All You Need Is Love was playing at full volume over the sound system of the black Aston Martin DB5 which had replaced the E-Type, almost drowning the squeal of its tyres as I gunned my new company car around Belgrave Square on the way to work.
James Garrett and Partners was the hot shop now; we’d become wildly fashionable and successful; six or seven ‘name’ film directors were under contract to us, all of them busy. Without being able to afford them, I’d always liked good hotels and stylish restaurants; now they were my habitat. I enjoyed the demands of the job I was doing, with twenty or twenty-five commercials in pre-production, shooting, or post-production stage at any one time. I got a kick from skipping lightfoot between different clients and different problems, and the sound of two telephones ringing at the same time.
Leaving the car at the Mayfair garage paid for by the company, I walked the hundred yards to my office. Panelled in pale wood, equipped with drinks cabinet, refrigerator and a slab of illuminated art looking like sucked barley sugar, I shared it with my secretary Jenny McClean.
Today, as most days, began with calls to set up casting, recording and shooting arrangements. We’d been at this for over an hour when James Garrett walked into the room. A big man with red hair, his normally ebullient manner was subdued by the three Americans he had in tow. He seemed particularly overawed by the forceful blonde leading the team he was with – as I soon became myself.
Mary Wells was thirty-something, small, good-looking, fashionably and expensively dressed. She’d risen from the bullpen at Doyle Dane to her present position of total power through a passionate certainty she could achieve anything. Tinker, the agency she ran, had none of the usual support services of an ad agency but consisted only of a task force of the most expensive talent in the USA, each paid at least 50 per cent above the going rate. Set up by Marion Harper, owner of the huge Interpublic group of international agencies, if an Interpublic account was in danger anywhere in the world, Mary flew there with a hit team, put up at the best hotel – in this case Claridge’s – to throw creativity and money at the problem until it went away.
After introducing me to her and the two men, James said, ‘Mary’s got this – Hah,’ he cleared his throat, ‘– promotion we’ve been discussing and she thinks – Hah – you’d be the right man to set it up for her.’
Mary took a sip from her coffee and put the cup down; clearly it wasn’t what she was used to. ‘I want you to find me the most beautiful girl in every country in the world,’ she said.
Years of practice had gone into not letting my jaw drop and looking wholly gobsmacked, but the vastness of her intention made me blink.
‘Below the age of eighteen,’ she added.
‘All the countries in the world?’ I asked weakly.
‘The First World,’ she said, impatient at my stupidity; the rest was not a market.
‘And the product …?’ I enquired when I’d recovered my equilibrium.
‘ … Is Love,’ she told me.
‘Er … what is Love?’ I asked, bewildered.
‘Probably a range of cosmetics … possibly a perfume,’ she answered crisply.
Mary did not believe in long meetings; details did not concern her. Soon after declaring what she wanted she went off with James, who had arranged for a chauffeur-driven car to take her shopping.
Kambannis, a volatile, creative Greek, and John Capsis, an older man in Ivy League sports jacket and flannels, who was Mary’s chamberlain and treasurer, remained with me in the office. From a world atlas we worked out a schedule of casting sessions in the various capital cities. The itinerary was enough to make the strongest blanch, but leaving Kambannis and myself to implement it, Capsis strolled off to Savile Row to order a suit. ‘OK, so where do we start?’ Kambannis demanded. ‘You’re the fucking guru. So you’re a friend of Roger Vadim, huh?’
Vadim was married to Brigitte Bardot. A world-class fornicator, I’d never met him in my life. But, if I wanted to spend the next few weeks jetting around the globe in pursuit of the most desirable girls in the world, this seemed the wrong moment for candour. Over the next few days I briefed casting and model agents across Europe, in Australia, Japan and South Africa, and was booked to fly to Rome the following morning, when I came back from lunch to find Kambannis snorting a bracing hit of oxygen from the cylinder I kept beside the drinks cabinet.
‘We got a problem,’ he announced, setting aside the black rubber mouthpiece.
I said I was sorry to hear it. Was it serious?
The excitable Kambannis was on his feet now and pacing the room in agitation. ‘It’s serious,’ he said, ‘It’s Coca-Cola. We got to pull this mother-fucker out the fire. We got a spot to shoot and Love’s on hold.’
I concealed my disappointment. What was the spot?
‘We got to get this fucking great shiny iceberg from the Arctic and tow it down to the islands and shoot there, right?’
‘Right!’ I echoed.
‘And we got to move fast,’ he said. ‘Get our asses to Norway or Greenland or somewhere and charter a plane and cast the fucker.’
‘The iceberg?’
‘Right! Mary wants Polaroids. A real fucking ice cathedral, man, and then we lasso the fucking thing and fetch it down.’
‘To the Bahamas?’
‘Right! We need a ship, and an expert on fucking icebergs. You know anyone who knows about the Arctic?’
I hesitated … and a monstrous notion blossomed in my mind. The surreal picture of these hard-shopping fantasists aboard an ice-breaker in the frozen North on an expedition led by … Father.
‘And you spoke to him?’ Fisher asked me over lunch a couple of days later.
‘Well, Father’s back in England, penniless again, and he needs the cash. But he said it was the most bloody stupid idea he’d ever heard of and hung up on me. When they learned how long it would take, they changed their mind. They want to shoot next week.’
