Being Boycie, page 20
I never completely understood him and I didn’t believe that I could significantly provide the kind of help he was looking for. However, he appeared very glad of what I had done. It was a strange period for me, brought on, I guess, by Stoppard’s own uncertainties at the time. I think he already knew that Night & Day was going to lift his career and standing as a world-class playwright up several levels, and he was preparing for it.
After one of these rehearsal and tinkering sessions, he told me he needed somewhere to sit and think. Would I mind if he came back to my hotel room with me so that he could do that?
I thought of the rickety elevator, the smelly inside well, the Roach Motel; all my instincts were to say ‘No’, but he seemed to need this escape quite badly.
I agreed and we headed up uptown to the hotel. When we got there, it was clear that he didn’t want to talk; he dropped himself into one of the creaky old easy chairs and just sat, deep in thought, staring at the lank grimy curtains as if I weren’t there.
He certainly didn’t want to chat, while I sat there bursting with the urge to say something helpful and, if possible, profound.
Having been involved with Tom Stoppard now for over two years, I was accustomed to his way of doing things with quite unselfconscious quirkiness. But, if asked, he would give reasons for it. When I was playing in Dirty Linen at The Arts in London, he turned up once at a weekday matinée with barely half a houseful. I asked him why he had come to a performance that would inevitably be flatter than normal.
‘Because the audience reaction won’t get in the way of the script,’ he said. ‘Because actors will play up to a busy, receptive audience, and I can’t hear it so well.’
He was right, of course; all actors are to some extent whores who will play to the laughs. Nevertheless he certainly acknowledged actors who he believed interpreted him well.
When I’d come back from South Africa, having switched parts to accommodate the local talent in the Dirty Linen tour, he’d written to thank me. He had also asked if I could come to Cambridge with him to help him with a lecture he was giving there. He asked Jean Fergusson, a colleague from the company in Harrogate, too. He was talking to the university about the development of his work, and wanted us to deliver passages from various of his plays to illustrate points he was making.
In November 1979, the Stoppard bandwagon rolled on to the Wilbur Theater in downtown Boston. It was a fine old theatre, not much changed in fifty years; even the dressing rooms had received no more than the odd lick of paint. I was glad of that when I found I’d been allocated the very room used by Marlon Brando thirty years before in the pre-Broadway run of A Streetcar named Desire. It seemed to me almost unbelievable that I should be sitting where the great Brando had sat, looking into the same tarnished dressing mirror, and leaning back to see the same cracked ceiling and cornices. As I responded to my call each evening, I left the room muttering, ‘I coulda been a contender!’
For living quarters I was billeted in an hotel with all the hallmarks of cheapness situated, although I didn’t know it, right on the edge of the red-light district. Harriet was back in New York and I was feeling a bit sorry for myself.
The first evening we were there, I thought I’d go out and get a little of the flavour of the city and drifted into one of those big circular bars that are part of Boston’s Irish legacy.
Harriet’s brother, Davis Hall, was with me, while I jokingly asked the barman where one found women in Boston.
‘You want a woman?’
‘Well, you know, just to meet, sort of bump into.’
The barman, unfamiliar with British circumlocution, gave me a knowing wink and went off to make a quick, muttered phone call from the back of the bar. I vaguely thought he might be ringing one of his regular female customers whom he knew to be unattached at the time.
He strolled back, looking smug. ‘OK, I’ve got somebody coming to meet you; isn’t that what you want?’
I wasn’t sure quite what he meant, until a woman with short legs, very high heels, beehive hair and half a pound of make-up on her face made an entrance into the cavernous bar.
The barman greeted her with a nod in my direction and she walked over. I was feeling embarrassed now; this was not remotely what I wanted, and Harriet’s brother was with me watching the whole pantomime as she walked up, waggling her arse and substantial breasts. As soon as she reached me she leaned up, kissed me on the lips and started chattering inanely in a way that demotes a grown male into a small boy who has expressed a desire for a cream doughnut.
‘What’ll you have to drink?’ I invited her with, I thought, exemplary politeness.
The girl did a double take at my unfamiliar accent.
Davis Hall giggled. He thought I’d meant to order a hooker.
I shuffled from foot to foot, answering her small talk in monosyllables, until, with more frequent glances at her Liberace watch, she sensed that a deal was not in the offing and excused herself with a trip to the powder room’ – never to be seen again.
The show did well enough in Boston, though we didn’t get the eagerness of the New York audiences. We expected better on the final leg of our tour in the altogether more reflective ambience of San Francisco.
I knew I was going to like San Francisco, but not as much as I found I did. The laid-back, unfettered charm of the city enchanted me and I naturally warmed to the place.
My always complex love life was confused by the distance between Sarah Venable, here in San Francisco, and her husband, left behind in New York. For the last two months, Sarah had moved herself to the sidelines of my life, occasionally firing a warning shot across my bow to remind me of her prior claim. I hadn’t stopped admiring her free spirit, nor had I forgotten the depth of our visceral relationship back in London; but when Sarah had told me it was over, Harriet had moved into the space she’d left. I hadn’t the strength – some might say the sense of honour – required to fight off the temptation to see Sarah again. Besides I didn’t want to be a source of hurt to her, and for a brief period, our affair resumed.
