Gotta Get Theroux This Read online

  For Nancy, Albert, Freddie and Walter

  Contents

  Prologue Sensual Eating

  Chapter 1 Boisterous

  Chapter 2 The Fulani People of Nigeria

  Chapter 3 Bird-dogging Chicks and Banging Beaver

  Chapter 4 The Way to San Jose

  Chapter 5 Have You Seen Roger & Me?

  Chapter 6 Millennium

  Chapter 7 Don’t Burn Me Now

  Chapter 8 Popular Documentary

  Chapter 9 Deadheads for Dole

  Chapter 10 Head for the Hills

  Chapter 11 Weird Christmas

  Chapter 12 Habits of Work

  Chapter 13 If You’re Going to Puke, Puke Chunks

  Chapter 14 The Godfather

  Chapter 15 Zero Tolerance

  Chapter 16 Celebrity Roundelay

  Chapter 17 Professional Objects of Curiosity

  Chapter 18 Jimmy Links

  Chapter 19 You Can All Fuck Off

  Chapter 20 When Louis Didn’t Meet . . .

  Chapter 21 Nancy

  Chapter 22 Behind Bars

  Chapter 23 We Want to Burn Him

  Chapter 24 This Is What I Do

  Chapter 25 Look on the Dark Side

  Chapter 26 Savile-Geddon

  Chapter 27 Coffee with Larry

  Chapter 28 My Scientology Movie

  Chapter 29 The Fart

  Chapter 30 Programme Six

  Chapter 31 Horrible Stuff

  Chapter 32 Gotta Get Theroux This

  Chapter 33 Half Old, Still Confused

  Chapter 34 The Last Mention of Jimmy Savile

  Epilogue Crooked Timber

  Picture Credits

  Prologue

  Sensual Eating

  Though I knew him to be a business executive and samba instructor, the poised man who came to the door in his t-shirt and pyjama bottoms, with his well-tended white beard and faint air of naughtiness, looked more like the sensei at an erotic dojo.

  I was a little out of breath. The house – tall, with wooden decks around it – stood on the side of a pine-covered slope on a street on the edge of Portland, Oregon, and I’d had to climb a steep drive in inappropriate leather footwear to get there, being met at the top by Cliff, my host.

  He ushered me inside – my crew followed behind – and I took my shoes off in a cloakroom, then ventured into a large kitchen where little Indian statues of couples in coitus sat beside generic holiday snaps of Cliff’s children.

  Trays and bowls of food were arrayed on countertops – a buffet of the type you would find in the business lounge of a regional airport: grapes and apple slices and small slabs of cheese – but there was cling film over them. It wasn’t yet time to eat.

  The kitchen filled up: couples, a handful of singles, male and female in roughly equal measure, most in their thirties and forties.

  Many of the guys were in plain collared shirts, and the women in knee-length dresses – they might have been at a church mixer. But there was also a sprinkling of more flamboyant partygoers. A bearded man in a blue sarong, his shirt unbuttoned to show a huge blue pendant resplendent on his hairy chest. Another, older, dreadlocked man, in black leggings and a little leatherette waistcoat. A heavyset lady in an orange kimono that was open to reveal a generous helping of cleavage.

  A woman, probably in her thirties, was smiling at me with a daffy air of free-spirited bonhomie that seemed to invite further inquiry.

  ‘Are you excited?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m so excited!’ she replied.

  ‘Are you nervous too?’

  ‘Nuh! Why would someone be nervous? It’s just a night of fun and freedom! It’s all about the pleasure.’

  ‘Yeah, the pleasure – of the food,’ I added hopefully.

  ‘Yeah! Well, you know, the food and . . .’ Eyes wide, she trailed off.

  ‘Have you been fed food before?’ asked a grey-haired older lady with dangly earrings. She placed her hand on my chest. ‘I think you’re going to really enjoy the experience. You’re pretty safe. We’re a good group of people.’

  ‘Oh, it’s good to hear that,’ I said.

  At Cliff’s direction, we separated into three groups. Group one began loading up plates with food and pouring drinks into plastic beakers with sippy-cup lids. Then we all made our way downstairs to a basement where mats were laid out and gentle music was playing.

