Maria was a fabulous monster but inspired as much love as she did hate. I adored her. County folk in Wiltshire found her impossibly grand and distrusted her connections to several highbrow international queens for whom she doubled as a kind of muse and high priestess during their various trips into town. Tennessee Williams was her best friend. According to Maria, he had based the character of “the Cat” in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof on her, and no matter what her detractors could say to the contrary there was more than a marked similarity between the two women. Maria was a Tennessee Williams character. (On his death she became the executor of Tennessee’s estate and it was only through her that I managed to get permission to play Mrs. Goforth in The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore.) Whatever else, Maria was a fiercely loyal friend and her special attachments included Gore Vidal and Franco Zeffirelli.
Zeffirelli was Natasha’s godfather, and when I heard he would be coming to her eighteenth-birthday ball at Wilbury, I became hysterical with excitement. I arrived at the ball dressed from head to foot in black leather and proceeded to scour the house for a sighting of the great maestro fairy. Sadly, when at last he approached me, I had no idea whom I was talking to and simply thought, in the arrogance of youth, that he was just another antique dealer friend of Maria’s who was trying to get into my pants. I glanced down my nose at him a couple of times and answered his questions with a perfunctory “yes” or “no,” staring resolutely ahead onto the dance floor where young men in dinner jackets and girls in billowing ballgowns were gyrating and pogoing to a music other than that which was playing in the room. Zeffirelli stalked off. I nearly fainted when I realised my mistake.
Maria loved her daughters with a deep and dangerous passion. She was hell-bent on motivating them, but unfortunately for her their make-up contained more than a vein of their father’s depressive nature, not to mention a healthy dose of that genetic Russian predilection for sitting around gloomily drinking tea. Maria’s tirades only helped Natasha to hide deeper inside herself.
My family moved from Essex to Wiltshire in 1979 and from Enford, where we lived, to Wilbury was a fifteen-minute drive across tiny country lanes over the Salisbury Plain. Natasha and I beetled dangerously back and forth when the pressure of our mothers became too much.
One weekend, just after my return from Yugoslavia, there was an especially explosive lunch at Wilbury. It was Boxing Day, and Maria was being particularly poisonous. Natasha and I went out for a walk. I was leaving for India in the New Year on another miniseries called The Far Pavilions. I was home, but I’d already escaped. Natasha had not. A cold winter night was settling in. The old house stood grey and forlorn behind us. The raised voices and tears of five minutes ago dissolved in the damp silence of the sleeping countryside. The sky was still white but there was no light. Pheasants flew over, their weird strangled shrieks echoing through the woods. Natasha was in a black mood. At the end of the huge unkempt lawn was a dogs’ cemetery. Surrounded by broken park fencing, little crosses marked the graves of generations of pugs and retrievers. The names of the dead were engraved upon them. Froggy Footman. Mishka. Kabanos. Later Maria herself was to be buried there.
Suddenly screams and shouts shattered the silence. A car screeched down the drive. We looked at each other and walked quickly into the trees.
“The Australians have left, can you beat it?” Maria’s voice bounced between the house and the woods.
We turned around. She was tiny in the large windows of the library. Behind her the Christmas tree glittered and sparkled with tinsel and blinking fairy lights. She might have just jumped off it. You had to smile because she never stopped. The harangue continued as we trudged back to help with the washing up. Coming around the house we could see her hurtling past windows like a crazy witch. We both laughed, but as we got to the front door Natasha suddenly took my arm and looked at me with an unusual earnestness. “Don’t you need some kind of assistant when you go to India?”
The Far Pavilions was a romantic novel about the British Raj in the nineteenth century. It was a story of star-crossed lovers, an Indian Romeo and Juliet. The handsome English officer was played by Ben Cross and his Indian princess was Amy Irving. Togged up in a floor-length wig, her piercing blue eyes rimmed with kohl, she looked more like a follower of Charles Manson than the daughter of a maharajah. A star-studded cast assembled in Jaipur, the pink city of Rajasthan. My character was called Gorgeous George. He was an Anglo-Indian civil servant who sadly committed suicide in the first episode. But I didn’t care.
