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Indeed most actors today have no sense of the ones who have gone before. When we were students we all knew about Macready (who invented the pause long before Pinter); that Philip Kemble was the brother of Sarah Siddons; and that Coleridge had compared watching Kean to seeing Shakespeare lit by lightning. We knew about Dame Madge Kendal and Mrs Minnie Madden Fiske.
And we knew all about Ernest Milton. Had not Gielgud himself, when he joined the Old Vic to play his first Richard II, slipped into the wardrobe to view the costume that Milton had worn, and found to his dismay that the rich black velvet was green with mould and that the impressive ermine sleeves were rabbit?
To us young actors in the 1950s Gielgud was the main man. This is Croall’s third book on him and is the most lightweight. Although there are some entertaining ‘Gielgoodies’, the narrative is driven by the author’s fury that it was Sheridan Morley whom Gielgud nominated to write the authorised biography. No matter how hard Croall tries to work around this agreement with his own perspective of Gielgud, or elicit an interview with the great man, or at least approval for a work that would not attempt to be a biography, Gielgud is adamant: he has given permission to Morley and that is the end of it.
When Croall approaches sources who might help him — for example the head of Westminster school, where Gielgud had been a pupil — he draws a blank. He continues anyway, though his original editor at Methuen withdraws. This book, subtitled ‘A Biographer’s Tale’, is the result of much travail. And when Croall writes of Morley it makes for deeply uncomfortable reading.
Sheridan was the son of the successful actor Robert Morley, who named him after Sheridan Whiteside, a character he himself had played in the immensely popular wartime comedy The Man Who Came to Dinner. To those who knew him, Sheridan was a genial figure on the theatrical landscape, with his bulky figure and his voice like a trumpet, and was regarded with real affection within the profession. He could be a perceptive critic (indeed was, for The Spectator, for 11 years); and though he was often affable in his praise he could also be deadly.
Towards the end of his life his bipolar condition reduced him to feebleness and he was much of the time in pain. But to Croall he was ‘an arrogant, self-important and spectacularly lazy hack writer’. He mocks Morley’s inaccuracies and is spiteful about him whenever he gets the chance:
Had lunch today with a neighbour who tells me that 20 years ago he and some friends founded a society called Spasm — the Society for the Prevention of Authorship by Sheridan Morley. He started it because his prose style is so dreadful. Clearly it’s time for this organisation to be revived; I’d willingly become a life member.
This bitchiness earns Croall no favours, and the reader begins to feel a growing distaste:
I was wandering around the grounds of Snape Maltings this afternoon. I suddenly heard a familiar voice floating out from an upper window, not Gielgud’s, but the Other Biographer. I find him in the restaurant, his chin wagging in profile as he holds forth non-stop.
There is no doubt that the competition between the two authors caused much frustration to Croall, but his editor should have persuaded him to go easy on such petty rancour. The book is titled In Search of Gielgud but the quarry has escaped Croall, and there remain huge chunks of John Gielgud’s life that have never been revealed.
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