Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall

by Will Self

  The airy bulk of the gasometers, the heroic hulk of Battersea Power Station, the liberating span of Chelsea Bridge, the plane trees romping in the breeze along Sloane Street, the Michelin Man squatting on top of his building, the Linnaean façade of the Natural History Museum – the only disturbing note was struck by the branch of LA Fitness on Pelham Street, which, sited as it was beside the trompe l’œil Thurloe Square – a thin wedge of terrace hiding the District Line cutting – suggested movie trickery.

  I didn’t let it get to me; after all, the familiar dumpy shapes of London cabs were wrapped around with the skyline of Hong Kong or Copacabana, and besides, Hyde Park had given way to Queensway, and I was already making my way through the backstreets of Notting Hill before the dump bins of newspapers outside the corner shops began to impinge, and I started to obsess about the weighty potential of Rhys Ifans’s scrotum. The shaggily mournful face of the Welsh comic actor stared up at me from newspaper after newspaper, on rack after rack, trapped there by the protracted and public break-up from his starlet girlfriend. He had come to prominence in Y-fronts and a snorkelling mask, typecast as an out-of-work Welsh comic actor in Notting Hill (1999). And so there his representation was, in the neighbourhood the representation of which had caused him to be so represented.

  I pushed Ifans’s bare back against the artex wall and took the soft gristle of his nipple in my dogged teeth, while Notting Hill grabbed the adjustable wrench of Ernõ Goldfinger’s* Trellick Tower and whirled it around my head. I lurched through Meanwhile Gardens, and came to on a bench beside the Grand Union Canal, staring at the brown emulsion waters, the decrepitating plunge of a skateboarder in a half-pipe resounding in my ears.

  As I headed west along the towpath the afternoon came puttering extended-play towards me – a broad stroke of sunlight painted by a narrow boat. Brawny young fishermen sat in the historic present: on empty milk crates, stripped to the waist to have it out with minnows, their six-packs of beer beside them, shiny as shell cases in the grass. And so by the time I reached Old Oak Common I had regained some kind of equanimity. All I had to do was maintain my course through the summery snowfall of dandelion spore and the giddy flip of the cabbage whites, not forgetting to duck when I saw Hal, sitting on a pole by the railway siding, or screwed into the masonry at the rear of the Car Giant warehouse, his brow knitted with pigeon-repelling barbs, a windscreen wiper for an eyelid. True, he might capture a few frames of me, but I doubted that I could be identified; I was merely a glyph in this panorama of subjects – bridge, lock, fisherman and lamp-post – which could be shuffled to produce an endless vista.

  Morgan Freeman and Ron Howard were waiting for me where I’d arranged to meet them: beside an information board disfigured with graffiti tags. It wasn’t until I came right up to them that I could establish who it was they were playing, and then initially I thought Freeman hopelessly cast against type – like a black King Lear. However, within seconds it was clear not only that he was Nick Papadimitriou, but that he had captured my friend’s mien perfectly: the hands-on-hips-belly-out stance, the furious intensity of Nick’s stare and his slightly nasal whine.

  As for Howard, I could never stand him anyway – and dying his hair red was cheap. Moreover, he was toting a large digital camera with a directional mike attached to it. Ignoring their greetings, I lashed out at him: ‘Why the fuck did you bring that?’ Then rounded on Freeman-as-Nick, ‘I told you to tell him not to bring a fucking camera – it’s crucial that there be no footage of me, if they get hold of it ... What’s more, it ruins all this—’ I waved a hand at the enervated canal, the road bridge leapfrogging the canal, the empty skips piled like dirty crockery in a factory yard. ‘Now I can’t suspend disbelief in any of it!’

  ‘C’mon, Pete.’ Freeman, to his credit, refused to be intimidated. ‘Lighten up – if you don’t want to be filmed, that’s fine, John’ll keep you out of shot. He’s come along to film me, not you – you knew he was making this documentary about me.’

