Paula and I met shortly afterwards in Valotti’s teashop on Shaftesbury Avenue. It was one of the last establishments of its kind, a place where actors and dressers ate beans on toast in a rush between the matinée and the evening performance, and now it was closing down. We were surrounded by a TV crew who were filming the event for Paula’s show, and the sparrow-like Italian cockney waitress and her sidekick, the big Polish redhead, were in a state of rare excitement. Paula was beautiful that day and tinged with hysteria; her little pale lashes framed eyes that glowed like a vampire from a Hammer horror film. But she was in great spirits, ecstatically happy and during our interview playfully dug her stiletto into my groin under the table. Sitting there in the tiny booth that afternoon, I remember thinking that Valotti’s was the perfect backdrop for Paula, though she would never have thought so herself. Against its red and yellow squeezy bottles of ketchup and mustard, its stainless-steel sugar bowls and cracked white teacups, she’d never looked so good. She had filled out, turning into a busty barmaid, yet still with that strange fragility, the latest in a line of English blondes, from Dusty Springfield to Diana Dors and Bet Lynch. She was sexy and fatal. She put all her energy into that. But she also had a fish and chips with extra vinegar side to her, and that was her secret recipe.
I had only met Michael once. Shortly before he died they came to a play that Philip Prowse and I were doing at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith. I was playing Mrs. Goforth in The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore by Tennessee Williams. It couldn’t have been a further cry from my last appearance on those ancient (but relocated) boards when I had played a bounding exuberant young priest opposite Gordon Jackson. Now I was a cancerous old swamp bitch in the classical Tennessee tradition. The play marked my first foray into the limelight after the success of My Best Friend’s Wedding and the first night was a colourful affair. Michael and Paula, losing the plot, brought their baby daughter Tiger with them, and they sat in front of my parents. Tiger gurgled and giggled through the show, and I thought I must be dreaming.
They were sweet but detached afterwards. It was a strange place to meet, because neither of us had been there since the days of Gordon and Rona Jackson all those years ago. We were adults now, strangers to ourselves then; standing in the same place now, but we couldn’t get back. Paula was giggly. Michael smiled. I was jumpy. At the dinner afterwards, there definitely seemed to be an aura of tragedy about them. Their faces looked as though they were seeing something else happening in the room. The air was thick around them. They had been swept too far out and were looking at us all from a long way off. Maybe, deep inside, they knew they were reaching the end of their journey. Each moment was just the one before the one before the last. What was a first-night party for the rest of us was just one in the series of sad farewells that Paula had dreamt of all those years ago watching A Place in the Sun.
Soon everyone knew that their relationship had turned into a runaway train. Events had outdone them. They had the first spilling nanny who spoke to a delighted press of Polaroids and opium under the bed. Bob and Paula fought. That delighted the press even more. And then Hughie Greene turned out to be Paula’s father. Things hardly got better in Fleet Street. She held it together as long as she had Michael. The world around them shifted and subsided. People took sides. Trusted friends turned. And then Michael hanged himself from the bathroom door of a hotel room in Sydney. Was it sex or suicide? Either way, Paula didn’t recover. Her last act was from Hamlet; her Ophelia would drown in a river of flash bulbs. I remember seeing a spread in Hello! magazine the year before she died. She was photographed on the beach at Hastings where she had a small house. The pictures were very moving. And like Valotti’s earlier, Hastings, with its gloomy south coast Englishness, its old people’s homes and its marauding yobs, was a perfect poignant background for Paula. She was putting up a valiant last stand, crouched out of the wind by the breakers, a lonely figure on a pebble beach beside the brown sea. After Michael’s death her every stumble was catalogued. She was shot and had nowhere to hide. Somehow death was inevitable.
One October morning in 1997 I was in bed in New York and the telephone rang. It was Bob. We had not spoken in nearly twenty years. “Paula’s dead,” he said, “and you’ve got to come and read a poem at the funeral. She wouldn’t forgive you if you don’t.”
