a deep-seated rancour and active hostility towards those of a different colour or racial origin. At the top of the scale one can put Adolf Hitler, who showed his detestation of Jews by slaughtering millions of them. On a different level we have Simon Legree, who regarded black people as animals and treated them accordingly, but did not hate them in a Hitlerian way. He and Hitler may certainly be bracketed together as racists in the fullest sense, but one must recognise that they are racists in different degrees within their category.

At quite the other end of the scale are those who are often called racists for no better reason than that they feel an instinctive preference for their own kind. They are not Hitlers or Legrees, they may not even voice or indicate their preference, and indeed to call them racists is all too often an attempt to confuse the swidespread, aituation, and to imply that the commuter who sits beside a white passenger rather than a black one is taking the first step towards the gas chamber. It isn’t true, and we know it, but this is what bedevils the whole race question—the attempt to tar all so-called “racists” with the same brush, and pretend that the man who simply likes his own folk best is a concentration camp guard in the making.

Now, if this preference is a sin, it is nd to be found
in areas where political correctness decrees that racism cannot exist. It cannot be denied that the preference is widely held in the black community; indeed, if what is called “institutionalised racism” exists in Britain, it is among blacks. They plainly feel a unity based on colour, a kinship and a sense of common experience—and there is absolutely nothing wrong with this provided it is not translated into discriminatory action against non-blacks. They are free to voice their sense of black unity, and frequently do—but white people do not have the same freedom. Let them give expression to their white identity, and they are condemned as racists. It comes down to this lamentable fact, that in our politically correct Western societies, only whites can be racist; black racism is an impossibility.

To take a simple example which demonstrates this—there exists in the US an organisation called the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People; its existence is acceptable to the American public. But suppose someone proposed a similar association to promote the interest of white people—the screams of indignation would echo worldwide, and the proposer would be assailed with the most extreme abuse and probably end up in court, if not in jail. A leader of black opinion can say bluntly (and they usually do) that he puts black interest first, and plainly feels that he is entitled to discriminate against non-blacks; he will meet with no contradiction, and would be indignant if he did. But no white person would dare to speak as his black counterpart does.

Many years ago a black tennis player, Arthur Ashe, won the men’s title at Wimbledon. A commentator (not Maskell, I hasten to say) announced afterwards that he was glad the black man had won. It passed unremarked. What would the harvest have been if Ashe’s opponent, Jimmy Connors, had won, and a commentator had expressed delight that the white man had triumphed? The commentator would have been hounded out of his job amid roars of condemnation.

This may seem trivial; it isn’t. It is the heart of the matter. It is
a denial of equal treatment of black and white, a discrimination based on skin colour, and until this is recognised, and it is acknowledged that prejudice has two edges, and that racism is no more rooted or, to use the foolish and inaccurate term of the Macpherson report, “institutionalised”, in the white community than it is in the black, there will be no improvement in race relations in this country.

Since I have probably said enough to convince the more obtuse or prejudiced that I keep a Ku Klux Klan uniform in my wardrobe, I should make my position clear. I am what I would call a racist in the sense that everyone in the world is a racist (for you are, you know), in preferring my own kind, by and large, to those of a different kind or culture. It’s no big deal; it’s a question of feeling more at home with those whom I know, and with whom I share a common culture and folk-experience.

I was happier in a North Country English regiment during the war, among fellow-Cumbrians, than I would have been in a Welsh or London regiment, and happier still when I went to a Highland regiment. I am no sports fanatic, but I feel pleasure when Scotland’s soccer or rugby teams win (especially against England, I admit, and I have a distinct impression, from the sporting press and the TV images of stout fellows with St George’s crosses painted on their faces, that there is some similar national feeling south of the Tweed, especially against Germany).

This is perfectly natural, and insofar as it shows a race-preference, it is surely racist, but in no sinister sense. I am happier among Britons than among foreigners, but that does not imply hostility to Chileans or Syrians, and I would certainly not discriminate actively against them, or treat them unfairly because they happened to be of a different race, creed, colour, etc. I simply like “my ain folk”, and if there is anyone who does not share this feeling (or says he doesn’t), and maintains that every human being is of equal value to him, regardless of kinship, colour, race, and so forth, I would ask him to consider the following question.

He is standing on a riverbank with his infant grandchild, and close by is another infant whom he has never seen. Both children fall in, and are in equal danger of drowning. Which one does he try to save first—his own or the stranger?

The answer is obvious, to me at any rate. You go for your own, you racist, you. Why racist? Because the race is simply an extension of the family. In my own case, I cleave first to my wife, children, and grandchildren; thereafter to my clan, the Frasers, and the folk of Cumberland among whom I grew up, thereafter the Britons, and so on. This is not, surely, to “discriminate against” the Australian aborigine or the American or Italian—or the African. Some fool (and he was a university lecturer, too) to whom I propounded my question, said “Ah, now, if one of the grandchildren were
black
, it would be an interesting question.”

“You great balloon,” I retorted, “can’t you see that would be irrelevant? You would save
your own
, black, white, or khaki.” But he couldn’t see it.

