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Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers
Umbraged social comment, that was the thing. Plus the MIND charity shop was three doors down from the Journal. I practically killed myself trying to work out why the incontestable Pulp Fiction was somehow despicably pro-capitalist. Also, you had to write something about guns – God knows what, but something about how a gun was in some way very similar to a camera. I knew it was in that kind of area. And there was nobody I could ask at the screening-rooms, where the atmosphere seemed strangely furtive and even shameful, as if one were in a municipal library where near-derelicts came to get out of the cold, and lovingly fold the newspaper into columns. Always, there would be four or five very old critics no longer attached, as far as one could see, to any particular publication, always in macs, always carrying little briefcases as blazons of busyness, grey and indeterminate as pigeons and vigilant over their rations of the free chocolate digestives, with which the pockets of their macs bulged. The husks of critics.
It was only to visit the screening-rooms that I left Jim's bed. There was the need to earn enough money not to be swallowed by London; and there was my lover telling me to stick a bottle of champagne on his tab at Liberties Bar on the High Street and get my arse round to the twenty-third floor. We didn't tell anyone at the Journal – although Eric, with his tactful omniscience, probably knew – and so we were wrapped up as close together as any adulterers. In bed, Jim always seemed doubly naked. It was the only place where he was divested of politics. Restored to his yellow coat, with a bottle of Teacher's, he was back on: ‘Have you ever noticed that the first screen on a cashpoint is actually pleading with you, saying PLEASE INSERT YOUR CARD? Fucking beseeching you to spend your money?’ And I would attempt to reflect this kind of thing in my reviews of movies like The Little Mermaid.
I came to know the pleasant tattiness of the Soho screening-rooms; the bulk of Philip French of the Observer's trainers, which he wore as though to speed himself breathlessly down Wardour Street from one classic to another. I came to know the little inset ashtrays that still survived like a memory of fifties luxury in the seats' armrests. The yellow cashmere scarf that the Evening Standard's Alexander Walker would wear with its admirable implication that a film deserved the compliment of your having dressed for it. I came to realise that nobody had one of those pens with a light that you always assume movie critics use. And then back through the winter to Jim's flat to wait for him.
He drank all the time. What he was was a ‘high-functioning alcoholic’, as they say. And even this, even the companionable imperfection of sleeping with someone who's a bit of a mess felt like a freedom, a liberation from the tyranny of physical perfection, so that I came to know him more fully than I would have otherwise. I was happy, and I thought Eric was maybe going to keep me.
‘That thing about the First World War you said. About John Reed,’ Jim said to me one night. ‘Do you really think that?’
‘Well, of course. It was all about prophets. People like Lenin, and Trotsky.’
‘Sorry, Lenin?’
‘Well, obviously. But even people like Wilfred Owen, you know. Marcel Duchamp.’
‘Profits, Sally. John Reed said the First World War was about profits’
20
Jim wasn't ugly at all, I discovered. Faces are like poems – the longer they take to puzzle out, the better, and Jim's was ungettable. It grew in power and meaning every day I knew him. How did the eyebrows rhyme with the mouth? How did the nose get to the cheek? Men with incoherent faces very often have beautiful hands (as a rule, the reverse applies too – either the hands or the face must be more beautiful, and you rarely get the two together). And Jim had sensationally beautiful hands. The tiny network of cracks in the webbing between his fingers was always grouted with pale skin-dust. They were highly coloured like the flank of a rainbow trout, pink and blue stippled, and had the unconscious elegance of Donald Sutherland's – the Gold Standard of manual beauty (incoherent face – see?). And the hands did beautiful things. What was sarcasm in Jim's mouth was softened to wit in his fingers. Using all five fingers of his left hand simultaneously as bookmarks for different pages of the paper, he would tear articles out in right angles with his other hand. He would seem to describe a simple expressive gesture in the air, and the four locks on his front door would fall open. Oh, beautiful dexterity! James Dean was a show-off with his hands, which were the most muscular parts of him. That's why people couldn't stop taking photographs of him – he was always grabbing attention by fiddling with some prop (bongos, a recorder, a cape, a camera). He was a prestidigitator. A hand magician – that very boyish accomplishment. The early turning point of Rebel Without a Cause is Dean dexterously snatching Buzz's knife in mid-air and there is always the bit in Giant when he's under pressure to sell the land he's inherited on Rock Hudson's ranch.
