And then, when “Carwash” began to play, Saint Laurent and Nureyev jumped up and came hand in hand onto the dance floor. They started jiving together, as I wiggled my way towards them and danced for five ecstatic minutes by their side. When the backing girls sang “Toot toot beep beep” they raised their hands and wagged their fingers in unison. Nureyev was wearing thigh-length boots and YSL was in black tie. The next time the chorus came around I joined in too and wagged my finger at Nureyev who took my hand and twirled me round and round. The flashing neon, the mirrored walls and the most famous ballet dancer in the world spiralled around me for what seemed like an eternity.
After that, I spent nearly every night at Le Sept, and although I never made friends with anybody famous (though not for lack of trying) I did meet some weird freaks along the way. One was a tall thin Vietnamese boy called Kim. He was very quiet, always dancing, and when he laughed he covered his mouth with his hand. Like me, he was new to France, having escaped Saigon in ‘75 with his family. His father had been shot dead by the communists, and in desperation his mother had married a surly colonial French colonel who got them out and with whom they now lived in a kind of slavery. Kim and I had rebellion in common, although his would go far further than mine. (We had no idea that we were at the beginning of a long journey together that would end in his death twenty years later, but at that time ours was an unremarkable friendship, and one I would never have remembered but for that image of Kim laughing, one of those little bookmarks one makes in the subconscious, for no particular reason. Years after, almost unrecognisable to ourselves and to each other, another hand on a different mouth rang a strange faraway bell, and the book fell open at the same page.)
Needless to say I didn’t learn a word of French in the din of Le Sept, nor in my bed every day till the early afternoon, nor in life class, and only rudimentary sex French in the Bois. But I lived happily speaking the language of love: an intense love for the city, and being a foreigner there; for sex, for religion, even for the Feuillattes. Paris was at its breathtaking best at the end of the seventies, a crumbling post-war romantic thriller full of mystery and intrigue. Behind the arched green doors onto the streets lay a thousand hidden universes, each with their own smells and sounds. In the mornings these doors were briefly thrown open to the world as the concierges swept the courtyards and watered the rows of potted geraniums. Their high-pitched voices, the sounds of their vacuum cleaners, and Johnny Halliday on their radios were the morning trio that bounced off the walls and awoke you to a stranger’s embrace in an unknown bed. Being from nowhere, with no place to go, you drifted back into a dreamless sleep pressed against the warm morning body of another, who like you was asking no questions, and were only awoken again by the tomb-like afternoon silence and the solitary click of the buzzer on that big green door that beckoned you back out into the Parisian jungle. And when you hit the street, and everyone was returning from the day’s work, you never felt more alive. Everything was beautiful: the peeling white shutters in the late afternoon sun; the smell of the drains; the little tied parcels of fitted carpet guiding the gushing water down the street.
But it was all about to change. Chirac was soon to be mayor, and he had already ripped out one of the oldest parts of the city, Les Halles. In its place, that winter of 1976, was a gigantic hole, like a huge grave. Not only was the old medieval city to be buried in it, but so also were most of the people I was dancing with that winter. When it was finally flattened over, a whole way of life had been flattened as well.
Christmas approached, and it was time to leave. Delphine gave me a card with a picture of herself as a curly-haired little boy. I sat with her one last afternoon in the truck. It began to rain. It streamed down the windows and beat on the roof. Delphine drifted off. She answered my questions in a dreamy voice with half-opened eyes. She only moved to cough or scratch. I was planning to come back in February, so it wasn’t one of those sad goodbyes. In fact we never said goodbye at all. The conversation petered out; I removed a cigarette from her half-open mouth. She let out a grateful snore of acknowledgement and I gently let myself out into the rain. I never saw her again.
She was shot by a farmer in Normandy. On a whim she decided to get out of Paris and had taken the camion to a village near the coast. Her presence was not appreciated by the local agricultural community, and one morning she was found lying in the truck, riddled this time not with cigarette burns but with bullets from a shotgun.
Madame Feuillatte dropped me back at the station and kissed me on both cheeks. As she turned to go, I heard a familiar voice behind me.
