excellent score for Charade was composed and conducted by Henry Mancini, and Hank, as he was known, was one of the most charming men you could meet. On the first day of recording, we met at CTS in Kensington Garden Square. He was introduced to me, walked into the studio, greeted the orchestra, picked up his baton, and they sight-read the title music without a mistake. It was sheer magic. The Charade theme, later with lyrics by Johnny Mercer, was heard for the first time. “It’s a standard,” I said to Stanley, who nodded sagely. I was quite right. I know a good tune when I hear one. The session was interrupted by lunch at a pub and then we continued. Everything was wrapped up in a couple of days, and Hank was back on the plane.
Charade was put together rapidly. Stanley took it to Los Angeles to show to Universal. They previewed it and he returned. Some tweaking was required to the final scene involving trapdoors in a Paris theatre and that was that. It was probably one of the most successful pictures Stanley directed in that period.
* * *
Having moved from Ealing to Bourne End during The Innocents, I now settled back into life on the Abbotsbrook estate. Although created by a spec builder who had fallen in love with Venice, the estate did not resemble Venice in any way, a stream with swans ran through it and the homes were rather mock Tudor in style.
I’d moved into Cornerways with a housekeeper, Mrs. Dring, a widow from Boston who my mother Florence had located for me. Mrs. Dring was charming and helpful. Kate went to school locally and my adopted son David was at a prep school near Newbury.
Laurence visited me in Bourne End after I returned from Paris. She soon christened it “Dead End,” because Laurence perceived it as a commuter belt area where people were interested only in domestic matters. There was no culture.
In deference to Mrs. Dring, Laurence stayed in the guest room. This situation quickly became tiresome, and she moved into my bed. Neither of us considered what Mrs. Dring might think.
Shortly after Laurence had returned to Paris and before we decided to marry, I was driving my mother to David’s sports day at prep school. Kate was in the backseat of the car. “Are you still sleeping with a board under your mattress?” my mother enquired. She was referring to a cure I had for backache. “No, he’s not,” Kate piped up, “Laurence didn’t like it.” Mother fell silent. She remained silent for the rest of the day, and we drove back to Boston without further reference to Kate’s remark. The following morning Mother came into my bedroom, looking haggard and drawn. “I didn’t sleep last night after what Kate said in the car.” I grunted a little. I was, after all, well over thirty. “Did I understand that you and Laurence slept in the same bed with Mrs. Dring in the house?”
In fact, we must have been really active since Sybil was conceived around this time. My mother said, “I will come to the wedding, but I will not enjoy it.”
Laurence and my mother tolerated one another, but I could not say they were close. Mother always said bad things about my wives. When I married Jessie, she described her as “attending the tin tabernacle,” a reference to the fact that she was Catholic and had a Russian mother. Laurence was Jewish and French. My mother would have preferred a nice English girl, who was not pregnant.
One Saturday the marquee from Harrods went up at Cornerways, and Laurence and I were married at Little Marlow Church. Sybil was born shortly after while I was editing Clayton’s next film, The Pumpkin Eater. Jack was a near neighbour and offended my mother by wearing casual clothes to our wedding and then compounding the felony by taking small children with him when he went to smoke in the back garden.
David and Kate were there and it was a family occasion. Laurence looked beautiful in her wedding finery, her family had come over from Paris and the sun shone all day. It was the start of a lifetime of happiness, though like all relationships it had its ups and downs.
FLASHBACK: Photogravure
My father had decided I should be apprenticed in the photogravure section of the factory that manufactured engraved cylinders from which the labels were printed. The department was under the strict rule of Mr. Booy, a small man with a big temper. Although I was the boss’s son, he treated me exactly like anyone else.
I lived at home and tried to adjust to small-town life. I joined an amateur theatrical group, the Boston Playgoers, and rapidly became their juvenile lead. This occupied most of my leisure time and introduced me to a circle of local folk who had a nucleus of like interests. We would repair to a inn after rehearsals where we drank too much beer. On Saturday nights, a few of the male members of the cast could be found getting drunk in the “men only” bar of the White Hart hotel. Women were consigned to the adjoining room with its wicker furniture. I would consume too much beer and then retire to my bedroom. The room would revolve as soon as I lay down and just in time I would get up to throw up in the hand basin. When this became a regular Saturday routine, I knew it was time for a change.
I had made a few trips back to Oundle, often to discuss my future with Arthur Marshall. He never once encouraged me to drop out of the family business and engage in something to do with cinema. When he was my age, he had wanted nothing more than to become a professional comedian. His parents had talked him out of that and, as a result, he had abandoned his desires and become a teacher, which he never regretted. He felt it was sensible of my parents to steer me toward a secure future in the printing business. That I eventually spurned his advice always amused me. It was only a couple of years afterward that Arthur abandoned teaching, left Oundle, and became secretary to Lord Rothschild; then he became part of Binkie Beaumont’s theatrical empire, and finally a television personality. He also never stopped writing humorous pieces for the New Statesman and the Telegraph. So much for his advice—which I never took.
The Boston Film Society had sprouted a production department. I had a16 mm Bolex camera and with the help of Charles Whittaker and others, we made a short silent film that we called Absconded. I volunteered to play the lead. It was shot on the marshes around Boston and concerned a Borstal boy who had escaped from the camp and was chased to his death by drowning. My friends played the police, who determined that there would be no way out.
The film ran for ten minutes and was awarded a prize in the annual amateur film competition. It was awarded to us by Harry Watt, the celebrated documentarian who was now making features for Ealing.
This success inspired us, in 1951, to make a much more ambitious piece that we called A Boston Story featuring Charles Whittaker as an American returning to his native town in Festival Year.
Before this, however, my father had decided I should go to the London School of Printing for a year, to learn the art of photogravure away from the confines of the factory. He contacted their south England representative and asked him to find suitable accommodation. For reasons I now find odd, this man booked me into a guesthouse in Bromley, Kent, which involved me taking a train each day to Charing Cross, a needlessly expensive journey and one that required me to take the last train home. This curtailed any fun I might find in the city, since the last train left at eleven. I had to put up with the bizarre and repressive life that existed in the guesthouse run by the Carters, a grim and obsequious couple lately released from the RAF, who made my life a misery. They ran their prim and proper establishment as if it were something to be treasured and revered. They were house proud and had something like a dozen guests, of which I was by far the youngest. Most of the guests were middle aged and escaping from something like wives or taxes. Some were business reps who used the guesthouse as a cheap hotel once a week when on their rounds of the area. All in all, it was a motley bunch of misfits, mostly men, who met over breakfast and dinner in sullen silence. I kept as far away from them as possible. The atmosphere was pure Graham Greene, and the Carters were a rigid couple who fawned over the regular customers while treating me with disdain and overcharging for my room and board. I never felt so lonely. Once I contracted a bad flu and had to remain in my room.
