Maugham's secret life rises from `Ashenden'
Chicago Tribune, June 1992
W. Somerset Maugham is chiefly remembered in America for his South Seas tales such as "Rain" and "The Moon and Sixpence." We forget that he was one of the first agents in the British secret service and that he wrote entertainingly of this experience in the lightly fictionalized "Ashenden" stories. Alfred Hitchcock adapted two of them, "The Traitor" and "The Hairless Mexican," for his 1936 film "Secret Agent," starring John Gielgud. Now the BBC and the Arts and Entertainment Network have spent six months and $7 million to make lush new on-location versions of these two tales and two others, "The Dark Lady" and "Mr. Harrington's Washing." The four hours of "Ashenden" will air on A&E over two nights this week (7-9 p.m. Sunday and Monday).
As Ashenden, British actor Alex Jennings, 34, strikes a suitably adventurous figure, but he warns that this is no James Bond of World War I. "Ashenden isn't a man of action; he's an observer," Jennings says. "He does nearly get pushed under a train and he does get shot at, but he doesn't carry a gun. Instead, he carries a stiff upper lip." "Ashenden had in him, it seems, a strain of flippancy," Maugham wrote, and the TV dramatization preserves the character's detachment as he dashes through melodramatic plots. Jennings says, "Playing the part, I did a lot of Alec Guinness acting-I got to listen to some very good actors in some very nice locations," including Americans Rene Auberjonois and Elizabeth Montgomery in Hungary, Yugoslavia and Austria.
Maugham, 40 at the outbreak of World War I in 1914, didn't enter military service. Jennings says, "The secret service recruited him because of his writing skills. But don't get the impression that `Ashenden' is a bio-pic. The stories were fiction and we've elaborated on them further. In some ways Ashenden is Somerset Maugham, in others he's not. I'm not giving my Somerset Maugham here." The espionage exploits recounted in "Ashenden" involve the forgery of some love letters to lure an Indian terrorist onto British-controlled territory; an investigation of the traitorous tendencies of an Englishman married to a German; a light interlude in Russia during the Revolution; and a romance in Naples toward the end of the war.
Discussing his "Ashenden" role, Jennings, tall and blond, occupies a cell-like space high in the concrete ramparts of Britain's Royal National Theatre, where he is currently filling the house as a knockabout swordsman in an 18th-Century comedy, "The Recruiting Officer." He's in scruffy mufti, topped by a flyaway hand-combed hairdo, ready to desert the theater at a moment's notice, as his wife expects the imminent birth of their second child. "Ashenden was fairly faceless in the book-I hope he isn't on screen," Jennings continues. "He dresses conventionally in handmade shirts, blazers, cream flannel trousers. Quite dapper. Very nice to stand about in those costumes. It was exciting to try and be understated and minimal in the midst of those toybox surroundings, the steam trains, the vintage cars, the luxurious yachts."
"Ashenden," directed by Christopher Morahan, is the most lavish British TV enterprise since "A Jewel in the Crown" (1984), also directed by Morahan. It was Jennings' first major appearance outside the theater, though he had worked occasionally for the camera in productions such as "Smiley's People," in which he played a policeman briefly glimpsed puking into a bush.
Jennings' career is an example of the way the British theater system is supposed to work. "I can't remember ever not wanting to be an actor," he says. Son of a car salesman in Essex, he got his first sight of Shakespeare during a schoolboy visit to Connecticut, but when he applied to drama schools he was turned away. So he went to college thinking instead of being a lawyer. He eventually did study theater and afterward settled in to a meat-and-potatoes career as a bit-part player. "I had a steady climb," he recalls. "If I'd still been doing theater in schools and supporting roles in provincial repertory at 35, I'd have been either very committed or very bitter." As it was, he admits, "It was galling at the time to see yet another E.M. Forster film being made without me. One does spend a certain amount of time spitting about others' better luck."
Jennings' luck changed when he found himself in a cast being directed by Nicholas Hytner. Hytner, who went on to direct the musical hit "Miss Saigon," saw Jennings' infectious good humor and his capacity for exuberant, physical acting and used him in a series of plays that "tapped a popular nerve," as Jennings puts it. "I was ready to take responsibility for the leading roles I started to get, which I hadn't been a few years earlier." His wide-shouldered performances drew superlatives from the critics: ". . . a masterpiece of caustic comedy . . . charismatic . . . superbly convincing and repeatedly funny . . . " etc. etc. "British actors are trained to revere texts," he says. "One show in particular that I did in 1988 was acrobatic, outlandish, over the top. At the very least it proved I wasn't afraid to look stupid."
Part of the pleasure of doing "Ashenden" was the chance it offered Jennings to shed his knockabout "top of the fops" image. Having the kind of long face that looks good under a large hat can be a limiting virtue. "I love the theatricality of the theater, the excitement. At the same time, I didn't want to be typecast as Mr. Comedy." Hence, his suave, reserved, pencil-mustached Ashenden. "I had thought I was quite well set up in the theater until I got my face on TV and realized no one knew who I was." Further major screen parts don't loom for Jennings, who says, "I'm not yet climbing over piles of scripts on my doorstep every morning."
Nor will he get a second crack at playing Ashenden in a sequel. "I wouldn't want to become too closely associated with one character. Besides, we used up all the best stories. It's a finite series of dramas. Although the stories are separate, you don't need to have seen one to enjoy the next. There is a through-line: Ashenden's growing disillusionment with the secret service. "After Maugham's participation in the war, he left Britain and never returned. At the end of `Ashenden' we flash forward to the man in his 80s sitting in his villa in the south of France, disillusioned and sad. The Riviera-quite a nice place to be disillusioned in."
