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Roy Ward Baker: Stardust memories

The director Roy Ward Baker made the original Titanic movie and kick-started Marilyn Monroe's career ? and then he met Dirk Bogarde... In a rare interview, he tells Matthew Sweet how it all went wrong

Friday 07 February 2003 01:00 GMT
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Under the glass roof of a saleroom in South Kensington, a hundred-odd people sit poised to push their paddles in the air and determine the market value of Marilyn Monroe's discarded stockings. The annual Christie's Film and Entertainment auction has lots to suit every taste: Scott Evil's platform boots; an oleaginous alien egg, operated by eight hidden brake handles; a pair of green satin breeches worn by John Travolta on It's a Royal Knockout; a felt-tip drawing by Sir Alec Guinness, depicting several football-shaped creatures by a swimming pool, their tiny genitals hanging between stick-legs.

Most of the above will end up as larky conversation pieces in suburban sitting rooms. Scott Evil's platform boots might even get worn to a party. But the Monroe material is less amusing, more expressive of a kind of funereal fetishism: a plastic comb, four sheer seamed nylons, an ivory-coloured chiffon scarf, a pair of dove-grey suede stilettos. As I'm wondering who'll bid for these items – and remembering Michael Douglas's vainglorious academic in The Wonder Boys, with his Monroe dress locked in a bedside safe – I clock the man in the Some Like it Hot tie.

This, however, is one occasion on which the journalist can't write himself out of the story. When bidding opens on Lot 1 (60 animation cells, gouache on celluloid, depicting Bugs Bunny as a psychiatrist), I know that only 79 hammer-strikes divide me from the chance of taking home the object of my desires: a large chunk of the archive of the veteran film director Roy Ward Baker – the man who holed the Titanic in A Night to Remember (1958), raised the ghosts of Mars in Quatermass and the Pit (1967), asphyxiated Richard Attenborough in Morning Departure (1950), and pitched Marilyn Monroe into madness in Don't Bother to Knock (1952). Sixteen shooting scripts in all, covering Baker's output from 1946-63, with accompanying files of stills, letters, telegrams, schedules and studio documents.

A word of explanation. I don't normally do this sort of thing. In fact, I have never done this sort of thing before. Everything I know about auctions I learned from watching Bargain Hunt. But the day before the sale I came to Kensington to sift through some material relevant to the book I'm writing on the history of British cinema. I intended to spend a few hours taking notes and then go home, but at closing time I was still rifling through files stamped with the insignia of the Rank Organisation, and gabbling into my Dictaphone. Which is why my flat is now crammed with Christie's carrier bags, and why a giant photograph of Dirk Bogarde in The Singer Not the Song (1960), clad in leather pants and flashing his revolver, is lolling against my filing cabinet.

"I needed a little more space," explains Roy Ward Baker, when I call round at his Chelsea home a few weeks later to discuss the contents of his files. "And a friend of mine told me that I might be able to get something for them. He worked on a science fiction series and had bought one of the spaceships for a few pounds. It'd been sitting on top of his wardrobe for years, and he put it up for sale and got a fortune for it." Baker's clearout is not complete: his study is piled with tottering towers of magazines. A complete run of Woodworker from 1918 to 2000. He shares the house with Lady Astor and her dog Sheba, but neither have put pressure on him to free the premises of archival clutter. When you're 86, I suppose, you may lose your desire to leaf through old correspondence as easily as you might lose your appetite for joinery.

Summarising Roy Ward Baker's career would require something of book length – it's called The Director's Cut, and he wrote it himself in 1999 – but his working life divides roughly into five phases. In 1934, he joined the staff of Gainsborough studios, where he was promoted from tea boy to Hitchcock's assistant director on The Lady Vanishes (1938).

After the war, he worked as a freelance director of realist thrillers: The October Man (1947), the submarine drama Morning Departure (1950); Highly Dangerous (1951), a Cold War oddity in which bees are used as agents of biological warfare. A Hollywood contract followed, under which he spent three years working for Fox on vehicles for Tyrone Power, Marilyn Monroe and Robert Ryan, and experimenting with 3-D.

The Rank Organisation claimed Baker for the rest of the Fifties: the director sent Hardy Krüger scuttering over wartime England in The One That Got Away, choreographed icebergs on the Pinewood backlot in A Night to Remember (1958), oversaw an inter-racial romance in Flame in the Streets (1961), and was strong-armed into directing the costly folly of The Singer Not the Song (1961), an unintentionally campy Mexican western starring Dirk Bogarde and John Mills, which proved Rank's last gamble before it retreated into managing bingo halls and bowling alleys.

For the next 25 years, Baker was primarily a director of television series – The Avengers, The Persuaders!,The Saint, The Flame Trees of Thika – but the latter part of his CV also includes a clutch of well-loved horror pictures: Quatermass and the Pit (1967), The Vampire Lovers (1970), Asylum (1972).

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Having watched a gaggle of collectors tussle over the grave goods of Marilyn Monroe (£12,000 for a photograph signed to a Hollywood agent whose death triggered one of her first suicide attempts), I ask Baker about the experience of directing her in Don't Bother to Knock.

