Life and Laughing: My Story (25 page)

‘Really, oh, thank you,’ I said. I didn’t know it, but Mark Cousins was a bit of an industry player. He was the head of the Edinburgh Film Festival and had access to all the producers I needed to get at. I just wanted to ask him what Woody Allen was like. But I left the bar that night aglow, clutching Mark Cousins’ address. I couldn’t believe I had met Mark Cousins from the TV, and he was going to read my script.

I packaged it up along with my covering letter and sent it special delivery the next day. Meanwhile, I had end-of-year university exams. I didn’t care; I had found my vocation. University was actually becoming successful for me; I was socializing and working incredibly hard for my future. The problem was that I wasn’t working hard at the course I had signed up for. I was concerned about being kicked out, and my department head told me he was interested to see how I would perform in the exams. I started to revise; I didn’t see that I had a choice. It was during my half-hearted revision of chemical equations that the phone rang. It was Mark Cousins. He loved the script and wanted to meet. I slammed shut the textbook, which was never to be opened again. He loved my film, I knew it, I knew it was good. I was so thrilled to have that vindication, from a professional, who had met Woody Allen.

I met him in the Dome Restaurant that was one of the locations in the film. He was so generous to give up his time to help a young aspiring writer. He couldn’t have been more complimentary about the script and wrote me a list of producers to send it to and said I could use his name in the covering letter. Well, that A4 piece of paper with Mark Cousins’ handwriting was all that I felt I needed to move to London to make it as a writer. I had my final meeting with my department head.

He looked me straight in the eyes and said, ‘Are you sure you want to be a biologist … or chemist?’

I replied, ‘No, I’m going to write comedy films, like Woody Allen. I’m moving to London!’

16

I wouldn’t be moving back home in London. Not because I was an adult now, determined to fend for myself, but because my mum, Steve, Nicholas, Thomas and Andre (now born) had upped sticks and moved to France. My mother had always dreamed of living in the sunshine, so she sold the house in Golders Green, and with the proceeds in cash drove to the South of France and bought another one. So my grandmother rented a tiny studio flat in West Hampstead for my sister and me to stay in.

Lucy was also heading up to Edinburgh University but was rather more studious and academic than myself. She got eleven As at GCSE and three As at A-Level so the world was her oyster. She didn’t require ‘clearing’ to get into Edinburgh; nor did she have to wait until she got there to find out what her course was. She was Little Miss Perfect: outgoing, social, she had a huge circle of friends and a charming boyfriend. She could have perceived me as her loser university dropout older brother, but she believed in me and she loved my script. She read it and improved my writing significantly. I would have been lost without her input but mostly her support, especially when I started to receive rejection letters on a daily basis.

I sent the script to everyone on Mark Cousins’ list with hope and optimism. In fact more than that: I fully expected a bidding war. But the returned scripts would land on my doorstep. Many of the covering letters were standard, copy and paste: ‘Thank you for sending in your screenplay, which we read with interest, blah blah, blah. Good luck with placing it elsewhere.’ One script was simply returned to me with the word ‘NO’ in big red pen on the front. Not a good day. I was also struggling to write another script. My first one had been such a breeze, but I had difficult-second-album syndrome. The problem, of course, was that my first album wasn’t a hit.

My sister was spending a lot of her time at her boyfriend’s flat, leaving me to struggle with my new script and start working as a barman at All Bar One in St John’s Wood to help make ends meet. She came to witness me pulling pints and excitedly told me she’d met an actress who was perfect for my film.

‘Have you been casting for my film?’ I asked while serving up a lager with an overflowing frothy head. ‘I love that you’ve got so much confidence in it.’

‘She’s a friend of Joe’s,’ she said, referring to her boyfriend. ‘She’s just hilarious and ditzy, a real character. I kept thinking she reminded me of someone, and then I realized it was Sasha, the girl in your film. She’s an actress, and her dad is a really famous actor. You’re going to love her.’

I was already approaching actors for the film. A film script always has more weight with ‘talent attached’. I was waiting to hear from (still am, incidentally) Sean Connery, Billy Connolly and Anna Friel. To give you an idea of the extent I was residing in cloud cuckoo land at the time, I wanted to play the main character, Marty. So a meeting was set up with me and potentially my leading lady.

