Semi-Detached (39 page)

A
decade and a half before, a clutch of directors had left Oxbridge and persuaded
the world that it owed them a job. Some of them seemed to have had theatres
built for them by northern boroughs. But they had no intention of giving up ten
years later. But I wrote. I worked my way through the entire list of theatres
in the
The Theatre Yearbook.
I got shown around the premises at the
National by the staff director and I was invited for an interview by Michael
Bogdanov. I wore a suit. That could have been avoided. But I came from an
elitist university background. That couldn’t.

While I
waited to see Bogdanov at some little theatre in Leicester, I went to visit the
big theatre in Leicester. Two friends with whom I had appeared in revues,
Geoffrey McGivern and Crispin Thomas, had joined the real world a year before
and were ‘getting their Equity cards’ by appearing in play-as—cast parts. I
sat in the corner watching them put on their make-up, feeling as useless as any
interloper in a dressing room does, especially before a show, but feeling
particularly useless in this real world of theatre too. Was this what I wanted?
Did I share any of their excitement? Where was the intellectual stimulation in
being a bit—part actor?

Mr
Bogdanov had no jobs and certainly no job for me. He told me he had a policy of
interviewing everybody who wrote. I crumpled and went back to London. (Perhaps
I should have persevered. About a year later he hired Mel Smith as an assistant
director at the Young Vic.)

Immediately
after finishing at Cambridge I was still much too busy to look down. There was
a hiccup for the exams, and technically I left, but some employment came in the
form of the Cambridge Gilbert and Sullivan Society It was considered an honour
to be asked and probably one to be resisted, but they had money to pay for a
director and, thanks to my father’s early selections from Chew and Osborne, I
could sing whole verses of ‘Take a Pair of Sparkling Eyes’ and quite a bit of ‘Tit
Willow’ from
The Mikado,
the operetta already chosen by the committee. I
got the general idea anyway: lots of enthusiasm, plenty of lusty singing. They
were sort of pantomimes, weren’t they? It wasn’t a job, but it was a
postponement.

We were
a little restricted by the fact that the production was to take place in the
open air. The Minack Theatre had been cut out of a natural amphitheatre in a
granite cliff and has, as a permanent backdrop, the boiling Atlantic Ocean.
Depressions marched in regular succession through the summer to break on the Cornish
coast. The audience were prepared for this. They simply clambered into their
oilies. The technicians were prepared for it. They wrapped their electrical
equipment in plastic bags. I am not sure that my production was prepared for
it. I had planned that the granite surroundings would be transformed- into
Ko-Ko’s garden, with the addition of dainty strings of Japanese lanterns to
light up and enchant us as night fell towards the end of the first act.

I stood
up in the church hall at rehearsals and made my usual rabble-rousing speech,
outlining my general plan of attack. With a week in hand to get them up and
trotting around, I was rather taken aback by their unwillingness to jump to it.
Matters came to a head when we rehearsed Ko-Ko’s first entrance.

‘Now,’
I said expansively, ‘Jeremy, come on from stage left and the chorus will part
hurriedly, with little steps please … is that OK, Jeremy?’

Jeremy
muttered. The chorus twittered. We tried it. But Jeremy didn’t appear.

‘Jeremy?’

Jeremy
appeared. He stalked to the centre of the church hall, and I could see that he
was exercised. ‘You don’t seem to understand,’ he said. ‘I have to come in from
the centre of the stage.’

‘What
do you mean you have to come in?’

‘That
is where Ko-Ko comes in from!’

I
looked blankly at my script. There were no instructions of any kind. ‘In what?’

‘In the
D’Oyly Carte production!’ the entire chorus thundered as one.

I
stared blankly back.

‘You’re
leaving out all the fan business!’ a member of the chorus wailed. Then they all
started shouting at me. This was not the same as the production which each of
them had seen at least a hundred times and memorized in every particular
detail.

