You are never more likely to ham it up than when you are registering surprise. In real life, surprise merely makes your face look puzzled for as long as it takes your brain to process the unexpected information. On screen, if you adopt a ‘wow’ face to convey your shock, it looks hopelessly over the top: better to do nothing. All this, of course, presumes that you are coping with the task of conveying appropriate facial reactions to a surprise you know is coming. Sometimes you get a real surprise, whereupon the problem solves itself, and you will remain nicely dead-pan unless you get the fatal urge to do a ‘wow’ face after you scrape off the custard pie. When we relocated the camera and the lights upstairs to the bar for the interview with Inés, I didn’t immediately see the vaudeville possibilities inherent in Philippe Starck’s idea of what constituted suitable furniture for a place where fashionable people might like to meet in order to drink, snack and talk about structuralism. The tables, though tiny, nevertheless had flat surfaces on which such things as drinks, cups of coffee and plates of pastries might conceivably be placed without falling instantly to the floor. The chairs, however, all turned out, on closer inspection, to have three legs. This was Starck’s breakthrough concept. Chairs had had four legs each, one in each corner, since civilization had first emerged among the Ashurai people of Mesopotamia thousands of years before Christ, but now a genius was on the case. Still waiting for Inés to show up, I sat down on my allotted chair so that we could get my portion of the establishing sequence. Pretending to be reacting to Inés’s shattering glamour – I had a standard stunned-mullet expression to fit that – I lowered my behind carefully into the hard laminated plywood seat of the three-legged chair.
I wasn’t pretending at all when I fell sideways out of shot, the chair still magically attached to my behind as if it has been glued into position. On my way down, I was already aware that we would somehow have to capture my transition to the floor. This is where the experience of filming that I had already acquired came in handy. A wide shot that panned with me as I dived would have taken a lot of setting up and would have looked contrived anyway. All we needed was a tight shot of my face as I lay on the floor. In the editing room we could tack that shot on to the first one, in which I fell sideways out of frame. As long as I did a good enough job of looking stunned while I was lying down, it would all click. I remembered the way Oliver Hardy had always made a point of looking merely resigned after the house fell on him. Helping me to cut my performance back – as the stage actors say when they act for the screen – was my apprehension that the beautiful Inés might take a dive too. But when she came wafting in I could see straight away why she wouldn’t be falling out of any chairs. She didn’t weigh anything. She was six feet tall but she was made of light. This ethereal apparition was famous for never wearing the same kit twice, all the way down to her lucky underwear. For this appearance she had chosen a sort of sailor suit ensemble which would have been appropriate for Captain Nemo’s social secretary on the Nautilus. During the interview she told me that she always chose her outfit for the day on the basis that it must tell a little storee. Today her storee was of the sea.
She could have told me anything and I would still have nodded with agreement, although every nod set me tottering on my triangular base. Since we had asked the management to let other people use the bar so that we could have some authentic background, almost every answer from Inés was punctuated by the sound of a new arrival sitting down on a three-legged chair and hitting the floor with his face immediately afterwards. But I could easily narrate all that. I didn’t think that what either of us said made a lot of sense even at the time, but she was such a spellbinder that it didn’t matter. Correctly guessing, however, that the ambience would be at least as entertaining as the interview, I asked the crew for a lot of extra coverage as we arrived and left, so as to leave room for my comments on the advanced designer’s success in ironically dramatizing the previously unexamined connection between chair and occupant. Inés, as advanced a design as a human being could be, sailed serenely away after assuring me that my blue suit told a storee of – how could she put this? – of a man in a blue suit. ‘You are not chic, yes? And that is your storee.’
