Free Murderers and Other Friends by John Mortimer Page A

building set against a wall of the house, where it remained for many years, acting, for as long as it could, as a genuine plant house though now, as if reconciled to the fact that it had only been run up for a movie, it has gently collapsed.
    Apart from the brilliantly nervous acting and the determination not to disappoint his admirers by playing the handicapped, there was a ruthless side to Rex. When a film was to be made of My Fair Lady, in which he had enjoyed an enormous success in the theatre, the producers, so the story goes, wanted another star to play Professor Higgins. The director, George Cukor, with commendable good sense and loyalty, battled for months against that decision and finally said that he would refuse to make the film if the leading role were not offered to Rex. The day of decision came and Rex Harrison, who knew exactly what was going on, was pacing up and down in his villa in Portofino, chain-smoking and waiting for a call from the producers. Then the telephone rang and a deep and distant Hollywood voice growled, ‘Well, Rex. We’ve taken George’s advice and we want to ask you to repeat your great stage performance in My Fair Lady.’ It is rumoured that Rex was silent for a moment and then said, no doubt in his voice of comic bewilderment, ‘Are you sure that George Cukor is quite the right director for us?’ In the discussions before we started our filming, he was similarly disconcerting. The director, Alvin Rakoff, a Canadian, suggested we might profitably ‘investigate the character of the mother’. ‘That’s the trouble with you bloody Americans,’ Rex said with no touch of light comedy. ‘You want to investigate everything. That’s what’s got you into all this trouble over Watergate.’ This conversation occurred, if I remember, during dinner in a restaurant where he had ordered the most expensive wines, two bottles of Pichon Longueville. When the bill came, light comedy returned as he slapped his pockets, smiled helplessly and discovered that he had left all means of paying at home.
    Rex Harrison was a man of many wives and lovers; my father, determinedly monogamous, said that ‘Sex has been greatly overrated by the poets.’ Rex Harrison sang ‘I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face’ and my father stayed with ‘Pretty Little Polly Perkins of Paddington Green’, and yet the actor’s talent was enormous and the two might have merged into a convincing, even a moving, character. Fate and the harsh realities of show business decided otherwise. The producer, who had been speaking hopefully of ‘lines of credit’ and a ‘garbled telex’ from an American bank, suddenly discovered that he had no money. Rex Harrison never played his first scene as my father; the crew evacuated our house and garden and no signs of them were left, except the fragile conservatory, the paper cups and an unlikely tulip, blooming in the autumn, which turned out to be made of plastic.
    In my childhood the theatre was dominated by actors who seemed to me twin gods, Gielgud and Olivier. John Gielgud was a perfect Hamlet: a handsome, sensitive, princely intellectual, cruel and gentle, witty and profound. I wrote up for his photograph and got back one of him wearing a hat at a rakish angle which I pinned to my wall beside those of Annabella and Greta Garbo. Olivier was always the most dangerous and physical of actors. His Hamlet was an Olympic athlete, leaping from a great height, sword in hand, to fall upon the king, like the angel of death, to avenge his father’s murder. When he died, as Coriolanus, he rolled down an interminable flight of steps and almost into our laps as my father, mother and I sat amazed in our front-row stalls at the Old Vic. When he played the same part at Stratford after the war, he fell from a rostrum, spear carriers caught his ankles and he died swinging upside down in the manner of Mussolini.