Vanished Years (36 page)

As if sharing this sentiment, Vanessa briefly grips the side of the coffin with the same expressive hands and fingers as her daughter.
For a moment she looks as if she is going to fall but she gathers herself and sets off towards the other room.

‘Come and see her!’ she chants, arms wide, to the group hanging back.

Robert and I stand on either side of the coffin, lost in thought, searching the face for some recognisable trace, but death has sucked all the character away. It’s unimaginable that Tasha’s great big china-blue eyes are seeing for someone else right now. Her lashes lie against her cheek and tremble slightly at the hum of the outside world, the traffic, the brakes, horns and wailing sirens that she will never hear again. I look up at Robert. He changed his entire life for this woman.

Natasha and Robert get married during a cold grey weekend in February and we are all staying at the Wyndham just behind the Plaza, a shivering group of refugees from each corner of the globe. The Wyndham is a tall thin hotel favoured by writers and theatre folk, the last of the great theatrical B and Bs. Jessica Tandy and Hugh Cronin have a permanent suite there. Maria St Just supervises (terrorises) New York productions of Tennessee Williams’s plays from Suite 43. It is dusty and overdecorated with vast swooshing curtains lined with plastic, complicated wallpapers (peeling) and lampshades dripping with tassles. Each room or suite has its own theme, and the lift trembles and groans up the building, driven by a series of sweet doddery lift boys. Somebody once said that to spend a night at the Wyndham is like waking up inside your grandmother’s knickers. This fantastical hotel is perhaps not the best place from which to make a new start in life.

The evening before the wedding we have drinks in Robert’s suite. The curtain is hanging off the rail in one corner and the tightly packed, blue-squiggle wallpaper has a damp patch over the bed. Natasha and her girlfriends briefly entertain us before leaving for their hen night, while we go for a grim bachelors’ dinner at Elaine’s. It is a drunken affair in that dismal eatery and nobody quite knows
what’s going on, but we all know something is. As it happens, last night the couple had a blinding fight and – unbeknown to the rest of us – are thinking of calling the whole thing off. But for the time being, Elaine hobbles about like the little clairvoyant from Poltergeist. Robert is a coiled spring and we have an early night but are nonetheless worn out by jet lag on the morning of the ceremony.

I am at breakfast downstairs in a nearby diner with Tony Richardson, Natasha’s father, his best friend Jeremy Fry the inventor, and Annabelle Brooks, the beautiful gazelle who finally manages to snare my evasive friend Damian (
Chapter 8
) into marriage. She is everyone’s mutual friend at the table. She used to go out with Jeremy’s son Cosmo, and met Tony at a dinner party years ago where she caught fire, lighting a cigarette from a candelabra. A whole table of young county folk screamed with laughter that night – no one more than Annabelle, who didn’t realise she was in flames until somebody doused her with Perrier. Dripping and smoking like a peat field, she turned back to her dinner companion and continued with the conversation they had been having. Tony falls in love. Annabelle is his kind of girl.

‘Have you written your speech, Tony?’ she asks now.

‘A gloomy peace this morning with it brings, the sun for sorrow will not show his head … You know the rest.’

Tony recites from
Romeo and Juliet
in the voice that many people have tried – and failed – to impersonate. It is a famous voice: gloomy, deliberate, slightly breathless and utterly compelling. The winter sun shines on his face through the window. He looks ancient in it, as though he is made of dust, the crumbling statue of a Roman emperor. Any minute now a strong wind will blow him away. But not just yet.

He is still a strange magic character, like a magnet. Some things (us) cling to him. Other people can’t get away fast enough. He is a director on set and off, quietly manipulating the present company – be they civilians or pros – into confrontations and reconciliations,
prodding them with a well-placed niggle, an innocent enquiry, so that lunches and dinners become explosive theatrical events. Everyone loses their heads around Tony, and are drawn – against their wishes sometimes – into the fantastical dramas he weaves, a twentieth-century Prospero. This latest one, the compact between Robert and Natasha, has not been of his making, and right up until today he has doggedly aired his reservations.

‘I don’t see why they can’t just keep on as usual,’ he says for the thousandth time.

‘But they’re in love,’ pleads Annabelle.

‘Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be together. Just not marriage. It never works.’

