Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (94 page)

We talk to Jonas and Violet – Jonas here for the
Cry Freedom
score. Peter Sissons is chatty – his Channel 4 news by far the best thing on TV. Ben Elton is much confused at walking down the grand staircase to the accompaniment of a fanfare from Royal Marine trumpeters.

The fate of
East of Ipswich
is over very quickly.
Lifestory
wins in that category – music, applause, one minute of glory for the producer/director, then on to … the best adapted children’s documentary in a foreign language. End of our, admittedly slim, hopes. Johnny Goodman reads a hugely verbose tribute to Bergman off autocue and at the end of the massive build-up fluffs his name – Iggimar Bergman. Ennio Morricone provides widespread unintentional laughter
by referring to Princess Anne as ‘His Royal Highness’. His award – for the
Untouchables
music – is extraordinary, when Jonas was overlooked. Was Sean Connery really the best actor of the year in
Name of the Rose
? Was David Jason really better than the incomparable Coltrane as TV actor?

Jean de Florette
was outvoted as Best Foreign Film, but voted Best Film.

To Prominent Studios for a meeting with Tristram and a reading with Dervla.

We read three scenes with Dervla in the eight-track studio at Redwood. She still imbues everything with this odd and precocious air of sophistication. What is beneath it, I don’t know. TP clearly thinks very little. So it’s inconclusive, and I leave to play squash with TJ feeling that we have no Brita and, as yet, no film.

We talk of ‘
AF
’ and it’s clear that TJ didn’t much like the January rewrite. I thought I’d solved it, TJ thinks I’ve lost sight of what the story essentially was.

I’ve deliberately tried to widen it – to make it less like
The Missionary
, to give the three main characters equal weight – as TJ says, I’ve approached it like a novel. I still think this is the way to go, but TJ gives enough good criticism for me to walk back down Hampstead High Street to my car, with mind almost made up to accept a postponement and to concentrate on a ‘No. 27’ and
80 Days
year.

Wake early. About half past six. Doze and mull over the matter of ‘
AF
’. From every way I look at it, the case for a postponement seems solid. The recent work on the script only emphasises how far it is from being just right (as Helen said last night, the best things you do are clear in your head before you start).

TJ’s words of last night echo Anne Bancroft’s of last December: ‘Why do you want to do the film?’

By eight o’clock, when Rachel brings Betty up to snuggle down beside Helen in the bed, my mind is virtually made up. But first this newest draft must be completed, and I do this in a couple of hours. Talk to Tristram and Patrick, who both feel I’m being sensible.

Wake about eight, still tired. Take Ma to church. It’s Palm Sunday. We have to leave in plenty of time so she can ensure her usual pew. We have almost the entire nave to choose from when we get there.

Her friends gather, generally single ladies, who I assume have outlasted husbands. They all have something wrong with them. Every snippet of talk is of ‘bad nights’ and people being ‘
much
worse’.

A last walk to the sea and, as the sun spills out of the mess of rain clouds, I leave for London, and am in Covent Garden by a quarter to seven.

To the Albery Theatre for an ILEA support concert. To raise money for a parents’ ballot before the government can destroy ILEA. Rachel told me only last week of the effects that the cutbacks on education in the wake of ILEA dismemberment are having – larger classes, some subjects withdrawn.

Helen tells me that yesterday she had the
News of the World
and the
Sunday People
checking on a story that Graham C might have AIDS. They were preparing this solely on the basis of how he looked at BAFTA. GC had already been contacted and had told them, with his customary reticence on such matters, that he had not indulged in penetrative sex for ten years! What more could I have said?

Settle into a long evening’s TV with the first part of
The Sorrow and the Pity
. Absorbing and provocative. How much history is propaganda? How many of the contemporary images we have of the period are distorted by bias? Ophuls’ film is an attempt to look at German-occupied France in as truthful and balanced a way as possible.

As Paris is falling the phone rings twice in rapid succession. First it’s Ellen B’s agent, Todd Smith. I tell him I’ve been trying to contact her all week. All he wants to know is that we’ll come back to Ellen first next year. All I really want is the chance to speak personally to her, thank her and assure her that this is so.

In a couple of minutes I’m in the Burstyn position, fielding a proposition from Frank Oz that I should co-star as a smooth English conman, with Steve Martin as an incompetent American conman, in a film he’s making on the Riviera this summer. Says he’s keen and Steve’s keen to have me.

My copy of ‘King of the Mountain’, the Steve Martin/Frank Oz film, has arrived from Mike Medavoy’s
¹⁸⁰
office. I read it at one go before we leave for dinner. Though the part is written for an American, it reads quite well as an elegant Englishman, and, though there is dancing and water-skiing with one arm to cope with, I read the part with mounting interest.

Different for me – I’m not the victim, or the shopkeeper, but the dominant instigator of most of the events – and a meaty role which would place considerable demands on my acting, but that it is what I need.

A message from the office to tell me that Innes Lloyd has a definite go-ahead on ‘No. 27’, shooting in June. Suddenly I’m in demand and the year looks like being acting, writing and documentary.

How fitting that this Dies Mirabilis should end with Granny G’s 73rd birthday party at L’Escargot – Mary, Ed, Cathy, Helen and I – and that Princess Diana should be at the table next door.

She holds her head and shoulders in a hunched, protective curve, as if not wanting to draw attention to herself. Her generally downcast, but big and beautiful eyes and pink cheeks very attractive. What she can be making of the bulbous man next to her, shouting about ‘lesbian co-operatives in the Balls Pond Road’ and other jeering anti-leftist clichés, I can’t imagine.

We all get up around the same time to leave. She drives off, herself at the wheel, from a car parked right outside. Elena, of course, has dealt with the whole thing
most
discreetly.
¹⁸¹

Various phone calls re ‘King of the Mountain’. Steve reveals JC turned down the part, but most reluctantly apparently.

Drive to Twickenham to make noises of myself sliding down a baggage chute. Charlie and John Jympson tell of a rather unpleasant meeting in LA after I’d left with a music supremo called Newman who was very rude about everything and asked John C if he’d ever done comedy before. I
do
laugh at this.

Frank Oz rings. He admits to being very embarrassed. Another actor is involved who had been sent the script and who had not responded and who suddenly wants to do it. I’m about to reassure Frank that I know who the actor is, when he tells me it’s Richard Dreyfuss.

Just as well I do not have a great ego over these things. Yet my part in ‘King of the Mountain’ is someone with a huge ego, so I’m assertive for half an hour. Oz very sympathetic, says it’s not entirely his decision. Producers, money boys, etc.

Work on the script until half past eleven. Only in bed do I allow myself to ride a wave or two of self-pity. It feels as though I’m doomed not to act again – already this year
Munchausen
,
American Friends
and now this have slipped from me. Add all these to ‘Troubles’ and a pattern emerges that could be attractive to a paranoiac.

Mind you, I sleep much better than when I thought I
had
the part.

Frank Oz calls. Dreyfuss read for my character, Lawrence, and couldn’t get it. Too much energy, he couldn’t play the laid-back characters, he wanted to be Freddy. So I’m back on the list and he would like me to fly over to New York before the end of the week.

He calls back at ten minutes to midnight to ask if I can fly on Concorde on Friday.

Up at 8.30, and by ten heading off with William towards Winchester. He wants to see the cathedral and the library in pursuit of his Malory enthusiasm.
¹⁸²

Winchester, an hour and a half from home down the M3, is a good-looking, well-kept little city. A pleasure to walk around.

On the way back we discuss Thatcher and what’s happening in the country. For the first time I feel that sense of helplessness before the weight of the Thatcher machine. It’s changing everything that I’ve believed in
in the years since I left Shrewsbury, and there seems no way of stopping it. I feel too old to change things, but William understands what’s happening and knows it’s up to him and his generation to carry the torch of concern, compassion, co-operation and conscience. (That’s enough alliteration – Ed.)

