That first summer of the Miners’ Strike, as well as travelling to South Yorkshire and back I was making my second movie, in the South of France. The film was called The Bride, a quasi-feminist retelling of the black-and-white James Whale classic Bride of Frankenstein. My old friend Sting, who I hadn’t seen since I’d dropped in on him the night before OTT began, appeared in the role of Baron Frankenstein; after fashioning a clumsy male monster played by US actor Clancy Brown, he succeeds the second time around by creating a beautiful female in the shape of Flashdance star Jennifer Beals.
The production was based in the medieval walled Languedoc town of Carcassonne. Linda was with me and the South of France in summer was a much nicer place to be than Finland in winter. On our first night we went for a drink with Sting and Jennifer Beals in a local bar but when we got there the owner told us it was closed even though it was only about nine. ‘Fucking buy the place,’ I said to Sting, but he wouldn’t because he was pretending to be ordinary. Maybe he would have bought it if the bar had once been owned by Voltaire.
The director Franc Roddam had previously made the mod movie Quadrophenia and there were several young British actors from that film on The Bride, most notably Phil Daniels who played sidekick to my evil circus owner, and Gary Shail, both of whom were very keen on a party. One night despite my best efforts everybody ended up in our hotel room where they drank and ate all the contents of the minibar. Old habits died hard and not realising we could easily afford it the next morning Linda and I were appalled at how much the hotel was likely to charge to restock the fridge. So while I kept the room-service people at bay, Linda set off into town to try and find replacements. The trouble with minibar stuff is that they deliberately buy odd sizes precisely so you can’t easily restock, therefore it took her all morning to track down four 23.5 gram packs of peanuts, six 8.2 ml bottles of champagne and a four-sided Toblerone bar.
Unfortunately The Bride was a movie that rapidly fell behind schedule (my role was supposed to be completed by mid-August but in fact my last day of work was Christmas Eve) which meant the lesser cast members such as myself and Phil had many days when we weren’t used. Held on ‘standby’, we would lie around the pool of our hotel, the Hôtel Cité, a rambling place with a suit of armour in every corridor, basking in the hot summer sun.
One of the producers of The Bride had another movie on his slate which had just finished shooting in Los Angeles entitled The Woman in Red. He approached us as we flopped sweating beside the Pool carrying a battered cassette player which he’d borrowed from the hotel reception. The producer obviously just wanted to talk to somebody and we were the only ones around. Excitedly he said, ‘Hey, you guys. Stevie Wonder agreed to write a song for our other movie and I’ve just been sent the first demo copy by courier.’ Then he pushed the button on the cheap tape machine and we were some of the first people in the world to hear ‘I Just Called to Say I Love You’ as it rolled out across the glittering blue water towards the ancient stone walls and the cypress trees lining the hotel’s drive.
I had a tendency sometimes to regard the time before I was in show business as a prelapsarian idyll. An era free from responsibility, criticism, compromise and anxiety. I needed to remind myself occasionally that perfect, unique moments of happiness such as this – listening to a new track from Stevie Wonder played to me by a man I didn’t like much beside a glistening pool in the South of France – were only possible because I had succeeded as an entertainer.
While some of us were under-used the principals were working far longer than had been envisaged. Clancy Brown as the monster was required to have a complex latex skin built up on his face, done by the same woman who’d created the Elephant Man’s head. This meant he had to be in the make-up trailer at 4.30 a.m. Because of his early call he was supposed to only work every other day for a maximum of eight hours but instead he was on set more or less all the time. Actors by and large do not complain but after a few weeks, one evening his real skin came away with the latex. Clancy was immediately put on a private jet to London and filming suspended.
That day as we waited for news of what was going to happen next there was a slightly hysterical carnival atmosphere amongst the cast and crew. To pass the time the actors decided to have a football match in the baking sun. One of the principal cast members of The Bride was David Rappaport, star of Time Bandits, and David’s stand-in, like himself, was a dwarf so each side chose one person of restricted stature each. I played in defence and discovered that dwarves are surprisingly difficult to play football against; because of their low centre of gravity they are very hard to foul. I tried repeatedly to knock David over but he would be round me in a flash. Then a second assistant came and told us that filming wouldn’t begin again for at least two weeks.
