Judy explained that a famous American actress had just flown in from Los Angeles and she looked a lot younger than she did in a TV series she’d made twenty years ago. Judy was worried that if we lived in Hollywood I’d get all sucked in by this and have face lifts and hair transplants. I tried to assure her I wouldn’t, that the people I was working with were really natural and I was bonding with them. This worried her more, she didn’t think I’d ever bonded with anyone before, she was convinced I’d been sucked into Hollywood. She asked me if I’d been jogging, I said I hadn’t, but I was thinking about going. This really upset her and she started crying. Elvin called me from across the studio.
‘Robert Llewellyn on set please.’
It’s very difficult to be supportive to your partner at a time like that. I couldn’t imagine where she was, so far away and in such a strange place. Judy knew LA better than I did, she’d worked there a lot in the past as a circus performer and acrobat. I had never been to Africa, let alone Ethiopia, my mind was a blank when I tried to imagine what she was going through.
I said goodbye and rejoined the cast. I told them about my disturbing phone call and was showered with sympathy and support. I’ve never been accepted into such warm, embracing, bonding love, so quickly, anywhere on earth before. English actors can be a bit gushy or luvvie as I’ve said, but we don’t have a patch on the Yanks. The women were virtually weeping as I told them how much I missed Judy. The men embraced me, telling me that knowing me, especially in my troubled time, was really important to them.
I was touched, I was bonding, but mainly with the men. I didn’t do any of the bonding with women that can get you into trouble with your long-term, live-in, regular partner. The women in the cast were great, I really liked them, as sisters. Lorraine, who played Captain Tao, was a lovely woman, she hadn’t had sex for a year. I didn’t know what to say. Elizabeth Morehead, who played Kochanski, had sex every night, I still didn’t know what to say. Michael Heintzman, who played Officer Munson, could vaguely remember having sex in the seventies, but he didn’t think it was up to much. By this time in the rehearsals we all seemed to know everything about each other. This is the upside to luvviedom, I never felt lonely in Los Angeles and I knew from previous experience it could be a very lonely town.
Just to balance out the whole, ‘California is full of natural people who relate to each other on a meaningful level’ notion, I need to relate the story of the Zeppelin invasion. The twenty-five women who came in to the studio on the day before the pre-record were unbelievable.
In the American pilot there was a sequence where Lister showed Kryten a hologrammatic device that hides the fact that his bed is a mess and contains an illicit cat.34 The hologrammatic images shown were his bed all neat and tidy like Rimmer’s, and another where a semi-naked beautiful blonde woman lay in a languorous pose on his bed.
We arrived for rehearsal to find the studio crawling with women who had what seemed to be large, tightly stuffed pieces of Ikea furniture attached to their chests. I was completely dumbstruck, all the women auditioning for this part had undergone breast implant surgery of mind-boggling proportions. They wore super skintight bright yellow Tshirts, but they didn’t look real. They looked like Barbie dolls. They all had big hair, which is a thing English women don’t have. American women seem to be able to grow their hair bigger, huge piles of fluff that is real but doesn’t look it. Interestingly enough, the woman who finally got the gig of lying on Lister’s bed and having her picture taken was the only one present who didn’t look like she had implants.
Here I am spouting off about implants and I don’t know the first thing about it, but all I know is very few parts of the human anatomy have ninety-degree angles in them unless there are bones present. That’s how unrealistic these breasts were, vertical down the chest, ninety-degree angle forward, vague breast-style shape, ninety-degree bend down, super-flat aerobic stomach.
I asked the male members of the cast if they found a woman with massive, pumped-up breasts sexy. They all denied that they did. I have since met all their girlfriends and I can state that they were being honest. Not a silicon implant amongst them. I still don’t really understand why these women did this to themselves, but then there are a lot of things that men do to themselves I don’t understand, there’s even a few things I do to myself, so there you go.
Suddenly on the pre-record day it was like work again. I was up at the crack of dawn, Andrea and I moaning and complaining, it was like the good old days. On went the mask and the new Kryten smiled right across his big square head. It was so comfortable, no rubber around my mouth or nostrils, there was no glue close to my eyes. The man who made the American mask is a god of prosthetics, a living legend of mechano-human comfort.
