Dying, says Jonathan Miller, is a full-time occupation. It’s not one that he’s
about to add to his extraordinary CV, but the fact is that he is 75 next
Tuesday and the question of mortality stands there uninvited. “Oh, my
forthcoming death? It’s of no concern to me at all.” He waves it away
disdainfully, as if it is just another troublesome detractor. He would be
lighting another Marlboro but his wife Rachel has sent him indoors to talk
and there is a no-smoking rule. The view through the big drawing window is
about as remote from his natural habitat as you can get. There is a lawn
being cut to impeccable smoothness and it slopes down to the placid lake of
Otsego, which goes on for as far as the eye can see. You can hear similar
mowers calling from the neighbouring properties. James Fenimore Cooper, the
author of The Last of the Mohicans, called the lake Glimmerglass in
his Leatherstocking Tales, and this is the name given to the annual
opera festival in Cooperstown, 70 miles west of the New York state capital,
Albany. Miller is here, as he has been many times before, to direct Verdi’s La
traviata.
Among the executive furniture of the borrowed house he sits awkwardly in every
respect, with his rangy English limbs going all over the place as he talks.
And how he talks — always has done — roaming across the fields of
neuropsychology, the business of direction, money, fame, England and back to
death, making links and allusions as audaciously as a metaphysical poem. A
Mohican he is not, but he is probably the last of something if only because
he was the first as well — a genuine public intellectual straddling the
worlds of medicine, comedy and the arts in the early TV age with a mixture
of high seriousness and almost knockabout accessibility as a presenter. He
is the most renowned pluralist of his day. When it’s going well it’s an
exhilarating ride across unguessable terrain, but when it borders on the
carping or self-piteous it grinds into four-wheel drive and churns through
peat.
When he talks about the full-time nature of dying, he does so in the context
of opera. How can we take it seriously, he asks, when a heroine dying of
consumption leaps from her bed to belt out the farewell aria. His insistence
that they should act more in line with their condition is one of the
hallmarks of his often controversial productions. Because this has been his
main professional pursuit for the past 30 years there is a temptation, in
Britain at least, to see him as being in some sort of gilded exile among the
great opera houses and universities of the world, firing squibs across the
water at a crabby, unappreciative old England. He has fuelled the
impression. A “mean, peevish little country” is how he described it in 1991.
He hasn’t done yet. Reminded about his description of Mrs Thatcher’s voice as
“a perfumed fart” he says, “Oh yes, I’d forgotten that” and looks far from
displeased. It might be easier to dismiss this as the contempt of the old
liberal arts for Tory “philistinism” if he did not now say of Tony Blair:
“Well, I have a deep disdain for them [Tony and Cherie]. I couldn’t bear
that grinning, money-hungry, beaming, Cliff Richard-loving,
Berlusconi-adoring, guitar-playing twat. I suppose I would say that, at the
risk of being inoffensive. No, it’s that beaming Christianity and that
frightful wife with a mouth on a zip-fastener right round to the back of her
head. And both of them obsessed with being wealthy. And he got us into this
disastrous war with Iraq because he had consulted with God. Like Bush. Well,
anyone who claims to do something on the basis of a personal relationship to
a non-existent deity . . .”
For someone notoriously thin-skinned over hostile reviews, he has quite an
appetite for invective, regularly attacking his critics in personal terms.
“If they go at me, yes. Most people believe it’s safer and more prudent to
keep their mouths shut. But what I will do is come out and say what I think
of these . . . liver flukes. I once said: ‘Bernard Levin came down on me
like an ounce of bricks.’ ”
Rachel, a retired GP to whom he has been married for 53 years, hides the
papers from him after a press night. So do their three grown-up children if
they’re around. They think he’s paranoid and he grudgingly admits they might
have a point. The thing is, he loves vituperation when he’s the author of
it, and enjoys doing it rather as a child
might enjoy getting hold of his father’s credit card. There’s a twinkle of
sheer delight when he’s got that sentence about Blair out, as there is for
much of the time while he successfully ushers his jostling thoughts through
his mouth. It’s a performance, it’s expected of him and he hates to
disappoint, rather as Oliver Reed felt he was short-changing his public if
he turned up sober. It’s only when you see him in repose, sitting alone,
that you can sense a melancholy settling on him and see his great long face
hang like a doleful horse.
There’s plenty more about England in general and his Camden street in
particular, but first it’s worth remembering why he has been such a lion.
Though his name means little to many under 40 he was extremely famous
extremely young. Educated at St Paul’s School and the University of
Cambridge, he was such a precocious comic that he became a sort of
intellectual version of his early idol, Danny Kaye. Even before the 1960
revue Beyond the Fringe made his name — and those of Alan Bennett,
Peter Cook and Dudley Moore — he had been in two Footlights shows that had
been into the West End. He became a Broadway sensation, hotly courted by New
York’s TV talk shows. Still in his twenties he was editor and presenter of
the BBC’s vaunted arts programme, Monitor.
He took to directing stage plays with uncanny ease — Laurence Olivier in The
Merchant of Venice, Jack Lemmon and a young Kevin Spacey in Long
Day’s Journey into Night. He made countless films, including the
classic 1966 adaptation of Alice in Wonderland for the BBC. For many
his 1978 TV series The Body in Question, controversial because of a
filmed corpse dissection, was one of the milestones of the form, a
confirmation of TV as teacher. All the while he had one foot in medicine,
which he had studied at Cambridge and then University College Hospital
London. He qualified as a doctor in the late 1950s and spent two years as a
house physician at the Middlesex. Even after becoming an operatic director
he spent two years studying neuropsychology at Sussex University in the
1980s, and considers himself a well-informed tourist.