I
restored order and approached Jeremy gingerly Luckily I had my own snicker-snee
to disable them. Jeremy, chorus, my friends …’ I boomed. ‘I would love to do
an authentic D’Oyly Carte production, really, but I think we have to be aware
that the Minack does impose restrictions on us. The only way that Ko-Ko could
make his entrance from the back of the stage were if he were to arrive by boat,
scale a hundred-foot cliff and surmount a ten-foot concrete wall. There
is
only
a fucking side entrance!’

I think
that did it. From that little crack in the fabric I managed to effect a
demolition of the Gilbert and Sullivan Society’s preconceptions and ended up
with something that was, I fear, more
₄
2nd Street
than
Titipu. I was perfectly happy to interpose business of our own. I seem to
remember that Ko-Ko made one entrance carrying a large wet fish in a chamber
pot.

On the
opening night, my
Mikado
was carried on stage in a magnificent lacquered
palanquin across a sweet little Japanese bridge. He was accompanied by
beautifully costumed aides. It was supposed to be a willow-pattern plate come
to life. Alas, a howling gale, accompanied by a sea mist, had blown up during
the first half. The Minack never became a Japanese garden. It reverted to being
the blasted heath it always had been.

It was
a beautiful summer. I was going to Edinburgh to redirect the Footlights, but it
would have seemed apposite to get into at least some sort of minor panic. I had
no money. My prospects were virtually non-existent. A quick look at my friends
who had left the year before could not have been encouraging. A few were
working as actors. Douglas Adams was holed up with John Lloyd, who was now
going out with my sister and living in a flat in north London. He had been
taken up by Graham Chapman as an ‘assistant’, but nobody seemed to have an
occupation you could easily describe as a job.

So I
had time on my hands. I embarked upon a rabid affair with the leading singer in
The Mikado.
We
used to meet up in London, get over-excited during
lunch and jump into a taxi to Putney when her rower boyfriend was away
sculling.

One
afternoon I arranged to meet my diva in a little room above Maison Bertaux at
the bottom of Greek Street, for a cake. I wouldn’t recommend taking your
mistress for tea in a small room with only one exit if you only know the place
because you’ve been introduced to it by your regular girlfriend. It is quite
possible that your regular girlfriend’s father will have introduced her to it.
It’s very possible your regular girlfriend’s father will be sitting taking tea
there. You can brazen it out, but he’s likely to be a canny man of experience.

He
never said anything at the time, but a year later, when it all went rather
messy, he told Charlotte that he had sensed something was wrong because I went
to such great lengths to introduce my companion and actually remembered her
name.

I might
have been expected to start taking some responsibility Apart from anything
else I needed to earn some money.

18. A Short Visit to the Real World

In 1975, at the end of a
summer directing the Footlights and Gilbert and Sullivan and sailing my father’s
boat, and with no immediate prospects of employment, I stood waiting for a man
whose brow had been furrowed, whose fleshy and unshaven jaw was set with
Desperate Dan determination and who was thinking, ‘This is fucking mad.’

The man
sitting next to him was thinking. ‘But fuck it! It sort of makes sense.’

Both of
these men had had the well-greased probity of ex-police officers, because they
were ex-police officers. They still wore their coats, despite clearly having
been in the room for some hours. There was a tray of coffee and some half-eaten
food in front of them. They hadn’t asked me to sit down.

‘Would
you be able to start tomorrow?’

‘Yes.’

As job
interviews go, it was short. I signed nothing. They told me to get to a room in
the Hilton by eight the following morning. The man sighed, and I left the
room.

When I
arrived the next morning, the corridor I had been sent to was empty except for
a squat-looking figure sitting up the other end in front of double doors. He
seemed to be distorting the normal perspective, like the illustration under a
greaseproof sheet in my mother’s big blue cut-paper edition of
Grimm’s Fairy
Tales
— the dog with eyes like saucers. As I tentatively approached, I
thought the corridor had shrunk to accommodate him.

