Vanished Years (10 page)

One person who is not for rent, however, is Victor Levin whom we finally land after all the other show runners have rejected us. He ran a ghastly sitcom called
Mad About You
starring my least favourite star, Helen Hunt. Everyone is delirious about the possibility that this
god
of comedy is interested in doing my show, and it has been nearly two years now that we have been looking for a show runner, and the network has intimated that time is running out, so one morning under a flat white sky our dynamic trio arrive in front of a house in Beverly Hills. The first alarm bell rings when I see a pair of tiny scrolls stuck into a crack in the wooden frame of the front door.

‘What are those little scrolls?’ I ask.

‘They are mezuzahs,’ says Marc, beaming approval.

‘Does that mean he is religious?’ I whisper.

‘Very,’ whispers Benny.

‘Do you think religion and comedy are happy bedfellows?’ I ask and the door opens.

By the way I am not anti-Semitic. If I saw a giant crucifix in the house of a show runner, or a prayer mat next to the computer, I would run a mile. I just don’t think religion is very funny. (When the nut formerly known as Mel Gibson made that hideous film about Jesus, they had Mass every morning before shooting, a really sickening thought.) I should have turned around then and there, but the show business art that I never managed to grasp was the most important one. More important than schmoozing, being talented, looking good, even. Knowing when to say no.

At the initial meeting things go well enough. Perhaps my hatred for Helen Hunt is irrational, and perhaps the show is as marvellous as everyone says. Victor seems nice enough, thin and wiry and slightly theatrical, with silky black hair and thick black eyebrows and a high starched collar to his white shirt. He has one of those anxious, mournful faces that is often built for comedy, a cross between Tony Perkins and Walter Matthau. His house is a nice, Spanish, high-end hissy-enda from the 1920s, which means it looks like something out of
The Flintstones
. Inside it is white with shabby-chic sofas.

We sit down. Coffee is served by his pretty wife. She is
not
wearing a wig and surgical stockings, so I begin to relax and the dance begins. In the first pas de deux he tells me what a fan he is and how excited he is about the possibility of us all working together and I jeté back at him en
pointe
, lying through my teeth, saying how much ‘I adored’ the Helen Cunt series. It comes out effortlessly by now, all this bullshit. (It’s the first of a twelve-step Hollywood programme towards living a life of sheer fantasy.)

Then I launch into my personal version of the ‘pitch’, sketching portraits of all the characters I am hoping will be in the show. These include my best friend in Hollywood, Meredith, one of the co-stars from my latest failure (unreleased),
Unconditional Love
. She is a little person (aka dwarf). I love this girl and if I’m going to sit around a studio in Burbank for the next ten years (ha ha, wishful thinking), I want to have a few laughs. I don’t tell Victor this. I just say that I really believe in her talent (which I do), and I think that she is going to be big even though she’s tiny. We all laugh. Victor giggles like a hyena. I explain that I also want to have a Snoop Dogg character in the show, a semi-hoodlum in charge of the boiler room in the bowels of the embassy.

‘Do you think that sends out a weird message?’ he asks.

‘What message?’

‘That a black guy can only work in the boiler room.’ Political correctness rears its satanic head.

‘Where should he work? The Oval Office? Do you know Washington at all?’ I ask, perhaps a shade breezily.

‘Somewhat,’ he replies tightly.

‘Well, as far as I can see, it’s all black, apart from this tiny master-race enclave in the middle. I think we should make the most of that weirdness, don’t you?’

‘Possibly.’

‘My other inspiration is a book written by Nancy Mitford called
Don’t Tell Alfred
in which the author is the wife of the incoming British ambassador to Paris.’

‘I never read that one,’ Victor says evenly.

‘Well, check it out. The beginning is great.’

Marc Platt looks at his watch, which is a sign that I should wind up, so I do.

At the front door Victor grins and shakes my hand. ‘You certainly got a lot of ideas.’

‘I know,’ I reply guiltily.

‘I’d love it if you could write down all these “amazing thoughts” so that I can read them and reflect.’

We all shake hands and quite suddenly the deal is done. I rush home and write all night.

