Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers

On Fridays when the big hitters rolled up, everyone was expected to contribute. Jim, whose hair seen closer up now seemed the colour of curry powder, would dazzle the room while Eric listened through the frosted glass to his protégé, too knowledgeable and wise to condescend to mere pyrotechnics. These were terribly detailed, recondite conversations as abstruse as the discussions on scripture during which I had been equally silent throughout my childhood. There was still the vexed issue of the Twentieth Party Congress. There was serious present business to do with Central America. There was the question of getting Stalin's twenty million victims down to something more manageable, like twelve million. There was always 1917 and Trotsky. While Jim waltzed through the upper echelons of theory and practice, I kept my head down and watched his elegant freckled fingers draw their merciless distinctions. Only once did I ever score a success, when the subject had moved to the First World War.

‘I don't know, but John Reed always seemed right to me,’ I said. ‘The First World War was about prophets.’

Jim, who was not to know that I was only aware of this because I was a fan of Reds, flashed me a vulpine grin which sent me floating up Parkway that evening eight feet off the ground. I had won a smile from a man who knew how to repair the flaws in dialectical materialism.

12

Not Reds for Warren Beatty – what kind of book do you think this is? For Jack Nicholson! Warren Beatty … The man with the loveliest, slowest pulse in cinema versus an actor who is forever trying to hoodwink you that his heartbeat is faster than it actually is. The guy who always acts less handsome than he is versus the preener: you're always mentally cleaning up Nicholson's face and mentally trying to ruffle Beatty's. The vulnerable versus the unhurtable. The living versus the dead. Nicholson is the greatest actor since, let's say, the time between the Beatles' ninth LP and the birth of Zinedine Zidane, whose work is founded on a sense of humour. They're not terribly funny, those geniuses whose names end in ‘o’, are they? Here are ten more words to kill any smile – Sean Penn, Kevin Spacey, Dustin Hoffman, Edward Norton, Gary Oldman. Serious business, great acting. Nicholson plays a small role in Reds as the playwright Eugene O'Neill being manipulated by Beatty's lover Diane Keaton into thinking he's seducing her. It's all rather sad and Chekhovian. She tells him that Beatty has gone away, leaving her to get on with her own things here in this beach house on Long Island.

‘What are they?’ he asks.

‘What?’ says Keaton.

‘The things that you have. That are yours. What are they?’

– this in his Nicholsonian way, turning over every word, holding it up to the light, inspecting it, and then judiciously pondering whether to place it, with great delicacy, in the world or just to, what the hell, smash it.

‘If you were mine,’ he goes on, ‘it would just be you and me. And it would feel a lot more like love than being left alone with your work.’

By this time you're pretty much rolling around on the floor clutching your ribs and screaming stop! stop! though there is nothing ostensibly there in his delivery except O'Neill's love, his courage in declaring himself, and the glimmer of an accusation against Keaton's way of life with Beatty.

But you're killing yourself, because everything Nicholson says is given its sense by how near or how far it is from the pure delight that makes up his soul. Not sniggering mischief, as people always say of him – delight. It's what makes him so tragicomic. Nothing he says isn't a fuse burning towards some dynamite-pile of hilarity. And he makes brilliant use of its absence, sparingly, and devastatingly, like in the two scenes in Five Easy Pieces (his best film) when he walks out on Karen Black. You think: My God, where's it gone? He reminds you of just how much you've got to lose, of how high the stakes are. Everything he does in his early films is to do with the frustration of this delight. You've got to be a comedian to be a tragicomedian. He'd be brilliant in Chekhov. Brilliant as Astrov in Uncle Vanya, the still-not-disillusioned doctor not a million miles from his not-quite-yet-disillusioned pianist in Five Easy Pieces.

