Vanished Years (13 page)

Benny suddenly arrives on the floor. ‘Don’t let them see you crash, man. Don’t let them see you crash.’

‘OK,’ I say.

He takes me by the arm, turning me away from the audience. ‘Breathe,’ he orders.

‘OK.’ I breathe.

‘You can do it.’ He stares at me solemnly.

I look back. His eyes are the still centre of my collapsing universe, and I think with a rush of gratitude that Benny has been a great manager. It’s a moment of empathy, which I will never forget, and that energy – from him to me through his clutching fingers on my arm – sends a surge through my body.

‘OK,’ I say and we go for it. The script supervisor comes over to me with the script so that I can look at the lines. She has a kind face and regards me with maternal concern. I study the words but they mean nothing. They are in fact jumping out of the page at me, like the reviews of a hit show in a Hollywood film from the thirties.

‘OK, I’ve got it,’ I say and off we go. This time it works OK. Hopefully cancer cells have not replicated inside me.

We finish the show. Executives and casting ladies surge backstage
and blow the usual hot air up any arsehole that has managed to unclench itself.

‘You know,’ says one with authority, ‘I haven’t heard a reaction like this since we shot the pilot for
Friends
.’

N
eedless to say,
Mr Ambassador
is not picked up, and I have never again seen anyone who was involved in it. Nor have I returned to Hollywood. But that’s show business. Yesterday’s best friend is tomorrow’s complete stranger. Like atoms we cluster and dissolve, forming strange exotic bodies that sparkle or writhe across the firmament in a lifespan that can be as short as a moth’s or as long as an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical – in either case, death is the endgame – floating back into the ether, only to be born again with other atoms on some other hit or miss, on or off Broadway, TV or radio, Pinewood, Hollywood Bollywood, amen. It is an endless movement of reincarnation or reinvention until the final croak. For the time being I am back to square one: London. The world of Hollywood zips up behind me.

But it is spring and I am lunching under the apple blossom with Nicky Haslam who has just had an amazing facelift and looks like an ageless German general with silver hair and a new Wagnerian jaw. He is unusually lively. On the other hand I feel dead. Spring always does that to me and I moan my way through lunch, an unpardonable crime in Nicky’s lightly painted, pouchless eyes.

‘You’re rather dreary today,’ he says as we peruse the menu, under the impatient scrutiny of the waiter.

‘I think I might have a––’

Nicky doesn’t let me finish my sentence. ‘Mid-life crisis?’ He enunciates every syllable, like Noël Coward. ‘How common. What a terrible waste. I enjoyed every moment of mine.’

‘But Nicky, that’s the marvellous thing about you. You adore everything. If you had a colostomy bag you would absolutely worship it.’

‘Worship is perhaps the wrong word but you know what they say? When you’ve got one? Bunny Rogers told me. The nurse says, “Welcome to a very exclusive club, sir! You are joining the ranks of the Queen Mother and some of our leading entertainers.” You’d never catch any of the royal family having a mid-life crisis.’

‘Do women have them?’ I wonder.

‘Don’t you know?’ (One of Nicky’s catch phrases.) ‘They’ve got more sense. They’re too busy washing up. Or being a she-man in the office.’

Possibly they are shell-shocked at having become invisible at thirty-five, unseen entities stacking dishes, while their men oogle (new virtual word incorporating Google and ogle) sixteen-year-old girls or their more successful men friends. Anyway, Nicky is right. Les girls normally sail through mid-life into the harbour of old age, playing bridge and gardening, while we men make a terrible business of it, ending up staring glassily into space, collapsed on a deckchair in the garden. Our pectorals have become baboon breasts (moobs) and our cocks leak. As our ladies and their girlfriends can be heard shrieking with laughter through the kitchen window, busy at their tapestries, we begin to wonder who we ever were, and what we are to become, but, as the Buddha points out, it was all an illusion in the first place. Best newcomer, executive of the year, employee of the month, fastest centre forward on the local team: all these absolutes are nothing more than stations, often too insignificant in the main-line scheme of things for our little puffing train even to stop at.

