There was a little nightclub that stayed open during the winter months in St. Tropez. Le Pigeonnier was an old round cellar, dangerously crowded in the summer, but out of season there were never more than ten people dancing under its lonely glitter ball. The waiter was an extraordinary freak called Bruno, a tiny Inca pixie with hair down to his waist, a shrill cackle of a laugh and pretty green eyes. He was twenty years old, with an entourage of school friends who had all followed him from the northern town of Mulhouse to the fleshpots of the Côte d’Azur. They were sweet and every weekend Duchesse (a boy who looked like Charles I), Catherine, Pascal and I danced all night in the little club, served with free drinks by Bruno.
The Aqua Club was open for lunch during the winter weekends, and all the regulars sat around the fire in the salle d’hiver. My particular friends were George the lawyer, his boyfriend Alain, and Jacques Monthelier, who reminded me of an elderly badger. I loved their old-school gay banter and tales of post-war life in Paris. George had met Alain in the Piscine Déligny, the houseboat swimming pool on the River Seine, when Alain was only seventeen. They both met Jacques in a club called Le Pimms in the sixties. I was entranced by the longevity of their relationships. In my world no one knew anyone for more than five minutes.
But none of this was sufficient to keep my anxiety at bay. Whichever way I looked at it, I was stuck. I was broke. I was unemployed. I lived in a huge ugly shell on a desolate beach. Eventually, in utter desperation, I began to attend the eight-thirty morning mass in the hilltop village of Ramatuelle. Maybe God would get me a job.
The church had large double doors that were always open. The first day that I went, I was surprised to see Jacques shuffling in. I waved but he made no sign of recognition, even when he took the collection. His neighbour was a buxom peasant woman called Madame Amiel. She was the other regular at mass. She was also the village gossip. She raised her arms in supplication as the sacrament was revealed by the little old padre and proclaimed in that marvellous Provençal accent, better suited to barter for fish in the port, “O Christ, prends pitié . . .”
Soon Jacques and I had breakfast together on a daily basis in the Bar de l’Ormeau after church. He was a fossilised old queen of seventy-nine. He came from Lille and his family made taps. Under his hopeless leadership the tap business had gone bust in the sixties. He had retired early and brought his sick mother down to Ramatuelle where he nursed her until she died. Now he was old and bored, horrified and entranced by the world that swept into the tiny village during the summer months. Like me, he was stuck in his little house in the fortifications of Ramatuelle. He was diabetic, and smelt musty and unwashed, but had a wry sense of humour and a twinkle in his eyes. We became very fond of one another.
Everything went wild during the summer at Windy Ridge. The house was full of people. One of my best friends from London was a designer called Tom Bell. We had decided to leave England together. Now he lived in Madrid and came every summer to stay in the caravan. Bruno and his clique lived downstairs in the big house, which little by little was being rebuilt, and Mo and I lived on in Bâtiment 3 with whoever we were having an affair with at the time. We rarely sat down less than twenty to dinner, and developed a dangerous reputation in the bars and clubs of St. Tropez, where our unpaid bills and jilted lovers waited for us accusingly when we arrived en masse in the town. All my friends from London came to stay and the summers were crazy whirlpools of arrivals and departures, ones I had no means of supporting and, finally, in the February of 1990 the electricity was cut off. On the way up the hill to morning mass, my car, my faithful Renault 25, burst into flames on the side of the road. I couldn’t pay the mortgage. Nor could I sell the house. I’d knocked most of it down. It was only a shell. I was well and truly stuck . . . And then Carol Levi, my Italian agent, called. Did I want to go to Russia for fourteen months to make a miniseries based on Mikhail Sholokhov’s novel, And Quiet Flows the Don?
The Richardsons were in France for Easter that year, so I went up to Le Nid de Duc to break the news to Tony that I was leaving for Russia. I told him I had no choice, which was true; I didn’t. He listened as I asked whether we could postpone the Hamlet tour for a year and just looked at me. We both knew there wouldn’t be a next year for him. It was a terrible betrayal. His face closed up in front of me. He became icily polite, then got up and walked inside. Even though we all met for lunch on a freezing Easter Day down at the Aqua, Tony never talked to me again.
