The Stand-In

by Deborah Moggach

  ‘Ah, Laurel. The starlet with the big knockers who so admires your work.’

  He opened one eye, looked at me and closed it again. ‘Imagine it. Socking great swimming pool. Some uniformed berk bringing us Bacardi cocktails. Crumpet coming out of the woodwork.’ He sighed. ‘You lying there, scripts dangling from your painted fingernails like Faye Dunaway.’

  ‘I don’t want to go to California. I want to work at the National Theatre.’ I picked at a hole in the sofa upholstery. ‘Neil Simon said it was paradise with a lobotomy.’

  ‘The National Theatre?’

  I dug him with my elbow. ‘You’re not interested in my career. You’re not even interested in the bloody theatre.’ This was true. He preferred going to the movies; practically the only play he had seen was his own. ‘You just want to be rich and famous.’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘I want to play Cleopatra, with Peter Brook directing me.’

  But I wasn’t playing Cleopatra, was I? And then I had to explain who Peter Brook was, because Trev had never heard of him.

  On the way home I bought some fruit. It was a sunny day and I was wearing a halter-neck dress I had just made. For the first time in my life, however, the greengrocer didn’t call me ‘love’ or ‘darling’. He called me ‘Mum’.

  For some reason, this decided me.

  And that’s where my story really begins. Although you could say it began eighteen months earlier, when I first glimpsed Trevor in that architectural salvage yard, surrounded by his priapic chimney pots.

  Four

  I COME FROM a silent household. Perhaps that’s why I find the fluster of filming so attractive. My father became the deputy head of a grammar school that was merged into a comprehensive. It broke his heart. He was a bookish, inward man who wasn’t good at what is called relating – a word he loathed. I don’t remember him ever touching me, or indeed my mother, with affection. The only way I could tell he was pleased with me – when I got my A-level results, for instance – was when he went to his bureau, fetched his camera and took my photo. When he died, years later, I went through his things. He had kept all my letters in separate plastic folders, each dated in careful typing. I should have been touched – I was, momentarily – but I was also repulsed by his secretiveness, and angry at the sheer waste of all that feeling.

  I was disturbed, too, because I recognised something of myself in it. My early efforts to attract his attention met with so little response that I retreated to my bedroom where I sat in front of the mirror, watching my brooding face with spasms of self-pity. I would mouth into the mirror my carefully prepared speeches, and his longed-for replies. With practice, I had him perfectly – his nervous cough, his deliberate pauses, the way he ran his finger over his moustache, touching his lips as he did so. I became a repressed, secretive child, closing myself off into my own fantasy world where I could re-run everything and make it all right. When I was alone, of course, it always worked. From the age of twelve I wanted to be an actress.

  My mother was a pretty, under-used woman who at some point must have realised that her marriage wasn’t up to much and who simply gave up. She was the last generation of middle-class women who didn’t work. Accompanied by her droning companion, the vacuum cleaner, she made the rounds of our house in Arundel each morning and in the afternoons took to her bed with a series of small ailments which were her last, and largely unsuccessful, attempts to get my father to notice her. In fact he found illness embarrassing and boring. I was more intelligent than my mother and realised that. Excellence was the only thing that pleased him. A staunch liberal, he had groomed children to excellence in his old grammar school days, and when I went to drama school I studied with his picture in my head, like a framed painting of the headmaster he never quite became, telling me to try even harder. If I failed he was not angry but disappointed, which of course made it worse.

  The only time I had him to myself was when I was up on stage. He came to all my productions, even terrible, amateurish ones in arctic community halls. When I apologised, he said that schoolteachers functioned best in a draught. Afterwards we actually had some proper conversations. We would go to a pub and he would buy me a drink – I would always have a scotch because that was what he drank. He loved going over my texts – he had taught English and knew a great deal about plays, even contemporary ones. He would come alive then; I realised what a terrific teacher he must have been. Teaching, of course, is easier than fatherhood because you can be more detached. In fact you have to be. But once you’re detached you can, strangely enough, communicate better – it’s like telling somebody on the phone all the things you are too shy to tell them face to face.

