“Look—I’ve found the raft.” Her voice bounced across the pond. She was fearless and held me in her arms, laughing, as I shivered. We hauled ourselves up onto the raft and dissolved into the darkness. There was no beginning or end to it. Just the vague grey shape of Suzy’s body and the noise of the water beneath. But soon our eyes became accustomed to the dark and the moon came out from behind the clouds and we played around for hours. Jumping off, kissing and jumping off. All sorts of experiments . . . Could we do it while treading water? How far was it to the bottom? Finally, spent, we leant our heads and shoulders on the raft and paddled our legs in silence. The water gurgled against the sides. Suzy was a beautiful statue, her pale vacant eyes shone back at the moon, her hair clung in thick snakes to her neck, and her breasts disappeared into the murky water, the nipples just visible, outlined in little silver ripples. A moorhen awoke and flapped about on the bank. The moon was blurry and low. The dark rustling trees bent over us and the blanket of water felt soft and protective now, as a breeze swept across it, lacing us in little pink waves. Everything turned into one thing and for a second or an hour we lost ourselves in it. But the brain always drags you away from those life-changing moments of oneness. Questions like, What am I doing here? and Where is this going? break the spell, and the real world retreats as the mechanics of illusion kickstart like an old generator after a power cut. In silence we swam to the shore and walked home.
As the evenings drew in we waited for each other secretly after school and walked to her flat and then to dinner in the little Indian restaurant around the corner. It was one of those typical places, a long thin room with red flocked walls, starched pink tablecloths and a lopsided picture of the Taj Mahal. Dinner for two cost £5.30.
One night, sprawled at another table, was a handsome man of about fifty-five in a crumpled pinstripe suit and a mop of black and white hair. He was leglessly drunk, booming orders and insults to the poor long-suffering waiter in a strange breathy vibrato that was pitched for the upper circle. Suzy and I watched him, entranced. In his intoxicated ramble he always came back to the same point, a single insult, a mantra, and he laboured over every syllable of it, so drunk that the muscles in his lips shook with the effort as he tried to form the words and throw them out: “Your father mowed my father’s lawn.” The mower’s son winked at us and grinned as the drunken man got up from his chair and lurched across the room towards the loo with his napkin in his hand like a dandy from a Restoration play. When he saw Suzy, he stopped dramatically in his tracks. “But soft,” he stage-whispered. “What light from yonder window breaks?” The waiter tried to push him on towards the gents’ but the man was having none of it.
“Get off me, flea!” he boomed and sat down. And so began the first of many evenings in the company of James Villiers, a theatrical legend whom nobody remembers; two eager students waiting in the wings and an old shot actor stumbling off the stage. We adored him, and he worshipped us. At least at night he did. On the rare occasions we met him during the day, passing each other on Haverstock Hill, or at the bank in Swiss Cottage (where, ashen-faced, he would fumble around in his pockets for an elusive chequebook like a silent screen comedian), he didn’t have the first clue who we were. We were part of the night; we came with the flocked wallpaper, the drunk’s dream of forgotten youth. For us, he almost became the reason we were together. We worked best through his eyes. He fancied Suzy and I think she fancied him. He would question us about school and acting and nod sagely to our replies, drifting off as we aired our grievances. He couldn’t really listen. But when he lost the thread of the conversation, he was always ready with a familiar refrain. With us it was: “If I were a producer . . .” His Rs rolled and so did his eyes. “You, Suzy, would play Juliet, and you, Rupert, would be Romeo. But I am sorry to say, the cake was not cut thus.”
