Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (98 page)

Drive to BUPA HQ, where I’m to be filmed having a medical check-up.

The crew have to sit amongst men in dressing gowns and I sense mutiny rumbling. Ron keeps asking why we’re filming so much pre-journey material, and especially why we’re talking to Alan Whicker.

I’m whisked off into a dressing gown and given the tests. Results similar to last time, except that vision in my right eye is less good. The dread word ‘optician’ is mentioned – and for the first time in my life not in a sketch!

Out of bed about ten past eight. Feel more relaxed about things now the filming’s begun, though big questions like how good will I be at the job, how will we all get on together, and how long will three months seem, remain.

By 10.30 I’m at the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington. It’s a pleasant late-summer day and the park looks quietly green and tempting from the windows of the Society.

John Hemming is very welcoming and helpful and enthusiastic. He has been on expeditions to Brazil and has been among the first men ever to make contact with primitive Amazon tribes. He’s lost many friends – ironically more killed in road accidents than by man-eating tigers or poison darts.

We film in the library, which is wonderful, well stocked and makes me feel colossally under-prepared. Leave with a big book on Oman under my arm.
¹⁹⁰

Rest of the afternoon at the Health Centre, receiving jabs. Then to the producer Jackie Stoller’s fine, eighteenth-century office in Bedford Square, for a get-together with the writers of ‘Article For Sale’.

Alan Bennett and Posy Simmonds and Jack R are already there. Alan, with white-socked Hockney-like legs thrust characteristically straight out in front of him. Jack is looking strained and poorly and not surprisingly, as he is going into hospital within a month for a hip replacement.

Carla Lane arrives. She talks about a pigeon she’s befriended and about meeting in the vet a man who had brought along his snails.

Posy, slim, white, in a simple black top, is instantly disarming and tells me how when she was a bridesmaid at a wedding at the age of ten she put a tortoise on her head and it peed all over her.

We ask, over smoked salmon and cucumber sandwiches, about things like deadlines and special requirements. ‘Will rogering be allowed?’ asks Posy, in the tone of a Jane Austen heroine.

To a house in Hambledon, near Marlow, a quite beautifully situated Thames Valley village, enclosed by wooded hills and bordered by misty green meadows. Here I am to do an interview, along with George H, for a programme on ten years of HandMade Films.

The house, largely shuttered, belongs to Harry Hambledon, who owns the village.

George is not at ease and feels that it would have been much better for me to be interviewed alone, then I could say what I really feel about HandMade. This is DO’B’s idea and George evidently likes it no more than having to wear black-tie at next Friday’s party.

When at last we’re through, George tries to persuade me to come over to Friar Park. I tell him I can’t as I’m meeting Alan and Barry C for one of our ‘Three Yorkshiremen’ meals. George tells me to bring them all up
to Friar Park … ‘We’ll get drunk together’. For a moment the idea of adding George and Friar Park to our threesome is tantalisingly bizarre.

Am whisked back to Vasco and Piero’s rapidly enough for me to be first there.

Noël Coward is talked of. Alan recalls Coward commenting at a party at which Dudley [Moore] had had the temerity to play the piano … ‘Oh, how clever, he uses the black notes as well.’ But Alan found Coward very helpful and charming. They first met when Coward came backstage after
Beyond the Fringe
in New York.

Alan drives us all home in his new Audi. At a traffic light in Kentish Town, a fussy little middle-aged man comes up to the car and demands a lift to Highgate. Alan, momentarily confused, but, ever the good Samaritan, agrees to take him part of the way.

So in gets this red-faced, rather truculent man, who sits there like a character in a bad play or, more to the point, a Python sketch. His presence rather silences our bonhomie and, when Alan drops me at Lamble Street and I see him drive away with Barry and the man in the raincoat sat in the back, I laugh all the way to the front door.

A day of considerable pressure on the
80 Days
front.

More gruelling London traffic, then into Lloyd’s of London for an interview with the man who, among other things, writes the names of all the shipwrecks in the book. The building is like a huge toy, with the escalators looking like a clockwork motor up the centre. No-one that I talk to likes it very much.

The human inhabitants are at first glance all men, all comfortably covered and impeccably dressed. 2,000 of the well-off classes beavering away. It’s like a giant public school at prep.

The analogy is confirmed by a steady stream of bits of paper darts, pellets and rubber-band catapults that drop from the galleries during the interview. ‘Oh, you’ve got off lightly … it’s usually much worse than this,’ says my interviewee.

To interview Alan Whicker at the Dorchester Hotel. Will life on the voyage be as hectic as this? I hope not.

