by Judy Nunn
Alain was sticking with his theory of going for the real thing now they had their commercial stars. And who was Jim to disagree? The roles of the two ageing actors in ‘The Glitter Game’ cried out for the two most famous has-beens in the country and he waited for Alain to make the triumphant announcement. Unfortunately Chris Natteros was with them and Jim winced as Chris now leapt to his feet.
‘Mandy Burgess and Sidney Meredith!’
Oh no, Jim thought, when would Chris learn that one had to allow Alain his moment? He must remember to have a word with Chris.
Alain’s smile was forced. ‘Precisely. Mandy and Sidney. What do you think, Jim? Couldn’t get more has-been than that, eh?’
‘Good idea. They still have quite a following too.’
Alain gave a derisive laugh. ‘Sure, if you’re after the infirmary brigade. But they’re spot-on typecasting. Line them up.’
Out in the corridor Jim turned to Chris but the director held up his hand in acknowledgement. ‘Not a word. I know, I know.’
Jim smiled. ‘They’ll need to be contacted at the same time because they’ll get their agents to run a check. Of course they’ll both jump at it but we don’t need to start off with more dramas than necessary. You do Mandy and I’ll do Sidney.’
Jim was right as usual. It was common knowledge that Mandy and Sidney loathed each other. Although they’d played husband and wife with monotonous regularity for nearly thirty years, it had been dislike at first sight and had grown ever since.
Sure enough, the agents of both actors rang back ten minutes after the initial contact with the same list of queries. When was the other actor approached? Was the billing equal, the length of contract the same? Simultaneously, Jim and Chris assured them that the billing, the length of contract and indeed the money (‘although I wouldn’t tell anyone but you’) was the same.
The money was, in fact, better than either of them had seen in the past five years, so once their pride was appeased they both leapt at the offer. So much so that the excitement of the impending series outweighed their mutual loathing.
As Mandy sat under the bright lights in her dermatologist’s surgery she barely felt the burning pricks of the needle injecting her bi-annual dose of collagen. It had been all she could do to afford the treatments over the past two years. No more worries now, she thought. She’d soon be able to afford her second full face-lift, thanks to the series. But, even more importantly, she’d be back in the public eye! A star! Oh, how she’d missed it. Five years ago she’d been appalled at being offered three granny roles in a row and had turned them down without even reading the scripts. That had been a mistake. In the past two years she’d been forced to accept a series of TV commercials for pensioners’ insurance and three episodes of a series set in a retirement village. It was mortifying.
At sixty-two, although she only admitted to fifty-five, and then when cornered — Mandy still wore the vestiges of a once pretty youth. True, the figure had grown blowsy and she dressed like someone half her age, which made her the butt of many a joke, but her bones were good and her eyes were still clear. If Mandy could only have learned to act her age, she would have been a handsome woman.
Mandy squeezed back the tears behind tightly closed eyelids as the needle dug into her upper lip. She thought back to the late sixties and the height of her fame in the four year series that had taken the country by storm. The award nights, the promotion trips, the luxury hotels — it would all be hers again. She’d be able to pay off the mortgage on the Orwell Street flat. God, what a relief that would be. She’d lived there for over thirty years and lately she’d been having nightmares each month as the loan repayment date loomed.
When she and Bill had divorced ten years ago, he’d left her the flat and kept the country house for himself. All very quick, all very civilised and Mandy barely noticed his absence as she poured all the money she’d accumulated from the series into the renovations she’d been wanting to do for the twenty years of their mistaken marriage. And the quicker the renovations were finished the sooner Cindy would move in.
Cindy was the reason Bill had left. He’d known of Mandy’s peccadillos with young women for years but, as sex was no longer of any interest to him, he turned a blind eye to them. He supposed it was better than Mandy cuckolding him with men. No one was likely to guess that she was actually bedding her succession of young female companions. But when Cindy arrived on the scene things changed. People guessed, all right. Cindy made sure of that. Cindy had a big mouth and was proud that her lover was a TV star. Cindy was a slut. Bill was mortified and left. Very quickly.
