Diana Christmas

by F. R. Jameson

  “But generally, that apart, I was happy at Motspur in the main. I made good films there, worked with a lot of good people. It was always a thrill in the morning to get the car down there.”

  Like all British studios, Motspur – which was situated at the edge of south-west London, only a couple of miles, in fact, from the house Timmy Williams had moved Diana to in Kingston upon Thames – had the look of a well-appointed industrial estate. It was comprised of a few large, anonymous concrete buildings, shielded in wooden panels, around which ran a couple of straight roads taking a person from point A to point B with nothing exciting to look at in the middle, other than a stretch of ill-kempt lawn. Only the high fence around the outside and the stern Keep Out signs gave any indication that this wasn’t a normal industrial estate. Even then, it could have been a chemical plant. There was nothing in the fence and the concrete façade to indicate that what was produced here was not propane or plastic, but dreams.

  My hand around her waist, my finger on her thigh, my nostrils entranced by her lavender perfume, I listened to her memories, knowing I should really include them in the piece I still had to write about her. But my attention largely drifted away from what she was saying and instead focused on how beautiful she was.

  “He’s lost his hair, you know?” she said. “I saw him in the paper when he was marrying his last wife. The child bride. I saw him there in black and white. That unpleasant purse on his lips even on his wedding day. And I knew – just knew – he’d have yelled out every wig-maker in town trying to find a hairpiece that worked.”

  I blinked. “Sorry, who?”

  Her gaze met mine, a bit askance, a bit amused. “Who? Ray, of course. Who else have I been talking about?”

  “How well did you know him, Diana?” I asked.

  The look she gave me then was more than just askance. She shifted a little uncomfortably in my grasp.

  “How well did I know him?” Any fluster was only fleeting. “Darling, you know my biography better than I do. You know I worked with him. I’m sure you can probably give me some of the dialogue exchanges from the scenes we shared together.” She laughed.

  “But did you do anything more? I was looking back through the clippings today and I saw you two were linked together as more than co-stars. Was that true?”

  Her right hand stayed on my knee, while with a slightly affected laugh she turned in the seat and ran the fingers of her left hand teasingly down my chest.

  “Oh, that was so long ago, darling. Please don’t be jealous. You know I love you, but you’re still not at the stage where I can let you be jealous. Certainly not of something which happened – gosh! – more than twenty years ago. We may have had a dalliance or two, but we were young and beautiful and that’s the kind of thing which happens when you put young and beautiful people together in a pressured environment. Even if you don’t really like each other all that much. Really, Ray and I didn’t mean much at the time and whatever it was certainly doesn’t mean anything at all now. Please do believe me, Michael. I’d hate for you to be cross over something so utterly inconsequential.”

  Her fingers stroked my chest delicately, her nails twisting and teasing amidst the buttons of my shirt. Again I leant forward for a kiss and this time she rewarded me with one. A brush of her soft lipstick-pink lips.

  “Diana.”

  “Uh-huh?” Her eyes were so wide, eager to please. She seemed absolutely besotted with me. With me!

  “What are we going to do if Wilder denies having a copy of the film? What’s going to happen if he laughs off the suggestion?”

  She glanced over her shoulder and out of the window, her smile a little tight. “You mean, how am I going to react if you tell me that’s what he said?”

  It hurt my head to admit it, but I nodded once.

  Her voice dropped to a whisper, which, though conspiratorial, sounded deliciously sultry. “You’re thinking of Carlisle, aren’t you, my darling? You’re going over that again?”

  My eyes went immediately forward, to see if the cabbie was paying us any extra attention. He seemed to be staring at the road, his bald head gleaming red under a traffic light. There was a pathetic piece of tinsel tied around his rear-view mirror. We were nothing but another fare to him. I don’t think he recognised Diana; he’d given her no more than a cursory glance. He was just happy with the road, Radio 2 and the inflated fare he’d no doubt charge us at the end of the ride.

