‘Once you’ve tasted the joy of writing you can never give it up,’ wrote R. C. Sherriff in this entertaining memoir, and there can’t be many books that describe so well the dogged determination needed to become a successful writer, or the euphoria when things go well.
The author of numerous plays, novels and film scripts, Sherriff is best remembered for his play Journey’s End, based on his experiences in the First World War trenches – still regularly revived and a popular choice for school plays – which he originally wrote to raise money to help his local rowing club buy a new boat. The play went down well with the local audience in Surbiton, and in December 1928 was given a single Sunday performance by the Incorporated Stage Society at the Apollo Theatre, with the 21-year-old Laurence Olivier in the leading role. It was an unexpected sensation, and No Leading Lady follows Sherriff’s translation from his modest job as an adjustor for the Sun Insurance Company, to full-time writer and eventually one of the best-paid scriptwriters in Hollywood.
It’s an extraordinary story, a vivid inside picture of the 1930s showbiz world and of the American film industry at a time when Hollywood was still a rough and ready collection of buildings in the desert churning out, among other things, adaptations of famous novels that bore very little resemblance to the originals. (When contracted to write the script for an adaptation of H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man, Sherriff asked for a copy of the book, to which the reply was ‘What Book?’)
Sherriff never married and was utterly devoted to his vivacious mother Constance, who travelled back and forth with him to Hollywood and attended all his big first nights. Once Journey’s End made him wealthy he bought a big house in Esher where the two lived a quiet and harmonious life until Constance died.
No Leading Lady is a wonderful read, and full of lively detail, but Sherriff himself is an enigma, a private man always seemingly anxious to avoid any suggestion of boastfulness but clearly driven by a burning ambition to succeed, though sometimes implying that he could have been equally happy as a humble insurance adjuster.
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