“Ah, there you are, dearest boy. Everything went according to plan, I trust. Tu parles couramment français, maintenant?” Vernon Dobtcheff appeared as if he had been in the other room. “What a coincidence, eh?” he said with a wicked grin.
“Yes, but what happened to you?” I asked, still slightly peeved to have been left so abruptly three months earlier.
“Ah,” replied Vernon with a twinkle. “Places to go. People to see. Actually, I had to collect some laundry before catching the train to Prague. And now, dear boy, we should hurry. That is, if you are coming home?”
“I don’t really want to,” I replied. “I want to stay here.”
“Well, you’re not. Come on, we don’t want to miss our train, do we?” And so Vernon delivered me back to London.
I forgot all about him until five years later. Ian McKellen brought him to see a play I was in at the Greenwich Theatre in London. It was only then that I learnt who he really was. “This is Vernon Dobtcheff,” said Ian. “He is famous in the theatre.”
“Oh, don’t worry, Ian,” breezed Vernon with a lascivious wink. “No need to introduce. Rupert and I go back a long way.”
Ian raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips. “You’re a sly old thing, aren’t you?” he said later and then I knew. I was in.
CHAPTER 8
Drama School
There is a grim area of London called Swiss Cottage. In the late seventies it was a kind of dividing line between the centre of the city and its surrounding suburbs. Now it is more or less part of the West End. Its high street is the Finchley Road, which at some point became the main exit from the city to the north, and so Swiss Cottage was cut in half by two dangerous torrents of traffic that left a marooned island in the middle, which was occupied by the Swiss Cottage pub, a rambling mock chalet complete with window boxes, gingham curtains, oak beams and fake chimneys, a gloomy landmark for Londoners returning from the weekend. Its twinkly lamps of fake cheer rise above the flow of tail lights on a Sunday night, and remind one of empty flats, lonely old ladies and imminent death.
On either bank of the constant stream of traffic, poor split Swiss Cottage rose and fell in waves of studios and rooming houses. There was a feeling of collapse on those wide avenues of large ugly houses. It was a land of broken dreams, inhabited by Jewish immigrants from Austria and Poland. They were people who had lost everything; first-hand experience of war was still present on their faces, etched in a kind of frozen horror. They met in the Cosmo coffee shop on Finchley Road and always came to the shows at the drama school.
The Central School of Speech and Drama stood back from the Finchley Road and from the world itself. It was a white building with blue doors; its windows were dark and empty. It might have been the headquarters of a spiritualist society, were it not for the odd show song jangling from a half-tuned piano in an upper room, or the disembodied voice of a dance teacher counting. (“And one and two and three and turn.”) There was a sad, dilapidated feeling to the place.
On the day of my audition, 4 February 1977, hundreds of young hopefuls were congregated in the foyer. A little old medium in a chiffon scarf introduced herself as Vinkie Gray, registrar, and ticked off names on a clipboard. There was an extraordinary tension in the room. Was it ectoplasm or blind ambition? From the first moment we were all turned on, little electric lights strutting our stuff, prancing and performing like show ponies straight ou
t of the horsebox. We came from all walks of life but shared the same dream of world domination. We had all been the funniest person in our class, the best looking in our village. This was the next step. Rejection was unimaginable at this stage, but what had seemed so easy, so certain in front of the mirror at home was suddenly confused by a new element: competition.
One by one we were taken to a large studio at the top of the building to perform our Shakespeare speech. The staff sat behind a long trestle table, about a dozen of them. There was a hushed religious feeling in the room; they were theatrical Jesus and his performing apostles at the Last Supper. In the middle sat their leader, a small perfectly formed man named George Hall. He had an intricately groomed beard and moustache, above a black polo neck, jazz trousers and ballet pumps, and when he walked an invisible string seemed to suspend him from the top of his head.
