Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions (33 page)

'Yes, let's talk about films. Films are my sector, my "cup of tea", as they say - in England.' He looks up in wonder.

'I think I'm going to have a cigar. You want one? . . . What drew me to the character of Tess was her incredible integrity combined with her - submission? No, submissiveness - and her fatalism. She never complains. All these very . . .
unfair
things happen to her, and she never complains until the end. The book is more morally complicated than you at first think. Alec had a cold, materialistic approach to life, but he is not too bad by today's standards.'

'And what do you think of Angel?'

'Oh, Angel to me is a complete shit. He represents to me very much the young man full of revolutionary ideals, but as soon as it affects him personally he turns out to be as hypocritical as everyone else.'

I was obliged to say at this point that the casting of Peter Firth as Angel seemed to be questionable. In fact it is disastrous. Angel must
appear
to have the attributes of a romantic lead. The vulgar truth is that Peter Firth would be fine if he looked more like Robert Redford and less like Jimmy Carter. Polanski shrugged and disagreed, showing no more than mild disappointment. But it was with shared relief that we went on to praise Nastassia Kinski's wonderfully steady performance as Tess. Polanski spoke of her with affectionate admiration - and with a little self-consequence: she is a protegee of his and, naturally, also an ex.

I asked him which of his films he liked most. 'Films are like women', 1 was informed (Polanski thinks quite a few things are like women). 'You always love the last most until the next one comes along.

'But of course there are films for which you have a special feeling. Some of my most praised films -
Rosemary's Baby, Repulsion, The Tenant —
were largely matters of convenience, done because of time or money or to accommodate a certain producer. I wouldn't have
choosen
them, you know? But my head tells me that
Cul de Sac
is my best film — it is the film that is the most self-contained. It only has meaning as a movie, as itself. My
heart
tells me that
The Vampire Killers
[an early title for
Dance of the Vampires]
is my favourite. I get more fond of that film every year. I suppose I am reliving my happiness at the time of making it. It was towards the end of the Sixties. Everyone was full of hope and good spirits. I was making a comedy with people I liked, and of course with Sharon . . . But
Tess
is very dear to me now.'

It would be rash to try to make up your mind about someone like Polanski. He is something of a ranter, his speech dotted with show-biz cliches ('Jack Nicholson - he is a great professional') and self-consciously quotable tags ('I like food, I like women, and best of all I like women who like food' etc, etc). But there is a great deal that is generous, natural, even transparent, about him. His confidence, for example, is a real thing, and not the grinning shambles that often passes for confidence in the film world. Clearly he has sometimes gone too far into the gratifications that his fast-lane milieu offers him, as the case in California amply demonstrates. But he has survived an extraordinary life, and is still himself.

After lunch he invited me to his cutting-room in the Champs Elysées, where he is preparing
Tess
for the English and American versions. It was a gloomy flat, full of gloomy, Gitane-smoking Frenchmen. Polanski spent twenty minutes cutting half a second out of a reaction-shot to a fresh stage in Tess's doleful decline. I asked him if he was worried that the film might be mistakenly regarded as a blow for Women's Liberation.

'What?
Tess responds appropriately to events, and as an individual. Women's Lib is an absurdity! A few just postulates do not make a movement just. How can one half of the species organise against the other half? There's not anyone who said at certain time, "That's the way women behave." Things are the way they are because of evolution! This is the way it is between monkeys, between dogs and between butterflies!'

'What about spiders?'

'Spiders, mm,' he said, nodding and looking serious. 'No, male spiders don't have a good time. Maybe they should get together and do something about it. I don't know.'

Tatler, 1980

MADONNA

Originally I came, not to review Madonna, but to interview her. Now, when you are circling round a star of this magnitude — stacked like a package tourist above her fogbound airport - you never negotiate with the star herself. You negotiate with her people or, in best post-modern style, with her people's people: her agent's agent, her assistant's secretary's assistant's secretary. The messages come back in a remote and cautious cipher. At first it looked as though Madonna had singled me out as someone she was especially keen to see. (Truman Capote, I remembered, gave the same impression, an impression gravely qualified towards the end of the interview when he abruptly addressed me as 'Tony'.) A few days later Madonna apparently decided that, on the contrary, she didn't want to see me at all. The reason she seemed to be giving was this: I was too famous. Madonna (I wanted to tell her), don't say another word. I completely understand.