"It was a rather cheap melodrama," he recalls. "And looked upon as being rather far-fetched – a cooked-up idea about a nanny who turns into a sort of loony. Nobody had thought of that before, but there's been dozens of them ever since, in reality as well as fiction." Baker was not pleased when he learned that Monroe had been bounced into the lead role. "I didn't know very much about her, and from what I'd seen of her in The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve, the decision to give her the part seemed to me to be grotesque."

His colleagues at Fox had much the same reaction. "Everybody on the lot was laughing behind their hands about Marilyn playing a leading part. Everybody said it was going to be a disaster. She'd been around, passed from hand to hand and back again, had a very chequered career, and was pushing 29 years of age, which was a bit old for the part, which was really for a 19-year-old girl. And nobody was taking her seriously."

Baker may have miscounted (Monroe was actually 25 at the time, a far less hazardous age). But the situation does sound fraught. The actress would go nowhere without the drama coach, Natasha Lytess, who would stand beside the camera, grasping her abdomen and growling, "It comes from here!" – and had also managed to persuade Monroe to pay off her $18,000 [£11,000] debt at the dentist. The studio head, Daryl F Zanuck, came to Baker's rescue, dispatching this memo to Monroe: "You have built up a Svengali, and if you are going to progress with your career and become as important talent-wise as you have publicity-wise, then you must destroy this Svengali before it destroys you."

"When it came to actually shooting the picture," recalls Baker, "I quickly realised this girl was completely hedged in by all this philosophy. So I decided on a policy, which was instinctive and turned out to be correct." He narrates his own thought process: "'I don't care what she says, she's not an actress and she never will be an actress, but by God she doesn't need to be. She's a film star, that's what she is. And that's what I'm going to show, and bugger all the rest of it.' And it came off." The picture transformed Monroe from a mid-ranking starlet to a household name.

Baker prides himself on the popularity of his pictures, though the film that his archive records in most detail was a costly flop. When I mention The Singer Not the Song, his response is quick: "That dreadful film that put paid to my career." Based on a novel by Audrey Erskine Lindop, the movie, a Mexican-set Western, details the strangely intense relationship between a sardonic bandit and an Irish priest. Although it made money abroad – particularly in Catholic territories – the picture was greeted with derision in Britain, where the reviews did little but poke fun at the cut of Dirk Bogarde's pants.

Baker never wanted the job of directing it. He was making plans to adapt a novel by Alan Sillitoe – Saturday Night and Sunday Morning – until Rank quashed the project on grounds of impropriety, and sent Baker to Spain with Dirk Bogarde. The director's suggestion that the whole project should be handed over to Luis Bunuel fell on deaf ears.

"I resisted for 15 months. The policy was entirely based on the idea that Bogarde, who was the only star that Rank had left, was about to come to the end of his seven-year contract. And we had to throw everything we could at him. It didn't matter what he wanted, he got it. That's the origin of it and the only reason I can give you for the bloody thing being made in the first place. To get him to sign another piece of paper to commit himself to making more films for Rank – which he had no intention of doing."

The casting of the priest was the only decision on which the Rank Organisation was not prepared to accede to Bogarde's wishes. Baker's notes reveal that he considered offering the part to Paul Newman, Harry Belafonte, Anthony Perkins and John Cassavetes – but the studio insisted upon John Mills. Baker recalls the following threat by Bogarde: "I promise you, if Johnny plays the priest I will make life unbearable for everyone concerned." He was, apparently, as good as his word.

"Dirk Bogarde's behaviour was absolutely disgraceful. Disgraceful. He had all the spite..." he trails off, biting his tongue. "He was very nasty. Very nasty. Johnny didn't know what the hell was going on. He said, 'What's the matter with this fellow?' I said, 'He doesn't like you, that's the trouble.' He was determined to rough the whole thing up. And I had to do my best to restrain him."

I try to draw him on the subject, and receive a warning shot. "I've always lacked one of the qualities that a film director should have, and that's the sense of intense curiosity in other people's business. If you invited Fellini to a party, he'd get a drink and sit in the corner watching everybody else and making notes. Not participating at all, but taking it all in. I've always had this frightfully British attitude that people's private business is their own private business. It's not right. It's probably why I've made realist pictures."

In the thick files relating to The Singer Not the Song, there's a clutch of photographs of Baker on location, and a still of the cast and crew. Bogarde is conspicuous by his absence; Baker isn't smiling in any of them. There is also a small handwritten card from the star, penned some years later. "I have always thought of Singer as one of my preferred movies. It was ahead of its time, and the unforgivable casting of JM all but ruined it – but it holds up jolly well, and you know, is 'très snob' in France and Germany! Funny after all that time."

For Baker, there was nothing very funny about it in 1961, and nor does there seem to be now. But the archive documents Bogarde's incognizance of his own cruelty, or at least his willingness to forget it. And that's something that a more fetishistic souvenir of the production – a pair of leather trousers, perhaps – would not record.

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