‘Well, would you look at that,’ said Duke, looking to the back of the stage.
‘All hail the Great Magnifico,’ I said, with my arms in the air. Through the wooden frame all that could be seen was the blue curtain at the back of the stage. Charlie the Chimp had simply vanished.
‘How’d ya do it, JJ? How? How?’
‘Well, Duke, you know how it goes, all it takes is a bit of monkeying around.’
Down came the curtain. If Harry Houdini could do it with an elephant, why couldn’t we with a chimp?
* * *
If the Breda rescue made us heroes, Charlie the Chimp made us stars. As the Moss Empires tour went on, I worked him into other sketches, the old man accepting my ideas with a strained demur that was more about his fear of fucking up a good thing than any new-found faith in me. He needn’t have worried. The public gets what the public wants and the public wanted a chimp.
And Duke.
You could see the superstar emerging. Every town we played, I filmed little scenes with my Brownie camera: Duke silently clowning in a hotel room; Duke cartwheeling along a street; his crushing hangover in the back of a car . . . I had this vague idea about making a documentary. I was an entreprenoor, see, as the old man said, savvy enough to overlook any envy in the quest for cash.
Dine with the Duke was another of my ideas, wheezing a PR trail through the pheromone fug. We would hold a raffle before a show, the lucky winner getting a signed photo and a lunch date with Duke, a photographer on hand, of course, a write-up for the local paper. I must have really hated myself to come up with that idea. Anna must have thought I hated her too.
In Leeds, we recorded The Good Old Days Christmas special at the City Varieties Theatre. The Music Hall sentimentalist that was the old man listened with dewy-eyed delight to Leonard Sachs sonorous introduction. Inimitable. Incomparable. Lifesavers . . . and escapees . . . of The Glasgow Empire. Your very own Breda BOYS. Then the famous gavel came down to introduce our first television appearance, Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend followed by a rendition of Walking in a Winter Wonderland, where Charlie, dressed as Santa, comes on to join us.
Another performance on The Good Old Days helped get us onto the bill for the famous Five Past Eight revue show at the Glasgow Alhambra in 1957. Then Sunday Night at the London Palladium came calling, which opened another door in November, the Royal Variety Performance.
Pinch yourself time.
Judy Garland and Tommy Cooper. Harry Secombe and Tommy Steele. Never mind the Queen, it was all about the Count. The old man was almost in tears watching Basie and his orchestra. I filmed him in the wings with the Brownie, the fedora held respectfully in his hands, eyes closed. Anna, there to cover the Breda Boys’ big night, was beside him, head on his shoulder.
That night was also the first time we went to Soho, tagging along with some of Basie’s band to an ‘All-Niter’ at The Flamingo Club on Wardour Street, a subterranean concrete bunker flooded with a sea of dancing people. The jazz I recognised, the blues less so. The soul was something else.
Elated by his arrival in the promised land, the old man vanished into the crowd, an arm around one of Basie’s trombonists. Sharply dressed black men stared at me, one opening his jacket to offer me over-priced miniatures of whisky from the dozens held to the inside lining by little pieces of elastic. ‘Big Time,’ he said, ‘why so serious?’ Then he burst out laughing. Intimidated, I bought one, sipping as I glanced at the shadier types, heavy-built and hyper-kinetic, as if barely controlling some internal energy. ‘Gangsters,’ Duke whispered. ‘Maybe the bloody Krays.’
I found out later that this night of firsts was also the first time the Duke had taken Drinamyl – Purple Hearts. It explained the bear hug when we met in the toilets, the hands gripping my shoulders.
‘Can you believe it? I mean, it’s unbelievable. We just played the Palladium. We met Count Basie.’
‘I know, it’s unreal.’
‘What if we get found out?’
Then we were laughing hysterically. No Purple Hearts for me but I must have seemed just as high, the two of us waltzing around the toilet to the indescribable luck that had landed us here. Then another amphetamine jump cut. Duke suddenly serious. ‘Anna. She’s wonderful, isn’t she?’
My brother’s wide-eyed question didn’t want a response. No validation was required, not yet.
‘I think she gets me. I really think she gets me.’
