Carl Halling - Rescue of a Rock’n'Roll Child

So it came to be that in the autumn of 1983 I took residence in a room on the grounds of the Lycée Jean-Paul Timbaud - which consisted of a general upper secondary school and an additional vocational school or LEP - in Brétigny-sur-Orge, a commune in the southern suburbs of Paris some sixteen miles south of the city centre. And it was during those early days in Paris that I became infected for what I believe to be the first time in my life by a serious sense of self-disillusion, as a new darkness spread over my mind.
 This sea change marked the onset of a real drink problem that went way beyond the usual student booze-ups into the murky realm of drinking alone by day, and there seems little doubt to me today that at its heart lay a conscience that was starting to become calloused through repeated defilement. Not that this had much effect on my well-being, in fact, for those first few months - the occasional violent depressive attack aside - I was happy, blissfully happy to be a flâneur in the city which’d inspired so many great poets to write classics of the art of urban idling. 
 I wrote of my own experiences as an urban wanderer in the city most suited to being one usually late at night in my room with the help of wine and cigarettes, and while few of these notes have survived, some incidents are still fresh in my mind. Such as the time I sat opposite a same-sex couple on the Métro when I was still innocent of its labyrinthine complexities…she a slim white girl dressed from head to toe in denim, who with lips coyly pursed gazed into some wistful middle distance, while her muscular black boyfriend stared straight through me with fathomless eyes until one of them said almost in a whisper, Qu’est-ce-que t’en pense? And then there was the night I took the Métro to Montparnasse-Bienvenue, where I slowly sipped a demi-blonde in a brasserie, perhaps of the type immortalised by Brassai in his photographs of the secret life of ’30s Paris. At the same time, a bewhiskered old alcoholic in a naval officer’s cap, his table strewn with empty wine bottlesandcigarette butts, repeatedly screeched the name “Phillippe!” until a pallid impassive bartender with patent leather hair filled the old man’s glass to the brim with a mock-obsequious “Voilà, mon Capitaine!” And what of the afternoon when, enacting the role of the social discontent, I joined an anti CND march through Paris which ended with a bizarre street cabaret performed by a troupe of neo-hippies whose sheer demented defiance may’ve filled me with longing for a time when I too was a Bohemian agitator, and I treated my well-thumbed copy of the Fontana Modern Masters bio of Che Guevara by Andrew Sinclair as some kind of sacred text…
 A day spent as a flâneur would often end in a movie theatre perhaps in the soulless Forum des Halles shopping mall to watch some dispiriting picture in solitude, and there was a point I started to hate these movies, as I struggled more and more with fits of deep and uncontrollable depression. For the first time in my life, I was starting to feel worse after having seen a film than before, the result perhaps of creeping anhedonia - a reduced ability to take pleasure in the everyday activities of life that make it exciting for the majority of people…vacations, friendships, the sharing of food with kith and kin and so on - which is one of the principle components of clinical depression, and a common spur to alcoholism and drug addiction. I grew bored of watching others perform. What joy I reasoned was there in watching some dismal movie when there was so much to do in the greatest city in the world?
 I’d never really been any kind melancholic up until this point but this situation may’ve started to change in my first few months in Paris, when if somehow my travels failed to produced the desired uplifting effect, I’d fall prey to a despair that was wholly out of proportion to the cause. As a means of protecting myself I started squandering my hard-earned cash on baubles and fripperies…these wholly pointless trinkets including a gaudy short-sleeved Yves St Laurent shirt with Zebra designs, a gold and black retro style alarm clock which made a horrifically loud ticking sound, a gold-plated toothbrush which I never actually used, a black and gold cigarette holder and matching lighter, a portrait drawn of me at the Place de Tertre which made me look like a cherubic 12 year old, a black vinyl box jacket procured at the Porte de Clignancourt flea market, and Folio volumes by fin de siecle writers Barbey d’Aurevilly, Villiers de L’Isle Adam and Sar Peladan. But it’d becomeaconstant battle.
 Could the kids who loved to wave and coo at me from all corners of the Lycée have guessed that their precious Carl, the smiling blond Londoner who looked like a lost member of Duran Duran was a secret dark depressive…and a collector of the literary works of late 19th Century decadents…and a social discontent given to recording snarling rants against the callousness of Western society on a cheap cassette tape recorder? The simple answer is never in a thousand years, for I was leading a double life, perhaps even a multiple one; little wonder therefore that I was starting to drink to try and make sense of what was happening to me, which was something akin to the fracturing of the personality.

I wasn’t long before I decided that the solitary life was not for me…but then becoming more sociable may’ve simply been the result of being in one place for a significant length of time and nothing more meaningful than that. In point of fact, I’d befriended Marie my counterpart as English assistant in the neighbouring town of St Genevieve des Bois in my first week in Paris, when I was taking classes at the Sorbonne intended to prepare my for the year ahead. We saw alot of each other from the get-go. She’d been a girlhood chum of my own great Westfield friend Astrid - they’d been convent girls together in West London- and one of the first times we met up was with Astrid when we saw “Gimme Shelter”, the documentary of the Rolling Stones 1969 American tour which culminated in the infamous Free Concert at the Altamont speedway in northern California. This of course famously marked the end of the ’60s dream of hippie peace and love.
 Another close friend was Gilles, a maths teacher at the LEP who was the rebellious son of an army officer, and a furious hedonist who worshipped the Rock’n'Roll lifestyle of Keith Richards and other British bad boy musicians. I still see him now, tall, thin, dark, charismatic, with his head of wiry black hair, dressed in drainpipes and cuban-heeled boots, playing the bass guitar - but brilliantly- at some unearthly hour with friends following a night’s heavy partying before rushing to be with a girl friend as the dawn broke. Sadly his lifestyle went on to kill him at just 29 years old in the summer of 1984.
 But my closest friend was Igor, another teacher at the LEP. He was the son of Yugoslavian parents from the suburb of Bagneux whose impassive manner belied the exorbitantly loving and unstable soul of a true poet. He fell in love with Marie at first sight, and spent the whole night on a train bound for the south of France in a romantic delirium singing the songs of Jacques Brel. He loved us both in fact, and referred to our slender swan necks as being typical of what he called “la charme Anglaise”.
 So many of the people of Bretigny went out of their way to make me feel welcome and content from the headmaster all the way down to the kids some of whom staged near-riots in the classroom whenever I appeared. I felt so unworthy of their kindness, of the incredible hospitality that is characteristic of ordinary French people. But if I was much loved in the warm-hearted faubourgs, in Paris itself I seemed to be a magnet for menace or hostility of some kind or another from the time I was hysterically threatened in Pigalle only days after arriving in the city. I was verbally assaulted again later in the year by some kind of madman or derelict who told me to go to the Bois de Boulogne to meet with what he saw as my inevitable violent destiny. I spent an entire train journey from Paris-Austerlitz to Bretigny with a self-professed voyou with chilling shark-like eyes who nonetheless seemed quite fond of me, as he made no attempt to harm me and even gave mehistelephone number, telling me that unless I did I was merely what he termed un anglais c**. And what of the sinister skinhead who called me une tapette Anglaise for trying on marie’s wide-brimmed hat while travelling home by train after a night out with her and Astrid? Well…after they’d gotten off at St Genevieve, I was left at his mercy as I made my way alone to my room in the insanely driving rain, but thankfully he’d vanished by then.

