Cox ranged from one end of the table to the other, talking the film up in his mid-Atlantic South Wirral accent. Now his gangly arms gesticulated. Now he thrust them in his pockets. We sat the length of one of the trestle tables, alternately tittering with the novelty of it all and gawping at the actors opposite.
On the plane next day, sitting across the aisle from me, Frank slapped a couple of blocks of A4 held together with brass fasteners on his knee.
‘When he comes to visit Hollywood,’ he said, ‘the successful manager always leaves with at least two film scripts.’
The scripts made their way round the plane. One of them was a script for a Jonathan Demme film called Something Wild. The other was the script for Straight to Hell. If the plot was indiscernible, the characters indistinguishable and the dialogue gobbledygook, it was because all I could think about was that I was flying home to end my five-year relationship with Debsey.
I spent a day by myself in my flat. I threw the windows open. I swept the dead flies into a dustpan and flung their bodies into the courtyard. I broke the discs of penicillin in the coffee mugs with a spoon and scooped them into the sink. The next day I rang Debsey.
‘I need to talk to you,’ I said.
‘Oh, it’s chuck time,’ she said.
‘Yes it is,’ I said.
Twenty-Two
It was September and it was hot in the south of Spain. As the sun passed over the open sea of the Mediterranean, the angled frontage of the Hotel Gran Almería focused the sun’s rays onto a pool the shape of a dart-flight surrounded by crap loungers upholstered with slack plastic tape. First thing in the morning they would be empty but by eleven were full and would stay that way until evening. Regulars at the pool were a woman in a bathing costume slashed into slits at the waist and whose skin hung in bronzed silken folds from her arse down, and her partner, a guy with steel-grey hair, skin similarly russet, who I saw one morning standing in the poolside shower, his arm extended from the twinkling stream, holding a lit cigarette out of harm’s way.
Some of us had rooms overlooking the breakwater of the Club de Mar and the palms of the Parque de Nicolás Salmerón, the grid of olive trees, the train tracks of the Cable Inglés elevated on rusted iron trestles which ended at the wharf and, beyond, the glittering Mediterranean. I had a room at the back with a view of a car park, the clock tower of the Palacio de Justicia and the palm trees lining the Avenida de Federico García Lorca. I would have been envious but I was too relieved to have a room to myself. We’d just finished a short tour of France and had flown from Colmar to Andalucía by way of Madrid.
As the cast of Straight to Hell arrived, the cool rotunda of the lobby with its pillars and its gleaming composite floor echoed with Americans trying to make themselves understood to the Spanish staff. The joke was that, sooner than repeat themselves more slowly, the Yanks merely raised their voices as if the concierge or the receptionist or the barman was deaf. The Americans whose voices reverberated in the rotunda and whose laughter exploded in the bar were Hollywood actors. The loudest of them all, when she arrived to play the part of the bank-robbers’ moll in the film, was Courtney Love, between myself and whom I made sure to put at least twenty-five yards whenever I could.
To the Hollywood actors were added a slew more from London, just as striking to look at but less divisible into stereotypes. Whether they were from London or Los Angeles, most of the actors knew one another, having either worked on at least one of Cox’s previous films, Sid and Nancy and Repo Man, or having otherwise crossed paths in their careers. The fact that I did not recognise any of them didn’t matter. I was in awe of them and glum that my incorporation in the ‘composite character’ of the Pogues made me unremarkable.
I was Jimmy McMahon, one of the twelve siblings of the McMahon clan. Our dad was the American actor Biff Yeager. Our mother was Sue Kiel, the voluptuous flame-haired actress from Hollywood. Our grandfather was Jem, who since the filming of the video for ‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’ had been typecast in Cox’s eyes as an old man.
