Anxious
Jeffrey Bernard
A Jobbing Actor John Le Mesurier (Elm Tree Books £7.95)
1,1:311r1 Le Mesurier once 'told me that he tia,lelt so insecure one day that he got on a is'.."e train and travelled the length of the iecadilly line, from Cockfosters to Hounslow in those days, in the hand t ssoelneone might recognise him and say tnethirig nice and kind to him. Of course, Vera) People did, and he got his required the Of reassurance. What an anxious lot who clowns! His friend, Tony Hancock, this ° more or less plays the second lead in autnbiog mare raphy, suffered from .even
like e self-doubt, and it drove him to suicide
.alc°hulism- The tragic clown, Nies if you depressive who sparkled. But Le p,tiner was no tragic clown. He was a fall droll man who tended to pile on a little A.se modesty and make up a sad face. Dirthr°11gh he had very little to worry about nec'h-essionally, the vein of his anxiety was bno"L.eliongh. It runs right through this aincl tt never really ran out in reality, his -".gn he did end up happily enough with but third wife, Joan, A nice lady this one, wittkeven Hancock, before they eventually rhd ciwn to anxious happiness in Ramsgate. well work never ran out — Dad's Army, as 1,,.tia.s his natural talent, saw to that — but he quietened down, a steady tippler, not the u%zer the
PoPular press would have had us
believe at the time of his death, and Rams- gate was punctuated with the odd flying visit to Ronnie Scott's Club and, happily, the Coach and Horses, where our private joke was collecting cliches which we hoped to, and never did, of course, put into a definitive dictionary. He threw too many of them away, and on stony ground as well. The last time we met, a stranger and fan approached him and had barely got out the `Excuse me, you're John Le Mesurier, aren't you?' before `Le Mes', looking frightfully regretful, said, 'Oh well. Mustn't keep you then,' and turned on his heel. He could spot bores at 1,000 yards.
The first draft of this book consisted, at one time, of at least 60 pages of childhood, from birth to leaving school. This obligatory section has been honed down to 18 pages and the book's the better for it. The genteel beginnings, the upbringing in Bury St Edmunds and unhappy school days at Sherborne are written succinctly, with a little whimsy. It was exactly what you would have expected from Sergeant Wilson. An apologetic, almost ineffectual, start. On the surface, at least, it stuck. He hits his own nails on the head very well. 'When thinking back to what it was in me, as a character actor, that appealed to direc- tors and audiences, I am bound to conclude that I owe a lot to my customary expression of bewildered innocence — a decent chap all at sea in a world of his own making. And that's how I was in real life. Having sought for recognition for so long, I now felt a lit- tle reticent about accepting it. Did I really deserve it, I kept asking myself?' And what other actor, apart possibly from Ralph Richardson, could write about his agent, 'I hardly ever saw Freddie Joachim. Occa- sionally, we had lunch but always in a restaurant that failed to qualify for Egon Ronay. On one never-to-be-forgotten outing, he took me to the cafeteria at Bourne and Hollingsworth?'
That's nicely typical of Le Mes, but one of the blessings of this book is that it isn't jam-packed with thespian anecdotes about landladies of digs in rep days, knights of the theatre stories, gratuitous name-dropping, having grease-paint in the veins, and the glamour of the limelight. It's just nice old, funny old John, walking gently, and with great anxiety, of course, from one engage- ment to the next, from Bury St Edmunds to Walmington-on-Sea. But much as he obviously liked the other dads at Walm- ington, there's a whiff here of it becoming a bit too much by the tenth series. Did the dummies begin to take over the ventrilo- quists by the end? Much as Les Mes en- joyed the recognition he deservedly got, eventually he was acting Sergeant Wilson. Not as easy as it looked, and it never is.
You could say, though, that he'd had plenty of rehearsals for the famous part. He had, by the sound of it, a pretty boring war, spending most of it in India where his ser- vant and servant's family fell in love with him. Before India, during his training here, he foolishly volunteered for the Parachute Regiment. As he stepped forward to have his name taken down for the mad venture by one of his heroes, Captain Fulke Walwyn, — he'd ridden the Grand Na- tional winner, Reynoldstown, in 1936, and Le Mes adored racing and racing people looked him over. 'He stood in front of me looking slightly aghast. Then, whispering out of the corner of his mouth, he told me not to be a silly cunt and to step back into line. I must confess to a great sense of relief .
Before the war he had married June Melville, one of the few women directors in the country in those days, but on his return to England he found her on the edge of alcoholism, and, 'Our names were entered on that casualty list known as "War Mar- riages".' Soon, he moved in with Hattie Jacques, and a little later his film career took off, thanks mainly to the Boulting brothers. His psychiatrist with the twitching face in Private's Progress turned him into a household face. Dilys Powell came to regard him as one of the fixtures of the British cinema, and he treasured her com- pliment about his absence from a film when she wrote, 'There doesn't seem to be a sign of John Le Mesurier anywhere.'
As his widow Joan says in a touching and moving epilogue, 'All that day (his funeral day) our house rang with laughter because everyone was reliving a happy memory of him. Strange how a man who so seldom smiled and who had such a sad face could conjure up so much laughter.' I think he conjured up a nice little autobiography, too, without a single tine of self- importance, and that's a rare performance indeed.
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