Why is the thinking man’s crumpet so proud of being a husband stealer?
As Joan Bakewell once again uses her affair with Harold Pinter to plug a new book . . .
EVEN before the curtain went up on the opening night of Harold Pinter’s play, Betrayal, an air of dramatic tension descended across the packed auditorium at the National’s Lyttelton Theatre.
It was November 15, 1978, and — while Pinter fans eagerly awaited the acclaimed playwright’s latest work — there was also much debate about who, exactly, had inspired it.
On paper at least, Pinter was still married, although in a bid to stifle any unnecessary gossip that might detract from his latest creative work he made clear where his affections lay.
‘Since 1975 he has lived with Antonia Fraser,’ read the brief biography included in the theatre programme. But those who believed the betrayal of the play’s title referred to Pinter’s infidelity with Fraser couldn’t have been more wrong.
Pinter’s true inspiration, as the lady in question herself reminded us this week, was none other than the writer and broadcaster Joan Bakewell, the original ‘thinking man’s crumpet’ and now a Labour Peer.
For, while Pinter’s scandalous affair with Fraser was no secret in 1978, Bakewell’s own previous seven-year liaison with the playwright was still very much under wraps. The pair had conducted a clandestine liaison between 1962 and 1969 under the noses of their respective spouses and their infidelity, admits the now 82-year-old Baroness Bakewell in her latest memoir, was ‘a moral cat’s cradle’.
Does she regret her affair with one of Britain’s greatest ever playwrights? Not a jot. ‘Why would I do that?’ she told Radio 4’s Midweek on Wednesday in an interview to publicise her book which went on sale this week.
‘Life is rich. You have to embrace it whatever it brings. Along the way you try to accommodate and not cause pain, but sometimes there are compulsions that have to be heeded.’
As ever, Baroness Bakewell’s eloquence is formidable — but her words do not take into account the broken souls left behind by Pinter’s infidelity. And neither do the victims of her errant behaviour share her rose-tinted view of the past.
For what twice-married mother-of-two Bakewell failed to mention is the continuing fall-out from Pinter’s unfaithfulness to his long-suffering first wife, the actress Vivien Merchant, who spiralled into a nervous breakdown after the collapse of her 24-year marriage and, heartbroken, drank herself to death in 1982.
In the wilds of the Cambridgeshire Fens this week, Pinter’s only child was left pondering the release of yet another book by one of his father’s mistresses and the real-life betrayals which saw his family life torn apart 40 years ago.
Daniel Brand — who changed his name from Pinter to his grandmother’s maiden name several years ago — lives in a remote and rundown cottage opposite a man-made drainage river outside the village of Ramsey Forty Foot near Huntingdon.
‘I haven’t read the book yet. But I will do,’ said the 57-year-old, speaking on the doorstep of the isolated property which once belonged to Pinter and was left to Daniel in his will along with £300,000.
Privately educated at St Paul’s School For Boys in West London, where he won acclaim for his published schoolboy poetry, Daniel suffered a nervous breakdown while at Magdalen College, Oxford, in the mid Seventies and while he is said to be a gifted writer, painter and musician, he has been a reclusive figure ever since.
At the time of Pinter’s death in 2008, the two men were estranged and Daniel refused to reconcile with his father even when Pinter was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer and, later, cancer of the liver. Daniel has never spoken publicly about his famous father and told the Mail this week that he probably never will.
It is said that he struggled to forgive the Nobel-prize-winning playwright for his extra-marital affairs and his divorce from his mother, Vivien, in 1980, two years before her premature death.
Certainly, Pinter’s son appears to have paid a heavy price for the betrayals that ultimately tore his family apart. The happy family photographs which once captured Pinter, Vivien and their then smiling curly-haired toddler, belie the deception that was simultaneously going on behind closed doors — first with Bakewell and later with Fraser.
Pinter had married dark-eyed, ravenhaired Vivien — real name, Ada Thompson — in Bournemouth in 1956 when he was a jobbing actor, beginning to turn his hand to writing.
