by Rupert Smith
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
Copyright Page
For Marcus
and in memory of
the real Mark
Thanks to Jessica Brighty, Tim Clark,
Patrick Fitzgerald, Tony Peake and Tony Roberts
CHAPTER ONE
I was born a month premature. Even as a baby, I was ahead of my time.
My mother said she always knew I’d end up in show business. As I lay in the incubator, hovering between life and death, the nurses watched my every movement. Even the other babies seemed to be straining to catch a glimpse of me. Every day they expected me to die, and every day I refused to give up the fight. By the end of the first week, the crowd round my incubator had become so big that the ward sister had to let people in ten at a time to see me; even the consultants had taken an interest. Sometimes I think that the only thing that got me through those difficult days was my determination not to disappoint my public.
It’s hardly surprising with a start like that I should end up starring in the most famous hospital series ever seen on television. Throughout my life I’ve spent more than my fair share of nights in or beside hospital beds, and now I make a living out of it, twice a week, as the star of the award-winning Patients.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. When I was born, hardly anybody had even heard of television, let alone of me. My first brush with fame ended the moment the doctors pronounced me well enough to leave the incubator at the tender age of ten days. And so began a life that’s taken me from the heights of fame to the depths of despair, from obscurity in a small working-class town on the outskirts of London to the front page of every magazine and newspaper in the world.
When I announced that I was planning to write my autobiography, there was a great deal of speculation (not all of it kind) as to why I had chosen exactly this moment. Why had I kept quiet for all those years when the press were banging on my door demanding interviews? Why did I, the most publicity-shy star of the sixties and seventies, suddenly decide to open my door in the nineties? Was it, as some of the ‘newspapers’ reported, that I was simply cashing in on my huge success in Patients? No, the real reason is that I love the truth. The only thing that matters – that has ever mattered – is being myself as a person, whatever the cost. Over the years that belief has cost me dear – as you’ll see.
The first thing I’d like to clear up is the so-called mystery of my name. Yes, I was christened Mark Young, and took the name Marc LeJeune as a young star in the sixties. A lot of nonsense has been written about how I tried to conceal my real identity, which betrays a complete ignorance of one of the first laws of show business. Nobody accused Marilyn Monroe or Judy Garland of trying to hide their real identities. It’s just that we recognized the need to give the public what they wanted, what they still want: glamour, mystery.
My home was nothing special. We lived in a small house with a little yard and double garage at the front and a neatly tended garden at the back – the typical British working-class family home. We weren’t poor; my father worked in London, and my mother made ends meet with a series of local jobs, so I never wanted for any of the essentials of life. My parents were smart, sociable, among the first people to make fashionable the ‘drinks parties’ that had become so popular by the end of the fifties. Every Saturday evening the house resounded with doorbells and laughter, cars scrunching up the gravel drive, the clink of glasses and the glug-glug-glug of bottles.
I longed to be right at the heart of the party. As soon as I could walk, I tiptoed out of bed and crept across the landing to the top of the stairs where I would sit and watch the fun in full swing down below. By the time I was three, watching was not enough. I’ve never been one of life’s observers. So one Saturday night I made a grand entrance down the stairs in my pyjamas just as my father had put a record on the gramophone – it was ‘Don’t Let The Stars Get In Your Eyes’, a song that’s stayed with me for the rest of my life. I pushed my way through a forest of stockings and slacks, climbed up on to the window seat that formed a small stage just behind the living-room curtains, and popped into full view as the guests laughed and applauded. It was the first time I had faced an audience, and I was hooked. I remember the staring faces, the sharp glitter of the women’s jewellery through a cloud of smoke, the discomfort of the lights in my eyes. I wondered for a moment what to do next, and then started to take my pyjamas off. By the time I had finished my striptease and was doing a series of gymnastic manoeuvres in the nude, the audience was divided. Some of the livelier partygoers were cheering, whistling and even stamping their feet. The rest of them were quiet and embarrassed, looking away or loudly tutting. My mother jumped to the rescue, picked me up and whisked me away upstairs as father went round with the cocktail-shaker.
The next day the atmosphere in the house was heavy. When I tried to climb on to Dad’s knee for a cuddle, he pushed me away; never again did he show me any form of physical affection. When I went to bed, I heard my parents arguing downstairs in the kitchen.
My relationship with my parents was, in many ways, ideal. My mother was a warm, spontaneous woman who loved clothes, parties and people; she’s the one I take after. My father was quieter, more distant – the typical British working-class man – and a deep thinker. He believed in traditional values – that a woman’s place was in the home, that black people belonged in Africa, that the unions were nothing but trouble. When my mother announced that she had taken her first part-time job he hit the roof and they didn’t communicate for nearly two weeks. When we got our first television, he would switch off if there was a ‘nigger’ or a ‘pouf’ on the screen. This meant that for many years I was entirely ignorant of the careers of Nat King Cole, Liberace and Johnny Mathis.
