But I really loved it, being behind the wheel of a fast car. I hadn’t been back in England long, however, before I proved to myself and all concerned that I had no business being behind the wheel of an ordinary car on a public road. Ordinary cars didn’t come more ordinary than ours. By that time we had upgraded from a Mini to a Golf, which, though bigger, was possibly even less impressive in its surge of acceleration. Even my wife, who by nature favours the secure over the spectacular, sometimes wondered aloud whether the Golf had been the right purchase. We would all get into it, wonder why it wasn’t going, and then find out, by close observation of the surrounding scenery, that it was. But with me at the controls the Golf became a weapon whose potential lethality was plain to all but the driver. The moment of truth came when I drove my elder daughter to Oxford for the new term. Passing through Milton Keynes, I drove twice around the wrong roundabout while my daughter made muted noises of apprehension. Kindly she waited until we had arrived at New College and unloaded her stuff – as always, I was good for lifting weights under female supervision – before she started reciting a list of all the times that I had nearly got us wiped out along with the numerous innocent civilians who were lucky to be going home in one piece. Shaken, I decided then and there to quit domestic driving on ordinary roads. I would save it for the screen. The whole family voted their assent with such unanimous alacrity that I felt I had no right even to be cast down. I have never driven on an ordinary road again, except when making a movie, which is a different world, where the budget pays for the damage and you are effectively preceded by a man with a red flag.
That being said, my new ability to make a car go roughly where I pointed it proved crucial when we made Postcard from Miami. At the time, the American police series Miami Vice was a big hit on British television, so our high-level executives were naturally keen to establish a thematic connection for promotional purposes. By that stage Richard’s insistence that I attend a gymnasium twice a week had begun to pay off, and it didn’t seem entirely implausible that I should be visiting Miami in order to pick up tips on a possible career as a fashion-conscious cop. I would have to be a fashion-conscious cop in a very ordinary blue suit, but at least I was roughly the right shape. My appearance was further enhanced by my reclining position at the wheel of a Ferrari Testarossa sports car, hired for two weeks at a heartrending fee. The Miami Vice stars, Philip Michael Thomas and Don Johnson, were always tooling around in glamorous vehicles and I would do the same, thus to blend into the atmosphere of rehabbed Art Deco hotels, fresh-from-the-carton Architectonica skyscrapers, white beaches, blue water and the scribbled dribble of neon on balmy nights. The benefits of having a proper international road licence were now apparent. Without one, I would have been feebly hailing taxis. In the Ferrari, I looked independent. I even looked dashing. The Ferrari dashed at only a fraction of its potential because I didn’t know how to get it out of second gear, but since it would do fifty in first there was plenty of speed to play with if I ever needed it. I did my best not to need it. Buses honked at me, impatient to get by. With the red-headed classic engine emitting a frustrated version of its characteristic coffee-grinder scream, I proceeded at the pace of a steam roller. But in my dark glasses and low-slung bright red car I looked the part while we shot miles of coverage to establish me as mobile in Miami and ready for action: lean, mean, dangerous and perhaps a little stupid.
The Ferrari footage was the link material for various episodes, which fell roughly into two categories: dead serious and utter nonsense. It was nonsense when a huge ex-Marine taught me to load and fire a .45 automatic. It was serious when I interviewed an ex-CIA agent who had been firing a .45 automatic for most of her life. An elegant blonde built along the lines of Christy Turlington, she could have stepped out of the annual Swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated. But she would have still been with the Agency if the PR arm of a Colombian drug cartel hadn’t blown her cover. Now she earned her living by writing books and teaching people like me to waterski, something she could do at championship level. The desire to show off to her, coupled with my usual urge to dare all for the camera, had an astonishing result. Most first-timers don’t stand up on the skis within the first hour, but there I was, upright at the first attempt and skimming along the blue water beside the white wake of the speedboat from which she, bikini-clad, waved back to me in encouragement, and, I thought, admiration. Off to one side, our camera in another speedboat was getting the shot. It was a moment of triumph and it received its due reward. After my skis got crossed, there was a somersault of large radius that ensured the unyielding water would receive my descending behind at precisely the right angle to inflict a sea-water injection of stunning power. Shafted, I was hauled aboard. ‘Not many people do that on their first day,’ she said. ‘Congratulations.’ I smiled back, as a man will smile who has just been sodomized by a speeding pillar of salt.