It's so close, this delight. All you have to do is laugh and the world will be full of it. And in his early films Nicholson keeps trying to tickle the world and failing to make it laugh. Meanwhile, we're laughing our heads off. Even to know that delight, in a perfect world, would be the proper response to life is a simplicity beyond most of us. It's not something that any of those other great actors mentioned above seem to have worked out. Do you know how rare this is? This innocence? Why you keep thinking Jack is a boy? It makes him one in a million. It makes him able to tell the story of the loss of innocence which nobody, only great artists, can do. What an absolute privilege to watch the young Jack liven up Easy Rider (he's the only utopian in it!) and talk you through the fall in Five Easy Pieces and tell you what you're leaving behind in The Last Detail. Amazing, amazing. It's the heart of Nicholson – that his essential self remembers innocence, remembers, no matter how scuffed, a prelapsarian world. And that's why the revered and lauded three-time Oscar winner is very, very underrated. Yes, you heard me! Jack Nicholson is underrated.

13

10 October 1993

The elephants, who have not

been getting on with the new

rhino, slept through the exhibition

which was being held in

the elephant house at the zoo last

night (Monday) by an Israeli

artist who arrived in the country

only yesterday (Monday) before

returning to Tel Aviv tomorrow

(Wednesday).

‘No wonder you failed your fucking degree,’ Jim said. ‘Nobody cares when the artist is going back or what the rhino thinks. You want to know who was there and how long it's on for. See?’

‘Got it. Except – what's wrong with the rhino exactly?’ I wanted to keep him talking.

‘Even if the rhino's doing the elephant's wife, we don't want to read about it. That's not the fucking story. You've got to find the story.’

But I never could – two-hundred-word pieces unstoppably ballooned, like Rufus Sewell, into vast paunchy monsters, and then were brutally slimmed down again (like Rufus Sewell) by brisk sub-editors. And the Journal, for all its apparent slapdashness, was a very serious little operation, with a sinecure on the Local Newspaper of the Year Award. Eric knew what he was doing, always running the necessary campaigns and magnificently inclusive little obituaries of local burglars and tramps. So I was aware that it was something of a test when he sent me to talk to a woman who was staging a protest in Arlington Road about the poll tax. It was an important story and I had a sense that I might actually be sacked, and never see Jim again, if I couldn't find it.

‘Where the fuck have you been?’ said Jim when I returned five hours later.

‘I think Mrs Norman's a bit paranoid,’ I said. ‘She thinks the FBI are watching her. But – it's actually quite interesting. There were two guys in a dark car watching the house the whole time I was there. Wearing ties. In this weather? It does seem a little strange. And get this – she keeps getting letters from the library asking her to return a book on J. Edgar Hoover. But she never took it out. So I wrote down the licence number in case you want to follow it up.’

I was demoted to theatre reviews.

14

‘What's the date, the first?’

‘Look at the paper. Oh, no, wait, of course it's the first – it was Halloween last night. What's the matter?’

‘River Phoenix is dead. It looks like an overdose.’

‘Poor kid. Deliberate or accidental? Bet it was coke. Coke and booze. Bet it's a John Bonham. What's the matter with you?’

What's the matter with me? Nothing. There was nothing to show that he was ever going to be great. In fact, you could pretty much guarantee that he wouldn't have been. But he wasn't Andrew McCarthy Jnr, or Ralph Macchio, or C. Thomas Howell either. He wasn't Björn Andrésen, the vision from Death in Venice, who was never going to be an actor. On the other hand, he wasn't Jean-Pierre Léaud. But he broke your heart. He was weak and soft and seemingly always in tears. In Running on Empty, a pretty good film which he made at the age of seventeen in 1988, he was the sort of teen dream that sends girls sobbing to their bedrooms, and yet there was nothing confected about him. He plays the son of parents on the run from the FBI, so he has to keep moving from town to town, leaving his friends and first girlfriends behind. It's an amazingly immature performance for one of his age, as they never say. It's so not mature. It's brilliant. When my little sister watched Titanic she was inconsolable for weeks. ‘There's no one like Jack!’ she would wail and I'd think yeah, kid, that's right. There is no one like Jack. They just made him up for money. But there is someone like River Phoenix, sweetheart. Phoenix is an open wound in Running on Empty, with clumsy hands and an uneasiness with his own new beauty (he'd been a chubby kid – Stand By Me), and a bloom of puberty still on his cheekbones. Large stretches of his performance look like perfect honesty, too natural to call naturalism. He was Romeo, and no one can ever get Romeo right, because by the time you've cast him the actor's got too old. Running on Empty isn't a good performance by an unfortunately doomed actor. It's a true moment caught in time. The moment when you feel more than you ever have or ever will again: the Romeo moment. There he was. And you can't pay an actor a higher compliment than that. He broke your heart. And the date was 31st October 1993.

