Joseph Anton: A Memoir (93 page)

The party scene took two days to film. Renée Zellweger stuck to her English accent all the time, even off-camera, so that he had the odd feeling of meeting Bridget Jones, not the actress playing her. Colin Firth was funny and welcoming. “I secretly hope you’re going to be lousy at this, because I can’t write books.” And Hugh Grant kissed him. There was a scene in which he and Hugh were supposed to greet each other as long-lost friends, and before one of the takes Hugh asked, “Do you mind if I kiss you in this one?” and then planted a major smacker right on his amazed mouth. The scene didn’t make it into the final cut of the movie. His first screen kiss, he thought, and it was with Hugh Grant!, and it ended up on the cutting-room floor. (The only other man who ever kissed him was the film director Abel Ferrara, who once embraced him in a New York nightclub and used his gristly tongue. On that occasion, fortunately, there were no cameras rolling.)

It was harder than he expected to play a character called Salman Rushdie whose dialogue was written by someone else. If he had been at a book party when an inexperienced PR girl was being clumsy and foolish his instinct would have been to be nice to her, and he tried to play it that way, but it wasn’t funny. The snootier he acted the more comic Bridget’s confusion became. Jeffrey Archer was in the party
scene too, and was very annoyed that he didn’t have anything to say. “I’ve taken the trouble to turn up,” he kept telling the producers. “The least you could do is write me a line or two.” They didn’t. Richard Curtis’s script was the script and that was that. He himself tried to write a bit of extra dialogue for “Salman Rushdie”—obviously—but it was all cut out of the finished film, except for one exchange that could be heard in the background, faintly. Somebody asked him how autobiographical his books were and he replied, “You know, nobody’s ever asked me that before.”

Now they had a place to live in New York and at close quarters the Illusion was becoming real. She was capable of saying things of such majestic narcissism that he didn’t know whether to bury his head in his hands or applaud. When the Indian movie star Aishwarya Rai was named the most beautiful Indian woman in the world in some glossy magazine or other, for example, Padma announced, in a room full of people, that she had “serious issues with that.” Her moodiness was unpredictable and extreme. About him, she was guarded. “I’m just giving it the summer and then we’ll see.” She blew cold and hot and he was beginning to be unsure if the hot made the cold worthwhile. She was dark and closed off for days at a time and then one morning the sunlight streamed out of her face. His journal was full of his own doubts. “How long can I stay with this woman whose selfishness is her most prominent characteristic?” One night they sat in Washington Square Park after a quarrelsome dinner and he told her, “This isn’t working for me.” After that for several days she was her sweetest self and he forgot why he had said what he said. She met some of his women friends and most of them approved. When he told her what they had said the positive remarks about her character mattered less to her than the comment about her perfect breasts. French
Playboy
found nude photographs of her and ran one on the cover, calling her his “fiancée.” She didn’t care about the words and she didn’t mind the picture being there, but she wanted to be paid for it, and he had to hire a French lawyer to work for her.
This is what I’m doing now
, he thought, bewildered.
My girlfriend is on the cover of
Playboy
in the nude and I’m negotiating the fee
.

Her mother called, weeping, in a marital crisis. She wanted to get away from her husband, Padma’s stepfather. “Of course,” he said at once, “she must come and stay with us.” “That was the day I knew I loved you,” Padma told him afterward. “When you immediately agreed to look after my mom.” And yes, they loved each other. There were many years when he thought of it as a great love affair, a grand passion, and so, he believed, did she. Yes, it was unstable, and yes, perhaps it was doomed; but while it was happening he did not think of it as illusory. He thought of it as the real thing.

Zafar came to New York and met her. He liked her, he said, but found it odd that she was closer to his own generation than his father’s, and said it was an “odd fit, the intellectual and the model.” But he thought she was “very nice” and “if that’s what you want, I support it.” He certainly saw, as everyone saw, the importance to his father of his new undefended life in New York, and that there could be no going back from that.

That summer he didn’t want to return to Little Noyac Path, but Joseph Heller’s widow, Valerie, offered him their house on Skimhampton Road on the East Hampton–Amagansett border. She had been invited to Italy and needed the break. “I haven’t packed it up, Joe’s clothes are still in the closets, so I want somebody I know to look after it.” The idea of writing at Joseph Heller’s desk was at once exciting and disorientingly strange. “His shirts would fit you,” Valerie added. “Feel free to wear anything you like.”
No
, he thought.
That would be going too far. No, thank you
.

He was by himself a lot because Padma was acting in a Mariah Carey movie that was shooting in Toronto, and by summer’s end he had completed a draft of
Fury
. When he came back to the city and gave it to the woman with whom he was trying to make a new life she had almost nothing to say about it, except about the character who looked like her.
All right
, he told himself,
nobody gives you everything
. He set the typescript aside and they went out for the evening. In the small hours of the morning a thought occurred to him. “I am actually enjoying myself.” “Which, folks,” he wrote in his journal, “I am allowed to do.”

There was extraordinary news. The British intelligence services had at long last downgraded the threat assessment. He was no longer at level two. He was now merely at level three, which was a big step toward normality, and if things continued to go well, they said, then in six months or so he might well be down at level four. Nobody at level four received Special Branch protection, so when that happened they could call it a day. He said, “Isn’t it already a little overcautious? When I’m in America I hail cabs, take the subway, go to the ball game, picnic in the park. Then I come back to London and I have to be in the bulletproof car again.” This is how we’d like to do it, they said. Slow and steady. We’ve been doing this too long to want to make a mistake with you now.