  ‘As those who have been to my events before – the massage-à-trois, the tantra events – know, I’m really into putting together events where you learn something about yourself,’ Cliff said. ‘You learn to connect more deeply. This is an L2 event, so genitals stay covered. No genital touching. But whatever else you would like to take off, feel free to take off. If you don’t have any underwear I’ve got plenty of my sarongs you can wear.’

  Group one sat down with their plates and beakers next to them. Some took their tops off.

  ‘If you like what’s happening, say yes. If you really like it, say yes please,’ Cliff said. ‘If you’re feeling overwhelmed and you need a pause say “ground”.’

  Then, at Cliff’s command, group one put eye masks on, and the rest of us – groups two and three – set about massaging, stroking and feeding.

  ‘Givers, feed slowly,’ Cliff said. ‘Feed off part of your body, but do everything slowly. Slow is always better.’

  It was a little like a starter’s pistol had gone off but, instead of running in a straight direction, the masked athletes had begun swaying and groaning with their mouths open like little baby chicks. I was immediately feeling a little out of my depth. Oh Christ, I thought.

  I circulated slightly aimlessly, trying to stay in the orbit of receivers who already had a giver next to them, to take the pressure off me. But even with a two-to-one ratio, it still occasionally happened that I was left alone with a receiver, which induced mild feelings of panic, having the sole responsibility of imparting profound feelings of connectedness and emotional well-being. In a way the feeding was the easy part: you pop a chocolate in someone’s mouth, they go ‘mmm!’ But you can’t just keep feeding and feeding, and it wasn’t totally clear what the next move was: you squeeze the shoulders, massage the arms a little bit, but then what? I was running out of ideas. A bit more chocolate? A strawberry?

  As the minutes passed, there was a palpable escalation in the groaning and gyrating. Cliff was keeping up a patter of encouragement. ‘Find connection on a deeper level,’ he intoned as he paced up and down. Across from me, a long-haired woman, who I knew to be a doctor, was squirting whipped cream onto one of her breasts and with a big smile on her face feeding it – the cream and possibly portions of breast – to her receiver. Meanwhile the man in the leatherette waistcoat was moaning and spasming in ecstasy. I looked over at my director Arron to try to gauge his reaction: was this what he’d been expecting? His eye was fixed to his camera.

  And then it was my turn: group two was called. And what, after all, was I doing here if I wasn’t going to get involved? I loaded my plate with some chocolate, some strawberries, slices of apple. I’d heard someone recommend a combination of savoury and sweet, so I added a couple of slabs of cheese. I took my shirt off, and I put my eye mask on, noticing a strange sense of liberation as my vision was obscured. I felt invisible and some of my self-consciousness ebbed away.

  ‘Human connection is one of the most precious things we can experience in our lives,’ Cliff was saying. ‘This is an incredibly safe space to explore touch, to explore sensuality.’

  Strawberries and cream were tickling around my mouth. I was aware of a low throaty sound and a soft face pressing against my cheeks. Then a warm hairy body was at my back – I had the impression of a pendant and then more flavours: chocolate,
whipped cream. I was saying my ‘yeses’ and ‘thank yous’; there was the sensation of other bodies and bits of chocolate and more strawberries entering my mouth and cheese – possibly a little too much cheese, though I didn’t like to mention it because I thought it might spoil the mood – and above all there was a growing feeling of connectedness, the faint echo of the tingling sensation of a first kiss with a new lover. I had to admit I was enjoying it.

  And then it was all over. I took my mask off to see Cliff sambaing up and down in a transport of satisfaction at the tableau he had created. But for a moment the idea of a community in which the currency of sex and love was more free-flowing made a tiny bit of sense. I rubbed my eyes at a world that felt a little friendlier, a little closer to home.

  A little later I said my goodbyes and drove back to my hotel with the crew. In the minivan I felt slightly sheepish at how far I’d gone with my commitment to experiencing the workshop. I had the familiar sensation of being assailed by multiple ironies, of having been in control of an experience and at the same time out of my depth. I thought about my wife, Nancy, aware that the scene I’d told her we’d be filming – involving me being fed a couple of strawberries by scantily clad women – had turned out to be more outré than I’d expected. I wondered whether she would be upset and annoyed.