Mandy never thought of herself as a lesbian. Far from it. She was highly sexed, that was all. Indeed, before her marriage to Bill there had been many men in her life. She’d turned to women when Bill had lost all interest in sex. It was quite harmless, just something different to do, really. Well, that’s what Mandy supposed. Cindy was something else though. Mandy was besotted.
It lasted till the money ran out. Four years. It would have been three but, after the money from the series was gone, Mandy mortgaged the flat which bought her a further year of Cindy, at the end of which Cindy went off with a highly paid AFL football forward.
Mandy’s love life had declined since then. She’d had a couple of flirtations with young women and a pleasant affair with a sixty-two year old farmer who was mildly infatuated with her. She’d had to put a stop to that one though, he was far too old for her (Mandy kept forgetting her age), with a libido active only once every couple of months. Besides, he wanted Mandy to retire and live with him on his struggling wheat farm. Mandy was far too young to retire and she loathed the country.
She breathed a sigh of relief. Her financial situation had been so desperate at the time that she’d been briefly tempted. Thank God she’d held out. Where would she be now? Rotting away amidst horse dung and flies instead of on the crest of international stardom in The King’s new television series.
She looked at her face in the mirror that the nurse was holding out to her. Wonderful. She could be a woman in her forties. The camera would love that face. Well, the camera would love it tomorrow when the little red marks had gone. What a pity she had to play opposite that dreadful hammy old fart Sidney Meredith.
Sidney was thinking very much along the same lines as he walked down the street towards the Actors Equity offices. Why on earth did they have to cast that blowsy old tart, Mandy Burgess? Damned shame! He dodged past the dark brick Victorian building which housed Mandy’s flat and ducked quickly into the Equity offices. God forbid that he should bump into her now, they’d be obliged to acknowledge one another and talk about the series.
Sidney had lived around the corner in his Victoria Street bedsit for over thirty years and he and Mandy bumped into each other regularly around Kings Cross. Their respective knowledge of the area had led them to the best value butcher, greengrocer and supermarket where they’d avoided each other assiduously for a good quarter of a century now. When they were working together, playing one of the many ageing couples they’d played over the years, they both resented the fact that they were forced to recognise each other over the loin chops, silver beet or soap powder.
Sidney paid his annual Equity dues to the girl at the counter. He paid at the counter every year — it saved stamps. Then he left, deciding to walk around the block rather than pass Mandy’s flat again. He didn’t want to push his luck and it was a beautiful day.
There was still a touch of spring in the air, although it promised to be a scorching summer. Sidney started perspiring at the mere thought of it. He perspired easily and he hated Sydney summers. In the forty years he’d been in Australia he’d never adjusted and each summer successfully took his system by surprise. So much so that he felt it to be a personal attack. Afternoon siestas, with cold flannels to the temple and Woolworths electric fans whirring all about his bedsit did little to alleviate the heat, and yet other people didn’t seem to be affected by it to the same degree. Indeed, many Australians wallowed in the
heat. They rolled around on the sands of Bondi Beach like stranded whales. Sidney shuddered. He still remembered with fondness the clean hard pebbles of Brighton Beach and Worthing and Bournemouth.
Sidney was still very much an Englishman. In fact, he would never have come to Australia had he been able to carve an equally successful career for himself in the Old Country. But after twelve years of weekly repertory in the poorer provincial theatres and summer seasons at Billy Butlin’s Holiday Camps, he’d felt he was ready for bigger and better things. Of course he hadn’t decided on the desperate measure of emigrating straight away. He’d had a bash at London first.
It was when he was at the end of his tether understudying and playing bit parts in the West End that his agent landed him a six month contract with the National Theatre. It was still the Old Vic then, of course, and the theatrical mecca of the world. Sidney was made. Or so he thought. Six months later, after spear-carrying, miming buglers and announcing that the king was coming, he emigrated.
