DAVID RAYNER

I don't read the Daily Mail, so I don't know what they printed about Dirk Bogarde. If they were referring to Dirk being homosexual, well, that's no big deal as it was known about for years.

Has anybody here read this new Dirk Bogarde biography yet? I just wondered if there's any mention in it of Dirk wanting to adopt little Jon Whiteley in the early 1950's and of his (Dirk's) friends pursuading him against it, which was something that Dirk was talking about in a BBC2 Arena programme a few years ago. I always thought that you could only adopt a child if it was an orphan and as far as I know, Jon's parents were still alive in the early 1950's. So what was all that about?

DB7

Piece here from Telegraph.co.uk:

'Dirk could be cruel – but I know why'
(Filed: 02/09/2004)

Gareth Van den Bogaerde breaks his family's 40-year silence to reveal an intimate picture of his film star brother. Jan Moir reports

In a hotel in the New Forest, teacups rattle in the lounge as a soft, summer rain falls on the lawn outside. A mobile phone rings. Someone slips a few biscuits to a yapping dog. It is not the best place in the world to conduct an intimate conversation about one of Britain's most famous actors, but Gareth Van den Bogaerde and I do our best. "Do you think he was jealous of your heterosexuality?" I ask, as the crockery falls silent.


Dirk and Gareth: at Pinewood Studios in 1947
"Partly. I think it has to be partly that, yes," he says. "But, really, he resented my advent. After that, he resolved that he would build a shell that would never be pierced; he would never be hurt by anyone again. He remained in that armour for the rest of his life, you know."

The endless homosexual concealment, I say, must have been stressful.

"Oh, yes. At the time that Dirk was sexually active, the law was such that it could not come out. If it did, he could have gone to prison. It couldn't be admitted," he says, as even the dog goes quiet. No wonder, for Gareth Van den Bogaerde has quite a tale to tell.

Many years ago, his brother Derek simplified his name to Dirk Bogarde and became one of our biggest post-war film stars. Born to a father of Flemish background who became art editor of The Times and a mother who was a slightly successful Scottish actress, the brothers had a jagged, difficult relationship, although the family were always discreet about this and other matters. For example, they all knew that Dirk was gay, but managed to keep a lid on it for years. As Van den Bogaerde says, you had to, in those days.

In conversation and on the telephone, they always circumspectly referred to Bogarde as D or Uncle D and they never talked to journalists. Gareth once accidentally did, when he worked as a film editor at Pinewood in the 1960s, when Bogarde was a big star there, trundling through the studio gates in a Rolls-Royce every morning. His little brother took the bus.

"I got terribly caught, I had no idea. It was a terrible con. In all innocence, I thought it was terrific; I was being interviewed about my brother!" says Gareth. "But when it came out, Dirk was absolutely beside himself and saw it as a betrayal. He said to me: 'Don't ever speak to the press again.' And none of us ever did."

Until now. Although the Van den Bogaerde family are thrilled with Dirk Bogarde: The Authorised Biography written by former Daily Telegraph literary editor John Coldstream, and in print at the end of this month, they are upset that extracts published in a tabloid newspaper show a tainted, unbalanced picture of Bogarde which depicts him as a fantasist capable of "malice, vile cruelty" and every other sin under the sun.


"That is the tragedy. If you take the bits that are beastly and string them all together, of course you end up with a black picture of someone. We all have dark sides of our life. But Dirk had extremes of kindness and generosity. He was a tremendously sparkling character of quick mind and brain," Gareth says of his brother, who died of a heart attack in 1999.

Today, 70-year-old Gareth unzips his cosy fleece, looking every inch the hearty boatie that he is, although there are cobwebs of sadness around his eyes. He has enjoyed a successful career making commercials and documentaries and his voice is clear and gentle, deceptively so, because sometimes the soft cadences disguise the frankness of what he has to say. Being the sibling of a rich and famous person is never easy – they unbalance the family unit, they suck up all the oxygen – and for Gareth Van den Bogaerde, it was more difficult than most.

"We had a love/hate relationship," he says of his brother. "I loved, he hated. I don't say this flippantly, it is the truth. I did love him, but he hated firstly himself and, secondly, what he had done, which was to nurture resentment of me. I think he had hurt himself because of that and he hated it. He hated himself."

And Bogarde did hate, there's no question about that. The man who would go on to star in films such as Death in Venice, The Servant and Victim, the author who wrote seven volumes of memoir, a handful of novels, reams of journalism and was knighted in 1992 could never forgive his baby brother for... what exactly? For being born, seems to be the answer. Dirk – or Derek, as he was still known then – was 13 years old when Gareth arrived in the bosom of the family and later wrote how he was "silent with shock" when he first saw the baby. He sensed that "someone had turned my egg timer upside down and the sand had started to run the other way".

