CLASS ACT: GOOGIE WITHERS AND JOHN MCCALLUM BRIAN MCFARLANE s I talked to the McCallums in May this year, I had to keep reminding myself that they are both in their nineties and that they’ve been in the business of entertaining us for over seventy years. Anyone who saw them in any of the films or plays in which they co-starred will know how well they Aplayed together professionally. As you watch them together now, complementing (and complimenting) each other, you can’t help wondering how much of their professional success was a spin-off from a stimulating partnership off-screen or off-stage. It seems timely to pay tribute to them for what they achieved in the performing arts in Australia and elsewhere. googie Googie Withers came to prominence in British films in the 1940s, when British cinema was enjoying its finest hours and when there was a flurry of memorable women stars. If they are not well known today, they certainly were then: Sally Gray with the eloquent voice and slightly melancholy mien; patrician Valerie Hobson; Ann Todd of the ambiguous, chiselled blonde features; Phyllis Calvert, so much smarter than the goody- goody image that was foisted on her; Margaret Lockwood, flaring her nostrils and baring her cleavage in a refined version of passion; sexy bad-girl Jean Kent getting into a lot of entertaining trouble; and Anna Neagle being so ladylike that you wanted her to slip 103 04_Essays.indd 103 29/7/09 3:36:53 PM on a banana skin. But Googie Withers was something else. She was bold, beautiful and sensual. She routinely gave men a run for their money, and they were better men for it, in films such as The Loves of Joanna Godden (1947), as a lady farmer who succumbs to a neighbouring chap but is still wearing a tie at the end, so that he needn’t think she’s going to go all frilly and feminine. Withers had been around for more than a decade before this, having made twenty-five films in the 1930s. Many of these were ‘quota quickies’ (films made to satisfy legislation about how many British films exhibitors had to screen), but there are two things to note. Several of these swiftly and cheaply made program-fillers she appeared in were directed by maverick master Michael Powell, who would be important to her later career, and one that was distinctly not a quickie was The Lady Vanishes (1938), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. She is in the opening sequences, in her underwear at first, then in a no-nonsense plaid cloak. ‘And there was another unpleasant man,’ she recalled of Hitchcock, having just summoned up some of Powell’s cruelties to actors and others. They didn’t, however, intimidate Withers. When we discussed this she recalled how she’d told Hitchcock off for some nastiness, and she said, ‘I was as assured then as I am today.’ John McCallum, who happened to be passing at this time chipped in with, ‘And that’s very assured.’ No wonder, then, that in the forties she commanded the screen with such éclat. ‘I never wanted to play the Phyllis Calvert parts,’ she said (neither did Phyllis Calvert, but that’s another story). Having made a start, in the thirties, on Hitchcock and Powell, not to speak of gormless Lancashire comedian George Formby (in 1939’s Trouble Brewing, she ended up in a vat of beer with him), Withers imposed herself on the forties with apparently effortless authority. She was involved in two ‘Resistance’ war films, The Silver Fleet (1943), with Ralph Richardson, and Powell’s One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942), in which she spirits a British bomber crew out of occupied Holland, and you actually believed she could do it. Sliding up and down the social scale as few British actresses could, she sashayed through the immaculate high comedy of On Approval (1944), undaunted by her distinguished and much older co-stars, Beatrice Lillie and Clive Brook; murdered her way through Pink String and Sealing Wax (1945), prior to throwing herself over a Brighton cliff; ran a sheep farm in Joanna Godden; helped a convict ex-lover to escape in It Always Rains on Sunday (1947); dealt with a mermaid threat to her marriage in Miranda (1948); and wielded a stethoscope with conviction in White Corridors, the 1951 release that crowned a decade of memorable achievement in film. And just to keep herself busy, she was also starring on stage, in plays as varied as J.B. Priestley’s Utopian allegory They Came to a City (1944) and Noël Coward’s brittle but dazzling comedy Private Lives (1945) as the maddening, mercurial Amanda. 