Three Jews walk into a bar, meet a beautiful shiksa and take her louche tales of showbiz and high society life as inspiration for one of the most iconic films of the sixties.
As well as making a star out of Julie Christie, Darling brought an Oscar to one of those Jews, Frederic Raphael, who won his statuette, plus a BAFTA and yet more awards, for the screenplay.
But Raphael, the only surviving member of the trio who came to that London bar to research an authentic Dolce Vita-type movie plot, did not get sole credit for the story idea, which he admits being miffed about having to share in the titles with director John Schlesinger and producer Jo Janni: “I thought they were friends,” he explains when we meet at his London home to discuss the re-release of the multi-award-winning film which has been restored in celebration of its 60th anniversary.
“Of course directors always try to claim more credit, and I loved John,” he hastens to add of Schlesinger, with whom he went on to collaborate on another star vehicle for Christie, Far From The Madding Crowd. “He was immensely enjoyable to be with and we had good times, but he became greedy, as directors always do. The closer it got to the film coming out, the quicker he was to reduce what I had contributed; I thought that was a bit of a bloody nerve.
“It was fun working with him and Jo, though, until it wasn’t, because I don’t enjoy working to other people’s schedules. But Schlesinger and Janni’s success were very important to getting the film made. And for me movie-making was a way to fund work like writing books for which I was never commissioned.”
Raphael, who has a history of settling scores, later took a swipe at his collaborators in Glittering Prizes, his hit BBC drama about luvvies at Cambridge, in which his semi-autobiographical character Adam Morris, like his creator, does not get invited to Hollywood by his collaborators to collect his own Oscar,
Darling, whose success did bring Raphael an invitation from Cubby Broccoli to write a Bond film, which he declined, got green-lit thanks largely to Laurence Harvey coming on board at an early stage, giving a fine performance, says Raphael, “when already suffering from the first symptoms of the cancer that would kill him”. The Oscar came the same year Raphael delivered a petition to Harold Wilson on behalf of other Jewish cultural figures, including Harold Pinter following the 1967 war. “We were promised then that Israel had no desire to increase its territory and on that basis signed up to promote its survival.”
Julie Christie with Laurence Harvey in Darling
Never denying his own background in the face of the not-so-subtle antisemitism which plagued him at public school and university, he has been waspish in his memoirs about other Jews who played down their heritage, including Stanley Kubrick, with whom he wrote the screenplay for Eyes Wide Shut and planned a future collaboration – “he said he just happened to have two Jewish parents”. But in retrospect he does not condemn his Footlights contemporary Jonathan Miller for describing himself as “Jew-ish” in a sketch for Beyond the Fringe; it’s how he sees himself. In spite of meeting Sylvia “Beetle” Glatt in the synagogue drama group he joined “to find girls” and marrying her under a chuppah, Raphael says: “I somewhat share that view; it’s like being left-handed or short or tall. It’s a fact, but I’m not interested in biblical questions like whether Moses was a Jew.”
In spite of avoiding religious ritual since that shul wedding ceremony only endured to please his wife’s Orthodox parents – “which I’m pleased about for sentimental reasons” – Raphael has been quick to call out the antisemitism he blames for interfering with his education – first being denied a place at Winchester and ending up a token Jew at Charterhouse. There he was refused a recommendation for the Oxford entrance exam after calling out a visiting lecturer for an antisemitic remark, and after getting into Cambridge was overlooked for the Footlights committee, from which Jews had been barred membership. But nothing has incensed him as much as the way Israel has been demonised in its response to the Hamas attacks.
“What is going on there now I’d rather not talk about, but it is not genocide and people should not use that word. They don’t use it about the Sudanese when they murder half their population, they don’t use that word when they talk about central Africa, or Myanmar, where tribes are being eliminated, but with a certain kind of glee they use genocide only about what the Israelis are doing in Gaza. I can’t defend that.”
And from the perspective of a very long life he has a startling explanation for the current rise of overt antisemitism. “In my opinion, the close-to-successful genocide of European Jews created so much guilt that it is a joy, and I mean that, to certain not very good writers and others who label the Israelis as genocidal. It lets them off what happened in 1941 to 1945.”
As for the events of October 7, he points out the fact that Hamas murdered “with great pleasure” participants at a music festival, among hundreds of others, “is hardly ever mentioned by people who want the Israelis to be responsible. I’m not interested in nationalism generally, and that includes Jewish nationalism, but the glee with which Israeli conduct has been allowed to resuscitate antisemitism is something else”.
If he were a religious man, Raphael would be lighting a Yahrzeit candle for his daughter Sarah, a celebrated artist who died at only 41 of complications from pneumonia in 2001. It is Beetle, with whom he spent 75 glorious years, who did her best to get him through the grief, he admits: “She would go into our garden in France and weep, but to comfort me she would say: ‘We were together before she was born, and we’ll be together again after she dies.’”
Deeply stung by more recently losing Beetle too – “she is so much part of what I am that her death has to some extent killed part of me too” – he says what matters to him most now is his surviving family – two sons who have made him a grandfather and great-grandfather: “They are so extraordinarily kind to me, I can’t have behaved that badly towards them.”
Despite tragedy and his own frailty – though still a towering six-footer he now walks with a stick and rarely goes out – Raphael has never stopped working, publishing Last Post*, his entertainingly frank and vituperative volume of love letters to old colleagues and rivals long departed, just two years ago. Producers are now expressing interest in developing a script he has written about Byron, one of his great passions, while the makers of Two For The Road, for which he was nominated for a second Oscar, are talking about a reboot. He is actively considering both projects, but warns: “At the age of 93, one had better not have too much expectation.”
*Darling is in cinemas now; Last Post is published by Carcanet.
