Bogarde's schooldays 'make-believe'

Sunday Herald, The, Oct 3, 2004 by Senay Boztas

A Scottish schoolfriend of Sir Dirk Bogarde has claimed that the late actor's accounts of bullying and victimisation at school in Glasgow were far from the truth.

In fact, he said, the cinema icon's four years at Allan Glen's were a period of academic failure and increasing alienation that crystallised his "enigmatic, complicated" character.

Dr William Lockie, who started at Allan Glen's on the same day as the 13-year-old Derek van den Bogaerde, believes the actor recast much of his early life in his autobiographies to show himself in a better light.

In a new authorised biography of Bogarde by John Coldstream, Lockie recalls an entertaining fantasist who was generous and engaging, but who had begun to assume a false shell in his daily life.

Bogarde, who died in 1999 aged 78, was one of the biggest British names in 20th-century cinema, starring in many distinguished films including Joseph Losey's decadent swinging-London drama The Servant and Luchino Visconti's Death In Venice - as well as, less elevatedly, a series of light medical comedies including Doctor At Sea, alongside Brigitte Bardot.

The pin-up of the 1950s was admired by millions of women, but the biography paints a picture of a man forced to hide his true sexual preference for men.

Lockie is believed to be the only survivor of the actor's schooldays in Scotland, which Bogarde presented as a desolate period in one of his volumes of autobiography, Backcloth, describing it as the Anthracite Years. In 1934 he was sent from a relatively easy- going life in England to stay with his aunt Sarah and her husband, William Murray, in Bishopbriggs.

He stayed until 1938, keeping in touch with Lockie by letter for another year. But this period of estrangement from his immediate family apparently led him to acting and to assume his public mask.

"We arrived at school on the same day, when he was 13 and I was 12," said Lockie, a GP who still lives in Glasgow. "I was immediately attracted to him: he had been to France, and could speak about theatre people. Although I didn't believe half of what he said, he was very entertaining company.

"But he didn't share my interest in rugby, golf and football, and showed no promise at any other school activities apart from art. He told me he would practice changing expression in front of a mirror for hours, and could mimic very well a Scottish accent.

"I didn't see any signs that he was bullied, and was too naive to notice anything about his sexuality, but he soon dropped an academic year and was taking extra art classes: he was going another way and looking for an outlet."

Lockie still has a clay frog that was modelled for him by Bogarde, and remembers him as increasingly a loner, with an extensive knowledge of films - Bogarde would play truant from school to go to the cinema, and apparently had his first sexual experience with a man he met there.

In the end, Lockie said, the headmaster told Bogarde's father Ulric, art editor of The Times, that he was wasting his time and money and that the boy should go to art school. "Derek's father thought his son had been heading off into the females' world," said Lockie, "and so had picked a very male school."

Coldstream claims those years were crucial to Bogarde's social development. "They absolutely pushed him in a certain way, and his shell became a carapace that he carried for the rest of his life and never shed. He was an outsider geographically, coming from a lot of freedom to a suffocating house that he found enormously dispiriting.

"He was a formidable personality, a fascinating man who managed being a dreamboat for women at huge personal cost."

Roots Of An Icon:Seven Days