Based on a True Story (4 page)

five

Washed-Up Tales from a Soap Flake

By Frances Bleeker

London Advance

Augusta Price once haunted Soho, and now Soho haunts her. This is where the actress used to drink and score pills, when she was still drinking and scoring pills. Those days, she says, are history.

Price is perhaps most familiar to television viewers as Kit Gallagher, the hapless barmaid on the popular night-time soap
Canals
and as the vampire surgeon Helen Mount in the short-lived cult classic
The Blood Bank
. Those successes are behind her, but the actress, like a dowager leopard that refuses to give up the hunt, is preparing to pounce once again.

We meet for coffee on a street that is full of ghosts from her antic past. Thirty years ago, in a café like this one, Price met a journalist and immediately ran away with him. Their affair lasted until they had no more coins to feed the electricity metre in a Salford flat. Yes, that’s right: They ran all the way from Soho to Salford.

You won’t find that tale in her recent autobiography,
Based on a True Story: A Memoir of Sorts
. In fact, some of the most intriguing stories from an intriguing life are not present at all in the book, which was a surprise bestseller last Christmas. Other colourful tales are present, but gently tweaked. Price could have been a sculptor, rather than an actress, considering how adept she is at shaping the clay of her experience. More on this later.

Those experiences, dark though some of them were, have left only a few marks on the woman sitting across from me — and she’s used all of her tools to try to erase them. Her dark eyes, ringed with eyeliner that Cleopatra would envy, are bright and shrewd. Her hair, the colour of an Irish setter’s, catches the sunlight streaming in through the window. Her small feet are crammed into orange platform shoes, in defiance of her age and gravity. She seems to have forgotten to button the top of her blouse, much to the delight of the café’s male patrons.

Although she won’t reveal her age — published sources suggest she’s 53 — Price seems not much older than when she left
Canals
, in which she played the dim-witted but kind-hearted barmaid. (Rumour has it that Ms. Price was sacked by the show’s producers after a series of public contretemps, including a punch-up with a rival soap star in the loo at the Dorchester Hotel.)

“Stories are just that, darling — stories,” says Price. “They are what we tell ourselves to make sense of our lives.”

She sets down her latte with a grimace of distaste. (She’s asked for “one of the disgusting ones filled with milk.”) What she is trying to say, I think, is that the truth about her sacking lies somewhere between the producers’ version and her own. In her memoir, she says only that “Kit had become threadbare, and it was time to find a new set of clothes.”

Considering how entertaining her memoir is — and that its very title contains a warning to the literal-minded — only the most churlish reader would point out the various gaps between Price’s account and the historical record. She claims, for example, to have resigned from her starring role in
T
he Blood Bank
over “script differences” with the show’s producers. At the time, though, it was reported that she’d been asked to leave when she compared her character’s vampirical desire for blood with “a priest’s lust for tiny white bottoms.”w

When the stories are this much fun, who really cares if she was in drugs and alcohol rehab once or twice (or more often), or whether she was arrested for pushing a shopping trolley off Southend Pier, or if she actually did serve Princess Margaret a drink when she worked at the dog track in Walthamstow?

“You’re wondering if any of it’s true,” she says with a cat-like smile, the tiny lines at the corners of her eyes creasing. “I suppose I opened myself up to that, given the book’s title. Not that it matters. It’s entertainment, darling.” Her voice is beautiful, low and whisky-tinted, pitched to draw the ear close.

Augusta Price has been an entertaining fixture on the minor-celebrity landscape since she left the North London School of Speech and Drama a little more than three decades ago. To her Italian-immigrant father, drama school was a betrayal of everything he’d worked and sacrificed for: “Why don’t you just take your money and throw it off Blackfriars Bridge?” he screamed at her when she left the house for good at 17. At that point, she changed her name from Anna Maria Ferragosto to the more marquee-friendly Augusta Price.

“For him, being an actress was little better than being a whore,” says Price. “And then in my first role at the Edinburgh Fringe I actually played a whore. Topless. He never really forgave me.”

They were never entirely reconciled. The tangled skeins are hinted at in her book: she seems to blame him, at least in part, for her later problems with alcohol and drugs. Her father had injured his back while working as a stonemason, and lived afterward in a haze of painkillers. At 14, a curious Anna Maria stole one of his painkillers, washed it down with a glass of homemade wine, and never looked back. Or, as she writes, “I looked forward, with pinned pupils, for the next drink, the next high.”

Yet, for a long while, Price’s dalliance with substances did not affect her career — perhaps because she was hardly alone at the bar. After drama school, and a couple of years in tights playing regional pantos, she made a name for herself in the
itv
miniseries
Highland Mist
, in which she played a London ad executive who is called home to Scotland to run her family’s distillery. “Whisky flowed on that set, darling,” she says, sounding somewhat wistful.

