Roland talks about being brought up in Birmingham and being in a class at school in which there were only five white kids. And then moving to Hull and being the only black kid in the class. The racism was constant and casual. One day he was walking along and heard someone calling out, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ When he turned round he saw it was a woman calling her dog.
Later he worked as a nude model for architects. Architects? In a life-drawing class, he says, so the barbarians of the future would get a sense of beauty.
We talk about the character of Danny being underwritten. Roland might fill it out by having a strong sense of what the character is. He thinks there’s much of himself he can bring to the part.
Bevan has managed to get permission from the police to block off some streets in North Kensington to stage the riot scenes, or the ‘scuffles’ as he describes them. They don’t even ask to see a script.
17 FEBRUARY 1987
To see Claire Bloom, Stephen and I. Chat for a while to Philip Roth. Roth fizzes and whirls with mischief and vibrant interest in the world. He is a wicked teller of tales! I tell him that on taking his advice and writing some fiction, a story I’ve written for the London Review of Books may not be accepted in the US because of the sex and four-letter words in it. He says he’s had similar trouble: imagine the nuisance, he tells me, of having to find a suitable synonym for the perfectly adequate ‘dogshit’ just so your story can be published in the prissy New Yorker. He also tells us with great glee that he’d written a story called ‘The Tormented Cunt’, but had to change the title.
Claire looks younger than her fifty-six years and I did want Alice older than that, partly so that the scene I lifted from A Sentimental Education — the woman lets down her hair and it has gone white — is effective. Claire hunts through the script for a line she doesn’t understand. It is: ‘The proletarian and theocratic ideas you theoretically admire grind civilisation into dust.’ It seems to me that no clearer line has ever been written. Frears explains the line and adds that the line ‘that country has been sodomised by religion’ in Laundrette mystified him long after the film had been finished. Claire looks sceptical and says she doesn’t think she can say something she doesn’t understand.
On the way home Frears says Shashi has rung to ask if he can leave early on the first day of shooting to go to a cocktail party. Frears says if this is how stars behave, it might all be difficult to deal with.
23 FEBRUARY 1987
I run into Roland. He says: Why does Danny have to have a girlfriend and a kid? I say because it makes the character seem more complex. I can see Roland wants Danny to be more romantic. I tell him the character’s unreal enough and idealised as it is.
Talk to Karin Bamborough about the end of the movie. The idea of it ending with the hanging is still not necessarily the best. It’ll send people away in a gloomy mood. Karin thinks there should be some image of reconciliation. I say, well, if one occurs to me I’ll put it in. I’m not sure Sammy and Rosie should be reconciled at the end of the film, not sure they’d want that.
Stephen and I talk about the music we’ll use in the film. Some kind of street music, plus some American soul, perhaps Otis Redding or Sam Cooke, music from the 1960s which seems to me to have really lasted, something that everyone recognises.
24 FEBRUARY 1987
Roland, Ayub and Wendy Gazelle (who has just flown in from New York) are in the production office today and on the walls are photographs of Meera and Suzette Llewellyn, who are playing Rani and Vivia respectively. Ayub and Wendy together look like Romeo and Juliet! Their all being so young will mean there’s little bitterness in the film, so a story that involves the shooting of a black woman by the police, an exiled torturer and the eviction of dozens of people from their homes, while ending with a hanging, won’t be as grim as this description sounds.
The actors are pretty nervous and complain to me that Frears and I haven’t spent much time talking about the backgrounds to their characters. I urge them to work it out for themselves, maybe writing out a few pages of background detail. Despite their worries, when I sit down with them and they discuss various scenes with each other, they seem to know what they’re about. The important thing is that they like each other and can relax. I know they’ve started to hang out together.
Stephen and I talk about the end of the film once more. It’s still not worked out properly. Maybe there should be another scene, after the hanging, maybe with Sammy and Rosie in each other’s arms, a scene that was cut from earlier in the script. I’m not against the idea; but maybe there’s something more interesting I could write.
25 FEBRUARY 1987
To Milan for the opening of Laundrette in Italy. I do an interview through an interpreter and go to the bar with the publicist, the distributor and the journalist. They talk politics. The journalist, a fashionably dressed woman in her thirties, turns to me and says: Isn’t it funny, all the Italians round the table are communists? It’s a disconcerting remark, since I haven’t heard anyone describe themselves as a communist for at least ten years, since I was a student. Indeed, I reflect, it’s only with embarrassment and in low voices that the people I know in London will admit to being socialists. Generally we don’t admit to believing in anything at all, though we sometimes disapprove of the worst abuses. It’s as if in London it’s considered vulgar or exhibitionist to hold too strongly to anything, hence the London contempt for Mrs Thatcher along with the failure to do anything about her. In some ways this British insouciance is a manifestation of British scepticism and dislike of extremes; in another way it’s just feebleness.
To a massive Gothic church in Milan. The stained-glass windows tell, in sequence, like bright cartoons, biblical stories. And with strong sunlight behind each of them, they resemble the frames of a film.
26 FEBRUARY 1987
To Florence by train. The fast and comfortable Italian trains and the businessmen around me in their sharp clothes. The care they take: everything matches; not a garment is worn or shapeless. What surprises me is the affluence and attractiveness of northern Italy and that despite Thatcher’s talk about the boom in British industry, compared with this place it’s in desperate straits.
In Florence I do more interviews. This publicising of films is an odd business. I have no Italian money and little grasp of what is going on. Norboto, the publicist, takes me from city to city. When I am thirsty he buys me a Coke; when I am hungry he fetches me a sandwich. He takes me to the hotel and in the morning he wakes me up. It reminds me of being a kid and being out with my father. You veer in these publicity tours between feeling you are important, a minor celebrity, someone to be listened to, and the predominant feeling that you’re a kind of large parcel, a property at the disposal of a nervous distributor with which things can be done, films sold and money made. You hope in return that you’ll get a decent view of the Grand Canal from the window of your Venice hotel.
27 FEBRUARY 1987
To Venice for the Carnival. I stand in the railway station and read the board: there are trains to Vienna, Trieste, Munich, Paris, Rome. That these places are merely a train ride away gives one a sense of being a part of Europe that isn’t available in Britain. When I’m in the US and people talk of making a trip to Europe it still takes me a beat to realise they’re also referring to Britain. I think of the legendary sign at Dover: Fog over Channel, Continent cut off.