The Man In the Rubber Mask

by Robert Llewellyn

  I handed the parking attendant my ticket outside the diner, he delivered my huge rumbler to the kerb, and I drove over the hill into Hollywood. I had a lunch appointment at Musso and Franks, an old-fashioned restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard. I was meeting Harvey Greenstein, the agent who had woken me up.

  ‘Robert,’ said Harvey, ‘it’s great to meet you, sit down, sit down.’ Harvey was waiting for me at a table near the door, we moved to a small cubicle at the back.

  ‘Whaddaya want?’ said a very old, tight-skinned waiter. I’m not sure if the waiters at Musso and Franks have the reputation for being very rude, but if they don’t, I’m starting one. They are also very funny.

  ‘We’ll have water, and a menu already,’ said Harvey Greenstein, not phased at all. He turned back to me eagerly. ‘This is great, Robert, you are such a talented actor, you’re a star in England, right?’

  ‘Well, no, to be honest I don’t think I could claim that.’

  ‘Stop being so modest already. If you’re not, it’s their loss, because you are going to be massive here, the white Eddie Murphy, you are so funny, with your walks and your voices. Listen,’ he said conspiratorially, ‘you will make so much money here with that kind of talent.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know, I mean it was only a pilot.’

  ‘But what a pilot. Oi oi. It’ll run, believe me. Tell me, what are you making on the show?’

  I wasn’t sure what to say, I still felt the natural British reticence when it came to talking about money. I didn’t want to tell this man. He started throwing around ballpark figures, I eventually nodded when he came down as low as mine.

  ‘Oi, what are you doing, charity work?’ he said happily. ‘You know what Ted Danson gets?’

  I told him I knew it was a million an episode.

  ‘That’s for one transmission, he gets 80 per cent for a repeat, Robert. I can guarantee that for the first year I will get you between fifty and seventy-five thousand dollars an ep. Okay, so this year that’s six eps in a mid-season replacement, so you’re looking at three hundred to four and a half hundred thousand dollars. That’s just to start, then, next year, thirty-six episodes, we go in gentle, a hundred thou an ep, raising to a hundred fifty in summer. Now you’re looking at about three and a half million a year.’ He paused and stared into my eyes, presumably looking for signs of delight. He could sense my misgivings. ‘Pre-tax of course, I’m talking gross, but even after every deduction there is, you’re walking away with two million bucks in your pocket. It’s big money, Robert, and you just fell right in it. How did you do it, I’ll tell you, with talent, that’s what sells in this town.’

  After lunch I left Harvey Greenstein on the pavement, waving at me furiously as I gunned my rumbler back over the hill. I was staying with Jane Leeves, in her apartment in Studio City. Her apartment has a spare room, we did not do anything kinky. I fell asleep and didn’t wake up until the following day.

  I went with Jane to see her agent, who also told me I was the greatest thing since sliced bread, but at least he was a little more legitimate sounding. He worked in a big black tower on Sunset Boulevard in a company called CAA. This was a huge agency that looked after thousands of actors.

  ‘So, you want to live in LA,’ he said cheerfully.

  ‘Um, not really,’ I said, ‘but if I have to I will.’

  ‘You have to, Robert, because that show is going to run.’

  ‘Right,’ I said.

  ‘If you ever want to talk about representation, you know where I am, give me a call. I guess you’ve been chased a bit huh?’ I nodded. ‘Don’t worry about it, you’ll do good. You are hot property now, Robert. This always happens when there’s a new talent in town. This town is talent-hungry and you’ve got buckets to sell.’

  On the way out to a restaurant that evening, Jane told me her agent never bullshitted, he was a straight down the line guy.

  We met up with the rest of the cast in some really chi chi place, the name and location of which I can’t remember. But the food was brilliant, the waiters were dead trendy and it cost a fortune. Jane and I arrived together and it was pretty clear everyone thought we had become an item. It was not so, Jane and I are good friends and that’s it. Okay?

