Clive James: ‘The trick of coping with a flop is to go on pretending it is a disguised success’
My friend the film pundit Antonia Quirke was here recently to do a radio interview with me about Steve McQueen. There is another Steve McQueen nowadays, but we were scheduled to talk about the one who drives a Ford Mustang flat out down the bumpy hills of San Francisco in Bullitt. Antonia knows a lot about him. She knows, for example, that the sub-frame of the Mustang had to be especially reinforced, or else McQueen, or whichever stunt driver was doubling for him, would have been converted by the repeated impacts into a half-cooked enchilada.
Indeed, she knows everything about Steve McQueen, but I was able to supply one fantastic fan-fact that she didn’t know. In The Magnificent Seven, when McQueen famously shakes the shotgun cartridges to see if they are packed properly before he and Yul Brynner proceed up Boot Hill in their borrowed wagon, Brynner was so cheesed off at being upstaged that he could hardly be persuaded to proceed anywhere.
Don’t ask me where I read this. All that mattered was that Antonia hadn’t read it, and that I had therefore, right there on the BBC, done to her what McQueen did to the suddenly uncool Yul.
She took it well, and bravely went on with her job of getting me to quote stuff about McQueen that I had once shovelled into my doomed novel The Remake. The word “doomed” scarcely covers the case: hardly anybody read it at the time. Today, there is an annual meeting of its readers, but it looks like those pictures of polar bears on an ice floe.
And yet I remain proud of that book, for what author is not proudest of the book that was hit by the truck of time and pounded into oblivion? The trick of coping with a flop is to go on pretending that the flop is a disguised success.
When my elder daughter suggested that my sedentary life might be a bit more thrilling if I ordered a certain brand of coffee machine, I gave her the green light to do the ordering. From the minute the thing arrived in a box big enough to hold a cyclotron, I knew the cause was lost in advance: I would never learn to work it.
A couple of months have passed, and I still haven’t, but I somehow get plied with gallons of frothy coffee, because everybody who drops by falls for my insistence that I am too weak to work the controls by myself.
Mentioning this fact takes me back to Steve McQueen in Bullitt, who looks so impressive when he works his coffee machine that Jacqueline Bisset falls silent with awe. Finally, she tells him that she can no longer share his life of danger. Yeah, right.
