LYING FALLOW

A couple of postings ago (‘Messenger Shooting’ December 5th), I mentioned an unpublished letter that I had sent to The Guardian in response to David Hare’s “hymn of praise” (as I called it) for Simon Callow, who frequently reviews theatre-related books for the paper. Sir David’s review of – or rather disquisition upon – Callow’s collected occasional pieces along with a new biography of Sarah Bernhardt may be read here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2010/nov/20/david-hare-actors-sarah-bernhardt

You may wonder, as I did, whether the world is truly short of books telling us how wonderful actors are. Sir David requires to keep actors as a breed rather sweeter than do the rest of us because they are the ones who bring the majority of his important words to us.

My letter went like this:

“Dear Madam,

The paperback edition of Simon Callow’s Love is Where It Falls (Penguin 2000) was prominently adorned with a quotation from David Hare: ‘Exquisite … Perhaps the best theatrical memoir of our day’. As a theatrical memoir was precisely what the book wasn’t, one naturally fell to wondering whether Sir David had indeed troubled to open it.

The puffing of one’s friends, particularly in the books pages, is a harmless and timeless sport, save when it perpetrates an injustice. In further beatifying Mr Callow (Give actors a break, November 20), Sir David commits several of these, not least the rendering of Sir Antony Sher as hors de combat in his gathering of an imagined consensus around the notion that Callow is ‘the best writer-actor we have’.

Having been (I thought) woefully miscast as Mozart in the original stage production, Callow fared better in the much smaller role of Schikaneder in Milos Forman's movie of Amadeus

Finding himself in general agreement with Callow on individual actors reinforces Sir David’s admiration. They evidently concur that Paul Scofield was ‘the supreme actor’, in whom they detected ‘emotional wisdom’. The tired technicalities and career-spanning mannerisms of Scofield find a contemporary mirror in Sir Ian McKellen, whose wheels may be observed noisily turning in every performance. Hare does manage to name one player with a genuine gift for accuracy of reading and truth of effect in Penelope Wilton, for me the Celia Johnson of our generation – now there was an actress whose economy of means and unerring emotional authenticity was supreme, but her stage work is forgotten, far more so than that dear old ham o’ the halls, Sir Peter Ustinov [whom Hare had bogglingly described in his piece as ‘forgotten’].

As to the resentment that Hare detects towards actors among journalists, I merely observe that, as one of a multitude squeezed out of a journalistic career in recent years by the daily invasion into our trade of actors, comedians and, I dare say, playwrights, I will be pleased to slap down any actor who crosses my path, however fêted.

Yours faithfully,”

That Hare and Callow are old chums may not be doubted. In the index to Callow’s first book [Being an Actor 1984], there are more references to Hare than to anyone else save for Laurence Olivier, Callow’s hero.

When I first came to London in the mid-1960s, I immediately began to haunt the Old Vic. At this lovely old theatre, Olivier’s National Theatre Company were in residence and presenting a revolving repertoire of (mostly) classics with the occasional new play. I saw everything they mounted there. Though I retain no memory of his face, I remember that there was one noisy, chirpy, flirtatious chappie often on duty in the box office. It was only after I got to know him about a decade later that I was able to confirm that this was certainly Master Callow.

Never perform with children or animals

The first of Simon’s acting performances that I saw would have been his role in Martin Sherman’s Passing By, presented by Gay Sweatshop at the Almost Free Theatre off Shaftesbury Avenue. Gay Sweatshop – which came to be known to its familiars as Sweaties – was an attempt to establish a tradition of theatre that addressed homosexual issues of all kinds. It was set up by Roger Baker, Gerald Chapman, Drew Griffiths and Laurence Collinson – all of them now dead – and, after a perilous start, it attracted Arts Council funding and enjoyed a bumpily productive run for several years. The other actor in that inaugural season to catch my eye was a South African called Antony Sher.

I don’t recall the occasion upon or circumstances in which I first properly met Simon – it turned out that we had quite a few friends in common, as was apt to occur on the London gay scene (or, I dare say, on the gay scene anywhere) – but I was gravely informed by a mutual friend later that Simon found me “the most sexually exciting man” whom he had met all year. And, before you ask, we met in November. So I was predisposed to look upon him favourably. At what point we bumped into each other at Bang disco – the only place to be, in those days, on a Monday night – and found ourselves back at my place, I cannot now recall. But we passed a jolly night.

Thereafter, I followed his career with particular interest. And in those days, Simon Callow was beginning to be a name to drop. He was terrific in Mary Barnes, Epsom Downs and A Mad World, My Masters. The critics loved him and he caught the eye generally but he was yet very much a star of what was still a new movement in the theatre: the London fringe.

