In Hollywood, the famous faces know how to lead their strange lives. I
concluded when meeting them for my television shows that the strangeness was
their answer to a violently artificial condition by which people became
symbols of themselves. In their wigs and facelifts and elevator shoes they
understood each other, even if nobody else did.
There are plenty of short men who can make any tall man feel awkward just by
the confidence they radiate, but Richard Dreyfuss seemed to have no such
assurance left. I had never seen a pair of elevator shoes quite like his. In
most cases men who wear elevator shoes must get used to standing on their
toes. The front of the shoe looks quite normal and it’s only when you spot
what’s going on at the back that you realise something’s up, as it were. But
Dreyfuss had a whole thick platform under each foot, like the Mikado. Why?
You see how perfectly, wonderfully, he can incarnate a sensitive,
self-critical human being in a minor movie such as Stakeout and you assume a
man like that would be equally in command of every other aspect of his life.
But then you discover that in real life he clumps around on a pair of kabuki
shoes. You don’t stare, though. In Hollywood the intention is always taken
for the deed. If your capped teeth look like assembled tombstones in the
snow, they will still be universally regarded as your own.
Kirk Douglas, when I met him (years before he had a stroke), had a face that
was a challenge to credibility. I think Barry Humphries was the first to say
that the dimple in his chin had originally been his navel, but he had looked
like that even before his first facelift. The first facelift, however, was
now far in the past. Fiftyseven varieties of facelift had happened since,
including that drastic intervention by which the flapping wattle below the
jaw is not only removed, but the line under the jaw is lifted to conform
with the line of the jawbone, so that in profile the victim looks as if his
throat has been torn out by a wolf.Around his eyes all the wrinkles had been
removed, reducing the whole area to a glassy surface from which the eyeballs
popped like penguins’ eggs from sheet ice. The missing wrinkles had been
bunched together and added to the edge of his face as a crepe ruff.
Kirk was a hero of mine for his realistic approach to show business. He had
made a great analysis of fame that can be paraphrased more or less like
this: “Fame doesn’t change the way you behave, it changes the way other
people behave towards you.” He left out, though, the further fact that the
changed behaviour of others will eventually change your behaviour as well.
If the famous person is smart enough he will try to take his name out of the
sky at the right time. But Kirk wanted to go on being Kirk: hence the facial
roadworks.
At least the hair on top of his head looked like his own, even if some of it
had not started its life on that part of his body. With other male stars the
hairpiece was widely in use. Most were so improbable that they defied you
not to burst out laughing. For a television programme I was making I went
through the process of having an upmarket version custom-made for me by the
celebrated hair stylist José Eber. The results were stunning. I had lost 20
years.
To try the effect of José’s masterpiece of a piece on someone who had known me
in days gone by, we enlisted Dudley Moore, who was spending more time
running his Santa Monica restaurant than in the movie studios. His time as a
Hollywood headliner was over and he wasn’t taking it well: too many pills
and too many of the wrong women, all twice as tall as he was and most with
half his intelligence. But somewhere in the depths of his racial memory he
was still Dudley and he took a visit by a crew from the old country as a
chance to step back into his original persona as the sharp British wit,
while momentarily abandoning his Californian quest for spiritual fulfilment
assisted by chemicals and a 6ft blonde sitting on his face.
I explained the number to him and as an old revue hand he saw immediately
where the sketch was going. I would walk in, complete with piece, and take
up my position at the bar. In his role as proprietor, he would walk into
shot, start a conversation and gradually become fixated on what was taking
place on top of my head. He had his line ready first time: “Bought or
rented?” In the editing room we had to trim the scene back for time, but
there was enough left to show him in all his elfin charm, the Cuddly Dudley
of old, still sparkling even as he drove the extra mile on the road to
destruction. He was still a star.
I was suspicious of Jane Fonda’s “Hanoi Jane” track record but the first few
minutes in her company told me where her political enthusiasms came from:
she had a generous nature. She was a dream, in fact: smart, funny and
without pretensions. I had already figured out why one egomaniac after
another had fallen for her: she gave them the humility they lacked. She was
full of affection and there would always be some cold-hearted male monster
to suck it up. Posing with me for production stills, she embraced me from
behind with one leg wrapped around my waist. Eyebrows were raised at home
but you could tell she would have done the same for Ronald Reagan.
I talked to Reagan, too. His autobiography had just come out; he had no idea
what was in it and he told me a few things that weren’t there in its pages.
