Then there was The Director. A man of random gnomic utterances which stopped conversation dead. In a later episode, he placed an Oscar on the table, a talking point that nobody talked about.
‘He even wears a checked shirt,’ I complained.
‘Why have you started wearing checked shirts?’ said Anna. ‘And those trousers. You’re not the army type.’
‘I just mean—’
‘What!’ She slammed her hand down on the counter. ‘What does it mean? What does it matter?’
‘It matters to me.’
‘Look.’ The anger had instantly evaporated. ‘People think you’re strange anyway.’
Such tender cruelties, I thought.
‘So who cares? You’ve got the big hit.’ This with a little pat on my cheek, a mother showing affection to a child. She hummed a little tune as she bent to Erin, mussing up the little girl’s hair.
A cinematic odyssey . . . A new departure in film . . . New wave meets old wave and swamps the screen. Don Heelpen gushed about the spooky meld of the traditional, three-act arc and the avant garde.
Jump cuts and flashbacks, breaking the 180-degree axis, we pushed it just far enough. We let the film flow and we stopped it dead, a ratatat of dialogue followed by the emptiest of deep-focus compositions: Burns by the sea, only the sound of the wind, the camera held on him for a full minute before moving left to follow an oystercatcher picking at the shore. Leo framed big landscapes with saturated dream-colours and oppressive, candle-lit close-ups. We stirred schmaltz with disquiet, enough of Redford’s beauty to keep the housewives coming, cool enough to bring the hipsters. Here was the sentiment and the harshness of Burns: the dreamer and the player.
Don’t take my word for it, read the reviews.
* * *
With multiple A Man’s a Man nominations for the forty-first Academy Awards, off we flew to Los Angeles in April 1969.
It’s hard not to be the bumpkin on your first visit to La-La Land. From Iowan, wannabe Monroes to yes ma’am Texan charmers and stunted Celts like me whose eyelids are sweating, the instant reaction is wide-eyed delight. The Californian sun makes it irresistible. Everything is utterly possible.
In some kind of nervous reaction, I retreated into an odd, imperial nostalgia. I ditched the combats and checked shirt and adopted an Our Man in Havana style, the Yanks all gee-whizz delight at my living up to the eccentric billing, while I impressed myself with how quickly I was able to ruin a linen suit. The concierge at the Chateau Marmont hid it well but when I glanced back he was smirking.
Anna, Erin and I had a suite. We looked south over Sunset, Los Angeles a sea of white lights. The bumpkin was reminded of Halloween childhoods, an epic field filled with turnip lanterns. Day and night the city hummed as if everyone was talking at the same time, now and then the disorientation of a siren always followed by others. My heart beat more quickly the whole time I was there.
Anna was repelled and fascinated. She was a silhouette on the terrace, staring into the blood and purples of an apocalyptic sunset, white-cotton elegance in a Hollywood Boulevard bar, blue eyes peering over the rims of her sunglasses as she sipped another Daiquiri.
She didn’t want to come to the ceremony. Three times she would stare instead at the television to see Fatty, Leo and I make the surreal clamber onstage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Best Cinematography, Best Film, Best Director. I eulogised about the old man and Duke, milked the rags to riches and babbled something embarrassing about the Scottish Dream, whatever that might be, being just as powerful as the American. The audience lapped it up.
I was still wearing the linen suit. In some pictures I hold an Oscar in the air with sweat stains under my arms. With Fatty in his country-pile tweeds and Leo in an oversized tux we looked almost subversive. The New York Times actually called our appearances a sly, countercultural statement.
Warners didn’t mind.
It was after 2am at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The curious were now drunk, the long-drunk now emotional, some offering a few lines of Burns with their compliments, memorised just in case.
‘They’re offering a two-movie deal and fifteen per cent,’ said Fatty. ‘I said we’d think about it.’
The reaction of Leo and I was both instantaneous and similar, a frantically whispered questioning of his sanity.
‘Relax, dear boys. The game’s afoot. Let’s see what MGM have to offer, yes?’
He returned later with a fresh Warners offer for three movies, twenty per cent and guarantee of the final cut.
