The Right Man (7 page)

The one
contract not to be found in Jeremy Planter’s file was a client/agent agreement.
This is because I don’t think they work. Naomi disagrees with me over this. In
fact she more than disagrees, she thinks I am a ‘head—in-the-clouds girlie
pushover’ on this issue, ‘a pussy’. Whether to bind a client to you by contract
is the one area in which the ‘Mullin’ and the ‘Ketts’ form two distinct armies
in the agency, with the battlelines firmly drawn up along the ‘and’.

Traditionally
there are no such contracts. It’s not the music business, thank God, and an
agency can never talk of ‘signing’ a new artist. An artist is free to go at any
time with an understanding that any money from already negotiated contracts
will continue to be filtered through the original agent. On the face of it,
this puts one in a rather insecure position, but it must be remembered that
without a binding agreement, the agent is also free to drop the client at any
time if he or she becomes boring, for instance, or unemployable for whatever
reasons. Usually alcohol. And, of course, it can be difficult sometimes to get
a client, especially a younger one, to sign one of these agreements. But my
main argument against them is that once a client has signed to you, they expect
more. They do less for themselves and they are constantly whingeing that you
don’t do enough for them. The mutuality is soured. Rather like marriage. People
who have been living together quite happily for years decide to get married and
then split up shortly afterwards. There’s nothing like a marriage contract to reduce
a healthy sex life to a bi-monthly obligation, is there?

Naomi Ketts
is keen on client/agent agreements, I suspect, because she dreams of selling
the agency on one day, of being bought out and retiring, although the thought
of her without her daily dose of show-biz animosity is inconceivable. She can’t
even manage a long weekend, let alone a holiday in Greece, without at least
three faxes to agonize over. She is the sort of woman who eats stress for
breakfast. It’s her roughage.

This
disagreement between myself and Naomi first reared its ugly head when we,
mistakenly in my opinion, took on Debbie Sarchet. You may remember her, she had
a brief flirtation with the media in the late eighties. A part-time model with
a rich daddy, whose main claim to fame initially was giving blow jobs to rock
stars in the toilets of briefly fashionable nightclubs. After a one-season
stint presenting some low-rating ‘yoof show, she announced to anyone who wanted
to hear — which, as it happened, turned out to include most of the British
press — that she had really wanted to be an actress all along, was taking
acting classes — though how often was not clear — and would shortly be moving
to Los Angeles because the English ‘hate success’. She was the kind of person
who sees fame, rather than talent, as the currency, and I couldn’t stand her.
However, the women in the office thought she might amount to something, and Tilda
actually admired her, so for about five months, she was one of ours.

My
point is that if we had actually signed her, as in made her sign a contract
with us, we might still be stuck with her now, which even Naomi agreed would be
a nightmare. However, during those few months, Naomi, I think, got a taste of
that eighties cliché, the ‘money for nothing’ bug, the pot of gold at the end
of the rainbow, the massive share-option yuppie dream. She wanted to live
happily ever after.

This
was because a week after taking on Debbie Sarchet, we got a call from her
modelling agency, Studio Visage. She had retained them, which was OK by us
because we know doodlysquat about the fashion world. They wanted to know if we
would be interested in taking on various other clients of theirs. We started
getting Studio Visage Z-cards in the post. A Z—card is the modelling equivalent
of a Walker-print. Instead of the standard actor’s full-on head-and-shoulder
shot, a Z-card will have a glam shot: something in a bikini, or if she looks
exotic, some leopardskin or fishnet; plus what I call a Chanel shot —something
grown-up with classy aspirations — and a fresh-face shot. The hair and make-up
will be different in all three shots and the girl’s measurements will be
printed down the side.

Likewise
the boys will have a shot with a shirt on, a shot without a shirt on, one with
hair gel, one without hair gel and occasionally an outdoor shot on a motorbike.