  “Don’t worry,” she reassured me. “Carlisle was different. That man ruined my life. I’m sorry for what I did, but I can’t be sorry for what happened to Carlisle Collins. My relationship with Raymond is totally different. It’s cold, it’s frosty. I know he bears me ill-will, he always has, but I won’t even go near him.” She grinned at me, and gave a quick lick to the end of my nose. “Even if I did, I’d be far more in control of myself around Ray Wilder. I promise you that. Much more in control.”

  She kissed me again, lingering longer this time but still not enough to do any damage to her lipstick. It was a moment sent straight from the heavens.

  At the gates to Motspur, I did as she suggested and described her as my assistant. The security guard checked and of course she wasn’t on the list, but he had the air of a man who’d reached the end of a long shift, and waved us both through anyway. No doubt the fact she looked like she belonged there helped as much as my battered press-pass.

  I held her tight as the cabbie took us the long way round to Sound Stage C. Despite asking the guard for directions, he got lost twice. The Knowledge was no good within the confines of Motspur. When the taxi finally stopped, it hurt me to let her go. Such was the glorious surprise of all that was happening to me, every time she slipped from my grasp, the pessimistic core of me assumed she’d never come back. That this was it and she was about to come to her senses. I stared at her and sighed. With a grin, she kissed me once more on the cheek and then darted off into what was, for her, a familiar darkness.

  As I watched her trot away, I realised she hadn’t said how she was going to get her glimpse of Raymond Wilder, where she was going to secrete herself so that she could surreptitiously judge him. But it didn’t worry me. I was glad of her company, happy she was going to be with me in the taxi out. A taxi straight to her bedroom and nowhere else.

  There was a clock across the way from Sound Stage C. Like the big one on the concourse of Waterloo Station, but mounted on a high silver lamppost. We’d arranged that she would keep an eye on it, and when I was done I’d wait there and tell her what I’d found out.

  Watching her go, my nerves broke fresh to the surface. But the fantastical was true and I did have this stunning woman on my arm. I knew I couldn’t let her down. It didn’t matter if all I’d heard about Raymond Wilder suggested it would be a daunting task.

  As McTavish had put it:

  “Whenever Ray Wilder flies into a country, he’s the biggest bastard in that country. They don’t even bother running the competition when he’s around.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Without any ceremony or grand entrance, the former matinée idol materialised in front of me. He stretched out his arm.

  “Raymond Wilder,” he said.

  I was still blinking after coming into the harshly lit sound stage from the December darkness outside, and so it took me a few seconds before I raised my hand to shake his.

  Impatience creased the wrinkles around his eyes. Part of my shock came from the discrepancy between the Raymond Wilder before me and the Raymond Wilder I’d pictured. I still thought of him as young, with saturnine good looks, thick black hair and full eyebrows. My image of him was romancing Jane Russell in a backdrop Tahiti, or as a bullyboy gangster decking John Mills, or as an adventurer with a similarly dashing Stewart Grainger.

  The man in front of me was shorter than the image in my head, so that his eyes peered up to me, and he was portlier too. I tried not to stare, but that rich mane of hair which once upon a time had been his trademark had disappeared. It had receded u
p his skull, as if eaten by his forehead. Without the pompadour fringe, there was a lot more face to see – yet, strangely, that face seemed smaller. With age his features had become pinched, that devilish handsomeness having become something more scrunched-up and pointed, almost like a Dickensian grotesque.

  I tried to remember the last new film I’d seen him in. It had been a long time since any Raymond Wilder movie had properly troubled British cinemas. My mind tumbled back to some international co-production war film that I’d seen a bit of on ITV. It was George Peppard in the main, but Raymond Wilder was the token Brit. Without looking it up, I couldn’t really say when it was made, but it must have been late Sixties. I think Wilder had hair then, and his face – although older – was still strikingly handsome. Either a lot of stressful things had happened to him over the last ten years, or he’d had a fantastic wig maker and cinematographer on that movie.