104 M E A NJ I N Q UARTERLY ESSAYS 04_Essays.indd 104 29/7/09 3:36:53 PM john The accommodating arms into which Withers surrendered herself in Joanna Godden belonged to John McCallum. He was born in Queensland, where his father was a well-known producer and entrepreneur and ran the Cremorne Theatre, but was largely educated in England, including drama training at London’s prestigious RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art). Withers was in Hollywood when she was told that her leading man for Joanna Godden was to be John McCallum. ‘Never heard of him,’ she said, and she returned to England, to the Romney Marsh, where it was to be filmed. As she came down the stairs of the hotel they were using on location, a small elderly man at the foot of the stairs introduced himself as John McCallum and watched with great amusement as her face dropped. Well, he was John McCallum, but father of the handsome leading man whose proposals she resists through the film, accepting them on a partnership basis at the end. Among the ranks of leading men at the time, he struck a convincingly virile, intelligent but sturdily uncomplicated note: less dangerous than James Mason, less leery than Stewart Granger, much taller than Dirk Bogarde or John Mills, and refreshingly free from limiting class associations. He’d had theatrical experience before the war, both in Brisbane and in the United Kingdom, with the Old Vic Company no less, but after war service he was back in Australia, co-starring with musical-comedy diva Gladys Moncrieff in The Maid of the Mountains and Rio Rita in 1945. He directed his first play there, The Wind and the Rain, and this is worth noting in view of his later multi-faceted career, when he was as likely to be directing as acting. As to film, he greyed his temples to play Muriel Steinbeck’s second husband and step-father to Ron Randell in Eric Porter’s family melodrama A Son Is Born, but if you wanted a film career in 1946, Australia was hardly the place to be, so he took himself off to England on the Aquitania with a lot of homeward-bound ex- servicemen. In his first film there, The Root of All Evil (1947), he showed Phyllis Calvert that a woman’s true vocation was marriage rather than business, and got away with this in a way that would be unthinkable today—or to Withers even then, as his next film, Joanna Godden, would show. His leading-man image didn’t act to straitjacket him in films. He was equally convincing as the patient farmer suitor in Joanna Godden, Withers’ unshaven convict ex-lover on the run in It Always Rains on Sunday, the cyclist hero of A Boy, a Girl and a Bike (1949), the Australian pineapple-grower who rescues the beauty queen from who knows what corruptions in Lady Godiva Rides Again (1951), and best of all as the police officer in The Long Memory (1952), tormented by his wife’s involvement in the case he is investigating. The Long Memory was directed by the great Robert Hamer, who had sent Withers over that Brighton cliff in Pink String, put her in danger from McCallum on the run in It Always Rains on Sunday and did some uncredited work on Joanna Godden. MCFARLANE CLASS ACT: GOOGIE WITHERS AND JOHN MCCALLUM 105 04_Essays.indd 105 29/7/09 3:36:53 PM He will do as the nexus that links the subjects of this piece, especially since they both admired him more than any other of their directors. And by this time they had become, in Withers’ words, ‘what would today be called an “item” ’. googie and john Individually impressive as their work was, and on film at least the evidence is still there, the partnership has been extraordinary. There have been other distinguished theatrical/ 106 M E A NJ I N Q UARTERLY ESSAYS 04_Essays.indd 106 29/7/09 3:36:54 PM cinematic duos: for a decade Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh dazzled us and bestrode the entertainment world, almost inventing the notion of ‘celebrity’; Sybil Thorndike and Lewis Casson were married for sixty years and often performed together, in Australia and elsewhere. However, it is arguable that no other combo has exhibited quite the same equality of achievement. Thorndike’s larger-than-life personality on and off stage tended to overshadow Casson’s more muted persona, and the Oliviers’ glamour foundered on personal difficulties and her nagging sense of not being up to the acting standards he set. In the McCallums’ case, Withers has an immense filmography and theatrical role-call, whereas he has the more diversified involvement. She is an actress par excellence; he is a director, producer and theatre company CEO as well.