Fast and Louche

by Jeremy Scott

  One warm summer’s day a few months later Tania and I were invited to Sunday lunch along with another couple by Robert Pilkington, a new acquaintance. We met for drinks in his fifth-floor Pont Street flat, intending to stroll from there to the Carlton Tower and lunch in the Rib Room.

  Wandering over to the window, I looked down at the prosperous sunlit street and the row of small eighteenth-century houses on the other side. The ground floor of number 1 Pont Street, obliquely opposite, was an antique shop (now Drone’s restaurant), but the front door to the house itself stood modestly recessed beside it. A good address and a nice little property. And it was mine – or rather mine and Tony’s. As I stood, Bloody Mary in hand, regarding the place, it was not without a certain pleasure. Built of mellow brick, unassuming but well-proportioned, it looked a solid, respectable little house. I studied it with satisfaction, I’d come to terms with being a man of property.

  Pilkington strolled over to join me. ‘See that house,’ he said, gesturing with his glass to number 1, ‘That’s a brothel. Peter Jacobs goes there every Tuesday afternoon to have his ass whipped.’

  When I finally succeeded in reaching Tony on the telephone that evening he confessed that he’d inadvertently rented the first-floor apartment to Mrs Wilkinson, who ran two girls there. And we’d just signed a three-month lease. I was appalled – we owned a disorderly house, we could be sent to jail for it. Mrs Wilkinson and her hookers had to go. ‘Well, I’m not doing it alone. You’ve got to help,’ Tony said.

  We called on her in Pont Street the following afternoon. I knew the flat well; I’d paid for the furniture, tasteful but hardwearing, and helped Tony put the place in order. But Mrs Wilkinson had rearranged and refurbished it for her specialised trade. Stocks built of heavy planking had been installed in the bedroom. The small living room where she received us was cramped by a leather-topped vaulting horse.

  Mrs Sybil Wilkinson – ‘Sybs’ to her girls – was in her fifties and dressed like the Queen Mother. Her accent was ‘naice’, a refined south London. She gave us a cup of tea and heard us out graciously. She made no fuss when I told her she had to leave. ‘I’ll get my movers to take the apparatus out on Friday,’ she said. ‘But boys, you’re being silly. Really, this is unnecessary, my best client is a High Court judge.’

  I dismissed her remark, wasn’t that what madams always claimed? But it proved to be true, and next week Tony took me to a specialised party given by His Honour and his actress wife in their gloomy Victorian flat in South Kensington. The other guests were already there when we arrived – two couples and a fat, Spanish-looking woman bulging out of a short tarty dress. After welcoming us and fixing drinks, the judge showed us his holiday snaps. We glanced through informal studies of his wife being imaginatively abused on the terrace of their rented villa on the naturist Île de Levant, and fellating the many friends they made while on vacation.

  ‘Interesting composition, what beautiful bougainvillaea,’ one murmured, leafing through the lurid deck. The conversation was banal, but held a sinister edge.

  Soon there was a general move to the bedroom. This room, though much larger than those in Pont Street, was furnished in a similar fashion with much the same equipment; the décor was striking but oppressive. I was high on Methedrine, otherwise somehow none of this would have been possible. You had to be displaced, the nerves strung tight; the poet Cavafy writes, ‘the healthy body is unable to feel what is required’. Assisted by another female guest, the judge’s wife secured the fat woman face down across the vaulting horse, obeying his instructions delivered in a cold precise voice to raise her skirt. The performance was ritualistic, you knew they’d played out this scene many times before. It was disquieting, even menacing, to observe, but also highly erotic. Fastidiously the judge chose a cane from a selection laid out on the bed. With a sense of unease, alarm and appalled excitement I watched him give her a sound thrashing on the bare ass.

  Occasionally we entertained at home. A week after Nigel’s party I’d asked a few people round to sample some majoum. A chewy paste like marzipan, it was made from kif and nuts and honey and tasted luscious. We’d each eaten our portion and were drinking mint tea, the recommended accompaniment. Procul Harum was playing on the record player and delicious warm lethargy was spreading through my limbs when I became aware of the telephone ringing behind the music. I picked it up.

