1958: Marriage and ‘Enemy In The Camp’
12/17/1958
Take Cleopatra and Camille
You add some more sex appeal
You mix the lot and what have you got?
Magnolia
1958 was shaping up to be a pivotal year for Peter Shure. His leading role in ‘After The Fall’, the year before, had got him noticed. As a result, he’d not only secured a significant cameo role in a big budget Yul Brynner pirate movie, which had garnered him positive reviews. He was also now lined up for a part in a major British production, the POW classic ‘Enemy In The Camp’, rubbing shoulders with many of the leading actors of the period – Attenborough, Lee, Wilding, Todd.
It’s considered a coincidence that the film is based on a book written by Shure’s lawyer, Michael Gilbert, but given how many other productions Shure ended up appearing in based on Gilbert’s work, it’s likely that some kind of favour was being pulled.
As well as this exciting opportunity, Peter’s old wartime pal Donald Pleasance had swung him a part as a drowsy clown in the macabre chiller ‘Circus of Horrors’. And to top it all, his ongoing romance with Helen Grosvenor had now progressed to a formal engagement, with a wedding planned to take place before the end of the year (subject to their busy filming schedules).
Helen Grosvenor – a mere 22 to his 39 – was a vivacious young actress who he’d met on the set of ‘After The Fall’. Before they met, she’d been closely linked to Michael Wilding, described by her only as ‘a family friend’, but talked about in the gossip column as one of the reasons for the break-up of his marriage to Elizabeth Taylor. (Taylor and Grosvenor, curiously, remained good friends for life, corresponding regularly and sharing their woes about men, movies and children).
The courtship between Shure and Grosvenor was what could best be described as ‘cagey’ – on both sides. Shure was never fully convinced that he should settle down, and had reservations about sharing his life with a woman.
He had throughout his life enjoyed the company of men – at school, at the fairgrounds, at RAF training, in Stalag One. By now he was rather set in his ways. He kept a room at the Pen Club in Bloomsbury for when he was in London, and otherwise resided in a comfortable country house in West Sussex, where he welcomed guests regularly, mainly other actors and writers, almost exclusively male, and played host to a number of musicians and bands associated with the ‘New Orleans revival’ movement. Mick Mulligan and George Melley, in particular, were regular drinking buddies.
Helen’s family regularly expressed to her their worry that Peter was too old for her and not of the right social class. The age difference certainly did not worry Helen. All the men she knew well up to that point had been significantly older than her. She made her first film in 1950 aged just 14, and from the age of 16 came under the spell of veteran French filmmaker Jean Duvivier.
Hitchcock is said to have considered her for ‘The Trouble With Harry’ before giving Shirley Maclaine her screen debut. She first met Wilding - 39 at the time - through a family association with Elizabeth Taylor’s father, a well-known art dealer based in London before the war. Controversially, Wilding put Helen under contract to make films with him, but Hollywood lured him across the Atlantic before any film could be made (and perhaps wisely Taylor encouraged her husband’s move to LA).
The class issue was also of no concern to Helen. She was, in fact, much more left wing than Peter and was far more interested than him in making films with directors and writers who hailed from the ‘kitchen sink’ school of drama. She was already friendly with Jonh Osborne and other writers from the Royal Court theatre set, and, due to frequent trips to Paris in her teens, she was familiar with the main protagonists in the ‘nouvelle vague’ movement. Helen was clearly looking to the future. Meanwhile Peter was very much content to appear in the traditional mix of war, pirate and gangster films, perhaps not noticing that the world was changing rapidly.
Helen's main reservation about marriage to Peter was, in fact, his competitiveness and, as she expressed it, his “capacity for professional envy”. Helen had seen how angry and upset Peter could be if he felt someone else in the movie business was doing well at what he felt was his expense. Peter regularly bad-mouthed Helen’s good friend Dirk Bogarde, for example, to her face but always behind Dirk’s back. Peter found it exasperating to see Bogarde playing roles that Peter thought he should have got. When Bogarde secured a part as an air pilot, for example, Peter hit the roof. Quite naturally, Helen wondered what he might say or do if her career took off and his didn’t.