We made it back to the Marmont around five, the first of the dawn streaking the east. We talked about the movies we’d make and the compounds we’d build in the Hollywood Hills, our Malibu beach houses. So much was possible, but you never see the high-water mark until it recedes.
‘Quite a night for you, boys.’ Anna’s words were slurred, eyes raw. Glass in hand, she swayed at the terrace door then walked carefully across to drape her arms around me. ‘I was watching you up there and all I could think about was Duke. I could see him, Johnny, right there, beside you. He’d have been so proud.’
Leonid raised a glass. ‘To Duke.’
‘To Duke.’
And we lifted our hands to a sky become blood-orange, the thrum of the city and the ever-wailing sirens.
‘What a god-awful place this is,’ said Anna. ‘He would have loved it, he would have absolutely loved it.’
Later, after Fatty staggered back to his room I told Leo that A Man’s a Man was Duke’s film, that I had found the script and storyboard. He laughed at me and we never spoke of it again. I sat on the terrace and watched those lurid LA skies. I thought about the film, the psychedelic bridge sequence where Burns sees the devil on the other side and makes the decision to cross.
* * *
It was a major sorrow I didn’t enjoy all that followed. Solemn John Calvin, what a gift he made of self-loathing.
Yir nae better than ye should be . . . Nae need for art, God gave you everything you need. My favourite? Him, famous? Ah knew his faither. I decided that my father’s greatest achievement was to cut loose from all that folk-guilt. He loved to trot out those bleak aphorisms, always deriding them with a mocking, dissident laugh. I should have screamed them out the window and given the press clustered on the pavement below something to write about.
Sometimes there was only one of them, more often a few, a constant presence for months after we returned from LA. The sense of siege was corrosive. I did a couple of interviews, Sunday profiles, but still the door-stepping, the ‘What’s next?’ questions and the usual gone before.
‘What about you and Anna?’
She retreated again, refusing to leave the house. Back flew the birds. Anna drew the outlines and Erin coloured them in. I had dreams that the house was filled with thousands of these pictures, fluttering on the walls, covering the floor as they wafted down from stacks of yellowing paper.
Eventually, I think I went insane. I can even date it.
21st July 1970. Groggy with summer London night sweats, I woke again to the squirrel at 5.30am on the dot.
For days, it had been the same. A scurry on the bay window roof and then an odd whirring, like an old football rattle. I shouted Shut up! and the furry little face appeared at the top of the window, upside down as it peered at me. That night, I’d even dreamed about it. ‘Meester Jackson,’ the squirrel was saying, a creepy, Peter Lorre syrup of a voice. ‘They’re fakes. Loook.’ And it gently took my Oscars and bit off their heads, sadly showing me the polystyrene . . .
‘Spot on!’ I shouted. Authenticity would always be just beyond my grasp. At least I’d finally had the sense to ditch the absurd linen suit, returning to my army surplus combat trousers and red- and black-checked shirt. Yet there’s Beatnik chic and there’s comic lumberjack.
I was always a beat out.
‘Always a beat,’ I shouted at the squirrel, which shook its head and vamoosed. I’m sure it shook its head.
A few moments later,
I started to hear singing from the room below, Wee Willie Winkie. I started to sing along, louder and louder, until silenced by a sudden banging at the door.
‘Thanks a lot, Johnny. She’s terrified!’
A small, shrieking voice was now repeating the big bad wolf, the big bad wolf . . .
When I went downstairs they were sitting at the kitchen table. They looked me up and down with almost preternatural calmness, sharing a glance that I fretted about for the rest of the day.
I stepped closer, my heart sinking as I again saw the pictures of birds. I went through to the lounge and tried to ignore the bottle on the sideboard. I slumped down in the red pod chair that Duke and Anna had bought in another lifetime and looked at the Oscars I had placed on each knee.
‘Whadaya reckon?’ I asked them, and had the sudden certainty that I inhabited a troubled, faraway place.
