Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins Page 7

  “Are you a detective?” said a voice behind me. I shot around. It was Danny. He was leaning against a lamp-post. Under the cap his face was a midnight blue, and his jaw pulsed in the orange street light. I visibly gasped. Samson bristled.

  “What’s going on in there?” I squeaked. “Is it a fancy dress party?” My mind was racing ahead. How was I going to explain this in Wolseys tomorrow night?

  Danny laughed, slightly unpleasantly. “Yeah, it’s a kind of fancy dress party. Why don’t you come in?”

  “I don’t think I should,” I said awkwardly, though I was longing to. “I’ve got a dog, you see. We were just out for a walk.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know what you were doing,” sneered Danny.

  “No, you don’t,” I said, going purple.

  “Okay, I don’t,” he said and walked back into the pub without another word.

  What unusual behaviour, I thought, intrigued. I took one last peek through the window and watched him make his way through the crowd. He was godlike. Soviet Reality in Earl’s Court. He turned around and I ducked. Samson and I ran all the way home.

  And so I developed a secret life. The pub was called the Coleherne. It was full of men into dressing up. All shapes and sizes, ages and classes left their identities at home as they squeezed into their night-time personae. There was an innocent feeling to the place. If you were good-looking, you probably didn’t quite know it; if you were older you probably didn’t much mind. There was something in everyone. In those days, just for being there, you counted. It was a different world. There was still a cherished, half-criminal stamp on being gay. Not so long ago homosexual practice had, after all, been illegal, and in that spring of 1976, sex was still very much conducted alfresco. Parks, disused basement areas, garages and alleyways were the unnamed but known places of worship, and being gay felt like being a part of an ancient Masonic lodge. You were outside the culture, and you loved it.

  I had a series of noms de plume and pretty soon I was a regular at the Coleherne, and also the Boltons, the pub across the road. It struck a different chord and was more of a marketplace for young runaway boys. But it was all dressing up to me. I moved effortlessly between the two and a basement club, called the Catacombs.

  At some point, biking from one latitude to another within that shimmering pink triangle, indulging, as I almost invariably did when alone, in waking dreams of the legendary screen career that was waiting to unfold before me, I was beckoned from a passing Rolls-Royce and joined instead, for a brief amateur career, the ranks of the oldest profession. In the prevailing winds of change I was simply fulfilling my duty as a Thatcher youth. “Get on your bike and work,” was Norman Tebbit’s message to the unemployed. (He was Thatcher’s gruesome henchman.) I got off mine and jumped into a passing limousine. However, more than enough has been said about my brief foray into commerce, both by myself and others, so I will only quote my bank manager, Mr. Humphreys, in a letter dated 18 April 1976:

  I have noted with pleasure that your current account is no longer in debit and stood at £9.46 as of this morning. We will be pleased to issue you with a new chequebook as soon as the monthly transfer of £10 from your father comes in. Keep up the good work.

  J.C. Humphreys

    Manager

  But I wasn’t the only one in that neighbourhood setting out on a career of complicated late-night love trysts under an assumed name. If the Boltons and the Coleherne ring some distant bell in the reader’s mind, it is because there was another princess tying on her pointe shoes at that time, getting ready to spring a few years later from the wings of Earl’s Court onto the world stage. Lady Di and her giggling flatmates lived in Coleherne Court.

  I witnessed one of those early uncertain walks in the public eye that she took from her flat to her car, surrounded by the school of sharks that would eventually undo her. I was going out for breakfast early one morning with Ronald, a toothless biker who had a poppers factory in his basement off the Coleherne Road. He was extremely thin, living the dream, wearing caps, jackets, studs, handcuffs and a handlebar moustache. His jeans and chaps were more or less painted onto his body, showing off to great effect the “definite added plus” to his already burgeoning charms. As we came around the corner into the Old Brompton Road there were shouts and screams and people running in all directions. It was as though a bomb had gone off. Suddenly, from a hundred yards away, Lady Di was striding towards us, the billowing engine of a runaway train all set to knock us down. She was already branding the gestures and expressions that we would come to love and hate and then love again over the next fifteen years: the unreadable smile, the apologetic but shifty air, the hand through the hair.

