The Varnished Untruth

by Stephenson, Pamela

  David was also into painting his ‘sausage dogs’, as I call them, although I believe they were dachshunds. He loved those dogs, and even had special car seatbelts made especially for them. His hearing was deteriorating but he didn’t want to wear hearing aids in what he called ‘old ladies’ knickers pink’ so he had the company make them in better colours – one red and one green. What an amazing man. Such purity of vision, and an utterly enviable artistic life. David had designed the sets for a production of the opera Turandot, and he had a full model in his studio. He played the music of one of the acts and moved the scenery and lighting around by hand to show us what it would be like. Someone told me he had devised a drive along Mulholland Drive all the way to the beach, with music that matched the view and mood at every point – what a brilliant idea! I longed to be invited on that ride.

  Dwight Yoakam also lived nearby. Billy and I both really admire him as an actor. We found him to be delightful and intense. I am intrigued by people who are unafraid to let their dark side be seen in their art, like painters Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud, and actors Kevin Spacey, Chris Cooper and Steve Buscemi. Some of the characters Dwight has played have been downright scary and I love that. And he seemed so . . . multifaceted. One day there was a power cut up where we lived, which meant that our electric gates were stuck shut and I couldn’t get out. Dwight came wandering past when I was trying to force them open, and I asked him to assist by climbing over and helping me to push from the inside. ‘Sorry,’ he said in his southern drawl, ‘I can’t do that. I’m on my way to see my agent.’ I was a bit taken aback, but it wasn’t personal. He was wearing pale blue suede cowboy boots that would definitely have been ruined by that climb. The boots were set off by the skinniest jeans you’ve ever seen (they would probably have ripped), a pale blue shirt and matching, pristine cowboy hat. Oh yes, definitely not Mr Fixit attire.

  Eric Idle and his wife Tania were our closest friends in the area. They are great hosts and continue to have wonderful dinner parties in their sprawling Spanish mansion. And Billy and I also adored getting to know Steve Martin; an extremely bright, cultured man whose writing I very much admire. He’s also an excellent banjo player, just like my husband. Unfortunately, I have never warmed to that instrument; in fact, it thoroughly irritates me. And I can be pretty scathing about it. What do you call a gorgeous blonde on the arm of a banjo player? A tattoo.

  Since Billy refused to carry a cell phone, in those LA days I felt I never knew where he was; although it was usually at the cigar store on Ventura Boulevard or at McCabe’s Guitar Shop where there were musical concerts by people like Loudon Wainwright. Confession time: when I first met Billy, I pretended to like folk music more than I actually do. Heavens, I used to sing it myself and play the guitar, but all that mopey wailing has limited appeal. Billy, on the other hand, made no bones about the fact that he hated jazz – which I quite like – and is unimpressed by most pop music. I prefer the more lyrical rock music, so we both enjoy Eric Clapton, Elton John, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Phil Collins, David Bowie, Queen, Foreigner and Travis, but when it came to my favourites (mainly lots of female vocalists like Beyoncé, Mariah Carey and J.Lo), Billy was scathing. Chick music, that’s what I’m into. Toni Braxton’s ‘Unbreak My Heart’, for example. I still play that on our kitchen jukebox in Scotland and have a moody dance all by myself. Oh, and Andrea Bocelli . . . Fabulous!

  Oh God, I sound such a dork, don’t I? I also like the Black Eyed Peas and lots of more edgy bands only I, erm, can’t actually think of them just now . . . Hmmm.

  As I was hearing you talk about your friends in LA and the music that has been the background to your life, you sound far more positive. It’s as if, after you settled in LA – well, especially after you began psychotherapy treatment – even though you had quite a few serious family challenges, you came out of your depression and began to enjoy family, studies, people . . .

