All's well that ends well

Spectator, The, Oct 18, 2003 by Baxter, Keith

After the war, he could take comfort from his triumphs in the cinema. To the amazement of his peers - Gielgud, Olivier, Richardson and Redgrave - his international celebrity far outstrips theirs. All this Read covers well. He gives us an intimate picture of Guinness's working relationship with the great director David Lean whom he alternately hated (The Bridge on the River Kwai, Doctor Zhivago and A Passage to India) and admired (Great Expectations, Oliver Twist and Lawrence of Arabia).

There are times when his behaviour towards his son is unforgivable. The relationship between sons and famous fathers is often fraught, but it is hard to understand Guinness's coldness to Matthew. But, in the end, all is put right. On his deathbed 'we were able to say how much we loved each other. He pulled my mother's hands to his face and kissed them, and said to me, "Kiss me," and gave me the firmest kiss I had ever had from him. Then he asked us to leave.'

There are minor gaffes. Ellen Terry was Gielgud's great-aunt, not his grandmother; it was Peter Hall not Peter Brook who directed David Warner's Hamlet; it is clearly not a photograph of Noel Willman with Guinness in The Prisoner - Willman had a cadaverous face, not the chubby jowls seen here; and he writes, 'Keith Baxter was welcomed to Kettlebrook with his friend Charlie [sic], and when Charlie died of Aids both Alec and Merula wrote touching letters of condolence', but Charley was a golden retriever and being a dog did not die of Aids.

But these are trivial errors. One flaw, however, is that Read's sources have not conveyed the gales of laughter that often filled Kettlebrook Meadows. It is nonsense to say that no one was allowed inside the kitchen. I made the mistake of revealing that, doing jankers in the army, I once peeled 240 potatoes in half an hour. When I arrived Merula would hand me the peeler and while she made a sauce Alec would bring us each a Danish Mary and sit on a bin. It is another nonsense to say that his criticism of her (very good) cooking hurt her; it was shrugged off. Water off a duck's back! She could take care of herself very well and had sharp opinions. Cruelty to animals was unpardonable and she did not like actresses, any of them, 'except Maggie Leighton, Peggy Ashcroft and Maggie Smith'. It is my only criticism that, in this splendid biography, Piers Paul Read has not captured the domestic happiness that enriched the end of Alee Guinness's life.