  I splashed some water from the Evian bottle I was carrying into the palm of my hand and dashed it against my rage-engorged face. Freeman was wearing the same white shirt, dark trousers and heavy leather shoes that I’d last seen Nick in – but, while there was pathos in the half-mast flies, the shirtsleeves rolled up pre-war high, he still looked dapper. I realized my anger was born of pride as much as anything – I’d been counting on Thewlis playing me for these scenes with Nick. My self-esteem required that I be better-looking as well as younger.

  Ron-John was cowering by the info-board, so I went over to him and did my best to sound contrite. ‘Look I’m sorry, John.’

  ‘It’s OK, Will, really – I understand. I’ll keep tight in on Nick, and if you want to examine the camera before I go that’s fine – besides, I’m only going to tag along for a couple of miles.’

  The situation remained deeply unsatisfactory for all of us. Ron-John ran on ahead, took up a stance, then filmed Nick as he walked by, then he squeezed back past us and did the same again, over and over. He’d fitted Nick with a radio mike so he could indulge in his penchant for hymning such quotidiana as the abandoned warehouses along the canal side, the Middlesex County Council shields on the lock gates and the steel-clapboard Travelodge by the North Circular Road – but, although he launched into a lecture on the industrial estate conceived as the props department of capitalism, he kept being interrupted by passing joggers and cyclists, who upon noticing who he was stopped to natter among themselves.

  I’d long since accepted Freeman’s performance – barely seeing him as African-American any more – and was infuriated by this gauche behaviour. As for Ron-John, no matter how ingratiating he was, or how many high-grossing movies he made, for me he’d always be the bat-eared sycophant in a letter jersey making up to Henry Winkler. When he offered me the camera for my inspection, rather than examining the playback, I simply removed the tape cassette and chucked it in the canal. He trudged away disconsolately over Horsenden Hill, while Morgan and I went on towards Northolt.

  Later, standing with him on the footbridge that crossed the A40 Western Avenue, and looking out north-west across the RAF airfield, I felt so happy to have escaped London that I was moved to embrace Freeman and cup his globe of white curls in my hand.

  ‘Steady on, feller,’ Nick said, but before he could disengage I was shocked by the frailty of his thin back. ‘You’ll be OK,’ he went on gravely, ‘so long as you’re prepared for Laurel Canyon.’

  I realized he had been granted a deeper insight than my own, and as we went on across a half-landscaped golf course, then into a nature reserve shaded in with un-coppiced beeches and cross-hatched by reed beds, I nerved myself to ask him what he knew. Yet couldn’t – and so we reached Uxbridge and the same little boxes of ticky-tacky we had left behind in Northolt, then the Hobbiton of its suburbia, then the redbrick carcerals of its office blocks – and still I hadn’t spoken.

  I left Nick at the tube station, standing by a half-century-old train indicator that promised a Metropolitan Line departure for Finchley Road. Stumbling on from one tepee of streetlight to the next, I missed him acutely. Morgan Freeman’s was the last familiar face I would see until I met up with Ellen DeGeneres in Los Angeles – unless, that is, I counted James Bond’s.

  * 24 Hour Psycho (1993) by Douglas Gordon is a video installation that slows down Hitchcock’s Psycho so that it lasts for twenty-four hours.

  * Of whom more later.

  3

  My Name is Bond

  I had booked a bed and breakfast on the south side of the town. I’d been able to tell on the phone that the woman of the house was played by Brenda Blethyn, and now that we were standing face to face in the atrocious vestibule of her bungalow, I was glad I’d soon be rid of this supporting cast of British character actors, who, after all, had no traction in Hollywood.

  I paid Blethyn in cash as soon as she’d revealed to me the converted garage lumbered with a double bed, a smoked glass table, a widescreen televisio
n and a partitioned bathroom. She waggled the banknotes in her hand, and my gaze skimmed past her creased top lip to bury itself in a massy spruce that writhed in the darkness.

  ‘Y’know, you remind me of ... you remind me of – now, who is it you remind me of?’

  ‘I dunno, David Thewlis? Or maybe ... Pete Postlethwaite?’

  ‘No, it can’t be, I’ve never heard of either of ’em.’

  ‘Well.’ I was barely civil. ‘I can’t possibly assist you to remember the name of someone I know nothing of to begin with, now can I?’

