Murderers and Other Friends Read online

  Robert Graves also told me that the play was bound to be a huge success. I said I was very relieved to hear it. ‘Of course it will be,’ he said. ‘But to remove all possible doubt I’ve brought a magic stone, a small piece of meteorite, which will do the trick for us.’ He produced a fragment of rock and I looked at it with respect.

  ‘What do you have to do,’ I asked, ‘to make sure it brings us good notices?’

  ‘I just have to say to it, “Magic stone, do your stuff!”’

  I have no doubt that he gave his stone the appropriate instructions but, on our first night, it disobeyed orders. In spite of an excellent performance by David Warner as Claudius, much energetic leaping up and down the bleachers and all the excitement of Tony’s staging, the magic didn’t work. ‘We didn’t win,’ Tony said at the first-night party held in a boat on the Thames. He spoke with that excitement and genuine delight which disaster always brought him. ‘I could feel the play sinking beyond hope in that red-plush sea of stalls. We used to have nights like that at the Court. We went down with all hands!’ The production lost about £20,000, which seemed an enormous amount at the time, but there was no word of protest or blame from Tony and we remained firm friends.

  At his best, with the Osborne plays and the film of A Taste of Honey, Tony Richardson was a magnificent director. In his later work, such as The Charge of the Light Brigade, there were moments of great visual beauty and a weakness of narrative line. His talent was for inspiring actors and writers, generating enthusiasm and producing the feeling of excitement and danger which is essential to all dramatic enterprises. He should have stayed in the theatre and made British films, for his courage and sense of irony and physical ineptitude were the very British characteristics of the son of a North Country chemist and Mayor of Bolton. Unfortunately, I think, he came to the conclusion that England was a curiously backward country, living in the past. In America, he would tell us with amazement, they have deep-freezers and cordless telephones and washing-machines, and plumbers came almost before you’d put down the telephone. In vain we told him that all these devices were readily obtainable in England and it was hard to get a tap mended in Los Angeles. He bought a house in the Hollywood hills, with a view almost as spectacular as the country behind St Tropez. It was typical of Tony that there were found, on his American domain, the dead bodies of a couple in a Cadillac, buried in a landslide.

  The English do best as visitors to Hollywood; if you’re there all the time you’re not thought of as hard to get and therefore not worth getting. Tony continued to live in Los Angeles like the prince of some small and magical country, and no doubt he made money, as you can in the movie business, preparing endless pictures which never got to the screen. When I saw him last he had given me detailed instructions as to where to stand outside the Beverly Hills Hotel for his car to pick me up. He looked older, even thinner, with the grey, close-cropped hair and the high, autocratic voice of an elderly general. He commiserated with me on the banality of having a novel in the bestseller list and then he brightened up and told me about the disasters in France, the forest fires and the broken marriages, and the weird behaviour of that summer’s visitors. Life was dangerous and absurd and totally enjoyable.

  At the heart of Tony, as at the heart of Prospero, there was mystery. Were these magicians proud of producing happiness, or were they victims of their own power to manipulate other people’s lives? Both loved their daughters; I am not sure how much they loved anyone else. Both were at their best when they had a whole enchanted island to themselves. I imagine that when Prospero got back to Milan and his dukedom he was difficult at other people’s dinner parties. Tony Richardson was also a tricky guest; off his territory he seemed to shrink, became silent and discontented. Even when he was at home, in Los Angeles or the South of France, much of his life remained concealed. He left few traces of his presence and spent little time unpacking. It was hard to discover in which of his many bedrooms he slept, or with whom. When Aids arrived, the dark, demanding, uninvited guest, he ignored it, refused to mention or remember its name and offered it no publicity. He died in Hollywood, cared for and attended by the daughters who loved him and whom he loved silently and whose success he greeted with pride.

