A Story Lately Told (21 page)

•  •  •

I was lonesome for Mum. Before I left for Austria, I’d met a new friend, an art student, at one of our dinner parties. He was a friend of Peter Menegas and his name was Jeremy Railton. We’d begun a romance before I left London, and he was now staying as a guest at Maida Avenue, in my room, under my Chinese bedspread. He wrote that he was having a good time with Mum. But then Tony wrote that Mum had not been in good form lately and that the atmosphere in London was “approaching the tragic.” In his letter, he said he’d gone to her room a couple of days before to find her crying in her bed. She had claimed it was the weather, and he had put on a detached expression, because he did not want to engage in her personal problems, lest he get trapped.

Tony felt that her world must have crumbled as we became adults but that this was a fact of life, and to draw out the parting would make it all the more painful. He remarked that Mum was an exceptionally motherly woman; all her friends were children who needed looking after, which was one reason she had no older friends. But one old friend had returned to the scene—John Julius. It was a relationship that could hardly leave frivolity in its wake. Mum’s efforts to seem gay and lighthearted around him reminded Tony of bad funny postcards. He said that lighthearted was not the way she felt and that Mum was no actress. Tony and I had begun to dread Mum’s sadness, resenting that she confided her pain to her friends even as she isolated herself from us.

Tony offered to write to Dad on my behalf—since I found it hard to speak to him—or to speak to Dad with me in the room. He advised me that a concentrated study of literature was important, though achieving A-level exams was a little irrelevant if I was to be an actress. He pointed out that once I was able to judge a script’s artistic merit, I would be able to make up my mind whether it was worth my time. He apologized for sounding
pompous and offered to come over to Austria, should it be helpful. I don’t think I ever acknowledged that letter. I felt that Mum had asked him to plea bargain with Dad for me.

Because I was under twenty-one when we filmed
A Walk with Love and Death,
my payment for the film was placed in a Swiss bank account. My father’s lawyers had made it all but impossible for me to access my own money. But on the way back from Austria, I went to the tiny town of Chur, nestled high in the Swiss Alps, and withdrew enough money to pay for a platinum watch Mum had talked about having seen in the window of Cartier on Bond Street.

Returning to London, I found myself, by an amusing twist of fate, in a twelve-seat airplane flying with the Monkees. I was wearing a fetching yellow, embroidered Afghan jacket that smelled strongly of goat. On a whim, I decided to be French and took to answering their polite line of questioning with Gallic shrugs and broken English. As the journey progressed through the snowy night, Davy Jones invited me to their concert, and upon arrival at Heathrow, Davy and his manager offered to drop me off at my house in their limousine. When we came to Maida Avenue, they walked me to my door. Mum opened it. “Bonjour, Maman!” I exclaimed, and I introduced them to her in heavily accented English. As they wandered back to their car, I waved—“Bonsoir”—and shut the door.

“Now, what was all that about?” asked Mum.

I was in my bedroom one morning, soon after I came back from
A Walk with Love and Death,
when Mum walked in holding a copy of an Italian soft-porn magazine. I think it was called
Playman.
Inside was a photograph of me, nude to the waist, with a bemused expression on my face.

“I cannot imagine how this happened,” said Mum. “Sometimes
they use tricks, like putting your head on someone else’s body, but I know what you look like without your clothes on.”

I was embarrassed and ashamed and very worried about what Dad might do or say. But to his credit, he never spoke to me about the incident. Although I hate to think what happened to the photographer.

I wrapped the Cartier watch in its little red box in sheets and sheets of newspaper, so that Mum would think it was an enormous gift. It was almost worth all the problems I’d had on
A Walk with Love and Death
—a moment of great pride for me to be able to buy Mum something she desired.

•  •  •

A few months later I was asked by British
Vogue
to go to Paris to be photographed for the collections by David Bailey. I was flattered, and happily accepted. Upon arriving in Paris, I was surprised to learn that I would have a companion in the pictures, and I practically fell over when I learned that, ironically, it would be Willy Fox. All the next day, we worked for Bailey’s camera, and all day I tried to be cool and keep my distance. That night after shooting, we went to Castel’s, and there, lo and behold, was Arnaud de Rosnay. He and I danced and he said, “Come on, let’s go somewhere!”

