Virtue
Page 25
A man who makes cups of tea. A man who saves you from skinheads and makes you cups of tea. I could get used to this. Well, maybe not the skinhead bit, but it’s nice to know he can do that if needs must. ‘Okay,’ I snuffle. Go over and curl up on the sofa. Yawn.
‘When’s Harriet due back?’ he asks as he fills up the kettle. Looks at the pile of mugs on the draining board, pulls a face and eventually selects the one he thinks is the cleanest.
‘I don’t know.’ I yawn again. ‘I think I should get some sleep, you know. I feel really crappy.’
Mike puts a teabag in the mug, finds the milk, spoons some sugar in. ‘I don’t take sugar,’ I protest.
‘You need sugar,’ he replies firmly, ‘you’ve had a shock.’
‘Is that something your granny used to say?’
Blue eyes look up and smile at me. ‘Yes. How did you guess?’
‘Never mind.’
He makes the tea, brings it to me, sits down in the armchair. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Like I’ve just had a big bang on the head.’
He nods. ‘You’ll probably feel like that for a couple of days.’
‘Listen,’ I say, ‘I really think I should get some shut-eye.’
‘Okay.’ He makes no move to leave. I realise that he’s planning to stay.
‘Look, there’s really no need for you to hang around.’
‘Bollocks,’ he says. ‘I’m not leaving someone with concussion on her own.’
‘I’ll be fine.’
‘And if you’re not, it’ll be all my fault. I’ll hang around until your flatmate gets back. It’s the least I can do.’
I take a single sip of tea, realise that I’m not going to make it through to the end of the mug. Hold it out to him. ‘I’m not going to finish this. Do you want it?’
‘That mug’s filthy,’ he says.
‘You really are a policeman, aren’t you?’
‘Don’t get lippy, son.’
‘I’m not your son.’
‘Listen,’ he says, ‘you’d better go to sleep. And if you don’t do it in an orderly fashion, I’ll have no recourse but to arrest you.’
He picks up the blankey that hides the big burn hole in the back of the sofa where Harriet spilled lighter fuel and then dropped a cigarette a couple of years ago. Sees what’s underneath, rolls his eyes and says, ‘I think you two need some help around here.’
I put my head down on a cushion, say, ‘A woman’s touch?’
‘Not on the balance of current evidence,’ he replies. ‘Do you want the cat?’
‘No thanks. He’ll only try to sit on my head.’
And then he shakes the blankey out over me and, to my amazement, tucks it in. No one’s ever tucked me in in my life. I pull it up around my chin, eyelids already dropping. Just before I slide from the world, I manage to remember my manners. ‘Mike?’ I mumble into the darkness behind my eyelids.
A creak as he sits back down in the armchair. ‘What?’
‘Thanks.’
A single word follows me down into the underworld. ‘’S’kay.’
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Meteor Maid
Search:
Godiva Fawcett
Sources:
All
From:
1969–72
Publication:
What’s on at the movies
Byline:
Ken Griswald
Date:
18 05 69
Headline:
New Talent: Godiva Fawcett
Only just nineteen years old, and Godiva Fawcett has already packed enough into her life to make a movie of her own. By now, we’re all familiar with the tale of how she landed the lead in Stephen Swift’s take on Martin Stack’s bestseller of a couple of years back, The Power Machine [out this week: see review, p.17], as the result of a chance meeting in a coffee shop in London, England. As producer Leonard Wildenstein tells it, ‘I had been over there a week conducting auditions and nothing seemed to have gone right. I had a very clear picture of how Melanie should look and act, but although I had seen dozens of very fine actresses, none had the exact qualities I was looking for. Melanie has a special combination of innocence and sophistication, and it was proving to be very hard to find a real-life woman who could combine those qualities in the right proportions. Melanie is a true English rose, and I had dreamed that England was where I would find her.’
And then he dropped by the Starlight Coffee Bar, and, in true Hollywood style, the Starlight produced a star. ‘She brought me my coffee,’ continues Wildenstein, ‘and the moment I clapped eyes on her I knew I had found my Melanie. I offered her the part on the spot. She was so ladylike and dignified, and yet had such warmth, such a glow, to her, that I knew it would work. I had wanted someone completely unknown in the States, but I never imagined I’d find someone who was completely unknown in her own country as well!’
Others who have worked with her on the movie are equally enthused. Fawcett says that working alongside co-star Charles Hollis was ‘The single most thrilling experience of my life. I’ve worshipped him from afar all my life, practically, and I never dreamed for a minute that I would actually meet him!’ Veteran director Stephen Swift is, she says, ‘without doubt the wisest man I’ve ever met’, and the director is quick to return the compliment. ‘I have to say, I wasn’t sure, when Leonard produced this kid, if we were doing the right thing. She had no acting experience, after all, and seemed pretty green to me. But we spent a couple of days shut up in a hotel going over the part, and by the end of that, I was convinced. The girl has talent, I can tell you that!’