Shortly afterwards, his father drove Derek to Glasgow – away from his beloved mother, his toy theatre and his friends – to stay with relatives. The new baby had made conditions in the family's north London home cramped and, on top of this, Derek was doing badly at school. Forced to stay in Scotland for three years – something he could never forgive Gareth for – he returned to England as a 16-year-old at the end of 1937. According to his biographer, he had become "less carefree, more capable of petty cruelties".

Now it was baby's turn to suffer. When little Gareth leant out of a sash window, Derek came up behind him and brought it down on his fingers. His mother came running when she heard the scream, but he told her: "It's all right, I'm just squeezing a thorn out of his finger."

In later years, his tortures became more exquisite, like the time when Gareth met Elizabeth Taylor when he was about 14. "She was with Michael Wilding," he says. "She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, I couldn't take my eyes off her. I was very gauche. And then Dirk introduced me by saying: 'This is my small brother, he is a farm boy'."

Gareth Van den Bogaerde: 'As I grew older I began to understand what I must have represented to him'

On another occasion, film star Dirk had just discovered an exciting new aftershave called Old Spice and had bought four cases of it. Sleek and perfumed in his dinner jacket, he wafted down the stairs past poor Gareth on his way out to an engagement.

"God, that smells terrific," said the awkward but excited teen.

"Yes, it is," sneered Bogarde in front of everyone. "And Jesus, you could do with some of it."

"Oh, painfully hurtful," says Gareth. "Those sort of put-downs were so common and I would be deeply hurt by things like that, because at 15 or so you just crumpled up. But as I grew older, I thought, 'Ah, you are such a clever bugger'. And I began to understand what I must have represented to him, why I stood in the light in front of him. I had to be there, I couldn't avoid it. I understood why he felt the way he did. It was damned unreasonable, but I understood it."

The fact that Gareth Van den Bogaerde can find it in his heart not just to forgive his brother, but also go some way towards understanding and appreciating him, says much about him and the depths of his fraternal love, but also a great deal about Dirk Bogarde himself. He was a difficult, brittle, brilliant man who, even at his most repellent, had the ability to make others love and indulge him.

Coldstream reluctantly points out that many of the assertions in Bogarde's seven volumes of autobiography were – how can we put this? – completely made up. His claim, for example, that he was in the Belsen concentration camp shortly after it was liberated – complete with lavish descriptions of scabbed inmates and how it affected him for ever – is tactfully dismissed by Coldstream.

The prevailing winds seem to suggest that Bogarde dissimulated like this because it was all part of a great smokescreen and intricate camouflage that he felt compelled to throw up around himself. It is a generous explanation; others just might call what he wrote plain, boiled lies.


Yet it would take a hard heart not to sympathise in some respects. Despite Bogarde's homes in the south of France, his lovely cars, good food and wines, burgeoning fame and the deeply happy, 40-year relationship with his friend Tony Forwood, always standing right in front of him was Gareth, who, with his wife and five children, had everything that Dirk really wanted. But he had a funny way of showing it.

"He adored my children, although he refused to see them until they were 14. He hated them so much when they were small. He used to say: 'Don't bring those filthy, little shits to my house. I don't want anything to do with them'," says Gareth. "It was hurtful, until I began to appreciate what was eating him."

When Gareth's firstborn son, also called Gareth, died of pneumonia when he was 21, Bogarde tried to help, in his own quietly horrified way. He was upset, of course, but his first reaction was to urge everyone to forget all about it, and he sent over a large cheque for Gareth to take the whole family away on holiday to get over it.

"He was shocked, but his shock was that such an amazingly awful event, such an event of huge magnitude, happened to me and not to him. I always felt that he rather resented Gareth being my son only because it was such a big event, such a huge thing to happen."

Bogarde did not attend the funeral.

"He had an appointment with Vogue in Paris. I didn't expect him to come. He just said, 'I can't come. I've got this thing going on with Vogue, I can't get out of it.' But also, he knew that wherever he appeared, that was where the attention was."

The truth about Dirk, as his family might argue, is both lighter and darker than it appears at first glance and certainly, for Gareth Van den Bogaerde, the publication of this new biography has brought a kind of catharsis and a lot of relief.

"It has been hugely emotional," he says. "It lays out a life for me that I had only partially understood. I've got the remaining pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, which I have now put together. All that angst and those hurts can be put to rest. I understand Dirk now more than I ever thought I would."

