The Idol of the Odeons

Who remembers Dirk Bogarde? Doctor in the House? Or was it Summer Holiday? Even when his boyish good looks aren’t muddled with those of Cliff Richard, Bogarde is decreasingly likely to be recalled for the successful books he wrote.

Those books included seven volumes of autobiography. But for such a loquacious memoirist Bogarde kept his real self firmly masked. The ‘idol of the Odeons’ had early lessons in how to evade definition. He might have been a bachelor boy to cinema-going girls, but he was something altogether more ambiguous in arthouse roles (Accident, The Servant). As a gay man who never publicly acknowledged his sexuality, Bogarde insisted that the character in which he triumphed in Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971) – the fading, tormented composer Gustav von Aschenbach – was emphatically ‘not a homosexual’. Bogarde’s writing career began after a publisher heard him telling a good story on the Russell Harty show. Chatto & Windus acquired his first book on a smattering of chapters for £1,500 in 1974. Bogarde was by then established in a farmhouse in Provence, typing through the afternoons, his friend and ‘manager’ Tony Forwood close by. Writing, it turned out, had always been the actor’s secret passion, but the book that followed eschewed a film-star ‘tell-all’ and revealed something far more charming, and disquieting. On the face of it, A Postillion Struck by Lightning (1977) is a memoir of childhood summers in Sussex. Written in a clear, confiding voice and with an actor’s ear for dialogue, Bogarde’s debut, as the reviewer John Carey put it, ‘fairly yammers with life’. Postillion splits in half, like a ripe fruit. Vividly pictured countryside adventures stand in contrast to Bogarde’s cruel exile as an older schoolboy to Scotland. It also contains an episode so shocking, it’s hard to forget; a trauma that, perhaps, goes some way to explaining Bogarde’s tightly wrapped private identity. Derek Niven Van den Bogaerde (he was not to become Dirk Bogarde for another thirty years) and his sister Lu spent their holidays in the hamlet of Lullington, in the Cuckmere valley, East Sussex, under the relaxed supervision of their teenaged nanny, Lally. Their parents were often back in London, where his father was picture editor of The Times. For 7s 3d a week, a quintessentially English cottage was the family’s summer home:

The kitchen was low and cool; white walls, pink brick floor. There was a smell of paraffin and butter and scrubbed wood and washing in the copper. Tea was scattered about the table, a plate of bread, the jam in a jar with a little white label saying Summer 1929, a big brown teapot with a blue band, cups and saucers and Minnehaha, our cat, quietly washing its face.

How much of the book is exaggeration is hard to say. It seems churlish to point out that the Van den Bogaerdes only spent a few short summers in Lullington, rather than the many years readers are encouraged to believe – but this surely misses the point. For Derek, Lullington offered freedom. In mid-April last year I walked via Alfriston, following Derek’s regular route past the Star Inn and on to the South Downs. The gorse was bright and a spring wind whipped across the chalk hills, my only company a small herd of middle-aged men in Lycra biking across the humps and bumps. Here, at Long Burgh Barrow, is where Derek staked out the ‘witch’ who lived in her ‘Eggshell’ caravan; over there, the looping track of his walks with fishing pals down the Ouse, beyond Firle Beacon. There they encountered a wispy-haired woman in a cardigan, waving a walking stick, and – with the dismissive misogyny of male youth – deemed her ‘potty’ (the unnamed woman is craftily identified in the index as Virginia Woolf). Postillion was an instant bestseller – 27,000 hardbacks sold, and over 60,000 copies of the paperback subscribed before release. The physical book suggests something soft and gently comic. The cover painting and endpapers depict Sussex; on the back a photograph of Bogarde, ever the eligible bachelor in his casual sweater. Attractive drawings illustrate the text. But a sharp reader sees beyond the sunsets. Bogarde’s new career as a writer ran in parallel with the outsider-ish roles he played as an actor, alternately amusing and amused. The book’s title was plucked from an old Baedeker as an example of the sort of ridiculous phrase a tourist is never likely to need. But when, as a boy, Derek takes a trip in a horse-drawn coach with a storm approaching, he is asked to hold an umbrella over the female coach driver. In the story our postillion narrator in fact comes dangerously close to electrocution. In the second half of the book, ‘Winter’, the grit of Glasgow replaces the outdoor life of Sussex. Lodging with his Aunt Belle and abrasive Uncle Duff, the teenage Derek sleeps on the Put-U-Up in the sitting-room. At Allen Glen’s technical college his foreign name and English accent are enough to prompt a lavatory dousing. Bogarde would later describe this time as ‘the three most important years of my life, the horseshoe-on-anvil ones’. It was where he discovered who he was. In August I follow him to Glasgow, and stand in rain-drenched Renfield Street in front of an Art Deco building. In 1934 this was the Paramount Picture Palace, brand-new and designed to seat more than 2,000 people. Today the white paint on its concrete fins is failing and a ‘To Let’ sign is set jauntily above the on-site kebab shop. This is where the 13-year-old Derek played truant and wallowed in ‘the glamour, the glory, the guns and the chases’. Here he accepted cinema’s pledge that the world was ‘never to be dull and drab again’. His future career was set. One episode featuring the Paramount stands out. After a showing of Boris Karloff’s The Mummy, Derek gets chatting to Alec Dodd, a pale-faced medical student who is eager to be friends. Derek is delighted to be taken out to tea and then home. Alec has promised to show him how to do up bandages just like Karloff’s