  My mother would twitter on about how pretty I looked. He would simply pause – he didn’t even pay her the compliment of sighing – and wait until she had finished. And then we would get back to what absorbed us both, more than anything in the world, which was words.

  Every actor performs for somebody. They have to. It might be the director, or – more rarely – the producer. It might be their drama teacher, if such a person has been potent for them. It might be some mythical film scout, who they imagine in the audience to psyche themselves up. It might be the reviewers, and always one in particular, the one they admire – the after-effects of this can carry on long after the first night. It might be their lover, for whom they display themselves erotically. It might be the playwright, though this can be unnerving. It might simply be some imagined member of the audience, someone just like themselves, a soulmate who knows and appreciates exactly what they are trying to do and would do it that way if only they had the talent. It might be several of these in succession, particularly in a long run when the actor needs to stay awake. It might be none.

  In my profession I’ve heard people mention all of these. But I’ve never described the face in my own darkened auditorium. It is my father’s. I always performed for him; in a sense, I still do.

  Arriving at a film unit when it is halfway through shooting is like arriving at a new school in mid-term. In my case it was even worse. As I had suspected, a stand-in was certainly not a member of the crew – a bunch of men in anoraks who were, as always, a law unto themselves. They either looked surprisingly young, with tight jeans and highlights in their hair, or else leathery and preoccupied.

  Nor did I feel like a member of the cast, who that first morning were nowhere to be seen, though I presumed they were in the make-up trailer. People rushed past me; I hung about, feeling both invisible and yet in the way. It was a chilly morning; I shivered in my sweater. They were setting up an exterior shot, in a smart Kensington street, outside the scientist’s house. What scientist?

  Finally I found the lowest of the low: an extra. She was a woman with a poodle who eerily resembled my own mother, though dressed as a Kensington shopper.

  ‘He’s got an irritated bowel,’ she said, gazing at her dog. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have had him clipped.’

  We drank a styrofoam cup of coffee together, leaning against a garden wall.

  ‘It’s a re-make of an old forties film everyone’s forgotten,’ said the extra. She had a high, refined voice. ‘It’s a comedy about an eccentric old scientist who’d invented a pill that can change a person’s sex.’ He was being played by an alcoholic stage actor who was having a sunset success in the movies. His younger American wife was being played by Lila Dune. ‘I don’t know anything else, except that Miss Dune is supposed to be having a thing with the director.’ The extra looked at her watch. ‘Hotpoint’s coming this p.m. to mend my washing machine. Does p.m. start at one, do you think, or two?’

  ‘Twelve,’ I said. ‘Post meridiem.’

  The woman frowned at me for a moment, and then wandered off.

  Suddenly the assistant director was there, the man with the walkie-talkie. He clasped me around the shoulders as if I were his long-lost niece, and told me to step this way.

  Films are shot in such a fractured fashion that it is hard to piece togethe
r their story. It is like being shoved up against various items of furniture – a table-leg, a cupboard – and never being able to stand back and see what the room looks like. I had hardly ever been in a real film; I had only appeared in student movies or else in low-budget TV dramas that were shot in the studio. Sexbuslers was the full works – a big feature with scores of technicians who had moved in on the street, blocked it off and set up their equipment as if major surgery was about to take place.

  A girl led me to the wardrobe trailer. She gave me a blue coat and a wig. It was a long, blonde wig; not mousy like my own hair but brassy yellow like Lila’s. It was too tight.

  ‘Sandy’s head was smaller than yours,’ said the girl. Her breath smelt of peppermints.

  I looked in the mirror. In the wig I looked phoney and skittish, as if I had rifled someone else’s dressing-up box.

  ‘Do I have to wear this?’ I asked.

  ‘Jock’s finicky,’ said the girl. She pointed to a taxi. It was parked in the street, outside the scientist’s house. ‘You sit here, Joyce.’

  ‘Jules.’

