Christian Bale (5 page)

Though David had a disdain for organized religion, he was a spiritual man who was essentially Christian and he named his son accordingly.

Christian recalled: “I always pictured Jesus as Neil Diamond when I was younger. My upbringing was not a religious one, but an inquisitive one. My father was best friends with the bishop and fascinated by religion. I would come back from church, and my dad would put on Neil Diamond. So, I would always picture
Neil Diamond with a big white beard, standing in a tunic and preaching to masses of people.”

David was also fascinated with nature and he delighted in waking his children up in the middle of the night to watch falling stars, comets, or eclipses.

While David enjoyed being a father, he was still hard-pressed to make a stable living to support his growing family. David had not finished his university education in South Africa and he blamed conservative, class-conscious British society for his frustrations.

Naturally it fell to Christian's mother, Jenny Bale, to work to support their family. She worked a variety of jobs—as a receptionist, an office clerk at a real estate agency, and for one summer as a dancer in David Smart's Super Circus in Battersea Park in London. During that season, Jenny commuted daily to take care of her children. And thanks to David and Jenny's eventual bitter divorce on June 6, 1991, David would forever tar Jenny as a “circus clown” in Christian's acting bio. It was David's way of demeaning and ridiculing his ex-wife while elevating his own role in Christian's life. She eventually became a therapist and reflexologist.

David and Jenny decided to send Sharon, Louise, and Christian to various dance and acting workshops. Christian was in fact taking ballet lessons and about to enroll in the prestigious Royal Academy of Dance, but David decided against the Academy when he saw how the boys were not allowed to play football or any sport that risked injury.

As Christian began to land TV commercials, David realized that the casting agents were only interested in his son, not his daughters. It looked like his son was going to achieve what he could not—success. David was optimistic and tremendously confident about Christian's potential career. He saw Christian as a golden ticket out of Margaret Thatcher's England, which, he believed, had stymied all of his past ambitions. English class warfare meant more rules about what you should or must do. David, who
considered himself a proud Afrikaner, scoffed at English class divisions and the prevalent discrimination by accent and origin—hence David's delight in putting on posh, Cockney, and other accents, a gift of mimicry Christian would inherit.

In 1987, with the money Christian earned from
Empire of the Sun
, David and Jenny bought a large, comfortable two-story brick home on 207 Capstone Road in Bournemouth. Today, the neighborhood is popular for university housing, but back then, it was a regular middle-class home on a broad residential street.

But David was desperate to move to America. David became the ultimate stage-parent, coddling and encouraging Christian to become a Hollywood star. With a Spielberg movie on his résumé, he knew that his son's future would be bright. But those plans hit a wall when Christian had his nervous breakdown in Paris on the press tour for
Empire of the Sun
. David had to treat his son extremely carefully because he could easily retreat into a reclusive shell and quit acting altogether.

British labor laws limited the number of hours a minor could work before the age of sixteen. In fact, Christian would be restricted to making only one movie a year. So while David anxiously waited for Christian's sixteenth birthday, he became obsessed with plans to move to America.

David wanted Christian to pursue the kind of acting career that wasn't possible in England. America was the land of megastardom, big contracts, and big money. To become a true A-list Hollywood star, the only place for Christian to fulfill David's dream was logically in Los Angeles.

However, Christian's mother, Jenny, didn't share David's ambitions to move to L.A. It was one thing to live in Portugal. As British citizens, they could live and work legally anywhere in the European Union. But moving to America was an entirely different matter. To immigrate to the U.S., one generally required a skill or a university degree in an area of demand by the U.S. economy.
Once an immigrant was granted permanent residence, they were awarded “green cards” for identification and employment authorization. Without a green card, David and Jenny would not be allowed to work or stay beyond their visa's expiration date. How, Jenny wondered, could they take that chance?

Unfortunately for David, he personally could never qualify for U.S. immigration. He never finished university and had no work of his own lined up. But he was undeterred because there were other ways into the U.S.—as a proprietor of one's own business or as a sponsored employee of an American company. Surely it was simply a matter of getting Christian to America, becoming a movie star, and then forming a family production company so that Christian could hire his father as the company's president or vice president. Problem solved.

There was just the simple matter of making reluctant young Christian into a star . . .

Jenny was opposed to a move to the U.S. because she realized that unless they had green cards, neither she nor David could legally work and the family would be financially dependent on young Christian who was, at best, ambivalent about acting as his career choice. Jenny was shocked that David would put all this pressure on their young son. Shouldn't Christian stay in England and finish his education instead?

Jenny recalled: “David told me that he and Christian would be moving to the U.S. I had no say in the matter.” David was adamant. He wanted to live in America. So he left behind Jenny and Sharon, and uprooted Christian and his sister Louise to move 6,000 miles away on visitors' visas. For Christian, even though he wasn't ready to call Los Angeles home, the California sun and surf were irresistible alternatives to more years at school. And after his miserable years at the Bournemouth School for Boys, he shared his father's disdain for formal education and for England.

Out of the conflict, Jenny Bale filed for divorce on April 22, 1991. It was finalized on June 6, 1991.

David soon discovered what many immigrants to California had learned—he could completely reinvent himself. From 1987 to 1991, while the Bales lived in Bournemouth, in every article about Christian Bale and his fledgling movie career, David described himself as a financial advisor or insurance analyst—a couple of innocuous job titles that wouldn't prompt any investigation into his background. However
Talk Talk
noted that Christian was “often not sure what he did to bring food to the table.”