  But she ignored this comment. ‘My husband and I don’t stop in the bungalow, so if you pull the door of the room to when you leave in the morning that’ll be dandy. You’ve breakfast things in the fridge there.’

  Milk puckering under cling film, indescribably obscene. Soon after that I heard the flutter and crunch of her Vauxhall Corsa pulling out of the drive. It was a minor part for Blethyn, and, as I made myself a bowl of Crunchy Nut Cornflakes, I wondered why she’d taken it on at all – I’d offered to send her a cheque or cash up front, and then she could’ve left the key under the mat for me.

  At 2.00 a.m. I began my preparations, naked in the bathroom, working the special forces camouflage stain into my skin from the hairline down – face, neck, arms, hands, cock and balls – but by the time I reached my ankles the gunk had run out and it looked as if a bear had been shitting incontinently in the bath. Of the life of man the duration is but a point, its substance streaming away.

  I tiptoed through the sleeping dormitory town, not moving freely until I had crossed the M25 by a footbridge and was heading north on a wooded path beside the Colne brook. The predawn sky draped over Iver Heath, the clouds a peignoir, the stars jewels gelid against its blue-black skin. It must have been freezing up there, because a plane taking off from Heathrow unzipped a distrail with its passionate heat. The cumulus gaped, the night moaned, and I streamed away through the long grass, leaving a long swathe of misplaited blades behind me that pointed the way to Iver, a hamlet that had had been ravished so many times by the camera, all the specificity had been sucked out of it.

  Beyond the houses, across Pinewood Road, the birches of Black Park were doubly silvered in the sidereal light. Over fifty films had been shot among these dense thickets and drives choked with fallen boughs. Black Park had been a wood in Wisconsin, a forest in Slovenia, the Siberian taiga – it was a hack woodland actor, ever ready to put on its pine-needle overcoat and make a multiplex believe. It was perfect cover – they’d never look for me here, where millions had already looked, unseeing.

  There was a fence of course: savage tridents and coiled razor wire; in among its loops Hal’s touring company dreamt on their poles, rapid-eye movements laying down the beat for their lullaby, ‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer doooo ...’ I dug down quickly into the leaf mould and earth – then I was in, loping from one shadow to the next. I’d cased the joint thoroughly and wasn’t anticipating security – they were tucked up in their kennels, watching reruns of Baywatch with their comedy dogs.

  Even in the starlight I could see the faded lettering – Clennam & Sons: Importers of Fine Fabrics and Silks – and the floral-pattern wallpaper exposed by the wrenching out of the carious house next door – except that there never had been one. With its stacked windows – dormer, upon bow upon bow – and steeply pitched roof, the set for the BBC’s latest TV adaptation of Little Dorrit was as familiar to me as my own childhood home – and so the perfect place to hide until dawn, when I could mingle with the techies, chippies and sparks. After all, no one ever looks upon the classics with fresh eyes, especially tired security men on minimum wage.

  Inside there was silence, half a room and no staircase, the things of the body are as a river, and the things of the soul as a dream and a vapour. I waited in the fake Victorian business premises until day came, pink and dewy, and with it a red and sweaty security man, played by Ray Winstone, who, led by an Alsatian, barrelled straight towards me from the direction of the sound stages. An extra would’ve been one thing; an actor like Winstone was quite another. Self-preservation took over: I scrambled out the back of the set, ran ducked down behind the half-hovels, then sprinted across the open lot.

  Would, I wondered, Ernõ Goldfinger, the architect of Trellick Tower, have been amused by this: a sign reading ‘Goldfinger Avenue’ slapped on the side of a Brutalist hangar? A reference not to him directly but to the Bond villain named after him – by which he had not been amused. I pelted down the avenue and, spotting an open side door into E Stage, shot through it and found myself inside a replica of the mausoleum at Chatsworth – a rotunda, surrounded by pillars, which was familiar to me from many happy visits to the estate as a guest of the Devonshires.

  I pushed on into the depths of the Stage, passing through bedrooms, dressing rooms, halls and a solarium – all of which belonged to Chatsworth but had been disarticulated to suit the logistics of shooting the interiors for The Wolfman, which began summarily in a blaze of lights that sent me diving behind some velvet drapes. When I peeked out the body doubles for its three stars – Anthony Hopkins, Benicio del Toro and Emily Blunt – were drinking coffee and chatting about last night’s television.