  It’s true. I sometimes wonder what my life would be like if we had not moved to LA. For a start, I’m not sure I would have sought treatment in the UK, or trained as a therapist. Also, getting some help for Daisy was crucial – I don’t think learning differences were as well understood in the UK at that time. But to go back to music for a moment, I have often wondered about the people who were the muses for some of the famous love songs I adore and was utterly gobsmacked when I met two of those muses – Ann Jones, for whom Mick Jones from Foreigner wrote that amazing song ‘I Want To Know What Love Is’, and also Pattie Boyd, who inspired Eric Clapton to write ‘Layla’ and for whom he wrote ‘Wonderful Tonight’. I wonder what it must be like to be adored and honoured in such a public way! Lucky cows.

  My husband certainly goes public on many aspects of me, but they are usually in the interests of summoning public mirth! Like telling the world about my beauty preparations, my ‘angry’ looks, my fashion mistakes, and my penchant for knocking down ‘perfectly good’ partition walls.

  But I’m really not complaining. Surely it’s just as much of an honour to be the butt of a comedy god’s joke? Not quite so personally satisfying, of course. Yes, that’s it: if only my husband would write a song about me . . . Oh wait, since he specializes in black humour versions of the country-and-western ballad it would probably be along the lines of the Lynn and Conway song ‘You’re The Reason Our Kids Are Ugly’.

  No, Billy’s just not the romantic type. He once told me his definition of everlasting love was Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder playing tennis. Oh, but he did write me a ditty for Valentine’s Day:

  Roses are red

  Cardigans are beige

  Stop all this romantic stuff

  And act your age.

  Ho hum.

  Chapter Eleven

  SHAKE, SHAKE, RATTLE AND SHAKE / FEAR AND LOATHING IN LOS ANGELES

  In April 1992, there was a bad feeling in town, a spot of tarnish on the tinsel. We’d been following a trial on TV that begged all kinds of questions about racism within the Los Angeles Police Department and, after a jury acquitted three white and one Hispanic police officers, accused in the videotaped beating of black motorist Rodney King following a high-speed pursuit, thousands of people began rioting. The Los Angeles Riots lasted for six days. Widespread looting, assault, arson and murder occurred, and property damages topped roughly a billion dollars. In all, fifty-three people died during those riots and thousands more were injured. Most of the insurgence occurred in a part of town I – and most people I knew – had never visited, so there was an uncomfortable sense of being disconnected from something that was undeniably important to us all. We could see the smoke from burning businesses and homes that had been deliberately torched by the rioters, though, and violent scenes commandeered our TVs. There was word it was all advancing closer and would soon be on Sunset Boulevard – unthinkable! I’ve never been sure whether I was a woman with a decent social conscience or an incurable ‘bleeding heart’.

  Pamela, that judgment would be in the eye of the beholder . . .

  Mmm it’s true, and I’ve been called both. I remember having lunch with a friend by the swimming pool of a hotel on the Sunset strip and feeling terribly guilty that we were enjoying ourselves in such luxurious surroundings while awful things were happening in South Central LA. Did one turn one’s chair to avoid seeing the smoke clouds to the south, or face the indigestible truth? My white face often troubles me, especially in times when I am faced with the realities of black/white antipathy. Though you’d never know it to look at me, I too am a child of colour. Well, that’s a nice way of putting it. You know that term used as a slur for someone perceived to be black on the outside and white on the inside – ‘choc ice’? Well, what’s the opposite of that, white outside and black inside – Liquorice Allsort? Yeah. That’s kind of what I am. Except if you called me that I wouldn’t be offended.

  Issues of race and colour are always complex, but it seems for you there’s an added personal ambivalence . . .