I was young. I was working. I was going to India.
So in that February, 1983, I set off with Natasha for Bombay and a small holiday in Goa before joining the production.
Nothing prepares you for India. Of all the arrivals it is the most exotic, and the most destabilising. The whole rug of life is pulled from under your feet. From the airport we took a taxi into the city. We hadn’t slept all night and could hardly keep our eyes open, but there is something about the colour of the dawn and the smell of the air that kept even Natasha awake on the long bumpy ride to Bombay. The road was a cacophony of hooting taxis and trucks. Scooters bearing entire families darted through the traffic; the women sat side-saddle with expressionless faces under saris that fluttered behind them. Cows lumbered across the road, cars swerved to avoid them, and the scooters flew on by. As the sky blanched, thin boys in loincloths washed by the side of the road, and fires glowed from the dark interiors of the roadside huts. We ploughed through this ocean of poverty in silence and were soon on more familiar ground, the India of Lutyens, and the collapsing traces of Empire. By the end of the journey we were in a kind of trance. Seeing India for the first time is a shock to the system, impossible to rationalise. The brain freezes, although Natasha’s was already in the fridge.
We stayed at the Taj Hotel, which overlooks the ocean and the triumphal arch through which the viceroys marched on their way back from England. We slept all day and came out at night with the rats that made the ground look as though it was moving. We took a rickshaw and delved into the depths of the city. The driver gave us something to smoke. We were young, green, greedy hoorays and we didn’t ask what was in it, because in the Embassy Club one never said no to anything. Soon we were in a sort of red-light district. The street was mayhem. Women looked down through prison bars from upstairs rooms. They wore fuchsia and emerald and turquoise. Little rickety staircases led to their cells. The light, the colours and the noise were overwhelming. It was as if someone had turned the dials up too high on the TV.
“Darling, that joint was really weird,” said Natasha after a few minutes. We were stuck in a sort of human traffic jam. “Am I really stoned or is there a hand coming up between my legs?”
We looked down and sure enough, there was a small grinning boy clinging to the undercarriage of the rickshaw. Or was there? When we looked back, he’d gone. The street was a dark seething crowd of men and since we were at a standstill, they began to crowd in towards us, curious and menacing. One man tried to drag me from the rickshaw, pointing in the direction of an imprisoned beauty upstairs. We both clutched the sides, suddenly terrified that we were going to fall into the blur of eyes, teeth, shiny hair and untucked shirts that surrounded us. I looked at Natasha. She was sweating. We were tripping. Or were we? You could never tell in India; everything was so extreme. But the experience was like a nightmare with some ghastly moral. The ladies of the night looked coldly down from their cages as the hands of men reached up from hell to drag us down. The crowd was pushing our rickshaw from side to side. Someone grabbed at Natasha’s purse, but they underestimated her. She was certainly not going to let go of her wallet while she was still conscious.
Finally we escaped down a narrow alleyway and were soon being pedalled through dark wide streets covered with sleeping bodies. The driver rang his bell as we wove through the narrow passage left by the half-dead untouchables. Rats jumped across them and nibbled at their feet. The odd man or woman sat upright and listlessly watched
as we passed. Now the din of the busy streets was a distant scary echo like a riot, a revolution coming from far away.
The next day we took the old ferry boat to Goa. Natasha put her back out carrying a suitcase so it looked as though I would have to be the assistant after all. The port was another impossible Victorian puzzle swarming with life. It was a two-day journey by boat. We had a cabin, but most of the travellers lived below with the cargo and we were rather jealous. A mix of Indians and hippies strung hammocks to the ceiling, sat cross-legged in circles, drank tea and listened to music. But even on the upper deck, it was a glorious trip. We lay in our cabin, luxuriating in the throb of the engine and the feeling of having disappeared from our lives. We had both given the slip to our overbearing mothers. Neither of them would be able to find us now, steaming down the coast of India. We sat in a dirty dining room at meals and played cards with some hippies from Manchester after dinner. Later, drunk and liberated, we lay awake all night and talked.