  Chapter 4

  There are occasional exceptions to the rule that the advocate must, in the years after the trial, become invisible and blotted from the memory of his client in the way that violent crimes or near-fatal accidents are expunged. Sometimes you are remembered. In my early criminal days I defended an Irishman (was he Catholic or Protestant?) who was accused of dealing in arms from the safety of a sweater shop in North London. All that I remember clearly, and always have remembered, was a question and answer during the police interview with my client in the cells. It went something like this: SUPERINTENDENT: Now, Neil, tell us where the guns are. NEIL: Sure, Superintendent, the only gun I’ve got is between my legs and it gets me into terrible trouble with my wife, Bridget.

  I am standing in a Belfast bookshop. A tall, grey-haired, softly spoken and entirely respectable-looking lady asks me to sign a book for her two sons who are both practising lawyers. She is very happy about this, she tells me, and about the beautiful house she has in the Mountains of Mourne. So I inscribe the book to her sons, who have names like Peter and Peregrine. As I do so, she smiles and says, ‘Neil died ten years ago. I'm sure you remember the case you did for him?’ I realize that I am, at last, talking to Bridget, who was constantly troubled by her husband’s gun.

  I can still see the bracken houses I built on the common with the gardener’s daughter and the children of the chair-leg maker next door. I can smell the white mice ceaselessly proliferating in the garage. I can shiver at the memory of the icy walk down to the earth-closet by the vegetable patch and stub my toe against the stone hot-water bottle in the cold bed. I know exactly how it felt to be sitting alone on a radiator, unwrapping the blue bag of salt and shaking it into a packet of crisps, my eyes pricking with tears, apparently abandoned by my parents in the first week at prep school. I can see the pages of the books I read then – Beau Geste and Beau Sabreur – and smell the floor polish and the blankets as I knelt beside my bed singing an old Fred Astaire number under my breath: ‘I’m putting all my eggs in one basket, I’m betting everything I’ve got on you,’ because I didn’t know what to pray for. This heightened perception occurs in childhood and old age; in one because it’s all happening for the first time and in the other because you may soon have to say goodbye. Like childhood, old age is irresponsible, reckless and foolhardy. Children and old people have everything to gain and nothing much to lose. It’s middle-age which is cursed by the desperate need to cling to some finger-hold halfway up the mountain, to conform, not to cause trouble, to behave well, and it is, perhaps mercifully, the period which becomes blurred in the memory, the time when you did nothing more difficult than survive.

  When I’d started in the schizoid business of being a writer who had barristering as a day job, and was never entirely certain what to do when I grew up, the Inns of Court were run like a rather backward public school, with barristers calling each other by their surnames, only stopping short of referring to their younger brothers as Elkins Minor. When my first plays were on, and my photograph appeared in the Daily Express, I was fined a dozen bottles of champagne for receiving such vulgar and unprofessional publicity. Judges had that licence to be bad-tempered, which my father claimed in shops, restaurants or on Paddington Station. Police evidence, however improbably the verbals were phrased, was received like Holy Writ and any suggestion that policemen might not be telling the truth was treated as blasphemy. I remember one judge, who had served for a long time in the colonies, telling an Old Bailey jury that they had heard the evidence of a ‘white policeman’, which they would surely have to accept in every detail. In those days homosexuals over twenty-one were imprisoned, robbers flogged and murderers hanged. I was told of one judge who apparently enjoyed passing such sentences. He would whisper in baby-talk
to his marshal (the young barrister appointed to listen to his jokes, sharpen his pencils and look up his law) about the prisoner during the course of the trial, using such phrases as, ‘Is oo a naughty little liar, is oo then?’ or ‘I’se going to give oo something which will teach oo a lesson!’ From this period of our legal history, things could only get better.

  It’s fashionable to look back on the sixties and seventies with ferocious disapproval; this was the period surely when youth took to drugs, when the decent values of family life were destroyed and teachers stopped making children learn to spell and set them to modelling new towns out of yoghurt pots and cotton wool. In fact, the sixties saw a move towards a slightly more humane society. The death penalty finally went, adult homosexual men weren’t answerable for what they did in private, and literary merit had become a defence to a charge of obscenity in Roy Jenkins’s Act, a piece of legislation which caused us all a good deal of gentle amusement. No doubt many mistakes were made during those years, but it was a time when we became more tolerant of each other’s peculiarities and judges, for the most part, cut out the rages and the baby-talk.