I filmed them on the dance floor. Watching through the camera made it easier, somehow. I watched the scene again, hours later, projected onto the wall of my hotel room. No soundtrack except the ratatatat of the feeding film, Duke and Anna laughing and dancing, there and gone in the seethe of people, their movements spastic and peculiar in the absence of music.
* * *
Providence once more gave a simian smile. We made the leap from stage to movie screen, moving to London in 1958. The deal with Rank demanded it. Five films, comic capers starring The Breda Boys and Charlie the Chimp. We’d tackle thieves in Tangier, gangsters in New York, crooked casino owners in Monte Carlo, just like those Bing Crosby and Bob Hope Road To . . . movies.
Duke and I had said barely a word at the contract meeting with Earl St John, aka the Earl of Pinewood.
‘Yer gonna want to sign us, I tell ye that,’ my father told him.
The Earl smiled. ‘Now why in the world would I want to do that?’
‘Because you’re clearly a man of wisdom.’
‘Wisdom?’
‘Aye, Norman. He musta done wonders for your bottom line.’
The Earl leaned back in his chair and laughed, slamming a hand on the table. A cigar sealed the deal.
We moved to Notting Hill, St. Stephen’s Garden, a whitewashed Victorian terrace on three floors. Charlie became a celebrity resident at London Zoo, chauffeured to Pinewood by Leo when needed on set.
Our lives had changed so quickly. Maybe that explained the ease with which I took to London. I just didn’t spend all that much time thinking about it. It would be a long time before I did.
Late-fifties London had a distinct, gloomy appeal. Still so many bombed-out streets. Piles of rubble. Men and women as grim as the buildings. Yet all so exciting for the country boy in the big smoke. I walked with the Brownie, gravitating to the little parks that dotted west London, and the canal, the windings of the Grand Central, east to Northolt and west to Paddington.
Meanwhile, Duke soaked up the attention. That was the deal, what the re-engineering of the Breda story demanded. The Rank contract catapulted us into showbiz society. The Breda Boys were a sought-after presence at parties. Bumpkin Jocks, that’s what the metropolitans wanted, a stereotyping slightly less lurid than that of their ancestors, who craned to see Buffalo Bill’s ‘Red Indians’ or poor John Merrick, Saartjie Baartman paraded half-naked at Piccadilly.
Coached by the old man, Duke tried to throw the ‘r’ away. He learned how to wear a Savile Row suit instead of seeming like he’d just fallen into it. He worked on That Smile and the optimum moment of deployment. He believed enough of his own hype to be credible but disbelieved even more, a headshaking Dorian Gray pouring another double in his Notting Hill bunker.
‘I feel like I’m breaking up. He’s got these expectations and I can’t keep up. Who’s the performing monkey again?’
‘It’s all a performance, mind?’
‘I know that, for Christ’s sake.’
‘Remember the first time we did coat stand surprise? In the kitchen. I thought the old man had gone mental.’
‘He is mental!’
Both of us must have had the same memory flash. A smack on the face, just get it bloody right.
Then we were laughing, affection for a memory that deserved none. Shared moments like this became increasingly rare. They seemed to bring complications Duke didn’t want to deal with.
He would head north every couple of weeks, trying to persuade Anna to move to London. Every other week she came down, testing the waters
while Duke hedged his bets with an ever-revolving cast of party girls and the inevitable morning-after guilt I hated myself for indulging.
‘I was squeezing breasts right and left, Johnny. They were being offered to me.’
‘What are you gonna do, eh?’
Anna herself turned a blind eye. She was a journalist, she must have seen the rumours in the papers about Duke and Linette Rogers, his co-lead in Moscow Monkey. Yet nothing was ever said, as if this new world was so bizarre and dreamlike that nothing in it could actually be happening.
The old man was living his own dream.
He established a near-permanent presence at the Mingo. This brought new friends and connections, and epic, late-night parties back at Notting Hill. One Saturday night, just weeks before the race riots, we had our windows smashed by a gang of Teddy Boys, incensed by all the black faces. We joined The Stars Campaign for Interracial Friendship, set up to fight against racism. Duke and I were photographed putting copies of What the Stars Say through letterboxes. He’d even claim, with full amphetamine delusion, to have prevented a second race riot.
