Not My Father's Son (27 page)

I said my emotional good-byes to the crew at a restaurant before I was driven to the airport for the journey home. I was going to miss them. We’d been through a lot together, and I was grateful to them for the kindness they had shown me in a time of great need.

I flew from Singapore to Tokyo and then had a few hours’ layover and once more was able to indulge in my lounge worship. But even this swanky Air Nippon lounge couldn’t quite lift me out of the numbness that had descended. It was now Saturday morning around 8
A.M
. My body clock was all over the place. I was drinking a sake Bloody Mary (I am very adaptable!) and Skyping with my assistant who was at my house in the Catskills, preparing for the influx of friends who were coming up for the Fourth of July holiday weekend. There the time was 8
P.M
. the night before. As much as I was looking forward to seeing Grant and my friends, I was a little apprehensive. I felt like one of those soldiers returning from the battlefield a different man. I have a webcam on my house that looks out to the meadow and the rolling hills beyond. It’s meant to be one of those security cameras that you face towards your house, but I like that it shows me what I look out at when I’m up there. If I feel needy of my life in the Catskills, it’s only a couple of clicks away. You’d be amazed just how helpful and relaxing a few seconds staring at it on a computer screen can be.

That Saturday morning, or Friday night depending on your vantage point, I was able to watch my assistant and my friend Lance bouncing on the trampoline I have in the meadow. It was unreal to think that I would actually be there with them the following afternoon (or later that day). I was about to start one of those crazy journeys where I would arrive before I had departed. It was a good metaphor for how life felt for me around that time—surreal, out of control. Everything I had known as sure and true had been taken away, shaken up, and then recalibrated back into my life and I was supposed to carry on regardless. I guess I had no choice.

I knew I just needed to give it all time, let it sink in, let things settle, then reassess and see how I had changed.

For the moment I was going to have another sake Bloody Mary and a plate of edamame, then get on a plane and watch films with Sandra Bullock in them and cry.

Part Three

O
ne of my favorite games is called “Two Truths and a Lie.”

You say three things about yourself, two of which are true, one of which is a lie, and the other players have to decide which is the lie. Well, you can imagine how great it was to be able to add “I recently discovered my grandfather died in Malaysia playing Russian roulette” to my arsenal of truths! Or how about “My father recently told me I wasn’t his son, but he was lying”?!

All summer I found myself telling the story to practically everyone in whose company I spent more than a few minutes. I could not stop thinking or talking about it. I knew that, as with any traumatic happening, it was important to give it weight, to acknowledge the effect it must be having on me, and to use the talking about it as a way to cleanse my system. That way I would eventually be able to create some distance, and therefore some objectivity. That’s the idea, anyway.

It’s a bit like when you break up with someone and you can’t stop talking about them until you get them out of your system. Though of course, having known many friends who suffered from Compulsive Break-up Talking syndrome and unfortunately having suffered from it myself more than a few times, I knew the danger was that my Compulsive Familial Bombshell Talking syndrome could oh so quickly and easily develop into Boring Old Fart Who Just Can’t Seem to Move On syndrome.

Although I’m joking, there were some similarities between my story and dealing with an ex. Or to be precise, dealing with two exes. My father was now definitively out of my life. I would never talk to him again. My grandfather too was gone, just as quickly and dramatically as he had appeared.

Both of them left many unanswered questions behind. Both were charismatic men with strong personalities and both had left their imprint on me on every level: emotionally, spiritually, genetically. Because of their absence I was a changed man, and talking about them and telling the story of my insane summer was my way of trying to realign myself and clear a path through the wreckage they had left behind them so I could move on.

I went back into therapy. One of the annoying things about starting with a new therapist, I have discovered over the years, is that you have to bring them up to speed on a lifetime’s worth of your stories. And that can be quite time-consuming! But actually, considering the magnitude of what I had just been through, it was a good and useful exercise for me to go back through my childhood and early life and give it more context. It still took a while, though.

After a couple of months I said to my therapist at the end of a session, “I don’t know why I’m here.”

“What do you mean?” she said, her face at once inquisitive and perfectly calm.

“Well I mean I know why I’m here of course. I’ve just had a huge fucking crazy lot of shit happen to me. But aside from that I sort of feel there’s some other reason why I’ve needed to come and see you and I’m just not sure what it is.”

I looked at one of the many clocks in the room. My time was up. I began to gather my things. After a moment she replied, “I think you’re coming here because you know your father is dying and you want to make your peace with him.”

I felt like I’d been slapped across the face. It was so obvious, and so right. That was exactly what I was doing.

“Yes,” I said softly. “I think you’re right.” I went home and bawled my eyes out.

The date of the broadcast
of my episode of
Who Do You Think You Are?
approached. Because of filming in New York I wasn’t going to be able to watch it on the BBC with my mum as I’d hoped, but we were both sent a DVD. It lay in my bag for days before I had the courage to watch it. It felt like I was taking a chance on opening up a wound that had only just healed. And it certainly didn’t pull any punches. There I was receiving the news that my grandparents had separated, that Tommy Darling’s medical records had been removed due to the psychological damage he’d suffered, and eventually of course the gory and shocking details of the Russian roulette.

