by Nigel Planer
‘Neil,’ I called, ‘it’s OK.’ But it wasn’t.
I had a brief few words with Marc, who said he understood, although I doubted that, bunged some cash on the table for the bill, and hurried out into Soho after Neil, who had sloped into the Coach and Horses pub opposite. I bought him a drink.
‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘I fucked up your deal. But they want me to turn out some sexist crap like Jeffrey Archer. I should’ve just done some Christmas joke book off the telly like Harry Enfield.’
‘No, it’s my fault,’ I said, trying to enjoy a half of lager. ‘Maybe you’re right, Marc isn’t the right editor for you. He’s just into quick, easy bucks, I know. I shouldn’t have got you into this in the first place. Look, go home, think about it. I’m sure something will occur if you give yourself time.’ Trouble is, some people — and I’m not necessarily saying Neil is one of them — are afraid of success.
A second-grade-venue tour of an Alan Ayckbourn play had come into the office that morning and I wanted to get back on the phone to see if there might be something in it for Neil. Get him away from all this, back on the boards, clearing his head, earning some dosh. Maybe things weren’t going so well for him at home in West Hampstead where he lived with his therapist partner, an older woman, American. He looked as if he needed some sex. I didn’t want to see one of my favourite clients suffering from spiritual anxiety, or doing a Dennis Potter on me. Oh dear. ‘Twas ever thus.
‘Look at that,’ said the taxi driver, momentarily drawing my attention away from Jeremy Planter’s photocopied contracts. ‘I don’t know why they bother. We’re all gonna die anyway.’ I glanced at the traffic but had missed whatever piece of road manoeuvring had prompted his doomy remark. I decided to agree with him nevertheless, since he was undoubtedly right, philosophically speaking.
The earlier contracts were mostly buy-outs. Royalties and repeat fees are sadly, more often than not, things of the early seventies. Since deregulation and the mushrooming of the Independent sector, even things like video sales and spin-offs are usually covered by an upfront fee. Gone are the days of artists and writers retaining rights over their work in perpetuity. The market has been so swamped by poor-quality cable and satellite product that broadcasters just cannot afford any more to encumber the sell-on potential of their properties with obligations to the originators of the material. However, the later three contracts were full of juicier stuff. As an artist grows in stature and pulling power, one can negotiate better terms, committing the hirer to increasing cash releases, shortening decision times on second and third series options, lessening the number of showings available, that sort of thing. Though I say so myself, Planter’s last three contracts were minor masterpieces, studded with sparkling caveats and buyback clauses. I had even managed to achieve a twenty-eight-day option renewal on Planter’s Revenge, which meant that the powers-that-struggle-to-be would have only a month from’ next Saturday, when the first episode of the new series went out, to make up their minds about whether to recommission. I wondered how fast a worker this Bella/Samantha/Chrissie woman would turn out to be.
The taxi driver slammed on his brakes suddenly, sending the sixteen pages of the Planter’s Revenge contract spluttering to the floor.
‘Wanker!’ shouted the cabbie out of the window, and then, over his shoulder to me, ‘Why not just drive straight to the crematorium, eh?’
‘Quite,’ I said, picking up the contract and putting it in order. I should have taken the time to staple it.
‘Look at them all, hurry hurry hurry. Wankers,’ he said, and I wondered if he was in the right job. Grave-digging perhaps might have suited him better, or lighthouse keeping. Grumpy old tart.