With the mask on, and after receiving suitable, fantastics and ooohs and that is incredibles from the director and cast, I headed for the costume department.
The men who had covered me in plaster bandage and measured my every organ had come up trumps. A Kryten costume of splendid comfort, durability, flexibility and damn fine looks. I could sit in it, walk in it, turn in it, I could almost look sexy in it.35 I was a happy robot as I stomped onto the set. I marched up to Rob and Doug. I wanted them to see what I had been on about all those years. This was just how I always wanted Kryten to be.
‘Guys,’ I said, ‘what d’you think?’
Doug started to walk around me, staring at the wonderful detail and splendid cut of my chest piece, the snug fit of the Lycra body suit, the gentle curves of the neck ribbing.
‘Yeah, no, yeah, no, it’s yeah, no,’ said Doug, nodding and raising his eyebrows.
‘It looks pony, Bobby,’ said Rob after a while. I was heartbroken. Pony was the worst Rob Grant criticism, if something looked pony, that was it.
‘I think it looks great,’ I said in a pathetically defensive way.
‘No, the costume’s okay, the mask looks pony,’ said Rob. ‘It’s pony, Bobby.’
‘Yeah, no, yeah. Pony,’ said Doug.
‘Pony, Bobby,’ said Rob.
‘Is it comfortable though?’ asked Doug.
‘It’s never going to be comfortable,’ I whined, ‘but it’s bloody amazing in comparison with the old one.’
‘You look greaeaeaeaeat,’ said Linwood who joined us.
‘Pony,’ said Rob, lighting a cigarette. I knew the bone of contention between us would continue.36 The crew were great, about three hundred more of them than there were in England, and they earn more money, they drive bigger cars, they eat more, they laugh more, their bottoms were considerably larger but other than that they were very similar. The director was calm and reassuring, Linwood was happy and loving and well-bonded and secure-looking. Rob and Doug, who were back on the set in a big way, were looking the same as ever. Dishevelled, shagged-out and totally focused on the job.
As the cast gathered to make an entrance before a scene, I was assing about doing silly walks and voices as I normally do.
In a similar situation in the English series, Craig Charles could quite likely be trying to set fire to the set with his Zippo lighter just before we go on. Chris could be telling me about his straight-8, 3.5 litre E-type engine, introduced in the early sixties. Danny could be showing us some dance steps from the musical Les Misérables, or doing a ‘drag run’ and laughing very loudly. Someone shouts ‘Action!’ and we go on.
Not so with the American cast. As I did a comedy walk up the corridor and tried to copulate with part of the set, Craig and Chris asked me if I wouldn’t mind stopping.
‘I’m sorry, Robert, but I really have to focus a moment here,’ said Chris. ‘Would you please stop fucking the sliding door?’
‘Sorry, sorry,’ I said. I felt awful, I would hate to be thrown by another actor in a situation like that. I was so used to the atmosphere in the old Red Dwarf, I had completely lost my manners.
We finished at something like six in the evening. Andrea cleaned off the mask and I showered in my dressing room, rece
iving the standard amount of static electric shocks. Los Angeles is basically built on a desert, and I suppose it’s something to do with the air and the temperature and the nylon carpet, but everything I touched sent such a bolt of static through me my hair stood on end.
I met up with Hinton and we went to the movies in my big rumbling jeep. I admit now that I saw Freejack, a movie with Mick Jagger in it. It is quite an embarrassing thing to have to admit that you paid money to go and see a film like Freejack. Mick Jagger. What an actor. That’s all I can say.
What I do remember clearly, though, was the cinema was in an area I wasn’t familiar with. I only noticed as I bought the tickets and joined Hinton, who had purchased a large bucketful of popcorn. I was more or less the only white person there. There was no clear sign of hostility, but I definitely sensed some underlying tension.
After the movie I asked Hinton if he noticed or if it was me being paranoid. He told me about the King trial and I remembered seeing the video of the four policemen beating up the black guy at night. It was shown every night on the TV as the newsman said, ‘The Rodney King trial continues today, defence claim that Rodney King was a drunken, drug running, cop-killing bum, more on that later, plus how Kim Basinger didn’t get an invite to the big party, but now, sport.’
