Not My Father's Son (2 page)

“You get your hair cut properly! Do you hear me?” he said, rage abating, coming down, spent.

“Yes,” I tried not to whimper.

He whacked me across the back of my head and was gone. The shed door banged, and I was left to climb down from the bench. I made sure to clean up the mess. I gathered in my hands the clumps of my hair that had fallen to the floor and took them to the trash can outside. I returned to the shed once more to make sure everything was back to normal, and then switched off that lone lightbulb and headed back into the house. I heard the sound of my dad’s van heading up the sawmill yard and I stopped for a moment, filled with shock and relief that he was gone.

In the bathroom I drank some water from the tap. Bits of hair fell into the sink as I drank and I could feel droplets of blood on my neck. Finally I stood up and stared at my reflection.

I looked like a concentration camp inmate, and I wanted to die. Really, in that moment I wanted to die. My mum tried to tidy up the mess with scissors, to make it look less uneven, but there were patches that actually had no hair left at all, that couldn’t be disguised. I would have to go to school looking like this. I cried all through the night. The next morning my eyes were so red and puffy they were almost closed, but I was glad because they detracted from my head. I told my teachers I had reached up to a high shelf and knocked over a jar of creosote (a wood preservative made from tar) and some had gone in my eyes. When asked about my hair, I said I had tried to cut it myself.

I
have had more hairstyles than most men of my age have had hot dinners.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out that part of the reason I have so enjoyed changing the color, length, and look of my follicles over the years is something to do with reclaiming the power my father took from me in this regard (as well as many others) as a child. My hair has been blond several times, it has been short and spiky, long and floppy, sleek, shaggy, and everything in between. I’ve even faced the clipper demons and shaved my own head more than once.

It took a while to get to this place, though. In my late teens, there were several occasions when I was in a hair salon and would suddenly feel nauseated, and twice I actually vomited, not realizing till many years (and quite a lot of therapy) later that my body was manifesting physically what I could not yet cope with emotionally. I clearly had some deeply suppressed and deeply painful coiffure memory. But after I had left home, and was free from my father’s grip, I began to make my hair a symbol of my own freedom. One time at drama school, in a particularly semiotic act of self-assertion, I actually agreed to my youthful locks being dyed purple by an overzealous hairdressing student and went back to the parental home for the weekend with my head held high and nothing, not a word, was said about it. (I did wear a purple sweater as well, in an attempt to divert all the attention, but still, it was ballsy, don’t you think?!)

I suppose what I am saying is . . . I am okay. I survived my father. We all did—my mother, my brother, and me—literally as well as figuratively. But as with all difficult things, it was a process. But more of that later.

I
am standing on the stage of a huge marquee that houses the Cinema Against AIDS Gala in the gardens of the Hôtel du Cap, just outside Cannes. I am looking out at a sea of rich, tanned, chatty French people, all sipping champagne and gossiping to each other and ignoring me and smoking, smoking, smoking.

I should point out that I am not alone on this stage. I am flanked by Patti Smith and Marion Cotillard, and the three of us are just standing there, and absolutely nothing is happening. Luckily, nobody in the audience is paying any of us any attention at all, and it feels like we are trapped in celebrity aspic.

Suddenly the reverie is broken by a sheepish voice that turns out to be my own, saying into the microphone, “Um, sorry about this delay, ladies and gentlemen, we’re, eh, just waiting for Mary J. Blige to return to the stage so we can auction off a duet with her and Patti.”

Patti Smith’s head whipped round towards me so fast I actually felt a draft. Panic made her eyes seem even more otherworldly than I’d remembered when she’d passed me on her way to the stage earlier in the evening. Right now she was the spitting image of one of those girls in
The Crucible,
fresh from a hellish vision.

{Courtesy of Getty Images; photographer, Francois Durand.}

“What?” she spat. “What would we even sing together? No one told me about this!”

You may not know it but Patti Smith is prone to spitting. I first met her at a party in a New York City clothing store a couple of years earlier. She sang a few songs as cute young people in black milled around serving canapés and champagne to less cute older people in black. It wasn’t very rock and roll, but then Patti changed all that. In between two of her songs, she spat. Not an “Oops I’ve got a little something stuck on my tongue” kind of spit, but a great big throat-curdling gob of a spit. A
loogie
as they say in the Americas. And she spat
on the carpet
. Several times.

No mention was made of Patti’s spitting by anyone in the store, least of all me, when I was taken to meet her after the performance. As we were introduced I could see Patti sizing me up rather suspiciously with her Dickensian eyes.

“You’re the mystery guy, aren’t you?” she said, pupils widening in recognition.

“What?” I said, a little overwhelmed.

“You’re the guy who hosts
Masterpiece
on PBS, aren’t you?” she said, as though she herself were one of the TV detectives I did indeed introduce as
Masterpiece Mystery
host. I was just processing the fact that Patti Smith was an avid viewer of Miss Marple and Co. when she dealt me another body blow:

“I’ve always wanted that job,” she muttered wistfully.

I made a pact with myself right there and then never to tell the
Masterpiece
people this information, as they would surely bump me and make Patti’s wish come true.

Can you imagine Patti Smith coming out of the shadows in a black suit, spouting forth about Inspector Linley or some malfeasance on the Orient Express and ending each introduction with a resounding gob into a specially designed PBS spittoon? I can. It would be a lot more entertaining than that bloke in a suit with the funny accent they have on now.

Meanwhile, Marion had walked to the side of the stage and was shouting to anyone who would listen, “Do something! Do something!!”

I admired her Gallic sense of injustice, but I knew her cries would be in vain. These kinds of events, though seemingly glamorous and sophisticated from the outside, are often organized with the finesse of a kindergarten nativity play, and one whose teachers are all lapsed members of Narcotics Anonymous.

