Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (81 page)

Papers full of horrific details of the ferry that capsized outside Zeebrugge, ‘Herald of Free Enterprise’. It sounds much more like the victim of free enterprise. All sorts of safety corners cut in order to be ‘competitive’.

It looks very much as if the ‘suspension’ of filming is going into a second week. LWT and the unions are locked in their own internal struggle, which involves issues far greater than just this programme. Meanwhile, in order to have some alternative to this stasis, Mitchell is beavering away to try and set up some independent deal. Decision will have to be taken by the end of this week.

So begins my second week in limbo. Like a soldier who has seen action briefly, been superficially wounded and then unexpectedly withdrawn from the lines, I don’t quite fit in anywhere. What makes it worse is that I spend much of the time, on the phone, having to explain to people why I’m not away at war, after I’d kissed them all goodbye.

Angela comes by for tea and to collect the two tickets for
King Lear
that I had thought I should never be able to use, but now of course could. She seems much more confident and in control of things. Did we over-react that first week she was here?

Anne has been talking to Colgan; a re-start date of March 30th is mentioned. Quick calculation suggests this is impossible, as it would not free me until the end of the first week in July, a week before
Wanda
and no time for rehearsal.

Terry J arrives. He is not happy with lack of progress on ‘
Erik
’. Eleven Hollywood studios have passed. Orion are the only hope and they want young American stars in it. TJ wants more ingenuity from John G and Prominent Features in suggesting alternatives. So he is in a sort of limbo himself.

Susan Hoyle rings to report on yesterday’s [T2000] board meeting. The idea of elevating me to a presidential position has been well received, and so long as I can stay on as Chairman to the end of this year, will be implemented. Relief.

In the afternoon Colgan rings and spins me a wonderful Irish yarn about the ‘Troubles’ reserve package, involving clandestine support from London Weekend management, who have already gone to the lengths of ‘smuggling’ scenery out of the building at 4 a.m. to get it out of the union’s hands. The union has threatened to burn any sets already made if it goes ahead without them.

The cancellation cost to LWT will be £1.16 million, but they can get some of that back if the new ‘Troubles’ production can use sets, costumes, drawings, etc, already acquired. Equity is being completely co-operative, a designer from
Out of Africa
will come in to help – even Hugh Leonard, who wrote a screenplay for ‘Troubles’ which wasn’t used, has sent them a good luck telegram.

Colgan slips into romanticism … ‘They all want to see this little Irish company taking on the big boys … and showing they can win.’

I promise to find out the exact end dates from
Wanda
to see what my availability in the autumn might be. JC’s approach to the
Wanda
film is the exact opposite to ‘Troubles’ – careful, considered, full of dates and detail supplied almost a year in advance.

So I shuttle between the hysteria of ‘Troubles’ and the icy calm of
Wanda
. The best I [can] do is to offer myself to ‘Troubles’ immediately after
Wanda
and right up to my pre-production period on
American Friends
. This gives him October to February. Not the best filming dates.

As I explain all this I feel I am talking myself out of the Major, probably permanently.

The phone is ringing as I get back – it’s Michael Colgan. He puts the problem to me quite starkly – either they go in late March and re-cast, or they postpone until the autumn and hope to keep me. Could I meet them to discuss this second alternative? Fix a meeting at the Python office (before we meet, Colgan asks me not to reveal to anyone, even Charles, that the bulk of the ‘rescue’ money is coming from LWT).

The meeting hovers between dream and reality. They seem very anxious to do all they can to accommodate me, but the
Wanda
schedule spreads itself, languorously, over the summer, and Anne thinks that my
contract will demand an extra two weeks on top of the ten I’m already booked for.

They will investigate the feasibility of postponement until the autumn, I will do my best to reduce the
Wanda
‘insurance weeks’ in September.

Home, feeling much better about things. A real chance of saving my part. Touched also by their loyalty to me.

My Major’s moustache is five weeks and two days old. Helen said I ought to shave it off, but somehow I still pathetically hold out hope. Shaving it off severs my last, fragile hold on the character of Brendan Archer!

