The Right Man (32 page)

Sally
sat us down at a table near the open front window of her upstairs room, so we
could look down into Greek Street below at the queue outside the Blue Ice
basement disco.

‘I was
a bouncer once, for a month or two. You didn’t know that, did you, Guy? Didn’t
last very long, though, on account of my being such a nutcase,’ said Tony,
picking up the folded beige card menu and squinting at it. Then, out of the
pocket of his shorts, he produced an old aluminium spectacle case and took out
a pair of half-moon spectacles and put them on.

He was
priceless really, sitting there in this foreign place being totally himself
with little-old-man specs on. I wished I was like him, or at least had some of
his containment. We ordered more beers and agreed to have some red wine with
our food. Grain and grape, I know, but I was on the big dipper now, I might as
well get up to the top before coming down whooosh for another go.

There
was a woman sitting at the table opposite with her back elegantly revealed by a
very low-diving black number. Her beautifully kept hair was shiny and clean and
swept up to show off her graceful neck. I couldn’t see her face and she was
sitting up straight with great poise, but a sudden stiffening of her spine and
lifting of her ribcage told me that someone significant had just entered the
room.

I
glanced across to the open arched doorway to where three or four rich-looking
folk had entered, and among them was Doug Handom. Sex on legs. The woman with
the back was looking down at her food now, trying to conceal her interest from whoever
it was she was with, husband, boyfriend, manager, pimp, but he seemed to be
jawing on oblivious, through mouthfuls of bang-bang chicken.

After
sitting Doug and his crew down, Sally came over to take our order. Doug Handom
too had his back to me. I would hop up and say hello later. He had with him two
females of the effervescent variety; an older, curly-grey-haired guy in Ivy
League clothes with an outrageous tan — producer, I’d wager big dosh — and that
Yank actor, damn what’s-his-name? Been in loads of stuff — movies — always the
bent copper sidekick, never the lead but major supporting, couple of Burt
Reynolds’s ages ago, oh, Peter something, Ramp? Ryecart? Rumpash? Balding,
rugged, butch — damn.

Tony
was asking Sally about the ingredients of just about everything on the menu,
not critically, and she was enjoying his interest. His questions were informed
and she seemed flattered about his knowledge of Thai cuisine.

‘No,
the sea bass is baked, just with lemon grass and a little bit of ginger,’ she
said coyly. He flashed a grin at her and made his choice. He was chatting her
up, the old devil.

‘I’ll
just have the pasta,’ I said, and handed the designer card back to her.

‘Used
to be a chef in Lai-sin,’ said Tony to me when she’d gone. I wondered whether
all the stories Tony told might actually be true after all. ‘That’s when I did
me legs in, falling off the Darai temple at Phuket.’

He put
his specs away and took a large gulp of red wine from the bulb glass. ‘Pity I
run out of blow tonight. Ah well, we’ll just have to get slaughtered on the old
alco-mo-hol. How’re you bearing up?’

‘Oh, I’m
fine.’ I had the fleeting thought that he might have come out tonight to keep
me company, to make sure I didn’t dive into a maudlin thingy. That he might,
dare I say it, think I needed looking after. Tony looking after Guy! That’s a
new one! I dismissed this thought as a projection of my own. I didn’t want the
evening to turn into some soppy bonding scenario.

The two
girls at Doug Handom’s table got up, leaving their jackets over the chairs, to
go to the Ladies’, followed by the actor man, Peter Saravan. That’s it! Peter Saravan,
of course! Thank Gawd for that! I’d be able to introduce myself soon. Doug
looked around and noticed me at last.

‘Guy!
Bro! How’re you doing?’ Although still unmistakably north London in accent,
Doug had picked up Stateside phraseology. The woman with the back glanced
across to see who I was. She was quite pretty, not Emmanuelle Beart but trying
to go in that direction.

Excusing
myself to Tony, I went across to Doug’s table. I shook hands with the old
tanned bloke, Irving Tellman — I was right, producer, a couple of cop shows in
the eighties and something to do with an early Tom Hanks movie, I think.

‘Hi,
Guy. Pleased to meet you, Guy. Won’t you join us, Guy,’ he said with that
ludicrously deep resonance only Americans are allowed by God to have. I looked
around at Tony as Sally arrived with our food. Seeing my table-hop, she
immediately offered to draw us up a table next to the Americans and change the
place settings. Tony came over and sat on the end of the table to eat his fish,
without the least trace of discomfort or embarrassment. He was evidently
oblivious to who Doug was, or at least didn’t register anything when
introduced, and this made Doug comfortable enough to ignore him.

