Memorial Service
A BIG STAR delivers the funeral panegyric for a recently-deceased colleague. It is a heaven-sent opportunity for self-promotion and mean-minded mud-slinging which he has no intention of squandering. He speaks with great warmth and sincerity – like Richard Attenborough.
BIG STAR: Dickie Dangerfield, in whose memory we are all gathered here today, has, throughout his long career in the movie business, been called many things: twit – I’m sorry, twat – I mean, raconteur, gourmet, petomane. But those of us who knew the man behind the image might with some justification add to that list such epithets as drunkard, cantankerous old git, flabby horse-molester, and broken-down syphilitic crab. I know I would.
I shall never forget the first time I met Dickie. I was a young, ambitious – well, prodigy, I suppose – and we were on location shooting my very first big-screen feature, The World’s Most Handsome Gigolo, in which as you’ll recall I was playing the lead, and his twin brother. At the end of shooting one day I was relaxing in my dressing room with Sheila Robinson, a dear friend of us all who later was so tragically to divorce Dickie and run off with me, when Dickie – or Bumface as we always called him behind his back – burst in. And here, if I may, I would like to quote from my bestselling autobiography, Thirty Years a Superstar, which came out last month in paperback, price three pounds ninety-five:
(he reads from a glossy hardback, holding at arm’s length so we can see his grinning photo on the cover)
‘Dickie, his bloated gut flopping obscenely over his waistband, fixed me with his bloodshot piggy eyes and said in that famous hermaphrodite’s whine of a voice, “What the hell are you doing in my wife? Get off her, you slimy little sod.”’
(he puts the book down)
I have often regretted punching him in the mouth on that occasion because it was only later that I learnt Dickie’s problems were not all self-inflicted, and that he wasn’t just the boorish loud-mouthed bastard he at first appeared. His erstwhile mistress told me one night in bed – and this may come as a shock to some of his dozens of fans – Dickie had been sexually impotent since the war and, a proud man rather than a brave one, he often resorted to childish abuse instead of facing up to his deficiencies like a man. This is not to imply of course that he wasn’t a loud-mouthed bastard as well, I mean, he was. But that was essentially his problem, and this is neither the time nor the place to attempt a whitewash.
Yet if, as a man, Dickie left a lot to be desired, which he did, as an actor he was – how shall I put it? – shite. Preferring always to play himself onscreen, rather than the character he was being paid to represent, it is hardly surprising that the abysmal performances he gave in such roles as Ahmed the Nubian ponce in Agatha Christie’s The Burning Postillion, are now widely held to be among the worst screen performances of all time. But as he himself confided to a close friend – his pile popper – “Let’s face it, ducky, artistic integrity is just so much piss in the wind,” and Dickie was the first to point out that he would never have taken on such roles if he could have made vast sums doing something else, like pimping.
Just a few months prior to his death, with his career in tatters following the tax frauds of which many of us still think him partially innocent, I had the great good fortune to save Dickie’s miserable life when, in a last desperate bid for public recognition, he tried to commit suicide by fondling the bosun aboard one of my smaller yachts, The Rank Outsider. While he sat contemplating his shattered dentures where they lay scattered across the floor of the engine room, in which I had been privileged to give him a job working his passage – not a euphemism, by the way – I couldn’t resist joshing him about our first meeting, quote: (reading) ‘“Do you remember all those years ago, Dickie, you called me a slimy little sod and now here I am, the richest, most charismatic movie star in the world, giving a break to a broken-down old has-been who’s barely worth the ratatouille he’s vomited. Isn’t life a funny thing, Dickie?” I said. “Piss off,” he said.’
And I think these words sum up for us all the kind of man Dickie Dangerfield was. Goodbye, Bumface, and good riddance.