Looking back angrily
Simon Ward
SO WHAT DID YOU EXPECT? by Anthony Shaffer
Picador, £16.99, pp. 222, ISBN 0330390430
The somewhat plaintive tone of the title of Anthony Shaffer's memoir would seem to capture his mood as he mulls briefly over a life spent writing entertainments for stage and screen. Expect the worst and you won't be disappointed would seem to be the message. Work your heart out, come up with a few new wrinkles and stand back as some knuckle-dragging producer, alcoholic director or megalomaniacal performer eviscerates your creation, leaving it bleeding over the delivery room floor, to the delight of friends as much as enemies. In showbiz, Schadenfreude rules, OK? Even the hardiest soul might confess to feeling wounded on seeing their agent suddenly disappear off the pavement into a Lexington Avenue carpet shop in order to avoid discussion about an uncomplimentary review in the New York Times. (No! No, wait a minute. That was my agent. That's my story and I've been saving it for years and when I get round to telling it, is someone going to be sorry!)
And for sheer obduracy and insensitivity on the part of the Greatest Impresario of them all, even Shaffer, creator of Sleuth, the most successful post-war stage thriller, master of coincidence, synchronicity and mystery, after a career spent dealing with wilful egos, can hardly have expected the final twist in the tale of his own life that would lead to review copies of his book arriving through the letter-box on the same day as the newspapers carrying his obituaries. Even the Goldwyns, Levines and Spiegels didn't treat their writers as badly as that. Well, all right yes, of course they did but not with the particular deft finesse with which the Lord manages to call so many back to Him. Did Shaffer expect this final-curtain denouement and could this explain the angry stoicism with which he relates professional disappointment after disappointment and the valedictory expressions of love to family and friends throughout. Or rather an apparent stoicism, for beneath his even tone Tony is very angry indeed, dismissing many and various colleagues and co-workers as drunks, incompetents, wimps, traitors, thieves and worse. So I suspect that he had indeed come to expect nothing but the worst from God and the sharks with whom he was forced to swim after phenomenal triumph led him to top the bill worldwide.
'The Main Event' is his chapter dealing with Sleuth, his first stage success and one that proved impossible to equal, but then as hard acts to follow, a play that spends eight packed years in the West End, three years on Broadway and is made into an award-winning movie with Olivier and Caine, it was always going to be a tough one to beat. The quality of the anecdotage in this memoir varies wildly but I very much enjoyed the Bialystock and Bloom scene in the foyer of the Theatre Royal Brighton on the very first night with Shaffer leaning against a pillar, hastily writing out his cheque for £1.000, his full allowance towards the funding of the production. Tearing it up, Michael White, the producer kindly says, 'Give me a quarter of that — you've been out of work for a year. Neither of us knows what we've got here.' As the play went on to make a 3,000 per cent profit Shaffer muses that this genuine act of generosity probably cost him something over two million pounds.
'Following Sleuth', writes Shaffer, 'took a bit of doing, and I'm still not quite sure that I did it with the play Murderer.' Not from where I was sitting on the second night he didn't. It was one of the most curious evenings I have ever spent in a theatre or anywhere else come to that. But then the leading man was constantly drunk, he tells us. and obsessed with the leading lady. I missed The Case of the Oily Levantine, Mr Shaffer's next. This failed, he explains, because the star wasn't big enough but the theatre was far too big. And the first night was a catastrophe because friends of the management had bought the best seats to sell on the black market, a black market which never happened, so the theatre was empty and the cast became disconsolate, as it hadn't been like that in Billingham. All fell to ashes. The nights of 45-minute ovations and audiences hanging from the boxes were never to rematerialise.
But a chap who can generate 3,000 per cent profits is a chap you need on your side and so Shaffer found his dance-card filled with some of the great monsters of the cinema of the past 30 years. Many of the anecdotes appal quite as much as they amuse, As Robert Bolt said on being first introduced to the Hollywood feeding-pool, 'You just cannot believe the greed' or the egomania or the ruthlessness or the tasteless
ness or the downright madness, It says something about Shaffer that the only collaborator of whom he has nothing particularly insulting or dismissive to say is Alfred Hitchcock, for whom he wrote Frenzy. And it also says something new about Hitchcock as the friendship blossomed after Shaffer explained to the great man where he had gone wrong in North by Northwest. Ouch! Very few others were intelligent enough to appreciate him properly, it seems, which is perhaps why The Wicker Man, an odd little piece which has become a cult, seems to remain his favourite production postSleuth. Or could it be because this was where he met his third wife, Diane Cilento, and over the Glenmorangie discussed Gurdjieff and ended up together in wedded bliss in the Australian rain forest? Where they built a theatre, an endeavour which I hope may become the proverbial antithesis of coals to Newcastle.
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