  And I thought, here I am, aged forty-seven, still making a fool of myself for the purposes of a TV show, creating connections in unlikely places, in a spirit in which the boundaries between silliness and seriousness, sincerity and role-playing, self-exposure and canny journalistic revelation weren’t always clear even to me. Here I am, telling stories, using myself, my feelings, for real – after so many years, still doing it.

  Chapter 1

  Boisterous

  Growing up, if anyone had suggested I might one day be on television, I would have looked at them, quizzical and confused, racking my brains to imagine what set of steps could possibly lead to it happening. It wasn’t that the people on TV seemed remote. If anything, the reverse: they were familiar – they turned up in your home, their faces beamed onto a piece of furniture, sometimes on a daily basis. But there was no sense that you could ever aspire to be them.

  One of my earliest memories is of watching an episode of the daytime legal drama Crown Court with my au pair. She told me the surprising fact that, although we could see the people on the television, they couldn’t see us. Years later I was able to confirm this is quite true.

  I probably watched too much TV. From the earliest days grazing on Play School and The Clangers, Pipkins, and Chorlton and the Wheelies on through Blue Peter and Swap Shop and then Jim’ll Fix It, It’s A Knockout, and Beadle’s About, television was a constant companion. During the holidays there was a show called Why Don’t You? that had the paradoxical brief of encouraging viewers to stop watching TV and do something else, develop a hobby like falconry or trainspotting. I never did the things they suggested, though. I was fine just watching the programme.

  It may be that I missed out. But I also tend to think that deprivation and narrowness bring their own compensations. The hours of watching Open University or Eastern European expressionist cartoons with atonal music or even test cards because nothing else was on were an education of a sort, the beginning of an understanding of storytelling and a shared language that connected you to friends at school. The strange images and random phrases from programmes you liked or remembered were like flotsam and sea wrack – rubbish that could be reconstituted and repurposed, as jokes and impressions, or just to provide the reassurance of something recognizable and familiar. Held prisoner by the television, a kind of Stockholm Syndrome set in and I fell in an ambivalent love with my captor.

  As I grew older and my tastes became more decadent, one of my pleasures was TV that went wrong. A game-show contestant called Floyd on an American episode of The Price is Right who got nervous and fluffed his prepared anecdote. ‘He-hey! Floyd! I didn’t quite get that!’ the host said. My brother and I would impersonate it and collapse in giggles. An episode of Record Breakers in which a truculent child contradicted the house expert – and keeper of the records – Norris McWhirter, who everyone knew had a photographic memory, presuming to tell him that he’d given the wrong weight for the Cullinan Diamond, drawing him into an undignified squabble. The following week the presenter Roy Castle came on with a pile of reference books and, in grave tones, assured viewers that the child had been mistaken – figuratively crushing him with the books – and order was restored.

  Later, I loved programmes like The Kenny Everett Video Show and The Young Ones that broke the rules by drawing attention to their own artifice. Kenny Everett would wander off the set, showing the wires and cameras you weren’t supposed to see. It felt daring and transgressive. The Young Ones made jokes about its own fictional nature, diving down rabbit warrens, using what would now be called ‘meta humour’.

  Sometimes I’d enter TV competitions hoping to experience the vicarious fame of having my work featured. I drew pictures and sent them in to the art programme Take Hart. They didn’t get on. I also entered two different Blue Peter competitions, one to design a logo for the UN’s International Year of the Child and another to do an illustration for an anniversary card for the Natural History Museum. Every time they read out the address, ‘That’s London W12 8QT’, I couldn’t find a pen in time to write it down.

  If I ever did send them in, they didn’t win. Nor were they shown in a wide shot of entries-that-didn’t-win.

  I couldn’t even get my stupid pictures on television. That’s how not-on-TV I was.

  Aged three, already worried.

  I was the second of two sons and I had the space and licence to be the silly one. My brother, Marcel, was the prodigy, the dauphin of the kingdom of literature: a precocious reader, a writer of poetry, a star actor at school. I was light relief. This was the natural order of things. Everyone had his place: Marcel’s was reading about Greek myths and Beowulf. Mine was knowing all the words to the nursery rhyme ‘Solomon Grundy.’ My English grandma, who had a gift for simplifying people’s characteristics, pegged me early on as someone who was ‘good with his hands’. It took me years to realize it might not be a compliment.

