by A. J. Crofts
Quentin didn’t miss a beat or a mouthful. ‘I’ll ring the production company and have a word.’
My schedule at The Towers had become more and more demanding as the producers tried to milk Nikki for all she was worth, so I didn’t get the time to have as much input into Meet the Real Steffi McBride as I would have liked. Dora was struggling to get me a bit of script approval in my contract on The Towers, but the producers were holding out against it, even though they had been happy to consult me unofficially. I suppose they thought if they gave in to one of us they would have to give in to others and the whole thing would become unmanageable. Some of the recent storylines hadn’t been that brilliant, to be honest, and seemed more like excuses for Nikki to get her kit off for the cameras. I was still getting away with making her credible, just, but it was becoming increasingly hard. The idea of doing a stage show, where I could perfect the performance and then repeat it night after night, was becoming increasingly attractive.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Maggie’s ghostwriter was obediently emailing material through to me every few days and I would print it off and take it into work with me to read. I have to say, it was a gripping story. It sounded like she had come from pretty much the same sort of family as Gerry – really straight and maybe a bit boring. Rebelling at 15, she left home in search of adventure in London, and found plenty of that. She became a Page Three model within a few days of arriving in the city (lying about her age) and was working for an escort agency within a few months. She wanted to act and sing, but everywhere she turned she was told she needed an ‘equity card’, which was like a union membership, but she couldn’t get one unless she was in work – bit of a Catch-22, really. One sort of work that would get her the card was stripping, so that was how she ended up at Raymond’s Revue Bar.
Bloody hell. That was a bit of a thought-provoker. Would I have been willing to put myself through all that in order to get into the business? Yeah, I guess I would have done. And would I have ended up in the same horrible mess? Almost certainly. The further I read into the story, the more I could identify with her. She painted a scary picture of what life in London must have been like in the 1970s and all in all it made me grateful that I’d been born when I had.
As the days passed and the pages kept arriving I came to terms with the idea of Maggie spilling the beans. Even when she reached the part describing her fling with Dad, which only took a few pages if I’m honest, I didn’t think it was going to be too hurtful to Mum. When it came to talking about giving me away it was a bit hard to read and it took several tries before I was able to do it without choking up, but she did have the grace to make Mum out as a sort of modern-day saint.
Lulled into a false sense of relief, I wasn’t braced for the next blow, which came from a completely different direction and knocked the breath out of me all over again. I should have realised that Quentin was up to something the night we had dinner together, but it honestly hadn’t occurred to me that Dad might also be writing a book until the serialisation came out in the Daily Mirror. The whole concept of Dad, the man who thought reading anything other than the Daily Mirror or News of the World was ‘a bit poofy’, writing a book was almost too surreal to take in.
‘My dad is your fucking client too?’ I raged down the phone on the morning the serialisation appeared. ‘Have you signed up my entire fucking family?’
‘Not quite,’ he chuckled, ‘you’re still holding out, but I’m hopeful you’ll see the light soon.’
‘Couldn’t you have at least warned me this was coming?’
‘Would have felt obliged to if you were my client,’ he said, smarmy git. ‘But as it is I had to protect my existing clients’ confidentiality.’
‘That is such crap, Quentin, and you know it.’ I hung up, angry but pretty impressed at the same time.
Dad’s story was very different to Maggie’s. The first extract in the paper mainly covered his childhood, up till the time he came across to England from Ireland in search of work on his 18th birthday. The main thrust of the story was his relationship with his father. I’d never met my grandfather, never even heard Dad talk about him, and now I knew why. The man was a monster. He beat the children to within an inch of their lives, as well as his wife, and had sex with all of them as if it was his divine right. How the ghostwriter had got Dad to open up about such personal stuff, when he had kept it all bottled up for so long, God alone knows, but he had made up for lost time. Every gory detail was there, but at the same time he painted kind of a nice picture of growing up in Ireland in the 1960s, buried away deep in the countryside. There was obviously terrible poverty in the family as well as the cruelty, but Dad had managed to describe a way of life that I would imagine not many people still experience, at least not in Britain. As I read his words I felt so sorry for the small boy telling the story, and for the first time ever I actually understood why Dad was the way he was; why he drank to try to silence the voices in his memory and why he had been guarding the family’s privacy so fiercely. I felt sad and guilty that my success had forced him to reveal so many of his secrets, but at the same time I felt a sort of relief that it was now all out in the open. Maybe he would be happier and more at peace now, not having to carry all this around in his head.
Gerry came round that evening, having read the pieces himself and knowing just how badly rocked I was feeling. He didn’t try to talk about it; he was just there for me, his arm around me, comforting me.
‘Your dad’s an OK guy,’ he’d said soon after our disastrous visit home, making me even angrier with him. ‘He’s had a hard time.’
Now I realised how right Gerry had been and how intuitive and how understanding. Maybe it was a bloke thing; maybe they all have some silent language when they’re drinking together that lets them instinctively know about one another’s wounds, whereas we girls would have to vocalise the whole thing to get it out there.
