up the hill, into view, in drag. There is no more effective way of concealing one’s own embarrassment than to engender it in others, and as he struts towards the tables Grant — unidentified by many of those present — begins to fix his attention on the luckless individuals on whom he will linger a vital few seconds too long, leaving them shrinking from his attention. Miming to a disco song whose dance mix runs for what feels like several years, he threatens for a moment to lose his concentration, without which the whole pantomime will fall apart. But he struggles through to the end, running with a triumphant leap back down the hill and out of sight as the song fades. There is much applause, but we do not see deals being signed spontaneously on table napkins.
After a break, reinforcing our reputation as the festival’smost tireless revellers, we return to the villa for somebody else’s party. The entire day feels like a hallucination.
*
It is a few days later. There are numerous people with whom to discuss business, but they will prove to be distracted encounters, escapist diversions leading to the moment in the late afternoon when Rupert Everett and Jason Donovan will finally meet.
Awaiting their arrival, we sit on the Grand terrace under an awning, which strains under the weight of the rain that has punctuated the day. Rupert has driven in from his house in St Tropez, and we make desultory conversation with him as we scan the approach paths from our table, hoping for a sighting of Jason Donovan. A telephone call to Nice airport confirms that his plane arrived on time: we hope that he will have instructed the taxi driver to take him directly to where we are.
We try Jason’s hotel, the Martinez, which appears to have come to a complete standstill. Elizabeth Taylor is presiding over a press conference for the film And the Band Played On, and the place is in the kind of disarray which in Cannes can only be prompted by the presence of a Hollywood evergreen on a slow day. The anecdotal fluency, which in the meantime has moved into overdrive, is just as rapidly declining. We begin to give up on his arrival. Instead, we make a dinner reservation and resolve to spend the intervening time tracking him down.
Another call to the Martinez reveals that he has checked in, then immediately checked out again. Someone in the search party has the number of a friend to whose house Jason may have driven. The friend says that he is on his way there but has not yet arrived. We leave a message with the location of the restaurant where we will meet him. Settling around the table under a cloud of early evening lassitude, we have completed the circle back to the nervous, vapid small talk with which we began the encounter. We consider ourselves amusing company, as people in the film world invariably do, but we have met for a purpose to whose resolution we are moving no closer, so three hours later the energy has evaporated.
The restaurant’s telephone is perpetually occupied, so I return to the hotel to call Jason. As I look for the number, the phone gives a ring in which the apologies are practically audible. It is Jason. He did arrive at the Martinez. Though no stranger to crowds, and unknown to most of those who made up the one which had gathered in and around the lobby, there was something menacing in the bustle and braying which completely unsettled him. So he left. I ask him if he is acquainted with Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, whose climax contains perhaps the definitive account of crowd paranoia. He is not.
As he makes his way back into town, I return to the restaurant. Now Stephan has gone. A press screening of Frauds has just begun, and by now reluctant to miss it for a meeting that may never take place, he is on his way. In the escalating absurdity of the evening, we have found the actor but lost the director.
When Jason arrives, with a breathless and cheerfully self-deflating account of his rapid retreat from
After a break, reinforcing our reputation as the festival’smost tireless revellers, we return to the villa for somebody else’s party. The entire day feels like a hallucination.
*
It is a few days later. There are numerous people with whom to discuss business, but they will prove to be distracted encounters, escapist diversions leading to the moment in the late afternoon when Rupert Everett and Jason Donovan will finally meet.
Awaiting their arrival, we sit on the Grand terrace under an awning, which strains under the weight of the rain that has punctuated the day. Rupert has driven in from his house in St Tropez, and we make desultory conversation with him as we scan the approach paths from our table, hoping for a sighting of Jason Donovan. A telephone call to Nice airport confirms that his plane arrived on time: we hope that he will have instructed the taxi driver to take him directly to where we are.
We try Jason’s hotel, the Martinez, which appears to have come to a complete standstill. Elizabeth Taylor is presiding over a press conference for the film And the Band Played On, and the place is in the kind of disarray which in Cannes can only be prompted by the presence of a Hollywood evergreen on a slow day. The anecdotal fluency, which in the meantime has moved into overdrive, is just as rapidly declining. We begin to give up on his arrival. Instead, we make a dinner reservation and resolve to spend the intervening time tracking him down.
Another call to the Martinez reveals that he has checked in, then immediately checked out again. Someone in the search party has the number of a friend to whose house Jason may have driven. The friend says that he is on his way there but has not yet arrived. We leave a message with the location of the restaurant where we will meet him. Settling around the table under a cloud of early evening lassitude, we have completed the circle back to the nervous, vapid small talk with which we began the encounter. We consider ourselves amusing company, as people in the film world invariably do, but we have met for a purpose to whose resolution we are moving no closer, so three hours later the energy has evaporated.
The restaurant’s telephone is perpetually occupied, so I return to the hotel to call Jason. As I look for the number, the phone gives a ring in which the apologies are practically audible. It is Jason. He did arrive at the Martinez. Though no stranger to crowds, and unknown to most of those who made up the one which had gathered in and around the lobby, there was something menacing in the bustle and braying which completely unsettled him. So he left. I ask him if he is acquainted with Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, whose climax contains perhaps the definitive account of crowd paranoia. He is not.
As he makes his way back into town, I return to the restaurant. Now Stephan has gone. A press screening of Frauds has just begun, and by now reluctant to miss it for a meeting that may never take place, he is on his way. In the escalating absurdity of the evening, we have found the actor but lost the director.
When Jason arrives, with a breathless and cheerfully self-deflating account of his rapid retreat from
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