My affair with Harold Pinter ...and how we were all tainted by Betrayal
In her searingly honest new book, the broadcaster recalls trauma of seeing her secret romance turned into a hit play
Joan Bakewell, the television presenter once famously dubbed the ‘thinking man’s crumpet’ had an eight-year love affair with Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter during the 1960s while both she and Pinter were married with children. Here, in exclusive extracts from her candid new memoir, Ms Bakewell, who is now 82, and an articulate spokeswoman for an older generation, reveals the shocking denouement to the romance – in a stinging final request from Pinter’s aristocratic widow…
FOR eight years in the 1960s, I had an affair with Harold Pinter. He was at the start of a blossoming career and I was a married woman with a small daughter and a radio producer husband whose work brought us regularly into contact with Harold and his actress wife Vivien. We were both conventional spouses who had married for love and were devoted to our young families. We shared the common aspirations of our generation to get on in the world, upbeat and optimistic about our lives and our futures.
Harold and I had met in the early 1960s at a party in St John’s Wood. Amid all the hubbub, we suddenly found ourselves together. We talked and talked. It was obvious we were strongly attracted. In the weeks and months that followed, we met for coffees and drinks in places all over London. Eventually we wanted to be together in private, so we found a place of our own.
Our lives were busy and exciting so we didn’t meet often. When we didn’t meet, we wrote letters. It was a continuing love affair running alongside our family lives.
My husband Michael came to know about it: Harold’s wife did not. And so it continued. Then, by a mix-up of letters, further complexities of the story came to light and proved too much… it was over. So what happened? Harold told our story in his 1978 play Betrayal, written long after our affair was over. By then I was in a second marriage and Harold was with Lady Antonia Fraser, whom he would marry in 1980.
Our affair had ended but our friendship had not – we met regularly to tell each other what was happening in our lives, both personal and professional.
I told Harold how I had met a younger man, Jack Emery, an actor and writer whom I would go on to marry; Harold told me in 1975 how he and Antonia had come together late one night after the opening of his play The Birthday Party and that something important was happening between them.
Later he would ask my advice when Antonia suggested they have a child together. All these confidences were exchanged at a string of restaurants across London, over long and convivial lunches that had all the air of casual encounters. I think for both of us they were more than that.
Then late one afternoon in 1978, a package was hand-delivered to my home. Harold had always dispatched manuscript copies of his plays to a small group of his closest friends. We knew to respond as soon as possible to acknowledge, congratulate and enthuse about the play; given their dazzling quality, it wasn’t hard to do.
Harold was deeply needful of support from those he trusted. More than that, he could fly into a wild temper if their response was not forthcoming.
The day the manuscript arrived I was at home alone. My husband was away. What I read kept me awake through the night.
Betrayal uses the story of fictional Emma, Jerry and Robert to tell of our falling in love, our subsequent meetings, our second home, the tension of our disloyalty to our partners, and the fact that my husband Michael had long since come to know about our affair.
Michael and I had kept this knowledge from Harold. When the truth emerged that Michael knew, Harold felt betrayed by my treachery in not telling him what had happened… a moral cat’s cradle indeed. It makes electrifying theatre. But it made me frantic. First thing the next morning I was on the phone to Harold, somehow reaching out at the possibility that he might make changes. Could he change the title? I felt that the word ‘betrayal’ seemed particularly targeted at me. I felt a decade’s guilt spilling into public view.
We discussed the title but, he spelled out, ‘the point is there are many betrayals in the play… each character has betrayed something or someone… every single person’.
I was hardly consoled. I ran into the indomitable ego of the creative writer. Harold was brought up to be exact and fastidious; he expected as much from those around him. He could not tolerate a single flaw.
He grew to be like that with people. There are accounts of his explosive anger in public that grew more frequent as he took up political causes. His friends knew to fear and avoid the volcanic temper.
The public unravelling came in 1996 when Harold asked me to collaborate with his biographer. ‘What shall I tell him?’ I asked. ‘Tell him the truth,’ he said. So I did. The biography contained the full background to Betrayal. The press went into overdrive before the story finally fell away. There was, however, a strange sequel.
