The Blue Touch Paper (39 page)

By Thursday of the same week, I was down in Chapel Hill teaching young boys and girls, check-shirted, fresh off the land, about the history of the British theatre. It was blossom time in North Carolina, the most exquisite time of the year, and the air was scented with bougainvillea. Colleges and dormitories glowed with colour. My pupils all looked about fifteen, with piercing blue eyes and tufts of sprouty blonde hair shooting straight up from suntanned faces. They were intensely well-mannered, keeping up a polite and gratifying interest, as if they knew that it was the only time they would hear a word about the subject before they returned to their farms. The English professor, Kimball King, who had invited me on campus because he knew as much about modern theatre as anyone alive, said the pupils were young but they were also impossible to fool. He was right. My week at the university was my only scheduled commitment in return for the full year's fellowship. The bicentenary fellowship didn't oblige me to
do
anything. The other fifty-one weeks gaped ahead, unfilled.

I went down to a Chapel Hill car lot and, for $1500, randomly bought a 1964 Ford Galaxie, a monstrous gas-guzzler which sat on the road like an ocean liner. The average car wastes ninety-nine per cent of its energy propelling itself. Only one per cent propels the passengers. This one drove as if it wasted ninety-nine point nine per cent. Its fins stretched to infinity but it comfortably sat two. The salesman had the sense of humour to say, ‘Good choice.' On the flight over, I had conceived an
absurdly bad idea for a film. It was to be called
Stella
and it was about a woman working in government who discovers, when he turns up in a car crash in the wrong state, that her husband is a bigamist, leading one life with her in Washington at weekends and another while working on the NASA space programme during the week in Cape Canaveral. For that reason I decided, when my week's teaching was up, to drive south to Florida, and take a look at one of the film's potential locations.

To give them their flavour, road movies, especially American ones, tend to stress the romance of life on the road. But what I valued was the tedium. I loved it. I was never happier than glazing over, surrendering to an impotent, pointless rage about the unspeakable unfairness of things. What was the point of writing? Nobody wanted to hear from me. After so many years of apprenticeship and maddened purpose, it was pleasant to sit in a Ford Galaxie and stare for days at an unvarying road, with nothing but a steady rise in humidity to make me feel I was getting anywhere at all. As I wound down the window, I listened to the radio and began to wonder whether, in the time I'd been away, the whole continent had been infantilised. When exactly had Can Do turned into How To? There were tips all day on How To enjoy yourself, or How To choose a holiday, as if American citizens were no longer capable of doing anything without first being given a manual. Worse, there was a complete contrast between the USA's founding philosophy and a new fearfulness which seemed to be stressing that life was really dangerous, so watch out. The national motto had once been Take Risks. Now it was Take Care. When I got to Daytona Beach, where I based myself in a massive empty concrete hotel, I found there were no doors on the toilet stalls in Dunkin' Donuts. That was because people liked to go in there to shoot up. It would be a couple
of years before Michael Mann would make his superb cinema debut,
Thief
, in which James Caan dies discovering how completely the lone entrepreneur has had their heart kicked out by the corporate. But for now there was no work of art to make sense of things. It was impossible to work out, in my general gloom, whether it was America which had changed or me.

Daytona owed its prosperity to the hundred thousand students who used it for spring break. But that was March. This was May. It counted as out of season. Occasionally I would say something, like ‘Can I have some coffee please?' or ‘Can you tell me where there's a bookshop?' But otherwise I was pretty well silent from the start of the day to the end. It didn't bother me. I had no hankering to speak. Some days, serving myself in an automat, I didn't open my mouth at all. It occurred to me that perhaps I was having a nervous breakdown, walking the wide, breathtaking twenty-three miles of beach or staring at the typewriter in despair. I'd always had a goal, a task. Now I had none. Tom Stoppard says that being blocked is not a question of not being able to write. It's a question of never being satisfied with anything you do write. By that standard I was blocked, and would remain so for the rest of the year.
Stella
was one idea so lifeless, so terrible that not even Kael's ‘treacherous power of art' could do anything to transform it. I knew less than nothing about America. Why on earth did I think I could write about it? But, worse, how on earth could I write at all when the last play that I'd written looked certain to be ignored?