Price never married, though her memoir is dotted with men who vary from bad to worse. Somewhere along the way, she had a child, Charles, who is curiously absent from the book. When I ask her about the young man, who would be 24 today, she bridles. “The story I told is the one I wanted to tell,” she says stiffly, before excusing herself to go to the ladies’. “There wasn’t the need to drag the whole world into it.”

Yikes! I wonder for a moment if I’ve blundered beyond repair (indeed, an acquaintance of Price’s will tell me later that she and her son are estranged, and that the young man lives in California).

When she returns, though, all seems to be forgiven. Lipstick freshly applied, charm fully in place, Price is ready to answer all questions. So what does the future hold? Apparently she is now trying to decide between two high-profile television projects, both of which have meaty roles for her.

“Darling,” she says, with such a pleasing smile that you really do want to believe her. “I’m not sure how I earned this much good fortune. I feel I should be knocking wood, or I’ll jinx myself.”

six

The pestilent scourge of breakfast meetings had laid waste to early-morning London. Roustabouts no longer lolled in bed, nursing their hangovers. Instead, they arrived scoured like copper pots at restaurants like this, a vast, echoing space in Piccadilly that had once been a car showroom. It was the only place to properly advertise one’s continued role in the running of things.

Politicians and their special advisers, dames and knights, censured comedians — all gathered on the leather banquettes, looking over their companions’ shoulders every time the door opened. Menus the size of briefcases were placed in their hands by silently gliding waiters, but no one ever looked at them. They ordered what they always ordered, and lived for the day when the waiter would say, with a small smile, “The same again, sir?”

Augusta was no longer a regular here, or at any establishment with tablecloths. For the first few moments she’d gloried at being back in the thick of things, but the thrill soon died. The din was murder on her hearing. “What was that again?” she bellowed to the bearded man beside her. His voice was moist in her ear: “I was just saying that I remember it as if it were yesterday. I came like a V2.”

She edged away from him on the banquette. “If we’d had relations in a makeup chair, Andrew, I would certainly have remembered.”

He laughed and pulled a crumb from his luxuriant grey beard. The gesture rang a tiny, muted bell somewhere in the back of Augusta’s mind. Of course she remembered, but the vain old goat hardly deserved the succour of her reminiscence. It hadn’t been a makeup chair, it had been a frantic five minutes in the costume trailer, Augusta trying to remember her lines over Andrew’s heaving back. A filthy Cardiff spring, twenty years before. Andrew had played a car thief turned football coach, and she had been . . . a paramedic? A social worker?

“Detective,” Andrew supplied, sighing deeply.

He was now a television star, famous for playing a deaf veterinarian who solved crime in the Shetlands. Augusta had arrived at the restaurant uncharacteristically early, eager to meet her agent and draw the map of her comeback trail. As she sat by herself, assessing her crow’s feet in the dull reflection of a butter knife, Andrew had spotted her and strolled over.

“I thought I might have made your book. Your
memoir
.” He gave the word an exaggerated French pronunciation.

“You read it, did you?”

“Flipped through it anyway, at the newsagent’s. Surprised to see there was no index.”

That
, Augusta thought,
is so vain twats like you would buy it.

“Andrew,” she said sweetly, “your presence is much too intense to be contained in a mere few pages. The paper would combust, and think of the lawsuits I would have on my hands.”

He was edging one meaty thigh closer to hers when she was saved by the arrival of a tall, reedy man at the table.

“So sorry,” said David, her agent, dropping into a chair in a cascade of scarves and bags. “Bloody awful on the Tube this morning. Passenger under train, again! Liverpool this time. Dear God, the sorrow in this city.” He noticed Andrew and brightened. “Oh, hello! You’re the vet off
Donkey Island
, aren’t you?”

Augusta introduced the two men, and they briefly exchanged gossip about mutual acquaintances.
The London equivalent of dogs sniffing each other’s arses
, she thought. Andrew finally left, after securing a promise that Augusta would call him one day soon.

David snapped his napkin across his lap. “You look well,” he said. “Rested. The holiday worked marvels.”

She searched his face for sarcasm, but there was none. Only familiar shrewd brown eyes, gazing at her over the top of Prada glasses that her fifteen percent had helped buy. A waiter poured mimosas at the next table, champagne meeting orange juice in a bright citrus explosion. It reminded her of a garden of orange poppies.

She tore her eyes away and took a sip of bitter black coffee. The urge to ask about Deller’s book was overwhelming, but she fought it down. It would be better to get the good news first, and delay the sting in the tail.

“Now that I’m back,” she forced a smile, “do we have the finished script for
Circle of Lies
?”

Six months ago, she had secured a job that would lead her back to the cameras. It was a small part, but gritty and eye-catching: she would play the wife of a Q.C. who was secretly running a European sex-trafficking ring. The wife, coddled in luxury, initially turned a blind eye to her husband’s crimes but in the end, twisted by her conscience, reported him to the authorities. Augusta had auditioned, and pleaded, and lunched for weeks until the role was hers. Now, looking at David’s darting eyes, she felt a stab of panic.

Her agent clung to his menu as if it offered the secret to life itself. She’d known him so long; this was not a positive sign.

