Days of Wine and Rage

by Frank Moorhouse

  It is easy to achieve proficiency and professionalism at a technical level – we’ve done that for years in our television commercials – but to make significant films you need content. (Phillip Adams, quoted by Keith Connolly)

  (All the quotes in this article, except those of John Weiley, are taken from ‘Tension on the Reel’, Overland No. 71)

  Going to the Fair

  Thomas Keneally

  (from Playboy Australia, December 1979)

  Phil Carey came to Cannes, not in a limousine, but in the little red bus that takes Air France passengers from Nice along the littoral of Alpes Maritimes to that former fishing village and focus of European decadence and moviemania called Cannes. The bus was full of what you’d call average French people on their way home to their apartments on the slopes high above the madness of the Cannes waterfront. Tonight, while a movie culled from one of Carey’s novels played at the Palais des Festivals, they would sit at their kitchen tables, eating onion soup and complaining to their spouses about the crowds of movie phonies cluttering Nice airport and driving prices up in Cannes. The look of them reinforced in Carey a dread of the coming evening, and made him speculate again on what amalgam of ego, friendship and contradictory fear had caused him to come here.

  He got down from this red bus in the middle of Cannes itself, at a corner where a furniture store advertised bedroom suites. He walked a kilometre in a narrow street, straight toward the cube of Mediterranean he could see glittering fair ahead.

  The air felt familiar. It was the air of Whale or Palm beach on the first benign days of summer. He swung his little green canvas bag, travelling light in a town of wonders. A fresh shirt, a novel manuscript he would not get a chance to glance at, underwear, socks and medicines were all his freight.

  So he came out of the alley into the wide vistas of la Croisette. The side street had been quiet, the butcheries and groceries doing a slow business with the permanent inhabitants. La Croisette was a berserk promenade crowded with obvious transients. The young and beautiful, shirts unbuttoned to the waist, strolled here in their legions. They paused at streetside café tables to talk with friends. They displayed that genuine European indolence, older than Caesar’s Gallic wars, which even the Americans can only imitate. Among this glorious olive mob, buttoned-down and suited film accountants and movie middlemen jinked and side-stepped, no indolence in them. Their cases, Carey could tell, carried mint-new draft contracts, or scripts in need of a banker.

  In the hectic traffic, among the palm trees, a limousine cruised along carrying a naked punk-rock queen on its roof. On her brown hair she wore a crown. Her breasts dragged a little. She was too old to be a punk, too old to be pleading for the world’s love.

  Beyond her crowned head, out in the bay, an immense cruising yacht sat at anchor. The message was: you’re in Cannes, mate, and yachts you’ll never see on Pittwater find haven here.

  A big London PR company was marketing the filmic pup Carey’s friend McNiell had taken from one of Carey’s novels. The company had taken apartments – for the duration of the festival – at an address called Palais d’Orsay. Carey had imagined chandeliers and rococo panelling but the Palais was a modern building. Its door was plate glass like that of a city bank. When Carey rang, he saw a tenebral image of himself show up on a screen high up in the lobby, and close to the bell a woman appeared on another screen and asked what he wanted.

  Carey answered her in his 1950s Christian Brothers’ French. He was un ami de M. Andy McNiell, le directeur du film The Cut-Rate Kingdom. Carey said he was also un ami de M. Derek Anderson, the promoteur distingué des films. Carey was l’auteur de la roman de la movie. Would she give him entrée so that he could confer with his amis?

  The great glass door sighed open, sighed closed again. The lobby remained dark, and the screens had gone blank. She’d said something about the first floor, and he found a dark stairwell and pushed his way up it. He found a glowing nameplate on a door. It said Viscomte de Bessières-Midi. The name was the only point of light in the darkness, so he hammered on the door, bracing himself to face the Viscomte’s contempt.