It was a new fear for me, I had always been in environments where black people were in a minority and suffering from white racism. At school we had one black girl in our class called Udine Taylor. She was great, everyone liked her, even the racist skinheads. When we had class discussions about racism, a common statement I remember hearing was, ‘I hate coons, sir’, to which the teacher would respond, ‘But what about Udine?’ The skinhead would look around at Udine who sat there passively, ‘Oh, no, she’s different, sir, it’s the other coons I hate.’
Being in that cinema where I was supremely conscious of the colour of my skin, I realised something I suppose I had always known but had never had to face before. Udine Taylor had her work cut out for her at our school, she was tough, she didn’t let the ignorant gits grind her down, not on the outside at least.
Driving through the wide, quiet streets of South Central LA that night was a peaceful and relaxing thing to do. The footage I watched later on TV, where I recognised many locations, was all the more chilling. It was obviously going to happen, the authorities knew it was going to happen. Basically, my favourite conspiracy theory about the LA riots, which I heard from many people, was that they were positively encouraged by the City and State authorities. They let the problem ‘burn itself out’. Most of the people who were killed were black gang members, and the City didn’t care about them. It only got bad when places like the Beverly Center shopping mall was set on fire.
The following day in the studio, racial harmony blossomed. Elvin Ivory turned up driving his Thursday Porsche, a green one. He has one for each day of the week, each of them especially adapted to take his amazing six-foot ten-inch frame.
‘Good morning, Robert Llewellyn,’ he said with a big grin as he strode past me. We had a script meeting, yet more changes, but none very major, and then we camera blocked the show, which was going to be recorded in front of the audience.
They recorded two versions of the show that day, one in the afternoon without an audience, one in the evening with. I had to put my make-up on during the lunch break ready for the full, recorded dress run in the afternoon.
The show went very well, we all knew what we were doing and we did it well. I had a lie down in my big dressing room, which for some reason always had a Rolls-Royce parked outside. I don’t know whose it was. Maybe it was for me. Maybe they just forgot to tell me about it, maybe it’s still waiting there for me to pick up? No.
I entered the studio with the rest of the cast and we hid behind the set. The atmosphere was transformed. There was an audience of about five hundred, most of whom had seen the British series. We were introduced one by one, and I have to say, and it’s not often this happens, and I’m normally humble, and I’ve never hungered for stardom, but I have to say they went ape shit when I walked onto the set. I have never received such a welcome from an audience. It was incredible.
During that evening, I can safely say it was one of the top two or three Red Dwarf recordings I have been involved in from an audience response point of view. They absolutely loved it, they laughed at everything and they roared laughing at Kryten. I have never enjoyed making an episode of Red Dwarf more. I wasn’t hot, I wasn’t too uncomfortable and I had loads of gags and no big speeches explaining triplicators and time dilation.
At the end, the men in suits from NBC television, the broadcasters who were due to buy the show, and the men in suits from Universal who were due to make the show, all came up to meet me. I have never shaken so many hands in one evening, in costume. People queued up to have their picture taken with me. I stood next to a very rich man in a suit and pulled a face into a camera. He shook my hand and said, ‘You are going to be a major star here, Robert. Fantastic performance.’
I thanked him and saw Rob and Doug looking at me. ‘Bobby,’ said Rob as he hugged me, ‘well done, we’ve done it man, it’s fantastic.’ Doug gave me a big hug, ‘Yeah, yeah, great, yeah,’ he said. ‘Hey, are you the popular one tonight or what?’
Elvin Ivory walked up to me and embraced me, my head came up to his tummy button. ‘Robert Llewellyn, you were great, that was a really funny performance. Listen, the boss of NBC was in tonight, he loved it. I’m telling you, I’ve been in this business a long time. I’m telling you, this show is going to run, and you, Robert Llewellyn, are going to be a star.’