  ‘Jeremy …’

  It was Audrey Watkins, Uncle Tony’s wife. She sounded excited, but then she often was excited. A fast-moving, petite, pretty woman, excitement was one of the qualities Tony had married her for.

  ‘Jeremy …’ She said something I couldn’t hear, something about the swimming pool.

  ‘Hold on,’ I told her, and went to turn down the music. ‘What was that?’ I asked.

  Her voice was frantic, ‘Jeremy, Tony’s shot himself.’

  I heard a man’s voice speak in the background, the telephone was taken from her by their nearest neighbour, a movie executive. ‘He was in the pool, he’s gone,’ he said.

  17

  Virgin Islands

  The tropical island was a picture-postcard cliché. A tiny atoll, no more than a hundred yards across, it was covered in palm trees and surrounded by calm blue sea.

  Tania and I were the only figures on the shell-sand beach which formed its leeward shore. The island had only one building, a small hotel, and had been complicated to reach. A six-seater Beachcraft had put us down on the coral airstrip on the neighbouring island of Tortola and we’d come the rest of the way in the hotel’s Boston whaler.

  We had got married a few months before in St Mary’s church in The Boltons, fifty yards from Gilston Road. This we thought was the ideal spot in which to … no, not exactly celebrate the occasion, because celebration and excess were what we wanted to avoid. Deliberately I had brought no drugs. We wanted to eat and sleep and get straight and feel well again. I had been using Methedrine excessively, both for work and to play.

  My state of health was fragile, and my mental balance far from stable. I was haunted by the thought of Tony’s suicide. He’d had so much to live for: a younger wife who vivified his life, three children aged thirteen, twelve and eight, whom he loved. The house he owned had a two-acre garden with swimming pool and a go-cart track, every winter they went skiing. Tony had capital and was a partner in a successful local business. It was true he had lost money recently on a share purchase, but the amount represented an inconvenience, not a disaster. The reasons for taking his own life were unaccountable.

  His mother – my grandmother – had killed herself while he was still at school, jumping from Beachy Head. Her body had never been found, and neither had Gino’s when he’d drowned in the Arctic a few years later. Tony too had been drawn to water, though it was a bullet that killed him. His various homes, like my own, had always contained guns. Guns were a standard accessory, shooting a part of life. You shot for sport or food; you shot national enemies, game, sick animals, and, if necessary, yourself. He’d used his revolver for the deed and either he’d got into the pool before he put the gun to his head or sat on the edge so he’d fall forward into the water. Whatever the reason for doing it, he’d wanted to be quite sure.

  The Caribbean atoll had seemed the perfect setting for a deferred honeymoon but, as so often, the idea and the reality turned out different. The hotel’s main building, a wooden bungalow with veranda, was set on the crest of the atoll; on the slopes below, a dozen empty guest cottages decayed among the palm trees. We were the sole guests; the owner, his wife and daughter the only staff. An accountant in Birmingham who had dreamed of coral seas, on retirement he’d sold up to realise his dream, and it had proved disastrous.

  Tiles were gone from our cabana’s roof. Inside it, notices were fixed to the mildewed paintwork; regulations which remained unseen, unread, for they had never come here, those sternly awaited guests who would take bath towels to the beach, remove glasses from the bar, play music after 11 pm and put anything other than Harpic
down the lavatory. The air conditioning had broken down, the owner said, but the truth was he could no longer afford petrol for the generator. This beautiful horrible little island was a prison and the atmosphere in our falling-apart hotel was grim. A quarrel simmered constantly in the background. The owner and his wife were bitterly discontent, their daughter serving our meals often red-faced and in tears. Only anger kept them from despair, and we were made to feel it was our fault.

  It was a mistake not to have brought drugs, I realised; combining a holiday with withdrawal from amphetamine was not a good idea. We both felt drained; we wanted cool and shade, not heat and blazing rows.