  The door was opened by a pretty girl Carey could tell was English. ‘Oh, you’re Phil Carey,’ she said. ‘Welcome to Cannes.’ She admitted him to an apartment which was full of posters. Englishmen wandered about with graphics and expense forms and press releases in their hands. Sunlight swept in across the room off the sea and made Carey blink. He felt delivered now from the strangeness of Cannes. An immense photograph of Albie Toombs, the black actor and lead in the movie, hung on the wall to make him welcome. On a settee nearby sat three Sydney journalists, assigned to cover this night’s triumph for Aust. Cin. Beyond the balcony door, Carey could see the lean Andy McNiell and his sweet-apple wife, Maureen, talking to someone. The frowns, the directness of their talk, their good complexions, had all travelled well. It was wonderful to see them there against that different sea. It was, Carey supposed, like seeing something tribal, Vegemite say, in the window of NSW House in the Strand.

  From the balcony, Andy McNiell came raging towards Carey. ‘G’day, you mad Irish git,’ he yelled.

  ‘Bloody Presbyterian streak of misery,’ Carey replied. He could see beyond Andy that one of the journalists was writing down all these half-aggressive greetings. If Andy became one of those cult names tonight, became a Bergman or a Bogdanovich, such greetings would be news.

  McNiell placed a hand on Carey’s shoulder, Carey on McNiell’s. Maureen embraced Carey from the side. ‘Come to see yourself made into a household name, eh?’ she asked.

  Carey ran his hand over her smooth, slightly sun-freckled neck. He felt heartened by the easy way she expected a triumphal evening. ‘Reckon your old man can make pictures, do you?’

  ‘Better than any other bugger,’ said Maureen.

  The three journalists had all stood and drawn in to the congenial circle. One of them said: ‘Susannah York’s coming to the party.’

  ‘Party?’

  ‘Our party,’ said Maureen.

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Café Ondine. On the beach.’

  The newspaperman said: ‘There’s a party on a yacht for Jon Voight. But Susannah York wouldn’t miss ours.’

  ‘Well,’ said Maureen, ‘Voight’s is just another one of these average-born and predictable American movies. Whereas everyone can tell we’ve got something utterly fresh.’

  And they all laughed, the six of them, as if moguls and maidens who spent the evening on Voight’s yacht would hold themselves accursed tomorrow morning that they had not read the drift of history and had missed out on the Café Ondine and the McNiells and Susannah and the gang.

  Andy introduced Carey to a small dark man, neatly made as a jockey, who was Derek Anderson. Anderson said: ‘I’ve got half a dozen movies here this year. But this is the one we’re most committed to. It’s also the only one we have that’s in official competition. A really important movie …’

  Across the room Carey saw a woman turn her head and glance in the direction of Anderson’s voice. She nodded to Carey. He recognised her as a producer from Sydney. He supposed that, having just heard the movie she’d just placed with Anderson described as inferior by the man himself, she felt pretty cool towards the lot of them.

  ‘Bring a dinner suit?’ Maureen asked him.

  ‘No.’ Carey indicated his small green canvas bag.

  ‘You’ll need one. You can’t go to the movies here without one.’

  ‘Oh,’ said one of the journalists, ‘you can go to ordinary movies. Not to those at the Palais des Festivals …’

  ‘… chosen for showing in competition,’ said Maureen.

  ‘But everyone’s half-naked out there,’ said Carey. ‘I saw a punk queen sitting up nude on top of a car …’

  ‘Ah,’ said Andy McNiell. ‘I knew my little mate wouldn’t miss that. Crook tits, eh?’

  Maureen was frowning. ‘You’ve got to have a dicky suit.’

  ‘What size are you
?’ said Anderson. ‘Four and a half, I’d say. Come with me.’

  He led Carey deeper into the apartment and knocked on a door. Entering, they found a middle-aged man blinking in bed.

  ‘Phil Carey, this’s my press man, Allan. You going to Kingdom tonight, Allan? No? Which one? The Voight movie round in les Ambassades? Bloody traitor! Give Phil your suit, will you?’

  The tired man rose, poured scotch for the three of them and, with the greatest good humour, found Carey a suit and cufflinks and a collar. Carey tried on the jacket for fit, and they agreed, by hanging the trousers from his waist, that they’d do all right.

  Andy gave Carey the keys to the flat he’d rented for himself and Maureen in Rue d’Antibes, and the pretty English girl who had admitted him to the Viscomte’s apartment showed him down to the dark lobby and into the street. As Carey left her she put a folder in his hand – it was full of graphics of the movie and large slabs of those reviews that Andy had gathered from renowned critics by giving them sneak showings of his film.

