Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers

Madame Depardieu and the

Beautiful Strangers

ANTONIA QUIRKE

For Ilana Bryant, best girl in New Jersey

‘You live in a dream and the dream is a cage,’

Said the girl, ‘And the bars nestle closer with age

Your shadow burned white by invisible fire

You will learn how it rankles to die of desire

As you long for the beautiful stranger,’

Said the vanishing beautiful stranger

PETE ATKIN AND CLIVE JAMES,

Beware of the Beautiful Stranger

‘You have to have a little faith in people’

MARIEL HEMINGWAY, Manhattan

Epigraph

PART ONE: Mademoiselle Depardieu

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

PART TWO: Perforated Screening Mechanism

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

PART THREE: Kinerotiquana

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Antonia Quirke

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

First I was a sperm and an egg, and then I was an embryo, and then I got born. After that I was a baby and then I was a toddler. This is coming really easily! Then I was ten lying in bed listening to the unmistakable cadences of a man and a woman arguing downstairs. I lay there harrowed by the growing conviction that the voices didn't belong to the radio but to my parents, and trying to will a snatch of music to prove that it wasn't. But it wasn't likely to be the radio at this time of night, and we didn't have a television in those days. The muffled fight went on, and on, until it was no longer bearable. I got up and crept down the stairs towards the living room, where my parents were curled up together watching a man and a woman arguing on the eight-inch black-and-white which they sometimes borrowed from next door when something especially good was on. I can remember the luxury of my relief. I can also remember how the two of them looked altered by the shifting light, made younger by it. And instead of being sent back upstairs I was invited on to the sofa to watch with them. It was a film, a famous film, with a title so romantic it seemed to contain all the scale of adult life: A Streetcar Named Desire.

(Forgive my presumptuousness in telling you all this, by the way, but if I don't I'm going to lose my husband.)

I had never seen a movie before. Not one. I had lived ten years absolutely untroubled by the knowledge of such things. I suppose I'm a bit stupid, really. ‘That's Marlon Brando,’ my father said. ‘He's the best actor in the world.’ I watched, delighted to be up late, being initiated into the privileges of adulthood, studying this Marlon Brando, this actor, who was now at the centre of a brawl. Some men put Brando under a shower, the women fled upstairs, and Brando began to cry. He walked outside the house in his wet T-shirt, and I saw him – like Blanche Dubois sees him when she first comes to the Kowalskis' apartment in Elysian Fields, like audiences first saw him, tormenting Jessica Tandy in the original Streetcar in the Barrymore Theatre on Broadway in 1947, like Tennessee Williams first saw him, in his original stage direction: Animal joy in his being is implicit in all of his movements and attitudes. Since earliest manhood the centre of his life has been pleasure with women, the giving and the taking of it, not with weak indulgence dependently, but with the power and pride of a richly feathered male bird among hens.

I saw and I saw and I still see. I like to revisit all my favourite bits of his face, to tour them. The folds over the corners of his eyes which make it seem as if a force is pressing down on him, as if he's subject to a doubled gravity. There's a kind of thumbprint on his brow where something powerful has marked him. The Golden Gate mouth too beautiful not to be disgusted by the ugliness of the human speech it must form. The curve where his jawbone meets his neck, seemingly the locus of all the strength in his head. The T-shirt torn so that it hangs off one shoulder like an emperor's toga. Brando was calling upstairs like a tomcat: ‘Stella!! STELLA!!!’ The thunderclap volume of his voice had the power to hurt.

‘What's the matter?’ my father was suddenly saying. And something did seem to be going wrong with me. Air was coming in but it wasn't going out. Brando sank to his knees before Stella, burying his face in her thighs. Everything was beginning to shut down on me. My breathing had become an alarming fish-pant. ‘Don't ever leave me, baby! Don't ever leave me!’ the best actor in the world was murmuring, semi-audible under my breathing. My parents had forgotten the film and ferried me to the kitchen table where my father quizzed me about things I might have eaten. Maybe I'd had a peanut-stuffed lobster stashed under my pillow? I couldn't muster the breath to reply. Time was beginning to thicken and deepen. I could see very clearly the fur coat of dust on our never-used fondue set. My mother gave up trying to open the airways in my throat with a spoon and called an ambulance. It was all happening very far away – I was dying, peacefully. And like a stone in the shoe of my peace was the fear that was beginning to harden into a certainty, that although dying wasn't so bad I would not be able to bear the humiliation of having my mother know why I had died. And she knew perfectly well. She understood precisely why I was gasping like a dog on a summer's day while next door in New Orleans Marlon Brando was smashing crockery. By the time the ambulance arrived, I had stopped hyperventilating and had to listen, suffused with shame, as my parents tried to talk their way round what had happened. Everybody was standing about lying their heads off. But what would the ambulance men have said if they'd known the truth? ‘Marlon Brando, Mrs Quirke? Do you think that was wise? We've had two Montgomery Clifts and a McQueen tonight already.’