She did indeed come from good acting stock. Her father was a major star in the seventies, playing Winston Churchill in Richard Attenborough’s
Young Winston
. Her sister was also an actress and had starred in
Return to Oz
and Steven Spielberg’s
Young Sherlock Holmes
. The signs were good. My sister said she was twenty years old and beautiful, a femme fatale with a string of men obsessed with her (including, awkwardly, Lucy’s boyfriend, Joe). She sounded exactly like the character I had created in the film, my fantasy girl.

We arranged to meet Lucy and Joe in a pub in Belsize Park called the Sir Richard Steele. I wore my grandfather’s cashmere coat, even though it was the height of summer. I walked into the pub in work mode, pretending to be an up-and-coming screenwriter, but as soon as I saw her I completely forgot about my film. There she was. I’d sat in my smoke-filled flat in Edinburgh and created her, and now my dream girl had come to life.

The last time we’d been in the same room as each other had been the Arnold House disco.

Her name was Kitty Ward. She was the girl I had been looking for. My girl.

In the romantic comedy that was my life, this would have made a good ending. We would fall madly in love and live happily ever after. Within moments of seeing her and chatting to her, I was totally up for that ending. Unfortunately, she wasn’t. It turned out we were actually at the beginning of a romantic comedy that might or might not have a happy ending.

I may have written a story about a fictional hot young blonde bombshell who came to life, but she didn’t write one where she falls in love with a bouffant-haired university dropout with one sexual experience. As had been the theme of my youth, I just didn’t do myself any favours. My cashmere coat may have been exquisite and expensive, but it was also several sizes too big for me. It dragged behind me. When I sat down on the stool in the pub, it draped on the ground like a rug. When I saw other people with my hairstyle I would say, ‘What a twat!’ but for some reason continued to have it myself. And I was never myself, never relaxed, when I was attracted to someone. I always tried to do an impression of the kind of man I thought girls would be interested in, but as previous results had indicated, it wasn’t working.

But I had one thing on my side. Destiny. When I asked for Kitty’s phone number, she gave it to me; I’m not sure she even knew why. This was only the second time a girl had given me her number. The first had been very recent. The night after I met Mark Cousins, I hooked up with my friends at a bar. I was feeling very confident after my high-powered showbiz tête-à-tête, so when I got chatting to a psychology student, I asked for her phone number, and she handed over her digits no problem.

The following day I telephoned. ‘Hello, it’s Michael,’ I said, jovially, ‘we met last night.’

‘Who?’ she said.

‘Michael, you gave me your number last night,’ I said, realizing she hadn’t exactly been waiting by the phone.

‘Did I?’ she said, hardly engaged in the conversation at all.

‘Yes, that’s how I called you,’ I explained, and then there was silence.

She said nothing, so I said, ‘OK then, bye,’ and hung up.

This was actually the most success I had with women during my stint at university. The condom from my university ‘starter pack’ was still in my wallet when I met Kitty in the Steeles pub. My prospects of using it were so slim, I thought I might have to leave it to someone in my will.

The only thing that made me feel better about not having a girlfriend at university was my friend Robbie. Robbie had also never had a girlfriend. Like myself, he never pulled. Robbie was a virgin; it was common knowledge. At least I had some sexual experience. I always felt better about my situation because of Robbie. It eventually transpired, however, that Robbie was having more sex than anybody at university. He was a closet homosexual who was shagging every Tom, Dick and Harry and Sebastian and Craig and Jerome and Alfredo and then Tom again and then Sebastian with Alfredo … you get the point.

So that just left me with my appalling record. But here I was in London holding the phone number of a girl I had connected with, a girl I had fallen for instantly. We had talked and joked in the pub about trivial things, but I could see what my sister meant. She was a real character. She was confident, opinionated, but her most noticeable characteristic was that she was smouldering. It was easy to see why men were falling at her feet. She wasn’t just beautiful with her blonde hair and English rose complexion; she worked it, she knew what she was doing. Men are pretty simple beasts, and she knew how to make them fall at her feet, how to make everything revolve around her. Oh, and her favourite film was Woody Allen’s
Play It Again, Sam
. I was in love.