  The girl said: ‘We put one of those in every hotel room in Cannes. And wherever any big movie nob was staying, one was sent there, and – if we could – we put it right in his plump little hand. You should be very proud.’

  Carey set off for the flat. He felt more as if he were a citizen of Cannes now. It was Maureen who’d inducted him, and he threw her mental tributes above the delicious and rotten crowd.

  All at once Terry Parker’s face, glowing and olive, was at his side. He got that feeling again, from the familiarity of the features, that now Cannes really would throw off its disguise and prove itself to be the beer garden of the Newport Arms.

  ‘Listen, got time for a beer?’ Terry Parker asked him. ‘We’re all up there on the Carlton terrace.’

  He pointed up to a table on the crowded terrace of the hotel. Carey saw faces he knew, Sydney actors, half the cast of Cut-Rate Kingdom, drinking beer there. Blue-faced bottles of Löwenbräu stood over the table.

  He let Terry Parker, himself an actor, lead him up into the crowd. They all wanted to explain at length how Cannes wasn’t a place for an actor. Not even for Jon Voight. No producer casts his movies from looking round the terrace of the Carlton. ‘The place is full of movie middlemen,’ one of the actors said. ‘Bloody movie grocers who would be just as happy selling cars.’

  ‘Or bloody toothpaste,’ said Terry.

  ‘But we’re all having a bloody marvellous time out at the villa. Bit crowded. But Jesus! Fantastic girls.’

  A commotion arose at the front steps of the Carlton, where a wine-red limousine had drawn up. Whoever was the passenger inside it managed to escape the car, but from then on was hidden by a close-fitting mob of press and other people. Carey had never seen a crowd move with such unity, all of them a-flutter, talking at once, moving their hands. It was like watching the crowd of bees who bustled the queen around the hive, partly her servants, partly her bullies. The whole mass advanced up the stairs and disappeared into the foyer of the hotel.

  ‘That’s Jane Fonda,’ said one of the actors. Carey recognised in the man’s voice the wonder, the mixture of admiration and resentment which occurs in writers too when they spot the lucky ones, the ones whose success they cannot imitate or explain.

  At Carey’s left ear, Terry said: ‘Did you know Denise and I have split up?’

  Carey said he had heard it.

  ‘Got a lovely girl here,’ said Terry. He dropped his voice lower still. ‘An Alsatian girl,’ he whispered. Perhaps not wanting his friends to make the usual jokes – ‘Woof, woof!’

  Carey was there an hour and drank a lot. It was hard to capture a waiter on the Carlton terrace using the accepted European or American methods of attracting attention. The Antipodean method, however, worked well for this little group of actors. They would rise in their places and detain the waiter with a semi-caress, semi-rugby tackle. So they were served regularly and, by the time the tide of conversation turned against Andy, Carey was full of the mellowness of the sun and three and a half bottles of Löwenbräu.

  ‘Joycelin Daly’s pretty upset,’ one of the actors began to tell Carey. Joycelin Daly was the woman in the Viscomte’s flat, the producer with the non-committal nod. ‘Mean, she’s paying 25 000 quid sterling to get Anderson to handle her movie. The same price as Andy’s paying him. But Andy cops all this special push.’

  Another said: ‘You know why. Anderson’s done his nuts over Maureen.’

  Carey chose to laugh over that. He said: ‘It could be because Andy’s is a better movie than Joycelin Daly’s.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, true enough. But 25 000 quid is 25 000 quid. Fee for bloody service, you know. Anderson’s such a bloody squirt; all Maureen’s got to do is trail one of her big lovely norks at him and the bugger dashes off another one of his press releases.’

  Another said, not with any clear malice: ‘Well, you know how it is with Maureen. She thinks that Andy’s the greatest thing since Eisenstein.’

  Terry Parker whispered to Carey: ‘I wish someone thought I was.’

  Carey said: ‘Anderson’s got lovely girls all over his office. He doesn’t need to lust after Maureen.’

  One of the older actors sucked at a Gauloise and looked out over the crowd of multi-racial hustlers on the terrace. ‘The more sated these blokes are,’ he told everyone, ‘the more likely they are to revert to a grand bloody passion. In the old style. You know.’

