Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (95 page)

With Helen, to dinner at the Garrick with Mel [Calman] and Debbie [Moggach, a novelist and Mel’s partner]. Like all these old clubs it’s on a grand scale – with huge windows and high ceilings – but everything, from the armchairs to the doorman, is slightly shabby.

This is an element of the English way of doing things that the Americans just couldn’t understand. They would make everything shiny. A coat of paint, unless applied with a liberal mixture of dust, would ruin this place.

I check through my
Number 27
rewrites as they come hot off the presses. Tristram rings to say he has found the complete Miss Barwick – Joyce Carey, who actually
is
90!

William arrives back from a week’s biology swotting in Pembrokeshire full of heroic tales of William Ellis’s effortless superiority over the other schools. He hears later in the evening that his ‘A’ Level history teacher has just quit, on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Will thought him a good teacher who knew his subject; still, no match for the Thatcher/Baker steamroller under which all London teachers are being squashed.

A significant coincidence. As the first part of ‘Troubles’ begins on LWT, Frank Oz rings to tell me that they’ve decided to go with Michael Caine!

The latter doesn’t hurt nearly as much as the former.

In fact, now I can contemplate a more leisurely summer, richer in everything, I hope, except, of course, money!

Set off for a poetry-reading at the Chelsea Arts Club in honour of Robert Graves. The Club is in an odd and characterful white building on Old Church Street; the bell must be pressed before you can enter (so the sound of the bell ringing marks the entire evening).

As I arrive, a very elderly lady is being assisted towards the low Beatrix Potter-like doorway.

I have a pint of beer. Out in the garden, which is very green and airy and protected, George Melly sits alone.

Spike is late, so the poetry-reading is postponed for an hour. I’m taken to meet the old lady I held the door open for. She is Ros Hooper, Robert Graves’s sister, and she’s 94. Quite easy to talk to once one ceases to be apologetic and sycophantic and behaves naturally. She clutches a book of Georgian poetry. She’s clear-eyed and says she can still read quite unaided. She also hears and digests info in the middle of this noisy throng with great ease.

She’s most concerned about the food and she enquires of every admirer who is brought to meet her when the food may be provided.

Spike arrives, looking very well, smooth of complexion and with a ruddy pink glow, either from fresh scrubbing or from the country life he now enjoys in Kent. He was quite a friend of Robert Graves and talks to Ros for a while.

Spike and I have an exchange of jokes. ‘Why are you so nice to me?’ he suddenly asks. ‘Because I like you.’ When Spike is on good form I can hardly imagine anyone better to be with – the combination of silliness, huge generosity and emotion makes him at times irresistible.

Eventually the delayed homage to Graves takes place.

Laurie Lee reads so well that I and the audience hang on every syllable and I’m made aware of how important it is to read poetry aloud. Ros Hooper reads beautifully too.

I shake a few hands and slip away from this sardine-like dining room and into the street. It’s a cool, but pleasant evening. The whole thing quite surreal and dreamlike. But somehow suitable that I should be there to remember a writer whose
Goodbye to All That
was one of the seminal books of my early teens, turning me towards other war writings.

‘
AF
’ is such an elusive number. Every time I read it, questions arise. Now why didn’t I ask them earlier? I feel like someone trying desperately to fill a suitcase, from which bits keep popping out. Even when it’s shut there are lumps which you know you must sort out before you go anywhere. But I feel as I read through today that I am at least editing from strength.

To Delancey Street for a meeting about ‘
AF
’ with Patrick C, Tristram and Steve A. I take the initiative and suggest that we tuck our horns in a little, trim the budget and head for UK or European money first, largely because of my gut feeling that this will be a difficult one to sell to the US and that MGM’s reluctance will likely be matched elsewhere.

To William Ellis to see their production of
Midsummer Night’s Dream
. A great success. That one could spend three hours on those small, hard chairs, in that acoustically suspect hall and hardly notice physical discomfort says a lot for them. Always good to hear Shakespeare interpreted by good people discovering it for the first time. Will Palin, as he is in the programme, did the lighting, and I am proud of him.