He's playing with a rope and leaning back in his chair, not focused on the other people in the room. Playing with the rope implies: I was happiest in the company of myself as a child. He keeps on playing with the rope, and gets up and walks to the door, still playing, then he flicks it and it forms a knot in mid-air. And although it seems a kind of corrupt, even irrelevant thing to do, so obviously a scene-stealing gesture, you can't help but think: Jesus, that must be acting. Or magic. (In the next scene Dean's showing off with his hands again as he sits on the platform of an oil tower, complicatedly putting one hand down between his legs to take all his weight, then transferring the weight to the other hand – like a monkey, little feet, massive sternum, or a gymnast on the rings, with the shakiness of a flower in time lapse. It's not fluent or graceful – it looks like he's demonstrating the resistance of the air, that oppressive weight Dean always seemed to be bowed under. And which his hair strove up against. Hair which looks like a cartoon of dreams of a better world rising from a head.)
21
Even with my new salary of £60 a week, I still felt a bit of an interloper at the screening-rooms. I had never, for instance, been to one of the lunches that were occasionally thrown for visiting directors or stars, until, hurrying out of a screening one day, I overheard someone discussing a lunch that was being held down the road for Oliver Stone to mark the release of Natural Born Killers. Feeling very much that I owed the Journal some news, I went along to try and gatecrash.
The party was being held in a private room upstairs from the restaurant. There was lots of sail-bright white linen and untouched fruit juice in iced jugs. Completely on his own, looking plaintive and even a bit lost, sat Mr Stone, so I went over and sat next to him.
‘What paper are you from?’ he asked, exhaling a plume of blue smoke.
‘The Camden New Journal.’
He nodded. ‘Is that like the Village Voice?’
‘Oh, yes. Very much.’
A tall and extremely beautiful Oriental woman came over and sat next to Stone, with a cigarette which was successfully impersonating her own slenderness.
‘Are you with the film?’ I asked her.
‘No. I'm with Oliver.’
Then Stone began to talk in a very low, slow voice. He didn't really pause at any point so I started to take notes.
‘Who are the real killers anyway? Is it really Mickey and Mallory? Or is it the media?. And who are the media? It's just another a word for us, right? Are we the real killers?’
While Stone talked, I wrote down his thoughts in big swirls and hieroglyphics and loops across pages and pages of notebook. A strange thing had happened. I think I must have been pretending, to both Stone and myself, that I knew shorthand. Which I don't. A couple of times he looked down at my notes and then caught my eye and I returned his puzzled look with a calm one, reassuring him that this was indeed an obscure but ingenious system of European notation.
‘… If you think about it, a camera is just another kind of gun. They're both machines you shoot things with, yeah? What I was trying to create in NBK was a thinking mans action film. It's like the anthropologist meeting the so-called “primitive” tribe. They think that when he takes a photograph, he's actually…’
Before I caught the bus back to Camden, I rang the Journal and told them to pass on the message to Eric that I had an exclusive interview with Oliver Stone. They were absolutely bowled over, and literally held the front page for my return. I would be safe at the paper from now on, I felt. But when I read back over my notes on the bus, it was like trying to decipher the markings on the cave walls at Lascaux. All I had was – well, it wasn't English, anyway, just pages and pages of drawings, which in their own way did seem somehow to capture the essence of Oliver Stone's conversation. You could have exhibited them, maybe, but not published them. They were quite undecodable. If I showed this notebook to Jim or Eric, having promised them an exclusive, I would be finished. Inconsolably, I nibbled the top off one of the mini pizzas I had pilfered from lunch, trying not to think of the disappointment and even contempt with which they would greet this fresh foolishness, and decided to leave the notebook on the bus. But what if they rang the bus company and got the notebook back, with me all the while palely cheering from the sidelines, saying things like: ‘Oh, thank God’? I dumped it in a bin and prepared myself for a performance of which I was incapable. But it turned out that none of this mattered in the slightest because when I got to the office I found that Jim and Eric had finally had the fight about Jim's drinking which I should have realised had been brewing for years, and that Jim had either been sacked or had walked out – no one could tell – and had gone back to Liverpool. Had gone to his flat and cleared out. Had gone. Gone.
