by Rose Tremain
The first thing Will told me about Mordecai – on that first day we met, my birthday – was ‘don’t expect him to direct.’ I stared at Will. Our bedroom scenes were still some weeks distant, but prior to them I had been banking on a little ‘guidance’ from Eyelids. Will then related how, in 1975, Eyelids had cast him as Ulrick Voss in a film he proposed to make of Patrick White’s justly famous (but in my view dead difficult) novel, Voss. Will invoked his education-deprived childhood to explain his confusion with this man (the casting was moronic, of course. Will Nichols is far too gross a person to play Voss, even in a weightless after-life) and went grovelling to Mordecai for a bit of direction. Mordecai was having one of his quivering and quaking days. They were in southern Australia in temps of 100° fahrenheit (I can’t do this centigrade thing; I’m much too old to learn) and Mordecai’s brain was blank white. He told poor old Will to read the book five more times (448pp. in my King Penguin edition and Will had one week), went off to have his morning enema and would not brook the subject again. Luckily – or perhaps in consequence of this sad scene – the film was so excruciatingly bad and so catastrophically over-budget, it was put into turnaround half way through and never re-started. Will caught sunstroke that year and in his fever believed he was getting nearer to understanding the hauntings of Ulrick Voss. Will’s life is full of little such ironies.
*
I’m a bit off track, I see. The course says: ‘Imagine your subject as a Roman Road (sic caps). Its foundation must be your understanding and, except where absolutely necessary, you must try not to veer from it.’ I don’t know if information about Will and Mordecai is ‘absolutely necessary’, but I think it might be. (I hate the word ‘veer’. There was a boy at school called Vere Pickersgill, whom I loathed.) Pearl Barley’s just arrived to do me out. She says all this writing I’m closeted with is making me deadly pale. Better phone Dougie and see if there’s a little role-ette for me in a hot clime.
*
I had expected to dislike Will Nichols. The fame and success of other actors can bring on neck rashes as badly as the virulent tomato. And who was Steve Nias compared to Golden Will, the lad from the Rhonda turned superstar? A nothing. An ‘SS’ in Dougie’s vocab. (I’ll explain ‘SS’ later.) But then – and this is the key to the events which followed – who was George Villiers, later Duke of Buckingham, compared to the king himself? A bit of trumped-up gentry with elongated calves. A hitherto also-ran at the court. Until, that is, the king singled him out. Until the king made him his confidant, his favourite, his own Saint John. With his stubborn Scottish hand, King James parted the sea of court bathers and gave Buckingham the Navy. Henceforth he was dressed, metaphorically anyway, in sapphires.
At the end of that first afternoon in Mordecai’s boardroom, just as I was about to sally home to water my cucumbers, Welsh Will invited me to tea. Mumbling something about needing to get to know each other better ‘before the schedules start to bite’, he shepherded me into his chauffeur-driven Jag and I was whisked off to Claridge’s. (Will is a tax exile now and has no home in England other than Claridge’s, which he treats exactly as if he owned it all.)
In his sumptuous suite, decorated in remarkably subtle shades of pale lemon and oyster grey, he ordered iced tea (a Californian fad I utterly loathe; it reminds me of my two years at Ipswich rep), then sent his secretary and other minions away and began to talk. He talked about exile. My eye wandered to an Indian rug which totally complemented the shades of the room, adding blue and a hint of white. I sort of waded in the lovely symmetries of the rug’s pattern while Will’s coal-silted voice rasped on about the loneliness of LA and Monaco. I was dying to ask Will where he’d found the rug (grey and yellow with blue and white are dead unusual colours in Indian wool work) but he was embarked on a monologue and I couldn’t get my question in.
Gradually, over the field of the rug, Will’s talking began to hang like a nearing thunderstorm. I stared up at him, sensing in his gaelic heart gigantic rain clouds. And lo, over the cragged hillsides of his cheeks, rivulets of tears began to beat down! I felt livid. Honestly, I did. Used. Acted upon in more ways than one. ‘God,’ I felt like saying, ‘if you understood the sacrifices us lesser mortals have to make for our so-called art (and the frigging Tiggo VOs aren’t the only ones) you wouldn’t be blubbing about fame’s adverbial negatives and qualifying clauses. You’d be admiring the management’s superlative flower arrangements and saying to yourself, fortunate me! Life had me marked out for rickets and TB and all I got was success.’
