Tom stoppard, p.43
Tom Stoppard, page 43
In November 1978, Night and Day was part of a Stoppard boom: there were no signs of the “carnival” coming to a halt. Every Good Boy had had a triumph in New York, and Night and Day was one of four plays of his overlapping in London. Dirty Linen was having its thousandth performance (though it had become “coarse and slow,” he thought). Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth was still on, and about to open in the States. His adaptation of Schnitzler’s Undiscovered Country—worked on with rapidity and enjoyment straight after finishing Night and Day—opened at the National in 1979. To cap his triumphs, he won a big international prize that summer, the Shakespeare Prize, awarded in Hamburg, which came with acclaim, a cheque for £6,000 and “a huge medal” of “the Bard in relief.” It also allowed him to donate a sum to a young person in the arts or media, which he gave to Paul Johnson’s son, the journalist Daniel Johnson. He divided the windfall up between a painting, “deserving causes” and all the family, urging his parents to accept £500 without demur.
There were queues for tickets for Night and Day at the Plymouth Theatre and the play won the Evening Standard Best Play award in January 1979. Diana Rigg as a cool, pantherish Ruth and John Thaw as a rough, tough Wagner, in a rousing production by Peter Wood, were a great draw. As often, Wood persuaded Stoppard during both the UK and the American runs to do a lot of rewriting, including some extra speeches between Wagner and Ruth, to deepen and to clarify the characters. Diana Rigg had regular rewrites slipped under her dressing-room door. But she loved the part. Looking back decades later, she would say: “I adored it. I knew this woman. She speaks her thoughts, it’s very novel. It wasn’t difficult to do—it was a gift. A wonderful part for a woman, so brilliantly concise and wry and witty.”
Things did not go so well with the play in Australia, early in 1979, where Stoppard spent a few weeks, when he could hardly afford the time, to monitor a mediocre production of Night and Day and one of Dirty Linen, and to give his theatre talks to adoring students, cheered up by a cricket match (between Queensland and Western Australia) at the Perth Literary Festival, and by dining with Warren Mitchell at a restaurant called An Elegant Sufficiency. (“One longs to set up a pie-shop in competition—The Vulgar Excess or The Crude Parsimony.”) He was made much of—“for the first time I felt a bit famous,” he told his parents—though at one social event he sat next to a woman who told him she loved his plays, and went on to describe her favourite, “which turned out to be Bedroom Farce.” On the way to Australia, the flight stopped to refuel at Bombay. He sent a postcard to Bobby from the transit lounge: “I set foot again after 33 years…I wish I could leave the flight and go straight to Darjeeling.”
When Night and Day went to the States, there were problems. Diana Rigg left the first cast in London, because of a back injury she had got from lifting the body of the dead acrobat in Jumpers. (To her regret, she has never appeared again in a Stoppard play.) Maggie Smith took over as Ruth at the Phoenix, and then in the States, with Susan Hampshire replacing her after a few months. There was some trepidation before Maggie Smith began—she was a force to be reckoned with—but she was “miraculous,” according to Peter Wood and to Stoppard, and gave one of the great memorable performances in a Stoppard play, like Hordern in Jumpers or John Wood in Travesties. Smith gave Ruth’s inner turmoil and desires an edgy expressiveness. Stoppard thought she did something impossible, like being in two places at once: inhabiting the character totally, while simultaneously seeming to stand outside it, making an ironic commentary on her own behaviour. When they opened at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., he gave her—it was his little joke for his lead actresses—a Head Girl badge.
But between the Washington opening and the New York run it became apparent that the actor playing Wagner was all wrong for the production, and the excruciating business of replacing him had to be gone through. Stoppard hated such situations, though he would always put the needs of the play first. He wrote home: “Life in the theatre—I’m glad I only write the damn things.” And even with Maggie Smith getting huge praise, the play had, as Codron put it, a “rocky road” on Broadway, and lost money—though a line about America’s cowardly record of dealing with Africa got a surprising burst of applause every night. New York, Stoppard noted wryly, was the only place where “Shavian” was a term of abuse. On one night, he told his parents, “100 people left during the play!!” He and Peter Wood were quarrelling over the production; he was doing endless interviews; he felt “over-attended” and over-exposed, unhappy and irritable. Stuck in a hotel room for weeks while he worked on the show, he was homesick. He wanted to see his boys and he wanted to be with Miriam. He lamented in secret: “Oh let it all be over so that I can come home…Dear me, this is not the life I had planned, either as a writer or as a father.”