I’m bouncing in a limousine through the shattered landscape of 2nd Avenue, Harlem. Buildings either burnt-out, bricked up or covered from head to foot in graffiti. Here in Harlem the security is quite overt, bent iron grilles, padlocks hanging onto rusty metal.

Then into the nineties and regeneration begins. Instead of decay there is cautious conversion. Once into the eighties we’re among some of the most expensive apartments in the world. It’s all New York. Like an eccentric friend – it’s impossible to understand but has to be constantly talked about.

I set my bags down at the Parker Meridien. I notice my computer-printed check-in slip is headed ‘Star of Monty Python’s Flying Circus’. If this gets me a room with a view then it’s fine.

I’m 31 floors up and looking out towards the greening park and amongst the towers around me is the famous Essex House, or Excess House, as it would be renamed in my autobiography. From here I can appreciate how gigantic the letters are atop the hotel and I should imagine in a storm there must be considerable likelihood of being struck by a falling ‘S’ ‘E’ or ‘X’, or possibly all three at the same time.

At a quarter to twelve US time, a quarter to five my own bodily time, I’m deposited at 50 Riverside Drive on the West Side, where Frank Oz’s apartment is located. Steve is already there.

We talk, have coffee. I sense that Steve has been through this before. I can’t help being affected by the knowledge that I am a name on a list. Not
the
name. We read some scenes. Frank O shows me photos of the villa where they’re shooting. He’s anxious that I should have as much material as possible on which to base the character.

Well, I find I’m not giving Frank quite what he wants. He wants it light and debonair and elegant and stylish and I am not delivering. I’m suddenly tight, heavy, plodding and predictable. I have to face it that I’m out of practice and it isn’t coming nearly as easy as I expected.

After an hour and a half we go for lunch at a Japanese round the corner.
Across the road Irving Berlin lived as a recluse for many years; at the corner is a hookers’ hotel. There’s a welfare hostel across the street from one of the most expensive private schools in the city.

At lunch I learn more about the film. They’ve changed the title to ‘Dirty Rotten Criminals’.
¹⁸³
When I also hear that the mystery writer is Dale Launer, who wrote the ugly
Ruthless People
, I begin to feel that my lustreless reading earlier may have saved me.

Walk back across Central Park. Magnolia, azaleas and hawthorn in blossom, but at the same time the number of odd, mad and sinister and threatening individuals wandering by seems to have increased and I feel a little jumpy. Brought out of my reverie as a woman passes, stops, turns back and gasps … ‘Oh God, I have just passed a myth.’

Cannot shake off persistent feeling of the blues this morning, and a nagging feeling of slipping backwards, of projects aborting left, right and centre.

All this tinged with a common enough gloom ingredient – am I doing the right things with my life? Should I have stayed in grubby Gospel Oak? Should the children have gone to beleaguered local state schools, instead of gaining the enviable confidence that private school children seem to have?

These last considerations all come under the heading of envy, which I know to be one of the Deadly Sins, and one which would be present at any level, so I refuse to take them too seriously. But they niggle, as a lot of other things niggle, this morning.

Happily listening to ‘How to Write a Screenplay’ on
Kaleidoscope
when Oz calls, ‘just to keep you in the picture’. Now Dreyfuss is re-interested and also onto the scene has strolled M Caine; ‘It’s between you three,’ a rather harassed-sounding Oz assures me.

More and more I don’t want to do it, but, just as much, I
do
want to be chosen. I think Caine is probably the nearest he will get in an English actor to the effortless charisma of Niven.

Am bought lunch by Hilary Neville-Towle of BBC Books. Rather of the class and style of most publishing ladies, but very nice, un-pushy and interesting.

She reawakens my enthusiasm for the
80 Days
trip and I try to forget that the contract cannot be signed because of the ridiculously low fee which the BBC have offered. Good progress on the book, which
must
look more exciting than the
Great River Journeys
she brought along. Poor photos, dull format.