But I’m a soft-hearted person. I poured Will a brandy and said: ‘I’m terribly relieved you’re such a sensitive thing, Will. James I was a terribly sensitive man. And you know what he said about privilege? “The taller be the trees, the harder doth the wind blow on them.”’
Then I left. It was a hot day and my bloody birthday and I wasn’t going to waste it all on Will.
We were shooting the interiors at Pinewood. Designer, Geoff Hamm, had done a great job on the Theobalds sets and on Day One old Eyelids’ pearly veins were rippling with expectation. Dougie’s assistant, an intelligent, pretty person called Victoria, had sent flowers to my dressing room. I’d never had the flower treatment before and they put me in a lovely mood. Jon Markworthy, reputedly sulking in his tent like Achilles over script changes commanded by Eyelids, turned out not to be sulking at all and had done a nice new scene between me and Jimmie Henraes, the very dear actor playing Charles (later Charles I), the King’s son. So all seemed set fair. I was feeling just the right amount of mingled fear and excitement. Makeup did a super job on my bags and this and my black wig took five years off me, or more. Ready, steady, go, I thought. But then Will appeared. Eyes like fried eggs, capilliaries popping like a coral forest, tongue like old pipes. Terror and self-pity had led him back to demon drink, the whole process begun, I later learned, by the single brandy I had poured him at the Claridge.
Mordecai’s voice grew guttural with suppressed rage. Will threw up into one of Geoff Hamm’s supposedly Jacobean fireplaces and was laid to rest in his dressing room with Vichy water and Aludrox. The entire first day’s schedule was changed and I spent the day mainly unused, just feeling ancient inside my wig.
Will slept through most of the day, then woke up and ordered a bottle of claret, which was evidently brought him because at five, when he asked to see me, he’d already drunk half of it and was looking better.
He apologised to me. At least he had the grace to do this. He also apologised for crying in Claridge’s. Then he said, quite utterly out of the blue: ‘there’s only two who are going to funk it on this picture, Steve, and that’s you and me.’
I poured myself a glass of his Château Something and sat myself down in his idiotic rocking chair. (Will Nichols has this sentimental stick of furniture flown and carted to every dressing room and every caravan he’s ever worked from. It’s his ‘trademark’. You could have gone on a world cruise with the travelling money that rocking chair has consumed.) I said something reasonably lame about not intending to ‘funk it’, but he cut me off. ‘I,’ he said majestorily, ‘shall fail because I no longer have the courage or the voice a talent like mine requires, and you, Steve, will fail because this part has come to you ten years too late.’
*
I don’t know, but I think I’m in my stride a bit now. I think my writing’s got a bit better as this story’s gone on. That’s because I’m worrying less about Neasdale’s rules and just trying to remember what happened and put it down. There are still words I’ll have to alter, though, like ‘frigging’. Dougie phoned. The VO Clinic (as I call it) want me to do Buffi-pads nappy liners. Have I reached my nadir, prostitutionwise?
*
For as long as we were in England, I was able to steer clear of Will, except actually on set. The schedule (and the script) were redrafted to enable Will to ‘get into’ King James rather better than he appeared to be doing before the big key emotional scenes were asked of him. In Mordecai’s age-yellowed e
yes, you could visibly see thoughts about replacing him doing battle with dollar signs. Cut his losses now and re-start the movie in a year’s time with a new star? Keep Will on, stay more or less inside budget, take the risk he’d pull something out in the big scenes? Some mornings Eyelids would look used up, poor old thing, as if he’d died in the night, but then out would come some quavery instruction and the hopeless day would start.
Will was dead right about him not directing. I came to rely on Markworthy (and thank God he was around) to help me step by step through Buckingham. Markworthy is a very plain (I don’t mean ugly) and honest and kind man – a far cry indeed from the petulant Marxists masquerading as dramaturges I’ve had the misfortune to meet at play rehearsals in condemned warehouses. Markworthy seems to handle success as if it were Health Food. It’s made him extremely calm and sensible and you sense that his bowel movements are exquisite. I rather envy him. And we’ve stayed in touch. He and his wife, Jane, grow cucumbers in Barnes (a great bond, the growing of things) and I’ve entertained them on my rooftop.