Yet if we’d somehow landed on the crest of the countercultural wave about to break across London, the zeitgeist captured by our films was of a 1940s vintage. Moscow Monkey was terrible. As were That Touch of Chimp and Peking Chimp. Yet I loved them, Pinewood Studios more so.
French streets become Alpine vistas become narrow Chinese streets become a medieval castle . . . I wandered the sets. I hung out in the editing suite with bespectacled men who took serious and generous delight in explaining the process. I bored the trousers off Doug Fotheringham, erstwhile director of the monkey films, who would say, ‘We’re not making Kane, dear boy . . . ’
Leonid hated the premieres as much as I did. Invariably, we walked up the red carpet together, one on each side of Charlie, holding a hand, Charlie’s sidekick and ‘the man behind the monkey’. Charlie stopped now and then, a grin for the cameras and a clap for the crowd. A few steps ahead, Duke and the starlet de jour sashayed. Inevitably, she would crouch down and blow a kiss at Charlie, who would put a hand over his eyes and fall over in love-struck delight.
‘I grew up watching Sergei Eisenstein,’ Leonid whispered to me during the first screening of Peking Chimp. ‘This is such shit. If he angled the camera by 30 degrees . . . much more interesting.’
He would say much the same about my efforts.
I was still walking the city, making my stream of consciousness epics, moving further afield, Epping Forest and Hampstead Heath, a bus to Southend, filming in the rain at the end of the pier. I spent the night in a decaying boarding house and filmed three hours of the darkening sea.
London Bucolia, I called these films, boring and amusing people by telling them narrative was overrated. What can I say? I was twenty years old. I would screen them at our parties, a second-floor living room that me and only me called The Inter Zone: low light and joss sticks, Mingus or Monk on the turntable. It was mostly the tokers who watched, smoking and staring.
Leo appeared one night, finally worn down by my nagging him to come and tell me what he thought. He watched silently for half an hour then said, ‘Why do you think only potheads are watching?’
I didn’t know.
‘Because they’re potheads!’
After I stopped moping, I asked Leo if he wanted to work together. He turned out to be a wonderful cinematographer, his feel for composition and lighting uncanny. Our first film was a short called Rooftop, shot in a snowstorm, about a man who may or may not be about to jump.
My brother’s response was sarcasm. He didn’t get Rooftop and because he didn’t, he somehow thought I was taking the mickey out of him. I remember another party, Duke surrounded by the entourage he had acquired. When Anna was around she must have counted every skirt.
‘What’s it all about? You’re too clever for old Duke here. I mean, have you seen Rooftop?’
Laughter rippled among the acolytes.
‘You know what I call this cat? Brother Grimm. Lighten up, little bro!’
I just shrugged.
‘Duke, you’re such a tease.’ This from the willowy blonde on his arm.
‘You’ve nooo idea, sugar!’
This was another recent shift, Duke’s odd appropriation of black slang. ‘That white brother sure wants to be black,’ I heard someone say. He dropped it whenever Anna was around.
‘Be easy, little bro. Be easy.’
Then he was gone, his devotees trailing. Increasingly, even though we were still living under the same roof, this is how we communicated: through awkward set-pieces at parties and PR events.
There is drift in every relationship. You watch it happen, you know it is happening and sometimes you just let it go. I cared less and less, even as I watched Duke untethering. The UK’s most popular actor in 1959 according to the Mirror. A constant presence in the gossip pages. It was sometime around then my brother went ‘full Duke’, when he decided, I am the Star they’re calling me, a teeth-grinding Benzedrine epiphany, setting mine permanently on edge.
I was sick of it, disgusted with him, the shake in his hand when the bennies and booze washed out, the glittery-eyed insistence that I’m going to get my head together, I’m serious, bro, and there’s only one person who can help me do that, only one, I’m bringing her south, telling you, a one-way ticket this time and watch, just watch, our feet won’t touch the bloody ground . . .
Seven
Tiny angels drift out of velvet black. You never expect them to be so small. You imagine soft beating wings and a silent hovering, a porcelain-faced boy or girl with the eyes of your first love. Yet angels are tiny, Duke, and legion, flurrying like the snow dancing round my head. This is why I have always loved winter, its holiness, the profound silences. Great distances. Great space.