  Tania and I lay on the beach, together but alone, each beset by our own monsters though, true to the British tradition of tight-lipped reserve we’d both been raised in, we did not discuss them. Outstretched on the sand with the warm sea lapping at our feet, my state of mind was dismal; I had been in two minds about getting married. Tania had said she was happy with her career and lifestyle … so why didn’t we? And, because I hadn’t come up with good cause, I’d gone along with the programme, not wanting to disappoint. It was the very worst of reasons. Naïvely I’d believed it need not alter the relationship. But that’s a tendentious way of explaining how the marriage came about; a shorter word is weakness.

  Now, in the Virgin Islands, the chill thought of Tony’s death was always present; the world was no longer a solid place. My emotions were atrophied, but as I lay on that idyllic white coral beach, sweating and weak and ill in the harsh dazzle of the sun, I stared into an emptiness that seemed to lie at the heart of all things.

  18

  Chelsea Police Station

  ‘I want a pale, translucent beauty – bring me Richard Lester,’ ordered Mary Wells.

  She’d winged into town with a crack team to shoot a further series of commercials for Coca-Cola. It was the most elaborate job Garrett’s had taken on to date – and Lester wasn’t available. With Petulia he’d become the highest-paid feature director in the world and was always on a picture.

  How about Nic Roeg?’ I suggested. He’d made his name as cameraman on Lawrence of Arabia and could deliver the visual effects she required.

  ‘Lester,’ Mary repeated. ‘Lester’s why we’re here.’

  It wasn’t entirely true. They and other New York agencies came to us not just for our directors’ list but because, filming in Britain, they/we could negotiate buy-out payments to the cast used, rather than pay residual fees. This provided a valid excuse for the real reason they came: to visit London, live it up at a swanky hotel and experience the vibrant ’sixties scene everyone was raving about.

  Throughout the preparation and shoot of a commercial it was the chosen film director and myself who had to look after them. They enjoyed being close to a big name in the film business, it was glamour-by-association. That director’s talent and ability to deliver the goods was vital, but just as important was his line of bullshit and charm, his capacity to suffer clients gladly, enthuse and play back to them. Roeg, Lester, Karel Reisz, Don Leaver were a pleasure to be with and understood the game, knowing when to become carried away by enthusiasm, when to show angst, when to become ‘difficult’; but others, such as Ken Russell, resolutely refused to play, showing their scorn for advertising even while they took its cheques.

  Seated in my office facing Mary Wells and her retinue, I continued to try to sell her on the merits of Nic Roeg, but without success. She fixed me with a look. ‘Lester,’ she insisted. I said I’d see what I could do.

  The production budget for these spots was bigger than any we’d had before. The job necessitated the large stage at Shepperton, complicated sets, actors and crowd extras. Setting it up had been fraught with problems. For days prior to their arrival the clients had been on the line from New York with changes and anxieties until 11 pm London time. Meanwhile, I’d had other commercials to produce and managed to stay on top of the work only by using speed. Though I functioned capably, just below the surface I was in a state of black depression and experiencing what my soldiers used to describe as ‘trouble at home, sir’. Before we were married Tania and I had got on well; in the months since the event we argued all the time.

  With difficulty, Lester was induced to take four days out from preparation of his feature to direct. The week before shooting I had numerous production meetings with Mary and her team; in the intervals between she shopped obsessively, always returning with fresh demands. ‘I want Orson Welles and Yves Montand for the voiceovers,’ she said.

  ‘Welles is available, but I don’t think we’ll get Montand. Left-wing French actors of that sort take themselves quite seriously,’ I told her.

  ‘I want him,’ she snapped. ‘Fix up a lunch and I’ll fly to Nice tomorrow and get him.’ Her meaning was clear, and she did.

  But finally everything had been straightened away, sets built and approved, the spots cast and crew booked. The day before we were to start filming I took my clients to lunch at Tiberio, a lush Italian restaurant in Mayfair. Tomorrow a new and evolving set of problems would arise, but for the moment all was in place for the week’s shoot and I was in control. Mario took our order, the wine was poured. As the antipasto arrived a waiter came to say I had a call. I took it in the lobby among the bustle of arrivals. It was Jenny McClean, my secretary at the office. ‘There are two men here to see you,’ she said.

  ‘Who are they?’ I asked.

