Young Winstone (26 page)

Siouxsie’s wasn’t the only famous face to come looming up out of the dry ice in that place. Yoko Ono was floating about too, as was Andy Warhol . . . hole . . . hole. I didn’t know too much about all these arty types, but I went up to him and said, ‘Alright, how are you going?’ He said hello back politely enough, so as far as I was concerned he was one of the good ones.

It’s at about this time that I take a hit on something that is probably angel dust and start to notice that the waitresses are all the most beautiful women you’d ever see. But after a few ‘Hello, darlin’’s my eyes start to adjust to the light properly, and now I’m thinking,
‘Woah, fuck me! Something ain’t right here – the old Adam’s apples are a bit prominent. These birds are all geezers. You could make a mistake here!’

By now the angel dust is properly taking hold and I’m not used to this kind of feeling. To be honest, I’m properly shitting myself, so I’m working my way around the outside wall like a kid who can’t swim hanging onto the edge of the pool. Eventually I get to the exit and promptly fall all the way down the stairs. So I get in a cab and ask the guy to take me to the Gramercy Park Hotel and he goes, ‘Well, I ain’t gonna take you to California am I, bud?’ When I finally get back to the hotel, Don Boyd’s standing there looking at his watch going, ‘Raymond, you were twenty-five minutes longer than I expected you to be.’

It was a great way to see New York for the first time because I was going in through the underbelly – not the gangsters but the artists and bohemians. I still had a massive chip on my shoulder, though, so I probably didn’t make the best impression.

Before one screening I remember being introduced to Richard Gere, who was one of the biggest stars in the world at the time, and he totally blanked me. I can understand why now – after all, he didn’t know me from Adam Ant – but at the time I remember thinking, ‘Fuck you, that ain’t very nice, is it?’

After we’d all sat there and watched the film, Richard came up to us again. I think Don Boyd probably knew him because he said, ‘Ray, invite Richard to the party after.’ But I said, ‘No, Richard’s very busy. Ain’t you, Richard? He’s definitely too busy to come to the party.’ Richard Gere’s probably a nice guy who has to talk to a million people a day – why should he have any idea who I am? – but that was my attitude at the time. I was quite fuck-you about everything. So maybe I had a bit more in common with Siouxsie than I thought I did.

When I eventually got to the party, they fitted me up with this starlet who became quite a famous actress later on. I’m just talking normally to this reporter from
Hollywood Tonight
and all of a sudden this bird has been slipped onto my arm. It ain’t her fault they’re trying to pair us up like Beauty and the Beast – she’s been told to do it, which they used to do years ago, and I suppose they still do today. It’s good for you to be seen with a starlet, and good for them to get their face out there, but all the time I’m thinking, ‘My fiancée’s at home – how’s she gonna react if she sees this?’

I’d rather not say who the unlucky lady was – not because she had anything to be embarrassed about, but because I did, as she was a lovely girl and under other circumstances, yeah . . . Oh, alright then, it was Jane Seymour, and I ended up being quite rude to her. I’ve done enough things I’ve had to apologise for over the years not to have to make up imaginary misdeeds. So I don’t see why I’d have a painful memory of telling the future
Dr Quinn Medicine Woman, ‘This
is my film – it’s nothing to do with you, love’, if I hadn’t actually done it. That’s just one step away from ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ really, though, isn’t it?

The problem with thinking you’ve cracked it is it’s all too easy to get complacent and piss the whole thing up the wall. I’d come out of shooting
Scum
and gone straight into
Fox.
It was a thirteen-part ITV drama series about a big South London family. They weren’t so much gangsters, more a strong, old-fashioned family who looked after each other in a way that was becoming less and less common then, but which I still believe in today. Maybe that was why it struck quite a chord with people at the time, even though not many people remember it now.

It was while I was doing
Fox
that the hype really started for the cinema release of
Scum.
I remember watching it come on Barry
Norman’s
Film 79
with some of the other actors in
Fox
– Peter Vaughan from
Citizen Smith
and Larry Lamb, who was on
EastEnders
for a long time years later, were definitely there. You could tell something big was happening, but I ended up being quite distanced from it all, because I’d chosen the two weeks leading up to the London opening to get married to Elaine and go on our honeymoon in Lanzarote.

