"A Pocketful of Happiness"

[fiefoe]

Richard E. Grant's memoir is a blend of a cancer diary for a loved one and showbiz highlights. It's open, honest and conveys his love for people (family, then Barbara Steisand most of all) and life.

• Whenever I waver towards the canyon of grief, her instruction pings across my cranium and I endeavour to try to find a pocketful of happiness wherever I can. <> It already feels like a welcome habit, my daily bread and buffer.
• Which resulted in Joan being interviewed to coach Mitteleuropean accents for Streisand’s directorial debut movie, Yentl. As I’ve been a Streisand fanatic for half a century, the details she recalled of their first meeting have been imprinted, like a talisman, on my memory ever since.
• She never tired of teasing me about my adolescent-adult obsession with ‘Babs’, and it’s a true measure of how secure our love is for each other that she wasn’t threatened by my fantasy idolatry, even after I’d commissioned a 2-foot-tall sculpture of Streisand’s face for the garden.
• Every gift given and opened, every memory shared, every carol sung and listened to, is supercharged with a poignancy so painful that it’s a titanic struggle not to go under.
• Read ‘The Good-Morrow’ by John Donne – that’s how I feel about you –
  My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears
  And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;
  Where can we find two better hemispheres,
  Without sharp north, without declining west?
  Whatever dies, was not mixed equally;
  If our two loves be one, or, thou and I
  Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die.
• To the lymph nodes. To the adrenal glands. To the brain.
  A Catherine wheel of information. Flaring and firing in every direction.
  What has taken eight short sentences to write took almost twenty carefully cushioned and considered minutes to reveal.
• D. H. Lawrence poem, since falling deeply and totally in love with you. He wrote it to Frieda –
  You are the call and I am the answer / You are the wish and I the fulfilment
• She is as friendly and accessible as I’d hoped she might be, looks unfeasibly unaged since Friends,
• I’ve observed her from a distance, flirting up a can-can skirt’s worth, but always assured that we are swan/seahorse/beaver/bald eagle monogamous. It’s literally been the bedrock of our marriage.
• Could we love each other more? I don’t think that’s possible. We complete one another, like a pair of well-worn bookends, our lives in large volumes, bound together, in between.
• audition for Withnail and I... I read for him and bellowed ‘FORK IT!’, referring to matter growing in the mouldy kitchen sink. He laughed and on the basis of saying these two words ‘as he’d heard them in his head’, I was called back every day for the next fortnight to audition with other actors, after which I was finally offered the role.
• Bruce Robinson letter: I fear this will be a short scratch because even 15 minutes in front of a typewriter feels like having a horse-shoe made on your leg. What am I going to do? If I can’t write a fucking letter, how am I going to write a screenplay? I have ‘Germinal’ and ‘The Boil’ to complete before Christmas – Ah Christmas – you can smell it coming like warm drains. The failed wish-bones and decaying marzipan and huge underpants already being purchased by my mother.
• ‘There is good news and bad news. Tepotinib has been so effective in shrinking the tumour on her lung, since she started taking it two weeks ago, that it’s created an air pocket, leaking air into the chest cavity. Likely requiring surgery to get the lung to reseal to the cavity wall.
• Delivered at top volume, as his control button clearly fell off at birth. He somehow is Woody from Toy Story come to life. There is no ‘side’ to him and he strikes me as quintessentially American
• Elizabeth Taylor’s quip that, ‘There’s no deodorant like success’ takes on a whole new meaning.
• Over breakfast, she sotto voces about how entitled the studio executives and publicists all are, waving their arms, with mobile phones affixed in each palm, talking at top volume, while administering famous names, like sacraments, to the assembled Eggs Benedictus commune.
• (Elaine May) flings ‘fuck’s about her conversation like torpedo-confetti.
• At one point Adam/Kylo has to reference Han Solo’s admonishing index finger pose. JJ asks his assistant to pull up the original scene on a laptop to precisely emulate it. Surreal and touching to see everyone crowding around to look at a very young Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher in a corridor set that precisely mirrors where we’re all standing decades later. Abba’s ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’ pops into my head. Never been on any movie where there is a back catalogue of eight movies to cross-reference across forty years, giving you the momentary delusion that it’s real instead of reel.
• Never met anyone with a brain that fizzes quite as fast as JJ’s. Smart as a whip of paint, with an opinion and depth of knowledge about almost any subject that you care to mention.
• to hear Hitchcock proclaim, “Yes, I’ll have it all over again, please.”’ <> Which Mr Brooks discovered was de rigueur for Alfred. He liked to eat twice over during one sitting – hence his girth!
• Am taken aback to see that the BB-8 spherical droid isn’t remotely controlled, but attached to a puppeteer, whose arms are covered in green felt, which will be removed digitally in post-production. Making sense of why it appears to be so human and all the more magical.
• Am as helpless as a speared turtle, flailing about, not knowing how to appease her.
• Reply to checking in emails from Eric Idle, Annie Lennox and Gabriel Byrne from the States, with an abbreviated update – ‘Stable/Fragile/Becalmed’ – rather than chapter and versing, as it feels too much to burden people with... Our week is marooned by her complete exhaustion,
