The Colonel's Daughter (24 page)

You may think the question of the
Spotlight
pics is a bit of a waffle (this writing course is tediously keen on the word relevance), but I don't think it is. You see, my pic was actually taken in '79 (hair darker, bags minimal,
you
know . . .) and in it I look so absolutely dead right for the part of the Duke of Buckingham that I was offered it sight unseen, or virtually. I did have lunch with the producer, Alfie Morton, before contracts went out, but Alfie likes to lunch at
The Rasputin
, an utterly excruciating Russian restaurant he thinks is de riguer for the famous, and luckily the bloody Rasputin is so dark – and I mean
pitch
– that you honestly can't tell whether the cav in your blinis is red or black. So you see, in those conditions I could still make thirty-five; Alfie stares at me like an icon over our red-glassed candle and his only worry is, is my voice, which viewers hear almost nightly extolling the nutrient virtues of a catfood called Tiggo, too domesticated a tool for the cadences of the haughty duke? He decides no, and he's right. The reason I got the Tiggo VO is that my voice is – and I say this without vanity – my greatest asset as an actor. I'm not a deep person; I know my failings. Life's a bit of a game to me, a bit of a tap-dance. But my voice is redolent with depth. It's as if it was engendered in one of those
grottes
the green Michelin guides keep encouraging you to visit. It reverbs. It has texture. I'd be dead on for Son et Lumière. I'm wasted on frigging catfood – but that's television for you, and my bank manager isn't complaining. So I have no difficulty convincing Alfie Morton that he and old ‘Eyelids' Mordecai, our illustrious director, have made the right choice.

By the time we get to coffee, Alfie's making his ‘Welcome Aboard' speech and I know I've got the duke. I actually begin to rattle with excitement: a four-month shoot, one month of which will be in Greece. And Will Nichols playing King James. With Will's name on the picture, it's certainly going to get coverage. It's a major movie alright: Jon Markworthy on script, Billy Nettlefold on cameras, the Morton/Mordecai clout with distributors, Will in his first screen role for over two years, and me. After lunch with Alfie (I put my shades on the minute we get anywhere near natural light) I brisk along to Dougie, my agent, and to my utter amazement he produces a bottle of Taylor's port from a filing cabinet marked ‘Clients SS'. I'm much too surprised by the Taylor's gesture to ask Dougie what ‘SS' stands for.

When I got home, I took my trousers off and examined my legs. My bathroom's all mirrors, so I shot little glances at them from every angle. They're okay. I'm five eleven. But they're not the exquisite legs the Duke displays in that picture of him in the Portrait Gallery. Those legs look as if they begin at his armpits, and my thighs seem positively neanderthal by comparison. But then I remembered that Will Nichols is a short man – sturdy and stubby – so that compared to his legs, I thought mine would have a touch of the gazelle about them. Heaven knows why I was so worried about legs. There were far more excruciating things to worry about, had I known it at the time (as the lion said to the unicorn), but I was all breezy innocence and excitement! I got out a pair of ancient bermudas and stuffed them out with a couple of cushions to make them look like hose. Protruding from these, my legs looked plain ridiculous. It's at times like these, with cushions puffing out my bum, that I'm thankful I live alone. At least, after everything that happened, I haven't lost my sense of humour!

*

Reading this, I see that there are two exclamation marks in my last para. The writing course says ‘use these sparingly'. May have to cross them out in my rewrite. And the joke about the unicorn: ‘Avoid doubtful and distasteful humour' says the bloody course. Never mind. I'll leave it in for now.

*

There was one fact which, from the start of this film, I found slightly odd, but which no one else remarked on: namely, Will Nichols, about to play the most Scottish king since Macbeth, was Welsh. I'd long ago seen Will Nichols grapple with a Scots accent in one of those thunderous war movies that are all about detonating bridges over the Rhine, and he'd done dismally. His voice has what I'd call gusto, but it's unmistakable Welsh gusto. He can do a passable English baronet, but not (well, I don't think he can) a Scots king. I felt like saying to Morton: you might as well cast an American, love, and have done with it. But by the time I was offered Buckingham (the juiciest film part I've ever had) Will Nichols's name was on the project and there it would stick. Over the Taylor's, Dougie told me that at least Will was off the booze.