Once we landed back in London, we got off the plane and straight into a cab to the premiere at the Prince Charles just off Leicester Square. There was quite a lot of hysteria and people fainting in the cinema (which I’m sure was a rent-a-crowd Don Boyd had paid for. Why not? They’d do it in America. That’s why I love Don to death, because he’d set that kind of thing up – even though he never admitted to me that he had). I remember thinking, ‘Fucking hell! I had no idea this was going to be such a big deal.’ It was probably a good thing I didn’t, because I’d already lost enough of whatever discipline I’d managed to accumulate as an actor.

I remember one of the producers of
Fox
telling me something that got me quite annoyed at the time. ‘You’re doing alright, Ray,’ he said. ‘But there’s nothing going on in your eyes.’ Looking back now, I can see that what made me angry about this remark was the fact that it was absolutely bang on. It took me a couple of years to get over the initial shock of someone digging me out like that, but as time went on I began to realise that just because you were saying the right words and making the right movements, that didn’t mean there was anything actually behind them.

I’m not sure exactly how I eventually managed to make a deeper connection between who I was and what I was doing as an actor. Maybe it was getting a bit more life experience. Maybe it was having a few disappointments. Maybe it was losing some people who
I loved. But I don’t think I’d ever have been able to do it without Elaine at my side.

People have sometimes said to me that it was a strange time to get married – just as my career was taking off. But it’s not a choice I’ve ever regretted, in fact quite the reverse. I wasn’t one of those people who needed showbiz to get a bird. I’d done all that by then, and I needed someone around who was a strong enough character to stand up to me when I was getting a bit full of myself. My Elaine didn’t just do personal guidance. On the next job I got after
Scum,
she gave me the most important bit of professional advice I’ve ever received.

If the people making the film had got their way, Elaine wouldn’t even have been around to save the day. We’d only just got married when I was offered the lead role in an American film called
Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains.
Well, that wasn’t the original title. At first it was called
All Washed Up,
but I think they changed that title because they were worried it was going to become a self-fulfilling prophecy (which, in a way, it did).

It was a funny old script about a load of punk rockers on a tour bus, which was going to be directed by an old hippie and self-confessed mate of Roman Polanski’s called Lou Adler. They’d cast some big old characters to be in such a confined space, but we’ll come to them in a minute.

When they asked me to do it off the back of
Scum
I said, ‘OK, fine’, but only if I could bring my wife with me. They didn’t fancy that too much but I said, ‘Listen, I’ve just got married and I want to stay that way, so either my wife comes with me, or I don’t come at all.’ Neither Elaine nor I have ever been the jealous type – that’s part of the reason we’ve stuck together so long – and these days when I go away for work she’s probably glad to get rid of me. But at the time
we’d only just got hitched, and I didn’t want to be out in Vancouver for a big chunk of 1980 without her.

It was a good job I felt that way. Because when I was trying to get my head around the idea of playing a character who was the lead singer in a band, I didn’t have the first fucking clue of how I was going to do it. Singing a song I could do, but the idea of me becoming a rock star and putting on some kind of performance just seemed completely impossible.

It was Elaine who told me something which now looks embarrassingly obvious written down, but that was all the more reason why I needed to hear it. She said, ‘But you’re not a singer, are you? You’re an actor . . . so act it!’ I realise how ridiculous this sounds, but that’s when the penny dropped for me. ‘Oh, so you’ve got to make out to be something else other than what you are, and make it look real. I get it now.’ I must have been driving her mad. When it comes to how I’d managed to get through a couple of years of drama college and lead roles in two versions of
Scum
without somehow waking up and smelling that particular cup of coffee, your guess is as good as mine.

The message had got through just in time, because when it came to looking comfortable onstage, I was about to face a pretty searching examination. The other three members of my band were going to be Steve Jones and Paul Cook of the Sex Pistols and Paul Simonon of The Clash, all of whom had a certain amount of experience in that area.