• Julie Christie：Far from the Madding Crowd was my O-level set book, and she’d been Bathsheba Everdene in the film version, followed by Don’t Look Now, with that never-bettered, iconic sex scene opposite Donald Sutherland, and then in Shampoo, where she disappeared below a dinner table to give Warren Beatty a happy ending. Completing my unofficial screen sex-education curriculum vitae!
• Somehow satisfying seeing this A-list crowd plaintively waving their car tickets, in between catching up with each other. This has to count as my all-time favourite car park fame game! Fleetingly feels like everyone is your friend, as there’s nothing quite like the approval of your peers and luminaries to balm your ego.
• Usual moan of actors, already kvetching about the schedule, corset discomfort and the catering. Plus ça change! Feel like an interloper looking in on this goldfish-bowl world, whose big fish is Dakota Johnson, my other daughter, who is charming, flirty and gilded with youth.
• After I’d concluded ‘Now is the winter of our discontent’, balancing on my right knee, crossed legs suspended in the air to the left, while precariously pressing both hands into the stage to keep from toppling over, Giles Havergal diplomatically asked, ‘And just how do you anticipate doing a full-length performance in that position?’ <> Never occurred to me until this moment, so hellbent was I on making a strong impression. Gingerly unfolded my legs and contorted my tongue into a byzantine explanation that doesn’t bear repeating.
• It’s one of the delights of our marriage, comparing stories on the way home. As delicious as Boxing Day leftovers.
• Nothing prepared us for what this would actually feel like. For this unreality to become real. Rather than the room just turning upside down, it felt like it’d revolved a full 360 degrees, at Mach 2 speed.
• The thirty-seven-year trajectory of my life and career struck me so forcibly that Oilly’s iPhone recorded my wild-eyed response at having begun my London life here and now landed an Oscar nomination. Posted it on Twitter and Instagram and it went viral, clocking up 3.3 million hits. The positive response was utterly flabbergasting. Complimented left, right and centre for being so undisguisedly delighted and emotionally open. Being uncool seems to have momentarily rendered me cool.
• Babs: ‘She’s writing her memoirs at the moment and told me that the only chapter that’s been easy is the one about her passion for Marlon Brando. Even visited his private island.’ <> Reassured to know that she too feels awestruck by someone else’s talent.
• Deep breaths and into the costume department where costume designer Christine Wada has me slithering into a Kermit-green Lycra onesie, yellow balaclava, gold helmet with horns, yellow pixie boots and baggy old-man shorts with a wide belt. Ye gads. The mirror-reflected image is worse than I anticipated. I genuinely look like a muscle-free old pixie in a provincial pantomime.
• Tom: His conversation is peppered with mythology, Norse gods and cross-referenced with the Marvel Universe. Despite having played Loki for eleven years, in multiple movies, he is as passionate and keen to share his Loki-ology expertise as an undergraduate in freshers’ week. It’s surprising and very endearing.
• This may sound odd, but there’s a lightness and buoyancy in her mood since being told that all treatment has ceased, which feels bizarrely life-enhancing. Somehow not knowing how long the tepotinib would work was more torturous than the certainty of it not. Acceptance and resignation.
• Emma Thompson: He loves you, Joan, so much, you gave him so much, again way beyond the work, but deep into his soul your kindness and interest reached. You were and always shall be one of the pillars of his recovery from all the traumas. He will carry you with him forever. <> The tendrils of love that connect us all cannot be uprooted by death and wherever this journey takes you, we will remain connected to you in the tenderest and most profoundly meaningful and sustaining way until it is our turn to follow you.
• if you subscribe to the theory that people get emotionally arrested at the age that they become famous, in my view this broadly applies to Barbra.
• While coaching Christian Bale, he asked her, ‘Do you always equate speech rhythms with dance? If so, how do you deal with English? Is that like morris dancing?’
  ‘Probably. You twiddle around in every direction, then surreptitiously throw the baton to someone else. Nothing about English is straightforward.’
  She had a theory that landscape and climate directly affected accents – flat Norfolk parallels with the flat Midwest in the USA. ‘Both sound like sheep.’ In contrast to the up and down rhythms of mountainous Wales, or the nasality of New York and Liverpool, ‘both port cities, polluted and congested with sea air’.
• Oilly and I find it difficult to concentrate on anything, as everything feels like it’s sliding off the table, in s l o w    m o t i o n.
• Just when I think I’ve got a handle on things and can control myself, the living grief is all-engulfing. An agony.
• It’s a real privilege to be able to do this together as a family – having said all we wanted to one another when Joan was still conscious. And continue to tell her, when she’s not. Knowing that hearing is the last sense to go.
• Return home. Key in the door. Outside light to switch off. Curtains closed. Keys hung. The sound of every habitual action is amplified. Footsteps. Mine. Light switch, click on. Teeth brushed. Click off. Clothes off. Climb into a cold bed. Reach out and touch. Amputated. How long will this last? Wishing her here cannot bring her back.