The last time I saw Dirk Bogarde was in 1984, in the First Class lounge at Los Angeles airport. He was making it waspishly clear to his very long-term companion Tony “Tote” Forwood, and to anyone nearby, that he had, as usual, hated being in Hollywood. How could he ever forgive the perennially crass potentates who had failed to make him what he had every claim to be: a world star? Tempted briefly to presume on my acquaintance with him, I chose to hide myself behind a courtesy newspaper. As on not a few more public occasions (the most disastrous a 1988 BAFTA evening convened in his honour), Dirk appeared set on proving that first-class was never quite good enough for him. Readers of Ever, Dirk will find similar riffs of petulance alternating with protestations of blissful je-m’en-foutisme throughout the copious advertisements for himself with which, during almost thirty years of Provençal exile, he kept postmen busy.

Dirk’s career began before 1939, when the young actor attracted the attention, and the attentions, of Noël Coward, whose sexual appetites, so he wrote to Coward’s biographer Philip Hoare, in 1991, he declined to share. “Pity”, said the Master, who nevertheless composed a play in which he invited the quondam Derek Van den Bogaerde to star when he came out of the Army in 1946, having served as a camouflage officer. The still young, and very comely, Dirk – he had elected to sharpen his first name and anglicize the second – preferred to try his luck in the cinema. He repaired to Pinewood, where J. Arthur Rank’s henchmen ran a studio which aped California in the volume and banality of its product.

Pinewood comedy depended largely on puns, pratfalls and chamberpots. Doctors and nurses were constantly on call. No great success was forecast for the 1954 Doctor in the House, but when Dirk, as the inattentive young Doctor Simon Sparrow, responded to the formidable surgeon Sir Lancelot Spratt’s question “What’s the bleeding time?” with the reply “Ten past ten, sir”, Richard Gordon’s line got such a sustained laugh from a try-out audience that (so Dirk reports here) “we went back into the studio to film me doing something with chrysanthemums – no dialogue – just to cover the laugh”. When the picture proved a huge hit, a star, of a kind, was born; of the kind which, within a few years, Bogarde had small wish to remain.

By 1969, the year in which the first in this fat volume of his letters was written, Dirk had already had the courage to prove himself more than the pretty face that executives and many fans wanted him to stay. He broke ranks first to appear in Basil Dearden’s Victim (1960): after a number of bigger names (the great James Mason not least) had backed away, he took the role of a barrister whose marriage is riven by his repressed homosexuality. At a time when homosexual acts were still criminal, to play such a part, and with such accurate passion, was courageous, although not – Dirk insisted – self-revealing. It may be that, as Philip Hensher has said, “no one much cares any longer” who does what and with whom, but all his life Dirk would deny what others assumed, often without malice, to be the case.

Ambivalence was part of his allure. Soon after Victim came The Servant (1963), perhaps his perfect performance thanks (copiously rendered) to Joseph Losey, who directed him, and to Harold Pinter, who provided the script, and then Darling (1965) in which he and Laurence Harvey conspired, with equal generosity, though little mutual rapport (“Larry’s taste is between his toes”, Dirk was pleased to tell me), in order to promote Julie Christie’s Oscar-winning performance. He continued to be an eager sponsor of Julie’s talent; he could be, literally and metaphorically, the nicest of uncles.

One of the earliest letters (January 15, 1970) here is to “Dearest Beloved A. S.”, who was Ann Skinner, the continuity girl on Darling. Her duties, which she was performing for the first time, included checking from the script that a scene had been thoroughly “covered”, before the unit moved to the next. It was also Annie’s responsibility to ensure that everyone was wearing the same clothes, with the same buttons done up, when a scene was shot from another angle. She had had a complicated time, early on, when a sequence was being shot at Lord’s Cricket Ground, (my screenplay specified the Large Mound Stand) on a fine day on which rain was supposed to have stopped play, thus allowing the enactment of the opening overs of the love affair between Diana Scott (Julie Christie) and Robert Gold (Dirk). Dirk wrote: “Remember Lords and the hoses and the first Cont Sheets? . . . and Arnoldie being devine as ever”. After their inadvertent drenching by the fire brigade’s rented rain, Arnold Schulkes – Dirk’s long-time stand-in – helped to lay out the sodden continuity sheets to dry on “the hallowed, sun-drenched turf”, as John Coldstream chooses to footnote it.