In a nutshell this is my story. Ronnie (me) and his manic-depressive wife (Miranda Richardson-type) arrive in Washington to take up our posts as UK ambassador to find that the last lady ambassadress (Glenn Close-type), who was insanely popular while her husband was in office, is still in residence, holed up in the housekeeper’s flat (Amanda Downes), throwing parties and refusing to leave. (Don’t tell Alfred.) It’s a very embarrassing situation. (Bill Clinton is discovered sneaking up the back stairs to dinner with Glenn.)

Miranda and I invite Glenn to tea, hoping that we can resolve the crisis. It just so happens that Glenn and Miranda were at school together and hated one another then. (An idea ripped off from
An Ideal Husband
by Wilde, which I have just been in.) Tea goes badly. Glenn has decided that her only chance of staying on is to seduce me and get rid of Miranda. Out of the frying pan into the fire as far as I’m concerned. I escape and decide to explore the embassy to let them hammer it out. In a subterranean corridor I hear hip hop, which I love, and come across the boiler room, which is decked out like a pimp’s boudoir. The keeper of the boilers is Snoop Dogg (type). The central relationship is born.

Meanwhile, upstairs, Meredith (little-person-friend from
Unconditional Love
) has arrived as a temp because one of the secretaries is sick. She has come to Washington from Westchester, New Jersey,
inspired by
Legally Blonde
, to break into politics. Things get stickier and stickier as Glenn refuses to leave and Miranda sinks into manic depression.

Our first reception is a disaster and everyone leaves early to go upstairs to see Glenn. Snoop Dogg takes Ronnie (me) on a trip to his neighbourhood to cheer him up. In the ’hood Snoop is known as Mr Ambassador. Ronnie adores the real Washington – everyone is much less stuffy than the diplomats at the embassy. Snoop takes Ronnie to meet his mother who is a Cuban witch (Corky, more of her later) and puts a spell on Glenn. All these comings and goings are monitored by the embassy number two, called Vickers, a sticky career diplomat who thought that
he
was going to be the next ambassador and has been having an affair with Glenn. He thinks that Ronnie (me) is remedial.

I send this story to Victor – in a considerably longer and funnier (if I may say so myself) form, go back to New York and forget about the whole thing.

A couple of months later the script arrives. It bears little or, actually, no relation to my original story and, needless to say, I think it is terrible. The rest of my team aren’t so gloomy. For them everything is part of a process.

‘What does that mean?’ I scream down the phone in a conference call to LA.

‘It’s a journey,’ reasons Benny.

‘Yes. Into hell.’ I am really angry.

‘No. Towards making the show you want,’ reasons Marc.

Benny and Victor come to New York and we have a very tense meeting in the palatial house of a friend with whom I am staying. I rather hope the magnificence of my natural environment will fill Victor with awe, but it doesn’t. If I didn’t know he was religious, I would have thought he was on crystal meth. He is coiled and dangerous with glittering eyes, and clearly ready for a punch-up. I have a silver tray all laid for tea, which I begin to pour into priceless Meissen teacups.

‘I want this show to be like watching a piece of theatre,’ says Victor.

‘But I loathe the theatre,’ I reply. ‘Sugar? And anyway surely this is Television. Not Tired Vaudeville.’

The conversation degenerates over sandwiches. It is very embarrassing to criticise people’s work in a friendly, even manner and so, pouring more tea and passing around the cake, we edge the conversation over the precipice. He is as angry with me as I am with him. The discussion becomes more and more heated until at one point I shriek, ‘
No
.’ (Too late.) There is a long pause while Victor puts down his cup and saucer.

‘Don’t say no to me again,’ he says simply. His knuckles have turned white and the meeting ends.

Benny and Marc are right. All work in Hollywood is a process and they are brilliant at their jobs because, in the course of three or four rewrites, they manoeuvre the script into something more in line with what I had originally envisaged, but it ain’t Yes Minister. It’s lame and flat and in my opinion not even vaguely funny. But they are brilliant diplomats and creatively astute. Which is lucky because there is no backing out now and we are going to have to roll with the dice, so the ‘process’ continues. Soon we are sitting in a casting meeting at NBC.

‘Do you think Sir Derek Jacobi would play Vickers?’ someone from the network gasps.

‘Do you think it would be wise to have two poofs in the same parade?’ I ask, slightly shocked.