The birthplace of fringe theatre was the Edinburgh Festival, where indeed Callow had first trodden the boards. In August 1978, when I was a drama producer at BBC Birmingham, I went to the overlapping Edinburgh Television Festival, then in its infancy. Following a screening at Film House one afternoon, I sat down in the lounge area with various industry pals while we loudly discussed what we had just seen. Already at the table where we sat was a strikingly beautiful young man, whose eye I caught. As I carried on being dazzling with my chums, I found myself playing kneesie with this vision and, whenever I caught his eye again, he dissolved into smiles. As far as I could see, my colleagues (one of whom, bizarrely, was a woman with whom I had earlier been involved) were unaware of this private romantic comedy. Then we all got up to go, having a reception to attend and, thereafter, a party. I turned to my new friend and invited him to join us – which, to my delight, he readily did.

His name was Aziz Yehia. His late father had been what Aziz termed a pasha in Egypt – pasha is in fact a Turkish word – and the family had been driven out under Nasser’s rule. Aziz always described his mother as “a Turkish peasant”; she lived in Switzerland where Aziz had citizenship. He had divided his growing years between Zurich and Los Angeles. In both locations, the Yehias seem to have mixed with a movie crowd: the Gene Kellys, the William Holdens, Kay Kendall (who supposedly dropped the baby Aziz from her lap when drunk), Marlene Dietrich and so on. Sydney Guilaroff, a name familiar from thousands of Hollywood credits, did his mother’s hair.

Aziz was then a student at the National Film School in Beaconsfield. He was wholly a movie brat, but very much in a glossy, romantic tradition, the sort of fare that he would have seen constantly while growing up in the 1950s and ‘60s. He fancied himself as Audrey Hepburn, in whose elfin image he was certainly cast by nature. He liked to tease me with Audrey’s most charming lines: “Do you know what’s wrong with you? Nothing”.

But he was also damaged goods, as indeed seemed to be everyone with whom I discovered a mutual attraction. He was clearly what we now call bipolar. When in one of what he called his “black lagoons”, there was no reaching him. Even when he was up, he drank suicidally strong coffee first thing and later Carlsberg Special Brew, the tipple of serious drunks.

Callow, always a colourful character

All that aside, he and I had a delightful relationship that extended through the better part of a year. We went to a lot of theatre and cinema together and one riveting occasion was a revival of Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui at the tiny Half Moon Theatre in Aldgate. The lead was taken by Simon Callow. The night we saw it, he had an explosive, streaming cold. In the role, he wore a clownish false nose on an elasticated string. His cold poured out around this nose. At his fittest, Simon is an exudative performer, perspiring and spitting and generally leaving a trail of mucus, snot, sputum and sweat. On this night, the audience was drenched in bodily fluids.

In the pub afterwards, I introduced Simon to the highly excited Aziz. We lathered the star with praise. Looking back, I think this was probably his finest piece of work. Another evening, Aziz and I had dinner with friends I had made through my fan-like attachment to Sweaties: Peter Whitman and Alan Pope. Also present were Simon and his then boyfriend, the actor Robin Hooper. After dinner, we were prevailed upon to play a sort of variation of the television game Mr & Mrs, rather against my better judgment. Alan and Peter, the longest established couple, won this easily. I found I did not much enjoy Aziz and I being asked searching questions about our relationship, especially when I gave answers that I thought tactful and kind and then Aziz contradicted me.

I doubt that this was any kind of augury of the end of our relationship. Nor do I think that Aziz began to see Simon before we broke up. A decent interval passed after we agreed to go our separate ways before I heard that Simon and Aziz were an item. Not everyone thought them well suited. I recall one member of Simon's circle saying that he thought Aziz played the “beauty and the beast” card a little too obviously.

At some point in their relationship, Aziz lost his right to stay in Britain. He returned to Switzerland from whence I occasionally heard from him. His depressions not surprisingly deepened. In 1982, my then flat-mate Phil Taft took his own life. Aziz, who had known and rather scorned Phil’s skittishness and youth (he was ten years younger than me, seven younger than Aziz), was electrified by this event. Two years later, he followed suit.

When Callow published the aforementioned Love is Where It Falls, I decided not to rush to read it, having swiftly learned that Aziz figured in it as well as its second lead (after Simon himself), Peggy Ramsay. But I inadvertently blundered into the author reading from the book late at night on the BBC World Service and then could not switch off. The first thing that struck me was that Callow pronounced his late lover’s name as As-is. He had introduced himself to me – and I had always known him as – As-ease. This was strange.

What Simon writes of Aziz in the book only occasionally chimes with what I knew and/or would have written. His characterization of the boy as some kind of intellectual is perfectly absurd, the kind of exorbitance that, pace David Hare, only an actor would reach for. My sole appearance in the account is this: “[Aziz] and I had met some two and a half years before. He had then been involved with a mutual friend, but in the fullness of time, this involvement had come to an end, and I had seized my moment” [p 22]. “A mutual friend” is a curiously inapt phrase but, along with the variations on the notion of being “involved”, it seems to argue from Simon’s perspective that my relationship with Aziz was to be discounted in the light of his own grand passion. He doesn’t mention, also, that I acted (brilliantly, I can confidently add) in one of the short films made by Aziz at Beaconsfield, to which Simon alludes. I can’t help remembering, too, that a resonant backdrop to all this is Callow’s earlier feeling declared about me.

The unbridled account of Simon’s mourning after Aziz’ death is hard for a non-theatrical to take. One part, coming after the lovingly detailed description of his first expressions of emotion, particularly sticks in my craw: “the days were filled with telling his friends and mine what had happened. They already knew, of course; such news seems to pass around almost before it’s happened, but they needed to hear it from me, and I needed to tell it to them” [p 125]. All, that is, except the “mutual friend”, whom Simon didn’t think to call until Aziz had been dead over a week. And I didn’t already know because all our other mutual friends assumed that Simon would have told me. That left a bitter taste that has yet to go away.

Simon describes a week he spent on Capri “howling like an animal, till my throat was sore” [p 129] yet is in love with someone else within eight pages, like any actor ringing down the curtain on one role and rushing off to the next read-through. Is it any wonder if I find actors a shallow breed?

Apart from a passing encounter in the auditorium before one of the last shows at the lamented Mermaid Theatre, I have not seen Simon Callow to speak to in many years. In 1998, I left a message on his answering machine because I wanted to pick his brains about the control of emotion when one is reading to an audience – I was going to recite a Shakespearean sonnet at my father’s funeral and I once heard Simon read the entire sonnet-sequence, stumbling only over the most famous (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day”) – but he never returned my call.

In truth, Simon Callow is one of the most personally generous people I have ever known. The generosity of his laughter is known to anyone who has ever sat in the same audience as him. He is, in all things, profligate and no one is ever in want when he is near.

I once wrote a stage play of which I felt rather proud. I had hugely enjoyed Tony Harrison’s rhyming-couplets translation of Molière’s Le Misanthrope, with which the National Theatre had a huge hit, starring Alec McCowen and Diana Rigg. Under its influence, I wrote a comedy in rhyming couplets called The Secretive Agent, wherein a London literary agent was comprehensively embarrassed by a sudden visit from his parents, whose dull suburbanism he wished to keep from his circle and from whom he wished to keep his own homosexuality. I don’t suppose for a moment that the satire was either very penetrating or very correct but I believed that I had handled the discipline of the verse with considerable niftiness.

Simon read the play and was kindly about it. He was more than kindly; he offered to arrange a reading of it at his flat. He and I between us recruited a stellar cast (Miriam Margoles, Pam St Clement, Drew Griffiths). He supplied the food and drink and the paper and printing machine upon which I ran off enough copies for the cast to read. He was enormously supportive but the reading taught me that the play really didn’t work.

With (right) Sir Antony Sher and (centre) Gregory Doran (Lady Sher)

But he also did something odd. On another occasion I had told him that I wanted to write a play for him, entitled The Private Life of Charles Laughton. I knew of his obsession with this extraordinary actor – he later wrote a book about him and played (excitingly) Perelli in the gangster saga On the Spot and (not too well) Brecht’s Galileo, two of Laughton’s signature roles – and I thought he could embody Laughton, whose life as a self-hating, closeted gay man was certainly powerful. I told him that I thought Zoë Wanamaker would be wonderful as Elsa Lanchester, Laughton’s wife (then still alive).

Some time later, I ran into him at a watering hole where he was holding court – in those days, Simon frequently had a claque about him – and he suddenly started talking about the notion of a play about Laughton, claiming it and the casting of Wanamaker as his own idea. I was astonished and resolved that instead I should write the play for the up-coming Simon Russell Beale who anyway was already the better actor. I never wrote it, needless to add.