Scarred by my previous disastrous ‘phoning a girl the next day’ experience, I felt sick with worry when I dialled her number. I typed it into my new BT phone with caller ID. Caller ID had just come out, and it was genuinely quite thrilling to know who was calling before you picked up.

It was ringing. I was nervous. I cleared my throat. After taking advice from my sister, my plan was to ask her out for coffee.

‘Hello, it’s Michael,’ I said, jovially, ‘we met last night.’

‘Who?’ she said.

I couldn’t believe it. Exactly the same as before. Why am I so forgettable?

‘Michael, you gave me your number last night,’ I said, like I did to the girl in Edinburgh.

My heart sank. I thought we had connected. She was definitely flirting. There were signs. How could this happen? Why was this always happening?

‘I’m joking,’ she said. ‘How are you?’

She was joking. Funny. I nearly killed myself; but funny.

‘I’m fine,’ I said.

‘So shall we go out then for dinner and talk about your script and stuff?’ she asked.

Wow. Things had really turned around here. She sort of just asked ME out; to dinner. Not a coffee; dinner! The big one. The most romantic meal of the day, there’s wine and candlelight. Wine relaxes you, gives you confidence and helps you lose your inhibitions. Coffee makes you tense, uptight and talk too quickly, and gives you bad breath. Dinner was great news as was the other thing she said: ‘To talk about the script and stuff.’ ‘Stuff’! That’s good, that’s a good word. This wasn’t just about the script, it was about stuff too. Stuff could mean anything.

‘Yes, that’s a great idea, when are you free?’ I asked, revealing too much eagerness. I was hoping for that night, maybe the next day, certainly that week.

‘Let me see, I can do two weeks on Friday,’ she said, leafing through a diary.

Two weeks on Friday? What? How can anybody be busy that many nights in a row? The only things I had in my diary were the things already printed in it, like St George’s Day, First Day of Spring and Christmas.

So we arranged to meet in over a fortnight at PizzaExpress in West Hampstead, at 8 p.m. People who are having a dinner in a restaurant always book for 8 p.m. if they can. 8 p.m. is ‘dinner in a restaurant time’, although at home you never eat dinner at 8 p.m. Odd.

In the two weeks leading up to our date, I thought only of her. I’d only just met her. A few days previously I didn’t know who she was, but now I was consumed by her. During this painful wait, I found out that I wasn’t the only one with these feelings for her. It seemed she had several suitors with much the same level of infatuation as me. On one level the news was good, she didn’t officially have a boyfriend. Men were in love with her, but she wasn’t in love with them. They are not me. I have a date booked in, for dinner, to talk about ‘stuff’. But then I panicked. Is that what she’s doing every night? Is she having dinner with different men every night? Is that why she couldn’t squeeze me in? Am I in some kind of auditioning process, like
The X-Factor
?

When the night finally arrived, I put on my cashmere coat and walked to PizzaExpress just around the corner. She wasn’t in the restaurant, so I decided to wait outside for her, to greet her, and there she was jiggling to a halt in her sky-blue Mini Mayfair, looking stunning in a camel coat. ‘Get in!’ she shouted across the road.

I was standing in front of PizzaExpress. Why does she want me to get in the car? ‘The restaurant is here,’ I said, motioning towards it like a model revealing a prize on
The Price is Right.

‘Get in!’ she repeated.

I crossed the road and squeezed into the smallest car on the road. We kissed on the cheek with predictable awkwardness. I went for one cheek, she went for two, there was a small headbutt.

‘I thought we were going to PizzaExpress,’ I said.

‘No, I thought we’d meet here. We’re going to Odette’s in Primrose Hill, you’ll like it.’

OK, fine. We’re going to another restaurant. I, of course, hadn’t heard of Odette’s, mainly because I was not a multimillionaire. I thought twenty-year-olds went out for pizza – not this one, she went to Odette’s. She was sophisticated and classy. The bill was more than my rent.

I had never been to a restaurant like this before. The waiter offered me ‘an apéritif’.

I had no idea what he was talking about, so I said, ‘No, we’ll just have a drink to start.’ Kitty asked for a gin and tonic, so I asked for the same.