The Wicked Witch of the West End! BOOKS
No star of stage or screen was safe from the vicious tongue of legendary agent Peggy Ramsay — even though she made a fortune out of them
PEggy RAmsAy, who opened a literary agency for playwrights in 1953, and which she ran in a ‘mercurial, severe and bossy’ manner until her death in 1991, had a unique attitude towards her clients: she didn’t like them to be successful.
success was corrupting, morally and aesthetically. too much money and acclaim only led to greed, laziness and a destruction of ‘the original creative talent’.
harold Pinter, she stated in 1964, ‘has become hideously spoilt and silly’ — so imagine what he was like by the time I saw him, 40 years on, screaming in a restaurant because he had been poured sparkling water when he preferred still.
Wealth had a ‘disastrous effect’ on John osborne and Arnold Wesker, who became lords of the manor on the Welsh border. J. B. Priestley with money in the bank was a ‘boring, preaching dead man, who is all weight and nothing much else’.
the ‘rush of money’ descending upon terence Frisby, who wrote there’s A girl In my soup, filmed with Peter sellers in 1970, ‘will undoubtedly destroy his career as a playwright for some years. he hasn’t written anything worth doing since.’ (Frisby is still with us at 85.)
But Peggy’s greatest censure was aimed at Robert Bolt, who had made millions from the screenplays he had furnished for david lean’s lawrence of Arabia and doctor Zhivago, and who won an oscar for A man For All seasons. ‘the shoddy prizes are fun to receive, but valueless,’ Peggy ShE told one director.
found Bolt was getting increasingly pompous and full of himself, spending lavishly on town houses, mammoth office suites, fleets of secretaries, long business lunches and a dramatic and indulgent on-off marriage to sarah miles.
‘you have simply got to build a store of inner calm and peace,’ Peggy counselled. Bolt didn’t do anything of the kind, and suffered a debilitating stroke in 1979.
Peggy saw that with riches, her clients became disconnected from the source of their material. they became slack and flabby. the true artist stayed hungry — figuratively if not literally.
If you wanted only filthy lucre, she said angrily, write something like No sex Please, We’re British, which in 1971 was raking in £7,000 a week — that’s around £103,000 today. she had a genius for spotting the potential in a rough first draft and spent her days in her london office, off st martin’s lane, sorting out business arrangements. If she wanted her clients to be spartan, the paradox is that she was the one who had made them affluent in the first place. her own fees and considerable commissions afforded her a very nice apartment in mayfair and a weekend retreat in Brighton.
An average day saw her exercising ‘diabolical powers of negotiating and manipulating and persuading’, settling a film contract about the life of gandhi, booking a theatre for a Peter Nichols play, arranging a New york transfer for Joe orton, and clinching deals with directors. ‘John mortimer wants more money than there is provided for in his contract with 20th Century Fox,’ she sighed in 1967 — the same year she was cock-a-hoop to announce she had sold the screen rights of Joe orton’s loot for £100,000 (nearly £2 million today).
Peggy didn’t have children — so her clients were her children, her brood, for whom ‘I am prepared to be an absolute dragon’. she promised one author she’d ‘fight to the death for you,’ and she believed her stable of writers had ‘only me to protect them’.
yet Peggy, despite the surging passion of her letters, which are brilliantly introduced
what everyone can actually hear and see,’ she told David Hare. And her artistic strictures and standards could seem almost disloyal — as when she begged Laurence Olivier to sack Bolt from a project at the National Theatre, because his recent works were ‘to my mind substandard. It is my job as his agent to say so loud and clear’. Talk about tough love.
One of the joys of this book is that Peggy, born in Australia in 1908 and raised in South Africa, never pulls her punches. She didn’t come to London until she was 21 — and she retained an outsider’s smart forthrightness.
There was no English timidity or reticence. She was never fearful of causing offence.
She was the enemy of mediocrity and complacency — what she called ‘bloodlessness’. I laughed out loud at her comment to an earnest writer (Simon Callow, as it happens): ‘Why is it so boring? Do you THuS, intend it to be boring?’
Peggy could tell Alan Ayckbourn to stop caricaturing people and create pictures. She couldn’t stand the way Alec Guinness and Ralph Richardson, who had trouble with his lines, relied on familiar mannerisms (‘Richardson is playing Richardson’).
She disliked Bette Davis, ‘an oldfashioned, out-of-date actress who does old-fashioned, ghastly films’, and blocked her from starring in The Killing Of Sister George, a role that went to Beryl Reid.
Her two bugbears were Joan Bakewell, ‘ disporting herself like some film starlet . . . she seems to think that she’s an object of beauty,’ and Sir Peter Hall, who ‘isn’t human, and one glimpses the bodies of his victims, whom he has destroyed on his climb to power’.
Hall comes across as the devil incarnate, with his ‘ maniacal will to power, which is almost destroying him’, and with his glamorous brides, country homes, television shows and advertisements for wallpaper, in addition to running the Royal Shakespeare Company and later the National Theatre.
This is an invigorating collection of letters from a great lady, whom, along with Callow, we can salute for her ‘tenderness, reproach, inspiration, anger and wisdom’. The funny thing is, the person she reminded me of most was . . . Bette Davis.