the beginning to shoot the hanging separate from the murderer just in case we needed to make a radical plot re-think at a later stage. By filming murder and murderer apart, one could slot in anyone’s face behind the rope. That afternoon, however, I’d invited Cibber to learn the murderer’s few lines, and he arrived on set with them only vaguely in his mind, while he expansively smoked a large cigar and exercised his fruity larynx on inappropriate jokes.
He patted Yvonne’s bottom. Silly old buffoon, I thought, and set about turning him into a lecherous bull.
I positioned him in the manger section, and gave him an ashtray to prevent his setting fire to the straw. We placed Yvonne so that her white dress, on the edge of the frame and out of focus from being too near the camera, nonetheless established her presence.
Moncrieff, concentrating on the lighting, added a sheet of blue gelatine across one of the spots. He looked through the lens and smiled, and I looked also, and there it was, the actor blinking, bored, waiting for us while we fiddled, but with the probability of his guilt revealed by a trick of light.
Cibber, as first written by Howard, had been a pillar of the Jockey Club, an upright, unfortunate victim of events. Reluctantly Howard, bowing to the film company, had agreed to write a (mild!) liaison between Cibber’s wife (Silva) and Nash Rourke. Equally reluctantly he had agreed that Cibber should persecute Nash for supposedly having hanged his (Nash’s) wife Yvonne. Howard still didn’t know that it would be Cibber himself that did the hanging. I would have trouble with Howard. Nothing new.
To me, the character of Cibber lay at the centre of the film’s dynamic. The Cibber I saw was a man constrained by his position in society; a man forced by upbringing, by wealth, by the expectations of his peers to mould himself into a righteous puritan, difficult to love, incapable of loving. Cibber couldn’t in consequence stand ridicule; couldn’t bear to know his wife had rejected him for a lover, couldn’t have waiters hearing his wife mock him. Cibber expected people to do his bidding. He was, above all, accustomed to deference.
Yet Cibber, underneath, was a raw and passionate man. Cibber hanged Yvonne in a burst of uncontrollable rage when she laughed at his attempt at rape. Appalled, unable to face his own guilt, Cibber persecuted Nash to the point of paranoia and beyond. Cibber, eventually, would be totally destroyed and mentally wrecked when Nash, after many tries, found that the one way to defeat his persecutor was to trap him into earning pitying sneers. Cibber would, at the end, disintegrate into catatonic schizophrenia.
I looked at Cibber the actor and wondered how I could ever dig out of him Cibber the man.
I started that afternoon by blowing away his complacency and telling him he didn’t understand lust.
He was indignant. ‘Of course I do.’
‘The lust I want is uncontrollable. It’s out of control, frenetic, frantic, raging, berserk. It’s murderous.’
‘And you expect me to show all that?’
‘No, I don’t. I don’t think you can. I don’t think you have the technique. I don’t think you’re a good enough actor.’
Cibber froze. He stubbed out the cigar: and he produced for the camera that day a conception of lust that made one understand and pity his ungovernable compulsion even while he killed for having it mocked.
He would never be a grandee type-cast actor again.
‘I hate you,’ he said.
Lucy was busy with the boxes when, on returning to the hotel, I opened the door of my sitting-room and went in, leaving it ajar.
She was on her knees among the boxes and looked up as if guiltily, faintly blushing.
‘Sorry for the mess,’ she said, flustered. ‘I didn’t think you’d be back before six o’clock, as usual. I’ll just tidy this lot away. And shall I close the door?’
‘No, leave it open.’
Books and papers were scattered over much of the floor, and many of them, I was interested to see, had come out of boxes she had already investigated and itemised. The folder of clippings about Sonia’s death lay open on the table: the harmless clippings only, as Valentine’s totally revealing souvenirs were out of sight in O’Hara’s safe.
‘You had some messages,’ Lucy said jerkily, picking up and reading from a notebook. ‘Howard Tyler wants to see you. Someone called Ziggy – I think – wanted you to know the horses had come without trouble through Immingham and had reached their