A Young Man's Passage (27 page)

We, the paying public, then filed silently out. As we slipped through the side gate I saw him, Britain’s premier psychic, smoking a Benson and Hedges in the kitchen, a healthy bulge in his top pocket, no doubt the £500 he’d conned out of us. It wasn’t until I was back in the car that my indignation surfaced. Why had I gone along with it? Why hadn’t I exposed the con for what it was there and then? How dare he pretend to be Christopher, or anyone else’s dearly departed?

I HAD FELT
the need to close this chapter with a moving epitaph to my dead boyfriend, such as: When I think of Christopher now I feel a warm glow, as if I’m basking in his presence although that is gone forever, on this earth at least. His eyes are alive, hovering in front of me, glorious amber fireworks of adoration, his aura swirls around me like a cashmere wrap fluttering in the breeze of an unknown existence. His mood is always benign, the gentle euphoria of an angel, banishing shadows and illuminating all that is dark and confusing. I know he is always there, I only have to call. It’s just like the movies.

But I think it sounds a bit crass, don’t you? The mourning homosexual secretly loving the tragedy of his bereavement, making sure he has a faraway look in his eyes at all times. His own pose and posture more important to him than any real depth of sorrow in his soul. His relationship with the dead the only one he can keep alive.

The dead don’t snore or leave you for another. Nor do you bump into them unexpectedly when you are out on the town with someone else. In many ways, death is the ideal ending. There is a lot to be said for it.

NINE

‘What’s this? Take it away. It’s enough that I am here.’

MARLENE DIETRICH REFUSING THE BILL IN A RESTAURANT.

THREE LETTERS TO Nick.

5 Albert Street

21 March 1992

Dear Nick,

Ola! I’ve been to Paris, if you please, with Ivan Massow, though there was no hanky panky. Probably because I’ve just enjoyed a brief 10-day affair-ette with a young American called Tommy. He was delightful: very small and Italian-looking, with a body that was no stranger to the gym. He’s gone back to Chicago now, which is probably just as well: a transatlantic lover is the only type I could cope with, I fear, but it was a pleasant distraction.

Meanwhile, I’ve just got a part in a new Carry On film –
Carry On Columbus
, which will be fun I should think.

Probably as a result of pawing young Tommy’s washboard stomach, I’ve joined a gym myself: a swish one, of course, behind Liberty’s, and I have a personal trainer called Dave, a kind of gladiator with a cockney accent. I did my first workout today and couldn’t help but get very camp-faced with all the serious bodybuilders. It annoyed them no end, I could tell, when I cried ‘O-er! Which one’s for my laterals?’ There was much grunting and clanging of weights. Dave was amused, although he does refer to his girlfriend in every other sentence, I suppose in case I try to corner him in the sauna. Physical exertion is the only thing that gets me going and lifts the gloom of bereavement. It started with the Y-Plan video, then Jane Fonda and now the gym. Who knows where it will end?

Love Julian x

Pinewood

6 May 1992

Well hello,

Here I be trussed up in doublet and cod piece (chips are off) in dressing room 82 of F Block. Over on stage E a life-size reconstruction of the Santa Maria awaits me. Maureen Lipman is currently carrying on there, along with Richard Wilson (with whom I share a cabin . . . ), Jim Dale, Alexei Sayle and Jack Douglas.

It’s a laugh being here. Pinewood is a bit run down and disused now, but it still has a whiff of former glories – ghosts of Messrs Hawtry and Williams follow you through the ornamental gardens.

A minibus full of minor celebrities collects me at 6.20 a.m. and by 7 I’m in the make-up chair, tended to by Sara (‘a collection of miniature Toby Jugs can look very attractive’). There’s much sitting around, of course. I simply have to create mischief to pass the time. Now I’m known as ‘the grass’ – not for any drug-related incidents but because Sara Crowe (famous for the Philadelphia cheese adverts and for upstaging Joan Collins as Sybil in
Private Lives
) puts additional blusher on in the privacy of her dressing room after she’s been to make-up, and I told on her. She also had two glasses of wine in the canteen the other lunchtime and I told again. It’s all lots of fun unless you get trapped in a corner with Jim Dale who likes (nay, insists) on telling you about his Broadway triumphs. He’s more fun if you get him onto Kenneth Williams anecdotes, but that’s not always an easy transition to make.

I also flirt with the extras; poor souls sat around on bales of hay for three days, waiting to be called. Two lovely Greek brothers and a muscle man/boy from Madame Jojo’s.

