Vanished Years Page 7

  ‘Yes, I have,’ I agree, nonchalant.

  ‘We gotta set that up. Huh, Ron?’

  ‘We really should,’ he agrees sagely.

  We all move on. Every time I see Ron for the rest of the night he taps his forehead but keeps walking.

  (They do organise it. Two weeks later I am at the White House, sitting at Chelsea Clinton’s table for the last Clinton bash.)

  Amanda Downes supervises the serving of the meal with military precision. She may not be an intimate of the President, but she is definitely a Washington star – a diplomatic Cinderella – because everyone lights up when she squeezes behind their chairs, particularly Colin Powell who turns, beckons her down with a finger and whispers in her ear. Her ample bosom brushes against his shoulder, and his little eyes swivel briefly. She prods him with a big bossy finger and he throws back his head roaring with laughter. I wonder if she is CIA? Quite possibly.

  I turn my attention to my cash cow – the ambassador. He is deep in discussion with Tina Brown. Assured, casual, vaguely flirtatious, he never flinches under her ice-blue scrutiny. ‘Mr Ambassador’ on the other hand must be vague and accident prone, dashing and depressive, possibly dyslexic. (A good modern condition is always a crowd pleaser.) He will need a nice, bipolar, semi-alcoholic wife, a leggy blonde (American, obviously) secretary, a diplomatic sidekick and bingo! Imagine: if it works, how rich and successful I will be! I have to clutch the chair to stop myself from passing out. I will be bigger than Dick Van Dyke and Lucille Ball put together. The idea is brilliant.

  The speeches begin. Jack Straw is self-congratulatory and much appreciated. He is the warm-up artist. The ambassador speaks next and then introduces the Child Catcher, who responds, flapping and quoting, and bringing the house down. His technique and timing are flawless. He throws his jokes casually into the wind, and watches them with a stagey gloom as they waft over the sea of upturned faces, creating shimmering ripples of glee that he quickly builds into waves that are soon slapping against the sides of the room. The footmen and maids stand by mirrored doors that separate the corridors of power from the back stairs and basements. Unconcerned, they watch the faces of the old regime laughing victoriously in the candlelight. For a moment Beth Dozoretz, taut and unfathomable, is reflected and multiplied in the panes of a closing door, only to be replaced by a laughing jowly Karl Rove at a table of Neo-Conservatives.

  It’s sheer Visconti. The whole thing – from the dove-grey room itself, sparkling under its priceless chandeliers, to the conga line of tables below, covered with linen, glasses, bottles and candlesticks, curling towards the top table, to the powerful men and women, sprawled on gilt chairs, their polished shoes planted firmly on the polished floor – is like one of those pictures in a gallery, of a sumptuous state feast preceding a period of intense upheaval. The little painted faces have no clue about the bloodbath to come. Tonight we are all overcome with confidence on this shifting sandbar, but strange underwater currents are already preparing to sweep us all away, leaving – possibly – only Amanda Downes, bobbing up and down on the changing tide. Ambassadors, ministers, entire regimes will come and go but a good housekeeper is hard to find.

  In the riotous applause that follows Simon’s speech, the ambassador surveys his party with pride. Tina claps lovingly, and I go outside to sit on the terrace and think. Another speech has started. I close my eyes and soon I am dreaming. Canned laughter, waves of applause and me – a body-building ambassador ruling the airwaves with my own unique blend of nonchalant glamour and effervescent humour.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The British Embassy in Burbank

  Now I am listening to another speech behind another door. A warm-up artiste – one of the best in the business, I am assured – is regaling a studio audience with the peculiar humour that creates canned laughter. Yes, it actually comes out canned – in short bursts of mechanical glee. Standing next to me is Derek Jacobi. We are both caked in make-up, suited and booted, but no amount of brickcoloured foundation can hide the fact that we are grey and drained and verging on hysteria. I feel like a drowning man. My whole life sweeps over me in waves. Of all the errors I have ever made, one looms higher than the rest, a tsunami of ambition and greed, gathering pace and roaring towards me, ready to smash this makeshift wall of planks and poles against which I cower. Why did I ever set foot in the fucking British Embassy? A young man approaches through the gloom.

