David Jason: My Life (28 page)

It wasn’t salubrious, then. But the point was, it was your club. You were among your own kind, you felt, and were very comfortable to be so. You could squeeze into a booth, if one was available, and order a meal – nothing fancy, steak and chips, mostly – and the beer and Scotch flowed freely. In those days, I stuck with beer – light and bitter, specifically. Many a night I would stagger out of Gerry’s in the early hours of the morning with Malcolm Taylor, in a state of over-refreshment, having unsuccessfully attempted to woo the waitresses. Those were thrilling times altogether. I was acting in the West End, living in the West End, drinking in the West End – I couldn’t have got much more West End without changing my name to ‘West End’.

CHAPTER TEN

How not to make a movie. In bed with Elizabeth Taylor, but not Richard Burton. And various other adventures in the screen trade, not all of them entirely satisfying.

WE COME NOW
to the portion of this narrative which must deal with my days in Hollywood – obviously an unforgettable period for me. The details are etched so vividly in my mind, it’s as though it were yesterday, although, I confess, at the time I was constantly pinching myself to check that it was really me.

Really me, arriving in the entertainment capital of the world! Really me, driving on Sunset Boulevard with the sky above an incredible blue and the sun glistening in the palm trees! Really me, passing in a state of almost childish wonder through the gates of Universal Studios and onto its famous movie backlot!

Ah, what a lovely week’s holiday that was. The summer of 1978, I believe. Linda Ronan, who handled this area for the Richard Stone Partnership, had got me a set of commercials for Cobb & Co., a pub-restaurant chain in New Zealand. The reason they wanted me was because of some physical antics I had got up to in a comedy series for ITV called
The Secret Life of Edgar Briggs
. The series had inspired a selection of scenarios
for adverts in which I played a salesman for whom everything goes wrong and who creates chaos even as he is trying to make his pitch – a kind of anti-commercial, if you like. Anyway, among the perks of the job was a flexible air ticket, meaning that I could break my return journey anywhere I chose. I chose Los Angeles, where a great former girlfriend, who used to work in the bar at Gerry’s, was now living. She had succeeded in securing a job with a publishing house and had emigrated. She agreed to put me up and show me the sights, and we had a fabulous week before I headed back to London.

Those seven days of tourism, which included trips to a number of very good burger bars, represent, even now, the full extent of my experience of Hollywood. Not for want of trying, I should say. Or perhaps I should say, not for want of dreaming. If any actor tells you their idle contemplations haven’t turned longingly, at some point or other, to the prospect of a major American film deal, they’re almost certainly fibbing. Yet it may be significant that, when I was actually in Hollywood that time, I didn’t think about doing anything to make the dream become a reality. My agent, Richard, had a representative working in Los Angeles – his son, Tim. So, at Richard’s suggestion, Tim and I met for lunch one day. Tim booked somewhere buzzing and businessy on the Sunset Strip, or thereabouts – the kind of place where you could believe everyone was talking deals and projects. He was adamant that we should get a good table – by which he seemed to mean one in the middle of the room. I was puzzled about this insistence at the time, thinking that surely all the best tables were the ones over by the wall, out of the way. But, of course, it was in order to be sitting where the maximum number of other diners would walk past you during the course of your meal, meaning you had the chance to catch someone’s eye and say hello if you needed to.

I was a wide-eyed innocent throughout that trip – to an extent that seems bizarre to me now. I was an actor, in Los Angeles,
with an agent – and yet it didn’t occur to me to network or mingle or put myself about or turn the trip to my commercial advantage. Maybe, deep down, in my heart, for all the fantasies about a life in film, I lacked the belief. Maybe, in my heart, I thought it was far above and beyond me. It really was back to my innocent Incognito days: I suppose I wanted someone to tell me I was good. I was incapable of telling them. I was the wrong way round in LA.

This is not to say that the film world has not come a-calling for my talents on at least a couple of occasions. Reader, I have indeed graced the silver screen. However, I think it’s fair to say that at no point while I was gracing it was cinematic history made. In fact, one of the films was so bad that cinematic history was almost unmade.