Vivien, a child dancer from Manchester, was already an established theatre actress who would go on to appear in many of Pinter’s plays and win an Oscar nomination for her 1966 role opposite Michael Caine in the film Alfie.
At the time Daniel was born in January 1958, the couple were living in a dingy basement flat in London’s Notting Hill and struggling to make ends meet, even though Pinter had already written his first two plays, The Room and The Birthday Party.
While his wife’s theatrical career went from strength to strength, it was Pinter’s early writing which brought him into contact with BBC radio producer Michael Bakewell and, at a 1960 party, his pretty, Cambridge-educated wife, Joan.
Years later, Bakewell recalled how she and the playwright slipped out for coffee during a rehearsal for a sketch by Pinter being produced by her husband. ‘ Something was happening in my head,’ she said. ‘ My mind began racing: everything seemed sharper, louder, brighter, as if I’d taken drugs.’
In her 2003 autobiography, The Centre Of The Bed, one of numerous occasions upon which she has written about her affair with Pinter, she nonchalantly recalled: ‘The Sixties was a good time to have an affair. The mood of the times was relaxed, sunny.’ N THE surface, perhaps, but even in an era of socalled sexual liberation there is s o mething uncomfortable about the way that Pinter and Bakewell conducted their affair so close to home.
While they embarked on their sevenyear sexual relationship in 1962 — even renting a flat in Kentish Town where they could meet — the two lovers and their spouses attended dinner parties at each other’s homes. Joan and Michael’s daughter, Harriet, was a guest at a birthday party for the Pinters’ son, Daniel.
Bakewell has often recalled the ‘magical moment’ when Pinter playfully threw her daughter up into the air and caught her — a scene remembered by his fictional lovers in the play Betrayal. And while Bakewell insists there was never any talk of leaving their marriages, recently published letters reveal that Pinter was privately thinking of doing exactly that.
In one, written about Vivien at the height of his affair with Bakewell in February 1967, he wrote: ‘It appears quite possible that we will separate (how?) when we return . . . We certainly can’t go on like this. I now feel that I’m more at fault than she is and have been. But one can’t talk about fault.’
In the end, as Bakewell’s own TV presenting career took off, it became increasingly difficult for the pair to meet and they ended their affair by mutual consent in 1969.
‘There was no harshness, no recrimination,’ Bakewell wrote in her autobiography. Behind the scenes, however, Pinter’s marriage to Vivien was already coming apart at the seams.
While Vivien is said to have remained completely in the dark about her husband’s affair with Bakewell, there is little doubt that it must have helped erode their marriage.
Those who visited the couple’s house in Hanover Terrace in Regent’s Park remarked on the cold and stifling atmosphere. Having parted with Bakewell, Pinter began seeking refuge in other sexual relationships until 1975 when he embarked on an affair with Lady Antonia Fraser, the authoress daughter of the Earl of Longford.
They were seen publicly together for
the first time at the opening night of his play No Man’s Land in April 1975. Vivien, who had become increasingly insecure about her lack of intellectualism, was at home suffering from a bout of pneumonia.
She was left to read about her husband’s appearance with the then 42-year-old wife of Tory MP Sir Hugh Fraser and the mother of his six children in the newspapers.
Five days after appearing with Fraser at that first night, Pinter walked out. If Bakewell ever felt that she, too, had contributed to the end of the Pinters’ marriage then she has never said so. Her own marriage ended in 1972 and a second 26-year marriage to theatre producer Jack Emery ended in 2001.
But while her f i rst husband, Michael, knew of her affair with Pinter, accepted i t and had a mistress of his own, it is clear that Vivien did not share their views on open marriage.
The depth of her grief at losing Pinter become clear in several newspaper interviews she gave at the time where she painted a glowing picture of their marriage and pointed the finger at Fraser.
‘I’m still numb with all that has happened,’ she said in one. ‘Ours has always been a legendary marriage in showbusiness circles. We were the happy couple that other actors used to talk about.
‘I promise you he is a wonderful man, but it seems he is possessed by Lady Antonia — she has cast a spell over him. How she can do it with six children to look after I don’t know.’
