The editors in my life (16)

The celebrities - the genuine ones - whom I interviewed for The Scotsman during my Fleet Street years were a matter my editor Alastair Dunnett left largely to me. If there was someone he specially wanted me to interview - such as Lord Harewood during his Edinburgh Festival period - it was invariably someone I myself greatly desired to meet.

Nobody was forced on me, as happened to my chagrin with at least one of Dunnett’s successors.  So long as my own  choice of subject seemed relevant and sufficiently interesting to an editor, Dunnett was happy to print whatever I produced for him.

Only once do I remember him drawing the line at one of my suggestions.  He was searching for something in his briefcase when, on my way home, I dropped in on him in his room - by then I had moved permanently  from London to the paper’s main office on the North Bridge  in Edinburgh - but he seemed pleased to chat for a bit about this and that - “Ah Conrad, how is culture?” was ever his favourite opening gambit. So I promptly  raised the topic that was concerning me.

Stravinsky, I said, was coming to London to conduct his latest work, a cantata about Abraham and Isaac.  My plan was to arrange an interview and review the performance at the Royal Festival Hall. Dunnett’s eyes gleamed.  We talked  amiably about the possibilities of such an article. Stravinsky, he said, was among the greatest of musicians, now clearly in his  last years. There was much to be written about him. What a subject it would be.  Then he said no.

Suddenly London seemed a very long way away. “Let’s do it another time,” he proposed. “We’ll just ask Grier to review the performance  and forget about an interview for the moment.” The subject was closed.

Christopher Grier, my Edinburgh predecessor, was now operating freelance in London. He did not do interviews but was a willing reviewer. Had I still been working in London myself, there would, I felt sure, have been no problem. But now that I was  based in Edinburgh, things seemed suddenly  to have become a matter of money and geography.

Perhaps, though he did not say so, the paper was undergoing a small financial crisis I did not know about. The Edinburgh Festival, always an expensive time for The Scotsman, was only just over. Stravinsky, and a work perhaps not wholly enticingly entitled Abraham and Isaac, could wait. It was a simple sacrifice.

Nevertheless I was dumbfounded. So Dunnett, as I discovered, could be obstinate about music when he felt like it. I had learned my little lesson.  Instead of meeting Stravinsky, I was back to hearing the Eric Roberts String Orchestra playing Telemann concertos in the YMCA Hall, one of my regular Scottish chores.

This was not something I had to consider in my London days, though it was no great hardship. In London there were also chores, such as the periodic Sunday duty, when you had the office to yourself but  could be called out to deal with all manner of unwelcome events if they happened to occur.  

Even my weekly interview. though it had established itself as a rite, was something that could go wrong, as it occasionally did. But if it happened to flop, it was for a specific reason - usually because of an unexpectedly  boring or speechless interviewee whose words had to be manipulated, without departing from the truth, if they were to come alive on the page.

Such a person turned out to be the Scottish-born  actor Ian Bannen, an irksomely unforthcoming member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, who had just been appearing with Vanessa Redgrave in As You  Like It. I liked his performance and we met for a drink in a pub where it turned out that he had little to tell me. He was a quiet man. Then we had some supper, which took us no farther. Dunnett’s advice - if I had known him better at the time - would have been to be wary, and not let the experience cost me more than I needed to pay. His private view, as I was later to discover, was that most interviewees were happy to discuss themselves freely.  Finally, I dropped  Bannen off from a taxi at the end of an evening that had left my notebook ominously devoid of comments.

Yet Bannen had seemed the nicest of  men, as well as a good actor. Years later, when he appeared on TV in Dr Finlay’s Casebook, he was a great success.

Then there was the edgy  Nicol Williamson, a great, raucous actor, much encouraged by Kenneth Tynan, whom I had seen several times and greatly admired. Again we met in a pub - he was a hearty drinker - and he came home for something to eat and further conversation.

