SPECS

Like a large number of my friends, I wear spectacles, eye-glasses or whatever you want to call them, to assist me clearly to see our wonderful world. I take them entirely for granted and feel more relaxed wearing them, even if I do not always need them. There is little downside: I am too old to be vain about my good-looks – I already closely resemble George Clooney in my own estimation! I suppose there is a small danger of being insulted as “a four-eyed git” if I have a road-rage encounter but such a sad event has thankfully not yet occurred. 

Our ancestors took a long time to perfect specs. Some rudimentary versions appeared in India and China, later taken up in 12^th century Italy. By the 18^th century specs were widely used in Europe and polymath US Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin, is credited with the invention of bi-focals.

Ben Franklin with his bi-focals

There was in the 19^th century a stigma against spec-wearing, thought to be only suitable for bible-backed, religious types or the studiously academic. Bespectacled but hyper-active Teddy Roosevelt put an end to that prejudice. Woodrow Wilson and Harry Truman followed in that style while in Britain Clem Attlee had a modest NHS pair of specs; Ernie Bevin and Herbert Morrison always sported glasses and famously Mahatma Gandhi peered out from his steel-rimmed favourites.

Not all spec-wearers were such worthy types. Horrid Trotsky, worse Molotov and unspeakable Himmler glowered behind glinting specs:

Trotsky

Molotov

Himmler

Anyway, grey politicians are never ideal role models and in the 1920s the world instead laughed with Harold Lloyd, inseparable from his horn-rims, even in his worst scrapes.

Harold Lloyd in Safety Last

The ever-enterprising Greeks gave a huge gift to opticians with lovely songstress Nana Mouskouri whose face advertised high-cost spec frames for a generation, as she trilled away with her fractured English and sentimental repertoire.

Nana's lovely specs

Here in Greece we await a visit tomorrow from bespectacled Jeroen Dijsselbloem, head of EuroGroup, the finance ministers monitoring Eurozone finance. He usually sounds reasonable, but he may find the newly radical Greeks a trifle aggravating.  I hope his vision is clearer than his complicated name and he is not blind to the fact that Greece needs urgent help!

Jeroen Dijsselbloem

My dear father was told by his own father to have a profession, as in his view the family’s embryonic entertainment business was too risky and grandfather feared cinemas were a 3-day wonder. Accordingly my father qualified as an optician and his shop grew to be a leading emporium in my native Aberdeen. Father kept it going even when his main interest shifted to the family biz which was much more remunerative. He held open court for the cross-eyed, boss-eyed, wall-eyed and cock-eyed, bringing them the manifold blessings of proper sight. Wear your specs with pride!

SMD

29.01.15

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2015

GREECE LIGHTS A FIRE

You will have read the papers and watched the TV stories. Greece has decisively turned away from the two parties, New Democracy and PASOK, who have dominated Greek politics for 40 years, and have voted for leftist SYRIZA and its leader Alexis Tsipras. SYRIZA got 149 of the 300 parliamentary seats and, to get a working majority, have formed a coalition with Independent Greeks, a conservative group led by Panos Kamenos, who have 13 seats. The Greek public is ecstatic at this radical change.

The result was never in much doubt. The New Democracy-PASOK coalition has totally failed to pull round Greece’s economy; the EU Troika’s 5-year “austerity” programme has merely strangled any hopes of recovery. The middle classes have been decimated by ever increasing taxes and unemployment is at totally unprecedented levels. The Greeks felt they had nothing to lose by voting for off-beat SYRIZA. I do not believe the Greek electorate endorsed SYRIZA’s programme, if such a thing exists, as it did not much feature in the campaign. The Greeks simply wanted change at any cost, an end to daily misery, to daily deprivation, to daily humiliation. The Greeks want hope: a world where they can live to modest standards of comfort: the Greeks are a proud people, hating to be beholden to anyone and determined to keep up appearances and to conceal need.

