Not My Father's Son (24 page)

I’m not normally like that about acting. I’m usually quite relaxed about that, except for on opening nights.

And of course the more you do something, the more comfortable you become, and the less frightening it becomes. I realized that the only way to both conquer my fear and embrace my desire about singing was to accept a proposal my manager put to me to perform a concert in Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series in February 2009.

And I was right. The more I did it, the more relaxed I became and the better I got. The more relaxed and the better I got, the more I did it. Nowadays I hop up onstage regularly to sing a song or duet with someone, and though I still get nervous, it’s the good kind of nerves, the necessary kind, that keeps you on your toes and makes sure the adrenaline is flowing.

That first night, though, at the Allen Room of Jazz at Lincoln Center, a beautiful hall with enormous glass windows overlooking Columbus Circle and Central Park, I was very far from relaxed. My manager came to my dressing room to see how I was before the first show and I told her I wanted to punch her.

Ninety minutes later I was euphoric. I had done it! I had felt the fear and done it anyway. And I had enjoyed it and so had the audience, and best of all, I had felt that
connection.
The rawest, purest connection you can only feel when you let the audience see inside you. I was hooked. Next stop was the Sydney Opera House as part of the Mardi Gras festival, followed by runs at the Vaudeville Theatre in London’s West End and the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles. Yes, I have always believed in starting small.

And now here I was, back at Feinstein’s, singing a song I’d written about my disdain for plastic surgery to a room filled with people, many of whom had obviously had plastic surgery; telling stories about what I thought was the essential American experience—being on an M&M’s float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade; then singing a searing, biting diatribe against all that is American, written by my musical director, Lance Horne; then asking the audience to contribute to a campaign to eject state politicians who had voted against marriage equality; before finishing with a rousing ditty with the chorus
“You’re fucking beautiful, and when I kiss your lips I hear those fucking angels sing.”

You get the gist. It defined eclectic and it was exactly what I needed. Each night I walked out onto the tiny stage and for ninety minutes my mind and my body were completely disengaged from what I’d just been through. The days were spent quietly, resting and walking our dogs in Central Park. Grant and I had decided to stay in a suite in the hotel that housed Feinstein’s, as in a week I’d be off again to complete my turn on
Who Do You Think You Are
? and going up and downtown each day in the New York heat seemed unnecessarily exhausting. So every night, after the show, I could just pop back through the kitchens, up the service elevator, and head back to my suite, and my husband, and true comfort.

Each night Grant and I would have drinks there with the friends who had come to the show, and each night I would recount the stories of Tommy Darling and of Alex Cumming, the two men who so completely filled my waking hours. It felt good to talk. Everyone was amazed by what I had to say. Their questions were thought provoking and sometimes allowed me new insight into what I had discovered. But mostly I felt solidarity and support and love, ironically three things I never felt from my father and three things I think Tommy Darling could have done with a whole lot more of.

W
hen I arrived at Newark airport on Sunday morning I was told my flight to Beijing had been delayed and I would miss my connection to Kuala Lumpur. I was supposed to have arrived there on Monday afternoon, and had an evening and a good night’s sleep to acclimatize myself and prepare for filming beginning on Tuesday. Now, alas, I would not arrive till Tuesday morning and would have to immediately start filming as soon as I landed, never an ideal situation, but certainly not when you’re going to be on camera sans grooming after traveling for a day and a half!

I managed to call Elizabeth, the director, and she eased my qualms by saying that the first day of filming was pretty light anyway, and all I’d be doing was examining a few documents in the hotel. There was nothing left to do but enjoy the luxury of the Air China lounge. As a self-confessed airline lounge whore, I had no problem with that at all.

In this bubble, this fancy no-man’s-land, I found myself decompressing after a week of cabaret and confession. I brought my mind back round to my grandfather, and the outcome of his story, which I knew was going to be explosive. As much as I was eager to solve the mystery of how he died, I was also wary of what I might learn.