We filmed for two entire days down in les égouts, the sewage tunnels under the city, and after painstaking work we got a lot of highly atmospheric footage which never made it past the first fortnight of editing, because, in the end, people trump spectacle. One of the people was completely unplanned for. The plan was to track with me as I visited the cemetery of Pére Lachaise, did a tour of the gravestones and ended up at Proust’s black slab, but when we got to Edith Piaf there was already a fan watching over her who might have been cast by the wraith of Jean Renoir and sent down to me for just this moment. The fan was probably in his seventies but might have looked younger if he had not overdone the black hair dye, the mascara, the rouge and the lipstick. He had loved her, however, and knew how to say so. He said so in French, but one phrase at a time, so I could translate it aloud as he spoke. The antiphonal effect was elegiac beyond anything that could have been written and acted. In the trade you call it a ‘snatched’ moment and there can be no doubt that the snatched moments are often the best thing in the movie, but if you have to depend on them you are in trouble. They reward the diligent, as is proved by how they are always withheld from the careless.
10. KEEPING THE BALANCE
Like a tour of duty as entertainments officer in a nuclear submarine, filming got me away from home, but home was waiting for me when I got back. Leading a balanced life got harder all the time. The first hazard was the fame factor, which seemed to consist entirely of drawbacks even when they were construed, by others, as privileges. Straightforward irritations were relatively easy to handle. In the streets, large tattooed artisans whom one would not ordinarily have wanted to meet shouted, ‘’Ere! Ain’t you that Clive Jenkins?’ The temptation to say, ‘Go screw yourself, my good man,’ had to be resisted. Even the nicest version of this instant familiarity involved a lot of autograph-signing and dozens of involuntary conversations every day. It didn’t happen in Australia, where my programmes, because they had been made in Britain, were resolutely kept from the screen by an ABC executive who took pride in protecting the Australian public from my disloyal voice. As a result, Australia was a reality check: when I went there on literary business, I got the mildly enthusiastic reaction appropriate to someone whose books have been read, or at any rate heard about. These bursts of normality served to underline the sheer weirdness of what happened when I got back to Britain and found myself shouted at by a whole building site full of workmen if I failed to stop and answer their questions about ‘them Chinese’. (After several aborted interchanges I deduced that by ‘them Chinese’ they meant the Japanese game-show contestants.) Walking on, instead of stopping, was the only way to save something from the day, but the penalty was to be followed for half a block by loud shouts of ‘Aren’t we good enough for you any more, Clive?’ In Soho one afternoon, Martin Amis was walking beside me when that question came raining down from above and he was fascinated. He still tells the story now, and I remain convinced that the hellish atmosphere of his middle-period novels was partly generated by that momentary revelation of mediatized insanity. One of the most unsettling aspects of being public property on that scale is that you are always addressed by your first name even when the message is abusive. ‘Clive, you’re a tosser.’ At such moments I felt bound to agree, but if I had stopped to discuss the matter I would not have been able to call my life my own.
That Faustian feeling of having sold your life to the Devil is the real explanation behind the self-destructive behaviour of the younger celebrities. They got what they wanted, and it drove them nuts. As an older hand, I was better able to compute the odds, but staying clean wasn’t easy. Sometimes wine, women and song look like the only place you can hide. (This can be especially true when you are out on the road, and stuck for the day in unfamiliar streets thronged by thousands of strangers all
calling you aggressively by your first name. Any soft, kind voice sounds like a port in a storm, and artists on tour are often trailed by tabloid snoops in the hope that loneliness will lead to folly.) Since I would never have gone into show business in the first place if I had lacked the conviction that I was the natural centre of attention, to be a recognizable face fed a primal urge, but it could sap the very confidence it was meant to boost. ‘Why are people suddenly so keen to ask me to dinner?’ It must have been a question that nagged even Einstein.