  ‘They’re nearly ready, gentlemen,’ he says.

  Derek is manically holding the door handle as if he is clutching at the proverbial straw. His head is cocked like a retriever, listening for a sign from its master. His teeth grind and his forehead gleams with sweat. A brush with a lady on the end emerges whirring from a nook and powders his nose. Somebody starts counting down from ten on the other side of the wall. The audience claps in rhythm. Suddenly Derek grips my arm.

  ‘Darling, I hope you won’t think it absolutely vile, but, God, I hope this show is not picked up.’

  ‘Oh me too, darling. Me too,’ I gasp, and before I know it Derek has opened that door. His drained face takes on a lunatic gleam, suddenly bathed in tungsten. His eyebrows shoot up and he sashays into the ambassador’s office. In Burbank.

  My dream has come true. I am NBC’s Mr Ambassador. For just one night. But no one will ever know. My TV career will start and end here. We will not be picked up.

  Three years have passed since that faraway summer’s night in Washington with Tina Brown and the Child Catcher. Apart from anything else, the whole world seems to have fallen apart. George Bush is the President. The Twin Towers have fallen, and illegal war has been declared by the free(ish) world. On a personal note, having carefully launched my own jihad on the American networks, tonight I am blowing up with the bombshell of a suicide performance. Luckily no one gets hurt. Apart from me.

  TV, or Tired Vaudeville as Tennessee Williams called it, is to be my last Hollywood stand. In one of the unwritten loopholes in the unwritten book of Hollywood rules, TV is still a place to go – a last resort – for many a silver-screen reject. The networks are not as fussy about things like sexuality as the movie studios. Why? God knows. This rule book is constantly being amended.

  When I first came to Hollywood in the early eighties, you were either a movie actor or a TV actor. Being in TV was rather like being an Anglo-Indian during the Raj. You were looked down upon by the movie-makers as a hopeless mimic, impossibly common, while a screen star was a gilded maharani, untouchable, both real and unreal, a brilliant actor. Nobody ever called Jane Seymour a craftsman as she ploughed her way through all those cardboard cut-out scripts churned out by Hallmark and NBC, whereas Jane Fonda, similarly screechy, would have been largely considered an artist, protected as she was by the more profound talents of Zinnemann and Kubrick. Until the eighties a movie maharani never considered TV and certainly not advertising. Her image was still guarded like a temple goddess, pristine for the silver screen.

  With Reagan in the White House and the emergence of a management culture in Hollywood, the floodgates opened. The stigma of television was drawn out by this new industry of asset strippers, and movement between the two mediums became a well-trodden goat path. So that by the time George Bush steals into the White House in 2000, success for a movie star is no longer simply based on a good performance in a good film. It is measured in perfumes and book deals, clothing contracts and celebrity endorsements, and the perception of success is as important as the actual quality of the product. The wage packet has exploded. Handbags, you will notice, at this point have developed padlocks and metal bars so that these wages can be stuffed safely into their crocodile interiors, and the knuckles of movie stars are gnarled and arthritic from grasping these treasure troves.

  I have managed to sell my latest and last idea for world domination to NBC with the help of my new (black) über manager Benny Medina. We got a ton of money for the idea, and my head is big, full of plans. I have a new producer. He is a small, neat, good-looking man called Marc P
latt. His offices are on the Universal lot. Everything is set up. But first we must find a show runner.

  A show runner is the writer who has the initial idea for a series. He writes the first episode and then forms a group of writers to churn out the product for him, should the prevailing winds be in his favour and the show get ‘picked up’. He or she will make a whole lot of money if a show makes it to syndication. Syndication – for you civilians – basically means that a show has run for three years and is sold – or syndicated – all over the world. It is at this point that the money begins to pour in. Tens of millions of dollars can be made if the show he created lasts for even three years. If it goes on for ten then he can bank hundreds of millions.