It was not very long before I was straitjacketed in strips of thin cotton bandage from the top of my head to my waist, arms securely folded, in the correct position of mummies, across my chest, a small slit left for each eye so that I could hazily see through a vague fringe of white blur, a small hole left for my nostrils so that I could breathe . . . Putting his beige face very close to my ear Mr Dodd said that it seemed a pity not to finish the job . . . he ripped off my underpants and I was stark naked before his eager, now red-faced, gaze . . .

The naturalist’s eye from the first half of the book is now turned to more sinister effect, as Derek is ‘wound tightly into a cocoon as a spider rolls a grasshopper’. He senses that something appalling is about to happen:

Which it did. And I knew.

What exactly does Derek now know? That Dodds is an abuser, no question, but also that Derek’s own naïveté has fallen horrifyingly away. The shame of the event may have helped to ensure that Bogarde’s sexual orientation remained strictly in the closet, yet he chose to share this episode in the memoir. Or is this an attempt to deflect the reader? The modern-day reader sees the meaning between the lines. Bogarde’s biographer, John Coldstream, proposed that ‘even if “it” did not happen in such an extravagantly shocking way’, this was when ‘Derek discovered the truth about his sexuality’. Throughout Postillion the ripples of trauma continue, often as a result of having to shield his identity. Bogarde’s metaphors for privacy – masks, walls, shells, whelks – all offer protection from a potential attacker. His strategies of self-preservation are intended to direct readers elsewhere. As he made plain in an interview with The Times in 1986, ‘What there is of me is what I’ve chosen to show you.’ Perhaps he was leading the astute reader back to Postillion. For Bogarde, the act of writing was a return to the joy and freedom of childhood days. Even visiting his publisher’s office was a nostalgic retreat. The ‘smell of paper, of cardboard, of print, of dust: above all an atmosphere of work’ reminded him of his father’s desk at The Times. The signing at Hatchard’s on publication day ‘was probably the most important day of my life . . . This was all mine.’ He wrote to his publisher, Norah Smallwood, ‘Thank you for being so splendid, kind, warm and, I dare say it, loving. It made me feel tremendously “safe”.’ Dirk knew what he had disclosed. As he wrote privately to Norah, he was ‘constantly astonished to get letters from children who have had parts of the book read to them aloud in class at school . . . the kids know that the book is, later on, too grown up for them’. A little later, he observed that the book ‘is having very much the same “reaction effect” as Death in Venice had . . . touching some silent chords somewhere in people’. He knew. There is a sudden loss of control at the end of Postillion, when we jump to Bogarde’s big break in Hollywood. His new mask is a stage name: Dirk. As he prepares for his part in an ill-starred biopic of Lizst (Song without End, 1960), the tight taffeta trousers and ‘great bouffant, faintly pink, tea-cosy of a hairstyle’ suggest high camp, but also another sort of mummification, this time by the studio. It would not be long before he was comfortably back in Europe, perfecting his on-screen essays in cinematic menace and stillness with the auteurs who understood him. As Bogarde grew older, he threw out ever more exaggerated feints. Beware the high syrup of Great Meadow (1992), a soppy reprise of Postillion with none of the granite; all sweet peas and skylarks. Even Bogarde likened it to eating four melted Mars Bars at once.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 87 © Clara Farmer 2025