Tsipras sworn in as Prime Minister this afternoon

Public services in Greece are in a sorry state. I recently went to one of the best state hospitals in Athens, its corridors crowded by patients on trollies and standards of cleanliness deplorable. Yet the barely paid doctors were polite and efficient. Many doctors and nurses are fleeing the country for better things. On my holiday island of Samos (population 40,000 and the island 45km long) there is only one ambulance on call. A few weeks ago a patient at one end of the island had a heart attack and the ambulance arrived too late; the patient was dead. Simultaneously a motorcycle accident at the other end seriously injured a man; by the time the ambulance came, this victim was also dead. There is no money for that essential second ambulance. Electricity charges are among the highest in Europe, family allowances are only spasmodically paid,  pensions have been brutally cut back, though some were over-generous, dustbins are regularly scoured for food. Greece is already in the Third World.

SYRIZA is right to seek a renegotiation of the nation’s huge debt burden. Greece clearly cannot keep to its obligations to the troika but the Berlin and Brussels paymasters are deaf to reason. “Pay up, or we will ruin Greece by bankrupting her banks!” they threaten this morning. Hostility to Greece in Northern Europe is endemic; ex-US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was shocked by the relish in the talk of “crushing Greece” from continental Europeans at a G7 meeting in Canada in 2010, and talked them round to sanity. Since then, Greeks have been experimented upon like laboratory rats, as one hare-brained EU policy after another is tested on them. Tsipras will try to get a deal, but he will have to be persuasive and subtle. Hard-faced Mrs Merkel and Mr Schaueble, not to mention devious Mr Juncker, will defend their pet Eurozone project and seek every pound of flesh from the Greek bail-outs. Much more rational would be a Greek bond negotiation followed by a return to the drachma and devaluation. But SYRIZA and the Greeks want to stay in the euro (why?) and the EU screams “impossible” if Grexit is even mentioned. Room for manoeuvre looks very limited.

Hard news on Tsipras’ programme will have to wait at least a week. I would expect populist moves, like the reinstatement of sacked government cleaners (a local cause celebre), a ban on home repossessions, and conditional electricity reconnection of some poor people – not “free electricity for the poor” as Sky TV claimed today. In time SYRIZA will want to investigate graft and theft by former PASOK and New Democracy ministers for which there will be plenty of evidence.

After today’s excitement, will there be any lasting effect on Europe? Smaller parties will be mightily encouraged by SYRIZA’s triumph. In 2009 SYRIZA won 4.6% of the votes and 13 seats; now in 2015 it has 36.4% and 149 seats, 2 away from an absolute majority. Big, fat and smug parties can learn another lesson on the pace of change. In 2009 PASOK won 43.9% of the votes and 160 seats; now in 2015 it ignominiously won 4.75% and holds 13 seats. Watch out, Labour! If any progress is made with the EU, how encouraged will be Podemos in Spain, Front National in France and Five-Star in Italy – a nightmare for Brussels. Political certainties always crumble in time and SYRIZA’s victory opens new doors and stimulates new thinking; it lights a fire which need not be destructive but hopefully brings light and warms the hearts of all Europe.

SMD

26.01.15

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2015

PS. Sky TV always gets the pronunciations wrong. Tsipras (say, Tzeeprass) with accent on the first syllable. SYRIZA (say, Seereeza), again with the accent on the first syllable!

DAVID NIVEN and DIRK BOGARDE: Celebrities of Stage and Screen (19)

[This is the nineteenth in an occasional series describing British artistes who found fame on stage or in the movies]

This piece describes two actors who had long careers in action films, comedies and dramas. Niven, with his military air, was the more extrovert while Bogarde, by commercial necessity and personal choice a closet gay, was much more diffident. Both had second careers as writers, surprising and impressing their erstwhile fans and a new audience.

David Niven

David Niven (1910 – 1983) was born into an affluent landowning family. His Scottish nominal father was killed in action at Gallipoli in 1915 when Niven was a child and his mother later married her friend Sir Thomas Comyn-Pratt, reputedly the biological father of David. His rebelliousness led to his expulsion from prep-school and barred him from Eton, but he went to Stowe, whose headmaster was the notably liberal JF Roxburgh whom Niven much admired. He went on to military school at Sandhurst eventually being commissioned in 1930 into the Highland Light Infantry, the Scottish regiment he had particularly wished to avoid. He hated his two years there and fled to America, resigning his commission by telegram in 1933.