Many years later somebody gave me a poem because they knew how touching I found the end of Withnail and I, though they may not have known why.
In Camden rain falls heavily On elephants and wolves and him in The greatcoat. ‘Man delights not me, Nor woman neither. No, nor women Neither.’ Nor even wolves. Stop now: Make that heartbreaking little bow, Reshoulder your rain-loud umbrella And drink the last of Monty's cellar — One can quite reasonably say That you will never play the Dane, Chin chin. So so long wolves, the rain Was artificial anyway. The city's a machine which tries Us; sorts the Withnails from the I's.
22
One day when Nick was thirty-five, some men came along and said, ‘An ogre! Stand there and look ogre-ish while we film you.’ Nick did as he was told. In a very gruff voice he pretended to be a proper ogre like his brothers and uncles were. They made him wear a scuba-diving suit and go under the sea, and people saw the film, which was called The Deep, and said, ‘Oh, look, a real ogre!’ He had thighs like tree trunks, and a neck like a bull, and a chin like a boulder. He was awfully funny and handsome and looked the very picture of a big happy ogre.
Nick pretended to be a big ogre in lots of films, even though he knew the secret that big ogres were really small ogres. Nobody else knew or cared, but to Nick it was very perplexing, because he saw that all big things were really very small inside, and the rest of the space inside big people and big ogres was filled with sadness, dreadful sadness. Which nobody ever talked about, and they certainly wouldn't believe you if you did!
And Nick was the saddest of them all. How could he tell everybody that he wasn't big at all, but very small and filled with sadness, just like they were? He stretched himself up as high as the sun and then toppled over with an enormous crash. His legs and arms turned into stone, and his ribcage too, and his head turned into a great wooden door. He wasn't an ogre any more, he was just a ruin. But when people went in through the wooden door they were amazed at what they saw! On the walls were four great big pictures, of Nick as a painter, and as a horrible policeman, and a frightened lawyer, and, in another one, as an ogre afraid of his father. But the strange thing about all the pictures was that, in them, Nick was very small. Just about the size of your thumb!
‘How sad it is in here,’ the people said, standing inside the ruin of Nick. ‘There certainly is a lot of empty space inside an ogre!’ And then Nick stepped out from behind a candlestick. He was just as big as your thumb. Everybody fell silent, and Nick said, ‘See how small I am! This is what it's really like inside big ogres.’ Everybody was very surprised. So they all went home that night and felt happy because Nick was telling the truth, and the truth always makes people happy. So by telling the truth about ogres, Nick had also got rid of some of the sadness inside the people and everybody was very grateful to him. Nick was the most truthful ogre there had ever been!
And they never forgot those four wonderful pictures. (New York Stories, Q&A, Cape Fear, Affliction.)
23
Jim rang me from Liverpool but whatever had passed between him and Eric had cut deep and he was too proud to come back. ‘It's the strangest thing,’ he said. ‘I keep thinking I see you.’ And it was the strangest thing – I didn't keep thinking I saw him, but I did feel like he was seeing me, or a ghost of me I had shed and seen on to a northbound train at Euston.
London felt empty. Down none of the fifty-five thousand streets of the city was a long yellow coat moving quickly. Somewhere, on one of them, was Wilson, if Wilson was alive. How strange men were, how unanchored, that they contained within them this show-stopping coup de théâtre. They could disappear. It was the male miracle, this neat erasure, this tidy and total cancelling, the negative of giving birth. Men had secret powers. They were private in a way that women weren't. They seemed to know something we didn't about voids. They were amazing.