Level three! It made him feel that his instincts had been justified. He had been trying to show everyone that he could take back his life, and there were friends who thought he was being a fool; Isabel Fonseca had written him long, worried emails telling him that if he didn’t “come to his senses” and hire bodyguards, “the obvious” was “inevitable.” But now, very slowly, too slowly for his liking, the safety net of the security world was beginning to release him. He had to go on proving he was right and the doom-mongers were wrong. He would regain his freedom. Level four couldn’t come soon enough.

Soon after this news came another huge concession. The condition of his marriage had been discussed, the Special Branch told him, and it was understood that at some point he would wish, and very probably need, to move out of the marital home. The higher-ups at the Yard, after discussions with Mr. Morning and Mr. Afternoon, had agreed that he could have an “overt” protection for six months at a new address. After that, assuming there was no negative change in the threat assessment, they would confirm the end of the danger to his life and the protection would cease. There it was at last. The finishing line had come into view.

Even though many of his women friends were being very supportive (not all of them; the critic Hermione Lee saw him in a restaurant and called him, only half-affectionately, a “scoundrel”), his worries about
Milan continued. And then there was another piece of crazy behavior from the real woman behind the Illusion, a quarrel woven out of thin air, and he found himself thinking,
I’ll go back, I’ll do it for Milan’s sake
, and he made the stupid mistake of mentioning that possibility to Elizabeth, who reacted with hostility, interested—understandably enough—only in her own pain, not in his problems. He tried a second time and then a third. But she was so hurt, so guarded, that she could not respond. And in the meantime, in New York, the beautiful woman who had him in thrall pleaded with him not to go, and finally admitted that everything he’d been saying was true, all his criticisms were justified, but she wanted to make it work, and she would. He believed her. He couldn’t help it. She was his dream of the future and he couldn’t give it up. So he turned away from Elizabeth again. It was his last vacillation, and the cruelest, the weakest. He detested what he had done.

The lawyers went to war. Ten years had passed since he had eaten lamb and nasturtiums with Elizabeth at Liz Calder’s apartment. A year had passed since the thunderbolt on Liberty Island.

After two false starts, two apartments whose owners were spooked by the security issues, he agreed to rent, for a year, a small Notting Hill mews house belonging to the pop star Jason Donovan, former star of
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
. When the news got out the
Daily Insult
was predictably furious that this man, who “hated Britain,” should now have uniformed policemen at his door around the clock because he no longer wanted to “hide.”
You’ve got a nerve, Mr. Rushdie
, the
Insult
told him. Elizabeth didn’t want Milan to come to the new house. It wasn’t safe, she said. It would upset him terribly. “You’re a selfish person who goes through life ruining other people’s lives,” she told him. “Who have you ever made happy? How can you live with yourself?” He had no good reply. But in the end Milan would come and stay with him. In the end he and Milan made and maintained a close, loving relationship, and Milan grew up to be an unusually mature, composed, strong-minded, sweet-natured, exceptional young person. In the end it was plain that Milan’s life had not been ruined, and that he was a happy, openhearted fellow. Yes, in the end, in the end. But before the end, unfortunately, there had to be the middle.

Mr. Joseph Anton, international publisher of American origin, passed away unmourned on the day that Salman Rushdie, novelist of Indian origin, surfaced from his long underground years and took up part-time residence in Pembridge Mews, Notting Hill. Mr. Rushdie celebrated the moment, even if nobody else did.

U
NTIL HE BEGAN HIS LIFE WITH
P
ADMA HE KNEW VERY LITTLE ABOUT THE
city of Los Angeles except the conventional wisdom that it was the place where illusions were born. For a long time he believed that the Twentieth Century–Fox logo was a real building, and he didn’t know that the MGM lion was yawning, not roaring, and he wanted to know in which mountain range the Paramount mountain was located. In other words he was as gullible as most film fanatics even though he had been raised in a movie city as important as Hollywood and should by rights have been a hard-bitten insider-cynic who wanted only to debunk the industry’s self-promotion, vanity, cruelty and deceit. Instead he fell for all of it, the whole Chinese Theatre concrete footprint hocus-pocus, he knew that the shaping influence on his own imagination of Fellini and Buñuel, but also of John Ford and Howard Hawks and Errol Flynn, and
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
and
Knights of the Round Table
and
Scaramouche
—was as profound as that of Sterne or Joyce, and the street names, Sunset Boulevard, Coldwater Canyon, Malibu Colony, quickened his pulse, and this was where Nathanael West had lived when he wrote
The Day of the Locust
, and that was where Jim Morrison was living in the early days of the Doors. He wasn’t a complete rube; his Nicaraguan friend Gioconda Belli was living in Santa Monica and introduced him to another, smarter, more political L.A., and so did his friend Roxana Tynan, who was working on the election campaign of the future mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and one day he ran into the academic Zachary Leader in the Rexall drugstore on Beverly and La Cienega and Leader told him that this was where Aldous Huxley had first dropped mescaline, “so those,” he said, pointing to the sliding glass doors of the pharmacy, “are the doors of perception.”