Drawn Out

by Tom Scott

  I could hardly argue with Charles. Still, it drives me mad when people say some misfortune or tragedy happened for a reason. Sports stars and celebrities who fall from grace are particularly prone to this. ‘I was up to my eyeballs on methamphetamine and Quaaludes and totalled my new Ferrari for a reason.’ When friends trot out this pabulum I bark, ‘What about spina bifida? What did any child do in the womb to deserve that?’ Life is not entirely random, there is cause and effect, but things don’t need a reason to happen.

  Having said that, if there was a reason for my final, painful and irrevocable break with Helen, it was to set me on a path of finding Averil.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  FALLOUT FROM FALLOUT

  THE MORNING AFTER AN INTOXICATED Rob Muldoon called a snap election on the night of 14 June 1984 I drew a cartoon for the Evening Post depicting Muldoon in the marital chamber with his good wife. There are balloons and party hats attached to a bedpost. Something is troubling the hungover Prime Minister. ‘Did I mention anything about a snap election last night, Thea?’ (I dubbed it the schnapps election, which quickly caught on.)

  Muldoon had been hitting the bottle all that evening—before, during and after a blazing row with rebel National MP Marilyn Waring. The Governor-General, the suave and hospitable Sir David Beattie, happened to be hosting a black-tie dinner for editors at Government House when he got word that the Prime Minister was on his way for a private audience. Barry Soper, private radio’s political editor, knew this could only mean one thing—Muldoon was going to the country and needed the Governor-General to formally dissolve Parliament and set a date for a general election. Barry made sure he was standing at the front door next to a fairly comprehensively pissed Sir David when a chauffeured limousine pulled up and Muldoon toppled out onto the ground. Stepping forward, Her Majesty’s official representative bent low, offering his hand and uttering the immortal words, ‘This man needs a drink!’ One of the guests, Labour’s Deputy Leader Geoffrey Palmer, shot back to Labour’s rooms at Parliament in his tux, squawking excitedly like Chicken Licken that the sky was falling on Muldoon. The formal proclamation was bashed out on a typewriter by another dinner guest—Listener editor David Beatson. When Muldoon returned to the Beehive with this document he held a stand-up press conference in a corridor.

  RNZ’s Dick Griffin thrust a microphone at him. ‘Four weeks doesn’t give you much time to organise an election campaign, Prime Minister?’ Like a person in two minds at a sushi train, Muldoon selected his words slowly, slurring. ‘Doesn’t give my opponents much time either, does it, Mr Griffin?’

  Hours later, in the Prime Minister’s office, National’s president Sue Wood, who was furious with Muldoon’s precipitous, unilateral act, was talking lowly and quietly with equally dazed and dismayed senior cabinet ministers when there was a loud crash from the Prime Minister’s private dining room. Sue dashed in. Muldoon was on the floor. She helped him to his feet. There were tears in his eyes.

  ‘I have done the right thing, haven’t I, Madam President?’ Sue told me later there was such fear and vulnerability in his gaze, compassion overwhelmed logic and fury. She had to lie. ‘Yes, Prime Minister …’

  I knew it would make a great television series one day, I just didn’t know who I would write it with, because it was too complex, sprawling and ambitious an undertaking for me on my own. It needed to be someone good.

  IN 1971 THE TOURING BRITISH and Irish Lions played a New Zealand Universities fifteen at old Athletic Park and a fleet of us from Massey drove down for the game. Catering in those days consisted solely of hot pies. An ag student mate of mine, Ross Stanway, happened across a wide, flat, greasy cardboard box of them parked on the grass at the halfway line. ‘Carpe diem!’ thought Ross, and grabbed the box. He jogged along the front of the Millard Stand, shouting, ‘HOT PIES! HOT, HOT PIES!’ People yelled and hundred of hands waved frantically. Ross hurled them like a discus thrower into the packed stand where they exploded on impact, splattering patrons with pastry and hot mince shrapnel. No one seemed to mind, or perhaps their screaming was lost in the general din.