I never saw Jacques again either. The day I was leaving for Moscow, we said goodbye after mass, and I watched him through the rear-view mirror, waving as I drove away. One morning not long after, his car broke down and he disappeared while he was walking back to the village. Madame Amiel told the police that he frequented a macabre band of young pédés and a half-hearted search ensued. His body was found six months later, sitting against a tree, decomposing and half eaten by foxes.
CHAPTER 33
Russia
Aeroflot was my first taste of Soviet Russia. A big girl with thick ankles and that Soviet make-up that seems to stand out from the face directed me with a stiff smile into my seat in first class. “You will sit, please, and wash face,” she said, handing over an evil-smelling hand towel the colour and texture of a spring roll.
“Could I have a drink?”
“You will have vodka? No! This is for later.”
It was July. I wouldn’t be back for a whole year. I definitely needed a drink.
Throughout the flight I could hear Mo down in the hold. He barked across France, Germany and Poland, and was still barking—hoarse now—when he appeared through the flaps of the conveyor belt in the weird sepia-toned baggage claim at Moscow airport. When he saw me he barked even harder. He was furious. This was his first flight.
A small unshaven Italian man called Gianni greeted me and guided me through customs. There was a dead feeling in communist Russia. It banged into you as you stepped off the plane. Men in uniforms with blunt dull faces, tiny and cruel under enormous hats, went through my belongings item by item, endlessly examining a bottle of soy sauce, or a bag of rice. (I had brought a trunk of provisions.) Others stood in groups watching with glassy lobotomised eyes. Stocky babushkas in headscarves swept mops back and forth, grim and mechanical. Where were the thick-necked heads thrown back in laughter, exposing gleaming Slavic molars? They had turned to stone and were standing on plinths high above the streets of Moscow in the amazing statuary of the Soviet Reality movement.
Outside a huge old limousine stood by the kerb. A man with frizzy hair, Dame Edna glasses and bellbottom jeans was at the wheel, and a stocky girl with short red hair and a round face stepped towards me and firmly shook my hand. She was what they call in Russia a “Hello Goodbye girl,” which in those days meant a KGB operative.
“I am Jana. I will be your interpreter,” she said and we all climbed into the back of the car, a Chaika or, as Jana translated, a Seagull, which used to belong to Brezhnev. A small spotlight was fixed in the door that bathed your face in a ghoulish light. If it had been embarrassing driving through Deptford in a limo on the way to Greenwich all those years ago, then this felt really weird, because the traffic, a million identical Ladas belching towards the city, more or less stopped when they saw us coming, such was their response to authority and its various props. This car was one of them, and we swept along the fast lane as the little tin boxes cowered at the edges of the road. Even the policemen with their whistles waved us on. No one seemed to care that a car like this hadn’t been seen for twenty-five years. Time stood still in Soviet Russia. But not in the good way.
Miles and miles of crumbling tower blocks surrounded the city and the production had put me up in a French hotel in one of these suburbs. It was allegedly one of the only decent places in town. I was deposited there with my dog, my trunks, and an envelope of dollars, and left to my own devices until the next morning.
That evening I felt like a ghost. I took Mo for a walk. It was warm as we threaded through the mudd
y labyrinth of high-rises around the hotel. Everything was falling to pieces. A porch hung precariously over a front door. Windowpanes were held together by tape and newspaper. Under the trees in the little parks, broken people sat on broken benches, and children screamed on ancient climbing frames that looked like strange installations. Pollen floated in the air, which had a metallic taste. Old men twisted by arthritis and alcohol sat hunched over chessboards wearing army hats from the Second World War, while sturdy women in shabby mackintoshes walked dogs.
It was overwhelming. Back in the hotel I felt completely lost. I couldn’t phone from my room. There was no restaurant. Mo looked at me with grave eyes. “You’ve really done it this time,” his gaze said. I went to the coffee shop downstairs, ate a sandwich and washed it down with vodka and a tranquilliser.