She gave me a revealing interview, though. It was all about drugs, illegal immigrants, Latin American politics and everything else that Washington was spending billions on failing to cope with. She didn’t say that last part but it was obvious that the whole thing was out of control. Off camera, I caught her speaking beautiful Spanish and asked her whether she had learned it as a child. Not at all: she had learned it in adulthood, with a self-devised programme of discipline by which she had set out to memorize the words for all the parts of the body in the first week, and then all the colours and seasons in the second week, and so on. I was abashed, and took the tip. From then on I was much more systematic about learning complete sets of words. (Left, right, ahead, behind, up, down: it’s an essential early set to learn in any language.) She was lovely, my secret agent, and she was very bright: a tremendous human asset which America was rich enough to waste.
It was amazing, the wealth of gifted people they had on hand. There was a young customs narc who looked like Steve McQueen. He too was careful not to say that the war on drugs was long lost, but he didn’t have to say it. He took me out on a fast boat. Fast meant really fast: with two engines bigger than the one in my Ferrari, it could catch the Cigarette boats that ran the drugs into Miami by night. On our day out, he just trailed a big gin palace into the river mouth while he told us why it was worth a search. ‘See that guy at the back who’s checking gear? It doesn’t need checking. He’s checking us.’ As so often with the Americans, this was dialogue you could put straight to air. We filmed the narcs as they swarmed all over the target boat and came up with nothing. The day before, they had busted anther boat with about ten million dollars’ worth of cocaine stashed in its air-conditioning system. (‘Don’t worry. If this boat had been dirty we wouldn’t have let you film it anyway. It would have screwed the case.’) With so much powder being picked up, the inevitable inference was that many times as much was getting through, on its way to reducing a few thousand mothers’ daughters to snivelling wrecks. It wasn’t a war, it was a process, and the most you could do was to dress the process up to make it look reasonably good for the forces of virtue. That, essentially, was what a show like Miami Vice was all about: it gave a pastel tone to stark horror. Real drugs do ugly things to people but on television the actors playing the cops make it all look cute.
Looking cute was Don Johnson’s cross. With me in the Ferrari and the crew in the van, we called on him one day when he had some downtime between jumping cutely out of a car with a gun in his hand and rolling cutely on the special grass that would not stain his pastel-blue jacket. His African-American partner, Philip Michael Thomas, was invisible in the trailer, waiting for the day, which then seemed impossibly far off, when a brother would become President of the United States. But Don Johnson was available and generously ready to play along. (The ruthless rule is: a big enough star will give you his time for free but the one who calls for his agent is the one you don’t want anyway.) Don Johnson was, and still is, a disciplined performer with the full American song-and-dance background, but he already knew all too well that he had the part because he looked so
good in lipgloss. I could go on for ages about the harsh laws of an actor’s life, but the quickest way of saying it is that while most of them get nowhere, those who get somewhere seldom get what they want. Don Johnson was a seriously accomplished actor and after he got off the pretty treadmill of Miami Vice he made at least two movies to prove it. In the reasonably successful Guilty as Sin he was very believable as the too-handsome villain and in the almost unknown The Hot Spot he was even better as the lawyer ready to kill for Jennifer Connolly. (Though it could be said that Gandhi would have been ready to do the same, Johnson made it subtle.) But he never got out from under his television image. It can be done: it started with Steve McQueen, James Garner and Clint Eastwood, and more recently George Clooney is a powerful example of the TV star graduating to big-screen hero. But on the whole, success on American TV is a straitjacket. Don Johnson’s straitjacket was beautifully cut – nobody ever looked better in pastel poplin, light tan chinos and Gucci loafers with no socks – but he was a prisoner. Later in his career he came to the West End to play Nathan Detroit in Guys & Dolls and the London critics, who uniformly panned the production, were nevertheless astonished that he could sing. But of course he could. He could always do all that stuff, and instead he had spent his best years jumping in and out of cars and shouting, ‘Go! Go! Go!’ His example gave me a lot to think about. Somehow, although my working life was theoretically a version of paradise, I was forever planning my escape, like a citizen of Havana.