We
giggled and joked about these arrivals at first, and the sexier boy ones ended
up plastered all over our walls. It being an office peopled entirely by women,
the sexy girl shots went straight into the bin, and I had to pretend not to
notice. Tilda was particularly into the model boys, though, and I suspect she
harboured serious yearnings for some of the hunkier guys. I bet she took some
of them home for private perusal. Anyway, when, amid an unwarranted amount of
publicity, Tilda managed to get Debbie Sarchet half a line in an actual
American movie shooting in London at the time, the Studio Visage wooing really
began in earnest. Would we like to go to a meeting with them? Could they take
us all out to lunch? For a couple of months we wasted time farting about with
them, while they toyed with ideas, first of a merger and then of buying us out.
They must have looked only at our most successful client list, done a few sums
and reckoned it would be nice to expand into films.

Of
course, when it was explained to them that to run an agency like this you have
to have a ratio of at least three low earners to one star and they realized
that we have to do a lot of dog-work for over 100-odd clients, they backed off
a bit. What really sent them packing, though, was when, to their amazement, it
was revealed that we have no actual contracts with any of our clients. Anyone
is free to piss off at any time.

This
they could not buy. I was relieved. They were awful people who had no
understanding that this is a very personal business. Bigger is not necessarily
better, and you can’t force a director or employer to take someone on. It’s all
about relationships with people. It’s about loyalty and intimacy. But by then,
Naomi had seen the figures. I mean, financially speaking. And they were, it has
to be said, impressive. There must be a lot of dosh swilling around in the glam
biz but I didn’t want to hang about watching Mullin and Ketts turning into an
artistic laughing-stock, however many copulating holidays in Barbados I could
have afforded in the short term.

One or
two of the pics of the model boys stayed up on the cork board alongside Tania’s
animal rights posters, though. Debbie Sarchet married some pitiable
thirty-year-old muso millionaire and scuttled off to Los Angeles, occasionally
appearing nowadays in women’s magazines — as you must no doubt know — with
tips for young mothers on exercise and dieting and, of course, breastfeeding.
Although whether it’s possible to breastfeed through a silicone implant is
tactfully not gone into.

Strange
that all this seems so clear to me when it comes to the agency, but at home I
seem to have adopted the reverse policy, having signed the ultimate ever-after
agreement with Liz. I often wonder why I married Liz, why she married me. My
three-reasons-for-marrying—Liz joke: I fancied her, I fancied her and I fancied
her. I suppose I figured that to. stand a sparrow’s chance in the
happily—ever-after stakes it would be best to marry a woman I fancied a lot
rather than one I liked but only half fancied, since as a man I might be
tempted to become a bit frisky and spoil everything after a couple of years.
Actually women are as likely to be unfaithful as men, but we all conspire to
remain silent on that. However, with previous girlfriends I’d kept other doors
open, had a roving eye even, but with Liz it was different. She had a way of
looking into my eyes as if I was the only person on earth who could save her,
and this used to — still does — make me tumescent. That and the needy quality
in her voice. As if that very inability to cope in her, which has now become
untenable, irritating, was initially the main attraction. Vanity, all vanity of
course; who am I to save anyone? But that look and that plaintive sound made me
feel right, like I had a place. Somehow I got it into my head that she needed
me. I wanted to be useful.

As the
taxi came to a standstill on Hammersmith Broadway, the cabbie took time to
reflect further on the absurdities of life.

‘There’s
people dying everywhere, you know. Sarajevo, look at that, and did you see the
programme about Burma on the telly last night? Diabolical.’

I hoped
that the traffic was not going to snarl into a gridlock as it can so often in
this part of London. The thought of sitting here for forty minutes with Mr
Morbid did not fill me with any joy. I wondered how long it would take to walk
from here to the Planters’ house in Chiswick. Too long, probably. It was
already quarter past two, and I wanted to be out of there before Susan and the
children returned. I put the contracts back in my bag and took out the estate
agent’s details for my mother.

The
noise of a thousand engines turning over in their stationary vehicles on the
Broadway was throbbing inside my head. A traffic helicopter passed by overhead,
but the sound of its propelling blades stayed with me. I suppose Neil James was
right: thinking I could look after Liz was a kind of abuse. Being the right man
for her had turned me into some kind of Roman emperor.
Mea culpa.
And
now she was breaking free of her bondage with centurion Bob Henderson from over
the Alps and I wouldn’t have the time to suppress this insurrection because the
bleeding empire needed constant maintenance.

The
Planters had a nice and big house in Chiswick. Jeremy’s success was not yet
long-lived enough to have warranted a move to hugely grander surroundings such
as Shepperton or Henley, but they had had an extension built out the back and
an extra floor on the top with dormer windows and a sort of half-balcony.

I knew
the house well; I had been there on many occasions. Sunday barbecues,
late-night chats in the kitchen with whisky. But I had never been there alone
before. I knew the downstairs toilet with the framed posters, photos and
cartoons of Jeremy’s early work, but I didn’t know the upstairs en-suite
bathroom adjoining their bedroom, for instance.

Jeremy
wanted me to collect a couple of the natty suits for which he was renowned, two
of his awards, a golf club and three of the funny wigs from his very first TV
show. It was a peculiar set of requests and seemed more like the props list for
a
Hello
magazine photo-shoot than an inventory of requirements for life
in a ‘love nest’.

In the
living room, among the framed mantelpiece photos, there was even one of me —
well, one in which I featured — a hot day in their garden with a slide and a
swimming pool. I had my shirt tucked into tight jeans. Cripes, it must have
been some years ago, before Liz. Nowadays, in the summer, I wear linen or silk
shirts, untucked, to cover the weight gain, and those jeans have long been used
as oil rags.

I
caught myself in the Planters’ mirror. Women put on weight when pregnant but
then they get the chance to lose it if they breastfeed — fifteen hundred
calories a day, that — and, if they’re like Liz, they go to aerobics and yoga
to stay slim. Or maybe it was Bob Henderson who was doing that for her.

Silly
blokes like me spend nine months empathizing, eating all the Haagen-Dazs
ice-cream with their wives and then have to cancel all exercise as they buckle
under the strain of supporting three people. The blob in the mirror stared back
at me. I turned to the photos again. Some had been removed from their frames,
no doubt recently by Susan. On the table were a couple of photo albums and a
box of photos. In the bin were some photos torn in two. Susan had been going
through the memories then.

Susan
is good-looking but, in life as in all the photos, she lacked that vanity, that
desperate need to be looked at, that fear, even, of being judged on her looks —
which Liz has in buckets —which attracts men like a blood-magnet. Which makes a
woman beautiful to the mindless-dick part of a man. Most of him, that is, as
the girls in the office would have it.

There
were a few photos in the box of a Planter holiday, presumably before Polly was
born, sun and swimming pools. Jeremy of course larking about in every shot,
always aware of the camera, no matter what — true pro. But Susan, who didn’t
feature that often — presumably because she was the one who remembered to bring
the camera and use it — even when. wearing a bikini, with tanned skin and
tousled hair, looked —how can I put it — wholesome, nice, at one with herself,
drinking no doubt just enough to be merry and then going to sleep, turning down
the second cup of coffee, eating the right amount of salad. Not that she is
fussy or prim: the sofa cushions were not overly arranged, breakfast had been
left unwashed-up and even the duvet in the bedroom was not pulled tight but
rolled back. Jeremy did not deserve her.

I had
the awards, the wigs and the golf clubs but there was a problem with the suits.
In the wardrobe were only Susan’s clothes, sensible clothes, nothing too
expensive, no men’s shoes in their shoe rack, but on the floor several empty coathangers
and some shards of linen and bits of thread. It looked as if Susan had been at
his stuff with the pinking shears. There was one tie which had been snipped in
two. The suits, no doubt, were already in pieces in black bin liners like the
chopped-up remains of murder victims. Now I felt like the secret prowler in
Neil James’s unwritten masterpiece. A chubby little bad-luck elf silently
prowling through this woman’s house to change the course of events, as if Neil
were my alter ego, as if he were writing my life.