In 2003, I published my autobiography. I thought my account of what lay behind Betrayal would add a valuable dimension for Pinter scholars, or for anyone who was interested. I asked Harold whether I might quote from the play.
His letter in reply was terse: it explained how unhappy he was that I was making our relationship public, and refused my request. He seemed not to notice that the relationship had been made public years earlier by his own biographer.
There followed months of estrangement between us.
Harold’s memorial service in 2009 filled the 1,150 seats of the Olivier Theatre. It was a grand event with readings from his work by, among others, Eileen Atkins, Colin Firth and Penelope Wilton. But I missed it all. Ten days previously I had a phone call from a friend. Could he come round? He arrived, and was distinctly uneasy. It was soon clear why. He had been deputed to convey a message to me: Antonia Fraser would like me to stay away from Harold’s memorial.
The request came as a shock. I discussed my quandary with many friends. How should I feel? How to respond? My feistier girlfriends’ advice was ‘Go anyway!’ Others were more temperate: ‘It isn’t usual for the mistress to go’ was one unsoothing comment.
In the end I left the diary blank and spent the day remembering
‘I felt a decade’s guilt spilling into public view’
Harold in private. After all, that was how I had known him most intimately and where my most cherished memories lived. I HAVE had two long marriages in my life. Each has been extremely important to me; each ended eventually and with sadness in estrangement and divorce.
I see marriage as the boldest and most honest attempt two people can make to know each other fully over time. It is within marriage that we grow to express our deepest selves, share trust and honesty, tenderness and passion, survive disagreements and disloyalty. Yet we also become dependent, surrendering something of ourselves into a common unity.
In my experience, marriage sucks you into the orbit of the other, sometimes with too great a power. The needs of each become mutually dependent; autonomy goes out of the window. Those who find this elusive balance are happy indeed.
I am the mother of two children and the grandmother of six. My bonds with them now sit at the heart of who I think I am. We have not always seen eye to eye; they have made efforts to strike out on their own and decide their own identities. To be part of a family is to be part of life and its unavoidable patterns. It fixes us in space and time; it defines where we belong. And it never ceases to exist. MY LIFE has moved in many emotional directions; in my 80s it has come into relative calm. That isn’t to say I don’t need, and welcome, attention, friendship and love. But I live contentedly alone and am often thoughtful about what has been and what might have been.
There are many like me. My friends, too, often live on their own. We depend increasingly on each other for the bonds of affection, and in some circumstances comforting jars of honey and visits to hospital. We are lucky: we have homes and comfort and enough savings for what we need.
These are the networks of the old: you see us in restaurants, cinema queues, art galleries, small hotels and occasionally on cruises. We meet over dinner, we belong to book groups. We share news of our children, our ailments, the latest online shopping, our hardening political views, our views of books and plays, music and art… and, yes, we discuss and elaborate our plans for the future. We are content.
For us the seasons become more meaningful: old bones feel the cold.
I am living the life of an old person, which has its own rhythms, its own priorities, its own satisfactions. They are not inferior, or declining. They are simply different.
We need the old to write about being old, and indeed about dying so the young can know what it’s like and not be fearful.
I have made a living will. Nowadays it is called an advance directive – was there ever such a triumph of bland bureaucracy-speak?
In it I set out what my wishes are should I by an accident or illness no longer be able to convey my medical preferences.
I recommend everyone over 60 to do the same. We never know when we might be forestalled by a speeding lorry or a clogged artery. So which will it be? A cardboard coffin with scribbled messages from the grandchildren, a wickerwork coffin to be interred in a forest, or perhaps even your garden?
Or will it be reduction to ashes, to be kept in an urn displayed on the mantelpiece or hidden in the cupboard under the stairs?
All this only matters if you have some sense that your bodily remains represent something important of yourself. I don’t.
I have left instructions that, having yielded up any useful parts of my body for transplants, I will be cremated and my ashes scattered on the River Cam in Cambridge, the city where my whole life shifted focus, where I learned what life held in store and where I fell in love – not only with individuals but, more consistently, with the life of ideas.