Certainly I had renewed myself by the end of the seven years I spent as an actor in Melbourne. I went there as a youth; I left as a somewhat disenchanted young man, harbouring that coldly passionate determination to change his life which so often comes at twenty-five. With the exception of six dull months working in an office, I actually managed to survive as an actor through every one of those years, getting by almost entirely through radio work. But survival was all it had been. I lived in single rooms: in bed-and-breakfast guesthouses smelling of floor polish and despair; in rooming houses in St Kilda, Caulfield and Fitzroy, where I shared dark bathrooms and ancient kitchens mysterious with grease. A flat was beyond my pocket; I never knew from month to month whether I could still go on covering basic rent and food. That depended always on the whims of radio producers — at whom, like all actors, I must smile and smile. They were the princes who totally controlled the livelihood we made from fantasy, and who could always take it away. An off-hand tone from one of them produced a small pang of worry; a frown chilled the guts; no calls for a fortnight spelled doom. And yet we were always light-hearted; it was the great compensation of the job. We were in show-business, God help us, high above the grey channels of the workaday world, sharing our actors’ jokes and show-business gossip and bitchery, each man keeping up appearances in the studios with his one set of elegant sports clothes, his one good suit; each of the women in her smartest suit, her sexiest dress, her most expensive make-up. Only the two or three top dogs went home to a good apartment, or a house in the suburbs; there wasn’t the volume of work in Melbourne to keep a large community of actors prosperous. For that, you had to go to Sydney, up north in the sun; but Sydney, the nation’s biggest city and the show-business capital, whose sub-tropical hedonism made staid, cool old Melbourne envious and contemptuous, also meant fierce competition.
For a long time I was happy in Melbourne, despite my insecurity — diverted by occasional interesting parts in local theatre productions, and by a number of inconclusive love affairs. But by the time I was twenty-five, the iron had entered my soul. In that year, when I decided at last to leave for Sydney, I’d come to certain conclusions.
My hopes of a big career in the theatre were futile; I saw that now. I was given good character roles now and then, but no leads; parts for an actor who limped were limited. At twenty-five (the age when boyhood is truly gone, and when life stretches ahead like a planned holiday — still lengthy, still full of the possibility of surprises, but its endings now actually conceivable), I saw that I must make decisions.
Acting wasn’t for me, I decided. I knew now what lay in store for ageing, failing actors. I drank with some of the old ones in the pub — actors like Tom Gordon, whose noble nose was rosy from too many nights here; whose eyes were lost and bemused. He was given to sudden rages; he talked about the successes of his youth, and railed at the stupidity of the producers he fawned on in the studio. Most of the old ones were like Tom. They snubbed the young ones like me to compensate, and were bitter about their more successful colleagues in brassy Sydney. Their hands shook as they held their scripts, these old, drunken actors with their well-polished shoes and good tweed suits; they worried about missing cues as they nursed their hangovers. They still lived in rooming houses like mine, or in cheap, sad flats with their old wives. They had given their lives to the glamour of well-spun illusions, but they had not been rewarded, I saw; and now I made up my mind that I would not end as they had.
This didn’t mean I had turned against illusion as a way of life. I had given my life to illusion; what did other people do? Clerks, executives, bank managers, politicians, businessmen: what did they all yearn for, freed from their day in the real world, growing drunk or earnestly thoughtful, opening their souls? I had met them in clubs and hotels and at backstage parties and had seen the look in their eyes at such times, half wistful, half pathetic: the child peeped out then, and asked for stories; fairy food. But the child inside such people was sadly stunted, and it was up to people like me, who dealt in the food of Faery all the time, to bring some back for them. Why not? They wanted to be what I was, but without the cheap rooming houses and the lack of money. We each paid a price.
So what must I do, at twenty-five?
