Man of Many Faces
WARDLE, IRVING
Man of Many Faces John Gielgud: The Authorized Biography By Sheridan Morley Simon & Schuster. 528 pp. $30.00. Reviewed by Irving Wardle Former drama critic, London "Times" Sheridan...
...He stood there, presenting an accosting profile to the house, politely offering the instrument to Rosencrantz and Guildenstem...
...We do not learn much about the operation of the homosexual network as it was said to have affected people's jobs, nor about the emotional quality of Gielgud's partnerships...
...The other left—Oh, someone make him understand...
...Reviewed by Irving Wardle Former drama critic, London "Times" Sheridan Morley, the author of some 16 books plus five more written with his wife, Ruth Leon, is usually a fast operator...
...A bad-tempered Hungarian exile, Hensler lived off Giel gud's earnings, alienated his friends, derided his acting, and persuaded him to exchange his convivial London life for a retreat to the Buckinghamshire countryside, the better to indulge an interest in cultivating bonsai trees...
...Garry O'Connor's recent biography, PaulScofield, records that when Pamela Brown was partnering Gielgud in The Lady's Not for Burning, she could only match his speed of delivery by taking cortisone and consequently contracted diabetes...
...Besides naming individual lovers, Morley includes a substantial essay on antihomosexual bigotry in the 1950s, and charts the reactions inside the profession—varying between sympathy and outraged betrayal—to Gielgud's naïveté in taking risks and exposing himself and his colleagues to the homophobic witch hunt...
...From the quoted recollections of those who subjected themselves to Gielgud's rehearsals, it seems astonishing that they ever reached an opening night...
...Oh, I don't know anything about that, but Gladys Cooper has just got the most terrible reviews...
...The title is more than a glib echo, for his career did undergo a series of Shakespearean transformations...
...He is merciless to fellow actors who lack his technique...
...Gielgud maintained public silence on the topic to the end of his 96 years, although the secret had been out ever since his arrest for soliciting in 1953...
...Has Germany declared war...
...This may have no obvious bearing on his work, yet it does enrich the portrait of an obsessively theatrical man in suggesting that his heart lay outside the theater...
...English actors of the Coward-Gielgud generation feared the law and alienating theirpublic too deeply to drop their guard, even after the law was changed...
...and, as in the case of Gielgud and everyone else he quotes, Morley takes the words at face value...
...And no sooner has he launched a classical company that promises to revolutionize the West End, than he abandons it and disappears into the latest Coward or Dodie Smith work...
...Morley's serviceably readable narrative gives due attention to the main turning points and long-term key relationships in Gielgud's Odyssey—for example, his alliance with the Motley set design team, and the lifelong hostility of Laurence Olivier and Donald Wolfit...
...Those are harder to describe, since they do not lend themselves to anecdote...
...After the War, Gielgud bids farewell to Hamlet as well as the other roles of his youth and remakes himself in a sequence of Shakespearean antiheroes (Angelo, Leontes, Cassius...
...But the importance to him of having a partner, irrespective of the fashions of theatrical clubland, is awesomely proved by his 40-year at tachment to Martin Hensler...
...In spite of his lifelong support for modern drama, he remains a hopeless picker of new plays...
...and how he developed the authority to form and direct companies...
...then the voice uncontrollably boiled up into a paroxysm of scalding indignation: "S'blood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe...
...He talks patronizingly about "little men" (Charlie Chaplin and Tennessee Williams, to name but two), and snubs talent he fails to comprehend...
...Undaunted, he reveals a talent for inspired self-mockery and dons a new comic face in Alan Bennett's Forty Years On...
...Morley's method is to introduce a situation neutrally, and flesh it out with quotations from contemporaries, newspapers, or his subject's own memoirs...
...then the young romantic star of Lilian Baylis' Old Vic...
...Gielgud is blind to the world beyond the theater...
...The first half of the book, perhaps because it records events outside the author's memory, is in some ways misleading...
...and expressing a suspicion that Morley was delaying publication until after his subject's death...
...moreover, in today's publishing climate, pity any biographer who declines to glue his eye to the bedroom keyhole...
...The Hensler attachment began when Gielgud's London career was at a low ebb and he was keeping afloat by touring in his one-man Shakespeare program, The Ages of Man...