  In countries that were colonized by Europeans you h
ear a lot about ‘white man’s guilt’ and, uncomfortable though it is to admit, I probably have it more abundantly than people whose whiteness goes back for more generations than mine does. I’m angry that the truth about my Maori heritage was kept from me for so long. I mean, there I was pursuing a career in the UK without much contact with relatives in New Zealand for quite a few years – and identifying as an Australian, of course, because that was my citizenship – then all of a sudden I learned that certain NZ cousins were embracing their Maori-ness, speaking the language, producing incredible Maori carvings, and claiming Maori land. Seriously? I admired them enormously, but I was also left wondering ‘How the hell did that happen?’, ‘Why didn’t I know about this before?’ and ‘What does that say about me? I’m the same generation as them . . . do I have ANY idea who I really am?’ It was a shocking revelation.

  The truth about your heritage was always there beneath the surface, as a sort of unconscious ‘elephant in the room’ amongst your folks. At some level you probably knew things you could not have articulated . . .

  Yes, but for all I know, it may have been openly discussed among family members in New Zealand; perhaps it was just that we Australians were a bit out of the loop. But I still don’t understand why neither of my parents ever mentioned our Maori heritage. Did they not think it was important? Were they uncomfortable about it? I wonder if it was my mother who wanted it swept under the carpet – after all, she had lived in a real ‘us and the natives’ colonial set-up in Fiji.

  But once I knew that my great, great grandmother was Hira Moewaka, a woman caught in the middle of the wars that raged between her people and her white husband’s, it was as though a large piece of a jigsaw I didn’t even know I was working on got slotted into place. Some of the mysterious feelings I’d had when confronted with issues of race and colour at various points in my life made more sense. For example, after we immigrated to Australia we learned about the people who lived there before Europeans arrived, but my Australian history lessons at school barely touched on the genocide that had been perpetrated on aboriginal people throughout Australasia. And no one ever spoke the atrocious truth about how aboriginal children were removed from their families to be brought up in hostels as ‘good Christian children’. I never met Aboriginal people until I was in my twenties, but adults described them in disparaging terms, providing all kind of ethnocentric rationales for their treatment at the hands of white people. I felt enormously uneasy whenever I heard such things – over and above the natural empathy any decent person would feel – yet I couldn’t really explain it.

  When I began to travel the world, I found myself in all kind of situations that pushed my ‘half-white-guilt buttons’. I was acutely upset to be called ‘pork’ in Jamaica (that’s a sexualizing term for a white woman), and recently, in Papua New Guinea, it was painful to be ‘locked down’ at night behind barbed wire fences designed to protect white people from the locals. And ‘fuller-blooded’ Maori or Polynesian people have often hurt me by being unaccepting. Yes, when a black or brown person assumes I’m ‘one of the enemy’ – descended from the white perpetrators of slavery, injustice and colonialism – that is particularly painful for me because it’s only half true. I always want to scream, ‘Don’t look at me like that! I’m far more like you than you think!’ But as a wise African-American friend once taught me, ‘I don’t need to respond to all the ignorance that comes my way.’

  So, during the LA riots you were more disturbed by the ethical issues than the safety ones?

  That’s commonly my greater concern in such situations. In most of the hostile environments I’ve been in, I’ve found that, yes, I might have been afraid of being physically attacked, but far more upsetting was always the question, ‘Why exactly are these people a threat? What has been done to them that makes them act like this?’

  How did you handle being with small children in the midst of civil unrest?

  Quite a few people I knew in LA – even those I considered liberal – let it be known that they had acquired firearms to protect their homesteads (I had always thought of a homestead as something you found in Little House on the Prairie and wondered whether a mansion, say, in Bel Air, with a swimming pool, gym, tennis courts, cinema and seven-car garage actually qualified as a homestead?). The topic of having guns in the house was hotly debated and, to be honest, I did consider it. Well, it was impossible to avoid playing out threatening scenarios in our minds. Many people upgraded their security and some even took Armageddon-type steps, such as creating bunkers or ‘safe rooms’, but I felt this promoted a ‘them and us’ sensibility and undermined due sympathy for the people who’d been wronged. After all, the essential issue was really one of racial discrimination and injustice, and shouldn’t we all fight against that? With a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, I took the girls out of town to Santa Barbara for a few days, just in case. But, eventually, the civil unrest subsided and passions cooled.