In 1973, I was busy in
No Sex Please
in the West End when Tim Stone got in touch and said, ‘We’ve had some interest from a company called Border Film Productions who want to make a movie with you. They’ve seen you in
No Sex
.’

Well, that suggestion certainly tickled my interest, even though I had no idea who Border Film Productions were. The truth is, I’m not sure I ever properly found out who Border Film Productions were, even while I was working for them.

Tim sent me the screenplay for a film called
Albert’s Follies
. That in itself was tremendously exciting – opening an envelope and pulling out a screenplay rather than just a play or script. I settled down to read it in a state of pink-cheeked glee. The screenplay was by a writer called David McGillivray. McGillivray went on to write a lot of scripts for the British sex-film industry. Perhaps you’ve seen his
I’m Not Feeling Myself Tonight
from 1975, or 1974’s
The Hot Girls
; or maybe you’ve even come across the script for his sadly unmade 1976 piece,
Unzipper Dee Doo Dah
. Whatever, all that was in the future for him. What he had come up with in
Albert’s Follies
seemed to be a fairly innocent kind of farcical comedy. The character it was proposed I
should play, Albert Toddey, was a civil servant and an ordinary, rather meek bloke. But when things got tough, Albert would suddenly transform into a kind of James Bond figure, suited and sleek, and rescue the situation – or, at least, in his dreams he would. A slightly old,
Billy Liar
-style kind of set-up, you might immediately suggest; and you might immediately be right. But I was so busy being completely impressed by the simple fact that I was reading a screenplay, that I didn’t really pause to have any particular reflections on its contents, critical or otherwise.

I went back to my agent and said I was definitely up for it. We weren’t, I should add, talking blockbuster budgets. However, a three-week shoot was proposed, which could be tailored to fit around my nightly duties at the Strand Theatre, and the film was to be shot entirely at Twickenham Studios, which, if not exactly Pinewood or Shepperton – or, indeed, Universal – definitely sounded pukka enough.

Contracts were tremblingly signed, and soon after that, I was going through the doors at Twickenham with a spring in my step. On-set, I met my co-star – Imogen Hassall, a British actress who had on her CV an appearance in the schlocky 1970 movie
When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth
. But, as she openly admitted herself, she wasn’t as famous for that as she was famous for being famous. Because she was glamorous, the press flocked to her, and she was frequently photographed on the arm of somebody at an awards ceremony, in a stunning dress – normally backless, and quite often fairly frontless, too. For this, she had earned the nickname the ‘Countess of Cleavage’.

I liked Imogen a lot and found her to be smart and sensitive in a way that, at the time, might have been at odds with the public perception of her. We had lunch together a couple of times while we were working and she mentioned being depressed about the way she was perceived. She said she felt trapped in a cartoon image of herself, and didn’t quite know what to do
about it. Seventeen years after all this, I was shocked to read that Imogen had taken an overdose and killed herself. She was only thirty-eight.

Also in the cast, playing men from the Ministry, were Tim Barrett, who later played Terry Scott’s boss in
Terry and June
, and Hugh Lloyd, whom I knew from another Terry Scott series,
Hugh and I
. These guys were good company, and we were to have quite a laugh together on this project – at least in the early stages.

So, we started shooting
Albert’s Follies
and, being totally inexperienced and knowing nothing about movie-making, I got on with doing what I was told to do. I turned up when I was told to turn up, I stood where I was told to stand, and I said the words I was told to say – which is pretty much the definition of film-acting, I suppose. I was the star of the film but I had nothing as glamorous as a trailer, I should point out. I had a utilitarian dressing room and went for lunch in the canteen with the props boys, where we all stood in line and moved along with a tray, having food slopped onto our plates by intimidating serving staff.

However, I very quickly got the sense that all was not what it was supposed to be. For one thing, we seemed to be working with extraordinary haste – with so much haste, in fact, that Ray the director didn’t appear to have much time to do anything in the way of directing. Imogen and I would be put into position under the lights, and then we would hear ‘Action!’ and soon after that we would hear ‘Cut!’ and then we would move quickly on to the next scene.

