Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers. Antonia Quirke
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers - Antonia Quirke страница 9
Название: Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers
Автор: Antonia Quirke
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780007323494
isbn:
10 October 1993
The elephants, who have not
been getting on with the new rhino, slept through the exhibition which was being held in the elephant house at the zoo last night (Monday) by an Israeli artist who arrived in the country only yesterday (Monday) before returning to Tel Aviv tomorrow (Wednesday).
‘No wonder you failed your fucking degree,’ Jim said. ‘Nobody cares when the artist is going back or what the rhino thinks. You want to know who was there and how long it's on for. See?’
‘Got it. Except – what's wrong with the rhino exactly?’ I wanted to keep him talking.
‘Even if the rhino's doing the elephant's wife, we don't want to read about it. That's not the fucking story. You've got to find the story.’
But I never could – two-hundred-word pieces unstoppably ballooned, like Rufus Sewell, into vast paunchy monsters, and then were brutally slimmed down again (like Rufus Sewell) by brisk sub-editors. And the Journal, for all its apparent slapdashness, was a very serious little operation, with a sinecure on the Local Newspaper of the Year Award. Eric knew what he was doing, always running the necessary campaigns and magnificently inclusive little obituaries of local burglars and tramps. So I was aware that it was something of a test when he sent me to talk to a woman who was staging a protest in Arlington Road about the poll tax. It was an important story and I had a sense that I might actually be sacked, and never see Jim again, if I couldn't find it.
‘Where the fuck have you been?’ said Jim when I returned five hours later.
‘I think Mrs Norman's a bit paranoid,’ I said. ‘She thinks the FBI are watching her. But – it's actually quite interesting. There were two guys in a dark car watching the house the whole time I was there. Wearing ties. In this weather? It does seem a little strange. And get this – she keeps getting letters from the library asking her to return a book on J. Edgar Hoover. But she never took it out. So I wrote down the licence number in case you want to follow it up.’
I was demoted to theatre reviews.
‘What's the date, the first?’
‘Look at the paper. Oh, no, wait, of course it's the first – it was Halloween last night. What's the matter?’
‘River Phoenix is dead. It looks like an overdose.’
‘Poor kid. Deliberate or accidental? Bet it was coke. Coke and booze. Bet it's a John Bonham. What's the matter with you?’
What's the matter with me? Nothing. There was nothing to show that he was ever going to be great. In fact, you could pretty much guarantee that he wouldn't have been. But he wasn't Andrew McCarthy Jnr, or Ralph Macchio, or C. Thomas Howell either. He wasn't Björn Andrésen, the vision from Death in Venice, who was never going to be an actor. On the other hand, he wasn't Jean-Pierre Léaud. But he broke your heart. He was weak and soft and seemingly always in tears. In Running on Empty, a pretty good film which he made at the age of seventeen in 1988, he was the sort of teen dream that sends girls sobbing to their bedrooms, and yet there was nothing confected about him. He plays the son of parents on the run from the FBI, so he has to keep moving from town to town, leaving his friends and first girlfriends behind. It's an amazingly immature performance for one of his age, as they never say. It's so not mature. It's brilliant. When my little sister watched Titanic she was inconsolable for weeks. ‘There's no one like Jack!’ she would wail and I'd think yeah, kid, that's right. There is no one like Jack. They just made him up for money. But there is someone like River Phoenix, sweetheart. Phoenix is an open wound in Running on Empty, with clumsy hands and an uneasiness with his own new beauty (he'd been a chubby kid – Stand By Me), and a bloom of puberty still on his cheekbones. Large stretches of his performance look like perfect honesty, too natural to call naturalism. He was Romeo, and no one can ever get Romeo right, because by the time you've cast him the actor's got too old. Running on Empty isn't a good performance by an unfortunately doomed actor. It's a true moment caught in time. The moment when you feel more than you ever have or ever will again: the Romeo moment. There he was. And you can't pay an actor a higher compliment than that. He broke your heart. And the date was 31st October 1993.
On Mondays he would go down to the police station and then the Princess Louise, coming back late and maybe even sleeping in the office. On Tuesdays he would usually go down to Paddington Green CID to get stories there and spend the evening at a public meeting. On Wednesdays he was busy putting the paper to bed. Thursdays and Fridays – that was my chance. The long, long weekends he disappeared. If you'd have been there, you'd have wanted to be his friend or his lover, if only to turn his fire outwards from you. Jim was the first principled man I had ever met, my father apart, sardonic and fearless like Sydney Carton. He was the first man I had ever met. But I hardly ever saw him now, and had no real reasons to engage him in conversation. So I became more besotted. The sentence ‘Jim's putting the paper to bed’ could incapacitate me for an hour. Yet he was as oblivious of me as an actor on a screen, and one always falls for those who cannot return your gaze, the blithe, the unaware, the one across the lawn.
In the single-figure audiences at the pub theatres where I was sent to review plays and where the actors could detect my gaze, I yearned for Jim and for the remove of the big screen, where actors moved in innocence of my eyes. My first plan was to impress him with the commitment of my reviews. I found out a lot of statistics and waved them at him like breasts at the pub on Thursday.
‘Did you know that there are 38,000 members of Equity, and at any one time only 13,400 are actually in work? It's shocking.’
‘In what way shocking?’
‘It's union-bashing, isn't it? Listen, these are working people. If there are fifty fringe theatres in London and they've got a cast of, let's say, an average of six per play, then that's, uh, 300 people, and if the Equity minimum is £85 a week, then that's 300 people living on a pittance. Eighty-five pounds a week!’
‘That's more than twice what you earn, love.’
My other plan was simply to write such astonishingly unforgettable reviews – reviews you could poke your eye out on – that notice would simply have to be paid. They СКАЧАТЬ