“Basically, hon,” she explained, summing up the experience after several vodkas drunk straight up, “we’ve both been around for twenty years. That’s eight lives in dog time. So, fuck ‘em. They’re not getting rid of us that easily.”
Viva la diva.
CHAPTER 47
Dangerous Lesbians
My French agent Dominique represented an extraordinary lady director, Josée Dayan. She specialised in what Oscar Wilde might have called, had he lived today, the “three-volume telenovela of revolting sentimentality.”
She had made everything from The Count of Monte Cristo to Napoleon and Josephine. Her reputation swept ahead of her in the looks and laughs and raised eyebrows that were produced whenever her name was mentioned. She was an eccentric ball breaker. Now she had her sights set on Dangerous Liaisons and wanted me to play Valmont. I met her for coffee one sticky afternoon in Paris with Dominique. A smallish Algerian woman in her mid-fifties with short curly grey hair, she dressed from head to toe in black leather. Her only concession to femininity was a lacy bra covered in blue bows that looked like breastfeeding butterflies peeking through her open white shirt. Her dame de compagnie was a tall thin lady swathed in cashmere, with long white hair and those perfect two-faced manners that are peculiar to the French bourgeoisie.
During the meeting, Josée petted me as though I were a thoroughbred up for auction. She took my head in her hand and yanked it towards her. “Quelle tête, dis donc!” she said to Dominique. Would she check my teeth next?
At one of those agency seances, round-table meetings of pimps and packagers that happen across the show business world every Monday morning, Dominique and Josée managed to summon up the greatest French star of them all to play Madame de Merteuil: Catherine Deneuve. On day one it was clear that this was going to be no ordinary film. Josée stormed around the set like the captain of a pirate ship, but when Catherine arrived she turned into a gallant suitor, a young swashbuckling mariner. Her eyes sparkled as Catherine materialised on the set dressed to disastrous effect by Jean-Paul Gaultier. The telefilm was set in 1963, an unfortunate period for hips, and at times Catherine looked like the Romanian housekeeper of some dentist’s wife from Dijon. The two women sparred together in a formal old-school French while the rest of us stood around waiting for instructions. Deneuve played Josée with icy precision, letting her in one moment before freezing her out the next, and Josée loved it. They called each other vous and madame, and no one else got a look in.
Added to this the cinematographer was another woman, Caroline, who looked like Charles I painted by Munch. She was small and thin with long red hair over a drained face. She also wore a leather jacket, but Caroline was no lesbian, although she seemed to be in the permanent throes of a shattering nervous breakdown, so maybe she was. (Joke.) She never slept. She fought all the time with Josée while we men trudged on with our jobs in silence, broken slaves, and she would collapse on the set with her head in her hands, gathering what strength she had left, before bouncing back up to stare madly at a lamp through her light meter.
Nastassja Kinski played the young wife. She was one of the few actresses around who had not succumbed to the knife and was ravishing, if unhinged. She had a tiny voice. It was almost as if she had stopped dead in her tracks at the age of eight, but she had been on a film set all her life, so she knew how to dig her heels in when she wanted. Another fragile rock. She was a great actress, however, and her performance shone in Dangerous Lesbians (as I’d soon renamed the production). It was, in fact, the most unusual affair. Film is traditionally a male thing, with men in charge as the director, the producer and the lighting cameraman. There may be a cinema diva, a Sharon or a Cher, and there may be a “power female” executive steaming about with castration on her mind, but in general the movie set is a great comfortable place for men.
Dangerous Lesbians was like Alice Through the Looking-Glass. Women ruled the stage with rods of iron and we men were their mute slaves. We learnt fast that it didn’t do to fight back. These ladies were longing for a full-on scrap. The whole universal war of the sexes concentrated briefly on our set and possessed us daily in gripping tirades and marvellous dressings down. The crew listened with bowed heads, hardly daring to move in case the storm moved from one unhappy spark to another. It was brilliant to watch these speechless men being well and truly pussy-whipped, and I wasn’t the only one to enjoy the spectacle. The Romanian housekeeper watched with the flicker of a smile from a shadowy corner of the stage, far away from the lamps, identifiable only by the thin line of smoke from her More cigarette, billowing up into the darkness from a manicured hand like a jungle fire seen from the sky.