The shooting location was twenty miles north of Almería in the Tabernas Desert. A dusty road from what was called Tent City, where the car park and catering were, led down past a couple of shabby brick buildings – a saloon with a covered walkway and opposite it a hardware store – to the plaza. Round a circular stucco fountain stood a Mexican-style pueblo of blindingly white, crumbling, mostly adobe buildings, including a church with a tiny bell in a tower above the front door. Beyond the plaza lay the otherwise biscuit-coloured expanse of the desert. The clarity of the light rendered the weathered wood of the window-frames and the water-tower luminous.
We didn’t start off on the right foot with Cox. We had been given instructions not to shave for at least five days before arriving on location. Towards the end of our ten-day tour of France before flying to the south of Spain, a consensus had developed that we couldn’t allow ourselves to be dictated to over the matter of our facial hair.
On the first day of work on the film we went to the costume department in one of the dilapidated outhouses up the dust road from the plaza. As we were tugging our gaucho outfits on, Cox strode in. He chided us about the unprofessionalism of arriving on set unprepared.
‘Not acceptable’, he said, ‘to have to change the shooting schedule until the band’s ready.’ He swept out of the building. I believed him and went hot with guilt that our collective vanity should affect the circumstances of a multinational cast and crew.
After that, I tried to demonstrate to the people I took to be seasoned practitioners of the craft of filmmaking that strangers to their profession as we were could at least be relied upon not to fuck up. As it turned out, make-up compensated for our lack of swarthiness until our stubble grew in. Cox’s bluffness had been just bluff.
Nonetheless, as soon as shooting started I made sure I was quick to learn what the assistant director’s honking instructions ‘first positions’ and ‘checking the gate’ over the walkie-talkies meant and to show that I could be relied on to pay attention to the orders ‘hold the traffic’ and ‘quiet on set’. I showed the crew that I knew where to stand, how to get out of the way, how not to wander into shot. I remembered what I’d been doing in what I found out was called the master shot. I could be relied upon to replicate it in the medium and close shots. Above all, I wanted to distance myself from the disorder I expected Shane to wreak on a daily basis.
He never knew which one his costume was in the corridor of bare brick and exposed beams that was our dressing room, but we all figured it out by process of elimination. He looked puzzled on set, but it turned out to be the severity of the sunlight which I realised must have hurt his blue eyes. To my surprise, he paid attention and stood in the right place, if sometimes unsure of where his mark was supposed to be. He spoke his lines at the right time, though the ferocity and precipitation of his delivery seemed to startle him.
The heat was punishing. The crew went about in canvas shorts and T-shirts. They tied bandanas over their heads, squeezed fluorescent strips of zinc oxide down their noses against the sun. Our costumes were heavy black suits of ill-fitting trousers and jacket, decorated with gold thread and buttons, a grey flannel shirt and a bandana tied round the neck. They were suffocating. The black sombrero I had to wear trapped my head in a vice of hard felt. At the end of each day I was filthy with the dust. I reeked from the heat.
In the hotel, the actors in Straight to Hell for the most part came across as a professional, homogeneous and oddly suburban bunch. The odd voice might have been raised in an attempt to clear the language barrier, but by and large, proprieties and civility were observed. The men went about in loafers, chinos and polo shirts, the women in halter-necks, blouses, shorts, the occasional muu-muu.
When they turned up on location, though, the passage through wardrobe and make-up wrought such a transformation that when they arrived on set, they had been possessed by the most grotesque of psyches, the fellowship replaced by a hydra-headed monster of suspici
on, supremacy and sexual tension. Why many of them needed to inhabit their characters so intensely and for such long stretches of time mystified me. The men lowered at one another with a mixture of hatred and suspicion. The women sneered with a combination of hatred, suspicion and lust. I tried not to let it go to my head. I told myself that they were actors, that they were acting. I tried to give as good as I got, but, being merely an element, and a fairly lowly one at that, of the composite character of the coffee-addicted McMahon family, and feeling increasingly out of my depth with these graduates of the Anna Scher Theatre School and the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute, I knew I would be the one to blink first.
