Leith, William (26 page)

`What?'

`If you want me to show you the law, where it's printed, then I'll go and get it right now.' She had raised her voice. She shouted, 'Winston! Come in here!'

A tall black man walked over to the table. The woman said to me, 'Now, do you want me to ask Winston to go and get the legal documents?'

`No.'

I said, 'Look, why don't I just pay for the drinks?'

The woman put the bill in front of me. She said, 'This is your bill.E 30 each for drinks. � 60 for the champagne. A �50 hostess fee. And �75 for the show.'

We didn't have the money. We had to get the money from cash machines in the street, escorted through the streets by Winston, one at a time, while the other waited in the basement. Later, we sat on chairs in a small, bright room, and a tattooed woman with very pale skin took her clothes off and bent over in front of us, showing us her bottom, and afterwards, we walked out into the rain and ...

The coke, I can tell, is wearing off. Somebody once gave me

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a good description of this moment; it's as if you're enjoying yourself, surrounded by lovely scenery, and then somebody comes along and takes the scenery away, wheels it off, leaving you sitting in a horrible studio, looking at the dirty brickwork, the exposed pipes.

When you snort coke, you become the perfect consumer. Having more makes you want more; wanting more makes you want more. As a product, coke never works, because consuming it feels like an index of loss. As a product, coke works brilliantly, because consuming it feels like an index of loss. As you continue to snort, the coke you've had becomes your enemy, reminding you that the coke that's to come will never be enough.

And later, we're all at somebody's house, at some kind of impromptu party or gathering, a whole lot of stray people drinking and listening to music and rolling joints and snorting lines of coke from CD cases, there's a big pile of CDs stacked up by a radiator, and everybody is talking at once, telling each other bitter little stories about living in the city about how they were nearly knocked down by cars, and pushed and shoved aside on public transport, and cursed by people who thought they had the wrong tickets, which maybe they did, but see, it wasn't their fault, and they tell stories about waiters who brought them the wrong food, and waiters who brought them what they ordered, but it was disgusting, really horrible, what a rip-off.

`I wish I was in Spain right now.'

`I wish I was in France.'

`What about a beach? A deserted beach, somewhere in the South Pacific? With, like, those birds, what are they called? And you can see the fish jumping in the sea.'

I'm drinking a lot, drinking to cushion my fall. I make a calculation; if I eke out my drugs slowly, I might not feel too bad, might not crash. This is what always happens, a fact that my inner spin doctor had soft-pedalled. In the kitchen I find some kind of milky liqueur, which would make me sick, and a bottle of whisky half-hidden behind a food blender, and I pour myself a big slug of the whisky into an inappropriate glass, a glass decorated with some kind of soft drink motif that reminds me of childhood, and I try to drink most of the whisky where nobody can see me, and, moving through the noisy room, I am the recipient of a familiar feeling, that there's nothing here for me, that I will get nothing more from the evening, that everything from now on will be damage control, and it occurs to me that I am alone here, as lonely as a Stone Age man, walking naked and hungry through the savanna with a sharpened stick.

I drink more and talk more about missed connections, people who look funny and just don't get it, people who are fat and eat too much, people who have serious drink and drug problems, or can't stop looking at porn on the internet, women who wear clothes too revealing for their overweight figures, celebrities who are putting weight on, celebrities who look suspiciously thin. Jennifer Aniston, we say, slimmed down and maintains a steady weight. Cameron Diaz can eat what she likes. Sophie Dahl is dropping, dropping. What's the matter with her? Jennifer Lopez employs a 'food cop' to check her hotel room for possible trigger-foods, which he removes before Lopez enters the room. Have you seen Kirstie Alley recently? Robbie Williams? Robbie Coltrane?

When I've Lost the Weight

Robbie Coltrane. When I interviewed Coltrane, I was slim, and he told me he'd recently lost 56 lbs; he'd got his weight down to around 275 or 280. It was 1993, and he was still hugely fat, I couldn't tell he'd lost weight, and he said he wanted to lose more, he wanted to lose enough to start taking exercise again. As we sat and talked, I began to realize that there was something about this man that frightened me, although, at the time, I wasn't sure what it was.