I said, “I’m going back to the Crillon. Call me upstairs in half an hour.”

I returned to the hotel with the others, with Willy giving me the full press, determined to take me to his room. I pleaded fatigue and shut my door, and when Arnaud called a few minutes later, I ran downstairs and jumped into his Ferrari. We went to his aunt’s deserted mansion in the Bois de Boulogne and made love on his big wolf coat by candlelight till dawn. By my loose standards at the time, a fine case of revenge.

Arnaud was a sweetheart. A gorgeous athlete, a real old
fashioned French playboy. He married one of James Goldsmith’s beautiful daughters, Isabel, and invented a board game called Petropolis, which was like Monopoly but with gold-dipped oil rigs to replace hotels and houses. He presented one of these games to me, much later, when he came to visit California. He disappeared not long after, in 1984, windsurfing to Taiwan on the China Seas.

•  •  •

I had been studying for A-levels at a crammers, Davies Laing and Dick, when Mum took me to a party at the apartment of Tony Richardson. He was one of the important film directors of the time, making quintessentially new-wave British films like
A Taste of Honey, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Tom Jones,
and
The Charge of the Light Brigade.
He told me that he and his partner Neil Hartley were mounting a stage production of
Hamlet
starring Nicol Williamson, and he suggested that I might like to try out for the role of Ophelia. I subsequently read for Tony but did not get the part. It went to Marianne Faithfull, the girlfriend of Mick Jagger. From the moment I saw her, I found her astonishingly pretty. In the dark overhang of the Roundhouse, where the play was in rehearsal, it felt like the interior of a great ship, and sitting in a halo of light, in a pink angora dress and white tights, she was the baddest angel I’d ever seen. So, as it happened, I didn’t mind at all when I got the chance to understudy her.

Built in 1847 on Chalk Farm Road to the north of Camden Town in North London, the Roundhouse had been conceived as a railway engine shed containing a turntable for the London and Birmingham Railway. It was a circular structure, gloomy and cavernous, that smelled of creosote, with enormous wooden beams. Within a decade, trains had become too
large for the building and the Roundhouse was used for various purposes. In the mid-sixties it had become the scene for love-ins, rock concerts, happenings, and the like. With the addition of a proscenium stage rigged for lighting and the construction of a few dressing rooms, it began its new life as a theater.

Nicol Williamson, a tall, laconic Scottish actor, played the part of Hamlet with a nasal twang and a partial lisp; this was not an affectation but Nicol’s natural speaking voice, and without doubt broke through some conceits as to how the Great Dane should be portrayed. Tony and Nicol rarely seemed to agree, and Tony munched nervously through a succession of green apples throughout the period of rehearsal. Anthony Hopkins was playing King Claudius and Judy Parfitt was Gertrude, and their chemistry was powerful. But after the show was up and running, Nicol would on occasion leave the stage without warning. This was always an interesting moment for the rest of the cast, who, without benefit of a curtain, would trail offstage after him into the wings in mute embarrassment. But Nicol was also an amazing actor and had a very strong presence; he was always entertaining to watch.

One night, the tip flew off his fencing foil in the graveyard scene and out into the audience. Nicol calmly stopped the action and asked if everyone was okay. Then crying, “On with the show!” he fell to the ground as Michael Pennington, playing Laertes, immediately stabbed him. Marianne Faithfull and I were both flirting with Nicol; we spent some time in his dressing room between shows. One evening at dinner after a performance, he introduced me to his friend Ian Holm, an idol of mine since I had seen his ground-breaking performance as Richard III at the National Theatre.

Marianne often would ease into the dressing room so close to
curtain that I was already wearing her costume. I’d whip it off and start to lace her up in it as she’d pin the waist-length blond wig to her hair and then wander onstage in a cloud of Robert Piguet’s Fracas perfume, a heavy distillation of hypnotic tuberose.