I thanked him, I thanked everyone. I was well brought up. I’m polite. Andrea came up to me and told me I had been clear for ten minutes and how come I hadn’t run screaming into my dressing room. She couldn’t believe what was going on, the whole studio was full of people embracing each other, patting each other on the back. Elvin was passing around peak caps with ‘I rode the Red Dwarf’ embossed on the front. Champagne bottles popped open, Linwood gave me a plastic cup full. ‘Robert, what can I say?’ he said. ‘You were really amazing. I can’t tell you how proud I am to have worked with you. This show is going to run, I can feel it, man. And you were so good, so funny, you’ve worked so hard. It’s incredible, man, did you hear that audience, they loved it, man. Hey, are you pleased I talked you into it?’
I told him I was very pleased, I drank my champagne and hugged the cast. We all kept hugging and kissing and drinking champagne for what seemed like ages. I eventually stumbled somewhat groggily back to my dressing room with Andrea. She peeled the mask off very quickly. There was a constant flow of people coming into the room: the cast, the director, Rob and Doug, Linwood. I was sitting in my Calvin Klein briefs with a rubber head on, looking like ET. No one minded. It was party time.
We all retired to the lobby of the hotel, waiters brought more and more champagne, Linwood and Rob and Doug seemed to have made up. Jeff Field was inviting me over to his house to ride his polo ponies. He came to England regularly to play polo, sometimes with Prince Charles. Jeff had been directing a series called Night Court for years. He was a seriously rich individual. He had that seriously rich way of sitting and talking.
Doug got up to go to the men’s room at one point, and as he moved away you could just make out the squeak of his false leg. Linwood leaned over to Rob Grant and said in a sort of stage whisper which all of us could hear, ‘If the series goes ahead, we really should buy Doug a new leg.’
Rob’s face was a picture of embarrassment and anger, everyone sat around feeling pretty awkward, Linwood seemed utterly oblivious to this.
Getting to bed took me ages, there were so many people to say goodbye to, so many people to promise to keep in touch with. It took me about an hour.
I collapsed with exhaustion at about three in the morning and crawled to bed, but not before we had all swapped numbers and addresses. Rob and Doug had to get up at eight and fly back to London to complete series 5 in England.
I was woken at nine the following morning when my phone rang.
‘Hi, Robert, this is Harvey Greenstein, I saw you last night in Red Dwarf. You were fantastic, I’m just ringing, really informally, to see if you have representation here.’
He was an agent, he was after my ass.
‘I’ve got an agent in London,’ I said trying to speak through the dead vermin on my tongue. Being a very light drinker, I only have to sniff alcohol and I have the mother of all hangovers the following morning.
‘Sure, but you need someone to look out for you over here. Why don’t we meet up for lunch and talk it over, in a completely informal way? Let’s go to Musso and Franks.’
No sooner had I scribbled down some information about when and where I’d meet this guy, the phone rang again.
‘Hi, Robert, I was given your number by Mona, my name’s Richard Williams, I saw you last night in Red Dwarf and I thought you were…’
After the third call, I asked reception to take messages and let me sleep. It was no good. My mind was racing with what was happening to me. As I was in the shower, I realised that I was potentially very hot property for an agent. I was an actor out on a limb with a ready-made income. They didn’t have to do anything except increase my income, rake off their ten per cent and go out to lunch with me occasionally.
At the reception there were eight messages and five faxes waiting for me. I felt like a very important person all of a sudden. I needed to spend some time on my own to remind myself that I wasn’t important at all. I am old enough to remember that I only feel important and special if people tell me I am. As soon as I’m alone, I remember the truth.
I threw my small bag into the vast cavern of my rumbling jeep and drove down the road ten miles or so to my favourite diner. It was crowded and busy and no one recognised me or told me I was great. I had a huge gut-busting breakfast with ten cups of coffee. I read all my faxes and messages, many of which were from London, where The Reconstructed Heart was receiving a lot of attention. I had to get back there to promote it. I had written articles for the Guardian, The Times and the Daily Mail. I filled in a questionnaire from City Limits magazine and sat back to think. However much I tried to remember that I wasn’t important, and things were really just normal, I was being swept along with the thought that I was going to be rich and famous and live in America.
The Man In the Rubber Mask Page 16