  My hand discovered a spirit level, and shouldering this I stepped out from my concealment and into a replica of the main hallway of the house. At the head of the marble staircase, between two stone lions, a dog handler stood with two Dobermanns on leashes, while an assistant swung a flail, provoking them to rear up and bark. I ducked behind a Grecian urn, although I needn’t have worried: only the dogs were in the shot being framed by an assistant director.

  I was beginning to enjoy my stay at fake Chatsworth, which was like any house party but without the tedium of having to make conversation. Then Winstone blundered in and ruined it all. His paunch advanced, there were sweaty patches at his armpits – his Alsatian dragged him on. He caught sight of me behind the urn and bellowed, ‘Oi! You slag!’

  ‘Cut! Cut!’ the AD cried, then Winstone’s dog slipped its collar and flew at the Dobermanns. A maelstrom of fur and flob ensued, into which I lunged – how to explain all things of the body are as a river? I had noted that one of the antagonized Dobermanns had hands rather than paws – four of them; I grabbed one and while the others were distracted pulled him from the mêlée. So we escaped from The Wolfman set, out through another side door, across the lot and into the cover provided by the Winnebagos, ambulances and fire engines that were assembled around the famed 007 set on this, the penultimate day of shooting for Quantum of Solace.

  Blue screen is always a comfortable experience for an idealist. As soon as Scooby and I were alone, I realized that’s what was happening – because this was no flesh and sinew Dobermann but a cartoonish hound who stood on hind legs puckering his muzzle to bow-wow-wow the near-discernible words ‘Ruffankyourufferrymuch.’ It followed, of course, that if Scooby were being projected after the fact of my own performance, then so too was all of this: the hive of activity around the wardrobe trailer, where extras were getting kitted out in army uniforms to play the part of a corrupt Bolivian general’s entourage.

  As in life we strike attitudes on a bare stage, responding to phantoms we cannot see with lines scripted for us, so now I joined in idle chatter, hidden safely in the simple past. ‘Basically,’ said a plump chap with a sporran of keys dangling from his belt, ‘they’ve reached the point in the schedule where there’s nothing left to do but trash the sets – burn ’em and blow ’em up.’

  He spoke the truth: ranged across the lot were the toasted slices of bogus buildings – a Haitian tenement, a Siena palazzo, a Bogotá slum. I suppose I should have been overwhelmed by this, the wide Sargasso of the narrow and destructive imagination of commercial imperatives – but I was filled only with my love for Scooby, who reared up on his hind legs so I could help him into his camos. He licked me in gratitude, his tongue curling right round my tired face. ‘Scherlupp!’

  ‘Nice work, boy,’ I to
ld him. ‘I needed to lose the stain.’

  The voices of two rehearsing actors floated through the open window of a trailer: ‘Was there any trouble securing the hotel?’

  ‘No, none.’

  ‘It’s just the fuel cells. The whole compound runs on them.’

  ‘Pain in the ass really.’

  ‘Sounds highly flammable.’

  It was beyond wooden dialogue, rewritten so many times that it had the ugly believability of multi-density fibre. Still, it sounded to me like something worth filing away for future use – from the extras I’d gathered what the morning’s shooting would entail: the Götterdämmerung of the lovingly constructed interior of a Chilean desert resort hotel.

  I could hear the low rubba-rubba-rubba of the generators, the whine of a truck’s power steering as it turned in the lot, the tick-tick-tick of metal expanding in the sun – my system was, I realized, flooded with adrenalin, hence this dreamy state, this sense of hours to kill that invariably preceded deadly action. Still on his hind legs, Scooby wrapped his foreleg tightly in my arm and we walked to the enormous 007 sound stage, picking our way between the loops and coils of fire hose that linked bowsers to engines.

  The PR was waiting for us at a picnic table underneath a sunshade; her eyes tracked from mine to Scooby’s, then dropped to his bare paws. ‘Old mate of mine,’ I explained. ‘Turns out he’s doing a bit of extra work – Rex, this is Karen.’