‘Are you coming to the recording of this Meet the Real … thing?’ I asked later in the evening as we cuddled on the sofa watching the pleasure boats covered in fairy lights gliding past on the river.
‘Nah,’ he laughed. ‘That’s just for celebrities.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘They’re not letting any civilians in.’
‘I could get you in,’ I protested. ‘I’ll have a word.’
‘No, really, I know my place.’
‘That is such bullshit.’
‘Listen, I spend my whole time waiting around in television studios for things to happen; it won’t break my heart to have a night off.’
To be honest, I was a bit sad that he didn’t want to be there to see me in my hour of triumph, but I could hardly admit that, could I? Not when he was being so modest and matter-of-fact about the whole thing. It would have made me sound like a right prima donna, so I just left it.
I rang Dad later that evening, once I’d collected my thoughts a bit.
‘Read your story in the paper, Dad.’
‘Yeah?’ his voice was slow and slurred. ‘Well, you don’t want to be believing everything you read in those rags.’
‘Are you saying it’s not true?’
‘I’m saying nothing.’ He sounded belligerent and I didn’t feel like fighting.
‘OK. I love you, Dad.’
‘Hah!’
I have no idea what he meant by that because he hung up and when I tried to ring back no one was answering the phones again. I could imagine that seeing his words edited up by a paper must have been a bit of a shock, but then he had been the one to say that reporters were all ‘slimy’ anyway, so maybe he would have anticipated it. I knew the newspaper would have picked out all the shocking bits from the book and left out a lot of the parts that he probably thought gave a more accurate, rounded picture of his life. Welcome to my world, Dad.
The next day there was another extract, all about his meeting with Maggie. There were pictures too, showing a surprisingly handsome young man. I’m not sure I would have r
ecognised him. He and Maggie would have made a good-looking couple. I could see why she might have been attracted to him that night in the club. He talked about Mum too, and it was obvious how much he loved her. I guess the ghostwriter must have helped him with those words because they weren’t any I’d ever heard him utter, or could even imagine him saying. Dad prided himself on being a hard man and hard men didn’t go in for all that romantic stuff, but the emotions rang true as they were written. It made me cry to think how much it would mean to Mum to read those words. Then he talked about my birth and how he was determined to bring me up and do his best to guide me in life. You can forgive someone a lot of sins when you know that they were willing to do something like that for you. I didn’t bother to ring him that evening; I felt we both knew where we stood now.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The whole Meet the Real … concept was about as fake as it was possible to get. The producers went after every possible celebrity they could think of, anyone who was currently hot, plus some evergreens from the past. (I have to admit there were a few old ones I hadn’t got a clue about, but I dare say they were famous to someone.)
There were singers and actors, footballers and footballers’ wives, models and weather girls, comedians and politicians, presenters of every kind of television programme from newsreaders to DIY experts. Anyone who had a face that would be recognisable to any part of the viewing public was herded in. The weird thing was, it was actually starting to seem normal to me, being surrounded by strangers with familiar faces. Perhaps it was my brain’s way of coping with the fact that all these famous people were gathering there for me. I mean, there was a strong danger that I would completely freeze on stage if I really thought about it. Best just to go through the whole thing in a sort of haze, like I was just leafing through the latest edition of OK!.
‘Celebrity World’ might be fake, but it’s a wonderfully comfortable place to be. It’s clean, safe and friendly, somewhere where we all know our places, a sort of Disney World where the characters are actually real people. Celebrities generally are kind and polite to each other when they meet. They bitch a bit, and stage the odd fight for the benefit of the press, but it’s not like the real world – at least, not like the real world that I came from. In the world I started out in people beat each other up and shouted abuse at one another – in Celebrity World, that generally only happens when the dialogue has been written for us by scriptwriters, or publicists like Quentin.
The grind of our daily existence is eased by make-up women and hairdressers and drivers and gofers. If we want to we can eat out for every meal and we don’t have to worry about how to heat the house next winter or whether our kids are going to be murdered by their schoolmates. None of us can live in Celebrity World all the time, of course, and we still have to step back through the looking glass to deal with things like divorce and cancer, road accidents and broken hearts, but as long as we’re in the studios and at the clubs and parties we can pretend the real world doesn’t exist, that everything in our false world is shiny and happy, at least for the short time that we inhabit it. We are living among the gods. Oh my Lord, I’ve gone all Greek Myth now …
A select few of this sparkly audience were given written questions to ask me, questions that would trigger off pre-prepared anecdotes and jokes that the director had rehearsed with me. To start with I was a bit uncomfortable and then it all started to seem rather camp and fun, like a Liza Minnelli or Judy Garland concert: pure showbiz glitz and smarm for all to see through. Every person in that room knew the score, knew what was expected of them, knew that the exposure would benefit them too, even if it was only a few seconds on screen as the cameras panned around the audience looking for them.
Towards the end of the show, someone was briefed to ask a question about Maggie and I was going to say something glib, she would then come on to tumultuous applause and we would sing together. Someone else would ask about Pete and I would make a joke about being shot in the street (always a good laugh to be had from that sort of material – not!) and then Pete would come on and look hard while performing his newly released single.