Nobody yet knew that he had Alzheimer’s disease. It was assumed he had
merely become forgetful. When I brought up the subject of Nicaragua, he
forgot the name “Somoza” and started referring to “that guy down there”.
Helpfully, I mouthed the name “Somoza” and he must have thought I was saying
“Move over”, because he did so. Always a tractable actor, he was touchingly
ready to take direction. The orthodox opinion remains that Reagan was some
kind of right-wing ogre limited in his depredations only by his stupidity.
The facts say otherwise. When he came to office, only two of the USA’s
client states in Latin America were democracies. When he left office, only
two of them weren’t.
To find a diva in the old Hollywood style I had to pursue Naomi Campbell to
Paris. She was intensely celebrated at the time, partly because of her
erratic behaviour. After long negotiations with her phalanx of
representatives, a deal was struck: I would meet her at Orly airport when
she flew in after her latest holiday in Morocco and keep close company with
her as she went through the two-week season of preparing for, and
participating in, the fashion shows in which she would be by far the most
stellar model to strut her stuff.
She arrived at the airport, I presented her with a tree-sized bunch of flowers
while the camera watched, and I accompanied her to her limousine. The door
slammed behind her while I still had one foot in the air. She disappeared
into an apartment, two floors up. Periodically, someone emerged to reveal,
by instalments, that she was up there with her new friend, the fledgling
diva Kate Moss, and that the two of them were engaged in scientific research
— to establish how a termite mound of white powder could be reduced to the
dimensions of a crushed aspirin.
Naomi eventually did make herself manifest and we trailed her abjectly around
as she went through the motions at one show after another. Luckily for us,
if unluckily for Naomi, at her last show one of the other models
accidentally stepped on the hem of her dress and tore the thing in half.
Suddenly she was once again the girl who had been picked on once too often
in the school playground. She collapsed in tears against the wall of a
corridor. I interviewed her there and, perhaps because I sympathised with
her plight, she poured out her heart. What she was saying in sobs amounted
to a protest that it was all too much. Her life was too much.
Back we went to Los Angeles to meet Mel Gibson. He had parlayed his star power
into a string of genuinely interesting projects. Even Braveheart wasn’t just
your average bloodbath. In its plot it was yet another example of Mel’s
continuing counterattack against perfidious Albion, but it was beautifully
directed and he had directed it. Mel knew everything about making movies and
he was determined to push his vision to the limit. The vision was
uncomfortable but, I think, considerable.
If there is such a thing as a necessary contribution to be made from a
right-wing viewpoint, it is to take account of the facts of human cruelty.
Mel would go on to do so in The Passion of the Christ; and his almost
unwatchably violent Apocalypto is, in my view, an important work of art.
Every minute of it scares me witless, but it is meant to. A man who can
conceive a thing like that has a direct mental connection to a primeval
state. Mel has always heard the devil’s voice within himself. In his younger
days he tried to drown it with drink, but it can swim. Later he learnt to
live with it, but only at the price of a rigorous discipline.
As to the accusations of anti-Semitism, Mel didn’t look very anti-Semitic to
me when we both sat down to dinner with Joel Silver. A producer of great
commercial acumen, rich, influential, cosmopolitan and domineering, Joel is
a Jewish mogul out of the worst nightmares of Hamas. But it was clear that
Mel respected him. Mel made his anti-Semitic remarks when he fell off the
wagon. The poison is deep in his memory, where he would like to keep it
bottled up.
Most likely he got it from his father, who really was an anti-Semite: a
Holocaust denier of the classic demented stamp. Mel heard it all when he was
a child and clearly it got into him. But the grown-up Mel doesn’t believe
any of it. He can’t, however, attack his own mental inheritance in public
because he honours his father, as I do mine. So he is torn. The tensions in
his mind are fierce, but they make him what he is. Though he smiles with
winning charm, there is nothing easy about him.
Helping to show it was the contrast between him and his friend George Clooney,
who was just then emerging as a fully accredited film star after a long
apprenticeship in the television series ER, where he was worshipped by every
female member of my family in the most abject manner: one and all, they
would sit back with their knees up and coo like pigeons.
I shot a scene where I toured a Hollywood back lot in a golf cart with Mel.
Clooney, in his downtime from an ER episode, was discovered shooting hoops.
