Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (54 page)

At the location by eight o’clock. It’s a 1900-20’s house at the top of the hill in Ealing – a cross between mock-Tudor and Arts and Crafts.

Shown up to a bare upstairs room with so few amenities that, had it not been such a warm, outdoors day, could have ruffled the start of the shoot. Denholm Elliott, Richard Griffiths, John Normington are all in one bare room. I’m put in solitary splendour next door.

First shot is under way briskly and consists of me cycling along a hedge looking up at the house.

Then a series of shots of the three ‘plotters’ round the table, which takes up the bulk of the rest of the day. Talk to Alan, who tells a good story of a lady friend of his mother’s who shared the same chiropodist. Having to let Mrs Bennett know of a changed appointment, but not finding her in, she’d scribbled a note and slipped it through the door: ‘Foot Lady, Friday, 5.30’. Alan’s father, a butcher, finding the note couldn’t fathom it out and eventually decided it must he a hot tip for a horse race.

Out to Ealing, for the second day of what is now officially re-christened
A Private Function
.

Denholm and his cronies work on the invitation scene and I have to find things to do to pass the time. This production cannot afford caravans to protect stars’ privacy, so I sit in the patch of front garden on my chair with my name on it. I may feel the need of somewhere to hide away when the pressure goes on in Yorkshire. But by then Maggie will be with us and she won’t settle for chairs in the garden!

Alan is always on hand for a chat. In reply to my asking him why he doesn’t do more acting, he just says, rather forlornly, that no-one ever asks him. He kept getting offered vicars, he says. His relationship with Mowbray arose because he liked [Malcolm’s] ‘Days at the Beach’ so much he wrote to him. Mowbray wrote and thanked and expressed admiration for A’s work and later brought him the idea for the ‘Pig’ script. Nice when things happen organically like that. It’s like doing things at university.

Collected at 10.30.

Roy, stocky, bronzed from a sun-lamp, turns out to be a Buddhist chanter. Says he was introduced to it by Bill Weston, the stunt man, who always looks slightly out to lunch, but is a chanter too. I’ve brought an Otis Redding tape in with me today, but it seems rather insensitive to have it blaring whilst Roy is telling me how the chants have ‘made things happen’ and ‘given me a more positive outlook on life’.

So in the end he puts on a cassette of Buddhist chants, as the Mercedes swings past Lee Studios and through Wembley to some woodland behind Perivale.

The first noise I hear as I approach the sylvan glade is the squealing of a fractious pig.

I’m used just before lunch, but the pig is very soporific and we have to try the scene again afterwards.

I have to lure the pig quite a few yards, along a plotted path with a sharp right-angled turn. No rope or halter, just with bread. The first take is slow and the pig goes off at a tangent, but it gets better and the second take is almost perfect. Suddenly realise it isn’t as difficult as everyone thought it would be. Provided I brandish the bread near enough to the pig, it follows quite obediently and I can regulate its pace. This is a great relief to all.

Leave the location in very good spirits, especially as I have two days off before the four six-day-weeks of continuous working in Yorkshire. Pleased with myself at having passably succeeded at chiropody and pig-stealing.

Up to the Rosslyn deli to buy food for lunch here with Anne J. We talk over business and dates and projects. Say no to the lead in the re-make of
Italian Straw Hat
, but yes to a limerick book. Scripts have arrived of ‘Stovold the Viking’. Looks short.

Go through correspondence and play squash with TJ at five. Our first game for several weeks. I win. Afterwards a familiar pint at the Flask. TJ seems much more excited by his script for ‘Labyrinth’ than by ‘Stovold the Viking’, and from various things he says I get the feeling that he’s decided his strength lies in fantasy and that our paths are more rather
than less likely to divide over the next years over this difference in subject matter.

Tom is having a ‘gathering’ at No. 2. Constant comings and goings through the kitchen. Generally very polite and considerate, though they consume gargantuan amounts of tobacco and rifle the fridge for beer, which I don’t approve of. Nor am I very pleased to spend my last hours as a 40-year-old sweeping cigarette stubs, half-eaten chicken legs and crisps off the floor of No. 2.

