Dreaming To Some Purpose by Colin Wilson

Author:Colin Wilson [Wilson, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781446473603
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-05-30T16:00:00+00:00

I made another interesting acquaintance at the Algonquin. After lunch the following day I was interviewed in the foyer by a columnist called Leonard Lyons. After Lyons had finished and gone, a good-looking, big-chinned young man came across to me and asked if I was Colin Wilson. He, it seemed, was Robert Shaw, who was in New York acting in Harold Pinter’s play The Caretaker, which was opening off Broadway.

When Shaw said he had acted at the Royal Court, I asked him if he knew John Osborne. He looked at me in an odd way and said: ‘He’s citing me as co-respondent.’ It seemed that one day when Osborne and Mary Ure had been bickering in his presence, he had said to her: ‘If you ever decide to leave him, come to me.’ And one night a month or so later, there had been a knock on his door, and it was Mary.

Recalling her quarrelsomeness after she had been drinking, I did not envy him.

Shaw had to go to a rehearsal, but we arranged to meet later. In a liquor shop opposite the hotel I saw that vodka was an absurdly low price – about two dollars a bottle. I bought a bottle, and when Shaw returned he came to my room and we drank some of it, which was by no means bad. And Shaw brought me a copy of a novel he had just published, The Sun Doctor. I read its first chapter – all I had time for with my hectic schedule – and was impressed. Stylistically, it was as good as Graham Greene.

Like so many fine actors, Shaw was dissatisfied with interpreting other people’s words, and would have preferred to be a professional writer. When he told me that he had written a play, I suggested that we might collaborate. He seemed to be interested in the idea, but it was never to come about. His acting career took off. Two years later he played the part of the KGB killer in From Russia With Love, and two years after that, the Panzer general in The Battle of the Bulge. By the time he played the shark fisherman in Spielberg’s Jaws he had put on a great deal of weight.

Mary Ure died on the opening night of a new play by Shaw, in 1975, at the age of forty-two, from a mixture of whisky and tranquillisers. Robert himself died of a heart attack in 1978, at the age of fifty-one.

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