MASQUES OF SATAN (21 page)

‘Every take this Tony White did was a carbon copy of the previous one,’ said the Director. ‘Not better or worse. I tried to get him to vary his performance but he either wouldn’t or couldn’t.’

‘Perhaps we should get someone else after all,’ suggested Selwyn.

‘No. No,’ said the Director. ‘It’ll do. I think it’ll do very well. It’s just weird.’ I could see that his pride had somehow been hurt.

I had more to do with the following week’s shoot, the one in which the Weetsheefs eater is transported to a sunlit wheat field, because it involved an outdoor location and all its attendant complications. We were allowing two days because of the weather, so hotels had to be booked, catering and transport arranged. I was to go along as Harrison-Hargrave’s representative and general all-round fixer: ‘gofer’ was the commonly used word, but it is one I hate because it brings back bitter memories. Anyway, it was on this shoot that I first got to know Tony White. Again, let me stress, I use the term ‘know’ loosely.

Tony White, the crew, and miscellaneous others like myself had been picked up by car from our London flats at five in the morning and driven down to the location in Wiltshire. There would be a set up in the morning, and in the afternoon, when the sun was in the right place, assuming it put in an appearance, we would shoot.

I remember that when we arrived the weather was fairly promising. It was June and the sun was shining, but there was a wind and some high cloud. The catering van arrived slightly late, for which, of course, I was responsible. It parked in the gateway at the top of the field where we were shooting. There was a brief hiatus, and more grumbling at my incompetence, before, at about eleven or so, the van was ready to serve the first coffee and bacon sandwich of the morning. The freshness of the weather and the delay had given us all an appetite. I deliberately placed myself last in the queue for breakfast, so as not to be subjected to yet more criticism. It therefore came as a shock when I felt my bottom being touched.

There are very few circumstances under which I enjoy this kind of contact, and that morning’s was not one of them. I had been quite unaware of anyone being behind me. I started, turned, and found myself staring into the blandly smiling face of Tony White.

He said: ‘Mmm. Delicious.’ It was his idea of a joke, I suppose.

I had enough self-control not to be violent in either actions or words. Normally I would have been both, but I knew that my job depended on keeping everyone sweet, not least the ‘star’, Tony White. I asked him please not to do that, and he just continued to smile. I could not make out his expression. Was he amused by my annoyance? Did he take pleasure in it? Or was he merely indifferent? There was no way of knowing. For the rest of the day I avoided him.

In the afternoon there was sun and wind. Conditions were not ideal, but we managed a few shots of Tony sitting in his field which were not ruined by a cloud over the sun or the standing wheat moving too much in the breeze. When Tony was not being filmed he sat placidly in a ‘director’s’ deck chair with earphones on, listening to tapes on his Walkman. He was no trouble. I wondered idly what his taste in music was, so got near enough to catch a glimpse of the cassette boxes: Cliff Richard, all of them. Tony turned round and saw me staring at him. He smiled. I had begun to hate his meaningless smile.

At the hotel that evening I was with the crew in the bar before dinner. As usual Jake, the cameraman, dominated the conversation. Jake was huge and bearded, expert at his job, and was considered, not least by himself, to be a ‘character’. He had worked on a number of major films and liked to tell anecdotes featuring himself and ‘Sean’, ‘Michael’, ‘Bobby’, ‘Keanu’, and the like. We were expected to be knowledgeable enough to fill in the famous surnames, the Connerys and the Caines, for ourselves. He was in the middle of one of his stories when Tony White entered the bar, bought himself an orange juice, and walked out again, smiling at us very briefly in the process. These actions had stopped Jake’s flow completely. When Tony had left the bar Jake broke his silence with a string of four-letter words in a number of ugly combinations.

When he had finished, and was refreshing himself with his Guinness and whisky chaser, we asked what was the matter.