A couple of times we went for a take, and afterwards, I said to Ray, ‘If we do that again, I might be able to …’

But Ray wasn’t really listening, and he would merely say, ‘Right, let’s get on. Next shot, please.’

Every now and again the cameraman would roll his eyes, conspiratorially, and quietly say to me things like, ‘This is a big
close-up that he wants. Don’t do too much. You’re doing a bit too much.’ So, in the absence of any other instruction, I was taking direction from the cameraman. Even I, in my state of high excitement and with my eyes set on the Hollywood horizon, realised that this was not how it was meant to be.

Also, was it me, or did bits of the set keep disappearing?

No, it wasn’t me: bits of the set did keep disappearing.

You would arrive in the morning and what had, the previous day, been a replica of a long corridor with numerous doors off it had dwindled to a solitary pair of doors in a small fake wall. It appeared the sets we were using weren’t being built for our purposes – we were borrowing them. Essentially, we were making our film on anything we could find around the place that was free. When the sets were wanted elsewhere, they were being carted away. Which would explain, I suppose, some of the director’s haste. You needed to get the scene in the sitting room done while you could because there was every chance that you would turn your back and find the sitting room had gone off to appear in someone else’s film. I’m not sure Steven Spielberg would have settled for this – or even the person who directed (or should I say aimed?) the
Carry On
films.

Meanwhile, I was completely knackered. Six days a week, I was getting up at six in the morning and going off to spend the day filming – and then hurtling back to the West End in the evening to fling myself all over the place in
No Sex Please
. Most of the time I felt like I had just been run over, not by a lorry but by a fleet of lorries. After two of the scheduled three weeks of the shoot, I was nearly dead. I came offstage at the Strand on the Saturday night and headed back to the flat in Newman Street – and almost nothing happened until I was woken by my alarm clock at dawn on the Monday, ready to drive over to Twickenham again. I just crashed out and slept solidly through until about 2 p.m. on Sunday, roused myself sufficiently to fix some kind of lunch, then curled up in front of the television
for the rest of the afternoon before dragging my battered body back to bed.

The crisis point was reached in the final week of filming. There came a moment in the day when Imogen and I were required to appear in a scene which involved us walking down a passage together. For some reason, within the plot, I had lost my trousers and was wearing boxer shorts printed with a Union Jack (you’ll get some measure of the quality of the film’s farcical humour here). Imogen and I completed our duties, and then we heard the director say, ‘Cut! OK, that’s good. Now we’ll go again with the second cast.’

Second cast? What did he mean, ‘second cast’?

Then, as Imogen and I stared open-mouthed, onto the set trooped eight girls in tiny, ragged bikinis, all of them tied by their wrists to a length of rope, one end of which was in the thick-fingered grip of a large muscle-bound man. I was completely confused. This wasn’t in the script, was it? A scene involving scantily clad girls, attached to a rope, and some kind of slave master? I don’t think I would have missed that. Yet here they were.

Imogen and I simply stood aside as the man, the girls and their piece of rope were filmed passing down the corridor.

Thus was it revealed to us that
Albert’s Follies
was no longer, strictly speaking,
Albert’s Follies
. It felt more like
Jason’s Folly
. And
Jason’s Folly
was now a film called
White Cargo
. A whole subplot had been grafted onto the script – a story about selling strippers into slavery. To be frank with you, I’m still fairly confused about how this all worked. But my basic understanding is that, at some point during the filming, the order had come through from the producers to switch the film from a U certificate to an X certificate, in the panicked hope, presumably, that this would give it some life in the adult cinemas – the ‘gentlemen’s cinema clubs’, as they used to be known in the 1970s – if nowhere else. Therefore, obviously, bring on the sex-slave strippers: it was as subtle as that. So
Albert’s Follies
became
White Cargo
, which was
Albert’s Follies
but with some extra slave girls and a random sex scene banged, as it were, onto the end of it. Or into the middle of it. Or whenever the fancy took the director.