The
woman with the back was now contorting herself inside with jealousy. Whoever
the man was with her, she would not be doing it with her eyes open tonight.

Doug
was still holding my shoulder with transatlantic sincerity. ‘Guy! Bro! Good to
see ya! Did you get my messages?’

‘I
certainly did. How long are you in town for?’ I asked, even though I knew that
Doug was here only for a few days. He had to get back to LA to see if there was
anything interesting for him in pilot season. Once a year, the American TV
stations make hundreds of pilot episodes for their new shows. In this country
it’s done slightly differently: once, long ago, we used to make the odd pilot.

Irving Tellman
answered, ‘Oh, just ‘til Tuesday, Guy. We’re on Park Lane? It’s OK there.’

‘We’ve
been to some crap charity do tonight. How about you, Guy? Hey, it’s good to see
you, bro.’ Doug pumped my arm now. At the end of the table, Tony ate his dinner
slowly, chewing properly and putting down his knife and fork in between each
mouthful.

The two
girls returned with Peter Saravan and took their places. It was fairly obvious,
by the Catherine wheels in their eyes, that they had been taking cocaine in the
downstairs toilets. Doug started the introductions: ‘This is Peter …’

I
interrupted him swiftly, shaking the American actor’s hand as hard as I could. ‘Peter
Saravan, yes, I know. I love your work. Guy Mullin, how’re ya doin?’

‘And
this is Vicky and this is … oh, I don’t fucking know, what’s your name, love?’
As sex on legs, Doug could do what he liked and it was OK. The two girls, Vicky
and whoever she was, simpered and giggled.

‘For
the sake of argument, let’s call her Tracey. Right,’ said Doug, ‘I’m just off
to the toilet.’ Irving Tellman also seemed, by some extraordinary
synchronicity, to need a wee at that very moment. He stood too. Doug turned to
me.

‘You
fancy a line, Guy, or …’

I
declined the pleasure of a furtive snort of white powder in the cramped toilets
of Sally’s. I’m the back-up service, not the main act. It doesn’t do for an
agent to join in. You have to stand by, go along with things. Tony suddenly
spoke up for himself:

‘I’ll
have his if it’s going,’ he said, breaking decorum somewhat.

‘Oh,
alright.’ Doug was a little fazed. He looked at me for reassurance that my
companion was OK, cool, one of us. I gave it. The three men left the dining
room and went downstairs. I was left with a middleweight American movie actor
and two pretty but completely out-of-their-depth girls, all as high as kites.

Peter Saravan
leaned over to me and spoke in my ear.

‘So,
tell me, Guy, you’re a Londoner, right? You’re Doug’s agent over here, right?’
I nodded. ‘Do you have any idea where we can see some serious action tonight?’
I spluttered a typically British sort of Ealing Comedy giggle, indicating Vicky
and the other girl, whatever she was called.

‘Oh,
them,’ he said with disgust. ‘Haven’t the faintest fucking idea who they are.
They just kinda latched on to Doug at this fucking charity do.’

We
talked a bit, or rather, I smiled and listened and laughed where necessary.
Actors are easy. They only need one, maybe two questions every fifteen minutes
or so. In the same way that it would be a truism to say that nurses tend to
care for other people, actors do like the sound of their own voices and like
them enough not to be overly worried about the content of what they’re saying.

I have
a reciprocal arrangement with Doug Handom’s representation in Los Angeles but
it is not exclusive. I can enter into agreements with other US managements over
other clients if I so wish. By letting him talk, I had found out from Saravan
in under five minutes which company he was with over there, the name of the
particular person who looked after him, the names of two producers who might be
shooting in England next year, which directors were considered hot at the
moment and which British actors, currently living over there, were doing OK.

Unfortunately,
Saravan’s agents were IGA, well established over here already. Big building in
Holborn, so nothing there for me but talent leads to talent. Next time I was
out there I could look him up and return the favour. It’s all about doing
favours. After Doug and Irving returned with Tony, I nipped downstairs solo to
do a little favour of my own.

I didn’t
need an address book, I had Kemble’s number there among the thousands of others
in the instant-access part of my brain.