From the secure place where I am now, I can ask, why did I do these things? Why, when a few moments’ reflection would have told me I was going to cause more hurt by reviving a semi-terminated relationship, didn’t I walk away from it? These dilemmas had become a recurrent feature of my life, and I seemed to have no strategy for dealing with them.
While I wasn’t occupied evading these issues, in the three weeks we were there I had time to get to know San Francisco. I would wander around observing people, marvelling, as ever at the astonishing array of humanity on offer in this cosmopolitan city. By day I’d take buses and little cable cars that climbed halfway to where the stars would have been at night. On one trip, a man dropped into a seat in front of me, looking very respectable, with a neat haircut and glasses, conventional in every way – except for the pair of large bear’s ears with which he had supplemented his own. Why was he doing this? No one paid the slightest attention to him, besides me.
Down by the waterfront I found a human jukebox, a large oblong cardboard box painted appropriately with buttons and knobs which one could press for a tune. A bored, hollow voice from inside would say, ‘Yeah? What do you wanna hear?’
‘Could I have Good Vibrations?’
‘Sure.’
After a pause and a big intake of breath from inside the box, there followed a top-notch, slightly muffled performance of the Beach Boys classic, played on the trumpet. Delighted, I tried a few more. It seemed he could play anything I threw at him; I thought about exporting him to London.
At night, after our show, I liked to trawl the bars and clubs for the best music. One night I found myself with one of the Americans in the cast in a Tiffany shaded joint somewhere near Polk Street. I was sitting up at the bar – always the best vantage point from which to launch a conversation – when a fairly deranged-looking woman lurched in and slumped on a stool between us. She seemed to want to engage us in some kind of incoherent conversation. I offered her a drink, which she accepted eagerly, then, seeing some dice and a dice box on the bar, challenged me with wild eyes. ‘I wanna play dice.’
She won a few throws, hurling back the bourbon I’d bought her, and became more deranged. I won a throw, and she started getting scratchy.
‘You fuckin’ Limey bastard,’ she snarled. ‘You’ve got no fuckin’ balls! You think you’re so fuckin’ great coming over here, thinking it used to be your fuckin’ country.’
I lifted an eyebrow like Gregory Peck and won another throw. ‘Aha,’ I said. ‘Look at that – good old England, we win again!’
She leaned towards me. I thought, Christ, she’s going to kiss me!
Instead, she bit my right ear – very hard indeed.
I felt a warm trickle down the side of my neck, but it was too dark to see clearly what she’d done.
The barman came round to deal with her. ‘Hey, come on! Get outta here,’ he said and aimed her out of the bar through a pair of swing doors.
He was apologetic. ‘Gee, I’m sorry about that. She used to come
in here a lot, but she’s just got out of jail.’
‘God, what was she there for?’ I asked.
‘You know, drugs and shit...’
I somehow got back to my hotel and went to bed; I woke with my pillow soaked in blood. When I met Sarah in the morning, she gasped and insisted that I go and see a doctor. She booked me into the nearest specialist, and I shot off in a cab, praying on the way that it wouldn’t cost too much.
The doc took one look. ‘My God, why didn’t you come to me last night?’
He told me that a bite on the ear by a human being was one of the most dangerous bites that one could suffer, second only to a bite from a chimpanzee.
How did they know? I wondered. How many people get bitten by chimps?
He showed me pictures of people who’d had ears bitten and come in too late. I had to stifle a gasp. There were great cauliflower aural extensions, impossibly distorted lugholes – the ugliest I’d ever seen.
‘You’re an actor; this is the last thing you need.’
While I panicked, he stitched up the ear, dressed it and gave me some lotions. ‘That should be OK.’
I wasn’t so sure.
A few days later, though, the ear was healing nicely – no sign of a cauliflower. I arrived back at my hotel in a cab and, just as I was walking up the steps and the cab was disappearing round the corner, I realised I’d left my wallet inside it. Everything, every document vital to existence in America was in that wallet, and I had no idea how to identify the cab or its driver. All I could remember was that the driver spoke English with a strong French accent, because we’d talked about being an alien in the States.
For practical purposes, the bottom had fallen out of my world, and I was due to leave in a couple of days!
Without much hope, I went desperately round every cab company I could find in the phone book to ask if they had any French-speaking drivers. Most of them had one or two but had no way of identifying the cab I’d been in.
But the gods were smiling. Next day, there was a note waiting for me at my hotel, telling me that if I had lost something, I should ring a certain number.
I pounced on the phone and made the call. After I’d described what I’d lost, a woman told me someone would meet me with the wallet at the theatre before that night’s show. I was massively relieved, but wondering how much she would sting me for her trouble.
I recognised the driver when he turned up at the stage door, bringing my wallet and everything that should have been in it. He had, he said, discovered my identity and my address when he found my doctor’s appointment card. There was nothing else there that could have led him to me. I tried to give him a $50 bill, but he wouldn’t take it.
‘Listen, you saved my bloody life!’ I said, hurling the note into the back of his vehicle.
He drove off, happy enough.
