A Hard Time to Be a Father. Fay Weldon
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five years ago; seeing I had a better chance of being close to Andreas Anders. You’d think a bright girl like me would think about something other than love, but at twenty-nine it gets you, it gets you! Twenty-nine years old and no children or live-in-lover, let alone a husband. Not that I actually wanted any of those things. In the film and TV world there’s not all that much permanent in-living. You just have to pack up and go, when the call comes, even when you’re in the middle of scrambling his breakfast eggs. Or he, yours. Men tend to do the cooking, these days, in the circles in which I live. Let’s not say ‘live’. Let’s say ‘move’.
I’d been the researcher on Andreas Anders’ first film. I was twenty-three then and straight out of college. It was a teledrama called Mary’s Son, about a woman’s fertility problems. It was during the first week of filming – Andreas took me along with him: he said he needed a researcher on set though actually he wanted me in his bed – that I both developed my theory on GUP and fell in love with him. At the end of the second week Andreas fell in love with his star, Caroline Christopherson, the girl who was playing Mary. And I was courteously and instantly dismissed from his bed. Nightmare time. I’d got all through college repelling all boarders: now this.
But Andreas Anders! His face is pale and haunted: he has wide, kind, set-apart grey eyes, and he’s tall, and broad-shouldered. He has long, fine hands, and what could I do? I loved him. That he should look at me, little me, in the first place! Pick me out from all the others? Even for a minute, let alone a week, let alone a fortnight, what a marvel! At least when he fell for Caroline Christopherson it was serious. They got married. And now she’s world-famous and plays the lead in big budget movies, and is a box-office draw, which irritates Andreas, since he’s so obviously the one with the talent, the creativity, and the brains: Caroline just has star quality. When it gets bad for Andreas, why there I am in bed with him again and he’s telling me all about it. They have a child, Phoebe, who gets left behind with nannies. Andreas doesn’t like that either. I don’t say, ‘But you’re the one doing the leaving too,’ because I seldom say to him what I really think. That’s what this one-sided love does to you. Turns you into an idiot. I hate myself but I’m tongue-tied.
How can I compete with C.C., as he calls her? That kind of film-starry quality is real enough: a kind of glowing magnetism: a way of moving – just a gesture of a hand, the flick of an eye – which draws other eyes to itself. I don’t look too bad, I tell myself. Though I suppose where C.C. looks slim I just look plain thin. Both our hair frizzes out all over the place, but hers shines at the same time as frizzing. I do not know how that effect is achieved. If I did, friend, I would let you know. I look more intelligent than she does, but that’s not the point. On the contrary. Andreas Anders once complained I always looked judgemental. That was when we were doing a studio play up at the BBC’s Pebble Mill studios, Light from the Bedroom. My first PA job. C.C. was giving birth to little Phoebe in Paris while we were taping in Birmingham. Andreas couldn’t leave the show: well, how could he? He and I stayed at the Holiday Inn. He is the most amazing lover.
I don’t let on how much I care. I pretend it means nothing to me. If he thought it hurt, he’d stay clear of me. He doesn’t mean to be unkind. I just act kind of light and worldly. I don’t want to put him off. Would you? GUP again! If you love them, don’t let them know it. ‘I love you’ is the great turn-off to the uncommitted man.
And now here’s Tony Schuster saying ‘I love you’ to me, publicly, leaning down from his dolly as he glides about in the misty air of Helsinki’s Great Square. The mist’s driving the lighting man crazy. The scenes are intended to be dreamlike, but all prefer the man-made kind of mist to the one God has on offer. Man’s is easier to control. ‘Let’s leave this life,’ Tony says. ‘Let’s run off together to a Desert Island.’
‘You mean like Castaway?’ I ask. I know film people. Everything relates back to celluloid.
‘How did you guess?’ He looks surprised. He’s not all that bright. Or perhaps I’m just too bright for everyone’s comfort. For all his gliding to and fro on his great new black macho electronic camera with its built-in Citroën-type suspension – ‘This camera cost £250,000,’ he snaps, if anyone so much as touches the great shiny thing – I can’t take Tony seriously. He has quite an ordinary, pleasant, everyday face. He’s thirty-nine, and has a lot of wiry black hair. Andreas’s hair is fair and fine. ‘I love you!’ Tony Schuster yells, for all the world to hear. ‘Run off with me, do!’
I think his loving me so publicly annoys Andreas, but he doesn’t show it. Tony’s one of the top cameramen around: they can be temperamental. It’s as well for a Director to hold his fire, unless it’s something that really matters – a smooth fifty-second track in for example – not like love, or desire, which everyone knows is just some kind of by-product of all the creative energy floating around a set.
‘I love you’ is a great turn-off for the female committed elsewhere. GUP.
Sometimes I do agree to have a drink with Tony, when it’s a wrap for the day, and we all stagger back to the bar of the Hesperia. Except for Andreas, who’s staying at the Helsinki Inter-Continental. When I heard C.C. was coming to join her husband and hold his hand through the whole month of Helsinki shooting, I put them in a different hotel (I do location accommodation, inter alia) from the rest of us. I thought I couldn’t bear their happiness too near me. We’d be going off to Rome presently, anyway, and C.C. wouldn’t be following us there. She’d be going, not back to little Phoebe, but to Hollywood for some rubbishy block-busting new series, which Andreas despised. He had the Art, she made the money.
‘It’s so clichéd I can’t bear it,’ Tony would moan. ‘The PA in love with the Director! You’re worth more than that.’
More than being in love with Andreas? How could such a thing be possible?
Tony’s wife had just left him, taking the children. He’d been away from home just once too often. When she wanted him where was he? Up the Himalayas filming Snowy Waste or under the Atlantic with Sonar Soundings or in the Philippines with Lolly a Go-Go. When he didn’t turn down Lenin in Love because he couldn’t miss an opportunity of working with Andreas Anders, the Great Director, Sara waited for him to say ‘yes’ to the call from his agent, and he did, of course, having said he’d say no, and at that point she packed. The wives do.
‘You love films more than me,’ she said. And so Tony did. Now he thought he was in love with me. I knew what was going on. His wife had left, he was sad and worried; love on the set’s a great diversion. On the whole, you last as long as the project does; not a moment longer. Sometimes it sticks – look at Andreas and C.C.; me and Andreas – but mostly it’s all, as I say, just surplus energy taking sexual/romantic form. I know so much, and so little too. GUP!
‘You have no pattern for a happy married life,’ laments my mother. ‘All my fault.’
‘I don’t want to be married,’ I say. If I was married how could I follow Andreas round the world? But I don’t tell her that. His favourite PA! I’m good at my job: by God, I’m good at it. He won’t find fault with me.
‘Without you!’ he once said (that was Love in a Hot Climate: we were in a really ritzy room at the Meriden in Lisbon: C.C. was off in Sydney and Andreas thought she was having an affair with the male lead), ‘Without you, Jude, I wouldn’t be half the director I am!’ A real working partnership we have, Andreas and me, oh, yes! His fingers running through my hair when there’s nothing else to do, and hotel rooms in strange cities can be lonely; you need your friends around.
Before I left for Helsinki my mother said something strange. ‘Your father ran off with a girl from Finland,’ she said. ‘Our au pair. Just make sure you come back.’ Now my mother never said anything at all about my father if she could help it. And my sister Chris and I seldom asked. Questions about our dad upset her. And it doesn’t do to upset a woman who is a