Their behaviour on set resulted in my being leery of them when we got back to the hotel. I befriended Kathy Burke, one of the few actors who managed to maintain some sort of immunity. She was a doyenne of Sid and Nancy and had appeared in Scrubbers and a BBC production of Bleak House. We met in the bar most nights. Hers was Holsten Pils. Mine was a Cuarenta y Tres con leche caliente.
One of the worst was Joe Strummer, who seemed never to be out of costume, never out of character. He hunched about the set, squinting here and there, or sitting on his haunches in the dust idly drawing something in the sand with a stick, glamorously lost in his thoughts, or combing his hair into bituminous striations above his ears with a steel comb and machine oil, flicking the excess into the sand. He had comely eyes, shaded by brows set at a more or less dolorous angle. If he looked at you, it was from a level lower than your own, clerically askance, as if he expected to be pained by a secret from the confessional. It seemed he rarely slept in the hotel. The rumour was he walked about Almería instead or slept up in Blanco Town. An undeniable charisma clung to Strummer, not just from his history, though it helped.
Strummer played the part of Simms, one of the bank-robbers who arrive in town with a suitcase full of money which needs hiding. In the script, members of the McMahon family go up to where the bank-robbers are holing up in the saloon, to point guns in through the windows, block the swinging louvred door and otherwise scrutinise the bank-robbers’ intentions. We’d done a couple of takes when Strummer came up to me.
‘You’ve got to pick one of us, man,’ he said. ‘And that’s the one you’re going to kill if it all goes to shit. Pick me! Don’t take your eyes off me! Not for a second. Do you know what I’m going to do next? No, you don’t! A lapse in concentration and you’re dead, man!’
In the script, as much as the arrival of the bank-robbers in Blanco Town threatens the town’s equilibrium, and as much as the hidden suitcase full of money sets the townsfolk against each another, it’s the bank-robbers’ sexuality – particularly that of Simms and Willy – which deranges the entire community. The womenfolk vie for Simms’s and Willy’s favours, and not merely in the hope of discovering the whereabouts of the suitcase.
Dick Rude, another doyen of Repo Man and Sid and Nancy and the co-writer with Cox of the screenplay of Straight to Hell, played Willy. Rude was a diminutive guy with sloping shoulders. There was a steely dispassion in his eyes that gave me an attack of self-disesteem whenever he looked at me. I was baffled what women saw in him, both when he played Willy and when he played himself.
In the third week into filming, ‘sexual tension’ became the repeated phrase on set. Before the shooting of any scene which included Simms and Willy and the town’s womenfolk, it was muttered as an incantation. Afterwards, it was huzzahed in celebration of its achievement.
It had been six weeks since I had ended my relationship with Debsey. I had a room to myself. It was the summer. We were surrounded by women. My susceptibility to sexual tension had been whetted by Olivia, a schoolgirl from the South of France whom I had encountered during our recent tour. A gaggle of teenagers outside the Roman amphitheatre in Nîmes, where we had just played, parted to reveal Olivia’s severe profile as she pulled her blonde hair back and snapped it into a hair-tie. We ended up in the hotel pool where we played like dolphins until our eyes were raw from chlorine.
On the set of Straight to Hell, sexual tension clogged the air when it came time for the shower scene featuring the hardware-store owner’s wife, Fabienne. Fabienne was played by Jennifer Balgobin, the tawny girl we’d seen at the meeting of cast and crew in Los Angeles. We studied her contours under the showerhead as she rinsed herself off – daftly, in an outside stall, and even more daftly in her clothes, skimpy as they were. Cox notched up the sexual tension even further when we were treated to the sight of Fabienne, again scantily clad, washing the chrome muffler of her husband’s motorbike with a foaming sponge.
Jennifer had long, tan legs and slim shoulders. She was gorgeous, with dramatic eyebrows and abundant black hair. During shooting I would take in her form. At lunch I made any excuse to gravitate towards her.