  The girl looked at her watch and shouted to somebody. I put on the coat and climbed into the cab. Its back seat was full of Harrods carrier bags. In the front sat the cabbie, a middle-aged Jewish actor I vaguely recognised. He had played Moses in a children’s serial I had read for, but failed to get.

  ‘What’s up?’ he said. ‘Rex is in a filthy temper.’

  ‘Who’s Rex?’

  ‘The director.’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve only just arrived. What am I supposed to be doing?’

  ‘Search me,’ said the cabbie. ‘You’ve been shopping, I suppose, and you’re coming home.’

  The assistant director wound down the window. He explained that once they had set up the shot I had to get out of the cab and carry my bags up the front path to the house. A maid would take them from me.

  I did as I was told. I sat still for what seemed an age. The wig felt like a thick rubber band around my skull. When instructed I got out, with the bags, and walked up the front path to the house. But it was an odd sensation, as if I were invisible. The sun came out. The lighting crew weren’t looking at my face, they were calling out numbers and adjusting their lights. I was simply a blue coat, with legs; I was a solid, with a shadow. I stood on the front steps, with all those eyes on me and yet none of them seeing me at all. It was curiously exhausting. Somebody shifted a tub of geraniums to one side. Somebody asked: ‘Where the hell’s Russell?’ Beyond the houses, which rose up in front of me, white as icing, the Knightsbridge traffic hummed.

  Minutes passed. People seemed to have forgotten about me. They all seemed to be in a bad mood. Every film unit has its own character, which is formed in the first few days of shooting. It comes from a chemistry of egos, weather, and a hundred other things. But the most pervasive of these is the director who, like a headmaster, sets the morale of the whole group; and the morale of Sexbusters was low.

  I didn’t discover this until later. All I noticed was that the actress who played the maid, arriving at the door for the shooting rehearsal, sighed at me and rolled her eyes heavenwards. And then I was told to move off the set. I tried to find the extra, but the woman had already been positioned at the far end of the street; she was working, now, and out of bounds.

  Film stars, like royalty, have a habit of suddenly appearing from nowhere. When I turned, there was Lila. She had come out of the house; she seemed to be arguing with a tanned, muscular man who wore a lumberjack’s cap. This, I deduced, was the director, Rex Benson. He was grinning. Lila stood on the doorstep and blew her nose. Rex patted her shoulder; she smiled sweetly at him. A make-up girl approached her with a brush; she smiled sweetly at her. Then she walked down to the taxi-cab. She was wearing an expensive-looking blue coat and high heels. She looked sensational.

  I didn’t get to meet her until after the lunchbreak. They were doing all the exterior shots of the house that day. Due to some hold-up with Lila, however, the cab scene had over-run, and people were scuttling about in a frenzy. There was no chance for me to introduce myself.

  Instead I ate lamb chops in a double decker bus. I sat next to the actress who played the maid. In front of us sat the group of extras who, like extras everywhere, ate twice as much as everybody else, as if stoking up for a siege.

  ‘Rex is a shit,’ said the actress.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Jumps anything that moves. He keeps telling me to bend over more when I’m doing my dusting.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said, ‘one of those droit de seigneur ones.’

  ‘Pardon?’ She lit a Silk Cut and blew smoke over the hair of the people in front. ‘No wonder she’s cracking up.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Lila. He’s been screwing Lorraine right under her nose.’

  ‘Who’s Lorraine?’

  The actress sniffed. ‘She doesn’t come here any more.’ She gestured around the bus. ‘Too good for us, I suppose. And she’s only got this teensy-weensy part as the gerbil-keeper.’

  ‘Gerbils?’

  ‘In the lab.’ She explained the story. ‘It’s a wacky comedy,’ she said, rolling her eyes again. ‘This old geezer, the scientist, he’s invented this sex-change pill. His wife, that’s Lila, she’s wooed by this handsome rival scientist. But when she finds out that the rival scientist is only using her to get the secret formula she blows her top, and gets her revenge by feeding him the pill and turning him into a woman.’ She stubbed out her cigarette in her apple crumble. ‘He’s a woman now, right? So he gets his revenge by falling in love with Rory.’