“David?”

He appeared to be gathering himself. Finally he looked up. All the coming disappointments were forecast on his lovely, open face.

“There will be other work, Augusta.”

She felt herself deflate in the chair, the air forced from her lungs. Surely everyone in the restaurant would turn and stare, smelling failure in their midst. In her head she was screaming, but only one word came out: “Why?”

David motioned to the waiter, who arrived with pen poised. Augusta was on the verge of asking for champagne in her orange juice. She bit the words back. Instead she ordered another coffee, and kept her hands in her lap to hide the trembling.

“Why?” she asked again once the waiter had gone.

David rubbed his spotless knife with his napkin. “They couldn’t wait any longer. You were . . . away.”

He’d left something unsaid. “And?”

Finally, he looked up at her. “And there was a problem with insurance. With insuring you.”

It was out, hanging between them, impossible to retract now.

The waiter arrived with David’s breakfast and her coffee. She reached blindly for his cuff. “I’ll have a mimosa.”

She took a deep breath. Suddenly she wanted to murder everyone in the place, to choke them with their words, their chattering, planning, scheduling.

“Well,” she said finally. “Is there anything else on the horizon?”

“Absolutely,” David said, with professional cheer. “I got a call about a reality program — don’t give me that look — and you’d be perfect as the presenter. Just listen a moment. You’d be sent to live in a puffin colony in Northumberland, and you’d commune with them, you know, urbanite and bird, for six months . . .” His voice faltered at the look in her eyes.

“The title of this masterpiece?”

He coughed. “
Lonely Birds
.”

“
Lonely Birds
.” She drew herself up in her seat. “Just me, and a mountain of dung, and some penguins.”

“Puffins.”

“Darling, you know I was once nominated for a Bafta?”

“Things have changed, Augusta.”

She remembered, suddenly, that it had been David who held her hair back when she was sick in the toilets at the Dorchester during the Bafta party. Alma Partridge had stood at the door, alternately berating her and anyone who attempted to enter the stall. Her army of two.

It felt as if someone were sawing at her throat. “Anything else?”

“Oh, Augusta,” David said. He reached over to lay a hand on hers. “It’s not so bad. The book’s doing quite well, as you know. The publisher’s interested in another.”

“Another book,” she said dully. “The first one took forever. You would not believe how much energy invention requires.”

“Not another memoir,” he said, jolly now that she had not actually impaled herself on her fork. “They’re thinking maybe we could capitalize on . . . on . . .”

“My infamy?”

“Your unique perspective,” David said. “Perhaps a kind of self-help book. A manual for overcoming disaster. I know it sounds horrendous, but in the right hands — in your hands — it could be good fun. Augusta, look at me. It’s where the money is.”

She shook her head slowly, watched the quartet at the next table clink their glasses together in celebration.

She said, “‘There are millions to be made, and your only competition is idiots.’”

David looked up, fork halfway to his mouth. “Sorry?”

“Just something a wise man in Hollywood once said.” She scanned the room for their waiter, but couldn’t tell him from his fellows. In their white aprons they were like solicitous penguins, indistinguishable.

He seemed relieved that she hadn’t screamed, or thrown anything. “And we’ll find a ghost, a good one. That’ll speed things along.”

“Well, at least it shall keep me in nuts through the winter.”

David shifted in his seat. “I’ve had a word with the publisher, and they would like to see a finished outline before they pull out the chequebook.” He started to chuckle, then thought better of it. “You know, after the last time. A bit of carrot, much handier than the stick. A good ghost will be invaluable.”

Augusta thought of her ghosts, drifting through the empty rooms of her memory. It was doubtful that any of them would want to help. She’d need someone biddable, and cheap, which ruled out most of London. A picture rose in her mind of the young American reporter in the dreadful cardigan. She’d been annoyingly tentative in person, but she left claw marks on paper.

The waiter arrived with her drink, setting it down with a chime. Her fingers closed around the cool stem, and she forced herself to count to thirty before taking a sip. She’d noticed on the cocktail menu that a single mimosa cost fifteen pounds. At least David was paying.

At the bar, Andrew was signing an autograph. She watched him replace the cap on his pen and slide it inside his jacket pocket. Such a small thing, a pen. So innocuous. A concealed weapon. She took a sip of her drink, already anticipating the next.

“So,” she said, “tell me about Deller’s book.”

David appeared relieved that she’d circled back to the safer ground of gossip. “I don’t really know much about it. I saw it in one of the U.S. catalogues. Some barking New Age publisher in California. It sounds like rubbish, but you never know with these things.”

Augusta kept her voice as mild as possible. “But you think it might be about me?”

“Well, it seems to be about overcoming a broken heart. And you were the one who wielded the hammer, in his case.” He pushed away from the table, worried perhaps that he might be in fork range. “Did you know he’s reinvented himself in California? Apparently he’s some sort of relationship counsellor.” He shook his head, chuckling. “Which is a bit rich, when you think about it.”