The interview had not started well. Coltrane, who was promoting a series called Coltrane in a Cadillac, a show about driving across America, was being lionized like never before. We watched two episodes of the show, which was quite funny but not very. At one point, Coltrane, driving through a desert, put on a funny voice and said, 'Whilst it might be some people's idea of ideal television to watch the, rather enormous Mr Coltrane driving an old banger across the salt flats, I found myself getting up to make a cup of tea after only ten minutes.' Dear me, I thought. I sensed that part of him, out there in the middle of nowhere driving his 300-lb bulk around in a 1951 Cadillac, thought that this view, however ironic, might be too close to the truth for comfort.

Coltrane presided over a press conference. When it was time for me to talk to him, I overheard him say to his Publicist, 'Well, that wasn't too bad. Nothing about the weight or the baby.' (He had recently become a father.)

We sat down. I said, 'Two things first of all, Robbie the weight, and the baby.'

He looked at me filthily. 'Ha ha.'

I asked him to tell me about his early life. When had he first wanted to be a performer?

`Oh, come on,' he said. 'That's all documented. That's all old stuff. Early seventies, I suppose. Mid-seventies, I suppose. Come on, this is old stuff. No, that's been in so many interviews. I did all that stuff about ten years ago.'

He sat there, with his vast belly, his strangely perched head, his suit that fitted him like a burst condom, strange leopardette brothel-creepers on his feet. Fat-guy shoes.

`Well, I mean, there's no point in going over old ground,' he said. 'People get sick of all that early origins stuff. I certainly do.'

`But, say, your schooldays? Can't you .

`Not really. It's all been done to death really.'

I asked him about his shoes. Was he wearing them because of the series, because they were fifties shoes?

`You cheeky bugger.'

`Well . . .'

`No,' he said. 'This is how I dress normally.' Then he looked at me and said, 'Well, I wouldn't walk around looking like a fucking student at your age. Cheeky bugger! I wouldn't! Who wants to be thought of as a student? God!'

I was wearing a denim jacket, jeans, trainers, a T-shirt, an outfit I would not have considered if I was as fat as Coltrane. We sat there, looking at each other. He was losing weight. I was gaining. Soon, I would step into a nightmare of bingeing which would last almost a decade.

Why did Coltrane get so fat? He once said that, for several years in the 1980s this is the era that his friends and colleagues referred to, gingerly, as 'the hell-raising years'

he put on 14 lbs a year. Another thing why did such a talented actor do so much work? He was doing everything

terrible movies, stage plays, ads, comedy. He once said, `Brando always said that no moment in front of the lens is wasted and that's absolutely true.'

Iid, 'What made you do the Cadillac series?' sa

`Driving across America it was just something I always wanted to do. I don't know why. It would have been easier and quicker without a film crew, obviously. But it occurred to me, I didn't really have the time to do it, and I wouldn't have done it on my own because of my commitments with work. I thought it would be a good idea to combine the two.'

`But why couldn't you have just had a holiday?'

Coltrane said, 'Because it would mean missing work.'

`Do you feel that you always have to keep on the move? That you always have to be working?'

`Yeah, you do. You have to keep on doing things that interest you, really. And excite you. And bring out the best in you.'

He lit up a cigarette. He told me he was on a strict diet, that he was going to quit smoking soon.

`I've lost 56 lbs,' he said.

`56 lbs? How?

`Just by being on a horrendous diet. I don't eat any fat, don't eat any bread. I just eat the occasional baked potato. I do it all through Nutri-System. You pay the money, they give You the grub. And they say: if you eat no more than this, you Will lose 7 lbs a week. They send you the food; it's like aircraft food, or those Marks & Spencer meals you get, in the wee trays.'

`What about exercise?'

`I'm still too overweight to do any serious exercise without damaging my heart. Once I've lost another 40 lbs I'll go back and do some boxing training.'

Coltrane had boxed at prep school in Scotland, just as he boxed a little at 18. But in his early teens, at his public school, Glenalmond, he was chubby, and unsporting. This is when, some of his schoolfriends told me, he became interested in being funny. When I asked him if he'd liked Glenalmond, he said, without hesitation, 'No! I hated it!'