  ‘Who’s Rory?’

  ‘The scientist’s son by his first marriage. So Adelaide – that’s Lila – she turns him back into a man.’

  There was a pause. ‘And why not,’ I said. The extra with the Hotpoint appointment looked at her watch and got up. I wondered idly what she had done with her poodle. The Lady with the Little Dog . . . I felt a wave of homesickness for Chekhov. Why was I sitting here, choking in the cigarette smoke of people I didn’t know? Where was Trev, and was he thinking about me? I remembered the night before, when he breathed into my ear and licked my elbows. Outside, a shadow passed over the houses; voices shouted in the silenced street. Last night I had dreamed I was standing, naked, on a stage. I was playing Hermione in The Winter’s Tale and I had forgotten my lines. Suddenly, with a hiss, I melted. Then I woke up, sweating.

  After lunch the atmosphere improved. Or perhaps I just felt more at home because I had eaten a meal. The AD, whose name was Malcolm, actually paused for a moment and outlined the afternoon’s scenes. He added that they had to get three scenes into the can, including one where the rival scientist appeared at the house in drag. The actor, Tony Chandler, had spent all morning in wardrobe and make-up.

  Besides, I was no longer the newcomer. The morning’s extras left and new ones arrived, plus a Sunlight Laundry van, which was to make a delivery to the house. Two more members of the cast appeared – the eccentric scientist and his screen son Rory. The director was seen with his arms around both of them, laughing.

  ‘It won’t last,’ whispered the actress who played the maid. She had finished shooting for the day and was waiting for a minicab. ‘It just means he’s made it up with Lila.’

  ‘Rex has?’

  She nodded. ‘He goes into her trailer and she gives him a blow-job.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘She’s dieting, apparently, and it’s very low-calorie.’

  I was only being used for one of the scenes. I had to stand at the bedroom balcony, watching my ex-lover, now female, arrive for a date with my stepson. The sun blazed. I pulled on my wig and gazed at the upturned faces. I imagined myself the Juliet I had never played, and now never would. Wherefore art thou, Trevor? Thinkest thou of me, who swelters seen yet unseen, the effigy of another? I closed my eyes and pictured him, loaded with chimney pots, climbing up the drainpipe to my balcony.

  Tony Chandler was a newcomer. Appa
rently he had started as a model, made his name in a lager commercial and was now breaking into the movies. I had been introduced to him earlier; he was handsome in a delicate way, like an etching. Now, from my balcony, I watched him drive up in his Morgan and rehearse climbing out, swinging his legs in their high-heeled sandals. He wore a red, curly wig and a full-skirted dress. One of the cameramen wolfwhistled.

  Later, off the set, I watched Lila acting the scene for real. I felt a tweak of resentment. That balcony was so familiar to me by now – its warm railings, its wisteria – that Lila seemed the usurper. I myself had stood there for an hour, but now I no longer existed; I was simply the servant who kept the throne warm for the queen’s arrival, for the radiant smiles and flashing cameras.

  From a distance, I watched the first take. Lila leaned over the balcony, her hair golden in the sun.

  ‘Rory’s not at home,’ she shouted down. ‘And, honey, green’s not your colour.’

  I picked up somebody’s newspaper and sat down on the garden wall. My blonde Lila-hair fell in my eyes and I pushed it back. Another cancer ward had been closed, I read, for lack of government funds. A Labour MP said that Britain was becoming a two-nation country: the rich were getting richer and the poor were getting bled.

  I smelt perfume. For a moment I thought it was the garden flowers behind me; then I looked up and saw Lila.

  Lila was just a few feet away. She was with the AD, Malcolm. They stopped. Malcolm turned to me.

  ‘Have you two actually been introduced? This is Julia Sampson.’

  ‘Hi. How’re ya doing?’ Lila shook my hand.

  Malcolm beamed. ‘Lila’s been telling me how great it is, that you could join us so quickly.’

  I beamed at Lila. I suddenly had an absurd desire to please her. ‘Terrific story, isn’t it?’ I said.