Mug Shots (17 page)

The glass house

Leon Fink, investor, patron of the arts and property developer, had bought Kinselas Funeral Parlour in Darlinghurst, and there was a party to celebrate. I wasn't invited, but tagged along with people who were. As the invitees were urged to wear something black, it was obvious from my Gold Coast white trousers that I wasn't one.

The central feature of Kinselas was an art-deco chapel with a non-denominational altar, backed by a fresco of ducks winging into the sunset. Behind the altar someone had found a cross and a Star of David on long sticks, which could be mounted according to the religion of the deceased. In front of it a band was playing. Many of the guests wore frangipani on their necks or ears, and spent much of the time rushing at one another for an embrace. It was all very Sydney, and after a few free drinks I felt more and more Melbourne and went home.

Months later, the place emerged transformed, with a bar and two restaurants—a theatre one on the top level, and a proper one on the ground floor. Graeme Blundell brought in classy cabaret acts for the former, and Tony Bilson ran the latter, with the chapel—now a dazzling miniature cathedral of glass—at its heart. Kinselas soon became Sydney's most popular rendezvous.

When we could afford it, we drank or dined there, and when we couldn't, which was most of the time, John Timlin, friend and now my agent, would celebrate his winnings on the track by shouting. Eventually the whole building became a ­performance space where people liked to be seen.

Sometimes you didn't have to leave your seat: theatre would come to you. Once, while I was dining, probably at Timlin's expense, Max Gillies, made up as a posthumous Bob Menzies for an upstairs revue, waddled over to us, his angel's wings shaking as he walked, and addressed me in lordly fashion, suggesting it might be wise if I left, since I wasn't going to pay. Ripostes were useless. Actors in costume were invulnerable.

Publishers were more generous then, and the University of Queensland Press launched
Scribbling in the Dark
, a collection of my articles and reviews, in the Kinselas sanctum. In keeping with the theatricality of the place, my friend Dick Hughes did the job in a black Christian Brothers habit, and threatened anyone who tried to slip out without buying a copy with an impressively large strap. ‘Horne,' he said, ‘face the front.' (Had Donald ever been spoken to like that before, except by Frank Packer?) Amongst the bemused crowd watching all this was George Melly, the English jazz identity and friend of Hughes's, dazzling in a pixilated suit. Was this how books were launched in this country?

More theatre: the Australia Council was dining one evening in the crystalline temple, and we were urged to peep in. Its director at the time, Timothy Pascoe, was being farewelled. He was lying on the table, blissfully smiling, eyes closed, perfectly dressed as always, with a lighted candle on his chest, as if he were being prepared for the mortuary rather than retirement.

Occasionally, when the writer Judah Waten and his wife Hirell were up from Melbourne, we'd eat with them there. The last time we saw them, the doorman, a large body under a top hat, was having trouble with a drunk, who kept making runs at the entrance, which were forcefully repelled. On his final run, Oddjob grabbed the drunk, slammed him into a post, then swept his top hat off and bowed us in.

Judah, though looking as always like a member of the Politburo in his sombre suit, had lost his hearty ruddiness and didn't seem well. Diabetes, Hirell said. ‘My doctor told me I was not to drink, smoke or have much to eat,' added Judah. ‘He said even then you may not live longer—but it will seem longer.'

He then began an anecdote which I've forgotten, and as it turned out, he had too. He built up to the climax, then came to a stop. There was an awkward pause, during which the abused and abusive drunk staggered up to the window behind him and let loose a huge chunder against the glass. Neither Waten saw it, and, not wanting to interrupt, we listened as Hirell finished the story for him. Soon after, the Kinselas' windows had a half-curtain of velvet to shield the in from the out-crowd, and not long after that Judah died and Kinselas did too, sold by Leon. The great days were over.

Meets someone else

Late in 1981, after so many good times—conferences, workshops, residencies, so much drinking and discussing what was literature and what was not (and actually doing so little of it), something happened that made it all seem of no consequence. Carmel, whom I'd so often left behind with the children while I was off pondering more serious matters, decided she'd had enough. She returned from Melbourne (where she'd been researching the life of the painter and teacher Dattilo Rubbo for her university thesis) and announced she'd ‘met someone else', and was leaving me.

Writers are the world's greatest recyclers, and since I've gone over it elsewhere, there'll be only brief reference to it here.

In depression, one becomes susceptible to portents. I had a powerful attack when I went to the Australian Writers' Guild Christmas party at The Stables Theatre. Friends were sympathetic. ‘Get yourself a new outfit,' said one. ‘Could be a play in it,' offered another. ‘You're looking fine,' lied a third, peering in at me, the bags under my eyes pendulous from sleeplessness.