After visa problems diverting him to Mexico, he eventually found work as a film extra in Hollywood, slowly improving his status to minor roles then to leads. He became a member of the “Hollywood Raj”, the English expatriate community in Hollywood, including C. Aubrey Smith, Rex Harrison, Ronald Colman and Errol Flynn, with whom he shared a house. He made several films including The Charge of the Light Brigade (with Flynn) and as Edgar Linton in Wuthering Heights in 1939 with Laurence Olivier. On the outbreak of war he became a lieutenant in The Rifle Brigade in 1940 and had a busy war between Signals duties, action in France after Normandy and propaganda film making. He left the army as a Lieutenant-Colonel. 

Hunter and Niven in A Matter of Life and Death

An early film success was the 1946 Powell and Pressburger romantic classic A Matter of Life and Death with Niven playing the lead as heroic Squadron Leader Peter Carter opposite Kim Hunter. He made a number of films as the lead like 1950’s The Elusive Pimpernel with Niven as Sir Percy Blakeney – the source of a contract dispute between Niven and Sam Goldwyn, resulting in Niven being excluded from work for the Hollywood studios until 1956.

Niven’s personal life had taken an unhappy turn when his beloved English wife Primula Rollo, whom he married in 1940 and gave him 2 sons, died aged only 28 in a 1946 house accident. He later married a Swedish model Hjordis Genberg, who became promiscuous and alcoholic, creating turmoil in their relationship, although Niven himself was a dedicated womaniser.

Niven shot to global stardom playing Phineas Fogg in the 1956 star-studded epic Around the World in 80 Days which was a huge success. In 1958 Niven put the seal on his career credentials by winning the Best Actor Oscar for his fine portrayal of cashiered Major Pollock in Separate Tables from Terence Rattigan’s play. He was only on-screen for 16 minutes!

Niven with Cantinflas in Around the World in 80 Days

Deborah Kerr and David Niven in Separate Tables

                     

Niven was familiar in action movies like The Guns of Navarone (1961), playing the insubordinate explosives expert opposite Gregory Peck and The Sea Wolves (1980) and as Sir Charles Lytton in the 1963 original Pink Panther, showing his comic gifts.

Niven and Peck in The Guns of Navarone

He started writing in 1971 when his first volume of bright memoirs The Moon’s a Balloon sold 5m copies. A second volume, Bring on the Empty Horses, stiff with somewhat unreliable if amusing anecdotes, often borrowed and heavily embroidered, also sold well. The second of two novels Go slowly, Come back quickly enjoyed some success. Niven was an unusually talented person despite his raffish air and he maintained, unlike many showbiz stars, a civility and politeness to all sorts – London Airport porters especially appreciated this and sent an enormous wreath to his funeral.

Niven was beset by the totally debilitating motor-neurone disease in 1981 (wife Hjordis not much help) and he died in his Swiss chalet, the Chateau d’Oex, in 1983, mourned by his many friends and fans.

                                                                           ----------------------

Dirk Bogarde (1921-99) was born Derek van den Bogaerde, in Hampstead, London, the son of Ulric Bogaerde, an Englishman of Flemish origin, who was art editor of The Times, and of Glaswegian actress Margaret Niven (no relation to David!). He was educated at University College School, Hampstead and for 3 years at Alan Glen’s, Glasgow. He wanted to study acting and then went to Chelsea Arts College, making his stage debut in 1939.

Dirk Bogarde

War broke out and Bogarde joined up, became an intelligence officer with The Queen’s Regiment, ending the war as a captain. On demobilisation he returned to acting and his good looks attracted the notice of The Rank Organisation and he was signed up on a 14 year contract. At first he played young tearaways, notably as the killer of PC Dixon (Jack Warner) in The Blue Lamp (1950). He made various adventure films and in 1949 met actor Anthony Forwood, erstwhile husband of actress Glynis Johns, and they became lovers living together devotedly for almost the next 40 years.