I wanted to direct actors, I said, not to be one; I wanted to create illusion, not to be one of its tools. And I must do this, I decided, on the handsome salary paid to a producer in ABS, the national broadcasting service. What I secretly wanted, saying this, was entry into that world I had glimpsed in the Red Room: the purring, comforting ether behind the yellow-lit radio dial, where reassuring voices gave all the world’s disasters a cosy respectability; where all cold poverty and dismalness were shut out; where Aunt Susan and Uncle Charles lovingly conducted Children’s Hour, and privileged, brilliant people adapted Oedipus Rex for broadcasting.
It wouldn’t be easy. Vacancies for producers in ABS Drama came about rarely; hundreds competed for them, and the organisation was leisurely about making any appointments at all. But I learned at last of an imminent vacancy at Head Office in Sydney, and wheedled a letter out of Rupert Jones, the ABS Drama man in Melbourne who had been my patron when I arrived from Hobart. The letter guaranteed me nothing; but it was sufficient to give me the nerve to prepare to leave at last, to depart this flat city on the southernmost edge of the continent and to take flight north to the unknown metropolis of sun, with my meagre savings and my two suitcases.
I would survive for a time as an actor, if I had to; but only for a time, I said. I wanted to get into ABS badly enough to believe I couldn’t be stopped. I wanted an end to rooming-houses; I wanted an end to fawning makeshift; I wanted other actors to smile on me as I now smiled on the producers who kept me fed.
I wanted control, and the high, far ether I had seen in the Red Room as my future. I would do anything to get it. Seven years in Melbourne had made me hungry.
2
William Street was my entrance hall to Sydney. A boulevard linking the city and King’s Cross, it carried me down into a tunnel of hotels and pawnshops and then climbed the Darlinghurst ridge. I had taken a taxi directly from the airways office, since the Cross was where most actors and show people were said to live.
Scalded by the vinyl of the seat, riding through an air that smelled like tin, I seemed to be wrapped in sacking. I had never been so hot in my life, and it was borne in on me that I had come to a foreign latitude, not very far below the Tropic of Capricorn. The taxi driver wore a T-shirt, thongs and indecent shorts, and was glancing sardonically at my heavy southern suit.
‘You better get outa that gear, sport, or you’ll turn into a grease-spot.’
Sydney’s surfaces were all strange after the cool south; it was nearing sunset, and a hot, honey-thick light coated the low brick business buildings with a weird density, and was reflected in the Cross’s hillside windows up ahead, making them flash blinding messages. Strangest of all was a line of three-storey Victorian terraces at the top of the hill, which was the junction of the Cross. Rearing on the skyline, their fantastic arches and spires half colonial-Gothic, half Oriental, these buildings had a worrying, even nightmare quality; they suffered, melting and mouldering in the heat like ancient wedding-cakes, trapped in the wrong hemisphere. Painted in hideous colours, degraded in every way that simple imaginations had been able to devise, they were covered over every inch of their facades by advertisements and neon signs: new, faded and almost invisible, going back to the twenties and perhaps even earlier. One of them said: Hasty Tasty. Highest of all, on the pinnacle of the Cross, was a giant bottle of sherry tipping its neon liquor into a glass. It faded out when the glass was full, only to reappear as we passed, like the Cheshire Cat’s smile; like a rune of the city I’d need to decipher. I fingered my letter of introduction to Martin Gadsby as though it were a talisman.
At six-thirty the next morning, I woke to find myself in the Sydney of my expectations: a room in Elizabeth Bay.
The place was called Beaumont House, and th
e bed I was in pretended to be a divan. In fact it was simply an old wooden base set on blocks on the floor — an example of Mr Beaumont’s flair for economy. But I was happy with it, and with everything else here. I saw that I was living almost out of doors, in Beaumont House: Sydney Harbour was half in the room. The sun, already gathering strength, was streaming through a pair of French doors opening on to an arcade verandah; and since these doors were the room’s only source of ventilation, I’d been forced to leave them ajar during the night. Now they framed the giant arch of the Harbour Bridge, and a blue segment of water.