The funeral was at Faversham, the beautiful medieval abbey surrounded by council flats that Bob had bought for Paula in those heady days when everything seemed as if it could never go wrong, and if it did there was all the time in the world to fix it. Then they had been the Arthur and Guinevere of the New Labour movement; common with a grand touch, and Faversham a kind of Camelot. Bob’s Round Table was the cream of international celebrity, though actually Paula had been the inspiration of the Live Aid movement. She was the one who stuck a collection box onto the fridge in Clapham after watching a documentary about Ethiopia.
It was a long and winding road from the kitchen in Clapham to the cloister at Faversham where she posed in that scarlet wedding dress surrounded by stars, every one a potential Lancelot. She had escaped from Camelot but now she was back. The Round Table were all there to welcome her home: Paul Young, Nick Cave, Jools Holland; older, a touch tubbier, more cautious, standing in awkward groups in the October sunshine. Paula wasn’t the only one to have sailed too close to the wind. The nineties had eaten a lot of us alive.
Would she have laughed or cried to see her mother with whom she hadn’t spoken for five years, meeting Tiger for the first time? She would definitely have done a quick rotation in her grave as Sabrina Guinness arrived in the church. The two women had disliked each other enormously.
Nobody wanted to talk much. There was nothing cheery about the event, which is unusual for funerals. Annie Lennox walked up and down at the end of the garden all alone, looking like The Scream by Munch. Soon the hearse rolled through the gates, accompanied by a blinding explosion of flash bulbs. The paparazzi had done her proud and were hanging out of the trees on the lane that led to the house. The white coffin, covered in tiger lilies, was carried into the chapel and the service began. It was beautiful. Bob had thought of everything and it was very moving to watch him. Whatever anyone might say, Paula had been the love of his life. Now he had her back feet first. Bono sang “Blue Skies” accompanied by Jools. At the end of the service they put on a track of Paula singing “These Boots Are Made for Walking.” I had completely forgotten it, but then I remembered seeing her the day after she had recorded it. We had been shopping in the World’s End, and she had bought me a leather jacket. Her disembodied voice filled the old church: breathless, thin. She was no singer, but there she was again over the hiss of static, suddenly alive. Our hearts leapt for a moment at the trick of sound and it was hard to listen to that silly song through chorus after chorus, but finally she said, “Come on, boots, walk.” The pallbearers, big-fingered mafioso types, lumbered from their seats and picked up the coffin as Paula broke into a final chorus and her physical remains left the church to be burnt at the crematorium.
CHAPTER 15
Barbarian Queen
In the four years since leaving drama school I had played a few small parts on TV, and had made a short film that would be my only (so far) near brush with an Oscar. It was called A Shocking Accident and won Best Short.
But my first serious car-to-the-airport kind of job was called Arthur the King. A reworking of the Arthurian legend from the pen of NBC in America, our film began with Dyan Cannon on a coach trip to Stonehenge under which lived Merlin, played by Edward Woodward (the actor whose name Noël Coward thought sounded like “a fart in the bath”), who had left open what can only be described as a kind of spiritual window. Naturally Dyan falls in. She discovers that Merlin and his wife (Lucy Gutteridge) are stuck in a time warp under Stonehenge and spend their days (eternity) watching out-takes of life at Camelot on a screen hidden behind some stalactites. Malcolm McDowell was Arthur. Candice Bergen was Morgan Le Fay. I was Lancelot du Lac. In my woven
gown, with my long dark hair and my painfully thin physique, I looked like a combination of Snow White and Anne Frank.
I was terrible as Lancelot. As a debut there were none of those early first signs one reads about in the biographies of others when a cinematographer swings down on a crane and says, “You got it, kid.” Ours, a man named Dennis, asked me, during a pause while he adjusted his lamps, “Why do you stand bent?”
“I don’t know, Dennis,” I replied.
“You’re all scrunched up,” he said, and made a horrible little grimace of imitation.
“Oh,” I said, outwardly nonchalant, but inside on red alert. “Scrunched up” is not the phrase you are looking for from the director of photography (always known as the DP).
Being part of a film crew on location is not unlike being at a public school. Gangs form. The class macho lays his claim (Malcolm). The school jokester takes his part (Patrick Ryecart, nicknamed by his agent the Duke of Darling) and within the first week the school weed is identified. The assistants are the monitors, buxom hairdressers double as matrons, and our benign headmaster was a sweet little man from the Rank days by the name of Clive Donner.