‘No one thinks of Sir Derek Jacobi as anything but … a great actor.’

‘I
Claudia
?’

‘Do you know him?’ asks the casting lady.

‘Of course.’ I laugh. Another lie. I know his agent.

Years ago my English agent Duncan had an assistant who was known as the Flower Fairy.

‘Don’t worry, darling, the Flower Fairy is on top of it,’ Duncan would say.

He was small and good-looking like a Dutch student from a good family. The Flower Fairy learnt fast. Pretty soon he was an agent himself, and not long after that one of the most successful agents in London. About ten years ago he moved to the country and fell in love with fox-hunting. From then on he divided his time between the office and the hunting field where he soon became one of the Masters of a hunt in Sussex. Many a celebrated dame or knight found themselves, slightly mystified, on the phone, talking over a part, only to hear horns and hounds baying in the background, along with various whoops of ‘Tally-ho’. Was it ‘this wretched new hearing aid’, or was it just that the Flower Fairy had such a very good seat, that he could handle a conversation with Sir John Gielgud about a West End transfer and a horse over a five-bar gate at the same time, all the while pretending he was in the office?

‘What on earth’s going on?’ one of his younger clients – Maggie Smith, for example – might whine.

‘Someone’s birthday in the office,’ was the usual reply.

Until the day when Paul – his real name – (‘Oh darling, you can’t call him the Flower Fairy any more!’) was the cover story of a magazine called
Horse and Hound
, the hunting fraternity’s bible. He was outed. But no one cared because he was still one of the best agents in the country.

‘Paul, it’s Rupert. How are you, darling?’

‘I have to whisper. We’re in a covey. Fox has gone to earth.’

I am in the bath at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and it feels rather thrilling to be in communication with a British hunting field as the palm fronds scratch against the windows of my room and the curtains billow in the warm desert breeze. I feel that sudden rush of brilliance that life sometimes delivers unexpectedly. I used to have to hunt when I was a child and dreamt of being Julie Andrews’ daughter to keep myself warm on those freezing winter days. Getting from that to this, from a disgruntled pony on a steep ploughed field to a
marble bath like Elvis’s tomb, with a spot of room service perched on the edge, is a universal miracle in itself, and suddenly the success of the pilot – or any success, for that matter – takes its proper place in the general scheme of things. It’s secondary to this extraordinary moment that has somehow been engineered. Maybe it’s successful enough just to be having this conversation.

‘Are they bringing in some terriers?’ I ask dreamily.

‘Not yet. What can I do you for?’ whispers Paul.

‘Do you think Derek Jacobi would do the pilot for my sitcom?’

I explain everything.

‘I’m sure he’d love to. When and where?’

‘It’s here in LA, February. The network are gagging for him.’

‘Of course they are.’

Blood-curdling shrieks can be heard in the background as another poor fox is torn apart by a pack of hounds.

‘Trot on!’ says Paul.

‘Are you talking to me?’ I ask.

‘Yes, actually. We’re moving. I’ll talk to Derek and get back to you.’

The phone goes dead.

The process chugs on and now I am riding high because poor Derek has finally said yes. After a good deal of vacillating and nudging, like a pinball, he has finally landed in our hole. A pilot is one of those tantalising gambles for an actor of standing, particularly a sir or a madam. The money is very good. The likelihood of the thing going to series is minimal. If it does somehow manage to ride the rapids to that glorious state, then poor Derek will have to move to LA, which he will hate, but on the other hand he will also be rich and, more importantly, able to grab the passing broomstick from Ian McKellen midflight and soar off into the stratosphere – next stop Dumbledore, Middle Earth, or even outer space. If the series is a success Derek will be giving his King Lear in the Hollywood Bowl rather than the Donmar Warehouse.

Anyway, for the time being all that is (or is not) ahead of us. NBC are ecstatic. Give and take is liberally applied in the lubed desert and they have given the go-ahead for Meredith to be in the series. So now we only have to cast Trey (Snoop) and the young female lead that Victor has conjured up to replace Glenn and Miranda who, he says, make the show too old-fashioned.

‘But I thought you wanted it to be like theatre,’ I whine.

‘Yes, but not that kind,’ snaps Victor. He is proving to be a real handful, a total megalomaniac.