‘You’re always telling me and Annabelle to get married,’ I remind him.

‘That’s completely different. You and Annabella need one another.’ At which point, looking fiercely at me through his eagle’s eyes, he begins to chuckle. ‘Oh, Roopsi Doopsie! What are we going to do with you? You’re such a floozie.’

‘I think they make a good couple, T,’ says Jeremy Fry.

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, J. Look at you. Imagine if you got married to Medieval Garb, how sorry we’d all be?’

(Medieval Garb is Jeremy’s boyfriend, a rather flighty opera director, who has long been the butt of Tony’s humour. According to legend, he once came down to breakfast in a kimono and someone described it as Medieval Garb. The name stuck. He has since become the director of the Paris Opera.)

Jeremy sits next to Tony on the banquette. If Tony is white and gaunt, then Jeremy’s face is the shape and colour of a beetroot. They are both craggy eccentric geniuses although Jeremy is at present flummoxed by his new invention – ‘a revolving wheelchair’, according to Tony. ‘Have you ever heard of anything more ridiculous?’

Tony has been overlooked by Hollywood and reduced to TV movies. He is too clever for the new managerial LA. They have casually written off his vast talent.

Today they are both dressed scruffily – they never take luggage on a trip. They address one another by their initials. Like T, J is a dangerous enemy, particularly when drunk, but a great friend. (He will be sitting by Tony’s bed the night he dies.)

The service itself takes place in the apartment of John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion. In the photo, Robert – one of the best-looking men we all know – seems slightly chubby. (This is his last year of drinking.) Natasha looks beautiful but strained. The service is agnostic, ministered by a jolly dresser. There is no music and we all stand uncertainly, marooned on the slippery parquet of the Dunnes’ drawing room, balancing delicious nibbles and high flutes of champagne, unsure what to do next. We are a group of marvellous eccentrics, yes, but not the youthful crowd one expects to see at a wedding. At a wedding everyone is looking forward. There is no past. Here everyone is looking over their shoulder, except for one guest who has mislaid his false teeth. Life has already crashed against this crowd – including the newlyweds – and the whole thing feels more like the Thanks giving party of everyone’s shrink than a wedding. The walls of the Dunnes’ house are shiny grey, the colour of ghosts, and half the faces in the pictures are dead. Maria St Just, John Gregory Dunne, Tony and Jeremy and, of course, the bride herself.

The wedding breakfast – or late lunch – takes place in a dark restaurant with raw brick walls on the Upper East Side, where the theme tune from
The Godfather
plays endlessly. Tony doesn’t recite the end of
Romeo and Juliet
. He gives a beautiful speech, talking about how he knew Robert’s father and loved him. This means a lot to Robert who, I think, loves Tony more than Tasha.

Adding to the transitory nature of the event, everyone is leaving directly for the airport after the lunch, so we all have our bags. Annabelle and I are going back to LA. (I am making a film with an orang-utan in the morning.) Tony and Jeremy are leaving for Africa tonight, embarking on one of their legendary trips. No luggage and no medication for Tony, who is terribly unwell. He knows this. No
one else does. Not even Robert and Natasha, who are going on their honeymoon in the morning.

Tony directs the party from a chair, forcing me and Vanessa to make headscarves out of napkins and sing ‘How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria’. It’s a jolly pub wedding out of Dickens. My final image is of Robert and Natasha against the brick wall of the restaurant, laughing, smoking and drinking – as Vanessa and I bring the house down, and Tony watches like a wizard, knowing everything.

On the way to the airport, I have never felt so lost in my life.

Robert and I move from the coffin. It’s another magnet and we pull ourselves away from it, while others succumb and are slowly enveloped by its field, edging closer and closer, while we struggle back to the living and join Tasha’s half-sister Katharine and her mother Grizelda for a stiff drink. Tasha’s head can be seen now, far away in a pool of light, rising out of the casket at the other end of the room. Now Vanessa and Uma Thurman are leaning over her. Vanessa holds Uma back like a heroine in a nineteenth-century melodrama. It is a theatrical wake for theatricals. We have played scenes like this in rep and on the West End stage. Some of us are better at it than others, but it is a brilliant way to deal with the tragedy. It’s nearly show time for me so I say goodbye and leave.

Outside, the paparazzi have intensified, and a lady with a microphone runs after me down the icy street.

‘Can you talk to CNN?’

Natasha is flying to heaven on the red carpet. She is more famous today than she has ever been. Too late as usual! I walk over to Broadway across the frozen park in a strange, twisting mood, at once elated and regretful. Dirty snow is piled by the sides of the icy pathways. The lake is frozen. The city towers over the treetops, a galaxy of windows sparkling with life, while the dead whistle round the naked branches in the park below. They are wagging their fingers.

*

Tasha and I gave one another a wide berth while she was alive. We knew each other well, but despite many connections and similarities we didn’t get along. Perhaps we were more alike than we cared to admit. Both of us dreamt, after all, of entirely different careers for ourselves than the ones that we ultimately achieved. (She wanted to be Vivien Leigh and I wanted to be Montgomery Clift.) Both of us had a sharp tongue concerning others, oversensitivity about ourselves, equal doses of practicality and hysteria, and a stumped vulnerability on the various crossroads of our private lives. Both of us tried endlessly to remodel ourselves – physically and psychologically – for those elusive conventional careers. The fact is, we were both better character actors than love interests. We both passed through periods of excess. They just didn’t coincide.

By the time I reach Columbus Circus I have plunged into a terrible depression but it’s too late. Suddenly I see the fiasco at the stage door in a new light. Tasha was holding out an olive branch, and it all went wrong. It’s quite an effort, after all, to come and see someone in a show. Why didn’t I ask her to dinner that night after the play? It was strange that the last show she saw was mine and a play about death. She could have been in it, actually, and still be here.

Life’s too short to bear a grudge. But I did.

I
am crossing Eighth Avenue on the afternoon Michael Jackson dies. You don’t need to see it on the TV or read about it in the news. It is passed mouth to mouth along the street, like a cold.

‘No shit,’ says a Puerto Rican boy with cornrows. He turns to me – a complete stranger. ‘Michael Jackson’s dead!’

‘You’re kidding?’

My heart races as we cross the street. Coming towards us like a wave, the crowd on the other side have already been hit with the news. In the middle of the road a big fat girl bursts into tears. She stands there as the lights change and the traffic swarms around her. ‘Michael!’ she wails. Somebody guides her to the other side.

It is matinée day in theatre land. There are queues around the block, and they are falling over with the news like skittles or playing cards, passing the tragedy down the line to the poor person at the end who screams it to the street. I rush into the theatre.

‘Have you heard?’ asks Rose, glued to her transistor TV set.

‘Yes,’ I reply.

‘I can’t believe it!’ she stammers. We are friends now, Rose and I.

In the dressing room Mr Geoffrey is ironing in front of the TV and crying – very
Cage aux Folles
– but this is no time for jokes. Life carries on mechanically, one eye trained on the TV, where the tribute biographies are already running. Again and again we hear the 911 phone call, set against footage of the ambulance arriving at the hospital, the aerial shot of the house, the tour rehearsals, all the highlights and lowlights of Michael’s incredible life. Sitting with Bubbles, going to court in pyjamas, dancing cartwheels on stage as a little boy, sitting in the branches of a tree aged forty, giving the fatal interview to the vile Mr Bashir. (I wonder how he is sleeping tonight.) The images of Michael’s face, one superimposed upon another, from the beautiful black youth to the chalk-white child-catcher, are a kind of postmodern
Dorian Gray
, a portrait of the Afro-American struggle that has turned from The Slae into The Scream. Weaving through the scandal, the same image returns. A little black boy singing and dancing cartwheels.

Connie (my PR) has organised for me to do an interview with the Daily Mirror in London. I have been putting it off but finally the date is set with their US showbiz correspondent for an early dinner before the show.

The journalist is a fabulous Fleet Street slapper, middle-aged, from Middlesex, living in Manhattan. She has big round Liza Minnelli eyes and of course we talk a lot about Michael Jackson. She has just got back from LA where she was sent as soon as the news broke, and where she managed to get the cellphone number of Michael’s bodyguard (the famous 911 call), and she was driving around LA on the day of the death, trying to talk to him, while all the other hacks were following the same fabulous lead.