In Goa the body of St. Francis Xavier was on display in a peeling old cathedral where the local Indian women dressed like Italian peasants. They swept the floors, trimmed the candles and said their rosaries (the Hail Mary in Hindu sounded like bees swarming). Many people had come to see the saint. Some of them moved across the church on their knees. His face was miraculously preserved, shiny as shoe leather from too much kissing. Some thoughtful nuns had plonked a curly old rug on his head. It looked as though it were made from pubic hair. His lips had receded and gave him a saucy grin that was not altogether saintly.
“He looks a bit like Bunny Rogers,” said Natasha. Bunny was a wealthy old queen who gave the famous “Mauve Ball” every year in London. We both got the giggles. The bees looked ready to swarm.
At night we trekked for miles through the jungle, guided by the distant thud of music, to caverns under vast canopies of bamboo where the hippies had their raves. Men with handlebar moustaches and biker jackets sat around drinking beer, and acid casualties writhed to the music in the embrace of invisible tree spirits. Returning from a glade where a German woman in a sari ran the bar, I found Natasha dancing alone. It was a glorious sight. Everything had changed, but Natasha was the same. She could have been back in the south hall at Wilbury at her coming-out ball, moving from foot to foot in a sort of trance, her signature Silk Cut in one hand, its packet clutched in the other. A semi-bald man with long wispy hair and a pot belly danced up to her and started to rub his groin against her and nuzzle her neck. “Actually,” said Natasha rather half-heartedly after a few minutes, “I’m with my boyfriend.”
The Rambagh Palace in Jaipur was a gigantic Victorian city of vanilla and white, a beautiful monstrosity. When its famous maharajah died it was turned into a hotel, although the maharani, who was put in prison by Mrs. Gandhi, still lived in a house at the bottom of the garden. Our bedroom was a large room panelled in dark shiny mahogany, which had been the maharani’s library and looked over an inner courtyard.
The dining room was huge, a former state receiving room, the walls covered in pale green silk that had seen better days. Fans like sails swung from the ceiling and their breeze sent shivers across the tables below. Silverware jangled and napkins fluttered. Musicians played on a podium. Our first night was a star-studded occasion. John Gielgud and his boyfriend Martin were eating silently at a corner table. Sir John was the epitome of the theatrical knight: perfect posture in a linen jacket, a pristine shirt and a slightly florid scarf. His boyfriend wore gold chains and medallions under a deeply open shirt. Then Omar Sharif walked in and the band, which comprised two zithers and some bongos, launched into a rousing version of “Lara’s Theme.” Poor Omar, probably exhausted from a gruelling day at work, in hundreds of degrees of heat, had to wave and bow to the enraptured tourists as he made his way towards his table. You could tell from the hooded eyes above the beaming smile that he had been through this in every converted palace, wherever there was a band, and was quite used to it. Ben Cross and Amy Irving came in and sat with us at our table. Afterwards we all went to the bar. Everyone seemed to be much more interested in Natasha than me, and I began to feel more like the assistant than ever. Robert Hardy and his wife knew Maria, and of course Sir John was one of Maria’s oldest friends. They had been in a play together in the fifties, when legend has it that Maria smothered Edith Evans with a pillow during a scene because she was upstaging Sir John.
We went outside. There was a full moon. Formal gardens spread out beneath the palace—hard red earth, fountains, and box hedges in patterns. A snake charmer sat cross-legged on the terrace playing a little flute. There were mountains in the distance. Peacocks stood in the moonlight. Their howls awoke me later that night in the pitch black of the maharani’s library, and for a moment I had no idea who or where I was. But Natasha’s sleeping form soon took shape in the darkness, grainy and reassuring, guiding me back like the three-two-one of a hypnotist, and everything fell into place. A peacock howled again. I looked at my watch. Four-thirty. It was time to get up.