There was a fair bit of tension around our first meeting. As I’ve said before, I’d enjoyed the Sex Pistols’ music, but a bunch of fucking geezers who picked their nose and spat at people? I ain’t gonna like them very much, am I? What made it worse was I’d had a couple of run-ins with Johnny Rotten at the auditions for
Quadrophenia,
where he was up for Phil’s role as Jimmy (Jimmy Pursey had a go
at that one too – I think Frank Roddam was aiming for the punk audience at that point). He’s funny, John, and he’s a bit of an intellectual on the quiet, but he’s one of those people that if you ask him a question, he’ll answer it with another one.

That type is all very well in real life, so long as you don’t have to live with them, but they’re a nightmare to do acting improvisations with. John’s probably grown up a bit now – or maybe he hasn’t, it’s hard to tell from the butter adverts – but the concept of two people working together for the benefit of the piece was not something he could really get his head round at the time. It was all about him being Johnny Rotten.

To be honest I thought he was a bit of a cunt, and when I got the hump with him, he didn’t like it. But if I was expecting things to go the same way when I met Jonesy and the two Pauls, I’d got it completely wrong. I actually loved them, and we’re all still mates to this day. Jonesy’s still a live wire now. I was on his radio show in LA a while back, and we kept talking in rude cockney rhyming slang that no one else in the studio understood, so you can see how much we’ve matured.

Looking back at that film now, I’m quite happy with the singing, and the bits where I beat up a couple of rock stars – Fee Waybill of The Tubes and a new-wave guy called Black Randy (who wasn’t actually black) – it’s the stuff in between that’s the problem. I was making progress, but the odd line is still a bit slow and some of my acting’s a bit naff.

Diane Lane played the girl who ends up turning into a kind of prototype Lady Gaga in the film. She was only fifteen or sixteen at the time, but she ran rings round me, which worked well on screen as the story needed her to be fucking me over left, right and centre, anyway. I didn’t mind playing second fiddle to her because she was a tremendous actress then and she still is.

The same is true of Laura Dern, who plays her sister in it. They were both a bit young to be in a film where there was an element of nudity involved, to be honest, and there was something a bit sleazy about the way it was being directed. Diane had her version of my dad’s ‘Give up while you’re in front’ moment at the premiere, when someone in her family asked her, ‘What about that film was worth your arse?’

I kind of agreed with that verdict, to be honest. But after Paramount effectively shelved the movie for some complicated tax reason that I didn’t understand, its reputation started to grow, to the point where it’s now considered a ‘cult classic’ by a lot of people who haven’t actually seen it. The saying ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’ is as true in the cinema as it is anywhere else. As my experiences with the first
Scum
and now
Ladies And Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains
proved, sometimes the best thing that can happen to you as an actor is to be quite shit in a film and then have it not come out.

Getting no work and having to receive secret food parcels off your mother-in-law is not quite such a good look. But that’s how things worked out for me in the first couple of years after Elaine and I got married. After the success of
Scum
and
Quadrophenia
I’d thought, ‘This acting lark’s a doddle.’ But once we got back from America, the phone suddenly stopped ringing.

I probably didn’t do myself any favours by moving up north and buying a house in Stockport, but that was where Elaine’s family lived, and it’s important for a woman to be near her mother after she’s got married. Well, maybe not for all women, but certainly for this one.

We’d tried living in London together for a while before we got married. My mum wouldn’t let Elaine stay overnight in Church
Street until we were officially man and wife, so we moved out into a flat above a launderette in White Hart Lane. You didn’t need any heaters in the winter because of the warmth from the machines, but in the summer it was unbearable. I was trying to do the place up a bit to make it nicer for her, so I got my cousin Charlie-boy round to help. Let’s just say the two of us going into business together as handymen if and when the acting work dried up was probably not an option.

Charlie was in between prison sentences at the time and he brought over this nail-gun he had to help me put up a curtain rail. We should’ve been drilling holes and putting rawlplugs in, but instead we were just nailing this fucking thing into the concrete walls. At one point the gun jammed, and he was bracing it against the floor to free it when it shot a nail down through the launderette’s ceiling. It was like a cartoon – this round hole appeared in the floor and we were stood above it doing a double take. Then we looked down through the hole and saw a woman sitting there with a laundry bag.