‘That bastard gives me the creeps,’ he said

We asked why. One reason, apparently, was that Jake, who liked banter (especially with Sean, Keanu and the others), was unable to get anything out of him: not a laugh, not a rise, nothing. Another thing, though this was in Tony’s favour, was that he hadn’t put a foot wrong all day. Because of the wind and the clouds passing across the sun it had been a difficult afternoon, and the windows of opportunity during which a perfect shot of the sunlit field could be had were small. Nevertheless Tony was there on cue every time giving his bland, identical performance.

‘The man’s a fucking robot,’ Jake concluded. ‘No. He’s a zombie, that’s what he is. A fucking zombie.’

After dinner I was getting into the lift to go up to my room when I found that the only other occupant was Tony, smiling as usual. Having had my feelings about him confirmed by Jake in the bar, I was especially nervous in his presence. I had half a mind to leave the lift and use the stairs, but I loathed the idea of being intimidated.

‘Are you second floor as well?’ he said.

I nodded. He came close to me to press the button. The doors closed. As he took his hand from the button he allowed it to pass across my breasts. It was a light, insinuating touch.

‘I’d rather you didn’t,’ I said.

He merely nodded and moved closer. With his left hand he felt the contours of my body from the waist down to the thigh, at the base of which, just above the knee, his fingers closed round my flesh and began to squeeze tightly. Terror welled up inside me, temporarily paralysing all normal reaction, and before I could regain enough sense to push him away the lift stopped and the doors opened. Tony immediately loosened his grip, walked out of the lift, and went to his room without a backward glance.

I was left gasping: it was as if someone had tried to suffocate me. I went to my room and locked the door. The following day it rained, so we went home early.

A fortnight later the Weetsheefs commercial was released. Nobody, least of all Harrison-Hargrave, had anticipated its effect. Weetsheefs took off like a rocket wherever the commercial was shown. People couldn’t get enough of the stuff, and, though it’s quite palatable as breakfast cereals go, it isn’t that spectacular. Realfoods were delighted with Harrison-Hargrave and decided to put their entire account in our hands. We at Harrison-Hargrave were also delighted, but delight was tempered with perplexity, not to say frustration. What exactly had we done right with this particular commercial? It was not spectacularly original: even, the creative team who devised it admitted that. Perhaps it was the sheer simplicity of the idea that did it. At one of our endless Creative Sessions, Selwyn suggested that it had something to do with that new phrase or word we had coined, ‘mmm-delicious’.

It is true that the term ‘mmm-delicious’ became for a while horribly ubiquitous. I remember going to several dinner parties in Hampstead and Islington at which someone would say something like, ‘Sylvia darling, this cassoulet is positively mmm-delicious!’ Then, because they were sophisticated people, they would deplore their own use of this odious coinage and laugh a good deal. Nevertheless, they used it. It was almost as if they felt compelled to. As for me, I winced and stayed silent. Even my then boyfriend, Doug, started to use it, but I soon stopped that.

Not long after, Harrison-Hargrave and Realfoods decided to launch a second commercial for Weetsheefs. It retained the identical formula of the previous commercial, the only difference being that this time it would not be Tony White who was translated from kitchen to corn field (or wheat field, we never knew the difference) but an attractive Mum and her two pretty children. Everyone at Harrison-Hargrave said, and Realfoods agreed, that the second commercial was even better than the first.

It was, but the public is the final arbiter, and it did not agree. As soon as the new advertisement was introduced into the networks, sales of Weetsheefs, which had been doing phenomenally well, suddenly slumped to a respectable, but disappointing, level. Harrison-Hargrave held an urgent Creative Session at which I was present. All sorts of complicated reasons for the poor results were given, or rather were ‘kicked around’. For once that expression seemed appropriate, since tempers were frayed and real kicks were being aimed at the black leather upholstery, as well as metaphorical ones at other people’s ideas. It surprised me that no one had grasped the obvious solution. In a quiet moment I pointed out that sales of Weetsheefs were still at record levels in Northern Ireland, where the old commercial featuring Tony White had not been superceded.