“A lot has gone on that even Christian doesn't know about as he buries his head in the sand about his father and doesn't even seem to realize the role I played in his upbringing,” said Jenny.

But after 1991, when David and Christian had moved to Los Angeles, David began to portray himself to Americans as a former RAF pilot, British Airways pilot, or British Midland pilot.

Being the single parent of a celebrity was opening doors for him, and David held a special place in this odd stratum of Hollywood society because Christian held a special place in the pantheon of child actors as a former “Spielberg kid.”

Since David could not legally work, he had a lot of free time, which he devoted to networking for Christian's career. He name-dropped frequently, and told producers that he could get them meetings with Spielberg. He socialized with other child actors' parents. He was on the phone for hours, talking to journalists as Christian's publicist.

Much to Christian's chagrin, David played up Christian's Welsh birthplace to Americans, describing his son as the natural successor to other great Welsh/Celtic actors like Richard Burton and Anthony Hopkins. While he made the Hollywood social circuits, lobbying casting agents, producers, and directors to consider his
son for roles, David found a ready audience for his interesting combination of social and political views. Thanks to his well-cultivated posh English accent, the proud father could easily spend hours talking about his favorite subjects: his beloved only son, name-dropping Steven Spielberg with empty promises of being able to set up meetings at Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, or his unusual breed of politics.

Once in California, David set about to reinvent his family background to make it more colorful. David
Charles Howard
Bale became David
Spike
Bale. Christian
Charles Philip
Bale became Christian
Morgan
Bale. David liked the more Celtic-sounding name. As Christian's manager, he named their family production company Morgan Management. Christian would no longer go by Chris as he did back in Bournemouth. David also quickly aligned Christian's bio to core Hollywood interests such as vegetarianism and New Age spirituality. Though David became a vegetarian in California, the burger-loving teenage Christian had a tougher time giving up meat. In an interview, Christian explained his eating philosophy this way: “I don't adhere to vegetarianism because I eat fish and chicken. You could say I'm sort of elitist in what I consider more important life forms. But my theory is that I will eat something that I will kill with my own hands.”

Emphatically anti-Republican and anti-Conservative, David was hoping that his politics would be simpatico with Hollywood, California. David was often a walking contradiction with his strange mishmash of twentieth-century liberalism and nineteenth-century British imperialism—in part a result of being raised by a military/safari hunter father in an affluent and privileged white area of South Africa during the apartheid era. He declared that he loved to drive Volkswagens because “Germans make the best cars,” but then in the same breath, denounced the Japanese as the race for “whaling and World War II.” His privileged upbringing in apartheid South Africa fostered a patronizing
attitude toward people of color. He loudly proclaimed that he could tell the difference between Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans and he boasted that he only hired Mexican cleaning women because he was a proponent of minority women's rights.

David didn't realize that he often acted like a stereotypical tourist in America. He hated American food, scoffed at the “culture” (his air quotes), and constantly chuckled at the quality of American acting. He also complained about American politics ad nauseum. “American elections are far too important for just Americans to vote in!” he'd roar. Yet, he never said a word about leaving California with its sun-kissed beaches and balmy oceans.

He was also delighted with Californians' interest in spirituality. The intersection of Eastern and Western religions was like a California Roll—sushi for Western palates. This suited David's own smorgasbord approach to religion and he was happy to attend a variety of churches and temples. He was extremely anti-Catholic and happy to rage about the pope, but oddly enough, David considered St. James Catholic Church in nearby Redondo Beach his primary place of worship. He made a weekly ritual of snipping the “words of wisdom” and “thoughtful quotations” he found on the side of his herbal tea boxes, pasting them into a scrapbook for spiritual guidance.

Though he despised England, he bragged to any American who would listen that the most modern and progressive countries in the world were all former English colonies. But perhaps the most contradictory element of David's behavior was his assertion that he was a feminist even while he blatantly favored and spoiled his only son. Having daughters, he thought, automatically made him a feminist. The reality that I witnessed was that David treated his daughter Louise, who had moved to America with them, like the family maid. She was responsible for cooking and cleaning and laundry so that Christian could concentrate on reading scripts and preparing for roles. David paid scant interest in Sharon's life back in England;
even less so in his first daughter, Erin, back in South Africa. His ex-wives, Jenny and Sandra, he described as “mean-spirited harridans,” who had been determined to destroy his dreams.

With such an assortment of views, you would think that having a conversation with David would be an ugly experience. But his undeniable charm, honey-coated with his British accent, only made him colorful and amiable. Back in Britain, Christian recalled that his father was unconventional and “was thought of as a bit odd.” But “odd” was the norm in L.A. David became the consummate dinner party guest, delighted to monopolize every conversation with pointed views on virtually every subject.

He eagerly attended Hollywood functions and Democratic Party mixers. He happily portrayed himself as everyone's favorite eccentric uncle who always had something funny or outrageously politically incorrect to say. He came to realize that in L.A. everything sounded better with an English accent. And David was amazed that his gift of gab was more potent in America than it ever was in England.

After spending quite a bit of time with the family, I started to question some of the many inconsistencies of his self-proclaimed biography.

When I asked David what he really did back in England, David laughed and told me: “Oh, Harrison. I was a confidence trickster.”

I was puzzled, startled. “Confidence trickster” is not a common term in the U.S. but in England, it's the equivalent of being a con man. From that point on, I realized I'd have to take everything David said with a grain of salt. You didn't need to be a therapist to see that David had had a troubled life filled with disappointments, so to make up for it, he was living vicariously through Christian, holding on tightly to the one thing in his life that could be a success.