Semi-Detached

by Griff Rhys Jones

  Was it then that I was trying to earn extra money by working in the ADC bar? Was it then, unable to get through the month, that I sold all my books in a shop opposite Magdalene? (I watched as the owner picked through the box and came to a leather-bound seventeenth-century tract I had inherited from the wreck of frizzy Aunty Betty’s house, assuming that it would be worth a fortune, only to have him sniff at it and add an extra pound to the total.)

  ‘I remember the carp you bought and cooked,’ Charlotte said.

  I remembered that too. ‘In red wine and sultanas.’

  ‘It was disgusting.’

  I had taken up experimental cookery too. How did we fit it all in? Why did we fit it all in?

  I was directing a musical version of Cyrano de Bergerac composed by Peter Fincham, but I finished a busy rehearsal one afternoon in 1975 and I decided that I ought to try to reread my essays. There weren’t that many of them, but I had Finals the following day I especially needed the one I had written on James Joyce. I spent the evening I had allocated for revision trying to track down my supervisor. He still had it somewhere on. his desk. I had never finished his sequence of supervisions before my exams intervened.

  So I finished my education and drew breath to look around me. There was no sense of panic. I had been crawling along the baby-boomer pipeline since 1953, doing pretty much everything that was expected of me and enjoying myself; possibly a bit too much recently, but as far as I .was concerned, I was top of my class in shouting at other undergraduates in university plays. Something would come of that, surely. If it didn’t, I wasn’t sure that I minded unduly Frankly, I was exhausted by the last four years. I needed a bit of a rest.

  I would become ‘a director’, of some sort. I had never invited anybody up from London to look at ‘my work’. I did write a letter to a man at the Royal Court, who promised that he would try and kindly pointed out that he had retired ten years before. (The library copy of the The Theatre Yearbook was a little out of date.) I vaguely assumed that I should work as some sort of assistant to begin with, but for whom? I decided I had better start writing letters in earnest.

  A decade and a half before, a clutch of directors had left Oxbridge and persuaded the world that it owed them a job. Some of them seemed to have had theatres built for them by northern boroughs. But they had no intention of giving up ten years later. But I wrote. I worked my way through the entire list of theatres in the The Theatre Yearbook. I got shown around the premises at the National by the staff director and I was invited for an interview by Michael Bogdanov. I wore a suit. That could have been avoided. But I came from an elitist university background. That couldn’t.

  While I waited to see Bogdanov at some little theatre in Leicester, I went to visit the big theatre in Leicester. Two friends with whom I had appeared in revues, Geoffrey McGivern and Crispin Thomas, had joined the real world a year before and were ‘getting their Equity cards’ by appearing in play-as—cast parts. I sat in the corner watching them put on their make-up, feeling as useless as any interloper in a dressing room does, especially before a show, but feeling particularly useless in this real world of theatre too. Was this what I wanted? Did I share any of their excitement? Where was the intellectual stimulation in being a bit—part actor?

  Mr Bogdanov had no jobs and certainly no job for me. He told me he had a policy of interviewing everybody who wrote. I crumpled and went back to London. (Perhaps I should have persevered. About a year later he hired Mel Smith as an assistant director at the Young Vic.)

  Immediately after finishing at Cambridge I was still much too busy to look down. There was a hiccup for the exams, and technically I left, but some employment came in the form of the Cambridge Gilbert and Sullivan Society It was considered an honour to be asked and probably one to be resisted, but they had money to pay for a director and, thanks to my father’s early selections from Chew and Osborne, I could sing whole verses of ‘Take a Pair of Sparkling Eyes’ and quite a bit of ‘Tit Willow’ from The Mikado, the operetta already chosen by the committee. I got the general idea anyway: lots of enthusiasm, plenty of lusty singing. They were sort of pantomimes, weren’t they? It wasn’t a job, but it was a postponement.

