Becoming friends with Clive James

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My daughter Sarah

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Becoming friends with Clive James

Frederic Raphael Writer

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The Glittering Prizes was a huge success except with Clive James, who thought that the lettering was wrong on the Cambridge rooms that my character occupied because they were done with Letraset whereas in the 1950s, they would have been painted by hand. What a terrible thing! Actually, he was...well. Our daughter, Sarah, the painter, became quite friendly with Clive when she was 18 or 19. She was not... she did not sleep with him because he... she didn't fancy him, but she liked him a lot and he liked her. And when he first began to be very nice to her, she said to him, 'Before I talk to you, I would like you to explain how on earth you could have written the things about my father's plays that you did'. And he said, 'Well, everyone else liked them'.

Clive and I actually, through Sarah in a way, have become... yes, we've become friends. It doesn't happen often with critics and their victims, but it did happen with Clive. I like him actually. And he writes... he's written too much and he's done various things, but he's all right. And we... we are friends, thanks to Sarah.

Born in America in 1931, Frederic Raphael is a writer who moved to England as a boy. He was educated at Charterhouse School and was a Major Scholar in Classics at St John's College, Cambridge. His articles and book reviews appear in a number of newspapers and magazines, including the Los Angeles Times and The Sunday Times. He has published more than twenty novels, the best-known being the semi-autobiographical The Glittering Prizes (1976). In 1965 Raphael won an Oscar for the screenplay for the movie Darling, and two years later received an Oscar nomination for his screenplay for Two for the Road. In 1999, he published Eyes Wide Open, a memoir of his collaboration with the director Stanley Kubrick on the screenplay of Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick's final movie. Raphael lives in France and England and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1964.

Title: Becoming friends with Clive James

Listeners: Christopher Sykes

Christopher Sykes is an independent documentary producer who has made a number of films about science and scientists for BBC TV, Channel Four, and PBS.

Tags: The Glittering Prizes, Clive James, Sarah Raphael

Duration: 1 minute, 22 seconds

Date story recorded: March 2014

Date story went live: 10 September 2014