Taken By The Billionaire(2)

I got a lucky break. One of the big players heard about the mini-drama (everything in Jenny Clark’s life is a drama), appreciated that I wasn’t willing to take her shit, said he liked my style and offered me a percentage contract on a small-scale film. It was a success story of the Danny Boyle kind; low-budget – or no-budget as I like to tell it now – with unknowns in the cast and some talented but inexperienced crew. I put every ounce of energy into that film. Blood, sweat, tears, the whole works. The hours the cast and crew put in, and the dedication they showed humbled me in a way that still swells in my throat when I think about those days. The film turned out to be a big hit, launching me and some of the cast into the stratosphere. The Oscar is right there on the shelf behind me.



After that I dived into Hollywood in a big way. I knew I had the looks and the appeal that drew the ladies, and of course I cultivated a Hugh Grant posh-boy accent to replace the harshness of London’s east end. It’s typical that since then Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels hit the scene and it suddenly became de rigeur to talk all cockney.



Once I got the money and the power to hire and fire at will I found I loved Hollywood. Before that, when I was broke and almost flat on my arse I’d hated the whole pretentious scene; but when the cash came in and I could indulge myself I soon, I’m actually embarrassed to say now, took up a pretty racy lifestyle.



I’m over the mentalist stage now. It hit me right between the eyes when Stella walked out. Stella was, still is, a sublimely talented actress, a fellow Brit, a beautiful, charismatic Welsh lady who had been willing to give herself to me completely. I’d been behaving like an arsehole, like I was still in my university days, drinking and shagging.



The old clichéd lyrics to Big Yellow Taxi are a real choker because they’re so true, I didn’t know what I had till it went, and I still haven’t found the guts to apologize to Stella. There’s me, who’s meant to be the macho tough guy, afraid of nothing if you believe the gossip in the magazines, the lady-killer with the legendary cock and energy of a stallion, and I’m still ashamed to look her in the eye when our professional paths cross from time to time. The best of it is, the irony of it is that she moved on from me quickly and now has a husband and a little girl. She got her shit together while I mooned over her for months and nursed a broken heart that I entirely deserved. Then the scales of justice balanced properly after I married Marianne and she did the dirty on me.



When the news broke about Marianne cheating, Stella sent me a note, a message so kindly-worded and just so plain fucking caring that it caught me by surprise so much that I sat in my office and cried proper fat tears. It was emotional, as they say in Guy’s films, complete with blubbing and bubbles of snot – the whole works.



I’m over Marianne now, and I might even allow her boyfriend back in from the professional wilderness – The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naïve forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget. So I’ll try to be wise for a change.



These days I’m loving the whole Stateside thing. A huge plus for me personally, living in America, especially California, is the weather. No more drab, dreary days in London where everyone looks gray and worn and it pisses down for months at a time, or so it seems. I love the ocean and watching all the pretty girls in their bikinis playing volleyball on the beach, all tanned and healthy like a scene from a Beach Boys video. For me LA has everything. I can get a decent coffee at 3am if I need one, order a pizza the size of a garbage can lid and have it delivered, and the climate here is just made for sweeping along on a big motorcycle.



The language fooled me a little at first. Americans speak English? You sure? Not the same English as I do they don’t, but it isn’t too difficult to get a grip on things after a few weeks.



I’ll say arse, the Americans say ass; which always makes me chuckle since to me an ass is a donkey, a mule. “Spank my ass, baby” conjures up a weird image I can tell you.



There were a few comedic moments until I adapted my speech to suit the American ear. “The boot?” the cab driver had asked, looking at me as though I’d molested a nun when I asked, fresh off the plane into LA if I should put my suitcase into the boot of his car. “Put it in the fuckin’ trunk,” he said eventually with a roll of his eyes.



And I quickly got out of the habit of saying, “Give us a fag, mate,” when I wanted a cigarette.



Those and a couple of other little quirks aside, give me California over England any day.