Bogarde and Forwood

This takes us to the central enigma of Bogarde’s life. He was entirely homosexual yet was built up by his studio as a matinee idol. He had to hide his orientation as in Britain male homosexual acts were illegal until 1967. His Rank contract had “morality clauses” which could result in dismissal for homosexuality, quite likely to be invoked by strict Methodist Lord Rank. Unlike many others, Bogarde never “came out” when the climate became more liberal and he publically denied his homosexuality all his life. Yet his post-1960 film performances reflected his nature unambiguously.

In 1954 Bogarde became Britain’s box-office top star with comedy Doctor in the House playing Dr Sparrow, ably assisted by Kenneth More, Donald Sinden and James Robertson Justice as irascible head-surgeon Sir Lancelot Pratt.

Doctors J.Robertson Justice, Kenneth More and Bogarde

In 1955, the first sequel, Doctor at Sea featured gorgeous young Brigitte Bardot, rather lost on Bogarde; there were 5 Doctor sequels. Bogarde starred in action films Simba about Mau Mau terrorism in Kenya and in 1957 Ill met by Moonlight with Bogarde as Paddy Leigh-Fermor, kidnapper of the German general commanding Crete. He was also self-sacrificing Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities based on Dickens’ novel. He played 3 roles in 1959’s Libel about an amnesiac officer opposite Olivia de Havilland.

Bogarde escaped from his Rank contract in the early 1960s. He tried but failed to break into Hollywood. His lack of interest in women was certainly a handicap, but anyway Song without End where he played Franz Liszt failed, as did The Singer not the Song with Bogarde in outrageously tight leather trousers as a campy Mexican bandit.

Bogarde in tight leather

Bogarde’s remaining film career was a mixture of the offbeat and the art-house, very much to Bogarde’s taste. He was a gay barrister combatting blackmailers in Victim (1961), a bold film for its time, and then decadent valet Hugo persecuting James Fox in The Servant. He was good as the bored banker in Darling (1965) chasing free-wheeling Charlotte Rampling, very much a film of the 1960s. In Visconti’s The Damned (1969) Bogarde wallowed in Nazi depravity. In 1971 he won awards as Gustav von Achenbach in Death in Venice, obsessed by a pretty Italian boy to the music of Mahler.

Bogarde in Death in Venice

His final German-themed film was The Night Porter where Bogarde as Max, an ex SS officer, recreates his sadomasochistic relationship with former prisoner Charlotte Rampling. One critic complained the film was: 

"as nasty as it is lubricious, a despicable attempt to titillate us by exploiting memories of persecution and suffering.”

Bogarde returned to his he-man persona in one of his last films in 1977 A Bridge too far in a cameo as “Boy” Browning in an epic about the battle of Arnhem. 

There was a strong element of fantasy and wish-fulfilment about Bogarde’s celluloid world. From 1971 Bogarde turned to writing with 7 volumes of memoirs, 6 novels and much journalism, his first volume A Postillion struck by Lighting probably his best. Written long after the event, Bogarde claimed to have been one of the first British officers to have been present at the Liberation of Belsen, but later research makes this highly doubtful. He was however generally a witty and sensitive writer. He was knighted in 1992.

In 1988 his lover Anthony Hopwood was dying of liver cancer and Bogarde campaigned for allowing voluntary euthanasia for the terminally ill. They had lived together mainly in a villa in Grasse in the French Midi but Hopwood died in London as did Bogarde himself after a stroke in 1999. It was a pity that commercial, social and personal pressures made Bogarde effectively live a lie: he may have been happier and helped others if he had “come out” in the 1980s. However it is wrong to judge others on such intimate matters and Bogarde had enjoyed a remarkably successful career.

SMD

24.01.15

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2015

TERRY-THOMAS and PETER SELLERS: Celebrities of Stage and Screen (18)

[This is the eighteenth in an occasional series describing British actors and performers who achieved fame in the theatre or in the movies.]

I describe here two “funny men” who much amused British and global audiences at their peak in the late 1950s to the mid-1960s. They quite often appeared in the same films but they were very different personalities. Terry-Thomas was a seasoned performer, well liked in his profession, cherished by his public and mourned for his ill-health. Sellers was much the more brilliant but he carried around a fatal cocktail of neuroses and complexes. Losing his touch and behaving badly, his decline and fall did not come as a surprise nor was he much regretted.

Terry-Thomas in 1951

Terry-Thomas (1911-90) was born Thomas Stevens in the London suburb of Finchley, the son of the owner of a Smithfield meat wholesaling business. His parents quarrelled constantly making his adolescence difficult and both became alcoholics, divorcing in the 1920s. Terry-Thomas was sent to public school Ardingly College near Haywards Heath, where he was happy though not academic. He was stage-struck, haunting the Golders Green Hippodrome and was an early enthusiast for amateur dramatics: he also adopted his dapper persona (he was a fan of Douglas Fairbanks) and trained himself to speak with an upper class accent.

Thomas made his stage debut in 1930 but his apprenticeship was long and obscure. He tried his hand at professional ballroom dancing partnered to a sister of Jessie Matthews, but found that too limiting. He joined ENSA in 1938 and appeared in many wartime shows, making his name with his versatile comic turns in Stars in Battledress, until being demobbed in 1946. His West End breakthrough came with Piccadilly Hayride, a show he compered starring Sid Field which ran at the Prince of Wales from 1946 to 1948. Various radio shows followed.

In 1956 he triumphed as Major Hitchcock in the wartime comedy Private’s Progress, where he rather upstaged the leading man Ian Carmichael and he coined his catch-phrase: “You are a Shower, an absolute Shower!” He was signed up by the Boulting Brothers and his films included old favourites like Blue Murder at St Trinians, Lucky Jim (where he played the avant-garde critic Bertrand Welch) and The Naked Truth, his first film with Peter Sellers. In 1959 he starred again with Sellers and Russ Tamblyn in Tom Thumb, which was followed by I’m All Right, Jack where Sellers won most of the plaudits.  Better was Carlton-Browne of the FO, with Terry-Thomas in his best silly-ass mode.

Villainous Peter Sellers and Terry-Thomas in Tom Thumb

T-T puzzled as Carlton-Browne

His career in the British film industry was coming to an end as he was lured to Hollywood, but not before making amusing School for Scoundrels based on Stephen Potter’s One-Upmanship books and Terry-Thomas as the quintessential gap-toothed cad and rotter.

Terry-Thomas’ Hollywood years were a mixed bag but he became familiar to the US movie public with at least two roles. He was hilarious as Lt.Col. Algernon Hawthorne in It’s a Mad, Mad. Mad, Mad World (1963) fulminating to an indignant Milton Berle about the hen-pecked American male and the national obsession with bosoms and brassieres!

Milton Berle upset by caustic Terry-Thomas

Terry-Thomas also enlivened the British-made but American-financed epic Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines (1965) where he played the conspiring bounder Sir Percy Ware-Armitage.

T-T as a Magnificent Man

His American swansong was with Jack Lemmon, who became a firm friend, in How to Murder your Wife.

His good days were over. He left Hollywood and appeared in second-rate Continental films, although he was seen on US chat shows. In 1971 he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s and gradually he only appeared in short cameos and finally disappeared altogether. Living with his supportive third wife in Ibiza, his fortune was eaten up by medical bills. They had to return to the UK finally living in a dismal charity flat. Theatrical friends organised a benefit which raised £85,000, half going to the Parkinson’s Society and half to Terry-Thomas allowing him to take a place in a nursing home in Godalming, where he died, aged 78, in 1990. This was a sad end for a warmly recognised actor who had brought laughter to a whole generation.

Peter Sellers (1925-80), born in Portsmouth, was the son and only child of Bill and Peg Sellers, who were touring music hall entertainers. Bill was an easy-going Anglican while Peg was a dominating Jewish lady to whom Peter was very close; Spike Milligan much later said this closeness was “unhealthy in a grown man” and was certainly the source of many later hang-ups. The family settled in Muswell Hill, North London in  1935 and at Peg’s insistence, Peter was privately educated at Catholic St Aloysius College. Peter was attracted by his mother’s Jewish heritage and he was a top pupil at school, known as “the Jewish boy”. At the outbreak of war in 1939, St Aloysius was evacuated to Cambridge, but Peg would not allow Peter to go and he left school aged 14.                  