Bloody Jeremy Planter, such a ladies’ man, such a chap’s chap. There was a time when I would have found it amusing to be out with Jerry. To chat up the hopefuls in the VIP lounge of some joint like the Limelight or Browns while he was snorting coke in the toilets or getting off with some young floozie. Vicariously, I could experience the dubious joys of the debauched life, and yet return home suffering nothing worse than an alcohol and Silk Cut hangover, conscience clear. This was in the days when Liz still asked me where I had been. Always the straight guy of the double act, the Ernie Wise. Never the one who got laid, but somehow maybe the one for whom it was all being performed. Maybe Jeremy was latently homosexual, maybe he fancied me underneath the braggadocio. Maybe his appetite was purely a show with an audience of one: me. If that was the case then I had played into it. I had laughed at his antics, who wouldn’t? They were funny after all. No, not just funny, absolutely hilarious. He was the best, after all. He was the king fish. Of a small and insignificant pond, it has to be said, in the wider picture of things, but the king nevertheless. More outrageous than Barrymore. Slicker than Jonathan Ross, sexier when on form than, oh, I don’t know, Billy Connolly, Albert Finney, Chris Evans, whoever you find sexy. More modest than … well, no, actually, that was a joke, not modest at all. Jerry had always been exciting to be with. The line between work and pleasure was non-existent with him. Needless to say, normal hard-working women hated him. They knew what he was up to. But he seemed to hold an endless fascination for that certain celebrity-notching type of woman, and, strangely enough, for us blokes. It was as if he could live out our most fearsome fantasies for us. Could epitomize our biggest dreams and worst nightmares. He was exhausting. And I might have to let him go.
The one contract not to be found in Jeremy Planter’s file was a client/agent agreement. This is because I don’t think they work. Naomi disagrees with me over this. In fact she more than disagrees, she thinks I am a ‘head—in-the-clouds girlie pushover’ on this issue, ‘a pussy’. Whether to bind a client to you by contract is the one area in which the ‘Mullin’ and the ‘Ketts’ form two distinct armies in the agency, with the battlelines firmly drawn up along the ‘and’.
Traditionally there are no such contracts. It’s not the music business, thank God, and an agency can never talk of ‘signing’ a new artist. An artist is free to go at any time with an understanding that any money from already negotiated contracts will continue to be filtered through the original agent. On the face of it, this puts one in a rather insecure position, but it must be remembered that without a binding agreement, the agent is also free to drop the client at any time if he or she becomes boring, for instance, or unemployable for whatever reasons. Usually alcohol. And, of course, it can be difficult sometimes to get a client, especially a younger one, to sign one of these agreements. But my main argument against them is that once a client has signed to you, they expect more. They do less for themselves and they are constantly whingeing that you don’t do enough for them. The mutuality is soured. Rather like marriage. People who have been living together quite happily for years decide to get married and then split up shortly afterwards. There’s nothing like a marriage contract to reduce a healthy sex life to a bi-monthly obligation, is there?
Naomi Ketts is keen on client/agent agreements, I suspect, because she dreams of selling the agency on one day, of being bought out and retiring, although the thought of her without her daily dose of show-biz animosity is inconceivable. She can’t even manage a long weekend, let alone a holiday in Greece, without at least three faxes to agonize over. She is the sort of woman who eats stress for breakfast. It’s her roughage.
This disagreement between myself and Naomi first reared its ugly head when we, mistakenly in my opinion, took on Debbie Sarchet. You may remember her, she had a brief flirtation with the media in the late eighties. A part-time model with a rich daddy, whose main claim to fame initially was giving blow jobs to rock stars in the toilets of briefly fashionable nightclubs. After a one-season stint presenting some low-rating ‘yoof show, she announced to anyone who wanted to hear — which, as it happened, turned out to include most of the British press — that she had really wanted to be an actress all along, was taking acting classes — though how often was not clear — and would shortly be moving to Los Angeles beca
use the English ‘hate success’. She was the kind of person who sees fame, rather than talent, as the currency, and I couldn’t stand her. However, the women in the office thought she might amount to something, and Tilda actually admired her, so for about five months, she was one of ours.
My point is that if we had actually signed her, as in made her sign a contract with us, we might still be stuck with her now, which even Naomi agreed would be a nightmare. However, during those few months, Naomi, I think, got a taste of that eighties cliché, the ‘money for nothing’ bug, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the massive share-option yuppie dream. She wanted to live happily ever after.
This was because a week after taking on Debbie Sarchet, we got a call from her modelling agency, Studio Visage. She had retained them, which was OK by us because we know doodlysquat about the fashion world. They wanted to know if we would be interested in taking on various other clients of theirs. We started getting Studio Visage Z-cards in the post. A Z—card is the modelling equivalent of a Walker-print. Instead of the standard actor’s full-on head-and-shoulder shot, a Z-card will have a glam shot: something in a bikini, or if she looks exotic, some leopardskin or fishnet; plus what I call a Chanel shot —something grown-up with classy aspirations — and a fresh-face shot. The hair and make-up will be different in all three shots and the girl’s measurements will be printed down the side.