Soon after, we made the necessary move. Wendlebury Manor was a big old pile in Buckinghamshire. Fatty had mentioned it in passing, some bankrupt cousin having put it up for sale, five hundred acres of woods and parkland. The house sat in the centre of this expanse, the land so flat and the trees so distant that you had a ten minute warning of any trespass on foot. Only one or two for a car but that could be controlled – a gated entrance, two security guards.
The space was instantly relieving. No more the sense of siege. Anna’s birds flew off and she took up painting, as if all those sketches she had drawn for Erin to colour in had triggered a deeper interest.
My old Fisherman’s Blues project became a new obsession. I let Fatty lead on Breda Pictures. He mixed the mainstream with the art-house and from 1970 to 1975 put together a series of hits: Down in the Valley, A Winter’s Fail and Just One More Day. Yet the kudos mostly came my way.It irritated him, and I offered no demur. Someone called me the puppet master in his mansion.
The manor had a ridiculous number of rooms, some of which I must have entered only once. Anna set up a studio in the smallest of the five reception rooms. She bought dozens of prints by Munch, Picasso, Kandinsky, copying them, learning by imitation. Like the photography before, she hid her own efforts from me.
I would sit at the table in the adjoining kitchen and had the connecting door removed so we could see each other as we worked.
I sensed an awkward amusement from our infrequent visitors. Their uncertainty about the exact nature of the relationship between Anna and I wrong-footed them. They awaited a big reveal that I was no more sure about than they.
Later, we had a narrow glass conservatory built along the south wing. Anna would paint at one end, ten metres away from my desk at the other. Again, we faced each other as we worked, a sofa equidistant between us. Our most intimate moments occurred when we sat there side by side, looking out across the vast garden; a neutral space we needed more than we probably realised.
‘Imagining just sitting here,’ she said. ‘For years. Like a time-lapse sequence, the skies all changing.’ In the distance, Erin was spinning round and round, arms outstretched. Then she fell over and lay still. ‘She’ll keep on spinning, growing up, getting older. Never moving from that spot.’
‘We’ll get old quick enough.’
‘Do you remember the big house past Esha Bay, the whitewashed one where the windows were all dark?’
‘The one with the old car parked in the garden, wasn’t it a Model T Ford?’
‘There was a replica cannon as well, facing the sea. And a set of broken swings. If you walked along the shore you could climb over the rocks into the garden. There was a fence but it’d fallen down.’
‘I think it’d been abandoned for years.’
‘Don’t think so. I saw someone at a window once. He was looking at me. An old man, ancient.’
‘You sure about that?’
‘I don’t think we leave anywhere. Not really. When we’re dead and someone moves in we’ll still be sitting here. Erin will still be spinning. They’ll hear us, now and then. What a racket we made.’
This inspired the final scene of Fisherman’s Blues. Morag sits outside her cottage, the skies shifting and the garden mouldering, her son’s trike becoming rustier. As she stares at the sea, waiting for the long-lost Makepeace to appear on the horizon, she is the one thing that doesn’t change.
* * *
We began filming in early 1972 and didn’t wrap until late 1973. An epic shoot, the Warners brass across from LA three times as the budget spiralled. I had second and third units scouring Scotland for the ideal fishing village. I obsessed about the perfect lighthouse we never found. The single biggest cost was the trawler transported from Hull and installed at Borehamwood, which meant an insanely expensive raising of the Studio One roof. We started to encroach on other productions, aggravating everyone with a stop-start schedule as I re-wrote the script as we went along.
Blues bombed. Rarely has so much expectation been met with such near-offended opprobrium. In later times, a chattering fax would announce the arrival of the latest review. Nervously, I’d watch it emerge, line by line. Back then, it was a knock on the door of the reception room as the mail was delivered. I remember the day that Roger Ebert’s review was handed to me.
We start with something very basic: why is ‘Fisherman’s Blues’ so excruciating to watch? The ludicrous scenes roll endlessly, one after the other like the over-lit waves. So much to create so little. This film is millions of dollars thrown into the air and one of the most indulgent examples of movie-madness I have seen . . .
