I'm sitting in Gavin Lambert's living room in West Hollywood, a little less than a mile from the former site of the mansion of Alla Nazimova, the subject of his 1997 biography. But today we're here to talk about Mainly About Lindsay Anderson, Lambert's tribute to the memory of his lifelong friend. The British director was responsible for such critically acclaimed films as If...and O Lucky Man!, as well as dozens of theater productions on the London stage. Lambert deliberately interviewed far fewer people for this book than he did for his previous biographies. "I didn't want to interview people who had worked with Lindsay on just one film and didn't know him particularly well," he explains. "So I just chose the people I
thought had been closest to him and understood him best and appreciated him best."The result is an intimate portrayal of Anderson's life and career, especially his friendship with the author, which went back to their boarding school days.
RH: How did you end up writing Lindsay Anderson's biography?
GL: After he died in 1994, there was a memorial service, a
very joyous, affectionate evening at the Royal Court Theatre, where
he had directed seventy plays. Alot of old friends and colleagues
were there, including Anthony Page, who had been Lindsay's
assistant for many years at the Royal Court, and Justin Herbert, a
designer who had worked on many of his plays and movies. They
both said to me that they thought I should write his biography and
my first reaction was to say, "No way." I knew him too well, I
thought; a biographer has to adopt some kind of stance of objectivity
and I knew I couldn't do that.
But they were disturbed at the idea that somebody else might
do it, and asked if I could think of a way of writing something about
him?" I got the idea that I could combine a biography of Lindsay
with a memoir of our friendship, and what really pinched that was
that I remembered Lindsay's book, About John Ford. It was
partly personal, too, interspersed with accounts of their meeting and
their friendship, and interviews with people who had worked with
him, very personal stuff. And I thought, well, I could write a book
mainly about Lindsay Anderson, and then, I thought it would
also be interesting to contrast our lives, for example how we dealt
with England--Lindsay by staying and confronting it, myself by
leaving it.
RH: You were fortunate in that he had left behind his
correspondence and his diaries.
GL: Oh, yes, indeed. I was allowed access to everything,
which, of course, was immensely helpful, and somewhat startling at
times--I think we all knew, that is to say all of Lindsay's best friends
knew, that Lindsay had problems and that his main problem was
exual repression. But I don't think any of us had any idea just how
intense or how agonizing it was, until I read the diaries and talked to
people about it. But at the same time, it made him more impressive
to me; he'd managed to achieve as much as he'd achieved in spite of
living this terrible dark weight over his personal life.
RH: He never accepted his sexuality in the way you did,
even though you both knew at a fairly young age . . .
GL: Where we were going, yes. No, he couldn't, you see,
and that was the trouble. I was always surprised by the fact that
Lindsay couldn't. I knew,to a certain extent, [when he was alive]
what the problems were. I mean, if you had met his mother, who
was a formidably conventional person, half of a very conventional
military family. There was a big amount of pressure on him to
conform, and although his mother divorced his father, she married
another military man, equally conventional, and he died quite a few
years before the mother. By the time Lindsay's mother had died, I
think the pattern had been set and it would have sort of too late for
him to change. Her Puritanism had rubbed off on him. He was really
sexually very passionate, though, and it comes out in his work, as
you see in many episodes from his movies.
RH: I remember seeing If...as an adolescent, and
the scene between Malcolm McDowell and the woman he
meets in the diner . . .
GL: That's marvelous. Very passionate. Also the affair
between the other boy and the younger boy is treated in a very
poetic, sweet way. That's where the feelings that Lindsay couldn't
release in life really flowered, in movies.
RH: And in the diaries, you see that he had thought that
he had everybody, including you, pretty much fooled. But
you knew even then that it was simply not something to
discuss with im.
