Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers

The model for Withnail was a failed actor called Vivian MacKerrell whom Robinson knew. But Robinson is a failed actor too. He had parts in Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet and other bits and pieces before turning up, extraordinarily handsome, as the object of Isabelle Adjani's amour fou in Truffaut's The Story of Adele H. (great movie!). He's pretty good. He's really very good. All he gets to do is simply be there while Adjani's wave breaks over him. You'd have to see it, if you haven't already. But after that Robinson's phone wouldn't ring. So he became a writer and did The Killing Fields before Withnail and directing. Then he sort of failed as a director. He continues to sort of fail as a writer. Is there any profession in the world with as high a rate of failure as acting? As the movies as a whole? This is a book about successes (apart from me, obviously) and all the actors I mention share a common trait, because being successful is a trait – they're all one kind of person, whereas partial success or failure is various.

Why not Bruce Robinson? He had a beautiful wide mouth wittily ironised by the quotation-mark lines around it, enormous cool, even greater charisma, talent (see Adele H.), brains, training (RADA), star quality (if you'll excuse the cobwebs on those words), and he talked, well, the guy talked and still talks like the greatest talker in the English language.

‘Vivian was too smart to get a job – an intellectual, erudite man. He'd go to an audition to play a priest, read up all this cackle of theological bollocks and then say, “It's very strange you should be considering me for this part because before I became an actor I was considering the priesthood.” And they knew it was nonsense, so he'd never get the job.’

Just one of the quieter bits from a twenty-page interview he did in 1995. Not a great story, but what is that word ‘cackle’?

Another bit, reluctantly endorsing capital punishment for rapists of children:

‘Dead him, is my view.’

Concerning a Spielberg project about a psychic woman and a child killer, which never got off the ground:

‘It's as black as your hat. This woman bounces off the lino of hell.’

The lino of hell? ‘Black as your hat’ I'm pretty sure is a phrase. But nobody uses it any more. It's remembered or rescued language. What a great phrase anyway, black as your hat – I hope it comes back. But ‘the lino of hell’? ‘Dead him’? A ‘cackle’ of something? You know who he reminds me of? William Shakespeare, that's who. That's what Shakespeare used to do instinctively, that black as a hat, lino of hell thing. He'd make something up (‘the multitudinous seas incarnadine’) and then let the groundlings know what he meant (‘making the green one red’).

I love Bruce Robinson, and all this is merely to remind you of what a great guy he is, this failed actor. Because it's not just the RADA boys who ‘only’ make a dozen films who are failed actors. It's not just the RADA boys who make no films at all who are failed actors. It's not just the boys who didn't get into RADA but still managed a lot of acting who are failed actors. It's not just the boys who were bloody good in the school play but didn't bother taking it any further who are failed actors. It's not even the boys who were OK in the school play but didn't bother taking it any further who are failed actors (like me). It's the boys, that is to say pretty much everyone in the world, who stand in front of the mirror one day, just once, casually, and think shame I'm no actor. They're the failed actors too. Most of this planet consists of failed actors.

So the parting scene at the end of Withnail and I, with its dramatisation of the sorting of the successful from the failed, I find as universal as Rick and Ilsa on the tarmac in Casablanca. The ‘I’ character is moving on, off to Manchester to play the lead in Journey's End. Withnail wants to walk him through Regent's Park to Euston, but it's raining cats and dogs and ‘I’ would rather have a quick clean break. He refuses the wine which Withnail presses on him and asks him to go back, and Withnail, perhaps realising for the first time that he will never play Hamlet (one of the film's motifs), turns to the wolves of the zoo, those same wolves which gave such comfort to Ted Hughes and his children after their mother killed herself, and gives them ‘I have of late, but wherefore I know not …’ Then he turns back through the rain towards Camden, where, if he looked to the right he'd see Park Crescent, where Robert Donat left his milkman's cart in The Thirty-Nine Steps, and if he turned his head further he'd see the cul-de-sac of St Andrew's Place where Glenda Jackson gave Salome's Last Dance for Ken Russell. And then he'd walk past Chester Terrace where Bette Davis scared the kids in The Nanny and down which Robert Redford would drive in Spy Game: all the successful actors. I is a success. I is saved. I wanted to be I, but Jim was I, I thought.

