A true writer of many trades

GAVIN LAMBERT, who died this month at age 80, arrived in Hollywood from his native Britain in the 1950s. He was an Englishman abroad, a gay one. At that time, in Los Angeles, those distinctions marked clannish coteries. In the fullness of his long, accomplished and admirable career, he saw -- to his surprise and guarded delight -- that being gay in Hollywood had become fashionable and being English became nothing to get alarmed about. He was a creature of Hollywood, and if the movie business never quite shaped him -- that had been taken care of before he got here, thank you -- he recorded it, set it down and became one of its clearest and most astute voices.

His screenwriting credits and his list of books and publications are long, and some are permanent. His first book, “The Slide Area,” a loosely connected group of stories, was published in 1959. One of the characters, Cliff Harriston, is based on Nicholas Ray, who was Gavin’s first American champion. In a story called “A Closed Set,” Cliff’s opposite is an actress based on Joan Crawford. Ray and Crawford had made the famously overheated western “Johnny Guitar” a few years earlier.

Gavin worked with Nick Ray on and off for some years, and as everyone in Hollywood seems to know, they were also lovers. He’s credited on one of Ray’s movies, “Bitter Victory,” and he did uncredited work on others, including “Bigger Than Life,” a James Mason movie that cineastes all but pray to but that has never quite caught on with the public. His later scripts include “Sons and Lovers,” for which he shared (with T.E.B. Clarke) an Academy Award nomination, and “Inside Daisy Clover,” adapted from his own novel. Through it all, he continued to write books, thinking, I’m sure, that scriptwriting is a chancy thing, while books offer a more logical progression if one expects to have a career as a writer. He once said to me, “With books, mine anyway, even if they’re not all I had hoped, I still know the best work hasn’t been tossed out.”

When feature work dried up for him, Gavin had a surprising run as a long-form TV writer. Among those movies was “Second Serve,” the story of transsexual tennis player Renee Richards, which starred Vanessa Redgrave. Gavin had perfect pitch for that picture -- he knew that it was a story of identity and that it was both dead serious and deeply amusing.

Later he wrote a series of biographies including “Nazimova,” the story of one of the silent era’s greatest figures; “Natalie Wood: A Life”; and “Mainly About Lindsay Anderson,” which is about film director Anderson, certainly, but was also as close to his own memoirs as he was ever likely to produce. Gavin liked writing about others, explaining them and telling their tales. He was less comfortable writing about himself. I think that to understand him, one has to remember that Gavin came of age and into his own sexuality when it was a criminal offense.

He wrote (in the Lindsay Anderson book) that he had his first affair at 11. At 18, during World War II, he tried to enlist in the army. He was refused. The pain and humiliation of that is hard to imagine now. I don’t know the exact dates and steps, but it seems that instead he went up to Oxford, where he had a place at Magdalen, one of that university’s most distinguished colleges. He left after a year. He said it was because he discovered that to study English literature, he would have to learn medieval English. It’s hard to imagine that he didn’t know the requirements when he chose the subject and harder still not to think that there’s more to the story.

It was easy to put a foot wrong with Gavin. He didn’t quite approve of a book of mine that was loosely based on his great friend Natalie Wood. He was cooler toward me after that publication. I thought with time things might sort themselves out. To my regret, I neglected to pursue it. Gavin was always working, so it’s quite possible that there will be another book or two found in his files. I hope so. Almost as sad as the thought of no more Gavin Lambert is the thought of no more Gavin Lambert books. He died of pulmonary fibrosis a few weeks before what would have been his 81st birthday.

Rest in peace.

Screenwriting woes

I spent a few recent months working on a treatment set in the late classical period. It involved serious reading and thinking. I accepted this challenge at the suggestion of a producer I knew slightly. I liked the idea and still do, so I was willing to write the treatment, the heavy lifting of screenwriting, on spec. What’s called an if-come deal was worked out. The “if” is that if anything happens with the thing, then the “come” is what will flow my way. I put my agents to a lot of work with no assurance of a sale. The producer, a lawyer, was to draw up the final papers.

Instead of doing so, the man has disappeared. He doesn’t answer e-mails or letters. Perhaps I should file a missing person report. “Officer, a producer hasn’t returned my calls. It could be foul play.” Well, maybe not. It’s a mystery, and one that Gavin Lambert would surely have understood. Unwittingly taking a page from Gavin’s playbook, I’ve done my best to put this distasteful episode out of my mind and have gone back to work on a novel. This, as Gavin well knew, is the pleasurable time for a writer -- just me and the manuscript, no rude or highhanded producers, no patronizing publishers. I go to my desk in the morning, and, if all goes well, at the end of the working day there are a few more pages than when I started.

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David Freeman is a screenwriter and the author most recently of the novel “It’s All True.” This is one in an occasional series of pages from his diary.