  We were a little restricted by the fact that the production was to take place in the open air. The Minack Theatre had been cut out of a natural amphitheatre in a granite cliff and has, as a permanent backdrop, the boiling Atlantic Ocean. Depressions marched in regular succession through the summer to break on the Cornish coast. The audience were prepared for this. They simply clambered into their oilies. The technicians were prepared for it. They wrapped their electrical equipment in plastic bags. I am not sure that my production was prepared for it. I had planned that the granite surroundings would be transformed- into Ko-Ko’s garden, with the addition of dainty strings of Japanese lanterns to light up and enchant us as night fell towards the end of the first act.

  I stood up in the church hall at rehearsals and made my usual rabble-rousing speech, outlining my general plan of attack. With a week in hand to get them up and trotting around, I was rather taken aback by their unwillingness to jump to it. Matters came to a head when we rehearsed Ko-Ko’s first entrance.

  ‘Now,’ I said expansively, ‘Jeremy, come on from stage left and the chorus will part hurriedly, with little steps please … is that OK, Jeremy?’

  Jeremy muttered. The chorus twittered. We tried it. But Jeremy didn’t appear.

  ‘Jeremy?’

  Jeremy appeared. He stalked to the centre of the church hall, and I could see that he was exercised. ‘You don’t seem to understand,’ he said. ‘I have to come in from the centre of the stage.’

  ‘What do you mean you have to come in?’

  ‘That is where Ko-Ko comes in from!’

  I looked blankly at my script. There were no instructions of any kind. ‘In what?’

  ‘In the D’Oyly Carte production!’ the entire chorus thundered as one.

  I stared blankly back.

  ‘You’re leaving out all the fan business!’ a member of the chorus wailed. Then they all started shouting at me. This was not the same as the production which each of them had seen at least a hundred times and memorized in every particular detail.

  I restored order and approached Jeremy gingerly Luckily I had my own snicker-snee to disable them. Jeremy, chorus, my friends …’ I boomed. ‘I would love to do an authentic D’Oyly Carte production, really, but I think we have to be aware that the Minack does impose restrictions on us. The only way that Ko-Ko could make his entrance from the back of the stage were if he were to arrive by boat, scale a hundred-foot cliff and surmount a ten-foot concrete wall. There is only a fucking side entrance!’

  I think that did it. From that little crack in the fabric I managed to effect a demolition of the Gilbert and Sullivan Society’s preconceptions and ended up with something that was, I fear, more 42nd Street than Titipu. I was perfectly happy to interpose business of our own. I seem to remember that Ko-Ko made one entrance carrying a large wet fish in a chamber pot.

  On the opening night, my Mikado was carried on stage in a magnificent lacquered palanquin across a sweet little Japanese bridge. He was accompanied by beautifully costumed aides. It was supposed to be a willow-pattern plate come to life. Alas, a howling gale, accompanied by a sea mist, had blown up during the first half. The Minack never became a Japanese garden. It reverted to being the blasted heath it always had been.

  It was a beautiful summer. I was going to Edinburgh to redirect the Footlights, but it would have seemed apposite to get into at least some sort of minor panic. I had no money. My prospects were virtually non-existent. A quick look at my friends who had left the year before could not have been encouraging. A few were working as actors. Douglas Adams was holed up with John Lloyd, who was now going out with my sister and living in a flat in north London. He had been taken up by Graham Chapman as an ‘assistant’, but nobody seemed to have an occupation you could easily describe as a job.

  So I
had time on my hands. I embarked upon a rabid affair with the leading singer in The Mikado. We used to meet up in London, get over-excited during lunch and jump into a taxi to Putney when her rower boyfriend was away sculling.

  One afternoon I arranged to meet my diva in a little room above Maison Bertaux at the bottom of Greek Street, for a cake. I wouldn’t recommend taking your mistress for tea in a small room with only one exit if you only know the place because you’ve been introduced to it by your regular girlfriend. It is quite possible that your regular girlfriend’s father will have introduced her to it. It’s very possible your regular girlfriend’s father will be sitting taking tea there. You can brazen it out, but he’s likely to be a canny man of experience.

  He never said anything at the time, but a year later, when it all went rather messy, he told Charlotte that he had sensed something was wrong because I went to such great lengths to introduce my companion and actually remembered her name.