In one of my first scenes I had to drive Deneuve in a speedboat around the Gulf of St. Tropez. It was May, but still felt like winter. I had not been back there since my roman-à-clef, The Hairdressers of St. Tropez, had been published ten years before. It had not been very well received by the burghers and I usually refused invitations that took me anywhere near the beach of Pampelonne, for fear of a squabble. I was the Truman Capote of the Côte d’Azur, but no one was able to turn their backs on me that morning when I arrived triumphant at the Place des Lices, with Catherine by my side, for the first day of principal photography. The port was a throng of fans, held back by the local police. I spotted many familiar faces as we clambered on board an old speedboat. Catherine was sporting an elaborate beehive under a little chiffon scarf. Her make-up lady handed her a hamper of goodies with which to check herself between takes. We were left with a walkie-talkie and made for the open sea as the crew crowded onto another, larger boat that was docked beside us. The sun shone, but there was a strong wind. Out at sea it was quite rough. We flew down huge waves and strained up the other side.
“Oh, dis donc!” said Catherine, grasping the rails.
The other boat was one of those ancient steel tanks that looked like a minesweeper from the war. Josée and Caroline stood in the stern next to the camera wearing waders and full wet-weather cover. Someone had strapped them into harnesses and they stood there, legs akimbo, leaning into the frothy sea. Josée had a megaphone (fatal) and Caroline looked at the sun through her meter. They were in their element. I had to follow behind at exactly the right distance for the focus of the camera, which was more or less impossible considering the swell. Josée shouted “Action!” through the megaphone, and Catherine and I played the scene. It was quite difficult to act and drive and pretend it was a hot summer afternoon at the same time, but we managed to get through the first take without bumping into the back of the camera boat. As the boat turned around to go back to the “first position,” Catherine delved into her hamper and produced a round mirror with a battery light. She clicked it on and gazed approvingly at herself from various angles, checking the beehive for wind damage, and then applied eyeshadow and lipstick, lighting a More at the same time, all of this ingeniously co-ordinated as we plunged through the choppy waters and she drew a perfect line around her lips.
Josée was shouting into her megaphone but nobody could hear, so I was unprepared when the other boat turned sharply to the left, and we ploughed into their wake. To my horror, I watched a huge wave explode over our bows. It climbed into the air and seemed to hover over the boat. I looked over at Catherine. She was preoccupied with the end of a comb in the interior of her beehive, looking intently into her mirror with a cigarette miraculously burning in the corner of her mouth. I tried to speak but no words would come out. I looked back up as the wave crashed down in an agonising slow motion all over the leading lady. Catherine’s mirror exploded and cracked. The beehive collapsed, and the cigarette hung comically from her lips. There was a moment of silence. Then Catherine threw back her head and laughed, while I giggled nervously as I tried to do the nautical equivalent of tiptoeing back to the dock. There, she stood in a puddle and was dried with all the available hairdryers.
We subsequently moved from the South of France to Paris. The crew felt drained. Working for Josée was like bei
ng bent in an endless wind. She never stopped until one day the French Fascist Party scored an enormous success in the first round of the national elections, at which point she was briefly dumbstruck. A quarter of the vote went to Jean-Marie Le Pen and his National Front Party. The whole of France was in shock, although it seemed to hit our ladies hard in particular. As far as I was concerned it had always been perfectly clear that France had a very right-wing mindset. You just had to take a walk to the Goutte d’Or and Barbes, a stone’s throw from the crumbling ninth arrondissement where I used to live, to find a completely isolated world of immigrants and refugees. And those quartiers were only the outskirts to the surrounding ghettos of Paris, which were desolate worlds of broken-down sky-rises and dreams. They bore no relationship to the sandblasted wedding cake that Paris had become under the socialists. The French didn’t like these people and now they had put their cards on the table, but Josée was particularly appalled. She was a socialist at home and Pol Pot at work.