This was the formative incident of my childhood. We lived in a tiny hill village in the South of France where every Saturday old Claude would lead his donkey Napoleon up the winding rocky path to the village square, laden with dusty old reels of film. The loveable village blacksmith, Rémi, would set up his projector facing the whitewashed wall of the church, Claude would feed in those magical strips of colour and light, and everyone would abandon their baking and games of pétanque and come rushing into the square agog with excitement to see the wondrous spectacles: Police Academy 6, Porky's, Evil Dead 2, Conan the Destroyer and Turner & Hooch.

I had been banned from the magical screenings in the square since I seemed so overwhelmed by the power of these ‘movies’. Yet old Claude took pity on me and allowed me to climb up his ancient olive tree from whose branches –

Alright. It wasn't the formative incident of my childhood. Life isn't so neatly patterned. But the first time I saw Marlon Brando, I nearly died.

2

Some time afterwards you could have found me standing outside Blackwell's bookshop in Oxford with my elder brother Saul and my younger brother Ben, all three of us holding up the books we had just bought with our pocket money so my mother could take a picture. Ben's book was called Where Do I Come From? and Saul's was called What is Happening to Me? My book was called Who Am I? Who am I? I'm a girl who loves actors.

We lived next door to the writer Jan Morris, and one day my mother said to me, ‘Antonia, listen, I've got something to tell you. James from next door is now Jan. So if you see him wearing a dress, tell her how pretty it is.’ And I thought: Isn't that nice? Anything to do with sex was nice. Sex had our respect. The defining struggle of my father's life had been between the Catholic priesthood and my mother. Sex had fought with God, as an equal, until they could both see each other's point of view. The children were the winners. And so we liked sex. As a nurse, my mother tended to turn everything into biology. ‘That bit at the top,’ she would say, when Ben and I were in the bath, ‘is Ben's foreskin. And those are his testicles!’ Bodies were nothing to be ashamed of. At fancy dress parties Saul and Ben and I went naked as Adam, Cain and Eve, saving on the price of costumes. We carried an enormous brown-and-yellow-striped home-knitted snake that was otherwise used as a draught-excluder. When we grew too old to go as Adam and Eve, we attended parties as Pollution, dressed in black and trailing empty cans of tuna while our new brothers and sisters nakedly paraded the snake. We were eco-friendly. The stickers in our car said ‘Nurses Against the Bomb’ and ‘Goats Rule’.

When my father became a psychologist, we moved to Manchester and lived in a modest house with campaigning students as lodgers, and the children kept coming: Patrick, Suzannah, Luke and Molly. ‘Do you know what Mum and Dad are?’ Suzannah asked me and my friend Mischa, as the three of us whiled away an afternoon inserting Crayolas into our vaginas. ‘What?’ ‘Perverts, that's what they are.’ ‘Perverts,’ I whispered to myself, rather liking the sound of it. Mischa's glamorous Australian mother Jill wrote the questions for University Challenge among piles of textbooks in her kitchen. It was not a happy house. Jill drank, and kept a bitter eye on Mischa's father Bruce, who came and went in a chocolate Jaguar, supposedly dealing antiques from the boot but mostly parked around the corner with the woman from Thresher's.

Right off the bat, my mother wasn't keen on Mischa, having caught me leaning up against a bureau inhaling on a pencil and saying to Ben: ‘You are a cold-hearted prick who wants to see me hanging from a tree in the garden.’ I had been possessed by the glamour of adultery. The atmosphere at Mischa's was always one of potential murder. The phenomenal scale of the arguments. The range and randomness of the information spilled, the strength-regathering silences in between. When she wasn't working, Jill sat stiffly in an armchair in the study, her dark hair falling to her waist in one solid piece like a bin-bag. There she would relay the drama down the telephone to Bamber Gascoigne.