‘Yes, Lucy, dearest heart, we did know that,’ said Selwyn. ‘The question is, why? That’s what we want to know. Now, do you think your mighty brain can tell us that?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

Selwyn did not take long to recover from his discomfiture. Assuming his most ironic tone he told me that the floor was mine, and that the rest of ‘us humble mortals’ were ‘all ears’. I told them that the difference between the two commercials was that Tony White was in one and not the other. I also mentioned that among the papers in front of them was a survey conducted on behalf of Harrison-Hargrave and Realfoods in which buyers of Weetsheefs had been questioned. Nearly ninety per cent of them had mentioned the phrase ‘Mmm-Delicious’, but always in association with ‘the bloke’,’the chap’, ‘the man’ who said it. It was therefore not so much the commercial which was making people eat Weetsheefs, but Tony White himself.

The suggestion was greeted with derision by almost everyone except, to his credit I suppose, Selwyn. He quelled the hubbub.

‘Okay, okay,’ said Selwyn. ‘This is, after all, a brainstorming session. It’s an idea, even if it is from way out of left field. I like that. It’s blue sky thinking. It’s off the wall, but let’s give it a whirl. Let’s put it on the trampoline and see if it bounces. Let’s drop it off the edge of a cliff and see if it screams when it hits the shingle.’ Like everyone else in Harrison-Hargrave Selwyn talked in clichés, but at least some of them were his own.

So the discussion turned to what, in the extremely unlikely eventuality of my being right, Harrison-Hargrave should do about it. It was Selwyn who came up with what he inevitably called his ‘brain wave’.

‘Let’s give Tony the Chimp Chips,’ he said.

There was a silence, reverent and still, like the silence at the close of a Quaker meeting. Chimp Chips had been known throughout Harrison-Hargrave as ‘the poisoned chalice’. It was another product of Realfoods which they wished to promote. Chimp Chips were a peculiarly disgusting kind of packet snack, in texture half way between a crisp and a biscuit, vaguely cheesy in flavour. The novelty lay in the fact that each individual ‘chip’ had been moulded into the shape of a chimpanzee, hence Chimp Chips. For weeks we had been trying to think of a way to market these repulsive comestibles.

I said: ‘Just get Tony to say: ‘I chomp Chimp Chips. They’re mmm-delicious.’’

‘Okay,’ said Selwyn. ‘We’ll run with that. Or does anyone else want to add some spit to the soup?’ Nobody did, so we ran with it.

Dinah seemed quite unsurprised that we wanted Tony again, and she drove her usual shrewd bargain. He was filmed in the simplest possible manner, in a studio in front of a screen of jungle fronds. He said his memorable words over the faint subtext of drums and monkey hoots. The whole thing was made and released as a ten-second commercial within a couple of weeks, and the effect was instantaneous. Suddenly everybody — and I mean perfectly sane, well-educated people, too — was buying Chimp Chips. Realfoods was inundated with requests for emergency consignments of these horrible morsels to be delivered to shops and supermarkets which had sold out. They were everywhere. You could not go to a drinks party without being offered a Chimp Chip. ‘Have you tried these?’ people would say, ‘they’re rather fun, I think.’ And the worst of it was, your host would look rather offended when you refused. Chimp Chips were even to be found in little bowls at the Private Views of Cork Street art galleries, served as an accompaniment to the tepid Muscadet.

As a result of this remarkable coup, a high-level emergency session was held at Harrison-Hargrave to which I was invited. It would not be true to say that I was exactly a guest of honour, because my part in their triumph was regarded as fluky, almost uncanny. All the same, it was a step up for me to be thought of as a necessary part of the process.

‘Okay,’ said Selwyn. ‘I may as well begin by saying that Realfoods wants Tony to do the Lemongingas ad.’