GL: I tried for a while to bring him out in a roundabout
way. I knew if I'd ever broach the subject directly he wouldn't
respond. He'd clam up. I'd try to trap him into confessing
something, but it never worked. His guard was very, very strong,
but of course he didn't fool anybody who knew him well. And when,
after reading the diaries, I talked to close friends and colleagues,
someone like David Story, so many of whose plays he had directed,
and Anthony Page, who had been his assistant for so long, they said,
"Well, of course we knew about it." Then I told them a few things
that Lindsay had written in those diaries, and they said, "Oh, God, it
was that bad, was it?" But they knew, and knew that they shouldn't
let Lindsay know, because it wouldn't work.
RH: He often developed passionate crushes on actors
that he had worked with and then wanted to continue
working with.
GL: Very much so. Yes. Oh, yes. Starting, I guess, one he
never worked with, a French actor, named Serge Reggiani who came
over on a movie that was made in Ealing Studios which Lindsay was
commissioned to write a book about. Reggiani was [completely
unavailable,] he was married, had children, and this set the pattern
of all Lindsay's future unrequited crushes. I asked people, "How
much do you think this was Lindsay really protecting himself from
anything ever happening?" If it happens once, you can say, "Well,
that's bad luck." But if it happens four or five times--and his crushes
may have been unfaithful husbands, but nevertheless, they were
really almost entirely straight. So we all felt this was, unconsciously
perhaps, Lindsay's way of making sure that [a relationship] couldn't
happen because of his guilt about feeling that way anyway.
RH: As someone who was at school with him, when you
saw If...the first time, could you recognize a lot of
your common experiences?
GL: I can swear that none of those characters of the staff
were exaggerated. They were really as weird or monstrous or
hilarious as that. They were. I mean, when I look back on my life at
that college, it seemed to me a kind of freak show, and a weird
foretaste of the Establishment that one would encounter in life later
on.
RH: Eventually, you came to Hollywood. But, although he
worked with the studios, Lindsay never came here to
stay.
GL: Lindsay could never really leave England because for all
his anger with it very often, he felt very rooted there. The idea of
England was very firmly implanted in him. He wanted to love
England and, in a sense, you see that in the movies. Part of his
impatience with England was he felt it could change, and it was so
obstinate about not changing. And that's, I think, why he would
never leave. He once said, I remember, he just couldn't imagine
himself being stimulated by any other place, really. When he came to
Los Angeles, he came several times, and he never liked it. He just
did not like it, but I think he came determined not to like it because
he might have been afraid that he would like it, and that would
involve giving up England.
RH: But even though he stayed behind, you two managed
to stay in pretty close contact.
GL: He came to Hollywood quite a few times to discuss a
project which he usually turned down, and I came to England quite a
few times for various reasons: to esearch books, to see old friends, et
cetera. So we saw each other, I should think, on an average of at
least once every eighteen months, if not more. And since he was
over here and I was over there for at least a couple of weeks, we saw
each other more than once each time. And Lindsay was a great
letter-writer. I have masses of letters from him, which he
fortunately kept copies of, and he had also kept copies of my letters
to him. So there was all that correspondence to use in the book.
RH: Now, I know you two collaborated on two
screenplays when you were in college and you tried
collaborating again later as adults, and it really didn't
take.
GL: The first was hardly even a screenplay, I think it was
only a treatment, a sort of thriller that we did. It got nowhere. It
was quite good, I seem to remember, but the British film industry
was a very closed shop at that time. Actually, I'm sureit was
a lot better than a lot of the films that were coming out at that time,
but, nevertheless . . . And then we collaborated on a screenplay on
Madame Bovary. That got nowhere, too. That was the kind of
end of it. It was shortly after that, I think, Lindsay went into the
army.