My mother rings at nine. I’m still in bed. She’s sent me £50 – an unheard-of sum for a present from her. She says it’s after ‘all the things you’ve done for me’.

Helen has given me a six-foot-long giant pencil – beautifully reproduced and a very silly, but satisfying and striking piece of decoration. An AA guide to hotels and restaurants from the children gives no mention of the Troutbeck in Ilkley – which is to be my home for the next month.

Feel remarkably together and well prepared for the day. Alan is at breakfast and hadn’t gone to sleep until two as he had the room over the bar. ‘It was like Christmas down there,’ he says, rather morosely.

He goes and I’m alone in this recently-refurbished, rather ornate dining room with ‘Adam’ pretensions and a giggly waitress who reports loudly my every word back to the kitchen.

I’m driven down solid, leafy roads to a cul-de-sac in Ben Rhydding and up to Briargarth, which is my home for the film. A long, detached, stone house of (probably) Edwardian vintage, with a porch and gables. Carpenters, painters, sparks swarm over it. Loud banging, shouts, and, amidst it all, actors – myself, Maggie and Liz – wandering gingerly, waiting to take possession.

Gradually the first scene creaks into action. Round the table, eating Spam. We reach around for our characters, absorbing all the clues and helps and hindrances of this brand new place in which we must act as if it were all too familiar.

Maggie, brittle and tense so often in non-acting moments, gives so much out when she plays the scene that it’s exhilarating to be with her.

A hot bath and a lager. Then walk down into Ilkley – clean, ordered, respectable, with oriel windows above the shops, glass-canopied arcades and ornamental flower beds. It’s like the Garden of Eden after Gospel Oak. Choose Chez François – a wine bar – for a solitary meal.

Read of Buñuel and the Surrealists in Paris in the late ’20’s and ’30’s. Similarities with Pythons. Bourgeois against the bourgeoisie. Buñuel sounds rather like TJ. Very interested in sex and the Middle Ages and blamed the media for all the world’s ills.

Drive my hired Ford Orion into Ilkley to look for a birthday present for Alan, who is 50 today. Buy him a card with a pig nestling provocatively, and a pair of nail clippers.

I’ve also booked a table at the Box Tree Cottage for tonight as an extra present.

Have pre-ordered a bottle of champagne and this helps Alan over his initial awe of the establishment – ‘I’ve only walked past it’ – and we have a very jolly time. The Mary Whitehouse lookalike who explains the dishes to us remembers me from Python days.

Alan and Maggie are all ears and eyes for what’s happening at the other tables and there are some good characters. I think all three of us are easily moved to laughter at the most inconvenient times.

Mark S joins us. The food is original and very good, with the timbale de fraises outstanding. It’s based around their home-made rose-water ice-cream and is delicate, light, aromatic and quite superb. But quite a large shard of glass in my cucumber and onions throws the Mary Whitehouse into near panic. She offers to re-cook all our meals, bring us free liqueurs, some more wine – anything short of giving us the meal free which, on reflection, would have been the only thing for a place like the Box Tree to do.

A bottle of Bollinger is thrust into my hand as we leave. And Alan, I think, was truly touched. He said he’d never been taken out to dinner on his birthday before.

We scan the papers for latest news of Honeybun, the pet rabbit of the British Ambassador in Libya, which he left behind when the embassy was
closed, much to the horror of the animal-loving British public. The
Mail on Sunday
arranged to have the rabbit flown back. The
Guardian
produced a quote from the ambassador’s wife to the effect that she loathed the rabbit – ‘I wish we’d eaten it before we left’. The
Mail
reporter was then caught by customs at Gatwick bringing a live animal back in the passenger section and his paper now stung for about £2,000 quarantine charges. The story has kept us going all week.

The pig is brought in and for half an hour we are all banned from the surgery whilst it gets used to its paper. ‘Pig’s business’ appears on the call sheet, but there is no need for the prop stuff as Betty trundles about depositing dark grey turds with the regularity of a train timetable every eight minutes or so.