Once, as we were carrying him home, we passed what looked like a rolled-up carpet on the street. “Wait! Is that Ronnie Fraser?” said Villiers. Fraser was another legendary drunk. Sometimes the two men would dine together in the Indian restaurant, and even the bullet-proof waiters would take cover. The place would come to a standstill and we all settled down to an evening’s entertainment from these two oblivious lunatics. They sat across from one another against the repertory backdrop of flocked walls and the lopsided Taj Mahal. They shouted and screamed at each other; laughed and wept seconds later. They got under one another’s skin. Jimmie usually went too far, and Ronnie would storm out, slamming the door of the restaurant, leaving the clientele on the edges of their seats, at which point Villiers would turn to the entire room and perform a sensational paralytic monologue about just how mad and drunk Fraser had become. But five minutes later the other would be back (as if nothing had happened) and the double-act would resume. This time Jimmie would play silent and wounded, and Fraser would turn to the audience in a comfortable aside and say, “Did he have a stroke while I was out?” It was magic. Real theatre.
CHAPTER 10
Clubs and Drugs
There was a raid on a tiny bar near the World’s End called the Gigolo. Suddenly the lights went on, the music cut out and the police were everywhere. Everyone ran for the exit. Nobody wanted to be booked or spend the night in jail. Police and queers collided; a poor fey queen was flattened against the wall, leaving a dirty protest of foundation and mascara streaked against the frosted mirrors, as the rest of us managed to squeeze through the mayhem and out into the street where more policemen were waiting to take pot-shots. One guy was tackled to the ground, his drink still in his hand, then it went flying into the air and the ice and lemon landed on a policeman’s foot.
“Watch it, poof!” I heard the copper say as I ran to the corner of The Vale and stopped to catch my breath and watch. It was my first raid, as exhilarating as it was frightening. A paddy wagon and two police cars flashed and screamed. You’d have thought a bomb had exploded instead of a few queens having a grope, but this game of tag with the law was the queer reality of the day. I waited on the corner contemplating my next move as a silver-haired man in a smart black overcoat came striding down the road from the club. As others were rounded up and shoved into the paddy wagon, this man’s very demeanour of entitlement seemed to forbid the long arm of the law from reaching out. He stopped by a rather beaten-up Triumph Vitesse which he unlocked; utterly unruffled, he got in, wound down the window and leant out.
“Perhaps you’ll find what you’re looking for at the Sombrero,” he said (the Sombrero was a famous discotheque in Kensington). I willingly jumped in. We drove in silence for a moment, past the police cars and the club. People were still being hauled from within. The paddy wagon pulled out sharply in front of us; the white-haired man punched the horn and muttered under his breath. “What a business!” he said dryly. “My name’s James, by the way.”
“Thank God we weren’t caught,” I said.
“Yes,” he replied suavely. “It would have been rather boring.”
I later discovered that James occupied a rather lofty diplomatic position.
At the Sombrero, news of the raid had already arrived, and we were given free drinks by a barman who seemed to know James quite well. Other refugees staggered in and soon it turned into quite a party. Anecdotes were swapped; stories were embroidered as we all walked hand in hand into the gay mythology of the times. The Gigolo raid became a date like 1066; subsequent stories would begin with, “I remember, because it was the day Tina Sparkle was arrested at the Gigolo.”
It never opened its doors again, and the owner spent several months inside on its account. But James and I became friends. He lived in a tall thin house in Belgravia. It transpired that we had more in common than we thought. He used to escort my aunt to debutante balls. At weekends Belgravia stopped dead in its tracks. Its large glacial houses were shuttered and bolted. The streets emptied of cars in a mass exodus to the country. Hardly a soul was abroad. The silence had the claustrophobic tinge of a Sunday even when it was Saturday. Only deviants and inverts stayed beh
ind. Walking down a deserted Elizabeth Street with James on a Saturday afternoon, one would come across some ducal figure emerging from a chalky mansion on the corner of one of the big squares.
“Afternoon, James.”
“Good afternoon, Jeremy.”
“Are you doing anything this evening?”
“I thought Rupert and I might go to our club.”
“Oh, lucky Rupert! I’m afraid Darren is insisting we go to that rubber thing at Mile End. I’m rather dreading it.”