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Jeff Sawtell, the film critic of the Journal, was so much of a communist that he wore navy blue Cultural Revolution pyjamas all year round, adding only a scarf in winter. ‘If you like your brew in a mug,’ he said to my excited inquiry about Four Weddings and a Funeral, ‘then it won't be your cup of tea.’ One got the impression that Jeff thought Jean-Luc Godard was a lickspittle bourgeois dog. A liver disease was making him progressively weaker, however, and Eric had nowhere else to turn but to me. I was thrilled, a thrill vitiated only by the lingering suspicion I had learned reading Jeff that movie reviewing was a branch of Marxist socio-economic theory.

‘Will this do?’ I asked Jim, showing him my first ever review, of a Richard Gere movie called Mr Jones.

It read:

The screen persists in portraying the mentally ill as remarkably gifted on the side. Not only is Mr Jones a virtuoso pianist, he is also a whizzkid mathematician and mind-reader. This kind of publicity does mental health organizations like MIND no good whatsoever.

Umbraged social comment, that was the thing. Plus the MIND charity shop was three doors down from the Journal. I practically killed myself trying to work out why the incontestable Pulp Fiction was somehow despicably pro-capitalist. Also, you had to write something about guns – God knows what, but something about how a gun was in some way very similar to a camera. I knew it was in that kind of area. And there was nobody I could ask at the screening-rooms, where the atmosphere seemed strangely furtive and even shameful, as if one were in a municipal library where near-derelicts came to get out of the cold, and lovingly fold the newspaper into columns. Always, there would be four or five very old critics no longer attached, as far as one could see, to any particular publication, always in macs, always carrying little briefcases as blazons of busyness, grey and indeterminate as pigeons and vigilant over their rations of the free chocolate digestives, with which the pockets of their macs bulged. The husks of critics.

It was only to visit the screening-rooms that I left Jim's bed. There was the need to earn enough money not to be swallowed by London; and there was my lover telling me to stick a bottle of champagne on his tab at Liberties Bar on the High Street and get my arse round to the twenty-third floor. We didn't tell anyone at the Journal – although Eric, with his tactful omniscience, probably knew – and so we were wrapped up as close together as any adulterers. In bed, Jim always seemed doubly naked. It was the only place where he was divested of politics. Restored to his yellow coat, with a bottle of Teacher's, he was back on: ‘Have you ever noticed that the first screen on a cashpoint is actually pleading with you, saying PLEASE INSERT YOUR CARD? Fucking beseeching you to spend your money?’ And I would attempt to reflect this kind of thing in my reviews of movies like The Little Mermaid.

I came to know the pleasant tattiness of the Soho screening-rooms; the bulk of Philip French of the Observer's trainers, which he wore as though to speed himself breathlessly down Wardour Street from one classic to another. I came to know the little inset ashtrays that still survived like a memory of fifties luxury in the seats' armrests. The yellow cashmere scarf that the Evening Standard's Alexander Walker would wear with its admirable implication that a film deserved the compliment of your having dressed for it. I came to realise that nobody had one of those pens with a light that you always assume movie critics use. And then back through the winter to Jim's flat to wait for him.

He drank all the time. What he was was a ‘high-functioning alcoholic’, as they say. And even this, even the companionable imperfection of sleeping with someone who's a bit of a mess felt like a freedom, a liberation from the tyranny of physical perfection, so that I came to know him more fully than I would have otherwise. I was happy, and I thought Eric was maybe going to keep me.

‘That thing about the First World War you said. About John Reed,’ Jim said to me one night. ‘Do you really think that?’

‘Well, of course. It was all about prophets. People like Lenin, and Trotsky.’

‘Sorry, Lenin?’

‘Well, obviously. But even people like Wilfred Owen, you know. Marcel Duchamp.’