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Home, by then, was Iver Grove, which they bought in the summer of 1979 and moved into between 19 and 24 September. They had been very settled in Fernleigh. He had written Travesties, Artist Descending a Staircase, Galileo, Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land, Every Good Boy, Professional Foul, Night and Day, as well as screenplays and his adaptation of Undiscovered Country, in that comfortable, ugly house. He was happy there. He often wrote bursts of pleasure into his journal about everyday life there, the boys going about their business, the domestic bustle, the view from his study, as on a wintry day at the end of 1978: “Outside my window: the lawn pearly with dew, bare trunks and branches of trees some shades darker than the fog which is and conceals sky; you [Ed] in blue and green anorak walking sturdily, your straight-haired roundhead tucked in against the damp.”
But they had often remarked on a perfect house near them which could be glimpsed, hidden away behind trees, at the other end of their road, Wood Lane. Miriam passed it all the time on her way to and from work in Maidenhead. Early in 1979, just as she was due to go on a trip to Mexico, she heard it was for sale, and boldly drove up its winding driveway, past the giant mulberry tree at the entrance. She sat there amazed at what she saw, before the owner shooed her away. Back home, she said (more or less): “You’ve always said you wanted red rosy Georgian brick instead of white pebble-dash—take a look at this house!” As she remembered it, she then went on her business trip, to be met on her return at the airport with his announcement that he’d made an offer on the house—and in alarm she said to him, but I only told you to take a look! In his memory, it was he who told her that he’d heard the house was for sale, during one of her phone calls from Mexico, and she said to him (more or less): “Go and buy it.” And then he went and looked at it. And when he saw it, he thought—as he put it—“well, shit.”
Iver Grove was indeed a very impressive house. It is a beautiful, small-scale, early-eighteenth-century brick mansion described by Pevsner as “one of the finest houses in Bucks in the Baroque style of that date.” It’s our favourite period, Stoppard told his parents. Estate agents referred to it as an exquisite Grade II listed Georgian villa. A sale notice for the house and its grounds in 1865 described it as “a commodious old-fashioned mansion” with “pleasure grounds of rare magnificence,” a “nobly timbered park” of thirty acres, double coach house and stabling for seven horses, a small enclosed farmyard, a pretty undulating meadow and three excellent kitchen gardens. Country-house architecture writers enthused about its purple brick with red brick dressings, its amply spaced bays and its west frontage, a three-bay pediment on giant Doric pilasters with a matching cornice and frieze, and a front door with a porch on Tuscan columns. Inside was a high hall with black and white marble tiling and a sweeping central wooden staircase, the pride of the house, with—in Pevsnerese—“slender-faceted balusters.” The wood for the staircase came from Nelson’s HMS Victory, and the floorboards were from the Armoury in the Tower of London. It was not a huge mansion—more of a jewel, a “Queen Anne doll’s house” as Stoppard described it—but with lots of outbuildings and vast grounds.
It had a colourful history. They would have liked to call it a Vanbrugh house, but in fact it was the work of John James, a good church architect and contemporary of Hawksmoor (their neighbour Paul Johnson was quick to spot this), who designed it for Lady Mohun, widow of a notorious rake and gambler, who was killed in a duel in 1712. The adventurous Lady Mohun then married a much younger man and had the house built between 1722 and 1724, as a country retreat for occasional use. But she died in 1725, and after that it was owned by country-loving aristocrats, the Gambiers, who created a famous garden of rare pansies. Then it fell into disrepair, and in the Second World War the house and stables were requisitioned and used for storage for telegraphic equipment for the Polish army (our wartime allies). Heaps of electrical junk were still lying around in the stables. After the war the house was done up by the Ministry of Works, listed by English Heritage in 1954, and then privately owned.