The striptease incident wasn’t the only hint of the future that angered my father. One summer Sunday afternoon, when my parents were drifting around the house pale-faced and red-eyed as usual, I was sitting in my room drawing (I’ve always loved art), endless pictures of princes and princesses, illustrations to the books that I’d learned to read. All the princesses looked like my mother, with sweeping blonde hair and blue eyes, but dressed in huge crinolines with crowns perched on their heads. The princes were square-jawed and handsome like Robert Taylor, Mum’s favourite film star. After an hour of this, I got bored. Mum was snoozing in her armchair in the living room; Dad had drifted off to the pub.
I sometimes think that if I’d had brothers and sisters, my life would have turned out much simpler – there would have been someone around to keep me out of trouble. But only children like me have to rely on their own powers of imagination. I went into the bathroom. Strictly speaking, it was forbidden territory: mother kept all her beauty accessories in a cupboard above the sink, terrified that I would drink her eyeliner or swallow Dad’s razors or drown in the toilet bowl. But what I did that afternoon had longer-lasting repercussions than anything Mum had envisaged.
Today everyone dyes their hair – pop stars, actors, even footballers are all familiar with the bleach bottle. But when I was a child it took guts for a man to work with his appearance. I coloured my hair for the first time that quiet Sunday, partly inspired by my mother, whose timeless sense of chic I had always admired, and partly by my discovery of a promising young movie actress. Her name was Marilyn Monroe, she’d just appeared in a film called All About Eve (not in the starring role) and I was one of the first people in Britain to recognize her importance.
I was standing on the bathroom
stool, stretching over the sink and rooting around in the beauty cupboard, when my eye was attracted to a picture of a glamorous blonde woman, a hybrid of Mum and Marilyn. I stretched up, grabbed the box and pulled it out, bringing a few bottles of nail varnish clattering into the sink with it. Thanks to my advanced reading skills (school reports said I had the ability of an eleven-year-old at the age of five), I scanned the directions on the packet, and started squirting the stinking blue liquid directly on to my hair. Two minutes later, every tress was covered in bleach, and I delved back into the carton to find the little plastic rain hat. After another happy hour spent drawing, I washed the dye out – by this time it had started stinging my scalp. I can still remember the excitement of bending over the bath with the shower hose runningover my head, watching the chemicals swirling down the plughole, not daring to look at my hair. I wrapped a towel around my head turban-style and stood in front of the mirror. There was one stray lock of hair falling down over my forehead – and to my delight it was not just blonde but WHITE.
I ran downstairs to surprise Mum, but it was I who got the surprise; just as I reached the hall, the front door opened and my father walked in. He stopped. I stopped. We stared at each other, neither one of us saying a word. I fully expected him to hit me, and I sensed that if I turned my back or showed any sign of weakness or remorse, he’d have grabbed me and given me the leathering of a lifetime. But I had to stand my ground and be a man, to make him proud of me however much our two worlds may have differed.
He turned, took off his coat and went into the kitchen. When Dad found us half an hour later, I was sitting on Mum’s knee as she brushed out my beautiful long blonde hair in front of the fire.
My hair wasn’t the only thing that made me stand out at school. At the age of five I still looked much, much younger than my years, and the other kids seized on this. Then there was my name – Mark Young. For years my nickname was ‘Baby’ Young or just ‘Young’ Young, which the boys would chant for entire lunch breaks as I made my way around the playground, oblivious to their taunts. I learned at an early age that there were some people who would mask their attraction under the appearance of hostility.
For this reason, I found it easier to play with the girls. I’ve always preferred the company of women. I love women, everything about them – their hair, their clothes, their conversation, their sense of humour. It was natural for me to gravitate towards the people that I found most attractive at school. But the mixing of the sexes, even in a co-educational primary school, wasn’t encouraged. In certain areas there was strict sexual apartheid. Complain as I might, I had to play football with the boys on a Wednesday afternoon instead of netball (for which I had greater aptitude). On one occasion, my father gave me a serious talking-to about the virtues of being a man’s man, of playing the game and being tough and brave. To please him I tried to join in the boys’ war games, but ended up in the role of the beautiful Nazi spy who leads our brave soldiers to their doom.
After girls, my next big discovery was cinema. I’d seen my first film just before I started school – Disney’s Cinderella, a film that captivated me. After that, I plagued my parents with requests for trips to the pictures; by the time I was seven, they’d grown tired of my nagging and would simply give me the money to go on my own. Thanks to an understanding door policy at the local Odeon, I enjoyed the great final flowering of Hollywood from the comfort of my regular Saturday-afternoon seat, and entered a fantasy world from which I’ve never emerged.
I’d watch whatever film was on, sometimes staying to see it again and even on one occasion (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) three times, at the end of which I was hauled out of the Odeon by an angry father and brought home to a distraught mother who was convinced that I’d been kidnapped. And films brought the first love into my life: a girl named Tina, who shared my passion for Marilyn Monroe and with whom I’d sit and hold sticky hands throughout long, happy Saturday afternoons. Although in reality we were scruffy little kids from the local school, in our minds we were movie stars. After the cinema we’d go to her house and act out scenes from our favourite film of the day. On many occasions brunette Tina was Jane Russell to my Marilyn.