Liam Neeson played Grak, the king of the barbarians, and he and I had a big stage fight at the end of the film. We rehearsed it for weeks. We had to fence, use poles, bend iron bars and gouge each other’s eyes out, before I finally got him round his huge size-eighteen neck with my bony little hands and said the immortal line, “Die, barbarian!” We were an incongruous match for a skirmish. Liam could have snapped me in half with a flick of those huge sausage-fingered hands. But he was one of the sweetest actors in those days when we were all starting out, and everyone adored him. He was a gentle giant, very much one of the Irish boys, and they attacked the world of acting differently from us uptight Brits. The Irish actor was a gypsy traveller; the Brits were civil servants by comparison. They packed light, smoked like chimneys and always made the day into a laugh. Later in California, Liam gave up drinking and changed considerably. Hollywood inevitably irons out the wrinkles in an actor’s psyche, and after a few years in the lubed desert we are all homogenised. But the Liam of the early eighties was a happy-go-lucky semi-tramp with a gentle Belfast lilt and forget-me-not blue boxer’s eyes. He was very much a man, and went out with one of the great sirens of the day, Helen Mirren, yet he was totally unfazed by hanging out with a queen. And of course, he loved a drink; but then in those days, everyone did. After shooting was over for the day, the whole crew adjourned to the hotel bar and we wouldn’t move until the early hours of the following morning.
Our hotel was cut into the hills high above Dubrovnik. (It was to receive a direct hit in the war later on.) The view was incredible. Formal gardens on terraces threaded down towards the sea. I loved getting up for work in the mornings, bleary-eyed, still drunk. The sky was mauve and scribbled over with pink. The Adriatic was black. Far below, the waves crashed silently against the walls of the medieval city; in the distance, out to sea, was a craggy chain of little islands, on one of them, the ruins of a castle. There was a silence in the early morning that was not just about the absence of noise.
The make-up and wardrobe departments were downstairs in Tito’s old summer palace. There, the Italian hairdressers brewed delicious coffee; you could smell it as you walked down the corridor. You shut your eyes in the make-up chair and were lulled into a semi-conscious state by the murmur of Italian and the moans of hairdryers and actors. People came and went. Assistants with voices like military squaddies updated the room on the plan and the weather. Idle chatter about the scandals of yesterday awoke you with a smile. The glamorous “barge ladies” were the subjects of our schoolboy fantasies. They had come for a couple of days to sail Arthur to Avalon (weather permitting) but the sea was proving too choppy for our barge. It was fairly makeshift and looked like a float from the Rio carnival. Each night someone claimed to have had one of the barge girls, or all of them. At some point Clive, the director, arrived decked out in a huge waterproof outfit, a colonel addressing his troops before battle. And soon we were ready. Tissues were placed around our collars to stop the make-up from staining our tunics. They made us look ultra sissy. The girls wore hairnets and giant rollers. Everyone was buzzing on coffee and cigarettes, and spirits were high as we all climbed onto our horses and rode out into the Croatian mists. By the afternoon the rain would normally bring work to a standstill and we would sit in little caravans high in the mountains, drinking the local beer, talking and falling silent. Mesmerised by the noise of the rain on the roof of the trailer, we would soon fall asleep, only to be roughly woken by a dripping assistant and told that work was over for the day.
In one long punishing scene I had to vault a wall into Grak’s castle and pull myself up through a hole in a ceiling. I was on my way to save Guinevere who was in chains upstairs, but unfortunately I was intercepted by Grak. Liam had developed a marvellous growl for the role that was like Muttley from Wacky Races.
“I’ve come for the queen, barbarian!” I squeaked on take one before jumping onto the end of Liam’s jousting tool. “Hee hee hee,” he giggled as he swung me around on it. I had to grapple it from him, which was more or less impossible, and then snap it in two. Five minutes of sword fighting ensued: jumping on the table, throwing myself down on Liam, pummelling his face with the handle of my sword before killing him with a good stabbing in the stomach. Then I had to go over to Guinevere and pull her chains off her. There was one chain made of rubber for me to break. The rest were real. I started tugging at the wrong one. Obviously it wouldn’t break, so then I tried another and it snapped rather easily.