  Actually the scene had all the premonitory violence of the crash to come. The photographers were sprinting backwards, shouting her name. I dodged out of their path but Ronald, who would have been an activist had he survived, could not or would not stand aside in the pile-up that followed. Three or four paparazzi banged into him as they dashed past. One fell to the ground, knocking down a second. Ronald was about to explode, but as Lady Di and the others came upon him, she grimaced affectionately, with that ease for instant connection that made her a star, looked him up and down, clocking the cock and the handcuffs, before blushing slightly and smiling naughtily at him through half-closed eyes.

  It all happened in a second, but Ronald was hooked, and the next day he was in all the papers. Sometimes just a corner of him, sometimes his back, a huge red hanky stuffed in the pocket of his jeans, but mostly full on, blurry, but definitely there. And for anyone in the know, (probably everyone) the “added plus” could be seen, grainy, like a mysterious mountain range on Mars. Ronald kept the cuttings by his bed till the day he died, which was not long after. They said he had tuberculosis, but it was a mysterious death—one of the first I heard of—that fluttered the nerve endings of our collective subconscious. Someone was walking on our graves. Whenever I see that famous calling-card picture of the Princess of Wales outside the primary school in the Boltons, the baby almost allegorically placed on her hip, the sun shining through the floral print dress, leaving nothing to her future subjects’ imagination, I always think of Ron, and the brief moment they shared.

  I saw her once again, at the funeral of Gianni Versace. Everything had happened. Now her face was grim and set in stone. Elton John sobbed uncontrollably beside her, but there were no tears left inside Diana. No more apologetic smiles, no limpid, laughing eyes glancing down at the packages of the passing trade. The rosy future of twenty years ago had gone up in smoke. She sat upright with her arm around Elton and her steely gaze fixed on the small gold box containing Gianni’s ashes. She died two weeks later.

  But I am getting ahead of myself. That summer of 1976 I scraped through my exams at MPW and was recalled home by my mother. I told her that I wasn’t coming, that I had other plans. She countered by cutting my pocket money, but it didn’t matter. I already had somewhere to stay and Mr. Humphreys was under control. I had made friends with Jody Fenton, a girl at school, and she let me go and live in the cottage she shared with her sister in Markham Street off the King’s Road. It had not rained since March. Now it was June and suddenly the famous heatwave was upon us. My life exploded in every direction.

  The curtains flapped in the hot breeze from the street. Rod Stewart played endlessly; Jody looked a bit like him and was obsessed. Her room was next to mine under the eaves. A noisy fan stood in the doorway between us, turning from one dishevelled bed to the other but giving us very little respite from the blasting heat. At some point in the late morning one of us would plough through the debris of old knickers and half-filled cups down to the kitchen to make coffee (instant). Then we would lounge on our beds for another couple of hours, smoking, chatting, dozing off, before coming round again to join in a rousing chorus of “Tonight’s the Night.”

  Life was perfect: nothing to do all day and each morning hotter than the last. The city’s parks and squares turned a golden brown. Dus
t clouds and diesel fumes made trucks billow on the main roads. The air was sticky and sexy. And the heatwave kept on coming. London was driven to a fever pitch. No one could sleep and no one could work. Sex was on everybody’s mind. I spent all night out and came in each morning just before dawn.

  On Saturdays the punks arrived on the King’s Road. Thousands of kids poured out of the tube at Sloane Square and terrorised the local community. Where had these people come from? There had been no warning, which made them all the more shocking, because there had been no reference to these wreckers either in the previous year’s fashion plates or in the general press. Punk was completely fresh, an invading army. Mohican warriors riddled with safety pins bumped drunkenly into scuttling housewives who cursed under their breath. Boys in black bondage trousers and dirty kilts snogged fat slutty drunk girls with their baby-pink hair stiff with egg whites. Chelsea pensioners looked on in mute rows from the bus stops. There was puke on the pavements and brawling outside the pubs. It was revolution. The upper class reeled in horror at this encroachment on their sacred turf.