Before agreeing to marry, she asked for assurances from Peter that he would not attempt to stop her working. He gave them. She went further, and extracted a promise in writing from him that he would not interfere with her career at all, and would always support her in her career choices. Only a few years previously, she told him, she had watched ‘The Country Girl’ and ‘A Star is Born’ back-to-back and had heeded the warning in both films. Peter responded:
“I promise you, my darling, we can both be successful together side by side. I’m doing well. You’re doing well. I have a dream. You have a dream. We can help each other make those dreams come true. In fact, all I feel like saying to you right now, as your future husband, is to quote that movie right back at you. Remember it? What James Mason says? THE DREAM ISN’T BIG ENOUGH!”
What really united this glamour couple was the need to create a family of their own. They both desperately wanted children. Peter had, for various reasons, ceased all communication with his mother before the war and had no siblings. He told most people that his mum had been killed when a bomb had dropped on a cinema in Skegness in 1942, and that he’d been an orphan since then.
Helen’s parents had pushed her into show business at an early age and had micro-managed her career until Jean Duvivier had come along and – in her words – ‘cut the cord’. Her father also very publicly disapproved of Helen’s interest in spiritualism and the occult, and famously made fun of her in a newspaper interview when it was revealed she’d paid a sizable sum to buy a set of tarot cards allegedly designed by Aleister Crowley. By 1958, she still saw her parents regularly for family meals and public events, but the relationship was always formal and frosty.
The idea of being parents allowed them to believe they could create their own little nuclear family – immune from interference by others - and thus set their own rules about how a family could and should be. For his part, Peter genuinely liked goofing around with children, playing silly invented games, making paper hats and going to the pantomime and the circus. Helen thought there might be increased status to be had in becoming a glamorous matriarchal figure. Producers and directors, she thought, might take her more seriously if she was officially spoken for and seen to be in charge of a household.
Both Peter and Helen also understood that the marriage could be good for business. They had seen how the press were drawn to celebrity couples. By being in the public eye constantly and appearing to be box-office gold, they could be sure of picking up plumb roles. Economically and tax-wise it made sense, too, to pool their resources.
Cracks in this plan became apparent even before the wedding in December. Helen spent most of the summer abroad making earnest ‘social realism’ films in Italy and in Africa. She can be seen in publicity photographs dining with the likes of Roberto Rosselini, Chris Marker and inevitably, Michael Wilding. She appeared on the cover of National Geographic, highlighting the plight of elephants and rhinos in Africa and calling for a moratorium on ivory trade many years before any other celebrity thought of doing the same.
Peter, meanwhile, was stuck in England, and feeling increasingly unhappy about his roles in ‘Enemy In The Camp’ and ‘Circus of Horrors’.
‘Enemy In The Camp’ was to be a film about the hunt for a dastardly informer inside an Italian prisoner of war camp responsible for thwarting a number of escape attempts with murderous consequences. The decision had been made early on to pack the film with a wealth of well-known actors, all of who could be suspected by the audience of being the mysterious quisling.
Peter had high hopes of being able to hold his own against strong competition from the likes of Richard Todd and Richard Attenborough. He had been led to believe that there was going to be room for a certain amount of improvisation when it came to developing a character, and in that way the film could become a compelling ensemble piece. Also, he felt he had the upper hand over the rest of the cast given he was the only person who had actually spent any time in a real-life prison camp.
When it came to filming, however, the competition became fierce to grab as many lines as possible and steal the limelight in every scene. Elbows were very much out, especially in the scenes in which Attenborough was involved, who – as everyone knew by then – had ambitions of being a producer and director in his own right, rather than just an actor.
Peter started as a character named Wilmot, a lookout who spent much of the time sunbathing and reading books, but who then becomes interested in accessing the camp’s sewers and roaming around them on a rubber mattress, seeking out a possible means of escape.
