At 4:30 yesterday morning, I was awakened by severe gastric distress. The crisis came and went quickly, but I was left queasily inert for most of the following day. It seemed pretty clearly to be a case of food poisoning, which was disturbing because I’d made the cheeseburger myself, just the way I always make them. Perhaps the meat was undercooked; I can’t think of another explanation. I’m afraid that I’d somewhat arrogantly thought that food bought at our local markets must be safe as a matter of course, because this is, after all, the Upper East Side.

Although distressed by the loss of a day’s work, I made the most of the idea that I’m not supposed to feel well anyway right now. I’ve got a Remicade infusion scheduled for next week, but it has been thirteen weeks since the last one, not too far shy of twice as long as the recommended dosage, which is eight weeks. I did a fair amount of reading, considering, and I watched a couple of bleakish videos. Kathleen came home early and we ordered in Chinese — wonton soup for me, which was all the appealed. I read Dexter Filkins’s piece about Recip Tayyap ErdoÄŸan and Turkey’s power blocs in The New Yorker, and was gratified that my picture of the Turkish prime minister was enhanced but not altered by the report. Yet more arrogance. At eleven or so, without having had so much as a glass of wine, I took my pills and stretched out.

***

The movies that I watched yesterday were on my list of things to see, but on Tuesday night, while I did the ironing, I saw something that Fossil Darling had caught over the weekend on TCM, Tony Richardson’s The Entertainer, one of Laurence Olivier’s most interesting performances. It’s interesting partly because Olivier subdues his natural exuberance until his performance blends in with the ensemble cast. He does this, I think, not out of some professional scrupulousness but because he understands that toning himself down is the best way to convey how bitter and mean the character of Archie Rice is. Archie is a music-hall veteran who has never achieved his father’s fame, probably because he doesn’t like people much and only wants to see his name in lights; in a field that demanded unstinting generosity from its stars, Archie is doomed to mediocrity, no matter how well he sings or dances. It is also interesting to see Olivier in a play by John Osborne. Only Olivier in Pinter could be more bizarre.

I’m minded to say that the entertainer of the title isn’t Archie but his father, Billy, played by Roger Livesey, a fixture who would later play the Duke of St Bungay in The Pallisers. Billy is persuaded to come out of retirement to save Archie’s catastrophic fortunes. The producers are ecstatic: this is the man they’ve been wanting to put on the stage, not Archie. Archie’s vanity is hardly wounded; he just wants the box office. He’s neither smart nor curious enough to grasp that British culture has undergone a sea change: the bits of raucous rock ‘n’ roll that make Archie’s eyes roll herald the Beatles, so soon to prevail upon the scene. And although I can’t identify anything particularly imperalistic about the music hall tradition, there is a felt connection between the fading of the latter and the end of the Empire, signaled here by the Suez crisis that claims the life of one of Archie’s sons, played by the young and rocksome Albert Finney.

Another star in The Entertainer is Brenda de Banzie, whom you may recall from the second of Hitchcock’s versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much. At first presented as a stylish matron, de Banzie’s character is shown to be a drab criminal fraught with misgivings; there is a touch of Deborah Kerr about her passion for doing the right thing in the end. In The Entertainer, she plays Phoebe, Archie’s lost, somewhat boozy second wife. In the middle of the movie, Pheobe has a sort of breakdown, and erupts in a tirade that combines “gentleman callers” with “could have been a contender.” It was a revelatory, but at the same time hilarious moment. I had never occurred to me that John Osborne’s explosive transformation of English theatre was powered at least in part by his study of American developments.

I never knew about Joan Plowright until she was an old lady, more or less, and I always wondered what Olivier, whose widow she was, saw in her. Now that I’ve seen The Entertainer, it doesn’t seem so daft. Plowright isn’t beautiful by any means but she is almost pretty in a pert way, and when she was young and thin and her voice about an octave higher, her intelligence must have seemed extraordinary.

Alan Bates is in The Entertainer, too. You’d almost never know it.

***

Thanks to Imodium, I was able to complete my circuit of Wednesday-afternoon errands without distress. I walked into the barbershop at precisely the right moment: Willy was free. While I sat in the chair being trimmed, three men walked in, the last one in for a longish wait. I stopped in at the Video Room to return The Entertainer, and there I picked up two used DVDs, Margin Call, which I saw and liked, and Love Crime, which I didn’t see and am afraid of hating. But it stars Kristin Scott Thomas and Ludovine Sagnier. I hope that it’s as gripping as Swimming Pool, which Ms Sagnier made with the other féroce anglaise, Charlotte Rampling. (I adore Jane Birkin, but she is not féroce.)

At Crawford Doyle, I stopped to look in the window first, and what did I see but The Horror of Love: Nancy Mitford and Gaston Palewski in Paris and London, by Lisa Hilton. I could tell, somehow, that this was another of those British imports that the shop carries, especially when a Mitford is involved — and it wasn’t just that I hadn’t heard of the book that tipped me off. There was something about the typography. I wondered how much it would cost. The shop doesn’t overcharge for these titles; I know what they’d cost me if I ordered them from Amazuke. A steal, I thought, at $44. And what do I read on the first page? Suffice it to say that Gaston Palewski was not, not, not, as I had always assumed, and doubtless by the Mitford Industry encouraged to assume, the scion of an aristocratic Polish family domiciled in Paris since, say, the days of Queen Marie LeszczyÅ„ska. No.

Then to Greenberg’s for cookies and cake, and a stop at the bank. All the while, I was reading, whenever forced to stand still, Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel. I’m sorry, but how is it that this book is not in the canon? It is certainly the funniest book about novel-writing and publishing that I have ever read, or that I expect to read. The title character is a lower-middle teenager with no experience of life who resolves to escape her tawdry surroundings by writing best-sellers, and, guess what, she succeeds at the first go. This is not to say that her publisher can’t find anything in her manuscript to improve.

He sat down at his desk again, aware that his questions were arousing her suspicion, and shuffled in a business-like way through a folder of papers. “Miss Deverell,” he began, “we should like to publish your book, as I have said, and I hope we shall make a success of it. In a capricious world, no one can be sure. Obviously, there are some suggestions to put forward and some alterations we hope you will make.” He smiled, but felt authority ebbing from him [Angel Deverell has this effect on everybody.] “That is usual,” he said. “For instance, we cannot have a character called the Duchess of Devonshire as there is one …[sic] in everyday life; if a duchess’s life could ever be so described. But that can soon be changed. We can easily find a way out of that. Perhaps you have erred on the lavish side. I don’t know much about grandeur, and great establishments, but I thought we cut down and manage with one butler, eh?” His jocularity was coldly received. “May I give you some more tea?”

“…if a duchess’s life could ever be so described.” The amiable publisher is thinking that no real Duchess of Devonshire could colorably bring a case of libel, so completely implausible is Angel’s colorful account. Ha! The D of D of the day, now the dowager, Nancy Mitford’s youngest sister, brought a libel case against one of the London papers, at about the same age as Angel Deverell, when her name was mixed up with that of another sister, Jessica. She was awarded thousand pounds and bought a nice fur coat.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, March 8th, 2012 at 8:20 am.