DAVID RAYNER

Thanks for that, DB7. Yes, I can see how such writing would do a demolition job on Dirk's image. Maybe, after he and Jon Whiteley had been so close in a father and son type relationship while making Hunted together in 1951, Dirk wanted a son of his own, in order to have something that his brother had...and Jon was it. From what I heard in that Arena programme, Jon grew to love Dirk dearly while they were making the film and at the end of shooting, when he and Dirk had to part and go their separate ways, the little boy was inconsolable.

DB7

When they say "they are upset that extracts published in a tabloid newspaper show a tainted, unbalanced picture of Bogarde" are they referring to the Daily Mail? (a paper I wouldn't read either)

Freddy

Edward fox in "The Day of the Jackal" had two bottles of Old Spice, one which he put his hair dye in.
Also my dad and I bet a lot of other dads used Old Spice. Is it still going. Better that than Henry Cooper, Kevin Keegan and Brut.
best wishes
Freddy

The world wags on.

David Brent

As fine an actor as Dirk Bogarde was i find after looking back on his old movies that he also had the tendency to overact in many of his scenes.
Also in many of his parts he played an unlikeable character, so just maybe a little of his own personality was actually coming out in his choice of roles & in his performances.

Dave.

DAVID RAYNER

I've just found this on the Internet and paste it in for your perusal:

TheBookseller.com
September 9th, 2004

Caveat Vendor

John Coldstream on the Daily Mail's distortion of his biography of Dirk Bogarde.

Brian MacArthur was kind to me in his article last week ("Paper seller or paper filler?") on the relative value to publishers and newspapers of serialisation. His list of the autumn titles that had already been given a showcase in the national newspapers began with "John Coldstream's Dirk Bogarde". Alas, however, readers had seen nothing of the sort. Instead, on three mid-August days they were treated to "The Daily Mail's Dirk Bogarde". It was not a pretty sight.

Indeed, to say as the Observer did on Sunday that I was "disappointed" with the treatment given to my authorised biography is to compete unchallenged for gold at the 2004 Understatement Olympiad. Heartbroken would be nearer the mark--and not exclusively on my own account. Far from it. For the collateral damage, on an emotional and a professional level, has been incalculable.
Writing the official life of a figure not long dead is more than anything else about trust. I knew Dirk Bogarde during the last eight years of his life, as commissioning editor for most of his journalism, as collaborator on his final book and, I am proud to be able to say, as his friend. For reasons never properly explained, he broke down the walls with which he compartmentalised us all, and introduced my wife and me to his family. It was the key to the Van den Bogaerdes' approval when, a year or so after his death, they agreed to the proposal of Ion Trewin at Weidenfeld that I might write the official biography.
It was the key, too, to everything that followed, because I believe that without the dual endorsement few of those whom I approached in the coming years would have opened their doors to me, let alone talked as candidly and freely as they did. They had respected Dirk's fabled desire for privacy in his lifetime, and why should they break the habit now, especially for some unknown and untried sleuth? Trust was the lubricant that kept the project in motion.
My book was late. Barely four months before publication, all that my agent could show to the five newspapers and one Saturday colour supplement expressing an interest was an uncorrected typescript--a dense and taxing prospect, which would, we all knew, not lend itself easily to extracts. But off it went.

In the event the Daily Mail was the only paper to make an offer. At one-fifth of the way up Brian MacArthur's 2003-04 payment scale at the Times, it was hardly lavish. However, it would help alleviate the parlous state of the late-deliverer's finances. More significant, by going with the Mail I knew we would reach a huge readership beyond Dirk's faithful Daily Telegraph constituency. We would, naturally, have no say in presentation and in "furniture" such as headlines, standfirsts and trailers; however, we would have sight of the extracted material and be able to correct factual errors.

The Mail employs writers I respect, among them my former boss. From my days as a literary editor I also liked--and had faith in--a key editorial figure involved with serialisations. And, finally, as President Johnson felt about J Edgar Hoover, there is a strong argument for having awkward critters inside the tent, rather than letting them do their worst from outside.
Elements of the tabloid had sniped away, hurtfully, at Dirk when he was alive; but its reviewers of his work had usually been complimentary. Surely, now that he was dead, the newspaper's undisguised homophobia and hostility might be tempered, if not balanced, in some reflection of the understanding that I had attempted to reach in my book.