But on. Markworthy didn’t come with us to Greece. (Let me just mention that the bit of the film we were to make in Greece was, in the script, meant to be made in Spain. Now, in most filmscripts, if the writer has been foolish enough to suggest Africa, India, Australia, Ceylon, Mexico, or anywhere parched-seeming, these bits are invariably made in Spain. In our case, we had a bonafide reason for shooting in Spain – namely that Buckingham and Prince Charles did actually go to Spain to woo the Infanta Donna Maria and are visited there (in the film, but not in the history books) by the king. But such is the pachydermic stupidity of this business that we lugged ourselves and our hardware an extra thousand miles, to dress one country up as another far closer to home. Perhaps we were getting money from the Greek Film Foundation, or whatever. I honestly have no idea. I didn’t even feel it was worth mentioning to Dougie, let alone to Alfie or Eyelids. Play the part, Nias, and shut up.)
*
I’m having a lot of trouble with my brackets. The problem is, quite a portion of my life seems to lie within this particular form of punctuation. Neasdale doesn’t seem to have a rule here.
*
So, no, Jon Markworthy couldn’t come with us to Greece, which was a blow for me. He was off on a talking tour of seventeen American cities, and we were flown to an arrid bit of Olympian hinterland we immediately christened Poxos. Poxos had one verdant edge – palms and cypress and yuccas and hibiscus and the sound of a bird or two, and hidden in the verdure a sublimely beautiful seventeenth-century palazzo, undergoing conversion to a 5-star hotel. It was called the Palladium Hotel, which gave rise to a series of panto gags among our irreverent group, brought on not merely by the name, but also by the fact that we weren’t actually staying at the Palladium; the Palladium was our location – the King of Spain’s alleged summer palace, the setting for our scenes with the infanta. (According to history, all these scenes took place in Madrid itself. Someone suggested Eyelids would pass on if forced to consume the oily paellas of that city.)
We were billeted – and this included our star, Will and his rocking chair – in a modern motel called the Eleusis, upon whose low-fashioned concrete walls the summer meltimi wind remorselessly blew, from six in the morning till dusk. At dusk, having boiled your mind to leaden grey meat all day, it died. You began to hear the birds and the crickets. You relaxed. The terrace of your favourite taverna would be bathed in last light. You began to drink.
Jimmie Henraes drank to forget Mary Powell (the actress playing Katherine, who wasn’t in the Spanisho-Greek sequences) and with whom he had fallen in love that day in Eyelids’ boardroom. (A love consummated so many times during the Pinewood days, poor old Jimmie could hardly stagger through a scene without having a lie-down.) Morton and Mordecai drank with some rotund Greek businessmen who had appeared in suits on Day One. Nettlefold and the crew drank Greek beer and spent a lot of time scorching the sparse local flora with untreated urine. Geoff Hamm developed piles and drank in solitary pain. And I, well I drank because I was there and because, by that time, I had fallen under the spell of Will Nichols.
I was so balanced, I thought. I knew what Will Nichols was – a failed genius, a lush, an egomaniac. But what he still had, and this I suppose was why he was still a star, was a terrible and irresistible charm. I say terrible because honestly I thought at forty-one I was immune to anything so peripheral as charm. I’m a wicked flirt, but I’m jolly hard to ensnare. I actually think my ensnarement stemmed from what Will had said about the two of us funking our roles. I’d become determined to prove him wrong – not only as far as I was concerned, but also as far as he was concerned. Can you understand this? I wanted to be a marvellous Buckingham, but I knew I could only do this if I helped Will (yes, helped him) to be a marvellous King James. And he sensed this in me. He sensed, right after the tea in Claridge’s, that I wanted to help him, to nanny him, to love him through it, if you like. And don’t forget, he was a lonely, exiled man, terrified out of his skull. He knew he’d get sweet nothing from Mordecai. He didn’t get on with Jon Markworthy, as I did. So he plonked himself on me. James’s obsessive need of Buckingham somehow became utterly mixed and mingled with Will’s need of me. Will’s psyche was just as plagued by imaginary enemies as the king’s. He saw enemies all around him. He had dreams of terrible persecutions and woundings. He needed a shrink, I suppose, and instead he found a soft heart – yours truly, Steve.