The situation seems very bleak for a while then, with judicious use of sardine oil smeared on the floor and on the toes of my shoes, the pig turns in a series of excellent performances as the room becomes progressively smellier.

Another good night’s sleep and down to breakfast at ten to eight. Malcolm sounds very pleased with rushes and Alan, who comes down later, says that he found my performance ‘touching’, which is unexpected and rather touching.

They get round to my five-second cycling shot at five to eight at night – nearly eight hours after my call. Malcolm apologises with great concern. Alan and Maggie tell him how angry I’ve been about the whole thing and Maggie says she heard my caravan shaking with sobs. For a moment Malcolm believes them.

At the Troutbeck, Alan buys the meal for Maggie, Malcolm, myself and Don Estelle. We are the only diners and the food is so consistently devoid of flavour that one suspects certain special anti-cooking skills. But we laugh a lot. Alan digs gently at Malcolm, ‘Buñuel would never have kept an artist waiting eight hours’, and Malcolm plays up to it gracefully. But the emptiness of the dining room and the distant sound of jollity from the folk club don’t raise the spirits.

Maggie, Mark S and myself are dawdling in the car park at Ben Rhydding Station after lunch, remarking on how many trains seem to be coming through this archetypal country station which miraculously escaped the Beeching axe, when Alan B steps out of one of them. Though he never told us himself, we know that he’s been up to London to collect yet another award for
Englishman Abroad
, so we greet him with a round of applause. Alan goes very pink and is delightfully embarrassed.

He says it was an awful occasion. They’d been sat next to the band, he says. He squirms as he tells us of the discomfiture he feels at having to make speeches at these occasions … ‘I feel such a twerp … the microphone’s always the wrong height … and your voice suddenly booms out saying something quite fatuous. I haven’t been given anything since 1971 … then all this … ’. He shakes his head with bewilderment.

More slow progress in the afternoon as we wait for the pig to be coaxed up and down the stairs. The day trails away. I sit at the top of the stairs in my long underwear, kitchen knife at the ready, whilst shouts of ‘Shit-bucket!’ rise from below.

Today I avoid hotel breakfast and lie in bed until a quarter to eight. With Roy to the location at 8.20. Not much for me to do again. A crowded living room scene. Black drapes shroud the lower half of the house. La Nuit Américaine. Pete Postlethwaite and Jim Carter do amazing magic tricks – probably born from years of standing around at rehearsals or waiting to go on.

Denholm chain-smokes – as do most of them. Only Jim and myself of the actors don’t smoke. Alan B says he has a cigarette every now and then. He says when he’s trying to think of a plot – which he finds very difficult – he has a Consulate. The actors assure him that they’re the worst.

The pig goes from strength to strength and received a round of applause after her first performance this morning. Maggie still very worried about her piano-playing. She scratched herself on the brass antlers of the cocktail decanter whilst rehearsing this morning and rather ruefully mutters that she’d hoped it had been worse and she’d have had an excuse for getting out of the piano-playing altogether.

They talk about their favourite Shakespeare plays. I feel dreadfully dull
when the talk turns to theatre and aware of how different my world is from the rest of these thespians. Maggie dislikes
Merchant of Venice
– ‘All Portia does is tell Larissa to close the curtains.’ She doesn’t have much time for
Taming of the Shrew
either.

Up just before eight, with news on Radio 4. The miners’ strike still dominates,
¹⁰³
as the Falklands War did throughout
Missionary
. Local ‘Day of Action’ in Yorkshire has stopped mainline trains, local bus services, etc. But not the slow, steady progress of the filming.

In one of the re-shoots the pig suddenly went off ginger biscuits. Denholm said he’d noticed the precise moment the attraction of the biscuits palled … ‘Amazing,’ he ruminated, ‘like a Pauline conversion.’

After lunch a freshly-killed pig is delivered – supplied and chaperoned by a ruddy-faced little rock of a man in overalls. Everywhere there is earnest talk of where a pig is stuck in order to kill it, how long it takes to bleed it, etc, etc. We have to carry it upstairs and it feels very strange – as if still just alive.