  Once we were back in LA and schools reopened, there were appeals on the radio for people to come down to South Central, where the worst of the rioting had occurred, and help with the clean-up. ‘Bring a broom and trash bags’ was the request. Next morning I drove to an utterly foreign neighbourhood. I would not normally have risked taking my car down there (carjackings were common, even a couple of miles from Beverly Hills) but as I drove further and further south, I noticed a very unusual sight. I was not the only one heading downtown in a smart car with a broom in the back. People from all walks of life had joined the clean-up force. It was unheard of. There were Porsches headed that way, alongside family Fords, chic BMWs, clapped-out Volkswagens and Ford pick-ups.

  South Central was completely broken and burnt. Distraught residents tried to welcome us, but their tears took over. I spent a bit of my time trying to comfort people in crisis, and I was proud of the united effort of Los Angeleans who would normally remain segregated into groups according to economic status; from what I had seen of the town, this was an absolute first. I once accompanied the wife of a film industry mogul – with her security team – to an address in east LA. As we left what’s known as ‘the golden triangle’ (Bel Air to Beverly Hills to Pacific Palisades) and approached West Hollywood, she asked ‘Is this the same time zone as Beverly Hills?’ She was only half-joking. Strangely enough, being just one of the many whose city was in crisis made me feel more at home in the place. We had all been through something together. All right, people were polarized in their opinions about the riots and the events that instigated them, but it was more like a massive family furore than a national rumpus.

  Perhaps your empathy for people who react violently to oppression is particularly engaged because the tendency to lash out defiantly as a defensive measure has been a feature of your own behaviour . . .?

  Undoubtedly. When I feel painfully threatened to my core I do feel inspired to go on the attack.

  Mmm, well, it’s the natural response for people like you who grew up believing that the only time they’re loveable is when they’re not being themselves . . .

  Well, either that or I withdraw. Someone once observed that in repose, my face often looks thunderous, as if I’m plotting.

  And are you?

  Yeah, sometimes. But I may be feeling shy. Out of my depth. It frightens me, not being sure of my next move. There’s a point where I feel I have to come up with a quick and savage display of bravado to disguise it.

  It’s occurred to me that perhaps the external upheaval in Los Angeles at that time may have served to deflect temporarily your focus from your internal chaos . . .

  Yeah, well, there was plenty of that. My psychology course really pointed it up. I started expressing myself on paper, and reading it back helped me to see my life more clearly. I became more aware of the way I internally processed things, and how much I was dealing with in trying to manage my family as wife and mother when I could barely manage myself . . . It was hard, you know. And, on top of my own, long-term issues, just like every parent of a
child with a disability, I felt guilty and overwhelmed by Daisy’s challenges. But the most difficult and worrying thing was realizing that I myself was an absolute infant, psychologically speaking. I had so much to learn about myself. And having made this switch from a performing career – well, it was definitely the right move, but I was lost all over again.

  Where did you find comfort?

  Well, it was a day-to-day sturggle. I focused on trying to be the best parent I could be, while still attending to my studies . . . and I found my way to Jean-Paul Sartre, who, I suppose, helped me to recognize my own experience in the way he described his existential crisis in Nausea:

  Something has happened to me, I can’t doubt it any more. It came as an illness does . . . cunningly, little by little; I felt a little strange, a little put out, that’s all. Once established it never moved, it stayed quiet, and I was able to persuade myself that nothing was the matter with me, that it was a false alarm. And now, it’s blossoming . . .

  My passion was dead. For years it had rolled over and submerged me; now I felt empty . . .

  If I am not mistaken, if all the signs which have been amassed are precursors of a new overthrow in my life, well then I am terrified . . . I’m afraid of what will be born and take possession of me – and drag me – where? I would like to see the truth clearly before it is too late.