The Sunday after the elections, we were shooting in an old Haussmann building somewhere near the étoile. The set was one of those huge rambling apartments with double doors leading from room to room, and high windows looking over the trees onto a wide honey-coloured street. Nowadays these apartments are mostly offices, but this one was still in private hands. It belonged to a retired colonel and felt musty and neglected, the perfect home for Nastassja in the film. That day in a devastatingly cruel scene I broke her spirit, as I walked through those rooms, sneering at them as I passed, savouring the detailed description of each of my deceptions, until I heard her collapse on the floor of the hall, weeping. The old parquet squeaked as the boys with the camera crept round the place in front of me, coiling electric leads, holding polystyrene boards and moving furniture back into place from their wake. Everyone always looked forward to doing a scene like this because it required a great deal of precision and concentration so that the camera wouldn’t be spotted through one of the many mirrors, or a sound man was not caught darting behind a pair of curtains. There was no room for improvised movement. The crew and the actor became one body. Everyone else hid in corridors and behind curtains because the whole apartment was in the shot. Josée was locked inside a cupboard with her monitor, and her tirade became muffled and comic. At the end of the third take, I was standing over Nastassja in silence, surveying the results of my cruelty, when a window blew open in the sitting room. A strange noise bounced in from outside. It sounded like a riot or a goal being scored in a faraway stadium. Josée yelled “Cut!” and everyone came out from where they were hiding and rushed over to the windows.
Outside, the street was deserted, but in the distance the roar pulsed through the air towards us in waves. It was the demonstration against the National Front. Hundreds of thousands of people were moving through a nearby boulevard. As I stood in the window with Nastassja and Catherine, dressed for 1963, for a moment life seemed to be as a scene from a film.
“Oh Christ,” breathed Catherine, hugging herself, as the roar intensified. Had something gone wrong? Had the demonstration turned violent as some had predicted? Was this the beginning of revolution? Everyone in the room was silent. For a moment no one moved, and then the spell was broken. Invisible fingers snapped and we went on with the day.
CHAPTER 48
Travels with My Father
In middle age, time begins to shrink. Days, months and years seem shorter. People who once appeared impossibly old are suddenly contemporaries with much more energy than oneself. The rebellion of youth gives way, exhausted, to the certainty of genes, and little by little one begins the long limp home. The gulfs we build between families and enemies and lovers begin to evaporate.
My father was old now but he was still restless. So one day at the end of 2004, I found myself in the airport of São Paulo where he’d asked me to meet him. He was coming from London, I from New York. He was eighty-three and wanted to go on a trip down the Rio Negro, the black river that flows into the Amazon at Manaus. We had arranged to meet at the Varig desk, and of all the images I will take to my grave of my dad, this will always be the sweetest. I could see him a mile off, although he couldn’t see me. As I walked towards him, I thought no cinema designer would ever be able to re-create his look. My dad was wearing his dark City suit; it was slightly crumpled and, it must be said, had seen better days. He was sitting legs akimbo with his hands leaning on his old brolly. His thin long calves tapered into incongruous lime-green socks. The Financial Times was tucked under his arm. His shirt was pink and a scarf was tied around his neck. He wore his favourite frayed straw hat and he sat there, an old soldier at attention, ready for trouble if it came. Twenty years ago he would have been appalled at how he was turned out. He’d let it all go a bit, and it suited him enormously. I stopped for a moment and watched him. An exotic Amazon with delicious hips swayed by and his head turned slowly as she passed, looking up slightly as she disappeared into the crowd as if he were sniffing the wind.
“Oh, there you are,” he said. “Well done. I’ve been chatting up the girl from Varig so we should get moving.”
He was, as usual, hell-bent on travelling economy, so I had to literally squeeze him into his seat, and I rode to Manaus with my knees up by my chin. A rather cute surfer boy with his computer sat next to my dad and promptly fell asleep on his shoulder. My dad shrugged and giggled slightly but the boy slept on all the way to Manaus and my father looked straight ahead, taking care not to wake him.
