I usually do a little research into an author before preparing an article, but in the case of John Heygate, I thought the few facts I already knew — that his affair with Evelyn Waugh’s first wife led to their divorce and Heygate’s first marriage, and that he was a long-time fried of Anthony Powell (they rented a house in Sussex together for their respective families during World War Two) — were enough. On second thought, however, I thought it worth getting a few more specifics before writing up Heygate’s 1934 novel, Talking Pictures.
Talking Pictures relates the experiences of a young Englishman who’s dispatched to Berlin in late 1932 to work on a joint German-French-British film production. He quickly becomes immersed in the daily grind of filmmaking, a process made all the more complicated by the challenge of making one film in three different languages at the same time time. Well, not quite at the same time: the German version of each scene always comes first, followed by the French, and finishing with the British. The sets, costumes, and non-speaking performers are reused, as are multi-lingual actors when available. Other roles are filled by players brought in short-term from London or Paris. Supervisors from the British and French studios shepherd their respective actors and actresses and crank out translated versions of the German shooting script.
Although one reviewer complained that “the pother of film-making” was “amusingly described at rather too much length,” Heygate is clearly fascinated by the complex mix of personalities, machinery, and procedures involved, and these details are what Talking Pictures should be remembered for today. Indeed, the book might well have fared better over the course of time had it been written as a memoir, as it easily could have. Ethel Mannin, then reviewing fiction for the Daily Mirror, remarked that “All I have against the book … is that it is called a ‘novel’.” As she noted, the story is told in the first person by a young man named John who went to Germany in late 1932 to work on German-French-British film projects, all of which she knew was true of John Heygate.
Like his fictional John, Heygate found himself recruited into the film business largely by accident. Having been fired from the BBC over the scandal of being named as the correspondent in Evelyn Waugh’s divorce case, he was looking for a job when Robert Stevenson (Stirling in the book) offered him the position as his assistant on Early to Bed, a British Gaumont film being shot in coordination with Ich bei Tag und du bei Nacht [Me by Day and You By Night] and À moi le jour, à toi la nuit at the UfA studio outside Berlin. Stevenson only knew Heygate by virtue of their being railroad enthusiasts and the fact that Heygate had written an article for the Daily Mail on riding the footplate of a Western Express locomotive during a speed trial:
Try to balance yourself on the footplate of an engine as you would on the fore deck of a Channel boat in a cross-running sea; remember that if you love it sideways you will be found by the next gang of platelayers; forwards, and you may singe your anatomy on the firebox … and you have a small idea of the personal comfort of the driver and fireman of a steam-driven express.
Stevenson felt that anyone who could keep a level head under those conditions was an ideal candidate for handling the chaos of a film production. He also knew that Heygate was fairly fluent in German, having spent some months in Heidelberg in the mid-1920s when he had hopes of gaining a post with the Foreign Office.
John/Heygate has the good fortune to hit it off with the Baron, the director for all three films, who jokingly refers to him as “our bad Oxford boy.” This comes in handy in avoiding the flak of the Baron’s frequent explosions:
“Ruhe! Ruhe! Ruhe meine Kinder!” cried the Baron almost in tears. The hammering stopped. “Probe! Eine Probe mit Licht!” Spengler whispered in the Baron’s ear that they had already spent twice as much money as they should have and perhaps it would be as well to have a rehearsal first without light. The Baron rolled his eyes and turning away to the walls shouted “Probe! Probe ohne Licht!” A siren blew. The Prince shifted his weight onto the other foot. Virginia who was to play the French version of the scene with Pierre Boucher got up from the bed and asked for her cue word.
“Fouquet! Where is Fouquet?” cried the Baron, rolling his eyes and waving a hand to dissociate himself from the French version should it prove a failure owing to the absence of the supervisor.
“I think he’s in the canteen, Herr Baron.”
“So kann man nicht arbeiten! [A man can’t work like this!]” the Baron thunders.