Others are watching. I feel their eyes. They peer from the three Mercedes stopped and purring in the lay-by. The cars were waiting at the bottom of the plane steps when we landed at Glasgow.
Petersen was delighted. I watched the strange, caterpillar moving of his lips, like a silent prayer. Oh God above, I give thanks to my outrageous fortune, to the opulence that awaits my big arse and clammy hands. It is touching, how he appears not to take providence for granted.
Everyone but Akira, Erin and have remained in the cars. I am trying to ignore my niece, standing behind me in the boneyard cold. She’s loiters like some kind of spooky Jungian archetype. I sense her even when she’s thousands of miles away, when I hear again the static rush and theremin-like undulations of the short wave as she moves hertz by hertz along the bands of her Vega 206, never settling on one station too long. Passing through, an addict of empty space.
‘I have never known silence like this,’ says Akira. ‘I can almost touch it.’ He is standing very still and looking up, a sentry who might have been here forever. The snow is starting to lessen, allowing a milky swelling in the sky gradually to reveal itself as a huge and looming half-moon. I feel unexpectedly relieved. A full moon would have been far too much.
‘Not far now, Johnny,’ he says, the only man who calls me Johnny, the ‘y’ stretched out like an ‘ee’.
‘No. Not far.’
Above Akira’s shoulder the outline of a mountain becomes more visible as the snow clouds further fade.
Another sentry, guarding the west.
For a giddy and fleeting moment, I am convinced that I have become the mountain and it has become me. I feel an enormous pressing of geological time and memory, and an awareness, at the same time, of the mountain’s quietly respectful acknowledgement of my own hinterland.
‘A true place of Zen,’ says Akira, a man of perspicacity. He can see the temple in the wilderness.
‘It sure is beautiful,’ says Erin. Her voice is almost in my ear. I did not hear her creeping closer. The sure grates on me, the mid-Atlantic drawl cheapening the moment. I am no more the mountain.
‘Why on earth did you move away?’ she adds.
‘Some
times I ask myself the same question.’
‘It’s stunning.’ She raises her phone. Takes a picture with the flash on that makes Akira turn and look at her for a moment before getting back into the car. ‘This would make quite a scene.’ She takes another, flash-less picture and is suddenly business-like. ‘We need to go now.’
I watch her hurry to the Mercedes behind mine. The picture now taken, the moment can be re-run as required. This one might merit a longer pause on the slideshow: it sure is beautiful . . .
Her car moves forward then stops. Likely a word from Erin, the driver told to wait for us to move off first. She suspects, not unreasonably, that unless the headlights are on me at all times, I may flee into the darkness. It is deepening, the moon fading as the snow blows in again, harder now, the angels now dancing furiously, my hair a flyaway Christopher Lee in The Wicker Man.
I’m smiling.
I open my mouth wide. The cold makes me cough as I breathe deeply, emptying my lungs of the last of the recycled plane air. The flight seems improbably distant. I’d slept, finally, waking to the orange lights of Glasgow strung below me. Immediately, I was catapulted into this high-speed drive west to Argyll, a rollercoaster eventually bringing nausea. Hence the stop in this lay-by.
I get back in and slump in the seat.
In and out of sleep.
My father’s ghost voice as Akira leans us in and around the bends. Helluva road. If yer goin’ to be sick I’ll stop the car . . .
I wake to the blue and red LEDs of the car’s interior displays, the buttons to press to open the drinks cabinet and the white-outlined numbers on the phone, unknown switches with strange hieroglyphs that make me think of kanji characters on Tokyo buildings. I feel a pang of nostalgia that I put down to alcohol. Tokyo seems impossibly distant and Akira has been driving for days, across land and sea, thousands of miles, hands always at ten to two on the steering wheel . . .
It is just after seven am.
I tell myself there is a faint lightening in the east, where the darker patches of unseen mountains meet open sky. In truth, it is as dark as when we landed at Glasgow. I stave off the hangover with another drink. Cotton-mouthed, I tell Akira not to stop until we reach the top of the pass above Inveran. I want the last of a more distant perspective before I plunge down, down, down . . .
The Accidental Recluse Page 8