Wake about seven. Cannot forget that Angela took her life a year ago. Everyone seems to have coped with it, though my hopes of talking about her, her life and death and the whys and wherefores with the family haven’t materialised.

Though it doesn’t haunt my life, when I stop and think of Angela, I cannot believe she isn’t there, and that’s when the pain begins.

To Eaton Place, where Joyce [Carey] lives in a ground-floor flat. She has warned us that there is some building work going on nearby, and would we mind drinks instead of tea.

An erect and handsome woman with slow-moving eyes comes to the door. She behaves towards me like a 16-year-old, flattering and flirting
quite shamelessly. Is the chair comfortable enough? Would I like some taramasalata with my whisky?

She’s effusively complimentary about the script. Tristram uses a phrase of Jonathan Miller’s to describe the process – ‘a Niagara of praise’. She tells stories of Noël [Coward] and has several photographs of him – in fact those days, presumably between the wars, seem to have been her happiest.

At one point she asks Tristram if he’s a bully.

We leave after an hour or so, leaving her in her tiny room, with her dark Maitland oils of London parks and her Corot miniature, and her signed photos of Noël – he wasn’t a bully, but ‘he knew what he wanted’.

Take Ma to the Hayward Gallery, where 85 pictures from the Phillips Collection in Washington are on show. Mum astute enough to loathe the grim, concrete approaches to the gallery and the extraordinary two-floor gap between one half of the exhibition and the other, but the pictures are all interesting and some are amongst the best of that particular artist’s work – notably an atmospheric empty city and railway tunnel of Edward Hopper, the complete contrast of Renoir’s party after the regatta, a big Bonnard panorama, and Van Gogh’s entrance to the gardens at Arles.

How they can put a coffee shop at the top of the Hayward Gallery and build windows too high to see out over the river is just another on a quite limitless list of questions I should like to put to Denys Lasdun on behalf of the despairing punter.

We walk by the river. Notice a new passenger boat service in operation – the Thames Line, sponsored, as most endeavours in the country are nowadays. This time it’s Barclays Bank who get their ugly logo across the stern. Lovely walk, high, puffy white clouds. A Dufy day over London.

Decide only to do the ‘Politician’s Speech’ at Wembley. The concert [Free Nelson Mandela] has already attracted controversy – the South African government condemning the BBC for televising it at all – but there it is on my TV at midday, the stadium packed out and nothing heavily political besides a large backcloth showing Mandela behind bars which says everything that needs to be said.

My car arrives for me at three. It’s been arranged for me to bring William and three friends, but the driver will not take more than four people, so Tom brings Will in the brown Mini, trailing us through the back streets of Harlesden.

A dark, cavernous hospitality/reception area is filled with the sound of the music and there are monitors and a huge screen to accompany the pounding beat. And nowhere to get away from it.

On the whole it’s run unintimidatingly, with much of the work being done by smiling young women. Rather as one might imagine behind the lines in the First War.

All of a sudden I’m buttonholed and led up towards the stage. Catch my first glimpse of the 70,000 crowd. Mainly young and white, whereas backstage was mainly middle-aged and black.

They want me on early as Stevie Wonder’s organ has been stolen and everything is being rearranged. Then they ask if I can do more than I’ve planned. Say three minutes – as long as possible. It’s been bad enough being dressed as a Tory MP throughout the afternoon, and now to be asked to incorporate another piece. Decide on ‘Plankton’, though I don’t have the gear.

Miriam Makeba is coming to the end of her set on the big stage. I am to be on immediately she finishes. Rehearse the words and think of links furiously. Makeba finishes. I am poised. Makeba begins again. Finishes. Jubilation. On I go … Makeba launches into one more number.

Not only has Wonder’s equipment gone missing, Lenny Henry’s mike has gone down, so I will not be introduced. Irony that I, who have come here to make an introduction, miss the honour myself.

