A modest triumph
Jonathan Cecil
CLOSE UP: AN ACTOR TELLING TALES by John Fraser Oberon Books, £21, pp. 294, ISBN 1840024577 t £20 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 Handsome young male actors of the older school have tended, in my experience, to be somewhat vapid and vain. 1 write this in no spirit of envy — comic and character actors, like proverbial blondes, usually have more fun. A shining exception to my first observation has always been John Fraser, once a golden youth, later a leading stage actor of distinction, always an intelligent, witty, modest and charming man. These latter qualities are much in evidence in his delightful autobiography. He writes exceedingly well — his often short, pithy chapters and sentences and his gift for evoking natural scenery invite comparison with Dirk Bogarde's writings but have none of Bogarde's occasional preciosity. There are remarkable set pieces like his description of a stag hunt in France — at once romantic and brutal — and many hilarious vignettes. When John was a Rank film star he attended grand lunches at the aforementioned Bogardc's house with luminaries like Rex Harrison, Kay Kendall and Judy Garland:
Another guest, the Thirties musical star Jessie Matthews, was a sort of in-joke, I suppose — and as jokes are frequently wont to do, it misfired. She not only sang Over my Shoulder' to Judy, hut piling Pclion on the Ossa of embarrassment, she insisted on high-kicking her way round the table showing her knickers which barely concealed an uncharted moonscape of cellulite.
John can be merciless but never malicious; with notable exceptions he rejoices in humanity's foibles. His life has by no means always been easy. His impoverished beginnings on a pre-war Glasgow council estate, with a hopelessly, violently drunken father and an adored mother both dying at only 48, make for painful reading, all the more so because of the writer's lack of selfpity. A good high-school education paid for by a remarkable aunt, early exposure to literature, music and painting were saving graces.
His homosexuality, described unflinchingly but quite unsalaciously, created a major problem for him in his youth as it did for any invert while the cruel anti-gay laws still operated, especially for a popular young film star adored by women and platonically adoring them. How times have changed; even my parents, vehemently opposed to the laws, still regarded homosexuality as a perversion rather than a fact of nature. There is a bleak little chapter describing John's visit to a high-class brothel in the vain hope of discovering his own 'normality'.
Too romantic to be squalidly promiscuous, he sustained an enjoyable if covert sex-life, including a torrid, tantalising affair with Nureyev, and two brief sexual encounters with women — the beautiful French star Dany Robin and Fifi, the banally named mistress of the just deceased Patrick Wymark. John has now been with the same ideal male partner for 27 years.
After early success as a film star he felt he ought to do something useful. This led to his involvement with a poultry farm in Surrey. The chapter describing its utter failure is almost Wodehousian in its comedy. And comedy abounds in descriptions of a hellish evening with a furiously inebriated Bette Davis in Danny La Rue's club and filming with the equally nightmarish LIedy Lamarr. As I recall, Lamarr's subsequent shoplifting arrest took place in London's Selfridges not LA, her lawyer being one Mr Sherman Wank — an innocuous word in America.
John's ever-present idealism finally bore fruit in his founding of the London Shakespeare group, promoted by the British Council, playing in over 60, often primitive, countries over 16 years.
He has now retired to a mediaeval farmhouse in Tuscany. I hope he will continue to write. His memoirs are outstanding — an often moving, seldom sentimental, and humorous account of a remarkably varied life by a generous-hearted, ever-curious man, with none of the conceit or relentless name-dropping of many actor-writers.
About himself, admirably untrammelled by jejune ideology, he is charmingly deprecating. At 19 he appeared as the messenger in Macbeth who precedes Macheth's 'Tomorrow and tomorrow' speech. One night he rushed on a minute late crying out, 'My Queen, your Lord is dead.' Few anecdotes misfire in John Fraser's thoroughly engrossing book.
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