When a man first feels that hurtling sensation, his world has packed up like a travelling stage set and he is quite suddenly falling through thin air, a dot in immeasurable space, with neither ground beneath his feet, nor parachute on his back. He may buy a Harley-Davidson, or grow his hair, or develop a drug habit, or take to the cloth. Anything can happen. If he has led a rather unresolved or sheltered sex life, a giant libido may suddenly bloom like some ghastly flesh-eating flower. Actually, even if he hasn’t, he is still quite likely to begin a sexual rampage. Sex, once a pastime, is now a religion. Viagra is the blessed sacrament, and a stack of steroids can be a course in miracles. These diversions will break our fall for a while, create the illusion of ground and control, but it’s a game of bumper cars at full speed, and pretty soon a head-on collision necessitates a new chassis, as we limp to the sidelines, exhaust pipe clanking against the superhighway, our big end gone for ever. Without wanting to, we step irretrievably into old age, and may never turn back.

Not if you’re Nicky Haslam.

I first met Nicky when I was seventeen and worshipped him immediately. In those days, he was quite conventionally turned out with only a feather-cut silver bouffant and a slightly clipped Noël Coward delivery that set him apart, unless of course you bumped into him off the beaten social track, late one night, as I once did, at the Coleherne pub in Earl’s Court. Nicky could fit in anywhere. He always dressed for the occasion, and that night, with deadly aplomb, lurking like a cast member of
Cats
under a lamp, he was decked out in a suit of black bin liners over galoshes.

Today we are reminiscing rather carefully, as only two dowagers in the throes of autobiographical looting missions can, when Nicky, somewhat cagily, I feel, denies this clearly etched memory.

‘Don’t be silly, dear. I was wearing my fireman’s uniform. I would never go out in bin liners. You should take up embroidery. Anyway, what about those leather drainpipes you were wearing with the pixiehat codpiece!’

‘Now
you’re
being silly, darling. I would never have worn drainpipes. I didn’t have the calves for them.’

‘Until you met that doctor in Brazil.’

‘Carlos Fernando has never worked on my legs, Nicky. I would like to make that clear right now.’

‘If you say so.’ Nicky’s face sinks back into itself, always a bad sign.

But the main thing was that even though he was already ancient in our cruel teenage eyes, he was completely unlike the other men we knew. He looked at life with a fascinating mixture of childlike enthusiasm and savage queenery. Nicky was, in fact, the last in line of a certain type of royal. David Herbert and Stephen Tennant, bright young things from between the wars, were his fey trailblazers, and Nicky’s psychological roots wrapped around caskets as long buried as Alfred Douglas’s. Unfortunately, this type of queer is largely extinct now, but in the seventies there were still quite a few left, and it was in their drawing rooms that one still heard the nuance and timbre of Wilde. Nicky loved a vendetta, and was normally waging wars on several fronts. If he got a bee in his bonnet, it could get stuck in there for years, or days, anyway, as we all found to our cost, at some time or other. But equally, a deeply lodged rancour could dissolve over a lunch or a funny remark, and the milometer would be back at zero.

My first significant public appearance was at Nicky’s famous ‘Tenue de Chasse’ ball at the Hunting Lodge, his newly acquired country seat.

I was determined to make a splash and decided to go as a Masai warrior. After much persuasion, my boyfriend at the time, the eccentric designer Antony Price, knocked up a ruched pouch in rust-coloured ultra suede on the sewing machine that stood in the corner of his bedroom in Earl’s Court. I lay in bed while he sat hunched over the machine, deftly sewing under an anglepoise lamp, which was the only light in an empty mauve room that contained a mattress, a pile of clothes and an ironing board. The windows were open and it was raining outside. The curtains flapped about and
Antony looked like an enormous wicked witch, pedalling away under his giant spindle, throwing an enormous shadow across the room. I watched him nervously from the bed – this pouch had taken a lot of persuasion – Antony was a gentle giant but a pathological grumbler as well. Now he was heaving with doomy predictions.

‘What are you going to do with that flat arse of yours?’

‘Sit on it. Anyway I’ll have my cloak.’

I was putting the finishing touches to a cape of butter muslin and threading tons of wooden beads into necklaces. Antony shook his head and chuckled as he inspected the pouch.

‘Come on then, Mary. Dress rehearsal.’