The biggest story in Miami was the Cubans. Though this was a political theme of such complexity that it could hardly be unravelled in passing, my producer Beatrice Ballard nicely succumbed to my demand that we trawl for vox pops in Calle Ocho, still officially called 8th Street but by now populated exclusively with people speaking Spanish. Calle Ocho was the main stem for all the Cubans who had transferred themselves from the workers’ paradise of Castro’s imagination to the opportunistic inferno of America’s brutal capitalist reality. Her instinct, however, proved right. Among the one and a half million Cubans who had survived the trip by crowded boat, open raft or rubber inner tube, there were too many head-cases with well-rehearsed stories who would hog the camera even if you pointed it away from them. As if the Bay of Pigs disaster had never happened, they spoke loudly and continuously of secret missions to go home in fully armed glory, an eventuality for which they trained in the Everglades by practising unarmed-combat routines against alligators while fire-bombing small areas of swamp with Molotov cocktails. The best way to handle the Cuban-exile story was to interview Gloria Estefan, which we did. A mainstream chart-topper as well as being by far the most popular singer in the Spanish world, she had a smart mind to go with her talent, and – rarer still, this – good manners to go with the smart mind. She couldn’t have been more cooperative, but the best part of the story came by implication, just from the setting. We arrived by boat to visit her at home. She was living on a little island with an entry fee of many millions: a community gated by open water. ‘I’m hardly ever here,’ she told me, ‘but when I’m out on the road it’s nice to know that I’ve got this to come home to.’ She waved sweetly at an acre of emerald lawn. The only conclusion to draw was that if you were content to play music for the Buena Vista Social Club and eat meat once a month, then Cuba was for you, but if you wanted to be a star singer on a world scale, then you had to go to Miami. The whole of Central America was heading for Miami. That was the story.
America’s magnetic attraction for the disadvantaged of the region remained a hard story to tell because of the assumption among intelligent people everywhere that America had caused the disadvantages. This assumption was largely a false one. Mexico, for example, wasn’t poor because America was rich; Mexico was poor because an endless succession of permanently revolutionary governments could waste any amount of American credit while pursuing employment policies which ensured the migration across the Rio Grande of every worker with the ability to swim or even wade. But the assumption kept on being reborn because among the intelligentsia of any free country the idea lingered tenaciously that the established order under which they themselves flourished was essentially a fraud. There had been a time when I had parroted such opinions myself even though not really believing them, so I was familiar with the mechanism by which one can profess a set of beliefs while harbouring contrary desires. This anomaly is prevalent in the field of show business, and especially prevalent in the theatre, where histrionic abilities are plentifully available to facilitate the cover-up. A radical playwright who accepts a knighthood after a lifetime of vilifying every aspect of the society that made him rich will look indignant if accused of hypocrisy, and his admirers will soon learn to go easy on the mockery if they wish to keep his favour. Among the admirers will be almost all the actors, who are scarcely likely, of their own free will, to get on the wrong side of someone who might write them a part. The almost complete absence of objections to his acceptance of an honour will soon strike the playwright as unanimous approval, and any inner conflict is quickly put to rest.
19. IT WOULD BE AN HONOUR
I like to think that there was no inner conflict in my own case, when I was offered membership in the Order of Australia in 1992. The decoration is conferred by the Australian government. Mine, however was to be pinned on me by the Queen at Buckingham Palace. This invitation was bound to confirm me as an irredeemable Establishment figure in the eyes of the Australian media commentariat, but I didn’t mind. By their standards I was already an irredeemable Establishment figure, so why fight it? I would have turned the gong down if my family had objected but they were already buying new hats. And my mother was pleased. Back there in Kogarah she was in the process of being moved into a nursing home on a permanent basis but she had more than enough energy still on tap to convey her approval. Always among her chief fears was that I would not be able to earn a living, and here was a new accreditation that might help get me a proper job. There was a certain amount of raucous comment from my Friday lunch cronies about the honour having been conferred for Services to Television rather than Services to Literature, but I could put up with that.