‘Oh, thank Christ,’ she said when Gascoigne picked up at the other end. ‘Bamber – he's here! But he's pissed.’ Bruce, sober, handed her a glass of water and some aspirin. Jill looked up at him and spoke, low, into the phone. ‘He's making me take some pills. I don't know what they are.’

On Tuesdays I rushed from my convent school to join Mischa and Jill watching Johnny Weissmuller being Tarzan on the television. Weissmuller would come down a tree like a Greek statue and rush off in his flank-flashing pants to meet people at the escarpment, a place we mysteriously never saw.

‘Those shorts look like they just about cover his scrotum,’ I noted.

‘Christ,’ said Jill in her boozy voice, ‘you Quirkes with your goats, and your Song of the Volga Boatman.’

It was at Mischa's that I saw my first videos. One was called My French Lover and involved a man and a woman carrying a big plastic doll with a moustache into a bedroom and then getting under the sheets and laughing like maniacs. I seem to have blanked the rest. When I told my parents about this, I was banned from visiting number fifteen again. I slipped off in the rain to tell Mischa but she was calm, like someone used to having the ends of things spelled out and then revoked on a daily basis. ‘Je reviens,’ I said, a line I'd picked up watching Emmanuelle with Jill.

3

Because Mischa and I weren't allowed to see each other we kept in touch by writing letters that Ben would deliver. Mischa had become very beautiful and began first to sign off as Marilyn Monroe and then to write as her. I responded as James Dean, and the two doomed stars began an affair. This grew into a very serious correspondence which required a great deal of biographical knowledge. I had a stack of Dean biographies and books of photos of him. (It never occurred to me to watch any of his films.) But Mischa was a couple of years older than me and when she went to try her luck as a trainee teacher in Tokyo, she wrote to me as herself rather than Monroe, as if Marilyn had dumped Jimmy – which offended Dean. He wrote to her from the set of Giant throughout those fraught early months of 1955. He was bewildered, hurt, jealous of Joe DiMaggio and suspicious that she might be forming an attachment with a playwright on the New York scene. But nothing came back from Tokyo, just chatter about food and friends. Was that what drove him to such near-suicidal recklessness? He burned her old letters. He'd be dead within the year.

4

I got four C's and an E in my GCSEs and failed the rest. But because I spent most of the next year recovering from an operation on my hip I didn't have to go to school and just sat in my room reading. I got four A's at A level. I convalesced in the arms of Antony Sher's Year of the King (about his Richard III for the RSC) and Simon Callow's Being an Actor and Stanislavski's Building a Character, and back to Year of the King, flicking ahead to my favourite bits, which were always about what Sher said to Roger Allam at the Arden Hotel bar. Nothing more comforting than that sense of the extended family which actors thrive in. Year of the King is just about the happiest book I've ever read, the most soothing, which is not what Sher meant at all, but there you go: actors' first neurosis is that acting is just too much fun to be art. I wanted to be in the Arden Hotel bar with Roger Allam.

So I decided I was going to be an actress and auditioned at the Contact Youth Theatre for a play called Don Juan Comes Back From the War and got the part of a bisexual dress designer who dates Don Juan after meeting him in a café in 1920s Vienna, gets dumped, strips and throws plates at his head. I petitioned my mother to hire me a sunbed so I could appear on stage with the tan I felt the part required, but she flatly refused. ‘You are what you are,’ she said.

On stage, I felt I had mainlined into acting. The aperture opened wide and I saw the abyss. ‘Listen, you bastard,’ I had to say, fetching a photo of the Don out of a drawer. ‘Our child is gone. That's right. Gone. Vanished. And I can never have another. Who was it I reminded you of, hmmmmmmm? Go on. Tell me. Who was the bitch?’ I took a needle, poked holes through the photograph's eyes, lashed out furiously at a table, and thinking what the hell, I can do anything picked up a chair and broke its back off by smashing it against the floor, and then leaned up against the wall, panting.

