Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers. Antonia Quirke
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Название: Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers
Автор: Antonia Quirke
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780007323494
isbn:
‘Got everything you need in there? Got all your little pencils?’
He talked like David Thewlis. He rolled his chair to the side of his desk and sat back in it unashamedly – his shiny green trousers unfashionably high, tight into his crotch like jester's pants, squashing his cock up and tight to the side – and relished my shoes.
‘Oooh, how smashing – a lovely little pair of Start-rites!’ he said. ‘I'm Jim Hewson, the deputy editor – we spoke on the phone. And now here you are.’
There I was. On the lapel of his yellow coat was a little badge that said ‘Touch My Monkey’.
‘Bring your little pencils. We're going out.’
He took me first to a pub and then down to Kentish Town police station, where he heckled the officer giving a statement about a head being found in Regent's Canal. I was already very drunk and confused and became extremely paranoid when he started to goad the police about being in league with the local gangs. The police clearly hated him. There was bitterness and fear in that room.
‘Still trying to get arrested, are you, Jim?’ the officer threatened. ‘And you, Miss “Quirke”. You trying to get arrested now too?’
‘You're not going to arrest us, we're white,’ Jim sneered.
After that he walked me down to a pub in Holborn, striding for miles like a peacock while I ran to keep up, my feet blistering in my court shoes. The Princess Louise behind Gray's Inn was where Jim liked to dig his stories out of the local councillors who drank there after meetings. Again there was a little pulse of fear at his presence, disguised under uneasy bonhomie. When I got back from peeling off my bloodied tights in the loo, he was smilingly scoffing at a councillor: ‘You're fucking her, aren't you? That's why this is happening. He's fucking her. You dirty man. What happened to your tights?’
On the way back to Camden we stopped at yet another pub where he drank his dozenth double of the afternoon and regarded the jukebox selections with the stalest disgust: ‘Why the fuck do I ever drink in here when all they've got to listen to is Freddie Mercury and his harem of stockbrokers?’
I could not reply because I fancied him too much even to open my mouth.
Jim was a communist. Everyone at the Journal was a communist. But Jim would never agree with the other communists, which seemed to make him immensely popular among them. People would come round and get sidetracked into spending long, hero-worshipping hours by his desk while he was unbelievably rude about them to their faces. Among these people were a group called the Chartists whom Eric Gordon, the editor, expected every Friday for a serious discussion involving the whole office. Eric was a communist too and had travelled to China as a journalist in the 1960s to help out with the Cultural Revolution. When he had objected to what he was seeing, the authorities had put him and his wife and child under house arrest. For five years. In a room that measured ten feet by twelve. And he was still a communist.
On Fridays when the big hitters rolled up, everyone was expected to contribute. Jim, whose hair seen closer up now seemed the colour of curry powder, would dazzle the room while Eric listened through the frosted glass to his protégé, too knowledgeable and wise to condescend to mere pyrotechnics. These were terribly detailed, recondite conversations as abstruse as the discussions on scripture during which I had been equally silent throughout my childhood. There was still the vexed issue of the Twentieth Party Congress. There was serious present business to do with Central America. There was the question of getting Stalin's twenty million victims down to something more manageable, like twelve million. There was always 1917 and Trotsky. While Jim waltzed through the upper echelons of theory and practice, I kept my head down and watched his elegant freckled fingers draw their merciless distinctions. Only once did I ever score a success, when the subject had moved to the First World War.
‘I don't know, but John Reed always seemed right to me,’ I said. ‘The First World War was about prophets.’
Jim, who was not to know that I was only aware of this because I was a fan of Reds, flashed me a vulpine grin which sent me floating up Parkway that evening eight feet off the ground. I had won a smile from a man who knew how to repair the flaws in dialectical materialism.
Not Reds for Warren Beatty – what kind of book do you think this is? For Jack Nicholson! Warren Beatty … The man with the loveliest, slowest pulse in cinema versus an actor who is forever trying to hoodwink you that his heartbeat is faster than it actually is. The guy who always acts less handsome than he is versus the preener: you're always mentally cleaning up Nicholson's face and mentally trying to ruffle Beatty's. The vulnerable versus the unhurtable. The living versus the dead. Nicholson is the greatest actor since, let's say, the time between the Beatles' ninth LP and the birth of Zinedine Zidane, whose work is founded on a sense of humour. They're not terribly funny, those geniuses whose names end in ‘o’, are they? Here are ten more words to kill any smile – Sean Penn, Kevin Spacey, Dustin Hoffman, Edward Norton, Gary Oldman. Serious business, great acting. Nicholson plays a small role in Reds as the playwright Eugene O'Neill being manipulated by Beatty's lover Diane Keaton into thinking he's seducing her. It's all rather sad and Chekhovian. She tells him that Beatty has gone away, leaving her to get on with her own things here in this beach house on Long Island.
‘What are they?’ he asks.
‘What?’ says Keaton.
‘The things that you have. That are yours. What are they?’
– this in his Nicholsonian way, turning over every word, holding it up to the light, inspecting it, and then judiciously pondering whether to place it, with great delicacy, in the world or just to, what the hell, smash it.
‘If you were mine,’ he goes on, ‘it would just be you and me. And it would feel a lot more like love than being left alone with your work.’
By this time you're pretty much rolling around on the floor clutching your ribs and screaming stop! stop! though there is nothing ostensibly there in his delivery except O'Neill's love, his courage in declaring himself, and the glimmer of an accusation against Keaton's way of life with Beatty.
But you're killing yourself, because everything Nicholson says is given its sense by how near or how far it is from the pure delight that makes up his soul. Not sniggering mischief, as people always say of him – delight. It's what makes him so tragicomic. Nothing he says isn't a fuse burning towards some dynamite-pile of hilarity. And he makes brilliant use of its absence, sparingly, and devastatingly, like in the two scenes in Five Easy Pieces (his best film) when he walks out on Karen Black. You think: My God, where's it gone? He reminds you of just how much you've got to lose, of how high the stakes are. Everything he does in his early films is to do with the frustration of this delight. You've got to be a comedian to be a tragicomedian. He'd be brilliant in Chekhov. Brilliant as Astrov in Uncle Vanya, the still-not-disillusioned doctor not a million miles from his not-quite-yet-disillusioned pianist in Five Easy Pieces.
It's so close, this delight. All you have to do is laugh and the world will be full of it. And in his early films Nicholson keeps trying СКАЧАТЬ