15

On Mondays he would go down to the police station and then the Princess Louise, coming back late and maybe even sleeping in the office. On Tuesdays he would usually go down to Paddington Green CID to get stories there and spend the evening at a public meeting. On Wednesdays he was busy putting the paper to bed. Thursdays and Fridays – that was my chance. The long, long weekends he disappeared. If you'd have been there, you'd have wanted to be his friend or his lover, if only to turn his fire outwards from you. Jim was the first principled man I had ever met, my father apart, sardonic and fearless like Sydney Carton. He was the first man I had ever met. But I hardly ever saw him now, and had no real reasons to engage him in conversation. So I became more besotted. The sentence ‘Jim's putting the paper to bed’ could incapacitate me for an hour. Yet he was as oblivious of me as an actor on a screen, and one always falls for those who cannot return your gaze, the blithe, the unaware, the one across the lawn.

In the single-figure audiences at the pub theatres where I was sent to review plays and where the actors could detect my gaze, I yearned for Jim and for the remove of the big screen, where actors moved in innocence of my eyes. My first plan was to impress him with the commitment of my reviews. I found out a lot of statistics and waved them at him like breasts at the pub on Thursday.

‘Did you know that there are 38,000 members of Equity, and at any one time only 13,400 are actually in work? It's shocking.’

‘In what way shocking?’

‘It's union-bashing, isn't it? Listen, these are working people. If there are fifty fringe theatres in London and they've got a cast of, let's say, an average of six per play, then that's, uh, 300 people, and if the Equity minimum is £85 a week, then that's 300 people living on a pittance. Eighty-five pounds a week!’

‘That's more than twice what you earn, love.’

My other plan was simply to write such astonishingly unforgettable reviews – reviews you could poke your eye out on – that notice would simply have to be paid. They were skull-crackingly bad. But they looked quite good. About a monologue on Virginia Woolf I wrote: ‘“I am mad! I hear voices! Not only that, I write them down!” That is, I suggest, what the character wanted to say. But where in all of this is our delicious wine? Our great little knitter?’ The worse the plays the more free I felt to woo Jim with this unique voice. And so it became a kind of competition. The more terrible the plays were the more terrible the reviews were. It was a contest of terribility. I wafted my pen around like Isadora Duncan, desperate for a glance from him. And one day he did call me over.

‘Listen, Sally. You've got to stop writing these reviews or Eric's going to sack you. And if he does that, you're fucked.’

I could feel the wind from Naked tugging at me, trying to tear me off London and suck me up the Archway Road towards the motorway and the oubliettes of the North. I also thought: He's noticed me. I wanted him. I even want him now, as I write, a painful need, never since matched, to touch him, though he was like a jagged piece of corrugated iron which would cut you no matter how you held it.

16

Glyn Maxwell has written some fine poetry and some bewilderingly wonky plays, but when Jim found out that there would be free drinks after a production of a new Maxwell play at the Battersea Arts Centre he decided to tag along. As we were leaving the paper an ad-boy laughed at the idea of Battersea.

‘Your drinking's changed, mate,’ he said to Jim.

‘It's not my drinking that's changed. It's your non-drinking. You might have stopped; I'm just carrying on as normal.’

At the interval Jim said he was going to leave and I tailed after him to the box office where he was demanding his money back and the girl was refusing to give the refund. He loomed over her like one of the inquisitors in Dreyer's film of Joan of Arc.

‘I can only refund you if you found it offensive in some way,’ she said.

‘I found it offensive in every way. It was shit.’

‘I can't refund you for that. Did you think it was sexist?’

‘No, it was just fucking terrible, and I'm going now and I would like my money back.’