I find it very all-consuming. There’s no life outside of filming. I just go home to sleep and on a good day, water my patio, which is ablaze with geraniums.

I play Diego, the prison governor, an ‘amiable, vague, somewhat camp character’ as the script puts it. Michelle Pfeiffer wasn’t round so they gave the part to me. The dialogue is as you’d imagine. After water is discovered in my cabin I rush up to the bosun and say: ‘’Ere, I’ve just had a leak in the hold!’

Bosun: ‘Well, next time do it over the side.’

After three takes my mind begins to wander and I say, ‘’Ere, I’ve just had a leak over the side.’ Fortunately our director, Gerald Thomas, saw the funny side. He’s very gentlemanly and smartly turned out at all times. On bank holiday Monday he wore casuals, though.

‘I’m afraid I can’t work with corduroy,’ I sniffed, indicating his perfectly pressed beige trousers. He obligingly moved out of my eyeline.

So between
Carry on Columbus
and the patio, that’s my life until we finish on 29 May.

My mother, if you please, said she was going to enter some playwriting competition about homelessness for the
Independent
. Or rather she said she’d tell me her idea and I could write it. I think not. They’re in Majorca at the moment with Grandma, Auntie Tess and Uncle Ken. They’re all getting older now. Uncle Ken’s just had new teeth fitted. They’d worn away on one side where he’d stuck his pipe for the last 70 years.

To finish here’s a good story from Sara Crowe. One day while rehearsing for
Private Lives
she wore a big diamante brooch. Joan Collins enters and says: ‘Darling, what a gorgeous brooch! On anyone else it would look expensive.’

That’s showbiz. Lots of love,

Julian x

5 Albert Street

22 June 1992

Well hello,

Sorry there were no more missives from Pinewood. I think it was the day after writing to you that I slipped on a cable and fractured a bone in my foot. I had an attractive limp until a week ago, to say nothing of the constant pain. Still I got a basket of fruit out of Gerald Thomas (not a claim many could make) and they got Peter Gordino to double (feet only) my flamenco dance. It’s all over now and quite a blur it all seems.

All in all the five weeks were a hoot. Sara Crowe dated, fell in love with and then announced she was going to marry Jim Dale’s unsavoury son Toby. Everyone smiled politely when the announcement was made. (Toby being 26, fairly witless, grubby, Jack-the-lad sort.) I said to my make-up artist, while the pretence of ‘how lovely’ was still being maintained, ‘I’m just wondering if he’s good enough for her,’ in the manner of a powdered aunt at the hairdresser’s. ‘I’m glad you said that,’ whispered Miss Monzani through gritted teeth as she reshaped my eyebrow. So within minutes we’d spread the word that really we weren’t delighted at all. In fact, we rather hoped poor Sara would come to her senses. ‘She’s on the rebound,’ I said. ‘So is he,’ said Miss Monzani knowingly. But we must wait and see.

Anecdotal highlights were Bernard Cribbins telling us how he got stung on the bum while ‘going at it’ with his wife on the sand dunes in Cornwall. Bernard’s obsession with shooting, fishing, trapping and pest control can probably explain his strange Womble phase.

I’ve just re-read
Mapp and Lucia
, hence the E.F. Benson-ish tone. In fact, I read it by the swimming pool in Mykonos. Had two hilarious weeks, with Patricia McGowan (1st week), then Ian Shaw (middle) and Philip (last week). Highlights from Patricia were her eccentric Scottish phrases, thus ‘Have you got a hangover?’ became ‘Have you got a dangly donger?’ Ian Shaw was good fun. Found a piano bar in town and he nightly took the place by storm. (Sometimes he sang, too.) Then Philip arrived and it all got very camp. We rather forgot ourselves in the Santa Marina swimming pool, when Philip was teaching me the crawl. (A stroke I’ve never mastered.) The hushed and snooty atmosphere among well-to-do Americans and Germans was rudely shattered when Philip, at the triumphant moment when I achieved the crawl for the first time, shouted, ‘That’s it, girl, you’ve got it!’ We also did lots of Palare: ‘Vada the lallies on the omi-polone at the bar.’

Mykonos is, of course, the gay capital of Europe, so what the provinces are like I can’t imagine. It’s a surprisingly tacky collection of gay bars full of international hairdressers. We met some funny Americans. ‘Hi, my name’s Harry, I’m a singer-songwriter from California and I’m also a good fuck.’ Or, ‘I’m here for a life-changing experience.’

Romantic highlights were a Frenchman called Marcel and a boy whose name I can’t remember who came from somewhere like Egypt but who definitely wasn’t English or American.