Stardust Memories, Future Dreams

by Charles Finch
5 March 2010 - this article originally appeared in Finch’s Quarterly Review Issue 7

To Charles Finch, the Oscars not only evoke deeply moving memories of both his Academy Award-winning father and his dignified mother, but also cause him to celebrate present-day movies and to reflect on the future

Terry O’Neill’s famous shot of Faye Dunaway at the pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel the night after the 1977 Oscars hangs near my desk at home in London. When I look at it I imagine what a night Faye must have had… She is like a victorious gladiator after an exhausting tournament. I find the image strangely inspiring, but also a poignant reminder that it was the year I lost my father… which, as fate would have it, was the very same year he won the Academy Award for Best Actor opposite her in Network…

The taxi booked to meet us at the small Left Bank Hotel de Suède is on time at 6.45am. It may be winter, or summer, it matters not, but I remember the cold of the morning air, and the uninviting smell of the small Parisian driver. My mother sits next to me in her black fur – fragrant and, as usual, beautifully dressed in Dior. Her fingers covered in her lovely rings, and her dark glasses firmly in place; a scarf over her thick hair. She is holding her hand to her nose and pointing at the man’s head with a horrified expression. We both giggle. It begins to rain as we pull away. The windscreen wipers beat time to the radio as we head towards the suburbs of Saint-Cloud. I am nervous and fidgety. At 13 years old, this is a momentous day. It’s my first exam of importance, vital for my entry to Phillips Exeter Academy – the feeding school, I am assured by my mother and her advisers, to Yale and Harvard and, of course, immortality as an international criminal lawyer or corporate raider! All I have to do is be in something called “the top three percentile”… Sadly, this is unlikely for me, as the chimpanzees in London Zoo are more literate than I, and mathematics has been – since my prep school in England – a form of mental water torture.

The city is dark this early in the morning but the traffic’s light. Our fragrant taxi turns into the Concorde and bumps along the cobbled paving stones as it loops around the great fountains that face the Hôtel de Crillon and the Automobile Club of France. Dead ahead of us and over the river lies my future. My mother reminds me that focusing might be a good idea during the exam, especially as I will only get one shot at this particular version of immortality; and focus, we have been told by several frustrated teachers, does not come naturally to me. We have seen several mock-ups of the exam. It is a multiple-answer puzzle of some kind. I make neither head nor tail of the thing when we have a go on the kitchen table. My mother is very good at it, though, but somewhat concerned for me… The reality is that it is already too late for me to develop a linear thought process. I choose the most interesting answers rather than the correct ones. After all, we have lived in France since my 11th birthday, up in the hills near Mougins, where too much rosé is drunk by too many idle expats and linear thought is frowned upon. School has been a mixed bag of Baudelaire and truancy. Tax has driven my mother here, where the sun still glints in the lonely winters, and no one seems to work. I have graduated only from horse to my first motorbike, a Ciao, which, stripped bare and rebuilt, breaks every local Highway Code. I keep academic study to a minimum and spend great swathes of my time with friends in the forest hunting, or on the high rivers fishing for trout. I have become wild, my mother tells me. I have found paradise, I tell myself.

As the taxi veers towards the Right Bank, I catch the first words of the news that will change our lives…

“Peter Finch, l’acteur nominé pour un Academy Award est mort hier…”

My mother’s French is perfect for a restaurant but not up to a taxi’s radio. I quieten her and, again, the radio presenter confirms the news…

Peter Finch, the actor nominated for an Academy Award for his performance in Network, died yesterday afternoon at the Beverly Hills Hotel…

I ask the taxi driver to retell me the news… I then retell it to my mother, and say it again to be sure. We sit bumping and jostling over those cobble stones as we digest the reality of the news. Our very souls rattle. I am confused, astounded, unable to understand. We are on the other side of the country from my sister, who is 16 and staying with friends. Will she have been told? Does she know? Have were heard it right? We are abandoned in a sea of emotion, and yet we drive on…

I see now only the flashing lights of cars coming our way, a glimpse here of the river, and the grand façades of buildings. I feel my mother’s cold hand clasp mine, and sense the quickening of her breath. I am drowning, and swimming, and the mist descends that will never lift again from that year. We stagger, and the two of us to decide to go on to Saint-Cloud – to do the British thing and continue ahead like two little warriors, me armed with my pencil, she with her crocodile bag. After all, what else was there to do?