  Carey had already stood up to leave when yet another complaint came up. ‘What I can’t understand is, why didn’t he bring Albie Toombs?’

  It was clear that most people at the table thought Albie Toombs should have been flown over by McNiell.

  ‘Like Bennelong at the court of George III?’ asked Carey satirically.

  Albie Toombs was a young tribal Aborigine from Yirrkala, the star of The Cut-Rate Kingdom. Maureen had first seen him in a department store in Melbourne while he was finishing off training as a mining driller at the Melbourne Tech. More or less on the spot she had decided he was right for the role.

  Carey said: ‘You’ve got to be fair. All this would have been far too much for Albie.’

  For Albie, Melbourne had been too much. He’d been dazed by the sudden money. On disco floors, he would grab city girls who had never seen an Aborigine and yell in their sweet empty faces: ‘Hey, I’m going to be a star.’

  Carey said: ‘Albie couldn’t even take Melbourne.’

  Someone said: ‘How bloody paternal can you get? This is too much for me and you. But no one bothered to protect us from it. Thank Christ.’

  Carey found the building where Andy had his flat in Rue d’Antibes. It too resembled the glass-fronted bank, but Carey was used to the process of entering buildings in Cannes now.

  He found Andy’s apartment on the first floor. It took three keys and a lot of experimentation to open the door. In the living room, dressed in a slip, a glowing set of Carmen curlers by her left hand, a bottle of Cutex before her, sat a young blonde actress from The Cut-Rate Kingdom.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I knew you’d be here. Good flight? Crowded, I suppose. You’re not going dressed like that are you? Have a scotch. You should’ve been here for the Film Corporation lunch. Look at that.’ She nodded towards a photograph pinned to the apartment wall. There she was, nestling her golden hair in under Michael Caine’s left armpit. ‘You’re my escort for the night,’ she told Carey.

  She stayed there for another half hour, painting her extremities, drying them in the breeze from the Mediterranean, doing her hair, uncritically delighted with herself. Her sentences, like a child’s, came out unrelated. ‘They serve up buckets of Veuve Clicquot. You know there’re drinks before the showing tonight? A lovely room at the Carlton. And then the party afterwards. Susannah York’s coming. I’m glad I’m not staying out at la Napoule with all those Aussie oafs. By the way, I met the head of Rank the other day at the EMI party. Did you know the PM sent Andy a telegram? Rip it into ’em, cobber – you know the sort of th
ing. David Carradine wants to see one of my tapes. Clothing here costs the earth. And booze too. Have another scotch.’

  When Andy and Maureen turned up, the four of them dressed more or less communally, trying out the effect on each other of various oddments of clothing. ‘How’s the coat? Pants too long? Cop the frilly shirt!’ The women displayed themselves in their seamless black gowns, then in their jewellery. Andy McNiell and Carey, two of the nation’s foulest dressers, turned from the mirror like Crosby and Hope, yelling ‘Da-da!’, then flashing their black ties at the girls, who thought it was all grotesque and clapped them.

  They left the apartment and headed for the Carlton. The women were easy in their glad rags, but Carey felt a little foolish. As they turned into la Croisette, they showed the naked-to-the-navel strollers there that the Film Festival had its standards.

  At the base of a golden staircase at the Carlton, two twenty-year-old Frenchmen bustled up to Carey’s blonde companion and begged her autograph. Radiant, she bestowed it. This was what was known in Australia as international acclaim; she would remember this more than the applause of 2000 of her countrymen.

  Finished with the autographs, she encased her writing arm in her black wrap as they all proceeded up the stairs. Everywhere, on the stairs, in the corridors, people walked fast, doing a year’s business in the Festival’s fortnight. The roofs were tall, the panelling gilt, the sideboards Louis XIV.

  At last, ennobled for an afternoon, Carey walked with a beautiful empty woman beneath the chandeliers. He should have enjoyed it, but it wasn’t believable; Carey wasn’t a credible inhabitant of such a whisky advertisement. And there was, in any case, a fear of the moment when the projectors would begin rolling in the Palais des Festivals and present him with the images of a book he’d written long ago.

  At the entrance to the chamber where drinks would be taken, Andy and Carey stood back to let Maureen and the actress go first. Andy took the chance to take Carey by the elbow.