I read incessantly throughout the year for the sheer pleasure of doing so. For example, while Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh” was a compulsory part of the drama course, there was no need for me to wade through “O’Neill”, the massive two-part biography of the playwright - published in 1962 and 1972 - by Arthur and Barbara Gelb, but that didn’t stop me. In fact it was a joy to do so.
 I made my descent into the depths of O’Neill’s tormented psyche at a time when my own drinking had become problematic. On at least one occasion I was to be found before studies in the morning with an opened can of extra strong lager, and at lunch I’d get blind drunk while socialising with various friends, such as Vince, who’d somehow managed to stretch his allotted three year stay at college to four. He was still trying to persuade me to join forces with him so we could take on the world, he with his writing and me with my acting. He sensed something really special in me, as had so many at Westfield, an electrifying energy and intensity and so on. But I was going through one of my perverse phases, affecting some kind of world weariness which I simply didn’t have at only 30 years old. In time he grew disillusioned and left college for good this time, leaving me to stew in my pseudo-cynicism.
 With Dr Mein I studied Gide as part of the final year of my French course, thrilling to the perverseness of such Gidian characters as Menalque in “The Immoralist” who awakens the Nietzschian immoralist in the protagonist Michel and Menalque again in “The Fruits of the Earth”, a pseudo-mystical paen to the pleasures of the earth from 1896 written by the scion of a devout Norman Protestant family. How close I must have come to crossing a line beyond which God can no longer reach one I cannot say. It’s one thing to study Gide, quite another to sympathise with the views he expressed through his darkest characters.
 On a lighter note, a special favourite of mine by Gide was the novella “Isabelle”, which appealed to my softer more romantic side. Written in 1911, it’s the tale of a young student Gérard Lacase who lives for a time at a Manor house in Normandy inhabited by two ancient aristocratic families in order to look over their library for research purposes, and while there becomes bewitched by the portrait of the family daughter only to become disillusioned upon finally meeting her.
 By the same token my favourite ever play by O’Neill was “A Moon for the Misbegotten”, another tale of hopeless love, although “A Long Day’s Journey into Night” came a very close second. Both feature Eugene’s tragic yet infinitely romantic elder brother Jamie. I became fascinated by him; and read all about him in the massive O’Neill biography.
 Poor Jamie. How richly blessed he’d been at birth with beauty, charm, and intellect. While part of the Minim Department of Notre Dame University, Indiana, he was one of founder Father Edward Sorin’s most favoured princes, destined for a glittering future as a Catholic gentleman of exquisite breeding and learning; and then a prize-winning scholar at Fordham, the exclusive Jesuit university from which he was ultimately expelled for a foolish indiscretion. He was also potentially a very fine writer, although he only left a handful of poems and essays behind, and the owner of a beautiful speaking voice which ensured him work as an actor for a time alongside his father James. But his true legacy is Jamie Tyrone, the brilliant yet tortured charmer who haunts two of his brother’s masterpieces with the infinite sorrow of promise unfulfilled.
 Another book that consumed me in my final somewhat bleak year at Westfield was “The Myth of Sisyphus” by Albert Camus, one of the most exhaustive anatomisations of existential despair in literary history. I identified with it more strongly than I did with any other work of its kind, including any featured in Colin Wilson’s “The Outsider”, which also exerted an immense influence over my life in the ’80s. How wonderful it is to be free of the kind of spiritual emptiness that draws a person to such desolating texts. “Sisyphus” was the work that the great English singer-songwriter Nick Drake was reading at the time of his death. It’ll be a cold day in hell before I’m ever drawn back to it, and so run the risk of having my faith in absolute truth and especially the absolute truth of the Bible compromised.
 ”The Wanderer of Golders Green” was formed from notes made in my final Westfield year of 1985 during the time I was taking my degree exams. It reflects what was a long-entrenched love affair on my part with Bohemian nihilism, and is therefore not to be taken too seriously as any kind of testament of nihilismus. Yet, my natural high spirits had undoubtedly started to be compromised by ferocious depressive attacks by ‘85. Furthermore, the possibility of fame was receding fast for me, and I may have used booze partly as a means of deadening myself to this fact. What is certain is that from the age of 27, alcohol became more indispensable to me than ever before.

The Wanderer of Golders Green

I decided on a Special B
Before the eve.
I bought a lager
At the Bar
And chatted to Joy.
Then Paul
Bought me another.
I appreciated the fact
That he remembered
The time he,
His gal Carol,
And Rory Downed
An entire Bottle
Of Jack Daniels
In a Paris-bound train.
A tanned cat
Bought me a (large) half,
Then another half.
My fatal eyes
Are my downfall.
I drank yet another half…

My head was spinning
When it hit the pillow
I awoke
With a terrible headache
Around one o’clock.
I prayed it would depart.

I slowly got dressed.
I was as chatty as ever
Before the exam…
French/English translation.
Periodically I put my face
In my hands or groaned
Or sighed -
My stomach
was burning me inside.

I finished my paper
In 1 hour and a half.
As I walked out
I caught various eyes
Sandra’s, Judy’s (quizzical) etc…
I went to bed…
Slept ‘till five…
Read O’Neill until 7ish…
Got dressed
And strolled down
To Golders Green,
In order to relive
A few memories.
I sang to myself -
A few memories
Flashed into my mind,
But not as many
as I’d have liked -
It wasn’t the same.
It wasn’t the same.

Singing songs brought
Voluptuous tears.
I snuck into McDonalds
Where I felt At home,
Anonymous, alone.
I bought a few things,
Toothpaste and pick,
Chocolate, yoghurts,
Sweets, cigarettes
And fruit juice.
Took a sentimental journey
Back to Powis Gardens,
Richness
And intensity,
Romantic
And attractive…
Sad, suspicious and strange.
I sat up until 3am,
Reading O’Neill
Or writing (inept) poetry.
Awoke at 10,
But didn’t leave
My room till 12,
Lost my way
To Swiss Cottage,
Lost my happiness.
Oh so conscious
Of my failure
And after a fashion,
Enjoying this knowledge.