The American School of Paris is lit up for the exam. I walk the stairs with my glamorous mother and into the classroom full of students from the School taking the test. We exchange words with the examiner. The situation is made clear: I have just heard my father has died… and yet… and yet… Phillips Exeter Academy will wait for no one. We are told this is the last slot for the year ahead. Harvard and Yale so close and yet so far…

I take my seat and peer down at the presented paper. I am aware of the sharp pencils and the sweet and sour smell of school. I look out to the road from the first-floor window, out at a poster. It’s a movie poster of Raid on Entebbe – yes, indeed, it is starring Peter Finch, my very recently alive father. I begin to write… not write, but colour in those little black multiple-question divots. “How could you go on?” you might ask. Well, isn’t that the point? I go on because the exam is there, because I don’t know what to feel or to do.

I sit making tiny marks on this form and I can no longer dream, as I have secretly done, of starring in a movie with him… Instead, there is the hollow emptiness of his fame staring at me from the movie poster outside and the unknown ahead for our small family.

We travel home by the Mistral train as the airports are closed. The taxi driver refuses payment as he drops us at the Gare. My mother and I sit facing each other in the first-class cabin and we talk of my father, for the first time not as parent and child but as friends… She tells me of their time together. How they met on a beach after he walked back and forward in front of her and her family, surreptitiously admiring her legs. She tells me of his love letters, which now, all these years later, I have. Of how they would dance and drink and travel. Of building Bamboo in Jamaica together, where they had their happiest times… She cries gently and I hold her in my small boy arms and cry with her. I ask her a million questions about everything and nothing… all to ask: why? Why did she not forgive him for his mistakes, his hell-raising, his travelling off to “the wild wetter’s”, as he would say… Why could she not just close her eyes and let him back into our lives when everything is so dull out there in the real world, which is how she tells me she really feels… but those are questions for her and for him only.

With his death there is no will. The estates in California and Jamaica, both in the name of my stepmother, are untouchable. We are left penniless and out of touch, but as the Network campaign starts in earnest, none of that seems to matter. The Oscars are bigger than that and, as the journalists call, we are reminded again and again that though my father is no more, Oscar will be our family friend forever.

Here, as another award season approaches, I can only give you glimpses of what I felt back then, and these sketches are but vague images from deep inside my consciousness. As I sit at my desk, my fingers refuse to search the net for images of my Jamaican stepmother picking up the posthumous golden statuette for Best Actor my father won that year. For far too many complicated reasons to list here, I remain, then, ignorant of all but the most basic facts. I neither watched my stepmother pick up the Oscar, nor make her statement – statement more than speech, I have been told, and perhaps it is for the better that I did not – and so I cannot tell you if the crowd clapped enthusiastically that night, if Swifty Lazar’s party was good as usual, or if Sidney Lumet was disappointed that he didn’t win for Best Director… What I do remember clearly from that night is how proud and generous my mother was about Peter, her lost friend and lover, the father of her children and who, to her great credit, she never, ever – not a single time – said an ill word of.

Years later, then, when the Academy became a little known to me, when the business of movies accepted me like a lost son and Hollywood – for all its complexity – became a town I felt comfortable in, only then did things become a little clearer. The Oscar became less and less about the past, and so one day when friends and movies I loved began winning, the night became a little mine too. When my mother died in my arms some years ago she made me promise to scatter her ashes on the Blue Mountains, have a baby and win an Oscar… She sits in an urn in my study waiting for me to decide which Blue Mountains to scatter her upon. My daughter catches herself in the mirror in the evenings as she brushes her teeth and pulls an “angry face” or a “happy face” – and she can cry on demand and recite and act out The Cat In The Hat. I know her grandfather is looking down and smiling on her, and I am smiling back at him. As for my own Oscar, we shall see…

Stardust Memories, Future Dreams

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