  The outfit he wore that evening didn’t help. He was still dressed for the film and his role was clearly not meant to radiate glamour or sophistication. He wore slightly too short brown trousers, which were hung over his shoulders by frayed black braces. The shirt he wore was a short-sleeved polyester number, which gave every impression of having been bought in a 99p sale at C&A. A ballpoint pen was clipped to his top pocket. I could only assume that the blot of leaked ink was deliberate.

  He grinned at me with yellowed, coffee-stained teeth, chipped and broken, clearly enjoying the effect he was having on me. Then, when he’d let go of my hand, he pried out both top and bottom sets of dentures into his palm and dropped them into his pocket. His proper smile was full and still brilliantly white. It looked totally incongruous against the rest of his outfit, like watching a full-grown lion masquerade as a bookmaker.

  “I don’t normally do interviews any more,” he told me, in a voice that still had its somewhat condescending, tuneful plumminess. Dilys Powell memorably described it as “like being told off by a melody”.

  He waved his hand and pointed me onto the set itself. “Actually, I don’t remember the last time I gave an interview. No, tell a lie, I do. It was with some dozy bint from the TV Times. Do you remember when ITV showed a dozen of my movies a few years back? A tribute to me, they said, like I was fucking dead or something. Well, they sent out this dozy bint to do the interview. To get my take on them, so I could share my memories like some old git in a home. Ha! I only agreed to it as I knew in advance that the girl had great jugs, a tiny miniskirt, and if you were famous enough and treated her nice, she’d blow you afterwards.” He chortled. “She fucking did and she fucking swallowed!”

  I nodded along and pretended to be entertained, as he led me onto the centre of the sound stage. There were actually two sets struck, one of which was the kind of dingy street scene which was a favourite in Gilbert Grayson films. That one lay in darkness, but the other glowed red as if it were the leisure room of Hell itself. It was the biggest, most nightmarish amusement arcade anyone had ever seen.

  All the one-armed bandits were at least eight feet high and bulgingly wide as if ready to burst their casings. Each was painted in demonic reds and deathly blacks. Instead of levers, they had the arms of mannequins screwed into their sides. So to pull down and try your luck, you had to grab hold of cold, lifeless fingers. Some of them had angry, screaming skulls painted on the front, while others had mannequin heads balanced on top. Those heads were so expertly made-up and bewigged, they resembled decapitated former patrons.

  The pinball machines were similarly wider and deeper than normal, every one the length of a coffin. Some of them even had their glass frontage cracked and shiny, plastic fingers poking out from their insides. Meanwhile, the grabber – which reached down into a glass case filled with nothing but the heads of baby dolls – was a mutated claw which wouldn’t have been out of place in a Ray Harryhausen movie.

  When I saw the film much later (by which point it had acquired a great deal of notoriety), I could get what Grayson Gilbert was attempting. In the past he had used skewed perspectives in his films. That had been subtle though, a chance for him to disturb the viewer without them realising quite why or how it had been done. This was him slipping off the manacles, creating a film set which owed nothing to realism, and everything to twisted and dark fairy tale reality.

  What particularly jarred me that evening was not just the set but the fact that Wilder (or some flunky) had set out two folding chairs right at the very centre of it. The neons of the machines were still flashing, illuminating us both in alternating reds and blues; the flippers of the pinball machines seemed to be operated by ghostly fingers, flicking back and forth with no one in front of them. Both of us had to raise our voices to get over the cacophony of noise.

  Somewhere in the mass of machinery, a disembodied voice flatly intoned, “You’ve won. You’ve won. You’ve won,’ like the needle was caught in the groove.

  “Not that I expect the same treatment from you,” he chortled again. His laugh was entirely humourless. “I might be an actor, but I ain’t no homo. I know that the two get mixed up in the rabble’s collective mind, but I’ve never had any truck with homos. Avoided them all, always. Never liked them, never wanted to know them, never wanted any patronage from those theatrical knights with their bum-fucking ways.”

  He indicated a chair, the one facing away from the door. Nervously, unable to quite focus with all the noise and flashing lights, I sat opposite him. He lit a cigarette out of a packet with Arabic writing, but didn’t offer me one. Then, after a long, dismissive drag, his face hardened into an expression of sheer contempt, which came much more easily to him than laughter.