The next morning Dame Edna and my KGB agent came to collect me and we went to the studio, Mosfilm, which was built by Stalin from plans his spies had stolen from Twentieth Century Fox. At the entrance an aggressive female labourer operated a barrier. She looked at the piece of paper we gave her for twenty minutes, then telephoned using a huge red receiver that looked like a child’s toy. It was exhausting, but this was communism. It had hit them over the head and now it hit me over the head. One had to slow down or die trying. On several occasions over the next year this freak refused point-blank to let me on the lot. Once I grabbed her by her anorak and we had a furious tussle but she was the stronger man, of course, and flung me to the ground.
Inside, the crumbling studios were caked with years of mud and dust. Pipes with big rusting taps grew out of the ground, like living things, and ran along walls and up over the street before diving back into the earth. The huge sliding doors to the sound stages were open. Inside was a kind of mill with giant saws, stacks of wooden planks, carpenter’s benches and incredible machines, with pistons and hammers. God knows what they did. People stood around in dirty brown coats, toothless, blotchy and backward looking. The men had moustaches and so did many of the women.
We walked through the sound stage, the biggest in the East, an indoor football field. On it a sloping hill had been constructed with two thatched cottages divided by a fence. A cyclorama surrounded the whole space, studded with fairy lights to make stars.
Upstairs, off a long corridor, was the office of Sergei Bondarchuk, twice People’s Artist of the Soviet Union; friend of Stalin; Director General of Mosfilm. He sat behind a large desk with his palms flat on the table in a pose of absolute power. At any minute you felt he might ring a bell and you would be frogmarched to Siberia. He had a shock of thick snowy hair and a handsome moustache. He wore thick glasses over hooded murderous eyes. He was old but vigorous. Communism had been kind to him. We shook hands and then he kissed me on both cheeks. I giggled. Pleasantries were exchanged in several languages through Jana and another interpreter, an Italian girl called Leila who had the voice of a cartoon mouse. It was like being at a meeting at the United Nations. Sergei had waited thirty years to realise this dream. Now that he had seen me, he said, he was sure that everything was going to be all right. When I walked in, he saw the character.
“You and Grigor are two peas in a pod,” he pronounced, and I giggled again.
It should be pointed out, at this stage, that I was vastly unsuited to the part in which I had been cast. Quiet Flows the Don is the story of a Cossack, Grigor, the toughest, bravest Cossack of them all. It is a beautiful book, mostly true, about the tragic life of a family torn apart by world war and revolution. The poor Don Cossacks were dragged one way and then another in the messy birth of communism. Strangely, the book was sanctioned by Stalin, even though its hero was a tragic victim of his system. The result was that the character of Grigor became a symbol for Russians; he was a man who stuck to his guns and lost everything. Even seventy years later, in 1990, every car still had his picture and that of his love, Aksinia, on the dashboard for good luck. He meant far more than Robin Hood to the English; more than any folk hero we have. He was a religious figure. He was Soviet reality.
The fact of the matter was that everyone from Richard Gere right down to me at the bottom of the list had turned the movie down. No one wanted to go to Russia for a year. Neither did I, now that I had got there. As Sergei droned on and Jana translated into terrifyingly literal English, I wondered how I was going to make it through. But there was no escape. I had to face it. At the end of the interview, Sergei took me down the long corridor to the hair and make-up department where he handed me over to the Italians to turn me into the part. “One last thing,” he said. “Don’t shave your armpits.”
Cheeky. What did he know?
Maria Thérèse Corridone was a legendary hairdresser in the world of cinema. She began with Visconti and ended up with Bondarchuk. In a couple of hours she artfully turned my short hair into a long shaggy Cossack quiff made of extensions, dust, pomade and artful backcombing. Her cousin, the make-up man, stuck moustaches, sideburns and stubble onto my face. The adhesive and the itchiness, the mortician’s wax and the scattered facial hairs, were enough to drive one totally insane; to repeat the torture for six days a week for the next fourteen months hardly bore thinking about, and my eyes brimmed with tears. I slipped into my bodystocking—thank God for that—and tried on my Cossack costume. Everything was fine until I put on the hat. My neck was so long, my shoulders were like a bottle and the silhouette stubbornly remained British. We put in giant shoulder extensions, and then I began to look the part.