But what is she like, this lass from the old country? So far, there have been few opportunities to find out: Wildenstein and Swift have kept her firmly under wraps, and, though lucky residents of Malibu have been able to see a bit more of her during the filming of Kurt Hamilton’s Beach Bunny Massacre, due out later this year, we the public have had few chances to judge for ourselves. She’s certainly made an impression among Hollywood’s glitterati. Hamilton fondly speaks of her as ‘my little lollipop’. Veteran actor Jeff O’Malley, soon to star opposite her in Harman and Cohen’s modern western, Bruck, calls her ‘Talented, extremely talented. I was unsure at first about what I could get from someone so young, but let me tell you – she’s already taught me a thing or two!’
Wildenstein, one of her greatest fans, says that she is ‘an old head on young shoulders. Godiva may look peaches-and-cream, but underneath is a steely will to succeed, an ambition and a willingness to have a go at pretty much anything that I am sure will carry her through. I truly believe that this girl is capable of anything’. Lara Siskovich, co-star in Beach Bunny Massacre, says, only half-jokingly, ‘I truly hate Godiva. She loves the camera and the camera loves her. When she’s on the screen, the rest of us simply don’t stand a chance.’
Meantime, she’s been making quite a splash on the party scene. Young and inexperienced she may be, but this girl’s innate charm has turned quite a few heads. Out here for under a year, she has already been linked with such members of Hollywood’s aristocracy as Marlon Cambridge, Joe Visconti, George Nightingale and Richard Loudon. Sophisticates in the know, it seems, are queuing up for a bit of quality time with our Miss Fawcett. An inside source says, ‘It’s amazing. The girl has such power it’s frightening. It seems that all she has to do is smile and grown men fall to their knees.’
I caught up with Godiva at the modest three-bed hacienda-style house she has been renting in Beverly Hills for the past six months while she decides ‘where I want to make my home’. The house is a combination of easy California charm and a very British kind of elegance; between shoots, she says, she has been shopping, filling her house with antiques and knick-knacks, creating a home-from-home to replace the one she lost at such an early age. ‘I need to have beautiful things about me, Ken,’ she says in that quaint and impeccable British accent that has won her so many admirers. ‘It’s not just that I’m a
n artist and need the tranquillity of art about me, it’s because, although I’ve adopted America as my home and love everything about it, I’m English to the core. The English have a very strong aesthetic sense, as you can tell from the interiors of our homes, and my mother, particularly, had a wonderful eye for interiors, which I’ve inherited.’
Over the very English ritual of afternoon tea, served by the pool in a delightfully shady hibiscus bower, she continues, ‘This has just been the most amazing time for me. I’m still pinching myself. People have been so very, very kind. I still can’t believe how much they seem to have taken me to their hearts.’ She gazes at me with those famous emerald eyes, and I can understand, myself, how this child-woman, with her maturity way beyond her tender years, can have cast such a magical spell over so many of Tinseltown’s harder hearts. She offers me an English muffin – ‘a little luxury from home’ – and says, ‘The thing is, there are so many more opportunities for a girl like me out here, and I just love the people, but at heart I am still the plain little English girl I always was. Sometimes I just long for those cool, damp mornings, the mist on the fields, the great oak trees, the smallness of everything. There are times when I long for a good old-fashioned winter evening toasting crumpets over an open fire. It’s the simple things I miss.’
So if she had the chance to go back, would she take it? ‘I don’t know, I really don’t. I’m so happy here, and with the work I’m doing, I can’t see that it would make sense at the moment. Anyway,’ she says, and fixes me once again with those eyes, ‘tell me about yourself.’
This is typical, it seems, of Godiva. ‘She’s amazing,’ says my party source, ‘so little of the sort of ego you find in your average movie star. Always wants to know everything about everybody she meets, never wants to talk about herself. No wonder her popularity has skyrocketed!’
With difficulty, I get her back onto the subject in hand. Her new-found wealth must come as a bit of a shock to her, I say. ‘Well, yes and no. I was absolutely desperate when I met Leonard [Wildenstein], doing anything I could to get by. But though everything went after my parents’ tragic death, I grew up in a good family, and I still remember what it was like to have lovely things about me.’ Her eyes mist over as she remembers her happy childhood. ‘They were lovely, my parents. They taught me all my values. I still miss them, think about them every day. They weren’t grand folk, they were simple, good people and I like to think that I take after them. Material things are lovely, of course, but they could never replace real things, like love, and goodness, and a happy family.’
How is she getting on on the set of Beach Bunny Massacre? ‘Wonderful. Hilarious. I was nervous at first about showing so much flesh, but everyone makes it so easy I can’t allow modesty to get the better of me.’ It’s quite a departure from the part of Melanie DuChamp, I say. ‘Ooh, I know.’ She giggles. ‘Melanie’s such a natural lady, so dignified and accomplished even though she’s only young; it’s been a real challenge getting into the mind of someone like Sandee Carlton after that. She’s a typical Californian girl: all fun and frolics, maybe a bit superficial, but good at heart.