`He was the classic chubby young boy,' one of his schoolfriends told me. 'He was the fat boy who started telling jokes to protect himself.'

After Glenalmond, he went to art school. And so began the unhealthy years, the years of eating and drinking and drugs, the years, as Coltrane himself put it, of 'getting pissed and feeling people's arses'.

`I wanted to be Rembrandt and I wanted to be Brando,' he told me. 'Neither has happened, so there you go.'

He put on 14 lbs a year. Why? Coltrane's friend John Sessions once said, 'Robbie has a strong self-destruct streak ... a deep, driving melancholy.'

I asked Sessions about this. 'I don't think he liked himself very much. That made him do it. He reconciled himself to the fact that he was going to get bigger and bigger and d
ie.
There was something in there.'

Sessions also said, 'I think he believed that, somehow, it was part and parcel of what sold him.'

Coltrane lit another cigarette. I sat there, watching him, deeply uneasy, although at the time I wasn't sure why.

,If you smoke,' he told me, sucking the smoke in with malicious enthusiasm, 'You're doing yourself no good. But I will give up. I'll give up when I've lost the weight.'

Collapse

And I drink more whisky, and I find a bottle of vodka and drink some of that, I'm guzzling now, preparing a cushion for myself for when the drugs wear off. I'm flagging. I snort a line and I smoke a joint, the combined effect of which gives me a minor, barely perceptible rush, and I'm beginning to panic a little. The drink is running out. The drugs are running out. The party is beginning to break up. People are still here, people are talking to me, but I'm not listening.

I'm upstairs, in a bedroom, on my own, snorting the last of my drugs, preparing for one last assault, and now I know, of course, what it was that frightened me about Coltrane. He looked out of control. He looked like he couldn't help himself.

He didn't lose the weight, of course.

Why? Because dieting was not the answer.

I snort the drugs and scrunch up the little square wrapper and put it in my pocket, one melancholy moment in a series of melancholy moments, the whole experience a Groundhog day of wrong turns, and I take a last swig of vodka, and I remember the milky liqueur, which might and might not make me sick, and the thought of the liqueur, combined with

the muted kick of the drugs, lifts my spirits, or l possibly

decelerates their fall, and I sit on the edge of a strange

bed, not quite numb any more, bad feelings and emotions beginning to break through, and I consider the condition of being out of control.

I've always had a morbid fascination with fat guys who lose control; I am drawn to them and disgusted by them in equal measure. Fatty Arbuckle, who hated himself, who pounded his liver with booze, who felt desperately unattractive, who tried to make people laugh, who wanted to be the centre of attention all the time. John Belushi, who more or less invented the gross-out movie with his Bluto character in Animal House, who could not stop drinking and taking cocaine, and who once said, 'I give so much pleasure to so many people. Why can I not get some pleasure for myself?'

Belushi and Arbuckle and Coltrane are similar cases; they were all driven by the need to work all the time, the need to entertain, and a desperate hunger for booze and food. This type of person does not want to sit still. Michael O'Donoghue, a writer who worked with Belushi, said, of his insatiable hunger, 'He wants to grab the world and snort it.'

Walking carefully down the stairs, I'm thinking about John Belushi, who would snort coke and drink alcohol for days on end, getting more and more terrified and paranoid. I'm thinking that, if I drink any more, I'll make myself ill; I'm also thinking, with a boozer's illogic, that, if I drink some more, my hangover will be less bad, because I will sleep better.

I remember talking to Michael VerMeulen about John Belushi. This was around the time I interviewed Coltrane. I was slim. Michael, by now editor of British GQ, was putting weight on. His appetites, for food, booze, and drugs, weregetting out of control. Neither of us had yet written the article about fat guys; it was something both of us were planning, and also avoiding. I would get fat. He would get fatter. The process was already underway. It scared the hell out of both of us.

Michael said, 'This is This is where he died.'

We were in the Chateau Marmont hotel in Hollywood, the hotel where Belushi had died after taking a lot of cocaine and drinking a lot of alcohol. 'I just asked for the Belushi room,' said Michael. (Actually, we were not in the room where Belushi died, but another room room 69 where he'd stayed; the receptionist had applied a little artistic license.)