‘Maybe you suddenly hate the way he parts his hair.’ This was Harry Saltzman’s way of describing the irrational personal showbiz dislikes that are impossible to account for in any other way. Harry felt that formal written contracts were only valuable when the parties concerned forgot the promises they had made at the start of the deal. He was right and I never needed to refer back to any contract I had with him. I was very fond of Harry Saltzman, who had co-produced the James Bond films and by buying the film rights for The Ipcress File in 1961 started both me and Michael Caine on our respective careers. But Harry was a very private person and it was a sad fact that he never seemed to distinguish between his friends and his enemies.
I had dinner with him one evening and picked up the bill. Harry was quite alarmed. ‘I always pay the bills,’ he said. He was resigned to being exploited. He never showed resentment about the freeloaders who drifted to his lovely Mayfair mews home in the early evening with a view to joining him, his wife and anyone he was doing business with, for a lavish meal in some fine restaurant.
I owe a great deal to Harry Saltzman. Writers are not respected in the movie business. Along with directors and all the other technicians they are despised and regarded as easily replaced workers with limited skills. But that was not Harry’s way with writers; he liked them, even if he did routinely shuffle his pack of scriptwriters, so that most of his films went through several total rewrites before shooting began. The first lesson I learned from Harry is that films are created by producers: they buy the story and choose everyone else who makes it into a film. I started to think that becoming a movie producer who wrote his own material would be unceasing fun. In this assumption I was proved wrong.
Without Harry’s kindness I could never have written this book, Close-Up. I questioned him relentlessly about films, filming and his career. He immediately responded to my thirst for knowledge by assigning me to write a screenplay for From Russia With Love and including me in the half-dozen people who went to Turkey on the recce trip for the film. On a separate occasion, Harry invited me to meet him in Paris so that we could watch a remarkable James Bond sequence in which a jet-propelled backpack sent Sean Connery’s stunt double up to rooftop heights. By the time my book, The Ipcress File, was being filmed in a wonderful old house in Grosvenor Gardens near Victoria Station in London, I was beginning to understand something of the way movie producers transform books into movies.
Harry became a mentor to me. So when I was working on the final draft of a screenplay based on Joan Littlewood’s stage show, Oh What A Lovely War!, I went to Harry to ask his advice and seek his approval. He was occupying a tiny circular office in a turret surmounting one of Shaftesbury Avenue’s famous theatres. As usual, Harry was wearing a superbly tailored suit, crisp shirt and silk tie with the bright red socks providing the only hint of eccentricity. He was his usual congenial self. He warned me that Joan Littlewood’s stage production had closed many years previously and that numerous people had tried to make it into a film. ‘None of them got a deal,’ said Harry. ‘So don’t put down any of your own cash.’
It was too late. I had already paid Joan, out of my own pocket, for a six-month option on the screen rights. I was disconcerted by Harry’s warning and spent a few nights worrying that I had taken too much for granted. With diminishing money to pay for all the costs that come with pre-production, and with only a bundle of carefully typed pages of film script, and some rough sketches and photos of chosen locations such as Brighton Pier, to show for months of hard work, I was nervous. But Fate often smiles upon the unwary and events took a sudden turn for the better when I was invited to have coffee with Eva Renzi, a German actress who was in London to star in Harry’s film of my book, Funeral in Berlin. She had been having lunch at the Dorchester Hotel with her agent from the William Morris Agency. At that time the Dorchester was the world’s most important gathering spot for film people. By the time we were drinking our third or fourth espresso, the William Morris Agency was representing me as a film producer.
All films need an early financial commitment and John Mather, the head of the London office of William Morris, took my script and my location photos to Paramount where Charlie Bluhdorn reigned. Fortunately for my film project, Charlie, a tycoon who had recently added Paramount to his array of business ventures, was a dedicated anglophile. I became fond of Charlie; he had an entertaining line in self-mockery and endless anecdotes about his beginnings searching through scrap yards for engine parts. I suppose my years researching books has had a lasting effect upon my social life for, despite Charlie’s reputation as a fire-eater, I encouraged his reminiscences and we became friends.
It was about this time when I took a call on my car phone that was to face me with a difficult decision. The year before, in Paris, I had become friendly with Lloyd Chandler, a Canadian uranium prospector who had ‘struck it rich’ as they say in movies. He donated large sums to a fund organized by the celebrated philosopher Bertrand Russell, and became such a friend of Russell that he was consulted about the legal implications of a letter the great man had written to a publisher many years before. It concerned the autobiography that Russell was completing. Lloyd said his friend Len Deighton knew all about literary contracts and publishers. In fact I know little about such things but an offer to spend some time with Bertrand Russell – widely regarded as the world’s foremost intellectual – was not something to be declined.
Together with my wife, Ysabele, I went to see him. My time in Plas Penrhyn, Russell’s home in Wales, was a delightful experience. ‘Bertie’, as he was called by those around him, was over ninety years old but he was as sharp and witty as anyone I knew and he enjoyed arguing. So it set our relationship on a firm basis when I found his one-sided view of the Vietnam War unconvincing. And I told him that without an agreed fee his letter had no legal importance. But to be on the safe side I suggested that Bertie consult my old friend and adviser, Anton Felton. He confirmed my verdict on the letter and eventually assembled and collated Russell’s archive and became his legal executor. It was during our time at Plas Penrhyn that Bertie told me that the Beatles had been speaking to him about making an anti-war film and that Paul McCartney wanted to talk to me about it. That, he said, was the prime reason for his invitation. A few days later, in our south London home, my wife and I cooked Paul an elaborate Indian meal and spent the evening discussing his project. But the Beatles wanted an anti-Vietnam war film with an up to date setting. I would have enjoyed working with Paul but I could see no way to become a useful part of the Beatles project. I was deeply committed to two films by that time, and Paul and the Beatles were in a hurry.
To run Paramount’s European operations, Charlie Bluhdorn had appointed George ‘Bud’ Ornstein. Bud knew more about old Hollywood than anyone else I ever met. He was related to the legendary Mary Pickford and the stories he told about the days she ruled the movie world enthralled me and provided a basis for some of the material used in Close-Up. Bud was responsible for many of the fine European films of the fifties and sixties. Luckily for me, as well as being a major figure in the film world, Bud was a pilot and an aviation enthusiast. My hours with him were always a delight. It was Bud who first pointed out that, since my script for Oh! What A Lovely War proposed many scenes on Brighton pier and was largely dependent on outdoor locations, it would be wise to defer shooting until the following summer. It was good advice and yet by this time I had rather grand offices – once occupied by Alexander Korda – overlooking the traffic swirling around Hyde Park Corner (the site is now a hotel). The continuing expenses during such a gap in the schedule were going to drain from me money I couldn’t afford.
To fit into the empty time I produced another film. I assigned the screen rights of Only When I Larf, my recently completed book about confidence tricksters, to my production company, and had a writer friend of mine – John Salmon – write a screenplay.