‘Did you think it demeaned any minority group?’ the girl said. She was trying to open a pathway to a compromise. ‘Did it offend you racially?’

‘It offended the entire fucking human race. Is that good enough?’

Jim's aggressiveness felt to me like something from an earlier time, when people were rougher and less touchy, when less offence was taken and given, when people were less proud of the masks that they wore. It seemed that Jim's aggressiveness almost relieved him of the burden of goodness – it was his good manners, doing you the courtesy of withholding nothing. Or perhaps I was making excuses for him. As he sailed down Lavender Hill in his yellow coat, leaving his disdained wake behind him, I hurried after, raising my voice to ask if this behaviour usually got him anywhere with women.

‘Yeah, lots – some fantastic ones, actually. Sometimes they let me fuck them. But usually they just want to tell me about their suicide attempts.’

What a horrible man! He crouched down to do up a shoelace and, since he was briefly my height, with his tongue half out of his mouth in a bite of concentration, I stepped forward and put my mouth around it.

17

And this was brave. This was acting. It sometimes seems as if a romantic history is the history of the removal of the need for courage. As you get older, you only need it for leaving. And even the braver of us – among whom I do not number myself – only use our courage two or three times in a life. It takes too much out of you, until you don't have enough to lose really to call it courage any more rather than heedlessness. So I stepped forward and lost my courage virginity. I would have two or three more to lose only. He reorganised his mouth and kissed me back as he straightened up.

And when we went back to his flat at the top of a tower block by Mornington Crescent, I was bouncing around like Zebedee, not only in the delight of possession but in the joy of having created it all myself. I did this! I thought as his puritanical flat revealed itself to me. I made this!, and this, and this hair, really the colour of rust right up close, and the taste of it too, and these collarbones and these elbows, and these ribs, and these grooves between his belly and his hip-bones, and even these jokes he's cracking causing me to look momentarily up, and these thighs and long shins – all of it magicked up by my courage. Anything I did, like this, and this, and that, and that again, I had brought into being!

Love runs through you and uses you as a device to get what it wants, and when you're in love you're simply keeping pace with it for a moment, briefly allowed to lope along at the front where everything that comes into view is new.

18

Let's get something straight. The most embarrassing film to like, if you're English, is Withnail and I, Bruce Robinson's failed-actor comedy with Richard E. Grant and Paul McGann. Even the BFI Classic on Withnail begins with much blushing and a statement that to admit to a liking for the film is to declare oneself unfit for adult company. Let's get another thing straight. If Kind Hearts and Coronets is not the funniest British film ever made, it's Withnail. If Kes is not the most touching British film ever made, it's Withnail. No film at all is as loved as Withnail, and if your hatred of students extends to dismissing that love then you're probably someone whose response to films stops at something like ‘intense admiration’. In fact, bugger Kind Hearts and Coronets, it is the funniest film in English. It's also a better film about the sixties than something like Blow-Up and, very indirectly (it's a subtle movie), an exceptional film about homosexuality.

The model for Withnail was a failed actor called Vivian MacKerrell whom Robinson knew. But Robinson is a failed actor too. He had parts in Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet and other bits and pieces before turning up, extraordinarily handsome, as the object of Isabelle Adjani's amour fou in Truffaut's The Story of Adele H. (great movie!). He's pretty good. He's really very good. All he gets to do is simply be there while Adjani's wave breaks over him. You'd have to see it, if you haven't already. But after that Robinson's phone wouldn't ring. So he became a writer and did The Killing Fields before Withnail and directing. Then he sort of failed as a director. He continues to sort of fail as a writer. Is there any profession in the world with as high a rate of failure as acting? As the movies as a whole? This is a book about successes (apart from me, obviously) and all the actors I mention share a common trait, because being successful is a trait – they're all one kind of person, whereas partial success or failure is various.

Why not Bruce Robinson? He had a beautiful wide mouth wittily ironised by the quotation-mark lines around it, enormous cool, even greater charisma, talent (see Adele H.), brains, training (RADA), star quality (if you'll excuse the cobwebs on those words), and he talked, well, the guy talked and still talks like the greatest talker in the English language.