Yet I quite liked being invited out into the beau monde. For one thing, in the border territory where gracious living meets the arts there are invariably more than a few women who are works of art in themselves, and I have always enjoyed the outlaw feelings that come with making a beautiful face laugh. For a heady instant you are Zorro, standing outlined in a window arch. A little less paunch under the cummerbund might have been appropriate, but for the moment I felt up to the part of making the great lady giggle. She didn’t have to be a countess. She sometimes was, but the fun was just as intense when the woman on your left or right was, say, Alison Lurie. (‘Write a strange novel,’ she said to me, and I did. I wrote The Remake, thereby loading myself into a circus cannon after first having taken down the net.) At higher altitudes, where the British aristocracy hung out with the super-rich, the yield in verbal interest seldom matched the visual splendour. I didn’t hear much said that I couldn’t have made up after being injected with enough novocaine. On the other hand, there were pictorial aspects that I was glad to file away for future use. Some of the grand houses in London have stretches of garden behind them in which you could land a light aircraft, and you would never suspect the layout was even there just from looking at the front door. One night, in one of these game reserves for the privileged, I saw a vision crossing the moonlit lawn between two marquees.
She was the acknowledged supreme young beauty of the day. In that year her name was Charmian Scott, and her mere existence was a reminder that you can’t make that sort of thing up. You have to see it. In fact you have to see it before you can even imagine that there might be something you can’t make up. She was wearing an off-the-shoulder ivory and white ball gown and when she turned into profile the length of her perfectly straight nose looked like an echo of her collarbone. Now was the time to quote Keats, but my throat was full of wood shavings. Clearly, radiantly, she had been sent to Earth to marry a duke. A few months later she did, which made me feel better about not having said anything. Not that anything I could have said would have made the slightest impression, which was the real trouble with the whole scene. It was like being in a masque written by Milton, but the level of conversation was usually even worse. There was always some drawling Adonis sitting opposite me who wanted to save me from talking to the women I sat between. ‘I must say that the things you get those Chinese chappies doing are a bit ripe.’ I could hear better things than that on a building site.
Educated in a hard school to appreciate the fragility of their advantages, the renegade East European aristos were far better value. Nothing could beat a multilingual high-born widow who was ready to show her kinship with artists and philosophers by inviting them regularly to dinner, usually for the only civilized conversation they would have that week. This was far preferable to hearing from the landed gentry about land, or from financiers about finance. The most glittering salon was run by Diana Phipps, whose original surname was recorded in the Almanach de Gotha. Tall, stately and uncannily charming, she had a gift for getting the bright sparks together and giving them a taste of the high life without cramping their style. At the same table as David Hockney, Philip Roth, Harold Pinter and Sir Isaiah Berlin, it was flattering to be treated like one of the boys. Lord Weidenfeld was the London host who was most famous for inviting everybody at once, but here he was a guest, and obviously glad to be keeping company with people who spoke his language, which was the cosmopolitan language of the old European cafes – not of cafe society, but of the cafes themselves, the places where the bohemian intellectuals once gathered before the two great waves of totalitarianism washed the brains out of the old cities. Eavesdropping while he compared notes with Alfred Brendel about the precious wreckage of the culture from which they came, I mentally composed a reading list as they talked, and a quarter of a century later I am still working through it. Brendel, who was just about to launch into his second recording cycle of the Beethoven piano sonatas, had strips of Elastoplast around his fingertips. I couldn’t have envisioned that under hallucinogenic drugs. The most startling surrealism is always real. Brendel, whose knowledge of literature is on a level with his mastery of music, told me that I should read the essays of Alfred Polgar. I had never heard of Alfred Polgar, but it was at such moments that I knew I had come a long way from Kogarah. When I was roaming the grounds of some stately home I had merely come a long way from the front door, and there was nothing but a general impression. Here, all the impressions were specific. The names had faces and their mouths were in action. Harold Pinter, an actor to the core, would present his profile even if you were sitting in front of him, but his voice was a thriller: deep, resonant, the rumble of a gravy train. When he found an excuse to quote from Philip Larkin’s great, late poem ‘Aubade’, Pinter would invariably quote the whole thing, to riveting effect. A political tirade, however, would sometimes inspire less unanimous assent, and a discussion might ensue during which his wife, Lady Antonia, who could get that kind of thing at home, would gently go to sleep, right there at the table. Her narcolepsy was a genuine affliction but it came in handy to block out boredom. Philip Roth was wide awake, alert to Pinter’s opinions, and hated every one of them. At one point, when Pinter was blaming America for the destruction of Carthage in the third Punic War, Roth stood up and stormed out, taking Claire Bloom with him. It was a spectacular case of ‘Darling, we’re going home,’ and I was there to see it. Noticing everything, I made a conscious effort to remember it all. If I couldn’t take out a notebook and jot it all down, at least I could pay attention. But I also noticed the number of writers present who had begun to grow less productive a generation ago, and I quickly figured out where they had been. They had been here, entertaining each other instead of the public. Social life was a trap. Either you had a social life or you got things done. But the woman who taught me that would never have been in a position to teach it if she hadn’t known all there was to know about the douceur de vivre, and I was glad to be instructed, although sometimes the lessons were painful. ‘People don’t want to be charmed. They want to charm.’ It was a way of telling me to shut up and listen. Learning to keep my mouth closed occasionally as an aid to keeping my ears open, I became more sensitive to nuance, perhaps the most important French word in the English language.