  I have sold my idea and now have been contracted to produce a pilot – one episode – which the network will review and decide whether to pick up or not. Hundreds of pilots are made. Few manage to jump the various rapids and make it to the breeding pools upriver and become a series, let alone achieve syndication.

  All these minor details are overshadowed by the grandiose thoughts running through my head as I embark on Mr Ambassador. You could say that I have been thoroughly taken by the flow of American show business. I think I’m swimming along in its embrace. Actually I am floundering. I am greedy and ruthless when I can remember to be – fatal. And the rest of the time I think I’m being rather marvellous and down to earth, but really what I think is that the sun shines out of my arsehole. Of course the whole thing is going to go wrong. I am not built for excessive wealth. (Too tall.)

  The first hurdle I encounter is that as the person with the idea, but not the writer – the show runner – I have to find one who is famous enough for the network, but who still has an interest in my idea.

  I commute to Hollywood and stay in the Beverly Hills Hotel. I love this place. It is ramshackle and jerry-built, the essence of movie land, and every night I sit plotting with my team in its dark-green Polo Lounge, merrily observing – sloshed in my booth – as that marvellous pageant of hookers and frauds peculiar to this corner of the world parade their wares. I am one of these freaks and it is almost a religious experience to be there as High Mass is celebrated each night in all the candlelit booths as another hopeless, flushed producer with dentures and hair plugs gives communion. The host is a crumpled, dog-eared idea and he places it carefully on the caked tongue of the jangly has-been whose soul he is trying to save from anonymity. We all ‘believe’ at the Polo Lounge, and to prove it the odd jewel sometimes shimmers past – a real star – orbiting the room like a rare comet seen once in a hundred years, and the believers turn as one, enraptured, but otherwise we buzz and hum – a thousand infertile bees – as Cats tinkles on the piano. I am in heaven, floating in this bubble above the smog. But there is other talk in the Polo Lounge this season.

  This is millennium Hollywood. The real world is shifting and so is Tinseltown because now it looks as if we are going back to the Promised Land. George Bush wants to liberate Iraq and the import of this is not lost on our desert community of refugees’ grand children. The Middle East could soon become a second empire – Son of United States – with Tel Aviv as New York. The idea is mind-boggling and, of course, brilliant. Oil, peace and the Promised Land all rolled into one, and there is a pre-war blitz mentality bubbling up out here in the lubed desert. Quite suddenly Hollywood – so proud in the past of its liberal spurs, won in the last golden age of the seventies – reveals herself in a harsher and more brutal light.

  NBC rents a gorgeous car for me in which I crash my way over the hills into the mist of the Valley for meetings with all the famous scribes. Marc, Benny and I are a strange trio, a Vaudeville act from the old days. I am tall and gaunt and terribly British in the middle. They are my Black and White Minstrels, on either side. Together we are the three minorities of the apocalypse: black, Jewish and gay. Anywhere else we would be outcasts but here, for the time being, we are It.

  Marc is compact and dressed for a safari. Benny is huge with enormous diamond earrings. (He dramatically loses weight during the course of Mr Ambassador, so that if you shot him with a time-release camera he would be like a deflating balloon, ending up on the night of our pilot a size zero wraith and hardly even black any more.) He is a famous manager with the thrilling reputation. He was Puff Daddy’s daddy during the famous gun hit-and-run disco scandal. He then became JLo’s manager and turned that screechy gonk into a pop star, and now he is going to turn me into an integral part of the American culture. Benny came to fame himself with the original idea for the TV series Fresh Prince of Bel Air while managing its star Will Smith at the same time. This sitcom was based on Benny’s real life. He was plucked from the ghetto and adopted by a wealthy family from Beverly Hills. He has a famous temper, and I am absolutely fascinated by him in the same way a chicken is taken by a boa constrictor and pecks and clucks around it, unaware that it is about to be swallowed whole. Benny also uses riveting rappy lingo, which I pretend to understand.