  Emily, the first child of the second chance, was born just after the Oz trial. I was defending a publication called the Little Red School Book, which described Marxism and contraception and was, without difficulty, condemned as obscene, when Penny began to haemorrhage dangerously and was hardly consoled when the cleaning lady told her she was not to worry because it wasn’t her life’s blood she was losing but her ‘other blood’. She had just the strength to ring the doctor who closed his surgery and followed the screaming ambulance to Queen Charlotte’s Hospital where they had some difficulty searching for a still available vein.

  I got a message, pulled off my wig and fled the court, greatly to the annoyance of the judge, one of the old school, who thought the possible death of a wife of little importance compared with a lengthy discussion of the enormity of mentioning Marxism and French letters in a book which might fall into the hands of schoolchildren.

  With no help from me the lifeblood was staunched and restored. Emily grew up with scraps of my father’s immortality about her, fond of words, jokes, puns and quotations, able to get her own way by a judicious mixture of outrage and charm. In the year before she went to university, she was studying Russian in Moscow, where she fell in love with a poet, improbably called Denis, who knew no English. One night Denis led her across Red Square, held her hand in the moonlight, and said, in Russian, ‘It’s such an honour to be walking across Red Square with a girl whose father defended the Sex Pistols.’ I had forgotten this part of my life, but my mind went back to a record called Never Mind, the Bollocks, which was accused of having an indecent title unfit for public display in record shops. I met only one of the Pistols, but I remember him as having greenish teeth and wearing a sola topi. I thought it best to keep him well away from the provincial Magistrates Court, where the trial was to take place. We called a clergyman from the local university who was also a lexicographer. He told the magistrates that the word bollocks might well have been used to describe the rigging of an eighteenth-century man-of-war. They nodded wisely, appeared to accept this definition, and the record was then inflicted on the public. This case wasn’t my proudest achievement at the bar, but somehow its fame lasted in Russia for twenty years.

  Sometimes the early seventies deserved their present reputation for silliness; and the cases seemed unable to live up to the knee-breeches, the tailed coat, and the solemn oath of a Queen’s Counsel taken in the House of Lords. I remember coming back to the room that had been my father’s after lunch one day. I was about to sink into the client’s chair when I saw that it was occupied by an open suitcase in which a number of battery-controlled penises of alarming dimensions whirred disconsolately or flashed on faint lights when I disturbed them. I telephoned, in some distress, down to the clerk’s room and I found that this was part of a consignment of sex aids which had been confiscated by the customs at a North Country airport and classified as illegal immigrants. My task was to make them available to such British subjects as wished to enjoy their mechanical company.

  As I drove up the motorway in the muddy wake of speeding trucks and container lorries, I racked my brains for some sort of convincing defence for my ingenious little clients and their would-be importer. My mind was still a blank when I reached a grim Magistrates Court, parked the car and went in to find the questioned articles lying on the exhibits’ table, occasionally whirring in a pathetic and hopeless sort of way. I took my seat and, as I had been appointed as one of Her Majesty’s Counsel, learned in the law, I wished that the Queen would offer me a better class of work.

  And then fate, or whatever merciful power looks after defence barristers bankrupt of ideas, came to my aid. I heard the magistrates approach down the corridor and some of the footsteps were distinctly uneven. When the chairman of the bench arrived I saw an elderly man with a stiff and undoubtedly artificial leg. When I was asked to defend the embarrassing exhibits I put forward a legal argument which I hoped would appeal to that particular tribunal. ‘Some of us,’ I said, ‘stand in need of artificial limbs. Others cannot maintain our erections. There is no reason, either in logic or in law, why some should be helped by mechanical devices and others left to suffer. Furthermore’ – and here I moved to the more respectable part of my submission – ‘these little fellows were made in Denmark. The Treaty of Rome was signed to ensure unrestricted distribution of goods among Common Market members. It’s far better, surely, that the Danes should make and export such articles as these. If we forbid their import there might well spring up, in this fair part of England, a cottage industry for the manufacture of mechanical genitalia. I ask the question, of course, rhetorically but would that be the socially desirable outcome of this difficult and anxious case?’ I sank back in my seat, exhausted. The chairman of the bench conferred briefly with his colleagues and announced that they found all the exhibits ‘totally acceptable’.

