"WHAT a great experience," wrote my correspondent from the north. "He must have had you in stitches. Do tell me what he's like."
Ustinov. Like Fonteyn or Nureyev, just the one name fixes the image. From the man who twisted lubricious lips around the Emperor Nero a performance that gave Spartacus its core of darkness and won him an Oscar in 1960 to the rubber faced, rubber voiced man about the world whose accents, says the advertisement for An Evening With Peter Ustinov which opens in Dublin on Monday, "can convert a mundane anecdote into a hilarious surprise", Peter Ustinov - as a master of ceremonies might say - is a man who needs no introduction.
We meet for lunch at the Chichester Festival Theatre on England's south coast where he has just finished a run of his play (his 20th by my count) Beethoven's Tenth. I am directed not to a comer table where we might talk unnoticed - usual in these circumstances - but to one in the centre of the semi circular restaurant, around which the others might be said to be grouped. A flurry among the waiters tells me the great man has arrived. And great indeed is the adjective that now best describes him. The sinuous, Levantine rogue who oiled his way around Melina Mercouri in Topkapi (another Oscar) has put on several stone in the intervening years. But among the sober suited Sussex playgoers, his pink linen suit proclaims him equally exotic. Heads turn and the restaurant goes quiet. Later when we leave he will be followed by book and programme proffering folk eager for his autograph. But I am not here for his auto graph, nor indeed to spend an hour and a half in stitches but simply to find out what everybody wants to know. What's he really like?
Peter von Ustinov's mother was French, his father was Prussian born of Russian descent, a journalist turned diplomat who at the time of Ustinov's birth was press attache to the German Embassy in London, an appointment gained simply because in the years immediately following the first World War the Ustinov non German name was deemed a diplomatic advantage. So it was that young Peter, conceived in St Petersburg, gestated in Holland, was born in London in April 1921. The mimicking skills of the son were already present in the father. By the time nine year old Peter had started prep school, von Ustinov pere "was more English than any Englishman".
Although he started rather late in life my father was desperate to be English. Watching him do it upset me rather. But he was a good observer of people to the extent that when he talked in English he had this tendency to stammer, but in no other language. He was imitating the mannerisms of the English aristocracy who have this tendency to waffle while looking for the wrong words." And Ustinov laughs. A body quaking laugh, a bottomless cave of a laugh - Ha Ha Ha Ha. And Ustinov junior? "I really made no effort to. But obviously I picked up a way of speaking fairly acceptable in the theatre at that time, but I never really tried to be English at all."
Yet the way he speaks is pure anyone for tennis. "Off" is "orft" hotel is "otel", English as it was spoken in the Home Counties before the war and in drawing room comedies ever afterwards. Yet he doesn't appear to recognise it as such and is derisive of Sir Patrick Mayhew's similarly tortured vowels which he equates with the entrenched traditionalism displayed by Britain in relation to Northern Ireland. ("It's so depressing. I can even understand the IRA point of view. Once you look at Ian Paisley and all that lot, `Dad's Army' walking around with their furled umbrellas and bowler hats.") This anachronistic upper class voice sits uneasily with the working class accents deployed as comedic grace notes to our conversation, giving his anecdotes a patronising edge I'm not sure is intended. My notes of the taped interview are scattered with explanatory brackets: Cockney, Irish, Northern Irish, Australian, Chicago hoodlum, New York Bronx etc. One story concerning the Sisters of Mercy went from Irish to Lithuanian (or Italian) to Indian to Albanian (invented or real - who am I to tell the difference?) in less than a minute. For anecdotes involving German and French he usually turns to the language itself, assuming either a similar knowledge on behalf of the listener or that the listener won't want to reveal her ignorance.
Past, present and future, Ustinov is the ultimate European. Although he lives in Paris and his wife of 22 years (his third - he has four children from two previous marriages) is French, his Englishness is clearly central to his identity though he despairs of the current Euro sceptic "morons". He was born with dual nationality. In 1942, at the age of 21 he had to choose.
"When it came to it I had no choice. I was already serving in the British army." Ha Ha Ha Ha. However although he dropped the "von" fairly early on, and is dismissive of those who cling on to such anachronisms ("I always thought it was silly. I'm British. What's the point?"), there is something very un English in the way his weekly comment column for the European newspaper ends with a "handwritten" signature above the printed by line "Sir Peter Ustinov" - something a hereditary knight, one suspects, would never permit.
The European column (also collected in two volumes as Ustinov At Large) is a curious cocktail, part pro European panegyric, part old man's musings shaped by his global wanderings as roving Ambassador for UNICEF since 1992. Recognition by the mass doesn't bother him. Although presumably appointed because of his fame, among the poor of the Third World neither the name nor the man, he explains, mean that much.
"In Albania, for example, nobody has ever seen anything you've done, so you are pretty anonymous. It's compensated for on a different level by the fact that if you are recognised you have a possibility to do something. As `Anonymous' you can only swim with the tide." We talk about maternity wards in Siberia and for the first time, indeed the only time, he talks with real emotion and anger.
"CHILDREN are suffering from leukaemia on a huge scale because of fallout from other nuclear explosions which were never reported. The whole thing is so hypocritical. People living on one side of a linedrawn by the Soviets could get double salaries because they were more exposed to danger of fallout than people on this side. But winds don't take any notice of that sort of thing." But wringing of hands apart, can he actually do anything?
"No. You can't do anything on the spot.
But you can bring things to people's attention." But which people? He is invited here and there: to the UN 50th anniversary celebrations in London, to former prime minister Edward Heath's 80th birthday, to Yehudi Menuhin's 80th birthday and so on. Old men's parties all. How much they listen to his views on Burma, Guatemala or Cambodia - as opposed to his chain link fence of anecdotes is anybody's guess. In 1989 Ustinov published The Disinformer a novella not much longer than a short story. It tells of a man who is born to peripatetic parents, brought up to be bilingual who ends up working for the British Secret Service, his time there marked out by "the mixture of demureness and arrogance".
"He had written his memoirs, but they were still in manuscript, and he had not even submitted them to the competent authorities, since, as he claimed, there was no authority competent to pronounce judgment, or even to exercise censorship over a book of his." Ustinov's hero, "his sardonic mask in place", takes pride in concealing his identity through a complex layering of voices and names as he plays out a charade that ultimately leaves him with a medal from the Queen but emotionally empty.
I leave Chichester knowing no more of Ustinov then when I arrived. We had talked at length, and the conversation was studded with funny and often apposite one liners - Stormont as "an Edwardian organ loft"; Northern Ireland as "an in growing toe nail"; John Major being "inconspicuous by his presence" are all brilliant. But honed and delivered with perfect timing, I suspect he has uttered them many times before. He no longer performs any other than his own work. The performer, the writer, the man are one, fused beyond prising to the mask.
For An Evening With Peter Ustinov (fully scripted) the auditorium is not blacked out. "It's slightly lit to take away the formality of the thing," giving the impression of cosy intimacy, of spontaneity. The lunch that we are eating also takes away the formality of the thing. The interview. But our conversation too turns out to have been rehearsed, if not actually scripted. The next day I visit my local library. It's as I suspected. All there, just about everything we discussed, in the last three issues of the European - minus the accents of course.
Ustinov is feeling the effects of his age. His body, now 75 years old, is beginning to fail him. If he decides to cut down his workload, I ask, which will go, the theatre or UNICEF? He answers right on cue.
"Performing," he says, is already very difficult. I don't walk as easily as I could. But it doesn't make any difference in Cambodia where not many people have more than one leg."