Patti and I were left center stage, both numb. She was presumably running through the list of songs she and Mary J. Blige might both know, which
can’t
have taken long.

I was thinking back to earlier in the evening. I had started the show with a song (“That’s Life”—how sadly apposite it now seemed) and a monologue in which I was purporting to channel the spirit of Sharon Stone, the event’s usual host and whose shoes I was filling, as it were. Alas, the crowd was underwhelmed. The only time the drone of chat slightly faltered was when I briefly made them think Sharon was watching the proceedings via a webcam from the film set that forbade her presence. “So make sure you bid high,” I had warned. “Cos that bitch will cut you.”

A small crowd had gathered at the side of the stage, some offering advice, others offering their services to fill the embarrassing gap. Suddenly Harvey Weinstein, the movie mogul and the man whose genius idea it had been to auction off the duet between Patti and Mary J. in the first place, came rushing in from a side door and blurted out that he had just been ripped a new one by Ms. Blige. A visible and voluble tremor rippled throughout the gaggle of glitterati. Harvey does not get dressed down by anyone, ever, let alone a ferocious R & B legend who was on her way home when she heard her name being announced for a duet she also knew nothing about. Harvey had that detached air of someone who had just been mugged. I had a sudden thought that witnessing his encounter with Mary J. would have made a much better auction item than a duet between the two ladies, but I used my inside voice and kept that to myself. Harvey mopped the sweat from his brow and said that Mary had finally acquiesced and would be out in a moment, presumably when she had finished wiping his blood off her Louboutins.

As Mary, Harvey, and Patti returned to the stage, smiling as though they had planned all this years before, I fled the tent and snuck off to the hotel bar to drown my sorrows. I realized I had never actually liked Cannes. Well, I like
Cannes,
the actual town. What I’m not so keen on are those few weeks every May when the town is marauded by movie folk.

My first ever Cannes was in 1992, when my debut feature film,
Prague,
premiered there. Looking back, it was all a giddy blur. The only film festival I had ever been to before then was back home in Scotland, when a film I had made in my last term of drama school, Gillies McKinnon’s
Passing Glory,
had its premiere at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1986. I remember that experience very vividly because it was the first time I had ever seen myself on the big screen and I was horrified by how my nose seemed to appear at least fifteen seconds before the rest of my face. A less confident man might have avoided the camera for life.

But I soldiered on, and here I was, not strolling up the Lothian Road and popping into the Edinburgh Film House, but cruising the Croisette and
monter l’escalier
of the Palais des Congrès! That week I realized for the first time that glamour actually had a
smell
. But also I was reminded that the industry I was in was show
business
.

Film festivals are really just business conventions, you see. It could be photocopiers, it could be shower curtains, Cannes just happens to be movies. And I think any business convention, even such a glamorous one as the Cannes Film Festival, can only be interesting for so long because too many people are talking too much about the
same thing:
their jobs or
product—
as not just photocopiers and shower curtains but also films are referred to nowadays. Now don’t get me wrong, I love my job, I love talking about films, but if that’s the only topic of conversation available for days at a time, I get a serious bout of ennui.

That night, in my beautiful room in the Hôtel du Cap that looked out onto the stunning terrace that sloped down to the twinkling Mediterranean where the little dinghies of paparazzi bobbed in the wake, I had funny dreams. I dreamed I was back onstage in the tent and Harvey was auctioning off a kiss with me starting at thirty thousand dollars, and nobody was bidding! The fact that this had actually happened to Ryan Gosling earlier that evening only further fueled the nightmare.

“No, Harvey,” I kept saying. “Be more realistic. Start at a hundred pounds!”

I also dreamed of my mum, feverishly knitting lots and lots of pairs of socks to give as Christmas presents to all the new Asian relations she was about to acquire.

Yes, I’ll run that by you again. You see, the very next day, I was to fly to London to prepare for the filming of an episode of the BBC TV show
Who Do You Think You Are?,
a very popular program in which celebrities have their genealogy investigated, and studious, balding men in tweed jackets with leather patches on the elbows help the celebs pore over ancient parchments wherein family secrets are hidden. But not for long of course, as a hitherto unpredictable secret is revealed, and then the celeb cries.

I had been asked at the end of the previous year if I would be interested in taking part in the show, and had immediately said yes. Then came the rather unnerving few months when the production company people went off and did some initial research to see whether or not my past was worthy of a full hour-long probe. In other words, they needed to determine whether my ancestors were interesting enough. Being an actor, I am very used to the notion of waiting for people to pass judgment on me—audiences, critics, awards juries, fashion police—all do it with such alarming regularity that it has
almost
ceased to be alarming. But this was different. This time the judgment was not about me, and yet it reflected on me.

And I wanted very dearly to do this show because it would give me the opportunity to get to the bottom of a mystery in my mum’s side of the family, a mystery whose received explanation I had never fully bought and knew would be resolved by the program once and for all. And hence the dream about my mum knitting socks for all those new family members I imagined I was going to unearth.

Well, actually, there were two family mysteries. The other one involved my dad’s side, the Cumming clan of Cawdor. Yes,
that
Cawdor, “Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be what thou art promised” and so on. Cawdor is a little village surrounded by forest and farmland in the north of Scotland, and Shakespeare had set
Macbeth
there without bothering to research the fact that the real Macbeths never set foot in the place because they died three hundred years or so before Cawdor Castle was even built. (This lack of attention to historical detail is more grist to the mill for my theory that Shakespeare, if he were alive today, would be writing for TV. But somewhere classy, though.)