Nancy [Lewis] calls, at eight o’clock, thinking she’ll get me before I start on the last day of my third week of filming. I have to pour out the story all over again. (The
London Daily News
seems to have been the only paper to run the story, with three reports, each progressively more accurate.)

Nancy has a five-week film part with Bill Cosby, in San Francisco from April 13th, for me. Just to complicate matters.

Night’s sleep broken by awareness of Helen’s early departure. She’s gone by a quarter to eight, off to Saas Fee.

A fine, dry, sunny day. Shopping, and at one o’clock over to Islington to have a drink with Ken [Cranham] and Fiona [Victory]. Airy first and second floor of a handsome, though externally grubby, villa in Thornhill Road. Well-polished bare boards, big hand-made carpets, a chunky, rough-hewn table which probably cost an earth or two. Ken, hair all swept back, has aged interestingly. Curious mixture of naughty boy and careworn middle-aged man. Both flash across his features in seconds.

We walk down past well-kept, gentrified town houses, which remind me of what Gospel Oak might have been but for the comprehensive redevelopment plan. Thornhill Road, Islington, is the sort of place where people who devise comprehensive redevelopment plans live.

To a pub called the Albion. Ken is a great teller of theatrical tales – he really has acted with almost anybody. Tells a touching story of playing Beckett with Max Wall. Wall, very tired before they went on, rested his head on Ken’s shoulders in the wings, Ken gently massaged his co-star’s
temples. Max after a while perked up enough to say gloomily … ‘That’s the trouble with this business, you’re only as good as your last performance.’ Then, just as the lights came up and they made their entrance … ‘Like marriage, really.’

Fiona laughs at my thought that filming in Ireland would be less complicated than dealing with LWT unions and their persistent demands … ‘You don’t know Ireland,’ she chuckles.

After breakfast William and Rachel express interest in a trip out. Rachel has become interested in the Great Fire, so I suggest we go to where the fire began and look for Fish Street and Pudding Lane and Farina’s the baker where it actually started.

The City is now littered with awful, unimaginative, dispiriting modern buildings. The complete boringness of the tallest of them – the NatWest Tower – seems to have set the tone. And the site of the Royal Bakers where the fire began has suffered particularly ignominiously, with a long, low, concrete façade (for Lloyds Bank), which makes a Second World War bunker look sensitive.

Rachel takes some photos. At least the Monument can’t be redeveloped for offices. There is a solid wedge of traffic through the heart of the City and across London Bridge. Into the middle of it all comes a stream of beautifully-kept Morris Minors with anxious owners consulting bits of paper. A vintage rally gone hopelessly wrong.

The script of the Bill Cosby film arrives; read it in the cab on the way to a
Wanda
get-together at the Meridiana Restaurant.

At least with Python we had an eccentric, understated surrealism which kept things fresh and unpredictable; here the sledge-hammer of zaniness has been wielded mercilessly. It’s cruel, corny, clumsy stuff, and I feel that I’m not yet ready to do
any
thing for money – even be Bill Cosby’s butler, with some good lines.

At the Meridiana are gathered Charlie Crichton, Roger Murray Leach [the art director], Greg Dark, Jonathan Benson, Sophie [Clarke-Jervoise, John’s assistant], Steve and JC. A pleasant group, and I begin to feel very warm towards this film, which up till now I’ve rather underestimated.
The bungling incompetence of ‘Troubles’ has increased my admiration for
Wanda
’s single-minded efficiency. JC makes much of the relaxed, wonderful, easy time we’re going to have.

Anne has spoken to Michael Colgan and all seems set for an October 5th start on the new, improved ‘Troubles’. Only myself and Ian Richardson know this, according to Anne. Until I hear more I can’t quite be sure, but it’s the best possible solution.

I have been invited to an Author of the Year reception by Hatchards. The reception is on the top floor of New Zealand House, from which there is a fantastic panorama of London.