Nearly all the terms in the English language that cover the subject of social grace are French, strangely enough. The British have almost no native vocabulary for the guiding precepts of the sweet life. If you rate comme il faut above savoir faire, as indeed you should, you will find it hard to say so in everyday English. Luckily I understood the phrases, even if I couldn’t pronounce them. At such moments in their careers, men who have risen in the world often consecrate their elevation by starting a second marriage, usually after contriving to demolish the first. As Cyril Connolly – important critic, repellent man – once put it, ‘The woman with whom one shares one’s early struggles is rarely the woman with whom one wishes to share one’s later successes.’ The frozen symmetry of the expression is enough to show what’s wrong with the idea. There is a certain realism to it – far too many of the marriages in my generation cracked up on that very rock – but the realism is bloodless. Nor was Connolly wise to neglect the possibility that the woman with whom one shares one’s early struggles might decide that one is a twerp, and kick one out, being in possession of a mind of her own.
The advantage of having had a taste of the high life is that you are not thrown for a loop when you are offered a whole plateful. As a wri
ter I thought that there were things I had to find out about how the world worked – one of the Devil’s opening moves, when subverting the soul of an artist, is always to present the artist’s thirst for privileges as a vocational duty – but I was too committed to my stock of common memories to trade it in for keeps. The family holidays continued to provide a steady stream of such treasure. The death dive at Bormio and the throbbing thumbs of Davos were regularly supplemented by the yield of stories from our annual fortnight in the sun at Biarritz. In the glory days of Biarritz, back in the nineteenth century, it probably rained less often. The Empress Eugénie would not have permitted more than a certain level of precipitation. In the early twentieth century, when Picasso was there, none of his paintings of prancing sea nymphs featured rain. For us, it rained almost all the time. The littoral of the Bay of Biscay is always a full ten degrees centigrade less hot than the Côte d’Azur anyway, but when you add rain to the cool, you can wonder why you came. Then the sun comes out again and you remember. On a sunny day the Côte des Basques was pretty without parallel: the sable d’or as soft as talcum, the sea like stretched shantung beyond the neatly foaming breakers, the tamarisks at evening glowing gold beside the pathways that led back up the cliff to dinner at Les Flots Bleus, a restaurant where everyone except me ate piles of moules six inches high. Our friend and landlord Michael Blake-more still invited, year after year, his actors and playwrights to join him at the beach. You would see Tim Pigott-Smith, still in character as Merrick from The Jewel in the Crown, snarling at a plate of moules. The lovely Nicola Pagett smiled at moules as if she hoped to charm them open. Robin Dalton, agent to John Osborne, negotiated with moules. Michael Frayn inspected a heap of moules as if the task was to deduce its molecular structure. My wife and Rhoisin Beresford could get through a hundred moules between them, the shells piling up like a midden. All these people were fascinated by moules. I could not stand moules. What else did the damned things do except lie there on the seabed imitating legless cockroaches while they ingested effluent?