Pearly Barley has an amazing son, who calls himself T-Bone Jack. He wants to be a rock star, she says with a groan. He just arrived to collect her in a borrowed Cortina. Pearl B. insisted on showing him my roof garden, so I went up with them. T-Bone Jack has the hardest eyes and the tightest buttocks I’ve ever seen on any man, ethnic or no. Yet, surprisingly, his handshake was rather soft and moist. N.B. Must remember to expunge all random jottings (i.e. about T-Bone’s buttocks) when I commit this piece to my stone-age Olympia portable.
On the fifth day at Poxos, we reached one of our key scenes. Finding Buckingham’s absence from England unbearable, King James has crossed the treacherous water and arrives in Spain. Paying scant respect to the King of Spain (an excellent Mexican actor, Leoncio Iagos – known of course to us as ‘Iago’) or to the infanta (an American actress, Jane Bellamy, doing ineffectual battle with Spanish consonants), he strides in to Buckingham’s lavish suite of rooms and tells him he ‘cares not a jot for England, nor for any man on this earth’ if he is to be deprived of his ‘Sweet Steenie’s presence’. (‘Steenie’, as you probably know, was James’s pet name for George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, derived from the angelic St Stephen. The fact that my name is Steve seems to have been, in Will Nichols’s confused subconscious, additional vindication of his need of me.) An exceedingly emotional duet is then played out: Steenie refuses to return to England until he’s nabbed the infanta for Prince Charles; James says he will die if he returns alone. Cut, meanwhile, to a posse of wily Spaniards, who start to mumble into their ruffs in the following vein: ‘Willst you not remark, my dear assembled lords, that James of England hath, by his untimely passage, vouchsafed to us a timely royal hostage?’ (This entire scene is historical bunkum. As I have previously noted, I learned in Chelsea Library that James never went to Spain. However, it thickens the plot nicely and gives to Will and me another challenging scene.)
I was dreading these scenes. I’d begun to have dreams of London and soothing wet weather. The meltimi and the retsina and Will’s talk of his infancy and the dust of Poxos were starting to get up my nostrils. I still wanted to help Will, but fear of my big scenes with him weren’t allayed by his ongoing drink situation (as I heard Alfie Morton describe Will’s attachment to the flagellating local wine).
But then Will pulls it off, as they say. On the first take, there he is, line-perfect, his Welsh-cum-Scottish voice at last singing with absolutely convincing pain, his hands pawing me in perfectly convincing Jamesian little futile gestures, his eyes starting to brim with the jewel in the brave
actor’s crown – on-camera tears. The floor is hushed. Mordecai signals to Nettlefold to keep turning over. And as Will at last pulls me to him and breaks down, sobbing out his months of loneliness and fear, I feel my heart start to pound with the thrill, the utter euphoria of being in the arms of a great actor.
Well, I’m not that young, as I’ve told you (my bags were brutal that day, what with the wind and the early starts), but I am a very over-sensitive man. There’s a lot of the child in me. I’ve never quite got over my love of excitement and fame. And although you’ll be thinking I should have known better at my age, I can only tell you that then and there, in the fly-blown Palladium, with a battery of zKs masquerading as sunlight and Eyelids Mordecai staring at me like an anorexic iguana, in the mingled smells of the Robin starch on Will’s ruff and his Pour la Vie aftershave on his bearded neck, I was caught with my rib cage down and my unprotected heart fell suddenly and hopelessly in love.
I went back to Wardrobe quaking and shaking from the triumph of our scene. It’s all turned, I thought. From now on, the film will start to work. In fact it will be a good movie. And the high spots will be my scenes with Will. I longed for the rest of these scenes now. Playing opposite Will, I knew I could be superb. There might even be a ‘Best Supporting’ Oscar in it, or at least a BAFTA nomination, who could say? I took off my costume with trembling hands, felt my lips quiver as my wig was hung on its friendly buff wigstand. So, out into the night, I thought! Have a shower, then on with the white seersucker blouson and down to the taverna to start the hot night’s revels with Will!