•  •  •

One night Mum gave a party for the American artist Kenneth Nolan; he came with the art critic Clement Greenberg and a pretty brunette girlfriend called Stephanie Gordon, in a blue Pucci minidress. The next day, I heard Mum and Gina Medcalf talking about how the guests had been smoking grass. A girl called Jenny Harrington, with red hair and sweet green eyes, came one night. She was only nineteen, closer to my age than Mum’s, and another Sunday she in turn brought two of her friends, a black actor called Stefan Kalifa and his friend Brian Henderson, a handsome young musician from Trinidad. They took Mum and me to a club in Paddington, where there was a reggae group called the Heptones, who sang a song that I loved called “I Need a Fat Girl,” aka “Fatty Fatty.”

I’m in the mood, the mood

I need a fat, fat girl tonight

Soon Mum was seeing more of Brian.

M
um was planning to drive to Venice to see her friend Manina, and while she’d spoken with me about it, she hadn’t told me that she was going with anyone. We hadn’t seen John Julius for some time, and I suspected that she was going with Brian. Allegra was to stay behind with Nurse. The night before she was to leave, she came into my room under the pretext of wanting to borrow one of my weekly women’s magazines.
She sat on my bed. Eventually, she just got around to it and said, “You know, Anjel, we need to talk, because things are changing very fast. You’re becoming a woman, and you’re going to want to see boys and have lovers. We’ve been living in an atmosphere of secrecy lately. I feel it in you, and you feel it in me. But we’re together in the same house, and we’re mother and daughter. It’s difficult, but we’re going to have to incorporate it into our lives, because it’s a factor now. Unless you’re going to go and live somewhere else, which maybe you’d like to consider. This is an issue we’re going to have to face.”

I burst into tears. We sat on the Chinese bedspread, and we hugged and cried. It seemed possible that everything could become honest between us again. For a whole year I had come home from pretending to be at school and she’d be crying in her bed. I had become secretive and devious. Mum was obviously very upset about the failed relationship with John Julius and the wall of silence that had divided us. She stood up and went into her room. And I was flooded with love for her.

The morning after our conversation, I was sitting at the piano downstairs in the living room, tapping the keys, as Mum was preparing to leave. She had asked me for some tapes to take on her trip, and I’d picked out some music for her—Miles Davis, Dylan, the Stones, Vivaldi’s
The Four Seasons.
She seemed in a rush to go, which tipped me off that she would have company. She was wearing makeup and looked very pretty. We hugged and I told her to have a good time. The front door closed behind her and the house was silent. I went to rehearsals at the Roundhouse. A few days later, Nurse said, “I haven’t heard from Madam.” That was strange and it worried us, since Mum used to call every day to ask about Allegra, who was only four at the time.

I had a dream that night that my spine was being pulled out
of me. I heard a voice saying, “Wake up, Anjelica. Wake up.” I opened my eyes. Leslie Waddington was sitting on my bed. I thought,
What the hell is Leslie Waddington doing sitting on my bed?
Then he said, “Your mother’s dead. She was killed in a car crash.” I felt my heart imploding while my mind tried to grasp what he had said.

When I walked downstairs, I saw that the house had changed overnight. I think Allegra was upstairs napping. The unthinkable had happened. Nurse was weeping. I couldn’t bear to look to her or Tony for confirmation. The light had gone out of everything. It was like being in a pile of ashes. Tony and I were silent. What could we say? We didn’t hug or touch.

Leslie said, “We should tell Allegra in Ricki’s room.” So we went upstairs to Mum’s room, and we sat on her bed. I sat on the right, and Tony sat on the left, with Allegra between us and Nurse opposite. Leslie told Allegra that her mummy had gone away and wouldn’t be coming back. Allegra opened her mouth and let out a scream like a banshee. A terrible, sad, high-pitched scream. An awful sound. Like something being torn out of your guts. Then Nurse took her to her room. Later that afternoon, she was reading aloud from her bird book.