Скачать или смотреть Frederic Raphael - Getting to know Beetle (33/144)

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Born in 1931 in America, Frederic Raphael is a writer who has written more than 20 novels, five volumes of short stories and biographies. He also won an Oscar for writing the script to "Darling" and wrote the screenplay for the acclaimed film "Eyes Wide Shut". [Listener: Christopher Sykes]

TRANSCRIPT: So anyway, I asked her name and she said it was Betty Glatt and I said, is that all your names? I don't know why I did, but she said, no, my name is Sylvia Betty Glatt, but everyone calls me Betty. And I said, oh really, I said, do you... do you have a nickname at all? So she said, well... actually my brother-in-law does call me something, but promise me you'll never call me that and I'll tell you what it is. And I said, yes of course. And she said, well, he calls me Beetle, because I've got this shiny black hair like a black beetle. So of course I've never called her anything else, that's the way the world goes. But I have called it her [sic] for a very long time.

Anyway, that all worked very well, why she attached herself to me, you would have to ask her. She wasn't particularly concerned about getting married, she wanted to get a job and she was going to get a job, and the fact that I was going to Cambridge didn't seem to faze her. And I was very lucky.

So I left the 'Sunday Express' and we went... we went to theatres, we went to all sorts of things together, we didn't make love a lot because it was very easy... difficult to find a place to do it. Usually in her mother's house, her parents' house on a Saturday afternoon because her father had a shop in Marylebone High Street where... where they were always going and her mother knew better, having two other daughters, than to... than to intrude. Anyway, Beetle is not a person who accepts 'no' if she means 'yes'.