“Sir Alec,” he replied, “the honor is all mine. Love your work.”
Guinness smiled and shook Harry’s proffered hand. Both men had strong, callused grips, but neither felt the need for anything as gauche as a bone-crushing competition. In Harry’s experience of 1950s society, that made for a pleasant change.
“I’m never quite sure how to take it when people say something like that these days,” said the recently knighted actor. “Would it be presumptuous of me to ask whether you refer to my old work or my new?”
Harry almost blundered into a Star Wars fan-boy moment, but Guinness was famously touchy on the subject of his uptime portrayal of Obi-Wan. Better to stick with the classics, Harry thought, as a waiter bearing a tray of champagne, wine, and spirits somehow managed to slip through the crush around them. Hundreds of guests, all in formal wear, most of them smoking and all of them drinking, pressed in from all sides.
“Well, my grandmother was always a big fan of your George Smiley,” he said, almost shouting above the din. “But I would have to say that your Prince Harry puts them all in the shade.”
It was a lie, of course, but one that brought forth a spirited laugh from Sir Alec.
“Well, my Prince Harry is not a patch on yours,” replied Guinness. “But it was a jolly romp of a film to make after that disastrous bloody Hamlet at the New Theatre. How I managed to fall into that trap for a second time I will never know.”
Resplendent in regimental formal wear, Harry felt hot under the bright lights, and sweat trickled down the small of his back. He threw down most of his drink-a soda water tricked up to look like a gin and tonic-in a couple of urgent gulps. Long before he had arrived in June 1942, he had learned to be careful about drinking alcohol in public; although he had also learned that people and, more importantly the press, seemed to care much less about such things here than they had back up-whence he had come.
“I imagine you thought forewarned was forearmed,” he said after finishing his sparkling water. “You wouldn’t be alone in making that mistake.”
“Touche, Your Highness.”
Harry had some trouble reconciling the fit, young actor standing in front of him with the old, limping man he recalled from the first of the Star Wars films. But he had no trouble imagining how Sir Alec Guinness had found himself caught up in a disastrous theatrical misadventure even though he had been warned off by his own future history, delivered by Harry and ten thousand other uptimers from the year 2021. Sometimes being told of the mistakes you were about to make was less of a warning and more of a provocation-as the Nazis had found out.
On the other hand, thought Harry, catching sight of Sophia Loren gossiping with Errol Flynn on the other side of the room, there were plenty who had managed to avoid their fates. Or at least their fates as Harry knew of them. Flynn over there, for instance, had already undergone the surgery that would save him from a heart attack a couple of years from now. He looked dangerously healthy, having given up the booze and smokes as well. And a couple of months of SAS-style fitness training to play opposite Guinness in Capture von Braun! hadn’t hurt either. Harry liked Flynn, but he had to wonder why the film’s producers had chosen the Australian to play Capitain Marcel Ronsard of the Free French First Army.
Well, actually he didn’t have to wonder about that at all. This was Hollywood, after all, or Britain’s version of it. So the raid on the German rocket facility at Donzenac in France, a mission nearly fourteen months in the planning and execution, was compressed into just over an hour and a half on-screen, with an Australian playing the token French officer, and Mademoiselle Anjela Claudel of the Bureau des Operations Aeriennes portrayed by the Italian actress Sophia Loren. At least Flynn’s mustache looked French, he supposed.
A bell began to ring: time for the audience to move into the theater and take their seats. Immediately the background buzz and rumble of conversation seemed to get louder. Harry noted the sudden flare of dozens of cigarette lighters firing up as their owners rushed to hammer in one last coffin nail.
“Are you going in?” he asked, as Sir Alec looked around for a waiter to unburden him of the drink he had hardly touched.
“Oh, yes. I’m sure if you could fight your way into a secret Nazi rocket base to blow up their whizbangs and kidnap their boffins, I can at least sit through the whole lark in the comfort of the Barberini. Besides, I haven’t actually seen the finished version yet.”
“Allow me,” said Harry, taking Guinness’s unwanted drink from him and palming it off on a waitress passing behind the actor. “I’m one up on you in that case. We had a sneak preview at the palace last week. Young Nana loved it. Thought it was very exciting. Although I notice they didn’t have Sophia Loren slitting anyone’s throat for making a nuisance of themselves. Not in this version, anyway.”
For just a moment, it looked as though a shadow passed across Sir Alec’s face. He looked Harry in the eye as he spoke. “People who have not played at war, sir, have no idea what an ugly, wretched game it is. I wonder sometimes whether we let them down by not telling them truthfully.”
“But war’s a game,” said Harry, “which, were their subjects wiser, Kings would not play at.” The smile did not reach his eyes.
“Cowper, I believe.”
“Could be, but I read it in Freddy Forsyth.”
“And you, Your Highness, not tempted by a second viewing?” Guinness asked with the return of a slightly mischievous grin.
“Duty calls,” Harry replied. “Well-dinner first, then duty.”
The bell rang again and the jostling crush of the crowd had become a slow-moving tide, flowing toward the doors of the theater. As the invitees, in their black-tie outfits and heavy-looking cocktail dresses, gradually shuffled past the two men, the large press contingent, those without their own invitations at any rate, were left behind. Harry nodded at a small clutch of women-uptimers, by the look of them.
“I have a date,” he said, conspiratorially leaning in toward Guinness.
“I see. An affair of state then,” teased Sir Alec. “Well, as critical and defining a cultural moment as the premiere of Capture von Braun! is, I do recognize that there are more important things in the world. You must be about your business, Your Highness. If I might be so bold, however,” he added, “which one is she?”
Harry couldn’t help but smile. “The tall, dark-haired woman, the American in the white dress.”
“Miss … I’m sorry Ms. Duffy,” said the actor, correcting himself. “I thought as much. I had observed her watching you these last few minutes.”
The crowd had thinned out to the point where the two men were able to speak in a more normal, conversational tone. Harry was impressed, if a little horrified, at the thick fog of cigarette smoke that remained in their wake. Sir Alec must’ve been possessed of especially sharp vision to pick out Julia Duffy through the crowd and the smoke screen.
“Do you know her?”
“Not personally,” replied Guinness, “but she did interview me a few weeks ago in connection with the film. She struck me as one of the more intelligent and perceptive reporters it’s ever been my displeasure to talk to.” He smiled as he said it.
“Tough interview, eh?”
“Indeed. She was very well informed about the failure of my theater venture, and not at all reluctant to keep asking me the most discomfiting questions about it.”