They were strongly advised not to buy it—by the bank and, at first, by Peter, keeping a careful eye on his brother’s accounts. Friends who knew Fernleigh thought they were mad—though friends who had seen Iver completely understood. At one point they nearly lost heart, but they both knew it was, as Miriam said, “the house of our dreams.” It was just as convenient as Fernleigh for her work, for quick access to London and for the boys’ schools. She thought it would be their ultimate house for the rest of their lives together.
There were plenty of other things going on in the summer and autumn of 1979. The Human Factor was being filmed, he was in New York working on Night and Day and seeing Every Good Boy at the Met, they had a family holiday in Corfu, he had four plays running at once in London. But the Iver plans were at the centre of their lives. They had to take the risk of buying the house before they could be sure of the outbuildings, which were owned separately, and which they knew they would want for their work, as although the house had lots of bedroom space, it had fewer reception rooms downstairs than Fernleigh. Now-unused stables set round a cobbled courtyard, a red-brick coach house with Dutch gables, a huge walled kitchen garden, a little cottage (with a sitting tenant) and another small house for the gardener, a ten-acre field, a great number of trees, a tennis court—these were all part of the attraction, and had to be charmed out of a nice old gentleman who, fortunately, had seen and admired Miriam on the television.
It was a major purchase, made at a time when he was spending lavishly. Thinking aloud about how he had used his Shakespeare Prize money that year—on a Peter De Wint painting of Windsor Castle, on rare first editions of Hemingway and Jane Austen—he said to himself, perhaps not very convincingly: “I suppose it’s awful to be so privileged/lucky/wealthy etc.” Fernleigh sold for £150,000. Iver Grove cost £190,000, the outbuildings and land another £40,000. He remembered buying his first house, River Thatch, in 1968, for £14,000. He couldn’t quite believe that, just over ten years on, he had bought a property for £230,000. (When the house was sold, nearly twenty years later, it went for £1.35 million; in 2007 it changed hands for about £5 million.)
But his satisfaction was intense. He had always had a fantasy of a beautiful country mansion, a “trophy” house, and he loved the eighteenth century, its grace and order. He wouldn’t mind ending his days in a country house near Bath, reading Jane Austen and The Times. He could see the potential of Iver’s grounds, and he had a passion for fruit trees. One day, he thought, they would have peaches growing against the south-facing wall of the kitchen gardens. As soon as the house was theirs, they picked six pounds of mulberries from the tree that guarded the entrance. He would not be doing the gardening, though, or the interior decorating. “I write plays, that’s my excuse.”
Iver Grove was his complete idea of a beautiful English house. But essentially it was Miriam’s project. She grasped it with passion, energy and organisational prowess. As her son Will would say, “like all the places Miriam has ever lived in, what they end up looking like is not what they looked like at the beginning.” It was a five-year plan: to redecorate the whole house first, then to refurbish the outbuildings as their workplace and to redesign and expand the gardens, eventually to put in a swimming pool. As a start, the tennis pavilion was moved from Fernleigh to Iver. Paul Johnson lent them his enormous Guido Reni painting of the Archangel Michael driving Satan out of Paradise, to go at the top of the stairs. An eighteenth-century portrait of a young girl in blue, in Gainsborough or Thornhill style, captured their hearts at an auction and was bagged for £700, giving him intense pleasure. There were already heaps of furniture at Fernleigh which wouldn’t all fit into Iver—the move took “umpteen pantechnicons,” he told his parents. But Miriam kept rushing home in high excitement with spoils from the Thames Valley antique shops—a Georgian commode, a tallboy, a bookcase—most of which she had bargained hard for. He enjoyed all this, and loved this side of her. At one point she dragged them all off to a cattle market in Thame to buy agricultural equipment. He was impressed that she was making coloured plans for the walled gardens: “It will be the Versailles of back gardens!” he exclaimed.