  I might have been expected to start taking some responsibility Apart from anything else I needed to earn some money.

  18. A Short Visit to the Real World

  In 1975, at the end of a summer directing the Footlights and Gilbert and Sullivan and sailing my father’s boat, and with no immediate prospects of employment, I stood waiting for a man whose brow had been furrowed, whose fleshy and unshaven jaw was set with Desperate Dan determination and who was thinking, ‘This is fucking mad.’

  The man sitting next to him was thinking. ‘But fuck it! It sort of makes sense.’

  Both of these men had had the well-greased probity of ex-police officers, because they were ex-police officers. They still wore their coats, despite clearly having been in the room for some hours. There was a tray of coffee and some half-eaten food in front of them. They hadn’t asked me to sit down.

  ‘Would you be able to start tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes.’

  As job interviews go, it was short. I signed nothing. They told me to get to a room in the Hilton by eight the following morning. The man sighed, and I left the room.

  When I arrived the next morning, the corridor I had been sent to was empty except for a squat-looking figure sitting up the other end in front of double doors. He seemed to be distorting the normal perspective, like the illustration under a greaseproof sheet in my mother’s big blue cut-paper edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales — the dog with eyes like saucers. As I tentatively approached, I thought the corridor had shrunk to accommodate him.

  His massive frame was encased in a navy blazer. He wore tight, light—grey slacks. His hair was greased back in a flamboyant pompadour. He was perched on a small upright chair, hunched slightly forward, as if about to launch himself up the corridor and devour me.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve come from West Security.’

  He paused. ‘Are you doing this shift?’

  ‘Yes.’

  A look of pain crossed his face. He snorted derisively There was another chair on the other side of the doorway ‘I’m Big Mike. That’s your chair.’ I sat. He turned away and continued staring up the corridor.

  It was the comedy science-fiction-novelist-to-be Douglas Adams, formerly of Brentwood School, now happily unemployable, who had once again taken an interest in my welfare. Thanks to his telephone call I was sitting outside the hotel door of the Sheika of Qatar, masquerading as a bodyguard.

  ‘Your sister tells me you’re looking for a way of earning a bit of money?’ he had begun intriguingly ‘I found an advert in the London Evening Standard offering four pounds an hour for bodyguard duties, and I thought it might be quite a silly idea to go along.’

  Douglas’ interview apparently took longer than mine. The ex-coppers who ran West Security feared that a namby-pamby, wet-behind-the-ears, over-educated slop like Douglas might not pass as a creditable bodyguard. But they were up against it.

  ‘What it was,’ Big Mike explained to me, ‘was that West Junior took over the company and he thought his dad was a bit slow, behind the times, as it were, so he went all around the embassies of our Arab friends, like, and he laid out a lot of the old baksheesh.’ He rubbed his thumb and fingers together. ‘Only it all went much better than he expected, ‘cos they all come over for the summer, see. It’s too hot over there, so they’re all over here in London. He’s got jobs coming up all over the shop, but he’s not got the operatives, not the trained ones like me.’

  The company needed bodyguards. They put an advertisement in the paper, but every old lag and con man turned up, intent on fleecing the clients. And then Douglas sauntered in. After appointing him, they wanted to know if he had any friends. The thing about students, it was agreed, was that they were too naive to be bent.

  We were also rather weedy Douglas, to be fair, was an impressive six foot and a lot. His hooked nose rivalled Big Mike’s, his hair was just as lustrous, but somehow he didn’t give one confidence that he was a killer. Gullies O’Brien Tear (another Douglas find) frankly looked like Little Lord Fauntleroy Barnaby Dickens looked like someone called Barnaby Dickens. Candidly we decided the job was largely a question of ‘presence.

  Though I was to work for West on and off for another six months, it was nothing like regular employment. The phone rang intermittently and a man called Roy handed out an assignment. One night, quite late in our relationship (indeed pretty late that night) he asked whether I could come down to the Dorchester ‘sharpish’, because somebody had failed to show I dragged on my only suit and found myself padding up a narrow staircase, disconcertingly like the back stairs of a country house. A bullet-headed, villainous-looking six-footer emerged from the shadows. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I’ve come to take over.