  Marc Platt, who is married with kids, comes from the opposite end of the Hollywood spectrum. He has a gunmetal crew-cut and looks a bit like a tentative version of Steve McQueen. His eyes are sky blue. He is impeccably mannered, never swears and is deeply religious. His Christmas present comes in the form of a substantial donation – in your name – to underprivileged Jewish children on a card with ‘Happy Holidays’ written on it. (God forbid you say Christmas in America.) I must admit to feeling slightly underwhelmed by this generous gift as I survey the jeroboams and hampers sent from the other members of my team and fan club. Next year, I shall play the same trick and make a donation to underprivileged queens in Hollywood and – unlike Marc (he is one of the straightest players I come across in the lubed desert) – I will siphon off all the funds to a numbered Swiss account. It could be a genius accounting scam.

  For the time being we set off each day to a different meeting in a different suite of offices at the end of another long corridor, which we march down three abreast, tense like matadors, in a building named after a god from the glorious past that is a part of one of the vast Hollywood studios. Once, not so very long ago, they were surrounded by groves of orange blossom but now are drowned in waves of beige linoleum rooftops.

  In the show runner du jour’s enclave, we present ourselves to pretty receptionists with wide smiles who chant our names into their headphones and we skim inside past hundreds of drones with vacant faces – they will never need botox – who sit in rows in the outer offices of a show runner’s hive. We swish through and are ushered into a priceless room with plantation shutters, white on white on white, where we perform together our ‘pitch’, the story of our show, with its jokes roughly etched, and with me giving a rough impression of all the spontaneous bubbliness I will be coming up with in the role. My team beam at me encouragingly on either side as I figure-skate to a dramatic halt. Then it is the show runner’s turn to whack the bullshit back across the net from the other side of the desk upon which there could be anything from cookie jars filled with jellybeans to a piece of ancient Greek sculpture (also possibly filled with jellybeans).

  No one tells the truth to your face in Hollywood – which face, anyway? This is one of the first rules of engagement – so everyone agrees that yours is the most wonderful idea that has ever been hatched. We – my team and I – jump back into our car, gloating and victorious, even though we have all been through this a thousand times and deep inside we know the probable outcome of the encounter. But this is one of the great and extraordinary things about show creatures, and particularly the West Coast breed. We put ourselves through it again and again, like some bizarre mating ritual that unusual animals perform in a wildlife documentary. We throw ourselves over the edge like lemmings, which is rather sweet.

  In a few hours we will be informed that our project doesn’t quite fit in with what they’re up to at the moment and so we have a conference call, where I am deflated and my Minstrels pump me back up. There are always innumerable brilliant reasons why this
rejection is the best thing that ever happened, and so we move on down our list. Thousands of calls are made but it’s not always plain sailing because So-and-So is out of town, somebody else’s wife has fallen off a massage table and is in a coma so he can’t make it. So it goes on until finally the next meeting is negotiated, woven on a web of phone lines slung between giant posts on the boulevards over the hills and far away. Agents call assistants who call managers who call network heads, and soon we’re tootling back over the hill into the valley of career death where we regroup in a parking lot, to brief one another about the meeting (act butch; he’s really anti-gay – or act as gay as possible because he’s just had triplets with his boyfriend and the cleaner). Off we march down another power corridor at another studio, as I readjust all my dials to make myself as perfect as possible for the show queen of the day. And so the merry-go-round whirls on. Past the bar and the doctor and the dealer and the chiropractor and the shrink and the hooker. It takes all that just to get through the afternoon.

  Hollywood jumps into the war effort with a terrifying abandon. I am in Marc Platt’s office on the morning when French fries are renamed freedom fries on Capitol Hill. In the United Nations the French have vetoed the offensive on Baghdad, and the smearing has begun. Marc is furious. His anger and suspicion go all the way back to Vichy. I try to explain the French side of the current dilemma, but there is no point. Marc says that the French have been in cahoots with Saddam Hussein for years. I reply that Osama Bin Laden was virtually invented by the Americans, and he stares at me as if I have gone mad. We will both look at one another in a different light after this conversation. I realise now that even Marc is brainwashed. He realises that I am a communist and (even though he probably doesn’t admit this to himself) will be looking out for anti-Semitic traits in our forthcoming dealings. These are dangerous days, and we are all suspicious and slightly hysterical.