  On the way back to Palmerston North, some of us stopped in a pub in Levin where a talent contest was taking place. As was mandatory in those days, several of the contestants were Māori boys wearing sunglasses pretending to be blind. Friends led them to the low rostrum where they belted out stunning versions of Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder songs. Another university chum, Alistair Williams, tall and handsome in a Jane Austen’s Mr Darcy way, got up and sang Bob Dylan’s ‘Quinn the Eskimo (Mighty Quinn)’ in a deep baritone. Every woman and girl in the place voted for him and he won first prize—a hamper of dressed hogget. The hostility from the local men was such we had to abandon the hogget and hightail it to Alistair’s old Jag.

  We could have done with the services of the towering, rangy, raw-boned, fast, furious and filthy, sandy-haired bastard who played at number eight for New Zealand Universities that afternoon. Had he been with us they would have formed a guard of honour and applauded us to our car, maybe even insisting that we take a couple of their women as well as the hogget.

  This big rig went on to write a seminal New Zealand stage play, the acclaimed Foreskin’s Lament, and the equally acclaimed television drama series Erebus about Air New Zealand Flight TE901 slamming into the slopes of Mount Erebus while on a sightseeing trip to Antarctica in 1979, killing all 257 people on board—Greg McGee. I researched and wrote the four-hour television series which became known as Fallout with him.

  We were the perfect combination. For those of you familiar with The Wind in the Willows, he was tall, reliable, sensible Badger to my yapping, bloated, blowhard Toad.

  We were funded at one stage in that endeavour by Auckland film producer, distributor and exhibitor, the late Barrie Everard, and former journalist, PR consultant and more latterly philanthropist, crusading environmentalist and guardian angel of Antarctica’s heritage sites, Rob Fenwick (now Sir Robert). Under their aegis the project, provisionally called 1984 then End Game, progressed for a while, then stalled and died. This is no disgrace. Every writer and producer I know has a movie script, play or novel going mouldy under their mattress, which at one point came within a whisker of being filmed, staged or published.

  When their option expired Greg and I chose not to renew it. It seemed like the only sensible course of action for us. In a switch on the usual film and television operating procedure, where the producers blithely sack the writers with nary a second thought, we sought to change producers.

  —

  HOWEVER, IN MARCH OF 1991, just as I was about to board a plane for Nepal to research another film project on Sir Edmund Hillary, I got a menacing letter from Barrie Everard’s lawyer, Jim Kingston, hinting darkly that our refusal to renew their option would be resisted. Good lawyers are skilled in drafting letters so authoritative and menacing your bowels turn to water when you read them. My first response was to go into flight or fight mode. Both wrong, so I opted for dismissive sarcasm. It was a lot of fun to write. I would have loved to have been there when he got it. I’m told Jim ran from his office screaming expletives after reading it. I hope so.

  20 MARCH 1991

  James Kingston

  J.R.B. Kingston & Co

  Dear J.R.B. … no, too impersonal.

  Dear Jimmy baby … no, far too familiar.

  Dear James … close, but still cold.

  Dear Jim … yes, that’s much better.

  Jim,

  RE: END GAME

  Thank you for your warm and endearing fax of yesterday. What a thrill it was to hear from Barrie and Rob again, albeit indirectly via your good self.

  I must say it is frightfully decent of you to act as an intermediary like this. I have some recipes and holiday snaps I’d like to share with them, can I forward them on via you? Could you tell them that the kids are settling in well at school and autumn down here is proving delightful. Please pass on my regards while you are at it. I trust they are both fit and well
.

  Incidentally, Jim, I hope you are keeping good health yourself. It would be a terrible blow to lose an intermediary at a critical time such as this.

  I must say my initial perusal of your letter conjured up visions of some sort of terrible fate befalling Barrie and Rob. I’m assuming that you received your instructions while pressing your ear to their lips in some grim hospital ward. Certainly this would account for much of your fax’s incoherence and the slipping into and out of reality.

  The reality is cut and dried. Barrie and Rob had an option on END GAME. They were unable to get it into production. Their option has expired, as you know full well, since you yourself drew up the documents calling for it to be extended. It will not be extended.