           

Peter Sellers the young drummer

                       

The family moved to Ilfracombe, Devon, and Peter worked backstage in the local theatre. He also became very adept as a jazz drummer and was billed locally as “Britain’s answer to Gene Krupa!” Peter joined ENSA, entertaining the troops, and then was called up to the infantry where his impersonations of senior officers were much admired. After he was demobbed he worked spasmodically but then was discovered by BBC Radio where he was a supporting player and voice in many comedy radio shows.

His breakthrough came with The Goon Show (1951-60) which started with an audience of 370,000 listeners and finally reached 7 million. Peter Sellers with Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe, performed in an original and anarchic show, re-writing the radio comedy genre.

Goons Milligan, Sellers and Secombe

Sellers started to work in films but he was mainly in a supporting role. He was a Teddy-boy member of Alec Guiness’ gang in The Ladykillers (1955), an eccentric cinema projectionist in The Smallest Show on Earth and a wicked parody of Scots comedians as Sonny MacGregor in The Naked Truth (1957). He was second-string to Terry-Thomas in Tom Thumb (1958) but came into his own as the uproarious shop-steward Fred Kite in I’m All Right, Jack, much the best Sellers performance thus far.

Sellers brilliant as trades unionist Fred Kite

Sellers again displayed his versatility in The Mouse that Roared playing 3 roles opposite Jean Seberg and amused me as the Edinburgh accountant outwitting brash consultant Constance Cummings in The Battle of the Sexes (1960), based on the Thurber story The Catbird Seat. 

Sellers had a foolish infatuation with Sophia Loren when making The Millionairess and then made 2 flops The Waltz of the Toreadors and Mr Topaze. In 1962 he divorced his wife of 12 years Anne Howe and threw his children out of his house in a typical display of childish willfulness. He decided to leave England for the USA.

In 1962 he well played the part of oddball Quilty in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita with James Mason and Sue Lyon. Then Blake Edwards persuaded him to take on the part of Inspector Clouseau for the first Pink Panther film – a franchise that was to keep him going over 5 sequels. He created a classic comic character. Equally brilliant was his 3-part portrayal of President Merkin Muffler, RAF Group Captain Mandrake and wheelchair-bound fanatic Dr Strangelove in Kubrick’s film of that name in 1963.

Herbert Lom and Sellers as Inspector Clouseau

Sellers multi-roles in Dr Strangelove

In retrospect this was probably the apex of his career. In 1964 he married glamorous Britt Ekland after a whirlwind romance but in 1965, trying to enhace his sexual performance, he overdosed on amyl nitrites and had 8 heart attacks. Sellers recovered but his relationship with Ekland was riddled with his paranoia and jealous insecurity and she filed for divorce. At the same time, Sellers’ mother Peg died, sending him into a spiral of depression.

He made more dud films like What’s New Pussycat?, Casino Royale, The Bobo and The Party, more frenetic than witty. His only success was There’s a Girl in my Soup with Goldie Hawn but he fell into a  drug-fuelled and alcoholic haze and outsiders thought his behaviour amounted to his being certifiable. Somehow he managed to star in the well-received Return of the Pink Panther in 1974, but he constantly quarrelled with directors, abused co-stars and threw tantrums. His 3^rd wife Miranda Quarry divorced him in 1974 but he remarried starlet Lynne Frederick in 1977, treating her abominably although she was still married to him when he died. Although he made a dire version of The  Prisoner of Zenda and an even worse Fu Manchu, his finally released film Being There, where he played the simple-wise gardener Chance, won many high awards, though its fey merits escaped me.

After he died of another heart attack in 1980, aged 54, good judges like the Boulting Brothers rated him very highly as: “The finest comedian produced by this country since Charlie Chaplin”. Sellers was indeed brilliant, but he was undisciplined and an impossible colleague. At the end he had morphed into a monster and his death was a blessed release for him and for those who were close to him.

SMD, 

22.01.15

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2015