I saw the rushes, which also seemed pretty wet, when John Schlesinger and Jo Janni screened them a few days later. The scene was so uneasily performed and so lacking in any erotic spark between the players that I hardly knew what to say, though I certainly remember saying it. After a constructive screaming match, the sequence was deleted. There is nothing unusual about such cosmetic excision; editing is of the essence of film. Dirk’s own life was no less prudently tailored; the scissors were applied to whatever might fail to be fetching. In his letters, spasms of conceit were trimmed with comely self-mockery, self-pity served with a twist. That most of them were addressed to ladies suggests that the sex was his preferred constituency, provided that it remained at a remove.

By the end of 1970, Dirk and Forwood had decamped to Clermont, the country house near Grasse which would be their base, and Dirk’s joy, until “Tote”’s death in 1988 when the stricken Dirk returned to London to live a short walk from Harrods. In the meanwhile, although he habitually lamented his sorry finances and his lack of appreciation by British critics (who more often than not gushed over his work), he was regularly in demand among quality filmmakers in Europe: Luchino Visconti, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Alain Resnais and Bertrand Tavernier. If he would never again be as hot at the box office as he had been with a stethoscope around his neck, it was due mainly to his admirable, if pettish, determination not to be a parochial poodle. Anxiety about status and fear of unemployment, however implausible, are constant themes here. Affectations of devotion alternate with neatly primed incitements to jealousy. How pleased, one wonders, was Losey to hear, at length, about the preparations for Visconti’s version of Death in Venice?

The TRUE story of DIV was that Mann, an old friend of Viscontis, was travelling on a train from Venice to Munich in 1910 . . . and in the compartment was a strange being in full slap . . . desperately unhappy, his died, dyed, hair streaky . . . his false eyelashes coming off in his tears. They spoke . . . it was Gustave Mahler . . . and he had just fallen in hopeless love with a child of thirteen in Venice . . . and so from there it went. So, although we are not telling anyone, I am in fact playing Mahler . . . and look rather like him with the putty nose-job and the rimless Lennon glasses . . . although how I am going to manage on the piddling little salary I dont know . . . we are back to OUR days of the Servant again . . . no lolly and everything needed. “The Damned” has been a sort of run-away success here and in the States, and in little old Belgium where it took 800,000 dollars!

Since The Damned had been directed by Visconti, in his usual inflated style, it is amusing (and surely amused Dirk, as he scribbled) to imagine with what close attention and pique Losey, the egomaniac’s egomaniac, was going to read of Dirk’s infatuation with Luchino. A few weeks later, we get what screenwriters call “the kicker”: a letter in response to an anticipated yelp of rage from Losey after reading an article by the film critic Margaret Hinxman to whom Dirk had spilled not much more than a single, but spicy, bean about something that had happened during the shooting of Accident in 1967:

[In red ink] WARNING!
This is supposed to be a funny letter – if you dont think so, ask Josh.
Dearest Josieposie . . .
Of course you WOULD be distressed by the “Telegraph” bit . . . I knew, the very second I read it . . . “Watch it! Loseys going to be pissed off about this one.” Well: I loved it . . . and approved it, and was terribly pleased to get the coverage . . . things on which you did not comment . . . like us both trying to work for English Films and make them go . . . seem to have passed over your huge head . . . the fact that I did NOT say you were pissed out of your mind, and disgusting, the night I walked off the set . . . and took ALL the blame; you choose to ignore . . . correctly, I suppose . . . if one thinks one is God one must behave as God . . . but I just honestly and calmely, do think that we have done all that we can together. I don’t, honestly, see how we could work together again . . . you decided, a long while ago, to take another path my dear . . . the one with the lolly and the lushness . . . I have kept to my rather wobbley one . . . . It is frightning like shit . . . but it is honour regained.