Heygate describes a typical set as “a set of Chinese boxes,” characteristic of the early sound days when the audio engineer hunkered in one box with his controls, the cameraman in another to muffle his noise, and several layers of backdrops served to give the impression of a world outside. But Chinese checkers would be an equally valid analogy, as the various German, French, and English performers shuffled on and off set. On the actual films, for example, Käthe von Nagy played the female lead for the German and French productions and Heather Angel for the British, Willy Fritsch played the male lead on the German film, Fernand Gravey on the French and British. However, Virginia Hope, the Anglo-German actress with whom the fictional John becomes infatuated, was based on Lilian Harvey, who appeared in several other films Heygate worked on.
What, one might ask, about everything that was going on outside the studio? Heygate’s eighteen months at UfA, from the Fall of 1932 to the early Spring of 1934, overlapped, after all, with Hitler’s rise to power and the onset of the Nazis’ totalitarian regime. “I had no time for politics,” the fictional John declares — though he adds, “I was beginning to wish the Nazis success.”
In reality, Heygate did more than just wish success. His time in Heidelberg included a good deal of carousing with young men of aristocratic backgrounds, including witnessing a duel with swords, and he found much to like in the lingering traditions of imperial Germany — as opposed to what he calls “this tedious fake-sophisticated liberal decadence.” After he left UfA, which ended its multi-national productions in 1934, he took his car (delivered to him in Berlin by Anthony Powell) on a driving tour around Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, an experience he wrote about in his 1935 book, Motor Tramp. He went so far as to have a garage attendant fasten a small Nazi flag to his car so that he could enjoy receiving salutes from people along his way. He wrote that the flag seemed “much more than something to be waved and draped from windows. It was a fighting banner which went before and men followed after.” That same year, he attended the Nuremberg rally with his friend and fellow Nazi sympathizer, the novelist Henry Williamson. They sat alongside sisters and British fascists Unity and Diana Mitford.
This context makes it hard to appreciate Talking Pictures as anything but a glimpse of filmmaking under unique conditions. And even setting aside Heygate’s political stance of the time, the book suffers as a novel. Francis Iles was not wrong in accusing Heygate’s writing of “unsophistication of the undergraduate type, which finds it really rather clever to eat very expensive dinners, and drive a car at eighty miles an hour, and get drunk, and so on.” As a narrator, John sees the world from the kind of immature egocentricity one would expect from a frat brother rather than a writer in his early thirties.
After John Heygate took his own life in 1976 at the age of 72, Anthony Powell wrote a brief obituary note to the Times. “He was a man who never quite found himself,” said Powell, who described Heygate as fine company when he wasn’t struggling with “black moods.” Heygate, who inherited a baronetcy from his uncle in 1940 and spent much of his last decades at the family’s estate of Bellarena in Northern Ireland, generally felt most at ease in Germany, Powell concluded.
In 1940, distraught at Germany’s instigation of war, Heygate wrote These Germans, a wistful memoir of his experiences of the country and its people. “As a people I seem to know you less and less,” he wrote, addressing the Germans as a whole. “Like childhood friends, we seem to grow apart as we grow older.” By the time the book was published, he had enlisted in the Royal Artillery as an ordinary soldier, and he served with distinction in Europe and India through the end of the war.
Though he published his most successful novel, Kurumba, loosely based on his experiences in India and Ceylon in 1947, his life after the war was rocky. His second wife, Gwyneth, divorced him for cause the same year. He married for the third time in 1951, after an abortive ten-day engagement with a 19-year-old from London. They met when Heygate dined at a night club and told his waiter, “Bring me a hostess. I don’t want to eat alone.” “He seemed terribly unhappy,” the young woman later told the Daily Mirror. His third wife died in 1968 and his descended into alcoholism and depression until his shot himself at Bellarena in March 1976.
For a far more extensive article on John Heygate and Talking Picture, see Geoff Brown’s 2008 article in Film History, “I am also a camera: John Heygate and Talking Picture” on Project MUSE.
You can also watch Ich bei Tag und du bei Nacht — a pretty entertaining rom-com, even if you don’t know German — online at the Internet Archive: Link.