Next to him was Barbara Caister, the head of movement, a Welsh lady with a beer gut and bare feet, a ravaged beauty going through the motions. Later that day, she taught us the secret of movement. It was called “the whoosh-ka.” My God, I remember thinking. I came here to learn how to act like Garbo at the end of Queen Christina (actually, I already knew), not how to do a whoosh-ka. But in case you want to try it at home, it goes like this. Feet together. Hands stretched high above your head. And . . . drop from the lower back down to the ground (whoo). Bounce up a bit, rounding the lower back as you go (sh), before flying up to start the whole head-spinning process again (ka).
It was demonstrated to us by a top student from the graduation year, a flat-footed queen with a steamed-pudding face. Up and down he went, Barbara standing beside him beaming like a magician who had just sawn someone in half. It was not very impressive.
Bardy Thomas was the head of voice. She had a pinched, mean face that was not disguised by a romper outfit and Pebbles hair. Over the next two years, she didn’t try particularly hard to camouflage her dislike for me. Now, after my audition, she laid her cards on the table.
“Rupert,” she said, all smiles and clipboard. “Could you just make the sound O for me?”
“Oh?” I replied, my nasal upper-class twang suddenly naked in the acoustic of the high room. Bardy looked to the others and sighed. They nodded sagely.
“No,” she explained, patiently. “That was not an O. That was ‘Eh-oh.’ I want you to say O.”
“Eh-oh?” I was puzzled.
“No. O.” She made her lips into a big circle.
“Eh-oh,” I drawled.
“O!” she shouted.
“Eh-oh!” I shouted back.
“You see, Rupert,” cut in George Hall, “you have a very thick upper-class accent. We’re just a bit worried that it may be, er . . .”
“Impenetrable,” finished Bardy. “He can’t pronounce his ch’s either. Say church!”
“Sshchursh?” I whimpered.
“See, he’s got a shushy S,” said Bardy, as she scratched away on her clipboard. Years of wearing a brace had pushed my tongue into the wrong position. My dreams were crumbling. Bardy turned to the others. They all looked worried.
“I’m sure with a bit of practice, I can get it right,” I said.
“It’s not that easy,” she snapped.
Later in the day George Hall took the floor and taught us a breathing exercise. It was called, “I give you the cake! I take it away.” He was like a Vaudeville star from the last century; only the hat and cane were missing. But he was quite a performer. “Okay. This may seem absolutely dotty,” he said with huge eyes as he painted a shimmering rainbow around him with his hands. “Totally bizarre! You’re going to think: he’s absolutely craaaazy!”
We all laughed. He was good. He put everything into it.
“Imagine I am giving you a cake and when I tell you about it you’re really excited. Like this! I give you the cake?” Suddenly his arms shot out to present the imaginary confection. He gasped ecstatically, a huge intake of breath held in the ribs, his face a cartoon of mock excitement. He looked deranged. “And now,” he said after this dramatic pause, “I take it away!” His whole body deflated with an enormous sigh.
We were a bit puzzled. After all, no one had ever talked to us like this before, and we were not aware that there was a mechanism to breathing. We just did it. But soon George was standing in front of us conducting.
“I give you the cake?”
We breathed in with excitement.
“I take it away!”
We breathed out with a big groan.
And so the day went on. We were observed in movement, singing (“The Lambeth Walk”) and acting. We stood with our arms stretching towards the sun and we rolled ourselves up into little balls. We watched each other suspiciously out of the corners of our eyes while we were trying to be spontaneously magnetic, and at the end of the day we were herded into another room by Vinkie Gray while the spiritualists decided our fate. There were about a hundred of us, and places for fifteen. It was an agonising two hours. The whole of life hung in the balance. Finally Vinkie tottered back in with her clipboard and read the names of the people who had been accepted. I was one of them. With a couple of exceptions, it was the happiest day of my career.
They gave me the cake, but two years into the course they took it away.
Meanwhile, my father bought a house in Chelsea, off the King’s Road, in a pretty cul-de-sac of nursery-coloured cottages called Bywater Street. I was given the basement, and my parents lived upstairs during the week when they came up from the country. They removed the stairs between the basement and the ground floor and replaced them with a trapdoor which in times of diplomatic strain over the next few years (there were many) they barricaded against invasion with crates of champagne.