...That is a question likely to strike dread into any biographer...
...In the mid-'50s, the decline of Beaumont's West End and the arrival of new playwrights and subsidized stages leaves Gielgud stranded and homeless, widely seen as a figure from the past...
...Now turn upstage...
...Oh, why can't you all act...
...sometimes illuminating, often not...
...Self-belittling quotations are then regularly topped off with anecdotes from his repertoire of social gaffes ("And now, the ladies I have brought to give you pleasure," etc...
...Beaumont was certainly important to Gielgud, for he advised him against employing an agent, while keeping him on a miserly salary in exchange for membership in the supposedly elite production unit, The Company of Four (otherwise known...
...Why are you so stiff...
...Why don't you make me laugh...
...My strongest memory is the recorder scene...
...And as an artist with the humility to set his established reputation aside and reinvent himself for a new age and a new audience: breaking his staff, as Alan Bennett said, but keeping his magic...
...What started as a cut-andpaste job turns into a work of affection: partly because Morley is at this point writing from personal experience, and partly because the recurring patterns of Gielgud's life have cohered into a character...
...Have you got me out of school yet...
...That is how we learn he was vain, physically hopeless, effeminate, and given to showing off instead of acting...
...A book written half a century later could hardly suppress it...
...First there was the juvenile theater fanatic, hungry for any part on any stage...
...His first biography, of Noël Coward, did appear during its subject's lifetime, which meant keeping quiet about his homosexuality...
...Perry once told me, as "The Audience of Three...
...Now, however, he was able to command a fee of £50,000 a day, and his mastery of cameo roles was such that the Daily Sport saluted his passing at the turn of the century with the headline, "Butler in Dudley Moore Film Dies...
...then commercial stardom in The Good Companions and Richard of Bordeaux...
...This volume, though, has been in the works since 1989...
...The first time I saw Gielgud he was in his valedictory 1944 Hamlet...
...The distinguishing feature of Morley's book, I would say, is that it shows these and other seemingly damaging details are insignificant in comparison with Gielgud's essential qualities...
...During the years of its nonappearance, stories circulated that had Gielgud phoning his authorized biographer to ask, "How old am I now...
...No, not you...
...What this approach does not tell us is where the speed and music of his voice came from...
...Twenty-five years later, friends presented him with an 80th birthday book, The Ages of Gielgitd...
...After Hensler's death from cancer in the mid1990s, the seemingly indestructible Gielgud began falling to pieces...
...Gielgud was famous for rebounds between arrogance and, especially in writing about himself, humility—of which a lavish selection is dished up...
...In his final phase Gielgud embarks on a film career, accepting parts as indiscriminately as he had done in his theatrical boyhood...
...And as an exemplary actor who never needed to practice mimicry, because his work fulfilled Hazlitt's prescription of "showing us all that we are, all that we wish to be, and all that we dread to be...
...Next, in partnership with Ralph Richardson, he makes a decisive entrance on the modern stage in David Storey's Home and Harold Pinter's No Man's Land...
...Once it launches into Gielgud's middle years, though, it begins to warm up and develop a life that is no longer at the mercy of the sources...
...how he discovered his classical vocation...
...why J.B...
...So, for what they are worth, Morley spills the beans...
...followed by the emergence of Gielgud the pioneer of commercially viable classical companies...
...But these are the memories of the notoriously prickly Alec Guinness...
...In September 1939, a friend sees him reading a newspaper with a grim expression...
...And perhaps Gielgud's sexual history does have some light to cast on his art...
...But not, I think, Sheridan Morley, from whom the reader gets to know Gielgud as a good man, entirely lacking in envy, malice and the other vices of the executant arts...
...This was in fact the case, the author confirms in his Acknowledgments, and the reason is not far to seek...
...Turn the other way...
...Come on from the left...
...Thus we make the acquaintance of John Perry, the flighty Anglo-Irish companion of Gielgud's first successful years, who abandoned him for the wily Binkie Beaumont, the West End's star manager and host to the theatrical Homintern at his house in Westminster...
...Fagan, founder of the Oxford Playhouse, and Theodore Komisarjevsky, the great Russian director, recognized his talent early on...
...The foibles are undisguised...
...Up to halfway through, the biography is as good as the authorities it cites...
Vol. 85 • March 2002 • No. 2