His
massive frame was encased in a navy blazer. He wore tight, light—grey slacks.
His hair was greased back in a flamboyant pompadour. He was perched on a small
upright chair, hunched slightly forward, as if about to launch himself up the
corridor and devour me.

‘Yes?’

‘Oh, I’ve
come from West Security.’

He
paused. ‘Are you doing this shift?’

‘Yes.’

A look
of pain crossed his face. He snorted derisively There was another chair on the
other side of the doorway ‘I’m Big Mike. That’s your chair.’ I sat. He turned
away and continued staring up the corridor.

It was
the comedy science-fiction-novelist-to-be Douglas Adams, formerly of Brentwood
School, now happily unemployable, who had once again taken an interest in my
welfare. Thanks to his telephone call I was sitting outside the hotel door of
the Sheika of Qatar, masquerading as a bodyguard.

‘Your
sister tells me you’re looking for a way of earning a bit of money?’ he had
begun intriguingly ‘I found an advert in the London
Evening Standard
offering
four pounds an hour for bodyguard duties, and I thought it might be
quite
a
silly idea to go along.’

Douglas’
interview apparently took longer than mine. The ex-coppers who ran West
Security feared that a namby-pamby, wet-behind-the-ears, over-educated slop
like Douglas might not pass as a creditable bodyguard. But they were up against
it.

‘What
it was,’ Big Mike explained to me, ‘was that West Junior took over the company
and he thought his dad was a bit
slow,
behind the times, as it were, so
he went all around the embassies of our Arab friends, like, and he laid out a
lot of the old baksheesh.’ He rubbed his thumb and fingers together. ‘Only it
all went much better than he expected, ‘cos they all come over for the summer,
see. It’s too hot over there, so they’re all over here in London. He’s got jobs
coming up all over the shop, but he’s not got the operatives, not the trained
ones like me.’

The
company needed bodyguards. They put an advertisement in the paper, but every
old lag and con man turned up, intent on fleecing the clients. And then Douglas
sauntered in. After appointing him, they wanted to know if he had any friends.
The thing about students, it was agreed, was that they were too naive to be
bent.

We were
also rather weedy Douglas, to be fair, was an impressive six foot and a lot.
His hooked nose rivalled Big Mike’s, his hair was just as lustrous, but somehow
he didn’t give one confidence that he was a killer. Gullies O’Brien Tear
(another Douglas find) frankly looked like Little Lord Fauntleroy Barnaby
Dickens looked like someone called Barnaby Dickens. Candidly we decided the job
was largely a question of ‘presence.

Though
I was to work for West on and off for another six months, it was nothing like
regular employment. The phone rang intermittently and a man called Roy handed
out an assignment. One night, quite late in our relationship (indeed pretty
late that night) he asked whether I could come down to the Dorchester ‘sharpish’,
because somebody had failed to show I dragged on my only suit and found myself
padding up a narrow staircase, disconcertingly like the back stairs of a
country house. A bullet-headed, villainous-looking six-footer emerged from the
shadows. ‘What do you want?’

‘I’ve
come to take over.

‘Fucking
hell. Are you a student?’

‘No.
No. Not a student, no.’

I could
only see the whites of his eyes, but I gathered they were glaring. He looked at
his watch. ‘Well, listen. The bloke downstairs is Para. The two blokes on
day-duty are ex-MPs.’ (He meant military policemen, not deselected backbenchers.)
He sighed. ‘If anyone asks you, you’d better say you were in the navy.’

Our
role in the event of an attack was to scream as we were machine-gunned to
death, reminding the Sheika inside to lock the door and phone for the police.
McDuff’s bodyguards have never warranted a play like
Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern Are Dead.
We were human alarm-bell receptionists.

‘She’s
gone out shopping,’ Mike explained on my first morning as a bodyguard. ‘She’s
the principal wife of the Sheik, see. So she gets to spend the whole of the
summer over here. All the other wives are left behind in the Gulf state’…Oi!’
He stopped in mid-sentence and looked up the corridor. ‘Oi. I’ve told you,
haven’t I? Fuck off out of it.’