So much to look back on. But when he does so, is there not a fear that he took
the wrong route? He says, chillingly, that as his eminent doctor father
Emmanuel, a pioneer of child psychiatry, lay dying in the hospital where he
had worked, he groaned: “I am a flop. I am a flop.” The serious medical
expectations of Miller, rather than the artistic ones, must have been great.
His mother Betty was a powerful voice too, a well-regarded novelist of the
Bloomsbury epoch. Did Miller inherit a surfeit of abilities, or was there a
seam of indecision running the length of his life?
“My life has been a series of yieldings, weak-minded yieldings to unsolicited
invitations,” he replies. It might sound disingenuous, but he has chapter
and verse from Fringe onwards — George Devine ringing from the Royal
Court to see if Miller wanted to direct a play, the conductor Roger
Norrington asking him if he’d like to do an opera, TV stations, theatres and
universities dangling options in front of him, on and on until the present
day and beyond. “Although not a lot, I have to say. I fear that as far as
universities are concerned I’ve rather fallen below the horizon. I get asked
by the smaller, but very good [American] ones, rather than Yale and Harvard.”
This description of his life makes it sound a little like the sculptures he
has taken to creating from random pieces of wood and metal. These are the
focus of two programmes titled Absolute Rubbish, which the Sky Arts 2
channel is re-showing as part of a season to mark Miller’s birthday.
Does he ever reproach himself in the way his father might have done? He
becomes uncharacteristically hesitant. “The possibility was always . . . you
see, I fell out of what I was intending to do, what I was meant to do, I
think. Which was to be a clinical neurologist. And that remains a
preoccupation of mine and always has done, you see . . . I’ve always a sense
that whatever I’ve done in the theatre, nevertheless I felt misgivings that
I hadn’t pursued the original [medical] curiosity that I had.”
He considers this and then, as if he is not entirely happy with it, says: “I
suppose now, looking back, I see that I have pursued the original curiosity
that I had, in a non-clinical circumstance.” By this he means that his
medical knowledge has proved a vital asset in his understanding of the human
condition and therefore in his directorial craft.
Like his contemporary and once bitter enemy Peter Hall — and like the Prime
Minister they both loathed — he is going on and on. He says he has to as he
can’t afford to stop, and is annoyed that opera companies can go on reviving
productions without paying the directors a royalty. For someone so sniffy
about money-seeking he thinks about the stuff a good deal. Gilded exile? Not
exactly, he says. Two months work at Cooperstown will make him about £8,000.
“Compared to gardeners working in the fields I can’t complain, but compared
to people working in the commercial West End theatre I’m very modestly paid.”
The photographer comes and asks him very politely if he would mind shaving and
putting on a smart shirt. He looks slightly panic-stricken in his wife’s
direction. While he is being snapped she and I walk into Cooperstown, a
place Miller finds insufferably dull — “nothing but baseball” — particularly
now, around Independence Day and with the nation mourning a pop star. She
says he bought a dress shirt in error and didn’t know what to make of the
pleats. At the deli she says he came in to buy some bread but brought home
the display loaf which was full of blue mould.
Everyone who knows him seems to enjoy his distrait, picaresque presence, or
absence. Kate Bassett, the drama critic and author of a forthcoming
biography of Miller, In Two Minds, recounts the middle son William’s
story about the time he and his father came out of the Renoir Cinema to find
a woman yelling that she’d been mugged. Miller senior sets off in hot
pursuit of two violent-looking boys, followed by a gaggle of Bloomsbury
cinephiles. Jonathan, in the lead, is waving a bread palette over his head
and shouting: “Stop, you little shits!” A man puffing along next to him
says: “We once met at Susan Sontag’s.” Miller briefly interrupts his rage to
say. “Oh really, how fascinating,” before effing and blinding on after the
boys. They stop, turn round and brandish a baseball bat. There is terror on
everyone’s face apart from Miller’s and he starts making come-on-then
gestures at the boys. William pulls him back by the coat. Jonathan calls him
a coward and doesn’t forgive him for a week.
When I ask if he feels any particular regrets when he surveys the past three
quarters of a century, he says: “Certain personal things that I don’t want
to go in to . . . unkindnesses or whatever.” He doesn’t come across as
unkind. Bileful perhaps, but it’s not the same thing. “I can be,” he
insists. “One of my children might say I’ve been mean or tyrannical.” One
of? “Any of.”
Surprisingly, given such parentage, none of the three went to university and
he concedes that he and Rachel “misidentified the education that was
available in London state schools . . . for the literate Left it was
absolutely a moral principle that you used state education, and I was
slightly embarrassed about having gone to a public school”. All three have
done well in their different fields of photography, business and TV
production and, he says, “have learnt about ordinary people in a way that
these bankers’ children never could, all going to private schools and living
on such a level that they are completely unacquainted with the unfortunate
and the poor”.
What about the smoking, Dr Miller? It’s quite rare to see people of your
generation doing it. “Yes it is.” Some of them are dead. “Yes, some are
dead. I would like to stop, but don’t. I’ve got in the habit. I don’t like
it particularly and I wish I had the strength to stop. But at the age of 75
I don’t mind it at all.”
The last regret he lists is his “failure to be more easygoing, less fussing”.
He is thinking again of his reaction to adverse criticism. It makes his
family angry. “Rachel says: ‘You don’t understand what a fortunate life
you’ve had.’ That’s what they all say: ‘You’re really asking for too much;
you’ve had a very fortunate life.’ ”
And does he agree? “Yes, I agree.”
On Sunday Sky Arts 2 is showing the programmes Absolute Rubbish with
Jonathan Miller. One is about his work with wood (7pm), the other about
his work with steel (7.30pm). This is followed at 8pm by his production of La
Bohème. On July 26 the same channel shows his Rigoletto
(7pm) and The Merchant of Venice (9.20pm)