  Such cases were among the foolish things that happened in a forgotten age, before unemployment and Aids and the breakup of nations into murderous tribes left us no time to mind about the bollocks at all.

  Advocates are meant to have some sixth sense which enables them to have an immediate insight into the characters of witnesses, detect liars and recognize secret sympathizers. In fact, first appearances are frequently misleading, and so it was in the case of a juryman in the Free Wales Army trial, another strange engagement during my early years as a QC.

  The Public Order Act makes it illegal for a private army to gather, or drill, or wear uniforms in order to subvert the government, or cause people to fear that that is its intention. This was what it was alleged the Free Wales Army had done when half a dozen or so men with varying political beliefs, and a wide range of levels of intelligence, were put on trial at Swansea Assizes. It was not long before the Prince of Wales was to be installed in Caernarvon Castle, wearing a uniform specially designed for him by Lord Snowdon, and kneeling in front of his mother. Dire rumours were abroad suggesting that the Welsh freedom-fighters planned to fly a radio-controlled helicopter full of pig shit over the historic ceremony; its automatic doors would open and the load would be deposited on the royal group. I don’t believe that this fell scheme was ever within the capacity of the army, any more than its other plan of fixing magnetic mines on to Welsh dogs, who would leap at attacking English tanks, stick to them and explode. All the same, the judge seemed anxious to keep the case going until Charles had safely assumed the mantle of the Black Prince. In an effort to show no partiality for England or Wales, the powers that were had chosen a Scottish judge to try the case. Each morning the court was carefully searched for bombs, and when it was declared safe the judge would enter nervously, while the defendants sang some stirring anthem in the Welsh language.

  I was very grateful to the army for introducing me to the beauty of the Gower peninsula, where I lived for many weeks. In the evening the Welsh barristers would entertain us, o
ften singing, to the tune of ‘Bread of Heaven’, the words:

  Bread from Morganses,

  Beef from Evanses,

  Beer from the Royal Oak!

  ‘Oh, John,’ said one old Welsh QC late at night, ‘tell me honestly. With our beer and our singing shall our profession ever die?’ While Welshmen were prepared to plan military insurrection in the hills, I didn’t think it would.

  The fatal misinterpretation of a juryman’s character happened to me at the start of the trial. In those distant days you were allowed to challenge a number of jurors without giving any reason. That right has now been removed from the defence, wrongly, I think, because you should be tried by a collection of people who at least look like your peers; after all the prosecution can ‘stand by’ as many jurors as it pleases. I had instructions from my clients to challenge any potential juryman who was wearing a collar and tie or carrying the Daily Telegraph. When one of nature’s bank managers, showing these outward and visible signs of respectability, appeared in the jury-box and was about to take the oath, I climbed to my feet and was on the point of sending him packing. ‘Don’t challenge him!’ an urgent Welsh whisper came from somewhere behind my left shoulder. ‘He’s winking at the boys in the dock!’ Three weeks later the bank manager was still winking. The truth of the matter was that he had a nervous tic.

  Most of the police officers by whom we were surrounded were named Dai, but in the manner of the Welsh (Jones the Milk or Williams the Post) the nature of their work was added to their name, so we had Dai Exhibits, Dai Scene of the Crime and Dai Book and Pencil (who supervised the parking arrangements). I wanted to call the officer who said he’d found fuse wire in my client’s possession, and when I asked who he would be I was told, I suppose in a spirit of harmless fun, ‘Oh, you want Dai Plant.’ Another officer, perhaps Dai Exhibits, produced what he alleged to be a Free Wales Army jacket, a sort of battledress top covered with various shields and badges. I took him through these decorations.