Vanished Years (35 page)

‘You said I had to have projects.’

‘Not that kind.’

A couple of days ago I stand on Mr Geoffrey’s hand during the quick change and he has a meltdown, even accusing me of being drunk. I am quite shocked.

‘This is my livelihood,’ he screams, nursing the poor hand in front of my face. ‘How will I work if I can’t use my hands?’

‘I’m terribly sorry, Mr Geoffrey.’

I am mortified, although at the same time I think to myself: this is all a bit Les Mis, with the hand and the livelihood, but anyway a wise mistress says nothing.

The next day Mr Geoffrey is in the room ironing as usual, when I come up the stairs. He is white. I am quite nervous myself.

‘Sit down,’ he says before I even get through the door.

I obey.

‘Rupert, I am so sorry that I went off on you last night.’ He puts his hand in front of his mouth and looks at me with those silly wide Polish blue eyes and then bursts into tears. ‘I don’t know what happened. I guess I’m just tired.’

‘Oh thank God, Mr Geoffrey. I thought you were never going to forgive me.’

‘Of course I’m going to forgive you.’

We hug and sob and are discovered thus by Bruce.

‘I hope I’m not interrupting anything.’

‘That’s fine, Bruce. Come in.’

‘You remember you were asking about percentages.’ Bruce is wringing his hands again.

‘Oh, yes,’ I reply loftily, regretting that outburst of the other day.

‘Well, God, you know, I don’t know how to put this, but you don’t have a percentage.’ He looks terrified, his mouth fixed in a terrible smile.

‘I don’t?’

‘You don’t.’

‘Oh, how very discouraging.’

‘I’m sorry,’ sighs Bruce, but he gives me my per diems instead.

On preview nights Michael Blakemore our director clambers up to the chorus boys’ room, slightly breathless. He is eighty-one years old with a bad knee and the climb is steep. Michael is a wise owl of a director with a magnificent head of white hair. He has sat through
rehearsals hardly moving a muscle, observing us through ringed eyes – solemn and all-seeing, occasionally hooting the odd direction, consulting his French’s acting edition of the play for Coward’s original stage directions. Now he can be spotted during the previews in the stalls – a solitary figure with a plastic bag – in a different seat each night. In real life I am myopic but for some reason as soon as I get on stage I develop X-ray vision and I can always spot him, sitting rigid, a homeless person in a trance wedged into the animated crowd.

His face is completely inscrutable, even when Angela neatly cuts three-quarters of the play during an early preview and finds herself saying the lines of the last act during the first scene. It threatens to be a short evening but there isn’t a trace of emotion on Michael’s face as we turn the ship about and clumsily tack our way back to the beginning of the play. He is a great director with the strangest method. He does nothing. He watches and waits for the actors to discover themselves, nudging us gently into a performance with a raised finger and an ambivalent phrase (‘I’m not sure whether I would do that’), so that the process seems effortless and our own invention.

During an early set-to in the rehearsal room, he suggests that I simply drop the glass I am holding and freeze when I see the ghost of my ex-wife, while of course I want to have a full-blown fit. I loftily announce that I am not prepared to simply be everybody’s feed.

‘Well, what do you want to be, then? An epileptic?’ he asks, fixing me with his owlish eyes, the slightest hint of an upward inflection in his expressive voice. (He is from Australia and speaks in a divine dialect, now extinct, shared with other Antipodeans of his generation and profession – Coral Browne, Peter Finch – in which the cheerful twang of New South Wales is channelled into the frosty clip-clop of Received Pronunciation.)

‘What do you want to
do
?’ he asks again.

‘I want to steal the show,’ I shriek maniacally.

‘I don’t know how happy Angela will be with that,’ he replies, laughing. ‘Remember Coward played this role. He knew how to
look after himself. Don’t worry. You’ll be terrific. But if you want to have a fit, it’s fine with me.’

It transpires that he was in the first play I ever saw (aged six), playing Badger in
The Wind in the Willows
. He is telling a story about it one day – how the eighty-year-old actor playing Mole falls from the stage into the orchestra pit during a matinée but is back on stage that night – and a brain cell burps from the hidden depths and suddenly I remember everything, the river bank, the girl with long hair singing, Toad Hall, and an alarming battle with some weasels. From now on I call him Badger.

On the night before he returns to London he comes to the dressing room to say goodbye.