On Saturday evenings we met for drinks at his house. If it was summer we sat on the roof terrace under the branches of a huge plane tree, the only living souls in the patchwork quilt of little gardens. In my fantasy James was a secret agent. He drank Pernod, wore jeans and a tweed jacket, jodhpur boots and a scarf around his neck. He was extremely educated, but the impressive thing about him was that he seemed equally at ease in the House of Lords or a Dockland dive bar. In a way, this was typical of the gay scene of the times. While the country was still locked in the rigours of the class system, the gay scene—by nature of its illegality—was not. Apart from the sex (forbidden outside the four walls of a private residence), this was the great thing about it. Convicts chatted with barristers, plumbers made appointments with earls. The present-day star system of hookers, porno stars and bodies beautiful had not been pioneered. People were quite generous with each other, none more so than James. We saw Lindsay Kemp as Salome together; we became joint members of the Embassy Club in Bond Street. I met Derek Jarman through him, and when I wanted to buy a biker jacket and leather trousers, it was James who lent me the money.
The night of the royal wedding found us sitting on his terrace. It was a beautiful summer evening with a warm breeze that tasted of iron and chestnut trees, but even inside the fortress of a quiet Belgravia garden you could feel the restless crowds moving around the city. There were parties on every street corner, fireworks soaring above the rooftops, pubs overflowing onto the streets. Nobody was indoors.
It is not in the queer DNA to take part in public events and national celebrations so we decided instead to visit a louche club in Leicester Square called the Subway. It had once been the famous Four Hundred, immortalised by Evelyn Waugh and Noël Coward, the smartest nightclub in London for thirty years between the wars. It was christened in the twenties by the Bright Young Things, who manically danced there before “sitting the next one out” at the surrounding tables to watch the slow collapse of the Empire, the destruction of the great aristocratic mansions and finally the Blitz, all playing out in front of them on the dance floor. From a tender romantic kiss as the band played “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” to the desperate embrace of “We’ll Meet Again!” those walls held it all. Now men fucked each other as Gloria Gaynor sang “I Will Survive.” Many of them wouldn’t.
We squeezed into James’ Vitesse, but the nearer we got to Buckingham Palace, the more crowded the streets became and soon we had to abandon the car and walk. It felt as if the whole of England was out that evening in an expression of nationalistic unity not seen since the end of the war. Suddenly maypoles were erected on village greens, oxen were roasted on giant spits and it was Merrie England all over again, or at least a kind of Disney version. This crowd seemed to come directly from a Chaucerian rental agency. Wives of Bath with hands on their haunches threw back their heads and laughed. Snaggle-toothed vicars downed beer and danced. All those children’s stories that had been branded onto our collective subconscious had turned flesh: the fairy princess; the frog prince; the kingdom saved from evil; happily ever after . . .
The Mall was packed with rosy drunken English faces, eagerly watching the balcony of the floodlit palace. Above them on high white flagpoles flapped the symbols and insignias that had suppressed them for centuries. It was the beginning of a new age, but not the one anyone had in mind. With that night the last thread of our medieval past snapped. Of course, the apple was poisoned and someone had cast a spell. The princess would short-circuit. The kingdom would be sold. And for us, the poor queers skulking around the perimeter that night, flapping in the breeze with the Union Jack and George and the Dragon, was another flag, a lethal marker only visible under a microscope. It was already unfurled in the old Four Hundred, silently exploding like the massive firework display that rained down from the sky as we finally arrived in Leicester Square.
And every time I walked down the stairs into the inferno of the Subway, I thought of the Ampleforth Christmas show in 1973 and smiled. Blithe Spirit by Noël Coward. I am wearing grey tights and a negligee as Elvira the dead wife. My arms are outstretched. Wadham is beside me as Ruth, another dead wife. He has flour in his hair to make him look ghostly. There is a cloud of ectoplasm every time he shakes his head. It is very effective and I am quite jealous. Barnes is Madame Arcati and Noel Two is Edith the maid. They are huddled around a table incanting. Finally we have been exorcised, and Wadham and me begin to float off into the ether. As we disappear through the french windows, in a sing-song voice I tell my still-living ex-husband about one final infidelity. “Charles! I went to the Four Hundred several times with George Frobisher. And I must say, I enjoyed myself enormously.”
