Murderers and Other Friends by John Mortimer

magic deodorant. He then collected the money, went off to work in America and put the unpleasant incident out of his mind. When he came back to London he was walking into the Connaught Hotel, where he always stayed, with a number of friends and acquaintances when two large coaches drew up outside the hotel. From them emerged a huge party of Japanese who saw Niven and burst into high-pitched laughter, lifted their arms and dabbed at their armpits in hysterical mimicry.
    We sailed through the harbour in a dinghy, slowly, with little wind. The rain, a permanent feature of holidays in the South of France, had stopped suddenly. Niven was talking about the great days of Hollywood, when he had emerged from central casting, an unlikely Scotsman to succeed in the tinsel city. He had shared a house on the beach, which they called Cirrhosis by the Sea, with Errol Flynn. He had organized an elaborate practical joke which again involved Rex Harrison. Niven and Nigel Bruce hired a young hooker to pose as Bruce’s virginal cousin from London, whom he had promised to look after, and then affected outrage when they caught Rex making love to her. He also described the embarrassing moment during the filming of The Prisoner of Zenda when they were riding into the city and his horse, eager as Harrison, reared up and mounted the mare ridden by Douglas Fairbanks Junior. And then, floating along the coast in a moment of silence, we saw a leaking boat, an abandoned wreck. ‘You know what that is?’ Niven said. ‘That’s Flynn’s boat.’ The great old days of Hollywood, the scandals and the fabled romances, were rotting at the quayside and about to disintegrate entirely.
    My father’s repeated question, ‘Is execution done on Cawdor?’, boomed out across the garden in my childhood, echoed down the years. It became a password. I was sent to stay with George Clune, a distant connection of my father’s, who had been converted to Rome and played the organ in a Catholic church in Eastbourne. He used to weave such tunes as ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ and ‘My Old Man Said Follow the Van’ into the music when the congregation assembled and dispersed. My father had told me to ask if Cawdor had been executed and when I did so George Clune folded me in his arms and welcomed me as though we were members of some secret society. So the words of Shakespeare became passwords or incantations. ‘Who’s the silent Irishman in Hamlet?’ my father would ask me. Long usage had taught me the answer: ‘He’s the one the Prince of Denmark’s talking to when he says, “Now could I do it, Pat. Now he is praying.” ’
    So the plays were part of our daily lives, like the evidence in divorce cases and drowning earwigs and ITMA being switched on during dinner when my father was bored. I thought hardly at all about the man who wrote them, whose coloured effigy seemed unreal and doll-like over his tomb in the church at Stratford. But then, towards the end of the seventies, I got a strange invitation from Associated Television, the fiefdom of Lew Grade, whose agile little feet had once been planted in the variety show and the summer season. I was asked to write six television plays about the life of Shakespeare.
    The first professor I asked said that everything known about the life of Shakespeare could be written on a postcard and you would still have room for the stamp. It seems he adopted no public personality, in which he was wise. Other great writers have not been so well advised. Dickens took on the role of a warm-hearted, devoted family man and, when it was discovered that he was cruel to his wife, secretive with his mistress and sometimes hard-hearted to his children, the perpetual pleasures of his books may, for some, have been diminished. Philip Larkin took on the part of a racist, male chauvinist bigot, thus disillusioning the many Guardian readers who had written dissertations on his