He shot a last hoop, fronted up to the golf cart and got into a dialogue
with me and Mel. None of it was scripted but Clooney was hilarious. Above
all, he was relaxed. You could tell that he would do everything with the
same casual grace. He had the advantage of his heritage. Mel had come up
from nowhere, slogging all the way and learning from his mistakes. Clooney
had never made any. Raised in a showbiz household, he knew, from the start,
the rules and the limitations. Just by being what he was, he stole the scene
from Mel in two minutes.
An older Hollywood legend, Tony Curtis, arrived at our London studio somewhere
beneath a hairpiece of improbable luxuriance and in a state of nervous
breakdown. He wouldn’t come out of his dressing room when it was time for
him to go on my show. He was feeling his age. He was feeling it in the dark.
He had turned the lights off and anyone who came in could detect his
presence only by his breathing. One after the other, in ascending order of
authority, the whole hierarchy went in to try and winkle him out:
researcher, assistant producer, producer, executive producer. He wouldn’t
speak to any of them.
Finally, I was sent in and said what he really wanted to hear. “Some people
say that you were the key element in three of the greatest movies ever made:
Some Like It Hot, Sweet Smell of Success and The Boston Strangler. But I
think there’s a fourth: Insignificance. Your performance in that one left me
overwhelmed with helpless awe.” Somewhere in the corner of the dark, a
familiar Bronx accent whispered: “You forgot Spartacus.” And out he came.
Equalling Peter Sellers’s trick of turning into a normal human being under
the lights, he gave me a brilliantly funny interview.
And then there was Diana. Not as a star, but as a friend. One evening, after
too much champagne in a teeming Buckingham Palace ballroom, it was my turn
to chat her up. I was doltish enough to say: “Care to dance?” She said no.
Already a dead man, I found it easy to take my life in my hands: “So can I
take you to lunch instead?” She said: “Yes, give me a buzz.” I had scarcely
reached the second course of our first lunch before a Range Rover full of
photographers and reporters arrived. It went on like that for what seemed
like years. How long was it, really? Not long enough.
There were many commentators who thought the Princess of Wales was no brighter
than a 40-watt bulb that tinkled when you shook it, but I couldn’t agree. I
knew more than my fair share of bright and beautiful women, but none of them
outranked Diana for fascination. She would have been the centre of the
action even if she had worked behind an airline check-in desk, an effect
that could not be ascribed merely to her beauty.
Though I was always apt to think a beautiful woman intelligent until the facts
proved otherwise, which they quite often did, I didn’t dote on the princess
just for her physical attraction, which was far out of my age range and
anyway not that remarkable: as someone who had to deal with people such as
Helen Hunt and Charlotte Rampling for a living, I knew what physical
attraction looked like and Diana didn’t have it. For one thing, her nose was
on sideways. But what she did have was lit up like Christmas from an inner
fire that was really the fire of curiosity.
She was voracious for news about what accomplished people did. This
worshipping curiosity, coupled with a wicked knack for reflecting a man’s
ideal self back at him, made her intoxicatingly flattering as a companion. I
was slow to see, however, that she was making a fundamental mistake of
taking it all personally. With no security of her own, she dreamt habitually
of “becoming herself” and of doing so in all those fields of achievement
that were opening up continually in front of her.
Eventually, had her life not been cut short, she might have built a base for
herself more solid than that conferred by her ability to make men who could
do marvellous things fall in love with her: a base of realism, founded on a
more certain knowledge of what she could get done through her position by
her unusual and true talent for empathy. But at the time I knew her she was
far from being sure about any of that and it was all too clear the
multiplicity of yearnings was scrambling her brains. It would have been
easier for her if she had been unattractive. But that’s just a way of saying
she would have been better at being herself if she had been someone else.
Alas, she was who she was, with all her charm, and so the charm was a deadly
gift. I was on the receiving end of it and I know.
When interrogated at home, I wasn’t just trying to save my skin when I said
that I thought her more than a touch gaga. I suppose the manifest absurdity
of our friendship conferred a plausibility and anyway it wasn’t as if she
hadn’t bedazzled every man she met, with the possible exception of her
husband. (And, I might have added, had I but known, every other senior royal
who had seen her in close-up long enough to know that she was a ticking
fruitcake.) She should have been in show business, where there is a protocol
for survival after your life has been eaten hollow by dreams come true. But
she was on her own. For days after her death I couldn’t stop crying. One
among millions, I coped with a sense of loss whose intensity defied
explanation.
© Clive James 2009 Extracted from The Blaze of Obscurity by Clive
James, published by Picador at £17.99. Copies can be ordered for £16.19,
including postage, from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0845 271 2135
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