  One Saturday Mrs. Fane, our neighbour, was coming back from Mrs. Beaton’s Bakery on the King’s Road with a baguette sticking out of her shopping bag. A passing beauty with a padlock around his neck whipped it out and started eating. Mrs. Fane, a tiny woman, but with a reasonable experience in holding back the rabble during partition, turned on this big drunken lug, pulling herself up to her full five foot three.

  “Give me my loaf, you bloody yob,” she said, as Jody and I watched from our room.

  “Shut your shitty arse, cunt,” replied her new friend nonchalantly.

  Mrs. Fane nearly retched, but then, gritting her teeth, she swung her shopping bag over her head and socked the boy hard in the face with it.

  “Cor. That hurt,” he whined.

  Then she grabbed her loaf and marched off, thrusting it half broken back into the shopping bag as though it were a sword. “You should be in prison. We didn’t fight a bloody war for this,” she shouted as she slammed her front door and the whole street shook.

  Punk in the heatwave was the trailer to a new England. They were the advancing rabble, wobbling in the shimmering desert smog towards the World’s End, and the end of the world as we knew it. Their Boudicca, unbeknown to them, was another peach blonde with a lot of egg white in her beehive: Margaret Thatcher. She would be the Main Attraction; they were the razorblades on the wheels of her chariot. They both wanted to get their hands on the past and slash it to pieces. Punks wanted to fight on the high streets and shatter the windows of the greengrocers. Maggie the grocer’s daughter was going to close those grocers down and put up Tesco’s. They wanted anarchy and so did she.

  The Chelsea hoorays packed up and went to the country at the weekends. Those who stayed had their own anarchic agenda. Punk, for the upper-class rebel, was heroin. For the five years before both groups finally burnt out, we hooray junkies watched the working-class fray from the safety of the stands, scratching ourselves with distant half-smiles, dilated pupils and a swag bag of silver stolen from home while our parents were away.

  CHAPTER 7

  Paris

  Mothers have an uncanny instinct for danger. Even far away, and totally ignorant of any world outside her own, my darling mother knew that the thunderclouds were rolling close. When she looked at me, she saw a Dorian Gray and his portrait at the same time. My youth was still there, but whispering around it was an older darker creature that she neither knew nor liked. Her instinct was to lock me up in a tower and throw away the key. She knew this was impossible, but she also knew, or thought she knew, that the danger I was in came from London, a place she had never trusted. And so she hatched a new plan. I was to spend three months in Paris learning French.

  I was appalled and did everything I could to wriggle out of the trip, but she would not back down. A girl called Dominique had been to stay with us five years ago on one of those exchange trips everyone dreaded. My brother was meant to go back with her at the end of the trip. He had flatly refused. Now this old credit was claimed. Trunk calls were made (after 6 p.m. of course) to Mme Feuillatte, Dominique’s mother, and pretty soon it was all arranged. Little did my poor mama know that she was sending me into the very eye of the storm she had been hoping to avoid.

  The boat train to Paris left at ten o’clock at night from Victoria station, to make its midnight connection with the ferry at Newhaven. My father took me to dinner in the restaurant at the station hotel and saw me off on the platform just as he used to do when I was a child on the way to summer holidays in Scotland. It was romantic to take the boat train: you stood in the footsteps of your nineteenth-century heroes, and nothing much had changed. The lights swung in the breeze from the high Victorian arches that stretched along the platform. The tracks ran off beyond them into the dark unknown. All you could see were flashing red and green lamps and the distant glow of the city you were about to leave. In those days travel really felt like travel, and going abroad was leaving your life behind. Victoria at night was your last taste of England, full of sad cinematic goodbyes, extraordinarily lit in ghostly sepia night-for-day that confused the odd pigeon flapping around in the girders. The disembodied voice of some genteel medium from Bromley read the tea leaves from a high office overlooking the tracks. Her voice echoed across the station. Bing bong! One journey ended as another began, and you were briefly suspended between the past and the future in an exotic emotional limbo.