  ‘Fucking hell. Are you a student?’

  ‘No. No. Not a student, no.’

  I could only see the whites of his eyes, but I gathered they were glaring. He looked at his watch. ‘Well, listen. The bloke downstairs is Para. The two blokes on day-duty are ex-MPs.’ (He meant military policemen, not deselected backbenchers.) He sighed. ‘If anyone asks you, you’d better say you were in the navy.’

  Our role in the event of an attack was to scream as we were machine-gunned to death, reminding the Sheika inside to lock the door and phone for the police. McDuff’s bodyguards have never warranted a play like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. We were human alarm-bell receptionists.

  ‘She’s gone out shopping,’ Mike explained on my first morning as a bodyguard. ‘She’s the principal wife of the Sheik, see. So she gets to spend the whole of the summer over here. All the other wives are left behind in the Gulf state’…Oi!’ He stopped in mid-sentence and looked up the corridor. ‘Oi. I’ve told you, haven’t I? Fuck off out of it.’

  A shifty man in a grey suit had come half-way down the corridor. ‘I’m just waiting until I can see the Sheika. I need to talk to her,’ he whined.

  ‘She’s not going to see you. I don’t want to see you. You’ll have to talk to the embassy’

  This was Colin.

  Until the week before, Cohn had driven the Sheika around town in a limousine. He had been on contract to the hire company ‘But then his company went bust and he was laid off.’ He couldn’t explain what had brought about such an unlikely financial failure. ‘But Colin has put a hell of a lot in,’ Mike told me. ‘I have some sympathy She’s going home the end of next week, and then the baksheesh will be flying around, and he’s going to miss out, after all that work, poor bloke.’

  Colin had gone and hired a limousine at his own expense. Whenever the Sheika left the hotel, he did his best to try to steer her into his car. Several times he had almost pulled it off, much to the annoyance of the embassy staff. They had hired a new limousine service and disliked the prospect of losing their crowned head to a pretender to the post of royal chauffeur.

  ‘Do we go out with the royal party?’ I asked.

  ‘Not really, no,’ said Mike. ‘Sometimes, if it’s an outing, perhaps, but our job is to guard the room, even when the
y’re not here.’ He lapsed into a determined silence.

  So, we were paid to sit outside the door for twelve hours at a stretch, four pounds an hour; forty-eight quid a night. I had brought Dombey and Son with me. I cracked it open. Mike watched me. ‘Is that a book, is it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You going to read that, are you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh right.’

  As I started reading I could feel his eyes on me. Finally, he reached down and picked up a copy of the Sun. I applied myself to the first paragraph. Mike opened his paper, gazed perfunctorily at the inside page, slapped open the rest of the pages in quick succession, sighed and threw it aside.

  He was looking at me again. ‘What’s it about then?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, I haven’t got very far, but basically it’s a description of the sun coming up over London, illuminating the houses and waking everybody up.’

  ‘Right.’ He shifted his massive bulk and plucked at his crotch. Then he settled back and sucked diligently at his teeth for a few seconds. ‘So …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What’s happening now?’

  ‘Well, Mike, the sun is still coming up, and the morning light is beginning to suffuse the city-scape.’

  ‘Mm.’ He cleared his throat noisily, sniffed and made a prolonged guttural hawking. He leaned over delicately and gobbed on the hotel carpet. He extended a foot and rubbed it in. He caught me looking at him.

  ‘I expect you think I’m an animal, don’t you?’

  ‘No, no.

  ‘What’s happening now?’ He pointed at the book. ‘Much the same,’ I said and closed it. Mike was uncomfortable about reading, but then Mike was uncomfortable generally. Being a bodyguard involved long periods of doing nothing. Mike liked the totally undemanding ‘work’, but chafed against the inertia involved. He was not a great conversationalist. Nonetheless there were a few subjects he was keen to ‘learn’ me: the fact that this was not his real job (his real job was as a Hollywood extra — ‘I shouldn’t be doing this’), the way the hotel economy worked and what was ‘proper’.