Low fife
In-depth
Jeffrey Bernard
Get this: 'Charlotte Rampling's eyes, for instance; those twin orbs of ineffable other-worldliness in whose depth cinema audiences have floundered exquisitely for a decade are, in the daylight privacy of her own home, the precise colour of a turnedoff television screen.' It's marvellous isn% it? I'd like to quote the entire piece, but I get paid for writing my own column so I suppose I ought to make some effort to do so.
Anyway, that was a soupcon of an Observer interview with Charlotte Rampling and Jean Michael Jarre written by Sally Vincent. I must say when Buchwald goes, when the Perelman pen runs dry, and if Coren retires, then there is always Vincent to snap us out of taking life too seriously. Whatever made anyone on the Observer think that Charlotte Rampling was of any interest whatsoever is something of a mystery. But then the qualification necessary to be written about on the Women's Page is solely to be female. I'd better own up though. Not only have I received no money for jam recently. I'm absolutely choked about the fact that I shall never ever be interviewed by a 'real writer' from a posh newspaper, and I'd like to be because I'm very silly and very vain. If only I could be the tool Whereby some hack could hope to find immortality on the pages of a newspaper then I think it might go like this.
'Jeffrey Bernard's eyes, twin pools of tired anger and bitterness, flicker with the pathetic expectancy of a man searching a newly vacated sofa for mislaid currency. His hair is precisely the colour of manmade ice and his teeth have the brittle falseness of a society hostess's welcome. When I called on him and his wife, Marie Zso-Zso Labore, in their Montparnasse apartment I was struck almost immediately by an odour of musty sweetness which seemed strangely out of place in a room literally heaped with Henri Onze furniture.
'With an unfinished autobiography and unstarted novel behind him, to say nothing of two accepted but unperformed plays, it was strangely moving to me that he should be whistling the Stamitz Symphonia Concertante in D major while his wife contended herself with provencale thoroughness in making the salad dressing. I asked about the odd smell and Marie, waif-like in her simplicity, glanced at her husband and told me, "Oh that, that's the odour of self-pity".
She dresses unobtrusively in old curtains but he clings defiantly to grey flannels — a symptom and reminder of his pebbledashed past. Conversationally they are on an odd frequency, the hi-fidelity of the incoherent, and yet what they say crashes into one's mind with all the abrasiveness of acid biting into copperplate. For example, I asked him what he was working on at the moment. "Well, basically, and I'm simply using words as thought-transfers now, I'm not actually doing anything in so far as you could call doing something anything." At that moment, encapsulated for me by the poignancy of his almost unwilling smile, Marie looked up and said, "Yes, basically, that is it."
'They asked me to stay for lunch.Marilunch. Marie served us some superb pain grille which she passed around on the willow-pattern plate that she insisted they took with them to Paris when Jeffrey's world crashed ten years ago in London. "Actually", she told me, "It's the last tangible connection we have with the old days in Camden Passage." 'He groaned and poured himself another cognac. Suddenly I was aware that Marie and Jeffrey were relating in terrifyingly stark but nevertheless intimate and selfexplanatory sentences that were the coded chips of their marriage. "Yes," he said. Just that, no more. She looked at him and whispered, "Of course. This is it," Then_heWalked over to the record player and put on the Rasumowski No 2. It seemed the right time for me to leave. Goodbye was understood, not said. How does anyone say goodbye to a recurring dream? JI would have been pretentious.
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