  I was getting more and more calls from London, it was clear I had to get back. The following day I caught a plane to New York, first-class American Airlines, all paid for, by the way. I would have flown super bucket-shop economy, bring your own packed lunch. The food wasn’t quite as good as Qantas, but there was plenty of it, and masses of room.

  New York was snow-bound and bitterly cold. I stayed with old friends for two nights in their lovely house in upstate New York, spent a day with Chris Eigman in Manhattan; saw Boris Yeltsin arrive by helicopter at the Battery (by chance that is, I hadn’t arranged it with Boris) and had a great meal at La Indochine restaurant with Chris. This is the place where drop-dead beautiful people queue to get a job as waitpersons because they are supposed to get spotted for movie parts. They were all drop-dead gorgeous, but I didn’t think any of them were going to get a gig to be honest.

  Chris woke me at the crack of doom the following morning with a cup of English tea. He had very kindly booked me a taxi to get me to the airport. The man driving the taxi was a Serb. He hated America, he wanted to go back to his own country but he couldn’t afford it. I felt lucky and gave him a big tip. As he drove away it struck me that he might be from Brooklyn and love America, he might just hate British liberals.

  I flew back to London first class, ahh. It was so luxurious and proper, so rich-feeling and special-making. I got on the Tube at Heathrow and headed for my small flat in Islington. The specialness and richness and glamour started to feel like old party clothes. I was back to normal, back to London; my pushbike, the rain, the homeless people, the telephone bills, the dust, the shopping that needed doing. Judy was still in Ethiopia. There was no one at my flat. It was warm, but hollow. There was a big pile of mail for me. None of the letters were from Hollywood. There was no contract, there was no demand for me to get on the next flight out there and start shooting the series.

  Likewise my answer machine, many messages, none from Universal Television, none from some agent saying, ‘Bob, they want you to take Mel Gibson’s part in Lethal Weapon 3.’ Nothing. I made a cup of English tea and sat in silence, back to normal. It was alright really. I wasn’t sad, I was just waiting to calm down again.

  The irony light in the giant control room in the sky had been going on in my section for a long time; however, every now and then, when there is some heavy irony going down somewhere on earth, you get a break. There was no irony going through my mainframe as I sat in my kitchen. I was in an irony-free zone. It was only a temporary glitch, but while it lasted, it was very, very peaceful.

  Universal Television presented NBC with the pilot later that year. It has its faults, but for a pilot I’d say it was pretty damned good. Linwood Boomer was fired, as were Chris Eigman and Hinton Battle. They recast both parts, with the Cat played by a woman. They never reshot the pilot, but they did shoot a short trailer for it, which I wasn’t involved in. Rob and Doug went back to Los Angeles for about six weeks, trying to hustle up support for the project.

  By mid-June, Doug rang me up to say NBC had decided to drop the whole thing. The Fox Network picked it up. Nothing happened. All the agents who blessed my head with praise singularly failed to keep in touch as they promised. Strange that, isn’t it? Red Dwarf VI was now in the can, there was talk of a movie and another series. The only thing I’ve learned through all of this is, in show business, don’t believe it until it’s happening, and even then, stay sceptical.

  I had insisted on Andrea Pennell being my make-up woman in America. I thought the Americans would say no way and cite some Union regulation, but it was no problem. Oh yes, I know all the expressions. It means open the boot. An Australian expression referring to a person’s sexual orientation. ‘Don’t fuss with him, mate, he bats for the other team’ was a snippet o
f conversation I heard between two women in Melbourne once. The Coast, as in West Coast, is what hip, groovy Americans like Hinton call California. I didn’t know this at the time and got confused. I mean, New York is also on the coast on the other side. The Big Black Tower is the headquarters building of Universal Television. It stands at one corner of the studio lot and is big, and black. The cat of which The Cat is an ancestor. I still couldn’t pee in it. I had to be unbolted, unVelcroed and unpeeled to get out of the damn thing. I have to say, now that I have seen the mask on the screen, the English one looks better. Damn. The American one looks like a bloke with rubber stuck to his head. There’s no way round it.