We're drinking and smoking and talking when the allegory attack begins. A derelict comes into the foyer and slumps against one of the sofas. His jacket is half over his head, his back is bare, and he has a cut lip. Angela Wales, director of the Guild, tells me it's William D, a writer and Guild member, in the grip of the alcoholic horrors. When the playwright Clem Gorman later led a group of stayers towards King Cross, D tried to follow. He reeled, fell across a planter box, got to his feet and did his best to keep up, as though fearing if we got out of his sight he'd die. Depressed, narcissistic, I thought that would soon be me.

By March I was running out of spirits and money. Max Suich (I hope not out of pity) gave me regular book reviewing for the
National Times
, and Vic Carroll (looking, but certainly not sounding, a little like Billy McMahon) offered me a fortnightly theatre piece in the
Sydney Morning Herald
.

For my first effort for the
Herald
, I interviewed the bellicose Miriam Hampson, who'd been running the New Theatre in Sydney's Newtown since 1948. Miriam was tiny and tough—her steel-grey hair seemed like an extension of her personality. She swore like a wharfie, with a voice almost as deep.

She led me into the shabby little auditorium, and we squeaked into old cinema seats. They were doing yet another production of
Reedy River
, Dick Diamond's folk musical from the 1950s. The coolabahs up on stage looked tired. Miriam was already talking: ‘When in doubt, do
Reedy River
. Frankly, I'm sick of it, but we need the fucking moolah—don't print that.' She paused for breath. I darted in to ask how she managed running an amateur theatre for so long.

‘Later, later. I was just thinking of the time Les Tanner—or was it Keith Gow?—got his foot stuck in a chamberpot in
The Lion on the Square
. Clumped around the stage trying to shake the fucking thing off while the audience fell out of their seats. Or the time whatsisname, that fat actor, stamped his foot, broke the boards, fell into the rostrum he was standing on and gave the rest of the fucking speech from inside the bloody thing.'

‘But wha—'

(Raising her hands.) ‘Later, later. What was that fucking play we did in 1968?
America Hurrah
. There's a man and a woman inside these huge dolls, and they, if you'll forgive the expression, copulate. We knew there'd be police in the audience, so we had all these fucking big wharfies lounging round the exit. At the end the actors waddle off and out the exit to get away, ripping their dolls off as they run. The cops get up to go after them, but the wharfies block the fuckers.'

‘And wha—'

‘Are you interviewing me or am I interviewing you? We scrounge, dear, that's how we do it. Laundromat does our costumes for nothing, hardware lends us doors, poke about Reverse Garbage for props. We're not rich enough to go broke. I'll show you last year's figures if I can find the bloody book. Memory's fucked ever since I got mugged—don't print that.'

‘Here in Newtown?'

‘In fucking Bellevue Hill, thanks very much. A guy goes for my purse, I hang on, and I hit my fucking head—don't print that. Where you from?'

‘Paddington.'

‘I knew it.'

Shirtsong

Everyone has a special shirt. Mine, a slightly regrettable pink, had buttoned shoulder flaps and breast pockets for maps, which is why its mail-order makers called it the Airline Pilot. It was a man-of-action shirt. My wife, now back with me after a separation of five months, said it suited me. I shaped it and it
shaped me
.

So when in June 1982 the screenwriter Keith Thompson suggested I apply for the position he was leaving—head of the Writing Workshop at the Film and Television School—I wore it for the interview.

Thus shirted, I found the confidence to tell the panel the truth—that I'd written only four screenplays in my life, and only one had made it to the screen: an adaptation of my play
Bedfellows
. Another CV plus, I added, was that I did not write the screenplay for my novel
The Great McCarthy
, which David Baker had turned into a total turkey.

Subtly, pinkly luminescent, I was so self-deprecating that the panel came to my defence, reminding me of my achievement in other writing fields. I nodded, but doubted that made me suitable for the job. Here was a man, they must have thought, so confident in his abilities that he'd spent the entire time diminishing their importance (and he looks as if he can fly an aeroplane as well). They gave me the job.

I wore my magic shirt when I first met the students, and self-deprecated even more. They listened, trying to conceal their bewilderment, while I told them I rarely went to movies—give me books any time.

Since one can't wear the same shirt every day, a lot of bluffing was required. Film's a technical minefield, and the possibilities for solecism were endless. At a lunch with my boss, the small and sharp Richard Thomas, he complains that the production people have been slow in replacing video with film, and I give a knowing nod. At a table with a group of students sitting reverentially around the famous English director Lindsay Anderson, one of them praised his ‘great tank work'. (Had he done war movies?)