‘Hi,
gorgeous.

‘Hello,
m’dear. What are you up to?’

‘Washing
my hair, watching a vid. Nothing.’

‘How
long would it take you to get up to the West End?’

‘Depends.’

‘Doug Handom,
Peter Saravan, Irving Tellman. Sally’s, Greek Street,’ I said.

‘Under
half an hour. Can you hold them?’

‘Please,
my dearie darling, if we are to get along, don’t ever question my
professionalism and I’ll never question yours.’ I was pissed by now.

On the
stairs, I passed the woman with the back and her consort. She smiled at me,
even though she hadn’t a clue who I was. This was living.

‘So
tell me. What’s Los Angeles like then? Worth a visit?’ Tony asked Peter Saravan
with a simple directness that was several centuries of time travel away from
normal biz-chat. Saravan’s answer was formulaic.

‘Well,
I have a large house in the hills, four cars, a pool. You can have a very nice
life there.’

‘Well,
originally I’m from New York,’ said Tellman, joining in. ‘But all the major
deals are in LA and the weather’s OK.’ Neither of them bothered to address him
by his name, since he was quite obviously a layman, non-useful, not in. I
intervened.

‘Well,
if you work in films, then really it’s the only place,’ I explained. ‘It’s the
Mecca of movie madness, so why not be there?’ The usual guff.

‘So you’re
saying it’s a crap place in reality, but you’ve got to go where the work is?’
said Tony innocently.

‘You
have to follow your dream,’ said Doug Handom profoundly. I thought of my first
trip there, to set Doug up, looking out at 4.00 a.m. from the window of the
forbidding Chateau Marmont Hotel where the Brits used to stay and seeing Sunset
Strip, a motorway with neon and hookers and fast food and guns in the middle of
a desert.

‘Sounds
like a risky code of practice to me,’ said Tony, ‘following a dream. I think I’ll
stick to listening to my dreams and working out what they’re trying to tell me.’
But Doug’s attention was by now elsewhere. Personally I’d rather not know what
my new dream was trying to tell me.

We’d
been in the crowded downstairs bar drinking tequila for some twenty minutes by
the time Kemble arrived. Well, I say that, but she could have been there for
quite a while for all I knew. She was sitting, amongst a group of friends, down
by the dead-log-fire end of the room, as if she’d been there all night. As if
she had happened by, cool as a stick of celery jutting out of a Pimm’s. We
clocked each other across the room full of miniskirts, uplift bras and big
hair. She was wearing spectacles. Was there a new fashion thing I’d missed out
on? Unlike Tony’s, hers were big black-rimmed jobs which made her look Joan Bakewell-ey,
intellectual, smart, in control. She looked at me over the top of them, smiled
and mouthed, ‘Hi, gorgeous. Doug Handom had clocked her too and Kemble’s eyes
rested on him accusingly for a tenth of a second, before she turned back to her
conversation with her friends, which looked from this distance as if it was
very deep and fascinating. It was perfect. The only woman in the room not to
want to gaze on those angular cheekbones, that famous jaw line, the vulnerable
mouth which had kissed Emma Thompson and Julia Roberts in the same film, for
Pete’s sake. The only woman who had better things to do and big grown-up
glasses on. She was brilliant. She knew how to handle herself, this one. He was
hooked and he didn’t even know it. I sat back to admire a master at work. Or
mistress, rather.

Various
sycophants came and went, claiming Doug’s attention: Liz Trainer, the casting
director; Anthony Durant, now a successful theatre director, who once employed
Doug in some dull, provincial Chekhov or something; Greg Pride, LWT, and more.
But all the while, Kemble’s poise and the way she was touching the elbows’ and
knees of the men in her group were working on him. I got waylaid by bloody Jonty
Forbes, BBC Comedy, who’d somehow heard about Naomi Ketts’s moonlight bunk,
and I had to spin him some line about having decided last year to start up my
own company. How Jeremy Planter had become a liability ages ago, difficult to
work with, drunk, out of ideas, that sort of thing. It’s easy to do. It’s
called sticking the knife in wherever possible. I’m sure that in another part
of town at that very minute, Naomi was having an identical conversation in
reverse with some semi-important possible employer. Denigrating me in any way
possible. Denigrating my clients. Fortifying her own position. ‘Guy is a lovely
man and I love him dearly but he doesn’t have that killer instinct.’ Or: