Silence in the room apart from muffled sobs from Merrylegs. Victor says nothing.
‘You know, he is right!’ reasons Derek finally. ‘We’ve got to know what we’re doing.’
When Corky hears that Victor is losing his hair, she is ecstatic.
‘This is great news. Get me six of them and we do a leetle work on him. There is a veery good Brouharia with hairs. Don’t give up hope. It’s going to be great. The Yipsy told me.’
‘I wish the Gypsy was directing,’ I joke.
‘She could. She first came to me when I was on tour.’
‘I bet she did.’
A small spell sounds just the ticket so I brief Merrylegs later that night on the phone. The next day while I am bickering with Victor in the rehearsal room, I see a tiny little hand appear from behind his back where a long black hair lies waving on his shoulder. I hold my breath as two little fingers delicately lift the hair off the shirt and then disappear. A moment later Merrylegs herself materialises behind Victor, holding the hair in her hand, and marches nonchalantly off to the loo. During the next coffee break she sidles up to me.
‘It’s in a Kleenex in my pocket. I nearly peed myself.’
‘We need six,’ I whisper.
‘Six? Don’t make me go through it again. I’ll have a coronary. You do it. I’m not established like you. If they find out … Imagine a dwarf in a black magic scandal. I’ll be dead in the water. I’ll never work again.’ She is ranting now.
‘You’re never going to work again, period. None of us will.’
I decide on a more direct approach.
‘God, Victor! We’re making you so miserable, you’re losing your hair,’ I say breezily, brushing his shoulder with my hand, and hairs fly off like autumn leaves falling. Actually I am feeling quite sorry for Victor by now. He knows we all hate him. He is exhausted. I am exhausting. And I have to hand it to him. He is tenacious. He will be there with Cher and the ants after the nuclear war.
‘Yes, you’re killing me,’ he says wryly. ‘OK, let’s try it again.’
We all drag ourselves from our chairs while Merrylegs discreetly crawls across the floor on all fours, hair-hunting.
‘I got at least ten,’ she whispers.
That night I race off to Corky’s after work and present the girls with the hairs. Miguelina’s leaving and her bags are packed. She is taking the red eye to Miami and then on to Santo Domingo. She holds the black strands up to the light, chuckling.
‘You’re not going to kill him, are you?’
‘Yelax, Roopi. We just give him a leetle smack.’
‘That’s what the mafia say when they are going to break someone’s legs.’
‘Oy, Roopi. Is a spiri-uh-ahl smack.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘We got two candles blessed by Father Gabriel – very important – and we plait them together and now we burn the hairs. Leave us. You gonna see.’
Nothing happens.
The next day we are on the set in the studio. It looks just like the embassy. There are three sections: the ambassador’s office, another office for Merrylegs and Megan the other secretary, and then Trey’s boiler room at the end. Facing all this is a bank of empty seats, and above it hangs a firmament of follow-spots and klieg lights. When Derek arrives he clutches his chest.
‘Oh, Christ,’ he says, looking at his watch. ‘In five hours this place will be filled with screaming and disappointed people.’
‘It already is! Look over there.’
Victor is having a heated discussion with some NBC executives. They have begun to assemble, like ghouls, watching the proceedings silently, huddling and pointing in small groups, as technicians focus the lights and push around the vast cameras, which look like Daleks, blinking and gliding. Victor is now ensconced in a control room at the back of the studio and has been reduced to a voice. He talks crisply to us over a loudspeaker, like God or Oz.
And so there we are, Sir Derek and me, cowering on the other side of the door. The audience are screaming. Corky and Gladys are there. They are both wearing their giant rosaries. My LA agent Nick has disappeared – an ominous sign. Everyone from NBC is in the house. Jeff Zucker has shaken my hand and told me how happy he is to have me here at NBC. I feel idiotically chuffed. Again, I think – maybe this is enough. It doesn’t matter what happens next, if he isn’t that happy for very long. Backstage we all hug one another – even me and Victor – with the hilarity of condemned men. Finally Derek and I are alone. And the countdown begins. I want to say sorry to Derek. But it just doesn’t come out.