If a sissy like Victor Mature could do it, so could I.
I knew enough about my job by now to construct what character I could. I had to take everything down to a minimum. Do nothing. Everything I had was wrong. It was going to be a very old-fashioned performance, and I would need help from all departments to pull it off, but by the end of the morning I was quite inspired by the prospect. I loved the Marlene Dietrich School of acting.
Soon afterwards, Bruno arrived with seventeen Barbie dolls and half the kitchen from Windy Ridge. The next night I asked the director, his wife and the producer to dinner in my suite. We all came directly from work. As I walked in, I noticed a Barbie in full evening dress swinging from the chandelier in the hall. I eased the party as quickly as I could into the sitting room, hoping they wouldn’t look up, but then Sergei wanted to use the loo. I opened the door for him. Sitting on the toilet paper in a bikini was another Barbie. Horrified, I threw it into the waste-paper basket where it lay with its legs in the air, before taking Mrs. B into the sitting room where three more Barbies were having cocktails on the sofa. I nearly screamed, and ran into the kitchen, grabbing the dolls as I went.
“Bruno! What the fuck are you thinking, leaving Barbies all over the place? I’m meant to be a fucking Cossack, not a schoolgirl!”
“Relax!” said Bruno, with a high-pitched shriek. “I’ll tell him they’re mine.”
The next morning Tom arrived from the South of France with more food, and he and Bruno set about looking for an apartment, while I left in the limo to start shooting the First World War in a field twenty miles outside Moscow.
Sergei was famous for his battle scenes. For his masterpiece, War and Peace, the whole army had been put at his disposal. Now entire tank regiments arrived at the location every morning. On the first day I had to get on my horse with a sabre at my side and a gun over my shoulder, and charge with 2000 other riders towards the enemy trenches. It was extremely dangerous and would never have been allowed anywhere but in Italy or Russia. If I fell I would undoubtedly be killed.
It was then I had an epiphany. Thanks to my upbringing, so much of which I resented, I was a fairly good rider, and in the minutes before the first take (no rehearsal, by the way), just as a soldier going into battle reflects on all the things dear to him in life, I thought of Netty and Crisp, of hunting and cleaning tack, with a new fierce gratitude. They were going to save my life.
Sergei shouted, “Action!” through a megaphone from the top of a huge crane. Three thousand of us began to trot a
cross the summer fields. The brigadier rode ahead, screaming instructions from beneath his waxed moustache. First we presented our sabres. I drew mine with a flourish but unfortunately it was a dummy sword and stopped right under the handle.
“Cut! Cut! Cut!” shouted Sergei through the megaphone. I made a mental note to kill the props man later. Meanwhile they brought me a proper sword, as my colleagues sniggered and made rude jokes in Russian, and we started again. We trotted. We presented arms. We charged. As I galloped across that field I have never been so afraid in my whole life. Explosions were detonated all around us. One horse was actually blown up and no one warned us about a trench that we had to jump over at the end of the charge. People fell into it but I sailed over with a technique that June Osbourne from the Braintree Pony Club gymkhana would have been proud of.
The boys from the army were incredible. Here, finally, were the laughing beauties of Soviet Reality. We couldn’t understand a word the other was saying and the KGB were not very helpful. Jana thoroughly disapproved of any contact, and translated anything the boys said with a pained expression as if their comments were beneath contempt. I fired her on the spot. (Needless to say, she stayed on the film, and we became good friends. On the last day of shooting, in an old schoolyard in the middle of the steppe, she came up to me and said that because of me she had become a lesbian.)
One morning I was driving to work with Dame Edna, and on the road towards our field we passed hundreds of trucks containing all my army colleagues going in the opposite direction. By the time we got to the trenches there was not a Russian in sight. The Italians gesticulated wildly over walkie-talkies. It was a mystery. No sign of Sergei. We waited for an hour. Two hours. We lay in the sun listening to the rooks in the nearby forest, complaining about the organisation, laughing about the crazy things that had already happened, and then Gianni arrived from Moscow. “There’s been a coup. Everyone should return to the hotel and await further instructions.”
Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins Page 29