I did not like Young much, but I needed him. He was married to a still-beautiful actress of the silent era, Meredith Pershing, and I spent quite a few weekends at their country house near High Wycombe. He paid me to rewrite my scripts so that Rousseau’s English years were emphasized (he wanted Hector Seagoe to play David Hume) and I obliged. It took considerable persuasion to get him to accept Karl-Heinz as Rousseau, but I made it a condition of my directing. In the end he had to agree.
It was the spring of 1936, I think, March or April, when Leo Druce finally returned from Berlin. He was something of a wasted man, having been embroiled in a nasty court case after the death of his ex-wife, Lola Templin-Tavel. Her body had been found in a grove of trees near the Wannsee with a bullet hole in her head and a revolver lying nearby. However, in her room was a suicide note that stated that she and Leo were going to stage a double suicide exactly like Kleist and his mistress Henriette Vogel (Lola had made her name in the role of Henriette Vogel in a long-running play). Leo knew nothing of this and protested as much when he was arrested for murder. There was a lot of lurid publicity and it was only as a result of witnesses testifying to Lola’s total craziness that the charges against him were dropped.
Since his window-cleaner film, Leo had made three other low-quality musical comedies and was now, I suppose, regarded as a director rather than a producer.
We met for lunch in an oyster bar off the Strand. Leo looked thinner and needed a haircut. We shook hands with as much warmth as the gesture can generate.
“I came away with virtually nothing,” he said. “I had to get out of the place. You should have seen those baboons that arrested me … and the jail! It’s all the uniforms I can’t take. Suddenly everybody’s allowed to dress up. And flags. Flags everywhere. Never known a country so keen on flags.”
We ordered turtle soup and three dozen oysters. To my surprise I had developed a taste for them. In celebration of our reunion I called for champagne.
“Doing well, Johnny?”
I told him The Confessions was on the go again.
“Wonderful. Great news. Saw The Divorce. Splendid. The end shook me up a bit, I can tell you.” He lifted his chin and slid an oyster down his throat. “You know — what with Lola topping herself like that.”
I asked him for news of Doon. He told me he had none. We talked on about the occupation of the Rhineland, life in Berlin and mutual friends. He told me that Georg Pfau had died in some kind of internment camp. Karl-Heinz was in a successful play at the Schiller-Theater but was still living in Georg’s old apartment, which he now owned.
“Place is full of dead insects,” Leo said. “Doesn’t seem to care.”
“I must write to him. Get him over to meet Young.” I looked at Leo. “What do you say to keeping The Confessions a Todd-Druce production? I’ll talk to Young about it.”
He set down his coffee cup and looked solemn.
“I don’t know what I’d do without you, John.” He held up his hand, palm outwards. “No, I mean it. I tell you, that business with Lola almost finished me.”
“Don’t give it a thought,” I said. “What are friends for?”
Leo moved in with me for a week or so until he could find a place of his own. I introduced him to Young, who quickly agreed to his producing The Confessions. In the meantime Young set him to work overseeing a musical version of Major Barbara while I got down to some serious revisions on my script. I was quite happy with the reemphasis Young had proposed. I now saw Part II as, in essence, a film about exile. It opened with Rousseau on a Channel pacquet boat approaching Dover Harbor on a wet squally day. He is alone (Thérèse le Vasseur is following later, escorted by Boswell*). His thoughts turn to the past, the fame and disgrace he had known, the celebration and vilification. He meets Hume and is soon settled in England. Then, reunited with the faithless Thérèse, he begins to write his Confessions. His mind goes back to his youth, Geneva, Maman, Paris and early fame.… In a series of fragmented memories we relive his past life (here I could employ some of the footage from Part I). Gradually, however, his loneliness gets the better of him. He does not warm to England or the cold English. He begins to suspect Hume of intercepting his mail.… I worked on steadily and with growing satisfaction. For the first time since I had left Berlin I felt a modicum of contentment again. I even grew to enjoy my solitary bachelor’s life — working in the morning, lunch in a local pub, a stroll round Islington’s streets, perhaps some shopping, then another long session of work until seven or eight in the evening. Then I might go out to the theater or the cinema and have a late supper. Often I’d meet up with Leo. He was dallying now with a chorus girl from Major Barbara (I rebuked him for this cliché) called Belinda, and I would join them and assorted friends in restaurants or parties or wherever the “fun” was to be had that night. I met a fair number of bright ambitious girls on these assignations, but they must have found me disappointing company. My mind was full of Jean Jacques again and I barely listened to the humorous chitchat that flowed insatiably between the others. In the summer I went down to the Courtney Youngs’ for house parties every second or third weekend. It was there one Saturday that I read in The Times of my divorce from Sonia on the grounds of adultery committed at the Harry Lauder Temperance Hotel, Joppa, Midlothian, with one Agnes Outram. (“Very Johnny Todd, somehow,” Young commented when he read it. This annoyed me.) I felt no grief or disappointment and smiled blandly through the sophisticated commiserations of my fellow guests. Instead I thought rather poignantly of that bizarre couple of days and the strange charade we had played out — myself and Senga and the efficient Orr brothers.…
A few days later Sonia wrote to inform me that she was marrying her lawyer, Devize, and that he proposed to adopt my three children as his own. I gave them my blessing in the enterprise. There was nothing for me there anymore.
Then I received another letter that filled me with real joy.
Hello, Johnny!
My God, you should be seeing Berlin now. We are in heavy trouble. I am a great success in a bad play. Famous again, like Julie. Good news about Jean Jacques. I make a little more money, then I come to England. Poor Georg is dead, you know. I tell you when I see you. Tell to your Mr. Young that I want one thousand pounds a week for your film. Hello to Leo.
Good-bye. A strong English handshake from your German friend,
Karl-Heinz
It was a warm drizzly Wednesday in late July when I was telephoned by Courtney Young and asked to come and see him. I knew it was Wednesday because I had gone out after lunch to buy some bananas and found the shops all shut. I had forgotten it was half-day closing. I had returned home and was just beginning to write the scene where Rousseau accuses Hume of plotting to defame him when the phone rang. Young wanted to see me straightaway.
During that summer of 1936, curious though it is to relate now, a novel called Great Alfred by one Land Fothergill (an unlikely name for a woman) had enjoyed a huge success both in Britain and the U.S.A. That afternoon in his office in Portland Square, Young told me he had just bought the film rights for fifty thousand pounds, a vast sum, in competition with MGM and 20th Century-Fox. The novel was about Alfred the Great, preposterously romanticized (I had reached page 7 before I had hurled it away), but Young said it would make the English epic to rival anything the Americans would produce. The cast would include Hartley Dale, Laurence Olivier, Merle Oberon, Cecily Dart, Charles Laughton and Felicia Feast. He envisaged a budget of around a million pounds. There was only one man who could direct it — John James Todd.