I'll tell you what I knew about Will at that time. (You'll know most of it already. His life is pretty well public knowledge.) He'd crawled onto a stage bent double from his deprived childhood in a Welsh mine, straightened up enough to do a memorable Hamlet aged twenty, married a then star of the English stage called Myrtle Bridehead, years his senior and opposite whom he played a rather chunky Romeo. (Myrtle Bridehead as Juliet, nudging thirty-seven, was one of the finest embarrassments of my protected youth.) He'd then been whisked off to America. In Hollywood, he began to make a string of romantic movies and by the age of thirty he was a flash name and a millionaire. He should have died then. Or am I being unfair? He's done one or two respectable things since then – he's now forty-seven, looks older – but his fame has bred on itself, rather than on additions to itself, if you get my drift. He dumped Myrtle the minute LA swam into vision through the smog and only played a bit-part at her suicide two months later. Rumour has it that since Myrtle, the last scales of Welsh conformism have fallen from his eyes and that from that time he has tangled off-screen only with men and boys. His most faithful companion of recent years has been the whisky bottle. His Welsh lungs have begun to sound as if they're filling up with coal. Despite all this, he's still a bankable star.

As to me (virtually unknown Steve Nias), I tried to prepare myself meticulously for Buckingham, and I don't just mean staring at my legs. Jon Markworthy's script suggested a relationship between Buckingham and King James which, if it wasn't a love affair in the understood sense, was as least as passionate as one. Now I loathe ambiguity. So I spent hours in Chelsea Public Library trying to decide for myself precisely what the nature of this friendship was – and failing. History itself is ambiguous on the subject, as I might have guessed. So all I had to go on were Markworthy's scenes. In one of these, I am summoned in the middle of the night from the bed of my wife, Katherine, to the bedchamber of the king. I arrive breathless, and no wonder. The king stammers on about his role as ‘nurturer of peace in this land'. I, wearing a night robe (that turned out to resemble and to be as heavy as a forty foot drape) start to mutter ominously about the need to take England to war. A verbal scuffle ensues. The King starts to weep. I hold him and he kisses me.
Lorks!
In the run-up to my first meeting with Will Nichols, I phoned Dougie and asked for a meeting with Markworthy and Eyelids re the persistent ambiguity of this and other scenes. Dougie simply laughed and told me to stop jittering.

*

I can't leave
lorks
in. But this one word conveys precisely what I felt every time I read this scene. One of the commandments of the Eric Neasdale Writing Course is ‘avoid ejaculations where possible.'
Lorks
is an undoubted ejaculation. Oh well. Perhaps something else will come to me in the middle of the night, as they say. N.B. I must take this piece of work seriously. I would seriously like to become a writer. But writing about ‘real events' seems to have its little problems.

*

Before I plunge in to the main thrust of my story (this last is a shitty sentence and must go), I think I ought to say a word or two about my life – as it was before I met Will Nichols, and as it is becoming again.

I came to acting from dancing. The love of dance hasn't entirely left me and I sometimes do little dance routines on the flat roof of my Fulham top-floor flat, among my plants. I grow cucumbers on this roof in the summer and shrubs and herbs and roses all the year round, in big tubs and old baths and sinks. I never grow tomatoes because I'm allergic to them. This allergy makes some dinners problematical: you find tomato in almost everything from
daube
to
douglère
, from Bolognese to braised oxtail, and the unsightly neck rashes I then have to endure are one of the penances of an otherwise quietly agreeable and civilised life.

I live alone, as I said, but I'm seldom actually lonely. I lived with someone called David for a year and with someone called Donovan for about nine months. Otherwise, I've always lived alone since I left school and home. My mother is an elderly person and safely put away in a home for elderly persons near Swindon. My father, who disapproved of me and all my works till his dying day, mercifully reached his dying day in 1976, and since then I've felt guilty about nothing and fairly positive about most things.

The money I make from Tiggo and other VOs I do for ITV have brought me a high standard of living, even though I don't get as much acting work as I'd like. Between you and me, I'm not that fantastic an actor. I've got my following because, as you've guessed from the Buckingham thing, I'm still fairly morbidly handsome. Sexually, I'm what they call alert and I honestly don't have any difficulty in that
département.
My West Indian cleaner, Mrs Baali (I call her Pearl Barley. That's the kind of joke that's typical me) is allowed to tease me about my boyfriends, but I keep them low profile. ‘Sex = love' is pure romanticism, pure bunkum, in my view. Jon Markworthy at least understood this in his famous script, if nothing else. I'm a very meticulous person, day to day. I like clean things. Lately, I've been a slut, though. I've had weekends when I didn't wash or shave or go out or wash up. Pearl Barley's been dying to comment. She's like a huge, wobbling brown fruit, my Pearl Barley, and comment on my sluttishness has been on the brink of bursting out of her for several weeks, I can tell. But she hasn't cracked yet. She's a loyal woman. I'm not all that loyal myself, but I value it in others.