The Just William orthography hints at the eternal youthfulness which marks Dirk’s posture to directors, who often serve in loco parentis. With Losey, he needles and wheedles all at once: “you know”, he says later, “I am the person who loves you most in the world, save for Patreecia [Mrs Losey]”. Seethingly congratulatory after Losey had worked his way back from blacklist to A-list and the chance, for instance, to direct “the Welsh bastard” (Richard Burton), Dirk still hints at repairing their ruptured romance. He never lost the ability to slam a door without quite closing it. And when Losey died, he wrote to his widow with shameless sincerity: “Clever sod! Shitty bugger! Goodness HOW I shall miss him”.

Having transferred his filial allegiance to Visconti, Dirk convinced himself that Death in Venice had to be a masterpiece. With feline enthusiasm, he writes to Patricia Losey (while Joe is shooting The Go-Between) to tell her (and her unaddressed husband) how happy he was on the Lido with Luchino, walking “the knife-edge between a sort of Peter-O’Tool-Chips perf with granny glasses and an elderly twitch . . . and a perf which would suggest a pre-senile man of fifty-one walking to his death . . . . I hope that we have done it, otherwise, as Visconti says, ‘We morto . . . perqui all the guns are at us with this’”.

Sheridan Morley’s biography suggests that Dirk’s animus against Peter O’Toole derived from bitterness at having been denied the role of T. E. Lawrence, first in a film which “Puffin” Asquith was preparing in the 1950s and then by David Lean. Dirk veers (like almost everyone else in the Biz) from pitiless accuracy when it comes to assessing the merits of other people’s talent, and character, to anxious inflation of whatever he is doing himself and his motives for doing it. He mocks Warner Brothers, who sponsored Death in Venice, for being concerned that the movie was going over the agreed budget of $1,500,000). “It is a bargain picture whichever way they try to cut it . . . and trust the bloody Yids to know that! Except for Dannie A[ngel]., there really aren’t any in the Movies that I would trust around the corner.”

If fear that Visconti’s masterpiece was about to be mutilated by “the Katzes and the Hymes and the Shinklehubbers” (who they?) procured this outcrop of English gentlemanly rant (Dirk really did think that he was some kind of aristocrat), it requires small effort to understand the executives’ dismay as DIV dragged its needlessly slow length along. Dirk may have reached for the usual epithets when abusing Hollywood execs, but he took the trouble, in the 1990s, to go round schools alerting the young to the horrors of the Holocaust (and proclaiming an unequivocal atheism). He then received his share of the usual paragraph-free, green-inked “anti-semetic” anonymous abuse.

Dirk cannot be blamed for the protracted tedium of Death in Venice. The common weakness of Visconti’s films was his conviction, seconded by courtiers who deferred to him as the Duke of Milan, or at least of La Scala, that he was making a statement of rare nobility. Only when the majestic screen presence of Burt Lancaster was forced on him, as the star of The Leopard, did he allow, or prove unable to forbid, anyone else to command the screen. The degree to which showbiz is a Hegelian world of maestros and slaves is revealed by Dirk’s recalling, to his instantly beloved publisher Norah Smallwood, how – after he had made a detour to Lake Como to see the ailing Luchino – Visconti wrote to thank him because he had “come all this way to see me, now that I am no longer of any use to you”. Dirk goes on: “that remark . . . hurt me more than any other he had ever made, or anyone had ever made! Did he, I wondered, really think that my admiration, my awe, my respect for him was simply founded on his ‘use’ to me?” Perhaps Visconti’s gratitude was soured by apprehension that Dirk’s kindness was cruel evidence of his own terminal impotence.