  I can see no point in a meeting unless it is to negotiate the expenses that would be picked up as a first charge should the project go into production with another party. If the project, to use your quaint language, is to be ‘resisted’ then of course, Barrie and Rob will do all their dough, plus your legal fees, Jim, which I’m sure won’t be inconsiderable.

  In any event no meeting is possible for the next month as I will be overseas. Should you need to contact me urgently my forwarding address is care of the Thyangboche Monastery at the base of Mount Everest in Nepal.

  Cheers,

  Tom Scott

  PS I really enjoyed your prose style—law’s gain has been literature’s loss.

  —

  IN 1992 I HAD TWO drama projects dear to my heart on the go: Higher Ground, a feature film on Sir Edmund Hillary that I was still researching, and End Game, which was written but still needed a production company and a broadcaster to fully commit to it. I thought both projects would benefit if I could come up with audio-visual proof that I had actors who could play the respective lead roles.

  Helen and I had separated for the third and final time and it was my turn to have the kids in the school holidays, so I took Sam and Rosie with me to Melbourne to put the two possible leads on tape. Back then I favoured the tall, rangy, shock-haired William McInnes to play Hillary—he was a terrific actor and looked and sounded a lot like Ed—and the burly television comic Mark Mitchell to play David Lange. Mark was brilliant as Con the Fruiterer in The Comedy Company. I had a hunch he could do justice to the warmth, brilliance and fragility of the David Lange character that Greg and I had written.

  To save money, we stayed in a cheap motel in north Melbourne halfway between Queen Victoria Market and the Melbourne Zoo and walked everywhere, including to the recording studio in Fitzroy. Rosie complained of sore feet much of the time. She was diagnosed a few years later with over-mobile joints and had to wear corrective orthotic shoes, poor angel.

  William McInnes was reeling from a recent family bereavement and wasn’t up to acting, so just spoke on camera—which was just as effective. Mark Mitchell proved to be a delightfully funny, engaging, brilliant polymath steeped in history, philosophy and mysticism. With coaching notes from me he was soon booming and orating like the real thing. It was an incredibly exciting moment. I knew I had my David Lange.

  Sam offered good advice, candid as always. From birth almost, Sam has never tempered his opinions to please other people. He’s not rude, just polite and fearless. On his first day at Wadestown School, when the infant mistress handed out blue chair-bags to the boys and pink chair-bags to the girls, Sam felt it was his duty to inform her, ‘Some of us don’t agree with that sort of thing.’ At around about the age that I was lying about taking rocket trips to Mars, Sam was chiding adults on gender stereotyping.

  I flew home elated and passed the VHS audition tape on to Greg, who rang me sheepishly a few days later to say that one of his boys had recorded an NBA basketball game over the top of it. I now had no proof that Mark was perfect for the part.

  We had had some interest to produce the project from South Pacific Pictures, but they were never entirely convinced until they saw the first rushes and were blown away with what director Chris Bailey and Mark were achieving. In pre-production, Chris and I made a special pilgrimage to Prime Minister Jim Bolger’s office seeking his permission to film in the chamber of Parliament itself—not the old chamber, as it was being gutted for earthquake strengthening, but the temporary chamber in a high-rise building across the road from Parliament in Bowen Street. It wasn’t perfect but it would be more authentic than any set we could build.

  I get on well with Jim now and I have a lot of respect for him. When he was Prime Minister he very kindly launched The Great Brain Robbery, a book I illustrated with my own cartoons and co-wrote with Trevor Grice with the sole intention of informing teenagers, their parents and teachers about how drugs work, with a particular emphasis on the adolescent brain. We accepted that people of all ages took mood-altering drugs because they enjoyed altering their moods, but we cautioned that for every high there was a low, and for every trip a return journey. Sir Edmund and Lady Hillary, Jim Anderton and Mike Moore attended the launch in Parliament’s grand old legislative chamber. The news media gave it a swerve. There is a pharmaceutical chauvinism when it comes to cannabis. Many of my chums in the press who partake of the exotic cheroot were privately scathing about the book. When their kids got into trouble they sheepishly sought me out, asking for a copy. The morning Chris Bailey and I went to meet with Jim Bolger in his office on the ninth floor of the Beehive the one mood-altering substance that should have been coursing through his arteries was in short supply—his blood sugar. There is no polite way of putting this: he was a grumpy prick that morning. I suspect his staff knew this. While he barked and snarled at us, a crouching staff member gingerly pushed a plate of sandwiches along the armrest of his seat towards his beefy Taranaki cow-cocky fingers. He couldn’t for the life of him see why we were bothering to make a drama about Lange and Muldoon, both of whom had ignominious departures from the political stage. I suspect he knew there would be no dramatic re-creations of his glorious reign in office. (He was not immune to self-aggrandising. After a meeting with the British Prime Minister I asked what had been discussed. ‘The usual word leader stuff,’ he replied evenly.) Nor was he convinced that Fallout would be fair and accurate—in his experience the news media invariably got things wrong. I bore the brunt of this tirade. Looking sideways at Chris for support I saw that he had somehow managed the neat trick of vanishing almost completely into the pattern of the fabric on his chair.