I
began filming in a hotel room overlooking the myriad beauties of Kuala Lumpur, which were, this morning, being drenched by a huge thunderstorm. From our sky-top vantage point we could see the dark clouds careening towards us, and the lightning reflecting across the dozens of glass towers we looked down upon.

Elizabeth’s assurance that the first bit of filming would be “light” buoyed me as I struggled with jet lag and the crew set up. On a table in front of me were some official-looking documents, facedown until the cameras would roll.

It was nice to see everyone again. I’d only known these people for one week before our monthlong hiatus, but it was quite a week in terms of what we’d all gone through together, and being back amongst them felt comforting. And suddenly the next week and the inevitable bombshell of Tommy Darling’s demise felt less daunting.

That feeling was not to last long. As the cameras began to roll, I turned over the first document. It was Tommy Darling’s death certificate.

It had come from the Malaysian National Archive. It read,

O
RIGINAL
C
ERTIFICATE OF
D
EATH.
P
OLICE
L
IEUTENANT
T. D
ARLING.
C
AUSE OF
D
EATH:
G.S.
WOUND IN HEAD.

G.S., gunshot, wound in head. I went on to the autopsy report . . .

O
N
22
^ND
J
UNE 1951 AT
8
A.M.
I
PERFORMED AN AUTOPSY ON THE BODY OF AN ADULT MALE
E
UROPEAN IDENTIFIED BY
P.C. 10112
AS
T. D
ARLING,
P
OLICE
L
IEUTENANT, AGED 35 YEARS.
T
HERE WAS ONE GUN-SHOT WOUND OF ENTRY ABOUT THREE INCHES BEHIND AND LEVEL WITH THE RIGHT EAR. THERE WAS NO CHARRING OF THE SKIN. THE OCCIPITAL LOBES OF THE BRAIN WERE GROSSLY LACERATED AND A VERY MISSHAPEN BULLET WAS RECOVERED FROM THE LEFT OCCIPITAL LOBE OF THE BRAIN. CAUSE OF DEATH: SHOCK AND HEMORRHAGE FROM GUN-SHOT WOUND OF HEAD.

Brutal. I was so unprepared for this. If today was “light,” what was the rest of the week going to be like?!

ONE GUN-SHOT WOUND OF ENTRY ABOUT THREE INCHES BEHIND AND LEVEL WITH THE RIGHT EAR.

This was all wrong. I’d been told he’d died in an accident while cleaning his gun. But you don’t clean your gun by pointing it to the side of your head. And then another thought struck me.

You don’t kill yourself like that either. Had my grandfather been murdered?

What was going on here?

As if on some supernatural cue, a huge, deafening clap of thunder exploded across the sky. I leapt out of my seat.

The fact that there had been no charring of my grandfather’s skin could only mean that he was shot at extremely close range, and the fact that the bullet entered the back of his head suggested he was executed in some paramilitary manner. Suddenly, finding the truth about Tommy Darling’s end seemed menacing, and not at all liberating as I had hoped.

I had been given some information about Cha’ah, the village where Tommy had been stationed. Because of its position on the main route through the country of Malaya, it had become a hot spot for terrorist activity and was policed twenty-four hours a day by my grandfather’s security force. I feared that Tommy Darling had met a vicious and violent end at the hands of the Maoist insurgents, possibly in a raid on his police station. What a sad and lonely way and place to die, I thought.

That night, I dreamt vividly of Tommy Darling and the horrors he must have faced in his dying moments. In my dream he was blindfolded, on his knees, hands tied behind his back, as a young, skinny, trembling Malayan boy held a gun to the back of his head. Everyone was screaming and panic-stricken, but Tommy Darling was stoically calm, except for a single tear that slid out from behind his blindfold and plopped down unnoticed onto the jungle floor.

I
awoke sweating and disoriented at 4:30
A.M
. I couldn’t get back to sleep. I didn’t really want to. I got up, did some yoga, but that didn’t help. I decided to go for a walk. The sun was just beginning to peek out over the horizon. The gardens of this hotel were lush and airy, with pools at either end, and beyond the perimeter fence the jungle in all its primal, fertile plenty beckoned.

