But some British dignity remains, unlike in New York where a friend of mine rings a fashionable restaurant on a Saturday night and they tell him they don’t have a table. My friend, who in the American manner is very persistent, says he is bringing a screenwriter with him — me. The person in the restaurant asks: We may be able to squeeze your party in, sir, but please tell me: what are the screenwriter’s credits?!
26 JANUARY 1987
We troop off to the famous theatrical restaurant Sardi’s for an award dinner. Like executioners, photographers in black balaclavas crowd the entrance. Going in, I realise we’ve arrived too early. We sit down and they bring us our food while others are still arriving. The salmon tastes like wallpaper. Around the walls there are hideous caricatures of film stars and famous writers. Thankfully the ceremony is not televised or competitive: you know if you’ve won; they don’t torment you with any opening of envelopes. Sissy Spacek and Lynn Redgrave, obviously experienced at the awards game, time it just right, so that when they arrive the whole room is in place and is forced to turn and look at them. Photographers shove through the crowd and climb across tables to get to them.
I see Norman Mailer come in. He is stocky like a boxer and healthy of face, though he looks frail when he walks. It will be a thrilling moment for me to have the great man rest his eyes on me when I receive my award for the Laundrette screenplay. When the playwright Beth Henley announces my name I eagerly look out for Mailer from the podium. I start into my speech but almost stop talking when I see Mailer’s place is now vacant and across the restaurant he is rapidly mounting the stairs to watch the final of the Super Bowl on TV.
27 JANUARY 1987
Spend two mornings in the hotel room interviewing actresses for the part of Anna. About twenty come in and we have longish conversations with all of them: they’re frank and lively and seem healthier and more confident than their British counterparts, somehow less beaten down by things. They are less educated too. The American film world isn’t adjacent to the theatre or literary world as it can be in London. It’s closer to rock ’n’ roll, if anything.
An actress called Wendy Gazelle seems untypical of the group we see. She is less forthright, more sensitive and attractive in a less orthodox way. When Wendy reads, in that room overlooking the park through which people are skiing, it is heartbreaking. I’m so pleased she can invest the somewhat duff dialogue with feeling and meaning that I urge the others to choose her.
In the evening to the Café Luxembourg with Leon from Cinecom, the company that, along with Channel 4, is financing our film. Frears and I refer to Leon as ‘the man that owns us’, which he doesn’t seem to mind. He’s thirty-four, friendly and intelligent, with long hair in a pigtail. Bevan, Frears and I are apprehensive about the pressure his company might put on us to massage or roll our film in a certain direction. We’ll just have to wait and see.
28 JANUARY 1987
To a smart party on the Upper West Side, given by a New York agent for the German director Doris Dorrie. It’s a large apartment in front of which is a courtyard and behind it a view of the river. Marcie, the publicist for Laundrette in New York says: I wouldn’t object to being the accountant of the people in this room! She points out: Isabella Rossellini, Alan Pakula, Matthew Modine, Michael Douglas and various others. Michael Douglas, polite and friendly, praises the British Royal Family to Frears and me for a considerable time, obviously thinking this’ll please us. On the way back we pass a laundromat called My Beautiful Laundrette done up in neon: it offers Reverse Cycle Washing, Fluff Drying and Expert Folding. Two days later I go back and this laundrette has closed for good.
We wonder why the film has done well in the US. It’s partly, I think, because of its theme of success at any price; and partly because the puritan and prurient theme of two outcast boys (outcast from society and having escaped the world of women) clinging together in passionate blood-brotherhood is a dream of American literature and film from Huckleberry Finn to the work of Walt Whitman and on to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
29 JANUARY 1987
I ride the subway across New York to have lunch with Leon at the Russian Tea Room. In the subway car a couple with a kid kiss shamelessly. A legless black man in a wheelchair propels himself through the car, carrying a paper cup. Everyone gives him something. The streets here are full of beggars now; every block someone asks you for money. Before going out I ensure I have a selection of loose change to give away, just as I would in Pakistan.
The young people in NY that you see on the street or subway are far less eccentric, original and fashionable than kids are in Britain. The kids in London, despite unemployment and poverty, have taste; they’re adventurous and self-conscious. They’re walking exhibitions: billboards of style, wearing jumble-sale and designer clothes together. In Britain fashion starts on the street. Here the kids are sartorial corpses. They all wear sports clothes. There are even women wearing business suits and running shoes.
The Russian Tea Room is a fashionable restaurant for movie people. It’s plusher than Sardi’s, apparently more ‘cultured’, and patronized by people who have money. It has semi-circular booths in red and gold: booths for two in the entrance, convenient for both seeing and being seen, and larger ones inside. It has a festive atmosphere. There are shining samovars, red and gold pompons on the lamp-shades and the staff wear red tunics. It’s like a kind of Santa’s grotto with waitresses. Powerful New York agents do business here, reserving several booths for their clients and associates and moving from booth to booth like door-to-door salesmen, dealing and negotiating.
Leon has this time brought with him some serious reinforcements to deal with the script ‘difficulties’, a beautiful and smart woman called Shelby who works with him.
Oh, how we eat! Oh, how I like life now! I have dark brown pancakes on which the waitress spreads sour cream. She forks a heap of orange caviar on to this and pours liquid butter over the lot. This is then folded. This is then placed in the mouth.
Shelby leans forward. As each caviar egg explodes on my tongue like a little sugar bomb, Shelby tells me she has just read all five drafts of the script. I am flattered. But more, she has compared and contrasted them all. More wine? She talks knowledgeably about them. She seems to know them better than I do. Scene 81 in draft 2, she says, is sharper than scene 79 in draft 4. Perhaps I could go back to that? Well. I look at her. She is telling me all this in a kindly tone. In the end, she implies, it is up to me, but … She expresses her reservations, which are quite substantial, at argued length.
I nod to everything, not wanting to induce indigestion. I am also experimenting with the Zen method of bending with the wind, so that when the cleansing storm stops, the tree of my spirit will gaily snap back to its usual upright position. But will this helpful puffing ever stop?
We talk about the end of the film and the hanging of Rafi. They suggest Rafi be murdered by the Ghost. I manage to say (though I object on principle to discussing such things at all) that this would be predictable. Leon says: How can a Ghost murdering a politician in an anarchist commune be predictable?