The first instalment was due to run on Saturday 14th August. On the Thursday at about midday my agent forwarded the text to me. I read five paragraphs with incredulity and mounting horror. This was no extract. It was a grotesque re-write. I skimmed the remainder, and realised that instead of a serialisation in the accepted sense I was confronted by a tawdry travesty from someone unknown to me who had trekked through my 600 pages with a salacity-detector, and strung together a "life story" based almost entirely on material from the book that showed Dirk in an unfavourable light.

I wanted nothing to do with it, and, with the backing of both publisher and agent, tried to withdraw. Weasel words from the Mail about the possibility of my rectifying matters were meaningless, and not merely because of the lack of time available to do so. The newspaper went ahead, and for four days--the Sunday offered the most dismal of respites--I watched in agony as four years of commitment to a thorough, fair and, yes, if you like, "warts and all" portrait was reduced to a repellent hatchet-job under the running headline "Dirk the Deceiver".

The following week the newspaper printed a letter from a reader in Durham headed "Vile dig at Dirk", accusing me of treachery. On the evidence of what she had seen, she was entirely justified. So, in a remarkable act of generosity, Dirk's brother Gareth telephoned her, to commiserate, to express the family's shared repulsion, and then to put her right about the authorship of the alleged serialisation. I expect she will dine out on the episode for some while. More important, she now knows where the true deception lies.
After 25 years in what was once known as Fleet Street, I thought I was reasonably savvy about the ways of newspapers; but this affair has taught an old dog, and many innocent bystanders, an unsavoury trick. My message to any publisher, agent and author considering a serialisation is, caveat vendor--and, especially, be on red alert from the outset for the word "adaptation".

DIRK BOGARDE: THE AUTHORISED BIOGRAPHY is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson on 30th September (£20, 0297607038). John Coldstream's fee for the "serialisation" is going to his subject's favourite charity, CancerBACUP.

[ 30. September 2004, 16:16: Message edited by: DAVID RAYNER ]

DAVID RAYNER

I now have it on good authority from a friend in the south of England who has read some of John Coldstream’s new biography of Dirk Bogarde, that Jon Whiteley is mentioned quite a bit in the book and obviously didn't mind being interviewed for it.

Strangely, Jon Whiteley says there was no truth whatsoever in the adoption story, and that he hadn't even been of aware of what Dirk Bogarde had been saying about him until he watched a television interview of Dirk Bogarde in the early 1990’s. He also said that he has never watched any of Dirk Bogarde's films nor has he read any of his books!!

How very odd. Jon and Dirk seem to get on like a house on fire in their two films together, so I wonder why Jon should say that? I also have a 1953 film annual, which contains a double page article about Dirk and Jon and shows a photo of Jon happily feeding the animals while staying at Dirk’s farm. I'm sure that if I'd made films with Dirk Bogarde and become friends enough with him to stay with him at his farm, I'd certainly be interested in watching some of his other films and reading his books. Am I the only one to whom this just doesn't make any sense?

[ 04. October 2004, 16:23: Message edited by: DAVID RAYNER ]

Freddy

Taken from The Telegraph Oct.2nd
www.arts.telegraph.co.uk

Dirk Boqarde: the Authorised Biography
by John Coldstream
610pp, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20
« £18-95 (plus £2-25 p&p)0870 1557222

Dirk Bogarde used to tell anyone who cared to listen that he didn't want a biography after his death. So what is the excuse for this immense book? Either Bogarde's family and the vast number of people interviewed by John Coldstream have disregarded his wish, or else they didn't believe he was telling the straight truth. Although private and evasive, Bogarde wrote many volumes of autobiography. Perhaps he was spiritually solitary, but he needed people to provide tribute and applause. As this book demonstrates, nothing about the man should be taken at face value.

Bogarde's most noted area of not-quite-straightness was his sexuality. Coldstream decides to "deal with this matter and dispose of it before getting on with the story. After all, it informs Dirk's life... work in the cinema and... writing." So Laurence Harbottle, Bogarde's solicitor from the early 1950s, is quoted: "I shared the view of every friend of his I have ever known that Dirk's nature was entirely homosexual." We are informed that the book contains no lurid revelations, that Bogarde lived for 40 years with Tony Forwood and that he never publicly volunteered the information that he was gay.

In the amazing story that follows, the reader must wonder time and again at the layering of a man who, so intelligent, rigorous and honest in many ways, apparently denied his own sexuality and scarcely acknowledged the existence of the man he loved. Forwood, by the way, emerges as a sublimely wonderful man. What are we to make of Bogarde's claim that he visited Belsen? Coldstream shows that Bogarde was nearby, but thinks it unlikely that he saw the horrors about which he spoke and wrote. Or the futile lie that his friend, the actress Capucine, was not found for many hours after her death? Coldstream does not flinch from pointing out the inconsistencies between Bogarde's reports and the facts of a case, but he does not really judge beyond a passing "cruel" or "puzzling". This may look like a dereliction of his biographical duty, but the more we see how perceptions of Bogarde varied, the more Coldstream's unwillingness to judge becomes a strength, for it allows Bogarde to be all these things - inconsistent, but still coherent; tragic sometimes, but also heroic.