Wearily I was envisioning my arrival at Kennedy Airport. As the Concorde taxied to a halt, its engines already outscreamed by the fans gathered on the terminal rooftop, my security guards would be patrolling the runway, using their infra-red binoculars to scan the skies for media helicopters. Paparazzi disguised as ground crew and maintenance men would vex my progress through immigration and customs.

The real trouble would begin in Arrivals. By this time the unconscious bodies of twelve-year-old Martin Amis look-alikes and wannabes would be heaped up by the improvised paramedical tents, as, with a slight movement of my left forefinger, I signalled to the police chief to start fire-hosing the crowds that besieged the waiting motorcade ...

MAIMED BY MADONNA ran the
Sun
headline, after one of its reporters had managed to sprain his ankle in a Madonna crush (probably by throwing himself under her car). I had simply been Aimed by Madonna. But I went along anyway, out of aroused interest, and fellow feeling, to review Madonna — or more particularly Madonna's new book:
Sex.

In the old, benighted, pre-modern days, a new book was normally sent to the reviewer, encased in a jiffy-bag or, under exceptionally glamorous circumstances, a Federal-Express wallet. But Madonna is perhaps the most post-modern personage on the planet, so in this case the reviewer was sent to the book, by supersonic aeroplane. The book lives under lock and key in the Sixth Avenue skyscraper of Time Warner, and in a few other hurriedly Fort-Knoxified locations. There have already been leaks and thefts, involving police investigations and, in one case, an FBI 'sting' operation. Most books submitted for review are top secret, in the sense that nobody knows anything about them. But Madonna always tends to do things the other way round.

The reviewer gets cleared and tagged, and gauntly rides the elevator to the tenth floor. He gives his name and sits waiting in a vestibule whose shelves are adorned with recent Time Warner offerings: rock biogs, real-life murder stories, accounts of financial delinquencies, mystery novels, fluff novels, novels written by two or more co-novelists. Summoned within, the reviewer sees on someone's desk a copy of a book - a whole book - called
Why Men Have Nipples.

We're in the editor's actual office now. But before the book is at last produced, the reviewer is obliged to sign a long and menacing legal agreement. 'You agree that Warner and/or Madonna', it says, among much else,

shall be entitled to issuance of an
ex parte
temporary restraining order, and a preliminary and permanent injunction against you for any threatened or actual violation of this agreement, and shall not be required to post a bond to secure such relief.

The reviewer boldly signs. And then, in an atmosphere of laughable solemnity, the book is grimly shoved across the desk. When it eventually hits the shops,
Sex
will be swaddled in a kind of nuclear-hardened polythene sachet, unbreachable except by carving knife or chainsaw. (The sachet will bear a warning: This Book Contains Adult Material And Its Exterior Packaging Reflects The Controversial and Sensitive Nature Of What Is Inside. But the main angles, clearly, are to intensify suspense and to thwart the browser.) Here in the office, though,
Sex
stood proudly unsheathed, naked as nature intended, and massive, with its spiral binding and aluminium covers. The reviewer is suffered to sit with it for an hour on a sofa, monitored throughout. He is not allowed to discuss it with anyone afterwards. And he is not allowed to take notes.

Looking through a hundred-odd cardboard pages of Madonna and others in the nude and semi-nude was, as expected, no great hardship in terms of tedium, though to be frank (and there isn't much point, hereabouts, in being anything else) she hasn't done a damned thing for me physically since she went blonde and hardbody
circa
1986. (The time I liked her was in the
Desperately Seeking Susan
period: 'the indolent, trampy goddess', as Pauline Kael described her.) I also reposed considerable trust in my own jadedness: Madonna might shock Middle America, but she wasn't about to shock this reviewer. And yet I will admit to
being mildly disquieted by Sex — by its hostile iteration, by its latent anger and impatience, above all, perhaps (and to this I will return), by its palpable otherness.

