The Club(90)
A good PA is hard to find.
It had always been one of their traditions, at Home, to throw a viewing party the night of the big awards ceremonies. The Oscars. The Emmys. The Grammys. The Brits. Everyone in one of the screening rooms with popcorn, sunk deep into those enormous leather sofas, applauding or laughing at the clips, catcalling, all stamping their feet and cheering whenever anyone that was in the room got mentioned, all throwing their popcorn at the screen and booing whenever the wrong person won. And it was fun, and funny, to see the people you knew up there, pretending to smile, pretending happily to clap whenever someone else beat them to an award, and know exactly what they were actually thinking and what they would say the next time you saw them. It was fun, and funny, seeing if any of the winners would mention Ned, mention Home, watch him growl and pretend to sulk if they did not.
She hadn’t been intending to watch any of the awards this year. Why would she? She wasn’t in that world any more. But occasionally, after a bath, as she was getting ready to go up to bed, she would just flick the TV on, and one night when she did so, it was one of the awards shows she happened to catch, right at the end of a video-montage tribute to Jackson Crane, Georgia Crane in the front row, brushing away a single tear, receiving a consoling hand on her bare shoulder from the actor next to her. Then the announcer said something about Ron Cox. If the remote control had been closer to hand, Nikki would have switched the TV off before she even recognized the man in the tuxedo approaching the stage, taking the steps up to the stage two at a time, making his way to the podium, clapping the announcer on the back as they ceded the podium to him.
It was Kurt Cox.
There was a hushed silence, a couple of swallowed coughs as he unfolded a piece of paper and retrieved from the pocket of his tuxedo jacket a pair of reading glasses, made some crack about them. Then his face grew serious, and he began to speak about his father: ‘A man known to many of you personally, and to millions more through his films.’
He was dead. Ron Cox was dead and Nikki hadn’t even noticed, had missed the news somehow. How odd it felt, his absence from the world, the man who she had once thought she had loved.
Kurt was talking now, with feeling, about the kindness his father had shown to him growing up, about being taken onto the set of all those much-loved, wonderful movies, being the first to watch them sometimes, his dad noting his reactions, asking his opinions. He spoke about the generosity of his father, his charity work, his love of his family – second only to which came his love of golf. Laughter had rippled around the room. That was the father he knew, he said.
But there was also the man that some of them knew. That some of them had helped enable. Accusations that had been hushed up, and hushed up, and hushed up again, but that everyone in this room, in Hollywood, knew about. About the girls, young girls, threatened into silence or paid off, the vast machinery of fear and manipulation and exploitation on which his father’s career had depended. And at first the camera kept cutting back and forth to faces in the audience. Angry faces. Frightened faces. And you could see the host standing in the corner of the stage, not knowing what to do or say, voices no doubt screaming in his ear. You could hear Kurt speeding up as he spoke – he even made some reference about needing to get this said before they cut him short and went to a commercial break. And he was talking now about how women who tried to tell the truth were ground down, gaslit. How chat-show hosts made jokes about them, how the media dug dirt on them, how they were advised to settle out of court. And how that was wrong. How what his father had done was wrong, using his wealth and his power first to pressure girls and then to silence them. And that was what he had wanted to say about his father and other men like him sitting in this room. That now he knew, although he had loved the man with all his heart, he could not stand here on this stage and let his father’s memory be buffed and burnished like a gold statuette.
That was when they finally turned up the music to drown out Kurt’s mic, and started playing the pre-planned showreel of all the most heartwarming moments from all of Ron Cox’s most heartwarming movies.
For a long time after she had turned the television off, Nikki just sat there, occasionally dabbing at her face with the sleeve of her jumper, occasionally digging a little ball of tissue out of her pyjama pocket to blow her nose. She didn’t need to look online to know what people would already be talking about, nor what they would be saying about Ron Cox, about Kurt. She could imagine there would be people defending Ron, and accusing Kurt, and all the people who always had opinions about things would be racing to be the first person off the mark with their hot take, and already the battle lines would be forming.
She put her phone down, walked to the window and looked out into the darkness, at the bare tree at the end of the lawn silhouetted against the orange-lit sky, the moon behind the clouds.
And she stood there for a long time, thinking. About Ron. About Ned. About all the things she had done in her life and all the things she had still to do. About all the ways one person can shape and twist and hurt another. About the difficulties, perhaps even the impossibility, of ever fully putting some things right. About the past and about the present and the future. About a decision, and a phone call, to the young man who she was proud to have given birth to, that it was finally time to make.
Acknowledgements
The past couple of years have not been the easiest time for anyone trying to do anything, and certainly wasn’t an easy time to write a book. The fact that we managed it is down to the support of our friends, family and each other – as well as brilliant teams on both sides of the Atlantic.