24
This is what I did. I watched films to cheer me up when love had made me unhappy. The oldest problem in the world and the twentieth century's greatest solution to it. Plus this was my job, right? Because Eric had actually run my Oliver Stone interview with its two extremely approximate quotes – the only thing I could accurately remember Stone saying was ‘Is the Camden New Journal like the Village Voice?’ – I'd been given a slot on Saturdays at a local radio station filling in holes in the programming with film reviews. It seemed to get easier the more I steered clear of relating everything to Engels. Another ten pounds. I was closing in on the Equity minimum wage.
I knuckled down. I tapped the fan and it opened. Not directors – who the hell were they? – but actors. Whereas some people might see, say, Women in Love and then go on to The Devils because they're interested in Ken Russell, I would see Women in Love for Alan Bates, and then chase after him in Britannia Hospital, bump into Malcolm McDowell there and follow him into If and O, Lucky Man! and then back to Bates in In Celebration, and without even realising it I would have seen most of the cream of Lindsay Anderson. Had you asked me if I'd ever seen any Godard, I'd have said, ‘Oh, no no no!’, even though I'd seen Breathless, Pierrot le Fou and Une Femme est Une Femme during a Belmondo binge and followed him to Is Paris Burning? where I recognised Glenn Ford among the ruins and hitched myself to him through Gilda and The Courtship of Eddie's Father by Vicente Minnelli and some rather duff westerns to The Big Heat where Lee Marvin throws boiling coffee over Gloria Grahame, and then careered after Marvin in everything (he was always brilliant) until we (Lee and I) tracked down the erotically brainy-looking John Cassavetes in The Killers, which got me to Rosemary's Baby – Christ, he's good in that – and a film called Brass Target which had good old George Kennedy in it playing Patton, who in Cool Hand Luke I sort of preferred to Newman and then in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot I even preferred to Clint, meaning that I could no longer avoid The Dirty Dozen, what with him, Marvin, Cassavetes, Donald Sutherland and Robert Ryan, who was so fantastic in Bad Day at Black Rock (with Marvin again!) that I went on a Ryan safari, stalking the wounded beast through Billy Budd, The Set-Up, Men in War and Crossfire, where the mighty Mitchum loomed, and that was me gone, an acolyte in the Mitchum temple, where one day (Cape Fear) I formed an attachment to a mid-ranking avuncular type I saw around a lot, Martin Balsam, that virtuoso of shirtsleeves, who has in fact appeared in every film ever made apart from Trainspotting and Raise the Red Lantern. Balsam's forearms were particularly compelling in All the President's Men (which I can never understand and is anyway not all that good but nonetheless my favourite movie of all time), wherein Hal Holbrook, playing Deep Throat, stank so much of cigarettes that I became passively addicted to him (even his hair looks emphysemic) and got out Capricorn One for another fix – though I had Jeff Bridges by now to take care of and Hoffman and Redford and Robards and Harry Dean Stanton and Terence Stamp from Billy Budd and Gregory Peck, obviously, and Jack Palance who was in Second Chance with Mitchum – and who do you think was running around in Capricorn One, in a flapping tie, but Elliot Gould, trying to rescue James Brolin, who at one point uses his medallion to break out of his prison, an action which perfectly describes Brolin's entire career. (In the ruinously expensive illustrated version of this book, the ‘Connoisseur's Edition’, there will be a full colour fold-out wall chart detailing these connections more lucidly.) It was always the actors. You could track actors through the cities of their films, and they would never disappear.
