The Couple: The Rider Quintet, vol. 4

FRAGILE CRAFT

FRAGILE CRAFT ON THE STRANGE LIVES AND UNTIMELY DEATHS OF MARY URE,ROBERT SHAW, AND RICKY NELSON They are passing, posthaste, posthaste, the gliding years —to use a soul-rending Horation inflection.The yearsare passing, my dear, and presently nobody will know what you and I know. V L A D I M I R N A B O K O V Cinema isthe mythology of the twentieth century. M I C H A E L P O W E L L 1 The Age of "Who?": Famous Photograph In Doris Lessing's autobiography she vents her anger at the media for coining the inapt phrase "angry young men," then locates one image to express the spirit of the era:"a famous photograph of the Royal Court people on some jaunt, on the top of a bus,lovely Mary Ure in front. . . every bit as fascinating as Marilyn Monroe, with the same fragility... her head back, laughing, but seems a bit panicky, from all the attention." As I plunged reluctantly further and further into a life I found disturbing for its lack of closure and abundant obscurity, I began to recoil from the "what are you working on" question and bristled when it was followed by the "butwho is Mary Ure"question— and that's without getting into the consistent mispronunciation of her name. Time will turn the tables; it's a matter of degree; here the reversal is complete. The beautiful pale woman who portrayed Clara Dawes in Sons and Lovers would never need a name, much less one as intriguing as Mary Ure. Having been a factor in a reverberant movement gave her an allure. I'd no inkling that the arc of her life and art was in anyway complete by the time I saw her physically present on stage as Kate in the Pinter play two years before she would die. I don't know why I 84 didn't say in Old Times, but have found that those who'd be loath to call Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or Krapp's Last Tape "the Williams play" or "the Beckett play," refer to a new play by Harold Pinter as "the Pinter play" the waythey would an art show, or a performance piece. When I saw Mary Ure physically present on stage, I was excited, susceptible to her fragile beauty, but my hair didn't stand on end as if I'd seen a phantom come to life. Here were husband and wife playing husband and wife. Robert Shaw, in civilian clothes, urbane, leavening his menacing persona as he delivered delicious lines that made us laugh— they were so close to the thoughtless banter that people employ so that they don't have to think. It brought me back: not to the familiar roles—they blended into one. If I mutter the syllables of his name, Shaw appears standing inside a garage with his hand on the flank of a gleaming Rolls or Bentley in The Hireling, about to burst the outsized silver buttons of his suffocating tacky gray chauffeur's uniform with the class anger and pent-up sex drive that was breaking his character apart. 2 There isno end to the torment that comes from watching dead actors in old, and not so old, movies, and you always fall into the hole of uncertainty; you know you don't know ifthey're alive or dead, some of them look so radiant on films made not so long ago. Richard Harris, the hero of The Heroes ofTelemark, is undergoing a second birth in old man roles, while in the rockface rappelling,snow on castles icecapade, Where Eagles Dare, two out of three leads, Richard Burton and Mary Ure, are both quite dead, as is her second husband, Robert Shaw. A lot happens in Eagles, but what sticks in my mind is the escape, where MaryUre, coifed, oblique glimmer of a smile, cradling a machine gun like a weightlesstoy on the caboose's deck, bullets in mesmerizinglyendlesssupply, decorously mows down row on row of Nazi pursuers, 85 who drop into the white Alpine ridges, like knocked over counters in a game, as if she were answering the blasts from Jimmy Porter's trumpet as they merge with a shrieking train whistle and screech of brakes. 3 To St Paul's Church, Covent Garden, for Robert Shaw's memorial service. Abeautiful, still day...