When they told me Mum and Dad and the rest of the family were going to be in the audience as well, I didn’t believe them at first. Well, I believed that they had been asked, but I didn’t believe Dad would actually show up. Still, even after all this time, I was underestimating the persuasive powers of Quentin James (Dad now had a product to promote just like the rest of us, of course). Not only were they all there, they were all newly attired in designer clothes (had that been part of the bribe?) and all smiling, apart from Dad who looked embarrassed – as he should have been for agreeing to betray his own principles so blatantly. The scriptwriters had even written a short piece of banter to go between me on the stage and him in the audience, something that would show we had been through hard times but still loved each other underneath, to show forgiveness on my part and contrition on his.
‘This is a corny crock of shit,’ I told Dora during a break in rehearsals.
‘Sure it is,’ she growled, ‘but the higher your star can ascend now the more I can ask for you when you agree to do Sweet Charity.’
‘I haven’t agreed yet?’ I asked, surprised.
‘You’re playing hard to get.’
‘You’ll let me know when I make up my mind, will you?’
‘You bet.’
What I liked about Dora was her total refusal ever to rise to any bait I might dangle in front of her. We both knew the score, and we both knew that the other knew the score. We didn’t have to pretend anything to each other; it was bloody restful.
‘This,’ I said, gesturing around the studio, ‘is all starting to seem a bit like This Is Your Life, set to music.’
‘That’s about the shape of it.’
I could see Dora was really enjoying herself; she even managed to raise a smile when Pete spotted her and came over. He didn’t trouble himself to remove his shades but he did grin broadly, reminding me of how charming he’d been when I first fell for him.
‘Hey, it’s the scary old lady. How’s it going, scary old lady?’
‘It’s going just fine, Peter,’ she replied, playing up to the schoolmarm role he was allotting her for the amusement of the gaggle of friends he had surrounding him.
‘This is my band, man,’ he told me when I gave them a bit of a look. I could remember most of them from school and this was the first I had ever heard of them being a band, but that was the producer’s problem, not mine.
‘Whatever, Pete.’
It was scheduled for Maggie and me to sing Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’ number and ‘The Best is Yet To Come’, which Garland and Minnelli had once sung together. We were then to end the show together singing ‘A Little Time’, which I thought was a bit weird since it was supposed to be about a man cheating on a woman, saying he needed ‘a bit of time’ and ‘some space’ and all that. I voiced my doubts to the producer but he was adamant that it would work, that the audience would remember me singing it with Luke and that would give it an extra poignancy. It seemed to me he was teetering on the edge of really bad taste, but I could see he was under pressure and didn’t need any sort of hissy fit from me at this late stage.
Ultimately you have to do what you’re told in these situations and it didn’t seem such a big deal. Celebrities may look like the most important people in any gathering, but actually we’re just the puppets. It’s the writers and the producers and directors, cameramen and executives who really have the power.
I had never felt stage fright like the feelings that gripped me as I prepared myself to step out on to the stage that evening. I knew it was all being recorded and I knew they could always stop and go back if I messed up or if anything went wrong technically, but it was still going to be me out on the stage with every pair of eyes on me. It was still going to be me that everyone was going to judge tonight. Would they be going away muttering about how I didn’t have the talent to hold together a s
howcase like this? Or were they going to be whispering to one another that ‘a star is born’?
There were so many people out there that I wanted to impress, wanted to make love me; not just the celebrities and the eventual television audience, but my own family as well. I was standing up in front of everyone as if I was someone special. I’d bloody well better be special, then, or I was going to look like a real dick. Most of all, I wanted Dad to see that everything was going to be OK; that the embarrassment of being in the public eye and having the reporters ‘going through our bins’ was going to be worth it if it brought us all together and meant we could be truthful with each other.
The moment I walked out on to the stage I felt every care and worry lifting from my shoulders. It was the most incredible feeling of power and comfort. I just knew I was going to be able to hold the audience’s attention and make them enjoy themselves. Some of the scripted jokes were pretty lame, let’s be honest, but there were ways of delivering them that could still be funny enough and would make everyone feel they were in safe hands.
The best thing was being able to see Mum and Dad in the front row. She was cuddling up to him, probably trying to calm his nerves as well since he was going to have to perform a bit. Our little banter came pretty early, which I should imagine was a big relief to him, and I was really surprised how well he did it. No one would have guessed if he was scared, he sounded authoritative and loving and funny. Maybe the old sod can actually act after all. I felt so proud of him when the audience laughed at his line and applauded and Mum was glowing up at him all lovingly. He was like a big kid being picked out for praise at school assembly. That’s what it must have been like when they were young, before all the pressures came. The reason she had been willing to take me on as a daughter must have been because she loved him so much. That was why she had stayed with him over the years, putting up with the beatings and bullying, knowing that the young man she was in love with was still there underneath all the arrogance and bluster he used to disguise his fears.