Whicker’s room is approached through a series of valets and PR persons. One would think we were visiting royalty. There is a positive, almost religious, build-up of reverence as we approach the door of his suite. In the first of many coups de théâtre the door is actually only leading to a flight of stairs, off which there is another door at which the great man, greyer in moustache than I expected, welcomes us.

Whicker is fascinated with
Wanda
’s earnings and, by extraordinary coincidence, CNN-TV, which rabbits on from a corner of the room, suddenly shows a familiar face. It’s me and my perm, illustrating the movie charts of the week – which show
Wanda
still number three in America.

All this serves to keep my end up, which is what you feel you have to do with Whicker. He is very much the Godfather. The way he tells his stories, knowing he’s keeping everyone waiting, indicates that he’s used to having things his own way. The suite, with the view over the park, must be one of the most expensive in London, and it’s coming off our production budget.

Whicker is sharp, alert, dapper – competitive – generous with advice and with his time. Oozing charm as we leave. Before we go he talks about Roger M – ‘a strange man’, ‘a man of ferocious intellect’. Whicker’s tie and blazer are as important to him as Roger’s lack of them are to Roger.

Listen to the BBC’s ‘Get By in Italian’ tapes in the car. Whicker was quite adamant about what to do in an emergency – ‘Don’t try and speak the language, you probably won’t be able to anyway. I just use Britishness, it never fails.’

Feel weighed down by all the work I’ve to do and after lunch set myself up at the kitchen table with the telephone. The oppressiveness of the phone calls and the interviews for ‘No. 27’ and so on seem worse as I see my mother looking very much frailer than before.

She cannot sit up on a dining chair for long as her coccyx aches. She says the doctor does nothing. I ask her what she wants to be done – ‘Oh, you can’t
do
anything … it’s arthritis.’ The skin on her thin little arms hangs down in folds. I suppose I’ve never seen anyone of nearly 85 so closely before, but her body, bowed over by her spinal curve, seems to be so inadequate for the job. But she remains cheerful and is determined to
be good company and she potters around and cooks and reads and looks at the photos I’ve brought.

After supper I have to work again – honing the HandMade speech.

Later walk through deserted Southwold to the North Sea. I shall have been on such an unimaginable adventure by the time I next see it again. Walk to the edge of the waves, which are building up noisily in anticipation of a windy night.

I feel happier and more confident about Ma’s condition as we eat our lunch. She has rationalised my absence on the trip and there is no longer a hint of a moan. As we part she says ‘It’s a school term, that’s all … just a school term.’

The still-blustery wind keeps her from coming into the street to say goodbye. She waves from the door. Make a mental note that at some time I shall have to get angry with the builder over the door and the rapidly crumbling window sill.

So little Ma recedes and I set myself to the hurdles that remain today. To the doctor’s for a double gamma globulin jab and home at five.

Then back to the speech. Feel hot and rushed – the paraphernalia of the journey lies on the floor of my room. Lists of things to do lie accusingly on the desk. A scotch and ice calms the racing system and at seven I’m at last finished with the speech.

The dinner [celebrating ten years of HandMade films] is at the Old House at Shepperton and is like a much jollier, friendlier version of the BAFTA Awards.

I find myself on the programme under Master of Ceremonies, and beside ‘Music: Carl Perkins and his band’.

Just before I go up, Michael White cautions ‘Take it slowly’. The opening jokes about this being HandMade’s latest film are well received – the talk of Denis not being able to do co-production because the lift at Cadogan Square is too small, hits home, and from then on I know I shall have a good ride.

At the end everyone is very complimentary. Denis tells a long and only moderately funny dirty joke in reply and George heckles him unmercifully.

George presents me with a gift for mastering the ceremonies – it’s
one of his old Oscars with my name scribbled on a luggage label and stuck across the base.

Much fun later on and a lot of jawing. Had meant to get home early, but it’s four o’clock before head hits pillow.

A wet, warm day – straggly low storm cloud and strong winds. In
Variety Wanda
is the No. 1 grosser for the first time.

Gradually assemble a workroom full of bits and pieces needed on voyage. Find, after all the preparation, that I’ve forgotten simple things like toothpaste.

Mary, Ed, Helen and I escape to L’Escargot for a last meal.

Lots of last minute hitches, including the small accompanying bag being rather small and it has to be substituted, but considering I have less to set off with for 80 days round the world than I normally take for two weeks in the States, I’m quite pleased.

To bed about two o’clock and to sleep an hour or so before dawn. There’s no turning back now.