I got a glimpse of what I would be like as an actress: a nightmare. Acting was shocking. It was more than just the power of having other people look at me, or the power of being another person. It was the utter freedom and violence and irresponsibility available. Don't think I'm saying that the performance was any good whatsoever – I just thought: I could easily spend my life in the service of this feeling. I'd come off stage weeping uncontrollably and sink into a kind of post-coital woolliness that lasted until we got to the pub where none of the rest of the stage-school cast would speak to me because, presumably, they all found me completely terrifying.

My family came and were stunned by my noise and rage as I clomped around on the stage balling up my fists like someone who'd been well and truly screwed over. In the car on the way home, my father turned round and said, ‘I'll never believe you again.’ And for a moment I had an instinctive feeling – something more than just the inculcated social instinct that being an actor is a bit silly – that if I kept this up I would be permanently releasing a sort of person that I might not like. When the next play was cast, my mother pointed out the ad in the local paper, but I said I didn't want to do it. I would have liked to have called this book ‘I've Been Marvellous: Seventy Magical Years at the Top’, or simply ‘QUIRKE: The Autobiography’, but I'm not allowed to. I forgot about being an actress and never thought of it again.

5

Let's start with a whole man. Let's lay down a brief marker, an ideal to measure the rest by. Who should it be, this person who, if the movies were asked what a man was, they could reply with? Someone with a bigger heart than Brando. More longevity than De Niro. Less neurosis than Cary Grant. Let's not use Steve McQueen or Gregory Peck or Al Pacino or Denzel Washington or Valentino. Let's use Robert Mitchum as our marker. Why? Because of all actors he explains himself the most, needs analysis the least. He tells you, more than anyone else, that a body is what a soul looks like, that the way you speak and move is all there is and nothing more need be said. You don't explain it, you just love it. In Mitchum's case, the eyebrows like droplets sliding off a windshield and the genius for standing still, as if he is both moving and staying put at the same time. The way his gaze comes at you through the second set of transparent eyelids he seems to have, like a crocodile. The upswing in his voice as if he's continually stopping himself from drifting off. The mysterious depth of experience implied by so many of his gestures as if he is laughing at the smallness of movies compared to life, which goes back forever. All great movie stars know that they will bore you in the end. Avoiding being boring drove Brando nuts. But the anxiety of being boring never crossed Mitchum's mind. The virus of boring-anxiety – which all actors carry – never made it past his antibodies. He is the undiseased. And, having read more pages on Mitchum than I have on anyone in this book, I've learned two things: 1) I have nothing whatsoever to say about him, and 2) nobody else does. So let Robert Mitchum, like a post driven into the ground to stake a claim over a landscape, be our marker. I like being silenced by him. He shuts me up like the right answer. He simplifies everything for me until I can think ah, Bob Mitchum, so that's what a ‘man’ is, is it? Got it. And what an amazing thing! Just look at that. Aren't they amazing, these ‘men’? And so many of them! It's raining bloody men! Let me tell you about a few others …

6

After my A levels I got a job selling insurance at Scottish Amicable in Manchester where every day I was convulsed by psychosomatic illness. But the job was useful because it enabled me to pay for all the drugs which my boyfriend and his friends liked to take.

‘What are you talking about? What are you on?’ my mother asked one day across the kitchen table.

‘Ecstasy!’ I beamed, happy to inform.

It was 1989 in Manchester and, had I but known it, my boyfriend was very cool. I had seduced him by the length of my jumper. I hadn't seen my own hands in eighteen months. He was a musician called Mark who looked a bit like Peter Firth in Letter to Brezhnev, I thought, and I adored him. I loved him. There was nothing else. But when he suggested that we should go to bed together, I was baffled. It was as if he had suggested that we move to South America, or that we weren't English at all, but French. Or aliens. A bizarre and totally irrelevant suggestion. Sex was abstract and ever present but it never actually happened. Like maths. I was horrified by the voice-over on Betty Blue which insisted that the principals had been ‘screwing for a week’.

‘Screwing for a week! Screwing! Screwing? Screwing! Skerreww-ing! For a week?. Can you imagine?’

‘Yes,’ said Mark.

I would roll around the floor of the Hacienda in a three-hundred-person embrace while Mark talked record deals with an old man who used to hang around called Tony Wilson. ‘Very pleased to meet you, Shaun. You too, Manni,’ I would say at five o'clock in the morning out of my tree on ecstasy and speed before removing Mark's hand from my thigh. Just what kind of girl did he think I was? What was he on?