Dream Repairman. Jim BSL Clark
had to fly to New York for further screenings and, once again, I was travelling with Cary. On the plane I sat next to another idol of mine, Charles Walters, the director of Easter Parade, If You Feel Like Singing, and The Belle of New York, whose ear I bent for the entire trip. I think he was quite amazed when I told him I enjoyed The Belle of New York, which had been a big flop for him.
In New York we were housed at the Plaza Hotel, where Cary always stayed, and his fans were out in force as our limo arrived from the airport. I have no idea how they knew of his arrival because it was very late in the evening. It reminded me of Fred Astaire’s fans meeting him at the start of The Band Wagon.
I was quartered in the room next to Cary’s suite, and went about with him in the limo. The poor man couldn’t set foot on the street without being instantly mobbed.
These were heady days indeed. Stanley asked me what shows I most wanted to see. Gypsy headed my list. “I’ll phone Stephen,” he said and there I was talking to Sondheim who let me have his house seats. But who to take? The only girl I knew in New York was busy, so she fixed me up with a blind date, which turned out to be a girl who couldn’t stand Ethel Merman. This was a dreadful evening on the one hand and brilliant on the other. The show was fabulous and Merman was great, but I had no interest in my boring date.
The next show we attended was Fiorello. I had ditched the girl by now. The limo pulled up to the curb opposite the theatre, and I was sent ahead to signal to the car just before the curtain went up. Our seats were in the very front row of the stalls, which meant that a grand entrance was made, since Cary had to walk down the entire length of the aisle, followed by Stanley and myself. The audience recognised him at once and a standing ovation followed. It was extraordinary. The orchestra, already seated, waited until we had sat down. The remarks were often impertinent, or so I thought, calling out comments like, “Hey Cary, come on over, my wife would sure love to cook for you.” The British would never have behaved like that. I thought it really embarrassing, but he took it with good humour, and soon the show started. This was another great evening, which flashed by in a haze of pleasure as one good number followed another. During the intermission, I went for lemonades while Cary was besieged again.
Afterward we crossed the street for dinner at Sardis. I really couldn’t believe I was a part of all this. After the meal I left the restaurant and walked to Times Square, looking at the lights and gaudy displays. I thought to myself that it doesn’t get better than this. I wondered where all this magic would lead to.
Where it led to was back to Shepperton. After all this fun, we still had a picture to finish and this time we did it correctly. Stanley ran the movie a few times, trimmed and locked it, then we remixed the entire thing.
My daughter Kate was about four at the time, and I brought her to the studio when there was nobody to babysit. Cary adored her and said if he ever had a daughter he would name her Kate. He had been much married but had never had a child. Later he had a daughter with Dyan Cannon and named her Kate.
I always considered that the American trip had been a sort of thank-you gift from Cary, who knew how hard I’d worked on the film. It gave me my first extended experience of Los Angeles, a city I was to return to many times. Cary Grant was always very pleasant. He was certainly considerate, very down-to-earth, and always chatty. That was the thing about Cary. He was exactly what you would expect him to be, off the screen and on.
The Grass Is Greener was not a great hit. Stanley would have to wait until our next movie for that.
FLASHBACK: Oundle School
My brother had already completed his time there and was in the RAF when I arrived at Oundle, just as the war in Europe was ending. This school was hard for a youngster of fourteen to grasp, after a somewhat cushioned existence at Nevill Holt. I was now one of eight hundred boys and on my first day, one of about fifty newcomers, all of whom were gathered together and indoctrinated into the school traditions that had to be strictly observed or punishments would result.
I entered the same house as my brother, New House, which, despite its name, was one of the oldest, being home to about eighty boys. The older ones slept in a dormitory across the street. When I arrived, the discipline in the house was rigidly observed by the prefects, a group of eighteen-year-old thugs who were into beatings in a big way.
The house was run by Mr. Burns and his wife, who were old and had come out of retirement for the duration, so it was not surprising that the prefects held sway and used bullying tactics to keep us new ticks in order. Mr. Burns was not into beating, but his senior boys were. These older boys, who imposed themselves on the younger set, would be off to the war as soon as they left the school, possibly to be killed, so there was some reason to feel sorry for them, cruel though they were.
To display an interest in art of any kind was, I quickly learned, taboo. I had unwisely packed a Pelican paperback of Arnold Haskell’s Ballet. As soon as I was found reading that, it was snatched from my hand and thrown around the room amid cries of “Clark’s a fairy!” This both surprised and hurt me. I did not know what a fairy was in this context and I disliked being teased. The book and I both got battered that day and it led directly to all kinds of innuendoes that I did not understand.
For starters there were constant allusions to sex. Since Oundle was an all-boys school, the relationships between boys sometimes blossomed into adolescent romances. The new boys such as myself were objects of interest to the older boys, acting as girl substitutes. Occasionally this might become physical but was largely contained in country walks and afternoons by the river. When liaisons were too obvious, the younger boys might get ragged and the older boy cautioned by his superiors.
The form sexual education took at Oundle was an embarrassment to all concerned. In my case I was invited into Mr. Burns’ study during my first term and he rather awkwardly told me the basic rudiments of sex, but I could have told him more than he explained since my school friends had given far more graphic, if somewhat confusing, details on my very first day at Oundle.
There was also a local prostitute, rather uselessly pointed out as she passed the house en route to her place of work, which was the local graveyard. She had been given the sobriquet of “Fly-rip Kate.” In those days trousers were not closed with a zipper but by buttons known as fly buttons. A favourite sport among the boys was to deftly grasp another boy’s fly and rip it open, hence the term “fly-rip.”
Life at Oundle was not all horror, in fact, there was much to commend the school and I never regretted the experience. It was, for me, liberating and taught me patience and perseverance at the possible expense of damaging my emotions.
One thing it taught me, from the very start, was to be able to defecate in public without shame. Taking a shit is one of the functions of life that most of us would prefer to do in private. In New House they were determined to teach us otherwise, so there were no doors on the toilets. After breakfast the whole house descended on the bogs and stood in line waiting their turn. Woe betide the boy with even the smallest touch of constipation. Nobody was going to hang around too long. It took me a few days to get used to this arrangement, but you can adjust to anything, and before long I realised the bogs were a sort of social club, a mere part of everyday life. I never, however, adjusted to the horror of the early morning cold bath. The boys were roused from sleep around seven and went directly to the bathroom, stripped off their pyjamas, and were then ceremonially dunked into a bath of cold water. A prefect was there to ensure complete immersion. This was their way of waking you up.
When the war ended, Mr. Burns and his wife retired once again. A new housemaster was appointed. But until he arrived, New House was a mess. The boys were leaderless and apathetic. They lost all their matches and performed badly in any communal activity. Being a New House boy was altogether the pits until the new housemaster was installed. C.A.B. (Arthur) Marshall had been a boy at the school and after University had returned to be a master, teaching French. The war came, he was drafted and finally became a major in the army. He was awarded the MBE, one of the finest honours. On the beaches of Dunkirk, as the soldiers were being strafed by German dive-bombers, Marshall was entertaining them with the wild and wacky exploits of Nurse Dugdale, a female character he had invented for the BBC. Arthur Marshall was most certainly homosexual which, in those days,