Likewise the boys will have a shot with a shirt on, a shot without a shirt on, one with hair gel, one without hair gel and occasionally an outdoor shot on a motorbike.
We giggled and joked about these arrivals at first, and the sexier boy ones ended up plastered all over our walls. It being an office peopled entirely by women, the sexy girl shots went straight into the bin, and I had to pretend not to notice. Tilda was particularly into the model boys, though, and I suspect she harboured serious yearnings for some of the hunkier guys. I bet she took some of them home for private perusal. Anyway, when, amid an unwarranted amount of publicity, Tilda managed to get Debbie Sarchet half a line in an actual American movie shooting in London at the time, the Studio Visage wooing really began in earnest. Would we like to go to a meeting with them? Could they take us all out to lunch? For a couple of months we wasted time farting about with them, while they toyed with ideas, first of a merger and then of buying us out. They must have looked only at our most successful client list, done a few sums and reckoned it would be nice to expand into films.
Of course, when it was explained to them that to run an agency like this you have to have a ratio of at least three low earners to one star and they realized that we have to do a lot of dog-work for over 100-odd clients, they backed off a bit. What really sent them packing, though, was when, to their amazement, it was revealed that we have no actual contracts with any of our clients. Anyone is free to piss off at any time.
This they could not buy. I was relieved. They were awful people who had no understanding that this is a very personal business. Bigger is not necessarily better, and you can’t force a director or employer to take someone on. It’s all about relationships with people. It’s about loyalty and intimacy. But by then, Naomi had seen the figures. I mean, financially speaking. And they were, it has to be said, impressive. There must be a lot of dosh swilling around in the glam biz but I didn’t want to hang about watching Mullin and Ketts turning into an artistic laughing-stock, however many copulating holidays in Barbados I could have afforded in the short term.
One or two of the pics of the model boys stayed up on the cork board alongside Tania’s animal rights posters, though. Debbie Sarchet married some pitiable thirty-year-old muso millionaire and scuttled off to Los Angeles, occasionally appearing nowadays in women’s magazines — as you must no doubt know — with tips for young mothers on exercise and dieting and, of course, breastfeeding. Although whether it’s possible to breastfeed through a silicone implant is tactfully not gone into.
Strange that all this seems so clear to me when it comes to the agency, but at home I seem to have adopted the reverse policy, having signed the ultimate ever-after agreement with Liz. I often wonder why I married Liz, why she married me. My three-reasons-for-marrying—Liz joke: I fancied her, I fancied her and I fancied her. I suppose I figured that to. stand a sparrow’s chance in the happily—ever-after stakes it would be best to marry a woman I fancied a lot rather than one I liked but only half fancied, since as a man I might be tempted to become a bit frisky and spoil everything after a couple of years. Actually women are as likely to be unfaithful as men, but we all conspire to remain silent on that. However, with previous girlfriends I’d kept other doors open, had a roving eye even, but with Liz it was different. She had a way of looking into my eyes as if I was the only person on earth who could save her, and this used to — still does — make me tumescent. That and the needy quality in her voice. As if that very inability to cope in her, which has now become untenable, irritating, was initially the main attraction. Vanity, all vanity of course; who am I to save anyone? But that look and that plaintive sound made me feel right, like I had a place. Somehow I got it into my head that she needed me. I wanted to be useful.
As the taxi came to a standstill on Hammersmith Broadway, the cabbie took time to reflect further on the absurdities of life.
‘There’s people dying everywhere, you know. Sarajevo, look at that, and did you see the programme about Burma on the telly last night? Diabolical.’
I hoped that the traffic was not going to snarl into a gridlock as it can so often in this part of London. The thought of sitting here for forty minutes with Mr Morbid did not fill me with any joy. I wondered how long it would take to walk from here to the Planters’ house in Chiswick. Too long, probably. It was already quarter past two, and I wanted to be out of there before Susan and the children returned. I put the contracts back in my bag and took out the estate agent’s details for my mother.