It was so strange to feel sorry for myself. The few months since, combined with the change in my physical appearance (my body hair had grown back in—I no longer resembled the pale, hairless man-child on the screen), had ensured that there was a healthy distance between the me then and the me now, so I could empathize with as well as relive the experience.

Also there was the experience of seeing myself completely off guard. Even in a show like this, where one is supposedly ignoring the cameras and the viewer is a fly on the wall, there is always of course some awareness of being filmed. Several times on my episode, all that was stripped away as I received information that completely floored me. I saw myself as I never truly have seen myself on-screen before: completely unadulterated, vulnerable, and authentic. It was fascinating but not very pleasant.

I could tell Mum was very anxious about the show being broadcast. It’s easy to forget how exposing being on television can feel at the best of times to people who aren’t used to it, but having very personal details of your parents revealed publicly was something she had no experience of whatsoever.

In the end Mary Darling decided she wanted to watch the show alone, and spent the rest of the evening answering her phone, which was ringing off the hook with people from all parts of her life wanting to speak to her about what they’d just witnessed.

For the next few months, people contacted her constantly about Tommy Darling’s story. Some she knew; others were strangers who had known him or known my granny. I think it was good for her. Much in the same way that I felt I had to keep telling my dual family narrative, she was able to talk it out in this way and was also fascinated to find out more details about the father she never knew. She has since met several relations from her father’s family, and continues to explore both sides of our family tree, armed with all the initial research that was done for the show before they realized my grandfather’s story was the one to focus on. I delivered to her two large binders bursting with documents, and she has had a field day with them.

I began to look into PTSD organizations with a view to arranging a charity screening of the program in honor of my grandfather. I discovered one called Give an Hour that I decided to contact. The premise of this group was that mental health professionals would give free hourly increments of mental health services to returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, and then in turn the people who received this free care would give an hour of their time to some form of community service.

I liked the way it was so simple and straight to the heart of the problem, and also that the veterans who were receiving the care were also able to give something back in return.

I hoped that in some small way I would be able to help some people in need, ensuring that they were given the professional psychological care that was never available to my granddad. But that wasn’t the only reason. I didn’t quite know it at the time, but now I understand that this event was a gesture to my father too. The more I have talked about him and what happened in my past, with both friends and mental health professionals, the more I have come to believe that he too suffered from some undiagnosed mental condition. It’s not just his violence, his volatility and mood swings, it’s his complete lack of empathy, his seemingly utter inability to consider the feelings of anyone else. And of course my dealings with him over the course of that summer only underscore this. I was not talking to a sane man in those phone calls. There was a disconnect and an egotism that was at times breathtaking: His insistence that I must have known I was not his son all along. His question “Did you not notice we never bonded?” And worst of all, the utter absence of an apology or any hint that he understood what he had put me through when I eventually was the one to break the truth to him. All these things regularly float through my mind and convince me of his madness.

I am not a psychologist (though I’ve spent a lot of time in their company!) and although I have speculated about what exactly my father’s condition or conditions might have been, I am weary of it all, weary of the wondering. This much I know: the benefit screening I held at the Tribeca Grand Hotel on Sunday 7
^th
November 2010 was a gesture to both Tommy Darling and Alex Cumming.

“This past summer has been really difficult for me, and so tonight is in some way a form of closure,” I’d said in my speech before the program was screened.

I had no idea just how much closure.

The next day I woke up to the news that my father had died that night.

O
nce a year I go to Boston to record the introductions for
Masterpiece Mystery,
just to annoy Patti Smith. It’s a fun annual jaunt. My assistant and my friend Michael, the groomer, had come up with me on the train from New York the afternoon before. That evening we had dinner with my old chum John Tiffany, who was doing a sabbatical at Harvard and so living in Boston at the time. John had directed me in
The Bacchae
for the National Theatre of Scotland. Soon we would begin work on our next project together,
Macbeth
.

After much mirth and a chilly walk back to the hotel in the snow, we were up bright and early the next day and at the WGBH studios to start shooting. I was sitting in the makeup chair checking my e-mails when I saw one from my brother.

Hi Alan. Hope all is well.

See the attached which you need to respond to.

That’s odd,
I thought. Tom wasn’t usually so enigmatic. But then I opened up the attachment and I saw why. Our father had once more, even from beyond the grave, entered our lives.

It was a letter to Tom from our father’s solicitor.

My heart was thumping as I read it. The title in bold was “Your Late Father’s Estate.”

The man introduced himself as the person who had been dealing with the winding up of the estate and said he was writing with regard to our “potential Legal Rights claim.”

I made as if to speak, but the whirr of Michael’s hair dryer filled my ears, and anyway, I didn’t quite know what to say. I had no idea what this could possibly mean. On the one hand I felt like I was suddenly a living manifestation of one of the plots of the
Mystery
shows I was about to introduce, and on the other I just couldn’t believe that my father was still able to exert such an influence. He was the embodiment of those buried mines left long after a conflict had ended that occasionally erupt, and the pain of the past as well as the carnage of the present combine in a perfect storm.

As you know, your father left a Will in which neither yourself or your brother Alan was bequeathed any items.