‘Profits, Sally. John Reed said the First World War was about profits’

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Jim wasn't ugly at all, I discovered. Faces are like poems – the longer they take to puzzle out, the better, and Jim's was ungettable. It grew in power and meaning every day I knew him. How did the eyebrows rhyme with the mouth? How did the nose get to the cheek? Men with incoherent faces very often have beautiful hands (as a rule, the reverse applies too – either the hands or the face must be more beautiful, and you rarely get the two together). And Jim had sensationally beautiful hands. The tiny network of cracks in the webbing between his fingers was always grouted with pale skin-dust. They were highly coloured like the flank of a rainbow trout, pink and blue stippled, and had the unconscious elegance of Donald Sutherland's – the Gold Standard of manual beauty (incoherent face – see?). And the hands did beautiful things. What was sarcasm in Jim's mouth was softened to wit in his fingers. Using all five fingers of his left hand simultaneously as bookmarks for different pages of the paper, he would tear articles out in right angles with his other hand. He would seem to describe a simple expressive gesture in the air, and the four locks on his front door would fall open. Oh, beautiful dexterity! James Dean was a show-off with his hands, which were the most muscular parts of him. That's why people couldn't stop taking photographs of him – he was always grabbing attention by fiddling with some prop (bongos, a recorder, a cape, a camera). He was a prestidigitator. A hand magician – that very boyish accomplishment. The early turning point of Rebel Without a Cause is Dean dexterously snatching Buzz's knife in mid-air and there is always the bit in Giant when he's under pressure to sell the land he's inherited on Rock Hudson's ranch.

He's playing with a rope and leaning back in his chair, not focused on the other people in the room. Playing with the rope implies: I was happiest in the company of myself as a child. He keeps on playing with the rope, and gets up and walks to the door, still playing, then he flicks it and it forms a knot in mid-air. And although it seems a kind of corrupt, even irrelevant thing to do, so obviously a scene-stealing gesture, you can't help but think: Jesus, that must be acting. Or magic. (In the next scene Dean's showing off with his hands again as he sits on the platform of an oil tower, complicatedly putting one hand down between his legs to take all his weight, then transferring the weight to the other hand – like a monkey, little feet, massive sternum, or a gymnast on the rings, with the shakiness of a flower in time lapse. It's not fluent or graceful – it looks like he's demonstrating the resistance of the air, that oppressive weight Dean always seemed to be bowed under. And which his hair strove up against. Hair which looks like a cartoon of dreams of a better world rising from a head.)

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Even with my new salary of £60 a week, I still felt a bit of an interloper at the screening-rooms. I had never, for instance, been to one of the lunches that were occasionally thrown for visiting directors or stars, until, hurrying out of a screening one day, I overheard someone discussing a lunch that was being held down the road for Oliver Stone to mark the release of Natural Born Killers. Feeling very much that I owed the Journal some news, I went along to try and gatecrash.

The party was being held in a private room upstairs from the restaurant. There was lots of sail-bright white linen and untouched fruit juice in iced jugs. Completely on his own, looking plaintive and even a bit lost, sat Mr Stone, so I went over and sat next to him.

‘What paper are you from?’ he asked, exhaling a plume of blue smoke.

‘The Camden New Journal.’

He nodded. ‘Is that like the Village Voice?’

‘Oh, yes. Very much.’

A tall and extremely beautiful Oriental woman came over and sat next to Stone, with a cigarette which was successfully impersonating her own slenderness.

‘Are you with the film?’ I asked her.

‘No. I'm with Oliver.’

Then Stone began to talk in a very low, slow voice. He didn't really pause at any point so I started to take notes.

‘Who are the real killers anyway? Is it really Mickey and Mallory? Or is it the media?. And who are the media? It's just another a word for us, right? Are we the real killers?’

While Stone talked, I wrote down his thoughts in big swirls and hieroglyphics and loops across pages and pages of notebook. A strange thing had happened. I think I must have been pretending, to both Stone and myself, that I knew shorthand. Which I don't. A couple of times he looked down at my notes and then caught my eye and I returned his puzzled look with a calm one, reassuring him that this was indeed an obscure but ingenious system of European notation.