As the rain poured down outside we painted my body with Negro Two by Max Factor (those were the days) and my lips with Crimson Lake by Leichner. Then Antony took Polaroids and had his wicked way with me as thunder crackled above and lightning briefly lit our incongruous writhing bodies. The beads broke on my necklace and bounced off all over the floor.

On the night of the party, a beautiful June evening, I set off from my parents’ home in Wiltshire with my two best friends in my smashed-up Mini for the party, which was about an hour’s drive away.

Liza and Damian were an item. They were also the best-looking people I knew. Already a ruthless snob, I revelled in the reflected glory of being their spokesperson, and they were staying with my family for the party.

Liza had a beautiful body and loved nothing more than to wear a skintight, leopard-skin dress, ravaged by scissors, over stiletto heels and under (but later quite possibly over) a fabulous mane of blonde hair. She teetered on the heels, moved like a caged tigress inside the stretch wrap, and her slightly pouting lips peeped out from beneath the mane of hair. She had incredible allure, with the added bonus of being the daughter of the Thane of Cawdor. She was a descendant of Macbeth. I was her best friend. We both had Minis. Mine was white and falling to pieces. Hers was blue and souped up. Mine had a
large gash across the bonnet inflicted during one of those typical hooray accidents – a hit and run with a parked car late one night on Eaton Terrace, on the way home from the Embassy Club. Hers had a House of Lords parking sticker on the windowscreen.

Nobody could persuade Damian to dress up that afternoon before the party. He was extremely shy and his lips too could only be glimpsed, full and sensuous behind his thick long dark hair. All the girls wanted him, and so did some of the boys. Parents said he couldn’t look one in the eye, one of their sink-or-swim yardsticks, but we didn’t care. We were looking at his lips. He was the richest of my friends. He had a credit card while the rest of us wrote cheques (which invariably bounced). We tore these meaningless contracts with abandon out of large flapping books from such exclusive banking houses as Coutts and Hoare’s, or, in my shameful case, Lloyds. Damian’s cheques, on the other hand, came from a bank in Nassau. This was indeed glamour. But then Damian’s father was a film star, the famous hellraiser, Richard Harris.

Now Damian and Liza were having an affair. She had stalked him through the drawing rooms and discos of SW1 with the intensity of a tigress on a feeding mission. Damian accepted her briefly, but he was a slippery fish when it came to girls and that night of Nicky’s party was their spring, summer and autumn merged into one. But everyone was impressed. These were the days when avocado pears were a novelty, and a bottle of plonk washed them down, at dinners and weekends largely populated by chinless creatures with wonky noses and teeth, youthful stoops and potatoes in their mouths. In this milieu Liza and Damian exuded a curious new international glow, and I was right there next to them, bathing in the reflected glory.

And what was I, exactly, that summer night by the river in our garden at home? Certainly no beauty, although straining every nerve to become one. A manic beanpole show-off, with blue-black hair and shaved eyebrows, looking, as Antony Price remarked one night after sex, like a cross between Anne Frank and Snow White.

My poor parents clenched their jaws and barely managed to
restrain themselves from leaping upon me and tearing me limb from limb. Every latest antic, every newest affectation – my refusal to get a job, get up, stand up when grown-ups came into the room, my eccentric appearance – all this had worn their nerves to shreds. A cartoon storm hung over our heads with lightning forks pointing in all directions. Recently a letter had been received from a business associate of my father’s – a man currently employing my elder brother – in response to one from my dad, in which he (my dad) had complained that my brother wasn’t working hard enough.

‘Why worry so much about your elder son,’ the letter said, ‘when your younger son is a drug addict, a homosexual and a prostitute?’

Very cleverly, my parents never said a word about this letter, although one can imagine the epileptic fit it engendered. My father only mentioned it years later, casually, one evening at dinner, but by then everything had changed.

However, that night of Nicky’s party it was all going on. Without knowing it, I was skating on very thin ice, so that what appeared to be an idyllic country evening in the garden held all the potential of a Greek tragedy. The drama was resolutely kept offstage inside buttoned lips and suppressed groans, but any minute now the whole thing could blow up, and I might be dragged to the river and held under water until I saw sense, my whole, short, wasted life passing before me.

‘Did you hear? Tony Everett killed his son. Drowned him in their river. There was some awful bust-up on the night of Nicky Haslam’s party.’