Australia wasn’t his first choice. He’d decided on Canada until he read an article about an actor called Peter Finch who was making an international name for himself. Finch evidently came from Sydney. The name beckoned and the die was cast. Sidney would go to Sydney. Australia would be Sidney’s springboard to international stardom. If Finch could do it so could he.
He was thirty-two when he arrived in Australia and he discovered very quickly that his past experience was of great value to the antipodeans. He gained many an introduction with his stories of Larry (Laurence Olivier) and Rafe (Ralph Richardson) and his West End anecdotes went down a treat. Of course he never mentioned that he’d been understudying, blowing silent bugles and announcing that the king was coming. The work started pouring in. A West End/National Theatre actor! He was snapped up gratefully by the humble Australians.
Unfortunately the triumph lasted only a few years. The tragic truth was that Sidney was not a very good actor. Naturally he didn’t realise this and put the thin time down to the fact that Australia was starting to find its own identity and there wasn’t much call for Pommie actors.
Although he whinged about the heat, the flies, actors’ conditions and the lack of cold pork pies, it never occurred to him to go back to England. This was the land of opportunity and he’d soldier on till he made it.
And make it he did. Eventually. With his rather portly figure and prematurely thinning hair, Sidney had always looked older than he was — by the time he reached forty he was eminently castable as the jolly avuncular character who appeared in all the early Aussie soaps.
Delighted as he was with the rebirth of his career, his vanity was a little piqued at the fact that he wasn’t playing the leading man, so he took to dyeing black what was left of his hair and combing it all towards the front. It didn’t work. He just succeeded in looking a little more ridiculous but nobody dared tell him. Funnily enough nobody wanted to hurt his feelings. Sidney was a bore, certainly, but he was harmless enough — just a bit of a joke, really. Nobody disliked him. Well, nobody, that is, except Mandy.
Sidney had been in the country eleven years before they were cast opposite each other. It was his major breakthrough role as a character actor. They were working on stage at the old Theatre Royal and Mandy, ten years his junior, was appalled to find herself playing his wife. She should have been his daughter, surely. It was she who started the age-old feud. In their first tender scene when she had to place a wifely kiss on Sidney’s lips, she shrank with horror from the Terry Thomas teeth.
‘Close your mouth, for God’s sake,’ she hissed.
To which Sidney, surprisingly quick on the rebound, replied ‘And you stop flashing those tired old norks at the dress circle!’
It was war from that moment on.
Sidney sighed as he pushed open the front gate and fumbled for his key. He hoped this time Mandy would play it with dignity. He certainly intended to, but if she started in with the snide remarks he’d have to retaliate and it was so exhausting, particularly with summer coming.
He closed the front door quietly, glancing at the landlady’s door beside the staircase. Damn, it was ajar. He crept up the stairs to his room on the first floor, praying that Maudie wouldn’t hear him and demand tea, bickies and a talk about the good old days when she ran the house as a digs for touring acts. Actually he quite liked old Maudie, and she’d certainly been a stalwart friend during his struggling days but, now that senility was creeping up on her, the good old days were becoming tiresomely repetitive and Sidney had long ago exhausted his own repertoire of theatrical anecdotes.
Maudie didn’t hear and Sidney thankfully closed the door behind him, put the kettle on and sank into his armchair beside the window.
Every available area of wall space was covered with photographs from Sidney’s stage and television triumphs. In pride of place was a youthful publicity portrait of Laurence Olivier bearing the inscription To my dear friend, Sidney, with best wishes, Larry. Naturally Sidney had never told anyone that he’d written the inscription himself to impress the natives when he’d first arrived in Australia. There were times when Sidney himself forgot that he’d written it. The stories had become so embellished that he’d lost sight of what was true and what was fabricated over the years. ‘Larry’ and the rest of the memorabilia had been very important to Sidney during his lean times. A comforting reminder that he’d worked with many greats, they held the promise that the next exciting role was only just around the corner.