  Part II

  Chapter 8

  In February 1993 I walked around a small rented flat in Shepperton High Street.

  ‘Yes, it’s okay,’ I said to the nice lady who was showing me around. ‘I’d like to move in next week.’

  Once again, I’d been lucky enough to spend most of the British winter in Australia so I was tanned, trim and terrific, though I say so myself. The reason I was renting a small apartment in an outer London suburb? It was within walking distance of Shepperton Studios where we were about to start recording the sixth series of Red Dwarf. In previous series I’d made the daily slog from north-east London where I’d lived to far west London to get to Shepperton. By the time we did series 6, my living arrangements had changed dramatically and I wanted to avoid having to drive many miles every day.

  The main reason my living arrangements had changed so much was because when Judy and I got back from our trips to the USA and Ethiopia the year before, we finally bought a house.

  I say house, I’m making it sound glamorous, it was pretty much an oversized shed in a field outside a small village in Gloucestershire. It would be easy to assume that because my parents and grandparents came from this area it was my idea to live there. However, Judy had found the place when she was touring around the Cotswolds with an Australian friend. A few weeks later she got the details of a tiny terraced cottage in a village called Oddington, which we thought, ah so amusingly, was appropriate for us as we were both a bit odd.

  One cold winter’s day, we drove out of London to see it. We never actually found that house, but instead stumbled on another one we both loved. Judy had stated that she wanted to live in a wooden house on a hill that wasn’t joined to any other houses. I said she was thinking of Australia and we didn’t have any wooden houses on hills in England, and more or less all houses were joined together in rows.

  We went to a dusty old estate agents office in Stow on the Wold where a lovely old lady leafed through a book of house brochures. One of the houses caught my eye, but the lady told us we wouldn’t want that one. I had to insist she let me see it again. We took the details and went to see it for real.

  What we found that day was a wooden house, on a hill, that wasn’t joined to any other houses. It was almost spooky.

  We could just about afford to put a deposit down and, after a massive load of hassle, managed to get a mortgage. I was immediately dumped into paroxysms of anxiety, I’d never bought anything more expensive than a third-hand car before. I’d never borrowed any money from anyone, it really didn’t feel good to me. Suddenly I was in massive debt, just when I’d started to earn some money for the first time.

  Judy had a flat she rented in Islington, so we kept that and used the house in Gloucestershire to work in and find a bit of peace and quiet. The one thing that almost put us off buying it was the nearby village school.

  ‘I don’t want to listen to kids shouting in the playground all day,’ I said, a man in his mid-thirties, with low kinder-tolerance. Oh my, how that would change.

  So we settled in and did gardening and went for walks, had supper in the late summer sunshine. It was all very tweedly and bucolic.

  It was while I was knee-deep in brambles one summer’s afternoon that I got a call from Rob Grant and Doug Naylor. They rang to inform me that the US Red Dwarf pilot had not been picked up, and they were now preparing to write series 6 of Red Dwarf to be shot the following year in the UK.

  Most of 1992 was taken up with performing my solo show, The Reconstructed Heart, with the catchy, humorous strapline of ‘The Male Response to Feminism, 1970 to 1990’.

  I did the show many times at various regional theatres, but most importantly for me, since the TV version had been broadcast, a publisher got in touch and suggested I write a book based on the comedy lecture. This was going to be my first actual book, a proper book from a proper publisher called Simon and Schuster that would actually be for sale in proper bookshops.

  Writing it was pure joy for me. I knew the show backwards and had worked up the gags over hundreds of performances. I came up with a lot of new material that I tried out on different nights, so effectively writing the book was an exercise in collation.

  When it was done I did a lot of PR for the book. I did quite a few interviews with journalists and one of them gave me a little taste of the very ugly side of the British press. A man called Tim O’Neil took me out for lunch at Simpsons in the Strand. I’d heard of this place, it’s an ultra-traditional old English dining room where a gentleman has to wear a jacket and tie.