And it’s been great getting to act all scared! Very difficult when you know that what’s on the other side of the camera is Kurt and his whoopee cushions!’
So there you have it. Godiva Fawcett: lady, child, star of the future. She may have come from nowhere, but I predict that she won’t be going back there. We’ll be seeing a lot more of this actress before she’s done.
Search:
Godiva Fawcett
Sources:
All
From:
1969–72
Publication:
Variety
Byline:
Beebee Sachs
Date:
11 31 69
Headline:
Review: Beach Bunny Massacre (AA). Dir. Kurt Hamilton.
Good old Kurt Hamilton, King of Schlock. He’s never made a good movie yet, but they never fail to entertain, not least with the timing of their release. After the arthouse success of Ski Chalet Killers in the summer, the eternal joker brings us Beach Bunny Massacre, a stabfest set in and around the cultural wasteland of Malibu. It’s all the usual stuff: cheap film stock, inadequate lighting, unknown actors mugging to camera, largely female cast whose primary talents seem to consist of a combination of embonpoint and the ability to stuff both fists in their mouths at once.
As usual, plot consists of a thinly disguised excuse to get a girl, make her wet, make her clothes fall off, make her run. This reviewer tends to find this level of sophistication a bit heavy going after the first ten minutes, and after thirty, I would scarcely have been awake but for one little thing: Godiva Fawcett, the little English lovely who raised all the hoo-ha earlier in the year when she turned in a not-half-bad showing in The Power Machine. Aptly named after a lady who lost all her clothes in medieval England, this girl spent practically every frame in a bikini in various stages of decrepitude. From the moment of her first appearance, to her last little vignette with a big rubber ball after the action was over, I was glued upright in my seat. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it. The girl was awful. The girl stank like eight-day-old fish. Her attempt at an American accent was so laughable it was contagious. Her reactions were so wooden, so scripted, so utterly risible you wondered if she was taking a rise from the director. Fawcett? Force-it, more like. Natalie Wood looks lifelike by comparison.
In other words, perfect casting. This absurd tale of bikini wax and screaming bimbos has all the hallmarks of another Hamilton cult classic. See it in a fleapit, see it with a quart of tequila, see it if you dare. Word has it that Fawcett has already landed another part in Stephen Swift’s upcoming wartime drama Calais, Mon Amour. I can hardly wait for them to storm the beaches.
Search:
Godiva Fawcett
Sources:
All
From:
1969–72
Publication:
The Moviegoer
Byline:
None
Date:
02 15 70
Headline:
‘Surprise’ Oscar nominee rates chances
Godiva Fawcett, the outsider who has come from the back to be a surprise nominee for this year’s Best Supporting Actress Oscar, has been speaking to the Moviegoer about her chances of winning. ‘I’m just stunned to have been nominated,’ says the British twenty–year-old, whose more recent role in Beach Bunny Massacre received universal brickbats on opening a couple of months ago. ‘I haven’t got a hope of winning, not with the sort of talent I’m up against. I’m only thrilled that I’ll get the chance to go to the ceremony at all.’
You said it, Godiva.
Search:
Godiva Fawcett
Sources:
All
From:
1969–72
Publication:
Information Weekly
Byline:
Staff Reporter
Date:
06 28 70
Headline:
Not so much amour on location
Rumours reach us that all is not peachy on the location shoot of Calais, Mon Amour, where Miriam Baylor is kicking up rough about favouritism. Youthful blonde co-star and recent Best Supporting Actress loser, Godiva Fawcett, it seems, is copping all those little on-set luxuries so beloved of the thespian community, and Miriam is spitting mad. ‘I wouldn’t mind,’ she was overheard saying to a dining companion in a local French eatery the other night, ‘but we all know her deal was finalised in the restrooms at Ciro’s.’
What can she mean?
Search:
Godiva Fawcett
Sources:
All
From:
1969–72
Publication:
Fish-Eye Lens: the alternative movie magazine
Byline:
Orange John
Date:
02 13 71
Headline:
Go-diva!
What is it about a British accent that makes otherwise able men lose their heads altogether? We’ve just seen an early print of Stephen Swift’s Calais, Mon Amour, and the thing that beats this correspondent is this: how come Godiva Fawcett? The girl’s pretty, but there are thirty thousand girls as pretty in the Beverly Hills area alone. She can act, a little bit, as long as no one asks her to stretch herself beyond the two faces – haughty duchess putting down retainer and soppy duchess bringing soup to farm cottages – she’s at home with. What she has to offer beyond that beats the hell out of me. One thing’s for sure: after a brief vogue in the early months of last year, we can fairly much say that the girl has turned to box-office poison. Calais is reputed to have run over budget to the tune of $2m, mostly because of extra film costs run up by the need to reshoot vital scenes, and previews suggest that the film is likely to get a week in mainstream auditoriums at most. I for one won’t be sorry if this chick disappears from our screens altogether; that De Havilland simper is beginning to make me want to reach for my Six Shooter.