Of All Sad Words of Tongue or Pen

My first employment after leaving Westfield in the summer of 1985 was as a deliverer of personal telegrams of a novelty kind. The work often brought me into potentially hazardous situations, but for me the risk was worth it, because I was getting well paid to show off and party, two of my favourite occupations at the time. Besides which, I rarely if ever had any trouble. But it was an unusual way of life for a man of thirty, indeed for a man of any age. What I really wanted was the earthly immortality provided by fame, and whether this came through acting, music or literature, it didn’t matter to me. In the meantime, until my big break came, I was content to feed my addiction to attention by any means necessary, and they didn’t come neater nor more hardcore than the novelty telegrams industry.
 I evidently had no deep desire to leave anything behind by way of children, nor for any career other than one liable to project me to international renown. So how did I end up as a PGCE student at Homerton College, Cambridge? The truth is that I’d yielded to family pressure to provide myself with the back-up career that I imagine is dear to the hearts of parents of budding artists everywhere and at any time. The singer-songwriter Nick Drake once told his father it was the last thing he needed. I was a little like poor Nick myself. From a safe and comfortable background thanks entirely to my parents who’d never known such privilege themselves, I think I felt that at 32, I wanted to make my own choices and become my own person, even if it meant taking risks that might result in my losing all social advantage. When you are blessed with it, it’s easy to play ducks and drakes with privilege. It’s only when you lose it that you realise how precious it is.
 But I was so unhappy about having to go to Cambridge that just days before I due to start there, I arranged for an audition for a Jazz Funk group, for which I learned a song or two, “The Chinese Way” by Level 42 being one of them, butI never made it. I almost did, but I was late and drunk, so decided to throw in the towel without informing the band of my decision. For all I know they may still be waiting for me.
In time, my discontent festered into an active desire to quit college, which I did, shortly after the beginning of the Lent Term 1987. Yet, I’d every reason to relish my time at Homerton, given that I’d been made to feel welcome and wanted from the outset by tutors and fellow students alike. What’s more, when I made my first appearance at the Manor Community College in the tough London overspill area of Arbury where I was due to begin my period of Teaching Practice the following January, the pupils reacted to me as if I was some kind of visiting movie or Rock star. My TP would’ve been a breeze.
 Then there were the chances to shine as an actor that were offered me. Towards the end of the term, Tim Scott, reigning president of Footlights had gone out of his way to ask myself and a close friend Jonathan to appear in the sole production he was preparing to mark his year-long tenure. He was a Homerton man, and wanted to give a couple of his fellow students a break. Being asked to be part of Footlights was a privilege almost without measure, given that since the the late 1950s, this internationally famous dramatic club had played host to gifted figures as diverse as Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook, John Cleese, David Frost, Graham Chapman, Eric Idle, Stephen Fry, Hugh Lawrie, Emma Thompson, and Sasha Baron Cohen. I could’ve been added to that list.
As if the chance of appearing in a Footlights production weren’t enough to persuade me to stay put, a young undergraduate, well-known throughout the university for the high quality of the plays he produced personally asked me to feature in a play he intended putting on during the Lent Term after seeing me play Tom in Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie” some time before Christmas. Someone told me that if he took an interest in you, you were pretty well made as an actor at Cambridge. What more did I want? For Spielberg himself to be in the audience and discover me? I can actually recall being faintly disappointed that he wasn’t a talent scout from outside of the university. That’s how self-deluded I was. I was so obsessed by fame that I could barely wait to get my clammy hands on it, and yet it seems that whenever I was offered a serious shot at it, I turned my nose up at it. I stood a far greater chance of achieving it by remaining at Cambridge than by leaving.
 In my defence though, I did feel trapped by the course, and was finding it heavy going. In order to pass, you had to spend a full year as a teacher following completion of the basic PGCE. That meant it’d be two years before I was free again to call myself an actor and work as such. It just seemed an awfully long time, when in fact it wasn’t at all, and two years after quitting Cambridge I was even further away from my dream than when I’d begun there.
But then had I become as famous as I so desperately wanted to be, would salvation have ultimately floated far away beyond my reach? Salvation of course can come to anyone, irrespective of gender, creed, race or social status, but it favours the humble. It’s not that fame in itself has the power to destroy the soul, but there are many temptations for those in its grip, and that’s especially true in an age such as ours in which traditional Judaeo-Christian morality is in decline. It does comfort me to know that had I become famous I might have glided slowly into a state of reprobation, whereas I was eventually brought so low that I cried out to the Lord. And not a second too soon I might add. But when all’s said and done I left Homerton for no reason, and my decision still pains me to this day, although my faith helps me to cope with my heartache. Without it these words from Whittier’s “Maud Muller” might tear me to shreds of utter nothingness:
For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: ‘it might have been’.

