Profiles by Tynan Kenneth; Tynan Kathleen;

Author:Tynan, Kenneth; Tynan, Kathleen; [Tynan, Kenneth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 6020591
Publisher: Nick Hern Books

NICOL WILLIAMSON

On February 24, 1969, Richard Nixon arrived in London at the end of a European tour, he dined that evening at Chequers, the Buckinghamshire mansion that is the official country home of Britain’s Prime Ministers. After dinner, his host, Harold Wilson, drew him over to a sofa, where (as Nixon tells it) ‘he engaged me in a very extended and animated conversation’. The other guests assumed that some international problem had grabbed the two men’s attention, and wondered busily what it was. In reality, they were talking about an actor. An infrequent and normally unenthusiastic playgoer, Wilson had recently attended the first night of a new production of Hamlet, staged at the Roundhouse — a converted Victorian railway shed in north London — by Tony Richardson, and what he was now so urgently saying was that the President must make a point of seeing Nicol Williamson, whose performance in the title role had been highly praised by the London critics. Williamson, said Wilson grandly, was the best Hamlet of his generation, perhaps of the century. Nixon explained that he had no free evenings, and this seemed to be the end of the matter. But the name clearly stuck in his mind, because later in the year items began to appear in the American press about the President’s interest in Williamson’s work.

These clippings reached the desk of Abe Schneider, the chairman of Columbia Pictures, which is the company responsible for distributing the movie version of Williamson’s Hamlet. Schneider called Raymond Bell, his man in Washington, and instructed him to find out from the White House whether the President would like to see the film. It seemed that he didn’t have time. Too bad, said Bell. In that case, how would it be if Williamson came out to Washington and gave the President an hour or so of Hamlet in person? It was now late in January, 1970. Red Skelton had just inaugurated a series of so-called Evenings at the White House, which would subsequently include the Broadway cast of 1776 and a tour de chant by Peggy Lee. A fair, square sampling of popular culture — but a touch of Hamlet in the night could do the Nixons’ intellectual status nothing but good, and the Columbia proposal was referred to the President for a decision.

At about this time, a London newspaperman telephoned Oscar Beuselinck, a stocky, outspoken London solicitor, who acts as Williamson’s agent in England, and asked him to confirm or deny reports that his client was going to Washington to entertain the President. Beuselinck replied, with that bluntness of manner and delicacy of grammar which characterise him, ‘Who’s kidding whom?’ He scented a hoax and, knowing Williamson to be of a mischievous nature, suspected that he might have started the rumours himself. A few days later, Columbia got the answer it was hoping for: Nixon wholeheartedly approved of its suggestion and would be happy to devote an Evening to Nicol Williamson, who thus became, at the age of

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