  A word that got used a lot about me was ‘boisterous’. My mum would sometimes recall a performance at my pre-school. We were singing ‘Peter Hammers with One Hammer’, with accompanying gestures, and she noticed that instead of hammering my own knee, I was hammering the knee of the boy next to me.

  I had a very loud voice. I was adenoidal, my Ms sounded like Bs. A family impression had me quailing after my mother, ‘Bub? Bub!’ They took me for tests to see if I might be deaf. I was probably three or four, given headphones for the first time while the doctor dropped tiddlywinks into a jar then whispered numbers into my ear that I had to repeat back. When the results came in, the verdict was: not deaf, just loud. Another impression my dad used to do involved me saying, ‘But why does the man have his mouth open?’ It was based on a dimly remembered incident on a bus or a train or somewhere in London when I’d embarrassed my parents by making loud enquiries about a fellow passenger who was, presumably, mentally ill or had weak jaw muscles.

  My ‘But why?’ questions were my sallies at a world full of mystery and strangeness, and often they drew attention to taboo subjects, things you weren’t supposed to say: the homeless, people with disabilities, the mentally ill muttering to themselves on streets. And yet I was also very worry-prone, finding causes for anxiety in the most unlikely scenarios. That I would never be able to read and write. That I would be unable to pay my taxes when I was grown up. That ‘Winkie’ – of the nursery rhyme ‘Wee Willy Winkie’– was out ‘running through the town’ and specifically running towards my bedroom with undefined malice in mind. That our family was going bankrupt. That I wouldn’t learn how to maypole dance in time for the summer fete.

  Many of my anxieties focused on events at school. When I was still at primary school my mum went in to explain to
the teacher that I was perhaps more fragile than they realized and needed special attention. The teacher was sympathetic but confused – she didn’t recognize me in the description. On the way out, my mum passed by my classroom and through the door she could see me running along the tops of the desks.

  My parents met in East Africa – in Kampala. My dad was American, a lecturer in literature at Makerere University and already a published novelist. My mum, English, was studying to be a teacher so she could take a position at a girls’ school in rural Kenya. They fell in love, married, and my brother followed less than nine months afterwards. Later they moved to Singapore, where my dad had taken a job teaching at the university, and it was there that I was born, in May 1970, at Gleneagles Hospital, and issued a US passport.

  We moved to England when I was one year old. My mum joined the BBC as an arts producer for the World Service. She was a feminist, a proud working woman, and we had live-in au pairs. There is an early photograph – from a newspaper feature about mums that work outside the home – that shows her resplendent in flares and a short-sleeved jumper, with puffy shirt sleeves poking out, as she strides off to her BBC office in London’s West End. I am looking on from the doorway with my brother and our au pair Catherine.

  My dad worked from home, tapping away on a manual typewriter, wreathed in pipe smoke. Photos of him from that time show he too was a prisoner of the era: long sideburns, big-collared shirt, a tight little tank top that his mother-in-law had knitted for him, and jeans that were as loose around the ankle as they were tight around the crotch.

  Mum going to work. I’m in the puffy shorts on the left.

  Until I was four, we lived in Catford, a scruffy area of south-east London, in a small terraced house. My memories of this period are dim and of the surreal do-I-really-remember-this? variety. I thought there were tiny musicians that lived inside the radio, and my favourite toy was a tin robot that shot sparks from its chest.

  The family fortunes changed in 1975 when my dad wrote a bestselling travel book, The Great Railway Bazaar. The success was enough to make him a literary celebrity at the young age of thirty-four. The impact on my parents must have been huge: recognition, financial security. In my world it meant seeing him on the flyleaves of copies of the book, and international editions arriving from around the world, with foreign stamps that, for a while, I collected in an album. Gradually our lifestyle changed. The car, a Singer Gazelle, was replaced with a canary-coloured second-hand Renault and then a sleek new Rover that was the least reliable of the three and often failed to start or broke down.