She welcomed my flirting. She laughed at my jokes with the guttural abandon of a teenager. It turned out, though, that there was something going on between her and Strummer. I put it down to the script and the predatory and violent relationship between Fabienne and Simms the Englishman. Off set I saw little evidence of any relationship at all. Yet, when I squeezed myself in next to her on the bench in Tent City, I became aware of sidelong glances. In the end it seemed best policy to separate myself from her when it came time to return to the set where Strummer invariably hung out during lunch.
In the last week in August, the Parque de Nicolás Salmerón erupted with the Feria de Almería. Strings of lights looped from lamp-post to lamp-post. In the middle of the palm-fronded promenade a huge Ferris wheel turned, bright with bulbs. Huge caged barrels of iron and wood with seats bolted inside spun and tilted, flinging out over the park the screams of the people inside. There were teacups, twisters, waltzers, dodgems and orbiters. The seafront resounded with the cracks from the shooting galleries, the clangs of bells, the interminable squawking of the bingo callers. There was shrieking and rumbling, the hiss of hydraulics, the blasts of air horns, and reiterated again and again the blowzy trumpet theme of the ‘Liechtensteiner Polka’ which brayed throughout the dusty park as soon as the sun went down. Kathy Burke had one of the coveted rooms at the front of the hotel overlooking the park. She took to sleeping in the bath to escape the noise.
On the dodgems at the Feria one night, as I slewed my car around the edge of the rink, I saw Spider pass me. He was wearing his suit. He drove with a foot up on the dashboard. His left elbow lolled on the back of the seat as if framing an invisible passenger. He steered the car with just his fingertips. I came in on an angle and rammed him from the side. When I saw him again he was driving with both hands on the wheel, sitting forward with his knees together. Blood was trickling down his face from above his left eye. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him who had rammed him.
One afternoon on a day off from shooting I wandered out of the hotel across the road to the amusement park. The Feria was quiet, though the Ferris wheel still turned above the strings of light bulbs pointlessly lit in the brightness of the afternoon. The sound of guitars at the far end of the park drew me to a warren of stalls with a small plaza in the middle and a makeshift bar. It was busy with stall-keepers and ride-operators before the Feria opened. In the bar a man and a woman were dancing flamenco to the accompaniment of a couple of guitarists sitting on boxes. The man’s white shirt stuck to his back with the heat. The woman’s face was haggard and red. Amid the abrasive rasgueados of the guitars, the cracks of fingernails on scratch-plates, the smacking of their audience’s palmas, and shouts of ‘¡Vamo’ ya!’, the couple circled each other, their arms raised as if keeping an invisible veil aloft. They showed each other nothing but their profiles. The woman wheeled around as if to keep the man in her sight. She stamped, as if simultaneously to warn him off and bring him into line. Though their arms snaked, though her buttocks passed maddeningly close to her partner’s groin, though her shoulders swept inches beneath his chin, they never touched once. Their deferred appetite for each other made me sulky with longing for Jennifer Balgobin.
; Day after day, Cox strode about the set in shorts, dusty boots, a T-shirt and a bandana. Such was his will and his domination of the set that his eyes became all pupil, organs of total concentration, permitting not the slightest deviation from the matters at hand, one at a time: the length of focus, an actor’s mark, the blocking of a particular scene, the motivation of one of the characters. If his focus and commitment were not reciprocated, he would become angry.
Cox looked benevolently, though, on our attempts to comply with his procedure. We had a rehearsal of the death of Spider’s character, Angel Eyes, by a shotgun blast to the chest. The McMahons came running to the scene. We knew that Cox was going to ask us all what we had been doing off-camera.
‘Burning an insect with a magnifying glass!’
‘Squeezing Lance’s nipples with a pair of pliers!’
‘Good! Good!’ Cox said.
The only sympathetic character in the film was a hot-dog vendor called Karl, played by Zander Schloss. Karl becomes the scapegoat for both the inhabitants of Blanco Town and the outsiders. In the script, at the culmination of an orgiastic party, Karl is marched to the plaza fountain to have his head dunked in the water.
Here Comes Everybody Page 24