  “So you’re here, my first interview in however long it’s fucking been. And now that I’ve been so gracious as to invite you through the fucking door, you can maybe explain to me how come I’m giving an interview to you as opposed to some dolly bird with big tits and loose morals?”

  There were still two technicians milling about, packing up whatever they had to pack up, setting up whatever they had to set up. Final preparations for tomorrow. I didn’t want to leap into my reason for being there in front of others. This needed to be kept as low-key as possible.

  So I ignored his question, ignored his nastiness. Instead I gave him a smile that I hoped was ingratiating, but probably wasn’t.

  “I’ll just start by saying how grateful I am for your time today, Mr Wilder.”

  In my limited experience, I’d observed that there were basically two types of interviewee: those who immediately ask you to call them by their first name, and those who don’t. Mr Wilder was always going to be the latter.

  (There was a third type of interview subject, of course, and that was Diana Christmas. Although she was surely unique.)

  Wilder didn’t do anything but stare at me disdainfully, so I ploughed on. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw one of the blokes walking in the direction of the exit.

  “Our magazine, as you no doubt know, Mr Wilder, is about the history of cinema over the last sixty years. And, as you’re one of the major stars of British cinema, I’m grateful for this chance to ask you about your career.”

  “Do you think I’m fucking history or something?”

  “Um, that’s not what I said.”

  “That is what you fucking said!” His index finger jabbed towards me. “Learn some fucking respect for your fucking betters and don’t deny the very thing that you just fucking said! What do you think, that I’m some kind of has-been or something? One of those old codgers who can only make ends meet by appearing in Tales of the Unexpected or Doctor Who or some dreadful LWT sitcom? Look around you, this is a proper film set and I am still a proper film actor. You should bear that in fucking mind!”

  There was one technician now, a mole-like middle-aged man in a stained beige tank top. He was squinting through glasses even thicker than mine at one of the pinball machines. I thought it looked fine, that all the lights were flashing just as menacingly as they needed to be. It was also making one hell of a rack
et. The intentness with which he stared at it, though, suggested it wasn’t doing all he wanted it to do.

  Panic rising slightly, a cold sweat sheening my back, I wondered if this might be the flunky who had put out the chairs. A cohort of Wilder’s who was keeping an eye on him and had no intention of going anywhere. The conversation I needed to have was sensitive; I wasn’t going to have it in front of anyone else.

  Not that Wilder was giving me much of a chance. His cigarette was waving angrily through the air, his face growing noticeably redder even under all that neon, his words spurting faster and faster.

  “Don’t you fucking clowns ever do any research? Basic fucking research, like reading and stuff. I may have been quieter when it comes to making films of late, but I have my own vineyard in Tuscany. That’s been occupying the lion’s share of my time. I’ve been in the sun in Italy, I’ve been drinking wonderful wine and I’ve been fucking more bella beauties than you’ll ever have in your ugly little life. So remember that, before you start talking to me about history!”

  I did my best to stay calm, to appear unflustered by his tone and the lights and the whirring and beeping all around. Swallowing as unobtrusively as possible, I gazed down at my notepad and tried my best to stall. Out of the corner of my eye I watched the mole man slowly – ever so slowly – pack his tools away.

  “It is your first British film in a little while though, Mr Wilder. I know you’ve been busy on the continent. So, have you come back just to do a favour for Grayson Gilbert?”

  I hoped to appeal to his generosity. It didn’t work.

  “Fuck him and fuck his favours! Do you really think I go out of my way to do favours? That I have time for that? No, the only reason I’m here is because the salary is good and I have a few spare weeks to kill. Plus, the script is passable. I’m certainly not doing any favours for Grayson fucking Gilbert, beyond having the interview here so we can show off his blessed fucking set. The Italian co-producer of this movie is a good and proper friend of mine, he understands talent. He says I have to be in this film and so I’m in this film. Grayson fucking Gilbert doesn’t even get a fucking choice in the matter. He can like it or lump it, quite frankly.”