  ‘I think they’re policemen. They have a warrant for your arrest,’ she told me.

  Several months earlier Tania had called me from the apartment; it was 7 pm and I was still at the office. ‘Do you think you could come home? The place is full of policemen,’ she said. I did as she asked, picking up our company lawyer on the way. I was driving the Aston Martin, he followed in his Jensen. As we parked our provocatively flashy cars outside, I glanced up at the open windows of my flat; each one framed a large policeman looking down. Inside, the apartment was crawling with them. They’d searched the place thoroughly by then, but what they were looking for was in an antique leather Buddhist scroll box, prominent on the coffee table. It contained small quantities of Methedrine, grass, LSD and majoum, and they took it away with them, saying they would be in touch.

  And now they were. Returning to the lunch table, I made my apologies to my clients. I told Mario to charge the bill and I walked back to the office.

  On the first floor I peered through the glass wall into the reception area, where sat two men in retro suits and lace-up shoes who were definitely not in advertising. When I was seated in my office Jenny asked them up. Inspector Lynch said they’d come to arrest me, and I said, well, if they must, but there were a few things I absolutely had to do first if that was all right.

  They could not have been nicer or more accommodating. They sat down and made themselves comfortable. I offered them a drink, which they politely refused, so Jenny served them tea and Fortnum’s cookies. Meanwhile, I made a number of telephone calls. It’s not easy to clear your diary for the foreseeable future and ensure the smooth production of a series of very complicated Coca-Cola spots, all in the space of fifteen minutes.

  ‘Actually,’ I explained to Inspector Lynch, ‘I’m right in the middle of setting up the biggest job we’ve ever done. I have a huge film crew, several actors and over a hundred extras starting shooting at Shepperton at 8 am tomorrow and, even as we speak, my crucially important clients are halfway through lunch and waiting for me to rejoin them.’ I paused to be sure he understood the full complexity of my situation before adding, ‘Actually, Inspector, this is a very inconvenient moment to be arrested.’

  ‘It always is, sir,’ Inspector Lynch confided in a tone of total understanding … and led me away to jail.

  19

  Manhattan

  The hotel desk called to say the limo was waiting and I escorted my Collett Dickenson clients down to the lobby and into the car with their luggage, then waved them goodbye on their way to JFK and back to England.

 
; Re-entering the hotel I waited for its single elevator, which was panelled in wood and operated by a uniformed attendant, to take me up to my small suite on the sixth floor.

  I was in New York, producing a series of TV spots for Hamlet cigars. The job had come to Garrett’s at exactly the right moment. Two months had passed since my conviction for unlawful possession of drugs. It had been alarming to have eight policemen burst into our flat to take it apart. To be arrested and locked up was disagreeable, and waiting for trial knowing I might be sent to jail was especially unpleasant, but in the event my sentence had been absurdly light. On advice, the lawyer I’d taken on to defend me was David Napley. In his stern authoritarian presence I felt nine years old again and that I’d been naughty.

  We walked from his chambers to court and were forty-five minutes late turning up. I was nervous this would make a bad impression, but far from it. The half-dozen policemen awaiting me were thrilled to bits by Napley’s presence at our humble trial. I hadn’t realised he was president of the Law Society, but the magistrate was positively deferential to him. I was fined £200.

  Afterwards the police witnesses were gathered in a group by the court exit, they were cheery and matey. The burly fellow who’d played Mr Nice throughout was with them, and as I was wishing him a restrained goodbye I asked, why? ‘Eight of you barrelling in! With dogs. Did you think I was Mr Big?’

  Overweight policemen are not the most sensitive of plants, so maybe I imagined it, but I thought I detected a hint of apology in his tone as he asked, ‘Do you know a William George Bolitho?’

  ‘Why yes, he’s a good friend,’ I answered.

  ‘Sometimes the people we think are our friends turn out not to be,’ he said. I supposed that Billy had been in trouble and obliged to trade off some names: if so it was a disappointment.

  My relief at escaping a jail sentence had been short lived. A few days afterwards over breakfast in our London flat, Tania mentioned that she was four months’ pregnant and looking forward to giving birth.