And I thanked God that the dopy woman had bitten me. I’d never have got the stuff back otherwise.
I flew out next day, singing to myself, ‘I left my ear... in San Francisco.’
The tour had ended in San Francisco, and I was confronted with the need to make a decision. I wanted to see Harriet again; I’d been in touch with her regularly while I’d been on the West Coast. I also did not want to go back to London, where there was nothing very much waiting for me. I was beginning to think, in that paranoid, actors’ way, that my agent had completely forgotten my existence.
By happy chance, Harriet rang me just as I was thinking how much I didn’t want to go back and witness my parents’ seasonal infighting. I asked her what she was doing for Christmas. She was, she said, planning to stay with her parents in Des Plaines, on the outskirts of Chicago. Her brother, my friend and colleague, Davis, would be there too. ‘Why don’t you come and spend Christmas with our family?’ she suggested.
It was a brilliant idea. I agreed at once.
Reluctant Homecoming
Christmas 1979 in Chicago was a great experience. It was wonderful to spend it with Harriet, whom I loved, Davis who had become a good friend, and their easy, down-home parents. Chicago was exciting, too, even with the icy winds blowing through the famous skyscrapers on the shores of Lake Michigan. There was glamour, dynamism and a lingering air of the lawless days of Al Capone about the place – and the big, bold skyline that confidently challenged New York.
Mr Hall, not the least bit theatrical, was a big, bluff Irish American, who, once he knew of my love for British football, was determined to tell me all he could about the American game. I sat glued to the TV with him, fascinated as he told me all about the ‘Rush’, the ‘Blitz’ and the ‘wide receivers’, as well as the joyous splendour of the great running backs.
He was a very likeable old fella, who called me ‘Good buddy’ – tremendously heartening in an alien land – and I was very happy to sit and listen while he told me why the Chicago Bears were really the premier team in the US.
When the holiday was over, I went back to New York. Without planning it, and without much choice, I found myself back in Harriet’s weird set-up on East 14th, where she and her Sufi chums drifted in and out of each other’s lives and space, and the happyclappy guys in the ground floor were still at it. She continued to possess a bizarre and, to English eyes, unfathomable blend of religious mysticism and carnal lust. However, although the Sufism was beyond me, I had no problem with the lust aspect. Regrettably, no amount of physical love was going to change the fact that I was broke, and even if Harriet had been much richer, I wouldn’t have taken any support from her.
Being in New York now was strikingly different from the first time round, when Dogg’s Hamlet had been doing a good tour. As a piece of fairly arcane British drama, it had attracted plenty of attention among Manhattan’s self-proclaimed intellectuals and their followers. Actually being part of it meant I’d been touched with the same ephemeral glory.
Having been feted to the heights at the time, now I had to learn the harsh but essential truth that in the States (far more than in Britain), if you’d been up and then made the mistake of coming down, they didn’t forgive you – not, at least, until you were up again.
Now I was in no show, and no more than a very skint, out of work (actually, legally unable to work) actor with pretensions to being a playwright.
As often happens when you have absolutely nothing, you start dreaming the impossible dream – in my case a quite banal impossible dream, like buying a Red Pontiac Transam and heading across the US by road (taking in Route 66 on the way) with the lovely, scatty, sunset-haired Harriet by my side by day, and in my bed by night.
This was never going to happen, and I also had more practical dreams, like marrying Harriet and getting a green card in the process.
In the meantime, in between doing the odd illicit voice-over, I touted around my South African play – now known as Cut the Grass for short. There was some interest in it.
‘I like it,’ people would say, ‘but I can’t quite see it working here – not just at the moment, you know, with everything else going on. But, listen, I’ll get back to you.’
I found that Americans seemed to promise a lot when first you met them; they issued lavish and apparently heartfelt invitations for you to visit their homes, but when you called to take them up on it they were busy. However, with one good Clive Barnes crit to my name, others would make encouraging noises about my acting.
‘You could do OK in LA; you’re quirky – that’s good.’ But no one came up with any mouth-watering offers. Despite the obvious bleakness of my position, I lulled myself into believing that if I only waited, I was sure to catch a good tide sooner or later.
Inevitably, I kept running out of money. In England, the monthly mortgage payments on my flat came round relentlessly, and I’d neglected to rent the place out to cover it – because I’d only planned to go to the States for a ten-week Stoppard tour. But I wasn’t prepared to give up yet. Even Sarah Venable reappeared, and reiterated the view that I should move to LA, where she was sure I’d find work. But I didn’t want to leave New York. That would feel like giving up, so I hung on there, partly to go on pursuing the unrealistic aim of wangling a green card and partly to bring some kind of conclusion (or at least order) to my confused love life. Neither of these was a turn-on for the local glitterati, and the party tickets that had been flooding in only a month or two before all dried up.
I’d been in New York for all of January, making no headway as an actor or a playwright, and was close to penury when I had a phone call from Marina Martin, my agent in London. This was the call about a small but good part in an episode of John Sullivan’s Citizen Smith, the BBC sitcom that had launched Robert Lindsay’s career as Wolfie Smith. I knew it had been running since 1977, was well established and now into its fourth series.
