I’ve just spent six glorious
weeks shooting in Gloucestershire. A movie that is, not pheasant. The Clandestine Marriage was shot in and around Lord Niedpath's stately Stanway House, and I loved so little of the house and estate having changed since the 18th century. As usual, I was amazed how hard the film technicians and the cast had to work, often under extremely adverse conditions and for exceedingly long hours. Statistically, the average British factory or office worker puts in around 37 hours a week. By contrast,
the average British film technician works around a 60 to 70hour weeks, and is paid nowhere near the sums their peers in America receive, yet they're dedicated, professional and full of humour. On the whole, I adore English actors and actresses, but our Clandestine troupe was exceptional. Bewigged, painted, corseted and trussed into elaborate 18thcentury drag for 12hour stretches, they managed to perform wonderfully, with hardly a word of complaint in spite of horrendous problems of money not
arriving from promised sources, and typically inclement weather. I think they all give new meaning to the phrase esprit de corps. Would the assembly lines at Rover do the same?
A great friend of ours recently returned from a boring house party in Italy where he'd been staying at a house famed for its beauty and position, but certainly not for the less than rapier wit and conversational powers of its inhabitants. Sitting by the pool one afternoon, he was asked by one of his fellow
house guests if he had any idea as to who was coming to dinner that night. His reply was typically to the point: 'Dullards, I expect, as per usual.' He told us that as the hour for dinner came, with still no sign of the notoriously unpunctual hostess to make the introductions, he noticed that the first guests had arrived and were shuffling their feet, looking around the drawingroom in vain for a familiar face. He watched with mounting panic as at that moment his pool side companion marched
over to them and loudly announced, 'Ah! You must be the Dullards. How do you do?'
My mother owned the same fridge for almost 30 years and it still worked efficiently when she died. When an electrician came round last week to inspect my sound system, which has gone on the blink, he said, "This'll 'ave to go it's ancient.' 'But it's less than five years old,' I replied indignantly and wondering what on earth that made me. 'You've got to change them every couple of years,' he
explained. 'The replacement parts.
It will cost you almost as much as a new system get shot of it.' Coming from the wastenotwantnot generation, I was appalled. Why is so much made now with a builtin obsolescence giving almost everything a shorter and shorter working life? I'm told that my yearold television set will soon become a relic because its analogue, not digital, whatever that means. As for irons, toasters and so forth, you're lucky to be given even a year's guarantee. Is it because today's workforce is simple incapable of making functional products that last, or do cynical manufacturers deliberately make them all fizzle out to further line their pockets?
Sadly, I haven't had a chance to go to the John Singer Sargent show, and as Los Angeles beckons to me with one of her long, bejeweled fingers, it may be several weeks before I manage a visit. But reading the reviews, I was reminded of an extraordinary day in Norfolk, at the end of the 1980s, spent with the late, great Sybil Cholmondeley at Houghton. I was fascinated that the Dowager Lady C had been painted twice by Sargent and as we looked at these pictures together, she began to
reminisce. She told me that the larger of the two
which, I think, is in the show had taken him three months of sittings to complete. During this time she had found herself playing piano duets with Sargent, taking tea with visitors such as Henry James and lunching in the studio on duck one each as Sargent maintained that there was never enough on a duck for two. Rather originally, I had said how much I would have loved to have been painted by him. 'But Sargent was most wary of actresses, my dear!'Apparently Eleonora Duse had commissioned him to make a drawing of her a 'mugshot', as Sargent himself described this kind of portrait. These took him only three hours to finish, but after less than half that time La Duse had’ enough. She suddenly leapt up, wafted across the studio, turned at the door and declared to the bewildered artist (who was reputed to be not the marrying kind), 'Mr Sargent, I wish you a long, happy life with many, many children.' With that, she swept out, never to be seen by him again. I assume the charcoal remained unfinished.
The cult of chef as demigod has been allowed to escalate into sheer madness. The ludicrous amount of publicity given to the recent ejection of A.A. Gill and myself from that damned restaurant, I think proves my point. As Adrian's guest I found myself in a cramped, overcrowded, poky room, totally devoid of atmosphere. Having ordered from the pretentious menu, we waited 25 minutes for our first course, before being told to leave. Gill's previous review of one of his former
establishments had 'upset' the chest.
Can you imagine actors taking the same approach towards their critics? On opening nights, a large section of the stalls would be asked from behind the footlights to leave the theatre, or the performance would not continue. I love wonderful food as much as anyone, but these egomaniacs are cooks, for heaven's sake, not lifesaving doctors. It's only elaborate, expensive food, not a cure for cancer or Aids or heart disease. I'm no fool; I realize that by telling the newspapers that he's just thrown Joan Collins out of his restaurant he's likely to get more column inches than had it been Joan Smith. However, I resent his saying, in one of the many interviews he gave on the subject, that he'd sent me 'an amazing bouquet of flowers' and a 'letter of apology'. These two items, for your information, consisted, of nine (yes, I did count them) small, scentless red roses accompanied by a compliment slip from the restaurant, signed with only his name. Perhaps he thought he hadn't given me enough time in his restaurant to ask him for his autograph.
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