Ultimately, a vengeful Vivien filed for divorce, citing Fraser as the ‘other woman’ and igniting a public scandal. Pinter and Fraser married in 1980, but the venomous fall-out from their affair continued as Vivien spiralled towards complete mental breakdown.
In his memoirs, the theatre critic Peter Lewis recalls how Vivien telephoned him to pour her heart out and how he visited their Nash-designed house in Regent’s Park.
‘Alone with the mirrors, like the Lady of Shalott, Vivien looked back at herself with staring, sleep-deprived eyes. Bottles of white wine, nothing else, stood on the kitchen counter. Nightly she walked the house unsleeping, the house of mirrors where there was no one at home on the upper floors. She wore an almost nun-like brown robe and her hair was openly greying.’
He also claims that Vivien told him she had asked her doctor for ‘a bottle of pills marked Husband’. But while Vivien raged against Pinter and Fraser, she remained entirely unaware of his earlier deception with Joan Bakewell.
Like most others, she believed that Fraser was the inspiration behind her cheating husband’s play Betrayal when it was first shown in London in 1978.
‘Vivien was to die believing Antonia was the original of Emma [the mistress],’ admits Bakewell in her new book, Stop The Clocks: Thoughts On What I Leave Behind.
Indeed, the unpalatable truth remained a secret until long after Vivien’s death, when Pinter decided to out his affair with Bakewell in an authorised biography written by Michael Billington in 1996.
There it was explained that the ‘betrayal’ of his play’s title referred not to the fact that Pinter and Bakewell had cheated on their respective spouses but t hat Bakewell’s cuckolded husband had known of the affair — a secret Joan and Michael kept from Pinter.
But while Pinter academics have endlessly analysed the nature of the betrayal, the two real victims of this painful saga have been reduced to a mere footnote.
In the aftermath of his father’s infidelities, Daniel watched helplessly as his once beautiful mother drank herself to death.
He coped by withdrawing from both his parents.
In an interview in 1981, a year before her death, Vivien claimed: ‘I have seen him once in two years. He changed his name. He doesn’t want to be either a Pinter or a Merchant. I truthfully don’t know what he does. He’s a loner.’
DANIEL was just 24 when his mother died in 1982. By that time 53-year-old Vivien, who had performed in so many of her husband’s plays, was a shadow of her former self. Her liver was swollen, she was severely jaundiced and was also suffering internal bleeding caused by her out- ofcontrol drinking.
Right up until the end when she became bloated and pale-faced she grieved for Pinter, believing that he might one day return to her.
He did so only once, at the end of her life, when he and Daniel sat at her bedside during her final moments at King’s College Hospital in London.
Although the last time Daniel saw his father is believed to have been in 1993, Pinter wrote to his son in 2002, while fighting cancer, after hearing that Daniel had phoned a mutual friend for an update on his condition.
‘I’m glad you called,’ he wrote. ‘I gather I’ll be weak for some months . . . It would be good to hear from you. Love your father (!!!).’
But clearly the emotional wreckage of Daniel’s childhood could not be overcome. He did not even attend his father’s funeral.
Late in life, Pinter had time to reflect on the consequences of his behaviour. He never expressed remorse for his actions, but he recalled what might be regarded as a premonition of the suffering that lay in wait for his son.
Daniel was still a baby, sleeping peacefully in a cot beside his parents’ bed, when Pinter woke up in the middle of the night.
‘I found myself in tears. My first wife Vivien said to me: “What in heaven’s name is the matter?” Daniel, who was about six months old, was in a cot in the room. I didn’t know what was the matter or how to explain what was happening to me. But I realised what was happening after half an hour or so.
‘It was simply that I couldn’t bear the life that was in front of him. I thought here he is having a good time, quietly asleep at this moment . . . he was actually a very enthusiastic child, too, and I knew that at the time, but I actually looked ahead and thought: “My God, what is in store for this infant?” ’
If Pinter could have seen into the future, it would have brought him l i ttle comfort to see how his son would suffer thanks to the adults around him set on ‘ heeding their compulsions’.