Tina’s parents were happy to tolerate our games, grateful to me for playing with their daughter, a shy, withdrawn girl; only I had seen her potential. We dressed up in her mother’s extensive wardrobe of cast-offs, sang along to her collection of film soundtracks and improvised our own romantic melodramas ‘on location’ around the house and garden. Our only problem was the lack of a leading man. I could never take the role – it would have upset the delicate balance of my relationship with Tina. Tina’s older brother Nigel was once disastrously persuaded to join in with a jungle picture that we were ‘filming’ on the bombsite that adjoined the garden; his subsequent stories (all lies) of precocious sexual shenanigans swept round the school within days and ended my friendship with Tina.
On the first day of my secondary education, Mum straightened my new school cap on my head (my hair had long since returned to its natural colour) and Dad gruffly shook me by the hand and exhorted me to ‘play the game’. I was prepared for the worst. This was not the genteel grammar school where gifted boys were cosseted and prepared for certain academic success. My future lay in the rough and tumble of the secondary modern, an environment where intelligence and individuality were punished as often as rewarded. Within two days I had been singled out as a figure of fun; my reputation had preceded me, and before long the familiar chants of ‘Young’ Young were haunting me once again (can you wonder that I was eager to change my name when the opportunity arose?). While my fellow students played football or sneaked down to the newsagent to buy cigarettes, I drifted around the library, the empty classrooms and the further corners of the playing field where nobody could be bothered to follow me.
I was not the only one who existed on the fringes of the school society. There were other freaks and oddballs who were eager enough to make friends – the fat boys, the strange spindly creatures with too many teeth and thick glasses, the halt and the lame – but I ignored them as they trailed in my wake. However, there was another solitary figure who fascinated me. I couldn’t understand why he was always alone. Like me, he was neither hideous nor deformed nor did he smell. He was tall for his years, an accomplished athlete, with a greasy quiff that was dangerously long by school standards. I was determined to find out more.
The playground grapevine furnished me with a brief personal history. Until the previous year, he’d lived with his parents near Manchester, suffering the regular indignities heaped on him by an alcoholic father. When his mother could no longer tolerate her husband’s violent temper and blatant infidelities, she threw him out. Two days later, the repentant father turned up, drunk and morose, begging to be allowed back in. He stank, he hadn’t changed his clothes and had been thrown out by his floozy who had quickly tired of his incessant drinking. Father and son confronted each other on the doorstep as mother wept hysterically in the toilet. Finally son dispatched father with a swift head-butt which left him unconscious outside the front door. He never returned; the parents divorced and he and his mother moved back down to her London home.
This legendary act of domestic violence had earned its perpetrator the nickname ‘Nutter’; real name Hugh Cole. There was something about him – his solitude, his air of suppressed violence, his history of family tragedy – that drew me. After weeks of following him around the school trying to engage him in conversation, I eventually ambushed Nutter in a remote corner of the playing fields one frosty afternoon in November when both of us should have been attending the Remembrance Day service. I trailed him from the hall during a silent prayer, past the kitchens to the deserted field where he loved to walk for hours, staring out across the rows of houses.
That was where I found him, leaning against the low perimeter fence, one foot resting on a broken wooden slat, chin in hand, gazing into the distance. It was a cold, sunny afternoon, the frost still lying on the shady si
de of the field, and Nutter’s breath rose about him like smoke. I stood and watched him for a while, too nervous to approach, until he slowly turned and saw me. He didn’t walk off, but slouched against the fence with his thumbs tucked into his belt loops, squinting into the sunlight.
‘Why aren’t you in church?’ he asked with a sneer.
‘Why aren’t you?’ I replied, boldly.
‘Man,’ he said (he was the first person I’d ever heard talk this way), ‘That’s for squares.’ He stared at me for a long time and I coolly stared back, wondering what it was he put on his hair to make it so shiny. Finally he laughed, placed an arm round my shoulder and started walking me round the playing field.
For the rest of the afternoon, Nutter quizzed me about every aspect of my life. He wanted to know all about my relationship with my parents, particularly with my father; he wanted every detail of the famous hair-dye episode (a local legend that hadn’t even passed him by); he demanded a list of exactly which singers and films I liked. It was on this point that we disagreed, and we hotly debated the relative merits of Marilyn Monroe (this was the year of Bus Stop) and the recently dead James Dean, whom Nutter idolized and resembled. I had never seen a James Dean film, but promised that I would catch Rebel Without a Cause, then playing at the Odeon, by the following Monday.
Much depended on my reaction. James Dean, according to Nutter, was the spokesman for our generation, the first person to articulate the failure of our parents to create a world fit for their children to live in. What fascinated me more was the relationship between Dean, Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo. When I reported to Nutter on Monday afternoon he was pleased with my review and encouraged me to assume the role of the Sal Mineo sidekick, although I had naturally envisaged myself as Natalie. It was enough; I was accepted as Nutter’s best (and only) friend. During the cross-country run that afternoon, we took a short cut through the woods and stopped in a circle of bushes to smoke a cigarette (his mother gave him a tobacco allowance) and rehearse lines from the film. At last I had found a leading man.