  I leant out of the train window and looked down at my father on the platform. He seemed impossibly ancient, standing there in his overcoat, bowler hat, briefcase and brolly, although in reality he was only a little older than I am as I write this today.

  “Mummy is awfully keen for this to work out,” he said warningly.

  “Relax, both of you!” I replied. The new me was dangerously abrupt.

  “Well, as you know, Mummy can’t.”

  At an unseen cue, the stragglers embraced and finally jumped on board. Doors slammed all the way down the train and the stationmaster blew his whistle.

  “Bonne chance,” said Daddy, in a French devoid of any attempt at accent. “Write, won’t you?” He stuck his chin forward and chuckled. It was his gesture of affection, and I returned it.

  With a metallic squeal we set off, but it seemed as though the platform was moving and not the train. The major, along with the other waving friends and relations, simply slid on a kind of conveyor belt back through the barrier and into the past, where as far as I was concerned they all belonged. The train clanked and jerked out of the old station across the river, the street lamps twinkling beneath us on the Embankment, the essence of London, moons held in the wrought-iron claws of Empire, laced with strings of bulbs that stretched all the way to Big Ben and threw white squiggly lines across the Thames.

  There was an actor in the British theatre who was legendary not so much for his acting as for his magical ability to catch every first night in the country. If he didn’t manage to attend the actual performance, then on the noticeboard backstage his familiar spidery handwriting could be spotted on cards from foreign parts to all the members of the cast. Everyone knew him, or thought they did. In fact he was, and still is, a mystery character, but one whose presence was essential for a play’s success. His name was Vernon Dobtcheff.

  He invariably wore black: polo neck, fedora and spectacles. Even if you were filming on location in French Guiana, you would most likely come across him in a local bar, on his way to somewhere, another location perhaps, or simply picking up some dry cleaning. He played small parts—spies and hit men—so he worked a lot during the Cold War. (Things may have quietened down a bit since the Wall came down.) I met him that night on the boat train to Paris. Without knowing, I was being beckoned into show business by its patron saint.

  Squeezing my cases along the packed carriages, I finally came across an empty seat. “Is anyone sitting there?” I asked.

  A man in a large black hat looked up from a newspaper and su
rveyed me through thick lenses. His nose was larger than John Gielgud’s. “You are, one hopes,” he said in a fine baritone.

  He observed me from behind his paper as I stuffed my case into the rack above the window; I could tell he was checking out my bum and I wiggled it around as if I were in a Carry On film. When I finally settled down he dropped his paper with a flourish. It was curtain up.

  “I’m Vernon,” he said and offered me a bejewelled hand. We chatted pleasantly during the trip and when we arrived at Newhaven, he said with an old-world chivalry and a coquettish twinkle, “If you need a place to lay your weary head, I have a cabin with two beds.”

  I was quite tired from the night before so I cautiously accepted the offer, wondering what exactly might be involved. Nothing much, as it turned out. I lay down on one of the beds. Vernon took off his hat and his glasses. He was naked without them, a baby bird with scraps of fluffy hair. The little bedside light between us threw his shadow against the wall. His nose was a giant beak. He produced a bottle of whisky from a rather macabre black holdall and poured some into a couple of toothmugs. As we toasted each other from our beds, the boat horn boomed our imminent departure and suddenly the whole cabin began to shake with the vibration of the engine. I kicked off my shoes and settled down to sleep. Vernon blinked blindly at me, said, “Repose-toi bien,” and switched off the light.

  I woke once during the night. The light was back on. He was in his specs again, slowly licking his fingers before turning a page of the book he was reading. He looked over and winked. I went back to sleep.

  Later, at about four o’clock in the morning, he shook me gently and we made our way together to the French train. It was freezing and inside the windows were misted up and dripping. I slumped unconscious into my seat but received another gentle prod as we approached Paris. By now the window had cleared and I looked blearily out.