Dating : Sunbeam Alpine

I used to run around with Bette Davis for a while you know. Her sunshine curls wriggling through my fingers as we sped towards the film set. Didn’t last though, fizzled out, you know how it is with big movie stars and all that. She was kind of kooky anyway. She had that look behind her eyes, like her soul was whispering something to her and she was trying to hear it.

I will never forget when I met her, this little big mouth, standing and demanding from the crew. All the staff scurrying around like ants trying to look busy or get out of earshot. Those poor bastards. But she, she was positively enjoying herself. Probably never had a firm hand in her life. Probably a lot of soft hands though, all over every inch of her. No care of mine. With girls like that you got to take them, get them, catch them. That’s the way it always worked. So, there she is shouting and hollering as I lean around behind her, script in hand, looking important and unimpressed. I lean in and whisper, like her soul, say something, I can’t quite remember what now, but I will never forget the look of shock on her open-mouthed face, like she just ran out of words and puff.

After that it was easy. Pulling round the Sunbeam Alpine to collect her after the daily wrap, pillar box red, on hire from the boys on the lot and let her live out her fantasy. A drop-top tour of British coastlines, dinners in expensive restaurants, credited to the studio under Ms Davis’ name, not that she knew. Almost too easy. She was the kind of girl who wanted to date her own shadow. It didn’t even matter that I was just an extra, a bit part, I don’t think she ever asked. I was just this tall, smouldering guy, well-presented, British, and she soaked it all up. She was falling in love with herself, how her hair looked sandy and golden against blue seas and pebble beaches, how her scarf flew wildly as we drove on unaccompanied roads, how her brash America accent stood defiant to my British reserve. She loved it, her English dream, her summer fling, her worldly experience, all stacked up against a man who said too little to be one thing or another, a man who could let her create her own movie.

Like I said, it eventually fizzled. To be honest I can only stay invested for the short term anyway, it is tiring being nothing to no one. She wasn’t the only one of course, I dated a string of them. Notches on the bedpost, all the greats. All these hungry women. Goddesses. Looking to play a part. Looking for something to feel, something real, different. I don’t know what they were looking for, but I wasn’t it. Audrey, Rita, Katherine, Grace, Marlene, Sofia, Ingrid, among others. And who was I? I was just Joe — the almost guy. Almost got the right part and almost made it. Pipped to the post, close but no cigar, on the edge of success, within sight of the dream, but never quite there. I never landed the part, always some other hot shot in the frame, the Rock’s, Roger’s and Richard’s of the world. Bastard fame-stealers.

Something about these guys when they stride out of the audition room, hair tuft and loose collared, a kind of dishevelled sex appeal, like they woke up like that. I couldn’t quite turn on that particular charm, always in my head, always trying to get into it, talking myself round and trying not to be myself. If you ask me, they were just very good as saying lines and being them. And the them they were was just the right amount of laidback or charming. It still stung though, every goddam awkward time the phone rang, or they call in you in for the face-to-face. Some nervous looking producer or sweaty senior crew member. Always the same, Sorry Joe, not this time, next time though. And when the “talent” would parade around, newly cast, walking around, cock-sure, large hand pat on the shoulder, “next time bud.” They knew me and I knew them, but they didn’t know it all did they.

And I always got something didn’t I? I got the lead in one way or another. I got a thousand beating hearts, a million stolen words, a hundred declarations, I got the girl way before the on-camera, off-camera romance. I was the soft hands before the movie star hands. I was the thought, the dream and whisper in the back of her heart. I might have even been the name on her lips in a moment of pleasure. I was the first, I was true love, I was the original off-screen story. I made my own movies while they made theirs. These tragic goddesses and their leading men, playing out parts and speaking lines they didn’t write. And right in-between, somewhere inside all of this was me.

And you know where it took me? It took me into the lives of millions on-screen. I exist in the fabric of the thoughts and memories that make up their pretty brains and turn their thinking into feeling, into acting. I am there. I am the story they tell their kids and grandkids about the seaside towns and footprints in the sand and London city lights and their first experience of a gentleman. I am the fingers through golden curls, the electric eye contact through billowing cigarette smoke. I am a Sunbeam Alpine and a love story, an apparition, a Joe in a red sports car on the lot of movie set, making the fake real and the real fake and a mockery of it all.