One almost forgets that Bogarde was probably the most successful English matinee idol there has been. Coldstream trots through all the corny films and famous names, but just as it threatens to get a bit tedious, along comes Victim (1961). "A great actor who has never appeared in a great film," was how Bogarde was described shortly before The Servant's release in 1963. Turning away from possible riches in Hollywood, Bogarde followed his own star.
This biography triumphantly succeeds in presenting not only Bogarde's worldly range (idyllic Sussex childhood, Glasgow, films, France, books, London) but also his internal range. It is unusual to see quite so many separate strands entwined in a life. Madonna apparently asked him to participate in her Sex book; at the same time, he was the gentle author of the classic childhood memoir Great Meadow. All his best characters are degenerate or tortured because they are drawn to something of which they feel ashamed. His inclination for such parts seems courageous: they interested him because, through them, tie found out something about himself. If Bogarde's best work displays an acute sense of the brittleness of things, Coldstream demonstrates that this is because he felt it, and suffered for it. If is startling to see just how deeply and widely the mercurial old baggage was appreciated in his last years. Perhaps this was precisely because he defended his privacy and lived on his own terms, rejecting the label that would have been pinned to him had he "come out".
More than most, Bogarde would have detested a volume of showbiz tittle-tattle, or a self-righteous carve-up of his sexual nature. But since, towards the end of his life, he derived satisfaction from what he was able to give to a wide range of people, one hopes he would have welcomed this stupendous biography. Its masterful justification of his many sides makes it possible for us still to learn from him in death.
John de Falbe

The world wags on.

DAVID RAYNER

Thanks for that, Freddy. I wonder if we are meant to take it from these various reviews of the biography that Dirk Bogarde sometimes made things up.

Freddy

Pleasure David,
Like you though I think DB must have been a very complex character, who did certainly seem to make things up, I recall the documentary about him and when he was describing the incident at Belsen he had tears in his eyes and even mentioned the fact that he was nearly crying just thinking about it.
What it sadly does though is cast doubts on his previous writings and the books that he had written.
I don't suppose we will ever know the truth, so perhaps it would be better to judge him on his acting which gave a lot of people great pleasure.
Was he the first person to be "economical with the truth" and this was how he kept people at arms length.
best wishes
Freddy
ps. David, didn't a third party mention in one of the documentaries that DB wanted to adopt Jon Whiteley but he was persuaded out of it so perhaps no one else got to hear of it. It is strange though that he has never read any of the books or seen any of his films even though he had seen a TV interview.

The world wags on.

DAVID RAYNER

You're right, Freddy. It's the strangest thing I've heard about for a long time. But it could well be that DB and his close friends at the time knew about his plans to adopt Jon, but Jon wasn't told about it.

Steve Crook

He was by no means the first to embelish his autobiography. Not for any suspicious reason, just to make it more like his life as he wished it had been. Or, in other places, he told a tale so often he thought that's how it happened.

I could cite David Niven. A wonderful man but his autobiography and the stories he told were often things that actually happened to other people but re-told to put him in the starring role. He spent most of his life playing the role of being David Niven.

Or what about Michael Powell, the great man himself. His autobiographies are a great history of movie making, especially in Britain. But we mustn't take every word of them as gospel truth. He was just re-editing the movie of his life.

Steve

Steve Crook

PaPAS

moonfleet

And the fact that he is "universal" is that he played , very convingtingly many heterosexual characters : "The Night Porter", "Our Mother's House", "The Damned", "Providence"....for "Accident", "Death in Venice" and "The Victim", it could be more ambigus !!....

Moon.

"Very difficult !" "Craazy!"

stuart.scot

The one thing about Dirk Bogarde's homosexuallity that I have a problem with was when talking about the film Victim he said the only homosexual actor involved with making the film was Dennis Price, which I took at the time to mean he was straight.

This was said at a time when homosexuality was legal, I think in the 1980s, so I couldn't understand while he said it about Price, he didn't own up himself. Also It was a very brave move on his part to play a homosexually inclined Barrister in Victim in 1961, so why not admit he was gay himself in the 80s, when he was happy to say it about Dennis Price