Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
A real internatıonal man of mystery
As the latest adaptation of a John le Carré novel, The Little Drummer Girl, keeps audiences on the edge of their seats, Christopher Stevens discovers that the author himself is as complex as any of the characters he created
Sunday night is le Carré night. Ever since Tom Hiddleston soared to superstardom in The Night Manager, all glamorous resorts and high- tension thrills, the nation has been agog for more spies, seduction and gun-play.
The Little Drummer Girl – set in the brutal Seventies as the Cold War and international terrorism collided – has gripped millions with its complex double-crosses and deceptions. As we await the penultimate episode tomorrow, the thriller has proved to be vintage John le Carré, with a twist: none of his other novels has a heroine at the centre of the story, taking on the macho world of espionage and beating the spymasters at their own game.
The intensely stylish start was, perhaps inevitably, baffling. Israeli secret agents trailed Palestinian bomb-makers, while an ominously silent stranger stalked a British actress on a Greek isle. It all ended in a high-speed ride as wary romantic Charlie ( Florence Pugh) found her date in Athens with the monosyllabic Gadi (Alexander Skarsgard) turning into an abduction.
But pat terns have gradual ly emerged. The machinations of Mossad masterspy Martin Kurtz ( Michael Shannon) have propelled Charlie deeper into the murderous world of Middle East politics. Last week saw her interrogated at gunpoint, then kidnapped in Beirut and thrown into the boot of a car – taken to meet shadowy figure Fatmeh ( Lubna Azabal), who seems to wield more control over the terrorist cell than anyone had guessed.
As the credits rolled, viewers were desperate for more, if somewhat baffled by some of the smoke and mirrors. But while the TV drama has sometimes been difficult to fathom, the life of its creator is ten times more mysterious. Le Carré is a compulsive storyteller – and as his sons Simon and Stephen explain today, that can make him hard to know. The legend often obscures the truth... sometimes deliberately.
For a start, John le Carré, now 87, is not the writer’s real name. He was born David Cornwell, in 1931 in Poole, Dorset, but by the time he published his first novel, aged 30, he’d been working for British intelligence for seven years, ostensibly with the Foreign Service. His controllers didn’t like to see their agents writing books – he once revealed, ‘Even if it were about butterflies, they said, I’d have to choose a pseudonym.’
With typical sleight of hand, Cornwell claims he chose le Carré because he saw the name over a tailor’s shop and liked it – then admits, in the same breath, that this is a lie he tells to satisfy nosy parkers.
His father Ronnie was a small-time fraudster and serial philanderer who liked to boast he was friendly with the Kray twins. When David was two years old, his father was sent to prison; when he was five, his mother Olive walked out on the family. After a series of brutal boarding schools, he went to university in Bern, Switzerland, where he was recruited in 1950 by the British Army Intelligence Corps.
‘One of my jobs was trawling through displaced-persons camps in Austria, looking for people who were fake refugees,’ he has said. They were actually Communist spies, and the Army sent some back behind the Iron Curtain as double agents. This notion of recruiting and inverted loyalties would become a constant theme of his novels.
Cornwell switched to MI5 while studying at Oxford, where he mingled with Communist activists and reported what he heard. After a stint teaching German at Millfield and Eton public schools, he returned to ‘diplomatic duty’, first with MI5 and then MI6 – a period that he now dismisses disingenuously as ‘a few years spooking around’.
After his third novel, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, became a bestseller, he left the intelligence services to become a full-time writer, leading a nomadic life around Europe with his first wife Ann and their three sons Simon, Stephen and Timothy. Divorced in 1971, he remarried the following year to Valerie, an editor with his publishers. Today, the couple live near Penzance in Cornwall.
After more than half a century of producing bestsellers such as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, le Carré is intensely protective of his work. The idea of updating his novels for television might seem too daunting, but was made easier because the production company that owns the rights is run by two of his own sons.
Simon and younger brother Stephen set up The Ink Factory, a production company for video games as well as TV and films, in 2010. They made Our Kind Of Traitor, another le Carré adaptation, for the cinema in 2016, but it was The Night Manager that brought the breakthrough, in the same year.
Le Carré was initially dubious. He disliked the idea of giving arms dealer Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie) a Majorcan villa for his HQ instead of a superyacht, and of turning his villainous customers into Arab warlords instead of Colombian drugs barons. Most of all, he was concerned to see his chief spy Leonard Burr become Angela, played by a heavily pregnant Olivia Colman.
But the novelist was eventually persuaded by his sons, and became so keen on the mini-series that he played a cameo – as a wealthy tourist, drinking
‘His father liked to boast he was friendly with the Kray twins’
a vodka martini at a restaurant table who is stunned by a Roper tantrum.
Vodka martini, of course, was James Bond’s drink of choice. That’s a typically subtle le Carré joke: he despises Bond, dismissing him as a an international gangster’ and insisting that Ian Fleming’s novels shouldn’t even be classed as spy thrillers. In the world of John le Carré, even the drinks aren’t what they seem.
So what was it like, growing up with such a brilliant but complex man for a father... and then going into business with him? Here, his sons reveal their ambitions and fears in bringing le Carré’s work to the TV screen, and what it was like growing up as the sons of the Tinker Tailor man...
The Little Drummer Girl, tomorrow, 9pm, BBC1.