“That was fan-fucking-tastic,” said Clive at the end. Dennis walked past me to trim a lamp with a patronising smirk on his face. I was so exhausted by the time we came to the second take that I was becoming confused. “I’ve come for the barbarian, queen!” I shrieked, and the whole set collapsed into hysteria.
I loved Candice Bergen. She was funny, beautiful and quite detached. We got along immediately. One night at dinner she gave me the most important advice of my career.
“Rupert, I didn’t know whether I should tell you this,” she said, “but I think I will.” She paused dramatically, and suddenly I was shot through with adrenaline, terrified that she was about to say that I couldn’t act. When a friend tells you to give up, you know you’re in trouble. “You have lip tension,” she said. “I know, because I had it myself.”
Of course I thought she was talking rubbish. Until the next day, when Dennis said, “You always look as though you were about to say the word mower. Can’t you relax?” Suddenly I caught myself in the lens of the camera. Candice and Dennis were right. A giant M was forming on my lips. Actually, I was tense all over.
At the end of the film I had my big moment. My face peeping out of my helmet, I walked towards Arthur’s barge, tingling with drama. My cloak billowed in the freezing wind off the Adriatic. The barge ladies were covered with goose pimples and thinly disguised love bites. They had been in the bar late the night before. “Goodbye, Arthur. As long as men dream, your spirit will never die.” I had rehearsed the line a million different ways but it was a lame duck and I could never get it off the ground. Malcolm had had a late night too. He was fast asleep and gave a little snore. I stifled a giggle and left the barge. Magically, it began to glide away. The barge ladies stood tall, their silk robes hugging their beautiful curves, their faces staring vacantly towards Windermere and the Bond film they were all joining next week. The crew watched, breathless. The props guys fanned smoke into the wind, frogmen pushed the barge from under the water, and suddenly—clunk—they hit a rock. There was a snapping sound and one of the corners sank into the freezing water. The girls screamed and Arthur jumped off his bier. Clive yelled through his megaphone, “Back to one. That was a total fuck-up!” If not Tennyson exactly, it was an insightful epitaph for our film. But nobody cared. Christmas approached, and we all packed our trunks and dreamt about the Christmas holidays.
> Arthur the King was renamed Merlin and the Sword and went straight to video. A copy can sometimes be found in those weird stalls at a Sunday market hidden among other disaster films, three for the price of one.
We had no illusions. Only Gladys, the wife of the producer, had “chills” during every scene. But it was a cheerful film, and we all hugged like old friends at Heathrow before going home to the nightmare of a family Christmas.
CHAPTER 16
Natasha and The Far Pavilions
One of my best friends at that time was a girl called Natasha Grenfell. She lived on the other side of the King’s Road in a flat in Ormonde Gate. It was one of the untidiest places I have ever seen. She never rose before lunch and was bleary-eyed and puffy until the evening, when she transformed herself and stepped out for dinner. Her father was a gentle, aristocratic manic-depressive called Peter St. Just and her mother was the famous Maria Britneva, or Lady St. Just to us, a tiny Russian woman with a clawing energy and a shadowy past. Despite a background in the theatre, and before that as a dancer (she was apparently known as the “little grasshopper” as a child), she was grander than an archduchess. She terrorised us as teenagers. As far as she was concerned we were a worthless lot of spineless druggies. She was probably right. Weekends at their beautiful dilapidated Palladian mansion, Wilbury, would be slothful affairs punctuated by Maria bursting into rooms where Natasha and her friends sprawled about watching TV, and ordering them to perform chores around the house. We quickly learnt to always be carrying a log so that we looked as though we were about to lay a fire. Screaming matches between Maria and her daughters bubbled to the surface at meals around the huge dining room table. Lord St. Just surveyed them from one end of the table as though he was watching the cricket. Occasionally he raised an eyebrow as a wicket was scored but otherwise he ate his meal and kept quiet. The latest Australian couple would be pale and pinched as they served up lunch, probably having just been called “little fools” by Maria in the kitchen. They often packed and left in the midst of the meal, at which point a state of crisis was declared and, after whispered consultations, Natasha’s guests would shuffle gingerly to their cars and hotfoot it back to London.
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