I honestly don't know how long I stayed in Florida, paralysed by self-pity, wondering whether anyone would one day come to rescue me. At every important junction in my life, a Bexhill boy, I had always gone back to stare at the sea. Well, this was the moment when it finally came home to me that I
had done everything wrong. How could I have been so stupid? Back in London Margaret and Joe were getting on with their lives. How could I have come this far without realising how selfish I had been? Peggy had often told me that the people she despised most in life were those who were unwilling to pay the bill. ‘Do what you want to,' she would say. ‘
But then pay the bill
.' I had deceived myself into believing that my aim was to balance out the love I felt for two women to whose loyalty and brilliance I owed so much. But in seeking to please everyone, I had satisfied no one. On the contrary. I was plummeting down and pulling down everyone with me. When I drove back up the East Coast to New York to stay with my cousin Rosi, my legs gave way. I parked the car in a midtown lot and was walking up Sixth Avenue when the pain became so great that I was incapable of moving. Maybe this mysterious paralysis was physical, the result of driving for five days, or maybe it was psychosomatic. Who knows? Whichever, I sat down on the edge of one of the low brick walls outside the Time-Life building and stayed there for several hours, hoping the pain would pass. Next day, I still couldn't walk.

Rosi lived with her witty but volatile husband Pierre, who had taken over the Marlborough Gallery following the shakedown from an expensive lawsuit brought by the estate of Mark Rothko against Pierre's uncle, Frank Lloyd, who was now exiled in the Bahamas. The daughter of my uncle Bumper and aunt Eileen, Rosi was one of those clever women who'd looked round England when she was young and got out as fast as possible. She'd become personal assistant to Ted Rousseau, who was curator in chief at the Metropolitan Museum. Pierre and Rosi lived on the Upper East Side and had a spare room in which I could sleep at nights and work by day while they were
out. The room's only disadvantage was that right beside the bed was a massive Francis Bacon depicting what looked like someone being sick in the lavatory. I woke to this vast canvas every morning. Pierre couldn't sell it, so he'd dumped it in the spare room. When I nervously remarked to Pierre that it wasn't very good, he just shrugged and said, ‘Everyone knows. Francis can't paint women.'

As a guest, I felt compelled to do a reasonable job of dissembling. I didn't want my problems to show because I didn't want to discuss them. Besides, I knew from my time at school that I enjoyed occupying other people's lives. For a while, I ate what was given and went where I was told, in the company of Pierre and Rosi's friends. After what felt like a lifetime of wrong choices, it was pleasant to make none. But in June I had to fly briefly back to England for two reasons. Margaret was pregnant again. She had been to the hospital, where they had pointed to a black dot and said, ‘Look, do you see the child?' In reply, she had said indeed she did see it, but what was that other black dot? In response, the scan operator had vanished for fifteen minutes. She had gone to get a doctor, it turned out, because she was under instructions not to tell mothers they were expecting twins, for fear of a bad reaction. Margaret had anyway been feeling that her time at the BBC was not going to run much longer. There had been executive interference on a couple more films. With two children on the way, it was important we were all together all the time. Margaret asked me who I thought should take over running
Play for Today
. I pointed out that our friend Richard Eyre was signing off from his superlative tenure at the Nottingham Playhouse with a group-written play, ten years before its time, about the unscrupulous methods used by powdered milk manufacturers to sell
their doubtful products to perfectly healthy mothers in Africa. Why didn't Margaret press his cause?

My second reason for returning was, of course,
Plenty
. From Florida, I'd become anxious, picking up only the vaguest indications. Now I heard the full story. The board of the theatre, and in particular its chairman, Max Rayne, had been alarmed to find what poor business the play had been doing since its opening. It was a flop, he said. Take it off. But Peter had dug in his heels, insisting that an important point of principle was now at stake. He was prepared to accept that when the National did work which it considered bad, it was reasonable to shorten its run. Of course. But
Plenty
was work which everyone in the theatre believed in. If they couldn't now stand up for things which were either ahead of their time or uncommercial, what on earth was the point of a National Theatre? Unless your values were seen to be demonstrably different, you might as well stick with the commercial. Peter confided to me that he'd be able to protect the play by presenting it just seven times a month, rather than ten, and by playing it mostly at weekends. If he nursed it, he said, he was sure its fortunes would change.