CHAPTER 11
John
John Jermyn came from bad blood. As I mentioned before, his father, the Marquis of Bristol, was the impresario of a band of amateur criminals in the mid-1930s called the Mayfair Gang, an assortment of aristocratic rascals and cockney thugs in the Ealing Comedy mould. A rich silly woman with a weakness for the bottle was their perfect prey. She would be wined and dined by a suave gang member, and then taken to a nightclub where other members of the gang were ready at the next table, to be wooed with more drinks and exciting talk. Her hand would be held and its rings would be slipped off. Her handbag would slowly begin to move across the table while she wasn’t looking and then suddenly disappear. The group at the next table would pay and leave. The suave gang member would, of course, stick by the lady through the meltdown that followed. It was simple yet effective. (Today, in Brazil, they have perfected this technique. It has a name: Goodnight Cinderella.) The Mayfair Gang were roguish and brash, yet by today’s standards they seem quite innocent. They were only caught out when their plans became too grandiose and they attempted to rob the jewellers Cartier. According to legend, Victor Bristol was the last man to be publicly flogged; actually his punishment was rather less dramatic.
It’s funny how life goes around in circles. My father left the army in 1961 to go and work for the import-export business that Bristol had set up with a mutual friend, a man named Ian Dundonald (my godfather). Another friend of Bristol’s and Dundonald’s was a retired admiral who had been given the job of running the Chilean navy. The two men seized on this rather questionable opportunity and went into business, using the Chilean navy as both a means of carriage and of avoiding the delicate issues of Customs and Excise. If it all sounds like something one might have read in a Graham Greene novel, this was simply how business was conducted in post-war London. Insider dealing had not been invented then and if a chap from the old school just happened to have landed a “whacking good job” running the Chilean navy and if that chap—who was “a very solid fellow, by the way”—had had some interesting contacts with some other “reliable chaps over there,” then everything fell swiftly into place. Naval manoeuvres could be scheduled for the Pacific, with a “fascinating visit to the Hollywood Studios” while one was docked in Los Angeles, and a few containers could be dropped off at the same time with no questions asked. That was how fortunes could be made in those days. Unfortunately for my father, no sooner had he arrived in London than he lost the job. Why, history does not relate, though doubtless he was just too straight for something as ambiguous as Victor Bristol’s business.
Seventeen years later, his eldest son John inherited £12 million at the age of eighteen. His estranged father was already on to a third wife, a former secretary named Yvonne, and lived in Monte Carlo. There was nothing to stop the you
ng earl Jermyn from diving off the deep end. He immediately acquired a large house on the west side of Brompton Square in Knightsbridge, having also inherited the use of his Palladian family seat, Ickworth Hall in Suffolk, and bought an enormous old motor yacht called Braemar: all this before he was twenty. And so began a rollercoaster ride that took him from London to Paris to prison and from riches to rehab to ruin. Disaster was to hit John again and again over the years. Divorce, suicide, addiction and death were his unhappy cards. But all this was for later. In the golden heyday of the late seventies, this terrible future was a mere whisper, the odd shiver you feel when somebody walks on your grave.
As part of his permanent entourage John had his own interior decorator. He was called Mrs. Renwick, and he doubled as a kind of social secretary. He had a savage tongue, slicked-back hair and black-framed specs, and spent John’s money like water on his addiction for ruched swags and draped tables. John’s Minister for the Environment was a young stockbroker called Nick Somerville, a short, ashen-faced man with big dark rings under his eyes, who was always on the verge of nodding off. No one in John’s inner circle had any money and pretty soon whether we liked it or not (and mostly we did) we were reduced to vassals. This incurred much backbiting among the court and frustration for John, so people went in and out of favour with the tide. Some, like Somerville, had squid-like tentacles and managed to withstand the crashing of the waves about them, clinging to a rock as the ocean was sucked away.
Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins Page 11