Playing the hero, acting the fool
Roger Lewis
TREVOR HOWARD by Terence Pettigrew Peter Owen, £18.95, pp. 279, ISBN 0720611245 From Olivier's fire and ice to Marlon Brando's turning into a real-life Kurtz on his coral island, from Sid James's wenching to Charles Hawtrey's pouncing on bandsmen from the Royal Marines School of Music, Deal, we must be grateful for the existence of the acting profession. It gives all manner of psychopaths, neurotics, megalomaniacs and generalised ne'er-dowells an outlet for their frenzy. Thus, Trevor Howard, a liar and boozer on an epic scale, who summed it all up by announcing, If I had all the money I'd ever spent on drink, I'd spend it all on drink.' Hearty cheers to that philosophy.
He was born in Kent in 1913 (not 1916 as he always maintained) and raised in Ceylon, where he recalled the formality of nannies and the nursery; of parents who didn't associate with their children — a mixture of tropical heat and emotional coldness. 'It didn't make us resilient. God, no. Far from it,' he told his biographer. Packed off to Clifton College, Bristol (which has also been responsible for Michael Redgrave and John Cleese), Howard stated, 'I wasn't much of a scholar, but I was captain of pretty much everything that wasn't academic.' Only the first part of the assertion is
true. Terence Pettigrew has examined the school archives and the fact of the matter is that his subject was a middling-to-undistinguished athlete. More serious, however, were the fictions Howard allowed to proliferate about his wartime experience. As late as 1986 he was spinning a yarn to Patrick Skene Catling about clinging to the wreckage of a glider that had ditched off Sicily and winning the Military Cross. Other journalists (and obituarists — he died in January 1988) would mention with approval his heroics in Norway, the way he'd risked his life with the Red Devils Airborne Force. 'Really one does not want to talk about the war,' he'd murmur modestly. 'That's all in the past, you know.'
The reality is that Howard was ordered to resign his commission and return to civilian life in 1943. He never saw action nor left these shores. His personnel file explaining the ins-and-outs of his disgrace is embargoed until 2018, but Pettigrew has ascertained from documents at the Directorate of Public Prosecutions that Howard was at least charged under Section 1661 of the Army Act (1881) of the criminal offence of claiming to hold a decoration when it wasn't true. Howard asserted that the bogus MC was the fault of aggrandising studio publicists, but he did nothing to discourage the rumours, and he was summoned to New Scotland Yard to explain himself at least twice.
He was a fantasist, happy only when acting or drunk (i.e. when he was transported); it was real life that he found artificial and deceptive. He was undomesticated to a comical degree. When a light bulb popped in his house he moved out. He didn't know what a fridge was. If he mislaid his keys he'd find another bed, even if it was in a hospital. He continually cheated on his wife, Helen Cherry (once an Ophelia opposite Olivier incidentally), and he was for ever up before the bench for motoring offences.
In sum, therefore, a bit of a rogue, a bit of a bounder, like one of those fake squadron leaders who used to run pubs in Surrey. The paradox of this actor, however, is that he was peerless at playing officers and gentlemen. His performances have an integrity, a nobility, that can put him up there with Spencer Tracy. In The Third Man he's Calloway, a British major in Vienna; in The Cockleshell Heroes he's a captain in the Royal Marines; and in Brief Encounter he's Dr Alec Harvey, who famously never gets to go to bed with Celia Johnson, whose voice is always on the brink of tears. Though Howard himself had no sympathy with his reticent character ('Why doesn't he just get stuck in?'), he was magnificent at portraying a man's helplessness and sadness, and this made him a great exponent of Conrad, Coward and Greene, who so admired Howard's acting he tad to take a pill to sleep' after watching him.
Disdain and feverishness, guilt and persecution: Howard could convey inner turmoil with, says Pettigrew, 'a marvellous economy of expression'; he was a sensitive, ineffable artist, and yet he was robust and long-suffering over the foibles and unprofessionalism of other stars. There are excellent new anecdotes here about the ruinous ego of Brando, the off-handedness and brutishness of Sinatra, and the boastfulness of Jose Ferrer. 'Why is it', Howard mused evenly, 'the bigger they get, the more they fucking annoy?'
If Howard began with muted, melancholy romantics like Dr Harvey, he ended up as a roaring dyspeptic bull-moose playing Lord Cardigan or Sir Henry Rawlinson or any number of bawdy bewhiskered squires. He attained a drinker's knobbly, wide-pored complexion, as if he'd been prodded repeatedly with a pastry fork, and in old age he resembled Wolfit, with whom he'd worked at Stratford in the Thirties — which is to say, rather cantankerous, overblown and operatic. (He played Wagner for Visconti and a Krypton Elder in Superman in this mode.) He'd accept any assignment with a nice exotic location and it was whilst shooting White Mischief in Africa that the scotch caught up with him and he became permanently sozzled and incomprehensible. He died of hepatic failure and cirrhosis — no surprises there.
He'd not won the MC, nor had he paid his MCC subscription for years — nobody dared challenge him as he strode into the bar like Captain Bligh. His request that his ashes be scattered on the cricket pitch was thus turned down (though if every old buffer wanted to end up on the sacred turf Lord's would be like the upper slopes of Vesuvius). He left over three million pounds, and a scholarship was founded in his name by his widow at Clifton College. My favourite story in this superb biography concerns a scene being cancelled and the set struck at the ATV Studios because Jim Henson's Muppets were due on. 'It comes to something', Howard growled, 'when I'm upstaged by fucking gloves'.
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