He felt sad to say goodbye to the Fernleigh “era,” and sad that Ed would probably not remember its rooms and gardens. But they closed their life in that house in style, giving a big lunch party in the garden on a Sunday in September two weeks before the move. Miriam lavishly cooked Indian food (with masses of curry left over for the freezer) for guests whose names the host listed in his journal: Otto Preminger, André Previn (now separated from Mia Farrow and with a new partner), Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard, Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal, Stephen Frears, the Johnsons and their son Luke, Harold Pinter and Antonia Fraser, John Stride and his wife, Bryan Forbes and Nanette Newman, the Wellses and Derek Marlowe—who would have vividly remembered the Stoppard of Vincent Square Mansions.
On the day of the move, 19 September, the family walked down Wood Lane in procession to the new house. Oliver was thirteen, Barny was celebrating his tenth birthday the next day, Will was seven (and would remember having his eighth birthday at Iver the following March) and Ed was five. They would be living out of packing cases for some months to come. In the chaos of the removal days, they ate some of their meals at the nearby Holiday Inn, where Stoppard would occasionally retreat to write in solitude. He had a moment of paternal pride when Ed, observing a packet of Brie on the hotel table, said: “An isosceles triangle!” Then he went off to the States to deal with Night and Day, and Miriam set about getting the painters in, the sofas and rugs ordered, the watercolours hung and an architect hired to design the plans for the outbuildings.
She began to get the feel of the rooms, pinning colour swatches and fabric samples onto the walls, changing her mind about greens, finding exactly the right lamps and curtains. It took her two years to get the sitting room just right. The dining room, and their bedroom, and his little sitting room next to their bedroom, their dressing room with two bathrooms, followed suit. She knew that there wasn’t room in his brain for this kind of thing. And she knew that their marriage worked well because they had their separate areas of interest. In her later words: “I never expected to get anything from him that I didn’t.” His running joke about doing up the house was, “you make the decision, I’ll write the cheque.” (Though her own income from her Syntex and TV work and her books, would also go into Iver—she didn’t like to be dependent.) If she asked for his view on a Turkish carpet, his interest was limited—but he liked having the carpet. He could see that this might have been frustrating for her. She was working and taking care of the children and travelling, and also pouring her energies into furnishing the house, and not always getting quite the reaction she hoped for. He caricatured his response: “Oh that’s fine, well done, and stop talking about that now, I’m trying to think about this play, and you keep banging on about furniture and carpets.” There were occasional explosions, shouting and tears and making up. But on the whole her energetic involvement with the things, and his concentration on his work, made a good balance.
The conversions to the outbuildings and the work on the gardens progressed in fits and starts, as and when they had the money. The coach house became an enormous two-floor work space, coloured bright red and orange. She worked downstairs with the Syntex secretaries and a desk for Jacky. Upstairs, at the top of a fire-engine-red metal spiral staircase and behind plate-glass windows, was his gigantic study, about forty feet long, where he kept his reference books and hung the framed autographs of writers he had started to collect, and had his huge partner’s desk. The children said it looked like a shopping arcade; he said it was the kind of study Mussolini would have liked.
Over time they added a billiards room, a darkroom for Miriam’s photography and what they called a “conversation pit,” a little sunken agora or mini indoor theatre, with carpet-lined seating round the wall for lolling on. Outside, the tennis court was floodlit, and there was, eventually, a glass-covered pool (which he preferred looking at to swimming in) and a croquet lawn. Miriam designed a Japanese water garden with a waterfall and a series of descending ponds. Reclaiming the history of Iver Grove, she turned herself into an expert on pansies, and created an exceptional garden with hundreds of species, and decorative, eighteenth-century style murals on the brick walls. He would have a circular stone sundial made for the wall of the garden, with a design of pansies and the inscription: “For Miriam who made this garden 1982.” (This hobby began expensively, when vast numbers of annuals were bought, under the impression they were perennials.) In the early 1980s, frequent entries in his journal noted that she was “gardening non-stop.”