I’d been woken by the little crashes of breakfast trays, set down on the tiles by Bela Beaumont, the house’s Hungarian manager, who brought tea and toast to all the doors. There were five rooms on this long back verandah, mine being the last, and I could hear his rubber-soled shoes advancing in a series of hissing rushes. He appeared at the doorway, setting down the tray on the tiles like a man doing exercises. Straightening, he paused, and looked across at me in my bed. ‘Good morning, Commander.’ He gave this title to many people, I found.
‘It looks like another hot day,’ I said.
‘Hot — yes, it will be hot again. It is too much for me, this time of year. I cannot get used to your summers.’ His voice was fast, loud and confident, and everything about him gleamed: his sculptural, receding black hair touched with grey in the right places; his tanned forehead; his electric-blue sports shirt. His almond-shaped brown eyes were friendly and inquisitive, and he had an almost military fitness, despite a slight thickening of the waist. I saw him as an officer in a Viennese operetta — a supporting role, not the lead.
Without a pause from his previous remark, he asked: ‘And what business are you in, Mr Miller?’
‘I’m a radio actor.’
He threw back his head and laughed on three notes, while I waited with some irritation for an explanation of his mirth.
‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘I am not laughing at your profession but so many people in show business are staying in this house! It was once owned by a great theatrical manager, you know. Yes; and I myself have been in show business. Well, I hope you get plenty of work. You must be able to pay my rent, eh?’ He laughed loudly again at his own joke. ‘You get plenty of jobs?’ he asked.
‘Quite a few.’ I tried to strike a note of off-hand confidence.
‘Good. Excellent.’ His white shoes moved like a dancer’s; he was taking off. ‘Enjoy your breakfast,’ he said. ‘Ta-ta.’ In his mouth, the colloquialism sounded oddly foreign. He disappeared from the doorway like a puppet jerked offstage. Then, just as rapidly, he reappeared. ‘You should meet some of the other theatre people here. Remind me to introduce you.’
Sipping my tea, I reflected on how uncomfortably accurate his guess about my rent potential had been. It was almost as if some sixth sense had told Mr Beaumont I had yet to get work at all.
3
We were all refugees, in the Cross. Dormitory of Displaced Persons, New Australians and old, King’s Cross was a ghetto for those on the run: from wives, from husbands, from jobs; from that past where they’d once been respectable. Roosting on its hill above the city centre, this junction where five roads met was so small it had no official right to separate existence. Mini-village in the ward of Fitzroy, gaudy patch on the slum-grey ridge of Darlinghurst, it existed through force of personality, and was more than a district. The Cross was the capital of deviance, and Australia’s most densely-populated square mile.
Back in the twenties and thirties, in the era of mutton chops and meal tickets, of the famous Arabian coffee shop and the poets Brennan and Slessor, this had been Bohemia; a southern hemisphere Montmartre. In the summer of 1964, when I first came there, it still wrapped itself in the tatty dressing-gown of these pretensions like one of its own landladies. But by now it was a teeming rookery of male and female prostitutes, show people, failed artists, successful criminals, and the wrecked and displaced flung to Australia from Europe after the War: people like my landlord, Bela Beaumont.
Elizabeth Bay rents were high, and so were his. The geography of the area entitled them to be so. The Darlinghurst ridge went on from the Cross to poke a long finger into the Harbour, becoming the fashionable village of Potts Point; below the ridge on the city side lay the dockside slums of Woolloomooloo, and on the other was expensive Elizabeth Bay, inviting as a dream of pre-war Hollywood, from which it took its style, with its white Spanish villas, gardens on the Harbour, and apartment towers. However diverse, the three districts were essentially one, connected by a maze of streets and lanes; but Potts Point and Elizabeth Bay, the Cross’s smart sisters, breathed a different air; and this was the air I’d decided was for me.
I was beginning as I meant to continue, and Bela Beaumont’s establishment at the terminus of Elizabeth Bay Road was no ordinary rooming-house, in my eyes; I saw it as Sydney’s version of a Venetian palazzo. In actual fact, it was a two-storey Victorian mansion come down in the world, carved into a warren of arty bedsitting-rooms such as mine; but saying so can’t change the way it seemed to me that summer: it remains in memory a musing palazzo, whose rent was beyond my pocket. Unless I got into ABS quickly, I’d soon be in trouble; but I’d left my letter of introduction with Martin Gadsby’s secretary, and all I could do now was wait. I knew no one in Sydney, and I began to sink into a sense of isolation. But on the third morning after my arrival, I had a small encounter.
