Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (93 page)

Back to the hotel for calls to England. Also speak to Ellen B in Paris. I will take her to dinner, at the Pharamond, Friday night and Tristram will fly over on Saturday to talk. If decision taken, Steve can do the deal with her agent before he leaves the US.

A half-hour massage and a swim before leaving for the MGM meeting.

Our meeting is with Alan Ladd Jr. Small, erect, striped blue shirt and hair, which needs a trim at the back, brushed tight down over his skull. Dark hair and dark eyes. He also favours traditional wooden furniture in his office, quite at odds with the modernity of the building. Big, squishy, comfortable armchairs and sofas.

I like Ladd but, as we leave, I honestly cannot gauge what might be the prospects for a pick-up of
American Friends
. But I don’t think Steve and I could have put our case better. The formal submission will be made next week.

Drive back to the Westwood. Charlie [Crichton] arrives in the bar after his flight from London. When he wants a drink he hoists his walking-stick in the air.

Down below me white-clad Hispanics are already attending to the pool area at which white-bodied Caucasians will later lounge. In Beverly Hills other dark people will be out clipping the lawns around the ‘Armed Response’ signs.

To breakfast with Steve – coffee, fruit, two eggs, bacon, hash browns and a croissant. Usual sprinkling of film people. Shirley MacLaine scuttles out of the elevator looking serious.

We have run out of meetings for a while, so have time to sit in my room and catch up. Then walk out to the shops in Westwood. A beautiful warmth in the air, the neat beds of pansies outside the hotel sparkle.

The unlikely figure of Charlie Crichton approaches, preceded by the walking-stick. He’s perspiring slightly but has already walked up through the Botanical Gardens and halfway round the UCLA campus from what I can tell.

Talk of Sandy – Alexander Mackendrick
¹⁷⁷
– who lives in LA but not for much longer, according to Charlie. He is anxious to get JC and Mackendrick together while there’s still time.

A white limousine transfers JC, Charlie C, myself and Steve to Lorimar (the old MGM studio) for a screening of the latest version of
Wanda
.

Watching the pic in the US for the first time I notice how much easier they are with Kevin than in the UK. He brings out laughs easily. The JC/Jamie rewrites at the end are smoother, but just compound the immorality, rather than solving it, and Kevin reappearing at the window seems a crude mistake. But enormous buzz of appreciation at the end. Frank Oz
¹⁷⁸
shakes his head in admiring disbelief – notes with pleasure the intensity of the performances.

Take the 2.30 flight to Paris. Am staying at L’Hôtel. It used to be the Hôtel D’Alsace and Oscar Wilde died here in 1900. The year my father was born.

Inside everything is very small – rooms, lifts tightly packed in a curve around a central gallery which runs uninterrupted to the top of the building. It’s like being in an extremely chic lighthouse.

My first sight of Ellen B is of a shadowy figure in the back of a taxi which slides up outside the hotel about 20 minutes later. I launch into brisk and well-rehearsed instructions, in French, for the cab driver, after which Ellen touches my arm gently and advises … ‘It’s alright, he’s from Cambodia.’

The driver is indeed Cambodian, came over to Paris in 1975 and has never heard of his family since. This starts our evening off in a fairly serious vein, and when we are installed at Le Pharamond she continues to talk rather intensely about her worries for the world – especially what’s happening in Israel at the moment.

In between apologising for the cold blasts of air from the street which send shivers along our row of tables every time someone opens the
door, and trying to be attentive and concerned when I really wish the conversation were on a less demanding level, I’m aware that she has a broad face with a pretty mouth, soft skin and a good complexion, a slightly bloodshot eye, and she brushes golden hair back with a hand in plaster after a fall from a horse in LA two and a half weeks ago.

She has her idiosyncrasies, some of which are a little worrying, such as the fact that D H Lawrence came to her in a dream and she’s now reading his poems – in public.

Halfway through our meal I had a little twinge of fear that we were barking up the wrong tree, but as we taxi home I’m a little more reassured. Maybe I’m too tired to think.

