A-List Encounters
Anthony Burgess goes to Hollywood and meets the famous.
Anthony Burgess’s reputation as a polymath suggests that his interest lay exclusively in intellectual pursuits and the creation of literary art. But he was also immersed in the world of popular entertainment. He grew up surrounded by the culture of the music hall and he frequented the cinema from an early age. In his adult life as a writer, the world of showbusiness, celebrity and Hollywood glamour became more than a distant fascination.
Burgess’s first visit to Hollywood was in January 1968. He’d been invited by the producer William Conrad to discuss writing the script and music for a film about the life of Shakespeare. In Los Angeles, Burgess stayed at the Beverley Wiltshire Hotel and attended a party on the ocean liner Queen Mary, newly converted into a hotel. The title of Burgess’s script is Will, and the film was written for Robert Stephens and Maggie Smith, who were to play Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway. After a three-year period of pre-production, during which orchestrated versions of Burgess’s songs were recorded, the film was cancelled following a change of management at Warner Brothers.
Burgess was already a regular guest on American late-night talk shows (such as The Dick Cavett Show) before the release of Stanley Kubrick’s film of A Clockwork Orange in 1971. To promote this film, Burgess went on a tour of America with Malcolm McDowell. The publicists at Warner Brothers also sent him to the 1972 Cannes Film Festival, where he met one of his idols, Groucho Marx. At a lunch given in honour of Marx, Burgess was joined by the writer Mordecai Richler and the film director Louis Malle. Burgess remembers Marx being ‘shy and bewildered’, but he eventually opened up enough to sing ‘Behold the Lord High Executioner’ from The Mikado. Burgess left the meeting with the gift of one of Groucho’s signature Romeo y Julietta cigars, which he ‘kept till it fell to pieces.’
By 1975, Burgess had written the scripts for two epic TV mini-series, Moses the Lawgiver, starring Burt Lancaster and Jesus of Nazareth, starring Robert Powell. The first of these associations grew into a kind of friendship. Lancaster, to whom The Clockwork Testament is dedicated, visited Burgess while he was teaching at the University of Iowa. He wanted Burgess to write a screenplay based on the Schreber case, one of Freud’s case histories. Daniel Paul Schreber was a German high court judge who suffered from the delusion that he was an angelic being whose divine mission was to repopulate the world. During this visit, in October 1975, Lancaster was in the audience when Burgess’s Symphony in C received its first performance. The film, titled ‘The Brain Killers’, was never made, but it was later adapted for radio by Polly Thomas under the title Schreber. Christopher Eccleston performed the leading role when the play was broadcast in March 2020.
After Burgess moved to Monaco in 1976, he formed his most significant relationship with a celebrity. Through their shared passion for Irish culture, particularly the work of James Joyce, Burgess became a close friend of Princess Grace of Monaco, originally known as the Hollywood actress Grace Kelly. Burgess wrote of their friendship:
I was one of her loyal subjects for several years and, unlike the visiting stars she had worked with, was happy to keep my distance, having a somewhat mystical regard for queens and princesses. It was she who offered friendship and enabled me to observe virtues which are rarely associated with international glamour — intelligence, for instance, and wit, a love of the arts, of reading, of philosophical discussion.
After her death, Burgess was one of the founding trustees of the Princess Grace Memorial Irish Library in Monaco, which is still flourishing today. The princess’s enthusiasm for Irish culture is well documented, and Burgess’s last memory of her was of him playing the piano while she sang Irish songs at the James Joyce centenary celebrations. He remembers that she stood at the piano, ‘leaning over it, asking me if I knew a song about the fighting Kellys.’
Although Burgess encountered celebrities throughout his career, he often portrayed himself as an outsider and an observer. In his introduction to Private Pictures, a large-format book of paparazzi photographs of stars, including Jack Nicholson and Brigitte Bardot, he examines the cult of celebrity:
Stardom is regarded as a desirable state, and one wonders why. It is easy enough to understand why a man or a woman should wish to produce good work and then retire modestly for that work, leaving it to be praised as an enhancer of life. A poet is one who divests himself of personality in order to create something greater than personality. Oscar Wilde pointed out shrewdly that minor poets behave like stars while major poets appear to be nonentities.
Despite his suspicion of the motivations behind stardom, Burgess had occasional moments of celebrity-worship. The star he celebrated above all others was Sophia Loren. The archive at the Burgess Foundation includes a signed photograph of Loren with a handwritten dedication to Burgess. In 1982 he scripted an unmade film adaptation of The Wanting Seed with the intention that Loren should play the leading role. When he first met her, he recalled, ‘it was a meeting in which I was charmed, overwhelmed because of her star status.’ As he got to know her better, he began to see her as a person of ‘genuine humility’. In an article written in 1984, on the occasion of Loren’s fiftieth birthday, Burgess attempted to articulate why he held her in such high esteem.
We loved and still love Marilyn Monroe, but we did not dare let our feelings spill over from the screen into the dangerous well of her private life, which we knew was disastrous, though we were shocked when it ended in disaster. There is, with most stars, a parallelism we do not care to think about too much. We don't want to know about the star's drinking, drug addiction, multiple divorces, bad temper; we are happier with the image up there. But with Sophia there has never been much tension between the real woman and the glamorized screen icon. Her true personality, in some measure, gets up there. When we meet the real woman we do not feel let down, rather the opposite. There is something of a unity, confirmed in the fact that some of her screen roles derive from phases of her own life.
Burgess described his lifelong devotion to cinema as ‘a one-sided love affair’, yet his involvement in the world of celebrities tells a different story. The appeal that stars provoked at a distance occasionally led him to discover their humanity and friendship.
Find out more
You’ve Had Your Time by Anthony Burgess, the second volume of autobiography, in which he describes his meetings with celebrities (affiliate link).
Nothing Like the Sun by Anthony Burgess, the novel that led to him writing a Hollywood musical about Shakespeare (affiliate link).
Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess, in which some of the author’s experiences of Hollywood are fictionalised (affiliate link).
Listen to our podcast on Anthony Burgess at the movies:
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