This quickly changed when another hut member was required for scenes involving Attenborough and Todd. Attenborough wanted more colour and a bit of light comedy in his scenes and had discovered that Peter could play the French accordian (something he’d picked up from his fairground days). Before he could say no, Peter had become a character called Pierre who sat in the background of scenes, playing away on an accordion, or sometimes emerging from an escape tunnel - or simply lying on his bunk in silence.
Famously Todd ad-libbed the famous line about Pierre – “Does he have to play that thing?” Shure’s lines were very much reduced to a basic ‘oui’ or ‘non’ - not just due to the machinations of Attenborough either, but very much at the request, it has to be said, of the director, who like many filmmakers before him found Shure’s voice to be rather harsh and odd.
In the last week of filming, the simmering feud between Shure and Attenborough blew up into a full scale row, when Attenborough shoved Shure’s head down into an escape tunnel hatch with the line ‘Au revoir Pierre’. Shure exploded. He proceeded to loudly critique his rival with observations ranging from ‘why don’t you stand on the box if you want to always be the tallest person in the shot?’ to ‘you wouldn’t be wearing glasses like that in 1945’ and ‘you don’t even know how to wear army shorts properly’ and ‘you were bloody shit in Brighton Rock’.
When the director attempted to interrupt, Shure turned on him, listing up to twenty different ways that the filming of the camp was historically and factually inaccurate.
When the dust finally settled, Peter was invited to act as a consultant in advising the production team on the actuality of life in a prison camp. But his lines and any further scenes with Attenborough were cut.
In the end, the very young and very unknown Michael Caine came away with more to say than Peter. If one had put a bet on which actor was going on to fame and fortune, before ‘Enemy in the Camp’ one might have put a bet on Shure. In hindsight, we can see that 1958 was a fork in the road for these two actors, and for Caine it was to be the more rewarding path.
Something similar occurred in ‘Circus of Horrors’, except in that movie Donald Pleasance had already warned Peter that the clown role was not substantial (but well paid), and that the director was one of an already growing band of filmmakers who really only wanted Peter Shure for a sleeping or ‘resting’ part, and an inevitably early death. When Peter famously complained to his friend that he was expecting to talk in the movie, Pleasance famously replied: “No, Peter, we’re expecting you to die!” Only a few years later the quip was adapted by the writer Richard Maibaum in the script for ‘Goldfinger’.
When Helen arrived back in London to prepare for her wedding, tanned and healthy having avoided the grey and dismal British autumn months, she found a pale, miserable and severely hung over Peter. He had decided to douse his professional disappointments by organising the mother of all stag-dos. He dubbed it ‘the rave in a cave’, decking out the very same cave he claimed to have lived in in the early years of the war with bunting, trestle tables, thousands of candles, a stage, sofas and chair, a dance floor and long, long bar. The Magnolia Band played all night. The Goons performed skits. Film stars, fairground workers, kriegies, motor racing drivers - people from all phases of Peter’s life turned up and danced and drank the night away. It was rumoured that both Princess Margaret and the Kray Twins had attended. Richard Attenborough had not been invited, even though the rest of the cast of ‘Enemy In The Camp’ were.
Helen was furious at the resulting press coverage and photos of Peter et all dancing to ‘Magnolia’ with a string of starlets (including Claire Bloom and a very young Christine Keeler). She threatened to call off the wedding. Suitable chastened, Peter promised to smarten up his act and to cut some of his rowdier friends out of his social circle. The guest list for the wedding was pruned drastically, so that only close friends and family were to attend the ceremony itself and the number of dinner guests at the Dorchester was limited to 100.
Just one week before Christmas, Peter and Helen flew out to the Alps for a romantic ski-ing holiday. The newspaper photo of them waving goodbye at the airport shows Helen in an expensive fur coat and immaculate make-up, smiling for the cameras. Peter is in a plain mac and astrakhan hat. He has blinked at the critical moment and appears to have his eyes closed, as if sleepwalking into marriage.
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