There is a plethora of love and kisses throughout this cull of letters, but not a single love letter. It may be that some were burned during one of the bonfires of earlier correspondence in which Dirk, as had Somerset Maugham, sought to protect his reputation from publishing scoundrels. Both men tried to edit posterity’s vision of them. Dirk, as the camouflage officer of his own biography, knew very well that some things were best hidden by seeming to bring them into the open. In John Coldstream's unstinted biography (2004), we learn that Dirk’s one unconcealed gay passion was a rubberized wartime fling with “Jack” Jones, to whom a couple of only-too-polite letters are here addressed. If the friendship with “Tote” began with a coup de foudre, it extended into a fifty-year life in adjacent bedrooms and was draped with a coverlet of chastity.

Why did Dirk so frequently deny what had ceased, supposedly, to be of any stigmatic significance? The energy with which he maintained his epistolary contacts, first in the Biz and later in the book world (where his career had a spectacular, and very commercial, second flowering) suggests a libido regularly sublimated into compulsive letter-writing. Dorothy Gordon, an American lady, received “between six hundred and a thousand ‘starlings’ fluttering into her letter-box, the last on the morning of her death”, but Dirk, we are told, spoke to her only once, on the telephone. It was, Coldstream says, “a disappointment, compromising one element of their hitherto cement-hard bond: mystery”. This style of “love affair without carnality” recurs with a succession of ladies, to whom Dirk hurried to declare himself with unbuttoned, misspelt verbosity. There is no shortage of the candour, camp and cant of showbiz, but scarcely any compromising innuendo or telling confession until, when writing to Penelope Mortimer in February 1992, after his return to London, he says “wrenched my pectoral (don’t laugh) by pulling open those sodding bronze doors . . . . I am told it must be rested. Thankfully I no longer masturbate”.

This solitary allusion to a possible routine of self-satisfaction comes very late and, while unstartling, may offer a clue to Dirk’s supposedly mysterious sex life. Men and women – Capucine and Jean Simmonds for showy instance – figured in his list of quasi-fiancées, but narcissism was his abiding pleasure. Why not? In the actor, Narcissus and Pygmalion are rolled almost – but never quite – into one. Bogarde’s abiding objects of affection, admiration and tender concern were his appearance and his reputation. Sharing Baudelaire’s dandy ambition “vivre et mourir devant un miroir afin d’y être sublime sans interruption”, his professional concern was to look after himself. Physical appearance – he prided himself, in his early fifties, on his twenty-eight inch waist – and prompt competence were cherished with objective egotism.

When Losey accused him, on the set of Accident, of being “unprofessional”, he confesses that that really got to him, as the intuitively sadistic Joseyposey knew it would. The performer and his instrument are very nearly identical, but remain asymptotically distinct. The film Narcissus has his pool filled regularly by those whose business it is to see that he is reflected in the best possible light, but – once “action” is called – he is repeatedly alone with his beloved other, himself: Dirk’s “I” was a double act to which he was never unfaithful.

In 1981, after his transition from fading star to bestselling memoirist, Dirk wrote to Norah Smallwood: “The thing I simply adore is ‘being’ another person. Trying to use his mannerisms, finding what he’d do in a given crisis, how he’d move, walk, use his hands . . . . I don’t always get this together fully. Sometimes I do”. To the film critic Dilys Powell, in 1990, he looked back with understandable complacency: Film . . . . Perhaps that’s the only real time I come alive. Sometimes in this last film with Bertrand [Tavernier], I used to sit under a tree outside the little villa . . . and I would say to myself, aloud, really quite aloud, “Yes. This is the thing I really want. This is when I am at the utmost peak of happiness and awareness . . . . To ‘be’ someone I have totally invented. To find a new dimension, to enter it, to give that dimension Life, if one can do such a thing, and to make someone in an audience perhaps in Tokio, maybe in Southgate or Northampton or even Munich or Fairbanks, move and say ‘I know that feeling. I have done that, said that, felt that. How does he know?’”