‘… If you think about it, a camera is just another kind of gun. They're both machines you shoot things with, yeah? What I was trying to create in NBK was a thinking mans action film. It's like the anthropologist meeting the so-called “primitive” tribe. They think that when he takes a photograph, he's actually…’

Before I caught the bus back to Camden, I rang the Journal and told them to pass on the message to Eric that I had an exclusive interview with Oliver Stone. They were absolutely bowled over, and literally held the front page for my return. I would be safe at the paper from now on, I felt. But when I read back over my notes on the bus, it was like trying to decipher the markings on the cave walls at Lascaux. All I had was – well, it wasn't English, anyway, just pages and pages of drawings, which in their own way did seem somehow to capture the essence of Oliver Stone's conversation. You could have exhibited them, maybe, but not published them. They were quite undecodable. If I showed this notebook to Jim or Eric, having promised them an exclusive, I would be finished. Inconsolably, I nibbled the top off one of the mini pizzas I had pilfered from lunch, trying not to think of the disappointment and even contempt with which they would greet this fresh foolishness, and decided to leave the notebook on the bus. But what if they rang the bus company and got the notebook back, with me all the while palely cheering from the sidelines, saying things like: ‘Oh, thank God’? I dumped it in a bin and prepared myself for a performance of which I was incapable. But it turned out that none of this mattered in the slightest because when I got to the office I found that Jim and Eric had finally had the fight about Jim's drinking which I should have realised had been brewing for years, and that Jim had either been sacked or had walked out – no one could tell – and had gone back to Liverpool. Had gone to his flat and cleared out. Had gone. Gone.

Many years later somebody gave me a poem because they knew how touching I found the end of Withnail and I, though they may not have known why.

In Camden rain falls heavilyOn elephants and wolves and him inThe greatcoat. ‘Man delights not me, Nor woman neither. No, nor womenNeither.’ Nor even wolves. Stop now:Make that heartbreaking little bow, Reshoulder your rain-loud umbrellaAnd drink the last of Monty's cellar —One can quite reasonably sayThat you will never play the Dane, Chin chin. So so long wolves, the rainWas artificial anyway.The city's a machine which triesUs; sorts the Withnails from the I's.

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nce upon a time there lived a family of ogres called the Noltes. They were enormous, and even the smallest of them still looked as big as a mountain. He was called Nick. Being so small, Nick felt different from the other ogres, but he also felt different from all the other people he came across, because he was still an ogre. So Nick was never quite sure who he was. Was he big, or small? This was something he thought about all day. He realised he knew a secret – big ogres were also small ogres. After all, Nick was both.

One day when Nick was thirty-five, some men came along and said, ‘An ogre! Stand there and look ogre-ish while we film you.’ Nick did as he was told. In a very gruff voice he pretended to be a proper ogre like his brothers and uncles were. They made him wear a scuba-diving suit and go under the sea, and people saw the film, which was called The Deep, and said, ‘Oh, look, a real ogre!’ He had thighs like tree trunks, and a neck like a bull, and a chin like a boulder. He was awfully funny and handsome and looked the very picture of a big happy ogre.

Nick pretended to be a big ogre in lots of films, even though he knew the secret that big ogres were really small ogres. Nobody else knew or cared, but to Nick it was very perplexing, because he saw that all big things were really very small inside, and the rest of the space inside big people and big ogres was filled with sadness, dreadful sadness. Which nobody ever talked about, and they certainly wouldn't believe you if you did!

And Nick was the saddest of them all. How could he tell everybody that he wasn't big at all, but very small and filled with sadness, just like they were? He stretched himself up as high as the sun and then toppled over with an enormous crash. His legs and arms turned into stone, and his ribcage too, and his head turned into a great wooden door. He wasn't an ogre any more, he was just a ruin. But when people went in through the wooden door they were amazed at what they saw! On the walls were four great big pictures, of Nick as a painter, and as a horrible policeman, and a frightened lawyer, and, in another one, as an ogre afraid of his father. But the strange thing about all the pictures was that, in them, Nick was very small. Just about the size of your thumb!