The noise of a thousand engines turning over in their stationary vehicles on the Broadway was throbbing inside my head. A traffic helicopter passed by overhead, but the sound of its propelling blades stayed with me. I suppose Neil James was right: thinking I could look after Liz was a kind of abuse. Being the right man for her had turned me into some kind of Roman emperor. Mea culpa. And now she was breaking free of her bondage with centurion Bob Henderson from over the Alps and I wouldn’t have the time to suppress this insurrection because the bleeding empire needed constant maintenance.
The Planters had a nice and big house in Chiswick. Jeremy’s success was not yet long-lived enough to have warranted a move to hugely grander surroundings such as Shepperton or Henley, but they had had an extension built out the back and an extra floor on the top with dormer windows and a sort of half-balcony.
I knew the house well; I had been there on many occasions. Sunday barbecues, late-night chats in the kitchen with whisky. But I had never been there alone before. I knew the downstairs toilet with the framed posters, photos and cartoons of Jeremy’s early work, but I didn’t know the upstairs en-suite bathroom adjoining their bedroom, for instance.
Jeremy wanted me to collect a couple of the natty suits for which he was renowned, two of his awards, a golf club and three of the funny wigs from his very first TV show. It was a peculiar set of requests and seemed more like the props list for a Hello magazine photo-shoot than an inventory of requirements for life in a ‘love nest’.
In the living room, among the framed mantelpiece photos, there was even one of me — well, one in which I featured — a hot day in their garden with a slide and a swimming pool. I had my shirt tucked into tight jeans. Cripes, it must have been some years ago, before Liz. Nowadays, in the summer, I wear linen or silk shirts, untucked, to cover the weight gain, and those jeans have long been used as oil rags.
I caught myself in the Planters’ mirror. Women put on weight when pregnant but then they get the chance to lose it if they breastfeed — fifteen hundred calories a day, that — and, if they’re like Liz, they go to aerobics and yoga to stay slim.
Or maybe it was Bob Henderson who was doing that for her.
Silly blokes like me spend nine months empathizing, eating all the Haagen-Dazs ice-cream with their wives and then have to cancel all exercise as they buckle under the strain of supporting three people. The blob in the mirror stared back at me. I turned to the photos again. Some had been removed from their frames, no doubt recently by Susan. On the table were a couple of photo albums and a box of photos. In the bin were some photos torn in two. Susan had been going through the memories then.
Susan is good-looking but, in life as in all the photos, she lacked that vanity, that desperate need to be looked at, that fear, even, of being judged on her looks — which Liz has in buckets —which attracts men like a blood-magnet. Which makes a woman beautiful to the mindless-dick part of a man. Most of him, that is, as the girls in the office would have it.
There were a few photos in the box of a Planter holiday, presumably before Polly was born, sun and swimming pools. Jeremy of course larking about in every shot, always aware of the camera, no matter what — true pro. But Susan, who didn’t feature that often — presumably because she was the one who remembered to bring the camera and use it — even when. wearing a bikini, with tanned skin and tousled hair, looked —how can I put it — wholesome, nice, at one with herself, drinking no doubt just enough to be merry and then going to sleep, turning down the second cup of coffee, eating the right amount of salad. Not that she is fussy or prim: the sofa cushions were not overly arranged, breakfast had been left unwashed-up and even the duvet in the bedroom was not pulled tight but rolled back. Jeremy did not deserve her.
I had the awards, the wigs and the golf clubs but there was a problem with the suits. In the wardrobe were only Susan’s clothes, sensible clothes, nothing too expensive, no men’s shoes in their shoe rack, but on the floor several empty coathangers and some shards of linen and bits of thread. It looked as if Susan had been at his stuff with the pinking shears. There was one tie which had been snipped in two. The suits, no doubt, were already in pieces in black bin liners like the chopped-up remains of murder victims. Now I felt like the secret prowler in Neil James’s unwritten masterpiece. A chubby little bad-luck elf silently prowling through this woman’s house to change the course of events, as if Neil were my alter ego, as if he were writing my life.