‘Darling,’ he whispers to me instead. ‘Would you think it so very awful if I say to you that I hope to fuck we don’t get picked up?’
And action.
The first scene goes pretty well. The audience are trained and laugh if you drop a teaspoon, so that by the end of it we are all feeling a bit giddy. The Daleks circle and scrutinise us with their black inhuman eyes. Derek and I possibly overdo it, and play and arch at them as if we were Gloria Swanson at the end of Sunset Boulevard, wild-eyed and shrieking. Why not? The audience seem to love it and only when we get to the second half of the show does it all begin to fall apart.
I have hardly had time to learn the new scene with Megan and in the middle of it I stop dead, scouring my mind for the next line, but it is nowhere to be found. The world literally stands still. The audience – so animated until a second ago – watch me silently on the edge of their seats. They have to laugh again and their mouths are open like baby birds craning to be fed. I feel as if I am going to puke at any moment. I try to speak. Nothing comes out. I look at Megan. She stares love and support at me, and mouths the text, but I can’t hear. A chasm has formed between us. Tears prick at the back of my eyes. Faces from the shadows stop what they’re doing and look. Merry watches from the wings. Everyone in this fucking studio is watching me. Silence. Just the whirring of air and electricity.
‘Sorry,’ I say finally.
There is an almost palpable exhalation of despair from the viewers as I rip down the fourth wall between us. The tension gone, people converge upon me from all corners. Make-up. Hair. Producers. Writers. All with some instruction or other. Tears begin to leak from my eyes. The first assistant circles me, talking into his headphones to the control room.
‘What do I tell him? OK. I’ll tell him.’
‘Can we go back a bit? I got lost,’ I whisper, but nobody is listening.
A brush whirls out and powders all the sweat that is dripping off me into a kind of mudpack on my face. The witch on the end of this mini-broomstick scrutinises me with undisguised horror.
‘Wait,’ she screams. ‘I gotta redo him.’ She prods the circling assistant with the brush.
I squint with horror towards the control room. ‘No. I’m fine. Honestly.’
‘Really?’ says the lady, considering. ‘No! It’s a total redo. He’s sweated the whole thing off.’
I am bundled backstage and the warm-up artiste rematerialises. As the witch fixes my foundation I look at the script but it’s just words now. I can’t take any of them in. Within minutes I am back on the floor. The warm-up artiste is much funnier than I will ever be and the audience is reassured and laughing along again, like a baby who has had its nappy changed. The technicians leave the stage and we start the scene once more. It goes OK for about a minute and then I lose the thread again. I stand there for a moment with my hands on my hips, trying to keep it together, but it feels as though I am about to pass out.
Benny suddenly arrives on the floor. ‘Don’t let them see you crash, man. Don’t let them see you crash.’
‘OK,’ I say.
He takes me by the arm, turning me away from the audience. ‘Breathe,’ he orders.
‘OK.’ I breathe.
‘You can do it.’ He stares at me solemnly.
I look back. His eyes are the still centre of my collapsing universe, and I think with a rush of gratitude that Benny has been a great manager. It�
�s a moment of empathy, which I will never forget, and that energy – from him to me through his clutching fingers on my arm – sends a surge through my body.
‘OK,’ I say and we go for it. The script supervisor comes over to me with the script so that I can look at the lines. She has a kind face and regards me with maternal concern. I study the words but they mean nothing. They are in fact jumping out of the page at me, like the reviews of a hit show in a Hollywood film from the thirties.
‘OK, I’ve got it,’ I say and off we go. This time it works OK. Hopefully cancer cells have not replicated inside me.
We finish the show. Executives and casting ladies surge backstage and blow the usual hot air up any arsehole that has managed to unclench itself.
‘You know,’ says one with authority, ‘I haven’t heard a reaction like this since we shot the pilot for Friends.’