Anna was more devastated than me by the hostility of the reviews. She thought of the film as hers. Early on, she saw herself as Morag, blessing or berating the midnight re-writes which I took back to the studio the next day. She adored the final film. She saw authenticity where others, I think it was Time magazine, saw nothing but disorder, melodrama and inconsistency.
‘Fuck ’em!’
We were in the conservatory, our voices almost drowned out by hammering rain. A few weeks had passed since Blues had appeared in the cinemas and sunk like the Makepeace. We were drunk.
‘No, I can understand it,’ Anna said. ‘That was my grief. Why should anyone else believe what they didn’t feel?’
‘Maybe if I had told it better.’
‘You told it beautifully. Apart from . . . ’
‘What?’
‘Maybe it could have been a bit shorter?’
‘You said it was just right! Fatty and Leo said that—’
‘Joking, I’m joking!’ She was smiling as she poured a refill. ‘You know what we need to do?’
‘What’s that?’
‘Burn the critics.’
I had a folder of reviews. We huddled under an umbrella and walked down to the barbecue pit at the bottom of the garden. Before I was allowed to set fire to the folder I had to stand in the rain.
‘Take your clothes off.’
‘I’m not taking my clothes off! What if Erin comes back?’
‘She’s at school. This is a purging, it should be . . . what’s the word, multidimensional.’
This was a reference to what Philip French called the multidimensional awfulness of Fisherman’s Blues.
‘Don’t take the piss!’
‘Sorry, couldn’t resist.’ She giggled and sipped. ‘Now. Off with them.’
I grabbed the glass from her, downed the rest of the whisky and bumbled out of my clothes. I had to stand with my arms outstretched and repeat what she said. I had a sudden memory of a similar scene from years ago, Anna standing behind me in Kilburn with her hands across my eyes.
‘I do here and the by and the very now.’
‘I do here and the by and the very now.’
‘Set my angst free.’
‘Angst?’
‘Say it!’
‘Set my angst freeeee!’
She held a lighter to the folder of reviews and stood staring at the flames.
‘Oi, what now?’
She turned to me and started laughing. ‘Cold, is it?’
I
quickly covered my crotch. ‘Little bit.’
‘You said it . . . ’
I joined her under the umbrella. I found myself bending down to kiss her. She recoiled instantly, hands on my shoulders. She seemed more than startled, almost frightened. Then, abruptly, she kissed me back.
Soon after, we went up to the manor and made love for the first time in years.
For several weeks afterwards there was a lightness to her I had forgotten existed. I glimpsed the poised woman I had met on the day she appeared at the cottage to interview the Breda Boys. She let me come to her when Erin was asleep, a few times. I would slip out with the first of the dawn. We even went on holiday, two weeks of courtship and caution in Mexico. Sometimes I could almost convince myself her gaze finally rested on me, that it hadn’t slipped past to Duke.
Then, in quick succession, came the photographs. The first was in The Sun, a shot of Anna and I embracing in the rain while the reviews burned. My nakedness was covered, reader discretion assured, with a large black X. The photographer must have been hiding in the trees. The image was captioned Fisherman Blue. I had no idea why they waited so long to publish it.
But it was less this first photograph which Anna reacted to than the episode which led to the second.
Exit the monkey.
Charlie the Chimp died at London Zoo. Before his time, the showbiz life having taken an early toll. I pictured him in his little coffin, the bowler hat they made him wear in the PG Tips advert clasped to his chest.
Anna didn’t see the humour. She was genuinely, oddly, upset, and insisted Breda Pictures issue a statement. I could see Fatty’s eyebrows rise as I dictated it down the phone. It is with great sadness that we have learned of the death of our friend and comrade, Charlie the Chimp. A true star of the screen, he leaves us with one last raspberry and a toothy grin . . .
The BBC took the opportunity to re-run every Breda Boys film. Anna kept Erin off school so they could watch them together, curled up on the sofa with the curtains drawn. As I listened to Anna tell Erin all about her father I realised that she had been looking for a way back to Duke ever since that day in the rain. Six-year-old Erin started to feel a loss for someone she never knew, her own way back to Duke an insistence that Charlie the Chimp was buried at Wendlebury.
The Accidental Recluse Page 20