‘Look after him,’ he instructs Mr Geoffrey.

I am almost in tears. He has become my father in this uncertain time and with his departure the prison sentence of the run is suddenly a harsh reality. ‘I want to go home too,’ I whine.

‘It’ll go by in a flash,’ says Badger.

‘I rather wish I hadn’t settled on quite such an energetic performance.’

‘Well, you wanted to steal the show.’ We hug and I watch him lumber down the endless stairs. At the bottom he turns. ‘You did, you know.’

‘Did what?’

‘Steal the show. Speak soon.’

And he turns away, waving, while I collapse on the floor sobbing.

‘Save your acting for the show,’ says Mr Geoffrey, yanking at my bow tie and brushing me down.

Over the road from the theatre is Sardi’s, the most famous restaurant in New York. The faces of bygone Broadway stars, caricatures with vast heads and noses balanced upon hopeless matchstick physiques, cover the walls above faded velvet banquettes where groups of ancient Americans congregate before a matinée, dressed for Rosemary’s Baby. The waiters are a mafia – often as ancient as their
clientele – and have perfected the art of passive aggression. They listlessly serve specialities that include Sardi’s wilted salad – comprising a sliced gherkin like a hepatoid cat’s tongue over a gigantic slice of tomato surrounded by dangerous-looking drops of pus. New York should really be renamed the big tomato.

The golden days at Sardi’s are over, but this year, the year I get old, it suits me perfectly. I sit at the same table every day. I make friends with all the sour-faced waiters. Like me, they have been embittered, and need only a little tickle to cheer them up. I know I’ve won over the hardest case of all with my special needs charm when I place an order and he looks at me for a second.

‘I wouldn’t have that if I was you.’

‘Why, thank you, Charlie. I’ll take your advice,’ I reply.

From then on he winks every time he walks by.

Some days I can hardly face going into the theatre so I cut into Sardi’s and head straight for the bar where I order a vodka martini with a twist. I settle on a stool in the window and observe the comings and goings over the road at the Shubert.

Many of our audience members have been fans of Angela’s since
Gaslight
. They are fork-lifted from buses in knots of Zimmer frames and walking sticks. They are absolutely charming and are going to love the show. I think theatre should be banned for the under-sixties.

Our poster, as high as the theatre itself, covers the side wall on Shubert Alley. We are all looking into the crystal ball, but I don’t need to be a clairvoyant to know that this job is not going to be the stepping stone back to the West Coast as I had planned it to be. I didn’t even get a Tony nomination. As if reading my gloomy thoughts, Charlie joins me at the window.

‘You gotta be a fool to be in this business,’ he says.

‘Mine or yours, Charlie?’

‘Both. Too much bending over.’ Charlie rubs his back, winking.

‘Certainly
not
backwards, in your case,’ I reply.

And there we leave it. My own caricature now hangs in Sardi’s. That’s something.

T
onight the lights are all out on Broadway because Natasha Richardson is dead. She falls on a ski slope in Canada, gets up, goes back to her hotel, has a headache and then goes into a coma. Brain-dead, she is flown back to New York, while her family rush from all corners of the world to her bedside. Finally gathered, the decision is made to turn off her life support system. Her organs are removed – someone is looking through her forget-me-not eyes right now – and she is pronounced dead in the late afternoon three days after the accident. Tonight her mother Vanessa, and her two sisters, Joely and Katharine, lead a vigil in Shubert Alley as the lights are turned out and everybody pauses for thought.

I watch this spectacle on the television in my dressing room, getting ready for the play. On the little screen Vanessa, Joely and Katharine are bundled up against the cold just yards away from where I’m sitting. Mr Geoffrey is ironing in the background. The cartoon voice of the Eyewitness News presenter talks about shock and death and bewilderment, and the tannoy announces show time. Life has taken a virtual turn. I am watching on TV something that is
actually happening on the other side of the wall, to people I have known very well, and, for a second, time literally stands still.

Last Tuesday I am running out of the theatre and, in that little vestibule between the stage door and the interior, I find Natasha with an older lady in tow, in the middle of a spirited confrontation with Rose and the no-neck redneck who operates as a bouncer at the stage door after the show. Natasha’s voice is raised and she is stabbing at the bouncer with her finger. Her friend confirms everything Natasha is saying, like a back-up singer in little bursts between Natasha’s belted-out melodies. Rose, who knows who Natasha is but is trapped inside her cubicle, two hands on the glass, looks desperately round for help. It’s a small space, a lot of people coming in and out, and a hungry public are crammed against the stage door, ready with their cameras flashing each time the golden gate is opened. Natasha has been made to stand in line by the loathsome bouncer.