Pat and Meinir were a famous make-up and hair team. Pat was make-up and came from Glasgow, but you could hardly tell. She and I made instant friends (and at the risk of playing into the hands of my detractors, she has been one of the most important relationships of my career. We have worked together ever since). Meinir was from Wales and made no attempt to cover her linguistic tracks. She was a great storyteller, rolling her eyes and her Rs. As she got more heated, she became quite guttural and would suddenly switch to Welsh. At this point you knew you were in trouble. She was moody; Pat was even-keeled. They were yin and yang, a really funny double act and the best in the business. They also loved a drink. The fridge in the make-up tent was crammed full of champagne and special favourites would receive a glass of Buck’s Fizz as they stepped into the chair of a morning.
I should probably have been a silent screen star but I can’t help thinking that there isn’t much point in hair and make-up these days. Cinematographers don’t light faces any more and actors all look drained and ready for rehab. (If only they were.) The fashion photo has become more deliberate, more tricked and retouched, but the moving picture presents the human face at its most banal. Skin has the texture of tea bags. Eyes are rheumy. Lips curve into nasty dribble drains. Even the stunning girls look as if they have emphysema. But in the old days, not so very long ago, when an actor had a close-up nobody could get anywhere near them because they would be surrounded by a forest of lamps on stands. Little lights called “inky dinks” made your eyes look full of something other than blind ambition and fear. Carefully placed “fills” and “keys,” “wendy lamps” and “blondes” gave your face the shape and contour of the cinema animal. A famous DP called Jack Cardiff lit The Far Pavilions. He was legendary—he had shot The African Queen—and he tinkered around with his light meter and his eyeglass. No one nagged him about the time. There were no monitors so everyone huddled around the action like moths at a flame. Walking onto the set, or later, when we got back to England, onto the sound stage, my heart always missed a beat. You went from the drab suburban drizzle to a dark dusty cavern with a face in the middle surrounded by lights. It was the face of someone you probably knew, but now it was different, possessed. Eyes were shrouded in deep mauve clouds and their lashes threw shadows across the cheekbones. A softening chin was firmed by a charcoal line thrown from a key light high above, and a girl’s cheek was lightly bruised in its shadow. Pat and Meinir would stand absorbed outside the pool of light, brushes and sprays, powders and lipsticks at the ready, waiting for Jack Cardiff to give them some last-minute instructions. There was a religious feeling: a miracle was being performed before our eyes.
While I was in India, Nicky Haslam was redecorating my house in Bywater Street, and when we returned from Jaipur in April the building work wasn’t finished. I had nowhere to live, so I went to stay with Amy Irving and her assistant Cindy in their suite at Blakes Hotel.
It was a Saturday afternoon, and I had an out-of-body experience. We all talk a
bout premonitions, but do we really have them? We remember we haven’t called someone and as we pick up the phone they call us, but this was different.
As I turned on the TV, I knew before the picture appeared that something was about to happen. Amy was running a bath in the room next door. She was talking on the phone. Suddenly everything crowded in—her voice, the bathwater—as if I was fainting or passing out drunk. In those days the picture came up before the sound, fuzzy at first, and then settled. The face of a boy I knew appeared out of the haze: John. He was talking, silently mouthing words. Adrenaline surged through my body and my head pounded. We’d had an on-off affair for four or five years but I hadn’t seen him for a while. Why was he looking old and drawn like a Trappist monk? He was younger than me, just twenty-one. The sound came up, with the measured voice of a BBC announcer: “John is one of the first people in this country to develop the killer cancer that attacks the immune system and does not seem to respond to any treatment.”
Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins Page 17