  In desperation I said that I had shown the script to his Minister of Broadcasting, Maurice Williamson, and that Maurice had loved it and thought it deserved to be made. I didn’t realise that the two men were not close. Bolger snapped that this didn’t carry any weight with him. He finally got to nibble a sandwich and his mood lightened appreciably. He became almost affable but didn’t grant us permission. Eventually we filmed in the long-abandoned old High Court—which had some of the grandeur we needed.

  The drama went to air in the winter of 1994 in two parts as Fallout (Helen’s clever title) and triggered a firestorm of wounded and righteous indignation from the likes of Brian Edwards, Helen Clark, Geoffrey Palmer and others who were smarting about how they had been depicted or how their major contribution had been minimised, compromised or ignored altogether. David Lange sued TVNZ for libel in a case that dragged on for years before dribbling to some sort of feeble settlement. Richard Prebble was quite sanguine. ‘It’s a drama,’ he said, cheerfully. ‘Of course they are going to dramatise things.’

  The most interesting response came a few years later from the former US Ambassador, Paul Cleveland, who was posted here in 1985 and tasked with cleaning up the broken crockery left by his predecessor—the hapless, hopeless, harmless H. Monroe Browne. Cleveland was an American diplomat straight out of Central Casting—tall, silver-haired and handsome. We all assumed he was Texan. He was in fact Boston Brahmin, a State Department career officer with a reputation as a tough and extremely capable trouble-shooter in East Asian affairs.

  In a long and candid 1996 interview with the Foreign Affairs Oral Histo
ry Project he revealed that he didn’t always approve of the heavy-handed approach his political masters took in dealing with New Zealand’s stance on nuclear weapons, and he was a better friend to us behind the scenes than we appreciated at the time. A few years after his posting he was back in town and asked National cabinet minister Max Bradford to arrange a lunch with me at the Wellington Club. I was a little bit nervous. I suspected the former ambassador didn’t warm to me much when he was here. He confirmed this when shaking my hand.

  ‘I never liked you. I thought you were a pinko bleeding-heart liberal!’ He grinned. ‘I’ve been given a copy of Fallout. I must say I was agreeably surprised. It’s pretty accurate and even-handed. Richard Armitage thought I’d like it.’

  Richard Armitage was a former naval officer who served in Vietnam, an Assistant Secretary of Defense under President Reagan and Deputy Secretary of State under President George W. Bush. A lifelong Republican, he declared publicly that he was voting for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.

  Greg and I interviewed him in an upmarket black suburb of Washington, DC. Built like a Sherman tank, with a shaved head shaped like a heavy artillery shell, he had a huge, framed and autographed photograph of Hulk Hogan on one wall.

  ‘In case you’re wondering,’ he roared, ‘I live in a black neighbourhood because I have black and Asian kids. It makes it easier for them.’ He clocked Greg for a jock and they got on really well. It was impossible not to like the guy. He admired Lange’s wit but was scornful of his timidity. He had even less time for Geoffrey Palmer. ‘Deep down, Geoffrey Palmer is really shallow!’ He summed up New Zealand’s importance on the world stage in one pithy sentence. ‘New Zealand is a strategic dagger pointed straight at the heart of Antarctica!’ Who cares if it was Henry Kissinger’s line originally?