That evening in Manaus my dad was calling the shots. He had a lead to a “rather good bistro in the port area,” so we got into a taxi. I stopped trying to take control and just sat back and watched. I loved the way he talked to foreigners, enunciating ev-e-ry syll-a-ble. “Could you take us via the Opera House to this address?” The driver took the piece of paper my father had in his hand, looked up, faintly surprised, and regarded us strangely. But my dad stared him out with a nod and a grunt, and soon we began to weave through a half-lit and incredibly dangerous-looking part of town into the very depths of docklands. My dad was totally unperturbed.
Finally we arrived at a kind of fish and chip shop in a shanty area by the river. The huge prow of a tanker loomed above us in the background, and the scene only missed sailors smoking their pipes around an old barrel with an accordion. My father marched into the restaurant, which was pretty empty. There were a few dirty tables with plastic chairs around them. A TV blared football on the wall over the bar, and there was a pool table with a huge rip through the baize in the corner.
“A table for two, please,” he said, and pretty soon we were seated and eating some thickly battered fish with rice and beans. A group of four leggy Amazons with peroxide-blonde hair arrived and sat at a table near by. I got the picture. We were in a hooker bar! My dad feigned oblivion and went on eating his fish. “Rather good, this!” he mentioned as another group of girls arrived, this time with black hair. My dad looked up briefly as they settled down at the table next to ours. “I much prefer it when they don’t fiddle with the colour too much, don’t you?”
“I don’t know. Depends if they colour all over,” I ventured cautiously.
“Oh, almost certainly, I would think.”
By this time the girls at the next table had begun to vibe us heavily and whisper to each other, giggling and pointing. “That girl has a really splendid figure!” said my dad of an Amazon beauty near by, at which point, in the bat of a long jungle eyelash, the entire group was at our table. My father could hardly control his mirth. They were all over us, kissing and shaking hands, and absolutely gorgeous into the bargain. The bargain?
“Daddy, would you like me to arrange something with some of the girls?” I gingerly suggested.
“Oh, no,” he replied, still bubbling over with suppressed laughter. “I’m much too revolting now. I stopped all that kind of thing years ago. I wouldn’t say no to another of those delicious drinks, though.”
Unfortunately, the girls had other plans, and after we had drunk endless
caperinhas together, my dad and I asked the waiter for a taxi. We got up, saying goodbye to our new friends, but up they got too. Outside, we got into our taxi and they all bundled into one behind. Thinking nothing of it, we waved goodbye and settled down for the twenty-minute drive back into the jungle where our hotel was. However, when we arrived, to our horror the other taxi screeched to a halt behind us and out piled “les girls” (all five of them).
“Oh, dear,” said my dad, hotfooting it up the stairs. “I think I’ll leave this one to you.”
So with the help of the doorman I explained to the girls that there must have been a misunderstanding. After some negotiation I put them back in their taxi and waved them off to the docks. It was quite a night.
Anyone who thinks of travelling on one of the big Brazilian rivers should know that the Rio Negro, being black, does not harbour a thriving mosquito community like the brown Amazon. My dad and I travelled unscathed for nearly a week up this amazing river. Every day we sat on the top deck as the jungle slowly drifted by, talking about our family, our childhoods, the other passengers, and age. It was sitting heavily upon us both. Old age for my dad was hard and middle age for me was confusing. My dad reminded me of a line from Oscar Wilde in a play I had done in Glasgow. “What was it? Oh, yes. ‘The tragedy of old age is not that one is old but that one is young.’ Hit the nail on the head. Now, if I could just get this bloody back right . . .” He trailed off. If I could just get this bloody life right, I thought.
Unfortunately, our trip was all steps: ladders between the decks of our pleasure boat, which I would literally have to piggyback him up. Stepping from a floating dock into a canoe is something one does without thinking until one day the body says no. Every evening at dusk we would be taken out in canoes to motor around the little creeks and tributaries of the huge river but my dad wouldn’t go. “I’ll only hold you all up,” he said. “I’ve got plenty of reading. Don’t worry about me.”
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