And so, within a matter of hours of the start of the Lent Term of 1987, I was gone, vanished into the night in the company of a close friend I’d wheedled into helping me out. It wasn’t her fault; she’d originally told me to go to Cambridge, implying…just get stuck in.
As soon as I was free, I started auditioning, usually commuting from near the south coast to various parts of London. I auditioned for several bands, but none of them took to me, and I can’t say I blamed them. There was a Jazz-Funk band, a Soul band, a Portsmouth Rock’n'Roll revivalist band…and I was hopelessly ill-suited for all of them, being usually drunk which was bad enough, but a bleach-blond fop to boot, with two little ear studs in my left lobe, and a predilection for brightly-coloured skin tight trousers…desperately uncool for the eighties.
I also auditioned for a pub-theatre in Ladbroke Grove called the Kensington Park Theatre, which was how I came to meet my friend Adrian, who was its then artistic director. I ended up acting in a film for Adrian soon after returning to London. What’s more, a comedy character of the type of the self-deluded egomaniac was created for me by my old Westfield friend and champion Astrid. The character Mr Denmark 1979 was a one-time winner of a Scandinavian male beauty contest, split like Miss World into three sections, formal wear, day wear and swim wear, who’d been lunching out on his paltry success ever since. Such was his condition that he’d even come to believe he’d been at the forefront of pretty well every major cultural development since the dawn of Pop, only to be cravenly ripped off by Sinatra, Elvis, the Beatles, the Stones, Punks, Rappers and so on. In September, Mr Denmark served as one of the MCs for a marathon benefit for the Gate featuring future luminaries of televisionandthe cinema including Rory Bremner, Jo Brand and Patrick Marber. He went down so well that I wrote a show around him which premiered at a new variety venue called Club Shout in what I think was 1988, again to great success. He lasted until the mid 1990s, when I decided to give up the idea of being a comedy cabaret performer.
1987 was also the year I first got seriously involved in walk-on work for television and the cinema. I’d done some previously. For example, I briefly feature as a side drummer at a typically English village fete in “A Mirror Crack’d”, based on the Agatha Christie mystery novel and directed by Guy Hamilton. The film’s producer Richard Goodwin went on to do a good deal of work with my dad.
And in the 1986 telemovie “Poor Little Rich Girl” directed by Charles Jarrott and based on the life of the Woolworth heiress Betty Hutton, I can be seen in a white suit gesticulating in front of a primitive microphone as seminal twenties crooner Rudy Vallee. But these were just isolated episodes. From 1987 or 1988, I took this form of work more seriously, initially in multiple episodes of the sitcom “Life Without George” which I received through Bill Richards Associates, and then in “The Bill”, a long-running TV police series through the Screenlite agency, with its HQ at Shepperton Film Studios.
Soon after I’d finished my work for “Life Without George”, I started rehearsals for Astrid for “The Audition” by the Catalonian playwright Rudolf Sirera - with English translation by John London - due to have its London premiere at the Gate early in the winter of ‘88. Set somewhere in pre-revolutionary France, “The Audition” involves the kidnapping of an actor Gabriel De Beaumont by a certain decadent Marquis, who goes on to sadistically toy with the actor before finally murdering him. It received mixed reviews in The Times, The Telegraph, The Stage and other British periodicals, with myself and Steve who played the Marquis receiving some modest praise for our performances.
I should have capitalised on my minor triumph at The Gate, but encouraged by Rob a close friend from the Guildhall who was himself already working as a teacher in a famous Oxford Street school of English known as the Callan School, I decided to join him. I stayed there for two years between about March 1988 and January 1990. It was a blissfully social period of my life but my theatrical career suffered because of it. Not that I was entirely inactive in this respect, in that I continued to perform as Mr Denmark, and at one point entered a singing competition at a South Kensington cocktail bar called Pip’s in the hope of gaining a residency there, but it didn’t work out.
I could write a whole book on my time at Callan’s alone, indeed on pretty much any of the major episodes of my life, “Rescue of a Rock ‘n’ Roll Child” being merely one version of it, to which multiple layers could be added to create something approaching an accurate self- portrait, although it’s doubtful whether this will ever come to be realised in the time I have left, however much or little this might be.