Bywater Street was my first home and I loved it, although the basement was so low I could hardly stand up. There was a little front room with the flat’s only window. Its view was the white brick wall of the area, and a mysterious hole through which hosts of thick grey slugs oozed in the summer months. There was a tiny kitchen, an even tinier bathroom with a bath so small one had to perform Houdiniesque contortions to get in; and the little back yard had been converted into two minuscule bedrooms. I was to have lodgers. In the major’s world everything had to be cost effective and these lodgers would provide me with an allowance.
In September the school year began. Finally I was at drama school and soon I had a pair of lodgers, two Southern belles, Betsy and Ginger. Betsy was from North Carolina and was at Central with me, and Ginger from Virginia was at another drama school, Webber Douglas. They slept on bunk beds in one room and I slept on a mattress in the dank airless cupboard next door. The place was a mess. But we didn’t care. We stayed up all night and left for school early each morning.
The morning peace would be broken by the jangle of Betsy’s alarm clock, and within a minute the flat was mayhem. We were fountains of energy, or we were out cold. There was nothing in between. The kettle and the music went on together. We sang along to every song, still at that age when songs appeared to have been written specially for us. “Baker Street,” “I Will Survive” and “Native New Yorker” blared across the street in high rotation. We danced around the flat with our toothbrushes in our mouths, mugs in our hands. If it was warm we put on our tights and T-shirts all ready for the morning movement class, and within twenty minutes the door had slammed, shaking the whole house, and we were clambering up the area steps in our tights and helmets onto Betsy’s scooter and heading for Swiss Cottage, singing all the way.
You’re no tramp,
but you’re no lady,
talkin’ that street talk
It was a six-day week at Central, and a three-month term. We rehearsed a play, studied movement, voice and singing. We had make-up class, improvisation, and twice a week we spent the whole morning at the zoo, studying animals. At the end of the term we had “shows” followed by “crits.” We performed the play we had rehearsed, followed by five minutes of the animal we had chosen and a twenty-minute group
improvisation to music.
Theatrical Jesus and the touring disciples sat behind the trestle table on the last day and pronounced judgement on your term’s work in front of the whole year. It was a useless exercise in authority, but they seemed to enjoy it.
After my initial enthusiasm, it seemed to me that there was barely any difference between this bastion of the theatrical establishment and Ampleforth. One wore tights and a jockstrap at Central instead of rugger socks and shorts. “Poof” became “darling” but that was about it. The teaching was uniformly flat and uninspired. Both places were institutions and had the bad breath of tradition, authority and class obsession. Just as no one at public school was taken seriously if they had working-class origins, so in the drama school you were simply a joke if you were upper class. Emotion and creativity were the domain of the poor; buffoonery was the hooray’s lot. The British theatre was in the third generation of its working-class revolution. The relative innocence of Look Back in Anger in 1956, and the star-studded casts presented by Tony Richardson and George Devine during the initial heyday of the Royal Court Theatre, had slowly crystallised into something much harder and more menacing; so that by the mid-sixties audiences were appalled to watch a baby being stoned to death on the stage at the Court in Edward Bond’s brilliant play Saved. In those days—unimaginable in today’s grab-it culture—being part of the theatre was similar to joining the priesthood. There was a vocational commitment involved, a missionary zeal. Vanessa and Corin Redgrave lurked at the stage doors of our regional theatres with leaflets describing the horrors of touring in the Urals. In hushed voices, huddled in the local pubs and occasionally in the canteen of our drama school, they described the Workers Revolutionary Party to receptive impressionable actors, who were mostly out of work and desperately reaching for identity. They were fertile soil for the seeds of revolution (not so dissimilar, in a way, from today’s disenchanted mujahedin). Someone would run into the changing room and shout, “Vanessa Redgrave is in the canteen!” and we would all run out and stand around awkwardly as Big Van talked earnestly to a puzzled George Hall. She always looked utterly spent and was not, I felt, a great advertisement for Utopia.
Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins Page 9