‘What's the noise?' I ask my assistant Chris Fitchett (who knew far more about film than I did—he'd even made one).

‘Tape hiss.'

‘Of course—very annoying sometimes.' Richard Thomas, who by now was getting suspicious, sat in the chair opposite my desk, looked at me hard, wondered whether students should start off with a day using the Portapak—or would a Super Eight be better?

‘Good question. I'll have to think about that.'

The AFTS was generously endowed by the federal government, so the students were taught in small groups—tutorials rather than classes. The one-year screenwriting group was more tolerant of me, since I'd been on the panel that chose them. Under their guidance I worked hard to catch up, reading about narrative structures, plot points, montage and back stories, and watching films they recommended in the school's theatrette.

The three-year students were another matter. These were worryingly talented people who found it hard to conceal their puzzlement that I had the job. (I agreed with them.) They included Jane Campion, who submitted a screenplay with a large phallus as a frontispiece, Paul Hogan (soon to re-style himself, for understandable reasons, P.J. Hogan), and Ian David, later to make a name in television.

In my second year, still hanging on, the pinkness of my shirt fading fast, the Film School scores a coup. Linda Agran, big-wheel London TV producer and script editor of
Minder
, has agreed to be In Residence for a few weeks. First Class, thanks. Her reasoning is pithy: ‘If you think I would even consider spending twenty-seven hours with my knees around my ears paying for drinks and picking at trays of mystery meat, you've got the wrong bloke. Also, I love flying like I love dieting and Margaret Thatcher, so if I am going to die I am going to do it at the front end, wearing my little free socks, pissed as a parrot.'

Three weeks later she arrived, pushing expensive matched suitcases. She was short and dark and wore large sunglasses. She's taken to the Sebel Town House. Considering the temptations of first class she seems quite sober, and immediately calls for two bottles of champagne. Principle one of TV production, she says—hold your liquor. She fronts up to a dinner at a Greek restaurant the following night, all make-up and blazing eyes, and soon has the one-year trio—Chris Lee, Steve Wright and Billy Marshall—in thrall.

The commercial TV channels court her. The head of one offers to collect her from the school in the company helicopter. The head of programming of another invites her to his mansion for the weekend. It has a suit of armour on the stairs, she tells us later, that lights up as you pass, a tennis court, and a swimming pool that can change colour.

Agran closets herself with her trio of admirers and says, ‘
We are
going to create a TV series, and we're going to get it to air.' I pick up some of what she says from the next room: ‘The English language is a millstone around a writer's neck. It makes them think of dialogue, and not structure. Don't go from script to visuals. Visualise the scene first, then write it.' (Why haven't I thought of that?)

One day, while they were huddled over their project, I took a phone call in my office. ‘Is that Mr Marshall?' a voice barked. I told the voice I'd get him. Billy picked up the phone and seemed to quiver. Fred Schepisi, he scribbles on my notepad. ‘Yes, Fred. No, Fred. Yes, Fred.' If Fred likes Billy's screenplay about Lasseter and the golden reef somewhere in central Australia, he's made.

‘It's a definite maybe,' says Billy afterwards, still quivering. I told him not to get too excited—in the seventies, Schepisi had a habit of taking novelists to lunch, intoxicating them with wine and promises, and nothing would happen. He did it to John Hooker, who arrived at our place so drunk he could barely stand. ‘Fred's going to do
Jacob's Season
,' he managed, before collapsing on the couch. And he did it to another novelist, who also collapsed on the couch. ‘Who was that?' asked Billy. ‘Me.'

Billy went back to his huddle, and a TV series did in fact emerge. It was called
Stringer
, about, inevitably, an alcoholic journalist who reeled from crisis to crisis and filed irregularly. With Agran's backing, a commercial channel picked it up. It made little impression—and, according to Billy, the English lead actor was ‘a pain in the ass', but it was made, a feat unheard of from three one-year screenwriting students.

Then Linda Agran had to go. In return for the hospitality she'd received, she gave the school the original
Minder
submission—the story outlines and the characters that George Cole and Denis Waterman would bring to life. For the school library, it was like
The Book of Kells
. Then she struggled into her tracksuit (‘Christ, I'm as fat as a goose') put on her sunglasses and flew away.

My time was running out too. After eighteen months of bluffing, I decided to take my incompetence elsewhere. I was getting older, and job opportunities diminishing. But before I risked the next step into the unknown, my CV suddenly improved. A man from Foreign Affairs with the oxymoronic name of Bruce le Compte rang to say I'd won the Canada/Australia Award.