I went out on to the arcade after breakfast, making my way towards a shower-room at the end. There was no sign of life. In front of the other four doors, four trays still stood untouched in the sun, covered with white napkins. I half hoped to see one of the inmates emerging to claim one, but it didn’t happen. I seldom saw any fellow-guests, and Mr Beaumont had not carried out his promise to introduce me; the place was silent as though it were deserted. And yet others must be here; hidden.
Bird cries; the eternal cooing of pigeons from the gardens of Elizabeth Bay, murmuring about a cook in the rich silence. There was a sense of secret events gathering; a feeling of being watched, as I moved across panels of sun laid down through the arches, the figured mosaic tiles warm under my feet. A ginger tom-cat dozed on the balustrade halfway down; I greeted him, and he blinked tolerantly.
The shower-room was in a sort of annexe. Like my bedsitting-room, whose thin wall partitioned it from the one next door, this place was obviously the work of amateur handymen: possibly of Mr Beaumont himself. It had two improvised shower-stalls fixed against one wall, made of cement sheeting. They somewhat resembled voting booths, or perhaps Confession boxes. A faint tang of ozone flowed across the bricks, so that I was still half out of doors here; and this had in it all the sub-tropical novelty of Sydney. Over everything, in this great port city of the Pacific, lay the pale bleach of Holiday; nothing was coldly earnest. I hooked shut the rickety door of my booth, and turned on the water.
Seconds after I did so, the clacking of shoes sounded on the bricks in the room outside. The lightness of the steps made me suspect a woman, and I listened tensely. Surely she’d retreat, when she saw my shabby male shorts on the bench? When I came out of the shower, I’d have to cross the full width of the chamber naked, to reach this bench — the only place where clothes and towel could be laid.
But the flimsy structure shook as someone secured the door of the other booth, and a young woman’s voice suddenly spoke through the partition.
‘What is the water like this morning?’
Amazed, I took some moments before answering. ‘Fine,’ I said.
‘That’s good,’ the voice called. ‘Sometimes it’s lukewarm, and that’s terrible.’ It was a pleasant, friendly voice, free of frivolity or coyness, and with the hint of a foreign accent.
The other shower was turned on and the voice fell silent; I heard a faint hiss of breath. I was now acutely aware that she and I stood naked a few inches from each other. I was unattached, having broken off a recent affair in Melbourne, and women had been on my mind in these las
t three days. Here in the Cross and Elizabeth Bay, attractive young matrons walked the baking avenues half-naked, stepping across violet carpets of jacaranda blossoms in high-heeled sandals, two-piece swimsuits and sun-hats — or in shorts that left their buttocks half bare, the creases under the cheeks exposed. I kept getting little shocks; one was not allowed to forget the body, in this latitude. All the byways and shops and buses jostled with segmented nudities: thighs; bellies; dewy armpits. City of water, and semi-nude flesh! It still maintained urban formalities of dress downtown, but another, near-naked sub-group wandered among the suits and ties: a race of white Polynesians. The taboos of the Anglo-Saxon grandfathers were slowly fading, as the zone muttered its demands for nudity; youths sat in city buses naked to the waist, pubic hair curling above their belts: narcissists of the sub-tropic of pleasure.
Product of an era and a region of cold-zone conventions, I was still digesting all this; and I was deeply surprised by my invisible neighbour in the shower. Was mixed showering usual, in this strange rooming-house? What would happen if we decided to come out of our booths at the same time?
Now the voice called to me again. ‘Are you late for work?’
‘Not really,’ I said. I didn’t feel like explaining that I had no work.
‘I’m always late for work,’ the voice called. ‘But I’m not going to hurry my shower.’
The Doubleman Page 14