But it is the failure of Callow’s promise as an actor that is the most distressing aspect of his career. In the ’70s, he was marked for leading the profession. Dusty Hughes, then the theatre editor at Time Out, remarked that he would be the first knighted actor of our generation. But he wasn’t. That honour fell to Tony Sher. I don’t know whether Callow and Sher were great rivals or whether such rivalry is something I imagine. For a long time, their lives and careers ran in parallel, even to the point that when Simon was stepping out with Robin Hooper, Sher’s boyfriend was Robin’s actor brother Jim.

But a chasm opened up because Tony started to scale all the peaks of the classical stage and Simon never did. The only Shakespeare roles he has taken are a rather unlikely Orlando in As You Like It at the National, in which he was the first ever Orlando who was clearly never in danger of losing the wrestling match, and Titus Andronicus at the Bristol Old Vic (which I didn’t see). He played Falstaff at Chichester, but in Orson Welles’ restructuring of Henry IV parts 1 & 2 as The Chimes at Midnight (Welles is an even greater Callow obsession than Laughton). That was his only performance that I ever got to review and I said that he would grow into it but in truth it was terrible.

All his vanity projects have been disastrous. There was the only movie he has directed, a rendering of Carson McCullers’ The Ballad of the Sad Café, which was a doggedly comprehensive hommage to the only film that Laughton ever directed, itself an hommage to DW Griffith, The Night of the Hunter. The gulf between them is that the Laughton was gradually recognised as a knockdown masterpiece whereas the Callow is, and I confidently predict will remain, forgotten. Then there was his stage version of Marcel Carné’s rapturous movie Les enfants du paradis, which we knew long before we saw it lose the RSC a huge fortune to be a truly wretched idea.

Callow’s trouble – not uncommon among thespians or among outgoing, ebullient, generous-hearted non-thespians – is that he finds it impossible to say no to anything or anyone. Tony Sher has chosen wisely and discriminatingly and planned the arc of his career with imagination and wonderful timing. He’s also much the better writer, of fiction and drama as well as books about acting. He has not enjoyed the success that Simon has had in movies but the Callow filmography is all over the place and the clear successes have not depended on his participation. His turn in Four Weddings and a Funeral is charming and touching, largely because he is pretty much playing himself, but the most affecting thing about it is the reciting of Auden’s verse by John Hannah as his bereaved lover at his funeral and the most haunting thing about that – which, to my amazement, I have never seen remarked in print – is Hannah’s facial resemblance to Aziz Yehia.

But for every Room with a View or No Man’s Land, there is an Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls or a Thunderpants. And Simon’s willingness, nay eagerness to fling off his clothes at every opportunity – to the point where, at one time, we thought the requirement must be a clause in his standard contract – is no longer sought by producers or front of house.

If there are two classes of person the young Callow excoriates in Being an Actor, they are directors and critics. Needless to say, he went on to practice both professions. I remember going to see him in Restoration, a revisionist restoration comedy at the Royal Court. I “went round” afterwards – a theatrical ritual that I loathe and only ever did regularly for Simon (and once for Tony Sher) – and he had no topic of conversation but the iniquity of Edward Bond who had not attended the press performance the night before, which sin Simon could almost forgive in him as the writer but not at all as the director. Nothing, he declared, should keep a director from seeing the cast through the first night. Not so very long after that, I heard him interviewed on the radio about his direction of a play out of town, whose first night, he mentioned en passant, he would not be able to attend.

I find him useless as a critic because he is a wholly uncritical enthusiast. He mostly reviews books about practitioners of theatre and/or film and he loves them all. Simon is one of those people – perhaps the leading one – who positively invites the properly despised term “luvvie” because he embodies every trait that that term seeks to parody. He talks and writes about actors as though they are pioneers, heroic and creative. They are not. They are gypsies and vagabonds, hired to flesh the imaginations of truly creative artists. It makes my blood boil to see actors described as having “created” a role. The playwright created the fucking role, you morons. And don’t start trying to bring things to the script. Try finding things in it instead.

Simon Callow is not the only person I have known who went on to be famous. He shares with the others the fact that I am no longer in their address books. Fame removes you from real friendships and delivers you into a world of celebrity in which you know all the other members to say hi to and know them like friends barely at all. Since his affair with Aziz, Callow has become very famous and has failed, or so I read, to find a lasting relationship. I only wish him well. I hope he can find someone who values him for himself and not for his fame. And I hope that he can turn down crap projects, refuse a few of his unnecessary reviewing offers and apply himself really self-critically to the senior years of his acting career. He could be a great Lear or a great Krapp if he truly wants to be. He could still be the fine actor he once promised to be, but he doesn’t have a lot of time.