Dirk played the theme of poor-dear-me with infinite variations. Just when you weary of his self-involvement, however, you get shafts of piercing candour. He may be the friend and close neighbour of Dickie Attenborough, but when it comes to Gandhi, he writes “not my kind of fillum, and I’m not in favour of the little man anyhow. Gandhi, I mean. I was in India during Congress riots and I hated his bloody, cunning, little guts then . . . . But I sobbed myself to a fit during ET . . . takes all kinds, dunnit?”. Dirk lacks the meum-tuum sense with which good letter-writers address their recipient’s taste and interest. He may have been fluent, but if he is often amusing, especially when nasty, he seldom coins an original phrase : “the sun died like an emperor . . . great scarlet arcs of silk . . . saffron . . . green” is about the best he can do (the appended gems from unselected letters are, at best, semi-precious).

Admiration of others is rare, but can be abruptly unmitigated: of Fassbinder, however self-destructive, he said “I would walk to wherever he was to work with him again”; Gielgud, Peggy Ashcroft, Juliet Stevenson and Tim Piggott-Smith are in the rare company of actors assessed as pure gold. He seldom speaks well, never for very long, about writers and soon spots the element of grande bogue in The English Patient, which he then declines to review, while of a Tom Stoppard script, he says, “It's school-boy stuff, right? God, the English!”. In 1985, he writes to Kathleen Tynan (one of his regular covey of – preferably – absentee charmers):

Yes: Pinter is a different fellow I fear. He and I “hosted” a party-cum-memorial-Service . . . for Losey last year, and he was very cool, and rather like a lama with disdain. She [Antonia Fraser] frightened the shit out of me, an aggressively faux-charming Lady.
“I do SO love your books . . .” Shit! . . .
I remember Harold in days of yore. Timid, because I had questioned him about Lobster Thermidor which continually arrived in the Script of “The Servant”. I was bewildered, and in awe of the Intellectual Writer. So I picked my way with care.
“Why is it that every rich person on the film only ever eats a Lobster Thermidor?” I asked bravely.
There was a stricken silence from the assembled Cast, Losey and Harold. Who pushed his glasses up his nose, so to speak, and then said in a shaking voice, “What OTHER meal do Rich People eat, then?”
And he didn’t actually know. He and Vivien [Merchant] had been taken to dine by the Oliviers (or someone) and they had been given L. Thermidor. So that is what he imagined all the rich ate.
We substituted the meal for others in the final Script.
But that is who Harold was once upon a time. And nice with it.
But, of course, we all change.

As Dirk himself said, doubtless in the hope of contradiction, these letters are “not brilliant. Amusing, perhaps, light and loving but they aint Intellectual”. Indeed not; they show small sign of their author reading anything but scripts or his own notices. The best inside story is from another letter to Kathleen Tynan in 1984, when Dirk was president of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival and my old friend Stanley Donen was one of the jurors who were eagerly canvassed, by the “Organizators” to give a prize to John Huston’s clunker Under the Volcano. “They admitted” Dirk wrote, “that Huston had been promised that he’d win everything. ‘You have to award Huston SOMETHING . . . . After all, be reasonable, he had to come seven thousand miles for this evening.’ To which Stanley Donen . . . said in his high, dry voice: ‘You do not get a fuckin’ Palme d’Or for TRAVELLING!’”

If Dirk had more inside stories like that one, what a fool I was not to seek a seat closer to him on that flight from LAX!

John Coldstream, editor
EVER, DIRK
The Bogarde letters
536pp. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. £25.
978 0 297 85241 4

Frederic Raphael’s most recent novel is Fame and Fortune, published last year. Ticks and Crosses, the fourth volume of his notebooks, is published this month.

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