By now I was in such a state that I'm not sure I even heard what Peter said. I certainly didn't guess that Peter's readiness to put his job on the line on the play's behalf would be the turning point of my professional life. Margaret and I installed Kate to house-sit in our absence from Richborne Terrace, then flew back with Joe to Cape Cod, where I planned to continue my purposeless fellowship by renting an A-frame on the beach at Wellfleet. We stayed there for a month, me all the time bashing away in a futile bid to animate a dead screenplay. When the stately Galaxie got bogged down in a rainstorm in the sand and we spent hours digging it out with spades, it seemed all too
apt. In July we started slowly to move westwards, taking four weeks to cross America. When we broke the speed limit in Colorado, a creepy policeman was willing to let us off if Margaret sat with him in his police car for five minutes. In the mountains we fed on the plentiful pink trout fishermen would otherwise have thrown back. We were heading for Los Angeles with the idea of spending the rest of the year there, mainly because I had been happy in LA thirteen years earlier and Margaret was interested to see it. But nobody had explained to us that in the late seventies it was impossible to find living space in LA if you had a child. Nobody was willing to rent. There were signs everywhere – ‘no dogs, no children' – and estate agents told us not even to try. So it was a paradox that the only place willing to accommodate a doubly pregnant woman, her husband and our three-year-old son was a swingers' apartment block in a dockside village in Marina del Rey.

It was certainly a different way of life from the one we were used to. We were by the ocean, but that was the best you could say. From time to time at dusk we would go down to the communal Jacuzzi, where all our neighbours were preparing for a night of action. Nobody minded Joe's presence. Oddly, they rather welcomed him. But by eight thirty Margaret and I would be the only pucker-skinned couple heading back upstairs in the formation in which we'd arrived. After a week or two, it became melancholic. Los Angeles was not prising itself open to us, and we both had a strong sense that this was not where we wanted our children to be born. So in the middle of September we got back in the car and headed up to stay at the El Cortez Hotel in San Francisco. We had dinner with Jessica Mitford, whose ignorance of the basics of tea-making had once so inspired me. Then we set off east, this time going as fast as possible. By chance
our first night's stop was in Reno, where my aspiring producer Shirley MacLaine was in solo cabaret at one of the casinos. Afterwards she told us that no one had been round to see her for weeks, and asked would I please give her notes? I refused, saying that I knew nothing about song and dance, it was not my field, and, really, we'd both had a lovely time and the show was perfect. At this, Shirley became so insistent that, mistaking her vehemence for sincerity, and being myself at the time more than slightly unhinged, I remarked that if I had a single problem it was perhaps with that speech from
Some Came Running
where a woman complains: ‘You've got no right to talk to me the way you did, Dave. I am a human being and I've got as many rights and feelings as anybody else.' Shirley asked me what exactly was wrong with that speech. It was one of her fans' favourites. It was one of the highlights of the show. People loved it. ‘Yes, of course, I can see that, Shirley, but isn't it just a touch, well,
sentimental
?'

Next day, getting out of Nevada as fast as our wheels could carry us, Margaret and I speculated freely as to whether Shirley would ever speak to us again. When we got to New York we hit a more serious problem. There was a newspaper strike. Usually you could rent an apartment by buying the
New York Times
, but in September 1978 it was not publishing. The sole source of news about rentals had become the
Village Voice
, which, in the mad rush of the homeless, was now selling tens of thousands of extra copies. There was, however, we were told, one stand on Christopher Street where the
Voice
was available the night before publication. We duly stood there among a bunch of desperate people wise to the same dodge, and grabbed the first copies as soon as they were thrown off the truck. But by the time we went to see Jerry Gretzinger, the landlord of what seemed to be an absolutely perfect tenth-floor loft on Broadway
between Broome and Grand, right in the heart of SoHo, he had already half-promised it to someone else.