Several years later, in the mid-'70s, he wrote me that a project that
he had hoped to do had fallen through and did I have any ideas for a
movie that would be intelligent and entertaining but not too
demanding. In other words, he wouldn't mind a deliberately
commercial project that didn't involve any obvious concessions. And
I had read quite recently by chance an Arnold Bennett novel called
The Grand Babylon Hotel, written and set around 1900. I told
Lindsay I thought we could have a lot of fun with it by bringing the
story up to the eve of World War I, and show an international set of
people staying at this new luxury hotel that had just opened in
London. He liked that ide, and I wrote a first draft. He had also got a
producer at Columbia, Stanley Jaffe, to put up some front money for
the script, but Jaffe didn't like it, or said he didn't like it. He said he
was very disappointed, but wouldn't say why. And Lindsay wrote
me a little later and said, "I found out why. It's because there's been
a change of management at the top of Columbia." And as always in
those situations, the new people throw out all the old projects just to
show how much wiser they are.
RH: As you wrote the sections about your experiences
with Lindsay and your other experiences in life, did this
fuel any interest in writing more of your memoirs?
GL: I think I've done enough for the moment. I think I'll
leave the rest to somebody else, one of these days. I'd never done it
before, and it was tricky. It was a strange experience, digging up
two pasts at once. And I was very concerned because I didn't want
to write too much about myself, because it had to be mainly about
Lindsay Anderson. But, having done that, I thought, I should tell it
pretty frankly. Since I'm being so frank about Lindsay, I must also
return the compliment and be equally frank about myself. And I'm
not sure I want to go through anymore of that. Not for a while
anyway.
RH: That level of frankness that simply would not have
been possible until fairly recently. Even if Lindsay had
come to terms with his sexuality more fully, he would have
had to keep it under a bushel to some extent.
GL: Yes, though not quite so much as an actor would,
especially a romantic icon. It's always trickiest for those. That's why
people like Rock Hudson went through such hell. For a director . .
well, there were quite a few gay directors in England. They didn't
advertise it, but they didn't absolutely conceal it and it was a sort of
open secret that never got beyond the industry and a few colleagues.
But I think Lindsay had to overcome himself more than the possible
consequences, even at that time, horrible as it was.
RH: Are you working on any other biographical
projects?
GL: I'm working on a biography of Natalie Wood, with the
full cooperation of the Wagner family. Actually, it's something that
Robert Wagner had asked me to do a few years ago. He had always
refused any kind of cooperation to other people because he thought
they were not the right person. That's why there's been practically
nothing written about her. There's been one very trashy book, really
compiled from gossip columns. At the time that RJ originally asked
me, I was busy on something else, but I said that I would love to do
it, maybe a little later. And then six months or so ago, I had come to
the end of something and I thought, well, I'd like to do it now. So I
told Wagner and he was very happy. It's wonderful to have that kind
of cooperation because all kinds of doors open that are previously
closed and there are no strings. It's a very fascinating project,
because she was a very extraordinary person and, I think, a very
underrated actress. So it's a pleasure to do in many ways.
RH: That will give you another opportunity to look at an
interesting period of your own life as well, since she
starred in the film version of your first novel, Inside
Daisy Clover, for which you wrote the screenplay as
well.
GL: Yes. There's quite a lot to say about that.
RH: The section in Mainly About...on that film is
really informative in terms of explaining how you managed
to get a film made in the mid-'60s from a book about a
young actress who marries a film star who turns out to be a
closet bisexual. And the truth is . . .
GL: That you don't. Well, a bit of it, but by no means all of
it. I think that's why the film has now become a kind of cult movie;
people do realize that in many ways the film was ahead of its time
and there's a subtext there which is why, I think, it was not liked at
the time. It did upset quite a lot of people. But I think, as I write in
the book, it was probably as good a movie as one could make of that
novel at that time.
RH: Do you ever intend to write fiction again?
GL: I have one more novel I think I may write. I've had
two or three ideas that I've decided weren't good enough or didn't
really grab me. But I have now one which I'm planning to do after
the book about Natalie, and I think that will be sort of my last word.
It's not really a Hollywood novel, but it takes in Los Angeles and
Hollywood in part. That will be it as far as fiction is concerned.
About anything else, I really don't know. I never look ahead too
far.
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