‘So you lost the job?’
‘No, we’re shooting Coca-Cola on the moon. Studio set, I don’t have to go there.’
‘Not your sort of place anyway, I’d have thought,’ Fisher remarked, tucking into his lobster thermidor.
We were eating at Wheelers in Compton Street, at what I had come to think of as ‘my’ table on the top floor. Fisher’s hair had receded somewhat since I’d last seen him, giving him the high forehead and wry face of an ascetic monk. In his sombre City suit he stood out from the trendily dressed advertising and film people filling the restaurant. A slap-up lunch was a treat for him, normally he had a sandwich. Client lunches didn’t exist at his level in stockbroking, he explained. And neither did expenses, luxury hotels or foreign travel. His only trip abroad had been a holiday in Nicaragua catching moths, his hobby since childhood; he’d moved around the country by bus to save money.
Unlike today, in 1964 stockbroking and banking were poorly paid professions staffed by former public school boys in bowler hats. God forbid that a woman should enter the profession.
‘Whatever made you go into such a dreary job?’ I asked him.
‘I ran into a friend from Cambridge who’s a broker. He said, ‘It’s all about gambling and practical jokes and fooling around. And you can leave at 5.30 sharp,’’ Fisher explained. But I couldn’t see that as an advantage; my own office turned into a bar at 6 pm nightly, and happy hour extended until going on to a restaurant.
During lunch Fisher showed me photos of the run-down country house with grounds he’d bought on the Essex coast. It was a large, eighteenth-century mansion, solid and dignified without being grand, but the photographs brought home to me how different his aspirations were from my own. I enjoyed the exhilarating pace of work, and the ambience and the gloss that went with – but I had no ambitions beyond that. My fellow partners in the company were buying houses and holiday homes, they had wives and children. My car belonged to the company and, apart from clothes, I owned nothing and had no plans for the future. I was living in a state of nowness, as Buddhists call it, but mine was no spiritual condition; it was the most material ‘now’ imaginable. I had no goal, I wasn’t navigating my life, but sailing as fast and close to the wind as I could.
The place where Fisher had bought his house was remote and rural. The nearest village, where he’d become a member of the Parish Council, had just one shop and a tiny church seating only twenty people. ‘You still go to church?’ he asked me.
‘Sundays are the only day I get to sleep in, and late lunch is about the only meal I don’t have to eat with clients,’ I told him.
But, although I’d stopped attending, I still theoretically believed in the faith I’d been entrapped in by Mr Pope. And I still believed in its precepts, though most emphatically I was not following some of them. At moments I experienced fearful hangovers of Methedrine withdrawal and remorse. One of these had coincided with a commercial for the Sunday Mirror. The paper’s proposed lead story, whose promotion we were filming, was about a homeless, unemployed young Irish couple with a baby dying from an inoperable brain tumour. The point of the story was that the baby had no need to remain in hospital; it was in no pain, it could be at home with its parents – except that they didn’t have a home. In the studio, surrounded by newspaper execs, admen and film technicians, the pathetic, poorly dressed pair looked cowed and miserable. I watched them sweating and awkward under the hot lights and unwanted attention, while feeling worse and worse myself, for I was coming off speed. At the end of the shoot a godawful hangover coalesced with Christian duty to make me say, ‘Well … I suppose you could have my flat to live in.’ I’d heard myself speak the words, appalled.
They did, for four months, while I stayed at Gilston Road, but I did not mention this to Fisher. We talked of the times we’d shared in the army and people we both knew, and he brought me up to date on Ivor Mottron who, still awaiting his expected inheritance, had worked for a while as a cinema attendant before taking a job as a travel guide. He’d escorted a coachload of Daughters of the American Revolution he described as ‘very very lovely people from St Paul, Minnesota’ on an itinerary which included Bologna, Padua and Verona before arriving at Lake Como, where they were to pass a rest afternoon before resuming their demanding schedule. By now thoroughly exasperated by their company, Ivor had installed them at a lakeside restaurant and himself rented a boat so he could escape them for a couple of hours. Unfortunately, while taking his pleasure with the boatboy some way from shore, the group’s passports slipped from the hip pocket of his lowered trousers and disappeared into the lake.
‘Goodness, whatever did he do?’ I asked Fisher.
‘He still had his own. He left them in the restaurant, took a taxi to the station and came back to England.’
Ivor’s life had always been somewhat mercurial but others we knew were doing well. Christoph had left Connecticut to start a corporation in Munich; Alex Howard had married, and moved to an almost-stately home in the country; Nigel Broackes – also married – was a property tycoon who featured in the financial papers. But somehow Fisher seemed not to be surfing the go-go prosperity of the decade.
‘Your life sounds so jazzy and exotic,’ he observed rather wistfully over coffee at the end of our meal. ‘It’s all going awfully well for you.’
I had to agree it was. As I tried to refill his glass with the last of the wine, he put his hand on it to stop me. ‘You’ve read Henry Miller?’ he said.
‘Some. Why?’
‘That bit when he’s sleeping under Paris bridges, cold, hungry and penniless. Then he gets a job washing-up in a restaurant, he has a heated room, food, money. You remember his reaction to good fortune?’
‘What?’ I asked.
‘It makes him fearful. He says it’s always at such moments the angels choose to piss in your beer.’