Drop her off, then, despite not having a coat suitable for the sharply cool weather, I walk, for an hour and a half, around the Left Bank, stopping at a couple of bars, enjoying what only certain great cities can provide – a marvellous set against which to invent and play your part. Like Venice, Paris dramatises everything.

Tristram arrives from London at 12.15. Cannot raise Ellen B – her phone is always engaged. TP and I set off to walk to her apartment, but when we arrive there is no name on the bell.

As a last resort, perhaps thinking what a Truffaut hero would do under similar circumstances, I try a loud, crisp shout of ‘Ellen!’, which echoes between the high walls of the narrow street. Sure enough shutters open several floors above us and the day is saved. It could turn out to be one of the more significant shouts of my life, for she had not known her phone was out of order and was feeling rejected and finally rather cross.

All is put to right over an expensive but delicious lunch at La Perouse – an ornate, old-fashioned restaurant on the Quai des Grands Augustins. Snow flurries sweep over the Seine. We sip champagne (her suggestion) and Meursault and eat angler fish and wild mushrooms and are about the last to leave (though no-one hurries us).

Ellen much more relaxed and afterwards Tristram remarks on how much humour she has – more than he’d expected. He finds her more soft, attractive and vulnerable than he’d seen Miss Hartley.

Ring Ellen B, as have heard the good news this morning that a deal has been done with her agent. She must have insisted on a quick settlement, because he evidently agreed to our price – 300,000 plus 40,000 deferment and ten percentage points. She sounds happy and anxious to meet, so I have to arrange a visit this week which will fit in with my plans and her language lessons. We go for Friday morning.

Then to BAFTA for the jury deliberations on Best Foreign Film. Clear from the start that Nigel Andrews, Carole Myer and Philip Strick all regard Tarkovsky as God, and I think they’re just trying to be polite to the rest of us in not being completely dismissive of the alternatives.

No-one fights for
Jean de Florette
or
Manon
, but Peter Greenaway’s film editor – John Wilson – and I put up persistent arguments for
My Life as a Dog
. The trouble is that we are up against those who feel that even a difficult, confused, occasionally very dull film with a risible ending is, if it’s by Tarkovsky, intrinsically more worthwhile than an accessible, moving, entirely successful picture by someone else.

In fact, the more we say we like
My Life as a Dog
, the more the Intellectuals seem to shift impatiently. It’s not about enjoyment, it’s not about accessibility. The more people who like a film, they seem to be saying, the more suspect must be its artistic credentials. We lose.

Tristram here about half past ten. He went to see
Handful of Stars
¹⁷⁹
– Dervla’s play – last night, and did not like her much.

Over to the BBC to have a drink and chat with Clem, Roger Mills and Will Wyatt. All is amicable and in fact this is the best
80 Days
meeting so far.

It’s decided that we shall make the journey in January 1989. Much clearer for everybody. Also I’m quite articulate on my feelings about the style of the programme. The rough with the smooth – a documentary unlike any other …

Walk around, past the ever-present security forces along the Rue de Varennes to Ellen’s apartment. Arrive there at nine o’clock – give or take a few minutes – to find that she has breakfast neatly set out and coffee brewing.

She has a view of the Eiffel Tower and over the wall into Rodin’s Garden, with a group of burghers in a permanent huddle just below the wall. She also overlooks a small hotel with cobbled courtyard. An elegant and discreetly quiet corner of Paris. Her flat is small, brightly decorated and full of light.

During our conversation about the script, Ellen comes up with a very pertinent suggestion about her relationship to Brita – basically that she should at first be encouraging Brita towards Ashby, then she falls herself. Several nice ideas for new scenes or for adding to existing scenes stem from this. An excellent and productive session.

I leave her about half past eleven, as she prepares for her afternoon classes. She says she’s making very little headway with the French language. I find we talk very easily and that she has an attractive wit and modesty – she is very concerned to know the dates of filming – ‘I need a month before to lose weight … I tend to expand between work.’

