Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers
A razor-sharp and achingly funny memoir of the men and movies that shaped one woman’s life…A unique memoir, ‘Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers’ is the story of how a young female film critic’s love-life is affected and nearly ruined by her obsession with male movie stars. As her increasingly hapless hunt for the right man unfolds and her television and newspaper career unravels, our heroine finally begins to understand that difficult truth: that life is not like the movies.Entwined with the narrative of her real-life love affairs is a kaleidoscope of digressions on great screen actors – her dream-life with Gerard Depardieu, a personal ad seeking out Tom Cruise, a disastrous climactic encounter with Jeff Bridges. It’s a helter skelter ride through love and the movies which reads like a screwball comedy. And the screwball is our heroine, who seems to know everything about movies and the human heart, and nothing about anything else.Written in a fresh and utterly engaging voice, ‘Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers’ is both moving and hilarious, a bittersweet and endearingly honest one-off.
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Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers
ANTONIA QUIRKE
For Ilana Bryant, best girl in New Jersey
‘You live in a dream and the dream is a cage,’
Said the girl, ‘And the bars nestle closer with age
Your shadow burned white by invisible fire
You will learn how it rankles to die of desire
As you long for the beautiful stranger,’
Said the vanishing beautiful stranger
PETE ATKIN AND CLIVE JAMES,
Beware of the Beautiful Stranger
‘You have to have a little faith in people’
MARIEL HEMINGWAY, Manhattan
First I was a sperm and an egg, and then I was an embryo, and then I got born. After that I was a baby and then I was a toddler. This is coming really easily! Then I was ten lying in bed listening to the unmistakable cadences of a man and a woman arguing downstairs. I lay there harrowed by the growing conviction that the voices didn't belong to the radio but to my parents, and trying to will a snatch of music to prove that it wasn't. But it wasn't likely to be the radio at this time of night, and we didn't have a television in those days. The muffled fight went on, and on, until it was no longer bearable. I got up and crept down the stairs towards the living room, where my parents were curled up together watching a man and a woman arguing on the eight-inch black-and-white which they sometimes borrowed from next door when something especially good was on. I can remember the luxury of my relief. I can also remember how the two of them looked altered by the shifting light, made younger by it. And instead of being sent back upstairs I was invited on to the sofa to watch with them. It was a film, a famous film, with a title so romantic it seemed to contain all the scale of adult life: A Streetcar Named Desire.
(Forgive my presumptuousness in telling you all this, by the way, but if I don't I'm going to lose my husband.)
I had never seen a movie before. Not one. I had lived ten years absolutely untroubled by the knowledge of such things. I suppose I'm a bit stupid, really. ‘That's Marlon Brando,’ my father said. ‘He's the best actor in the world.’ I watched, delighted to be up late, being initiated into the privileges of adulthood, studying this Marlon Brando, this actor, who was now at the centre of a brawl. Some men put Brando under a shower, the women fled upstairs, and Brando began to cry. He walked outside the house in his wet T-shirt, and I saw him – like Blanche Dubois sees him when she first comes to the Kowalskis' apartment in Elysian Fields, like audiences first saw him, tormenting Jessica Tandy in the original Streetcar in the Barrymore Theatre on Broadway in 1947, like Tennessee Williams first saw him, in his original stage direction: Animal joy in his being is implicit in all of his movements and attitudes. Since earliest manhood the centre of his life has been pleasure with women, the giving and the taking of it, not with weak indulgence dependently, but with the power and pride of a richly feathered male bird among hens.
I saw and I saw and I still see. I like to revisit all my favourite bits of his face, to tour them. The folds over the corners of his eyes which make it seem as if a force is pressing down on him, as if he's subject to a doubled gravity. There's a kind of thumbprint on his brow where something powerful has marked him. The Golden Gate mouth too beautiful not to be disgusted by the ugliness of the human speech it must form. The curve where his jawbone meets his neck, seemingly the locus of all the strength in his head. The T-shirt torn so that it hangs off one shoulder like an emperor's toga. Brando was calling upstairs like a tomcat: ‘Stella!! STELLA!!!’ The thunderclap volume of his voice had the power to hurt.