As it happens, and possibly this is irrelevant, too, although I don’t think so, I owe my life, indeed my existence, to a black African. He was a Kikuyu warrior named Wakibi, and when my father was wounded and had to be abandoned by his comrades in East Africa (it was that sort of war), Wakibi, who was his orderly, refused to leave him, tried to dress his wound, and finally carried him unconscious to safety. So I have an unpayable debt to that wild shield-and-spear hero not only for my father and myself, but for my children and grandchildren. Without Wakibi they wouldn’t be here.
Bayete
Wakibi.

It follows that the view of race relations with which I was brought up was slightly unusual for the time. The word “nigger”, which was not uncommon then (though less common than moderns may think) was simply anathema in the Fraser household, and I got into trouble at school for rounding on a classmate who, perfectly innocently, described an African child as “a little nigger boy”. The
acceptable term at that time, incidentally, was negro or coloured; black became beautiful later, and now I gather America has adopted Afro-American, which is as clumsy and daft an expression as I can conceive. It is a sign of the times that one has to be careful in choosing words; lack of intention to offend is no excuse, as the tyrants of the race relations industry have made clear. They have shown themselves eager to exploit race sensitivity, taking offence where none is meant, and trying to make mischief where none exists. They belong to all races, and do immense harm while pretending the purest of motives. Most of them I would call arrant racists, not in the Hitler sense, but not in the commuter sense either. Somewhere between and truly dangerous.

It has long been evident that the Race Relations Act was one of the most foolish and pernicious ever enacted by Parliament, and that the Commission for Racial Equality has proved itself to be a bad and unnecessary institution whose activities have been, to put it charitably, quite deplorable. If these seem unduly harsh and sweeping words, I employ them because, unlike some race activists, I care very much about racial harmony, and far from bringing it about, both the Act and the Commission seem to me to have done immense damage to race relations, and consequently to the social fabric of the country, which is probably beyond repair. They have bred resentment, suspicion, and hatred. We must assume that they were the product of good intentions; well, they have failed, tragically, for the fact is that no one intent on stirring up racial trouble could have done a better job.

The Commission have been openly pro-black, as has the BBC. How low the corporation’s standards have sunk was seen when a black so-called comedian called the Queen a bitch. In an incredible display of race bias, the Broadcasting Standards Commission decided that this disgusting insult was permissible
since the speaker
was black
. They ruled that “bitch” was acceptable “street slang” for a woman, and the BBC supported this with the feeble excuse that
the speaker “was using the term as it is used in ‘rap’ music, to mean ‘woman’ and not as a term of abuse.”

Would the BBC be equally tolerant if a white person called the offending comedian “a nigger”, possibly advancing the excuse that the term was inoffensive because it was acceptable in certain white circles? Of course not; the BBC’s racist bias aside, such an excuse would be false and hypocritical, as it was in the case of the black comedian (who, to do him justice, expressed regret for his ill manners). Words in the English language are not to be redefined by an immigrant minority in a way which they know perfectly well will give gross offence to those who speak the language properly, especially when the insult is directed at the Queen. A broadcasting authority with any sense of fitness would have banned the offender for life instead of trying to pretend that such despicable behaviour can be condoned in an unpleasant vulgarian simply because he is black.

This insistence on viewing the race question through dark glasses has become virtually an official policy which, while it fails to satisfy the black community who continue to nourish an understandable historic resentment, helps to build a similar—if usually unspoken—resentment in a white community which has been brainwashed into feeling guilty, and is thoroughly fed up with being made the scapegoat for problems which the race relations industry has created.
*
The race propaganda is, to use modern jargon, counterproductive; the parrot-cry that we are a multi-racial society, when we are not (London and many large centres of population are, but the greater part of the country is not, as yet), the nakedly racist demand that there should be quotas of blacks in Parliament (and Welsh, Scots, Cornish, Jewish, why not?), and the apparently disproportionate number of black and brown faces among television presenters—all these things sow in the mind of the white population a feeling that they are being unfairly dealt with, that the dice are loaded against them—but by God they’d better not say so.
*

But if it is largely fear of being called Nazis that keeps them quiet, there is also at work in them the instinctive tolerance and sense of fair play that distinguishes the island race, for which they are given little credit. They know too that the most militant and abusive black leaders no more represent the black population than the National Front does the white, and that the huge majority of blacks want nothing more than fair treatment and opportunity. I’m not pretending that the worst kind of white racists don’t exist; we know they do. But they are a tiny minority. What I have called racial preference is universal, among all ethnic groups, but it’s harmless, and only the race relations industry, in their untiring search for alleged offence, however trivial, would deny this.

We have not yet sunk to the point reached in the USA where the bigots demanded and got an apology for the use of the word “niggardly” (comment on the ignorance or stupidity of the complainant is superfluous—and would probably be described as racist anyway), but it is sometimes a near thing. The radio commentator who implied that black athletes were good runners because they were used to being chased by lions, was admittedly making a reference to their ethnic background, but could it be called seriously racist, and would any intelligent person take offence at what was obviously meant to be no more than a joke, albeit a pretty feeble one? Yet there came the knee-jerk blare of protest from the race relations lobby, the commentator had to apologise, and race relations had taken another knock, not so much from the thoughtless comment as from the over-reaction which gave the incident so much publicity. The accounts I read, incidentally, contained no complaints from black athletes.