Walk out. It’s very strange. A feeling of slow motion, as if performing to a drunk. The huge crowd swings slowly, heaving, rippling and lurching, in my direction. A strange lack of connection between us.

Decide that I best just plunge in, hoping I have the attention of a few thousand.

To the Everyman with TG to see
La Grande Bouffe
. This is rarely revived and I am interested to see if it is as good as I remember it.

Despite it being a very scratched print, and a little too long, it is. The audacity and outrageousness of it, with the sexy and the scatological so stylishly combined, are an object lesson.

Bad taste served up with good taste. Ugo’s death, being spoonfed till he’s stuffed at one end and gently masturbated by a schoolteacher at the other, is one of the greatest and most bizarre deaths in cinema – closely followed by Piccoli experiencing a terminal fart.

We eat a small amount afterwards at the Pizza Express.

An urgent message to call JC reveals that MGM have changed the release date for
Wanda
yet again. It’s now to open in selected theatres in New York, LA and Toronto to gather word of mouth in time for the big release two weeks later. My dates are all now in upheaval.

To lunch with Tristram. ‘I need rather a lot of wine,’ he confesses. We laugh a lot.

Maybe our laughter is just pre-filming hysteria. I know that there will be more problems with this than with
East of Ipswich
, and the finished product will not be as special or as much loved. Awful to feel that way.

But for now on, with slightly hysterical cheerfulness, we talk about the British attitude to sex and ‘all that sort of thing’, as his mother puts it. According to Tristram his father has become much more outspoken on the subject than he used to be. Apparently he’s now quite likely to refer to someone as a ‘silly cunt’.

Home about six, then out to a Hap Kido demonstration with Tom’s class, in a Catholic premises behind the Royal Free. Odd to see them breaking breeze-blocks with their hands beneath a huge mural of Christ displaying juicy stigmata.

To the Disabled Ex-Servicemen’s home in Ealing, where ‘No. 27’ is filming. There have been problems since Monday. Five hairs in the gate – an unforeseeable chance at any time, but all this afternoon and all involving Joyce, whose first day it is. They have fallen behind despite working until nearly ten o’clock last night.

But the sunlight, filtered through the trees, is very pleasant and the location comfortable, if one can get used to the presence of limbless servicemen in wheelchairs dotted about.

I am able to make a few suggestions and entertain Joyce – who does seem to have taken quite a shine to me. Apparently her skirt fell down as
she stood in a rose garden earlier. ‘Normally I would have laughed, but this time I was a little cross,’ she confesses.

Drive to Epsom College which has become Melford School for the day. A slow journey – one and a half hours for about 20 miles. Cool and drizzling when I arrive on the site which is spacious and well endowed with cricket nets, fives and tennis courts and various pitches.

Afternoon spent in the still rather horrible conditions, shooting the scene we nearly cut – the aborted royal arrival at the end. Three hundred boys in suits and the school band. It looks impressive and is completed by 4.15. Early wrap, so everyone euphoric.

I had to be available to sign autographs (apparently they got a cheaper filming rate because of this!). About 120 boys availed themselves of the offer. I wrote a different message every time, knowing they’d compare them. Humour very strained by the end.

Back home, crossing the river at the fourth attempt – all usual routes blocked – I have a message to ring Shamberg. I know it bodes ill, and it does. Shamberg, not even deigning to break his monotone in sympathy, tells me that there are ‘awareness problems’ with the picture and that the release date has been changed again.

Whilst running an idea occurs to me for the ‘Articles for Sale’ drama series to which I have been asked to contribute by Jack Rosenthal. It’s to do with Hemingway – the object being a seat which one fits to the deck of a boat for deep-sea fishing – as in the famous photo of Hemingway. From this I work out a story involving a post office clerk and Hemingway fantasies.

Back at Sunset House scribble my ideas down while waiting to cool down. The lines, characters and odd ideas spill out quite fluently.