  I’m a scruff, I’m an artist, I don’t do jackets and ties. If I went there now at least I own a proper suit and I could scrub up for the occasion, but back in 1992 I didn’t own a suit and the only tie I had was a fluorescent pink one I’d worn on stage.

  When I arrived I was informed that I couldn’t enter without a jacket and tie, but the maitre d’ was very happy to lend me the full kit. I was then furnished with a jacket that would be a close fit on a thirteen year old, and a tie that was so short it could do nothing but look like a joke. Thus attired, I joined Mr O’Neil in the grand old dining room and proceeded to have a lunch of roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, piles of sprouts, roast potatoes, thick dark gravy and all the trimmings.

  Mr O’Neil, it transpired, worked for the News of the World, which came as a bit of a surprise to me. I had very clearly specified when I’d talked to the PR people from the publishers that I didn’t want to do any interviews with the tabloids. I didn’t want anything to do with the celeb gossip columns or the red carpet brigade. I had gone to this lunch expecting to meet a freelance journalist who wrote for The Times and the Telegraph, but Mr O’Neil informed me they were ill and he’d stepped in.

  I’m a nicely brought up sort of chap, it would have been rude to storm out in a huff, so I ate my lunch and listened. Yes, I listened while Mr O’Neil did a non-stop monologue about footballers I’d never heard of, page three girls I’d never seen, soap stars I wasn’t interested in, events in night clubs I would never frequent. He did this for about an hour. I didn’t say a word but I did notice he kept filling my glass with red wine as he spoke.

  As I may already have intimated, I am a light drinker, especially during the day. Craig Charles would classify me as a tragic lightweight middle-class loser. Even Chris Barrie, normally a very polite gentleman, is not impressed when I have half a shandy, ‘Ruining a perfectly decent ale there, Mister Bobbington.’

  So after my third glass of red wine, even with a big English roast lunch, I was half-cut.

  Mr O’Neil suddenly stopped talking and started asking questions, he started with my book, which he clearly hadn’t read, asked me why I was interested in relationships between men and women, asked me what direct experience I’d had in the field.

  Before I could stop my half-pissed gobshite mouth running away with me, I’d told him about my previous girlfriend Sonia. She was a fiery French–Italian woman of prodigious intellect and a healthy hurricane of complex, often contradictory emotions. Sonia tore my once reserved English male countenance to shreds. Once you’ve lost your inhibitions and verbal taboo restrictions it’s very hard to get them back. Living with Sonia for five years had changed me enormously, parting from Sonia had been very stressful. We had fought on many occasions during our tempestuous love affair, and it’s true she
did once throw a fairly large amount of crockery at me. She didn’t do this out of the blue. There is no question that I would have been behaving like any other white Englishman in his late twenties: incredibly immature and selfish, stupid, cruel and endlessly annoying.

  That’s what Mr O’Neil was interested in, not the years I’d spent working on the show, the careful jokes I’d created, the insightful observations I’d made about the way a man’s mind works. He wanted pointless gossip and tittle-tattle, and like a fool I was giving it to him.

  When I got home after this prolonged lunch, I fell asleep for a couple of hours and woke in the early evening full of dread. What was that unpleasant little man going to write?

  For the rest of that year I worked on a series called Murder Most Horrid with Dawn French. I’d first met her and Jennifer Saunders at a comedy gig in a workingmen’s club in Tottenham, north London before the Comic Strip launched them to national fame. They were brilliant, very funny and clearly already in another league. In Murder Most Horrid I played a taxi driver. Dawn got in the back of the cab and we had a few words of dialogue and then we had to do a lot of drive-by shots with Dawn looking anxiously out of the rear windows.

  While this was going on, we were gassing on about boys, sex, men, sex, women, sex and, well sex. Dawn told me she wanted to start up a special school for young men where she would obviously be headmistress, and the only subject on the curriculum would be sex, lovemaking technique and physical fitness. I thought this would be a very good idea and I wished I’d attended when I was seventeen. She offered me a role as art master, which I gladly accepted.