The opening chunk of Sex is all hard-edged and black-and-white and predominantly gay and punk and sado-masochistic in its themes. Nothing here or elsewhere in the book is technically hard-core, but the milieu is in itself pornographic, and darkly pornographic: the heavy-gay, pre-AIDS sex-crypts of downtown Manhattan - one of which, I recollect, was undesigningly called The Toilet. The joint featured in Sex, anyway is called The Vault, a sooty basement furnished with lockers and urinals and, this being Madonna, religious knick-knacks like crosses and candles, before which she poses as if entombed or ready for sacrifice.

We also glimpse Madonna in mid-threesome with two girl skinheads covered in tattoos and with every stray protuberance pierced with pins and rings. In one photograph they hold a knife to Madonna's throat; in another, to her groin. The men on view here sport the half-dressed-policeman look of outdated career gaydom; in the elastic bands of their jockstraps Madonna's head is variously entangled. She is also often seen at the centre of a great press of gay-male flesh, in 'playful' gang-rape scenarios. The atmosphere recalls the intent, aggressive, leathery, specialist sexuality of the Seventies; the actors are a dedicated janitoriat in the venereal boiler-room.

After a while the book starts cooling down and brightening up. Many of the snaps that follow could be out of
Playboy
or
Penthouse
or even
Health and Efficiency.
There are some striking 'found' set-ups, where the dare element is simply a result of location: Madonna half-nude in a dumbstruck pizza parlour; Madonna on the kerbside in Miami, wearing only high heels, a handbag and a cigarette. The diversification in tone is accompanied by a diversification in personnel and 'preference'. Characteristically - indeed crucially — Madonna's bawdy house has many mansions: hardly anyone who isn't already in jail need feel at all locked out.

Apart from gays and sado-masochists, Hispanics and blacks are of course represented in all inter-ethnic combinations. There are cross-dressers and androgynists. There are posed encounters with the very old and the very young. There is even a shot of Madonna looming over a belly-up Alsatian with an expression of fond indulgence on her face. And the book winds up with a solid reversion to hot-sheets sleaze: an eight-page narrative of stills with paste-on speech bubbles, depicting a fuddled orgy in a cheap hotel room, during which a grimy rock musician has sex with, among others (Madonna included), his sister. Then the acknowledgments, in predictable style: private jocularity plus apocalyptic gratitude.

Interspersed with the pictures are sections of scrawled or printed prose from Madonna's own pen. These include various bites of sexual advice, some of which might be seen as contradictory. The now-familiar sloganising about condoms ('Safe sex saves lives') is soon followed by a paranthetical few words about sodomy, hailed as 'the most pleasurable' form of sex although it 'hurts the most too'. Not that
that's
a contradiction, in these pages, where pain gets a consistently good press (on bondage: 'Like when you were a baby your mother strapped you to the car seat. You wanted to be safe - it's an act of love').

Other prose sections include accounts of erotic dreams (too boringly circumstantial to be anything but authentic), a series of letters addressed to 'Johnny' (about how the authoress is languidly toying with Ingrid while they thirst for Johnny's return), sexual reverie or heightened reminiscence (trashily generic, with such biological unlikelihoods as the Madonna figure visibly 'gushing' in orgasm), dating tips ('The best way to seduce someone is by making yourself unavailable. Don't fuck them for the first five dates.'), cute panegyrics to her own genitalia ('I love my pussy. I think it's a complete summation of my life'), and a smattering of sexual slogans in praise of freedom, individual choice, lack of inhibition, and courage to explore your etc., etc. 'A lot of people are afraid to say what they want and so they don't get what they want.' But the book, remember, is presented as fantasy, a realm in which it is presumably okay to get what you want, even if it's your sister, or your dog.

Opinions on
Sex
will divide sharply, and will further subdivide when the book is dutifully processed by the innumerable interest — and target — groups that make up Madonna's mysteriously vast constituency. All the Middle-American, Dan-Quaylean moralistic objections can be concentrated as follows: if the identikit Madonna fan is still the thirteen-year-old lookalike and wannabe — then what? 'Let's face it,' as Madonna herself said recently, while complaining about the obsessed teens who camp outside her New York apartment, 'they're not that bright.' Any role model, in America today, must be ready for accusations of irresponsibility or even - to use the phrase unintentionally popularised by Woody Allen — 'abuse of trust'.