PART TWO
CHAPTER EIGHT
Nicky Haslam’s Mid-Life Crisis
Needless to say, Mr Ambassador is not picked up, and I have never again seen anyone who was involved in it. Nor have I returned to Hollywood. But that’s show business. Yesterday’s best friend is tomorrow’s complete stranger. Like atoms we cluster and dissolve, forming strange exotic bodies that sparkle or writhe across the firmament in a lifespan that can be as short as a moth’s or as long as an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical – in either case, death is the endgame – floating back into the ether, only to be born again with other atoms on some other hit or miss, on or off Broadway, TV or radio, Pinewood, Hollywood Bollywood, amen. It is an endless movement of reincarnation or reinvention until the final croak. For the time being I am back to square one: London. The world of Hollywood zips up behind me.
But it is spring and I am lunching under the apple blossom with Nicky Haslam who has just had an amazing facelift and looks like an ageless German general with silver hair and a new Wagnerian jaw. He is unusually lively. On the other hand I feel dead. Spring always does that to me and I moan my way through lunch, an unpardonable crime in Nicky’s lightly painted, pouchless eyes.
‘You’re rather dreary today,’ he says as we peruse the menu, under the impatient scrutiny of the waiter.
‘I think I might have a––’
Nicky doesn’t let me finish my sentence. ‘Mid-life crisis?’ He enunciates every syllable, like Noël Coward. ‘How common. What a terrible waste. I enjoyed every moment of mine.’
‘But Nicky, that’s the marvellous thing about you. You adore everything. If you had a colostomy bag you would absolutely worship it.’
‘Worship is perhaps the wrong word but you know what they say? When you’ve got one? Bunny Rogers told me. The nurse says, “Welcome to a very exclusive club, sir! You are joining the ranks of the Queen Mother and some of our leading entertainers.” You’d never catch any of the royal family having a mid-life crisis.’
‘Do women have them?’ I wonder.
‘Don’t you know?’ (One of Nicky’s catch phrases.) ‘They’ve got more sense. They’re too busy washing up. Or being a she-man in the office.’
Possibly they are shell-shocked at having become invisible at thirty-five, unseen entities stacking dishes, while their men oogle (new virtual word incorporating Google and ogle) sixteen-year-old girls or their more successful men friends. Anyway, Nicky is right. Les girls normally sail through mid-life into the harbour of old age, playing bridge and gardening, while we men make a terrible business of it, ending up staring glassily into space, collapsed on a deckchair in the garden. Our pectorals have become baboon breasts (moobs) and our cocks leak. As our ladies and their girlfriends can be heard shrieking with laughter through the kitchen window, busy at their tapestries, we begin to wonder who we ever were, and what we are to become, but, as the Buddha points out, it was all an illusion in the first place. Best newcomer, executive of the year, employee of the month, fastest centre forward on the local team: all these absolutes are nothing more than stations, often too insignificant in the main-line scheme of things for our little puffing train even to stop at.
When a man first feels that hurtling sensation, his world has packed up like a travelling stage set and he is quite suddenly falling through thin air, a dot in immeasurable space, with neither ground beneath his feet, nor parachute on his back. He may buy a Harley-Davidson, or grow his hair, or develop a drug habit, or take to the cloth. Anything can happen. If he has led a rather unresolved or sheltered sex life, a giant libido may suddenly bloom like some ghastly flesh-eating flower. Actually, even if he hasn’t, he is still quite likely to begin a sexual rampage. Sex, once a pastime, is now a religion. Viagra is the blessed sacrament, and a stack of steroids can be a course in miracles. These diversions will break our fall for a while, create the illusion of ground and control, but it’s a game of bumper cars at full speed, and pretty soon a head-on collision necessitates a new chassis, as we limp to the sidelines, exhaust pipe clanking against the superhighway, our big end gone for ever. Without wanting to, we step irretrievably into old age, and may never turn back.
Not if you’re Nicky Haslam.
I first met Nicky when I was seventeen and worshipped him immediately. In those days, he was quite conventionally turned out with only a feather-cut silver bouffant and a slightly clipped Noël Coward delivery that set him apart, unless of course you bumped into him off the beaten social track, late one night, as I once did, at the Coleherne pub in Earl’s Court. Nicky could fit in anywhere. He always dressed for the occasion, and that night, with deadly aplomb, lurking like a cast member of Cats under a lamp, he was decked out in a suit of black bin liners over galoshes.
Today we are reminiscing rather carefully, as only two dowagers in the throes of autobiographical looting missions can, when Nicky, somewhat cagily, I feel, denies this clearly etched memory.