But he didn’t need them now. He looked out across Woolloomooloo at the view he loved so much, and thought with mounting excitement of the coming Monday. Only two days to go. Only two days till the meeting of the entire cast and the first read-through of the two hour special. Two days and ‘The Glitter Game’ would be set in motion.
Outside, a light summer shower started to fleck the waters of the Woolloomooloo docks.
It was raining on Monday. It had been raining relentlessly for two days. One of Sydney’s torrential down-pours which often ended in floods and which invariably invited surprise — ‘What about the weather? … I don’t believe this rain!’ The rain was a regular occurrence and the only surprise, Edwina thought, as she watched the windscreen wipers, was the fact that people continued to be surprised.
Davey was driving carefully. But then Davey always drove carefully. She glanced at him fondly and he, sensing her look, offered her a supportive smile.
‘Big day, Edwina.’
She smiled back, then looked out of the passenger window at the blinding rain, her mind strangely blank.
In the boardroom at Channel 3, a dozen people waited for Edwina.
Jim Avalon and Chris Natteros mingled with the cast, all of whom they’d known previously or had met recently during the casting sessions. Everything was pleasant and informal, although there was a hint of tension in the air, a feeling that this was a gathering of nervous people playing at being casual. Not Alain, of course. This was his day, the birth of his baby and he was going to enjoy every minute of it.
‘OK, gang, a bit of shush please.’ Instant quiet. Alain smiled benignly. ‘I’d like to introduce you to a very important member of our team. Someone most of you won’t have met before but someone I want you all to get to know very well and someone who already knows your alter egos even better than you do.’ He gestured towards the door and everyone noticed, for the first time, the shy gangly man wearing glasses who looked as if he wished he were somewhere else. ‘Our executive writer, Evan Ryan.’ Alain initiated the smatter of applause while Evan smiled and nodded self-consciously. ‘Now, why don’t we all take a seat and get ready for the read-through while we wait for Edwina.’
As everyone shuffled to their places around the boardroom table which was set up with notepads, pencils, jugs of water, glasses and ashtrays, Alain muttered an aside to Jim. ‘Where the hell is she? Did you ring her agent?’
‘Yes. Rosa called her home and got the answering machine. She must be on her way.’
Ala
in turned the paternal smile back to the assembled company. ‘Put your tea and coffee orders in to Wendy, everyone.’
Alain’s secretary bustled about with cups and saucers and the general chatter started up again.
Jane was deep in discussion with Chris Natteros while Paul had made an immediate dive for the chair beside Narelle and discovered that, close up, she was every bit as desirable as she appeared on screen. Even more promising was the fact that she was a fan of his.
‘Are you really?’ His teeth gleamed his humble appreciation. ‘That’s very kind of you to say so.’
‘Oh I’ve been mad about you since I was ten. My mother was a fan too. Only she’s dead now.’
Narelle’s eyes were moist with either adoration or grief. Ten, Paul thought. That hurt! But he tried hard not to let it show.
Greg, one of the few genuinely relaxed people in the room, had dropped all butch pretensions and was whispering asides in Vicky’s ear. Wicked, tantalising stories about the others present, all of whom he knew. Nothing malicious, nothing damaging but, hell, the kid was new to the game and she needed some relaxing. And relax she did. Trying desperately to control her laughter, Vicky decided she liked Greg. A lot.
To Sidney’s astonishment, Mandy chose to sit next to him. She clasped his hand and placed a moist kiss on each cheek. ‘Lovely to be working together again, Sidney. It’s been too long.’
So, that’s the way she’s going to play it, Sidney thought with relief. ‘It certainly has, my dear. Far too long.’
The door opened and Edwina stood there with Davey at her side. Evan was busily shuffling through scripts by the sideboard, having refused a seat at the boardroom table, Alain was muttering to Jim to try ringing again, and the actors were all deep in chat. Nobody noticed her.
Davey started toward Alain but Edwina gave a barely perceptible shake of the head and glided silently forward. ‘Alain, I’m so sorry I’m late.’
