Funny Girl(49)

THE SECOND SERIES





10


If Sophie had asked Brian to custom-design a miserable few months intended to make her grateful for Barbara (and Jim) and all who sailed in her, he couldn’t have done a better job. People from Hollywood wanted her to be in movies, he said, and when she didn’t believe him, he sent her a script called Chemin de Fer. She read it, and didn’t really understand it, and called him on her phone. She never got tired of picking up her phone and dialling a number and not putting a coin in a slot.

‘First of all,’ she said, ‘what does Chemin de Fer mean?’

‘It’s the same thing as baccarat.’

‘You’re going to have to say something else it’s the same thing as.’

‘Shimmy.’

‘No. Try again.’

‘It’s a card game they play in casinos.’

‘Nobody knows about casinos.’

‘Of course they do, sweetheart. They’re even legal now. You’re being naive.’

‘I’ve never been in a casino.’

‘Of course you haven’t.’

‘I’ll bet Tony and Bill have never been in casinos.’

‘Why do we care what Tony and Bill have never done? They’re BBC writers. They’ve never done anything.’

Tony and Bill would never have written Chemin de Fer. They cared too much about things being real, and about how one scene led to the next. This script was like a dish made from things you’d found in your larder and had to use up before they went off: a Welsh mountain, a casino, a blonde with a big bust.

‘They could have gone to a casino. They’re on good money,’ said Sophie.

‘They’re not on commercial television money.’

‘I mean, compared to everyone else in Britain. People who work in shops and live in the North.’

‘Oh, well,’ said Brian, ‘I don’t know how much we can worry about them.’

‘You don’t want them to see the film? If it’s only for people who play chemin de fer, it isn’t going to do very well.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Brian. ‘Crockford’s was packed on Friday.’

She gave up.

‘Anyway, what did you think of it?’ Brian asked.

‘It’s terrible.’

‘They know it’s terrible. They’re getting John Osborne to rewrite it. And he’s putting in a lot of jokes for your character.’

‘Is he going to explain why they end up shooting people in Wales?’

‘They’re up a mountain, Sophie. There are no mountains in Paris or London or wherever you want them to be shooting people. Honestly. What are you looking for?’

Sophie could see that it wasn’t a script one could spend any time arguing about. You either did it or you turned it down. She had nothing else to do, and the money was extraordinary, and Brian was very excited. If she insisted on being an actress, then this was exactly the sort of thing she should be acting in, he thought. She was only one or two moves away from the gold spray paint and the bikinis, and then the world was hers. Clive, on the other hand, didn’t seem to care one way or the other whether she disappeared off to Wales.

‘I’ll say no if you want me to.’

‘Why on earth would I want you to say no?’

‘Because you’d miss me too much.’

‘I’ll come to Wales and see you.’

‘Will you?’

‘Of course.’

‘And can I ask you a favour?’

‘Anything.’

‘Will you feed Brando?’

She had been sent a Siamese cat by a proud Blackpool pet shop. It had been delivered to the BBC in a van and the van driver wouldn’t take it back again.

‘That would be lovely. I’ll feel connected to you when you’re gone.’

He didn’t come to Wales. (He didn’t feed the cat either. When she got back, Brando had gone.)

John Osborne, it turned out, was not available for the rewrite of Chemin de Fer. (Sophie suggested Tony and Bill, but the American producers weren’t interested.) A man who’d written something for a Dean Martin film did it instead. He put in three jokes for her character, two of which were removed before the shoot and one of which didn’t survive the edit. She hated the director.

She liked the leading man, a French pop singer named Johnny Solo, presumably by his manager rather than by Monsieur and Madame Solo. He was charming and extraordinarily handsome, and after he’d chased her around the hotel they were staying in, she could no longer remember why she was running away, so she stopped. It wasn’t as if she had a boyfriend, as far as she could tell. Johnny was a terrible actor, though, and in any case he couldn’t speak English. Most days Sophie had to ask the cameras to stop rolling, because she could only listen to the French pop star’s American accent with a straight face for very short periods of time. They had a bad script, an awful director and a terrible leading man; it was all so hopeless that she didn’t even have to consider her own performance, luckily.