The best example of how my actor tracking worked is Woody Allen. I developed an enormous crush on Tony Roberts (oh, Tony Roberts!), Allen's microphone-haired sidekick in Annie Hall, and ignored Manhattan (for years) in favour of the Roberts flicks – Radio Days, Play It Again, Sam, Stardust Memories (great thighs, Tony Roberts) and Hannah and her Sisters, in which I saw, sort of for the first time, Max von Sydow (‘Haf you been kissed tonight? You can't fool me, Lee, I'm too smart!’), whom I hunted down through Winter Light, Wild Strawberries, Three Days of the Condor and The Seventh Seal, during which I tumbled head over heels for the acrobat played by a man called Nils Poppe. Since I couldn't find Poppe in any more Bergman films, I callously discarded the great Swede and sought out Tony Roberts again, who I mistakenly thought had a part in Allen's September (even better than Gene Kelly's thighs in a way – he's taller) in which I saw Sam Waterston, who I went on to fancy even more in Capricorn One of course and even more, so meticulous and lonely-seeming, in The Killing Fields, which had the effect, I remember, of splitting me in two directions – towards Malkovich and also towards Patrick Malahide, who happened to be on television at the time as Casaubon in Middlemarch, in fact it was on tonight, oh, good!
In short, I didn't get out of the house much. I was promiscuous. The actors just kept on coming, and it's not like when an artist rearranges your head leaving no room for others and you go into a Dylan phase or a Ted Hughes zone or a Godard jag. It's a broad church, the church of actors. The Church of the Beautiful Strangers. It's always got on my nerves, the affected way with which some people try to lay claim to a kind of screen monogamy – ‘I'm a Monica Vitti man.’ Oh, you liar! Monica Vitti and not Claudia Cardinale? Not Sophia Loren? Such fidelity! ‘For me it was only ever Gary Cooper.’ What and not Gregory Peck? Ooh, you lying cow! Watching movies simply is a promiscuous experience. The voracity it breeds! That quantity of quiddity compressed and quickened and sent at you! It's a little bit mad, isn't it, to hold a faithful flame for the one you've picked, when no such choice is required of you? The sane response to a rainbow is not to pick your favourite colour. And it did make me happy. If you'd have seen how happy I was, going through my stack of Lee J. Cobb videos like so many digestives, you'd have called me sad. But I really was sad. Because I really was happy.
25
Perhaps it was the result of a slight difficulty in adjusting from one reality to another, but when one Saturday I saw one of the production assistants at the radio station reveal a Quaid-cobbled stomach as he changed his shirt, I determined to doorstep him in an effectively cinematic fashion, which is to say like Sean Young in No Way Out or Ellen Barkin in Sea of Love, that is, in nothing but a fake fur coat and a pair of heels, thinking keep it snappy, keep it flirty, keep it The Big Easy, as I rode the tube to his flat on the Edgware Road inside which Tom, the Quaid-cobbled production assistant, asked me why I had such a guilty look on my face, to which I had no reply other than to attempt to shrug the coat to the floor, struggling with the buttons in an un-Sean Youngian fluster which nonetheless carried enough weight of intent to make him, maladroit himself, lurch towards me and sort of accidentally knock me to the floor, where, after rather a while of polite tussling, he scrabbled for a condom and put it on, tentatively, like he was potting a cactus, and, once inside me, became oddly static, allowing me to observe his beautiful silky hair (of a paler, more delicate red than Jim's, hard to describe) and wonder, with steadily diminishing enthusiasm, whether he were doing some sort of tantric sex on me, a semi-debacle which I amended a week later with a twenty-year-old trainee chef who had curls like James Frain and who, to my horror, turned out to be fifteen in the morning (that skin, I knew it!), an offence which I assume, perhaps overconfidently, the police will regard as having happened a long time ago etc. etc. should they ever read this or subpoena my diary of the time, which records that I attempted to remedy, and then – what do you know – remedied the child-chef-non-semi-debacle over the following few days with several other legal (take note, police!) men, the last of whom was an ethical banker with a garland of rose-tattoos around his neck, just low enough to be invisible under a T-shirt, with whom I enjoyed a lovely fortnight before his tetchy tutting at Walter Matthau's casual, rather gentle sexism in The Odd Couple drove a wedge between us, leaving me with nothing to show from the fling except an American acquaintance of his called Ilana, from New Jersey, a chestnut-bright young woman simultaneously