‘No Richardson here.’ He frowns, checking his list. The name rings no bells and he shakes his head.

She has told him she is my friend, but he doesn’t care. Someone in the crowd says, ‘Hey! That’s Na-tah-sha Richardson.’

‘No Richardson here,’ he chants, waving his clipboard.

‘Tasha,’ I say.

She turns to me, eyes wide, half laughing, half crying, a coiled spring. ‘Rupsy, there you are!’

We hug and she is trembling like a leaf.

‘What’s happened?’

‘You’ll never believe it.’

I take her out of the throng to the staircase that leads underneath the stage. Her friend comes with her. Natasha explains and dabs her eyes with the corner of a tissue.

‘He just shouted out Richardson! Richardson! Like a piece of meat.’

The bouncer himself appears, with some guests for one of the cast. ‘There he is!’ accuses Tasha.

He turns around. ‘I gotta have names. It don’t matter who the party is,’ he declares, red-faced and blunt.

‘But I’m a friend of the leading actor.’

‘I don’t know that,’ says the pig, evenly.

‘Yes you do. I told you.’

Now Mr Geoffrey appears, with Rose behind. Gale Natasha has swept us all up into a hurricane and everybody stops and turns.

‘What’s going on?’ asks Mr Geoffrey nervously, and I swirl into action like a cyclone. I am incapable, in such electric surroundings, of anything else.

‘This arsehole refused to let my friend come into the theatre.’

‘I did not refuse. I just need names and then I need to check the names.’

‘Oh, did you need to check Peter O’Toole last night? Did you make him tell you his name? What are you afraid of? This dangerous crowd?’ As if by magic the stage door opens and a hundred jolly old ladies wave and blow kisses. The door slams shut again. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘I don’t need to listen to this,’ shouts the pig.

‘No, you don’t. Leave.’

‘Calma, calma,’ tries Rose, while Mr Geoffrey hustles the bouncer back to his post outside the theatre.

Now Natasha laughs. She puts her hand to her chest, changes gear and ploughs right on. ‘Sorry, darling. Anyway, you were great. Michael Blakemore said he had no idea you were such a good comedian. I said, we all know that! But what about that sofa?’

‘I know.’

‘It’s awful. What are you up to?’

‘I’m just running out for dinner. Robert’s here. Did you know?’ Robert is her ex-husband and one of my closest friends.

‘No. I didn’t.’

‘Are you going in to see Angela?’

‘Yes.’

I guide her there.

‘We
must
meet up,’ we say in unison, laughing and hugging. I knock on Angela’s door and pass the two ladies into the room.

I blow a kiss and escape.

A week later.

‘
Blithe Spirit
was the last play she saw,’ Vanessa says in a strange musical voice, as if she is trying to work something out.

‘Yes. Isn’t that odd?’ I reply.

She turns to me, those blue-diamond eyes dead with disappointment. ‘Very.’

She leads me and Robert by the hand towards the open casket, in which Natasha lies, cocooned in white satin on a lacy pillow for eternity, in virginal white with rust-coloured make-up on her gaunt lifeless cheeks. Vanessa, like a seasoned undertaker, or an actress who has mastered a difficult prop, neatly lifts the bottom half of the casket lid to reveal a blue woollen blanket covering Tasha’s legs.

‘She loved this,’ mouths the matriarch, stroking the body and kissing the hands of her dead daughter.

We must have terrified faces, because she looks up at Robert, with a classic Vanessa half-smile – biting her lip, boring into him with her burning eyes.

‘You can kiss her,’ she says.

‘I will,’ says Robert, but he doesn’t. He touches her hands instead.

They are beautiful. I never really noticed them when she was alive. Her long sensitive fingers are crossed over her belly and for a moment they seem to be rising and falling as she breathes. One hallucinates when confronted with death. We all look down into the coffin, searching for life, but it only whispers round the rigid features in the thousand memories of the living. Every past action has a new colour now, matched against the intractable black of death. It is quite overwhelming and makes me giddy.