I thought of my grandfather standing here looking out at this natural bounty, this explosion of nature.

This is the air he would have breathed, I thought.

It was beautiful. It was magical.

I thought of what his life must have been like back in St. Albans, all frost, loneliness, twitching net curtains, and mean little hedges. No wonder he came back here, where there was this, where he was
someone
.

I swam in the pool. It felt good to be submerged. Under the water my jet lag had no purchase. I was the lone survivor in a postapocalyptic paradise.

As I stretched out on a chaise, contemplating what my day would reveal to me, a door to the main building behind me creaked open and a little man carrying a huge bundle of towels appeared. I watched him as he struggled towards me, his face peeping out from behind his load from time to time, checking that he was still on the right path.

He arrived at his station and dropped the towels into a basket, then picked up one and came over to me brandishing it with both hands and a little bow.

“You have jet lag,” he said with a smile.

“Yes,” I replied. “How do you know?”

“Only jet lag people swim at five thirty!” he responded.

I laughed.

“You will have beautiful day,” he said, starting to back away.

“I hope so,” I replied quietly, and smiled.

“No need to hope,” he said over his shoulder. “Many happy things will happen to you today.”

And then he was gone and I was alone again. I shivered and wrapped myself up in the towel and made my way back to my room.

After breakfast we traveled to Cha’ah and I was taken to an old colonial-style country clubhouse, complete with elephants’ hoof side tables and various stuffed animal heads mounted on the walls. Outside was a pool, glimmering in the baking sun. I wanted to jump in. I wanted to do anything other than do what I was about to do.

At the other end of the room was an old, English military man, who I had been told had served with my grandfather in the Malayan police force. His name was Roy Samson, and the second I saw him I felt impending doom. Elizabeth was intentionally keeping Roy away until the crew was ready and we were set up on a terrace outside. Then I sat listening to him regale me with tales of killing young Communist guerrillas during jungle patrols. The relish with which Roy remembered these details did not sit easy with me, and I interrupted him impatiently for information about my grandfather.

Poor Roy, he had the air of a man who no longer got the opportunity to spout forth very often, and now, given the chance, he was doing so with loquaciousness and even glee.

“When we killed somebody, they were brought back to the police station for display to the public for two reasons. First of all, they had to be identified, and secondly, we wanted the local population to see what happens to terrorists, to give them a deterrent, in fact, from joining them. Now these are a couple of pictures of those
decorations
to the police station, if I may use the term, and they became the responsibility of Tom.”

He laid out some pictures on the raffia drinks table between us. They showed the lifeless bodies of young Asian men laid out on the ground, and just behind them, squatting in a semicircle, beaming proudly for the camera as though these young men were antelope or some other big game catch they had just taken in sport, were the British officers and their guides. Roy was amongst them. I was truly disgusted. I paused for a few moments. I wanted to get up and walk away from this man. I knew that his purpose here was to tell me something shocking about the death of my grandfather. But the way he was casually tossing down in front of me photographs of people he had killed made me worry that he would be as cavalier and insensitive about Tommy Darling’s end. My stomach had started to churn. The jet lag was kicking in again. All I wanted to do was jump into that pool that sparkled behind me.

I gritted my teeth and held up another picture. In the foreground was a young man’s contorted body, his eyes closed, his mouth agape. Poor Tommy Darling, who had been sent to Doolally to recover from the mental damage the horrors of jungle warfare had inflicted on him, was now once more face-to-face with the worst that mankind could inflict: death, and humiliation, and hubris.

Roy told me that this picture had been taken just outside of the Cha’ah police station. These bodies were literally dumped on my grandfather’s doorstep.

I sat back in my chair, stunned, my mind swirling.

I looked over at Elizabeth. She nodded. We’d discussed earlier that I should procure from Roy some general background on what life was like in the village. When I thought I’d heard enough, I would ask the question I was dying to have answered.

I steeled myself.