‘Don’t be silly, dear. I was wearing my fireman’s uniform. I would never go out in bin liners. You should take up embroidery. Anyway, what about those leather drainpipes you were wearing with the pixiehat codpiece!’
‘Now you’re being silly, darling. I would never have worn drainpipes. I didn’t have the calves for them.’
‘Until you met that doctor in Brazil.’
‘Carlos Fernando has never worked on my legs, Nicky. I would like to make that clear right now.’
‘If you say so.’ Nicky’s face sinks back into itself, always a bad sign.
But the main thing was that even though he was already ancient in our cruel teenage eyes, he was completely unlike the other men we knew. He looked at life with a fascinating mixture of childlike enthusiasm and savage queenery. Nicky was, in fact, the last in line of a certain type of royal. David Herbert and Stephen Tennant, bright young things from between the wars, were his fey trailblazers, and Nicky’s psychological roots wrapped around caskets as long buried as Alfred Douglas’s. Unfortunately, this type of queer is largely extinct now, but in the seventies there were still quite a few left, and it was in their drawing rooms that one still heard the nuance and timbre of Wilde. Nicky loved a vendetta, and was normally waging wars on several fronts. If he got a bee in his bonnet, it could get stuck in there for years, or days, anyway, as we all found to our cost, at some time or other. But equally, a deeply lodged rancour could dissolve over a lunch or a funny remark, and the milometer would be back at zero.
My first significant public appearance was at Nicky’s famous ‘Tenue de Chasse’ ball at the Hunting Lodge, his newly acquired country seat.
I was determined to make a splash and decided to go as a Masai warrior. After much persuasion, my boyfriend at the time, the eccentric designer Antony Price, knocked up a ruched pouch in rust-coloured ultra suede on the sewing machine that stood in the corner of his bedroom in Earl’s Court. I lay in bed while he sat hunched over the machine, deftly sewing under an anglepoise lamp, which was the only light in an empty mauve room that contained a mattress, a pile of clothes and an ironing board. The windows were open and it was raining outside. The curtains flapped about and Antony looked
like an enormous wicked witch, pedalling away under his giant spindle, throwing an enormous shadow across the room. I watched him nervously from the bed – this pouch had taken a lot of persuasion – Antony was a gentle giant but a pathological grumbler as well. Now he was heaving with doomy predictions.
‘What are you going to do with that flat arse of yours?’
‘Sit on it. Anyway I’ll have my cloak.’
I was putting the finishing touches to a cape of butter muslin and threading tons of wooden beads into necklaces. Antony shook his head and chuckled as he inspected the pouch.
‘Come on then, Mary. Dress rehearsal.’
As the rain poured down outside we painted my body with Negro Two by Max Factor (those were the days) and my lips with Crimson Lake by Leichner. Then Antony took Polaroids and had his wicked way with me as thunder crackled above and lightning briefly lit our incongruous writhing bodies. The beads broke on my necklace and bounced off all over the floor.
On the night of the party, a beautiful June evening, I set off from my parents’ home in Wiltshire with my two best friends in my smashed-up Mini for the party, which was about an hour’s drive away.
Liza and Damian were an item. They were also the best-looking people I knew. Already a ruthless snob, I revelled in the reflected glory of being their spokesperson, and they were staying with my family for the party.
Liza had a beautiful body and loved nothing more than to wear a skintight, leopard-skin dress, ravaged by scissors, over stiletto heels and under (but later quite possibly over) a fabulous mane of blonde hair. She teetered on the heels, moved like a caged tigress inside the stretch wrap, and her slightly pouting lips peeped out from beneath the mane of hair. She had incredible allure, with the added bonus of being the daughter of the Thane of Cawdor. She was a descendant of Macbeth. I was her best friend. We both had Minis. Mine was white and falling to pieces. Hers was blue and souped up. Mine had a large gash across the bonnet inflicted during one of those typical hooray accidents – a hit and run with a parked car late one night on Eaton Terrace, on the way home from the Embassy Club. Hers had a House of Lords parking sticker on the windowscreen.
Vanished Years Page 10