‘Vivian was too smart to get a job – an intellectual, erudite man. He'd go to an audition to play a priest, read up all this cackle of theological bollocks and then say, “It's very strange you should be considering me for this part because before I became an actor I was considering the priesthood.” And they knew it was nonsense, so he'd never get the job.’

Just one of the quieter bits from a twenty-page interview he did in 1995. Not a great story, but what is that word ‘cackle’?

Another bit, reluctantly endorsing capital punishment for rapists of children:

‘Dead him, is my view.’

Concerning a Spielberg project about a psychic woman and a child killer, which never got off the ground:

‘It's as black as your hat. This woman bounces off the lino of hell.’

The lino of hell? ‘Black as your hat’ I'm pretty sure is a phrase. But nobody uses it any more. It's remembered or rescued language. What a great phrase anyway, black as your hat – I hope it comes back. But ‘the lino of hell’? ‘Dead him’? A ‘cackle’ of something? You know who he reminds me of? William Shakespeare, that's who. That's what Shakespeare used to do instinctively, that black as a hat, lino of hell thing. He'd make something up (‘the multitudinous seas incarnadine’) and then let the groundlings know what he meant (‘making the green one red’).

I love Bruce Robinson, and all this is merely to remind you of what a great guy he is, this failed actor. Because it's not just the RADA boys who ‘only’ make a dozen films who are failed actors. It's not just the RADA boys who make no films at all who are failed actors. It's not just the boys who didn't get into RADA but still managed a lot of acting who are failed actors. It's not just the boys who were bloody good in the school play but didn't bother taking it any further who are failed actors. It's not even the boys who were OK in the school play but didn't bother taking it any further who are failed actors (like me). It's the boys, that is to say pretty much everyone in the world, who stand in front of the mirror one day, just once, casually, and think shame I'm no actor. They're the failed actors too. Most of this planet consists of failed actors.

So the parting scene at the end of Withnail and I, with its dramatisation of the sorting of the successful from the failed, I find as universal as Rick and Ilsa on the tarmac in Casablanca. The ‘I’ character is moving on, off to Manchester to play the lead in Journey's End. Withnail wants to walk him through Regent's Park to Euston, but it's raining cats and dogs and ‘I’ would rather have a quick clean break. He refuses the wine which Withnail presses on him and asks him to go back, and Withnail, perhaps realising for the first time that he will never play Hamlet (one of the film's motifs), turns to the wolves of the zoo, those same wolves which gave such comfort to Ted Hughes and his children after their mother killed herself, and gives them ‘I have of late, but wherefore I know not …’ Then he turns back through the rain towards Camden, where, if he looked to the right he'd see Park Crescent, where Robert Donat left his milkman's cart in The Thirty-Nine Steps, and if he turned his head further he'd see the cul-de-sac of St Andrew's Place where Glenda Jackson gave Salome's Last Dance for Ken Russell. And then he'd walk past Chester Terrace where Bette Davis scared the kids in The Nanny and down which Robert Redford would drive in Spy Game: all the successful actors. I is a success. I is saved. I wanted to be I, but Jim was I, I thought.

19

Jeff Sawtell, the film critic of the Journal, was so much of a communist that he wore navy blue Cultural Revolution pyjamas all year round, adding only a scarf in winter. ‘If you like your brew in a mug,’ he said to my excited inquiry about Four Weddings and a Funeral, ‘then it won't be your cup of tea.’ One got the impression that Jeff thought Jean-Luc Godard was a lickspittle bourgeois dog. A liver disease was making him progressively weaker, however, and Eric had nowhere else to turn but to me. I was thrilled, a thrill vitiated only by the lingering suspicion I had learned reading Jeff that movie reviewing was a branch of Marxist socio-economic theory.

‘Will this do?’ I asked Jim, showing him my first ever review, of a Richard Gere movie called Mr Jones.

It read:

The screen persists in portraying the mentally ill as remarkably gifted on the side. Not only is Mr Jones a virtuoso pianist, he is also a whizzkid mathematician and mind-reader. This kind of publicity does mental health organizations like MIND no good whatsoever.