Well, that's me. Enough said. On to the main thrust, as they say: my love affair.

I was forty-one the day I met Will Nichols for the first time face to face. An odd coincidence that this project should kick off on my birthday, 6 May. In fact, it had kicked off months before of course, but old Eyelids actually sat down with his lead actors on 6 May in what appeared to be the boardroom of his Wardour Street offices, flanked by Markworthy and Morton and Nettlefold and legions of PAs, and over a rather troppo minceur lunch of smoked salmon mould he began to talk about ‘my great new royal baby, King James I'.

‘Eyelids' Mordecai is seventy-eight years old. My allergy to tomatoes (uncomfortable enough, God knows) is but a shade compared to the ghostly army of allergies haunting Mordecai. Mordecai rightly belongs in a Swiss sanitorium, muffled to the neck in polyanimide, breathing cloudless air. Here, he would die calmly, snow would settle on his globally famous eyelids and that would be that. As it is, his quaking body is carried on and off aeroplanes, wheeled around scorching Spanish locations in the modern equivalent of a Bath chair. Some days, even his voice has a quake to it and his brain has patches of blank, like sunspots, and all his instructions fall out of his drooling mouth in slow motion, like elephants' feet. It makes you wonder, when you consider what Mordecai earns per annum, about the film business.

The first thing Will told me about Mordecai – on that first day we met, my birthday – was ‘don't expect him to direct.' I stared at Will. Our bedroom scenes were still some weeks distant, but prior to them I had been banking on a little ‘guidance' from Eyelids. Will then related how, in 1975, Eyelids had cast him as Ulrick Voss in a film he proposed to make of Patrick White's justly famous (but in my view dead difficult) novel,
Voss
. Will invoked his education-deprived childhood to explain his confusion with this man (the casting was moronic, of course. Will Nichols is far too gross a person to play Voss, even in a weightless after-life) and went grovelling to Mordecai for a bit of direction. Mordecai was having one of his quivering and quaking days. They were in southern Australia in temps of 100° fahrenheit (I can't do this centigrade thing; I'm much too old to learn) and Mordecai's brain was blank white. He told poor old Will to read the book five more times (448pp. in my King Penguin edition and Will had one week), went off to have his morning enema and would not brook the subject again. Luckily – or perhaps in consequence of this sad scene – the film was so excruciatingly bad and so catastrophically over-budget, it was put into turnaround half way through and never re-started. Will caught sunstroke that year and in his fever believed he was getting nearer to understanding the hauntings of Ulrick Voss. Will's life is full of little such ironies.

*

I'm a bit off track, I see. The course says: ‘Imagine your subject as a Roman Road (
sic
caps). Its foundation must be your understanding and, except where absolutely necessary, you must try not to veer from it.' I don't know if information about Will and Mordecai is ‘absolutely necessary', but I think it might be. (I hate the word ‘veer'. There was a boy at school called Vere Pickersgill, whom I loathed.) Pearl Barley's just arrived to do me out. She says all this writing I'm closeted with is making me deadly pale. Better phone Dougie and see if there's a little role-ette for me in a hot clime.

*

I had expected to dislike Will Nichols. The fame and success of other actors can bring on neck rashes as badly as the virulent tomato. And who was Steve Nias compared to Golden Will, the lad from the Rhonda turned superstar? A nothing. An ‘SS' in Dougie's vocab. (I'll explain ‘SS' later.) But then – and this is the key to the events which followed – who was George Villiers, later Duke of Buckingham, compared to the king himself? A bit of trumped-up gentry with elongated calves. A hitherto also-ran at the court. Until, that is, the king singled him out. Until the king made him his confidant, his favourite, his own Saint John. With his stubborn Scottish hand, King James parted the sea of court bathers and gave Buckingham the Navy. Henceforth he was dressed, metaphorically anyway, in sapphires.