To Charles de Gaulle. A South African team of some sort – speaking Afrikaans – are waiting for our flight – they ‘can’t wait to get back to Jo’burg and the sun’. A tough-looking lot with vacant red faces. One is so hirsute that his chest hair erupts from beneath his collar and tie and emerges as a kind of jet-black ruff around his neck.

Briefly touch base at home, then to the Bijou Theatre to see
Temptation of Eileen Hughes
– Tristram’s latest film for the BBC. Bijou projection doesn’t help what is a gloomy, unhappy little tale which I don’t much warm to.

Afterwards talk to Nigel Walters, the lighting cameraman. He has been approached to go round the world with me and is most enthusiastic. He tells me the original
80 Days
idea was to be on video, with live reports and with Noel Edmonds as the traveller.

In late afternoon go with Rachel and Tom to Latchmere Leisure Centre, where Tom is taking part in a Martial Arts Display.

He and his class, under Gavin, are the best item on the programme. Well drilled and presented, they take us through from simple exercises to routines, throws, fights and leaps, to Gavin breaking six roofing tiles with one blow of his forehead. Tom, the youngest of his group, is very lithe and crisp in his movements. Rachel and I are both impressed. At the moment he is a Green Belt, second rung on the ten-rung ladder to Black Belt, but he clearly will do well, and fast, if he sticks to it.

Lousy weather, cold and wet. Donald Woods calls – just for a chat. Reception of
Cry Freedom
not as good as hoped in the US, but excellent in Europe. He’s been travelling everywhere with it, even Iceland. Says he nearly phoned me from Portland, Oregon, where he found himself in the house of friends for whom Python was the greatest show ever aired. Donald wanted to show off that he knew me!

Tristram here at 10.30. Work on through the script. Had been to M&S to buy sandwiches for our lunch, but the shelves were bare – no delivery yet. Writers with withdrawal symptoms looked dazed and disbelieving – saw Denis Norden heading helplessly for the chicken tikka.

A meeting re Prominent Studios, with Anne, Steve, the trustee in a suit and tie who’s rather nice, Eric I, Ian [Miles, our accountant] and Terry G, is not as fraught as expected. We are only £175,000 over the estimate of £1.2 million which we were given in January last year. But, as Anne says, at one time it was to cost £200,000 to refit. Malcolm Ballisat, the ‘outside’ trustee, is very reassuring – we have a wonderful building and it’s a credit to our pension funds.

The next step, however, is to equip the viewing theatre, sound transfer and editing rooms as best we can. So far they are shells. If we want them we must find £300,000 more.

Tom [currently on the staff] is back at Redwood at midnight to lock up. They are working him savage hours at the moment and he shows signs of demoralisation.

Steve rings to tell me that MGM do not want to do
American Friends
. This is a bit more of a blow than I had expected. For a couple of hours I have to work very hard to be cheerful.

Decide must take the bull by the horns and ring Burstyn, Tristram and Irene with the news. When all this is over and I am about to settle to work, Terry J rings, so I have to tell him the saga.

Find it very hard to concentrate on the rewrites. The sun shines happily outside, but in my room I am assailed with doubts – why continue writing a film that will never be done? Has my bluff finally been called? Is this the beginning of the end for ‘
AF
’? Has reality intervened? And so on.

In the absence of any word of hope from Steve on ‘
AF
’, I call Ray and begin the delicate process of re-opening links with Denis O’B. Ray promises to call him ASAP.

No time for brooding – to Marshall Street for a swim, which sets the world to rights, then home for breakfast and at midday a call from Ray Cooper. He’s contacted Denis. Denis is very happy to look at the script, but he sounded one or two dark words of warning about hawking it around, disinclination to co-production and so on.

I feel that the approach to Denis is necessary, but regrettable in a way. Steve will surely suffer in some way, but I checked with him yesterday on the HandMade initiative and he agreed it should be made.

It’s raining as Helen and I, in our ‘awards’ gear – Helen in her very sexy purple sequinned top and black skirt – step into a taxi for the Grosvenor House and BAFTA. Park Lane is a sodden jam as taxis and limousines disgorge some of the 1,000 or more guests.