hard and soft like all the great movie stars, with whom I felt I was going to be permanent friends, and who in fact set me up with a Canadian who lived alone, bald as Kurtz, in a condemned house on Plimsoll Road in Arsenal which he had decorated with the most staggering murals of Ganesh and Shiva and Vishnu and other gods whose names he must have told me but I have since forgotten, and who comforted me the day I was diagnosed with cervical cancer by making me watch In the Heat of the Night, which did indeed help keep my spirits up until I received a call from the hospital two days later informing me that they had mixed up their smear tests and I wasn't going to die after all – a relief which had the paradoxical effect of somehow sundering me from the Canadian and propelling me into a, no doubt, easily explicable series of one-night stands over the next ten days, as England rolled past their opponents in the European Championships on a growing wave of belief that this time, finally, they were going to prevail, and I found myself considering the question of promiscuity and wondering about the motives of the promiscuous, maybe 50 per cent of whom are Don Juans, mere number-crunchers, and maybe two-thirds of whom are sex-addicts and maybe nine-tenths of whom are frightened of commitment, and for maybe four-fifths of whom promiscuity is an index of their unhappiness, and wondering what proportion simply liked a lot of people, could simply be marked down as slow learners, could be thought of as just needing lots of lovers, lots of lessons, before they understood about their own capacity to absorb other people, such as the apple-picker from Somerset whom I attempted to console after Gazza had stretched to make that Sistine Chapel contact with the ball in front of the gaping German goal (which he would never, never do, freeze-framed forever in memory a millimetre from redemption) and who had been so thoroughly consoled he broke, that very night, into his estranged father's house in Greenwich where we lived an idyllic life for three weeks before the police, called by a neighbour, arrested us, sending me on my way that afternoon with no charge against my name but with a note from the apple-picker in my hand which read, ‘Good luck with everything and, well, just don't put people off by making too great a display of yourself and by overdoing things’ which, although with hindsight I can see that he was on to something, royally pissed me off at the time: so much so that it was rather self-consciously in defiance of this advice that I went out and overdid things a bit, thinking it's not me that's doing this, it's the movies as I learned about the absolutely crucial importance of beryllium to the Russian economy, and what it was that banks did exactly in the bed of a precious metals dealer, and just how hard it was to be an amateur boxer in London if you were from Paris, and that blue Y-fronts are acceptable underwear among Brazilians, and that being an officer in the British Army does not preclude a high intelligence, and even softness, and that ‘good in bed’ is pretty much a meaningless and vicious term imposed upon life by a public discourse that revels in encouraging neurosis, and that the anxiety I felt in the company of a dimple-chinned Sinn Fein man (whose smoke-and-mirrors face seemed to incarnate all the shape-shifting of his political life) with whom I conducted a stop-start affair at this time was different from the kind of nervousness I had felt around Jim, because Jim's violence was social and unconcealed whereas the Sinn Fein man's was something altogether more unreadable, so that I felt, when I was with him, like William Hurt faced with the opaque obelisk of Lee Marvin in Gorky Park, to the extent that even though I idolised him, I would come over with a fit of the vapours like Michelle Pfeiffer's Madame de Tourvel in Dangerous Liaisons whenever he undressed me, causing the affair to fizzle out, and I thought, about that time, how incorrect it was that the promiscuous should be thought of as jaded where they were really innocent, that they were not so much fools slow to understand the fact that human variety is far from infinite, that the exploration should be in oneself rather than of others, but a different kind of fool, happy in the illusion that human variety was infinite – having said all of which, and despite the fact that I was hardly Catherine M. (and doubtless sixteen-year-old readers will at this point be asking themselves, ‘Where's this promiscuous patch she keeps talking about?’), I must have been feeling a slight lesion of identity, a slight blurring of definition, a slightly stretched kind of feeling, because when a man with curly hair and a long nose asked me who I was one night in a bar, I surprised myself by saying, and almost meaning, ‘Oh, just some girl.’