Me and Linda got the TGV to Paris then travelled onwards to London. We hung about at home for a few days then got in the Rover and headed back to France. To drive over eight hundred miles in a car built fourteen years before but with engineering that was a decade and a half older was taking quite a gamble and indeed all the electrics failed just as we were about to board the hovercraft across the Channel. The RAC got me going again in one of our many assignations, part of a liaison that would go on almost weekly for as long as I owned the coupé. In some ways the second or third most profound relationship in my life was between me, my car and the RAC.
Taking the hovercraft was like traversing the Channel in a demented wind farm. The noise from the engines was phenomenal and even on the calmest of days the ride was so bumpy that you arrived in Calais just a few moments before you threw up. But if you were patriotic the hovercraft made you feel proud because the technology was more or less entirely British. The French tried to build their own version which they called an aéroglisseur. It was much more elegant in appearance than ours but it hardly worked at all and you would often see it there on the concrete ramp in Calais lying tilted sideways, its skirt all rumpled and dishevelled, like a drunken girl after a night out in Warrington as you vomited proudly on European soil.
After the initial glitch the Rover behaved itself and motored back across France, the big Buick-derived 3.5 litre V8 engine burbling away as we sped down the autoroutes into the heat of the South. When we reached Carcassonne filming had still not resumed so not wishing to hang around we headed off again, driving further south, finally crossing into Spain. Needing fuel I stopped the coupé at a shabby little town right on the Spanish side of the border. Pulling into the petrol station provoked a sudden and unexpected tug of memory. Looking around at the tiled roofs, the faded antique shops and dusty bodegas I said to Linda, ‘I know this place.’
While the fascist dictator General Francisco Franco had ruled Spain we had felt unable to visit. When he died Linda and I felt it was our anti-fascist duty to have a holiday there so a couple of years later, in 1977, in the time we were still poor, we took a ten-day package tour to the Costa Brava. It was a cheap holiday with four of the ten days spent on the coach that took us from London to the Catalan resort of Calella. We left Victoria Coach Station in the early morning, crossed the Channel on the ferry and by lunchtime were in a weird French modernist new town where most of the passengers ate at a branch of a café chain called something like Restaurant Flunchy. Not me and Linda though. To save money we had brought our own food with us, fruit, tomatoes, bread and tinned pâté, along with a metal plate and a small knife. We ate this sitting outside the restaurant on a bench.
In the late morning of the next day, tired and sticky, we swapped coaches to a Spanish bus at a petrol station in the shabby border town of La Jonquera. Before departure I sat on a stone wall at the petrol station to consume the last of our supplies. The wall was only about three feet high on our side but on the other dropped down perhaps twelve feet to an impenetrable tangle of cactus and weeds. Clumsy from lack of sleep I managed to knock the plate, the last tin of pâté and the knife off the wall and down into the cactus. Peering over the side we could see it but there was no way our food could be retrieved. So without breakfast we got on to the Spanish bus and proceeded to spend a week at the ill-named Hotel Relax.
On the way back to the UK all that could be seen from the rear of the coach was rows and rows of straw donkey ears poking above the seat backs, gently swaying along with the rhythm of the road, all belonging to the large souvenir animals everybody apart from us had bought.
Now sitting at the wheel of my Rover in 1984, I realised we were once more in that same petrol station in La Jonquera. I said to Linda, ‘I wonder if our pâté is still here?’
With great excitement I approached the wall. Leaning over the drop, I was eventually able to discern, nestled amongst the cactus, the metal plate now rusty and corroded, the knife, its wooden handle rotted away, and beside it the mottled tin of pâté.
It lay there visible but inaccessible like the past. From then on whenever we were in the South of France or Northern Spain we would go and visit our pâté and when I told Peter Richardson who holidayed every year with his kids at a resort on the Costa Brava about it, they started visiting our pâté too.
Over the years this tin of pâté, the knife and the metal plate seemed to me to become a sort of monument to my career and my life. Every time I looked down at the slowly decomposing metal I reflected on how far I had come, who I had been when I lost my pâté and who I was now.