I see Roald Dahl across the room with Jane Asher and Gerald Scarfe and realise that I’m too shy to barge in there. I still have the mentality of an outsider looking in. I don’t share their lifestyle, I don’t easily have their apparent cool poise and urbanity – well, not in these circles. They circulate because they know people will want to speak to them.

Anyway, Bob Geldof brings me out of my shell, hailing me warmly. He’s just come from doing a commercial for shaving which he’s rather pleased with. I hint at disapproval and he snaps at the bait. ‘My morality is absolutely clear. I just want to make lots and lots of money’ – classic Cleesian position.

A morning of desk-clearing is eclipsed by trouble at ‘Troubles’. Anne rings with report of negotiations. The money being offered for the new ‘Troubles’ is not much more than the old. She spent three hours with Colgan even to get this far. Colgan wants me to sign a letter today committing myself to the part in October, for 16 weeks and almost all in Ireland. As he has not yet got Charles’s signature, this seems like putting the cart before the horse, but when Colgan calls a few minutes later I agree to his request for a meeting and hie myself to the neutral Mountbatten Hotel.

Ferociously strong gusts of late-March wind strike from time to time,
reminding us comfortable city-dwellers how fragile a place we live in. For a moment a whole street goes out of control. People, caught unawares, stagger at the force of it, lose their belongings. People help others retrieve their hats, wild newspaper spreads spiral high over buildings to dive-bomb the innocent in neighbouring streets.

At the Mountbatten all is calm. They even serve herbal tea … orange flavour. Colgan is a teetotaller, which he says is almost unacceptable in Ireland. The only way he can not drink and maintain a shred of respect is to say he’s on the wagon. That at least conjures up feats of heroic consumption at some time in the past.

The gist of our hour-long armchair discussion is that there is money available to re-mount the film. ‘Don’t ask me who it is … I can’t tell anybody. I haven’t
even
told my wife.’ (Helen, when I tell her this afterwards, is the first to mention the IRA.) The money needs written commitments – signatures. Evidently he is asking for mine and Ian Richardson’s. These will satisfy them.

But what of Charles – who seems to be the artistic driving force? Colgan, who is a humane, tolerant and sensitive man, looks pained as he describes Charles’s reaction to the autumn re-start. Evidently Charles felt that this was a chance for a whole ‘new’ look at the way they might do it. This could involve a different sort of location, and he is very keen to get Peter O’Toole as Edward. Colgan is an admirer of O’Toole, but says he is impossible to tie down and will be a destabilising factor. Colgan, in short, has run out of patience with Charles and wants a deal to be struck which would then be presented to Charles. October 5th or not at all.

I am most concerned not to stitch up the one person who involved me in the project, nor am I willing to sign my autumn and winter away to another director.

Gallop on with ‘No, 27’ [as the play about property developers had become]. The flow seems so easy that I worry it will all be junk when I put it together, but it’s a wonderful feeling, wanting to write.

With Helen to the ‘Gala Preview’ of
Personal Services
. A red carpet has been laid across the pavement in Jermyn Street, but the only illustrious names I see are Jones, Leland and Gilliam. Then Cynthia is amongst us and we are all roped in for a photo. Cynthia sparkles, figuratively and literally, in a tight-fitting diamante sort of number. ‘One, two, three se
… x!’ she choruses for the cameras. There’s a big, red lipstick mark on her left cheek.

Afterwards to a ‘reception’. Wine is free, but Helen has to pay £2.00 for a non-alcoholic drink. I meet Bert Kwouk, so I feel I achieve something.

My invitation to attend a special preview of LWT’s
Scoop
arrives in the post. In the form of a mock telegram, it talks of ‘delightful LWT onlaying drinks’. It just stirs in my mind a now-receding, but still potent resentment of the company, none of whose representatives have given me one word of solace, or explanation, let alone apology, since cancelling ‘Troubles’ five weeks ago.

Work through the afternoon, trying hard to keep to one side the desperate cries from various charities that have come in today’s post. People
are
starving in Mozambique, young children
do
have cystic fibrosis, AIDS
is
dreadful, and all these causes lie balefully staring out at me from my letter tray. Cover them up with a request to write an introduction to another railway book!