Harder to put up with was the fancy dress. I looked stout in the morning suit but the effect might have been alleviated if there had been no top hat. There was a top hat. It looked no more appropriate on me than it had looked on Hitler when he called on Hindenburg. The women in my family, who could give the effect of a trio of Furies even at the best of times, fought laughter as they took turns being photographed with the paterfamilias in the forecourt of the palace. Luckily, once we got inside, they were led away to join the audience of massed relatives while I was briefed, along with a bunch of other recipients, by Black Briefs in Waiting, Master of the Rigmarole. He was admirably succinct. It was the clearest set of rules I have ever had explained to me about anything. One advanced to meet the Queen. The Queen would hang the medal on the hook in one’s lapel. The Queen might ask a question while doing so. Answer it. But when she extended her hand, the audience was over. Shake the hand and walk away backwards. Try to extend the acquaintance and you would be hauled off with a hook.
I would like to say that it all went wrong because that would make a better story. But it went like clockwork, which, I suppose, is what’s wrong with it. Why lavish so much protocol on something so trivial? But the answer is in the question. It’s trivial for her, who has to do it thousands of times a year, and it’s trivial for us, who must live for other satisfactions or else be sorely disappointed. But it’s not trivial in itself: or rather, the triviality has weight. It stands in as a comparatively benign substitute for all the corruption that might be unleashed if people did their duties for no rewards except those of palpable substance. The great critic and thoroughgoing bastard Cyril Connolly always thought that he was being amusing when he told the story of how he had expected the Queen to know something about what he did for a living when she gave him a medal. But he was mistaken in two different ways at once. The Queen couldn’t be expected to keep
up with literary criticism, so there was nothing funny there. And if Connolly wanted his listeners to laugh because his expectations had been ridiculous, he must have been very confident that they were interested in what he felt: there was nothing funny there either. On the other hand, literary criticism had been honoured, in the same way that keeping a neat and honest set of housing-transfer certificates gets honoured when a civil servant receives on OBE for thirty years of service. The protocol is the prize. It’s a tradition, and has the advantage of not having been invented yesterday. (Some of the British traditions, including most of the coronation ceremony, were indeed invented yesterday, but they were concocted out of scraps left over from the past.)
I was getting my award at just the right time in my own history. Very slowly, too slowly, I had been graduating out of contempt for the inherited order’s injustices to gratitude that it was not more unjust. Object to the inherited social structure by all means, but object in detail, and always in the knowledge that an enforced wholesale alteration would be unlikely to ameliorate the condition of those you claim to speak for, and very likely to make it immeasurably worse. That, briefly, had been the story of the twentieth century, by then nearing its unlamented end. My increasing knowledge of recent history, which I never ceased to study even when out on the trail of tinsel glory, has been doing its work, along with the mere fact of growing older, and so less confident in my ability to change the world all by myself. Both for Britain and Australia, the constitutional order looked worth preserving, the Royal family included: the Royal Family whatever its limitations. (The Queen still knows next to nothing about literary criticism.) Unbroken even by the moment of death, the permanent existence of a monarch sets a limit to ambition. If I bend my knee to the monarch, I don’t have to bend the knee to anyone else. This knowledge would come in handy if I were ever to meet Rupert Murdoch, who would dearly like to rearrange the established order so that he could have a say in who would hold the office of head of state. He is a baron, and in my homeland there are many barons like him. At Runnymede, the great charter, by putting the monarchy beyond contest, limited the power of the barons in perpetuity, to the inestimable benefit of the common people. Barons are ambitious men. As an ambitious man myself, I know something about what goes on in their heads. They want the world. The wisest of them learn to temper their wish, but the wish is basic.