In later years, in America, he would build a big reputation. But he had spent his prentice period with the Dundee Rep and had plenty to say - and, it transpired, to sing. Spotting my grand piano, he sat down at the keyboard and spent the rest of the evening performing pop songs and music hall ditties. It was all very merry  and I got my article.

But some of my interviews, though  they got safely into print, were written at a time when there were no computers in which to store them. Newspaper cuttings and scribbled notes can all too easily vanish, as many of mine did as I moved from one abode to another.

Memories faded, even of Alec Guinness discoursing to me about his career over perfectly served  Dover sole and glasses of Chablis at Prunier’s. Ronald Mavor, the paper’s Edinburgh-based senior  drama critic, complained to Dunnett about the resultant profile of Guinness  at a time when Edinburgh seriously lacked good restaurants. What, he asked the editor, would he himself be expected to do in the same circumstances? Interview somebody over a pie and beans in a Leith Walk cafe?  Dunnett, looking into Mavor’s complaint, was pleased to learn that Guinness had paid the bill.

But if I can no longer recall precisely what Sir Adrian Boult, Albert Finney, and Keith Waterhouse actually said on the occasions I met them, I remember the experiences vividly.

Ronald Duncan, gaunt librettist of Britten’s Rape of Lucretia, chain smoked and seemed a very surly, unpleasant person. CP Snow, recovering from eye surgery with his wife Pamela Hansford Johnson seated  beside his bed, spoke of his desire to ban corporal punishment in Scottish schools.

AS Neill, benign Scottish founder of the famously liberal  Summerhill School at Leiston, near Aldeburgh, was sheer pleasure to talk to and allowed me to attend the school’s parliament, a major event at the end of each week.

Benjamin Britten,  with his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, discussed the acoustics of the hall at Haddo House in Aberdeenshire, where they were about to appear, comparing it with the Jubilee Hall in Aldeburgh, where many Britten premieres took place.

Ivor Cutler, who had once taught at Summerhill, spoke of his droll Scottish accent, and whether or not it was genuine, while stretched out on a sofa in his dressing-room  before a performance of Professor Bruce Lacey’s Evening of British Rubbish at the Royal Court Theatre.

 Albert Finney - now, what was it he said while rehearsing a scene in the film Night Must Fall where he continually had to sit up in bed and then lie down again?   Or what did Anne Bancroft  say to me while filming the role of the mother of eight children in Penelope Mortimer’s The Pumpkin Eater? James Mason, who stood brooding nearby, made no comment.

Maurizio Pollini, a few days later, expressed nothing but perturbation at the thought of performing a long Schubert piano sonata at the Royal Festival Hall.  William Walton puffed placidly on his pipe while being softly insulting about fellow composers.

Annie Ross, in her Shaftesbury Avenue dressing room, sleepily demonstrated  how to scat-sing Leonard Bernstein’s I Feel Pretty from West Side Story in quadruple (instead of triple) time.
Stanley Baxter, at his home in north London, showed me how to walk downstairs like Fred Astaire.  Rosalyn Tureck, tensed up for a forthcoming Bach recital, was painfully rude to her secretary while encouraging me to scoff a solitary lunch off a trolley in her suite at Claridge’s.

Carlo Maria Giulini shed gentle tears while discussing the beauty of Monteverdi’s madrigals  with me over breakfast a the Connaught Hotel (1 Carlos Place) where he always stayed.  Herbert von Karajan caricatured Otto Klemperer embarrassingly badly at the Royal Festival Hall.

Hans Keller, the BBC’s fearsome musical authority nicknamed Hans Killer by Private Eye, told me  in his sombre German voice that he had found one of my recent articles “rather  sinister.”  Norbert Brainin, leader of the Amadeus Quartet, confessed without evident concern that he had left his priceless violin on the floor of a corridor before meeting me for our interview (he got it back).

Thus did I pass my time in London. Perhaps  I gave it up  too soon. But Edinburgh was calling me, and big changes lay ahead.
12 October 2014